You're Already Amazing: Wearing Pearls Well

I read the maxim while cancer raged: Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass; it's about learning to dance in the rain (Tiffany Wilson, who spoke in 2007 at the It's My Life foster care conference). As I read the Psalms, this sentiment was echoed again and again in the rejoicing suffering servant's poetry, most eloquently in one of my favorite Psalms, 46, at the end of which David exhorts us to be still and know that He is God. 

The other day, it rained in it's soft April way all day long. The flowers were coated with raindrops. As I sat in my swing looking out at the glory of it all, I noticed the very ordinary chives growing in my kitchen garden, made extraordinarily beautiful by the pearls God had placed on each spear with his laws of gravity and physics. Each water molecule is positively charged on one end, and negatively charged on the other, so opposites attract like the latch and hook of train cars, forming strings of drops, each growing larger until it is heavy enough to drop to the earth. 

As I prepared for my dissertation, I tried to pull my post-baby belly into a pair of, well, let's just call them iron shorts. I am a large raindrop. I am glued to the earth by the gravity of too much weight, and it is a source of embarrassment for me. Holley Gerth addresses this in her book:

Inside a voice whispers, you're not enough. Depending on the day, an extra word might be thrown into the sentence. You're not pretty enough. You're not outgoing enough. You're not likable enough.

I felt all of these things that day. Would they like me enough to let me pass? Was I outgoing enough to slog through a 30 minute presentation about my own work? (I didn't even wonder about pretty. I was so sure it wasn't true.) Once I stepped into the room where I would give my presentation, I was even more embarrassed by a comment made during my introduction to the small group gathered there. My mentor said I had stuck with my studies through "thick, and thick, and thick". I immediately felt my cheeks burn, and I wanted to jump up and explain I had just been following God as best I could! Receiving this compliment seemed so false. But Gerth refutes this in her book, drawing us in to a private conversation she had with God during her exasperated and exhausted prayer. The truth is, this compliment was just telling me that others could see God at work in my life. I didn't need to explain myself, because others have already seen faith at work.

"Lord," I asked, "why do women feel as if we're not enough?" It seemed I heard a whisper in response, "Because they're not." For a moment I thought I had some holy static happening. "Excuse me, God, it sounded like you said we're not enough. Could you repeat that, pretty please?" Again, gently and firmly, "You are not enough." By then I started thinking perhaps my heart had dialed the wrong number and the devil was on the line. But in that pause it seemed God finished the sentence: "You are not enough...in me you are so much more." We are much more than pretty...we are wonderfully made. We are much more than likable...we are deeply loved. We are much more than okay...we are daughters of the King. I think the enemy tricks us into believing we are not enough because he knows that if we discover the truth, we'll be unstoppable.

If you're in the rain storms of life, wear your pearls with a confident heart. Gerth asks us to go beyond Eve's sin, and uncover the other lies that slow us down and destroy our joy in the Lord. What if we said "Yes, God really did say I can do all thing through Christ" (Phil. 4:13). "Yes, God really did say he loves me with an everlasting love." (Jer. 3:13) "Yes, God really did say I am fearfully and wonderfully made." (Ps. 139:14) Everything could change forever (Gerth, p. 42). If you're like me, one of the lies that brings you down is the concern that being confident means you are prideful and selfish. But Gerth points out that insecurity is just a tool to turn us inward - away from God and the truth of our position in Christ. We focus on ourselves, our looks, our housekeeping ability, whether or not we're fully using our talents. Holley says that being confident allows us to "stop looking inward and instead focus upward and outward on Him as well as others." (p. 51)

Another truth leaps off the raindrops. Later that day, the sunshine warmed the earth, and the chives were quickly dried in the breeze. Even dry, with no pearl necklace, the chives are beautiful.

This was a good reminder for me. I think those of us who have faced suffering and trials can become addicted to walking that path. It is hard to bring yourself to look up and enjoy the sunshine. It is hard to shed the pearls of the rainstorm. It is hard because it is scary. As difficult as it is to trust God during the rainstorm, it can be even more difficult to trust that the sunshine is meant for you, that it will last more than a brief moment. You are braced for the next trial to sweep you off your feet. But as I continue into remission, into dissertation success, I've got to shed my survival mode thinking. The path stretches long and dappled with sun in front of me. I need to look up and trust I'm not going to be lashed with the cold wind and the sudden rain. If I live the rest of my life expecting to suffer, I will miss out on so much.

