Reflections
I'm not up to passionate reason or reasonable passion just now, so I guess I'll ramble rather than taking up an issue to examine. It feels like I've been dissecting a lot lately, everything from courtship to M'Adoo to forest noises. I'm fractious...or fractured. I want to just be.
The day has proven itself a mixed bag. I woke several times in the night, once with a very strange head/neck ache, once with the feverish certainty that I had heard fire alarms going off in the house, and once for I-forget-what, but it wasn't pleasant. This sort of troubled sleep isn't unusual when Mom and Dad are out of the house, as is currently the case. They have gone to Montana for a conference, with Davy and Churdee, and are staying to visit Yellowstone until Tuesday. They've been gone since Thursday, and the ache of their missingness is becoming acute.
Hence, blogging. It keeps my mind off of being lonely for them. I never did get over homesickness, you know. It is with me constantly at school, and now, even at home, in their absence. This is the price of being very closely knit to my dear ones. I pay it gladly, trusting God to return them to me again. Only, whenever they are gone, I have nightmares that they have been killed in some sort of accident, and are never coming home. This dark feeling I am usually able to ward off through prayer, but it is still a strain.
Of course, I further compounded the emotion through my own stupidity--I picked this weekend to read a book I've always meant to read and never have. I allude to The Scarlet Letter, that tome of apparently vast American intellectual importance, which is so heavily laced with symbolism that it leaves me seeing bogies in my sleep and ominous portents in the fact that my grandparents just chanced to be watching Return to Me last night.
What utter mental rubbish! Now, having confessed it, I am able to laugh at it. As if God is not sovereign! By the way, that was the best part of my Sabbath: church service this morning. Church is the only thing besides parties and quasi-formal dinners that I bother to dress up for during the summer. All the rest of the time I go about in whatever is clean and matches, but on Sundays I put rosebuds in my hair, or elaborate silvery hair-clips, and earrings and all the rest. There is such a rich delight in dressing up to honor the Lord's Day!
I have little general acquaintance at CLC now; after three years away, I am greeted only by parents and family friends who remember me, fellow caregroup-members, and a few girlfriends with whom I have been able to maintain relationships over the distance of space and time. It is enough for me; I only feel a little stab of sadness when people visit our home and do not know that I am a daughter of the house, because I have been away. That makes me feel as though I don't belong in my home, and, you see, not belonging at home is a horror second only to not belonging to Christ.
So I do not like that, but I do not mind being a sort of ghost at church. I pass through all the hallways of my childhood, and sometimes pause to smile in front of a mirror that saw me when I was ten or eleven, and still reflects my image at twenty-one. Because I am so generally unknown, I feel a certain freedom. I need not speak to anybody. This is a dangerous freedom, for it feeds a certain element of my nature that would prefer absolute solitude--saving only my dear ones--to every other mode of existence. My summers are lonely, in a social sense. Yet, you know, I always have a place. In the family row, between my brothers and parents and grandparents and sisters, with my cousins seated a little way down the center section, I am absolutely secure and free to worship my God.
Oh, there is such joy in worshipping God! I have often thought that nowhere, in any human relationship or interaction, in any delight of nature or stimulation of the senses, have I ever known the heady sweetness, the intensity and rightness, which I experience while praising the Lord. And this is man's chief end? I can well believe it! If I was made for anything--and I was--than it is to glorify God. My whole being proclaims it. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty! The earth is full of his glory! This adoration of his perfection, this need to speak it aloud, echoes from wall to wall, piercingly beautiful, as though radiance in corporeal form had settled substantively, but fluid and sparkling, in the chambers of my soul.
Therefore banish all evil dreams as mere shadows of the cave, and be in sunlight, O my soul. Oh, my little soul, the wonder of it...
He loves thee.
The day has proven itself a mixed bag. I woke several times in the night, once with a very strange head/neck ache, once with the feverish certainty that I had heard fire alarms going off in the house, and once for I-forget-what, but it wasn't pleasant. This sort of troubled sleep isn't unusual when Mom and Dad are out of the house, as is currently the case. They have gone to Montana for a conference, with Davy and Churdee, and are staying to visit Yellowstone until Tuesday. They've been gone since Thursday, and the ache of their missingness is becoming acute.
Hence, blogging. It keeps my mind off of being lonely for them. I never did get over homesickness, you know. It is with me constantly at school, and now, even at home, in their absence. This is the price of being very closely knit to my dear ones. I pay it gladly, trusting God to return them to me again. Only, whenever they are gone, I have nightmares that they have been killed in some sort of accident, and are never coming home. This dark feeling I am usually able to ward off through prayer, but it is still a strain.
Of course, I further compounded the emotion through my own stupidity--I picked this weekend to read a book I've always meant to read and never have. I allude to The Scarlet Letter, that tome of apparently vast American intellectual importance, which is so heavily laced with symbolism that it leaves me seeing bogies in my sleep and ominous portents in the fact that my grandparents just chanced to be watching Return to Me last night.
What utter mental rubbish! Now, having confessed it, I am able to laugh at it. As if God is not sovereign! By the way, that was the best part of my Sabbath: church service this morning. Church is the only thing besides parties and quasi-formal dinners that I bother to dress up for during the summer. All the rest of the time I go about in whatever is clean and matches, but on Sundays I put rosebuds in my hair, or elaborate silvery hair-clips, and earrings and all the rest. There is such a rich delight in dressing up to honor the Lord's Day!
I have little general acquaintance at CLC now; after three years away, I am greeted only by parents and family friends who remember me, fellow caregroup-members, and a few girlfriends with whom I have been able to maintain relationships over the distance of space and time. It is enough for me; I only feel a little stab of sadness when people visit our home and do not know that I am a daughter of the house, because I have been away. That makes me feel as though I don't belong in my home, and, you see, not belonging at home is a horror second only to not belonging to Christ.
So I do not like that, but I do not mind being a sort of ghost at church. I pass through all the hallways of my childhood, and sometimes pause to smile in front of a mirror that saw me when I was ten or eleven, and still reflects my image at twenty-one. Because I am so generally unknown, I feel a certain freedom. I need not speak to anybody. This is a dangerous freedom, for it feeds a certain element of my nature that would prefer absolute solitude--saving only my dear ones--to every other mode of existence. My summers are lonely, in a social sense. Yet, you know, I always have a place. In the family row, between my brothers and parents and grandparents and sisters, with my cousins seated a little way down the center section, I am absolutely secure and free to worship my God.
Oh, there is such joy in worshipping God! I have often thought that nowhere, in any human relationship or interaction, in any delight of nature or stimulation of the senses, have I ever known the heady sweetness, the intensity and rightness, which I experience while praising the Lord. And this is man's chief end? I can well believe it! If I was made for anything--and I was--than it is to glorify God. My whole being proclaims it. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty! The earth is full of his glory! This adoration of his perfection, this need to speak it aloud, echoes from wall to wall, piercingly beautiful, as though radiance in corporeal form had settled substantively, but fluid and sparkling, in the chambers of my soul.
Therefore banish all evil dreams as mere shadows of the cave, and be in sunlight, O my soul. Oh, my little soul, the wonder of it...
He loves thee.
posted by Praelucor at 4:21 PM
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