Tag Archives: Jesus Christ

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a poem to share

Last week I received a beautiful, thick volume of Victorian poetry, published as a textbook in the 1960s, with excellent editorial notes and a fantastic breadth of coverage. My only complaint about the book is that it inexplicably omits one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’ve always been under the impression that this was one of his best-known poems, so all I can guess is that either its omission was a mistake or the editor was tired of hearing it. I’m not tired of hearing it, so I’m going to share it with you here. This poem is in the public domain, and I obtained this text from the ever-helpful poets.org. (The accented syllables are meant to receive emphasis. Try reading this poem aloud; it’s even better that way!)

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;	
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells	
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's	
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;	
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:	        
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;	
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,	
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.	
 
Í say móre: the just man justices;	
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;	        
Acts in God's eye what in God’s eye he is—	
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,	
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his	
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
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Sunrise over the Sea of Tiberias

In my last post (which was longer ago than I realized!), I mentioned that I’m working on a couple of short stories based on the life of Jesus. I want to share the latest draft of one of those stories with you. This is based on chapter 21 of the gospel of John. I feel like it needs one more paragraph to bring it to a close at the end, so if you have any suggestions, I’m open!

The sun was just starting to rise over the Sea of Tiberias. An orange glow crossed by thin dark clouds. The air was still chilly.

Some of us had gone fishing overnight. It had been Peter’s idea; he’d said he wanted to do something with his hands.

“But we’re not fishermen anymore,” Andrew had pointed out.

“What are we, then?” Peter had argued. That had silenced Andrew. “Besides, we’re not going to sell them,” Peter had said. “I just want to do something.”

Not all of us were trained as fishermen, but those who were gave us things to do, to keep us busy. We sat in the boat all night, quiet in the dark, drained of stories from the past week.

As the sun began to rise, we headed back to shore. A silhouette of a man was standing there. I shivered. He called out: “I guess you guys didn’t catch any fish?”

I thought I recognized the man’s voice, but I didn’t want to say it. I glanced at the others.

“No,” Peter called out. He didn’t sound irritated, just tired.

The man called back: “Let down your net on the right side of the boat. I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

Someone gasped. I saw John smile and nod. “Do it,” said Peter. Of course we did. I wasn’t there three years ago, but I’d heard the story dozens of times.

Immediately, the net was full of fish. This was not a surprise—again we all knew what to expect—but it still took my breath away. I paused to gasp some air into my lungs. “Grab the net!” James hollered. I did. But even with all of us pulling, we couldn’t get the net into the boat.

“Drag it in,” said Peter. “I’m going to talk to Jesus.” He took off his coat and jumped into the chilly water.

The orange glow was spreading up from the horizon. James and John got us into the little boat, not the main boat, so we could pull the net into shore without having to weigh anchor. My job was to hold onto the net for dear life.

When we got to shore, there was a small coal fire with bread toasting over it. Just when I realized I was hungry, the man raised his head from the deep consultation he had been in with Peter and smiled. It was unmistakably Jesus. There was a moment when I forgot he had been dead a week before. I remembered when he pushed his hair off his forehead and when I saw the ugly scar in his hand. “I’m making breakfast for us,” he said. “Hand me a couple of those fish.”

I grabbed two of the fish from the teeming pile. They were cold, and a ray of sun shone off their silver scales. I placed them in Jesus’ hands, which were warm from the fire. “Thank you,” he said, looking in my eyes, and it sounded like a blessing. I didn’t know what to say, and Peter looked eager to continue their talk, so I turned back toward the net. “We should count these,” Thomas said.

“Why?” I frowned. “We’re not going to sell them.”

“Someone will want to record the number.” He gestured toward the others. At least two of them were writing down their experiences with Jesus. I was just trying to make sense of it all in my head.

“Is the number important?” I looked at the net. It was just a small one, not a big commercial net like I’d seen some of the fancier-looking fleets have. But it was bursting, a multitude of fish now glowing with the fire of the mostly risen sun.

Thomas shrugged, already spreading out a canvas for them to dry. “Anything might be important.”

So, I helped. As Peter remained in hushed conversation with Jesus, who listened carefully as he turned the fish over the fire, as James and John mended a net just on the edge of their discussion, as Nathanael walked the beach alone, picking up driftwood for the fire, I helped Thomas count the fish. There were 153.

