Villagersonline : blogs : Suki : Childhood

From: Suki
Date: Fri Apr 30 20:47:25 MST 2004
Subject: Childhood

Responses
Karen: Test response (4/30/04)
Patricia: Joy (5/3/04)

Responses (sorted by date)
Patricia: Joy (5/3/04)
Karen: Test response (4/30/04)

I have purple toenails. They smell like grapes. I know that from past experience, not current knowledge. I just bent over and smelled my big toenail. Definitely grape. Now it’s current info (or would it be currant? No – that’s raisin talk, not grape).
Eric and I went to see 13 Going on 30 tonight (thanks for the babysitting, Jules). I loved it! Which is odd, as I don't generally like movies. The adolescent scenes are set in the 80’s, complete with melodramatic music videos and purple sweaters decorated with hearts. It brought back a lot of memories from my youth. What’s funny is that it tied right in with what God has been showing me lately.
Last week I had a couple of conversations with people that brought me back to significant turning points in my life. One was the summer between my junior and senior years of college, when I decided that it was time to grow up and be deep. I chopped off my waist-length hair and stopped wearing makeup. Time to get serious. No more flirting. I would surely get higher approval ratings from God if I let go of the shallow me and dove into meaningful relationships and ministry. Six months later I was in counseling for depression. Which turned out for the best, because that’s where I realized I was in love with Eric. But I digress.
The other turning point was somewhere around 5th grade. I have memories of the last doll I was ever given, a Cabbage Patch Kid® named Tammy Sue (she was originally named Sue Tammy, and I took her adoption papers from the box, filled out the name change form and mailed it back to the company. I was serious about this motherhood thing). I really enjoyed her, but I knew I was too old to play with dolls, so it was with some embarrassment that I got her dressed up on Sundays before church and moved her to the couch in the living room before I left each week. It was about this time that sex ed books came into my life, and I started letting go of the silly things of childhood. Time for makeup (a lot of it, in cobalt blue and charcoal gray up to the eyebrows) and long earrings and caring about grades. I stopped dancing in the living room and choreographing gymnastic routines on the uneven parallel bar that was my swingset -- it gave me enormous callouses on my palms that just weren’t ladylike.
So I have these 2 timeframes that reveal to me how in the necessary process of maturing, I gave up precious parts of myself that didn’t really have to go. I was propelled forward by shame and fear, and I lost so much joy of living in the process. What would it have looked like to have been urged into the future by an awareness of God’s love for and pleasure in me? I’m starting to get a taste for that. For the first time. God loves me. And I have purple toenails to prove it.
By the way, Russ, I saw the short post on our homepage about your developing ideas for the website; I can’t wait to see what you’re cooking up!

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From: Karen
Date: Fri Apr 30 15:02:54 MST 2004
Subject: Test response

The last responses I've written are caught somewhere in a mysterious web of computer cross-hatching (or somethin'). Check, check...

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From: Patricia
Date: Mon May  3 10:53:49 MST 2004
Subject: Joy

Sue wrote: “…it was time to grow up and be deep. … Time to get serious. No more flirting. I would surely get higher approval ratings from God if I let go of the shallow me and dove into meaningful relationships and ministry. … What would it have looked like to have been urged into the future by an awareness of God’s love for and pleasure in me? I’m starting to get a taste for that. … God loves me.”
Russ wrote in his blog “Identity”: “I am starting to think that God wants me to take joy in the intimacy with God outside of the context of an awareness of my sin and his actions in redeeming me. I am starting to think that God wants me to take joy in him, and that sometimes in that joy I will be blissfully unaware of the terrible realities of my sin. I have tasted of the sweetness of just enjoying him without purpose or justification. I could feel how much he delighted in me, and I delighted in him as well.”
Someone wise encouraged me to be myself – offer myself as I have been created without apology (or fear). It seems that Sue and Russ have been given the same advice. In yesterday’s sermon Eric posed the question why we choose to be in darkness, rather than stepping into the light. I think it’s fear who invites us to linger (or step) in the darkness. Fear is sneaky, ugly and clever. Fear tells us we’re unworthy of genuine happiness and the only way to have any kind of fun is to engage in sinful behavior. We’re already bad, how could we possibly make it worse?? And when we do experience lightness of spirit, then it must stem from something bad.
But I found that hidden within is this person who longs to live out loud, be silly, and disregard convention. And somewhere within reach there is this irresistible, faintly tangible source of contagious joy. I feel like God is inviting us – inviting me (me?) to dip a bucket into this iridescent fluid called joy and spill it all over the place. But then my ears listen to the whisperings of dusty-gray, prune-faced fear. “They’re looking at you funny,” he says. “Real adults have a good time quietly, in muted earth tones.” Or: “It is rude to be happy in the presence of someone who is struggling in life.” “Joy and abandon belong to the children.” Or worse yet: “You belong to the suffering Christ – so be a suffering Christian!” In the back of my mind chimes the Christmas carol “Joy to the world”. Now I know that it’s been lies I’ve listened to. He came so we may have ‘abundance of life’; doesn’t that imply joy as well? But how do I reconcile giddy joy with all the suffering and struggling that befalls us all? I suppose joy is not always giddy. It seems to also be the fuel that propels us through the hard places where we would be destroyed without it. It must be the expression of love. God’s love.
Like Russ and Sue before me I come to realize that guilt-free joy is God’s message to us. Now when I feel it I can know that He just whispered into my heart: “I love you.” No 'if', 'when', or 'but'. I am free to receive this joyful feeling, without hiding it as in shame. I can return the message, “and I love You.” I know He heard me and is as glad to hear it as I am.

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