golden clay

I come back again and again to her Facebook post. I consider typing something mean, then something clever.

Some people would see it as their job to correct her. Others would block her. 

In the end, I do nothing.

Like I tell her over the phone on a Saturday, change has to start with me. 

But often it hasn’t.

Like when I sit across the table from her, poking at my sushi, and complain about their lack of vulnerability. 

Because that’s easier than sitting across from her and sharing my fears.

Like when I watch for his reactions on Zoom, telling him about my hatred for injustice. 

Because that’s easier than defending her in front of them.

Like I criticize celebrities for the way they spend quarantine. 

Because it’s easier than recognizing my own privilege.

Like I tell her, change has to start with me. 

And the times I’ve really changed have started in the early morning prayers in a maintenance closet, in the long jogs where I persevere to the end, in the habits I start at my desk–in a pandemic, as I spend the hours alone with everything I’m learning and dying to share. 

And maybe the best way to change is to learn more and share less. 

And maybe the best way to see the right thing happen more often is to start doing it myself. 

To grow without recognition. To fight without the spotlight. To give in secret. To pray in solitude. 

What if we stayed six feet apart forever? What would happen to our religion if it had never really happened in the heart? 

What would happen if it had? 

“For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.” James 1:23-24

“I’m glad you haven’t asked me what’s new,” she laughs.

I know better than that, weeks into social distancing.

It’s a Saturday afternoon and usually I’d just be finished hiking. Usually I’d be rolling down the windows of my car and turning up the volume on the radio.

“What is your daily routine now?” she asks.

“Well first, I wake up.” We laugh.

I know it inside and out. The routine.

Like I know the old, old story. I send him a selfie with one eye closed, one half open during our Zoom discussion on the passage where Jesus dies.

It’s that moment where the future hangs in the balance, the inciting incident, the moment that changed everything, and I feel tired and want to go to bed.

“What do you think, Kate?”

I go off mute. “Sometimes the gospel feels–I just forget its impact,” I try to say.

I know it inside and out. The plot.

I walk slowly along the edge of the river as we talk about where we want to travel when this is all over. “Even if I don’t get to travel on this earth, I pray I get to travel in the New Earth,” she says.

The thought thrills me.

Like she once told me her greatest hope was to never lose curiosity.

Because the best way to close yourself off to discovery is to think that you have already arrived.

You never know what you might not know yet.

It’s the same advice he gives me for writing headlines. “Always assume there are a hundred good ideas available. You just have to wait for them to appear.”

Always assume there are limitless wonders of His available and His mercies are new every morning.

You just have to trust the familiar routine will bring them to light.

We read the passage again. I’ve read it twenty-five, maybe fifty times, and it hits me in a new way how God must have anguished over the death of His son.

Because I’ve watched him become a father, the unraveling gentleness, and the love I’ve never seen him have for any other.

On Sunday, I wake up. I’m not looking for a plot twist.

Or even the comfort of a familiar story.

I’m just looking for a curious heart to see what’s been there all along.

And what is yet to come just beyond the New Horizon.

“Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.” Psalm 51:12

 

In the middle of a pandemic, as the days grow longer, I bury myself in books and blank notebooks. I converse with C.S. Lewis over a cuppa tea at the Kilns. I hear James from across the gap of two thousand years tell me of joy in suffering. I devour histories of the civil war and the civil rights movement and mourn the loss of histories never spoken.

“I wouldn’t have been able to get through it without books,” she once told me her secret to survival. “The stories of others showed me I wasn’t alone.”

Like the wisest man in history said: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9

And when the airwaves are shattered with sensational news, it’s easy to think we’re alone in a new era of suffering, that the peoples of the past never had a clue.

It’s easy to think we’re alone.

Like she tells me late one night how living in a pandemic makes it easy to get stuck in the ‘if onlys’.

If only we had kids right now, they would bring so much joy.

If only we had peace and quiet, we would be better able to endure. 

If only I didn’t have to work from home. 

If only I didn’t have to work outside the home. 

If only I had work. 

“I know I could complain if I wanted to,” she says. How will people know our struggles if we don’t?

Because in worldwide trauma, it can feel as if the only way to be seen is to scream.

