by Christie Purifoy | Jun 14, 2012 | Family, Florida, God's promises, Scripture, Seasons, Uncategorized
There are times when we get to see the full circle of the year pulled tight around us. The firstborn’s annual dance recital is one of those times.
I remember leaving the downtown theater last year to find ash from the wildfires covering our car. Driving home that night we followed an enormous moon made blood-red by reflected smoke. I remembered the stories of a fire by night and a cloud by day, and I believed we were being led through the wilderness. I believed we would not wander forever.
But the days to follow were often a heavy burden. Stretched out before me, they looked like a desert landscape, dry and empty.
This year’s recital ushered in one more rainy day in a season of rain. It’s been pouring steadily for weeks. The retention ponds are overflowing. Streets have flooded, and I haven’t seen anything like this in the two years since we moved here.
It seems the drought is over.
In so many ways, it is over.
We’ve been handed a key, and we can spy an open door just a short way ahead. I can’t say exactly where it leads, but I also know exactly where it leads:
“For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land – a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills” (Deuteronomy 8:7).
My daughter has been working on her ballet for nine months, yet somehow I didn’t realize until this week’s dress rehearsal that the dance was performed to a symphony rendition of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.”
I don’t usually find myself moved to tears by early 80s rock anthems (and, no, I don’t think I can blame the pregnancy hormones. Or, not entirely).
For two years I’ve heard only one word of instruction from the God I follow: believe.
That’s it. That’s the only thing that has been required of me (though even that one thing often felt impossible).
When “Don’t Stop Believin’” first came across the theater’s speakers, I wanted to put my head down and cry.
Not out of sadness or misery. But relief. Gratitude.
“These are the words of him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open. I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”
Revelation 3: 7-8
by Christie Purifoy | May 31, 2012 | Faith, God's promises, Music, Poetry, prayer, Pregnancy, Uncategorized, Waiting
Pentecost Sunday was nearly a week ago, but I still feel stuck in that room. Waiting. Asking this question: how did they survive the long, empty days between Jesus leaving and the Comforter coming?
How did they endure being lifted up by the joy of a promise believed only to drop again into the discouragement of yet another not yet?
And why the gap? Why did they have to wait at all?
We do know that the wait moved them to gather together. I imagine the promise was easier to believe when they could see the hope in one another’s faces. When they could pass around their Jesus stories, like a platter of bread and fish. Stories multiplied into hope. And faith.
And I imagine they worshipped. Sang and prayed.
Was this what it was all for? Was their worship the reason?
Did God wait, strain with holding himself back, because he wanted to hear their songs?
“Call to me,” he had once told them. “And I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3).
Call. My husband tells me this word suggests something organized, something formal. Something created. Like a song. Like a poem. Something more than careless words tossed at the sky.
Maybe you don’t sing songs. Maybe you don’t write poems. But maybe you journal. Maybe you sketch. Maybe you take photographs or bake bread for the neighbors. Maybe you orchestrate elaborate finger-painted messes with the three-year-olds at church and maybe, just maybe, that is your call? Your song? Your cry for more of God?
And maybe that is the point of it all. The point of waiting. The point of living. To add our call to the many others until a crescendo of sound and beauty and worship rises to heaven and All is unleashed.
Then, just as it was that Pentecost when God’s church was born, wind and fire reveal the great unknowns.
What have we all been waiting for? To hear the mysteries of God’s glory in a language we can comprehend.
Those unsearchable glories we never even knew to seek.
by Christie Purifoy | Apr 27, 2012 | Family, God's promises, healing, motherhood, prayer, Uncategorized
A birthday letter for one’s child should be a marker of all that a mother knows. For instance, on the day you turned three you had a scratch on your cheek and a bruise on your forehead. Your legs and arms were somehow both surprisingly long and impossibly tiny. You loved your balloon. You whined for more chocolate cake. You pronounced it so carefully: “choc-oh-lut.”
But you are almost entirely unknown. This doesn’t bother me or frighten me. At least once a day your father or I will laugh at you and say, “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
Your blonde hair sets you apart in our family. But it is more than appearance. Perhaps it is comparison. With two older siblings whose personalitites and interests have seemed long settled, you are less familiar. We are still getting acquainted. You are still getting acquainted with the world.
