New again

Last year was a big marker year for our family, and entering the new in 2014 brought such joy.  It was in the major transitions of 2013 that I got to feeling dizzy with LOTS of frustration and at least some fear mixed in.  We weren't just entering a new chapter, it felt like starting all over again.  This, despite the evidence that the changes were actually leading to a wonderful culmination of the last ten years.

I confess I still have days, every week it seems, where I just cannot see that evidence!

But back to the story... I was spilling to my Hub this struggle with all the newness, when he acknowledged so simply,

"It's hard to be in a new place."  

That's all I needed: the permission to say it is hard.  It is normal/acceptable/human/forgivable to struggle to believe and stay in the moment.  I wrote down my circling thoughts as a poem, including the fantastical things that happen in my head when the Now becomes uncomfortable.  Months later, I reformed it into the villanelle below.  It reads very specific to me.  I hope some of you can relate enough to find permission, and then be freed to face the disbelief.

New again is still the place
where I smile for the hope
but then run a moment later

to where it’s long been cold.
For I’d rather be there, then.
Not new again, displaced.

What if today is just mistake 
I let our yesterdays take me
running only moments later

to where I'm dizzy, unrequited,
mistaken over you, wishing
new then was still my place.

Then back again, though not far
off, I still find hope is hard and
cannot run in moment’s laughter.

I do mistake what is today
to mean our dreams are now erased,
that being new in another place
bodes us run alone hereafter.

I still believe

As our pastor taught last week from the scriptures on the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37), part of me wanted to jump up and cheer while another part ached, weary.  It was more than a year ago in the prayer room when the same verses were spoken over our community.  You shall live . . . Come O Breath . . .  know that I am Lord . . . But we've been bearing burdens of that hope much longer than a year (and baring all at times) to see what's dead here come back to life.
I still believe.

There's a young man from our town who was running from police for weeks.  He's been arraigned, accused of murder.  While he was missing I prayed ardently for him and wrote the poem/lyric below.  At some point in those petitions, my mind went to the disbelief of the sisters of Lazarus when Jesus had failed to save their brother from death.  To them, it was over.  To whom would it not be?  I imagine for some this murder case is a closed one as well.  GUILTY - no matter what the law says about maintaining innocence and not to mention the redemption and new life in which many of us claim to believe.

Jesus' reply to Mary and Martha was to share in their sorrow without leaving the loss as the final word.  He asked the question,

"Did I not tell you that if you believed

you would see the glory of God?"
(John 11:40)

And then he brought Lazarus back from death.  Mary and Martha showed disbelief but there came resurrection anyway!

It is belief in the Risen One, the Conqueror, that is my resolve.  It must be.  When nobody seems to get the Dream.  When everything around me looks a lost cause.  When I've seemed to have lost my own way in the valley.  I'll not let death have the last word.  I'm gonna tell stories of hope. 

May we see Your Glory.
 

On My Mind

Face in the news
Face on my mind
Face in my memory from days before

Of a kid on the run
Of a kid in my mind
A kid I remember who stayed next door

If you're to blame
Or whether you're blameless
Neither will tell the half of the story
The one about children still being brought up
to do nothing less and expect nothing more
Than carry on curses handed on down
in cruelty, dejection, futility, turmoil

Who will speak life
Who will keep hope
Which are the stories we choose to tell

If we breathe hope
If we speak life
We follow the call of Ezekiel

Awaken the stories of children in families
who want nothing less but expect what is more:
To break every curse and snuff out the cruelty
That all see in your face their own son or brother

Face in the news
Kid on the run
Blameless in every mind you become

Until it is time

forty each

one of them says

greeting the passerby like

he's known her before

he

just

slows

goes

while i pull

weeds and wonder not

about dirt and indiscretion

but how it is i know

yet stay

sometimes

the ones behind

the lattice weaved i must leave 
till they've grown

so
go

slow

then 

each is known

before reaching to be pulled
out of dirt and in discretion

Gardening one day last year, I overheard an exchange maybe fifty yards away between a female pedestrian and a driver.  Quickly I was conscious of its nature: the young woman and her friend were marketing.  Selling themselves.  For as long as we've lived in this dubbed-destitute place, there are still moments that stun.  The real world of the desperate is right here.  (It's everywhere, mind you.) The cruelest acts are lauded for amusement and the most innocent or vulnerable are handled with contempt.  I am thankful in these moments that I'm still disturbed.

Interrupted.  Stirred up.  Dismayed.

On another day on our old property, I decided - once and for all - to get at a menacing vine.  I started digging to reach the roots, pulling it foot after foot and yard lengths, only to see that the further I dug the thicker and deeper it grew.  Still, I worked: heaving, chafing hands, bent in affront.  I never did rid the root.  Somewhere in the fight I had the picture of a powerful, unseen enemy.  It symbolized perfectly certain things that we'd discerned in our midst at that time, and it has since served me repeatedly.  Whether on individual or universal scales, it's the systems of earth and sky that we battle against here.  Not people. 

