From 97 to 0 in a Blink of an Eye

It truly was a blessing in disguise.  But I didn’t know it at the time.

How could I???

At the time, I thought it was the end of the world. And, in a way, it was.  A blissful end to a horrible world… no... No!  A horrible end to a blissful world, is how it really felt.

The dawn of the doomsday was just like any other ordinary day.  

No advance warnings.  No creepy premonitions. No special announcements.

In fact, it was supposed to be a fun day.

Few errands.

A violin recital. I know - we all have our own definition of 'fun'.

A bite on the go.

And to top it off, a field trip to Trader Joe’s!  

How can anything bad happen on a day when there is a field trip to Trader Joe’s???

Be back home in time for my Duolingo Day 97.  I was already planning a 100-day-streak party.  Just three short days until the coveted milestone. Practically already in my pocket.

Then, one little hiccup led to a delay, and then another hiccup, which led to another delay.

No biggie, I thought.  I can handle this.

By the time we returned home, got kids in bed and I turned the computer on, it was already all over.

Instead of 97 what greeted me on the Duolingo home-screen was… a big. Fat. Z.E.R.O.

Do you have any idea how it feels to go from 97 to 0 in a blink of an eye???

How it feels to tumble head-first from almost the top into a mucky nothingness of not even one but zero???

I could sense a giant void being formed inside the pit of my stomach, shaped exactly like that zero mocking me from the screen; then, a torrent rushing into the void at a lightening speed. Denial, rage, negotiation, arguing, the madness of injustice and unfairness of it all. More denial, more rage, more negotiation. 

Mom, are you O.K? A pair of big brown-saucer eyes peers at me from behind the bedroom door just cracked open.

Nooooo… I think I just died!

The Making of a Pharisee

I can’t say I noticed when the great unraveling begun.  Honestly, I didn’t even realize that anything was unraveling at all! If you’d asked me, I would still vehemently claim that the sole reason why I was on Duolingo was because I loved learning languages and I wanted to talk to Margaret.

Then, one day  I almost forgot to clock in.  It was only by the grace of God that I remembered just in time before the day expired.  I was determined never to allow such a slip-up to happen again.

That’s when I set up my Duolingo alarm.

At 20:15 each night, it would go off as if the house was on fire.Sometimes I was in the middle of doing something, and even though I appreciated the reminder, I didn’t really appreciate it.

Mom, have you done your Duolingo today?

Hon, it’s your Duolingo alarm!

Now I had support of my entire family. They cheered me on, genuinely impressed  that I was still sticking with it.  They checked my streak and the number of lingots accumulated in my account.  They even picked up some Spanish themselves without even trying! I can't say I liked that very much.

I still continued to clock in, but somehow most days it felt more like a chore.

Then I found a loophole.

I discovered that if I just re-did my old lessons, it  would count towards my daily quota. Now, I could still keep my streak  if not alive at least on life support, with hardly any engagement of the mind, not to mention the heart.  

Nobody knew about it, so I thought it must be O.K.

My earnest desire to  learn to speak to Margaret in her own heart language faded into the background.

Totally oblivious to what was really happening, I found myself deep in the swampy regions of  Duolingo religion.

My joy was gone, but through gritted teeth I was determined to keep adding to the mindless streak.

Without knowing, I’ve become a Duolingo Pharisee. 

Duolingo or Die

When I started Duolingo 97 days ago, it wasn’t because of how many days  I could rack up in one streak.

Nor was it because of how many lingots I could earn.

Nor was it because of all the cool stuff I could buy in the Lingot store.

I didn’t even know there was such a thing as streaks or lingots or Lingot store?!!?!

And I certainly didn’t do it because I wanted to amass an adoring crowd cheering me on as I conjugate verbs in Spanish.

All I had was this long-standing dream of learning new languages and the fascinating worlds the skill opens up.

More practically, I wanted to talk with Margaret, the crossing guard in her language.

