Hannah Farver's Blog, page 3

Strapped to a table; didn't turn into a monster

I used to come close to fainting about once a week.

I got fed up a few times and scheduled a blood test or a scan of my heart. Each time, the doctor would give a new recommendation. Quit coffee, take salt, nurse Gatorade constantly, wear tights, take beta blockers, avoid beta blockers…

Nothing worked. I didn’t have time for test-after-test, so I tried to ignore it as much as possible. I got used to feeling miserable.

There was one thing the doctors thought I might have, but to find out for sure, I’d need to undergo a “tilt-table test.” (If your mind immediately jumps to medieval torture chambers, I’m right there with you.)

The doctors described strapping me to a moving table, which would stand my body up and then drop it down while injecting me with adrenaline to “see what would happen” to my heart. One doctor described it as “almost inducing a heart attack, but not all the way.”

I think now she was being dramatic, but you can see why I avoided this test for months.

I don’t remember asking God to heal me. Because the doctors couldn’t confirm the problem for so long, I wondered if it was all in my head. I certainly wasn’t going to pray for healing from something I couldn’t prove existed.

The big day for the test came in early 2013, and they velcro’d my arms, legs and waist to a table. My body was covered in plastic sensors. Less than halfway through, they shut the test down because it was already conclusive.

After the test, it was simple. The doctor gave me pills, which I take several times per day, and I truly feel 100% better.

What’s the moral to this story and posting this personal information on the interwebs?

I didn’t know how terrible I’d felt until I remembered how wonderful it was to feel well—really, truly well. And I am grateful to feel that way now.

It was a season of feeling miserable I thought would never end, but it did.

In a small way, my three-times-a-day pills remind me that God can make things over and that nothing I fatalistically accept has to be.

It’s not a deep message, but important if I let it seep in.

Nothing in this world is set in stone. No cause is ever truly lost. Tomorrow is not sentenced to being the same as today. Times change on their own—sometimes despite my lack of effort. And to me, this is an encouraging thought.

how to destroy your imagination

Dr. Anthony Esolen wrote of how the Christian imagination (the faith-driven thoughts that see God in the day-to-day) may be killed in busy, city-life:

"You can deny the existence of God, and of any meaning in the universe. You may take out the democratic steamroller and flatten all heroes in sight, or, perhaps more wisely, raise every ordinary selfish fool to the status of a hero. You may laugh at manhood and womanhood, and deprive boys and girls of ways to express longings natural to their sex. You may douse the flames of love of country, and convict your forefathers of wickedness, for not doing everything as you do. You may see all the world through the lens of politics. You may schedule a child into submission. You may keep him from witnessing honest and ingenious labor. You may muffle him up indoors."

Is there a solution? Yes, requiring the cell phone to be left on the coffee table.”All it might take for the imagination to breathe again is some time in solitude and silence.” (Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, 202)

Credit: Olga Gromova

Credit: Olga Gromova

"We cling too much to the promises of broken people and not enough on the promises of an unbroken..."

“We cling too much to the promises of broken people and not enough on the promises of an unbroken Redeemer.”

- God, Grace and The Gospel (via rainydaysandblankets)

the loud earth & human flourishing

(Photo credit: Me! Berries from outside my door.)

The internet is a tool. I get that. Tweets are seen world-round and there’s really no such thing as a “closed country” as long as the people have internet access. That’s amazing. It’s a new world.

But I belong to this new world, and can say it has mutated new kinds of blindness. Everyone seems worried about the lack of community, the lack of real relationships, caused by technology’s advances. But there are more subtle changes, too:

I read recently: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1) Then I flipped to Romans 8 where it says that “Creation groans.”

The earth is not quiet.

Glory rings loud in tree branches. Mountain haze illuminate His permanency. When it comes to God, nature talks about Him to the point of redundancy.

But on my cell phone, I can’t hear it. And descending to the metro station via gum-encrusted escalators, I can’t see it. Stillness is drowned out by the city, by busy, and by brick and mortar.

