Yesterday we celebrated the life and love of my husband’s dad, here with his bride in 1961. They celebrated 50 years of marriage last month, and on Monday, he went to meet his Creator. And in his passing from the land of the dying to the land of the living, we have seen the hand of God on his life. Now he knows fully, even as he is fully known. I will return next week to a regular posting schedule, and until then may you embrace the glimpses of eternity that show up in the smallest of ways, and may you celebrate this life as a mere shadow of the one to come.
life
July 29, 2011
the horrifying thrill of the last 5 percent
July 25, 2011
I’ve been working on Grace for the Good Girl in some form for the last 31 months. There are roughly six weeks before release. I’m in the midst of the last 5-ish percent of the work it takes to get a book from the mind of a writer into the hands of a reader. And if you compare my publishing journey to that of most people, this has been fairly quick.
The first five percent was hard – admitting I had an idea that I couldn’t shake, accepting the fact that writing it down would be the only way to get it to stop hovering, knowing all odds were against me and putting hands to keyboard anyway. I spent a lot of time seeking permission during those days of that first five percent. I looked around for someone to affirm me and tell me to do it so that I could argue with them and tell them all the reasons why I shouldn’t or couldn’t. It was a dizzying cycle, the fear.
Once I finally launched a full out pursuit of the art and passed the first five percent, things got easier. There were writing days that began gray and lonely only to turn out bright yellow and full of hope, word count met, concepts complete. And that’s how it went, up and down for a while, but still within a reasonable, predicable pattern. The 90 percent in the middle wasn’t a breeze by any stretch — but there was momentum.
Until this last five percent. The book is written, edited, titled, covered, margined, page numbered, and finished. All completely finished. But the work? The work is not yet done. Because this last 5 percent of the work is the deep down, gutteral, horrifying, thrilling work of letting it go, releasing it out of my hands and into yours. It is the work of belief, of knowing that the God who created the earth and the heavens still speaks today, and sometimes he speaks through us.
Because as difficult as it is to start, it could be equally as difficult to say that you are finished. I want to hold on to the loose ends. I want the freedom to make it better. I want to manage outcomes and to ensure that all will be well with me. I think I might want to be God a little bit.
It isn’t just in this, is it? The last days before the wedding are hurried and crazy and wild with anticipation; the last month before she moves into her dorm is filled with worry and angst and excitement and tears all stirred together in the pot of a mama’s heart; the finishing up of anything requires a great deal more resolve than you’ve had to dig for yet. But we are told that our times are in the hands of another, that we are loved everlasting, and that He has already made all things well with us. There is great comfort there, and I keep coming back to that.
how death brings us to life
July 22, 2011
Folding the clothes is a gift today — this blessed act of normal, the sweet scent of detergent. I didn’t even complain when I put them away, typically the part where I dream of having a robot who can do it for me. But today, I have savored the cotton, sorted the pinks, matched the socks with care, nary a robot thought in sight.
We know there’s a time for everything, but it’s easier to accept the time for birth than it is the time for death. My father in law is entering into the last weeks of his appointed time and there is sadness in the knowing. But aren’t we all approaching that time, living one day closer to our last? He may get there first, but we’ll all get there eventually. Everyone has a living story, and we’re watching as his comes to an end. And we begin to count the gifts with every word spoken. When someone says I love you when they’re dying, it seems to mean more than in the middle of their living.
But why? Perhaps because we know we’ve forgotten to remember the sweetness of those words in the busy, and it’s only here at the end where we pause long enough to realize how heavy they are with grace and blessing. We say each of these last days is a gift, but so are all the ones that came before. We try to pack more meaning in the ends and beginnings of things, but I wonder if the Lord sees them all the same?
Her moment of birth bursts with the same amount of blessings as a Thursday afternoon six years later when she comes home from school and plops her bag on the floor.
Isn’t the day we said I do filled with the same kind of magic as ten years later when we pass the beans and biscuits around our Kmart table? Isn’t her first day of kindergarten equally as monumental as the 22nd day and the 76th day and the last? Because in each of those days, she lives and she moves and she is. Eternity is not for later.
