Why We Need Your Wine (Yes, We Really Do!)
I am home again, back from my Colorado trip. So begins my winter life (and yes, it is snowing today! Soon this will be my view out my kitchen window).
I cried a lot on this trip. Including at a lunch with a friend in Colorado. We met 12 years ago, but I did not know it. And now we met again at a restaurant I followed my google maps to. We sat there the two of us, picking at our salads, and leaking rivers, stories, startling our waitress, who lingered to hear what words were bringing such a flood. But it was Him, really. Someone she couldn't see, except maybe on our faces. He was making us cry, the One who has pursued us all our days, Amy and I, and who has not let us go, not through childbirth and ocean storms and islands and darkness and joy.
It happened again on this trip. And again. People pouring out kindness, generosity, through open doors, a beautiful table, little girls on my lap, a drive through Garden of the gods, a soul-deep lunch with my agent, a pizza reunion with dear friends, pumpkin cookies made and delivered with love, a joyful editing session, eight strangers, holding hands around a table praying for the book I am finishing . . .
I came home this time, this one time not emptied and exhausted, thinned to a reed of need----but full. Overflowing. Wine running down the cut-glass sides, Believing maybe God was here, after all, in this work that I cannot turn away from. Believing maybe this lifelong work has value to someone. Believing a few people are listening and somehow, mysteriously, beyond all deserving, God has quickened some of those words. Could it be true?
And what about these words, found this week. Is it possible that these words are true?
Samuel writes,
He brought me forth also into a large place:
he delivered me, because he delighted in me.
I felt that delight this trip, though mostly I doubt (God delights in me, in us??? (My stubborn Calvinism protests.)
But Samuel's words go on:
The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness:
according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.
For I have kept the ways of the Lord,
and have not wickedly departed from my God.
My Calvinism protests even stronger. No, not according to my righteousness has He rewarded me! No, not according to the cleanness of my hands. Have I really kept the ways of the Lord? I know myself too well . ... . No, it is nothing but mercy, nothing but astonishing mercy that He attends to me, rescues me, drenches me.
And here I would rest---savoring and greedily gulping, swallow by swallow, all I had been given. And then the phone call came. Then the email. Another email. Another phone call.
I was ready (almost).
The cup tipped. Wine spilled. Prayers fell out, for healing, for a friend's daughter in the hospital, for a struggling son, for the midnight falling upon a friend's every morning. Cookies were made. A package mailed. Tears spent. My heart so bent with the hurts of others.
But Bent gladly.
Spilled gladly.
Here is what I have to say today, though surely you know it already. Don't cover your cup. Let others pour in. Receive as from the Lord. (Yes, He DOES delight in you! Never mind your Calvinism that delights in groveling unworthiness.)
And then don't hoard it. Don't drink it all. It's been given to you so you have something to give to others.
The freed man standing before the King who would not free others?
The blessed man kneeling before the King who would not bless others?
The glutton given a feast with the King will not share with starving others?
This will not be us.
As you tip your cup this week, the drink you pour will fill ten
more, a hundred more glasses, and like that,
never will an end come to the feast
begun by One.
Cheers!
(And pass it on here! How have you been emptied and filled this week? You may yet fill an empty glass even now . . . )
The Poem that is YOU: How Will it End?
The sun rose and lit the horizon out my window with fire and flash. But I almost didn't see it. I'm a little dizzy. A bit unsure of where I am, and soon to leave again. Fish camp is over (already?). The Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop is done (far too soon). This first week back in Kodiak I'm trying to house train a deadly-cute puppy whose spiritual gift is piddling in every wrong place.
(Oh WHY oh WHY did I say yes to a puppy?? Because my two youngest sons are just too persuasive? Because God made puppies [and children] with instant pull-cords to our ridiculous mushy hearts??)
Then the mail came, and Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers showed up at my door again----this time in Chinese.
And Micah (youngest son)and I have just started Godspell rehearsals, which gives us a huge nightly shot of gospel joy and dance.
Sunday I leave for radio interviews with Focus on the Family (and more) in Colorado Springs.
But Saturday. Do you know what happened on Saturday? Besides offering a poetry workshop that only three people attended. (Oh, the suffering of poets!) But more----a poem was planted above a beach, overlooking mountains and sea.
With Corey Pederson, the amazing photographer who took the accompanying photo.
I read it aloud to the stalwart crowd, into the cold blasting winds that amplified my words.
Later, that night, Wendy and I walked back to the beach at sunset, and marveled. (The amazing Wendy Erd is the founder of the statewide "Poems-in-Place" project.) The land and sea itself echoed the photo, and the words . ...
Since the poem was chosen months ago---I have not been allowed to share it. Until now. May I share it with you?
Tideline
great sinking ships.
Wind lifts ocean to lace.
Mountains wear their own sky,
Volcanoes fume.
The dizzying spruce sway shadows across the sun.
Under the bay, red corals grow houses
like veins, hearts.
And here, along the tideline, fragments of it all---
whale bones, ash, lost trees, homes.
Each time I come here with you
the continent’s shelf tilts, empties, delivers
to our hands and feet this surplus.
