When Winter is Gray and the Fog Rolls In

"Anger is the cloak sadness wears." - anonymous

It was one of those gray, soggy January days.  Ice and fog wrapped the world in a cold mist and I had been trapped at home nursing sick children for over two weeks.  So I piled the kids into the van - as though crowding together into an even smaller space might somehow help – and pulled away from the curb with no clear destination.

A plan started to emerge as I drove and we headed out of town and onto back roads toward a large greenhouse that also boasts a store and kid-friendly restaurant.  There would be a large, warm room full of plants, a fish pond, bunnies and a train and the promise of hot dogs for lunch.  I figured what we all needed was a glimpse of green and flowers and a taste of spring, a glimmer of hope to get us through yet another winter day. 

We drove on wet roads over rolling hills beside the wide and resting fields of winter.  I told the kids we were going on a surprise, a secret trip and things started to feel a little more hopeful.

I came down a hill to a large, familiar intersection with a traffic light that turned red just as we approached.  I braked, stopping and looking in both directions, before putting on my blinker and swiftly turning to the right.  We were almost there, close enough that I could already feel the hope of spring and warmth and relief that I hoped the green-house held.   

I noticed the “no turn on red” sign just as I was turning and heard the honk of the car behind me.  No one was coming, though, and the kids were shouting and pointing to farm equipment in the fields, so I thought, “ooops,” and kept driving. 

Looking in my rear-view mirror I noticed that the car that honked had turned right too and was following close behind me, aggressively close and as I slowed to round another corner I worried I would be rear-ended.  The car stopped just short of my bumper, then turned, following me, and I started to grow concerned. 

Fifty feet or so more and I turned again into the greenhouse’s parking lot and my suspicions were confirmed as the car followed and parked too, somewhere behind me.  I sat waiting for a minute, fearing a confrontation.  I had all four kids in the van and the last thing I wanted was to expose them to a shouting match, or worse. 

Just when I thought I was safe, a woman appeared in my window and I automatically opened it.  She stood there, leaning forward, aggressively – an older woman with short, messy gray hair.  Her face was in mine as I looked up from the automatic window button and she threw her words at me like one might throw a drink at a party, “Don’t you follow traffic signs?” 

The question was all accusation and meant to catch me up short, but I was already caught up short, which is why we’d left the house in such a hurry and I simply didn’t have anything to hurl back at her. 

My face was filled with sadness and exhaustion as I replied, “It was a mistake.” 

“That’s why I honked my horn,” she spat back at me.  

I looked at her and said again in a pleading tone, “It was a mistake.”

“We lost two children in that intersection,” she said.  Then, quickly, she spun around and sped back to her car, her long black sweater sweeping behind her. 

Winter filled my heart and fog rolled in. 

I recognized immediately that her raging anger was a stiff mask that hid great pain, something I doubt I would’ve noticed if I hadn’t also been in pain. I also guessed that she was probably lonely and afraid, as I was, and frightened too, perhaps, by the depth of her rage. 

The kids asked what was going on and I brushed the interaction aside, but something had been stolen in the moment.  I thought, as I unloaded the double stroller and snapped it into place, that I would’ve liked to invite her to have lunch with us, but she was long gone and not, I suspected, in the mood for company.

Later, I wondered what she saw as that window rolled down, I wondered how she felt as she walked away, and I wondered whether my words, repeated twice in my own exhaustion and humility, were what she needed to hear, “It was a mistake.” 

This post will be shared with Playdates With God and Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday.

Remembering (we are held)

I sat in the living room last week rocking my poor, sick, sleeping boy and watched while his twin brother explored a small wooden chair.  He walked diligently to the book basket, chose a board book, then toddled quickly over to the chair.  Placing the book on the chair, he lifted one little knee and, after maneuvering the book to make room, pulled himself up and turned, settling into a seated position with a look of great satisfaction. 

There he sat, fuzzy-headed and plump, like a ripe peach, his short legs sticking straight out.  Glancing at me with a look of triumph, he opened his book and “read” briefly and with great volume.  Then, with a swift movement, he slipped himself off of the chair, and went running on his little bare feet to get a new book. 

He repeated the whole process again and again with a different book in hand each time, as though neither “Trucks” nor “Things That Go” were proving to be quite the literary adventure he'd hoped they would.  Stand, climb, turn and sit, then, repeat.  Sitting and standing are a pleasure for him and he repeats the movements over and over as though swirling the feeling of it all around inside of his little body until at last the feeling fades to ordinary, like so many other firsts tasted and mastered in his short eighteen months.

*   *   *

And while I'm thinking of it, a strange thing has happened several times now during my monthly retreat – at some point I've found myself acutely aware of the reality that the chair I am sitting in is holding me. 

Every time we sit, we are being held. 

But most of us, most of the time, have stopped feeling it.

