Author: Natalie Hart

I want to be more like Nebuchadnezzar

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I’m almost at the end of the Old Testament, which means that I’ve been wallowing in the prophets for a few months. And I do mean wallowing.

It’s been tough to read the many and detailed promises of destruction for faithless Israel and its arrogant neighbors. There have been some lovely moments, and some rather awful moments, but on balance, it isn’t exactly uplifting reading. Not that all Bible reading needs to be uplifting, but day after day after day of gloom and doom wears on a person.

Of course, this endeavor has brought its surprises, one of which was the portrayal of Nebuchadnezzar. We meet this King of Babylon most personally in the book of Daniel, after he had conquered all the lands near Babylon, including Judah. From Judah, he absconded with treasures of the Temple, as well as people, including Daniel. He educated Daniel and other Israelite men, as well as many men from the other countries he’d conquered. But none of that is why I want to be more like him.

It’s because Nebuchadnezzar was teachable.

When he had a troubling dream and Daniel was able to tell him what he had dreamed and then interpret it for him, Nebuchadnezzar said, “Truly, your God is the God of gods, the Lord over kings, a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this secret” (Dan. 2:47, NLT).

Until that time, all he might have known about this god was that he was the god of one of those tiny countries he’d just crushed. But he immediately recognized that there was something different about Daniel’s God.

Contrast this with Ramses II, who may have been grossed out and irritated by the stunts Moses’s God pulled, but he was never impressed, never figured out or learned that this God might have more power than him.

I loved that bit about me being gold

I admit that my multisyllabic friend may have taken the wrong lesson from that dream and interpretation. Daniel told him that, in the dream about a statue with a head of gold, chest of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet of clay, he was the head of gold. To his credit, he didn’t freak out upon hearing that his kingdom would end. But the next we hear, he’s built a huge golden statue of himself to which he ordered people to bow and worship. Which leads to the exciting story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refusing to bow to it, being ratted out, and being thrown into the furnace — and surviving. Nebuchadnezzar praises their God and orders that anyone saying anything against their God be torn limb from limb, because “There is no other god who can rescue like this!” (Dan. 3:29).

Not that I’m recommending the tearing from limb to limb part, but Nebuchadnezzar recognized God when God acted in front of him.

Contrast this with me. I don’t always manage to do that. At least not right away. There have been many times when I’ve asked for help with a specific problem and a solution arrived, sometimes in show-offy short order … and it still took me awhile to remember, “Hey, I prayed about exactly that!” And to recognize that God acted right in front of me. And to be grateful. Wendy Van Eyck of I Love Devotionals has a great post on just this, Sometimes the best miracles look like nothing.

Listening the first time around is way better

Daniel 4 is taken from a proclamation of Nebuchadnezzar himself, writing in his own words about how Daniel’s interpretation of a doozy of a dream came to be.

Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a huge and life-giving tree that gets cut down, although the stump and roots remain, bound with bands of iron and bronze. He was that tree, and the dream was a warning: “Stop sinning and do what is right. Break from your wicked past by being merciful to the poor” (4:27). Otherwise, he will be cut off from human society and spend seven periods of time as an animal, living in the open, eating grass like a cow.

Although the king doesn’t freak out and jail or banish Daniel (I infer this because the Bible does love a good jail rescue story and we don’t have one here; also because Daniel serves future Babylonian kings), he doesn’t learn right away. One year later, while he’s standing on the roof of his palace, having a self-satisfied “everything here is mine” moment, a voice from heaven announces that the prophecy was now beginning and would not end “until you learn that the Most High rules over the kingdoms of the world and gives them to anyone he chooses” (4:32). Indeed, Nebuchadnezzar’s sanity left him and he lived in the wilderness until “his hair was as long as eagles’ feathers and his nails were like birds’ claws” (4:33).

Eventually, Nebuchadnezzar receives his sanity back, as well as his kingdom. “Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and glorify and honor the King of heaven. All his acts are just and true, and he is able to humble those who are proud” (4:37). He accepts the humbling, and puts the glory where it belongs, with God.

Contrast this with the people of Israel — God’s own special treasure. It was hard to choose sample passages of God condemning his people, because there are so many.

These people are stubborn rebels who refuse to pay any attention to the Lord’s instructions. They tell the prophets, “Shut up! We don’t want any more of your reports.” They say, “Don’t tell us the truth. Tell us nice things. Tell us lies. Forget all this gloom. We have heard more than enough about your ‘Holy One of Israel.’ We are tired of listening to what he has to say.”
This is the reply of the Holy One of Israel: “Because you despise what I tell you and trust instead in oppression and lies, calamity will come upon you suddenly. It will be like a bulging wall that bursts and falls. In an instant it will collapse and come crashing down. You will be smashed like a piece of pottery–shattered so completely that there won’t be a piece left that is big enough to carry coals from a fireplace or a little water from the well.” (Isaiah 30:10-14)

“Your ancestors would not listen to [my call to justice and mercy]. They turned stubbornly away and put their fingers in their ears to keep from hearing. They made their hearts as hard as stone, so they could not hear the law or the messages that the Lord Almighty had sent them by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. That is why the Lord Almighty was so angry with them. Since they refused to listen when I called to them, I would not listen when they called to me.” (Zechariah 7:11-13)

 

I am having a humbling season. And I do not want to harden my heart or plug my ears or fail to recognize when God is acting right in front of me. I have asked God for help, and he has given it — repeatedly. Has given it even when I ask for guidance and I don’t want to listen his answer, when what Anne Lamott calls my princess self has a hissy fit, stomping her foot, pouting, and saying, “But I don’t want to.”

