A Prayer or a Dream, this Christmas

“…the band is going home, it’s raining hammers, it’s raining nails. And it’s true there’s nothing left for him down here…And they all pretend they’re orphans and their memory’s like a train- you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away. And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget, that history puts a saint in every dream…are those dreams or are those prayers?...” -Tom Waits

God in heaven and on earth,

You know my thoughts.

Was it a dream of him? A prayer for him? A prayer of him?

He was 22 and he lived. He couldn’t speak, but he looked just like himself; moved just like himself. Shoulders tall. Stride fast and long [he always moved with purpose when he was sure of himself or when he wanted to be.] His hands were in his pockets because it was cold, and as an optimist, he never wore a proper coat. A half grin and a twinkle, something like an inside joke he’s ready to let you in on, in his eyes.  In a University of Georgia hat, the gray hoodie that I now wear, and old boots with one leg of work khakis that hadn’t cleared them. We were at 346 Tugaloo, and I held his hand and sang to him. An Alabama song of all things. [I wish it had been a cooler song.] “Down home, where they know you by name and treat you like family”. As I sang, Father, he was 10 years old again, smiling so big that he showed all of the newly crooked teeth that he wasn’t old enough to try and hide- my favorite age of his, I think, but how could I pick? So, I sang that line again and he laughed right out loud: his 10-year-old quick giggle that he kept until the day he died [do I get to hear it again with my ears instead of my memory, God?] So, I sang those words again and he, miracle of all, sang them with me. So, I kept singing it; we kept singing it. I never wanted to stop singing and laughing. I was ok that he wasn’t the same as long as he could sing and laugh, and, mostly, hold my hand. I never wanted to wake up.

I have a lot on my mind, Lord, about how things have changed now that I wake up to my worst nightmare instead of from it. Fear doesn’t touch me in the ways it used to- ie snakes, heights, disease, thievery, what people think of me… but somehow dismantles me at the sound of a cell phone vibrating on a hard surface or a helicopter flying over. “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” they say. “It’s normal,” they say. It’s not normal, I say, but it also makes sense in this way:  if a piece of my heart is gone, how could a piece of my mind not also be? How, God, could the bullet that pierced my son not also pierce me? I’ve made an unpaid living out of trying to sense my children’s movements; trying to anticipate them, predict them. I have tried to watch and feel every move he made from the time he was conceived. At first, “When will he move in my belly? Should he be moving already? Is he moving enough?”  And as I lost him, begging that someone please take those taped bags off his hands. [he’s no criminal!] I needed to see if they could still move. I needed to see if they would squeeze mine like they always did when our prayer was ending.

I knew somewhere deep down in the places of knowing that if his hand could squeeze mine when I asked him to, it would. Just like when he got those horrible covid shots in his stomach because I asked him to, because of his lifelong struggle to breathe. The foreshadowing of it all, God… remember me and him, sitting in the small bathroom in the middle of the night with the shower on full hot so the steam would help him breathe, while I read to him so he wouldn’t be afraid. And so, even as I lost him, I read to him and whispered in his ear for only him to hear- “Son, you know the Shepherd’s voice, you can go to it if you hear Him.”  Because if he could have stayed for us, he would have.

His hands didn’t move. They still felt the same. They were cool yet clammy- used to leave a film on my steering wheel when he borrowed my car- but my God in Heaven, they did not move; did not squeeze mine. They had squeezed mine for the very last time.

 “But what about heaven?” a well-meaning person might ask. Father, You know I trust You. You know all my hope is in You and I know even in these deep dark places that You will make eternity the way You make “all things” [together for good, You said], but I do not trust in heaven, only in the God of it. I don’t know heaven. I know You. It would be as if I had an accident and upon waking, You tell me I will live and it will be more wonderful than before, but I will no longer experience touch, taste, smell, sight, or sound. Surely it would be wonderful since You said it, but I cannot for the fallen life of me imagine that it would. And I cannot for the grieved life of me yet bear the foolishness of someone who thinks that they could imagine it.

