Category: grief

grace and grief

I found myself outside early and the cool of the morning rushed over my bare legs. I welcomed the goosebumps and the good feel of a sweater hugging my shoulders. The morning chorus caused my limbs to laze, tucked into that cozy angle of our little outdoor chairs and my grandma’s afghan. My fingers found the holes, like always, curling around the knots and clinging to the wide, soft stitches. I breathed in the cool, deeply, as if I was getting ready to sing. But, I let the morning sing a solo while I listened.

This song is the song of these late summer mornings outside. Not because it plays audibly or even in my head, but just because it is what I’m doing. Meeting with. Pausing. Listening. Questioning. Slowing Down. Being with Jesus. Early is the only space and time that makes sense right now. And the song is one I hear in the birds and the breeze and the distant Marta train. The sway of the leaf dropping trees and sometimes the traffic on Sylvan Road.

I looked out on our little, sleepy street and took note of the days it had been since I had seen someone working on Tameka’s house. And right next to it, Noor’s house stared at me with two dark hollows upstairs where windows should be. Two renovations-in-progress that both feel a little bit like our street is pregnant. We are waiting and hoping and expecting the spaces to fill with life, but they haven’t yet.

I sat in my quiet perch and noticed the pile of chair and bed and dresser emerge from the morning haze as a strange monument to our neighbor’s transition. Mr. Banks passed. His step-daughter found us as we were heading out to the library the morning it happened. She crossed the street to meet me at our front yard’s edge to tell us the news. Her body was a mix of exhaustion and sorrow-slumped shoulders… that posture that almost always accompanies grief. Our bodies do know, the very nerve endings feel it. I just read an article that quoted a scientist saying something like grief is our brains trying to use the maps inside our hearts but finding them wrong and wanting. That feels accurate.

My mind drifted to the grief on the pages of another novel I’m in the middle of, Homeward. It’s set in 1962 and, in a scene I read late at night this week, Rose received news her husband was killed in active duty. Not long after, she went into labor and delivered her baby girl stillborn. The scenes following are familiar, even though I never birthed a baby stillborn or navigated the 1960s as a Black woman whose husband went off to war. Grief is not partial.

“And before I knew it, I was making sounds I had never heard come out of me before. … Nobody tried to tell me to stop. They just let me cry. … It was like birthing a baby all over again, but this time, the baby was grief, and they were my midwives. They weren’t here to stop my pain; they were here to bear witness to it.” ( p. 98, Homeward by Angela Jackson-Brown).

I remember when my greatest grief got born in our little Brooklyn apartment, the two of us huddled around a cell phone with the late summer light streaming in at a slant from the south windows. Grief is not partial, but we are not naturally trained grief midwives. Grief is everywhere, but we seem to run from it and all its graves– quick to have some other place to be or more important things to do. The women tending to Rose and Pat tending to me were very different scenes, but one similarity emerges.

And it emerged in the pages of yet another book this week, The Tales of Hibaria. This fantastical book of short stories is all situated around a boy who has been collecting these tales as they have been told to him from around the islands of Hibaria. This particular story was about a boy, Hart, whose entire family and village and every single soul he knew was wiped out by a disease brought to their island from a trader. Hart left his house and climbed into a boat and set off down a river that cut through a tall, tall forest (where no one really ever came back from). He’s by himself in this boat, finally letting all the grief have its way when a badger appears and climbs in beside him. The scene that unfolds cut my heart open.

Presently, Hart said, this time without bitterness, “What do you know of grief?”

For a long time, the badger did not reply. Then it said, “That it is a deep wound. That it feels as though it will never go away. That it feels as though it will never heal.”

“That is not very comforting,” said the boy.

“Perhaps. But that is what you are feeling, is it not?”

Hart nodded.

The badger reached down and picked up a pair of broken lanterns that lay in a tangle of rope in the bottom of the boat. The creature hung one from the sternpost behind them and then made its way to the bow and hung the other from the stempost. As the badger returned to sit beside Hart the lanterns suddenly flared bright.

“You feel that hope and beauty are dead, but they are not. They are only hidden from you for a time, made invisible by your grief.”

“But what do I do?” Hart had begun to cry again, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

“We sit,” said the badger gently. “And you mourn, which is no easy thing, while I help you to remember that there is light when all you see is darkness. We sit, and travel this slow river road together until we come out on the other side.” (p. 75, Tales of Hibaria)

Grief is not partial and it doesn’t just find us at death. It is change. It is being a stranger. It is watching a dream die. It is someone else’s loss. It is learning of grievous, unrepentant sin. It is paving old growth forests. Because, well, it’s all death. Or, at least, it is the reminder that before Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there was no word for grief. There were no lines in the DSM-V, no documentaries to tell the stories of suffering, no oral traditions to speak of the layers of pain and brokenness. We, with Adam, have chosen our destruction and we, with Adam, now have to birth or bear witness to grief in all its shapes and forms.

