Good History (May 7, 2009)

There’s an impressive looking calculator on my dining room table. Under it are notes on Hitler, Stalin and Mao – papers scribbled with multicolored explanations of DNA transcription and translation are scattered across my desk, and a hand-drawn picture of blood flow through the heart sits by the window. It’s quiet now. In this moment. The air outside is light and full of silently buzzing insects, blissfully unaware of the mechanisms of cell reproduction going on inside their tiny bodies.

The last few months of my life have been filled with precious little moments like this one. Moments that glitter like gems along the tenuous strand of my life, precious either in their fullness or in their vacuum. Moments treasured for their sweetness and for their brevity. Moments that are sweet because I know just how short they are.

Over the last few months, my life has been jumbled up with the lives of a bundle of others. There are journeys I have taken, and journeys that have brought others to me. There are journeys that have taken them away again.

The reason my house is covered with history and biology and sparkly converse tennis shoes is that a few of the girls have moved in. It’s the start of finals, and their parents are out of town. They’re here to be fed and sent to bed and loved on. Before them we had a musician and a cameraman in the guest room and on the couch. They were preceded by a lawyer turned revolutionary, a pied piper who leads many to great heights of faith as they kneel down to serve the poor.

He came just a few days after I had left his world – Romania. I lived and laughed and jostled and tended wounds among children of the very rich come to serve the very poor. I baked and loved and watched the sunsets with comedians and kings, with sweet sisters and wild men. I sometimes felt like Wendy, caring for Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, although they are more found than most men ever hope to be. Moments there flash like gold in a pan of dirt, miracles slipped just under the surface of the mundane.

I have run through the streets of Rome and been silenced by the majesty of Austrian alps. I have cried in the villages of France watching hearts as hard as winter begin to thaw and heard whispers of the coming spring in other hearts along the Hungarian highways. I have witnessed the goodness of God in a million tiny little ways, overwhelmed by the beauty of His love borne out in my life and in the lives of others.

I cannot fully explain the value of these precious little moments to you. I know only that they fly by, and so often I have missed them in the midst of my busyness, and tiredness and weakness. I am trying now to treasure them – to soak in the sounds and the smells of them, to feel with intention the weight of their air on my skin. I want to steep myself in such moments – when the barefoot sun walks soft upon my face, as it does on a Sunday morning in the Romanian foothills to the mingled joyous strains of a guitar, tin flute and didgeridoo.

Right now I am tired. There has been more studying than sleeping going on, and the cacophony of laughter and learning and chaos over the last week has been almost never-ending. In a way, it’s what makes this moment – right now – so sweet. It is this silence that reminds me how precious all those former moments have been. It is this emptiness that reminds me what a treasure it will be when the doorbell rings again, and they all shuffle in full of excitement or frustration, giddy with the knowledge of all they’re now allowed to forget.

Part of the beauty of believing in God is having Someone to thank for the moments that stretch long and wide under the luminous glow of peace. These moments, these people, these friends have been gifts of a loving Father to His tiny daughter. I know we will not all pass this way again, and it is the rarity, the brevity of these times that make them as special as they are. Dry days are coming, but my loving Father has given me these treasures to store up, so that when the times of famine come, there are jewels in my heart, keeping it lit.

The King of all the earth “Knows the plans that [He] has for me, plans to prosper me and not to harm me; to give me a hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). He knows when these precious little moments will come, and He knows when I will need to hold onto the ones that have slipped by, alive only in my memory, pearls of joy spent with those I dearly love.

I am thankful for the pearls He has brought my way. I am determined not to complain in their absence, because owning them has never been my right – only a gift. I am thankful for the gifts He has brought my way – late nights, bedtime stories, study sessions, breakfast prayers, treat time on the veranda, coffee in pajamas at noon, running through the hills of Tuscany, cabin time, God moments and songs in the sun by a guitar, tin flute, and didgeridoo.

There is history all over my dining room table, and every moment of it has been precious. It may be passing by, but it hasn’t passed away. I love that there are scattered notes of DNA strands on my desk, and a hand-drawn heart by the window. I love the clutter of forgotten sweaters and sparkly converse tennis shoes because it means that my God is good and has blessed me with more than I could ever ask for. I pray that we all learn the beauty of soaking in and thanking our good, good God for such treasured history. 

Fingerprints (January 29, 2009)

Since I’m airing horrid little secrets, I might as well let you in on another one. I know this one ought to cause me great shame – when I meet other women effortlessly successful in this arena, I sense that great waves of inadequacy ought to wash over me and spur me on to make vast and sweeping changes. It hasn’t actually happened yet, but I always sense that it should.

Here it is: I am messy. I hate to clean. There – my dirty little secret is out in the open. If you’ve been to my house (or seen my office) you may already know this. It pains me to admit it, because society tends to peer down its polished nose at me and “my kind”, subtly suggesting that I am somehow less of a woman because of it. I warned my husband of this minor flaw before we got married, but, swelling with the dizzied flush of new love, he said, “That doesn’t matter – I love you anyway!”

