Tag: spirituality

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

the grace you’ve been given

O Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow after us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

It’s always humbling when a children’s book speaks Truth that (ahem… pushes glasses up on nose) adult literature has progressed beyond. I’m not surprised anymore, but I’ve noticed that if I don’t keep a curious posture, I might miss it altogether and be like a lot of adults out here skipping childlikeness like it’s last week’s meatloaf.

So, I had to pause when Bayard the Truthspeaker was talking about a son who had strayed away from his father and rebelled. I even read the whole exchange twice for my kids (let me not lie, it was for me).

“Does a tall man deserve to be tall? Does Prince Steren deserve to be the son of a king? A bird might think he deserves to swim as well as a fish, but if he sits moping on the riverbank instead of using the wings God gave him, the fox is going to eat him. “Your brother would rather have his own way than be happy. He’s thrown away the grace he was given because it’s not the grace he had in mind.” The Truthspeaker paused to reflect on that. “There’s not much hope for a person who won’t live in the grace he’s given.” – Secret of the Swamp King by Jonathan Rogers

The Collect this week is simple, but the real-life  working out of it can sometimes feel complicated. What my mind may grasp and even my actions may reflect, my heart can be sluggish to believe. We know the heart is both deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9) and the wellspring of life (Proverbs 4:23)– a true and literal war within our bones that reveals what we want the most. I want the fruit of the Spirit, but I also really want to be very good at something and to binge watch a cooking show and to forget the laundry and to escape inside a book. My childhood pastor used to reference the often quoted Psalm 37:4, “Delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart” and exhort us that it was our “wanter” that would ultimately be changed to desire what God desires for us. 

It’s taken me decades to begin to understand that changing my “wanter” is not a task God has given me, but a grace that precedes and follows after me. Changing my “wanter” is not so much a prize I can win, but is accepting the reality that the victory is won and I’m clinging to the cloak of the One who has the crown. My current pastor once preached a sermon where he described us arriving in heaven holding on to the edge of Christ’s garment. My “wanter” is concerned with that kind of clinging, knowing that only my closeness to the Victor will bring me into glory.

The grace of God– the grace that hems me in on all sides– this very gift of grace is initiated and accomplished by the Maker Himself. And we pray we would align with the reality of that truth that we may be given to good works. Because, as we well know, grace without works is dead (James 2:14). And works without grace is a life of striving. The only way to do any good thing is to notice that it is grace that both paves the way and pulls you along the road. 

I sometimes read books in the philosophy section and recently the book “On the Road with Augustine” has been quite the ride. The journey of faith is a strange one, full of paradox, and this book has been a comfort to me especially knowing that so many have considered the questions that seem to constantly inhabit my mind and my time. In the chapter on freedom, James K.A. Smith quotes Gabriel Marcel,

“You are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything.”

And you, friend– do you question the place and space where God has you? What grace have you been given this day, this season? It may not be the grace you had in mind. Maybe you had in mind different neighbors, a more fulfilling  job, a tiny home on a mountain in Spain, a byline in the NYT, or a full family photo on your desk. But, what do you have? Dig in (with me!) to that grace and we will find God (Jeremiah 29:13) together.

**wrote this for my church this week and thought I might as well re-post here**

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

when our souls can hug

“Ugh! Don’t you think it’s just so frustrating that we can never actually hug?!”

She’s acting out the question like it’s a modern dance prompt. “I mean, we’re just covered in molecules and there’s no real way that you… I mean the real you can really hug the real me! We’ll always just be separated by our skin!”

I’m not sure if I get the sweats because she’s so like me and I can so clearly visualize the mountains she’s climbing in her head OR if I get the sweats because she’s so unlike me which means there is a whole different set of mountains in there. Either way, I get overwhelmed by the barrage of questions and thoughts and the speed which is eerily similar to Rory from that one show I never watched in high school. The whole business of “we’re hugging but we’re not” was too existential for the post bedtime moment when it was introduced, so I shooed her off and snuggled into the end of one of three books on my nightstand.

