You who have been safe your whole life, you children yet to meet the evil of this world, you're sassy and free. I am learning what a child of 7, 8, 9 is like without scars. You believe in those big hands of Grandpa's - they would protect you, they would threaten anyone who threatened you.
You don't know that evil is insidious. It comes dressed in friend's clothing, it comes in the shape of your heroes, it comes along with love and it comes along with joy. It is a silent companion, a shadow like a panther creeping closer when those big hands aren't around to protect you.
You dream when you are alone. I don't know what dreams fill your little head, but I know they aren't nightmares. I know your nightmares, and they aren't of people you love turning evil, or of being awoken in the night by a terrible face that used to show only love. Your nightmares are amorphous - lightening storms and monsters. But when you wake, I can comfort you. You haven't wet the bed in fear. You don't hide your nightmares from me, afraid I'll discover the truth.
And maybe life can be as simple as growing up and falling in love and living with joy. It is the hope of mothers everywhere - that their children have a happy life. Do some mothers dream of their children having a childhood just like theirs? I pray you have the joy of siblings, the love of parents, the wings for your dreams - but not the torment and the secrets and the caustic burn of wrongdoing in the night that feels as though it somehow leaked through the innocence of your own little soul.
I pray that when someone says they love you, they really do. I pray that when someone says they'll always be there for you, they will be there. I pray you never face a turncoat or a frenemy or a two-faced liar. I hope you never discover one of those amongst your friends. I pray you keep your innocence, that the world doesn't rip it from you with the truth that evil is here along with good. I hope you can watch from the sidelines when pain is afoot. I pray you are His, and hedged about, and free and believing and gullible and naïve.
Be the shining face that believes in the power of good. Be the innocent soul that encourages and gathers groups to carry out your big dreams. Be the kind voice that speaks of Christ's love, unadulterated by the knowledge of exactly what His love has saved us from.
How easily we forget the past. Five months into this season of depression, I'm finally experiencing some freedom from the oppression - by practicing skills I've known for 2 years now. I brush the dust off slowly as my therapist reminds me how to bring the sunshine back. Opposite action - throwing myself into the life God has set before me, children, messes and all. Accumulating positives - a scribbled list of gratitude in my Joy Journal. Mindfulness - ignoring my constant, self-refreshing mental to-do list and entering into the present moment completely.
Returning to these practices slants the sunlight back into our home. There are long periods of freedom from sadness and guilt throughout the day. The urge to simply leave, either temporarily or permanently, eases as life becomes less difficult. My eyes are no longer blind to the beauty that surrounds me - the dancing girl on the dandelion lawn infusing my day with yellow; the orioles glistening in the morning sun as they sing to heaven; the twin mama cats co-parenting the little brood of kittens that arrived on Monday. It soaks in, finally. All this joy!
A line from a favorite song floats in - "we went dancing in the minefields, sailing through the storms" - yes, that voyage sounds like our lives. For a season, perhaps we'll walk easy on a safe road. Perhaps the minefield is in the rearview mirror for now.
The children always feel it, the lifting of oppression. They pronounce to the sky above that I am healed! Getting better every day! I wonder if they remember that depression has repeated it's turbulant course through our lives multiple times now. Another thing I've felt guilt over: they are all too familiar with suffering, pain, anguish and torment. Is this because of my weakness and my failures? I have to lean hard into the truth that God sent these children, these specific four, to me to mother, weaknesses and failures and all. It's all been seen by Him and allowed by Him and only He knows what He is shaping these children for. As much as I would love to believe that their lives will be easy, is there such a thing? Is life ever truly easy? I know so many of the house of faith for whom life has been an aching bittersweet experience. I know no one who does not miss someone, long for somewhere or something. How can I expect that my children will be free from desires, from failures, from heartbreak?
They are marked for glory, four baby believers already on the hard path of faith. I pray their journeys are marked with the beauty and sunshine I've been blessed with. Rosy wrote to me this morning, "I had a lot of fun through my life and most of it was with you." I feel just the same - my family is the most delightful blessing I've ever been given.
May you dance freely with no fear of danger today...for He can take away the fear even when dangers still lie ahead.
If you are alive today, you are a work in progress. Unfinished. Still being refined. Untangled. Strung with pearls.
