Tag Archives: grace

Farewell, Kia

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Last week my 2008 Kia had an accident—its third—and this one marked the end of its life. It was the first car I ever owned and it’s been a lot of places and done a lot of things. Off the top of my head, I can think of nearly twenty people who have driven it, and at my best count, it’s been to twenty-six states, both coasts, and two Canadian provinces. 

I bought it the summer of 2016 and immediately drove it down to Fort Myers, FL with a former student to see a friend—a week during which I remember both crying a lot and laughing a lot. 2016 and 2017 were difficult, unmooring years and there were many long phone conversations in that car. I played Look Homeward’s “High Tide” on repeat. In 2018, I moved to Vancouver and the car stayed home for a year. My parents appreciated having an extra car to drive and I learned to ride the city bus in a new place. 

Then, in the summer of 2019 my dad and I drove it cross country—stopping along the way to see friends and bison and prairie dogs—and arrived in British Columbia in sparkling mid-summer. Thus began what I consider the glory days of the Kia. It allowed me to take a job at a nursing home that was a bumper-to-bumper but beautiful commute away in West Vancouver—that job would change my life in small but significant ways. Friends and housemates borrowed that car to drive to work, to drive to church, to drive to therapy, to drive to the grocery store. Together we took it to the Okanagan, to the Sunshine Coast, and back across the border to Montana for breaks and get-aways. When the Covid shutdown happened, some of us spent a night joking that we would drive it up to the Yukon and start a new life there. The car was a promise—it held out hope. And it gave a lot of rides, enabled simple generosity.

I drove back into the States for good in June of 2021. When I pulled away from my home of three years in Vancouver, I turned on the radio and Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” blared out of it. The next day, as I drove through the stunning desolation of Northeastern California, I listened to Anne of Green Gables on audiobook and wept. My brother met up with me in Lake Tahoe and we drove back east—stopping along the way to see family and cities and memories. I got the windshield replaced in Colorado. That fall I took the car with me to Wisconsin, where I learned to shovel a driveway, but got in an accident on an icy road anyway.

I’ve had the Kia back home in North Carolina since 2022, and have tried to tend it gently in its old age. It had an ant problem for a while, the check engine light came on anytime I try to drive through mountains, and the CD player has been jammed since 2020. And now, it has given up a bit earlier than I wanted it to, but still, it has been my friend. 

Someone asked me the other day if I’m a person who names my cars. I think I did pick a name for the Kia when I originally bought it, but then promptly forgot it. So no, clearly I am not. But just because I haven’t been able to properly personify the thing, does not mean it has not been home to me. There is a sticker on its bumper which says that: Home. I can barely recognize my 2016 self, but the Kia can. It has accepted nearly a decade’s worth of my tears and songs with patience. It has carried me through move after move, year after year, and I am grateful.

Remembering

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If I’m honest, I have felt still—too still—the last few years. My life has been full of abundance: a job I love, many good friends, settling back into the neighborhood I grew up in, a sweet church full of creative people, so much travel to beautiful and beloved places. Yet I’ve been irked by the sense throughout that I, as a person, am stagnant, that I’ve stopped growing, that I’ll never feel changed or fresh again. In many ways I think this feeling is born out of my loss of desire to write, the fact that ideas no longer seem to come when I want them, or that when they do I don’t find them interesting. This loss makes me afraid.

The best spiritual antidote I have for this is to follow one of the few commands in scripture which I feel I’m naturally good at: I remember. I remember that the Lord led his people like a flock through the parted sea. I remember the woman who touched the edge of his garment. I remember Saul on the road to Damascus and Gladys Aylward on the train to China and Flannery just sitting there writing about her peacocks. I remember these things because I have read them and heard them, but perhaps even more pressingly, I remember the Pieta in St. Peter’s when I was seventeen, and the silent snow in Grove City when I was twenty, and the bursting red tomato on the nearly-dead vine in my parents’ garden when I was twenty-three, and the August smoke in the Vancouver sky when I was twenty-six, and the shared champagne on the beach at Spanish Banks when I was twenty-nine. I remember that I neither expected nor asked for any of these things, but that they came upon me like a warm summer storm. I hope that this can happen again.