The sun had fully risen when Jesus said, “Breakfast is ready.” He broke the bread and passed it around. He burned his fingers on the fish as he divided it up. The skin was salty and crispy and the flesh flaky, and I didn’t know if it was because God had cooked this fish or because Jesus of Nazareth just had a lot of practice preparing food in the open air. But it was perhaps the best fish I had ever eaten. The bread, too, was soft on the inside with a faint char on the outside, and this surprised me not at all.

Jesus looked out to sea, toward the sun in its strength. Then he looked back to us, casting his gaze around the circle, where we all sat licking our fingers. “Remember,” he said. “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth. You are the fishers of men.” He smiled. “But you are shepherds now, too. As I just told Peter, I am sending you to feed my sheep.”

Peter ducked his head and gave a grin that looked uncharacteristically shy. I thought about how Jesus had called himself the good shepherd. Now he was asking us to be the same.

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writing goals for 2024

As I think about my goals for the new year, I’m considering how I want writing to fit into my life in 2024. I have always seen myself as a writer, but after a few highly productive years leading up to the completion of a novel in 2019, I’ve been in a dry spell, at least by comparison. I do a lot of writing for my work–mainly emails and grading feedback–but in this post, I’m thinking about writing that is both more enjoyable and less ephemeral than those, important as they may be. So here are some writing goals I’d like to focus on in the new year.

  1. Get back into the habit of writing in my notebook for 15 minutes a day. I started doing this in September after I read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and wanted to rediscover the joy of writing, especially in longhand (a practice Goldberg speaks highly of). Throughout that month, I wrote for 15 minutes every morning. Most of what I wrote will never be shown to the world (though this post was a result of one particularly productive day), but it was a good practice, and I’d like to get back into it consistently in 2024.
  2. Research and revise two short stories based on incidents in the life of Christ that I drafted in 2023. These stories resulted from my daily writing practice. They are quick sketches that need research give them accuracy and authenticity. I may use my research and revision process to help me develop some resources for my students (I wrote about this idea here), but even if I don’t end up doing that, I would like to get these stories into a state that I’m happy with.
  3. Reread Sam’s Town to help me decide whether I want to work on the sequel. Sam’s Town is the novel I self-published in 2019. Soon after I completed it, while still riding a writing high, I started the sequel, Sam’s Home. But then I got married, moved, and lived through the pandemic, and the few brief attempts I’ve made to pick the manuscript back up haven’t really gone anywhere. So in 2024, I’d like to reread Sam’s Town in hopes of recapturing some of that excitement. Even if I ultimately decide not to make writing the sequel one of my goals for this year, I think I’ll enjoy revisiting those characters who played such an important role in my life for several years.

Three is a magic number when it comes to goal-setting, so I’ll stop there. What are some of your goals for 2024, writing-related or otherwise?

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a prayer for humility

I wrote this prayer in my journal a few weeks ago. For clarity, Jordan is my husband, and BSF stands for Bible Study Fellowship.

When I think I know how Jordan is feeling and I really don’t

When I think I have the most insightful comment that could be made at that moment in my BSF group

When I assume a student’s tone in an email

Lord, help me to pause.

Help me to remember how little I know, and how good that is.

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“Not many of you should become teachers”

I am slowly memorizing the book of James in the Bible. Right now I am focusing on chapter 3, which opens with this statement: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers” (ESV). The humor here comes from the fact that James himself is clearly performing the role of a teacher throughout his letter, with his terse tone in which love for his audience competes with exasperation with them, his frequent questions and illustrations, and his short sentences, after which I can almost imagine him pausing to make sure his students are tracking with him. I would personify James’s narrative voice in this letter as a high school boys’ Sunday school teacher standing in front of a whiteboard alternating between outlining serious theological concepts and keeping an eye on the cutups in the back of the room. “Really, guys? You can be better than this.”

If James himself is a teacher, why is he warning others to pause before following in his footsteps? The second half of the sentence explains: “for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” This makes me think of two of the great sayings of James’s brother Jesus: “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak” (Matthew 12:36) and “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required” (Luke 12:48). All of us will be judged on the careless words we speak, but the more people who hear the careless words, the weightier the judgment. James is talking about influence.

If James were writing his letter today, he might say, “Not many of you should become influencers.” I think nearly all of us are at least a little bit allured by the idea of having a large platform with a large audience, whether it consists of book readers, podcast listeners, or social media followers (or all of the above, if you’re branding and marketing yourself as you should be). I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having those things, and I don’t think James would either. He is just saying: Before you take on that kind of responsibility, count the cost. Make sure your words have a firmer basis than your impression of what will sound wise or hip in the moment. People are listening.

