Wonderful

Drilling down to the 3rd thing

~ Natalie Hart ~ 10 Comments

Last week I complained that I couldn’t go to a writer’s conference I really wanted to go to. And then my husband insisted that I go. So I went. This is my attempt to articulate how monumental a gift the Writer Unboxed UnConference was.

The Don, Donald Maass, would not let us take the easy way. He insisted, over and over, that we not use the first metaphor, the first emotion. He would say, “Write down the dominant emotion your character is feeling in a particular moment. Now write down another feeling. And now another. Use this third thing.”

So I’m going to apply this technique to what was, without exaggerating, one of the best weeks of my life.

Yes, it was like summer camp, with its intense emotional connections, its sessions, its bonfires (aka Bedtime Stories). But without the mean girls, the peer pressure (although I *did* have my once-in-a-decade after-dinner cigarette), or the inflexibility of scheduling (nobody got in trouble for skipping a session).

Was it a mountain top experience? That gets at the transcendent feel of the week, but we spent time in the valley, too, grieving for writer friends who’d died and getting real about the struggles of being a writer.

It was a quest.

A heroic one, even.

It was not a quest to be published, or to find the right agent, or meet the right editor, or to practice our elevator pitch, or to learn about marketing and social media (although those were active concerns for many).

There was one overarching purpose: to learn how to become the best damn storytellers we can be. So even the well-published authors leaned towards the same goal as the unpublished. For this week, we were all learners and supporters of other learners. We focused on our path as writers. The presenters came to Bedtime Stories (when anyone could read from their work). They went to sessions. They didn’t stick to their own vaulted company, but sat at the bar with anyone, played poker with anyone who wanted to sit at the table. The published went to lunch with the unpublished and were genuinely interested in what the unpublished were writing — I know this because they asked follow-up questions and made comments that showed that they had listened to the answers. I’ve been to enough writer’s conferences to know that this was truly an UnConference.

There were trials, of course.

There were 5 sessions slots every day from Tuesday through Thursday (from 9 a.m. – 10ish p.m.), with 30 possible sessions (oh, the choices we were forced to make!) with one long workshop all day Friday. I took 51 pages of notes. And I have teeny writing.

21st Century Fiction epiphanies

Every day, I learned at least a dozen things to apply to my works in progress or to my life. I pretended to be one of my characters while I chatted with other writers who were pretending to be one of their characters, and I had to order garlicky hummus because that’s the only menu item my character would be comfortable with (and then I had garlic breath all day). This method acting/eating/writing session gave me some insights into my character that I would never have gotten otherwise. I thought about beginnings and middles and character arcs and secondary characters and emotional impact and throughness and metaphor and woundedness and voice and a thousand other things, getting all wound up. And then a session reminded me to set appropriate goals, to reframe, to tell myself useful fictions, to not externalize my validation, and to practice patience and impatience simultaneously. And to “write fucking more.” I needed all of it.

Right before lunch on Friday, I was on the verge of tears, just because I was so exhausted. But then The Don asked a question about me and what I learned at the conference that launched something in my brain and one of my works in progress became clear to me in a way that would never otherwise had happened. It will be a deeper and tighter book because of that one moment of almost losing it.

 And then there’s the making of a symbol.

Since entering the chaos of parenting, I’ve become a very neat person (clean is another story). After being perfectly happy to live in a tornado of books and clothes spread so thickly on my teenage bedroom floor that mice would take up residence every autumn, I now need a peaceful environment — my home must combat the tumult of my life. Even my kitchen cabinets are visions of order. Like is always with like, lined up or stacked in the same positions. Heck, I even arrange the plastic kid snack plates into rainbow color order. As a result, I do not like one-offs in the kitchen. They mess up the organization and the visual calm. I do not like dishes with logos and words. If I receive one as a gift, it goes to Goodwill pretty quickly.

But the first morning I was in my own home since the conference, I cradled in my palms the generous curves of my one-off mug with the conference logo, and cried.

Cried, not because I was happy, or missing people, or tired (although I was all those things), but because I was full. Am full.

