Unity

My prayer for all of them is that they will be one…..John 17:21
Stretched before you like the river of an unforgettable song,
your days might haunt you. In their entirety
they might overtake your life–what you spoke
as prayer and what you really meant–the fear
you pretended not to have even as the husk
of your inner thoughts composed this cacophony
in place of the honest melody that you were afraid
to strut and fret upon the stage. What were your intentions
in the beginning of yesterday? We all wanted the same thing,
and yet our worship has turned out so differently, the way
in which we shelter our own ideas, the way in which
we cut them off from their mothers, the way our orphans
flee from their articulations and hasten to the boon
of homophonic tones. Silence, then, is the hand that catches us.
Silence before the shape of our lives when all our days
dance before us in a numerical trance. Nothing separates
this silence before God.
-submitted by Kerri Snell

Among Us

What if the flesh of God hung upon His words,
His clarity stretched like a sea
not a code to crack. Not a mystery novel
drenched in tweed, not a symbol for anything,
just God’s hands in this world today for real.
God’s fingers stretched in the soil–
God’s hands buoying childhoods–
God’s hands at Disneyland–
God’s hands touching the sick and the dying–
God’s hands twitching in the midst of human prayer,
opening the doorknob for the spirit–
God’s hands quiet and watching,
listening to music, fiddling with the remote.
What if all revelation were just evidence of that–
God in this world, loving it–
His weathered skin scavenging for food,
handing light to the blind. What if all God wants
is a world to come to Him, to finally recognize
His marrow in the blade of grass, His attention
to the plain birds, His omnipotence through windows,
His power which gives and takes, but does not accumulate
a list of strikes or reasons why a man should ever hide from Him.
What if God isn’t really hiding at all from us? What if He just meant
the Beatitudes? What if He is saying them over and over in the North Wind,
clouding the skies of the planet with the beauty intended  for us.
What if that is the lightning rod we fear? The lost potential
of our humanness when we turn our backs on the God in the room,
the God this close to us, a part of our breaths,
 architect of all the corridors
of our minds.
–Kerri Vinson Snell 2011

Pentecost

We attempt to add the indeed
to He is Risen. After Easter, after so much after.
The Word walked on egg shells
among us. Fortunate for us the trembling stone,
the largess less likely to be whisked away
than simple, mountain words. Fortunate the witnesses,
the matriarchs and their meticulous haste in doing
what they’d always done, and the boys who followed,
whose precepts grew up in the shells of their own eyes. Each sound
beckoning the white silence, then water rushing through vocal cords,
then fire.  How can this uneducated fisherman show us God?
Fortunate for the obedience of fishing, for the leaves which shudder
in the sac of life, for the broken process of finding seeds, for the words of a man who left the sand immaculate
with the brush of perfection. Not fire, light.

Timelessness

The resurrection is upon us. Reflection has led us to old, perpendicular boards where the essence of a power we seek in ourselves and in everything and everyone around us lies in wait for whatever worshipful moment becomes ours. I am an Easter rebel.

I don’t give up things for Lent. I choose to be told what I can do, not what I can’t do, believing that if I fill my moments with all that is possible, there won’t be many linear segments of time in which I will focus on the can’t.

Poets are obsessed with time. T.S. Eliot comes to mind, but really all poets, unlike novelists and those who write nonfiction are constantly within and without the craft of their work attempting to suspend it. A poem only works if it exists in timelessness. I might give up time for Lent within the context of a work of poetry. A poem that fits upon the page is a revelation because it is an entire world scrawled into being, a heterocosm that makes its own rules, then breaks them.
Take the famous “Red Wheel Barrow” poem by William Carlos Williams. Read it and invariably it means something. With a few simple words carved into the niche of universal symbolism, we are drawn to the vignette and we don’t care when that is. The poem happens for us as we read it and it happens all over again for the next person to encounter its simple genius.


