Soft in the Middle

I found these words and re-read them today. I'm glad, because I needed to hear them again. I wrote them months ago, on ruled notebook paper, with a pencil, the really old-fashioned way. Sometimes when the need to write presses me, I want to press as well, to feel the words pushing their way onto the paper as I watch. Sometimes I lose the papers, or pile them up and forget them, or put them in a "need to copy" folder. That's what happened with this work, so I don't even remember how long ago I wrote it - a few months, maybe a year, not more than two years. Regardless, I wrote it to share, so here it is.

To love, one needs to be soft, but not weak.

I am soft in the middle, not hard, like a warrior, though I've seen my share of battle.

"Love," He said, "is the greatest of these things that abide."

I abide. I endure. I persevere.

I love.

And love is strong, but never harsh.

I am soft in the middle because I wear my love, my determined commitment to open-hearted service, like body armor. No, you don't see it, because you don't know how to look. I didn't see it, either, until God gave me eyes to see. With new eyes, I can look in the mirror unashamed, look straight at that too-soft body armor, and know the truth.

Every extra pound of softness I carry around is made of tears uncried, retribution unsought, anger unraged, disappointment unexpressed. I am wrapped in bruised feelings and half-broken dreams. I carry around the rubble left over from surrender.

God didn't order that, of course. He didn't require me to clean up the battlefield. Quite the opposite: He commanded me to rise up and walk, to come and follow Him. He even said NOT to clean up - "let the dead bury their dead" - but I was bound in the habits of nursing the wounded, sitting up with the dead, cherishing mementos of the lost. I myself felt lost and wounded. I did not see that He had given me new life. So tear by tear, ounce by ounce, pound by pound, I cherished my losses and piled them on to remember the fallen, keep the hope alive.

It's not alive, though. This soft wrapper I've formed to cloak myself is made of bits and pieces of stuff I let go so I could be who I was called to be. It's scraps of immature expectations and selfish goals and specious arguments. It's shards of jealousy and strife and contentiousness that I threw down, away from the person He was making me: the rubble of surrender, the dross of purification. There is no life in this, no hope, no safety.

Yet, like the grieving mother who cannot process the murder of her son, I could not let go of the body of death from which God had raised me. I clung to the very things I'd grown beyond - the right to be heard, the entitlement to recognition, the claim to the last word. I was not made to carry these; I was ordered to put them down. Still, I carried little remembrances, battle trophies, evidences to shore up my self-esteem. "See here what I've overcome?" "See how much I've given up?"

Gosh.

What pride I've had in worthlessness.

And what a weight to carry! Pounds and pounds of artifacts of no use to anyone, I hauled around with me . . . because, I guess, I never really put them down when asked, so I kept cramming more and more sorrow and anger into my already-full storage, covering them with the love I sought to give.

Spiritual struggle has a way of showing up in the physical realm. My body could not hide  what I thought my spirit could. Now that I'm seeing more clearly, I can see that my spirit never hid it, either. I can look at myself and see that I don't need all that junk in the mental closet, so I'm finally letting it go. It's not a fait accompli - it's a work in progress. I'm sure it will take a long time for my body to release all I've packed into it.

So, yes, I'm soft in the middle. I have been weak. But I'm relying on love, God's love instead of mine, to help me grow stronger.

Will you please remember this when you see someone soft in the middle - even if that someone is you?

Snow Moon

This moon is a whisper, sshh-ing over the shining face of the silent snow. Hold your breath or you won't see it. Breathe the chill air, you will feel it. This moon can see you; it sees me; it's a bright eye with a twinkle smiling at the night world.

Maybe it smiles because it sees its face here, reflecting back in whiteness the divine blessing of night light. Maybe it smiles because it sees me shining here, lifted by the transcendent beauty of winter night.

Maybe my heart's song brings the moon a smile, the childhood rhyme that comes to mind when I look up at night: I see the moon, and the moon sees me . . . 

Please do sing along. 

Rainbow Snow Day

Seated at the kitchen table, again and still. It's been two days of snow now, slowly but steadily increasing the white cover on the back lawn. I have trouble, on snow days, moving away from windows. This window is large, a bay, and my shepherd's crook birdfeeder is just outside, so needless to say I've spent a lot of time here in the last thirty-six hours. Part of the kitchen time has been taken with stirring up new batches of suet for my hungry guests. I've refilled the seed and suet feeders several times since the weather turned wintry.

All the indoor lights are off now, children tucked away to bed. I'm alone, husband working in the upstairs office some more. I left on the back porch light, and it makes sharp-lined shadows of the porch rails, a black grid on the smooth white lawn.

The day's been far from black and white, though. I've had Roy G. Biv at the birdfeeder! Red cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, red-winged blackbirds, and red spots on the downy woodpeckers. Orangey tummy on our little house wren, whose tail feathers somehow got shortened but who still flies in daily for a nosh at the feeder. Yellow underwings on magnolia warblers, a first for me; yellow dots on the white-throated sparrows' faces added to the show. Green winter plumage on the goldfinches and the tiny olive-toned ruby-crowned kinglets. The grackles found the feeder today, and they finished out the rainbow with their iridescent plumage, black shining blue, indigo, violet.

