I'm not the worst mother

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,

The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,

The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1892)

Every day, I know I've failed. I can feel it in my bones. The dangerous, no warnings world I grew up in taught my brain to tune to the negative frequencies. My mind as an adult is bathed in adrenaline and a very motivating sense of shame. It's taken years of therapy to understand that the picture I paint at the end of the day is not realism. It is dark, devious, like one of the Black Paintings by Francisco Goya: an incomplete representation that captures the darkness of the mind, not just the negative facts in the everyday.

Then something happens: I come across a painting like the one above, left for me on the kitchen counter by my whimsical 9 year-old, who thinks, dreams, breaths music and laughter and sunlight. It seems miraculous that anyone sharing genes with me could be so fancy-free. I read the words slowly: Beauty. Freedom. Love. Peace. Everything. Even through the sudden stars of tears in my eyes, the black letters are shouting to my soul. You taught her this!, my brain screams. All that blackness, fear, pain, suffering in your life? You've transmuted the sorrow into thankfulness for joy. You've taken the fear and transformed it into an immutable longing for peace and love. And these translated whisperings of the soul? The faintly glimmering flame of hope that life can be different and perhaps even beautiful? They have whispered their way into the depths of her heart and this is the song she sings, hope and wide-spread arms flung far toward both horizons, unafraid of sunrise or sunset, sunlight or storms.

I've spoken of this through gritted teeth: those who know the full depths of the pain proffered in this universe have unique ability to comprehend the beauty, to take each nugget of pleasure and value it, celebrate it. Locked in the inhumane routine of the psych ward in June, trying to piece together a spring season fraught with failure and old threats, I stared out the hazy safety glass at a world bathed in the summer sun. I knew I would feel the sun afresh when I walked out those doors. I didn't want it to take misery to make me appreciate life yet again. I want to remember on my own, that every day is a gift, and suffering always passes, and new seasons bring new challenges and new joys. 

I will my body to remember. Remember the significance of every small smile and momentary joy. Remember not to take it for granted. Remember that failure is often the prerequisite for success. What is it about our frail 3 pound human brains that allows us to forget this? To forget the hardest lessons of all?

And so I write. Think. Breathe. I refuse to forget that bittersweet still has sweetness and failure still has possibility and fear can be conquered. Remembering that gives me the bravery to open my eyes to each new day and believe that my scars are equalled by my sacredness and my pain is assuaged by the gifts from the universe that surround me each and every day.

Memories versus moments

The photos of me sniffing my babies are covered in dust, thick as carpet. I remember when life was like soup broth, thin and warm and full of good things, beauty, joie de vivre. Then came the great reduction, the splitting off of people and things and places and beliefs and safety. Life is kind of gravy right now, not in an easy way, I mean the food. It takes time and energy to produce but you don't need much gravy to live on. I've learned to live with less. I'm still learning to love with less.

Through the fog of depression, love leaks out of me in long wails like a wolf at twilight. The children's happiness is as unreachable as the moon is to the wolf. Instead, my mind goes skipping off across the mirrored pond of memories using shards of broken dreams like stepping stones. They are as hard and unyielding underfoot as real rocks born of eons of pressure and heat.

Memories are mirrors because they only reflect ourselves - our perceptions, our truths, our meaning. There is no going back to understand. There is no way to break the mirror and see through to the objective truth. Many are more beautiful than the actual experience, some are even more ugly. The pain of the insults tossed my way in 7th grade? It's like the state of Texas in the nation of my memory. My brain seems bent to crystallize the bad as if to freeze it's power, to breathe in the good as if to swallow the sensation. Those glaciers of the bad times are fraught with danger - sharp ice, gaping crevices, avalanches and cold temperatures. Go exploring there, and you just might get lost forever.

Acceptance slowly leads me to see those sharp and scary parts of my life kind of like Mount Everest. I know it's there. I can see beauty there from afar. I just never, ever want to try to climb it. The view from the top isn't worth the risk. That sense of conquering? I've given that up with my youth. I don't need to be right; I don't need to be the best or brightest; I just want to survive. It would be a fool's game for me to climb up those memories in some quest for understanding or meaning.

