For the last 10 years or so, my family has lived counter-culturally around Christmas time. We practice Advent, a time of waiting and lament, a time where we remember the dark time before Jesus came into our world. That’s why we don’t buy or put up our Christmas tree until a few days before December 25^th. 

Because of this, we have landed some deep discounts on Christmas trees and found some free ones too. Once we paid $1 for the last Christmas tree on the lot.  It’s become an adventure, trying to nab the cheapest Christmas tree out there.  It’s also fun because finding a Christmas tree later means my adult kids are usually home, which makes for great fun.

There are other advantages. This year, my husband and I walked into 10,000 Villages on Dec 19^th (our anniversary) and fell in love with a hand-crafted olive wood nativity set made by an artisan in Bethlehem. We bought it at 25% off, and the cashier kept saying how lucky we were to find it because it sold out online and she had only two left in her shop.  

On December 20^th, I wandered into the hospital gift shop to buy something Christmasy to add to my friend’s hospital room shelf –she was awaiting surgery and needed some cheer. All things Christmas were 35% off. I couldn’t believe my good fortune and hers—she came through surgery well and will get to be home for Christmas.

Deep discounts are just a byproduct of living into the liturgical practice of observing Advent. This practice doesn’t make us more spiritual than anyone else. It just helps us remember. We remember that before Christ came, heavy darkness hovered over the world. Scriptures written long before He came mention this, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2).

Practicing Advent means we remember the dark times our older brothers and sisters walked through more than 2,000 years ago. Observing the darkness they experienced connects us to them. The harsh realities they faced are not unlike the ones we face. And we pray too, much like they prayed, “Come again, Lord Jesus. Come make all things new.”  

During these four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas, we make an effort to light a candle after dinner and read scriptures selected for us from our church’s Advent devotional guide. We pray heartfelt prayers for those in need and often end this contemplative time by praying together a prayer written long ago. In this, we remember, we wait, we hope. 

And then, starting on December 25^th, we celebrate for 12 days the goodness of God who left the comfort of Heaven to become one of us so that we might know Him.

I’m writing this essay on December 21^st. Our tree is not up yet. We will start our search in two days when my daughter joins my other daughter who is already home. It will be an adventure that will include deep discounts, we hope. But our biggest hope is that in the busyness of the season, we will remember that He came, that He is the light shining in the darkness, that He is here with us, and that He will show us the way.  

It’s been several years since I read Robin Shreeve’s essay, “In Praise of Scruffy Hospitality,” from her TreeHugger blog, but I think of it often. Her short essay changed me and the way I think about having people into my home.

She starts out by describing a couple’s home. “The kitchen is small. The wood cabinets are dark and a few decades old. Spices and jars for sugar and flour line the countertops because there’s nowhere else to put them. A tall, round table shoved in a corner has mismatched bar stools crammed around it.”

She goes on to describe the deck—a yard-sale table, hand-me-down chairs and cushions, a “well-used chiminea.” The food too is mismatched—everybody contributes something—leftovers, toasted day-old bread and hummus, slices of cheese.

And yet, the author says, though the kitchen and deck are nothing fancy, they “are two of the most hospitable places I know.” And though the food doesn’t match, it becomes a literal “feast.”

I too have a friend like Shreeve’s friend. When you walk into her kitchen, the desk you come to first is piled high with papers. Barrettes and hair ties are shoved into the desk’s corners. Fingernail polish and other miscellaneous items have found their way to its flat surface. The dishes in the sink have yet to be washed. When we come to her house, we bring something to contribute—often it doesn’t match.

Why then, is this house one of the most hospitable spaces I know? What makes me feel so at home when I come here?

Too often our culture confuses hospitality with entertainment. We compare our spaces to Pinterest and trick ourselves into thinking our homes need to look like those homes before we invite anyone in.

I was talking with a few college students about this topic not long ago when one piped up and told me how stressful the holidays are for her. Her mother insists on hosting big dinners for the family, and she doesn’t let anyone bring anything or help. She and her mom clean for days. “It’s just so stressful and so much work,” she said, “and then people leave shortly after the dinner—you don’t even get to sit and talk with them, and no one seems to appreciate all the work that has gone into it. I hate it,” she said.

I feel her stress. I’ve been part of those preparations. Those dinners. The stress is palpable.

So, what makes a space hospitable? I don’t think mismatched furniture or messiness qualifies a space as hospitable necessarily—you can be neat and tidy and be hospitable too. The point of hospitality is that you let people into your space as-is. No matter that things aren’t perfect, a welcoming space is where someone says, “Come on in. Have a seat. Let me fix you a cup of tea. Tell me all your news.” This is the welcoming we long for—the friendship and personal care we crave.

Jesus commended Mary for her hospitality when he came to visit her and her sister Martha, two of Jesus’s best friends. Martha, the scriptures say, is the one who met Jesus at the door and welcomed him into their home. But then she hurried around setting the table and getting tasks done in the kitchen to prepare a meal for her Lord. And let’s be real, someone has to get dinner on, right? Some of us, I know, feel sorry for Martha because she was doing all the behind the scenes work by herself while Mary, seemingly, was just sitting there. But Mary wasn’t just sitting there –she was showing Jesus true hospitality. Her heart was bent towards him. She couldn’t wait to hear his news and everything else he had to say. By sitting with him and listening to him, she made him feel loved and cherished, and she did this because she really did love and cherish him (Luke 10:42-48).