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Earlier I sat in the pediatrician’s office with the same sick child whose limbs hung limp as he fought a raging fever.  Between the bustle of nurse and doctor, in the midst of the bright light and noise, he lay slumped against me, belly to belly, his heavy head pressed, unmoving on my chest.  His fine, blond hair was sweaty and his cheeks fiery red with heat.  His eyes ran and he breathed in short, panting breaths; his small mouth hung open, pressed against me. 

He smelled like sweaty, sick, drooly baby or I smelled, for I’d lost the ability to distinguish between us.  Finally he raised his flushed head, squinting his eyes in discomfort and I noticed that the whole front of me, two t-shirts thick, was soaked through with spit. 

I pulled him back toward me and curved my body like a hammock and we rocked and I sang and he hung on for dear life between the Dr.'s probing exam and tests for the flu and strep throat. 

As I sat there, turning my body into a living, breathing home for him, I wondered if God doesn’t also do this for us.  God curving, bending into a mighty ocean of a lap, a wide, swinging hammock of rest; God, like a chair that holds us.

*   *   *

God holds us, my friends, even when we’ve lost the ability to feel it, even when we’ve outgrown the desire to be held.  God waits like a hammock swinging in the breeze, like a mother’s lap that sways full of life and breath and song.                  
 

This post is shared with Imperfect Prose, click over to read more posts on the topic of Mother.

A Little Gumption (the mustachioed man)

 

Every day, while driving my daughter to kindergarten in a van stuffed with four children that were wrestled, wrapped and carted out one-by-one, I saw him.  Sometimes on the way to school, sometimes on the way back home, he appeared on the edge of the horizon like the sunrise. 

He was consistently fascinating.

He ran with a loose gait, drooping athletic pants swaying as he pressed on, one step at a time, his arms bent, hands in front of him.  He wore a hat, or more often a white visor and also white gloves. 

But the thing that struck me most was his moustache. 

It takes a certain kind of moustache to attract the attention of a driver passing by with a van full of noise and need at twenty miles an hour, so maybe you can picture it without me having to draw it out in fine detail.  I will tell you it was brown and heavy, but well-trimmed. 

He was a regular Tom Sellek, my mustachioed man. 

Something about his regularity, the predictability of this sighting, this crossing of paths pleased me. 

That, and his moustache.   

It takes a little gumption to sport a moustache like that, don’t you think?  And I guess there are times when we could all use a little gumption.    

This post is shared with Just Write, which is about, well, just writing.  But somehow I confused it with a 5 minute time-limit challenge I saw on another website, so what you see here is a very quickly written little piece.  Enjoy!

He Runs Through the Night For Her (Lessons in Bravery)

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” Isaiah 6:8

My two oldest children, four and six, share a room far enough away from my own upstairs bedroom that my husband and I keep a monitor on so we can hear if they need us in the middle of the night.  My son has bad dreams or wakes for one reason or another several nights a week.  He calls and we stagger downstairs to reassure and then everyone drifts gratefully back to sleep.

There are times, though, that we forget to turn on the monitor or we accidentally leave the volume down too low and we miss my son’s slow, repetitive cry.

 “Mama, Dada, Mama, Dada.” 

. . . click HERE to read the rest of this post with the community over at SheLoves Magazine . . .

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I wonder, where have you see bravery lived out in little ways?  I'd love to hear your stories here or on A Field of Wild Flowers' facebook page.

This post is also shared with Playdates with God andHear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday.

For my Husband on our Anniversary (or Thereabouts)

(Tuesday was my thirteenth wedding anniversary and in the wintry slump of sick kids, it was tempting to feel a little discouraged.  And yet, there remains, between my husband and I, much to be encouraged about.  This post is for my husband, whom I love.)

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The Wild Rose, by Wendell Berry

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart.

Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed,
choosing again what I chose before.

*   *   *   *   *

When two people stand, face-to-face, holding hands with their arms extended, as we did on our wedding day, they create a space that's more than the sum of each of them.  With their arms and bodies they frame-out a small and simple dwelling place; a room composed of both their separateness and togetherness, for Love encompasses both. 

Henri Nouwen suggests that marriage is a vocation to

              build together a house for God in this world. It is to be like the two cherubs

              whose outstretched wings sheltered the Ark of the Covenant and created

              a space where Yahweh could be present.  . . . the intimacy of marriage itself

              is an intimacy that is based on the common participation in a love greater

              than the love that two people can offer each other. (from "Clowning in Rome")

I’d be lying if I said I could’ve foreseen where we were headed all that long time ago.  Here we are thirteen years later doling out syringes of medicine while one of us runs a child to the doctor and the other juggles dinner and bedtime for three more. 

We are no longer who we were for good reason, but there’s an ease that comes with knowing each other for so long.  Enough so that you can bring me a twelve-pack of diet coke and a bag of Fritos, both wrapped in newspaper, for our anniversary and it means something more between us. 