It’s sitting. It’s weeping. It’s being beside. It’s joining with. It’s stooping low. And I can’t help but think of the impossibility of a Creator God who did all those things. He sits in our grief boats and lays in our grief beds and walks on our grief paths. And he knows it all, deeper than any inner map we are lost inside. He feels it in His innermost and still He comes.

What an indescribable grace.

Posted on by Caroline 1

the news is good because of the Giver

The stress of Sunday felt like a 7 layer dip I got buried inside. We rolled out of church just before the lights shut off (as per uzh) and Pat looked at me and said “Should we get doughn–?” and I interrupted with, “Well, I don’t really want to clean u–” and then he said, “So, pizza?” and I was like, “…invite Margaret!”

We were all like, “yeah, totally YES AND!” in those beautifully spiritual words of improv. And after pizza and catching up with our friend, we had to stop for eucalyptus and then also garland and then by the time we got home… well, there wasn’t much time for sabbath rest before dinner and hosting preparations began.

I wrote the Magnificat on butcher paper in pink to acknowledge the subtle relief we feel this week as we light the candle of Joy. I found myself pausing, even as I haphazardly decided to bake and frost cookies with sprinkles an hour before people were supposed to arrive. My pausing was a mental one, connecting the bright dots of light across the sky behind my eyes and seeing a picture emerge while the chaos of color and sound happened in my view.

Constellations. It’s the best way I can explain how something can connect so completely inside my spirit that I am almost convinced I’ve known before and forgotten. And as I traced dots of light in my mind’s sky, I saw a different way to consider the absurdity of Mary’s worship. The news that she would give birth to the son of God was actually the worst news for her reputation and for conversations at family gatherings and for a “honeymoon” stage of marriage and for her young body that would shapeshift to hold the baby. When I asked the kids Sunday night what emotions she might have felt when receiving the news from the angel, they answered the way I always have, “Scared!” … “Nervous!” … “Confused!” … “Afraid!” and their answers hung just under the strings of eucalyptus and leaves and evergreen branches on the ceiling.

And yet, I have no problem picturing her joy because I’m on THIS SIDE of Jesus’s birth. I know it will be ok. I know she will be an outcast, but she will also be visited by shepherds and angels and far away kings. I know the crude manger scene will give way to assimilating into some sort of regular life where he gets left at the temple, teaching rabbis. I know her Son, my Savior will be the Messiah because I believe the historical fact of his birth and kingship more easily as I look backward. I am believing with the whole picture of what He came to accomplish and living in light of His victory over the grave.

But, Mary.

She may not have known that her baby boy would one day walk on water, but she did know the character of the One who made the waters and the winters and the womb home inside her where Jesus would reside. She did not know most things about how the Savior would do the saving. But as she is caught up (and us with her) in her song of joy, I am struck by how her worship was fueled by all she did know about her God.

The news was not good in the way we might celebrate the joys (ahem…success) of the past year on a Christmas card: job promotions, marriage, babies, trips, renovations, awards and Pinterest worthy hosting events. Mary’s update to her family and friends might have read something like, “This year, angels appeared miraculously to Joseph and me to tell us we would be the parents of God’s son, Jesus. We are overjoyed! We write to you from a long, lonely walk to Bethlehem and hope that we can find lodging there. We have had a hard time finding work and maintaining friends, but we are hopeful that someday soon you can join us in this joy that we know to have come from the Maker Himself. It is truly amazing!” She probably wouldn’t even write the sad parts which read passive aggressive now, as I read them back.

Mary’s joy somehow sat beside, and was not overshadowed by, the sorrow in her heart. And though this news would flip her life like a temple table in Jesus’ hands, she stepped into the miracle of it and sang for joy. I wonder if, like the words of Elizabeth when their wombs met, their access to such joy came because they weren’t afraid it would displace the appropriate ache of all the other things. The injustices in the land. Stress and tension among family. The sorrow of lost loved ones. The pain of estrangement. The everyday toil of torn muscles and stretching work schedules.

It was past dinnertime last night, our guests were running late and Pat would be walking in just moments before their arrival. I was a flurry of motion, praying the paprika chicken would be edible while I made dough balls for naan and let Vesper run between my legs. I spoke slowly and directly and sternly to the children in my charge, “I need your help. I’m asking you to help me because I cannot do this alone.” The crack in my armor was showing and Zella responded in her too-grown way, “Mom, you seem stressed. Ok, let’s say 5 things we’re thankful for, ok?”

Anger boiled behind my slow breaths, because I don’t run a tight ship in my house and it felt like we were sinking. But, her words glittered like stars in the darkened sky of my anger, above the sinking ship of my house. Somehow, by the grace of God, prayers of a friend and my daughter’s convicting words, we righted the ship under a less sailors-take-warning kind of sky. The pride and the pain in me are resistant to Mary’s type of worship because I want to know, “exactly how, God?” How will this turn out good, in the end? I don’t see your purpose in it. I don’t understand my role in it. I can’t work out the specifics of this type of saving.