What makes Mary’s posture of hospitality more favored than Martha’s? I believe it has to do with vulnerability. I listened to an Audible book on a plane recently called Getting Naked, by Patrick Lencioni. No, it’s not a book about sex. But it is a book about vulnerability. The very first line in the introduction says this, “Vulnerability. It is one of the most undervalued and misunderstood of all human qualities. Without the willingness to be vulnerable, we will not build deep and lasting relationships in life.” Lencioni goes on to tell a story about a consultant firm that practiced vulnerability and humility instead of the spiffed-up, know-it-all, polished presentations that his consultant firm practiced. Clients preferred vulnerability. It’s a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it.

I think living out scruffy hospitality has to do with a willingness to be vulnerable, and vulnerability makes us uncomfortable. We fear people won’t accept us if we let them into our everyday spaces and thoughts where things are a bit messy. We think the new art on the walls or the spring cleaning we just did will make people think we’re okay. Maybe they will think we are special if our food tastes “just so.” Perhaps they will like us more and think we are wonderful if our house looks beautiful.   

But the opposite is actually true. What people are longing for really is not a pristine, beautifully put together house or an amazing food selection. They just want you. That’s it. They want you.

A friend of mine told me about a dinner she went to at an acquaintance’s house –they invited her and her husband over so the families could get to know each other better. The dinner was lovely, but after eating, the hostess disappeared —for quite some time. My friend noticed her absence. She wondered where she could have gone. Eventually, she found her in the kitchen, cleaning up all the dishes and wiping down counters.

My friend felt undervalued. She felt cheated out of good conversation and guilty for failing to help out with the dishes. This story made me sad because my friend is a wonderful person and she’s worth getting to know. The hostess on that night missed an important cue. That’s what Jesus was trying to say to Martha –you’re missing the cue. You think the tidying and the food prep are the point of the visit. They aren’t. Getting to know me—that is the point.

This journey to scruffy hospitality has been just that for me—a journey—one that I’m still on. There were plenty of times as my kids were growing up in our house when I know I put stress on them and on my husband with trying to get the house in order before “the company comes.” My kids have all read Shreeve’s essay, and when they are home and feel that old perfectionistic stress coming back in me, they will say, “scruffy hospitality, Mom, remember?” And when they say this, I immediately think of the couple in the essay, and my shoulders relax, and again, I am free.

Sometimes as a discipline now I will leave dirty dishes in the sink, even though I have 20 minutes to spare before guests arrive. The other night, I invited friends over after a church service and told them we were going to pop some pizzas in the oven. A few of them got to my house before I did and started assembling pizzas with my husband. The oven was preheating. We opened the bags of chips and popcorn our guests brought and started eating and chatting it up. It didn’t seem to matter to them that the pizzas weren’t done ‘til 930. It also didn’t seem to matter that my daughter warmed up the tomato soup she had made that day and put it on the table too, along with some “smokey” grilled cheese sandwiches she almost forgot about. “I like them smokey!” someone said. We enjoyed it all because we enjoyed being friends around some mismatched food and some great conversation.

I’m grateful to Robin Shreeves for writing about scruffy hospitality. It has helped me tear down walls of perfection and embrace vulnerability.  Hannah Brencher’s words in Come Matter Here, sums up the heart of hospitality for me, “I think we’re all just wondering if someone will leave the light on for us. If they will leave the door open. If they will usher us in, saying, ‘Come to the table and eat. You must be hungry. Here, let’s eat.’ It’s the company, the belonging, that we’re most hungry for. The bacon is just the bonus.”

Recently I heard a pastor preach a sermon that sounded distantly familiar to me, a sermon I had heard many times in my childhood.  The thesis went something like—the singular important thing about the Christian faith is that we pray the prayer to receive Jesus into our hearts so that we can spend eternity (meaning the life after this one) with him in heaven and not in hell. 

The pastor said pretty clearly that the fact that we might be good to our families or coworkers or that we might be generous with our time or money really does not matter in the grand scheme of things.  The only thing that matters is that we have prayed the prayer to receive Christ and that we know we are going to heaven when we die. He ended his sermon with a sample prayer, the prayer that gets us into heaven, the prayer that keeps us out of hell.

Many of my Christian friends would say this type of sermon sends a strong message of salvation, a needed balm in a world gone wrong. I acknowledge that praying a prayer that confesses one’s failures and recognizes one’s need for God is a starting place. But is that the end?  I’ve prayed the prayer. I’m good. I’m going to heaven. I am no longer headed to hell. Whew!  What a relief. Glad that’s over.

I wanted to stand up and shout, “Jesus did not present the good news of his kingdom this way!”   

How did the good news of God’s kingdom—God coming to be with us and to rescue us from darkness in our everyday lives and beyond—become so depressing?  How did it become only about what happens to us when we die?  How did it become about death instead of about life?  