Because I loved the people, because I liked how I was while I was with them, because my brain was a puddle on the floor from all the work it was doing, because we listened to each other’s stories (both the fictional and the personal), because we grieved and we laughed, because we quested together — because of all these things, this one-off logo mug is now a symbol of all the deep and silly things that happened. I will use it every day and it will be full of glorious meaning.

The story is the heirloom

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

I have a folder called Family Stories. It started with my Oma’s funeral. I’d gone around that day, asking people to remember the sayings she had, “You haff to laff,”  “It comes handy-in,” “It’s an unicum [oonickum],” “I simple cannot,” and, to her own children when they were growing up, “Act normal and you’re acting crazy enough” (except said in Dutch). I wrote down every remembrance, every story, every detail someone told me.

And I’ve done that ever since, whether with my family or my husband’s, because I know that if I don’t scribble them down somewhere, I’ll forget. There are stories that stick with me, like the Nazi soldiers coming to the house for my Opa (because he worked in the Resistance) and his sister-in-law dressing him in a lace cap and nightgown, plunking him in a rocking chair and handing him a baby, and then showing the Germans around the house, “See. No men here. Just women and babies. Women and babies.” They bought it, and he was safe. That one’s so good I’m putting it in the second David and Saul novel, with David getting the nightgown and baby treatment. Or one my father’s earliest memories: he was playing outside during the war and the air raid siren came on, and his mother (and nanny?) screamed for him to come inside, but he wouldn’t, because he was only two, and it was fun outside.

There is one story that I’ve been wanting to write about in a more formal way for a long time: the time my mother’s house burned down when she was 6 and she managed to salvage something both silly and important and everyone laughed at her. catapult* magazine gave me that opportunity, and I’m grateful to them for it.

Even in the writing of that piece, I found out things I didn’t know before. I had to call my mother for clarification and learned that the outhouse she used until she was 7 was a two-holer, and that the Sears and Spiegel catalogues were the toilet paper of choice. Also that they moved into the basement of the new house the year after the old one burned down, and lived in just the basement for a few years while her Uncle Herm built the house above them, as they could afford it. This was apparently a common way to build houses back then.

Don’t get me wrong, I love every item I have from prior generations, and I recently made clear to my dad that I don’t want him to give away their art after he and my mother have died (which won’t be for many, many, many years). But the real heirlooms are the stories, the reminders of different ways of life, of the fears and struggles and triumphs of those who eventually made me (and my husband). The fun stories and the not-so-fun ones. They’re all important.

So I’ll keep jotting down the details as my family members let them slip. I’ll keep stealing good stuff for my fiction. And I’ll keep turning them into more formal pieces, so I can learn even more. ETA: Since publishing this, I learned two things I got wrong — there were 5 kids in the house, and she only had to run 1/4 mile to the neighbor.

When my mother was six, in the summer of 1947, her home burned down. Her mother was in the barn, and the four kids were in the house. After the four-year-old noticed fire licking out of the wood-stove pipe in the kitchen, my mother and her older sister got the kids out of the house and then ran a mile to the neighbor’s — he didn’t have a phone, either, but he had a car and could drive to a phone.

The fire department doused the flames, but the house was a total loss.

Their neighbors followed the truck, gathering to commiserate. Once the ruins cooled, the kids took turns dashing into the house to see what they could salvage, tossing the spoils on the grass. My mother was very proud of one thing she managed to save: my grandmother’s ratty house shoes.

Everyone burst into laughter, leaving her mortified and confused.

Please click here to read the rest.

 

Sunday Ramblings

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

On this lovely Sunday, I begin 3 days of kid-free existence. I feel rather giddy about it. And also rather nappy. In fact, a nap may very well interrupt my writing of this post. Which might make this the best kind of Sunday afternoon, except for the problem that I often wake up crabby — scratch that, I always wake up crabby.

The Sunday afternoon nap remains an appealing daydream, despite the fact that I’m a terrible napper. Not only do I always wake up crabby, but I also have to trick myself into sleeping. Even then it mostly doesn’t work. Just now, for example. I had This American Life on the radio and all those mellow voices were lulling me. My eyes were getting heavier and heavier. My behind was sinking deeper into the couch as my muscles relaxed. I put the computer down, but kept the radio on, and curled up, listening and not listening, trying to distract my brain.

