A Gold Shirt

On By Charis PsalloIn Flowers2 Comments

blue jay ch IMG_5799

Mom said I sang a lot when I was a little kid. My favourite song was apparently “Que Sera, Sera” which I belted out in my bold three-year old voice from the backseat of Daddy’s cavernous Olds. Since I am now officially closer to one hundred years old than three, what will-be-will-be, at least on this green earth, has probably mostly already been –and it’s been mostly good.

I also remember singing something about a “blue bird of happiness.” I found the actual lyrics today. The chorus goes like this:

Be like I, hold your head up high,

Till you find a bluebird of happiness.

You will find greater peace of mind

Knowing there’s a bluebird of happiness.

And when he sings to you,

Though you’re deep in blue,

You will see a ray of light creep through,

And so remember this, life is no abyss,

Somewhere there’s a bluebird of happiness.

Happiness, crappiness.

I was crying with my friend a while ago. It was the anniversary of the death of her little girl. She showed me pictures of her little one’s last day. There sat a disheveled version of my friend in a rocking chair. Her boyish husband stood beside her, stunned-faced, hand on her shoulder, as they tried to gaze into Lily’s eyes which were closing for the last time. The child was still connected to tubes; you could see a nurse’s hand on the edge of the frame supporting them. Not exactly a blue bird moment.

My friend’s blue bird, like all flighted birds, done flyed away. She has no desire to pursue happiness right now. Their pursuit of happiness was a journey that led to an abyss where the chirping blue bird, flitting high and out of reach in his very own personal sunbeam, mocks her.

Your story may be equally painful. The devil has an uncanny ability to custom-make horror and toy with our fears.

I wonder if we fear disappointment more than pain.

Hope can hurt –hurt too much to risk raising that flag again sometimes. I didn’t dare unfurl that one for nearly twenty years myself. If I saw a “ray of light creep through” I just ignored it as one more creep.

Yet Jesus promised joy and a peace that passes understanding when we trust him. Well, I kind of ignored him for a long time, but when I was finished my dark night of the pout, he was still waiting, willing to talk. Nothing else was working so I decided to listen. I read, in the book of James in the Bible:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Pure joy? You’ve got to be kidding!

I began to wonder if there is a difference between happiness and joy. Nowhere does God guarantee happiness all the time, but he does promise joy in the midst of trials. It seems to me that while happiness might drop by for a visit, joy is willing to move in.

So I asked, “What is joy?”

I think I am beginning to see it. Joy is wearing a gold shirt.

Remember the first Star Trek shows? I’m not allowed to forget. My husband spent weeks taping them all, then bought the boxed DVD set anyhow. He puts them on, turns up the volume, and promptly takes a nap on the couch. I’m the one who can recite the dialogue. The actors in the red shirts seldom came back for a second episode. It is much easier to feed those characters, for whom we have developed no fondness, to the aliens. But we loved our Captain Kirk and his emotion-free sidekick, Spock. Week after week they faced the perils of where-no-man-has-gone-before. Week after week their lives hung by a half-blasted plasma conduit or dangled by a thread of non-linear inspiration until Scottie swooped in –all Deus ex machina and beamed them out of there. We could breathe again.

How could we survive the tension?

Because we knew that our beloved characters were played by actors who had a contract until at least the end of the season –or even longer in the case of syndicated Star Trek spin-offs that still play out during hubby’s nap time.

This is the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness is sunbeams and singing blue birds, and lo-cal non-fat lactose-free ice cream that tastes just like the extra creamy cookie dough stuff.

Joy is the excitement of hanging over a cliff all summer until the opening show of the new season when we know, we just know, that God has a creative solution in his script. Joy is the anticipation of seeing how he’s going to get us out of this one. Real joy is seeing the big picture, the reeeeeeeaaaaaally big picture on the really big screen of eternity, knowing that we have a contract with the Producer/Director. He gave everything for this relationship because he has a vision for character development that goes way beyond this season. It goes on forever.

I saw my friend smile the other day, when she talked about Lily in heaven.

See the big picture. Joy. It’s exciting really.

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The Believer’s Cross

On By Charis PsalloIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

“The believer’s cross is no longer any and every kind of suffering, sickness, or tension, the bearing of which is demanded. The believer’s cross is, like that of Jesus, the price of social nonconformity. It is not, like sickness or catastrophe, an inexplicable, unpredictable suffering; it is the end of a path freely chosen after counting the cost. It is not, like Luther’s cross, an inward wrestling of the sensitive soul with self and sin; it is the social reality of representing in an unwilling world the Order to come.” John Howard Yoder in The Politics of Jesus

When facts get in the way of truth

On By Charis PsalloIn Mountains, Trees and forests5 Comments

Fisher Peak from Environmental office ch rs

I love the valley we live in. Snow, clouds, and sun continually change the texture and colour of the mountains. I drove my old Saskatchewan farmer uncle up to a viewpoint expecting him to admire the vista as much as I do.

“It’s okay,” he grunted, ” but those mountains kinda block the view.”

To him beauty was a thin band of waving wheat domed by an enormous sky. I suppose mountains could look like giant rocks that would impede the progress of a plow. His eyes feasted on open space.

