I was walking with friend in Hermosa Beach this weekend.  We decided sipping coffee while watching surfers would be fun (it’s a tough life in southern California), so ascended a hill toward the best java-joint of choice, i.e. Peets, as a family on bikes was noticed as coming toward us.  At first glance they looked like the happy little clan, out for a morning ride.  But in closer observance, the youngest boy had a stench of fear in his eyes, as well as increasingly velocity in his wheels.  He’d lost control and was going downhill fast—literally.  His training wheels were tottering back and forth, swinging his fragile body to dangerous degrees.  “Daaaddddy, I can’t stop,” he screamed, as my friend and I went breathlessly numb.  Mom and Dad were on bikes, too, so were of no help but terrifying stares of horror.  He had about ten yards till he crashed through us, and then about another ten before he hit a big intersection.  In what seemed like an hour-long pass of seconds though, his out-of-control wheels spun him into safety.  Spun him into a cinderblock wall.  Into a cement savior who’d come to his rescue.

Though the entrance wasn’t pretty, and rather quite abrupt, painful and bruising, little-boy-biker was alive.  His life had been spared.  By a wall.  By a boundary.  By a brick bordering otherwise known as hard and heartless.  This morning, however, these arms were soft and incredibly heartfelt.

They saw.  They protected.  They saved.

Maybe roadblocks are good.  Maybe walls aren’t always the worst of our predicament.

Stoic bricks on the outside, but sensitive points of saving when I scream, “Daddy, I can’t stop.”

It’s easier when you know the whole story.  Makes more sense when all the pieces have fallen.  But that’s not where I am.  And per request, that’s not what I’m posting.  My latest thoughts have been unfinished. Unfinished starts, and unstarted ends.  It’s like they’re soaking the middle.  Steeped in the tension.  And I’m realizing that to dismiss this space—to discard this mess—is to lose the story.  To minimize the whole.  So here I am. Maybe these starts will further your finish, or maybe these midpoints resurface your start.  Or maybe we’ll just stay here and revel in the middle.

