The flu, I mean. Four out of five of us (only Orilus was spared...which is hilarious, considering he's the one with "immune system" concerns given his transplant history!) lived through the flu last week.
Other things we've survived since I last posted: a seeping floor in our basement (thankfully our basement remodelling project is not all complete, and we had minimal damage, though Jason lost two entire nights of sleep this week trying to keep it that way), two meetings at the boys' school regarding their academic progress (or lack thereof), a few physical therapy appointments, the transition "back to work," the near-end of the boys' basketball season, the sudden rise of fashion concerns for each of our boys (skinny jeans a must; winter hats--which they refused to wear all winter--decidedly in, now that it's warm; Orilus begging to have his hair braided; Jackson trying to skulk around with his hoodie UP as much as possible), and...a fourteenth birthday. Which we celebrated Orilus-style with Caribbean-Haitian food and family (he's graciously going to wait until summer to have some friends over for a backyard cookout).
Wow. And then I wonder how it is I haven't made/had time for blogging, emailing, and other such communiques...
This morning I was singing really loudly in the minivan on the way to work and thinking about that, about why I haven't blogged. (By the way, I have a new favorite song--Matt Redman's Hear Your People Saying Yes to You, from his Beautiful News album. I think I played it and sang it four times...every time, my heart is just so moved, and I cry and reflect and teach myself again to WELCOME the changes God has brought me in these last eight months). I'm a little sad I haven't blogged because this has been possibly the richest spiritual season of my life since Moriah's birth. I've been journaling a lot (a very good sign that my spirit is finally recovering and on its way back to health), but I think part of what God is doing in my heart, I am meant to share. And so here it is, as best as I can tell you, and as briefly.
My faith tradition teaches me that the ultimate life I can experience is one that is fully surrendered to God. Jesus said that the person who wants to keep her life, will only lose it, but the person who gives up her life for the glory of God, that person will gain BIG life. He also said that true spirituality is not about avoiding suffering, but about suffering as he did, about taking up a cross of sorts, about a willingness to go the way that can be hard--not because we love suffering, but because we trust God. These things I have known for many years. But I kind of philosophized about them...I mean, really, how many of us need faith, for what we do each day? And as we go from meeting to meeting and cook our suppers and tend to our kids, doing mostly well at most things, all on our own, the less "taking up a cross" seems even really relevant. Life seems mostly good in those seasons, with suffering sprinkled in (when we turn on the news, or on an occassional bad day or during a difficult week or month). And Jesus' call to give him ALL of our life seems kind of far-out...harder to remember to meet with Jesus when cooking chicken or when I am Miss-Competent at work. Mostly my world--my family, my work life, my school life--mostly, I can do it, most of the time. The answer, it turns out, to this question: What can we do apart from Jesus? Or, what can we do without faith? The answer, it turns out, is actually this: Far Too Much.
Which is not to say that we are a faithless people when life is going about as usual. We have our moments of spiritual resonance or inspiration, and Jesus does meet us, especially when we remember to invite him to do just that. And we are encouraged by others. And we are productive, Oh God!, we are productive, doing lots of things we think God would want us to do, and this brings a sort of fellowship with him. It does.
And then the fit hits the shan, as a good friend of mine likes to say. For me, Moriah's birth was one of those moments (and someday, I will work up the courage to tell you her birth story in its entirety...it's my honest goal to do this before she turns one, to face dead-on the trauma and sadness of that day, and to hope that in the sharing, the story I carry in me as a great burden will be somehow lightened). Mostly I had this awful sense after Moriah was born that the great surrender of life--you know, the "easy" give-God-everything spirituality that was mostly about a good, nice life--was drastically altered. For the first time in my life, I felt (and this is a term I've shared with some of you), like a Prisoner of War, a POW. I was surrendered, sure, but against my will and better judgement. And I mean, AGAINST my will. I did not want to be a mom to a special needs child. In fact, I dreaded the very idea. I did not want my own boys (who have special needs of their own) to be burdened again in their life by something else difficult, and strange. I did not want a baby who was so visibly imperfect. And on and on. And I felt, I really did, that God had changed the rules on me somehow, and that he had tied a hand behind my back (what was I going to do, give her back? Of course not!) and was waiting for me to say "Uncle!" Making me surrender, and taking away my choices and my free will. And I was royally pissed off. What kind of God could he be, if this is how he treated his friends? (And here I must say, Mother Teresa's good words, "Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, it's no wonder you have so few of them," have brought me great comfort these last months).
Some of you are going to be surprised by what I'm about to share here. My family comes from a long line of faith-filled people. I mean, the kind of people who believe that when Jesus said we could move a mountain with a small amount of faith, they think he really meant, to move a mountain. They believe God still heals people. Not just in the your-body-heals-itself-slowly kind of way, but in the sudden miracle of a person walking who could not walk, or a sick person suddenly feeling well. And I believe this, too, believe this because I have seen it with my own eyes many times, though I think God does what he wants, when he wants to do it, and that so often he chooses not to perform miracles (theologically, I actually believe this is better for our faith, his holding back, then if he did them all the time...though my heart breaks to know he does not heal when he has the power to do it). Some of my family, and some of their friends, they got to praying after Moriah was born. And they weren't just praying for courage for our family, or any of those kind of nice-y, nice-y prayers. They were praying for Moriah to be HEALED. For her heart to be made well, before surgery. And even that Moriah would be healed from Down syndrome. I will just say here that I am so grateful to every good-hearted person for praying, even when I myself don't have the faith for a phenonmenon like the re-ordering of chromosomes in every cell of a person's body. It was good of people to pray, to express their faith and to trust God to hear them, even if his response was an ultimate "no." And it was no, because God didn't close the holes in Moriah's heart without surgery. And she still has DS. And a seizure disorder, to boot. So if anything, it would make perfectly logical sense to say, this time around, God was giving a big NO to us, and to Moriah's life.
