How to Write a Life Story

“Not much time left, really.”

My father’s voice on the other end of the line reminds me of my grandfather’s, determined, sure. It’s been nearly ten years since I heard that voice, but here it is again on a Sunday morning, me making beds before church, Dad making his customary Sunday morning call.

“At best, maybe fifteen years. I’m on my last chapter.” He pauses and I let the empty space beckon answers. Grandpa died at eighty. Dad will turn sixty this coming year.

“I need a plan. I don’t think I’ve had one.”

I pull the sheets up, smooth out the bed’s coverlet in coming light, then wait, listening to Dad think. I’m hesitant to say anything. Best he find the way. But I’m still, just standing here, knowing that we are moving out into hallowed ground. I wait. Then venture into the space with only a question.

“Well, how do you want that last chapter to read, Dad?”

“I want to end happy.”

I sit on the edge of the bed, sunlight warm on my back, and ask slowly, “And what do you think brings happiness?”

He’s probing in the silence, the back corners of being, looking for what lies in unexamined places, and I’m praying.

“More farming.”



“More farming?” I make an effort but I know the words still sound incredulous, disappointed.

“My father farmed his whole life and made nothing.... But he thought someday folks would pay farmers for their work. That might happen in my lifetime. Can’t quit now. And maybe someday the grandkids will talk about how I could grow a crop of corn.”

I can see Dad sitting at his kitchen table, looking out the bay window, watching rows of pride growing up into light.

“What about the people? The relationships?” I let the words sit. They do.

And he goes in another direction, approaches it all from the other side.

“Alan Strand called the other day. He was trying to figure out whether to spend the time he’s got left restoring another tractor, buying a new engine for it, or if he should try to track down his daughter. He hasn’t heard from her in ten years. Doesn’t even know where she is.”

“And he decided?” That decision seems obvious, blazing.

“The tractor.”

I grope for meaning and the words dribble out. “He intentionally considered the options, voiced them to you… and then decided the tractor?”

“Yep. He knew how to do that. Little risk. The daughter was all risk. And you know….”

I shake my head. None of this makes any sense. And yet it does.

“Do we give up what makes us really happy --- farming, restoring tractors, writing, study, whatever we are good at it--- a lifetime of happiness—for a few days of happiness at the end? Do we sacrifice what makes us really happy day in and day out, for a few days of happiness with the people at the end? And there’s no guarantees with the people.”

I’m stirred. Before I can think, I rush along, finding what I’m looking for, my rock. I say the words more to myself than to him, words leaving my mouth before I can think. “Jesus said, ‘He who loses his life will gain it.’”

The other end of the line is quiet. Tentatively, I step out a bit further. “Maybe making small sacrifices in personal pursuits – doing less of our own thing in our own spheres .... maybe taking the time to enter into the bubble of the other, in the end we will know a happiness we couldn’t have imagined.”

I circle back, wondering if he’s following. “Maybe this is one way we live out what Jesus us calls us to.” I say the words again, deliberately, for they seem new to me, richer in ways I hadn’t considered. “He who loses his life will find it.”

Dad lets his voice expose where he is. “Yeah. Maybe. But maybe none of us can change really. Great artists, great actors, great politicians, its all the same. They do what makes them happy and that means they don’t have much time for people. Balance is a hard thing. Nearly impossible if we are going to do something well. And we’re wired the way we are. Maybe those around us just come to accept it.”

I hurt inside and Dad says, “I am too old to change. I know farming.”

Then he’s talking about the price you can get for a bushel of corn, the weather forecast for the next few weeks, but I’m thinking about the times I’ve been in my own bubble with my own agendas of accomplishments, drifting away from people and true happiness disguised.

I’m remembering with a strange sadness a woman standing amidst the floral memorials of her mother’s funeral, reflecting on her mother’s far-and-wide reputation for the important stuff of bleach and immaculate housekeeping. And the times I’ve chosen to wash windows, tend a flowerbed, answer an email, instead of playing a game of bananagrams with a trio of loud boys, read an Eloise Wilken story to pleading eyes. My pride was tangled up in the tasks. Why didn’t it matter more to love well? Where did I think I really would find happiness?

And I wonder if it’s the fact that relationships don’t bring us paychecks, rarely accolades. Loving well, stepping over hurt, laying aside self and desires, draws on more of our interior resources than investing in a career, a skill, a personal pursuit. And yet, there are no promotions. No public status. No guarantees.

Relationships grow only in a hot house of of humility, selflessness, open-handedness. Hard things that are inherently risky: for all that, you can’t control the outcome.

Investing in relationships requires courage. It mandates daily fortitude and intentionality to make moment by moment decisions to prioritize relationships while balancing vocational demands.

Do my daily decisions support my belief that relationship is the essence of reality? Or do I merely pay lip service while the use of my hours clearly reveals true priorities?

Dad’s talking about what he’s got to get done this week and I am my Father’s daughter.

“Look at the time." I can see him turning there at the table, looking up at that clock ticking loudly over the kitchen sink. "What am I doing here?” He sounds disgusted. That rural work ethic. “I’ve got so much to do and here I am talking the day away with you.”

I have to smile. Dad’s customary call always ends with this customary adieu.

“Good talking with you, Dad.”

And then he’s gone. Off to write more farming, more of what he’s good at, into that last chapter. And I gather Bibles for church and more of hearing Jesus’ words to come crucify self, words I need to hear again and again.

Monday dawns a week of holidays, days of flag waving and patriotism.

Farmers don’t know holidays. Livestock needs feeding 365 days a year, crop rhythms keep time with the skies not the calendar. But we finish barn chores early, eat dinner, gather lawn chairs to head up to the lake and explosions of hues over water. Something we rarely did as kids, but trying to make memories for this generation of farm kids. Leaving the work and investing in people.

Sun’s sunk deep down into water, only a glow of embers burning along the horizon, when we find a place on shore’s edge. A place beside a man sitting in a lawn chair in the deepening dark. A man with a farmer’s cap silhouetted in night drifting in.

