Crushed Clothes in a Crowded Closet

My clothes closet is jammed with clothes accumulated over decades. There is an Austrian dirndl I bought in Vienna with my sister, shortened to a miniskirt length. A Mexican blouse from Olvera Street in LA, bought with Don the first time he came to Long Beach. A skirt with autumnal colours given me by my mum-in-law. A dress and trousers my sister made me (and she has been home with Jesus now for over 30 years). A Pendleton jacket my mother grew out of and handed on, and a paisley print jumpsuit with 60s neon colours she sewed for me in 1971. A USC sweatshirt of my Dad’s. The bridesmaids dress I wore to my sister’s wedding, and my own yellowing, spotting wedding dress. And much more of the same.

Clothes with tags of love. I may never wear most of them, but how do I give them to a charity shop?

Then there are other things in there. Clothes I once thought looked good, and which still look fine on a hangar but have lost their allure when I put them on. Clothes that are usually too warm-weathery for this climate. Clothes that are well and truly out of style. Big shoulders. Wide legs, or narrow legs. Clothes I still like. How do I give them away?

I was sitting in a talk at the Cherish conference last week, listening to an amazing, moving talk by Lisa Harper, when I suddenly had this random thought about my crowded closet, and how most things that come out of it look crushed.

During my lifetime I have gathered many memories of my short-comings, my sins, shaming me, making me stuff them into the closet of my soul. But they are still there, secreted away, largely forgotten but nonetheless cluttering my being, stifling my breath and honestly, crushing me.

Get rid of them, God says. Throw them all away. Give them to me and I’ll throw them away. I’ve forgotten about them and so should you.

Jesus came to bring us life to the full, where we can live in freedom and not be haunted by past mistakes and poor choices, by things we’ve done and things that were done to us.

I don’t know if I’m ready to be brutal with my physical clothes closet, but with the internal one – yes. Every time I hear that condemning whisper reminding me of something I could have done better, something I shouldn’t have said, something I shouldn’t have done, I’m going to yank it out and throw it away for good.

And breathe in the reviving breath of God.

Clear the Cache

I do thank God for the cheerful help and skills of my son Douglas. After the disappearance of my website, he has intervened and retrieved and liaised with the web hosting folks, and it is now up and running again. His last instruction to me on the subject was that I just needed to clear the cache on my laptop and I’d be able to see it again.

Pardon? I understand that the cache is the computer’s memory of where I’ve been surfing, but clearing it? Very pleased to report that I googled it, followed the directions, cleared the cache and voila! There was my website.

It strikes me that it would have been a handy button for God to have included in our design spec. How often our lives are blighted by memories of where we’ve been or what has happened to us: wouldn’t it be great if we could ‘clear the cache’ and move on? 

Or would it? However painful and appalling memories are, in the hands of our loving Father he can redeem something of good from them. I don’t say this lightly. I am sure I would struggle to believe that statement if I had been abused, trafficked, beaten, neglected ... But I still think it is true.

Jesus came to set the captive free, and that includes those who are imprisoned by a cache of dreadful memories. 

Praying that though our ‘caches’ can never be cleared, they would all be redeemed through the love of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, so that from those caches can sprout new insights, new compassion, new understanding, new strength.

Memories

Caught on camera. Laughing faces; striking sunsets; happy dogs; newborn babies; weddings; journeys; loved ones. 

Hours spent trawling through digital images and off to the shop to print out 400 – a small percentage of what I have digitally. I’ve been frightened into action by a dire prediction that millions of images would be lost forever once technology moves on and there are no longer the same means of capturing, storing, retrieving the files. Now I’ve purchased the photo albums and will spend a few more hours when they arrive, labelling and placing the pictures in their sleeves to be enjoyed later at our leisure.

The great thing about photo albums is just that. You don’t have to look at a screen to enjoy the memories captured in the pictures.

I have a bookcase of such memories. My mother has a bookcase of such memories. Priceless. Wonderful, though I do wonder what on earth we are to do with all these pictures when we move on outta here. Well, it won’t be our problem. One more decision for our kids to make...

It is so nice to have images of much loved faces. The Bible, of course, has no such images. It rarely even describes the physical characteristics of anyone so we have little more than guesses to know what Jesus looked like, or Paul, or David, or Moses. An odd sentence here or there might provide a clue but that’s it.

I like that. It universalises the people in the Bible and helps everyone to identify with them where they might not if appearances differed radically from one’s own looks. 

It’s amazing how many different shades of skin, of hair, of eyes...how many shapes of noses and lips and limbs...what variations in height and girth...there are, and yet we are all God’s children. We all are made in his image. His DNA runs through each one of us. 

Why, why, then, don’t we get along better? There shouldn’t be such discord, mistrust and downright hatred in the family of God. We have so many challenges in stewarding this wonderful planet, and it would make so much sense if we pooled our resources and figured out the best way to keep the Amazon rainforest, to save the tigers and elephants, to clean the air and purify the seas.  

Made in the image of God. My prayer is that we all begin to resemble him more and more each day, through the help of the Holy Spirit.

Palm Crosses

A Christian online resource has just emailed to offer to sell me palm crosses, and it startled me because once again, I find myself moving through Lent without giving it much thought. I wanted to make it more of a pilgrimage this year, but one thing or another intervened and I never got myself organised with focused Lenten meditations or readings, and already we’re looking ahead to Palm Sunday.

I do like the aspect in some church traditions of having liturgical seasons, so that every Sunday one is reminded by the colours of the hangings even, what season it is. Maybe I’m just flighty but I kind of need frequent reminders.