Okay. Back to this morning. So I'm in my van. And I'm singing. Not just singing, but pray-singing, like belting it out as if God were right with me. I think he was, actually, because I could feel him all around. The words to this new favorite song of mine have become both a mark of what God has done in my heart these last couple weeks, and a desperate plea as I try to choose this surrender-path now, every day: "Hear your people saying yes to you. Hear your people say amen to you. Yes to everything you plan, yes to everything you want to do. Yes to everything that's in your heart. We're taking up our cross for you. Give us the strength to follow through on your dreams for us." It's really, really the ultimate surrender song to me....and here's why.
A few weeks ago, I took a retreat with my great friend Val. It was her birthday weekend and instead of eating a bunch of M&Ms and watching movies (which we are also very good at doing), I planned a spiritual retreat--24 hours of prayer and pointed spiritual conversation and a labrynth and a church service. And somehow, God met me during that weekend. I can't describe it, except to say that somewhere between conversation over dinner and the early morning prayer walk through the outdoor labrynth (and friends, if you've never prayed through a labrynth, you must!), I knew that I was willing to lay down my POW status and to take up surrender as my own choice, as the song of my heart and my spirit. I knew that I was on the verge of trusting God again and hoping again in a plan I could not see. I realized again that life is not about me, or my story, or Moriah's, but about God's story. Somehow, I had a sense that God would use Moriah's life to help people to read again the story of God's love for them, and that this purpose would be enough, would be amazing, and meaningful. And that I could choose to finally accept Moriah as a gift, to accept that God had made her exactly the way he had intended to make her. So that weekend with Val, I layed it down over and over, layed down the pain and the anger and made a choice (theology-friends, spare me a debate on this one). Walking that maze, I knew that the choice to fellowship with God would be at best a circuitous path, and that sometimes it would seem I was getting farther from him, or that the turn was leading me in the wrong direction...but that I could trust that this was not true, and that the path of my life, and Moriah's, would bring me back to him, always. Always to the center, always to Love. And the labrynth also taught me that I could not even begin to fool myself into thinking I had finally and ultimately surrendered my life and heart to God, that these things are done in halting measures, and as best as we can at the time, and over and over throughout our lives.
So this morning in the car, I was singing the song. I started to cry. Saying "amen" (which means "so be it") to Moriah's life is really so hard sometimes. Amen to the diffiuclty in getting her places. So be it. Amen to the strange comments I often get when I take her out in public. Amen to the beautiful and poignant comments I get in public, one of which made me cry in Target last week. Amen to that! Amen to crying in Target and all the messy emotions that come with being Moriah's mom. Amen to a girl who can't sit up and won't for a while yet! Amen to a girl who is still so big from steroids and to everyone's comments that she is so roly-poly...amen to a girl who has survived and who has a chance at a seizure-free life! Amen to the heartache and the doubt! And...and this has truly been the struggle of the last two weeks...amen to being a mom to ALL my kids. Amen to school meetings that bring difficult things to hear! Amen to making mistakes in discipline and coming up with other things that are awesome and just what our boys need! Amen to accepting them for who they are! Amen to trusting that there is a destiny for each of them! Amen to hours of homework and rebellions that will not last forever! Amen to the progress we see, and the growth, and the beauty of their spirits! Today, I was saying amen to all these things, over and over, and then it hit me:
THIS IS THE MIRACLE OF HEALING. My family has prayed for healing for Moriah. But the real miracle of these eight months, at least as far as I'm concerned, is the work God has done in my own heart. The trust I've deepened in his wisdom and in his good ways. The surrender I give freely now. The freedom I feel from the giving, and the receiving of all that I've gotten as a gift. The way I'm learning how to invite God into my every single day in ways I didn't before...invite him, because I am so aware of how much strength and courage I need to face each moment. This awareness, this sense of presence...this is a miracle, a healing balm to my spirit. It is a greater gift, I believe, than any kind of miraculous healing in Moriah's life would have brought me.
And I just knew today, knew as I was driving and crying and laughing about it all, knew that I should write it down. I'm memorizing Psalm 42 (look it up...what a beautiful psalm for those like me who suffer and doubt!), and I want today to make record, to remember this time of great joy and great breakthrough. And mostly, I want God to get all the credit he's due. It's not just that I've changed my perspective or my mind about things, friends. Literally, something has given way in me, something has been mended and made right, and I can only say that I have been under the knife of God's surgical hand before, and know its beautiful scars when I see them.
After a scripture reading in many of our churches we say, "The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God!"
After reading this post, friends, say it aloud with me: "The WORK of the Lord! Thanks be to God!"
1 comment:
thanks be to God. amen!
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