MAKING SPACE

When visiting one of my kids recently, my heart smiled to find this... 

...and this...

...lying about the house. Whether is it's playing music, painting, baking bread, writing, drawing, blending spices for smoked meat, sewing costumes, or designing farm plans, when I catch glimpses of my kids engaging in creative work, I feel like the world is a better place, like I can breathe a little deeper. When they are creating, they are reflecting something of the beauty and delightfulness of their Creator God.

One of my prayers for my (now adult) children is: "Lord, please give them space to create." I pray this because creative work requires time, thought, mental and physical energy, and the demands of life easily strangle creativity.

Life in this broken world is hard for every single one of us. It is exhausting. The demands on our time are never-ending. Whether you work 8-, 10-, or 12-hour days, there is always more that needs to be done, more that our consciences or our families or our employers or our churches tell us should be done.

If you have read this blog more than a few times, you have undoubtedly recognized a common theme to many of my posts: I. Am. Tired.

I run hard all day, then come home to pull in a different harness every evening. As I explained to my boss recently, "There is no quiet space in my life. Zero."

CAN WE PLEASE JUST TAKE A BREAK FROM ALL THE INCESSANT DEMANDS?!

One of the many things I miss deeply in all this work-work-work is space to write. It occurred to me recently: I pray regularly for God to give my children space for creative work. Why don't I pray the same prayer for myself?

And so I started praying for God to provide consistent space in my schedule for me to write. Through the very practical advice of my therapist LeCretia, God answered that prayer and gave me a tiny window in which to write: 9:45-10:30 every Sunday morning.

This small gift of time was enough to reignite the engines and get rusty gears turning again. But once the creative juices began flowing, I quickly realized that 45 minutes each week was not going to be enough.

"Lord, I need more time to write," I prayed.

Again, He answered: "Well, then, make time."

Make time. Yeah, right, like that is even possible. I've been banging my head against this one for a couple of months now.

I have a thick skull.

After months of head-banging, a new thought began growing inside my slow mind: perhaps what God is telling me is not so much "Make time" as "Trust me."

God gives me - and you - 24 hours each day, 168 hours each week. If God is telling me to "make time" to write (and if I don't have a time turner, like Hermione Granger), then He must be telling me to spend less time someplace else.

That means giving up something that I think is essential, 'cause I ain't got no free time at present. Whether it's giving up full-time work as a nurse (and the benefits that go with full-time employment) or giving up full-time responsibility for Mom-care, that thought terrifies me.

In fact, it seems downright impossible.

And so my prayer has morphed from "God, please give me time and space to write" - to - "Lord, please give me faith to trust you and courage to act."

Because I understand now that making space to write is going to demand a leap of faith.

SABBATH

Gary came and mowed the field around the house Friday. Saturday, he raked hay into windrows, and by evening he was rolling bales.

A newly mown and baled hayfield looks so neat and tidy. And it smells delicious, like freshly baked bread.

A dear friend gave me a porch swing as a house-warming gift when my family first moved into this house-in-the-hayfield. For almost 25 years, I have sat and swayed in this swing, watching the hay grow, the seasons change, the bustle of traffic on the highway and the ebb and flow of vehicles down the long gravel driveway that we share with the house next door.

This porch has witnessed a lot of laughter, music, tears, long conversations lasting deep into the night. It has absorbed two-and-a-half decades of popsicle drips, beer-bottle sweat, and dog slobber. It has hosted family dinners, church gatherings, weddings, graduation parties, and after-funeral pot-lucks.

Pheobes come back every year to nest atop the posts lining the porch. This morning as I sit here on the swing and write, mama bird eyes me warily while she warms her second clutch of eggs. This evening, a clever brown toad will hop up the front steps to feast on insects drawn to the light streaming from the kitchen windows, while a flat green tree frog will climb right up the windows themselves.

As I sit here and sway, sipping tea and listening to the birds and enjoying the morning breeze, it is strange and somehow deeply calming to think that I have traveled almost 25 laps around the sun while sitting in this very same spot.