***
The Fall—how did it feel?  What did it sound like?  How was it to experience the birth of fear?  Like in the garden…like when Eve consciously chose the apple…  Do you think her appearance changed?  Do you think her stomach flooded with anxiety, or maybe “falling” was more subtle?  And Adam—how was the experience for him?  What were his thoughts?  What did he say at his lover’s choice?  Did creation scream?  Or maybe it went numb?
*
Who would I want to trust that has the power to take everything away?  
But who else would I want to trust?
*
Jesus died on the cross to restore perfect relationship with our Heavenly Father.  What does this mean?  What does it mean that at the base of Roman nails, a soul finds nourishment in the cleansing blood of Christ?  Or that at the cross, we are rescued from ourselves, rescued from the death of this world, and most profoundly, rescued into the loving arms of our purposed chase—a Lord who, “Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, has chosen you to be his treasured possession” (Deuteronomy 14:2)?
*
The call to marriage and God's sovereign plan for finding the “one” seems most about a sovereign plan for one's heart and heart's mutual readiness for find that one.
*
Do you ever feel like you give and give and give…and you’ve given so much that you’re done...out...at the end of your rope?  Hurt, tired and empty….saying to God, Lord, how do I do this?  How much am I suppose to give?  How much did you give?  How far does your grace go?  How far did your grace go?...”  I wonder how God would respond?  Wonder if He might say something like this, "I know child…I hear you.  My grace goes as far as it needs to.  My grace goes farther than it can fathom.  My grace goes back to the cross.  Always.  My grace always goes back to the cross.  Back to the point of death.  To the point of killing me.  Grace killed me.  Killed me for life.  For your life.  I died because my deepest longing was your birth.  
*
He knew who he was.
He knew whose he was.
He knew what he wanted.
He knew what he had.
*
I long for him tonight.  I long for the knight in shining armor.  I long for the smell, for the touch, for the silent gaze that speaks a novel.  What is that Lord?  What true longings found these thoughts?  What true desires sweep away my longings?  The blindfold on my heart is tired today.  But the raw strands of desire are exhausted too.  I can't run from it anymore, but my tears running toward it have cried their last.  The chase has found me beat.  The chasing has found me beaten.  How long must I wait, O Lord?  How long must I wait?  What is love, Father and who defines it?  What is not love, Lord, and who can so discern?  Is it the discrepancies that blind?  Or are blind?
*
Doing is so much easier than not doing
*
I saw a girl chasing a butterfly today.  It was glorious—the innocence, the artistry, the creation.  What is she really wanting though?  Is it the completion of the the caught fly?  Or the journey of actually chasing it?  Confusion seems to awaken when we chase an end without knowing its really for another.  Or when we chase another, unable to embrace its already found end.
*
Ever feel like your faith is frozen?  Wanting to move anywhere, but feeling stuck, to some degree, everywhere?  You know it has the potential to ebb and flow and mist and make, but right now it’s hard as a rock.  You’ve seen it soak and fill, and you’ve experienced its taste and filling, but its current state is dull, dark and fixed.  Frozen, cold and scared.
*
Mindful: "What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?  You made him a little lower than the angels; you crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his feet." Hebrews 2:6-7
I love the word, "mindful."  I love how philosophical it sounds, how introspective it reads and even how intellecutally it speaks.  What I don't love about mindfulness, is how hard it is.  Based on sheer semantic breakdown, mindful connotes carrying a full mind of, toward, to, or from something.  So the obvious challenge falls in the fact that to be full of anything, we must be emptied of something else.  In other words, in order for my mind to be filled completely, I must attempt an emptying of what’s already there.  Consider mindful listening.  If I want to be mindful in hearing you speak, my mind must attempt to be “full” of you—and thus to some degree, intentionally “less full” of me.  
*
Prodigal Freedom: I was always the perfect one, so didn’t relate to the story, or circumstance, or strayings of “the prodigal son.”  I was clean, innocent and didn’t need forgiveness.  I was the brother.  But now I’m angry.  Now I have done all the deeds and delivered the good life, but am still empty.  Am still longing.  Still lusting after the life I don’t have and freedom I don’t experience.  To get there though, I’m thinking part of me might have to embrace my stance as the prodigal—unveil my masked states of rebellion.  Not because of the rebellion itself, but because of what lies beneath.  Because of its instant gratification and then let-down.  Because of its turning, and then returning, to the porch I was made for.  The Home I was Freed for.  The hell I was Freed from.  But doing so means I let go of control.  I let go of my guard.  And resultingly, I follow and let Someone else in.  And that scares the hell out me.
*
Home: Something in me longs for home today.  But what, I must ask, is home—be it a home, my home, or the home?  It’s not as simple as grieving my church home, or residential home.  And it’s not as complicated, or far-off, as my spiritual home.  It’s a space between—a tension unscripted.  
I long to be at home in my body today, but I also long to be at home in my surroundings.  I long to taste the familiarity of peace, but I long to bring comfort to the confines of injustice.  I long to rest, and I long to play.  I long to be with and I long to be without.  I long to be whole and I long to be empty.  I long to live and I long to die.  
For in without, I am with.
In being empty, I become whole.
In coming to die, I choose to live.
Something in me longs for home today.
*
I’ve heard myself pray for opened or closed doors, believing such doing insists that, "God's will is being done."  Recent musing, however, has found me realizing it’s not just a matter of an open, or closed door.  My willingness to walk, or not walk through, is equally crucial.  "Yes, there you are God, but yes, here I am, too."
*
Loving: I asked my mom if she loved God.  She responded, “Yes.”  Then I asked her if she was in love with God.  She said, “No.”
*
Her tattoo caught my eye.  First impression was from across the bar, so I couldn’t make-out more than a caliedescope of colorful, Chinese script.  Moving closer, though, the shape morphed into a cross, coupled with a subscript that read: “RUINED FOR LESS.”  I loved it.
*
I learned what I don’t want to be when I grow-up.  A truck-driver.  See, I always thought leadership meant leading forward.  I thought it meant you lead and I’ll follow.  And it does, in some ways.  But it also doesn’t, in maybe a lot more ways.  That's what the truck driver taught me.
*
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think we tote deepest impression when we are least like the world.  Which seems to leave us in the most capable state to actually change the world?  And thus, maybe find ourselves most relevant to it?
*
Have you ever considered that a Savior was born to die?

Wanting to give a big hello to the students at Linfield College and say thanks again for letting me come worship with you last week.  McMinnville, Oregon is quite the spot and I'll look forward to being back there soon.  In the meantime, praying for you guys and hoping these final (and finals) weeks of school carry-out smoothly.  Keep in touch (*facebook*) and have a Merry Thanksmas, or Happy Christ-giving, or something representative of the stint between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  PEACE, abbie

It was broken.  And dirty.  And gross.  And I was able to be with them.  There were feces on the sidewalk and urine puddles rinsing our sandals.  It was drug-infested and prostitute-infected—and all in my own backyard.  

