12. Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am grown old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also? [Genesis 18]
This is not the first time we have heard this. Abraham as well said so
17. Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born to him who is a hundred years old? And shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear? [Genesis 17]
Ancient rabbinic thought does not comment on the one thing that I been thinking about in these passages, probably because it was so obvious. Sarah and Abraham both laughed because she thought that a son at this point was impossible. Of course, God can do anything, so it shouldn't be so impossible, hence God’s impatience concerning Sarah
13. And the Lord said to Abraham, Why did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old? 14. Is any thing too hard for the Lord? At the time appointed I will return to you, at this season, and Sarah shall have a son. 15. Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid. And he said, No; you did laugh.[Genesis 18]
On a very personal level I understand Sarah laughing. Not only was there the issue of conceiving, but of carrying and giving birth to a child. Physical limitations seem to be insurmountable. Sarah, more than Abraham, has to be intimately involved with the creative process. In my own creative work, I’m also familiar with physical limitations. I’ve discussed my color blindness before, but I never have gone into the other limitation in my life.
The first signs of a problem came in early grade school. My handwriting was terrible, and I was doing terribly in Physical Education. Besides picking the wrong colors, when using coloring books I could never color within the lines. I would often, when trying to write my homework completely zone out, what the teacher wrote on my report card as “daydreaming.” Due to a series of fortunate circumstances, My parents were able to get me tested for what was going on. It turns out my brain is working faster than my motor nerves. These two working at conflicting speeds mean I cannot control my body as easily as most people do. This might not seem to be that big of a deal but think about all the things that need coordination of those two systems. The reason I did so rotten in virtually any sport wasn’t a matter of strength, but coordination. Trying to catch a ball or swing a bat becomes a nightmare when there is even a fraction of a second delay between what you see and your arm moving. I failed Drivers Education the first time I took it because trying to get my arms and feet to control the vehicle was near impossible. By the second time I drove sufficiently well to get my license. But the worst of all was putting a pencil in my hand.
Nothing is so subtle and precise in its movements than handwriting. I had to concentrate intensely to write a single letter. It took a while, and my brain meanwhile flooded those same muscles with thirty more ideas or letters that needed to be put down. In that clog of ideas my hand would go on strike and shut down, hence the day dreaming. One teacher ever figured this out, and she did something that I’m indebted to her forever. She put me on a typewriter, and let me type my lessons. The ideas flowed much easier, though even here I had an incurable problem with typographic errors. Unfortunately in the years that followed I didn’t have a typewriter and I suffered in my classes from having to write my homework. As much as Blue books were bad for most students, for me they were a total terror. Even in graduate school, things were problematic with writing. Trying to take my handwritten comprehensive examinations for my first Master’s Degree, I almost failed because my writing was so bad as to be unreadable. I would start writing one sentence and then pick up with the end of the next sentence, skipping dozens of words in between in my incomprehensible scrawl. Fortunately my advisor knew about my problem, and was merciful in his grading. He knew if you put me in front of a key board, the words just start streaming out in incredible prose – my only problem was that pencil and pen.
Word processing has been one of the greatest blessings in my life. Without it I would have had nothing of what I have today. I seriously doubt I would have graduated High School. Yet now I have two graduate degrees.
One thing that I always wanted to do was art. I wanted to draw and paint. But between my color blindness and my lack of motor control that was a laughable dream, as laughable as two senior citizens having children. Yet it was a dream I really wanted.
Shortly after I finished my Masters in education and that comprehensive exam, I did something very scary for me. I took a drawing class. Like that typewriter in first grade, it was a moment of enlightenment when John, our teacher stuck two Chinese takeout cartons and a Styrofoam cup in the middle of the room, and told us to blind contour draw what we saw in front of us. Blind contour, for those not familiar with art is a way of drawing where you never look at what you are drawing; your eyes are instead always looking at the subject you are drawing. But there was one other instruction I was given, and that was the breakthrough in my art. I was told not to draw by movements of my fingers but to use my whole arm. That suggestion changed everything, and within three weeks I was drawing the cups and take out cartons, along with watering can and milk pails as recognizable objects. Removing the hundreds or motions of my fingers for the few muscles of my arm meant I gained far more control of my body than I ever had with a writing instrument in it.
After graduating college I got a job that had me on the road six days a week. Although I was still very rough in my driving, in the nine months I worked that job, I put on 80,000 miles on that car. By the time I left that job for another, no one could ever tell I ever had trouble driving. In the twelve years since I started drawing and painting, I have filled dozens of notebooks, almost every day of the last twelve years I’ve painted or drawn. And something amazing happened. I could draw and paint. My ability today is the result of a few teachers who set me in the right direction and a ton of practice. I’ve learned to use my hands and the rest of my body properly despite my disability. Repetition has been a huge part of that.
Had someone handed me one of my acrylics or watercolors and told me I painted that, I would have laughed as much as Abraham and Sarah. It seemed inconceivable I could do anything like that. Yet staring at the work which covers the walls of my apartment I’m reminded of how much one can accomplish.
Miracles happen, but they happen when both God and humanity take them seriously. We may laugh at the prospect of something incredible happening, be it a child in one’s old age or painting a beautiful woman at a beach bar. I thought of all this recently when I was given a few new physical challenges by a friend of mine, and once again my hands feel like they are made of lead, and I find my self fighting not to shut down. It’s made me realize what is necessary to get me to function like a normal human being, something unwritten into the text of the story of Abraham and Sarah. In stories of infertility we usually have no gap between God promising and God fulfilling. Yet here there’s a three-month gap. It took a year for Sarah to have a baby, while if she had gotten pregnant immediately it would wold have been sooner. We have no idea how long she was kept captive from Abraham by Abimelech in the second “she is my sister” episode. Yet it would seem a lot less than three months. Since it is clear also that it is Abraham’s son, there is only one conclusion about those three months. Any time they were together, they copulated. Abraham and Sarah did the human physical acts that made the miracle true. God supplied the rest.
The laughingly impossible is possible if only we try and try again. I rode tens of thousands of miles in my first car, and have become a good driver because of it. I have painted thousands of paintings, each one better than the last. When I learned how to throw pottery on the potters wheel, my ceramics teacher told me how to make a good pot: you make a lot of pots. I realized how powerful that advice to me twenty-two years ago was when last year when for the first time in fifteen years I sat down at a potter’s wheel and threw a perfect pot to my total surprise. Muscle memory is different than conscious memory, it never forgets.
But there is the other part we cannot forget. God will do miracles and blessings, if only we look for them. I had no control of which teacher I got in different parts on my life, but those who were particularly memorable were blessings from God. I would not have succeeded without them. That is the stuff we need to thank God for.
My disabilities are mostly inconveniences. I’m not blind or paralyzed, as others are who are presented challenges I can not even imagine. Yet I believe anyone who has a limitation can expand themselves into places that they or others might laugh about, if only they put the hard effort of practice in. When they do that, God will provide for them blessings. We all have limitations that make a dream laughable. Though I can strum a few chords, with my fingers I very much doubt I will ever be able to play Flight Of The Bumblebee on my guitar. My fingers just can’t move that fast.
Or can they? If I had the desire, put in the practice, and looked for the miracles that would help me get there, even that may be possible. If you really had the desire, the discipline to do something thousands of times, and the willingness to let God give you a few gifts along the way, what could you accomplish?
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