of carpets and broken hearts {a Good Friday story}

Today I heard a story that broke my heart.  

We were outside washing carpets, my new helper and I.  With overturned tea bowls, we scrubbed circles in soapy lather, shoving the warp and woof this way and that, collecting clots of hair and fuzz.  Brown water and soapsuds ran in rivulets down the driveway.  

This was her first week of work; the neighbor who’s been helping me for two years recently found out she’s pregnant with their fourth baby.  This new girl, Mikayla, the wife of one of James’ workers, is kind, cheerful, energetic - a perfect and timely answer to prayer.  She arrived just in time for spring cleaning, and we had been waiting all week for a warm day to tackle the carpets.  

  

We squatted on our haunches in the driveway, scrubbing away, our backs warmed by the spring sunshine, and she told me her story.  

I knew she had a two-year-old son at home, so I asked, innocently, if they wanted to have any more.  

“Not yet,” she said, sprinkling more soap on the carpet.  

“The doctor told us we should wait two years, and then we can try again.”  There was something I wasn’t understanding.  

“When my son was a year old, I got pregnant again,” she explained.  They underwent the usual three ultrasounds throughout the pregnancy, but it wasn’t until the last one that the doctor noticed anything unusual.  

“The doctor told us the baby’s head was too big,” she said. She pushed the broom in long strokes across the carpet, squeezing off excess water.  “He told us it would be born deformed.  That it would be very hard on us, and on the baby.  He said we should consider aborting.” 

When I finally understood this last sentence, I stopped scrubbing and jerked my head up to look at her, my eyes widening.  

“Really?  He said that?”

She nodded, still scrubbing.  

“What did you do?”

“I cried, and said, ‘No, no, I won’t do it, I’ll have the baby, I want to keep it.”  Her arm moved in rhythmic circles.  “But then I went home, and my mom talked with me, and she said it would be really hard on me later and that I should do it, and my husband wanted to do it too… what choice did I have?”  

“You were eight months pregnant already.”  She nodded.  I’m in disbelief.  I’ve never heard of a doctor recommending an abortion that late.  I want to ask whether they had tests done, whether they got a second opinion… 

“So what happened?”  I already know I don’t want to hear the answer.

“They gave me some medicine.  And then - the baby stopped - moving.”  There are queer little stops in her voice.  She manages to get the sentence out, but only just.  There’s a long, heavy pause.  A huge hand is squeezing my heart.  “I was in the hospital for ten days, and I cried every day.”

I’m crying now, too, my face crumpled up, the tears running down.  Around and around go the tea bowls, upside down, all these rivulets of dirty water running off.  I’m silently screaming at God. This is upside down!  This is backwards!  This should never happen!  Why, God?  Why?

People here don’t like to display emotion, and my tears are embarrassing her, but she doesn’t say anything, and I wonder if they are validating her too. 

Out loud, I say, vehemently, “That doctor put himself in the place of God.  He decided your baby shouldn’t have the chance to live.  That is God’s decision, not a person’s.”  

“Yes. I know.”  She agrees.  She scrubs another minute in silence.  “But what could I do?  Everyone was telling me it was the only thing to do, and I believed them.”  

There’s a long pause.  She stands up and reaches for the hose to flood the dirty water off the carpet.  I want a hose that will flood her bleeding heart with grace.

“So… did you have the baby?”  I almost can’t bring myself to ask.

“Yes.  They wanted to give me a caesarean but my mom went to bat for me and convinced them to let me deliver naturally.  It only took me 4 hours.”  

And then?  And then what?  I simply cannot imagine the pain of knowingly delivering a dead child.  “And then… you… said goodbye?”  Now I’m the one who can hardly get the words out.  It’s hard enough just to breathe.

She nods, silently.  Water pours from the hose, washing away all the grime.

“I’m sorry,” I say, vigorously wiping my eyes on my sleeve.  “You probably don’t want to think about this or talk about it… I’m sorry.” 

“Yeah, you don’t want to think about it, but of course, you do…”

A minute later, I find a way to encourage her, even just a little.  “At least you know he’s in heaven, with God, and he’s perfect.  He’s playing, and laughing, and happy…”

She nods again, meeting my eyes.  “I had a dream that my grandmother, who’s dead, came and patted me on the shoulder one night while I was crying, and said, ‘It’s ok, he’s with me, we’re looking after him.’”

