When the writing starts...

It's been years since I dared sit to write.  I have scribbled and scrabbled my way through some tough circles around the sun, but never risked a proper sit-down: a head-on collision with my life.  It hasn't been a lack of being present or existence in denial -- it has simply been a time that has eclipsed actual language.

To my mind, I've reached a point where the bleeding has slowed.  There is still a need for constant pressure on the wound, one which could drain my life, but I can look up, look around, take stock of my surroundings.  Ernest Hemingway purportedly said that there is nothing to writing  "-- just sit down at the typewriter and bleed."  Some passage of time had to take place for me to invite that different kind of bloodflow.

I'm keenly aware that my everyday orbit is comprised of the walking wounded, and most of them have done what they need to do in order to keep moving, breathing, carrying on a semblance of living.  There's nothing special about me.  Nothing unique about my pain.  Nothing new in my odyssey.  People who have survived the unsurvivable have come into my life, and I could be shamed by the generosity of their love and openness, if I had not learned the cost.

My days are packed with the energy of high schoolers battling for identity/voice/calling, and my evenings are spent in friendship that balances and fills me.  It's a place of still waters, restoring me for the storms ahead.

It may be that when the bleeding slows, when the writing starts, the beauty becomes loud and begins to eclipse all else... it may be a prelude to deeper grief.  I'm hoping that beauty wins.

Surprised by Beauty

A farm share is a recent luxury in my life, and four months in I am still marveling.  The thirty-five minute drive leaves behind the clutter and congestion of the suburbs with every mile, and breathing and mood both deepen and lighten.  Today the sky is a postcard or a painting -- the perfect shade of cobalt that always carries a reminder of New Jersey on 9/11.  That hint of brokenness persisting underneath such a canopy of beauty only deepens my appreciation for the aesthetic feast before me. 
I swing my car into the wood-lined lane, alongside all the other Subarus, and carry my woven market basket and a mason jar down to receive our allotment of vibrant yellow and purple and orange and green, green, green organic vegetable goodness.  But this week flowers are ready for cutting, and berries are ripe for picking, so there is an extra layer of delight in this bi-weekly errand of mine.  My companions on the opposite side of the raspberry bushes are a brother and sister who look to be about eight and ten.  Clearly the older of the two, he makes slight respectful conversation with me as we work in almost mirrored pace down the row.  "I have twice as many berries as you," he gently chides his sister.  At this admonishment I stop my dawdling and concentrate industry toward my own near-empty pint basket.  "I don't care," came the soft distracted voice from much further away.  "I am just enjoying the moment."

Down in the flower patch a young couple has taken a professional approach to their bouquet acquisition, attired for business in matching garden overalls and straw hats.  She directs him in the colors and the length of stem and uses terminology I have never heard.  Evidently he is a bit weary of the long instructions to accomplish her vision, and voices his objection with bland sarcasm.  "Thanks for all the acronyms."  Unfazed, she chirps a sunny, "You're welcome," as she brushes off their shiny gardening shears.  They turn their attention on the hill leading to the raspberries and I am alone in the flower patch with the snapdragons and zinnias. 
I love this breath, and its immediate context, "enjoying the moment." Straightening, jar filled with blossoms, I spread my thoughts wider -- to the year, and then to my whole life. 
My own hands have wrought damage where they should have brought blessing -- grief is at the back of my mind always.  But so many blue sky, flower-filled, soft sounding moments have been gifted to me.  Beauty persists, intrudes, invades my days over and over again.  It is around everything, and it softens me the way a sunset changes the landscape when it paints the tones of deep golden pink on the world.
The Farm website maintains the benefits of growing food in the most healthful way, and of participation in the community built around this intrinsic aspect of humanity. It is a good place to be, two times every month, for both of those reasons.

God, in great love for me, uses it for so much more.

