Maybe

Maybe it doesn't matter that I can't capture my heart with words. Maybe the heart is meant to surpass the mind, and to try to balance them on the same scale is like trying to level the bottom of a well with the surface of the earth, and then keep the water from spilling over into puddles.

Maybe if the heart causes groanings too deep for words, trying to speak the groans into cognisance will cause me to miss the pleasure of soaking in the deep. There are things too glorious for man to understand, and what causes us to grasp for it when it seems as fruitless as catching clouds? We talk ourselves in circles and after getting dizzy, after finding the tail is attached to our own behind, we start asking questions: the rhetorical, the theoretical, and logical. Gasping like a thirsty, salted sailor lost at sea--

Please...make...sense...

Maybe God is chuckling at us. Maybe his brow is creased and the corners of his eyes are tight because he is hurting, waiting, groaning with creation for the day when he can complete us, and maybe there will be no distinction between the top and bottom of a well. Maybe he is sighing because there is something better for us than understanding, and our trying to divine understanding is like trying to know your lifespan by the germy, crisscrossed lines on your palm.

Maybe trying to know it all is the part in us that tried to overthrow God in the Garden. Eat the fruit of understanding and maybe you will attain life. Maybe it is the part in us made in God's image and anticipating fulfillment. Maybe I will sit here all afternoon and scribble until my ink runs out, and sit back and reread my words and feel an ounce of satisfaction that I captured my inability to capture words so cleverly.

Maybe I will come close to knowing; maybe I could be Einstein or Decartes or Solomon and rise in the estimation of men. Maybe I am meant to fly, but I keep getting tripped up on the runway. At the end of my surmising, all I have is maybe.


May you, being rooted and grounded in love, know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Eph. 3

Froth

     The steamer hisses like a defensive cat, spitting froth up the sides of the metal pitcher. I pull the nozzle up gently and the foaming milk eases. For my third shift, the froth isn’t too shabby. I tap the espresso scoop to loosen the old grounds, refill and tamp the fine powder, crank the scoop and watch the filmy stream of coffee gurgle into the cup.

It's still a little surreal to be on this side of the counter. I was always the girl with the book bag, studying at the corner table, watching the baristas steam milk and drizzle chocolate, wearing plaid shirts and sipping coffee from ceramic mugs they probably molded themselves. It seemed so romantic. Probably too romantic to be true, I thought, and lowered my eyes to my book.

I tap the froth with a knife and pour milk into the espresso, topping it with two swaths of the white fluff; cap it and embrace with a Christmas paper sleeve, and relinquish the creation to its owner. Someone wants a soy latte, so I have to use the other steamer, which is fickle and likes to screech like a toddler who doesn’t know what she wants.

It’s a lot like me, actually. For many years my heart felt like gasket about to blow. It bubbled and churned with unpredictable undercurrents, until the pressure pitched at a too-high temperature and issued a shriek of frustration. Anyone standing nearby became the collateral of the spewed, scalding contents. My heart’s fickle mechanism made me flighty, flitting from one job to alight on another. One relationship to another. I didn’t know how to fix it, so I ignored it, and continued sitting at the corner table.

It was probably too romantic to be true, anyway.

The door opens, ushering in a gust of cold air and a familiar face. It’s Eli, a friend from church, here to get a cup of coffee from the new barista. Do I really get to call myself that? That privileged title claimed only by trendy, pottery-making, espresso-sipping college students in plaid shirts? I am grateful to him for coming. It’s physical evidence that I’m starting to belong. In the same way Dena asks when my shift is, and my writing friends meet at the corner table. In the same way Beth asks me to help her make sandwiches, and Han and I fill the backroom with laughter when I mess up counting tills.

Each one a safe nest for my flighty heart to rest.

Snow drifts outside the window and I shake candy cane bits onto drifts of whipped cream. In my typical impulsiveness I applied for this job and had my interview the next day. But before applying, I asked God what he thought. I think you will love it, he replied. It’s truly romantic, having a place to rest and hearts to belong to. Especially when the place smells like coffee and baked goodness, and God has fixed your fickle mechanism, and the hearts you belong to are teaching you how to froth correctly.

This Curiosity Called Pain

I’ve been contemplating this driving force of nature that simultaneously wrenches the earth and fuses it together. Pain, an anomaly that both constructs the heart into a watchtower and shrinks it into a hardened lump of matter until all that matters is the pain.

I know a man who drowns himself at the bottom of a bottle because of his pain.

I know a woman who is wounded with barbs, but instead of plucking them out so she may heal, she bristles like a porcupine to ward off future barbs.

You can get sucked into despair like a black hole and turn endlessly with no gravity to pull you back to ground.

 

I’ve been thinking that the solution to pain is not its absence, but hope. Hope, also an anomaly, is some sense of tangible intangibility that the pain will end. Pain becomes your greatest foe when there is not hope, because when pleasure is sucked from your surroundings and you are left with hopeless pain, what else is left to do but check out, or drink, or put a gun to your head?

 

I am grappling with my own pain. I let it in by the lake, when the sun glittered on the water and my eyes stung with tears and cold wind, and somehow I knew it would lead me to wholeness. Right now it follows me around, riding shotgun while I drive, keeping me awake at night, hovering while I clean and ever-looking for moments to thrust darts at my heart.

It’s been a long time since I experienced pain like this, but I embrace it afresh, because it makes me feel alive. It doesn’t make me grow resilient, or feel diminished. Rather, it heightens my awareness of the blood running through my veins, the throbbing of my heart.

Why does pain make me aware that I am living? Why do I feel a strange sense of thriving amidst it?

I’ve been surmising that the reason I have never been to the hole of despair is because of an eternal hope burning in my belly, a ball of light that never goes out, of which pain can never loom large enough to snuff. I’ve been imagining a world where pain didn’t exist, a world prior to sin’s birth. Pain was never the intention of God. He promises to come back and restore us to the perfection of Eden, to conquer pain with finality. I think this must be the eternal hope.

I stopped thinking. I asked Jesus why I feel alive in pain, why it doesn’t make me want to die.

You always say that where there is life, there I am. The life you feel in pain is me.

Of course. Isn’t that the first thing I do in my pain, cry out to God to come to me? I never realized, all those times I encountered pain, that he came to be in it. Life. Hope.

I am musing about a God who comes to dwell in my pain. Jesus, after all, is not unacquainted with it. He is the life in my sorrow of this world, and the hope of a world restored.