christianity – walkwithme413

What if -?

I wake one morning this week to cool air, windows open wide.

In my tiny house, I can practically touch fingertips to opposite walls, and all around me birds are hailing in the morning. For a moment, it feels expansive, like my tent somewhere deep in the woods, and I tunnel under quilt, reluctant to let the moment pass.

When I finally drift outside, stand by porch rail, the wildfire sky is pink, pulsing as if alive. It’s a wonder, despite the source.

I’ve had lots of time to think, recently; not the moving-over-rock-and-root kind of thinking, the kind I love and miss; but anchored, centered introspection about where I am and why and how.

There’s a story in the Bible about a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. Mark writes, she had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better, she grew worse.

She’s been ostracized, forced away from neighbor and temple, considered unclean, untouchable. I long to talk to her, to draw close, to ask how she’s managed it for so long.

What’s your secret?

Under the weight of this injury, my muscles soften and my body grows thicker by the day. I want to walk, run, climb, stand on summit, cross rivers, burn my skin red. I’m stuck – like my friend, I’ve bled money and time searching for the cure that ever eludes.

But what if-?

Mark describes what happens next. Desperate, the woman with the issue of blood gambles through the throng, trailing behind the One whom she has heard can heal. If I could just touch his hem, she reasons, maybejustmaybe, all that they say about Him will prove true, for me.

And it does. Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction.

And after a somewhat comical exchange between Jesus and disciples – Who touched me? – Are you kidding, Lord, don’t you see this crowd? – Jesus stops everything and focuses on this one lone lady.

Daughter, your faith has healed you, he tells her. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

What if-?

What if all those years cowering on the outskirts, being shushed and shooed, ignored, beaten down, drained of hope? What if all of it pointed to one singular encounter with a Savior who was willing to break open her suffering heart and set her free?

I want to ask her, though I’m sure I know the answer: was it worth it? To go through all of that for that one momentous moment, and all the hereafter that followed?

I want to think it that it was. That it is, for me.

What if the moonscape of the last 12 years has simply been leading me into a covenant of greater trust in Him who holds back the crowd for just His beloved one?

Have I been moving so long and so fast that He’s had to sit me down for this season? To pull those pieces of my reluctant, petulant heart that kick and scream like an angry toddler who thinks she knows what’s best?

Summer has always been a time of growth, but I sit here, again, shrinking, day after day, pleading my cause (Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me), tiptoeing around His promises, asking skeptical questions, doubting but wanting to believe.

Like Abraham did. He, too, endured years of waiting on the God who promised.

Paul puts it this way: Abraham dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do.

I long to meet Him at the hem.

To pray through. For it not to matter if I am ever healed, to say that it was worth it, even if.

To declare, as Habakkuk did, not through gritted teeth but with open, surrendered, triumphant hands:

Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.

Like a wink, I read the last lines.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.

What if-?

Lessons from a Little

She came to my daughter’s house late one night, a tiny tugboat of a girl, bird-boned and face-scabbed from some yet-unknown less-than-benign neglect.

I’ve been watching her.

From the very beginning, it seemed her arms, her heart were open to whatever new presented itself. She is fearless, sweet, unabashedly inclined to ask for aid.

She’s not the first foster my daughter’s family has taken in, but she is quickly becoming my favorite.

I sense there is a lot I can learn from her.

Stuck in a washer of injury/rehab/recover/repeat, I understand now why the cycle is called vicious, and I desperately crave an exit.

I have to admit the days since being forced off-trail have not been my best.

Days were spent at a Super 8 willing my legs to heal, ordering takeout and coming to terms.

Once at home, turtling in on myself, indulging in obstructive self-pity, railing at God and whatever this thing is that He thinks He’s doing. Wondering, like Saint Teresa of Avila, if this is how You treat your friends, God, is it no wonder You have so few?

Yikes.

But then – I look at this little and see how unbothered she is by her own novel circumstance. She does not protest the food she is offered, the new crib where she sleeps, or the hours she is asked to spend outside.

She is part of the fabric of this busy family, for now, until her own can mend and take her back.

I recently read how Jesus tells his disciples, his friends, that they must count the cost of following Him: “hold no opinions, make no demands, retain no privileges, abandon all cherished sins, worldly possessions, and secret self-indulgences,” as the footnote in my translation reads.

Without reservation or question? Really?

Impossible.

Yet knowing what weak-willed, selfish creatures we are, unable to say no to ourselves, I am not surprised to turn the page and see the very next parable Jesus tells them.

The lost lamb.

He knows our sheep-nature will lead us to bracken, cliff, and hole; but He chases us anyway, lifts us up anyway, brings us back anyway, to start anew.