Out of all of history, God chose this time for you to be on earth. He knew the exact second you would enter this world with a cry and change it forever. In between the laundry, the mundane parts of being human, we can forget we're part of a bigger story, a greater plan. And here's the thing: we only get one you. There never has been, and never will be, another you in this world. God doesn't have a backup plan or replacement policy. We don't need a copy of someone else - we need the one and only, original you. How do we live in this place, suspended between history and eternity? How do we find the courage to offer who we are in the middle of the mess? ...He is the I AM. We find God not in the future or in the past. We find Him right here with us, beside us, in us. The temptation will always be to say, "After I...." or "When this happens, then I'll...", but life doesn't work that way. Embrace this moment. Be who you are. (Gerth, p. 180-181; emphasis mine)

Take hold of the fortitude and insight to thrive in whatever season God has you. If you are in the rain, wear your pearls - don't hide them! And find hope in the fact that the sunshine always comes, sooner or later. If you're in the sun, don't be ashamed to be happy dancing in the gentle breeze! Don't wear a false garment of shame, don't let yourself be trapped in thinking this is just a moment before the next storm. God has given you this moment. Be yourself here, today. Because He can't wait to see you dancing - in your rain boots and slicker, or your shorts and tank top!

Back in the beginning of March, I was invited to review Holley Gerth's new book, You're Already Amazing. Life intervened, and although I read the book immediately, I'm just now getting to the writing of the review. This is part 2 of a 3 part series on this simply beautiful book about our position in Christ. (Read part 1 below)

Dying to be beautiful

Perichoresis.  "To dance or flow around".  A relatively unpoetical Greek word that describes the poetry of worship, of glorifying, of praising our Creator.  On nearly every page of His book, there is a command, a suggestion, or a mention of our praising God. Unbelievers have time and again labeled this as the ultimate in self-servient pride, proof that God is, indeed (if He exists at all) a megalomaniac sadist who has human puppets dancing in a fiery and comedic tragedy toward their eventual, unwitting and stupid death.

Seen without the lens of Christ, that's exactly what this life is.  A march toward the inevitable grave, the only redeeming value whatever legacy we leave for the next generation, the one after that, the one after that...the gifts we give to the others on this death march a few miles behind us.  Some take comfort in nature, seeing the death and return of the plants as a sort of allegory for our own endless circle of spiritual reincarnation.

Then there is spiritism - the idea that we all flow from and return to a great conglomerate spiritual place that is safe and beautiful.  Kind of like this tree - the sap rising up through the branches and strengthening them, finding eventual release in the leaves at the very tips of the branches, the last to let go in the fall winds.  When they finally let go that tenacious clasp to life, they die in the ground and feed the trees again.

The ancients were like seeds, released from life and lingering in the air, flitting on the autumn breeze for days or months, until that essence was finally carried to a permanent home in the afterlife - whether it be the monarchic underworld of Zoroastrianism, the tiered hell of the Greeks and Romans, or dichotomous Kingdom of the Dead of the ancient Egyptians.

I tried all that on for size, somewhere between the end of high school and the beginning of my career.  But all those tabernacles and churches, places of worship and places of gathering left me begging one question still: why dance?

What about a hierarchy in a Kingdom of the Dead inspires wonder? The pale and resigned hope of reincarnation as a slightly better person so you can do it all over again - what about that inspires praise?  If I simply return to the Great Spirit, why worship?

It dawned on me slowly, as I experimented, and wondered, and searched, and groped in dark places and seethed blindly with the masses when the light was blinding.

And then the heart of Eowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. ~J.R.R.Tolkien, The Return of the King

To sleep, perchance to dream.  To die, perchance to be in glory, to glorify, to dance as never before.  There is something about this great big God that has gets my feet moving and my body twirling, even when the dinner dishes are like scattered carcasses on the kitchen island, and the children screech their energetic protestation of bedtime even from behind closed doors, and husband is weary and wife is worn and messes abound and nothing about this house looks redeemed.

In the green and yellow grasses dying at first frost...the last leaves clinging to the tippy-top of the winsome oak tree...the seeds gathering droplets of rain...the cat's one aged green eye glinting in the yellow haze of the first winter storm...the rusty spade in the dead-green grass...the pock-marked red of the last rose blossom against the hole-bitten fade of her dark green leaves...

Death comes to us all, that last final season that brings with it weeping.

For some, it is a season of putting on beauty.  The old, old skin glows pink as every blood vessel within squeezes life to the surface in one final bloom of beauty.  The parchment paper husk of face turns a glowing pink and yellow in the last light of the soul's release.  The lips relax their corners and the wrinkles fade.  The beatific smile forever remembered as a sign of peace.

Crippled by age or infirmity, what we see in those beautiful last moments is the soul dancing away from a body that long forgot how.  If you know where you are going - and perhaps, when you lie quiet in your bed though your family throngs close and tight and twittering, you are already present with Jesus - this is when the real dance begins.

