Traveling Mercies

On Monday I found myself driving back towards Tennessee and my final year as a student at Lee University. During the first couple hours of my journey I drove east under the light of a crescent moon and a few stars that seemed to reserve their brilliance for the last lingering moments before dawn. Then the sunrise began to peek its way over the horizon. The contented sense of beauty and life it evoked from my heart made me want to get up at five every morning. I love the beginning moments of a sunrise, the gentle lightening of the sky while the world lingers between dark and light. On this particular morning, I crested a hill in my drive and dipped down into a valley laden with fog. It was lacing its way through the contours of the land and covering the hills with a sense of peace. I should have been mildly concerned. Fog and driving do not usually mix well. But I wasn’t. As I crossed over the Missouri River the fog gave the impression of steam lifting off the water. The sight was breathtaking. And I could see just enough ahead to keep traveling in confidence.



When it comes to life, foggy moments do not seem rational or ideal traveling conditions. We feel much more confident if we can see miles of flat Nebraska plains stretching before us as we drive, rather than proceeding somewhat blindly, seeing only enough to know that in the next five seconds there is nothing that will cause our vehicle to crash. But as I stared at the fog, it occurred to me that some of the most beautiful moments in life are laden with fog, or at least they can be beautiful if we learn to rest in the midst of them.

There are so many aspects of my life that seem unresolved: relationships that are just out of reach of where I want them to be, decisions about the future that remain unclear, words I want to write but don’t yet have ways to say. But destinations aren’t meant to be reached instantaneously. It takes a lot of time and patience to arrive at them. It took me eighteen hours of driving to reach Tennessee, longer than I planned. I saw the sun for only a few hours of that drive. I drove under a cloud the entire time I was in Missouri. Five hours of torrential rain assaulted my car and my vision. There were moments I couldn’t see at all and was forced to stop and rest. Several hours into the storm I grew frustrated and impatient. I had to remind myself that there was nothing I could do to get to Tennessee any faster. I had to drive every inch of the 1021-mile trip whether I was cruising at 70 mph or crawling through a rainstorm at 45. Worrying about what time I would get in that night wouldn’t change my circumstances. I would arrive when I arrived. I might as well sit back for the ride and rest.



Somewhere in Kentucky I came out of a calmer rain shower to see fragments of a rainbow along the horizon. As I was admiring the splash of color in the sky and meditating on the faithfulness of God, the highway turned to bring the entire arch of the rainbow into view and to carry me right beneath it. I felt covered in the arms of a Father who knows how to love his children. I felt confident that whatever this next season held, he would be there with me and we would find beauty within it.

Contentment in the places where we have not yet arrived is a gift from God to those who learn to rest and trust in who He is and what He is doing. God is an artist with time. When He crafts time to be right and brings the needed mediums to combine into their places together, beauty wells up and our hearts know that God is good. But until that time is right, no amount of striving will get me any closer to where I want or need to be. It is in those times of fog and torrential rain that I am tempted to question the goodness of God, to allow stress or pain to overwhelm my heart, to loose vision of what or Whom I am traveling towards. But if I can learn to press into the heart of the Artist, to allow Him to complete what He has started rather than get in the way, then He will bring rest and contentment to my heart.

I have an image of a Father trying to paint a masterpiece on a huge canvas while his little son keeps trampling through the Father’s paints and smearing his fingers on the canvas in an attempt to help accomplish the picture he thinks his Father should be painting. The Father is patient and only smiles time and again as he wipes away the numerous smudges from his little boy’s hands and dips into the paint to begin again. But the painting would find its completion so much quicker if the child would be content to sit curled up in his Father’s lap, resting and watching the picture unfold.



I want to be that child, content just to be in the presence of my Daddy as He paints in my life. I want to learn to rest instead of strive. I want to trust that eventually we will get there together.

Contentment

Contentment. Sometimes the word seems to evade me, flaunting itself just beyond my reach. One would think contentment should be calm and easygoing, patiently waiting for his companions to ease up alongside him. But he is not. I find contentment to be very energetic, dancing vivaciously ahead down the road, leaving me out of breath trying to catch up. When I seek the company of contentment, I always seem to lag behind, but perhaps this is only a perception.

I think I am not alone in being fooled into believing that contentment is a feeling. If I am content, then the evidence of my contentment should be exposed in the way that I feel. So often I battle with my feelings, longing to find contentment in Christ, wanting to be satisfied with where He has led me, and yet still feeling the pangs of unmet desires, even lusting after things that are not mine to have (at least in this time and place). In these moments I judge myself lacking in the quality of contentment. Inwardly I harass my soul for its selfishness, its lack of gratitude for all the good things God has placed within my life. My heart seems to have failed.

