Rivers In The Desert

Rating: GT, QT, GRG
From RevGalBlogPal's Friday Five:

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:19, NRSV

"name five practices, activities, people or _____ (feel free to fill in something I may be forgetting) that for you are rivers in the desert."

1. My Wrestling Team. A group of people from my faith community who wrestle with me, in both senses of the phrase--supporting me and challenging me--in the long, strange trip of vocational discernment. Every time we gather--I mean, every single time--I leave more energized than I arrived. It is a singular experience for an introvert who enjoys people tremendously but nearly always finds spending time in a group to be an energy-expenditure (like playing a sport, fun and rewarding and exhausting) rather than an energy-refill.


2. Sleep. I have taken, as my Lenten discipline, going to bed at 10:30 every night except Friday. I did not take on this discipline lightly. I have not been able to keep it perfectly. There is always so much to do. Yet the practice of humility involved in submitting to my body's need for sleep (no, Max, you're not SuperQueer, made of stronger stuff and with greater responsibilities than the rest of the world), and embracing the idea that the world will get on perfectly well without me for 8 hours every night, continues to be as restorative a river to my soul as the REM sleep is to my poor queer body and brain.


3. S. More than a friend, never a lover, S is my comrade, my cosmic fraternal twin, my Queer-Fencing-Partner, the person I would call if I woke up in a strange hotel room with an unconscious Republican and no memory of how I got there. Gumby to my Pokey, Ernie to my Bert, Tom to my Huck. Water in the dry place, shelter in the storm, and the alleluia at the edge of the grave.


4. Stars, and the black sky in between. ...and the rest is silence.


5. Always, L. L is the Big River, the daily incarnation of the joy that C.S. Lewis describes as the heart-rending longing for the almost-remembered realm of heaven. L is my home, the home I longed for my whole life but didn't know existed until our lives joined together. Inspiration, comfort, challenge, relentless telling-of-truth and hosing-of-bullshit, passion, courage, perseverance, and faith--these are the furnishings of the home that is L. Also the best damn pair of legs on the planet.

yours in the struggle,
Max

PS Just after posting this, I wandered over to BlueWren and read this post, which I now commend to you all.
peace,
Max