let go and take hold

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
                             -Rainer Maire Rilke



it's the little things that break me.

the signature in a yearbook "we made it! (heart) your very best friend ____" and feeling the absence of that for your 17 year old who stopped school the first month of 9th grade because it was all too much. who has no very best friend, not really.  it's not the proms and the drivers license and the college tours.

it's the loneliness.

it's in the remembering of my life at 17 and how important it was to break off from my parents and become my own. how differentiation was desired and needed and happened like every other milestone. milestones i've been watching and waiting for since her birth- some reached delayed- some never attained.

this summer she's going to sleep-away camp for 5 nights. it's a a camp for kids with special needs. she's terrified. for the past 6 months she will wake in the night, "what if i'm bullied?"  "what if people are mean teasing me?"  "what if then i become mean?" it's the same questions over and over. a deep fear of rejection. a fear of her own failure. a fear of the loneliness that sits at the the bottom of both.

i put on a good face. i listen. i tell her that she won't be bullied because i really believe that she won't. but inside i'm scared for her. just like i was when i dropped her off her first day of kindergarden with her giant hello kitty backpack down to her knees and kissed her little blonde head and watched her limp walk into a giant elementary school to be eaten by life. and she was, we heard years later, by kids who did 'mean tease' and bully, leaving scars on an already wounded girl.

it is what it is.
this.
for her. for me.
in the savory moments and the sour ones.

she will go and i will settle her in. i will believe in her. her goodness. her bravery. i will give her back to God like i do everyday, and pull my ego from hers and let her be who she is.

and God will speak to her as He made her. and speak to me as He made me.
and walk with us (both) silently out of the night.

may she find the limits of her longing, and go to them.
may she flare up like a flame
may she keep going, in the beauty and the terror, both
may she never lose the One who made her
may she take hold of His hand.

conservation of mass

i have a middle-schooler. it's exam week. we leave for the USA in 3 days and that needs another post. but the middle-schooler and the exams are interesting. according to "captain fantastic" "interesting" is an illegal word. it doesn't say much. it's kind of a cop out- it buys time, maybe waiting to see if the asker is really interested in the answer. so what i mean is this week of midde-school exams has shown me things about the dynamics of our family. mike takes math. i take science. we rotate on history. we share english. bible, pe, music, IT and french? he's on his own. because we're too tired.

so i was reviewing science with him today.

conservation of mass: in a reaction, the total mass of reactants is equal to the total mass of the products; matter can be changed, transformed, but mass is neither created nor destroyed.

i'm looking at my child who 13 years ago was created in my body. and if he was created, his existence must mean that something in me was destroyed. there has to be balance. some things in me gave themselves to become him. i know technically it was the extra food i ate, but that went to his bones and muscles. parts of me gave him life, my breathing grew him too. my spirit spoke to his.

a very long time ago i was a nursing assistant on the neurosurgery floor of an academic hospital, when i was also in the process of thinking about becoming a doctor. there was a young woman on the floor who had a bad brain tumor growing in her head and a baby growing in her belly. it was complicated. trying to kill off some of her fast growing cells and trying to encourage the growth of others. trying to save her life and the life of her baby. after a while it became clear she wasn't going to make it, but there was still the baby. she was incubator-like. a giant nest. the unlikely protector. semi-conscious but functioning as a garden for this potential life.

it was weird when the obstetrician would come on the floor to scan her belly and see how this baby was doing when she was doing poorly. something dying. something trying to become a life. a floor riddled with endings, and a doctor that helps those beginning. we were all trying to get her to viablilty, 25 weeks at least. and it seemed somehow more significant that anything else happening there. getting that baby to live would somehow validate her living. in a place of loss and questioning of the meaning of things, this would feel like victory. a tangible piece of her to keep breathing her breath. a way for her cells to walk on out and kiss death goodbye. an exchange. conservation of mass. conservation of spirit.

she was about 22 weeks. i remember the code well. i think i may have even been the one who found her not breathing, maybe not, but it felt that way. standing to the side while the already doctors flooded the room and began to resuscitate her. she was already gone. everyone knew that. like for an organ donor, they tired to perfuse her heart, her liver, to pump the blood, to get the oxygen into the baby. maybe she could be kept alive on life-support for a few more weeks- just long enough- just until we could cut the baby out. just so things could somehow be okay.

but that is not what happened. i think that baby got more than nutrients. that baby got a taste of death before it was even born and that was too much. no thank you. i'll head out with my mother. this world is not looking like something i want to be a part of. i'll say goodbye now too.

it was tragic. it was heart wrenching. to hear the words- "she didn't make it, and the baby died too." to imagine the double loss her parents would feel. but there was something sacred about it. something that felt right. they would be buried together. flesh of my flesh. bone of my bone. paired forever. together.