A Branch Shall Grow

There are real flower people.  They are master gardeners, prizewinning horticulturalists, and botany-dabbling enthusiasts.  My children's paternal great-grandfather was such a one.  The estate he managed neighbored those of the Great Names of American Industry, and it eventually sold to one of the kings of Morocco.  Central Park and surrounding botanical works of art were projects he sandwiched between overseeing the New Jersey gardens which beautified and provided for a community through the economic straits of war.  Recently, I was shown an old newspaper article about his life after retirement to sunny Florida, and there I found a nugget of non-biological kinship that spanned our disparate levels of vocation and mastery.  He cultivated orchids.
I am a dabbling devotee of flowers, but my particular fondness is for orchids.  They have an unsightly root system that does not stay properly restrained, the leaf is prone to awkward size and direction, and long periods of dormancy almost make the months of blooming insufficient.  Even when the stalk is hung with buds, it is not the beauty contained that captivates me -- rather, it is the unfolding of such dramatic shape and color where there had been a dry, seemingly barren, dead stalk just days before. I have "rescued" plants headed for the rubbish heap because I know the latent life concealed by dark, twisted, floppy leaves and brown stems.  I'm not even particularly fond of the flower of an orchid, being more of a dahlia or garden rose girl.  But the potential for life that is running beneath a dead surface concentrates my attention and care with an intensity those blatant beauties can never elicit.  I tend as sparingly as the most finicky orchid could desire, and I wait.  Ignoring the spectacle of disarray, I keep my charges in a prominent place, daily noting the tinge of the roots, the levelness of the foliage, the precarious moisture balance of the pots.  Always, the change surprises me when I have settled into the waiting.  

So, it is the Advent season.  
Today is the last day of the week of Hope, and hope to me is much like an orchid.  It is an abandoned, withered, ugly thing left-for-dead on the back doorstep, but brought in to be rescued, to be nurtured, to be watered and fed and given sunlight until -- at last! -- a small bright green shoot emerges from the dark tangle of deadness.
It is my heart, prone to wander to the lesser things that were never meant to sustain, shriveled and exposed on the compost pile until gathered close in the hands of the One who made me, who searched until He found me, rescued me and brought the brilliant color of life to the dead places.
It is this beautiful world, broken and dark and helplessly fettered to decay, for whom the Eternal One bound Himself to humanity that He might bring healing and light and make all things new.  Hope is the waiting, with expectation, for redemption and wholeness to triumph despite the devastation all around.
The article about the retired gentleman in Florida describes his crowning accomplishment of cultivating and naming a new strain of orchid.  Most astounding to the reporter was the source material for his horticultural efforts:  the garbage containers of garden centers and florists.
A new creation from discarded and abandoned things.
A greenhouse filled with verdant loveliness that was once mangled and twisted bits of debris.
Hope.

Behold a branch is growing
Of loveliest form and grace,
As prophets sung, foreknowing;
It springs from Jesse's race
And bears one little Flower
In midst of coldest winter,
At deepest midnight hour.

This Flower, whose fragrance tender
With sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor
The darkness everywhere.
True Man, yet very God;
From sin and death He saves us
And lightens every load.

Burden Carry

I went to CrossFit a week or so ago -- "went" as in a one-time occurrence.  It was every gym class nightmare on steroids.
The fun began with a ten mile trek that may have only been one mile, but a very long one that went straight uphill.  As it was the first event of the ninety minute class one could postulate that I was at my strongest and had no excuse for such a gasping, flailing performance.  In my defense, I had no idea how far beyond my limits I would be dragged. 
The run was so special it had a name, "Burden Carry", and each duo was responsible for taking a sandbag along on their Saturday morning adventure.  Except in our case it was a heavy ball, because I wasted prep time thinking the brief introduction to torture apparatus was the actual workout. 
So, while the other teams slung weights across shoulders, I hobbled with our load up in the air, or at chest level (which was the furthest I could heave).  
I was mouth and nose breathing, desperately searching for some oxygen while my legs bellowed, "What is THIS?!"
Mid-stride I thought I might just die before my foot touched ground again.
"Take the burden," I whispered.
And then came the magic.
She did.  Immediately.
Without the weight pressing down I could make it another three yards, and then feel my lungs blessedly full and empowered.
"I can take the burden again," I offered, gasping.
"Sure?"
"Sure."
I only lasted four or five strides before foisting it back on my buddy, but we kept it up all the way to the home base, where we were not greeted with cheers of victorious accomplishment, but bustled to the next impossible task in Column 1 of 3.  The subsequent hour blurred in a haze of rowing and climbing and throwing and jumping and squatting and lifting, but that first portion retained all its clarity. 
Agony notwithstanding, the endorphin flood was unparalleled and poetic implications saturated my mind three days later when I was able to walk and sit with the full cooperation of my muscles.
Upon reflection I realized the other teams distributed work by direction -- one carried out and one carried home.  If that had been a requirement we could never have finished, because I was not able.  But our little shuttle system was a mini-pilgrimage, an image of communal burden sharing.
It is a beautiful picture.  
I have never before voluntarily entered into a time that required that extent of physical fortitude, and I suspect I might wait a year before considering attending again.  However, like most human beings, I know what it is to find myself overwhelmed by trials and challenges, unable to continue on.
When I am far enough beyond pride of appearance to honestly gasp, "take the burden," there is somehow always someone right there, climbing alongside me.  I don't get to stop running uphill, but I am freed to catch my breath. 
It is God's gracious provision in this broken world-- for us to live in community as we pilgrimage through, bolstering one another's faith, keeping company in prayer, and sacrificially sharing the load.