In indefinite isolation, it can feel as if the only way to be happy is to be heard.

Like he heard me when I told him how I really felt, all the pent-up anger flowing into the phone. He listened and listened and listened.

Like she leaned in to meet my gaze after I disclosed the truth about myself, terrified to look her in the eyes.

And like they listened then, He listens now in the silence of isolation.

He takes my ‘if only’ and writes between the lines.

If only You could take whatever circumstance I’ve been given and fill it with meaning.

If only You could take the blank page and scratch out a story. 

If only we could learn from the past and look to the future.

And run the race for a cloud of witnesses we cannot yet see.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:1-2

 

It’s day twenty-one and it feels like all I’ve seen is the four corners of my living room. 

And the four corners of my thoughts. 

I wake on a Sunday morning with the message of another well-meaning person warning me to prepare for the worst. 

“You sound peaceful,” she tells me over the phone a few days before. 

“I am today,” I say. Today, I’m carrying the burdens of today only. 

Because three weeks into a pandemic, we’ve already forgotten everything it’s taught us: We were never in control. 

We still aren’t, no matter how many cans of soup we have in our cupboards. 

On a Wednesday night, in the middle of an economic crisis, he walks me through a retirement plan. “The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient,” he quotes Warren Buffet. 

The way to physical wealth is through faith that things will be set right eventually, that this too shall pass. 

“Isn’t it crazy that all of us are here today,” she motions to the four of us on the Zoom call, “because our grandparents survived difficult circumstances?” 

And I tell them how Grandma used to talk to her friends from the bedroom window as she recovered from polio. And now, over half a century since she learned to walk again, she sits in a nursing home and talks to her daughter-in-law through the bedroom window. 

Life is a continuous story. Same pattern, different scene.  

If there’s one thing the empty tomb has taught me, it’s that the Hero wins in the end. 

The sick are healed.

The lame learn to walk again. 

On a Monday, the four walls start to close in with doubt. Has God changed? 

“It’s funny,” I tell her over the phone in the middle of the pandemic, “I learned in my novel writing courses that literature often uses the ‘Christ figure’ in the climax of a story.” 

The Christ figure is what solves the problems of a plot and brings the story to a satisfactory end. 

And when I wake to fog on a Sunday morning, I don’t let limited vision discourage me. 

I know the sun will shine again. The conclusion will come, a satisfactory end to the one true myth.

Eternally ever after. 

 

I guess it’s day five. Like everyone else, I don’t know what I’m counting up—or down to.

But it’s been five days since I last spoke to someone I loved without a computer screen between us.

“Is it hard living alone?” she asks.

“It’s okay so far.” I say. “I’m keeping busy.” And it’s true.

Everything is cancelled, but I’m keeping busy.

I don’t tell her that what’s harder is facing aloneness.

For days, I’m glued to my phone, refreshing the twitter news feed for updates on the latest statistics. I book back-to-back virtual coffee dates and binge watch Downton Abbey.

I don’t tell her that what’s harder is facing a life without distraction.

Months ago, they ask me what my biggest fear is and I tell them it’s living a life devoid of adventure.

What’s harder is facing a blank calendar.

I think about writing a novel because ambition is less terrifying than boredom.

Because what’s harder is not having something to show for myself.

And after five days of isolation, I wonder how much of my life is spent ensuring some tangible excuse for why I’m here.

If I can’t produce reasons for my existence, I busy myself in distractions from it.

But she texts me with verses and prayers that she is praying—and I know she is because when she says she’ll pray, she really does. Even though she cannot always see the results.

And when I turn off the internet on a Saturday afternoon and face my fear of boredom, I don’t worry about the results.

Because my Maker doesn’t ask me for the reasons I was made. He doesn’t ask me to bear my own fruit. He asks me to abide.

I face the empty space in the day as my chance.

To abide in love, joy and peace.

“Can you pray that I use this time to lean into Jesus, to know the sweetness of His presence?” I ask the girl who prays.

Because aloneness is easier to face when you recognize you’re not.

And boredom is easier to welcome when you pass the time in the arms of Peace.

And existing as God-breathed creation is reason enough to exist.