That never goes well for me.

But God keeps giving me chances to be obedient. So I am trying. I’m saying yes to things I wanted to say no to, and no to things I already said yes to. I’m moving forward in trust. Learning. Listening. Looking around for God’s guidance. Taking more of my cues from Nebuchadnezzar than from God’s people.

On saying goodbye

~ Natalie Hart ~ 9 Comments

This post was originally going to be about jealousy and stupidity and a long-overdue apology. You see, I like to think of myself as supportive of my fellow writers. If you are a friend, and you have a blog, I will not only read it, but most of the time, I’ll let you know I read it. I try to encourage my writer friends, commiserate with them. But I’ve been in possession of a slim volume of short stories for over a year, stories written by one of my favorite cousins, Rodney Hart. I bought it as an ebook the first day it came out, so at first my excuse was that I didn’t like reading on my iPad. But then he gave me a physical copy. Still nothing.

What’s worse is that it wasn’t accidental. I avoided them. Out of stupid jealousy. Because here I’d been writing with the dream/goal of publication for years, submitting work and getting rejected over and over, and he quits his job and within several months, self-publishes a collection of short stories.

I’m not proud of my jealousy, but I can’t hide from it, either. So I apologize to Rod, here in public: sorry I was such an idiot.

And then this week I got sick of myself (this is so often my motivator) and finally read RockNRoll Shorts: Tales From a Local Musician’s Road. Most stories are vignettes from the lives of gigging rock and roll musicians, with band fights and money woes and grimy bars and the transporting community-making power of music. There are some great moments, like in “Rednecks and Soul,” about an African-American singer-songwriter playing in a redneck bar; Marceau’s interactions with a bar customer he calls “Party Naked” (because that’s what it says on his shirt) are really great, both funny and classy. The story made me want to hear Marceau play. This is a great description from “Lost Dead and Saved”:

They grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a sludgy river town Mark Twained to death with no music scene and coffee shops as the only venues.

Love that. And this reminds me of a hundred similar conversations with musicians, from “Lost Dead and Saved”:

“You know, ‘Reeked of Death’ would be a great band name,” Vinnie said, and Benny smacked him upside the head in honor of Mush.

But then there’s the story that hijacked my planned post about writerly jealousy, “Beautiful Night to Relive.” It details several days Rod spent camping on my parents’ beach a few months after his mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. My aunt was a bright spark of a woman, genuinely delighted in so many things, a writer of stories for her grandchildren, an encourager extraordinaire. She was only a few months from retirement and the freedom to visit her kids and grandkids as often and for as long as they all wanted. And he never got to say good-bye.

In the story, he’s sitting on the deck when he first hears her voice:

“Is this the place that’s going to save me?” she sang, and the wind was her mirrored symphony, and for the first time since her funeral, I wept.

The next time, it’s when he can’t sleep, and he’s counting “the seconds between the waves”:

“It’s a beautiful night to relive,” she sang.

I opened up the tent to look around. I started back toward the steps, and there she was, slowly descending without walking, a light behind her and a sound of a symphony in front of her.

“It’s a beautiful night to give back what you get,” she sang. She got near the bottom of the steps, and her face had a wide goofy grandma smile, and her arms were extended. “Beautiful,” she sang, and the chorus behind her intensified.

I started to walk toward her, and she held out her arms, and I was just a few feet from her.

Then she was gone, and the silence thundered in my ears, and I stood motionless for what seemed like hours.

I can see this.

There are more sightings, more singing, some words of wisdom. There’s a conversation that I loved between him and my brother. Even some humor at the end about her directional impairment. But mostly, it’s a deep and good story about grief and loneliness and facing loss — and how amazing a place a Lake Michigan beach is.

The thing is, he’s not the only one in the family who’s seen a loved one after they died.

Given that we grew up in the rather heady Christian Reformed faith and, as a clan, are not generally given to emotional displays, we’re not who you’d think would be open to seeing those who’ve passed on. But we are.

When I was 9 or 10, I saw my Opa (Dutch for grandfather) who’d died the previous year. I was sleeping over at my cousin Esther’s house and woke up some time in the very early morning, when there was a haze of light coming through the curtains — her pink curtains, in her pink room, with the pink shag carpeting. And then there was my Opa, standing at the foot of my bed, canted forward slightly at the waist, as was his way. He made a calming gesture, not quite a wave. It was weird, but I wasn’t afraid. I was comforted.

I mentioned it to Esther in the morning, and when she said she’d seen it, too, I got huffy about her wanting to be a copycat, and not wanting me to have an experience she didn’t. (Those of you with a same-gender cousin almost exactly your age might recognize the competitiveness that can coexist with cousinly friendships.) I hadn’t even been particularly close to my Opa. I’d been living in Australia for the 3 years before he died, although I’d seen him the month before when we’d flown back to Canada for Christmas.

