looking through me

Tag: pain

February 16, 2017

terra firma

Wave after wave sweeps over me:
a friend’s niece with seven days or less to receive a heart transplant,
a dad with young children suffering a series of strokes,
return trips to detox and rehab,
a toddler’s cancer surgery,
early onset Alzheimer’s stealing a family’s mom and grandma,
white blood counts so low chemo can’t be administered
and questions without answers.

In between sets, I find myself treading water and reaching for words like hope and peace and joy.

I reach for them not as life preservers to temporarily keep my head above water—I don’t reach for them with my hands at all. I reach for them with my feet searching for solid ground beneath me.

Because the waves keep coming. The unthinkable situations keep rolling into the lives of those I love. Sometimes they pull us under. But the waves are not all that is real. Terra firma exists.

It is real.

My toes touch it when I sink into truth: “The Lord is near.”

And my feet find their footing.

“The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Hope. Peace. Joy.

Jesus.

Terra firma.

 

 

 

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November 23, 2016

cushioning the hard

Some days are hard. The intangibles of the world’s incivility, the crescendo of chaos in the news, the crashing waves of heartache—they all pile on at once.

And when those days thread together to weave weeks of discomfort one after the other, the air itself begins to feel heavy.

This is one of those months . . . one of those seasons.

Under this weight, words seem so inadequate. They slip unformed off my tongue and elude my fingertips. My usual method of working out all the thoughts and frustrations falls away. Yet I notice my hand involuntarily reaches for the words of others, for the inky stanzas of hope painted by poets past and present.

I didn’t know how much the words meant until I glanced above my laptop and saw a wall of poetry framing my workspace. The unintended result of weeks of accumulating words—printed and jotted down on scraps, pinned and taped—to cushion all the hard.

And there on the corner of my desk—the place I store the books I slip into my purse each morning for stolen moments of reading while walking or eating—a Bible and a slim volume of poetry.

I don’t know when my words will return. I don’t know if civility will claw its way out of the ashes. I don’t know if love will overwhelm the hostility. I don’t know.

But for the first time in days I took a deep breath. A crack of light cleaved the darkness. A moment of peace shattered the noise.

Because beauty finds a way.

 

 

 

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