Tag: suffering

An Advent Threshold: The Light Inside an Open Barn Door

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When the miracle happened it was not
with bright light or fire—
but a farm door with the thick smell of sheep
and a wind tugging at the shutters.

There was no sign the world had changed for ever
or that God had taken place;
just a child crying softly in a corner,
and the door open, for those who came to find.
~Kenneth Steven “Nativity”

This Advent, I’m trying not to be scared of the dark. 
~James K.A. Smith from “Waiting” (Image Journal)

I feel like I’m constantly aware of the world’s anguish, reminded daily in headlines and news updates. The knowledge of others’ grief and mourning, their losses and struggles, is overwhelming.

This world is a fearful place of pain and tears for so many, so much of the time. For my part, I try not to be afraid of the dark…

So who am I to write of moments of incredible encouragement and beauty, posting pictures of the latest masterpiece painted through the filtered light of sunrise and sunset, searching out and sharing the illuminated gifts that exist all around me – while people suffer?

We were certainly not created to wallow in anguish – yet here we are, trying in every way to climb our way out of the dark mess we’ve made. I am one of the countless standing on the threshold of a Light sent to diminish and overwhelm our darkest times.

Three different times, a messenger angel appeared out of the blue, saying “do not be afraid.” Zechariah had been “startled and gripped with fear,” Mary was “troubled and wondered at his words” and the shepherds were “terrified.” They were never to be the same again.

Yet the first words directly from heaven were “fear not.” My first reaction would be: there must be plenty to fear if I’m being told not to be afraid. And this world is a terrifying place, especially in the dark.

It is up to us, overwhelmed by the darkness of these times, to seek out the barn door opening enough to show a light spilling out. We are invited, troubled and doubtful, to come see what is inside.

So too then, we ourselves open: waiting, watching, longing for this glory to come. Nothing will be the same, ever again.

My 2025 Advent theme:
On the threshold between day and night

On that day there will be neither sunlight nor cold, frosty darkness. 
It will be a unique day—a day known only to the Lord—
with no distinction between day and night. 
When evening comes, there will be light.
Zechariah 14:6-7

So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
~Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

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Calling from the Wind Phone

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The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
~C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed

the rubble still piled on the beach at Tohoku, Japan, a year after the 3/11/11 tsunami

In the wrecked landscape
of Fukushima

a white telephone booth
shines

with many panes of glass
in the hinged door

and a man steps in
dials the cell number

of his wife’s phone,
of course unanswering—

she was swept away
in the tsunami,

a photo in the paper
shows her sitting outside

on a blanket, knees
up, rocking back in laughter.

I pick up the black
receiver, still warm

from his hand, dialing
my sister’s number I used

to know by heart.
No answer from the sea

or her, just the whirling sound
of blood pounding in my ear.
~Patricia Clark “The Wind Phone”

photo by Nate Gibson at Sendai, Japan
photo by Nate Gibson 11/11
photo by Nate Gibson 11/11
photo by Nate Gibson of Sendai rubble pile 11/11

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
~Emily Dickinson “Parting”

Original windphone is Otsuchi Garden, Japan

In 2012, we stayed with our friends Brian and Bette at their cabin on a bluff just above the Pacific Ocean at Sendai, Japan, just a few dozen feet above the devastation that wiped out an entire fishing village below during the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami.

As we walked that stretch of beach, we heard the stories of the people who had lived there, some of whom did not survive the waves that swept their houses and cars away before they could escape. We walked past the footprints of foundations of hundreds of demolished homes, humbled by the rubble mountains yet to be hauled away a year later, to be burned or buried. There were acres of wrecked vehicles piled one on another, waiting to become scrap metal.

It was visual evidence of life so suddenly and dramatically disrupted and carried away.

This had been a place of recreation and respite for some who visited regularly, commerce and livelihood for others who stayed year round and, in ongoing recovery efforts, struggling to be restored to something familiar. Yet it looked like a foreign ghostly landscape. Many trees perished, lost, broken off, fish nets still stuck high on their scarred trunks. There were small memorials to lost family members within some home foundations, with stuffed animals and flowers wilting from the recent anniversary observance.