I remember being confused by this pray-the-prayer-so-you-can-go-to-heaven preaching when I was a teenager.  Although I had heard this kind of sermon over and over again, I had parents who lived out their faith throughout the hours of each day.  I didn’t get the impression, from them at least, that faith was about praying the prayer and then going about your business without much thought of God.

In high school I recall a walk with a friend whose spiritual condition was to me uncertain. I conjured up the courage to ask her if she knew Jesus.  “Yea, I did that.” she said. “The prayer. With my dad. In my room. When I was 5.”

I remember feeling perplexed at her answer and not knowing quite what to say. I think I said something like, “Oh good. I just wanted to make sure.” But I was puzzled by her notion that knowing Jesus was a prayer she prayed –in her room—when she was 5.

When Jesus presented the news of the good life he came to offer, he told a woman who was drawing water at a well, “If you knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water” (John 4:10). He goes on, “ . . .those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again.”  He goes further, “It [the water] becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life” (14).

Her response was desperate, “Please sir, give me this water!” (15).

And he did, and the act of drinking Jesus in changed her.  She no longer had to give into her impulse to bounce from man to man to try to fill up the longing in her heart but became filled up with God-love, the kind of love that transforms you and gives you confidence. Her joy in drinking in this thirst-quenching God-water became like a fresh spring bubbling out of her so that she couldn’t help but tell everyone she knew –that God can fill your every longing, that you need never feel alone again, that he will walk with you every day.

Not once in his lengthy interaction with her did Jesus talk about her impending death. Or about getting into heaven. Or about praying the prayer. Or about not going to hell when she died.

Later Jesus told a crowd of people who kept following him around to stop being so concerned about perishable food, and to seek true bread, “The true bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33).

He said this because Jesus is Real Life; person after person on this planet, so many people I know, would say if you asked them that until they awakened to the love of Jesus, they hadn’t really lived. Perhaps that’s why Jesus’s audience responded, “Sir, give us that bread every day” (34).

Jesus offered it to them, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry again.  Whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (35).

What he is trying to say is—nothing can fill you. No one can complete you. Your boyfriend or girlfriend can’t. Your job can’t. Neither can your college degrees, sex, alcohol, good concerts, great movies, friends, kids, spouses, parents –nothing. Only God can satisfy your human longings. 

And God came down through me, Jesus says. I am your source of joy and happiness.  Believe what I say, and you will awaken to true love, God-love, Real Love.      

And when we awaken to this kind of love, we begin to crave knowing God more, and we change by knowing him more.  When we eat and drink God-love, it frees us so that we no longer have to be angry, or defensive, or self-protective, or desperate, or judgmental, or insecure.  When we know the goodness of God-love every day, we can flourish and become who we are meant to be. 

We can live without fear of what people think of us because we know that God thinks highly of us. We can use what we’ve been given to help others generously without expecting favors in return. We can even take all the insults that come our way because He’s with us helping us to handle the hardship, and he is qualified to help us because he faced more insults than we will ever face.

I am writing this essay several days after my church entered into the season of Lent, a time of self-examination, contemplation and lament, where we fast from favorite foods in order to feel, to a small degree, the sufferings of Jesus on his journey to the cross.  Feeling physical hunger reminds us that what we are really hungry for is God, his friendship, his direction, his presence, and even his correction. 

In the Lenten reading for today Jesus tried to explain to a group of people what he meant by saying, “I am the bread of life.” Jesus’s listeners struggled because Jesus called his own flesh “bread” and asked them to eat it. They couldn’t get past a literal cannibalistic interpretation.  They couldn’t stomach (so to speak) the suggestion of something so horrid. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52).

And then, one of the saddest lines in all of scripture, “After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him” (66).  Extremely sad, but at least they realized one thing, that life with Jesus is not a one-time prayer; it’s a walk, a journey where we follow him—now and tomorrow and the next day and the next, right on into our own individual deaths, and then into our lives after death.

Recently, I led a small group of Christian friends in a discussion where I asked them to imagine their lives without Jesus. After a moment of silence, one friend spoke up saying she would not be here—that she would have committed suicide, something she had tried before. Another said he would likely not be here either, that alcoholism would have taken him out. Another said he too may not be around –he just didn’t see the point of life and lived recklessly, caring little about himself or others. Another said she’d be paralyzed by bitterness over a hard past. I shared that I would be a total bitch.

That Jesus transforms lives in response to us letting him in is the most convincing part about the Christian faith. My personal vision of what I would be like without Jesus in my everyday life is so chilling to me that it makes me hang on to him with a vise grip.  My friend and I joke that the old hymn, “I Need Thee Every Hour” should be rewritten for her and me to say, “I Need Thee Every Five Minutes.” 

For awakening to God-love “is not just something that happens to us at the beginning of our spiritual lives.  We need the gift of awakening each day,” says John Ortberg in his latest book, Eternity is Now in Session. Ortberg points out that Jesus tells Peter to “follow me” at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, but three years later in John 21, Jesus calls him to “follow me” again “showing perhaps that in the spiritual life, we’re never really done. As long as we’re alive, the journey toward Jesus is never finished” (150).

