When you’re waiting (and when the waiting’s over)

June 18, 2018June 18, 2018 ~ hearingtheheartbeat ~ 5 Comments

I checked my email too many times on Saturday, waiting for the results of the contest. I’d been shortlisted. Would my manuscript make the final cut? Was it going to be published?

Maple keys, fallen, waited on the stony ground where I stopped my morning run to stretch. Paused, there, in that middle place, the keys are no longer attached to their former life, but not yet given ground to sprout into their new life. They don’t even know, for sure, if they will be given that ground, or if this middle place of waiting and being held in existence by the One in whom all things hold together will be their long-term life.

They looked more than a seed lying there, tiny, fragile animals, almost, with mouth and eye and a single translucent wing laced with a mesh of finely-woven veins. I wanted to pick them up, to touch them gently, to reassure them it would be okay, they would have their turn to finish the process of falling, of dying into the darkness of the earth and being born into new life, in their time bearing thousands, hundreds of thousands, of keys, each carrying the potential for new life within it, each aching for that bit of earth that would let them be blessed and broken and given.

In God’s economy, waiting, like pain, is not a waste, but an opportunity—the place where new life is nourished, love learned, and surrender can take root a little more deeply.

“How are you doing in the waiting?” a friend asked at the end of the day when I let her know I still hadn’t heard the results of the contest. I loved it that I could respond, in all honesty, “Actually, I’m fine. Even delighting in God’s timing in it all.” It had been a lovely day, a day of coming close and reading and listening and of being a bit or a lot awestruck by something new God was opening up for me about his love—another piece for the new book I’m working on. At the time, it helped me realize that if he loves me like that I really can trust him to look after me no matter how these coming months unfold, including in the results of the contest and all that that does or doesn’t open up. Later, I realized that being given the next piece for my new book held echoes for me of Is 41:

“But you, O Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, you descendants of Abraham my friend, I took you from the ends of the earth, from its farther corners I called you. I said, ‘You are my servant, I have chosen you and have not rejected you.’

Whether or not I won the contest, whether or not other people chose me, I had already been loved and chosen, and I wasn’t being un-chosen. God was, at one and the same time, loving me by sharing a breath-taking glimpse of his love for me, and loving me by giving me the next bit for the next book, assuring me that I hadn’t lost my job. I was still wanted and chosen and given important work to do with him, even if the process didn’t unfold quite the way I would have planned.

It felt, that day, like the results of the contest hardly mattered. I was still curious and still hoping, but also trusting. I knew God had it and I knew he had me, and no matter what came I was loved and cherished and safe.

The day after I heard that I hadn’t been chosen, though, I felt sad, and wrestled with what felt like tension between disappointment and trust. If I feel disappointed, does it mean I don’t trust? No, I realized all over again, it just means I’m human. Trust doesn’t mean that I won’t have the whole range of human emotions. Trust means bringing all those feelings to God, confident that he can handle—and even delight in—being with me in the ups and the downs of the journey.

“But I had hoped. . .” As I prayed the words, my own words, I realized that I’d heard them before. On the road to Emmaus. When Jesus invited the grieving travellers to tell him their disappointment. “But we had hoped.” The words come right in the middle of their story—right after they’ve told how the loved and respected prophet Jesus had been crucified, and right before they mention how confused they were by the women’s story of the angels and the empty tomb. “But we had hoped”—their perspective was the hinge that kept them in their sadness even while all the pieces of the incomprehensible story—which turned out to be a story of breath-taking love and hope-giving victory—were coming out of their own mouths. And speaking that perspective to Jesus, and walking with him, and listening to him, and inviting him into their home, was the hinge that finally let their sadness turn to amazement and their confusion to lightness and joy.

There’s an invitation in disappointment, and it’s not to push it aside. It’s to bring it to Jesus, to accept his welcome to tell him my sadness, and, whether or not he explains all the details, to receive the comfort of his loving presence and perspective.

The maple keys still lie on their rocky bed, waiting their time. Beside them, the St. John’s Wort, at home in its sandy soil, is starting to open. Dozens of upturned faces reflect back the sun’s glory, red-tipped stamens splayed wide like a spray of fireworks or a celebratory pom-pom. The God who loves like this, who meets us in the waiting and the sadness and makes it a place of encounter and transformation—He is worth celebrating.

“And all of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory; this is the working of the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18 New Jerusalem Bible)

For the moments you feel disconnected from God

May 7, 2018 ~ hearingtheheartbeat ~ 1 Comment

Moving week do-list:

arrange for hydro
finish packing
clean bathroom, windows, fridge
pick up key
buy microwave

The list continues. Most of it can’t be put off. Time and energy run short, and though I try to pray, in the busyness I feel disconnected from God and from what’s going on in my own heart.