He weaves eternity into our minutes. Everyday, he is creating minute after minute, and he hands us the grace we need for each one as they come. Worry and anxiety show up when we try to rush ahead into the minutes that haven’t been made yet. And we try to manage the future inside a time that doesn’t even exist, and we wonder why it makes our stomach hurt.
When we stepped off the elevator for the first time on the Palliative Care Unit last week, I had the distinct feeling of the presence of God. This is a place where heaven touches earth. It was real, palpable, comforting. But heaven touches earth in my living room, too. In my bedroom and in my front yard and on top of the Empire State Building and on an island in the middle of the sea and in the cardboard houses in Manila and on my front porch. Heaven touches earth every minute, when I touch my husbands hand and look into his eyes, when the girls whisper goodnights and I love you’s and the boy makes a mess with toy airplanes and crayons. Heaven is touching earth right now. But sometimes it takes endings for us to see it.
when you pass through the waters
July 18, 2011
I wore my water-wading pants today. Not for ocean kind of water. But the ones I wore that hot day in Manilla, when we walked through the deep waters of poverty.
Every time I pull those pants on, I think of that day. I think of how I thought riding through the one foot high water in a pedicab was dangerous, until we got on the styrofoam boat. And I thought riding on a styrofoam boat was bad, until we put on the rubber boots. And it was there, walking through the water with my gray Old Navy pants on when it hit me how awful this broken world can really be.
And so today, I wore those pants again. Our family is walking through a difficult time with one who is close to us quickly moving towards heaven. And all we can do is watch as cancer takes what cancer wants.
The song has been in my head all day, the one from the verse about passing through the waters. I’ve thought of the heartbreak in Manila and the heartbreak at home and how there often are no easy answers or ribbon-tied endings; just deep waters, feeble faith, and a God who holds all things together even as they fall apart.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.
Isaiah 43:2 ESV
how to see the future
July 15, 2011
In the middle of his alcoholic days, my dad didn’t go to church with us unless it was a holiday or special occasion. So when my mom, sister and I would leave, this is how he would spend his Sunday mornings.
When they leave for church, I open a beer, read the paper, and crank up the stereo. Sometimes with a few beers in me and the music loud, I stand and talk in a loud whisper. I catch myself acting like a teacher, talking and intellectualizing on things in the news, or politics, or sports, or music, or other things my mind randomly latches onto. Sometimes, in some foggy way, I see myself doing this explaining and persuading out in the future. Then I have another beer. I vacuum and wash the dishes so I don’t feel totally useless. I take a nap. They come home from church. This becomes a normal Sunday morning.
He didn’t know why and he couldn’t explain it. But it was in him to speak out. That was 25 years ago. Today, he is an announcer on the radio. A believer in Jesus. A teacher at church. A mentor to couples. A small group leader.
All my life, characters have been following me around, waiting for a starring role in a story I haven’t yet told. Last week while in South Carolina, there they were again, hiding in the Low Country shadows of the oaks with their mossy-grey profiles. Still, not one of those characters are clear to me. It’s as if I’m surrounded by a smokey cloud of faceless witnesses. The fog is thick with story but I can’t see a thing. And so I wait. It isn’t time to tell their stories yet anyway.
Art does that. Sometimes it follows after you so hard and so loud that you look around to see how everyone else is reacting to this most obvious explosion of creativity happening right here in this room. It is bright and tangible and full. But other times, it speaks of future, not yet things to come. It whispers for us to prepare so that it isn’t so surprising when the story shows up one day, demanding you to tell it or to live it, ready or not. The Spirit of the living, loving God speaks into our lives and offers us shadows of things to come, blurry and unclear. But no less real.