No go.

My brain whirls and whirls. So there was no nap.

Just rambling.

* The telling moment

It happens in fiction all the time — that one little moment, comment, reaction — that tells the truth of who someone is or how healthy a relationship may or may not be. But we don’t always gets to see one in real life. Here’s one I heard about recently.

A young man liked a young woman. Happily for him, the young woman liked him back. But they were taking it slowly, making sure they had a solid foundation of friendship before taking things in a romantic direction. Truth be told, this was the first young woman to like the young man back.

Both of them had recently read The Fault In Our Stars and were looking forward to seeing the movie when it came out. The young man’s mother told her son about something a friend of hers had done: seen an advanced screening, with the author, during the movie, they were served risotto during the dinner in Amsterdam scene, and after the Q&A, they all went out in the parking lot and egged a car. She told her son, thinking that he’d get all jealous about her friend meeting John Green and doing that cool stuff.

But, no.

The young man turned a serious face to his mother and asked about the throw-up scene, and how graphic it was, because the beloved young woman had a problem with seeing other people throw up, and he’d like to be able to warn her about it, so she’d be more comfortable seeing the movie.

[sigh]

What a lovely glimpse of her son as a boyfriend.

* Scope for imagination:

A Facebook friend linked to this article this week. It was an interesting piece about a subculture I’d never heard about: young women in southern Guangdong province in China who could choose to become “self-combed women” rather than marry. Now, it’s not like they could then go to university and live a fabulous and independent life. They had to leave their families and work hard, either in factories or as servants in others’ households. They were illiterate. They were expected to send most of their income to their family of origin. But the women made money, and their contributions to the household were worthy of thanks — these were unusual in that culture in the 1800s through the mid-1900s. Women who entered (either by choice or by force) their husband’s family’s household would have had to endure whatever kind of treatment the husband and his family deemed their right, and they’d have to serve their parents-in-law with no thanks (because they were merely doing what was expected). Also, the self-combed women were expected to remain celibate. They were independent of the marriage system, but still bound by cultural norms; able to choose, but not have many choices.

The thing that has my imagination all fired up is the name itself, “self-combed.” By deciding not to marry, they wouldn’t get to do the pre-wedding ritual when their mother would comb their hair into a bun to symbolize their transition from single girl to married woman. They combed their own hair into their own bun.

When I looked into this more, I found a contemporary visual artist, Man Yee Lam, who sees her own life in the complicated story of the self-combed women: “‘Self-Combing Women’ is an exploration of my relationship with my ancestral roots, and of my life-long battle between my independence as a woman and my experience of subjection to cultural patterning.” Click here to see the piece she made of a woman inside a silk cocoon (the self-combed women often worked in silk industry factories).

* Do I miss my children when we’re apart?

I won’t keep you in suspense: no. For the most part, I do not pine, I do not ache, I am not distracted by their absence. When they’re gone, I am glad they are on whatever adventure they are on, with whichever friends they are with. And if I’m the one who’s gone, I’m generally consumed by whatever adventure I’m on, with whichever friends I am with.

This is in the forefront of my mind these days because my 15-year-old son is off in Europe for 2 1/2 weeks with his best friend and said best friend’s mother. In the week he’s been gone, I’ve had one teary moment — right after we’d finished a FB chat. We talked via Skype this afternoon, and there was no teariness. He’s having way too much fun, seeing way too many amazing things.

And, as I said at the beginning, I’m giddy because my daughter is camping with a friend and her family for 3 days. It’s fun for me and my husband to have the house to ourselves, to have cut in half the needs and schedules we have to negotiate. This time, I’m not even racing to paint the kids’ rooms, as I was the last time we had them both gone for days at a time.

There are many different kinds of mothers, and I guess what I’m doing here is claiming my own style, my own way of loving my children.

* I must confess

That most of my ramblings these past few days revolve around bad words and unkind thoughts that I aim at my neighbors and their love of all-day and middle-of-the-night fireworks, particularly those booming M-80s.

Netherlands Lion* And also Hup Holland Hup

I’ve been enjoying The Netherlands’ performance in the World Cup, spending lots of money at the Dutch store, eating more dropjes in the last month that I normally do in two years.

 

SO, what are you rambling about this Sunday?

 

The Natural Angle of Repose

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

My parents recently had some landscaping done. An area to the side of the house that butted right up against the dune was being unsuccessfully held back with a tier of railroad ties; sand always dribbled onto the walkway, except when it rained, when there would be serious erosion.

So their landscape guy recommended that they get rid of the railroad ties and find the natural angle of repose.

The Natural Angle of Repose
the dune’s natural angle of repose

Which is my new favorite phrase.

The natural angle of repose is the gradient at which the material naturally settles and becomes stable. How do you find said angle? You send people to the top of the dune to pour sand down the hill until it stops sliding onto the walkway. Then they added some plantings and mulched it. My parents have had a number of good rains since then, and there has been zero erosion, despite how steep that angle of repose is.

The thing I love about that phrase isn’t so much its landscaping use, but its personal one.

Aren’t we all trying to find our natural angle of repose? To find the arrangement of our lives that will be stable enough to allow us to thrive without depleting our resources, no matter what conditions are thrown at us.

And there’s no way for that other than to live and try things out. Just as different materials become stable at different angles, someone else’s angle of repose won’t be the same as yours, so you can’t just copy what others do.

I feel like I’ve been holding back my personal dune with railroad ties for so long that it’s taking me ages to dribble that sand and find my natural angle. But I’m trying.

This is a bit of a funny post for me: I’ve got no words of wisdom, just a really cool phrase with lots of scope for imagination. And a wish for you that you find your natural angle of repose.

 

 

 

Strip Away the Weirdness and You Get Good News

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

I have a confession to make: I’ve never read Revelation on my own. In fact, I’ve avoided it because it seemed like a book for Christian conspiracy theorists, numbers obsessives, and end-times enthusiasts — none of which I am. All those apocalyptic images of battles, beasts, horsemen, etc., are so distracting and confusing. Not to mention scary.

The Good News of Revelation, by Larry Helyer and Ed Czyewski is an antidote to all that.

The authors do not bend themselves backwards to try to make sense of those distracting images for the contemporary reader. They get down to the story basics:

Who were the people this was originally written to?

What was happening in their lives?

What did they need to hear from God?

How did Revelation give them what they needed?

I love drilling down to the core of a story, and I’ve found it so fruitful, in my own spiritual life, to use my imagination in concert with cultural research into what life was like for the people we read about in the Bible — this book was right up my alley.

Helyer and Czyewski begin each section of the book with a short story, each of which is told from the point of view of a different person who was involved in the writing, disseminating, or receiving of this communication from John. These were wonderfully grounding: a real person wrote Revelation, and real people read it and passed it along in spite of real threats to their personal safety. The stories ran the gamut from interesting to truly moving. The final one is my favorite: Lydia, whose husband was dragged away by Roman soldiers, poring over the scroll at night:

“As the rising sun made it easier to read the scroll in front of her, she traced her finger over the small letters once again. One particular line caught her eye every time, ‘He will wipe away every tear.’ She thought of the lonely nights crying by herself and those moments before bedtime where her boys cried out for their father. They didn’t feel safe. She didn’t feel safe. She didn’t know how much more she could take. While the details were vague about God’s new home for his people, she couldn’t stop reading about Jesus wiping away every tear. As good as that sounded for some day, she needed that now. She needed God to step in and deliver her. She needed God to protect and provide for her boys” (p.84).

Phillip’s response to her questions aren’t entirely satisfying, but he sums up the gist of the letter:

“Well, the point of the letter is that God is already victorious. We just don’t see it yet. However, there will come a day when God visibly rules. We don’t know what this New Jerusalem will look like, but the point is that Rome’s days are numbered. While we need to persevere for today, there will come a day when God will reward us with his presence and peace, wiping away every tear.”

All (what I think of as) the weirdness is in service to that basic message, that basic good news.

There is more to Revelation than that, of course. There are specific messages to the seven Asian churches about what they’re doing well and what they need to work on or root out of their congregations. There is prophecy, which the authors connect to the prophetic writing in the Old Testament and define as “inspired speech that appealed to the listeners to repent and to put their complete trust in the Lord;” it can reveal God’s future plans, but doesn’t necessarily give us a “blueprint of the future” (p.8). There is also apocalyptic writing that communicates the fight between good and evil via visions, symbols, and images that would be able to be decoded by those in the know, but opaque to outsiders — and that assured readers/listeners that not only will God win, but God already has.

One of my favorite writing teachers, Lisa Cron, says this about story: “Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution–more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on t0” (Wired for Story, p.1). In Revelation, John is given a heck of a story to tell the seven churches of Asia, with lots of flashy elements to get them to pay attention and to help them connect this story to stories they’ve heard before, but it is, at root, a story about what and who to hang on to, and encouragement to keep hanging on.

As I read The Good News of Revelation, other stories kept coming to mind: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson. Each of them, essentially, contains the message that there is evil, there will be difficultly, you will have to choose your path, evil will come at good over and over again, there will be pain and even death for you and those you love, it matters how you treat everyone, even those “lower” than you, good (and love) will eventually triumph. This is also the message of Revelation.

Please note that Helyer and Cyzewski do not make this connection; that’s on me. You see, I love those stories. Seeing echoes of them in Revelation may give me a way in to a book I’ve avoided. As will having (finally) read all the Old Testament prophets. As will having read The Good News of Revelation. At the glacial rate at which I’m reading through the Bible, I might be at Revelation by the end of the year; I’ll report back then.

The authors are running a Goodreads giveaway, or you can just go ahead and buy it: Amazon | Barnes & Noble.

Sometimes Fields Need To Be Fallow

~ Natalie Hart ~ 6 Comments
image courtesy of Darryl Smith via rgbstock.com

 

I messed up.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been “writing” (in my head) a post on being fallow. Because that’s how I’ve been feeling: like a field with tapped-out soil that’s being rested in order to be more productive later.

You see, I did what I said I’d do a few months ago and sought help for my depression. It has been a beautiful, beautiful thing. I’m sleeping (mostly). I’m not having random anxiety attacks. I’m present for my family. I haven’t visited TMZ.com even once. I have enough energy to make my kids do their chores.

But no writing. My drive and discipline seemed to vanish with my desperation.

I wasn’t stuck, just … still. Which made sense. I’d twisted myself into such a tight, unyielding corkscrew of disappointment and frustration over my writing that there wasn’t going to be a SHAZZAM when all was made okay in an instant. It would take time. And I’d have to decide — over and over — not to follow the comfy brain paths I’d worn in during my depressed period. I’d have to choose to put good nutrients back in my tired soil.

So I started reading again: romance, history, mystery, speculative fiction, science, memoir. While I painted and redid my kids’ rooms, I listened to audiobooks of two Harry Potter and three Rick Riordan novels.

I let myself be fallow, and didn’t pressure myself to write much more than Facebook posts and Goodreads reviews (including for The Good News of Revelation, a longer and more reflective review of which will be forthcoming in this space).

And I took some risks. The Japanese student who lived with us for 9 days was a good risk. Joining the adult “beginner” soccer league (that was not so beginner) was less so. Then there was signing up for the Festival of Faith and Writing.

Which was where I messed up.

Does anyone out there remember phones with cords? Do you remember winding the cord around itself until the only remedy was to unplug the knotted cord from the body of the phone and hold it so the receiver dangled? And when you did that, it’d slowly untwist at first, but then it’d get faster and faster? (If this is not in your memory banks, visualize a figure skater doing a tight spin that speeds up until he or she is just a blur.) Well, if all my earlier soil restoration strategies were the slow untangling of the cord of my frustration (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?), then the Festival was a giant pile of soil conditioner followed by a glorious rain that spun my phone receiver around like crazy. So that I no longer feel fallow.

I’d been so wanting to write a non-triumphalist narrative, to write about being fallow while in the midst of it. But, being fallow, I waited too long. And seeds were sown and fertilized this past weekend. Good seeds. Good fertilizer.

Because it’s how God rolls, this even fits with my theme for the year — softheartedness. The phrase that the New Living Translation renders as “Plow up the hard ground of your hearts,” appears as “Break up your fallow ground” in the New Revised Standard Version (Jeremiah 4:3).

That isn’t to say that I’ve already got a healthy crop growing. It’s not like I’ve forsaken online Boggle, or severely limited my time on Facebook, or even reduced the number of blogs I read (if anything, after the Festival, I have more). But I’ve written this, and actually have ideas and plans for more. I’m moving forward with submitting It Is You and revising its sequel again.

Resistance is already dialing up to meet my challenge. After months of waking up at 5:30 a.m., last night I decided to take inspiration from Anne Lamott and do some writing before the craziness of the day started. Resistance got me up at least 8 times over the course of the night so I’d be too tired and already too harried to write. Did it work? No. But I’ve got to give props to a good attempt. Now I have to keep at it until I wear new habit grooves in my brain.

Although I’m sorry I didn’t get you my in-the-midst post, I’m grateful for my four fallow months and for the Festival of Faith and Writing. I needed them both.

How is your field? Fallow? Fertilized? Highly productive?

Compassion for Jesus?

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

In 1988, I did a bad thing. Well, I didn’t think it was bad, but the fact that other people did made it all the more delicious.

I went to see the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Kind of funny now, I know, but back then, during the height of the furor around the movie, it felt naughty. It wasn’t playing in the conservative city where I attended a Christian college, so a friend and I drove for an hour to see it, giddy with anticipation of the blasphemy to come.

The movie did not disappoint. A Jesus who waffled, unsure of who he was and what his message was? Check. Sexual overtones with Mary Magdalene? Check. Extensive fantasy scene in which he comes off the cross, doesn’t die for our sins and even confronts later Christians with his physical, non-dead presence? Check.

I giggled in glee at the prospect of writing my review for the school paper.

But then there was one scene that didn’t go for shock value, and that one scene made me reevaluate not just the movie, but my appreciation of Jesus’ story.

The Garden of Gethsemane…

Please click here for the rest of this post, part of the Stations of the Cross series hosted by Emily McFarlan Miller.

Blessed Are The Listeners

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I recently told the story of The Wise Man and The Foolish Man (who build houses on rock and sand, respectively) in children’s worship, but forgot to add the line I wanted to include at the end:

In Jesus’s story, the wise person is the one who listens and follows, not the one who knows the most. Which means that even you (kids) can be wise, because anyone can listen to what Jesus says and follow it.

It isn’t a perfect fit, because “the one who listens and follows” is like the wise man who builds his house upon the rock, which he presumably does because he knows that rock makes for a firmer foundation than sand. The wise person has to know who to listen to, but once that’s in place, the wise person is the one who listens for and listens to the voice of God, and follows it.

Not the smartest person in the room. Not the one with the degree. Not the one who makes all kinds of pronouncements about what you should and shouldn’t do. Not the one with the “best” theology. A wise person can be and do and have those things, but those things aren’t necessarily a sign of wisdom. Nor are they sufficient as a proof of wisdom.

Listening and following are.

There is some of this in Proverbs, too. I’ve written before about how crabby Proverbs makes me (Spotten on Wisdom), but I appreciate this:

“But the wise, when rebuked, will love you all the more. Teach the wise, and they will be wiser. Teach the righteous, and they will learn more” (9:8-9, NLT).

The wise person is teachable.

Again, not the most knowledgeable, but the one who learns when faced with their unpleasant realities.

Proverbs 10:17 People who listen when they are corrected will live, but those who will not admit that they are wrong are in danger.

I think of King David, a man with many unpleasant realities, but who God called a man after His own heart. When Nathan confronted him with his sin with Bathsheeba and Uriah, his response was simple, direct, and unescapable: “I have sinned against the Lord” (1 Samuel 12:13). Again, when he was fleeing the son who was trying to usurp the throne and a relative of Saul yelled curses at him, instead of agreeing to let his soldiers shut the man up, he says, “My own son is trying to kill me. Shouldn’t this relative of Saul have even more reason to do so? Leave him alone and let him curse, for the Lord has told him to do it” (2 Samuel 16:11).