Plus, I like making people laugh, which is almost a given when I start practicing my butchered linguistic skills on a willing victim.  

Sadly, life sometimes gets in the way of making dreams come true. So was my sob story until, earlier this year, I stumbled upon this amazing free app.  Suddenly, my  life-long dream came literally within reach of my fingers!  

I joyfully and a bit sheepishly started clocking in my bare-bone minimum requirement day after day. I wish I could have been more ambitious, but I learned that setting my bar low spares me of many a disappointment in life.

High or low, I faithfully jumped  through the tiny hoops and was instantly rewarded with huge sense of accomplishment for reaching my pea-size goals.  

It was pure delight all around. I felt I was learning so much and my brain and my heart were so happy they were doing the dream-come-true cartwheels.  It was so bad that even my family noticed that something was up.

Kindness and Cruelty

Even in my banged upstate, even through the fog of trauma, while firmly planted in mid-air between sheer terror and desperate search for a glimmer of hope, one thing stands out.

There are nurses, and, then there are nurses.

Nurses come in all shapes and sizes. 

There are melted marshmallow nurses.  There are drill sergeant nurses. Crossing-the-t-s-and-dotting-the-i-s nurses. Even the Nazi nurses, one of which I met in the maternity ward after I gave birth to our first child. I could tell she didn't trust me to keep our fresh-out-of-the-oven son alive which was probably very smart. I wouldn't trust myself either.

In many hospitals, it is the nurses, not the doctors wearing the hospital pants, if you know what I mean.  They know so much and they do so much -  the power over life and death, lunch and dinner, surgical supplies and clean sheets resides with them – that they render the doctors practically useless.

The nurses are demi-gods of sort.

The doctors… well, they are more like presidents. Enough said.

Then, this happened. 

I was sitting in an exam room, drilling the nurse who was checking my vitals with the torrent of questions.

The woman was tight-lipped and deferred all my questions to the doctor.

I thought she didn’t understand, so I rephrased my spiel which was met with another,

You can discuss that with your physician.

I was annoyed to no end.

I knew and she knew that she knew the answers to my questions. 

Her silence was embodiment of pure evil meant to torment me in my vulnerable state. 

I could feel my temperature rising even as she was taking it. I would have stuck my tongue out at her if it hadn't already been stuck out.  

But she remained calm, kind and unintimidated by my temper-tantrum, stone-faced and immovable like Mt Rushmore. 

The Doctor will be here shortly. He will answer all your questions. 

And with those words, she smiled, walked out and closed the door behind her.

The Game-Changer

Needless to say, the length of my hospital gown, and whether my behind is exposed or not is the least of my concerns if I am the one wearing it. Or if it’s the one I dearly love wearing it. 

Even how exactly I got here doesn’t matter that much.

It could be an illness. It could be an accident.  An ‘act of God’. My fault, your fault, everybody’s fault, nobody’s fault – it doesn’t matter.

Just the fact that I am here.

The simple fact that life has side-swept me off its highway,  knocked me of my feet and left me half-dead in the ditch while the rest of the world is happily zooming by.

I am out of my depth, in-over-my-head.  This is way more than I could ever handle on my own. 

I.

Need.

Help.

Suddenly all my priorities are rearranged for me.

Suddenly, my scheduled is completely cleared up on my behalf.

Suddenly, what I do, what I call myself and all the stresses and worries that are attached to my silly titles - matter very, very little.

And in an instant, what matters A LOT is what I’ve been taking for granted most of my life.  What I’ve been shortchanging and squandering and sacrificing on an imaginary altar of more important, more urgent things.

Suddenly, I have a lot of time to kill.  Honestly, more time than I really want to have on my restless hands.

And as the seconds drag like molasses into minutes, and minutes drag into hours I would kill to have my old life back, at least some parts of it, but with these new eyes that have been opened. 

Because I am seeing myself – my life and everything in it, as if for the very first time.