My willingness to put up with foolishness- this died too, Lord. A lot of things of mine died that day. Parts of my memory and feeling still lay buried. This has persisted in such a way that sometimes I can only remember what is important. Sometimes, all that is important is how beautiful he still was in the hospital. Sometimes, it is the way the young ER doctor with glasses that were too big for her face and somehow made her look sadder said “devastating brain injury” and how I thought I had never heard a more fitting word. Devastating. And sometimes all I can feel is the way the absence of feeling sort of hurts too: like a vacuum that will suck everything up if you don’t pay better attention.  “It’s not pain, it’s pressure,” they say- as if pressure feels far better than pain; as if pressure does not immediately precede pain.  God, I am not okay with losing my son, [You know this because You know me], but I am okay with losing some of the other stuff, even if I fight against it sometimes [forgive me for still occasionally wielding my weak weapons]. That’s the thing about living down here with bullets, Father [your Kingdom come], there are unintentional targets. Sometimes, there are multiple casualties. Your people in the south have a lot to say about this topic, Lord. I wonder, could they look me in the eyes and say it with the same hubris that they do on their bumper stickers? In my eyes…

My two eyes: one that sees beauty and one, only pain. Yet You ask that I keep both open and let them somehow work together to see a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. How did You do this, Great One? Design us to somehow carry both utter grief and unshakeable hope at once? It is too heavy, too complex. You knew this. You made a way, The Way, to shoulder it.

So King of Kings, this Christmas, [how do they keep coming?] in my dreams or in my prayers, I dream and pray for patience. [“Don’t pray for patience or you get trials,” they say. As if You are someone who is waiting to catch us in our words to send us something really bad. Foolishness.]

I pray for my friends’ patience with me and for my patience with them. For the ones who miss the ‘old me.’ For the ones who think I should go back to ‘how things were’ : to half-truth, to pleasantries, to frantically worrying over things that do not matter. I pray for the ones who want me to “let my grief go,” when doing so, to me, feels like a betrayal [Not of Alex- he can no longer be betrayed now that he is with You, but a betrayal of myself, my soul, to make others - what??? comfortable? blissfully ignorant? ]. I pray that I don’t betray myself by holding it too tightly. I pray for the ones who, for now, have the luxury of a mostly untested faith or who, at least, walk upright in the round world that I used to walk in before it somehow went flat and flipped in a millisecond. Who knew how malleable the world could be? Mine, suspended in time and place while others, probably on the same night, opened up to some kind of new, glorious dimension. Your world is enigmatic.

I do remember, Lord, the last time my world was spherical. Do You? [Sometimes I ask silly questions.]  It was me, You, Rev, and the two strangers who were discussing a pasture fence [for Pete’s sake].  We were inside a snow globe of the ICU waiting room- some sort of microcosm of our old lives [it was shrinking already]. We wanted to be alone while we waited for the results of the last test that would be performed. There we were, a mom and a dad who needed to be alone but were in fact with dozens of well-wishers huddled in the hospital halls, nothing separating us but a material that probably wasn’t even real glass. Probably plexiglass. Plex: root word- fold. A material that is made to bend instead of breaking… because we want to believe that the things we love can’t slip through our hands and shatter. I find plexiglass offensive the way I find all cheap substitutes so. Things we love; people we love; we, ourselves, are breakable. It’s part of what makes us precious.

It may have been my last moment in a rounded world, but it was taking too long. I was somehow in my chair but completely in Rev’s lap at the same time. Did that doctor consider what was happening out here in the snow globe? Did she realize it had gone still? Did she perceive somehow that even taking too long may have been a bit of a blessing?  That, at the very moment it occurred to me that it was taking too long, I looked at my phone and it was 5:17, the same numbers that she would say…. no, brand into my soul when she said them just after saying “the time of death”. THE WHAT? I searched all six of the other professionals’ faces to see if there was anything at all to cling to. I found only reverence and pity in each face. A reverence and pity that stopped speaking and waited because I was not the first one to lose her son in this way. They knew the five seconds that it would take for the news to travel to my heart. When it makes it there, I am, again, at once still on my feet yet somehow boneless in Rev’s arms like a small child. He is bearing the entire weight of me and the loss of his only son at the same time. [God, you don’t make many men like that. I noticed You, even then.] I was saying one word over and over again into his chest. It was a word that was muffled by his shirt else the whole world might have heard it. It was a word, Father, that may as well have been muffled because it held no power anymore [had it ever?]:

“No!”

No, this is not right.                       Doesn’t matter.

No, I do not want this.                  No one asked you.

No, this is too much.                     Tough luck.

No, I want to go back.                   No can do.

No, I want him back.                     That’s life.

Rev’s shirt muffled my words. Death muffled life. Life muffled death. It was all very circular, Lord, in my freshly flat world and I didn’t know anything but 5:17, time of death. 

But I digress, Good Counselor.

My friends will need patience as they try to walk beside me in this alternate universe. I will need patience as I try to walk beside them.

