Author: Tamara Belanger (Page 12 of 74)

I picture social media as people sitting at a banquet, a friends’ banquet…..and there’s a microphone being passed around.  It’s my turn…..testing…1, 2, 3….what to post as my status, what to snap with my camera for instagram…..what footprint to leave.  “Hello?  Is this thing on?  Yes?  It is?  Ok, the guys in the sound booth tell me the mic is hot.”  I stand up silent before the crowd and let my eyes rest on the crowd, and then on individuals; for longer than feels comfortable to me.  But I want to weigh in; to see and consider.  I do this in my head, of course, because my kitchen is too small for the 500 + list.  I scan through the names, the stories I know, the people I’d probably have never heard from again, save this platform.  It sits strong on my shoulders, the responsibility to speak real, to resist the urge to appear bigger than life, never faltering, teeth always white, breath always fresh, I’ve -got- this presenting.  Like so many prancing peacocks.

My mind asks itself……..so I’ve got the mic……what would I say if it was the last thing or the only thing I would have the chance to hear reverberate in the air?  Because the reality is, I don’t know if it will be or not.   I start to tap dance all wonky like before the crowd because I heard tell once in a song…”If I can make you laugh, I can make you like me.”  I do so want you to.  I like to make friends and keep them if I can.  I hate goodbyes and distance and endings and misunderstandings hollow in the heart.  I wince seeing people try to high five and miss and walk away bewildered, wondering what went wrong.   So I dance silly to make you smile while I figure out what to say.

This is a dog I used to know.  His eyes always captivated me when he’d come sit silent beside me in the grass while I watched the sun start to burn out for the evening..   Like he knew something.  Like he’d lost something he was wondering about and looking on the horizon for.  Waiting.  Watching.  It always reminded me of us.  We live longing.  Because whether we know it or not, we’re just passing through this place.  We can’t stay.  And the journey rolls like waves of sweet, scratchy, terrifying, placid.  There are the gift moments when everyone we think we’ll ever need is right beside us; a Christmas card snapshot.  There are times when no matter how loud the sound in the room, it’s a deafening silent scream of lonely.  When all is right in our world, there’s a nagging knowledge that it won’t last forever and it scares us a little; the anticipation of change.  But when it’s bad, there’s an unrelenting thread that sews itself into a hope fragment.

I’m suddenly aware that the crowd I’ve been speaking to sits motionless while I hold up my show and tell dog picture and patter on for awhile.  I stop and chew my lip and peer out steady.  I’ve gained my nerve and I don’t feel awkward.  Because I see the same hunger in them that I feel in me.  I stare at the mic in my hand and put it up to my mouth.  “I’ve come to say this.”  Silence.  Echo.  “We’re all bruised and broken.  Go easy on each other, if you can.  If you think you can’t,  if you feel like you want to throw stones, step aside to collect yourself and let your neighbor help you put the rock down.  Because the truth is we all need each other to remind each other to never give up.  And one more thing?  I know this will make some of you want to stop listening?  But the thing is, you are loved with an everlasting love and underneath you are the everlasting arms.  His name is God.  And He’s the reason to never give up. ”

I hear a squawk tinny and shrill.   In my uneasiness, my fear of saying the wrong thing, I thought if I put my mouth up real close to the mic I could hide behind it while I spoke.  That maybe you wouldn’t notice that I’m the biggest hypocrite around, telling you these things.  That I’ve thrown rocks, I’ve wrinkled my dress all up in my fists with unforgiveness welling up in me.  That sometimes I’m not kind and don’t feel kind and don’t wanna be kind.  A few times I’ve felt “better than” and cringed at my arrogance.  Sometimes I’ve actually gotten it right and then toasted myself at how great I’d acted.  Only to drop the glass in my lap.  Worse, though, is that I’m afraid you won’t believe me.

I clear my throat and look down at the mic in my hand.  “I’m gonna ask God to replace the haughty in my eyes with grace light.  To remind me the bill He paid for me, so that I can have the courage to cancel what I think you owe me.  I’m gonna rip the bloody bandage off of old wounds so they can breathe healing; loosen my hand on what I have hold of too tightly to stay my balance.  I’m going to show you my raggamuffin self, in the brightest of light, and tell you sure…….until you lay down for good?  Never give up.”

I pass the microphone on and start to sit down again.  But before I do?  I dance all wonky like…..just to be sure you’re smiling.

If I were a blade of grass on a spring morning, just right before Easter, I’d be this one.  I looked out my window early today and recognized myself and grabbed my beat up, cracked screen phone to go capture it.

I snapped several angles, all bent down in the wet grass and shivered cold in my jammies,  sweater over them quick so I wouldn’t miss the sun ray.  Hurry, I said to myself.  I have to go clean a house today.  No, I answered back to me.  I get to.  I told myself to be quiet, to stop tricking my mind into positive thinking, when I didn’t always feel so positive.  Be real.  Be real, I silently yelled at myself.   All the while, I’m snapping pictures of a single blade of grass, because, for some reason, I care about it.

I closed the door behind me, and went back into my kitchen and rewarmed my coffee for the too many timeth, and sat down to edit the picture.  As I did, I clicked on Instagram and there it was.  A picture.  Better than mine.  Much better.  Because I’m no photographer and I don’t have a real camera and who do I think I am posting anything at all?  For some reason, though, the blade of grass begged my attention and I pulled it up on my screen and stared at it hard.  It was the drop of dew that got to me.  It was the smile of God.  It was the mark His fingerprint had left on it; on me.  I decided to string words together and hang them up around the picture.  To decorate it with what He’d whispered to me.  Months have come and gone in my life; months of learning that to be not chosen by someone or for something?  Is to be hurt.  To be hurt?  Is to be alive.  To be alive?  Means purpose.  And I, in this sea of grass world, still have a dew drop on my head that He’s put there and His light has chosen me, to bounce off of me,  His reflection.  It’s not at the expense of others.  But for them, with them.  It’s a tiny lighthouse, giving me just enough light, the light I need for the moment to trust Him for the light I’ll need for the next moment.  And in the process, it creates a circle of light for the grass around me.

