Sweet Days
“When I am talking about food I am talking about life.” Nigella Lawson
I should be back in this space next week. In the meantime, it’s all about the pool, the cousins, and the food.
Because You are One Step Closer
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.
To Run Toward the Desert
Sometimes I think about the privileged ones in God’s story. The ones called out into the desert, like Abraham, Moses, even Jesus. The desert was brutal. Not a place or an experience they would have chosen.
It was also beautiful. They met angels there. They met God himself there.
There are others, too. Like Hagar. Hagar knew desolation in the desert, but it was also there that she discovered the intimacy and the peace of being seen. “You are the God who sees me,” she said. “I have now seen the One who sees me.”
To follow God into the desert is to turn your back on ordinary life. To trade comfort for something much harder and much better.
I know this, but why do I also know that I don’t want to hear that call? Shouldn’t I be willing not only to follow but to run toward the God of the desert?
I’ve had these lyrics bubbling up in my mind for days:
When we were young
We walked where we wanted to
Life was ours
And now we’re old
We go where we’re told
The Lord’s Spirit calls
He’s singing
Follow my road to sorrow and joy.
(from “Desert Father” by Josh Garrels)
We left Chicago two years ago to follow that singing voice into the desert. I hoped for joy, but found, mostly, sorrow.
I’m not sure I would have followed had I known.
I’m glad I didn’t know, because we never do look far enough ahead.
I would have seen loss. I would have seen loneliness, and I would have stopped looking, turned my back, and walked the other way. I’m sure of it.
I would have turned my back on the road that would carry me through the loss, through the loneliness and toward …
Another daughter. A gift and a blessing I was sure would never be mine. I was sure, and I was wrong.
Now I pray, with hope and joy, the final words of “Desert Father.” I pray them for myself. I pray them for you:
Hold on
All you
Who wait by the blue shores
For him
To part the water
Desert Father
Show us a new way
The impossible dream
Through the deep and the unseen
Carry us home.
When Our “No” Meets God’s “Yes”
When we moved from Chicago to Florida, we gave away all of our baby things. There was no reason to bring a bassinet, a baby swing, or a boppy pillow halfway across the country. Our family was complete.
Some friends asked me how I knew. I’m not sure what I said, but I know, looking back, that our decision felt like the most reasonable one. It felt right. It felt wise. I think it was wise, given our circumstances and what we thought we knew about our future.
The decision to try to grow your family is very emotional, and I can remember congratulating myself that I was able to say “no” to the idea so rationally. So reasonably. Of course, I’d always had a hard time getting pregnant and the first trimester of being pregnant was even harder. That may have had something to do with the ease with which I said “no more.”
Here’s something I’ve learned since moving to Florida: God’s gifts are not always rational or reasonable. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that God is wildly unreasonable. And we – well, we are too easily content to stay within our comfort zones, to respect our limits, to steer clear of obstacles and hardship, while all along God desires to give us more.
I’m not necessarily talking about more babies. Or more money in the bank account. God’s more, at least in the beginning, may actually look like less. The money is shrinking. The troubles are multiplying. The mountains are growing.
Yet, there in our midst, is God, and he is longing to give us more, always more. If he is holding back it is for a season and for a purpose, but all through history his cry is the same: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it” (Psalm 81:10).
I heard those words from God way back in August. I can remember the goosebumps on my arms and the question in my head: “What is God about to do?” I was slightly excited and terribly afraid.
I don’t think I’ve yet glimpsed the full answer to my question. What is God about to do? What is he preparing to give? I know that there is always more. More than I’ve seen. More than I can imagine.
But I have seen one thing … and it is very good.
A small blur of a heart beating furiously on the ultrasound screen.
And I have felt the slightest flutters of new life being knit together.
We have forgotten our “no” and embraced God’s “yes,” and it feels like nothing less exhilarating than a feet-first jump into a rushing river.
“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.”
Psalm 46:4
Advent (Day 24)
In our family, we always celebrate Christmas with a birthday cake. Sometimes, birthday pie.
No, it isn’t in honor of Jesus. We don’t sing “happy birthday to Jesus,” appropriate as that may be. We sing to our own birthday boy. My husband. Born on Christmas Day … well, not too many years ago.
Three days after Christmas and birthday we celebrate fifteen years of marriage.
Once upon a time, we raided a Christmas tree lot the day after Christmas, collecting free decorations for our reception space. Once upon a time, we filled clear glass Christmas ornaments with birdseed. Once upon a time we ordered a few simple arrangements from the florist, grateful the church was already full of poinsettias. A Christmas wedding.
Fifteen years later, I know that marriage is no fairy tale. I know that it’s harder than we imagined it could be. I know that the children we count as blessings also make it very difficult for us to talk to each other at our own dinner table. Last night, with the kids distracted by a movie in the upstairs playroom, we actually sat down to eat without bothering to let them know that food was on the table. They figured it out eventually, but, in the meantime, oh joy! ten minutes of quiet conversation. Ten minutes to remember who we once were and who we will be again someday.
Perhaps, marriage is no fairy tale. Perhaps, there is no happily ever after. And yet … I don’t speak this truth out of disappointment but out of gratitude. Fifteen years ago it was romance. Today, it’s love.
It’s a husband who says he’s sorry. It’s a wife who cooks dinner even when she has a chest cold (though not, necessarily, with a good attitude). It’s a husband who wakes up every single night to soothe a baby who has long outgrown babyhood but still can’t quite manage a full night’s sleep.
It is love in the gritty details. Love that still puts twinkly lights on a Christmas tree and is grateful to accept a free poinsettia after the holiday concert. Love that dreams dreams about the future at a table sticky with maple-syrup fingerprints.
Love in the flesh.
God with us.