Filling empty cups

They clamor around my worn figure just peeping through the door after a long day's work like cups clattering around the teapot warm off the stove. No matter in whose care they've been, nor what they've done all day, they are empty for Mama and ready to be filled up. I marvel at this full-time job that begins the moment I crack the door and doesn't end until long after I wish it would in the night hours. Our conversation runs the gamut from the doings of the day to what it is like to die, what I lectured on today. They are suckers for the gory details while we eat our dinner and even when I think I've gone too far, I pause, look around, and all I see are eager eyes staring back, waiting for the next description.

For some reason today is a day of many tears, even from the daughter-who-cries-not. I spend many extra many minutes cuddling, stroking hair, and delving deep into souls to dig out worries and smooth them out like twisted up scarves that need folding. My husband throws his hands in the air after 3 hours of this, and I think I might too, but perhaps it is the estrogen that keeps me going until 10 p.m., when finally everyone has had their snack and we've had our last tears together into tea cups warm, and we march up the stairs to their beds.

I tuck extra covers around shivering bodies already poised on the edge of slumber. My middle daughter turns and says she has hunger pangs even though she just got through eating her fill. She's growing. I explain. And in my mind, in the last warm folds of consciousness, I think this is what the tears are, too. The growing pains. Little girls and a boy growing every day, a million questions begging answers, knowledge to be gleaned and a hunger for the eternal that is never satisfied even while we feed on the very Word itself.

I sigh as I sit down on their cold wood floor to sing carols to them as they drift off to sleep. You will never be rid of these hunger pangs, I think. Spiritual ones, they stay with you, and long after your body has stretched to it's highest height, your soul is still expanding, because there is an entire universe out there to absorb and you will never, ever be done eating of Truth. The body, the blood. In this way, my children, you will always be empty tea cups clanging around the boiling pot, waiting for Water that quenches the thirsty.

Longing for home

The silver of moonlight's dawn shivers over the last stubble of hay in the field. Headlights glow their yellow incandescent as they snake along sleepy down the country road. I hear the rattle of the oak leaves percussive against the bare arms of their mother's trees, feel the vibration in the frozen ground as the wind rushes like wave of thunder through the pine stand.

I am alone on the hill in the darkness, watching stars appear like pinpricks in the night sky. It is a day of brokenness, the emptiness of my hollowed out heart palpable in the church surrounded by strangers and the echo of a pastor's tears unfamiliar in my ears. It grows pregnant in my chest as I drive aimless through the countryside, alone with Jesus and my tears. Music flows in fragments through the ache, sister carries her loneliness in a hidden hollow in her chest, and sometimes all she wants is an end to the long, long night...her bow is on the strings, and the tune resonates in the open space, to show us how emptiness sings.*

I plead with Jesus, feel Him in this space with me, beg Him to please take me home. End the long long night. Bring me peace. Tears flow like raindrops down windows, beat on the soul like ground too parched to soak up this sorrow. Sometimes in the middle of a party I just want to go

Home.

Yesterday the heartache of friendships lost last year swirled up in the drain like so many tidbits of uneaten food in the sink, ten years gone in the blink of an eye with not a shadow of the relationships left to warm cold hearts. I hear it again, those friends fall around me like pearls from an open string, the necklace of life broken, torn and losing it's beauty in one wild rush out of the hollow of my heart. My scream is the dustpan scraping the floor, my wail the swish of broom and the quick descent of all that wild love into the trashbin.

The cat sits sentinel against my leg and I am a field stone on the hill. The silver of the moonlight dances at my feet. I am so still and quiet a deer glides like a ghost out of the treeline, tawny sleek in moonshine, almost close enough to touch. But I am riveted in the dark shadows, and she is quickly gone. The dog senses the sorrow friable in the winter night air and her moan gives voice to the pain as I beg again.

Just take me home.

Take me home.

A tractor roars to life rusty on the valley's edge. I am sliding like the wheels in the muck. I watch it crawl down the arched back of the far hill, the next farm over alive with corn dryers and cows lowing and fertility. I sit on our dry ground, just a witness to this busyness.

