Note to Self

I live in Florida. I play outside. I go to the dermatologist for skin checks. But NOT, apparently, often enough to remember all the details.

My first couple full body scans in my late 40's were made bearable by the fact that my dermatologist was a woman, and that they are over so quickly that I had to work to convince myself that the trained eye really can spot a budding melanoma that quickly. But, alas, she's been gone from the practice for several years, so when I have a strange thing on my face that doesn't go away, I take the only appointment available that will get me in before our son's wedding, and glibly say "yes" to a "full body scan" to kill two birds with one payment. The resident physician (male) will check me.

I work to convince myself that this doctor-in-training has seen enough strange blemishes to know what to do with the one on my face, and remind myself that the full body scan will be over in less than a minute. Not much in my closet besides workout clothes fits me so I'm wearing comfy yoga pants with thong undies to avoid a rear view appearance of double butt. I'll have to take them off for the exam, anyway, so what does it matter?

Well, it matters a lot as soon as the young, female assistant informs me that I can leave on my undergarments for the body check. Great.

The "barely-out-of-his-teens" resident comes in, finds out that I run and bike while he works on that thing on my face, then squats down as he does the rear view body scan to get a good close look at the backside of the running legs. Unfortunately, he also has a good close look at my thong-clad, almost 53 year old grandma butt. I am certain, that even though words are coming from his mouth that my skin looks fine, his eyes have glazed over in shock, he can't bring himself to look any higher than my thigh and so hasn't even glanced at my back.

Which is where that mole I've had for so long is. The mole my gym friend who has had melanoma worries over when she spots it just days after my exam, and each time she sees it the next couple weeks. Which is why I call to schedule another appointment - and another payment. "No, I do not want to see Dr. _____ again. I want a second opinion."

So now the strange thing on my face and the benign mole on my back have been removed, and I just had my first exam by my new primary physician - a WOMAN- yes! I wore briefs under my yoga pants.


The photo above taken at Appalachicola, Florida (panhandle)

Hovering

Underneath the surface layer of my life of ever-shifting responsibilities and schedules these past few years, I have been trying to process a tangle of grief and witnessed suffering, asking myself "the big questions" once again about meaning in life, the existence of God, what I believe, where to place destruction and suffering, etc.. One part of that process was a protracted courtroom trial in my mind. I have called witnesses to the stand and put on trial the existence of an "All-Powerful God who is Love and Truth and Who does what is right and Who comes to the aid of the helpless". In this court the witnesses came from current and historical world events as well as various philosophers, teachers, and writers through the various essays, books, movies I had engaged over the course of my life. In this court I played prosecutor, defender and presiding judge.

In the early months, during the first stage of the trial I kept running through events from my own experience which I had previously labelled "God's engagement or intervention", calling each to the stand as a potential witness of God's existence, greatness and goodness. As the presiding judge, I refused to allow Bible passages to be introduced as evidence in this stage of the trial- I determined to see what conclusions my reason would come to without the evangelical Christian framework I had lived within all my life.

Most people, upon examining my memory bank, would say I had a full file of events labelled as examples of God's engagement or intervention. Recent first hand exposure to the culture of poverty in Kolkata, India, shock and cumulative grief from witnessed conflict, loss and trauma, both around the world and in my family had obscured my memory's range of sight and left me with a truncated experience list to call as witnesses in God's defense. During each testimony the prosecutor would object and ask the judge to disallow the testimony on the basis of "coincidence", "personal interpretation" or "man's compelling desire for meaning, coherence and order. Only one experience from that list, one "witness" withstood the agnostic prosecutor's dismissive objections.

It was a chance encounter from several years before "the trial" began. A woman I had never met was the listing realtor of a house I wanted to see, and as she showed me through the beautiful home, she mentioned a personal loss. I murmured empathy, asked a question, and as we sat on a luxurious sofa in a sun-drenched home, her story of pain spilled over the edges of her professional personna like a raging river coursing over a suddenly inadequate dam.