And the worst thing that ever happened to me, that very thing that left my soul in the ditch, that clothed her in the threadbare hospital gown, slowly, imperceptibly becomes one of the best thing that ever happened to me… 

And I thank God, from the depths I didn’t even know existed in my heart, I thank God for it. 












For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? Matthew 16:26

Hospital Gown for the Soul

Instead of shooting out a rapid verbal fire fueled by my usual well-stocked arsenal of not-so-well-thought-out answers, I do something quite out of ordinary.  

I slide the question right back into her court:

What do you think? What does a butt-naked soul look like to you?

Just like that. Then, I wait for the little Facebook notification letting me know I have a new message. I hope it's quick.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it couldn’t have been something revolutionary different from what I was already thinking. After all, Susan and I are so alike. Like two peas in a pod.

Maybe that’s why her answer blind-sided me so much.  Or perhaps, one can say that it opened my eyes to something I didn’t really see before we started our conversation.

This is what my dear friend, who, incidentally is recovering from a knee surgery even as I write this, said:

I'm still not quite sure how to define a butt-naked soul. Kind of like walking down a long hallway wearing a hospital gown that's two sizes too small.

Walking down a long hallway…

… wearing a hospital gown…

… that’s two sizes too small.

I don’t know about you, but this appears to me like a major paradigm shift.  

A shift that moves us from a theatrical stage to a hospital hallway. 

From performers with wardrobe malfunction to patients waiting for the arrival of the physician who alone can give the accurate diagnosis and prescribe proper treatment.  

From stage-lights and stardom to soul surgery.

What does a butt-naked soul look like to you?

I guess the answer utterly depends on who you ask.

It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Mark 2:17

Sir, We Got the Visual!

Few weeks ago, after reading the One Size Doesn’t Fit All post, my friend Susan who not only reads but actually ponders what is written, sends me a private message with the following question:

What does a butt-naked soul look like?

Hmmm....I frown. I didn’t really think about it, I want to say, but I am embarrassed to admit it.

This happens to me a lot.  First I write.  Then, I think. Especially when prompted by my thoughtful friends’ questions.

What DOES a butt-naked soul look like?? I ask myself, and immediately a few images pop inside my head. 

An un-named orchestra conductor’s dress pants that split wide open from behind at the peak of an extraordinary performance (true story told by the un-named conductor!)…

The row of overgrown azalea bushes pruned way back, their lush foliage skirt stripped off, revealing their bare gnarly skinny legs and shockingly hollow interior…

The high-school principal during the awards night…

My reel goes on, revealing mostly painfully embarrassing images of inadvertent exposure – visual and verbal - soliciting a horrified gasp from unsuspecting audiences.  All my images imply deep humiliation and strong desire to hide what was exposed. 

To cover up the rip in the pants. 

The operating word - something we all are all too familiar with - shame.

Several Bible verses that speak on the subject of shame, nakedness and such also pop inside my head, and now I am getting really excited to share my brilliant findings with my thoughtful friend. I didn't realize I was being profound without even trying! 

Just as I am about to pounce on the Instant Messenger, something stops me in my tracks.  

Something pulls on me to hooooold my horses.

Something reminds me of my old old Communications 101 professor, his life-time nicotine-addiction burnished voice trailing across the ocean, across the decades - even centuries! - still strong, still admonishing us, the young, bright know-it-alls that it is far better to answer a question, not by unleashing a horde of prancing answers, but… by… 

...asking… 

...another... 

...question.

A Sleepy Head's Guide to Achievement

I got so many achievements last night, Mom.

I had a rough night, after a long, rough day. It’s way too early to make any kind of conversation, much less a conversation that involves making sense of such incongruous statement.  

Hmmm… I am waiting for the java juice to work its drip magic. How can you get achievements while you are sleeping?!?? I wish my life would work like that, racking up achievements while I sleep...

You know I am talking about Clash of Clans, right?

Of course,  I lie, still fantasizing about the achieve-while-you-sleep idea, waiting for his answer and the java-juice effect on my brain.

It’s because I was attacked so many times all throughout the night!