It’s on a Saturday when I stop counting down the days because sometimes the things that matter most can’t be counted.

And sometimes the things of value can’t be quantified.

And sometimes the fruit from a season of waiting cannot be measured.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” John 15:4

Before Dad took the chainsaw to the cedar bush, it used to stretch up to my bedroom window and hide the sparrows. Countless sparrows.

And they’d sing. Some mornings, they’d sing so loud it was impossible to go back to sleep. I’d put my hands behind my head and listen to their happiness grow louder and louder.

Even now, when birds sing, I remember what it feels like to be safe.

That’s what I’m looking for on a Monday morning in the middle of March when I open my window to hear the birds. To feel safe. To know the world will go back to normal.

But he calls me a day later with the results of his cat scan. “Don’t worry, Kate. Just pray.”

Just a week before, I tell her how I try to think on what is good and right and true–and not to wonder on the what ifs.

But when the world shuts down one week in the middle of March, I catch fear like it’s the plague. I’m glued to every post, every news report as though I can somehow control the future better if I just know–everything.

But I can’t.

Like he can’t.

And maybe we don’t have to.

Maybe we don’t have to know everything happening in the world if we know what is happening in heaven.

And maybe the deeper the darkness, the stronger the light flickers. Maybe the bigger the wound, the wider the cut through our self reliance–the bigger the peephole to heaven.

To a glimpse of an unsurprised God. A God who has faced Death and sent it to the grave.

I go for a walk along the river before the sun sets and hear her say it through my ear buds. “It feels like time has stopped, but Easter is still coming, even if it will be different.”

Her words are another peephole to heaven.

Even in the calm before the storm, when the sparrows go silent.

Easter is still coming.

And the sparrows will sing again.

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” Matthew 10:29-31

“Are you flying home?” She asks me, as strangers on airplanes do. 

“Well, it’s home now. I’m moving here–today.” 

And I don’t realize it when I’m arranging my furniture on the fifteenth floor and memorizing a new skyline from my living room window. I don’t realize how God’s going to rearrange my soul. 

Because I was too comfortable to ask Him the hard questions before. Things I always assumed were better left unasked. 

What do you say is true? 

Like two years ago, when I was scared to ask him the hard questions in the lull before he cleared his throat and said he’d better be going. Scared to rock the boat. Scared the relationship couldn’t handle it. 

“Marriage really does get better with time,” she tells me. She’s learned to rock the boat–and they’ve managed to stay afloat. 

Because where do relationships go if you can’t say what you’re thinking? Where do they grow? 

I was 17 when I drove through the mountains and told them I could never live there. “Too terrifying,” I said. “Too big.”

Three weeks into living against a new skyline, I find a quiet mountain lake, slip in my kayak and glide through its silky surface. And I wonder at the way the mountains seem different now–more familiar, safer. Bigger than ever. 

I was 17 when I thought I had God figured out.

And now, I know Him better and I know Him less. He looks different. Bigger. 

Yet, I’m the only one who’s changed. 

The new view of a skyline makes room for a clearer view of the Saviour. 

And her phone call four weeks into living there takes my view of God and turns it upside down. Turns me upside down. Shakes me out of comfort. Plunges me deeper. 

Pilate looked into the face of Jesus and asked: “What is Truth?” But I’m convinced He didn’t really want to know. 

What is Truth? I pray. Give me discernment.

And I look into the face of Jesus–and I want to know. 

Because I don’t know exactly where it’s going to lead me. 

But I know Who it’s going to lead me to. 

(If I’m brave enough to go.)

“We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.” Colossians 1:9-10

Sunday comes. “How was your week?” she asks. 

I want to say mundane. “Uneventful,” I tell her. 

I don’t tell her that I spent an hour the night before, staring at a blinking cursor in my Word document. 

Or that the blank Word document feels a little like my life lately. 

Not terrible. Not wonderful. Just a little blank.

Call it lack of sunlight. Call it a slump. 

I remember waiting outside the door to her studio, nervously wiping my hands on my jeans. 

She hated how I played Bach. But she was also the first person to show me that the space between the notes was just as important as the notes themselves. 

It’s Sunday when I know I’m stuck in the space between.

And it’s easy to try to fill the silence.

