Hope is the origin of faith

Today our class lecture was about pediatric hematology and oncology. We ended with this documentary about a family who was dealing with their son's losing battle to cancer. Following the son's death there was an interview with the father about his spiritual life. I didn't get the vibe that the father was particularly devout to any certain doctrine through he did say he prayed a lot more. One thing he did say that made me stop and think was, "I really, really hope that there's a better place."

Faith is being sure of what we hope for...

That's what Hebrews 11 says, that faith is the assurance of things hoped for. We are faithless, but never without hope. Faith is something we have to be taught, it's something we have to have modeled as seen through God faithfulness to Israel and through the life and death of Christ. But hope does not need to be taught. Hope is all we know how to do. Even when we say things are hopeless, what we mean that there is no realistic way of ever getting what we really hope for. Hope, hope: our desires, dreams, wishes, yearnings. My hopes have done terrible things to me.

But it's these hopes that lead people to cry out. Like some sort of grassroots prayer, it's people crying out through tears and sighs and frustration saying "this is not what I hope for; this is so far from what I hope for."

Faith is being sure of what we hope for

So faith is taking these hopes and being sure about them. When hopes stop being wished for and start being waited for there is faith. So we take these hopes we have and we look at God and the things God seems to be faithfully working toward and we decide which hopes seem to be worthy of our faith.

I really, really hope that there is a better place.

Nursing a Thought

Another thing that I've been learning from Mother Teresa's story is a little more of what it means to be devoted to Jesus. Though her heart was for the poor, to whom she was called, her devotion was to Jesus; it was her dedication to his will that brought her to the poor. I think sometimes in ministry we have to hide the name of Jesus, the "share the gospel always, and when necessary use words" sort of idea. And I buy that, I know the kingdom isn't words, but a place where things happen, where real life happens. If we don't do works our faith is incomplete. The problem though is when we don't speak the name of Jesus in our motivations and prayers and hopes for those we minister to. We forget what we are doing this for.

See for a while I saw me studying nursing almost equal to me being a Christian. So last year when things started going downhill, I felt like my poor grades was just like me being disobedient to God. Like because I wasn't being successful, I was letting God down and falling short of myself. But now I'm beginning to see that my call, my first call is to love and to care about others. So before I'm a nurse, I am a Christian. Nursing is a way for me to care for people, but if for some reason nursing doesn't work out I'll still be able to love and I'll still have hope and I can still be obedient. And I can justify spending time doing other ministry, because ultimately my goal is not to be a nurse, but to minister. It's kind of a 1 Corinthians 13 sort of deal "If I have the gift of nursing and can heal everyone and administer all treatments but have not love, I'm nothing but a doctor's bitch."

Now, I do want to be a good nurse because nursing is a good thing. I once read that the first nurses were those in the early church, and I love that. Actually I kind of have a dream to one day to start a Christian nursing school where we care for those homeless and the people who come over from TJ or something like that. The school would revolve around a hospital and it would be our life. At chapel we'd pray for the sick and meet their families. We'd learn to love, to heal, and to minister. I don't know I'm working on the idea, we'll see what comes of it.

Momma T you're more than a flute to me.

I haven't written in a while because I haven't really had anything worth writing about (since all my blogs are usually super inspiring, right...) Whatever, anyway today I have something to say, hopefully it's at least a little satisfactory.

So I'm reading this book by Mother Teresa called, "Come be my Light" about her life and struggle to please God within the hierarchies of the church and the darkness she often felt in ministry. As one would suspect, it's inspiring.

I was talking to Heidi Snow about it the other day in class and for some reason, I mentioned that I was reading a section about talking about how Mother Teresa was "nothing but an instrument." When I first read that I thought, man that's humble and it reminded me Jimmy Eat World's "Goodbye Sky Harbor" but I really didn't analyze it too much. And when I mentioned it to Heidi she said something like, "Well that doesn't sound very uplifting, just to only be an instrument and nothing more." And I thought something like well Heidi, that's cause you care too much about other people's feelings.

Today though I spent some time in prayer and I was thinking about what it meant to be humble. Are we really just instruments? And I realized that, no, there's no way I'm only an instrument. I've made too many mistakes, had too many times of hurt, and have too much of a soul to be nothing but an instrument. And I know it was even more true for Mother Teresa. God did not create me as an instrument, God made me a person, or for the sake of the metaphor God made us musicians. We are called to play songs of compassion, giving honor God and bringing notice to Love and Beauty. We don't downplay our role or sit quietly in the back, we play our parts as best we can and we try to keep in rhythm with the Music. Our humility comes not in making ourselves objects, but in realizing our being, and playing in a way that compliments the Orchestra, honors the Song, and doesn't upstage our brothers and sisters.

