Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. ~Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray
Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! ~William Wordsworth from “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”
Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves. ~Leonora Carrington
Looking for God is the first thing and the last, but in between so much trouble, so much pain. ~Jane Kenyon from “With the Dog at Sunrise”
In the moments before dawn when glow gently tints the inside of horizon’s eyelids, the black of midnight wanes to mere shadow, the fear of night forgotten.
Gloaming dusk transposed to gleaming dawn, its backlit silhouettes stark as a dark hurting earth slowly opens her eyes to greet a new and glorious morn.
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I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time — waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God — it changes me. ~attributed to C.S. Lewis in “Shadowlands”
A recovering Faye with her sister Merry
Last week, on May 1, I found a surprise hanging on our front door – a little May Day basket full of little perennial blooms, along with a cheery message and a rainbow sticker. It hung from the door handle as a symbol of spring renewal, as well as a bit of a mystery – the flowers came with no hint of who had left them.
So I did a little sleuthing (actually A LOT of sleuthing) and found out they were delivered by our nearby neighbor Faye, who turned 11 just last week. She has a very special history some of you may remember:
Nine years ago, on this Barnstorming blog, I wrote about our little neighbor, two year old Faye, sickened by E.Coli 0157 infection/toxin to the point of becoming critically ill with Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (plummeting cell counts and renal failure requiring dialysis to keep her alive). My original post about her illness is found here. I asked for your prayers on her (and others’) behalf.
At the worst point of her hospitalization at Seattle Children’s, when the doctors were sounding very worried on her behalf, Faye’s mother Danyale, in the midst of her helplessness, wrote to our Wiser Lake Chapel Pastor Bert Hitchcock with a plea for prayers from our church.
Here is how Pastor Bert responded to Danyale and her husband Jesse who remained at home, caring for their four other children:
“I understand that Faye (and everyone dealing with her) is fighting for her life. And that’s the way I am praying: that God in his merciful power, would deliver her, even if her condition looks hopeless.
If you were able to be in church this morning, you might hear my sense of urgency, for I have chosen this benediction, with which to close the service — and I give it to you right now, from the mouth of our Lord:
Jesus said: “Do not be afraid, Danyale! I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One. I died, but look – I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and the grave.
Neither you nor I know how this will turn out — the possibilities are terrifying. But we do know who holds the keys of life and health and death; He is the Life-giver, who heals all our diseases — nothing can rip our lives (or little Faye’s life) out of His hands. And, when He does allow these bodies to give out, He promises to give us glorious new life, safe forever in His presence. These are not pious platitudes; these are the rock-hard promises of the one who loves us more than life, and who is absolutely in control of what is happening today.
Safe in the arms of Jesus, Safe on His gentle breast; There by His love o’ershaded, Sweetly my soul shall rest.
I’m praying for you all; and your Chapel Family will be praying this morning, as we gather in the Lord’s presence.
Love you, and yours, Danyale, Pastor Bert Hitchcock
That week, Faye’s renal failure reversed itself. She was able to return home with normal kidney function and improved cell counts, having also survived a bout with pneumonia.
Here is what her mother wrote to share with you all once she came home:
“Dear Friends and readers of Barnstorming,
Some of you we know, but so many of you we do not. Whichever the case, Emily tells me you have prayed for our little girl, Faye, throughout her sickness and into her recovery. What can parents say when people–many of whom we may never be privileged to meet in this life–have come alongside us to beseech the Lord for our daughter’s life and pray for her healing? Thank you. Thank you!
Faye is doing so well; stronger every day, more and more herself! It is wonderful to see.
This week we head back down to Seattle Children’s for a check up–we’ll get to say hello to the good folks who saw her through her sickness. A special stop will be made on the dialysis unit to see Nurse Kathy, a favorite of Faye’s. We anticipate a good report!
Thanks again for your love and support, far and wide. Truly astounding. Danyale and Jesse, for Faye, too
—————————————
Now Faye is a delightful, healthy eleven year old girl who secretly blessed me with a basket of May Day flowers. She doesn’t remember the crisis that nearly took her from us nine years ago, but she does know about God’s rainbow promises. And she certainly knows about the power of prayer in the face of helplessness.
