On Tenderness Being Born

There are just two kinds of tender.

The first: spring green pressing through earth, tender shoot of new life. It is the soft mush of newborn feet, uncallused, so vulnerable. Or the essence of old love letters, penned before routine and distraction and mortgage payments made commitment an act of love, when it was all flowed sweet and wild and effortless, all the time. New life is always tender.

The second tenderness is a birth story too, but one of the soul. It requires, like spring crocuses and newborn life, a passage through dark soil, a labor through perilous birth canal, but here the contractions and dark dirt that precede tenderness come in all forms: grief and disappointment, brokenness and discipline. Like a meat mallet tenderizing tough flesh, the pain of loss makes its mark, and we press into the darkness, right through it to the light, and when we emerge we are not what we once were.

And we must press through pain, right into it, if we are to emerge. The hiding and distracting, the numbing and the sugar coating and the easy answers – they leave us right there in the dark unborn. When our hearts cry “no more” and the way to the light is not clear, but we keep moving forward – keeping hope that light will come, and when we whisper it to each other in the darkest nights, and keep vigil with the slightest hope that morning must dawn – our hearts grow tender unseen.

So press on, dear friend. Press on.

Yes, linking up this Friday with Lisa-Jo and the community over at the Gypsy Mama, who invites me & you to write for five unedited minutes:
“For fun, for love of the sound of words, for play, for delight, for joy and celebration at the art of communication. For only five short, bold, beautiful minutes. Unscripted and unedited. We just write without worrying if it’s just right or not.” -Lisa-Jo
This week’s word: TENDER.

On Vivid Colors Bleeding & Love Painted Here

Sometimes life bleeds vivid, and there are no words to write: just tears and quiet and being held. And some grief we walk through out loud, and sometimes heartache requires cocoons of silence, and let me tell you, sister, that is just fine too.
And life is a mess – all this beauty and pain running together. And the water, all alive, it makes this paint so unpredictable.  Sometimes I downright prefer the rigidity of pencils and ink – something that won’t bleed and run wild in all the places I’ve meticulously sketched out. There are days I long to abandon color altogether, and just cling white knuckled to neat lines and even control.
But even when I give up and walk away from the brushes strewn across the dining room table and the color seeping right through my best attempts to just hold it together, I find I cannot escape: this flaming red, her deep blues, that kissable pink.
The fresh fallen white light out here burns my dim-glassed eyes, and these colors etch deep into my heart. Life is teeming, even in loss, and all pain is anchored by joy, and these gifts keep this beating heart anchored in the love.
So I scrawl it out, and I let color seep off the brush and onto blank pages, pigment filling in empty. Late in the day, sun streams in, unexpected, lighting up color and casting glints of hope across my page. And when dark falls and vivid colors fall silent, I close my eyes, and exhale the ache, making space to just breath in the grace of it all.

Counting gifts today… Join us here?
– a weekend with extra hours of sleep
– the gift of paint, therapy for my soul
– first big snow and wide-eyed wonder
– getting to know new friends & the sweetness of old ones
– cookie dough in the fridge
– old hymns and quiet sanctuaries
– oatmeal
– good friends who are neighbors
– a new book
– out of the blue phone calls

Life Uprooted, Hope Planted.

March is ending, and in my mind’s eye, I see clods of grass and earth clinging to black heels: life uprooted, torn right out, my soles aerating the lawn stretching from the car to her graveside.

A year’s passed since we buried my sister, a year since the unexpected loss that came in the midst of all our calculated transitions.  And my heart has ached and I have come to the end of myself this year.  I have wept, shaken my fist at heaven, appalled at the lack of redemption, even while it germinated in my own faithless heart.

In her death, she gave me the gift of discovering the dark places of my heart; the shock and finality of her slipping into eternity – and my inability to cope – exposing all my people pleasing, judging, guilt-driven motives, and pulling me, driving me, compelling me towards home.  Home.

And, yes, I have moved back home this year, our calculated transition, despite all my life’s longing and pursuit of moving far and away.  I have come back. And I have said the submissive yes on the outside, and kicked and screamed silent within, fearing the death of dreams, all the while living the reality of disappointment – mostly with myself.  I have had to come home to learn again, always, again and again, that my home, my dwelling has little to do with location and much to do with belonging.

He is my home: to abide, to dwell, to know His very presence and be satisfied in Him. This is not a new idea to me.  These are revelations I have heard and believed, truths I have spoken and taught, planted in others’ lives. I can recall with clarity the day He whispered it straight to my heart: You were made to be the woman at the foot of the cross.

But as grief has exposed my deep disbelief, and stillness has brought light to brokenness, I am rediscovering a foundation firmer than my own fabrications, a stillness sweeter than my own striving. I’ve seen the dark, ugly of this heart, and am learning to breath easy, discovering I am loved, deeply loved, in spite of it (because, really, the only one I was ever hiding it from was myself). No hiding, no impressing necessary: my life, lost in Christ.

So March comes to a close, and as the seasons change, I mark a year gone by.  I prepare to prune and uproot, plant and wait in preparation for new growth outside, and inside I am quieted and grateful, humbled by the slow, steady redemption budding here. I am home.

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I’m grateful for Ann’s words, compelling me to write and to risk, and for the many women in my life (past, present and future), like those of SheSpeaks, connecting the hearts of women to the heart of our Father God, and urging me to do the same: a broken vessel, glory, I pray, spilling out. I count it joy to sojourn with you. Thank you.

On Falling Leaves and Pressing On

I spent the day off the beaten trail with my little adventurers. It was spontaneous, unplanned, and absolutely what I needed.
Fall has always been my favorite season.  But this year has been different.  I will never cease to be amazed at the way things in the natural world around us are wired and created to give visual clues and methodology and language to the reality of our experience. In the last few weeks, as life has begun to settle down and routines have begun to form, I find I’m confronted with the grief that has lingered these last few months since the whirlwind of our spring: primarily the death of my sister and our moving away (albeit not far) from the community we’d established for most of our marriage back here to my hometown.

Seeing fall, experiencing the slow decent, the unabashed beauty that preceeds what will inevitably be cold and harsh and devoid of visible growth, has served as a little whisper in my ear, reminding me to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep hope alive. In the change of seasons, the death of dreams, even the most searing losses, there is always hope. Winter always follows fall, but spring always follows winter. Summer lingers beyond that. And fall will come again.I once heard a man who had traveled a little farther down life’s journey say that if he could do one thing differently in his youth, he would have pushed into the pain and the trials and grief, rather than expend all his energy working to avoid it.  With the help of some amazing listeners, and the rich, deep grace that seeps in to my life again and again, even when I least expect it, and when, for sure, I am undeserving, I am pressing in.

I am holding out hope that Jesus, who came to bind up the brokenhearted, to give freedom and bring light to the darkest corners of our world and of my heart, to comfort and provide for those who grieve, will shape me into an oak of righteousness (Isaiah 61),  that His life will be more evident in me because of these losses.  That the fear and mistrust and control that the loss exposes in me would be changed by His love, and made into something beautiful. I am hoping.