Within a space of three months, she had lost her mother, then her father to death, and her husband of a few years had left their later-in-life marrige. She felt abandoned, alone and completely undone. The foundations of her life had been yanked out from under her, and she had not slept in months. Her unremitting pain had become a full-body garment of lead so heavy that she struggled to breathe.

For one of the few times in my life, I didn't try to fix her with words of explanation, encouragement, or instruction. I simply sat with her, looked at her and listened to her.

I asked her permission to pray aloud for her on that sofa, then bowed my head and listened, waiting for words to come, as had become my custom over years of praying daily with others. Her suffering was so great that it seemed the best I could ask for was for God's Spirit to hover over her as he had hovered over the waters at a time when the earth was formless and empty and darkness reigned over the surface of the deep (Genesis 1:2).


So I lightly touched her head and the back of her neck and her shoulders with my hand and asked God to come to her. I asked Him to hover over her as he had over the empty, dark earth, and to brood over the surface of her deep with his creative Presence, stirring the waters of her emptiness and pain with His love and peace and rest. I asked "I AM" to come and hover over her, to be WITH her; and I sat in silence, waiting and listening as slight gasp and quiet sighs came from the woman beside me.

My internal landscape was absolutely silent, devoid of intuitive words or pictures about what might be happening inside her. I was quite accustomed to "hearing" words breathed or seeing symbolic pictures displayed in the recesses of my mind as I prayed for people, but this time there were no interior markers to indicate that God might be working in the person for whom I prayed.

After some moments of silence and my whispered "amen", I raised my head and opened my eyes, waiting for her to speak. She looked at me with wondering, incredulous eyes and asked, "What did you do to me? I have never felt like this.....what happened?....what did you do?....I feel so different...like a huge weight has been lifted off me...what is this - what did you do?"

I knew that whatever had happened to her had not been my doing, and told her so. "I simply asked God to come and hover over you and touch you. Whatever happened to you is God's doing, not mine."

In a few moments we parted ways, and I went about my day. She called me the next morning to tell me, with wonder in her voice, that she had slept the night before for the first time in 3 months. She had slept like a secure child for the entire night, without waking once. Even now, a full day after sitting on sofa with me, waiting for - she knew not what - She still felt incredibly peaceful and free of burden. She didn't know the expected procedure for expressing gratitude for an encounter like that but what had happened to her was so amazing that NOT openly acknowledging and giving thanks to that God whom I had beseeched on her behalf, was simply inconceivable. So before starting her workday she set a candle on a table in her home, lit it, bowed her heart and said thank you to God.

A day later a woman appeared at my front door wanting to talk. My brain knew it was the realtor with whom I had sat and prayed, but she looked so completely different I felt I should call her by a different name. She had slept all night again, still had that mysterious sense of peace and lightness of burden and had come to thank me once more. We chatted for a few more moments, most likely prayed together again, had another brief exchange as she helped me with a real estate matter, then, like most chance encounters within two busy, non-overlapping lives, those brief encounters became the entire history of our relationship.

And so this witness, this compact exchange with a stranger whose words and actions seemed to indicate very little, if any, experience with and expectation of a Supernatural Other to engage and intervene became my most compelling witness. So many of the other witnesses I called to the stand during those days inolved only experiences or changes within me, or experiences with "church people" who would, as a natural course, attribute numerous attitudes, experiences and events to God. The prosecutor had labelled those witnesses "biased" and the judge had agreed. So at this stage of my "God on trial" trial, this lone "witness" stood against centuries of suffering and powerfully persuasive philosophers and scientists and writers who severely questioned the existence of a Supernatural Other who is always all knowing, all-powerful, all-good and who, from motives of love and care engages and intervenes in the affairs of men. This lone witness returned to the stand, again and again to whisper, "Yes. But what about me? What about that thing that happened?"

A week ago, I once again found myself in chance encounter, listening to two whose circumstances of loss and pain were overwhelming. Together, we had no answers, no hopeful courses of action, no "silver bullets" to make things right, and it felt almost impossible to envision a future without compounded stress and anguish, loss, pain and destruction.