Today I will go to someone’s house and kneel to clean around their toilet because their legs don’t work so well anymore and they can’t.  I will shop for their groceries because I am able to do so without a walker.  I do it for pay so I am not a saint.  But I recognize His provision for me, His provision for them by layering our lives over one another.   I will come home and shower in clean water and put on something pretty and sit beside a young man and his family from school that have sown into me and my girl.  They invited us to come sing with them; to celebrate what’s been done for us.  To be reminded.  Afterwards, I will go to my school and dust off where invisible dirt has landed, vacuum up little moons of white paper that have fallen out of hold punchers all week.  I’ll take a walk with my girl in the park nearby.  Probably take another picture or two with my silly little phone.  Because He put that joy in me that notices His world.

And through it all, I will need to be reminded, to constantly be prodded, to not give up or give in.  Because I am so prone to wilt, to bruise, to gasp tired.  That’s why.  That is why this picture captured me.  Because sometimes that dew  is tears cried private and those rays warm my feet to take the next step.  That…it’s not all bad to be a single blade of grass at the base of a toilet.  It may be that’s exactly where He’s shining on me.

It’s been a whirlwind of a few weeks in our lives here in our small Kentucky town.  The girl has been in a school play; her first since we left homeschool land and came into private school world.  Lots of long days and longer nights practicing and perfecting.  The Music Man songs still rattle around in our brains.

Not only was my girl in the play?  But my dear friend in charge of directing decided to put me in charge of helping one of the  main characters with costume changes;  a young lady I’d only met briefly. I absolutely adored her! To say the least, when you’re standing just offstage, in the dark, with necklaces wrapped around your neck, hats on your head and billows of skirts and blouses to yank off and put back on in a minute’s time…….you get to know someone better….or at the least, you find yourself laughing over upside down skirts and you gesture wildly and whisper frantically in british accents to each other for no reason until you’re fairly sure your actor is appropriately dressed and you send her back onstage.  And when you have down time?  You get into a bit of mischief yourself.

I was worn pastey thin by the last of the five performances.  I sat and stared into space during the down time because I’d run clean out of personality.   I always notice, at times when you go behind the curtain, that you see the backside of life, the frayed threads.  There’s something sanitary about staying in the bleachers.  You don’t get germs that way and everyone is nicey nice.  When you actually venture close enough to finally pay attention to the man behind the curtain….that’s when things get dicey.  Turns out we get on each other’s nerves, we don’t all fold the towels the same way, we get tired and cranky and whispery behind backsies.  We rush by someone going slower.  We generally show ourselves fallible.  We love.  We just do it messy and outside the lines.  Sometimes we hurt without meaning to.  Sometimes we very much mean to.

So I crawled into bed at the end of that last night of the play, all full of theater analogies, tired beyond tired, rehearsing the day.  Tired makes the world bigger and I cried for no discernible reason; at least ones I couldn’t slap a label on;  except that I was tired and thinking about how fast life sneaks things in on you when you were busy clapping politely in the bleachers.   After the last of the costumes had been hung up and the doors slammed hollow with people leaving; the ending of something making me wince, I’d walked to my car, remembering what most of these young actors weren’t old enough to forget.  That things change irreversibly, sometimes when you don’t notice, until one day you look back and realize you’d done something for the last time and hadn’t known it would be.

I’d made a promise earlier that week to young boys at school that I’d come and watch them kick and tumble and score all the way down the field and back that night after the play.   It was their last indoor game, a rite of passage in their 12 year old soccer world for this season.  I walked toward the bleachers, the second set I’d seen that day,  and there I saw the back of someone I used to know, whose table I’d shared meals on,  whose couch I’d sat on and listened as tears fell.  The thing is, the last time?  I hadn’t known it would be; until time came in and went out tide like and one day I’d realized.  I found my place on the bleachers and didn’t speak.  Or look back.  Just forward, eyes locked on the field.  Jagged endings make the air feel strange and dissonant and you stay behind the curtain, not remembering your lines.  So you don’t say anything.

It lay on my heart heavy like a cold greasy egg this morning when I woke up.  I spit out bits and pieces to my friend; this script we’re sometimes handed in a language we can’t hardly read, the stage blocking making me resentful and edgy. I wanted things to be hard for this person whose back I’d stared at the night before.  I wanted plays to begin and not come to an ending that would change things forever.  I struggled to be all in the day and scrolled aimlessly through internet stories to distract myself.  Then I read this from a man who’d just lost his wife two weeks past.  He recalls the last few days.

“Joey gathered her family together around her and she said goodbye to each of them… to her mother and father and her three sisters.  There were lots of tears as she explained to each one how much she loved them and that she was going to be going home soon.  That her time here was done and she was going to go to sleep soon.  And then she asked me to bring our baby in.  And so… I set our little Indy on Joey’s lap and we all cried with my wife as she told her how much her mama loved her and, “…you be a big girl for your papa… and that mama will be watching over you”.  And then she pulled Indiana up and she kissed her.

One last kiss.”

I needed to forgive endings that come; forgive jagged edges and unapproved scripts.  I had to come to terms with backstage behavior and frayed life threads; to learn  how to shake hands with the man behind the curtain.  I needed to decide not to settle on bleacher seats just to stay comfortable when the play got messy.   I had to figure out a way to stop at backs turned and extend the far reach of grace.  The time is coming when it will be the last time unaware.  I don’t want to cringe.