Shalom turns and the man sihouette turns and then she laughs, runs through the shadows. “Grandpa!”

And I smile for time made and the sacrifice written onto this day’s page.

My hand finds the shoulder of that flannel plaid jacket and he finds my hand, pulls me closer, brushes my cheek with that leathery skin.

“Ann…” He nods, his voice soft, full of things he can't say.

“Dad.” I squeeze his hand, a long, lingering pulse of all I feel.

And then fireworks bloom, mirror images rocking gently on water, two spaces merging and petals of color falling. The children pull up on Grandpa’s lap, lean in close, and I think how children will talk about this yield of time, and how in our dark places, we sacrifice and find faces and light and happiness unexpected.

The skies explode and light rains down and I think of who I am in this story with these people, and what the plan is for this flash of days, and how I am my Father’s daughter.

Tonight we are not too old to take courage, sacrifice the accolades of accomplishments, and linger long with souls on the rim of time, and somewhere in the dark we forget what was lost for the tender wonder of what has been found.

Lord, today how can I die to accomplishments, pride, tasks? To do the better work of Loving well.


Photos:
Two paths in our wheat field
Dad's work clothes flapping in the wind
Dad working on tractors in his shop
Fireworks, family, and small sacrifices

Third Birthday

(Notes from this weekend...)

She slides close in the coming light and I bury my head in her tendrils, damp and tangled, this night halo she wears through dreamworlds. And then I remember. Today (I can hardly breathe) is the last day.

Tenderly sweeping back these gold strands from around her face, I watch her eyelashes flutter but a moment, her lips slightly open, breathdreams rising and falling softly. On this very pillow she lay the night she first breathed air of this earth, this sliver of heavenlight. That night I cupped her head in my hand, fragile moon, and slept the night us two nestled near, while lightning bugs blinked celebration at the edge of the woods. And in a blink I wake to this morning, to this, the last day of her being two.

Her and I, we’ve always only known two.

Two from the meeting, from the soundless, cosmic settling, the forever light unfurling, the knitting into me. Two from the watery womb swelling, her skin stretching mine, her heart staccatoing under mine, us two in time together.

Cutting the cord on the emerging day changed everything and nothing at all. Heads close on this pillow, we breathed into each other faces. My life flowed out, nourishing hers. Our skin now touched, melded, us two. Though two, we lived entwined, mingled, one.

But today two slips away and she, this gift child, blooms three.

The intake of breath, the realization, pierces sharp.

But He comes quick, soothes with Truth, " But hasn't Two always been Three?"

And I close eyes, nod a half smile, caress her soft cheek, and slip out of bed to bake a cake for tomorrow in the peace of always Three.

"A cord of three strands is not quickly broken" ~Ecc. 4:12

Lord, braid us, these ones near to us, our lives around You, a strong strand for these days...

(To those who sent Shalom birthday wishes, you make us smile, together we delight, and we thank you for sharing this journey with us... We'll write soon...)

A Love Body

Part One: Common Stones

It’s hard to think that it’s been almost two years since I wanted to quit church, ours. I mean that particular building, that group, not the Body, never the Body.

A Sunday in late August, as the corn dried golden all around that country church, Beryl Martin, after playing the closing chords of the service the way only she can, hair coiffed and soft eyes searching, she found Mama in the foyer, back by the coat hangers and children darting between legs, and she asked after me. Asked how I was doing and all. Did Mama think Ann might be interested in helping with the women’s ministry?

“No, Beryl, I don’t think so.” Mama has a reputation for her nonsensical ways; gentle, warm, but forthright nonetheless. “She’s not good here. Not good at all.” I can hear Mama saying that, the way she’d punctuate “at all,” her voice deep and certain, her eyes peering knowingly over the rim of her glasses, headed tilted down.

It bothered me for days, when Mama told me of their exchange. Laying in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, that line would lay out too, stretching long beside me, prodding me awake. “She’s not good here.”

And I’d say it again, what I’d been muttering all along, “But I am good. No, maybe not entirely with this particular church.” Satin night fell soft outside windows like a headboard over these pillows and I’d look up to Him who names those diamonds strewn across the Milky Way, “But I am good with You, God. Know I am good with You.”

I was.

But still this internal bleeding, anguishing slow drips of sadness that seemed to know no healing.
I was growing estranged from His Bride.

It hurt, my soul did, in this physical, fractured way, to have Mama say what I couldn’t say. That, true, I struggled to sit for a few hours with that particular group of people for whom the Carpenter had stretched out two palms and let hammer staple him to wood. That I shrunk from gathering formally with this group of folks who took His name as theirs. That I wanted to worship God elsewhere, even alone, but not in the midst of that assembly.

I mourned. But truth is I didn’t fit, couldn’t force myself into the shape of the place. I didn’t belong. I came to live on the fringe, a Body appendage exposed and cold. On the outside. This endlessly repeating experience of trudging through chilled blue moon nights looking for someone to open a door into warmth and a seat by the hearth. I think the loneliness though gnawed worse than the cold.

But, really, I wasn’t alone: many wander raw. The church as a whole is full of outsiders, dangling body parts who find themselves far from the heated heart of their spiritual home. So many numb-cold fingers of discouraged outsiders looking for doors, doors into places that read, understand, live Scripture as they understand it, to warm near sojourners who burn within as they do. The Christian landscape swarms with migrating outsiders seeking new church homes, new hearths to draw close to, places to feel embraced, full, wrapped warm.

We stayed. I got up every Sunday, dressed kids, gathered Bibles. We went. I read eyes of other outsiders, wounded ones who stayed committed through long years of cold. I read this line, underlined it, held it as a light through the wintry nights howling:

“God wants you to be in regular close fellowship with other believers so you can develop the skill of loving. Love cannot be learned in isolation. You have to be around people --- irritating, imperfect, frustrating people.” *

Maybe even wrong people. Not on the essentials, but perhaps not entirely right on doctrine as a whole. Could I love frustrating, arrogant, (possibly) wrong people? (And, anyways, haven’t I been all of that and more?) So we intentionally attended. Though worn out we reached out.

