Enfranchised!

Victory! Well, for me, not necessarily my candidates, but every little step helps. I actually received my absentee ballot in the mail. Strange as it may seem, I wasn't counting on getting it. See, I'm from a city that has been under the strangle-hold of the democratic party for a very, very, very long time. And voting kafuffles go hand-in-hand with that history. Every time I've voted there I've felt the thrill of having wrested something I deserved out of a hand resentful and reluctant to yield it to me.

This reminds me of a story... Once upon a time I went down to the local park department to vote. (Actually, this is a true story. Don't let the fairy-tale beginning throw you off.) It's only 3 blocks from my house, and the voting process is very easy. All you have to do is tell them your name. Thinking back, I realize I've never once shown my ID to prove that I actually am the "Amy Peterson" on the list who resides at --.

Anyway, at the double doors of the building's entrance were several very "beefy" men (read: large, muscular, and unmistakably descended from mafia), there to help people vote, I assume. As I approached the heavy doors they fell over themselves to hoist both wide open, creating a princess-like entrance into the dingy, echoing, CPD halls. All smiles and nods, they were the very picture of eagerness as they pointed me down the left hallway toward the voting room. (There is never a line. Chicago is very efficient when it comes to getting in the vote.)

I happily went through the process of punching my tabs and shoving my ballot down the slot. Somehow or other, when the old ladies at the table had given me the ballot, they also gave me a little receipt that I could carry out with me, showing that I had done my civic duty and voted. Oddly (as I think about it now), this receipt was colored -- one color if you were a registered Dem, and another if you were a Republican. They kept the tear-off part, which I guess was an added safety measure to ensure no one could pretend to be me and vote again.

Clutching my receipt in my hand I sauntered back toward the main doors, happy in the knowledge that there were several large men available to open them. These doors, you see, are huge, metal, fireproof sorts of things. Rather awkward.

I turn the corner to the short foyer hall. I'm on one end; the doors and three men are on the other. I see them. They see me. Their eyes drift down to the receipt in my hand. Their faces harden. Their arms cross. Their backs lean against the walls.

Undisguised hostility oozed toward me and my red receipt. Not a nod. Not a smile. (And I'd been looking rather fetching, as I was in a skirt and on my way to work. It didn't help a bit.)

There was only one way out, so I held my chin high, my eyes down, and walked the gauntlet. (I'd have rather run.) Three slouching guards (each at least twice my bulk, and I'm not a short woman) glared angrily at me on either side; six bulging arms remained stolidly crossed two feet away as I struggled with the heavy 1960's-weight metal doors.

When the door had finally opened and I'd slipped out to the other side, their following anger felt like brick weights pasted to my back. The feeling accompanied me all the way to the car. I shivered some, glad that it was morning and the sky was light, glad my receipt and I hadn't met these public servants in some dark alley.

Chicago's slogan is, "The City that Works", and it really does. I truly admire Mayor Daley's tulips, symbolic of the well-oiled bureaucracy that keeps things moving along and even keeps them looking good as they do. I've actually recommended just such a mafia-inspired governmental structure for poor D.C., which seemed in bad need of help when last I saw it. Chicago may be corrupt, but dog-gone-it, it works. The only thing is, it takes God on your side to get it to work for you.

Which I don't mind, as I have God.

Gosh, I love that city!

What an unmarried woman had to say about that!

Tonight was the Bible study I wrote about a few weeks ago, where I'd be leading on the book The Power of a Praying Wife. Unbeknownst to me when last I wrote, I HAD volunteered for the week that the chapter was actually on the subject of marriage! So here I sat, an unmarried woman waxing eloquent while six married women listened. Only God does these sorts of things.
I was afraid of boring them, and perhaps I did (Dora insists I didn't). Yet, I enjoyed teaching what I did. Several days ago I was talking to my dad on the phone and he popped out with one of those memory-blazing phrases -- the sort that will in the future will always be prefaced with a "my dad says...." What did he say? Ah yes, good of you to ask.

