Brave Strokes

(Revisiting Paris... )

It's only brushstrokes of color, heavy and textured, deliberate and intended, somehow brash and unrefined, and yet I hold my breath, hold this moment of witnessing. For it is that, the witnessing of something noble.

It's a painting. Just of sheets, a window, hooks, a chair or two. Nothing ornate, gilded, plush. Just a homely bedroom of a doleful, sometimes tortured, man, a man skimping by on money sent from his brother to buy food, to rent this humble place for a pillow. Hardly worth esteeming to canvas or the ages.

And yet...

"I had a new idea in my head... this time it's just simply my bedroom, only here color is to do everything and giving, by its simplification, a grander style to things...."

I stand inches from the frame, want to reach out and let fingertips touch this color doing everything, this simple thing doing a grand thing.

Daubs and strokes they are, swaths of oil shades, broad rich lines. Thick, layered color slashes across canvas stretched, like the underscoring of words. Like a statement.

My understanding of his language, his sentiment, is not cerebral but in the parts of me collecting, surging, with emotion, that tender place that speaks in colors, in movement. In that which the heart knows as inexpressible.

But what's burning within isn't so much about the striking, stark beauty of a bedroom in Arles, about that saturation of hues calling one to come lie down and rest. What's spilling me is about the grandest of all. This courage.

This ruthless mettle to forge the road rarely traveled. The fearlessness to tilt head, heart, and see beauty in the mundane. The tenacity to care little what others think but to sing the the song He's composed for you alone.

I lean into the textured white that fills the pillow. This is the work of the anguishing unafraid. A dauntless one who endlessly jousted his own apparitions.

"I went... still accompanied to the village, the mere sight of people and things had an effect on me that I thought I was going to faint and I felt very ill..."

Fear hounded every moment, agoraphobia stalking, and yet he laid himself out.

"The emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without being aware of working..."

He steeled himself, opened oil, and ripped open his chest wall to expose the workings of a fragile spirit. Dipping brush tip, he brandished a sword against self-doubts encroaching army. He listened to the tune well. And sang his solo despite interior cacophony.

It's only colors, a painting of a bedroom, I know. But for me, rooted here before 22 by 29 inches of soul pigment, it's this raw clarion to do what we must do, simply because we must.

Regardless of the naysayers, the loneliness, the giants we think lurk in this land, because He calls, and that is what matters.

Changed by old paint, I wander out of the gallery.

This life canvas stretches and He's asking for brave strokes.

Van Gogh's Prayer, written to his brother:

I want to be bound to Christ with unbreakable bonds and to feel these bonds...

To live in and for Christ, to be one of the poor of His kingdom,

steeped in leaven filled with His spirit, impelled by His love...

To become one who finds repose in Him alone,

who desires nothing but Him on earth.

Lingering with Scripture: Deuteronomy 31:6 Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you."

Lifting voice in response to Scripture: Father, if I desire nothing but You, what is there to really fear? You go with us, calling us to come to sing the song You meant for us, on the canvas You've given.

Living Scripture: Where is God calling me to take courage today?

Photos: Taken at the Orsay Museum in Paris of Vincent van Gogh's The Artist's Room in Arles

Safely Through

It wasn't that long ago, but obviously another lifetime, when the sky crushed lungs, and the vise of crowding people squeezed too tight, and I stopped breathing.

Anxiety, I discovered, atrophied a life.

The doctor called it agoraphobia.

I just knew that walking through Varey Hall on the way to English Lit, the universe wildly spun, lungs imploded, and heart galloped ferociously, paralyzing me in this dread sweat.

Medicated and shaky, I finished my second year.

And on a day in late May, I packed the last of my books in a grey Volkswagon Rabbit, and followed the black ribbon out of the knotted city nest, emancipated to gravel roads and empty space and big sky and my lungs expanded and I felt something inside stir, alive again.

For weeks of summer days, I lay in glades. The play of light, leaves and shadow falling upon me and fears let God close. I put down deeper roots in Him, grew stronger and when the leaves rustled dry in autumn winds and blew away before the snow came, I too could go where the wind blows...

But the father of lies still chases with fears, hacks at reaching roots, chops at spreading limbs. Tries to shrink my world.

It's an intentional act of the will to remember truth: greater is He who is in me than he who is in the world. I feel fear, but in Jesus I still grow, still do it anyways. Waking to His daily gifts, I know, experientially and intimately, His perfect love. And His perfect love, when I stay in the moment of it, focus on it, accept it, casts out all fear.

And this is what I am thinking at the airport waiting to take wing. About fears and perfect love, and taking His hand in leaps of trust. Sitting amdist carry-on bags and travelers flipping through guidebooks, I need to squeeze His hand again. I slip open my pocket Bible to this page and directly read:

Acts 28: (Safely at Malta) "When they had been brought safely through..."

And I laugh, lean back to Him. He's here! He knows! He guides!

He brought me safely through... over a night of ocean waves, flying into glowing sun rising red around the rim of the world, and then, in light, a line of land at the edge of the sea.

I breathe, brought safely through a fog of fears.


Lord, we feel fears. Forgive us weak ones. Let us trust You anyways. You have places to bring us to.

(Sadly, my camera isn't communicating with this computer. Paris pictures may have to follow later?)

Eat the Mystery

Part Three of a series on choosing...

