Even the Sparrows...

She cradled it while its breath slowed. Tender hands. Tender heart.

We talk about death, because she says she is a little afraid.

All good things, all of us, will come to our end in this world, we agree. She looks up at me with those wet eyes full of questions.

"But then the bird's body turns to dirt and it helps make better soil so that more seeds can grow."    

Yes, dear one.

It seems that life and death are bound up, each thread tight in its right place, holding the other. Nearly indistinguishable, sewing the nest together.

And it all matters. This moment while the bird takes its final breath and lies limp in her tiny hands. The tenderness of her heart for another. The journey home. The mystery. Her sadness and her questions.

They matter.

Some say life is just a cosmic accident. Others say whatever, whoever, Creator is, must be aloof, uncaring, considering all the suffering in the world. 

But if the end of even a sparrow's life is met with love, if its resurrection is found in bits of earth and the hearts of children, if our worth is amplified by the caring of one for another, an offering of dignity and worth and purpose, then I say this power of love MUST be personal and real enough that every single one of our lives has meaning. All the glitter and all the dust and all the wandering hours in between.

The fall of every sparrow, known.

Each hair on my head, counted.

And, oh, dear one, there are worse things than dying. Losing our sense of compassion, losing the wonder and sadness of it all. That's a death far worse than the death of the body.

Death is never the end of the story.

* * * * *

 If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all

 kinds...Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

~ Wendell Berry

Of dust and the best sort of magic

Sun is shining. It's a bit of a tease these days, considering the deep collective yearning for spring. If only I could flip the calendar an extra page and coax the sun to follow suit...

No dust particle floating freely can escape these winter rays, strong and true. What kind of magic turns dirt to glitter mid-air, anyway?

The best sort of magic.

* * * * *

Lift the heavy history book down from its place up high, out of sight, out of reach, out of remembrance. Down to earth, to heart, back to mind. Down down down it has been awhile, you think. Exhale and dust flies off the familiar pages. The scar-words. The penned lies written like facts meant only for rote memorization. No, no, you mutter, that is not me. Exhale all the foul thoughts and watch them scatter under breath and light. Exhale you are foul. Inhale you are loved.

* * * * * 

The boy says that Lent starts today anyway so it's a good time to give up all dairy and see if he feels better. Lent is for giving something up, he tells me. Everybody gives up something for forty days. Like chocolate or coffee or video games.

I tell him the old story about ashes, repentance, humility, this tradition of soul-searching by sacrificing bits of self. I feel it again, familiar, ash cross on forehead for all to see. 

I am dust. I am human.

Daily residue builds up. It has built up, I realize again. Today's failures, unspoken dreams, all the agony of watching Hurt fester in others, all the helpless nights and fearful mornings. All of it, dead cells, waiting to be sloughed off.

I am dust and it's getting caught in my lungs.

...because we were created from dust, I tell him, and some day our bodies will be dust again. We remember who we are, that we are The Created. And by remembering our dustiness, maybe we also are reminded of our shine. Reflectors of Light and of a magic turning.

If Lent is about recalling my own brokenness, my dusty self, my handwritten lies and biting past...if Lent is about sensing the need to depend on God to stitch up my open wounds and make me whole again, then I am already there.  I am sitting in it, and there is grace here. This terrible and marvelous year of dependence. This is all Lent, I say.

And God isn't asking me to go on a diet and call it sacrifice. "This is the kind of fasting I want," He says.

He just wants me.

He wants to breathe Life into my dusty corners and let me watch the past turn to diamonds in the winter's sun. Even ashes reflect Life, I hear whispered.

Exhale I am foul. Inhale I am loved.

What kind of magic is this that brings the dead to life?

One Week at a Time...

One week ago today I was here:

Majestic cliffs. Divine hot springs. Walking sticks and exploration. Wildlife and moss and mountain passes that make you hold your breath and the smell of sweet cedar in the air.

Oh, Missoula, I love you!

But then we packed our workhorse of a van full of sunburned but happy bodies and headed back to drop our good friend, Bailey off at her new home in Billings. The time was sweet. The goodbyes sweeter with a touch of bitter, and somehow we survived the trek across the North Dakota nothing and back to our little cottage in the pines. Home.

We desperately needed the get-away, we had been made painfully aware with Matt being treated for stomach ulcers just days before leaving. Stress will do that to a person. Cause you to stop everything and re-prioritize- reset your life. But this, also, is good and necessary.

I had planned on writing about the many blessings found on our adventure to the Big Sky. I had planned on sharing how miraculous it was to have just finished my herbal remedy for Lyme Disease and, for the first time in well over a year now, to have almost no pain. I could write an entire blog post on the rejoicing over this wondrous timing, considering I'm back on another medication/remedy now and the hurt is returning. Still, a glorious week. GLORIOUS.

I had planned on putting words to seeing our Creator in Creation. I did. I do.

But then things rarely go as planned.

I got a frantic phone call from my younger sister the day after we got home. She was pregnant with twins, one of which she had just found out had died. There was already much suffering, but this was a new desperation in her voice- she was only 25 weeks along and in hard and sudden labor. "Please just pray I don't lose this baby, too."

I cried. I stayed up all night by my phone, waiting for text messages from our other sister who was with her. Yes, she needed an emergency C-section.

I have the most precious new baby niece, at 1 lb. 11 oz. She is a miracle- a fighter. I know so many who have gone through these situations, but never in my family. We're new in the NICU. And I get to be there tomorrow to hold her tiny finger.

Somewhere in the middle of these huge life moments there are still dishes to wash and garden to plan and backpacks to fill and laundry piles. The piles. And my mind is somewhere else.