I spent yesterday in Skid Roe, touring the grounds and serving alongside a friend who works with Union Rescue Mission, as well as two ex-Tweakers (meth-addicts), ripe with memories grafting hellish days in this fifty block range.  The past couple weeks have found me itching to be back in the broken realities of Africa, often harder to recognize here.  A few collisions have scratched pretty clearly though, providing a brokennes, and reality, that would've been hard to miss.

Yesterday I was able to be with Andy, six months into his recovery program and convinced, “This is the time, because it’s finally me that wants it (recovery), versus God, or someone else, wanting it for me.”  Last weekend I was able to share dinner with a homeless woman named Nancy.  She comes from an educated and lucrative background and spoke of fond memories living on a farm and “breathing the airs of freshness” (I loved that she spoke of air in a plural sense…how did something so robust and uncontainable gain such a confined, singular phraseology?).  And I’m not sure if you remember the story of Barbara (see February posts), but she’s been a special player in bridging my gaps to brokenness, and has ironically resurfaced this week.  Barbara called at midnight on Saturday, ecstatic to apologize for her silence, but more ecstatic to brag that she’d been in a strict rehab program and as of that morning (at 12:01am), had been sober from meth, pot and alcohol for ninety days.  This Friday we will get to share a meal and afternoon of hiking.  If I were gonna die on Saturday, this is exactly how I’d schedule it—truly being with a person and doing so in the unshackled confines of airs.

As I ponder these stories, each seems to pose a bridge.  A bridge to the broken.  A bridge to my brokenness.  A bridge to complexities of the past, concerns for the future and realities of the present.  Each receives me as a bridge to poverty—my poverty and theirs, my wealth and theirs, my story and theirs.  Each presents a bridge to humanity—humanities heart and the heart of humanities longing.

Can it be quantified this simply though?  Life—as a web of bridges—connecting me to you and you to me—or me to me—or me back to them—and all back to Thee?  Could it be—not to fix, or force, or finalize, or face, but to bridge and to be bridged and to be with bridging gaps?

Is this all just a bridge?

I was broken.  And dirty.  And gross.  And you were able to be with me.

I thought it was gone.
I thought we were done with this.
Will you ever leave me fully?  
We you ever leave me in full?

Sometimes this is the conversation that goes with my sin.  Or sometimes it’s what goes with my circumstance.  Today it's my summer.  I can't get rid of it.  Fall is edging toward Winter, and I'm still stuck in a season well past.  

Some call what I'm experiencing "Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome."  I call it…I don’t know what I call it.  Hard.  Exhilerating.  Awful.  Real.  Right. …  It depends on the hour.

Tip-toe'ing on the gates of hell scared me to a point where death and danger are no longer what happens to old people, or hurts only on the movie screen.  Death is real and danger is present.  The question is, am I willing to feel that?  In a culture that’s convenient and “full of life,” am I willing to feel that no matter how it’s spun, it still carries death.  Sometimes at face value, and sometimes as an undercurrent, but at the end of the day, I’m still a dying person.  We’re still a dying people, and we still live on a dying planet.  

So in a world that facades reality and a body that runs from pain, do I have the courage to engage with death’s sentence?  And if so, do I have the courage to engage with the one that claims Life?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaXXdF_tKPM

Granted, I was in Boston last weekend, but it’s something more.  More unrefined, but complex.  Permeating, yet freeing.  It feels like a window.  An escape.  A journey.  A beginning.

I like it.

I knew this would be a hard transition.

I didn’t know it would this hard. I’d lived overseas before and had no expectation that two months abroad could wreak such havoc on my soul. But it has. This summer marked and married me in ways like nothing I’ve experienced to this point. It’s been a little over a month since the ground touched me at Dulles, most of which has felt dressed in a stranger’s skin, wrestling to reconnect with a distant land, while attempting connection to this foreign land called home—and this ambiguous being called me.

