When You Fight to Illuminate Hope - Imperfect Prose on Thursdays

I am tired and too delicate for this world. 

It all seems to fly at me at once today, an assault of worldly concerns and it feels like just too much and I whisper for Jesus to come and come soon and all the while I feel like a hopeless lunatic just waving my arms as the merry-go-round spins. 

Let me get off. I want the ride to be over.

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Continued here over at Emily's place for Imperfect Prose. Join us? 

What Lightning Has to Say

{written yesterday} 

Source

I have lived a lifetime this week and it is still only Monday.

Baby Girl (who is 9 these days) was baptized in beauty and love and living water, surrounded by family on Sunday as she said yes to Jesus. My open-aired barefoot church split at the seams with family old and young, and even the nonbelievers among us lifted hands to Him and it was the kind of beauty that is still making me weep 28 hours later.

I was asked to be a part of somethingso incredibly close to my heart, so vital to this blog community, so honest and real and out of my league that it, too, made me weep for good things.

But I am weeping today for things that don't feel good or right at all, things I don't know how to justify or make sense of, things that shouldn't be and searching to find God in it all.

A phone call with our adoption caseworker left me sobbing into the phone, as muffled by red tape as the pleas of our boy caught in the system have been, and equally as unheard, then later, louder, into the nape of my husband's neck with pounding fists at the injustice of a child whose future is reduced to manila and copy paper and black ink while his heart swells with anger and nobody hears.

She heard, though. She heard me when I said I will fight for him, lady, and keep fighting and sucked breath sharp and mean and bit my lip to keep the rest of it inside.

Brokenhearted people have to clean their floors too, it turns out, so I mop the floors with tears and soap and scrub like I can lift the dirt off the world with elbow grease, taking out anger on the tile while polishing it with apple-scented solution and somewhere in here is a Garden of Eden metaphor but I'm too tired to find it.

I nauseate and the sky tumbles dark and green too and bolts of lightning flash in the distance, sky all sad and angry and it's Him to my heart saying, "Yes, I know, dear One. Me too."

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Linking to Imperfect Prose, a sacred space where our souls can breathe... so, so blessed to be a part of this. Join us over there, will you, and be blessed?

The Side Effects of Fruit

Last night I cried and into the pitch-black hours where coyotes howled beyond the window I lurched and pitched, shoulders wracking with the sobs so deep they hurt my rib bones.

And I just couldn’t manage the silence another night.  Couldn’t bear to say the things, the words already tumbling out of my howling mouth, making up excuses for the God who stays silent while I thrash and demand an answer, demand a word to free me, and instead make my own way in impatience, walking barefoot on proverbial broken glass and know that I don’t want it to be this way.  No, no… this will never work, and I am forgetting what to hope will come of all this.

But I have come this far under my own influence.  I have come all this way and now, He nods in my direction.  “Go on.  Have it your way.”  

So He waits quiet to see what I will do next but of course already knows and I wait but don’t know already and I mumble-pray-weep-plead that He just have something up His sleeve.  And all the while I am Eve and I long for that fruit of selfishness and I too wonder why He is keeping good things from me, and the serpent winds between my feet while my pillow swallows tears and before I know it, I’m hissing along with the serpent’s song.  I have it in my head that what God wants for me is only hard living.  I am parched and licking lips for what I’m sure He must be keeping beyond my grasp.

And isn’t that the lie that gets us every time?

That He is keeping something good from us?  That He is the God Who Holds Back?

And the hours pass ‘til I stir with fever and the delirium hasn’t faded.  How does a girl paralyzed learn to walk in silence?  How do I move an inch without knowing the way, and I am filled with doubt and fear and all the side effects of being Eve and eating fruit. 

The Practice of Love

We look at each other and we know, wordless, that we have come to an end, toes edged right up against all that we can take in this moment.  There is a terrible reality hanging in the air, the kind of moment when all you can think is this can’t be happening.  But it is.  And we keep on breathing through it.

But there we stand, the mix of fear and worry and exhaustion painted plainly on our faces, suddenly aged beyond our years, silent before the Lord that only knows how the rest of this story will go.  And I am struck by the sight of us there and more than the weight of the horror is the weight of what stands out to me in this heightened moment – our togetherness.  Lovely though they were, the rings and vows and wedding guests dabbing at their tears that marriage-day seem so futile now, in this, in the face of real. ugly. painful. scary. life. 

This is commitment.  This is love.

Standing soul-bare, side-by-side and I have never been so empty.

And I have never been so full.

It occurs to me only here, only just now and in the hollow quiet of this barren moment that at the bottom of fear and loss and emptiness is only awareness of what remains when there is nothing else.

In this moment I see that the strong love is the quiet love.  The love that fears together and wonders together and laughs together and sits quietly together when there are no more words to be said.  Love is the practice of love’s presence.

This broken girl is two kinds of bride all at once and imperfectly running toward renewal at both altars -- altars of faith and of matrimony, covered over by the love that is action and the love that is left over in emptiness, running over in abundance.

Linking to:

How to Stand Still in a Puddle of Pee

I awoke to a pee puddle on the floor, and that’s the kind of week it’s been --  a who-pooped-in-the-tub?, walls-falling-down, have-to-hire-a-sitter-to-take-a-shower kind of week.

In case you need me to clarify, the puddle belonged to my toddler, not me.  But these are the gifts that keep on giving, aren’t they?

Friend, can I pull covers back over my head and sleep for six days straight if I promise to catch up with laundrydishesdustinggradingwritingreadingcleaningbathing… later?  Thanks.  You’re a pal.

Fancy a recap? 

Good friend missing in Alabama tornadoes.  Worried sick.  Knock-me-over allergy woes.  Big kids in big trouble with big implications… lots of “what kinda man are you going to be” conversations with our resident boys, this week.  Four doctor appointments all around, tuberculosis scare.  Phone calls from teachers…detention, detention, suspension.  Potty training.  Water leak.  Five trips to town.  Medication changes.  Meetings.  Tick bite…Lyme disease?  Six hour front-lawn laugh- and cry-fest with coworker/friend.  Picked for Relevant sponsorship, might as well have won the lottery.  Insomnia.  Anxiety.  Teenage boy tears.  Canker sores, migraines, fibromyalgia flare up.  Report cards.  Fevers.  A boy I’m particularly close to around here moved to a different cottage.  Heart broke.  Alabama-friend found, safe and well.  Relief.  Fitful sleep.  Sixty days without a day off.  Husband handles it all in stride.  Kids, not so much.  Mom… not so much.

Wait, did you say it’s only Wednesday?  That I still have a home licensing inspection, two more doctor appointments to shuttle kids to, a staff meeting, end-of-year testing, company coming to stay for a month starting Friday, two birthdays, four sporting events, one preschooler party, a service plan meeting, fourteen meals, two in-progress bedroom makeovers, Mother’s Day, and the great potty-training-undertaking of 2011 still ahead of me, this week? 

More coffee, please.  

Life has sorta been this way since becoming a housemom.  Ten kids in one house will do that.  Always worry, always life on the roller coaster of things to do, things to feel, things to pour over in prayer.  And so much tiredness…physically, emotionally, spiritually. 

But God’s teaching me, in increasingly major ways, how to feel it all and be present for it all, but let it go at the same time.  How to kneel in my weakness and remain.  I haven’t loved it, but He’s taken me lower, and for the first time in my life, I’ve learned how to rest in dependence, on Him, on others.  I’ve learned how to receive encouragement and ask for it.  To let my husband rise where I fall.  To do one thing at a time.  To be weak and incomplete, and not be guilt-ridden by that.

What’s He teaching you, friend, where you are, today?