Nightmares

Plagued since early childhood with nightmares of the most distressing kind, I have often awakened myself with my own screaming.

There is no horror movie by Wes Craven that could compare to the technicolor and vibrance of the nightmares that have been visited upon me. There is no rhyme or reason for when or why they come, if I could figure that out I'd prevent the nightmare from the get go.

I don't watch horror movies for that reason. I don't like to be scared to begin with and the very idea of paying money to pee in my pants sort of seems counterproductive. And embarrassingly expensive.

There has been a constant thread from the time I was a small child that I had an arm cut off. Not a fun dream. When I was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, it was in the arm which I had repetitively dreamed was cut off. Go figure.

While I still retain a majority of my arm, I do have a pretty wicked scar where they followed my instructions to 'get it all while you are there the first time'. Adults are repulsed by it, but I am personally just thankful to be alive. Kids are fascinated by it and I generally tell them I got it through some sort of heroic battle with a shark near Madagascar.

They know I am kidding with them because I wink at them when I tell the story. Sometimes just the joke is enough, but for kids who have been through that kind of nightmare with family or personally, we dispense with the hokey stories and jokes when the crowd thins out and we talk pretty seriously about the fear and the horror that cancer can bring.

Most of the time, when people think about nightmares, they are truly confined to the evening and sleeping hours of the day. But I've lived through a few of them in broad daylight, so I am well aware that horror producing events don't always wait until bedtime to show up.

Having heard that "C" word more than once, I just sort of take it as a process of life. Not normally so sanguine about my life experiences, it just seems like there are some things that are part of the mortal journey that require a few marks of their passage in order to come out on the other side of the event in any measure.

Scars on various parts of my body are reminders that I have lived through some of the daytime nightmares in my life. Some scars are deeper and wider than others and some create physical changes in the tissues around them that are hard to explain and some days are even harder to deal with. I want to wear cute shirts and blouses, but truthfully, I consign my wardrobe to a selection of t-shirts mostly because I get so tired of people staring at the gaping absence of me where part of my arm used to be.

I feel like shouting "LOOK, IT WAS GET A HOLE IN MY ARM OR BE PLANTED IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND!!! GET OVER YOURSELF!!"

But that would probably be rude and hurt someone else's feelings and I would never want to intentionally hurt anyone. I know what that feels like and it's not pleasant.

I remember waking from a nightmare shortly after my Momma passed away, feeling very lonely and keenly aware that I couldn't just pick up the phone to call her and talk it all over with her. Momma had told me some years before she became ill that she had experienced that particular feeling herself after her own mother had passed. The feeling of wanting to share a moment - good, bad or indifferent - but knowing that it was no longer possible. That kind of nightmare of missing someone from your life even on the temporary basis which we believe this separation to be is still pretty hard to take.

I am thankful for a wonderful husband who sometimes gets awakened from a deep sleep to help me cope with a nightmare I can't understand or deal with by myself. He has even offered quiet and sleepy prayers to help the imagery to fade away and held me in his arms until a peaceful sleep finally came to claim me.

I listen to a special selection of music when I get freaked out at night. Sometimes the terrors of the night take on their own life and creep into my next day unbidden and most certainly unwelcome. For those times, I am thankful to know that I can ask for a priesthood blessing to help sort out and put right the truth from the fiction and be able to have an oasis of calm through the desert storms of my nights.

Even though other people are susceptible to the ravages of nightmares in their nocturnal mental gymnastics, it doesn't seem as personal to 'hear' about them as it does to experience it all in the full-color, imagination filled darkness of your own bedroom at night.

We normally have at least a little bit of light on for that reason. I am afraid of the dark.

I know all too well what happens in the darkness.

So a tiny shaft of light piercing the gloom makes all the difference between making it through the night and being overcome by it. Beneath a blanket and with my music playing softly in my ears, the light is the one element that truly drives away the nightmares. Light and dark cannot exist in the same physical space. Maybe that is why I am afraid of the dark so very much. Because something has to be in charge in this life and be the boss - and my childlike heart knows that it cannot be the darkness that wins and me survive it for very long.

That is why I am happy to be aquainted even at a distance with the Light that can fill the whole world. Through His Light, I can survive the nightmares that come.

Just rambling through some random thoughts tonight while revisiting my music collection . . .

The Image of Christ

Faith is an individual matter and should be treated as such. I respect that.

What I am having trouble with is the sign-seeking that seems to be filling the airwaves and online communities with images of Jesus in everything from pancakes to plywood.

I firmly and with all that I have in me believe that God moves in mysterious ways, but I'm not too sure that he intended for the image of His Only Begotten to be 'discovered' in a Cheetos.

Recently, the 'image' of Christ and the Madonna on a grilled cheese sandwich was sold on E-bay to a gambling house. My, what a contrast. The sacred against the profane in all of its detail and bias.

