Eyes All Around

Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl. And the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went. And their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. (Ezekiel 1:15–18)

I used to be afraid of what Ezekiel saw... eyes all around the wheels, moving in all directions. I thought of them as scary, snooping eyeballs, bulging independently and variously as in a horror shop. Then one day for some reason, I remembered the watchful, loving eyes of our dog Miso, honey amber around small black pupils and completely outlined with dark fur like soft eyeliner.  Eyes I treasure. And I was enlightened. 

To move from kitchen to living room couch and have Miso's eyes follow me from where he lays in the sunshine, is to be loved. To see his eyebrows raise when I approach the treat cupboard is to know hope. A good dog is an okay avenue by which to approach the Holy God. One must have a way and He knows this. Perhaps this is why everything was made.

 

Now, when I think of the eternally spinning eyes, I think of the eyes I most love in the world. Of being seen, known and delighted in by not just my dog, but my husband, my children and my mother.  And then from these earthly goods, I know the eyes of God are only better, a shift higher in the direction of "yes, and".

 

Life can be blurry, messy and damaging. If life is like a pot of pasta, my once freshly cooked noodles are tangled, sticky and, the older I get, hardened. An increasingly impossible task to make all work out. Like Ezekiel in another famous vision, some of us scan the windless plain of past remorse, of dry bones and wreckage. "Son of man, can these bones live?" We whisper, "Sovereign Lord, you alone know."  Why ask, Lord? You alone see the past, the present and the way to life, if there is indeed one.  But He sees every sticky strand, curving path and dry bone. And what He sees makes all the difference.

 

I am looking for the eyes. I feel an unspeakable longing for the compassion, clarity, and attentiveness behind them. There is an eye with a tear forming at its rim, circumference for my grief but with no opening for despair. There is an eye that bores unblinkingly through blandly spoken courtesies deftly disarming shards of envy or murderous disregard. There is an eye blazing with vigor that instantly erases fatigue and battle weariness and lends joy from the ancient yet ageless heart of God. His sight is provision for a race of children wandering in the dark. As the psalmist knew, let me know "In your light, we see light".

Waste

"The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works." Ps. 145:9

I lay quiet this afternoon and in my mind I wandered through what felt like disconnection with the world. I could see it all but could not find why anything I saw mattered. It was all blah. I was troubled as this seems wrong. Then I saw that there is only emptiness when the Lord is not present. The rooms are dull. Until He joins us in them. Then, his attention, his belief in us make the spaces warm and trustworthy. He actually cares for each thing — tender toward all he has made. And this humanity, this earth, is a 'particular affection'; Jesus being the "pudding" of the proof. In the backdrop of His concern, our daily human meet and greets rise into distinguished events. We, our earth and human realm, don’t have to be all there is to be desirable and beloved -- we may be the smallest part of the universe for all we know, or our universe may be the smallest fragment of whatever else there is. But Jesus, the part of God that is like us (while the rest of Him is not), puts familiarly human arms around this 'particular affection' in case we forgot.

But a “spirit of waste” has sometime entered in. Perhaps it takes advantage of a bruise, a loss, a time when we gave up our faith in the face of pride or pain.  A malicious mindset, intentioned against God’s love of people. It creates disillusionment, isolation and diminishes us until we imagine, falsely, that we are hapless matter heaped here and there. We get used to mockery. What does it matter what we do, whether we cook dinner tonight or decide one day to not come home?  I think it can come where the Lord is not present and disorients us, or at least me. So that I travel long seasons disconnected and live partial -- suffering from, yet largely unaware of, soundless melancholy. 

So come, Lord of the human race, and banish this wasteful thing, that dully loops in our mind; like the reprogrammed security camera in a Hollywood jewelry heist. Instead, revitalize us. Let the goodness we were made for, and made of, unmask mere entertainment. What You have made, each family laughing over their simple jokes, each afternoon window brimming with neighborhood noise —  they were created for joy and treasure. Though we are small, we are not tedious to You. Fill our streets, and cars and offices, and marriage beds and hiking paths and sports fields. Welcome, Jesus.  Fill our throats and stomachs and songs and studies. Light of creation and invention. Genius and Joy, we are Your own. "The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it." Amen.

