Tag: inspiration

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

who we are and who we should be

“She can sure tell a short story!”

“She didn’t ask me to do a single thing at that party!”

“I love how nonlinear her thinking is!”

“My, she is indestructibly composed!”

I just read that last description in a novel and couldn’t stifle the laugh. Composed is not who I am and not really who I have ever been. If you walk into a party at my house, there is a good chance I’ll need your help cleaning or cutting the chicken or telling my children that playing hockey with tree sticks is probably not a good idea (you would end that like a question because of course you wouldn’t let them play stick hockey in the house with a rock for a puck while they rollerblade, but I have, indeed, done just that). All the other quotes above are just things I imagine no one has said of me, ever.

I was once so fully committed to the haphazard confetti of my personality that I dressed as a Christmas tree for a costume party and plugged myself into the wall for the whole thing. I’m a lot of years removed from that party in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, but I remember the absolute joy radiating from my face (or was that the Christmas lights around my neck?) like some people remember winning a championship. I didn’t win anything that night (not even best dressed), but I just loved being in my skin.

Now, in the year 2024, I have somehow time-traveled to my sixth grade year but with the saggy skin of a mid-lifer. I am unsure who to talk to, what to say, and how to share the little gems of myself at a reasonable rate while also making sure to stay reasonably curious about the needs and treasures of the folks around me. That last part is the 30 years since sixth grade, but it all seems to be overlapping in strange and vulnerable ways. What is it about our characters and our personalities that is meant to be sanctified and what is just who we are?

How do we come to have our preferences and habits and rhythms and weekend plans? Is it a series of events that have us arriving at an enneagram number and a different set of variables that defines our Meyers-Briggs? Or is it all the same information just organized differently? How much of who I am right now is the same as my six grade self (who wrote journal entries about the first day she wore shorts to school and the seating placement in history class and the rabbit skin that showed up in my locker as a gift from the locker next door). What of who we are is who we are meant to be?

I’m very much not sure about that. As much as I have lived and seen in the three decades since sixth grade, it seems that I (metaphorically) have spent the whole journey walking around the same tree. Every once in a while, I’ll turn and notice something in the bark and with the passion of a EUREKA! epiphany will declare the new knowledge to myself and others only to discover a journal entry or a blog post from 13 years ago that boldly declares the same truth. Things I learned in those early years of discovering God to be personal and holy and good are lessons I am waking up to these days like I’ve never heard the news before.

Can I be sanctified into indestructibly composed? I would settle for uncompromisingly gentle or abundantly kind. But, it’s just hard to know what is possible, you know?

What I do know is that the God who made me is full of grace and truth and is incredibly patient. I do know the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. I do know that those who abide in the vine will produce fruit. The Father gives us every opportunity through the Spirit to discover Him and, in discovering Him, our truest selves will come into view. Where I want to measure myself against others or my own ideas, God applies a measurement of the heart that might make little sense to the world. Whatever that truest self needs to shed and whatever it needs to grow by sanctification, I know the plumb line is sure, steady and stable.

I might ditch the novel. The theology of the 60s and 70s in England (as it’s portrayed in this book) really perverted the incredible early work of Augustine and Ambrose. I’m not sure I can keep everything in its tidy place anymore. The day is what late summer dreams are made of, so we will read outside and go on a neighborhood walk and eventually land at the library and Zella’s first band practice. And I will show up to all those places as my unfinished self, no matter how many eurekas I’ve had today.

Now, the task of embracing what is unfinished with humility and not shame, because God is glorified in my growing.

Posted on by Caroline 2

do I have a “native” habitat?

We decided to naturescape for the birds and the bees, in the beginning. Planting native wildflowers, clover and grasses on top of crunchy pecan leaves that would eventually be mulch. But pecan leaves are a pain. They start falling long before the autumn equinox, when trees have the nature’s okay to turn color and create the palette we stand in front of for family pictures. They cover our lawn in one way or another for most of the year, so naturescaping meant peacemaking with the pecans.

