A Holy Experience » Because all of Life flames with God
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02.09.12
5 Ways to Fight Through to a Loving Marriage {What You’re Trying to Tell Him When You’re Angry}Ithink we were standing outside the back door, out by the white pickup under the Big Dipper, when I turned and said it. Said I hated him. The dark can make you brave. Or a fool.
But when you’re twenty-two and think you know everything, panic can tear up your chest like this howl that has to rip free. “I hate it when you stand there all quiet.” He kicks the ground with the toe of his boot, drives his hands deep into his Wranglers. Does he hear me at all? “Hate how you just pull away. Hate how you always think I’m the problem and it’s never you. Hate it, hate it — hate y…” There. There it is, spewn sick over everything. And the moment that ugliness wrenches free, I feel released — and wretched. Ill. I want to fling that wedding band encircling my finger and everything. And I want to somehow hold on tight. I want him to hold me tight. He turns his back.
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02.08.12
When Winds Blow & Love Tries to Hold OnThe old threads cut up, laid down, stitched side by side, that quilt, it flaps on the line. A quilt for beds and bodies twined in the dark, hung out here to ride spring winds. The sun warms the back of a bare neck. I feel it, and on my arms. A breeze sways and the wooden pins still hold that quilt on the line. My Dad, he leans against the wire fence watching the windmill pump. The bonneted Mennonite girl comes out from the house and they talk windmills. They talk about water and wind. The things that run through your fingers and you can never quite hold. The windmill hums round with all that rushes in from somewhere else. It makes water of it. I’m watching her square scraps rock back and forth in the heat, a sometimes sail that falls dead still.
Dad and I, the kids, my Farmer, Dad’s wife, we drive to the next farm over, the one with the shingle hanging out front that reads “PRODUCE.” A horse stands there patient with a buggy. I walk amongst the pots, evaluate shades of geraniums. The Farmer and the boys ask after seed potatoes. Dad leans up against a door frame. I pick magenta blooms, 12 in 4 inch pots. I carry the flat past Dad, set the blooms upon the counter. “You picked pink?” Dad shakes his head, incredulous at the rejection of my proper upbringing, the years of his formal red geraniums and starched white petunias. I wink at him, half smile, shrug the shoulders sheepish and sometimes you just need to find your own quiet way. Sealed jars of honey and jam line the walls behind the counter, three dozen homemade carrot muffins lure from a shelf. A Mennonite in a blue-collared shirt, suspenders, nods, leaves his conversation with a white bearded man in a straw hat, steps up to the counter, asks me quiet. “That is all for today?” Malakai pats my hip, points hopeful at the muffins and I shake my head and the Farmer nods his smile, reaches for the back pocket of his Levi’s. The white bearded man at the door turns, the brim of his straw hat catching light and I think I see. It’s been twenty years, and those years, they’ve wrinkled and they’ve sliver lined and they’ve worn, but I think I see who he is. “Dad? The man at the door?” I murmur it quietly. Dad raises his eyebrows and I nod towards the door and Dad’s eyes follow. “Is he Daniel?” “Daniel?” Dad’s feeling about his memory warehouse. “Daniel and Sarah — they fed all our pigs the year we did the barn renovations. I would have been…” I try to remember. “Fourteen?” Dad nods his head slow and the light comes, a recognizing, and he smiles. “You just might be right.” “Sir?” Dad calls towards the door and I reach for geraniums. “Might I ask where you live, sir?” Dad steps towards the white bearded man all in black. “Yes.” The Mennonite’s weathered hand strokes his beard, putting the words together first. “I live just around the corner, to the left, and if you go three farms over, we are on the north side.” The man’s German accent is thick. Dad smiles knowing, shakes his head that they’d meet here and I remember a summer evening and his barefoot, braided daughter and the way the horses smelled in the shaded cool of the barn and the clanking of the stanchions, the cattle all standing for milking. “Then you are Daniel Martin and a long time ago you finished my hogs.” Dad offers his hand, offers Daniel his name. I see Daniel’s light flicker, and how we look into eyes and back through years and all the ways time changes us. “Yes, yes!” He takes Dad’s hand heartily. “A couple hundred hogs I fed for you that year.” Dad smiles. “And I think you and Sarah came once in the horse and buggy to our place — for dinner.” It had taken them all afternoon coming, the spokes making the slow miles. I can see Sarah’s black cape on a hot July night. “I remember, I remember.” Daniel’s happy too, his beard and all the whitened years falling mid-chest. “And your wife?” he looks behind me and my geraniums, past Malakai pressing against my leg, listening. “Is your wife here?