But what Mary knew was enough: the giver of the News is what makes it Good.

God, heal my unbelief.

P.S. Dinner was fine. It was more than fine, it was wonderful. Both Advent and our guests last night were truly a gift from the One who knows my name. And I am humbled because I could have worshipped before I knew that the chicken was delicious and the kids would warm to candlelit trivia about Mary and our living room would fill with joy and honest prayers. I missed that opportunity, but I pray I won’t miss the next one. When I receive the words (however they come) that God is good, I pray my first words are rejoicing ones.

Posted on by Caroline 2

signs of life

Sun is speckling, slanting across the kitchen counter, then the dining table, the dresser in the bedroom and now the smudged glass of the hutch. A clock counting the daylight hours, I count too. My eyes follow the golden spotlights and the shadows.

“Christ is Light!” The second littlest proclaims after dinner. “In Him there is no darkness,” we respond. What a ride candles are with little kids. On Sunday’s advent dinner, a mess of fingers rushed for the lighter, the precarious (yet very cool, vintage) five candle holder dipped and dived as a separate mess of fingers held it “steady” for lighting. Life.

Outside, the rain and clouds made it feel like night around 4 pm, winter cold hanging in the damp dark. Inside, the oven was still warm and I opened the kitchen window to invite a breeze between our bodies. We were many, filling out every room and spilling potluck dishes on every counter. Abundance. Inside the dark day, inside the dark season, inside the dark world– we are bright defiance. Pièces de résistance.

Our neighbors shared a tip a few years ago after we gave them a young crepe myrtle from the abundance we dug up from an acreage “thinning their plants for maintenance reasons.” (Praise be!) When we apologized to our neighbors because we thought maybe the tree we gave them didn’t survive the uproot and replant process, they said, “Oh, actually… it looks dead, but if you just scrape the bark you can see it is green underneath. Ours is alive, so we think it’ll have leaves in the spring!” Praise. We ran to see if ours survived, too.

Our front lawn is a sad mess of wet, brown pecan leaves. We are now choosing to compost our leaves by doing absolutely nothing about their gathering every fall, but it does not look good or tidy or festive. We shoved our shoes in their cubbies and under dressers so that there was space on the mat for the friends who would come for advent dinner Sunday. We knelt to pray at 5:45 pm as a family that God would help us be good hosts, even if it was a small group. That little rubber mat didn’t stand a chance. The shoes piled as the plates filled and I had to walk sideways in order to make the circle from dining to living room and back again. Warmth stretched out from my middle, as Pat prayed for the provisions and kids crawled out from under tables.

We ate well and drank deep in that special, winter potluck way and then huddled together to mark another week of advent– to name the shadows where light appears to have faded almost completely in this present darkness. We prayed peace into wars and sibling fights and meanness and anger. We prayed peace where it is impossible. We prayed for miracles.

“All is not lost. Mm-mm.”

My body sags with the desperation of it, now Tuesday and sunlit. But it is still advent dark. Our prayers for peace inside wars and fights and meanness and anger, well… It is still advent dark. So, I hear this song on repeat and remember that planting seeds of peace is obedience.

We prayed the Collect to finish out our time on Sunday. I’m still learning these rhythms.

BLESSED Lord, who has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The time for teaching moments had passed. The kids attached well to the illustration from Isaiah 11 that Jesse proclaimed over the group, “The lion shall lie down with the lamb… the wolf and the goat… the baby and the cobra…” These are not relationships of peace in the kingdom of the world. This vision is the hope of a peace that Christ accomplished being fully realized on this earth– every inch of it. Their right answers earned them a Ukrainian chocolate that some of our guests brought to share from their home country. God be praised, but those kids weren’t hearing more lesson. So, we simply spoke the collect together. We let the words rise in a chorus above our heads, an unlikely choir of ages and stages and backgrounds. And, we may not have known it, but we were praying for the seed to be planted in us. We prayed that the Word would actually take root in us, so that we ourselves could be the very planting of the peace that Christ accomplished.

May these seeds defy the flippant scattering and the death underground and the complicated germination and the unlikely conditions and the hungry squirrels– may these seeds of peace sown in obedience bring about an otherworldly rest for the weary, the war-torn, the wintered and the waiting.

Advent is still so dark. When there is no sign of life, may Christ light the way to plant the seeds of peace. AMEN.

Posted on by Caroline 3

Leaving

I forgot the tender stack of leaves in the car. We had collected them the day before in North Georgia, on a winding trail up and around rocks that eventually led to a tumbling river. Oak, maple, dogwood, sweetgum. The colors struck a rainbow of pigments that told tales of their time in the sun. They survived two brothers’ antics and the constant bend and snap of a mother noticing nature and keeping her brood safe. The stack delighted me as I added to it, showing it off to my partner and holding it up in the light.

