that thursday

I've been sitting here quietly, staring down those words she said, holding them at arm's length. I circle them suspiciously. I simultaneously dread them and long for them. I put them in my mouth, wanting both to spit them out and to ingest them. In truth, they scare me.

So here I am. Sitting across from the truth, holding the raw shredded heart tissue that found its way out of me that day. It had been in hiding so long, protected behind thick steel doors, secured with locks that had long been rusted over.

But now it is here in the light of day, demanding a reckoning. I hold it in my hands, and it's a terrible mess. It's pulpy and tattered and dripping. I can't put it back together. I can't bring any sense or semblance of meaning out of it. There's a reason it remained hidden for so long.

By now most of you have a sense of something happening for both Christianne and I on a day we've both come to call "that Thursday". On that Thursday we were together, we were both startled to the core. For completely different reasons, we saw separate truths emerge that had been hidden and stuffed within us, crammed into dusty corners of forgetting without any conscious knowledge on our parts that they were about to make themselves known.

Christianne has written about beginning the journey deeper into what God revealed to her that day; and now I am doing the same.

I don't want to go there.

Going there means revisiting old wounds, splitting open old scar tissue and permitting God to poke about my insides.

It means resurrecting the memories of relationships long past, bringing to the surface that which I had gagged, bound, weighted with lead, and made to drown. It means not merely being present for the autopsy, but wielding the knife that will open these dead things.

It means looking at the past fifteen years of my life and relationships through a microscope. It means identifying where and how the seedlings of lies were planted, watered, and permitted to grow.

It means putting my finger on sore oozing places and letting God do the same.

It means identifying the lies that have tangled their long, sinewy roots around and throughout my insides, roots that have firmly embedded themselves in my flesh. It means acknowledging that I have held on to them as much as they have held on to me. It means asking God to pull these out by the roots.

It will mean learning to believe the truth.

The truth: the truth of those words that she prayed over me. The words that I keep at a distance, staring them down and eyeing surreptitiously. The words that I walk circles around to examine from every angle, looking for leaks, cracks, flaws, exceptions. Words that are foreign to my heart, that feel like rocks in my mouth. These words I must learn to believe.

And so I fear what is being asked of me: of being called again to walk a path that is dark, where my feet are the only ones that can do the walking.

gratitude, refreshed

At last, I am emerging from the flu that has had a hold on me since Saturday. It is easier to get up and move, to stand in the shower, to make my way up the stairs. I am remembering what my home looks like from vantage points other than my couch. Today I am wearing something other than pajamas (which by all accounts have seen better days after being worn for 72 hours straight); today I washed my hair, put on mascara, made my bed. My movements are slow and deliberate, and I am grateful for the simple movement.

In a way, I am actually thankful I got sick; I am amazed at how resilient my body is and how much it has put up with over the last six months (over the past two years really, if all the gastrointestinal drama is factored in). I was overdue for a concentrated period of rest.

Though this illness spanned a mere two or three days, it felt like an eternity. My head throbbed and pounded, felt like it was going to split open like a ripe melon. Every bone in my body ached. My sinuses were staging their own protest and more than once, I was fairly certain my lungs were making an attempt to jump ship. My appetite for food had all but disappeared; every attempt to get up from the couch required that I concentrate on suppressing the overwhelming waves of nausea.

Today, I woke to a world where I could breathe through both nostrils and stand upright without visceral protest. My lungs have calmed down and it no longer feels as though someone is taking hammer and awl to my head. I just managed to enjoy a cup of steaming split pea soup. I folded laundry today and put it away, I caught up on some long-overdue ironing. Quite rightly, the sun is shining out my window. Does it get more glorious than this?

Some might express a difference of opinion, but few things give me as stark an appreciation for wellness as illness does. When accustomed to good health, it becomes easy to take it for granted, to forget what extraordinary gift is is to move, to breathe, to consume a meal. Likewise, few things make me fall to my knees with gratitude like remembering I have been set free of my chains and now reside safely in the shadow of His wing.

