Winter white

It's April and the snow just keeps coming. I can't escape the analogies out my window every day. Snow covering mud, the old deer carcass on the front lawn, the mighty roaring rivers through the culverts from all the melting. Snow settles over all and the earth quiets and stills beneath her blanket. All ugliness is forgotten and lies buried invisible again.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause. “Come now, let us reason together," says the Lord: "though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be eaten by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isaiah 1:16-20)

The red road to Galilee is covered with white. The bloodiness of weeks past is covered over by God's infinite grace.

Choices monumental mark this road of forgiveness. Will I accept it, as freely as it was offered? Can I find the strength to seek joy and to do good, to turn from my own oppression and free others in the turning? 

Easter in the snowdrifts. Bright colors dancing across the white driveway up to family celebration. I can hear each tiny snow crystal hit the ground, dance up off it and fall again to become part of the earth's down comforter on April 11th. Slowly each little crystal melts from the warmth of the earth below, and all become one, and then will be the melting, and the joining with the roaring rivers through the culverts and rushing out onto the fields to make ready for planting. I long to join. To become one with the One great love our world has known. To rush out to make ready for the planting and the harvest. I turn quiet and stoic, exhausted but ready. For such a time as this I have endured.

Yearning to walk on water

They've been life rafts through the rapids. Painkillers for the soul. The water-stained King James Version of my childhood floated me out of adolescence. The green one is the first I ever bought with my own money, on a night of desperation that found me in the bowels of the hugest Christian bookstore I'd ever seen one winter night in Minneapolis when I was 21. I felt like a rebel buying a NIV just because the cover spoke to me.

Pain is an ocean you can't cross swimming on your own strength. I remember the day in 2010 when I heard Jesus calling from the stormy sea while I huddled in the boat, begging for the hurricane to pass. All the underlining in my Bibles had not prepared me for this moment, this crisis of faith. Would I walk out onto that ocean of pain? Could I trust that He would make my footing sure?

I almost died in that boat before I finally decided to step over the side. But when I finally took that step of faith - to walk into my pain with Jesus beside me - it was the first step in healing. I was used up, battered, abused, discouraged, hopeless. With every step farther onto the ocean, my confidence climbed. Maybe His Word, those Words I had eaten and subsisted on for so many years of spiritual and emotional famine - maybe they were true - true enough to bear my weight if I stood on them. Maybe I could move the mountain of my own faith-challenged self if I had just that speck of trust.

Just like Peter, I fall in and almost drown again. As I'm flailing in the water, frantic for rescue from this pain I'm succumbing to, I can't for the life of me remember how I got up to the surface last time. I was a lifeguard once, and I still remember them saying that a drowning person who struggles drowns twice as fast. I've been using up my last reserves of energy flailing in the pain, and my head's about to go under for the third time.

I hear His voice, trying to calm me. Trying to remind me how I walked on water once, and that I can again. But maybe this time, I just need Him to calm the storm and come lift me up from the depths. Sometimes He does that. And sometimes not.

What's pulling me under isn't the dark underbelly of the mind, the pain bottled up, the wind whipping that ocean of hurt into a typhoon. It's the fear that follows, the fear that I'll be forever submerged in this pain. Panic is what's drowning me. All the words of thanks spoken in hushed voice into the wind of this suffering aren't pulling me to the surface right now. All the joy-finding, and the distractions of working, and the staying in the moment coping skills I've collected, they're no lift raft today. What I need is the faith to climb back out of the ocean and walk again.

Tonight, I will try to be still in the ocean of pain. Conserve my energy. Quit flailing. Maybe in the quiet, I'll be able to hold onto the rope of His love and He will pull me to the surface again.

