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 Reflections for My Sisters in Christ

Sunny killed a possum today. Why am I telling you? In hopes that I may be able to forego the cost of therapy if you just let me sit on the couch and spill this one out. I hate possums. Like any good idiosyncrasy, it stems back to my childhood. We lived just outside of our Arkansas town on top of a hill and we burned our own trash. I can remember my Nanny (my maternal grandmother who lived with us) heading out to the big garbage can with a fresh load of trash, lifting the lid, then suddenly mirating like the dickens. That usually meant one thing: a possum was in it. She was as tough as a boot which any widow back in her day had to be in order to successfully raise a house full of fine kids. She didn't squeal and run. She took Tony's baseball bat and bonked the disgusting thing. (Keith insists a possum is a marsupial. Trust me. It's nothing but a rat on growth hormone.) Before she could step up to bat, however, it would roll back its hairy lips and hiss, bare its jagged teeth, and hump its back as if ready to pounce on her. I can still remember the sound. It gives me the willies just to think about it. (I'm not sure this is going to help. I still think I'm going to need therapy.)

            I really love creatures. I watched a raccoon in the neighbor's yard the other day as long as it would let me. I love to watch armadillos, squirrels and chipmunks when I get the chance. And few things thrill me more than observing a coyote or catching a bobcat in the lens of Keith's binoculars but I am not a possum fan. No indeed. This morning there I was minding my own business out in my backyard having my quiet time. The sun wasn't even up yet. The dogs were outside with me and began raising a ruckus. They started clawing at the door to the garden bath and in an effort to settle them down, I planned to simply open the door and show them nothing was in it. After all, if something were in it, I, Miss Sonar Ears, would have heard it.

            I opened the gate, both dogs lunged in it, and in three seconds flat Sunny marched straight out with a dead possum in her teeth. I might add that on her way out, she swept my right calf. (That's it. I'm calling 911.) Then I saw it. That was the end of "quiet" time. I screamed like a maniac, ran in the house, slammed the door with the dogs outside and yelled, "KEITH!!!!!!!!! Sunny has a wild animal in her teeth!" (My subconscious mind knew it was a possum but I wasn't ready to face it, let alone say it.) He walked past his screaming wife (picture it: "Ahhhhh! Ahhhhh! Ahhhhh!" That's what it was like.) giving me that look he gets when he knows I am beyond reasoning. I continued screaming ("Ahhhhh! Ahhhhh!") even after I locked him out there with it. In a little while he came back in the house with both dogs and no possum but looking deeply concerned.

"Elizabeth, was Beenie with Sunny?"

"Ahhhhh! Of course she was. Why? Ahhhhh! Ahhhhh!"

"Sunny must have gotten a head start."

"Ahhhhh! No, she didn't. Beenie was right next to her. They went into the garden bath at the exact same time. Ahhhhh!"

Then I figured it out. Keith was undone because my dog completed the hunt before his dog. He just could not believe my mutt outhunted his fine birddog. He made excuses for her all morning. The amusement of the competition and another cup of coffee to settle my nerves finally calmed me down a tad. "Keith," I stated arrogantly (go figure: an apparent bout of amnesia after the complete idiot I'd just made of myself), "You know full well that Sunny is still a wild dog. We've never been able to tame her and we never will."

Even he had to agree. She showed up on our porch ten years ago out of nowhere. After we came to love her so much and discover her many nobilities, I suggested she might have been from the order of Melchizedek's pet (a slight doctrinal reach), since we can't trace her lineage. One thing we've always known: she lived on the streets. Sunny is the most wonderful dog you can imagine. Honestly, she's Lassie dressed in black but she has that wild side to her that makes you appreciate her attempt at domesticity all the more. For instance, you cannot make her stay in the back yard. She can dig a hole to China or knock a slat out of the fence. She also eats flies out of thin air. Will jump two feet to snag one. When she's spots a squirrel in the yard, she nearly breaks the glass in the windows trying to get out. She also prances around like a fine, trained dog on a leash.until she wants off. Then she just tilts her head a certain way, slips out of it effortlessly, and goes where she wants. You can pet Sunny all you want but don't even think about picking her up. She'd rather bite you than let you get away with acting like she's some lap pet. She's a real dog. A working dawg. I tell Keith continually that any sense in which she seems trained is just her condescending to cooperate. She simply humors us. Yep. That's my Sunny. She could bring home the bacon.whole wild hog.

While I'll thank her never to brush past me again with a warm, dead possum hanging from her teeth, somehow I love that we've never been able to completely domesticate her. I have to respect the old girl. She never has conformed.

Come to think of it, neither has Keith. He doesn't jump two feet in the air to snag a fly but I've never been able to create him in my own image either. Never been able to totally domesticate him. Or manipulate him. Or fix him. And I'm so glad. I have to respect the old guy. I'm a tough opponent when I want to be. And the man's still standing tall.