As Pastor Bert said: our faith in an unchanging and steadfast God who loves and holds us, can change us – forever.
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver. See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair Is, hair of the head, numbered. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “The Golden Echo”
…writing was one way to let something of lasting value emerge from the pains and fears of my little, quickly passing life. Each time life required me to take a new step into unknown spiritual territory, I felt a deep, inner urge to tell my story to others– Perhaps as a need for companionship but maybe, too, out of an awareness that my deepest vocation is to be a witness to the glimpses of God I have been allowed to catch. ~Henri Nouwenfrom Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
“Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
For too much of my life I have focused on my foreshortening future, bypassing the present in my headlong rush to what lies ahead. There is always a goal to achieve, a conclusion becoming commencement of the next phase, a sunset turning right around in a few hours to become sunrise.
Yet the most precious times occur when the present is so over-whelming, so riveting, so tenderly full of beauty that I believe I can see a brief glimpse of God. I must grab hold with all my strength to try and secret it away and keep it forever. Of course the present still slips away from me, elusive and evasive, torn to bits by the unrelenting movement of time.
Even when I’m able to take a photo to lock it to a page or screen, it is not enough. No matter how I choose to preserve the essence of this moment, it is already passed, ebbing away, never to return.
So I write to harvest those times to make them last a little bit longer although they will inevitably be lost downstream into the ether of unread words.
Where have all the words, all the flowers, all those moments gone?
Even if unread, I am learning that words, which had power in the Beginning to create life itself, still can bring tenderness and meaning back to my life. How blessed to live the gift twice: not just in the moment itself but in recording in words that preserve and treasure it all up, if only for that ephemeral blooming moment.
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Let us not with one stone kill one bird, much less two. Let us never put a cat in a bag nor skin them, regardless of how many ways there are to do so. And let us never take the bull, especially by his gorgeous horns. What I mean is
we could watch our tongues or keep silent. What I mean is we could scrub the violence from our speech. And if we find truth in a horse’s mouth, let us bless her
ground-down molars, no matter how old she is, especially if she was given as a gift. Again, let’s open her mouth——that of the horse, I mean——let us touch that interdental space where no teeth grow, where the cold bit was made to grip. Touch her there, gently now, touch that gentle
empty between her incisors and molars, rub her aching, vulnerable gums. Don’t worry: doing so calms her. Besides, she’s old now; she’s what we call broken; she won’t bite. She’s lived through two thirteen-year emergences of cicadas
and thought their rising a god infestation, thought each insect roiling up an iteration of the many names of god, because god to her is the grasses so what comes up from grass is god. She would not say it that way. Nor would she
say the word cicada——words are hindrances to what can be spoken through the body, are what she tolerates when straddled, giddy-up on one side then whoa on the other. After, it’s all good girl, Mable, good girl, before the saddle sweat is rinsed cool with water from the hose and a carrot is offered flat from the palm. Yes, words being
generally useless she listens instead to the confused rooster stuttering when the sun burns overhead, when it’s warm enough for those time-keepers to tunnel up from the dark and fill their wings to make them stiff and capable of flight. To her, it is the sound
of winter-coming in her mane or the sound of winter-leaving in her mane—— yes, that sound——a liquid shushing like the blood-fill of stallion desire she knew once but crisper, a dry crinkle of fall leaves. Yes, that sound, as they fill their new wings then lumber to the canopy to demand come here, come here, come here, now come.
If this is a parable you don’t understand, then, dear human, stop listening for words. Listen instead for mane, wind, wings, wind, mane, wings, wings, wings. The lesson here is of the mare and of the insects, even of the rooster puffed and strutting past. Because now, now there is only one thing worth hearing, and it is the plea of every living being in that field we call ours, is the two-word commandment trilling from the trees: let live, let live, let live. Can you hear it? Please, they say. Please. Let us live. ~Nickole Brown “Parable”
When a governor writes about her decision to shoot her wayward dog and stinky goat, our reaction is about the injustice perpetrated on the dog more than her decision to play god with any animal she has responsibility for. I feel a twinge of guilt at the accusation. Who among us can throw stones?