He weaves His art into the very fiber of our being, so close that we can’t not have at least some hint of it, even if we are drowning in addiction, blind to the truth, hardened by unforgiveness, paralyzed with fear. My grandfather was a rather unhappy man in his living days. He was an alcoholic too, but his story didn’t end so well. He stopped drinking only a few years before he died and he never grew into his potential. He encouraged me in my writing as a young girl. I think he may have seen something in me that he recognized in himself but couldn’t quite touch. There were shadows of his design, whispers of his giftedness that I’m sure spoke to him in some way, but his demons drowned them out.
Maybe you are drawn to the people and culture of another country but you can’t explain why. You bring your camera to every wedding because you can’t not take pictures of the bride. You write for free and it should feel like a waste, except that it doesn’t and you don’t have an answer for it. You stare at your living room and imagine ways to make it better, and then you do and it changes your mood. It should be silly, except it isn’t.
And so when you hear the whispers, One day, there will be fiction. Children. Teaching. Speaking. Love. Writing … don’t ignore them. It doesn’t mean that things will turn out exactly as you think. They won’t. But I do believe God fully provides for us in the present while at the same time, faintly hints about the future. And sometimes, as He moves in us and around us in the moments of our day, He nudges us in whispers and desire towards something He has for us later.
It’s why an alcoholic who isn’t even a believer can stand in a room and pretend to teach and not know why. It’s not because he had an idea that he would like to try that out one day. It’s because teaching was woven into the fiber of his being when he was knit together in his mother’s womb. We — a people with a full capacity to love and learn and teach and create and live — we did not just happen. We were made by design, and that design is held together by a Person. And his intention for us is beautiful, hopeful, and filled with delight.
What are the whispers of design saying to you today?
sometimes I talk about blogging
July 12, 2011
Most of you know the story about how I went from writing on a blog to writing books, but I plan to share it again next weekend with a beautiful group of women in Charlotte at the She Speaks Conference. It’s my story, but it can’t be just about me because who cares? And so I hope I’ve developed a talk that will encourage and spur on, giving at least a key-chain sized ray of light onto the writing path that is often times dark and somewhat lonely.
I do plan to share some of that talk here on the blog when the conference is over for those of you who can’t be there with us. But today, I’m talking about blogging over at SITS. They’re celebrating their third birthday over there and having all kinds of fun. There are a thousand beautiful blogs out there who have way more interesting and informed things to say about being a writer, but if you have any specific questions for me on the topic today, I’d love to hear what they are. Ask away in the comments and I’ll work on a post to answer them. Or I’ll at least direct you to someone who can.
the importance of staying small
July 10, 2011
There is a map of the world hanging in an office some 9,000 miles away from my front door. At first glance, it looks as though the continents are in the wrong place. But after a bit of study, you realize it isn’t wrong at all, but simply drawn from another perspective. Standing in the Compassion International office in Manila, Philippines, our team stared hard at that map. And seeing Asia in the middle with North and South America shifted way to the right didn’t cause one entitled huff or puff. Instead, our entire team breathed a collective sigh of relief.
I’ve thought of that moment a lot, wondered why we all had the same reaction to that map in that moment. Perhaps it’s because traveling the world helps you realize you aren’t the center of it. And there is a great relief in remembering that it isn’t all about us.
My dad used to watch our kids as toddlers and say under his breath, We teach them when they’re babies that they’re center of the world, and they spend the rest of their lives realizing they’re not. It’s true, we do it. We have to tend to them as though their world depends on it, because it does. They are so small. But so are we.
Still, we spend a lot of time working hard to keep our world spinning ’round–write the proposal, plan the meal, pick up the girls, deliver the brownies, ask him the questions, give them attention, and on it goes. We have to do these things, as they are our living, our livelihood, our art. But our living and our art can quickly cross over into our burdens even as we will them not to.
Instead of living and loving out of a place of fullness, we grasp for meaning and worth out of a place of need. Call me important! Tell me I matter! our actions cry out. There is a voice that whispers, You are and you do, but not because of all this activity.
Celebrate your smallness today. Lay back on the wide green earth and let the world spin the sun right up above you. And breathe a sigh of sweet relief as you realize you had nothing to do with it.
