Nab'hia - Part 5: My Mother's Keeper

Read Part 1 here,  Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.


I was shocked.  It was the first time Nab’hia had ever questioned anything I said about my mother.  It was the first time I’d ever been put on the stand by her.  I gazed back at her, and as I watched her in the firelight, that quiet, unsettling change of appearance that sometimes occurred to her seemed to take place.  Her features became more pointed, her eyes more yellow.  And then she smiled at me around the stalk in her mouth, and for a moment, all of her teeth were gone, and all I could see was the open mouth of death.

            “It’s time Karine.”
            “No,” I said.

            “It’s time for you to keep your promise.  I’ll be needing your daughter now.”

            “She’s not here, you can’t have her.”

            “I’ll keep coming back Karine.”  Her voice was barely a hiss now.  “I’ll keep coming back until you’re weaker and weaker, and then, one day, you won’t be able to stop yourself giving her to me.”

            “Never,” I said.

            She smiled again, and this time, her mouth was huge and filled with decay.  “Then I will take what I need from you today.”

            I barely heard the scream start from my lips.  It was dark and wild, and if I had been able to hear it from the outside, it would have made me feel like the jungle was bearing down on me out of the mountains, coming for me, hot and moist, looking to take another piece of my heart that I would never get back.

            Nab’hia left me by the fireside in a daze, without even speaking to any of the other women, with out addressing my mother at all, and as she stood up and passed in front of me, in between me and the fire, my hollow eyes gazed over the hot flames and met my mother’s eyes for just a moment.  And then it dawned on me.  Whatever Nab’hia had done, she had done in secret.  The others were oblivious.  None of them had heard my cries, not even my mother.  But somehow my mother knew that something had happened.  And when our eyes met, I saw the terror on my mother’s face and saw her touch her breast, just above her heart.

            And I knew the truth.  Nab’hia was done with my mother.  She would never come to see my mother again.  She had her piece of my mother’s heart, and now she had what my mother, too, had promised to Nab’hia long ago.  She had finally taken my mother’s daughter.

To Be Continued...

Nab'hia - Part 4: Time to Pay the Piper

Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

There were a group of us that night, and by the time Nab’hia came to the center of our yard, we were already all gathered around the small fire in between the animals’ lean-to and the house.  I was pensive, seated a little away from the others, and this is where Nab’hia came to me and settled herself down on a flat stone next to the fire.  In its flickering glow, she looked like a dark, dangerous snake warming herself on that rock, her yellow eyes dining lazily on the flames.

            “So, Karine,” she said to me, “how does your mother treat you?”

            I was puzzled.  Usually, the ritual would go thusly:  Nab’hia would approach my mother first and ask her how we all did, or what we had all been doing.  And then my mother would offer some vague and completely unsatisfying platitude about the absolute mediocrity of our existence.  And then, when this part of the ritual was finished, Nab’hia would turn to me and ask me how my mother treated me, and I would tell some tale about how she had broken an egg I had brought in from the hen house, or that she had turned out my pail of water before it was dirty and I had been forced to go all the way back to the stream for another.  And then Nab’hia would smile her little smile and she would slap my mother, or scratch her cheek with her claws, or pinch the muscle in her upper arm between her strong fingers.  And she would always hiss this cryptic reminder to my mother not to take what didn’t belong to her.  And my mother would whimper, and I would feel sick.  But I was powerless to stop it.  I was powerless to stop myself from giving Nab’hia what she wanted. 

            Except when it came to my daughter.  Nab’hia had my heart.  I didn’t know where she kept it, if it was in a glass jar somewhere or buried in the ground, but she had it.  And she could keep it.  I would not give her my daughter.  There was nothing she could do to me that would ever make me give her up.

            So now I sought to play my part in the ritual with Nab’hia even though the rules seemed to have changed without my knowledge.  There she sat on that stone next to me, separating me out from the other women.  Her slanting yellow eyes gazed intently at me over her high cheek bones, and she chewed on some piece of nearly dead vegetation.  At first I had thought it was a stalk of long grass, but now it looked more like what the Americans called a cat-tail, but I wouldn’t have even known what that was then.  I watched her jaws work on it and tried to figure out what it was that she wanted to hear from me.

