The Story

Saturday morning…11:15am…still in bed.

My brain keeps screaming at me that it’s time to go be productive…must study for the GRE and get more vocab words under my belt…must head to the lab and shock some millipedes before lunch…must write thank you notes, plan out the rest of my catch up dates with friends, do laundry, clean my room.

But I’m not going to. I’ve been racing all week and my spring break has felt a lot like a “spring busy” thus far. Different kinds of busy, but busy none the less. It’s time for a contemplation morning.

I slept in and then started looking at photo albums from senior year…taking a little jaunt back through prom, senior trip, and graduation. It’s starting to feel like very long ago indeed that the drama and decisions of that era were occupying my brain, and yet most days in my head I’m still no older than 17. Interesting how our bodies and lives continue to change despite the fact that we still feel inexperienced and unready to face what is ahead. Perhaps for me it is because I seem to spend an amazing amount of time learning the same lessons over and over again. Se la vi.

Fernando Ortega accompanies my brain power this morning with his fabulous hymns CD…one that will be a lifetime favorite methinks. Something about the construction and delivery of a timeless hymn can teach me so much about my faith…whether because they are handed down from saints generations ago or because the words carry so much meat or because the simplicities of their melodies and the depth of their harmonies allow the church to bind together across a vast span of persons. I remember teasing Andrew back in high school for his resolution to read the hymnal like a devotional each day…and then the shock that I experienced when I tried it for myself one day. There are some golden nuggets of truth in both theology and life experience hidden in those pages.

This week has been a good one despite it’s crazy schedule…midterms were quite hardcore and though I think they ended out pretty well I had a lot of catching up to do on sleep and was landed with a nasty cold this past weekend. Matt came home to help celebrate my birthday with roomies, family, and friends….21 is an impossible age for me to be at…thus far I’ve chosen mostly to ignore the fact that I’m well on my way to being an adult. However, my friends and I did go out to celebrate with a little alcohol and some movies and food. I’m privileged to have friends who want nothing more than tons of fun and the bond of friends who will be there whether you’re grouchy and tired or in perfect form. Good times.

Friday morning we said goodbye to Faith, who spent the week in Alabama with her parents and grandparents…she asked me to accompany her a while back, and while I would have loved to do so, I quickly realized that I had a larger priority, one that did not include beaches or carefree days.

The millipede project I’m working on is an effort to see how much millipedes (and their small brains and simple neural ganglion) are capable of learning. There is a new push in the scientific area to build some “invertebrate models” about learning and general brain capabilities of animals at very low forms. The thinking is that the more we know about what can be done with small structures in the brain, the greater chance we will have of understanding the physiological process of memory and learning. It’s incredibly complicated and fascinating…so I can use this logic to transform the boring work into something a bit more heroic sounding…

…or at least I can try…

Despite my best efforts to feel like I’m accomplishing something for the greater scientific good, it’s hard to keep this attitude when I spend my days lifting millipedes in and out of a foam box, giving them pep talks when they won’t move one direction or the other and shocking them when they will. SOME people (I won’t mention any names) seem to see this as cruel and heartless. Apparently my project seems to hint at many distasteful past acts similar to the holocaust and, in the midst of this appaling injustice, is also pointless and unnecessary. So while I hold high the banner of scientific inquiry and ward off these jabs at the project which will dominate the next 5-8 months of my life, I continue to think of myself as an educator of sorts…benevolently imparting wisdom both to my fellow scientists and to the small, helpless creatures who are my subjects in training.

I have 20 millipedes each in two test groups…and I have found that due to the slow movement of many many legs, it takes about 1.5 hours per millipede to perform the 15 consecutive trials. All told, I am basically working a full time job or more without being paid…but at least I am getting to do this all without the hustle and bustle of classes to block the progress.

Midterms are a thing of the past now, but studying has not ceased…my Kaplan study guides for the GRE came in just in time for spring break so I’ve been brushing up on verbal skills especially this week. Somehow I had myself convinced that this test would be so similar to the SAT that I’d hardly need to study….but quick review of the reading comprehension and vocab sections of the test have informed me that I very well will have to do some hard core study sessions before I take the test (hopefully in June). I am getting excited, and a little weirded out, however, by the coming of the next step, and by the prospect of preparing applications (and hopefully interviews) for REAL school…which will finally propel me into real life.

And then there is a large part of me that reminds me how dumb I am not to consider my life right at this very moment “real”…how the way I live through classes and midterms and millipedes and sisters moving to college really does determine what my “real life” looks like far more than the school that I attend in two years and whether or not I ever get married and if I’m the best PA in town. Today is the day that I have been given to live…and I’d better get to it now rather than waiting, worrying, or wishing about the future.

