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

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?

Psalm in Pocket

Visit "Of Poets and Saints" for the why of "The Psalm in my Pocket"....
"Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving
and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.' ~ Psalm 95:1


The LORD, the God of gods, has spoken;
he has called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting.

Out of Zion, perfect in its beauty,God reveals himself in glory.

Our God will come and will not keep silence;

Psalm 50:1-3

Father, come into my day, and do not keep silent.

Listening to the Song

Slowing to listen yesterday to the the quiet sounds of a singing world....

flaking sound of scooping oatmeal

robins singing early

whistle of pressure cooker

echo of children laughing in empty rooms

tractor humming far off in fields

book pages turning

creak of opening mailbox

toddler sobs ebbing to peace

boys humming hymns

click of seatbelt

fender rattling with stones of gravel roads

wind rushing through open truck window

pigeons fluttering off barn's tin roof

child speeding by on whir of bicycle spokes

horse hooves clopping down a sideroad

laundry flapping

buggy clattering

squeak of old swing swaying

suds sloshing

his laugh

breathing of tired childen deep in sleep

click of last light out

Today's Scripture Drink: Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! ~Ps. 150:6

Have you considered establishing gratitude as a permanent soul fixture? Just grab a scrap of paper lying around and begin counting the blessings, with your own 1000 Endless Gifts:

Why begin your own One Thousand Gift List --(drop me a line if you do, and I'll add you to the "1000 Endless Gifts" blogroll in the sidebar-- we invite you to join the Gratitude Community!)

Read the listing of the endless Gifts

Slowing to Make Seeing Spaces

Two tired boys with mononucleosis and a sniffling mama... I am slowing down. And seeing. A memory I'm revisiting as the snow melts and spring pushes through:

I close the mailbox with a snap and head into the house with a stack of junk mail and bills, rifling through them as I walk...chicken breasts on sale for $1.97 lb...telephone bill due again. A flicker of blazing gold flashes, once, twice, on the periphery of my vision and I blink, waking. Lowering the stack of mail, I pause.

I catch again the lighting of the monarch's golden wings…then another streak of brilliance. Captivated, drawn, I lean in...only to find the beauty wrapped in chains. Treacherously woven between the purple coneflower and the blooming lavatera, a spider's web ensnares this queen of the skies. The butterfly flails, exhausted, flashing its wings for rescue.

I reach my hand slowly, imperceptibly, into the snare and snap her bonds. In a flutter, the regal brilliance thrashes and flounders about my feet, snagged still in the spider's sticky lace. Do I dare touch her wings? But I must...and she stills, trembling.

I wait, hanging, hoping.

Intherushoflife,inthestreamofcommonandordinary,Ihadpausedandallowedtheretobespace.

And in the space, real seeing came. Paradoxically, seeing the seamlessness, the oneness, of the hallowedness and the everyday, I need to make space. Spaces around the moments. Without the spaces, I seem to lose sense of all meaning. Pausing, I look and really see: mailbox, bills, monarch, web, life ---

"No distinction was made between the sacred the everday…their life was all one piece. It was all sacred and all ordinary." ~Sue Bender

It is all sacred, all ordinary, all one piece.

Then she, quivering, unfolded her wings into the space, knew freedom...

and flew.

Lord, how can I slow down today, make s p a c e and really see? To be still... still... and see You who wants us to soar?

Related:
A One-Piece Life
Supermarket Poetry

(From the archives)

Bleating

You sit on countertop in sunlight

reminding me in my darkness,

though you say nothing,

that there is always

a ram in the thicket,

if I listen.


Photo: thrifted ram ($1) that sits before my sink

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.

Easy Listening

Part of this week's prayerful focus on Listening to God

I sit in the light and say nothing. I just am.
I just am listening.
Isn't this prayer too?

"I had never met a group like this. Instead of a planned program for the evening...these people spent most of their time listening.

There was an occasional prayer said aloud---in no particular order around the room--but these prayer were more like outbursts of love and praise for God than thought-out petitions.

It was as though every individual in that room sensed that God was very close, and in the delight of His company wanted nothing, needed nothing, except occasionally to express the joy bubbling up inside."