“ “Yes……” Dad looks around, out towards the pots of tomatoes. My stomach knots tight. Dad and Mom’s divorce is what — eleven years ago now? I look away. Wish I could slip past, by, rush away. “Yes, my wife is here, Daniel.” Dad nods towards Daniel Martin and Daniel Martin nods happily towards Dad and I think my lungs are collapsing. “But I don’t have the same wife. I’m not married to that woman anymore.” I think of Mama’s white hair. And how twenty-five years can be swept away with a few words. And I want to reach for it, seize it, hold on to all the things that slip through your fingers, wind and water and some dreams. I see how the clouds pass over Daniel’s eyes, dark shadow. “Oh.” He says it slow and I hurt so bad I want to bend over, gaping for air. This, it’s like feeling it all over again — all of where you came from just blown away in the wind and the wind is the father whom you love and I stand still… still here. I want to open my heavy mouth and find words. I want to tell Daniel I still have the same mother. That I still have the same God. That the vow to love never changes, regardless of the direction of the wind. I want to say that I limp, broken by storms. I want to say that sometimes you think you might die, and for all your praying, things slip through your fingers, water and wind and dreams. And did God answer all our prayers? No one enters into the real joy of the Lord in spite of the hard times —- but squarely through the door of the hard times. I want to choke it out: that I wish that the pins had all held. I want to say that what I want to be, isn’t — but I know He still is. God’s purposes are not for me to understand His plans: His plan is for me to understand Who He is. But I say nothing. And I can’t slip out the the door, these two men and all my past filling it, and I stare down at my pink geraniums and all these years that aren’t anymore. I feel how the wind can pump water and my own grief near spills. I chew hard on my lip, fight back what you can’t see. Dad asks Daniel about his crops and if they have the corn in, and yes, some, three acres out of ten and things are different in a world with horses-drawn equipment and windmills and same wives, and I whisper Excuse Me, to slide through that door. Like I could just excuse my wrong mama, and duck out the door and the wind waves the geraniums, blows pink petals into the air and away. Dad’s wife, she sees me. She calls from the tomatoes, “Ready to go, Ann?” I stand with my blooms. Strands of hair blow across my face. When will I be ready to let go? There are things that if you keep trying to hold on to, you’ll fall. Lean against love and you’ll stand. I wish I could whisper it to Dad and the last 20 years: Love lets go of it’s ultimatums — to ultimately hold a person. Dad’s second wife chooses her pot of tomatoes all in budding yellow promise. The wind, it carries Dad’s voice, Daniel’s voice, all that was, and I hear. Sometimes you get wind of Grace. Malakai looks up. “Mama? Ready?” Yes… Yes, I’m ready to go. To let go. Ready to let go of pain of the tearing apart of what was. Ready to take the ripped scraps, stitch them together, to make a sail from what’s dead and catch the wind ahead. Ready to take wind blowing in beyond my control, and just make water of it. I’ve been thirsty too long and I am desperate to drink. Sometimes letting go is how to find out He holds. Malakai, he helps me carry the geraniums. Over head, the clouds, silver-lined, sail on…. Sail over the windmill still singing. :: :: ::
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02.07.12
How to Build a House {into a Family}
They build it with their own hands. They build it in the angling sun and they are loud and happy and they pack in in all the gaps with handfuls of snow spraying like sweet sugar everywhere. They talk of sleeping under stars and sleeping in coats under blankets and with a flashlight and candles and the dog, the dog right there at the door. When one lies down, they nudge on; they have this vision. They say that this will be like nothing ever before, the most beautiful one ever. Levi pulls off his touque, hot and sweaty, and piles his snow high on the wall. They build this snow house. They hand me a shovel.
