I laid on my bed tonight, tired early. As I let sleep overtake me, I looked straight at my guts. I saw my inside hollow, with stone walls. My breathing was a wind passing through.Waking up in the middle of the night desperate for a way to describe it, I can’t.But for the always constant twitch for sex, it seems very much like the absence of every other desire.
Is anyone else up to the 12 minute challenge?
I feel like it’s changing my life. Could it change yours?
Where is the place where you don’t share yourself?
Do you hide your creative side? Do you lock up your thoughts and emotions? Do you give your wife 50%? Do you lock God in a box for when you need him?
What could you change in 12 minutes a day…?
It’s weird how ominous 12 minutes sounded when I first got into this. Now, it’s just a way of life.
Tonight Sarah shared how she feels like long-running prayers have been answered. She feels like we’re communicating on the same page. She feels like she’s a part of something.
I do too. We’re tackling problems together. We’re working out solutions to kid problems, back problems, money problems, lovin’ problems, and we’re enjoying each other more…
I’ve always been able to write. I’ve been able to sound funny and witty when the fingers hit the keys, but struggle to communicate out loud. I feel like that’s changing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still hilariously charming with the written word, but now I’m opening up a little more of the 98% that goes on inside my head…and she likes it. Whoa, she loves it.
And why wouldn’t she? She loves me.
10 to 9. I’m leaving the apartment because I’m meeting the guys, for our ritual.
She comes on the videophone.
I guess we don’t call it a videophone, but that’s what they were calling it in sci fi books and sci fi movies right up until about 1990. I guess we call it video chat. Now that it’s 2008.
This girl she’s in another country and here I am talking to her like it’s no odd thing. She’s in her bedroom and I’m in my living room thousands of miles apart, and then suddenly she’s in my living room, on screen. She smiles big. She always does. It’s a dying art, the way she smiles. Big and earnest, always like it could loose its balance at any moment and fall into a laugh.
“I’m on my way out the door,” I say.
“Aw, where are you going?”
“To meet the guys.”
“Can I show you something?” still smiling.
She puts up a painting to her camera – my screen – except I can’t tell it’s a painting because videophone technology hasn’t been perfected yet, even though it’s 2008.
What she’s holding up is a mash up of chunky squares.
She tells me the title.
“Huevo Rojo,” she giggles.
Like I said, just a mash up of chunky digital squares. No egg in sight. But it’s funny. I didn’t need to see it. I mean I still want to, hope to, and was eagerly looking for a digital picture over email of Huevo Rojo upon return home at 10 to 12.
But I thought about the girl and her work of art all night not because I saw it. But because I know how much she delights in doing, in creating, in pushing around oils on canvas.
Even if it’s complete nonsense to paint an egg in red, it makes all the sense in the world when she smiles large and says, “Can I show you something?”
I sleep with a CPAP.
For those that don’t know, that’s Continuous Positive Airway Pressure.
I have sleep apnea. I had a sleep study done a while back, and basically, without the CPAP, I stop breathing for up to a minute. And that happens over and over again, up to 60 times per hour.
Can you imagine taking one breath per minute?
The CPAP forces my windpipe open. It forces me to breathe.
Isn’t that just wrong?
In Genesis, it says, “God breathed into the man the Breath of Life.” Doesn’t it just feel like a curse that I or you should not be able to accept the gift that has been given? That which God imparts, my flesh fights against. It doesn’t want to take it in, and so I need to put fail-safes in place to make sure I accept it.
For me, this just represents the push and pull that we all do with God. There’s this amazing gift that we know is life-giving, and yet we fight against it. We push and pull. And when we see that we can’t do it on our own, we put in our own fail-safes. We create systems and process for prayer, for worship, for talking to God for just twelve minutes a day hoping that, God is still leaving the offer on the table that we can have the breath of life.
Sometimes the power goes out on our own plans. And then what happens?
We just lay there and unconsciously pray that we don’t suffocate. That God will continue to let us rest. Let us breath. Let us dwell in him, without plans, processes, parameters, or even prayers. Just rest in his arms, and breathe deep his life.
I was reading John this morning, really fast, and came to the end quite abruptly. He ends by telling us the reason why he wrote all these things in the first place. You can read it for yourself in John 20, but to me I feel like John writes all these stories about Jesus and then basically asks me to leap.
“Listen, this stuff is real, it’s hard and I believe your life will be more full this way. But you’re going to have to jump, you’re going to have to leap. You have all these other ways you could live, but I’m telling you this is better. Trust me. Leap.”
And the longer I am a Christian, the more I have to leap.
Life gets hard, bad stuff happens, I have lots of questions, is this true or this, or how about this? But what about this God, and this? And those people?
Come on, give me something to hold onto here God!
The problem is that Jesus isn’t inviting us to have all the answers.
I mean look at all the things Jesus gets excited about in John. It’s all these people who have faith! I haven’t seen faith like this he says.
All these people leaped, and He loves it!
I don’t know if what I’m praying for will happen, the big or the small.
