by Christie Purifoy | Mar 8, 2012 | Blog, God's promises, Lent, Seasons, Waiting
Things have been a little quiet around here. A little empty. On the blog and in my heart. This Lent I find myself in a waiting, resting mode. Waiting for my lungs to heal. Waiting for a little boy’s fever to break. Waiting for God to reveal something of what’s next.
I’m waiting on big things and small and holding on to the hope that there will be much to share and much to say on this blog in the months ahead.
Last night, awake at 3 am and waiting for sleep to return, I noticed the moonglow in my bedroom. There’s a full moon tonight, but I have been thinking of new moons. This blog began with my thoughts on a new moon. I’m posting them again in case any of you are finding Lent to be a dark season.
Just remember … darkness is never the end of the story. To paraphrase the writer Anne Lamott, we may be living in a Good Friday world, but we are an Easter people.
Do you know what a new moon looks like? Of course, I do, you’re probably thinking. Until two days ago, I would have thought exactly the same, but I wouldn’t really have been seeing a new moon in my head.
Because I have been in the middle of one book (or six) pretty much ever since I picked up my first kindergarten reader, many of the ideas floating around in my head are attached to letters but not pictures. For example, having read a towering stack of nineteenth-century British novels, I have the word rookery firmly planted in my head. However, I have no solid picture to go along with it. Instead, when I happen upon this word, maybe in Jane Eyre, I see the letters r-o-o-k-e-r-y with a vague image of big black birds sitting on rocks. Which is funny, really, because a rookery shares nothing with rocks but “r,” “o,” and “k.” Though, I had to look it up in wikipedia to be sure even of that.
So, new moon. Two days ago, I googled the phases of the moon. If you’re following a train of thought and sitting in front of a computer (or smartphone, I suppose) it’s amazing how far you can follow said train. My thought began with a complaint and a worry.
I have a two-year-old, and he is a terrible sleeper. Always has been. Which means that my husband and I haven’t slept well in more than two years (because those last few months of pregnancy are never great for sleep, either). Lately, this boy has taken to creeping into our bedroom several times each night and trying to sleep on the floor beside our bed. It’s a little sad and a little cute, but, mostly, it’s exhausting because the two-year-old can’t actually fall back to sleep on our floor, and we can’t fall back to sleep with the loud sucking sounds of his pacifier. Also, I’ve been worried that I’ll get up in the night, not realize he’s there, and step on him. Did I mention that our bedroom has been very, very dark lately? We have transom windows that let in a lot of moonlight, but recently there’s been no light at all and why has there been no light? . . . well, I started googling. The first page that popped up had a huge image of Wednesday night’s moon. A new moon.
This is what a new moon looks like: black, empty, nothing. Somewhere in my head I suppose I knew that. However, it’s the word new that throws me off. New suggests promise, possibility, beginnings. New things should be light, bright, and shimmery. Shouldn’t they? Yet a new moon looks like a black hole. The opposite of promising. The opposite of fresh. The opposite of, well, new.
Staring at that shadowy, black circle where a moon should be, I felt both surprised and encouraged. I’ve been waiting and watching and longing for new things. Months ago, I read these words and felt a promise for my own life: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43: 19). Some days, I did perceive it. Lately, not so much. I read David’s confession that God lifted him “out of the mud and mire” and “put a new song” in his mouth. I too want a “new song,” but I’ve seen so few signs of it. The landscape of my life looks a little dark. Mostly empty.
Seeing rightly what a new moon is, I recall what I do know: new things start out small. New things begin growing in darkness. In their earliest days, new things look a lot like nothing.
Today, I am choosing to believe that what looks like emptiness and nothingness to me is actually the most promising sign of something new. It is fertile ground for the new thing I choose to believe that God is doing.
I’m afraid I’m mixing metaphors here (from sky to earth), but the new moon reminds me of nothing more than a bed of fertile soil. It looks like absolutely nothing. It looks like darkness and emptiness. It isn’t.
“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him” (Psalm 126: 5,6).
by Christie Purifoy | Feb 14, 2012 | God's Love, God's promises, grief, Jesus, Waiting
Alone in darkness.
Someone typed those words into their search engine, and it led them to my blog. It breaks my heart to know this. I wonder if they found what they were looking for. I wonder if they found something else, something good that they didn’t even know they were searching for. Somehow, I do not think they did.
For those of you unfamiliar with the writing of blogs (which group included myself only a few months ago), it is possible for the blog’s author to check his “stats.” One of these stats includes word searches that have led someone to click on that particular website.
These searches usually make sense. Someone searching for a particular poem or literary quotation is often led here. A surprising number of people want to know about southernisms like “bless her heart.” I wrote about that once. And every single day someone types in some variation on “Jesus” and “prostitutes,” which leads them here. That makes me very happy.
Sometimes the words searched are so bizarre I cannot fathom how the google gods led them to my site. I laugh, imagining how disappointed or confused that searcher must have been as my site filled their screen. Yesterday, I didn’t laugh. Instead, I decided that if anyone ever again typed alone in darkness they would find my response here.
Do you feel alone? Has the world gone dark? Then I have something for you.
It isn’t advice. I don’t believe in advice. But, I do have my story, and I know what it is to feel unseen. Unheard. Alone in darkness.
You are not alone. You are not. Yet, I know that it feels that way. I know the weight of it is crushing. There are few things so painful as feeling unseen and unknown.
There is Someone with you. He has always been with you, and he has not abandoned you. He goes by so many names, but the name I know best is Jesus. He made you. He knows you. And he promised that he would always be with you (Matthew 28:20).
Here’s something else I know: when we’re in the darkness we only sometimes feel his presence. Usually, we don’t. We feel alone. It is only later when some grace has drawn us slowly back into the light that we are able to turn around and see rightly. That is when I have known, without a doubt, that I was never on my own. That I was never forgotten. Never unseen.
