fire

One of the most beautiful things Emmett taught me was how to build a fire, even with wet wood.  The way you arrange the wood, prepare the kindling, even place the lit match and nurse it just so when it begins to burn.  I loved watching him build fires when we went camping because he made it an art form, and though the patience required nearly drove me crazy I became so good at building them that he often told me I was better than him (though I suspect he was just trying to curry favor).  Whenever we had fires at the house, he would sit up and watch them burn out long after I had gone to bed, always the rule-following boy scout, waiting for the embers to be cold to make sure we were all safe. 

So as I stay up waiting for he fire to go out tonight, I keep listening to his song on repeat:

          Kate York, Lay Down Your Sorrows

          Lay down your sorrows so troubled of heart

          come to the tree on the hill as you are

          Lay down your burdens that you've called friends

          watch as it blooms into life again

          Here is the ending and here it begins

          here at the river that washes your sins.

          Cast all your shame, all your sorrows and guilt

          here on this altar that love has built.

          There is no burden too heavy for him

          There is no battle scar he cannot mend.

          Love is a man well acquainted with grief,

          He longs to show you the way to peace.

          Fathers and mothers, O daughters and sons,

          Mercy is waiting with wide open arms.

          Heaven's a feast and the table is set.

          Run with abandon and never look back.

I love the rhythm of this song.  It makes me feel like a little girl dancing.  Not that I actually danced in my living room.  Who would do something so silly....  Sheesh.  When Quinn dances, which he still does frequently and with great abandon, it is a glorious sight to behold.  His awkward hips and flailing arms interspersed with short, jerky hops delight my heart, even as I'm silently praying he doesn't fall on his face again because, let's face it, the poor guy inherited my coordination.

Someone responded to one of my last few posts, commenting on my grief journey, and I was a little surprised.  There is so much darkness and struggle in my life, and grief - of a sort, yet I haven't felt particularly like I've been grieving.  Rather, I feel like grief over Emmett was just the first step into a new dimension of my journey, a new awareness of God at work.  It's funny to be pigeon-holed as "the widow," and it sometimes catches me off guard when I get the impression that people expect me to be carrying some kind of weight ready to dump on the next unsuspecting victim.  Yet I can honestly say that precisely because of the intensity of the battle, I've never felt this light.

Perhaps it is because I've given up trying to arrange my life just so, trying to get the stack just right.  As I watch the fire die tonight, I'm praying for God to arrange the pieces of my life just so, to stack each gnarled, soaked, twisted branch into a glorious heap ready to catch on fire.  And that's not a place of grief.  It's a place of reality, not a blind superficiality, but a tenuous hope.  Not ignorant of suffering, but not driven to despair.  I've found it to be part battlefield and part ballroom.  It's a curiously secure yet fragile place where joy is forged from sorrow and peace is the hard won prize for long-suffering.  

still standing

Music never really defined much of my life until Emmett began making me mixed tapes in high school. Now I find certain songs bring memories rushing back, like Michael W. Smith's, "Friends are friends Forever."  That's such a horribly cheeseball song, but it's apparently exactly what you should put on your girlfriend's mix tape when she graduates from high school.  At least Emmett isn't alive to kill me for telling the world that he put that on a mixed tape for me.  If he were alive right now, then I'd be in big trouble for ruining his street-cred.

Whenever I hear Cleareyed by Glen Phillips or Sons & Daughters by the Decemberists, I'm immediately transported to Quinn's nursery just after he was born where I read my way through the Harry Potter books and Neil Peart's Traveling Music while I nursed Quinn and Emmett toured the country playing drums.  Those were songs of hope and endurance, but they were also lighthearted and merry.  

When I downloaded, Light for the Lost Boy by Andrew Peterson, a few months ago, I was initially disappointed, and I put it down for a while.  But when I picked it back up in September and fell in love with it, I didn't really know it would be the soundtrack for the last couple months of my life.  Let's start with these lyrics from the first song:

'Cause every death is a question mark
At the end of the book of a beating heart
And the answer is scrawled in the silent dark
On the dome of the sky in a billion stars
But we cannot read these angel tongues
And we cannot stare at the burning sun
And we cannot sing with these broken lungs
So we kick in the womb and we beg to be born
Deliverance!
Deliverance, O Lord!