So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white
chickens.
No internal punctuation, the poem only works because of the order Williams followed in the placement of his words on the page. Time stops. Fascinating to me is the realization that the chickens just have to be white and there has to be water in the poem–ablution.
The resurrection is where time stops, where the sequential doom of all civilizations comes to an abrupt halt. The resurrection is the point at which I look in the bathroom mirror, turn the lights on bright and see my sin. The resurrection is the point at which I close my eyes and place my pointy finger on a page of the Bible and the words ring out with life-sustaining relevance.The resurrection is the resounding message which I can’t work hard enough to believe. I can’t click off to-do’s on my Lenten sight-seeing tour. I can’t buy enough souvenirs, eat enough crackers or drink enough grape juice to deserve.
I must carefully open the pages and tread within the border of the poem that is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and simply take it all in. So much and beyond so much….everything depends upon that.

Prayer for a Garden

Lord,

When all that I don’t know fills up the cup of all that I do,

like You I head to the garden, a place where mystery

is non-threatening, a place that feels as though

Your hand has just been there. Digging into the dirt

of words, shaken roots which sully truth, I sometimes

fling my papers toward the moon–a desperate radish.

But in the garden where there are no better words for light,

just light itself, I work toward the water of my soul.

It’s a beautiful place, this garden, mostly because

You are there.

Old Books

     I am of the age that antique stores are becoming a trip down memory lane. It’s like answering questions in a Trivial Pursuit game when the history category covers events you have personally lived through. It is interesting to me to realize the cyclical evolution of “things” within the framework of society–where they begin and ultimately where they end up. Often, contemporary evaluation misses the boat. Once an item has lost points on the scale of usefulness, usually because something more useful has been invented, that item is prime for a new beginning and sometimes an even greater value because as a society we discard so hastily, and we so readily adapt to new technology. Look at the way we purchase cell phones. We like our things to continually do more with less. It isn’t so much that we align with the thinking Less is more, it’s more like Less with more Apps.
     Has anyone else noticed that since everyone (except me…I am not a Luddite, I am just technologically inept) is reading from Kindles and Nooks and downloading E-books from personal computers that are also phones, calendars, game stops, and television screens, how many magazines (the hard copy kind) are using old books in their layouts? Old Books are everywhere–in window displays at Pottery Barn and Main Street. Girls are standing on them in high heels to promote the fashion of J Crew. Old Books are used to support table tops and as support beams for the shelves that used to house them. I’ve even seen them used as room dividers to define our open concept floor plans.
     Recently, I have ventured into a major bookstore chain store that is going out of business and one of the local variety that is a haven for vintage books that is, sadly, going out of business as well. Seeing all those books on the shelves for the last time evokes that “Toy Story 3″ emotion of experiencing something soon-to-be-nostalgic for a last time. I wonder if my grandchildren will cut their first teeth on actual books as my children did? Can a baby drool in a Kindle? The day will very likely come when no one will  have ever seen a church hymnal except in an antique store and no one will read their Bibles from well….Bibles. The Word is the same regardless of the medium…I know this. Before there was even the written word, there was the Word.
    I can’t help but hold to the belief, however backward, that books are precious and that in their archaic-ness, their value might become invaluable. And I can’t help but pray that my grandchildren will grow up to know the difference between a book and a brick, a history that is, for me, vital to my being because I have lived it. Old Books know best.

Lifestyle or Life?

