She called to thirteen-year-old Jake, who was in the adjacent family room reading. “Jake, can you please come here a minute?”
“Hey! No fair consulting,” Nathan said when Jake appeared in the doorway, comic book in hand.
“Look at your dad’s face.” Hannah tucked her chin-length hair behind her recently pierced ears. She was still getting used to her gold studs. “Is he bluffing or not?”
Jake scanned the board. “What did he play? Heeze?”
“Oy!” Nathan playfully boxed his son’s chest. “Quiet!”
“He always plays ‘heeze,’” Jake said. “British word.”
Nathan reached up to tug on Jake’s ear. “Whose side are you on?”
Jake grinned, shrugged, and returned to the couch. “Thanks, Jake!” Hannah called after him. Chaucer, the family’s golden retriever, flopped sideways onto the linoleum with a sigh, belly exposed and tail thumping. Hannah leaned over to stroke his fur. “Go ahead and take your points for your dodgy word,” she said, gesturing toward Nathan’s score sheet.
He clicked his ballpoint pen at her, scribbled his score with a flourish, then pushed his chair back. Chaucer scrambled to his feet, nails clicking on the floor as he trotted to the other side of the table. “Since you always take sooooo looooong for your turn,” Nathan said, rubbing Chaucer’s muzzle with both hands, “I might as well make some coffee. Want some?”
“Yes, please. The real stuff.” If she was going to make it to midnight to ring in the new year in worship, she needed a caffeine boost. She studied her tile rack, shielding it with both hands when Nathan pretended to peek on his way to the sink. He stooped to kiss the top of her head. “Nice try, Allen.”
While he filled the coffeepot with filtered water from the fridge, Hannah used Nathan’s Z for ZAP and drew two tiles. U and I. Good. She ought to be able to fashion something with those letters on her next turn. She examined the board for several long minutes and kept rearranging the tiles on her panel. Q-U-I . . . Oh, oh, oh! If he stayed away from the lower left corner on his next turn—
She feigned nonchalance when he sat down again. “Your turn.” She reached for her glass of water and took a slow sip.
He studied her face with his penetrating dark eyes. “You look like the cat that just swallowed the canary.” He removed his glasses and breathed on them, eyes still fixed on her as he methodically rubbed the lenses on his cardigan. “What are you plotting?”
“Nothing. Your turn. I played ZAP.” She made sure to avoid looking at the triple-word section of the board.
“Hannah?” he said, drawing out the last syllable. The coffee began to percolate with a rhythmic slosh and hum. He leaned forward as if to peer at her tiles upside down.
She thrust out her hand and pressed against his chest. “Hey! No cheating.”
Jake returned to the kitchen, sidling up behind her to inspect her letters.
“C’mon, Jake,” Nathan said, chin raised. He looked younger without the goatee, more like the seminary student the twenty-three-year-old Hannah had been determined not to fall in love with. “Blink it to me—Allen Boys’ secret code.”
Hannah spun around to look at Jake, who grinned again and shrugged. “The Allen Boys have a secret code?” she asked.
“To the untrained eye, it just looks like a tic,” Nathan said, “but to the trained—” He glanced down at the board and stared at the empty triple word corner. “Oh . . . I left myself wide open down there, didn’t I? Do you have something to add on to TIC?”
His gifts of perception were uncanny. She took another sip of water. “Your turn,” she said.
He pushed his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose.
She hummed the theme from Jeopardy.
He exhaled with a loud, exaggerated sigh. “I’ve got no power to stop whatever you’re about to do. So . . . here.” He built on to the P of ZAP with APOGEE. “Such a great word, such lousy points for it. Double letter score for E. Whoopee.” He scribbled the points on his tally sheet. “Okay, Shep. Let’s see it.”
With a preparatory stretch of her arms above her head and a roll of her shoulders to goad him on, she laid the tiles down on the board, one at a slow time, punctuating each unveiling with a triumphant thud. “QUIXOTIC. That’s a double-letter score for the X and a triple score for the word, which makes—” She twisted her mouth as if computing complex equations. “Hmmm, Dr. Allen, would you like to check my math on this?”
His lips curled into a smile, and he shook his head.
“What’s the Allen Boys’ code for one hundred and two?” she asked, rapidly blinking at him.
He bowed with an “I’m not worthy” gesture. “You’re getting way too good at this whole ‘learning to play’ thing, Shep. Maybe you should go back to being somber.”
She laughed. He was right. After a few months of sabbatical—and particularly after a few weeks of submitting to Nathan’s regimen of learning how to celebrate God’s love and relax into God’s grace—she was beginning to see the fruit of her practice. Nate was a gifted teacher.
She ended up beating him by fifty-three points.
While she emptied the tiles from the board into the drawstring bag, Nathan poured coffee and sliced an apple cinnamon crumb cake. “Let’s eat in the family room,” he said, “and then we can play another round. Best of three.”
“Jake’s waiting to start his game,” she reminded him, quietly enough so that Jake wouldn’t hear.
Nathan tracked her gaze into the other room. “Hey, bud!” he called as he laid three pieces of cake on a plate. “Hannah says she’s ready for a rematch on Settlers of Catan.”