But what if it hasn’t? What if, like so many other aspects of the Christian faith, contentment is not a feeling, but a choice? I have begun to learn the lesson that love is not a feeling; it is a choice. When I love my family, my friends, my God, my feelings do not exude with easy affection and pleasure every moment of our relationship. Some days bring hard choices, choices made to pursue the actions and hard work of love even when the feelings are evasive. Is not contentment the same? The moments I find myself unsatisfied, maybe the true test of my contentment is not how I feel, but what I chose to do in the moment of dissatisfaction. Do I choose with my actions to be content despite what I feel? Do I press on to pursue what God has laid within my life? Do I run to his arms with my imperfect feelings and let him help me find contentment? Or do I give in to my feelings and let them carry me away?

I am encouraged to think that perhaps contentment isn’t always supposed to be a comforting feeling. Sometimes I think it is meant to be a struggle, and it is in the midst of that very struggle that I find my success. Instead of believing I have failed, I can rest in the fact that I am right where I am meant to be, fighting for something worthwhile.

When love hurts...

I watched the movie “The Shadowlands” this past weekend. It chronicles part of the life of C.S. Lewis when he met and married and lost his wife Joy Gresham. When Joy knows she is going to die of cancer she tells Lewis not to shy away from or ignore the pain that is coming. She says, “The pain then is part of the happiness now.”

I have heard it said before that grief is the proof that we have loved deeply. I think that grief is not just the proof of love but an integral part of loving itself. One cannot find love without finding pain. Love opens the heart, makes it vulnerable, leaves it exposed. To love someone creates the risk of losing them, the pain of watching them suffer. To love invites the pain of separation, whether for months or the remainder of a lifetime. To love means watching those I love suffer and finding the strength not to turn away when it hurts so much it would be easier not to love. Sometimes it would be easier not to care, not to helplessly watch and feel love share the agony between my heart and theirs. But that is the essence of love—refusing to stop caring even when the heart is left screaming for relief.

Knowing this, is the happiness of loving now worth the pain later? Do I choose to love now even though I know it will hurt? I think about my future and the hope of loving a man. Is the privilege of loving him going to be worth the pain? Inevitably I will hurt him; he will hurt me. I will have to watch him suffer, watch my children suffer in one form or another. And chances are we will not leave this world together. We will be separated and the separation will rent one of our hearts with a pain I know I cannot fathom. Knowing all this, can I still choose to love? Should I?

The act of loving is the heart of life, community. If I do not love… I dare not consider the alternative. Though life with love is a life including pain, life without love… is it life? So many hearts try. They lock themselves away into isolation with cement walls built up around their hearts. They have tasted love and felt its pain and lacked the courage to love again. But what is left to them but their pain and isolation?

Pain is the beauty of love. It is the refiner’s fire that turns love into something stronger, deeper than the shallow affections of men. I ask, without pain, can love find life? So yes, I pray for the courage to love, though it presses thorns inside my heart. I pray for the courage to love my parents, my siblings, my friends, the family I one day hope to have, to enjoy the moments of happiness and to stay engaged in the moments of pain. I choose to watch when they suffer and not become immune. I choose to let their pain become my own, knowing very well there is nothing I can do to ease it but continually lay it before the throne of grace. This too is love, this pain. Perhaps the most beautiful part of love.

For Pam Macchi

…in gratitude and remembrance

Soft hands,
Hands worn with time,
Held the brush
Dipped in the paint
Paused before the canvas.

Calm eyes,
Eyes wizened to the steadfast pulse
Underlying life’s inconsistencies,
Closed—to envision a scene
No other earthly eyes could see.

She painted
Upon the canvas
Upon the hearts of those she touched
With her soft hands
Her calm eyes.
She painted
What others could not understand
What the Bridegroom allowed her to behold.
She trained wandering eyes to trace
The line of the horizon
On her canvas, to envision
What it took only faith to see.

Her voice was quiet
Yet strong
Waiting to speak with purpose,
Calling her children by name.
It was the voice of a mother
Shepherding a flock built of generations
And nations,
Born from the womb and birthed from her heart.
No matter how they came
She loved them,
Carried them,
Taught them.

Her feet, calloused,
Tread a path for her children to follow,
And broke into dance with the man she loved
Upon the horizon she saw when she closed her eyes.

I close my eyes
And I still see her
Dancing—eyes thrown open
To immense beauty,
Beauty the struggle of life prepared her to see.
She is near still—
Living on in her children,
In those to whom she gave of herself,
In the heart of the man who shared her life.
She painted indestructibly
With mediums that will not fade.