Tohoku is a powerful place of memories for those who still live there and know what it once was, how it once looked and felt, and painfully, what it became in a matter of minutes on 3/11/11. The waves swept in inexplicable suffering, then carried their former lives away. Happiness gave ground to such terrible pain that could never have hurt as much without the joy and contentment that preceded it.

We are tempted to ask God why He doesn’t do something about the suffering that happened in this place or anywhere a disaster occurs –but if we do, He will ask us the same question right back. We need to be ready with our answer and our action.

God knows suffering. Far more than we do. He took it all on Himself, feeling His pain amplified, as it was borne out of His love and joy in His creation.

This beautiful place, and its dedicated survivors have slowly recovered, but the inner and outer landscape is forever altered. What remains the same is the pulsing tempo of the waves, the tides, and the rhythm of the light and the night, happening just as originally created.

With that realization, pain will finally give way, unable to stand up to His love, His joy, and our response to His sacrifice.

We can call Him up anytime and anywhere.

bent gate at Sendai beach -2012
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I’m Comfortable in this Spot

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There are no creatures you cannot love.
A frog calling at God
From the moon-filled ditch
As you stand on the country road in the June night.
The sound is enough to make the stars weep
With happiness.
In the morning the landscape green
Is lifted off the ground by the scent of grass.
The day is carried across its hours
Without any effort by the shining insects
That are living their secret lives.
The space between the prairie horizons
Makes us ache with its beauty.
Cottonwood leaves click in an ancient tongue
To the farthest cold dark in the universe.
The cottonwood also talks to you
Of breeze and speckled sunlight.
You are at home in these
great empty places
along with red-wing blackbirds and sloughs.
You are comfortable in this spot
so full of grace and being
that it sparkles like jewels
spilled on water.
~Tom Hennen “From a Country Overlooked”, from Darkness Sticks to Everything

There are some God’s creatures I struggle to love –
fleas, chiggers, mosquitoes, ticks, slugs, yellow jackets among them. Also poisonous snakes, spiders and scorpions come to mind.
And then there are pathogenic bacteria, parasites and viruses…

It is not their fault I struggle to find their value –
only God knows why He made them as He did.

What I have learned over 7 decades is to try to look for beauty wherever I am.

To listen to the breezes and the birds, to look for how the light plays with leaves and water and how it is all created to help us feel at home for the time we are here.

Yet, this is an imperfect world where beauty doesn’t provide shelter to those with their basic needs unfulfilled – where there is no comfort, no safety, no hope.

God, deliver us from being too comfortable when others suffer.
Help us feel Your love to pass on to those in need.
Help us to know how to make a difference for them.
We know that makes a difference to You.

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Where You Go, I Will Go: God is Not Immune to the World’s Pain

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I’m still discovering, right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.

In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from The Cost of Discipleship

In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?
~John Stott from “Cross”

With all that is happening daily in this disordered and confused world, we fall back on what we are told, each and every day, in 365 different verses in God’s Word itself:

Fear not.

Do not be overwhelmed with evil but overcome evil with good.

And so – we must overcome — despite the evil happening within our own country, despite our fear of one another and what might happen next.

As demonstrated by the anointing of Jesus’ feet by Mary of Bethany on Wednesday of Holy Week, we do what we can to sacrifice for the good of others, to live in such a way that death can never erase the meaning and significance of a life. 

We are called to give up our own self-aggrandizing agendas to consider the dignity and well-being of others.

It is crystal clear from Christ’s example as we follow His journey to the cross this week: we are to cherish life – all lives – born and unborn, the stranger and the refugee. If Christ Himself forgave those who hated and murdered Him, He will forgive us for not understanding the damage we cause by our actions and inactions.

Our only defense against the evil we witness is God’s victory through His Love. Only God who knows pain can lead us to Tolkien’s “where everything sad will come untrue”, where we shall live in peace, walk hand in hand, no longer alone, no longer afraid, no longer shedding tears of grief and sorrow, but tears of relief and joy.

