On finding beauty everywhere: Why I turned Christian radio back on

I suppose I could take photographs for money if I wanted to. But I don't. There's two simple reasons. One, it only seems to work for me when there's true love involved - that relationship flowing back and forth between subject and photographer that makes the photography session a synergistic hour of magic, laughter, and a time when true beauty shines through and unequaled joy is shared. And two, because I refuse to discard the outtakes: you know, the photos that are out of focus, not quite perfect, or unphotoshopped to perfection.

I see beauty in the rough edges. I see real life in the raw. 

We sing hymns at church these days, the old kind, those written pre-1900. Sometimes you have to listen hard for the raw. The pentameter is perfect, everything rhymes, and the music is classical perfection. One of my favorites, written by Helen Lemmel, based on Hebrews 12:2, was inspired by a simple line from the writings of the impoverished and embattled missionary Lillias Trotter, whose writings on suffering have brought comfort to many on the hard path marked out by our Savior. Lillias wrote, “So then turn your eyes upon Him, look full into His face and you will find that he things of earth will acquire a strange new dimness.”

Helen recalled that the melody to her hymn, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, came into her head immediately upon reading these lines, and the lyrics were perfected within 2-3 days, with what she felt to be the obvious direction of the Holy Spirit. In the lyrics you hear a rawness of reflection on the brevity of our life here and a bittersweet comfort found when focused on the hope we have in Christ, although Helen doesn't record any particular suffering in her life history as a gift concert pianist, voice professor, composer, mother and wife.

O soul, are you weary and troubled?

No light in the darkness you see?

There’s a light for a look at the Savior,

And life more abundant and free!

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,

Look full in His wonderful face,

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,

In the light of His glory and grace.

Christian radio offers up more rawness than I hear on Sunday in the meticulously practiced performances of a concert choir accompanied by a professional organist and pianist. There are the dissonant diminished chords of rock music, the harshness and brashness of unpolished solo voices, lyrics about the realness of 21st century Christian life. For some time after I left the Evangelical Church in 2010, all of this, so familiar to me that I had most of the songs memorized, grated on my soul like rubbing course salt in a fresh and bloody wound. I switched my radio pre-sets, and my kids listened to Kidz Bop instead of Jeremy Camp. I was on a search for Jesus in the lyrics of the lost on pop stations and in the rock anthems of my dad's hippie days.

But I still wake up, I still see your Gospel
Lord, I'm still not sure what I stand for
What do I stand for? What do I stand for?
Most nights, I don't know...
(Some Nights, Fun.)

The past two months have been tough. My schedule is busier than it's been in many years. There are days when I feel like I am failing at everything - mothering, my job(s), my friendships, my relationship with my husband, my duties at home, and any semblance of caring for myself. I have friends wading through some serious hard stuff. I can't seem to focus for 5 minutes, let alone let my mind still long enough to hear a whisper from God. I'm gritting my teeth through Bible reading, and prayer feels like a disciplined work-out rather than a conversation of souls.

That's why I finally turned my radio back to Christian radio. Yes, I still think most of it is pretty bad, musically speaking. The poetry is forced, every third melody sounds virtually the same, and I'm generally unconvinced about the worth of any of it. But it seeps into the cracks of this dry ground of my soul, and every now and then a word catches..."Ancient of Days"..."You were the first, You are the last"..."Here I found my home". For these few phrases, I'll let it be the chatter in the background when I'm in the car. The songs are mostly new, and the wounds are mostly healed. And He is speaking to me again through the musical "outtakes" that make up most of Christian radio.

What's your station tuned to?

Mid-night journal

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. ~ Philippians 4:6

This verse is an oldie, but goody (my brother Daniel used to say that as a small boy, and it still tickles me deep within to say it). Tonight I am up as the first pink glaze of sun appears in the pines out my bedroom window, heralding the end of night and beginning of another morn...up all night trying hard to put actions to this verse. It has been a night of prayer, a night of reading, a night of closing my eyes in near delirium and still the prayers flow and the sleep does not come.

How many times had patients sat there waiting for her to announce her decision after a similar moment of respite? Invariably the decision was based on science and statistics, a conclusion crosschecked and attained by logic. What a cask of horrors, she now thought, lies concealed in this moment of respite! Dontsova had known what she was doing when she had concealed her pain from everyone. You only had to tell one person and irresistibly the avalanche was set in motion, nothing depended on you anymore. Her ties in life, which had seemed so strong and permanent, were loosening and breaking, all in the space of hours rather than days. In the clinic and at home she was unique and irreplaceable. Now she was being replaced. We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it. She was so used to taking personal charge of everything that even today she couldn't leave a single person without making at least a month's mental forecast. She was getting acclimatized to her misfortune. She examined, prescribed, and issued instructions, gazing at each patient like a false prophet, while all the while there was a chill running down her spine. These were the thoughts that plagued her and weakened her normal resolute cast of mind. She looked at one patient...they had given so much of themselves to try to save this quiet Tartar, yet all they had won was a few months' delay. And what miserable months - a pitiful existence in an unlit, unventilated corner.