Her eyes are closed,
Yet they are open.
They are still seeing what others cannot understand.
Her heart is still resonating
With the steadfast pulse underlying the pain of inconsistency.
If she were here she would take our hand
And help us trace the line of the horizon to rest
Upon the chest of her Bridegroom
So we could feel the steady pulse of his heartbeat too.

Growing old...

It feels weird to get old. Not the kind of old that means gray hair and grandchildren, but the adult kind of old, the feeling that keeps reminding me that childhood is gone. The playfulness, the laughter, it’s still there, but it’s different; the world has changed. It’s the kind of old that watches individual friends become families, the kind of old that needs high heels and leather portfolios for graduate school or job interviews, the kind of old that has to take all the dreams of childhood and actually make a decision about what I want to be when I grow up. It’s the kind of old that brought my brother and I to sit on the porch for two hours last night talking. We talked about relationships and dreams, but as we talked I realized that we were no longer speaking with the voices of children but of adults and that our hopes were no longer just dreams but possibilities. It was the feeling of the world becoming tangible.

I’m not sure how I feel about getting old. Some days I miss the weightless years of childhood when my only tasks were only to dream, play and learn. Some days I like being grown, facing a world of endless possibilities with the power to make some of them come true. Some days…

As I face the reality of getting old, I wonder if it is possible to retain both worlds, that of a child and that of an adult. I ponder if I need both worlds, if I can’t live fully without them. Perhaps this is the secret of getting old, to stand between two realities and plant a foot in each, to combine the authority and resources of getting older with the innocence, trust and faith of a child, to blend the power to dream with the power to create. I think what scares me most about getting old is that so many adults seem to be too tired to play, that sometimes I too am already too tired to play. I never want to lose the ability to laugh really hard, to run through the grass with bare feet and loose hair, to play in the rain, to dream of things beyond myself—the ability to be young even when I am old.

Vagabond no more

I’m home. Still living out of a suitcase because I haven’t unpacked… but I am home. No more traveling for a good long while. My siblings were excited to see me, and they made me feel loved as usual. The entourage was waiting in the driveway with a banner for my car to break. But I do have to say they are very opinionated. Within two hours of walking in the door they had made several judgments: according to my little brother, (who weights in at all of fifty-some pounds complete with toothpicks for legs) my backside is too big. I also have too much hair, I’m getting old, and apparently I’m supposed to be having children because I got baby bibs in my birthday presents. Becca saw them at a garage sale and bought them because they had music notes on them. They said they were for my hope chest, but I don’t really believe them. If I let my siblings plan my life I think I would have been married three years ago with fourteen flower girls and would already have five children. Oh well. I love my family with all their ridiculous comments and take it stride; it is my proof that they love me. No mistaking I am at home either.

The last five months have been a brainial, emotional and physical whirlwind, but they have landed me in the place I love most in the world. My goal for this summer is to be. To be with the people I love, and just to be—be still, be calm, be quiet. There is a certain attic calling my name, and a box of books from which I may choose (a luxury only afforded to me three or four months out of the year), as well as a few of my favorite couches scattered throughout town. I’m ready to stop thinking so hard and listen. If I hear anything worth sharing, I’ll let you know.

Vagabond

If you are wondering why the blog posts have been scarce (okay, nonexistent) over the past month, it is because I have assumed the life of a vagabond. Not really, but almost. By the time I reach home next week, I will have lived out of a suitcase for five weeks. Within those five weeks I will have traveled in Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and finally Nebraska. That makes eights states, five hotels, four homes, two graduations, one wedding, and ten hours of college credit squeezed into the cracks.

Traveling has been fun, but I'm now counting the days until it is over and I can tuck myself into a little Norfolk nook and stay for weeks without moving. I must confess it will also be nice to be able to open the fridge or look at a menu and not see crawfish or anything fried. (Honest confession-I'm not a fan of traditional southern or Cajun food. I know Brian, you are disappointed.) For that matter, it will be nice not to look at a menu again for days, maybe weeks. Eating out every meal for two weeks is not as appealing as it sounds. But though the south has not won me with its food, it has captured me with its music-Louisiana Cajun and Zydeco music to be exact. Music and dancing is such a part of community life in Louisiana I am tempted to believe I was born in the wrong state. Everybody here dances, frequently. Yesterday I was on four dance floors. I've learned everything from a waltz to a two-step to a three person jig, and then I accidentally brought down the house with a spontaneous Cajun solo act at a live radio broadcast. I guess I found my first real dancing audience among the senior citizen population of Eunice, Louisiana. If grad school fails I have a back up plan of moving to Louisiana and going into the show biz. Saying I love the music here is putting it lightly. But I'm still looking forward to coming home. I've purchased my Zydeco CD souvenir and will bring it back to Nebraska so I can dance to my heart's content among those that I love and miss.

The blog posts will resume with more regularity shortly.