by Christie Purifoy | Feb 19, 2013 | children, Dreams, Faith, Florida, God's Love, healing, Home, Joy, Pennsylvania, Stories, Uncategorized, Winter
I want my children to know that God’s love is as real as the cupcakes and green tea we shared on Monday afternoon. It’s as real as this house that shelters us from cold and frames our daily view of the sunset.
But this is actually a hard thing to believe, and my daughter goes straight for the crack in my story: what about the kids who have no cupcakes? What about the student my health teacher just told us about? The one with no money for a visit to the dentist? The one who is about to lose his house because his parents ran out of money to pay the owner?
And I can hear the real question whispering beneath our conversation: isn’t it a terrible thing to suppose God loves one child with a gift of cupcakes while another one is left to starve?
I’ve been listening to this firstborn of mine for years, and one word that always comes to mind is wisdom.
She reminds me that wisdom doesn’t necessarily know the answer, but she does ask good questions.
That is a good question, I tell her. I don’t know the answer.
All I really know are the stories that make up my own life. While I don’t believe in the God of Parking Spaces (in other words, a God who makes my life easier and more comfortable with special little favors), I do know that God loves in big ways and small.
Maybe God is loving you right now with cupcakes, I tell her. Maybe he is loving that other child with a bowl of rice from an aid worker.
One time, I tell her, God loved me with a sofa.
It was just over a year ago, and I had this farmhouse dream in mind. It was a dream about caring for an old house and a bit of land and welcoming lots of people around our table. In my mind, it looked like an antique sofa. The kind with a carved wood frame and pretty little legs. I don’t know why the dream looked that way to me, but it did.
But I was very sick that last winter in Florida. I spent every day in bed trying to breathe, trying to avoid the wicked, golden tree pollen wafting through the air.
Until the day, dear firstborn, when I couldn’t take your cabin-fever complaints, your boredom made manifest in bickering. I grabbed you and my inhaler and took off for some thrift-store therapy. I don’t think I ever felt so far away from my dream as I did then – struggling to breathe and desperate for escape. From pollen, from warm winters, from bickering children, from all of it.
We walked into the thrift store – headed for the twenty-five cent children’s books – and I saw it. My sofa. My farmhouse sofa.
But, we don’t have room for another couch, you said. You’re right, I said. We don’t have room in our Florida house, but I don’t think we’ll always be here. Dear God, tell me I won’t always be here. Desperate for breath. Dying to escape.
I bought that sofa. It sat in our Florida garage for a few weeks until I had enough faith to write the check. That’s when I googled upholsterers.
I chose the one with the coupon and the free in-person estimate. He loaded my sofa into his white van, and I went back to my sickbed. Not even a sofa in the garage to remind me of my dream.
Months went by, and there was no reason to think we’d be leaving Florida anytime soon. The sofa wasn’t ready when he said. Weeks went by, and I emailed. Soon! he wrote back. More weeks went by, and I emailed again. Very soon! he wrote.
I tried not to think about my farmhouse (but all I could think was where is it? And when will we go there?). I tried not to think about my sofa (but all I could think was where is it? And did I pick the right fabric?).
June 23. My birthday. 5 pm and there was a phone call. Your sofa is ready, and I’m in your neighborhood. Can I bring it by?
You and I, we don’t believe in the God of Parking Spaces. You and I, we can’t ever forget that starving child (which is as it should be).
But I know my own story, and I know God gave me a sofa for my thirty-fifth birthday.
Today, I am sitting at my desk in an old, old farmhouse. I can see my sofa from where I sit.
It was made for this house.
Which is as inconsequential as a parking space. And as miraculous as anything I know.
//
//
by Christie Purifoy | Feb 6, 2013 | Dreams, Faith, God, Seasons, Uncategorized
I’ve spent the past five years wondering, “Where will I be this time next year? What will I be doing? Where will I be living?”
I’ve been like a neglected houseplant, my leaves slowly curling. I had no roots.
Here at Maplehurst, we are in the freeze/thaw ugliness of midwinter, but I am fixated on the particular beauty of golden, late-afternoon winter light. I stretch toward the light and feel just how deep these roots can grow.
/
/
There are dreams planted everywhere here. Specific dreams about the vegetable garden and the blueberry bushes. Vague dreams about community and hospitality.
How did I get to this place? This place called Home? This place where dreams are realized?
I have no formulas to offer you. No guarantees. I suppose there are no shortcuts. All I have is this one thing: when I look back I see all the dreams we let go.
It turns out knowing when to let go of a dream is a necessary part of the dreaming life.
/
Jonathan and I fell in love at an inconveniently young age. He had always planned to attend medical school. He gave up that dream so we could marry. So I could earn a PhD.
We dreamed of moving overseas. We imagined living in Scotland or Ireland. We let the dream go and moved to Chicago. Spent two weeks hiking Ireland’s west coast, instead.
We dreamed of moving closer to family. Maybe a farmhouse in the Midwest? Close to grandparents in Kansas, not too far from grandparents in Texas. Instead, we moved to Pennsylvania.
/
When I tell you that my dreams are coming true, I do not mean I saw this life in advance. What I mean is this: life unfolds and something deep within us says, “Yes. This. Yes.”
