Anita’s Belated 2014 Christmas Letter and Early New Year Letter

Friends,

Happy New Year!! May it be a year of blessing and happiness for all of us

My Christmas letter has morphed into a New Year’s letter–which is kind of how my year went!

2014! What a year! Here it is:

January—I win an all-expense paid competition to go to … Cambodia with Tearfund.

Zoe gets an offer from Oxford University to read Theology. She worked in the Bridge in Gadsden, Alabama at the end of her gap year at the School of Ministry, Catch the Fire Toronto.

February—Family trip to France—Paris and the Loire Valley. Came back to find we had been burgled. Our car too and loads of stuff. A beautiful moment to discover that we had never got around to getting homeowner’s insurance!

March—Intense trip to Cambodia. Images here.

April—I publish my first children’s book: Francesco, Artist of Florence: The Man who Gave Too Much

Merry Labradoodle joins our family.

May—Still exhausted after Cambodia, so go on a retreat to shake it off to El Palmeral, Spain, a retreat centre run by charming Mike and Julie Jowett.

(In fact, I have aggressive cancer, not that easily shaken off by rest and retreats!)

July—Irene wins the Anne Hogg Prize for Modern Foreign Languages (French and Spanish).

Lovely family holiday in Helsinki. (See images) I walk, walk, walk.

August— Suddenly exhausted. I surprise Roy by continually murmuring, “I think I have cancer.” Take up running to feel better—but do not outrun cancer…

Irene goes to Poland and Germany on a school trip, and Zoe and Irene visit my mother in India.

Roy and I go to David’s Tent, a 72 hour worship festival. I’d like to go next year too. This prophecy I received was VERY significant for me, though it may seem heartbreakingly ironic in the light of the rest of year.

September—Interview by Maria Rodrigues at Premier Radio, Women to Women Show.

http://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Weekday/Woman-to-Woman/Episodes/Woman-to-Woman80

I’m on at 34:30 and the interview is 55 minutes!

October—Nice trip to France at half-term.

Zoe starts at Oxford University reading theology. She has a great first term, throwing herself into all manner of activities, from Cuppers drama, to Christian Union, Christian Theologians Society, Just Love (social justice), Just Lunch (Freshers studying the Book of Amos), Family of Friends (Charismatic Oxford students) and… oh, my head’s spinning already.

Jake the Collie, who was once “obese,” (thanks vet!!), gets thinner and thinner, until he has to be carried downstairs, limps painfully, and we say a tearful goodbye. It was cancer. Not to be taken lightly

I am still tired. See doctor. Severe anemia. Colonoscopy. Visually, it looks like cancer, the endoscopist says. It quacks like cancer…

November— I am the runner-up for “Tweeter of the Year,” in the Christian New Media Awards, and attend a glamorous awards dinner in London.

Roy and I celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.

Biopsy in. And it is…colon cancer! I have surgery on November 25.

December—

Biopsy in again. Fresh horrors. 45% of the lymph nodes removed have tested positive for cancer. Chemotherapy is advised. I am envious of my friends who had cancer at the same stage, declined chemo and are alive to tell the tale.

I don’t have peace declining chemo, because to go by the three oncologists I’ve spoken to, and the medical papers I’ve read, taking chemo will dramatically reduce my odds of getting cancer again, and will increase my odds of 5 year survival. Also, if it returns it may be metastatic and virtually incurable. Horrors!

So I guess I am going to go ahead with chemo next month.

10-20% of people who take the chemo combination suggested for me do not have side-effects. If you’d like to pray for me, please pray that I am among them.

I am also learning about mega-nutrition via juices and smoothies to strengthen my immune system to withstand chemo, and vanquish cancer.

Some people come out stronger at the end of chemotherapy and cancer because they start exercising and eat beautifully, my friend Azmy, a GP tells me. God willing, I will be one of them.

Stephen Jay Gould writes in his beautiful essay on his cancer, “The Median is not the Message,” “Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don’t know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. “A sanguine personality,” he replied.”

What a year! Dear God, I don’t want to hurt your pride, or show off or anything, but I think I could have done a better job editing it! But whey-hey, I am just in the middle of the story and I do not know how God is going to work it out.

Oh yes, I was going to be positive, wasn’t I? There is a message in the bottle of cancer, and, next year, I am going to decode it. In Oxford, England, on December 21, the winter solstice, we had 16 hours 18 minutes of darkness, but also had 7 hours 42 minutes of daylight. Always some brightness on the darkest day. Next year, I will be looking for it, and cultivating a joyful and grateful heart.

The whole earth IS full of his glory.

Happy New Year, everyone

Love,

Anita

In which Rest is an Essential Part of the Creative Process

By Anita Mathias

The first chapter of Genesis explodes with creativity!

God creates sun, moon and stars; banyans, baobabs and butterflies; macaws, mice and mastodons from a smile in his brain.

