Living a Pick-Up-Sticks Life
Anne Lamott’s writing comes across as consistently delightful to read. Her style is personal and unvarnished in truth-telling and question-asking. Hers has been a life filled with plenty of trauma and triumph, possibly like yours.
Recently, I ran across a snippet from Lamott worth repeating.
Brothers and sisters, here we are, clueless about what the future holds but knowing who holds the future. I wonder if it would be so much skin off Their divine nose to let us know how everything is going to shake down, so that we can make advantageous plans. But noooo, this is not the system.
The system is that one some days God’s will unspools in in the ways of a surrealist, non-linear movie director, with PMS.
Other days, we feel hilariously abundant love and grace, grace as spiritual WD-40 that against all odds, and I mean ALL odds, pokes its thin red straw into our darkest and most clenched spaces, and offers release. (Cold dead hands, in my case.) (I heard in early recovery that everything we let go of has claw marks on it.)
And most of the time, everything is pretty mixed up, hard stuff, love, the sniper in the trees picking off someone you love, peace, grace, bad news.
If I were God’s West Coast representative, I would have a much more organized system, all sad and weird events were in the knife slot in your silverware drawer, joy and peace where the big forks go, acceptance of the mystery in the salad fork slot, resentments and the desire for revenge in with the teaspoons.
That’s classic Lamott and thanks, Anne. I’ve had the same thoughts. When life twists pretzel-like in on itself, I often wonder what in the world is going on.
Why doesn’t God just lay it all out in an orderly fashion and let me in on the end of the story?
How am I supposed to make sense of the senseless and discern a plan in what looks like chaos?
What do I do in those times when I don’t know where to turn next?
Remember Pick-Up-Sticks? A jumble of thin plastic sticks are tumbled out on the floor and the game is to remove one at a time without any of the others moving. With shaking hands and trying to discern how one piece interacts with the rest, we choose the next stick to remove and hope it’s right. Inevitably, another one moves and our turn is over. Failure.
There are times when I’m living a Pick-Up-Sticks Life.
At those points, it’s good for me to return to first principles. Here’s one at the top of the pile: God is God, and I am not. Seems obvious, but how often am I like the toddler demanding an explanation for a situation far beyond my ability to understand.
God, through Isaiah, gets at this, and it might leave a person less than satisfied who wants answers.
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the LORD. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.
For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
To some this can sound like, “Just sit down and shut up,” but if I couple his “higher knowledge” to the belief in a kind heart beating in the chest of a good Father, the message changes into a call to freedom to go ahead and pick up the next best thing to move. If we fail, and we surely will, the game continues. We are not tossed aside. There is no losers’ bin collecting failed saints.
Instead, when we stumble we are pruned and cleaned and lifted up out of our dirt (check out John 15 for Jesus’ illustration) to go again into the next season of fruitfulness. The higher ways and thoughts of God the farmer may seem harsh at the time to the branch, especially if we’ve grown comfortable in our place in the dirt. But that’s not what we are made for. You and I are made to bear fruit. Getting to that place, though, may be hard.
So, looping back to Anne’s lament, I could have said the same things with the same heart carrying the same frustrations. And I love how she begins her complaint with,
Brothers and sisters, here we are, clueless about what the future holds but knowing who holds the future.
That, friends, is trust in the dark. This honest statement every believer in any situation can utter. And then we are back to asking of ourselves,
“Do I really believe and trust in a God I cannot see but who says I am never out of his sight?”
Maybe a prayer to end this note is appropriate.
Lord, I mostly believe and try to trust…but please help me in my unbelief
Let your love overwhelm my fears
May your Spirit pray for me when I can’t
Fill my reservoirs of faith
File down my dull edges to sharpness for your use
Amen.
Let’s lift out the next plastic stick from our pile and go together into territories yet to be seen and hard to understand. Come on. Let’s go.
Music is always good…
Funnies Galore! …or at least 2
Herman was afflicted with an explosive personality that caused him more and more problems at home and on the job. Finally, his distressed family persuaded him to enter an anger-management course.
Herman’s therapy included an alarm clock on his bedroom table that was tuned in to his brain by electronic pulses. Every time Herman flew into a tantrum, the clock would explode into a loud and irritating ring that wouldn’t stop until he calmed down.
For quite a while, Herman deeply resented the noisy timepiece, but eventually he came to see that it was helping him to control his anger. He would even sing to it: “Clock of rages, left for me. Let me chide myself with thee.”
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Mom and Dad were trying to console Susie, whose dog, Skipper, had recently died.
“You know,” Mom said, “it’s not so bad. Skipper’s probably up in Heaven right now, having a grand old time with God.”
Susie stopped crying and asked, “What would God want with a dead dog?”