I don’t like it. It feels like I’m missing the richest part of life. I don’t want to live this way for long.

Friends help move, unpack, clean. I receive God’s care through them.

And in the midst of it all, there is gift in this reminder, and in the invitation to rest here: My security does not depend on my holding onto God, but on His holding onto me.

______________________

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

His love endures forever

April 23, 2018 ~ hearingtheheartbeat ~ 5 Comments

The refrain echoes through Psalm 136: His love endures forever. As I read the Psalm on Friday morning, several hours before I signed a lease, I realized something. In the past, when I’ve read this Psalm, I’ve read the refrain the first few times it appears, and then become lulled into impatient laziness by the repetition and unthinkingly begun to tune the refrain out and focus on the unfolding of the story in the lines in between.

As a writer, I should know the danger of doing that. If an author (at least one who has taken the time to carefully edit) chooses to repeat something, it’s meant to highlight something important. I should have been paying extra attention to that line, hearing that line as the center, and all the other lines as illustration of this key truth experienced in the painfully difficult and wonderfully miraculous bits of the Israelites’ story: God’s love endures forever, always holding his people, providing, protecting, and sustaining them. (As an aside, isn’t it interesting that it’s usually through the most difficult times of life that we also learn most deeply that God’s love endures forever?)

I dare to think there’s an invitation implied, a summons to pay attention to our own lives and continue the song with our own verses as we let this refrain become the grounding certainty of our lives: His love endures forever.

One species of cherry tree behind my old place has just finished blooming, and the other is starting to burst. It feels so kind that God would give me one more spring with this dozen trees that feel like friends before moving me to a new neighbourhood and introducing me to new beauty there.

As I prepare to move into the new home God has provided for me, I look back over these past difficult five months and add a few new verses of my own to the Psalm, giving thanks as I see ways God’s love has held me through this time and is going before me into this new place.

And this time I’m lingering over the refrain.

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good.

            His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the God of gods.

            His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the Lord of lords:

            His love endures forever. . .

to him who provided an interim home during the months I had none of my own,

            His love endures forever.

who gave two months of free rent in the midst of moving expenses,

His love endures forever.

who brought friends to help pack and clean and move,

            His love endures forever.

who guided me to a good home, closing dozens of doors along the way,

            His love endures forever.

and taught me that I couldn’t assume I’d be accepted elsewhere so I’d step through the door he finally opened,

            His love endures forever.

who helped me learn what matters to me,

            His love endures forever.

and provided a home that fits who I am,

            His love endures forever.

whispering that my needs and desires are important to him,

            His love endures forever.

to the One who remembered me in my low estate,

            His love endures forever.

and has been freeing me from clinging to security that is not in him,

            His love endures forever.

who gives food and shelter to every creature,

            His love endures forever.

teaching me that it’s safe to trust,

            His love endures forever.

Give thanks to the God of heaven.

            His love endures forever.

______________

I won’t be writing next Monday as I’ll be finishing up a course and preparing to move. See you back here in two weeks!

A season of transformation

February 26, 2018 ~ hearingtheheartbeat ~ 3 Comments

Some years by now the trees here are already bursting with bloom, but Saturday morning I pulled on my hat and boots and headed out into the thick fresh snow that had descended overnight.

“Lent” comes from a word meaning “spring.” That morning, it didn’t look much like spring.

How do we live this Lent, this season of preparation, when winter seems clearer than spring? How do we live the times when we wonder if the spring will come, the moments when we cry with David, “How long, O Lord?”

I step out of the foot-printed path into the deeper snow to make way for a woman brave enough to run in sneakers, a rim of bare leg showing above her ankle socks.

I slow and pause and enjoy the unique beauty of winter. Even when the benches are covered with snow, we’re invited to linger, to notice how God’s mercy is new on this morning.

Spring is not an isolated season but a moment-by-moment transition from winter to summer, a slow work of transformation when some days winter seems to have the upper hand and other days the fresh scent of irrepressible newness fills the air. Spiky witch hazel blooms poke through caps of snow, sun warms my shoulders when I turn my back to the wind, and snow melts into heavy, crystal drops that fall from burdened pine needles, pitting the bank beneath.

Along the road to spring’s resurrection is the death and dormancy of winter. Winter has its own important work to do in us. Here as nowhere else we learn the lessons of perseverance and patience and grace. We only really know how deeply loved we are when we come face to face with our own helplessness and find ourselves loved even in that place.

