The longer of hope and Main

I got it, and I’m going to be well now. Starting today. (Or, tomorrow morning I guess, due to like, time zone and gestation issues.)

I saw my psychiatrist today and I’m starting my crazy meds again.

I don’t treat this with near the fecundity I’m sure you’re getting here.

Tears are still tangled in my eyelashes as I type in fact.

I had a thought in his office about an hour ago that I thought I’d share with you though; the tears showed up somewhere between you, his secretary and the good doctor.

I’m seeing this guy because I’m messed up.

Nature, nurture; sin, perfection; laziness, overambition; decaf or leaded; however you choose to work through my messedupness, I’m calling that your thing.

I’m messed up though, and he’s my hope to get me back on track.

So sitting in his office this morning, as I was studying all the accolades on his wall and reflecting on how thankful I’ve become for his methodical, caring nature, I had one of those 3rd person observation/narration-type moments were I sort of thought to myself about how Dixon had gotten here, what was next, and how much I needed this guy.

Right about then he asked me if I had any questions or concerns for him, snapping me out of my poetic fog.

I didn’t voice any of this to him, but my thinking at just about that intersection reduced to “I’m trusting you to get me well, you and all your diplomas, journals read and hours studied”.

“I trust you to get me well.”

Now you probably didn’t know this, but pastors in the early Christian church thought themselves as “physicians of the soul”.

Their parishoners, or sheep, or patients, trusted them the same way I’m trusting this guy, the guy with more framed, formal accolades on his wall than paint. The guy who understands the frayed wires and wrong fires making my brain work with such ill-tempered rhythm. The guy whose job wasn’t done if I can’t tell him my life is a little better the next time we meet. The guy who has more resources to throw at my “issues” than I’ve got hairs on my head.

I genuinely don’t mean this as any sort of cynical or backhanded statement at all here, but I sure wish we felt that way about our pastors today.

I don’t know, maybe I have before, and I feel like it was well-placed. But I feel like that particular pastor was pretty unique, as far as pastors go. Two of my dearest friends here in Dallas are finishing up their training to go out as two of those very “physicians of the soul,” and I’m hoping they both make that particular pastor a little less unique in the world.

But I can’t tell them how to do it and I don’t have anything new to offer to this lost way of thinking about the office of shepherd.

Here’s what I know ties together the job of the pastor and the physician alike though.

I was headed down to the seminary from his office and decided to take the scenic route through the heart of downtown Dallas. At the intersection of Pearl and Main I reached over and put in my CD of more thoughtful, introspective instrumental stuff (called, appropriately enough, “Somber”). Just as sort of an afterthought I skipped over to Keith Jarret’s “Over the Rainbow” and was struck anew at its appropriateness. Right there in the busyness and grime of downtown Dallas, with buildings drawn too high for even the sunlight to best, deep tears began to stream down these unshaven cheeks.

All I could think of was “hope,” and that life is gonna be okay.

Not because I had that medicine in the seat beside me, or even because of the beautiful weather today.

No, that song, which I’ve listened to a dozen times before in similarly bent situations, just ministered to me sort of a quiet calm, a reminder that many times what’s going on inside sure ain’t like what’s happening outside. Those familiar and gentle piano strokes for just a whisper’s moment seemed to negate entirely the noise around me and the noise within.

Hope is the Christian credential that isn’t marked by some diploma or stamp-hope is the proof that nothing man makes blocks the light of God’s sun.

Hope is found anywhere you’re not ashamed to admit that it might be all you’ve got.

Hope, you see, is the cradle that’s gonna get me better, and hope is the cradle that’s gonna get us all home.

Number(ing) the stars

Every once in a while I slow down enough to spend some time in the DFW Metroplex’ closest approximation to ‘nature’. Tonight I tripped over that on the front porch of my apartment.

So I was lying in front of our door, iPod ablaze, front porch light disabled and the troubles of tomorrow simmering in the sea of forgetfulness.

And I just stared at the stars for a while, probably no more than twenty minutes. (I’d been meaning to do that for some time now, truth be told.)

Well, my first thought was to grouse about the lack of stars visible in the Metroplex and how happy I’d be to one day be back in Arkansas, or Colorado, or Utah, or really anywhere where stars happened to always be on tap just for me.

Once I settled though, I began to see that there were more stars than I’d seen at first. And more. And even more. I couldn’t focus in hard enough to find the ‘bottom’ of them; the harder I stared, the more triangles my eyes tried to make and the more phantom star trails I thought I saw. Reminds me of the Carol King line that James Taylor popularized, “and the stars at night/they put on a show for us/for free”. And what a show it was!

I think the questions and grounds for meditation are as infinite as the very ranks of those stars themselves, but two are settling over me:

-Upon further examination, there is always more to ____________ than what you thought at first. Always, be it the Dallas stars, the Dallas Cowboys, the Bible, or what some kid said the other day. Everything in life bears digging a little deeper, and everything yields more.

-I wonder if, the deeper one digs into that non-finite expanse of starrage, those stars grow closer together, so much closer such that outer space is no longer cold. I wonder if most things warm up the closer they get to things of similar kin. I wonder what else changes about things as they grow closer to others like them. Stars don’t move, but I sure can.

Pray with me that you’ll dim not the stars. It doesn’t take much work to see them every single day.