A DARE TO LIVE FULLY

RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE

one thousand gifts

ANN VOSKAMP

For the Farmer,

who tended and grew my soul

Contents

Cover

Title Page

CHAPTER 1 an emptier, fuller life

CHAPTER 2 a word to live … and die by

CHAPTER 3 first flight

CHAPTER 4 a sanctuary of time

CHAPTER 5 what in the world, in all this world, is grace?

CHAPTER 6 what do you want? the place of seeing God

CHAPTER 7 seeing through the glass

CHAPTER 8 how will he not also?

CHAPTER 9 go lower

CHAPTER 10 empty to fill

CHAPTER 11 the joy of intimacy

afterword

notes

acknowledgments

Bible translations

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Share Your Thoughts

CHAPTER 1

an emptier, fuller life

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

A glowing sun-orb fills an August sky the day this story begins, the day I am born, the day I begin to live.

And I fill my mother’s tearing ring of fire with my body emerging, virgin lungs searing with air of this earth and I enter the world like every person born enters the world: with clenched fists.

From the diameter of her fullness, I empty her out—and she bleeds. Vernix-creased and squalling, I am held to the light.

Then they name me.

Could a name be any shorter? Three letters without even the flourish of an e. Ann, a trio of curves and lines.

It means “full of grace.”

I haven’t been.

What does it mean to live full of grace? To live fully alive?

They wash my pasty skin and I breathe and I flail. I flail.

For decades, a life, I continue to flail and strive and come up so seemingly … empty. I haven’t lived up to my christening.

Maybe in those first few years my life slowly opened, curled like cupped hands, a receptacle open to the gifts God gives.

But of those years, I have no memories. They say memory jolts awake with trauma’s electricity. That would be the year I turned four. The year when blood pooled and my sister died and I, all of us, snapped shut to grace.

Standing at the side porch window, watching my parents’ stunned bending, I wonder if my mother had held me in those natal moments of naming like she held my sister in death.

In November light, I see my mother and father sitting on the back porch step rocking her swaddled body in their arms. I press my face to the kitchen window, the cold glass, and watch them, watch their lips move, not with sleep prayers, but with pleas for waking, whole and miraculous. It does not come. The police do. They fill out reports. Blood seeps through that blanket bound. I see that too, even now.

Memory’s surge burns deep.

That staining of her blood scorches me, but less than the blister of seeing her uncovered, lying there. She had only toddled into the farm lane, wandering after a cat, and I can see the delivery truck driver sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, and I remember how he sobbed that he had never seen her. But I still see her, and I cannot forget. Her body, fragile and small, crushed by a truck’s load in our farmyard, blood soaking into the thirsty, track-beaten earth. That’s the moment the cosmos shifted, shattering any cupping of hands. I can still hear my mother’s witnessing-scream, see my father’s eyes shot white through.

My parents don’t press charges and they are farmers and they keep trying to breathe, keep the body moving to keep the soul from atrophying. Mama cries when she strings out the laundry. She holds my youngest baby sister, a mere three weeks old, to the breast, and I can’t imagine how a woman only weeks fragile from the birth of her fourth child witnesses the blood-on-gravel death of her third child and she leaks milk for the babe and she leaks grief for the buried daughter. Dad tells us a thousand times the story after dinner, how her eyes were water-clear and without shores, how she held his neck when she hugged him and held on for dear life. We accept the day of her death as an accident. But an act allowed by God?

For years, my sister flashes through my nights, her body crumpled on gravel. Sometimes in dreams, I cradle her in the quilt Mama made for her, pale green with the hand-embroidered Humpty Dumpty and Little Bo Peep, and she’s safely cocooned. I await her unfurling and the rebirth. Instead the earth opens wide and swallows her up.

At the grave’s precipice, our feet scuff dirt, and chunks of the firmament fall away. A clod of dirt hits the casket, shatters. Shatters over my little sister with the white-blonde hair, the little sister who teased me and laughed; and the way she’d throw her head back and laugh, her milk-white cheeks dimpled right through with happiness, and I’d scoop close all her belly-giggling life. They lay her gravestone flat into the earth, a black granite slab engraved with no dates, only the five letters of her name. Aimee. It means “loved one.” How she was. We had loved her. And with the laying of her gravestone, the closing up of her deathbed, so closed our lives.

Closed to any notion of grace.

Really, when you bury a child—or when you just simply get up every day and live life raw—you murmur the question soundlessly. No one hears. Can there be a good God? A God who graces with good gifts when a crib lies empty through long nights, and bugs burrow through coffins? Where is God, really? How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind? Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away. Where hides this joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt? How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?

My family—my dad, my mama, my brother and youngest sister—for years, we all silently ask these questions. For years, we come up empty. And over the years, we fill again—with estrangement. We live with our hands clenched tight. What God once gave us on a day in November slashed deep. Who risks again?

Years later, I sit at one end of our brown plaid couch, my dad stretched out along its length. Worn from a day driving tractor, the sun beating and the wind blowing, he asks me to stroke his hair. I stroke from that cowlick of his and back, his hair ringed from the line of his cap. He closes his eyes. I ask questions that I never would if looking into them.

“Did you ever used to go to church? Like a long time ago, Dad?” Two neighboring families take turns picking me up, a Bible in hand and a dress ironed straight, for church services on Sunday mornings. Dad works.

“Yeah, as a kid I went. Your grandmother had us go every Sunday, after milking was done. That was important to her.”

I keep my eyes on his dark strands of hair running through my fingers. I knead out tangles.

“But it’s not important to you now?” The words barely whispered, hang.

He pushes up his plaid sleeves, shifts his head, his eyes still closed. “Oh …”

I wait, hands combing, waiting for him to find the words for those feelings that don’t fit neatly into the stiff ties, the starched collars, of sentences.

“No, I guess not anymore. When Aimee died, I was done with all of that.”

Scenes blast. I close my eyes; reel.

“And, if there really is anybody up there, they sure were asleep at the wheel that day.”

I don’t say anything. The lump in my throat burns, this ember. I just stroke his hair. I try to sooth his pain. He finds more feelings. He stuffs them into words.

“Why let a beautiful little girl die such a senseless, needless death? And she didn’t just die. She was killed.”

That word twists his face. I want to hold him till it doesn’t hurt, make it all go away. His eyes remain closed, but he’s shaking his head now, remembering all there was to say no to that hideous November day that branded our lives.

Dad says nothing more. That shake of the head says it all, expresses our closed hands, our bruised, shaking fists. No. No benevolent Being, no grace, no meaning to it all. My dad, a good farmer who loved his daughter the way only eyes can rightly express, he rarely said all that; only sometimes, when he’d close his eyes and ask me to stroke away the day between the fingers. But these aren’t things you need to say anyways. Like all beliefs, you simply live them.

We did.

No, God.

No God.

Is this the toxic air of the world, this atmosphere we inhale, burning into our lungs, this No, God? No, God, we won’t take what You give. No, God, Your plans are a gutted, bleeding mess and I didn’t sign up for this and You really thought I’d go for this? No, God, this is ugly and this is a mess and can’t You get anything right and just haul all this pain out of here and I’ll take it from here, thanks. And God? Thanks for nothing. Isn’t this the human inheritance, the legacy of the Garden?

I wake and put the feet to the plank floors, and I believe the Serpent’s hissing lie, the repeating refrain of his campaign through the ages: God isn’t good. It’s the cornerstone of his movement. That God withholds good from His children, that God does not genuinely, fully, love us.

Doubting God’s goodness, distrusting His intent, discontented with what He’s given, we desire … I have desired … more. The fullest life.

I look across farm fields. The rest of the garden simply isn’t enough. It will never be enough. God said humanity was not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And I moan that God has ripped away what I wanted. No, what I needed. Though I can hardly whisper it, I live as though He stole what I consider rightly mine: happiest children, marriage of unending bliss, long, content, death-defying days. I look in the mirror, and if I’m fearlessly blunt—what I have, who I am, where I am, how I am, what I’ve got—this simply isn’t enough. That forked tongue darts and daily I live the doubt, look at my reflection, and ask: Does God really love me? If He truly, deeply loves me, why does He withhold that which I believe will fully nourish me? Why do I live in this sense of rejection, of less than, of pain? Does He not want me to be happy?

From all of our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story.

Satan, he wanted more. More power, more glory. Ultimately, in his essence, Satan is an ingrate. And he sinks his venom into the heart of Eden. Satan’s sin becomes the first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve are, simply, painfully, ungrateful for what God gave.

Isn’t that the catalyst of all my sins?

Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.

Standing before that tree, laden with fruit withheld, we listen to Evil’s murmur, “In the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened …” (Genesis 3:5 NASB). But in the beginning, our eyes were already open. Our sight was perfect. Our vision let us see a world spilling with goodness. Our eyes fell on nothing but the glory of God. We saw God as He truly is: good. But we were lured by the deception that there was more to a full life, there was more to see. And, true, there was more to see: the ugliness we hadn’t beheld, the sinfulness we hadn’t witnessed, the loss we hadn’t known.

We eat. And, in an instant, we are blind. No longer do we see God as one we can trust. No longer do we perceive Him as wholly good. No longer do we observe all of the remaining paradise.

We eat. And, in an instant, we see. Everywhere we look, we see a world of lack, a universe of loss, a cosmos of scarcity and injustice.

We are hungry. We eat. We are filled … and emptied.

And still, we look at the fruit and see only the material means to fill our emptiness. We don’t see the material world for what it is meant to be: as the means to communion with God.

We look and swell with the ache of a broken, battered planet, what we ascribe as the negligent work of an indifferent Creator (if we even think there is one). Do we ever think of this busted-up place as the result of us ingrates, unsatisfied, we who punctured it all with a bite? The fruit’s poison has infected the whole of humanity. Me. I say no to what He’s given. I thirst for some roborant, some elixir, to relieve the anguish of what I’ve believed: God isn’t good. God doesn’t love me.

If I’m ruthlessly honest, I may have said yes to God, yes to Christianity, but really, I have lived the no. I have. Infected by that Eden mouthful, the retina of my soul develops macular holes of blackness. From my own beginning, my sister’s death tears a hole in the canvas of the world.

Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.

In our plain country church on the edge of that hayfield enclosed by an old cedar split-rail fence, once a week on Sunday, my soul’s macular holes spontaneously heal. In that church with the wooden cross nailed to the wall facing the country road, there God seems obvious. Close. Bibles lie open. The sanctuary fills with the worship of wives with babies in arms, farmers done with chores early, their hair slicked down. The Communion table spread with the emblems, that singular cup and loaf, that table that restores relationship. I remember. Here I remember Love and the Cross and a Body, and I am grafted in and held and made whole. All’s upright. There, alongside Claude Martin and Ann Van den Boogaard and John Weiler and Marion Schefter and genteel Mrs. Leary, even the likes of me can see.

But the rest of the week, the days I live in the glaring harshness of an abrasive world? Complete loss of central vision. Everywhere, a world pocked with scarcity.

I hunger for filling in a world that is starved.

But from that Garden beginning, God has had a different purpose for us. His intent, since He bent low and breathed His life into the dust of our lungs, since He kissed us into being, has never been to slyly orchestrate our ruin. And yet, I have found it: He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB). He means to rename us—to return us to our true names, our truest selves. He means to heal our soul holes. From the very beginning, that Eden beginning, that has always been and always is, to this day, His secret purpose—our return to our full glory. Appalling—that He would! Us, unworthy. And yet since we took a bite out of the fruit and tore into our own souls, that drain hole where joy seeps away, God’s had this wild secretive plan. He means to fill us with glory again. With glory and grace.

Grace, it means “favor,” from the Latin gratia. It connotes a free readiness. A free and ready favor. That’s grace. It is one thing to choose to take the grace offered at the cross. But to choose to live as one filling with His grace? Choosing to fill with all that He freely gives and fully live—with glory and grace and God?

I know it but I don’t want to: it is a choice. Living with losses, I may choose to still say yes. Choose to say yes to what He freely gives. Could I live that—the choice to open the hands to freely receive whatever God gives? If I don’t, I am still making a choice.

The choice not to.

The day I met my brother-in-law at the back door, looking for his brother, looking like his brother, is the day I see it clear as a full moon rising bright over January snow, that choice, saying yes or no to God’s graces, is the linchpin of it all, of everything.

My brother-in-law, he’s just marking time, since Farmer Husband’s made a quick run to the hardware store. He’s talking about soil temperature and weather forecasts. I lean up against the door frame. The dog lies down at my feet.

John shrugs his shoulders, looks out across our wheat field. “Farmers, we think we control so much, do so much right to make a crop. And when you are farming,” he turns back toward me, “you are faced with it every day. You control so little. Really. It’s God who decides it all. Not us.” He slips his big Dutch hands into frayed pockets, smiles easily. “It’s all good.”

I nod, almost say something about him just leaving that new water tank in the back shed for now instead of waiting any longer for Farmer Husband to show up. But I catch his eyes and I know I have to ask. Tentatively, eyes fixed on his, I venture back into that place I rarely go.

“How do you know that, John? Deep down, how do you know that it really is all good? That God is good? That you can say yes—to whatever He gives?” I know the story of the man I am asking, and he knows mine. His eyes linger. I know he’s remembering the story too.

New Year’s Day. He asks us to come. Only if we want. I don’t want to think why, but we know. “Already?” I search my husband’s face. “Today?” He takes my hand and doesn’t let go. Not when we slide into the truck, not when we drive the back roads, not when we climb the empty stairwell to the hospital room lit only by a dim lamp. John meets us at the door. He nods. His eyes smile brave. The singular tear that slips down his cheek carves something out of me.

“Tiff just noticed Dietrich had started breathing a bit heavier this afternoon. And yeah, when we brought him in, they said his lung had collapsed. It will just be a matter of hours. Like it was at the end for Austin.” His firstborn, Austin, had died of the same genetic disease only eighteen months prior. He was about to bury his second son in less than two years.

I can’t look into that sadness wearing a smile anymore. I look at the floor, polished tiles blurring, running. It had only been a year and six months before that. The peonies had been in full bloom when we had stood in a country cemetery watching a cloud of balloons float up and into clear blue over pastures. All the bobbing, buoyant hopes for Austin—floating away. Austin had hardly been four months old. I had been there on that muggy June afternoon. I had stood by the fan humming in their farm kitchen. The fan stirred a happy-face balloon over Austin’s placid body. I remember the blue of his eyes, mirrors of heaven. He never moved. His eyes moved me. I had caressed my nephew’s bare little tummy. His chest had heaved for the air. And heaved less … and less.

How do you keep breathing when the lungs under your fingers are slowly atrophying?

I had stumbled out their back steps, laid down on the grass. I had cried at the sky. It was our wedding anniversary. I always remember the date, his eyes.

And now, New Year’s Day, again with John, Tiffany, but now with their second-born son, Dietrich. He’s only five months old. He was born to hope and prayers—and the exact same terminal diagnosis as his brother, Austin.

John hands me a Kleenex, and I try to wipe away all this gut-wrenching pain. He tries too, with words soft and steady, “We’re just blessed. Up until today Dietrich’s had no pain. We have good memories of a happy Christmas. That’s more than we had with Austin.” All the tiles on the floor run fluid. My chest hurts. “Tiffany’s got lots and lots of pictures. And we had five months with him.”

I shouldn’t, but I do. I look up. Into all his hardly tamed grief. I feel wild. His eyes shimmer tears, this dazed bewilderment, and his stoic smile cuts me right through. I see his chin quiver. In that moment I forget the rules of this Dutch family of reserved emotion. I grab him by the shoulders and I look straight into those eyes, brimming. And in this scratchy half whisper, these ragged words choke—wail. “If it were up to me …” and then the words pound, desperate and hard, “I’d write this story differently.”

I regret the words as soon as they leave me. They seem so un-Christian, so unaccepting—so No, God! I wish I could take them back, comb out their tangled madness, dress them in their calm Sunday best. But there they are, released and naked, raw and real, stripped of any theological cliché, my exposed, serrated howl to the throne room.

“You know …” John’s voice breaks into my memory and his gaze lingers, then turns again toward the waving wheat field. “Well, even with our boys … I don’t know why that all happened.” He shrugs again. “But do I have to? … Who knows? I don’t mention it often, but sometimes I think of that story in the Old Testament. Can’t remember what book, but you know—when God gave King Hezekiah fifteen more years of life? Because he prayed for it? But if Hezekiah had died when God first intended, Manasseh would never have been born. And what does the Bible say about Manasseh? Something to the effect that Manasseh had led the Israelites to do even more evil than all the heathen nations around Israel. Think of all the evil that would have been avoided if Hezekiah had died earlier, before Manasseh was born. I am not saying anything, either way, about anything.”

He’s watching that sea of green rolling in winds. Then it comes slow, in a low, quiet voice that I have to strain to hear.

“Just that maybe … maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds.”

The words I choked out that dying, ending day, echo. Pierce. There’s a reason I am not writing the story and God is. He knows how it all works out, where it all leads, what it all means.

I don’t.

His eyes return, knowing the past I’ve lived, a bit of my nightmares. “Maybe … I guess … it’s accepting there are things we simply don’t understand. But He does.”

And I see. At least a bit more. When we find ourselves groping along, famished for more, we can choose. When we are despairing, we can choose to live as Israelites gathering manna. For forty long years, God’s people daily eat manna—a substance whose name literally means “What is it?” Hungry, they choose to gather up that which is baffling. They fill on that which has no meaning. More than 14,600 days they take their daily nourishment from that which they don’t comprehend. They find soul-filling in the inexplicable.

They eat the mystery.

They eat the mystery.

And the mystery, that which made no sense, is “like wafers of honey” on the lips.

A pickup drives into the lane. I watch from the window, two brothers meeting, talking, then hand gestures mirroring each other. I think of buried babies and broken, weeping fathers over graves, and a world pocked with pain, and all the mysteries I have refused, refused, to let nourish me. If it were my daughter, my son? Would I really choose the manna? I only tremble, wonder. With memories of gravestones, of combing fingers through tangled hair, I wonder too … if the rent in the canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, our own emptiness, might actually become places to see.

To see through to God.

That that which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.

Maybe so.

But how? How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing-through-to-God places? To more-God places?

How do I give up resentment for gratitude, gnawing anger for spilling joy? Self-focus for God-communion.

To fully live—to live full of grace and joy and all that is beauty eternal. It is possible, wildly. I now see and testify. So this story—my story. A dare to an emptier, fuller life.

CHAPTER 2

a word to live … and die by

Eucharist [thanksgiving] is the state of the perfect man.

Eucharist is the life of paradise. Eucharist is the

only full and real response of man to God’s creation,

redemption, and gift of heaven.

Alexander Schmemann

I slam upright, jolt the bed hard, hands gripping the cotton sheets wild.

There’s a halo of light by the door. I breathe, heave breathe. There are stars.

I can hear the clock in the kitchen, the one over the dining room table, making time, one loud, sure tick at a time.

My chest pounds the hooves of a thousand stallions running on and away, and the universe outside the window holds—the one stuck through with the stars—and I breathe. I breathe. It was all dream, a mirage of the moon. I feel my hand across the threads of sheets and there is a bed sure under the body and there are morning stars all in place out the window and his bare shoulders rise and fall beside me in the heavy slumber and the relief courses through my veins, veins draining away the fear blue. It was all a dream.

I fall back to the pillow, lie on relief. I don’t close my eyes. I stare out the window and I wonder that there is real breath in these real lungs and that is the real red Antares, Scorpion’s beating heart, hanging below that waning crescent moon and I am here to see it. And they were just four nightmares in one night, a silver thread unraveling through black. And for me, she who says she never has dreams.

I lie there and untangle the memory of scenes, the string all twisted, one long strand of nightmares plagiarizing life, the fibers of the neocortex working through my life, all the life most important. I revisit dream scenes and I think about this. The all most important.

It has seemed real, the dream. It was a faceless doctor—just a voice—and it was a pallid room of walls and no windows and it was just the uttering of one word and I can feel it again, how the veins constrict.

That haunting “C” word, the one with gluttonous belly and serrated teeth and the voracious appetite to divide and dominate. Cancer.

It’s a slam to the gut. I green. And he blandly says the cancer’s been invisibly consuming bits and pieces of me while I’ve birthed the six babies, mopped their muddy prints off the floors, kissed the lips of their father at the door. He says there’s nothing to be done. All’s been devoured. Just wrap up the last of my living.

Already? No more? The heart hammers and the blood surges, scream of electric blue.

Gasping, grasping, I had tried to struggle free, to emerge up into life. Into the four scone-colored walls, the dim light at the door, the pure white matelassé bedspread pulled up over the vows. How I wanted to surface and breathe and keep this skin on and live. But night’s noose had tightened, and I’d been strangled back into this dream script of telling the news of my impending demise to husband, father, brother. In terrifying nightmare fashion, they all shrug their shoulders, walk away blithe. I want to live. Fully live. What is the message of dreams? I remember it, four times escaping up into consciousness only for the rope burn back into the choked out good-byes and last anguished touches.

I lie there long staring at ceiling, listening to the beat of my untamed heart.

This …

But this … this waking to the crack of a nightmare, this violet shock through the veins, even this might be better than the way I usually wake. Since … I want to say since after the six babies, or at least since the third—the first girl and the one with the dimples—when motherhood began to sag me … but really, no, it began years earlier. Since the girl with thick glasses in Mr. Colquhoun’s English class read books to escape thoughts of her mama sitting up in a psychiatric hospital aching for the baby that bled through the blankets. Yes, it really has been all those years since then.

For years of mornings, I have woken wanting to die. Life itself twists into nightmare. For years, I have pulled the covers up over my head, dreading to begin another day I’d be bound to just wreck. Years, I lie listening to the taunt of names ringing off my interior walls, ones from the past that never drifted far and away: Loser. Mess. Failure. They are signs nailed overhead, nailed through me, naming me. The stars are blinking out.

Funny, this. Yesterday morning, the morning before, all these mornings, I wake to the discontent of life in my skin. I wake to self-hatred. To the wrestle to get it all done, the relentless anxiety that I am failing. Always, the failing. I yell at children, fester with bitterness, forget doctor appointments, lose library books, live selfishly, skip prayer, complain, go to bed too late, neglect cleaning the toilets. I live tired. Afraid. Anxious. Weary. Years, I feel it in the veins, the pulsing of ruptured hopes. Would I ever be enough, find enough, do enough? But this morning, I wake wildly wanting to live. Physically feeling it in the veins trembling, the hard pant of the lungs, the seeing it in the steady stars, how much I really want to really live. How I don’t want to die. Is that the message of nightmares and dreams? To live either fully alive … or in empty nothingness?

It’s the in between that drives us mad.

It’s the life in between, the days of walking lifeless, the years calloused and simply going through the hollow motions, the self-protecting by self-distracting, the body never waking, that’s lost all capacity to fully feel—this is the life in between that makes us the wild walking dead.

The sun climbs the horizon. I throw back the covers, take another breath, and begin. I get to. I get to live. A lone morning dove woos from high in the spruce tree. In the kitchen, I stand over the heat of the stove, slowly stirring the wooden spoon through the bubbling-up oatmeal, but my eyes are on the window, on the field. Freshly fallen snow coruscates in the sun, countless stars across fields, trees in the woods falling soundlessly, their blue shadows stretching. Down by the lane, where the gravel curves to the road, where that bulk of a yellow lab has been digging hard, steam rises slow off the earth’s black loam.

Life has mirages of its own.

The nightmare creeps up the nape of the neck, clamps me in a chokehold of reality.

The end will come.

Doctor’s warning or not, the end will come, and this life of the bare toes across grass, the sky raining spring down on eyelashes, the skin spread close under sheets, blink of the fireflies on dusky June nights—all this will all end.

I turn off the stove.

I toss in a load of laundry, pull a recipe book out of the cupboard to plan the day’s menu, wipe off the counters. I try to breathe and press on. But I’m rattled, upended, undone. I can’t quite shake the reality of the dream. The nightmare of my life.

Which road through this brief land? What is all most important? How to live the fullest life here that delivers into the full life ever after?

A child tromps in, boots still on, with a chestful of mail. Between the flyers of a grand opening for a new flooring store in town and a sale on tires lies a letter from my recently widowed father-in-law. On a hot night one July in the dark of room 117, God had used cancer to usher my mother-in-law, his bride of half a century, into the throne room and glory ever after. We had sung that night, “What a day that will be when my Jesus I shall see.” I had laid the cold cloth on the sweat beads stringing along her brow. I tear open his envelope, slide out the DaySpring card, read his slow Dutch scrawl. But it’s the last words of his card that grab me:

“Thinking on the beginning of this year, who does He call to come Home? Is it me, Lord? May I be ready. Or us. Whoever.”

Emotion wells, spills. How this letter, these words, and now, after last night’s dream wrestle? After my years of mornings?

Whoever. Ready for the end of here.

Whoever. Ready for the first meeting of Him there.

Whoever. Soon.

Will I have lived fully—or just empty?

How does one live ready, and always? Yes, ultimately, only Jesus. Yes, this premature dying to self, birthing into the cross-life, the grace cocoon before emerging into the life unending. Without this Jesus, no, no one can be ready.

But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?

In my reality-dream (dream-reality?), I gasp for more time, frantic for more time. But I have to wonder: more time for more what? The answer to that determines the road these so-short days take.

Hard questions drive me hard to distraction. I check e-mail. More words sent this way, this time from a mother. Her seventeen-year-old has been diagnosed with, yes, specter of that word too real, cancer. I try to breathe. Today, it’s hard. What are the messages of God? Her mother types the words across my screen: “Any words?”

I stumble away.

Obviously, I have no words, no answers. I am groping for my own way. Desperately feeling along today for a way to live through this fleeting blink of a life.

How do we live fully so we are fully ready to die?

I stack the linen closets. I think of all the things I might never live to do.

I think of all the things I am going to miss.

My eyes will never know China’s jade-green Li River. I’m never going to see those black-haired boys under straw-brimmed hats fish off their bamboo rafts with the ringed cormorants, the mist rising behind over the karst formations, surreal and dark. I am never going to be ascending the Loita Hills of Kenya to witness the dance of gazelles migrating up by the millions from the Serengeti. I am not going to be swimming the sapphire waters of some South Pacific grotto, or sitting up late listening to the wind whisper through the Sequoia woods, or spending my golden years scaling the summit of emerald Machu Picchu.

I run my hand across the thick of the terry towels. I’m a farmer’s wife. I’m the homeschooling mother of six children. There are no fancy degrees, titles, diplomas hanging on these finger-smudged walls. Are there places that must be known, accomplishments that must be had, before one is really ready? I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?

I remember once sitting at the hairdresser’s. The woman beside me reads, and I read her title in the reflection of the mirror: 1000 Places to See Before You Die. Is that it? Are there physical places that simply must be seen before I stop breathing within time, before I inhale eternity?

Why? To say that I’ve had reason to bow low? To say that I’ve seen beauty? To say that I’ve been arrested by wonder?

Isn’t it here? Can’t I find it here?

These very real lungs will breathe in more than 11,000 liters of air today,[1] and tonight over our farm will rise the Great Hexagon of the blazing winter stars—Sirius, Rigel, ruby Aldebran, Capella, the fiery Gemini twins, and Procyon, and in the center, scarlet Betelgeuse, the red supergiant larger than twice the size of earth’s orbit around the sun—and I will embrace the skin of a boy child that my body grew from a seed. The low heavens outside the paned windows fill with more snowflakes than stars, no two-stacked crystals the same; the trees in the wood draw in collective green breath to the still of January hibernation, and God in the world will birth ice from His womb, frost of heaven, bind the chains of the Pleiades, loose the cords of Orion, and number again the strands on my head (Job 38:31; Matthew 10:30).

Isn’t it here? The wonder? Why do I spend so much of my living hours struggling to see it? Do we truly stumble so blind that we must be affronted with blinding magnificence for our blurry soul-sight to recognize grandeur? The very same surging magnificence that cascades over our every day here. Who has time or eyes to notice?

All my eyes can seem to fixate on are the splatters of disappointment across here and me.

I close the bathroom linen closet. Pick up a brush to swish toilets. I don’t need more time to breathe so that I may experience more locales, possess more, accomplish more. Because wonder really could be here—for the seeing eyes.

So—more time for more what?

The face of Jesus flashes. Jesus, the God-Man with his own termination date. Jesus, the God-Man who came to save me from prisons of fear and guilt and depression and sadness. With an expiration of less than twelve hours, what does Jesus count as all most important?

“And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them …” (Luke 22:19 NIV).

This. I live in this place, make porridge, scrub toilets, do laundry, and for days, weeks, I am brave and I do get out of bed and I think on this. I study this, the full life, the being fully ready for the end. I start to think that maybe there is a way out of nightmares to dreams? Maybe?

I thumb, run my finger across the pages of the heavy and thick books bound. I read it slowly. In the original language, “he gave thanks” reads “eucharisteo.”

I underline it on the page. Can it lay a sure foundation under a life? Offer the fullest life?

The root word of eucharisteo is charis, meaning “grace.” Jesus took the bread and saw it as grace and gave thanks. He took the bread and knew it to be gift and gave thanks.

But there is more, and I read it. Eucharisteo, thanksgiving, envelopes the Greek word for grace, charis. But it also holds its derivative, the Greek word chara, meaning “joy.” Joy. Ah … yes. I might be needing me some of that. That might be what the quest for more is all about—that which Augustine claimed, “Without exception … all try their hardest to reach the same goal, that is, joy.”[2]

I breathe deep, like a sojourner finally coming home. That has always been the goal of the fullest life—joy. And my life knew exactly how elusive that slippery three-letter word, joy, can be. I think of it then again, that night of nightmares, the flailing, frantic, moon-eyed lunge for more. More what? And this was it; I could tell how my whole being responded to that one word. I longed for more life, for more holy joy.

That’s what I was struggling out of nightmares to reach, to seize. Joy. But where can I seize this holy grail of joy? I look back down to the page. Was this the clue to the quest of all most important? Deep chara joy is found only at the table of the euCHARisteo—the table of thanksgiving. I sit there long … wondering … is it that simple?

Is the height of my chara joy dependent on the depths of my eucharisteo thanks?

So then as long as thanks is possible … I think this through. As long as thanks is possible, then joy is always possible. Joy is always possible. Whenever, meaning—now; wherever, meaning—here. The holy grail of joy is not in some exotic location or some emotional mountain peak experience. The joy wonder could be here! Here, in the messy, piercing ache of now, joy might be—unbelievably—possible! The only place we need see before we die is this place of seeing God, here and now.

I whisper it out loud, let the tongue feel these sounds, the ear hear their truth.

Charis. Grace.

Eucharisteo. Thanksgiving.

Chara. Joy.

A triplet of stars, a constellation in the black.

A threefold cord that might hold a life? Offer a way up into the fullest life?

Grace, thanksgiving, joy. Eucharisteo.

A Greek word … that might make meaning of everything?

When children sleep under the scraps stitched into quilts and the clock ticks too loudly through the dark hours and the spiral galaxies spin in space, I lie under the afghan by the fire and read the words of an old sermon. It is weeks later now, and the mind stores things, waiting for such a time when God aligns the stars. I read, “The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live…. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything.”[3] Breath leaves the lung.

I whisper in the dark: Eucharisteo!

It really might be the mystery to the fullest life …

I lie on relief. I might have found the holy grail … and lost it, moved on. And yet really—hadn’t God set the holy grail in the center of Christianity? Eucharisteo, it’s the central symbol of Christianity. Thanksgiving. The table with its emblems is the essence of what it means to live the Christ-life. Sunday after Sunday in our nondenominational Bible church, we’re formally invited to take the bread, the wine. Doesn’t the continual repetition of beginning our week at the table of the Eucharist clearly place the whole of our lives into the context of thanksgiving?

And too … it’s the most common of foods, bread. The drink of the vine has been part of our meal taking across centuries and cultures. Jesus didn’t institute the Eucharist around some unusual, rare, once-a-year event, but around this continual act of eating a slice of bread, drinking a cup of fruit from the vine. First Corinthians 11:26 reads, “whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup” (NIV)—whenever.

Like every day. Whenever we eat.

Eucharisteo—whenever: now. Joy—wherever: here.

Doesn’t Christ, at His death meal, set the entirety of our everyday bread and drink lives into the framework of eucharisteo? The Big Dipper lurks low outside the window. Yet how does the framework of eucharisteo undergird a life? Penetrating the mystery is like discovering galaxies; there is always more.

I stand the next morning on planks of light lying down across the floor, and I bake bread, yeasty dough moist between my fingers, and that one word works me, again and again—eucharisteo. I won’t let it go this time. I’ll enter into the mystery.

I shape loaves and think how Jesus took the bread and gave thanks … and then the miracle of the multiplying of the loaves and fishes.

How Jesus took the bread and gave thanks … and then the miracle of Jesus enduring the cross for the joy set before Him.

How Jesus stood outside Lazarus’s tomb, the tears streaming down His face, and He looked up and prayed, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me …” (John 11:41 NIV). And then the miracle of a dead man rising! Thanksgiving raises the dead! The empty, stiff cadaver surging, the veins full of blood, the alveoli of the lungs filling with oxygen, the coronary arteries full of the whoosh of thrumming life.

How there is thanks … and then the mind-blowing miracle! I lay loaves into pans and feel years of the angst lying down too.

Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.

The bread rises.

And I stand in the kitchen stirring a kettle of lunch’s lentil soup, the one that calls for the salsa and the carrots and the hungry children, and I read while stirring and I have to sit down to let the words find their places: “The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world.”[4] That was the fall! Non-eucharisteo, ingratitude, was the fall—humanity’s discontent with all that God freely gives. That is what has scraped me raw: ungratefulness. Then to find Eden, the abundance of Paradise, I’d need to forsake my non-eucharisteo, my bruised and bloodied ungrateful life, and grab hold to eucharisteo, a lifestyle of thanksgiving. Might a life of eucharisteo really work the miracle of the God-communion? I rise from the chair.

That’s when I begin to track it whenever I open my Bible, the red pen in hand, hunt down the trail of eucharisteo through Scripture. Where it leads barbs, and I am surprised and I reel.

“On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces …” (1 Corinthians 11:23—24, emphasis added). Jesus, on the night before the driving hammer and iron piercing through ligament and sinew, receives what God offers as grace (charis), the germ of His thanksgiving (eucharistia)? Oh. Facing the abandonment of God Himself (does it get any worse than this?), Jesus offers thanksgiving for even that which will break Him and crush Him and wound Him and yield a bounty of joy (chara). The mystery always contains more mysteries. Do I really want this way?

I listen to Matthew 11 for a whole week while exercising, panting hard, skin flushed with life, before I snare this truth—and it snares me:

Then Jesus began to denounce the cities in which most of his miracles had been performed, because they did not repent. “Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! … If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day” (Matthew 11:20—21, 23 NIV).

And then what does Jesus directly do, in the face of apparent failure, when no one responded to His teaching and things didn’t work out at all? He lives out eucharisteo. “At that time, [precisely at that failing time] Jesus answered and said, ‘I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth …’” (Matthew 11:25 KJV). In the midst of what seems a mess, in the tripping up and stumbling down of all hopes, Jesus gives thanks?

What precedes the miracle is thanksgiving, eucharisteo, and it is a Greek word with a hard meaning that is harder yet to live. Do I really want to take up this word?

But I wonder it one Sunday as they pass the broken loaf on that plate of silver, from Paula Van de Kemp to Ron Collins to Tammi Lindsay reaching for it over her kids. Maybe I already take up eucharisteo’s hard meaning every time I take Communion? In a very tangible, physical act, aren’t I enacting my thanksgiving for His pain? In a very real way, in a digestible, consuming-oneness way, I’m celebrating greater gain through great loss. “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16 NIV). The Eucharist invites us to give thanks for dying. To participate in His death with our own daily dying and give thanks for it. Then Mrs. Klumpenhower passes me the silver plate, and I tear off my small chunk of bread, chunk of the dead-and-risen-again wheat. I feel the granules between the fingers. I lay the torn bread on the tongue and I remember and press it to the roof of my mouth and the bread melts and I give thanks for the dying.