When you look into grief and refuse to cover it up with self-justfication or co-dependencey or martyrdom or food or comparison-- when you face all the hard parts of reality without glossing over them or making up alternate stories that sound better-- when you stand on the edge and stare into a darkness you cannot read -- this is the very spot where I have been frozen these past months despite all the busy holidays and friends and work and family.  For a moment, when the shootings happened in Newtown, I felt that most of the world had come to join me in my little spot, yet how quickly people drifted to distractions, to find any petty argument to turn their gaze away from the darkness.

But it was in the darkness, surrounded by a sky more beautiful and terrible and lonely than we can imagine, that God gave Abraham a promise.  I had no idea this darkness was the place I had to stand to see God.  I don't think I could have signed up for this gig so many years ago if I had known it would lead me here.  And yet...

I couldn't really put it into words until I read Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts.  It is a beautiful little book that I avoided because it was so trendy and her writing style is not my favorite.  When a dear friend gave it to me, I started it with mixed feelings of obligation and curiosity, yet I quickly devoured it as words of life to my soul.  While the book is an amazing testimony of the transforming power of thankfulness, I was struck by so many of her stories.  The moments where she learned to be transformed by gratitude were the moments when she came face to face with the darkness, the ugliness, the hopelessness, and chose to face that emptiness and wait on God.  I was overwhelmed with the importance of learning just to stand in the darkness and intentionally open yourself up to God.  I had not been practicing euchariteo as she calls it; instead of "thank you," my thoughts were more like, "um... i'm here, now what..." But I was amazed at the ways in which God would meet me in those moments, ways that are probably not even noticed externally, but speak to my soul that God is accomplishing a beautiful work in my soul.  And I was so thankful to know I wasn't nuts, or if I was nuts, then someone else was there with me.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm still an expert sinner, but by intentionally removing all my coping mechanisms and forcing me to metaphorically stare into the abyss, God is also training me to see him.  But standing on the edge of the abyss can really take it out of a girl.  I mean, sheesh, have I been tired.  Sometimes I feel like the work of faith is more like just standing.  You know the last scene of the last X-men movie where Wolverine is standing there regenerating his skin as fast as that Jane girl can burn it away?  I kind of feel like I am living that scene every day.

It's like Paul says in Ephesians 6: 13, "Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand."  I am just standing lately.  That's it.  Nothing glamorous, but some days when I get to the end of the day and I'm still standing, stripped of all my coping mechanisms that I so desperately want to use to hide the abyss - oh man - those are the nights I want to laugh out loud or dance a jig precisely because I'm still standing.  

Recycling and Bicycling

Shortly after we were married, Emmett and I were cleaning out the last remaining items we had left our parents' houses.  I was going through a box of school items under my bed when I came across a green notebook full of poetry that I wrote in seventh grade.  Seventh grade girl poetry.  In other words, epic.  It was entirely about dolphins and saving the planet and recycling, which by the way, only sort of (in a very unsatisfying, contrived sort of way) rhymes with bicycling.  Yep.  That's how good I was.

I cringed as I opened it, so of course Emmett immediately snatched it from me and began reading them aloud, much to his delight and my embarrassment.  After wrestling him for the notebook, I vowed to rid the world of my awful poetry, once and for all.  Although Emmett protested loudly, I finally managed to destroy its contents, and the world is a much better place.

I remember showing that notebook to my seventh grade english teacher, and I was so proud of it.  The response I got from her when she returned it was much less enthusiastic than I anticipated. I'm surprised she managed to say anything nice at all.  That is why middle school teachers are saints and I teach high school.

Lately though when I sit down to write, I end up closing my blog, putting away my story outlines, and writing poetry.  What?  Yeah.  Somebody shoot me now before I embarrass myself again.  That's how I feel about it.  After swearing I'd never attempt poetry again, I can't seem to stop (although I'm so dreadfully slow I feel pretty much like I'm not moving).  And no, there is no way I'd post a poem on the internet, so don't even suggest it.

But there is something about poetry that fits with my life right now.  Sometime this week I realized that today would mark 18 months since Emmett died.  Today I learned that a Team Emmett board member and new friend had passed away after his cancer returned a couple of months ago.  I've been watching friends have babies, get married, take new jobs, move, get promotions, grieve, and suffer while I feel forced to sit still, merely a spectator.  So when I have a chance to reflect on and engage with reality, the true reality of God and creation, I find myself being thrown up against this invisible wall that I can't seem to penetrate.  I sit down to read the Bible, and I know there is deep, life giving truth, but the words ping around my brain like meaningless hieroglyphs. And not for lack of knowledge.  It's like no matter how much I study or read or work, I keep hitting a wall and truth - real life-giving, soul-satisfying truth -  is always on the other side.  I picture myself beating desperately on this wall, asking to be let in, shouting meaningless words at the chaos just wanting confirmation that I've been heard, much like Habakkuk.