Internally I’m having all sorts of theological difficulties (I have no idea whether her grandmother was a believer or not), but I don’t mention any of them… I just nod, and sniff.  

“We’re going to give his one-year nazir (memorial service) this year…. 

“A way to remember him,” I say.

“Yes.”

We’re almost done with the last two carpets.  I take Ruby inside to change her wet clothes.  I pay Mikayla her first week’s wages, wishing I could give her the Gift without price that will soothe and save her wounded soul.  Please, Lord, I beg.  Please, one day soon.

I see our Easter mountain in the kitchen window, the cross tilting lopsidedly on the top.  Good Friday floods over me afresh.  It had slipped my mind while we were outside scrubbing. 

Into my mind floods a vivid memory of walking through the Good Friday story this morning with the kids, and how Ben had to get the hammer so I could tap the nails through Jesus’ pierced wrist into the little apple-twig cross.  The boys went perfectly quiet while I did it, except for Ben saying mournfully, “I don’t like this part, Mommy.”  Will’s eyes were wet.

My stomach twists, remembering. What you had to go through for us, Jesus!  The brokenness you endured, so you could heal ours.

The empty cross is dark against the window.  The women are weeping as they leave the tomb. 

It’s Good Friday.  And my heart is breaking.

But.  Sunday is coming.  There is hope.  Hope for all the brokenness.  

And suddenly, I’m flooded with a rush of gratefulness: that we ourselves were broken, but are being healed.  And that we get to live here, in this broken place, next to broken people, with Sunday’s healing hope inside our broken hearts.  

Tree {at Lisa-Jo's Five-Minute-Friday}

{Joining up with the linkies over at Lisa-Jo’s today… her Five-Minute-Friday prompt this week is: tree.  Come join!}

GO.

Across from our first house in Central Asia there was a tree.  It was a beautiful poplar, and what I love about poplars is that they stretch their branches straight up to heaven.  Every time I passed that tree with first my 18-month-old and my bulging belly, then later my two-and-a-half-year-old and my infant in a stroller, I would follow the shape of the branches up into the blue sky, and inevitably my thoughts would turn to God.  I would take in a deep breath, exhale it, walk a little more slowly.  Return to being all there, right where I was.  I would usually smile at my little boys, point at the tree, remind them how beautiful it was.

And then, one day, they cut it down.

And I realized that here, in Central Asia, things like economizing and firewood and making room for telephone and power lines are just more important.  These people I live amongst just do not have the time and energy to appreciate art.  Art as we traditionally think of it is not necessary to their breathing, like it is to mine.  They do listen to music - at weddings and from car stereos, and they do frame photos - of grandparents and honored relatives.  But God’s art being all around us?  A tree pointing the way to heaven?  Those are things that rarely, if ever, cross their minds.  

So I cried.  I cried, as I snapped photo after photo of the demise of my friend.  I blogged about it, cried some more, snapped more photos.  I grieved, unreasonably some might say.  But the thing is, there is so little real beauty around me and I scrape to find what there is, because I need it for the health of my soul… so when a huge piece is destroyed, just to feed someone’s fire for the winter or because it’s getting in the way… I can’t help it.  Something aches and oozes inside of me.

I went outside one day, across the street.  I couldn’t take it any more.  I knew I was the weird foreigner risking ridicule, but I had to ask someone.  Why?  No one had a good answer to give me - the worker men were just doing their job.  So I never got the real answer, but I don’t think it would’ve mattered anyway.

What mattered was the tree was gone.  And I miss it.  Still do.  

Amazing how a tree can be a signpost to God’s heart.

STOP.  

(links and photos added after my 5 minutes finished)

"Pearl of great price" {a vignette from our sojourning this summer}

{Thank you for grace for this long silence... we are 5 days into our third trip of over two weeks this summer.  We've been away more than we've been home, and life has been made of lots of waiting and trying to find joy in the moments, despite feeling like wanderers... }

A vignette from our first couple days in our temporary apartment, God planting us each place we go, even if it's only for a short time...

She tells me her name is Pearl.  “Pearl, like the stone, you know?”  She’s wearing a sky-blue spandex T-shirt and denim capris, her dark hair pulled into a messy bun on top of her head with a black velvet scrunchie.  I notice her pretty earrings, gold with blue stones, her matching pendant.  She doesn’t look more than 25 or 26.  She introduces me to her kids: the baby she’s swinging, a little boy 14 months old; his sister, 4 years old; and the older brother, 10 years old.  At this point I stop her, kid her.  