I swallow it down.

This constellation in the dark—grace, thanksgiving, joy—it might be like that—reaching for stars. So hard. So hard.

Is there some easier way to the fulfilling life?

The day I peel back chapter 17 of Luke’s gospel, I think I have my answer.

I sit at the prayer bench before my bedroom window. Outside, our boys roll millions of flakes into a snow fort. I read the passage, one I remember from the musty basement of the Knox Presbyterian Church Sunday school. I think I know this one. Jesus restores ten lepers to wholeness. And only one returns to offer any thanks. I remember the moral too, Mrs. Morrison and her glossy red lipstick: “How often do you remember to say thanks?” Yes, I think I know this one. I skim.

“One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan” (Luke 17:15—16 NIV). Yes, thankfulness, I know. Next verse.

Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17:17—19 NIV)

Wait. I trace back. Hadn’t Jesus already completely healed him? Exactly like the other nine who were cured who hadn’t bothered to return and thank Him. So what does Jesus mean, “Your faith has made you well”? Had I underinterpreted this passage, missed some hidden mystery? I slow down and dig. I read Jesus’ words in Young’s Literal Translation, “And [Jesus] said to him, ‘Having risen, be going on, thy faith has saved thee.’” Saved thee? I dig deeper. It’s sozo in the Greek. Many translations render sozo as being made “well” or “whole,” but its literal meaning, I read it—“to save.” Sozo means salvation. It means true wellness, complete wholeness. To live sozo is to live the full life. Jesus came that we might live life to the full; He came to give us sozo. And when did the leper receive sozo—the saving to the full, whole life? When he returned and gave thanks. I lay down my pen.

Our very saving is associated with our gratitude.

Mrs. Morrison hadn’t mentioned this. But … of course. If our fall was the non-eucharisteo, the ingratitude, then salvation must be intimately related to eucharisteo, the giving of thanks.

I look back to the text. That is what it says: “Thy faith has saved thee.” And the leper’s faith was a faith that said thank you. Is that it? Jesus counts thanksgiving as integral in a faith that saves.

We only enter into the full life if our faith gives thanks.

Because how else do we accept His free gift of salvation if not with thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is the evidence of our acceptance of whatever He gives. Thanksgiving is the manifestation of our Yes! to His grace.

Thanksgiving is inherent to a true salvation experience; thanksgiving is necessary to live the well, whole, fullest life.

“If the church is in Christ, its initial act is always an act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God,” writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann.[5] If I am truly in Christ, mustn’t my initial act, too, always be an act of thanksgiving, returning to Jesus with thanks on the lips?

I would read it much later in the pages of the Psalms, at the close of a Communion service as the bread and the wine were returned to the table, the Farmer handing his Bible over to me, his finger holding the verse for me to see because he had just read it there, what I had been saying, living, believing, and the chin would quiver before I’d brim at the way God shows His salvation: “He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God” (Psalm 50:23 NIV).

Thanksgiving—giving thanks in everything—prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.

The act of sacrificing thank offerings to God—even for the bread and cup of cost, for cancer and crucifixion—this prepares the way for God to show us His fullest salvation from bitter, angry, resentful lives and from all sin that estranges us from Him. At the Eucharist, Christ breaks His heart to heal ours—Christ, the complete accomplishment of our salvation. And the miracle of eucharisteo never ends: thanksgiving is what precedes the miracle of that salvation being fully worked out in our lives. Thanksgiving—giving thanks in everything—is what prepares the way for salvation’s whole restoration. Our salvation in Christ is real, yet the completeness of that salvation is not fully realized in a life until the life realizes the need to give thanks. In everything?

I would never experience the fullness of my salvation until I expressed the fullness of my thanks every day, and eucharisteo is elemental to living the saved life.

Mrs. Morrison hadn’t told me this either.

And sitting there before the window, I’m struck, a comet blazing across the empty dark of my life. All those years thinking I was saved and had said my yes to God, but was really living the no. Was it because I had never fully experienced the whole of my salvation? Had never lived out the fullest expression of my salvation in Christ? Because I wasn’t taking everything in my life and returning to Jesus, falling at His feet and thanking Him. I sit still, blinded. This is why I sat all those years in church but my soul holes had never fully healed.

Eucharisteo, the Greek word with the hard meaning and the harder meaning to live—this is the only way from empty to full.

I watch our boys carve in the wall of their snow fort.

They dig and their cheeks flame with the heat of the work, their hair damp with the effort. I think of the mother of the daughter with cancer, my father-in-law asking if I’m ready to go Home. No. I still have no words. Our tallest son has a shovel and the youngest son, a garden spade, and they dig into their wall. I have just one word. A word to seize and haul up out of a terminal nightmare, a word for fearless dying, for saved, fully healed living, a word that works the miracle that heals the soul and raises the very dead to life.

The packed snow of the fort gives way and there it is. A door in the wall.

Eucharisteo.

The way through is hard. But do I really want to be saved?

CHAPTER 3

first flight

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter

everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that

change forever how we experience life and the world.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

The window in the den is open wide, the carved loon and the mallard sitting still on the sill, the heartwood of a tree hewn into a longing wing.

In a friend’s kitchen, I work too, cutting cucumbers.

It’s drifting in on July, and I can hear it, up from the riverside, peals of child laughter, this stream running smooth, and the seedy cucumber disks fall to the china plate, their own green platters full of summer. She has a vase by the sink.

Tall with the foxglove spires, their full pink lips flecked with drops of scarlet, and I can just see how she would have cut each stalk careful and carried it in here, beauty for the women come to the tap for water. A medicinal bloom for heart failure, I remember reading that of foxgloves, a heart strengthener. Did she think of that when she cut them, thinking of me coming?

The men voices wander in the open window too, with the smoke and the sizzling, their broad backs hanging over flame and the grill all dripping. I’m hungry. My blade slices rings of the green. She stands at the stove, stirring a sauce, us parents cooking for the broods we have borne, and I almost don’t hear her when she says it.

“You’ve changed.” She turns to me, and I turn to catch the words.

“I have?” She’s caught me off guard. I’m thick-tongued and the cheeks flame and I reach for the pitcher, to pour the cups full and distract from her catching me trying to take wing.

“Yes … you’ve changed.” Shelly sets her pot on a trivet, her eyes on me, and I can feel them and I just set out the glasses.

I don’t say it, but I am thinking she may be right and I had felt it for months, the maturing, the swelling, the something different that had begun to happen. But I had thought the re-creation was still embryonic, a bud of hope. I hadn’t thought it had fully bloomed. I hadn’t thought that anyone could see the light in the eyes.

“It’s that list you’ve been writing, isn’t it?” She clatters down bowls.

I concentrate on pouring the water steady into each empty cup.

A fly cuts the surface of one full glass. I can see it—the wounding of water.

“Yes …” There. A moment. And yes. “It’s The List.”

The wound of the water smoothes … fades … heals.

I may have always known that change takes real intentionality, like a woman bent over her garden beds every day with a spade and the determined will to grow up something good to strengthen the heart.

I may even have known that change requires more than merely thinking the warm and fuzzy thoughts about a door and a way through and that Greek word, eucharisteo, holding the mystery to the full life and ever after.

But none of that at all meant that I knew what to do.

How in the world, for the sake of my soul, do I learn to practically pick up eucharisteo, the word I had underlined as a firm foundation to lay down under all of my days?

How in the world, for the sake of my joy, do I learn to use eucharisteo to overcome my one ugly and self-destructive habit of ingratitude (that habit that causes both my cosmic and daily fall) with the saving habit of gratitude—that would lead me back to deep God-communion.

To live—at all—I needed to know.

I had read that too, written by a wise man of old, Jean Pierre de Caussade: “When one is thirsty one quenches one’s thirst by drinking, not by reading books which treat of this condition.”[1] If we are dying of thirst, passively reading books about water quenches little; the only way to quench the parched mouth is to close the book and dip the hand into water and bring it to the lips. If we thirst, we’ll have to drink.

I would have to do something.

But I hadn’t known at all the day I laid aside the books about eucharisteo and picked up a pen to begin that list that I was really taking down, swallowing, the first real drink and how I’d transform. Or that the transformation would be so visible.

It was a dare, like a love dare of sorts, and I take it one clear November morning, not at all unlike that long ago November morning that her blood soaked the ground and I can never forget. It is the beginning of list season. Lists of holiday menus, lists of handmade projects, lists of have-to-buys. They’re scattered and stacked across the counter, around my desk, when a friend’s dashed-off digital line blinks up on my screen. She dares me, and I don’t even blink. Could I write a list of a thousand things I love? I read her line again. As in, begin another list? To name one thousand blessings—one thousand gifts—is that what she means? Sure, whatever.

It’s not like I thought that this is the carving, the flying, the healing of my wounds. Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.

I grab a scrap paper out of the ash-woven basket at the end of the counter, one with a child’s drawing of St. Patrick, I think, headed to Ireland because he’s in a boat and those really do look like shamrocks on his sleeve—and I flip it over. Across the backside, on a whim, a dare, I scratch it down: Gift List. I begin the list. Not of gifts I want but of gifts I already have.

1.Morning shadows across the old floors

2.Jam piled high on the toast

3.Cry of blue jay from high in the spruce

That is the beginning and I smile. I can’t believe how I smile. I mean, they are just the common things and maybe I don’t even know they are gifts really until I write them down and that is really what they look like. Gifts He bestows. This writing it down—it is sort of like … unwrapping love.

It might fit like a glove.

16. Leafy life scent of the florist shop

17. The creak of her old knees

18. Wind flying cold wild in hair

And when the house sleeps all heavy and only the dog barks crazy out on the lawn up at the cold round moon, I look down at Day 1 of counting all the way up to one thousand gifts. I run my hands across the page. I see again frames of the day, a life album in miniature. Writing the list, it makes me feel … happy. All day. I can hardly believe how it does that, that running stream of consciousness, river I drink from and I’m quenched in, a surging stream of grace and it’s wild how it sweeps me away. And I add one more to the list. To feel it all again. I can’t understand why it does that. And yet … too … the list, it feels foreign, strange. Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall—discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied.

And this, wasn’t this … I finger the corner of the page neatly numbered.

Well, if all these were gifts that God gives—then wasn’t my writing down the list like … receiving. Like taking with thanks. Wait.

“And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them …” Gave thanks.

This crazy-dare gift list—it’s language lessons in eucharisteo!

For real?

But eucharisteo—it’s the word Jesus whispered when death prowled close and His anguish trickled down bloody. He took the bread, even the bread of death, and gave thanks. I look down at my list. This thanks that I am doing—it seems so … crude. Trivial. If this list is the learning of the language of eucharisteo—this feels like … guttural groanings. But perhaps the “full of grace” vocabulary begins haltingly, simply, like a child, thankful for the childlike.

But doesn’t the kingdom of heaven belong to such as these?

At first, it’s the dare that keeps me going. That and how happy it makes me—giddy—this list writing of all that is good and pure and lovely and beautiful. But what keeps me going is what I read in that Bible lying open on my prayer bench looking out the window to the snow fort. The fort with a door in the wall. It’s Paul writing the letter to the Philippians. I read the fourth chapter. I almost don’t see it, but Paul repeats it twice in only two sentences, so I don’t miss it:

I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little.” (Philippians 4:11—12)

I read it many times, groping for the latch.

There it is—the secret to living joy in every situation, the full life of eucharisteo. Twice Paul whispers it: “I have learned …” Learned. I would have to learn eucharisteo. Learn eucharisteo—learn it to live fully. Learn it like I know my skin, my face, the words on the end of my tongue. Like I know my own name. Learn how to be thankful—whether empty or full. Could the list teach me even that hard language? Over time? Gratitude in the midst of death and divorce and debt—that’s the language I’ve got to learn to speak—because that’s the kind of life I’m living, the kind I have to solve. If living eucharisteo is the key to unlocking the mystery of life, this I want. I want the hunt, the long sleuth, the careful piecing together. To learn how to be grateful and happy, whether hands full or hands empty. That is a secret worth spending a life on learning. Even if it takes a Rosetta Stone of decades.

I wake the next morning and I grip my pen, ink to crack the code.

Mr. Klumpenhower slides the mail into the clunky mailbox at the end of the lane, the one I painted Martha Stewart’s burnt maple syrup but it really is more a barn red. I stand at the window and I hold the pen. I write it down in my journal:

22. Mail in the mailbox

And when my grandma’s bona fide wood-handled pressure cooker from the fifties, full with the potatoes, bobbles the steam all dancey over kitchen windows come noon, I hold the pen and I write it down clear:

23. Grandma’s pressure pot still dancing

Thanks is what multiplies the joy and makes any life large, and I hunger for it.

And when I’m in the produce section of Zehrs Markets looking for a just-ripe clump of bananas and I look over and see an old man all white-whiskered and bent, looking for the just-right card in the Hallmark aisle, I grab the journal from my bag and I hold the pen and I write it down wobbly:

24. Old men looking for words just perfect

I know how this makes me feel. I think I’m beginning to know why. How eucharisteo always precedes the miracle, even joy in a supermarket.

So I can’t say I’m surprised when I read the words of Martin Luther, author of those ninety-five theses nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, but he did say, “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen.”[2] This does feel like my own reformation, all things wooden-hard giving way to the sky. Recording gifts to reform. I pick up a pen and write of the God-gifts—all these things I had blithely and blindly brushed past before—and the list is my thanks, and eucharisteo is, I swear an oath, opening up the heights.

He says it too, John Piper—the things I am discovering, me with a hunt pen in hand—that moving the ink across the page opens up the eyes, that he may not understand how it sheds light, focuses its lens, but he only knows “that there are eyes in pencils and in pens.”[3]

Eyes in pencils and in pens. I hold the seeing pen, the one with eyes, eyes that, in due time, might just decode the whole of eucharisteo.

I am hard after it.

Because the picking up of a pen isn’t painful and ink can be cheap medicine. And I just might live.

I hold the pen. The cataracts clear.

37. Windmills droning in day’s last breeze

38. Wool sweaters with turtleneck collars

39. Faint aroma of cattle and straw

“A nail is driven out by another nail; habit is overcome by habit.”[4] Erasmus said that, contemporary and admirer of Martin Luther. When I read this thought, I am surprised because I had never known and I am sad for all that would have changed if only I had.

I look down at the pen, this pen I keep wielding, one writing her way all the way to one thousand. This pen: this is nothing less than the driving of nails. Nails driving out my habits of discontent and driving in my habit of eucharisteo. I’m hammering in nails to pound out nails, ugly nails that Satan has pierced through the world, my heart. It starts to unfold, light in the dark, a door opening up, how all these years it’s been utterly pointless to try to wrench out the spikes of discontent. Because that habit of discontentment can only be driven out by hammering in one iron sharper. The sleek pin of gratitude.

I hammer.

54. Moonlight on pillows

55. Long, lisped prayers

56. Kisses in dark

And in a house sleeping, my heart rings.

In the morning, my Farmer Husband comes in from the barn smelling of hogs.

“We lost another litter this morning.” He washes at the sink, dries those rough mitt hands, dark and work-worn, on a gingham towel draped over the cupboard. “All of them stillborn.”

I smother a sigh with a smile, weak and resigned. He takes it regardless. “Yeah …” He too smiles soft, a hand letting go, and our eyes hold each other long.

At the table, I pour milk over porridge. The Farmer sinks down into his chair at the end, lowers his head in prayer. He thanks God for the sustenance. I pray for some of that too.

I watch him eat. His three-day stubble, it’s brushed with flakes of cracked corn, remnants of what he fed to the sows this morning. The neck front of his T-shirt is stained with sweat. He works four hard hours in the barn feeding hundreds of sows, and the sun is just now meandering up to the table. The glass of orange juice set out for him sits untouched. I know what he would never tell me: more cold sores on the inner wall of his mouth. Stress.

It’s just that this thing, this sickness getting to sows—getting to him—has no name. It’s been months. He’s sent feed samples to an international lab, run various water trials, called in the vet to run a multipronged battery of tests. Nothing. No diagnosis for this spike in late-term miscarriages, the loss of litter after still-shriveled litter.

“I told Greg that I think it’s viral, not environmental.” He reaches for a second piece of toast. The Farmer and the vet have known each other since grade school and the soccer fields and Good News Bible Club.

“He asked if we could reconfigure production data to analyze symptoms by parity.” I hand him his two vitamin C tablets. “Some strange patterns. And the thing that makes no sense? Sows testing pregnant when they aren’t. You can hear the swoosh, swoosh with the ultrasound, but she’s not pregnant. Why?!”

I’m getting good at feeble half smiles.

I clear off the table and he reads Scripture. We do this at the close of every meal. This morning, the book of Amos, the prophet-herdsman with the name that means “burden bearer.”

Late afternoon, the back door latches close and water runs at sink. That’s always him, washing up first. I turn to the clock. He’s in before dark? Before I get to the mudroom, he slips past me to the study. “I think I’m on to something.”

He’s already hunched over keyboard, tapping in some search. I stay in the kitchen, chop up onions, wear smells of my own. I can hear the click of the cursor, him tracking a lead.

Then sauté, then broth, then vegetables to the pot. The sun has turned off the lights, gone to bed. In the dark of the study, his face is lit by the blue web. Soup simmers low, flavors bubbling, and I slip in behind him in front of the screen. His shoulders are tight, man tense with the trail; I rub the muscles deliberate, deep. “Anything?”

“It looks like it …” He mutters the words more to himself than to me. “If this isn’t it, I don’t know what is. Everything just … lines up.”

My thumbs work circles into the sinews. I scan cyberwords. The words make me wince. “You think so?”

His cursor lingers at the end of a paragraph … then he spins his chair around, pulls me down to his lap. “I think that’s it—that’s the name.” He murmurs the words near my ear.

“If that’s …” I point to the screen, to that name too long to pronounce. “If that’s really what’s going on out in the barn, are you OK?”

I can feel his relief, the way it drains into me.

“Yes … and no. I don’t like what it is, or that it looks like it’s nearly impossible to eradicate, but you know what?”

I turn to find his eyes, the way he and I meet, touch. His hands around me tighten, us melded in hope.

“I’m strangely happy.”

It’s true. No furrow plows across his brow. His maritime eyes lay calm.

“God’s good. Just naming it … Just naming it. When you don’t have the name for something, you’re haunted by shadows. It ages you.”

I press my lined forehead onto his.

“But when you can name something …”

When you can name something.

My list of naming God-gifts lies open on the counter …

117. Washing the warm eggs

118. Crackle in fireplace

119. Still warm cookies

Naming is Edenic.

I name gifts and go back to the Garden and God in the beginning who first speaks a name and lets what is come into existence. This naming is how the first emptiness of space fills: the naming of light and land and sky. The first man’s first task is to name. Adam completes creation with his Maker through the act of naming creatures, releasing the land from chaos, from the teeming, indefinable mass. I am seeing it too, in the journal, in the face of the Farmer: naming offers the gift of recognition. When I name moments—string out laundry and name-pray, thank You, Lord, for bedsheets in billowing winds, for fluff of sparrow landing on line, sun winter warm, and one last leaf still hanging in the orchard—I am Adam and I discover my meaning and God’s, and to name is to learn the language of Paradise. This naming work never ends for all the children of Adam. Naming to find an identity, our identity, God’s.

It’s late, and in the lamplight when the bones finally rest, I read and turn a page and run unexpected into these words,

Now, in the Bible a name … reveals the very essence of a thing, or rather its essence as God’s gift To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God. To name a thing, in other words, is to bless God for it and in it.[5]

I read the words again. The heart palpitates hard. I don’t hear the clock or the slosh hum of the dishwasher. All I can see, think, is that my whim writing of one thousand gratitudes, the naming of the moments—this is truly a holy work.

This naming really does call now a gift, a gift of God. I read again: “To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it.” I look at a day, a thing, an event in front of me, and it may look manna-strange: “What is it?” But when I name it, the naming of it manifests its meaning: to know it comes from God. This is gift! Naming is to know a thing’s function in the cosmos—to name is to solve mystery.

In naming that which is right before me, that which I’d otherwise miss, the invisible becomes visible.

The space that spans my inner emptiness fills in the naming.

I name. And I know the face I face.

God’s! God is in the details; God is in the moment. God is in all that blurs by in a life—even hurts in a life. GOD!

How can I not name? Naming these moments may change the ugly names I call myself.

I put a pen to a journal, to name solve, and I shake it when it runs dry, trace circles, and I coax out ink.

Some days I coax hard. I am tired. I don’t know if it’s the way the honey light runs down the walls and sticks to all the dust lying still on every surface, or if a fog films over the eyes, or if I am plain deceived. But that morning the washing machine hums early and the kids, all six, already studying long, I try taking up eucharisteo because I have known it before, that joy-miracle that might happen even now and here.

243. Clean sheets smelling like wind

244. Hot oatmeal tasting like home

245. Bare toes in early light

I do feel that. Happy when I name. But the porridge pot soaks in the sink and I don’t know. How much is my tongue, tail of the heart, learning the real language of eucharisteo? (I didn’t know then what was to come.) I forget Eden and naming and nails, and it all seems just a bit … juvenile. Contrived. This is the whole of the secret learning? I confess, even after all that I’ve seen and tasted and touched, I do scoff. I yearn for the stuff of saints, the hard language, the fluency of thanksgiving in all, even the ugliest and most heartbreaking. I want the very fullest life. I wonder, even just an inkling—is this but a ridiculous experiment? Some days, ones with laundry and kids and dishes in sink, it is hard to think that the insulting ordinariness of this truly teaches the full mystery of the all most important, eucharisteo. It’s so frustratingly common—it’s offensive.

Driving nails into a life always is.

I pick up the journal. Paul had twice said it, and I mustn’t forget it. He said he had to learn. And learning requires practice—sometimes even mind-numbing practice. C. S. Lewis said it too, to a man looking for fullest life: “If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.”[6] It might even be good. So I, too, can be like our children and the everyday training, memorizing of the Latin paradigms with the practicing chants: amo, amas, amat. The washing machine dings and I light. This is why I had never really learned the language of “thanks in all things”! Though pastors preached it, I still came home and griped on. I had never practiced. Practiced until it became the second nature, the first skin. Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation. Practice, practice, practice. Hammer. Hammer. Hammer.

This training might prove to be the hardest of my life. It just might save my life.

Some days I pick up a camera and it’s a hammer.

The lens is my ink, for cameras have sensor eyes, and pixels record. I slide it into a pocket, a thin point-and-shoot, and find another way to chronicle, to force the lids open; another way to receive the moment with thanks reverential. When he comes in from the barn, the Farmer finds me with my hammer in hand, leaning over a plate of cheese grated and sitting in sunlight. It is true. I do feel foolish. I mean, it’s curls of mozzarella and cheddar piled high in a pond of golden day. And I’m changing the settings for macro, pulling in for a close-up frame. He’s fed 650 sows with one strong arm this morning, flicked on a welder and melded steel. It is quite possible that the God-glory of a ring of shredded cheese may be lost on him.

It isn’t.

“I like finding you just like this.” He wraps one arm around my bowed middle, draws me close and up into him strong.

“Crazy like this?” I blush silliness, and he brushes close with the four-day stubble. He laughs.

“Perfect like this.” He nods toward the cheese plate. “You being happy in all these little things that God gives. It makes me very happy.”

Happy in all these little things that God gives. Ridiculously happy over slips of cheese. That I am, and it’s wild, and, oh, I am the one who laughs. Me! Changed! Surprised by joy!

Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.

It is true, I never stop wanting to learn the hard eucharisteo for the deathbeds and dark skies and the prodigal sons. But I accept this is the way to begin, and all hard things come in due time and with practice. Yet now wisps of cheese tell me gentle that this is the first secret step into eucharisteo’s miracle. Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle. The miracle of eucharisteo, like the Last Supper, is in the eating of crumbs, the swallowing down one mouthful. Do not disdain the small. The whole of the life—even the hard—is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole. These are new language lessons, and I live them out. 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 will add up.

I, too, had read it often, the oft-quoted verse: “And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:20). And I, too, would nod and say straight-faced, “I’m thankful for everything.” But in this counting gifts, to one thousand, more, I discover that slapping a sloppy brush of thanksgiving over everything in my life leaves me deeply thankful for very few things in my life. A lifetime of sermons on “thanks in all things” and the shelves sagging with books on these things and I testify: life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.

Little nails and a steady hammer can rebuild a life—eucharisteo precedes the miracle.

I snap a picture of cheese.

I roll out the dough, sprinkle the ring cheese on round pizza thin. I feel how the sun lies down warm across hands and how thanks soaks through the pores. I think how God-glory in a cheese ring might seem trifling. Even offensive, to focus the lens of a heart on the minute, in a world mangled and maimed and desperately empty.

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks.

This thanks for the minute, this is to say the prayer of the most blessed of women about to participate in one of the most transformative events the world has ever known. Mary, with embryonic God Himself filling her womb, exalts in quiet ways: “My soul doth magnify the Lord” (Luke 1:46 KJV).

So might I; yes, and even here.

Something always comes to fill the empty places. And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me. This, this, makes me full, and I “magnify him with thanksgiving” (Psalm 69:30 KJV), and God enters the world. What will a life magnify? The world’s stress cracks, the grubbiness of a day, all that is wholly wrong and terribly busted? Or God? Never is God’s omnipotence and omniscience diminutive. God is not in need of magnifying by us so small, but the reverse. It’s our lives that are little and we have falsely inflated self, and in thanks we decrease and the world returns right. I say thanks and I swell with Him, and I swell the world and He stirs me, joy all afoot.

This, I think, this is the other side of prayer.

This act of naming grace moments, this list of God’s gifts, moves beyond the shopping list variety of prayer and into the other side. The other side of prayer, the interior of His throne room, the inner walls of His powerful, love-beating heart. The list is God’s list, the pulse of His love—the love that thrums on the other side of our prayers. And I see it now for what this really is, this dare to write down one thousand things I love. It really is a dare to name all the ways that God loves me. The true Love Dare. To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable. This is the vault of the miracles. The only thing that can change us, the world, is this—all His love. I must never be deceived by the simplicity of eucharisteo and penning His love list. Cheese. Sun. Journal. Naming. Love. Here. It all feels startlingly hallowed, and I breathe shallow. I should take the shoes off.

I am bell and He is sure wind, and He moves and I am rung and I know it for what it is: this is the other side where Daniel, man of prayer, lived. Change agent, mover and shaker Daniel, second-to-the-king Daniel, sleeping-on-perfect-peace-in-the-den-of-the-lions Daniel. Daniel is a man of power prayer, not because he bends the stiff knees and makes petitions of the High Throne three times daily. Rather, his prayers move kings and lion jaws because Daniel “prayed three times a day, just as he had always done, giving thanks to his God.” (Daniel 6:10, emphasis added). Three times a day, Daniel prayed thanksgiving for the everyday common, for the God-love spilling forth from the God-heart at the center of all. The only real prayers are the ones mouthed with thankful lips. Because gratitude ushers into the other side of prayer, into the heart of the God-love, and all power to change the world, me, resides here in His love. Prayer, to be prayer, to have any power to change anything, must first speak thanks: “in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6 NIV, emphasis added). “First, I tell you to pray for all people, asking God for what they need and being thankful to him” (1 Timothy 2:1 NCV, emphasis added). Prayer without ceasing is only possible in a life of continual thanks. How did I ever think there was another way to enter into His courts but with thanksgiving?

It’s that one wondrous mound of grated cheese, rung in the sunlight and captured in frame, that makes me think it. What that ancient wise woman Julian of Norwich stated:

The highest form of prayer is to the goodness of God…. God only desires that our soul cling to him with all of its strength, in particular, that it clings to his goodness. For of all the things our minds can think about God, it is thinking upon his goodness that pleases him most and brings the most profit to our soul.[7]

The gift list is thinking upon His goodness—and this, this pleases Him most! And most profits my own soul and I am beginning, only beginning, to know it. If clinging to His goodness is the highest form of prayer, then this seeing His goodness with a pen, with a shutter, with a word of thanks, these really are the most sacred acts conceivable. The ones anyone can conceive, anywhere, in the midst of anything. Eucharisteo takes us into His love. I am struck and I long chime: Daniel is only a man of prayer because he is a man of thanks, and the only way to be a woman of prayer is to be a woman of thanks. And not sporadic, general thanks, but three times a day eucharisteo. Was it the power of everyday thanksgiving prayer that shut the gaping mouths of the lions ravenous? Lions would count as hard eucharisteo.

I slide a pizza out of oven and cheese has melted over all and through all and someday I would tell Shelly that life change comes when we receive life with thanks and ask for nothing to change.

I cut the pizza round into slices. And the porcelain dove, etched with the word peace, the one that hangs in hope by my corner kitchen window—she looks to soar into hard winds.

CHAPTER 4

a sanctuary of time

All we have to decide is what to do

with the time that is given us.

J. R. R. Tolkien

April sun pools into a dishwater sink, liquid daylight on hands.

The water is hot. I wash dishes. On my arms, just below the hiked sleeves, suds leave delicate water marks. Suds glisten. And over the soaking pots, the soap bubbles stack. This fragile tension arched in spheres of slick elastic sheets.

Light impinges on slippery film.

And I only notice because I’m looking for this and it’s the rays falling, reflecting off the outer surface of a bubble … off the rim of bubble’s inner skin … and where they meet, this interference of light, iridescence on the bubble’s arch, violet, magenta, blue-green, yellow-gold. Like the glimmer on raven wing, the angles, the hues, the brilliant fluid, light on the waves.

I touch wonder and fragility quivers … and bulges. Merges. Melds. Ripens full round, time shimmering clear.

And bursts.

Science may explain mechanics, but how do the eyes of the soul see? I seize the pen on the sill, and I can record another one. With my hand still dribbling dishes, with the breath all caught, I etch it down in that journal always lying out flat.

362. Suds … all color in sun

I lay down the pen. Dry my hands on the dish towel, dab at water spots transfusing into ink.

The house is a mess.

The pots pile, husks of the lunch labor. Bits of potato harden to counter. Books and pages and paper and pencils and crayons stagger senseless across the study table, ideas lost and left. Domino tiles hail across the floor. The children have all tumbled out, out to the air and the spaces wide open. I wash up undone on an island of quiet. The loud and blur of the morning ache across my shoulders. The washing machine works, and the porcelain dove, the one with “peace” scrolled deep into wing, hangs by one clear thread. From the sink, I can see her spin, spin, this way, then that, around and around and dizzy around.

After that night of the nightmares, I had said it, that I didn’t need more time to do or see or experience anything more. But look at the remains of a morning and it’s obvious I’m craving it deep: more time to manage just the life I already have. The work, the kids, the meals, the laundry, the ministry, a life so full it can seem empty. And then, on top of all that, who has time to take on yet one more thing and keep a gratitude journal, count gifts? Who has time to tally up one thousand of them? Can our time-crammed lives handle yet one more thing?

I drain the sink, suds exhausted to oily scum.

I refill. The tap runs fresh water. I watch the stream from the faucet foam up fresh soap. I only see it because I’m looking …

362. Suds … all color in sun

I fill the sink with the circle of bowl, and batter floats up in suds. I wash. I see my reflection in the stainless of the tap. I know you, those seeking eyes. You’re the one in dire need of time, that thing we can’t buy, what we sell of ourselves to get more of what we think we want, what we sacrifice to seemingly gain. They say time is money, but that’s not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time. I wipe a water spot off the tap; there is a reflection of me. Oh yes, I know you, the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life. I’m the face grieving.

God gives us time. And who has time for God?

Which makes no sense.

In Christ, don’t we have everlasting existence? Don’t Christians have all the time in eternity, life everlasting? If Christians run out of time—wouldn’t we lose our very own existence? If anyone should have time, isn’t it the Christ-followers?

I hold the bowl in hand, take that knit cloth, and work it around the bowl’s lip. I think back, remembering that stark morning in May when I sat with the dead as I do every Tuesday—but that Tuesday, I won’t forget.

While children play keys at the piano teacher’s, I wait down the street among the tombstones, looking for keys of my own.

I sit at cemetery’s edge, reading, and two white-crowned women stand alone by a hole in the ground at the other end of the graveyard. What are they waiting for in shy spring light, jackets pulled round tight? A white pickup truck with its dangling hoist backs up to earth’s gaping mouth. A man in green work pants gets out of the pickup, hooks on to concrete box, lowers it into black void, a cradle for the casket.

Then a black hearse creeps slowly into the cemetery, slow across grass. Here comes the casket—the remains of the living. I lay aside my book.

Is there no preacher coming? Just two elderly ladies—and a funeral director with his grave digger? And one black crow presiding high from the pile of dirt dug up, a shadow ready for the flight.

Who awaits in the hearse with only two gathered for the burial? And did he, the deceased, push to get through each day so he’d be first lunging over the finish line, life done? Did the dashing to grab fistfuls of life fill his emptiness … fill the emptiness of a coffin?

“We are merely moving shadows, and all our busy rushing ends in nothing” (Psalm 39:6).

The women, shoulder to shoulder, brush away flies. And when the funeral director and grave digger open up the back of the hearse and slide the coffin out, in that stark moment of earth-finality, a question once asked of a pastor haunts through the rows of headstones and I hear it sure again.

What was the pastor’s most profound regret in life? They carry the wooden box across the graveyard. It’s the weight of regrets that weighs a coffin down. And I hear the answer of the pastor ring.

Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing…. Through all that haste

I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.[1]

In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.

Haste makes waste.

And I had paused before driving out of the cemetery and looked back to the grave digger and funeral director walking through headstones and I hear this too, words of another woman seeking: “On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.”[2]

I scrub the bowl hard, try to scrape away the regrets of my life lived amateur.

Because that is the way I have lived. From the time the alarm first rings and I stir on our pillows touching, stretch over his bare back and check those relentless hands keeping time on that clock. The time, always the time, I’m an amateur trying to beat time. The six kids rouse. We race. The barn … and hurry. The breakfast … and hurry. The books, the binders … and hurry! In a world addicted to speed, I blur the moments into one unholy smear. I have done it. I do it still. Hands of the clock whip hard. So I push hard and I bark hard and I fall hard and when their wide eyes brim sadness and their chins tremble weak, I am weary and I am the thin clear skin, reflecting their fatigue, about to burst, my eyes glistening their same sheer pain.

The hurry makes us hurt.

And maybe it is the hurt that drives us on? For all our frenzied running seemingly toward something, could it be that we are in fact fleeing—desperate to escape pain that pursues?

Whatever the pace, time will keep it and there’s no outrunning it, only speeding it up and pounding the feet harder; the minutes pound faster too. Race for more and you’ll snag on time and leak empty. The longer I keep running, the longer the gash, and I drain, bleed away.

Hurry always empties a soul.

And it’s those six souls there I love, those six under spruce trees, there out my window. Twelve arms gathering fallen cones. Twelve legs bent. The Boy-Man’s arms rake a pile of dead grass, winter’s refuse. The Tall-Girl tucks Little-One’s blowing wisps of blonde under spring hat. Two little boys bent, tossing cones into pail, their heads touching in joke and I see their faces laughter light, their shoulders shaking in fun. And oh, I know that sound and I smile.

The crusted pan that baked the chocolate-melt bars slides off the tower of bowls, crashes to the floor. I pick it up and watch it sink into sink.

I speak it to God: I don’t really want more time; I just want enough time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done—yesterday. In a world with cows to buy and fields to see and work to do, in the beep and blink of the twenty-first century, with its “live in the moment” buzz phrase that none of the whirl-weary seem to know how to do, who actually knows how to take time and live with soul and body and God all in sync? To have the time to grab the jacket off the hook and time to go out to all air and sky and green and time to wonder at all of them in all this light, this time refracting in prism.