Suddenly I am wide awake, and he has my full attention.

You get achievements for being attacked?!!!

Now I really wish my life would work like that – getting achievements every time I am attacked - day and night!

Of course not!,  he laughs. That would be silly. You don't get achievements for just being attacked! You get achievements every time the attack on you fails. That’s how you get achievements. You get attacked. Your defense wards off the attack.  The attack fails. You get the achievement. The more attacks, the more opportunities for attack-fails. The more attack-fails, the more achievements. That’s how it works. 

In addition to all this take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Ephesians 6:16

May the Forth Be With You

The following post was originally published several years ago titled Who Is George Lucas? I rarely revisit the oldies, but thought it would be fun to make an exception to the rule on this day. May the Fourth Be With You!

We can thank my mother-in-law for introducing Star Wars into our children’s lives by getting our 5 year old son his first Star Wars LEGO set. He ripped the boxes open and within seconds our home was invaded by the Imperial Stormtroopers and the Droids.

I was mortified.

Star Wars?!!! He is waaay too young for Star Wars!

It wasn’t the complexity of the building process I was concerned about, because that never seemed to be a problem for our pint-size engineer. What bothered me much more was a matter of introducing complex adult issues into his immature mind, and the challenge that creates for me as his parent. But, like it or not, the door was open and there was no going back.

From that day on, my son turned into a miniature Star Wars maniac. So far, he’s been mostly preoccupied with recreating cosmic wars against his little sister. Along the way he somehow acquired a prodigious amount of information about the characters and the plot and various twists and turns in the storyline. He learned the difference between the Imperial and the Rebel blaster, the who’s who and what’s what of the Imperial Army and the Rebel Alliance, and all the whys and therefores of the narrative that molded the worldview of generation after generation since the first movie was released. He bought a Star Wars Visual Dictionary with his own money(!) and would spend his free time memorizing its content.

Now, all this wouldn’t be so surprising if it wasn’t until this afternoon, years after the initial encounter, that he saw his very first Star Wars movie. Watching him watch the movie was as much (or more) fun as watching the movie itself. It was as if he had all these loose pieces of a puzzle, and he finally saw how they all fit together, he could finally place them in their exact spots in the larger, 4-D story-puzzle. His delight was quite contagious. During dinner, he continued chatting enthusiastically about all the fascinating trivia he picked up during the afternoon Star Wars extravaganza. In the course of the conversation, my husband casually mentioned George Lucas and what his intent might have been for the unfolding of the various episodes in a certain sequence.

George… Lucas?!! Our son muttered hesitantly… And who is this George Lucas? 

There was no doubt that he was utterly confused. You could tell that he was scrolling down the imaginary database of Star Wars names and faces, from Emperor Palpatine through Chewbacca and Ewoks, but there was no suitable match for the name “George Lucas”.

It was now our turn to be confused. How is it possible that with all these years of borderline obsession with the Jedi and their pecking order, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, and R2D2 and Obi-Wan Kenobi, our son never ever heard the name George Lucas?

We looked at each other and burst into laughter.

Hmm …George Lucas…. George Lucas…. Well, he is kind of like God to the world of Star Wars. Without him, there would be no Star Wars, nor the galaxy, nor anybody or anything else belonging to this galaxy far, far away. He created it all. This amazing world exists because it first existed in the mind of George Lucas.

It took several minutes for the news to settle in his shaken-to-the core 9 year old mind screaming for a paradigm shift. Until this moment of revelation he was so preoccupied with the fascinating universe which George Lucas had created that for a brief while he simply couldn’t compute the information about the existence of the creator of that universe.

There…there is a George Lucas… there IS a George Lucas and I never even knew it!

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1

One Size Doesn't Fit All

I spent a lot of time this week sorting through clothes in preparation for our annual no-money-exchanged, absolutely free office ‘garage sale’.

I know that some people cringe at the though of being caught wading through other people’s ‘junk’. Others absolutely love it.  As the saying goes, One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. 

