Those writing moments that are few and far between...

Back in the dark ages, when I was an educator, the best moments were the light bulb ones.  For they truly do happen.  Between one moment and the next, understanding dawns and light rushes into the place that was once clothed in darkness.  For the student, those moments are not always happy ones as we might like to think.  

On a dear friend's Facebook note about homeschooling, I recounted the story of a young boy whose light bulb moment--when it came to reading--was filled with raw anger.  For a micro second, I would actually have called it rage.  

A rather intelligent boy had been shut out of the world of his family and peers because he could not, as a second grader, read.  His reading lessons had been the immersion type, void of direct instruction. After receiving permission of his parents, whose professional field was literacy, I began tutoring. I did so because while babysitting, it broke my heart to see the naked longing in his eyes as he watched his three-year-old brother read and to hear the bitter resignation in his own voice whenever he blithely admitted he was not a reader. Even his classmates acknowledged the same, labeled him the same, as did everyone else.

I would like to claim great professional skill in the tutelage, but I cannot.  All I really did was connect the dots for him.  In that moment though, he screamed at me, Why didn't anyone teach me this? As a reader, after that, he went from 0 to 60 in ten seconds flat.  It was a truly joyous moment when he announced to his peers, to the world, rather proudly that he was now a reader.  

For a writer, the best moments are when you write something that is either what you intended to say or quite darn close.  Today, that happened for me.  

One a friend's post, someone wished he were better about being joyful in suffering. My friend, a pastor, replied who ever said suffering was joyful.  The man responded with: "Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross"... (Hebrews 12:2).

[Now THAT is a passage (Hebrews 12:1-6) that I would LOVE taught by a Lutheran pastor for is sure reads like Law to me...be the good witness...or else.]

But his response made me think of how I have changed the way I look at, think about, the word peace and the phrase: the peace of Christ or Christ's peace.  So, I added my two cents:

I do not equate joy, always, with emotion. I mean, I have always heard of peace as a feeling, but it is also a cessation of hostilities. The peace of Christ is a cessation of hostility with God. That knowledge can still you, quiet you, even in the midst of great sorrow or deep anguish...moving through and with and beneath the emotions, but based upon a state of being.

For me, the joy of the cross is the delight, the keen pleasure not of the suffering, but of what He would gain for us through and with and beneath the pain and anguish and humiliation and a loneliness none of us can truly understand.

When I was a missionary in Africa (back in my evangelical days), there was a couple whose van overturned and killed all five (I believe) of their children. Their grief was constant, their sorrow great through the years. Yet they had joy in the hope of their resurrection and being reunited with their children...one day. They were old. They had lived a long life with both sorrow and joy.

The joy that God brings, therefore, to me, is more like His peace, a state of being born of who we are in Christ, what He has won for us, rather than a feeling of...excitement.

For me, the result of my pen was almost all that I hoped it would be.

It was strange, though, because part of my lying in bed last night was taken up with how poorly I have done, in my opinion, at trying to explain what it is like when my body temperature drops.  I was thinking this, of course, because I was miserable with cold, waiting for the moment (hours) to pass.

Something that I noted last night is that the surface temperature of my skin becomes very cold to the touch. You know how its fun to take your ice cold hand and touch it to the back of someone's neck or face after playing in the snow?  It is like that. Only, all my skin is ice cold.  My legs and arms and hands and face.  I have a hard time lying there because I do not want any part of me touching the rest of me, only the best way to work on warming up that I have found is to wrap my body in a thin cotton blanket beneath the arctic weight comforter I have on the bed....double cocooning of a sort.

That is the other trick, by the way, to have not a single inch of me outside my face, exposed to any air.  Even the smallest, tiniest sliver of room air sends chills up and down my body and deep within me.  I wriggle and wriggle to ensure that every bit of me is covered by the cotton blanket and the comforter is tucked around my body from chin to toes. And then wriggle more, within that inner cocoon, to try and move my arms and legs away from my body so that none of my skin is touching any part of me. The wriggling usually untucks the blanket or the comforter, a "breeze" sneaks in, and I start wriggling more to get the covers properly arranged once more.

All of that is, of course, after I dress in four or five layers.

Even with the above, however, I have yet to find the adjectives, the figurative language that would convey what it is like to be so cold. Before this started happening, I never would have thought this could be a problem for someone...not unless that person was too thin. [I am so totally not too thin.] The feeling, the misery, the experience really does not have words yet...good ones, that is.  Words to paint a picture for when I say, I got cold today, and anyone would understand.  It is not for sympathy, mind you, this longing to find the right words.  It is to be less alone in the struggle in a way. 

[Sometimes my pen really disappoints me.  SIGH.]

I used to think that hypothermia was not all that bad of a way to die.  I mean, you basically just fall asleep.  Only, I forgot about the abject misery of cold, how it can consume your entire being, and discomfort to the point of pain of the violent tremors that take over your body.  I am not, I know, dying of hypothermia at these times.  But I have wondered what would happen if I didn't work so hard to warm myself up when my body temperature begins to drop.

I am Yours, Lord.  Save me!