I just want time to do my one life well.

A soap bubble bursts next to my skin.

A soap bubble, skin of light and water and space suspended in sphere. Who has time for that?

Hadn’t I? Only because I was looking. Because that list of one thousand gifts has me always on the hunt for one more … and one more—to behold one more moment pregnant with wonder.

The wonder right in the middle of the sink. Looking for it like this. I lay the palm under water and I raise my hand with the membrane of a life span of moments. In the light, the sheerness of bubble shimmers. Bands of garnet, cobalt, flowing luminous.

I see through to the pattern. I see. The way my life, vapor, is shaping. I hadn’t noticed. It’s 362.

362. Suds … all color in sun

That’s my answer to time.

Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. And when I’m always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. And time slows. Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time’s river slows, slows, slows.

The bubble in my hand quavers, a rainbow at fringes.

And blind eyes see: It’s this sleuthing for the glory that slows a life gloriously. It’s plain, bubble straight through: Giving thanks for one thousand things is ultimately an invitation to slow time down with weight of full attention. In this space of time and sphere, I am attentive, aware, accepting the whole of the moment, weighing it down with me all here.

I tilt my hand more to the light and the wave frequencies reinforce on bubble’s dome and color bands deepen, fire-blue swirling flame into lurid scarlet. A kaleidoscope planet. Full attention fills the empty ache.

This. Is this eucharisteo the way to that elusive fullest life, the one that lives in the moment? What my sister urges when I get angsty and knotted about tomorrow, when I sorrow for what is gone, her words always tugging me to stay right here—“Wherever you are, be all there.”[3] I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.

Light on soap film, its energy traveling, reflection, refraction on a wall a few millionths of an inch thick. Light waves permeate and collide, crest to crest and crest to trough. Yellow marbleizes into indigo dark. I do see this. I hold it.

This is where God is.

In the present. I AM—His very name. I want to take shoes off. I AM, so full of the weight of the present, that time’s river slows to a still … and God Himself is timeless. The bubble trembles slight. Or is it my hand? It’s not the gifts that fulfill, but the holiness of the space. The God in it. Far curvature of the bubble eddies, violet sliding down. This is supreme gift, time, God Himself framed in moment. I hardly breathe … and time is only of the essence, because time is the essence of God, I AM. This I need to consecrate: time.

I may never wear shoes again.

The bubble arches into the dome of a cathedral. There. What I am to do? Make every moment a cathedral giving glory … I am Jacob and the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it (Genesis 28:16). And it is eucharisteo curving the moment into a cupola of grace, an architecture of holiness[4]—a place for God. Thanks makes now a sanctuary. And I take my vows: I will not desecrate this moment with ignorant hurry or sordid ingratitude. I will be Jacob, and I will name this moment the “house of God” (Genesis 28:19). Crystalline orb gleams in the light of the window.

The clock ticks slow. I hear it for what it is: good and holy. Time, what God first deemed holy above all else (Genesis 2:3). Thank God for the time, and very God enters that time, presence hallowing it. True, this, full attention slows time and I live the full of the moment, right to outer edges. But there’s more. I awake to I AM here. When I’m present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. In His embrace, time loses all sense of speed and stress and space and stands so still and … holy.

Here is the only place I can love Him.

The bubble glints luster, pearl pried from the oyster.

I hold it as long as it has life. Then I wipe slow the wet hands, grab my journal and put pen to paper, plunging pole into terra firma, new territory claimed, and the banner flaps wild in wind. Here is the only place I can love Him. I have time for God …

363. Rays reflecting hues off translucent globes

364. Sound of spruce cones thumping buckets with spring

365. Cackle of crows high in the limbs, iridescence on wings

I am a hunter of beauty and I move slow and I keep the eyes wide, every fiber of every muscle sensing all wonder and this is the thrill of the hunt and I could be an expert on the life full, the beauty meat that lurks in every moment.

I hunger to taste life.

God.

I cut squares of chocolate-melt bars in half and the knife slides clean straight through. A ladybug walks the windowsill, spring stroll all in parade of red and black dots. Her back parts into wing, then shies. I jot her down, 366. I slow time! It’s ridiculous how much joy a moment can hold.

Dishes soak. The clock ticks, and I hear it like a song in easy time. I lick the chocolate off fingertips and swallow sweet down and I try to open it up all the way wide.

Why is eucharisteo the answer to the time starved and soul famished?

I haul out a stack of white china dishes. One dessert square for each china plate. Count again, slow—is there enough?

Like the God-Man counting His too-few loaves and not-enough fishes. The one I remember from felt boards and figures pressed out smooth, where “Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted” (John 6:11 NIV, emphasis added).

Gave thanks. He’d done it there too? Again? I’d missed it and all of my life?

I’d never considered those two words, the bridge words there in the middle, the crossing over that took the not enough and made it enough.

Gave thanks.

Eucharisteo.

Jesus embraces His not enough … He gives thanks … And there is more than enough. More than enough!

Eucharisteo always, always precedes the miracle.

And who doesn’t need a miracle like that every day? Thanksgiving makes time.

Really? Give thanks and get time? Give thanks … slow time down with all your attention—and your basket of not-enough-time multiplies into more than enough time.

I have extra squares. I bank them along the rim of the plate and realize for the first time what has never been the problem of my life.

The real problem of life is never a lack of time.

The real problem of life—in my life—is lack of thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving creates abundance; and the miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks—take the just one loaf, say it is enough, and give thanks—and He miraculously makes it more than enough. I have beheld suds in sun, and I have known miracles like that.

I am a mother-tired, but when my soul doth magnify, my time doth magnify. I look out to the six I carried on the hip and in the heart and need all the hours for. And #362 and all the eucharisteo that came before tell me this: I redeem time from neglect and apathy and inattentiveness when I swell with thanks and weigh the moment down and it’s giving thanks to God for this moment that multiplies the moments, time made enough.

I am thank-full. I am time-full.

Leaning, light out the door, iron dinner bell in hand, I ring and it’s gratitude that invites me to the here grandeur, to the embrace of I AM, to come multiply my little time into enough time and the glory of now I ring for children to come, come.

The table is set. There is enough and more than.

Though I’d be tried and sore tested.

They tramp in loud and fling themselves out of their coats like cicada splitting skins, leave boots a trail of droppings.

The Tall-Girl lets the door swing loose and it slams the fingertips of Little-One and she yelps a pain dance of salty tears.

In the tussle out of a stubborn sleeve, a big brother swipes hard the head of a little brother and Small-Son wails the mad fists and there are coats and boots and still all the dominoes and dishes and books and who has time for all this more? More work? More stuff? More stress? I can feel my pulse quicken fierce. Entering fully into the moment can overwhelm, a river running wild. I will forget, and again, and again, but today I do remember. I breathe and I reel and I hold my ground and my tongue in this torrent coming down. I’ve staked my claim to the miracle. I know the way to the Promised Land.

I do what I always need to do. I preach it. I preach it to the person I need to preach to the most. I preach to me. The skin’s tugged hard by the rush of time and I say it aloud in current pounding past, words I need like water: Calm. Haste makes waste. Life is not an emergency. Life is brief and it is fleeting but it is not an emergency. I pick up a coat and thank God for the arms that can do it. Emergencies are sudden, unexpected events—but is anything under the sun unexpected to God? I call a son back and hand him a hanger and thank God that he can do this too. Stay calm, enter the moment, give thanks. I thank God for boots and we line them straight and the little hands help. And I can always give thanks because an all-powerful God always has all these things—all things—always under control. I breathe deep and He preaches to me, soothing the time-frenzied soul with the grace river in whisper.

Life is not an emergency. Life is eucharisteo.

Eucharisteo.

I, too, soothe the cheek of the mad-fisted child. I give thanks for that one curl that always lies on his forehead, beckoning invitation, and him held close in the arms, I know it. That life is so urgent it necessitates living slow.

It’s only the amateurs—and that I have been and it’s been ugly—who think slow and urgent are contradictory, opposite poles.

He lays his head on my shoulder. I stroke his hair, wind my finger round that curl. I can feel the heat of his cheeks. I can feel time’s current in my blood ease … meander. Is this what the life experts know?

That in Christ, urgent means slow.

That in Christ, the most urgent necessitates a slow and steady reverence.

For a moment, longer, I hold son—and life—and I hold it mindfully … attentively … thankfully. Life at its fullest is this sensitive, detonating sphere, and it can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried and reverential—a bubble held in awe.

I carry the small son boy to the table.

When those hungry eyes and empty tummies circle round the table, smiles big just like their daddy’s when he’s eyeing something good heaping high on a platter, they are all story and loud talk and hardly able to restrain the waiting for the nod and I grin it too, “You may …”

They dive.

I watch them feast. They quiet. Taste buds savor it long. It’s that same recipe my mama baked up when I was a kid, cowlicks sliding up the front of my hair, just like theirs.

The Boy-Man mumbles, his mouth sticky full. “I am not eating mine fast.” His tongue licks chocolate off lip. “Wanna taste it all.”

“Oh, when I was your age I used to just scarf my food down.” I pull back one of the paint-flecked spindled chairs, one of the worn ones that used to sit around the walls of the community center during old-time Saturday night dances. It only wobbles a bit. “My Grandma Ruth would shake her head, disgusted at me. Like this.”

And I show them and I wag my finger too, just the way she did, and they grin chocolate.

“She’d say, ‘My lands, child! That is no way to eat. It took time to make this meal. And you’d better take some time to taste it. Slow down, like so.’ Then she’d chew slow and deliberate like. And tell me again, so I’d remember, ‘Food is meant to be savored.’”

The Tall-Girl’s jaw slows. I wink. She smiles, brushes her lip with her finger.

“Pork chops, potatoes, peas, it was all just food to me.” I hand down the plate with extras for the boys looking eager. They kneel up on chairs to eye out that one square that’s just a smidge bigger. “But Grandma’s apple pie? Her butterscotch squares? She didn’t have to tell me to slow down then!” A boy takes a big bite, too big, smiles knowingly. I look around at their faces, their taste buds all alive, eyes shining delight in the sweet.

When did I stop thinking life was dessert?

I push back from the table. Push away from regrets. They need something to drink. I clatter out the stainless steel glasses. Pour out the cold milk and think of the strangers walking briskly, blithely along to Emmaus, oblivious to the God-skin before their eyes. Only in the slowing, the sitting down at the table, when His hands held the bread and the thanks fell from His tongue, do the open-eyed, the wide-eyed, see the Face they face (Luke 24:13—35). The fast have spiritually slow hearts.

I carry the cups back to the table.

My drained, empty body has stopped and my soul has caught up and if I give thanks here, Whom might I recognize? I pass two cups down to the end of the table. It takes a full twenty minutes after your stomach is full for your brain to register satiation. How long does it take your soul to realize that your life is full? The slower the living, the greater the sense of fullness and satisfaction. The body and soul can synchronize. This moment I enter. Racing time tempers. And the neurons brand into memory—the Tall-Girl collecting crumbs on the end of a fingertip, the light reflecting off the curve of her skin, the near man-sized hands grabbing glass, swigging down milk, hands that once clenched my finger in first life, Small-Son lisping out a joke and all their happy banter, this taste of chocolate and children, and I don’t reach forward and I don’t reach back and I weigh the moment down with full attention here.

Life is dessert—too brief to hurry. You don’t wolf it down. The Little-One’s tongue searches about for smudge of chocolate she can feel on her cheek.

“More milk?”

She nods, eyes large, laughing yes.

I pour more. And I have an appetite to celebrate—yes, let us eat cake!—and nibble on bare toes, to pick armfuls of poppies, to hold a heart up against me, stronger, surer, to sit long with my mama in the last of afternoon light. “Wherever you are, be all there” is only possible in the posture of eucharisteo. I want to slow down and taste life, give thanks, and see God.

There are four appointments scratched on the calendar this week and two evening meetings slotted and all six kids have swimming lessons and there are piano recitals and exams looming at week’s end and … and … and days flood torrential—but full attention slows the current. Don’t I always have the choice to be fully attentive? Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus. Eucharisteo, eucharisteo. That keeps the focus simple—sacred.

I watch the hands move grace on the clock face. I’m growing older. These children growing up. But time is not running out. This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there’s this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.

The Small-Son pauses between bites, wiggles his tooth with tip of his tongue. I watch him and I smile. He sees me watching and he grins. He takes that last bite of chocolate-melt and with mouth still full of gooey good, he serenades soft, “I love you, Mom … and all this.”

And all this.

This cathedral moment, this God, this time before it bursts. All this.

I am Jacob and this moment is the house of God and I reach for the plate.

I want to savor long whatever time holds.

CHAPTER 5

what in the world, in all this world, is grace?

One act of thanksgiving,

when things go wrong with us,

is worth a thousand thanks when things

are agreeable to our inclinations.

Saint John of Avila

The front porch flag Mama bought for me from Burvey’s General Store flaps in a lazy gust of back road July.

It’s early morning, first light, and I’m watering flowers. Before the heat of high noon coming. The scarlet profusion, the petunias, the begonias from the market, the wintered-over geraniums. The water soaks into earth and I watch it go. Water in, flowers out, miracle there on the porch. The watering can empty, I lean a bit at the rail. Watch the bees drone honeyed heaviness over purple of coneflowers, work for a queen. Then, sudden, thrum out of nothing, a ruby-jeweled hummingbird. I hold the breath. Make the self invisible. It darts, blossom lip to blossom lip.

Her long bill swills back July sun transfigured into nectar. I watch her, become her, drink the sweet right out of now.

I’m still transfixed when the ricochet of words rip up the back.

“Levi’s hand went through a fan at the barn!”

The knees go weak. Our oldest son pants hard against the door frame, feed chop from his chores still mussed down his shirt.

I drop the watering can and I run.

I hold the edges of the skirt tight and, bare feet across gravel yard, I fly scared. It’s the naked heel pressing the sharp of the stones that push the memories through and I am four again, child running after mother, the mother running to the child crushed away red. Now I am the mother, the eyes shot white through, and I run for my child, child maimed and bleeding away. I do remember to breathe, to hold each breath long, so I won’t give way when I find Levi. He will be howling. He will be … I can hardly imagine how those fan blades, each two feet long, each a whacking two pounds, each whirring at blurring speeds, circulating air for hundreds of sows, might hack up a little boy’s hand.

Or hack it off.

I know it, even in running down the lane to the barn, the diaphragm rising, bracing; this may be it. The hard eucharisteo. Now I know that I don’t want to know it yet … Ever.

How to lay the hand open for this moment’s bread—when it will hurt.

Three hours later, the gravel in the lane crackles, Levi and I home from ER. Bent over his bandages, Levi whimpers, rocks the swaddling back and forth, back and forth. She’s waiting for us in the lane. My mama who has wept and rocked and who has had the child taken from the hand—she meets me there in the gravel lane, the angst carved hard across her forehead.

I speak to Mama, me who still has my child.

“He has a hand.”

I open the door to help seven-year-old Levi out of the passenger seat. I steady Mama too with details. “And … he has all ten of his fingers.” She drops her head in relief, holds her hand to her chest, exhales.

“He’s cut up bad. But only the index is broken. They’re booking us for a surgeon.” The surgeon would tell us that the weight and speed of that fan blade slamming into the finger snapped the bone in half and rotated it full round. Without surgery, the scalpel blade careful to limit nerve damage, to open up the finger and spin the bone, Levi’s right index finger would warp, useless crook.

Levi, eyes hollowed with shock, holds up his bandaged hand to show my pale-faced mama.

“But hey—he has a hand!” I rub hope into the small of his back, into Mama’s fear.

Her tension lines loosen, and she leans into me, laying her hand firm on my shoulder and she whispers it sure. “God’s grace,” she whispers. “God’s grace.” She pats my shoulder and I feel her relief … and something dark … angry … ugly.

I guide Levi into the house, one arm around, one shielding his wrappings. And a slippery question serpentines up me, nearly shakes my tongue with its words but I refuse it. Refuse the opening of lips to the wondering. But the words still come quiet, hard and black, squeezing me tight.

And if his hand had been right sheared off?

What of God’s grace then?

Can I ask that question?

I get a pillow for Levi, all weary from crying. I lift his head, slip some comfort under him heavy with hurt and just stroke his hair. His eyelashes still, his chest breathes the slumber and I think of what I had heard on the radio on the way home from ER, the announcer static crackly. The obituaries after the noon farm news. A thirteen-year-old Mennonite boy, just down the road from the red-roofed dairy farm my husband grew up on. A farm boy, an accident. Date of death. Siblings. Funeral details. No mention of the state of his mama’s heart, delta fractures splitting her through.

Why in the world, everywhere I turn, every page, always death? I’d like some happy, blithe, Pollyanna words, please. For a happy, blithe, Pollyanna life. My gratitude journal lies open on the counter. I retrieve it, flip back through pages, and run my hand over penned numbers, memories of the Pollyanna moments. And I can see it in the looking back, how this daily practice of the discipline of gratitude is the way to daily practice the delight of God and what in the spring had been #362 suds in the sink, grew over weeks and months and I read

457. Brown eggs fresh from the henhouse

485. Hair bows holding back curls

513. Boys jiggling blue Jell-O

526. New toothbrushes

and I remember realizing when I was already over half and fixed on counting, couldn’t stop, always looking for just one more in this unfolding of a chronicle of grace, our life story in freeze frames of thanks

613. Paper bag puppet shows

647. Pinky skin of newborn pigs

663. Opening jars of preserves

664. Nylons without runs

and not only was the numbering leaving traces of our days; this counting blessings was the unlocking of the mystery of joy, joy, “the gigantic secret of the Christian,”[1] joy hiding in gratitude and who but the Jesus people are the most thankful? And then it had seemed like it might be over all too soon …

748. Mama delivering chicken soup to the back door

783. Forgiveness of a sister

882. Toothless smiles

891. Earthy aroma of the woods

Come early winter, I jotted haltingly, not wanting it to end:

904. First frost’s crunch

924. Scooping out squash, all steaming

943. Stepping over a dog when coming in through the dark

971. Kettle whistling for tea on a cold afternoon

And when I wrote the one thousandth gift, I had written careful:

1000. Resurrection bloom, an amaryllis, a gift a year in the coming

My mother-in-law had given us that amaryllis bulb the year before. I had set it in the kitchen windowsill, under the porcelain dove. I had waited. A full rotation of the earth through the galaxy, I had waited. Cancer had left Mom Voskamp’s remains buried deep. And then. Her bulb had trumpeted a call: Fully live! Live fully!

My one thousandth gift. I had swallowed hard. God had used the dare to give me this; led me all the way to give me this as the thousandth gift, exactly like this, to unfurl just this: Live fully! Mom Voskamp spoke to me from the grave. Here are gifts worth waiting 365 days for, gifts worth counting to one thousand for, gifts that will unbelievably emerge out of the deathly dark. Joy is always worth the wait, and fully living worth the believing. The pursuit! The bloom had trumpeted for weeks.

Was it all over now?

I had turned the page. And into another year, another spring, another year of beans and corn and wheat under sun, I had kept writing it down, a free-for-all, a journal in my purse, one by my bed, another on the counter by the sink, a file on my computer, because the dare to write one thousand gifts becomes the dare to celebrate innumerable, endless gifts! That initial discipline, the daily game to count, keeping counting to one thousand, it was God’s necessary tool to reshape me, remake me, rename me, and now how could I stop being Ann full of grace?

Or was this now only the beginning of really becoming?

Daily discipline is the door to full freedom, and the discipline to count to one thousand gave way to the freedom of wonder and I can’t imagine not staying awake to God in the moment, the joy in the now.

But awakening to joy awakens to pain.

Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who don’t numb themselves to really living. Pages of the gratitude journal fill endlessly. Yet I know it in the vein and the visceral: life is loss. Every day, the gnawing …

What will I lose? Health? Comfort? Hope? Eventually, I am guaranteed to lose every earthly thing I have ever possessed.

When will I lose? Today? In a few weeks? How much time have I got before the next loss?

Who will I lose? And that’s definite: I will lose every single person I have ever loved. Either abruptly or eventually. All human relationships end in loss. Am I prepared for that?

Every step I take forward in my life is a loss of something in my life and I live the waiting: How and of what will I be emptied today?

I return to Levi and pull the blanket up over our boy curled round his wound. I watch him sleep.

Does anyone whisper in the dead boy’s house, “God’s grace … God’s grace”?

What in the world, in a world of certain loss, is grace?

And the more of the blessings I name, this theological problem deepens, the kind that manifests itself between the breakfast table and last light out. If I am numbering gift moments to one thousand and now beyond—what moments in my life count as blessings? If I name this moment as gift, grace, what is the next moment? Curse? How do you know how to sift through a day, a life, and rightly read the graces, rightly ascertain the curses?

What is good? What counts as grace? What is the heart of God?

Do I believe in a God who rouses Himself just now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on hemorrhaging humanity? A God who breaks through the carapace of this orb only now and then, surprises us with a spared hand, a reprieve from sickness, a good job and a nice house in the burbs—and then finds Himself again too impotent to deal with all I see as suffering and evil? A God of sporadic, random, splattering goodness—that now and then splatters across a gratitude journal? Somebody tell me:

What are all the other moments?

Levi moans. I brush his cheek soft. Is there Tylenol in the kitchen? My Bible lies open by the gratitude journal. I look for a bottle of pills to ease the pain, and I remember the summer I was twelve.

We beat it down a gravel road in a cloud of dust, and I looked over at the billboard that the van Veens had planted back in their woods. I asked Dad why anyone would bother putting a sign up in their woods if no one could make out the words. He looked at me squinting, and my mama made me an optometrist’s appointment. Next time we drove by van Veens’ words in the woods, I wore glasses, horn-rimmed frames. And I saw the words as clear as a bell and I read them plain: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31 KJV).

The woods spell out words. I need a lens to read them.

Every dark woods has words. And every moment is a message from The Word-God who can’t stop writing His heart.

But who can read His messages?

I feel around the back of the medicine cupboard for the bottle. I squint hard, but I can’t read the cryptic, indecipherable text of injured farm boys, anemic marriages, terminal mamas … war, famine, disease. What do all the words written in the world really spell out? I had read it in Job, what makes reading God’s message in every moment a form of art, fullest life: God speaks to us not in one language but two: “For God does speak—now one way, now another” (33:14 NIV). One way, His finger writing words in stars (Psalm 19:1—3), His eternal power written naked in all creation (Romans 1:20); and now another way, the sharp Holy Writ on the page that makes a careful incision into a life, blade words that kindly cut the tissue back to where soul and spirit join, tenderly laying bare the intents of the heart (Hebrews 4:12).

I hold the medicine bottle, but have I found pills for the pain?

To read His message in moments, I’ll need to read His passion on the page; wear the lens of the Word, to read His writing in the world. Only the Word is the answer to rightly reading the world, because The Word has nail-scarred hands that cup our face close, wipe away the tears running down, has eyes to look deep into our brimming ache, and whisper, “I know. I know.” The passion on the page is a Person, and the lens I wear of the Word is not abstract idea but the eyes of the God-Man who came and knows the pain.

How does the Word read the world?

I lay out two Tylenol for Levi in the palm. Levi moans, swallows it down. I hold the glass of water and I tell him the pain will ease in a bit and I don’t think about the surgery, that hand throbbing sore.

He closes his eyes, tired. I pull up the blanket again, let him find comfort in the dark. And I go looking for medicine of my own. Slipped in books, in purse, taped to the fridge, mirror over the sink, these cue cards are yellowed old. Tattered remnants of those days after I drove away from the locked ward of the psychiatric hospital, my belly swollen heavy with our first child, and I left Mama behind, her heart swollen too heavy with the emptiness of the child she watched bleed away before her eyes. At the door of the ward, before the steel had slammed hollow shut, she’d slipped me her wedding band so it wouldn’t get stolen. I wore it home on the finger next to my own band. I had cried blind all the roads back, and I spent that night writing out these lenses through which to read a world.

Ten years, longer, I’ve carried these cards.

I stand in our bedroom by the window and hold a card to the light. I can hardly now make out the water-splat words of Isaiah 14:24, “Surely, just as I have intended so it has happened, and just as I have planned so it will stand” (NASB). As God plans … so it stands.

I read the faded ink below, and I remember what I felt the day I copied those words, “Does disaster come to a city unless the LORD has planned it?” (Amos 3:6). And I feel it again today and I breathe: A good God plans everything. Everything. So a good God can only … make plans for good? He only gives good gifts? A thing of evil cannot be created by a good God?

From the bedroom window, I watch a shadow move across the lawn, move out long across our wheat fields. That is what a shadow is, an empty space, a hole in the light. Evil is that—a hole in the goodness of God. Evil is all that lacks the goodness of God, a willful choice to turn away from the full goodness of God to that empty of His goodness.[2] I watch the grey shadows slink away over the hill, the sun driving them east.

All God makes is good. Can it be that, that which seems to oppose the will of God actually is used of Him to accomplish the will of God? That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way the eyes see the shadows. Above the clouds, light never stops shining.

But what perspective sees good in dead farm boys, good in a little girl crushed under tires of a truck right in front of her mother’s eyes, good in a brother-in-law who buries his first two sons in the space of nineteen months—and all the heinous crimes and all the weeping agony and all the scalding burn of this world? The sun rolls across wheat warm. I lean against the windowsill and watch it. I hear the echo, truth words whispering down time’s cavern, words that Julian of Norwich heard:

See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?[3]

Perspective—how we see.

And how should anything be amiss? I can see her name on that stone, five letters of my little sister named “loved one,” and I won’t shield God from my anguish by claiming He’s not involved in the ache of this world and Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leash and the God who governs all can be shouted at when I bruise, and I can cry and I can howl and He embraces the David-hearts who pound hard on His heart with their grief and I can moan deep that He did this—and He did.

I feel Him hold me—a flailing child tired in Father’s arms. And I can hear Him soothe soft, “Are your ways My ways, child? Can you eat My manna, sustain on My mystery? Can you believe that I tenderly, tirelessly work all for the best good of the whole world—because My flame of love for you can never, ever be quenched?”

I only close my eyes … Enter the dark too. Sometimes we need time to answer the hard eucharisteo.

How do we converse with a God who may not seem to honor our honor?

In the quiet, Levi sleeping, I wonder, cue card in hand—if I had the perspective of the whole, perhaps I’d see it? That which seems evil, is it a cloud to bring rain, to bring a greater good to the whole of the world? Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perseverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life? I dare flip the cue card over and I make out words on the back side, “See now that I, I am He, and there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal” (Deuteronomy 32:39 NASB). I nod. I know. I know. And these truth words reconfigure the battlefield under my feet.

I grip the card and I know all our days are struggle and warfare (job 14:14) and that the spirit-to-spirit combat I endlessly wage with Satan is this ferocious thrash for joy. He sneers at all the things that seem to have gone hideously mad in this sin-drunk world, and I gasp to say God is good. The liar defiantly scrawls his graffiti across God’s glory, and I heave to enjoy God … and Satan strangles, and I whiten knuckles to grasp real Truth and fix that beast to the floor.

It’s just that the eyes are bad—my perspective. “Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body,” Jesus said. “When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!” (Matthew 6:22—23). If Satan can keep my eyes from the Word, my eyesight is too poor to read light—to fill with light. Bad eyes fill with darkness so heavy the soul aches because empty is never truly empty; empty is only a full, deepening darkness. So this is what it is to be. Eve in the Garden, Satan’s hiss tickling the ear, “Did God actually say …?” (Genesis 3:1 ESV).

No Scripture glasses to read what God is trying to write through a prodigal child? Scrawl my own quick editing on the half-finished story: failure. Satan’s tongue darts.

Not wearing a biblical lens to decipher the meaning of a doctor’s ominous diagnosis? Just read Satan’s slippery interpretation: cheated.

Not using anything to bend the light of this world so I can read my own messy days? Spray on another layer of graffiti: worthless.

So I have been ambushed.

Without God’s Word as a lens, the world warps.

I slip the cue card into my back pocket, glasses slipped on. I catch a glimpse of myself in the bureau’s antique mirror, the glass wavy and flecked with age. I only slightly distort.

The phone rings. Levi still dozes. I lunge across the bed, try to grab the receiver before the next ring. It’s John, my brother-in-law. He has the details of the Mennonite family’s funeral arrangements for their young son.

“I can’t fathom that kind of grief.” I’m thinking of shadows and holes. It hurts to talk. Levi breathes heavy on the couch, whole and here.

“I talked to the uncle.” John’s voice is steady. “They have peace. They look at how the accident happened, this series of unlikely events. Change even one, and none of this would have happened.”

Levi groans. I sit by him, tuck the blanket over his shoulders, John speaking quietly on the other end of the line. “The family accepts. God meant it this way.”

I shake my head, shake off disbelief, shake off this weight pressing hard on the chest.

They can whisper it in the dead boy’s house too?

God’s grace, God’s grace.

The unwavering faith of fissured hearts that stand in funeral parlors looks in the eyes of those offering condolences and speaks it with sure voices, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21 NKJV). Twice I’d stood in the same pew as John had at the funerals of both of his sons, and I had turned and I had seen for myself, how John stood with the congregation and sang it clear, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Twice John sang his lifelong favorite Scripture before the coffins of his sons. I can still see him brave through each line sung, the tears of faith streaming down his cheeks into his smile. My throat had swelled raw in this sad awe, and I had turned away, drowning in grief waters all my own. The kind of faith I had witnessed in John, that spoke in the dead boy’s home, that kind of faith puts real vertebrae into a verse like Ephesians 5:20: “always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ …” (NASB, emphasis added). That lets the Word take on their flesh, their lips speaking hardest eucharisteo.

I hang up the phone and I stand for a long while, just watching Levi breathe. Watching Levi live. He had an extra serving of ice cream on his plate last night and licked the mint right off the plate. He might not have. He slept in a bed last night, on clean sheets, and beside his brother. What if he hadn’t? He woke and walked out across the dew grass this morning, the blades all sewed up in dangled gossamer of spiders. Why him? He worked alongside his dad in the barn, swept the broom hard; and when his dad said he was growing quite the muscles, he had laughed. He might not have.

Who deserves any grace?

A line of cumulous white races across July, dragging grey shadows across our fields. Levi whimpers, slips his bandaged hand higher on the pillow. And I remember words of evening graces and morning miracles:

Here dies another day

During which I have had eyes, ears, hands

And the great world round me;

And with tomorrow begins another.

Why am I allowed two?[4]

Why doesn’t anyone ask that why question?

Why are we allowed two? Why lavished with three? A whole string of grace days?

Isn’t even one grace enough? Me with child alive, thinking of faces of mothers in cemeteries—my own mama—I want to yell, “NO!” No, it is not! I want to take both fists and splinter that door with an ungrateful demanding for more. Why can’t we be allowed days indefinitely? How can God ever expect us to say good-bye to the eyes, ears, hands of those we cherish more than our own?

Is it because His heart awaits us at Home? Because if we don’t say good-bye here, when will we meet Him there? Because these are the lens words for a life: Precious in His eyes is the homecoming of the saints (Psalm 116:15). Blood seeps through the edge of Levi’s bandage. I put the bottle of Tylenol back in the cabinet. I pull the pen out of the gratitude journal’s coiled spine, the one lying open on the counter always naming, endlessly naming, to one thousand and ad infinitum and I write it slow:

Levi’s index finger

Bandages and pain relief

That we are allowed two—a grace miracle I hardly ever notice.

When I realize that it is not God who is in my debt but I who am in His great debt, then doesn’t all become gift?

For He might not have.

When the night sky frays to day, smudged light coming up over fields, I wake Levi. Today’s our date with the city hospital, an operating table, a surgeon. He’s sleepy. He drags to the back door, holding his splint and bandaged hand to his chest, and I tie his shoelaces. The Farmer leans against the open door and takes my hand and I take Levi’s other one. We will pray for the going, the cutting, the healing. Then it comes, this murmur, and from my lips …

“Lord …” All the feelings since the blade and the breaking, all my questioning and asking, they swell, hot lava to the surface, and I choke it back, the thick farming hand squeezing mine.

“… that I’d day after day after day greedily take what looks like it’s good from Your hand—a child gloating over sweet candy …” My voice catches hard. I’ve been a thief, trying to hoard away all the good.

“… but that I’d thrash wild to escape when what You give from Your hand feels bad—like gravel in the mouth. Oh, Father, forgive … Should I accept good from you, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10).

I pray Job’s words and heat flows down liquid.

What if that which feels like trouble, gravel in the mouth, is only that—feeling? What if faith says all is … I think it. But do I really mean it?

I gather up Levi and hand and the man at the door kisses us both good-bye and we wind through the dawn dark. The radio snaps out sound bites of presidents, celebrities. Lights flicker in milking parlors, farmers at chores. I click off the radio and flip over to Scripture on CD. The gospel of Matthew. In the slumber of towns, the odd kitchen light flashes by. Jesus said … And then Jesus replied … And a voice from heaven said … My fingers wrap hard around the steering wheel. At a graying intersection of two empty country roads, I idle long, stunned. It’s coming out of the same stereo speakers, like the voices of presidents, dignitaries. These are the words of God.

Headlights make holes in the slate morning. I nudge Levi gentle, awed, “We’re listening to God.” And out of the speakers, I hear Him clear:

But Jesus told him, “No! The Scriptures say,

‘People do not live by bread alone,but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:4)

I listen and I live fully on what comes straight from His mouth. That Serpent, he’s slithered with the lie that God doesn’t give good but gives rocks in the mouth, leaves us to starve empty in wilderness and we’ll just have to take lessons from Satan on how to take the stones of the careless God and make them into bread to feed our own hungry souls. And I hear it straight out of the speakers on a July morning breaking, the Son of God saying there is only one way to live full and it is “by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

It is all that Jesus used to survive in the desert, in His wrangle with silver-tongued Lucifer, only this: “It is written.” And it’s the Word of God that turns the rocks in the mouth to loaves on the tongue. That fills our emptiness with the true and real good, that makes the eyes see, the body full of light.

I glance at the clock … Levi is to roll into the operating theatre in three hours. The Word of God whispers through the speakers. Levi drifts back to sleep. The countryside splits open, the earth unpeeled into sun. The wheat wears gold.

I drive out of dark and into morning glory.

I awaken to the strange truth that all new life comes out of the dark places, and hasn’t it always been? Out of darkness, God spoke forth the teeming life. That wheat round and ripe across all these fields, they swelled as hope embryos in womb of the black earth. Out of the dark, tender life unfurled. Out of my own inner pitch, six human beings emerged, new life, wet and fresh.

All new life labors out of the very bowels of darkness.

That fullest life itself dawns from nothing but Calvary darkness and tomb-cave black into the radiance of Easter morning.

Out of the darkness of the cross, the world transfigures into new life. And there is no other way.

Then … yes: It is dark suffering’s umbilical cord that alone can untether new life.

It is suffering that has the realest possibility to bear down and deliver grace.

And grace that chooses to bear the cross of suffering overcomes that suffering.

I need to breathe.

I roll down the window. I inhale the pungency of a passing hayfield in bloom of clover, ditches with those all together wild black-eyed Susans swaying in early air. I try to think straight, truest straight. My pain, my dark—all the world’s pain, all the world’s dark—it might actually taste sweet to the tongue, be the genesis of new life?

Yes. And emptiness itself can birth the fullness of grace because in the emptiness we have the opportunity to turn to God, the only begetter of grace, and there find all the fullness of joy.

So God transfigures all the world?

Darkness transfigures into light, bad transfigures into good, grief transfigures into grace, empty transfigures into full. God wastes nothing—“makes everything work out according to his plan” (Ephesians 1:11).

We pull into the hospital parking lot, and I park across from the entrance sign that reads Oncology. A mother pushes a wheelchair down the sidewalk, bald-headed son gripping a stuffed tiger. I open the door for Levi.

I wear my lenses, and I pray to see. Who knows when you might climb a mount of transfiguration?