A Day Out of Time

This day. Full. I watch the blessing spill over and can’t catch it all. A bit frustrated, I wonder if I should try harder. How? So I write.

Less than 24 hours ago we were all preparing for a major hurricane to hit our islands. We stacked our gallons of water and canned beans, dismantled the trampoline and took house photos for future insurance claims. Schools were closed and many grocery store shelves were emptied.

Eerily apocalyptic. But last evening, by the intervention of the “high shear winds”, as the weather people called them, the force of this dark system was suddenly dissolved even as it approached. Ah! Tell me there’s not a metaphysical truth involved. I envision the protective intervention of angels directed to our petitioned defense. But even without a gloriously mysterious narrative, I feel the sigh of relief. Now our whole community is living in what feels like the “day after Thanksgiving” but without the stress of shopping, of distracting and insistent options. Like a day taken out of time, a holy interruption of Chronos. Ironically, impending destruction makes us all hold our breath. And the consequent deep sigh of relief is fodder for better focus. For breathing slower. 

At a Loss

Last week for my son’s 15th birthday, he got a surfboard. Since Covid cancelled his regular sports season, he’s rediscovered surfing and it’s becoming his favorite pastime.  He’d been using a heavy 10-foot fiberglass board someone had given us years ago. The first time he had to walk that monster down the Waikiki strip, he understood its disadvantages. So he was excited to find the new 8’ foam Wavestorm leaning against the wall. While these new boards’ extreme buoyancy can make it harder to dive under incoming swells, they’re much easier to catch waves with and are a breeze to carry down the street.

Now the only thing better than riding a wave in the Hawaiian sunset glow is capturing that exhilarating theatre on video, and sharing those 10 seconds of magic with your social media peers. So, the icing on my son’s birthday cake was a waterproof GoPro action camera. The small, and pricey, device can be worn on a head strap, capturing the adventure from the third eye of the beholder, though many surfers use a mouth grip and others a handheld wand. A budding videographer who has already done a lot with his phone and DSLR camera both for fun and school, my son has been drooling some time over the vlogging potential of these action cam devices.

A few years back, returning from a work trip to Shanghai, I had surprised him with a GoPro from a market there, gotten at a very excellent price. When he opened it, we had chuckled to more closely examine the colorful GoPro sticker covering a generic white box. The kicker was the printed manual, titled “Ultar Action Camera”.  The Ultar, as we came to affectionately call it, worked a few times but clearly lacked what he called “quality build”.

So, after already receiving the board that morning, my son was over the moon to open an unexpected package: a bonafide GoPro Hero7 Black Action Camera with HyperSmooth Stabilization. He spent the rest of the evening unpacking the kit, sorting out the accessories and charging the battery. He called his surfing buddy and made immediate plans to get out on the water with it.

The following weekend, he and his friend met at Duke’s at 5pm carrying their Wavestorms. He was excited to get his first surfing footage. I sat on the beach watching them and kept an eye on their things, having stressed a hundred times that it takes just 2 seconds for someone to walk away with a deserted beach bag. I was uncomfortable with the alternative plan to wrap the camera in his towel when he wasn't filming, place his slippers on top of it and sneakily set it near his decoy bag. Also, I wanted to watch him enjoy the fun birthday gifts, which signaled to me his growing mastery and skill as a young man.

The guys were having a great time. The sets were coming in 2-3 feet and it was surprisingly uncrowded. Hawaii as you hope for. They caught some easy rides. I loved watching my kid make the decision to paddle hard in advance of the swell, take off in its power and then throw himself up into that victorious standing pose, like Neptune astride dolphins. I could make out that he was enjoying himself, filming as he rode. At one point, I saw them paddling back out toward the break, struggling over some incoming whitewater and my son’s foam board popped up without him and floated til he also emerged.

Shortly, I was surprised to see the two boys paddling back toward the beach and hauling up their boards. It was only about 6 and there was still plenty of daylight. “Coming in so soon?” I called. They dragged their boards up near my chair and my son explained, looking a bit disoriented.

