ellen cline @snipsh0ts - Tumblr Blog

elisabeth elliot

There is no ongoing spiritual life without this process of letting go. At the precise point where we refuse, growth stops. If we hold tightly to anything given to us, unwilling to let it go when the time comes to let it go or unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used, we stunt the growth of the soul.

It is easy to make a mistake here. 'If God gave it to me,' we say, 'it's mine. I can do what I want with it.' No. The truth is it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of - if we want to find our true selves, if we want real Life, if our hearts are set on glory.

Think of the self that God has given as an acorn. It is a marvelous little thing, a perfect shape, perfectly designed for its purpose, perfectly functional. Think of the grand glory of an oak tree. God's intention when He made the acorn was the oak tree. His intention for us is '...the measure of the statue of the fulness of Christ.' Many deaths must go into reaching that measure, many letting-goes. When you look at the oak tree you do not feel the 'loss' of the acorn is a very great loss. The more you perceive God's purpose in your life, the less terrible the losses seem.

I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.

Last art retreat. Surreal.

reasons why the world is great.

cl-sm

projectgoodbyeizmir

one more ferryboat ride.

Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher, which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me.

the district + the kiddoes

d.c. journal 1: independence ave

Independence Avenue

Each summer strangely beckons me one step closer to adulthood. One step closer to that great Western ideal: independence.

The older I get, the less I’m impressed by that ideal, emblazoned as it is across the city I’m calling my summer home. The bold individual pillars of these historical building stand firm, gleaming marble back at the sun that strikes them. The single tables at Peregrine Espresso, where people sit alone, impenetrable in their iron suit jackets. Even the public transportation system encases us in isolation. Crammed together, touching each other, we look aside and do not speak.

I have brought myself here, the city boasts to me. I step off the metro and echo back: I will make my own way.

Owen’s cleft palate surgery makes it harder for him to form words than it is for his sister, Cora. His chubby face is, then, powerfully expressive. He nods emphatically when I ask him questions, strings “yeah”s together in a long affirmative vocalization. Yeahyahyahyahyahyahyahyah, he says.

He approaches his dinnertable chair like an obstacle to overcome. Need help? I ask him. He lifts up his arms, round and firm, fingers opening and closing. I lift him, squeeze the roundness of his little belly against me, careful not to shift his backpack off. The black pack holds a little machine that sends water through a tube into his growing body. Another narrow tube runs into his nose, held in place by once-white medical tape and cemented now with dry snot and peanut butter.(At the playground, we meet a wiry streak of energy named Robbie. Sweat rivulets down his black skin as he and Owie face off on the ramp. He bleedin’? Robbie asks suddenly, face squinched against the sun, eyes concerned. He bleedin’ or somethin? Owie grins, oblivious, and holds out his ball. Nuh, he says, his all-purpose, symbolically interchangeable word. Robbie forgets his worry and grabs the ball, lobs it high in the air. Owen laughs.)

Need help, Cora’s voice escalates. Neeed heeeelp. She’s struggling with a whisk, her long narrow arm working against the lumps in the pancake batter. Let’s do it together, I tell her, closing my hand over hers.

I think of -- me, as Owen’s daddy points his fork to the grilled asparagus he’s been trying to eat over the clamor of the dinner table. Owen, his daddy says. After I eat all this asparagus, then you can have more yoghurt. Owen’s first closes around his rubber fork. Twin tears roll out of his eyes and plop onto his bib. Nuh! he says. NUH.

Cora’s wailing voice at night, rising higher and higher in fear. Her daddy is there. Nothing can harm her. She cries anyway.

I am Cora and I am Owen and I need to be more like them. My eyes well over in my own little room on the second floor. Need help, I whisper into the early mornin dark, as Cora’s mom begins to sing to her, soft and low.

Holy God in love He came, she sings. Perfect man, to bear my blame. On the cross He took my sin; by His death, I live again.