Tonight, we walked the Beltline in search or Kombucha. Just two nerdy ladies making loud commentary on everything from fall weather to friendships to socially acceptable fraternizing.

“What’s singles night? Who goes to it? If you can get drunk on alcohol why do you drink it?” And she interrupts her own thoughts– “Oh, mom look! That place opened up! We’ve been waiting for it to open and now it is.. oh and looks like kind of a hula theme, okkkk! Oh, there’s the climbing gym. I sure love that place. And also why are there so many memberships but they are so expensive? You know, in heaven that will be so cool…

“Oh, you mean we will have all the memberships?”

“There won’t be any because we will all be in the same club!” I smile and she reaches for my hand. Now, we’re back to fall weather and sweaters and, oh! Here we are again. Back at molecules hugging.

“But, mom it really is awful that I’ll never actually be able to hug you. Like, really hug you, because we are just covered in skin and molecules and… ugh!”

“Wait, so you want our bones to hug? Our blood? What is it you envision hugging that would be more me than with my skin on?”

I was pushing, prodding… not because I knew what she would say and definitely not because I knew the answer (who even does know if molecules hug?). Today, she learned about dust mites (thank you Science class for introducing us to a world of terrors we cannot see) and she’s convinced we are all being “hugged” by tiny, terrible insects most of the time. Gross. But no, I think I was pushing because I was genuinely curious about where her thoughts would land.

“No, not blood and bones! I don’t know… Maybe, I don’t know, maybe I wish our souls could hug! Is that it? Like I just really think there is so much in between us kind of.”

“That’s it!” I said maybe a little too loud but it was okay because the DJ at the singles night was bumping. “I think I get what you’re saying!” And all at once we both summited a mountain in cozy sweaters in our separate brains and I realized God is seeing me, loving me, tending me, through the mind of this exquisite young lady. And I can see her a little bit more clearly in all her bursting, 9-year-old glory.

Indeed, what a wonderful day it will be, Zella Ruth, when our souls can finally hug.

Posted on by Caroline 0

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,  ̶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

Christ the Breaker, Peacemaker

Winter becomes official next week, the darkest day of the year signaling its arrival. I expect gloomy days and meet sunshine with skepticism. The pecans and dogwoods reach crooked angles up into the sky and the crepe myrtle stands like a skeleton. Does nature choose to be wintered? It seems to just happen, despite its own transformation every year into full spring and summer beauty. Does nature feel the death of it, before the life of it breaks forth?

We’re studying animals in winter for school and I’m convinced they have a better bodily understanding of the season than humans because they aren’t distracted by sweater weather and hallmark movies. They are fully present, doing the work of preparing and then presiding over their bodies when the elements are against them. The painted turtle plans a winter without air, deep in the cold mud under a frozen pond where the it will stay for 6 months until spring without breathing once. The American black bear will give birth to young while asleep in hibernation. Other animals are less dramatic, but none of them are escaping their bodily realities.

We still hear birdsong here in December, just slower and spaced out. We see the occasional Flying V formation overhead, late arrivals for a warmer winter home. Their melodies bounce across the neighborhood— their chatter lilts and pauses, comes forward and then fades behind children and cars and planes high above. Is the sky the backdrop to their dramatic song or is the song the accompaniment to the early nightfall?

We make our deliveries, down Langston and across Sylvan Pl and the kids do some of it while I peek through the front window. I can’t figure out how to teach Foster his letter sounds while making bread and tending the baby, but I am humbled by my love again with this life— with this neighborhood and its trees, with our neighbor friends and the honesty of this time of year. The liturgical year is my insides turned out— my heart’s constant forgetfulness of God’s condescension and redemption needs the rhythm of Advent and Christmas and Epiphany and Lent and Easter to stay in step with the Spirit.

