Author: Tamara Belanger (Page 8 of 73)

The girl and I had planned for months to go back to Tennessee.  It hugged us close the last time we were there and we needed to feel it again.  I drove in the quiet of the morning and captured quick my view as it disappeared behind me.  The girl turned on The Great British Baking Show that she’d downloaded onto our tablet the night before and it lulled peaceful in our little car.  It was warm that morning but we’d brought a blanket and worn our sweat pants, each of us, because the cabin of our car filled with a cold, frosty wind pouring through the vents and neither of us wanted to turn it warmer.  We’d just been graced a new car the week before by people that loved us and people who didn’t even know us, a car with the luxury of air conditioning that we hadn’t had the past three summers before this and we just couldn’t quite get over it.  So we bundled up and looked at one another and laughed….being cold was a probem we didn’t want to fix just then.

Just past Louisville we felt hungry.  I saw the heralding signs on the highway.  “Denny’s ahead.  I used to work there when I was just about your age.”  The girl wanted to stop and it turned out, Denny’s had dressed itself up as a 50’s diner, all silver like a train car on the outside and black and white checkered floor.  She wanted a diner version of a cup of coffee, in a glass mug, no fancy syrups or talls that were smalls.  We shuffled in with our hair a mess, no make up on, still wearing what we’d slept in.  Didn’t matter; we were together writing adventures on our hearts.

With scrambled eggs and biscuits and gravy devoured right off the plate clean, we tucked ourselves back in our ride and headed south.  “Check in any time!  The place is ready for you!”  My phone dinged the message and made me want to drive a little faster.  We’d stayed here before, this cabin on 92 acres of Tennessee heaven, and felt a kinship with the owners and a sense of finding a secret that belonged only to us.   When we pulled into the driveway two hours later my girl breathed in and looked at me.  “It feels like we’re home.”   Our hands and our hearts unpacked and we sat on the porch just to listen.

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/16530197

I breathed in thank yous and breathed out praise.  Just a few days ago, it looked like we wouldn’t be able to get here.  No car, not enough money to buy one.  I’d decided to cancel these plans long held to get our money back and into our hands, clutched with a panic.  “No, mama.  Wait to see what God does.”  The tears welled up humble.  He’d wanted us here.  My girl had taught me to sit still and watch Him.

Up the road is a tiny little ramshackle looking diner with a big God story.  A woman named Marcy Jo had always wanted to have a diner and her brother and his wife saw this little place for sale just down the road from their farm.  So they bought it and dusted it off with love and there’s no place on earth you can get cinnamon rolls or fried catfish dinners quite like them.

We walked in the door four months almost to the day that we’d been there last.  Rachel had waited on us then and she met us at the door this time with the look that recognizes old friends.  “Hey!  I remember ya’ll!”  She asked us what we wanted and I told her to surprise us.  Without hesitation, she wrote up the order and whisked herself off to the kitchen, and minutes later brought us plates of goodness that tasted like grandmother’s cooking.  It was close to closing time and she lingered at our table and we talked about life and what she wants out of it.  I left with two pieces of cake for my birthday, compliments of Rachel.  She’s a friend now and we’ll think of her and whisper her name to the Maker of stories.

https://www.marcyjos.com/

We went back that evening to the cabin and turned down the a/c and pulled up the covers and planned our next day’s adventures.  I slipped out quiet to the front porch while the girl read and let the cicadas in the trees sing to me as the last light disappeared.  “Thank you, Father, for this.  For all of this.”

The rest of the week was filled with unexpected finds like a scavenger hunt.  Franklin Theater was having an afternoon showing of American Graffitti on the big screen and we bought tickets right then and there and I introduced my girl to a memory from my high school days.  I felt a certain wispiness watching the familiar images.  We traced the back roads to Leiper’s Fork and sat in Puckett’s Grocery and ate fried bologna sandwiches, the meat cut thick and charred.  We bought little bags of herbs and essential oils and trinkets for those back home to let them know we took them with us in our hearts.

http://www.puckettsofleipersfork.com/

It came up quickly, the storm on Saturday late afternoon, a warm and heavy rain, and we ducked into Merridee’s Breadbasket and shook off the wetness in the cozy room with the wooden floors that creak under foot and baskets hanging over our heads.  We found a corner table and sat with our soup and sandwiches and read our books that we always carry with us, whichever one we are in the middle of, and the thunder serenaded us.  After it let up and the steam rose from the muggy, hot streets we grabbed our things and headed back to the cabin for a quiet night, our last night here.  I snapped a picture of the overall clad sign painter as we left.  It made me feel like a part of the fabric of this little town to watch him.  Signs being painted, bread being baked, families sitting around tables, life stories being lived out.