I had a funny conversation with the chairman of the Living Proof Board of Directors yesterday. (I'll get to the funny part in a minute.) We hadn't had a chance to catch up in a while so we sat for three hours at Starbucks while I downed a grande caramel macchiato. We were talking about the ministry. I was telling him how I wanted them to buckle down on me in this present wave of growth with which the Lord has seen fit in His sovereignty to entrust to us. I want desperately to get through this season - however brief, however long - honoring the Love of my life, my Lord Jesus, to the bone. In every attitude. Every motive. In my subconscious. In my conscious. Outwardly and inwardly. Of course not sinlessly though I do so wish it were possible. Integrity's doable, however. With everything in me - the power of His indwelling Presence and the health my Healer has gone to great lengths to work in me - I want to run this marathon to glorify my God.

I've been blind-sided before. I don't want to be blind-sided again. I'm learning that the devil has all sorts of masquerades and just because you've blown his cover in one area doesn't mean he can't come after you with a good disguise in another. He's let me know clearly - in ways I'd find hard to explain - that, like many other servants, he wants me dead. The feeling is mutual. If I'm onto him this time, he's switched to religious garb. I'm not sure I was ready for this one. I love the church and sometimes love is blind so I'm going to have to be far more discerning about where he's setting a trap. Yep, I'm going to need some help on this one so I prepared a list. A list of things I want my board and my loved ones to watch for in me. It's called "Things I do not ever want to become." 

After telling him my list and spouting the coinciding Scriptural preventatives, the chairman of the Board asked me, "How's Keith?" He loves Keith. He gets a huge kick out of him because he's so untamable. "Fine. Oh, Steve. What would I ever do without Keith? Who on earth loves me like Keith?" Steve started laughing and telling me how God knew exactly the kind of man I needed and that if I had gotten what I thought I wanted, I would have been so nauseatingly sanctimonious that God wouldn't have even used me. Then he and I got tickled about the time many years ago when I tried to get a Godly counselor (another good friend of ours and also a member of our Board) to give me permission to leave Keith. I blurted out, "I don't even know why I married him!" To which this counselor spontaneously retorted, "I'll tell you why you married him! Because he's such a real man with such rugged, good looks he intimidates the rest of us guys half to death!" That night I took a good look at him and said to myself, "Yep, that's why I married him." And I decided that if I let go of him, some other woman would have her mitts on him so fast that I'd have to be like Loretta Lynn on "Coal Miner's Daughter." I don't remember her exact words but I'll never forget the gist of it: "Woman, you get that arm off my husband before I rip it off and beat you half to death with it." "It'll be over my dead body so get out while ya can cause you ain't woman enough to take my man."

Not too long ago Steve gave Keith and I a copy of John Eldredge's book Wild at Heart. He said it reminded him of Keith. But it speaks to all our men.no matter how successfully they've covered it or smothered it. Wives, we could all stand to read it. In it, Eldredge addresses this very thing. No, not possum trauma. Our men. They have an innate need not to be tamed by us. For crying out loud, if we could do it, we'd ruin them! God doesn't want to take the wild out of them. He wants to make them wild for Him. To that end they need our intercession. Not our intervention.

Wives, have we tamed our husbands with the whip of our tongues then had the ironic audacity to complain that they're boring? Are we saying, "The thrill is gone," after drop kicking it out the door with our own right foot? Have we complained and demeaned the self-confidence right out of him? Please, please pardon my candor but sometimes it helps to say it like it graphically: Do we emotionally emasculate our husbands only to turn around and ask, "Why can't you act like a man?" Well, let's see.

Oh, let that not be us. 

I so badly want the Bible studies we do together to have a profound affect on how we live our lives right in our homes and work places. Not just at church. I love nothing better than a man telling me that God and Bible study are the best things that ever happened to his wife. That's the way it should be. With the glorious intervention of the Holy Spirit, we can be women our men are so glad they married.

I learned something profound from my mentor, Marge Caldwell. Our men want to know they are men. Real men. And that we respect them. Sometimes I think they might need us to honor them even more than "love" them. To them, honor is often the purest form of a woman's love. I don't mean cowering down to them. I think you know me better than that. I mean simply treating them like men. Shall we let them get all their affirmation out there in the world? Or shall we give them a reason to hold up their heads right here at home? And be a welcoming shelter in their storm?

Let me just say this before I close. And if you'll pardon me, no matter what spell check says, I need to default to my old vernacular. Ain't no such thing on this planet as a perfect man. And if there were, he'd look the world over and never find a perfect woman. Some battles must be fought for health and wholeness to dwell in a home but must we make everything a battle? Must we take every opportunity to hit them where it hurts? And to what benefit? Who wins? The only battles worth really fighting are those implicitly for the marriage. Not against it.

Yes, they need to be good spouses, too, and make us feel loved and beautiful.but only God can make them that way. And He doesn't accomplish that through taming them. He does that through unleashing their passion into what Eldredge calls the "holy wild." Christ delights in putting His yoke on mavericks and watching them spend that energy on the uncharted ranch of His earthly Kingdom. Paul tame? Peter tame? James, the Son of Thunder, tame? I don't think so.

I don't know who this was for today. Maybe just me. But I feel better. One of our dogs is having a fit. You don't think it could be another.? Naaah. Surely not. 

I love you, Sisters.