breakthrough of breakthroughs

(this requires a little explanation preceding:
my best friend got engaged. and when i say best friend, i mean the kind of friend that you are so close with, you'd spent your entire childhoods together inside your imaginations, and grew up together, and really know and love each other. we're cousins, and we call each other "davida" and "jonathana", our female versions of david and jonathan from the book 1 samuel. i am not even twenty, and jonathana is getting married. and i have always gone on these little rants about how i will never get married young, and i've always meant them with my whole heart, i think. so imagine my shock when one of the many emotions i felt, hearing about the sparkly diamond ring on cassia's finger, was envy. i am so very excited for cassia and ben, that was the main emotion-- that and overwhelming change-- but i never expected to be kind of jealous. then i had a breakthrough. actually, i should not take credit. God broke through to me.)

This is the core of what I thought was jealousy, a jealousy of what Cassi and Ben have, that seemed to materialize out of nothing (especially in light of my loudly proclaimed "marriage-wariness".)

There is something so beautiful to me about that kind of love that is so sure of itself it can only be satisfied in marriage.

I was envious that Cassi has someone who loves her so much he wants to marry her. He wants the world to know, he wants to be there for her always, always, he wants her and only her for the rest of their lives.

Who wouldn't want someone to love them like that?

This is what I was forgetting, the reason the institution of marriage even exists.
It is supposed to echo the way God feels about us.
It is the picture, a muddy sort of earthly picture, of Christ and his bride. Us.

Jesus has seen us at our worst, our very darkest, and loved us. He has known all we've done (and haven't done) and died for us. He is so sure of His love for us He can only be satisfied in marriage. He wants all of us.

I had wondered what the significance was of Dawn and I memorizing Ephesians 5, explicitly about marriage. We're both kind of single. "Really, Dawn?" But Dawn listens to God, so... "Really, God?"

"Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives, exactly as Christ did for the church—a love marked by giving, not getting. Christ's love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty. Everything he does and says is designed to bring the best out of her, dressing her in dazzling white silk, radiant with holiness. And that is how husbands ought to love their wives."
(I thought Eugene Peterson's translation for that section was pretty.)

I think I get it now, though. The last bit of Ephesians 5 is explicitly about marriage, but not necessarily that between man and a woman. It's about Christ and the church.

"'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church."

What I really wanted was to know HE loves me. All I really need to know is that HE loves me. and He does, so much more than I'll ever know, without condition.



Oh Jesus, sanctify and cleanse me. I am Yours I am Yours I am Yours.

the mountain descent

This morning I went on a hike. Piestewa Peak. It's one of my favorite hikes, about a mile--a very steep mile-- to the summit, where you sort of scramble to the jagged top of it. My friends and I feel some sort of vicarious link to Moses when we stand up there, red faced and catching our breath, half-hoping to hear the voice of God or maybe see a trail of Him in the landscape.
The way down is less of a mind-over-matter victory, but it's still very nice because you get to actually talk. I know I've had good conversations descending the peak, though I can't always remember them. The fresh air and pounding blood circulation and feeling of achievement is conducive to very stimulating discussions, about morality and literature and God and psychology.
My boyfriend and I were going down the first set of Mordor-like steps carved into the rock, and he commented that he imagined us being taken down by eagles, just like Sam and Frodo, which would be "incredible".

And we started thinking about why they were taken down by eagles, and I think it has more behind it than sparing them the physically wearing descent. I think they were also being spared the memory of the worst parts of the journey; they were escaping the terror of having to relive every deathtrap, every mental collapse that took place in the crevices of that mountain.

I have some friends who experience flashbacks. I've never had to go through something like that, a nightmare vision that is so real, your brain recreates the sensory experience you had, since its the brain that creates the the experience in the first place, synthesizing all the information taken in by each of the senses. It's just as vivid as the first time you went through it, the first time you were burned in the fire or almost drowned, or whatever happened, and you even feel the pain all over again. I would never wish this on anyone. And yes, there are some things that we need to call to remembrance because those experiences make us who we are and take us back to better times and change our futures. But some things we understand the first time, and it would be a blissful existence to never remember them again.

I believe God delivers us from some memories; He definitely has the power to, and if its His will, it's what's best for us. This could have happened to me, but obviously I would never be able to tell of it because I wouldn't remember what would have been taken out of my index of memory in the first place. And now I don't know what to think about that brand of psychology where your old tramautic memories are drudged up from the sea floor of your mind, and you have to feel all the hurt and pain again so you can address it. I think God can heal us from those things without us having to go through them all over again. (I'm talking more about terrible wrongs done to people, things that make you so broken that even the scars hurt.) There's also the matter of fabricating memories and that hurts more than just you a lot of times, and things get really messy.