For if the ministry of condemnation was glorious, the ministry of righteousness will abound much more in glory. Indeed, what was endowed with glory has come to have no glory in this respect because of the glory that surpasses it. For if what was going to fade was glorious, how much more will what endures be glorious. (II Corinthians 3:9-11)

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Thoughts as a dear great-aunt lies dying.  To be continued, in part II, tomorrow.

Particles of sacrifice reveal untold beauty

Northern lights in the middle of the sky above rural Wisconsin

on August 3, 2010; visible due to an explosion on the sun's surface.

A storm opens our eyes to see, our hands to receive the starry nights that follow.  An explosion - damaging, fire-gushing, volcanic, erupting - on the sun's surface sent billions of particles toward earth.  (A damaging, painful explosion of God's wrath above the Cross snuffed the life out of the Son of God.)  As the particles of that great light-filled body in the heavens float through the galaxies down to Earth's atmosphere, the northern lights become visible all the way down to parts of New England where they are never seen.  (So grace fell like a million drops of the Son's light on my soul, revealing hidden beauty beneath the scars of sin as His light reflected there in my black heart for the very first time, and every time since, when I confess.)

The storms of the spring and summer where suddenly eclipsed today in a dark doctor's office that has held nothing but sorrow for me since March, 2008.  Storms eclipsed, for once, not by more storms - but with a heaping pile of good news!  He took my neck in his hands, and felt no tumor where there has been one since November of 2008.  He looked at my lab work, and discovered that, for the first time since cancer struck back then, my body is fighting back.  I have lost weight, almost miraculously and effortlessly, on my no sugar/no starch/no alcohol/no over-the-counter meds diet.  That is why my thyroid hormones are out of whack - I need less medicine than I did before, because my liver is functioning at 100% and I have gotten a bit smaller.  (Less medicine is, at least in my case, a very good thing!)  My tumor markers are slightly more elevated, but that is probably because my own immune system attacked a tumor in one of my lymph nodes, one in a very inoperable location, and exploded it into a million tiny pieces that now float in my bloodstreams, innocuous because of the new antibodies my body is making.

And so I dance (a quick jig before getting back to work on my exam) and thank God for good news on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday.  For lighting the night sky with green and red, for sending dancing light last night as a harbinger of dancing feet today.  For helping me find better health, for using better health to trounce cancer, at least for the moment.  For keeping me with my family until my next scan, which won't be until October or November now!  God is great!  That is all.

Click on the little images to see bigger ones - the lights are faint,

but they are there!

Another thought on storms

Seen in the hospital gift shop today:

"Life is not waiting until the storm passes,

but learning to dance in the rain."

That, in a nutshell, is what God has taught my husband, my children and I through this season of our lives. I have a hilarious memory of being allowed - at some ridiculous age like 10 or so - to run in the rain in our wooded backyard in the country, clothed only in my underwear. I will never forget the freedom of that sensation, skipping through the yard, naked, the icy chill of the raindrops and heat of the humidity rising from the grass. My brothers were in the basement, and I'm sure my mother watched me dance from the kitchen window. Now I must dance again, in a new way. He has stripped me of my "clothes" now in a spiritual sense. Instead of feeling fear in my nakedness, I need to relearn the happy dance I did in the rain as a child. Freedom? Is that what it is?  Or trust maybe?  Something you lose when you grow up, when you learn that you have to consider the future and not just the moment.

Longing

Have you ever held someone you love, heart to heart, and felt that slowing, filling in your chest that only love brings? For me, that feeling comes only from my children and my mother. When I cuddle my kids, when I get a long hug from my mom, there is some kind of spiritual level communication that occurs. Sometimes it almost hurts, sometimes nothing ever felt so good. The scientist in me wonders if the heart actually swells in some way in that moment, when you really relax and reconnect with that person.

I had one of these moments in the midst of chaos yesterday...just a brief moment, holding Caleb and then holding Amelia as they woke from their naps. One blink of an eye, and I had moved on to correcting the squabbling over lap space and trying to get Caleb to stop whining. But just that moment...it reminded me of the heart-level love response I have for these children. The type of love that easily gets lost in the day to day work of life. I wonder if that mother-response I feel deep in my chest is Christ-love flowing over for a brief second? All those mother-hen, nursing mother references in the Bible seem to collide in my own heart for just a moment.

