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.
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