Levi and I sit on hard chairs, waiting. The turquoise paint in the waiting room is chipped. They’re in the midst of renovations, plastic draping off one corner of the room—everywhere, transfiguring. We sit in a room with bodies broken and casted, bent over the walkers … burned, the skin dressed in gauze, the skin exposed, grafted, mottled, scarred. No one speaks. We try not to stare at each other but I can’t keep myself from saying it to God, this raw sob echoing St. Teresa of Avila’s: “If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few!”[5] Can I be that honest?

I am David lamenting, “O LORD, why …?” (Psalm 10:1). Why this broken world punched through with losses? “O LORD, how long?” (Psalm 13:1). How long until every baby thrives and all children sleep down the hall from a mom and dad wrapped up in love, and each womb swells with vigorous life, and every single cancer clinic sits empty and we all grow old together? How long? I know a neighboring Mennonite woman folding away the clothes of her dead son and I sit in a room full of the battered and busted and I lament: please. And He takes the empty hands and draws me close to the thrum of Love. You may suffer loss but in Me is anything ever lost, really? Isn’t everything that belongs to Christ also yours? Loved ones lost still belong to Him—then aren’t they still yours? Do I not own the cattle on a thousand hills; everything? Aren’t then all provisions, in Christ also yours? If you haven’t lost Christ, child, nothing is ever lost. Remember, “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” [Acts 14:22 NASB], and in “sharing in [my Son’s] sufferings, becoming like him in his death” you come “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection” [Philippians 3:10 NIV].

And I nod it soft. Yes, Father, You long to transfigure all, no matter how long it takes. You long to transfigure all.

The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of this world, and I see—this, all this, is what the French call d’un beau affreux, what the Germans call hübsch-hasslich—the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as “Le laid peut être beau”—The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace.

In infant psychology at university, I learned that newborns, shown side-by-side images of two faces, spend more than 80 percent of their time looking at the attractive face. So to see through the ugliness to beauty, won’t I need to wear a lens? I’ll need my own transfiguration to enter a kingdom where the Prince is born into a manure-smeared feed trough, where Holy God touches leper sores, breaks bread with cheats, where God wounds Himself through with nails on a cross and we wear the symbol as beauty.

Is the Son of God nauseated by the stench of twelve years of soaked menstrual cloths when He speaks tenderly to the bleeding woman? Is He repelled by the crazed eyes, the foul talk, or bad breath of the demon-possessed man. Staggeringly, doesn’t even Beauty Himself become the ugly-beautiful? “There was nothing beautiful … about his appearance” (Isaiah 53:2). He became ugly that we might become beauty. The God of the Mount of Transfiguration cannot cease His work of transfiguring moments—making all that is dark, evil, empty into that which is all light, grace, full.

I take to heart the words of Thomas Aquinas, who defined beauty as id quod visum placet—beauty as that which being seen, pleases.[6] And if all the work of transfiguring the ugly into the beautiful pleases God, it is a work of beauty. Is there anything in this world that is truly ugly? That is curse?

Levi looks up at the clock, counting minutes down. Levi, with freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose, cowlick swiping his brush cut, with a hand, who breathes, boy who has been allowed the grace of two. He leans against my shoulder, lays his bandaged hand in my lap. I look down at his ugly-beautiful. And I see what I am. I’m amputated. I have hacked my life up into grace moments and curse moments. The chopping that has cut myself off from the embracing love of a God who “does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow” (Lamentations 3:33), but labors to birth grief into greater grace. Isn’t this the crux of the gospel? The good news that all those living in the land of shadow of death have been birthed into new life, that the transfiguration of a suffering world has already begun. That suffering nourishes grace, and pain and joy are arteries of the same heart—and mourning and dancing are but movements in His unfinished symphony of beauty. Can I believe the gospel, that God is patiently transfiguring all the notes of my life into the song of His Son?

What in the world, in all this world, is grace?

I can say it certain now: All is grace.

I see through the woods of the world: God is always good and I am always loved.

God is always good and I am always loved.

Everything is eucharisteo.

Because eucharisteo is how Jesus, at the Last Supper, showed us to transfigure all things—take the pain that is given, give thanks for it, and transform it into a joy that fulfills all emptiness. I have glimpsed it: This, the hard eucharisteo. The hard discipline to lean into the ugly and whisper thanks to transfigure it into beauty. The hard discipline to give thanks for all things at all times because He is all good. The hard discipline to number the griefs as grace because as the surgeon would cut open my son’s finger to heal him, so God chooses to cut into my ungrateful heart to make me whole.

All is grace only because all can transfigure.

Levi reads his book, good hand holding it in lap, and I read the sacred script of pain bound in plaster, the illuminated manuscript of twisted bones, the text gilded of crutches hobbling. I wear the lens of the Word and all the world transfigures into the Beauty of Christ and everything is eucharisteo. And when I find Levi groan-writhing in post-op, blood leaching through gauze, his tongue all thick hot, I stroke his hair. I lean over stainless rail of the bed and I press my cheek to his flushed red and I ask soft if he’d like water and he nods. I put the straw to his lips.

In early light so new, heads hovering close over a glass of water in a hospital room, we drink the sweet right out of the world.

CHAPTER 6

what do you want? the place of seeing God

Every time you feel in God’s creatures something pleasing

and attractive, do not let your attention be arrested by them alone,

but, passing them by, transfer your thought to God and say:

“O my God, if Thy creations are so full of beauty,

delight and joy, how infinitely more full of beauty, delight

and joy art Thou Thyself, Creator of all!

Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain

“You will want to see this.”

He takes my shoulders in his hands, large and field worn, and draws me close. I fight the urge to writhe.

It’s not him. Not his hands holding me, the whisper of his voice, his eyes inviting me now. It’s just that I’m feeling time’s strangling grip, struggling to make a cathedral of the moment, to hallow it with the holy all here. It’s late and I’ve got an even later dinner to dish onto eight empty plates. A half dozen children noisily, happily, ring the table with their hardly washed hands and silly jokes replete with snorts and grunts and dirty feet still needing bathing. And I haven’t served the dinner yet, haven’t sliced up the loaf of bread yet, haven’t put away the basil, oregano, parsley, the peelings of carrots, the skins of onions, the jars of tomatoes. Still have to grate the cheese into circles in the soup bowls. Still have to wash the dishes, sweep the floors, wash up kids, turn down beds, kneel for the prayers weary and long and needy. My gratitude journal is buried under a mess of papers over the sink’s sill with yesterday’s snippets of the list that never ends:

Book pages turning

Child sobs ebbing

Boys humming hymns

Click of a seat belt

Fender rattling with stones of gravel roads

Wind rushing through open truck window

Horse hooves clopping down a side road

Laundry flapping

Buggy clattering

Squeak of old swing swaying

Laughter

—but nothing counted today. And I know my camera is lying facedown in a cupboard and my windows are finger smudged and my head is right spun and when I carry the water pitcher to the table it leaves drops of clear on the counter, round rim of a circle, one large in the center, and it looks like an eye.

For a moment, I notice.

I stare back.

Then wipe it away.

The aping racket rises and I feel it mount and I almost yield to its vise, almost acquiesce, almost desecrate the space with words that snap. “Can’t I just see whatever it is later?”

But he’s holding on to me gentle. He’s smiling broadly. He’s leaning his face into all my knotted angst, and his hands slide down my arms, bold, blind love, and his thick fingers twine mine. “Come.”

“Right now?” Can’t he see the kids, hear the kids, feel the crush of all these kids?

He’s grinning silly, man-boy with a secret he can hardly contain.

He leads me the impossible distance of a whole two steps to the windowsill. I’m transfixed. Wonder gapes the mouth open and spirits the words away.

His whisper brushes the curl of my ear, “When I saw it, I knew you’d want it too.”

Want it? Who can breathe? I am moon-eyed and moonstruck. I turn to find his eyes to find words. “Serve dinner? So I can …” So I can what? What is it exactly that I want to do?

“… So I can run out there?”

He’s laughing at me all wide-eyed, but I don’t care and he’s used to it, he who made vows to a woman seeker and hunter and chaser. No—he didn’t actually make vows to that woman. But this is the woman I am becoming. That eucharisteo is making me—fulfilling thanks vows to God. I am starved and the feast makes me wild. Because really, who gets to touch the moon? Tonight, she’s close. I might.

He grins, nods go, and I breathe relief and I remember to grab the camera off the shelf but forget to close the cupboard and I am gone, out the back door, across the back lawn, apron still on.

I take flight. I feel foolish, like a woman taking photographs of cheese, but I feel four again, the spring after we buried Aimee, and my younger-by-only-twelve-months-and-thirteen-days brother John, he and I ran whole lengths of fields at twilight to touch the sun, an ember burning up the horizon. I remember how the swallows had swooped, the flame light thick with bugs for their bills. My mama had sat at field’s edge rocking my only five-month-old sister and watched us chase and she smiled, understanding the hoping. We ran and ran. My dad drove a tractor down the field, tilling up the earth.

I am old now. Why am I after the moon tonight? I have known all these years since that you can never run all the way to the end and lay your hand up against awe. I have grieved this. Are the staid Mennonite neighbors peering out their kitchen windows to see the farmer’s wife flapping across the wheat stubble? I do have shoes on. Are my own children nose-pressed to the window watching my race?

The moon rounds immense, incandescent globe grazing ours. Her gravity pulls, pearl filling deepening sky, stringing me unto the universe.

If I race to field’s edge, earth’s rim, can I stroke her lustrous curve, drink her lily-white skin?

I laugh. I am still a child.

She is a harvest moon aching, swaying over the golden fields, womb swelling round with glory, and she’s rising away. I gather my apron close, run faster through the wheat stubble. Who am I to see glory with unveiled face? Is that what the child seeks?

Is that why I escape motherhood at the dinner hour, because I can’t see the glory there, here, right in the moment? Still? And me slowing for the hunt, looking for even one thousand more gifts, sanctuaries in moments, seeking the fullest life that births out of the darkest emptiness, all the miracle of eucharisteo. Yes—maybe that woman-child. The one who lives her life in circles, discovering, entering into, forgetting and losing, finding her way round again, living her life in layers—deeper, round, further in. I know eucharisteo and the miracle. But I am not a woman who ever lives the full knowing. I am a wandering Israelite who sees the flame in the sky above, the pillar, the smoke from the mountain, the earth open up and give way, and still I forget. I am beset by chronic soul amnesia. I empty of truth and need the refilling. I need come again every day—bend, clutch, and remember—for who can gather the manna but once, hoarding, and store away sustenance in the mind for all of the living?

An arrow of geese catch the moon before I do, black silhouettes shooting her through. I run harder. The flock lifts her higher into night coming down, lonely cries heralding the coming autumn. They pierce me through. There at our fence line where our wheat field gives way to foreign land, I gasp to inhale, crumple to earth. The moon on the geese wings climbs.

I am of terra; they are of heavens. I’ve only come to witness.

Is this why I’ve come?

The weight of all this stark beauty crushes lungs. Mine burn.

I had written it down after I had read it, that I might hope to remember it: the Hebrew word used throughout Scripture to describe God’s glory, kabod, is derived from the root word meaning “heaviness.”

Dusk and all the arching dome and the field and the great-bellied moon, it all heaves, heavy with the glory. I heave to breathe: The whole earth is full of His glory. Sky, land, and sea, heavy and saturated with God—why do I always forget? Yeah, I’m no different than Jacob, Jacob waking from sleep before full moon rising. “Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I wasn’t even aware of it!’ But he was also afraid and said, ‘What an awesome place this is! It is none other than the house of God, the very gateway to heaven!’” (Genesis 28:16—17). This moment, this place, is none other than a gate into heaven. God’s glory rains down, weighs down earth’s tented heights, and grace tears through, ripping sky canvas and me clear open. Everywhere windows and gates, and I did not know it. No. I have known it and I have forgotten it and I remember it again.

The weight of God’s glory, not illusory or ephemeral, but daily and everywhere, punctures earth’s lid and heaven falls through the holes. I kneel in wheat, moonstruck.

Bowed at the edge of the world, Jesus asks me spun in circles, me coming to, only to lapse and to forget again, He asks soft of me who is yet again lost what He asked of the man born blind: “What do you want me to do for you?” (Luke 18:41).

Why have I run?

A mama with children, a wife with full house, a Father’s child living eucharisteo and even the hard—His eye is on me under the moon, penetrating my own shroud. His breath falls warm. He knows what I want, need. Has He called me because He wants me to do my own plumbing of the soul? What do you want?

Isn’t that the sole question we all need to circle back to, over and again? And who knows the answer?

I feel in it my chest first, before any answer or layer of answer finds shape in image, words. (For all real answers, don’t they come in strata, gradations of understanding?) My body knows it, the way tension drains from shoulders and a heart unknots. I loosen, breathe long. I slow. Moonlight cascades and a smile spreads in its wake. What do you want? Why have I run? A summer of traveling to the city with Levi for follow-up visits with the surgeon. A summer of physiotherapist appointments and daily bending exercises, trying to work his gnarled joint, stretch through the scar tissue stiff. Yes, the whole of life, these exercises to break down the knotting scar tissue from the fall. A summer of pain. Always the running. A summer of grace. Always the revelation. Pain is everywhere, and wherever the pain there can be everywhere grace, and yes, Jesus, I am struggling and I get turned around but I think I know, at least in part, what I want. If I had never run, if I had never fallen, and here, I am not sure I would have known with blazing clarity. I may not know all that it means, but this is what I want.

This kingdom laden with glory, this, the pearl of great price, the field I’d sell everything to possess. This is the pearl that crams me with a happiness that throbs, serrated edge, pit open wide for more of His glory.

The only place we have to come before we die is the place of seeing God.

This is what I’m famished for: more of the God-glory.

I whisper with the blind beggar, “Lord, I want to see” (Luke 18:41).

That’s my moaning pulse: “See. See.”

The camera.

I slip the camera out of the pocket of my apron. How can this sensor, point-and-shoot in the palm of my hand, capture what the eye sees, the soul memorizes? I kneel low on wheat stalks at the edge and I frame up the moon. I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep. Isn’t beauty what we yearn to burn with before we die? What else so ignites, hot flame? Beauty is all that is glory and God is Beauty embodied, glory manifested. This is what I crave: I hunger for Beauty. Is that why I must keep up the hunt? When I cease the beauty hunt, is that why I begin to starve, waste away?

I laugh—because haven’t I run? Pursued? I must be Sehnsucht for beauty, that word C. S. Lewis used from the German—to long for (sehnen) like a mania (sucht). I have run because I long for beauty like a mania, a woman leaving dinner, running in apron for the cast of the moon. When I can’t find it—is that why my soul goes a bit wild, morose, crazed? Strange—I hadn’t even noticed that I’d been hungry for Beauty until I ran for the moon. Today frayed, unraveled at the edges a bit with dishes and dirt and paraphernalia dumped by kids. But only yesterday I had been numbering moments, counting graces. I thought I had felt soul-nourished. Is that it? Like an addiction, a compulsion that can’t stop its seeking, do I always want to see more beauty—more of the glory of God? Because that is what I am made for—to give Him more glory. More eucharisteo, more. And not only yesterday. But today—manna today or I starve.

The moon has all my gaze, God-glory heavy and mounting. I kneel here, needing to know how a hung rock radiates—ethereal? This beauty is not natural, not of nature. This beauty is not merely form and color but God’s “shining garment’s hem.”[1] Beauty is the voice endlessly calling and so we see, so we reach. Doubt the philosophies, doubt the prophecies, doubt the Pharisees (especially the ones seen in mirrors), but who can doubt this, Beauty? Beauty requires no justification, no explanation; it simply is and transcends. See beauty and we know it in the marrow, even if we have no words for it: Someone is behind it, in it. Beauty Himself completes.

I am alive!

Focus and click, focus and click.

A hunter trying to capture. And none of the shots are close enough, wide enough, radiant enough for the hunter. What is this that I feel sitting here, coursing through me relentless, hot, ardent? I have to seek God beauty. Because isn’t my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? Every moment I live, I live bowed to something. And if I don’t see God, I’ll bow down before something else.

Is worship why I’ve run for the moon? Not for lunar worship, but for True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself. God is present in all the moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on hemlocks, the moon over harvested wheat. Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things. I know it here kneeling, the twilight so still: nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature. I had told it once to a questioning son that theology is but that born of theos and logy—God and study—and theology is to study God. I had always thought of the hefty concordances on the high shelf in the study, but isn’t this, too, the deep study of the Spirit God? The revelation of God over the farm?

How I want to see the weight of glory break my thick scales, the weight of glory smash the chains of desperate materialism, split the numbing shell of deadening entertainment, bust up the ice of catatonic hearts. I want to see God, who pulls on the coat of my skin and doesn’t leave me alone in this withering body of mortality; I want to see God, who gives gifts in hospitals and gravesides and homeless shelters and refugee camps and in rain falling on sunflowers and stars falling over hayfields and silver scales glinting upriver and sewage flowing downriver. Eucharisteo is everywhere and I want to see eucharisteo everywhere and I want to remember how badly I really want to see.

Here. How could I have forgotten how badly I wanted this?

To bow down and rightly worship.

It is still, stalk still.

One lone stem of wheat bows its head before me. Behind it, the perfect backdrop of pure moon full, pregnant with the grandeur.

I reach out my hand, run my finger up its silk slender shank. This is how. I learn how to say thank you from a laid-low head of wheat. From the wind rustling glory through the dried blades of grass raised, from the leaves in the silver maple hushed awed still. I pay tribute to God by paying attention. I raise one hand high. And another hand high. I bow the head down. I lay the body down. “The life of true holiness is rooted in the soil of awed adoration. It does not grow elsewhere,” writes J. I. Packer.[2] I am bowed like wheat, raised like grass blades, grounded and rooted to now, and from Him and through Him and to Him are all things and all is His and everything that has breath praises Him and I whisper it again, again, again, remembering, remembering, remembering.

Eucharisteo, eucharisteo, eucharisteo.

Isn’t He the face of all faces? He is infinite and without end, without jaw or sockets, everywhere eye. The face of the moon, the face of the doe, the face of derelict, the face of pain, His the countenance that seeps up through the world, face without limitation, face that “plays in ten thousand places.”[3]

All beauty is only reflection.

And whether I am conscious of it or not, any created thing of which I am amazed, it is the glimpse of His face to which I bow down. Do I have eyes to see it’s Him and not the thing? Satan came in the scales that gleamed, a thing of beauty, and he lured the first woman and she was deceived. Beauty, the disguise, can slide dangerous. True, authentic Beauty requires of us, lays claim to us, and it is this, the knees bent, the body offered in obedience. A pantheist’s god is a passive god, but omnipresent God is Beauty who demands worship, passion, and the sacrifice of a life, for He owns it. Do I have eyes to see His face in all things so I’m not merely dazzled by the trinket, glitzy bauble dangling for the ogling, till it flakes and breaks and I strain for more to lie prostrate before?

I rise slowly, roll face to sky darkening navy, strung with that one large pearl; I lie quiet. I lie long. August lies out. A sparrow flits low, a surprise. That moon is so white. I could lie here forever, murmuring the only language of the God-glory: gratitude. It’s all so … unlikely. I have never before run. I have never before stretched out prostrate. Why am I out in this evening field, lying under moon? Is eucharisteo opening the eyes wider, the heart deeper? Is this paradox—that giving thanks for what is, creates an appetite for more—not for more things, but for seeking more of God to give more glory?

Looking is the love. Looking is evidence of the believing. The moon swings higher. I remember reading it only weeks before, sitting in the surgeon’s waiting room with Levi, the hospital renovation progressing slowly, the patients healing only slightly faster. (Transfiguration can be the long miracle.) Levi had daydreamed out the waiting room window, listened to the stories of car accidents and work injuries from the bandaged, and I had held my book. I’d read how the Israelites looked about and saw much to bemoan, much to complain about: “and they began to speak against God and Moses. ‘Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die here in the wilderness?’ they complained. ‘There is nothing to eat here and nothing to drink. And we hate this horrible manna!’” (Numbers 21:5). I had looked around at the wounded all waiting. I had turned back to the page. And what does God send the ingrates? What came to the ingrates in the Eden beginning? A slithering blanket of snakes that coil around the complaints of the Israelites, open wide and pierce the flesh with the fang. Always, ingratitude makes the poison course. The cure against thanklessness’s bite? The remedy is in the retina.

Then the LORD told him, “Make a replica of a poisonous snake and attach it to a pole. All who are bitten will live if they simply look at it!” So Moses made a snake out of bronze and attached it to a pole. Then anyone who was bitten by a snake could look at the bronze snake and be healed! (Numbers 21:8—9, emphasis added).

How we behold determines if we hold joy. Behold glory and be held by God.

How we look determines how we live … if we live. A patient’s name was called and a father helped a son to his feet and the boy leaned hard.

And I had read how Jesus says, “In the same way that Moses lifted the Serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up—and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life” (John 3:14—15 MSG). I had looked up from my book and into the face of a boy with his ear bandaged and I didn’t want to imagine what had happened. I had tried to take it in: Isn’t Jesus Himself saying that people need to see and then believe—that looking and believing are the same thing? That in the right inner looking, we can gain the right outer life … the saved full life? I had read it and had forgotten (always!) but I remember it now, mooning under the moon, “Faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God.”[4]

Faith is in the gaze of a soul. Faith is the seeing soul’s eyes upon a saving God, the saving God of twisted bodies, the saving God of harvest moons. Is that summer’s last cricket strumming lonely? The diameter of the night orb fills all the atmosphere over our farm. Faith is the seeing eyes that find the gauze to heaven torn through; that slow to witness the silent weight, feel the gold glory bar heavy in palm, no matter the outer appearance. Seeing is the spiritual life.” … they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and return and be healed” (Isaiah 6:9—10 NASB). “Looking comes first,” wrote Lewis in The Great Divorce.[5] First, the eyes. Always first, the inner eyes.

Two crickets sing now in echo. That leper who had returned with thanks—his faith that gave thanks was counted by Jesus as saving faith. And now this—that faith is not a once-in-the-past action, but faith is always a way of seeing, a seeking for God in everything. And if the eyes gaze long enough to see God lifted in a thing, how can the lips not offer eucharisteo? The truly saved have eyes of faith and lips of thanks. Faith is in the gaze of a soul.

Has His love lured me out here to really save me?

I sit up in the wheat stubble, drawn. That He would care to save. Moon face glows. We are head to head. I am bare; He is bare. All Eye sees me. An ample hoop rung with brilliance, the moon is like a wheel of chrysolite riding up the sky, full of the radiance of the glory of the Lord. I want to be cherub, all eye, looking back. To be like the cherubim, with “eyes all over their bodies, including their hands, their backs, and their wings” (Ezekiel 10:12). To be Moses, who “kept right on going because he kept his eyes on the one who is invisible” (Hebrews 11:27). That is what makes us persevere through a life: to see Him who is invisible! It is my prayer with the last crickets of summer: O Lord, open the eyes of my heart, the eyes of my hands, the eyes of my mouth, the eyes of my feet. I long to live all eye.

A gust of wind rattles hollow through dried leaves of a patch of soybeans. The leaves in the silver maple murmur of fall coming, fall coming. I feel too bared. Can I live all eye and gaze on God and live?

I must, to believe, and so said Jesus, but I too remember,“‘But you may not look directly at my face, for no one may see me and live’” (Exodus 33:20). And yet there are days where I know it in the shadows: “Truly you are a God who hides himself” (Isaiah 45:15 NIV). (Or is it me who hides?) Other times, Jacob times, I know it is the only way to be delivered from the blackness: “So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered’” (Genesis 32:30 ESV). And yet at all times, I wonder: Can anyone with the oily stains of a pride-splotched heart see God?

I look down at the stained skirt of my apron, washed in moonlight. And I think I can stand here? I think I can brave this Beauty? Not an empty, tinny beauty but a Fierce Beauty, Flaming Fire who burns through the thick masks and leaves the soul disrobed. I am naked and I am right ashamed. I know how monstrously inhumane I can be. Raging at children for minor wrongdoings while I’m the one defiling the moment with sinful anger. Hoarding possessions while others die of starvation. Entertaining the mind with trivial pretties when I haven’t bowed the head and heart in a prayer longer than five minutes in a week. My tongue has had a razor edge and my eyes have rolled haughty and my neck has been stiff and graceless and I have lived the filth ugly, an idolater, a glutton, and a grace thief who hasn’t had time for the thanks.

I wrap the hem of my splattered apron around a finger. I cannot raise the eye. We’ve read it around the table at the close of the meal, us all with Bibles open, and we’ve read the verse with one voice: “God blesses those whose hearts are pure, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). What am I doing out here? I am filthy rags. Is sight possible? I’ve only got one pure thing to wear and it’s got Made by Jesus on the tag and the purity of Jesus lies over a heart and His transparency burns the cataracts off the soul. The only way to see God manifested in the world around is with the eyes of Jesus within. God within is the One seeing God without. God is both the object of my seeing and the subject who does the act of all real seeing, the Word lens the inner eye wears. To sit in the theater of God and see His glory crack the dark, to open the eyes of my heart to see the fountain of His grace—thousands of gifts—I have to split heart open to more and more of Jesus. Who can split open the eyelids but Jesus? He tears the veil to the Holy of Holies, gives me the only seeing I have. I have been lost and now I am found and I sing it softly, before the flying of the flocks south: “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart …”

The lunar pearl overwhelms and I am all eye to the world. It is strange, how joy pains. In the burn of the ache, there is this unexpected sensation of immense moon slowly shrinking and God expanding, widening and deepening my inner spaces. Is that why joy hurts—God stretching us open to receive more of Himself?

I ache-gaze on bits and blades of creation and all things created fade, diminish, and only the features of the Creator shimmer, magnified. My eye sees through to the heights and Him and things beneath are seen for what they are: but finite talismans pointing up. That full moon rising higher holds me rapt. This is where I see it.

God always sits here.

Joy that fills me under full moon is the joy that always fills God. What I’ve run to brush up against, to press all my throbbing emptiness into, these heavy glory waters endlessly flood from Him and He spills. Skirts of stars swirl through black space and waterfalls canter over stones, manes of runaway horses, and lone mushroom tilts in the shadows of soundless forest and God sees it all. This is His endless experience because this is who He is, beauty overflowing. My moon wonder is but a glimpse, foretaste, of what God always sees, experiences. He is not tyrant or despot. I smile under the moon.

For God is happiest of all.

Joy is God’s life.

Don’t I yearn for it to be mine?

Is this why I’ve run? Answering the invitation to live in Him who is happiest of all? I am a child again and tonight I have run to the end of the horizon and this time I have touched Him and I twirl in full apron skirt, spinning hem brushing the grass heads bowed and I laugh joy. It’s dawning, my full moon rising: I was lost but know I am found again, Jesus, and I know what I want: to see deeply, to thank deeply, to feel joy deeply. How my eyes see, perspective, is my key to enter into His gates. I can only do so with thanksgiving. If my inner eye has God seeping up through all things, then can’t I give thanks for anything? And if I can give thanks for the good things, the hard things, the absolute everything, I can enter the gates to glory. Living in His presence is fullness of joy—and seeing shows the way in.

The art of deep seeing makes gratitude possible. And it is the art of gratitude that makes joy possible. Isn’t joy the art of God?

It’s true! What that ancient man Irenaeus, very disciple of the apostle John, wrote: “The glory of God is the human being fully alive and the life of the human consists in beholding God” (emphasis added).[6] For all the reasons He called me to come across field, He surely called me for this. Don’t I give God most glory when I am fully alive? And I am most fully alive beholding God!

I spin happy, and in the radiant expanse, engulfed, I glimpse the endlessness of God. My desires, don’t they stretch out endless, like God? Desire has no end, no bounds, but fuels all living, all lungs, and I spin. Our endless desires are fulfilled in endless God.

I stop the whirl. The grass heads still. I can see the house lights glowing in the back bank of windows up on our knoll. I should go to dishes and children needing baths and stories and prayers. But I just don’t want this moon to end. The desires submerge into God. I want to see God endlessly. I long to merge with Beauty, breathe it into lungs, feel it heavy on skin. To beat on the door of the universe, pound the chest of God with the psalmist: “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek … all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD, and to seek him in his temple” (Psalm 27:4 NIV). Faith is the gaze of the soul and I want to see in. So I can enter in. Enter into God. I would read it long after my moon chase, words of C. S. Lewis, and I would startle at my unknowing echo of his cry:

What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.[7]

Yes.

Is the longing for the Beauty the happiest place of all? Longing to gaze upon the Beauty of the Lord and to seek Him, the place where all the joy spills from. No matter how manifested, beauty is what sparks the romance and we are the Bride pursued, the Lover pursuing, and known or unbeknownst, He woos us in the romance of all time, beyond time. I ache for the oneness. Would eucharisteo take me even into that? I would pursue and He would pursue and how could I have known where all this journey would lead?

The moon climbs, a radiating disk gliding, shimmering space rock that slides on invisible gossamer, and behind me, somewhere in thickening dusk, children call, running across fields. “Mama? Mama!” And they find me and laugh that I’ve chased the moon and I laugh that I have too. How I laugh and it feels so right.

“Did you catch it?” Hope-Girl asks, breathless and grinning.

“No, I didn’t catch the curve of the moon.” I look up, wishing. “But I did find what I wanted” … what He longed for me to know.

All eye, all eye.

The hills darken black. We walk up the last knoll, our shadows outlined in the sun smoldering down in the west. The children talk, laugh, holler. I am happy. I smile, slip a hand into a pocket, cool night air drifting in. I’m no pilgrim at Tinker Creek, no recluse at Walden Pond. I can’t live in moon moments. (Could I?) I live with the broken bodies. Wasn’t He awakening me to Beauty everywhere, because beauty is the way of the inner eye? The wheat stubble scratches my legs as I walk the fields. One hand fingers the hem of my splotchy apron. I am going back. I look up, try to find her again. I’m reluctant to untether from the moon. The world I live in is loud and blurring and toilets plug and I get speeding tickets and the dog gets sick all over the back step and I forget everything and these six kids lean hard into me all day to teach and raise and lead and I fail hard and there are real souls that are at stake and how long do I really have to figure out how to live full of grace, full of joy—before these six beautiful children fly the coop and my mothering days fold up quiet? How do you open the eyes to see how to take the daily, domestic, workday vortex and invert it into the dome of an everyday cathedral? Could I go back to my life and pray with eyes wide open?

Praying with eyes wide open is the only way to pray without ceasing.

If I unwrap eucharisteo down to its next layer, will I find more of the answer? His love had invited me into this part of the answer—wouldn’t He lead on into the rest? I half spin apron skirt, half smile—Him happiest of all. Wouldn’t He show me? The children run on ahead, their voices carrying long through the night coming on.

I come slow up the field, watching their black silhouettes fly, and the mind numbers gifts:

Laughter at twilight

Glow of the front porch light

The last cry of geese

I could live blind, either in black or in blaze. I’ll be all eye, all blinded by glory.

The windows of home burn bright.

CHAPTER 7

seeing through the glass

Nothing here below is profane

for those who know how to see.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The last of the sunflowers stands tall in the kitchen garden right off the porch. It’s early, too early, really. The picket fence gate at the side of the garden lies open. I have scissors in hand and hopes for just a ring or two of fresh petals. In the house, empty vases line the counter. Emptiness opened wide for beauty filling. So I have gone looking, always looking.

The finches, yellow on wing, flit among the high leaves. The ground is damp from the night dreams. I stretch high on the toes to reach a crowning sunflower, perfect. A few lower ones, bowed, still new. I walk the rows of giants and I gather. My arms are wet with dew, full of summer.

In the house, I trim stems, shear off lower leaves, fill the open vase mouths, and I arrange. I set the vases of the golden heads out. One on the side table by the window, another at the end of the hand hewn-mantel, beam from a barn that the school bus drove past all my childhood. I bring beauty in. I take the last to the table, set its bouquet in the middle of the quilted runner of pinwheel stars that Mama stitched for my birthday, thrifted cotton ginghams, old men’s shirts, faded summer work. For a moment, I bend, fingering petals.

I peer into a wide circle of sunflower, a mother searching a child’s face.

My boys come in from the barn.

I lay out bread. They banter, hard, the brother-scrape. I stir orange juice, keep breathing, ask them to be kind. I brought the beauty in: why now smash the vases? One of the boys tosses in slices of bread for toast, careless. I set out plates in sun. The Tall-Son lathers butter on toast, but only his. I notice.

“Son, your brother? Could you butter his toast?” He reaches for peanut butter, fires me a white-hot glare. Morning flashes.

How’d I stumble into shadow and cross fire?

“Please. Might you pass a piece of toast down to your brother?”

“Sure.” His sarcasm slaps. I steady myself on the table’s edge.

Nothing could have braced the gut for what he did next, shrapnel ripping intestines.

He whips a piece of toast into his brother’s face.

Why throw toast in your brother’s face?

His brother rages red and I’m sucker punched and it’s toast, yeah, but isn’t it his heart and I shake the head stunned, losing words, and the child I ripened with, bore down and birthed from the heart, he turns on a Tuesday, tears out a few more of the pulsing chunks and where did I go so wrong?

Who cares about bringing the beauty in when all the inner rooms reek? It’s toast and it’s not toast and I can’t shrug it off because it’s the profanity of it, the desecrating of one made in the Image. I slam hands down on the table when I’d like to grab hold of his throat. Can I exchange the clay eyes shot red for the sacred seeing?

“Why?” My mother-anger could crack vases.

He’s smirking.

“Why would you throw that at him?” I’m too shrill, too gaped, too blind-white angry.

Straw comes in all shapes and the back of a camel can be weak and it’s toast and surely there’s something behind it that I should seek out but I don’t even care. It’s my own face that obscures the face of God. How can I help this son of mine see when I can’t see? The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they’ve held their own peace? Christ incarnated in the parent is the only hope of incarnating Christ in the child—yet how do I admit that people made in the Image can make me blind to God, my own soul contorting, skewing all the faces? Why gouge out your own eyes when crusading for Beauty? Pain drives us to the mad acts.

I am mad. I’d like to will myself out of it but the blood is pounding loud in my ears and the sons slash at each other with the dagger eyes. Why? Can I just go back to the moon and the brazen glory? Wind and trees and sky wake me and I’m Peter on the mountaintop, stirring to see The Glory in all its God-radiance, stammering out that it’s good to be here; let’s build shelters and never depart (Luke 9:28—36). But there’s always the descent from the mount. The meeting of the crowd, the complaining, the cursing. Obvious and immediate transfigurations exhilarate the faith, but the faithful can forget transfigurations, faces that once changed appearances. We betray Who we know. Didn’t Peter?

How to be a contemplative here, seeing the fullness of God with the six children 24/7, the one farm, the six hundred sows, eight hundred piglets, only a whole lot of craziness? I hang my head. A boy pounds a plate with a clenched fist. The other blithely butters toast. How do I fix this? Them? Me? In the messy, Jesus whispers, “What do you want?” and in the ugly, I cry, “I want to see—see You in these faces.” He speaks soft, “Seek My face.” I want to answer with David, “My heart says to you, ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek’” (Psalm 27:8 ESV) but I’m desperate to grab someone, anyone, and shake hard, “How do I have the holy vision in this mess? How do I see grace, give thanks, find joy in this sin-stinking place?”

The moon and the geese fly high, unsullied and wide-eyed, and I’m too twisted.

A boy drives a plate hard back down the table at his brother. And God tries to gently drive the words of Caussade from the knowing of my head to the bleeding of the heart:

You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies—though that never occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet [God’s] beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is.[1]

A blasphemer.

I pull out a chair from the table, sink down. The sunflower heads have turned low. The Tall-Son is chewing his toast too loud at the other end of the table. What compels me to name these moments upheavals and annoyances instead of grace and gift? Why deprive myself of joy’s oxygen? The swiftness and starkness of the answer startle. Because you believe in the power of the pit.

