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

On Melancholy and Miracles and Waking Up

the melancholy:

Sleep is forgiveness.

It falls, drop by drop, washing the dust of the day as it ushers in a clean slate and the promise of tomorrow. Sleep feels like rain and sounds like poetry.

Except when it doesn't. Except when you toss and turn and can't find comfort, when your mind only finds its form in the dark of night. Sometimes joy doesn't come with the morning and God, forgive me, please.

Let me just admit here that I've been bitter.

Let me say this out loud because it's important to say the hard things out loud- I've been whiny and miserable and exhausted and desperate and sometimes straight up mean. Grace makes it possible to be completely and utterly vulnerable. This time grace tastes bitter.

I feel heavy. And I imagine I'm not alone here, right? We carry it on our backs all day long. The plates we keep spinning. The baggage. The emotions. The failures.

And my God I am tired. 

A numbing melancholy has been my coping mechanism these last months where our lives were turned upside-down, shaken out like change on the floor. I'm not saying it's good. But this happens from time to time, I know. It keep us on our toes. And while I realize down the road we'll look back and see all the layers of struggle woven together as only time can do, right now, today, I'm not exactly counting it all as a blessing. I'd have to squint one eye and let it blur into oblivion to convince myself there's a silver lining.

So I've made the decision to keep both eyes open instead. To call it what it is. Frankly, I don't have the energy for anything else.

It's survival mode in these parts after all.

* * * * *

the miracles:

The holidays manage to show up year after year whether I'm ready to receive them or not. The holy-days. That's what it means. Holy. Advent is a time for hope. And joy. It was so odd this year, if I'd had any energy I would have used it to say it all looked pretty ludicrous to me. Me, with both eyes painfully and begrudgingly open. My heart wasn't there. I hated that it was snowing and -30 degrees and the garden was shriveled up and in hiding. Cold and dead. Nothing holy about that.

I should have known better. I did, I do. But I'm sleep deprived, so give me a break here.

Matt was out of a job and we felt like we were drowning some days. There were layers of other stresses. Layers like a cake when you have no appetite, and the insomniac icing on top is enough to make you turn all sorts of crazy. I'm human and I'm telling you I couldn't do it. So I stayed numb to the twinkling lights and carefully cut paper snowflakes and fancy gift wrap and baby Jesus and talk of hope and joy and why couldn't I just sleep?!

I know it's better to feel deep the pain and grief, whatever it is. I know. Sometimes, though, lives are fractured and it takes a miracle to break through the window so we can be ourselves again- our whole selves.

I don't know how it all started, really. Friends offering help, dinner, cups of coffee, fixing our brakes on the van. Random cards with encouragement or checks in them from loved ones and then a group of strangers who heard about our situation and decided to care and pay most of our bills for the month. Now, people. Hear me say this- sometimes help from strangers is enough to bring you to your knees. It was. It did.

And it kept happening, like salvation does, even when you're miserable and it hurts to walk or hold a conversation. It happened every time I looked someone in the eye and knew they actually wanted to help. They listened to me vent. They were kind and gentle when the world had been cruel. They kept my head above water. 

I'm still here, standing with one foot in the muck, still fighting my way through today on 3 hours of sleep. I know my kids don't have cancer, and I know the world is plum full of pain beyond what I will ever know and I should be grateful. But this is my today. It's still there when I want to hide under the covers and emerge in April. It still asks for breakfast and needs laundry done.

* * * * *

The night before Christmas Eve I  pulled into our driveway at midnight, snow crunching, thick and fresh. In front of my bright yellow door sat a massive pile of wrapped Christmas gifts. I sat there and stared them down, confused. An anonymous someone had bought us all presents and labelled them each thoughtfully, and there were so many presents! We're minimalists when it comes to Christmas, and not just out of necessity which was this year. But this- this was a gift all its own. I had never seen my kids so in awe of Christmas and in such wonder!

We all need space to wonder. To be kids again. I needed it.

I could keep going... more offerings, more help, another mortgage paid out of kindness. Friends and family to share meals with and roll out lefse with and community dinners to sit all together, shoulder to shoulder...it all reminded me what it means to be human. I am no island, it turns out. Surprise, surprise.

He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us. -2 Corinthians

* * * * *

There's a story about Jesus feeding a multitude of people, who knows the real number, maybe 5,000, with just a basket of a few loaves of bread and two fish. What a joke, right?  Jesus took what there was and started feeding people. They ate until they were full. And there were twelve baskets worth of leftovers.