I just watched a snippet of newsworthy information about how a family had 'discovered' the 'image' of Jesus Christ in a shroud in the fur of a kitten in their home.

While photo enhancement shows us what THEY are seeing, what I am failing to see in all of these remarkable viewings of Christ in the marble, the plywood and the sandwich is these same people seeing Christ in the people around them.

Those people who reflect His image in their countenance are not in short supply. They are everywhere. It's that man who helped you pick up the contents of your purse when you slipped in the rain and dropped your possessions everywhere. It's the woman at the market who never misses the chance to ask about your family and who knows you by name even if you don't know hers. It's that teen who stops to let you in even though traffic is backed up for miles and no one else stopped.

The image of His love is made manifest in everything from a newborn baby smiling at the world for the first time to the beauty of the woman who is withered and wrinkled by time that sells the garden fresh tomatoes in the gas station parking lot.

The image of Christ is in the face of all those who have willingly taken His name upon themselves through the cleansing waters of baptism. It shines in and through them. It is the image of love in action.

I don't require an artifact of physical properties in order to see my Savior. I don't believe those images that may or may not be on these various objects has any real power. They don't lack for the ability to attract a splashy sort of attention. But what they DO lack is substance.

Miracles are nice. Miracles can indeed be heaven sent. But miracles alone cannot convert because they are fleeting. And the way that people seek after them sort of make me wonder why we can't be happy with the things of God in our daily life that bear only the marks of His Love upon them and no direct image.

It won't be any time at all before someone 'discovers' the 'image' of Christ in a leaf or a piece of shredded carrot or some other substitute for faith. Because that is what we are talking about. Substitutions.

Just like a substitute teacher, it may be adequate for a moment or two, but it truly isn't the same thing.

Our job, it seems to me, is to be willing to take on faith that our Savior will not present himself to the world as a piece of broccoli or the swirls in some prosciutto ham. I have the feeling that those types of 'manifestations' are not what He has in mind for us at all.

Instead, we rely on our faith, knowing that some things just have to come in the 'own due time of the Lord' and not on our timetable. We can't see the beginning from the end and know everything because we have a whim to know it all. That is an earned privelege for the faithful who patiently endure until the time of judgement and rewards comes. And I believe at that time those who have fufilled the measure of their creation WILL see the Savior. He will not be ham or grilled cheese or Cheetos.

He will be divine, whole and totally marked by the scars of just what He bore for us as individual children of God and brothers and sisters for whom He willingly gave all just to save us from hell if we would only come unto Him.

And at that time, we will know Him for who He really is. And we will require substitutes no longer, for our Savior will be before our eyes. The image will become the reality and we will be face to face with the Risen Lord.

There is a song, which I love to sing, called "His Image In Your Countenance". In those words it says 'with no apparent beauty that man should him desire' - unlike these objects which are only substitutes for truth that sell to the highest bidder like so much bologna in the market square.

We won't desire Him in that fashion because He will not come to be popular. Instead He comes to offer salvation, which has a price. It is a price He paid for us in full and with willingness in order that we could choose to return home or choose to damn ourselves through our wicked and willful choices.

And understanding that we are the ones who stand in the way of our own eternal goals is a painful reminder that God never forces His will on us and that Jesus Christ will not magically make us worthy to enter into the kingdom. Instead, we determine how we receive the One who did all for us.

There is a painting that shows Christ knocking upon the door. He stands there and knocks because there is NO KNOB on His side of the door. Unlike the world, Christ will not kick down the door and let Himself in. He will not hold us hostage to His desires for us to make wise choices, but has shed His very life's blood so that the penalty for our poor choices will not be fully laid upon us if we seek His mercy and God's forgiveness.

Because I totally rely on both mercy and justice, I can't believe that either could come from any peice of granite or from a pancake or some other random flecks or swirls in the world. Christ is not an anomoly, He is the literal Son of God. And that is the best thing for me. I can't possibly make up for all that I mess up on my own because I am still learning how to be responsible and make good decisions.

So I need an Elder Brother and Savior who can stand between me and the reality of my circumstances when I have fallen short. At times when I stand convicted, helpless and guilty, I need a Savior not a grilled cheese. I need a Friend, not a patch of random fur. At these times in my life I need an Advocate who can speak for me and make things better.

I seek to someday be worthy to see not just the image of Christ, but to see Christ Himself.

It isn't the image that is important. It's the salvation.

Salt Lake City 5k

3454.

I have been initiated into a strange Utah ritual. The entire STATE stands still. Shops and businesses are closed. Traffic is rerouted and parades are held. Even temples in the state are closed. Not fully understanding at first, I ignorantly said I would participate. Indeed, I thought I knew what I was getting into. I could not have been more wrong.