I teeter between the two, having experienced the sharp edge at the ends of both extremes. But I digress…

We organized and sorted tops by S, M, L and XL.  This is where I learned that there is such a thing as a PS which are even smaller than S.  And XXXL is not the end of the clothing universe.   

As if the letter categorization isn’t complicated enough, some clothes are sized and sorted based on numbers. It took me years to figure out the relative sliding scale that morphs from chronological age for babies, children and teens into some arbitrary numeric designation for adults, which of course is different for men and women. I still struggle to wrap my mind around the fact that that there is size 0 or 1/2 for women’s bottoms... but I digress again…

Needless to say, there is much more to clothes than just the size.  There are billions of colors, materials, textures and styles that make a person like me absolutely overwhelmed. 

So many options! So many possibilities! 

And I didn't even mention shoes!!!

The variety is truly limitless.

But, it always boils down to one simple (or extravagant, fun, practical… ) outfit that I chose to wear at any given moment. An outfit that not only fits me but also fits the occasion and the need of the day. Something appropriate and often affected by external conditions like customs, culture and weather. 

Most days I don’t spend too much time mauling over this choice. I try to keep it simple, comfortable and relatively attractive.  I know what hangs in my closet and how to put it on. And even though my husband’s closet is just few feet away, I never help myself with what’s in there. I would never dream of knocking on my neighbor’s door in the morning expecting to help myself with the stuff from her closet?!!?

What we wear on the outside may be off the rack but it’s always personal.

What we wear on the inside may be universal but it’s still no less personal.

Each of us has a spiritual wardrobe at our full disposal every day.  This is where we clothe our souls so they don’t go running around butt-naked.  God’s Word is like our free office ‘garage sale’. It’s well stocked-up with most diverse and amazing getups.  But what is even more amazing is that He has something custom-designed to fit me for each particular day! It may not be lavish and eye-catching but it’s always deeply personal. Each morning I can dive in there with Him, dig through His hangers and ask Him to help me find something beautiful, appropriate and fitting that my soul gets to wear all day! 

Sadly, for some inexplicable reason I seem to prefer checking out the high fashion show of social media first. Then I try to squeeze myself into my friends’ wardrobes. They may look great but their stylish outfits rarely fit me. They only make me feel awkward, inadequate and self-conscious.

I must go digging through my own Closet and find what the Fashion Designer has custom-tailored for me today.

For in the matters of the heart, one size doesn’t fit all. 

You Can't Scramble Easter Eggs

It seems like all the pastel-colored glory of Easter faded into oblivion by late Wednesday of last week… or Thursday at the most.  

You guys don’t mind if I turn the Easter eggs into a salad? I ask nobody in particular.

But I don’t even like egg salad! I like my eggs scrambled!

Well, honey, you can’t scramble Easter eggs.

It's Monday morning I am faced with the same old problems and the same old struggles. I am grumpy and disappointed.

It’s not like I don’t believe it happened.

It’s more like I don’t know what I was expecting...

But, is it unreasonable to think...

that the incredible super-jazzed energy that raised the beat up and flogged; the half-dead-before-crucified; the three-days-dead-and-buried Jesus -

...is it too much to think that the incredible energy that not only raised this Jesus from the dead but also endowed His basic pre-resurrection body with these unbelievable post-resurrection powers....

... would make some change...

A fraction of a difference...

.... in this run-down life of mine?

A week... well, eight days ago… I think... and the story meanders into my mind, some may explain it as just a coincidence of timing. Plus, I admit I've been thinking of Tom a lot.

But something else rolls into focus, like an unexpected egg from the Easter Egg hunt, that you find a week later.

Eight days later, his disciples were again in the room.

This time Thomas was with them.

Jesus came through the locked doors, stood among them, and said,

"Peace to you."

Then he focused his attention on Thomas.

"Take your finger and examine my hands. Take your hand and stick it in my side….”

And this is where I stop.