He comes to the back door this week, looking for his brother, looking like his brother, looking like those babies of his we buried in that country cemetery, and I see how it all could have been different.

My brother-in-law, just filling time, he’s talking about soil temperature and weather forecasts and that he’d heard from John van DeGevel who likely heard it at the coffee well on Main that some farmer brought a three inch bean plant into Atwood Farm Supply and nobody knew how a field of beans like that was going to survive the late May frost they’re calling for tonight. I lean up against the doorframe. There’s no saving a field like that on a night when the temperatures dip below freezing, that moon rising higher in a cloudless, cold sky.

“But that’s the way it is,” John shrugs his shoulders, looks out across our wheat field.




“We think we control so much, do so much right to make a crop, and when you are farming, you are faced with it everyday: you control so little. Really, it’s God who decides it all, not us.” He slips his thick, Dutch hands into frayed pockets, smiles easily. “It’s all good.”

I nod, almost fill the space between us with words about Farmer Husband coming home from the hardware store soon and instead of John waiting longer, making small talk with me, if he just wants to drop off that new water tank in the back shed for now. But I catch his eyes, those clear as heaven blue eyes, and I know I have to ask. Ask how he can say that, mean that. If he really believes that.

Tentatively, eyes fixed on his, I step into that place we rarely go.

“How do you know that, John? Like deep down, how do you know? That it isn’t all random, that it is really all good. Others who have walked your road haven’t arrived where you have.” His eyes don’t leave mine. I know he’s remembering too.

It had been a New Year’s Day, that day of fresh starts, resolutions, new dreams. And it was all ending. Again. John had called, left a message on our machine, asking us to come, if we wanted. Room 112, second floor, right across from the nurses’ station. The recording of that soft, matter-of-fact voice machine left us stunned, punched in the gut.

I searched my husband’s face. “Already? Today?” He had taken my hand, held it tight all the way there, right to that hospital room lit only by a dim lamp in the corner.

We met John at the door. He nodded, eyes smiling bravely. The singular tear that carved down his cheek chiseled something out of me.

He brushed it away, still clinging to that smile, that Dutch determination. “Tiffany just noticed he started breathing a bit heavier this afternoon. And yeah, when we brought him in, they said his lung had collapsed and it was just a matter of hours. It’s all like it was at the end for Austin.”

I can’t look into that sadness wearing a smile anymore. I look at the floor, polished tiles blurring, running.

Only a year and six months had passed since Austin. And here we were again, with Dietrich. Austin had been hardly four months old on a muggy June afternoon when I had stood in the light of the front window, balloons waving in the gentle hum of the fan, caressing my nephew’s bare little tummy, stroking each little toe, and watching his chest heave less and less with life. How do you keep breathing when the lungs under the skin you touch are slowly atrophying? The doctors said that with spinal muscular atrophy the chances of future children having the same fatal disease were only one in four. Twelve months later, Dietrich was born to hope and prayers and the same diagnosis.

John hands me a Kleenex, and I try to wipe it all away. He tries too, with his words, “But we’re blessed that up until today Dietrich’s had no pain, and we have good memories of a happy Christmas together with him. We had only hoped that with Austin, but it didn’t happen. Tiff got lots and lots of pictures. We got five months with him. It’s all good."

"And you know,” he laughs, that tone he’s teased me with since I was fourteen, that gawky friend of his kid brother, “Austin’s waiting for Dietrich to just hurry up and get there already.”

I shouldn’t have, but I did. I looked up. And saw all this wild grief, this dazed bewilderment in eyes above stoic smile. In that moment I forget the rules of this Dutch family of reserved emotion, of their carefully measured words, and, my world flooded in fluid pain, I grab John by the shoulders, pull him close and this ragged, scratchy voice half-whispers, half-chokes, “If it were up to me, brother, I’d write this story differently.”

I regret them, as soon as the words leave me, wish I could pull them back, comb out their tangled madness, dress them in calm Sunday best. But there they were, released, raw and real, stripped of any theological cliché, my naked, serrated howl to the throne room.

Those are the words I am remembering, standing there on the back step this week, probing more.

“You know,” John turns again towards the waving wheat field. “ Well, even with the boys...” He was remembering too.

“I don’t know why that all happened. But do I have to?” He turns towards me, shrugs again, eyes saying more. I wait.

“Maybe something else would have happened later on. Who knows? I don’t mention often, but sometimes I think of when God gave Hezekiah 15 more years of life because he prayed for it. But if he had died when God first intended, Manasseh would never have been born. Think of all the evil that would have been avoided if Hezekiah had died earlier, before that son was born. I am not saying anything, either way, about anything, really.”

He looks away, off across sea of green rolling in winds, lowers his voice. “Just that maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds…”




My raw words from that dying, ending day, echo, pierce. There’s a reason I am not writing the story and He is. He knows how it all works out, where it all leads, what it all means.

I swallow hard, find my voice.

“Some bury a child and can’t accept there is Anyone writing meaning out of it. And others bury two children, and do. Why?”

His eyes linger, see through to my meaning, my ache, and he nods, knowing. “Maybe, I guess, it’s accepting there are things we simply don’t understand. But He does.”

