This road is a burden. I fight the uneven pavement with my steering wheel, weary of the travel. I want to be home, but I know what a hard concept that is for me to grasp. Right now, I’m just dashing between one house and another, trying to steal my breath from the wind.
I think about the new house I just left, the one slowly filling with my boxes of linens, kitchenwares and the unknowable amount of books that only an English major will accrue over four years. I try not to think about this day and all the many burdens it heaped on my shoulders. I try not to think about the doctors and the money and the family and the grief. I try not to think about how I can’t breathe.
The farmlands of Severance and then Ault fly past me. I take notice of the llamas, the lambs with dark damp earth encrusted in their wool, the horses cantering along the gates. I hear the song on my iPod switch from something by Copeland–a band I can’t seem to get enough of these days–to a Bethel Live song that cries out for the presence of God. And again, someone else has the words I haven’t found all day. I think: When I woke up, Lord, I ignored you. I didn’t know how much I’d need you. Will you make yourself real to me now?
In a flash, the sky is clear and the sun filters through the clouds as it did on my island. Everything shines. I admire the hungry brown earth, fallow all winter which is now, at the first beginnings of a long summer, tilled and ready for replanting. Something is growing there already, something golden made brilliant against storm filled skies.
And this is what is sounds like when you sing heaven’s song.
And I see the doctor, telling me to have this checked.
And this is what it feels like when heaven comes down.
And I see my paycheck, already distributed to bills and no sign of what my next job will be.
And this is what it feels like when God is all around.
And I see my family, hearts broken from this unimaginably hard year.
Let it come.
I drive with one arm stretched out beside me because I don’t have the words for a grief this loud. This one motion, this one moment is all I have but I’ll give it up in worship. It’s all I can do to raise my hands to the one who made me and just mentally assent to whatever He chooses. It’s all I can do to pull my car over, yank up the emergency brake and put my forehead to the steering wheel and just say her name. Because I don’t have anything else. Today I don’t have anything else but this.
When I look up, I see a pair of red barns with their doors flung wide. One, I think, is full of all my rage and guilt and unforgiveness. The grains inside are rotting, putrid. They will decimate the earth. The other, I think, is ready for planting. There are seedlings, saplings, beautiful trees that make up a family and a home. Love. Healing. Redemption.
What will we plant? What will I plant?
I pull back onto the road and stretch my arm out, lips shut but heart open. I choose to believe that this massacred fairy tale is not the only possible end for my family because HE is a God who loves beyond logic, heals beyond hope, and redeems beyond reason. I will not choose bitterness today because His love breaks chains and sets us free. It set me free.
It can still set us free.
