singleness

  • why punch the dough?

    A skilled breadmaker, after kneading the flour and yeast into the rest of the ingredients, will let the large lump of dough rise for an hour or so.  Then he or she will violently punch down into the lump, leaving a jagged crater while releasing the central pocket of carbon dioxide produced by the yeast.  Then the dough will be kneaded again, after which it is placed in bread pans.  This time the dough is allowed to rise undisturbed.  After another hour or two of rising, the bread is ready for baking.  (Mmm... fresh bread is delicious...)

    Why is the dough's first excitement rejected?  And how ought the dough to think about this event?  Ought the dough to conclude from the Chef's savage blow that rising is contrary to the Chef's wishes?  Ought the dough to conclude that the Chef is capricious or cruel or untrustworthy or stupid?  Ought the dough to hope for the future?  If so, what should be the content of that hope?  "I shall rise again"?  (But what if the dough will remain unrisen for the rest of its days, for example if it will be made into pizza instead of bread, necessitating no rising (but causing much rejoicing and salivation among the dining clientele)?)

    "I shall be delicious in the end no matter how beaten in the process, because the Chef is a good Chef.  Though He shatter me with His fist, still I will hope in Him."

  • singleness and cisterns

    The floodwaters of life-juciness have receded.  They have left positive changes in their wake.  Another cistern has cracked and crumbled beyond repair.  Why am I still trying to fill it?

    To the fountain I must go.  Repeatedly throughout the day, every day until I die, and forever thereafter.  Surrender and trust-in-God cannot be something done only once...  the old desires must be killed as often as they arise... and they must be replaced.

     

    Here are three good articles on singleness.   If you only have time to read one, the first is excellent.

    http://www.cbmw.org/Resources/Articles/The-God-Who-Knows-the-End-of-Your-Singleness

    http://www.cbmw.org/Online-Books/Recovering-Biblical-Manhood-and-Womanhood/For-Single-Men-and-Women-and-the-Rest-of-Us

    http://www.cbmw.org/Journal/Vol-5-No-2/The-Holy-Vocation-of-Singleness

    "Jesus, if this is Your will,
    then YES to being single.
    In my deepest heart, i want to marry,
    to belong to a great man;
    to know that i am linked to his life...
    and he to mine...
    following Christ and our dreams together...
    but You know what i need.
    if i never marry, it is YES to You."
    -- Ann Kiemel Anderson

     

    "Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
    And shudder, be very desolate," declares the Lord.
    "For My people have committed two evils:
    They have forsaken Me,
    The fountain of living waters,
    To hew for themselves cisterns,
    Broken cisterns
    That can hold no water.

    -- Jeremiah 2:12-13

  • Jesus and our sorrows...

    Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.
    So when He heard that he was sick, He then stayed two days longer in the place where He was.
    ...
    Therefore, when Mary came where Jesus was, she saw Him, and fell at His feet, saying to Him, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died."
    When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled, and said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to Him, "Lord, come and see."

    Jesus wept.

    So the Jews were saying, "See how He loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?"  - John 11:5-6, 32-38

     

    Lord, if only you had done such-and-such differently, this tragedy would never have occurred!

    And instead of telling us, "Yes, I am fully aware of that... I have bigger and better plans than you can comprehend", He simply comes and weeps alongside us.

  • "no answer"

    Two excerpts from C.S.Lewis - the first from Till We Have Faces, p. 95-96, with 1 Peter 1:3-9, and the second from A Grief Observed, p. 18-24 and p. 80-81.


    We had come into the sunlight now, too bright to look into, and warm (I threw back my cloak).  Heavy dew made the grass jewel-bright.  The Mountain, far greater yet also further off than I expected, seen with the sun hanging a hand-breadth above its topmost crags, did not look like a solid thing.  Between us and it was a vast tumble of valley and hill, woods and cliffs, and more little lakes than I could count.  To left and right, and behind us, the whole coloured world with all its hills was heaped up and up to the sky, with, far away, a gleam of what we call the sea (though it is not to be compared with the Great Sea of the Greeks).  There was a lark singing; but for that, huge and ancient stillness.

    And my struggle was this.  You may well believe that I had set out sad enough; I came on a sad errand.  Now, flung at me like frolic or insolence, there came as if it were a voice - no words - but if you made it into words it would be, "Why should your heart not dance?"

    It's the measure of my folly that my heart almost answered, "Why not?"  I had to tell myself over like a lesson the infinite reasons it had not to dance.  My heart to dance?....


     

    Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 

    In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; and though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.


     

    I must think more about H. and less about myself.

    Yes, that sounds very well. But there's a snag. I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts - real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt.  I shall put in nothing fictitious (or at least I hope I shan't). But won't the composition inevitably become more and more my own?  The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.

    The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.  Is all that work to be undone?  Is what I shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams?  Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away.  Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back - to be sucked back - into it?

    Today I had to meet a man I haven't seen for ten years.  And all that time I had thought I was remembering him well - how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said.  The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely.  Not that he had changed.  On the contrary.  I kept on thinking, "Yes, of course, of course.  I'd forgotten that he thought that - or disliked this, or knew so-and-so - or jerked his head back that way."  I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again.  But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years.  How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.?  That it is not happening already?  Slowly, quietly, like snowflakes - like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night - little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her.  The real shape will be quite hidden in the end.  Ten minutes - ten seconds - of the real H. would correct all this.  And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again.  The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.

    ...

    When I lay these questions before God I get no answer.  But a rather special sort of "No answer."  It is not the locked door.  It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.  As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question.  Like, "Peace, child; you don't understand."


     

    My life has been filled with questions lately.  (I know, "What's new about that?" :)   But more questions, deeper questions, I can assure you.  And I have been asking God a lot for wisdom / answers / guidance/direction/leading.   And like Lewis' later observations (see above, unlike his earlier observations: "But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and the sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.  You may as well turn away.  The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house.  Was it ever inhabited?  It seemed so once.  And that seeming was as strong as this.  What can this mean?  Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?"), God has been sending me reminders constantly, almost every day, to trust fully in Him... and that He will work these situations out for good.  I ask Him for answers to some specific questions, and He has not yet answered.  But He continually reminds me to trust in Him.

(I use 'tags' and 'categories' almost interchangeably... see below)

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