N.T. Wright, in Surprised By Hope says that:

When the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also, quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time.  

I never really had any perspective on heaven and earth because heaven being a place in the sky somewhere past Jupiter never really worked for me.  But the way Wright speaks of it here, I can't help but geek out over how much this resonates with my science nerd brain.  Now if you've read anything or seen any PBS specials on string theory, you're probably no better off actually understanding what it says, and I'm not even going to try to explain it because it doesn't really make any sense and there's no way of testing if it's true, which makes it a pretty useless scientific theory.  However it presents a very similar possibility of extra dimensions, present but undetectable (hence the uselessness of the theory).

Essentially, whole worlds could exist right in front of us and we might never know.  Doesn't this sound just like the veil Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians?  Like Lewis's Narnia?  Jesus could be standing right in front of me like those guys on the runway guiding airplanes waving giant sticks of light (I'm sure they have a fancy name but I don't care enough to google it), and I have no sense of his presence.  Yet in some mystery of faith I know he is there, even though I can't get past that veil.  And what's more embarrassing is to think of that great cloud of witnesses from Hebrews 12 standing just on the other side of that veil cheering and booing and whooping and hollering as I live out the success and failures of my daily life.

Hence the poetry.  How that veil can be frustratingly impenetrable and yet so tenuously thin makes my breath catch and my body tremble and my brain shut down.  It simultaneously makes me want to conquer the world and never get out of bed again.  So metaphors are the only things I have left to work with anymore.  Sometime in eternity when I can see clearly, I will cast off these words as a child's attempt to explain the dim shapes in the mirror.  But for now I'm still stuck trying to get recycling to rhyme with bicycling and it's still very unsatisfying.

lightbulbs

When you live over seas for an extended period of time, it isn't so much the large things that get you, like being a thousand miles from your family.  You prep for those kinds of things and adjust your life.  It's the little things, like the clerk not helping you bag your groceries or not getting ice in your water at a restaurant - the little things you don't prepare for mentally, that somehow have the power to spontaneously and completely unhinge you.

Being a widow and a single mom is somewhat similar.  You expect holidays to be difficult.  You plan ahead and put on your game face.  It is almost surprising how easy they are because of the hustle and bustle.  But changing the light bulbs... Now there's a task that can completely unhinge me.  Shortly after Emmett died, I was wondering why all my rooms were so dim, and I realized that about half my lightbulbs were burnt out.  I'm not sure I changed a lightbulb for the entire time Emmett and I were married.  It's just something he did.  He noticed poor lighting and changed the bulbs.  I noticed dirty bathrooms and cleaned them.  It wasn't exactly equal division of labor, but it worked.  So when I went to change the lightbulbs, I wasn't even entirely sure where we kept them.  And wouldn't you know that nearly every single light fixture in my house requires a different size and shape of bulb.  So when a light goes out, it's another trip to the store for a special bulb.  So when my shower light went out again this week, I sure did want to cuss.  I'm still showering in the semi-dark with the sensor light in the rest of the bathroom turning off every five minutes.  Because I'm awesome.  And lazy.  Mostly lazy, I guess.

Quinn came home from school yesterday, and when I asked him how the day went, he suddenly got very confessional.  "Mom," he said, "I'm sorry. We had to write down what we were thankful for, but I only had room for three things, and you didn't make it on the list, but I really am thankful for you."  I chuckled and asked him what made it on the list.  He looked me straight in the eye with the biggest grin on his face and said, "ME! And the world and God because I love the world he made."

Recently Quinn has been bringing up the world and how God made it and how much he loves it.  On Sunday we talked about what it meant to be a new creation and how God was making all things new.  Last night as we read the last chapter in his Jesus Storybook Bible, which is amazing, by the way.  The chapter is about the letter of Revelations, and it is such a beautiful picture of heaven and God making all things new and right.  At the very end, after this chapter, is a little part about saying yes to Jesus and being made new.  Quinn likes to read that, as I've always assumed to stretch out bedtime a little longer.  He's seen baptisms, and when he brings it up we talk about that passage and how one day he can make a choice to follow Jesus.  Usually we go on about our business and he forgets about it, but last night he was adamant that he wanted to say yes to Jesus right then.