He creates the world in exuberance because that is his nature. He is a Maker, a creator.

And all of us are inherently creative, because we all have shades of the Maker in us. Our houses, gardens, outfits, meals, work, and budgets, all betray hints of the original artist’s creativity.

* * *

Any creative person’s work will be enhanced if they align themselves with the master artist.

Not all of us will be Michelangelo or Fra Angelico, Milton or Hopkins, Handel or Bach (who were all Christians incidentally). However, spending time in the presence of the original creator, divinely enhances and super-charges us.

We become thoroughly ourselves, yet our work will shimmer with the presence of the Master. Which creative has not had the experience of the blog or the story basically writing themselves, of an electricity beyond ourselves racing through our fingers?

I used to think of writing as an art and a craft, a matter of reading, study, and conscious and subliminal absorption. And, of course, it is all that.

But what I rely on most now is alignment with the Master Artist. Before I write, I try to align myself with God, and get in touch with him, ask for his streams of living water to flow through me. I write best and fastest then, with surety, without excessive self-criticism.

* * *

God’s account of creation ends with a vital and overlooked part of the creative process.

Rest.

Isn’t that lovely? Though God was effortlessly creative, his creativity flowing from thought to word to product, yet, on one day out of seven, he came to a complete halt, the inspired author of Genesis tells us. He rested from “all the work of creating” (Gen. 2:3).

God made things to last. Though dodos, passenger pigeons, woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers have gone extinct, creation “in all its vast array” still glows. It’s a still a wild, wonderful world.

And God is still creating through us. Down the waterfall of the mind of God tumbles nascent ideas for Macbooks and iPhones with access to all the knowledge of the world in our pockets; blogs and stories, symphonies and comedies.

And if we like God want to produce fruit that will last as Jesus commanded us to, if we want to continue creating all our lives, then we too need to pace ourselves, to come to a complete halt, once a week, and rest from all creating. We need to let the Spirit reset us.

* * *

How? Since God did not spell out how to keep the Sabbath holy, we can interpret it personally and honestly. I like to worship in community, but when I am exhausted, physically or emotionally, I send my children (since I consider that my Christian duty) and I spend that time praying alone. Reading my Bible. Or in lectio divina.

On Sunday, I do not create. I sleep in. I garden. Or walk. Or nap. A lot of napping. If ideas come, I jot them down, but do not refine them. I resist any work that will make me better-off, or better-known, or more successful. Or thinner! I just rest.

Sunday is a day God blessed, we are told in Genesis. A day to step into another economy in which resting is an activity, not a cessation from activity. In which magically a day in which one does nothing but rest is holy.

* * *

Ah, Sunday. One day in seven in the divine economy. One day to acknowledge that we do not ultimately own our lives or our careers. We can not control them, not really. We cannot make ourselves rich or successful or famous or beautiful, or else the world would be full of super-rich, super-famous, beautiful people. Why even true art is beyond our control, or the world would be awash in it. And in this world of polluted food supplies, even our health is partially out of our control. Cancer strikes gourmets and gluttons; foodies and fast-foodies; billionaires and bankrupts. It’s as impartial as death!

In a world in which we control so little—not the date of our death, not the cells in our bodies, not the outcome of words, our stocks, or the fruit of our womb, what a sublime idea to take a day a week to rest, to let go of interminable striving, and enter another economy. On the day of rest, we enter the economy of the powerless who seek power from God, the economy of the tired who seek strength as they wait upon the Lord; the economy of the unconnected who seek God to connect them; the economy of the creatives who one day a week silence their words to make room for The Word.

And perhaps on that blessed, holy day, the spirit of God shall hover over the still waters of the quieted mind, shall wake in them words and visions which shall last.

* * *

Ah, we lose our way; we become functional atheists in Parker Palmer’s phrase, when we believe that nothing will happen unless we make it happen.

But there is another way consistently recommended in Scripture, the way not of might, nor of power, but of God’s spirit.

What might that look like for me? It would mean that if I want to get a book commercially published, I must seek the Spirit about how to do this. Perhaps he will connect me to the right literary agent and publisher without my doing anything about it. May it be so!! Perhaps he will clarify whom I am to contact. It may well be a process as streamlined and efficient as the process of creation, (unless for my character as for Joseph’s and Job’s, he chooses to prolong a sojourn in the desert).

For my blog, the way of might and power is no longer sustainable. I am too weary for it. I must now do it by the way of the Spirit. Seek the Spirit for what to write. Seek the Spirit for how much to write (currently 5 posts a month, so I have time to work on a book). Seek the Spirit for how to share what I write.

He is The Spirit. He is not human. His ways, his strategies will be greater, more surprising, more out of the box than anything I could think of. And because he loves me, his strategies will be practical, sustainable, and not exhausting.

Roy and I need to seek the Spirit in our family business, for cleverness, for strategy, for thinking out of the box, because, again, time and energy are in short supply. We need his ideas, not our own.