The most attractive part of life with Jesus is not that I get to go to heaven when I die, but rather that I receive the companionship of God while I live! This daily walk with God is the water that quenches my thirst and the bread that satisfies my hunger. That I need never be alone again—today, tomorrow, and in my death sometime in the future—comforts me and changes me—every day.

Recently, my friend and I spoke to some moms about Moms in Prayer, an initiative started many years ago to help encourage moms to pray for their kids’ schools. We spoke of answers to prayer we had seen and of praying evil away from our schools.  We encouraged them to start Moms in Prayer groups in their children’s schools, even if it meant just praying with one other mom.

During the question and answer time, a woman raised her hand and asked something I wasn’t altogether prepared for.  “I too believe in prayer,” she said, “I pray hard for things, and I don’t know where else to ask this question.  I’ve been begging God to save Norah Brubaker’s life, and she just died. What am I supposed to do with that?”

I knew about this sweet little 10-year-old girl who had just passed away.  Our entire community, it seems, had been begging God for her life for the last month.  I had read on social media about Norah’s diagnosis of septic shock, the eventual loss of her left leg to save her life, and then the loss of her right leg, and then her death. It was tragic to watch, even from afar. I can’t imagine her family’s pain.

And so in these hard times, the age-old questions emerge, “Why do bad things happen to good people? Why didn’t God answer our many prayers? Why didn’t he heal Norah?”

I stumbled to answer her question.  The why questions are always tough, especially when we are asking about death because death is an imposter.  It’s hideous.  It’s monstrous. And even though we all have to face it, death feels unnatural, and it is unnatural because it was not the way it was supposed to be from the beginning.

When Satan entered our beautiful world and tempted us to believe that God is not good and that he doesn’t love us, we took the bait, and at that moment, everything in our beautiful world broke, including our bodies.  We now live in a broken world where our bodies don’t function as we want them to and where cancer and disease win too often. We live in a world where evil is too prevalent. And God doesn’t rescue us from it all. That’s pretty clear.

I think of the teaching in John 6 where Jesus says some difficult things that make some of his followers desert him.  For some reason, Jesus didn’t’ run after them and beg them to come back but instead turned to his disciples and said, “Are you also going to leave?” (John 6:67)

“Lord, to whom would we go?”  Peter says.  And so, we must ask the same question.  Where else do we go with our grief over the death of sweet Norah?  Do we turn away from God? Do we embrace atheism?  Is that where the answer lies?  Or is there some other place or person or religion where we can run?

Another story from scripture that comes to mind when I think about grief is the time when Jesus got the news that his cousin John the Baptist had been beheaded. John’s death was made even more despicable because he died as a result of a silly game a powerful king had played. Jesus seemed genuinely surprised by this news and “got into a boat and headed to a lonely place” (Matt 14:13).  Perhaps the “why” questions were flowing from him to God the Father during his alone time there in the boat.

We also see Jesus begging God to take the cup of death from him in the garden of Gethsemane.  God does not.

And then we hear Jesus promising those who follow him that “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows.  But take heart because I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). What he doesn’t promise is that he will keep us from trials and sorrows. Instead, he conveys something like, this world is not as it should be. But don’t lose courage even though things look grim. I will restore all that’s been lost. Trust me.

And that is the hardest part, to trust him when we don’t understand, when the outcome is not what we wanted. His message of comfort to us is, even if it looks like I’m not there, I am.  And even if it seems like I haven’t heard you, I have.  “And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20).

Jesus offers similar words to the kind thief on the cross. Perhaps if Jesus would have had more breath left in him, he would have said something like, I’m not going to take you down off this cross, but I am going to die with you.  I’m going to hang here with you.  We will die together, friend.  And when we meet in paradise, I’ll explain things.

Norah died on Good Friday.  Though I did not know Norah and I do not know the “why” of Norah’s death, I have to believe our God of love was with her and spoke words of comfort to her so that she wouldn’t be afraid. I believe this because Jesus loves children and even told us we must be like them to enter his kingdom. I believe this too because David believed it and put it in a song so many years ago, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

May the God of all comfort be with our community and especially with Norah’s family and close friends as we all grieve this great loss.

 

“Mom, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Dad had a stroke this morning.”

These were the words I woke up to on Friday, December 14, 2018.  My husband? A Stroke?  He’s 48.

My 21-year-old son who made the call tried to reassure me.  “He’s with the paramedics, Mom.  They are talking to him, and he’s responsive.  They are positive about his prognosis.  Don’t worry,” he said from his seat in the front of the ambulance.

I had awakened that morning wondering about my husband and my son in Nashville.  They were to leave for Memphis early that morning so my soon-to-graduate son could interview for a master’s degree residency program. My husband had been so looking forward to the road trip. He had even bought 2 new books about Memphis and scouted out interesting places to see.

But he had awakened at 3 in his Nashville hotel with a splitting headache.  He took some ibuprofen and then woke up again at 6:30, fuzzy headed.  He ground his coffee beans and headed to the hotel restaurant to see if he could get some hot water to pour into his French press.  While there, he dropped a coffee mug that shattered. He spilled coffee down over his shirt when he tried to drink it.  Then, he fell headfirst to the ground out of a chair when he tried to stand up.

