Bees in My Bonnet

 "Oh teach us to pray!" the disciples yearned: As children try on language, stumbling, awkward, We long to speak with words our God, our Maker, will hear. In settled calm, He teaches us, "Pray:     "Your will be done. Here in me, on this earth,     Do as You will, as it goes in Your homeland." First He teaches; then, He shows, "This is how:     I come to a Garden. Remain with me, Pray for me.     Pray with  me. My prayer is still, 'Your will be done.'" To stay with Jesus, here, now, in darkness, uncertainty,     Can I  pray, "Your will be done." ? "You found me sleeping," I confess. "Your spirit is willing; your flesh is weak."     My struggle is held with grace. He taught us once to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread." Then later, He breaks the bread: "This is my body: I am the manna."  I need this daily bread! The bread given.  In it, I am for given. How God is for  giving!! He gives His...

 Just a poetic meditation for today. And that is all. Where we hurt Can I find the place,  The hidden cavern Crested , unexplored,  The fountain-head,  That point of pain - Where it begins  Its crimson stain Which flows, reaching  Every stream of me?  Can I wonder over Every part of my being - What is seen, what is unseen,  To detect where hurt resides,  Seeking a blanket, a balm,  A cool cup of water?  I will seek I will find There I make a nest, Cradle the ache. Tread softly  Listen  It speaks, "Hear me!"  I will go Leave the place I've come to know  Let rest unbind tight-woven dread Take slowly life's breath Into every crevice yet to be seen; I entrust myself to Love.  "My burden is light," I am told,  And laughing, gasp, allowing doubt to speak, "Oh really?"  A burden - light? How can it be?  The answer came long before: "Cast your burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain you." 

For Previous Post Click Here   Here's what I wrote last year:  I start to get up out of bed and grab a purple skirt, and throw a t-shirt on. A random thought hits me - 'glad I'll be home in a bit as I shouldn't really go out in public looking like a disheveled trash collector wearing whatever I gleaned from a dumpster dive' (no dig for dumpster divers here! They're probably my tribe!). Sam offers to go instead. I tell Sam he can go to bed since he's tired. Last minute before I leave I see Sam up - some random impulse compelled him to come with me. I let him drive. 'Just go to North Avenue. Then go north on Gary - that's what Timo said. He said we'd find him there a little way up.' And find him we did. First we saw some bright lights. We figured a cop car had likely stopped. But there were so many. We didn't count them all. The road was cordoned off. A cop was re-directing traffic - no cars could head north on this road. We pull up to the ...

Click here for previous post (part 1)  Sam and I made our way to where we were supposed to find him. We noticed the roads were blocked off and there were lots of flashing lights. "Hmm, there must be an accident ahead - I wonder how we'll get through," I thought. I began to think that maybe there was something ahead, something I didn't know or wasn't ready for. "I'm not going to worry," I kept telling myself. "He sounded fine," I almost spoke the words aloud. The policeman tried waving us past, and we said, "Our son is back there." We were waved past the barriers. We pulled up to an intersection and parked by the roadside. As we got out of the van, Sam reached over and grabbed my hand. I still haven't talked to him about that night. A year has passed and we have hardly processed it. I don't know what he was thinking. I wasn't afraid, yet. I felt the world seemed to slow down. The night air was muggy, damp, and not too h...

 Infancy is weak, fragile, cute, maybe even a bit scary. I know infancy. Not only holding my own infants, but the infancy of hope in my own soul: the infancy that seems only a tiny spark of light in a long, dark, tunnel - this is a fragile and even scary dawning of hope.  These 24 hours are some of the hardest of the year for some: there are hopes, fears, expectations, longings, moments of despair, regrets, losses, hardships - this list is not exhaustive. And somehow the hopes and expectations seem to all land on this day, and how easily we forget space must be made to accommodate the losses and hardships as well. In fact, even the lack of fulfilment of hopes needs space to be grieved on a day set aside for celebration and joy.  "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight" - and as we sing this Christmas hymn, we mean it. The hopes AND fears - of this loooooong   year - these meet together in this infant child, Jesus.  I imagine the time of J...

  I can't believe September is done. It feels like a gap in my year - that a whole 30 days was swallowed into some black hole or vortex of suffering. I don't know how all those days went by when I wasn't paying attention. On October 3, I usually remember the line in the sand of my life - that fateful day when I witnessed violence and fear like nothing I'd known before or since. (Link to that saga here)  It is one of those days - a before and after, where my life is forever marked as having crossed a bridge that can never be reversed. In other words, I can't unsee that.  This September feels strangely similar. Timo's motorcycle accident has thrown me face to face with the unpredictableness of all of life.  One moment I was heading to bed, the next, I'm riding an ambulance...it's still so surreal that I actually lived through this, and even more, that Timo did! And then two all-nighters, back to back. And to sit dazed in a hospital room, stunned, numb, and...

 These are the days I walk around seeing life with new and different eyes. They are eyes bathed in the furnace of suffering, with understanding unobtained before now.  Those dreaded words landed like a thud: "They discovered cancer." My Mom has been diagnosed with Small Cell Lung Cancer, typically a cancer only seen in smokers or their partners. It feels heavy and dark, and menacing and cruel, and so many other things that words don't seem to describe.  (Taking Mom to the hospital in Arkansas with my sister) It is one thing to hear about it. And to feel sad. To think on it. To learn of it. To wonder where this goes - typically nowhere good, except, I suppose, heaven. Heaven is good. I'm okay with the heaven part. It's the process of getting there that somehow unnerves me. I've had little fear of death in my life. God gives us these years, some more, some less, and we must reckon with the undeniable reality that 100% of people die. The statistic stares us blank...