I need to seek the Spirit for how to shed the extra weight that puts me at risk for colon cancer. Cancer seemed a far away thing that happens to other people. However, I now await the results of a biopsy. Being overweight increases the risk of colon cancer, as does being sedentary, or eating red meat, or too much fat. Yes, yes: Guilty as charged. Losing weight has never been easy, or else I would have done so. I have lost 21 pounds over the last 2 years, but my weight loss stopped around Easter. So how do I lose this pesky weight? I must seek the ways of the Spirit.

There are gurus who will tell you all this—how to grow your blog, publish your book well, grow your online business, and lose weight. It makes sense to skim their books; I mean why waste time reinventing the wheel?

But Michael Hyatt writes on Platform, but I daresay none of his readers have a platform like his. Jeff tells us how to get 10,000 subscribers; do any of his readers have that many? Dr. Fuhrman has a brilliant, but unsustainable way of weight loss.

These things worked for them. Each of us must seek the Spirit who loves us for what will work for us. My daughters love giving me advice, and I sing out in reply, “But I am not you. I am me.” So it is with other people’s strategies; they may not work for me for I am not them. I am me.

I must seek the streamlined way of the spirit, the way of minimal wasted effort. I think again of the intricate interlocked efficient universe in which nothing is wasted, created in the mind of God, spoken forth into existence over six… aeons.

I hear the voice of the Spirit when I am still and listen for it. I hear it when I wait and just hang out with him. I hear it in rest.

And on the Sabbath, the day I set apart for haunting his paths, I greatly increase my chances of hearing the wise, astonishing, loving voice of the Spirit.

* * *

Tweetables

Rest is an intrinsic part of the creative process NEW POST from @anitamathias1

On seeking the way not of might or power, but of the Spirit. NEW POST from @anitamathias1

Alignment with the master artist supercharges our creativity NEW POST from @anitamathias1

Over to you

Have you experienced walking in the ways not of might, nor of power but of the Spirit?

How do you experience Sabbath Rest?

In which Imaginative Literature Stirs the Heart to Conversion (A Guest Post by Holly Ordway)

By Anita Mathias

I am honoured to welcome Dr. Holly Ordway to my blog today.

In which Imaginative Literature Stirs the Heart to Conversion

How could a fierce atheist enter into Christian faith? There are many ways for God’s grace to work; my own story is one that highlights the importance of imaginative literature!

When I was firmly an atheist, I dismissed Christianity as superstitious nonsense, and I simply would not have listened to the arguments that ultimately convinced me that the Christian claim is objectively true. Apologetics arguments were (eventually) vitally important, but as I reflected and wrote about my journey, I recognized the importance of imagination as both the catalyst and the foundation of my rational exploration of the faith.

How did that happen?

Let me give you a little glimpse from my memoir of conversion, Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms.

From my childhood:

Long before I gave any thought about whether Christianity was true, and long before I considered questions of faith and practice, my imagination was being fed Christianly. I delighted in the stories of King Arthur’s knights and the quest for the Holy Grail, without knowing that the Grail was the cup from the Last Supper. I had no idea that the Chronicles of Narnia had anything to do with Jesus, but images from the stories stuck with me, as bright and vivid in my memory as if I had caught sight of a real landscape, had a real encounter, with more significance than I could quite grasp.

And at some point in my childhood, I found J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and that changed everything. Not suddenly. Not even immediately. But slowly, surely. Like light from an invisible lamp, God’s grace was beginning to shine out from Tolkien’s works, illuminating my Godless imagination with a Christian vision.

I don’t remember reading The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit for the first time, only re-reading them again and again… Middle Earth was a world in which there is darkness, but also real light, a light that shines in the darkness and is not extinguished: Galadriel’s light, and the light of the star that Sam sees break through the clouds in Mordor, and the ray of sun that falls on the flower-crowned head of the king’s broken statue at the crossroads… I didn’t know, then, that my imagination had been, as it were, baptized in Middle Earth. But something took root in my reading of Tolkien that would flower many years later.

From my time at college:

The bumper-sticker expressions of Christian affirmation – “I’m not perfect, just forgiven!” “God is my co-pilot!” – and the kitsch art that I saw – a blue-eyed Jesus in drapey robes (polyester?) comforting some repentant hipster, or cuddling impossibly adorable children (none crying or distracted), presented faith as a kind of pious flag-waving. No thanks!

I didn’t know then how to say it, but I was looking for the cosmic Christ, the one by whom all things were made, the risen and glorified Jesus at the right hand of the Father.

The Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins got past my allergic reaction to kitsch because it flowed naturally out of what he saw in the world.

Where his poetry was sweet, it had the sweetness of a perfectly ripe strawberry, or of the very best chocolate, creamy and rich – not the chemical sweetness of a low-fat sugar-free pudding with non-dairy whipped topping.