And I think I see. When we find ourselves groping along insufferable desert floors (and we will), we can choose. We can choose to pick up what we don’t understand, what has no meaning to us, what makes no sense, and call it good. Because God sent it. Like Israelites gathering manna. And asking: “What is it?” Forty long years of daily eating that which had no meaning: “What is it?” More than fourteen thousand, six hundred days of taking as their daily bread that which they didn’t comprehend. They embraced the inexplicable.

They ate the mystery.

And they found the mystery to be “like wafers with honey.”

A pick-up drives in the lane and I watch from the window, two brothers, meeting, talking, their hand gestures mirroring each other. And I think of all the mysteries I have refused to let nourish me, the wafers with honey I have wasted, rejected. The sweet I have missed.

And I wonder if the rent in the canvas of our life-backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, those black holes that smatter everywhere we look, are not, somehow, ways to see through the soul holes to God. Thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the beauty beyond and Him.

If we’ll sup on the mystery.



"When the sons of Israel saw it, they said to one another, "What is it?" For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, "It is the bread which the LORD has given you to eat." Ex. 16:15


Lord, cause me today to eat what you've given. To find nourishment in all that is a mystery.

Part of this week's focus on Choice. Part One here. Part Two here.

Sunday Worship

Just Stop and Think with Francis Chan

We can never hear the story too often...

Let it awe us all over again.

Fifteen minutes to fall in love all over again...

We say, "Yes, God. YES!"

(My apologies... you may want to scroll again to bottom of screen and pause music.)

Shaped

I flew west to think about words, to meet women who write. That felt awkward, strange. For what do I know about words? I simply scratch in the dark, an act on the fringe hours of which I never speak. The thing I do, must do, that embarrasses me.

It's all new to me, this trying to grow comfortable in my own skin. This breathing deep and saying, "It's okay." Why is it excruciatingly hard to accept how He's formed us? The Potter must grieve over stiff, stubborn clay.

I keep returning to this long ago journal entry:






I picked a vase full of sunflowers, the final act in this Day of Preparation for Lord’s Day. The floors are done, the windows not, and I am tired. Indifferent to the lateness of the hour or the weariness of the body, I need to come and sit here, press these keys and watch letters shuffle into words on the screen. It is my streak across space, falling into words and landing softly.

I tell no one of these rendezvous with 26 letters. Like the Perseids, this act of dancing with curves and lines occurs in the out-of-the way hours, unbeknownst to they who call me daughter, friend. Day dawns, the bell tolls, and I slip away home.

Every apprentice knows, painfully so, of the chasm to be crossed in the journey towards skill. Loose and awkward, my knitting of words is not something to be paraded. And who would understand?

“You are the mother of six---you don’t think your life full enough? And writing? Maybe gardening, baking, quilting…but writing? What kind of a product is that?”

But it is not about product. This writing is about process.

“Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive.

The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write.

To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know.” — Henri Nouwen

This scratching, trying and difficult, probes new, tender spaces within. No, I know not the destination, but I know the direction: the essence of me.

Gentle questions muse in my inbox: how do you mother, educate, keep home…and clumsily work at casting on rows of words?

My whispered, tentative answer: And how do I breathe? Some soothe with rocking while needles click. I settle with the pattering, however maladroitly, of keys. You make time, no matter. To enrich and under gird the rest of time. Breathing hangs in the balance.

And sometimes I simply do all of it, the job of me, rather poorly:

“Indeed, the great paradox of [the life of one who writes] is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.” ~ Betsy Lerner

But this, all of this, is about learning. And when it matters, we become good studies.

A star shoots across the inky night draped outside my window, skimming the drowsy sunflowers.

Like Perseids, I am His handiwork, made this way.

And it's okay.

Lord, You formed each clump of clay uniquely. What can I do today to accept how You shaped me, a work of Your hands?

Get You a Roof

Though I have never been there, I have heard it said that in Africa the proverb goes, "The beginning of wisdom is to get you a roof."

And I guess, wherever you live, it makes sense: best to hammer some rafters, bake a paddy of bricks, wrap the corrugated cardboard close. Make an abode in which to abide. Life necessitates shelter.

Both of us, this man to whom I covenanted and I, our lives of breathing began down the same hospital hall. We birthed our children too, a few decades later, in those very same starch white rooms. My sister says we'll all likely die here.

We're content with here. Here where we went to school with our dental hygenist who attends the same church as my sister-in-law, the same church as my hairdresser, who's a sister to our family doctor's nurse. It's comfortable, this shelter of a place where you know and are known.

Like a roof that's grown moss. A long shelter.

I have heard it said, and, yes, fervently believe, that "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And so it is.

Get you a roof.

One Who has sheltered the expanse of space before the winding up of time. A long shelter, weathered and worn and still bearing strong. One you can intimately know and by Whom you are deeply known.

Move in and watch the moss grow.

Aged velvet absorbing millenia of rains pelting down.

"
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High...." Ps. 91:1

Lord, storms beat. Pull me under Your trusses. Be my roof.

Related: Moving In
Glad Refugees

Photo: mossy roofs of Shannon Woodward's outbuildings... the plane took the farm girl far west

Support System

Turbulence shakes his balance, and his hand flashes for steadying,
something sure, like a seatback,
but my shoulder, curved and strong too, will do.

Never turning or noticing the feel of bone, he presses hard, and I know purpose,

a body made like a staff.