In fact, I forgot about the Esther-aspect of the story until she was sick with cancer and started talking to others about having seen Opa. We were much better friends as adults, so we could talk about it as a shared experience. A warm and loving experience. Made extra poignant because Esther was, herself, dying. This viewing became so widely known and openly discussed in the family that just a few weeks ago, Esther’s father was telling a story about something else that happened at that house, and my dad said, “You know, that house where you and Esther saw Opa.”

At least one member of my father’s generation has seen a departed loved one, as well, but that person hasn’t told me the full story (although I’d love to hear it some day), so I can’t detail it here.

And I know that at least one person was hoping that Esther would take inspiration from her Opa and visit those who ache from missing her. But to my knowledge, she hasn’t.

While I’m not generally into paranormal stuff (I didn’t even go through a ouija board phase as a teenager), I can’t deny my experience. Nor can I deny Rod and Esther’s experiences. Sure, one could say that my aunt’s appearances were manifestations of his need for closure after her death, but plenty of people say belief in God is irrational and ridiculous, and I believe in God with my whole heart and mind.

So I’m left loving that story of my aunt on the beach, encouraging her grieving son, and I’m glad he could be with her one more time.

How about you? Any good ghost stories? I’d love to hear them, whether comforting or confusing.

Also, I would like some kind of credit for not using the phrase, “I see dead people,” anywhere in this piece.


 

 

an unexpected overcoming

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

On Monday, I saw a friend in the parking lot at Meijer and in the course of chatting, I started crying. There in the parking lot, with all the people doing their errands streaming past me, I couldn’t pretend I was handling it all anymore.

Now, nobody I love is dying (although people I love have cancer). My husband is still employed. I’ve even got work for which I’ll get paid. Eventually. I won’t even say the thing I was going to say, something about not missing the E.R., but that would be tempting fate, so I won’t.

But in every area of my life that is important to me — kids, marriage, writing, finances, church work — I’m overwhelmed by failure and fear. And fear of failure. Things that I thought would be manageable, became huge, looming problems that won’t untangle themselves quickly or easily. Things I thought were positive have taken their pound of flesh instead, but not surgically, more like the flesh-eating bacteria kind of thing where the wound must remain open for a long time. Issues I thought we were past…. You get the idea.

My throat on fire barely registered, because at least it was understandable.

I’ve been waking in the middle of the night, heart pounding and unable to fall back asleep, which certainly doesn’t help me deal with any of this more rationally. I’ve spent my days trying to convince myself, “These symptoms of stress are helping me. Body, thank you for preparing me to deal with these challenges,” after hearing this great TED talk on how to make stress my friend. But that never helped for long.

And I’ve prayed. Oh, how I’ve prayed. Mostly that most basic of prayers: Help. No specifics. Just, Help. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t have the imagination to see how this will get any better. Help.

On top of that I’m in the thick of the prophets in my Bible reading. All that doom and gloom and punishment and exile and “you brought this on yourselves.” Even though most books are tempered by a little bit of “on that day when the Lord thinks you’ve had enough punishment and he restores you, everything will be perfect and amazing,” it’s not exactly the most uplifting reading I could be doing.

Yesterday morning, I read this from Hezekiah 3:16-17 (NLT):

“Cheer up, Zion! Don’t be afraid! For the Lord your God has arrived to live among you. He is a mighty savior. He will rejoice over you with great gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears. He will exult over you by singing a happy song.”

Did I sigh with relief? Did I hand over all my fears to God? Nope.

I liked the bit about rejoicing and exulting over us. How great is it that we can made God so happy that he can’t help singing?

But God’s love calming all my fears? All my fears? Even those ones that have nothing to do with my behavior but with other peoples’? How does that work? I may have even added a tweenish, “I don’t think so.” And a curmudgeonly, “Hmph.”

That same day, I had a kid home sick, which I responded to the night before (when I saw the writing on the wall) by yelling at her. Classy.

This school year has my head spinning, trying to keep track of two kids in two different schools with entirely different academic calendars. In the 7 weeks I’ve had one or both kids in school, I’ve only had one 5-day stretch with both of them gone. Truth time: I love it when my kids go back to school. After a summer of togetherness and putting aside my plans so their plans can happen, I relish the fall. We always do better when we have a little time apart. But this year, I’m still scrambling, still trying to find purchase and focus.

Instead of resenting her, I embraced the kid at home. After all, we have the same symptoms, so I knew exactly how she felt.

(My selfish “somebody give me a medal for that” side wants me to add that I managed to make breakfast and lunches and pick up kids from school and sit and cheer at a soccer game and do the dishes and give some lectures about my expectations regarding making up missing work on that same “first day of illness” that she sat on the couch and had a bath.)

I was warm and sympathetic. I scrubbed the tub for her.

Then the other child came home from school and practice. We had a good dinner all together, and then that child buckled down and got the missing work completed.

And I was flooded with love for my children. My husband was gone for bedtime, so I got to pray with both of them. By the end, I was overwhelmed with love and tenderness. To the point of tears. I’m still a little weepy about it.

This is not normal for me. I love them, yes, but I’m rarely swamped by it. They are, after all, 12 and 14. And I’m not a super-gushy mother.

Right before I went to bed, I remembered: “With his love, he will calm all your fears.”

Not one single issue was solved. But doggone it if love didn’t calm my fears. God wins again. And despite my skepticism, too.

All I’ve got to say to that is, Thank you.