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!"
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.  Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another.

Let Us Adore Him

I have loved many people in my life, but none quite the same as those four who spent their earliest months nestled and nurtured within me.  No matter when they first spoke or how clearly they wrote their names in wobbly capital letters or fearlessly/fearfully gained skills of autonomy, I was devoted for the very fact of their being.  As each grew I identified traits inherited from one or both parents that were always magnified into something so much better within a uniquely new human being.
The newness, separateness --  and yet connectedness -- has never changed, and is completely independent of anything they have ever done or said.  They have come from me and I am both lessened and increased because of their existence: each a splendidly distinct, miraculous gift.

These bonds are on my mind because I am missing them today and because God in His faithfulness and grace is using the silence to see the comparative meagerness of my efforts at love, and to draw me, helplessly, to ponder the Incarnation in a newer, deeper way.  
"She [Mary] will bear a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.  All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call His Name Immanuel (which means, God with us).'"
No wonder Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.  For nine months as this child grew within her she must have daily wondered at the coming fulfillment of all the promises repeated through thousands of years of labored human existence under the heavy curse of sin.  The promise, repeated by generation after generation, of the lifting of the sentence of thorns and pain and death and separation from God.
God with us.

It is the deepest longing, isn't it?  Underneath the human successes, the family affections, all the spiritual endeavors, is the hunger of my soul that can only be satisfied in the presence of God.  Further compounding the bleakness of my estate are the offenses that not only pile up obstacles in relationships, but ultimately bar all access to the source of life and change and growth.  
And in that one birth the obstructions of sin were removed and He was with mankind.
God with us.  With me.

He did the work.
He cleared the way by becoming the way.
Such LOVE:  
To make me, pursue me, redeem me at the cost of hell itself, so that I could see Him, know Him, love Him, adore Him.

It is unfathomably, achingly splendid that God humbled Himself to take on the humanity of His own making in order to bring that wayward creation back to Himself!
But adoration has often been lost, for me, in the details of Christmas.
Oh, I have found it more blessed to give than to receive, and even stayed within a reasonable budget.  I have incorporated Bible verses in my cards and preferred carols over winter merriment jingles.  Christmas Eve, I maintain, is my favorite part of the season.  
But ever-so-subtly, the homemade soup and bread, the candlelight, the dulcet tones, and the string of beautiful, beloved faces in the pew next to me have distracted my affection from the point of it all.
Not because family, food and candlelight are bad things -- human love is surely the greatest earthly gift God has given -- but because my heart is prone to wander from the very thing it needs for life. 

God with us.  With me.
Such Love:  to seek me, save me, and  patiently draw me back ...to wonder and adore.

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear,  for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me,  for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The babe, the son of Mary.

Leaning In

I remember the phone call fifteen years ago, with news so devastating that it physically bent my knees.  "Should I go?" I asked, tentatively --fearfully.  "If not you, then who?" was the bald challenge.  Driving the ten minutes to a house of sudden bereavement I metaphorically dragged my feet each mile.  "God, I don't know what to do, don't know what to say, don't want to be this close to this kind of pain.  Help me, please.  Send someone else.  I cannot do this."

A group of us had studied a book together about a family that barely survived the death of a child, and we assiduously noted the practical ways community kept these heartbroken members alive by bringing food and making arrangements and moving them through their days until they could begin to take wobbly steps all on their own.  But now the intellectual discussion had abruptly become a call to action.  

So I went.  And I wasn't as much comfort as company.  I said the wrong thing, was the wrong thing, most of the time.  Others went as well; many wiser in their ministrations than I.  From them I learned to close my mouth, stop bustling about, have tissues at the ready.  Being there meant sorting clothes or reminiscing or talking about a new book/movie or companionably pushing food around a plate.  And possibly crying through all of it.

