I was just wandering...

My dearest Wormwood,

I am writing to commend you on your hard work in North Carolina on the Amendment One initiative. It looks sure to pass, but even if it fails, know that you have distracted a good many who think of themselves as Christians, and your efforts have sown seeds of discord and hatred that will grow into generations of contempt. The Enemy’s oft-used battle cry (“G— is L—-“) will ring empty in the ears of North Carolinians for years.

Your affectionate Uncle,
Screwtape

I want to be whole. Break me.

Dash me on the rocks. Destroy me.

Take away my comfortable lies. Reveal me for what I am.

There is within me an ego pretender to your throne. Drive him out.

I drink from broken cisterns. I wait in vain at a well that has run dry. Lead me to living water.

My eyes are set high. My heart is lifted up. I occupy myself with things both great and marvelous.

I lean on my own understanding. Take from me any false frame. Forcibly remove any sweet support on which I might rely. Empty me.

Teach me your ways. Make me poor and humble me. 

Crucify me. Take me into the valley of the shadow. I must die.

Fill me. Bring me to life. Make me whole.

Shorty after the plane took off, I looked down and saw a mountain of stone standing alone in the flat center part of Georgia. From so high, men’s chiseled marks on her face weren’t visible. Nearby, a quarry cut deep into the heart of the earth — no doubt to harvest the same vein of granite — was. In the distance, the wrinkled fringes of the Appalachian mountains rose, aspiring to the clouds. I remembered hiking not too far north of those very hills, where they do meet the sky, and fog and clouds and mountain become one. In those places, you can nearly escape the thought that so many people share this planet; only a well-worn path reminds you that someone has come before you (and someone will follow behind.)

I looked down again on a many-fingered lake spread out behind a dam. The red clay banks stood out in unnatural contrast to the deep blue water. Water is itself a mystery. A clean cool glass on a hot day brings such refreshment, but a tsunami wave kills mercilessly. Rains bring both life to crops and drowning floods. How can these be the same, simple substance?

As the plane climbed and we passed over the Carolinas, the houses below became smaller. I thought how each holds a family, maybe, or a couple or a widow or a single young man. I saw them clustered in communities and wondered what they shared other than proximity. Do they know their neighbors? Do they love them? From up here, I can’t tell. I decide to abandon the idea that God looks down on us, or of Heaven as somewhere up in the sky. I can’t imagine that the God who sent his son to live among us as a brother and a friend would choose such an impersonal vantage point.

When we crossed over the Potomac, I looked but couldn’t see the Capitol. I did notice that the homes below were farmhouses, each one standing alone in the middle of fields. I wondered how long those fields have been there, and who has farmed them. Did the men go off and fight in the revolution against the British, or in the civil war? Do the same families live there still, or has the land been bought and sold until no one remembers the history?

As we pass north, the fields disappear and the houses grow closet together. Communities become cities. I realize we’re flying over Long Island, then I spot familiar landmarks. Our approach passes over Brooklyn and affords me a spectacular view of Manhattan. I take it in quickly, and start searching for a more familiar landmark. There it is, where the BQE cuts the corner off a block at the intersection of Marcy and South 3rd streets. I spot my building, and can just make out the patio door of my apartment. As soon as I see it, the plane banks left and the view changes. We circle out, and as we turn one last time to approach the runway, the window shows me a postcard skyline against a pink and purple sunset.

I have been foolish.

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Matthew 13:44-46

This is my most grievous sin: that I know the Lord, who is the only true source of joy and fulfillment I will ever find, but that I squander my time and affections on lesser gods that can never satisfy.

My failure is that I have not spent every ounce of energy, every waking moment, in the relentless pursuit of Christ. My only saving grace is that he does not give up his relentless pursuit of me.

Lord, make the things that can not quench my thirst to be distasteful to me, as brine on a parched tongue, that I might not drink of them them any longer.

If you have ever had a cat, you know that they always want to be on the other side of the door. As soon as the door opens, the cat rushes through it, eager to get outside or inside, no matter how long he’s been in or out.

At this moment, I’m locked inside my apartment. The deadbolt jammed and I can’t go through the door. I’m starting to identify very strongly with a cat. There’s something about not being able to open the door that makes me want very much to go out.