We (even us) learned grace.

But I never knew it like I did this past Sunday, standing there in the last row, holding a toddler, voice rising on hymn’s chorus. She’s standing too, singing there in front of me, holding a toddler of her own. A rowdy, bobbing toddler, playing this riotous game of peek-a-boo with 6-year-old sister who’s darting in and out behind Mama’s shoulder. A younger brother’s running back and forth across the chairs.

“Stop now,” she glares at oldest girl. Daughter giggles, pops around other shoulder. Toddler howls loudly, throws himself in her direction and another boisterous round begins. Singlehandedly, vainly, this Mama shoos away, shifts, shakes an angry finger and the kids play on.

I ache.

She’s bravely here alone, a single Mom trying to manage, no hand from a mate and father. He’s living with a highschool girl who swells with another of his children. It wasn’t that long ago this Mama too ran with that crowd, writing her own wild story.

My brother knows. He’s happens to be standing beside Single Mama and children this Sunday. I look at them both, standing here, side-by-side. They both did the same parties, the same all-nighters. And, incomprehensibly (but isn’t that God’s modus operandi?), they both met the same Jesus. Instead of dragging through a Sunday morning hangover from a Saturday night binge, they are standing here in a little country church singing a two-hundred year old hymn of worship.

Little girl flashes again, toddler shrieks with delight, brother dashes. Single Mama frowns, hisses, sighs.

Then my brother leans over.

Leans over, whispers something, and she nods. He scoops up brother zipping by, wraps arm around peek-a-booing sister, and the chorus crescendos but I can’t sing for the mess of tears streaming down.

I’ve seen grace.

Raymond Petersen’s leading the congregational hymn, and Charlotte Hiemstra’s playing the piano, and widowed Gerald Hayden’s manning the sound system. Ann and Piet Van Den Boogard are on the far side with the ten kids, and bachelor Andrew Versteeg is holding out a hymnal for the seeing-impaired friend he faithfully brings. And through this spilling blur, I see.

I see Bert Struyk across the aisle. Bert shaved bald, that crescent scar arching across his head where they cut into his skull and sliced out that knot of cancer. Bert exposed. Like us in this moment.

I may wash up, dress in Sunday finery, prune and preen and turn out to church looking polished. And in hushed voices (and sometimes a tad too loud) I disparage other pilgrims, point out the hypocrites, the Pharisees, the power hungry, the doctrinally wayward. I, we, try to tear off the masks, deflate the puffed up, set things straight.

But in this moment, we are this, all of us, naked and seen.

We are all as messy as these rowdy kids and an exasperated Mama. We are all as bruised as an abandoned wife with her own sordid past. Without exception, we are all scarred, torn and scraped, battle weary. Me (chiefly). My brother. Gerald Hayden. Bert. The elders. The pastor. All ragamuffins in need of a little help. A lot of grace.

I wipe wet cheeks, try to focus on the next verse of words still swimming when I realize that us ruffians are all He has. The only ones He has to gather here, braid voices together, and worship Him. The only ones He has to lean over, offer a hand, and love each other. The only ones to be His Body here in this wrecked world. We’re it. For all our façades and our masks, we are just a bunch of broken, cracked, messy ones. We, His global church, His beloved Bride.

We'll never get it all right, be all right, create heaven on earth. Because, individually, we aren't. Though I wish, no church utopias on this side. Because each of us as body parts are a bit malformed. (I guess that is what heaven's for, the perfecting yet to come.) But we can be here, together, loving, a bruised bride wooing the Bridegroom with worship.

The hymn’s on the last verse, and the children are asked to file down to Sunday School. My brother helps rambunctious children make their way to the aisle. Relieved, Single Mama smiles up to my brother, nods gratefully, takes little hands, and leads dragging, dancing ones to the stairs. Bert Struyk’s smiling too, because he’s here. Not sick at home or in some hospital bed, but here in the gathering of the saints. Us sinners sanctified into saints… still stumbling, still scarred under it all, but saints nonetheless, headed in the right direction, Crossward.

And I am here too, across the aisle from Bert, standing behind my brother, scanning the rows, looking for Mama’s face, her crown of white. I want to find her, tell her about loving the messy ones, like a Carpenter I know does for me, about living in community with (irritating, frustrating, maybe even wrong) ragamuffins, some obvious, some not so obvious, tell her about this grace I’ve touched for the wounded and mended ones.

Tell her that I am here, that I am staying here, and I am good.



Lord, today how do you call me to warm chilled outsiders who are scarred deep--scars I too know and carry. How can I love messy ones like me... who may not even know they're messy? How can I love Your broken and limping Bride? Show me. She's all You have. And I am a body part, messy too, made for grace and called to love.


To read part one of these thoughts : Common Stones
* quoted from the Purpose Driven Life

a bowl of cherries bestowed

He and I, we bring home a cherry tree in the bed of the pickup, roots twelve years old (a year younger than him), fibrous and fragile, leaves slapping in the wind.

And he’s telling me how much he paid for milky moon on buds, raindrops coursing down bark still smooth young, snow falling thick and quiet on branches , sun unwrapping the first early blossoms. True, a more slender tree was cheaper, but he’s telling me how much he decided to pay (with birthday money, his 13th) for time, a cycle of a dozen seasons to be exact, for trunk thicker, limbs longer.

Paying for time. I’d like to buy me some of that. More of that.

June’s heat falls heavy and hot, too close and sticky, and we’re rolling windows right down, and I turn down a back gravel road and let the wind whip our hair cool, relieve us from this tinny oven. Arm out the window, riding high then low on air currents, he’s talking about which end of the orchard to plant it and how to ward off winged thieves, those wily crows scheming to scarf down ruby gems, and wondering how many cherries it would take to make a pie, but did I have any ideas on how to pit what is sure to be a record-breaking crop?

