A Jonah day

"The trouble is, I've got things the matter with my conscience," sobbed Anne. "Oh, this has been such a Jonah day, Marilla. I'm so ashamed of myself. I lost my temper and whipped Anthony Pye."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Marilla with decision. "It's what you should have done long ago."

Marilla passed her hard work-worn hand over the girl's glossy, tumbled hair with a wonderful tenderness. When Anne's sobs grew quieter she said, very gently for her, "You take things too much to heart, Anne. We all make mistakes . . . but people forget them. And Jonah days come to everybody. As for Anthony Pye, why need you care if he does dislike you? He is the only one."

"I can't help it. I want everybody to love me and it hurts me so when anybody doesn't. And Anthony never will now. Oh, I just made an idiot of myself today, Marilla. I'll tell you the whole story."

Marilla listened to the whole story, and if she smiled at certain parts of it Anne never knew. When the tale was ended she said briskly, "Well, never mind. This day's done and there's a new one coming tomorrow, with no mistakes in it yet, as you used to say yourself. Just come downstairs and have your supper. You'll see if a good cup of tea and those plum puffs I made today won't hearten you up."

"Plum puffs won't minister to a mind diseased," said Anne disconsolately; but Marilla thought it a good sign that she had recovered sufficiently to adapt a quotation.
Anne of Avonlea, Chapter 12, L.M. Montgomery

It all began with a two hour battle with Caleb over nap. A brief reprieve came mid-morning in the form of a trip to the farm in rain coats and mud boots, camera in hand.

The smell of freshly loaded silage, warm milk, and spring seed greeted us as we emerged from the car. We spent a lovely hour visiting the calves and petting barn cats and feeding the goldfish in the farm wife's amazing pond. We picked some rose buds off her tree, which was just beginning to flower. I marveled afresh at the co-mingling of ugly and utilitarian with beautiful and rare. The freedom of routine that has allowed these hearty people to flourish under back-breaking work and endless responsibility, planted as they are on this windy hill a mile from our home.

We paused on the way home to get out on the "troll bridge" - an unexpected treat. We marveled together at a small deer carcass graveyard (fascinating stuff to children, jawbones and ribcages!). We listened to the distant hum of an approaching train on the rusty tracks...until the sensible mother in me hauled the entranced wee ones off the rickety rail high above and back to the safety of the blacktop on the other side.

Home again. Kids with the flu. T-ball practice to prepare for. Lunch and dinner unplanned. A stressful doctor's appointment in the afternoon. T-ball practice, right at dinner time. Dinner was late, Aaron called in to work - good for the finances, a strain on the wife's workload! An e-mail announces a crisis at school stemming from the spring semester, which has just ended. An error in textbook writing discovered and in need of correcting. And so it went, on and on.

I wanted to throw my hands in the air, throw my head back and holler - perhaps even swear a bit!

I thought about not writing this. I prayed about it, actually. I don't write these words to be a discouragement. I write them because they are real. I want to nail a name to something that doesn't get hung up in public in the Christian community. I want you to know that living with cancer doesn't immediately transport one into the realm of the saints. It is a process of daily working out my faith, working out the difficult little details with God. For instance: why, God, would you pile on trouble after trouble today? On this day when cancer is rearing it's ugly head and I have to come to grips with the fact that my future is that uncertain, why allow all these other tests to enter in to the picture? In that sense, perhaps it was more a Job day than a Jonah day: I'm sure Job had these same feelings, multiplied a thousand times, when God allowed his livestock, children, wife and health to be swept away in one awful day!

At t-ball practice, Katy was pensive. I marveled afresh how my attitude seeps into the soil of these little souls. I prayed hard about what to say to my husband, so that I wouldn't drag him down to the depths along with me. I wrestled with God about how to be authentic, and open, and yet spare those around me the ripping and shredding that was going on in my spirit today. How to ask for support...to express my need to be lifted up, without dragging down.

And so it went for me today. There are days in everyone's life when the clouds gather and the thunder starts to roll. Today was unexpectedly awful, and I am praying that tomorrow will be unexpectedly beautiful. I have storms to weather at school, in my work as a freelance author, as I serve others in church and family, and in my health. Thank God I have His wings as my umbrella!

Under His wings I am safely abiding,
Though the night deepens and tempests are wild,
Still I can trust Him; I know He will keep me,
He has redeemed me, and I am His child.

Under His wings, what a refuge in sorrow!
How the heart yearningly turns to His rest!
Often when earth has no balm for my healing,
There I find comfort, and there I am blessed.

