Seeking the right answer

Warning- I was wrong about the furminator. I found a small abrasion on poor Honeybun, which I strongly suspect is from the furminator. And we decided Lucky has two somewhat bald spots, again courtesy of the furminator. My grooming friend tells me the furminator is a blade on a handle, and most people (yours truly included) don't understand that and should be very careful using it. Guilty. Thus I retract my endorsement and will continue to vacuum 40 times a day to try to stay ahead of the dog hair collection. I will continue to use the low tech dog brush, which costs $5.95, but which poses no danger to our dogs.

With the furminator debacle laid to to rest, I went on a walk to Shadowlake, where the beautiful swans used to glide. It is not the same without the swans, but it is still a peaceful place to walk with the dogs. I was trying to work out the solution to the SAT question of the day. Once a day, I get a question sent to my email from the SAT organization, preparing me for college entrance exams. I do not intend to return to college, but I thought it would be good practice for both me and Asherel, and how long could one question a day take? The first two days, I got the questions correct in 10 seconds. So did Asherel. This was day three, and a math problem. A quadratic equation. Need I say more?

So I wandered along the lake shore thinking about the hint that was given with the question. It reminded me (tactfully suggesting that this was something I once knew in the first place) of the vertex quadratic formula. This hint did not help me at all, because in the formula were variables that I had no idea what they were, specifically h and k. I looked out at the peaceful waters of Shadowlake, and wished the swans were still there, then headed home to cheat.

  I did a google search on h. That gave me a whole series of new formulas and told me that h and k were the vertices of the parabola, graphed by the equation. This helped a little, believe it or not. I plugged in the one vertex I knew, and after about twenty steps, arrived at the correct answer. Now it was time to explain the answer to Asherel, who had also unsuccessfully attempted the question.

I brought her my two pages filled with computations. At the 4th or 5th step, I could not remember why I had done what I had done.
"Do you want me to go do Spanish while you figure this out?" she asked.
"No, I want you to try to figure it out with me."
Finally, about twenty minutes later, we plowed our way through  to the correct answer. It is perhaps a good thing that I am not intending to enter college again. And Asherel has four years of SAT question of the day to help prepare her. I hope this is a wise approach. I hope I am not inflicting hidden wounds, like the furminator.

Sometimes there are no Biblical precedents to help in some of the dilemmas of life. One has to glean from general guiding principles. In the midst of all this angst of the day, I was faced with a philosophical question. If the world seems to be swimming one way, people you even like and respect, yet your own conscience will not let you float along with them, do you fight the current? It is so much easier to hop on the bandwagon. Maybe my conscience is misdirecting me. Am I becoming legalistic, patronizing, self righteous? But why won't my conscience let me off the hook and give in to those things which a majority opinion seems to coalesce around?  I admit that I am growing weary of trying to stand against a flood. Every parent knows what I am talking about at some point in their role as guide and protector of our children. I won't go into specifics but the furminator episode made me wonder. Do we sometimes think we are doing something good, something wonderful...but we are abrading a soul underneath? I just don't know.

I looked over my computations for the quadratic equation. Under test conditions, would I have been able to arrive at the correct response in a timely manner without the hints? No, not yet. But if I did this every day, trained myself bit by bit, perhaps in a few years I could. I suppose seeking God and His Way is a similar process. Day by day, grow more sensitive to His voice speaking to my conscience, and perhaps each time the answer will come a little more easily, a little more clearly. This daily digging to the depth of how the Spirit is guiding me has the exact opposite effect of the furminator- it is the kind of scraping that heals wounds, not inflicts them.

Job 27:6
I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.

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The Furminator

My nightmares have been watching too many movies. The nightmare last night was right out of Hitchcock. It is a troubling one, because it is recurring. And now it has become more and more explicit and worst of all, I remember it. Last night was a variation on the theme, but they all follow the same basic pattern.