            “My mother went into the village last week,” I said to her warily, “and found my father drunk.  While she was there, she got drunk herself and I saw her dancing in the street with some of the boys that I grew up with.  She was letting them touch her while they were dancing with her.”  It was funny, but I was running out of things to tattle on my mother to Nab’hia about.  This one was even almost a lie – I had seen my mother dancing in the street with some people, but I hadn’t known who they were, and I hadn’t known if she was drunk, and I certainly hadn’t seen them touching her.

            Nab’hia chucked smoothly deep in her throat, and her jaws continued to work on the plant stem she held between her long, brown fingers.  “Now what’s so bad about that, Karine?  Why shouldn’t your mother have a little fun?”

            I was shocked.  It was the first time Nab’hia had ever questioned anything I said about my mother.  It was the first time I’d ever been put on the stand by her.  I gazed back at her, and as I watched her in the firelight, that quiet, unsettling change of appearance that sometimes occurred to her seemed to take place.  Her features became more pointed, her eyes more yellow.  And then she smiled at me around the stalk in her mouth, and for a moment, all of her teeth were gone, and all I could see was the open mouth of death.

To be continued in Part 5: My Mother's Keeper (posted 16 May)

Nab'hia - Part 3: How Beautiful are the Feet

Read Part 1 here and Part 2: Secrets and Silence, here.

After that, Nab’hia began to come back to our house regularly again.  How strange her presence was!  It was as if some shift in her cosmic force amongst us had taken place.  She visited with my mother still, but now I could sense her watching me, and I felt as if she were only biding her time.  And every time those yellow eyes would turn my way, that scar on my chest would burn.  It had never hurt before.  Even when I had watched Nab’hia’s hand go right into my chest it hadn’t hurt.  But something was different now, and more and more I felt this dull, pulling ache under that scar where I knew a piece of my heart should be.  To make matters worse, I knew that Nab’hia wanted to see Gécy.  She asked about my daughter every time she visited, which was a lot.  But by some strange turn of chance, Gécy never happened to be at home when Nab’hia came. 

            The new thing in our village was this missionary school, and some Christians from the United States had come and opened it up.  It really wasn’t much, just a couple of palm branch thatched huts at the bottom of the mountain, but the children couldn’t seem to get enough of it.  Some of the older or more devout Vodouissants in the mountains refused to let their children attend and chose instead to keep them at home, helping around the house.  I had never been particularly devout, and did not even serve any gods in our house.  The school was less a symbol of religion to me, and more a symbol of freedom.  I thought that perhaps if Gécy should become educated, she could break free of the life of poverty that had always served as the background to our family portrait.  And it seemed like the more time Gécy spent there, the more time she wanted to spend there.  Apparently the missionaries were kind to her.  They spoke to her in our own language, and seemed to know it well.  They did not patronize her, but taught her difficult lessons like those that little girls in the United States learned, and she even learned to speak English with the missionary’s children.  When school was out, there was often some sort of children’s group in the evening, and on the weekends, Gécy went to Sunday school and to church in the village.  I did not go, but she seemed to enjoy these things, and they took her out of the stench of poverty that permeated our little house and farm yard, so I let her go. 

            Sometimes the missionary’s wife would come to visit me and mother and she would bring us things from America that I had never seen before.  She was a smiling woman with a round, pink face and a laughing voice, and when she would come walking up the mountain road, to see her coming was like the opposite of everything that seeing Nab’hia was.  She didn’t come often, but when she did, she always had a big wicker market basket covered in red gingham, and I always knew that underneath it were exotic treasures that I couldn’t even guess at.  One time she came and brought us shampoo in a bottle.  It made foamy lather like a cushion and smelled like summer berries.  She laughed and laughed as I put it on my hands and used cold water from the wash pail to make a lather.  The hard, grey tallow soap that we made for ourselves never made such a pure white foam like that, and I had never imagined that something that could get you clean would ever smell so good.  Another time she brought us a box of little chocolate cookies with white cream in the middle.  She said they were called Oreos.  When I asked her why, she just laughed and said she didn’t know.  When she visited, mother and I never argued.  It was almost as if we were friends.  And when the time came for her to leave, it was always a sad time.  The moment she was out our door, we longed to see her again.  Her visits never lasted long enough.