They tell me that – how they have sculpted something that will last beyond the next thaw. That they have made a memory and what can erode that and wasn’t it worth it? If we build companies but lose the company of family and if we build visions but lose sight of relationship, have we only built these hollow canyons of pain? Family is this altar you lie down on and build joy. All that life in their cheeks, all that effort, all that love, it flames with a heat of it’s own. I watch how she works with that shovel. How she crawls straight through that door in the wall, exhausted but smiling, her hair blowing long in the wind. :: :: ::
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02.06.12
What to Do in Hard TimesI would wonder later if I had hugged him tight enough before he left. I would put in laundry and wonder when I’d wash his again. Wonder if that plane would get him the 16,000 kilometers home again, across the jungle, an ocean, the mountains, the prairie, wonder if he’d ever find his way back here to the farm again. What if the someone you love doesn’t ever come home again?
It’s crazy what you think of when you wash piles of denims and sort the whites. When the washing machine whirls around, around, I can almost feel how this world keeps turning and he’s somewhere far away and on it and I am here. And how someday it will turn without us, us a vapor and us no more here. but eternal. You can’t get time back. Is that why the saints wrestle with God — until they see even hard times as holy times? I will not let You go until You bless me. When I pass his room, I stand in the doorway. He didn’t make his bed before he left. I want him to come home and fill those quilts again, bare feet dangling out the end. I want him to whistle too loud and leave his books open everywhere with apple cores here and there, and I want him to follow me around the kitchen talking about Ron Paul and Mitt Romney and American politics even though we’re Canadian. I want him to keep opening up the fridge and scouring for something more. I even want him here to tell him to stop teasing his brother and pick up his coat and only speak words that make souls stronger. When you might not get any more good moments – you’d take even some bad. And I’d take the ugly with the beautiful because the hard stuff is the heat that refines. Do I think of him more now that he’s gone — than when he was here? Why do we not know how much we love until we’ve lost? That’s what a man I knew said the year after they put a headstone on his son’s grave. “Now I think of him everyday. Before I did not.” I didn’t ask him – Did he wish he had seen the gritty chronos time as gifted kairos time?
I gather clothes up off the floor of his room and pull the blankets up. I don’t want to think about the possibility of him not coming home. My parents buried a child. My husband’s parents, they buried two. My father said that the day Aimee was killed, he looked across the fields and a neighbor kept plowing his dirt. Kept going about his work, breaking open the earth and turning it over. When we’d have to cut open the earth and lay down a child, a daughter, a sister. My father said he was madly wild to go over there and rip the keys right out of that tractor. How could anyone go about ordinary time when nothing was now ordinary time? Why do we not see that hard chronos time is holy kairos time until we don’t have any more time? The washing machine, it just keeps spinning, spinning on and on. I haven’t enjoyed all the moments – some of them have just about killed me. And now, if he didn’t come home and it does happen and I know, I would want even those back. It’s true: One child can keep you in contractions for decades and it can hurt to breathe. But to wake to the moments and embrace the moments, all of them, the exhaustingly hard and the wildly good and the ugly beautiful, because God only comes to us through the moments. And He isn’t only in some moments, abandoning us in others. The saved are called to spend all of their lives to Him who paid it all. It’s how many days now until he gets home? And what mother doesn’t think it — what if he doesn’t?