~true story of the God's Smuggler, our current, highly recommended meal read-aloud

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
I want of nothing.
I need nothing.
For isn't He the grace fountain who endlessly surges, gives, washes over dry bones?
Makes me too bubble up inside,
This thing called joy,
This easy duty (or is it luxury?)
Of listening: prayer.

"There is no greater proof in the world of our spiritual danger than the reluctance which most people always have and all people sometimes have to pray...

Yet prayer is nothing but desiring God to give us the greatest and best things we can have and that can make us happy.

It is a work so easy, so honorable, and to so great a purpose, that (except in the incarnation of His Son) God has never given us a greater argument of His willingness to have us saved and our unwillingness to accept it, of His goodness and our gracelessness, of His infinite condescension and our folly, than by rewarding so easy a duty with such great blessings."

~Jeremy Taylor

Lord, still me long enough to listen. So easy a thing, with such great blessings. Then why am I often reluctant?

Listening Today to His Word:

“My sheep listen to my voice;

I know them,

and they follow me.”

~John 10:27

Related Resources: Praying through the day
Photo: light falling on our century-old bedroom door

Hearing Aid

Part of this week's prayerful focus on Listening to God

Shadows slip down walls when my toes slip out too. All days are inherently good days, but better days begin when I listen early. When I listen before the hours grow old, deaf.

For when I listen early, His words echo off the walls of my day.




Bare toes on bare floor, I stand at canyon’s edge, ready to cross the day’s bridge. The Living Word speaks into the chasm and I listen: “I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go” (Isa. 48:17).

I linger here. Reading again, entering into His Word, my insides reverberate with His Word.

I lift up voice. For His Word stirs, rouses. Requires a response. I pray:

“Be my God, Jehovah Jireh. I repent of my arrogance, like a man who thinks the knows the way, who need not ask for directions. I confess: I haven’t the foggiest idea how to traverse this day. Direct this unsure one.”

Am I ready? I have listened. Then lingered. Then lifted voice. Now to live it. Can I contemplate the words so long that they percolate down from mind to heart, hands, feet, drip out of me?

I step out.

So the porridge sticks. The boys stomp in from the barn, bickering. The mailman drives down our gravel sideroad while my envelopes still lie on the counter. A child whines about flax in his bowl. I sigh, snap. And then a happy one comes for breakfast singing a hymn. I hear the echo. Is this Him teaching me what is best? Yes, praise. I turn that direction, smile. And ladle out another bowl.

Hours grow, racing now. Books pile, baby cries, washing machine buzzes, pot boils over, telephone rings. The bridge cracks. Where do I step? The clock chimes twelve. Time to pray. “I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go.” Yes, next step.

And then time pools into quiet of late afternoon, the sun slanting across snow, windowsills, me. We strap on skis, grab poles, slide out. Wind sings through the spruce. Skis whisper to silver snow. Winter’s white canvas calls. Across the fields we glide. And His words echo again: “I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go.”

Hours can be loud, deafening. A hearing aid to the soul, Scripture attunes one to The Voice that never stops speaking. Through the circumstances of each day, He continually speaks. But can we hear Him? To step into the day without listening to His Word is to hear only life’s muffled sounds, garble.

His voice echoing, we cross the day.

And ski home.

Lord, help us listen. Linger. Lift up voice. And then live it. Remind us to tune the hearing aid early.

Related Reading: Savor & Quiet Time

Photos: more ice on bedroom window, skiing on silver snow turning gold...

Word Melts

Part of this week's prayerful focus on Listening to God

"He showers down snow, white as wool,
and sprinkles hoar-frost thick as ashes;
crystals of ice he scatters like breadcrumbs;

He utters his word, and the ice is melted.

O praise the Lord."

~Ps. 147

Lord, fire cuts steel, Your Word melts ice. Heart can be hard. Melt Mine.

Photo: ice on bedroom window

(A full post was written, but inexplicably eaten by Microsoft. I am listening, accepting. Not those words for today.)

Heart Burn

Part of this week's prayerful focus on Listening to God

Fire cuts steel.