I’m not quite there yet (at peace with the pecans), but we did watch fritillary butterflies grow from skinny ‘lil babies to chrysalis plump. We noticed wrens and cardinals and mourning doves and mockingbirds and eastern towhees and tufted titmouses (titmice?) and downy woodpeckers. And we noticed a handful of other birds in different seasons, sitting early on the front steps in the morning. Listening. Is it nature taking back our yard as a habitat or is it just that I am listening?

Maybe it is both.

Some of the neighbors don’t mind. Actually, one of our sweet neighbors is a designated wildlife area and another has a 10 year plan to reclaim their yard to benefit the ecosystem where we live. So, we’re not the first with the idea. We’re just doing our best with free cardboard and harvested seeds and letting those blasted pecan leaves help where we can’t. They are cover for little insects and they are food for the ground and eventually compost to create a rich mix of soil for those little native seeds to grow.

I can’t help but think of native things. The idea that something– a plant or a person or a bird– belongs somewhere. This whole wide world in the mind of its Creator– with rocks carved out for waterfalls and mountains capped with snow and long, flat stretches of flowing wild grasses– is full of places and spaces designated specifically and uniquely to be a home, a place of belonging for something or someone. Cardinals and monarch butterflies and arctic foxes– they all have a sense of where they are supposed to be, to grow, to hunt, maybe even to die.

Humans are a bit more complicated. And not the least because our whole existence has been displacing people and plants and primates to make room for our ideas and inventions and ill-motivated conquests. We are not the world’s next best thing. We show up on the shores of places and we destroy. If we look at the long history of humanity, stretching back even further than the disasters of European explorers, we find destruction at the beginning or ending of every story. I’m no history expert, but as our home studies ancient worlds and middles ages, the stories all start to sound very similar.

I have a few moments now, while Pat puts finishing touches on our free book library out front. The cicadas push back the quiet and I wonder: what is native to our hearts? What belongs there, originally before the sins of self started to eat us from the inside? What has been choked out by invasive species that someone told us would be good to plant? What has been a nice, Bermuda grass landscape that has made my heart uninhabitable for the good, wild fruits to grow?

Thankfully, God is both the prologue and the epilogue to the books of history. He is before and after every place of destruction, inviting us into redemption season. Like a forest decimated by a fire, God invites us into the miracle of something new, green, and good growing up from the ashes of human destruction.

The analogies blur and my mind shakes back to our neighborhood picnic in an hour. Carrots, tomatoes, should I pack the BLT’s sitting on the table since we haven’t eaten lunch yet? I need to pick up my friend’s kids and find a cooler…

I do wonder if there is a place on this earth that a human feels “native.” Does that exist uniquely for each human or am I dreaming?

We started naturescaping for the birds and the bees, but maybe it is for my brain. Maybe I need to ask questions about why things are how they are and what needs to be ripped out. Maybe I need to let the soil inside rest so I can see what might grow when given the chance. Maybe naturescaping is a thing that can happen on the inside, too.

Posted on by Caroline 3

the part where I am not able

I squinted against the midday sun in summer, changing lanes and reaching water bottles to the four thirsty ones behind me.

“Mom, how does a person not have legs?”

What a great question, Foster. I quickly sent my brain’s minions to collect my mind from all the places it had wandered on the car ride home from drama camp. They were learning about the body– every part has a purpose, that sort of thing. And, by extension, the Body of Christ works together, so it wasn’t entirely out of the blue.

“So,” I began with a deep breath in,

“Well, some people are born without legs. And some people, like our friend Patrick, lost his legs in a car accident…” I trailed off, trying to make quick work of all the implications now pushing and shoving for front row seats at this lesson. I was Harrison Ford walking out over that canyon in Indiana Jones, with little idea of where to go next.