Now having come to faith as a young adult, I have a hearty skepticism that borders on a sinful disdain of people who say they accepted Jesus as a child.  Now I know it can happen, but I sure was surprised to find Quinn so adamant and myself so hesitant.  I caught myself wanting to say he couldn't pray right then because there's no way he was old enough to really choose.  And then I thought, "but that's not the gospel!"  So being the good mom I am, I threw out a caveat knowing how much he doesn't like to pray out loud.  I said "okay, but you have to pray for yourself because no one else can do this for you."  He looked at me without flinching and agreed, though he asked me to help him know how to pray. I also said he'd have to talk with our pastor and let him know how he felt about Jesus, to which he also very surprisingly agreed.  And then totally out of the blue he said, "but I'm only going to get baptized if I can wear goggles."  I'm sure Jesus got a chuckle out of that one.

After praying and finishing bedtime I hopped on the treadmill for a long run to help me process the day and the upcoming holidays.  On the one hand, I was overflowing with joy at Quinn's heart, but on the other hand, I thought, "well, crap, now he's got a big target on his forehead."  I found myself thankful, but mostly terrified about how to shepherd this child without Emmett.  How in the world will I do that when I can't even manage to change the lightbulb in my shower?

hope

Epistemology.  A fancy word that nerdy people like to throw around that essentially means the study of how we know something.

Hope. An expectation of or desire for something good to happen in the future.

At some point last month, I sat among the women of our community group and couldn't think of a single prayer request to offer, even though I felt adrift in a sea of chaos.  I couldn't put my feelings into words until later when a friend from that group asked me how I was doing, the real question, not just the passing courtesy.  It was a hard question to answer.  Luckily it was a friend who expected a real answer, and I said, "honestly, the best news I could get right now would be that I had a terminal illness or that Jesus was coming back tomorrow."  Like the best of friends, she wasn't embarassed by the weightiness of my confession, and so we embarked on a short conversation about hope that stirred new thoughts and feelings to the surface.

I have been aware for some time of this overwhelming desire to be with Jesus, not because I'm particularly holy, but rather because I have no reasonable hope that my life here will get better before then.  Yet I have also felt this desire to be peculiarly sinful because it is a desire borne from weariness rather than love, a desire more focused on squirming out of responsibility rather than following Christ.  I suspect that anyone who has also seen her future drastically redefined by the illness or death of a family member might feel this way.

So I find myself on a prayer journey towards hope.  At a funeral recently, so many strange phrases were thrown out about deceased loved ones, that I began to realize that people, myself included, have no idea what the Bible says about death, resurrection, heaven, and the new creation.  My heart has always been stirred by passages like Isaiah 54 and Revelations 21 that speak of creation being made new and whole again.  Yet I find myself stumped at how this future changes my life today.

So I picked up a book called Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright.  It's been sitting around for a couple months, and the Spirit finally pressed it on my heart.  In grand Eeyore fashion, I picked it up and said to myself, "Well, maybe it'll do some sort of good because, after all, it does have the word hope in the title."  Big pathetic sigh.

I hesitate to quote the book because I am pretty sure I haven't got to the really good part yet.  I'm still in the opening chapters, where I'm only underlining about half the sentences.  But I will leave you with this tidbit:

Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism.  It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.

I'm learning that God is transitioning my hope from a small, selfish desire for things to work out for my good in this world to a broader way of seeing the story of Christ unfolding in his new creation.  That maybe he wants to transform not only my actions, but the way I see his story unfold in the world.

how my mother-in-law ruined my life

I mean, did October really have to come with a bulldozer and bury me alive? Sheesh!  I was doing really well as a single mom until Quinn's fall break and a visit from my mother-in-law completely unhinged me.  Now, I know that the phrase "mother-in-law" is almost universally negative because of cultural stereotypes, but I happen to love mine.  She cooks, she cleans, she spoils Quinn but still enforces basic manners, and she made my life much easier during Quinn's fall break the first week of October.  I got to wake up at a reasonable hour, leave for work early, get things done, work out, attend an event on a school night by myself, not do the dishes and find them magically cleaned the next morning, not make the final round to shut things down every night.  All the things you get to do without thinking about them when you have a husband, but none of which you get to do as a single mom.

And then she left.  That's how she ruined my life.

