Author: Tamara Belanger (Page 13 of 75)

“Silence is your only claim to wisdom” – Job 13, The Message

Sometimes I have days, chunks of them, when the words in my mind go quiet, almost by command; outside of my own will.  I sit on my lily pad like a wide mouthed frog and occasionally feel a welled up thought rise in my throat and I burp it out, lick my lips and settle myself, shifting to and fro, back onto my lily seat and look around quietly at the world.  And then?  And then there are times when the words have formed a league and bang insistently on the door to be written out.  I can always hear their footsteps before they knock.  I began this piece at 11:15 this morning, sitting in my car in a graveyard.  I felt Him urging me to write, I could feel the “message” forming like an egg that’s being fried in a pan, the white morphing from the clear goo when it’s first cracked.  I shoved my hand blindly in my purse and fished for what felt like pen and paper and wrote out this paragraph on the back of a church bulletin.  And then I got here.  And stopped.  “Wait.  Be silent.”  How odd that I would pulse out words, glad to have my “voice” back and then……come to the end of a sentence and have no idea where to go next.  So.  I got out of my car and walked towards this bench and took up it’s offer and sat.  “Be silent.”

A few days ago, I was worried about my yard.  It’s growing time and with my one boy gone far to South Africa, my other scaling Montana’s mountains and my one here working full time, I felt that creepy uppy thing that gets me most in the middle of the night start in.  I couldn’t sleep because my grass was waving like a prairie, my lawnmower doesn’t work, I have no extra cash to pay for it and no idea what to do about any of it.  Those little things that make a woman alone feel most definitely alone and eat at my peace like little mice.  So, I told God my dilemma.  Two days later I came home to a tiny yellow post it on my door.  “If you need help with your yard or getting your mower started, I can help.”  There was a phone number and a mans’ name.  “Ok.  But God.  Remember?  I don’t have money for this.  And besides.  Who is this man??”  So I ignored it.

Last  night I fell asleep early on my couch.  My girl sat quiet watching a movie when the post it note man showed up.  “Tell your mom I used to cut the grass for the man who lived here for years.  She doesn’t have to worry about paying me.  I just thought she might need help.”  So I called him tonight and told him my story.  Told him that I’d taken it right to my Father, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and asked Him to show me what to do.  “I’m a Christian,” says post it note man.  “I was driving by your house and noticing your grass growing and kept feeling like I was supposed to stop and offer to help.  My pastors’ kids go to your school.  I’ll be there tonight and get your grass taken care of.”

I’ve learned to keep company with being quiet.  Here lately I lean into the silence to listen.  It’s then I am learning wisdom.  It’s then I know better what to say when I speak.  I’ve come to tell you this.  He doesn’t have to show up?  But He always does.  If you’re watching for Him.  Sometimes He leaves His words on post it notes.

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.