Right at the place of Thomas’ curved finger inside the palm of His hand. 

Right at the place of Thomas’ shaky hand inside the scar on Jesus’ side.

Here’s Jesus, eight-days-fresh out of the tomb, donning His glorious resurrected body… perfect and flawless?

...

That's what we imagine.  That's what we want.  

That's what I want:

A flawless, scarless resurrected glory.

But that's not what we get. 

What we get is...

The scarred glory.

The pierced might.

I scratch my head, feeling  like my Easter eggs just got scrambled. 

I shake my head, feeling like my pastel-colored Easter glory just got a tattoo on its side. 

Resurrection Party Re-run

Nobody knows why Tom missed the party.  

There were so many people it’s doubtful that anybody even noticed he was missing.The next day his Facebook news-feed was flooded with exciting pictures of beaming faces, great food and the surprise appearance of the real Easter bunny!  The silky-soft velveteen just like in the book. It was clear that everyone was enjoying themselves, having a blast, savoring like a piece of lemon-meringue pie, the taste of this incredible resurrection life. 

Everyone but him.

He scrolls down his friends’ status updates - blow-by-blow account of the party of the century - the sinking feeling in his stomach growing as he scans the posts.

He missed it! He missed the opportunity of a lifetime!

It’s that feeling when you want to kick yourself and then everyone else around you, for being left out. For missing the boat, for being left behind with no one, absolutely no one asking,

Where’s Tom anyway? Has anybody seen him?

All these years together, and nobody cares about Tom. 

Nobody misses him.

Suddenly he decides.

Fine.  I don’t believe it. I can’t.  I won’t. Perhaps somebody put something in the lemonade bowl, and you guys are all hallucinating. I need facts.  I need evidence.  I need some hard-core proof that this Jesus-rising-from-the-dead talk is for real. If you want to taste a pie, you have to stick your finger in it. What’s the use in just talking about the pie if you can’t bite into it.

It turns out, somebody did notice that Tom was missing.  

Somebody knows that the resurrection party just wouldn't be the same if Tom is not included.

To Jesus, this one  - the hard-nosed, hard-evidence, disbelieving, doubting, pain-in-the-butt Tom is worth the trouble. 

He is worth more than enough to throw yet another -  resurrection-rerun -  party.

Eight days later Jesus’ disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors having been shut, stood in their midst and said, "Peace be with you." Then He turned to Thomas, "Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing." Thomas answered and said to Him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed." John 20:26-29

The Hard Work of Rest

Sandwiched between the unspeakable drama of that Friday and unutterable victory of Sunday stretch out the interminable hours of an eternity-long Saturday.

The Sabbath day.

The God-prescribed day of rest for all the Lord’s people.

It seems like rest is the last thing on your mind following the triumph of evil.  

Rest is the last thing you want to do.  I know that rest is the last thing I want to do.

I want to do something.  Anything.

Anything to make things better.

Anything to make things less …worse.

Less… hopeless?

Anything that makes me feel less useless and less powerless.

I want to keep my hands and feet busy, just to keep up with the racing mind that refuses to quiet down... that just can’t wrap itself around unjust suffering, the murder of the innocent; the chaos and confusion of unmitigated hate…

… and, irony of ironies, done in the name of God.

The loss seems unredeemable.  The damage permanent.

How can good God allow this…?

It’s hard – hard – work, entering this rest.

In the midst of swirling unanswerable questions, the endless loop of Why? Why? Why? , this rest forces me to look away from what I do… 

...from what you do…

... from what evil can do and is doing…

Not in ostrich-kind of denial…

Not in some blind don’t-worry-be-happy naïve optimism…

But in faith – a rock-solid conviction that there is more to this story. What you and I see is not all there is.

This command to rest invites me to w-rest-le until my eyes are deliberately focused away from all that we do – terrifying or impotent as it may be, and I am able to take a deep breath – in and out – and look up to what God does.

For there is more, much more to that… to what God does – the God-story - than meets our little eye. 