James is talking specifically about teachers of the word of God, and I could write a whole series of posts about how influencer culture has…well, influenced the Church in the 21st century. But this blog is written for and by a different kind of teacher, and James’s principle applies to us too. Our students are listening. Preschool and elementary teachers realize this when they hear their students repeating their words and then wonder, “Yikes! Did I really say that?” (Most parents have had this experience too, I think.) I am always a little freaked out when one of my graduate or upper-level undergraduate students cites one of my course presentations in an assignment. [Fun side note: Now I’m starting to see my married name in citations: (Martinus, 2021).] My first reaction, even before I feel flattered, is a little bit of fear: “Oh, they’re actually paying attention. I need to be careful what I say!” I remember how cool and smart I thought my college professors were, especially those in my major. (And I should add, in case any of them read this, that they really were cool and smart!) I took their words very seriously. And I know I probably have some students now who think I’m cool and smart and who take my words very seriously. “Everyone to whom much was given, of [her] much will be required.”

Nobody is exempt from this principle, of course. We are all influencers. Some people have a wider (e.g. Instagram celebrities) or more intense (e.g. parents) influence than others. But no matter who you are, someone is hearing (or reading) your words and watching your life. You are a teacher. This is a great and a fearful honor. Yes, there is grace for when we make mistakes. But hear James’s warning whenever you are tempted to speak a careless word. Someone is listening.

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Jesus was busy.

Last week, I told you about Forest, an app that helps with productivity. I’ve been using it again this week, and it’s helping me a lot. I have quite the little forest going. Actually, it’s more of a meadow; I’m currently planting grass tufts instead of trees.

This week, I want to tell you about something infinitely more important than productivity: a quiet heart. I would like to quote at length from a book I am rereading, A Praying Life by Paul E. Miller. Here is what Miller says about the integrated nature of the praying life:

Many assume that the spiritual person is unruffled by life, unfazed by pressure. This idea that the spiritual person floats above life comes from the ancient world and, in particular, the Greek mind–although we see it strongly in the Eastern mind as well.

But even a cursory glance at Jesus’ life reveals a busy life. All the gospel writers notice Jesus’ busyness, although Mark in particular highlights it. At one point Jesus’ family tries to stage an intervention because he is so busy. “Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him,, for they were saying, ‘He is out of his mind'” (Mark 3:20-21). Given the sacredness in the ancient world of eating together, Jesus’ life seems out of balance. But he loves people and has the power to help, so he has one interruption after another. If Jesus lived today, his cell phone would be ringing constantly.

The quest for a contemplative life can actually be self-absorbed, focused on my quiet and me. If we love people and have the power to help, then we are going to be busy. Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life: it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of outer busyness we can develop an inner quiet. Because we are less hectic on the inside, we have a great capacity to love…and thus to be busy, which in turn drives us even more into a life of prayer. By spending time with our Father in prayer, we integrate our lives with his, with what he is doing in us. Our lives become more coherent. They feel calmer, more ordered, even in the midst of confusion and pressure.

Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life (NavPress, 2009)

I feel both a longing and a conviction when I read this. I deeply crave this life of inner quiet. But I recognize in myself the misguided pursuit of external calm. I can use all the focus apps I want do yoga in the middle of the afternoon but still feel frazzled and worried and bitter toward people who (as I see it) demand my attention. Quietness of soul is not about tools or resources, though those can help. Miller concludes his book with a section on prayer tools, and he acknowledges the importance of having a literally quiet place to pray (though he never says that’s the only appropriate environment for prayer). Quietness of soul, though, comes from acknowledging my need for the Lord from the outset—not waiting until my day is falling apart around me, but even when I wake up feeling pretty smart and together (which sometimes happens).

I’ll conclude with a quote from Emily P. Freeman that nicely sums up what Miller wrote and what I am contemplating these days. (This quote is from the show notes of an episode of her podcast, The Next Right Thing: https://emilypfreeman.com/podcast/the-next-right-thing/59/)

Just like any ordinary practice can be a spiritual discipline if it brings us into the presence of God, so can any ordinary place be a sanctuary if we will to see it so.

Cultivating quietness in our lives is less about our stage of life and more about our state of mind. You can be busy and soulful at the same time. The key is in paying attention.

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sounds like birds

Instead of trying to bang out a well-supported thesis-driven argument in half an hour like I normally do (it’s hard, by the way), today I’m going to write a not quite stream-of-consciousness, loosely poetic series of observations. Let’s see how it goes.