“You know, Foster, it is really interesting. God didn’t intend for us to be broken in our bodies. …But God is always at work to redeem what he made, so our friend Patrick is able to use prosthetics and our friends Kim and Merry are able to “hear” through someone’s fingers communicating. Isn’t that amazing?”

“You mean we can grow back our body parts?”

“No, no not like that. Although, that would be cool! What I mean is that God cares so much about his creation that he has given humans the ability to be creative and come up with ways to still use our bodies in incredible ways… even if they are broken.”

“Can I have a snack?”

“Yes, totally. One more thing… are you listening?”

“What? oh, yeah…”

“What do you think heaven will be like? Where we are able to live just exactly as God has envisioned life?”

“Well, we will be whole with all our body parts…”

It’s over, I know. But my mind kept going and I immediately questioned everything I said. But, Jesus had his scars after he was resurrected! And, how do the passages on body parts and unity read to someone who is differently-abled? How do I unravel everything I know and still land at a place that has always felt certain: God is good. He made good things. He is actively mending what is broken. And he is always, always inviting us to be part of that redemption story.

I blinked and barely made the exit to 166 off the 75 North highway. I mentally flipped pages in my brain, ask questions of the people who are better equipped to respond to these queries. I heard no responses, save the battle for fig bars behind me.

God, do you hear these questions in my brain? Do you know my desire to sit in a room and study questions just like these? With people who are after You instead of accolades or letters or knowledge. My shoulders were lonely to touch some kindred spirits, but just then I turned onto Sylvan Place SW. We unloaded bags as if we’d been gone a week and I went through the making dinner motions, mental math-ing substitutions and extra guests and singing the prayer together.

I still don’t know if I would say it all the same or change it completely. I suppose this is the part where I am not able.

Posted on by Caroline 3

reply to Ecclesiastes

The muscles in my neck are protesting my pillow. Or, is it just the place anxiety has found to rest? Maybe it is both. I hear Sho Baraka’s clever lyrics rhythm my own mind’s conversation. Today, I write with a full view of the dogwoods in the backyard. They are catching autumn color early for lack of rain. I imagine the roots reaching, searching, hoping for a drink that hasn’t come.

How does a root ask for a drink? I wondered in my nature journal last week. I know now they are connected, all the trees. Their roots reach out like fingers and share their ailments and abundances like neighbors and cups of sugar. The network is much, much wider than the spread we get under for shade, invisible and vast and quietly keeping everything alive while the crown of creation makes all manner of trails and highways and best efforts at gardens just inches above.

There is growth in our garden, but I’ve forgotten the wildflowers I planted and I’m not sure how to tell if the thick collection of green is intentional. And, I remind myself, some weeds are not bad. Some weeds are just plants someone decided they didn’t like. But, then there are the invasive kind and there is no good argument for those.

I sketched a fly and a mosquito today as I sat with Foster for Science class. When my mind wants to make the wrong noise– to mirror the droop of my shoulders and the resignation in my throat– I look and listen for an invitation to the present moment. And there is always something. The leaves dancing in shadow on the deck chairs. Blue jays and cardinals and wrens chatting in the morning. We compare notes and sketches and try to figure out if I placed the legs in the right place, or are they arms? Feelers? Stingers? His web is an abstract attempt and I shoo away his apologies and disclaimers to pronounce it good.

And I wonder if he questions the authority I have to pronounce anything good. And he’s right. I don’t have any. I’m just a person.

Last night, I was sharing this idea I had with someone… where we would gather a list of questions from kids and then find real humans in our networks who could answer their questions. The idea, of course, is that within our networks we have vast, beautiful storehouses of knowledge and we could have our question answered by a human with eyeballs instead of a search bar with an interface.

“That’s so cool! What would your areas of expertise be?” he asked, like a gentle giant of fairy tales. Because, well, he is quite tall.