I am still back thinking about time and how to get more of it (but it’s really about just making the most of it) and knowing the hope and loss we’re bringing home in the back of this pick-up.

So I turn, look into the field-tanned face of this boy of mine who’s just left childhood and bought himself a cherry tree and I smile and tell him what little I know of life, and this heaping bowl of cherries bestowed.

“We’ll deal with the pits.”

He smiles too and he and I drive home to plant a ball of roots in dirt and wait with open hands for what the seasons bring, time heavy with cherries and pits redeemed, a pie orchard for a someday generation.


Scripture Thought: "Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?" (Job 2:10)


Lord, cause me to see, gather, taste, the cherries of each season. And help me deal with the pits: with You, they could be planted for more sweet.

Common Stones

Our shadows stretch us long across this field, us bent low, rock pickers combing earth. This is spring's song. Always has been, as long as I can remember. It’s what I know and what those before knew, what those now coming are coming to know.




The ground moans after winter’s weight, working stones to the surface, and we, all of us, young or worn, come again with spring, pluck this sod, play this song. Fingers pry around hard edges, dislodge rock from soil beds, then haul limestone and granite to trailer. I watch us, silhouettes on dirt, scan, swoop, carry. We are outlined clay.


Here, it is clear. This is what we are, all of us without exception. Peel off the degrees, strip the careers, tear back the status symbols, this is who we are. We are dirt.

And in a moment I am twelve again, heavy with rocks, racing my brother in this same field, arms cradling rocks bigger I hope than his, to trailer heaped. Grandpa, near deaf, slows tractor, clutches, waits, but doesn’t idle back the throttle. Tractor engine screams for us to hurry, press harder.

We did. We do.

And now time’s raced on, returning Grandpa, returning him to the dirt whence we’ve all come, never to know these kids who walk this same soil, this same field, leaving footprints here too. But here in twilight, we somehow meet, dust bending down to touch dust.

“The earth is what we all have in common,” writes Wendell Berry.

In common with those in the past. In common with those in the future. In common with those now, all of us walking and living off this dirt beneath our feet. This earth, loamy and rocky, sandy and gritty, it’s where we live these now days, that from which we came, that to which we all return. We all return to our fathers, to what we all are.

“You picked this field, Mom?” Our 13 year-old future man pants the words, his arms too full, his face red with work.





“Every year. This ground’s been picked and picked and picked.” I toss two more rocks onto the trailer’s rising mount and think of the years of gilded harvests before the late autumn rains, the shift of clouds and winds, and white flakes falling, years of warmth returning, and us with it, to work up soil and pick these rocks, rocks, rocks.

“Is there a volcano or something underneath this field, just bubbling them up? Where do all these stones keep coming from?” His brother, sweaty, grimy, weary, hollers from the other side of the trailer. He’s kneeling down, both hands gripped to a stubborn one, thin muscles quaking it back and forth.

I laugh, motion him out of the way, kick at the embedded granite. “When I was your age, my brother, sister and I, we used to fill trailer load after trailer load with rocks and these crazy dreams of some spray we’d invent to disintegrate stones.”

Farmer Husband, wearing this mask of dirt, teeth smiling white, heaves a big one up to the trailer’s edge, rolls it in.

“You too? I thought only my brothers and I had those kind of wild ideas.” I look into those eyes ringed in dirt, and he into mine, and I remember him young, us farm kids, like these kids, us dreaming the same dreams.

Our oldest reaches up behind the tractor seat for the thermos and some cold wet for us all standing here for a moment. “Guess nobody can figure out a spray or anything better than just this, eh?” He grins, a raccoon of grime, then glugs that water down.

“Nope. This is really the only way. Bend down, pick it up, carry it off.” Farmer Husband takes his turn at thermos spout. He swipes away water dripping from chin with dusty, untiring arm.







“Just one rock at a time.”

I smile at the patch of skin he’s washed clean.

Just one rock at a time. Generations of us dirt-ones, bending low, picking up sin-boulders, asking Jesus to carry them off. Each growing season turning up more stony edges, more that needs prying, kicking out. So it goes for us who are dust.

It’s what we all, every one of us everywhere, have in common: this earth. These bodies of dust. This rocky soul soil.


We all must wrestle, wrench out, pray for Him to come do what we can’t do with these sin boulders so we can harvest a crop. Season after season, generation after generation, dirt dealing with dirt and all its stones.

All of us, we’re the same, working with Jesus on our soul fields.

We’re all just picking rocks.

Picking rocks with Him who does what we all only wildly dream of.

Working with Him who rolls the stones away.

Lord, I am just simple dust, dealing with a lot of rocks. Help me. Roll away my stones. And help me see what I have in common with all of us living after the Fall: that we are all just picking rocks, asking for Your hand.

Part two of Common to follow
Photos: us, dealing with stones

Soul Holes

Part One Here...

We grew full of bitterness, not grace.

Years later I would sit at one end of that brown-plaid couch, my dad stretched out along its length. Worn from a day driving tractor, sun beating and wind blowing, he’d ask me to stroke his hair. I’d stroke from that cow-lick of his and back, his hair ringed from the line of his cap. And he’d close his eyes and I’d ask the questions I could never ask looking into them.

“Did you ever used to go to church? Like a long time ago, Dad?” The neighboring Williams family took turns with the van Veen family, picking me up Sunday mornings for the drive into town and services.

“Yeah, we went. Your grandmother had us go every Sunday, after milking was done. That was important to her.”

I kept my eyes on his dark strands of hair running through my fingers.

“But it’s not important to you now?” The words, barely whispered, hung.

He pushed up his plaid sleeves, shifted his head, his eyes still closed. “Oh….”

I waited, hands combing, waiting for him to find the words for those feelings that don’t fit neatly into the stiff ties, the starched collars, of sentences.

“No, I guess not anymore. The day Aimee died, I was done with all of that.”

