The glistening new one

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~

July 31, 2008 -- A [long overdue] monica update

31 July 2008
A [long overdue] monica update

Dearhearts, friends and family~
So… I know I’m off the appropriate time for “Christmas and what-I’m-doing-now letters” by about 7 months (or I’m 4 months early! Depending on how you look at it :), but this summer I found myself at my first huge pause in a very long time, and waves of love and missing people hit me as I finished something that felt difficult to me, and I found the largest emotion in me was an ache to reach out and say hello, and ask for prayer, and re-open my side of all these relationships that I haven’t poured into as I’d like to by default… Please know that I am sorry for my lack of communication, and that you have been thought of much in this lapsed time~ I began trying to write all of you in a little house on the Carolina shore… Erik and Mom and Dad were all able to take off work, and we escaped for a whole week, which has never happened, as far back as I can remember. It was beautiful to watch everyone decompress; some of the complexity of the last few years for my family sloughing off, puddling somewhere gracious. I cannot describe how great and poignant it was to have “guitar under the stars time” with my brother, and to have the time to read books just for me, while bathed in sunlight! Right before we left (vacation was in June), I received word that I am now, after two years of teaching High School, finally a “real” teacher :). The last time I wrote to some of you was after Berry and right before Ghana (oh, heart!)… So much has happened since, but I returned to Georgia after Africa and took an office job in the name of getting rid of my school debt so that returning to the mission field could come sooner. God’s plans for the time being were different for me though, and a challenge to my heart. Instead, through some bizarre orchestrations, I fell head-first into teaching English/Literature, mostly in the Special Ed. environment, at my old high school (!) and taking evening classes to get my teaching and Special Ed. certificates. The program allowed me to work in the capacity of a true teacher for two years with the understanding that I would complete all the classes and state tests by the end, and turn in a culminating “digital portfolio” with all kinds of proof that at the end of that, they could trust that I knew what I was doing. Oh the stories I could tell you! The education system here has been such an odd training ground, and these two years have run the gamut from kamikaze days of driving after 7-hours of teaching to my 5-hour certification class (3 days a week!), to teaching a literacy class for a group of 15-19 year olds that were identified as unable to read or write above a 3rd grade level… It was more than I could have been prepared for, but also more than I expected. And now I find the beginning of my third year is just about to begin. It’s funny how much excitement and how much reticence can exist together! In all this time I still find how true it is that a “hope deferred makes the heart grow sick” (“…but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life” Proverbs 13:12)! and though it has been an accomplishment, my longings are as they were, and I feel as convinced of my call to full-time missions as I was before. I do not know how God’s going to use what I’ve learned this way, but I find that in the “extra time” that I have this school year (since I won’t be taking classes for myself), I want to commit to plead for His vision and for guidance for all the parts of my heart finding their way out of ‘sickness’. Please, as part of myself, pray for clarity as I embark on this next year of teaching: that God would direct my use of time, my desire to proactively get out of debt, and my continued questions about and longings for training in Linguistics and Bible Exegesis… And now you have reached the end of my run-on sentences, as this may be the best I can do to summarize where I’ve been all this time. Know that I love you, and again, that I’m sorry for my tendency to get splotchy about staying in touch. There’s so much more I could say; so many more important chapters have been folded inside these few years for me, and so much I have learned about love and heartache, but I know this is long enough. I would love to hear from each of you, and to know what’s been going on in your lives. Truly. With all my heart, Monica

Posted on 31 July 2008 at 2:21 AM Comments (0)