Sometimes you have to table your doubts like the dust on a working machine. If your faith is still working, maybe now is not the time to clean the cobwebs, read the books about the doubts you have. Maybe you need to lean on just a few words, like I am today: "Lord, I believe. Help thou my disbelief." (Mark 9:24)
Maybe there is beauty you can see today. Maybe you can mark it down in your mind on that endless list of gifts, blessings sent down from the Father of Lights.
Maybe you are peering into the dark for the beauty. Maybe you are holding your head in your hands, a head full of ache, a soul of distress, on the foggy moorland, wandering through the peat bogs, searching for home. Maybe today is more Wuthering Heights than Anne of Green Gables. Maybe it is an Isaiah day, a Lamentations day, maybe you can't end the Psalm yet with the praise part.
He is already there. Where you are finished, where He is finished with your refinement. He stands at the end of time, at the beginning of time, unbounded and with eyes seeing everything start to finish. As you hold your aching heart tight, against the hurts bound to come today, remember, He is there to bind those wounds. If not today, if you walk today wounded and the Savior does not come with His healing today, there is a day coming. The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the LORD binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted. (Isaiah 30:26).
When you will see the tears in the precious bottle, when you will see your name engraved on the palms of the suffering Savior's hands -reach out and touch those holes from the nails He lay still to be pierced for you - and in the pages of His book of life, when you will be unbounded by the darkness of time and you will see. He is giving you beauty for ashes.
Back and forth goes the brush, smoothing months of winter tangles on the back of a young horse. My friend is patient, gentle. The horse stands still at the post, soaking up the love.
There is no "trust" that compares to the relationship between a girl and her horse. He is tamed by her affection. She is tamed by his willing heart.
I have been the brute beast tangled in winter's coat, protecting myself from the cold. Softly, tenderly, you draw me out into the vulnerable places, the painful places. Brushing through all these tangles is hard work. But you are teaching me to stand still at the post, to feel your love in the brushing, to wait for that moment we can walk together as one.
When my soul was embittered,when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you. Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold, those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you. But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all your works. (Psalm 73:21-28 ESV)
Yes, my heart and flesh may fail, but, my God, you never will. I am just old enough now to know that I have nothing mastered, despite previous suppositions. Just old enough to see that faith is an iceberg, and I am precariously perched on the narrow top although there is a deep foundation I will not see this side of heaven. When the doubts come, when I am stuck in the "not good enough" and "better off without me" trains of thought, I must remember the vastness of what you've built in me, even if it is submerged under your ocean of Grace and invisible to me. It is there, that foundation. Oh, soul, cling! Cling to the promises, for a new day is coming!
I've tried for three years now to turn myself into an optimist. But for thirty I've been a glass half empty girl. Now I have some type of binocular vision, seeing the world in both black and white, the positive and negative crowding in together a confusing mosaic of blessings and curses.
My messy house is the nest in which meaningful moments are carved out with children who are growing up way too fast. Busy days are filled to the brim with more important tasks than dishes and laundry, but I still sigh at the unfinished homemaking chores at the end of the day. I watch my kids running across the troll bridge in the autumn afternoon sun, and I breathe deep the crisp air, but half of my mind is on grading unfinished and schoolwork they're not doing and all the busywork I used to measure my worth by.
I've been a griever, a lamenter, a mourner for as long as I can remember. My childhood held a hidden pain too deep for me to understand, and twenty lifetimes of pain shoved in to my formative years billowed out in weird ways: I found things to cry about because I had to cry and I couldn't cry about what I needed to cry about. Now the well of pain is too deep to tap so I leave the cover on most days but still the pain aches there inside despite the gathering of joys and the counting of blessings I've made it a habit to do.
How does one go about healing wounds when it hurts so to peel the bandage back? When it's festered so long, it seems easier to pretend it's been amputated long ago. I guess that's why I run away so often. Run away from failure headlong into small adventures, like drives into the country to count the rails on a track with my train-crazy son. Like last-blast fully clothed afternoons at a splash pad, with all the other moms looking at me like I'm crazy, they fully prepared with their beach towels and their kids in swimsuits and goggles, and mine the crazy lady's kids dripping wet in jeans and t-shirts.