            This night, when Nab’hia visited, I wished Gécy was with that missionary’s wife.  I wished that she was as far away from my house as I could wish her.  I felt like Nab’hia had finally come to make good on her promise.  She had not yet seen Gécy, but somehow I knew that tonight was the night she would insist upon it, and old Norberte’s just didn’t seem far enough away to keep my girl safe.  I remembered how Nab’hia’s quick hand had latched onto my mother’s shoulder that one time.  Almost as if one moment it was in one place and the next it were in another – she didn’t even have to move it between the two.  I thought, if she really wanted to take Gécy, it would be quick like that and I wouldn’t even know it.  I would do whatever I could to keep my daughter from her.

To be continued in Part 4:  Time to Pay the Piper (coming 14 May)

my hypocrisy

I am a hypocrite.

I have been among you all this year, sinning as one who does not know the Lord.

I have been angry, and I have been unrepentant in it.

I have been unforgiving, and have not asked for the grace to forgive.

I have kept secrets and refused to trust, and have lived as one enslaved and in bondage to fear and darkness.

There has been no discipleship for me, nothing in me that would seek counsel as I have sat in my pit and watched its dark, moist walls close in upon me.

How many times do we find ourselves in a place of desperation, deep in a pit of despair, and as we seek a way out of the depths, we look at the dank walls which enclose us.  We examine the walls for handholds and footholds, seeking a place where we can grab hold and begin to climb out.  Sometimes we can begin to hoist ourselves up, but our climb only lasts until we realise that the walls are far too slippery and steep and that our strength is far too feeble to accomplish the deed.  And so we sink back down to the bottom of our pit.  Down into the puddles and the dampness and the cloying, rotten, chill and hopelessness of that which we’re trying to escape.  And as we get more and more desperate, we begin to forget that we cannot climb out, and we scrutinize the walls more closely.  And where there are no handholds, we try to make our own, sometimes clawing at the walls, breaking fingernails and bloodying fingertips, tearing sobs from our throats at the hopelessness or our own situation.  Ever scrutinizing the walls, ever dwelling on the floor of the pit into which we have sunk.

And we forget that we do not find the way out of the pit by looking at the walls, but by looking up into the light.  Sometimes it’s only when I take my own eyes off of the walls of my pit and the stinking floor on which I’ve been living and look up at the opening, the true way out, that I realise my Lord has been reaching His hand down for me the whole time, offering me a way out which would have cost me so much less pain and heartache.

So now I have taken His hand and am finding my way back out into the light.  But in that, there are consequences that I must deal with, for I have been wrong in this place where I’ve been dwelling.  I have been wrong and I have wronged others.  Perhaps that’s what this is all about – learning how to deal with failure.

Or maybe, more to the point, learning how to fail without being a failure.

Now at the same time, I must be honest.  There are those among my peers – those whom I care for deeply – whom I must call to task.  And I do it because I care for you.  I do it because I want to grow in Christ and have been hindered during this time because of things you have done.  I do it because I want you to be able to grow in Christ and to know that the things that you do and say – by virtue of freedom and liberty – have a greater range of effect than ever you may know.  I have searched myself in this matter and want you to know that I have not been without fault – perhaps you may never realise the depth of my sorrow over the sin that I have dwelt in in my own silence.  It has not been forbearance that I have practiced.  It has been the worst type of hypocrisy.

So now I will just say that you cause me to stumble.  You are free to do things that I am not free to do.  You are free to go to places that I cannot go.  Every time you go there and leave me behind, try though I might, pray for the grace to forebear though I do, I stumble.  I want to go with you, but I cannot.  You see, God has delivered me from the very things that you do.  To me they are a doorway to a Hell that I do not ever want to live in again.  One that I do not even want to peek into.

I do not judge you for what you do – I cannot be the one to do this.  I have fallen before, even since I have been a believer.  But I cannot approve of the things that you do, and I cannot go to the places you go.  When you do them, and when you go there, you look no different from the world.  I know.  I have both been in the world and of the world.