To bang out the notes, whether they belong in the melody or not. 

I’m not growing enough. I’m not using my time wisely. 

To become convinced that the age-old promises about abundant life are not for me. 

And it’s easy to let the silence fill me. 

To forget to pray in the morning. To wonder if it really matters when you don’t feel the pleasure of it.

She hated how I played Bach. But she was the one who showed me that silence can be intentional. 

That some pages are left blank on purpose. 

From the pulpit, he reminds us that Jesus didn’t start his ministry until he was 30. And what happened in the years before that? 

It gives me hope that maybe there is growth between the lines.

“Back when you were sassy.” She sends the photo to me with a note.  

I stare at it closely–back when I wore light purple overalls and polkadots. I was too young to know how to drive, but young enough to know what I really wanted. 

And too young to notice what other people really wanted me to want. 

And young enough not to care. 

“Being in your twenties is about figuring out who you are,” he says. 

I’m not the little girl in the photograph anymore. Am I?

I call her on a Thursday night. “I think I’m having an identity crisis.” She waits for me to say more. 

It’s a miscellaneous mess of a reply. I’m trying to piece together my past, present and future and put it into words for her. 

Finally, she says my name in a way that makes me want to listen. “Kate,” she says, “the wisdom from above is peaceable.” 

Not confusing. Peaceable. 

And I’m a mess of confusion, gripping my phone like it’s a lifeline. 

We all sit around the table together and he’s not really talking to me, but that’s how I hear his words. “The more we keep quiet about our values and identity, the more we diminish our sense of self.” 

It’s not that I’ve been lying, I’ve just been silent. Maybe that’s worse.  

When you’re silent about your identity, you start to wonder if it really exists at all. You start to wonder what it is. 

“You’re right,” I tell her over the phone on a Thursday night. “The truth is not confusing like this.”

The Master of Confusion knew it too, tempting Jesus. If You are the Son of God, he said. 

If you are a child of God, Kate.

Instead of being buried with Christ in God, I have buried my values in the fear of people’s opinions–people from church and people from work and people from the train stop. 

Instead of being found with Christ in God, I’ve been lost in what they say is the proper way to live.

Everyone talks big about embracing identity, but I’m scared of what that will mean for me. I serve a God who demands my whole life–lived out in the open with mistakes and opinions spoken. 

And I’m scared of what it will mean for me if I don’t. I serve a God who has given His whole life for me–who loves me in the light without reservation.

The past, present and future is still a miscellaneous mess, but I know who I am. I am hid with Christ in the great I AM. 

And that is not something you can live with half a heart.

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” Colossians 3:3-4

Barely twelve days into the new year and I call him, voice breaking, and he tells me to come right over.

He holds my head against his chest with both hands and doesn’t say anything.

The year’s just opened like a stiffly bound book and the pages are already filling with an ending I hoped to leave out.

And I’d just spent the better part of that afternoon, trying to send her some reasonable answer for the question she’d asked me. Why has God allowed these hard things happen? 

It takes a few hours before I realize that philosophy feels flippant when pain still stings.

Why indeed. 

But when he holds my head against his chest and we sit on his couch and I tell him I feel sad, he says that’s okay because it’s part of the process.

“Don’t wish for pain, but when it comes, lean into it and find out what it will teach you,” he tells me.

Because she told him something similar once. And she was shaped by pain and she shaped me with her kindness.

Because pain is really just growing pains.

And growing pains are really just side effects of being stretched to full height and pushed to greater strength.

Pain is really preparation for battling better next time.

“Lean into the Lord and none of your hurt is wasted,” she tells me.

But I’d rather fall asleep to pain. I’d rather forget sadness in the endless line of weekday activities. I’d rather fix my gaze on the Netflix home-screen than on the face of Someone who knows my emotions. I’d rather philosophize than feel.

But that would be a waste.

If pain is going to wake me up–if pain is going to snatch me from the arms of comfort, then I’d rather it wakes me to the reality that He weeps with us.

And I’d rather it hurl me hard into the arms of Grace.

I’d rather that be the purpose of pain.

And perhaps sadness greater than sadness itself would be to live a year without the side effects of growth.

“Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” Romans 5:3-4