Carolyn Weber - Holy Is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present

Living in the Gift of the Present

Carolyn A. Weber

www.IVPress.com/books

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400
Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com
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2013 by Carolyn A. Weber

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION, NIV Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple
Image: Martin Poole/Glow Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-9575-5 (digital)
ISBN 978-0-8308-4307-7 (print)

For the good folks of Westmont College

Thank you for filling my well.

Carolyn Weber is an author, speaker and teacher. Her recent academic positions include associate professor of English literature at Seattle University and visiting associate professor of English literature at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California. She is also the author of Surprised by Oxford (Thomas Nelson), a memoir about her doctoral studies at Oxford.

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4

U-Turn Friends

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

P rayer of S t . P atrick

A year later, after I successfully received tenure and completed my remaining teaching requirements, we arrived in Santa Barbara for my sabbatical. The boys were toddling and talking now, running in two different directions at once. I would be using the relative seclusion here to finally complete the writing of my conversion story. I prepared to settle into my usual self-sufficiency, but again, the Lord had other plans for me.

What a friend we have in Jesus!

Sitting there in a new church, the congregation sang alive the long-enduring hymn, written by Joseph Scriven in 1855. In music, the words soared above me, beautiful and genuine. But it wasnt always that way. Before I was a Christian, the line had stung. How can we have a friend we cannot even see? I used to think. I mean, come on, who swallows this stuff? It seemed the ether that swirly-eyed hippies were made of, something that someone at a commune might say trying to convince you that the end of the world was coming so we all better give each other a hug. Or worse, what a placard-waving zealot might sing out to an innocent bystander who just lost the love of his life, trying to convince him that the world is just and right and good anyway.

It bugged me.

Even later, as a believer, the line when extracted and tossed about as clich still owned the power to make me wince. It seemed so, well, happy-clappy, feel-goodie, canned-cheesy, sing-songs-around-the-campfire. Ugh.

Trite or truth?

I soon began to see, however, that the question applied to me. And the answer lay within being friends in Jesus.

During that first year in Santa Barbara, many of these manifestations of his love for me through others in him came in the form of a headache.

Yes, a headache.

A migraine, to be exact.

Shortly after we arrived in Santa Barbara, and for the first time in my life, I experienced a migraine. At first, I had no idea what was happening. Kent had just left on a twenty-four-hour trip back to Seattle to manage outgoing and incoming tenants at our home on the first of the month. The holiday timing stunk; it was actually New Years Eve Day. I hadnt been feeling well when I drove him to the airport, but shrugged it off, blaming a bug or perhaps something I atenothing that getting an early night once the kids were down and perhaps taking an aspirin or two wouldnt fix.

A few hours later I found myself back at home, heaving my guts out in the bathroom with the kids clinging helplessly to my legs. My head spun like a carousel of evil steeds on speed, and I couldnt open my eyes to the light. It felt like someone had swung an ax through the left side of my brain. It was growing increasingly difficult to form words or make controlled movements. Was this a stroke? Had I unwittingly ingested some sort of poison? I had never experienced anything like it.

My heart swung in terror. This was my worst nightmare come true in real time: being left alone with my children, helpless, with something terrible happening to me, leaving me unable to take care of them. I feared collapsing, being blacked out for days, my little ones running around, unsupervised, uncared for, and somehow finding their way out of the house...

Actually, when I look back at it now, an unleashing of my children poses much more of a risk to others than to themselves. But hey, I was still a nervous young mom, after all.

Besides, I didnt know a single neighbor. Because of the holiday, virtually nothing was open. There was not even a medical hotline to call. I could hear party revelers starting to make their way down to the beach as the sun fell lower in the sky. People laughed and drank in their yards all around us; in one of the most beautiful beach towns in the world, I existed in a crowd but had never felt so alone. Having been here only a short time, we didnt belong to a community yet and had only just begun attending church on the recommendation of a good friend back in Seattle.

A single local contact lurked in my cell phone: the churchs youth director, a friendly young woman with piercing blue eyes and a head full of dancing curls. I gut-liked her right away. But could I really call such a new acquaintance out of the blue, with such a random request for help? What would she think? Could I really trust her with my children? My mind raced, well, more like limped, through the blinding pain. Blinking in the excruciatingly sunlit living room, I herded the children like miscreant alley cats onto the couch and managed to turn on a cartoon.