Love will grow over barriers and around obstacles still blooming and still fragrant. Love is having the strength to stay. Love is a wild and furious risk, a pouring out of all that one can from that cup and drink it. Love is rich and poor. Love is sickness and health. Love is a verb, an action word. Nothing about love is passive. Love cannot be manipulated. Love. Risks. Everything. The Holy God is Love’s name…ponder this, ponder Him on this busy Tuesday of your life. Love changes everything!
Today God orchestrated some happenings that I needed. It was an affirming whisper from him…
Such an intimate and sweet “I love you” from my Lord. I say intimate because He and I are the only ones who know. I say sweet because I am his daughter and he understands me.
So I end this day with a Hallelujah.
Sleep well my friends.
Snapshot of my dreams, 4… “painting broken pictures with wounded hands.”
It was not eight o’ clock in the morning. It was not two days before Christmas, and my phone did not just ring and awaken me from a fitful dream.
If I do not allow these things to exist then all is well. You are alive, therefore, my world is on its axis and breathing continues…
I did not hear my husband’s footsteps coming down the hall. I did not hear the groan of that spot on the wooden floor that is worn and squeak under his weight. I did not feel someone sit on the end of our bed. He waited…
He could not be sitting there waiting because if he were it means you are dead. It would mean he is going to tell me so. It would mean that a light went out in my heart and all has gone dark…
This tiny act of turning my face toward my waiting husband confirms that he is there and he is going to tell me you didn’t make it. He will remind me they said your heart was too diseased which made repair difficult at best.
If I close my eyes and try with all my might to make things not happen, to never have this wretched day exist I would do it. Yet as the minutes tick relentlessly on I finally turn my head and open my eyes and it has to be said…you are dead. I step into a quicksand. I am dazed, cloudy in my head. I must face immortality with Faith. I had to face that the one who loved me the most in all this world was gone. Now I am painting broken pictures with wounded hands.
I am five years old and it is Christmas. We live in Memphis and it has snowed on Christmas Eve. The snow in the dawn’s twilight looks powder blue blanketing our yard. I have my nose to the window because Santa is coming! You are as excited as I and my brothers. The next morning we were up at the crack of dawn and there in the snow were the biggest boot prints I had ever seen. You said Santa walked around our yard because we don’t have a chimney so he came through our back door. I marveled at this possibility. It was pure magic at Christmas with you. It is quite appropriate that you died in the season you enjoyed the most.
Now I am forty- five and there is no snow, there are no boot prints in my yard. There is no joyous Christmas music. Just the silent weight of grief. I speak to friends but I am on autopilot. I have never lost someone I loved so much. It isn’t a feeling of sadness because I know your Faith in Christ is real. It isn’t a feeling at all. It is an altered state, a new dimension.
The funeral is blurred. I do all the daughter type things for my Mom. I have stayed with her these last two nights as she stares into space or weeps. It is December twenty sixth and I marvel at the amount of people who are here even though it is Christmas and they could be somewhere else having fun. People offer condolences, love, and prayer. They are kind. I do my best to be attentive to their kindness but I fail. I can’t think straight. I cannot imagine a world where you aren’t. There is no one else who will knock on my door every school morning and awaken me with a silly song or stand at my door and do a pretty good impersonation of Elvis, or call me by a nickname you gave me. There will never be another church service where I sit and listen to you teach the Word of God. There will never be another Daddy who came when I got hurt and picked me up and took me home. Never another strong arm as yours will be held up in front of me like a gate as protection when I am standing beside you in the front seat as you drive…(no seatbelts in those days) but the thought never crossed my mind that it wasn’t safe because you were there. I will never have another super hero who catches me when I jump in the deep end of the pool and don’t swim well yet. There is no one left on this earth that will understand the anger I sometimes had with Mom as a teen or the despair I felt when I got sick. I remember you wept when you saw my swollen joints and that I could barely walk. I saw your frustration at not being able to fix it. I always felt you were on my side. I always knew nothing I did could stop your love for me and I was right. Nor mind for you.
