golden clay

As she slams into the read end of my car, all I can think about is how I cringed at the four figures I saw on the VISA machine at the vehicle repair shop three days earlier.

And the four figures slipping through an e-transfer to my new landlords two days earlier.

Until I call him and he says, “It’s a little thing, Kate.”

But I’m thinking of all the little things at once. And how there’s no cell service in heaven and I can’t call her for that compassion she served as often as her English trifle.

“It’s a little thing.”

I drive home singing praises because I sat on that dock a week earlier watching the sun rise higher, as it does every day.

As it does every morning.

His faithfulness is new every morning.

I sat on that dock in the company of the minnows and stuck my finger between the pages of that soul-changing book. The book of Psalms. Chapter 91.

It’s the very verse she texts me out of the blue after I tell her about my back bumper. “He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.”

His faithfulness is a shield.

When life marches against me, who better to stand behind than the One who shields me with a track record of victorious love.

I sit down beside her bed, two heavy-weight oxygen tanks hooked up to the wall. I can tell it’s been a hard day for her.

She smiles at me, “How’s Kate doing?”

Machines breathe for her and she hasn’t left Room 7 for weeks, but “How’s Kate?”

And as the sun, that golden thread, weaves its way through the windows and rests on Grandma’s face, we talk about boys, the article I just wrote for work, God’s plan for my life.

And with her, the fifty-four years between us slip away. A friend listens to another friend’s heart.

Like two years ago, when I called her from the highway and said, “Grandma, I may need a place to live.” And for months, I called her my roomie and she’d cook potatoes and roast beef and we’d sit for hours at the kitchen table after dinner, sipping earl grey, and giggling about my step-grandpa. She’d tell me stories of her childhood, of the days of raising her kids.

I cried when I moved into my own apartment.

I knew Grandmas could be inspiring. They could be loving. They could be supportive. But I never knew they could be your best friend.

Friends. Even though she had every reason to embrace bitterness. Instead, she got up every morning, put on her makeup and a chiffon top or dress pants. She was “clothed with strength and dignity and looked to the future with confidence” (Proverbs 31:25).  She sometimes told me it was just vanity, but I knew it was hope.

Now, I wear her scarves.

And when death knocked at the door, she ignored it and wrote poems. And those two children’s stories she always wanted to write. She painted a picture of poppies. She wouldn’t stop living until she stopped breathing.

I walk through those hospice doors weeks ago and hardly have time to kiss her hello before she hands me the prayer she wrote:

“So, you grew up in a Christian home,” she says, fingering the rim of her Starbucks cup. It feels like an accusation.

“Sort of,” I say. “My parents became Christians right before I was born.”

This is always my response. It’s my way of validating that I wasn’t coerced, manipulated or brainwashed into a life of faith.

Unless I’m the stupid one?

I wonder this sometimes. Maybe I’m crazy to believe this old, old story. Maybe the world is one-dimensional. Maybe life really is all about adrenaline highs, sex and entertainment. Or even romance, family and friends.

And what’s the point then?

I know a few hundred kids who grew up in Christian homes. I know fewer who walk with Christ.

But my mind always finds its way back to the age-old rhetorical question. To Pilate staring into the eyes of Christ and asking, “What is truth?”

And my heart finds its way back to another age-old rhetorical question. To Jesus looking ‘round his group of disciples and asking, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

I talk her ear off for five minutes about how it just sank in that the soul is the most essential part of us. Not gender. Not a six-pack. Not our name. Not our good deeds. Our soul.

I know a few hundred kids who grew up in Christian homes. But I don’t know anyone who’s a Christian because of that. Christianity is not the box you check on a form. It’s the reality of the soul.

No one’s soul is washed in redemptive joy because their parents read them the Bible at dinner.

There are no Christians by proxy. Joy is a joke to those who have never experienced it. Forgiveness is a myth to those who have never received it. And love is an imitation to those who have never known Him.

I come downstairs in the early hours of the morning to my mom with her eyes closed, whispering prayers. But it’s only a fond flashback to my childhood if Christ is not Ruler of my soul.

I am not a Christian by proxy. I am a Christian because Christ took over my most essential self. He puts my sleepless nights to rest. He gives me hope to wake up.

