About

It’s solidly fall now and I have so many mixed-up feelings. The trees on my street are huge and old and they look like they’re on fire when the sun starts to set.  I love it so much that it physically hurts. I am intentional to always notice the beauty all around me as I drive and walk and live in the fall. October has been truly beautiful. But today, November is here, uninvited as ever. The ground was covered in frost this morning and it was a shock to all my senses. I wanted to rebel and get back under the covers when I saw it. The leaves on the wisteria in my front yard are shriveling and falling at this very moment. More leaves are going to fall and keep falling until they cover the yards up and down my street. The leaves that I Iove are going to die and deep down, I’ve been dreading that certain future since I saw the first golden leaf back in September.  Every time I’ve noticed the beautiful reds and golds and oranges up above and all around me, there has been a whisper of warning. “Enjoy it. Notice it.  Remember, it doesn’t last much longer.  Gray is coming, cold and wet and muddy. You are surrounded by the most intense beauty, but remember it doesn’t last.” I could just cry when I think about how short October has been. It’s such a lovely month but way too busy and it’s gone now,  and it’s not coming back again for a long, long time. Everything is going to get cold.  Some of us feel it coming in our bones and others feel it in our hearts or our minds.  The sun is setting earlier and long nights lay ahead. It’s not a surprise but I’m still caught a little off guard. I’ve never been a great sleeper and it’s even worse in the winter.  I expend a lot of energy during the day trying NOT to think about things that hurt and all the many problems I haven’t solved yet and all the problems I know I never will.  During the day, I can light my little candle and raise it up and bring my offering and trust that it’s enough. But when I lay my head on my pillow, all the brutality of the earth knows where to find me.  I fall asleep pretty easily but ever since I was a little child, the hours between two and four am are my personal worrying time. I’m not quite lucid enough to trick myself into controlling where my thoughts wander, but I’m not quite sleeping, either. Maybe one day I’ll learn to pray in that twilight state, but I haven’t yet and so I just worry.  As far back as I can remember, the weather has really worried me on cold, windy, or rainy nights.  When the wind howls, I think about the people and the animals in my neighborhood without shelter and protection. I think one of the reasons I’m really dreading the winter is the assault on the most vulnerable that comes with it.  I know that I am one person and nobody asked me to single-handedly solve the issues of poverty and homelessness or animal neglect or even the cruelty of Mother Nature herself, but when the lights go out and everyone else is asleep, I know I won’t be able to distract myself or steel myself or convince myself that the arc is bending toward justice at all. I’ve been thinking lately about all the things that are broken around me that I just can’t fix.  I am one person, raising a house full of kids, doing a difficult job and trying to stay married forever and be a decent friend to the people around me. There just isn’t that much left over at the end of each day.  The news is almost all bad and it’s really overwhelming most of the time. The risk of falling into the ditch of distraction and apathy is as high as the risk of falling into the ditch of burnout and despair. I’ve been thinking about what I CAN do lately and you know what I’ve decided?  I can’t heal the world. I can’t save anybody, not one single person. I can’t right all the wrongs. But I actually DO have the power to reach for the light in my own life and make the choice to fight for my own deep, inner healing. I have access to five therapy sessions each year and I feel like I owe it to the world to use them.  Because if hurt people can hurt people, can’t we also assume that healed people will be the ones who can contribute to the healing of the world? Maybe my greatest single contribution to the Kingdom of God that was and is and is still coming is to just put myself in the way of healing and rest in every way I can. Will you? Will you rest?  Will you try to practice laying one burden down for a while and then two? Is there a spiritual practice that brings you peace or comfort? Do you ever think about yourself with tenderness and compassion? I wonder what would happen if we offered ourselves a bit more intentional care and a little less numbing out on food or wine or exercise or piety.  A few minutes ago, I turned on a sink and didn’t get a drop.  I turned on another and then another. And then I realized WE FORGOT TO PAY THE BILL!  Here I am, in a house full of dirty clothes and children and dishes and I didn’t pay the water bill and they just came and shut it off.  