Jesus used metaphors for teaching the truths of how this all holds together.  One parable depicts the kinds of soil that determine whether seeds take root and thrive and finally bring a bounty.  In another, there's a story of an enemy who's sown bad seed and the workers have asked to pull the resulting weeds.  The landowner replies, "No; for while you are gathering up the tares, you may uproot the wheat with them.  Allow both to grow together until harvest."  Let them go.  Until it is time.

I think some weeds aren't weeds at all but life existing where it shouldn't be. 

Two weeks after the soliciting incident, I was tidying up the yard again and couldn't quite reach the saplings growing wildly under my porch.  Even though they're trees and I love trees, they're unsightly and destructive when they grow under there, behind the lattice.  I know now from experience that if I let them go, they'll grow long enough to be easily grasped and drawn out.  The metaphor returned to mind.  How often I wish I could just pluck others - neighbors, family, strangers - from the entangled messes they live in, in the dark.  I'd like to act quickly, forcefully, but my attempts to reach into those places in such a manner would and do prove futile.  (Not to mention the cuts and bruises that might ensue as when I try squeezing my arm through that lattice!)

I may feel disturbed.  I do get dismayed.  If I wait, though, wait on the Lord in supplication, I do get shaken up to hope.  I keep up with gardening, and I beckon with power in prayer for the day when seasons have proven to mature it all.  Many tomorrows may pass, but I pray that even these seeming weeds are found to be seeds that fell on good soil, longing in the end to be pulled from the dirt, from the dark.

-------------------------------------------------

And this is for
anyone feeling they're in the dark
wondering about the ground they're in.








 

Heed

When school was closed for MLK Day, we'd just been away without the kids for five days.  A nice winter's day inside was all we had planned.  Then a knock at the door.  More than a year had passed since a visit from LT, our old neighbor.  He wanted a ride into the next town and thought he'd try us.  He didn't need to get there fast, so he stayed for a while.  Over the next couple of hours, we ate together, drank tea and coffee, prayed, talked theology and played with the kids. 

I felt Grace move so freely that morning.  (Oh, when we let it do so!)  The kids were in and out of conversation and back and forth in play.  Cooking, clean-up and dishes just flowed along with the chatter and jokes and childhood stories.  Nothing out of place.  More than once in recent days had the bunch of us remarked how we'd missed LT.  He fit back in like we'd seen him just yesterday, like he's one of the family. 

I was bent down, getting some paper for A when she whispered to me in deep satisfaction, "I knew he was coming.  I thought he was coming, and he came."  I understood completely.  It happens to me and has for as long as I remember.  With joy, I whispered back something about connection, about the Spirit knowing her heart and speaking to her inside.  She smiled wide.

Not much later, LT was talking when I re-entered the kitchen.  He was saying that he'd started out that morning prepared to scrounge up change along the train tracks and out of shopping carts as he's always done.  "Something told me to stop," he noted his uncertainty.  He confessed he kept on course, ignoring it, but it kept on until pointing him to us.  He didn't want to come, not to ask for help.  But he couldn't shake it.  "I don't know what it was..." he wondered but spoke with jittery gladness for heeding.

You bet I let him know about A's encounter!  Plus I shared a thought on the Voice inside him, too.  I've no doubt both of them sensed that pull at precisely the same time that morning.  What untold prayers were answered that day, I can and do imagine.

Something new

The house quiets because the children are in bed.  I consider going myself, as I get dreamy watching the shadows of snowflakes bounce and fly on the wall.  One seemed to come descend inside, and then they all fall faster and fatter, and distorted through window glass they look more like a fifty Nerf gun attack. 

Every year when we get our first real snow, to me it's like the first time all over again.  Something new.  Something saved, too, because it's all enveloped in white.  That's especially the feeling when it comes on days like today, as I recover from the previous evening's too many loads of laundry and floors to wash in too many rooms after the littlest one puked everywhere.

It's like the new door on the house on our block.  Currently, empty apartments and boarded up homes number more than those that are not.  One house has been under major renovations on the inside but you cannot tell from first glance.  You couldn't until today.  I cannot believe the difference a door can make.  It isn't my taste, but it also isn't quite the piece of junk landlords will slap on only when it's absolutely imperative for their own sake that a door be replaced.  Is something new really happening?

Though I'm always dreaming about what's to come, no matter the time of year, I'm also no stranger to despair.  I need pictures like the snow cover to mirror my heavy prayers and then quiet me with hope.  I know the snow will melt away, and not before it's soppy and sullied!  Winter only lasts so long, and even spring has rain.  Still, I ache for a sweeping in to cover, cover.  Recover.  Whiten, lighten, hush. 

And make new.