I can’t pretend self is my bio on Instagram.

And I can’t stare into the face of Jesus and wonder what truth is.

I’m a Christian.

I’m dating when I sit across from her at lunch and tell her I just need to find someone for her.

“Why?” she asks.

And it’s a fair question.

Someone else makes an off-handed comment in the middle of the kitchen one day–and I remember it. “People always ask me if I’m dating, but they never ask me if I’m happy,” she says.

If the world has made life about fulfilling romantic desires, the church has made it about gaining marital status.

When I’m single again, at least two people in one week tell me I should get a dating app.

Someone else reassures me it’s okay that I’m not married yet.

Did I say I was concerned?

I start to wonder if I’m wrong to enjoy singleness.

I get home from work, sit at the table with a book, a plate of dinner and a glass of wine, the whirr of the air conditioner in the background. And I wonder how much longer this quiet life will last.

I wake in the morning to birds singing outside my bedroom window and open my Bible, penning thoughts beside a well-loved passage and looking up Greek words and timelines. I pray for my friend’s hectic morning; she’ll wake to busy little feet, scratched knees and hungry tummies.

She tells me how people look at her strange when she says she stays at home with her kids.

Aren’t we both finding our way in this life?

One family.

People always ask me if I’m dating, but they never ask…

They never just ask.

How is your wonderful, difficult, complicated life this week?

I watch the way she lives: wanting to date, but happy to not. To think I almost tried to “fix” her.

Do we keep missing out because we see a single person as a problem to be solved?

Was Jesus?

 

I rub sleep out of my eyes on a Thursday morning, but I can’t rub away the sick feeling that he hasn’t texted me back.

I pick up my phone to ask them to pray for me and put it down again. Pain is particular, specific, personal. How do you put your pain in words that mean the same to you as to them? We’re often fighting foggy definitions.

She asks me about being an adult, but I don’t tell her that being an adult means it’s easy to be unknown. And that it feels better to be unknown than misunderstood.

The world is big. Full of people slipping past the other’s point of view.

She looks at me from the driver’s seat and smiles. “You must get a lot of flack from everyone. You’re a livestock farmer, you’re religious and you hunt.”

I laugh. I also work for a pesticide company, but she doesn’t mention that. It feels good for someone to understand the misunderstood.

She asks me about being an adult, but I don’t tell her how, at the end of the day, I can come home to an empty house and a soul full of hope in the One whose family didn’t “get” him, who’s friends fled at signs of trouble, and who cried on the cross, “‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46).

Hope in the One who endured for me.

Misunderstood.

Hope in the One who understands.

 

“Good job at saying no.” She sends the text with a winky face.

She’s onto me. I’ve started saying no to things. Because not every good thing is something good for me to do. And sometimes saying yes is like subtracting 10% of my energy from something else.

I go on the church website and scroll through role after role accepting serving applications. I sign up for one.

Half the time I don’t worry that I’m doing something I shouldn’t. I worry that I’m not doing something I should.

Always in the back of my head: What am I doing with this one beautiful life?

She talks about turning 40 and how “there must, there must be more than this”. I’m a Christian. I know there is.

But sometimes I live like I don’t.

I hear her pause on the other end of the line. “Our human actions are just so much more limited than simply asking God to do it instead.”

I wander down the sidewalk in the early morning light. Like Moses, I remove my sandals in the presence of Holiness.

I don’t bother wondering if five minutes is enough. I just pray fervently.

I go home, take a shower and start my unremarkable day.

What am I going to do with this one beautiful life?

Perhaps the greater choice is not about the things I should do. It’s to start filling the things I do with prayer.

To fill the unremarkable days with purpose.

 

I point out a groundhog. She spots a cardinal.

We’ve been sipping punch in crowds all day and I’m wondering how I can get through the weekend. Thinking of the way he squeezed my shoulders outside the palliative care unit, the unopened letter I left beside her bed. How can you explain what someone means to you in 500 words? The dent in their car and my bank account. The way his heart just stopped—and can I bring a casserole? The texts lighting up my phone “guys can you pray guys can you pray please pray if you could just pray for me”.