I pray, God, for the ones who may not be able to make sense of abiding joy yet refusal to celebrate it anyway but quietly. Who are sometimes concerned about my inability to worship in any way but by tears [because most of the time that is all I have to offer You: Here, Father, is my pain, can you do anything with it? ]

I pray for my friends whose worlds are currently the same shape and direction as mine. It is an unfortunate and devastating gift, but it is a gift, God: to have a kindred catch a lump in their throat the same time I do, and not just to catch it, but tell me that they did. That is You, is Love, that presses them to tell me. Like the quiet one, who made sure to say: “I dream about my Dad like that too.” Said he thinks of us when he hears a song [“life is a battelfield. and it will drag you right through hell. bites like a rattlesnake. the kind that you just don’t see on the trail. and i miss my father every day. the kind of pain I pray don’t fade away. for the ones above to guide me down the road. yeah, grief is only love that’s got no place to go…” -Stephen Wilson, Jr.] It is Your way of reminding me, in all my self-induced independence, that I am not alone. And for the time being, it is to me the way You always are- More Than Enough. I pray these kindreds will also find You so.

I pray that all of us, no matter the current shape of our world, will be patient with each other. That we will give each other the same grace we would like to be given. That we would consider that even in a joyous time of year, most people we know are cripplingly sad about something, and to think of this before we open our clever mouths. That we would consider that someone is having the best day of their lives and to also rejoice with those who rejoice, if quietly.

I close my prayer/dream with this, Father: an echo from a beautiful poet, that I only could have found during an airport delay. And even this makes my heart smile when I think of You and the ways You make beauty, not only out of our great tragedy but out of our ordinary inconveniences and temporary setbacks. Oh my Heart, it is just like You. Because You know how hard it is for me to come back home to this after I’ve been away. Because You know I need a little hope first, a little glimpse of You, a little glimpse of us. I am so thankful. “Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.” You said ‘I’ six times. So my eyes are trained on You, El Shaddai. Though my cup is misshapen, it still runneth over.  

“Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.”- H. Abdurraqib

Your daughter,

Martha

Letter to my son in Heaven

On your first birthday in heaven, Alex

Humans Connecting

The wedding speech for my favorite newlyweds

---

 In honor of my daughter and son-in-law’s first anniversary, here is my “Father Mother of the Bride” speech from one year ago.

Typically, the father of the bride gives this little speech, but we decided (and by “we,” I mean “me”- I decided) since the father of the bride got to officiate the wedding that I’d do the speech.

Thank you everyone for coming and sharing this special day for Logan and Kinsley. We love you and we love how you all love them and are so grateful for our family and friends.

It seems very surreal that my baby girl is now a wife.  Like how did that happen so fast? I’m like 90% thrilled about it and excited for you guys and like 10% sad that my daughter is a grown-up. It feels like yesterday you were playing “dress-up,” “wedding,” and “house” and here you are actually married. But gosh I am thrilled. We love Logan. We couldn’t love him more. I mean, first, he is a bulldog fan so what else even needs to be said? Go dawgs. But beyond that, He is loving, patient, kind, faithful, selfless, hardworking, godly, and did I mention he was a bulldog? Go dawgs. But seriously Shellie and Nelson, thank you for raising the young man that you did. Mike and I have long prayed for the man our daughter would marry. We prayed that he would be raised to know God and follow Him so while we were praying for Logan before we met him, we were praying for you two as well as you raised him. It has been such a blessing to see the way that God answered those prayers now that we have met you all.  

And Kins Mins, for me you will always be one of the absolute best things about this life. Before you, I never really thought about being a wife or a mom. I figured I would get married and have babies, but I never dreamed about it. I had crazy dreams of being a rich professional athlete living on a private island. Which would have been ok I guess, but incredibly empty compared to love; compared to you. When I got pregnant with you, my dreams changed. I didn’t dream about myself anymore. I didn’t dream about the kind of mom I would be—I couldn’t even imagine that. Maybe I should’ve spent a little more time dreaming about that and it would’ve worked out better for you, but I didn’t dream about that. I dreamed about you. I dreamed about the kind of girl you would be.

I dreamed you’d be smart but not proud. I dreamed you’d be beautiful but not vain. I dreamed you’d be determined but not hard. I dreamed you’d speak your mind, that you’d stand up for yourself but that you’d also remember compassion. I dreamed you’d not accept anyone’s vision of who you should be but your own and that you’d get your vision from your Creator Himself. I dreamed you’d be incredibly funny.  I dreamed you wouldn’t back down from what is right and when you did mess up, you’d have the humility and courage to ask forgiveness and to get back up and keep walking. I dreamed you’d be brave and bold and that you wouldn’t just let life happen to you but that you would truly live.

