Tougher
01.08.2008

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says: "Prove that you are a good person". Another voice says: "You'd better be ashamed of yourself". There is also a voice that says: "Nobody really cares about you" and one that says: "Be sure to become successful, popular and powerful". But underneath all these often very noisy voices, there is a still small voice that says: "You are my Beloved, my favour rests on you." That's the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort: it requires solitude, silence and a strong determination to listen. That's what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us "my Beloved".

- Henri Nouwen


My recent, little woes have rested upon helpful and much appreciated ears this month. Most of my ramblings and sometimes quiet, speechless moments have been conducted via the graypink cell phone whose ring reminds me of heaven. Not used to engaging in such elaborate phone conversations (or at least in this quantity), I had to carve out little sitting spaces to talk. I always prefer the floor to chairs and knees against chest rather than crossed. I also can't stand having an audience to my phone conversations so I need solitude. Speaker phones drive me wild. My favorite chattyspace is in the very front of my house right off the kitchen where the background music is the drone of the dishwasher that glass-by-glass improves my messy little life. I am squirelled up against the clothes washer on the hardwood floor and with a view of my favorite indoor plants (African violets, Rex Begonias, aloe cactus, and Megan's housewarming tree (I love my plants like puppies)) and the freshly fallen snow on my redbud tree outside. There I talk for hours, making my adventures known in New York City, Minneapolis, Naperville, and Chicago. I've had many very beautiful, insightful, and amusing conversations this month which have been nothing but tiny little gifts that I open up again and again.


"Maybe you need to be tougher than you want to be right now," Michelle offered one evening when I sat curled up in frustration and confusion. There was, of course, a part of me that started an uprising at this statement. Tougher? I feel like I am the strength of 10 men: I am holding everything up right now and it is heavy. I am tough. Aren't I? So I sat down with a pile of sticky notes (because loose leaf just wouldn't get the point across) and sketched out an illustrated definition of strength. And once again, it continued coming back to faith.

The next morning I sat alone in our movie theater church (Ben was running sound) and I watched the flurry of people young and old who have been so humbly influential in my life. They were smiling and extending their hands toward each other. Michelle and I later marveled at how one sermon can speak to several people in an audience, all with different struggles. The sermon that morning: faithfulness and strength. It was just what I needed.


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For Lisa in response to last conversation on organic artistry versus drug/ speed/ heroin artistry: " As an artist he held the proud notion that every image came out of his own spontaneous chemistry, not from any synthetic formula."

-Anais Nin

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