The First Drop of Rain Read online

  But I began to understand them as a sort of gift. I began to find in them this wonderful time to set my own course, to meander through life at my own (and my children’s) whim and fancy. We could go to the beach and linger until our souls were filled to the brim. Coming home wasn’t an interruption in the fun but the perfect thing to do. I began to see beauty and freedom in these stretches and to accept them as a gift to my spirit.

  However, there is another element to these writing seasons. When the project is complete, it’s almost as if Les returns from a trip abroad or awakens from some kind of coma. He re-engages with vigor. I brace myself for the return of his typical laser intensity, when Les is deeply attentive and energized to get his world in order so he can enjoy life again. The adjustment for the rest of us is a bit jarring. He points out the dust and the clutter and the empty shelves in the pantry and takes on our world like he would a writing deadline. Gone are the lazy beach days when we fly under the radar. We are now in the center of his sights. Eventually, that will be marvelous—deep connection and order is restored. But I have learned to brace myself emotionally for the reentry.

  Sometimes we desperately need to be noticed, to have the person we love fully attentive and totally engaged. We need someone to pick up on those subtle cues like the strain in our voice or the light flickering in our eyes. We need someone to see that we are anxious or overwhelmed, and don’t even have the strength to put this into words. We all have inner insecurities that threaten to consume us, regrets that disable us, and fears about the future that freeze us. In these moments, to be seen is everything. All it takes is a knowing glance, a compassionate touch on the shoulder, a simple word of encouragement left on voicemail.

  My friend Debbie lives in Pasadena. Once a week we pray together over our cell phones. For reasons that neither of us fully understands, God seems to spring into action in response to our shared prayers more visibly than either of us has ever experienced when praying alone. We seem to have bold faith with one another that we lack by ourselves. Maybe that’s why Jesus tells us to pray together and agree with one another—each of us adding our faith to the faith of our friend.

  I’ll be in my car, commuting in solitude with tears rolling down my cheeks while I grapple with my own tiredness or my feelings of failure. My cell phone will ring and I’ll hear Debbie’s voice. “Leslie, God awakened me last night, and I prayed for you at 3:30 a.m. Are you okay?”

  Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

  Hosea Ballou

  Have I mentioned that every time we pray, Debbie ends by asking God to “wake us in the night” if the other person might need our prayer for the day ahead? I used to ask, “Debbie, what’s wrong with God prompting us during the day, preferably after we’ve had our morning coffee?” But Debbie is resolved that middle-of-the-night prayer sessions are a grace gift.

  Maybe she’s right. I know that a mere phone call, timed by the Spirit to coincide with a time of discouragement and anxiety, brings strength and courage. I have been noticed, by God’s spirit and by a distant friend. I know that I am not alone.

  Noticing isn’t everything though, is it? There are those soul-changing moments when someone not only sees us but reflects back to us the beautiful brilliance of who we truly are. It’s like the magic moment of dawn, when the colors are spread across the horizon like glorious, glowing wings. The shape of our best self has been seen. We feel that we are stretched across the horizon of someone’s vision, that their breath catches as they glimpse our true colors. For a brief passing moment, like a sunrise, our God-created image is dazzling. We know the color will disappear soon, but we need to know that there is someone who fully expects to see that dawn again.

  I remember the look on my husband’s face when I crossed the finish line of the one and only marathon I ever ran. I was twenty-six years old, living in Los Angeles, and decided to train for the LA Marathon. At the end of the race, the instant I stopped running after 26.2 miles and about a million steps, lactic acid flooded my legs. The pain was sudden and crippling. Les literally had to carry me. My face was beet red, and salty tears were streaming down my cheeks.

  When I glanced at Les’s face, I saw a look of delight and joy. I had fulfilled a dream. It’s a look I will never forget.

  After the race, he was almost as sore as I was and hobbled into the Jacuzzi at our little graduate-school apartment complex with me. He had been so tense watching and waiting for me that his muscles were strained. I felt the depth of his connection to me that day in a rare and special way. It is a moment I have hidden in my heart—a magic moment.

  to ponder

  Have you ever relished the freedom of feeling “invisible” for a time? What did that freedom allow you to enjoy?

  When have you felt the gift of someone who truly “sees” you at your very best and delights in who you are? What was that experience like for you?

  the emptiest places

  These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

  T.S. Eliot

  My mom was diagnosed with brittle juvenile diabetes when she was twenty-one. A newly married young woman, just finishing college and on her way to serve on the mission field, this was a devastating diagnosis. People with chronic health issues weren’t candidates for missionary service. Her body had deteriorated so much before the diagnosis was finally made that she weighed only eighty-five pounds. Because her body couldn’t metabolize her food, she was severely malnourished. With the diagnosis of diabetes came the doctor’s instructions not to pursue pregnancy. Mom was cautioned in the severest terms that pregnancy would mean sure deformity or death for the baby and possibly her own death.