And if any of you know my daughter at all, you know she is all those things and so much more. Kinsley, though I know this isn’t exactly the way things work, it seems like I dreamt you. Though you are now a part of your only family, I hope you will remember that- that I dreamt you. That your dad and I love you that much and that nothing you ever do will change that. As you were once a part of my body, so you will always be a part of my heart. It would be impossible to separate the deepest parts of us.

I wish for you many things in this life—the best of absolutely everything, but I also know this life is an imperfect one and at times broken one. So, in those moments, I hope the world breaks for you in just the way that lets the light of God in His truth and love and strength and joy and peace. I love the way Frederick Buechner says it. He says something like- “Here is your life. You might never have been but you are… because Martha and Mike and Alex and Logan and all of humanity wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.  God is with you. Nothing can ever separate you from him. It’s for you that He created the universe. He loves you.”

And with that, I am reminded of the greatest command, that I will remind you two of as you begin your lives together as one. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Truly this may seem like the easiest thing in the world right now, to love each other with all your heart, but as you live in this imperfect and broken world, there will be days it will seem impossible. But here’s the beauty of our God and his great providence: Just as the God who demanded a sacrifice for sin that we could not pay, provided that sacrifice for us… so the God who commands that we love Him and each other which we cannot in our own strength accomplish, provides it for us—enables our hearts to love and empowers us to do it.

Now, I’m going to add one more vow to the ones that Logan and Kinsley already made. Can we all raise our glasses, while they make this vow? Logan and Kinsley, please repeat after me. I hereby solemnly vow, before God and all these witnesses, to try to give Martha and Mike, and Shellie and Nelson at least 3 grandbabies.

Cheers.

 I love you, daughter and son-in-law. Happy 1st Anniversary.

Humans Being

A letter to my favorite 21 year old

---

Culture is a fascinating thing. In ancient Bible times as well as more recent Gothard ones, you would be a young man everyone began to worry about being a lifelong bachelor. In parts of Pennsylvania, your chance for Rumspringa would be over. And in most of modern America, you’d be celebrating becoming an adult by the beverage that you are now allowed to consume, while truly only celebrating extended childhood. Fascinating what passes for life in different cultures, even at the same time. Even more fascinating is how some people fall so hard into it that they build little worlds around it; around something that shifts with the tide. They build organizations, philosophies, and theologies out of it and then use those unstable structures for classifying and judging one another- all based on culture- something that is not necessarily a lie, but certainly not the truth; certainly at least sometimes false. It’s a sort of tricky Monty Hall Problem that ends with a whole civilization built on a strong illusion; a false assumption: an assumption that every little thing that is good for us must be good for the entire world. A Casual Bravado. An Everyday Hubris.

I write to you, Son because we have the same sort of soul. Maybe we all have the same sort, but some of us just bear the burden of being able to deny it less. It’s the kind that makes me question so much of what I’ve done in life when I look back on it. So many times, I played the game even when I didn’t believe in it. And you know what I mean if only for those few moments you and I have shared where we stopped pretending and I found my courage to remind you that most of what you see is fake. Most of what culture (yeah, even church culture) calls life is just a mirage of what our hearts are after; what we were made for. I thought of this after our Sunday table conversation with a skeptic. You weren’t there so I’ll tell you about it. Nephew couldn’t say he necessarily believed that the earth was round and traveling through space at 67,000 miles per hour, yet we can’t feel it move and we don’t hit things and it still takes us 365 days to get around the sun. As a child, Nephew said he was astounded by all his classmates writing that down and saying, “ok, yes, seems perfectly reasonable” while he sat there thinking “preposterous, no way.” And so, we all vehemently defended a science that we ourselves don’t fully understand or fully care about yet were passionate about him understanding the realness and completeness of our own understanding (reminder: “People like you to be something, preferably what they are.”- Steinbeck). My point is not to say the earth is flat. There are scientific facts that cannot and should not be denied. My point is this debate we had made me think about how we come to the things we believe. How we’re always seeking some kind of structure or idea, preposterous as it may be, to hold on to for dear life, and how most of it is a house of cards. It made me start thinking about all the times I’ve felt l was hammering my square self into a round hole- and I know you feel it too. At first it is a challenge- “Yes! I can do this, and I will find LIFE!” Then it’s- “Oh this is too painful and seems pointless.” And finally- “Why do I even want to be round.” I’ll tell you why, bud, because we are most afraid of own ourselves; of the things that make us different. We are not usually striving for life or truth or goodness the way we think that we are… we are mostly striving to be something or mean something, and we are convinced we will be that something or mean that something because we are the same as everyone else, just better at it. We can’t see the beauty of the word “unique” for the loud word “different.”  And we mistake this sameness for a home; this coping with death as life itself (“as tho to breathe were life”- Tennyson).