Today I walk down Independence Ave and I think about the men who laid the bricks down in the sidewalk. A tourist stops and asks me for directions. I laugh into the irony of that and point them to Union Station.

This summer that was to confirm my independence and bravery has me on my knees in a tiny room in this row house, grieving death and clasping at Revelation hope. I try to pray, far away from the funeral, and cry instead. Need help.

This summer has me lost on logical ordered streets, has me calling my sister to buy time outside a full church until the service starts. It has me asking new acquaintances to walk me home in the dark, marveling to myself here in this DC coffeeshop at the irony of an ideal that defies the essence of human life. Independence. Un-dependence.

I need you, Owie is saying when he cries after he wakes up from his nap. I need you, his mother is replying when she puts down her own lunch to make sure his water bag is full. I need help, Cora tells me, trying to carry seven books upstairs at once.

I can close the door to my tiny bedroom and try to figure it out. Or I can walk down the hall and open the door and try to come like a little child, because isn’t that what Jesus asked for anyway? I am trying to say it back. I need you. Walking into the National Gallery of Art, I put my backpack down for security check. Hi, I say, suddenly seeing, really seeing, the officer who zips it open. How are you? His face is a blank barricade but his eyes are tired.

My internship is four blue walls but I look at Aishwariya’s face, beautiful Indian eyes intent on her project, Elmer’s glue and paper mache. This can’t be about me. I don’t have anything in me. My lone footsteps ring tap, tap, up the wide Freer staircases. I push open the door and breathe deep, humid, Washington, D.C. air. I am flipping pages in my map and when I look up, a concerned and sweaty face peers over at me. You need some help, miss?

I’m laughing inside as I start walking toward the metro. Yes. Yes, I do.

So I was sitting there talking to Rebecca in the glow of our hanging lamp and she asked me about something or other that made me stop and sit up on the couch, lean across the coffee table to her. My bulbs! The flowers I planted!

Reconition dawned on her face. I remembered - she’d been one of the first ones I told; in the richly shadowed dark of Barefoots after I’d finished closing up. We sat on the leather couches and talked. I’d told her how I struggled to make an altar, how do you make an altar? How do you make an altar for class? And I told her how I’d gotten this weird idea to plant perennials instead of building something; planting is an act of hope and I wanted to bury something and watch it die and hope for it to be something beautiful - isn’t that what an altar is?

It was late in the chilly night before I had a chance to go out and plant them. I remember bringing my Bible and a spoon and the mesh bag of bulbs. I carried them over to a tree on the rim of a wooded side of campus. I’d picked the place because of the way the roots curve around and make a little hollow: a place I had sat often that semester, a little shelter I went to when the wind got knocked out of me in one way or another. It was dark then, and I remember how hard, hard, hard, the ground was when I tried to dig holes for each bulb. Tree roots were in the way when I tried to get down as deep as it said on the package. But it was so cold by that point and far enough past the season that the bulbs were going to need supernatural help to come up anyway, so I just planted them shallow: in groups. I knelt there by the tree, scraping the ground with my spoon, holding my cell phone up with the other hand to give some light, and for each group of bulbs I buried, I tried to hand something back over to God that I’d been trying to hand over and over. I remember crying a little bit, looking like a fool on my knees scraping cold dirt over these little bulbs I had picked at WalMart. God, I trust you, with all this hard stuff, I was trying to say. Here you go. By the time these come up, if they come up, I'll have seen your faithfulness.

I planted all of them, in a little ring around the west side of the tree, and then I took the empty bag and the mesh spoon and went back to get water. I watered them then by the light of my cell phone, shivering a little bit in the cold, and only once more over the course of the semester did I water them. The next day my class stumped all the way over to look at my altar and they only saw some loose earth and were too cold to pay attention to what I tried to say about it all. Then Christmas came, and the cares that I had tried to bury grew up and choked me, and I forgot about that altar until tonight, when I was looking at Rebecca, and for some reason whoosh I remembered and I had to go look, right then, right then.