conservation of mass.

there was a time when my baby had a brain tumor. this one. 12 years ago.  this one now studying conservation of mass.

the world is giant and small and terrifying and yet wonderful.

we pour ourselves into each other. when our children leave our skin we are transformed. we have pieces of ourselves walking around outside of our bodies. and we have space created from their leaving. we are open, possibly vulnerable, but available. what do we fill it with? we have multiplied. they are ours yet completely their own. unique. not extensions of our selves- but separate selves - battered and bruised by the world and loved and held as well by love and light, by God- so much bigger than me.

and i? i am who? who i was? who i will be?

i am here. reading the science 6 semester 2 study guide, with a boy made up of me.

 

God doesn't make mistakes

today i got up just before the sun to talk to God. there was a beautiful sky, the coming light. the changing from night to day. He is all about new beginnings in a real and deep way. i know that. and if i get up early enough, He reminds me. it's so worth it.

as i sat out on the porch, alone, watching the day begin, i truly felt nothing but joy. i had no great reason, just the moment itself. cool air. the fading darkness. the early light.

and i listened to that transition and i heard: "God doesn't make mistakes".  He doesn't make mistakes. i sat with that for a while to be sure i believed it, because that's huge. i mean it has ramifications.

it's opening a can of worms about suffering and why God allows it and is it His will or not and what kind of a God would... to which i say i don't fully know. but what i'm pretty sure about is that we are put on earth to find God. and when we find God and i mean really find God - like we want to sit and have a conversation with Him/Her, not like we decide to go to church, not like when we find religion - when we find God and begin to know and trust Him,  we find Joy.

but we don't have to. by all means it's our choice. we can try to make our own way and generate our own version of happiness. which people do all the time, successfully, but i think God has so much more for us. we can be really busy at doing many other things- like working hard and sacrificing things for that, like making money and enjoying that, like focusing on our relationships, like traveling and building things and making things and reading and writing things. good things. all the parts of our life can distract us from finding God, or they can be used to point us to God. the things in our life are not bad. but if the main purpose on earth is to find and know God, the paths that take us through suffering are part of that and they are often a more direct route.

i don't think God meant it like how we think of it. i don't think God wants us to suffer and come crawling to Him. i certainly don't think suffering is anything related to a punishment. sometimes we suffer because of the natural consequences of our choices, but often suffering is random, or because of someone else's choices.

God didn't fall asleep when Zoe was conceived. He knit her together in my womb and she is fearfully and wonderfully made- with her scoliosis and her sprengels shoulder and her autism- because God is so much bigger than our little made-to-last-80-years bodies. He made me with a straight back and even shoulders and a neuro-typical brain, and a great need for attention and affection and a tendency to be secretly selfish, and a great many other struggles. mine are just invisible.

so much of life is about avoiding suffering at all costs. i get that. do i wish for zoe that her world could be easier? that she didn't have a limp? that she understood facial expressions? yes. but i wouldn't change her because i am small and only see so far. because i'm often wrong. because i don't know in this great spinning world the potential importance of her challenges for her path to God, or mine, or anyone else's, maybe yours.

what about the most vile of crimes? does God allow those? yes. because people have choice and people hurt other people and we should do everything in our power to prevent and protect. can God heal the deep wounds from those crimes? yes. fully. with the tears that He cries while holding us in our pain. does God love the person who inflicted those wounds? yes. fully. as unfathomable as it seems He can't help Himself, as i would love my most broken child at their worst.

what about illness? why does God allow that? in a child? a young parent? i don't know why except that sometimes we don't make it to 80,  we all end. the great suffering that comes from that? i think it breaks God's heart too. but He doesn't avoid it, He joins us in it. and i have felt His tears and arms when i've walked though some of this suffering.

sometimes our best intentioned responses to potential suffering can move our paths away from His plan and make it harder to find God. when i was pregnant with jude and things looked very bleak, that he would be severely handicapped, many people mentioned abortion. it was their best intentioned response to help us avoid suffering. yet i would have missed encountering God in a powerful way- during the dark days that followed. i would have missed the opportunity to see miracle. my world would have gotten a bit smaller, a bit more controlled, a bit less about the mystery. and with out a jude.

when we open ourselves up to suffering we open ourselves to experiencing things beyond us. we gain a perspective that is only from the privilege of loss. when we die all our small deaths, of unmet expectations and dreams lost, we free ourselves to see a much bigger world. blinders come off and what kept us tethered or treading water in our understanding of what's important, changes.

from that place i can thank Him for all of life. from a place of trust and some personal experience, i can say thank you even for hard things, because i know God doesn't make mistakes.