White lips, pale face

Breathing in snowflakes

Burnt lungs, sour taste

Light's gone, day's end

Struggling to pay rent

And they say

She's in the Class A Team

Stuck in her daydream

Been this way since 18

But lately her face seems

Slowly sinking, wasting

Crumbling like pastries

And they scream

The worst things in life come free to us

Cuz we're just under the upperhand

And she don't want to go outside tonight

It's too cold outside

For angels to fly

Angels to fly

~Ed Sheeran, A Team~

Catching my daughter's vision

Amy painted this, of the Jesus who has visited her thrice, for my office at work 

Everything is focused in, fine detail, microscopic, onto this image she portrayed to me, her yellow-haired Jesus with the blue clothes and the glowing feet; her angel with spiky orange hair and the wings that don't fly and whole face that smiles. I dream of it, down to the cross-hatch of the linen of those blue clothes, to the strands of that yellow hair, to the burnt-umber orange of the angel's coif. It passes through my prayers as I beg for no more seizures, beg peace for a nervous system taught and tripping. I try to focus on that image hard as I battle with her skinny little stubborn frame at every meal time, hours of battle for just a few bites. I show her a video of a child getting a feeding tube placed, the gagging, the vomiting, the red-faced crying and begging. I make her smell formula, which isn't even as nasty as tube-feeds. This is what you'll have to eat, I say, if you won't eat food. With the seizures come the texture aversions and the difficulty coordinating chewing and swallowing. Finally last night we give in and make milk-toast soaked in the broth from the pot roast, and spoon the gelatinous mixture into her mouth through her tears, and I am at the glowing feet of that Jesus deep inside myself, praying, beseeching, weeping without weeping with my face.

This is what you do to fight for a child. It comes up on you like a storm blown in sudden from the northeast. You are in the sunshine of the last rays of summer one minute, and the next all the old familiar sounds of the storm howl around you - the tears, the eyes that won't track, the bumping into walls, the pooping in the pants, the can't-swallow-anything. I call the neurologist and he isn't there and I think it will be impossible to go two more days like this even though we've gone months like this before. The nurse asks for her weight, and I walk into the bathroom and weigh her, all her clothes on, and find she is only 1 pound heavier than she was 9 months ago, and I am on my knees by the scale, thank goodness. How hard have we worked for that 1 pound. How helpless I feel at that moment as the nurse repeats back the weights to me, and asks me to check again. How can she have outgrown her dosage of medication if she hasn't grown? I ask. The nurse has no answer. Wait for the neurologist, she says. He'll have a plan. For just a few minutes on the phone, she is the angel, for she has heard the hard-edged grief/anger/fear in the voices of a million parents and she knows I don't ever want my child to seize again. She can't do anything more to stop the next seizure than I can, only just speak in that soothing voice, assure me there will be a PLAN.

So I focus. On the threads of the blue cloth. On the glow of the steadfast feet. On the broad shoulders that carry the load I cannot. Come, Lord Jesus, come...not just to her, to us. Carry us home.

Written on Lisa-Jo's prompt, "Focus" 

Wind on skin

Easter is just one of those days of traditional finery I cannot seem 

to squelch with my most tom-boy mom style. 

Shirt and tie, toe the line, proud of our judgement.

As the sun warms the earth now, 

I am like new skin,

 in new wind,

 in new life

Fade, fade each earthly joy; Jesus is mine.

Break every tender tie: Jesus is mine.

Dark is the wilderness,

Earth has no resting place,

Jesus alone can bless;

Jesus is mine.

Tempt not my soul away; Jesus is mine.

Here would I ever stay; Jesus is mine.

Perishing, things of clay,

Born but for one brief day;

Pass from my heart away;

Jesus is mine.

Farewell, ye dreams of night; Jesus is mine.

Lost in this dawning bright; Jesus is mine.

All that my soul has tried

Left but a dismal void: Jesus has satisfied

Jesus is mine.

Farewell, mortality; Jesus is mine.

Welcome, eternity, Jesus is mine.

Welcome, O loved and blest,

Welcome, sweet scenes of rest,

Welcome, my Savior's breast; 

Jesus is mine.

~Jesus is Mine or "Fade, fade, each earthly joy"

disputed authorship

When I grieve alone

I was plunged deep into a hidden pain yesterday, a pain I am quiet about because I do not want to hurt others by revealing my own hurt in the wrong way. (Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God... I Corinthians 10:32)

Moonrise in November

Yet in the depths, when the tears become a river, and the sobs escape even though I hug my knees to my chest hard and dig my nails into my own flesh...it is the Man of Sorrows who sits with me in my grief. A baby born to die...who escaped the murder of all male infants ordered by an evil king...the one who prayed that the cup of the Cross be lifted from his trembling lips. Emmanuel...God with us. He is here, Emmanuel, on the bathroom floor with me as I weep. Inside my broken heart, feeling every awful twinge and groaning for me at the Mercy Seat.

"Man of Sorrows, what a name
For the Son of God who came
Ruined sinners to reclaim.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!
~ Phillip Bliss, 1875 ~