scaffolding

For the followers of the crucified Messiah, the main message of the imprecatory Psalms is this: rage belongs before God (Janowski 1995, 173)–not in the reflectively managed and manicured form of a confession, but as a pre-reflective outburst from the depths of the soul. This is no mere cathartic discharge of pent up aggression before the Almighty who ought to care. Much more significantly, by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face to face with a God who loves and does justice. Hidden in the dark chambers of our hearts and nourished by the system of darkness, hate grows and seeks to infest everything with its hellish will to exclusion. In the light of the justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness. Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion–without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness. // Volf

in Sabah insha'Allah

in Sabah.

the Smiles that melted

the Stitches that mended

my heart.

frayed, frozen heart,

forget him not!

insha'Allah.

finally got around to revisiting/uploading SLR pictures from last summer. it is good to remember.

welcomed laura to the city today.

On this great thrill of possibility.

Dear Little Sheepish Heart,


No matter how it goes, remember this out-of-body, forward facing elation and hope and gratitude, after how well the interview for the job of your dreams just went. Remember daring to hope that your Father just maybe could be that generous. Remember being injected with such foreign joy, at the mere lick of the possibility...

Remember, He didn't just propose, He promised, and you will know with certainty His certain Yes!es soon. Remember, He did not withhold his Son!

Remember the fuzzy faraway forms, of how He's so laboriously been making you into a trustworthy steward of gifts only He could have willed, coming into slightly sharper focus today. Remember how enslaved you would be if you could boast in these gifts, how enslaved you were when you did.

Remember He feeds you, and He discerns what to you for such a time as this is bread and what for you at another season can only be stones, despite your propensity to confuse the two and to chomp on pebbles. Imagine, if you are thankful for the broken road even now, how you will marvel on that day when He unveils just how just He has been all along. Remember how you glanced backward today and saw a straight path behind you, and an adventure before you. Remember how in these dark weeks, amidst your forgetful fretting, He remembered His mercies, He remembers His children.


And rejoice!

Baby Taylor

Today she spent her last waking hours walking in the park with her family, being fed her favorite: McD's vanilla cones (in excellent taste -- she always was so finicky with her food), and fell asleep in the company of those who loved her most.

Taylor, when you moved into our Harlem home, you became Taytay. How pungent you were! Thanks for the year of cuddles, for warming my feet with your furry butt, for teaching me compassion by your fear of rain and baths, for entertaining me endlessly when you'd scamper away in fear of fart noises, for always staying to listen, and for walking me around the neighborhood (literally). Most importantly, thank you for being the object of such high affection, for showing me her beauty. You brought your family much loyal joy, manipulative cuteness, and miraculously perpetual smelliness.

I'm so glad your last day of cuddles and lovely lady lullabies was not your first. Baby Taylor, you were loved by the very best. See you at home Fluffymuffinpoo (all dogs go to heaven--I think they made a documentary or two about that), where we'll be stinky/sick/sad no more.

Commune

This bed is my resting place for the next months in a 1925 Victorian-style house in upstate New York. I wear the floppy flower hat when we work on the organic biodynamic CSA farm and in the community gardens.

Living in intentional interfaith community, and sharing a 2.5 bathroom house with 18 other bodies, is quite a joyful task and learning experience. The biggest challenge for me as far as dialogue with Muslims, Jews, and Christians of other stripes and scales goes, is in reconciling our similarities, not in living with our differences. I am confronted again and again about how much my "faith" is merely about feeling good about being good, and feeling bad about being bad, and how much I still practice vague spirituality, legalistic morality, general psychology, and wider mysticism, rather than hope in Christ alone.

Everything else is common ground: religious goodness. And I must say, most of my new friends do it better, dress and pray and eat and hope and work and sing, with more piety and skill and religiosity than I. There must be more. Kun said, these are realizations you can't make unless you interact a lot with people of other faith, and that every religion has good principles to live by, and that it is good for me to be put into that context.

Put into that context? How is it that we are not already in this context all the time? We have managed to withdraw, somehow, from this pluralistic world. I suspect that as Christians, we should encounter this conflict far more often than we actually do, and that it would drive us to Jesus Christ each time confessing "I need Thee every hour!" As it is, our cloisters blind us to how un-distinct and ironically un-set-apart we are, how much we are not in the world.