As a teenager, every Lent was marked by one or two sessions of folding palm fronds into crosses to give out on Palm Sunday. I folded so many over those years that I can still perform the intricate folding today. In Scotland palm fronds are hard to come by, so I used to use heavy paper to do it with children in Sunday school. But now you can buy them online and save yourself the bother of folding them.

My memories of the folding of the crosses was not that it was a tedious task but that it was fun to chat and laugh with others as we mindlessly got on with it. Like worries, which once shared are halved, so work like this seems less onerous if done in company.

I say mindlessly got on with it, but actually there were moments when the very act of folding the straight frond into a cross reminded me of just what Jesus did for me. It’s weird that Christians have a symbol which was an instrument of torture, but that symbol means so much. 

Jesus took up the cross, though he was pure and holy, because I am not. He bled and suffered unspeakable horrors and died so that I might live. 

I want to remember that as I walk through the next few weeks of Lent. I want to sense a proper appreciation and respect for his sacrifice. I want to stand with him, symbolically, as we remember his humiliation, his scourging, his crucifixion, so that the full implications of Resurrection Day hit me. 

I can’t say thank you enough to him.

Memories

Once upon a time, long, long ago, my older sister Judy and I hitch-hiked round Europe for three months. We were truly innocents abroad, and the good Lord had his watchful eye upon us because remarkably, apart from a couple of uncomfortable moments, we had no problems. 

We had a rough plan of where we were going and had made bookings in the youth hostels or YWCAs in the big cities, and our travelling ‘Bible’ was Frommer’s Europe on $5 a day. Incredibly, we often could survive on less than $5 a day. 

Our parents had instilled in us a fascination for Europe. Their favourite pages in the LA Sunday Times were in the travel section, and my mother often cut out and filed articles about places or hotels, for future use. They were the generation who survived the Great Depression in the US in the ‘30s, and the second world war, and finances had never stretched to enabling them to travel to Europe themselves.

So Judy and I felt like their eyes and ears, and often we would say things like, ‘Mom and Dad would love this’. When we returned to California, tired and ready to be taken care of for awhile, we developed our slides, put our souvenirs in scrapbooks and tried to share with Mom and Dad the joys of our trip. 

I still remember the feeling of quiet disappointment when I would see them glazing over as we reminisced, often in fits of laughter, about various episodes of the trip. I had thought they would be hanging on our every word, but having watched other people’s slide shows and heard their stories many times since, I now understand. Hearing about someone else’s experiences, however interested you are and however exciting they may be, is just not as enthralling as it is for those who were there.

One of the bereavements I’ve felt since Judy’s death is the loss of my travelling buddy, and the sadness of not being able to connect with her anymore in knowing looks and laughter as we might recall certain incidents of the trip.

God instructs us to remember the big events of our spiritual journeys. I’ve always thought of that as being important for us in our life of faith, so that when we are in tough times, perhaps, we buoy ourselves up with recollections of God’s constancy and faithfulness. 

But in a relationship, both parties take delight in recalling high points in their lives. Judy and I loved sharing our memories. Don and I frequently laugh over events during our lifetime together. The grown-up ‘kids’ enjoy trips down memory lane as we pull up shared experiences. 

And so with God. I no longer think he calls us to remember certain things just for our own good. I think he invites us to linger with him and laugh as we recall momentous events in our own spiritual journeys. My moment of being born-again in the Spirit wasn’t only a momentous event for me. God was there. He was laughing too. He loves to recall that moment as well. The angels in heaven were singing and maybe even dancing. 

He is my travelling buddy on my journey of faith, just as he is yours. He loves it when we remember with joy those close encounters we’ve had over the years. He’s there when we remember the dark times, the tricky bits when we’ve not felt his closeness, and he is always calling us, drawing us back. 

How great is that? Don’t you just love Him?

I

Family Blessings

A house full of family. Not everyone is here, but many are, and from afar. There is a lot of laughter, some expectations, a lot of food and teasing. You have to have a thick skin to survive in this family. 

Tennis is on in front of me; the anticipation of watching Murray, the great Scottish-British hope, storm through is enough to make you think he’s bound to fail. At the moment though Federer is powering through to victory.  Until the rain stops play.

It’s the Fourth of July. I have a scrapbook of memories in my memory bank of past Fourths. Homemade ice cream – the rock salt, the taking turns at cranking it, the ice cream so cold it gave you a brain freeze. Heat, sunshine, fireworks in the evening. It got dark by 8 in California. Can’t have fireworks in a place where it doesn’t get dark til 11, unless you have it at midnight.  My memories here are fun, too. BBQ, usually cooked in the garage, someone racing back to the house through the rain with the cooked food. Flags flapping in the moist air. Friends coming round to celebrate.

We’ll do it today again, later. We’d all love it to be hot and sunny – it has been some years (including last year) – but we’ll enjoy ourselves whatever the weather.

My heart is full of gratitude to God, for such a family. For such love and laughter. I don’t take it for granted.

Wild winds

The wildest thing at the Harris Ranch so far is the wind.

And it isn’t too wild. 

A little fog through the valley. Uneventful trip other than that and on to Sacramento this morning. Really fun having a road trip with Mom. A lot of reminiscences and laughter and a few moments of sadness.

Today we will link in with her friend from back before they had children. We won’t go into how many years ago that was.

Yesterday I met a friend I had before I had children.

Reunions. Remembering. God tells his people to remember what he has done for them. It’s encouraging and heart-warming and strengthens me for what might lie ahead.

Grateful today for memories.