Sunday dawned foggy and thick.  We headed to Marcy Jo’s for a final meal before church and heading back home.   We’d worshipped at Crosscountry Cowboy Church last time we were in town and we drove into the parking lot and picked a spot; a man on horseback keeping watch over the cars.  That same feeling of finding home washed over us and we stepped inside.  We sat in the same seat we had before, like you do when you’ve been going to the same church for a long time.  Everyone knows where each other sits and our seats seem to have been waiting on us since last time.  The pastor’s wife had become my Facebook friend and she recognized me from my picture and greeted us with a hug, her soft southern drawl sounding like welcoming grace.  This church was more of a bigger picture than anyone had ever bargained for just two years ago.  A husband and wife had purchased the farm, the same ones who helped start Marcy Jo’s.  They wanted a place to raise their family and sing their songs and stay near home. They built a barn they could perform in and dreamed of growing old together and being buried out by the big trees in the field.    Along the way, the young wife got sick and and with a trembling heart and aching held out hands they looked up and gave it to God.  She went to heaven and her husband stayed here, still looking up.

Today?  The farm is still where he lives, he and his little girl.  And the barn has become a church.  And God has written a story there that no one saw coming.  It has been baptized with tears and the doors opened up for others to share in it.  My girl and I took in the songs being sung that morning that reminded us of the unexpected turns of our own story, of the goodness found in all of them.  “God writes good stories,” sang the author of the song that day, “and He always has.

https://www.facebook.com/CrossCountryChurch/videos/1548648395197965/

(begin at 8:40)

We stood out front on the church porch after the service and gathered around a simple, clean cow trough as people stepped in and dunked under the water to wash away a past and grab hold of the Truth.  My girl leaned in and whispered how much she liked it here.  I was glad that her faith had kept me from losing mine; that we had made the trip after all.  We got in our car and drove down the street and stopped one more time at the diner to grab a cold tea to take with us for the ride home.  Rachel poured it for us and saw us off at the door.  “Ya’ll drive safe and come back!”

God does indeed write good stories.  And He always has.

Two years ago, at this same time of year, I found myself with a terminally ill car and not enough resources to get another one of any better quality.  It wasn’t that I didn’t save my money.  It wasn’t that I didn’t live within my means.  It’s just that my savings and my means didn’t add up to much for a hit this big.    I required serious rescue of the air lift kind.  Friends, a term not near enough big to describe them, found me a car and wrote me a check and I had a “new” ride.  I was beyond grateful.  Five days later, to all of our dismay, I found myself broken down on the side of the road on the Fourth of July.  I’d been sold a lemon.  The man who took my money was enjoying a vacation in Florida with the spoils and wouldn’t answer my calls for days.  My friends, already having rescued me above and beyond, loaned me one of their cars while we figured out what to do.  And all the while, my heart looked up and I whispered aloud…”You’re a good, good Father.”  I was determined to trust Him no matter what.  The no matter what part was beginning to stretch me.

I finally got the money back, after finding my big girl voice and asserting it all shakey and tinny sounding in my ears; there is no time like car trouble to make my single woman status feel like a cold wind blowing lonely.  Take the money, my friends said.  You will need it.  See, the week before my car died, I’d taken ahold of what seemed like a wild dream and enrolled my girl in a private school.  “Trust Me.  That’s where I want her,” I kept hearing.  But God.  That’s impossible.  “Yes.  I know.”  But God……I say that a lot…..I have to buy a car.  “Yes I know.”  He says that a lot.  So, we waited to “hear” what to do next.  “Girl,” one of my friends said on the other end of the phone the next day.  “I had a dream about you in a cream colored car.  I’m believing for you!”

Day two aboard the waiting train dawned bright and clear.  My girl was sleeping in.  It was a Saturday.  “Will you be at home this morning?”, my phone dinged with the message.  “Yes?”, I replied with a question mark in my mind.  I hadn’t seen these people in two years.  They lived just a few miles away but life and work and busy makes a few miles feel like another state.  They’d be there soon, they said, and I scurried to vaccume and look prepared.  Within the hour they sat on my couch holding a piece of paper, clearly there for a reason.  Their girl was going away to college and they wanted to get her a new car.  They placed a key in my hand.  It’s not much but we want you to have her old car.  For a split second I couldn’t hear their voices, like the stop action in a movie when the main character keeps moving and everything around him freezes?  Is this real?  Did I hear them right?   It wasn’t a cream colored car but…..it was a car! I stood on the porch and watched them pull away as I waved. It was then that a thought blew quiet in my mind.  I now have a car and the extra money to put my girl in her school.  They moved to Florida weeks later and I’ve not seen them again after that day; two people who did a good turn with no expectation.

