I sit with Job.

 

In the silence. In the midst of his friends. In grief.

I sit with Job not knowing what to do or say or think. My mind is numb. I watch the lines in his face hoping to learn how the righteous suffer.

We scrape our sores with clay pots broken just like You broke us. The voice of Isaiah surrounds us as he watches the potter. I try so hard not to ask why You made me.

All of Job’s friends have left, all of my friends have left. They had nothing good to say, but they filled the silences when I was tempted to speak. When Job speaks, my breath catches and I mouth the words that he says for all of us.

I sit with Job and I think of Moses hidden in the cleft of the rock watching your glory pass by. Oh that you would pass by.

I sit with Job and I know that I have no right to ask you to come this way. But we need you to.

I sit with Job and I wait.

Open and Shut

When one door shuts, another opens. Right? Kind of.

Last Thursday I was acutely aware of the feeling of wanting to "go through a new door" but needing to shut one first. I guess it's good housekeeping. But mostly, it felt final, nauseating, and a little scary.

Let me move beyond metaphor.

Since March I have been in contact with a company trying to figure out if they have a place for me. This is a career change. And it is not a fluid one. We are talking about the difference between wrenching on airplanes and selling fair trade food products. I originally applied for a warehouse position. We interviewed. I networked like mad, wore my orange pants, and in general tried to be as kind and as memorable as possible. That process was from March to May. They gave me the kindest "no" I have ever received and promised to call if there was another position. Everyone promises that when they don't want to feel the discomfort of denying you. The thing is, my interview questions were *hard*, personal, and to the point. These people do not do things the comfortable way. Some part of me actually expected them to contact me. That optimism held out for a week or so and then back to the problems at hand.

July comes and they call me to request that I put an application in for a sales position. My response? "What makes you think I'm qualified for sales?" I receive a rather thoughtful answer and submit my application that night. Two weeks and three interviews later, I have a job offer. A door opens. But I cannot walk through it with my airplanes in tow. And that terrifies me.

Do I want too many things out of life? Do I even know what I want? What on earth makes me think that I can do this? I have a vacuum of experience to offer where I usually have a cornucopia of skills and experiences from my long history of dabbling. Now, I have a two year contract in a job that I would have laughed at if it were any other company asking me to do it.

And so, last Thursday I gave my notice. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done in pursuing a future and dreams and purpose. I was so very aware of the sound of my doorway to flying closing. No one ever told me that I would ever have to be the catalyst to my own doors closing. All of my skills are in finding the new options, in reacting to closed doors, and in identifying that they are indeed closed. But this one? I shut it. I can't blame my family, my boss, my husband, or even God. It is hard to close a door that I worked so hard to fabricate.

I love flying. It has long been the dream. But I am so disenchanted with the industry surrounding flying, I cannot see straight. I am angry because I feel like it didn't have to go this way, but I am hopeful that leaving will make space for me to come back in a healthier way. But maybe it won't come back at all. I did shut that door. Of course, the nature of doors is to open and shut, to provide passage, to keep some of us out.

I cannot worry about which of those will happen to me. I am not fully in control of that. I will always love flying though. Once the love of flying bits you, it stays in your blood.

Saturdays are the most glorious days. I can tell that they were the day on which God rested. I feel this even on Saturdays when I have had to go in to work or do some unseemly, unglorious task. It seems to violate a law of the universe. Seriously, it is as though I can feel myself doing more work than God on Saturday. I hate that feeling.

My big accomplishment today was cleaning out the refrigerator and getting half-way through laundry. But! I am trying to write again. I mean real writing, not stream-of-consciousness-write-so-you-don't-forget-how-when-it-matters blogging. Here are two sections to a story that I just might finish before my hair turns grey.

Caelum became aware of his dreaming. He was in a painting. No, he was a man on a green and sunlight hill so picturesque it looked like a painting. Coming down the road toward him was a figure. The dreamscape swirled like smoke in the wake of their path.
Prophet, prophesy!
It was a woman who spoke. He did not recognize her though he suspected that she was from the desert. Her voice hurt him because she had borrowed it from his wife. Strong and familiar. He felt resentment rise up. Who was this woman to use his wife’s voice to command him as if her voice were only a tool for distributing obligation and burden without giving back to him any other aspect of his favorite person?! 

Prophet! You must prophesy.

The woman in his dream looked at him earnestly, maybe even apologetically. She seemed desperate. And then the dream took her away.

Caelum lay there awhile not wanting to be awake, not ready to be awake. He hoped his dream would fade like unimportant dreams do. It only burned brighter turning up every emotion he had as he tried not to think, tried a bit too hard to go back to sleep.

And also:

Jullanar looked in the mirror. Her hair lay in a heap on a nearby towel. The reflection challenged her, stared her down and asked a thousand questions that all came together in three words: Who are you? She was afraid of herself. Do you know who you will be at the end of all of this? She took in a slow breath. Jullanar dreaded her work in that tunnel. Cutting her hair felt like welcoming that dark, blood-letting place and she hated it. She touched her head and turned away from the mirror. It was late. She needed to sleep. Tomorrow is going to be awful and nothing is going to change that, Jullanar was certain.

 Rolling up the towel, she tried to pray but found every honest prayer, unreasonable. She wanted to say something to the person she had been a month ago while she was still at home but she did not know what she would say even if she could. She got into bed and sat there in the dark semi-consciously reciting the lines Koi had written her when she had been reassigned ships.