That’s when another hotel guest found him, unable to stand.  Even then, my husband didn’t realize things were as bad as they were and pleaded with the hotel guest, “no, please don’t call 911.”

Thankfully, the guest knew better than to listen to my husband’s slurred speech.  Paramedics were there in an instant, the TPA drug was given immediately, the large clot in his brain was spotted quickly, and my husband was rolled into the Operating Room within minutes of a brain scan.

I flew to Nashville as soon as I could.  My friend didn’t trust me to drive to the airport in my state of confusion and panic, and so she drove me there and made sure my car got back to my house.

My pastor prayed with me on the phone before I left.  On the way to the airport, several of my close friends and family called to pray with me on the phone.  I cried most of the way there. I was getting texts and calls from all over.  Family on both sides texted me scriptures and prayers.  My medical brother-in-law talked with me and answered some of my stroke questions.  My husband’s sister and spouse left immediately from Atlanta to be with my husband and son, a 5-hour drive.  Another close friend who just happened to be visiting Nashville left for the hospital to be with my son as soon as she heard the news.

Church friends took care of my daughter who was home sick from school that day. They prayed with her and brought her food and stayed with her for hours. Three of her Christian school friends left school early to be with her and even took her out for a bit to get her mind off things.

I couldn’t get hold of my other college daughter.  I asked God to help her to find my “call me” text after her final and not before, and that is what happened.

One friend got the news and left a coffee line he was standing in (without the coffee) and retreated to his truck to pray.  So many people, we found out later, stopped in their tracks to pray for my husband: pastors in meetings, families in our church who homeschool, my daughter’s Christian school classes, teachers in hallways at her school, and our parents and siblings on both sides. He was even put on a national prayer chain.

Fortunately, my husband’s stroke took place one mile from one of the best stroke hospitals in the nation, Vanderbilt University Medical Hospital.   We now know the kind of stroke he had is called a dissection where the carotid artery is injured or torn somehow. Blood then clots around the tear and travels to the brain where it blocks needed oxygen from getting to brain cells.  My husband’s entire left side was compromised.

Also fortunately, my husband improved so much while he was being rolled into the Operating Room –speech was clearing, facial paralysis was going away, feeling sensations were returning to his left arm and leg—that the Physician’s Assistant who was in charge of communicating with me said to me on the phone, “he improved so much as they were wheeling him in that I’m actually not sure whether or not they had to do the surgery to remove the clot.”

Indeed, we found out later that they did not have to surgically remove the clot because, by the time they got the camera to his brain, it was gone.  This seemed to surprise the doctors.  They explained, “perhaps the clot was young, perhaps it was fresh and malleable, perhaps the TPA just worked that fast on your husband.”   All we know is the clot was gone.

The main surgeon looked at my husband the next day and said, “let me just say it this way, you got a get out-of-jail- free-card, and there isn’t another one.”  The Occupational and Physical Therapists tested him there in the hospital and said he needed no further treatment—he had no deficits. A few days later, a nurse commented after looking at his chart, “you had a big-ole stroke; people who have big-ole strokes don’t act like you.”

And he was right.  As we stayed there in the Neurology ICU unit for 3 days and then the ICU Step Down for 2, we saw many people who had had strokes—they were not acting like my husband.  His restlessness had him doing laps around the unit, pushing his heparin drip along with him.  No other patient there was doing laps. No other patient was even walking.  Many were in neck braces.  Some couldn’t even swallow.

A month later when my husband went to Occupational Therapy for a lag in his left hand when typing, the therapist was wide-eyed.  She had rarely seen someone with that big of a stroke with so few deficits. She called other therapists in to take a look at him – they were amazed.

We are sobered and grateful when we think of these things and still don’t know why my husband was saved when many are not.  God was merciful to us.  He heard the many prayers for him and acted on his behalf.  We believe this and are humbled.

I am writing this story down so I can remember.  We are forgetful people, and I don’t want to forget what a kindness it is to me and my kids and my community that my husband is still alive. He is so loved and truly does so much for us all.

And I am also writing to thank my community, particularly my Christian community, for rallying around us, not only in prayer but in action.  In addition to everything that I mentioned already, our tight-knit Christian community loved on us in so many ways:

My friend who drove me to the airport got my first panicked call. She immediately went into help-mode and found me a plane ticket.

A young couple from my church found out our California son needed a ride home from Dulles airport and volunteered to pick him up—a two-hour drive each way.

My son who was with us refused to leave the whole 7 days we were there in the hospital, even though we offered to fly him home.

A couple from our church in Harrisonburg happened to be in Nashville for a family funeral and came by the hospital to see us and pray with us

My friend, a big sister to my kids, spent an entire week living at our house just to help out. “I’m not leaving until you come back home,” she said, which gave us much peace.

Another friend picked up my daughter for school each day we were gone.  Other friends gave her rides to basketball practice and back.

My friend who owns a restaurant brought my kids a bunch of food.