No longer overcome by evil but overcome with the goodness of a God who makes all things right.

All to God’s glory.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: I Never Got Wet

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When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.
~Ada Limón “The Raincoat”

When I was 13, I grew too quickly. My spine developed a thoracic scoliosis (curvature) — after inspecting my back as I bent over to touch my toes, my pediatrician referred me to a pediatric orthopedic specialist an hour away from my home town.

The question was whether I would need to have a metal rod surgically placed along my spine to prevent it from more misalignment or whether I would need to wear a back brace like a turtle. The least intervention would be physical therapy to try to keep my back and abdominal muscles as strong as possible to limit the curvature.

Since my father didn’t have much flexibility in his work schedule, my mother had to drive me to the “big city” for my appointments – as a nervous driver, she did it only because she knew it was necessary to get the medical opinion needed. She asked me to read aloud to her from whatever book I was reading at the time – I don’t think she listened closely but I think she knew it would keep me occupied while she navigated traffic.

At first, we went every three months for new xrays. The orthopedist would draw on my bare back and on my spine xrays with a black marker, calculating my curves and angles with his protractor, watching for a trend of worsening as I grew taller. He reassured us that I hadn’t yet reached a critical level of deviation requiring more aggressive treatment.

Eventually my growth rate slowed down and the specialist dismissed me from further visits, wishing me well. He told me I would certainly be somewhat “crooked” for the rest of my life, and it would inevitably worsen in my later years. I continued to visit PT for regular visits; my mom would patiently wait in the car as I sweated my way through the regimen.

The orthopedist was right about the curvature of my aging spine. I am not only a couple inches shorter now, but my rib cage and chest wall is asymmetric affecting my ability to stand up totally straight. An xray shows the wear and tear of arthritis changes in my somewhat twisted chest wall and spine.

I consider crookedness a small price to pay for avoiding a serious surgery or a miserable brace as a teenager.

What I didn’t understand at the time was the commitment my mother made to make sure I got the medical monitoring I needed, even if it meant great inconvenience in her life, even if she was awake at night worried about the outcome of the appointments, even if the financial burden was significant for my family. She, like so many parents with children with significant medical or psychological challenges, gave up her wants and wishes to make sure I received what I needed.

As a kid, I just assumed that’s what a mom does. Later, as a mom myself, I realized it IS what moms and dads do, but often at significant personal cost. As a physician, I saw many young people whose parents couldn’t make the commitment to see they got the care they needed, and it showed.

I was blessed by parents who did what their kids needed to thrive.

Without my realizing it, my mom constantly offered me her raincoat so I wouldn’t get wet. Meanwhile she was getting drenched. I never really understood.

Some of you walk this road, now and in the past, sometimes long miles with a family member, handing over your own raincoat when the storms of life overwhelm.

Your sacrifice and compassion are Jesus’ hands and feet made tangible. He walks along where we go, keeping us safe and dry for as long as it takes.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: The Depth of His Wounds

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…by his wounds you have been healed.
1Peter 2:24b

The first time I saw him it was just a flash of gray ringed tail
disappearing into autumn night mist as I opened the back door
to pour kibble into the empty cat dish on the porch:
just another stray cat among many who visit the farm.

A few stay.

So he did, keeping a distance in the shadows under the trees,
a gray tabby with white nose and bib, serious yet skittish,
watching me as I moved about feeding dogs, cats, birds, horses,
creeping to the cat dish only when the others drifted away.

There was something in the way he held his head,
an oddly forward ear; a stilted swivel of the neck.
I startled him one day as he ate his fill at the dish.

He ran, the back of his head flashing red, scalp completely gone.

Not oozing, nor something new, but recent. A nearly mortal scar
from an encounter with coyote, or eagle or bobcat.
This cat thrived despite trauma and pain, tissue still raw, trying to heal.

He had chosen to live; life had chosen him.

My first thought was to trap him, to put him humanely to sleep
to end his suffering, in truth to end my distress at seeing him every day, envisioning florid flesh even as he hunkered invisible
in the shadowlands of the barnyard.