But sometimes my remembering is not enough, because the questions nag at me: That is all well and good, but what if it’s all in the past? What if the summer rains are over and what if they never come again? What good does just thinking about them do? And the answer to all the fear at the heart of this is that while my remembering God has value, what has infinitely more value is his remembering me. And he promises that he does. In Matthew, we are told of the attention he pays to the smallest sparrow and to each hair on our heads. And then Jesus says wryly (I love when Jesus is wry), “Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” Because of course all those warm moments I habitually remember which feel like warm thunder in my hands occurred because he remembered me first. He always remembers me first. I am, in fact, always only echoing his remembrance. This practice of remembering between myself and God is not reciprocal—it is wildly imbalanced. He has engraved me on the palms of his hands.

Journey in Poetry

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Back in October, I gave you a little collection of poems that were perhaps talking to one another, and I’m doing the same today, just to remind both myself and you that though it is the end of February, we can remain confident that we will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. All our running in circles will not bring us either farther from or closer to him. If we are in him, he is with us. So here’s Walt Whitman (who did not know any of that), a draft-poem of mine called “The New Lazarus” which feels perpetually unfinished, and the middle passage of Psalm 139, which has been stuck pleasantly in my throat lately.

From Whitman:

Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

“The New Lazarus”:

Come along out! I want you out in the light.
You think it’s you alone, but we are many,
We mothers of our own exile,
Our teeming selves, but worse,
Imprisoning lightning behind our breast-bones, 
In our wrist joints, at the base of our skulls
Where it sears us, marks us.

Show me those well-documented failures.
Come out in your grave clothes,
Your skin pale in brazen light,
Show me the hilly scar,
The busted ear, the lips chewed to silence,
The huddled back, the head so wrapped in refuse
It thinks you can’t be made new.

Now, tell him, go ahead and tell him,
Tell the good doctor:
“Lord, the one you love is sick.”

Psalm 139:7-12:

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,”
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

Late September

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The waters are still high in the mountains right now. In all the pictures I’ve ever seen of this or any flood the water is a creamy brown—dull, unassuming, lethal only in the way it wraps itself around the waists and necks of buildings, carries in its depths the shards of bridges it has washed out and whole shells of cars and porches.

I’ve had an unplanned long weekend down here in the low hills, since school was canceled on Friday. I read a novel set in Seoul, as well as Ephesians, did some laundry, waited out a power outage on Friday then helped put on an event at church. I walked to the corner farmer’s market in the sunshine on Saturday. Tonight I’m bringing shortbread and roasted veggies to contribute to dinner at community group, and I’ve gained a tiny, stinging blister on my finger from peeling rutabagas.

In the meantime, folks evacuate homes or drive up into the mountains themselves, toward that softly ugly water, to search out family they haven’t heard from since the storm came.

Tomorrow for me is work and Arabian Nights and Wordsworth and grading and leftovers for lunch in a classroom that’s just slightly on this side of too warm and coming home rightly tired at the end of the afternoon.

All these are the facts of the matter, and I balk at the task of ripping the threads of meaning from their core and arranging them before your eyes. You can see them well enough yourself. 

It’s late September. The sun is golden warm, knives are busy in four p.m. kitchens, and He holds our lives in his hands.

The Summer of the Project

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This has been the summer of the project for me. Said projects have included sorting through all my papers stretching back to childhood, painting the bathroom dark purple, beginning the application process to do respite foster care, cleaning beneath the sink where for a few dreadful months a legion of mice took up residence, organizing students to come into school on their summer break so I can interview them on camera for a larger undertaking, painting the kitchen cabinets dark teal, listening to all of Narnia on audiobook, making lists of things to read and places to clean and food to cook, emailing with a travel agent about the course I’m leading to London with a teacher-friend next summer, hanging curtains in my living room that actually block light, finishing the non-fiction piece I started last summer about my endless adventure on Amtrak, and coming across a bag of cut-up t-shirts and deciding to make a quilt, though Lord only knows when that will happen.

