Hannah Farver's Blog, page 17

love your enemies

I could quickly learn the art, I think
Of contempt; letting the rain slide off
In sprezzatura; adoring those only who
Do as I please; hating all those who
Show contempt for me

I could quickly grow numb, to all
Aches and pains; putting out of joint
My skill at disdain for overuse; to cause
All anger permeate; no aspect untouched
In my life of hate

Then I would prove no redeemed soul
No grateful saint
But hardened imposter
Listless at the words of a Savior not my own.

On days that all seems dry, I remember how You loved me with every heartbeat; and how scandalous...

On days that all seems dry,

I remember how You loved me with every heartbeat;

and how scandalous that is to say,

but how You said it first. (Jn 17:23)

Photo

If you squint, tree branches look fuzzy,Brushes raised against...

If you squint, tree branches look fuzzy,
Brushes raised against the sky,
Soft to the touch.
If you see them from the highway,
Unsquinting, you will see them as most do:
Tall, gnarly, rough and unmoving.
And if you get up close, and I mean,
close—when your chin rests on the rough bark
and the height no longer fazes you—
you will see more. Bark that breaks off
in your hands. Branches that poke
into your clothes, keeping you from
climbing further.
One secret I may tell: the day,
and not a moment before, but the very
day you take that deep breath,
forget the ground below and the shaking of
your knees and instead reach your hand to the highest
nearest branch, hoist your body higher,
then higher, chestagainsttree, and
facetotheheavens, at the top, on the waving
hands of twigs and leaves, you will see

green growing, small.
There, the leaves will shine, new,
fresh as babies faces; unshaken survivors of
winter blasts, because they hid in the recesses of bark and moss and dead pieces, which tied them
unbreaking, to life.
When you cling, nails digging intodry tree skin, take note of how it

feels to survive.

[I wrote this one a long time ago…]

"All children, except one, grow up…One day when [Wendy] was two years old she was playing in a..."

""All children, except one, grow up…One day when [Wendy] was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, 'Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!' …henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.""

- Peter Pan

Yeah. It's my birthday. At least, in about an hour and a half, I will be twenty-one and Wendy will have flown the coop. Sad. Not that I would trade the past 252 months for anything.

At the ocean's edgeMy feet wandered over white sandShells bit at my feetThe houses of dead...

At the ocean's edge
My feet wandered over white sand
Shells bit at my feet
The houses of dead clams—
But everything around me screamed
"ALIVE."

It's funny to think, to sit and

Watch the water thunder;
Collapse breathlessly at my feet;
Foam swirling with lethal power on waves

That tickle my toes.

And still…

There are days

When I find myself crippled on the sand
When I find waves
Threatening to suck me in—
The heart still beats.

I have found (oh, at last!)
I have found the Joy
Not in sunlit skies or rainbows
Not in waves subservient to my will
I have found the Joy
In the unlikeliest place

On the sand

In the rain

When we are still Your's

In spite of everything.

[starting to post some old eh, poetry? is that what this is? some of this is from rougher days, a long time ago. reading through them reminds me of the gift of Gospel hope; how people saved by God never stop needing grace, and that they never become less desperate for God, only more reliant on Him]

redefining "maturity"

"There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chuses, and that is, his duty…"

-Mr. Knightley, Emma

Honor: " …nobility of soul, magnanimity, and a scorn of meanness."

-Dictionary of the English Language, 1755

We measure people by their "maturity." This is usually defined as the capability of carrying large burdens responsibly, not shirking work, paying bills, being well-groomed and articulate.

That's all fine and important; but I wonder if we have shortchanged ourselves.

Back in the day, men and women aspired to honor, not just maturity. Honor was defined in a man as responsibility for his family, purpose in life, humility in his interaction with others, strength and boldness in the defense of truth, honor in what he did (and what he refused to do), and a consistent respect for his elders and to women.

Honor in women was pretty much the same, but was also clearly marked by graciousness and the ability to nurture strong relationships—not just with that-specific-gentleman, but the ability to keep up her friendships with girl friends, too. (Every Elizabeth has her Jane and Charlotte Lucas, every Elinor her Marianne.)

Today, I see people who are card-carrying members of adulthood with all the marks of "maturity," but no aspirations to this kind of honor.