And I love Advent— the heavy despair and ache of it against the backdrop of tinsel and lights and holiday parties. I like the idea of making my body to bend, to form my longing for help into the shape of kneeling because all the lists and goals and scribbled schedule maps get lost in stacks of watercolor paintings and play dough scraps. I reach for a grid outside the one I would make myself because in mine I am the master of ceremony. I am the one who leads the way.

“The One who breaks open the way will go up before them;
    they will break through the gate and go out.
Their King will pass through before them,
    the Lord at their head.” Micah 2:13

Here, in Advent, I meet Christ the Breaker— the King who leads the way. As the well-known characters of the Christmas story find their place on the hill and the camel journey and in the manger scene, I plod through these days both aware of the complete miracle of existing and aware of my cavalier attitude toward my Maker’s God-made-flesh reality and promised coming again.

The King’s coming would make a way for us, but it didn’t look like the Red Sea. He had already done that. Centuries and generations of miracles and signs and wonders and parted seas. The scene closes in Malachi with all the drama of a finale. These words shake the core of me, picturing all those Ebenezer towers and oral histories that crowd the Old Testament pages.

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.
“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

Malachi 4:1-6

And then, nothing.

No response to their questions or pleas or praise, just… silence. But, I imagine the families of those who held on to hope would speak these words to each other. I imagine in the ordinary making of bread and tending of sheep and exchanging goods at the market, there were families who feared the Lord, desperately holding on to hope that He would not be silent forever. And with each generation, I imagine the longing grew for the unfettered joy of a newborn calf set free from a stall. “The sun of righteousness will rise, with healing in his wings,” but Christ the Breaker would not come with a glorious entourage and resplendent power.

Jesus was growing inside a womb as a baby and would come into the world through a birth canal. The fullness of time was his due date. The King’s going up before me sounds like the soft lantern light on a warm, summer night. But, I wonder if His making a way is more like a bushwhacker … because the evil is thick. The hurt is not a morning fog but an advancing army. And Hope is so impossible— an insult, almost, to the depth of despair. For the Israelites, that depth lasted 400 years. And they are not alone in their suffering. We join brothers and sisters, a cloud of witnesses the world over and throughout history who sit in a place of longing before a holy God, believing He will rescue them but not knowing when.

The peace we long for, the peace we find in Christ, is forged with active rebellion against the evil forces of the world that would rather war. “For He himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility.” Ephesians 2:14

We are loved by the One who promised to make Peace for us with God forever so that we can make peace today exactly where we are.

The Sabbath soup sits on the stove, preparations are made for a day of rest tomorrow before Advent dinner begins in the evening. A series of fortunate events today meant that we had company for much of our preparation and guests for sabbath dinner. We guessed on the masala chicken, let the baguettes boast an extra crunchy crumb, and tried a new granola recipe. We fluttered from room to room and explained again that we are a team and we are preparing to enjoy a day of rest tomorrow. We followed behind helpers and helped their helping. I confessed, again, at dinner my impatience this week and I’m sad to hear the words in my mouth.

We will light a candle of joy tomorrow and I will kneel now in prayer. And, God, would you help me get behind you as you do the Breaking and the Peacemaking?

Posted on by Caroline 4

when I shout my lonely office

It’s full again. I empty the Dyson and the dust puffs up in my face. I check the simmering onion and garlic with a glance, tie the red strings and lift the garbage with my good arm while I close the door under the sink with my foot. Vesper is still boundary training. I throw a towel over the naan dough and pray it’s clean enough, and then rush out the front door in sock feet to sling the bag at the bottom of the front steps. Before I bend-snap my shoulders back up above my hips, I clock the distance to the garbage can.

The red, stretched out strings find my fingers and I take the long way– sidewalk, pavers, retaining wall before slinging the bag with my bad arm, careful not to rotate it too far above my shoulder. By the time I race my socks back inside, the garlic has nearly gone but can still be saved. Praise. Curry tonight and it’s got to be a swift and substitution-heavy turn around for our meal.