I don't know, really, if I'm teaching them to be spontaneous joy addicts or just social outcasts. I don't know if I'm teaching them the same bottling-up-pain coping I employ or if I'm showing them that you can salvage something out of a day lost to that deep ache after all. All I know is when the day ends, we are all smiling. The kitchen is still messy, but we're laughing in bed together under the comforter watching The Voice and trying to guess who's going to win the latest vocal battle. I haven't solved any of my real problems, I suppose, but I've enjoyed life anyway. Lived it. This day I lived. This day I smiled. This day I wasn't crushed by the granite boulder of a prisoner's existence. Today I was free for a while. Today I forgot for a time.
I'm trying to believe this is what it means to grasp the Promise - that I'm washed clean as snow, that all my past is forgotten in the outpouring of Love from the Cross. If He remembers it no more, do I really have to (Isaiah 43:25)? Do I have to go back there? Do I have to unleash those sorrows, work through them to truly be free of them? Or can I just shrug them off like old clothes, put on the new ones He's offered me (Colossians 3)? It is a crazy life, this Saved life, isn't it? Who cares if people stare? I don't have to drown in the pool of my suffering, because He's pulled me out of the mire and muck, and even if my glass is half empty for the rest of my life - the beauty of it is, that means it's still half full.
I've held 50/50 chances in my own two hands, flesh of my third daughter lying silent in the sleep of coma, doctors hovering in full biohazard gear, telling us of damaged neurons and people who don't wake up from infections like these. I've lived 50/50 chances in my own bones, almost 5 years now of a cancer journey, and I am passing that first hallmark on the road to survival, on to the next, the 10 year mark, when I have just a 50% chance of still beating cancer, still having a beating heart, still being here.
A friend died quietly on All Saint's Sunday in the peace of her earthly home, and while she walked away from us, she was welcomed on another shore by others who'd been waiting there for her return to another home. Today is her funeral, yesterday her wake. I touched her cold hand in the casket last night, a new friend gone quickly from my life. The nurse in me saw the sore on her nose from the NG tube, the reddened finger from the oxygen probe. The signs of cancer's battle still visible after death. She faced that last battle with a smile on her face, with courage, with hope. I held my tears back while I was in her room, because she was brave and I didn't want her to see that I am not. Today at the funeral, her body was gone. An urn stood at the front of the church instead. It was a little too quick, this ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I stared at the ceiling, the stained glass windows, let the music carry me away to the top of the church, so I could numb the tears and flee the fears, keep myself together in front of my peers.
We all hold death somewhere silent in our cells, but mine can be pulled out and measured in a test tube of blood, quantified in numbers, just how much death is there stalking me this year. How much treatment will be needed to keep it at bay. How my chances change every time they test my blood. I have my Scriptures that have become my mantras: sufficient unto each day are the troubles thereof...my hope is in you, maker of heaven...redeem the time...with God, all things are possible...
If God is for us, who can be against us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (from Romans 8)
I live in moments, I breathe in small joys, I am mindful of that which is set before me in this present time - the class I am about to teach, the task I am about to accomplish, the piece I am playing on the piano, the painting I am working on, the children who throng me and demand all of me. But it is a practice, all of this. A way to keep pain and hopelessness and paralyzing fear at bay. A Holy practice of obedience, because He tells me to carry His light burden, to walk in peace and not in fear; to walk and not faint, to believe in things much bigger than the landscape I can see with my own two eyes.
I hide tears behind closed doors. When I am doubled over with grief, I do so alone. I don't want to gather my children into these moments and darken what days we have together. I don't want to bring my husband in to the gates of my vast suffering. I struggle to let even Christ be with me in my Gethsemane nights. How can I say I have hope, how can I believe all these promises I have listed, and still be so overcome at times by the weight of death that hangs so heavy on my heart?
Several times throughout the Bible, God mentions the measure of our years at 70 or 80. My coworkers at the University see me as "young blood", 33 and maybe 40 years of a career ahead of me. Will that come to pass? Will I see my daughters and son at their weddings? If I make it to 20, I will be in the 3% that beat the odds. My children will be the ages of my friend's, her brave children, brave like her, who shed barely a tear today as they celebrated their mother's vibrant life and spoke of her deep faith. Will I have "fed" my children enough of my faith by then, by that 20 year mark, that they can be so brave? Will they be braver than me?