I’ve willingly spent hours and hours in this apartment, but when the locksmith said, “I’ll be there in 25 minutes,” it felt like he was pronouncing a prison sentence.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere about freedom (or at least our perception of it) and contentedness, I’m sure. There is something we can learn about human nature, and why we want so badly to do the very thing we can’t do, even when there are so many other options available. We kick against the goads, rather than being content no matter what the circumstances.

I’m not sure what that lesson is. I think today, it is enough to recognize the tendency in myself, and ask God to give me a spirit of contentedness. This situation makes my condition easy to see, but where else in my life does discontent hide? What else do I desire, simply because I can’t have it. What blessings am I ignoring that are in plain sight?

I’m also praying the locksmith hurries up.

I work on the tenth (and top) floor of a building on East 28th Street. Most days, I take the stairs at least twice. The following are observations about stair-climbing.

• In the morning, I have a number of reasons to climb the stairs. I choose from “The elevator is so slow,” “Andrew does it, I should too,” and “I just walked 14 blocks, I can handle this,” and “I took the train instead of walking 14 blocks, I should probably climb the stairs.”
• After lunch, my rationale is always “I just ate lunch, I need to.”
• Sometimes when I don’t take the stairs it is because a co-worker is lazy. Other times, it is because I am lazy.
• Tip: don’t pay attention to which floor you’re on. Just keep climbing.
• Confession: I’ve never been able to make it to the 10th floor without looking at the floor numbers. I’ve made it to 8.
• Warning: If you don’t work on the top floor, you should probably ignore that tip.
• This is particular to my building: The number of stairs in flight the between the ground floor and the second floor is different than between the second floor and the third floor. The number of stairs per flight from the third floor up is constant. 
• In Europe, that last observation wouldn’t make much sense. They have two flights between the ground and second floors. Or so I’m told.
• I’ve never counted the stairs. While the idea of doing it once is very appealing to me, I’m scared that counting 9 flights of stairs would be enough to be habbit-forming, and I’d never be able to climb them again without counting.
• (For those of you who are paying attention, I know that the first and second flights have different numbers because the way the stairs are arranged at the top and bottom is different. I didn’t count.)
• Like many staircases I’ve seen in the city, the first flight is nicer than the rest. It has better stone on the treads, and fancier handrails.
• The treads on the first flight are also more worn than the rest. All the wear is on the front edge of the tread. Do that many people really step on the edge of the stair?
• The is an elevator service company on the 8th floor. When I pass it, I wonder if their clients mind that the elevator is so slow.
• It’s much easier to go down the stairs than up.

Last night was ordinary. The Empire State building was illuminated in three tiers of bright white. I paused at 12:36 AM walking home across the Williamsburg Bridge.

It was mostly clear, with only a thin layer of clouds obscuring the shape of the waning crescent moon. The skyline of the city encircled me, from the the towers of the Queensboro Bridge stretched across the East River in the north to the business districts of downtown Brooklyn and lower Manhattan facing off across the harbor.

At this hour, I shared the pedestrian path with few other walkers. Occasionally, a biker sped by on the other platform. The sounds of the cars and trucks rose and fell in steady, calming waves, synchronized by far-away stoplights. While I stood against the rail, a train crossed beneath me, interrupting the soundscape with its familiar rhythm. 

I thought to myself that the river looked calm, and I couldn’t see any boats. Just a few hours ago, I’m sure the channel was busy with cris-crossing water taxis and disco-lighted party cruises making their way back to the piers at 23rd street. 

I’ve lived in this city six months and a week. Six months passes very quickly, but is long enough to hold many, many experiences. I wonder what the next half-year will bring?

I pulled out the white earbuds — the music had been stopped for a while — and started walking again.

I decided to Google it. I typed “new yorkers call their apartments spaces” and hit enter. I was sure I’d find pages and pages of references to this odd linguistic phenomenon.  Surely, every write who’s ever spent even a few minutes here has remarked about this. I was disappointed in the results. I got articles on “living in small spaces,” a few real estate ads, and — strangely — a link to this article on Wikipedia. But none of the sociological dissertations I expected.

