Light The World Day 1: Freely Given

"Freely ye have received, freely give." - Matthew 10:8

The following story is a creation story I heard from Robin Wall Kimmerer a Native American woman of the Potawatomi Nation. I may not be telling the story exactly as she does, but it is very close and then I will expand on what the story means to me about freely giving.

In the beginning there was the Sky Woman. She fell from the sky and held a bushel of sweetgrass in her hand. As she fell toward the ocean, she had no way to stop. The animals looked up and saw the Sky Woman falling and understood her plight. The geese flew together, making goose music as they pumped their wings up to meet the Sky Woman and broke her fall as she gently rested on their feathers. The geese flew down towards the water gently.

The geese could not hold her much longer so they called a meeting of all the animals to see what they could do to help the Sky Woman. A beautiful strong turtle rose to the surface of the water and offered its back for the Sky Woman to rest on. The animals knew that the Sky Woman needed land to live on. And they had heard that there was land at the bottom of the ocean. Once by one, many animals tried to swim to the bottom of the ocean to find the land for Sky Woman, and one by one, the animals could not reach it, and came back to the surface, out of breath. Then came the muskrat, the weakest of the swimmers but the strongest in heart and loyalty. The muskrat dove down into the ocean. He was gone a very long time.

After a very long time, the animals became very worried for the muskrat. Then there was a small stream of bubbles that rose to the surface with a limp muskrat body. The animals pulled the little limp body of the muskrat onto the turtles shell. He was dead, but in his little paw, he held a handful of mud. Muskrat had given his life for the Sky Woman, to find her home. Touched by the sacrifice of Muskrat, she took the mud from his paw and spread it on the turtle's back so she could stand on it. She was overwhelmed with the generosity and care of all the animals since she fell from the sky. Her deep gratitude spilling out of her, she began to dance with thanksgiving.

As the Sky Woman danced, the mud, dirt, and ground began to grow beneath her feet. The alchemy of all the gifts that were so freely given in combination with the gratitude of Sky Woman had created land beneath Sky Woman's feet expanding out in all directions! On this new ground, the Sky Woman shared what she had brought with her and planted the Sweetgrass, straight from her hand to the soil.

I am the Sky Woman, I fell from the Heavens. There are so many people who caught me gently, who kept me warm, fed me, gave me somewhere to stand, and somewhere I could begin to call home. They sacrifice time, money, and mental energy to help me grow. They gave these gifts freely. They did not give because I had deserved it or earned it, or even because they felt they had to. They loved me, for me. They didn't expect anything in return. They just gave because I was falling and needed a place to stand because I had worth to them just by my existence.

When a gift is freely given, it is very hard for me to accept and therefore also hard for me to trust. When I stay in this uncomfortable place, it feels like balancing on a slippery and muddy turtle shell bobbing in the ocean. It allows me a place to stand, but it still feels like I have no where else to go and it is shaky and slick at best. I fear it could be gone at any moment. When I don't accept the "free" part of the gift, I fear the moment I will disappoint them, use the gift too much, or need it too much, and I fail to hold the gift at all. The gifts given are powerful, and my ability to hold them feels small. However, it is in the combination of the freely given gifts AND the freely given gratitude that creates a place I can truly stand. I have to accept the gifts freely given through gratitude and celebrate them before I can really stand firm and hold them at all. It is in the gratitude that I find trust. And with the trust, I find solid ground.

I then have the opportunity to plant, grow, and share what I brought with me from Heaven: my heart, my care, my talents. I don't give back because I'm afraid I'll lose my freely given gifts. I don't share my heart because I am indebted to them. Freely given means there is no debt. I try to share what I have to offer simply because I want to be like them. You cannot pay someone back for a gift freely given. You can only freely invest in their gift and then give yourself. To give freely is to accept what is freely given. It is to be free with your gratitude and acceptance, and not limit it only to gifts I feel I deserve or earned. I want give gratitude freely.

Because of "The Fall," we needed the gifts to live, but no one was obligated to give them. They were given freely. The Atonement caught us from the fall and gives us a place to stand. A sacrifice was made to allow us to find Home. He gave the Ultimate gift, freely given. We cannot earn it. We cannot deserve it. We cannot pay Him back. Even if we could, it would be irrelevant, because it was FREELY given. That means that no one is keeping score. No one is counting how many times you messed up to see how much of the gift to take back. The Atonement was given freely.

