Consider the Lilacs: Soul Care Toolkit #2

20 Monday May 2013

Posted by in beauty, Communities, Soul Care

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If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Didn’t it seem like, when we were kids, lilacs lasted all summer long?” my sister once asked me.

I had to agree. Evidently, as a child, I was oblivious to things like the passing of time and the life cycles of flowering plants. When I think about my childhood home, I remember winter ending, sunshine returning, and lilacs blooming in my mother’s yard. Summer loomed long before me, and childhood was pleasant.

One early June, the summer before my husband and I were married, I planned to cut a bouquet of lilacs for my apartment before he came for a visit. Each time I walked past the bank of bushes which lined the parking lot at the rear of my building, I drank deeply of their fragrance and color. When I went out scissors in hand to clip a few blossoms to bring indoors, I was stunned to find most of the flowers had turned brown and their lovely aroma had faded. Until that day, I had not realized how short was the season for enjoying lilacs.

Since writing my post about the color yellow, I’ve been thinking about what else I might add to my soul care toolkit. I definitely need to pack some lilacs in there.

“Consider the lilies,” Christ told his followers when they were tempted to doubt the Father’s goodness or question His provision for them. He pointed them to the stuff of this creation which was spoken into existence by the word of God and bears witness to the same.

Each spring I don’t just wait for lilacs to bloom, I will for them to return. As soon as I seen signs of life in flowering trees and plants, I begin examining my lilac bushes. I squint my eyes in search of the slightest hint of lavender, the tiniest cluster of a flower bud beginning to form. I know the lilacs’ signature scent won’t return until the flowers begin to open, so I search out the first floweret which unfurls and drink its aroma deep into my lungs.

I don’t just enjoy lilacs; I bury my face in and inhale them.

Because I know these flowers will be with me for such a short time, perhaps two weeks at best. I don’t take them for granted. They are a gift to me each spring, a lovely and gracious one from the hand of my Father. They tell me something of His delight in giving me good things. And they remind me of something important about Him.

God cares about things like beauty and fragrance.

Within the myriad of detailed instruction God gave his people about building His tabernacle, He told them to build an altar of incense. And the fragrant smoke which ascended from the altar, reaching toward heaven and representing the prayers of God’s people, pleased Him.

And when I am tempted to doubt my Father’s goodness or question His provision for me the scent of lilac wafting through a spring breeze feels a little like a love letter from Him. He reminds me that the cry of my heart, whether in joy or in pain, arises like a sweet-smelling aroma to Him. When I take time to sit beneath my lilac bushes and allow myself to be enveloped by their fragrance, I am reminded that God cares about the cries of my heart. And He delights to give good gifts to his children.

I have told my children that, when I die, I intend to do it in May. Not necessarily this May, mind you, should the Lord tarry and continue to give me strength. “Fill my casket with lilacs,” I’ve told them, “so I’ll be able to drink in their fragrance forever.”

Already the lilacs in my neighborhood have begun to fade and turn brown, and this grieves me. I know I will wait almost another full year before they return and make my heart glad. I long for a world where lilacs bloom eternally, just as they did in childhood memory.

I have already commissioned my rock-star diva girlfriend to sing at my funeral which, I tell her as a cancer survivor, is how I know she is going to outlive me. And don’t even try to pick apart my logic here; just go with it.

The song I have asked her to sing is There is a Land of Pure Delight, an old hymn written by Isaac Watts and recorded by Red Mountain Church. The lyrics, in part, are these:

There is a land of pure delight,
Where saints immortal reign,
Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.

There everlasting spring abides,
And never withering flowers:
Death, like a narrow sea, divides
This heav’nly land from ours.

Granted, Isaac Watts’ words don’t carry the weight and authority of scripture. Perhaps lilacs won’t bloom eternally in heaven. But maybe they will. And, if so, each time I bury my face in a bunch of them, and inhale them deep into my lungs, I am feeding my soul a foretaste of heaven.

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Joining Laura, Michelle, and Jen in these communities:


 

Roads I’ve Known

08 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Communities, memoir

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My sister, my girl cousins, and I were all dressed alike in pink seersucker dresses, gifts from one of our aunts. We’d gathered at her home for a summer picnic after which the adults did what the adults typically did. They sat around in lawn chairs in the sweltering summer heat and talked about boring adult things. As the adults sat around being boring, one of the cousins led the rest of us in a procession of pink seersucker to the country road which ran in front of her house. There, she introduced us to the fine art of popping tar bubbles which simmered up to the road’s surface in summer heat.

We never wore those pink dresses again.