Watching the horrible tsunami wash life literally away produced within me the usual safe and non-threatening response, a response which is perhaps the curse of the evangelical on the world around us–it’s what I like to call the “Al Franken” effect for those who, like me, curled their hair to the late-night antics of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players on SNL. I am not without deep empathy for the victims of this latest natural disaster. What must it be like, I have thought this to myself…to run a few steps in front of that monstrous and watery filth in a frantic race for life when you cannot win? I have lifted and continue to lift prayers for our neighbors in Japan. I have opened my pocketbook, but in reality, non of this makes me the least bit uncomfortable or stressed in the same way those whose lives will never be the same have and will be impacted. What must it feel like to rock one’s child on a small island with nuclear reactors threatening meltdown? How helpless would a prayer feel?
    I do know this. When life and mere survival becomes “life or death,” it’s amazing how quickly LIFESTYLE  gets tossed out like possibly contaminated bath water. Who cares if your car hasn’t been washed or a little bird poop is on the windshield? Who notices the name on the back pocket of someone’s jeans? Who takes a moment to make mental note of the fact that your Bible is wrapped in Vera Bradley fabric? Or whether or not you are sweating those onions in the most glamorous of oils with a Rachael Ray spatula? Who is watching arms jiggle in the midst of a rescue and saying to themselves, “See, I knew those shake-weights were all gimmick?” Who takes the time to name-drop the latest- and- for- the- next- five- minutes last word on Heaven as declared in the book you just read?
     Identity in survival takes on an authenticity as all the falseness rolls away. Tsunamis and tornadoes and earthquakes and hurricanes are not happening so that we, the “Al Frankens” of  Christ’s church will learn this lesson, nor do they happen at the whim of an angry God who we tend to project our own mood disorders onto because Christians and non-Christians alike will do just about anything to avoid facing our own flaws. We will go to great lengths to avoid natural consequences through a curious summoning of allegory when the time is ripe. With our own hands and many times in the place of God we build the machines of our own undoing.
    The truth is, no one knows, really, why terrible things happen to folks who aren’t any less perfect than I am or you are. When catastrophe happens to us, why it happened usually takes a back seat to making it through the day. There are mysteries we will never understand for reasons we will never know, but there is something I could learn today, watching video footage of the tsunami wave indiscriminately covering all that is inanimate and animate in its path.
   I could quite easily discern in this moment the vast difference between living the Christian lifestyle and living the Christian life. Prayers might come less readily. Pocketbooks might fly open.
-submitted by Kerri Snell

Heaven is For Real

 
 From the Thomas Nelson Newsroom:


New York Times #1 Best seller Sets New Thomas Nelson, Inc. Record
Since its release 16 weeks ago, sales momentum for Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent has continued to surpass every expectation. For the week of March 6, Heaven Is for Real will be listed as the #1 “nonfiction paperback” and #1 “print hardcover and paperback combined” on the New York Times Best Seller List – its seventh week in the top spot and a record for Thomas Nelson, Inc. Inside My Heart by Robin McGraw held #1 nonfiction hardcover spot for four weeks (October 2006).
Heaven Is for Real also is listed currently at #6 (all books) by USA Today, #4 (nonfiction paperback) by Publisher’s Weekly, #4 (nonfiction paperback) by National Public Radio, and #3 (all books) by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. (Complete best-seller list information below.)
In addition to being ranked near the top on numerous best seller lists, the one millionth copy of the acclaimed title has recently been printed.

“It has been incredible to watch the contagious enthusiasm of readers drive the success of Heaven is for Real,” said Michael Hyatt, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Thomas Nelson. “Colton’s story gives a wonderful glimpse into what lies ahead for believers, and encourages us to embrace our childlike faith.”
In March 2003, Todd and Sonja Burpo were on the verge of their worst nightmare – losing a child. Their 4-year-old son Colton’s appendix had unknowingly burst days before, and he was now fighting a life-threatening infection. To save Colton, surgery was the only option. But what would happen during that surgery was more than healing through modern medicine.
Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back is the true story of the Burpo family and Colton, who during his life-threatening illness and sudden surgery, slips from consciousness and enters heaven. He narrowly survives. Several months later while passing by the same hospital that saved him, Colton begins talking about his experiences during surgery and making a trip to heaven. The family didn’t know what to believe, but soon the evidence was clear.
Written in the first-person narrative of Colton’s father, Todd, and by New York Times best-selling author Lynn Vincent, Heaven Is for Real walks readers through the revelation of Colton’s trip, his parent’s initial uncertainties, and the lessons learned by such a small child.

Todd Burpo is pastor of Crossroads Wesleyan and a volunteer fireman. His wife Sonja is a children’s minister, busy pastor’s wife, and mom. Colton, an active eleven year old, has an older sister Cassie and a younger brother Colby.
Lynn Vincent is the New York Times bestselling writer of Same Kind of Different as Me and Going Rogue: An American Life. The author or coauthor of nine books, Vincent worked for eleven years as senior writer, then features editor, at the national news biweekly WORLD Magazine where she covered politics, culture, and current events. A U.S. Navy veteran, Lynn is also a lecturer in writing at the World Journalism Institute and The King’s College in New York City.
Best-Seller’s Lists
New York Times

• December 5, 2010       #3 paperback nonfiction
• December 12, 2010     #11
• December 19, 2010     #5
• December 26, 2010     #5
• January 2, 2011,          #13
• January 9, 2011,          #13
• January 16, 2011,        #9
• January 23, 2011,        #1
• January 30, 2011,        #1
• February 6, 2011,         #1
• February 13, 2011
  • #1 paperback nonfiction
  • #2 E-book nonfiction
  • #2 Combined Print and E-book nonfiction
  • #3 Print Hardcover & Paperback
    
    

Inquiring Minds Want to Know...

