Yelling At God

I don't want to write one of those "and then, and then, and then" blogs that tells you all about every little minute of my day. Who cares! Yuck. I sure don't. So I'll just quickly say that I had a great birthday, and a great visit with Rick's family over the weekend. I'll talk about "aging" another time. I'm 53 and I have a few things to say about it, and, I don't care if you know how old I am. Right now I want to talk about yelling at God. That's what's on my mind today. I know it's treacherous territory, so before I start, I'll ask you to please try not to be offended, and don't bother scolding me. I'm not opening up a religious debate here. How absurd would that be? I'm just talking from my side of the cheese, which is whole other story, and some of you long-timers have read it. So here we go...

It's a goal of mine to make this a mostly-positive blog, but I'd be a liar of I led you to believe there are no bumps along this road to home. This morning was a particularly frustrating one. Mondays tend to be hectic and messy, and today we're short handed in the park, so I thought I was going to have to jump in and volunteer - again - for a job that the summer helpers are getting paid for... when they show up. Ranger Rick let me off the hook though, probably because I looked like I was going to cry, and was blathering on, hands flapping like a worried killdeer, about all the things I have to do that get in the way of doing the things I want to do, and how I'm not getting paid to do any of them right now. You know those days. Everything is swimming along just as sweet as a school of guppies, and then blam-o, someone drops a big old cranky catfish in the pond and everything goes straight to Chaosville.  I've been a happy guppy for weeks, but not today.

My problem is this: Most of the important things I need to do in a day have to happen before lunch, and Rick takes lunch at 11:30, meaning I have to stop what I'm doing at 11:00 to be the Food Maker. So my mornings go something like roll out of bed, slam some breakfast, walk the dogs, clean up the breakfast mess, check email, wake up the studio, and make beads for a couple of hours. Ideally I'd also write in the mornings because I'm wittier then, but it's more important to get the torch work done before it gets too hot. Once the sun moves around to the back side of the tent at about noon, it's all over. So it's beads before blog. Sigh...

Rick pushed his lunch to 12:30 to help me out, and went off to work, no doubt glad to not have to hang out with me. Relieved but still flapping, I went out to fire up the studio. It wasn't even 9:00 yet, but it was already hot outside, and hotter in the tent. I opened up the front and back walls, knowing the wind would be an issue, but I'd worry about that later. Next I had to find the heavy duty electrical cord that feeds juice to the studio, as it had wandered off to recharge the golf cart's batteries. I reclaimed my cord and got everything plugged back in the way I need it for work, but when I turned the kiln on, I got the dreaded "Err2" message on the controller. This was very bad news. It meant I was going to have to reprogram the controller, which takes some time and brain power, and I had already lost a lot of time (and brain power too I suppose) flapping and re-plugging. By now I was stomping too, and starting to sob a little bit, as I dug through the storage box looking for the paperwork that tells me how to fix the controller. I found the stack of pages, and flipped to the part I needed, and looking at all the "do this, then this, then this" instructions, and it was all too much. As the meltdown began, I wadded up the papers like I was planning to swat flies, but instead I starting hitting the studio walls and stomping and flapping ever more furiously. And this was where the yelling at God part happened. I felt like everything in my life was discouraging me from making beads. And what's a girl to do when the thing she's been doing for so long no longer feels like the Right Thing? Just stop and walk away? Maybe, but that felt too scary, so I yelled instead.

I yelled, as quietly and still forcefully as I could, so as not to disturb the campers, If you don't want me to make beads anymore, then find me something else to do for a living! It wasn't the volume so much as the intensity that qualified this as yelling. One blast, followed by a few minutes of sobbing like a big baby, and I began to calm down. I realized that tent walls don't care very much if you hit them, and that God probably doesn't care very much if you yell. I fixed the kiln, fired it up, and sat down to make some beads, which is usually a good time for thinking. The wind was bad. The heat was bad. And lizards like to wander through for a spot of shade, which makes me wonder if snakes might do the same. Interestingly, it turns out that a tent makes a better winter studio than a summer one...

So I sat there thinking about writing all this, and how I was going to explain just why I think it's OK to yell at God, and hoping to not start a big nasty ruckus in the process. I've done that a couple of times, and it really wasn't fun. The human brain, when it gets to thinking, tends to like to define and explain things, and put them in pretty frames and hang them on the wall, or even just in a drawer where they can be found later. My own personal brain's thinking - in a molten tent with dragon-breath wind and creepy little visitors - brought it to the following, which I will own as I write it, but reserve the right to re-define whenever it seems right... Things change so fast these days. Surely you've noticed...

I think God is a He/She/It that's too big and incomprehensible for just one name, or gender, or religion. And I think God is also too big for one form of communication. Some people pray softly and sweetly. Some cry and plead. Some recite ancient prayers. Some make it up as they go. Some chat matter-of-factly to Whoever Does The Listening. Praying is talking to God, and we all have our own styles, or no style at all, which is yet another option in this Free Will setup we have. When I was a kid, sitting through Catholic mass after Catholic mass with my Mom, I used to listen to the old ladies whispering their prayers as they fingered their rosaries. Pss, pss, pss, pss, pss. I had beads too, of course, and would kneel there with the smell of face powder and ancient paper and wood and bad breath, fiddling with my own little rosary, and whispering pss, pss, pss, pss, pss, right along with them. And I meant it with all my heart. Those little wordless prayers came from a place of innocence and sincerity, and I'm sure they were heard exactly how I meant them. 

My habit of yelling at God started some years back when I just didn't feel that I was getting through. There's so much competition to be heard these days. Talking to God felt like talking to my kids, or my dogs, or even Rick, who reminded me at lunch today that he, like the kids and dogs, sometimes doesn't really hear me unless I yell at him. I don't know why that is, but it is. It's like I'm invisible, or at least inaudible, until I say, Hey! Listen up, buster! I got somethin' to say!

Deep breath... 

I feel better now. I think I was heard. I think God is taking me more seriously now. I'm perfectly willing to be the hands and eyes and ears and everything-else that helps our Creator to experience Creation in this physical world, but I can't see any reason to cause myself struggle and frustration in the process. I keep hitting wall after wall with the bead thing, and after almost 14 years of doing this particular job, I'm really rather tired. I'm beginning to think I'm being sent a Divine Message - Time for something new, Kim. Are you ready? 

Maybe I'm slow to get the messages that are sent to me. Maybe God feels the need to yell at me, in the form of slow sales, and wind, and heat, and a general feeling of banging my head against the wall. Maybe I'm the one who's not listening... And maybe we're speaking the same language now, God and me. Maybe I can go back to a simple pss, pss, pss, and know I'll be heard. But just in case, my answer to that last question is, YES! I'M READY! JUST TELL ME WHAT TO DO NEXT!