 

Where I’m From

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

 

I am from the flour-encrusted wooden speculaas mold of a windmill,
from the Delft tea strainer and Loonies and Toonies in my change bowl.

I am from the duplex on the corner with the handmade furniture
and the green 1954 MG-TF in the driveway that my dad bought in Australia
(to prove to his employees that he wasn’t always a humorless hardass)
so the steering wheel is on the “wrong” side.

I am from the ferns and lily of the valley that mixed in my mother’s garden and now in mine,
and the yellow plum tree with the two thin-skinned plums a year the squirrels would leave us.

I’m from praying in the New Year and always being right;
from Oma and two Esthers. I’m from clean as you go and making things gezellig
and reading in the living room.

I’m from your brother’s doing it on purpose and close that book and turn off the light
and every ABBA song ever committed to vinyl: I feel the beat from the tambourine.

I’m from opening presents on Christmas Eve, after the oil fondue dinner.

I’m from Toronto and the Netherlands (as far back as they can see),
from boerenkoel met wurst and the cereal cookies that everyone
wanted the recipe for and then would complain that they didn’t taste
the same as my mother’s even though they hadn’t followed the instructions.

From “poop on your own time,” Tante Nell’s pronouncement when someone tried to get out
of his chores by hiding in the hall bathroom, there in that big house in the country
during the Hunger Winter, the last winter of the war, when the house held 3 families,
3 resistance workers, one nanny, and five people who “hid” in plain sight.

From the farm in Overisel — the one in Michigan, with its sharp basement smell,
and the crook in the sour cherry tree that perfectly fit my 12-year-old behind,
and afternoons spent pitting those cherries in the kitchen with my aunts and grandmother.

From looking for new things to try and always investigating new solutions and ideas.

From using imagination to deepen faith.

 

 

I am linking up here with SheLoves Magazine’s Where I’m From poems. The secret is that there’s a template, so you (like me) don’t have to be any kind of poet. Come over, follow the template and make your own. Add it there, or post it here in the comments. 

 

[new mantra] it will be fine

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

My hard drive died.

Sitting at that genius bar with only scorched earth possibilities is … sobering. Galvanizing (surrounded by all that lovely metal, I couldn’t resist that word). Clarifying. What was important enough to have the very helpful young man give me a backup of? One thing. One thing that won’t surprise anyone. Family photos.

It Is You and all my other past and partial manuscripts were already backed up. Same with Word documents of family stories. But the one thing that was most overwhelming to save was the most overwhelming to consider losing.

There was a lot I chose not to save. I will miss the folder of positive notes about my writing that I’d hoarded, but I never looked at them after the first read-through. I don’t need a physical copy of them to let them bolster my faith in my dreams and my vision. I remember how wonderful they were and how important to me they are. That’s good enough. There were some hilarious extended family exchanges that I’d saved, but I’d never looked at them. I let them all go.

This has changed what my main focus of my Happiness/Stableness Project will be. The project is modeled after the one Gretchen Ruben did for herself (and has written two books about, The Happiness Project and Happiness at Home). The idea is to take a year (or so) to focus on and turn around areas of your life that are a drag on your happiness/stableness and pump up areas that are uplifting. Before today at 11:10 a.m., I’d had some ideas about what I needed to focus on: our finances, my irritability, my failure to be emotionally balanced or distanced or stable about the already (you are doing good writing that is satisfying and pleasing to you and to others) with the not yet (you do not yet have an agent or publisher) of my writing career.

I’ll still have some goals that relate to those broad issues, but those things just became secondary to the massive project of sentimental organization. Photos, cards, letters, kids’ stories, kids’ drawings, school projects — I know where they all are. Pre-2005 is in 3 neat file boxes. Post-2005 is shoved in a box, willynilly. It would break my heart if I lost these due to my own negligence.

So while I sat at the bar trying not to cry, surrounded by the genial geniuses, I came up with my September Happiness/Stability Project goals:

1. Figure out good backup procedures for everything. Implement them.

2. Restore and consolidate all digital photos from the various computers and external drives they’re on. Make sure they receive regular backups.

3. Work out (with husband) a budget that incorporates our new financial obligations and work on a system for regulating spending (envelope system?).

4. Finish reading The Happiness Project and interact with the others in the group.

And speaking of backups….

5. Schedule the RotoRooter people to prophylactically clear out sewer pipe so we don’t get a clog from tree roots and have a disgusting back-up problem of a different kind (like we did 2 years ago).

My computer works again, after being wiped clean, inside and out, which I’m grateful for. But who knows how long it will stumble on with only its left fan working?

And now for a little stress eating — for once, I’m taking the last chocolate chocolate chip muffin for myself.

Have any of you had to bounce back from this very modern catastrophe? How did you do it?

 

 

Wait a minute, who’s on trial?

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

 

The muttering started as soon as they broke camp. No. Moses had to admit that it started as soon as the pillar of cloud moved and he gave the official word that the Lord was moving them out of the Wilderness of Sin.

It was always about the same thing. Where is there water? Are there water holes where we’re going? How much water should we put in the skins? Will there be water in two days, because that’s all the donkeys can carry?

His answer was always the same: “The Lord is leading us. He took us out of Egypt, across the sea on dry land, and he’s promised us a new life. He will not let us die of thirst on the way.”