There’s so much more love these days, more than we started with, for sure.  Love of a different depth and quality, as though in the beginning we loved in black and white and now love lives between and around us in a rainbow of different colors.  This love sparks and flies so, drifting off in so many different directions so that, sometimes, love like this, stretched so far, can seem diminished somehow against the wide expanse of life. 

Hold on tight, my love, don’t let go, though life pushes and pulls. This space, this dwelling place made by two becoming one, remains. 

I chose you, I choose you, again and again. 

(This post is linked with Imperfect Prose, for the prompt, "Engourage." To read other posts on this topic, click on Emily's buttong in the side-bar.)

Worn, Weary and Threadbare (for when you need permission to Rest)

"Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." - God

I came into the retreat like our old cat Samson used to come into our house after a string of nights out on the town.  Samson would just disappear and refuse to show up for nights on end as we leaned out the screen door, peering and calling his name into the darkness.  Then, a few days later, he would come dragging in, thin and dirty, walking slowly with a limp. 

That’s how I felt that morning - I arrived completely exhausted.  Life with four young children is like drinking from a fire hose, all struggle and gasping and refreshment to the point of drowning.  The discipline of a monthly retreat has revealed the intensity of life lived between those moments of rest and I often arrive haggard, gasping for breath. 

The day opened with an opportunity for each participant to write on a scrap of paper three words that described how they arrived.  Then a large ceramic bowl was passed from hand to hand around the gathered circle as we named our words and laid our papers into the bowl. 

It felt to me that others had much nicer words, like “rested,” “eager,” and “waiting.”  But as I lifted the heavy bowl and dropped in my small scraps of paper three words escaped my lips like a cry,

worn,

weary,

and threadbare.

I passed the bowl quickly and sat quietly.  I listened and prayed throughout the morning as the tears rolled down. 

Later I found a sunlit window and sat curled in a chair soaking it in.  I ate a quiet lunch that settled in me like a bowl of warm milk, full of soothing comfort.  Then I returned to the retreat house and stretched out on a long cushioned bench.  I wrote a little, read a little too, but eventually I gave in and, leaning to the side, I curled up there in the lap of God and drifted my way off to sleep.

(This post is linked with Playdates With God and Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday. )
(This image was found here.)

A Little Bit of Death (of blessings and curses and sinus infections)

Yesterday I took my youngest on a tortuous trip to the Doctor and brought my oldest home early from school sick so, it seemed like a good time to post this little bit about sickness and death that I wrote a little while back.  Enjoy.

. . . I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life . . .” Deut. 30:15

I headed out to see the Doctor one Wednesday this past fall to be treated for a sinus infection.  I was pretty sure I had it by Wednesday of the week before, but my husband was having his wisdom teeth out on Thursday and I was in denial and hoping to avoid a Doctor visit.  It started as it often does with a head cold that moved quickly into my chest and a week later I was still swallowing and blowing out mucus in a wide variety of greens that rivaled the arrival of spring.  A few days into it all the low-grade fever started, just low enough to think I was imagining it, but high enough to make my aching body fall into a miserable stupor every evening. 

Sinus infections are such a slow, low, underlying illness to me, not loud and boisterous like bronchitis, not pity-inducing like laryngitis, not violent enough to strike fear into your friends and co-workers like a good stomach bug.  I can live, get by, with a sinus infection long enough until it becomes clear that even a little bit of sickness, a little bit of death, is too much. 

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I love the verse above that comes near the end of Deuteronomy; love that God doesn’t stop with laying out the choices - life or death - but feels the need to add a qualifier, a hint for those of us prone to making poor choices.  Like an anxious game show host rooting for the contestant, God poses the million dollar question and then, giving a not so subtly disguised cough, offers the answer too, “choose life.” 

God knows the Israelites too well, those golden calf builders and murmurers in the wilderness.  It’s such an obvious decision, “life” or “death,” “blessing” or “curse,” but God knows our endless excuses, our propensity for choosing death in all of its wide variety of guises.  So God makes it clear – clear that we will struggle even with this the simplest and most basic of choices and clear that he, God, is rooting for us to choose well. 

Humans are notoriously inept at distinguishing between that which is life-giving and that which isn't and I imagine God has ceased to be suprised by our propensity for making poor choices.  The problem lies not so much in our choosing death - the gospel sees this, in fact as inevitable - the problem is in our refusal to let it go.  Even the tiniest bit of death clings and spreads itself within us; just as a little leaven leavens the whole loaf, so too a little death deadens the whole.  

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I wonder in the end if this isn't part of the reason God came to us in human form; God embodying Life so fully that we might somehow finally be able to see the difference, make an informed decision as it were.  Then God, Life in flesh, takes it one step further, embodying death itself, not by choice, but by surrender.  In that one act of surrender death itself is transformed and with Christ's resurrection the hope is born that all of our wrong choices, little and big, might be also transformed - redeemed.  Because of this we gain the opportunity to be freed at last of every little bit of death that lingers and we find the courage to choose again and again, even though we fumble all the way.