I'm not sure there is any other way today. This is Life. And only one week, at that. Somehow the lows make the highs that much more profoundly special, and rejuvenate the soul just enough.

God, be enough.

We are the Created

  How I treat a brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike, how I deal with normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day may be a better indication of my reverence for life than the antiabortion sticker on the bumper of my car. ~Brennan Manning

We are messy creatures, we humans. 

We bear the image of our Creator. Complex. Marvelous. Emotion-filled. We are little creators ourselves, having been given the mandate and the innate passion to imagine and build, to sing and learn, to birth new life and tell our stories. We are the Created. And here we are creating, because it is what we were made to do.

And all of Creation is called Good.

Check out this photo montage called 'Created Equal'. Do it. Right now.


http://www.ufunk.net/photos/created-equal-les-contrastes-de-la-vie-magnifique-projet-photo-de-mark-laita/


Did you look through them all? Did you see their faces? The stories behind them? Did you recognize something in each of these people that is also written in the mirror?

We are messy but intriguing creatures. And we may be Good, but we do not always do good, spread the good, create goodness. Often we choose to not really see one another, to disengage. We pass people by in favor of maintaining our idea of today's success. We try not to look into the stranger's eyes because it's awkward. Or maybe because we don't want to feel the conviction of knowing we should say something or do something to help or just to know them. We are far from the reality of the many people we encounter every day, aren't we?

I'm missing out not knowing these folks, especially those different from myself. Missing the chance to listen to their story and learn from them.

But if I say I believe that all of us, ALL of us, however crazy or smelly or intimidating, bear the image of our Creator, then I have to force myself to step outside of my own self-protective bubble and look into the stranger's eyes, engage when it's uncomfortable. I am craving the connectedness- the community of Creation that I know it was purposed to experience together.


**************


It was a rough week. It really was. Like, want-to-hide-in-the-closet-and-cry sort of rough. I'm guessing you know the feeling. Few of us can evade the human experience. I was saddened and shocked at the lack of redemptive creativity in the people I expected it from, and equally surprised by stunning acts of redemptive creativity from those I hadn't. Wait- what?! I totally didn't expect her to speak that kind of truth into my life!

I'm finding that just when I think I have someone figured out, labelled and tucked in a box neatly on a shelf, I put expectations on our relationship- whether complete stranger, close friend, spouse, barista... but that is exactly when I am surprised by the people around me, surprised when I see the authenticity of Jesus in someone unexpected, or have the opportunity to show a person some needed dignity by looking them square in the eyes and greeting them with a smile.

Dignity changes things.

Listening opens up the doors for creative community with those we least expect.

These are good surprises.

Reduce, Reuse, Repost?

 "Remember–the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker." - Madeleine L'Engle

I find it a little ironic that today is Earth Day, and here I am entering the virtual blogosphere, this crazy world that is the opposite of earthly wild. No smell of moss and pine here. This soapbox creature lets everyone speak their mind, even if they really have nothing valuable to say.  I'm not entirely sure I have a reason, other than that I love to write about things I'm passionate about, like many of you who do the same. I'm not doing it because I have something enlightening to reveal to the world that isn't already being said. I'm doing it because I feel compelled to take the time to articulate my thoughts, particularly about my faith, in a way that is a little less obnoxious than posting on FB where it will surely start a war among the masses in as little as 10 minutes. Yes, I've been known to do this a time or two-hundred.

I am passionate about my faith. I have become a question-asker. This is often not well-received as I grew up in primarily your typical conservative evangelical Christian home, and many of my friends and family maintain those beliefs. While I deeply love and follow the Jesus who walked this earth, I don't always love or recognize the Jesus that Christians display so loudly. Reality is that I don't put my trust in other Christians. I put my trust and hope in Jesus himself, who points straight to our Creator God. I read of Jesus answering questions with parables and following them with deeper questions, and I have come to believe that questions are sacred. It's not God who is afraid of our questions, but it is us who often are afraid of the answers.

I call myself a universe-disturber, a L'Engle term, which is more than a bit presumptuous, but that means a few things to me. First, I believe we are all connected- all people, all of creation, the apple trees and galaxies and sparrows and bumblebees...all dependent on each other, nothing acting just on its own but intertwined and deeply relational. A monarch flaps its wings and affects galaxies a million light years away. Each cell in my body responds and changes to energy and emotion in ways scientists are just beginning to understand. This absolutely astounds me, and while I am no scientist, I have a budding fascination with how this world works. Many of us grow up to face a difficult, yet completely unnecessary choice between our faith and intellectual honesty. People have abandoned their faith over this misconception. I am here to hopefully help make a space for these conversations that I also desperately crave.

My favorite author, Madeleine L'Engle, also says that "universe-disturbers make waves, rock boats, upset establishments. Jesus was a great universe-disturber, so upsetting to the establishment of his day that they put him on a cross, hoping to finish him off. Those of us who try to follow his Way have a choice, either to go with him as universe-disturbers (butterflies), or to play it safe and resist change." Unwavering beliefs may seem like security, but if we cannot move with change, we are closer to death and further from life. And real, meaningful, passionate life is what we are all after! So not only are we all ultimately universe-disturbers in being connected to one another, but I aspire to be a universe-disturber, one who follows in the difficult steps of Jesus of Nazareth.

So here I am. Questions, doubts, weaknesses, all bound up with splashes of hope and peace, and on my best days, a mustard-seed-sized faith and trust in the Maker of this Earth we're celebrating today. There is much in this life that seems meaningless. And then, just when I'm about to give in to this reckless chaos, some glimpse is given which reveals the strange weaving of purposefulness and beauty. Because I know that what God creates, God will not abandon.