     In preparation for a C.S. Lewis book study which I am about to dive into with an impressive group of intelligent ladies at the church of my choice ( or as I should say… God’s choice of church for me), I read through a biography of C.S. Lewis during the downtime of a ski vacation. The book, entitled C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands, was written by Brian Sibley, who researched Lewis and his wife, Joy Davidman, extensively for the PBS movie Shadowlands.
    Can you visualize it….me unable to contain my speed on the bunny slopes of a cross-country course, falling headlong into the deep snow bordering the well-groomed path I was supposed to stay on, my skinny skis pointing various random directions, my knees twisted into unnatural positions, my not-so-skinny back side covered in snow… I would pull the handy little soft back biography out of my pocket and peruse a page or two while waiting for my friend to dig me out of the snow…..Okay that’s not really what I mean by downtime, but the mental picture painted itself in my head and I just had to share….
     This ski story is an apt metaphor for the journey of C.S. Lewis which eventually led him to Christ. I was again amazed at the details of Lewis’s life, at the way so many random events and invites worked themselves in and out and through Lewis’s own mental preoccupations and startling intellect to turn this great mind at just the right time from atheist to adamant Christ-follower. While an atheist, so many of the friends he deliberately chose and surrounded himself with were Christians, including J.R.R. Tolkien.
   I am surprised at the faith which led Lewis to such an avant-garde generosity. He was not preoccupied with stuff. He was preoccupied with ideas.  Lewis at his best occurs when he encounters the personal and spiritual downside of that preoccupation. He gave money away freely, and felt it was his Christian duty to do so. Sometimes, though, as he relates best in “A Grief Observed” he held on to his ideas a little too tightly. A more logical thinker never existed, and yet, Lewis’s faith was inextricably linked to loss and to joy, to feelings–his own.
    I am also struck by the reality that Lewis’s life even with such a great faith was not a neat-and-tidy picture of Christian perfection. He married a divorced woman. He dealt with his own limitations socially, and in his closest relationships he could be characterized as possibly an enabler. His own words, which sold millions of copies of books, struck him down and caused him pain when faced with his own personal grief. Throughout his life, his friendships sustained him as did his love of fantasy literature. Both led him ultimately to a uncompromising belief in Christ.
-submitted by Kerri Snell
Come check out the selection of C.S. Lewis books that we offer at The Well.

Auditions

My daughter has been through a grueling audition process for graduate school. She is a classical musician, which stress-wise is sort of like choosing to be an air-traffic controller where everyone watches her land the plane successfully then critiques her perfection. Splitting the hairs of perfection is the marketable imprisonment of a free market. It’s also the tyrannical decisions handed down from a not-so-free market, and it seems we spend most of our network time listening to pundits arguing for the  necessity of the prison of our own choosing, and sometimes those pundits are standing in our pulpits arguing for those distinctions we can buy under the guise of the distinction that was bought for us with the life of a Saviour. This is how we forget all about freedom, even  in a free world where God has supplied an abundance of Grace.