One good thing about having the windows open in the house is that I can hear the high, one-note call of the red-winged blackbird currently enjoying our bird feeder. I don’t remember seeing these birds until I moved to the Midwest, and I am still startled when I’m looking at a drab roadside field or that patch of wilderness behind our neighbor’s house and I see that yellow-outlined dab of red on a shiny black wing.

Another good thing about having the windows open is that when I’m listening to my record of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending” in the middle of the afternoon, I can share it with my neighbors if they choose to listen. I’m not sure if the little girls giggling on the trampoline in the other neighbors’ backyard really care, but as I’m sitting cross-legged on our bedroom floor doing yoga and enjoying the record, I can imagine one of the girls whispering, “That sounds pretty.”

One good thing about taking a walk toward sunset is that we might hear a mourning dove coo and then look up at our neighbor’s roof and see it outlined against the glowing clouds. The mourning dove’s song is the earliest bird call I can remember recognizing and, I’ll be honest, still one of the only ones I can actually recognize. The sound takes me back to a summer night in my childhood home, where through my open window I might hear a mourning dove or I might hear my dad listening to a baseball game out on the deck.

One good thing about birds is that they remind me to pray. Today I learned about prayer triggers, sounds that remind us to stop for a moment and talk with God. Some people, apparently, pray whenever they hear a siren. I get it, but I don’t want to associate prayer with panic. So I wrote in my journal that whenever I see a bird at our feeder, I will try to remember to pray. There are two reasons for this. One is that ever since we put up this new feeder last week, birds have been flocking to it consistently. So, they will help me to pray without ceasing. The other reason is that Jesus once said, “Look at the birds.” He was teaching his disciples not to worry. He asked them to think about how the Father makes sure the birds get fed–even the ones that don’t live near a well-stocked platform feeder–and how much more precious each of them, the disciples, was in the Father’s eyes. So when my eye is on a sparrow–or when I hear a blackbird sing–I will think about how God watches me.

Another time, Jesus said to his disciples, “Fear not, little flock.” I always picture a flock of sheep there because of that automatic association most of us make between the Bible and sheep, but I don’t know, maybe Jesus was thinking of a flock of purple finches too. One good thing about birds is that they’re always handy for a metaphor.

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what marriage is all about

You might have looked at my title, knowing that I’m not even married yet, and written me off as a person with a (very small) platform who’s presuming to lecture on things she knows nothing about. Before you tense up, let me put you at ease. All I’m offering today is a quote. I think it’s about all I have the creativity for today, after grocery shopping, emailing distraught students, and calling hotels to hold blocks of rooms for our wedding, a task that had me disproportionately stressed out for some reason. (And I didn’t even teach today, at least not in the formal classroom sense.) Plus, coming up with a blog topic every week is hard work, you guys. Normally, around this time of year, I have something to say about the Oscar nominations, but I haven’t even looked at those closely enough to say anything intelligent about them. Maybe next week.

So, for today, a quote. This is actually a secondary citation, which I typically discourage my college students from using. You’re supposed to go to the original source; it’s a (relatively minor) infraction of academic etiquette to cite the book where you found the quote instead of the book where it originally appears. But this isn’t a dissertation; it’s a blog, so there. Anyway, in my premarital counseling homework reading, I came across this lovely and fairly lengthy quote. I found it in Greg and Erin Smalley’s introductory chapter of Ready to Wed, but they’re quoting Tim and Kathy Keller’s book The Meaning of Marriage. (Note to put that one on our to-be-read list.)

When looking for a marriage partner, each much be able to look inside the other and see what God is doing, and be excited about being part of the process of liberating the emerging “new you.” … This is by no means a naive, romanticized approach–rather it is brutally realistic. In this view of marriage, each person says to the other, “I see all your flaws, imperfections, weaknesses, dependencies. But underneath them all I see growing the person God wants you to be.” … The goal is to see something absolutely ravishing that God is making of the beloved. You see even now flashes of glory. You want to help your spouse become the person God wants him or her to be. … What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.

This is true. I don’t know much about marriage yet. (I wish I could trade my nearly-useless knowledge of citation etiquette for something useful like marriage wisdom.) But I already know the Kellers’ description to be true. This is why, already, Jordan can point out (he always does it gently and rarely does it at all) an area for improvement in my life without me getting angry or hurt like I would if a stranger, or even perhaps a friend, said the same thing. And why I can do the same for him. This is why we can feel, and act, confident in one another’s presence–because we know that we have already accepted one another.