Lord, who today would You have me undergird, uphold?

(Photo: collecting luggage, cluster of thoughts, in Detroit airport)

I left on a jet plane... and am back again, the bags unpacked, mind settling. Now to collect thoughts, offer thanks for the grace ... grow. Thoughts from the journey....

Living into a Good Story

I am not there in the kitchen when she spills the ink bottle across the counter, there to see it run down her arms, splatter cupboard fronts, pool on planks of trees under her bare toes.

She calls for rescue and, after slight gasp, weak smile, feeble rebuke (for, really, had I been there?), I wipe up smearing black, return cap to smudged bottle, the grooves of these fingertips stained with word paint.

Little Girl and I, we scrub, soap lathering thick, foam piling. All to no avail. Today, we wear ink. And somehow it feels right.

For I bleed stories, and these stories that we live mark, permeate, me. And I wonder as I measure salt, sift flour, make bread: Do the stories come from without or within? And maybe both, simultaneously. The stories of our days saturate us, soak into our pores. And we leak our stories. One, we are.

I scoop dough from stainless steel bowl, knead out its warm softness on countertop. I touch tentatively, hesitating. Will these inky fingertips of mine sully bread dough? I smile at the thought, understanding: doesn’t story nourish us, feed us?

I was four and they were old, skin wrinkled soft, and I’d climb in between them both, toes under flannel sheets, and ask, “Tell me stories of when Dad was a little boy?”

And Grandpa, wearing cotton undershirt, would lace gnarled fingers behind his head and start slow. “Did I ever tell you about his dog, Sandy?” Although he had, I’d only say, “Tell me that one!” and Grandma would chuckle and together they’d take me back too.

I was twelve and he was ageless, and while the school bus careened with talk of Teen Magazine, Michael J. Fox, and what hairstyle to wear with dangly earrings, I wrote down the stories Great-Uncle Elmer told us all over porridge bowls and sunrises and honey-sodden tea biscuits.

Great-Grandpa Joe tracking bees to trees full of the sweet stuff, he and cousins nabbing foxes down in the fence bottoms, Bill Chambers’ team of horses carefully backing up, wagon and all, over railroad tracks too, when Uncle Bill stepped out door of the mill and whistled for the chestnut pair. Great-Uncle Elmer dipped biscuits into porridge and we dipped too into stories from before that became the stories of now, of us, explaining who we are, how we’ve traveled here. I can still hear his voice, time-rusty, see his eyes, transparent as water, letting me see that which once was.

I knead these stories, this ink, into live dough rising. As Ezekiel heard from God, “‘Eat this book’” (Ezekiel 3:2), so we too will eat our words, the words we speak, read, listen to. Like Ezekiel, we too will open our mouths and eat stories. Words, living and rich, nourish.

The first words spoken into the cold expanse of the cosmos are words meant to reassure: “In the beginning…” It is all story. We live in narrative; the epic of existence is His story. And it is His story: “In the beginning, God….” God is the central character. His story flashes with Him. Our stories are not our own, not even really about us, but spotlight His heart. I forget that, listening to my story, these days, to know more about me instead of Him. How often had I missed the point of the story?

I wash dough off my hands, indelible ink stubborn, permanent. It won’t come off, dyed into being. Isn’t that way with love stories, the passion bathing you? He’s writing a romance. The bridegroom woos: "And when I passed by again, I saw that you were old enough for love. So I wrapped my cloak around you to cover your nakedness and declared my marriage vows. I made a covenant with you, says the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine" (Eze. 16:8).

In the late morning light, bread rising, I trace fingertips black with ink and know how this story ends. In Him, there are only happy endings, lovers united. No, I don’t know how the middle chapters will read. Yes, with embarrassing frequency fear strangles me and I wrangle against turning the page. Regardless of angst, the next scene comes. But this is a story I can trust, an Author I can believe in. He’s writing a story with a beginning, an ending---this middle must make sense. Will I remember when the anxieties loom, bear down: I can trust His storyline.

Our lives are not random, haphazard, absurd. The story has a Storyteller Who is making meaning of these moments. Nor do I have to slip a peek at the last page. He’s already told us the words inked there: "I have plans for you... plans to prosper you..plans to give you a hope and future Jer. 29:11 ... I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am John 14:3... No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him 1 Cor. 2:9."

My hands are stained with the ink of a good story.

Because The Word came, His hands stained red.

Feeling for His Face

Dark things in dreams chase her to wakefulness, and she cries for me. Her soft sobs stir me to consciousness, those pleas for "Mama! Mama!" shaking me awake. Through sleep’s fog, I find her, this little one, her hair damp and curled to her forehead in fear.

“It’s okay, Shalom. Mama’s here, Mama’s here.”

I draw her up close.

In between the waves of fears, tears, that wrack her little body, she tries to catch her breath, reaching, turning, struggling.

Anxiously, her fingers find my face. Ten fingertips gently brush along my lips, patter across my eyelids, touch my cheek. Like fingertips tentatively feeling along the embossing of Braille, again and again, she lightly reads my face.

“Is it you, Mama? Is it you who are really here with me?”