Why does he sometimes leave us in the darkness? Why doesn’t he swoop in to rescue us? I don’t really have the answers to those questions. “Why” questions are mostly impenetrable. I do have some “whats”, however. I don’t know why, but I do not what has happened to me. Having walked through darkness into light I know that morning always returns. The night never lasts forever. I know that I am loved and that I do not walk alone through the valley of the shadow of death. I know that sometimes I needed to change in ways that only darkness could accomplish. I know that I have never searched for God or prayed to God like I have in the darkness. I am glad to know that I am capable of that. I am forever grateful to know that he always responds, he always hears, even if it isn’t on my timetable.
I will not tell you that darkness is good. I certainly will not say that it is good for you. I do admit that I have been amazed to see how bright the light shines after darkness.
That light is waiting for you. I know you cannot see it yet. Try to hold on. Wait. Pray. Hurl your loneliness and fear at the sky.
He’s listening. He sees.
“I have heard your prayer and seen your tears.” (Isaiah 38:5).
by Christie Purifoy | Jan 26, 2012 | allergies, Florida, God's promises, healing, Seasons
This is the kind of landscape I’m dreaming of. Cold. Bleak. Beautiful. Beautiful because there is not a drop of tree pollen for miles.
It seems that the trees here in northern Florida are trying to kill me. Maybe they have no such intention, and it’s only that my lungs have misunderstood. They think the thick yellow dust swirling through the air is reason enough to close up shop. I try to convince them otherwise with pills and inhalers.
It’s been a long month, and pollen.com tells me I still have a ways to go.
I’ve never experienced anything quite like this. It’s left me feeling nostalgic for Chicago’s concrete jungle. Living there I did do some sneezing in springtime, but this? I’ve never known anything like this. I’ve always said that I’m a winter person. That I need that season of cold, sleepy hibernation. It seems my body agrees. There’s always something blooming in Florida, and, apparently, my lungs have had enough.
For now, I’m sticking close by my bedroom air purifier. I have time to be inspired. Time to write. Somehow, though, I’ve found the life of the bedridden to be less than inspiring.
Still, whenever I open my Bible I find promise after promise of healing. Who knew God had so much to say about healing? Now I know, though the promise of it belies my reality. So, I’m holding tight to the promise and waiting.
Waiting.
Breathing.
Waiting.
“Blessed is the one whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal.”
Job 5:17-18
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 31, 2011 | God's promises, prayer, Seasons, Waiting
This is the view from where I sit on the eve of another year. Not literally, of course, but “literal” has never meant much to me. Literally, the view is more about scattered toys and laundry piles and cough drops (I’m trying and failing to remember a holiday season that didn’t feature some virus or other).
But, the real view, the shaped-by-a-river-of-prayer view? It looks like this: quiet, peaceful, empty, yet hopeful. There is something just over the horizon … I can sense it … almost see it. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know that it is good.
It’s a far cry from last year’s view. Having moved to Florida only a few months before, having just determined to take a break from university teaching, the future looked blank.
Then, it was emptiness. Now, it is expectation.
What happened in the between? What has brought me from one to the other? The answer, I think, is month after month of not-having and not-doing. Waiting, you might call it, though it often felt more like grieving.
I stopped teaching. I didn’t start serving in our new church. I didn’t make many new friends (though, there are a few – you know who you are!). I didn’t organize or join a church small group. I watched my husband volunteer in the kids’ classrooms while I moved in small circles between house and yard and house and library.
And what am I left with at the end of this year of nothing? A finished manuscript for a memoir, this blog, and many, many new plans and dreams. Dreams that are entirely unrealized yet somehow substantial in their promise and their beauty.
I am living the upside-down values of Jesus’s kingdom. That which looks empty is full. That which has died brings life. Beneath the piles of laundry and the scattered toys, between the crumpled tissues and half-empty medicine bottles, there is water becoming wine.
We may still be living in darkest winter, but I sense the nearness of spring. And, so, I dip my toes in the river and pray the season in. My prayers are merely a welcome for all that God long ago determined to give.
“Ask the Lord for rain in the springtime … He gives showers of rain to all people.”
Zechariah 10:1
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 22, 2011 | Advent, God's promises, Jesus
Advent, like life, is bittersweet. And this is as it should be. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said.
Yet, he didn’t finish there. He continued: “But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
And that is the unadulterated sweetness of Christmas. He came to us. He overcame everything that troubles us.
This has been his song since the beginning. Unlike the ancients, we are privileged not to hope for it but to know it. We who live in the end times (and that is no prophetic prediction, only a reader’s observation that we are living neither in the beginning nor the middle of God’s great story), we are privileged to know how trustworthy his promises have always been. He promised us a Savior and an everlasting King, and he kept his promise.
And so we have no doubt that every promise he has made is a solid stone beneath our feet. We are unshaken. We have tasted, we have seen that the Lord is very good (Psalm 34:8).
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it. … with honey from the rock I [will] satisfy you.”
Psalm 81:10,16
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 21, 2011 | Advent, God's promises, Jesus, Scripture
Do not be afraid (Luke 2:10).
Those words still echo from the day of his birth. How is it that we forget? Why do we close our ears?
We busy ourselves with words, with rules, with judgements and controversies. We worry. And, yes, we continue to live lives rooted in fear.
Afraid we’re doing it wrong. Afraid we’ll lose it all. Afraid someone will find out. Afraid there’s nothing to look forward to.
Afraid, afraid, afraid.
We set up our fences. We wonder who’s in, who’s out. We criticize. We condemn.
Why?
When he had risen from the dead the command was the same: Do not be afraid (Matthew 10).
How would you live if you believed there was no need to ever be afraid?