And with God who was willing to go the length of the Cross for us, there is no telling what He might be willing to do to get us out of our graves. 

Cracking the Building Code

Looking back, the pieces finally started clicking together when our son got his first LEGO® building set – Star Wars The Clone Wars. Of course, at the time, I had no idea...

The sealed cardboard box perfectly epitomized my approach to just about anything creative - cooking and gardening, parenting and disciple-making.

On the outside, there was a high-definition picture – in fact, several pictures - of what I should expect the end result to look like.  Just seeing them made my fingers itch to get this building business under way. 

Look at those slick lines! Check out these cool features! 

The spattering of few odd-looking characters made the process all the more interesting.

Inside, I could find a booklet with clear, step by step, easy to follow instructions and several bags of well-organized pieces. Everything I need to build the pictured model was in that one box.

My job was to open the box, get my pieces together, read the manual, follow the instructions, and in no time, without fail - voila, there comes a model disciple!

It turns out, real life rarely works quite that way. 

Except, perhaps, for those odd-looking characters.

Sure, there is the instruction manual.

Except, the instructions are not as simple, easy to understand and follow.

And sure, there are the building blocks. 

But, not all of them are ‘fresh-out-of-the-box’ nice and shiny.  In fact, hardly any of them are!  Most pieces in my pile are scuffed up and old, chipped and even broken. They all seem to have a mind of their own, refusing to stay put together the way I want them. They go off on their own in a million directions, lurking under the desk or embedded in the carpet, waiting for my unsuspecting bare feet to find them. 

Ouch!

And so my nice little set gets morphed into a big messy pile in the middle of the bedroom, the content of dozens of different boxes all hopelessly mixed together.

I can’t make any sense of that mess! 

There are days when I scratch my head for I am not sure if I am supposed to build an Imperial Starfighter or the Little House on the Prairie.

Or, perhaps, I should just bag the whole thing and go back to Duplos®!

Seated next to the big messy pile, nursing a massive headache, I do know one thing for sure.

I can’t do this on my own.  I desperately need help.   

I must call on the Master Builder!

It turns out, the Master Builder loves to answer. It is His joy to come alongside and help all the flailing junior builders in over their heads.

He always knows exactly where to start. He picks up a piece. He holds it up so I can see it clearly, and says,

This... this piece is the key. It’s the Cornerstone. Whenever you build, whatever you build, make sure you always start with the Cornerstone. 

Do I Know You?

I noticed him while he was still quite a ways away.  

Idaho University sweatshirt, shorts, baseball hat, the Birkenstocks,  heading clear across the lawn in my direction, following imaginary unswerving straight line.

His deliberate moves beg for a question,

Am I supposed to know this guy?

The facial recognition software runs furiously inside my brain, but except for some vague familiarity, all I get is, 

NO MATCH FOUND.

I feel sorry for the guy. Clearly he must have taken me for somebody else. 

I smile, the way you smile at a confused stranger.

By this time he’s stopped at respectable few feet distance.  We are standing face to face. 

Still no recognition. 

He smiles and says,

You are…

And he finishes the sentence by using a simple unmistakable description of one of my side roles, the label so rarely used I’ve almost forgotten belongs to me!  

My eyes pop wide open. 

How does this complete stranger know me?!!?? NOBODY here knows me in this role?

Obviously, it’s my turn now to be thoroughly confused.

I look at him again, and just as he is about to shorten my misery and introduce himself, it finally dawns on me.

I’ve known the man for more than a decade!  His face hasn’t changed much over the years.  Many times we’ve chatted casually about work and school, kids and politics.

But until today all our interactions have always been at the exact same location, same carefully parceled out context, sitting in the same chairs, each of us occupying a clearly defined role. 

As if that's not enough predictability to last you a lifetime, he was always wearing the same thing. A uniform of sort.

White pressed shirt. 

Business suit and tie. 

Carefully polished dress shoes.