And I froze. I’m almost 40 and I am actually speechless when it comes to what I have to offer. Isn’t that funny? I mean, it’s hard to package “been rescued from a hike on a mountain where wild pumas roam free” and “taken multiple rides in cars with strangers” and “frequently attends theology and philosophy conferences without knowing a soul, not for a ed. requirement but just because” and “loves youth ministry, loves to dance” and “has kids, interest in spiritual formation.”

What I said was, “I’m not really sure. I have lots of questions! I just learned today that the dynamic of slavery in the Greco-Roman period could really change how we read Bible passages about freed people and how they relate to former owners and, therefore, how the message of the Gospel looked like an alien religion because it united people across classes in a way that nothing had ever done before. I’m interested in that!”

As I write that, I realize that what I said last night was more like, “Um, I learned this thing about Greco-Romans… interesting.. reading Ephesians…”

Does anyone have imposter syndrome about being human? I always think of Satan holding out some delectable sin– something sparkly and sinister and obvious. But, lately (always), it seems Satan has taken a more subtle tone with me. His garden question sounds more like, “But, were you actually worth making, compared to all this other glory He made? Did He really forgive you? Has God given you anything good to offer?”

And to be honest, there’s a lot of evidence stacked against me. My anger with the kids, my impatience with the ticking minutes, my resignation after a bad hour of the same work I was made to choose. It’s self-sabotage and Satan’s behind it. So, I speak it to the leaves and the sunshine on the dancing philodendron and the flies hovering above the dried smoothie on the table.

It’s this song, the bridge especially. And, there is no more time so this will publish unfinished but with these incredible beautiful harmonies.

Posted on by Caroline 2

bravery of a small life

There is no one on my lap, no one honking my nose or jungle gymming my back or gripping single strands of my hair with tiny, dimpled fingers. Adults crowd tables that look like high school chemistry class, but everyone is spaced out in socially appropriate bubbles and no one is doing experiments. I sit with three vacant chairs, staring at the exposed ceiling and pretend to vibe to the relevant music obscuring human conversations and clinking keys.

Caroline.

I am always too ambitious about being alone. My bag is stuffed with luxuries – Lord of the Rings, computer, daily liturgy, journal and some pens. I open a tab to make a list about all the things and it overlaps my stream of consciousness: articulate our family’s approach to discipline, write/rewrite a social media post, finally get more garlic at the grocery store for goodness sakes, breakdown our budget to weekly cashflow, look at houses for sale with/without boards on windows, think a whole thought, look through emails for things a normal human would have responded to already, reach out to realtors and lenders, look up “what to say to realtors and lenders” on community resource pages, decide whether my kids will ever be the kind of kids who wear real pajamas, write something down with a pen, look adult and confident and busy and important, watch people for a relevant reference, drink something all the way at the temperature it was when I ordered it,  Ì¶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶o̶o̶k̶, , make a plan to write a book.

…

Days later, here I am again in the freedom of alone at a different coffee shop, this time in our neighborhood. We – my neighborhood and me – are less cool and more practical. Aluminum folding chairs, computer, coffee, days-old hair and I think I slept in this shirt. I sit by the window and try to still my streaming thoughts, try to distill a sentence or a political commentary or even return to some of the list left unchecked from my last moments alone. But, I also have a dentist appointment this morning and I took too long ordering that ice coffee…

…

Again, alone. I came on my bike today, breathing the wet that comes after rain and feeling different muscles work to keep me in motion. My body battles back at me – creaking out something about, “use me more, not less.” Ok, I say under my breath, and I tilt my head toward giant, shining magnolia leaves and lean in so my shoulders can feel the rhythm of my pedaling as I duck under a flowering tree that hovers over the road. Morning is good for yard work and neighbors are in front lawns and on porches. I smile and my hellos surprise me. The world sounds so fine without my voice in it, with just the crackling neighborhood morning sounds.
I beg my arms not to surrender to the weird fungus that appeared in the crease of my elbows.
Did I sleep last night?
My hands kept feeling like eczema fire and I remember flopping around with Foster – trying to get him to tell me what the trouble was, but our conversation was half-asleep. Must not have been serious because he woke up happy at 6 am.