The road in front of my cousin’s house was so very different from the ones in my neighborhood. Mine were safe, quiet, and predictable. But for the whimsical elegance of those terminating at Hillcrest Circle where a decorative fountain once flowed, most streets were laid out in a grid crisscrossing the town. On those streets I learned to observe traffic rules while riding my bike and to look both ways before crossing on foot. Fifth and sixth grade safety patrols held out their arms to guard the intersection which led to my elementary school, only dropping their hands when they deemed  the road safe for younger students to cross.

I have been down a few different roads since those days of pink seersucker and safety patrols. Some I have no intention of revisiting.

I remember a number of family trips taken out west when my children were young. Many of the roads we traveled seemed little more than steep switchbacks and hairpin turns carved onto narrow ledges leading over and through mountain passes. Allowing barely enough room for two cars to a clear one another, the ground beyond the roads’ shoulders often dropped off steeply toward oblivion. Or Hades. Or Mordor.

And those who had constructed the roads seemed indifferent to the need for guardrails, as if to communicate, “This is the West. It’s dangerous here. Exercise caution. Drive at your own risk. Or don’t exercise caution; we don’t care.”

Once, after a day of hiking at Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah, my husband discovered a dotted line on a map indicating a road named Pucker Pass. Ever open to adventure, he turned our rental car off-road onto what he thought would be a shortcut back to our hotel. Perhaps the posted warning signs might have clued us in that Pucker Pass was not going to be a real time-saver. Would-be travelers were advised not even to attempt the road without a high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicle. Also, signs indicated that should emergency assistance be required to rescue a car trapped on the road, removal fees would likely exceed $1000.

We made it through the pass, having had to stop at least once for my husband to remove a boulder from the middle of the road. I have no need to make that drive ever again.

My children grew up within the relative safety of a neighborhood on a cul-de-sac. There, they could roller skate and ride their bikes and scooters out on a road which seldom saw traffic. The year my daughter left for college, I followed in my car as she and her father drove north together in her little gray Subaru. Prior to that trip, she’d had very little experience in highway driving. As I watched her signal and change lanes, and saw tractor trailers merging practically on top of her rear bumper, I screamed out prayer, “Lord! Take care of my baby girl! Those trucks are so big and she’s so little!” Every mile down the highway placed distance between her and the safety of the cul-de-sac.

I watch as others who are very dear to my heart travel a winding, unpredictable road. Their way takes unexpected twists and turns, and signposts for navigation seem few. Their paths don’t seem to register on a smart phone or a GPS; there is no dotted line on a map marking the way for them to follow. There seems light enough to see but one step forward at a time; they walk in the company of few faithful companions.

Yet safety calls out from behind, “This is the way, walk in it, when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.” (Isaiah 30:21)

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Click here for a virtual ride through Pucker Pass.

Linking, for the first time, with Nacole @ Six in the Sticks for #concrete words, and with emily and the imperfect prose community:

Yellow

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in beauty, books, Communities, creation, scripture, Soul Care

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Look at the stars; look how they shine for you, and everything you do. Yeah, they were all yellow. – Yellow, Coldplay

If there were such a thing as a soul-care toolkit, and I was to begin assembling one, one of the first items I would pack into mine would be the color yellow.

When I married the beloved Swede nearly thirty years ago, I asked my bridesmaids to wear yellow. His groomsmen all wore brown tuxes, but that’s a conversation for another day. In our defense, it was the early eighties when many of us made unfortunate fashion choices.

A year ago when I was discussing blog redesign ideas with a friend, I told him my site needed to have yellow in it, but I didn’t know why. Last week a friend invited me to meet her for lunch. Afterward she asked if I wanted to stop by her house to see her daffodils. There were nine hundred and fifty-two of them, she told me. She’d counted.

As we stood together, surrounded by a sea of spring flowers, I told her I remembered reading somewhere that, during seasons when he was experiencing relief from the mental illness which tormented him, Van Gogh tended to use more yellow in his paintings. When I got home, I did a little online sleuthing to see if I could find any confirmation for my story. I didn’t.

Some sources suggested certain Van Gogh’s vision was affected by certain medications he took to treat his physical and mental illness, and these caused him to see yellow or yellow spots. Some in the art world speculate that Van Gogh merely painted what he saw. I did find, however, this quote from a letter written to his brother in 1888:

Just now, we have a strong glorious heat, with no wind, just what I want. There is a sun, a light that for the want of a better world I can call only yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!

The world outside my window is currently aflame with yellow. Forsythia is in full bloom, and even the pesky dandelion–cursed by homeowners who labor to eradicate it–turns it spiky yellow petals toward the sun. Perhaps even the miseries of this life are tinted yellow to bear witness to some hidden beauty.