My mind wanders back to Robert Hayden. Lines from the poem yesterday are alighting like the chickadee bird of our school research today. Foster tells me that chickadees are so smooth in flight you can’t hear them. I imagine a chickadee might surprise me with its presence, though if I had eyes to see or ears to hear I might have noticed its arrival.

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden in “Those Winter Sundays”

What do I know, about serving with a heart that doesn’t keep track of the broom sweeps and the simmered garlics and the nuance of a day’s schedule. What do I know of love’s lonely office? Still little, maybe nothing.

The office I keep is haphazard and more Jekyll + Hyde vibe than I would like, than I hoped… than I claimed for my future when I was envisioning this phase. I am not what I envisioned. I’ll say that, for sure. I’m far worse. Where has all the wisdom gone? That’s what I asked of Solomon over peppermint tea at Kiara’s house as we studied prophets in the Old Testament and somehow landed on Solomon’s backsliding. The man literally asked God for wisdom and was granted it and STILL he ended up with 700 wives and who knows what else in his disobedience. What we do know is the little letters in the text cannot contain the havoc his sin wreaked. Somehow, he got less wise as he got older! I sipped my tea and passed judgment and then listened as my sisters shared that shrinking in wisdom was a bit of an epidemic.

We’re into our morning now, breakfast and reading aloud and prayers. I committed to ignore my phone until scripture finds my face in the morning, so the world could be ending and I am blissfully unaware for the next 17 minutes. We’re out of order, but we’re in the first week of advent school, so everything feels a bit disjointed. I come to our Scripture this week and we read from Isaiah 11.

I thought it would be a few verses, but as I am reading I become animated. I lean dramatic, so a prophetic passage can’t be appropriately delivered sitting down. “Righteousness will be the belt of his waist!” I proclaim as I motion for a giant belt securing my middle. “And faithfulness the belt of his loins!” I know less where to motion for this but I am dramatic, still. The whole passage comes alive in front of me– the impossibility of a Savior, the unlikelihood of people being around to even be looking for one. And yet the prophet paints the picture.

These are the words that had to be repeated, from generation to generation to generation to generation. Words guarded and savored like secret recipes passed down with a knowledge of their potency, their flavor and power. These words of the prophets were the words for all the years of silence, when the mornings and the noondays and the evenings seemed only dark. When the ordinary going out and coming in required belief in a faithful God who had spoken promises, but had stopped speaking.

Can you believe this? 700 years before Jesus came and THESE words were given to the prophet Isaiah? Wow, but do you see? I am jumping now and they are laughing. Praise God for laughter as it shakes off offenses of spilled milk and withheld apologies. These words about who? “Jesus,” they say. Yes! And when Jesus came did all the dark go away?

At this, they are not quite sure. It feels like the pep rally answer is YES but that somehow doesn’t feel true. That’s what I’m sensing in their faces at least. I get a mumbled majority, “No?” like a question. That’s right! When Jesus came into our darkness, fulfilling this prophecy, the darkness did not go away. But, he did give us a way out. He did open a door so we didn’t have to stay in this darkness forever.

And I felt alive in a new way. A mess of wires behind my ribs connected again and I felt the power of hope. Hope? What an impossible thing to hold.

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
    and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
2 And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
    the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    the Spirit of counsel and might,
    the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
3 And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
    or decide disputes by what his ears hear,
4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
    and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
    and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
5 Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,
    and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

Isaiah 11:1-5

This is the righteousness that will expose the wars within and without of my bones. My lack of love in my lonely office and the languishing faces of those despairing. This Jesus, the door out of the darkness, invites me come and walk with him. And I review my steps. Simmering garlic, running sock feet errands, reciting prophetic words, alone and lonely in a house full of disciples. The thoughts all tumble back down in the mental jenga game as Pat gets home from work and we sit down to pray over our curry while I take the naan out the oven foolishly with my fingers.

Something about conviction that I need to be seen and noticed and it’s not enough that God knows. I’ll return to it tonight, maybe tomorrow? I know it is an important thought about the poem, but now there is a basketball game for our dear Miles. Sweep the rice, clean the plates, sock the kids, and make a sign that says, “Go Miles!”