A couple in our small group took our kids out to dinner and had them over for Sunday lunch while we were gone.

The Sunday we were in the hospital, our church had a special prayer time for my husband.

The prayer time made my daughters cry, and they were hugged on and loved on and handed tissues and a soft clean handkerchief.

A deacon from an Anglican church in Nashville came to our room and gave my husband, my son and me communion—we all cried.

Family on both sides and our close friends sent us large baskets of snacks from the gift shop.

My husband’s sister sent him a book of his favorite— Calvin and Hobbes.

Our Atlanta brother-in-law ordered a Yeti shirt for him to replace the one the paramedics cut off him (my husband had protested, “no, you can’t have this shirt—I like this shirt”).

Both sets of parents changed their Christmas plans and traveled 3 hours to our house for a Christmas dinner.

My California son cleaned our gutters, took trips to the dump for us and offered to move home to Virginia to take care of us.

Huge numbers of texts, calls, and emails came our way, telling us of many prayers going up and asking, “what can we do to help?”

Many tearful bear hugs met us upon our return with words attached to them like, “we are so glad you’re still with us.”

The faith-based residency program in Memphis let my son interview late, and he got into the program—he leaves for Memphis in June.

People ask me, more than a month out now, if my husband is changed.  He sleeps more than he used to, as his brain is still healing.  He has a slight deficit in his left hand, but it’s improving.  And he and all of us have cried a bit more over the last month-and-a-half than we are used to doing, and I think it’s because we realize how precious life is and how close we came to huge loss.

And that is the challenge, isn’t it, being aware of and ready for the loss we will all experience one day?

While being rolled into the Operating Room, my husband was asked by a young nurse if he wanted to be resuscitated should his heart stop during surgery.  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” my husband responded immediately, “I’ve had a good life. I’m ready to go.”

My husband’s strong faith in Jesus is wrapped up in that statement, and I’m inspired by it.  Someday I will face this question, and I hope I can answer the same way.  And one day, none of us knows when, things will not turn out the way they did this time, and I will have to say a life-changing, heart-wrenching goodbye to someone I have loved so much.

And when that day comes, I trust in my Savior Jesus, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” to cover my sorrow with peace and to actually be there with me through the hands and feet and faces of his people, my brothers and sisters in Christ, who have loved us so very well.

I recently read The Paris Wife, Paula McClain’s fictional but historically accurate account of Hadley and Ernest Hemingway’s marriage, and I am brokenhearted.

I won’t spoil it for you, but if you know anything about Ernest Hemingway, he was no saint, so you can imagine that, like in his novels, things don’t end well.  McClain said she wanted to give voice to Hadley, to tell her side of the story. But what surprised me most in her portrayal of their marriage is how much they loved each other, what good friends they were, and how much they relied on and needed one another.

McClain paints an unusual picture of deep intimacy that brilliantly depicts the everyday struggles of marriage –not just the passionate highlights.  Details like Ernest not being able to sleep without a light on, his anger at Hadley for being careless with tracking her cycles, their nicknames for each other, all come together to give us a picture of the good and the bad of marriage—but mostly the good, wholesome steadiness that a good marriage can be.   But then his skyrocketing fame, and you can guess what happens next to their story. Hadley’s words foreshadow what’s ahead, “we would never again be unknown.  We would never again be this happy.”

I’m not writing a book review, although I do recommend McClain’s thoughtful, lovely, well-researched portrait of Hadley and Ernest Hemmingway.  I’m writing because I want to say some things about marriage.  I am married 23 years now, and like Hadley and Ernest talked of becoming, my husband and I are likely “one of those couples who have been married so long, you can’t tell them apart.”

One sweet scene in the book shows Hadley in front of a mirror dissatisfied with her hair, “I’m sick of it.” So she starts to cut it while Ernest sits nearby reading, and he chuckles at her, “You’ve lost your mind, you know,” he says.  Then she comes to him and starts cutting his hair too, like hers, so they can look like each other, “just as Ernest wished we might, long ago on a star-hung rooftop in Chicago.”  That night in Chicago she had said to him, “I’d love to look like you . . . I’d love to be you,” and then comments that nothing could have been truer at the time. “I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night because I believed that was what love meant.”

Was this flawed thinking, as Hadley guesses, or were they onto something?  The scriptures talk of marriage as one-flesh.  Can you think of a description of marriage that is more romantic and shocking at the same time? Is marrying really like crawling into someone’s skin?

That is exactly the theme of the best wedding homily I’ve ever heard. My friend Anna got married last summer, and as I sat alone at the wedding (my husband couldn’t make it), I wished I had a pen and notepad.  Why couldn’t every marriage homily be like this one?  The minister expounded on this beautiful, mysterious description of one-flesh, but then he invited the bride and groom to count the cost.

Yes, there’s a cost, the minister said.  From this point on, there are not two people here, but one.  None of us has ever experienced these two people as one before today.  Today they are one new entity.  As beautiful as that is, there is a cost.  The first cost, he said, is that you must commit to never again make a life-changing decision independent of each other because you are no longer two, but one.  The second cost, is this—from this day forward, you must say “no” to every other charming person that you will meet along life’s way, and there will be many.  This is the cost and the beauty of one-flesh.