The kids come running to cuddle when I say I need to "soak up some love". They know it means I will open the pores of my consciousness to the moment with all my will. It feels quite literally like soaking something right up into the very core of me. The dried out painful sharp-cornered wad there fills and saturates and becomes forgiving and yielding again.

Sometime soon I will master the closing of my pores to the sadness. I will let memories wash over me and bead up and fall off like water on a duck's back. I say this to myself like an affirmation, as if to will it into being. I am learning to speak positive words in the same certainty and black ink I use for the negative ones. All part of changing the voices in my head.

Meanwhile, I soften my arms for hugging. I curl the edges of my lips up into a half-smile. I bury myself in moments, pour my very soul into them. I hope that's what the world sees. I hope you see my love and not just my pain.

For that would be a successful life.

The road ahead

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. (Sylvia Plath)

I've fallen for the promise of a mirage a hundred times. Ran toward it, only to have it escape me like a handful of smoke or dreams. And so I've learned to live here in the now instead of staring at the road ahead. I suppose graduate school trained me to always look ahead - and of course, work demands it, too. Life demands it. But not every moment of every day.

I used to daydream while I worked. My mind rarely came back although my hands were hard at work. I watch my students, in the lab practicing skills, in clinical helping real people. It's all so new to them, they are completely absorbed by the mental part of the task before them.

I teach them life is messy, even nursing. It's better to make a mess on the floor and clean it up later than it is to endanger a patient. I think this goes for all of life: people, relationships, they are always paramount. When I was a young mom, I had to have a perfectly clean house to have a friend over. How many visits did I miss because I was focused on the mess on the floor instead of the face of the person begging for my attention?

The children come with when we go to the lab on weekends. They take blood pressures, they do CPR, they like to put tubes in and out of the "fake people". It is their favorite place at the university (well, maybe 2nd only to the vending machines). They are here in the now but also hard at work on their futures.

I am on a road to change. I can see the vista in front of me is quite different than I imagined. And the mirage? Yes, I'm tempted to run pell-mell toward it, leaving all else behind. But this time I'm wiser, older. I'm walking slowly, testing it out. Is the freedom and peace I seek really there in front of me? Or is it perhaps beside me in these moments, just waiting for me to notice.

When a Christian blogger starts to doubt

The night slowly fades into day as the gray on the horizon turns pink. I lie in my bed, alone, watching the dawn appear. Life is like this, I think. We are in the fog, in the dark, and we can't even remember what the sun looked like; we have given up believing it will ever return. Like everything else that comes and goes, leaves and returns, the cycles of the mind, of emotions, are so vivid that you forget they are part of a cycle.

Time: 11 p.m. f/1.8 ISO 1600 ss1/6"

The nightscape of life is like an impressionist landscape. You're groping in the dark, but every now and then the most incomparable beauty lingers in the night sky.

It is hard to know what to write as I go through this darkness yet again. Therapy is pulling off layers almost frantically now, and underneath I find someone - me - who has never defined herself without thinking in the context of others. When I was hurt as a child, I did the thing that came instinctively to me: I became a protector, a helper, a healer, a listener, a friend to the broken. This is how I became a nurse instead of a doctor: I need to help, to heal, to listen, to befriend, to advocate, to know people. It fills up the empty space where I suspect my "self" is supposed to be - and fills it up with something admirable, good.

Time: 730 a.m. f/4.5 ISO 200 ss1/2400

These days I feel like I am constantly "faking it". I am afraid that, when the light comes again after this season of doubt and depression, I won't recognize myself. I am afraid of what all I might be pretending about. I am afraid to discover what is left after this debridement of the inner self. Will it be bloody and battered? Healed and scarred? Will I ever be able to claim accomplishments, compliments, love as evidence of my true self?

The doubt grips so hard that it has squeezed the big G right off the name of god and I am foundering in disbelief, disillusionment, even anger. I went through this when my heart was at it's worst in college. At that point, I needed to claim my faith for my own - not just because it was my family's faith, or because it was the way I was taught. But because it was what I believed.