But, I forgot the tender stack in the center console between the captain seats of our Sienna. I collected it again when I found our coffee bean bag empty the morning after we returned from our trip. The leaves had curled on themselves, the brighter ombre colors turned inward and the dull undersides showed a different kind of beauty. The stack snuggled in, hugging themselves with leaf arms and stems stretching out, in seeming futile hope of reaching the branch that once gave it life.

I love the crunchiness of this time of year. Where the ground once squished, it now crackles underneath my feet. Each leaf has its own delicate story of beginning and living and dying with the almost weightless grace. The science of leaves changing colors, from bud to broad to breaking free, is easily explained with pigments and sunlight– my daughter tells me, anyway. But the enduring truth of the whole process speaks of something less calculated.

When God began things– breathed or spoke or willed or wooshed the world into being– He immediately constrained things to time, ordering the days, weeks, years and seasons in a way that could tell an ordered story back to the creation seeking Him out. And the story these leaves tell (or, maybe one of the many stories), is one of life and death and community.

I’ve always wondered at the beauty of the death in the seasons. We gaze in awe at the colors as they change, travel long distances to stare at mountainsides and clamor up trails where the trees are tight together. We are shocked every year that the leaves have done it again, though we know exactly why and how. We pull the autumn season up around our ears like a blanket and sit to watch the firework display that cannot be replicated or outdone by human hands. This is the work of the Creator. So, why must this mastery disappear? Why must the leaves leave?

I look at the curled clump of leaves now brittle in my hands. I notice the dry cracks around my knuckles and remember winter will morph my body as well. We will collect leaves and string them up in our living room soon, hanging them so the tallest heads have to duck underneath. We will notice the way each leaf is different in color and pattern and the ways they dance when the boys wrestle the walls.

But, these brittle leaves in my dry, autumn hands are not stretched out like nature’s bunting above our heads in the living room. These leaves I stacked so carefully are now curled in snugly and I read my own story back from them– that when my life began by the thought or the song or the woosh of my Creator, my life was also starting to die. My fate as a daughter of Eve and Adam is that my current body is not my forever vessel.

We are, those of us with breath, leaving this place even as we are living in it.

And though my body’s clock began a countdown when it breathed first, I remember God did not think it good for Adam to be alone. When sin broke the lifeblood and beauty of their garden home, they needed each other. They curled in even as they were cast out and God knew. God provided community before the first sadness had ever snuck in with sin. God knew that the bodies he formed from dust would be brittle in a different way, breaking with the weight of a free will that chose to defy the living God in violent acts of self glory.

The story of these curling leaves is the story of my own heart– hurt by my own sin and the weight of a world filled with brokenness. As I reach out to live out my days in all their glorious pigments and seasons, I curl in with a body that cannot be alone. And this is the Lord’s good provision inside the fate of our leaving.

Posted on by Caroline 4

I want to get in His sights

I am wearing white for Eastertide.

It started because we wanted to see and feel Easter – to shake off everything regular for our greatest festival celebration. So, we literally put on our party, looking like a wedding where everyone is the bride. And then somehow it stretched into the whole Easter season… my high kick to winter and death and the muted colors of typical Brooklyn fibers.

Yesterday, I folded into a wooden pew next to Patrick after I successfully passed Z Ru off to the nursery magicians. I followed the stitching on the white that hung just over my wrists as Vito talked about the deep sadness of joy – the weeping and the wearing and the working of it.

Jesus preached that there is blessing – there is joy – absolutely inside the worst things. Yes, absolutely. Because Jesus is inside the worst of things, just exactly where you think He is not. He is behind and in between and above the worst, saying, “Come, heal, breathe, hear, repent, believe, stay, rest…”

And that’s hard. I disbelieve that for joy, I think.

I already confessed my light Lent, but I forgot to say that there is something else I feel – something other than regret. The world is brimming with weeping and wearing and working, in bad ways. The worst. I am not strong enough to even hear all of it. I don’t know what to do with the headlines and the histories and personal hells typed out in simple texts. Because I am afraid I can do nothing, afraid what I can do is not enough.

My grief weight is heavy. Just the weight of my sorrow could sink a ship, I am sure of it. But there are entire cities, countries, and continents filled with people who bear the same weight.

The sheerness of my white sleeves put a fuzzy filter on my arms, a weird and welcome distraction from the message about sad joy. The points rolled out on Luke 6:20-26, just two about joy coming by way of discipling relationships and consolation.

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry.
“Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.
“Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. (Luke 6:20-26 ESV)

I heard myself mmhmm. Jesus. I want to get in his sights. I want to be there when he lifts up his eyes because then I might feel sure about being in His presence. I know that is where joy reaches fullness, somehow.