Really? I lay my head on the table. Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love? That Satan’s way is more powerful, more practical, more fulfilling in my daily life than Jesus’ way? Why else get angry? Isn’t it because I think complaining, exasperation, resentment will pound me up into the full life I really want? When I choose—and it is a choice—to crush joy with bitterness, am I not purposefully choosing to take the way of the Prince of Darkness? Choosing the angry way of Lucifer because I think it is more effective—more expedient—than giving thanks?

Blasphemer.

Blasphemer.

I rake my fingers through my hair. Who’s the real sinner at breakfast on Tuesday, the one with the stinking pig in the temple?

Senses are impaired if they don’t sense the Spirit and somebody, tell me, how do I tear open tear-swollen eyelids to see through this for what it really is?

If there are wolves in the woods—expect to see wolves; and if there is God in this place—expect to see God.

Can I be so audacious? To expect to see God in these faces when I am the blasphemer who complains, who doesn’t acknowledge this moment for Who it is?

“Do you even care what he did to me first?” Future-man is standing now, hands stuffed hard into pockets, glowering. His stack of toast is growing cold.

I should want to care, and I try to will myself, but I’m hard, so tired. I turn away. See, somehow I’ve got to see, got to feel.

How did Jesus do it again? He turned His eyes. “And looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave …” (Matthew 14:19 NIV). He looked up to heaven, to see where this moment comes from. Always first the eyes, the focus. I can’t leave crowds for mountaintop, daily blur for Walden Pond—but there’s always the possibility of the singular vision. I remember: Contemplative simplicity isn’t a matter of circumstances; it’s a matter of focus.

One boy is turned, shaking his head, angry, at the window, the world; the other is eating another slice of toast, defiant. I take a deep breath, say nothing to them, but I look up to heaven and I speak it to Him here because there are wolves in the woods and there is God in this place and I haven’t done this before and it feels strange but I give thanks aloud, in a whisper: “Father, thank You for these two sons. Thank You for here and now. Thank You that You don’t leave us in our mess.” My heart rate slows. Something hard inside softens, opens, and this thanks aloud feels mechanical. But I can feel the heart gears working. “Thank You for toast. Thank You for cross-grace for this anger, for the hope of forgiveness and brothers and new mercies.” I look for the ugly beautiful, count it as grace, transfigure the mess into joy with thanks and eucharisteo leaves the paper, finds way to the eyes, the lips. This, this is what Annie Dillard meant:

Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, ‘not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.’ … I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing…. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present.[2]

I speak the unseen into seeing and I can feel it, this steady breathing in the rhythm of grace—give thanks (in), give thanks (out). The eyes focus, apertures capturing Beauty in ugliness. There’s a doxology of praise that splits the domestic dark.

The sun spreads out across the table, a cloth, and sunflowers ring light. I see it. All the world is window. No material is opaque. If we are willing to see—people, circumstances, situations, relationships—all is transparent.

All of this globe is but glass to God.

And eucharisteo washes the glass. Eucharisteo, wholesale worship, its redemptive work wiping away the soot of days cindered.

I look over at my son tearing away at toast. Why am I a habitual reductionist? Why do I reduce God in this moment to mere annoying frustration? Why do I reduce The Greatest to the lesser instead of seeing the lesser, this mess, as reflecting The Greatest? I have to learn how to see, to look through to the Largeness behind all the smallness. Isn’t He here?

The humiliated son can stand it no more, pushes away from the table, pushes past his fuming brother, slams the door behind him. I exhale. Remember: Gratitude redeems, making us the realists. Mouth thanks to the heights and see the real reality. Give thanks to keep the gaze on heaven.

Glass to God.

Eucharisteo always precedes the miracle.

Why do I have spiritual Alzheimer’s, always forgetting?

I can feel it, the grip on my shoulders, and it’s St. John who whispers it clear too, how to find God in the mess:

We [actually] saw His glory…. For out of His fullness(abundance) we have all received [all had a share and we were all supplied with] one grace after another and spiritual blessing upon spiritual blessing and even favor upon favor and gift [heaped] upon gift. (John 1:14, 16 AMP, emphasis added)

That’s the mystery map to the deep seeing! We saw His glory … because … we have all received one grace after another. We have all received one grace after another, but we only recognize the glory of God in this moment when we wake to the one grace after another. “If you want to be really alert to seeing Jesus’ divine beauty, his glory … then make sure you tune your senses to see his grace,” urges theologian John Piper (emphasis added). “That’s what his glory is full of.”[3] Grace—that is what the full life is full of, what the God-glory is full of. To see the glory, name the graces. Retune the impaired senses to sense the Spirit, to see the grace. Couldn’t I do that anywhere? Why is it so hard? Practice, practice.

I run my hand across the table, gathering crumbs, and look carefully into the face of my son. His arms are stiff, his jaw set, his eyes near mine and drenched black-blue, like the day I first held him. This day too has bruising of its own. I glimpse Who this moment really is and I’m tender. The swine flees.

I lay a hand on his shoulder, but he bristles, skin grown from this skin and sick of this skin. “Can you tell me more? I’m ready. I really do want to understand.” I climb his eyes down into who he is. He’s echo-black.

He jerks his shoulder to flip away my hand, steps back from my stench. We eye each other and mine beg and his ice. The lips I once traced after the lullabies, they turn surly and hard.

“You never see what he does!” He leans into my face. “But you sure do always see what I do!” He wants to stare me down, shoot me down. This is old pus, infected wounds. This is not about toast. Is it ever all about now? His howl fills the face, his and mine. Heart that once beat under mine, how did we get here? How did I fail you? How did I see things all wrong? I am Hagar lost with boy and the boy bangs the table with his fist and I want to step back, flee. Who can witness the dying, but how can I leave him?

“Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water” (Genesis 21:19 NIV).

Hagar and her boy were dying of thirst with a well less than bowshot away.

What insanity compels me to shrivel up when there joy’s water to be had here?

In this wilderness, I keep circling back to this: I’m blind to joy’s well every time I really don’t want it. The well is always there. And I choose not to see it. Don’t I really want joy? Don’t I really want the fullest life? For all my yearning for joy, longing for joy, begging for joy—is the bald truth that I prefer the empty dark? Prefer drama? Why do I lunge for control instead of joy? Is it somehow more perversely satisfying to flex control’s muscle? Ah—power—like Satan. Do I think Jesus-grace too impotent to give me the full life? Isn’t that the only reason I don’t always swill the joy? If the startling truth is that I don’t really want joy, there’s a far worse truth. If I am rejecting the joy that is hidden somewhere deep in this moment—am I not ultimately rejecting God? Whenever I am blind to joy’s well, isn’t it because I don’t believe in God’s care? That God cares enough about me to always offer me joy’s water, wherever I am, regardless of circumstance. But if I don’t believe God cares, if I don’t want or seek the joy He definitely offers somewhere in this moment—I don’t want God.

Blasphemer.

In His presence is fullness of joy. He is in this moment.

The well is always here. God is always here—precisely because He does care.

God faithfully provides water for His people everywhere.

But how do you make yourself want joy? I look across at my son glaring me down.

When you know you’re Hagar and you finally come to the end of yourself and all the water in your own canteen is gone and you know that you and your son are going to die if you don’t get some joy to the lips and down the parched throat—and now; when you can no longer stand to see those you love die all around you from your emptiness; when the emptiness is so dark you are driven to struggle again for joy, to cry for joy to the Joy God there and you beg, sob—remember: You have to want to see the well before you can drink from it. You have to want to see joy, God in the moment.

I cradle the son’s glare with the beholding eyes.

Thank You, Lord, for that one strand that always curls near his ear, that scar he ripped across his cheek when he was three, those eyes sky like his father’s.

I am praying with the eyes wide open and prayer becomes revelation. My eyes change and he changes in them and I remember, as G. K. Chesterton observes, how “our perennial spiritual and psychological task is to look at things familiar until they become unfamiliar again.”[4] The unfamiliar becomes the real and the real is only seen by the lovers and I count him as grace, I embrace now as love, and I know how lovers alone see the true.

Love is not blind; love is the holy vision.

For a glancing moment, I am Hagar healed, Hagar who had spoken once before in a desert exile:

Thereafter, Hagar used another name to refer to the LORD, who had spoken to her. She said, “You are the God who sees me.” She also said, “Have I truly seen the One who sees me?” So that well was named Beer-lahai-roi (which means “well of the Living One who sees me”). (Genesis 16:13—14)

Hagar had known God sees for she had met Him before, needy in the sands, yet when sent away the second time, Hagar had forgotten. She had laid her son down to die and couldn’t see any well. In the domestic cloud of dust and family, I too can forget the One who sees me, but in eucharisteo, I remember. I cup hands and all the world is water. The well, it is still there. There is always a well—All is well.

I choke out my son’s name. His skin is transparent … glass. And he stares long, brims … quavers … falls. And I cradle him, the Boy-Man, flood over shoulders.

“You wear anger to hide all this sadness?” I lay a hand on his back, whisper words. He pulls away, bites lip quivering, dams it up.

“Where do you find happiness anymore?” I ache for the once-laughing child now struggling into his teens and the man-skin. He stares out the window, away, murmurs it to no one and anyone. “I think I am happy … when I am alone.”

I ache toward him sitting by the window and I am mother searching child’s face and I crack … I brim … I fall … and the tears scald. Oh, son … So thirsty. There is always a well.

I remember a moon and the face of Him who is happiest of all who wants us to be happiest in Him and oh, son, I know, I know, this peopled life. Jacob wrestled with God and called the place Peniel, meaning “God’s face.” This daily joy struggle, above all, it is a Jacob-wrestle to see God in the faces we face. How do I help my son, so thirsty?

Tell him what eucharisteo is doing. How I’m wrestling to name graces to see glory in the moment, graces to see glory in the faces. I could tell him stories of people like us, living the strain of everyday family life, who tried eucharisteo too. How we tried a ten-day eucharisteo experiment. Ten days of eucharisteo as a stress intervention, eucharisteo as a practical miracle, not on the mount, but in the faces and the crowd. Whenever we felt stress in relationships, we audibly gave thanks. I could tell him how one woman wrote, “I can feel the gratitude starting to soak into my soul. I’m becoming someone else, a new person, one that I like better than the old.”

How another voiced, “I’m learning to express gratitude before stress gets a chance to creep up in a lot of situations…. I’m so thankful for what God has allowed our humble attempt at gratitude to work in our home! I just can’t help but share how life changing this gratitude experiment has been!”

That another’s words make me cry joy because it is my life story?

“Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness. I have begun to ‘see’ again.”

My human experience is the sum of what the soul sees and I see precisely what I attend to and what the eyes focus on is what the life is. See the well, son, the well.

He’s sitting now, turned toward the window and fields and gnawing his lip, trying to stem the hollow burn running down his cheeks, and I finger for words.

“I get it, you know.” He doesn’t turn. Brushes his cheek with the back of his hand. What day when I wasn’t looking did his hand become like his father’s? Like a man’s. He’s weeping. My son is crying and he’s letting me in, sharing what it’s like to be behind his eyes. Eucharisteo gave me this … It was just toast. Ugly toast. And He showed me how to give thanks for it. And then the miracle—a soft heart. To let me hold his heart.

“I get how hard it is to live with the people and find the joy.” I lower into the chair across from him. The babe has become me. His hair is darkening, only a few lighter strands now in his cowlick, like my cowlick—one I inherited from my father.

“You see it every day here. How I wrestle for joy, for seeing God in the faces … you see how I fail.” I reach across the table for him. Stretch my hand out to touch his. His knuckle’s cut. From welding steel? From the miter saw? Always creating, designing … dreaming.

He turns slightly—toward me. He lets me touch him. Oh son. He is not alone; I am not alone. I want to hold him in my arms, make my skin, his skin, right again. Return to Eden. I can’t change our skin. Maybe our eyes? I catch his. He doesn’t look away. He lets the eyes hold him.

“Can I help you find the laughter again? I’m looking too.”

My eyes beg. His thaw. He shifts, sighs. I almost miss his murmur.

“I’ve already tried giving thanks.” Oh.

“You knew? I mean, you knew that giving thanks is the way into joy? Because thanksgiving is the way we enter into God?”

“I hear you doing it all the time.” He slumps into the chair, lays his head on the table.

The thrash for joy can be gory, loud.

Did he see it on the counter too, the constant counting of gifts in the journal under the words “Ugly Beautiful” scratched across the page?

Toppling closets (books!)

Toys all over the floors (boy joy!)

Two-month-old paint tape around trim (someday soon!)

Mismatched socks

Lost library book

Apple cores, apple cores, apple cores

Dusty shelves

Splattered mirrors …

Does he see me doing the hard eucharisteo, counting the ugly as grace, transfiguring the ugly into beauty with thanks? Does he see?

“And?” I pull my chair closer, gently squeeze his hand.

“It’s just so … hard.” He mutters, closes his eyes.

He knows my skin; I know his.

“Hard. Yes. So hard.” He lies with his eyes closed. I feel it too, boy of mine. Days, just close my eyes to it all. “It’s hard, eucharisteo. I am trying, really trying: Practice. The discipline of thanks only comes with practice.” I know, son. So many days, so hard. I want to give up too. But give up the joy-wrestle … and I die.

“The practice of giving thanks … eucharisteo … this is the way we practice the presence of God, stay present to His presence, and it is always a practice of the eyes. We don’t have to change what we see. Only the way we see.” I whisper it to the son with the eyes closed. His chin trembles. Eyes leak tears. Oh, son. So hard. To see all this material world as transparent, glass to God. To practice migrating one thousand gifts on paper to one thousand all eyes to one thousand smiles on lips. To transfigure the principle to the skin.

But if we don’t intentionally commit to the hard practice of seeing, don’t we die in barren wilderness? Anger, frustration, emptiness?

I lay my hand on my son’s cheek, his tear-wet cheek. We are of a piece.

“Son? You can’t positive-think your way out of negative feelings. About your brother, about me, about people. Feelings work faster than thoughts; blood runs faster than synapses.” His eyelashes quiver. “The only way to fight a feeling is with a feeling.”[5]

I stroke his cheek slow.

I move closer, hoping my words might revive. “Feel thanks and it’s absolutely impossible to feel angry. We can only experience one emotion at a time. And we get to choose—which emotion do we want to feel?”

He lies still. Sometimes acknowledging what we really want is hardest of all.

I wrap an arm around him, his back warm in sunlight, and lay my head on his one broad shoulder. Under my face, his shoulder rises and falls, labored breaths. Death sadness. I must still try to give my son water.

“Can I tell you a story?” I can feel his muscles relax. Since the day I first held him, I’ve told stories to this curl of ear. He and I, stories, this is our space.

“There was once a wrestler like us. His name was Jacob. And on a night when he was all alone, staring up at the stars in the dark, unable to sleep because he was scared to go meet his brother the next day, this brother that he had run away from because the brother had wanted to actually take his bare hands and kill him. Talk about taut family ties.”

“Esau.” Ah. He’s listening. His voice, hope in the sands. I smile into his shoulder, squeeze him tight.

“Yes. Esau. Jacob was terrified to meet his brother Esau. And all night long, he wrestles hard with a man, flailing and thrashing and struggling and he grips his fingers deep into the leg, the torso of the man, and he utterly refuses to let go, right till the sun embers kindle up the horizon. It’s hard. He’s exhausted. He’s confused.” I sit up. Rub my son’s back in slow, wide circles. The midmorning sun’s rays through the window are strengthening.

“And when the man can’t overpower or throw off Jacob, he touches the socket of Jacob’s hip on the sinew of the thigh. The man breaks Jacob. Then day breaks. And he commands Jacob to let him go.” I run my fingers up through his hair, that cowlick of mine.

“But Jacob, he refuses to let the man go. He doesn’t even really know who the man is, can’t clearly see his face, but he begs, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” And the man turns to Jacob and gives him a new name. Names him Israel, the God-wrestler. Says to him, “You’ve wrestled with God and you’ve come through.” All that while Jacob hadn’t known who he was wrestling. Just a man in the dark, a man he couldn’t see. And in the black, all that night, it was the face of God over him that he was struggling against. God is behind the faces, son. Can we see?” My hand rests on his head and my chest hurts.

“And you know what Jacob named the place? Peniel—means ‘God’s face.’ He said, ‘I saw God face-to-face and lived to tell the story!’”

I smile. “But there’s more to the story … There’s always more to every story.” His lips twitch a sad smile and I see it. I half grin. “A long time ago, a preacher named James H. McConkey asked a friend of his, a doctor, ‘What is the exact significance of God’s touching Jacob upon the sinew of his thigh?’”

“And the doctor told him, ‘The sinew of the thigh is the strongest in the human body. A horse couldn’t even tear it apart.’”

These are the words I have never forgotten, what preacher McConkey said: “Ah, I see. The Lord has to break us down at the strongest part of our self-life before He can have His own way of blessing with us.”[6]

Like this morning, breaking us down at the tough parts … Then we see. See the blessing.

I lean in close to my boy’s ear.

“And when Jacob went out the next morning to meet that brother he dreaded? After the dark of the wrestle, and being torn right apart in his strongest part, by a man he didn’t even know was God—do you know what he said? He looked into the face of his brother, that brother who had wanted to kill him, and he said, ‘To see your face is like seeing the face of God’ [Genesis 33:10 NIV].” I rest my hand on his arm, arm so still.

“Wrestle with God, beg to see the blessings … and all faces become the face of God. See, son?”

Water? Do you see the water?

Under my hand resting on his arm, I can feel the drain of his wrestle, mine. I look into his face. His eyelids rest easy. His cheeks have dried. We’ve shaken and the blood has rushed and we have felt the heat of the rage, the fire of the enemy, the flame of True God’s holiness, and we have done war. We’ve dug in our nails and we haven’t let go until the blessings; we have practiced, we have extended, we have clung and we’ve been rung out. We have panted it and we’ve cupped palm to the heavens, “Bless me, Bless me. I won’t let go.”

Like Jacob, we ask, breathless and heaving, where He is, who He is, for His name here, the only real blessing. “Please tell me your name.” We have named the graces and there found His name, Glory, and in the face of man we have seen the face of God. Then Him, the blessing, God, joy-water in the desert.

But wells don’t come without first begging to see the wells; wells don’t come without first splitting open hard earth, cracking back the lids. There’s no seeing God face-to-face without first the ripping.

Tear the thigh to open the eye.

Wrench the socket of the hip, the tough grizzle of the heart, and heal the socket of the eye. It takes practice, wrenching practice, to break open the lids. But the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is.

“Son?”

He lifts his head. He opens his eyes and he looks into me and this heart revives. My son … He blurs. There is always a well. All is well.

“You want to—want to practice eucharisteo with me?”

The round of our eyes hold us liquid round and within him I warm, and the love really sees.

“Yeah, Mom.” He smiles slow. “Yeah … we could practice thanks together.”

… Grace eyes

… My hand near his

… The calm after the storm

The moon will rise and those who limp know how to see. Who can live with hand wide open?

Son turns his hand open toward mine. I lay mine down gentle.

The morning light makes halos of the bouquet of sunflowers, their faces all upturned.

CHAPTER 8

how will he not also?

All I have seen teaches me

to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

God and I, we’ve long had trust issues.

Outside the laundry room window, snow falls, the down of angels.

The swing under the maple hangs still. The empty sandbox fills with white, and the lane down by the barn, up by the sheds, sleeps. Bread bakes in the oven. I can smell them, five earthy loaves in early winter. They’ll be rising like old mountains, rounded, brown, smooth. My bread rising up on the top rack in Marjorie Knight’s bread pans, same pans that baked the loaves she sliced up for me as a girl, my brother and I having biked the mile of gravel to her farm, up her long lane through the dark of the tall spruce trees. How many years has she been gone now too? I can still hear her laugh, the way all her words ran together like a stream of laughter, her mountain-humped back shuddering mild with each chuckling word. I stand in the laundry room. Smelling bread, remembering, folding towels. Watching snow fall. In the corner windowpane, I can just catch the hem of winter’s quilt sloping down the barn … The barn.

That barn housing our livestock, our very livelihood, seems more like a house of death to me, the death of dreams, and in an instant, the bottom of the stomach gives way and I’m all pit and the towel stack teeters, falls to the floor. It’s the market that really keeps falling, tumbling, the market prices for our pigs, and I’d felt weak when I read it in the farm paper last week, the dire prediction of family hog farming in Canada on the brink of extinction. It’s true for us: Our once-thriving lives on this farm teeter on the edge of collapse and only a glimpse of that barn strikes rank fear into me and what we’ve already lost directly out of pocket piles far higher than those snowdrifts blowing in around the barn. Every day we get up and every day we work hard and every day we produce food that gouges deep out of us. How long until we are gone?

I turn my back to the window. I am bent in the refolding of the towels, refolding of the interior world, when the Farmer comes into the laundry room on his way out of the house back to the barn and the work we keep doing that’s draining us dry. I can feel him watching me. A whisper of wind moans.

“Ann …. it’s OK.” Dare I brave his eyes?

But he’s not looking at my face. He’s looking at my feet.

“You.” He shakes his head. “You! Look at your toes.” I glance down. “They’re all curled tight.”

I hadn’t noticed.

He lays his foot gentle on my curled ones, kneads my shoulders to stroke out all my worry. “We’re going to be OK. Out there, the barn, the pigs, the sows. We’re going to make it through this.” He wraps his arm around my shoulder, pulls me up into that strength.

“Relax … just trust. Just trust.”

Just trust? When the farm economy is imploding and all around us farming families are losing their land or being buried in loans and debts, us all just hanging on by the skin of the teeth? I take a deep breath, exhale. I lay a weak smile into his shoulder and all that faith.

Anxiety has been my natural posture, my default stiffness. The way I curl my toes up, tight retreat. How I angle my jaw, braced, chisel the brow with the lines of distrust. How I don’t fold my hands in prayer … weld them into tight fists of control. Always control—pseudopower from the pit. How I refuse to relinquish worry, babe a mother won’t forsake, an identity. Do I hold worry close as this ruse of control, this pretense that I’m the one who will determine the course of events as I stir and churn and ruminate? Worry is the facade of taking action when prayer really is. And stressed, this pitched word that punctuates every conversation, is it really my attempt to prove how indispensable I am? Or is it more? Maybe disguising my deep fears as stress seems braver somehow.

I curl my big toes, crush them hard into floorboards. I’ve breathed the air of angst, bent the bones with anxiety.

I am five and lie in bed and dark night, eyes drilling ceiling with the fierce determination. My sister’s little hands, ones I held as she tottered down the back walk, they’re rotting in the dirt under a gravestone and I don’t have to close my eyes to see the forces of the composting. If I don’t close eyes, I won’t die. In our house, we don’t talk of heaven; the dead bury the dead.

Mama comes, shadow through the doorframe, and she sits and she sings and she rubs my feet. She strokes my hair. She coaxes sleep.

“I don’t want to be dead in the dirt like Aimee.”

Mama holds me and we rock and rock.

I am seven and the nurse clatters in with a tray of pea soup and I gag. Pea soup. But pea soup isn’t acidic, doesn’t scald the lining of the stomach wall. Dr. Munn stands in the hallway, tells Mama he thinks my fetal-curled agony is an ulcer. I am seven. I am seven and in second grade and I have an ulcer.

“Is she a particularly anxious child?”

I can’t hear Mama’s murmurs, only the fevered toddler with pneumonia whimpering in the crib by the big window looking out on the steepled church across the street.

When I return to school after that weeklong hospital stay, I sit in the desk behind Matthew Rowbotham and I tap him on the shoulder and I tell him straight out, “You can’t tell me jokes anymore. Laughing makes my gut hurt too bad.” In our house, we don’t do much of that either, laugh.

I am seventeen and my hand lets it go, an empty jam jar, glass over concrete, and the shards rain across the garage floor. In the shattering, the tightness inside cracks. The pain drains. I finger for the sharpest edge, long and smooth, and lay it against the bare skin of the inner arm and I cut long and watch it all run, salty red tear. I don’t want to die. I just want to bleed out of me.

The long years after my salvation and baptism at sixteen, I break and cut away the self-hatred, the anxiety, right at the wrist, right up the arm. Slicing the flesh burns, burns away pain, and the blood drops, the angst it ebbs, flowing far out and away. I try to pray.

I am twenty and waiting for the elevators in Varey Hall on a bitter cold day in February, when that first panic attack snaps me at jugular and I twist bits of the neck skin between fingers, tear for air. I’m wild for the door, the door. Claw through student swarm, the backpacks and books, to the lit exit sign. Winter blasts my face and lungs gasp for air. Back in dorm, I sit in a rocking chair by fourth-floor window, open my Bible. I rock and rock.

My mind is all scrambled and my heart won’t stop slamming the chest wall the day the psychologist hands me a slip of her scribbled ink, a prescription on a square of white, lays her hand on my shoulder. “It will help with the anxiety attacks, the agoraphobia.”

Agoraphobia, “anxiety about being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult.” It’s my skin that is difficult to escape. I snap an elastic band around my wrist. For months, I swallow down the calm with the pills. I try to pray.

Fear is like this piano wire cutting round the wrists, life shackled, cutting deep, and the hands spasm, fists of control. Fear keeps a life small. The music dies and the joy drains. I’ve lived the strangle.

What if I opened the clenched hands wide to receive all that is? A life that receives all of God in this moment? How do you do that when the terror tears up your throat and you wear the burn scars of a razed past?

“You’re really worried, aren’t you?” His voice is soft. I catch that glance of his out the window, out to snow falling deep on barn, that roof over our livestock … our dying livelihood.

“Yeah … I guess I am.” I exhale. Farming families gathered this week in our community facing bankruptcy, asking for prayer. Record low prices breaking generations of earth tillers, herdsmen.

“Is there going to be enough?” He tucks a lost strand behind my ear, and I whisper more of the honest. My voice races only a bit ahead of the wave of panic. Do I look in his eyes and let him see how scared I am? “Maybe I’m just stressed …” That word again. Stressed.

Deep breath.

Stress isn’t only a joy stealer. The way we respond to it can be sin. I stand in the laundry room looking out at the barn, knowing that stress stands in direct opposition to what He directly, tenderly commands: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me” (John 14:1 NIV, emphasis added). I know an untroubled heart relaxes, trusts, leans assured into His ever-dependable arms. Trust, it’s the antithesis of stress. “Oh, the joys of those who trust the LORD” (Psalm 40:4). But how to learn trust like that? Can trust be conjured up simply by sheer will, on command? I’ve got to get this thing, what it means to trust, to gut-believe in the good touch of God toward me, because it’s true: I can’t fill with joy until I learn how to trust: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow” (Romans 15:13 NIV, emphasis added). The full life, the one spilling joy and peace, happens only as I come to trust the caress of the Lover, Lover who never burdens His children with shame or self-condemnation but keeps stroking the fears with gentle grace.

How can I trust when a troubled, joy-shriveled heart has pumped fear through the stiff veins of all my years?

I exhale. I’m still all knotted.

If I believe, then I must let go and trust. Why do I stress? Belief in God has to be more than mental assent, more than a clichéd exercise in cognition. Even the demons believe (James 2:19). What is saving belief if it isn’t the radical dare to wholly trust? I read it in one of the thick commentaries, that two hundred twenty times that word pisteuo is used in the New Testament, most often translated as “belief.” But it changes everything when I read that pisteuo ultimately means “to put one’s faith in; to trust.”[1] Belief is a verb, something that you do.

Then the truth is that authentic, saving belief must be also? The very real, everyday action of trusting.

Then a true saving faith is a faith that gives thanks, a faith that sees God, a faith that deeply trusts? How would eucharisteo help me trust?

I read the verse several times in the Amplified Bible on an afternoon while young hands work scales up and down the piano keys, “Jesus replied, ‘This is the work (service) that God asks of you: that you believe in the One Whom He has sent [that you cleave to, trust, rely on, and have faith in His Messenger]’” (John 6:29 AMP). That’s my daily work, the work God asks of me? To trust. The work I shirk. To trust in the Son, to trust in the wisdom of this moment, to trust in now. And trust is that: work. The work of trusting love. Intentional and focused. Sometimes, too often, I don’t want to muster the energy. Stress and anxiety seem easier. Easier to let a mind run wild with the worry than to exercise discipline, to reign her in, slip the blinders on and train her to walk steady in certain assurance, not spooked by the specters looming ahead. Are stress and worry evidences of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God? To stay in love? I don’t like to ask these questions, sweep out these corners where eyes glare from shadows. But this I must ask and I do, out loud, to the C-scale being played with certainty: Isn’t joy worth the effort of trust?

Because I kid no one: stress brings no joy.

In fact, stress may be far worse than that: “He who believes [who adheres to and trusts in and relies on the Gospel and Him Whom it sets forth] … will be saved …; but he who does not believe [who does not adhere to and trust in and rely on the Gospel and Him Whom it sets forth] will be condemned” (Mark 16:16 AMP).

Without trust in the good news of Jesus, without trust in the good news of God’s saving work even in this moment, without an active, moment-by-moment trust in the good news of an all-sovereign, all-good God, how can we claim to fully believe? This is the trust I lack: to know that if disaster strikes, He carries me even there. Trust in the wholeness of the gospel—including this moment, good news too—and be saved. Choose stress, worry, anxiety, reject what God has given now, which is good news too—refuse to trust—and be condemned.

I’ve just begun to feel around the outside edges of it, here in crumbling economics, the fretfulness of parenting, the dizziness of the twenty-first-century spin. Just begun to realize it, and it catches in the throat:

If authentic, saving belief is the act of trusting, then to choose stress is an act of disbelief … atheism.

Anything less than gratitude and trust is practical atheism.

I wince. Perhaps the opposite of faith is not doubt. Perhaps the opposite of faith is fear. To lack faith perhaps isn’t as much an intellectual disbelief in the existence of God as fear and distrust that there is a good God. If I don’t emotionally believe, practically believe, in the goodness of God, am I a believer? Don’t the believers have to believe? Don’t the saved have to trust the Savior? For yes, salvation from sins, but this too: the salvation from fear.

True, certainly, there are organic, biological causes to anxiety, and there may certainly be underlying chemical issues that warrant medication. I have filled prescriptions. This has been right. All anxiety is not spiritual. And yet I know and haltingly confess: Much of the worry in my own life has been a failure to believe … a wariness to thank and trust the love hand of God.

I make soup and I bake bread and I know my supreme need is joy in God and I know I can’t experience deep joy in God until I deep trust in God. I shine sinks and polish through to the realization that trusting God is my most urgent need. If I deep trusted God in all the facets of my life, wouldn’t that deep heal my anxiety, my self-condemnation, my soul holes?

The fear is suffocating, terrorizing, and I want the remedy, and it is trust. Trust is everything.

If fear keeps our lives small, does a life that receives all of God in this moment grow large too?

I light candles and slice bread for dinner.

Early Sunday morning, the Farmer still works in the barn with his crew of diligent kids, but I am slotted to serve in the nursery for first service at the chapel. He and the six kids will rush in from the barn later, make it in time for the second service. I drive on ahead to the chapel, through a countryside of snow glimmering around barn islands, bastions of hope, and I count gifts, do eucharisteo. Something always comes to fill the empty spaces and this is what I’ve come to do with white space. I invite thanks. For this is His will, thanks the one thing He asks to be done in everything and always and only because He knows what precedes the miracle.

I speak the graces aloud that I might see them, feel them:

Thank you, Lord, for …

Sculptures of drifts

Salvation of sinners, me, chief

Hoarfrost flaking off tree limbs, like the cold slipping off its necklace

All the clear sky descending into one black crow

Steam rising off barn …

Barns.

The edges of everything in sight darken. All that stands is a barn. I gaze at a barn up a lane and the eyes don’t dart away. Time slows with me all here.

It’s the absence of the thing that startles: I feel no fear.

I’m looking at barns, counting gifts, and I’m jarred: There is no choking angst. I am not anxious and I breathe easy and that worry child I’ve clung to, she deserts. I feel no fear and it makes no sense. The market still teeters, the future of our livelihood still hangs precarious, and there are still no guarantees, no assurances, no change. Nothing has materially changed since yesterday’s fears, last week’s anxiety. But I have. I’m changing. I am changing, deep changing, and I am giving thanks, doing eucharisteo and eucharisteo is eureka and I know why there’s no fear and why had I never seen it before? I can mark the spot on Road 178, right at the bridge, where the epiphany blinds like snow:

Thanks is what builds trust.

I cross over a bridge.

The Maitland River curls glassy, barns along both banks. I cross the bridge, and the river’s a ribbon of silver slipping under the bridge like a thread passing through eye of a needle. And in that moment, another strand of eucharisteo slips through the eye of my soul.

Who trusts the Bridge Builder?

Who trusts the Bridge Builder when you’ve seen your sister’s crushed body bleed lifeless on gravel? When you wake to find the kitchen eerily empty again, her bed vacant again, Mama long gone again, checked into a locked psychiatric ward again? Who trusts the Bridge Builder when you wake to snow on your blankets and winter blasting through cracked walls and dinner for four is a fifty cent box of Kraft Dinner rationed in half and your dad tells you every single day that he just doesn’t know how there is ever going to be enough?

How do you count on life when the hopes don’t add up?

A morning in late November, joy shimmers.

The hopes don’t have to add up. The blessings do.

I want to slam on the brakes right then and there on a side road in Howick Township, the light blinding.

Count blessings and discover Who can be counted on.

Isn’t that what had been happening, quite unexpectedly? This living a lifestyle of intentional gratitude became an unintentional test in the trustworthiness of God—and in counting blessings I stumbled upon the way out of fear.

Can God be counted on? Count blessings and find out how many of His bridges have already held.

Had I not trusted all these years because I had not counted?

I glance back in the mirror to the concrete bridge, the one I’ve boldly driven straight across without second thought, and I see truth reflecting back at me: Every time fear freezes and worry writhes, every time I surrender to stress, aren’t I advertising the unreliability of God? That I really don’t believe? But if I’m grateful to the Bridge Builder for the crossing of a million strong bridges, thankful for a million faithful moments, my life speaks my beliefs and I trust Him again.

I fearlessly cross the next bridge.

I shake my head at the blinding wonder of it: Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks. Remembering frames up gratitude. Gratitude lays out the planks of trust. I can walk the planks—from known to unknown—and know: He holds.

I could walk unafraid.

Is that why the Israelites kept recounting their past—to trust God for their future? Remembering is an act of thanksgiving, a way of thanksgiving, this turn of the heart over time’s shoulder to see all the long way His arms have carried. “Gratitude is the memory of the heart,”[2] writes Jean Baptiste Massieu, but gratitude is not only the memories of our heart; gratitude is a memory of God’s heart and to thank is to remember God.

I had read it this morning as I prayed the Psalms, the psalmist giving thanks for the memories:

Give thanks to the Lord of lords.

His faithful love endures forever.

Give thanks to him who alone does mighty miracles.

His faithful love endures forever.

Give thanks to him who made the heavens so skillfully.

His faithful love endures forever.

Give thanks to him who placed the earth among the waters.

His faithful love endures forever.

Give thanks to him who made the heavenly lights—

His faithful love endures forever. (Psalm 136:3—7)

In memory, the shape of God’s yesterday-heart emerges and assures of God’s now-heart and reassures of His sure beat tomorrow. And for the first time I see why the Israelites are covenanted with God to be a people who remember with thanks. It is thanksgiving that shapes a theology of trust and the Israelites bear witness and I see.

Isn’t this what ultimately Christ asks of us in the Last Supper? One of the very last directives He offers to His disciples, the one of supreme import but I too often neglect: to remember. Do this in remembrance of Me. Remember and give thanks.

This is the crux of Christianity: to remember and give thanks, eucharisteo.

Why? Why is remembering and giving thanks the core of the Christ-faith? Because remembering with thanks is what causes us to trust—to really believe.