* * * * *

In healthcare, we preach a lot - and are preached to a lot - about good nutrition, regular exercise, sleep hygiene, stress management. In nursing school, we were exhorted to be "good examples" of healthy lifestyle choices for our patients.

Yeah, right.

In January, determined to better in my pursuit of healthy lifestyle choices, I resolved to take at least a 15-minute break every workday to mentally and physically step away from work - maybe walk one lap around a local park, or just pull off the road, roll down the car windows, and admire the beauty of a lake - in an attempt to better mange job-related stress. Should be easy, right? Six months later, I can count on one hand the number of times I actually took that break.

I am doing better about packing healthy lunches and making fewer corn-dog-&-tots runs to Sonic, but I eat that healthy lunch on the fly, racing from one patient's home to the next. I am intentional about drinking more water, but I still drink way too much caffeine.

I actually like to exercise - and I absolutely love yoga - so you'd think regular exercise would be a fairly easy habit to maintain. But the yoga mat and gym clothes camped out in the back seat of my work vehicle haven't been touched in a month: they are held hostage by long days and never-ending demands.

BUT TODAY...

Today, I have a couple of hours of rest from the stress of work (provided the on-call alarm on my phone doesn't shriek) and from the demands of my household (only two more loads of laundry to finish and one bed that needs clean sheets).

Today, I am swaying in the porch swing (Thank you, Katherine!), bathed by a cool fresh breeze, listening to the sweet, sweet music of birdsong, inhaling deeply the smell of freshly baked bread.

* * * * *

Thank you, thank you, thank you for asking, Lahrue - your checking in means so much. It's been a rough several weeks, but I am fighting to come up for air.

BROKEN AND BEAUTIFUL

Out of curiosity this morning - I'll get to the reason later - I Googled "total depravity vs. utter depravity." Let me just say, as an at-least-fifth-generation Calvinist, Professor Google does not always provide trustworthy information!

Whether you are contemplating the people around you or the world in which we live, it doesn't take more than 5 minutes of honest observation to realize that everyone and every thing is broken. It also does not take long to realize that there is, alongside the broken, much that is right and good - what Jerram Barrs calls "echoes of Eden" and what Yours Truly refers to as "fingerprints of God" - in the people, places, and circumstances we encounter.

My tiny patient, who is a frail dried husk of tissue-thin skin stretched over protruding bone, who would as soon bite my head off as tell me her name, she has more courage and strength of will than any fairy-tale knight or big-screen super hero ever created. I tell her at least once a week, "I want to be more like you when I grow up."

The man lying in his bed day after day, fighting intense chronic pain as his bones are eaten away by an invisible tormentor - he might have been something of a hellion in his youth, but today, he smiles through his pain when I visit him, and says "Thank you. I appreciate you so much."

It is weird - and beautiful - how death gives strength to the weak and softens the mighty.

Totally broken/fallen/depraved does not equal broken/fallen/depraved to the uttermost.

[Aside - Speaking as someone who once struggled desperately to categorize everyone and everything into categories of black or white, good or bad: If you find yourself also struggling with this tendency, nothing in life is that simple. Beware the compulsion to embrace or promote your own or someone else's person/cause/experience/insight/whatever as Perfectly Good or The Ultimate Evil.]

Anywho, I ran away from home yesterday afternoon, away from the exhausting demands of work and away from the heavy neediness that is the one constant when I get off work and away from the weekend routine of painful chasm and silence to a place where my head and my heart can find quiet and rest. Even in this sweet haven, however, I did not sleep well last night - coffee too late in the day yesterday, to help me push through the end of the work week - but lying awake through the wee hours, I felt loved and safe.

I woke up this morning in our big, beautiful, broken world to birdsong and the soft drip-drip-drip of last night's rain falling from a forest of green leaves, to strong black coffee and waffles and gentle people who handle my heart tenderly.

My life is a total mess. It. Is. So. Broken.

But it is not utterly broken. 

It is also so incredibly beautiful.

Thank you, Lord, for birdsong, spring rain, the riot of green outside my window, and rest.

* * * * *

"We are all broken...that's how the light gets in." - Hemingway