Father, save Your church from mere moralistic therapeutic deism, give us Jesus, fill our discernment with You, and send us out in Jesus' sweet saving name.

Potholes, 2.

The great thing about a stiff old-lady-hip is that I get to feel younger every day.

While I was injured, black people were saying the funniest things to me. Direct speech is a hilarious and lovely feature of African American Vernacular English. It took some years in Harlem to adjust to it, but during awkward furtive grocery store stare-and-averts back in the midwest last weekend, an unexpected trip, I realize that I much prefer the frankness.

Terence, my UPS guy (since I've lived at the same address for three years now, there are many familiar faces in the neighborhood) chided, "ESTHER! You get in a fight again?" A bike accident, I clarified. "With what, a rhino?! Damn."

And my favorite incident--a run-in at the corner deli with an older black woman, in a house dress and curlers. "Giiirrrrrlll, you gotta leave his broke ass." Let me tell you, the "No, no, it's not what you think" that I meant in reassurance was not what she wanted to hear. "Ohh honey child, you don't gotta cover up for him! You don't gotta put up widdat shit, y'heard? Now you run on home now and you think bout what I says. Mm-hmm!"

What laughing, coughing, and sneezing had in common: They hurt my hip. A lot. The other thing they had in common: They're involuntary. So as much as laughing hurt the last two weeks, I remember a long long season, of recent vintage, in which I did not laugh at all, and that hurt even more, even though sometimes it felt like nothing at all.

While I was getting discharged from the hospital that Sunday, my best friends' father was being pronounced braindead after a sudden and severe asthma attack a few days prior. Mercy bowed me. It's why I was home for those silent suburban stares that dared not ask, of the splotches and bruises on my face, what happened and if I was okay.

Lord, let me never pretend I've not seen. Sometimes asking real questions is awkward. But so was hanging naked on a cross, probably.

Potholes, 1.

I'm 22. For a few more weeks. A good year of bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.

On Sunday, I had a minor bike accident. I was in the bike lane, there were cars in the road, so I didn't swerve to avoid a big pothole. I hit the pothole, and unfortunately, I also hit my handbrakes. I flew over the handlebars in Superman fashion (right arm extended, left hand in since it was pulling the handbrake), volleysprawled, rolled, recovered on my feet, and went back on the ground because everything stung. Asphalt is not as friendly as a gym floor. The skin scrapes and road rash tell the story -- left knee, right hip, right chest/shoulder, right palm/elbow, chin, forehead. The brim of my helmet, and my glasses, which snapped in half, probably protected my nose from breakage and eyes from gravel. It could have gone a number of other ways, but my bike is fine, and I will be too. If I must describe the discomfort--I feel very elderly (stiff and sore from the impact, some hairline fractures in hip and elbow, moving about slowly and gingerly) and extremely sunburned (I eagerly await the formation of scabs, which means my skin won't reopen when I move anymore).

Kind bystanders insisted on calling an ambulance, though I did not black out and did not wish to go to the ER. One lady drew a compact mirror out of her purse, showed me the unicorn-horn-goose-egg forming on my forehead, and I said okay, okay, I'll go. External swelling, as scary as it looks, is good; the fluid is draining out instead of swelling in the brain. I called my friend who I was on my way to meet, before church. Rachel, her husband, and two of my other friends were going to visit EPC for the first time. I told her to go ahead into the church, find Scott or Kathy, they would know what to do. Meanwhile, sitting on the curbside, terribly nearsighted, I cancelled lunch with the Dalberths (we had a good laugh later at my text: "Bob actually I just got banged up pretty bad after hitting a pothole while biking. Maybe dinner?"). I called my old coach to tell her she was going to be my emergency contact since she lives in the heights... and that she had ingrained that ninja sprawl quite well, apparently. Rachel met me at St. Luke's. Her MD-PhD husband stayed as well; they were supremely heroic and reassuring.

They got to meet many from my church Family in the waiting room including the four elders who visited. I was glad. That they were church both in service and in the world of tetanus, potholes, bike accidents, bad decisions, emergency brakes, broken glasses, broken skin, slow and smelly "Emergency" Room service... in this world, that Jesus moved into. in this world He so loved. All four friends said they would come back next Sunday.

My little sister doesn't like hospitals much, but she was brave and wanted to visit (she brought me soup and she liked my monocle). Her mommy was very kind to me, so is she. She got to see me walk out of the hospital alive and well!