Yet the scar did not keep him from eating well or licking clean his pristine fur.

As much as I want to look away, to avoid confronting his mutilation,
I always greet him from a distance, a nod to his maimed courage,
through wintry icy blasts and four foot snow,
through spring rains and summer heat with flies.

His wounds remain unhealed, a reminder of his inevitable fate.

I never will stroke that silky fur,
or feel his burly purr, assuming he still knows how,
but still feed his daily fill,
as he feeds my need to know:
the value of a life so broken,
each breath taken filled with sacred air.

The depth of his wounds shows how much he still bleeds.

This is my only close photo of our wounded farm guest

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: Even in the Wilderness

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To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness ,
is like being commanded to be well when we are sick,
to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst,
to run when our legs are broken.
But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless.
Even in the wilderness-
especially in the wilderness –
you shall love him.   
~Frederick Buechner from A Room Called Remember

The wilderness might be a distant peak far removed from anything or anyone, where there is bleak darkness.

The wilderness might be the darkest corner of the human heart we keep far away from anything and anyone. 

From my kitchen window on a clear day, I sometimes see a distant mountain wilderness, when the cloud cover moves away. 

During decades of perching on a round stool in clinic exam rooms,  I was given access to hearts lost in the wilderness many times every day.

Sometimes the commandment to love God seems impossible. We are too self-sufficient, too broken, too frightened, too wary to trust God with our love and devotion. 

Recognizing a diagnosis of wilderness of the heart is straight forward: despair, discouragement,disappointment, lack of gratitude, lack of hope. 

The treatment is to allow the healing power of the Father who sent His own Son to navigate the wilderness in our place.

He reaches for our bitter, wary, and broken hearts that beat within our bodies, to bring us home from the dark wilderness of our souls.

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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Where You Go, I Will Go: The Mourning Bench

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…we all suffer.
For we all prize and love;
and in this present existence of ours,
prizing and loving yield suffering.
Love in our world is suffering love.

Some do not suffer much, though,
for they do not love much.
Suffering is for the loving.
This, said Jesus, is the command of the Holy One:
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
In commanding us to love, God invites us to suffer.

Over there, you are of no help.
What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is.
I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation.

To comfort me, you have to come close.
Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son

I wondered if 7:30 AM was too early to call her. As a sleep-deprived fourth year medical student finishing a long night admitting patients in the hospital, I selfishly needed to hear her voice.

I wanted to know how Margy was doing with the latest round of chemotherapy for breast cancer; I knew she was not sleeping well these days. She was wearing a new halo brace—a metal contraption that wrapped around her head like a scaffolding to secure her degenerating cervical spine from collapsing from metastatic tumor growths in her bones.

She knew, we all knew, she was trying to buy more time from a life of rapidly diminishing days.

Each patient I had seen the previous 24 hours while working in the Emergency Room benefited from the interviewing skills Margy had taught each medical student in our class. She reminded us that each patient had an important story to tell, and no matter how pressured our time, we needed to ask questions that gave permission for that story to be told. As a former nun now married with two teenage children, Margy had become our de facto therapist at a time no medical school hired supportive counselors.

She insisted physicians-in-training remember the suffering soul thriving inside the broken body.

“Just let the patient know with certainty, through your eyes, your body language, your words, that you want to hear what they have to say. You can heal so much hurt simply by sitting beside them and caring enough to listen…”

After her diagnosis with stage 4 cancer, Margy herself became the broken vessel who needed the glue of a good listener. She continued to teach, often from her bed at home. I planned to visit her that day, maybe help out by cleaning her house, or take her for a drive as a diversion.

Her phone rang only once after I dialed her number. There was a long pause; I could hear a clearing of her throat. A deep dam of tears welled behind a muffled “Hello?”

“Margy?”

“Yes? Emily? ”

“Margy? What is it? What’s wrong?”

Her voice shattered like glass into fragments, strangling on words that struggled to form.