All these things are for more than keeping myself busy. I paint because it improves my home, and therefore, by gentle degrees, my life. I plan to foster so that I can share that gently improved life with others. I take on creativity of various kinds to give myself a stable basis for joy.

I suppose on a larger scale, projects in general are all part of the good life, perhaps most of all in their unfinished state—when we are in the midst of the doing, the nailing the roof tiles, the writing the chorus of the song, the signing of the umpteenth form. Because we were designed to try. We are the strivers, the dreamers, the sweat-ers, the laughers, the wanderers and the wonderers, and the pursuers of goodness.

And the best of it is that though in our bones we are tryers, we do not finish the good work. The Lord is the one who brings it completion, who perfects our faith. That truth makes trying much easier, the burden of it light. His promise that he will finish the project that is us, the project that is all creation, his promise that he has already done it, means that we are free to try our best and understand just how little that is, to receive participation trophies in the form of abundant grace, to be prodigal children stumbling home reciting our apology speeches as our father crosses the finish line to meet us, to become transformed children of God waking up with paint still staining our nail beds to each fresh morning in which we can do it all again.

Remaking with Layers

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We’re starting again before the planned six months’ hiatus is up, stepping gentle back into this space.

There is not much new to tell you except that all things are being made new. This is hard to remember because usually newness comes in layers, like pale watercolor seeped over paper again and again or translucent fabric laid over and over itself, until what was sheer becomes solid, vibrant, real. This imperceptible, unhurried layering is how relationships form roots, how children grow, how people are transformed. 

The last few weeks my classroom has held more tears than usual: over Henry V, over test grades, over The Velveteen Rabbit, over friendships, over Dickinson poems, over endings, over everyday—which is to say eternal—pains and joys.

None of these tears have been mine—teenagers’ emotions have the volume turned up on them—but I have been grateful for them each time because they’ve reminded me of the becoming that’s happening before my often-short sighted eyes. On one hand these are just kids, but on the other, no one is just anything. Their tears, their laughter, even those occasional holy mixtures of the two are another sheer layer of film, another millimeter’s thickness in the story God is telling. We forget too often.

But sometimes we’re reminded. Thursday night was the much-beloved Senior Recognition ceremony at Caldwell and as each of the students—some of whom I frankly struggled to teach last year—rose in turn to be spoken to by their teachers, I thought that though they stood quiet, they were loud in feeling. So many of them looked raw, just-hatched, shining, frightened, hopeful, transformed. For a moment, I could see all their layers at once.

I was struck by the same changed look on their faces, the different angle to their shoulders, the next evening at their graduation. This newness was a wild mystery, and it brought home to me my own ineptitude. After, I drove from the graduation venue to school to see the newly-minted seniors paint the rock—their rightful territory—for the first time. But the whole drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids I’d left behind, whether I had taught them well enough, whether I had loved them well enough, how badly I had failed them, and most, beyond my own sometimes-misguided efforts, what a strange, unknowable work God was doing and would continue to do in their young souls and frames, what he was building with a thousand repeated whispers.

And then, as I stood at ten p.m. in the parking lot of what was my high school and is now my vocation, watching students chase each other to slap wet pink handprints on their friends’ arms and legs, the mystery of divine remaking sat heavy on my shoulders. They blasted country music from one speaker and then another and I wondered whether these kids could understand the color, the wholeness, what the Lord wanted to build within them.

I suspect the answer is no, they do not comprehend, just as I do not comprehend. We will none of us understand what it means to be real, saturated purple and gold people, to step fully into the presence of the God we were made to image until we reach that other shore. But I am glad that these kids can weep with remorse when they have hurt someone and shriek with joy at a song they love, that they can abandon self-consciousness, tilt their faces to the sky, and let God get down to the slow and certain work remaking his people, his world.

Boxes of Glory

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In my bedroom, there’s a box on the low shelf next to the armchair that’s usually piled with the clothes I think I may wear the next day. And in that box is everything: every bulletin I came home with from a church service, every pamphlet from a historical house I toured, every name tag from every retreat weekend and every map of every camp I’ll probably never go back to. That box contains the last few years of life: sparkly leis, birthday cards, notes from students, lists of my own hopes and dreams when I was feeling low, and lists of chores on Saturdays. 