But He pairs blessing with the absolute worst things: poverty, hunger, weeping and then being hated, excluded and reviled. How can joy get inside these things? Jesus.

Somehow, mysteriously- magically even, Christ is deeper than dark. Light came into the world and the darkness could not overcome it. I memorized that when I was nine, but I always thought it was a light like the break of day, chasing cold shadows to corners and covering like a warm blanket that keeps only good underneath. I’ve always imagined light versus dark as a cosmic battle of no contest, where the two rushed in from separate directions to make a messy collision in a long, deep valley. A crowded mess of thunderstorms and white robes and lightning and dark forces and probably Gandalf, but the sides stayed easily distinguishable – in my mind.

But this deeper-than-dark light is something new to me. If in Christ all things are held together – the aloe plant in my window, the rain drops dripping April, Zella’s squishy little body, and the superlative worst – then He is there in all these things, too.

Inside poverty and hunger and sadness – the deepest of it – Jesus is deeper still. It seems wrong to flip the superlative like that. Find the absolute worst thing, and there find the absolute best thing hiding. It doesn’t make any sense for Jesus to promise that. And then I think about the cross, the whole cruel journey of it, and the story looks different.

He was the light that couldn’t be overcome, but he was crucified. He was so, so deep in the darkest of us. He is light in the deepest, darkest of us – holding all things together, overcoming death and claiming victory over evil. Definitively. Absolutely. Making joy the surest thing because He (Jesus) is the surest thing. Surer than death, even.

I ended up with a whole loaf of communion bread on the bus ride home from church. Zella wriggled under my chin, fighting sleep, and it felt deeply appropriate to rip off fistfuls of the sourdough and let it work my jaw. The body broken for me… the darkness lit for me… the joy assured for me.

It still doesn’t make any sense. I think the light hiding deeper than dark scene is hard to choreograph behind my eyes. The light that doesn’t come from darkness… the light that is somehow deeper than darkness and can reach all the sunken ships full of the world’s grief weight.

And in that mixed up meeting of light and dark, there is our joy called Jesus. And we are happy with Him alone.

This was the offering song Sarah Gregory sung for church yesterday and it is still sweet honey to my disbelieve-for-joy soul. She learned of the song four hours before she sung it. God is so good and full of grace for us.

Posted on by Caroline 0

celebration and sorrow

Zella Ruth knows nothing about Good Friday – that it is actually bad, dark, and terrible. She knows nothing about the repetition of “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” and nothing about the silent exit of the night liturgical service. I’m not really doing a very good job of educating, though. I spent Holy Week singing “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” and dance-contorting all over the spring warmth in our apartment. We spread a blanket in the park and talked about blooming trees, fingered blades of green grass, and squinted up at the bright sun. We woke up extra early on Friday to go to the flower district in Manhattan for Sunday’s centerpieces. ZRu’s first Holy Week outside my belly was not heavy with sadness at all.

I lacked sorrow for the via dolorosa this year.

I just couldn’t manage to let death and depravity cast its shadow over those 40 days. I couldn’t get around to it. Grief wiped me out the last two years. It took all my energy and  I didn’t have time to imagine plumbing those depths again.

After the dust settled on Christmas and Epiphany, my heart got good and fixed on the resurrection. No, this year was not the time to teach Zella about Lent sadness, not with words anyway. Maybe she felt the water dripping off my eyes… or a different rhythm as she pressed up against my chest… or a restlessness in my preparations as I wore her tight under my chin.

It’s all tangled up, this celebration and this sadness, in confetti tears and Google spreadsheets and clean sheets and a bit of silence that comes as a surprise on a Thursday before the mushroom red sauce is served over quinoa.

I am not making any progress and I suppose that is still grace.

There was a moment at our Easter celebration, one of those I just curled up into. Can you sit on the lap of a moment, can it stroke your hair and say, “You will be okay.” Can a moment do that?

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In some ways, Easter was everything my heart was hoping for because it has to be. It is the easiest party to plan because there is victory already inside it – the biggest and most victorious victory that heaven declares with celestial confetti and hell recognizes like yesterday’s news. Because it is. It already happened.

So, I’m not surprised my heart swelled to sing liturgy, to stand with the choir, to sway with sweet Zella on my hip, to take the bread and the cup, and to hear the words proclaiming our greatest festival.

But there’s something you may not know or assume about me, when it comes to parties. I get so worked up – so blind with starry eyes about the beauty of it that I almost make myself sick. I had imagined this crazy build up for the moment we honored the Host of our gathering, but I got caught tongue tied and fumbled all over the raised glass I was pretending to hold. I had misplaced the confetti and the champagne was only partially poured when I called for the big hoo-rah!

But then, this moment happened and I melted into it – right onto the floor where I found my people. These sweet, bright souls who knew exactly what to do when confetti appeared.

