Of Red Balloons and Blessings

Todd preached a sermon recently about the Love of God. As usual, he taught me many things I didn't know, among them that it's an ancient Hebrew tradition for parents to bless their children before they walk out the door. Hands on little heads, speaking words like, "I love you, you're my child" over them. He compared this to God, blessing us, hands on our heads, I love you, you're my child, as we walk out the door, and then God follows us along the way. God in the car, I love you, you're my child. God as we walk into our offices, I love you, you're my child. God at the gym, God at the grocery store, God at the doctor's office, God on the beltway, I love you, you're my child.*

The day after Todd's sermon, I walked out of my apartment and floating in the hallway, directly outside my door, was a red, heart-shaped helium balloon, with the words "I love you" on it. Escaped from one of my neighbors' Valentine's Day celebrations no doubt, but still. I literally gasped. And then laughed right there out loud. I nearly felt the Hand on my head. I love you, you're my child.

Beautiful, right?

Todd and I fought most of Sunday. Impatient, barbed words. Off-the-cuff comments that stung. A fight that kept finding itself tangled up in other, bigger fights, so that each word took on a heaviness, a weight, the other didn't intend.

Sunday night we went over to our friends' house in desperate need of translators, someone to ask the right questions, someone to say "Kim, what I hear Todd say..." Our friends came through like pros. They asked just the right questions. They told me to wait my turn when I wanted to jump in and tell Todd why he was wrong. They know us. And they knew exactly what we were each trying to say.

We each spoke. This is why I'm angry, this is what I want you to do differently, this is how you make me feel.

It was this beautiful moment of community and vulnerability and laying ourselves bare out of love for one another and as I bent down to put on my shoes so we could go home, the whispers almost made me sink to the ground: they think you guys are failing. They think you guys have a bad marriage. They probably think it's all your fault. They know that you were wrong.

Our friends are hugging Todd and me, telling us they love us, they believe in us, we can do hard things and all I'm hearing is well, the jig's up, now they know.

(As if anyone who's ever met me thinks I've got it together, let alone the people who know us best. Shame - it's such an insidious, lying bastard.)

But then.

Don't you love when there's a "but then?" So much grace.

But then. We walked out their front door, and there, caught in bare tree branches, was a red, heart-shaped balloon.

"I love you, you're my child."

God is with us. Hands on my head when I'm failing. Hands on my head when I'm listening to Shame even as Grace is being poured out. Hands on my head, I love you, you're my child.

I read it like this: "Gospel is the shocking, provocative, revolutionary, subversive, counterintuitive good news that in your moments of greatest despair, failure, sin, weakness, losing, failing, frustration, inability, helplessness, wandering, and falling short, God meets you there - right there - exactly there - in that place, and announces: I am on your side."**

God on my side. Even then. Even now. Even here.

"I love you, you're my child."



*Listen to Todd's sermon here: http://vimeo.com/61030608
**From Rob Bell's new book.

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.