I don’t forget that the box is there—I’m always stuffing more things into it every few days, every time I tidy, but I do forget that what it holds is so good. The conventional wisdom says that to remember is to feel melancholy, to compare what we have now to what we had then, and wallow in a sort of gentle sadness, to miss what we once were and now lack. But I’ve never really thought that argument held much water. It never made sense to me.

Yesterday a friend texted me to ask if I could find a page of Christmas songs from the year before, so I pulled out the box and disemboweled it on my lap and across my bed. And there were all the good things—joyful, painful, unremarkable, and otherwise—of the last three or four years in pink and yellow and scrawling pen. As I unfolded creased papers and spread open folders, I was aware that remembering these things, these past realities, makes me just as happy as I was the day each of them originally arrived in my hands—often happier, because I’ve wised up to their significance. In fact, upon reflection, these paper and ink memories often reappear from the box infused with a divine purpose, a little extra glow that I couldn’t understand when I first received them. “Oh,” I think as I flip through one by one, “Of course! God was doing that, and that, and that all along.” Their small, matter-of-fact glories don’t fade, but become brighter every year.

So sadness, even the gentle kind, doesn’t come into the equation for me. I sat in church this morning wondering why that was as the preacher read from Isaiah: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.” And when those words found their home burning warm in my chest, just as they have the hundreds of times I’ve heard them before, just as they have in the chests of all the children of God through the millenia, I remembered. I remembered that to recall the Lord’s blessings is to recall that he is capable of blessing, that he desires to bless, and that he promises that he will again. The fact is, in the kingdom God is building, every ordinary glory is the harbinger of a splendor even greater.

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end

And the first coming of the second coming.

-T.S. Eliot

Community in Quiet

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Yesterday afternoon I came home from work, ate chips and guac, peeled off my tights, and took a walk with my sister—a walk we’ve taken a hundred times. We each arrived back home with novels we’d found in different Little Free Libraries. Then we sat in my living room and I listened to her read a chapter of a favorite childhood book aloud—a chapter where the boy goes to the opera, watches a snowplow, and finds an abandoned puppy. After that, I drove north for dinner, outside city limits down winding late-summer roads, where I sat at a long table with four other women from work in a shining house with a round window. We ate good food with more than one kind of cheese, and laughed deep and long, though now I can’t remember what it was we were laughing at.

This morning I took a hot shower, because the weather almost feels like fall, and then got back into bed and listened to the audiobook of a mystery novel. Three cousins sat around a dinner table pouring drinks for each other with a heavy hand in an effort to nudge the others into confessing to murder, so just my type of thing. Later I got up and drove to Kernersville, where Karen and I took a meandering hike through the woods over rocks and tangled roots. We ate good greasy burgers at a little grill decorated unabashedly with grinning clown dolls, then I came home, laden with two old maps of British Columbia from her historian husband, and napped to the busy whirring of my washing machine.

Weeks ago, I sat down and started making notes for a blog entry about community and audience and the difference between the two. My notes were mostly a series of questions, not answers: Is it possible to have both? Which do I write for? Which do I consider my students to be? Is it possible to be both?

I never did manage to get answers on the page. My mind has been full of a hundred other whirring things while my body has been simultaneously busy following the rich gentleness of the path above. 

In an hour or so, I’ll head over to my parents’ house for drinks. Both my siblings are home for the next week or so, and there is a plenty to our time when we’re together, all talking over each other at once from five different directions, laughing teasingly in the face of one another’s confidence. Then tonight I will get dressed up and drive back to school on a Saturday to stand cheerfully behind a punch bowl and watch my students decide if they are comfortable enough to actually dance for Homecoming. They like to wait until the lights are way down, until they can convince themselves no one can really see. Then, at last, they’ll crowd close together in raucous safety and let loose.