“Wait - you have a ten-year-old?  That can’t be possible!”  She breaks into a broad grin.  

“How old are you, anyway?”  I tease.  I offer my own age.  “I’m 31… you must be - “ 

“Thir-ty fife - no, thir-ty ayte, I’m thir-ty ayte!” she carefully corrects her English.  We’re speaking a mixture of English and Russian - she has about as much English as I have Russian.  We’re managing.  

“Thirty-eight!”  I’m incredulous.  She really looks just out of college.  I tell her I should call her my “Tye-tye” (Russian for “aunty”), and we both laugh.  I look at her beautiful children.  We talk about age gaps.  I introduce my kids, Ruby on the ground eating dirt, the boys chasing each other around the jungle gym.  She chuckles when I tell her how tired I am, pantomime pulling out my hair.  We share quiet, maternal pride.  

It’s not until later that she tells me.  This is, after all, only our first conversation.  But in this part of the world, the hard stories often come sooner rather than later.  Because everyone has them.  They are a bridge into intimacy, shared experiences spanning the gulf between strangers.  I often feel a mixture of guilt and relief that I don’t have any tragedies of my own to tell.  

We are talking about our sons, how my eldest is serious and studious, my second-born rowdy and active.  She tells me then.  “I had another son.  My first-born.  He was serious, like yours.”

I want to make sure I’ve heard her correctly.  “Another son?”

“Yes.  He died.  A… cat-a-strof.”  The Russian word is the same as the English one.  Catastrophe.  I want to know, and I don’t want to know.  I’m already bonded with this woman.  “What happened?”  I lean closer, instinctively trying to comfort her with some kind of nearness.  

“I was driving, we were going to the lake.”

“You were by yourself?”

“Yes.”  The details are few, the language barrier frustrates now more than intrigues. “My two sons were - “ she waves behind her.  I fill in, “Behind you.”  

“Yes, behind me.  My son, the oldest, he was crying about something, I don’t know what.”  At this point, her ten-year-old comes up on rollerblades, and she stops.  Asks me if my children can have ice cream, gets out money, sends her son off with a stream of instructions.  I, too, get out money and offer to pay, but she waves me off with a mock-serious frown - “No. No!”  Unthinkable, to let guests in your country pay for their own ice cream.  I give in, smile at her son as he rolls away.

When he’s out of earshot, I ask, “So, what happened?”

“I was asking my son, ‘Why? Why? Why are you crying?’  I was - “ she motions with her hand again, whacks at an invisible child “ - like this, behind the seat, trying to get him to be quiet.”  Her youngest is tugging at her T-shirt, so she  blandly whips out her breast and he begins to nurse.  She cradles him across her body, continues her story.  

“And then, the car - “ she makes a twirling motion in the air with her hand. 

“You - you rolled the car.” 

“Yes, yes, I rolled the car.  Two times.” She tells me this with an almost immovable face. Only her eyes betray her pain.

“You rolled the car twice - “ my hands are over my mouth, I can’t breathe.  I shake my head wordlessly at her.  Finally I ask, “Was he wearing his seatbelt?”

“I told him to put it on,” she says, making a helpless motion with her hand.  “I told him, but… he didn’t listen.  I was stupid.”  The English word sounds abrupt and harsh, bursting from her mouth.  Chastising herself in a foreign language.  She says it again, and again.  “I was stupid.  Stupid.  I should have stopped the car.  I should have wiped his face, cleaned his face, comforted him - “  By now, my eyes are watering.  I’m looking wordlessly at her, both hands over my mouth.  I still can’t breathe.  The noise of the playground swirls around us.  

“I should have said, ‘Quiet, quiet, my son, what’s wrong?’”  I think, if it were me telling this story, I’d be crying so hard I couldn’t get the words out.  

Finally I ask, “What happened?”

“He was sitting beside the window, he was thrown out of the car…”  Her son returns with the ice creams, hands them out.  I get out wet wipes, call the boys over, scrub the palms of Will and Ben’s hands, open the ice cream wrappers.  I do this automatically, numbly.  My mind is with Pearl, in the car, on that horrible day.  

“How long ago?  When did it happen?”

“Five years ago.  And five years have - “ she makes a stroking motion over her heart. 

I fill in. “...done a lot to heal your pain.”

“Yes.  I have two more children, a daughter, and now another son.”  She pats the baby at her breast, looks fondly at her four-year-old, pigtails bouncing as she bounds up the slide with her ice cream.  