I beg of you, as ministry-minded Christians, to think very carefully of what you are doing.  I know that you are free in Christ to do what you do.  But I beg of you, I plead with you not to cause me to stumble.  You know who I am.  But how many more of me might there be on this campus who are afraid to tell you that you are causing them to stumble?  Afraid even as I have been afraid to tell you all year.

I love you all so dearly.  So dearly that it nearly breaks my heart to write this and feel that you may not like to hear it from me, that it may even anger you or cause hurt feelings.  But I cannot keep from writing it.  Please, please help me not to stumble any more.  Please don’t leave me behind any longer.

For through your knowledge he who is weak is ruined, the brother for whose sake Christ died.  And so, by sinning against the brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.  Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble...  All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.  All things are lawful, but not all things edify.  Let no one seek his own good, but that of his neighbor.

                        (1 Corinthians 8:11-13, 10:23)

Nab'hia - Part 2: Secrets and Silence

Read Part 1: Thief of My Heart, here.


Nab'hia's presence had been strange.  We had seen her regularly for years.  She would come to see my mother all the time.  She would sit with her in the morning when my mother rocked on the porch.  Or while my mother tended the chickens and the goats in the barnyard I would hear the two of them talking softly and intently.  It was funny, because Nab’hia spent so much time around my mother, and they should have seemed like good friends, but I always knew that they weren’t.  Sometimes, just as my mother was leaving for the village, Nab’hia would show up on the road, arriving from where ever it was she came, and take my mother’s arm, offering to walk with her.  I knew that my mother never wanted Nab’hia there, though she never said so.  When my mother would return, she would look years older, and her skin would take on a greyish tint.  I would offer to help her sometimes, or ask her what was wrong, and she would always yell at me for asking.  Sometimes she would even hit me.  Usually Nab’hia would come ‘round the next day and ask me how my mother was treating me.  It was funny how she would know to ask, because I would be so angry with my mother, especially if she had hit me, and I would always tell Nab’hia. 

            Then Nab’hia would find my mother and secrete her away.  I would see them at the edge of the forest, their black bodies blending into the shadows of the tree trunks, or sometimes Nab’hia would take her into the lean-to shed where we kept our goats and pig.  And then she would make my mother scream.  My mother’s screams were like the dark and wild screams that came from the jungle in the nights when the air was so hot and heavy that you would think it was a living presence marching right down out of the mountains, looking for you, coming to strangle you.  I never knew what Nab’hia did to her or what she said to make my mother scream like that, but there was some small, smug part of me that remembered the feel of the bones in the back of my mother’s hand as they connected with my soft cheek and smiled inwardly.  The more Nab’hia came and made my mother scream like that, the more my mother hit me.  And the more my mother hit me, the more I longed to tattle on her to Nab’hia.  It was like a game to me, and I was a small, selfish child with a darkened heart.

            But after that day when Nab’hia took that piece of my heart out of my chest, we didn’t see her for years.  Sometimes I’d catch my mother standing on the edge of our little porch, staring down the mountain road, a wary look in her eye, and I knew that she was wondering where Nab’hia was.

            My mother and I never got along, and Nab’hia’s absence didn’t change that.  Perhaps it was the presence of Josue, and perhaps the presence of my Gécy after him, but once Nab’hia left, my mother stopped hitting me.  I still longed for someone to tattle to about her, though, when she made me angry, and my foolish, darkened heart did not grow any wiser.  It was as if that piece of it that Nab’hia had taken out was a piece of my humanity, my compassion.  But then, if it was, it was really a piece that I had never had, because I had never cared much for anyone the way that I cared for myself.