If you get caught up in the deserving of it, you will remain on a slippery bobbing Turtle shell in the middle of the ocean. Our actions are being watched, but it is not for the purpose to see how much we have earned being saved, it is to see how much we are grateful and accept and want to be saved. In the end, I don't believe we will be at judgment day pleading to God to let us stay. I believe it will be Christ, pleading with us, to freely accept His gift, and choose to stay, want to stay.

Try accepting freely and feel the ground grow beneath your feet. THEN you can share what you came here to provide the world and others. We love Him because He first loved us. He is the reason for the hope within us. May we dance in gratitude as freely as the gift was given - with no stipulations about what we will accept. Gratitude in combination with the Atonement creates an alchemy: hope where there was despair, love where there was a stranger, confidence where there was fear, faith where there was doubt, strength where there was weakness, wisdom where there was stupidity, and truth where there was confusion. Repentance is that alchemy where grace (gifts freely given) meets gratitude and planting.

Consider this story my dance. As I wrote it, I felt the ground grow solid beneath my feet.

The Celestial Eclipse of Time and Stringing Beads

I have not posted in over two years. Part of that is about grad school. But a greater part of that is what this post will attempt to explain.

In August, I went to a beautiful isolated spot in Idaho on top of a mountain with just the sky and moon between me and the sun as the moon and sun collided right above me. It was a special 2 minutes and 20-something seconds of total eclipse that I wanted to document and remember every second of it. Problem was, I was so concerned about losing the moments as they ticked by, I could hardly stay in awe of the Celestial and spiritual event for longer than a flicker at a time. After the experience, I felt a deep sense of loss. What I was excited to write about just 3 minutes before was now a sort of dread. I could not capture the moments with my words. I could not bring that experience back. And I had failed to experience a significant percentage of it besides. And so, I never wrote about it. Until now.

I have often passively wondered how to make my journal writing more habitual and soul-filling and less guilt-ridden and overwhelming as it has become in the last two or three years. Ironically since not long after I learned about a heart condition that I was told could wreak havoc at any time, when I became very aware of every day I lived. I've also wondered how to make my entries more meaningful and enlightening like they used to be. My posts on this blog often come from my best journal entries. Maybe they are more meaningful and insightful than I think. This thought I have about my recent journal writing being motionless and shallow is not a new thought. And yet, without fail, each time I go back to entries at least 2 years old, I am impressed by my past self and wonder if I have, in fact, gotten dumber and forgotten the truths my soul articulated years before.

But each time, I still think, no, this time my thoughts actually are more dull, my ideas superficial, and my stories accurate, but heartless. This time is no exception. This time I've really gotten bad in my journal writing. It's bare minimum. Person, place, and thing. No take home. No connection. Skipped days and weeks in between. Which honestly reflects a lot of the way I'm feeling in life most of the time now days.

Anyway, I had a thought that seems to help me think and write with more purpose. It seems to have worked enough to make it up on the blog. Recently, I've been writing to capture the moment, to freeze it in time and space, to keep it from going unacknowledged or forgotten. There is an urgency to it as if trying to catch beads that have fallen off the end of a conveyor belt. But the belt is still moving and beads keep coming and my hands and arms are full and I'm overwhelmed and they are coming too fast. Many hit the ground, rolling underneath the refrigerator with that one kitchen magnet from that one trip to San Diego, never to be seen again, or lapped up by the curious puppy, stepped on at 2 am when you couldn't wait til 6 to pee. Some beads I like more than others, but with my arms so full, they are all hitting the ground, with no respect to their preciousness or the filler-status.

It feels a lot like that. I write about a moment, a conversation, a day, trying to catch it before it becomes lost. Trying to capture it before the experience leaks out of the cracks in my brain. And it IS overwhelming, trying to catch them all. The moments, the days, weeks, months, and years come too fast. I can't look. I can't face that I'm losing them, that I can't capture them all. So, several days and weeks go by without writing. I used to write every day. I convince myself that my plate is full; I cannot write. But I also cannot let it go. So I watch Netflix for a while, feeling guilty the whole time that I'm not writing, creating, expressing, capturing. But I don't want to see what is hitting the floor, what I can't stop from moving faster than I can analyze and articulate or burn into memory.