I saw it as a child. I close my eyes and see it again. I stand in the shop and Dad, with singed, frayed holes splattered across his coveralls, turns on the tap of the acetylene tank. He watches the needle of the gauge hop to the right numbers. Then those big old hands that I love scrape the lighter before that hiss of gas. A spark, then a roaring blaze of heat. Eye on the flame, Dad opens up the oxygen tap. He adjusts the intensity of oxygen, the deep of the burn. The torch whispers blue, white hot at its core. I step back and Dad steps into it. Searing heat lays into black iron. An explosion of light, sparks, metal scatters across shop floor and my memory. Heat burns open the unbreakable.

It always made me wonder: that heat too welds all the pieces together again, into new shapes and formations. Screwing back the torch tanks, Dad lets the flame die. He reaches over to flip the switch of the MIG welder under the shop bench. The buzz fills my ears. Dad slips a welding rod into the electrode handle, checks the temperature. From behind tinted glass of my welding helmet, scorching white light flashes and glowing molten weaves, bleeding two pieces of iron into one. Sometimes Dad has me weld and I sew steel with a thread of fire.

Now, decades later, my Dad still cuts steel on the floor of his shop, grey hair showing at his temples, and I, with grey hairs of my own, think about how to torch into hearts, steely and hard. Some hearts need that. Mine does. Maybe all do. To be cut open, to be bled into something new, better.

I wonder if the answer doesn’t etch across paper, a story from thousands of years ago when God walked here. For the cosmos-quaking events of then still reverberates through now, echoing off the walls of our existence.

It’s the narrative of two sorrowing men, two men who have lost all that gives meaning to their world, men who are blind to Emmanuel, God with them, close enough to touch. They are on the road, like we are too. Groping, stumbling along.

They invite a stranger in. Isn’t that the first step we all take? The Stranger enters their grief, their world, their heart. And in the breaking of bread, in the giving thanks, in the eucharist, their scales fall off. They see God. The resurrected Jesus sups with them. He who they thought dead lives, walks, eats, communes. Their orbits recalibrate. They rejoice in equilibrium.

Basking in the afterglow of it all, “They asked each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?’ ” There it is: hearts burned open. Heart burned open, torching out eyes to see a world ignited with God—God right there.

And what burned open their hearts? The opening of Scripture. Listening to God Incarnate speak into their lives torched open first ears, ears to hear. Their heart burning with them, lit by His Word, scorched out eyes to spiritually see.

John Wesley’s experience concurs. He writes of his conversion experience, “About a quarter hour before nine, while [a preacher] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.” Listening to God’s Word, His flaming sword that cuts open both the joints and marrow, burns us open, warms us.

We listen, and hear Jesus asking the blind man, and us groping ones too, “What do you want?”

We want to see. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s fox in his classical children’s tale, “The Little Prince,” reveals that the secret of life is as this simple profound truth: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It’s not our eyes that are blind. It’s our heart that is hard. Our heart that must soften, open, if we are ever to see.

Yet one hears before ever seeing. It’s the way a heart develops: our heart cannot see, until it first hears. As hearing develops in utero weeks before sight, so our soul cochlear must develop before the cornea of our heart opens.

Heart sight requires first heart burn.

Before the sun taps on the day, I open the pages of His Word and listen. He burns this heart within me.

Fire cuts steel.

Lord, burn this heart open to hear, to see.

Today's fire:

For the word of God is alive and powerful.

It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword,

cutting between soul and spirit,

between joint and marrow.

It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.

~Hebrews 4:12

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

In quiet...

"Blessed are the ears which hear God's whisper

and listen not unto the whispers of the world."

~Thomas a Kempis

"Silence is imperative...

We are going to be quiet with One who has everything to tell us...

His voice is so still, His deepest contacts so imperceptible,

that only in quiet can we perceive them.

The Holy Spirit educates us in inner stillness,

and it for lack of this that most spiritual lives are

so crude & shallow & vague."

~Evelyn Underhill

Father, to hear the song You sing over me, I will need to still today, to quiet. Or I'll miss You. I will need to be careful where I listen, how I listen... or I'll miss Your whisper.

Following after Jesus, who went up to a quiet place to pray, give me the grace to go away from the world, too... into the silence and solitude. The world presses in: help me to find, make, create, a place in quiet today, to listen to You. A still place to worship You in spirit and in truth.