A dream-come-true is a thing both surprising and deeply familiar.
It is the future you were made for before you even knew enough about yourself to dream it.
/
I have these words starred and underlined in my Bible, “May he give you the desire of your heart” (Psalm 20:4). One day I read those words, and it felt as if I’d tipped my head beneath a stream of warm water. That warm-water-feeling was real enough that I wrote the date, too. The ink is a bit smudged, but I can still read this: “So I pray / 12-14-2008.”
I didn’t write anything else, because, at that time, I had nothing else to write. I had no dreams. I had no desires. I couldn’t picture the future at all.
Now I know the most incredible thing. God not only gives us the desire of our hearts, he plants it there too.
He gives us the dream. He gives us the desire. He makes it come true.
And our hearts say, “Yes.”
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 26, 2012 | Advent, Family, God's Love, Grateful, motherhood, Pennsylvania, Poetry, Pregnancy, Uncategorized, Waiting
One year ago, I was waiting, holding on to these words from Psalm 81: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth, and I will fill it.”
The date inked in beside those words in my Bible is August 23, 2011. By the time Advent began, I’d spent three months wringing out every drop of hope they had to give.
I did not know when (or even if) we would be moving on from Florida, but I longed to leave the desert behind. I was not yet pregnant, but I had a daughter who prayed every night for a sister. I had only imprecise dreams of what the future might hold, but I kept my mouth open and imagined a cup running over.
I wrote every day that Advent, and I shared it all with you here.
Before I’d even packed away the Christmas tree, I was pregnant, and the events which would bring us to Pennsylvania had been set in motion. I celebrated the new year with anticipation, though I still knew nothing of a baby girl or a red brick farmhouse.
Such a year it has been. Such a year.
And now – now, it is a season for singing. And, so, like last year, I will have something for you here each day of Advent.
We will wait and sing, together.
Magnificat
I am singing my Advent anthem to you, God: How all year
I’ve felt your thrusts, every sound and sight stabbing
like a little blade – the creak of gulls, the racket
as waves jostle pebbles, the road after rain, shining
like a river, the scrub of wind on the cheek, a flute
trilling – clean as a knife, the immeasurable chants of green,
of sky: messages, announcements. But of what? Who?
Then last Tuesday, a peacock feather (surprise!)
spoke from the grass; Flannery calls hers “a genuine
word of the Lord.” And I – as startled as Mary, nearly,
at your arrival in her chamber (the invisible
suddenly seen, urgent, iridescent, having put on light
for her regard) – I brim over like her, quickening. I can’t
stop singing, thoroughly pregnant with Word!
– Luci Shaw
by Christie Purifoy | Jul 19, 2012 | Faith, Home, Jesus, Uncategorized
We’ve signed papers, and, if all goes as planned, we’ll soon move into an old farmhouse in the Pennsylvania countryside. For two years dreams have been our only food, and those dreams are being realized.
Dream is a word I’ve always had trouble with.
When I was a child I learned words like sinner, salvation, and cross, but those good words twisted themselves in ugly ways until all I heard was duty, obligation, and sacrifice. My faith boiled down to what I owed to Jesus. There is little room for dreaming in a life of obligation.
Why dream my own dreams when Jesus might say follow me somewhere I did not want to go?
The Jesus who loves me – me! – and not my life of sacrifice taught me how to dream. I wanted to live in the city, I wanted a PhD, I wanted children. They were my dreams, and Jesus made them reality. Each dream realized was a gift from the One who is Love.
Until the day I came to the end of my own dreams.
Pregnant with my third child and only a few hurdles away from my degree, I saw a future that looked blank. The horizon was right up close, and I had nothing to aim for. The dreams I had chased for years had come true, but I had no dreams of my own left to run toward.
We cannot live without dreams. They are as necessary as bread.
But where do we find them?
I know now that our best dreams come from the kingdom of God.
For too long, I looked at Jesus and saw only the cross: a one-time event that left me in his debt. I saw but didn’t see.
Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection were not isolated events. They were beginning and ending. They unleashed something so beautiful and miraculous words just can’t capture it. But we try. We say, as Jesus did all those years of his earthly ministry, “The Kingdom of God is at hand!”
Frederick Buechner puts it so well. Speaking of Jesus’s first followers, he writes: “One way or another Christ called them. … They saw the marvel of him arch across the grayness of things – the grayness of their own lives, perhaps, of life itself. They heard his voice calling their names. And they went” (from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons).
Yes, we are moving to our dream house, but we are not chasing a house. We are chasing Jesus. It has always been his beautiful voice calling to us in the desert. It was his voice that said NO, and NO, and NO when we pursued familiar things like church involvement, an academic career, a life just big enough for three children, no more.
Now, we are living in his YES and everything that looked like sacrifice and hardship has proved to be the surest and best path toward glory.
Buechner goes on, “[Christ] called them to see that no matter how ordinary it may seem to us as we live it, life is extraordinary. … Life even at its most monotonous and backbreaking and heart-numbing has the Kingdom buried in it the way a field has treasures buried in it. … The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. … The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it.”
We jumped into the river, though we had no idea where it might take us.
It has taken us home.
