In the Meantime

I’m writing this feeling completely beaten down and torn up.  I even feel forgotten by God, like my cries are going unheard.  I know that my “feelings” are not reality, but they are consuming.  They come from finding out my mom’s cancer has spread to her bladder, from watching her start another round of chemo, from having an awful stomach flu ravage most of my family including myself and from feeling helpless as this bug won’t release my sweet Sawyer and he gets skinnier and weaker every day.  These feelings come from my exhaustion and from my litany of seemingly unanswered or even denied prayers, as I’ve begged for my mom and begged for my boys. From past experience I know that these feelings will fade, and I will see the evidence of God’s love and his constant attention again.

But what do I do in the meantime?

These feelings remind me of a Jesus story I used to really dislike.  John 11 tells the story of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead.  The story’s happy ending is usually the focus, but what always bothered me is that Jesus let his friend die.  Days before Lazarus’ death, his sisters Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that said, “Lord, the one you love is sick” (John 11: 3).  The ladies knew Jesus had the power to heal their brother; their faith was strong, “yet when [Jesus] heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was for two more days” (John 11:6)! 

After Lazarus died, Jesus finally headed to the ladies’ side.  Showing their faith and perhaps their hurt, both sisters said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21 & 32).  And then, of course, Jesus raised their beloved brother from the dead.

But why didn’t he spare them their anguish and just heal Lazarus to begin with?  What could have been so important that he would delay two crucial days?  Why, when he’s completely capable of healing the people we love, does he not act until all hope is lost—or perhaps not even then?

I was truly dissatisfied with this story until I was listening to the wonderful song “Your Hands” by JJ Heller.  She sings to the Lord, “one day you will make all things right.”  I was struck with the veracity of that statement and immediately thought about the Lazarus story.  True, Jesus didn’t prevent Mary and Martha’s suffering, but he did make it right for them.  He brought their brother back.  And before he did that, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35).  He didn’t scold the ladies for questioning his timing; he didn’t minimize their grief by saying, “silly girls, I’m going to raise him from the dead!”  Instead, he felt compassion and empathy for their pain and cried with them.

I don’t know how Jesus will make all the suffering of the world right someday.  But I believe he will.  We may not get to see it in a glorious “man-rising-from-the-dead" kind of way, but someday when all in heaven and earth is said and done and the prophecies of Revelation have come to pass, he will have made all things right.

So, I try not to seek too much understanding or form any faith-changing beliefs during these dark times. I hold onto the fact that there is proof of Jesus’ love for me all around—my children, my husband, my family, my friends, my students, my wonderfully strong mama and her faith.  And even though the darkness is blinding me to a lot of that right now, Jesus is weeping with me.

Scarred Perfection: For Christina Wehr, My Brave Mama

Scars don’t fit into the image the popular media works around the clock to portray.

Perfection sells, and scars mar perfection.

Fortunately, they can be hidden by products, clothing or carefully styled bangs, and they can even be removed by surgery.

But maybe scars are getting an unfair reputation.

Little boys treat them like badges of courage, showing them off to friends and regaling captive audiences with the tales of their scar’s adventurous origins. And since much wisdom can be gleaned from the way children see the world, maybe scars deserve a second evaluation.

After all, war heroes wear them with honor; a mother’s C-section scar represents the moment she brought her child into the world, and the scar from a surgery to remove cancer tells the story of healing and salvation from evil disease.

Scars are, in fact, the symbol of healing without forgetting.

Jesus himself chose to not only keep his scars from the cross, but to be identified by them.

After he came back from the dead, he appears to his disciples and tells them, “Look at my hands and my feet.

It is I myself!” (Luke 24:39).

When his most intimate friends cannot believe they are standing in his presence, Jesus uses his scars to convict them and remind them of his salvation and his promise to return.

Those are some powerful scars.

So maybe unscarred perfection should remain a media-created fantasy, because scars—the evidence of healing, salvation and new growth—tell a more fascinating story than smooth, untested skin could ever muster.

Scars say, “I was wounded, but I won the battle, and I’m still here to tell my tale.”

A Proposal: Thoughts on Grief and Joy

Snow kisses my flushed cheeks and melts immediately against the warmth.  Naked branches click together in excitement, keeping time with my rapidly beating heart.  All around me are the bushes, trees, hidden caves and veiled trails that hold the stories of my youth—tales of adventures no one, not even my own memory, can readily tell. 

We are in the park I’ve played in for twenty years.  Twenty winters of sledding until my brothers or I broke something.  Twenty summers of hiking, volleyball and imagination.

We are in the park where I’ve done everything a person can think up to do in twenty years.  But now—something new.

Ryan is proposing.

At lease he is assuring me that’s what he’s doing after I ask, “Are you kidding?”  But his reiteration of the question, and the spreading dark stain of melting snow on his jeans as he kneels in the white powder, convinces me that proposing is in fact what he is doing.

Meaning, answering is what I should be doing.

Doubt is not what delays my yes—not lack of love.  I knew this moment would come as soon as we went on our first date.  The words I love you sprung out of my mouth as easily the first time as the million times hence, as if from a well I had been born with—a stymied well until Ryan held my hand.

No, doubt and love are not the causes of this silence in the park.  This moment—passing quickly in actual time, but eternal in the weight of thought it carries and in the memory Ryan will develop of this day—is filled with a realization I cannot quite grasp.  A realization I feel I must see through, at least in part, before I promise my life to Ryan in the snow.

Without knowing why I know, I know I can only have this realization in this park at this moment as the scenes of my life play around the trees, on the soccer fields and over the playground: the hot lava game Luke, Caleb and I played incessantly over the bark chips; the time my kite flew for the first time with my Daddy’s arms encircling mine as we guided the taut string; my last spanking after I hid from my family because I needed “alone time,” causing my parents to think I’d been kidnapped as they searched for me in panic; the black eye at the end of harrowing day of sledding and Daddy’s insistence that we not tell Mama how I got it; and my first real kiss with my high school boyfriend on one of the hidden trails I found with my brothers during a game of Robin Hood.

My proposal will now be one of my park stories—the stories I will tell our children as we picnic in this same park.

But the realization goes beyond the memories held in the frozen grass beneath my wet shoes.  My Papa’s funeral last night and my first ticket as I drove my brothers home to get away from the wake at Gramma’s house is part of it too—this epiphany beyond my grasp.  The days and nights the last two weeks, sitting next to Papa’s bed as he struggled for breath, knowing I was watching him die and the cancer growing in Mama’s belly even though we do not know it yet.  All this is encompassed in my hesitation.

Ryan’s pleading eyes and soaked knee will not wait for me to wrap my thoughts in a cohesive package, so:

“Yes!” I’m say, the word coming from the same well as my love.  And as Ryan twirls me around into our new life, I can see my package in all its cohesiveness for the first time.

New life.

God is offering me new life in this wonderful man with his arms around me.  Ryan’s proposal is God’s answer to my devastation over my papa’s death and the further desolation I will experience when they discover Mama’s cancer. 

This is what God means in I Thessalonians when he says we are to grieve with hope.  These moments, the childhood joys and the proposals and the births and the new homes, are the antidote to all-consuming grief.

The culmination of my epiphany is not flashing before me like the fireworks I’ve watched here for twenty 4th of July’s, but sliding over me like the cooling waters of the lake across the street.  I’m kissing Ryan and laughing at what this means—this yes and this ring. 

I am going to marry this man.