Here too we learn about ourselves. What am I clinging to? Where do I find my security? I’ll not quickly forget the words of one of my teachers, “When we’re in the midst of suffering, there is an invitation to let something go.” What is God inviting me to hold more loosely so my hands are free to hold more tightly to his?

And here we find that the all powerful God who could put an instant end to winter instead enters it, meeting us in it (though it may take a long time for us to recognize the signs of his coming in the cold and dark of winter). As that same teacher said, encapsulating for me one of the key invitations of Lent and of the whole life of discipleship, “Suffering reduces me to the truth that I can’t do this. Oh, right! I have a Savior who was unfairly tortured, crucified, and rose again. Maybe I can talk to him and live this with him.”

We live the cycle of the seasons in many different ways during our lives. Each year, maybe, we live the rhythms of nature, allowing the cold and dark of winter to settle us into a different sort of rhythm than when the summer sun tugs us outdoors to play in its warmth. We live a longer cycle, too, from the newness of infancy through the seasons of planting and harvest of our adult years. But maybe in another way, this whole life on earth is a sort of springtime, a transitional season in which we live in that tension of the soul’s winter which is slowly giving way to Life’s light brightening within us.

The sun was warm that morning that I ran, and by the time I returned home, soft clumps of snow were starting to fall from the branches, denting the drifts below with a soft thud.

Jesus’ 21st century hands

January 22, 2018 ~ hearingtheheartbeat ~ 10 Comments

I walk past the billboard declaring, “Mental health affects everyone. On January 31^st, let’s talk about it.” When my brain finally makes the connection, I find it mildly ironic that January 31^st is the day my lease ends, one factor in the saga of the past few months that has tipped me into a depression for which I’m having to take antidepressant medication for the first time in my life.

The timing has not been convenient. (Is a disruption like that ever convenient?) Almost everything about moving requires making a series of decisions: choosing where to move, what to pack and what to sell or give away, trying to sort out what I’ll need for the next three months and what can be tucked away in the boxes that aren’t to be opened until after I almost certainly need to move again in three months’ time. (To where? That will be another matter for discernment and decision.) All these decisions are a problem for someone in the midst of a depression where even the simplest daily decisions seem almost impossible.

I’ve needed my friends: one to look at possible apartments with me, another to help me see how to fit my few remaining pieces of furniture into my temporary new room to make a little corner that can feel like home, and to pack some things and suggest a few concrete next steps for me to take. One to bring a meal and pray and sit with me for a few hours when I could no longer bear to be alone with my thoughts. A friend from my spiritual director course will help move furniture and boxes on moving day, and another from Regent days will help clean. Most have done several of those things and I have been so touched by their sacrificial love. I want to love like that.

I still find it hard to need help.

I find it harder to need help for mental health limitations than for physical health ones. (Why is that, I wonder?)

I’ve thought my resistance to needing help is because I care about the needs of others and don’t want to bother them with mine. I suspect the deeper reason is pride, an extension of the lie in the garden that it’s possible to be like God, limitless and without needs.

Once again I’m learning what I’ve experienced so many times before: it’s only in the places of weakness and vulnerability and opening ourselves to receive that we learn how loved we are. Grace is not a concept; it’s a person and an action, embodied once in first century Palestine and continually enfleshed as His body lives on in 21^st century Vancouver and around the world. I receive grace not just in letting Jesus lift my sins, not just in baptism and bread and wine, but in boxes packed and sinks scrubbed and hands laid on my shoulders to pray in moments when presence and touch matters more than words. As often as not, it’s through Jesus’ 21^st century hands that I experience God’s unfailing kindness.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

Two days before I was diagnosed and started on meds, a friend took me for the first time to a new soul care group. New groups are often a struggle for me, but this group of six people felt like a gift from the moment they opened the door and welcomed me into an evening of colour in a long stretch of darkness. We ate delicious tortilla soup and kale salad and walnut bread, and by the time we lingered together over prayer and communion, the couplet in the prayer we were praying had settled deep in me:

Let me not run from the love that you offer,

But hold me safe from the forces of evil.

Someone read it again, aloud, this time in plural: “Let us not run from the love that you offer, but hold us safe. . .” .

Safely held. Those two words have lingered with me through the almost two weeks since that meeting, through the diagnosis and the new meds and the receiving of help and the still not knowing which address I’ll be travelling from when I meet with that group three or four months down the road. Part of our safely held is Jesus’ 21^st century body, and being in this together. Safely held in the hands that hold the universe, yes, and, when I don’t run, in each set of hands through which our present and active God chooses to offer himself to me, packing, scrubbing, praying, hugging, and feeding me with his unfailing kindness as he also, in his kindness, continues to give me small ways to pass his love along to others.