I once read the words, “The foremost quality of a trusting disciple is gratefulness.”[3] And for months of naming blessings, these words had spurred me on, that gratitude was the preeminent attitude of the Christ-follower (think of it!), that eucharisteo returned me to God as non-eucharisteo had caused the fall from God. And of course—eucharisteo is at the heart of Christianity. But I had never seen, until a crossing of a bridge, that gratitude truly is the foremost quality of a believing disciple precisely because gratitude is what births trust … the true belief.

It’s only when you live the prayer of thanksgiving that you live the power of trusting God. I had never known what the door of eucharisteo might lead me into—and all the fears it might lead me out of. Light glints bright in my mirrors.

And in an empty pickup truck I hear voices scarred—the voices of people I have long loved and their voices cry pain and I honor them with the listening:

When your memories have an old man groping for your crotch, hot, foul breath on your face, and your skin crawls? Give thanks?

And an ultrasound screen stretches still and you’re sent home to wait for the uterine muscles to contract out the dead dreams?

Or the woman you lay down with, shared the naked and unashamed, she beds another man, hands you back the wedding albums, and says she never knew love for you, what then?

Remember and give thanks? For what? What if remembering doesn’t kindle gratitude? What if remembering just leaves third-degree burns?

The words sear. I know their voices and I remember their faces and the sun spills from window glass, slants gold across steering wheel. Eyes on the road, yellow line dashing like a line on hold, I wait, just wait. In the wait, memories blister. And in the still, Spirit comes and He whispers a name.

Christ.

And I see a world through His lens: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32 NIV).

He gave us Jesus. Jesus! Gave Him up for us all. If we have only one memory, isn’t this one enough? Why is this the memory I most often take for granted? He cut open the flesh of the God-Man and let the blood. He washed our grime with the bloody grace. He drove the iron ore through His own vein. Doesn’t that memory alone suffice? Need there be anything more? If God didn’t withhold from us His very own Son, will God withhold anything we need?

If trust must be earned, hasn’t God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips? How will He not also graciously give us all things He deems best and right? He’s already given the incomprehensible.

Christ our Crossbeam.

The counting of all blessings is ultimately summed up in One.

All gratitude is ultimately gratitude for Christ, all remembering a remembrance of Him. For in Him all things were created, are sustained, have their being. Thus Christ is all there is to give thanks for; Christ is all there is to remember. To know how we can count on God, we count graces, but ultimately there is really only One.

And the radical wonder of it stuns me happy, hushes me still: it’s all Christ. Every moment, every event, every happening. It’s all in Christ and in Christ we are always safe and “how will he not also …?”

When bridges seem to give way, we fall into Christ’s safe arms, true bridge, and not into hopelessness. It is safe to trust!

We can be too weak to go on because His strength is made perfect in utter brokenness and nail-pierced hands help up. It is safe to trust!

We can give thanks in everything because there’s a good God leading, working all things into good. It is safe to trust!

The million bridges behind us may seem flattened to the earthly eye, but all bridges ultimately hold, fastened by nails.

It is safe to trust.

Each bridge I need cross, from one moment to moment the next, is wholly safe, each leading me deeper into Him and closer to Home.

And I hear that hurting voice again, her and me and all those aching voices I have known and they still cry: There are moments that as sure as I bruise don’t feel like good things have been given. What of all the memories where Christ seems absent? When the bridge shakes and heaves, when “how will he not also?” reads more like “he will not.”

Trauma’s storm can mask the Christ and feelings can lie.

I draw all the hurting voices close and I touch their scars with a whisper: sometimes we don’t fully see that in Christ, because of Christ, through Christ, He does give us all things good—until we have the perspective of years.

In time, years, dust settles.

In memory, ages, God emerges.

Then when we look back, we see God’s back.

Wasn’t that too His way with Moses? “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back” (Exodus 33:22—23 NIV).

Is that it? When it gets dark, it’s only because God has tucked me in a cleft of the rock and covered me, protected, with His hand? In the pitch, I feel like I’m falling, sense the bridge giving way, God long absent. In the dark, the bridge and my world shakes, cracking dreams. But maybe this is true reality: It is in the dark that God is passing by. The bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite: God is passing by. God is in the tremors. Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by. In the blackest, God is closest, at work, forging His perfect and right will. Though it is black and we can’t see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present to us, I-beam supporting in earthquake. Then He will remove His hand. Then we will look.

Then we look back and see His back.

I look in my rearview mirror. The bridge I cross on the way to the chapel has fallen behind hills. I can still see, in memory, the river’s winding light, mirror on moving water.

God reveals Himself in rearview mirrors.

And I’ve an inkling that there are times when we need to drive a long, long distance, before we can look back and see God’s back in the rearview mirror.

Maybe sometimes about as far as heaven—that kind of distance.

Then to turn, and see His face.

At the corner of Road 178 and Gorrie Line, turning north, winter sun now slips behind, shadows of the bare maples drawn long over fields, ditches. The Tinholt farm deep under snow to the south, pigs sleeping under those roofs. I remember it right then passing pig farms. And that God would bring that story to memory now.

How bread became a comfort when bombs fell in World War II, shattering earth and all that is within and children wept for parents, cried for food. Refugee camps offered beds to huddling, dirty frames but could not furnish rest. Blast of days haunted pitch of nights. Nothing comforted shell-shocked, gaunt children. Fear rimmed the eyes and the hearts pounded, too loud, and the sleep fled. I know how nights blinked with the saucer eyes, the vigilant, terrified eyes. But somewhere in the dark, up between each narrow row of beds, a hand came to pull up the thin sheets, a hand to touch each bony shoulder and offer the fear-chased something to seize.

A piece of bread.

Dazed child hands took the bread, tucked in with bread. They gave thanks and rested on pillows of trust. The bread hushed the fears with assurance: “The sun sets and He has provided and you’ve ate. Tomorrow the sun will rise and again He will provide. You will eat bread again.”[4] Hands clutch bread. And finally it comes: the terrified sleep deep.

I shake the head; sleeping with bread, a strange mental image. And yet really … isn’t that what that gratitude journal on the counter is? Opening the hand to receive the moments. Trusting what is received to be grace. Taking it as bread. Recount how we laughed today. How we cried today and it too was grace. How He fed us. We ate. We filled. We swept up the crumbs. So He lays us down to sleep. Trust tucks in. He has blessed today. Will He not bless again tomorrow? Sleeping with bread may seem strange, but Jesus knew the wilder.

He knew I’d only trust, rest, when I lived with bread in hand. When I eat manna.

Eucharisteo, remembering with thanks, this is the bread.

We take the moments as bread and give thanks and the thanks itself becomes bread. The thanks itself nourishes. Thanks feeds our trust.

And it swells up in me and I can’t stop it, this surging sense of emancipation. Over a steering wheel in a white pickup, I can’t help this glorious laugh, the laugh of the unafraid and the bold, the giddy hope of the bread carriers, the manna eaters.

Until Home and Promised Land and complete clarity, I’m a wanderer crossing bridges, wanderer eating manna, eating mystery. For really, as long as I live, travel, is there ever anything else to eat? I either take the “what is it?” manna with thanks, eat the mystery of the moment with trust, and am nourished another day—or refuse it … and die. Jesus calls me to surrender and there’s nothing like releasing fears and falling into peace. It terrifies, true. But it exhilarates. This, this is what I’ve always wanted and never knew: this utter trust, this enlivening fall of surrender into the safe hands.

There is no joy without trust!

I can feel all the sinews releasing, the opening of the heart chambers, the unfurling of a life into one reverberating, exultant yes! “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:20 NIV).

Yes in Christ!

To the Enfleshed Yes who said yes to this moment and yes to last year’s illness and yes to the cracks of my childhood and yes to the nail and yes to my name in the Book of Life, hear me say YES! Not “I’m worried.” Not “I’m stressed out.” Not “I’m anxious.” Not “I’m too afraid.” Hear me say thank you. Hear me say YES! Watch me live a life of yes. To all that was and is and is to come. The power of sin and death and fear-sent-from-the-Enemy are forever ended because we can trust in the bridge even if it’s caving, in God even when it’s black, in manna-nourishment even when we don’t know what it is. The God whom we thank for fulfilling the promises of the past will fulfill His promises again. In Christ, the answer to the questions of every moment is always Yes.

The answer is always YES!

You’d think I’d want to devour the bread. Epiphany’s flicker, light here and gone. Come Monday morning, I forget. A child loses a book, has an exam, is late for practice. I stress over the trite, a phone call, what’s for dinner, a deadline. And there are far longer, higher bridges: Where is a child’s heart headed? Am I living God’s best for this life or am I bankrupting any legacy of faith? What misery lurks in the next twenty-four hours and the next? Stress can be an addiction and worry can be our lunge for control and we forget the answer to this moment is always yes because of Christ.

My baby is five. She falls asleep in my arms after the close of dinner prayers, us still seated at table, and I hold her long after the Farmer has put the rest of the tribe to bed, her curls damp and etching into my skin and I don’t move. Her face is turned toward mine, broad and open, eyelashes whisper of gold. I trace her lips, gentle curve of all things beautiful. The way her eyes danced today, soul light, the arch of her eyebrows and that lyrical laugh, heaven’s echo that entirely undoes me. Her breath is warm on my face, all that is alive and warm and breathing inside of her now, falling upon me, and I can’t capture it, hold it, this, her life now, me in this moment. She is leaving me, she’s growing up and moving away from me, and she stirs and I sweep back the crop of the golden ringlets. Stay, Little One, stay. Love’s a deep wound and what is a mother without a child and why can’t I hold on to now forever and her here and me here and why does time snatch away a heart I don’t think mine can beat without? Why do we all have to grow old? Why do we have to keep saying good-bye?

Again I refuse to walk the bridge into tomorrow’s unknowns, and I shame the Bridge Builder with my worries, my demand to just let me stay here, or go back, but no, not to go on, and again He comes to carry me flailing and anxious.

Am I always the atheist in Arms, me the believer who doesn’t believe?

And He soothes His own restless child in arms with the whisper, law of the universe that He’s writing deep into this heart: Eucharisteo always precedes the miracle, child.

And the chin trembles and I stroke her cheek, her body leaning back against mine, and I tentatively open the hand to receive the gift of now … I name the now gifts and I await miracle.

That button nose. I touch a finger to its tip and smile. I gaze long, memorizing.

That sprinkling bridge of freckles. I brush my finger across them. These, these I will remember.

The way that singular curl spirals over her ear. The way it winds like silken staircase, on and on and on. And I lean over and the lips seal the delicate spot on her forehead with a long kiss, her skin berry wine and I feel Him, His kiss of tender truth:

All fear is but the notion that God’s love ends. Did you think I end, that My bread warehouses are limited, that I will not be enough? But I am infinite, child. What can end in Me? Can life end in Me? Can happiness? Or peace? Or anything you need? Doesn’t your Father always give you what you need? I am the Bread of Life and My bread for you will never end. Fear thinks God is finite and fear believes that there is not going to be enough and hasn’t counting one thousand gifts, endlessly counting gifts, exposed the lie at the heart of all fear? In Me, blessings never end because My love for you never ends. If My goodnesses toward you end, I will cease to exist, child. As long as there is a God in heaven, there is grace on earth and I am the spilling God of the uncontainable, forever-overflowing-love-grace.

I wrap a thread of her curls around a finger. I stare into that face conceived in love, reflecting love, and I feel His fall soft on me. I am child in His arms and His breath falls warm upon my face and what I feel for this daughter He feels for me, and the gifts, all these gifts I keep counting, they are His love gifts and they’re slowly waking me up to the tenderest, fiercest Love of all.

Cradling this child, her eyelashes fluttering, her breath rising and falling in sure and steady rhythm, I know it in the pulsing, real, surest kind of way: “Perfect love casts out all fear.” His love had done that.

The table still needs to be cleared. The bowls washed. The bread put away. Snow falls in the dark, white on a barn roof. I can’t imagine what deeper layers of my wounds eucharisteo will gently peel back to heal, but I take her sleeping hand and trace the lines of her skin and I keep on counting blessings to keep on remembering to keep on walking out into the unknown.

I clutch soul bread and a Perfect Love that knows no end.

CHAPTER 9

go lower

God created the world out of nothing,

and as long as we are nothing,

He can make something out of us.

Martin Luther

I’m taking photos of light sliding across a wall, light lying out lazy along the pine-planked floor and pouring into the old bottles, when she asks for my camera. She’s not three and a half feet tall. I press the shutter on light seeping into the grain of the hewn beams, into that wood that stood as a tree under sun in the fields two hundred years ago. It’s like the rays are looking for a way in along the beam’s century-old cracks, light looking to revive the long-dead, to raise the cut down. I’m capturing beauty on a Tuesday morning in a farmhouse, giving thanks for now by reverencing it with a frame and the sacred eyes, but how could I have known it would be the child who would hand me the light?

“I take some pictures too, Mama? I won’t break anything, I won’t. Promise.” Her eyes are the oldest dawn, an otherworldly morn. She’s cupping her dimpled hands, showing me how she’ll cradle the lens. This child churns me to butter and her voice spreads me out and I slip the neck strap over her head.

“Which button do I press again?” She looks up at me. How do her eyes widen to catch that much unadulterated joy?

“Just press this one.” I could inhale her, fragrance of peonies in June.

She presses the shutter.

Vase. Click.

Doorway. Click.

Cupboards. Click.

Her laughter makes me laugh too and I can hear her going through the house, flagrantly recording all time and space. Child and mother, we’ve exchanged places, her seeking wonder, me with hands of pencils and LEGO bits and books, and I try to return order to chaos and she too returns to Eden, naming each moment with a frame.

Eventually she comes looking for me, her face filled with lens, her every step activating another click. I’m separating whites from darks in the laundry room.

“Can you show them back to me now?” She holds the camera out to me, as long as the neck strap will allow. Nothing can restrain her giddiness.

Settling into a pile of laundry, our heads lean toward each other and touch. Her arm around my neck, we scroll through her photos on the glowing screen. A picture of me bent over her, showing her which button to press. I’m mountain over her lens. I can feel the laughter rising up in her, and she cups her hand over her mouth to catch the bubbling pleasure. She’s enchanted by her photos. I grin.

Frame of a table. A doorknob. A bookshelf skewed on a tilt.

Yet her photos surprise, every single one. Why? It takes me a moment to make sense of it. It’s the vantage point. At thirty-six inches, her angle’s unfamiliar to me and utterly captivating: the study ceiling arches like a dome, her bed a floating barge. The stairs plunge like a gorge.

She’s Alice in Wonderland all the world grown Everestlike around and above her.

“Do you like them, Mama?” She pats my cheek with her laughter-drenched hand.

I can only murmur, flicking through her gallery. “Marvelous … just marvelous.”

She giggles and who can resist and I lay the camera aside and tickle her soft belly and she throws the head back, bliss, and I kiss blind all up that sweet neck of hers and she laughs breathless and we roll happy. And when she scampers off into other majestic realms, I look after her longing, longing to go too, longing to go back and could I? Go with her and into the wonder? I stay. I sort laundry and thoughts.

I want that kind of crazy, happy joy, God. Jeans to the right, socks to the left. How have I lost it in the growing older, duller? How to see the world again through those eyes? To live in the wide-eyed wonder of a world that unwraps itself grandiose and larger-than-life, so otherworldly?

Those summers, my sister and I played with slippery frogs in the back ditch, creek-bottom mud squelching up through our bare toes, us sloshing through the dark of the culvert, our laughter echo-ringing off steel. We built moats and castles and all our princes really were frogs and I want those days again. Maybe that is why I curl up on the girls’ bed every night and the boys pile in too, and children beg for my childhood stories. I tell gilded tales. It only takes a memory and we’re the Darling children slipping off to Wonder-That-Really-Is Land and we fly.

I think of my aunt. She did fly. All over the world, an airline steward, her whole life trotting the globe, dining in exotic locales, wandering the streets of the foreign and unusual. In her fifties, childless, she came to the farm. Sat in the living room of our farmhouse and rolled a red plastic ball across the floor to our toddling daughter. I can still hear our daughter squealing ecstasy as the ball rolled toward her and the room rang, turned inside out with the bouncing glee. We had laughed wonder. Daughter had stretched out her two little arms, clutched that giant globe in two chubby hands, and held it high over her head, her own face tilted back, the round wonders meeting. Again and again, my aunt hit replay: roll ball into purest delight, child squeals laughter, roll again. Our sides hurt happy from the laughing.

Weeks later, my aunt sent a letter. From a far-flung hotel, stamped in some post office on the other side of the ocean. It was her looping, aching epiphany that scrawled me deep: “I will never forget your daughter’s wild joy in that ball—a happiness like I have never seen in all my travels through all these years. And in the simplest of experiences.” I never forgot—the child-joy of that afternoon … or my aunt’s words.

Yes, otherworldly joy, like that. The kind you could search the world over—and find only in a child.

I pluck Little-One’s pink-flowered dress from the laundry basket and hold it in hand.

It’s because she’s small.

Is that it? The secret to a child’s language of laughter, their domain of delight, is perspective.

If the heights of our joy are measured by the depths of our gratitude, and gratitude is but a way of seeing, a spiritual perspective of smallness might offer a vital way of seeing especially conducive to gratitude.

Those child photos, that wonder I experienced firsthand through her eyes—“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it!”[1]—was that it? I had just held evidence of it.

The joy of small that makes life large.

Hadn’t I personally experienced it before too, that vantage point that gave a sense of smallness before grandeur? At the lip of the Grand Canyon, peering into the carved earth, the vastness of the hewn and many-hued chasm. A late June night peering into the expanse of heavens nailed up with the named and known stars. A moon field. I hardly dare brush the limitlessness with my vaporous humanity.

But the irony: Don’t I often desperately want to wriggle free of the confines of a small life? Yet when I stand before immensity that heightens my smallness—I have never felt sadness. Only burgeoning wonder. Is it because within each frame of finite flesh lies the likeness of infinite God? In all things large and spectacular, we recognize glimpses of home and the call to our own deeper chemistry. Do we writhe to peel out of our smallness and into the big life because that fits our inborn God-image?

Echo calls to echo, deep to deep.

Awe … awe ignites joy because it makes us bend the knee and I remember a night chasing moon and we are in deepest happiness in the posture of grateful worship. Because the God-likeness within our smallness speaks to Father-God in His magnificence. I hadn’t understood that in wheat under lunar light: That all wonder and worship can only grow out of smallness.

I’m standing in a mudroom, sorting children’s dribbled shirts, grass-stained jeans. It’s been years since I stood on the rim of the canyon, months since I ran with the moon. I live in laundry. How to be Little-One in now’s wonderland, in Kingdom of Heaven coming? How to live in a state of awe when life is mundane and ordinary? I know layers of the eucharisteo answer because I have felt the miracle … but there are layers I don’t yet understand.

Light falls in gold bars across laundry.

The watch on my wrist chimes the hour, modern bells to prayer. I stop the spinning thoughts, the probing questions, the hands sorting, the laundry work, because God needs knees more than hands. Bowed like Daniel, I move to the other side of prayer with on-the-hour prayers of thanks.

Thank You, Lord, for the perspective of a child …

Thank You for door frames and doorknobs …

Thank You for soaring ceilings and bed barges and tables that loom large …

For her laughter and her wonder and her eyes that turn the world inside out and stretch it large and leave me again in surprise … in awe …

I murmur eucharisteo thanks in a pile of laundry and the world expands and heightens and deepens and surges with the glory of God and I can feel the body decreasing and the soul increasing and joy filling the breadth between. This, this is like a child happily capturing pixels, our daughter giddily grasping the ball—the perspective of smallness that cultivates surprised wonder, that grows gratitude, that yields joy. The orb awe of a moon that makes the eyes see, the kaleidoscope of a bubble that makes the time slow, this is eucharisteo working its change on a life, but here, isn’t this here another layer of eucharisteo? Eucharisteo makes the knees the vantage point of a life. I shake my head, my quiet laughter remembering her glee, because isn’t that how children live? Life as large surprise. A child has no expectation of a globe-trotting aunt bringing her extravagant gifts from the Orient, or a bouquet of flowers, or even a postcard. A rolling ball? Surprise! A laughing aunt? Surprise! Again and again? Surprise!

My mama, valley wise and grief traveled, she always said, “Expectations kill relationships.” And I’ve known expectations as a disease, silent killer heaping her burdens on the shoulders of a relationship until a soul bursts a pulmonary and dies. Expectations kill relationships—especially with God. And that’s what a child doesn’t have: this whole edifice of expectation. Without expectations, what can topple the surprising wonder of the moment?

I think of it only a couple hundred times a year, that single wide-eyed night by the bed of one of our sons in the pediatric wing of a city hospital. The moaning of babes, the crying of sick children, the murmur of nurses with grim prognoses on lips and morphine in hand, these haunted through the endless hours. I did not sleep, the pain of that place begging me to pray. After our son was given the thumbs-up and the signature of release, I came home to bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchen and fridge and windows and unmerited, luxurious health and I threw up my arms in giddy gratitude. Here? This place? Surprise! I was a woman who saw what her life could well have been, a woman who didn’t live by a deathbed or in a refugee camp or a war zone or the rubble of an earthquake. I laughed at the surprise of dishes in my sink and the wild surprise of turning on the stove to boil water and I swished toilet and I was healthy and I got to be here and do this! And things but forty-eight hours prior I entirely took for granted—even rather half resented as flawed and less than—I spun around: All surprising grace! And there has not been a single night the nearly ten years since, that my son and I haven’t whispered in bedside prayers for those who cry out in the dark, for we witnessed and we remember and we will always carry …

Is it only when our lives are emptied that we’re surprised by how truly full our lives were?

Instead of filling with expectations, the joy-filled expect nothing—and are filled. This breath! This oak tree! This daisy! This work! This sky! These people! This place! This day! Surprise!

C. S. Lewis said he was “surprised by joy.” Perhaps there is no way to discover joy but as surprise?

The way the small live. Every day.

Yes, the small even have a biblical nomenclature. Doesn’t God call them the humble?

The humble live surprised. The humble live by joy.

I am ear and Jesus whispers to the surprised, “God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth” (Matthew 5:5). The humble are the laid-low and bowed ones, the surprised ones with hands open to receive whatever He gives.

He hands them the earth.

The earth.

But is it any wonder? That word humility itself comes from the Latin root humus—the kind of earth that grows good crops. God gives the earth to the humus-people, the humble ones. Humility is that good humus that grows gratitude that yields abundant joy.

In the upside-down kingdom of heaven, down is up and up is down, and those who want to ascend higher must descend lower. And so “anyone who becomes as humble as this little child is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:4). Later I read the words of F. B. Meyer. They wring me and I think about the earth and the knees and the things I never knew:

I used to think that God’s gifts were on shelves one above the other, and that the taller we grew in Christian character the easier we should reach them. I find now that God’s gifts are on shelves one beneath the other, and that it is not a question of growing taller but of stooping lower, and that we have to go down, always down, to get His best gifts.[2]

To receive God’s gifts, to live exalted and joy filled, isn’t a function of straining higher, harder, doing more, carrying long the burdens of the super-Pharisees or ultra-saints. Receiving God’s gifts is a gentle, simple movement of stooping lower.

Is this, too, why I’m often joy starved? Why a narcissistic, gluttonous world lives emaciated? But the humble joy of small child? This I had witnessed. And my aunt had never seen anything like it in all the world.

I trace the stitches of the flowers embroidered on Little-One’s dress and I whisper worn words, new in revelation: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30 NASB). I knew my soul need magnify Him, but of the flesh minimizing? And there it is bent over laundry, that humility isn’t burden or humiliation or oppressive weight but humility is the only posture that can receive the wondrous grace gifts of God—God who humbled Himself and came to the feed trough and waits to be seen in light off doorknobs and the curve of vases and the mound of laundry. I shake my head, half smile, lay aside her dress because the funny thing? The moment I try to grasp for humility, she’s gone. Speak of humility, shine a light shaft on it, and she’s shadow-gone in the dark. “Humility is so shy,” writes Tim Keller.[3] If I focus on humility, I look inward to assess if I’m sufficiently humble, and in the very act, humility darts and I’m proud, self-focused. It doesn’t work. But what humbles like an extravagant gift? And hadn’t I felt that joy of small, child-wonder when I paused to give thanks?

The quiet song of gratitude, eucharisteo, lures humility out of the shadows because to receive a gift the knees must bend humble and the hand must lie vulnerably open and the will must bow to accept whatever the Giver chooses to give.

Again, always, and always again: eucharisteo precedes the miracle. And you’d think I’d know that by now. But I forget. Father never forgets what I am made of, child of dust. The Wounded Warrior is achingly tender with the broken ones and He has all the patient time to gently lead those who seek and He keeps leading me back to eucharisteo.

Is this what is happening as I learn eucharisteo, to be full of grace? I humbly give God thanks for the gifts. I practice eucharisteo. And in that place of humble thanks, God exalts and gives more gifts and more of Himself, which humbles and lays the soul down lower. And good God responds with greater gifts of grace and even more of Himself. And I ride the undulating wave of grace, this lifting higher and higher in grace, the surging crest of joy, and this plunging lower and lower in humble thankfulness only to rise yet higher in grace and this eucharisteo, it offers the ultimate joyride and I don’t think I ever want to get off. Is this why the oil jars of joy never run dry, but endlessly refill? He must increase and I must decrease—not because that is burden but so that my joy might increase with more of Him! I kneel down to toss in the laundry.

I set the dial to extra dirty. I stay on my knees and watch the water run into the washer, watch it splash against the circular glass of the washing machine’s front door, hear its gurgling fall. Down it flows. Down, always down, water runs, always looking for yet lower and lower places to flow. I watch water run and spiritual water must flow like this … always seeking always the lowest places—and the washtub begins to rock. I must go lower. I tell myself this, watching water run. That whenever I am parched and dry, I must go lower with the water and I must kneel low in thanks. The river of joy flows down to the lowest places.

I get up off my knees.

I hang socks. Across the rack, white flags of surrender. My thoughts, they’re hung up on humility and smallness and receiving all as surprising grace and how this eucharisteo has layers that lead deeper into the kingdom, lead deeper into my truest, fullest self, the one He intended. Children play in the basement below my domestic choreography, thunder of feet and crazy laughter. Swoop and drape, quotidian work, familial cadence constant as rising and setting sun and God fills the common moments. A shatter of glass splinters the rhythm.

A child screams.

I wince eyes tight and the arteries tighten in mother-distress.

“You did it!”

“You pushed me right into it! I didn’t do a thing!”

“Moooooom! Mommmmm?”

I exhale. I take each step down the stairs slow, methodical, a climber descending deliberately because they’re at the brink and the precipice is black. A day of attempting to restore domestic order has already racked up a tally of highlighter scribbled on a sleigh bed frame, a CD cracked in half, a paint stain on a bedroom carpet, and an endless drone of sibling squabbles. When I get to the bottom of the stairs, blades of glass meet me, carpet of shards in front of the stereo unit.

“The glass in this door is still good.” A daughter swings the remaining cabinet door. I think I am supposed to be pleased. “He just broke this one.”

“I broke?” Son whips his hand to chest, throws arms in the air. “I was just running after you. It was your shoulder that slammed into the cabinet.”

I’m wound tight. I’m pressing my molars together, compressing the jaw. Clenching the hands tight. Ten minutes ago and that theoretical exploration of a theology of joy? Well, theories and theology stillbirth unless they can take on some skin, breathe in the polluted air of this world, and make it happen. And my knees are stiff and it’s jarring, how peace can shatter faster than glass, the breakneck speeds at which I can fall—and refuse to bend the knees at all.

Can I just be David, and evening and morning and at noon, complain and murmur, mourn the mother’s lament of dependent faith that God will hear my voice (Psalm 55:16—17)? Can I hold the tongue from the Israelite complaint with its ungrateful discontent and bitter accusations, complaint that kindles God’s anger (Numbers 11:1)? I dare not let loose my tongue for I know which cry is more likely. But I can’t seem to hold her back, that tail of the heart, the tongue, she springs anyway.

“What in the world were you thinking? How many times have we said no running? I am just …” I’m spewing and it’s ugly and the words are so frazzled with frustration, they fray midstream. I can feel the slow smothering, the tight choking, and I can feel it in the throat, rising … this moan, this baying bawl … an injured animal wild, the trapped mad, and this is not a David lament. But I carry these David words memorized, grace for when I can’t get the David lament right: “I was so foolish and ignorant—I must have seemed like a senseless animal to you” (Psalm 73:22).

God holds us in the untamed moments too.

I breathe deep, look at them. I remember: Lament is a cry of belief in a good God, a God who has His ear to our hearts, a God who transfigures the ugly into beauty. Complaint is the bitter howl of unbelief in any benevolent God in this moment, a distrust in the love-beat of the Father’s heart. God’s anger kindles hot when the essence of the complaint implies doubt in His love and I rub my forehead and shake my head. Lament is this long learning, hard like eucharisteo. And this I know like I am coming to know my name, Ann, “full of grace”: the more I learn eucharisteo, the more I learn His love, the less likely I am to Israelite complain and the more I genuinely lament, complaint that trusts His heart.

I look into the faces of the guilty and a son arcs his eyebrow, shrugs his shoulders nonchalant and doesn’t God Himself express righteous indignation, wounded deep with His own sinning Israelite children? Didn’t God’s heart often break? Didn’t He grieve and rage and feel rejection (Genesis 6:6; Exodus 4:14)? I read it in the pages of Scripture, lines of His own story, the Joy-God owning His own grief, so I won’t be Naaman and I won’t pretend I don’t feel any pain. Army chief Naaman (2 Kings 5:1), Naaman with the grotesque leprosy that thickens the skin numb. Numbness, too, can twist the body beastlike. In the end, it’s the numbness that kills you.

I lean against the stair wall. I will be real and I will feel life and I will be Naaman who bends the knee, enters the muddy waters of the emotions. True lament is the bold faith that trusts Perfect Love enough to feel and cry authentic.

Holding my head in my hands, I ask it honest before God and children and my daily mess: “Can we really expect joy all the time?”

I know it well after a day smattered with rowdiness and worn a bit ragged with bickering, that I may feel disappointment and the despair may flood high, but to give thanks is an action and rejoice is a verb and these are not mere pulsing emotions. While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things, because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.[4]

True saints know that the place where all the joy comes from is far deeper than that of feelings; joy comes from the place of the very presence of God. Joy is God and God is joy and joy doesn’t negate all other emotions—joy transcends all other emotions. Though my marriage tree may not bud and though my crop of children may fail and my work produce little yield, though there is no money in the bank and no dream left in the heart, though others may choose different ways to live their one life, till my last heaving breath, I will fight to the death for this: “I will take joy” (Habakkuk 3:18 ESV). I will struggle to heed this until I am no more: “Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy” (James 1:2), and I will listen and again I will listen and I will wrestle to put skin on it: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4 NIV, emphasis added).

I gnaw my lip. The body howls when joy is extinguished. The face shrivels pain, the voice pitches angry cry. “No man can live without joy” is what Thomas Aquinas wrote.[5] And I confess, it is true, I have known many dead waiting to die.

The glass lies everywhere broken. But this isn’t about this glass but old glass, about glass to God, about glass to my life as a whole. I see right through to what I am.

Only self can kill joy.

I’m the one doing this to me.

The theology I’ve been turning over, it comes now clear windowpane and I can see, holy vision.

Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand. In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy. The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing toward self and rights and demands, joy is snuffed out. Anger is the lid that suffocates joy until she lies limp and lifeless. And for me, it’s a cosmic-numbing notion that far eclipses this domestic moment. It speaks to the whole of my life and the vision brands me: The demanding of my own will is the singular force that smothers out joy—nothing else.

Pride, mine—that beast that pulls on the mask of anger—this is what snaps this hand shut, crushes joy. When I would read Henry Ward Beecher’s words later, I’d take it for my own story, so familiar his thoughts: “Pride slays thanksgiving … A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.”[6] Dare I ask what I think I deserve? A life of material comfort? A life free of all trials, all hardship, all suffering? A life with no discomfort, no inconveniences? Are there times that a sense of entitlement—expectations—is what inflates self, detonates anger, offends God, extinguishes joy?

And what do I really deserve? Thankfully, God never gives what is deserved, but instead, God graciously, passionately offers gifts, our bodies, our time, our very lives. God does not give rights but imparts responsibilities—response-abilities—inviting us to respond to His love-gifts. And I know and can feel it tight: I’m responding miserably to the gift of this moment. In fact, I’m refusing it. Proudly refusing to accept this moment, dismissing it as no gift at all, I refuse God. I reject God. Why is this eucharisteo always so hard?

I look down at shattered glass, glass that brings memories, glass that gives me eyes to see in. And I see: I had thought joy’s flame needed protecting.

All these years, these angers, these hardenings, this desire to control, I had thought I had to snap the hand closed to shield joy’s fragile flame from the blasts. In a storm of struggles, I had tried to control the elements, clasp the fist tight so as to protect self and happiness. But palms curled into protective fists fill with darkness. I feel that sharply, even in this … and this realization in all its full emptiness: My own wild desire to protect my joy at all costs is the exact force that kills my joy.

Flames need oxygen to light.

Flames need a bit of wind.

The theology’s putting on skin.

All light seen is light from the past and light now old from the sun streams through the window, glints off the glass shards. Broken glass ignites in light and there it is, the secret of joy’s flame: Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control … let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy’s fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knee and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love and whisper surprised thanks. This is the fuel for joy’s flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust.

I can let go.

I hadn’t known that joy meant dying.

What did I think hard eucharisteo and the table of the Last Supper meant?

But dying to self demands that I might gratefully and humbly receive the better, the only things that a good God gives. To be nothing in the flesh and Christ might be everything in the soul, to follow after Jesus who “humbled himself and became obedient to death …” (Philippians 2:8 NIV), to follow Christ to the table of eucharisteo, the table of surrender that gives thanks for what is given—this is joy! True humility is self-smallness to the point of “blessed self-forgetfulness” and what could bring more happiness than emptying of self-will and being wholly immersed in the will of God for this moment? Joy—it’s always obedience.

I know it deeper now: This eucharisteo is no game of Pollyanna but the hard edge of blade.

Only self can kill joy.

I take a long deep breath. I step from the stairs, stairs that have led all the way down into this.

I kneel down into a mess of glass.

I have known this place. I remember the red tears and the cutting away pain, and was this careless breaking of glass really about all the cares that made me break glass long ago? This time, I know healing. Eucharisteo makes the knees the vantage point of a life and I bend and the body, it says it quiet: “Thy will be done.” This is the way a body and a mouth say thank you: Thy will be done. This is the way the self dies, falls into the arms of Love.

This is why. This is why the fight for joy is always so hard.

“No one who ever said to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and meant it with his heart, ever failed to find joy—not just in heaven, or even down the road in the future in this world, but in this world at that very moment,” asserts Peter Kreeft. “Every other Christian who has ever lived has found exactly the same thing in his own experience. It is an experiment that has been performed over and over again billions of times, always with the same result.”[7]

I am kneeling in glass and my memories of shattered glass and Jesus comes soft, “Thy will be done is My own joy story, child, from beginning to end.”

And I think of Jesus’ beginning, His supernatural conception. His mother bends the knee and submits her will to God’s: “Let this happen to me as you say!” (Luke 1:38 NCV). This is a woman, a womb, a hand humbly opening to the perfect will of God. Jesus’ mother sings over the dividing cells of His divinity: “How my spirit rejoices in God my Savior! For he took notice of his lowly servant girl…. He has brought down princes from their thrones and exalted the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things.” (Luke 1:47—48, 52—53). In Mary’s humility—her willingness to die to her expectations and plans—God exalts her. In her submissiveness to His will, He fills her emptiness with fullness of Himself. Her refrain of humble, surrendered gratitude quietly sings through all ages.

