They float,
Silently, indifferently,
Contentedly
Above
White puffs against the blue
To notice them
You have to stop your motion
Be still.
Look up.
But clouds aren’t still,
They drift.
Sometimes obscuring the sun
Or moon
And when something isn’t clear—
When the truth is obscured from us
We say
“It’s cloudy.”
Clouds are collectors.
Drops of water congeal
Connected in suspension
Laced together
Hanging between heaven and earth—
Like my hammock.
Until they spill over
(My hammock spills me out too.)
The cloud disappears into rain.
Rain gets my attention.
It races to me,
Unbidden.
Touches any exposed skin,
Soaks in.
Clings.
But these days,
My head is in the clouds.
low clouds
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you …
—But who is that on the other side of you?
T.S. Eliot
The biggest surprise of living on the seventeenth floor is how connected we feel to the sky. There’s so much to look at outside our windows—the Space Needle, Lake Union, the Cascade Mountains, the cityscape; ferries and sea planes come and go, the monorail zooms by. These are the players, but what I thought of as just the backdrop—the sky—is really the star of the show. Wisps of cotton form endless patterns, the perfect I-Spy game for little boys. By turns dark and stormy, or brimming with golden morning sunlight, or showing off brilliant sunset colors, the sky and the clouds are always alive. Sometimes the clouds wrap themselves around our high-rise, reminding me of Robert Frost’s words, “The clouds are low and hairy in the skies like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.”
If there is one thing I want more of in my life, it is clarity. I always imagined insight and clarity were the backdrop, like the clouds in the sky. And of course, I would have a sense of what is important. Of course, I would know what needs tending and what needs ignoring. Of course, I would be clear about right and wrong. Of course.
Yet, like the ever-changing whispered patterns of clouds, my fleeting thoughts shift and reconfigure. The patterns that seemed so recognizable change their shape before my next glance. I want to know, really know, what I should be doing in every area of my life, but I can’t get a handle on it.
My boys press their faces into the windows of our apartment. As they look out at the clouds, they create their own clouds of breath that actually prevent them from seeing as clearly. Sometimes, in my eager, overanxious, too-intense desire to see life with clarity, I create my own cloud cover. Now I see through a glass darkly.
Sometimes you do your best despite the darkness. My friends Doug and Margo met a six-week-old baby girl who needed a safe, loving home, so they took her in. No formal papers, just love. The biological mom wasn’t able to be the nurturing presence Jazzmyn needed. She knew that, but, periodically, in her healthiest and most stable moments, she felt the loss of her baby girl. The dad was in prison. Over time, Doug and Margo developed such a love for little Jazzmyn that they hoped and prayed she could belong to them. Out of deep respect for the mom’s place in Jazzmyn’s life, they waited for her to release Jazzmyn to them. She had chosen them and relied on them but still had a deep ambivalence about giving up her baby.
Into each life some rain must fall.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The time came when Jazzmyn’s biological mother decided to allow the adoption. Doug and Margo rejoiced. But Jazzmyn’s dad—in prison, guilty of serious offenses, unsafe as a dad—fought the adoption. A trial was held. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent during months of agony. And always, very real, was the terror that Jazzmyn could be placed in the hands of an unsafe guardian.
Doug and Margo felt helpless. There were allegations and interrogations: “How can you two Caucasians raise this African-American child properly? Why didn’t you pursue adoption sooner? Do you really love her?” It all took a toll on Margo. Her body absorbed the stress, and she suffered a string of physical symptoms.
Finally, after months of delays, a decision was made. Their adoption of Jazzmyn was legal. They had a party, a time to dedicate Jazzmyn to the Lord and to thank family and friends for all the prayers and support. Jazzmyn, at four years old, was the belle of the ball.
What haunts Doug and Margo are all the other children who don’t have strong advocates and are lost. It seems scandalous when love, freely offered, costs the lovers so much. Will the months of agony, the debts, and the suffering surrounding the adoption of Jazzmyn serve as reminders to us of the forgotten children?
The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow.
But the things we can’t see now will last forever.
2 Corinthians 4:18
I press my nose against the glass of life and strain to see past my own breathy clouds. Maybe what I’m looking for can’t be seen. A character in Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time reminds me that “What can be seen is temporary. What is unseen is eternal.” Perhaps clarity isn’t my greatest need. Maybe what I need is simply to believe that someone is walking beside me.