Being human is broken. 

Some people, I guess, can sometimes feel like everything is kind of okay. Like– maybe the world isn’t perfectly ordered, but their lives seem to be and it feels good. I’m not one of those people, or at least I can’t remember ever being that person. 

I like the tension of longing. I think I even long for it. Maybe the act of longing sets me squarely in the present but connects me beyond it – recognizing deep in my spirit that all is not well right now, but it will be. It has been. It is in heaven. From night’s groggy end to it’s dusky beginning, I busy myself inside the ordinary moments while searching for that unnameable something that connects me outside them. 

“There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven, but more often I find myself wondering whether in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. . . . It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work.” C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain

I am present in my work – grabbing the leftover “pet elephant food” [marble] before it hits Foster’s lips, attempting to answer, “how did all the words get in there – in the Bible?” with some kind of pure simplicity, clean then dirty dishes and splattered stovetop and worm hunts and porch swings and toy baskets and sweat snuggles and the exhausting explanations about kindness coming from the heart.

…

I am home now, both children covered in carrot-berry smoothie. We take turns swaying in front of all seven windows. I spin for an applause of giggles. Beauty, delight, magic. 

“But, I wasn’t hitting Mama! I was just patting.” 
“It was an accident, I think”
“I wasn’t trying to…”
But what was in your heart, babe?
“Anger.” 

I can see her eyelashes, all of them resting on her cheeks, when she says that last word. We heave breaths together, sweat mingled on all the arms. Yes, sweet girl. When there is ugly anger inside us it is incredibly hard to be kind. Almost, even impossible. She ducks into my skin, curls up and whispers, “I’m jealous.” I know, I say. And I hold them both like two wiggly fish on my lap on the floor in afternoon glow of all the front windows.

It is broken to be human and it is human to be broken.

And the bravery of a small life is to be about the work of restoration in the present moment, because of / in light of / in search of that desire that is hidden inside all of us. Eternity. It is saying YES to victory in Jesus by claiming His redemption over spilled milk and gentrification and humans who are called illegal. It is acting out that redemption in all the ordinary ways that callous our hands, not measuring a moment or a person or a question or a detour in light of its earthly value. The bravery of a small life is longing that all would be made well, knowing it is in Christ, and weighing the value of our days on the scale of His Kingdom come. 

And I think I’m going to write a book about that. 

**And that was 5 years, 2 kids, one house and a whole lifetime ago.**

Posted on by Caroline 0

I was the one worth leaving

Light dapples the deck and backdrops the August cicada song. The kids are loudly protesting quiet time and Postal Service serenades me with the windows open to the first hint of autumn cool breeze. “I was finally seeing, I was the one worth leaving.” Depravity is an idea with maybe too much mental baggage in my mind. Tulips, for me, should always and forever be considered for their beauty and elegance and never for their acronymic abilities. But, there are no tulips right now. My last zinnias are fighting for drinks in this drought stretch, reaching up at the very corner of our yard for the best light. They are bedraggled and glorious all at once.

When we started our very novice journey in landscaping, we thought “we are green people, not flower people.” The thought shames me now, but I will own it because then I know I’ve grown! My grandma, for years, wrote to all of her grandchildren on notecards that she made from pictures she took of her flowers. I almost said “her prize flowers” but they were all her treasures. She paused to notice each one blooming, sometimes letting just the bloom live in a vase inside to extend her viewing of it. But, she loved them all the same and though the picture quality was sub-par, she would lovingly write in her flowing cursive the name of the flower in the bottom right corner on the front before letting her pen update us on the weather and her clothing choices for the season and the goings-on in her neighborhood. I still have all of them in the basement. I mean to bring them up and use them for flashcards to memorize all her favorite flowers. Someday.