My eyes feast on rivers, lakes, trees and mountains.  I particularly like being surprised by the mountains. The other day they suddenly emerged after hiding in a moody dark cloak of cloud all week. A fresh fall of snow glowed in the morning sun. The beauty kind of took my breath away and I pointed them out to another person in the parking lot.

“Too bad the telephone wires ruin the view,” he said.

I was so enthralled with the light I hadn’t noticed the poles and wires. Nothing was “ruined” for me. If I was taking a photo I probably would have moved to change my perspective -maybe to a spot right under the wires. At that moment I was not focusing on telephone poles. I could still see beauty.

Facts can be like annoying telephone wires that keep us from seeing a bigger truth. Have you ever been in the middle of sharing a really good anecdote to illustrate your point when someone interrupts with facts?

“No. It was a Thursday and she was the niece of the Schufflemeier boy with the plate in his head, not his cousin.”

Clouds sailing to Alberta on the high westerly winds sometimes look like they snag on the Rockies on the way to the waving wheat fields. They can stay there for hours. I think some people’s minds snag on facts like the clouds snag on the craggy peaks and they miss the beauty of both the mountains and the prairies.

My stories are not always accurate for detail -although I am trying to be more respectful of  those who need documentation. Fiction can speak truth more plainly than court evidence. And honestly? A lot of my photos are photoshopped because I am trying to communicate the truth I see. I take out the telephone wires -unless it’s a comment on the shape of sunlit frosted wire garlands, which can be kind of cool. So you can correct me if you were there and remember it differently, but I’ll probably ignore you like I ignore the telephone wires.

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Subject to change

On By Charis PsalloIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sometimes I read things I wrote with such passion years ago –and cringe.

I’m not the same person I was then, or even a week ago. I am changing.

Being aware that written words flung into space have an indefinite life-span, I am wary of attaching my name to any opinion that ends with a click. Jesus did mention that someday words spoken in secret would be made public. The recent Wiki leaks poignantly remind us that words typed, spoken or signed may all be piling up in some cosmic file somewhere where there are no passwords, avatars or pen names.

So I’m wondering, given the weight of this responsibility, what I should write. Or not write. I’ve uttered some pretty stupid stuff in my time. Every once in a while, though, I’ve passed on a useful tidbit to another sojourner on the road -but only  because it’s a patch of road I’ve already been down -sometimes several times. Some trips worked out well and others…

Sometimes I am merrily dancing down this road when I catch the gleeful possibility of a new rabbit trail in my peripheral vision (where most creative stuff happens.) Sometimes I come out ahead. Sometimes I emerge, scratched, bug-bitten and humbled ten miles back from where I was distracted. Then I get to experience the same lesson all over again.

Sometimes I am merrily dancing down the center of the road when I am attracted by a pretty new idea blossoming on a bush on the verge. After a time, when the thorns from that bush clutch at my mental, spiritual, or intellectual  freedom I pull away so hard that I land in the soggy boot-snatching mud in the ditch on the other side of the road.

It may take a while to find the center again.

Then again, I have noticed a tendency in people who constantly worry about being in the center to make the road much narrower than God does; it’s hard to dance on a tightrope. I intend to make use of the whole road and dance, plod, saunter and holy roll (if I feel so led) into my God-given destiny. Tiny “c” conservative is not a compliment if it means burying your one talent in the ground for fear of making a bad investment, nor will making a grand ta-dah dismount from the balance beam of life, after decades of clinging to it with all fours, impress the judge all that much.

I have not arrived, and as the Bible says, “It does not yet appear what we shall be.” I have not arrived, but I would like to leave some bright ribbon trail markers from time to time, if it will help followers conserve shoe leather and take them farther than I have gone.

So, I am subject to change, by the grace Jesus Christ pours on me, because sometimes I’m wrong -and I’m learning to admit it- and he gives me more chances to get it right. I am subject to change because God has created me to be something I haven’t fully realized yet, although he does realize it and probably is not nearly as discouraged by my flubs as I am since he is not limited by the constraints of living on a timeline. He knows the end from the beginning. I am subject to change, because thing one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind I press on to the mark of the high calling of God, and the more I get to know him, the more I love him, and the more I want to change.

It’s a process.

My Psalm

On By Charis PsalloIn Poetry, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Like a child standing on tip-toe,

unable to reach the light switch,

like a girl groping cellar walls,

unable to find the stairs

I waited in the dark.

The drone of traffic in the streets

in rising and lowering songless pitch

neared my heart

then passed me by,

hope deferred yet once again.

I cried, “Oh God! Where are you?”

Pouring my effort into limp flowers

potted in dessicated soil

I watched as it seeped through again and again

staining the white tablecloth beneath.

“I can never be good enough,” I whimpered.

But you,

Abba

Papa

Father

said, “Come.”

You placed your strong arms under mine

and lifted me up.

You tossed me high

into the sunlight

and caught me with your grace

stronger than any fear of failure.

You held me in your lap wide as a green orchard

and fed me words from your mouth.

Abba, you are my light in the hall.

Papa, you are hope like the door left ajar.

Father, I hear you in the kitchen preparing a feast for me.

You are my strength, my light, my hope, my joy.

I love you.