While scripture reminds me the grass withers and flowers fade, and only the word of the Lord endures forever, it also points me toward the one who leads me beside still waters to restore my soul (Psalm 23:2). He visits the earth and waters it; he crowns the year with his goodness, and he causes little hills to rejoice on every side. (Psalm 65:9-11)

And he is the one who graces the world with the color yellow.

Another friend said to me recently that, as years go by, she finds herself increasingly surprised by the return of spring. And I knew just what she meant. Although God’s word tells me he has set the sun in its circuit (Psalm 19:4-6) and ordered the moon to mark out the seasons, (Psalm 104:19) my soul grows weary throughout the cold, dark days of winter.  Though spring has returned faithfully each year of my life thus far, sometimes I am tempted to wonder, “What if this year it doesn’t?”

When yellow returns it speaks to me of hope, it whispers to me of resurrection. It restores my soul.

I see yellow and I am reminded that out of darkness light will dawn once again; mourning will make way for joy. Out of death, life will rise. It has before, it will again.

And the one who rose from the dead is the very same one who wove this pattern into all of creation. He is the one who numbers the stars and calls each of them by name. (Psalm 147:4) He knows mine.

And he gives me the gift of yellow.

How about you? If you were packing a soul-care kit, what would yours contain? And what’s your favorite color? Why?

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Joining the writers at Living the Story @ BibleDude who, throughout the month of April, have been celebrating our ability to Rise and grasp the wonder of Christ as we walk out Eastertide. Today, Margaret Feinberg shares how we nurture awe and live wonderstruck in the every day.

Also linking with these communities:

Playing With Paperwork

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Communities, family, memoir

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Saturday was going to be a writing day. But for the baby shower I missed because I wrote the wrong date on my calendar, I had no commitments. A full day of uninterrupted hours stretched before me.

And I wrote not a single syllable.

I sat down at my desk, logged onto my computer to take care of some online banking, and quickly became distracted by the pile of file folders next to me and on the floor. As one who wears the label organized with no small measure of pride, I find piles of clutter mess with my psyche in profoundly disturbing ways. I blame the piles for the shower date mix-up.

In order to make space for my folders, I had to weed through many which had resided in the deep file drawer since my daughter had used the desk as a high school student. I unearthed homeschool records, transcripts, and letters of recommendation; copies of applications for colleges and scholarships, and several years’ worth of support letters from short-term mission projects in which both of my children had participated. I pitched catalogs from which I had ordered school uniforms for my son. I shredded outdated copies of FAFSA forms

As I sorted piles of paperwork representing years of my children’s histories, I was completely unprepared for the effect my little archaeological dig would have on my heart.

I found a copy of the speech my daughter had written in her seventeen-year old voice, one she had intended to deliver at her graduation party though she never did. She had composed words of appreciation for teachers and mentors, and pastors and friends, who had walked with her throughout her childhood and taught her about music and life and faith.

I uncovered the letter she had received from the admissions office of the college she attended, the one notifying her of her acceptance. I had forgotten how personalized the letter was, the admissions officer having taken care to quote excerpts from recommendations written on her behalf. I pictured myself holding the envelope while sitting in the parking lot of a bus station as I waited in her little silver Subaru for her to return from a weekend trip. I recalled the mix of emotions I felt as she opened the letter— both pride in her acceptance and disappointment that my first choice of colleges was not also hers. Her decisions about college and life were beginning to diverge from mine, yet they turned out to be okay and they turned out to be good.

Programs from Baccalaureate services from both high school and college were tucked away in files next to one another. Graduation announcements, napkins, confetti, and other memorabilia tumbled out of another folder. I found a picture of my daughter, dressed in her high school cap and gown, posing in front of the Snow Fountain Weeping Cherry tree in my front yard.

As each folder and every paper passed through my fingers, I remembered how important each had seemed at the time. Each signified major turning points; each represented years of doubts, fears, questions, and prayer. Everything which had once seemed monumental had, over time, eased into its place of proper proportion. I held onto a few of the treasures I unearthed, choosing several to pass along to my kids, but not many.

As I look out the window from where I sit here at my writing desk, I can see the Snow Fountain tree about to reach full flower. Each year I look forward to the beauty of its blossoms; each year its blooming is bittersweet. No sooner do its flowers fully extend than they begin to fade away and fall to the ground. Six seasons of blooms have passed since my daughter posed in front of this tree in her cap and gown.

Time goes by and seasons pass. I filter once important papers through my hands. Former milestones yield their way to greater glories. And all men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.*

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*From yesterday’s call to worship. Joining Michelle, Laura, and Jen and the sisterhood.


Fewer Words, More Prayer

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in books, Communities

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The word forth is not one I use in everyday conversation.