Scenes blast my memoryscape and I reel.

“And, if there really is Anybody up there, They sure were asleep at the wheel that day.” I don’t say anything, that lump in my throat a glowing, burning ember. I just stroke hair, soothing pain. He finds more feelings, stuffs them into words.

“Why let a beautiful little girl die such a senseless, needless death? And she didn’t just die, like your mother always says. She was killed.”

That word twists his face. His eyes remain closed, but he’s shaking his head now, remembering all there was to say no to that hideous November afternoon that branded our lives.

Dad didn’t need more words. That shake of the head said it all. No. No benevolent Being, no grace, no meaning to it all. He rarely had said all that, only sometimes, when he’d close his eyes and ask me to stroke away the day. But these aren’t things you need to say anyways. Like all beliefs, you simply live them. We did.

No, God. No God.

The air our family breathed, this oxygen of negativity, it wasn’t ours alone. It is our human inheritance, the Garden’s legacy. It’s the bedrock of all sin, this ingratitude of Adam and Eve. The rest of the garden wasn’t enough.

When God said humanity was not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God ripped away what we wanted. He stole what we considered rightly ours. He snatched away what we deemed ultimately necessary for our happiness and wholeness. Don’t we keep reliving the Garden, again and again? No longer did we trust Him. No longer was He good. No longer could we see all of the remaining paradise.

When Eve stood there under that tree’s leafy shade, determining that she needed what God had said no to, she closed herself to the rain of His grace. So began our long drought. Focused on that which she was not to have, she lost all that she did have. Ingratitude throws us out the Garden and into the barren wilderness of despair.

And even long after I personally said yes to God, I still lived no, developing macular holes on the retina of my soul. Blind spots, missing God present and giving.

Funny, my soul’s macular hole seemed to spontaneously heal in church. There God’s obvious, close. Bibles lay open in laps, the sanctuary fills with hymnal worship, reverent and real, and the table, spread with the emblems, that singular cup and loaf, calls us to remember, to see. There, even I could see. But the rest of the week, the days lived in the glaring harshness of the gritty world? There, yes, full-thickness macular holes, complete loss of central vision, a world pocked with scarcity. I could find no water well.

I wasn’t good enough, my children weren’t good enough. Our church needed more of this, our community more of that. Now that we’d finally got this fixed, couldn’t we now tackle that? Sure, the new house down the road was lovely, but when were they going to get the lawn seeded? I appreciated the neighbor’s lively conversation, but when he was going to get busy, lose a bit of weight, find a wife?

My sister’s jarring death had torn a hole into the canvas of my world right at my beginning. Now everywhere I looked, I only saw all that wasn’t. Holes, lack, deficiency.

One life loss can infect all of our life, a rash that wears through the fabric of our days, our seeing, with black voids, shadowy fissures, endless abysses.

It means favor, grace does. From the Latin, gratia. Connotes free readiness. A free and ready favor, that’s what grace is.

I took the grace offered at the Cross, the free favor of forgiveness of my sins. But to live as Ann, "full of grace"? Full of all His favors, His gifts? I didn’t know how to patch that gaping gash up.

And so more tore.



Lord, losses burn holes in the soul retina. Leave us blind to You. And the infection spreads. Heal, Lord. So we can see You, find the well of Your living, spilling waters. And end the drought.

Part of this week's prayerful focus on Choices. Part One here. Part Three here.

Stop Signs

I think it was because my window was rolled down a few inches that he bothered to yell at me.

Otherwise, he may have just left it at that disgusted frown and shake of his head. But his driver’s window was cranked down too, us both looking for the relief of breezes from that sun blazing down. So when he turned north off the 4th line, down at Knapp’s corner, our dusty van barely paused there at the intersection, he didn’t even have to lean over when he hollered at me.

“There’s a stop sign there, you know!”

Color, shame, floods my cheeks. But before I can nod, mumble an apology, he and his diesel pick-up rumble off.

“That wasn’t very nice of him. You had stopped, Mom.” Joshua’s passenger seat defense tries to soothe.

“Why did that man yell that?” Hope’s turns back after the truck’s dust cloud, looking for answers.

Flustered, I carefully scan to the west, then east, then west again, before creeping forward through the intersection. And then manage a feeble explanation.

“He was concerned I wasn’t going to brake in time. That I hadn’t seen the stop sign. It scared him. And that’s fair.”

The wind blows through our open windows, our hair. In the rush of spring, I wonder if each of us replay his words again, the scene, reading his anger as fear. But maybe they don’t, their young faces silently watching the meadow slip close to the road with its petticoat of white trilliums. Maybe it’s just me thinking about stop signs nearly missed.

I’m like that. Always rushing, hardly braking in time, off again. In a hurry. So much to be done. Or so I think.

What hard stops in my life have I been driving through---or hardly pausing for?

How often am I mindfully slowing to intersect my time with God? Early, throughout, and late. Or do I barely make meaningful time at anytime in my day to commune in lingering, unhurried ways with God? Somedays, yes. Somedays, no. There are too many rolling stops.

The meadow retreats and waving fields of greening wheat lap up along the roadside. The children, hands pointing and voices sure, debate whether that farmer is planting corn way off in a field on the horizon, or if he’s drilling in beans. And it’s just me thinking about stop signs nearly missed and slowing to meet with God.

I’m listening to the prophet in a pick-up: There are stop signs here, you know. So I’ll stop and linger long in prayer.

To avoid life crashes.

Lord, if life is crashing... have I been running stop signs?
Today, it's all speeding by so fast, I simply have to stop and pray.

Part of this week's series on prayer...

Related: John Piper on Be Devoted in Prayer
Read an excerpt of Praying with the Church, Following Jesus, daily, hourly, today
Et-Tu: Schedules and Hard Stops and Permanence
Praying the Hours

Gestation Days

I don't remember how many times stainless needles poked about her blue veins in attempt to drain in another IV bag. You lose count in a storm of hyperemesis gravidarum that pounds relentlessly, leaving one limp and hanging over a toilet bowl. The days, weeks, months of wooziness, churning smells, swirling green nausea, it all eroded away at joy.