I love, love, love this poem by Kathleen Norris.

Bean Song

A bean does not know much,
but it remembers the winter.
It sweats in secret, its skin grow tough
and smooth as it pushes up against the darkness,
against the weight of the universe.
Somehow it displaces just a little earth,
and everything shifts to one side.

The bean flower stands up
to see if it's in the middle of a field,
or in someone's pot;
it is beautiful and bitter,
and dies after a while,
but the bean keeps singing to itself
and song about the stars,
and the cities, and the people
who live in sunlight.
No one hears it singing,
only a few ever hear its song.

At night, when I sleep alone,
I sing it for you.

Poem a day project: day 2

So I'm going through the book "The Poet's Companion" by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. In the introduction they say good poems the writer writes about what they know and asks a question. Here's a funny excerpt from a poem by Ellery Akers that illustrates writing about the mundane:

"I cook, I shell peas, breaking open the pods at the veins with a snap: I take vitamins--all the hard, football-shaped pills--sometimes they get stuck in my gullet and I panic and think what a modern way to die, they'll come and find my dead, perfectly healthy body."

Ok so here's my second attempt at a poem. Its a little rough in some parts but c'est la vie. I have no rhythm or structure. I don't know how. In all honesty I really don't know what I'm doing. So I just write sentences of sorts.



My Chore

All I can do is wait
to rake the fallen leaves come autumn.
And all the other fallen things.
Springs best efforts retire as memories
and become a chore.

With all the fallen leaves
I remember
fallen plans
fallen short of the intent
the times I’ve fallen from grace
and blaming the fall of man
the heart fallen to pieces
after having fallen in love.
And all the other times I fall for no reason it seems.

With the fallen leaves I leave those dreams.

My hopes now lie in worm excrement.
My hope is reduced to dirt.
Perhaps my dirt may flower,
and blossom into something beautiful
or become something sweet
and nourishing.
No doubt though some will produce
next season’s fallen leaves.

Poem a day project: day one.

This is my first poem for my poem a day project. It's about redwood trees and the Church of the Nazarene. It's pretty obvious, but give me a break, its my first one.

Fairy Ring

First Church of the Nazarene is not what it used to be,
I hear
A fire broke out in the woods,
And burnt the redwood,
But the lightening underestimated the tree
Not knowing of its goodness,
Its willingness to share,
And the strength of its family.

The church has grown and spread elsewhere.
The tree remembered its substance,
The letters of its genome
And spread the stuff in a fairy ring
Around the broken tree.
The tree, the church is resilient.

can I share a Rumi with you?

I've been trying to get into poetry lately. I think its a very brilliant thing, that poetry stuff. You take this profound truth a speak it in a creative way. It's kind of like finding buried treasure, digging it up then putting it back in the ground again and giving someone a general map of it's location. Maybe they find the treasure you buried or maybe they find their own, but either way they use your map to get there. Anyway, I don't really know anything about poetry save the little I remember from high school English and Shel Silverstein's, but I got a few books from the library and my aunt gave me some too. One was a collection of Rumi's poems which of course are timeless and fantastic and another was about how to write poetry. These are some of Rumi's:
*****

"Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more, who's not himself
longed for by anyone else,

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.
It says, Live"

*****


My Worst Habit

"My worst habit is I get so tired of winter
I become a torture to those I'm with.

If you're not here, nothing grows.
I lack clarity. My words
tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.
How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in the habitual whirlpools,
dig a way out through the bottom
to the ocean. There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can't hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,
no matter whether that friend is moving away from you
or coming back to you."

*****

Enough Words?

"How does part of the world leave the world?
How can wetness leave water?

Don't try to put out a fire
by throwing on more fire!
Don't wash a wound with blood!

No matter how fast you run,
your shadow keeps up.
Sometimes it's in front!

Only full, overhead sun
diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you!
What hurts you, blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
You boundaries are your quest.

I can explain this, but it would break
the glass cover on your heart,
and there's no fixing that.

You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen and lay your head under the tree of awe.

When from that tree, feathers and wings sprout
on you, be quieter than a dove.
Don't open your mouth for even a coooooooo.

When a frog slips into the water, the snake
cannot get it. The frog climbs back out
and croaks, and the snake moves toward him again.

Even if the frog learned to hiss, still the snake
would hear through the hiss the information
he needed, the frog voice underneath.

But if the frog could be completely silent,
the snake would go back to sleeping,
and the frog could reach the barley.

The soul lives there in silent breath.

And that grain of barley is such that,
when you put it in the ground,
it grows.
Are these enough words,
or shall I squeeze more juice from this?
Who am I, my friend?"



So good. So good. I'm going to try to write one poem a day. You should write one too, and leave it as a comment!! or, you know, don't.