Into the dark, I smile. This has always been her way, this face reading, this face feeling. A babe of only a few months, she would howl through the night, and I would crouch over her basket, and Shalom, between sobs, would stretch frantically for me, clutching my face in her chubby fists. Desperately, whimpering, she’d pull my face close to her wet cheeks, run her hand across my mouth, rest her fingers on my eyes…and then sniffle… closes her eyes…eyelashes would still, breath slow, fingers relax…and sleep would softly fall.

Little Child needed no holding, no rocking, no nursing. Peace came, but nothing had changed. Except the assurance of my presence. All was well.

I know my own nightmares, day terrors, desert hallucinations that pursue across the sands. Waking to the everyday gifts, the common miracles, daily graces, this is my way of feeling for His face, my way of knowing He is pressed close.

I read Him in syrup melting down into stacks of pancakes, in the heavy breathing of slumbering children under old quilts, in the moss curling around old trunks down in the woods. A monarch lights on the clump of coneflowers by the picket fence, we linger after the noon picnic in the surprise of Indian summer, cold water runs from my tap. These are the graces, the magnanimous, munificent gifts, that I daily seek to run my fingers across, feeling for His face.

In my common deserts, I have found the daily discipline of fingering for Him in small things, in giving thanks for all that is, reveals the contours of Who He is. This waterfall of little grand gifts unveils the features of His countenance, the gentleness of His heart.

Waking to God near as we intentionally open eyes and give thanks, we experience the words that Pascal wrote more than 300 years ago,

"Instead of complaining that God had hidden Himself, you will give Him thanks for having revealed so much of Himself." (Pensees)

And yet we do not fixate "on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen" (2 Cor 4:17, 18 NEB). The daily gifts are not ends in themselves, but rouse us to become present to His abiding Presence. They lead us along the beam, back to His love.

I can rest. I have caressed and know. He is close.


Father? I feel You everywhere. You are beautiful and I have nothing to fear.


Today's Drink of Scripture:
"The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face shine upon you." ~NIV Numbers 6:23-25
"God bless you and keep you, God smile on you and gift you." ~MSG Numbers 6:23-25

Consider beginning your own gift list...feeling for His face
(adapted from a post originally posted 9/21/07)

Faith Assured

The house fills with the smell of roasting lamb.

The pies, dark red strawberries oozing, spilling, are cooling on the counter.

The Empty Tomb buns are rising.

The Twelve Voices of Easter rise too.

And the sun shines strong, the snow melts slow, the ice drips, drips, drips,

and we have faith in the Resurrection of the Son
rising tomorrow,
Spring and healing on His wings,

Christ on the move.

We thaw.

Part 1: Essence of Faith

Essence of Faith

I half, fold, crease the winter stitches

pressing patches down into blanket box darkness,

then shake out Easter quilts bright

as wind shakes panes

and ruffles the feathers of a huddle of sparrows

skittering atop ice crusted knoll

heralding, with calendar page, the first day of Spring,

the day for the changing of the quilts,

the hanging of resurrection hope

while the snow blows hard.

Photo: Easter quilts hanging on ladder in living room by bucket of pussy willows, branches for Easter Tree

Cure for a Soul Drip

It’s 1:48 a.m., from what the clock seems to read in the dark if I dare look, squinting without specs, and I want to, almost do, howl. Night, she’s escaping. Vainly I grab for the hem of her skirt. She runs. How to pin her down, force her to sprinkle me with that sparkling dust, what I need, must have, before that burning sphere of brilliance hurling towards the horizon storms in here. I beg her for sleep. She refuses to anoint with shimmering dreams. She teases. Elusively close, darting away, a flirting mirage I chase through the night.

The bath keeps time. This dance of desperation meted out by the faucet’s long, slow, shattering drip. I throw the pillow over my head. Drip. Plunge fingertips deep into ear drums. Drip. Yank blankets over my head. And lay still, pretending. If I act as if asleep, will Night acquiesce, come close and rock me? I lay feigning, praying. And the thought comes: is it really the slow drip of fears in the deep of me, one by one, gathering, swelling, hanging, suspended, waiting to fall, these that relentlessly prod me through this night running out.

Fears fall. Namelessly eroding away at the foundation of a life. What will the next doctor’s appointment determine? The next batch of bills bring? What will time carry these children to? How am I failing, falling, fumbling through? Drip. Drip. Drip. When the day whirls, and we swirl and the phone rings and the refrigerator hums and conversations crescendo, we don’t even hear the slow leak of a life. But come dark’s still, and Night taunts with sleep, we lay awake, with only the rush of pumping blood filling our ears and that wearing drip carving us down.

Farming Husband, captive audience to my flail and my fling, this dismally poor sleep-acting, slips out from under sheets, prepared to meet the drip. Two towels later, he crawls back in. A loud, echoing silence fills the night’s amphitheater, the house, me. I wait. And wait. And almost hope, and think maybe Night too will lean, bending over to listen, and the dust will trickle from her hand, and whisk me away to slumber.

“Sleep, Ann.” he whispers. “It’s quiet.”

Drip saturated, soaked up.

But I lay awake, thinking.

Are there towels to absorb seeping fears?

A way to hush a soul drip?

What saturates pain, quieting all that murmurs and howls within?

“The dominant characteristic of an authentic spiritual life is the gratitude that flows from trust—not only for all the gifts that I receive from God, but gratitude for all the suffering,” writes Brennan Manning. “Because in that purifying experience, suffering has often been the shortest path to intimacy with God.”