Hearing

Today, snuggled with fevered, sick little one under love-blanket from dear friend, toy basket close at hand, we looked up and just quietly watched the snow fall...and fall... and fall... I whispered into the curl of Shalom's ear:

God shakes

Falling flakes

Confetti of the angels

And if we listen, I think we can hear the party:

Does He really rejoice over us with singing?

Let it snow, snow, snow.

Father, let us still today, long enough to really hear the refrain of all the universe: Father loves you, Father loves you, Father loves you...

Question:

~from Mary Oliver's Summer Day from a Poem a Day for American High Schools :

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?"

Not a question to consider flippantly. I am thinking.

Quietly.

Long.

Because the answer effects forever.

Listening to Poems

"The Bible tells us that we are God's masterpieces (poiema in Greek);
not only creatures, but his creations, his poems (Ephesians 2:10).
We are living epistles (2 Corinthians 3:3).
And so, our lives are meant to be listened to,
because it is God who is speaking into and out of and through the symphony of the years,
and the masterpiece of a lifetime."

~Michael Card

Lord? This life? A poem? A masterpiece? Dare I say: the beat feels off, the rhyme not quite. I shall just be out with it (You'll understand, yes?): this life haiku reads more like a disjointed limmerick.

I know, yes, I know. You are the faithful poet, the persevering sculptor. But hear me on this, Abba. Sometimes I listen to this life--to me--and, well, Lord? All is grating, wearying, cacaphony. Yes, You know this too, yes.

But then, just for a moment, there it is: A flash. A strain. You. You speaking through this life. This life, unbelievably, too.

Father? Sometimes, I confess (You already know, yes?), I doubt whether this place, this corner of the web, is where I should scratch out this listening to You, this listening to this life. Other poems read... of You, more clearly, more distinctly. This letter I am living has messy, scratched out lines; inky, blotted out words; thin, worn spots. This web place catches but fragments of the letter. You know the other parts, creased and wrinkled.

And, funny, You just keep smoothing out the paper, writing more, turning the story so. Redeeming.

This life may be quite the piece. But, it is true, You are quite the Master. The Master greater than the piece, with its broken shards.

Yes, Father? Alright, I will take up the shell and listen. To this day. To this life. To You.

It sounds like the ocean rolling in, like a symphony thundering, lifting, transporting.

Is that what Grace sounds like?

Listening... and doing

I wake Sunday morning to grey growing on the horizon like dark waves rolling in from the sea. These fields of corn and beans, that lap up around old farmhouses and quiet country churches, lie far from the shore with its seagulls and wet grains of sand, but those clouds to the west, riding in low and full, carry the ocean close, droplets from the depths.

I dress and wait for the sea to come crashing in. I measure oatmeal and pray for a baptism, a revival, of this cracked open land, parched and panting. Outside the kitchen window, bottom leaves of the beans are yellowing. The bean flowers, future pods, have aborted, dropping to the cement-hard soil. Corn leaves have curled all week, writhing under the scorching sun.

The back door opens, and the mudroom sink tap runs. I know he’s in and washing up from the barn. I go to read his face, to ask, wringing my own hands, “Its coming, don’t you think?”

He doesn’t look up. A tsunami might be surging up on that horizon; he is quietly focused on the task at hand. This is how farmers are after years of working dirt and knowing that God is going to do what God is going to do, without anyone’s worry or commentary: its best to simply keep your hand to the plow, doing the part that is yours to do.

He dries his thick knuckles on a towel, eyes looking out the window, then finally offers, “Looks like we may get some, doesn’t it?”

We gather at the porch window to watch that dark sea of hope rise. “They weren’t calling for it, but forecasters can only predict. God alone performs.”

He glances up at the clock over the kitchen table. “If we didn’t have worship service, we could sit on the porch swing and watch.”

We fill bowls and tie bibs and keep our eyes on the sky, the waters above separated from the dry land below.

The odd drop smudges the dining room windows as we bow to thank Him for this day and food. Funny, how all eight of us take spoon to mouth but wordlessly keep our eyes on the heights whence our help comes from.

We are slipping shoes on and patting down the last rooster tails in front of the back mirror, when we hear it. We still and listen to the steady patter on the roof. Darryl breaks into a smile and I can’t help laughing. “Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

The garage door opens to wet diamonds falling and silver puddles pooling. A curtain of watery green beads veils the grain elevators across the fields. The windshield wipers sing. I shake my head in the wonder of this gentle deluge.