And, so I realize, small, little me in this small, little house of quiet time protesters… that I am the one worth leaving. My temper, my selfishness, my pride. I used to think “approaching the throne with confidence” was a badge of honor I wore, like a parade I got to make because I had every right to be in front of the King (because of Jesus, obvs) even with all the TULIPS being explained around me. You might think that as my life got bigger and wider and held more I might feel smaller. Instead, it is only now as my life shrinks to the size of our square footage that I can see more clearly just how unlikely it is that I should ever step foot near that throne. How utterly ridiculous an idea that I should be in the same room with a King, a true and holy and perfect King.

And yet, even though I am absolutely the one worth leaving, He came for me. And He comes for me now. Praise be!

“Don’t wake me, I plan on sleeping in…” what existential thoughts can I attach to this song while I sit with the crayons and the crumbs and the leftover smoothie on the table? God knows.

Posted on by Caroline 0

no better place

There is no place like home, it’s true. There is a familiar comfort in a cozy corner or books arranged systematically in a way no other human soul could understand or the steam rising from a freshly baked loaf cooling on the counter. But sometimes home isn’t home enough. It’s unexplainably lonely and cold and quiet, even as the joyful shouts of children smother your thoughts and you shuffle around with three layers of your husband’s socks. Just me?

How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young— a place near your altar, Lord Almighty, my King and my God. Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you.

Psalm 84:1-4

This morning, after a mess and tangle of extra limbs in my bed and water requests before I opened my eyes, I remembered my home. I put the water on to boil, measured the coffee extra strong, and gave my littlest ones cereal in bowls with milk that I mentally prepared to clean up off the floor because they wanted to share a chair. Muscle memory pre-heated the oven to 460, because I have a hunch my oven runs cold. I formed the dough while the hot water rested, then rested the dough while I ground the coffee.

And, I thought of home. It’s a refuge I know well, but a place I have never lived. It’s the home God made for me and where my heart rests its head sometimes without my body fully participating. And it feels so desperately far from where I am. I sang the words with my winter-cold voice and it cracked extra as I achieved a level above the din of hide-and-seek madness circling three rooms.

I wanna be in Your presence, I wanna be near Your heart
I wanna know You’re close even when I’m feeling far
I don’t want what this world would offer, I want the living God
‘Cause there’s no place better than where You are

from Caroline Cobb’s “No Better Place”

I poured fluid ounces of meticulously heated water over coffee grounds and I cried. “Do I?” The thought surprised me, like reaching deep back into the freezer for a chocolate long hidden only to turn around to meet a child’s curious gaze. Shame and love warred for a moment– and I paused, wondering what my exposure would produce in me. I sang again, believing that singing my love for home would remind my heart where I belonged.

As I prepare for advent this year, I’m listening. I’m listening to Howard Thurman and Tish Harrison Warren and Fleming Rutledge. I am listening to old saints and seekers, monks and martyrs. And I am yearning with them for home. I am believing with them that Light has come, will come and is a Light that cannot be overcome. This is the Light that illuminates my true home. My yearning for this home feels fragile– wrapped as it is in my human understanding.

As I listen to others, I also hear my own condemnation. No matter how much I know, how many times the Spirit convicts, how often I face the facts of spiritual failure in my own life, I cannot accomplish my own mending. The ripped garments of my choosing can only be repaired with the torn veil of the Temple and the broken flesh of a Savior. And, those tiny words formed in a question hidden in the noisy kitchen chaos this morning, beckoned me, “come.”

Come, child. Come sit inside my mending. Come repent and rest. Come without all your defenses and reasons. Just come be in this Light and know that the exposure allows you to see, actually see the home I’ve made for you. Be here. Be with me. Sit with me. Listen to me. Come, child. Listen to the stories I tell of a world I made right, a world I am setting to right, a world I am actively mending by the blood of my Son, Jesus.