But when a whisper of fingers wrapped close yesterday....

"Wasn't that worth every single day of it?" The words are soft. No one speaks loud on holy ground. I search my sister's eyes.

She smiles, looks down into those gleaming black jewels just opening.

"Entirely." She strokes that heaven-fresh cheek. "If you only knew... had a window ahead to see... then you'd know for all those days where you just want to give up. It is more than worth it."

A stretching yawn captivates. Smitten, we laugh.

"It's like heaven, isn't it?" I watch Little Ana sigh, purse her lip, bubble. "If we just had a window ahead... We'd know these hard days are worth it."

Quiet settles and we let it, eyes only for this miracle bundled. I smell her whisp of black hair, kiss her forehead.

And then... after a bit, the realization comes slowly.

"You know....," my eyes don't leave that flawless face. "We did know. We had a window ahead of why it was worth it: her three sisters."

My sister sadly nods. "True."

And through the twilight home, I can only speculate about all the windows ahead He opens, faintest glimpses of heaven's glory, that I miss, ignore.

Today I pray to wake. To wake to this endless stream of assurances He gives.

For all around He writes that heaven's coming wonder will be worth these long gestation days.

Lord, wake me to the windows of the soon-to-be that open into now. Let us bask in the rays of light, warmth to carry us through the weariness of gestation. Oh, the delivery coming!

Photo: Ana and I meeting

A Dwelling Place

It’s the slow, heaving pant on the other end of the line that wakes me. No words in the receiver, just this heavy, exaggerated exhale of a body.

My brow crinkles. I don't open eyes, searching for a way out of dreams, to figure out who, why.

And then a voice, hardly audible:

“I think it is today.”

Today?

It registers.

My sister’s voice.

And today. The Saturday before Mother’s Day.

I know this place, familiar and worn. I been here before.

Thirteen years ago on the eve of Mother’s Day, that was my labored breathing, the muscles of my abdomen contracting taut and iron hard, me riding wave after cresting wave.

I don’t open my eyes to the grey mingling of dark and dawn, just inhale and exhale too. I remember words for this in between place.

“In Him, you can do this, sister.” I press the phone closer, wanting her to hear, get this.

“Just stay fluid, lean back into it. Let it come. The more you tense, the more it intensifies. Let it all flow through you. Channels only.”

They are close, handy, those phrases that coached through our six births. And too, I guess what is true of labor is true of the work of life. Stay fluid, let His current take you, don’t rail. Channels only.

“You think I can do this?” Her teeth are chattering now, nerves jangled, scared.

“Lay back into Him, and let it all just come. Don’t fight it. Then yes, you can definitely do this.”
She answers with long, methodical breathing. I nod, smiling into dark lighting.

“Enjoy this fullness,” I whisper. “You know not if you pass this way again.”

We both know it’s time and she has to go and I step into new day coming. I stretch covers up over sleeping places, comb out Little Girl’s dream knots, set bowls out and around for their coming in from barn and chores and early morning air. But prayers linger on lips, always prayers.

Hope-girl and I, we dress for a Mother-daughter garden tea at the chapel this morning, this Saturday before Mother’s Day. She wears flashing pink and I wear safe black and I don’t know what my mother would have wore, for now she cannot come. Mama will collect my nieces close while my sister lets go of curled child within.

At garden gathering, we choose a table draped in yellow, Hope-girl and I, finger the violet petals strewn about, and listen to this chatting, laughing, weaving of lives together, shuttle slipping back and forth. I am there, surrounded by daughters, mothers, grandmothers, but I am not there, a loose string. Talk of recipes, sipping of cups, but my thoughts are in the same hospital I was in thirteen years ago on the cusp of my first Mother’s Day.

I am with a uterus emptying.

Sometimes I catch myself, this laying a hand on my flatness, over that still cavity, and feeling the pulse of ache’s echoing howl. A woman’s body and soul is hollowed out to create, to weave, to knit in the private spaces. And so the longings come, yearnings to fill, to carry, to deliver.

I remember where I was when Husband looked into these seeking eyes and tenderly agreed, “It is true. The barren womb never is satisfied” (Prov. 30: 15-16). If only he really knew how it can scald...

And yet, I have come to think, does the womb need a seed, an unfurling, embryonic soul? Can any soul fill the void? While not necessarily with child, perhaps we may be with abandoned, with elder, with needy. The barren and deserted may become the dwelling place, the fertile home, of souls seeking mother-care.

“The barren has borne…” (1 Sam. 2:5).

Hope-girl beside me, she brushes up against my arm, yogurt-dipped strawberry kissing her lips. She's laughing with her friends. How did that babe I once enveloped in watery womb, unfold into this long lissome dreamer? She grows and I lay fallow. And yet…

We are hardly through home’s door when the phone rings, her voice again, her breathing now undetectable.

“Already?” I glance up at the clock over the table.

“She’s here.” Her voice is light, wearily happy. “We have four.” I shake my head at the wonder of those four sisters laughing and weaving old together.

“Ana… after you.” My breath catches. Words scatter, leaving me stilled.

“Ana Jordan… Jordan cried when we told her. Who knows? Jordan may never marry or have children. And there is always this little one to love.”

The barren has borne. Both of us.

And I realize: We never cease to be with child. Those of us who have birthed, and those of us who never have. We may make spaces within us for all of humanity, for their dreams, their stories, their hurts, their lives. Do we not, over the years, line our lives with the stretchmarks of love?

The privilege of carrying a soul is always ours. We may choose to never let our wombs languish empty. Always we may open and welcome another person to find nourishment and comfort within the empty places we have made just for them.

Somewhere under this night pinned up with stars, Ana Jordan sleeps near her mother’s face, her warm breath falling, her fists clenched tight. And we of empty uteruses still swell, making ourselves homes.