     Let’s split hairs for a moment between perfection and being made perfect because one is Biblical and the other is not. Perfection in and of itself is impossible and in our heads we all realize this, don’t we?  Perfection requires noise and being made perfect creates quiet and peace. Perfection is all about a relentless pursuit with delayed gratification. When this happens, then I will find peace. When I have earned enough money, raised perfect children, developed the ability to perfectly —fill in the blank—then peace with myself will be my prize at the end of the journey and oh, by the way, it will be a perfect peace.  On the off-chance it doesn’t feel perfect to me when I get there, I will simply discard it like last year’s fashion for yoga pants and the beat goes on. This pursuit requires me to believe in a God who has a bucket full of Grace that He could pour at any moment He deems me worthy of it based on my performance and it would be like taking a bath in a mudless Mississippi river. This makes perfect sense if salvation is based on the model of Henry Ford.
     John Piper says it like this, to paraphrase…Piper says that to market religion to a free market society we must promote  the power to escape from weakness through leisure, but that the Biblical truth is we must seek the power to endure weakness in love.
    This is what God spoke to the Apostle Paul: But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you,  for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.–2 Cor. 12:9.
    Today I rejoice in missed measures, in burned steak, in all the unfinished cross-stitch projects, in my messy closet, in the race I run with injury, in my less-than-perfect testimony, and I rejoice in my hastily uttered and random prayer language. I rejoice in the mud of the river which clouds my vision to the bottom, a mud which Christ will take and turn into the balm for blind eyes.
    We spend so much time perfecting ourselves instead of giving to God the reality of our weaknesses when He is the only one who can create order out of the chaos and beauty from the ruins. Perfection seems like an acceptable sin, but the price is dangerously high. The price is peace.
-submitted by Kerri Snell

Subtle Differences

There is a subtle difference between responding to the will of God while content to wait within that will and thrashing out on one’s own as the pioneer of re-creation. In the case of the first, I am a small yet integral part of the complete circumference of an all-powerful, perfect God. I move within movement, and sometimes I rest. Sometimes inaction is my action. Sometimes admitting “I just don’t know” is what I know.


In the latter case, the teetering universe seems to be hanging on the thread of my thought processes, or worse yet, my feelings. There is drama and melancholy and frustration because there are so many walls to climb over, so many barriers because I am the only one whose movement, whose architecture I am ever aware of. I am a selfish instigator loaded with zeal and fueled by hunger. In this scenario, God can only go where I choose to go. When I accidentally land myself in the whale’s belly, I spend my days trying to light the candle in my pocket so that I can repeat the same world I just magically escaped from. Then I experience the most humbling of revelations to date….not even the whale wants me.

Remember, God is infinitely bigger than my most profound insight into Him. He is bigger than my most insurmountable problem. He is bigger than my wildest dreams. He is bigger than my Christian lifestyle. God is bigger than my life. I can do my best in the “situation room” of holiness, encountering one triviality at a time, one emergency at a time, limiting the Creator of the Universe to only those questions I know that I have the answer to, or I can begin to move through stillness into His magnificent solutions for every issue, every conflict, every one of us. I can participate with gratitude that “little, insignificant Me” gets to be a part of God’s wonderous plans. Those plans are perfect and they will always work out for the best.

It’s a subtle difference like the difference between deep, rhythmic breathing and momentary gasping.  

Be still and know that I am God.–Psalm 46:10

-submitted by Kerri Snell

Presto Chango

I have my moments. Those who follow this blog would testify, hands on the Bible, about just this fact. So would my siblings and my children…and the Hubby…except I would remind him of the ring on his fourth finger, and he would be persuaded to take the fifth.

Sometimes, usually when I am walking or jogging or gardening in the Great Outdoors of wherever I am, my moments surprise me in an exciting and beautiful way. Sometimes, after weeks or months or even years muddled in the complexities of my attempts to apply Biblical truth to my oh-so-real life, a little songbird comes to rest within my mind. It’s not really an epiphany in the “turn on the lights, the party’s starting” sort of way, it’s more of a gentle reflection upon still waters, a life-changing whisper. It’s that moment when a glimpse of the truth is completely satisfying to me. I don’t want to ask for more. I don’t wish for less.

How often do I spend all of my energies attempting to run from truth? How often is this decision followed by a complete lack of elegance? Followed by defensive posturing. Followed by wallowing in self-defeat. These aren’t pretty moments.


There was a day in my life…I can’t tell you exactly when the day was because it was indeed just a moment. It was a moment when I felt a knot release within myself physically. It was a moment which I can trace back to myself at age eleven and my decision to ask to be baptized, for the Old Me to be washed in the water and the blood of Christ. It was many years later, and by many years I mean some twenty or so years later….it was the moment that my journey took a new turn because my understanding of grace pulled into the forefront of my own priorities. It was a day that my own to-do list became a source of humor to me…as if doing can bring us to any kind of wholeness in and of itself.