Or, perhaps it is a holdover. You were unknown for nine months before your birth. Boy or girl? We chose not to know. You were the little stranger born into the thoroughly familiar, the utterly known: our own bed, in our own apartment, in a city that felt like home.
There has been only one moment when I saw more. One moment when I seemed to glimpse the you that is still buried in your bones.
You were six months old. It was late at night. Your cough was so like a barking seal that we had no need to google symptoms. We could name it. By naming it we felt we had tamed it.
We had done no such thing. In the space between those known, nameable coughs your breath became jagged. Desperate. Each breath seemed just on the verge of not coming at all.
Your father spoke with the nurse on call, and I held you on the floor of the bathroom, your face hardly visible through the steam. I prayed for you.
So often prayer is just a desperate word or two. It hardly seems capable of traveling whatever distance lies between my mouth and God’s ear. But sometimes prayer takes over and I know that it does not come from me at all. It is more like a river, and I’ve just fallen in.
Sitting there, holding you, I was in that river and I saw something. It was as if that rushing river of prayer drew back the veil between known and unknown, seen and unseen. I saw You, the you that is never just a baby or a three-year-old, but the You that is every age, and I recognized how far away from me you would travel. I could see you bringing light into dark places where I would never go. It seemed to me, as I prayed, that there was a great struggle taking place in this ordinary, steamy bathroom.
Later, I recognized that this river of prayer was not my communication with God. It wasn’t my puny request for healing. A simple question to be answered “yes” or “no.” The prayer was God’s own roaring response to the darkness, the utter evil, that would end your life before you could do all that you were made to do. Or, more importantly, before you could become who you were made to be.
God wouldn’t allow it. Yes, the darkness was there with us, grasping at you as you grasped for breath, but God was shoving it aside. Saving you because we needed you. A “we” that includes so many more than just your father and I.
I don’t know exactly who you are or how far you will go. I do know your life will be beautiful, more beautiful even than these first three years. Your life will matter, more than it already has to your family. And I know you are one step closer today to the promise I glimpsed in that prayer.
You are three.
by Christie Purifoy | Apr 6, 2012 | Faith, Family, God's Love, God's promises, grief, Jesus, Lent, motherhood, Uncategorized
I thought it would be hard to fit Good Friday into Spring Break. I thought it would be difficult to clear space for the cross in a week devoted to beach, pool, and mother-daughter shopping.
I was wrong.
In the car, on our way to the dollhouse store, her voice pipes up from the back seat. It’s hard to hear, the radio too loud, but I know she’s just said something about Daniel. I want her to stop talking. I can’t bear to hear any more about Daniel.
“That’s where Daniel lived.”
“Daniel is gone now.”
“Daniel is the first kid my age to die.”
Then she repeats the words I’ve heard so many times these past few weeks: “I wish I knew what happened.”
My daughter wants to understand how her second-grade classmate died. She wants to know how his little brother died. And how his mother died. We’ve talked about it a lot, but when it comes to the details, I’ve been vague. I’ve spoken of mental illness and accidents. I’ve never spoken the word murder. I can’t bear for her to know how dark the darkness really is.
It’s amazing, really, that she doesn’t know. With all the television cameras camped in front of her school, the grief counselors gathering the children into circles on the floor, the adults whispering at the bus stop, and me, trying to turn the tv off, the radio off, whenever she walked into the room, it’s a wonder that we managed to protect her from the full story. Because, of course, the full story only leads to an unanswerable question: why?
Why did this happen to these beautiful boys? God, why did you let this happen?
The small voice from the backseat says, “Daniel is in the ground now.” With these words, I find my voice again, and I tell her what I believe.
I tell her about Good Friday. I share the word gospel, and I explain that it is so much bigger, so much more beautiful than I understood when I was her age.
When I was a child, growing up in the church, I thought the gospel was this: “I am a sinner so Jesus died and rose again to reconcile me to God. Now I can have a relationship with God.” But I only understood a small part of the story.
My personal salvation is precious to me, but it is only one, small part of the Easter story. When I face evil, like the darkness which led to Daniel’s death, my personal salvation starts to look small. Insufficient. Sometimes, I even dare to whisper this dreadful doubt: “Do I want to be in relationship with a God who allows such things?”
Confronted by the brokenness of our world, I want more … so much more.
On Good Friday, God gave more. He entered history at one, specific moment and he bore on that cross all the brokenness which came before and all the brokenness that comes after. Including Daniel’s murder.