Because I remembered all the selfish reasons I miss Emmett.  Apparently so did Quinn.  He's been dreaming about his dad and asking for pictures and stories.  Add to that Emmett's birthday, which was  yesterday, and we've both pretty much been basket cases all month.

Two days ago Quinn and I went to bed at 7 pm.  Yes, 7 pm.  Now I'm pretty sure I even broke my own record for early bedtime that night because I was asleep by 7:30.  On top of just not being able to get my act together this month, this week has been particularly tough on multiple levels.  A student lost her mom this week and Quinn broke his arm.  So as I crawled in bed Friday night I prayed one of those wordless prayers that come out when you get way down to the bottom of your soul and there's nothing really left to say.

And then I slept the whole night for the first time in weeks, although by whole night I mean until 3 am.  Because let's face it, when you go to bed at 7 pm, then 3 am is a reasonable wake up time.  I got out of bed around 4 am and did what I always do when I'm crawling back from that place at the bottom of my soul; I cleaned my room.  You'd think I would clean my room on a weekly basis since it is apparently such a spiritual event for me, but really it only happens every few months.  Just when I seem to get a little balance in my life, God tweaks it just enough - like that game Jenga - and everything crashes in a heap, and then, I clean my room.

But seriously, people.  I spend time with God.  I pray.  I live a quiet, sober life full of reflection and meditation.  I go to Bible study and try to be nice to people.  I give where and how I can.  I play with my kid and pack him healthy lunches.  And I do these things even when I'm not feeling the Holy Spirit mojo because I know I need these things.  Then SHOULDN'T I BE OVER BEING CRAZY BY NOW?  I thought I was an adult.  Isn't that what being an adult means?  That sensible, responsible living means you get to stop being crazy?

If truth be told though, I found plenty of reasons to lose it when Emmett was alive and well.  Maybe it's a good thing he can't tell you the whole truth.  Cause I could get crazy.  All that has really changed is what kinds of things make me lose it.  God likes to nudge me over the edge just in case I might start to feel like I have it all together. And nothing I can do, no matter how holy it is, can prevent God's little nudge from sending me whirling into chaos. I've discovered that I like orderliness and quietness and sensibleness and peace, sometimes more than I like God.  I can carve a life that suits me out of the chaos around me, and I can defend that little space against all sorts of evil.  But then God sends someone like my mother-in-law to be kind and caring and loving, and He completely destroys my little space.

So be careful when you're nice to people, because genuine service and love may be God's way of showing them kindness. And the kindness of the Lord, though it be all sorts of painful, truly does lead us to repentance, but often the road to repentance first passes through the land of crazy.  So when you're kind to people, they may get crazy.

I don't even have words yet to say what I'm repenting of because in the midst of all the crazy, I've felt deeply cherished by God, like he's ridiculously in love with me and well pleased with me.  Maybe that's all I needed, was to feel that again.  Either way, I'm glad my mother-in-law likes to ruin my life and I'm very thankful that she does, even though I'm still clawing my way out of crazy.

tenant wanted

At some point last week I remembered that I had a blog.  It's been several weeks, nearly a month, since I've written.  At first I thought, well, I don't have anything to write.  And then I thought, oh, well, I'll write later because I'm not feeling so much like writing now.  Now I wonder if anyone will even read this one, as it's been so long.  And I find I don't really care about the readers, but I'm drawn back for the words - words that have been swimming in my consciousness, catching bits of light now and then like baubles hung in my grandmother's window.

I'm reading so much and living so intensely.  I found myself weeping over the passages in Exodus about slavery, weeping for the tender way in which God constructed his laws to protect the poor and helpless.  I've driven into a sunset whose brilliant colors were muted by a wispy, almost invisible cloud line on the horizon and thought how perfectly that fits how I see God's brilliance right now.  I've taken a walk on a fall morning after a night of rain and felt poetry drop into my heart, like a little gift that blossomed and grew.  My skin bears numerous scars from the yard work during our service project day where we cleaned up another widow's yard.  The angry red welts looks so much like my soul feels, that I smile at them like they're old friends.

In Phantasties,  by George MacDonald, the narrator traveling through faerie land notes that the irony of sorrow is how it carves out hollow spaces in our soul where we can experience a uniquely deep and abiding joy.  You might even say that we can only experience joy to the extent that we have lived well through sorrow.  I have whole new unexplored caverns in my soul carved out by sorrow.  Joy is poking around, trying the new spaces on for size.  We'll see if it takes up residence.