Though Hannah had tried to digest Jake’s careful and intricate explanation of rules on Christmas Day, she had never succeeded at games with complicated strategy. Every couple of years her father had tried to teach her how to play chess, but she could never keep the pieces or moves straight, and as soon as the game was over, she was like an Etch a Sketch with an erased screen. Since Jake’s game required three people to play, she strived to keep pace with them as they traded their resources and established their local economies and built their roads and settlements on their imaginary island, but it was as if she were playing for the first time.
Hannah rolled the dice and, with Jake’s coaching, made a move that evoked a loud protest of “Oooh—nasty!” from Nathan. She high-fived Jake, who looked just like his dad when he laughed.
The Allen Boys.
They were heading toward some significant upheaval now that Nate’s ex-wife, Laura, would return to Michigan sometime in February. After years of living overseas with the man she married shortly after her divorce from Nathan—a man she’d had an affair with while Nathan was pastoring and Jake was a toddler—Laura was relocating to the Detroit area, pregnant and expecting to reestablish a relationship with the son she had abandoned. According to Nathan, Jake wanted nothing to do with her, a reality Nathan confessed to savoring.
Somewhere in Europe—or was it Asia? Hannah hadn’t asked—Laura would be celebrating New Year’s with her husband, no doubt fantasizing about next Christmas, when she would have a newborn. She might even be imagining Jake participating in her cozy vignette.
It wasn’t going to happen. Nathan would fight for Jake’s right to spend Christmas at home in his pajamas, and in a couple of years Jake would be old enough to tell any judge what he wanted.
“Your turn,” Jake said, offering Hannah the dice again.
On Hannah’s nightstand at Meg’s house was a book—a volume of photographs of the Holy Land that Jake had given her for Christmas, probably with some prompting from Nathan. To get ready for our trip, Jake had said shyly when she opened it. Our trip. In May the three of them would fly to Tel Aviv with Katherine Rhodes and the rest of the pilgrims on the New Hope trip, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
What a way to finish her sabbatical. What a way to transition toward whatever next steps the Lord had in mind for her. For them.
“What number am I
hoping for?” Hannah asked, scanning the board.
“Two,” Nathan said.
Jake elbowed him. “An eight would be good.”
Hannah cupped the dice in her palms. “C’mon, eight!” she said, and rolled.
Thursday, January 1
11 a.m.
In all my years of ministry, I’ve never spent a New Year’s Eve in worship. Maybe I’ll take the watchnight service tradition back to Westminster. It was beautiful—a time to reflect on God’s faithfulness to us during the past year and also to commit ourselves to the Lord for the coming one. Scripture readings, lots of time of silence, music, candlelight, prayers. But what really caught me was the Wesley Covenant Prayer, which I had never seen before. Talk about a costly prayer of trust and surrender! We were given time to sit in quiet and read the words before we were invited to speak them in unison at the end of the service. I didn’t speak them aloud—didn’t feel like I was ready. I think it’s a prayer I’ll need to continue to ponder in order to pray it wholeheartedly. Here it is:
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine.
So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.
The line about being “employed for thee or laid aside for thee” caught my attention right away, given where I’ve been with the sabbatical over the past several months. But here’s the difference now: I’ve begun to settle in to the rhythm of being laid aside for God. I’ve embraced the gift of rest, of fallowness. Will I feel ready to embrace being “employed for God” again in a few months, especially if that employment means leaving behind this life I’ve discovered in West Michigan? No—write it more honestly. This life I’ve discovered with Nate. There it is.
I was sitting there next to him last night, looking at the words of the prayer, trying to be in that place of “holy indifference,” where my desire or hope is not in a particular outcome but in whatever brings God glory and honor and praise, and all I could think about was, I’m not there, Lord. I’m not in that place of trust and yielding. I feel like I’ve only just begun to pay attention to my desires. I’ve only just begun to be honest in naming them. And I don’t feel like I’m ready yet to lay them at your feet. I guess that’s okay. You know where I am.
Here’s the truth: the more time I spend with Nate and with Jake, the more my heart is enlarged. I spent years denying my need or desire to be married. I spent years answering inevitable questions about my singleness with canned lines about being totally committed to Christ and his church, with no time for anything else. But once I offered my yes to exploring a romantic relationship with Nate, I crossed a threshold. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where we’re headed.
Before Nate and I reconnected in that crazy, small-world, providential way, I never once questioned my return to long-term ministry at Westminster. I assumed I would return in June, refreshed and reinvigorated, better equipped for even more fruitful ministry with the congregation I love. But here’s where my thoughts drifted last night as I thought about the new year: Once I get back to Chicago, then what? I can’t just pick up where I left off. I’m not the same person I was when I left. And—I’ll be honest and just write this all out here—for the first time ever, I found myself thinking last night about what I “owed” Westminster in light of their investment in me. I’ve never, ever thought about returning to ministry as something I’m obligated to do. I even found myself wondering what would be appropriate to offer them in terms of time after a sabbatical as generous as mine. A year? Two? Five? And that new train of thought only makes me realize just how much I’m hoping to end up in a long-term commitment with Nate. There. I said it. I don’t know what to do with it, except offer it to you, Lord. I would love to “heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal,” but I’m not ready.