A couple of years on and slightly less flushed, he said, “You’re messy.”
I said, “I know – I warned you.”
He said, “Yes, but you were supposed to change.”

Marital matters aside, the fact remains that brooms and mops do not inspire me. The scent of bathroom cleaner does not sweep me up into fits of ecstasy, and while I love a man with dishpan hands, washing them myself is sometimes the bane of my existence.

The wheres and whys and deep psychological issues related to my “neatness-challenged” self are not really what I’m getting at today, however. I mention it only because I spent today cleaning – not my house, of course (to my husband’s dismay, I’m sure), but a place where I have spent much my life over the last five years.

We, in Düsseldorf, call it the Clubhouse, and it is a special place; a literal and figurative home for myself and countless others who have walked through the door. It’s where we fit in and belonged. It’s where we were family.

As I wiped fingerprints off the walls, I wondered which hands had made them, for many hands have run along those walls. Many feet have slid up and down the great hall, many eyes have shed tears, in laughter and in sorrow. Many enthusiastic arms have hugged hello, and many heavy hearts hugged good-bye. Many memories made by many people had now condensed into little more than fingerprints on the wall. And I was wiping them away.

It made me think. Don’t we spend much of our lives making fingerprints on the wall? Trying to leave something lasting, something that will endure once we are gone? We reach out and touch others, hoping that we will leave an impression, a print that will not fade with time or circumstance. Sometimes, we succeed. And sometimes, the world comes along behind us, wiping our fingerprints away.

The lives we live are transient ones. Some of you know this better than others. While losing the Clubhouse does not erase the memories we made there, memories were made by other feet and arms and hearts before we came, and many other memories will be made, fingerprints left by hands we do not know, after we are gone.

What, then, is permanent? Where, then, is my home? Is there a place where my existence is validated, my heart settled? Where in the world do my fingerprints remain?

I don’t know how many times I have moved. I have changed schools 13 times. I have lived in five different states and three different countries. My hope is that I’ve left my fingerprints over all of them. I don’t know. I do know they’ve left their fingerprints on me.

I know because every time I travel or move somewhere new, there is still a whisper of familiarity, an aftertaste of home. I feel a little bit settled everywhere I go, even if I’ve just arrived. And while that is comforting, the flip side of the coin is that there are now pieces of me scattered all over the world. Everywhere feels a little bit like home, but nowhere feels exactly like home. Or how I imagine it would feel.

Soon I will long for Germany the way that I now long for Albania and Romania, and any beach I’ve ever been on. The landscape of my life will change again and wherever I land, I’ll feel a little bit at home. But not quite. Mere geography cannot quench the little blue fire of loneliness that sometimes creeps along the floor of my heart. I assign a person, place or thing to the feeling, I say that I miss so-and-so or thus-and-such, when what I really mean is that my soul is searching for lost fingerprints, for feelings of belonging, of fitting, of being home, and I think I remember those feelings in those places with those people. Have you been there? Unfortunately, seeing those people or going to those places doesn’t always satisfy the longing we've nurtured in our hearts for them – sometimes, it only makes the longing worse b/c we're at a loss as to what will truly satisfy it.

C.S. Lewis spoke to this phenomenon when he said, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

Often, people see the Kingdom of Heaven as the “pie in the sky, place where good people go when they die”, perfectly simple, perfectly calm, perfectly boring possible existence after this one. I don’t. On the day I cease attempting to leave fingerprints on this life and step into that one, all my misplaced longings will be satisfied, the bits of me scattered and left behind in one country or another will navigate their way back to each other and, at last, I will be Home. Home – where I fit, where I belong; where I am Family. Where my fingerprints will never be wiped away.

“…We have a priceless inheritance—an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay.” (1 Peter 1:4, NLT)

That is the appeal of Heaven for me. This good King has built His good Kingdom as the lock for my ever-searching key, every other “home” merely a layover on my journey there. It is beyond the reach of change and decay, a home sweet home that can never be anything less.

Perhaps the reason I am less than enthusiastic about cleaning is b/c of its transience – I can spend hours cleaning one day what will be messy again in a week. It’s a reminder that in this life nothing truly remains, all things and states of being will pass away; everything I do to make a lasting impression on the world will someday be forgotten. Forgotten here, that is. But God notices my attempts, feeble as they may be, to validate my existence. He sees each tear shed in laughter and in sorrow; He has known every enthusiastic and heavy-hearted hug, has watched my hands run along the walls of this world and treasured each fingerprint. My thoughts and actions, though often dusty and disheveled, are not hidden from Him, and He never fails to clean me up when I ask Him to. He’s much better at it than I am.

Which is good, because on my own… I’m a mess.