Under this dripping heart, I lay two towels down: Trust. In the unfaltering, immutable goodness of God, in a love that I can reach out and lace my fingers through in the middle of the dark. Trust in the Hand that lets suffering gently purify, drawing me in, close to His face. Gratitude. The essence of an authentic spiritual life that lays back into Him. Grateful and thankful for all of what is, because isn’t He in all of it too?

Fears absorbed.... if I don't move the towels.

Soul silence. Still and deep.

Entwined in Him and His peace, I sleep.

Father God, show me how to lay out trust and gratitude under this heart. I long for soul stillness.

Behold the Lamb... Trusting to go into Egypt

A series preparing hearts for Easter... (Day 6)
We pause to listen to His Word, linger, lift up voice in prayer...then go live the Word.
Perhaps gather family to join, cutting out the accompanying artwork and hang symbol on an Easter Passion Tree.

Listen to His Word (lectio/read):

Matthew 2:13-18 from NLT

After the wise men were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up! Flee to Egypt with the child and his mother,” the angel said. “Stay there until I tell you to return, because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

That night Joseph left for Egypt with the child and Mary, his mother, and they stayed there until Herod’s death. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “I called my Son out of Egypt.”

Herod was furious when he realized that the wise men had outwitted him. He sent soldiers to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under, based on the wise men’s report of the star’s first appearance. Herod’s brutal action fulfilled what God had spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

“A cry was heard in Ramah—
weeping and great mourning.
Rachel weeps for her children,
refusing to be comforted,
for they are dead.”

Linger (meditatio)..silently meditate on His Word:

That night Joseph left for Egypt with the child and Mary, his mother, and they stayed there until Herod’s death. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “I called my Son out of Egypt.”

(Join children in closing eyes and envisioning the passage, re-read again... again...linger.)

Lift up voice in prayer, responding to His Word (oratio):

Father, we marvel how You tranformed Egypt, the place where the babe Moses once floated down the Nile to escape the blade meant for all male infants, and used that same land as a place where the holy Child Jesus might find refuge. At Your fingertips, places of death are made into places of life. Mary and Joseph trusted You to deliver them even through the means of Egypt. Lead us into the same firm faith, Father. That in places that once meant death, we'd trust that You will bring forth life.

Places like the Cross.

Live the Word (contemplate it so long that it settles down into heart, hands, feet):

Today, have faith that places that seem to be dying places... God means to bring forth life. Spend time today with someone who has hurt you. Show them Christ's love. Have faith that God will to meet you there.

Watch for signs of new life.

Print, mount, cut, hang art symbol on Easter Tree

Artist: Dürer, Albrecht

What is Faith...

Part of this week's prayerful focus on Putting Roots into Christ:

"This is what faith really is:

believing,

not with the head or the lips or out of habit,

but believing with one's whole life.

It means seeking community with...

Christ in every situation in life..."

~Jurgen Moltmann

Jesus, could anyone see by my life what faith really is? Could anyone see that I have unbroken communion with You? Let me not just say I believe in You. Cause me to live it.


Photo: Roots digging down in the middle of winter at Niagara's Floral Showhouse

Looking Back...

Part of this week's heart focus on Trust




It’s morning, but the wind has not woke. Along the lane, the spruce trees slumber under heavy blankets of winter. Down in the orchard, the apple trees have tugged some of the eiderdown up across naked limbs, pulling warmth close. Last night’s wind song has lulled the world into deep sleep.

I walk the fields. This land, always my returning metaphor, the central metaphor, for this life we live here. (Is that why He calls us to dwell in the land?) A crow sets down, circles, lights. I watch him land in a hemlock on wood’s edge, snow showering down.

In the middle (or is it?) of the monochrome freshness rolled out, near the scruff of grasses poking along the old fence bottom, I stop, turn back. My tracks, pewter on pristine, trail behind, marking what’s been. Back behind the shed, tumbling down the hills past the barn, out through the hollow, they thread. But ahead, this endless sea of white, milk spilled across these farms, pooling around me , ahead stretches untried. Will I muddle the clean with my mucky ways? Will I, unaware, plunge down too deep, thrash about in pain and sadness? What knot lurks on tomorrow’s trail?

A gust of stinging cold blasts down the hill. I tighten my scarf. Winter stirs, fears whispering on the wind. I feel my own mounting.

Once asked if he could define the Christian life in a single sentence, a student apparently didn’t blink before replying, “I can define it in a single word: trust.” Standing there knee high in winter lace, is that another word mingling with wind’s howl? Trust, trust. Trust that the way across the fields, a life, will make itself known, will be well.

Trust whom? Surely, He who carries from those tracks behind, into now, out across the future. Is He worthy of trust? In looking back on the warp and weave of the tracks, in the remembering, clarity rises, cream coming to the top.

The act of looking back, track-pondering, is trust’s germ. Taking time to recollect, intentionally pausing, to remember the ways in which He has carried down, over and through the mires of the past, nourishes a trust that strips the fears and regales the faith. The choice to turn from the future fears and turn to recall who He has been through deaths, divorces, disappointments, unveils again the tender heart of He who winnows the way across the valleys to come, reveals His trustworthy character. Yes, true, there is the sense we forget what is behind, what has weighed down and burdened, what untruths the wicked one tangles and strangles us in, but doesn’t the Biblical narrative bear evidence: looking back gives courage for the trail ahead.