We step onto the edge of a clearing. We search for the eggs of a killdeer.

“What’s that verse?” I ask her. “The one about the birds.”

“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…consider the lilies of the field,” she knows Matthew 6 by heart. “If God so clothes the grass of the field…will he not much more clothe you?”

It’s silent between us then. “Look,” she says, “is that a crane?” We watch a blue heron overhead.

I consider the birds.

“Should we head back.” It’s not a question.

“I’d rather stay here.”

We dread the bits of conversation-making over the tops of wine glasses. And what if someone tells us something else our hearts can’t handle.

I consider this.

We put on our heels, but there’s still dirt between our toes. And that’s enough.

We meet her on the way back, sitting on a park bench. And we gather around her, our prayers causing the heaviness to lift and washing our mascara away.

Before we head back into the crowd and the lights and the heavy sound of the bass on the dance floor, I pause and hide a bit of the quiet in my heart.

I pause and consider the birds and the way their song sounds in the silence of a clearing.

 

“I expect at least one piece of sad news a week now that I’m an adult,” I text her. I mean it as a joke.

But then I count back the weeks–and no one’s laughing.

I sit at home on Friday, voiceless, sipping honey lemon tea. And praying. Praying because it was one of those texts that knocks the wind out of you.

Words? They’re deleted as soon as they’re typed. Silenced as soon as they’re thought.

What do you say when she sends a picture of her twenty-week old baby cradled in her husband’s hands?

We were seventeen together once. Me and her. We had all the answers then.

I can’t even call her because my swollen vocal cords are bigger than the lump in my throat.

Growing up is like that. It’s made me mute, taken all my answers away.

And yet. I do not want to be seventeen again. Full of answers. Devoid of faith.

I linger over this paragraph in a book I read the day after, how faith is really just thinking.

Thinking Truth.

I bump into strangers walking down the path beneath the cherry blossoms with her. “I am so happy with this time of life.”

Grown up and helpless. Without a plaque-on-the-kitchen-wall-scripture verse.

Emptied of words. He fills the space with His.

Mute. Without answers. He speaks.

And in the silence, in that pause over the phone, it’s Truth that fills the gap.

“The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever.” Psalm 119:160

I stand at the front of the church and watch her take the first step down the aisle, hanging on her Dad’s arm.

Like I watched her on the night she missed her bus stop and lost her luggage, how her eyes still sparkled as we licked ice cream under the street lights afterward.

Her radiance is not cliché. It springs from deep contentment born out of a thousand ordinary moments. It plays at the corners of her mouth like a well-kept secret.

Her groom must know it too by the way he wipes his eyes.

I blink like mad.

When I want to know if the gospel works, I watch my friends.

Because friendship is more than the blessing of community, it’s the evidence of sanctification.

Like the girl at the piano, playing the processional for the bride. The way she looks upward whenever she plays. Because–isn’t that the posture in which she prays?

And the girl who stands beside me holding a bouquet, who let the Truth come in and break down her walls. And I watched them crumble.

Like I watch her now, walk down the aisle.

I wipe my eyes. Because I’ve seen the way she walks throughout the week.

And it’s full of radiance too.

“In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace.” Colossians 1:6

 

“I’m getting soo old,” I lean against the kitchen counter on a Monday and complain to her.

It’s often Mondays that make me angry at the way Time steals joyful moments, steals the quiet solitude of the weekend away.

It was just months ago I remember that cool granite countertop against my wet cheeks. My shoulders shaking uncontrollably. And her knuckles rubbing back and forth across my back.

And then that was yesterday.

And then it’s six months later and I wake up and–. Remember that consuming ache?

I live a day and I don’t think about it at all.

It comes back again, but the sharpness is worn away.

She told me it would be like this. I thought she was just saying words.

But Time sews up the seams of the heart. And every passing month puts miles of distance between me and my aching soul.

And then it’s a word on the tip of my tongue.

And I wake up on a Monday, thankful that the Watchmaker sets the watch to move forward.

That getting old is just His gracious push toward the end of the end of joyful moments.

That He numbers the days of sorrow.

And sorrow and delight turn grey and die away with the seasons.

“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Psalm 30:5