This season, though? Instead of watering my soul like it has whenever doubt has crept in before, the Bible reads as a law book, misogynistic, sardonic, even malicious. Prayer feels fake. Who am I praying to? Right now, I'm not praying to the God I believed in for 30 years. A line sings in my mind: "I'm still alive but I'm barely breathing/ Just prayed to a God that I don't believe in". I just don't want to be alone in the universe, and so the words still sometimes flow.

I don't know what the future holds for me, for my family, for my faith, for this blog. It seems inappropriate to spew my disbelief onto pages that were set apart for the glory of God while I still believed. I hope this is a season of doubt, and not a life transition. I hunger for your thoughts, your comments, to hear of your struggles. That by one dim flame, my own dark candle may be lit again.

O lord I think I'm falling

To my disbelief

I'm cursing like a sailor and lying like a thief

It's hard to heed the calling from the better side of me

When I'm blaming everybody else and no one's coming clean

O lord can you see my thick skin wearing thin

And the demons of a lesser me are beckoning me in

Those who gathered 'round me - I'm watching them all leave

Cause I am my own ragged company

You can take a trip to china or take a boat to Spain

take a blue canoe around the world and never come back again

But traveling don't change a thing, it only makes it worse

Unless the trip you take is in to change your cruel course

'Cause every town's got a mirror and every mirror still shows me

That I am my own ragged company

O lord it's lonely, lord it's mighty cold

And I don't want to live this way

Afraid of growing old

It's hard to heed the warning when you cannot see the crime

The only way to remember is to forget in a rhyme

And I'm scared to tread the red road that leads to Galilee

Cause I am my own ragged company

"True"

Oh little girl

{Warning: This post may contain triggers; please read only if you're ready.}

Bare feet on beams. We go to cool off down by the stream. It is 2013, and the memory washes so far over me that I catch my breath, forgetting children laughing under the bridge. I'm no longer here, I'm gone again - into the trap of the secret sin. I am remembering the halcyon days before you ruined my favorite clearing in the woods. I remember the cool of the shade, the feel of the moss under foot, the whispering wind quaking through the aspens, the shafts of sun lighting the world yellow and green. I was at peace there, it's where I went to think. I thought a lot when I was a child. Spaces of silence and solitude were sacred.

And so here it was that you found me. 

Sitting silent under a tree. 

I was amazed... how could it be?

A friend like you for a little girl like me?

You took my hand

and we sat down

No sound escaped

when you laid me on the ground.

Oh little girl,

the things you knew

darkened with her shadow

as you looked up at the blue

sky above

and earth below

dirt beneath your nails

as she mutilated slow.

She said, don't you dare tell.

The world swam

and you fell out of body

into her hands.

Your soul escaped

out through your eyes

you perched on branches

when she took you by surprise.

The precious thing -

you never knew -

she stole it long before

it was precious to you.

Oh little girl,

I wish you'd cried

I wish you'd beat her

every time that she tried

to shame your soul,

tearing at the seams,

she kept your tears

locked up in your dreams.

She knew the cost -

she'd paid it, too,

She knew exactly what

she was doing to you.

That clearing now

only appears

in your nightmares

and in your worst fears.

Where is the peace

she took away

When she crushed

you on that sunny day?

Her eyes looked down

she laughed out loud

glad she had wrecked you

without a sound.

Oh little girl,

where have you gone?

To heal the damage

I need you to come home now.

I finally feel

the missing piece

I finger lightly

because it still stings

Oh little girl,

why can't you cry?

How could someone

make you wish you could die?

Confused and scared

You made the leap

Out of safety

and under her feet

So go reclaim

that holy ground

this time when you scream

won't you make some sound?

Let it come

from deep within

and forgive yourself

for her dirty sin.

Oh little girl,

I'll keep you safe

come learn to weep

go pick your soul out of the heap

of trash she threw

deep in your mind

Oh little girl,

won't you be kind

hold yourself gently

while you're trying to find

the pathway out

from those dark woods

Oh little girl,

I'll take you home

to forgive yourself

now that you're grown.