“But…” I stop, feeble.  I want to say, But there is no one in the world like your son.  No matter how many more children you have, you can never replace him.

“He would be thirteen,” she says this softly.  Almost apologetically.  As if she’s not supposed to allow herself to imagine him as though he were still living.  

I try to say my thought, try to express my sorrow for her loss.  She nods, only partially understanding my broken sentences.  Our eyes meet.  Impulsively, I lean in.  I reach an awkward arm around her shoulders, around the nursing baby.  I plant a quick, clumsy kiss on her broad, brown cheek.  Her skin feels moist.  My heart leaps towards hers.  I pull back, and our eyes meet again.  There seems nothing more to be said.  

We enjoy our children enjoying their ice cream.  Ruby screams for licks from Will’s stick, mouths little bits of chocolate.  She tilts her head up, gives a cheeky grin, displaying all six of her tiny teeth.  I make a joke, try to crack the sadness with mother-empathy: “With my first, I didn’t give him any sugar for two year.  With my second, I think he was maybe a year old before he had sugar.  With the third…” I trail off, and motion to Ruby sucking on the ice cream.  We both crack up laughing, she knowing exactly how the standards go out the window.  

Later, when it’s time to go, I tell her: “I prayed and asked God for a friend, for these two weeks we will be staying here...” 

“Really?” She seems surprised one would pray about that.  “Well, I’m new too,” she admits.  “We just moved in a week ago.”

“Only one week!  But you seem so natural, so at home!”  Suddenly all the pieces click: her desire to strike up a conversation with a stranger, wanting to practice her English, buying my kids ice cream, impulsively telling me her story… she needs a friend as much as I do.

She’s a sojourner too.  Even though this is her home.  

Before, she had described their house in the country, how they want to find tenants for it, and I thought it was just another property they owned.  But no, that was the home they just left behind, so their children can go to a good school in the city.  And here she is, sharing her pain, in a foreign language with a foreigner on the playground… I like this woman.  I like that she shared herself with me, risked something on a friendship that can only last two weeks at most.  It could be just callousness, that she’s numbed to her own pain.  Maybe she tells everybody her story.

I don’t think so.  

I tell her what I think.  “I think God arranged this, our meeting.”  

Light breaks over her face.  “Yes!  I think so too.”

how to give thanks when your heart is breaking?

I stumble out bleary-eyed from too much sleep, thankful my baby girl has slept an incredible 8 hours in a row... and the radio is squawking out more details of this nauseating, heart-breaking thing.

This thing that defies belief.

This thing that has me screaming silently at the sky, "Are You there, God?  Are you GOOD?"

How can You possibly be good if You allow 7-year-old lives to be brutally shattered by bullets?  If You allow families to be torn apart without warning, on just another a normal blue-sky day, just like the one we had yesterday?

How. can. You. be. good. if You just stand by and watch a twisted human being, made in Your image, explode sweet, creative hearts into a bloody mess?  Shred parents' hearts into a mess of bleeding grief?

How is it possible for one of Your image bearers to inflict this horror on other human beings?

I numbly chew my toast and drink tasteless tea as I battle in my spirit with You: How can I keep thanking You for Your goodness when my heart is aching?  When their hearts will never quite heal?  

I was splashing in waves with my own sweet boys yesterday...

Why do I get to keep my kids, when they had to kiss theirs goodbye?

In the shower, the sluggish thought surfaces: Today is Monday, a day for giving thanks. 

Today is always a day for giving thanks.  How do I give thanks for this?

I don't have answers.  I just don't.  I won't offer trite words that would sound hollow.  I will just say how utterly, desperately sad I am for each family plunged into this nightmare.  And I will say that I do still believe what the Words tell me, the only Words that are self-authenticatingly true:

I still believe it with my head, doggedly, that He works all things together for good, even unbelievable atrocity.  

My head believes; honestly, my heart is struggling.  I am wildly flailing with the ache of how unfair it seems.  

But. I. am. thankful.

I am thankful for life, today.  I am thankful for each moment with my sweet children.  For their soft skin, their sparkling eyes, the sound of their laughter.  I'm thankful for the sweaty grip of their hands in mine, that I get to kiss their ow-ies and put bandaids on scrapes, that I get to tuck them into bed at night and feel their wet kisses on my cheeks.

I am deeply, truly, achingly grateful.