I don’t know why some prayers in the world get answered and others don’t.
By praying 12 minutes I don’t have any answers, but I know I am experiencing a different kind of life.
I leaped, in this one area, and I’m taking what Jesus says and believing it’s true and going with it.
And I guess the only thing I do know is that I’ll probably have to leap again soon…
Actually, it was a lot more than 12 minutes. It was so nice to finally see my wife last night. Even though it didn’t really happen until 9pm, when we finally got the chance to talk to each other…It was peaceful. We both shared where we’re at. We both listened to each other. We both had something to say and pray. I really think we’re taking our next steps toward deeper engagement with each other.One thing we’re working hard on right now is money. It’s been an issue all of our marriage. We’re taking steps to be far more intentional with our finances. We’re paying the bills, giving God’s money back, and learning to live on less each month.We’re both in the same place with money for the first time ever. It feels so right to actually be able to talk about it and not be hiding from reality.
Oatmeal can’t just sit there — a still, cold lump in the bowl. It has a life as the perfect metaphor.
I mean how tidy. How neat. How ripe. The thing is Adam’s apple for Christ’s sake. Oatmeal — coercing you to the first bite by a bit of a promise, repulsing you in its last. The way it’s been written here you could make it stretch to say it has an almost shaming effect.
Oatmeal is every intention good or bad ending with an undesired result. It’s the first glass of whiskey or wine, the buzz on its way up, the first cigarette, the first high from weed – the one where your ribs strain from the pressure of your laughing. It’s your first time masturbating, and arguably every time since. It’s the first kiss given to someone you don’t have any intent on loving, it’s the first kiss received by someone with the power and follow through to crush you, it’s that first act of sex in which you succumb to a lover and wake up with a thief.
But it’s other things too – a stubbornness for aloneness on Saturday, that turns to hate for your loneliness on Sunday. A means to create wealth that over time fortifies a type of misery.
Well whatever it is, it’s just the right metaphor because you think you’re capable to make the decision that oatmeal is most assuredly not for you.
However, the truth is decisions like that are never resolute because oatmeal is incredibly patient, knowing the longer you stay away the longer it has to work up its promise again. It will lick your ear and blow on it.
Then you get to that part where he writes about harboring responsibility for it, and for ‘putting it away’, so to speak. I mean if you bend the words just right it’s really talking about mankind shoving it in, or burying it deep out of sight, or hiding its vulgarity behind the bushes, or serving a penance for the choice.
How brilliant a metaphor, in fact how brilliant the device that is metaphor. Anything — no everything can serve as little lens shaped story capable of magnifying the very nature of human existence.
Why not? It’s how Jesus teaches, after all, using his tidy parables the way he does.
He gives his exact meaning through metaphor saying, The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
On first listen you know precisely what he means. You believe you understand. Until you realize you’ve never done it, not sure you’re capable. I mean, trade it all, everything for that one thing? That one treasure that has the staying power to actually stay a treasure?
No, the transactions you make look more like a fool catching lightning bugs. At times you sweep your paw through the dark believing you trapped one, only to open your hand to its own emptiness. Other times you get one in your grasp, but you’re quick to close it up tight in a jar, to make something less-than-living out of something that once was fully alive.
You will be ever hearing but never understanding, come the words form Isaiah, repeated by Jesus before all of his the kingdom-of-heaven-is-like parables. This starts to sound more like the truth, because while stuck in the habit of resetting our appetites for the things that just leave us sick, we have never traded it all for that one treasure.
At least not like he has. Selling off might, power, prestige for that one thing. Siding with foolishness, brokenness and poverty over posturing, governing and greed. Literally selling it all for the one, just like the crazy old preacher in some story has it: He had died one death for all, but he would have died every soul’s death for one. Did they understand that? Did they understand that for each stone soul he would have died ten million deaths?
Do we understand?
If this is what the kingdom is like maybe it will always remain beyond our total grasp.
I wonder, can we at least understand how worthy a king he is for such a place?
So there’s this guy right and he’s been wandering for a few days. He’s been living in this same town for years, but kind of just wanders day by day. He works, but nothing real consistent, mostly odd jobs, working mostly to pay the bills. He has friends, actually he’s got a lot of friends, but would still considers himself a loner. It’s late summer and he’s doing okay. Not too bad, not too good. The weather is great, so he’s just walking thinking about the world, thinking about his life. If he had to describe himself he would say that he is joyful but discontent. Happy but not full.
As he is walking through this field, his foot kicks something hard. He swears out loud. Then laughs. Then looks down to see what he kicked. It’s beautiful. It’s shiny. It grabs him as keeps staring at it. The next thing he knows he’s on his knees digging around this thing, digging and digging. As he uncovers it from its hiding place his spirit fills up with something. He’s not sure what it is. Every part of his body starts tingling.
He’s crying now. He doesn’t even know why.
He picks up what he kicked, sits on his butt.
He looks up to the sky with a mix of crying and laughing and tingling.
Matt 13:44“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
Over the last week, I’ve done:
