wondering

Wherein I am sarcastic to God and God is good to me

An image of the cover of The Giant Slayer by N A Hart with a quote superimposed on top. How long would it take? A few days? Until the new moon? Could Adonai keep him in suspense for a whole season?
~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

One of my favorite moments in The Giant Slayer is when young David, having just been anointed by Samuel, who won’t tell him why, wonders,

How long would it take? A few days? Until the new moon? Could Adonai keep him in suspense for a whole season?

It’s adorable. His disbelief that God might make him wait a whole season.

Of course, it’s not nearly so cute when God is making me wait.

Back in November 2021 I was at a retreat at The Transforming Center. It was a gift to the staff and church leaders from my boss and pastor who was about to retire. And it truly was a gift. After a year and a half of doing ministry during COVID, I needed a retreat. They actually gave us time to listen to what God might be trying to say to us–like, hours, not just a token 10 minutes before a session. 

One of the best things I did there was grieve: grieve what COVID stole from me, from all of us, grieve the upcoming loss of my pastor. I needed a good cry and I got it. The retreat gave me the space and time to get out of management mode so I could recognize what emotions I needed to process, and then begin to process them.

But then I sensed that God was promising me rest–not just rest for that day, but capital-R Rest. My response,

That’s adorable.

Other than those few days, I would get no chance for rest in the near future. In fact, I knew that the near future would be busier than ever. What a hilarious thing for God to promise me.

With the pastor retiring and me on the celebration committee, I’d be going full steam ahead on all the party plans as soon as we got back, and that was on top of my normal 5 part-time jobs. And then once he retired, I’d be on the transition team tasked with searching for and calling a new pastor. And the children were finally coming indoors for ministry so there was extra COVID-planning and -proofing to do. And the middle school youth group was finally going to start up. That was just what I knew. I didn’t anticipate that fewer people would return to church and that even fewer would want to come back to volunteering so finding people to do ministry things would become even more torturous. Or that the worship director and associate worship director would leave the church. That more and more and more responsibility would fall into my hands.

Jim Gaffigan tells a great joke about what it’s like having 5 children: “Imagine you’re drowning. And then someone hands you a baby.” Here’s a church-staff-coming-out-of-COVID version:

Imagine you’re doing everything normal plus extra to try to connect everyone virtually and hold the church together. And then some people come back and are so excited for what you were doing and so glad to be there, but you wind up with more to do and nothing taken away. And the thing is that you love these people. They are your church family. You know they’ve had an exhausting pandemic, too, so you don’t want to burden them or ask too much of them. So you shoulder it yourself.

I began to see that a new job could be part of God’s promised rest. The end of July 2022 I traded one part-time job for a full-time job with benefits. The end of December I left my church, my denomination, and two more of my part-time jobs (the stress of which brought me 10 additional pounds and three vertigo attacks in 6 weeks). I’ll free myself of one more tiny job by the spring, and I’ll keep one that is faith and justice related and only a couple of hours a month.

It took 14 months since God promised me Rest for me to reach the conditions that would make it possible. I am so grateful.

But here’s the thing I’ve realized: I’ve been running on adrenaline, in emergency survival mode, since the three police officers walked up my porch steps to arrest my now-ex-husband for a sex crime. Over 7 years ago. That’s why I managed COVID so well — I was already in a state of emergency, so I could just fold that in.

I know how to escape, chill out, have fun. But capital-R Rest? No idea. I had a tiny taste of it last week on Tuesday evening and I cried.  

How long until I re-learn Rest? How long until I step out of the high-alert pathways? Until I no longer constantly clench my jaw, my stomach, my glutes, my legs? Until my left eyelid stops twitching? My heart stops randomly beating hard?

A few days? A month? A whole season?

That’s adorable. I think it’s going to take a long time.

Confusion and Curiosity

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been wondering about confusion and curiosity.

A few days after Christmas, the adults on my Hart side got together at my parents’ for dinner and a movie my parents adore: The Tree of Life. My father, especially, loves this movie. He’d seen it three times already, and will see it at least another three. He loves it so much and finds it so deep and affecting that he wants to show it to everyone he knows.

I did not have the same reaction. To put it mildly.

I was alternately bored, confused, irritated, interested, annoyed, impatient, analytical. I spent the entire movie in my own head, and not in any of the characters’ heads. I didn’t experience the story. I observed it. This is not what I prefer. I like story. I learn through story. And Tree of Life is not interested in storytelling.

But that’s not what got me wondering. It was our discussion afterwards, in which I was (see Beginnings for my admission) too negatively passionate. My dad was making a point, based on brain research, that when we are presented with something confusing and tense, our emotions are engaged, to which I may have screeched, “What?!”

Because, for me, when I’m confused, my emotions disengage, and I become skeptical about everything. And if I don’t trust the artist/thinker to lead me out of the confusion, I turn off almost completely.

However, what he said is close to standard writing advice: there should be an overarching story question that fuels the story; when the question is resolved, the story is over. In addition, there should be lots of minor story questions, in service to the overarching one, to keep the tension, and the reader, hurtling towards the end. In fact, I’m organizing the David and Saul story into three books according to this advice. Book 1: Why did Samuel anoint David? Book 2: When and how will David become king? Book 3: Will David be a king after God’s own heart?

This led me to wonder about the differences between confusion and curiosity. Imagine the body language of each of those states. A person curious about something leans forward, their face is open, they’re driven forward. A confused person is frowning, their arms might be crossed, which hunches the shoulders in. Confusion is a state someone is in. Curiosity leads a person to inquire and investigate.

To be fair, my dad explained himself better in a follow-up email:

The book I referenced was Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman. “Fast” thinking is intuitive, subconscious thinking and “slow” is rational, conscious thinking.  A very good book – full of counter-intuitive findings.

What I recall saying is something to the effect that we are more fully engaged, more alert and more attentive when a situation activates both types of thinking. For example, the Tree of Life film operates on the intuitive level through music and picture. But if it only operates on that level, we might fall asleep. By adding material that puzzles us and motivates slow thinking, we are more attentive, more alert and more engaged.

I can get behind that. With one caveat. Like with everything else, people have differing thresholds for stimuli. My extroverted husband is energized by crowd situations that overwhelm or exhaust me. My physicist brother-in-law understands things I can’t even begin to conceive. And the line wherein curiosity shifts to confusion, wherein a puzzle no longer interests, is shorter for some than for others.

In other words, in art, your mileage may vary.