Well Worth the Weight

Behold the well crafted water tank!

The ridiculously heavy tank had been in the back yard since I moved it last summer.  It belonged to a 1920’s pump house, where it sat on a concrete slab perched atop a well.  It had a good view of that hole in the ground, I know because I dismantled the pump house myself last summer.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say I hastened the pump houses’ demise, as it had fallen half way down when I started to take it apart.  If factual accuracy is the goal, I would have to confess I didn’t move the tank as much as I dragged that sucker across the lawn until it became wedged in the grass, where upon I would switch ends and push the tank until I collapsed.  Commencing a 5 minute reflective pause, I would look up at the sky from my horizontal position until I regained the strength to stand up again and restart the process.   Taken one step further it would be honest to say I was pushing the wretched beast across the lawn when my neighbor caught sight of me and came running over to help, lest he be the first to witness death by fury: me spontaneously combusting due to sheer frustration at the shockingly fabulous construction and astonishing longevity of that hunk of metal.  My neighbor is a nice man, whom I have known since high school.  Fortunately he knows my family long enough to not to question our behavior, and shows up whenever “accidental death by project” seems imminent.   Small towns are nice that way. 

After my neighbor and I carried the tank the remaining distance in a civilized manner, it sat in the garden and waited to be taken to the scrap yard.  I secured it in a safe spot until the time came to remove it. Whenever I looked outside, I would see that big old tank and sigh.  “I will get to you soon.” I wanted to remove that thing countless times, but there were other things to do before its removal.  So there it sat. 

As I was getting ready to move the tank last week, I was met with an unexpected delay, which got me thinking this week about the subject of waiting.  Waiting for God to remove that which causes us distress can be an agonizing experience.  Unanswered prayer brings with it issues of God’s sovereignty and the mystery of suffering.  When God doesn’t remove distress it can be distressing.  If you think that sentence ridiculous, I would challenge you to waltz through the praystagram world, where suffering is wound up with a bow and a side of spiritual unicorns.   Wait patiently, drinking coffee from your Jerimiah 29:11 scripture cup until God removes that which has blocked your freedom, and persevere until you attain a higher level is a crap message stemming from crap theology friend.  For those who are locked in prolonged suffering I would say, if you have friends who swim in this stream of saccharine positivity, it won’t be long till they leave you by yourself because watching someone struggle, watching someone who can’t read their coffee cup, is a real inhibition to their solid breakthrough.  On a positive note, if you are left alone, you will swear at them less, I guarantee it. 

I’m feeling a bit spicy - yes.

But dear suffering friend, please remember that even if you are left with a situation you cannot remove, a situation that has you powerless, if all your happy-clappy friends are gone, taking their expensive slogan t-shirts with them, please remember that your God is kind.  He might seem like a monster but he is kind.  When the unanswered prayer weighs on your mind like my ridiculously-heavy-but-ever-so-well-made** water tank there is one thing left to do. 

You must bow.

Bow with all your rage, disappointment, and dismay.  Get on your face and tell him he is God and you are not.  Wrestle with the issue of sovereignty until you are exhausted.  Stay there repeating every scripture your mind can grasp about the goodness of God.  Struggle. Cry.  Wash your face and stand up again. 

Seasons come and go and it is likely that although you feel like you will never recover, in time, you will.  This does not mean you won’t experience loss.  Despite the burden, God will bring new life.  Sometimes, it comes from unexpected places and unexpected ways, but nothing stays the same forever.  Hold on.  Do not give up.  Keep on.  God is for you.

My water tank?  The one waiting for the scrap yard, I tried to move it last week.  Looks like I have a bit longer to wait. Sound on.

xoxKaren

** I couldn’t point it out earlier, but I hope you got that clever pun.  Well made… did you catch it?   Water tank for a well? Didn’t even have to make that one up.  It just flowed…

Oh Deer

 

Not seen in this photo, but very present, off to the right 
is the blue tarp covering the deceased deer awaiting 
its reunification with nature. 

One beautiful evening last week, I finished the dinner dishes and decided it was too lovely to be indoors.  Grabbing a cardigan and my tea, I headed for the back garden.  An unusual warm front meant temperatures 10 degrees above normal.  In response, springtime vegetation celebrated by stretching, blooming and putting on a show I had waited all winter to see.  The scent of apple blossom danced in the air, I couldn’t inhale it like I wanted too, but it played around the fringes on the night breeze, adding to the general awesomeness of the moment.