Audience is often good and well and appropriate. But, in the long run, all right human interaction is in hopeful—if sometimes shy—pursuit of community. It’s a need which, unfulfilled, rumbles and aches like an empty stomach. And I suppose it will not be filled by agonized black and white answers on a page, but only by a complex and hearty stew of other people’s chairs and laden tables, of familiar words read aloud in well-loved voices, of silences and noticings, of drives through country this way and that, seasoned over long months and years by patience and by the practice of joy.

Homemaking

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August always feels still and hot and thick inside my chest.

I have spent my time the last week or two going into work for the morning then coming home to mop my floors with vinegar and water and play solitaire with a double deck of cards while I listen to nineteenth century novels on audiobook. Sometimes I go for a walk or text a friend. If there’s something I can do to help, I am glad.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a little meditation for the upcoming women’s retreat at church about peacemaking. And doing that has got me thinking about our powers of making, not just making things like chairs and pasta salad and promises, but our participation in larger acts of divine making: making peace, making good, making beauty, and—most particularly—making home.

I have never been more home in my life than I am now, not even when I was a child. I have lived away enough now to know how good it is to see everyday familiar faces and squares of pavement and to be myself part of that scenery.

And one of my great delights of the last year since moving back to Greensboro has been to have a place all my own, to make my home precisely what I want it to be. I’ve hung all my dresses and skirts along my bedroom wall where I can see them and turned my childhood swing into a kitchen shelf. I’ve imposed order of the kind I love and called it good.

I believe I am meant to do this homemaking. All of us are in our places and spaces.

And yet. Irish spirituality talks of “thin places,” usually places so beautiful and eerily “charged with grandeur of God” that the boundary between earth and heaven, human and divine, has collapsed to a mere veil, a curtain which may be torn in two at any moment by the thundering laughter of the Lord.

If homemaking, the ordering of what we’ve been given, is a participation in God’s larger work, I suspect his ultimate desire in that making is to turn all our places into thin places.

This is what I’ve been thinking about sitting in my big green chair in the corner of my living room: we are called to carefully order our homes and ourselves and our lives so that they are sensible and stable and welcoming, while simultaneously understanding it all as mutable—vulnerable this very second or maybe the next to sudden and complete permeation by the full glory of God.

I suppose without fully understanding it I’ve known this about every place I’ve ever loved properly. With each move of the last few years, as I’ve settled all my things just-so I’ve thought, “Who knows what will happen here?” and as I’ve organized a new classroom the last few days, I’m fully aware of the chaos that will rumble in with my students next week.

But to hold order and everyday routine in one hand and true, full surrender to God’s eternity in the other opens us up to much more than teenage angst. In making a home the way God means us to, we may find that only a gauzy curtain separates us from the utterly sacred. While following our best-laid plans we could find ourselves welcoming angels unaware, encouraged not to be afraid while in receipt of some great message. The curtain could tear as we set the soup pot in the dish drainer and dry our hands, and we could become like Mary, the one who carries the Lord in her womb, the one who sits at his feet, the one who breaks open her carefully hoarded savings to wash them with her hair, or the one who discovers his tomb, singingly empty.

Friends’ Homes and Peculiar Gifts

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I am almost home from this journey. Almost, but not quite. The trip been the things I expected, but also more. There have been eleven train stations (plus two bus stations for good measure). And when you travel by train, you look out the window a lot and see the trees and the fields and the small-town roads and jails and houses flashing past, then laid gently on top of all that you see your own reflection looking back at you.

Last week I had a long layover in downtown Chicago, so I stored my luggage and bought a pass to the Art Institute. I walked there down full, sunny streets. Wearing a wide brimmed hat and a short flowy dress in the Windy City was an added complication, but I didn’t really mind. This is how you expect solo travel to be: a little complex, but peaceful. I wandered through room after room at the Art Institute, photos and paintings and stained glass and pencil sketches and antique furniture, with the soft feeling that beauty tends to give me creeping along my skin. I took breaks from the art to each lunch in the courtyard and to walk down past Buckingham Fountain to the shore of Lake Michigan.