I don't need to know how this miracle happened. I know it happens. It is my story.

* * * * *

the waking up:

I have seen the hope of healing. I'm watching it ripple out all around me, touching the sick, lifting the weak, feeding the hungry. It is simple and unassuming. It takes human hearts and hands that choose Love. Sometimes I am the weak one, sometimes the sick, sometimes the one too self-absorbed and arrogant to notice the miracle. But gospel is good news for everyone, and it is FOR the weak. That is where I find myself again, at my most fragile. Because what the world calls worthless, our Creator calls his own.

I'm tired. I'm still begging for sleep that feels like forgiveness. Sometimes I lie awake next to my husband whose only full-time job these last months has been taking care of his crazed wife, and I feel guilty for worrying and guilty for all we have and thinking I need something more. I am privileged at the expense of another family maybe oceans away. During the day I can skate right over the top of that deep darkness. Ignorance is bliss, and that isn't a conversation for the dinner table. But guilt is meant to drive us to change. I need to be fully awake, fully alive to this wild world for that part.

I do need sleep and I desperately need healing. I am writing this because you probably do, too. But no man ever died just so I could get a good nap in. Soul healing is rooted deep and true and merciful. HOPE.

There is a time for rest and then there is a time to Wake Up. I will hold the melancholy close, calling it by its right name, for as long as it is a part of me, knowing bits of joy are found even in the darkest places.

I'm trying.

Wake up to the day, stretch out and feel the warm sun shining on your face, feel all the love and all the pain, side by side, bound together as they were meant to be.

Rise and shine.

When Jesus goes by 'Butch'

I can't sleep.

My mind is slipping in and out and then drips right through my tired fingers and I'm not sure I can save it this time.

It's that sort of night, though. The kind where the rain on the window is telling a story you forgot you heard as a child. The kind of night that slows the clock- as real as when you're sitting in the dentist chair and that fifteen minutes may as well have been fifteen dreadful hours. That sort of magic happens on these nights. And it appears so commonplace. You should have noticed it there yesterday like the smudge on the bathroom mirror, right between the eyes.

Drops keep falling. Falling and falling and speaking a language of deeper truths. Truths about how things should be. How they were meant to be.

I saw him last Thursday, down by the lake shore. I was picking up my ruggedly handsome and sunburned husband and middle son and friends from their canoe adventure up the Mississippi River. They were back, survivors of the wild twisting and turning 67 miles by canoe. And it was Matt's birthday. The pies were waiting fresh on my kitchen counter.

He staggered a bit as he walked, head down and eyes quiet. 

All the littles were running around, joy-filled shrieks and windblown hair. There were seven of them altogether. Our two families tend to combine, and we relish those moments.

I saw him. And then I did it.

I whispered to my friend that he was walking toward us and we should really gather the kids. You know, someone was mugged down there just the other day. 

The words slipped out. Slipped just like my mind did tonight. 

I gathered the littles and still looked him in the eye and smiled as he passed. Said 'Hi there' and thought I meant it. 

We scurried along. We sang Happy Birthday. We ate pie. We listened to stories of fishing and storms on the river and campsites and wildlife from excited and tired little boys. 

: : :

The next morning I saw the headlines. A body had been found washed up on that same beach. A homeless man.

My gut knew before I even looked at the man's picture. It was the same eyes, the same long ragged hair. Except he had a name this time. On the streets and with his friends at the church where he often stayed and ate he was known as Butch.

: : :

I've been shouting from the rooftops for awhile now that Jesus is found in the outcast. I've studied this. I've thought and prayed and read and talked a lot about this. I've stepped outside an inner-circle church community to focus on living this. And now here I am, reading the news, seeing his face, learning his name, and all I hear is my judgment. Better safe than sorry, especially with kids. I can easily justify my concerns. And hey, I did smile and say hello. What more could I have done? I mean, really, what could I have done?

I'm naive. Admittedly. But slightly less than I used to be. I know it wasn't a moment where I could have prevented a tragedy. Maybe. Maybe the tragedy wasn't even that I judged someone I knew nothing about out of unfounded fear. Maybe the tragedy wasn't that it happened.

Maybe the real tragedy is that it happens.

We talk a lot about love. Especially loving the unlovely. And in a moment, old habits return and fear rules our hearts once again. We miss the miracle in the common or ugly or unknown. We miss Jesus.

