we played with a big kid puzzle on the floor yesterday afternoon.
mozea shoved the pieces together, pretending they would fit however she pleased, ruah stuffed them in her mouth, and i tried to convince myself that the puzzle was not too hard for me.
at one point mozie got a little p.o.ed at ruah and said: "sissy! NO! don't eat the puzzle!"
i told her that this was our family puzzle and that if ruah wanted to chew on some of the pieces, it was ok, and then i asked her to repeat to me "our family" to help her articulate the idea.
she kept saying "our slimy. our slimy", totally proud of herself that she was repeating successfully the words i asked her to say.
so there we were, my slimy, my beautiful slimy, pretending to put a puzzle together on the kitchen floor so we could be near michael, the slimy's papi and official mascot, while he made soup and rarebit. it rained a hard and cold rain and the dogwood beat against our front window as we listened to blue grass and were warm. it was our saturday afternoon and the lights in our house shed the perfect yellow.
as i'm writing this i'm thinking of lee, the homeless vet to whom i have a knack for bringing completely inedible food. he has no teeth and i seem to forget that he can't do apples. it can be a brutal time of year to live outside. no that i know this, but i can imagine. he lives up in the woods beyond barbur blvd. he "camps", he says. i'm never sure what to do with all of that except pray and offer a little of what i have. once i offered a lot of what i had, my home, to a homeless man in our park, and it didn't turn out so well. mostly because i ended up being mean to him and hating him, really. after 3 weeks, i just wanted him out of my house. i was sick of the cigarette smoke and the lethargy. i completely failed at doing the "good deed" i had set out to do. those sorts of things tend to fall apart--those "good deed" sorts of things. they're bullshit, really, because good deeds are always about my good deed and not so much about anyone else. as soon as a "good deed" gets complicated and people actually become people, not projects, the good deed bit flies right out the window pretty fast.
the terrible and wonderful thing about Jesus is that it's all about your heart.
that sucks if you have a heart that sucks at being all about itself in a way that's good for anybody else. which is me and maybe you.
i'm selfish and don't want to share my yellow-lit kitchen. and even if i did, would it do anything? i can't set anyone free from the things that cause homelessness, whatever those things might be. no way.
but praying. praying. praying to the One who can do something. and then praying that i'd want to also be an answer to some of those prayers. hoping that i would want it to cost me something, not so i could feel self-congratulatory and write about it on my blog, but so i could see beautiful things happen in my time. to people who need to be free, like lee and like me.
just some thoughts....