It made Dontsova realize that if she rejected her own yardstick and adopted Sibgatov's, she could still count herself lucky. ~ from Cancer Ward, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, true stories based on his own 2 year battle with cancer in the mid-1950's

As the bleeding heart blooms in the spring afternoon sun, I contemplate losing a part of self. Not just figuratively, like last time, but literally this time. I agonize over the prayers I've prayed of willingness for cancer. I long for a different, easier way.

I walk around the house, and see the writing literally written on my walls...the signs that open the door for this kind of trial, let God in to tear things down and build them back in a totally different shape. I start at the front door, and the words flow in this order: with God all things are possible. As for my house, we shall serve the Lord. Love like there's no tomorrow. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Verses, sayings that reflect our intimate understanding in this marriage and house that this is only temporary. The suffering is temporary, the joy is temporary, the work is temporary.

What am I supposed to do with the fact that we are so far outside the realm of normal experience that most people are simply confused by our story? We have asked ourselves and each other times innumerable whether this is a wake up call. We still don't see it, if we are being woken to something...and that is so frightening! How much further might God push to show us what we seem to be blind to? And might it not be a powerful Evil that foists this suffering upon us? Might we have something in our future that is so definitely for God's glory that Satan might try to destroy it? And why, then, would God allow it? Could we really be a modern day Job story, a modern day David, hunted and oppressed and beaten and crushed? Could we share the sufferings - and deliverance and beatitude - of Paul, Timothy, Noah, Moses, Elijah, heck, all the prophets?

The next step comes Wednesday. I have surgery at 10:30 a.m. to remove the lumps. They will be biopsied for cancer, perhaps sent to a specialty lab if they come back one certain type...follicular, the type of thyroid cancer cell origin, and also possible in the breast. We may know immediately - and I may lose my breast on Wednesday, too. Or it may take weeks. But at least the lumps will be out, gone, frozen in liquid nitrogen and sliced and examined and done with. What follows is a big question mark that has me sleepless, petitioning, taking fear into my two hands and throttling it with Scripture. So many questions have no answer...but what to do? is not one of them. I simply pray. I plead. And I read.

Nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

~ written by a sinner like me::Leonard Cohen, 1981

Today I am comforted by other struggling sinners, and the Word that washes away fear and doubt. Fullers' soap strips me bare: scours, scrubs, bleaches, and beats me. But leaves me clean.

But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fullers' soap:

Ye have said, It is vain to serve God: and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the LORD of hosts? And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name. And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. (from Malachi 3)

When the rain comes

God's promise is raining down on me fresh this week.

When the rain comes it seems that everyone has
gone away
When the night falls you wonder if you shouldn't
find someplace
To run and hide
Escape the pain
But hiding's such a lonely thing to do

I can't stop the rain
From falling down on you again
I can't stop the rain
But I will hold you 'til it goes away

When the rain comes
you blame it on the things that
you have done
When the storm fades
you know that rain must fall
on everyone
Rest awhile
it'll be alright
No one loves you like I do
When the rain comes
I will hold you

~ When the Rain Comes, Third Day

Have You Ever Been Alone with God? Oswald Chambers (scroll back a day, too: I've linked to my favorite of a two part series)

"Be careful what you wish for"

God, my God, I cry out
Your beloved needs You now
God, be near, calm my fear
And take my doubt

Your kindness is what pulls me up
Your love is all that draws me in

I will lift my eyes to the Maker
Of the mountains I can’t climb
I will lift my eyes to the Calmer
Of the oceans raging wild
I will lift my eyes to the Healer
Of the hurt I hold inside
I will lift my eyes, lift my eyes to You
~ I Will Lift My Eyes, Bebo Norman

I received news today that my prayer has been answered. In a difficult way. Samples of my tumor were sent three weeks ago to Pennsylvania, and a report and interpretation of the findings from both the pathologist and the specialist at the University of Chicago were sent to my doctors. The pathologist asked for the entire tumor to be shipped to her for further testing. She has since sent a final report to my team of doctors in Eau Claire and Chicago. However, the endocrine specialist was out of the office today for the holiday, and my regular general practice doctor didn't feel capable of giving me the results himself. It is difficult to know what to make of the entire situation, other than to lean on the fact that I asked God to stay the news, and He has.

In the midst of my heart breaking and my insides turning wrong side out, my brain is trying to make sense of this. I am trying to strike a balance between responding to the news I've been given without overreacting and assuming the worst, which is my natural bent.

Mostly, I feel completely inadequate to express any of the rawness I feel right now. I am in one of those "beyond words" moments, of which I have had so many...positive and negative...in the last six months. I feel bruised and I will try my darnedest to love and savor this Christmas with my family.

Whatever God has for me in this life, I know that through the miraculous birth of my Savior over 2,000 years ago, my tears will be wiped away. I may be in the tragic, perilous, fragmented and uncertain middle ground of my fairy tale, but I will live "happily ever after" someday.

Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro: He bustles about, but only in vain; he heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it. But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you. Save me from all my transgressions; do not make me the scorn of fools. Hear my prayer, O Lord, listen to my cry for help; be not deaf to my weeping. For I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger, as all my fathers were. from Psalm 39