After a fitful night of moments of sleep interrupted by flashes of heat, cold, and worry, common to this menopausal season of my life, I turned to a writer who could have been one of God's defenders in my courtroom had I allowed others in, and found him describing his struggle to process and order senseless evil, loss, and grief that had invaded his life. He reasoned that all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God allowed evil and destruction and loss to remain as an invitation to people to choose different ways, different paths...an invitation to choose love, and from that choice, to turn evil into good. Sort of an invitation -albeit in unbelievable disguise- to become co-creator with God.
Though my inner trial still continues after all these months, albeit on a lesser scale and with a gentler prosecutor and more lenient judge, I found myself compelled to utter the words of the witness, "Oh, God, come and hover over them, over this darkness, over this vast expanse of formless deep. If You do not help them, they will not survive. If you do not help them they will all be destroyed. They belong to you., these little ones ....hover over them with Your creative power and lift them up. Brood over them and bring them rest and strength. Lift them up out of the darkness, bring them renewed power to hope, to envision, to create, to love."

And in my courtroom the witness whispers, "but what about this?

The Last Human Freedom

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

These words by Viktor Frankl, Nazi concentration camp survivor, resonated within me like the striking of a huge gong when I first heard them as a college student. The vibrations from that first articulation of the power to choose what rules my mind and how I respond to a person or set of circumstances have stayed with me throughout my adult life, surfacing and ringing again from time to time, activating and urging me to apropriate, during the most difficult circumstances and challenging seasons of my life, the incredible power of the freedom to choose my thoughts and attitude in any situation.

The circumstances of my life have been as far away from the deprivation and genocide of the concentration camps as one can get - I have had a life of loving nurture, provision, safety, health, friendship, acceptance, and encouragement. Any prisons I've been in have been prisons of my own making, my own choices.

I've placed a high value on living a life that honors God in all aspects, a life that models love, truth, integrity, personal responsibility, compassion, life-long vibrant partnership in marriage and stable families who can provide safe and nurturing environments for children. So my choices have often been choices of constraint, choices to turn away from actions that beckon with such beguiling promises of freedom and power.

Those initial and daily choices of constraint have had the effect of closing and locking doors of action and opportunity to myself that many others routinely walk through in order to cope with , bring order to, have power over or escape from the exceedingly difficult people and circumstances of life. Living -truly living - within the spaces created by those closed doors, spaces that somehow become simultaneously pain-filled and empty, has been a challenging and time-consuming curriculum for me.

Given all these deliberate choices I've made to live a life bound by honesty, integrity, faithfulness, responsibility and accountability, it seems strange that so many internal moments of my life have been lived from "the victim" stance - feeling that others were responsible for whatever current misery was pressing on me - other people's boundaries, expectations, criticisms, deprivations of my "God-given rights".

That is why, I think, Viktor Frankl's words about the last human freedom being the power to choose what one thinks has stayed with me so powerfully, and why I have spent so much time sucking the marrow from the New Testament passage in Philippians 2. To the one who feels handcuffed and gagged by powerful circumstances or people, realizing he has the freedom to choose how he views and thinks about that circumstance or person brings empowerment and liberty, even if his hands and feet must remain shackled and his voice gagged.

To the one whose rights are being trampled upon or taken from him, there is no life-sustaining stance within the pain-filled emptiness by adopting an identity of worthlessness or despair. But solid dignity and empowerment and hope comes with adopting the identity of a person created in the image of a God of love and truth, seeing oneself as just a little lower than the angels. The person who sees himself as a beloved child who has been given the rights and inheritance of a son of God can CHOOSE to lay down his God-given rights for a time, can choose to let her freedoms go, can choose self-sacrifice over self-preservation in the power of love and hope.

