Most evenings, after dinner, you’ll find us piling into the car. We drive because it’s so beautiful here, we drive to put the three-year-old to sleep, we drive because we’re worn out and we want to fill the time between feeding and bathing in the easiest way.
I’ve never been very adept at keeping my mind tucked inside my body. It’s always floating off, connecting imagined dots somewhere up in the clouds, which makes me (I’m well aware) a real danger on the road. With Jonathan behind the wheel, I’m free to tell stories in my head, so I do. So many stories.
They’re meant for you; I’m sure of it. Someday (soon, I hope) I’ll share them. But for now … well, I’ve entered a kind of nine-months-pregnant tunnel.
It’s a strange, foggy place. Most of the things I normally value in life seem lost in the general grayness. Like writing for this blog or returning phone calls. Other seemingly unimportant things loom inexplicably large. Like painting my bedroom furniture.
Yes, the baby’s room is a mess of odds and ends, and the bassinet I recently ordered through the mail is still sitting in its unopened box exactly where the UPS man left it last week. But I can’t tell you how vitally, vitally important it has been to attack my bed with white paint.
Please, baby girl, just hold on till the paint dries.
I’m not sure if I’ll be in this space much before she arrives. I do promise I’ll be back before long.
There is so much here (in this new place and season) worth noticing, and I don’t think these things are meant only for me. Things like a full moon rising over a quilt-square patch of corn. Things like driving the same country road night after night until the night when one wrong (right?) turn takes you through a field of sunflowers.
Those things must mean something. They must be a part of some very good story.
I’ll be sure to let you know what I discover. Once the fog recedes.
I’m a lover of stories. I’m a writer of stories. Increasingly, I understand my life and I understand my God through the lens of story.
There’s one story I can’t escape (though I have often wished I could leave it behind or move past my need for it): the story of the Israelites wandering in the desert. This story is tribal: it’s about those particular people, at that particular time. It’s global: refugees lost and searching for home. It can also be deeply, achingly personal.
It’s a story of living in between …
I’m honored to be telling my story here today. Will you join me?
I encourage you to explore Angie’s website Woman, In Progress. She has a great deal of wisdom to share, and I am blessed to call her friend.
This is a familiar story (though I’ve never told it before). I’m sure you have your own version. It’s a story about how one song comes to represent something big: young love, say, or new parenthood, or that one particular summer when the weather just couldn’t be believed.
It actually was summer, and, yes, the weather couldn’t be believed. The coolest Chicago summer in a decade. I’ve never liked hot weather, but I was heavily pregnant and extra grateful for lake breezes.
I’d emerged from the long, dark tunnel of infertility. I’d survived the euphoria and illness of the first trimester. I was cocooned in the mellow hormones of the third trimester.
I’m sure it wasn’t all mellow dreaminess, but that’s how I remember it. The worst was behind. The earthquake that is a first baby was still to come. My husband and I took long walks. Went for long drives. Ate out in all our favorite restaurants.
That summer we could hardly turn on the car radio without hearing the song “Yellow” by Coldplay. Perhaps it only happened once, but when I think of that summer this is what I remember: a nighttime drive down the length of Chicago’s lakefront, overhead the city lights like glittery stars, windows rolled down, a baby girl filling me up, and “Yellow” playing on the radio.
That song and my firstborn: they’ve been tangled up in my mind ever since.
Which is a good thing.
Now when I hear that song, I’m taken right back to a place and a feeling it’s important never to forget. I hear the song, and I remember all of the joy and love and hope that a mother feels when her baby is tucked up inside, still unknown.
It can be difficult (often impossible) to hold on to those feelings through sleepless nights, temper tantrums, sibling fights, meltdowns over homework … well, all the ordinary awfulness of day to day life.
And my own mother-failures are the most awful of all.
But the ordinary awfulness is a distraction. It’s not the real thing. It doesn’t tell us who we really are. It tries to obscure the truth of who our child is.
More and more, I’m convinced that good parenting is learning to coast through the awfulness without losing my grip on the truth.
And the truth is this: life is magical, motherhood is an indescribably good gift, and my child (yours too) is more precious and beautiful than even the nighttime sky.
That is the truth, and this song helps me remember.