One time when you were a teenager you told your dad and me that you didn’t think spending time the way we did was the way you wanted to live your life. And at first, that offended me. But then right behind that, I thought, thank God. Thank God he wants to define his own life. Don’t be surprised that I said it that way, Son. A well-meaning person will tell you that it is God who defines life. And He is. But remember the way He defined it from the very beginning. He gave you a choice about it. He says come; live life My way, the way I intended it when I created you, but He didn’t force it. He offered it. He invited you to it. And this I know more surely than anything I have ever known, you must own something before you can give it to someone else, even, and especially to Him. Otherwise, you’re just giving sacrifices; pieces of yourself; pieces of your time and effort; the work of your hands. And what, to Him, is a multitude of sacrifices? Does a millionaire need your penny? Or would it just be a clanging symbol? Sound and Fury, signifying nothing (Shakespeare)? Bring no more vain offerings, they make Him sick. Forget your religious traditions, they are a burden to Him. As the most beautiful reference ever written to humanity says, He desires steadfast love, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings (Hosea). And so, He says, Come; that He will make you clean with His love and goodness. You will know His voice when you hear it; the one of the good shepherd. HE will show you His way. (PLEASE REMEMBER THERE IS NO FORMULA TO THIS and run fast from anyone who tries to convince you that there is). And He will keep you on this path. Your penance, devotion, and sacrifice doesn’t keep you there; He does. Sometimes out of fear for your future, I forget this and momentarily lash out. Thinking I can somehow coerce or bully or scare you onto His path. A fool’s errand if I ever saw one. The Father says it best: I have made and I will bear. I will carry and I will save (Isaiah). And Little Man, you know the voice. Remember that day, that conversation we had that inspired your ink? I hope you always do.

So Bubby, I guess what I am saying is when I look back on our two decades together, I, somehow simultaneously, wouldn’t change a thing and wish I could change ten thousand things. It’s so easy to figure out life when we look back on it, isn’t it? But we only get to live it forward (Kierkegaard creds). I say I wouldn’t go back and change it because I was never meant to. All those little missteps and those leaps of failures are what got us where we are. It is something to have been, isn’t it (GK Chesterton)? We all have so many flaws. The biggest being that we think those flaws are what make us monsters instead of being what makes us human; that they are what makes us unworthy of love when they are the very reason that He was moved by love enough to die for us. I should have been better at teaching you this by being brave enough to live my life instead of trying to live everyone else’s. I hope you do better at that, but if you can’t, if you don’t, then at least do as Ralph Ellison recommends: “Play the game but don’t believe in it- that much you owe yourself… play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.” And while you’re learning the game, or playing the game, or finally discovering that none of it is a game at all, remember this- I will be your home in all of it. Every big mistake anyone ever made, I believe, was made with a rucksack on their back, looking for a home. We can’t outrun love, though. It is the truest thing, and the only future God offers. I don’t deny you a rucksack wandering. Everyone in God’s world gets to find their own place in it. I only remind you that you have a place here at home; a place that God gave us in July 2001; a place I am privileged to keep saving for the rest of my life. There’s pain here too and flaws and weakness and fears, but there is also love. And that, thank God, transcends culture.  

I love you, Son.

The Silent In-Between

Maybe it’s my middle child syndrome, but I’ve learned to pay attention to the in-between. Oppose it, resist it, thwart it- sure. But finally, accept it as ‘a place’ more than an ‘out of place’. And then even rejoice in the spot of an outlier; an observer; a wonderer; an identifier; a scriber. 

So, it stands to reason that the Saturday of Holy Week, while the most still, speaks the loudest to me. 

I wonder a-lot about the day. 

I wonder if it felt like a thousand years. 

I wonder about it as I wonder about the 400 years between the old and new testaments. Was He really silent? Or was He speaking volumes.

I’ve learned to pay attention to the bereft moments, where the heart is still and can hear without ears. 

