It finally rained last night, and this morning, and I'm sure the grass and flowers and trees are rejoicing. I even felt my own heart drinking up the rain on behalf of the plants that weren't fully quenched yet. It's strange, but I was thirsty for rain too, and didn't realize how thirsty I was until it rained.
When I stepped outside the house this morning on the way to Tabor Space, I was greeted by the wonderful aromas of wood fire smoke and fresh rain. The whole neighborhood smelled like a campground on a wet summer morning. Birds were calling out their good mornings, and the firs seemed cleaner and greener.
I got thinking about it: how the rain falls when it's told, the grass grows, and continues to grow after it's cut.
Flowers keep coming back year after year and not giving up. The trees don't seem worried or stressed out. They keep adding new growth every spring. The birds keep waking up at 4:45 every morning, and the squirrels are still making plans for winter. I suppose I could take a hint from all of this. I know I need to keep growing as well, and reaching and producing. A lot of the time I feel dormant, or wish I was dormant, just sleeping the world away. In some ways, I've gone into hiding and put my mind out of this world. I don't want to be here...I want to be in God's country. I'ts just not the right time yet.
I get a little lost in my wishful thinking. I forget how to live. I've experienced so much death that I've forgotten how to live. I find myself envying people who are oblivious to the horrors I've experienced, just as I was once oblivious to the horrors that others have seen. They've got it so good - they literally have no idea how good they've got it. I used to have that beautiful innocence too, and I miss it so badly. I was touched by the pain in this world - the pain of other people - but it was never my own loss. I didn't know what suicide did to those it left behind. Now that I know, I can't un-know it. I can't un-see the horrors I've witnessed. How can I go on as before? Well, I can't. Horror changes a person. (True horror, that is...not the Hollywood stuff that can be switched off with a button - as gruesome and evil as it is).
We, as people, weren't meant to process the unfathomable terrors that are possible in this world, which take place daily. That's why we have words like: unfathomable, unbelievable, incredulous, unimaginable, incomprehensible, unknowable, inconceivable, unheard of, unthinkable, and indescribable. There are a lot of things and experiences in this life that fall outside our ability to reason and understand. We can't do it. We try for our whole lives to understand, and we spend billions of dollars on research, study, medicine, therapies, awareness, and programs, but we're not able to stop it. Each new generation births horrors all its own, and no human hand will ever be able to put a stop to all madness, all confusion, all evil, all disease...all death.
Yet God keeps calling us forward into the next season, the next morning, the next dry spell, and the next rainfall. We are called forward into life despite our inability to meet the challenges which await us. We are forever beckoned forward into night after night, day after day, breath after breath, death after death, and Life after life.
God has not made us masters of the rapids, but he calls us into the river anyway. He hasn't swallowed up our death, but he has swallowed up Death. We are not masters of our circumstances, but we are called to walk forward anyway, and to walk with courage. What we are given is the ability to humble ourselves, to grow, to trust, to choose God's path, and to choose love.
I've been having some difficulty in choosing life, but life keeps happening to me anyway. My eyes open in the morning. I feel hunger for breakfast. I want coffee. I want to kiss my baby and my husband. I breathe, I talk, I blink, I move around. Mostly though, I observe life around me; that pull forward (because that's what life really is - a pull forward), and I mimic what I see. I get out of bed, I take my pill, I make old person noises, I stretch and flop around in the blankets for a while. I cuddle my husband and 14-month-old. I sigh.
I think it's in these observations that I'll be able to remember how to live. After all, the forward pull is still there. What else do I really need?