"Satan is always warring against love. He is always warring against relationships."

I've thought about it several times since, especially as I prepared for leading this study. It is so true, and so infrequently considered seriously. Oh, we're aware of the enemy's involvement in major things like divorce and bitterness and adultery. But the little things escape our notice: irritation, annoyance, self-preservation, fear, accusations. The list is extensive, so I won't even attempt to complete it. The point is, we are actually in a war. If we never recognize the fact, we will never violently and vigilantly act to preserve the way of love.

God IS love, and we are made in His image. This means that what Satan hates in God, he hates in us also. The enemy hates love.

Can you imagine this? Really? A personality that hates love? I find it horrific.

We can already see how effective the enemy is in this. Our culture guzzles divorce like beer. What are our defenses against such an all-out attack? What are our counter-weapons? What tools and strategies has the Lord given us to counter this onslaught of powerful hate?

Prayer is the first. Love is the second.

There are two aspects to this love. The first is following the law of love toward one another. That law says that we are to love the other as we love ourselves, that we are to prefer the other above ourselves, that we are to lay down our life for the sake of the other. (Ever notice how much easier it is to follow this law of sacrificial love toward our friends and neighbors than toward our family and spouses?)

The second aspect is this: we are married to two men at once. One marriage will last about 50 years. The other will last over 50 million years (to name a smallish sort of number). Our marriage to Jesus is our first, and our longest. It is the real thing, of which our physical marriage is a picture and shadow and reflection. It is the blueprint. It is the guide.

What does this mean practically? Our capacity for love is greater than a human being will ever be able to fill. We are deeper people than our spouses will ever be able to plumb. Women (and men, I assume) habitually look to their spouses to fill needs God created so extensive that only He could fill them. He left room in us for Himself!

He took me once through the 23rd Psalm, having me declare back to Him that He was my shepherd, my husband wasn't. He was my provider, my husband wasn't. He would give my soul rest and peace, my husband wouldn't. And so on... It was a wonderful exercise. At each verse I acknowledged that God might use my husband as a tool and an avenue, such as providing for me financially and physically. But in the ultimate sense, at the end of the story, a spouse is not going to ever complete what only God can.

I told the girls tonight that they will always be in want, they will always be in need. No husband will supply what God designed only to be satisfied by Himself. Until the marriage of the Lamb and the bride, we will always be waiting. The only way for a physical marriage to be all it was designed to be, is for it to be second to our marriage to God. The only way to really love your spouse, is to love God more than your spouse.

And that's what an unmarried woman had to say about that!

I Am More Beautiful

Whatever you’ve heard about Hawaii, believe. Unless someone tells you it’s paradise. A friend was praying a week before I flew here and he accidentally asked God to bless me in heaven. It was quickly reworded, “Hawaii,” as we all giggled. My very first impression when I saw the mountains that surround my brother’s house, (one which has lasted these three months) was not that I would find beauty here, but that I would find the Lord. Every time I have paused to take in a sight and have intentionally opened my spirit to hear His comments on it, He has said this: “I am more beautiful.” It is no denigration of the creation lying in front of us. It is just simple truth. And I love that truth!

I was reminded of this in Kauai this past week. The beauty there should have been overwhelming, and to many people it probably is. But I’m just me, and God keeps whispering this thing in my ear, and I stare at lush mountains and white-frosted aqua seas and they seem remote and half-way compared to the tangible presence of Jesus.