I think of the end of His earthly life. Jesus Himself bends the knee in a garden and weeps His own song: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42 NIV). He opens wide His mouth and accepts; He will drink this cup of suffering too. Why? For the greater joy. Joy now, joy forever. Conceived in grateful humility, Jesus faces death in grateful humility. And I hear it soft too, what all His life speaks: Joy is in the acquiescing.

A circle of children stand around me, watching, waiting. Long slivers of transparency, blades, lie before me, catching light.

I humbly open my hand.

Without a word, one by one, they come to the outer edges and they kneel too.

And I humbly open my hand to release my will to receive His, to accept His wind. I accept the gift of now as it is—accept God—for I can’t be receptive to God unless I receive what He gives. Joy’s light flickers, breathes, fueled by the will of God—fueled by Him.

A shaft filters through an afternoon window and the cracks of the aged wood revive in sun.

I pray.

I let go. Lay the hand open. The sun slides across old hairline scars.

My palm holds light.

CHAPTER 10

empty to fill

Use me then, my Savior,

for whatever purposes and in whatever way you may require.

Here is my poor heart, an empty vessel;

fill it with your grace.

D. L. Moody

I wake to rain in October, water upon panes.

Autumn comes quietly to wed the countryside. The maples all down the lane blush and silently disrobe. I make beds, smooth out sheets.

In the kitchen, I light a candle and the wick bows, a willing flame. A fire flickers in the hearth, slow warmth in slow time for a slow rain.

On the rim of the world, edge of a cornfield gilded, I listen to rain fall shy on the roof, on the corn’s rustling leaves, leaves of the dead still standing. Dead leaves of cornstalks, thousands, touch, like bows across strings, making music like water. Like running water. Fields make music with sky, with that sea come looking for dry land, and rivulets course quiet down glass. Gray clouds track low, head east. I lay breakfast bowls out on the table.

Soon those children, that fine man, will come in hungry from the barn. Silver spoons, stainless steel cups, enamelware pitcher of milk, farm honey. I stand for a moment by the table, looking out a wet window to the south. One comes now, a son with his hood pulled up against early morning rain. I watch him, love of ours, meandering up the back walk. His head is bent low, feet finding all the puddles. He’s splashing through ancient water, water from the beginning that has cycled through all centuries, puddle-jumped by a thousand young boys through the ages and I wonder if the water Adam knew falls here.

The clothesline strings across the back walk. Droplets reel out, a jeweled necklace, framing now. From one forgotten clothespin hangs a singular raindrop. And I see: the clothesline is the beam, the wooden clothespin an upright post. I see a cross in the clothespin. Son looks up, sees me at the window, and he waves, all a smile.

The droplet falls from the cross clothespin, grace upon us.

And for a moment, longer, long, I blaze.

This child, this time, this day, we are all here, grace, all grace, and this fountain of Great Grace falls all around and it could flow through us and on into the world, and with borrowed breath I am fueled, a torch in October rains.

I am blessed.

I can bless.

So this is happiness.[1]

I set the honey down on the table laid out and I wave back at my son and he laughs in the rain. I am a flame to light other flames.

In the October mist, eucharisteo opens the eyes, the heart, to the grace that falls upon us, a drop, a river, a waterfall of blessing filling our emptiness. It falls into the open hand and makes life a paradise again. We wonder: If eucharisteo had led us to let go and open the hand to receive all His shimmering river of gifts, how can we now close the hand?

If I close these fingers, try to hold, hoard the river—dam up the grace—won’t the water grow stagnant? Long the children and I once looked at photos of the dead Dead Sea, and we read how the Jordan River streams into the sea and nothing flows out of the sea and the salt content rises and everything dies. I think of this. That fullness grows foul. Grace is alive, living waters. If I dam up the grace, hold the blessings tight, joy within dies … waters that have no life.

I turn my hand over, spread my fingers open. I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain … again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise of His presence. I am blessed. I can bless. A life contemplating the blessings of Christ becomes a life acting the love of Christ.

I listen to wind in the corn, rain on the pane, and I find my place. All the lost pieces are finding their place.

The name I had lost back at the beginning—Ann, full of grace—weren’t these a few more of the pieces? Eucharisteo was laying bare my realest self, revealing my true birthright—the endless riches of His grace. The endless riches of His grace. I am naming grace and I am finding my name and over the course of months, years, I am becoming, I am returning. I am Ann, full of grace, and I am blessed and couldn’t I bless and couldn’t this fullness flow on and on and on and this could be happiness? Are these the long lost pieces of name with three letters?

Skies clear.

A Thursday morning, I flip pancakes and the phone rings. The youth pastor. I don’t have children old enough to even be in youth group. He wonders if I’m interested in serving with our youth group for a weekend on the streets of Toronto. I remember the streets of Toronto. My first panic attack was on those streets, city that choked me tight. I was then the age of many of the kids in youth I’d be chaperoning. Could I go back, live full on those same streets, now be full of His grace? Was this the way I might bless? And is any opportunity we are given to let the fullness of grace flow on, the opportunity we always should take? The pieces lie uncovered, ready for the taking. The call seems from God. I say yes. Yes!

This is my place, openhanded.

Who could have known how grace would fall and on whom?

The youth group walks down Yonge Street, Toronto’s main drag, toward the Yonge Street Mission, a bit of November stealing into an October night. Last of the light seeps out of the gold of the trees and I linger behind, dig hands deeper into pockets, look for a vestige of warmth. A grey chill is creeping up the wet pavement. Cars hiss by in thickening twilight. It’s going to be a long night out here.

A long night doing what we’ve come to do, to bless Christ in the other. A night not walking wide of the crumpled hurt, not looking the other way like we normally do, not a night about us and our agendas and getting to wherever we’re going because isn’t the place we always really want to go to, the place of seeing God? But I still almost miss him standing there, there in the shadows, a wild mane of graying hair, back to me, in front of the mission’s front entrance. I’m focused on the kids. Trying to ignore the cold. It’s easy to forget the how of happiness, to shift the focus and forget to let the stream flow on. And it’s him, his tribe, we’ve come to bless, be blessed by. Before I reach the entrance of the mission, the bulk of a man steps out in front of me, walks toward our cluster of kids on the street. His buddy stays in the shadows, swigging long out of a one-liter pop bottle. Something inside tightens fear, twists hard.

Marisa and Hadassah and Erica are up ahead, kids from the country huddled together, hands drawn up into warmth of coat sleeves, waiting for staff from the Center for Student Missions to meet us, give us directions. Tyler and Dan and J. D. are closer to the street, checking out models of cars flashing by. I can hear Dan’s voice above the others, “Catch that little bimmer? Sweet.” Kids mingle, joke, laugh, wait.

I’m a few steps behind this bulk of back and tangled hair when I see the man raise his hands to his face. He pulls down a mask. He’s pulling down a mask, walking into the center of our youth group. I walk faster.

From behind, I can see the man’s hands wildly gesticulating, and he must be saying something, but I can’t make out his words, words muffled under the mask. For a moment, he turns and I see clearly the garish plastic of a clown’s mask. Over his shoulder, I can see the uneasiness of our group standing outside the mission, Marisa’s eyes, Hadassah’s ashen face. My blood courses fast and I try to remember: trust. No matter what unfolds here, He is always good and we are always loved. Let go.

I catch a phrase.

“Why you think I’m wearing this %*$& mask? Hey? Why?” Hadassah steps back. The raspy voice yells louder, leans into these farm kids.

“Why would I wear a *$% mask like this?”

Erica scuffs her shoe at the crack in the sidewalk. None of us know what to do with this. It’s not on the itinerary. One never knows what it will cost to bless.

Then the man rips the mask from his face and the blade of his howl slashes at us all stiffened to this spot here.

“I’m wearing the %*$& mask to mask my feelings.”

He shakes the painted rubber face in his hand. “I’m masking the real me! Know what I mean?”

The heart jolts. I have never heard the whole human condition spoken so baldly, and from the unexpected lips, and I want to raise a hand to my own face, see if I can peel off mine.

There are words, drifting ones, but I can’t hear them. Only see his wide shoulders shudder. Erica looks up. Tyler chews his lip. And the night air on Yonge Street fills with this guttural moan, this pitched wail.

It’s the exposing of a naked soul.

He’s crying. Sobbing. I catch snatches … “I’m so *&$** up … Jesus … Savior … need … know what I mean? … Just so … Jesus … Lord … know what I mean?”

Bared, he writhes, storms past me, a flurry of tears, hair, hands. A chaperone from our group calls softly after: “Jesus loves you …”

He stops. Half turning, he tries to steady his voice between the wracking of sadness, tries to find the face that went with that voice. “Yeah, He does. And He loves you too, lady.”

I don’t know what any of this means. The wind whips at his hair. He blusters down the street. Has any grace fallen from our presence in this place?

When the staff from the mission, our drivers, arrive, our group is quieted, shaken. They direct us to enter the mission. And at the door, there he is, mask still in hand.

He has unfinished business.

His eyes dart, desperate, driven. His buddy keeps guzzling it down. But there’s more to this story, lines he’s got wrong, parts we haven’t understood. I study his face, I read his eyes, eyes asking what eyes silently plead: “Do you have time to really listen?” The traffic whistles by. Yes, we have time. What is time for if not to bless?

“Hey, I’m sorry, OK?” the man bellows. “I’ve got issues, know what I mean? I’m like, bipolar.”

His buddy spews his drink, mocking. “You’re not bipolar.” Like graffiti, he smears the words across the coming dark. But the scoffing doesn’t deter. It’s us he’s got to say something to, whatever this is.

“Hey, I’m *&%$* messed up, man. Look at me!” He steps into the company of young people. Some look away. “Look at me!” His rage shakes us. Shakes the drowsy, shakes the slumbering, shakes us to look at what we really came to see, to look straightway into it and really open the soul wide to see and it terrifies.

His nose is crooked, busted up somewhere, healed all wrong. His mouth clings to a few brown teeth. His skin is pocked, ruddy, and his eyes look like a childhood friend’s. Maybe he’s my age.

“I’m a **%$& retard. Fried my brain on crack, know what I mean? Got a pacemaker in here.” He pounds his chest. “OD’d just down there,” he waves his hand toward a side street, “and it took them five hours to find me. Don’t do crack, know what I mean?” His eyes are fiery, searching the faces of these country kids. “Don’t get &*%*$ messed up like I did. Love your mom and dad cuz they love you, know what I mean?” He is choking back emotion. So am I.

I wonder where they are, his parents, if they know he’s here, like this, if they care that he’s in all this strangling torture. I care. I think I do. What do you do with all this grizzled pain? What do you do to dress these oozing, gory wounds, what do you do to be a healing grace to a soul mangled in skin with a fried brain? I stuff my hands deeper in pockets and I am the one who feels utterly bankrupt before a homeless man and I give all I really have. I pray. He rummages in his duffel bag, looking for something. What’s he trying to do? What’s He trying to do?

My arms stiffen hard and the pockets don’t go deep enough. The kids search each other’s eyes. Nobody knows what comes next in a night, a life, unscripted.

He straightens. He has something in his hand. He shoves it at Erica.

It’s a dog-eared Bible. A Gideon Bible.

“Read Romans 7 to 8.” He shakes his finger at the grubby cover.

I can hardly hear over the traffic, the rumble of the city.

“Louder. So they hear you!”

Then comes Erica’s voice, calmed by these words she knows and the Person in them.

“… I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do …”

And a low bass throbs.

It’s his voice. He’s mumbling the words from memory, his eyes penetrating, his hand keeping beat with each word Erica reads. “… but what I hate I do.”

It’s like he’s directing an orchestra with those grimy hands, the refrain of his life, beating out the Words that reverberate with his brokenness. The traffic blurs by blind and the night sets in cold and I am stilled inside, rapt, freeze-framing this image in my mind, this scene on life’s stage of a man whose cerebellum is scalded with fraudulent relief but he knows the lines, the God-words branded deeper, right into his core. His fingernails are so dirty.

“… I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.” He slurs some of the words, stumbles. Erica reads on and he marks each word with a swaying hand, his voice echoing hers: “For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”

He’s rocking his whole body to the cadence of ancient words, this cry that his flesh weeps. He turns my way and I look into tearing eyes, his begging eyes, “What a wretched man I am!”

He has torn it off like a rind. The masks. Those words say who he is. Who we are. Here stands the cold, bare skin of a soul. Can I, just my eyes, hold him?

I know these last lines of the chapter, for they are mine too, and I speak them with them: “Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Grace.

The mission worker speaks to him in low tones. Our group spills past and into the mission, escapes. He holds open the door. I am the last one to trickle by.

I can’t walk by without looking into him. I turn and we are face-to-face. I feel no panic, no attack of anxiety. His eyes implore and his gravelly voice begs, “Did I get it right this time?”

I’m busted open.

Do I do any of the good I long to do?

Did I bless?

Am I blessing?

We are two looking into the other. All the world falls away. I know. I know. This is happiness.

I speak eucharisteo, the only words I can muster.

“Thank you.”

I say the words slowly, hope they soak into his pores, broken man who yearns to bless, and I am him and he is me and behind the masks we are all the same. All, we only find joy in the blessings that are taken, broken, and given.

I nod and smile and somewhere find the courage to say it slow again, sure, so he knows.

He is broken and he has given.

“Thank you.”

Our eyes do hold the other.

On Yonge Street, we enact eucharisteo.

On a Toronto street corner, he has begged for grace.

The grace to be the blessing.

And on a Toronto street corner, I have been more of my true name.

His face, his voice, his story, they saturate me. When I open my Bible later, to read of Jesus at the Last Supper, again I am with him, an untamed mane on Yonge Street who took off all our masks and howled our collective cry to not just take the blessing, but be the blessing.

The snow flies. The amaryllis blooms in the windowsill. Life buds tender in winter, and I read:

The evening meal was being served…. He got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him….

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (John 13:2, 4, 12—15 NIV).

Jesus is about to let flesh be broken with nail, heart be broken with rejection, the chains be broken with bleeding love. And in His last hours before His earthly end, He doesn’t run out to buy something or catch a flight to go see something, but He wraps a towel around his waist and kneels low to take the feet of His forsakers gently in hand and wash away the grime between their toes.

This is the full-bodied eucharisteo, the eucharisteo that touches body and soul: hands and knees and feet awash in grace.

At the last, this is what will determine a fulfilling, meaningful life, a life that, behind all the facades, every one of us longs to live: gratitude for the blessings that expresses itself by becoming the blessing.

Eucharisteo is giving thanks for grace. But in the breaking and giving of bread, in the washing of feet, Jesus makes it clear that eucharisteo is, yes, more: it is giving grace away. Eucharisteo is the hand that opens to receive grace, then, with thanks, breaks the bread; that moves out into the larger circle of life and washes the feet of the world with that grace. Without the breaking and giving, without the washing of feet, eucharisteo isn’t complete. The Communion service is only complete in service. Communion, by necessity, always leads us into community.

I hadn’t fully seen it until after that night on Yonge Street: Eucharisteo means “to give thanks,” and give is a verb, something that we do. God calls me to do thanks. To give the thanks away. That thanks-giving might literally become thanks-living. That our lives become the very blessings we have received.

I am blessed. I can bless. Imagine! I could let Him make me the gift!

I could be the joy!

I scour pots and grin silly: I can wash feet here by washing dishes. My heart can enter into communion anywhere and anywhere my hands can enact the Eucharist! The tap water runs hot over my hands and I rinse steel. The world gleams. Christ’s ministry began with His miracle of turning water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana. And at the close of His earthly ministry, Christ turns from the wine of the Last Supper back to the water, the water for the washing of feet.

Always and again: Eucharisteo precedes the miracle.

This is one of His miracles too: the taking of a life and making it a blessing.

Scratching a stubborn pot furiously with a wire scrubby, I remember it again, what I once read of liturgy. That liturgy has its roots in the Greek word leitourgia, meaning “public work” or “public servant.” The meaning! This life of washing dishes, of domestic routine, it can be something wholly different. This life of rote work, it is itself public work, a public serving—even this scrubbing of pans—and thus, if done unto God, the mundane work can become the living liturgy of the Last Supper. I could become the blessing, live the liturgy! I rinse pots and sing it softly, “This is my song of thanks to You …”

In the moment of singing that one line, dedicating the work as thanks to Him, something—the miracle—happens, and every time. When service is unto people, the bones can grow weary, the frustration deep. Because, agrees Dorothy Sayers, “whenever man is made the centre of things, he becomes the storm-centre of trouble. The moment you think of serving people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains…. You will begin to bargain for reward, to angle for applause.”[2]

When the laundry is for the dozen arms of children or the dozen legs, it’s true, I think I’m due some appreciation. So comes a storm of trouble and lightning strikes joy. But when Christ is at the center, when dishes, laundry, work, is my song of thanks to Him, joy rains. Passionately serving Christ alone makes us the loving servant to all. When the eyes of the heart focus on God, and the hands on always washing the feet of Jesus alone—the bones, they sing joy, and the work returns to its purest state: eucharisteo. The work becomes worship, a liturgy of thankfulness.

“The work we do is only our love for Jesus in action,” writes Mother Teresa. “If we pray the work … if we do it to Jesus, if we do it for Jesus, if we do it with Jesus …. that’s what makes us content.”[3]

That is what makes us content—the contented, deep joy is always in the touching of Christ—in whatever skin He comes to us in.

I want the contentment, the real happiness, the touching of Christ in the work and I look for Him. We invite a young woman in an abusive relationship to come to live at our place for a season. I write words that line themselves into books and four times a year we give away the proceeds from those projects to Africa to supply a medical clinic, fill a stable, dig a well, more. We give the blessing of presence to elderly in nursing homes. Ten years, all eight of us, we don’t exchange Christmas gifts but give sewing machines, chickens, coats, food, hope to those in need in our global family. We write letters, share ourselves, with our sponsor children through relief organizations. I become an advocate for Compassion International, a Christian child development ministry, and I campaign for the sponsorship of more children. We gather bikes and eight of us ride in Ride for Refugees, raising awareness and funds for displaced families around the world. Our children laugh and pump the air with happiness that they’ve given more of their lives away and I feel the smile that spreads across a life.

Christian hands never clasp and He doesn’t give gifts for gain because a gift can never stop being a gift—it is always meant to be given.

In an endless cycle of grace, He gives us gifts to serve the world. This is how to make a life great and eucharisteo embarks us on the path: “Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave” (Matthew 20:26—27).

Outside my window, the whole of creation chooses just this. The leaves of the maple tree freely unfurl oxygen, clouds overhead grow pregnant with rain to bless, the soil of our fields offer up yield. All His created world throbs with the joy in eucharisteo: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

This is the way Jesus Himself chose. “That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not be served—and then to give away his life in exchange for the many who are held hostage” (Matthew 20:28 MSG).

It’s the astonishing truth that while I serve Christ, it is He who serves me. Jesus Christ still lives with a towel around His waist, bent in service to His people … in service to me, as I serve, that I need never serve in my own strength. Jesus Christ, who came into this world “not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45), will one day come again and “put on an apron, and serve them as they sit and eat!” (Luke 12:37), and even this very day He faithfully serves that we might say, “The LORD is my helper” (Hebrews 13:6).

Every day for a month we as a family read together Isaiah 58 and we can’t get over it and we come to know it in the marrow and the fiber:

Feed the hungry,

and help those in trouble.

Then your light will shine out from the darkness,and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon.

The LORD will guide you continually, giving you water when you are dry and restoring your strength.

You will be like a well-watered garden,like an ever-flowing spring. (Isaiah 58:10- 11)

It’s the fundamental, lavish, radical nature of the upside-down economy of God.

Empty to fill.

While the Deceiver jockeys to dupe us into thinking otherwise, we who are made in the image of God, being formed into Christ’s likeness, our happiness comes, too, not in the having but in the handing over. Give your life away in exchange for many lives, give away your blessings to multiply blessings, give away so that many might increase, and do it all for the love of God. I can bless, pour out, be broken and given in our home and the larger world and never fear that there won’t be enough to give. Eucharisteo has taught me to trust that there is always enough God. He has no end. He calls us to serve, and it is Him whom we serve, but He, very God, kneels down to serve us as we serve. The servant-hearted never serve alone. Spend the whole of your one wild and beautiful life investing in many lives, and God simply will not be outdone. God extravagantly pays back everything we give away and exactly in the currency that is not of this world but the one we yearn for: Joy in Him.

In early spring, the trees that were losing their leaves when I drove away to Yonge Street now come again to bud. It rains. I drive into town, the windshield wipers rocking back and forth in the rain. I’m gathering with a women’s small group at Roberta Fryers’ bungalow, one with the sign “The Thai Trio” hanging over the mailbox, home to three elderly women who spent the whole of their lives being the blessing, missionaries in Thailand. Women meet in Roberta’s entrance with embraces. Nancy Martin has interceded in prayer for me for years, calls me her other daughter, and makes these honey-dripping, old-fashioned doughnuts that are ravishing. Anne Peterson and Ann Van den Boogaard, mothers to a collective tribe of eighteen, both smile, nod, and I take my place at the table and now we are complete, The Trio of Anns seeking to be full of grace. The rain is falling harder on the windowpanes. We circle together with Effie Struyk and Mary Cook, and as a community, we take Communion. I bow and pray over bread. And when I break it, I remember a body broken and His heart torn open, and I break open. Love falls, a tear. I pass the bread. For a long while we are stilled and deeply moved.

Then, quietly, I fill the basins with water warm.

Circled together as a community, we give communion. We bare our toes, soles, and I bend with sisters in Christ, dip my hands into water, and touch shy skin. We wash feet, all around, we wash feet. We lap water across skin and I hold a woman’s heel and I gently bathe and as group facilitator, I ask each of us in the room to think about this washing of feet as symbolic of our lives on a grand scale, of how we are called to complete the Communion service in service. I tilt my head to look into her face and I ask it quiet in a quiet room: “Do you, in your day-to-day life, feel served? How might we as a community better serve you?”

And she, mother of eight, an elder’s wife, children’s ministry leader, one who pours her life out in unending ways, she whispers, haltingly through emotion. “But I’m the one who needs to ask if I’ve been a blessing.”

I hear the echo of a voice on Yonge Street.

“But you—oh, how you have blessed.” With the tepid water, I wash her toes, these beads between fingers, and I recount the long string of ways she’s intimately blessed me: “The day you took me for a walk through the woods and you listened to the faint heartbeat of my faith. The countless words you have sent me, a hand of friendship.” I take the cloth and wash her heel. “The way you have been real with me, transparent and authentic, and we have been mothers and we have been sisters and we have wept.” And I look up into her face, her wet feet in my hands, and again the chin wobbles all feeling. In this room of women, washing feet, it overflows. With memories of the ways each has become the blessing. Unmasked, we wash our faces in tears of joy. Hands cupping dripping soles, I see how it is our very presence in each other’s lives that makes us the gift. It is by the very function of our being, not our doing, that we are the beloved of God. And so we become the love of God, blessing those He loves.

The God of Abraham is the God of Yonge Street is the God of the women bent over basins, God who answers our pleas for a fulfilling life with His promise: “I will bless you … and you will be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2 NIV, emphasis added).

I walk out to the street through rain, grace falling all around, and I drive home thinking of my brother-in-law, John. John, who had buried his two sons, who let me into his healing through crazy grief when he said, “The way through the pain is to reach out to others in theirs.” I have known ache and becoming the blessing is what deeply blesses us and this is the way He binds up our wounds.

Empty to fill.

I walk in our back door to candlelight still flickering, hang the keys on the hook, and look around at the steep mountain of laundry there in the mudroom, the shoes scattered, a coat dropped. The mudroom sink is grime ringed. Fingerprints smear across the mirror. I laugh the happiest wonder. In the afternoon’s drizzle, I give happy thanks for the daily mess with a smile a mile wide, because this is again my chance to wholeheartedly serve God, to do full-bodied eucharisteo with the hands and the heart and the lips. I can count each task a gift, pure eucharisteo. Grace! This work—the thousand endless jobs—they each give the opportunity for one to become the gift, a thousand times over! Because with every one of the thousand, endless jobs, I become the gift to God and to others because this work is the public God serving, the daily liturgy of thanks, the completing of the Communion service with my service.

Eucharisteo wakens me wide-eyed and nodding to the words of Tagore that I, a mother of six, now own, bought with the practice of eucharisteo, “I slept and dreamt life was joy, I awoke and saw life was service, I acted and, behold, service was joy.”[4]

I reach out and touch the reflection in the splattered mirror over the sink and whisper into those eyes: Yes, today, again, yes, you can bless! Here you can enact eucharisteo; here you can become a current in a river of grace that redeems the world!

Here I can become the blessing, a little life that multiplies joy, making the larger world a better place.

God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.

I am nearing the wonder of Communion.

CHAPTER 11

the joy of intimacy

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy

because the praise not merely expresses

but completes the enjoyment;

it is its appointed consummation.

C. S. Lewis

I fly to Paris and discover how to make love to God.

It’s June, after all—Paris in June. I had long felt the stirrings of something more, but how could I have known what a love like this will really mean? It’s June and the wheat heads are filling out right to the ends.

My friend Linda, the same who had first dared me to jot down one thousand gifts, now over eighteen months ago, she’s rented a flat in Paris for six weeks in early summer, right on the Seine, across from the Louvre, down from Notre Dame. Would I like to come and stay a week with her?

The agoraphobic farm hick who has spent a lifetime wrestling fears? Jetting off to Paris? Flying solo to a foreign country to stay a week with a woman she knows only as a voice at the other end of a telephone line? My sister laughs, uncertain, and my mama raises her eyebrows. “You may never have a chance to see Paris again, Ann. We’ll be good. Just go!” He had smiled, winked, a farmer telling his wife to fly. And if I have a panic attack? And if I miss one of the connections between here and the nearly four thousand miles to there? Or if the plane crashes? I have no idea what those seven days in Paris could hold. I think that’s the point.

Wasn’t it time to fully live?

Hadn’t counting one thousand gifts, counting on endlessly, counting on eucharisteo, hadn’t it begun to deep heal the soul holes so I could be the wing that takes to the sky in peace? Eagerly celebrate His gifts wherever I find them?

The wind blows through the fields and those heads of wheat, they murmur, old wives whispering go, go. I do.

I go and they stand under the shade of the maple, all six of the love-children, and that chiseled Dutch man stands tall behind them, and with hand that has held me he holds our youngest. They all wave, wave like banners in the wind, and I’ll carry the memory of the ocean-blue eyes all across the Atlantic. I watch them long in the rearview mirror and I am an amnesiac being healed, for I really remember that eucharisteo has taught me to trust. I leave crops in the field and a husband with half a dozen children. There are a thousand ways to humbly let go.

At the airport I wait with pocket Bible in hand, wait for the boarding of Flight TS788, that plane that will wing me away from their faces with the freckles sprinkled, hair with the cowlick and the curl. Could I please have a few good verses, Lord—something to hang on to? Just a few to calm the jittery nerves, for that, oh, stomach lurching up into throat, that crazed, bloodshot panic that wants to scream, “What in the world was I thinking?” Planes explode and people die and the man next to me, two days’ growth and long hair hanging in eyes, he strums a guitar, melodic strains. OK, Lord—a psalmist’s song? A David sent for a Saul vexed in spirit? That’ll do fine. I read the open Scripture, lean back into notes soothing and a divine sense of humor. When the shaggy shepherd stands, slings the guitar case over his shoulder, our eyes meet. I whisper, “Thank you.” He accepts the gift.

I board, breathe, buckle, bow my head, and murmur thanks to Him who never takes leave. It’s impossible to give thanks and simultaneously feel fear. This is the anti-anxiety medicine I try to lay in my wide-open palm every day. Thank You, God, for surprising songs.

The plane flies; I cocoon in God.

It’s an hour or two of blackness, a brief layover, and a long stretch of darkness before I can see it out of the plane’s portal window: sun rising red over Greenland. The world tilts scarlet. We fly into the light splitting back the dark. I press my cheek into the cold of the windowpane, wanting the whole of the erupting horizon. Happiness burns like a longing, and over the wing and the whir of the propellers, forty thousand feet over earth, I can hear Him, singing, waking the world. He’s singing that song! The one I really didn’t believe He sang! “He will take delight in you with gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with joyful songs” (Zephaniah 3:17).

He sings love! In the air, over the world, I can see the song, the ardency of the notes pulsing in colors. The curve of the world burns ruby, a jewel prying open the day. And I can see in: Love is the face at the center of our universe. A sacred Smile; Holiness ready to die for intimacy. Light and waves and land and sky crescendo in passion and He serenades, “How do I love thee?”

I count the ways.

Memory of their freckled noses crinkled in laughter

Flying through black (we fly!) into celestial radiance

A window seat and eyes for this

In eucharisteo, I count, count, count, keeping the beat of His song, the love song He can’t stop singing, this long song of longing. That He sings love over me?

What else can all these gifts mean?

Crazy, I know, but until eucharisteo had me write the graces on paper, in my own handwriting, until it alerted my mind to see the graces in the details of my very own life, I hadn’t really known. With every grace, He sings, “You are precious to me. You are honored, and I love you” (Isaiah 43:4). “For you are a chosen people … God’s very own possession” (1 Peter 2:9).

I was afraid? I would have let fears that He wasn’t close, wasn’t passionately caring, wasn’t tenderly tending, keep me from seeing this sunrise bleeding love up over all the world? Now that would have been crazy! Look at that love that orchestrates red over water, that arranges light to play ocean in shimmering lines, that composes sky to gradate, scale of luminosity. And all for us—in this moment! He chose me—us! To be His bride! True, that’s the intellectual premise of the Christian life, but only as the gifts are attended, not as ends but as means to gaze into the heart of God, does the premise become personal, God’s choosing so utterly passionate. So utterly fulfilling.

It’s a new voice, this endless stream of grace, one I never get over. This love song He is singing, it is the antithesis of life’s theme song, that refrain of rejection I know so well. That mental soundtrack of condemnation and criticism that I’ve let run on continuous replay, lyrics I learned from the grade three boys huddled on the ice, exploding laughter when my skates slid east, west, and I fell south, from the trendy city girl moved to the country who snickered at my thrift store shirts, from the critical eye of every evaluator, judge, assessment, grade. That heavy beat of failure, a pounding bass of disappointment, it has pulsed through my days and I’ve mouthed the words, singing it to myself, memorizing the ugly lines by heart. They become the heart. For years, I tried medication, blade, work, escape, all attempts to drown out that incessant, reverberating drum of self-rejection. All futility, acidic emptiness.

But here on a plane over black waters, I hear it well: the only thing to rip out the tape echoing of self-rejection is the song of His serenade. One thousand gifts tuned me to the beat. It really is like C. S. Lewis argued: that the most fundamental thing is not how we think of God but rather what God thinks of us: “How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.”[1] Years of Christian discipleship, Bible study, churchgoing had been about me thinking about God; practicing eucharisteo was the very first I had really considered at length what God thought of me—this ridiculous and relentlessly pursuing love, so bold. Everywhere, everything, Love!

Giving thanks awakens me to a God giving Himself, the naked, unashamed passion, God giving Himself to me—for me—a surrender of love. “Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are … a divine choice,” wrote Henri Nouwen.[2] A divine choice! He chooses His children to fully live! Fully live the fullest life: the astonished gratitude, the awed joy, the flying and the free. The discipline of giving thanks, of unwrapping one thousand gifts, unwraps God’s heart bare: I choose you. Live! Over Greenland, I hear the beat of his heart, that song, crystal clear: “I have loved you,” says the LORD (Malachi 1:2 NIV), “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness” (Jeremiah 31:3 NIV).

In a thousand ways He woos.

In a thousand ways I fall in love.

Isn’t falling in love always the fullest life?

How can I know what this Love will really mean?

The plane descends and from my seat I can spot fields of wheat and they wave here too, a welcome. A welcome. I take a deep breath and smile. Gift.

When we land, I find the baggage claim and I wait and this is all I can think: I am falling in love. Falling into being fully alive. I tuck a lost strand behind my ear; the heart beats loud in the ears.

In the airport, in the street, the voices are foreign, exotic, thick with travel and miles and I can’t understand, can’t respond. People stream, move me along, but everywhere I go, I’m accompanied by this Voice whispering to me new words, new love—urging me, Respond, respond.

Linda, in a black sweater and smile that warms straight through, she finds me in the melee and leads the way back to her flat, woman forging a way. I had caught a red-eye flight across the Atlantic, had flown into red sun rising, hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours, but when she asks if I’d like to stroll down to the city center, I nod yes, yes! Leaving bags up on the loft bed, we stroll to the traditional center of France, point zero of Paris marked in stone on the cobbled courtyard of Notre Dame. The Dame’s perched gargoyles eye us. In the shadow of the church towers, not far from a statue of Charlemagne mounted on steed, old Parisian men sit watching the world stream by. Under our feet lie ruins of a Roman building, bits of stone from a long-buried medieval road, a crumbled wall that failed to keep the invading Franks out in AD 497. Tourists in black patent heels and Nike running shoes descend steps down into the crypt one hundred yards below the shadow of Notre Dame. But for me, it’s those open doors calling.

Ornately carved, the massive doors of the Notre Dame lie open, arms receiving the weary and I am that. Even in the touristic whir of the courtyard, I can hear the singing. It’s that song I’ve been hearing all day, all over the world. We thread through the crowd, drawn.

Under the carved central portal with its statues of the enthroned Christ, I crane the neck over the crowd and I can see a choir robed in white, ethereal, standing in Notre Dame’s central nave. This air is old, the ground, holy. A triad of windowpanes, dark reds, vibrant blues, kaleidoscope of shifting shades, break out of the blackness behind the choir and all the light reverberates, shimmers. I can see this song. It fills all the vaulting space.

Their voices echo His love song.

Somewhere in the heights, the notes and spirits mingle.

Aria ascends and heads, they bow, and Linda and I shift for a clearer view into the light of the cathedral. Behind us a tourist bus grinds down the street and teens talk on cell phones. All around, screens glow with text messages, digitalized images. Bulbs flash. And where the crossbeams of the cross-shaped cathedral intersect, at Notre Dame’s center, at Paris’s center—at my center—on the altar table, I can see it and the breath lodges hard in the chest.

Bread and wine.

On the table in gold chalice, gold cup, gold circling all round, the Eucharist.

“While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it …” (Matthew 26:26 NIV).

How many miles have I traveled around this spinning planet and what does God again reveal as preeminent, as always the first step of entering in, the thing He can’t stop calling me to do? Had I left the farm, left my small world, got on a plane to fly a whole night over watery depths, landed in Paris, the romance of France, traveled, yes, even to one of those thousand places you must see before you die, for God to speak to me the exact same word He had spoken to me back at the farm, had been speaking to me for months, a year and a half now—the same word He speaks everywhere?

Eucharisteo.

In the central nave, the cup is lifted high and my rusty French can’t easily unravel the words but I’d know that inflection anywhere, that universal language, language we’ll speak forever in heaven but could learn already here: gratitude, gratitude, always eucharisteo.

Do I know what this Love will really mean?

My eyes follow the stone arches rising over us, granite hands clasped in prayer over souls. I think of all who have gone before, the hands of medieval peasants who chiseled the stone under which I now stand. I think of those long-ago believers who had a way of entering into the full life, of finding a passage into God, a historical model of intimacy with God. I lean back to see the spires. I think how lives, whole generations, were laid down to build this edifice, to find a way in. But they thought the steps to the God-consummation were but three: purgation, illumination, union. Had my own journey of transformation into the full life taken me on the same pilgrimage of the ancients who had built and passed under these stone arches?

Purgation was the first step toward full life in God, according to ancients. Awakened to the chasm separating from God, one prays for divine assistance to purge the soul of self-will. And for me too, eucharisteo had gently slowed me down, opened my hand to purge me of my hold, my control, on the world. With each gift I had accepted and given thanks for, I let go of my own will and accepted His. But my purgation, this releasing of sin and self, wasn’t an act of will or effort, but the act of Christ and His grace all-sufficient. Overwhelming grace drew me to the Christ full of glory that I might empty of the self.