David turns too and track ponders:
“Yahweh, my God, I cried out to you for help,
And you healed me.
Yahweh, you pulled my life back up from Sheol,
made me alive again rather than an inhabitant of the Pit.” ~Ps. 30:2-3

He remembers his personal history—His story tracking across our fields. And in the intimate recalling, he encounters again Yahweh as Jehovah Jireh, his Provider. In the retracing, David again knows a reliable, trustworthy God who will never leave nor forsake him. But he can’t see that all so clearly when he peers ahead, squinting into the future. Clarity, hopeful trust for tomorrow, is often glimpsed in the shade of the path behind. David’s recollection tunes his heart to sing the final line of that psalm, “O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever.” Trust strengthened.

Looking down at my boots, I tromp north now, wondering and wandering. The words that crackled from the radio the other night home through the dark revisit. It’s the voice of Evelyn Husband, wife of Rick Husband, an astronaut whose soul never returned to earth after the crash of the shuttle Columbia. Speaking of all the feelings that surged in the moments and days after the crash, and the realization that Rick was never returning to their earthly home, she said,

“Deep inside, I knew God was going to walk me through this somehow. I knew it because he’d walked with me through other crises earlier in my life ... That’s why when you walk through a crisis, it’s so important to have a foundation of faith already established. Because you have to know whose hand you’re holding in order to step into the darkness of an uncertain future. ”

Evelyn Husband turned and looked back. And trust sprung up.

In remembering how God had carried her through the tight, suffocating places, this woman whose heart suffered third-degree burns when a shuttle scorched through earth’s atmosphere, she knew that He too would tenderly bind up these new wounds. Would thrust markers down to show her the way. Would grab her hand, let her lean into Him, and take each anguishing step with her. Just as He had done before. That, in looking back, the character of God stepped out of the shadows. God could be trusted. Even in this.

Brennan Manning writes, “The foremost quality of a trusting disciple is gratefulness.”

Isn’t this another paradox of the faith walk: trust for the future has its roots in gratitude for the past. I have begun to test the outer rim of this, wading into the shallows. I recall gifts:

little fingers stroking Mama hair...butter saturating pancakes...the script of a childhood friend tucked in the mail...a psalm that grips in the morning and carries throughout the day...the fragrance of a hyacinth blooming on the windowsill, snow falling outside...

Daily gratitude establishes a foundation of faith, trust, for whatever the path holds ahead. In the remembering, the looking back at the blessings, I see what God has done. But more. I see who God is. Loving. Sustaining. Faithful. The One who fills wandering ones with faith.

This homeward track pocking the snow isn’t empty, but full of faith.

I know His hand.

Lord, cause me to remember the blessings. For gratefulness for what You have done nourishes my trust in what You will do.

Begin you own One Thousand Gift List

Waiting on God

"The question comes again: Why is it that God's people do not know their God?

And the answer is: They take anything rather than God,—ministers, and preaching, and books, and prayers, and work, and efforts, any exertion of human nature, instead of waiting, and waiting long if need be, until God reveals Himself."

- from "Waiting on God"

Lord, I repent. And I wait.

Together

Part of this week's prayerful focus on Trust

She stands at the back door, her one sock molting off, boots still in hand. I catch her eye.

“Where are you going?”

The older children have piled into the van with coats and boots and spilling anticipation. But does this little one know the destination?

She crosses her knees, toes curling. Her eyes linger, searching.

Then eyes flash with the knowing. Little voice chirps, “I’m going with him.”

Pudgy finger points and deep blue eyes follow up to Big Dutch Daddy. Big Dutch Daddy grins down into this slip of a girl. Chuckling, I test again.

“And where is he going?”

A sun coming out from behind the clouds, her smile peeks. Slowly, the answer comes too. The only one that matters.

“He’s coming with me.”

Is this why the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these trusting ones?


Lord,why fear what is up ahead? What if I happily trusted? I am going with You, and You are coming with me.

Can I trust? Because we are together:
"Come, follow me," Jesus said,
I will never leave You nor forsake you

Probing: Where today could I take His hand and trust?

Savor

The sun is shining in, virgin light across brilliant snow. The table is flooded with golden warmth and steaming porridge bowls. The day begins with sustenance.

Malakai laughs, "I slurp down my toast!"

A frown knits across Joshua's brow. "We don't slurp our toast, Kai. We chew. Slowly."

My Bible lies open on the table, beside my bowl of oat flakes flecked with flax. And I wonder: Do I slurp this heavenly bread down, swallowing, swallowing? Or do I chew. Slowly. Deliberately. Savoring.

We wake to a new year with intentions to eat differently. While we resolve to exercise more, lose weight, to eat less, we begin the year as starved, crazed ones, desperate for food, gnawing for real filling, deep satiation.

So it should be. We growl, hungry for God.

And maybe that is how our empty heart places are satiated: eat less, savor more.

Words come to mind, a letter to this quiet inbox:

"I tried to use a One Year Bible this year and I found it too much for each day. I wasn’t able to really focus—it was too much content for each day.

I need some fresh ideas for reading His Word.

How do you read your Bible through the year? Do you follow a reading plan? Do you read straight through? What has been working for you lately?"

