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The Final Chapter (In the Room Part 7)

It's funny how people who would never leave comments on my blog about my "In the Room" series think nothing of letting me know in person what they think about it. Makes me wonder: why are words easier to spout than to document? I suppose because if you're typing them, actually writing them down, you have to think about it first -- formulate a purpose for the response. But when you spout off, you don't need a point, you're not responsible, your name is not at the bottom of the comment. Not that it matters, really, feedback is feedback -- regardless of how it's served to me.

But me? I always need a point; I'm all about points. Coming into this room had a point -- the room with the bookends labeled "Then" and "Now" -- I had to spend some time looking through all these volumes from the past, going over things, reviewing the years.  Then I got clumsy and dropped them all -- every book, every story.  With the tears still fresh in my eyes, I could see that this dingy gray life had provided a necessary type of chaos to my days, a point - if you will. After the glue of His grace dried, I looked over the volumes and I couldn't believe what I saw! They had been reordered -- replaced and repaired, yes, but now reorganized.

No longer in chronological order, the stories of my life had been rearranged, converted for a different purpose other than observation and regret.  Standing at the table, my soul melted with gratefulness as I scanned each new title carved in red across the volumes of my life: Hope, Faith, Love, and Mercy -- with grace smeared over every page, in every corner, in every book.  The Savior had not only restored but had found a new way to tell the same old stories.

It is with relief that I step away from this room. I've been told there is only reason to ever go back into this room, and I quote, "To grow and improve current functioning." Easier said than done, but I'll try.

As I stand in the hallway with the door shut firmly behind me there is only one question for me ask, "What do I do now?" Maybe a better question would be, "What would a courageous person do?" 

She would step away from the room with confidence, remembering the stories from God's perspective, with the new titles attached every time she had to mention one. She would go on to do the thing she knew to do -- just do the thing in front of her right now and never look back. "What's that? What thing?" You may ask. You'll have to come back later to find out.

I suppose everyone has the opportunity to accumulate sorrows in life. I just thank God that his fingerprints can be found in the dried clumps of grace that glaze the altered volumes of my life.

Julie

Nothing Bewteen My Soul and The Savior (In The Room Part 6)

I dropped all the books. It's so dark and gloomy in this room -- the room with the bookends labeled "Then" and "Now" -- that I got disoriented, I got scared and, somehow, I let them all fall from my grasp -- all the spines cracked, every page ripped to pieces. The words make no sense anymore; the pieces of my life broken at my feet. I started crying; forgetting why I had come into this stupid room in the first place. My tears were getting the pages wet, the pages are getting ruined. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw panic dancing in a shadowed corner of the room. I wasn't sure what to do; I wasn't sure how to salvage what's left.

I head a whisper, "My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness."  

Who is it? The commotion in the corner made me jerk my head to the left -- panic was scurrying from the room, his tail between his legs. The charcoal walls dissolved around me as grace gushed over my soul, filling the cracks, cementing the holes, replenishing truth. The God of the universe moves me into his arms one tear at a time . . . his grace gluing it all back together without any trace of tears or rips -- the spine of each volume perfect, the page of each story seamless. Now I feel weak and fragile -- transparent and exposed all at the same time as I sit quietly at his feet, waiting for the grace to dry -- forming a permanent bond -- nothing between my soul and the Savior, so that his blessed face may be seen.

Julie

A Glop of Wisdom (In The Room Part 5)

There's been only one person visiting me occasionally in the dark, stale room with the bookends labeled "Then" and "Now" and this week that someone shared a glop of wisdom before turning abruptly and leaving.  The lump of truth left behind has been haunting my insides and testing the tracks of thoughts that have been a part of my brain's transportation system for *gulp* forty-some years:

"God made us human beings, not human doings."

My tormented brain has only one response:

This just being stuff . . . easier said than done.

Julie

Bad Dreams are Stupid (In The Room Part 4)

Reporting to you live from the room with the bookends labeled "Then" and "Now". I think I've been in here too long. I'm starting to have nightmares.

I really hate having bad dreams. What's the point? You wake up in the tiny hours of morning with fear gripping your throat, the darkness around cutting at your skin, your nerves are raw. What is the point? I'm going to have to go straight to God on this one . . .  I mean, come on, God -- why did you make it so that our brains could/would have nightmares? What useful purpose could this horrible experience serve? 