The answer he wanted to give? We were slaves for 400 years, people. None of you left Egypt unless you were part of a work detail, and then you were more likely to be trying to avoid the whip than noticing your surroundings. Any of you who knew these lands and how to recognize the signs of water died generations ago. This is only possible with the Lord! So trust Him.”

But the people were too anxious. No argument, either rational, sarcastic, or faith-filled could get through, so he just let them grumble.

They were a slow-moving column, slow enough that runners with donkeys could go back to previous campsites to fetch just enough water to get by. But the Lord kept moving them further and further from known water. Days away. Mountains hemmed them in on every side. Cruel rocks with no vegetation, which meant no shepherds who might tell them where there was a spring. Now and then they’d see a smoothed section of rock that looked like it was made by flowing water, but it was too late in the season; all the runoff from winter rains had dried.

Moses could hear a whine of disbelief roll through the people when the pillar of cloud stopped after only a half a day’s walk. They wouldn’t reach water again today. It was true that the people only had strength to journey that far, but he could feel the weight of their panic like one of those mountains, pressing in on him.

And then something worse happened: silence. All the chatter of the people stopped as they surrounded him.

A lone voice cried, desperation in every word, “Give us water to drink!”

Everyone spoke at once, each accusation like a rock thrown at his head. “My mother is dying.” “My children will not live through the night.” “I’ve already lost livestock. I’d better not lose more.” “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Quiet!” Moses tried his best to calm them down. “Why are you bringing this up to me? I don’t control the water any more than I control you.”

But they weren’t listening. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt?” “Are you trying to kill us?” “We were better off as slaves.” “At least we knew where water was.” “At least our masters gave us enough food and water to keep our strength up.” “We’re going to die out here.” “The Lord brought us out here to die.”

A sandstorm swirled through Moses’s insides. “No! No. Don’t say that. Those are serious charges.”

“You looked so tough in Egypt, but you don’t know what you’re doing.” “We’re cursed.” “We’re doomed to fail.” “Why is the Lord leading us to our death?”

Their complaints took an even darker turn. “How can Lord be with us anymore?” “It was all a trick.” “The Lord doesn’t care about us.”

Moses clenched his fists and cried out to the Lord, “What can I do with these people? They’re ready to stone me!”

The voice of the Lord came into Moses’s mind, as unhurried as usual. “Walk out in front of the people. Take your staff, the one you used when you struck the water of the Nile, and call the elders of Israel to join you.”

Now they were going to get it. They’d pressed the Lord too far. The Lord was calling a judgment council and putting the people on trial for daring to challenge Him. And people would die. Because there would have to be deaths. What else could the result be for calling the Lord’s power and wisdom into question?

He sent Miriam and Aaron to gather the tribal elders, and then stalked through the crowd, pushing through with his staff in front of him, no longer even trying to answer the people.

The Lord told him to go the rock at Mount Sinai, so that’s where he headed with the judgment council. They each assured him that they’d been trying to keep their tribe in line. What could he say to that except, “It’s too late. They’ve pushed the Lord too far. He told me that he’d stand on the rock at Mount Sinai. I don’t know what He’s going to do to them from up there.”

“Not quite.” It was the Lord. “I said that I will stand before you on the rock at Mount Sinai.”

Moses stumbled. “But it’s the accused who stands before the judgment council.”

The Lord was silent.

“You–” Moses could hardly get out the words. “You will stand before the council and let the people make their charge against you?”

The tribal elders gasped when they heard his side of the conversation.

Moses panted at the effort to keep his fear in check. “My brothers, the Lord will allow Himself to stand before the judgment council, under the accusation of abandoning his people.”

This was getting worse and worse. The people were not supposed to put the Lord on trial. And the Lord wasn’t supposed to agree to it. They had all watched as the Lord moved the waters of the sea for them and then swamped the Egyptian army. What would He do for this offense? Would He pull down the mountains on top of them? Strike them down with a sickness?

Finally, Moses and the elders were there. They sat between the rock and the people, unsure of how to proceed, afraid to look at each other or at the people.

“Strike the rock with your staff,” the Lord said.

Moses pushed himself up and thought about bargaining with the Lord, begging for mercy for His people, but dread pooled in his gut. The people were beyond his help.

“Moses.” The Lord’s voice was so … gentle. “When you strike the rock, water will come out. The people will get their drink.”

This was even more confusing, but if Moses had learned nothing else, it was to do what God told him to. He grabbed his staff with both hands and swung it behind him. In the heartbeat when the staff was poised in the air, right before he brought it against the rock, he heard the people scream in panic. He put all his power behind his swing and almost broke the staff against the rock.

Water gushed out and drenched Moses. He stood under its stream and cried — whether it was in gratitude, in relief, in shock, in awe, he didn’t know. When the tension washed away, he stepped to the side and watched the people. Many of them had turned away from the rock and tried to run, but the crowd was too thick. In the confusion and arguing, few people noticed what happened. The elders had to wade out and tell them, “Turn around. The Lord has given us water.” “Come and drink your fill.” “Bring your jugs and water skins.”

Some people dipped their fingertips in the water and tentatively licked them as if it might be poison. As the water filled the dry river bed that had been their path, others knelt in the middle and stuck their faces in while they drank. Some people danced and others wept. But there was more than enough water to revive everyone. Even the livestock.

When everyone was satisfied, Moses raised his staff one more time. The people quieted.