I’m lucky, you see, because it was just a mistake, a simple oversight that I am sure can be traced the wild ride of a too-busy October.  I made a couple of phone calls and now I’m just waiting for the guy who turned it off to circle back through my neighborhood and turn it back on.  There are so many in my city who live without power or water or gas for their heaters for months on end for reasons too deep and twisty to begin to list.  My college education and hard-working husband and inherited prosperity I don’t deserve would allow me to live in perpetual summer if I wanted to. What was a mild annoyance for me could have been the catalyst for a life-altering cascade of events for someone else.  It’s not enough for me to be mindful of my blessings and simply count them and whisper thanks at dinner time. What if the greatest blessings in this life could come not through emergency funds and 401Ks but through intentional proximity and authentic kinship with those on the margins for whom Jesus saves the seat of honor at His table?  I’m different than I used to be and I don’t think I can just keep going on in all of the old ways. The 2016 election felt like a tipping point for me and it forced me to finally begin to reckon with what my sisters and brothers without my blinding privilege have always known; that this world is not safe for everyone and that really bad things do happen and keep on happening.  Powerful men use what they have to get ever more and their grasping is always at the expense of people at the margins. To see and notice and start to feel a little bit of the deep suffering of so many people makes it hard to hold onto faith in a God who is good and powerful, so those of us who can opt out of the sights and sounds of the suffering often do.  Nobody wants a paradigm shift. I would never use the word “woke” to describe myself because for one thing, I don’t know if any thirty-something, middle-class white women like me should use that word.  It’s not a part of my vocabulary because I have a hunch about how much I still don’t know. I know I’m still asleep in a lot of ways and I have so much work to do in my own groggy heart. I want to be awake to the suffering and marginalization and systemic oppression of my sisters and brothers around me.  I’m waking up, I think, a little at a time. I’m different. It hurts, but I know the middle of the night pain I absorb through osmosis isn’t a fraction of the pain mothers in tent encampments in Tijuana feel. It isn’t a fraction of the pain of mothers in my city feel when they can’t overcome the odds that have been so heavily stacked against them for the sake of their children. And so I read and give and speak when I can, holding the knowledge I can’t fix anything even though  I am altogether unable to look away now.   I don’t want to go back to the way I was before 2016.  I want to keep waking up in every sense, even if it pushes me out of the safe center where I was born and live.  The more I learn of Jesus and his love for margin people, the less I long to see myself centered and the more I actually believe that He meant what He said about the way we treat the least of these. So here we are again, at the end of the warm season and bracing against the cold winds that always come, sure as the leaves change their colors. I can forget to remember that spring always comes on the heels of the dreariest days.  While we hunker down and bundle up and make it through the next few months, good things will be growing silently underneath, preparing to burst back through the earth when we circle back around again. I can let the gray sky come and let the leaves fall, knowing that these long nights won’t last forever. We who hope in Jesus hang everything on His resurrection. Resurrection is such an absurd concept to build a religion around, isn’t it? But just as I have been convinced of the resurrection of Jesus, I am becoming more convinced day by day that resurrection is coming for more than just our broken Savior and these broken bodies. I am holding onto the idea that even though so much is undeniably broken here, the power and the glory of the resurrection of Jesus still goes out into the world, still makes broken things whole, uses the foolish the confound the wise, still calls the dry bones back together joint by joint. Resurrection is coming for me, for you, and for the world. And so, because I believe in the resurrection and I want to be looking for it when it happens around me, I think I’ll make myself a cup of hot coffee and sit out in the cold under a blanket for a while.  It will be my act of holy defiance to sit a while as the leaves fall, knowing that good things still grow. Even when the colors are going away and the gray sky looms, good things are just below the surface and resting up for spring.  I’ll rest. I hope you will, too.And then I’ll light my candle and bring my little light into my little corner of the world where we can see resurrection happening all around us even as we speak, if we have the eyes to see it.