Where his poetry was bitter, it was bitter with the taste of real misery, the kind that fills up your awareness, squeezes out the memory of better times and draws a blank on tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow – not the faux-sadness of “Jesus died for you!” (so cheer up and get with the program already), the faux-compassion that can’t bear to look at a crucifix (so morbid).

Somehow for Hopkins the sweet and the bitter were not opposed; they were part of the same experience of being in the world, and undergirding all of it was something I didn’t understand at all, never having experienced it or known anyone who had: the reality of God, not as an abstract moral figure or as a name dropped to show off one’s piety, but a dynamic awareness of being in relationship with the Trinitarian God, an experienced reality bigger by far than the words used to point to it.

Years later, struggling with questions of meaning, wrestling with despair, I re-read Hopkins. I had no conscious desire to find God; I thought I knew that He did not exist. And yet something was at work in me, just as Hopkins wrote in “The Windhover”: “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird. . .” My heart stirred – for what? For something beyond my experience.

Poetry had done its work. I was ready to listen.

Holly Ordway is Professor of English and Director of the MA in Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, and the author of Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms (Ignatius Press, 2014). She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; her academic work focuses on imagination in apologetics, with special attention to the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

What Children Know: What it Means to Truly Live (A Guest Post by Laura Boggess)

By Anita Mathias

I am honoured and excited to be hosting Laura Boggess today. I am reading her exquisite book Playdates with God with much delight. Do yourself a favour and buy it too–today!!

Playdates with God

What Children Know: What it Means to Truly Live

A few frail drops of rain fall and I sit at the breakfast table, wondering.

My New Testament reading this morning is on the Year of Jubilee and I am thinking of freedom. I am thinking of a broken figure in a hospital bed—one of the patients in the hospital where I work—held prisoner by a body that once was taken for granted.

I am thinking of brave words uttered from cracked lips, of a story telling long torment in an able body, of abuse and addiction, and how his eyes are opened now. I am thinking about what it takes to realize the gifts we are given each day of our life.

Do you feel like giving up?

It is something I have to ask, part of my job as a therapist.

Do you want to live?

I stare out my window and I ask myself this question:

What does it mean to truly live?

To feel each passing moment in my marrow, detect the pull of gravity on my spirit—measure each turn of the earth with outstretched arms? How can I hear a moment call for calm solitude? How to be present in each heartbeat and feel each wisp of breath travel through my nose—move through my body as it is carries life into my unknown places?

Today, I need a map. I am lost—all turned about in this thing I call living.

Yesterday, I asked my two boys, “What if today is the best day of your life and you miss it? What if you miss it because you are thinking about tomorrow? Or the next day?”

We were taking our dog, Bonnie, on her evening walk—our constitutional these autumn days. We missed our promise earlier, so we were walking in the dark—light from neighbors’ windows peeking out at us.

Their moon-faces and shadow-mouths shone bright and under cover of night the tide of their laughter swept over me and I knew. I knew they never would miss the best day of their life.

Children have a way of catching joy and carrying it out into their every day—into their walking around life.

Why don’t I?

The Year of Jubilee came after seven years of Sabbaths. Seven times seven years. In the fiftieth year, liberty is proclaimed. Debts were cancelled; land returned to its original owner, countrymen who were slaves were freed…

I know that Jesus is our Jubilee. He came to set the captives free.

But there are no answers for lost days here. Only questions. These empty eyes, these silent muscles do not know about the arcana of Jubilee. What do we miss in our grown-up lives while we wait for the promised freedom.

Isn’t there freedom now? In each moment, if only I choose to see?

I pray for faith like a child. I pray for eyes to see the holy in each moment.

And the Name, whispered, fills the room.

I feel each passing moment in my marrow; detect the pull of gravity on my spirit—stretch arms to feel the earth turning. I hear this moment call to me—it whispers all that is required. Each heartbeat ticks the seconds, each wisp of breath breathes life.

Do you want to live?

The Jubilee is inside of me. Sometimes I give it away.

Photo of Laura by Fall Meadow Photography.

Author of the newly-released Playdates with God: Having a Childlike Faith in a Grown-up World, Laura Boggess lives in a little valley in West Virginia with her husband and two sons. She is a content editor for TheHighCalling.org and blogs at lauraboggess.com. Connect with Laura on Facebook and Twitter.

When, For a Season, God Himself Blocks You

By Anita Mathias

You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to save many lives,” Joseph quietly tells his brothers. (Genesis 50:20)

Oh they did; they sure did, first throwing him into a disused well, then uncaringly selling him on for thirty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, not caring what became of him.

And what came out of his experience of betrayal, slavery, false accusation, and imprisonment was elevation—promotion—influence–the ability to save many lives.

* * *

I used to feel stressed and a bit hopeless if I had enemies, if I thought there were people with inveterate animosity, jealousy, competitiveness, or malice towards me, who would block me, who might slander me. The thought of such people still does not make my heart sing!

