Category: Uncategorized (Page 6 of 71)

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.

I’ve been reading a lot about being minimal; in diet, possessions, technology,  mind set.  What do I really want, really need that adds the most value to my life?   It’s quite personal, the answers to those.  My body, my thoughts, my emotions nudge me to pay close attention these days.  The future doesn’t seem endless like it used to.  I’ve gone past my “hunting and gathering” days and I find myself shedding what has hung off like barnacles.  I wonder how I’d have chosen differently, had I thought to ask this question more urgently in my younger years.  I throw even that  off, though, and walk on.  I don’t have time to harness myself.

I live in a 150+ year old house, the rooms built all in a row.  I’ve created sort of a first floor “attic” in my living room, where the shedding has begun.  I’ve piles of books, trinkets, and furniture that seemed like a good idea at the time.  They’re in there together now, mingling  like a roomful of old men smoking cigars and slapping each other’s backs, reminiscing.  I’ll wait for spring to set them out on my front lawn and invite others to peruse.  I’ve pushed and scraped things into place, emptied out shelves and drawers.  I start to feel differently.  The tether to things is loosening.  It is easier to let go than I thought.

I got up this morning, and sat in company with my coffee.  I have right now.  What shall I do with it?   It’s these thoughts that often bind me up.  I can’t think of anything that seems important enough, big enough to matter.  I’m reading The Oregon Trail, A New American Journey by Rinker Buck.  A desire bigger than a dream pushed him into action and he and his brother recreated the trek that so many other brave and deliciously reckless souls before us saddled up for.  I picture them in my mind; nameless, faceless, lost to anyone’s history, doing every day chores, thinking every day thoughts.  And one choice at a time formed a life lived.  Whether I know about it, whether anyone remembers?  It mattered then.  It matters now.  And I decide to lay my fretful notions of grandiose in the same room with the old men relics.

I decide to decide, one choice at a time.  I grab my camera and go for a walk.  Outside fills my lungs and my mind with oxygen.  My world becomes bigger, bigger than me, and there’s room for joy and bird songs and the beautiful in the every day and I take notice and snap it quick so I can remind myself.  I wonder what the Oregon Trail “ghost” people would have left behind, had they had cameras.  I wonder if they would have thought we’d have cared.

I pay attention to the colors and sounds around me, I notice the smallness and the big, in equal measure.  It all weaves together, color blocks, life quilt.  I take my fullness home and make more choices, small decisions.  I read to my girl and stop to look up things we wonder about to find answers.  We gather up Christmas gift cards and go to hunt some tennis shoes for walking, shoes I could not afford, save the blessing from a friend.  I need these shoes.  My feet are beginning to feel age and wear that younger years betrayed me into thinking would never happen to me.  The pain, though, reminds me.  Nothing taken for granted, nothing too small to be grateful for.  I slip into my new kicks and wear them the rest of the day, floating on a cloud of relief.  It is good to be loved, to receive, to feel the ripple of kindness with each step I take.

The girl and I make lunch together, all chopped onions and spices and we pile our plates high and look across the table from one another.  Time spent eating, simple acts.  “I love this day, mama.”   My heart warms to her words.  We’ll forget this particular lunch, this particular moment.  There will be more of them.  But this choice to sit and savor?  A good one.  I wash up the dishes clean and leave them to dry.  We walk to the feed store down the street, the Mayberry flavor that makes you look to see if Aunt Bea or Sheriff Taylor is just behind you.  We gather up suet cakes and cages to go with them and take them back home to hang on our Christmas tree, now relocated to the back yard, to give it new purpose, a new kind of living.

The day is ending now, the “doing things” part of it, and I find myself feeling on purpose.  Intentional.  And I decide I’ve found my word for the rest of this year.  I will look for the value in what I am doing, saying, thinking, reading, eating……how I consume the currency of my time.  I will live on purpose, content with the lack of grandiose, and take the next step.  I will decide to live to enrich and be enriched.

I will walk without barnacles.