Too much content, not able to focus: swallow, slurp, swallow.
Fresh ideas: eat less, savor more.

My Bible beckons to Ps. 1:2: "on his law he meditates day and night." Is that swallow, slurp, swallow--or eat less and savor more? I want to digest God's Word, letting me become one with Him.

While we may read "meditate," the literal translation of "meditate" is the Hebrew word "hagah" meaning "to growl," sounding like what it describes, an onomatopoeia.

"Hagah"--"meditate"--"growl": one commentator refers to this meditating as "a deep dull sound as if vibrating within."

A vibrating within, a hunger. We starve for God.

But we don't seek fast food, tasteless, dry food that soon leaves us weak, but deeply satisfying, nourishing gourmet food.

To eat this book, to growl, hagah, for God and find filling, requires a reader who, in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, "does not always remain bent over his pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over the line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood."

How to let God's Word spread through our blood? How to eat this book and be changed viscerally? Do we bend over the plate, and vehemently consume? Or slow, taste, let it roll, swirl around, lean back, close our eyes, savor? Let its meaning spread through our blood.

A manner of scriptural feasting called Lectio Divina, meaning "divine reading" in Latin, invites one to slow, sacred eating.

As a meal with several courses so lectio divina offers up several servings of God's Word

Lectio: read the text.
In lectio, we begin to eat. We read or listen to a short passage (10-15 verses) of Scripture. Not a nibble here and a nosh there, not a gulping down... but from the same book of the Bible, each day, a portion of 10-15 verses, over the course of 20 minutes. We savor, reading deliberately, slowly re-reading, waiting for the still small voice of God that will speak to us personally, uniquely, intimately. We listen for a phrase or word from the text that is specifically God’s word for us this day. We sink into a good meal.

Meditatio: chew on the text.
We now chew on our word from God, the words we have read and eaten. This is not fast food. We will not rush, but meditate on this Word, this text, breaking it down, letting His Word becomes one with our being. We churn the words over, entering into the text, imagining the words being spoken to us personally. We lean back, close our eyes and see ourselves in the words of the active and Living Word.

Oratio: pray the text.
After slowly savoring God’s word to us, chewing on it, we are grateful for real food, thankful, moved. Oratio is our prayerful response to our satiation. Our prayers may be words, or prostrated worship, silent awe, voices raised in song. Our prayers may swell, grow, beyond our lips, to our hands, feet, and hearts! The word we have digested, chewed, has now begun to seep into our deepest selves, and we, filling, respond from those depths.

Contemplatio: live the text.
We still before Him who comes in the whisper, and hear how His Spirit tells us to live this text today. We've eaten and this food now fuels our speaking, our thinking, our walking. Our living. In the quiet of the meal's closing, we thinking on practical applications, so that the Word in the Bible becomes flesh in us. We let God's Word spread its meaning out in our blood, work its way into the sinews of our being so that we live out its vibrant hope.

I stand now, gathering porridge bowls that are empty, wiped clean with scraps of toasted bread. We have slowly savored, chewed, responded... and now we live from the strength found here at this table. For what is eating but nourishment, the formation of health?

And this Bible that lies on the table, it is no different. Unless it leads to health, to changing muscle, organs, sinews, the marrow of our bones ...

Food leads to bodily form. Lectio leads to spiritual formation. I am what I eat. How I eat.

“Reading, as it were, puts the solid food into our mouths, meditation chews it and breaks it down, prayer obtains the flavor of it and contemplation is the very sweetness which makes us glad and refreshes us.” ~Guigo

What if this year I ate eat less and savored more? Much more. So that He could form me.

Lord, let me read, meditate, pray. Then live it. Would You take me and form me? I am chewing slowly.

What I am listening to, whetting my appetite for more, more, more--can't get enough
And a highly recommeded gift from my Mama to make us growl, hunger, meditate

Free of Cares, Full of Trust: Celebrate

Part of this week's personal focus on Celebrate...

I am listening... humming... dancing a step here, there. A bit of celebrating, in the midst.

In the midst of snips of paper and crumbs of cookies, dough traced bowls and smudges of icing, curls of ribbon, crunch of scattered sprinkles underfoot. And laundry. And legos. And trail of lost socks, snow-wet peeled off and abandoned, as barefoot adventurer pursues other, better, exploits.

Release. Loosen. Surrender. Hum. It's an option, one I am pondering. Celebration in the midst, that is.

I think on it: that the spirit of celebration will never sing in us until we happily abandon ourselves.

That the spirit of celebration composes its music in us only when we let go, falling into the arms and heart of Father God.

That the spirit of celebration wells, springs, spills in us when we trust God, knowing His arms hold. Hold the way a Father holds a Babe.

I sweep, wash down with soapy warm, wrap up, gather loose ends and think on this end: We will never know joy and a lifestyle of celebration until we have "no anxiety for anything," "being careful for nothing."

We celebrate when we are free of cares, and full of trust.

Trust invites our spirit to a soiree-- a life--of carefree celebration.

I wonder if I might try.

Father? What would happen if I emptied my heart of cares and filled my day with trust? I could lay back into You. And You could hum. Sway. Swirl. Carefree Celebration. I'll be child in Your arms.

Remembering Why All is Well....

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well..."

~Julian of Norwich

Take a moment, just a moment, and remember why all is well....