And, they don't even make sense. If the stupid dream was a metaphor or was somehow symbolic of some greater meaning in my life -- then maybe I could understand. But it was stupid. That's my new favorite word: stupid. At least for today.

OK, so here it is (it's so stupid): I'm standing along the banks of this rushing river, looking into a shallow area of the water and I see a black puppy, lying on the bed of the river, beneath the water -- motionless, except for the water pushing past it, ruffling its little ears and hair. But I can't get to it because . . . (and get this) because I'm not there. And I know I'm not there. I know I just said that I was standing along the banks of the river, because I was -- I just wasn't there. Dreams are so stupid.

Then out of no where, a big white lab jumps into the water, swimming frantically toward the puppy, picking it up in his mouth, swimming to shore, fighting the current, the limp puppy flopping around in its jaws. I'm convinced that the big dog has smashed the puppy in his mouth and that there is no hope for the puppy now anyway (because, of course, I'm watching this but I'm not there).  After struggling to get out of the river and up onto the shore, the white lab drops the black, lifeless mass onto the ground, pants for a few minutes, and runs off. I'm thinking I should help the poor little puppy, but I can't because -- yup, you guessed it -- I'M NOT THERE!  So I become frantic to get there so that I can help the puppy. But I can't get there. I can't get to the shore. I can't get near the river. I can't reach the puppy. I wake up trembling -- over a puppy, who's probably dead by now anyway. Poor puppy.

If I look a little deeper I see helplessness, maybe a loss of control or a sense of no control. Maybe that's what looking back over one's life does -- it identifies the areas where you had no control, where you felt helpless and hopeless. Maybe reading the stories of my past life that I didn't actually get to write myself has been a bit stressful -- leaving my brain wide open to take in the impressions of helplessness and hopelessness.

Did you ever play with silly putty when you were a kid? I used to smash it out flat and press it onto the colored Sunday comic pages and get this great colorful picture on a pink frame-- only it was in reverse. Or I'd press it onto things like the end of a glass or the palm of my hand and study the indentations left behind in the putty and try to figure out if they were backwards too.

I think looking back over life is like taking the silly putty and pressing it onto parts of life, peeling it away and analyzing the grooves and the creases and the crimps from an alternate perspective. Maybe, with a different point of view, it's possible to see that sometimes things happen, like drowning puppies, that I have no control over because maybe I'm not there -- I'm here, in this room, with all of these stories and all of this past and all of these stupid dreams.

Poor puppy.

Julie

Synthetic Truth vs. Genuine Truth (In The Room Part 3)

Posting again from the room with the bookends labeled "Then" and "Now". I'm a little tired of being in here, but right now, there's no way out except through.

We all know the famous question Pilot asked Jesus . . . wait. We really need to start further back in the passage to get the full benefit of the question:

Pilate asked, "Are you the king of the Jews?"

Jesus asked, "Is that your own idea, or did others talk to you about me?"

"Am I a Jew?" Pilate replied. "It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?"

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place."

"You are a king, then!" said Pilate.

Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."

"What is truth?" Pilate asked.

The famous question: What is truth?

Maybe Pilate was confused -- it was uncommon for the Jews to get the Roman government involved in their personal dealings in the first place. On top of that, this man before him seemed docile, almost peaceful. He claimed to be a king with no tangible kingdom. He insisted that his motive was to testify to the truth.

As the angry Jewish mob outside unleashed their hatred with obscenities, Pilate could only stare at the composed man standing accused before him.  Can't you hear the confusion in Pilate's voice: "What have you done?" It's no wonder he asked, "What is truth?"

If these -- a religious and godly people -- want to destroy a man like this, where is the sense in that? Where is the truth in that?

As I've continued through the historical volumes of my days, I think I've been too willing to stand as judge over certain moments.  It's been all too easy for my mind to become the angry mob who is ready to kill off those parts of myself that appear misplaced. My intellect is the confused judge asking, "What have you done?"  But not with disbelief, rather with disgust. At first I was tempted to formulate a truth, fabricate words that explain my actions and excuse the results. Then I realized -- that's what I've been doing all along. As is human nature to do so, I've been settling for synthetic truth--produced through my own experience, molded by my own strife, and relied upon by my own weaknesses. 