~ Under His Wings, William Cushing, 1896

Not as it appears

Some trees leaf out in many different shapes. The little buds unfurl to reveal jagged edges, rounded edges, long skinny leaves. In the end, they all end up looking the same, once the heat of summer warms them and brings them to full fruition. The box elders in the forest are a good example of this. If you picked these three leaves off the tree, you would never guess they all came from the same limb.

Allegory - metaphor - is a beautiful way to learn about the deep truths of the universe. These leaves showed me something about cancer: things are not always as they appear. I know, I know, it's an old lesson and one I should have learned long ago. Yet it is realized afresh, at new levels, at different stages of our lives. What it means to me today is that what seems like cancer cropping up again may not be. Just because it looks like the same thing at the outset does not mean the outcome will be the same.

I found hope in the leaf on this box elder that looks for all the world like a baby maple leaf. That's what I've got in my life now: what looks for all the world like a baby cancer leaf. Yet it might turn out to be something completely different. I need to absorb this lesson, let it soak deep into my soul, so that I am spared the angst every time I get a poor test result in the future.


What's down the road we can't say
And the road behind don't matter
But every mile along the way
Is just another mile together
Unconcerned about the twists and turns
We're taking it nice and slow
Safe and sound, covering ground
Steady as she goes

Yesterday is dead and gone
And tomorrow takes care of itself
We'll just keep on keeping on
'Cause we ain't stumbled yet

One foot in front of the other
Take one step and then take another
Just walking and talking and moving in the same direction
Putting one foot in front of the other
Little by little gets a whole lot further
Hitting our stride, one foot in front of the other

~One Foot in Front of the Other, Leroy Parnell

Back into the forest

Tomorrow is my next big "test day". I don't know yet when I will have the results. I feel a bit like Alice, falling back down the hole. I wasn't expecting to be in this place, emotionally or physically, until December. I am drained today, contemplating what lies ahead, a path I know too well already. I would appreciate prayers.

Testimony come now, quickly, whisper in my ear:
Celebration
Peace at last not far away, empty sheet, a borrowed grave:
Salvation
Come freedom, come
Come freedom, come

~ Come, Freedom, Come (Breathe on Me), Jennifer Knapp

"Quiet time"

The wind whips suddenly through the stand of pines on the southeast hill. The whir of wind through winter-dried needles grows deeper and stronger as the gust rushes past the pines and rattles the dry stick branches of the hardwoods behind the house. I am out hanging laundry, a crisp lemonade sun shining down just hard enough to warm my shoulders when the wind pauses to gather it's strength. The clothes are rough under the dry, cracked tips of my fingers, and the clothespins are brittle from three winters hanging on the line. It is stillness and wind and sun and I for twenty minutes, twice a day. It is the most gapless communion I've ever experienced, being outside in stillness with God all around me.

I remember the hectic days of the city, when the whir came from a million cars and other machines in perpetual motion. I remember how distant God seemed. That wasn't a place for natural worship for me. I needed to be in a place where other people were not. An expanse of earth to call my own, to be quiet in, to breathe in. I know not everyone is like that - that to some people, the whir of people is the same as the whir of the wind is to me. That for some people, cities mean synergy.


One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple. For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle and set me high upon a rock. (Psalm 27:4-5)

In moments like these, hanging clothes, or trudging up the ravine to check cherry blossoms with the children, or rambling down the truck path in the waning sun of evening, when I feel the heaviness of God's hand resting on my shoulder and bolstering my soul. When the world is quiet around me and I am distracted by the beauty of creation, my skin wiped clean by the sun and the wind, I feel deep inside exactly how "okay" I really am. I am not falling into an abyss, I am not at the edge of a precipice, I am not crying alone in a dark room. I am walking through a field of tall grass with God whispering in the breeze, whispering of blessings innumerable and beyond the scope of this mortal imagination.

You may wonder why I almost always include photos and music in these ramblings. It is because that's how God speaks most intensely to me. It unlocks my heart, which is usually a solid rock, and pours the emotions out in a flood. I will never forget the first time this song made me really weep. It was the night I got the biopsy results back. Aaron had called me and told me the results in person, and I sobbed. Then I held it together all day, until a late night trip to Walmart with the kids just before coming home. I bought a CD by Rebecca St. James because I felt like I needed to listen to SOMETHING about God or I was going to break apart into a million pieces. When this song came on, I pulled to the side of the highway and cried and sang with my children. They understood that what was happening was BIG, and we prayed and cried and sang together. It is a sweet, sweet memory, even for all it's bitterness. Take time to click on the link and listen to the song.

Blessed be Your name
When the sun's shining down on me
When the world's 'all as it should be'
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name
On the road marked with suffering
Though there's pain in the offering
Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out
I'll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in,
Still I will say
Blessed be Your name
~ Blessed Be Your Name, Matt Redman