“Whatever this place used to be called, I am renaming it Massah and Meribah, because here is where we brought our complaint against the Lord. Against our charge, “Is the Lord with us, or not?” the Lord did not put us on trial for daring to accuse Him, nor did He crush us. He agreed to stand trial and his evidence is all around us. Here is the verdict of the council: He is with us! Glory be the name of the Lord!”

*****

This story found its germ in a sermon I heard this summer that unpacked the ancient legalese that I hadn’t recognized in the biblical record. Thinking about how radical a shift it was for God to agree to stand before the tribal judgment council fired up my imagination, and I wanted to play with unpacking the story, and taking more time to tell it than we get in the Bible. Also, I apologize that I do not have a credit for that amazing artwork — I’ve looked. If you know about the original, please drop me a line.

On Writing My Prayers

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

I’m thrilled to be doing my first guest post today, for my Renew and Refine Retreat for Writers friend, Emily Miller, over at emmillerwrites.com. I’m talking about the one spiritual practice I’ve managed to be consistent about: writing out my prayers. Regular readers of mine, I invite you to start here and click through to the rest of the post at Emily’s site. Readers who’ve come here from Emily’s site, I invite you to read this post (When Fear and Avoidance Mean You’re On the Right Track) with more details about how praying for compassion for my husband affected our marriage.

Whoever you are and however you got here — thank you for reading.

 

Thank you, Emily, not only for inviting me to talk about writing my prayers, but also for calling the series Spiritual Practices and not Spiritual Disciplines. I like the attitude of practice. As a spiritual director friend of mine likes to say, “That’s why we call them practices, because we’re not very good at them yet.”
I’m really not very good at being disciplined.

Ten or so years ago, I prayed through the Psalms. And then several years later, when God let me know I was acting like a child, he led me to read through the Jesus Storybook Bible. Both inspired sweet and holy times of prayer and reflection, but when each was finished, that was it; they were projects, not practices.

I’ve decided numerous times to pray every night before bed, but either the prayer would get me so charged up that I’d lose sleep or I’d fall asleep and lose prayer. Or my mind would follow one loosely connected path to another until I was in an imaginary interview with Terry Gross about the fabulous book I’d written, and prayer time lost to my daydreams of personal glory.

Determination to pray first thing in the morning was no better. It either cured the insomnia that woke me long before the alarm, or, if I managed to follow through, the children would get up earlier than I expected, and the amount of discipline it took not to snarl at them would sap my ability to stick with the prayer.

I prayed often, particularly when driving or doing laundry or awake in the middle of the night. But I resisted all attempts to be disciplined or intentional about my spiritual practices.

And then, in December 2010, a pastor friend suggested that I write my prayers down. You know, because I’m a writer. So maybe writing was meaningful to me and helped me process my world. D’oh.     keep reading

 

Flipping the servant worship switch

~ Natalie Hart ~ 4 Comments

[My point here is probably better made in the children’s message at the bottom of this post. I understand if you’d rather skip ahead to it.]

I have a confession to make: I have been a moody worshipper, grumbling and getting upset if two songs in a row left me cold. We’ve been at our new church for about a year, but even this winter, I could be in tears about music selection — and my husband was one of the people picking and leading music. I sometimes desperately missed the music at our previous church and that got in the way of my appreciation of other parts of the service. The music at the new church was (and is) good, and I love singing old hymns again, but I was wrapped up in my own sense of what “proper” worship was.

Something needed to change and, conveniently, and predictably, I didn’t think it was me.

And then this past spring I interviewed over a dozen ministers in order to write profiles on their churches (for this project). I asked each one the same five questions, one of which was, “What are your strengths as a congregation?” One of the answers changed my experience of worship — changed it utterly.

Bob Boersma of Providence Christian Reformed Church said that servant worship was one of their strengths. He characterized servant worship like this: “We ask our people to sing along [with songs they may not like] because someone else may need to sing it.” So the act of worship is not just personal, and it isn’t just communal — that is, we’re not each doing our own personal worship all in the same place. Worship as an act of service to the other people in the congregation is more intimate. It requires me to give up (some of) my fussiness about worship, to modify my need to get something out of every moment of the service and my right to be upset if every moment of the service doesn’t speak to me.

I found this glorious. And freeing. But also grounding. Even better, it helped connect me to the church that still felt foreign to me after seven months of involved membership.

It’s not like the servant worship switch being flipped made everything about worship wonderful. It didn’t. There are still songs I don’t like, songs that don’t feel particularly worshipful to me. But now I think to myself, “here’s a servant worship moment,” and I sing with my eyes open (otherwise, I close my eyes), looking around for those people who are getting their worship on, looking for the people singing with their eyes closed, or raising their hands, or bouncing their clapping baby. I listen for the voices of the older women singing their hearts out or the “Amen” from someone in the back. And in those moments, I can be glad that we’re singing that song I don’t like.

This explanation has been pretty good, but I think I said it best yesterday in my children’s message:

I’ve been thinking about children’s worship starting up again soon, and thinking about the songs we sing. Songs like the walls of Jericho song [to the adults, I noted that it was one of our crazier songs]. Some of you love, love, love it. And some of you are kind of scared by the craziness of it. And I was thinking about my 3 versions of Jesus Loves Me. Some of you love the sweet and quiet regular version and some kids love the louder rock and roll version. That happens in grown-up church, too.