I did. I missed him. And I mean it. I'm grieving a complete stranger, wishing I would have looked a little deeper in those eyes, asked him if he was enjoying the summer sunshine at least, connected. I missed something there and I feel it now, that loss, that groan for a life, for God to come fix all this mess and my fearful heart and turn it into something useable. Something closer to the way things were meant to be.

People are meant for knowing one another and for knowing their Maker. Sometimes you find that you meet Jesus in the grocery store line, on the street corner, or walking down the beach. Often he or she doesn't look a thing like the blond-haired blue-eyed painting we've bought and sold as gospel. We're meant to share life with one another, inter-connected instead of independent. Tearing down walls and labels and stereotypes and injustice and poverty one day at a time by inviting people over or in conversation instead of building fences and installing security systems and keeping our children safe from strangers.

We were meant for so much more than this. And I am sorry.

: : :

The rain is still falling, still saturating the earth, still scattering across the glass like ants whose hill was barbarically stepped on. It is this story of Life and the groaning and suffering and longing for our world to be made whole again, a return to Eden. I am pulled back to my childhood, back when I knew everything was alright in the world. When stories were true.

I was hungry and you fed me,
I was thirsty and you gave me a drink,
I was homeless and you gave me a room,
I was shivering and you gave me clothes,
I was sick and you stopped to visit,
I was in prison and you came to me.

Whenever you did one of these things to someone 

overlooked or ignored, that was me— you did it to me. - Jesus

: : :

I hear that Butch had many friends, that he was a kind and gentle man, that he had lived here for many years. He is loved and missed.

     ***Due to the response of this post, and after going to  Butch's memorial service, I wrote a follow-up post here:  http://prodigalstories.blogspot.com/2013/07/when-homeless-guy-gave-me-voice.html

Learning to Lean In

She leaned forward over the table and set her mug of lukewarm coffee aside. Words soft but lips tense. "How can you be sure that all this struggling means anything?" The sadness behind her eyes was piercing and impossible to ignore.

I certainly don't know much. Each year the number of truths I know beyond a doubt shrivels. Each year questions replace the list of doctrines. Each year my view of God expands. It has settled, sifted, much of the I'm-not-so-sure-anymore falls through holes I poked out of my skin like a sieve. But what remains! The tiny diamonds, glistening anew, beauty begging to be marveled... it cannot be denied. This sifting is painful and sometimes gives way to loneliness. The sifting, the questioning while still intently following has brought me into much sadness. It's the same sadness I saw across the table- one that knows there is hope or the questions wouldn't have even escaped her lips. Oh yes, my friend, there is hope.

I reach in and show her one of those diamonds I've spent years cleaning off, painstakingly, gently. Still dusty and raw.

You lean into it. Press into the questions, the doubts, the pain, the struggle, all of it. You stay there awhile, in the wondering, in the loneliness, in the waiting, leaning into the biting wind instead of running to safety. You keep on leaning and saying the hard things out loud and naming the hurt, owning this place, the shifting ground you've landed on. You lean in, until you're sure God is there, too.

But shouldn't we know? I mean, that's what faith is for. I am supposed to have faith.

We've lost so much of the richness of that word- know. Knowledge is something of the intellect, taking place in the brain. But it's deeper than that. To know deeply is something more than just knowing consciously. It's more than my finite mind can explain like facts on a power-point presentation. It digs, sharp and deep, down through myself to the core of who I am. That thing- and it is a thing of substance- it is my absolute foundation.

I know that what God creates God will not abandon.

I know my calling and everyone's is to co-create by Jesus' example of the power of love over the love of power.

I know that nothing can separate me from that Love. Not even death.

I know that the human condition is one of pain, but I also know that I find my life when I offer it up in service, not when I act independently, grasping for control and security. Instead I can invest infectious love into my community and trust that others will catch on to the notion that either we all matter or none of us do.  Repeat: Or none of us do.

I know that my perspective of the joys and struggles is so very small, and I must trust a bigger story.

Much like childbirth, the more we tense up, clench our jaw, fight the pain, the more it hurts. Mommas know. I learned by my third delivery that the key to suffering was to surrender. This process has to happen. It takes everything within me to not fight back, but to breathe and focus on release of all tension. And you know what? The pain doesn't go away, but somehow it hurts less. And there is such freedom in trusting the process will give way to LIFE.

******

I am listening. Keep talking. There is no rush. And there's always more coffee.