            But when Gécy turned twelve, Nab’hia started to turn up at our home again.  I was coming into the yard with an apron full of eggs, when there she was, moseying up the mountain road, as if the last time she had done so were yesterday.  She had let herself into our home without asking and sat down at our table.  Gécy was in the village, at the missionary school there, but Nab’hia seemed to know all about that.  “You watch out for those people, Karine,” she said to me in her soft, hissing voice.  “They fill your head with lies.”  She had asked my mother how we all got on, and my mother told her that we did fairly, and so she turned to me with her cunning yellow eyes and asked me how my mother was treating me.  She had stopped hitting me, I told Nab’hia, but she still called me names.  Quick as a snake, Nab’hia whipped her arm out and caught my mother’s shoulder blade between her fingers.  “Now why do you do that?” Nab’hia asked my mother, who whimpered like a child under her grasp.  “Why do you name something that does not belong to you any longer?  You should know better.”  And as quickly as she had taken my mother up, Nab’hia’s hand was back on her lap.  It was almost as if the incident had never happened.  It had been disquieting, to say the least.  There was always a small, selfish part of me that enjoyed getting under my mother’s skin, that enjoyed having something to pin on her.  But I did not like to see her small and shaking and cowering in her chair.  I did not like to see Nab’hia looking at me with that smug expression, as though she and I shared some secret that my mother could not be part of.  


Continued in Part 3: How Beautiful are the Feet (posted 12 May)

Nab'hia - Part 1: Thief of My Heart

Here's a little story I've started to write.  The idea came from a nightmare I had about a soul-sucking demon who wanted to take my daughter (of course, I have no living children, but our subconscious minds, in dreams, cannot know this), and I would not let it.  Give it a read and see what you think.  There is more written, and I'll continue to post it in parts.

Now here was Nab’hia, back in our home again.  I had heard my mother’s cries when Nab’hia had come to talk with her in the secret, purple shadows of the dusk, and now I feared that she was here to talk with me.  I feared that she would separate me from the other women as she had done to my mother in the past, and lure me out into the yard, and that somehow, on the cusp of our little farmyard between where my papa's land married itself to the jungle, she would show me what it was that made my mother cry so.

            If only, I thought, If only I could convince Nab’hia that it were my mother she wanted to see, perhaps then she would not be here to see me after all.  
            Nab’hia played at being our friend, but there was something in her deeply exotic face that just wasn’t right.  Somehow, when her smooth dark features and pronounced bone structure came into just the right lighting, it was as though I could see something about her that gave me a chill, even in the humid tropical air.  When she looked at me now from under her heavily lidded eyes, I could feel that dread chill growing in my bones.  She mingled with the other women who were at my mother’s hut, moving about them as though she were one of them, but she was not.  They were all uneasy around her, and my mother’s high-pitched, nervous laugh spoke to me the volumes that her words would not.  Nab’hia was not welcome at our fire, and yet we could not make her go.  I never understood until today why we could not make her go.

            I had seen her coming.  The sun was setting in a blaze down the mountain, its rays shooting like fire through the leaves of the calabash trees, and I had seen her walking up the dirt road toward our home.  For a moment she had looked like she was ascending to us out of a pit of flames, and I couldn’t shake that image from my mind.  Her exotic bone structure had become pointed, her chin and nose like hooks, and her yellow eyes had seemed to glow from under their heavy lids.  Before she could reach our yard, I had invented an errand to send Gécy on.  We needed some cow’s milk, I told her, and she would need to run down to old Norberte’s down the mountain trail.  It was foolish, even Gécy was old enough to know that a luxury like cow’s milk was not something that we should need so desperately that she should have to go running down the mountain at dusk for it.  But she was a good girl, and she took my tin pail and set off begrudgingly down the trail.  If it was too dark when she got there, I told her, she should stay the night with Norberte and Pedro.  Gécy looked at me as though I were a crazy person, because we both knew that it would be too dark when she got there.  But she humored her idiot mother and set off on my fool’s errand. 

            I couldn’t risk her coming back early while Nab’hia was still at our house.  I couldn’t forget the promise I had made to Nab’hia years ago and the strange ritual I had watched her perform on me in the dark.  Couldn’t forget how she had reached into my chest and taken out a piece of my heart – that it hadn’t even hurt as I had watched her do it, her hand bloody with the small, thick piece of muscle tissue that she had held between her fingers.  I remembered the way the warm blood had felt on my own dark skin, and how I had never felt my heartbeat so acutely before.  I have never felt it beat so since either.  But more than that, I couldn’t forget the promise that I had made her, the exchange she had let me make as a part of that ritual.  I would have my man.  I would have my Josue.  But in exchange, she would get my daughter.  I had laughed inside at the time, so young and naïve.  I did not have a daughter, I did not have any children, nor did I plan to.  I would not be like my own mother, saddled down in one place, waiting for a man to return from the village when he was done with his drinking and his whoring.  I would have my Josue and he would have me.  There would be no daughter.