The two things I don’t have pictures of are what most impressed a mark on me. At the organic farm where we camped one night we hung out in the “cookhouse” with a pile of the hippies who work 15 hours a week in exchange for a campsite. Laid-back, earthy, dull, and-in spite of their grasped and obtained “freedom”-visibly repressed, they welcomed us with an ease and a carelessness that was little interested in whether we were or were not. Two thoughts were paramount during those hours with them. One was whether or not it’s possible to get high accidentally off the fumes of someone else’s weed (oh, I’m so ignorant…it’s funny, but don’t laugh at me, Anna Lew!) and the other, fighting for predominance and winning, was how I could possibly share the good news with this group of people so in need of it. Conversation was not engaged in, openings were not being made, and I felt myself so ill-equipped (as Mr. Darcy might say) to recommend myself to strangers such as these. Why would they listen to a clean, groomed girl who had spent the last few nights in a posh resort, was a college graduate, and politely declined their offers to share in the joints? The more they smoked, the more each retreated into their own internal world and the chance slipped further out of my fingers. Do you know how frustrating it is to know how to save a drowning man but be tied to your boat? I kept praying for some sort of opening and finally God gave me the opportunity He had built into the evening. Hippie girl #1 (bubbly and carefree) had been to the store and bought markers and a journal. It was decided that everyone who stayed there should write in it, and Deanna and I were to inaugurate the book since we were the first who would be “leaving” the farm. When it finally got into my hands I knew what to write about—His voice, continually telling me, “I am more beautiful than this,” and my joy at having something more to look forward to than the beauty in the natural realm.

We retreated then, using a cell phone to guide our stumbling feet along ruts and mango rows and vegetables growing in the red dirt. Before bed we were invited into the owner’s metal barn-home, where we were supposed to be watching a movie but instead watched scuttling cockroaches in relief against the bright computer screen-the only bit of light in all that huge, dirty space. I was glad they were on the screen, for then they were not on me (at least, so I hoped).

The second interaction that impressed me was with Vladimir, the Russian-named Brazilian to whom we fed s’mores roasted to perfection in Lawrence’s beach campfire. Lawrence had gotten a job recently, but didn’t have enough yet to snag a place to live, so he was camping on the beach until he’d saved up. Tom, his friend, came and zipped himself up in his bag next to the fire, accepted one of our s’mores, and promptly slipped into an oblivion of sleep only the homeless achieve. The starry sky above us would surely turn rainy at some point during the night. I didn’t remember Tom being there until morning, after I had survived the disturbing hours of high wind and crashing surf from under the safe cover of a Marine combat tent. How Tom fared I don’t know. He was gone before we rose. But Vladimir, who was so handsome and thought he knew so much…who accepted our food and our help in the dark rain then carelessly insulted all we had told him of ourselves…whose request to impose himself on the rest of our trip we refused, yet who unknowingly slept all night as a tent guard between us and the creepo in the camp beyond… this man I tried to reason gently with under the stars. There is absolute truth. Religions are made by man, but God is still Himself, whatever we may say of Him. Should we throw away reality because someone else once offered us a twisted rendition of it? But he would not listen. Perhaps he was thinking too much about sleeping on the beach under such stars, or about managing to get a place in our car the next day, or about the very American experience of campfire s’mores next to pretty, kind girls. In any event, I was glad when rain abruptly sent us scattering to our various tents.

That is not a very complete rendition of our Kauai trip, which also involved treacherous hikes toward the wettest place on earth, views of an unparalleled Napali coastline, dances in the festival crowds around very Hawaiian bands, tastes of Kauai pie ice cream (coffee, coconut, macadamias, fudge), sushi and poke, destroyers anchoring off swimming beaches, birds playing among the resort’s breakfast buffeters while early surfers dotted the waves just beyond, pervasive and permanent red dirt, packaging up 70 lbs fresh mangoes for transport to the airport then Hilo, Queen’s Bath’s salty buoyancy giving us the ability to swim and watch the schools of fish around our feet at the same time… The beauty of Kauai is extreme, but even in the midst of it, He kept whispering the same thing to me: “I am more beautiful than this.” And I am so glad. I would be sorely disappointed if anything I could see or experience on this earth was the pinnacle of joy and beauty. I need more to look forward to than that, and I have it.

I've posted tons of photos w/lots of explanatory captions on facebook. Here's a link, for those of you who are interested :)