It was the moment I tried on a new set of clothes which had been hanging in my closet for the entirety of my life. Elegant and intelligent in its design, this New Me was waiting for me to come to this moment, this revelation of self through much hard work and failure and prayer and silence and conviction and confusion.


It was the moment I realized that salvation via Christ’s death and resurrection is more than a successful system within which to transfer guilt. In other words, there comes a point where new birth means more than handling guilt and sin and others’ heaping piles of judgement into the hamper of my life story. There comes a time when the old garments get obviously tattered and torn and as outdated as an 80′s wedding dress, a time when a new “do” is in order.


I had this idea that baptism cleansed me of my former sin (and any little sin of omission which might have occurred as I sat on the front pew awaiting my turn in the dunk tank), and from that point on, the New Creation was the Holy Spirit dwelling mysteriously within me somewhere ready to take on my heaps of guilt and sin as they continued to occur within my life. I thought salvation was like a large-capacity washing machine where the water always had to be hot and the laundress had better never be luke-warm.


Do you ever wonder where all the mates to your odd socks are? Do you ever wonder what kind of IKEA shelving system exists with which God organizes the wrongs in your life? Do you ever put on a dress right before a party that is hiding in the chaos of your daily outfits, a dress you thought you might never wear, a dress that you bought on an ill-timed whim just because it was on sale or because you dreamed of one day fitting into a garment two-sizes smaller than you had ever in your adult life been?


You slip on that dress and it looks so beautiful and it just feels so right, so you. You wear it to the party and you dance and you have the time of your life. Then the next day, you put on your sweats and running shirt and you look pensively into the mirror again, and magically, still, you look radiant. You look the same. You look like the New You because you are the New You because you feel like the New You because you miraculously and wonderfully are. One day there is a moment when you simply can’t ever take the dress off.


Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here! 2 Cor. 5:17.

Submitted by Kerri Snell

one thousand gifts

This book is available at The Well.
Mention this blog to receive 10% off.

I am currently reading through (soaring through really) Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts which is, as books go, a thing of utter beauty. Through poetic prose that aches with art, Voskamp dares the reader to “live fully right where you are.”

Voskamp’s narrative begins very circumstantially and personally as she recounts personal tragedies in the real realm of her own real life. There is no distance for the writer between her honest responses to grief and the questions created, the vacancies left in her life, places where she felt afraid to attempt to fill with God.

There is no mistaking the knee-jerk, human response to the unexplainable, when bad things happen to good people. I have looked into the mirror more than once in my life and seen those “good people,” been those “good people.”
Ultimately, Voskamp stumbles upon a concept which even to her sounds too good to be true, too simplistic to really work, the pursuit of the miracle of eucharisteo as a discipline, a learned behaviour. Through the act of compiling a list of a thousand blessings, gifts from the Lord, could she learn to express true thanksgiving even for circumstances which she might never understand?

The book is Voscamp’s journey, and it is truly transformative to read.

Voskamp writes, “God is not in need of magnifying by us so small, but the reverse. It’s our lives that are little and we have falsely inflated self, and in thanks we decrease and the world turns right. I say thanks and I swell with Him, and I swell the world and He stirs me, all joy afoot. This, I think, is the other side of prayer.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderous if many of us, even some of us, started such a list? How might naming one thousand gifts transform this community? The naming of simple gifts on ordinary days….if you are intrigued by this, I highly recommend you read this book.

-written by Kerri Snell, contributing author.

Check out One Thousand Gifts for yourself at The Well!

Mind of Winter

Poet Wallace Stevens writes “One must have the mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.” His famous poem “The Snow Man” speaks to insignificance with its repetitive use of the word “nothing” three times in the last stanza of the poem. Snow has a way of making me feel insignificant. The tracks my boots make from door to driveway can be covered over with a fresh sprinkling of the white stuff. Snow is quiet. Snow is neutralizing. Each person, each animal, each fledgling winter plant must feel the cold.

Christ tells us in the Gospel of Matthew that the rain falls on the just and the unjust–another great weather equalizer.

