A Sparrow's Update

The daylight is retracting on padded feet, exiting the yard with a hush, and I’m watching the woods fill up rapidly with layers of feathers in downy gusts of white. There’s a cathartic release as I watch the two transitions… All days and all years end for a new one, and oh how the Lord covers all things with refreshment, at just the right moment. 

We end this year as two weary kids, tucked in by our Father’s quilt of white, warm despite the cold, fed with unbelievable heavenly morsels, made a little braver each small day this year. We’ve lasted in a sort of blurry survival mode, and many days it felt like there was just enough adrenal-sputtering to shuffle to the next place, be it work or church or the next doctors’ appointment. Truth be told, there have been so many hours unwillingly relegated to a couch this year, ‘enough’ rest to even out this sickness never seemed retainable for more than a few days at a time. As I look back at this year, I actually cannot form a timeline, cannot recall all the portions of it—it sloped and swung into unexpected places—for us as a family, making medical decisions and treading water with immigration paperwork, but also just as two humans, watching a world go through a lot of pain and uncertainty and transition for one year. 

Many, many times in these last months, we have felt like the current journey looks a lot like this painting: plodding forward with all our strength, unable to move too far, but persistently hopeful, certain that we’re following Him, and filled with the knowledge that this following is what’s important, and that He will not let the waters overwhelm us. 

In these months, I have heard this in your stories too. You are exhausted students, you are steadfast and sometimes at-the-end-of-your-rope parents, you are caretakers, wives and mothers and husbands and friends, but your journey was one marked with exhaustion this year, it was dusty or busy, heavy, numbing or just “off” and a bit unclear. The loss of your job pricked through your identity, the loss of your child stole your breath, the whole political climate filled you with grief and fear or anger. 

We are reminded daily lately that we simply need a Savior. These things are too big, we cannot overcome them. But HE. But God. Every statement that could come after that is changed by those two words. And with His sovereign, overflowing love, all is made well. All is covered in Heaven’s down, made newly smooth and Peaceful in a way that people can never accomplish.

Jonathon and I have been reflecting this month on verses about waiting, JOY, health, community, hardship and plenty, and what trust (and the blindness that often precipitates it!) really look like. We’ve known for a while that with the ending of this December, we would be walking into financial blindness for the foreseeable future, bekoned to trust God for our provision as we serve in the callings He’s put before us, but walking out into a newly blatant sort of dependance on Him—a truly moment by moment kind. Where in the last two years, I’ve known that I had enough pledged financial partners to carry us through each month, we knew 2017 was going to begin with a huge shortfall and the reality that we cannot cover most of our needs has made us pray for eyes that ever seek Him—for hearts that will pant for Him and not lives that measure stability by provision. 

This month, as God has covered our woods with unexpected blankets of snow several times, we have been reminded especially by the swirling, wing´ed birds that even the winter is filled with LIFE—jubilant creatures have frolicked about in this harsh season—the Infamous Tailless Raccoon visits us and leaves cute, wobbly trails, Stellar Jays careen past our windows, leaving a streak of indigo in our vision momentarily! We have been praying for the Lord to “bring interesting and wonderful things to our window" (a prayer Johnny began whispering many years ago), and we’ve been BLESSED with the most remarkable creatures this snowy month! On Christmas Eve, even an enormous, elegant heron swooped into the woods and alighted upon the snow-capped cedar-stump in front of the stream. Johnny saw him first, and we both went to the window and watched him. He looked straight at us, majestically arched and spread his awesome wingspan, and flew through the trees straight towards us—growing in size, gliding as he reached the house, swooshing upwards over the porch awning!! It was breathtaking, and recalled to our hearts all the messages of Hope that God Himself has connected to egrets and herons in our minds over the last years. I felt known and especially-loved.

We can be tricked into thinking of winter as a barren season, but it is a mystical time of watching nature depend on its Lord for a wayward winter-fish in the stream, for a shelter, for crisp life and air. I am reminded of the many messages in nature of dependence and of how humility brings life, how unknowing makes us capable of really walking with Him.

In Hannah Hurnard’s book Hinds Feet on High Places, even the water sings an exultant song of the joy it has found in falling down, of being brought low:

Come, oh come! let us away--

Lower, lower every day, 

Oh, what joy it is to race

Down to find the lowest place. 

This the dearest law we know--

"It is happy to go low."

Sweetest urge and sweetest will,

"Let us go down lower still."

Hear the summons night and day

Calling us to come away.

From the heights we leap and flow

To the valleys down below.