I have to ask: if he never came home – would something in me be over? Would joy be over, would gratitude be over? Would sadness no longer be islands in my day, but my sea? I would lose him and he would lose the witnessing of the trees budding out this spring. Lose his annual planting of the potatoes out in the garden. Lose the chance to bring home a girl someday with a ring. I have to ask: Would I still care about the frogs when they came to the pond and sang in early May? Would it matter to me if we put seeds in the ground, if anything good came out of the earth again? Would I still listen to Dvorak’s eighth symphony or is there any music in this world that could pull notes up around a brokenness that I would never want to heal? Be present – because the present is just that – a present. A gift. No one has to carpe diem, seize the day, of everyday chronos time — we can all grind our teeth through as many of the difficult moments we want – and miss who knows how much of our life? How do you know which moments are the kairos moments to seize — and the chronos ones to merely survive? Maybe the ones you aren’t seizing are the ones that might change you? What if your present was giving you more gifts than you ever imagined? But maybe it isn’t so much about as carpe diem – seize the day. Maybe it’s about this: God uses the day to seize us. God carpe diems. God seizes the days: God seizes time and uses it as an instrument to transform. God seizes every moment to sculpt souls and shape lives and transform ashes into glory. What if isn’t so much about seizing kairos moments and surviving chronos moments — but seeing all as Christ-filled moments? That God seizes the moment to make me more like Christ and what if I seized more of the moments, because there is something of my Savior in them? I stack his books on his desk. I run my hand along his shelves, trace his handwriting on a list. If he doesn’t come home… all I could do is remember him. Not experience him. And I think that is partly why: That is why even hard everydays are holy experiences. That doesn’t mean I’m not a mess and don’t miss far too much. I won’t feel guilt about it. It’s just that I’d rather wake up. I want to be present to the gifts here — before they are gone.
Because those days he is gone now? I check email 1378 times, hoping to hear from him. It doesn’t matter that I know there’s no internet where he’s headed in the jungle. A word, a line – anything. Anything at all. I jump every time the phone rings. I close my eyes and can hear his ridiculous laugh. Twice, I forget and set his plate at the dinner table. After Mama buried her little one, she said she’d see a blonde little girl in a cart at the grocery store and just for a moment, she’d think she saw Aimee again. For a moment, it didn’t hurt so bad – or it hurt worse. If the plane doesn’t ever bring him home, would I say it was God? Or would I say it wasn’t God, that something was beyond God, and He slumbered or was indifferent, or was powerless to do anything about it? Why would either answer seem to raise more questions? Or — what if I had the questions all wrong? What if all that mattered was to live with the scars of the unanswered questions, leaning into the answer —leaning into the God with the scars deep in His side and my name nail etched into the palm of His hand? Our wounds may be our unanswered questions — answered only by the wounds of our God. There were six teens from our chapel who flew half way round the world to serve in an Indonesian jungle. I count their six empty seats on Sunday morning. How do we know how this story will end? And maybe because of the Cross we always already know and all is well… Sunday after Sunday, our pastor has us open our Bibles to the book of Habbakuk.
And I run my fingers again under these lines in Habbakuk. Could I do this? What would I do if He asked this? And doesn’t He? Though the fig tree does not bud…. I may not enjoy every moment but every moment I can joy in God. Does He ever leave us? That’s what it says at the top of the page: Habbakuk. The name means wrestler. To wrestle with God because the hard times are holy times. To not escape time, but stubbornly, fully embrace time, because this is how we stay engaged with God. When we don’t know how to hang on in hard times, to just grip hard to God. The only ones who can rest in God are the one who have wrestled with God… I will not let you go until I you bless me. That is what the pastor said: There is no tighter embrace than the grip of the wrestle. Will he come home and I get to hug him long again? Will get to rib him again and hear his laugh? Will the fig tree bud or not…
Outside the church windows, the trees stand leafless in winter. It’s there if I feel along His rib — His wounds. And in the wrestle, in this God-embrace, I rest my hand there, in the deepness of the gape — in this grip of grace. I let go and hold on to Him and all the holy moments just as they come, as many as He gives — Watch it there out the window, how the wind winds itself tight and long around all the grey, bare trees, this wind sounding like a song….
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