Now you're grown.

Oh simple faith where have you gone?
I'm getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you're gonna let me in
I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin
~originally sung by Keane~

Letting the light in

I spoke of things this week that I never thought would cross my tongue. Childhood hurts locked away tight and buried after all these years of avoidance. I am nudged - gently - to sift through the secrets and unlock the padlocks and let someone in. To this most horrible part of my self. I shy away, trying to trust.

It is difficult to say "yes" to grief. Especially if that thing you're grieving is nearly 30 years old. Why bother now, I ask in desperation? My friend, my therapist - she says it's important to let the light in. That the truth will set me free. That my fear of the thing is bigger now than the thing itself.

So I open, tentative as a blossom in April, and invite her in. Tears fall, sadness wells up in the throat, water from the lip of a petal. Soft and quiet and aching. For a moment, what was unholiest about me feels holy - sacred ground that was trespassed upon. And for that moment, I see myself as He saw me so long ago - His beautiful child in pain. Only by the power of Christ have I held this pain and all His glory and emerged, somehow, whole.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love. ~Washington Irving

Growing up is hard to do

She's been asking for short hair ever since I shaved my head in October, 2011. I promised I would cut hers short when she was old enough that people wouldn't mistake her for a boy. All because I remember, too well, the pain of being called a boy throughout high school. 

I was afraid she would look too grown up. I was afraid of losing control by letting her decide what to do with her hair. I was afraid I'd do a bad job.

Softball season has started, and she looks miserable out on the sun-drenched field, and I put aside my fears and get out the shears. Growing up was not fun for me, but this innocent little soul revels in each passing day, revels in being almost as tall as me, revels in sharing shoes with me, revels in the responsibility and freedom that comes with age.

It is an important part of my healing, to call out fears that stem from my own twisted experience and check them against the facts. Does growing up always mean bad mistakes, loneliness, and depression? No! I hope and pray for something different for my children. And as I force myself to walk in to my counselor's office every week, it is this dream that keeps me going even when I hate the work of therapy: I want to be the last generation of this family that suffered abuse.

Lord, hear my prayer. Please make this true, please protect my babies. Even when they aren't babies anymore.

The dagger of the mind

I have two kinds of fear. The kind of fear that whispers what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee (Ps. 56:3). This kind comes when I have to hand over someone I love to Christ's care.

I remember the many times I've wept for my third daughter. Through her brain infection, as we watched her fade away, and so many, many times as we've watched her creep back. Who knew a mom could feel fear teaching her baby the alphabet? But what if I can't?

Throwing flowers on Teddy's grave in November, 2009

There's a different kind of fear that attacks me out of the dark shadows. Fear of being swallowed up. Fear of fading away myself. Grief is a gaping pit into which one slips slowly, the light at the top fading quickly as we lose footing on the hard-scrabble walls packed down by guilt and shame. There is only one way back out - hitched up to the rope of rescue He throws down.

For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock when he is among his sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep, and I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. (Ezekiel 34:11-12)

Vergil described fear this way: Obstupui, steteruntque comae, et vox faucibus haesit. (I was stupefied, and my hair stood on end, and my voice stuck to my throat.) Macbeth famously quotes that fear is "a dagger of the mind." Time to put on the helmet of my salvation. No more daggers. I'm allowing myself to be dragged out of this pit.

My manual of skills from therapy tells me that the opposite of fear is courage. I am going to try. One act of bravery every day. I already have tomorrow's plan: going to a water park with friends without shaving. Yes, I'm going full on hippie in public. Simple. But I think it just might work.