“A wave knocked me off my board and put me through the ‘washing machine’. And when I was tumbling, I guess the head strap came loose and the camera got washed away. I tried to look for it right then but holding the board and with bare eyes, it was hard. We thought we better come in and get some goggles to search.”

Ugh. My heart sank, like an expensive GoPro with HyperSmooth Stabilization in the heretofore happy Pacific waves. But, outward optimist that I am, I kicked into “helpful and hopeful” and joined them asking groups on the beach if anyone had spare goggles or masks. We pieced together one child sized goggles with a strap that needed to be jerry rigged on one end and one decent mask that could be used for the next 20 minutes.  The boys went back out and duck dived in the area they reasoned the waves might have dropped their prey.  The child goggles ended up being unusable and then the mask owner needed to leave. Again, mom put her best sandy foot forward and approached suspicious tourists who, after hearing about the lost camera and with pity in their eyes, readily offered their miscellaneous gear. The light was fading and the waves were smoothing out sweetly as the wind died down. I sat in the beach chair, praying silently.

I saw my son standing now about only 20 feet out where the waves were breaking onto some sandbags. Just standing. His faithful friend was still a bit further out diving around. I waved at my boy, urging him to go out a bit further to look again and use the goggles from the svelte, young Indian man in a Speedo. He dragged his way up through the swirling push and pull and explained, “the goggles are dark so they don’t really work.” He was tired from spinning this way and that, groping about helplessly. He paused and said with a tone that frightened me for its undoctored awareness: “I’m at a loss.”

I did a wordless emotional calculus and then beckoned, “Come in, honey, it’s okay.”

We returned the goggles to the sympathetic lenders. The boys went back out on their boards for the 15 minutes they had before his buddy was getting picked up. The sky turned orange and I used my phone to video them riding shoreward one last time.

By the time we walked to the car, I had worked out in my mind that I would just go ahead and buy him a replacement camera and not put any strings or scolding on the deal. There’s no way either one of us had expected the head strap to come off. It was purely unintentional. As his friend’s dad, an avid surfer, said to me, “all I know is that there are a LOT of GoPros out there.” Sigh. The gift was already a splurge and it gave me a little heartburn to belly up to that bar again. But, with an instinctual decisiveness, I found myself shellacking over rational objections about possible teaching lessons and fiscal responsibility. This pain is something I have power to do something about, I told myself.

As we drove home I said, “There are going to be a lot of things in life that I can’t help you with that I will wish I could. But this I can do.” He was a little surprised, I think, that it was going to be this easy. He said, “I’m glad I can get a new camera, but I feel really bad that you have to spend money, Mom.” “I don’t have to, but I want to because I love you,” I said. And tried to leave it at that. Which is hard for me. But I didn’t want to sully the proffered resolution with dramatics or overthinking. He sweetly indicated his appreciation later, bringing a plate of chicken nuggets and ketchup to my computer desk where I had resubmerged myself into work. The afternoon was still eating at me.

Later that night as my husband and I lay in bed, I couldn’t shake my agitation. I shared aloud, “I’m still really upset about that camera.” “Why? It’s just a camera.”

The thing is that it’s not the camera. It’s the experience I know is out there. The one that I am 24/7 trying to outrun, for myself but maybe even more so for my children. I’ve been doing it for decades. Trying to make life bulletproof for the “weak” people I love. And that afternoon, I failed. Obviously, this wasn’t the first time - it happens constantly.  But as I witness my kids growing into adults, it gets scarier. When my fifteen year old, standing waist deep in the ocean, wet and tired against the fading light, voiced into the listening air, “I’m at a loss,” I felt the tremor of adulthood. Of his increasing consciousness and my decreasing ability to shield him.

When my son was 10 months old, he lost his stuffed bear at a zoo and didn’t sleep for 9 days. I came through eventually after posting ads far and wide and hoofing miles of stores; an online mom had an identical that we brought home as a surrogate. But last week might be the last time I can replace a “thing”. After this comes the heavier stuff of life.