Over the years, his gray suit in my mind somehow grew into him, into his skin and flesh, bone and marrow. His suit became an inseparable part of his identity without which he was just a confused stranger.

   

Outside his little ‘pigeonhole’, on an emerald-green lawn filled with colorful plastic eggs and bouncy children, stripped of his suit, he became utterly unrecognizable to my eyes.

I scratch my head over this and then I wonder if this might be why so many of us fail to recognize Jesus when He stands face to face with us?  

We are so accustomed to keeping Him pigeonholed in a clearly defined, predictable context, all buttoned-up into a suit of our own making.  When he shows up looking different, it’s confusing and unnerving.  There might be some vague familiarity, but no real recognition.  

We are just not ready for His surprise visits.

And yet, He knows us. 

He takes the unswerving straight line across the emerald green lawn, wearing Birkenstocks and baseball hat, and just as I am about to say,

Sir, do I know you?

He looks me in the eye, smiles - the way you smile at a confused child - and says,

I know you.

The Phantom Ear-bud Syndrome

Even though the ear-buds are gone, I still feel them like little lime-green wiry ghosts securely attached to my ears.  

It must be the Phantom Ear-bud Syndrome. 

I can even hear – at first loud and clear, but with time softer and softer – my favorite playlist.

Or, should I say, what used to be my favorite playlist.

For, curiously, I find that what once was a sound of heavenly escape, an oasis of peace and tranquility in the midst of the sea of turmoil suddenly feels more like noise pollution, something similar to trying to listen to your beloved radio station after somebody was messing with the tuning dial causing it to slip a notch or two from the right frequency.

I feel like I need an auditory detox!

My phantom ear-bud syndrome and its little ‘auditory detox’ side-effect make me notice something conspicuous about the people I pass on my morning walk.

They all have their ears happily plugged with their own version of my lime-green buds.

Young mother in yoga pants pushing a double-stroller.

The buffed-up guy showcasing his physique by wearing a tight black tank top.  I can recognize the beat from the way he speed-walks.

A bunch  of sleepy middle schoolers shuffling across the street oblivious to the second bell.

A  health-and-wellness conscious middle-aged couple.

The last two make a particularly curious pair.  They must be attempting to carry on a conversation with their ear-buds in.  I don’t think they realize it, but they look like two raving lunatics yelling at each other from the top of their lungs.  

It's actually quite entertaining. 

The Writer's Choice

At this point in the story, the tension for some of us can become unbearable.

Living with tension is tough. Some of us feel we must resolve it, get the immediate closure. 

We don't want to walk the tight rope.  We want to cut it!

The story, for example, could suddenly take a sharp turn, and even end – happily end - right here.  Right now.

I could, for example, take things in my own hands.  I am an adult, for heaven’s sake! I am in charge. I could  shorten the misery by hopping into the car, driving over to Best Buy and purchase a replacement set  Or, even better, order them on line and have them delivered to my doorstep.  I may even get free shipping.

When the package arrives, I would rip it open, plug my ears back up and  resume where I left off – humming blissfully to John Legend’s All of Me.

I could do that.

Or, perhaps, I could add a little intrigue, a little spirituality and mystique, and have my old buddy-buds mysteriously re-appear on my front door step.  Hung from the faded door knob by an invisible hand, a kind of deus-ex-machina. 

This may imply I have some special connection, special strings I could pull in order to get this vending-machine-god to deliver just what I want just when I want it. Even the great writers like Euripides and Shakespeare resorted to such literary devices. If it’s good enough for them, it certainly has to be good enough for me!

I am honestly tempted to choose one of these two approaches. Some may consider them cowardly, but who cares? If I am happily plugged back into my favorite playlist,  happily deaf to the unpleasant realities around me – who’s gonna blame me?

We could all live happily ever after. End of story.  The end.

I could do that. 

 

But, see, here's the problem. My friend Susan, my wonderful, faithful cheer-leader friend would have none of these shortcuts. She thinks that I need to chose C. 

Not A. 

Not even B.  

But C!