If Hadley and Ernest would have heard that homily and been in a community that practiced one-flesh, perhaps they would have made it.  Perhaps they would have understood the cost and been expecting the hardship of it.  Perhaps they would have recognized the beauty of the oneness they felt, not as a naive dream, but a mysterious reality that could only be preserved through choosing to daily pay its price.

 

 

 

My son was stopped by a police officer north of Harrisonburg on Saturday.  He was on his way to a ceremony at a newly found slave graveyard—he was to be the videographer.

When my son saw the blue lights he pulled into a gravel driveway. He pulled in far from the road so as to keep the officer and him safe from traffic.

The officer in a voice low and loud ask for my son’s license and registration.  He was unfriendly and unhelpful when my son had a hard time locating the registration.  My son tried to make conversation, told him he was in a hurry to get to this graveyard ceremony and that is why he crossed the double yellow line to round the slow moving car.  “I have 20 minutes to get there,” my son pleaded.

The officer showed no mercy.  He took his good ole time checking out my son’s information. With glee, he told my son that his under-21 license had expired just days before (he just turned 20).  My son had no idea —no DMV letter in the mail, no email.

The officer then proceeded to accuse my son of evading law enforcement because he had pulled far into the driveway.  He also lectured my son –“what if you would have crashed into a family of 5 head-on when you rounded that car?  What if they all would have died? How would you feel?”

My son who has never been in trouble before or even gotten a ticket was handed his punishment.  “I’m charging you with reckless-driving and driving-without-a-license. Don’t ever ever do it again. “

The officer then confiscated my son’s license and told him he couldn’t drive, but “you’ll somehow have to get this van off this private driveway.”  When my son asked if he could drive the van to the parking lot a hundred feet away, the answer was an emphatic “no.”  He offered my son no solutions, no ride, no help.

The officer would have left him stranded there had my son not had the number of a man that was at the ceremony.   The man and his small child who came to pick my son up talked the officer into letting him drive the van to the parking lot 100 feet away.  My son stayed with this man’s small child till he could get back –the officer did reluctantly give this man a ride back to his car.

There are so many problems with this story, so many questions:  Do police officers know they are public servants out to do good for the people?  Do police officers know they incite anger and hostility towards their profession when they treat law abiding citizens like criminals?  Do their superiors have any idea how these officers are practicing their craft?  Do they care?

But the main problem with this story is that it’s too common.  My husband has been a criminal defense attorney for 16 years.  He will be the first to admit that there are wonderful officers out there, officers who treat people with respect and dignity, officers who try to calm people down, officers who are honest and good.

But he could also write books, literally books, of stories about officers who somehow believe that treating people poorly and accusing them of anything and everything is part of their job.  My son’s case is nothing compared to the stories people share with my husband.

My son’s conclusion:  “I actually feel sorry for him, Mom.  When I watched him walk away, I thought, ‘He must have a pretty miserable life. It’s pretty sad.’ ”

“Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers,” says Tom Wright in Simply Christian. We photograph a sunset, and we are left with only the memory. A full symphony’s glorious sound speaks to us differently in a live concert than in a recording. The view from atop a mountain leaves us itching for more, and the itch doesn’t go away (chapter 4).

I have a confession to make. I am fascinated with near-death-experience books about heaven.   I’ve read many and, in all, beauty is a central motif. In 90 Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper talks of vivid, dazzling colors, the sparkling teeth and smooth skin of his grandmother, the perfectly beautiful features of familiar people, even features that hadn’t been considered attractive on earth. Eben Alexander, a surgeon who found Christ through his after death experience, speaks in his book, Proof of Heaven, of a beautiful woman who toured him around heaven –he was deeply attracted to her loveliness, which was not at all sexual.   Susanna, a personal friend of mine, tells of her near death experience in terms of bright light, beautiful flowers of brilliant colors, and silky, swaying, soft grass.  She still remembers, 60 years later, the sweet smell of the grass which enveloped her as she lay down in it.  All who’ve experienced the heavenly version of near-death say words are insufficient to convey the captivating beauty!

Tom Wright says beauty, along with justice, spirituality, and relationships, is an echo of a voice calling to us from another world. He likens beauty to a collector finding an unknown piece of music by Mozart which is marvelous yet seems to have gaps where other instruments are supposed to enter—it’s beautiful but incomplete, and we yearn to hear the piece in full.

And we are puzzled by beauty’s quick fading –a young person’s beauty is admired for a time, but we all know what’s coming. We are puzzled by its elusiveness—a butterfly’s brilliant colorful wings lose something the minute they cease to fly and are pinned to a collector’s board. We are puzzled by beauty’s incompleteness –the exquisite colors in a sunset take our breath away and then turn dark in a moment, leaving us wondering about a world beyond the sunset where colors don’t go away.

Christians point to beauty as something that calls us out of ourselves and strikes something deep within us, an echo of a voice claiming, “this beauty is not in your imagination—it’s real! Heaven and earth are full of glory. I made them glorious.”