God is clear we are meant to be caretakers of His Creation. Yet I still swat flies and trap mice – there is no pleasure in doing so, so I still ask for forgiveness for my lack of charity and decision to make my own existence more comfortable at the expense of another living thing.
I admit I fail Creation in myriad ways.
I have owned animals whose behavior brought me to my knees, sometimes literally with my face in the muck. I have wept over the loss of a deformed stillbirth foal and a pond of koi frozen in a bitter winter storm. The stories abound of my helplessness in the face of sadness and loss and frustration but I never wanted to become executioner.
I don’t live with cycles of cicada population booms but have experienced their overwhelming din and understood we are mere witnesses and not in control. We are not “little g” gods on this earth. We are its stewards.
Be silent. Be still. Alone. Empty Before your God. Say nothing. Ask nothing. Be silent. Be still. Let your God look upon you. That is all. God knows. God understands. God loves you With an enormous love, And only wants To look upon you With that love. Quiet. Still. Be.
On a Sabbath day, I try to be still and silent but fail miserably in my attempts to rest. So much to do, so much to fix, so much to say.
I have forgotten the original reason for the seventh day.
God simply wanted to look down at what He made, declare it good and love it.
The least I can do is stop what I’m doing, look up, hold still and listen…
1 O love of God, how strong and true, eternal and yet ever new, uncomprehended and unbought, beyond all knowledge and all thought! O love of God, how deep and great, far deeper than man’s deepest hate; self-fed, self-kindled like the light, changeless, eternal, infinite.
2 O heav’nly love, how precious still, in days of weariness and ill, in nights of pain and helplessness, to heal, to comfort, and to bless! O wide-embracing, wondrous love! We read you in the sky above, we read you in the earth below, in seas that swell and streams that flow.
3 We read you best in him who came bearing for us the cross of shame; sent by the Father from on high, our life to live, our death to die. We read your pow’r to bless and save, e’en in the darkness of the grave; still more in resurrection light we read the fullness of your might.
4 O love of God, our shield and stay through all the perils of our way! Eternal love, in you we rest, forever safe, forever blest. We will exalt you, God and King, and we will ever praise your name; we will extol you ev’ry day, and evermore your praise proclaim. ~Horatius Bonar
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What words or harder gift does the light require of me carving from the dark this difficult tree?
What place or farther peace do I almost see emerging from the night and heart of me?
The sky whitens, goes on and on. Fields wrinkle into rows of cotton, go on and on. Night like a fling of crows disperses and is gone.
What song, what home, what calm or one clarity can I not quite come to, never quite see: this field, this sky, this tree. ~Christian Wiman, “Hard Night”
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So, a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain; then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales console the lodger looking out across a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls a child’s name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer — Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre. ~Carol Ann Duffy “Prayer”
photo by Bob Tjoelker
As a child falling asleep, I prayed to God with moans and groans echoing in my ears.
Growing up on a small farm located about two miles from a bay in Puget Sound, I found myself praying for safety on foggy nights as fog horns moaned in the distance. Scattered throughout the inlet, the horns called out mournful groans of warning to passing freighter ships. The resonant lowing of the horns carried miles over the surrounding landscape due to countless water particles in the fog transmitting sound waves so effectively. The louder the foghorn moan heard on our farm, the thicker and more hazardous the mist in the air. Those horns would make me unspeakably sad for reasons I could only articulate to God. Thus I prayed for the ships, and I prayed for my own shaky navigation through life.
Navigating blind in a fog necessitates taking unpredictable risks. The future can seem a murky mess. I cannot see what lies ahead: I navigate by my wits, by my best guess, but particularly by listening for the low-throated warnings coming from the rocky shores and shallows of those who have gone ahead of me.