The headlights slide golden down the road's curves and the children echo laughter from the porch steps. Husband slides warm next to me, but there are no words for this pain and the explanation is just a whisper.

I want to go home.

I can't live like this, a stranger in my own skin. I live anyway, I make my mind busy at work, I surround the silent echo in my heart with the crash and slip of a hockey game, my dad's voice a familiar rumble next to me on a day of strangeness.

And all day, I beg. And all day, Jesus says no.

Nothing swallows me in the black night and I reemerge lost and with no answer. The family whirls with laughter and tears and piano notes and wolf-pup game howls. I am drowning in a sea of life when all I want is heaven.

I choose life, over and over again, but it is a compulsion, a duty, something I give like an unbirthed baby cold in the grave, a gift of a frozen heart to a Savior who sweats blood and begs too, not to drink this cup. I choose life where the guardrail ends at the river's edge, I choose life with a credit card burning a hole in my pocket and guns and ammo for sale just down the street. I choose life when I stand stock still at the edge of the treestand twenty feet in the air above the sweet death hidden in the bracken. I choose life when I could just lie down on this cold hill and never wake up, turn into a field stone and sink into winter's earth, cover myself with the first blanket of snow.

For He drank anyway, the thunderous wrath, the stones split in two, the world flooded with darkness as He breathes last on the Cross. And so I follow. Bitter draught of life.

Oh, to be eighty instead of thirty-two.

Oh, to be close to the release, the relief, the Love. 

*lyrics from Christa Wells' How Emptiness Sings

Cum se cum sa

Translated from French, it means "like this, like that", or the more familiar English phrase "so-so". Often accompanied by a shrug, it is the only way I really know how to answer that nagging introductory questions we Midwesterners always ask after we say hello to someone, "How are you?" How am I? Well, at the moment, I woke up from a nightmare and I'm brooding. Do you really want me to say that? Or should I just say the obligatory, "Fine"?

I sit and watch the wheat grass wave in the sunset, all lavender and pink, and my heart breaks for beauty, and I cry for that.

I hear of a friend's consuming troubles and sleep that night through nightmares of all kinds, waking at six o'clock to calm my nerves. And there are the misty hills, all lavender too,  floating in the morning mist. A verse springs to mind: let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants. (Deuteronomy 32:2) I grab my Bible and go out to my porch swing and read the other verse when God compares the morning mist to our love for Him - fleeting and quickly disappearing (Hosea 6:4). Is my love for Him fleeting? Is this why the rollercoaster of emotion?

Five months ago, my eyes were dead, my laugh was silent and my heart was dry. Today I can laugh - belly laugh - enjoy hours on end without any numbness, silence, or tears. A sure sign I am getting better.

I praise God for the capability, in the midst of PTSD and depression, to enjoy life. While my social anxiety gets worse in large groups, I hide behind my camera and capture the beauty and joy to look at again later, when I am calm.

The brother who didn't know if he'd ever be a father holds his double blessing, like Job, and I wait for mine. I see signs of it's coming: a job offer better than I hoped for, writing up my dissertation, being capable of homeschooling the kids through it all, retreating less into self.

There are times I am just tired, and my eyes are dry again, although my heart aches. I sit in my swing in the last breath of twilight, and hear the lone cricket singing his last serenade of the night, all others silenced by the autumn, quietness beginning to blanket the black earth as it prepares for snow. The trees rustle with their bright, dead leaves, and the last pink of sunset is barely visible above the hills across the valley. I cry again, for all this beauty, and wonder at my tears.

It won't be easy,

you'll think it strange

when I try to explain how I feel

That I still need your love

after all that I've done

The truth is I never left you 

All through my wild days 

My mad existence I kept my promise 

Don't keep your distance 

 And as for fortune and as for fame 

I never invited them in 

Though it seemed to the world 

They were all I desired 

They are illusions 

They're not the solutions 

They promise to be 

The answer was here all the time 

I love you and hope you love me

(don't ask me why, the song, "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" comes to mind as I write this.)