O Savior, how do you not weary of us?

Like my small friend, maybe it’s time to quietly pick up my cross.

Open my arms and heart, bravely face the changes I never asked for, temper my rebellious and immoderate spirit, ask for the help my Father is ever poised to give.

If this small slip of a soul can fierce the unknown, and do it with such calm and trust, then so can I.

So can you.

O Captain! my Captain! When will this fearful trip be done?

We cannot know nor see.

And perhaps that is best. Had I known I would be back here, injured and alone, so soon after the last time, I’m not sure I could have borne it. Knowing the work ahead, exacting heart work that, apparently, desperately needed to be done.

As quickly as the trial comes, it may, perhaps, just as swiftly, depart. I think of Paul and Silas in prison, singing and praying an earthquake into being.

Friends, multiplying joy and dividing sorrow.

Prayer, working, as Spurgeon once observed, as “the slender nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence.”

Pick me up, our toddler girl gestures with chubby arms aloft.

Pick me up, Jesus, because I’m just not sure I can do this again.

Yet I have to believe that You believe I can.

Snakes and Stones

A new song brushes by on Pandora this week, and the first line wrecks me, a perfect mirror of the pain and frustration marking the past month.

Tired and I am angry at the nature of it all
Fighting just to find myself a breath

After scrapping all year to heal from last summer’s injury, I was ready to try again to perhaps be the first woman to hike the 115 tallest mountains in the Northeast in one continuous footpath. At least give it a try.

I was feeling pretty good, actually, most of the year.

I’m able to get back on the trails that I love, covertly start a second Grid (shh).

I spend time with the littles, joy at my son’s engagement, teach the sweetest bunch of middle school boys on the planet.

All along, in the back of my mind, is The Hike. A metaphor for overcoming: injury and age and the steady drip of the world.

Then.

It starts as an ache in my shoulder, travels down the muscles of my back. A nagging there-ness that begins to shout the moment I put on a pack.

Sparing no attention to rehab my wretched hip, I had neglected other places that were bent on rebellion. The pain is constant, a reminder that the time to leave is short and I can’t leave, I won’t, until it does.

Not this time, I tell myself, and try everything available to excise the growing knot hellbent on shipwrecking my plans. Chiro, deep tissue massage, reps with rubber bands, a tennis ball.

I go back to the stories that have always brought me hope.

Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:9-11)

How. Much. More.

And yet – though I know it can’t be true – it seems that all I get are snakes and stones.

I love the forest. It is a place where I can be, silent, away. Away from other weighty pains, where it’s okay to be alone.

Can I trust, at home, my own tired soul? Not good with empty time, I fear I could be a danger to myself.

And then, just when it seems my shoulder starts to calm – bread! fish! – I cannot even. Attention drawn away from its constant demands, my hip reverts back to its old treacherous ways. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t just so darn sad.

Can these dry bones live?

I wonder and worry. Will these compound setbacks be a dark night of the soul, leading me to oceans of deeper trust – or will they send me spiraling?

I realize I have a say in the matter, and who wants to willingly spiral when it’s surrender that is necessary?

So I try. Remember all the fish, all the bread from seasons past.

Number present blessings. Pray and cry and pray some more. Banish those doubts and disappointments to the empty tomb and roll back the stone.

God’s plans are rarely linear.

I do wish He were predictable. So much of the last decade has been anything but.

But what I can count on, what is as unmistakably as granite solid as the mountains I crave, is Himself. His presence, provision, and care.

So I wait here in limbo, knowing that his howmuchmoreness will one day win.

What will this summer hold?

Ah, Sovereign Lord, you alone know.

A Better List

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time or inclination to write, but today, as a wintery mix falls and my car sits idle in the driveway with its check engine light on, again, it feels like a need.

The haste with which Christmas came and went felt cruel. Though it happens every year, it seemed particularly thus this time.

The hopes and fears of all the years: they are a weight I can’t shake, a long list of assaults that sap my faith.

Frequent injuries that linger long. Brain fog. Mice in the walls. A Judas car. Loneliness. The pounds that creep back on.

The very socks I pull on this morning. His socks, the one who left too soon, who loved this season, his family, life itself.

The elastic crackles as I pull, and I realize there are some things that just go, no matter how hard you want to hold them tight.

Maybe I need to look up, not down.

There was another list I started to keep this season, inspired by something I read on the Bible app earlier this month. Apparently, there are more than 700 different names for Christ in the Bible, and author Robert Morgan writes that “each one meets the various needs in our own lives… (and) discloses the many layers of his relationship with us.”

I start to count.