At key "hinge moments" in my life, simply REALIZING that, unlike the Nazi concentration camp prisoners, I CAN CHOOSE which doors I unlock and walk through, has helped me to remember who I am. Remembering I have the power to make a different choice has led to reflection about those potential choices, what they would cost, what the likely results would be, and what that different choice would say about me - who I am, what I value, what I believe. Remembering I can make a different choice has enabled me to move away from the mindset of seeing myself as "powerless victim" who is paralyzed by despair and unable to do anything other than react in unconscious patterns formed by my past.

Realizing that I can choose what I think and how I respond, is both an awesome gift and an incredible responsibility. That realization has moved me, in key moments of my life, to a position of power and full engagement, to a place of being fully human.

The photo above was taken on the Pinellas Trail, looking out over Bay Pines, St. Petersburg, FL

D Day

So a 2000 sq. ft. house that takes months and months to build can be demolished in 20 minutes with the right equipment and operator.

Wow. Noisy, but fun to watch the big machine chomp away at the house that was the location for so many fun times and happy memories. David's mom and dad bought and added onto this house for their still large family while David was away at college and in the service. We bought the home from them when Kyle was 5 and lived there until Kyle was living in Kolkata (post college) and Sam was finishing college, so almost all their growing up memories are grounded in the 102nd ave home.

David's friend, Rodney, who runs a demolition and excavation business stayed close to Isaac, explaining the process (over and over again, I'm sure :-) while Michelle and I worked the cameras. The claw operator took one giant bite through the garage door and just kept chomping. The house came apart so quickly.







As the various rooms were spit out of the giant jaw, the memories of the every day life with our two boys in the house flooded past, and I couldn't help but give thanks:

• the bedroom where Sam (first grade) "set out his school clothes" for the next day, the shirt, pants, shoes and socks each unfolded and stretched out on the floor as if a phantom child was wearing them while lying on the floor



• the back room that hosted ping pong tournaments and suffered numerous broken windows from backyard baseball



• the compact kitchen which I had avoided when the "Cullum women" crowded in to help when Mom worked her Sunday dinner magic, but grew to love and appreciate when it became my domain for baking cookies and serving hungry boys



• "the brown room" - home to so many fun meals, fun games, and lively discussions



• the bathroom to which I would banish the boys (1st-3rd grade) to tell their "bathroom jokes" to one another



• the oversize tub that David and I routinely squeezed into together to share the events of our day with one another



• "the red room" - scene of more indoor wrestling matches and ball games of all sorts than probably any home in the city - the trim board that went around the room at 8 ft height was "the fence" for home run derby. I don't regret the broken lamps from all the "boy activity" one bit.



• "the orange room" which sticks in my mind as the scene of two particularly memorable rages - one by David, one by me



• the overhead fluorescent lights in the master bedroom which I continually complained about until my 41st year brought dimming eyesight and I finally understood why my father-in-law had installed four foot fluorescent fixtures above the bed



• the entryway windows which invited me every time I passed, to look outside, drink in the strong lines of the thick oak trunk and give thanks for the beauty that surrounded me and a mother and father-in-law who had seen, helped create, and pass along the joy to our family.

I watched the walls crash down and thought of the scene in "Forrest Gump" in which an adult Jenny throws rocks at the house where her father abused her, and the subsequent demoliton of that house by Forrest, and how this house was so very different - full of so many GOOD memories, and that this day was the happy beginning of a third chapter for this home.

A New World

Four years ago this month, over a period of 4 weeks, I looked within, searching, listening, waiting for my greatest, deepest - below all else - heart's desire to surface and make itself apparent. I did that so I could ask God, my longtime Father, friend and lover for that desire. Finally one rainy night alone in my car traveling towards home on mostly empty streets I shouted/sobbed in an agony/ecstasy of desire, so forceful that speaking it left me utterly spent. "I want them to know You, God - I want them to experience You in your fullness."

The "them" I referred to was my husband and sons and new daughter-in-law. "Them" - though intensely focused on the four already in my family - included the as yet unknown woman who would, hopefully, eventually stand beside our second son as wife, and any children that might come from these unions.