On the other side, I think of poor King Saul who, when he went about business as usual, was smacked down by Samuel:  “What is more pleasing to the Lord: your burnt offerings and sacrifices or your obedience to His Voice? Obedience is far better than sacrifice. Listening to Him is much better than offering the fat of rams” (15:22). Saul never really “got” that lesson, and lived out his kingship in paranoia and fear.

“If only you would listen to his voice today!
The Lord says, “Don’t harden your hearts…” (Ps. 95:7-8a)

Here again my theme for the year: softheartedness. We (you and me, both) cannot truly listen if our hearts are hardened to what God has to say. I daresay we cannot be wise if we are hardhearted.

Can we expand this listening as wisdom idea to encompass not just God, but God’s children — our families, friends, spouses, people we love, people who make us uncomfortable, people we disagree with, people who are different from us? I think we can. After all, it’s usually through our relationships that we are forced to confront our unpleasant realities. God doesn’t only communicate with us through the Word, but also through other people. How can we be teachable if we don’t have a listening attitude? How can we have soft hearts to God and hard hearts to God’s children?

What if we got better at listening than telling? At asking more questions instead of crafting tighter arguments?

Listening is intimate. We have to quiet our egos, our need to be right, our need for other people to acknowledge how right we are. Being teachable means that we know we need correction. We have to fight against our natural urge to defend ourselves. And then there’s the following. Being wise is not an intellectual state. We have to live out our softheartedness with other people and their unpleasant and glorious realities. These things are the heart of wisdom.

Moreover, these things are the fuel for the louder things we usually associate with wisdom: The demand for justice for the poor, the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the debtor — all those who are considered “at risk” in or are ground down by our culture. The perceptive analysis of a state of affairs, whether in your own or someone else’s life, or in the life of the wider church, nation, or world. The call for us all to be more faithful and loving followers of Jesus.

Wisdom is complicated: listening and speaking, being teachable and teaching, all while softheartedly following God.

I’m writing this to, at the very least, remind myself to pursue the heart of wisdom and let anything I say, any argument I make, grow from its roots there.

 

 

More Than We Can Ask or Imagine

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

Today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite Bible verses, but first, we’re going to talk about this.

What can we do with a mandarin orange? We can eat it. We can make it into juice. We can put that juice into muffins. Maybe we can even toss it in the air and catch it. Really talented people might even be able to juggle a bunch of them at the same time. Can you imagine anything else we can do with it?

How about this … can you imagine it as a lamp?

First, cut the peel around the equator and loosen it all the way around.

 

When you peel the halves away, try to keep the center thingy attached to one of the halves, but if you can’t manage it, you can pluck it out and stick it back onto one of the halves.

Now, mostly fill the half with the “wick” with oil (olive oil, canola oil, any household oil) and light the wick. It might take a few tries, especially if the wick is too high above the surface of the oil.

Look at that. I made a mandarin orange into a lamp. Did you think I could do it? Is this what you imagined it would look like?

This orange lamp reminds me of … me. When I was your age, I was really, really shy. I would’ve been too shy to come up in front of church in front of everyone to listen to a children’s message — just like some of you have been, just like some kids who are sitting with their grownups right now.

But here I am. Up front. Not just listening, but talking. And sometimes dancing. And doing it happily. I couldn’t have imagined that when I was a kid. I don’t know that I ever even asked God to help me be better at being in front of people. But God kept giving me gifts and passions and starting me out small and building me up until here I am.

So here’s the Bible verse, from Ephesians 3, verse 20 (from The Message):

God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.

That was true for me. And I know it’ll be true for you.

Because I could turn this mandarin orange into a lamp and I’m not very amazing, but God is totally amazing. I wonder what amazing things he’s going to do with you as you grow up….

I have one more thing to show you. First, I have to cut a hole in the other half of the mandarin orange to make a lid.

Look what happens when I put the lid on.

Did you know that the peel had all these little circles? They were invisible before, but now we can see them.

That reminds me of me again. When I was your age, I had no idea I could dance. I didn’t even want to dance. I wasn’t taking lessons or anything. But as I got older, that changed, and I discovered I loved dancing and I could to it and I did it more and more, in classes and then in church, until it became a big part of how I serve and worship God. I didn’t know it was there … but God did.