The first time I sat down to write this, I was in the peaceful confines of my home, cooled by the window’s clean breeze and comforted by plush furniture and the scent of a cinnamon candle. I had woken to a hot shower and feasted on a slow, Saturday morning breakfast. This afternoon finds me in a lighted coffee shop, with a floor, a ceiling and even background music to enchant my writing. It’s still perplexing to me that the machine at my fingertips can have me sending, buying, or surfing instantaneously. Or if that feels cumbersome, I can do so with the plastic card in my pocket. People are driving on a road in front of me, laughing at a table beside me, and an elderly man just skateboarded down the sidewalk behind me (granted, this scene might be unique to LA). It’s sunny outside. It’s safe, colorful and progressive. For the most part it seems controllable, such that needing a God today will not make a natural crossing of my mind. I can do, plan, prevent and predict, almost to a tee. The idea of surviving this day is the farthest thing from my attention. A homeless man just walked in. He probably hasn’t showered all week, and maybe hasn’t eaten all day, but chances are, by nightfall, he’ll be covered by a meal and comforted by a roof. Memories reel quite the contrary in Africa, where food, shelter and even survival are never an expectation.

The jury is still out as to whether our life is “better” necessarily, but in terms of ease, life in a first-world country wins without question. My rationales to poverty were shattered this summer. Living with poverty, versus visiting it, has forced me to engaged with some entirely new subjects. I no longer believe, “They don’t know what we have,” and therefore, “are content with what they don’t.” And I no longer assume that one kid’s smile means the whole country must be okay—let alone that kid. There are a few launch pads here, but I’ll make it brief by saying they do know what we have, or at least enough to give them a more desirous and intrinsically covetous spirit than anyone I’ve ever met on this side of the ocean. Furthermore, what kid wouldn’t smile when you ride in on a shiny bus, or even running automobile, carrying candy, polaroids, or presents?

There is no good reason why Africa is seeing, feeling and tasting depravity and death at this very moment. And this one. Most mornings wake me with tears—tears of nostalgia and confusion, tears of conformity and consternation, limitation, inadequacy, intolerability, tolerability, memory, reality, superficiality, sadness, separation, and the list goes on. There’s no telling what my next minutes will unravel, but as I continue to process through these past few months, I continue to grow in belief that there are approximately, and maybe only, two options that make any consoling, and yet logical, sense. Either, the concept of God is an historically massive crux that has killed, marred and masked mankind as a mechanism of power, justifying the true state of humanities depravity and depraved desire—all at the sick cost of “saving” souls. Or, there is a living God who is intrinsically and extrinsically aware and untraceably empathetic toward the cause and causation of what we know as “evil.” Though still impossible to perceive, or conceive, from the limitations of a mind, this God speaks and spoke in such a way that claims His personhood as enough—more than enough—to answer into life’s richest high and poorest low. Furthermore, as one who is gently and justly piecing together a mysterious mosaic that restores, rectifies and saves lost souls.

I’m hoping in the latter.

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Dear Africa,

I’ve made it home safely. The thirty’ish hours of flying weren’t the high of my journey, but they did mark a tangible reminder of how distanced our two worlds are. My mom used to make me write thank-you notes when I received a gift; today that requisite seems a most minimal privilege. I have so much to thank you for, Africa, and so much to hold onto after a summer on your soil. What began as my attempt to come and serve you, turned-out to be just as much about you serving me.

You served my perspective, exposing a lifestyle completely different from that which I know.
You humbled lenses of my self, my world, and my God.
You exhausted me to a point of matchless refreshment.
You ignited my views, vision and hope for the Church.
You smiled at me, and enhanced understandings of my own smile.
You taught me how to give when I don’t have.
You taught me how to receive when I don’t give.
You loved me in my weakness, led me in my fear and carried me in my sorrow.
You showed me that what I’m used to is easier, but also that what I’m used to, and what is easier, isn’t always better.
You found me dirty, redefining my understanding of clean.
You showed me the face of Jesus through the eyes of AIDS.
You showed me the face of faith through the eyes of a child.
You exposed the fragilities of life, but also the tenacities.
You helped me feel exposed, vulnerable and tired, but also freed, purposed and awake.
You forced me to believe blindly.
You feasted with me at a table set with questions, not answers.
You challenged me toward contentment—when I have little and when I have much, when I am well fed and when I am hungry, when I am in abundance and when I am in need.

I thank God for you, Africa, and ask that He’ll continue etching you on my heart to pray for, live for and die for. I have become convinced in your hands that losing my life for the sake of Christ's is, in fact, the very vessel that finds it. I will not bid you farewell, for I’m not good at goodbyes, nor am I convinced I won’t be seeing you again soon. Until then, may the peace of God go before you, as He gently leads us into a greater understanding of who He is, who we are, and the perplexing freedoms confronting that middle.

With Love,
abbie