I am easily lost in the fog of my fears – disconnected, afloat and circling aimlessly, searching for a touch point of purpose and direction. The isolation I sometimes feel may simply be my own self-absorbed state of mind, sucking me in deep until I’m soaked, dripping and shivering from the smothering gray. If only I trust the fog horn warnings and reassurances from the Word of God, I could charge into the future undaunted.
He is in the pea soup alongside me, awaiting the Sun’s dissipation of the fog. Now I know, nearly seventy years into this voyage, the fog eventually clears. The journey continues on beyond these shores.
Even so, I will keep praying with the resonant voices of wisdom and caution from shore, like the nightly tradition of the BBC radio shipping forecasts that calm so many to sleep to this day. Even a Finisterre (the end of the land) prayer holds us in safety as we find our way home.
Instead of echoing the anxious moans and groans of my childhood prayers, may my voice be heard singing an anthem of hope and promise.
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The great mystery of God’s love is that we are not asked to live as if we are not hurting, as if we are not broken.
In fact, we are invited to recognize our brokenness as a brokenness in which we can come in touch with the unique way that God loves us.
The great invitation is to live your brokenness under the blessing. I cannot take people’s brokenness away and people cannot take my brokenness away. But how do you live in your brokenness?
Do you live your brokenness under the blessing or under the curse? The great call of Jesus is to put your brokenness under the blessing. ~Henri Nouwenfrom a lecture at Scarritt-Bennett Center
…be a glorified human being, with wounds. God the Kintsugi master who beholds such brokenness in tender care, invites us, and asks of us, to be present in suffering and incalculable losses. … worship a Wounded Glorified Human Being, and be that ourselves. ~Makoto Fujimura from Kinsugi Grace
It is a ceramic pot meant specially for our kitchen table — handmade by a potter friend using the abstract artistry of mane hairs from our farm’s Haflinger horses burnt onto the sides. But it hit the floor and broke into many pieces, looking completely beyond repair.
It is back on our table, repaired with love and care by another friend, using nothing more than copious amounts of Elmer’s Glue. This is the glue of every child’s school desk, the glue of every mother’s junk drawer, the glue of every heart that needs mending.
Elmer’s is not the gold of the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken vessels are repaired with precious metals, creating an object even more valuable and beautiful than before, with streaks and tracks of gold highlighting their shattered history.
Yet it is now even more precious to me. Someone we love cared deeply enough to make it in the first place, and another we love cared deeply to repair it, making it even more beautiful and blessed in its brokenness, highlighting ragged pieces made whole again.
Someone made us. Someone repairs us when we fall apart. Someone blesses our brokenness with a glued-together beauty that makes us whole.
Every day, as the sun goes down, I pause, broken, remembering how often I messed up that day, in big and small ways. Cracked open, my mistakes are illuminated, weighing down my heart, impossible to forget. Yet, as I pray for mercy, there follows a peacefulness, as my errors are blotted out. My slate, one more time, is wiped clean.
Therefore do not lose heart.
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
16 Therefore we do not lose heart. 2 Corinthinians: 6-12, 16
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Opening the book at a bright window above a wide pasture after five years I find I am still standing on a stone bridge looking down with my mother at dusk into a river hearing the current as hers in her lifetime
now it comes to me that that was the day she told me of seeing my father alive for the last time and he waved her back from the door as she was leaving took her hand for a while and said nothing
at some signal in a band of sunlight all the black cows flow down the pasture together to turn uphill and stand as the dark rain touches them. ~W.S. Merwin “Sun and Rain” from Flower & Hand.
All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning ~W. S. Merwin “Rain Light”from The Shadow of Sirius
We want so much to leave a legacy for our children that will carry them through their lives, long after we are gone. Then they pass that on to their children, and on and on, like the strands of DNA we leave behind in our descendants.
But words and rituals of faith and covenant can be lost so quickly from one generation to the next. Our DNA passed down is a given, but nothing surpasses the teaching about the eternal love of God and His purpose for His people.