So we put on our coats and walked back through the light rain, gave up avoiding puddles eventually. We got to the big tree and the ground was soft and grass springing up wet and sloshy under my feet. I hadn’t thought about how dark it would be. I flipped open my phone and knelt down where I thought they should be, scanning the earth with the little blue square of light. What would the growths look like? We pulled at longer blades of grass, I tried to think if I was searching too high up near the roots. Is that--no, nevermind. Alright. Well, it wasn’t likely, to begin with. I flipped my phone back closed and looked up at Rebecca. Oh well - we should come back in the morning, when it’s light, maybe we’ll see something. She agreed, but some impulse made me look back once more. Wait.

A clump of small blooms on the left side; maybe an inch tall, with tiny purple blossoms.

I screamed. I looked up at Rebecca and shrieked. Loud. I combed over them with that cell phone light, marveled at their tinyness, their stubborn spade-like leaves, spread a little apart from each other, but so definitely there, and so definitely flowers, and so definitely flowers from my bulbs, my first altar. I yelled again, something like hallelujah and then I took off running towards the field behind the tree and spun in circles and my shoes came off so my feet got all wet in the rainwater and then I came back and looked at them again and I still can’t believe they came up.

So many odds against them. And I thought about all the burdens I tried to bury with those bulbs and how the Lord who gave them life has given me life too, and how life WINS in the end, and I thought about how I found those flowers tonight, when it was dark, not in the morning but tonight, when I had to look for them, when they were half hidden by night.

Happy Easter, Rebecca said, and I thought, of all the nights for me to remember, I remember tonight, and they bloomed, and life wins in the end. And those stubborn little bulbs stuck out the coldest spring and God upholds everything by the word of His power and He made those flowers come up.

Even though I didn’t come back and water them, and even though I planted them so late, and even though I didn’t bury them deep enough. And He is faithful to me, too, to give me this tonight, and his truth of resurrection is true even when I don’t water and I don’t bury and I’m not faithful, all the while, this whole semester long, while I worried and worked, those bulbs were dying and breaking open and pushing up through hard cold soil towards the surface and in the sporadic sunlight God gave them color and flower.

And I wasn’t even remembering them.

Sirens were going off as I stood up from kneeling next to them, giving thanks, headed to my dorm room. A fire truck and a couple ambulances, it sounded like. That is part of tonight, too. Just like my friend’s tired face, tired from imagining an empty house and a grieving brother, is a part of last night, and arthritis taking over Miss Julia’s body is another piece of tonight. But somehow seven little perennials poking out of the ground have reminded me of the truth of Easter in a deeply moving way I don’t think I’ve managed to explain very well.

I’m reminded that in a world where death is at work, the work of life out of death is happening all around me, too. The sirens from the fire truck are just louder, easier to hear. But life wins, in the ultimate end, and in a world dragging down in entropy and decay and death it is an immeasurable gift to be on the side that pulls the other way, against that drag, pulls up and pushes up through hard soil because we have hope for what is on the surface.

Because breaking open and dying and pushing up and blooming go against the grain of death and decay and everything falling apart. And we are on the side that goes against death and decay and everything falling apart, and now I remember: it's not a hopeless struggle upstream against the riptide of the fallen universe because Jesus died and rose up from death like spring and he defeated death and decay and everything falling apart.

So now bulbs still break open and grow green to the light, because He says so.

HAPPY EASTER.

Please Do Not Touch the Artwork

I touched the marble torso

of Pan. I knew, as soon as I walked into this foyer,

High windowed, slick floored (my shoes

Clip audible footprints, distinct, as I walk)

that I would touch this marble Torso of Pan, first century B.C.E,

surging off of its pedestal in a torque of knotted muscle.

There is a smooth groove running

down between the shoulder blades; window light

broods in the long, polished furrow.