Detangling the lie

As soon as the snake saw his chance, he slithered silently up to Eve. "Does God really love you?" the serpent whispered. "If he does, why won't he let you eat the nice, juicy, delicious fruit? Poor you, perhaps God doesn't want you to be happy." The snake's words hissed into her ears and sunk down deep into her heart, like poison. Does God love me? Eve wondered. Suddenly, she didn't know anymore. "Just trust me," the serpent whispered. "You don't need God. One small taste, that's all, and you'll be happier than you could ever dream..." Eve picked the fruit and ate some. Adam ate some, too. And a terrible lie came into the world. It would never leave. It would live on in every human heart, whispering to every one of God's children: "God doesn't love me." (from The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name, by Sally Lloyd-Jones)

THIS is how God looks at us, every moment of every day

It's lies that create the clutter in our hearts, crowding out the Truth. When we're listening to the hissing, relationships crowd out, joy flees, the dark clouds descend to touch our earth. Does God love me? quickly turns to does my husband love me? Do my friends love me? Will my children love me when all is said and done? And suddenly there we are, stranded alone on a desert island of our own making, built with our fears and our tears and a steady inundation of doubt.

God unites. Fear isolates. When Evil sees me in a corner, keeping to myself, wrapped up in the clutter of thoughts, it strikes. Only when I open up that wounded heart and let the words of God and His children wash over the sore places, fill up the empty ones, scrub out the dirt - then I can walk in the light as He is in the light. There, in the light, relationships are still difficult; finding worth in myself is still an almost impossible task; dark clouds still threaten. He says, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in Him (Ps. 34:8).I'm opening my mouth to let the flavor of His love sparkle over my tastebuds, washing away the bitter of the poison apple of doubt. 

Yes, it's disappointing to fight depression again after so long a hiatus. It's disenchanting to understand that a beast you thought you slayed was only injured and is back to wage war with you again. Yet the very same Truth that rescued my spirit last time will be what rescues me this time. God is always good, He is always loving, He is always there, and He will someday put an end to suffering.

Yes, today might be difficult. But I'm not going to "just get by". I'm going to get up and keep trying. Keep looking for the whispers of His love that rebuild faith and bleed joy and heal hearts.

Where there is desire

There is gonna be a flame

Where there is a flame

Someone's bound to get burned

But just because it burns

Doesn't mean you're gonna die

You've gotta get up and try try try

Funny how the heart can be deceiving

More than just a couple times

Ever worried that it might be ruined

And does it make you wanna cry?

When you're out there doing what you're doing

Are you just getting by?

~Try, P!nk~

Switching strokes

She smiled, but there was sadness in her smile; even now she felt forebodings of the coming pain, the air she breathed was heavy with the storm that was about to burst. (Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, 1835)

The keys of the piano are heavy, and my heart thrills at the tension between unplayed and played notes and all the richness of resonance and volume and cascade the old brown piano holds hidden inside herself. I run fingers through the chords flowing from my memory, chords to a song of lament. Putting music to the emotion calms me, and there is even a smile hedging it's way into the corners of my mouth.

The front room is dark, the bitter cold grayness of January's sunset casting the children's window decorations in relief. I am the frozen observer, and the only activity about my body is trapped inside the mind.

I had a false hope that the ocean of pain held in my story would eventually soak into the ground, disappear into the bedrock under my feet. As with all false hopes, the destruction of this idea undid me. Six months I've walked on water, with joy insurmountable. Someone suggested I turn my mind from the ocean, forget it's there. For just a second I looked down at the ocean, contemplating. Could I leave this behind? Instead, the hems of my pants were suddenly wet as I felt myself sinking back in. Escape from pain? Possible for some. Impossible for many.

My counselor's voice is a soothing melody over the phone lines. She tells me to swim through it. There's no ignoring the ocean. Now you must swim.

I do, stroke after stroke, those moments coming every now and then when I breathe in a wave of water and panic that I can't make this swim. Oxygen-starved brain cells create a firestorm of anxiety. But instead of trucking on with my poor stroke and my mouth filled with water, I will flip on my back and float for a while. I feel every teardrop that made up this ocean of pain. Still beneath me. But I'm looking up at the sky, and the deeps aren't so terrifying.

