There was a day last year (early 2009) when I drove myself up to Berry for a visit. It was a glorious, sunny afternoon of traipsing all over campus… I chased deer, I careened down Stretch Road with abandon and elation in the crisp newly-spring weather, I stomped leaf-piles and inhaled Ford air, pool reflections, and picture-taking…
As the day wore on though, the clouds dripped down like watercolor gray running oddly over everything bright, and the sky began to tilt its melancholy chin. I was visiting with the new spring colts by this time, and suddenly heard sirens in the distance calling all of the wide expanse to attention. Ducks from around the pond had been scattering for a while, and I noticed that the last few photos I’d taken at the small waterfall had bleeding-droplet designs and an odd whirling effect to them..
By the time I’d run down the hill and back to my car, wild raindrops were the urgent metronome (metroGnome? :)), and I jumped into my front seat, retracing the miles of Stretch to their drumming.
I just made it off campus when the hail started.
First it was minute: small pin-pricks at the windshield as I giggled. Slowly it picked up speed and force: pebble-like wads flung like a bridge-troll’s trick.
I didn’t make it a whole two miles before the golf-ball sized ones came crashing down, and the giggles were completely gone by the time the pieces were as large as a small fist..
I remember finding a small Rome gas station, the only covering for miles, as the tears started down my cheeks. It was one of those small-town now-closed stations, so the old tanks stretched up into poles that only had a “roof” of about 4 feet across.. When I pulled in, I could see I was the third car trying to find succor in the thin covering.
I edged as close to the other cars as all of us could bear, and turned the Sentra off as it rocked under the weight of the blows. I had never sat with fear in the midst of nature, other than the time my college home was hit with lightning (this is a tale for another time though), but I couldn’t seem to help scrunching my eyes up each time that metallic crash would ripple through the frame of the car. I found myself balled up in the center of the car, envisioning the glass splaying sideways in jagged lines, and when I opened my eyes I saw a little girl in the car next to me, sitting in the very same position.. little arms wrapped around her knees that were pulled up to her chest, peering through her squinty eyes and jerking in little jumps each time the huge ice balls hit.
In a less dramatic way, this is what 2010 was like.
Like a sentence about sickness, punctuated with hopes holding their breath—cheeks full of air and lungs wondering when they’ll get some, dizzied by the lack.
Being sick again started in the fall of 2009… I got back from that most incredible semester of Linguistics classes and rolled right into my new assignment of teaching elementary school. But as a high school lit. teacher for going-on-four years, I s t r u g g l e d to figure out how to teach an all-in-one-classroom group of third, fourth, and fifth graders that desperately needed a literacy specialist. I was handed three stacks of books and told “you’ll do fine, they’re behind anyway”. And I tried, with every fiber in me, I stayed up nights and “did my homework”. I learned all the new terminology for third-grade math and studied-up on literacy strategies. I re-taught myself 5th grade social studies and lesson-planned for 7-preps daily, but within three weeks of the new school year I was very sick with an Ulcerative Colitis flare-up for the first time in years. Severe sickness, bleeding and weight-dropping, lasted the entire year, and for only the second or third time in my life I tasted the sad flavor of relinquishing something that feels like a failure even when you’ve given it your all.
Family was the best part of this year, and I was blessed with wave after crashing wave of support from my parents, sister, and brothers. They cut through the isolating nature of the ache of chronic illness, and loved on me.
But the year saw difficulties for them too, as my mother’s father became very ill and she left for Brazil (getting held there for a while because of issues with her papers!), and we had a few scares with her health too in these last few months.
I realized a few weeks ago that my emotions were brimming over with the most recent event: our church dealt with the weight of a young friend’s death. She was 28. We all gathered, some that we hadn’t seen in so long, to celebrate a life difficultly lived, boisterously hopeful and sorrowful at the same time, and it was utterly overwhelming.
Fist-like ice-balls on a windshield, ice in our stomachs and hope firmly in our cheeks, though our lungs felt deprived.
This long, meandery post is not about the details of sickness or sorrow however; nor the deeply beautiful lessons learned inside of God’s mercy-plan of suffering. It is instead about the second part of one of my favorite verses.
Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
And so hope is a heavy seed. Whatever aches and hiccups-of-path, whatever struggle and revelation, whatever necessary dependence, whatever loneliness and waiting, whatever fog-filled hunger for what you feel is coming but is not yet, it is all just inside the comma in that verse. The tree afterwards is already growing.
I bid 2010 Adieu with a strange mixture of feelings tonight, because so much has occurred—so much that hasn’t even been broached in these paragraphs. So much has been fashioned in me that I don’t even know how to explain yet, and so much rambunctious, stubborn good and needling bad has passed this way. But TRUST, the likes of which I hadn’t known before has lit up, and now comes a new year…
With love, fiery hope, pungent prayer, and a glad heart, I usher this one in quietly with you. And grin at the glistening new one~