It all begins at the butt-crack of dawn. Hapless people arise and put on a wildly colorful assortment of shirts, shorts and shoes to participate. Money has been tendered in quiet corners and through the mail for the privilege of taking part. As the darkness still shrouds the sky, friends and loved ones get into cars from all over the Salt Lake Valley and begin the ascent to the top of the hill where some of these same strangely attired people are unceremoniously dumped off on this winding, narrow road with bad pavement and they disappear into the darkness. There are no streetlights in this area and they have to put temporary lighting near the porta-johns that are available for the brave souls who were apparently born with no sense of smell who require that answer to nature’s call.

Mind you, while this moment of dropping off is happening, some of these people exchange hugs and a few tears as an endless parade of returning vehicles flips a “U-ie” and heads downhill. Others are sufficiently jaded by their repeat offender status at this unusual event to simply stuff their earphones into place and trot away as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring.

I was astonished at the number of cars streaming up the hillside as if none of these people had ever heard of sleeping in. What is even more odd than the above scene is that some of those in the returning cars have donned the same type of colorful clothing for an event in another part of the Valley. I know because I was one of those folks in a returning car.

Branded with random numbers attached with safety pins to the front or back of various shirts, these people seem oblivious to the fact that most of the world remains blissfully unaware that there IS a 4:30 in the morning.

I confess my part in participating in this ritual. While I willingly said I would do this (Beth would say I was dragged into it – not true. I went voluntarily and stepped off into the abyss of insanity), I didn’t fully realize what was about to happen until we had hugged goodbye as she was getting out and I was departing for my moment of eternal glory.

Okay, so it wasn’t so much about eternal glory as it was about praying for daylight and a person in the same color shirt as me whom I could follow so I could hope to find my way to the end of the road printed so colorfully on a handy little pocket sized map. The poor benighted individual at the start of my portion of the day’s events was handing out route maps to those of us standing, stretching and meditating on what might be ahead of us on the trip. I wore the shirt that was the ‘badge of honor’ for this event. It was black. Black? In the desert? Whose bright idea was that? I was personally just hoping that the grim reaper wasn’t wearing a 5k shirt.

There is almost a tacit understanding and prayer of hope among the newest initiates that someone ahead of them knows where in the hell they are going. I know that was what I was thinking. Especially in light of the fact that their precious little map meant absolutely nothing to me.

While I confess my absolute faith in OTHER people when it comes to direction, I am a hopeless loony when it comes to finding my way around. It isn’t that I don’t have a strong desire to know my way from sea to shining sea, but I can get lost in the damn grocery store! My skill lies in my ability to fold maps neatly.

Look, we all come here with skill sets and finding my way isn’t one of them.

While I have traveled all over the nation to do vacations and road trips and what not, I am also blonde enough to be willing to cop to the fact that I have ZERO sense of direction. This fact was made perfectly clear to me in college when some erudite individual said, “If you want to know which direction is ‘north’ just look to the mountains. The whole valley was ringed with them so either my compass didn’t respond to their specific direction or I must have missed just which of those mountain peaks represented Utah north.

I more than make up for my lack of directional skill in my total ability to provide comic relief for those who are blessed with navigational skill. Those people are under stress because of folks like me so I do my part the best way I can. I find a deep sense of comfort in the soothing voice of the little man stuffed into the GPS unit who tells me which way to go. I’m just hoping that little soothing voice doesn’t ever tell me to take the next left turn to Albuquerque and go to blazes.

As an example of my clueless behavior when it comes to direction finding, Beth and I were in Atlanta, Georgia for a "Time Out For Women" event and she hands me the direction sheet and says ‘Tell me where we are’.

I believe I said ‘We are on the road.’ Worked for me.

She was NOT amused. Beth said ‘You got that right!’

Although I am ‘directionally challenged’, I have to tell you here and now that I did achieve a minor miracle today. After 365 days of planning, sweating and telling myself that the ice cream in the freezer was NOT calling my name in a siren song of syrup, nuts and whipped topping, I clocked in a personal best time for the 5k distance.

58 minutes from the popping of the starting balloons (Do what? Even in the redneck south we start our events with a gun!), to crossing the finish line isn’t too shabby for someone who should be date stamped as past her prime and ready for disposal.

I was amazed at the marathon runners who whipped past me on the route looking like gazelles in full stride as opposed to me, who at times felt like an elephant lumbering along. Their lithe, clean lines and the full and purposeful strides led them past me toward their well deserved rewards. I could appreciate their skill. I just wish I shared it.

When I heard the shouts of encouragement and the cheers and applause of the people lining the route, it kept the adrenaline flowing like cheep booze at the bar call. As they shouted out their various messages, some would holler out the numbers of people as they passed and I heard MY number (3454) being called out and a personal shout out of how great I was doing came from someone whom I didn’t know, but who shared at least that moment of the journey.