“Gordy’s gone, Emily. He’s gone. He’s gone forever…”

“What? What are you saying?”

“A policeman just left. He told us our boy is dead.”

I sat in stunned silence, listening to her sobs, completely unequipped to know how to respond.

None of this made sense. I knew her son was on college spring break, heading to Mexico for a missions trip.

“I’m here, what’s happened?”

“The doorbell rang about an hour ago. Larry got up to answer it. I heard him talking to someone downstairs, so I decided to try to get up and go see what was going on. There was a policeman sitting with Larry on the couch. I knew it had to be about Gordy.”

She paused and took in a shuddering breath.

“The group was driving through the night in California. He was asleep in the back of the camper. They think he was sleepwalking and walked right out of the back of the moving camper and was hit by another car.”

Silence.  A strangling choking silence.

“They’ll bring him home to me, won’t they? I need to know I can see my boy again. I need to tell him how much I love him.”

“They’ll bring him home to you, Margy.
I’m on my way to help you get ready…“

God is not only the God of the sufferers
but the God who suffers. …
It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live.
I always thought this meant
that no one could see his splendor and live.
A friend said perhaps it meant
that no one could see his sorrow and live.
Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. …
Instead of explaining our suffering, God shares it.
~Nicholas Wolterstorff from Lament for a Son

This year’s Lenten theme:

…where you go I will go…
Ruth 1:16

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A World of Hurt

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The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.
~C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. 
~James A. Baldwin

We pay for hate with our lives, and that’s too big a price to pay.
~Brené Brown from Braving the Wilderness

We live in a world of hurt. We are consumed with hatred for all that is unjust and unfair because we are people who are in fear and in pain.

We get angry at what we don’t like or don’t understand and that includes the mystery of the ways of God.

We are a people struggling with profound irritability of the spirit.
We give no one the benefit of the doubt any more,
and that includes God.

We ask God why He doesn’t do something about the suffering we see everywhere, or the terrible hurt we feel ourselves. We want answers, and that includes answers from God.

Instead He asks us the same question right back:
What are we doing about the suffering of others?
What are we doing to understand our own misery?
Where are we seeking answers if not from His own Words?

God knows suffering and hurt.
He knows fear.
He knows what it is to be hated, far more than we do.
He took it all on Himself,
loving us so much because His pain was
part of the deal He made with us to rescue us.

With that realization,
we trade our pain for hope in Him,
our fear for trust in His promises,
and our hatred gives way to His sacrificial love.

Only then are we ready to respond to His call,
wrap ourselves within and around Him,
cling to His Word,
and feel His comfort for His people.

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear..
1 John 4:18a

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We Are Lost…

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when the sun peeks over the horizon to greet
the day and spread golden honey warmth
to the dark, sleepy earth

when the birds begin to stir and twitter
and tune their songs to one another

when the trees rustle as the morning breeze
opens her eyes from slumber, and the dew is heavy
on the blades of grass

when I know morning has come once again
and we are not lost to the night, even as we
are not lost to the day

light dawns, and I can move again
breathing in streams of fresh morning air
lighting a candle for rejuvenation
and praying the day in with ginger and
salt and clay

oh how lovely it feels to be alive
how magical to wake with the light
and live
~Juniper Klatt, I was raised in a house of water

…deeds are done which appear so evil to us
and people suffer such terrible evils
that it does not seem as though any good will ever come of them;
and we consider this, sorrowing and grieving over it 

so that we cannot find peace in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do; 

and this is why:

our reasoning powers are so blind now, so humble and so simple

And this is what he means where he says, 
“You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well”, 
as if he said, “Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, 
and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.
~Julian of Norwich from Revelations of Divine Love

Even when,
yet again,
innocents – our children, our teachers –
do not wake, as if by magic, to see this golden morn

I’m heavy laden as the tears of this dewy dawn
touch every lost and grieving thing

there is no reason for this
to happen again and again and again
~we weep until we are dry as dust~

Pay attention to this now, to this mourning for innocents
who are lost to the night and the day.

If only we listen and act, shall this be made well.

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