In the months before I lost Veronica I refrained from listening to ordinary love songs. I remember those months too well–waiting in hope and fear.
I had so much faith. I knew–knew He would bring her back. It has been 14 years. 3 to go…
I have felt that fear so many times since–the fear of loss and grief and love.
Perfect love casts out all fear.
Imperfect love clings to the scarred feet of Perfect Love, praying for flat out miracles.
My father was a straight talker.
He was raised in a baptist church by the parent who attended, but he was also raised in the south during a time when it was hard to miss the hypocrisy (is it ever far from us?)
He walked away. When I first knew him he did not believe in God. Even when other members of our family became flamingly involved with Jesus, my dad stayed back.
He did not take the leap until a conversation with a fire-and-brimstone type who pointed out that his hereditary baptist background suggested that the alternative to the yoke of Jesus was a bit warm.
Warm apparently worked. I say this because I never really felt it was even necessary to bring hell into the conversation. Who needs to know they are escaping a one-way trip to a dump if the alternative is an all-expenses-paid trip to paradise?
Where are you headed?
And who or what is leading you there?
You can imagine me
Being dumped
On a nearly deserted island
just for talking too much
And you can also
See me chafe
Not so much for myself
(I am quite capable of talking to flora, fauna, and God, thank you, very much)
No.
For the children in my boat
They don’t deserve this–
The extreme isolation
So many freaking
Hot piña coladas!
No.
They deserve community
Friends who see them through
A voyage through calm seas
I tell myself this
Too much
Until I remember a wee bit of sage advice–
If you are going to burn your bridges
You better love the island
Love indeed
Beautiful survivors
I would have written this as a letter
I would have used the proper
Format:
Dear You,
Only…
That is the point
Dear you, not me
Not God Himself, quite real
Your appetite for bacon
Recalls to me the reason
Why?
We are not family anymore
Friends with the devil
Need to count the flies
Attending him
I speak the oblique
Because you have a right to be angry
We all do
But only on the pallet in hell
we lie down…
So close to Jesus.
He picks up a Shutterfly book his father made several years ago…our family before the flood.
There are pictures of flowers taped over my adopted son’s face. One of his victims has placed them over his face because her grief is still deep, and the righteous anger with it.
To her younger brother this is a strange thing. Who is this teenage boy? Why is his face covered?
I explain it to him. I explain the story using the simplest words I can find–the words of a fairy tale, a bedtime story. Only no one wants to tell the story of why the little girl has covered her “brother” in flowers any more than we want to face the hurt that happens when someone you trust and love betrays you and all you hold dear.
Hold dear…
Hm, little girl in the picture, I will always hold you, dear.
It is my job, like breathing.
God is enough.
More than enough.
Luke 3:17 (NIV)
His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
God is a patient guy, but we would all be prudent not to confuse patient with impotent or sloppy. He will not wait forever to fix what we have broken.
And it will take a very long time to burn all the trash we have amassed…in our hearts alone.
Make no mistake–
We will all be salted with fire.
Pentecost.
I imagine the room is in a church basement. Worn wood, a coffee pot on a table, styrofoam cups, a rows of folding chairs.
Sparsely attended. I cannot see the faces of the other attendees. I know like mine, theirs will be worn, washed of something. Artifice. No room for that here.
I stand and tell them my story. All of it, unadorned, shocking. Only here, in this circle of (imaginary) truth it will not be held against me–my pushy honesty, my tenacious insistence on the whole story. Uncomfortable, impolite. I know. I got it.
Most places now I tell myself, shut up, you know now they don’t wanna hear this.
That is why I return to this picture in my head–a simple circle of truth, where every secret thing is revealed. So no one is shocked when the truth is what it is—
We all
Underestimate
Jesus.
Most people have run across CS Lewis’ quote about pain being God’s megaphone. We are risk averse. We don’t really even like to think about pain.
I dropped a roll of (heavy) butcher paper on my big toe. Dumb, I know. The pain was and is intense, binding.
It derailed my plans for a run. This in itself is a sticky issue. Exercise, especially running is my go-to, no-guilt stress reducer. If I could I would eat a lot of chocolate and drink vodka gimlets, but to paraphrase Tobias Funke–I don’t need the calories.
I guess I didn’t need the run.
The truth is my big toe was already a wounded soldier–bunioned, afflicted with frequent stubs, not helped by my penchant for running barefoot and in Chacos. That poor toe was already punished.
I am not really that fixated on my toe. I am fixated on why?
I know God well enough to trust that my clumsy accident is no accident at all. He has stuff for me in the midst of pain. Things like:
Wound care. I wiki toe breaks. Importune my doctor husband. Follow his advice…
Pain management. I take the ibuprofen with alacrity and gratitude. It just takes the edge off. Same with the ice…
Change plans. No run is a bummer. But this also means a real change in my dazzling and exciting plans to work on the exterior trim of our house. I went from looking forward to tackling the high places to envisioning myself doing most of the yard-and-under edges.
The little things. As I said, I was already neglecting this toe. Now I am not. I am grateful for all the thankless weight-bearing it does and very aware of how much I need my big toes.
Need. I am also going to need more help. My kids will have to be my team–helping with all the not-so-fun cleaning jobs.
Empathy.. Most of all I am aware that my small intense pain is nothing compared to the people I pray for–friends battling cancer, families missing loved ones, prisoners in terrible places, women whose lives have been stolen by…it is too easy to say monster.. Too easy to pile a decade of individual blows–each one vicious and deadly into a lump sum.
I would prefer to separate each into a blow of such force that to minimize or forget is to be less human, less alive.
Let us face these terrible things together, these monstrous griefs.
I saw a lady in a parking lot
Reminded me of you
Same color
Ride even, champagne
A place becomes a grape
Becomes a beverage
Sparkling…celebratory
Just a vehicle, mind you
The complications of love
Missing you despite
All you have said
And done.