“…you are coming in at a crazy time. It will get better but it may be a rougher start that I would have liked to give you. Hang in there…”

So, you faithful few who read this, tell me what you think. :)

I wake up because my mind clears and starts turning gears. As of yet, I have not found the cause. All I know is that the thoughts in my head start tumbling until I am aware and awake and there is nothing I can do about it. I know people who can go back to sleep on command. They can never wake if they choose. I wonder what that is like. I wonder if it is worth envying.

When I first wake, it is hard to hear my own voice with clarity. More than that, it is hard to hear what I would say or think today. The first few hours of each day always start with the unfinished, unpolished thoughts of yesterday. Things I heard, conversations in which I failed to accurately represent myself, and problems that I have yet to solve. There is no difficulty in remembering for me.

As the day continues, I slowly or quickly fill my mind’s arms with new thoughts and observations. This is the only thing that I have found to get rid of yesterday. If my mind can grab enough of today, it will have to drop yesterday little by little. I would not say that I forget just because I drop a thought though. It often happens but it often does not as well.

So I sit here with my sore throat tea, with the cool air creeping in the open window trying to escape the ever strengthening sun outside, with a pile of old thoughts. I am desperate to start this day, as they say, new. I want to hear my own voice sound in the present, ready and alert, arms empty. But my purpose lies in yesterday. Today does not yet have a purpose. I am trying to knit one, trying to build one, trying to write one. I struggle to grasp today’s helm with both hands, trip and fall straight into tomorrow. So very often do I find myself trying to pilot a ghost ship that I cannot control. I know nothing about tomorrow, but I throw the sum of all of my yesterdays at it hoping to create some meaning.

Somehow I have managed to wake up in the past and go to sleep in the future with only the barest of the middle hours dedicated to the day I am actually living.

I am aware of myself becoming less possessive. What I mean is, I am becoming pickier. That is to say, I am less of dragon who hoards. And by that I am trying to explain that I am changing from someone who wanted to collect dozens (if not hundreds) of beautiful things...really I wanted to own every thing that was pretty...and instead choosing to be someone who has a clutter free, but still lovely life. It is easier now to look at something that is beautiful and say, "but it is not for me." This shouldn't be so revolutionary, but I am aware of the pressures of materialism and the mysterious unnamed forces of social media that leave me always feeling like I need to keep up, live beautifully, and have a picturesque household before I have even chosen a career. It's silly. It's unrealistic. But it's persistent. Ever so slowly, I am peeling back the layers to say, "what I have is enough". Which, in this day and age, is the same as saying "who I am is enough".

Today, I hurt. Profoundly. It's probably my gallbladder they say. I should "eat light" they say. What they don't say is how long I will be like this. So, I am home from work. As it turns out, your gallbladder is the very center of your being. When it hurts, you cannot move any other part of your body save your toes and fingers without causing an eruption of pain. It makes it hard to work on airplanes. It makes it hard to think. It just makes things hard. Except drawing. I have finally made some time to sit down a little and draw.

I was reading an artist's friend's blog recently. On their blog, they had a few time-lapsed videos of their creation of paintings and other works. In watching her work, I suddenly became very aware of a mistake I had been making for awhile now. I was making art more complicated than it needed to be. I had gotten self-conscious, well, about everything since getting fired. In my terrible self-consciousness, I had been trying way too hard to be "creative". Art was no longer a refuge for my brain to wander in. It was now disciplinary ground for me to practice, practice, practice until I could make all of the pictures in my head come out exactly as I saw them. But first, I must find the best images in my head and set the bar high! I was creating with something to prove; and that is a terrible way to create.

While in this awful mindset, I made the following painting. Now, I am not proud of this painting. No amount of encouragement is going to convince that it isn't terrible. The first reason being that I had forgotten entirely how difficult the paints that I chose had been to use. I did not enjoy painting most of this. It was a struggle. When I look at this painting, I feel that struggle all over again. And I feel self-conscious and melodramatically creative.

The next photo is a dandelion I drew today in order to distract myself from the gallbladder pain. When I look at it, I don't remember the gallbladder pain, I just remember thinking intensely about the shapes, the lines, and dandelions. It was magic to watch pen become plant. And I love it. It is simple and ordinary, but I find it lovely.

Strength is a heavy thing. If you have held onto it all of your life, you probably don’t know just how heavy it is. There are those who carry strength for so long that their grasp is stuck. I am not one of those people. Today, I have to pick up my strength up off of the floor. I have to massage it gently into my limbs and legs and chest. I hope that I can rub it deep enough to penetrate the bones, the joints, and my heart. All of these things have been aching with weakness, creaking as if to break.

Strength is such a heavy thing. And it is not as necessary as we have been taught. You think that the opposite of strength is weakness and then draw lines around strength and surviving such that weakness equals death. But it doesn’t. And this is one of the deadliest lies. You think that to embrace weakness is to invite death. But weakness is only weakness, the crying out for rest. Without that cry, rest is slow in coming. Without that cry, without that rest, strength begins to consume weakness.

My strength is trying to consume my weakness. If it does, I will never separate them back out again.

Weakness is a gentle thing that stands guard in the passage between strength and death. It utters warnings and cautions that you have found your limit. You can do no more. Indeed, you do not need to do more. Weakness is a thing that the universe understands. It is a limit which God himself respects.

Weakness is such a gentle thing. And that is different than being fragile. Weakness is what invites me to slough off my strength at the end of the day, let it lay beside the night stand, and rest. Weakness is the respite that makes sure that there is strength enough to finish tomorrow.