There are days when a group of objects are placed just so. There is a bowl of sunlit fruit casting shadows over a wilting flower on the dining room table he’d built with his hands, before the baby, when we were two. Bowls stacked, ready and able, and there is coffee. A white mug, oversized – obscenely large in my hand, like a mother’s heel on a toddler foot. Grandiose, elephantine. Vast.
The components of our morning – scene one – have altogether facilitated something in me. The stark sun, the mug, the angles forecasting a brief moment ahead. “What do ya know, Joe?,” he’ll say, and my cheeks will smile. I’ll respond as I always have, as I mostly do, because to pinpoint what I know – what I know to be true on this very day – would take far longer to excavate than the moments allowed.
“Nothing, you?”
And yet, my mind has already wandered. It has arrived at its dig site, dusting off memories and uncovering age-old beliefs about life and love and God and truth. He knows already, that I’ve arrived, and so he leaves my question unanswered, his silence offering permission to return to dusty knees, muddied trowels.
In truth, I know much. I know much of the person I want to be and much of the person I am, and much of the vast space that lies between the two when I’m looking at them on a linear level – here vs. there. Past vs. future. Right vs. wrong.
But when I dig deeper, everything muddies a bit. I strike rock and wince, unearthing contradiction after contradiction. Bones, dismantled and scattered, willing to be pieced into something purposeful and not puzzling.
This is life, the rockiness of it all. The uneven terrain where one wins and the other loses and nothing is as it seems. The if, next to the then. The but above the also.
To live is to contradict. On a singular, intrinsically scientific level, we know this to be true. Our bodies decay as our hearts beat life; skin shedding, blood pumping. Breathe in, breathe out. Left foot, then right. Up and down. To and through.
And yet, we are surprised, or agitated, when contradictions exist outside of our bodies. When our choices for the day lead not to a fork in the road, but to a forest in which trees must be climbed, walls must be scaled, foliage must be cleared. And in our quest for height – clarity – our choices bump into something below, and the effect is near.
The effect I’m writing of – the bump – is inevitable. To become a more present wife, one listening with both ears, I must tune out my child momentarily. Bump. To become a more present mother, one watching with both eyes, I must shield my needs momentarily. Bump. To become a more present leader, one serving with both hands, I haven’t any additional fingers to offer anyone else – momentarily. Bump, bump, bump.
To say yes to something good and worthy, we must say no to something good and worthy – equal, but different. The yes has a consequence, as does the no. And the bumps arrive, and stack, and create the collective effect that we call a life lived.
And so, we do the best we can with what we have: two eyes, two ears, two hands. We say yes, then no, then yes and no, and we swim in those contradictions for a bit. We allow them to muddy and brown and we cross our fingers, praying our bumps don’t bruise the ones we love.
They do, and they will, and they have.
“Can you pass the salt?”
My mind returns again, to the table. The coffee, the sun. The smell of fried bacon, burnt toast.
I do, pass the salt.
And I leave my thoughts at the dig site, and I butter my toast and pepper my eggs and let the clink of our forks become music.
A bump in the right direction.
This is so beautifully written and really hits home for me at the moment!
Thank you sweet Marisa!
well good morning.
that was simply beautiful
ah, thank you paige!
So very beautiful. In composition and in earth-cracking truth. Thank you. I’m a brand new wife so this was quite nourishing. -k
Ahhhhhhh.
:)
Eloquent. Raw. Divine. Thank you for that!
thank you katy!
love.
thank you :)
thoughtfully written, lovely. so true and i needed reminding. i tend to think that when i choose a path, that it takes me off the other path. i need permission to say yes and no and then no and yes with a bit of fluidity. my girls will be ok if i have another passion as well as them. it gets muddy in my mind somehow.
I totally hear you!!! :) It’s muddy and messy, but we’ll get through. ;)
Beautiful Erin. For me there is this tension of living in the right here and now. We live in a broken and fallen world and all of us carry around a deep problem inside of us – sin. It causes me to want to live for nothing bigger then my own wants, my own desires, and my own self-defined needs. Sin makes me scarily self-focused,self-defined, self interested. Sin makes me selfish. We also deal with an enemy. An enemy of everything that is right, true, good and beautiful. An enemy of not just of us, but an enemy of God. And he is a divider,tempter, and a destroyer. He want to seduce us outside of the borders that God has called us to live. But there is a fourth thing. Yes, we live in a broken world, yes we carry sin around inside of us, yes, there is a real enemy, but there is a fourth thing we all deal with all the time, it’s the plan of God. In Acts 17 Paul says something astounding. He says God determines the exact place where I will live and the exact length of my life. It is shocking to think about it, but God has me right where He wants me. And in this place where I live He is working to accomplish good things in me and good things through me and I have to factor in part of the plan. So every morning, I wake up to a broken world, every morning I wake up to personal sin, every morning I wake up to the temptation of the enemy, and every morning I wake up to the good plan of God. Every morning I will deal with those dynamics. In Jeremiah, he gives a wonderful physical description of 2 ways of dealing with that world. Jeremiah 17:5 “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parches places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the man who trusts in the lord, whose confidence is in Him, he will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream, it does not fear when heat comes, its leaves are always green, it has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” This is that tension I find daily the brokenness of the world, my own struggle with sin, the temptation of a real enemy and the plan of God. Somedays I am like that dry dying thorn bush and other days I am like a fruitful tree that even in the heat produces a harvest of things that are good. I take hope though that God has plan and I need to factor that daily into my life. (thoughts taken from Paul David Tripp)
I LOVE THIS!!!!!!