I have a confession to make. Can we keep it just between us? That song we did two songs ago, [name of song], I don’t like it very much. I don’t.

But I sang it anyway.

Why do we sing songs that some people don’t like?

Let’s do an experiment. Grownups and kids, I’ll need your help on this. If you loved that song, if it made you joyful, it you felt the love of God for you or your love for God while you sang, raise your hand.

[a couple dozen hands went up]

Look at that. Look at all those hands of people who loved that song, who were really worshipping while they sang it.

So that’s why. But it’s only part of why we sing songs not everyone loves. Here’s the bigger reason.

[did the sign language for love and made the kids tell me what it meant]

That’s right. Love. We are all God’s family here, and because God loves us, we love each other and we want to serve each other. Jesus served the people he loved. Even though he was God, he washed his friends’ dirty, smelly, sweaty, disgusting feet. Serving someone by singing a song I don’t like is a lot more fun than washing their smelly feet.

So that’s why we sing a lot of different songs in children’s worship and in grown-up church: we’re a lot of different kinds of people who love a lot of different kinds of songs who feel and express the love of God in all kids of different ways — and because we love each other, we serve each other by sometimes singing things we don’t personally like. It’s servant worship, and it’s a lot more fun than washing smelly feet.

Let me note here that I am not suggesting that you stay in a church even when God is nudging you out just so you can be of service to the people there by participating in worship you can’t stand. And I’m not saying that all churches need to sing a variety of music — I’ve never met anyone whose spirit soared during every single song that was sung in their church.

I am suggesting that changing how you think about worship — in particular, changing how you think about singing songs you don’t like — can help you feel more connected to your fellow congregants, can give you joy even in the midst of songs you don’t like, can utterly change your experience of worship for the better. It did for me.

And now, because I’m talking about worship, you may commence yelling at me.

 

Magical Thinking Makes Me An Island

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

I am a hypocrite.

Lately, I’ve been writing about fear and about moving ahead despite fear. I’ve talked with one of my kids multiple times over the school year about magical thinking: as in, “you can’t just let your unfinished work pile up, hoping that it will go away and everything will resolve on its own.” I can honestly say that I’ve been doing things this year that give me high anxiety and the change and growth that have resulted have been really, really good.

Except in one case.

My daughter had 4 E.R. visits in from December to May, one of which involved an overnight stay, two of which involved IVs and X-rays, and one of which involved a broken bone. An avalanche of insurance paperwork and hospital bills have been arriving at our house. And I let them pile up.

After awhile, I let them pile up unopened.

My husband’s company had switched insurance companies two weeks before all this started, and the new company’s policies were incomprehensible to me. When my husband called about the first item that arrived, he was told to wait, that they’d pay that soon.

I took that too much to heart. Way too much.

In May, I made a binder for all the medical stuff, and I paid a few things from our flex pay account. I even discovered that we could pay bills based on the full amount that we’d set aside for the flex pay, that we didn’t have to only use what was in there at the time. Even so, I let the bills pile up. Unopened. As if everything would be fine. I’d been praying about it for months, praying that I would push through my anxiety and take a look at the bills, asking God to help me stop being such an idiot. I couldn’t sleep. For weeks, every time I woke up in the middle of the night, I’d lay there in a stew of anxiety and fear. And in the morning, I’d do nothing.

So this past Wednesday, I taped two pieces of paper together, opened the binder, opened every piece of mail, detailed everything in one big chart, tossed duplicate bills. And discovered that we had enough in the flex account to pay for everything. I felt chastened and relieved. And really, really stupid for having wasted so much time.

At least part of the relief was that I didn’t have to feel so alone anymore. Because that’s part of magical thinking: it keeps you alone. Alone and terrified. You can’t admit your magical thinking because as soon as you say it out loud to another person you realize how irrational it is and then your adult self will have to step in and do something about it — if you don’t, the person you said it to will step in. This is a lonely place to be.

I’ll have to confess this to the child I talked to about magical thinking, which should be good for both of us. And make us feel less alone.

Anyone have any magical thinking they want to confess? Feel free. You already know I’ll relate to it.

This was part of my participation in Lisa-Jo Baker’s Five Minute Fridays, wherein we write for 5 minutes about a common topic. This week’s word: lonely.

What a great concert does to a person

~ Natalie Hart ~ 4 Comments

The last time I went to a concert in a basement was 17 years ago in a grim bar on the eastern edge of the East Village, when my husband’s band, The Haints, went on at 2 a.m. to play to the 3 friends and 2 near-comatose strangers in attendance, all of us drinking $8 glasses of soured McSorleys. I think we all hated each other by the end.

This was the opposite of that show in every way.

Jason, Toby Hazlet and Gerko Tempelman

Friday, July 19, Jason Harrod and his traveling band – Toby Hazlet on the ukulele bass and providing nicely understated harmonies, and Gerko Tempelman on drums – played a garden concert in Chris Smit and Lisa Van Arragon’s basement. Rain earlier in the day left everything outside wet, so they moved it downstairs. A great decision. There were no distractions from the music in that limited space, so emotion could build and flow between and among us. I felt it as an audience member, and I hope we were feeding it back to Jason and the band.