Two years go by.  It’s 4th of July week, 2017.  A few weeks prior, I’d had significant work done on my car to keep it healthy.  However, it had an underlying condition that had gone undetected and I waited nervously at work to get the call from the mechanic on it’s diagnosis.  “You should probably look for another vehicle,” I heard in my ear and I hung up the phone and cried.  I’d just drained much of my bank account.  I drove myself home that night in a borrowed car,  too tired to think about a solution, too worried to stop thinking.  My prayer that night was one word.  “God?”  I began another ride on the waiting train.

“Please don’t be upset with us,” read the message. ” We want to do this for you.”  My work friends had set up a funding account on my behalf.  I was struck by the joy it brought everyone to see the account filling up, the excited messages I got from people checking to watch the amount rise!   In three days time, a car was found and fully funded by friends in my town, friends from back in Illinois from high school that I haven’t seen in years and people whose names I did not even know.  I pulled into the driveway of the pastor who was selling the car.    Do you mind if I pray over the car for you, he asked, before I drove away.  He gently laid his hand on the car…”Father, let this car serve her long and well.”

I sat on my porch swing that night reading the words in Walking to Listen by Andrew Forsthoefel, a young man who felt listening to each other was a lost virtue and he aimed to find a way.  So, he strapped a “Walking to Listen” sign on his back pack and trekked from Pennsylvania to California with a tape recorder and a shakey, open heart to hear.  At the end of his journey, as he prepared to walk onto the beach near Half Moon Bay, he looked up to see a large group of people waiting for him, many of them he’d met and/or stayed with along the way.  He was washed over with emotion.

“The people were like my footsteps; every one of them was necessary.  Each contributed to the movement.  We were inextricably bound together, giving and receiving, speaking and listening, seeing and being seen.  We were all walking, side by side.  We were the walk itself, all of us, every one.  What a way to walk, for us.  What a way to live, to live for others, experiencing light and dark and every shade in between so that the experiences might be an offering for someone else someday, so that my life might serve something greater than just myself.”

I know just how he felt.  Oh.  And the dream my friend had two years ago?  My car is cream colored.

“Forgive the song that falls so low, beneath the gratitude I owe.” – unknown old hymn

I sat in church yesterday and let the words of the songs run down my heart, the parts that felt raw like salt in a carpet burn.  I held the bread and juice of the communion in my hands and felt like the beggar at the tableside.    I’m just back from visiting my daughter and her beautiful family this weekend.  They are carving out, so intentionally, the landscape of their lives. The little girl she was, the lover of nature and beauty, the feeler of feelings deep, has become a keeper of her own home and it reflects those little girl lost qualities.  It’s lovely and gentle and strong and good and it warms me to see the good seeds being planted.

I gave her, early on, the job of decorating the table for family celebrations.  From my seat in Panera Bread, where I’m typing these words, I can see her run for the door in the theatre of my mind,  returning with hands full of pine cones and flowers and weave them  in with bits of lace or things found around the house that she found beautiful.   She still does that.  I walked past a vase where she’d kept a sprig of their first full sized Christmas tree from this year.  That is so like her to think of that.

I watch her with her own little girl now and I am transfixed.  She chooses toys, wooden and purposeful and lovely in their own right.  She reads her a bible story each day while Bea plays around her on the floor.  She makes oatmeal paint colored with natural food dye and lets her paint in the bathtub.  She feeds her good, whole food and makes most everything from her own hand.  She is a marvel to me.   So, it astounds me that I could have wounded her so deeply from my own hand.  The divorce, and my own subsequent slide off the track for a few years, cut her heart up in pieces.  Her pain comes out in quick, sharp comments from time to time; memories she carries.  She doesn’t mean to hurt.  I know that about her; but I  feel myself quietly implode when her scars become verbal.

It’s a difficult thing, sitting beside the scene of my own crime.  I can feel the bumpy parts where the scars grew on the  skin of her heart, see the lingering distrust in her eyes.  It’d hard for her, I’m thinking, to see me love her girl and remember the shots I fired into her world when she was a girl and not want to make me pay still.  It feels heavy in my gut those times when I want to explain but can’t craft anything to say that changes anything.

So, I sat listening to my pastor remind us that the Holy Spirit is about the business of eliminating barriers that keep people from hearing the truth.  I lock back tears as I stab at lies screaming at me and force open my clenched up chest to let Him breathe His truth to me.  I am forgiven.  I can allow myself to be forgiven.  I will look on the horizon for His freedom and freely take the bread and the cup offered to me.  And take up the basin and towel to wash the feet of my daughter.