Today, I was reading through a life volume from several years ago -- I was so young, almost innocent to the point of ignorance at times; I grimaced at the slight form of my previous self, unprepared for the judge within me to rear itself. My mind screamed at her, "What a loser. Look what you've done. How could you?" As they lifted the sword to cut this self out of the picture of my life, my intellect rose up, "Wait! What has she done? What is the truth here?"

My heart pushed through the rabble of accusatory thoughts, "The truth is, she did the best she could at the time with what she knew and with what she had. It's not too late. There is still genuine truth to be found for this life."

Pilate asked, "What is truth?" Too bad he didn't stick around for a response from Jesus. The answer could have saved his life.

I'm going to be in this room for a while longer - there's a lot to go through. If you're so inclined, slice the truth thin and slide it under the door to me. Not the counterfeit stuff -- legitimate slivers are all I can digest right now.

Julie

My Brain is Ready to Explode (In The Room Part 2)

Writing about  the Advanced Roles and Concepts of the Mental Health Nurse Practitioner is giving me a mental health problem -- not like I didn't already have one.

I finished the assignment last week and now they want a slight rewrite. Heck, rewrites are a part of the job, aren't they? So, why is my head ready to explode?  I'm not sure; I usually love rallying the right words, forcing them into a specific order and commanding them to perform --- like accomplished dancers carrying themselves across a stage effortlessly or like the high school janitor smiling at the gleaming white porcelain (you pick the metaphor, I'm too tired to choose).  I guess I felt like it was all done, accomplished, book closed!

Don't get me wrong -- I actually love rewrites. They're great, they really are. Without rewrites nothing good would ever get written in the first place. Maybe aging is one big rewrite. You go along for several decades thinking you've got life figured out, assuming that you've gotten a few things right, when --- BAM!!!!! --- out of nowhere, somebody requests a rewrite. 

OK, OK -- yes, I'm still in the dark and silent room with the bookends labeled "Then" and "Now" and I'm still going through each volume as if my life depended on it. Maybe it does. But, maybe I don't simply have to read through them -- maybe God's giving me a chance to rewrite what I thought was OK, what I sensed needed altering but never attended to. I know, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Yuck. That's why my life needs a rewrite. I need to trim back the dangling participles, glue together the split infinitives, and find all those misplaced modifiers.

More to do than I realized. And I wonder why I have a mental health disorder.

Julie

My life . . . . (In The Room Part 1)

I don't like looking back over life. It's not an easy process--simply because the looking behind strains my neck, pinching nerves I forgot I had and bringing on headaches I ignore as long as possible. Not that what's there to observe is so sad, because it's not so, it's just sad. Backward is sometimes a temporary direction that everyone must go eventually in order to move forward unfettered.

I can't simply glance backward; there's no clarity in that. So, I pick up both feet, rotating myself 90 degrees, surveying the landscape. I see a starting point and an ending point--my life sitting between bookends labeled "Then" and "Now".  I pick up an early volume, thumbing through the condensed version, feeling like an outsider. Who is this person?  I put it back, forget this one right now. Another primer appears to be an opus, the words spilling off the pages, dripping down my jeans onto my shoes. Another is a collection of poems, moments that furnish each emotion I've ever had. Wetness moves between my vision and these realities--wait, emotions aren't reality. I'm confused. Maybe this is not me. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong set of encyclopedias.

Hoping to recognize something, anything, I open the cover of a story a bit more recent--it's full of pictures with no words. The black and white photos are scattered through the book: one an eye, another a knee, another an ear, another a heart, another a foot, another a tumor, another a soul. They look just like pictures I would take, displayed in an arrangement I'd make--but, is that my eye? Is this one . . . my heart, my knee, my soul? As I consider each image, a vague familiarity overcomes me, urging me to go back -- read each dissertation, study each monograph and learn. 

I run my fingers along this, my life, a collection of stories that tell about who I am, what I believe, and what I came from. These stories tell how I've struggled and how I've gained strength. Sure, the ratio of positive stories to negative stories may change from day to day, depending on which volume I read, but I need to find the truth in these stories -- the truth about me.

If anyone would have told me when all this started that the most significant parts of life are unusually challenging and frequently impossible, I would have never turned around. I need a neck rub.

Julie