Looking back, I might have spent too much of the liturgy of that day wishing I had Lent-ed harder or planned better. But, somewhere inside that moment, I was learning from Senna and William and Ezra and Orion and Hannah and Zella – all the littles who knew just what to do with paper celebration.

We got lost in it. I’m not sure how long I sat there in my white pants, letting gold and white confetti rain down from the sky from sweaty little fingers rushing to throw it up in the air. The moment, God, held me with a tender knowing.

My inner eight-year-old followed celebration and found sorrow. I gave in to wild delight inside that confetti moment, but there was – creeping in the cracks of that fellowship hall – a stretch of sorrow.

Like light streaming in, sorrow pulled at my eyelids and scratched across my throat. Already and not yet, they say. Christ has conquered the grave and offered that victory to us, but we are awaiting his return. We are looking forward to final peace.

And I am having trouble with the tension.

I can’t put words to it because they seem at once too harsh and too soft. I am the disciples on the way to Damascus. I am disbelieving for joy. I am in the middle of a spirited hoo-rah, summoning energy from a force outside me to throw joy into the air when I become very aware of corners and shadows and my brother’s ashes somewhere in an urn on a shelf.

I am disbelieving for joy that God has won, that He wins in the end. Somehow, I can’t formulate the cardboard book version of this tale, not now anyway.

Until then, Eastertide – this season to celebrate freedom and life and secure hope. And mushroom red sauce with quinoa.

 

 

Posted on by Caroline 4

eat your deliverance

food sermon

I finally turned toward the Lord.

It was the smallest bent of the shoulder, the slightest tilt of the head – away from destruction and toward restoration. It took one calendar year and then some. I should be straight-facing the Lord by now, parallel to the Presence. Feet to feet and eye to eye, if God would stoop to look me in the blues He painted on my round face.

It’s October now, and for months I’ve been saying all the spiritual self-talk, “You’ve turned toward the Lord, now gaze on Him. Delight in Him. Love His presence. Feel His embrace. Taste His provision. Be with Him. Rest in Him. Listen to Him. Breathe the breath of Him.”

But foolishness can follow a person, like spider webs that play phantom strings on skin hairs long after being swept away. Foolishness doesn’t care about posture or position. Maybe that’s why I have trouble lifting my gaze or moving toward the One who redeemed my soul.

God is always on my mind like grief is always on my mind, but this year I didn’t have an appetite for Him. I didn’t crave Him like I craved a medium rare steak or Nonna D’s Oatmeal Lace ice cream (read: pregnant).

I guess I am waiting for that moment – you know the one, in all those Psalms? The moment in the stanzas that say, “and then they cried out… turned from their wicked ways…” Because in the next stanza, the Lord would come down.

He would come all the way down to listen and heal and deliver the wayward from the sure destruction of spoiled appetites. Stanza after stanza, story after story, He came down when they cried out. And then He fed them with rich, mysterious food – though I imagine they never knew they were starving until that first bite.

Taste and see that He is good. (Psalm 34:8)

This command is soaked in love, drowning in it. In this command I hear the heart of my Father saying, “Oh, child. Your foolishness has confused your appetite. You don’t even know what real food looks like anymore. What you put in your belly is spoiling you from the inside. But now that you have turned toward me, you can hear me when I say I am the best food. Eat your deliverance. Unleash your appetite on something that will satisfy.”

Eat and be satisfied. (Deuteronomy 8:10)

If I could relax my shoulders with palms face up like benediction, I might hear the Lord saying, “Oh, darling. Eat your deliverance.”

Is it fear that has my hands tied? Am I afraid that Joy will tip the scale and Grief will lose out? Maybe Pride is too good a friend, blinding me to the food my soul craves. Maybe I am suffocating because I covet the past and I covet the future.

The longer I let the spoil sit in my belly, the less I live.

It sounds strange. But it is death in my belly if it is not life. God did not come all the way down, in Jesus, for our bellies to rot and for our breath to die. Jesus came to give life and breath and food, the richest food, and this is my deliverance.

“Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts.” Jeremiah 15:16

Praise comes like all the waves in all the oceans, because you cannot gulp down the glory of the Lord. It is a slow delight. His deliverance happens when desperation makes space for His glory and our praise happens because those who have been delivered say so.

“Let the redeemed of the Lord say so.” Psalm 107:2

“Let” is the command to everyone in earshot of the redeemed: allow these people to praise rightly the God of their redemption. Listen to their praise because they can be trusted. Especially if they were foolish before – let them swoop ribbons and dance swirls and sing melodies and make a ceremony out of praise.

Let those with life in their bellies say so.

Someday soon I hope to make a ceremony of silly praise, a tribute to the God of my redemption, the God who satisfies with good food. I am waiting for that moment…

Posted on by Caroline 1

invitations are about movement

I was on the couch, curled up in Sabbath bliss and rubbing the watermelon belly that has become a part of me. We saw the due date come and go last week and a little bit of me thought, “Well, I guess I’ll just be pregnant forever.”