The day after the funeral came and went. Then the next day and the next and the next. I am robotic much of the time. The grief beats down my body with a crushing weight. I keep remembering our last conversation, it blesses me still. You said, ” Jesus was always “Center” for you. That following him (Jesus) is the most important issue for a dying world. You said, ” don’t follow politics or religion! Just follow Jesus.” Then you called me the apple of your eye. These words of endearment comfort me and little did I know they would be a greater comfort in the twenty-two years that have come to pass. So much left unsaid in snapshots, don’t you think Dad?
The little seabird with twigs for legs hurries up and back about three feet. Waves rolls seaward and the Sandpipers skirmishes lighting fast to peck a little minnow and hurries back …the water never once touches her. It is comical, this dance of the Piper. Her spindle like legs never seems to tire…
This is the beauty that fills my mind. ” everything that is created was created by Jesus. By him all things made above the earth, below the earth, on land, and in the sea. Everything visible and invisible were made by him for his pleasure. Jesus hold all things together and in him all things live and move and have their being.
Even the Sandpipers Dance is for Him.
Pages of snap shots in my dreams.
I rise early in the morning a few seconds post dawn. The melted butterscotch sky is streaked with baby blue and left over indigo. A nice squall blew up last night and the sand has no footprints in it. The sand dunes are pregnant with sea oats. The oats, my favorite tropical grass, sway charmingly in the breeze and quietly support the island with their roots. The large oats smell like salt and theirs stalks tall and sleek weave into grass.
Just in a snap spot of my dreams I take off running from shore as the rain begins. I dash and grab my laundry on the clothes line.. At that moment your camera just happened to find my face and you say,” your eyes are blue- gray, like seawater.” I close my eyes. When I open them you are gone.
Shutter stop.
The knockout punch…
I have eaten nothing in three days.
The pain in my chest is a slow agony.
I have no memory of warmth with others of my kind.
Although fading, my longing drives my soul forward.
A primal memory of Joy beats like a captured bird in my brain.
Yet somehow I know Him and see the full Glory of God.
So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, “You are a God of seeing,” for she said, “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me. Genesis 16:13
Camellias are blooming stout and ruffled in oh so many rosy shades of pinks!
Azalea bushes lay a thick carpet for Gulf summer heat and rain.
The golden-green sea oats weave and spin the island’s core in an endless ballet.
All the while, the Faithful Morning Glories, pink and yellow, vine along the sand like a hodgepodge of holiday lights.
The salt sits thick upon my skin and hair.
I am baptized in a wave and the horizon melts into carnival colors of pulled taffy in my Watercolor Garden.
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These high school halls are not hallowed halls but they are unsurpassed in the scheme of life lessons….Truth and Fiction …
Remember that boy with the unfortunate eyebrows hurrying down the hall as if afraid or embarrassed? He was.
Remember that girl passing a note to her “steady” guy declaring her undying devotion because he said he “loved” her? He did not.
Remember when you thought a certain friend’s family seemed so perfect? They were not.
The stereo- types still linger in these tales of fiction. Fifty years later and I can name them all by heart.
We all wanted to be (well most of us) to be prettier, cuter, thinner, funnier, taller, shorter, darker, lighter, a better singer, a better dancer, the beauty queen, the sports star, the math genius, or the valedictorian.
I guess it is like the “Breakfast Club” and the “Big Chill” movie all rolled up together. (we did have the best music though). I always felt like the adults in my days of high school tried to minimize the harshness of the unspoken boundaries. There are many people that I admired from afar and would have like to have known better but there was also a nagging burden of exposure.
Ends up that about ninety-nine percent of High School Fiction left some of us hurt and even wounded and that is where reality steps in. No, we had not yet let our tender souls relax in the discovery zone of finding there is no such thing as perfect. How could we know that what lay ahead would require a lot more truth and a little less comparison?
Just saying…
When hardship comes your way, will you tell yourself it’s a tool of God’s grace and a sign of his love, or will you give in to doubting his goodness? Paul Tripp
When the road seems shorter than before.
Wherever you turn there is no open door.
Your life is in convulsions like vomit on the floor.
All the paperwork of your life is yellowed and rotted.
Is the God’s grace of love or is it cruel?
Who do you worship and let rule you?
Will you head for the hills of Babylon?
Look for ways to numb your sorrow?
Will you turn to the One who made you?
Will you cry out and hang on to your pew?
Will you doubt God’s goodness in the dross?
Will you walk away or toward the cross?
Jill Autrey Dorman 