Maybe people in other places use the word “space” to refer to their apartments and offices, but I’ve never heard it until I lived here. People in Carolina and Texas say “house” and “apartment” and “office.”

I can’t help but wonder — and I’m sure this has been wondered before, even if Google won’t reveal when and by whom — if the use of the term betrays a certain optimism and hope. Texans, who don’t lack for wide-open fields, invoke the word “house” to enclose and protect their lives. New Yorkers don’t need to be housed, they are used to constantly being enclosed by the crowds, the subway cars, even the canyon-like streets. The one thing we don’t have is space.

So, when I walk into a friends new apartment, I will adopt my fellow Gothamites’ term and tell her, “This is a great space.” It will be a compliment, an aspiration, and a blessing.

It seemed to me that my junior year chemistry teacher had an obsession with significant digits. I had a really hard time understanding the whole concept. I was 16 years old and thought I had a good grasp on reality, so when I answered that 12,000 + 0.01 = 12,000.01 and had points taken off my grade, I was pretty confused.

It turns out that, to a scientist, adding 0.01 of something to 12,000 of the same thing is insignificant. It doesn’t have an effect worth remembering when you write the answer. In fact, 12,000 is such a big number and written so inexactly (we assume it could be something like 12,042.3, rounded off to the nearest thousand) that we could add one, ten, or maybe even a hundred to it and still ignore the change.

Significance and scale are incredibly hard to comprehend. What does a million years mean? How small is a single Hydrogen atom? How big is the sun? And just how long does it take for a nerve impulse to fly up my arm to my brain when I prick my finger? I’m so used to convenient numbers — pairs and dozens, maybe hundreds and thousands on occasion; minutes, hours, weeks, and sometimes years — that I can’t integrate the extremes into my way of thinking.

This came to mind last night, as I was contemplating what I thought were significant decisions I must make. I was interrupted by a friend who asked me to pray for the people affected by the flooding this month in Pakistan, where the numbers of people displaced and made homeless are being rounded off to the nearest million. The significance of the decision I was making and my petty concerns about maintaining a luxurious standard of living faded quickly. Current estimates are that as many as 8 million people have lost nearly everything they have. The only way I can even begin to make sense of that number is to realize that it is very close to the population of New York City, which itself boggles my mind.

Thinking about scales outside our own individual- and family-sized frames of reference helps me to understand the logic behind Christ’s call to deny ourselves and sacrificially love our neighbor. When we are promised an eternity living in perfect community with God and all who love him, what is the significance of a week, a month, or 93 years spent giving ourselves away? If it takes a miserable lifetime to bring even one person into that eternal reward, was it worth it?

There are some places in New York City where two subway trains, leaving the same station and going to the same place, will be on different platforms. At the Essex and Delancey Street station, they are separated by a stairway. Commuters who are in a hurry have developed rituals to deal with the uncertainties these stations create.

This morning, because I left the Marcy Avenue stop aboard the J (skip-stop) train instead of the coveted M, I stood by the last door in the first car. When we arrived at Essex Street, I was positioned perfectly to race down the stair to the F platform. Mere milliseconds can make the difference between slipping between the closing doors of the train that might be waiting and standing shamefully on the platform as it pulls away.

As I shot out of the train and descended the stairs in what amounts to a barely controlled fall, I noticed a rotund Hassid to my side, keeping pace. I arrived at the bottom. There was no F train waiting. I took a deep breath and posted myself at the bottom of the stair. People were still streaming down, and then I heard the J train departing.

I noticed the Jewish man was standing beside me. He was about my age, with a formidable beard and tightly curled sidelocks beneath his black hat. We looked together up the stairs, then he started climbing. He reached a point where he could see any approaching M. I could see an F. We could both see each other. He looked back at me, and without exchanging words, we were partners.

A few minutes later, the indistinct rumble of an approaching train reached my ears. I looked back at the F tracks. Still no train. I looked up the stairs. The Hassid looked down at me, nodded, and waved, “come on.” I glanced around at the few others who had joined our ad-hoc brotherhood, and started up. I was still ten minutes late to work.