It reminds me of when Gar, my beloved dog, was about to be taken from me. I carried the video camera around with me, trying to capture every little thing I was about to lose. The sounds and sight of her snarfing down her kibble, her piggy snort when she sniffed the air, how she cocked her head when you went around the corner, playing in the yard with an orange juice jug, the shape of her walking by my side, the curly zig-zag fur down her back. I taped all day long it seemed, trying to get everything on video so I would never forget, so she wouldn't really be gone. The ordinary became so extraordinary because I knew I was about to lose it. This "live like you were dying" way of life can certainly wake you up, and also, gone about the wrong way, can induce a heart-attack from constricting your blood vessels from stress for extended periods of time and really make you die like you were living.

I think my Dad did the same thing. In all our family trip videos from when I was very little, my dad taped all the sites, the sounds, anything that he felt he might lose when we left that place. He wanted to recreate that moment when he watched the tape later. He cared about those moments, and wanted to take himself right back there anytime. Any of the family is hardly in these videos, likely because he planned that he wouldn't lose us like he'd lose that view of the ocean or the building. So I come by it honest.

But like Dad, who missed the point of the moments on our family vacations on his video camera, and I, who missed moments I could have spent truly connecting with my dog, I was doing the same thing with my journal. Trying to control time, to hold onto it, trying to protect a moment from the rust of progression, trying to own it, is to lose it in two dimensions instead of just one; the past AND the present. It is a gluttonous practice to try to keep an actual moment for yourself. It is addicting and consuming to be focused on all you could lose when you think that you could intervene if you just put in enough effort.

Looking back at my greatest writing, it was not a snapshot of life that my insecure soul ever actually craved. It was a celebration of the fact that I could not hold or articulate all a moment had to offer. It was reveling in the feeling small and vulnerable inside a moment. It was an honoring of the past with the voice of the present in a medium that extended into the future in the form of a story. It was not about saving what I could lose. It was about being grateful for what I got to keep from it as time slipped through my fingers. In those best of writings, I did not often express details or even share events in order. No, it was a sense of some divine curiosity that came from a self that seems to have existed before this time, and it craves something eternal. The most impactful writing is not about the beads of time, but the threads of truths that runs through them. Catching every bead as it comes off of the conveyor belt is not realistic or really what I need. I need the threads that can hold the beads together.

But I can't trick myself with this. Once I think of the threads as simply ways to hold onto the beads, the beads stick to the thread and can't move down it, and I can't fit anymore beads on it, and it's just like trying to hold them in my hand. I have to let the beads go and focus on the thread in order for the beads to stay with me as what Viktor Frankl would call "an unintended side-effect" or "by-product." The individual beads to get a little lost as the necklace grows. Only a few beads really stand out here and there, but a good string is strong enough to hold them all. Even if you can't see each bead or pick them out individually, you feel their weight around your neck.

I do not remember every detail of Gar now - a nightmare to my 13 year old self. But there are strings: love, loyalty, loss, longing, sacrifice, responsibility. And there are Gar beads on every one of those strings. She shaped each necklace one bead at a time whether I can pick out each bead or not. But to allow for the beauty of letting time change me, I have to let go of it. I don't want to let the beads just fall while I sit on Netflix for too long, but I can't hold onto them either. If I hold fast to strings that really matter to me, no bead is ever truly lost. If I hold fast to a truth and value, no moment properly strung, connected to a value, or seen though your truth's eyes, will ever be lost.

Maybe that's how God will forget our sins. Maybe repentance is deciding to place an ugly bead on a strong string. Maybe God looks at the strings you're holding onto more than the beads.

So I demonstrated that here in this post. My strings: Honor, Time, Meaning, Surrender. My beads: Gar, my recent journal entries, my non-entries and unwritten posts, and a solar eclipse. You see, even things I thought I lost, (like two minutes of nature's sunglasses or days I cannot remember because I did not write them down) are no longer lost to me now that I found some strings worth holding onto. I can save all that I thought was lost simply by letting them go. I immortalize a moment and make it breath to my soul by giving up the moment in a way. Maybe that is why God gave us limited memory resources, so we can learn to hold onto the strings and not get caught up in the beads so much, ugly or pretty ones. I guess time is always eclipsed for us right now. And isn't it Celestial? Someday I believe that eclipse will move on and the lights will come back on, but don't worry too much about it; it's just another bead on a string.