 Before I tell you last night's dream, I must preface with my dream from two nights ago. The recurring theme is I descend into a spooky basement. Two nights ago in my dream, my mother in law had cleaned the basement and I could not get over how unspooky it had become. It was no longer the terrifying dark pit filled with unknown horrors. It was neat and scrubbed. She had even put up fake windows with curtains on the concrete walls to give it a homey look. There were soft warm rugs on the concrete floors, and all the spider webs had been dusted away. This is the only time I recall the basement dream being pleasant. All other times it follows the pattern of last night's dream.
But before I tell you last night's dream, I must set the stage with the story of the furminator, which was heavy on my mind before going to bed. Our neighbor had loaned us her furminator to try out on our dogs. The furminator is a dog brush that costs $60, but is supposed to remove every stray dog hair from your dog in one brushing session. This could reduce the need to vacuum in our home by months, so I have been eager to try the furminator, but not eager to pay $60 for it.  I had heard you are not supposed to brush wiry terrier type fur with the furminator, but I wasn't sure if a reputable source told me that or not. So I tried it gently on Lucky. His fur began coming off in huge gobs with absolutely no effort. He loved it and stood happily while I collected a pile of fur ten feet high. When I was done, his undercoat of golden retriever like fur was more evident, and there was clearly less of the wiry wild hair. I wondered if I had ruined him. I was very surprised at how soft and silky and thick the undercoat was that we had never really seen before. You just never know what is under the surface.

Now fast forward to last night's dream. The dogs and I descended into the spooky basement. It was clean, but not nearly as decorated and clean as my mother-in-law had left it two nightmares ago. As always, in my basement dreams, I felt an unsettling sense of foreboding. I looked around and all was silent. There was no apparent cause for alarm. I started back up the stairs, and the dogs suddenly stopped and stared back down into the basement, hackles raised. I turned quickly and saw in the center of the room, a strange globular substance starting to rise out of the drain. As soon as I looked, it instantly disappeared, such that I wasn't even sure I had seen it. I started up the stairs again, and the dogs continued to stare and softly growl. Again, I swung around and this time the ooze was growing and it was clearly malignant. In terror, I tried desperately to say, "Jesus is Lord," which is a strategy I have used many times in overcoming nightmares. I don't know if this is a universal phenomenon, but when I try to say something out loud in the midst of a dream like that, I have to struggle and groan, and force each syllable. I am sure it is terrifying to my husband, who quickly awoke me, though not until I had garbled those victorious words, Jesus is Lord.

I know what the dream means. Evil lurks, and evil desires to overcome. It is usually hidden, biding its time. But it is a real and everpresent danger. It is like Lucky's undercoat- hidden, but always there. We just don't always notice it. What makes this particular nightmare even more unusual is how it came on the tail of the clean basement dream. It is an exact parallel of the story in Matthew 12, where a person cleans house. A demon leaves the person, and seeks other places to inhabit. It decides to return to the original host, and finds the house clean, orderly, and unoccupied. So the demon invites seven of his buddies to now go and take residence, and the poor person is worse off than ever!

To tell you the truth, I am not crazy about this passage. It is spooky, like my basement. It is not enough to just clean the unoccupied house, despite all the external trappings of purity and righteousness. Jesus must occupy the house. One must daily put her trust and reliance on God, or the demons return. Only God can ultimately defeat evil. When I awoke, I found myself praying, "What more can I do, Lord? I believe and I struggle daily to live my life in accordance with that belief. I don't know how to trust more."

And I think perhaps that is key. I, on my own, can't trust more. I can only submit, and watch God work, watch the bubble of evil disappear, and let Him show me His glory, in spite of my meager faith. He is capable of meeting any of us exactly where we are, with how ever little we have to offer. In His hands, little is enough.
He is the ultimate Furminator, sweeping away every thing that hides what we really are underneath, and exposing all weakness, all sources of defilement. We may stand shivering, exposed, and vulnerable before Him, but that is when we recognize most how desperately we need Him. Oh how I pray that I would trust the brush of His presence more!

And by the way, this week I intend to buy a furminator.

Matthew 12:43-45

   ⁴³ “When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. ⁴⁴ Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. ⁴⁵ Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”