Isaiah wrote (perhaps on a mountaintop?) that "Those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." Maybe we can apply this even to the struggle that goes on inside our own heads; that desire for revealing the source of any kind of pain, the meaning of any kind of memory. Rather than reliving and reliving and trying to descend into the depths of that memory ourselves, what if we waited for Him to form it perfectly in His hands? What if we waited on Him, and He carried us swiftly away from the memories of our sins and the sins of others? What if we kept running from them without looking back, pressing further into His kingdom on earth? Then we wouldn't be weighed down with the exhaustion of carrying all that personal history, that baggage of emotional experiences we don't need to relive anymore. He will deliver us from recreating those experiences in a subtle, but just as beautiful way, as flying us down from the mountaintop on the backs of swift, enormous eagles.

what a beautiful God there must be!

i'm the wide-eyed child discovering your goodness to me.
you're a magnifying glass in a world of things too small to see.
you're a perfect map in a crooked landscape i don't know;
i hold a broken compass and can only guess which way to go.

living water fill my soul
i am broken, make me whole.
i am weary, cover me
with your flood of grace and peace.

you make trees grow from seeds of plants already dead.
if there is hope for me take this broken seed and make me grow again!
i was covered in blood and kicking, naked in an open field--
you saw me and you clothed me, and on me your love was sealed!

living water, fill my soul.
i am broken, make me whole.
i am weary, cover me
with your flood of grace and peace.

Excerpts from Job chapters 7-9 (Eugene Peterson's translation)

"That's what happens to all who forget God-- all their hopes come to nothing.
They hang their life from one thin thread,
they hitch their fate to a spider web.
One jiggle and the thread breaks,
one jab and the web collapses."
-Job's friend, Bildad

"Somehow, though he moves right in front of me, I don't see him;
quietly but surely he's active, and I miss it."
-Job, on God

"What a miracle of skin and bone,
muscle and brain!
You gave me life itself, and incredible love.
You watched and guarded every breath I took."
-Job, to God

Job never attacks God. He only asks those difficult questions that come from the core of a person, that try to get at the mystery and terrifying glory and indecipherable nature of God. One of those questions is where God is. How is God in those times of complete, all-encompassing pain? Where is he, why does he let it happen, why does he make it happen?
Job never paints God as evil... he still glorifies him. He still recognizes the love that was threaded into every ounce of his body when he was created, when he was given that miracle of skin and bone, life. But he also sees the difference in how God sheltered him then and is making him grow now.

"My belly is full of bitterness.
I'm up to my ears in a swamp of affliction.
I try to make the best of it, try to brave it out,
but you're too much for me,
relentless, like a lion on the prowl.
You line up fresh witnesses against me.
You compound your anger
and pile on the grief and pain!"
-Job, to God

Job was honest before God-- a man of integrity. What is integrity? It means you're the same person before people and under the cover of darkness. (For it is shameful to even speak of those things which are done by them in secret.) You're honest with yourself, you're honest before God. Like Pastor John said, it means you don't cheat-- and there are lots of ways to cheat. With your eyes. With your money, with your thoughts. Kierkegaard would say Job strove with God, not with men. He wouldn't compare his suffering with what his friends were going through, he wouldn't compare what he could handle and what they could handle-- he went before God a broken man, humbled, feeling like the waves of God's wrath were pounding him into nothing, not only wanting to die, but wishing he had never been born. But he went before God.

today has been a good day. i went to vertical relief for a little bit, read one hundred years of solitude while drinking a latte at macy's, met a dog named fiver, and for breakfast and lunch ate free, rescued food (from the dumpster).

one hundred years of solitude is already so, so beautiful. the storytelling sucks you in, and before you know it you have this entire history painted out in your head, and the empty space keeps getting filled and expanding outward with enchanting words and people. it's what i've been looking for in a book for a long time, but its daunting length kept me from opening it until now. thank you leah, for the gift of that book. interestingly enough, i'm reading lorca in my european lit class right now; the gypsy ballads (los romanceros gitanos is the spanish title, i think). those already sucked me in and i could see parallels with chronicle of a death foretold-- especially in the ballad of one doomed to die. lorca's writing is so hermetic and cryptic --hard to crack open, but the stories are fascinating and mystical, the characters magnetic, and the images vivid and both beautiful and horrifying at times.

i feel inspired to write a list of 20books i need to read. it's good to start small.