Maybe this is how you escape madness: to switch strokes in the middle of the swim, and stare at the clouds moving across the azure. I'm no less sodden, no less in the middle of the ocean. But at least I'm looking up. And up there is the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation nor shadow of turning. (James 1:17)

*Photos from Amelia's play camera

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~

As one saint goes marching in

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

 Until my bones become brittle against my will

My heart is home oh to make the earth stand still

You are a tree always in bloom

You are a hall of endless rooms

A living fountain springing up

I'm satisfied but never done

I'm never done

With you

~Christa Wells, Everything Moves But You~

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)

God of all comfort, stay away from my baby?

I start my job, and she starts quaking again. Six months, maybe more, have passed since the last seizure, so long that I've forgotten the weight of the worry you wear like a heavy winter blanket around your shoulders all day long. I carry her with me to work, carry her heavy and set on vibrate in my pocket in the form of a cell phone, jump whenever it goes off...all just false alarms. I run out of class to answer all the calls from the hospital prefix, and the operators reminding me of upcoming appointments probably wonder at my sigh of relief followed by snappish, I can't talk now, sorry, I'm at work. Mentally, I wipe the sweat collected on my brain's brow, she's not in the hospital, everything is quiet and okay for now.

She seizes mostly in the evening and at night, and I wake with her, cycling like we did when she was a baby, every 2 hours or so. I grit my teeth and bear it, hold the party line when my husband shoos her off to her own bed at 9 p.m., aching to hold her, know she's okay. Sync my breathing with hers, know her breath is still coming, regular and true and deep. I hold him instead, and sleep light, as if the mattress is made of pins, until she creeps into bed with us around midnight, grasps my hand, and I fall deeper, peaceful now to the rhythm of her sucking on her "nuksie".

Sometimes I wonder if I should be tougher. But I wasn't made of the stern stuff. I have more playful and more lenience in bones that feel so old sometimes. I rest on the blue chair in the afternoons like a grandma and watch the children dance in the living room in the falling rays. Sunbeam babies in halcyon days, spectator mama laughing at antics till dinner.

She tells me Jesus came, two nights ago. She's told me this only twice before, once shortly after her brain infection that held her in a hammock hovering over death's yawning darkness, the great river that separates us from those we love until we, too, swim into the night and cross to the light. She was only three then, and I didn't answer much, just listened. Then at 4 1/2, after a 2 hour seizure in the ER, she told me of Him again, the same Jesus with His yellow hair and happy face and blue clothes and funny belt and feet that glow. This time He brought her angel to play with her and make her laugh, because He knew how scared she was. Her angel has orange hair, spiky, and she has wings but she doesn't fly, she dances and spins and flips about on the floor in a funny way that makes sick girls hovering in some unconscious abyss laugh. Her angel laughs like a thousand bells and when she smiles, her whole face smiles. Now this third time, she comes to me, with the story of the angel and Jesus, the same story, and she is only a month shy of 6 now.

I can't ignore the yellow-haired Jesus with His blue clothes and the orange spiky haired angel who dances and smiles with her whole face. Because for 3 whole years now she's said the same things. And always the same: when they come to her, they come to comfort and make her laugh when she is sad and scared because she can't be with me. Is this heaven, I wonder? Not that we forget, but that we are comforted, and we are loved, we can stand it until the others get here to be with us again? Does time tick slowly like when you can't sleep on Christmas Eve, or does it fly by like when you're sleeping on a regular old night cuddling someone you love?

She looks up at me, face glowing, radiant, full of Jesus, and she brushes tears from my cheeks. She laughs and says, Isn't it beautiful, Mama? Aren't you glad Jesus comes for me? And it is a sour, hollow lump in my throat. Oh, how I want to be thankful. But oh, how I want to keep you, my girl! I don't know what Jesus coming means. I don't like seizures and I don't like you needing comfort from anyone but me.

But what will happen to a warrioress who has laughed with her angel and smiled at Jesus three whole times, and remembers? What will this child carry into the world, for whatever time she is aflame in our world? How can I be jealous of time and the Creator of life?