            But Nab’hia had been right.  Josue had been mine, and though he had put off marriage, to my chagrin, there was a daughter.  There was Gécy.  And no sooner was she born than Josue was gone.  At first I had hated Gécy.  I had blamed her for Josue’s faithlessness.  For the first two years of her life I blamed her.  But then, one day as I dressed, I noticed a small scar on my chest.  It was the scar where Nab’hia’s hand had entered between my ribs and touched my beating heart.  As if remembering a dream, I remembered the promise that I had made to her, and I remembered that she was supposed to return and claim my Gécy.

Continued in Part 2: Secrets and Silence (posted 10 May)

more than ok

When I’m up with the sunrise,

I want more than just the blue skies...

When I’m lit with the sunshine,

I want more than just a good time

I want more than just ok, more than just ok.

(Switchfoot.  “More than Fine”, The Beautiful Letdown. Colombia Records, 2003.)

I have never made it a secret that one of my favorite things about being a student is writing papers.  I like to write long papers and short papers.  I like to write research papers and introspective papers.  I like to write book reports and book reviews.  I just like to write papers.

Or at least I always thought I did.

This semester, I had a huge problem, though.  Well, let me skip back a little, ‘cause I guess it started a little before this semester.  About four months ago I started to have my first bout with writer’s block.  I’d never experienced it before, and I don’t think I even knew what to call it at first.  So I called it lots of different names.  Like “procrastination.”  Or “laziness.”  And how about “just-not-good-enough-ness.”  That last one was one of my personal favorites, and when I’d catch myself lying awake late at night into the wee hours (which I did a lot) it was often the choice name I would give to my new little pet.

It started out with a big end-of-semester paper that I needed to write for last semester’s archaeology class.  I had a lovely bout of pancreatitis in the middle of the semester that pushed that paper back, and had gotten an extension for it so that I could turn it in when the Spring semester began.  I had great ideas for it, and if you’d asked me what it was about, I could have told you to a “T.”  I did my research and was genuinely interested in the research I did.  But every time I sat down to write, I’d just stare at my blank Word document...  sometimes for so long that I don’t even want to recount it here.  I did finish that paper, and it was amazingly mediocre.  Yay.  How I managed to wrangle an ‘A’ out of it, I’ll never know.  Because I know the work I did on it, and I know the work I’m capable of, and it was just... mediocre.

So now for this semester’s piece de la resistance.  I carried that one around for so long it became like this annoying little monkey on my back.  I even started to think of giving it a name.  The monkey, that is – not the paper.  It was insane.  INSANE I tell you!  I don’t know what my damage was; maybe I was still raging from the insecurity of the previous piece of artwork that I’d turned in, but I just could not put together one coherent sentence for this paper.  And it was such an awesome topic – such an awesome theory.

See, I had this theory...  This paper was on David’s use of fortress imagery in his Psalms, particularly in how he ascribed the image of the fortress to God in his Psalms.  He uses several different Hebrew words for fortress, but only two to refer to God as the fortress.  I know, I know... all the seminarians automatically think that “migdol” is the word that David uses to refer to God as the fortress, but it isn’t.  David never calls God that.  A migdol is always a military-type fortress, something built with human hands, and only in one Psalm does David draw a vague parallel between God and a migdol, but he never calls God “my migdol.”  The words David uses to draw a picture of God as his fortress have more of a connection to sheltering in the wilderness – to cliff tops that are too high to reach, or underbrush that’s too thick to penetrate, or caves that are too dark to see into.  They’re the types of places that small, vulnerable animals might seek shelter from predators.  They can have military connotations, too, but in a broader sense, they often find their root meanings in these more natural contexts.  So I saw that David found God’s protection and provision for him not in the things that he could build with his own hands, or in those that he could have commanded to have built during his time in empire, but rather that he identified God as his fortress in the uncertain, fearful time that he’d spent fleeing from Saul in the wilderness.