Through the sobs that wrack me on my drive home, loosed finally in the silence and privacy of my car, away from the eyes of others, I turn up the music and let myself come back to my body, this body filled with fear today. This body that watched a friend fall to cancer in a month's time with little warning. This body that can't imagine doing it half as well as she did. This body and mind that don't want to go there yet - home. As much as I long for heaven, as tired and worn out by life's struggles and cancer's lingering effects as I am, I have so many things left undone. So many things to finish. So many lives left to touch and mold and cherish. The voice of a friend sings me home to my yellow house, the home I want to stay in for ever so much longer...
when I was a child I held my mother tightly
then i grew taller and left to follow my dreams
I went after my dreams and some of them brought me delight
But they didn't bring me everything i hoped they might
I fell into love like a skydiver in the clouds
It wasn't enough no we couldn't sustain it ourselves
All the things i pursue
Well they stay for a season
Then everything moves
Everything moves oh
My towers fall
But you aren't leaving me
cause everything moves but you
I trained my body to run and not be weary
I worked and i read how to raise a better family
Then i bought a good house on the safe side of town because i could
And as long as my life stays like this i'm feeling good
When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. (I Corinthians 15:54-58)
I apologize for the lapse here on the blog. The last few days have seen my descent into a new and difficult health trial and I've been simply treading water in bed. I had a blast helping out with games at the kids' vacation Bible school this Sunday and Monday, but with a bad cold already on board, and just off the heels of a double pneumonia late in June/early July, I knew I would pay for the extra energy expenditure! What I didn't know was exactly how much! While, last night finally saw me back in the ER looking for help breathing, as I had been coughing and gasping almost non-stop for 24 hours and the oral meds given me by my doctor to treat an amazingly horrific case of bronchitis were not helping. After some new-to-me nebulizer breathing treatments and a shot of IV steroids, I was feeling well enough to head home. This morning I am facing a whole host of new medications to juggle to keep my breathing normal, all on my daughter's 9th birthday. Add to this the fact that both my grandmother and mother struggled with debilitating and life-changing asthma for much (or all) of their adult lives - I am a weepy, exhausted mess! I am repeating one of my favorite verses in times like these - "what time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee" (Psalm 56:3) - each and every time the emotion drowns me on the spot. I can do little about the tsunami of emotions - especially on the heavy-duty emotional rollercoaster cocktail of steroids and nebulizer treatments! - but I can change my attitude and take on a posture of dependence on God, who knows all my tomorrows and has laid out the perfect plan if only I have the courage to step into it.
What the landscape looks like in black night - even lit by the presence of Christ as we navigate the fog - may change drastically when the morning comes again. I took these nearly identical photos one foggy 24 hours last week - one during the darkness of night under a full moon, and one around 5 a.m. as the dawn was just wrapping it's violet fingers around our side of the world. How much less sinister the world looks when we have walked through the dark tunnel to the other side!
I was also brought encouragement from a short devotional circulated the first day of VBS - more reassurance that this new church has a different and healthy grasp on the role of suffering in the life of the Christian. I share it here as I have spent the little energy I had for typing. If you get the chance, please once again lift my health up for prayer. It will be a difficult few weeks clawing out of the poor state my lung health has declined to, and probably a few months of vigorous rehab and treatment to get me back to baseline.
Session 1: I Am with You
God is with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Daniel 3:1, 4-28
What do you believe about God when everything’s going your way? How about when you’re in the midst of life’s worst-case scenarios? When a job is lost, dreams are shattered, or severe illness strikes, maybe you believe God is right there with you. Or maybe you think God has deserted you.
Look again at how Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego responded to a potentially life-ending worst-case scenario and you’ll discover what they believed about God. These three young men took a stand for God that would potentially end their lives. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego knew that God was able to save them, but they also realized that He might not choose to. Whatever the outcome, they knew God was with them.
Although we know God can do anything, the Bible never promises us an escape hatch from trouble. While you may feel abandoned by God while going through the depths of suffering and loss, the truth is, you can have confidence in God’s promise—He is with you before, during, and after any trouble that comes your way.
The sliver of yellow breaks through on a difficult day of research last week. He gives me glimmers - my seashell dull grey and unremarkable on the beach, like an iceberg with it's beauty hidden beneath the sea. He catches my eye, and I lean down, and dig up gold. I open His book and I am surrounded by His promises and beauty. A fairyland with giants and armies, glitter, pomp and circumstance, romance, history, beauty for ashes. Go digging today, my friend, even if you think you've exhausted the Good News and live in the bad. You will be rewarded.
Teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies. Give me not up to the will of my adversaries; for false witnesses have risen against me, and they breathe out violence. I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord! (Psalm 27:11-14)