Now, in the book of my heart, I cannot abide this loss of innocence. But in the book of my mind, I know it’s inevitable. Either way, I don’t get to write the book -- it’s read-only. Still I’d give anything for my children to be spared. I would break my bank, perhaps go against my better judgement to guarantee their sense of security and having all they need. It is my worst fear to be outmatched against what is coming. I can make plans to guard their goods from beach thieves, but a rogue wave can take it anyway right in the middle of the thrill.

Finally, I am probably largely projecting. Because I find myself more and more at my own wit’s end in my own life. I turn slowly in the surf, unable to plumb a direction or rationalize the continued search, and say both to God and to my aging soul, “I’m at a loss.”  There are so many fronts as you get older. My mother is 96. We’ve been unimaginably blessed but the day I’ve dreaded since I was 8 will come when I can’t save her anymore. Someone Else must. My husband and I have particular injuries from being two incomprehensibly wonderful but drastically different beings fighting like cats and dogs to be one. And the damage is rarely neat and the scars itch like hell. And there are the creative dreams I had strapped to my head when I started this fine afternoon. Things were looking up, but then there were incidents. And now the light is fading. And I’m too tired to grope for where they went down in this opaque sea.

I wonder how this day is going to end and I wonder how, like my son, to respond with some kind of, well, affection. That would seem like a win.

The scriptures say that ‘though I am evil’ I know how to give good gifts to my kids; and how much more will my heavenly Father give good gifts to me. I still bank on God being good. But what is this going to look like? How much of this remorse is going to be alleviated by a wordless grace, no drama needed? The Deus Ex Machina which I would gladly accept.

And how much is going to be the brave acceptance of adult growth, of consciousness and vulnerability in the face of loss? Can I know comfort in that wild place of the soul? Can I sense the presence of a good Father there? As the Psalmist penned thousands of years ago for those who might sing: “Let morning bring word of your unfailing love.”

The Real Thing

We all know that unity requires the collaboration of distinct individuals. The concept is irresistibly catchy and rings through to our best instincts, like the 70s Coke ad where kimonos, plaid pants and saris float in the sunlit promise of peace. Most everyone nods approvingly to togetherness built on diversity.  But I think, sans soundtrack, that focusing on that lovely, wide angle group shot can be a distraction from the real thing.

Operationally, there is no unity of the masses worth having without a human-sized focus on the one. Unless we approach our world, one fascinating, troublesome, unscripted person at a time, our unity will just be another fancy idea, political label and empty campaign.

Take me. I'm a middle-aged, married, Chinese American woman of Christian faith. All true. But I've come to know, finally, that each of those labels that I wear, and appropriately so, do not ultimately present me to you. You can't call me by a "team name" (for example, "Woman") and really call ME. You can maybe summarize me; but you can't do that without also minimizing me. To know me, you'd have to spend time with me, conversing, sharing airspace and soulspace, and in that place of patient appreciation, you begin to apprehend me. And I, you. 

That's the glory of human beings (as well as the glory of God, by the way) - we are social, family, completed in connection. Knowledge about is not enough for us. We cannot Wikipedia or IMDB ourselves into fulfillment. Rather our brains actually change by human connection, by interpersonal mirroring and this starts from infancy and doesn't stop. There's an old Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy says, "To know me is to love me." I think the reverse is also close to true: "To love me is to know me."  Love and knowledge of another isn't linear, but a circular dance of growing appreciation and discovery that reveals and transforms the people dancing face to face, and not by avatar.

Maybe that's why in the 10 commandments, there's this strange prohibition against graven images. Yes, I know, it helps curb outright worship of statues. But, I wonder if it isn't also because God knows we are tempted, in our immaturity and avarice, to short-cut the real in exchange for pocketable, storable symbols of the real. We are collectors and can feel the power of holding individuals, like baseball card players, in our hand rather than play ball with real, everyday amateurs like ourselves. Increasingly that's how we live our substitute lives. I have a thousand great looking "friends" with incredibly interesting lives and deep thoughts and killer wit --- on Facebook. We all know that don't mean a thing, really.

But geez, who has the time? We've got companies to manage, churches to shepherd, nations to harmonize.  We may be thinking about the whole thing sideways. Less might be more if we trust the embedded design of relationship in our creation.