It’s my last act on this Saturday before Mother’s Day. To fold a card and write a haiku of feelings for my own who loves and harbors yet:

Silver-crowned mama
Still you swell, full with child, an
Always dwelling place.

Lord, show me today how I can make space in my life to be a womb...

Related:
On Mothering
In Mama's Honor

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.

Seed Bed

She’s laid bare, exposed and waiting. We, all of us, watch as he stands on her tilled edge, opening bags, preparing to fill soil’s barrenness. Something about the sound of ripping out stitched string, hope and promised unsealed.

The open seed bags line the tailgate, ready. The truck bed sags under the heaviness of seeds, millions of diminutive, near-weightless-in-my-hand seeds. Across the field, edging toward us, the tractor with planter behind, seems to enlarge, grow up out of the dirt. Engine drones louder, closer. That horsepower’s filling earth’s emptiness with seeds, 16 rows drilling 29,500 embryos of life into every acre of naked ground.

Farmer Husband kneels down into land already planted. Like a prayer, he scrapes back the surface, searches.



“Found one.” The wind carries his voice to us sitting in the ditch’s grass. “We’ve got the depth, the spacing. Looks good!” His grease-creased hands move slowly, carefully, folding the seed back into its dark earth slumber.

Granules, sediment, is all she looks like. Dirt. Kick a foot at her, and she flies away, a cloud of dust. But beneath her, still and hidden, lies millions of seeds about to awaken, stir, burgeon, swell with life.

Farmer Husband’s brother backs up tractor and this planter empty of seed. Time to refill. These brothers, whose blood comes from a land far across the Atlantic Ocean, heft seed bags and pour into planter hoppers.

Little Girl stands beside me watching her daddy work, her cheeks full of apple, her hair riding wind. She’s standing on dirt I stood on as a little girl, watching my own Daddy pour seed to fill this farm with.

Seeds and dirt. Isn’t that what we are, really? Seeds planted deep into loam, growing, living, dying, dust returning to dust, new seeds planted. Seeds as many as the stars in the sky.

I reach down and touch her silken hair, touch all the children within her to come, and think of Abraham and Levi before Levi even yet was… and yet he was:

“Because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor,” reads Hebrews 7:10. The New Living Translation offers,“For although Levi wasn’t born yet, the seed from which he came was in Abraham’s body...”

Inside the frames, the bodies, the souls of our children, reside the children still to come. And the children then still to come. Like nestled dolls, future generations dwell within the child whose eyes I now look into, whose hands I now touch.

Stars in the sky, seeds in the earth.

We parent not one child, or even a few children, but every day, we parent innumerable, countless children. When I raise my voice, frustrated with a child, I speak to generations of children. When I wipe away a tear, comfort, listen, I honor centuries of children.

When we meet our children, children we will not live to meet on this earth, are, in very real ways, met, shaped, formed. Parented.

She bites again into white apple flesh, looks up with smiling eyes.

Face of clay, she is. Made of the dust of the ground. But, oh, the seeds within.

The planter drops back down into seedbed, heads across earth, and I take her hand and whisper a prayer.

God, give grace to tend her well.

More that Dies....

“As soon as you open the door, it hits you. ‘Ah, spring in the country!’ “ She laughs and offers her tousled red-haired daughter another cookie.

“Well, it’s like I was telling Emily on the way over here. There isn’t a block in the whole county that doesn’t reek today.”

The two friends chuckle and I nod and smile too, us this cluster of community at the back of a country church on a Wednesday night. The children’s club closing program has concluded and the church is all a bustle with happy kids nibbling on treats from the refreshment table, mothers talking of tilling up gardens, the fathers who are there and not on the seats of tractors, making plans for the work bee to reroof the church come Saturday morning. A toddler needs a refilling of pink juice so I take her hand and we weave through the crowd.

In the midst of the milieu of swirling children, I pour juice and revisit a scene, words, from earlier in our day.

On the headland of a dusty two hundred acres, I stood waiting for him. Tractor roars down the field, cultivator working up earth behind him. The wind flaps about skirt hem and the apron I forgot to slip off in my haste to get the meal to the field and his empty stomach. Are fields all over the countryside dotted with waiting farm wives, aprons flying on spring winds, arms full of food for work-worn men? The tractor looms, rumbles to an idling halt. He swings open the cab door. Large rocks he’s gathered from the last few passes across the field line the steps up to the cab. One by one, he tosses them off into a pile in the ditch, and I step close with his lunch basket.

Instead of raising his voice over the engine, he motions to his dirty shirt, my dress, explaining with hands why he thinks it best not to offer a hug. I laugh, him joining too, and he leans in to kiss this forehead. We rest there for a moment, lingering touch on the edge of a wind-blown field on an afternoon in late April.

Another tractor whirling down the gravel road in a cloud of dust, manure spreader behind, interrupts us. He steps back, adjusts his cap. “You know,” I raise my voice, “I was thinking of this on the way to the field. The fragrance of spring’s new life is that of rot and decay.” I nod towards the passing manure spreader.

Farmer Husband presses in close, his soft voice competing with the tractors. “True.” He points towards last year’s corn stalks wrapped around the teeth of the cultivator that he’s been pulling across this field all day. “Manure yes, but the more debris and dying matter from last year’s crop too, the richer the soil bed for this year’s crop.”

I look across the dirt stretching towards the horizon. We've spread manure over this land already, beginning of the week.

“Yes, more that dies, more that lives.”

He takes the lunch basket from my hand, brushes with a kiss again, and hauls back up into that tractor cab and waiting steering wheel.

But his words echo through the rest of my day, revisiting me here tonight in a full country church, us womenfolk talking of hanging out lines of laundry, working up sleepy gardens, and the countryside wafting with the smell of sweet manure.

“More that dies, more that lives.”

Out into the falling dusk, these church folks slowly spill, frogs of the church pond filling the night with their croaky chorus. And we all mingle under the shy stars twinkling, the air pungent with death, and I look at these people, a body of believers, a people called to live new life.

