Notes From The City: An Abundant Life

Several years ago, before I was born again, I went out on the evening before Easter Sunday to a bar on Manhattan's Upper West Side called Lucy's Surfeteria. An actor friend was bartending there, someone I'd met recently through a filmmaker I was working with at the time, and my then boyfriend was doing a play with him so he invited us to come up and have a night out. Lucy's was a party bar, a place to do shots and drink. I don't remember if they served food or not, but we weren't eating. They had a kind of competition, that whoever did a certain amount of different kinds of shots and ended with a shot of tequila and drank the worm would be given two plastic fish, a large whale with a smaller shark in its mouth. I used to pride myself in those days that I could drink with the guys, and so I cheerfully drank everything our new friend passed to us, and walked out the door sometime around 2am with my plastic fish in my raincoat pocket.

I tend to get car sick, especially in New York City cabs, and halfway downtown I knew I'd have to get out and walk. I made it to 23rd Street, and with my then boyfriend grumbling, got out and started walking the rest of the way down to the apartment I lived in at the time on West 10th Street. I chose to walk down 9th Avenue, because the apartment was near the West Side Highway. At some point just below the Meat Packing District, in an area that is now very popular and trendy, but in those days was very desolate and dangerous late at night, a large black car drove by and someone yelled something out the window along the lines of "Hey baby," and I yelled back in very colorful language for them to get lost. The car stopped, and a big group of very big guys got out and surrounded me, pushing my very frightened boyfriend to the side. One of the guys asked me what I had just said, and I repeated it in all its full color, and he took out a gun and said, "Oh, yeah, well look what I have here," at which point I took the two fish I had won at Lucy's out of my pocket, and said, "Oh, yeah, well look at what I have." All the guys nearly fell over laughing, and one of them said, "She is so drunk, let's get out of here," and they got back into their car and drove off.

I think of this story every year when Easter rolls around, and sometimes at other times too. I keep my fish on the side of my bathtub as an every day reminder of the goodness of God. There are many places in the New Testament where Jesus is in some way around fish or fishermen, or feeding people with fish, and so the sign of the fish is a sign of Jesus. I didn't know that then, of course, but now that I do, I know that the only way I stayed alive and unharmed that night was because of His grace. The other thing that amazes me, in addition to the fact that God chose to intervene in the mess of my life on an evening when I was doing anything but being reverent to the fact that Easter Sunday was the next day, is the humor that He used to save my life with. Wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom and joy and love, and those things are so powerful when that Spirit is there, that everything else is overcome by them.

This year, when I was invited to spend the Saturday night before Easter with two artists I know who both know the wonder and beauty of God, I knew that it was God's way of reminding me gently and beautifully how different my life has become. I still go out and have fun, and I still enjoy a good party. But the excessive and unhealthy way that I used to overdo has been replaced with enjoying the fullness of an abundant life.

Art Night with Rebecca Fraser and her sister Katherine is a very special evening, something they do for themselves as a way to keep the creative joy flowing. To have the opportunity to share an evening with them was a blessing, and a beautiful reminder of how God not only restores the things that we have lost that others have taken from us, but also those things that we willingly tried to give away. Peace, love, joy, hope, and the ability to enjoy life to the full - all these things and more, our very lives themselves, are given to us as a gift because of Jesus' journey to the Cross. It is something that is impossible to fully comprehend, because the only thing that He asks of us to receive that gift is to have faith and accept Him at His word, that He is who He is and that He did what He did for no other reason than love.

Art Night With Katherine and Rebecca Fraser

Jersey City Heights, New Jersey