I am reading an excellent book on parenting, one of those books that is literally page after page of "aha!" moments and flashes of recognition between the poorly articulated thoughts in my own head and the tersely written prose of this author. At the very least, this mother/author is a kindred spirit, someone who parents much like I do, who has the same strengths and weaknesses. Leslie Leyland Fields writes,

No longer do my wildly fluctuating levels of fulfillment measure the worth of the whole parenting enterprise, the worth of my own parenting, or the worth of my children. The questions "Is parenting really worth it?" and "Am I fulfilled as a parent?" are, finally, irrelevant. I ask myself instead, "Am I parenting faithfully? Am I parenting consistently? Am I honoring God in how I raise my children?" This is what I am responsible for. God is responsible for all the rest. Every day his sure hand is beneath my children, just as it is beneath me. This is our deepest hope and greatest pleasure. It is a hope that also frees our children as we release from them a weight they were never meant to bear: our expectations that they'll make us happy. Then every moment of delight they bring is extra, grace upon grace, like a jig joyously erupting before a startled audience. We can laugh for days in the unexpected dance.

Part of me aches that failure ever has to enter this relationship between mother and child. What I truly long for - more than the adventure I longed for as a teen, the success I craved as a young adult, the peace I lusted after as a young mother - is to be like Christ. The painful truth is that I will fall short of that goal until I open my eyes in heaven. I hate being a sinner. I hate wounding my children with my poor choices or anger or lack of patience. But it is inevitable, to some extent...because, apart from Christ, none of it amounts to anything. All my work, good intentions, promises to myself and God - without the power of Christ, I will still fail. I am thankful that there is One who loves my children perfectly. The swelling in my chest when I hold them is the fervent desire to love them as perfectly as I am capable.

___________________________________

Commentary on the curse & pervasiveness of evil from my all-time favorite female musician, Bonnie Raitt:

We were born with our eyes wide open
So alive with wild hope now
Can you tell me why
Time after time they drag you down
Down in the darkest deep
Fools and their madness all around
Know that the light don't sleep

Step into the silence
Take it in your own
Two hands
And sprinkle it like diamonds
All across these lands
Blaze it in the morning
Wear it like an iron skin
Only things worth living for are
Innocence and magic, amen
~ Silver Lining, written by David Gray

Because He lives

A weekend of pure joy...

...all possible because of one day on a cross

and one "happy day" when He rose again.

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow,
Because He lives, all fear is gone;
Because I know He holds the future,
And life is worth the living,
Just because He lives.

For the full lyrics, click here.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (I Peter 1:3-9 exc.)

Extraordinary

Somewhere along the line I decided I was invincible. Oh, I admitted I would someday die, but until then...invincible. It was right around the time I had to face up to the fact that I would someday die. Around age 19. I felt the tautness of youth in my muscles, the energy propelled on by the drugs that kept my heart beating, the refusal to sleep for fear of wasting precious time. I remember wearing a shirt that bore the motto, "You can sleep when you're dead." And I truly believed it. Rest was for the weary, sleep was for the weak, reflection for the elderly.

One day, once a year, I resurrect that spirit from the ashes. I rise early, pull on my oldest clothes, forgo my shower, and head outdoors, whatever the weather. My body coils and springs again as I chop wood. I lay down in the dirt, and light fires, and breathe smoke. Maple syruping time is the one time I relive this youthful pipe dream of invincibility. I hope I never see the day when I have to lay aside my ax and give it up forever.

That spirit of invincibility carried me through a dark, dark day when my heart actually stopped. When I try to think back to that day and figure out why I acted in certain ways, it still makes no sense to me at all. I collapsed in a hallway at work - thankfully, work was a hospital - and came to during my third shock as defibrillator pads sent an arc of electricity through my chest. I don't remember collapsing, although I do remember having an odd sense of impending doom while finishing my shift, which caused me to check on my patient about 100 extra times before I completed my work. When I came to, I made a miraculous recovery, and refused to even allow the doctor to call my parents. That streak was there from the start of my health problems, and, to this day, I don't understand what about heart disease made me push my parents away as a young person. I wonder sometimes if it was a sense of frantic lack of control, the idea that I would never be an independent, healthy adult? I wonder if I tried to protect them? Whatever the reason, it was a nearly uncontrollable, animal urge, and reduced me to an automaton at times. Like when I told the doctor I would not give him their phone number the day my heart stopped. I regret it, sometimes. On the hand, I lived through it.

And kept on my invincible course. If my heart stopping didn't kill me, what would? I wasn't a particular risk taker, although I enjoyed crazy hobbies like snowboarding and whitewater kayaking, and did weird, random acts of insanity like jumping from a perfectly good bridge into a shallow river and skydiving from a perfectly good plane. Oddly, cancer hasn't inspired a second surge of "Bucket list" type activities - instead, I am cataloging the simple pleasures and stocking up on hundreds of hugs from my kids and fabulous evenings with my husband.