And so Wright concludes with the claim that the longing for beauty is really a longing for God, the good Creator, who made all things beautiful. The presence of beauty in our world is a signpost to a larger beauty that will one day be complete when God rescues his beautiful world from the invasion of darkness. The hope of the Christian is that Susanna’s sighting of soft swaying grass and flowers of brilliant colors IS reality, a reality that’s just around the bend, just out of reach, but soon to be experienced in its fullness.

 

The above is personalized summary of Tom Wright’s writings on beauty in Simply Christian, chapter 4.

 

comments on Simply Christian by Tom Wright

I remember several years ago reading Eat, Pray, Love. The author, Elizabeth Gilbert, hungered for something beyond herself, a spirituality that would guide her, a centering force.  This hunger sent her on a quest across several countries.  She heard an audible voice at one point telling her, “You have no idea how much I love you.” I am not sure she found the speaker. Perhaps she is still searching.

Tom Wright talks about this modern day yearning for spirituality in his second chapter of Simply Christian. Our yearning, he says, is like a natural bubbling, spring that has been covered over with cement, the cement of the materialist philosophy of the last 200 years that bids us believe that our spiritual yearnings are daydreams, that God is a rumor, that religion is a private hobby (18).

But in the last three decades, bubbling springs of spirituality have come bursting forth through the cement of skepticism.  “Many people today hear the very word ‘spirituality’ like travelers in a desert hearing news of an oasis” (18).

The renewed interest in spirituality can be seen in the huge number of books that inundate our book stores, books for which a category isn’t clear–should we put that one under religion, self-help, spirituality? (22).

This awakening to spiritual things has taken people down many different roads:  the study of reincarnation, a crazed interest in personality testing, a focus on nature mysticism or getting in touch with the deep cycles of the world around us, a turning towards “a quasi-Buddhist detachment from the world” (22).

This spiritual ache has prompted people, like Elizabeth Gilbert, to do pilgrimages around the globe.  It has created huge curiosity in anything Celtic.  Perhaps in Celtic “music, prayers, buildings, jewelry,” we can find another world, a world where God, whoever he is, presents himself more clearly (23).

Tom Wright asks, “What makes us so thirsty?” Then he proposes the Christian explanation of the thirst– “in Jesus we glimpse a God who loves people and wants them to know and respond to that love” (24). He’s a God who is calling them to drink in springs of living water.

The widespread hunger for spirituality, he proposes, is a signpost to something more, an echo of a voice that beacons us from a distant land (27). Perhaps it is the same voice Elisabeth Gilbert heard. The one that said, “you have no idea how much I love you.” And so, the quest becomes a search to find the voice behind the loving words.

Simply Christian, made simpler, a summary of Tom Wright’s great work called Simply Christian

 

Made for Each Other –chapter 3

 

Before I summarize this chapter, I have something to say about marriage.  I lead a fascinating discussion each semester in my professor friend’s general psychology class at James Madison University.  She asks me to come in when they talk about romantic relationships and marriage because of my many years work at a local clinic where I have spoken with hundreds of women about their current romantic relationships.  What surprises me every time I go into this JMU class is the answer to the question, “do you want to be married someday?”  When I ask for a show of hands, I’ve never had less than 95% raise their hands to a “yes.”  Last semester, out of approximately 90 students, I had zero nos.  Even the occasional “no” is most times ambivalent—“don’t care either way.”  This is truly fascinating to me in an age where marriage is in such trouble and the divorce rate is headed towards 50% of all first marriages and much higher than that for 2^nd and 3^rd marriages.

This experience at JMU made me say a resounding “YES” to Tom Wright’s thoughts in this chapter that the whole area of romantic relationships forms an echo of a voice from a distant land, similar to the echo of a voice we hear for justice. How do we know that it’s not right for someone innocent to be jailed?  Who told us to feel this way?  So too, where did the ache for intimacy with another human being come from?  Could it be an echo of a voice from another world saying, “hey you, you were made for something more.”

As we all know, we live in a world where many marriages that were “made in heaven sometimes end not far from hell. Although to couples in the first flush of romance the very thought of each other adds a whole glorious new dimension to their lives, statistics suggest that, unless they know how to navigate the road that lies ahead, they may soon be yelling and sobbing and calling the divorce lawyers” (29).

And so we see broken relationships and know about high divorce rates, and yet we still long and hope for that perfect relationship to come along.  Wright argues that this very hope and longing is a signpost to another world, an echo of a voice calling to us that says we were made for relationship, that our hopes for intimacy are not made up fantasy but rather proof that things are not as they should be, that things are not as they were originally intended to be.

The Christian view of this voice is that God, who is relational in his very being, has made us relational as well and is calling us to a relationship with him and with others.  That’s where the aching for intimacy with another human being comes from.  God shares the pain of broken relationships too.  One of the claims of Christianity is that “the paradox of laughter and tears” that runs deeply through our best relationships also runs deeply through the heart of God. (38)

And so just as we long for justice and find it so hard to grasp, so too we long for deep relationships and find them to be elusive. These longings tell us that our lives as we experience them here is not all there is, that we were made for more, that there IS more.