be here now | betsybeadhead

This last week I’ve woken up tired. We’ve been going to bed late, and getting up early. Sometimes it seems no matter how much I plan or cajole or wheedle or lament, this keeps happening.

I have gotten really angry about it. It is important to both of us to get in bed at a decent hour. Me, because I’m bipolar, and not enough sleep brings out the weird side of my brain. Scott, because his work schedule means that he has to be up two hours before I do.

But this week I rounded a corner on this. Instead of getting upset about it, I decided to see it as a “this is the way it is” kind of thing. I decided to see it as something that God needs to happen. The fact that I’ve tried to get us to bed on time and we keep not managing to do it means that there is some other force acting on this. I prefer to see that force as God. I prefer to think that God is in charge of everything, and always is moving us in the proper path so that God’s will is properly unfolding.

Perhaps I need to be a little “off” in order to see a situation or a person in certain way. Perhaps being the way I am is helpful to God’s plan. Perhaps being a little tired means that we will both take more time to do something, and thus do it better. Perhaps someone else needs to see either one of us moving more slowly to know that it is OK to go slower, and that life isn’t all about rush rush rush.

The moment I accepted the way things are as part of God’s plan was the moment I felt better.

I think this is what the Lord’s Prayer is all about. I think that what Jesus is trying to teach us is to be OK with what is happening, and not to fight against it. I think that Jesus wants us to totally submit to God, all the time, in everything. I think that Jesus wants us to know that we need to relax into life in order to live life. The more we fight against it, the harder it gets. The more we let God use us as we were made to be used, the better off everything will be.

I think this is part of what Jonah teaches us when he was in the belly of the whale. Everything looked like it was lost. Nothing was going according to his plan. It was dark and smelly and lonely. And yet, in that moment, he gave thanks to God.

In the moment he praised God he was freed.

So it seems like we are
sent to be the ones.
So what now?

They don’t want to do it.
This may sound strange.
There are many different churches
that I have been deceived by.

Then the lights came up.

On to the shelter
our bodies house

Now I’m adrift in the middle.
Note that I am sure how to do it
no matter how.

Everything else is extra.

————————————————————————————————–
I’ve started a new thing with my predictive text poems. The Kindle offers words all the time while I write. It thinks it knows what I want to write even if I’ve just put down one letter. It is kind of like that annoying friend who won’t let you finish your sentences. I decided to let it help me write poems. Previously I’d just go with the flow and let it offer whatever it wanted. At a certain point it bogs down and starts only giving me two or three letter words. This is after the first word in a sentence. Most of the words aren’t nouns or verbs either, so this gets old really fast.

I decided to start poems with a theme or a trick. I’ll pick a word, and start each section with one letter of the word. When I put the first letter down, the Kindle offers me about ten words that start with that letter and I’ll pick whichever one seems the best at the time. It is kind of random, and kind of by feel. I have input – but I can only pick the words that are there. At the end of each line, reuse the letter until I have gotten to an ending point. Then go on to the next letter as the next section. I’m trying to pick a word that has a resonance with me, and if I remember I’ll put an intention at the beginning, as a sort of prayer request. The resulting poem is either the answer to it or a further meditation on it.

I write what I can, then email it to myself and edit it on my real computer. The Kindle assumes every line starts with a capital letter, and sometimes the syntax is a little off so I have to tweak it. Sometimes in the middle of the poem I feel it has led me to a place where I need to say something that it isn’t giving me the words for and I’ll free write. But in general, when I call something a predictive text poem, the Kindle supplied around 90% of the words. I just harvested them.

I especially like the tension in this one in the line “On to the shelter/our bodies house” because is the shelter the house, or our bodies? Is the body a house? I think it points to the idea that we don’t need a church because we carry it with us. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. We no longer need to go anywhere to find God – God is always with us. Actually, this has always been the way, it is just that now we are coming to see this. We have been mislead for so long in thinking that we didn’t have any power and we had to go to someone or somewhere else to find it.