But they are a fact of life. “Some are jealous of your face. Some are jealous of your lace. And some will be jealous of your grace,” as RT Kendall writes in The Anointing.

However, Shakespeare’s young Henry V puts it well, “We are in God’s hands, brothers, not in theirs.”

I sigh if I realize someone is reflexively blocking me or my ideas, putting in a bad word for me, but I am not afraid.

I do not fear them.

Because there are always two stories going on in our lives: the plot we see, and the story God is still writing. There is the story people think they are forcing onto your life–in which you may miss the chance to lead, speak, get the prize, the invitation, because someone feels threatened by you, is jealous of you, or just plain dislikes you.

Often you are unaware of these machinations, and that’s best. When you do know, you wring your hands with a sense of loss.

But all is not lost.

You were not meant to lead at that time. You were meant to quietly follow the One. You were not meant to speak at that time. You were meant to listen.

Sure, it will take you longer to achieve your heart’s desire. The Spirit is taking you on the scenic route. You are in the desert, where all voices are silent, but the voice of God; where is no trophy but his companionship; no wine but his spirit; where your progress is not measurable, and, anyway, there’s no one to praise it.

Why, even your prayers aren’t working. Every avenue of showing off is blocked.

Welcome to the desert, fellow pilgrim, where God himself blocks you.

* * *

You say: “See here, God, I have wasted my life. Look at me, mid-life and achievement-poor. Remember, God, those years I was promising; remember that award for a writer of unusual promise? Why I was in my twenties then. The snazzy university, the snazzy prizes, the early publications, the blushing peach down of promise, remember?

Well, I’ve failed, and you’ve failed me; we’ve failed together, you and I.

Yeah, you really haven’t managed my life too well, Lord, and neither have I. Let’s just go eat some worms.

My twenties are over, my thirties, my… Let’s just say “my hasting days fly on with full career, but my summer little bud or blossom showeth.”

How can you make up to me, God for the years when I wanted to build much, but instead built little?

You have behaved rather badly towards me, my God, my friend. You have let me down. You are my friend, and so I forgive you, but I am sad about this. I am.

But if I love anyone, I love you. So yes, I will follow you because, you’ve sure ruined my appetite for following other paths of glory.

I believe you can restore the years the locusts have eaten. The prophet Joel said so, and Christians have attested to it. But I don’t see how. Jesus, let’s be honest here, I sometimes feel as if nothing can compensate me for those wasted years, the years in Joseph’s dungeon.

I really do.

Though they were what you gave me, and I accept them because I love and trust you. I accept them from your hands in trust as I accept the full years of your goodness.

* * *

And you, Lord, reply:

“Child, child, friend, beloved, Anita, what you wanted was a lesser good, and so I withheld it.

You saw the success of your writer friends—their whirl of book readings, teaching gigs, speaking gigs, lectures, prizes, prolific writing, book contracts, money, fame, fascinating friends, travel. All the trappings of a career. And you wanted it too.

And I knew you wanted it.

But I also knew you better than you knew yourself. Don’t make that face. I truly do.

You were not ready for the busyness of travel, deadlines, speaking, teaching, crises, midnight oil.

Fame and glory–what made you think it would make you happy? I knew it would not. It would not. Rushing to planes, trains and automobiles has never made you happy. Rush has never makes you happy, or busyness, or deadlines. You love quiet unscheduled days at home, or in your garden.

But I promise you this: You will write the books you want to write. You will not die before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain.

All the things you deeply love and want to explore and preserve in words, I will ensure you explore and preserve them,

All the things I kept from you, I kept not for your harm, but that you might find it in my arms.

You are sad that success came later than you wanted it, but trust me.

The bright lights of the big cities would have obscured me.

The noise would have silenced my whisper.

A hammer had to be taken to all those idols.

There had to be a gotterdamerung, a ragnarok. You wanted to be Ms. Famous Writer, to dazzle the world with your creativity. You wanted fame, glory, money, success, as you saw your friends get it.

I gave you quietness, I wooed you to the desert, and there I showed you my love.

You had but one shot at investing in your children. I slowed down your career so you could teach them all you had to teach them. And could your marriage have withstood the rush in peace, not pieces? Did you want to be Ms. Divorced Famous Writer? You did not.

You have reached mid life with a full heart and full spirit, into which I have poured and poured and poured myself and my words. And now it is time to write.

* * *

“Oh God, could you not have poured both? Both yourself and the other things I wanted?”

“But then there would not have been room for me. I had to pry your fingers from other things, so they would clasp me. Had to silence other sounds, so you could hear me.

I gave you not what you thought you wanted, but what you love, quiet and peace and silence. And in the quietness of your country garden, I shaped you, I formed you, I made you into a woman of integrity, a woman aligned with me, a woman I can trust.

You sometimes feel you’ve wasted your life.

But child, you’ve given your life to me. It’s now my story, not yours. I am the author, not you.