I just received a Valentine from five-year-old Jazzmyn. She is announcing the arrival of her new little sister, Mia Isabella. Doug, Margo, and Jazzmyn flew to Guatemala to bring her home. She’s almost one. She has bright brown eyes, thick dark hair, and front teeth peeking through. The biggest surprise? Mia’s two older siblings, an eleven-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl also need adoption. Doug and Margo met them on their trip to pick up baby Mia, and they will be the newest members of the family. Neither speaks a word of English yet. Both are excited about belonging to a family and having parents.
When Doug and Margo married, he was certain about one thing: no kids. He and Margo would find other ways to be generous, other avenues for service. They opened their home to Young Life groups, raised money for nonprofits, and led small groups at church. But then Jazzmyn’s mother knocked on their door. And Mia’s smile captivated their hearts. Their windows were f lung open to the sunshine of four beautiful children. And Doug, so certain before, has never seen life more clearly.
to ponder
Have you ever been so anxious to see life with clarity that you actually created your own “cloud cover”? What is one thing you are struggling to get clarity on?
How have you determined to move forward, doing your best even when you lack clarity? What steps have you taken in faith?
thinking of a key
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key.
T.S. Eliot
My uncle Robert once had a license plate on the back of his car that read “No Exit.” Now he’s gone. I am on a flight to his memorial service, deeply grateful for his life and grappling with what it meant and means.
In seminary, his journey took him away from faith rather than deeper into it. He was a person who personified grace while never embracing it. He was divorced twice, his heart broken after two “pastor’s daughters” walked away, yet his love somehow enlarged. Not a man of words, acts of service became his language. When his body was ravaged by Huntington’s disease, an ex-wife was among those who provided around-the-clock hospice care.
Uncle Robert looked exactly like the Jesus in all the paintings—shoulder-length wavy brown hair, olive skin, beard, and sandals. He was a professor of artificial intelligence who loved unsolvable mysteries and contradictions. I think he felt safer in
a sea of doubt than in the harbor of certainty.
Most people talk a good game, but their lives fall short. Uncle Robert seemed to believe with his body—his mind was the last to know the Spirit in his heart. And then his body shut down long before his mind and he was unable to move or speak. What was it like for a man who spoke with loving actions to lie imprisoned in a failing body?
We have a framed print of Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World. The original hangs in Keble College in Oxford. In it, Christ knocks at a rough door with no handle on the outside, looking for the world just like my uncle Robert looked. Instead of the No Exit of his license plate, I hope he slipped the key into the lock and walked out, exiting this world into paradise.
Uncle Robert’s memorial service was held in a garden in downtown Austin, Texas. We sat in the July heat beneath shade trees—his daughters, grandsons, brother and sister-in-law, nieces, nephews, uncles, and friends. I thought of the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, called “The Burial of the Dead.” It is about asking questions, starting a journey, crossing the threshold. It is about the pain of lost opportunities to love, about the intense suffering of being awakened, about a sort of limbo between good and evil in the “Unreal City.”
We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.
Madeline L’Engle
I find myself fantasizing about hosting Eliot and Uncle Robert at a dinner party. Eliot in his dark suit and cane, Robert in his sandals and jeans. When Jesus said it was harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, I wonder if he wasn’t talking about all types of wealth. Intellectual wealth—brain banks overflowing with capacity and curiosity—might be one type that prevents the humility necessary to reach for redemption. What would Eliot have told Uncle Robert about the leap of faith that both supersedes and celebrates intellectual knowing?
When my thoughts finally ceased, the service was drawing to a close. The only choir was the resounding buzzing of cicadas, rising and falling in rhythm.
As we walked out of the garden, it began to rain.
to ponder
Have you ever experienced a greater comfort level with doubt than certainty? How do you hold on to doubt? What are the areas that trouble you most?
What type of “wealth” might be preventing you from experiencing the gift of faith?
surface tension
Yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with invoidable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues.
T.S. Eliot
Water has a skin on its surface where the molecules hold tightly together. It’s surprising to discover that water has skin, a surface tension, when it seems so fluid, so penetrable. But things are not always what they seem.
Skin is protection. If someone isn’t easily hurt, we say they have “thick skin.” Where our skin is tested, we develop calluses that prevent painful blisters. But thick skin can also be a danger when we can no longer feel the texture and the rub of life. The challenge is to maintain just the right level of elasticity in just the right place at just the right time. So often I get it backwards.