One spot in the yard is not white, and at first I was unhappy with the brown, wet place near the garden. Midday today I remembered that the birds need water on frozen days, and I'd started to plan a water station when I noticed a cardinal and a slate-colored junco sipping from the muddy spot. I guess I'd accidentally given them water already - the wet place is at the base of a composting pile of leaves. I'm sure the heat from decomposition was melting some of the snow and sleet, and the meltwater flowed to the low place I'm planning eventually to fill with the compost. For now, though, I'm glad I didn't finish the project yet, as my delay became a way of attracting and providing for my colorful, thirsty visitors.

Away from the kitchen window, I've watched a movie with the children, tried to make snowballs, helped make a snowman, made snow cream and three batches of cookies, dried a lot of snowy clothes, nursed a child's injured finger, and built a small fire in the fireplace. I guess I'll move away again and head to bed.

It's been a quiet and colorful, memorable day.

Fifteen Fahrenheit

I sat on the worn porch steps, alone in the peaceful dark of winter. The blue-black sky was pierced with stars, studded in the familiar patterns of the season, and the quarter moon floated silently, a white boat sailing westward through the night.

Not only the moon was silent. The world held its breath, too frozen to speak. I celebrated the cold, lifting my face to the moon's glow, closing my eyes, inhaling deeply, reaching with my spirit to take it all in. When I looked again, the cloud of my exhaling danced and dissolved before my eyes.

How can I explain the joy I felt as the chill settled into exposed skin and began working through my layers of clothing? Exhilaration, titillation, freedom, praise. 

I breathe in, I breathe out. The Spirit flows with me. His breath gives me life. The chill is His touch, reminding me I am alive. Life is beautiful.

The penetrating quiet fills me with wonder. As far as my hearing can reach, not a creature is stirring, not a branch creaking, not a leaf whispering to its neighbor. After the fierce winds of yesterday, this soundless landscape is a welcome relief, but there is more. Who is this God who can shake a world or make it still at His whim? He can shout in a tempest, call from the flames, but more often He waits for me to be quiet and listen in stillness. In smallness. In infinitesimal infinity. As I grow more and more aware of my smallness and His greatness, I feel more and more aware of His power in me, for me, through me. This is the wonder of the silent night - it is holy, full of His presence, even as my senses tell me it is empty and lifeless.

Thank you, Holy Father, for the boundless creativity of Your creation. Thank you tonight for cold, clear, dry, silent nights. Such nights as this remind me You are holy, wholly other, pure and lovely. Thank you that every place can be a sacred space when I pay attention to You. Alleluia! Amen.

I Just Want to Say

I guess I want to say today, this first day of a new year, that even when life doesn't make sense, I still believe in God.

I guess I want to write this down, mark this, that despite my lack of understanding, I believe God's understanding is greater than mine, and in His mind, my sometimes-confusing life makes perfect sense.

I guess I want to note that even when I can't figure out which way to go, I believe He watches over all my ways.

I want to remember that when I feel lost, He has no trouble finding me.

I want to proclaim that when disappointments and delays and disturbances come, singly or in massive walls that seem insurmountable, I am free to celebrate the joy of relationship with a God Who is able to work all things for good.

I guess I want to say today, this first day of a new year, that nothing, nothing at all, can separate us from God's love, His care, His watchfulness. I guess I sorta want to write it on my forehead, maybe backwards, so I'll read it in the mirror when I look to see how I'm doing. I kinda want to mark it on my forearms so I'll see and remember when my hands are busy working at tedious tasks. I think I want to turn it into a song so it will pop up randomly in my head and remind me of the truth sometimes when I'm slogging through and slipping into forgetfulness.

I guess that's a good enough start for a year. I just wanted to say it.

Another Taste of Moonshine

Smooth and round a day ago, the lemon gelato moon has begun to melt, flattening from the top downward, and its light is puddling in the mist surrounding its base.

December Moon

This sky is the color "midnight blue" from a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons with sharpener, and it's as featureless as the surface of that wax stylus when it was brand-new, shiny-smooth, as yet unmarked by fingernails or other crayons, still sharp and unbroken in its pristine wrapper with the neatly lettered, mysterious name. I wasn't allowed to stay up until midnight, of course, but this crayon, with its honest childhood smell, promised to show me what it would look like if I could see the sky at that late hour.

It isn't midnight now; it's barely dark, and the moon is just beginning its climb from the horizon into that smooth, flat, midnight blue sky. The moon is pale buttercream yellow tonight, but it isn't soft-edged like a frosted cupcake. Instead it is as sharply round as the circles an art teacher cuts from construction paper, circles I try in vain to copy with compass and tracing patterns and round-tipped scissors. The moon's edges are so sharp, in fact, that the sky looks as if some gigantic teacher has cut one of her perfect circles from it, and I can see through the dark into a world of light beyond, a world where  beautiful and warm and welcoming people are smiling and waiting to meet me, shining a light to show me the way in.

I think if I can get there, they won't even mind that my circles are a little pointy.