And gathering these pieces
I am already generous,
forgiving breached promises, lost homes, broken hopes.
I lay these weights down
on the beach,
now small and light
as the coil of red coral
I rest at your feet.
This is where poems and words belong (and Wendy knew this before any of us.) Out in the light of sun and sunset. Out where they meet us when we don't expect them. Out of closed books and four-walled classrooms. Out where we walk and sing and cry and pray and pick up shells and spruce cones and driftwood as though collecting friends.
Just simple words to you all this week:
I want to send you out. Out in God's glowing and Fall-bright world. Maybe for an hour you will lose yourself. Maybe for those minutes you will see the largesse of God in a flower cup, the particular love of God in a swallow's flight, the revelry of God in a colony of raucous gulls.
Maybe, under such a sky, He will break your heart and make you generous again, as you used to be.
I want this, too.
It will happen. Because do you know what God sees when He sees you walking on that trail, by the sea; when He sees you head-up in the pines, dancing in that flower garden?
He sees a beautiful poem. There, among his glorious Creation He sees you, His "poeia," one of the loveliest poems He's written. He has spent so much on you. And He will not stop, just as He will not stop breathing out beauty in this world. Do you see it? Do you feel it? Do you know it?
Be generous again. As He has been with you. Be generous with others. Walk your beautiful poem-self straight out into broken homes, lost hopes and sad people. Lay down that piece of your heart at their feet.
And now, your poem will end just as God wrote it.
How Do We Survive such Terrible Grace?
I know. This does not look like terrifying grace. I know you will think I am exaggerating. Or that I'm off my hormones, or need on them. But do you know how it all began? With earth, wind and fire. Winds gusting to 60 mph. An uncontrolled fire breaking out near Kodiak the day before. High seas and unflyable skies. Planes grounded. 100 year old ash from Novarupta erasing the mountains, choking us. Like this, in the midst of this, they came. (Yes, late. Nearly every one, delayed by the ungodly roaring elements.)
But on Saturday---THE day scheduled for us all to fly out----the ash settled, the winds calmed, the seas slept---and our little plane made it out. And our little skiff made the watery journey the rest of the way.
The very next day, it blew again. Hard. We would not have madeit out that day. Or the next. So I look at the photos from this past week, the week of the third Harvester Island Wilderness Workshop---and tears come. Fear comes. My face melts with fatigue, with a touch of self-loathing and great gulps of wonder and disbelief.
I know you may not understand this, how it feels to live on an island, a very far away island for 38 summers and a few winters----and most of that time alone with your family, with the ones you love. But you are lonely still . ....
You know about loneliness. We all share this, don't we? Loneliness, paradoxically, is our common lot. But I know you dream, too. You dream on your own island, in whatever waters your island sails, of something impossible. That you know will never, ever happen.
And then, one day it does. And though I have planned it to the last detail, no one is more surprised, more afraid, more humbled than me. Because----
tucked away in the deepest pocket of my heart was a longing to open the door of this faraway place, and to bring others in. Even for just one week. Others who love what I love. Others who see my island for the first time, so I see it again, too, through them.
And I do. See again.
It is not only this, this inconceivable thing, that lovers of words and God would fly thousands of miles to land here on this piece of earth and sea. That my far north life would be theirs for this week, that their presence would bring companionship and joy, far more than I ever could have guessed.
There is yet more. Years ago, I had to give up teaching. It wasn't my choice, entirely, but the Lord made it clear. To give up this thing that I loved. And I did. I gave it up-----twice. But He keeps giving it back to me. I did not even dare to dream of this.
And here is the terror of this grace. I am Simon Peter who is out fishing, living his normal drab life and then he is told to do something he knows won't work--throw your net on the other side. He doesn't want to do it. And then he is drowning in fish, sobbing, forehead flat on the feet of Jesus as he says the truest thing he has ever said, "Go away from me! I'm too full of sin to be near you!"
How can He bear to come near this bumbling, flat-footed, selfish woman who cannot stop sinning, who cannot lay down her wounds, who struggles to trust, who keeps tipping the scales to herself, who deserves nothing but what she has earned: darkness and death?? How does He come near to this woman? How does He listen to her? How does He bless her far past her prayers?
This is terrible grace---terrible for Him, wondrous for me, because He fearlessly plunges into that darkness---and hauls me out into this. Into this:
I learn again: Grace is an unparseable blend of undeserved, profligate mercy from our limitless God, but we cannot think we are simply to sit around and wait for it to come to us. We have our part too: we must long and thirst and pray and ask and work toward receiving it.
I don't know what your dreams are, what your prayers are, but I know one or two that can be answered soon. This week. This month. Joy and friends and companionship and the thrill of giving to others can happen in your house, in the coffee shop, at your church. You don't have to look around for someone else to do this, and pray wild prayers with desperate hope. God's grace is ready to be poured out on you and on all who gather with you, no matter how far away your island. Pick up the phone. Email a friend. Go to church this week. Invite your family over. Invite friends and make of them a family.
God's grace is nearer than you imagine.
Do not be afraid.
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