Accept the plot twist I chose. Forgive me, as I forgive you. It was not time before. It’s time now. It’s time.

* * *

Lord, I accept the plot you chose. I accept my years in the wilderness. I accept your judgement that they were necessary. I forgive you.

And I will go forward in joy, in alignment with you, your joy filling my heart.

* * *

Open your hands wide, and I will fill them. Your heart has been reformed in the silent years.

Now I know, and you know, that while your hands are full of my blessings, your eyes will be on me and your heart will be full of me.

* * *

Tweetables

Welcome to the desert, fellow pilgrim, where God himself blocks you. From @anitamathias1

You are in the desert, where all voices are silent, but the voice of God. From @anitamathias1

There are always two stories going on in our lives, the story we perceive, and the story God is still writing From @anitamathias1

When God stills all the noise, and you say “See here, God. I have wasted my life.” From @anitamathias1

Questions

Have you experienced a period of great silence? Have you experienced God more deeply as a result?

Image Credit

This post is kindly sponsored by mordocrosswords.com. Thank you for your support.

Homo Sapiens and Homo Stupidus: On Giftedness and its Price

By Anita Mathias

I live-blogged in Cambodia recently, fund-raising for a charity. We were to be accompanied by a “Christian celebrity” who had promised to do national talks on her return. The posters had been printed.

Well, she was not at Heathrow. Among several possible forms of ID, she sent off her passport to get her driver’s licence renewed. Had not paid for expedited processing. So no passport. So despite the charity having paid for her (and ours) ticket, hotel etc., despite extensive logistical planning on the part of charities in Cambodia, she couldn’t fly out!

* * *

Hmm! Clever, successful, achieving, experienced people can do stupid things. It’s part of being human, these flashes of stupidity.

The scientific name for man is “homo sapiens,” literally “wise man.” Our wisdom supposedly distinguishes us from the animals.

However, Linnaeus who first used binomial nomenclature (and whose garden in Uppsala we’ve visited) could just as well have called us homo stupidus, “man the stupid,” for animals are never stupid. They act out of an unwavering instinct for self-preservation, common sense if you like. And their instincts are more reliable than our reason.

* * *

I was surprised at Heathrow. So other adults, sensible, intelligent, achieving adults make such mistakes?

I would have had a disproportionate reaction if it were me—would have felt crushed by shame and guilt and sorrow. I hate to mess up, especially when it messes others up.

Ah, I would show myself and my family grace for occasional flashes of stupidity, I resolved.

Practising… Practising…

* * *

My teenagers, Zoe and Irene, were to fly out to India on the 30^th July to stay with my mother.

At midnight on the 29^th, the witching hour when one is tempted to throw things, Roy asked, “Don’t they need visas to visit India?”

They didn’t have them.

To my credit, I didn’t throw a thing. Didn’t even say a cross word. Getting visas didn’t cross his mind, Roy said, though he bought their tickets for them, and went personally to get their visas for their last two visits. How can you blame someone for something that did not cross their minds? Especially when it didn’t cross yours.

They did not fly out. We changed the tickets, and paid a penalty. Ouch!!

* * *

We are homo sapiens and homo stupidus at the same time. They are both equally part of our nature.

As The Book of Job commences, Job has everything: ten children, and thousands of oxen, donkeys, sheep, camels and servants. Then in his Great Depression, he lost everything, even his health.

His wife crumbles. “Curse God and die,” she says.

But Job says, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?’The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”

Shall we accept gifts from the Lord, and not the liabilities that are the shadow side of those very gifts?

* * *

The fact that we had overlooked getting visas was, ironically, linked to our strengths, our intensity. We got the tickets to India, got tickets to Helsinki, got tickets to David’s Tent, a Christian worship festival, and then, summer logistics done, (we thought!) turned our thoughts to other things: writing, for me; creating new garden beds and worrying about our family business for Roy.

The intensity caused the forgetfulness.

* * *

Our marital counselling included a DISC assessment (which showed that Roy and I had diametrically opposed personalities, each on the far ends of the graph) and a psychologist administered IQ test. Both of us had IQ in the “superior” range, in the top 5% of the population. (My verbal IQ was significantly higher than my non-verbal IQ. Which explains why I might get lost on my way to your house, or my cooking can be erratic.)

Anyway, the pastor looked at the scores, and said, “Anita, you are the most gifted person I have every counselled.” (And I looked gloatingly at Roy–God forgive me, so I did!)

The pastor’s wife was doing a Ph.D in gifted and talented education, and he lent me a book on giftedness. Part of giftedness, I read, is intensity: your mind works a little faster; you get impatient with slow-moving, frivolous conversations; small talk bores you; you cut to the chase. Waste of time or money, stupidity or folly can feel like a crisis.

When gifted people marry other gifted people, life can be “crisis squared.” Factor in the gifted children who’ll likely result and family life can be “crisis cubed,” they said. In our case, “crisis quadrupled!”