Just in time for Mother’s Day: a gorgeous cover of “Yellow” by Renee and Jeremy:
I love this photograph so much. It’s only a picture of my nephew and his stick at the edge of some woods. I think it is one of those pictures that reveals so much more than the sum of its parts: boy, stick, tree.
I look at this picture, and I see fairy tales. Knights with swords as alive as they are. Wickedness that must be sought out in dark forests. I see adventure stories. Those stories that make sleeping on a bed of leaves and cooking food over an open flame sound like heaven.
This photograph reminds me of all that I love about the very best stories: magic, beauty, goodness. Also, darkness, evil, confusion, until, finally, triumph and victory.
I think that I am a Christian because I believe these stories tell me something true about the world. They also tell me true things about myself and about other people.
I think that I will always be a Christian not because I will always believe exactly the same things, or because I have figured it all out, or even because my questions have all been answered. I think I will always be a Christian because the story of King Jesus is a story in which I can live. Within this story, I can move, and I can breathe.
In Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Lauren Winner shares her friend Julian’s memory of being confirmed as a twelve-year-old. A few days before the service, he panicked and told his father (who was also the minister) that he didn’t know if he believed all the right things and wondered if he could proclaim in front of the church that he was ready to believe them forever. Here is his father’s response:
“What you promise when you are confirmed,” said Julian’s father, “is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever.”
Sometimes, faith is like a wrestling match. Like Jacob wrestling all through the dark night with God himself. Jacob always bore the scar of that struggle.
Sometimes, faith is like coming home. Abiding in a place that reveals something of who we truly are.
Faith is not saying, “I know this” and “I am sure of that.”
To have faith is to say, “This is the place where I live.”
Jesus said, “Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you.”
“Mom,” she asks, “What happens next in the story?”
I’m distracted, brushing my teeth, checking the clock. I realize that we only have 5 minutes before we need to leave for church. It takes more than 5 minutes to strap three kids into the car. At least, it does if one of those kids is a two-year-old who processes every instruction as an opportunity to run and hide.
“What story?” I ask.
“You know. The story at church. What happens after Christmas? What happens with Jesus?”
I rinse my mouth and give her a look of confusion. She says, “You know, the story! The angels and the stable and the star. What happens next?”
Finally, I understand her question, but I fumble for an answer. I may have an advanced degree in stories (I’m an expert! An authority!), but it only takes a child’s simple question to deflate those ego-balloons.
“Ummm … well … Jesus grows up. Then he starts teaching and performing miracles.”
Even I know my answer isn’t quite adequate, but the girl is thoroughly unconvinced. She huffs and rolls her eyes, and I know she thinks I still don’t understand.
But, I do. I do.
I know that it takes readers years to learn and even more years to appreciate that stories are not simply the sum of their plot developments. You could summarize a book by Agatha Christie and one by Virginia Woolf in the same number of sentences, but which summary would leave the most unsaid? You don’t need to have read Mrs. Dalloway to know the answer, I think.
“What happens next?” is not the only question we should ask. Why and how may be even more important.
I understand that my daughter, a new reader, is looking for excitement. We’ve had the star and the stable, the angels and the shepherds. What’s next? What’s next? Keep it coming! Keep it coming! Or, as her five-year-old brother might say, “Is there another picture in this book?”
We do get a few pictures between Christmas and Easter. Fishes and loaves. A broken jar of perfume. A man high up in a tree. Still, they aren’t quite as stunning as that stable or that cross. Neither the beginning nor the end, this is merely the hum-drum middle, right?
I’m not so sure. The middle may be less of a set-piece, less likely to be carved in wood or clay, but it’s the part that gives me the most hope for my day-to-day.
We live most of our lives in the middle. Between set-pieces. The funeral. The child’s birth. The phone call. The move. Those things happen, and they look like peaks and valleys as we glance back in time, but we mostly live in the in-between.
Jesus breaking bread. Jesus talking. Jesus healing. Jesus praying. That’s what the middle looks like. It’s beautiful and breath-taking in its own way. We only need to slow down enough to see it.
It’s like I always told my students when they first read Virginia Woolf. “Don’t rush. Take your time,” I would say. “If you hurry through only looking for what happens next you’ll turn the final page and realize that you’ve missed the story.”
I don’t want to miss the story. I want to live it.