Like personal communion with the pastor on Thursday 

Like the way we didn’t want to speak after re-living the Passion on Friday 

Like when you lay your head on your pillow at night, nothing left to distract 

Like after you’ve spoken His word and what He sometimes does with it in between when it left your mouth and reached an ear (like one of our brilliant church children described that was more perfect than I’ve ever heard: “it’s like magic, but not, because it’s real.” -Ellie P.)

Like when you look around the upside-down world for the place you thought you knew… roving for signs of life…anywhere 

I suppose God is always speaking and the listening part is the thing to get to. I’ve never heard Him quite like I have in the silence of a sunset. Or surrounded by nothing but damp trees. Or in a perfect short sentence that holds not the power of the word of God but that you were no less meant to read. 

The absence of cacophony is resounding. 

Watch for it. Wait for it. Identify it. Observe it.  Rejoice in it. 

“… and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away.  In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.” - Frederick Buechner

A Good Friday

This Good Friday brought to you by Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

It seems like too beautiful of a day to think about a tortuous death. It makes me think about a day a few years ago. It was one of the most beautiful days we'd had so far in 2017. It was also the day we found out that one of my husband's best friends had terminal cancer. I couldn't get my head wrapped around a day that could be so beautiful when this good man's life was falling apart. It felt like life was profaning itself. 

I thought the same thing when my husband's grandmother died unexpectedly a few years ago. We were on vacation at the beach when we heard. We sat on the balcony and the waves kept crashing, never skipping a beat, and I wondered aloud if the ocean did not know that one of the sweetest, strongest women we knew had just lost her life. 

I thought the same thing when one of my (and everyone else's) good friends was diagnosed with cancer only to come home to a massive stroke. I walked into his hospital room and lost any ability to help anyone else when I saw the way his eyes lit up like he wanted to say so much, but no longer had the ability to speak. I kissed him on the head and looked outside the window to a cloudless sky and thought the weather must be very cruel to behave this way on such a day. This was my friend. At the time, I didn't  make many friends. Acquaintances, easy, but real friends, not always. He was an unlikely one, grant it, but he wouldn't be deterred. I was sick for a while when we moved into town, but  also a little secretive about it. He didn't accept my hiding. He'd look me straight in the face and say "what's wrong?"  And "what do you need?" The weather had to know that. Had to have seen it. Then could've known why my heart needed a rain cloud in the sky on that day in the hospital. 

I could think about the beautiful walk I had the morning my friends and neighbors woke up to a tragedy I still cannot describe or even begin to write about. 

I could think about the beautiful November in high school that my favorite uncle lived on life support and my brothers, sisters, cousins and I lived in the fresh air outside the hospital until he was gone. 

I could think about the lovely summer sunsets that would sometimes make a 12 year old cry as she wondered if she could sleep for her thoughts tonight and wondered what she had ever done to God to deserve these new scars then feel even worse when she worried about the threat of hell for even forming such questions. 

Who has lived more than a day and couldn't write about such tragedies in the midst of such beauty. Even birth itself speaks to it. And I have been so blessed and yet I think....and I wonder about the sense of it all...

Then I think about the years we got to spend with my husband's right hand man that recently lost his battle with cancer. Would we have rather never known him than to know this pain? No, we would not. We will live forever with this extra love and these fond memories in our hearts because of him. We will be better people. We will love our other friends more. Our capacity to love will be bigger and stronger and deeper than it ever was. 

I think about my Jimmy Dove and yes I'd selfishly have him back, but I know that would be cruel. I'm glad he's whole. I'm glad he was here to teach me to let people in easier. And I'm so very happy to have found a new soul mate in his wife that I would've probably never found before. 

I think about my uncle Larry and how his good natured wit shows up in my brothers and sisters and I think, thank God we can all laugh like this. Thank God we were raised with a Larry. 

I think about that 12 year old girl and I still ache for her sometimes. But she never asks God what she ever did to Him to deserve what she got. Instead I look at how far she has come and how she may not be great or a success in anyone's eyes, but she has peace with herself and with her God that gives her all that she needs to live among the tragedy and the beauty, with the ability to realize the gift life really is- all of it. 

All of it- every single piece of it points to Good Friday. The most heinous thing in history- A people brutally beating and killing their creator, their king, their teacher, their friend. This very act of indescribable tragedy, which in a seemingly sick twist of love , pleased God,  is exactly what made him our beautiful savior. Creators are wonderful; kings can be tricky; teachers are helpful; friends are nice. But Saviors? The prior do not compare to that title. The most terrible tragedy procuring for us such a beautiful beautiful thing, one that we were created for- peace with God for eternity. 