My tears started shortly after I rounded the final corner of our route (thanks to all of those who led the way and didn’t lead me into blind alleys or bars). Beth was standing there camera in hand. You have to memorialize these events when they occur lest someone think you are making it up or that you are drunk. I honestly think even though she had already done more than a yeoman’s work for the day in completing her 10k run (that’s right, campers, she RAN her event), she was more proud of me than I was because I could see in her eyes that she thought more of what I had done at that moment than I did.

Which felt kind of awesome – and kind of strange too.

Although I am more than proud of what I accomplished, I honestly believe that she understands about just how strange this world of night arrivals and ziggurat drives back to parking lots and unknown or unfamiliar destinations is to me. This is a shade of color in her world spectrum that I simply had never understood – until today.

Though I am not yet in shape for running (Holy Moses! Did I say ‘not yet’?), I can now get a glimpse of what it means to prepare and then to test your personal mettle as you put it all on the line and hope and pray you can find yourself sufficient to the task at hand.

For the record, I didn’t place first, but I wasn’t expecting to do so. Frankly, I was simply hoping to cross the finish line without the use of my lips and teeth to drag my carcass across.

I was pretty specific in my prayers to Heavenly Father about what I was expecting and didn’t ask Him to give me something I hadn’t done my part to receive on this event. That would be wrong. Instead, I asked Him to hear not only my prayers but also the prayers of the people who were praying for not only me but also for Beth and for us to be able to finish our events. I totally FELT their prayers today.

What happened today was more about friendship and trust than about distance and sweat. I choose to believe that it was a walking and running example of what it means to believe.

For a while, I didn’t. It was just too hard.

But my life has changed because Beth believed I could do this.

She says she ‘knew’. Beth said that believing has uncertainty and there wasn’t uncertainty in her because she KNEW I could do it. She also said all I needed was a good, swift kick in the ass. So thanks for knowing and thanks for the kick in the ass.

You know, sometimes the best helping hand is a good firm push. Or in my case, a firm kick to the seldom used and saggy buttocks.

So for those who have not experienced what it is to arise at some unknown hour to slip into clothing that is not main stream and participate with strangers who become kin through this ritual, I encourage you to try it.

But don’t do it alone.

This is an event best shared with someone who already sees the end of the journey even if you can’t.

As a codicil to this event, Beth kindly reminded me before we got to this morning’s events that "there would be an ambulance standing by" for me in case of need.

God love her. Because at that moment I was beginning to wonder about her sanity…and mine.

Go Big or Go Home!

Karaoke.

The word sounds like an affliction.

Which is good since that is an apt description of what occurs as people of varying skill levels proceed to the microphone to afflict the eardrums of others with their version of someone else's hit song.

Inflicting the most vocal damage is the point, right?

That's good.

Because at the church party Saturday night, I was reluctantly coaxed into singing something, anything. "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" was out because a cute, adorable waif with a tooth missing sang it first.

Parusing the catalog of bygone hits, I decided that if I was going to make a fool of myself, I was going to do it on my terms and promptly picked a song by Whitney Houston.

Let it be said now the only thing I have in common with Ms. Houston is that we are both female.

Her range is atmospheres above mine. Being a second alto is a great thing. I can play vocal limbo with the big dogs and get away with it for a while. You know, how low can you go?

But karaoke is different, you are singing to a prerecorded track that you can't speed up or slow down to add nuance to your performance and in this case, although someone more in Whitney's range was dubbed in, it did nothing to enhance my ability to hit the high notes.

Adding to the hilarity was my best friend singing along with me. Beth and I were doing good to keep up with the flow of the words and were not too concerned with the notes in most spots.

I realized as we were going along murdering Whitney's music that the very reason it is so much fun to do so is that most of us believe as we belt out the Top 40 in the shower that we sound every bit like Steven Tyler or that our range is as impressive as Whitney Houston.

When the dog starts scratching at the door and whining, well . . . Houston . . . uh,
Ms. Houston . . . we have a problem.

Although I can sing well enough to carry my part, it was not my destiny to have gold records hanging on the wall. And unlike the lyrics from Dr. Hook, I won't experience "the thrill that will get you when you get your picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone".

The closest I am likely to get to that particular accolade is that I once tripped because of rolling stones and I own a cover to the BBQ grill propane tank.

As the music ascended the ladder of musical wonder and joy, there was nothing that we could do to match the pitch, so what we lacked in pitch we made up for in 'loud'.

Poetry in motion never had it so good.

Mercifully, the music ended, but we laughed ourselves silly and I gave us a stage bow to be the finale.

Wherever Whitney is, she is cursing the makers of karaoke machines and their abuse of her lovely songs.