When God’s own son, Israel’s righteous King, chose to suffer and die he unleashed rivers of justice and peace that will one day flood all of creation. This is a kingdom flood. A flood of living water. A flood to make all that is broken whole again.
When Jesus spoke his final words, he meant not only that his ministry on earth was complete, he meant that death, sin, and all the brokenness of creation were ended.
It is finished.
Can we trust him when evil continues to rear its head? Should we turn to him when our questions push us towards despair?
We know that God gave his own son to suffer and die. We know that God did not abandon his son to the grave. I am convinced that he has not abandoned Daniel. He will not abandon me.
He has not abandoned his creation. He is making it new.
Sometimes we see only a trickling fountain. Sometimes we glimpse the roaring river, but we who have pledged ourselves to this King have been given living water.
For now we share that water with our thirsty neighbors, and we look forward to the day promised each Easter, the day when there will be no more desert. No more thirst.
“Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.”
Isaiah 9:7
Shalom.
(photo by yours truly)
by Christie Purifoy | Mar 22, 2012 | Faith, God's promises, Jesus, Uncategorized, Waiting
That’s quite a confession, isn’t it? I may as well admit to disliking puppies.
Slowing down, living in the moment, appreciating the ordinary gifts of each ordinary hour: those aspirations have become a kind of religion. Widely admired if less widely achieved.
Like most religions, I suppose, there’s a commendable seed of truth. I do believe that the moment matters. Of what else is our life composed? Whether I’m considering growing children or changing seasons, I want to notice. To appreciate. To pause and give thanks.
And yet, I wonder … why do we find this so difficult? Why is there always something inside of us looking ahead, peering around the bend? Why the inner voice always asking “what’s next”?
I think this voice won’t ever fully let us go because we are not living in some eternal moment. We long for that. We dream of it, but we don’t inhabit it. Not yet, anyway.
Our lives are journeys. Our lives are stories. There are beginnings and endings, narrative lulls and cliffhangers. Mountains and valleys.
To look ahead, to anticipate all that’s yet to come … this is the substance of faith. This is the shape of Christian spirituality.
We pick up our crosses and follow One worth following.
We run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
We strain our eyes looking for promised lands, for God’s kingdom breaking in, for creation made new.
The moment may be good. It may be very, very good. But we know that we’ve been promised even more.
Glorious anticipation.
“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
by Christie Purifoy | Mar 19, 2012 | allergies, Faith, God's promises, healing, Jesus, Uncategorized
I’ve been so sick for so long that looking back over the past few months is like staring into a dark tunnel. I’m just glad to be at the other end.
I’m a little too worn out to fully analyze the experience. Maybe some things are meant to be endured and survived rather than understood.
Still, I do know that there is a metaphysical, spiritual conundrum that we never quite escape in this life. C. S. Lewis called it the “problem of pain.”
Why do we get sick? Why do we hurt? And, hey, if we’re going to ask these questions why not go all the way … why do our babies get sick? Why do so many children suffer?
Of course, I don’t know how to answer those big questions. Does anyone? Lewis himself offers a bounty of wisdom, but it isn’t as if even he lets us off the hook. We won’t find the ultimate answer in a book. I believe we’ll find it one day in a face. Jesus’s face. But, I haven’t yet looked into those eyes, so, for now, it’s all hope.
Even if we can’t fully answer the “problem of pain” on this side of life, I don’t think we’ll ever get close if we ignore the little problems. The everyday pain.
When Jesus said to pick up our crosses and follow him, I don’t think he was telling us to suffer in silence. To just shut up about it already! Though, I admit, I sometimes picture him rolling his eyes in response to my whiny prayers. But, in my mind, it’s a fond exasperation.
That picture – of someone picking up their cross and following – is kind of nice, actually. As if Jesus were telling us that even our pain is a part of the story. Even our pain matters in some way. Pick it up, bring it along, I’ll take care of it, he says. Maybe today, definitely someday, it will be dealt with.
I won’t forget the tears you’ve cried.
So, what do we do in the meantime?
I’m not sure, but for the first time in months, I’m taking a good look around.
By the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel I can see blue skies. I can feel a warm breeze. And the scent blowing across my face is the heavy sweetness of backyard orange blossoms.
Here is another moment that begs not to be analyzed. It’s meant only for joy.