Always answering to the call,

To the lowest place of all.

Sweetest urge and sweetest pain,

To go low and rise again.

Nature knows this message; it exults in rhythm, in cycle, in smallness, in honest need and outcry. It waits for its Lord to usher in the change, the meal, the light, the warmth. It even allows for natural disasters, and by His design, it is the Body that is meant to help when craziness breaks loose! It is in the HUGE, blatant, messy needs that God is given opportunity after opportunity to strip away our false realities and the false things we put our hopes in, and then, when things are good and raw and fascinatingly impossible, we get to watch Him provide, from inside His presence, from humble, on-our-knees nests, like kids in awe, dropped jaws and funny grins. It is when we are brought low and crumpled that we are able to see all of what comes next from our small place on the ground.

This last week of 2016, He has begun laying a groundwork of awe-inspiring things for us to watch! In this framework of need, impossibility, and exhaustion, we see Him urging help from far corners of mystery to provide for us in ways that leave us laughing, knowing His goodness, and having to SHOUT it! We have felt  g o b s m a c k e d !—The Lord has sent some of you, (we don’t even know who!)—that specifically asked to cover our rent for the month of January, and then, but a day later, we received notice of another mysterious donation, and then another from dear friends. The amounts cover the rest of the shortfall for the month of January and into the month of February! Body of Christ, thank you! We do not know who to thank, and in this anonymous generosity, it is made clear we must always thank Him! Dearones and dear Lord, we, like the winter sparrows feel so known and loved and watched over. May you, with us, remember piercingly how like the sparrows we all are. Not one will fall without His knowledge, without His deep compassion and available presence. And through the Body that compassion is fleshed out, and we prepare for one another His choicest care in the winter.

Recent things of note we’re CELEBRATING and things to PRAY for (THANK YOU, beloved friends!):

PRAISES!

-Mystery-person(s) paid our rent for January, and 2 other large gifts were given that will cover our shortfall for the 1st 2 months of the year! 

-We FINISHED our Spousal Sponsorship, Permanent Residency, and Work Permit immigration applications and sent off the almost-4lb., 300+ page packet yesterday!! This is a major victory after so many hold-ups! It is a three-years-in-the-making project and we are SO relieved and grateful!  

-I had a few really good health days! The fevers have stopped(!!) and we PRAISE God for these needed positively-plateaued days that help us get through the harder health days!

PRAYER REQUEST: 

-My doctor asked me to begin decreasing the steroid again, now the it seems the infusion medicine has begun to work. Unfortunately even just going down half a milligram caused bad flare-up symptoms to start Thursday.

October calls from behind the veil, come and be a person

Today I sat under the porch-awning that hangs over our suite door, on the splintery and wise old barn-wood bench my landlord made, and watched a sheet of rain wash over the cedars. That kind of weighty rain here is so truly rare, and even today it only poured for a few minutes and then returned to the more common spitting kind. But in those minutes I could breathe differently, deeper. 

Today it’s October. 

When I try to think of my “relationship with October” in simple terms, I just feel gratitude that “there is a month that understands me”, haha! But when I ask myself what that means?—it’s harder to parse out into words! 

—October is the joy-struck month I became a Wycliffe member in 2012, after more than an aching decade of hoping to see the day! 

—It’s the month in 2013 when I got to meet my Johnny down in Dallas after we hadn’t seen each other in a breathless few weeks.  In several slow, perfectly ordinary hours, spread out over a week where I was attending a conference during the days and we only had the dinner hours to see each other, my heart could finally have the conversations with itself that it needed to hold.

—It’s when, with a candid pep-talk from my sister over the phone (still in Dallas), I first mustered up the courage to tell Jonathon I loved him; it’s when I first knew for certain that I wanted to marry him, even though we thought that meant he’d be waiting for three years while I went to Papua New Guinea first!

—That same October was when I first met the woman who would become my supervisor and friend in a department I didn't know I'd be working for later. It began the seeds of a story I would later know God had lovingly put together for me, when the work I'd hoped to do would become impossible for me and I would learn in November, through a surprise phone all on the very same day I was hospitalized, that my Lord had been preparing other work for me all along.

—It’s the same month in 2013 that I first started to be sick again, after 4 years of solid remission, with symptoms that seemed to double and re-double in a frenzy through that November until nothing looked as it had before, leaving me in the hospital with no possibility of Papua New Guinea, an almost-zero chance of ever working in a third world country, and no hopes of working in the very physical role of Surveyor that I’d longed for and trained for, and had only been two months away from beginning.