1. one hundred years of solitude by gabriel garcia marquez
2. nine stories by j.d. salinger
3. dead souls by nikolai gogol
4. fear and trembling by soren kierkegaard
5. on the road by jack kerouac
6. ficciones by jorge borges
7. the heart is a lonely hunter by carson mccullers
8. the house on mango street by sandra cisneros
9. watership down by ryan adams
10. one flew over the cuckoo's nest by ken kesey
11. east of eden by john steinbeck
12. slaughterhouse five by kurt vonnegut jr.
13. knowledge of the holy by a.w. tozer
14. the great mother by erich neumann
15. crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky
16. sophie's world by jostein gaardner
17. othello by william shakespeare
18. the plague by albert camus
19. the sound and the fury by william faulkner
20. jitterbug perfume by tom robbins

This is Kayla Smith, and these are ten things you never knew about me.

1) I like to wear apple bottom jeans and boots with the fur. Some days I dance around my room with them on.

2) Pink really really really is my favorite color.

3) Brittney Spears is my idol, secretly I wish I could be her.

4) I talk to snakes. They are quite amiable.

5) My latest obsession is fashion, currently I look to Cosmopolitan for inspiration.

6) Cheer-leading is secretly my life passion.

7) My daydreams often consist of unicorns. Pink. Fluffy. Unicorns. Who spear people to death with their glittery horn.

8) Moist is one of my favorite words.

9) More than anything I hate the play Hamlet and authors like Don Miller. The only reason I keep the books around is to look important.

10) I hate grammar!?!.,.,;;;:::;][

what child is this?

this is early to be writing something that's loosely christmas-themed, but i don't much feel like being in the present, anyway. i've been thinking about the birth of Jesus. even though the birth probably took place in the spring, and pretty much everything about our whole nativity-schema is historically incorrect, this time of year makes me think about it. (what i'm writing works under the belief that Jesus is the Messiah, which is what the nativity assumes as well. it's not about the theology behind that particular idea.)


i just wrote an essay on the movie children of men. there's a line in w.h. auden's poem "musee des beaux artes" that talks about suffering, and that the aged are "reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth". i kept thinking about this line while i watched the film. it's brilliant, especially if you're a fan of neitzsche, but there are also undeniable parallels between the hopelessness of the world painted out in the film, its redemption resting on the birth of one child, and the story of the birth of Christ. my professor posed a question before we screened the film, "what hope do children bring when things look very, very bleak?"
in the movie, jasper says to kee, "your baby is the miracle the whole world has been waiting for."

there are so many characteristics of birth that are beautiful and contain hope for us, beyond the mystery of its biology. there is that limitless potential (keirkegaard wrote about possibility never disappointing us), there is a revival of imagination, there is the pure joy of bubbling, high-pitched laughter, there is "faith put into practice" (as children of men describes it) and the magnificence of something so small, a cell, becoming a perfectly shaped human being.

children captivate us. but why did Jesus have to be a child? think beyond the necessary fulfillment of prophecies, such as Isaiah's that Immanuel would be concieved by a virgin, and the Son of Man needing to be born of man, just like the rest of us. there are some other bible stories about children, too. remember when abraham couldn't have a son, yet he was promised descendants as numerous as the twitching white dots in the canopy of the night sky? then there was a miraculous birth. remember when people had to put blood on their doors when they were slaves in egypt, or their first born child would be killed? the blood connection between parents and their children is the epitome of the beautiful human connection, the linkage between everyone in our flawed and glorious race, and helps us understand how God feels about us (having created us and everything). still, though, think beyond all of that. why a baby?

there is a kind of hope that only children bring. the birth of Jesus reminded us of what a miracle birth is in the first place. he didn't just walk out of the dust like Adam, his first breath being the breath of God. Jesus had to go through the gory, bloody birth that every child does, that your future children will come out of, that you came out of. hope makes us alive, and the limitless potential of a newborn baby is as pure as hope can come to us. mary and the divinely appointed few who knew the secret of this child's identity waited with held breath to see his life stretch out. they watched the messiah king come from humble yet miraculous birth and turn the world on its head with his upside-down heirarchy of servanthood and martyrdom and love. Jesus taught meekness, and the need to learn about God and His Kingdom and to be curious about its mysteries. He said to receive the kingdom of God like a child, and he was a child once, so he really can say that, he knew what it implied.