  At the threshold of adulthood, a time when life is about possibilities and dreams and vision for the future, my mother stood in an emotional graveyard and buried her dreams. All that she had anticipated vanished.

  My mom and dad decided together to pursue pastoral ministry in the local church and went off to their denominational seminary in the Midwest. Mom used her degree in education to teach in an inner-city neighborhood school while Dad completed his master’s of divinity. They lived in a one-room trailer with a fold-down table and bed and scrimped and saved. My dad then pursued a doctorate at the school of theology at Emory University. Mom again secured a teaching position to fund the high tuition and provide for their living expenses. Dad had to sign an agreement that he would not work during his first year of advanced doctoral studies. He went ahead to Atlanta, moving their small trailer to set up life in a new city.

  Mom had been battling a mysterious illness and wasn’t well enough to travel. Then came the surprise diagnosis: Mom was pregnant, something they had taken every precaution to prevent. Dad quickly withdrew from the doctoral program and took a pastoral assignment at a little church in Weatherfort, Texas. Their lives were in limbo. The future looked dire. Mom’s doctor refused to care for her because her pregnancy went against his recommendations. She endured a pregnancy that made her so severely ill that she gained fewer pounds than I weighed at birth. Mom and Dad didn’t set up a nursery or pick out a name—these activities were discouraged as they were both told repeatedly that I wouldn’t survive.

  I will give you a full life in the emptiest of places … you’ll be like a well watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry. You’ll use the old rubble … to rebuild the foundations from your past.

  Isaiah 57

  When the time came to deliver, Mom checked in at the hospital for the high-risk Caesarean. It was 1964. Mom was given general anesthesia. She remembers waking up in a hospital room from a groggy sleep and being told that she had a living, lovely (if I do say so myself!) little girl.

  I was perfectly healthy and weighed in at over seven pounds. I have the original hospital document from Harris Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. Under Name it simply reads, “Baby Girl Young.” The doctors were even more astonished than my parents. The excited nursery workers twisted the blonde curls on the top of my head and tie
d them with a little pink bow before presenting me for the first time to my mom.

  I don’t know why so many of my parents’ early dreams turned to rubble. But I do know that with God’s presence, they went on to experience a rich season in ministry and marriage and even this unexpected gift—a full life in the emptiest of places.

  One of the joys of living in downtown Seattle is its proximity to freshwater Lake Union. It is a glacial lake that the Duamish tribe called “little waters.” At the foot of the Space Needle, Lake Union is a landing strip for seaplanes and a thoroughfare for pleasure boats on their way to Puget Sound. On the east and west sides, it is lined with floating homes, made famous by the movie Sleepless in Seattle.

  For Father’s Day, our family climbed into two double kayaks (a tricky business requiring exact placement of the paddle to secure the kayak and a limber slide into a small compartment with foot pedals) and paddled our way around these waters. John, age ten, shared my kayak, and Jackson, age five, paddled with his dad. We sometimes had to speed up to get out of harm’s way as a seaplane headed toward us.

  At the north end of Lake Union, directly across from our apartment, is Gasworks Park. It is a beautiful green lawn surrounding a hideous, imposing industrial relic with large towering rusted ruins that seem like the inner workings of a massive factory that have been exposed to open air. A reclaimed gasification plant from the early 1900s, it was transformed by the community of Seattle, which had the foresight to use the old rubble as a foundation for a beautiful, well-watered garden. Kite hill is bright with happy flashes of color as families run and laugh along its length.

  Life—full life—has now come to this formerly broken, empty place. Every time I see Gasworks Park, I am reminded of God’s amazing promise of transformation. The park is for me a sacred place, a symbol of God’s character written in steel and grass.

  There have been plenty of empty places in life for my mom and dad. The day Dad decided to end his marriage after thirty-five years was the emptiest day of Mom’s life. When the day came for the unwanted divorce, Mom drove herself to the courthouse in Chicago during a blinding rainstorm. I was living in Seattle and couldn’t be there. For reasons she can’t fully explain, she had to be there when it happened, to witness this dark hour of her life, to make her heart believe it was real. Dad did not attend.

  The years immediately following that day stretched out before her in bleak emptiness. Now, more than fifteen years later, her life is full of grandsons and family and community here in Seattle. Life has sprung up from an empty place.

  Naturalist John Muir observed that “storms of every sort … however mysterious and lawless they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation.” In the emptiness after the storm, in the sudden stillness, we can hear the promise of God.

  to ponder

  What dreams have you had to bury, leaving you feeling empty?

  Have you ever “reclaimed” a ruined part of your life and created something fresh and good there? Where have you sensed God’s restoration in your life?

  Empty Places

  My mind reviews my

  Losses

  Like my son’s tongue

  Seeks out his recent

  Missing tooth.

  In a way

  This whole life is a mouth full

  Of baby teeth.