Somewhere around the time of my radioactive iodine treatment, I began to feel vincible. Death, of which I had always been aware, didn't seem that much more real; but weakness did. I began to feel the life blood course a little slower, I felt the tautness melt out of my muscles as I gained extra pounds of flesh fed by stress, sorrow, and a drastically slowed metabolism.

This week, I had just one glimmer of the old self: in the chopping of the wood, the starting of two fires, the brave cooking outdoors on a windy, bone-dry spring day. The chatter of children floating on the wings of the wind, and moms reveling in the smoky morning tradition. For tradition it has become now, after 5 years: a sausage and pancake breakfast cooked over an open fire; the steam off the sap scenting the air; the walk up into the sugar stand to touch the skin of the maples and taste the drips of icy sap flowing down metal taps. I emerged from a week of extraordinary weakness to feel extraordinarily invincible once again.

Now I realize it is just another gift from God. Although I do fuel the fire of the energy myself, clawing down deep to find a hidden reservoir, He fans the flame. He gives the sun, and the unseasonable warmth, and the friends to help chop the logs and load them onto the fires. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.They are brought to their knees and fall, but we rise up and stand firm. (Ps. 20:7-8)

I am invincible. This week especially, I am reminded that my Lord destroyed death. There is absolutely nothing that can destroy me...because I am covered with His righteousness. (Isaiah 61:10) His extraordinary strength has been completely revealed to me in my extraordinary weakness. Two days ago, I chopped wood like I was 20 again. Today, I am laid up with a chest cold-bordering-on-pneumonia due to my lowered immunity, and yet can hardly sleep because of the cancer suppression drugs that are currently wreaking havoc with all body systems. I take nothing for granted but this: Christ died, Christ is risen, Christ reigns!

Dancing

You dance over me while I am unaware

You sing all around but I never hear the sound

Lord I'm amazed by You
how You love me

You paint the morning sky with miracles in mind
My hope will always stand, for You hold me in Your hand

How deep, how wide, how great is Your love for me
~ Amazed, Jared Anderson/Desperation

When Pharaoh's horses, chariots and horsemen went into the sea, the LORD brought the waters of the sea back over them, but the Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground. Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women followed her, with tambourines and dancing. Miriam sang to them:
"Sing to the LORD,
for he is highly exalted.
The horse and its rider
he has hurled into the sea."
~ Exodus 15:19-21

The day before I left to receive my scan dose of radioactive I-131, I read the girls the story of David defeating Goliath. At the end of the story, all the maidens of Israel ran out into the streets, with tambourines, to dance and praise God for David's victory, and danced through the troops of young men returning from battle. Being very like my eldest, Katrina, I found this image rather disturbing and decidedly "un-Christian" to imagine. But as I watched the raptured awe develop in Rosalie and Amelia's eyes, I prayed that God would light a spirit of dancing in all of us. That we would be a family of women who dance for His victories. And what an immediate and unequivocal answer He gave to that prayer! Never before has His love swayed me so in an almost physical sense. I feel as though I have been loosed from a lifetime of boundaries and fear, all in one fell swoop. I pray the dancing spirit that has taken hold of me in the past 48 hours will be mine forever, that I will be a dancing Mama to these dancing girls He gave me.

*Thank you, Grandma Debra, for the beautiful photos of my little Degas dancers!

How should we then live?

Use your good dishes...
make lots of messes...
want what you have...
Turn up the music...
Turn it up loud...
take a few chances...
Go to the ballgames...
kiss all your children...
dance with your wife...
tell your husband you love him, every night!
Don't run from the truth...
make peace with God...
in the end, there's nobody else...
~Point of Grace, How You Live

We turn it up, once a day: dance hour in the morning, the loudest and craziest music the kids crave, turned way up and break-dancing and hip hop moves all around. We take chances, rainwater rushing through culverts as we feel the pull of the current on our tall boots. We go to the uncles' ballgames, we kiss so many times a day, we dance, and we tell each other we love, we look the truth of cancer treatments and consequent separations in the eye. Our peace is in God, we know He is the beginning and end, the Alpha and Omega. Still, I find myself ransacking my memory, mulling over this day. Was it enough? What if it is the last season together? What if cancer shreds this reality, children running through mud puddles and splashing in February thaws with Mama? What if next February finds a sickbed, or a coffin? What purpose does that serve, God? What is your agenda, God? I ask this not in bitterness, or consternation. I struggle to align myself to the Truth laid before me. What shall I now do? How should I then live? What next, God? Where is the map?