It feels I have lived a lifetime since those days of joining together, working out a round-the-clock schedule to come alongside loss that was beyond comprehension, carrying out a commitment to not leave someone alone in the deep waters of grief.  They were "desperate times" calling for "desperate measures."
But human need is the same, whether the trial is a fiercely raging inferno or a nagging dull despair: people who know God's great love and mercy humble enough to show up, to walk beside, to be companions through days that take every effort just to keep breathing -- even with the wrong words, or at the wrong moments, or in the wrong ways.  

A currently popular philosophy admonishes taking all there is from life, pursuing each advantage and experience to the utmost.  The premise, as I understand it, is that you have to "lean in" to the opportunities.
But what if the truly great calling is to step closer to the hardship and devastation in the lives of those around us?  Not begun in a reluctant, begrudging attitude, but with the assumption that something vital and life-giving could be accomplished by that momentum?

I have been blessed to have people in my life who love well.  They are faithful with their prayers and faithful with their presence, particularly when this world seems to be most broken.
Their courage has deepened my faith in God, whose love equips and emboldens and empowers us to bear one another's burdens.  To enter into the pain.
To do the things we cannot.

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

Thinking Aloud

Every human being has trials.  Every blessed man, woman and child of us.  
They look so different from one person to the next that it isn't always easy to remember similarities outweigh the distinctions.  For some, known physical deficiencies accompany birth, others are burdened by malignancies that creep up gradually or sudden injury that lasts a lifetime or a period that feels like a lifetime.  Trials are loneliness that has never eased, or heartbreak that empties a cup once overflowing with abundance of loving relationships.  Even deprivation of material substance brings a different kind of testing, a heaviness that often weighs down a life.  
Each experience can isolate, weaken, hinder.  And somehow, it is always unexpected when the locusts swarm the fields, and stay for years.  

Concerned for the vulnerability of students I love, this was the focus of my graduation address in the spring:
"'Do not be surprised at the fiery trials.'  Right living does not erase the brokenness of this world.
There is no guarantee that Christ's righteousness on your behalf is an armor against disappointment, grief or even devastation.   But those are the times when you will know God to be your refuge and your strength -- a very present help in time of trouble.
This is amazing news.  Your greatest triumphs will be when you are emptied and weak and a beggar.  When all of your merit is stripped away and you know your own helplessness,  God will be near to you.  He will supply His strength, so that the boasting will all be 'the Lord has done great things for me.'  Those are moments of true, refining gold making. 
God made you, uniquely fitted you to do something great.  You will fall and fail.  BUT in those times you will find the true accomplishments of your lives.  Each of us needs a Redeemer of our soul and our life...in all its motives and minutes."

They were true words six months ago, and are so today.
And yet.
Trials (fiery, or run-of-the-mill-garden-variety-type) often encase me in a fog of me.
Having never been an insect, I am led by numerous readings of Charlotte's Web to surmise that a fly stunned into inertia by a spider feels similarly the numbness which renders a binding web and imminent demise to be things barely worth a wriggle or twitch.
I'm thinking that isn't my purpose.
Actually, I am increasingly convinced that God doesn't "supply the strength" in order for me to feign death until my enemy loses interest.  The "great things He is doing" must describe more than my living a few years just holding my breath. 
Then, truth came as a micro-adjustment to the focus of my heart this week.
From two separate sermons from two separate pulpits from two separate decades I heard that God brings us through trials in order to equip us to serve.
Hmm.
Wow.
I like imagining the muscle building accomplished during a fiery time might be used to pry a heavy beam off of another pilgrim further on.  That seems a much more valuable outcome than semi-conscious, web-bound survival.
And perhaps God even brings us joy in the middle of our trials through our serving.  Although the end goal is not my happiness, surely James was alluding to something worthwhile when he encouraged believers to consider the aspect of joy within the context of faith-testing times.

It might be that these opportunities to focus on something other than the roaring wind and the rising waves provide that elusive way to "turn our eyes upon Jesus."

And if not, 
...it still seems a more worthwhile way to pass the time.


Lead on, O King eternal,
till sin's fierce war shall cease,
and holiness shall whisper
the sweet amen of peace.

For not with swords' loud clashing
or roll of stirring drums,
but deeds of love and mercy
the heavenly kingdom comes.