To me, it's like when I run in the mornings before dawn (or when I used to I should say, before the tragedy of my left knee ). Something happens right before the sun rises. There's a coolness that falls. Maybe it's the dew. I don't know. I've just noticed it over the past year. It's such a magical thing. All of the sudden the air around you changes. It's refreshing.  And moments later the sun shows up in its scorching brilliance. It's ineffable. I think about a God that does that. I would've never thought to do that, but I'm so glad He did. When I get to heaven, which I am satisfied will look nothing like I've been taught, if I get perfect knowledge and care at all to see what He did with all of that tragedy we suffered here, I'm sure I'll say those exact same words. I would've never thought to do that, but I'm so glad He did.

Letter from a Hedgehog to a Little Girl. 1987.

“Surely the hedgehog, furling and unfurling
into its spiked little ball, knows something
that, with gentle touch and unthreatening
tone, can inure to our benefit, surely the wicked witches of our childhood have died and, from where they are buried, a great kindness has eclipsed their misdeeds. Yes, of course, in the end so much comes down to privilege and its various penumbras, but too much of our unruly animus has already been wasted on reprisals, too much of the unblessed air is filled with smoke from undignified fires. Oh friends, take whatever kindness you can find and be profligate in its expenditure: It will not drain your limited resources, I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses, and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.”
-Michael Blumenthal

---

Dear Little Girl, observant but reticent; always thinking. Thinking as if the world depended on it. Do you already suspect that most of life is wasted on the future? Do you already sense that birthday candles are a mirage?

Retaining. Attaining. Retaining. Attaining. (Pete and Repeat were sitting on a log. Pete fell off.)
Collecting fragments to construct- not a fool’s perfect world, not his loud perfect life, but your perfect place in it. Your X on the idiots map. Twisted. Tucked. Moved. Molded. Uncomfortable but conformed finally to the single missing piece that proves you are a part of the puzzle.

But I see it in your less than smile, looking at those candles: that you are starting to know what I now know, an accidental freedom first written to you by Beverly Cleary. Your life is not a manifesto so much as a song; not a race so much as a dance. Sing! Dance! Romona Quimby does not learn to be a better girl, she just grows.

Your mind, Little One, it runs for tomorrow. Yet your lungs breathe only today. In The Kingdom, the one of the Sage, time is more art than science. Today is the only day. Tomorrow is a fugitive. It comes only never and always—chased but for love nor money, caught. So, waste not your tears, Little Girl; those tears for the future: a world that does not exist. I’m here now so I can tell you, that world was never real. “In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time…”-CS Lewis

Can you hear me, Little Girl with the puppy on your shoulder? Two words for you, Lass. Would that they could be coursed back through time. “Would that they could,” though, another fugitive. So instead, two words for you, Matron. And to you, Witnesses (for the ears, like the lungs, can only hear today). Two words.

Two words: Unfurl thyself.
Two more: Sing. Dance.

Dry Bones

And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” Ezekiel 37:3

---

Not for lack of trying, but there is a lot in the book of Ezekiel that I do not completely understand. There is probably not another prophet in the Bible though that I’ve learned more from, and there’s a phrase in this chapter that is sort of the culmination of that learning for me, “O Lord, You know.”

A prophet passionately loves what is right; loves truth; hates falsehood and evil. That passion, improperly channeled, can be hasty and harsh. Knowing what is right and wrong, we can easily assume we also know the right way to fix it all, putting our self most foolishly and often disastrously in the position of doing the work our way instead of God’s.

I am 100% sure Ezekiel had some ideas about what to say and do about the chosen people of God who were walking in disobedience, and I’m just as sure that building what sounds like a mini fort and laying on his left side for 390 days and then turning over to his right side for another 40 days never crossed his mind as an option. So in the Valley of Dry Bones chapter, while the main point is so very clear- about who God is; about His character, I also see the heart of a prophet with his passion channeled rightly in verse 3. The Lord shows Ezekiel a valley full of dry, dead bones and he asks Ezekiel if these dry, dead bones can live. His answer was not impetuously: “Of course they can live!” Or presumptuously: “I have the power of God with me, I’ll make them live!” But instead, humbly: “O Lord God, You know.” His answer was that they can live only if You say they can. I know that You can and I know that You ultimately will, but I don’t know if you will right now and I don’t know exactly how.