I wonder what’s already inside of you that you have no idea about … but God does.

I wonder what God imagines for you.

I can’t wait to see.

This is the text of the children’s message I gave at my church on January 5, 2014. 

 

 

One vulnerable risk led to my favorite Thanksgiving

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

I apologize ahead of time to my families: my favorite Thanksgiving was not with you. While I’ve had some lovely 4th Thursdays in November with you — eaten great food (including my triumph of a turkey last year), laughed, and even heard some good lines that have lived on (“You’re not my uncle, you’re just a random person,” and “Dong Wong’s thongs,” among others) — the Thanksgiving that shines the warmest in my memory was one from our early married, New York City, days.

It was our second non-family Thanksgiving. After we got married, the plan had been to spend Thanksgiving with one side and then Christmas with the other. It took only one season of that for us to realize how nuts that was, and we spent the November holiday in New York, with our friends. I know it was the second one, because I was working for a college textbook company, not the sexual-harrassing-stockbroker I worked for after quitting grad school.

On Wednesday, at the very end of the day, after everyone with clout was already gone and it was just recently-hired assistants and other down-in-the-pecking-order folks left, one of my co-workers approached my low wall. I don’t remember his name (because I’m a terrible person*), so let’s call him Guy. Let’s say it in our heads in the French pronunciation so it sounds less generic: Gee (still hard-g, people).

He spoke quietly, so I had to lean across my desk to hear him. His Thanksgiving plans had fallen through so he was wondering whether I had room at my celebration. We were friendly, but not particularly friends. What he had done was so vulnerable, so risky, that I immediately said there was room, even though the meal was not at my house and none of the other people knew him. A few minutes later, a mutual work friend told me the real deal: he’d planned to go to one of the editor’s houses, but the editor’s spouse had just found out/figured out that said editor had been having an affair with a co-worker (not Guy); Thanksgiving was no longer going to be a cozy, welcoming affair, and Guy was disinvited.

The place was in Williamsburg before it was gentrified, in a warehouse just a couple of blocks from the East River, in a neighborhood of warehouses. There was often a semi-truck rig idling outside. This was not a fancy converted warehouse, so get the visions from Dwell Magazine out of your heads. I was the only female person there. There were old rock-and-roll-band friends of my husband, one of the first friends I’d made after moving to NY for grad school, possibly another guy who lived there and maybe a friend of his, my husband, me, and Guy. The guys were in charge of all the food except for the pumpkin chiffon pie (a pie I bring every year, wherever I am; it is a ridiculous amount of work, but it is that good).

I may have had a moment or two of horror at how little cooking had been done when I got there, but, for once, I went with the flow. I believe I drank enough wine that I didn’t get too hangry (so hungry I was angry). One friend had recently bought a lovely and simple mezzaluna in Chinatown, and I happily rolled it back and forth over bunches of herbs. I tried really, really hard not to get all take-over-y in the kitchen. Not sure how successful I was, but I tried.

And laughed. My main memory of that day was of warmth and of laughter. We’d been at it awhile when Guy arrived (probably with more wine), so he got a good welcome. Not sure if we actively commiserated with his sucky situation or just folded him into the festivities, but the cooking and snacking and drinking went on for hours. This group of guys sometimes had some tension (anyone who’s been a band can probably relate), but I think having Guy there diffused all that; we were all our best selves, coming together for him.

Then we ate. And ate. It was all so delicious. After dinner we played the dictionary game — someone chose a word out of the actual dictionary and we all came up with definitions, which we shared and voted on before finding out what the real def. was. It was raucous. At the end of the evening we went for a walk by the East River. Happily, the molasses smell from the nearby sugar factory overwhelmed any other East River odors. We stayed until the frigid wind blew through our remaining alcohol haze.

I smiled the whole way home on the subway. Actually, probably not. It took 45-60 minutes to get to Astoria from Williamsburg. But it was still good.

* It should be noted that my husband’s memory for names is so awesome that it’s almost a superpower, yet he can’t remember this guy’s name, either.

If things aren’t too hectic where you are, I’d love to know about your favorite Thanksgiving.