I have a friend with 3 children who found that their typically busy family was showing signs of time stress and relational unrest. She shared that she and her husband changed their game plan on how they invested family time. Instead of trying to spend time as a group in the evenings, they focused on one child for a special longer time each night. That child got to have Mom and Dad sit in bed with her and share for 10 minutes about whatever and perhaps read a special book together. This proved to be much more satisfying to everyone, relationally deeper, esteem-building and also do-able.

So back to unity. As John Lennon lyricized, "Say you're looking for some peace and love, Leader of a big old band, You wanna save humanity, But it's people that you just can't stand." If we're serious about unity, we have to ask ourselves, how are we handling just one? And, not incidentally, how are you handling yourself? 

For me, I struggled to seriously honor my own distinctive value. Maybe this stemmed from being the 5th child, from my sensitive, peace-keeper tendancy, and maybe in part from an ethnic culture that emphasizes the group over the one. But because I couldn't truly love and honor myself, without any bells and whistles, I wasn't really so good at loving other individuals. I was eager to celebrate commonalities and building bridges, but shy about digging deep into the differences that ultimately makes people interesting, and potentially unharmonious. I didn't know until much further down the road that until I could lovingly regard myself and others in our unique potencies, unity would be elusive, diluted or sabotaged.  

Know thyself. There's an important difference between self-knowledge and self-determination. Our current culture seems to blur them unhelpfully together. I've found the work of self-determination has frequently distracted me from knowing myself, especially what I need to know before I try to improve anything about my life. Specifically we need to know that we are loved and valuable as is. And if we enter into the machine of self-determination without that essential knowledge (as most of us do), we will be ground beef, pulled apart, chopped up and ready to fry.  

I spent most of my life caught in the wheels of self-determination but missing essential self-knowledge. The silent script "I'm important, and here's why" beat in the background of my various fantastic efforts.  What degrees I had, what unions I joined, my worldly ease in various settings, how I felt about my style, what expectations I standardized for myself as a woman, how much I inspired others in their faith -- these were ways I approached self-determination, mostly unconsciously trying to liberate myself. And none of it turned on the lights in me because guess what? Nothing we do can actually add value to who we are by right of God's magnanimous creation.  Does that make you mad? For those of us who have worked hard to determine ourselves, it takes a kind of humility to drop it all and receive the gift of yourself.  The apostle Paul wrote, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." That is to say, the love of God is your infuses you with identity, not your ethnicity, your social/political position or your sexuality. When I was finally graced to encounter myself as God receives me, it changed pretty much everything, and among other things, set me up much better to encounter and appreciate other people.

We're longing to be seen, to know who we are by what others might truly reflect back to us. The problem is a lot of us are cracked mirrors, or we grew up with people who contorted our image back to us. But I have hope that with God's work in us, we can offer profound experiences of knowing and loving to one another. And we're told that one day we're going to have a sublime, culminating experience of that with our Creator, so it makes sense that we warm up now.  

A couple years ago, I was being introduced as a conference speaker by a young pastor who had been in a small group I led when he was a college student. He surprised me when, describing why I was an impactful person worth listening to, he told how, while in that college small group, when we spoke, he felt like he was important, like he was the ONLY person in the room. Those face to face, life on life interactions, had profound effect on him.  We, and others who were in that small group, have a uniquely powerful bond, a unity, if you will. (To this day, over 20 years later, we half jokingly address each other as “mom” and “son”.) 

May I suggest a way to start. Look squarely, patiently, awkwardly at someone. It might even be yourself. Let him speak, or not speak. Give space for breath. Permit what she is and what she is not. And while you're doing that, invite God, the father of us all to lift your perspective of this person above your habitual one. Don't assume you see with clarity or know what love is like, but ask God to help you see and love the one in front of you. Do it today. Then again, tomorrow. And see what happens.

Magic Words

Expecto Patronum! Duckliflors! Potterheads may recognize these crucial spells for overcoming dark forces. (The first taps one's deepest place of joy to render a protective force and the second turns the target into a duck.) They are fun to say, especially when dramatically lunging with wooden chopsticks.