I empty to become full. Full of grace … to fully live.

Illumination, the intermediary step in the path to full life in God, so said the ancients. The seeker sees. What the ancient saints called a vision of heaven, a way of seeing that draws one closer to God. Eucharisteo had been exactly this for me, opening my eyes to a way of seeing, to a realization that belief is, in essence, a way of the eyes. The one thousand presents wake me to the presence of God—but more so, living eucharisteo, living in thanks, had done the far harder work of keeping me awake to Him. I began to see that nothing I am counts for anything, but all that I count of Him counts for everything—seeing eyes might illuminate the glory of Christ in all.

I am all eye, seeing through life as glass to God.

Union, the medieval Christians thought, was the final and culminating step in the hungry pursuit of the full life, the mystical oneness achieved by only the most devout. Union. Yet don’t all the true believers, the ardent see-ers, have union from the first moment of repentance, becoming one with Christ in His death, burial, and rising from the dead? Union is actually and always the first step of the Christ journey. And yet attending to grace upon grace ushers into an ever deepening union, one we experience on the skin and in the vein, feel in the deep pit of the being, an ever-fuller realization of the Christ communion.

Endless thanksgiving, eucharisteo, had opened me to this, the way of the fullest life. From initial union to intimate communion—it isn’t exclusively the domain of the monastics and ascetics, pastors and missionaries, but I, domestic scrubber of potatoes, sister to Brother Lawrence, could I have unbroken communion, fullest life with fullest God? “To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less,” writes Ronald Rolheiser.[3]

Little had I known that counting one thousand gifts would launch me on a thousand-year-old journey of transformation. Would it really give me, the empty-handed and close-fisted, the gift of becoming fully alive, fully one? Do I even know what that really means?

Pigeon wings clap the air, land somewhere overhead, unafraid of the gaping mouthed gargoyles. My eyes fall upon the abutments of this door of the center west portal, carved with the five wise virgins and the five foolish virgins. Will I be one of the waiting, watching … one longing for the Bridegroom? For the union? That feeling under the gothic door arches … This feeling. I remember this feeling. The way my apron billowed in the running, the light, the air. The harvest moon. I remember. The yearning. To merge with Beauty Himself. But here … now? Really? With Him utterly pure and me so soul ugly? I hold the side seam of my skirt in fingers clenched tight, Linda and I walking along the Seine in the warmth of June twilight.

I am not at all certain that I want consummation.

We pass the stalls that line the quays of the Seine, tourists browsing the old books, shelves of penciled sketches, the faded prints offered by les bouquinistes. Lovers hold hands. Everywhere, lovers in Paris. All I can think: real communion terrifies. And who wouldn’t cower at the invitation to communion with limitless Holiness Himself? When I read the words of Walter Brueggemann, I nod fervently, my sentiments encapsulated exactly: “The shock of such a partner destabilizes us too much. The risk is too great, the discomfort so demanding. We much prefer to settle for a less demanding, less overwhelming meeting. Yet we are haunted by the awareness that only this overwhelming meeting gives life.”[4] Yes, God as partner shocks and I’m too ugly, spiritually, physically, too filthy, too … low to be courted by God and He lavishes His love, the uncontainable riches, and can I trust His love and part of me is right anxious to flee. Yet I am haunted. Only this overwhelming meeting gives the fullest life: the holy and hallowed communion. Do I know what that means?

Monday morning dawns. Quiet click of heels on the cobblestone of Rue Mazarine. Church bells intone morning. From the belfry of Saint-Séverin?—those ancient ones cast in 1412? He just can’t stop singing, can He? I stir, reach for my pocket Bible.

“But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him,” reads 1 Corinthians 6:17. I run my hand along the beams over my loft bed, wood hewn by a hand several hundred years ago. I can hear Him. He’s calling for a response; He’s calling for oneness. Communion.

Jesus says there is no other way to take up the faith but complete union: “I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). I am stilled. I think on being in Christ and Him being in me and He is wind whisperer and I am leaf and He stirs and I tremble: “Remain in me, and I will remain in you” (John 15:4). He’s calling me to graft on, become one with the True Vine, the vine the biblical symbol of joy, festivity … fullness. He’s calling to come and celebrate being made one, and in Him, by Him, to bear the fruit of the full life round.

I see it clear, June coming in bright on the breeze through open window: there is no real reality, no full life, outside of the relationship with Love, because God Himself wraps Himself eternally in relationship: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit existing in relationship, an encircling dance of communion sweetest. God is love—everywhere! everything!—and He can only be love because He exists in triune relationship. Before I ever breathed or the earth ever spun, the love within the Godhead orbited, Father loving Son “before the creation of the world” (John 17:24 NIV) and when I am in union with Christ, I too am lavished with the love the Father has for the Son. In union, that love is mine—ours! I can’t simply ignore His serenade because I’m unsure, uncomfortable, uninterested, thinking I’ve claimed Christ as my Savior already anyways. God is relationship and He woos us to relationship and there is nothing with God if there is no relationship.

I can hear Paris waking.

Cars humming down the Quai de Conti. The hushed whir of a bicycle, the closing of doors out on the street. I lay thinking. This invitation to have communion with Love—is this the edge of the mystery Paul speaks of? “‘A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.’ This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one” (Ephesians 5:31- 32). The two, Christ and the church, becoming one flesh—the mystery of that romance. Breath falling on face, Spirit touching spirit, the long embrace, the entering in and being within—this is what God seeks? With each of us?

Is this the apex of the dare to fully live?

I would later read the words of John Calvin, Protestant Reformer, and wonder fresh at the meaning of the mystery: “God very commonly takes on the character of a husband to us. Indeed, the union by which he binds us to himself when he receives us into the bosom of the church is like sacred wedlock.”[5] And again, “Therefore that joining together of head and members, that indwelling of Christ in our hearts—in short that mystical union—are accorded by us the highest degree of importance.”[6]

Mystical union. This, the highest degree of importance. God as Husband in sacred wedlock, bound together, body and soul, fed by His body, quenched by His blood—this is where eucharisteo leads. Lover bestows upon the Beloved gifts, the Beloved gives thanks for those gifts and enters into the mystical love union. If God, who could have any life of His choosing, finds the most satisfying joy in communion within the Trinity, wouldn’t I?

I know and don’t know why I am afraid.

How receptive to God do I really want to be?

“Morning …” Linda’s voice floats up to the loft. She’s folding the blankets of her futon. First light is falling from the floor-to-ceiling balcony windows. “So, what’s on your itinerary for Paris?”

Linda maps it out and over a handful of days, one by one, I stroke off items on the penciled itinerary in my Moleskin: the glass sanctuary of thirteenth-century Sainte-Chapelle, the millions of fragments of colored transparency, suspended like a delicate ornament, midair. (No one dare speak lest we fall.) A day wandering the mirrored halls, groomed gardens, of Versailles, gold shimmering in sun. (My heels bleed blisters we walk so far.) The Eiffel Tower pierces the night sky, a lightning rod electrified, and I snap too many photographs. (Everywhere, shutters capturing, this the perfect backdrop for lovers kissing in June dusk.) We walk streets of perfumiers, boutiques, book shops, restaurants with full-size pigs on spits slowly rotating in front windows. Everywhere, cathedral spires penetrate sky. Each evening, I lie in my loft bed and across the narrow blue lines of my come-with-me-everywhere gratitude journal, under the title “June Gifts” I write a few more …

White-haired women lined at the grocery, baguettes dangling out of baskets

French waiters

Pigeons on peaks of copper-green roofs

Rusting bicycles with wire baskets, pedaling down narrow streets

Blue-knickered boys digging in a sandbox in the shadow of Notre Dame

Keys jingling in the pocket of the janitor of Saint-Germain-des-Prés as he bows to pray before the altar

Blooming weeds in the cracks between cobblestone

Tolling church bells

I think about union and what I’m skirting, what I’m drawn to … I turn out the light. I lie in the dark, waiting for sleep. Waiting to know what this all means.

It is late on Friday afternoon when Linda and I wander the Louvre, brave a whirring circus of shutters to catch a hint of Mona Lisa’s smile. But for me, the aura of the Mona Lisa isn’t how I will remember the Louvre. It’s the mystery we enter into in the upper chambers, heavy with the scent of God.

The notes lure. Throughout the galleries of the second story, we can hear it faint, high and lilting, music drifting like a fragrance. Aren’t art galleries to be hushed, quiet affairs? Where’s the music coming from? The enigma of it keeps me seeking, peering anxious around every corner. The beat grows stronger, the words clearer, and then there in a large gallery, entirely unexpected, I stumble clear into it: a choral ensemble gathered in formal attire, black bottoms, white tops, their perfectly formed mouths singing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Nocturnes 1 and 2.

A crowd fills the room; the man beside us in the doorway, his head, shoulders, swaying the music indwelling. Jean Restout’s painting, Pentecost, hangs massive on a wall in front of the ensemble and the director raises her hand for their voices to scale heights. Listening to harmony, I attend to the canvas before the choir: the Holy Spirit descending as flame upon the heads of life-sized apostles. It’s a vivid, dramatic imaging of words I remember from Acts 2:4: “And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit.” God falling. God filling. Union. Fulfilling. The notes pitch high and the heartstrings tremor.

Dare I respond?

The ensemble’s striking upper octaves echo and I wander reluctantly on, find myself in an adjacent gallery standing before a gilded frame, a diminutive and unassuming work, directly at eye level. A Rembrandt. The chorus holds a note long. These brushstrokes, gold light soaking canvas, these glorious Rembrandt strokes, they illuminate two sojourners leaning in awe at a table. It’s a Rembrandt of strangers at Emmaus eating with Christ. Am I in the shadows behind the young servant, oblivious to the miracle unveiling? Do I recognize Christ here, enter into Emmaus epiphany? “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Luke 24:30—31 NIV).

Eucharisteo—communion—that hound of heaven, He won’t relent, always, everywhere, eucharisteo, opening the eyes to God.

Notes and song and that wooing love and He can’t stop the intimate pursuit, the passionate love and I dare the response, a barely tremor, a hardly song. “Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name” (Psalm 103:1 KJV).

I peer at His hands holding bread. Then the crescendo.

Bless “the LORD, who daily loadeth us with benefits” (Psalm 68:19 KJV). “Bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth” (Psalm 34:1 KJV). “Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name” (Psalm 100:4 KJV).

I could bless very God.

Not take anything. Not ask anything, demand anything, petition anything. I could simply give something to God. A gift to Him! Like He had given one thousand, countless, gifts to me! This I could do! I look into the face of the painting, of Christ giving thanks and breaking bread.

God, He has blessed—caressed.

I could bless God—caress with thanks.

It’s our making love.

God makes love with grace upon grace, every moment a making of His love for us. And He invites the turning over of the hand, the opening and saying the Yes with thanks. Then God lays down all of His fullness into all the emptiness. I am in Him. He is in me. I embrace God in the moment. I give Him thanks and I bless God and we meet and couldn’t I make love to God, making every moment love for Him? To know Him the way Adam knew Eve. Spirit skin to spirit skin.

This is what His love means. I want it: union. This is the one gift He longs for in return for His unending gifts, and this even I could give Him, and anywhere. Anywhere—in the kitchen scrubbing potatoes, in the arching cathedrals, in the spin of laundry and kids and washing toilets—anywhere I can have intimate communion with Maker of heaven and earth. I can’t help myself here. Inches from the canvas, strains of Mozart carrying, I whisper eucharisteo:

Thank You, God, for the bread of now … for Your Son and sacrifice …

for the love song You keep singing, the gift of Yourself that You keep giving …

for the wild wonder of You in this moment.

A stranger on the road, my cold heart burns (Luke 24:32) and He is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh and I am His and He is mine and I want to touch the paint. I want to run my fingertips across oils, let the colors saturate my skin, let them run into my blood. I want to be in the painting, Supper at Emmaus, the painting to be in me. I want to be in God and God to be in me, to exchange love and blessings and caresses and, like the apostle-pilgrims, my eyes open and I know it because of this burning of the heart: this moment is a divine interchange. I raise my hand slightly, finger imperceptibly the air before the canvas and this is intercourse disrobed of its connotations, pure and unadulterated: a passing between. A connection, a communicating, an exchange, between tender Bridegroom and His bride.

The intercourse of soul with God is the very climax of joy.

The scrolling gold frame holds what I long for and I feel this burn too, flush of embarrassment up the face. And yet … we’re called to do more than believe in God; we’re called to live in God. To enter into Christ and Christ enter into us—to cohabit. Is this why it is His will for us to always give thanks in all things—the unbroken communion (1 Thessalonians 5:18)?

The choir sings; on a mauve wall Rembrandt’s Christ breaks the bread, Communion, and the words of Teresa of Avila play in my head, a beckoning refrain:

Just these two words He spoke changed my life,

“Enjoy Me.”

What a burden I thought I was to carry—a crucifix, as did He.

Love once said to me, “I know a song, would you like to hear it?”

And laughter came from every brick in the street and from every pore in the sky,

After a night of prayer, He changed my life when

He sang,

“Enjoy Me.”[7]

That’s His song! I rejoice in you. Come rejoice in Me. The song that plays the world awake, the song that fuels joy: Enjoy Me. Enjoy Me!

Is there a greater way to love the Giver than to delight wildly in His gifts?

I hand Linda my camera. Will she record this moment, me before Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus? I would carry it back home across the Atlantic, that photo of me in a long black dress, me with head bowed slight, smiling shy. I would hold that time captured and know that this was the holy moment I knew the warmth of union with Christ, not union only positionally, but communion with Christ experientially. I’m a celebrant! Officiating at the endless Eucharist of thanksgiving, a celebrant celebrating Christ, anywhere I could take up the elements of the moment and I might live eucharisteo, experiencing and enjoying Christ! (Might the world split with joy if all were celebrants celebrating Communion?)

“Would a soul continually eye His everlasting tenderness and compassion … [then] it could not bear an hour’s absence from Him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with Him one hour,” writes John Owen, Puritan theologian.[8] “Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from Him; but if the heart be once much taken with the eminency of the Father’s love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared unto Him.”[9]

Linda hands me the camera, the one who dared in the beginning now witnessing the full leap into Arms and I nod grateful, turn to those painted hands holding bread, holding me. Will I remember this, not wanting to spend an hour’s absence from Him?

My last day in Paris we do what we’ve done every day: touch her past, taste her breads and cheeses, listen to her sounds on every street corner, violins, guitars, cellos, watch her international faces and vibrant colors. I’m alive with His scent. Off Rue de Rivoli across the street from the church, St-Gervais-et-St-Protais, I find an island of quiet in a monastic bookstore. A spray of blushing heritage roses creep up the sun-washed stone along the back wall. Hand-hewn beams span the low ceiling and light floods in from the wall of paned windows facing the empty street. A young nun in a long blue robe serves browsers in hushed, lilting French, her fawn eyes inviting, welcoming. I, too, drift through the stacks of Bibles, French titles, crosses. Back by old wooden stairs climbing up stone wall, standing in a pool of afternoon sun, I pick up a CD of hymns. I read and I shake my head in wonder. Can that really be the title?

Eucharistique.

I lay my hand over the word. Why do I even wonder? I read the title again to be sure. Yes, eucharisteo always, everywhere, right where you are and I can’t shake the question from my love-drunk head: How badly do I want the deep communion? The dappled light shifts on the stone wall. I trace the letters “e-u-c-h …” Communion with God, what was broken in the Garden, this is wholly restored when I want the God-communion more than I want the world-consumption. What that first and catastrophic sin of ingratitude ruptured, what that one bite of the forbidden fruit stole from those fully alive—union—can be repaired by exact inverse of the Garden: lifestyle gratitude and a willingness to eat of the bread He gives in this moment. How badly do I want to return to perfect Paradise, walk with God in the cool of the evening, be fully alive?

“O my soul, thou art capable of enjoying God, woe to thee if thou art contented with anything less than God,” Francis de Sales gently, rightly urges.[10] Does earth have anything I desire but Him? I have to ask it. And I know the answer: When I remember the gifts and how He loves me … I am moth drawn again to His ardent flame.

My finger underlines the CD title whispering eucharisteo. I have underlined my life and one thousand times I have practiced the language of eucharisteo and I now know this song. I step out into the street, ready to return, to listen to the song, to set a print of Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus in the farm kitchen sill and live fully, hand wide open. I now testify: Counting His graces makes all moments into one holy kiss of communion and communion comes in the common. He will break bread and I will take and the world is His feast! and He is love! and nothing will keep my hand from filling with His.

Into a sun-orb sky, I fly home.

And into the heart of God.

afterword

It is spring, the farm in spring. Dust devils blow gritty vortexes across tilled fields and a single crow sits high in an apple tree abloom in the orchard, an iridescent black silhouette in a cloud of delicate white. A morning dove is sitting on a clutch of blue eggs under the leaves of the sunburst locust by the porch. I take a load of sun-dried laundry off the line.

Balancing the basket of fresh towels on one hip, I step in the back mudroom door into a still-teetering pile of jeans dirty from the stone picking out in the fields, into the shoes strewn, the LEGOs scattered, the half-baked experiment in the mudroom basin that involved green dye and too much sand, the kitchen sink always filling, the pantry always emptying, and I can see it and who could miss it, that herd of dusty footprints tracking mud across the kitchen floor? The washing machine groans. The oven timer beeps frantic. I have no idea where half a dozen kids are.

I step over the darks and lights sorted. Why doubt the dare to fully live? Now and right here. Why not let all of life be penetrated by grace, gratitude, joy? This is the only way to welcome the Kingdom of God.

I drop the basket on the wooden ironing board in the mudroom, pick my way through to the oven. Every breath’s a battle between grudgery and gratitude and we must keep thanks on the lips so we can sip from the holy grail of joy. Nowhere else in the whole tilting universe lies the joy of the Lord but in that one word. I silence the siren of the oven, of me.

Out the kitchen window the sky rolls out. Apple blossoms fill all the orchard. The morning dove warms her bluing hope. I can hear Him, what He is telling the whole world and even me here: this is for you. The lover’s smile in the morning, the child’s laughter down the slide, the elder’s eyes at eventide: this is for you. And the earth under your feet, the rain over your face upturned, the stars spinning all round you in the brazen glory: this is for you, you, you. These are for you—gifts—these are for you—grace—these are for you—God, so count the ways He loves, a thousand, more, never stop, that when you wake in the morning you can’t help turn humbly to the east, unfold your hand to the heavens, and though you tremble and though you wonder, though the world is ugly, it is beautiful, and you can slow and you can trust and you can receive each moment as grace. Eucharisteo. Eucharisteo. Eucharisteo.

Isn’t that the music playing? The playing in the stereo, playing the world alive. The music from Paris, Eucharistique. Did Hope-Girl put it in while she washed down bathrooms? It’s her favorite CD since she smoothed out the page of a fresh journal and began her own One Thousand Gifts list the day after her baptism, day after she claimed the full life. She has left the CD case on the counter.

I pick it up, run my hands across the letters again. And the moment opens unexpectedly. I’m in the cemetery kneeling, tracing the only five letters carved deep in that slab of granite laid down in the dirt.

“A-I-M-E-E.” Loved one.

I remember her silken hair. I still don’t know why He took her. I don’t know why her children don’t run free on spring days with mine, laugh with my sister’s. Don’t know why my parents’ hearts were left to weep, eroding all away. Though I cry, this I know: God is always good and I am always loved and eucharisteo has made me my truest self, “full of grace.” Doesn’t eucharisteo rename all God’s children their truest name:

“Loved one.”

Me, my dad, my mama, all the children, all the broken ones, all the world, He sings us safe with the refrain of our name, “Loved one.”

In the window next to the stove, the porcelain dove soars. In the sill a framed print of Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus invites. How many times a day do I look at this print in my kitchen and return to that sacred moment of soul communion in a still gallery? How many times a day do I again reach to embrace Him in communion thanks? It comes again now like it does every day, what I had read after I had already counted thousands of gifts: that this discipline of counting graces is as old as God’s people themselves, the seriously devout Jews of today still giving thanks to God one hundred times a day. The words of the rabbis have been impressed deep into my skin, my being, their words beckoning the way into joy:

Blessings keep our awareness of life’s holy potential ever present. They awaken us to our lives…. With each blessing uttered we extend the boundaries of the sacred and ritualise our love of life. One hundred times a day, everywhere we turn, everything we touch, everyone we see. The blessings can be whispered. No one even need hear. No one but the Holy One. “Holy One of blessing, Your presence fills the Universe. Your presence fills me.”[1]

My gratitude journal is lying open on its permanent home on the counter, enumerating moments, making a ledger of His love. It is Chesterton who encapsulated the truth of my numbering life: “The greatest of poems is an inventory.”[2] I grin happy in the midst. No, I’ll never stop the counting, never cease transcribing the ballad of the world, the rhyme of His heart. He and I, a couplet. Count one thousand gifts, bless the Holy One one hundred times a day, commune with His presence filling the laundry room, the kitchen, the hospital, the graveyard, the highways and byways and workways and all the blazing starways, His presence filling me.

This is what it means to fully live.

In the dark of the next morning’s dawn, I receive a dashed-off note from Shelly, her seven-year-old daughter still heavily sedated in the operating recovery room after reconstructive surgery for a shattered elbow that threatens to render her right hand useless. Shelly who testified how The Gift List had changed me. Shelly who has lived eucharisteo with me and the List unwraps the same in her too and she writes: “God is good. Always.” I nod yes, think of Aimee’s name engraved in stone, all our names, all of us, the loved ones. My fingers over the keyboard, I think of that letter from my father-in-law asking who is ready. That mother, her daughter with cancer, full of questions. And now I think I have the beginning of an answer. I write Shelly prayers and love and sign my name with what I have come in the end to wholly believe. Who I am and always have been.

All is grace,

Ann

I press Send and my clenched fists open to a clutch of faith that warms into the coming light. In the orchard, the day’s first wind blows a thousand apple blossoms from the trees. They shower earth’s dark breast.

I watch them fly. A snow of endless beauty.

And I feel His caress.

notes

chapter 2: a word to live … and die by

1. “How Much Oxygen Does a Person Consume in a Day,” How Stuff Works. http://health.howstuffworks.com/question98.htm (accessed April 20, 2010).

2. Augustine, Confessions of Saint Augustine, book 10, chapter 21, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.xi.xxi.html (accessed April 20, 2010).

3. Albert Schweitzer, Reverence for Life, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Harper, 1969), 41.

4. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 18.

5. Ibid., 61.

chapter 3: first flight

1. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, book 1, chapter 1, section 4, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/decaussade/abandonment.ii_1.i.i.iv.html (accessed April 20, 2010).

2. Martin Luther, quoted in Bob Kelly, Worth Repeating: More than 5,000 Classic and Contemporary Quotes (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2003), 379.

3. John Piper, When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2004), 124.

4. Erasmus, quoted in Andy Zubko, Treasure of Spiritual Wisdom (New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 2003), 219.

5. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 15.

6. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 52.

7. Julian of Norwich, quoted in Richard Foster, ed., Devotional Classics (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 71.

chapter 4: a sanctuary of time

1. Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Your Sabbath (Nashville: Nelson, 2007), 45, emphasis added.

2. Evelyn Underhill, quoted in Martin H. Manser, ed., The Westminster Collection of Christian Quotations (Louisville: Westminster, 2001), 270.

3. Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1986), 20.

4. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

chapter 5: what in the world, in all this world, is grace?

1. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Rockville, Md.: Serenity, 2009), 138.

2. Augustine, Confessions of Saint Augustine, book 7, chapter 12, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.viii.xii.html (accessed April 20. 2010).

3. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin, 1998), 59.

4. G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Collected Poetry: Part 1, ed. Aidan Mackey (Fort Collins, Colo.: Ignatius, 1994), 38, emphasis added.

5. Teresa of Avila, quoted in Amy Welborn, The Loyola Kids Book of Saints (Chicago: Loyola, 2001), 87.

6. See Gregory Wolfe, “The Wound of Beauty,” Image 56 (Winter 2007—8), http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/editorial-statements/the-wound-of-beauty (accessed April 20, 2010).

chapter 6: what do you want? the place of seeing God

1. Amy Carmichael, “Immanence,” in Mountain Breezes: The Collected Poems of Amy Carmichael (Fort Washington, Pa.: Christian Literature Crusade, 1999), 19.

2. J. I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness: Know the Fullness of Life with God (Ventura, Calif.: Regal, 2009), 69.

3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, Catherine Phillips, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 129.

4. A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Camp Hill, Pa.: Christian Publications, 1982), 73.

5. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 77.

6. Irenaeus, quoted in Letters of Faith through the Seasons, James M. Houston, ed. (Colorado Springs: Cook, 2006), 1:152.

7. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 12—13.

chapter 7: seeing through the glass

1. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, quoted in A Guide to Prayer for All God’s People, Rueben Job and Norman Shawchuck, eds. (Nashville: Upper Room, 1990), 244.

2. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), 33.

3. John Piper, “From His Fullness We Have All Received, Grace Upon Grace,” Desiring God, http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/ByDate/2008/3394_From_His_Fullness_We_Have_All_Received_Grace_Upon_Grace/(accessed April 20, 2010).

4. G. K. Chesterton, quoted in James M. Houston, Joyful Exiles: Life in Christ on the Dangerous Edge of Things (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2006), 140.

5. “People generally do not make efforts to actively infuse their daily experiences with greater emotional quality,” posits scientific researcher and professor Rollin McCraty. “Although most people definitively claim that they love, care, appreciate, it might shock many to realize the large degree to which these feelings are merely assumed or acknowledged cognitively, far more than they are actually experienced in their feeling world. In the absence of conscious efforts to engage, build, and sustain positive perceptions and emotions, we all too automatically fall prey to feelings such as irritation, anxiety, worry, frustration, self-doubt and blame” (Rollin McCraty, “The Grateful Heart,” The Psychology of Gratitude, ed. Robert A. Emmons [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 241, emphasis added).

6. James H. McConkey, Life Talks (Harrisburg, Pa.: Fred Kelker, 1911), 103.

chapter 8: how will he not also?

1. The Strongest NIV Exhaustive Concordance, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 1583.

2. Quoted in Robert A. Emmons, Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 89.

3. Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 24.

4. Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn, Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life (Mahwah N.J.: Paulist, 1995), 1.

chapter 9: go lower

1. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Rockville, Md.: Serenity, 2009), 19.

2. Quoted in G. B. F. Hallock, “The Cultivation of Humility,” Herald and Presbyter 90 (December 24, 1919): 8.

3. Timothy Keller, “The Advent of Humility” Christianity Today, December 22, 2008, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/december/20.51.html (accessed January 24, 2010).

4. I am indebted to Tonia Peckover for her thoughtful insights.

5. Thomas Aquinas, quoted in Peter Kreeft, Catholic Christianity (Fort Collins, Colo.: Ignatius, 2001), 357.

6. Henry Ward Beecher, Life Thoughts, Gathered from the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Sheldon, 1860), 115.

7. Peter Kreeft, “Joy,” http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/joy.htm (accessed April 12, 2010), emphasis added.

chapter 10: empty to fill

1. My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless. (W. B. Yeats, “Vacillation”)

Quoted in Richard J. Finneran, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, vol. 6 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 147.

2. Dorothy Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church (Nashville: Nelson, 2004), 143.

3. Mother Teresa, quoted in A Guide to Prayer for All God’s People, Rueben Job and Norman Shawchuck, eds. (Nashville: Upper Room, 1990), 228.

4. Rabindranath Tagore, quoted in John Shea, The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2006), 193.

chapter 11: the joy of intimacy

1. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 10.

2. Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 60.

3. Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (New York: Random House, 1999), 66.

4. Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 45.

5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2.8.18 (2:385).

6. Ibid., 3.11.10 (2:737).

7. Teresa of Avila, “Laughter Came from Every Brick,” in Love Poems from God, ed. Daniel James Ladinsky (New York: Penguin, 2002), 276. Copyright © 2002 by Daniel Ladinsky. Used by permission of Daniel Ladinsky.

8. John Owen, Communion with the Triune God (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2007), 124.

9. Ibid., 128.

10. St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life (New York: Kessinger, 1997), 299.

afterword

1. Dennis Lennon, Fuelling the Fire: Fresh Thinking on Prayer (Queensway, UK: Scripture Union, 2005), 43, emphasis added.

2. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Rockville, Md.: Serenity, 2009), 55.

acknowledgments

To these, I humbly offer up the two most profound, potent words I know:

Thank you.

Laura Barker for pioneering and breaking ground, Laura Boggess and Marybeth Whalen for generously believing, Bill Jensen for surest faith and tireless championing, Leslie Leyland Fields for wise, girding words, and Andy Meisenheimer for the unlikely yes.

For Mick and Sheri Silva, who were the gift.

For the Zondervan team, Mike Salisbury and Dirk Buursma who go the extra mile in their kingdom work, for Sandy Vander Zicht the consummate professional who graciously took this project under her experienced wing to make a fledgling fly. I am indebted.

For every single blog reader—and you know your beautiful names—for every thoughtful note, for every kind prayer, for every time you read, offered your friendship, passed on a post to a friend, and invited one more to the circle of friends … these pages are because of you and I will never be able to thank you enough. I love community with you—appalling grace!

For Marlene Fitch, Sherri Martin, Anne Peterson, Annette Weber, Megan Modderman, Linda Chontos, Lydia Bower, Shannon Woodward, L. L. Barkat, Sally Clarkson, Elizabeth Foss, Bobbie Wolgemuth, Shannon Lowe, and the fellowship of GBF, the unwavering friends who held the hands up when I was faint-weary. Life in the Love Body with you heals, gives life, multiplies joy. For Shelly Kearns, biblical scholar, who kept true pastoral company through the early draft words. For Holley Gerth who received pages so fresh with such faith. For Tonia Peckover, for everything, these years and the together pilgrimage. For you all, I will always be grateful.

For Linda Sunderland who dared me to count to one thousand. You change lives. How to thank you?

For John and Tiffany Voskamp who have courageously trusted God’s goodness, and for David, Noa and Mya, Lia and Ana, the faithful five. I am so thankful we have the gift of doing life together.

For Molly, the sister who has been one, a safe, strong place; for John, the brother who has prayed and come the whole long way; for my dad who has loved through hard times, the highest of compliments; and for my mama who has shown me how to live into the God-strength with beauty, grace, and astonishing joy.

Caleb, Joshua, Hope, Levi, Malakai, Shalom, six who have swollen me, shaped me, and birthed me into love. I weep for the grace of each of you, the six crowning gifts. Mama loves you from here to eternity and back.

Darryl, the far better, wiser half, who daily takes my hand and tenderly leads into living fully for Him. I am so glad you asked for forever and I said yes. I never expected so much joy.

For God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit … who draws the whole beautiful world into communion’s embrace and the dance of the Holy Fulfilling.

Bible translations

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked AMP are taken from The Amplified Bible Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Scripture quotations marked NCV are taken from the Holy Bible, New Century Version. Copyright © 1987, 1988, 1991 by Word Publishing, a division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982, by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NEB are taken from The New English Bible. Copyright © 1961, 1970 by the delegates of the Oxford University Press and the syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Kindest friend …

You are warmly invited! Might you be able to join us at www.onethousandgifts.com?

A community of eucharisteo gathers there, a place with free resources and downloads to help you live fully, with photo galleries from stories of this book and the recipes from these pages, a place where we wildly take the dare and give thanks right where we are.

A place where we daily fight. hard. for. joy.

We’ve made a place of photo galleries highlighting you and all those who’ve picked up a pen and counted their own one thousand gifts, a place for your stories of eucharisteo and radically changed lives, a place of beauty and transfiguring pain and extravagant grace.

“Communion, by necessity, always leads us into community.” A Love-Body, we’re meant to be joined; we battle better together. We’d love to meet you, friend … and count the gifts in community.

Eucharisteo always precedes the miracle. All really is outrageous grace,

Ann Voskamp

www.onethousandgifts.com

www.aholyexperience.com

Praise

A book destined to become a classic, the sort of book you dog-ear and reread for the sheer joy of cherishing the words and experiencing the depth of the heart that wrote it.

Mary DeMuth

author of Thin Places: A Memoir

Where do I begin? Do I tell you that Ann Voskamp writes like a poet with the heart of a mystic? Or do I share with you how One Thousand Gifts is so profound that if we internalize this message of lifestyle gratitude and all-pervasive grace, we can know Christ like Adam knew Eve. To write of such beautiful, intimate union requires the pen of a spiritual artist. Open this book, then open your heart.

Lisa Whelchel

actress, speaker, and author of Creative Correction and Friendship for Grown-Ups

This book is one that will change the way you see the world.

Marybeth Whalen

author of The Mailbox and She Makes It Look Easy and director of www.shereads.org

Very rarely in my life have I been given the privilege of sharing about something so exquisite. As I moved from page to page, I became convinced that my life would never be the same. Prepare yourself to leave these pages a changed person. Thank you, Ann—you are the 1001st thing I have on my list today.

Angie Smith

author of I Will Carry You and speaker with Women of Faith

As I read One Thousand Gifts, I kept thinking of Walt Whitman’s haunting phrase, “Finally shall come the poet.” It’s a rare gift that can render both life’s everyday intimacies and the heart’s broken rhythms in language at once lucid and lyrical, but Ann does it without seeming to try. And most of all, best of all, she employs that language to tell a story of a life—her own—transformed by the simple act of giving thanks. Finally comes the poet.

Mark Buchanan

author of The Rest of God and Spiritual Rhythm

Compelling, poetic, and poignant, Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts dares us to become grateful in everything. Voskamp is a beautiful narrator, retelling painful, sometimes grief-stricken moments with fearless vulnerability. One Thousand Gifts is a masterpiece full of wise hope and light, with simple truths that will inspire you to see God’s grace in everyday circumstances, blessings, and hardships.

Matthew Paul Turner

author of Churched and Hear No Evil

The book itself is the best gift of all—one that stays with you and keeps blessing your life long after you’ve read the last word.

Holley Gerth

DaySpring editorial director, author, and counselor

To find your deepest heart—to know joy—read your Bible, and this treasure of a book, this portal into the deep goodness of God and of life.

Kelly Monroe Kullberg

author of Finding God Beyond Harvard

Ann Voskamp’s writing is vibrant, her insights piercing.

Tony Woodlief

World magazine columnist and author of Somewhere More Holy

This book is like a treasure hunt. Ann sits beside you and speaks words that will inspire you to open the door into the miracle of holy joy.

Bobbie Wolgemuth

author of When Morning Gilds the Skies and compiler of the NCV Mom’s Bible

One Thousand Gifts reads like a series of prize-winning photographs, bringing the reader to stop and marvel at the depth and detail, the light and shadow, of all those scattered moments in life. Ann Voskamp tells the story behind the image—in memorable, mesmerizing prose.

Allison Pittman

author of For Time and Eternity and Forsaking All Others

Copyright

ZONDERVAN

One Thousand Gifts

Copyright © 2010 by Ann Voskamp

This title is also available in a Zondervan audio edition. Visit www.zondervan.fm.

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Voskamp, Ann, 1973 -

One thousand gifts: a dare to live fully right where you are / Ann Voskamp. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 231).

1. Christian life. 2. Voskamp, Ann, 1973 -. 3. Farm life—Religious aspects—Christianity I. Title. BV4509.5V67 2010

248.4—dc22 2010025364

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Other Bible translations quoted in this book are listed on page 231 - 2, which hereby becomes a part of this copyright page.

Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers printed in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-310-41235-9

Published in association with William K. Jensen Literary Agency, 119 Bampton Court, Eugene, Oregon 97404.

Cover design: Michelle Lenger

Cover photography: Masterfile®, iStockphoto®

Interior design: Beth Shagene

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