Admiring the blue bells, I turned and caught another scent before I saw the upsetting scene.  A deer was lying dead on the ground, having been hit by a car; it made it as far as my yard before dying.  I groaned, struck by the juxtaposition between the night and the sight before me.  Grabbing a tarp I covered the body, anchored it with rocks and resumed my now subdued reverie.  I continued, appreciating the flowers and new leaves while simultaneously wishing death didn’t exist.  The presence of a dead animal under a blue tarp wasn’t helping my mood, so I walked to the front yard to admire the non-deadness of the scene.  “I will deal with this poor animal in the morning,” was my last thought on the matter before getting ready for bed. 

The next day my bed was displaying a gravitational pull it reserves for Monday mornings.  I contemplated going back to sleep when I remembered the tarp in the back yard; more specifically what was under the tarp.   I had no idea what I was supposed to do with a dead deer but hoped someone in conservation could tell me. 

I reached a person in Animal Conservation about 20 minutes later.

“Good morning, this is Jim.”

“Hi Jim, I’m wondering if you could help me.  I have a deer in my backyard that was struck and killed last night, could you let me know how I am supposed to dispose of it.  It is clearly too big for the garbage service.”

“Well Karen, I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that if it dies on your property you are responsible for disposing of the body.”

“Oh darn it.  What is the good news?”

“Well, the good news is the deer on the island are much smaller than the ones on the mainland.  So you have less to lift.”

“Jim, regardless of that fact, I still have a bunch of deer to get rid of here. What should I be doing?”

“Well you have a few things you can do.  First option is the bury it.” 

I look at the boot cast on my foot. “Sound advice Jim, supposing that wasn’t the easiest option, what else have you got?”

“Okay then the next thing to do it to throw it in the back of your truck…”

I sighed heavily…

“ …and whaddo you drive?”

“A Firefly.”

“…throw it in a friend’s truck and drive it to the outskirts of town and reunite it with nature.”

“Jim, this deer is really and truly dead, it isn’t being reunited with nature or anything else at the moment.”

“Ha, ha, ha, yes I get that, what I mean is, you drag it a good ways off the road and it will return to nature.  And there is one more piece of good news.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“You don’t need to dismember it or cut it up at all.”

“Jim, I am beginning to think that your version of good news is very different than mine.”

He laughed for real this time, “you can just let nature do its thing!”

“Okay Jim, so far this is really appalling. I don't think you have a lot of friends.  And if someone sees me and thinks I’m a murderer?”

“I am going to give you a file number and if a good upstanding citizen tries to get you arrested you tell them Jim knows what you are doing.”

“Delightful.  So to summarize, I am to take the corpse of this deer, throw it on the top of my car, drive through the town to the outskirts, drag its body into the bush and if someone tries to arrest me I can give them your number.”

“Yes, mam.”

So you might understand Beloved Friend, why I felt that my Monday morning was off to a rocky start.  I shared my research with my better half, and he immediately got his man-i-tude going and rescued me.  He wrapped the deer in tarps and threw that critter in the back of the car and accompanied me on the next part of the adventure of reuniting the dead dear/deer with nature.

I would like to tell you that the whole thing went off without a hitch, but in a new and surprising marriage-first my husband and I ended up squabbling over where we were going to dump the body.  Friend, believe me when I tell you the discussion was like being caught in a very bad movie.  Perhaps you will understand why I was praying strange prayers as we pretended to look at our phones as two joggers ran past as we parked on a semi deserted road.  When they were out of sight, my man dragged the dead animal off the roadside, only to disappear neck deep into Oregon Grape.  I wasn’t sure if he was going to make it out again.  I was worried the joggers were not only healthy but were upstanding enough to find us suspicious.  What if they had enough oxygen coursing through their systems to make a phone call?  What if they were ultra-marathon folk who were capable of chasing my firefly home?

Suffice it to say I was in a pretty bad mood when I returned from my noble, yet illegal feeling act of environmental reunification.  Frankly, because the experience was very corporeal (and the slightest bit traumatizing) all I could think about was that death in movies was far easier to deal with.  Corpses are heavy, and murder on tv is way more stylish than lugging something dead into the middle of the bush.  Deciding my thinking was getting kind of dark, I focused on thanking Jesus that I wasn’t a murderer.  And because all that thinking of death had landed me on the subject of loss, I decided let myself consider some of the losses I was grieving on the quiet. 

Specifically, I was thinking about a relationship that was as dead as the deer I had left to decompose.  Stuck by a friend without warning, and the blow was fatal, it killed a relationship that had taken years to build.  My once-friend was like the driver who kept on going, leaving me to deal with the fall out.  As I sat in my car, windows open to lessen the stench of death, I was profoundly thankful that Jesus cared about me.  The losses of the past few years had been great, the strains of the pandemic so difficult, I cried.  I wished I had a friend to call, and when I realized there wasn’t anyone, I cried some more.   

