More from Cold Tangerines

Cold Tangerines. Its so good. I should've just bought it, but I'm cheap. So I took a pencil to the pages and marked the parts I wanted to remember and now I'm typing them out so I'll remember them even better (in theory, at least). How old school of me!

Pg. 148: I imagine a huge choir, hundreds of voices, and they’re singing something unquestionably, remarkably beautiful, and if you look at each person, you can see their intensity, their attention to detail and precision, their extreme focus on sounds and phrases. And you can see their love for music and their passion to sing. You could never pick out an individual voice, out of those several hundred, but that’s not the point. They are not singing to be heard individually. They are singing for the act itself, for the love of music and tone and melody. That’s one of the reasons I pray, for the act itself.

158-160: Shalom is about God, and about the voice and spirit of God blowing through and permeating all the dark corners that we’ve chopped off, locked down. Its about believing, and letting belief move you to forgive. Its about grace, and letting grace propel you into action. Its about the whole of our lives becoming woven through with the sacred spirit of God, through friendship and confession, through rest and motion, through marriage and silence.

Shalom is the act of life lifting up and becoming an act of worship and celebration, a sacrament, an offering. Its about living in a world of movie theaters and shoes and highways and websites, and finding those things to be shot through with the same spirit and divinity and possibility that we see in ourselves. Its living with purpose and sacrifice and intention, willing to be held to the highest, narrowest possible standard of goodness, and in the same breath, finding goodness where most people see nothing but dirt.

I have been surprised to find that I am given more life, more hope, more moments of buoyancy and redemption, the more I give up. The more I let go, do without, reduce, the more I feel rich. The more I let people be who they are, instead of cramming them into what I need from them, the more surprised I am b their beauty and depth.

Shalom is happening all around us, but it never happens on its own. The best things never do happen on their own, and shalom is the very best thing. In the same way that forgiveness never feels natural until after its done, and hope always feels impossible before we commit to it, in the same way that taking is easier than giving, and giving is easier than getting up, in that same way, shalom never happens on its own.

It happens when we do the hardest work, the most secret struggle, the most demanding truth telling. In those moments of ferocity and fight, peace is born. Shalom arrives, and everything is new. And when you’ve tasted it, smelled it, fought for it, labored it into life, you’ll give your soul to get a little more, and it is always worth it.

Shalom.

178-9: …when you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it an epic, that’s when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that’s celebration.

When you can invest yourself deeply and unremittingly in the life that surrounds you instead of declaring yourself out of the game once and for all, because what’s happened to you is too bad, too deep, too ugly for anyone to expect you to move on from, that’s the good, rich place. That’s the place where the things that looked for all intents and purposes like curses start to stand up and shimmer and dance, and you realize with a gasp that they may have been blessings all along. Or maybe not. Maybe they were curses, in fact, but the force of your belief and your hope and your desperate love for life as it is actually unfolding, has brought a blessing from a curse, like water from a stone, like life from a tomb, like the actual story of God over and over.

Nothing good comes easily, you have to lose things you thought you loved, give up things you thought you needed. You have to get over yourself, beyond your past, out from under the weight of your future. The good stuff never comes when things are easy. It comes when things are all heavily weighted down like moving trucks. It comes just when you think it never will, like a shimmering Las Vegas rising up out of the dry desert, sparkling and humming with energy, a blessing that rose up out of a bone-dry, dusty curse. 

194: "...My life is much quieter now. When you work on a team and you have a boss and projects and deadlines, when you get to the end of something, someone says, "Good job." Or, "Thank you." Or, "Wow, that was smart and helpful." But Henry never looks up at me when I'm changing his diaper and says, "Good move with the wipes, Mom. Very thorough." He doesn't look up at me when I'm trying to get him to go back to sleep in the night and whisper, "Fabulous techniques with the shushing and rocking. You're a genius."

It doesn't matter to Henry one little bit that I can speak French or explicate sentences or cook really good roasted salmon. What matters is that I can be there with him as long as he needs me. What matters to him is that I can play with Froggie, his favorite toy, one more time, one more time, one more time. 

All my life I've been multitasking. I'm good at it. I don't want to be braggy, but I'm kind of a champion multitasker, really. And all of a sudden, what's valuable is not the multitasking, but the single task - being with him, only him, doing nothing else. 

206-207: ...As we talked about it, I commented that this season, while they're selling their house and getting ready to move, must feel like an interim season. And she stopped for a second and looked at me pointedly. "You know, Shauna," she said, "everything is interim. Every season that I thought was stable and would be just how it was for along time ended up being a preparation or a path to the next thing. When you decide to be on this journey with God, everything is interim." When I got back home, I wrote that phrase on a Post-it and keep it near my computer.

We can dig in, make plans, write in stone, pretend we're not listening, but the voice of God has a way of being heard. It seeps in like smoke or vapor even when we're barred the door against any last-minute changes, and it moves us to different ways of living. It keeps us moving and dancing and watching, and never lets us drop down into a life set on cruise control or a life ruled by remote control. Life with God is a daring dream, full of flashes and last-minute exits and generally all the things we've said we'll never do. And with the surprises comes great hope.

When it comes right down to it, of course, it's always been in the interim. We've always been in the middle space, the not-yet-heaven middle space, the yearning and groaning. We construct elaborate castles of business cards and Pottery Barn catalogs, and craft armor out of skinny jeans and insurance policies and text messages, beating back the sense that we are not enough, that life is not offering us enough, but we are not and it isn't.

All of life is in the interim, and if we're honest and tender with ourselves, if the armor is off and the castle has crumpled, we feel the ache of the meantime. Our permanent records are a mess of marks and offenses, and we are laid bare to the ache of what's coming.

208 - on control: ... I'm learning to just keep moving, keep walking, keep taking teeny tiny steps. And it's in those teeny tiny steps and moments that I become. And actually, who I am. We won't arrive. But we can become. And that's the most hopeful thing I can think of.

218:  (Talking about how symbolic it is to be able to make a good, homemade stock from bones. Something dead, bringing forth new life in a sense, a resurrection, redemption. I like her perspective on it and it makes me really want to get into making my own stocks one day!) I like the idea of everything being alive, healthy, brimming with spirit and hope. I wish my life was like that. There are moments of life and beauty, but there are also a lot of bones, skeletons from lives already lived, regrets, broken hearts and promises and relationships. Now on my best days, I take a look at each pile of bones and imagine what it would take to make some soup, to repair and redeem, to make something dead into something full of life and flavor. 

Sometimes it takes a phone call, or an apology. Sometimes it takes a new promise, even though I've broken so many in the past. Sometimes telling the truth, sometimes giving up something important, sometimes leaving something long dead. And what you get from that pile of bones is soup - warm, rich, full of life and soul and spirit. You get something beautiful out of the trash, which is the whole point.