I wonder if we've redefined "maturity" to mean "the bare minimum to qualify as an adult." And I wonder if, even people who are productive, ambitious and seemingly "model adults," lack the marks of honorable lives.

A girl who works hard and looks adults in the eye when she speaks is not mature, or honorable, if she does not make an effort to maintain peaceful friendships with the girl friends around her. A guy who works hard and plans to do something with his life is not mature, or great, if he substitutes real relationships with "networking friends."

I wonder how many more terms we've re-defined.

"Our biggest hindrance to greatness may be the desire to be great."

"Our biggest hindrance to greatness may be the desire to be great."

- Beth Moore

an uncomfortable post

I've been thinking (a dangerous pasttime, I know).

Since when did it become popular to refer to our circumstances as "my world." Like, "My wife and 2.2 kids are my world." When did it become praiseworthy to claim a world so small?

It doesn't do us much credit if "our world" is limited to people who it is natural for us to love.

My heart has adopted an unnatural ache for a people who are perhaps amongst the world's most forgotten. They are people we think of in terms of nuclear weapons.

Frosty Cold War-era diplomacy.

Hatred of, well, pretty much everyone who isn't them. (If you don't know who I'm talking about, google what nation is rated as the world's worst persecutor of Christians. It'll all come together then.)

They've got concentration camps that hold thousands—and those outside the barbed wire don't generally have much brighter conditions.

Every country has parentless children. But their orphans line up in orphanages like men line up in our death row. Except even our death row prisoners get to eat regularly.
Then there are house church members lined up in front of their own neighbors and shot to death.

And somehow, they've still got heroes who have the courage to defy it all. By praying. By hoping. By worshipping God, not the state.

I'm not saying this because I like pain or like talking about it. As a kid, Mom read aloud Christian persecution stories. I don't recall ever feeling more uncomfortable in my life than huddling on the couch, hearing about children killed in Sudan or Iran. I haven't changed a ton—I still hate hearing such painful news.

But there's a difference between hating painful news cause it makes you uncomfortable, and hating painful news because you hate that people loved by God are suffering.

Frederich Buechner wrote: "Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin."

John Stott said, "We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God."

And I guess all I'm wondering is what would happen if we saw the world as it is, and didn't reduce it just to us and our lives.

I'm praying that God would give us wide, wide hearts for the world's pain and bodies that are willing to jump headtotoe into God's desire for the nations.

At the very least, the lovers of Jesus in the most hurting nations would know they aren't forgotten.

Posted this on my facebook this summer. Was reminded of it again...

Posted this on my facebook this summer. Was reminded of it again this morning, when the pastor at a church I visited mentioned how all our wantings find their rest in God…

On this trip to the water I have been stalked by a sense of—what is it? Longing does not fit. Call it an intense stirring; a desire to be swallowed. Feet half sunken in sand, foam gathers at my ankles. Wave after wave collapses on the shore, as if grasping but never reaching, the heart of land.

Watching this pattern of life that does not need me in order for it to persist, I ache for it to swallow me. To become one with the ocean. But I submerge myself in the water, patted back and forth by the waves as a ball of string under a kitten's paw; never "one."

The term "one" has been stolen by yogis, hippies and John Lennon. I understand it in a broader sense. I want the endlessness this ocean represents to belong to me—for "forever" to be carried in a locket near my heart. That's not meant to sound cheesy. I don't know how to say it.

Simply put, God has placed eternity in the heart of man. My heart included.

Reading an essay on an academic's conversion to Catholicism, I am distracted from the meaning by the form. She spews words like "grace" and "catechism" much as the ocean spews foam. But foam fizzles on sand. I can't hold on to the beauty of waves or words. Everything, in this place, falls apart.

I am reduced to scraping, trying to understand. The dimensions grow thin. At the water, I feel the earth eroding under waves. The sands are shifting. My own balance is quaking.

I wade in.

I feel like a turtle in one of the eggs buried nearby. A whole world of new molecules and colors and light awaits. One peck could crack open this shell. One web-thin membrane stands between me and a different sort of birth. Everything is ready.

A long stream of seaweed clamps around my forearm. The tide pulls.

I am pushed over. Caught, but not swallowed.

Yet.

"Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality." -C.S. Lewis