He had an opening act, local 16-year-old singer-songwriter, Maddy Wiering. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I’ve known Maddy since she was 4 – the flutey little voice she had back in the days of minivan carpools has matured into a high and lonesome sound that draws in and holds on to the listener. Okay, more full disclosure: I asked my husband, a musician, how he’d describe Maddy’s voice, and “high and lonesome” was his answer.

Many of her songs are restrained in presentation, so you can really hear the lyrics, and appreciate the pathos of “Tough All Over,” which is about not being tough all over. But then she can strum her guitar harder and sing louder and wilder so we can join her in the crazier side of human relationships in “Crazy.” It was really fun to watch other musicians in the crowd nod along as she played, to hear them laugh to themselves when she got something so right. Check her out on SoundCloud. A fitting opener for Jason.

I love Jason’s voice. There, I’ve said it. It does something to the back of my neck, in particular, not quite shivers, not goosebumps, but that’s where I feel it. For the entire time he’s singing. Especially when he breaks out the falsetto. I just had to get that out.

Indulge me one more time. Jason stood in front of us with more command, more generosity, more comfort than I remember seeing from him in the past. He guided us on emotional journeys and we were happy to be led. I blame/credit his recent experience as a worship leader. I’ve seen this same change in another long-time performer; not quite enough of a sample to make for a full-blown theory, but close.

Now on to the show.

Even before he started singing, the mood in that basement was rather gleeful – we were all so happy to be there, even the chubby baby with squeezable legs sitting on his dad’s lap. Jason started with an oldie, “Siren Song,” which got our heads and toes bopping. In the intro to the next number about riding the subway, he confessed that his songs are generally about God, women, or geography, or a combo of all three. He was right; there was only one song that didn’t fit that description.

The third song was the first new one he played, a cool mix of monumental and granular imagery. “When I came down off the mountain, I was breaking like a wave,” to lyrics about particles of dust. And then in the middle of this fantasy, he pierces us: “Who’s going to love me today? Who’s going to calm me down? Who’s going to take me as I am? Who’s going to take me home?” This was the first of three times Rachel Laughlin leaned over another person to look at me long and hard before finally whispering, “I love that one.”

Then it was on to “Moon Mission,” the first single off the new album Highliner (give it a listen here). What seems, at first, like a straightforward song about the last man to walk on the moon turns into an exploration of the sadder and bleaker side of human experience: “I’ll be your sweet sailor up in the sky … There’s nothing for me down here.” This is something Jason does so well. At the end, Steve de Ruiter called out, “That’s a killer tune, man.”

I must add that opening act Maddy Wiering pulled a similar shift in her song, “The Girl With The Gorilla Tattoo.” It started out as a cheerful story song about a waitress in Nashville with some impressive tattoos, but then Maddy took it somewhere else with the observations that nobody knew her name or cared to hear her stories. Bodes well for her future songwriting.

By the end of Jason’s next song, we weren’t just appreciating a good line or a gorgeous falsetto or an intricate guitar solo (a more music-y person would’ve written more about that, because he’s got some chops, but I’m a word person, so that’s what I tend to focus on). The room hushed when he took out the harmonica for “The Messed-up Everywhere Blues.” The next phrase looks sort of wrong in print, but it’s the best way I can think of to describe us during the next song: we were feelin’ each other, and feelin’ him. The plaintive cry at the end, with his “Jesus don’t take my song away,” and the repeated, “you know I only play for you,” just got me.

When he sang “Carolina,” it was the first of a few times that I could hear people singing along – it’s hard not to for longtime fans. But they didn’t sing along very loudly. I call it “ghost harmony.” Just loud enough to hear it, but not loud enough that you get annoyed because you didn’t come to hear people in the audience sing (or is that just me who gets annoyed when the person in front of me sings louder than the person I came to hear?).

Jason introduced the next song as a straight-up prayer: “Chains” — “Take these chains from off my neck …Melt them down into something good.” One wouldn’t normally characterize a prayer this way, but in my notes, I wrote, “this is the shit.” In all caps. Also, “If my husband doesn’t do this song at church sometime, I’ll leave him.” Beth Skillen and I almost raised our hands as if we were in church.

I was still recovering from “Chains,” so I didn’t recognize one of my favorite Jason Harrod tunes until he started singing “My Mad Girlfriend.” I sat in a row with two other women above 35, each with somewhat passionate, emotionally intense natures, and it was a blast listening to this song together. Did I give a whoop at the line, “She’s so boss”? Yes. Yes, I did.

And that was just the first set, people.

I won’t exhaustively detail the second set (for fear of losing everyone), but it was just as wonderful. After “Kicking Mule,” it was a little more contemplative in tone than the first set, and marvelously intimate. All the lights were on in the basement, so Jason could see us clearly and we could see each other, appreciate each other’s reactions to each song, hear each called-out encouragement (enjoy Steve de Ruiter’s multicolored striped socks). Toby and Gerko added great energy to the songs and to the evening. We even found a few people to speak Dutch with Gerko and his wife Rachelle.

Big thanks to Chris and Lisa (and Moses) for hosting and to the musicians for giving us an experience. It was a great night. If you’re reading this and you haven’t seen Jason and Toby and Gerko yet: make plans to do so. Go here to see the rest of the tour schedule (many East Coast dates in August). And if you feel inspired to host them for a house concert: go for it. It was the kind of night where we all loved each other a little more by the end. I’m still smiling about it.