—It is the shining month in 2014 when I married the dearest Jonathon, before God and Heaven, our families, and the fiery oak trees.

So many achingly beautiful highs and chaotic low memories swirl within this month for me—hard seasons before these examples, and other vibrant ones—years of tromping around Berry in autumn months in our 20’s, hay rides and haunted barns with best friends, camping trips and apple orchards, loss and triumph, and now, in British Columbia, sometimes October means unending rain and trees that have stayed quite green, squawking stellar jays, and intermittent moonlit sitings of the tailless racoon…

I love the unkempt metronome of October. It’s a month bursting with visual drama, but also one that fills itself with the beauty of the ordinary—intense storms of gilded colors being transformed into each other, yellow to gold to bleeding red, but always with the calm side-by-side of things turning brown, of common decay.  Nature gets it! In its very fiber it knows that it was made for process; it doesn’t fight or need to endure the weight of grief or change or loss. It doesn’t drown in the sorrow of what we could call a declining beauty (gosh, if a person displayed such highs and lows in a short time we’d be inclined to call it a downward spiral!), but it just knows that this is its way—To buoy with what the year brings, to season in and out, to be seasoned by and through the cyclical song He has written and to know that it is good. And it is then, then that winter is lovely, and spring is awaited, and decay is normal, and all these things are seen and experienced for the good that they were designed to be.

I listened to my footsteps scuff-sideways on the gray pebbles under my canvas shoes this afternoon as I paced beneath our awning, and I could feel the cracking open. It’s been a tough few weeks again with health, and I hear small reminders tapped out in the heart’s morse code…how do you care for the soul when the body keeps trying to fall apart?… How do you connect with everyone on the outside of the health-cyclone when it just won’t stop, and leaves you too thinned and weary to run after them?…tap..tap..  And always the answer is to speak it out. Naming a shadowy thing takes the power out of it.  I am sad over survival mode—because it is not enough—because you can cease to feel like a real person, because it strips the life out of our outsides while our souls itch from the inside, and it tries to clobber you by turning all your time into “catch up” time. I am sad that illness means so much must be left undone, and that in the thick of it, there is only enough energy and ability for only some of the necessary things—which means needed things get left undone, unsaid, unsplendorized when I would long to do it all, to send all the words, to have sent all the cards finally expressing all of the gratitude I FEEL so fully, but have not said with the promptness and physical form that I would want, all the I-miss-yous, all the skype calls, and all the even everyday-normal things that go into making new friendships in the place God has brought the two of us to for now. I am sad that I am only small, and that maybe I am sometimes a thing withering early. I can be scared that things Jonathon and I hope for—like starting a family, finishing degrees, working on a language project together in the future—that these things will slip away from us before we ever get to really roll around in them. I can find worry lurking in my heart that illness will wrap its tentacles around these dream-stars and yank at them before we can choose and step, gleam and grow into them.

Knowing and naming even some of these thoughts and aches helps (and remembering that they are thoughts, and not truths). It doesn’t necessarily fix anything, as there are so many things with chronic illness that you’re just powerless to fix, but it hangs them out like a motley line of laundry, unravels the choked knots, the fabric of me, and helps wearied limbs stretch back out to truth, to hang there in the sun of it and be remade even as the fibers come apart.  Patient endurance is what you need now, Hebrews 10 meters out over my soul, like little hand-scrawled music notes ink-scratched over yellowed parchment, and I know the answer is just that we keep on. 

We breathe, and we inhale the rain, and claim a moment to tiptoe about, to photograph the life around us and to decidedly know that it’s inside too. 

We decide again each day to do as we can and not as we can’t but to do so with all that we’ve got, and to let the false shame of those limitations fall to the earth with the rest of the brown. And we let lovely people and moments remind us to do something small, speak something small, paint or write or shout something small to the feeding of our soul, to the shaking of the trees, and in His mercy we find that He’s written a story where the decay that falls to the ground in this gusty season is food for us all. We are all reborn by its percolation come spring. 

So in this florid season of rushing winds and tempestuous shift, I seek my trunk, my sturdy gnarled and knowing One. He is steadfast, and He is lovely, and illness and process and the forwardness that we were knitted with are all like autumn—where joy and ache are meant to intermingle, and it is the weaving together of the two that makes it what it’s supposed to be—brilliant, fleeting, and always leading into the next season. This mellow cello swoon song, this is what makes me feel understood by October, by my Lamb of a Lord, by my earthly beloved, and by the ones that know me best and plod-twirl through this pile-up crunchy fire-dance alongside me.