Barren Places

As much as I love to buck gender stereotypes, I have to confess that I have no aptitude for science of any kind. I'd love to blame an evangelical upbringing that pitted me against my 6th grade biology teacher as I obnoxiously argued with him about the origins of life (oh Lord, have mercy), but regardless, I don't have it. So I had to Google this fact: Decreasing temperatures cause trees to go dormant - to reduce metabolic activity to conserve energy so they can survive the winter. The trees look pretty lifeless around here right now, but they are, Google tells me, full of life mostly unseen.

It's been a few weeks, but I'm still haunted by an image my pastor used in a recent sermon series. We attend one of those ginormous, suburban complexes of a church so we've gotten pretty used to fairly elaborate stage props. But no one could miss the giant leafless tree that appeared on stage a few weeks ago. Brian was speaking about divine imagination, the gift from God that allows us to see that which is not yet*.

I stared hard at that leafless tree asking God for the divine imagination to see myself, my life for what it is not yet and then, in the last song, the word came: fertile. Well then. It's good to know that God isn't messing around here. That will certainly take a divine amount of imagination.

It's been ten months since the last miscarriage, over two years since the first. I don't feel particularly sad anymore. Oh, tears still occasionally spring to my eyes when Todd holds a baby or on certain anniversaries or whatnot, but I'm not often sad. And I don't think I'm afraid of trying again. Overwhelmed, maybe, apprehensive, sure, but I don't think fear is what I'm feeling.

I feel barren. Dormant. Quiet. Fragile. Winter-y.

I went for a walk the other day, desperate for even the weak early March sun and for Jesus, who seems to meet me outside. Most of the time these days, I'm talking to a God who feels a little further away, a little quieter, than in the broken, shattered days of last summer when God felt so near I could almost feel His breath on my face. As I walked, identifying with the brittle grass and the deep quiet that hangs over the lake in the winter and seems to muffle all sound, I finally heard a whisper of a thought:

Be patient, little one. There is life here.

I want life. Like eating peaches till the juice runs down your face and arm as you sit outside smelling fresh grass life. Like babies crying in the middle of the night and teenagers slamming doors and I-won't-tell-you-again-to-turn-that-down life.

But then Google tells me that the trees are not dead in the winter, just dormant. And Romans tells me God is the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. And the Voice that is so often barely perceptible tells me that there is life here too, in the quiet, barren, winter-y places.

So today I ask for myself and maybe for you: may God grant us the divine imagination to see life in all barren places.

*The Divine Imagination sermon series was unreal. Go to cfellowshipc.org to check it out.