“Our entire livelihood waits for the sea to roll in and rain down like this. We’re so full of our dreams and work, and yet we are so utterly impotent. We are so…at His mercy.” The last three words are whispered, a bowing low.

The rain is falling heavy on the country church roof by the time we take our seats in the sanctuary. As the pastor steps to the pulpit, a few farm families trickle in, late from chores. To the rhythm of the sea sprinkling down, he begins, “If you’ll take our Bibles, we’ll turn to our ongoing series in 1 Kings. We concluded chapter 17 last week, so we’ll pick up at chapter 18, at the very first verse.”

Thumbs page and gilded leaves turn. The pastor clears his voice, and commences, “After many days the word of the Lord came to Elijah, in the third year, saying, “Go, show yourself to Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth.”

The only sound filling the sanctuary is the celestial seas pouring out, the earth’s soil opening wide and swallowing deeply.

Rising out of the waves, the size of a man’s fist, the ocean, now, before us, has gathered together and rolled out across our wilting, waiting, gulping fields. He, on a Sunday in July, has sent rain upon the earth.

He speaks across time. We hear. And tremble as His breath, warm with vapor and life, falls upon us.

Gazing out the sanctuary windows at the world of rain, we listen to the roof softly sing of the sea, and we fill with unspeakable, inexpressible praise.

It’s doing the part that the impotent do.

Listening... Why Journal

Update:
How writing benefits health of cancer patients
How to Write to Bring Healing

For daily therapy, I never have to dab my wrists with L’Occitane magnolia perfume beforehand, nor worry if I’m ten minutes late, or bother sitting in some paneled waiting room for a receptionist in Birkenstocks to open a hollow-paneled door and call my name.

For this office is out in the orchard, or down in the flowerbeds, burst into flame of sunflower and zinnia, and the only ones who call my name are mop-heads kids who have my eyes of robin-egg blue and their daddy’s mile-wide smile.

And the space and the time is free.

So sometime after the hour of three, I look up and see those hands calling me to come to the keys, and tap away. And lo and behold, doors open wide and I enter in, to stumble upon things I never knew, right inside the meandering halls of a soul. And in His Light, the best light, that which is discovered is dusted off and redeemed.

Daily key therapy unlocks to places one didn’t know had doors or vast expanses behind. Who knows what will be found in this tapping place?

In the beginning was the Word, who comes again every day, just after three, and asks one to tap and knock.

There are things to be found.

"Writing can be a creative and invigorating

way to make our lives available to ourselves...

we may discover that the better we tell our stories,

the better we will want to live them."

~Henri Nouwen

Lord, I don't know what lies within. But this writing is to take the time to listen to You and find. And then, to take up a different life.

*Photo by Caleb of these hands tapping, knocking and finding, under His skies...

Listening.... Paying attention

This morning, I open the creaky steel lid of the mailbox and find the word emblazoned on a white envelope: “Attention.”

Who’d thought I’d find a word from the Lord in the mail today?

So I carefully open the day, choosing to take it out slowly, mindfully.

I pay attention to to the wet dew between my toes on the way in with the mail.

I glance upon a fragment of a brilliant blue egg shell thrown down underneath the second red maple, and bend over to tuck it in my pocket, life gathered up.

I pause by the black-eyed susans nodding at the backstep to watch a silver spider parade elegantly down its hairy stem, yellow petals hanging over its head like lacy parasol.

The day is worth this paying attention. Why be cheap and miss this wonder called living?

Who can afford blithe miserliness?

And really, attention only costs tuning the cochlear of the soul, massaging a heart to feel the sensation of this moment, and peeling back the drowsing lids of these eyes to focus on the brilliance of now.

Today has been delivered, and I think I will pay the price, dig deep into the pocket of me and pay attention.

For the price of paying attention, life is a startling bargain.

Lord, I'll pay the price of attention today. Your wares are too breathtaking to pass by.

Preparing

Listening tonight as a family to Back to the Bible's voices of Easter .... preparing hearts, eyes focusing on The Door, turning to the cross as the Only Way... looking through the dark to the Light of Jesus. Listen too?