It’s Easter again, and though it is supposed to snow tomorrow morning I’m extremely excited about the service, the friends, and the food that will fill our day. Yesterday was our good Friday service at church and I was so captured again by the depth of the story of God’s intervention in our lives. It’s not just Christ, not just creation, not just the paradoxes seen in the bible, not just the mystery of the spirit, not just the awesome power of the miracles and the resurrection, not just the prophets who predicted the savior’s coming, not just the way Jesus relates most closely to the hurt and the broken. It is the depth, the angles, and somehow the simplicity of the story of redemption…the plan of man to create, purchase, and return all men to himself again for his glory…an honor so huge and so complex and so overarching that we could never comprehend it in our human form. It’s the workings of love, grace, truth, beauty, humility, pain, suffering, death, life, bondage, freedom, and victory all meshing together in a tapestry that fills to many dimensions of space to count.

As much as I love my dad’s genius for music and sound, I think my favorite part of watching him do a church service or a choir concert is his total fascination with the Story. Without ever verbalizing it, he has taught me that this is one of the most central places where we can see our faith become real, true, and meaningful. He’s obsessed. I’ve learned so much from him about the way that God works, not because he understands it all, but because he doesn’t. Yet he returns to the same story every year, multiple times, with narration and drama and words and song…trying to flesh out one specific part of the story…once facet….one dimension. For 35 years he's been designing church services and choir concerts around the same exact plot. He always jokes with the choir at vespers time because he finds himself preaching little sermons on the podium, then laughing to himself and saying “I guess you know this…it’s the same story every year.” And yet he returns to it. We all do. Because it doesn’t run dry if we keep telling it.

The Story doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t “work out” like a fairy tale or a fable. It’s a story of desperate love, ravaging anger, a creation gone bad, a pursuit that is relentless, a fight against the final enemy of every man on earth: not a person but death itself.

The Story isn’t linear. It doesn’t work chronologically, and while God has revealed the “ending” we still don’t know or grasp many parts of the “middle”, let alone the ending.

The Story is timeless…it includes us and other men that haven’t even lived yet…and somehow it is complete but still being written. And the story goes on in our own lives, but in a bigger sense it is carried out through the universe, breaking through barriers of time, space, and intellect.

The Story is chaotic. It doesn’t flow well and it certainly isn’t the most efficient way to an end. The characters get messy and stay messy…they don’t find the secret formula that lets them live a perfect life toward the end. They kill people and have affairs and are still called “men after God’s own heart”, or they do everything right and live seemingly perfect lives and yet get torn apart by Jesus himself.

The Story seems contradictory. Especially when it comes to Jesus, there’s enough paradoxes between words and deeds to make your head spin. He says that he has come to fulfill Moses’s law, the ten commandments –things like “don’t commit adultery” and “don’t steal”. But he comes to the house of a filthy tax collector and he hangs out with prostitutes and lets them touch him and cry with him.

The Story is told in words but can’t be summarized by them. As much as you want to say that the story can be put into 4 bullet points, and that we can comprehend salvation in a quick 3 paragraph essay (knowledge of the savior, accepting the savior, forgiven by the savior), sometimes the best way to understand the story is not to explain it at all. When you start to summarize and categorize and prioritize, the situation looks confusing and the plot loses its interest and you start to think whoever wrote this thing must be completely crazy.

The Story is mysterious. As much as we’d love to be able to summarize the story and hand it to everyone we know so that the world could know God, on some level the story must be accepted and experienced and lived before it can begin to be appreciated. And the truth is that once we start trying too hard to understand it’s intricacies we loose all sense of its mystery and somehow feel no need to live it any more. When it becomes a text book or a HOW TO: list or a set of rules or even a novel with simple rising action, climax, and resolution, we lose hold of the heart of the story and all we leave with are words. The potency of the gospel is lost as soon as we make it a formula (read Donald Miller for more on this…he’s got me thinking like crazy these last few weeks).

The Story is personal. I’m struck more and more by this as I get older and realize that all the big words we learned in Sunday school and memorized in AWANA really do apply. Words like GRACE and REDEMPTION aren’t just put there to summarize…they are essential to the process of salvation and to the way that we understand our relationship to God. The ginormous proportions of the Story don’t keep it from being applicable to our lives, even our individual days. This truth is truly astounding.

Those thoughts only touch the brink of the depth of the story…and I’m truly grateful for another Easter to immerse myself a bit more in its complex simplicity. May we all take the time to live the story this holiday, and to revel like children in the marvel of the best story ever heard.