But the daily death comes first. The more that dies.....

The more He lives.



Scripture Drink:

"Could it be any clearer?
Our old way of life was nailed to the cross with Christ,
a decisive end to that sin-miserable life...

What we believe is this:
If we get included in Christ's sin-conquering death,
we also get included in his life-saving resurrection."

Ro 6:6-11 MSG

Lord, my dying today may not smell pretty. But it is necessary for the new life You want to grow in me. Where can I die today? The more I die.... the more You live.

Breathe

I stand in the dark of a house lulled to sleep, just standing there on quiet floor planks, before a stretch of black glass, the only glow that of the yard light at the corner of the barn spilling its milky pool of white.

Last light’s out. I’m ready for a pillow, to call it a day. All’s, finally, almost, still. Somewhere far over our heads and this roof and these fields, and further than this spinning orb’s atmosphere, a night-drenched canvas drips stars. But what rivets me to this place under the heavens is the call of her breathing. Yes, the call.

With every inhaling breath, she whistles, faintly, softly. I stand motionless, waiting, listening, just to be sure: yes, she breathes and whistles. A beckoning siren to come. She lies on her sleigh bed, stitched patches of powder blue, dusty yellow, stretching over her lengthening frame, willowy and strong, and from deep in slumber her every filling of lungs is a summons.

I want to answer, come, but I realize: the call is not for me. This whistled sleep-breathing is not of this earth. It is like deep calling unto deep.

In the shadows of farm kitchen I hear her breath calling to Him whence every breath comes.
And then, after a moment, I hear it too: heavy exhale. Breath returned to Him who comes. Circle complete. “For from Him and to Him and through Him are all things.” (Ro. 11:36)

I read it once, and think of it often, and the thought revisits on a still country night, standing here in a lightless house:

“The letters of the name of God in Hebrew are yod, hay, vav, and hay. They are infrequently pronounced Yahweh. But in truth they are inutterable….

“This word is the sound of breathing. The holiest name in the world, the Name of Creator, is the sound of your own breathing. That these letters are unpronounceable is no accident. Just as it is no accident that they are also the root letters of the Hebrew verb ‘to be’… God’s name is name of Being itself.”

~Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

She inhales, soft whistle breath calling Him, her very existence an unceasing invitation for Him to come. She exhales, breath returned to Him, a circular ventilation of the soul. Tonight in a soundless house surrounded by soundless fields, she simply is, breath after breath. And in this state of breathing, being, she utters the name of her Maker, YHWH.

Inhale: YWHW.

Exhale: YWHW.

We breathe…. And call His name.

In the soul-quiet of a tranquil farm night, I listen to the sound of breathing and feel how close He comes.

He’s as close as the sound of your every breath.

Lord, every breath is Your name. Come.

Still Songs

We hear them far off in the woods, just as the sun sinks further down, and I stop, like you do when the world slips up behind and surprises you, and he can’t believe it either, so we stand there and listen long and neither one of us can stop smiling.

The frogs have returned.

Then, after a bit, he and the dog go crashing off through the quiet of dusk coming down, worn carpet of leaves rustling as they bound through, both boy and Lab questing for game and excitement, but the Little One and I, we just stand there, having already found it. For hadn’t I mentioned that the frogs had returned?

On pond’s rim, she, her small fingers entwined through mine, stands wordlessly. A symphony of sound, trilling low and deep, fills the spaces between the trees, lifts us too. The light falls warm on our winter-faces, and this tattered snow still hugging water's edge. But that sound. From where? It is like it’s the water itself, a looking glass of trunks and limbs, that croons.

At first, when I am still looking with everyday eyes, I don’t notice them. It takes time for eyes to adjust to stillness, to slow and really see. And then, they are, on the far side, these glinting eyes flickering up through waters cold and murky. The peepers are back and we see them.

I want front row seats. Can we pick our way across the swamp and closer? She squeezes my hand tight and across the bog we splash.

In a flash, the pond snaps shut. All is soundless. Just glassy reflection of branches pointing to that curve of muted moon come early.

She and I swish swash further out, as far as we can go. Then wait.

On this isle of tangled grass, the water slowly rises up to boot ankles. A red tail hawk swoops and soars, his wings motionless on the currents. Moon rides higher, tailing sun dipping. We say nothing, this Little One and I, but watch swamp’s mirror, waiting stock-still for singers emerging. Bungler lab charges up, smashing reflection of anticipating faces.

“Go, Boaz!”she whispers in a loud lisp. “We waiting for the frogs to thing!” From within the woods somewhere, boy whistles and dog ricochets off.

Again, we wait.

Then one by one, they pop to the light. We catch our breath and dare not move. Then tentatively it comes, this chorus , then crescendo, throaty yet gilded, and she squeezes my hand and we smile, spellbound.

Long we soak in these songs on golden pond.

And then, when our toes are cold and the shadows stretch to fading dark, it’s time to go.

“We leaving the frogs, now?” she whispers up to me.

True, I too could stay here forever, but yes, time to go home. Things to do.

We splash through the water, feet seeking islands of matted grass. The sudden hush turns our heads. She’s soundless, the swamp, blinked silent by our sloshing.

I scoop her up and tickle her ear with what I’m endlessly learning and relearning.

“Sometimes we only hear life sing when we still.”



Today's Drink: "After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper." ~1 Kings 19:11-13

Related: Rocking Rhythms
Why the Push?
Slow to Savor
Spring Thoughts

While the children run ahead, she pauses

to say good bye to

Winter all worn through,

weary and frayed about

her dingy, graying hem,

dissolving everywhere into silver pools

reflecting pewter sky.



White gulls on snow's white fringe,

those tufts on pencil-line stilts

encircle her sterling puddling,

Spring come with water to scrub earth clean,

And there in her threadbare places

Hope pokes through.

Father, use the places where I wear thin as places for Your glory to shine.

Slow to Savor