This day, three of our young grandsons are baptized by their church, ushering them into a life in fulfillment of God’s promise within them. As children, they may not yet fully understand how this manifests in their lives, but with the love and guidance of their church, parents, extended family and godparents, they will know His Love as they witness it in His people.
The washing with water from God’s creation, like rain from heaven, gives me hope for the future.
Though the world may be burning, Jesus is right alongside us through it all – I know our children and grandchildren will be all right.
Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you… Isaiah 55:1-3
When he takes it all away, will we love him more than things, more than health, more than family, and more than life? That’s the question. That’s the warning. That’s the wonderful invitation. ~John Piper in “I Was Warned By Job This Morning”
We all have recently lived through a time when the freedoms we take for granted – our jobs, education, corporate worship, visiting easily with extended family and friends, our desire to go where we wish when we wish – were challenged due to the threat of a packet of viral RNA invading our bodies and wreaking havoc.
Though that threat has largely passed, what we lost during those years still lingers – financial security, educational and career progress. Many are now chronically ill due to the virus, but most painful, we experienced the death of millions of loved ones.
The Book of Job is a warning about losing everything – what we have strived for, cared about, loved and valued suddenly taken away. If we are stripped bare naked, nothing left but our love for God and His sovereign power over our lives, will we still worship His Name, inhale His Word like air itself, submit ourselves to His plan over our plan?
I know I fall far short of the mark. It takes only small obstacles or losses to trip me up so I stagger in my faith, trying futilely to not lose my balance, and fall flat-faced and immobilized.
Just recently, people I love are confronting this reality in their own lives. When I’ve seen people lose almost everything, either in a disaster, or an accident, or devastating illness like cancer or COVID-19, I’ve looked hard at myself and asked if I could sustain such loss in my life and still turn myself over to the will of God.
I would surely plead for reprieve and ask the horribly desperate question, “why me?”, girding myself for the response: “and why not you?”
The invitation, scary and radical as it is, is from God straight to my heart, asking that I trust His plan for my own and my loved ones’ life and death. This trust is crucial to my faith, no matter what happens, no matter how much suffering, no matter how much, like Christ in the garden, I plead that it work out differently, and not hurt so much.
The invitation to His plan for my life has been written, personally carried to me by His Son, and lies ready in my hands, even if I’m wary of opening it. It is now up to me to read it carefully, and with deep gratitude that I am even included, respond with an RSVP that says emphatically, “I’ll be there! Nothing could keep me away.”
Or I could leave it untouched and unread, fearing it is too scary to open. Or even toss it away altogether, thinking the invitation really wasn’t meant for me.
Even if, in my heart, I knew it was.
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Part of the joy of beauty is the realization that it is part of a larger whole, most of which appears to be just out of sight. We are drawn forward toward something… and left waiting, wondering. ~N.T. Wright from Life, God and Other Small Topics
Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake, up to my neck in that most precious element of all,
I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather floating on the tension of the water
at the very instant when a dragonfly, like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,
hovered over it, then lit, and rested. That’s all.
I mention this in the same way that I fold the corner of a page
in certain library books, so that the next reader will know
…God’s attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us–loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is “renewed in the morning” or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, “our inner nature is being renewed everyday”. ~Kathleen Norrisfrom The Quotidian Mysteries
We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. ~C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory
Whether it is in a favorite book of fiction or poetry, or from the Word itself, or as I keep my eyes open to the daily wonders around me, I feel compelled to share the good parts with those of you who visit here.
It is easy to be ground to a pulp by the little things: waiting in line too long, heavy traffic, an insistent alarm clock, a mouse (or more) in the house, miserable spring-time pollen allergies, so much misery in the headlines.
God is in the details, from dew drop to tear drop and even to nose snot. His ubiquitous presence is in all things, large and small, not just the “good parts” of His exquisite grandeur.
It isn’t all elegance from our limited perspective, but still, they are all good parts worthy of His divine attention.
The time has come to be refreshed and renewed by His care revealed in the tiniest ways. I feel immersed in His wonder.
He has my attention and perhaps, in some small way, I now have yours.
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