Sometimes I try to make more of myself than need be, I try to insert my influence, my ideas, my presence onto scenarios and people who aren’t really looking for anything new. There are people out there who don’t try to build a Snowman out of Snow, who aren’t interested in my recipe for Snow Ice Cream, and who don’t want to commit Stevens’ great poem to memory as I have.

There are those who don’t want to feel their insignificance, and sometimes, lots of times, I am one of those. Oh, the scratching and the clawing and the igloo constructing that commences with a solemn force to make my Winter Wonderland a better place.

We Christians don’t have a corner on hope and non-Christians certainly don’t have the sole patent for discontentment and errant strife, do they? As the rain and the snow fall upon each of us,without preference, I would do good to let the quiet ice of winter just fall and not try to make more or less of it than it is, than I am.

I would do well to look more deeply inside myself and let my story be simply that, however dull or ordinary the light I am cast in. If I have the courage to do that and only that, oh, the comfort that comes from such a decision. The closeness I will feel to God even as I realize how pitiful I am in comparison to the God who created each snowflake uniquely.

It sounds backwards, almost anti-American. It sounds wimpy and fitfully dull–to surrender to the notion that God’s will is not one bit dependent upon me, that life is not a Jack-in-the-Box crank that I turn and turn and turn in order to get a pop-up blessing. To realize “the nothing” that I am, is the first real breath a born-again Christian can take, and then I stop squirming in the Almighty’s Hand. I stop defining myself by comparisons to others. I stop limiting myself to lifestyle trends and manmade, denominational hierarchies.

A Christian should be….I stop saying this at all, except to say a Christian, a child of God, a follower of Christ, should be playful, joyful, a roll-in-the-snow-soul because nothing we can do or not do can taint the Victory that is ours in Jesus Christ. In Stevens’ poem, paradoxically, the word nothing is the most important word in the poem. My “nothing” truly surrendered to God could be the most important something to me.

“For the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and nothing that is.” –Wallace Stevens

-submitted Kerri Snell

Hiccups

There have been a few “tragic flaws” in my character which I obviously was not all that attached to. They were like prom dresses–all poofy and brightly colored and ready for one moment, but not suitable for a new or different occasion. These “sins” were relatively easy for me to overcome, to just walk away from and never look back. Because I had not integrated the sin into my positive sense of identity, I could see the sin for what it was–an ugly and demeaning feature which I was all-too-happy to rid myself of through repentance and prayer.

The sins which spring from my own gift set, from the talents and abilities and personality which God created for kingdom purposes, these are the sins which are like camaflouge in the jungle–hard to find, and hard to snuff out. These are the sins which place worms in the fruits of the spirit. These are the sins for which the potential to re-visit never goes away. These are the mistakes we “fall not on our knees but on our hearts” in repentance of as Vassar Miller puts it.

Nothing makes me realize how hopeless I am without the Grace of Christ than hiccups of faith, mistakes which I can’t seem to learn a full lesson from without repeated offenses. I am beginning to accept the notion that some of these potential errors are like rapidly breeding termites within the trunk of a tree, within the strongest part of that tree, or like cancer cells free-floating through a blood stream before a deadly lump is found. Or perhaps it’s more like my own immune system fighting itself and creating diseased havoc within what should be my healthiest cells.


The Great Physician says in his Scripture (prescription) that it is vitally important what the patient does after the hiccup. Pride must be swallowed fully with a great swig of Living Water, and prayer must follow. After I have fallen once again on my heart, I must pick myself back up and start again and believe in the newness of applied grace.


We hear much from the pulpits much about catastrophic sins, the mistakes you might make and not live to tell about. The error in judgement which might have no reversible track. Yet, the hiccups can build and fester and left unrecognized and unattended can change what was supposed to be, what was planned by God to be that beautiful, intangible quality of a person–that element which is the difference between “craft” and “art.” The hiccups not taken seriously enough can bring down a kingdom, one person at a time, in such an individual and private way that the great tree never knows what eats him.


We must give the best parts of ourselves to God, completely at His disposal and bidding for whatever purpose He so chooses. When we mess up, as soon as we mess up, we must set our feet back on the path of small steps again. Even if it isn’t a matter of our eternity (I’ll leave that to the greats to argue), it’s a matter of our usefulness on this earth while we are here.


Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5,6


Submitted by Kerri Snell