It is a faint glimpse of the acceptance we find in Christ. Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of the woman at the well in John 4. When she went back to her town to tell people she had met Jesus, she said, “Come, see a man who told me everything I had ever done.” She said this excitedly, like it was a selling point. Because for her, that may have been the best part of her conversation with Jesus: the fact that he knew everything about her–her sin, her social isolation, her confusion about spiritual matters–and still accepted her. He sat and talked with her, took her questions seriously, and after the initial mention, never brought up her sin again. Full knowledge, full acceptance.

Well, that is not the direction I thought this post might take when I started it. I’m actually sitting here crying right now. I hope this will encourage someone else, but if not, it did me. Thank you for reading this quote and my thoughts on it today.

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History ends with a wedding.

Close on the heels of my last exciting life event, the publication of my novel, I celebrated another, even more monumental milestone: engagement to my “real-life Sam,” whose name is actually Jordan. We are getting married in May. And I want to take a break from emails about wedding venues and cost breakdowns to share a thought that leaves me in awe every time I consider it.

I try to get across to my literature students the significance of why (almost?) all of Shakespeare’s comedies end with a wedding: because history as we know it ends with a wedding (Revelation 19:1-10). And that wedding is followed by a feast. I love the fact that the very act of getting married and celebrating our marriage symbolizes and proclaims God’s covenant of faithfulness to his people, his church—his bride, as he calls us.

I am trying to keep this in mind as we plan. Regardless of how classy the decorations look or how good the food, our wedding is going to be a picture of God’s love. I can hardly wait.

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more musical observations

My posts have been taking a musical turn of late, not necessarily by design. Here are two more semi-profound musings I had about songs this past weekend.

  1. In a post several years ago, I grouped together three movies that came out in 1999 and summarized them all with the famous line from the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” (1998): “You bleed just to know you’re alive.” I found myself thinking about this lyric again while listening to a song from just two years later, “Pinch Me” by the Barenaked Ladies (2000). I realize now that I’ve typed it out that this is a really unfortunate convergence of song title and band name (well, let’s just say a really unfortunate band name, period), but the title simply refers to the song protagonist’s feeling that he is asleep and needs to be (but is not sure if he wants to be) awakened in order to face the real world. (By the way, you may know this song better as the one with the line, “I could hide out under there/I just made you say ‘underwear.’”) The song could be read as a plea from a depressed person who can’t muster the courage to even go outside his door. I have a feeling that many cultural critics read it, along with “Iris,” as an anthem of the malaise of late Gen X-ers and early Millennials—people my own age, who grew up hearing these songs as background music—and perhaps some of them connect this malaise with the sense of entitlement that they are so fond of attributing to people in that age range. I prefer to think of true interpretation of these songs as somewhere in between: they’re not only about people with diagnosable mental health conditions, but neither should they be dismissed as the whines of bored young people who have to manufacture problems in order to help themselves feel validated. I would submit that the world has gotten more overwhelming and that people my age and younger are less equipped to deal with it than those who came before us, and these songs are just evidence of that. I’ll leave you with that to ponder.
  2. Now, something more uplifting. While running on Saturday, I listened to one of my favorite songs of all time, Queen’s “We Are the Champions,” and maybe it was all the adrenaline or the fact that my institution has graduation in less than two weeks, but in any case, I came up with a brief commencement address on the theme of this song. Here it is: Have you ever wondered why we use the term “commencement” for something that we usually talk about as an ending? Also, have you ever wondered why the song says, “We are the champions,” implying that we’ve already won, but then goes on to say, “We’ll keep on fighting to the end?” The answer to both these questions is the same: it’s that the struggle is never over in this life, is it? You’re celebrating the end of college, and indeed you should. You are a champion. But you still face the fight of career, relationships, and just getting through life. You can “go the distance” like Rocky, but then you still have Rocky II, II, IV, IV, and Rocky Balboa and Creed and Creed II—you see what I mean. The Queen song goes on to include several more of these “already and not yet” constructions (to borrow a term from theology): for example, the speaker of the song talks about taking his bows and his curtain calls, but just a few lines later he uses future tense: “I consider it a challenge before the whole human race/And I ain’t gonna lose.” So remember, the fight goes on. But don’t let that discourage you. [And I teach at a Christian college, so this next part applies to my students and is crucial.] Remember that you serve a God who does have time for losers. He gave his life for losers like us, and he makes us champions. The End.