Irrational, maybe. But these are things you think when 43 days have gone by and the wiggles are still on the inside. Things I think, anyway.

Patrick came over and snuggled in to ask, “What can I do to encourage you?”

And then he started reciting Scripture in my silence, while my cheeks burned hot tears.

Philippians 4:4-8
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

Psalm 34
“I will bless the LORD at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the LORD; let the humble hear and be glad.
Oh, magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together! Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Oh, fear the LORD, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.

He kept reciting the verses from the list my mom sent us in an email a couple weeks back. I asked her to send me verses for laboring to calm my delivery nerves, but he memorized them because he knows it’s good to have Scripture saved up in your soul.

I kept silent, blinking and battling and defending my stubbornness.

The hot tears came because, sure, all the baby emotions. But the Word of the Lord never returns void and the chord it hit yesterday in my spirit was one I’ve been trying to avoid.

I want Baby K to come now because my calendar says Michication (our annual family gathering in Michigan) starts with a flight on July 10th. I want to go to the beach with my niece and nephews and I want to come back with sand in my shoes. I want to sit around campfires and toast marshmallows and play board games late into the night. I want to do all the things we have been talking about since we last left each other in September after James and Carly’s wedding.

That’s what I want.  And just above the din of my own heart and schedule I could still hear him reciting –

Psalm 46:1-3
“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling.”

God surely knows my need for fresh water and sibling laughter and firelight. He surely knows these are good things – things that soothe my heart and calm my spirit. He surely knows I need it just this way.

And still more verses cut through my innermost arguments –

Psalm 143:8
Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.

A couple weeks ago, we sang a familiar song after communion at church – it’s a song I have posted before and will probably post again. The song is a simple invitation to sit at a feast, but what I hear these days when I sing is an invitation to movement.

Come, Sinners Come
Come sinners, come for there is a spread
a table full and free
For all who thirst, for Christ has said
that all may come and eat

Come sinners, come
Come sinners, come
Oh, what a love is this
that bids sinners come.

All the way to a dinner party has felt too long to travel these past 10 months – from grief and worry and selfishness and fear. I know that celebration and belonging and courage and joy are just past that threshold, but sometimes I’m still holding the invitation on my doorstep – feeling the beauty and weight of the faith that hangs in the distance between.

I want to sit at the celebration, but I just don’t know if there are enough steps in my feet. And I guess that’s why I am realizing the invitation to “come” is all about movement. The “coming” might take awhile, but repenting is about direction as much as it is about destination.

Stubbornness and pride and fear and worry and anxiety will probably make part of the journey with me, but I guess you could say I’m slowly turning toward the Host.

Pat keeps on saying this whole pregnancy and delivery is a way the Lord is teaching us, speaking to us, and challenging us toward greater faith. I keep nodding that he is right while my feet are planted like cement on my doorstep, inwardly promising to move when I have less to give up.

It doesn’t work like that.

God’s invitation for sinners like me to “come” to the feast is not the reception after the main event I have planned. It is the main event. Movement toward that feast is a movement away from all the things I want instead – beach vacations and 7 pound babies and easy delivery. Every step believes that what is promised is the best there is, the absolute best.

There will probably be more Scripture quoted to a stubborn face hot with tears before Baby K arrives, but I’m praying that Truth will soften me to repentance and movement toward the absolute best.

Posted on by Caroline 3

dear little one | your uncle will

Dear Little One,

Is it you who craves ice or me? We make quite a pair, you and me – so round and so ready. Sometimes I lean down and say, “Mama’s here” just to remind you I haven’t left. I guess that’s silly, but I do it anyway.

I’ve tried writing you this letter several times but I have to stop in the middle because the words won’t come and the words come too fast. I’m not ready. I want you to be here so badly, my dear sweet, but I am not ready to be your mama.

Maybe that’s okay, maybe every mama feels like this when they are 37 weeks round.

It’s June now and that means warm, sticky heat. It means the park is so thick with green it can make you forget there are skyscrapers. And this year, it means night pacing in the bedroom we will share with you soon. Because I cannot sleep. Last June, your papa and I were planning our wedding. We were fretting over silly things like lamps and talking about serious things, like how we would love each other.

And, you know, none of that talk made me less afraid or more prepared for the life that has happened this year.

What I’m trying to say is: I am not ready for you to meet this world without your uncle Will in it. I am not ready to just tell you stories about this man, not ready to have you meet him in pictures, not ready to insist on his specialness. I’m not ready for you to be here when he is not. Oh, I know it makes no sense.

You will soon stretch out into your first brave cry and we will say “you are alive!” This is the most confusing part: your uncle Will is alive, but he is not here. He died in a car accident on August 2nd, 2014. That is a very hard sentence for mama.