Expressions of desire that powerful do not simply vanish. I knew, as surely as I knew my name, that in the utterance of that desire, I had opened a door to a new world for myself and these ones I loved with such passion. A world that would almost certainly involve more hardship and suffering than we had hitherto experienced. A world that called out "Goodness", "Love", and "Truth" from my stance outside the threshold, but once entered, would bear labels like "Loss", "Grief", and "Suffering" and would likely have me screaming for escape or respite for myself and my loved ones.

That much I could glimpse with my forward looking eyes through a Biblically grounded mindset where wanting to know God fully seems to require knowing Christ in the fellowship of sharing in his suffering - Philippians 3:10-12. Christianity does not have a monopoly on the "suffering required for fullness of life" theme, but the writings in the Bible do seem to highlight the possibility of a fuller relationship with this Supernatural Other in the midst of or as a result of suffering and pain. The New Testament writings, in particular, imply that increased pain and loss will come to those who choose to become Jesus' friends.

What I did not foresee, even in my wildest pre-prayer imaginings, was that, in my 50's I would struggle so mightily with "the existence of God" and "the meaning of life" questions. I did not foresee that I would come to a place where I felt I could trust neither the traditional Christianity played out in the churches I knew or my past interpretations of "hearing God's voice" in my Bible reading and prayer. I did not foresee that within a matter of months I would go from being a woman who rarely started a day without extensive Bible reading, prayer, and journaling to becoming a spiritual deaf/mute, who avoided picking up the Bible and struggled with unbelievable effort to frame and direct my honest questions to a God whose existence I seriously doubted.

I did not foresee that my inability to place the newly encountered suffering comfortably within my past theological/world view boxes would bring about a lengthy retreat, not only from regular church attendance and involvement, but also from my extensive community of friends - all of them evangelical Christians. I knew it would be way too threatening for most of them to see that Sandy, "the strong Christian, the prayer warrior", had moved into an agnostic stance - seriously doubting the existence of God.

I felt that most of my friends, upon hearing my struggle - assuming I could clearly articulate it - which I couldn't - would do what I would have done for so many years - answer quickly and try to "fix" me. Fix me with scripture passages or stock American Evangelical "box" answers that had become too shallow to impact my thinking. I reasoned that if the God I had known and loved for so many years did exist, then he had heard and was in the process of answering my deep heart desire, and if so, I didn't want to be fixxed. I wanted to find out what I could only find out by walking through the struggle. Even if that meant I came out the other side still broken.

I tested the water with one friend I thought had experienced enough suffering and loss to perhaps identify with the "restructuring of belief" in which I found myself immersed. Nope. Listening, really listening to my intellectual struggle was something she was not at all prepared to do. I also figured I might - at some point - move out of depression - if that's where I was - or resolve the questions and move back to a stance of firm belief in traditional Christianity. I had no desire to awaken faith struggles in others and feel responsible for their "loss of faith", so that too, has kept me largely silent and withdrawn. Since then, over these past three years, I have confined trying to speak about my intellectual and faith struggles only to my immediate family and 2 exceptional friends, one in her 20's and one in her 60's, each of whom has cared for me more than I deserved and has listened intently, with her entire being.

This morning I came across this quote I had copied into my journal just over 4 years ago, just two months before "the dangerous prayer". It's an apt description of part of my journey.

"Moving into another culture is often traumatic. In a brief moment, all that we know can be shattered into little pieces. A different landscape, language, values, and worldview leaves us uncomfortable, if not terrified. In response, we quickly erect barriers in an effort to stop, or at least buffer the onslaught of foreign realities.

How difficult it is to summon the courage for breaking through the fear of the unknown. For many people, engaging a new world is an experience of losing the self. When this happens, it is hard to believe that a new self or frame of reference will be found. Anthropologists use terms such as "freezing of boundaries" to describe defense mechanisms employed for battling the perceived enemy - the unknown.