I hold her tentatively to my chest, feeling her energy pulse rhythmic like the singing of a star. Warm like a campfire just lit between the palms on an autumn night. So alive. And it is I, older and wiser one?, who comes away comforted.

imperfect prose

When your dreams get lost in the mist

There have been many starry-eyed beginnings on this long journey to becoming a professor, but today was not one of them. On the last eve before I face a roomful of 100 or so starry-eyed students, sophomores and juniors entering their first semester of the nursing curriculum, I found myself much less excited and much more afraid than I had dreamed. It was an eve of many tears as I realize just how ill-prepared I am for the first day of this journey.

I go out to the porch swing, my personal sanctuary, at 2 a.m., when I should be sleeping, as those students await me at 8 a.m. sharp, with their skills lab packets, ready to begin their pre-testing for which I am the somewhat clueless evaluator. Instead of sleeping, I am shaking in my boots.

And, as He has so many times before, God matches the internal pendulum of my thoughts and fears with a picture in nature to comfort me. The very trees I treasure are hidden from view as a pea-soup fog rolls over our valley and clouds the night in an impenetrable white of hidden hopes and dreams, darkened landmarks of comfort and familiarity. I take a deep breath of the humid, heavy air and I know that the fog will lift in the morning - from this landscape I love and from these dreams I hold so dear and so close.

I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for me to bear the yoke while I am young. Let me sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on me. Let me bury me face in the dust— there may yet be hope. Let me offer my cheek to one who would strike me, and let me be filled with disgrace. For no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone. (Leviticus 3:19-33)

 You have my heart

And I am Yours forever

You are my strength

God of grace and power

And everything You hold in Your hand

Still You make time for me

I can't understand

Praise You God of Earth and sky

How beautiful is Your unfailing love

Unfailing love

And You never change God You remain

The Holy One

My unfailing love

Unfailing love

You are my rock

The one I hold on to

You are my song

And I sing for You

And everything You hold in Your hand

Still You make time for me

I can't understand

Praise You God of Earth and sky

How beautiful is Your unfailing love

Unfailing love

~Chris Tomlin~

What time I am afraid

Today I quit breathing several times while unconscious in the ER. "It is appointed unto man once to die..."

My children heard quite by accident that I wasn't breathing, and ripples of fear awakened in their young souls so long stilled as my cancer had gone silent. And so, there in the waiting room with grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, they joined a grown-up huddle of tense prayer and staunched tears.

the children laying on hands when I lost my hair back in October 2011

Oh, to take back words, hours, fears. We begged to go home, and, by some small miracle of medical kindness, the doctor granted our wish. We huddled in bed, a human chain of gratitude and grief, and fell asleep, the children sprawled across our bedroom floor on piles of quilts, rotating through the slot between Aaron and I for extra cuddles. The tears poured off and on during the night as they woke from nightmares of Mama blue and still and gone.

I don't know what is wrong with my heart right now. Stress? A new cardiac med recently increased in dosage? Insomnia that's been dogging me? Whatever it is, it has once again brought me to the precipice between life and death. Once again, God chose life for me. And all I can do is stand in awe and thankfulness. That I am here to quell the fears of these little people.

Campground ladies, sing this song...

We haven't been to church camp since a fateful, fearful time in 2010 that changed everything for our family. I felt a little like I was walking on broken glass...but we went, we relaxed, we made friends, we got bug bites, and it was all very normal churchy campy stuff.

I will go before you and make the rough places smooth. (Isaiah 45:2a)

A hammock bought for $1.25 outside San Salvador in 2001 provided many naps...

...and sisterly swings.

There were the usual kid antics, smoke in the eyes, and dirty toes.

And we had a little extra fun with water balloons, a tradition of 20 years

for this church we're calling home. (from the looks of it, someone took it quite seriously.)

(for Thul kids, nothing really gets done without sticking out your tongue.)

Rosy manages to add grace even when pitching.

Katy was trying out for the major leagues of water balloon baseball

(and had the wettest hair to prove it - the little kids were thrilled that

she didn't miss a single balloon and smashed them all to smithereens.)

The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. (Deuteronomy 31:8)