Because I can’t say the things he would say or laugh the way he would laugh or think the way he would think – he is gone in a way I can never be present on his behalf. I learned that from a grieving book by C.S. Lewis. And all that William space he filled so well is very empty now and I don’t know how that will feel to you.

I can’t tell you about his treehouses or his childhood tantrums or his tenderness. I can’t tell you about the time we went to the zoo with Heidi and Amaya or the time we sang the Newsies at the cousin reunion or the times we stayed up too late telling stories. I can’t tell you about the time I told him I liked your papa.

I could tell you all those things, but it’s not the same.

Oh, darling. Even now as you bulge my belly with your feet and fists, I know I am not the mama I pictured myself being. I only have 23 moonlights until you are scheduled to arrive and I am a mess most days. I am afraid of many things. And I don’t know how to tell you about your uncle Will, but this is a start. He is alive with Christ, but he is not here. It will never make sense. I’m sorry about that.

love you,

mama

Read all the dear little one posts here.

Posted on by Caroline 10

she is not ours

I know I have not nested enough or planned enough or read enough or enoughed enough – with this whole parenting thing, I mean. I know this because it seems like all pregnant ladies have lists – to do, to buy, to think, to read, to reflect, to pray.

There are also the “don’t worry if you haven’t made a list – this is the one list you’ll need” lists.

I’m not as organized as I used to be (or maybe I am just more honest). I have no lists. [Actually, that’s not true – I am keeping a list of songs that pop into my head unannounced. So far I have: 21 Questions by 50 Cent, Away in a Manger, Video by India Arie, The Storm is Passing Over, We Like to Party, Easter Song by Keith Green, I’m Coming Out by Diana Ross. And those are just the songs that come when I’m near the pen and paper at work where I keep track.] 

I do daydream about baby’s hair color and baby’s imagination and what kind of family we will be when baby turns five.
I do have doubts about being a mom, though with every day my body confirms that I am created for it.
I do imagine what Brooklyn will look like from new eyes as a stay-at-home mom.
I do wonder about the privilege of welcoming a baby with special needs – if that is one of the surprises waiting on delivery day.

A few days ago I gave a strange, bullet pointed version of “my story” for our Brooklyn Fellows class. In the process of preparing, I remembered some precious words my mom said once on a terraza in Santa Lucia, Honduras. My parents were visiting from the States for a week and I had taken them to all my favorite spots – the garbage dump school, the feeding center, the orphanage, and the home for boys – before bringing them to my student’s home for a late lunch (except that, in typical ambiguous fashion, Alejandra and I had never communicated or confirmed this plan… so my dad ended up eating a LOT of pastel (cake) and coffee in the absence of meat).

When my dad was on his third slice and my mom had shared all of our galavanting stories, Alejandra’s mom asked, “Don’t you worry about Caroline being here?”

She answered it just like she would her age or her affinity for the country life, “Well, she’s not ours. She is the Lord’s.” So simply, so true.

I nodded with all my silly, missional enthusiasm. I had done a lot of things in that wonderful country – hitchhiked in El Salvador and La Tigra, been stranded overnight hiking a mountain, driven students through El Centro at night, been pulled over by fake cops, taken students with bodyguards on mission trips, rode in the back of pickup trucks, wandered up to houses that looked like mechanic shops, accepted invitations from neighbor-strangers, stayed up all night with students baking pumpkin muffins and making sushi at 2 am, argued with cops who pulled me over and wanted to take my car… the list is too long and too embarrassing to recount. Not all of it was wise or prayerful or good.

My parents prayed a lot. And they never told me to slow down or to move back home.

“She is the Lord’s.”

I don’t know yet the kind of courage it takes to believe that as a parent. I think it’s the way she said it – like I am first God’s family and I am on loan. It was a fact like the price of corn, but it came out like she was announcing I had royal relatives. It rippled across every belief in my heart that God is sovereign and a kind of kinship welled up as if to say, “I am the Lord’s!”

All of the Scripture I read as a child was not mumbo-jumbo. All those verses and sermons and conversations in the kitchen before dinner and talks before morning milking chores – those were about my Father. I belong to Him.

And He is a good keeper, the best.

I have thought about my mom’s words often, especially this past year when we have held so tightly to Will with possessive pronouns: my son, my brother, my husband, my friend, mine.

And even as we push against it, God is saying, “He is mine. He belongs to me. I am his keeper. And I do not fail.”

That’s hard to hear.

It was a strange time to get pregnant – in the first few months of marriage and in the first few months of grief. But God never stopped being faithful, never stopped keeping promises, never stopped claiming us as His. So, now I pray that when people ask, “Aren’t you afraid your baby will…” we will respond, “Oh, Baby K is not ours. Baby K is the Lord’s.”

It sounds crazy, but I can still hear it spoken over me, like last year’s corn prices and the announcement of royal heritage.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Thank you for not claiming me as your own – for doing the harder thing in confessing that I am the Lord’s.

Posted on by Caroline 14