High IQ makes academic work easier. It’s easier to assess, absorb, collate and retrieve information rapidly, abilities which are the foundations of academic success. And these traits are assets in starting a business from scratch, I discovered.

However I also have a higher degree of forgetfulness when it comes to things my reticular activating system has pegged as irrelevant—my mobile number, say, or driving directions, or transferring the laundry to the dryer…

* * *

My husband once stayed with a fellow mathematician in Tuscon while at a conference. A fellow guest was the legendary Hungarian mathematician Erdos (who has written so many papers that every mathematician has an Erdos number. If you’ve written a paper with Erdoz, you have an Erdos number of 1. If you written it with an Erdos collaborator you are Erdos 2. Roy is Erdos 3).

The phone rang at breakfast. It was the neighbour. “Do you have a mathematician staying with you? I have him here.”

Erdos had gone on a morning walk, wandered into the nearest big house, located the coffee maker, made coffee, then settled down at the table, scribbling formulae, not noticing his different surroundings at all.

The abstraction, homo stupidus behaviour, was the shadow side of his genius.

* * *

The shadow side and difficulties of giftedness is particularly pronounced in school. When I was nine, in my first year at boarding school, I was reading the books in the cupboards for 16 year olds. Sister Josephine, the senior school English teacher, read my essays out to the seniors, I was often told.

However–though I had skipped grades and had been put with the 10 year olds– physically, emotionally and spiritually, I was nine, probably younger, because I had concentrated my energies on reading everything I could get my hands on.

All this made my life turbulent.

* * *

In Baudelaire’s famous poem about the albatross, the very wings which help it soar effortlessly make it ridiculous when captured by mariners who make it waddle on deck, where its giant wings hinder its walk

The same IQ which was an asset at Oxford University or graduate school often made me feel restless in Bible study and sometimes in church. I moved from small group to small group, and church to church in my first years as a Christian, seeking something focused, meaty, fast-paced and intense.

“You will have to remember that in an average group of 20 people, you may well the smartest person,” the pastor explained, looking at my scores. I stared. I had grumbled to him about a fluffy, vapid Bible study. Yes, that explained my occasional restlessness and irritation during group Bible study, and boredom during sermons.

I realised then that the purpose of church and small groups was not to stretch my brain, but a far more important organ: my heart. To become a student of the people in the group as much as the Word, to learn to love. The purpose of church was not intellectual stimulation, but to worship God in the anonymous great democracy of the faithful–on earth as it will be in heaven.

* * *

Giftedness is a double-edged sword. Our whole personality leans that way. If our gift is composing or writing or painting, and we do not do it, we feel as psychically crippled as if we were trying to function without an arm or a leg.

However, if we develop our gifts single-mindedly, there will be a price. In the phrase of Greg McKeown of Essentialism, we might not “protect the asset” that enables us to exercise the gift—i.e. our selves. We might pursue our gift at the expense of sleep or exercise or rest, thus affecting our physical health. We might pursue it at the expense of time with family, friends, or paying attention to the inner river of our emotional life . We might pursue it at the expense of our spiritual life.

The personal lives of many gifted people betray the scars of having pursued their gifts, or their career, at the expense of their physical, mental, emotional or spiritual health and their relationships.

* * *

I don’t want to do this. I want to protect the asset—become physically strong (which I am not, though I am “healthy” as defined by the absence of disease or meds). I want to have good relationships with my family and friends. I want to be healthy, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

If we led a balanced life, got our sleep and exercise, spent time with family and friends, spent time with God, kept our homes and lives orderly, would we have enough time to make our gifts shine?

Would I have less time to write? In the short run, yes! Balance means we will have less time to nurture our gifts and passions.

In the long run, not necessarily! We might instead burn brightly, though not dazzlingly, throughout our lives, instead of burning out.

* * *

Fortunately, there are ways to be healthy and balanced and still exercise your gift.

A Do-Not-Do list is one. Mine is extensive, and helps provides fallow time to “sit and stare.”

Part of it: No recreational shopping. I don’t clean (we hire someone); we outsource all handy-man type jobs and heavy-duty garden jobs (though I do garden every day). I outsource all techie blog maintenance. I don’t watch TV. I get together with people twice a week, but am picky about social life, preferring encounters which offer meaningful conversation. Essentially, I try to eliminate trivia, to leave room for what interests me.

* * *

Giftedness is fire which can scorch or destroy its possessor, if not well-managed. And it’s fire which can warm, illuminate and comfort many if wisely managed.

How manage it? Surrender it to God, place the gift in the hands of the Giver, seek his wisdom on how to use it, so that your gifts become gifts to you and the world, fire that will light, warm and comfort, not burn and destroy.

Have you ever been Homo Stupidus? Tell me your stories.

I don’t have time to maintain these regrets

By Anita Mathias

Gaudi mosaic

My daughter Zoe introduced me to this song by John Mark Macmillan: I don’t have time to maintain these regrets

I am a memoirist (and also a restless, tiptoes person full of hope for the future).