In cross-cultural experiences, the typical stages of fear, denial, anger, and avoidance have been well documented. Some people are able to move through and beyond these stages, while others hang on to the familiar with persistence and passion."

George Beukema, Stories from Below the Poverty Line , pp 30-31

So now I find myself in a vastly different place from where I sat 4 years ago. It is not the place of angry existentialism or despairing agnosticism of 2 years ago. But it is still a place of questioning and waiting, still a place of reading, writing and thinking; still a place of listening more than talking, still a place of laboriously reconstructing, bit by bit, my foundation of belief.

It is still a place of a different kind of prayer.


The photo above was taken on Resurrection Bay, south of the Kenai peninsula, Alaska.

Olive Oil Dog

Thompson, the terrier, and I have been losing a battle for months against a pernicious staff infection. Thompson is old, his nurse hasn't been regular enough in administering either his twice weekly "leave the medicated shampoo on for 15 minutes" baths or his daily antibiotics, and he greatly aggravates the infection by all the licking, scratching and biting of himself which he does to try to relieve the itching. After a month or two of making Thompson wear a lampshade collar for most hours of the day, I was sick of the lack of progress and discouraged over his visible despondency. So I decided to try a remedy from my childhoood.

After another shorter-than-its-supposed-to-be bath, I slathered him with olive oil from head to toe and dressed him in baby clothes purchased at the thrift store for said purpose. Dressing a dog who doesn't want clothes is hard enough, but dressing an olive oil slick dog WITHOUT getting any oil on oneself is apparently, a feat I'm not capable of performing.

Thompson reminded me of Olivia, the pig, of children's book fame walking around the house with his black bell bottoms and skinny legs. I don't have any good face shots, because he refused to cooperate - every time he saw me coming with the camera he made a hasty retreat.

Even though he didn't cooperate for photos, it seemed like he had relief from itchy skin for the first time in a looooong time, So, the next day I decided to slather him once more, this time reeeaaally rubbing it in till all his nasty crusty scabs came off - pretty close to an hour massage. A clean thrift store outfit, some help from David to dress the reluctant, oily, fashion model, and a couple more circuits of the house with me chasing my photo op. Reminded me of Snowbell, the cat, talking to Stuart Little, the mouse "talk to the butt, talk to the butt".

Finally, to get away from the camera he traveled through our bedroom to the bathroom. He climbed into the shower, stuck his nose in the corner and refused, absolutely REFUSED to turn around until I left the bedroom. I don't know - maybe he was offended by the pink girly outfit. So now its been a couple days, he reeks again, and its time for another treatment. Sigh. Maybe David will do the honors this time....

Worth the Time to Read

I'm a book person. There are currently over 2 dozen books (most non-fiction) stacked on, in and next to my nightstand - books I've been working through this past year or 2, but not done with enough to have made it to one of the bookshelves in another room - and another stack of a dozen new ones on the dresser waiting to move to the "reading" stack.

Perhaps on a more fundamental level, I'm a word person. Without limits, I would devour magazines and newspapers to the point of exclusion of other activities so I have to limit my contact with them. I can be greatly affected by movies and dramatic productions and I am thrilled that e-mail and blogging has brought written language back into a place of prominence and power in people's lives. I love it when bloggers - family, friends, and strangers - invite me into their lives with their digital words and pictures. But when it comes to sorting through history, knowledge, and experiences to choose blocks to use in building life perspective there is something about a book that has a greater weight in my reasoning mind.

I give minimal time to daily news broadcasts of any variety, but I regularly read a couple news magazines to keep me out of the Neanderthal box on world events. But I really appreciate the research, fact-checking, editing and deepening of perspective that should come with the time, people and money that has traditionally gone into producing a book for market.

All that said, I've decided that sharing books of my life should be a part of my digital journal. Sometimes they will be recent reads, at other times books I view as having major impact in my thinking and living. Sometimes just a quote and a link, other times more. That is, as soon as I can find an easy way to attach a picture of the book to the Amazon.com link for said book (thereby making it a "button")....