After so many years of “empty,” I’m only just discovering what it means to be “full.” I lived for so long praying only to be poured out and emptied, to have nothing, to be brought low, to be used by you in ministry, to give you everything I had. But I’ve never asked you to let me be “exalted,” “full,” or “to have all things.” Those were prayers that never would have occurred to me. So how do I taste your abundance and then offer it back to you and say that whatever you choose for me is good? That your will is enough? That I embrace your desires as my only desire?
I see Nate’s “hineni” tattoo whenever he’s barefoot. He often says that his “Here I am” prayer of surrender describes his intention, but not always his practice. Purify both in me, Lord. I want to trust you. No matter what.
I talked with Mom and Dad a little while ago. Mom’s still recovering from all their traveling before Christmas and said she’d prefer I come out to see them rather than them flying out to see me. So I’ll head to Oregon next week for a few days. Lord, you know my desires for our time together.
Here’s the part of Wesley’s prayer I can say wholeheartedly: thou art mine, and I am thine. I’m learning to know that truth in the context of love, in the language of lover and beloved. I’m learning to see myself not merely as a servant, but as your beloved. And if I am confident in your love for me—a steadfast, unchanging, trustworthy love—then I think I’ll be able to come to a place of yielding to you in a new kind of way.
So be it, Lord. Please.
Meg
Meg woke with a gasp for breath, her heart racing. She had dreamed of Jim—a dream so vivid, so ordinary, so real, she rolled over and reached for him, her fingers brushing the soft flannel of the sheets Hannah had put on the guest room bed at the cottage.
If only she could return to sleep.
She and Jim had been washing dishes together at the sink in their house. He was elbow deep in suds, and he splashed her, the bubbles floating in slow motion in front of her, shimmering like prisms in sunlight, landing on her nose like iridescent butterflies and lingering there. She reached into the sink for a handful of soap bubbles and rubbed them onto his cheeks, and he laughed with his tumbling, musical laugh, and his face shone with rainbow light, and he scooped her up in his arms as if she weighed nothing. A butterfly. A bubble. And then the image burst, and she was alone again, her cheeks damp with the soapsuds.
No. With tears.
She smeared her hands across her face. Thanks to the NyQuil, she had slept through the night. In fact, for the first time in a few days, she was hungry. Probably a good sign.
Hannah was already seated beside the picture window, mug in hand, when Meg shuffled into the kitchen in her pajamas and sheepskin moccasins. “Never even heard you last night,” Hannah commented. “Knocked out, huh?”
Meg nodded. “Just what I needed. A good night’s rest.” She sank into an overstuffed chair and gazed out at the lake, which was frozen along the shoreline.
“Look at the trees,” said Hannah. “I’ve been sitting here for the past twenty minutes, trying to figure out what’s causing it. Some kind of hoarfrost, maybe.”
Nearby a row of trees and shrubs winked in the sunlight, as if the bare branches had been dressed with sequins. Or sprinkled with diamond dust. Exquisite. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Meg murmured.
“Neither have I. A special display of glory, just for us.” Hannah smiled and took a sip from her mug. “It hits me sometimes, the wonder of being the only person in the world praising God for a particular gift of beauty, in a particular moment. I didn’t want to wake
you up, but I was hoping you’d come out in time to see it.”
The timing had worked perfectly: sleeping long enough to glimpse Jim in shimmering light and waking in time to glimpse the world basking in it. Gift. Maybe she would try to sketch those trees. She blew her chapped nose.
“How about some breakfast?” Hannah said. “What sounds good? Eggs? Oatmeal? Also got some Cream of Wheat in the cupboard.”
Cream of Wheat. A favorite childhood comfort food. Whenever Meg spent the night at their neighbors’ house, Mrs. Anderson would make Cream of Wheat for breakfast, with brown sugar that melted like syrup in the milk. And Mr. Anderson would play “Three Bears” with Meg, whom he affectionately referred to as Goldilocks. She had forgotten about that. They would march through the house while they waited for their porridge to cool, and then Meg would dip her spoon into the bowl, pierce the skim layer on top, and declare after tasting it, “This one is juuuuust right.” Breakfast at the Andersons’ house also meant hot chocolate simmering in a saucepan on the stove and whipped cream in the refrigerator. Meg would slurp the cocoa until the whipped cream formed a mustache above her lips, and she was never scolded. She had played the same game with Becca when she was little, whenever Mother was out of town.
“I haven’t had Cream of Wheat in years,” Meg said, wrapping an afghan around her shoulders. “That sounds good. Thank you.”
While Hannah switched on the kettle for tea and filled two glasses with orange juice, Meg checked for phone messages. She’d been so comatose, she’d never even heard a call come in from Becca. Just as well, maybe. She didn’t have the energy to hear a detailed account of how wonderful her time with Simon had been. Hey, Mom, just wanted you to know that we made it back safely to London. Paris was amazing! I didn’t want to leave. Hoping to go back again soon. Anyway, hope you’re doing well. I head back to classes on Monday. Call you later. Au revoir!
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