In a now-viral Ted talk, a guerrilla gardener from Los Angeles said,

"You just couldn’t imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people…I have witnessed my garden become…a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood... Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus, you get strawberries.”(See the rest here//Caveat: some language)

This man, who doesn’t seem to perceive the glory of God in nature, recognizes that something incredible happens when people appreciate it. Standing still in the cricket-chirping universe, (for some moments) apart from things made by human hands, can have tremendous value.

The guerrilla gardener pulpit-thumped: “I see kids of color and they’re just on this track…that leads them to nowhere. So with gardening, I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life.” He said that kids need to be taken off the streets and shown “the honor in growing your own food.”

Doesn’t that ring of Genesis? Of cultivating the land and having dominion? In valuing the earth as a good gift, we catch glimmers of the created order. And revisiting the created order encourages flourishing.

When we forever walk among monuments to human commerce that crowd out the sky, is it any wonder we think the world is about us? Beside billboards and dry concrete, too much screams of our glory.

Of course, nature doesn’t solve everything. It cannot. I grew up in the country, and there were more sex offenders in our population-poor county than in the concrete jungle nearby. Nature cannot redeem men’s souls. But it can echo of a long-ago lost created order, and point souls to the Creator who redeems.

"I wish they could have that one shattering moment of confession to dramatic failure of years past..."

“I wish they could have that one shattering moment of confession to dramatic failure of years past and present…I want that moment for them, when they walk under a night sky and look at the stars with the new and numbing knowledge that nothing stands between them and their Creator.”

- - Elise (the sister of a good friend, writing on legalism)

A recent bit of drawing.

A recent bit of drawing.

in which internet rants get me down

It seems every time I log in to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr these days, there is a new scandal. The commentary on scandals follow like this: Christians are perplexed. Former Christians are outraged. Those Who Keep a Respectful Distance are usually confused. Everyone tries to offer a solution, which is simple, but always controversial.

The internet lights up, and my Facebook feed becomes a hall of podiums.

I shut my laptop and shut the blinds. Occasionally, I’ll try to diagram the arguments in my head, but they soon run in circles. Because “wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy…” and anger rarely makes a logical case.

I want to shut these people out. I have enough troubles to deal with— I could give you a list. (And in my head, I have a separate list of the dangers of ranting online, and how the internet incentivizes skepticism and outrage.)

But shutting out is what the debaters do; a mind closed to reason is not one of the fruits of the “wisdom from above.” I pull back open the blinds.

A quick review of our context pulls the scene back into perspective. We are all victims and instigators in a cracked universe. Annie Dillard called herself a “frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world” who has “eaten and have done my share of eating too.”

Disappointment, heartbreak, betrayal, divorce. Disrespect, mutilation, violence, verbal lashings. We live in a world where these things are not surprising, watching what we love burn before our eyes. Isn’t that victimhood enough for us all?

There is a central hunger. The world throbs as one. Only when seen in this context does arguing begin to sound like the mourning that it is.

And of course, as my Facebook feed refreshes for new scandals, I remember: this pain is ours to keep, but not always, and not forever. Samwise was right—the sad things will come untrue. One day, all of mournings’ forms—shrieking arguments and cowed silences—will empty out. He who took our pain as His own will fill us. Finally.

"Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are."

““Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are.””

- Lloyd Alexander

Two happy elephants + transitioning slowly back into the blog world

(Our kitschy lil’ elephant salt shakers.)

It is an exhausting but good season, sprinkled with just enough chai lattes to keep my eyelids peeled back. (If I had a dollar for every hour I’ve spent on the phone with customer service over our wedding registries…)

Then, there are thoughts that whirl in my head like this:

Questions about covenants.

The meaning of marriage as a picture of the Gospel.

How to glorify God when we’ve both been secretly inundated with the message "Your Spouse Will Make You Always Happy Happy."

Then—what is my responsibility as a wise wife-to-be? Is there value in frugality? (Or better, is there virtue in it?) 

Then work calls. I have to design something and send it out, quickly, quickly, and try to find where I left off in my head.

But burrowed in covers at the end of the day, all I can think is how grateful I should be—how grateful I am—underneath it all.

(Less than 45 days…)