  The permanent ones

  Will sprout someday

  In our gaping gums

  And we’ll sink those teeth

  Into Eternity

  And smile.

  air currents

  The limp leaves

  Waited for rain, while the black clouds

  Gathered far distant.

  T.S. Eliot

  Mystery surrounds us, yet we live with the unexplainable impossibilities until, by some miracle, our attention is seized. Children, more fully present than the rest of us, attend to these miracles more readily and sometimes usher us into sanctuaries of awe.

  Jackson invited me today. “Mom, why do clouds float, I mean, since they are full of raindrops?” We stood together, gazing at the clouds. I thought in silence about how water was most certainly heavier than air and marveled at the complexity of his question. Then I marveled at my total lack of curiosity regarding this matter. I had somehow reached midlife without giving a single thought to this circus trick.

  Later I discovered to my amazement that clouds float because of the interplay between rising air currents and the force of gravity. Air currents push clouds up at a rate that counteracts the downward pull of gravity. This aerodynamic drag creates the effect of clouds hanging suspended in the sky. Most clouds are actually descending, but at a rate so imperceptibly slow it is invisible to the eye. In addition, the droplets that form clouds are much lighter than raindrops—it takes about 15 million cloud droplets to make a single raindrop.

  I sat in silence, allowing the science to work its way from my head to my heart. The downward tug of gravity is a reality of the spirit. I thought about the discouragement I was feeling over being miserably inadequate for a friend who was fighting for her life against the ravages of cancer. We had ended a recent phone call with her saying hastily, “I’ve got to go—I’ve got to go make a bed.”

  Hot tears had spilled down my cheeks as I considered that my very presence was something she needed to escape from. I felt like I had offered vinegar instead of water to this parched and thirsty friend trudging through the wasteland. In some technological quirk of symmetry, even my emails to her refused to go through and came bouncing back to me, undeliverable. The force of gravity seemed unstoppable.

  I thought about the diffuse moisture of cloud droplets, the sheer density of 15 million piled up to the tipping point in a single drop of rain. Clouds remind me of the bowls of incense described in the book of Revelation as the collected prayers of the saints (5:8). Fifteen million is a big number, but it isn’t infinite. My diffuse and invisible prayers began to take on a different meaning for me as I pictured them collecting with the prayers of the followers of Christ throughout the ages until—a small real miracle—the first drop of rain in the wasteland.

  Our prayers stream to heaven like currents of air, preceded and blown by God’s Spirit, by the pneuma of God’s breath. I pictured my friend, caught between the pull of gravity and the updraft of the air currents, and I prayed that God’s grace would float her as gently as she needed. I prayed that the invisible updraft would become visible. I prayed that the sheer audacity of being sustained by a peace that passes all understanding would capture her full attention.

  I picture myself as a friend bold enough to cut a hole in the roof of a house and lower my sick companion to the feet of Jesus. I thank God that the sky really is a sanctuary, for “God’s glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon. Madame Day holds classes every morning, Professor Night lectures each evening. Their words aren’t heard, their voices aren’t recorded, But their silence fills the earth: unspoken truth is spoken everywhere” (Psalm 19:1–4).

  I pictured the heavens opening for my friend as the breath of our prayers carry her to Jesus. I thank God for the child who ushered me into the sanctuary of the skies, who helped me reclaim my call to serve boldly and believingly in hiddenness. If each of us is a drop of rain, let us ride the updraft of grace where the wind needs to carry us.

  to ponder

  What is pulling at you right now, like the downward tug of gravity on your spirit?

  Do you have “air currents” in place in your life, things that pull you upward, toward grace, counteracting the pull of gravity? If so, what are they? If not, what can you do to establish that kind of support?

  brooks that hold the sky

  A spring

  A pool among the rock.

  T.S. Eliot

  We just returned from a friend’s ranch in Montana. The country was expansive and mountainous. Ridges teemed with wildlife. A mother bear and her cubs wandered close to our lodge, as did a coyote and more rattlesnake
s than I cared to lay eyes on (that would be more than none, if you’re counting). But nothing about the landscape can compete with the sky. In Montana, the sky is the star of the show. Vast and vigorous, its presence is pervasive and commanding.

  One day in Big Sky Country we ventured deep into the acreage of the ranch and discovered an abandoned one-room cabin that had been built more than a hundred years ago. The rusty potbelly stove and tin cooking utensils, covered with a thick layer of grime, looked as if they were waiting expectantly for a hot fire and a can of beans to return them to usefulness. It is always sobering to catch a glimpse of something that has survived neglect, yet remained faithful to itself and its purpose.

  The true prize came when we rounded a bend to find the source of a sound we had been tracking—a sparkling brook. For the boys, this was better than striking gold. Bright Montana sunlight danced on the spray as the water carved its indelible mark into the sheer walls of stone rising beside it. The Montana sky, captured in the brook’s surface, took on a magical motion as the water babbled along over rocks and fallen logs that added dimension and depth to the sky’s canvas.