I don’t know if you’ll deliver us from our enemies now or if you will do it 390 years from now. I don’t know if you will fulfill your promise of “making from me a great nation” now or if I’ll need to wait until my wife is 90 to even give birth and then not even be alive to question how You multiplied the people while allowing them to be enslaved for over 400 years. I ate from that tree and I don’t know if you will bruise the serpent’s head with my child or from my seed thousands of years later. I don’t know if “this generation shall not pass away before” means mine or someone else’s.

I don’t know if I’ll feel completely whole again after losing my spouse.

I don’t know if I will be cured of this disease in this lifetime.

I don’t know if I’ll get a good job.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get another full night’s sleep.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find someone to share my life with.

I don’t know how long I’ll be in this foster home.

I don’t know how long I will be in pain.

I don’t know if our country will remain free.

I don’t know if my elderly loved ones will survive the pandemic.

I don’t know which loud “side” I should be on.

I know that You can. I know that You will. But I don’t know how and I don’t know when.

If I knew how and when, you would not be able to shut me up about it. You’d not be able to turn my heart from it. That’s an easier time when that happens. So much easier, in fact, that some people fake it just to feel better; to feel like they have some sort of control. Incidentally, they can make a lot of money fleecing the flock or at least stir up strife among the believers in doing so. I give you, if you will, “88 Reasons Why the Rapture will be in 1988”, and one billion other prophetic books and posts on social media since then with absolutely no Biblical basis other than we know that it will happen one day and sometimes, not even that.

I’ll keep trying to know all that I am meant to know, but the things that I am completely soul-sure of are not changed by all the millennium charts and graphs in the world. I’m for charts, if it helps. I’m for learning all that I can. The chart itself thought doesn’t give me any comfort. If it did, I’d be getting comfort from the wrong place. All my hope is in this: that God will fulfill His promises. All of them. His promise to punish evil. His promise that He knows His own and His own knows Him. A promise that He will change my very heart so that it can know Him and fear Him. A promise that He will finish the work He started in me. A promise of the Spirit to guide me and keep me when I need to know the how and the when (along with so many more!). If my hope is there, you can’t shake it with threats of a deadly pandemic nor of accidental mark of the beast chipping nor anything else this broken world may afford.

Knowing the how and when is easier. But not knowing is sometimes the only opportunity to grow our faith and our complete trust and reliance on Him. So it’s not as if I’ll ever give up on the knowing. It’s just that if you ask me if a bunch of old dry bones can live, I can’t give you an answer that will make me famous. I can only say this- if God says that they will, they will. Maybe not in the way or the time we would expect them to, but they will. And when that simple answer brings me worry instead of peace, then I know I’ve stopped trusting Him.

Letters from Midian

“And now my brothers I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without Him is the real death, that to die with Him the only life?”- Frederick Buechner

---

A brief backstory

Run. Box up wedding stuff. Clean closet.

That was my list for today. Then, what happened was that I heard a new song on my run that reminded me of a little something from my ever-growing, out of control, “are you a writer or just crazy” personal archives, so instead, it is “get over yourself and publish your blog day.” (I cringe.) Also, may I add, there is nothing quite like closet cleaning to set you afire to do anything but.

A dialogue with myself

Now?

But I am still a little tired.

But there is too much at stake.

But I might be cancelled.

But I still start all my sentences with conjunctions.

{I might even be cancelled by the very ones that claim to hate cancel culture. Pause for a definition, please—Irony: a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.} 

A hard question for myself

 Is that who you want to be? A fraidy cat? Someone who stops short of even trying real things out of fear?

An answer

No, it is not.

A question to answer a question

Where has that ever gotten you?

THE question of all questions, as presented by Fredrick Buechner

 “And now my brothers I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without Him is the real death, that to die with Him the only life?”

THE answer with another rhetorical question

Yes, so what else matters?

All that to say, here it is.

Raw and a little unedited, just like the real me. Or it is, at least, my best attempt at it (ah, the writer’s unceasing heartbreak: “…but now that I’ve tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I am drawn upward again. So that even before I finished I have failed”- Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man).

Courage, I suppose, is the thing. So again I say, here it is.

These are my Letters from Midian. I’m no Moses, but I’ve spent time there on occasion. This is my way of staying mindful of the burning bush moments; Mindful of the Wonders.

Read them.

Don’t.

Love them.

Hate them.

Do both.

I can take it. In theory. I am human.

We are all human.

{Another one by Ralph- “denounce and defend…condemn and confirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no…but too much of your life will be lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate.” What a guy. If you don’t want to hear quotes from my favorite writers, you’re not going to like it here.}

Start with the one called “Dry Bones” is my only advice.  It’s why I’m even here on a sphere called blog. (I cringe, still)