And no, it isn't fair.

I didn't have the answer to what to write in the second half of this post until just now, walking back from the post shop where I sent a tiny Christmas package full of music, nail polish and dinosaur tattoos to a friend who also has three gorgeous children....  Children who at this very moment are alive.  Breathing.  While someone else's gorgeous children are dead.

While I walked, I couldn't breathe for the ache of it.  I was struggling for breath, walking down the street, pushing my brand-new daughter in front of me, when these words scrolled through my brain.  At first, just this phrase:

"He who did not spare His own Son..."

I nearly stopped walking.  My brain repeated that one line, over and over, fumbling around for the rest of the verse:

"He who did not spare His. own. Son...

but gave Him up for us all...

He gave up His own Son for us.  And I would question His goodness?  

"He who did not spare His own Son,

but gave Him up for us all,

how will He not also

with Him..."

We have His Son.  He gave us His only Son.  Gave Him to us, in every conceivable way.  Gave us His Son's blood, poured it streaming down a horrible cross.  Gave us the breath from His Son's lungs.

When we have lost our sons, our daughters - when He takes them away - we have His.  

He gave us His Son.

"He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all,

how will He not also with Him 

graciously give us all things?"

~Romans 8:32

All things.  Things like... comfort.

Answers.

Hope.

Life, forever.

He promises He will graciously give us all things - with His Son.  In His Son.

When we have Christ, we have...

all things.

When I get home, I look up the reference.  Romans 8:32.  Just 4 verses after those other words I found it so hard to believe this morning: Romans 8:28, that He works all things together for good.  All things.  All things.  

Just 4 short verses separate the "all things" of our lives from the "all things" we have in Christ.

The God who did not spare His own Son, but who graciously gives us all things when He gives His Son to us, is the same God who works all things together for good.  

I can believe that, with my head, and my heart.

{With our deepest sympathy and prayers for the families of the victims of the Connecticut shooting. May the God of all comfort wrap you in His arms....}

 

unlooked-for grief

[I’ve just started a creative writing course which I hope will challenge, expand and hone my writing skills… Today’s exercise asked for 3 creative ideas, one idea expanded into 20 separate words, then those words formed into a poem of 16 lines or less, and then the same 20 words used in a short story of 300 words or less. The result?)

7 For there is hope for a tree,

if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,

and that its shoots will not cease.

8 Though its root grow old in the earth,

and its stump die in the soil,

9 yet at the scent of water it will bud

and put out branches like a young plant.

Job 14:7-9

I mourn

with unlooked-for agony.

Soared magnificent skyward,

testified truth with beauty,

my poplar friend

dead now

through thoughtless, shallow process.

Embarrassed:

am I overreacting?

Or does my anger

vindicate

creation’s intrinsic value?

Today I am in mourning.

This week I watched, helpless, as my magnificent friend across the street was dismembered limb by limb and hacked to the ground in [what I considered to be] a thoughtless, shallow process. I didn’t expect its death to cause such agony.

Since we moved to this house, that tree has been for me the epitome of beauty in this place. Branches soaring skyward in poplar glory, daily testimony to the truth of “all creation praises Him”, catching a window-glimpse my heart would invariably mount up in praise. In my mind, I sat on its branches, conversing with the pigeons and the cuckoo who loved to perch high above the street and gossip. I stared full minutes at the color of the sky between its leaves, marveling at the intricate pattern of blue and green.

Embarrassed by my own grief, I ask myself, am I overreacting? Or is this unlooked-for anger its own self-vindication? Is the very fact that I feel anger at its murder proof of the tree’s own intrinsic value?

And suddenly I am grieving something else: I mourn a culture with a poverty level that forces firewood to take urgent precedence over aesthetics, where Maslov’s hierarchy of needs dictates that while homes need to be heated, hearts cannot stop to ponder the beauty of branches whispering grace.

22 Thus says the Lord GOD: “I myself will take

a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and will set it out.

I will break off from the topmost of its young twigs

a tender one, and I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.

23 “On the mountain height of Israel will I plant it,

that it may bear branches and produce fruit

and become a noble cedar.

And under it will dwell every kind of bird;

in the shade of its branches birds of every sort will nest.

24 “And all the trees of the field shall know

that I am the LORD;

I bring low the high tree,

and make high the low tree,

dry up the green tree,

and make the dry tree flourish.

I am the LORD;

I have spoken,

and I will do it.”

Ez. 17:22-24