Now, lest you be tempted to think I’m pathetic and don’t know how to have a good time, I have to tell you that were you in my “little-blue-faintly-smelling-like-death-mobile” in order to drop a rather large dead animal in the woods to decompose, at moment you would have seen me smile.  In fact, I might have suggested we go find and overpriced chocolate in one of our fancy chocolate shops to celebrate the crap morning we were having.  Because in the mess and muddle of it all, I knew that God really did care.  It was one of the first real victories I had during that grief soaked string of years; years that I wondered if God cared, why he seemed to have withdrawn and if He could grow a faith as frail as mine. 

He does.

He didn’t.

He did.

Sometimes, I am amazed how sticky the prosperity gospel can be.  Death and loss are part of the human condition and it takes a mature heart to accept these realities.  My love of miracles and easy answers, my desire to be saved from the battle leads me people to think my prayers are being ignored when the preferred answer does not come.  Yet sometimes, the victory is in coming through loss knowing his goodness.  This heart change cannot be faked; it is won in the battle to trust God when things are far from perfect. 

It is won by his grace.

So friend, if by chance you are trying to move on from a loss that has left you broken, from the death of something or someone you held dear, or trying to recover from the unexpected and unwanted: let me remind you that you are still on the road of faith.  You are not less because the miracle you wanted did not come.  You belong to God, you are not forgotten and that road will get you home.  The season you are in will turn in time and eventually we will find our way home.

Praying for you this week,

Be safe and drive carefully.

xoxKaren

A Cemetery Kind of Day

thank you Waldemar Brandt for the photo

It was sunny but cold, a neat trick of life on the coast, when the blanket layer of clouds pulled back and allowed the sun to cross the sky unobstructed. It was a nice afternoon, the whimsical combination of errands and treats dictating the route.  I found myself staring at the blue sky when I realized where I was and made an unscheduled stop.  Pulling into the parking lot behind the church, I immediately turned off the stereo and peered through the trees.  The graveyard lay in an Oak grove and as my feet touched the ground, my shoes crunched on the acorns and leaves the winter left behind.  Gingerly walking across the grass, dodging clusters of grape hyacinth sown generously by nature, I made my way to the headstone.  It was beginning to look like spring but it felt like winter, I shivered and pulled my coat tighter.

I have never woken up and thought, “Today is a cemetery kind of day.”  So I was a bit surprised that my errands had landed on this side of town.  The cemetery itself is one of the oldest in the area and less fashionable than the perfectly manicured cemetery grounds less than a mile away.  The ground is uneven and undulating, caused by a century of root growth from surrounding trees.  The overall effect is one of cozy, timeless neglect. 

There was broken glass around the grave, which immediately kicked off an internal dialogue of criticism.  “Drinking in a graveyard? Classy. I hope your ancestors haunt your dreams to remind you to stay out of here. Clearly you need your great, great grandma to show up and set your lame-self straight.”  I listened to myself for a while, marveling at the boldness of those who don’t yet have the life experience to view such ground as holy.  

Picking up the glass, my thoughts turned to remembrance.  He would have disapproved of broken glass that could have inured deer or other graveyard creatures.  He loved nature, sometimes more than people.  And dear friend, if you have lost someone, you might understand when I say that I spent some time with thoughts that were as sharp as the shards of glass I was holding.  Loving people isn’t always easy, losing them can be equally as difficult. 

It was a tiny stab to my finger that brought the sting of tears to my eyes but the lacerations to the heart caused them to fall.  I spent a while intentionally thinking about the lovely things, until the tears stopped.  Sometimes I miss the past, when life seemed simpler, less complicated.  It is hard to take the good with the bad, the remedied with the unresolved or the finished with the incomplete. 

As this pandemic continues, with all of its impact and force, I have been thinking about those who have been left feeling incomplete by the things they have lost.  Those who didn’t get to say goodbye: funerals that didn’t happen, business that closed, friendships that ended, the graduations suspended.  The list goes on and on and on.   Perhaps you are experiencing the frustration of being deeply impacted by loss yet entirely powerless to bring about a remedy.  Friend, I hope that you are being patient with yourself.  Recovery takes so much longer than anyone wants.  Grief is a time consuming process and avoidance isn’t a short cut.  Spend too much time stuffing your grief and you might end up being snippy with the Costco employee who tells you can’t look at your daughters face without her mask for 2 seconds when buying new glasses frames even though you are more than 10 feet away from everyone and the woman is behind Plexiglas on the other side of the store. 

Strictly hypothetical, of course.

So I am praying and cheering you on this week if you are feeling inadequate, and like you want to stay in bed.  Get up and do the next thing.  Accept the good with the bad.  Try not to lose it and put yourself in time-out if you need too. 

I'm in the time-out corner, come visit, I'm here for a while.

xoxKaren