Warren writes about the prophet Isaiah pairing repentance and rest (Isaiah 30:15) and how it might seem curious at first. We might assume that turning from sin is work. It makes sense, because resisting temptation is work. But, in our turning we are also accepting the joy of the true work accomplished. In Christ, our repentance is not work but freedom. In Christ, we walk through an open door to be both fully exposed and fully at rest. Home. Not a home with dusty corners or shadows or shame. The home we have in Christ is rest and my body relaxes into a deep and yearning sadness to be fully arrived mind, body and soul. There is no better place.

Now, I return to the hide-and-seek madness as we prepare for Sabbath. A little one will sit on my hip as I vacuum and another will keep me company on the kitchen floor while I clean and bake. I will tend the sick one with sips of Sprite and listen as another regales me with tales of the worlds inside her books. I will share elbow space with my partner as we set to the tasks of the day. And I pray all day I will hear the refrain, “there is no better place” and think of the invitation into the Lord’s presence somehow, mysteriously, in the midst of it all.

Posted on by Caroline 2

how to “do Christmas” like the little drummer boy

I am that little child with that flimsy toy drum strapped around his angular little boy shoulder. Come, they told him. The sticks strike that moon face, commanding air and passers-by to listen to the rhythm, the foolish parade of one. I am that simple, repeat refrain. And even then, he does it better. He found the drum and the sticks and the bravery to begin.

Honest talk, I’m getting a little worked up facing this blank page. I am sad for being gone, sad for not playing my song (foolish as it sounds), sad for hiding my gift under a bushel basket full of distractions – mindless social media and early bedtimes with a tired brain.

My wet mess of a face almost matches the mess I meant to clean in our apartment when Pat left with Zella two hours ago. I don’t know why, but imagining myself into the story of the little drummer boy is just so exactly where I am right now. I guess the small gesture – lifting strap over shoulder and calling on a hidden, inner repertoire – convicts all my defenses.

Whew, I didn’t know I needed this kind of cry – let me take a moment. Let’s all take a moment.

I know – it’s not technically Christmas music. But sometimes the song beating rhythms behind our ribcage isn’t jingling bells. Most times, in my case. The Advent season is not triumphant. It is precious beauty, but it is sad too. We are the reason Jesus came all the way down, all the terrifying way down, from celestial glory to stomachs growling and torrential storms. I am both loved by this act and reminded that there was reason for His condescension. I am the reason.

My proneness to wander so pressed on the heart of God until it broke Him and compassion poured out in the real life of a little babe.

 

Anyway, I salute you – little boy and your silly pa rum pum pum pum refrain. Thanks for being brave enough to bang on your drum and make a grown woman cry while thinking about it. Here is me striking my drum in your honor.

Posted on by Caroline 5

singing catechisms

The cold blue sky hugged the red bricks of all the buildings in the neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon in February. Our Friday sleepover friends had just left and Zella Ruth was tucked away for a nap in her crib. 

Pat rolled the rocking chair back and forth, back and forth… with a hiccup where it caught the carpet. And I was there – curled up tight in his lap, with my head tucked under his chin and with my eyes weeping motherhood. I humiliated myself into a little cocoon on his chest, folding all my limbs as small as they would go. I had lost something, something very precious, at the laundromat and that hiccuping rock let me forget adulthood for a little bit.

I wanted to blame everything – the laundry ladies, the drudgery of schlepping overstuffed clothes bags on city streets, the baby strapped to my chest, the postpartum stuff I still don’t understand – but I didn’t have the energy. I wiped sad slobber all over one of his zip up sweaters and listened as he prayed, feeling very like a child.

That was months ago, before we sang the Heidelberg Catechism on Sundays for Eastertide and before the cherry blossoms peak bloomed and then swirled down like snow. It was before my bit of breakdown that happened in the hours stretching between endless walks and goo-gaw talks and failed attempts to get anything done except answering “present” when Zella Ruth gave roll call.

