TURNING POINT

It was one of those days. I looked in the refrigerator for a remedy – none there. Maybe a cup of tea or hot chocolate would ease this particular tension. Nope.

I went to the greenhouse looking for weeds to pull – couldn’t find even one tiny little thing, so I squished a few kale worms. My tension didn’t ease.

Came inside to the Quiet Room but couldn’t keep my seat on the ottoman long enough to get a good meditation done.

In that quiet though, I connected today’s nagging tension to a familiar sensation recalled from the years I wrote about in the memoir, Turn & Walk. That memoir is full of Turning Points, experiences or epiphanies that altered my reality. Whatever the details of a specific encounter, something happened that caused a sudden leap of understanding in that moment. A new realization. A breakthrough of some kind. Life – at least my perception of it – was renovated in a flash. Previous logic irrelevant; new principles, bona fide.

The suddenness aspect was not at all normal for me before this. I would normally carry an idea in my head for a long time, rationalizing, adding information like adding frosting, making the current situation more palatable. But when an encounter, audible or visual, happened, my reality immediately changed. From a Turning Point moment on, I lived and made choices in alignment with the new reality, as if, finally, I had better light.

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Not all Turning Points were supernatural in my history, but none the less permanent.

The hawks in my back yard seem to take a long time to fledge the nest. Parents train them to eat, then capture, substantial prey to live. Tension builds until one day, they don’t return to their nest. They sit on a branch nearby, but don’t go back in. My fledging Turning Point was shortly after my eighteenth birthday when I signed up with a Navy recruiter visiting our senior class. It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the family nest was too crowded. Once I flew away, I didn’t return to that nest, only to sit on a branch nearby for a while.

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Early in my 20s, I worked hard to study the bible, believing I could find all the answers to life in its pages. Believing that because my husband told me so. However, in my 30s, when our two sons were growing up, it made no sense to teach them Thee and Thou or try to explain Old English grammar or jargon. Internal tension built until I bought a New International Version and put King James on the bookshelf for good. I was done with it. There was tension after this Turning Point, but just in church and in-law gatherings.

Farther down that path, after this proactive turn, I picked up The Message. I wanted to read the disciples’ letters like letters, without footnotes. Today, I read the Jerusalem Bible, The Message, the Wuest Translation, or the New Living Translation. What matters in walking out my life after that Turning Point is my intention to get to know the entity-person all these writers seemed to know. To listen for God’s voice through all the religious chaos.

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In my mid-40s, a string of sad and painful situations slashed through my world. I suppose most of us who’ve lived past 40 have been disappointed or let down by people we’ve trusted. Tension built inside me with every disappointment until yet another Turning Point. I realized, in a single moment, that only I owned any responsibility for my learning in the religious world. I hadn’t yet grasped the idea of an individual connection (still far from a personal relationship) with God.

But I was absolutely and finally done with the phrase, “Someone smarter than me has studied and figured it out” concerning what people need to know about God. Previous decades of my burning questions had been answered with opinion; education mixed with religious tradition and bias. They might have studied Greek and Hebrew, but these guys in front of the class had no more access to God’s mind or heart than I did. I can do my own research. I’ll never know all I need to know, but I’m solely responsible.

Walking that out, I chose to believe the characterization of God in John Chapter 10. If I accept as a true principle that the Great Shepherd calls us sheep (by name) out of the corral into open pastures, and we sheep follow him because we know his voice, then my work is simply to learn to recognize that Shepherd’s voice. I started tuning in to listen, like listening outside to familiar nature sounds and identifying specific animals.

Also, God started waking me up at 3:18 a.m. no matter when I went to bed the night before. I kept a notepad and pen beside a stool in the closet and wrote what I heard – or saw.  I slipped over to that dimly lighted cozy closet easily, even without coffee. Those couple hours flew by. And my listening developed into hearing from God in more ways and different places. (More stories are in the book.)

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Some Turning Point encounters radically altered my world, but I had taken no active role. When I experienced one of these turns, it wasn’t like driving on a highway and turning onto a gravel road. These were like I turned into another universe.

Turning Points, at least my experiences with them, cannot be reversed or discounted. Like when I saw a hologram of myself as a lighthouse with brilliant rays of forgiveness radiating from holes all over me. And when I heard “Your name is Caleb” in the car on the way to where the question was asked an hour after I heard the Voice. When I saw and felt the misty smoke of God’s Spirit flow around and past me. These, and other weird encounters, are as vivid and relevant today as when they first happened. My perception of life changed permanently.

I can’t un-see that vision. Can’t un-hear that voice.

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Today was a good day to explore Turning Points. Why? Because I feel the increasing tension of some unforeseeable Turning Point almost every day! And maybe you do too.

Every day, I feel nagging tension regarding risks of Covid; I can do my best to apply medical wisdom to my actions and prepare for a worst-case scenario. Every day I feel tension and anger regarding racial injustice and horrors. Precious friends have shared experiences that make me cry. Any gender injustice I experienced pales to their reality.

Every day I feel heavy tension (disgust and outrage) concerning the cancer of corruption throughout national leadership and appointed positions. Propaganda designed to hijack rational minds of people of faith bothers me on both ends. I’m frustrated that people who can vote don’t, or won’t read, especially from a range of sources. Pissed that this culture equalizes “reality TV” with reality. Confused that sensible grown-ups would support an impostor and excuse, even defend, his false statements.

Every day is closer to a Turning Point, I can’t predict when or what. It could have to do with any of the three situations above. All I’m sure of is Turning Points happen – eventually.

What might you do when you feel that tension? Allow yourself to feel it. Sit with it. Don’t try to arrange an outcome, just notice details about where the tension is and prepare yourself for surprise.

Making changes in response to new knowledge is part of leading up to the turn. Tension builds – we adjust. But I know, for me, that until there’s a real transformation, it’s not yet a Turning Point.