Words? How flimsy. What can they possibly do? You know, better to fear sticks and stones, right? Actually, ancient writ instructs: "Life and death are in the power of the tongue."  The Genesis creation story passes down that light, heaven and earth, finger, toes, chipmunks and all that followed was spoken into being. When describing the savior of the world, the Gospel of John calls Christ: The Word.

I believe in magic words, in that the Maker's creative verbosity is still lodged in us. Believe it or not. Here are some words I'm found to work. "I'm sorry." "Thank you." "I was wrong." "Wait." "I love you."

Too simple? Try saying them. Or worse, try not saying them. Worlds form and worlds collapse. People wait all their lives to hear something, and individuals and family lines perish for the lack of it. You are a wizard. Of dark or light. Of healing or hurt. Little do you know, but the word you say to others, may be the one that transforms you.

Taking off the stinking slipper

A close encounter with God, ultimately means a close encounter with ourselves. And maybe not surprisingly, it's this latter meeting that may intimidate us the more. Because we remember what's there. And maybe worse, what's not there.

We may be terrified by the general sensation of intimacy and revelation, particularly if in the conveniently buried parts of ourselves, we carry an ID card, of sorts, of avert-the-eyes, shrink-and-clench shame. After finding them hiding in the garden, post-forbidden fruit, God said to Adam and Eve, "how come you're now embarrassed about your bodies?" After all, A&E were running around naked for who knows how long, having a great time. The shame didn't come from God or from their created state; vulnerability about all we are doesn't have to bring shame.  But shame was the silent partner in the sin that snared 'em. 

Shame is a self judgement, a giant, ugly bleeping thing that is tied around our neck. It is opportunistic, taking advantage of any convenient sin around you; not just your own. Many of us bear shame that came to us as little kids through adult messes around us. It's hard to get rid of.

A man at the dog park recently told me how he taught his puppy to stop chewing his rubber slippers. He took the one she chewed and fitted it over her head so that it was tight around her neck and couldn't come off and she had to wear it around all day; after that she wouldn't come anywhere near slippers.

I don't think shame works in the same way although some religious types imagine it does; rather, I think shame gets noosed around our neck when we chew on sin and God actually wants us to come to him and let him take the stinking, aggravating slipper off. I don't know if we are as smart as the dog to connect the shame to the sin; we tend to just ingest that we ourselves are giant, ugly bleeping things and we might as well do crap to ourselves and others (sin) since we have such little worth. The truly grave consequence of Adam and Eve's sin was that death entered humanity; but shame is the haunting pre-stench of that rot. And both sin and shame work cruelly to separate us from the kindness of our God.

This is why the good news of Jesus is all that. He has not only closed the dripping maw of eternal death with his own beautiful, immortal life but he has radically and kindly lifted us by the chin to say "Neither do I condemn you. Have peace." Jesus, motivated by the joy of our rescue, himself "scorned the shame" of the cross (Heb 12.2), and uprose against all mortal gravities, taking us with him to sit in the Father's perfect favor. He wore our skin and bones as if to say to us in the hearing of all the universe, angels and demons, defenders and accusers alike: "See, I'm not in the least ashamed of YOU. I really LIKE you. In fact, I AM now LIKE you. You have nothing to fear."

Jesus approaches us without hesitation. He grabs us warmly by the arms and says, "Come into the great house, I have so much for you but we can talk on the way." He is not big on prepping us to be "just so" before he brings us home. We come into the Father's blindingly good presence with sandy feet and not knowing which fork to use first, and it's okay because we're beloved friends that His son just brought home from the neighborhood.

Don't run. You are already known beyond your knowing. And you have been aggressively sought after for true love's sake. The cost has been no barrier to him because His affection is beyond your human reason. Let it be so; to insist on human reason at this point would be the saddest and deadliest poison of pride, the devil's last and trusted device. If we trade our "oh hell, it's just not possible for ME" for "I would believe", Jesus will restore to us the most beautiful glory of vulnerability that ever graced Eden: innocence. As strong as the One it leans on, fertile in its power, and untroubled in its peace.

So then, when you are invited to come close in your heart and encounter God, give your shy soul's hope a chance and say to both God and yourself, "Ok, I'm coming."