I never say to my son, “Please bring forth your laundry from the dark recesses of your closet.”

I don’t call my husband at work and ask, “If it’s no trouble, would you sally forth to the local market and pick up a gallon of milk?

I don’t call my daughter and tell her, “I plan to venture forth to visit you over Memorial Day weekend.”

And yet when I talk to God, I use the word all the time.

“Send forth your Spirit,” I pray. “Let the gospel go forth. Show forth your power.”

Granted, there are certain words I use only when talking to God: Glory. Transcendence. Majesty.

But sometimes when I’m praying and I stop to listen to myself, I begin to wonder, “Why am I talking like this? This doesn’t sound like me at all.

I’m sure, in part; my word choices reflect the language of the King James, the gospel vocabulary on which I was raised. And, at times, I’m probably just mimicking speech patterns I’ve heard when listening to others pray.

More often than not, however, I’m probably just filling in dead air space. Like an awkward teen on a first date, I keep blathering on in God’s presence because the possibility of silence in the conversation seems far too uncomfortable for me.

This week, I am among several other friends who are discussing chapters .004 and .005 of Margaret Feinberg’s book, Wonderstruck. Feinberg describes, in chapter .004, the wonder of reclaiming God’s life-giving gift of Sabbath. She wrote of the ways in which adopting practices of ceasing and rest awakened her more to the reality of God’s presence and goodness in her life.

It seems fitting to me that, after describing how she made more time to be with God, Feinberg devoted a chapter to discussing how she spent time with him in prayer. She recalled a Lenten season during which she felt moved to give up lengthy prayers and replace them, instead, with carefully crafted ones of no more than three words. Feinberg wrote:

Most mornings I stumbled into lengthier prayers by mistake. I paused and rephrased. Then stumbled again. The painstaking process left me frustrated and edgy. Prayer times expanded, not because I felt close to God, but because crafting even a few comments took so much time.

I also recognized I’d slipped into something one of my favorite writers calls “magical religion”— those moments I convince myself I can control or conjure God through my words or actions. Though I never outwardly admitted to such practices, my new time with God exposed a deep-seated belief that if I just prayed long enough or was more articulate or heartfelt then God would answer.

Anyone who has visited here a time or two and read my words can attest that I can be a bit wordy. Verbose.  Garrulous even. Not to mention repetitive and redundant. It probably wouldn’t be difficult for any of my readers to imagine what my prayer life might be like.

I take out my prayer journal and anguish over the names written there. I ask God to act. I beg. I plead. Sometimes I offer suggestions:

“If you would just do A and cause B to happen, then change the course of the wind and weather and, finally, insert tab C into slot D, I’m sure everything would all come out right.”

As though the God of all heaven and earth needs me to coach him in doing anything.

Other times I ramble on, filling up space, perhaps saying things because I think I am supposed to say them. And I have to wonder if, at times, God might not just want to interrupt me and ask,

Are we talking about anything here, or are you just talking?

Feinberg offers no magic formula for prayer. She doesn’t reference a command from scripture restricting the entreaties of God’s people to three simple words. Yet this chapter challenges me to think about how I converse with God when I approach him in prayer.

Frankly I don’t always know how to pray on behalf of many of those I care about. Since I was a child, I have offered up the words which the Lord taught his disciples to pray:

Your kingdom come, your will be done; on earth as it is in heaven.

But I look around and see these things are not the case. Some days the words in my prayer journal sound more like those from the script from a Lifetime television movie than something one would find in the pages of a respectable middle-aged Presbyterian woman. Things here on earth aren’t being done as they are in heaven. Not yet anyway.

I’m learning I don’t have to offer God solutions. I don’t have to beg him to be present or ask him to act with compassion toward others. He has already promised to do these things. God’s willingness to bring about his purposes depends on his character and his promises, not on the words I use or the earnestness of my pleas.

Sometimes I ask for specific things on behalf of others: healing, wisdom, clarity, reconciliation, forgiveness, rest. Other times, I echo his words back to him,

Remember when you said you would be God, not only to me but also to my children and my children’s children? Remember?

I haven’t tried limiting myself to three-word prayers. I am learning, however, simply to sit before God, give voice to my concerns, and release them to him. In doing so, I am affirming I believe he is at work and is going to do everything he promised in order to make thing right.

Just how he brings that forth is, of course, entirely up to him.

Joining the book club discussion co-hosted by Shelly Miller @ Redemption’s Beauty and Duane Scott @ Scribing the Journey. And with emily wierenga’s community for imperfect prose:

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Source cited: Feinberg, Margaret (2012-12-25). Wonderstruck: Awaken to the Nearness of God (p. 78). Ingram Distribution. Kindle Edition.

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