My chains are gone

I've been set free

My God, my Savior has ransomed me

And like a flood His mercy reigns

Unending love, amazing grace

~Chris Tomlin, Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)

Language will always fall short where expressions of gratitude toward God are concerned; knowing that, this is my small way of remembering and saying thank you.

in medias res

I've been thinking a lot about the whole concept of story lately, both in terms of its power to move us beyond what the mere acquisition of information does, and as a way of understanding our roles in the grander scheme of all that God has planned in a very broad and eternal sense. Drilling down into the finer points of individual stories is vital; I think it could be said that the entire point of the gospel is compassion: both God's compassion toward us as manifested in the life of Christ and our compassion for other people regardless of any category or judgment we could assign them.

Compassion and story go hand in hand; unlike sympathy or even empathy, compassion means to suffer with someone (com- being a prefix meaning "with" or "together" , and the word pathos meaning "suffering"). Compassion requires the one who extends it to suffer alongside. And how are we to suffer with others unless we know the particulars of their stories: to know their wounds as we know our own, and to bear a burden of desire to relieve it? It's not a far stretch to conclude that Christ embodies this definition of suffering with in all its particulars, not only in His final and ultimate act of suffering, but also in the mundane: leaving the unimaginable splendor of heaven for the filth and stink and flesh of earth. God took on flesh and dirt under the fingernails, stomachaches and splinters, hunger and fatigue.

As someone who has only recently snapped the tether that held her heart, I can hardly be considered an authority in this regard. There is no soapbox for me to stand on or pulpit behind which I will posture myself. Perhaps it's because I'm feeling things so keenly and seeing them so freshly now that I've been blinded by the truth of it. The stone walls I hid behind are crumbled and still crumbling. As I walk through the ruins and kick these stones over, I consider how they performed a function I never consciously intended. No doubt they protected me from pain. But they also prevented me from being present for the pain of others. They walled me in, distant from joy and from full engagement in my own life. As a new friend recently stated, I was safe but ultimately unsatisfied. I was hedged in, protected against that which was bad or hurtful and also that which was good and joyful.

Relatively little is written about Christ's everyday life on earth, but I can imagine that not every day was one in which tables were turned, masses were fed from a sacklunch, or men were raised from the dead. Especially in the thirty years that preceded the advent of His active ministry, we can likely infer that there had to have been plenty of the mundane: meals around a shared table, stomachaches and headcolds, building tables and chairs, thatching rooves. Jesus came for that, too: He left heaven and emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant, subjecting Himself to our everyday -- in fact, to what is sometimes our mundane, mediocre, and quotidian existence.

It occurs to me that exercising compassion does not require that we go out of our way to seek out the person who is hurting the most, or that we attempt to insert ourselves into the stories unfolding in hospital rooms, prisons, or on the five o'clock news (though for some, it may very well include this). We are called, I believe, to come alongside those whose paths intersect with ours daily: co-workers, baristas, roommates, siblings, and spouses; to walk beside, to hold a hand, offer a shoulder, to be open arms. To listen, to ask, to laugh with. To offer what we have: an open door, a car, a shower, a bed; to get out of the way so the love of God can flow through us, inserting itself into our everydays and the everydays of those around us.

When we lock ourselves in that dragon-guarded castle, walling ourselves in as a spontaneous response to our own pain, we cut ourselves off not only from unwanted intrusions, but from love and goodness and laughter as well. We cut off the means by which we can offer ourselves to those who may be moving through the very pain we've reacted against. This is a response I know well. But now I've lowered the drawbridge, crossed the moat, and circle the stronghold I once called home. Looking away from my pile of stones, I discover a lush landscape teeming with life, a horizon that extends into eternity. This is where life is.

But as long as this remains a pretty philosophy, as long as my day-to-day interactions fail to mirror these words, they are only words hanging in space. Like the apostle Paul said:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

It does not matter what I know or what I write; it does not matter if I can wow a reader or impress a publisher or have a hundred by-lines to my credit. God cares more about me serving my roommates, listening to and assisting my co-workers, celebrating with my friends in their successes and crying with them in their heartaches. In short, He wants me to be a vessel for His compassion, to be the fitting word that agrees with the story He is telling.

Our stories matter individually, but more as threads woven into the great fabric of compassion and redemption that He has been weaving since time began. Our own stories begin in medias res in relation to His own, and we have the opportunity to echo this when we walk alongside others every day. Will I be the stray thread, or will I allow myself to be inserted into the fabric of a story He began so long ago?