My friends George and Arlys Osborne live with their daughter, Hanna, on the edge of downtown Seattle, where established estates blend with newer developments. They have been in an old, elegant home for twenty-five years and have lovingly restored its welcoming wrap-around porch, gracious gardens, fruit trees, and expansive lawn. They host weddings, parties, and celebrations of every kind.
The Osbornes are connected to their neighborhood and generous with their hospitality. Theirs is the opposite of a gated estate. When homeless travelers find shelter under their trees and food from the branches, they are welcomed. When strangers join the gathered family and friends on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks, they are given a drink and a warm blanket. The back door into the kitchen stands open most of the time, ready to greet visitors.
Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean, scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.
Psalm 51
But in the past several years, a problem has developed. A mentally ill neighbor, obsessed with their daughter, has become an angry stalker. Tolerated at first—“He doesn’t know what he’s doing”—the Osbornes have had to involve the police. Hanna no longer feels safe in her own home. And now the Osbornes are faced with having to become a gated family. They have been blistered.
And calluses are forming. Nothing is more painful to a father’s soul than the threat of danger to his daughter. Arlys is in my small group, and recently we met in her home to pray for protection, for healing, for God’s intervention. We prayed that this sick man’s family would take ownership and help him, that he would be relocated to a place where he cannot harm Hanna or any other child. We prayed for healing for Hanna, for divine wisdom for the Osbornes. We prayed because calluses are forming on the beautiful, blistered hearts of the Osbornes, the family that embodies gracious openness.
This is our daily struggle with surface tension. Soap weakens the surface tension on water, making it f lexible and elastic. I keep thinking of our prayers as an invitation to God to enter our souls with exactly the right amount of soap to break up the tension.
Last night we had a family campfire at our favorite place, Discovery Beach. We gathered driftwood and stoked a roaring fire. When the coals were just right, we pulled out the graham crackers, marshmallows, Hershey bars, and the super-duper rotating extending tongs we bought Les for Father’s Day. With some new friends, we toasted marshmallows to perfection (losing some into the flames) and devoured piping hot s’mores.
At home, the boys bathe off the campfire smell. They lounge in the water, covered in bubbles, playing and waiting for me to do the serious scrubbing.
The truth is that we can’t do this scrubbing by ourselves. Our souls are created, like drops of water, with a certain amount of surface tension. We pull together; we protect. And it is only God’s surfactant spirit who can bring on the bubbles.
I wrote a poem for Hanna on her sixteenth birthday. This beautiful young woman lives a remarkable life. She volunteers at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital, where she swaddles preemie babies and interprets for bewildered, frightened Spanish-speaking patients; she serves as coxswain on her racing crew; she plays saxophone in a jazz ensemble. Hanna gives so much of herself. She is blown by God, graceful enough to spin and pirouette in the changing winds. May her blisters soften and heal.
May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and the rain fall softly on your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.
Irish Blessing
For Hanna
The water I give will be an artesian spring within,
gushing fountains of endless life.
John 4:14
This moment is drenched in beauty
Like your mom’s garden at dawn.
It’s your time—here, now.
Yet always,
There are those who are dry
Whose moments, days, lifetimes
are deadwood—Ready kindling for fire.
And you’ll have thirsty moments too.
Weak, cotton-mouthed, and soul parched.
Never forget,
Your heart is a spring.
Living waters flow in you.
And just the grace of your presence
Brings life all around you.
Never feel small.
Someone has to be
the first drop of rain.
to ponder
1. Have you ever felt like you developed a blister or callous on your soul? Is your tendency, when it comes to life, to be underprotective or overprotective?
How have you allowed God to break up the “surface tension” on your soul, bringing more flexibility and health?
stony places
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water.
T.S. Eliot
My aunt Jill has a small house on a corner lot north of Seattle. Even though she rents, she has poured enough labor and love into the yard for it to become a garden oasis. She has a hammock, a swing, a perfect climbing tree, and flowers galore. Since we live in the city with no yard, my boys love visiting Aunt Jill’s, where they’ve spent countless hours digging in the dirt, climbing the tree, running through the grass, and riding bikes. For us, these simple activities are treats.
The First Drop of Rain Page 4