What do I know? It’s advent and the darkness is not hiding.

Posted on by Caroline 0

|kept|

He wore a blue Nike track jacket, but I didn’t know that until we were above ground at Union Square.

My head started to clear with the smell of city rain and I realized clumsily: I didn’t know this man who had walked me up the steps from the subway, thrown down his backpack on the sidewalk for a seat and was now carefully explaining that he would walk 10 feet to buy water from a food truck. I was nodding. He would be back in less than two minutes. More nodding. I sat there on his backpack and breathed. There was laughter hidden somewhere in my future self – looking back on this very personal NYC moment. He returned with water and I drank the whole bottle. I leaned on his arm and we went back to the subway after deciding that water and fresh air had cured the worst of my spell. Then he found a seat for me on the 6 train and we talked about life in the city, his wife and the family they want to start, and all the neighborhoods they have lived in. I asked if he would be late to work and he said he would be just fine. When I assured him I could make it the three blocks to my office beyond Grand Central Station, he went on to 57th.

And that was how I met Rick, my Tuesday subway angel.

My doctor said it is one of the most common calls she gets – fainting in the subway. The morning rush is shoulder to shoulder, the overheated air is stale, and the underground is dark like a cave. Over the course of this pregnancy, I finally learned what my sister has been telling me since I moved to Brooklyn in 2013: Care, you can do whatever you want – nothing is surprising in NY.

And it’s true. I’ve crouched in a corner of the Q train, thrown up in a subway grate, bypassed the bathroom line at Bryant Park, worn tennis shoes with everything, thrown up in Starbucks cups, stretched out pre-pregnancy work clothes, thrown up in trash cans, used an embarrassing amount of dry shampoo, thrown up in ultrasound appointments, consumed a senior citizen’s portion of fiber, and regularly rubbed my belly like a little buddha. Oh, and one of my coworkers just left an entire box of thin mint cookies on my desk, so I might add “consumed an entire box of thin mints in one sitting” to the list (Update: proudly did not).

I’m not a pretty pregnant lady. But I didn’t have time to create expectations about my pregnant self in the whirlwind of marriage and moving and newlywedding and grief and winter and the general pace of life in the city, so I guess that means I’m not disappointed. It’s probably better that everything is a surprise.

And the surprises come in all kinds of ways.

The other night, I lost track of time while I tracked the rolling and tumbling movements on my belly. I still can’t believe there is a human in there. I watch and I hold my breath for the next fist bump or soccer kick to bulge out beside my belly button… and then my eyes get big and I gasp, “Oh! There you are!” Every time the sensation of a little, moving human surprises me. There is a little human in there.

And I am the home for this little human for another 9 weeks (maybe less if Baby K gets antsy).
I am the home, but I’m not the keeper.

The words “you hem me in” are making new sense from Psalm 139. This baby is hemmed inside the walls of my womb – kept on all sides. And I am learning that God’s keeping of us is the purest preservation and the most perfect protection.

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD is your keeper;
the LORD is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore. (Psalm 121 ESV)

His is a keeping that never sleeps, never tires, never wearies, never pauses. His is a keeping that is attentive to tiny fingernails and to terrible nightmares. His is a keeping that is secure like a mountain and tender like a magnolia.

This is a Psalm of Ascent – a song the Israelites would sing as they traveled up into the city of Jerusalem, believing God was literally keeping them from the harsh sun, the dark night, and all evil. Just as he keeps the heavens above the earth, he is keeping us too.

He will keep your life.

That line really gets me – that promise to guard and protect my life and the life inside my womb. I close my eyes and imagine He is keeping us in the same way, in the cleft of the rock and in the palm of His hands. I open my eyes and don’t know how analogies translate. All the tidy “hemming in” gets pushed outside the lines in 42nd Street traffic and fluorescent lights and fainting subway episodes.

But, there He is. Keeping me.

Posted on by Caroline 3