Heidelberg Catechism

I relax into that spot on the bathroom floor – the place where I sit as Z splashes wonder up from her little whale tub. I am slow. I sink into her gaze, round eyes and wet hair stuck to her little head – shining little bruises from little bonks. She splashes again for my reaction and I answer “present” to her roll call – mirroring her chin down, slow blinking face. She lingers. I take the soft, red measuring cup that doubles as bath toy and pour warm on her shoulders. She shudders with delight and follows the water to the breaking surface, slow blinking wet lashes while the warm trickles off her fingertips before looking up for more.

I hum around a few bath songs and settle on a catchy little tune her Papa made up. I sing it softly, touching her little wet features as if this is the only thing in life.

I love your nose, nose, nose
I love your nose
I love your lips, lips, lips
I love your lips
I love your eyes and your ears and your tiny, little tears
I love your nose

She pauses, lifting her nose up so my pointer can keep time on its tiny surface. She waits for the song to cycle again, letting the faint sounds of bath water fill the empty space. I start again, tapping on that nose and watching her open mouth grow into a half smile. There are other verses, of course. Endless verses.

It is Pentecost now and the liturgical season is green – for new life, for growth, for Jesus. The season is green because Jesus is the seed God threw to the earth to be planted in death and raised in new life. And this – this throwing down, dying, and raising is my only comfort in life and in death. It seems so singular – so exclusive and definitive – to say my only comfort at all, ever, always is that I belong to Jesus. If that is so, I must belong in a way that isn’t attached to postpartum or marriage or geography or accomplishment or feelings. I must belong to Jesus so deeply that I am not my own anymore (and that is a comfort?).

It sounds messy and untrue because my gut says that comfort is when I am my own.

Sometimes, Z will cruise herself across a room, close enough for our foreheads to touch and then lean in between me and whatever has my attention to say, “Ah!” With raised eyebrows and an open mouth smile, she declares with one word, “Here I am, Mama! You must have forgotten about me, but it’s okay because I am here! And I am wonderful!”

The truth of it was more ethereal and less tactile before Z was born. (Not my own, uh sure. Yeah.) This tiny human sleeping a few feet from our marriage bed (and needing me in the most complete way I’ve ever been needed) made “not my own” less delicate and more… more desperately tangible.

I do the same thing I did in singleness: try to claim that I belong, body and soul, to me. My comfort is queen. But motherhood has been an especially physical response to that tendency – in its denial of what I want to do.

I cannot understand her words quite yet, but it sounds something like, “Be fully present, mama. Be completely here. Look at me long enough to notice the hair swooping over my eyes and the way I can make a bowl be a hat.”

God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in Him. It’s kind of an updated Westminster Catechism idea called Christian Hedonism and it’s what I think of when Zissou appears in front of me thinking she is the world (Sidenote: she is only 10 months, so I realize this analogy unravels really quickly – like in a month or so).

Zella is teaching me how to joyfully choose to not be my own, to be satisfied completely in the Lord. She is teaching me that there is comfort in being present for the banal moments of bath time and the tender night cries of teething because this is the way of the Father. He came all the way down to earth to be present with us.

He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my father in heaven. In fact all things must work together for my salvation.

My truest and most enduring comfort is belonging to Jesus, the one who watches over me in all the ways I can’t watch over Zella. He is the one who watches over me when I lose laundry and when I can’t sing another made up song. He knows exactly what I need and then He gives it abundantly. He is the only one who can grant salvation with belonging.

You won’t find it anywhere in red letters, but I hear it in this season – I hear God saying, “Be fully present when I take roll call because I am here and I am wonderful!” There is absolutely nothing that is more precious or more important than being with the One who set you free, the One who made you so deeply belong that it is a comfort to say, “I am not my own.”

In the spirit of being present, this blog post took weeks with plenty of breaks for giggle parties on the bed, forts in the living room, catechism sing-a-longs, tongue cluck contests and sweet, singing walk dances in the park. My living room is currently in an impressive display of unkept and the bed is not made. Just keeping it real.

Posted on by Caroline 1