But most of this trip has not been cosmopolitan like that. Most of this trip has been family homes. Since I last wrote to you, I’ve been in a succession of them. There have been four babies, lots of toddlers and preschoolers, and a few older kids too. The highlights of days have been trips to the park with double strollers, family ice cream runs, and little hikes suitable for small legs through midwest woods. I’ve curled on many different couches to write.

These friendships all have a sweet longevity, sustained by small, unremarkable bits of upkeep when we see each other. We go to the library, and I pick out good grown-up novels for them while they watch their kids play in the children’s section. We color each other’s hair with henna because we’ve talked about it for a couple years now. We sit in the evening and watch something and chat long, holding out memories and future hopes to each other with equal care.

I am more aware than I’ve ever been of my friends’ generosity. Traveling this way requires it, requires people to rouse themselves out of bed at odd hours to take me to the train station, to make space for me in their rhythms and homes and at their tables. Going through this pattern of being cared for in place after place was more humbling than I knew it would be.

But this is what it means to be in each other’s lives.

Last night, bleary and tired I sat on the train looking down at the rings on my hand—the amethyst from my grandma and the pearl I found in that rental car last summer— and thought of all the pudgy little fingers that have reached out to fiddle with them in the past couple weeks. And suddenly, with my head leaned against the window, I was teary.

I am a woman with a natural instinct to mother, but single in my thirties and surrounded by peers who are in what we like to call a “different stage of life” from me. I will tell you, some days I feel as if an important part of me is wasting away, withering imperceptibly month by month while no one watches. The oft-repeated suggestion of pouring that directionless love into someone else’s children almost always clangs like a trite consolation prize, no matter how nice the kid or good the friend.

But as I looked at those rings, and thought of the little people nestled into my side who had touched them, a quiet wonder happened. I was fully, divinely aware of what a peculiarly glistening gift the last two weeks have been. I sat there and cried because, as someone told me once, we serve a no waste God, and he takes our deep desires into his own hands, and uses them in ways we could not imagine.

Because the gift of being with my friends’ young families was not a gift to me only. I’ve spent this time buckling so many car seats, holding so many hands as we cross a street, and swaying with so many fussy babies balanced against my hip. I’ve read more books aloud than I can count, small bodies using my arm or shoulder to somersault themselves into a new spot on the couch. My lap has more real estate for sitting on than a nursing mother’s and I know card games the school age kids haven’t learned yet. I can cook dinner with a thirteen-year-old for a sous chef while his mom runs out to pick up his sister and I can make sure the toddlers don’t touch the breakables in the general store. In return, I’m called “Miss Alice” in a sweet host of piping voices. 

Some kids who a decade ago hugged my legs with head mashed against my hip are now taller than me. The ones who hugged my legs this past week will grow fast like that too, and whether I have my own kids or not, I get to watch, and watching is a joy.

I’ve had much time to think about all this, because my last travel leg home has been a long and ridiculous saga. There were four graveyard-shift hours spent waiting at the Indianapolis Amtrak station, and then twenty-four straight hours on a train, about seven of which were at a total standstill. Arriving in Charlottesville after three this morning, the station attendant sent several of us in a taxi to a hotel outside of town where we would stay for free, but when we were dropped there and walked into the lobby we found that they had no record of us. Eventually I got some real sleep in a clean bed though, and now, after a sticky midday walk, I am sitting at the University of Virginia library writing this to you. I will catch my final train home this evening.

I’d planned to be back in my own space by now, and I’ll be happy when I am. And yet. Despite exhaustion and discomfort, this last day or two has been its own peculiar gift. I’ve been surrounded at every juncture by people who seem straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story, their outrageous humanity busting through all the cracks in their veneer. I’ve watched and laughed and thought about what wonderfully messy, oozing poetry they would make. 

But that’s for another day.

Today I am simply grateful for all of the last few weeks: all the homes I’ve entered, all the beds I’ve slept in, all the plates set in front of me, all the arms wrapped around me, and all the beauty I’ve seen. And most, I’m grateful for the grace of God in allowing me to occasionally understand just how good I have it.