Stacking Up Joy

Psalm 73:23

Yet I am always with you;

you hold me by my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel,

and afterward you will take me into glory.

I knew God was going to speak.

I knew he had a message. A promise. An image.

And sure enough, he did.

"Someone is running in the dark, past all of these closed doors. But God rushes in and takes your hand; suddenly you are running with him in the light—free," she said.

I knew the image was for me.

I know the light has been promised. The joy will be forthcoming. The twirls and running and sensation of grass springing beneath my toes will be a reality.

I don't doubt it.

But I can't feel it. Right now--even after prayer upon prayer--I don't feel the joy and I can't see the light. Not yet.

But I don't doubt it.

The one thing I know is that I won't fake it. There is a time when I would have faked it, so hard it would almost tear me apart.

But today I will not fake it. The God who promises me light is smart enough to know that I'm not there yet. He's patient enough to give me the grace to grapple. To say, God I don't feel this joy that you talk about. I trust it is coming. I pray for the strength to ask for it.

I feel it fragments. In moments. In glimpses and hand squeezes and heads bowed and tears pricking.

But this picture of overwhelming light and sun and freedom--I don't feel it yet.

I love the image of stacking up truths. I like the idea of the addition, the stacking, the summation of experiences and truths and ideas.

But lately I've been challenged on this mindset. For what good is truth without love or joy?

I could stack up sad, pathetic truths for days.

1. The world is a place of deep pain and intolerable suffering.

2. God doesn’t always answer prayer.

3. People I love get sick, trapped in destructive patterns, move away, move out of my life.

4. I can't seem to get ahead of this curve of depression and burnout.

…..Etc. etc. until I can't get out of bed.

But where does this get me?

This keeps me in the dark, sprinting, heaving past closed doors.

There is another truth I can choose to see: the light wins.

God grabs my hand and sets me free.

Will I build my life around the darkness or will I build my life around the joy?

In One Thousand Gifts Ann Voskamp writes, "Do not disdain the small. The whole of life - even the hard - is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole ... There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments add up."

The moments add up.

The joy adds up.

I want a life stacked on joy.

God, I ask for the courage and discipline to choose to see the good. To unclench my fearful fists so you can take my hand.

Even in the darkness--in the not yet--I can stack these moments. I will stack the little joy and I will build my life on your promises:

Aly, you will grow. I will comfort you. I will restore your joy. I love you.

I thank you for the glimpses. The fragments. That which I see in part that will one day be given to me in whole.

I thank you God for the hope of most this amazing joy. Please guide me with your counsel and take me to your glory. Amen.

T.S. Tuesday: Thankful Thievery

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." T.S. Eliot

Today, at the bequest of T.S. Eliot, I am stealing one of my favorite poems (of a different author) to share with you.

by e.e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any--lifted from the no

of all nothing--human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake

and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Unempty Moments

I can't remember anything but her underwear.

I can't remember the day or even which convalescent facility we were in. I can't remember what my mom was telling me or what I was wearing.

What I can remember is her underwear. They were big, literally granny panties. Soft cotton. Conservative white and new baby pink. No lace or ruffles.

I can remember how they folded softly in my mom's hands. She caressed them absentmindedly as she spoke.

We were moving my grandmother into a new facility.

We were in the repeat-the-same-question-every-five-minutes stage of her dementia, not yet to the frantic wheelchair racing or the evergreen season of suspicion. She hadn't yet looked desperately into my eyes and asked if I could find her mother.

But still, we were scared, my mom and I. Missing the mother and grandmother we once knew. The woman who remembered her legendary spaghetti and meatballs recipe and walked loops around her apartment complex with friends bearing names like Petey or Marge.

The fear hung silent between us as we unpacked her clothes, a few books, some pictures of toothy grandchildren for her bedside table.

Henri Nouwen talks about patience as one of the cornerstones of the compassionate life; impatience the deterrent that keeps us tapping our feet, checking our watches, and missing the glory of God.

By this point in the story, (like you I venture to presume) I should have been tapping my feet, checking my watch and writing off another summer afternoon as "empty, useless, meaningless."

But I didn't.

The counterpoint to impatience, Nouwen describes another rendering of time when we experience the moment as "full, rich, and pregnant." When "somehow we know that in this moment everything is contained: the beginning, the middle, and the end; the past, the present and the future; the sorrow and the joy; the expectation and the realization; the searching and the finding."

This was one of these moments. Watching my mom delicately fold my grandmother's underwear. In this moment I was gripped by the thought that love need be nothing more than this simple, intimate act.

It became an unempty moment.* A moment I didn't want to get away from. A moment filled with the glory of God.

To this day, this afternoon represents a rupture for me. A rupture that signaled not a fracture, but a deepening. A deepening love for my grandmother. A deepening respect for my mom. And a deepening gratitude for every humdrum moment-turned-miracle I had left with both of them, together in one room, folding underwear, in an unempty moment.

***

*Precious moments was already trademarked.