I had planned to capitalise on the good deal of commentary I’d found that bore these points up, as well as some theologising (oh, dear, another one I’ve made up that Word says isn’t a word!) and philosophising that I’d looked into on fortifications during the time of the Davidic and the Solomonic Empires.  Then of course, my grand scheme was to work in how David’s philosophic view of God inevitably influenced the way in which he began to build fortifications throughout his empire, and how we can see that played out through archaeological evidences today.

It was going to be a very whaxegesic, big-halo-academic paper.  You know, the kind that dreams are made of, not like the mediocre pieces of pudge I’d been cranking out lately, the ones that were really just me kind of stringing together other people’s quotations and informational tidbits and stretching them into a patchwork quilt that was essentially twenty pages of uselessness.

But once again, I did my research, sat down to write my paper, opened up my Word document, and that blank white page just sat there, taunting me and jeering at me.  It was humiliating.  I’ve never had the privilege of feeling impotent before, but O baby, I had it then.

So I went into exile for a while.  I exiled myself.  I exiled my friends.  I punished them because I couldn’t write.  I punished my other homework because I couldn’t write.  I punished God.  I put Him in His little tent, and set the presence of God outside of my camp.  It is one of the most mournful and truly sad things a Christian can do during her own time of despair and confusion, is it not?  And all of this I did during the Easter season – a time when I should be rejoicing in my rebirth and my union with Christ and His glorious Body, the Church.

So then I did the only thing a child of God can do at a time like that.  I stopped reading more commentaries about the passages on which I was trying to write that blasted paper, and I started reading the passages themselves.  What did they say?

¹ I love You, O Lord, my strength.

² The Lord is my rock and my fortress

            and my deliverer,

   My God, my rock in whom I take refuge;

   My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

³ I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,

   And I am saved from my enemies.

It is so easy to view David from the perspective of 1 Kings 2:7.  His great son is on the throne, ready to rule, his empire has been established, the plans for the Temple are laid, his battles have been fought and won, he’s been forgiven, and now he’s ready to rest with his fathers and go home to be with God.  David’s fortress is secure.

But David did not always know this.  There was this time, this small, dirty, low, Psalm 18 time, when David was dodging around in the underbrush, hiding in whatever cave he could find shelter, crying out to God.  He did not always know.  He knew he was anointed, he knew God had made him a promise, and don’t we, too?  But aren’t there times when, despite that promise, despite knowing from where-ever God has rescued us, we look at whatever God is asking us to do now and we think, “Oh, God, I can’t.  It’s just too hard.  I just don’t see how it will work.  How can You ask this of me?”  Did David ask these questions, too?  I don’t know, because Scripture doesn’t say, but David sure is a pretty human guy.  He stumbled like the rest of us.  I’ll bet there were nights when he was cold in the wilderness, sleeping on a bed of rocks with nary a Temple in sight when he cried bitter tears and asked God what the heck He was doing.  But David was obedient.  He was always obedient. 

When he blew it with Uriah and Bathsheba, he was obedient – and that was monumental.  He didn’t lock himself inside his dorm room for a month reciting woe as me’s and staring at a blank Word document, pondering exactly what word order he was going to use in order to make Psalm 51 most emotionally effective.  He was obedient.  It was his heart condition.  He didn’t know what would come of it, all he knew was that God was good, and that the right thing for him to do was to repent and to return, and that whatever God chose to do with him after that... well, it would be okay.  No, he knew it would be more than that.  It would be more than just okay, it would be perfect.

So I put away my stupid research, and my stupid theologimificationising (ooooooo... Word likes that word even less than the last one...) and decided to just write my paper about what I knew.  I decided to stop trying to make it fit into some big-halo-academic model and write it about what God was teaching me about how He had defended His people in the Old Testament.  Because, really, that’s what that paper was supposed to be about in the first place – Old Testament warfare and the ultimate Warrior in it.  And that paper ended up being better than I’d ever thought it could be, even though it was a little late getting in.

Was it great?  I don’t know.  Was it up to the calibre of my undergrad work?  Maybe not quite – I did some really good stuff then, and I think I’m working back up to that level, but I don’t think I’ve quite found how to get back there yet.  But you know what, it was a work of obedience, a work of trust, and a work of God’s will and growth in my life.

And that’s more than just ok.