However examination of the past is rarely without regret.

If only. I wish I had

But that’s it!! No more looking back in sorrow.

Love’s like a hurricane, and I am a tree

Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.

I don’t have time to maintain all these regrets

When I think about how he loves us.

* * *

Besides, the past is never past (as Faulkner famously said). It is the introduction of an ongoing story. Its reverberations continue through space–time; beauty can still emerge from disasters.

Glorious mosaics are fashioned from shards of shattered glass.

2000 year old seeds have been germinated.

Entire towns in Yorkshire or Wales are built of stone plundered from destroyed monasteries, like Rievaulx or Tintern Abbey.

God can build castles out of the glorious ruins of the past.

He can use the ancient smashed goblets to make stained glass or kintsugi.

I truly believe it. We can write off no experience as wasted because we do not yet know what God will make of it.

So Martha faced with the stench of her brother Lazarus, dead four days, tells Jesus, “Even now, God will give you whatever you ask.”

Even now, God can somehow combine all the things I am tempted to regret: anger, self-pity, unforgiveness, fear, sloth—into art which lives.

Even now, God can combine hazy memories, half-read books, broken friendships and wasted days into art that is different, new and shimmering, an iridescent morpho butterfly shimmying from a drab chrysalis.

* * *

And so I will not give way to regret. Because I have a very clever Redeemer.

All the sadness, the mistakes, the sins, the waste of the past have made me who I am: a woman who is, today, the Beloved of God. (As I always was, always was, even when I didn’t feel it in my bones, as I do now.)

The novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick says she read 18 hours a day when she was training to be a writer. Joyce Carol Oates has published over 50 novels, 30 volumes of short stories, and 52 volumes of children’s stories, poetry, young adult fiction, essays, memoir and drama. She writes from 8 to 1 in the morning, from 4 to 7 in the evening, and then reads or writes at night. (John Updike had a similar schedule).

I read this, and inwardly writhe. As a writer, I wish I had read more, and wish I had written more.

When I was younger, I wanted to write like Salman Rushdie, or Vladimir Nabokov or Laurie Lee or William Faulkner or Toni Morrison. I haven’t read as much as they, or practiced as much as they have.

And so my thoughts and sentences may never have the depth and richness of one who has single-mindedly trained her mind and pen.

But, no longer trying to imitate the singing-masters of my soul, I now write simply and transparently, pages which can be grasped at the first reading. I write differently, and for a different audience.

But it is the audience God had prepared for me to speak to before the beginning of time, before the Big Bang, before Planet Earth spun into being, before the dinosaurs prowled the earth, before the saber-toothed tigers.

* * *

The race is not to the swiftest, nor favour indeed to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, but time and change happen to them all. (Ecc. 9:11).

And that is most true when it comes to creativity!

I love Solomon’s observation, and often pray for luck—being neither as swift, nor as wise, nor as understanding as I could be.

But creativity is like the wind which blows, and we cannot see where it comes from or where it goes. The best read do not produce the best writing, which speaks to the most people. Those most diligent in practicing their craft do not necessarily produce art which changes lives, which makes the world happier.

Creativity is the art of combining—things you’ve read, and things you’ve done, and things you’ve thought and felt and heard, and all those 10,000 hours of practice to make something entirely new. And the value is in the combination, not in the raw materials.

Look at Gaudi’s mosaics….

Art is the spark from stoniest flint that sings in the dark and cold, I’m light.

So what I am going to do as a writer is to put it all into His hands–everything I’ve read and heard and thought and felt and experienced–and ask him to make of it an entirely new thing:

Such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enameling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing

On Flawed People, Perfect Art, and Happiness

By Anita Mathias

In Creative Writing graduate school in the US, reading of the scandalous, chaotic and pain-filled private lives of the American poets whose luminous poetry I loved, I naively asked the professor if he thought one needed to be a good man or woman to be a good poet.

(We were studying the “prophetic” voice in poetry, and whether it can be mimicked or simulated. Whether you can sound like a “prophet” without being one. And, yes, it can, and knowing how easily passionate rhetoric can be produced without passion but with a few verbal and rhetorical tricks in your bag, makes me listen to preachers and prophets and some bloggers with slightly narrowed eyes, and a degree of scepticism).

“Hell, no!” he said. “Most of these poets are regular SOBs.”

I no longer wonder if one needs to be a good person to be a good writer. I can echo the professor. “Hell, no!”

But it’s not worth it! Not being a good person is not worth it. Sacrificing goodness for the sake of art is not worth it.

Being a good person when no one is watching (which is one definition of character) is worth it in the long run. And in, most cases, leads to more productivity in the long run.

And it is certainly conducive to that gentle state we scorn in youth, value more in middle age, and which is invaluable in old age: happiness.

What Children Know: What it Means to Truly Live

anita.mathias