The First Drop of Rain Read online

  My spiritual vision is declining in clarity as rapidly as my eyes. When I was younger, I expected that by now I’d finally have my act together. This idealized spiritual me wouldn’t have to grope in the dark anymore. Nope, my body might fade, but my spiritual vision would get better every year.

  What never occurred to me was that my spiritual growth might involve a decline in my spiritual optics. At a time in my life when I expected to be spiritually capable and confident, I am straining and squinting. Life is blurry. Without the vision of the Spirit, I’m blind as a bat and I’m no longer too proud to admit it.

  My son Jackson was recently diagnosed with a vision problem. His eyes weren’t working together, so to prevent him from seeing double, his brain shut down the sight in one eye. During the eye test, the optometrist covered Jackson’s strong eye and held up pictures for him to describe. They were right in front of his face, yet he could not see them. Fortunately, with glasses and vision therapy, this can be corrected.

  Our brains are hardwired to protect us from the confusion of seeing double. It is quite possible to become blind even while we are physically capable of sight.

  Blindness is a common subject in the Bible and with Jesus: “These are people—whose eyes are open but don’t see a thing” (Mark 4:12). In my circle of close friends, I love it when someone challenges me with “Leslie, when did you get blind?” They love me enough to speak the truth. I need to correct my vision. Here I am in midlife, echoing the cry of the blind beggars who cried out to Jesus, “Have mercy on me!” More than ever, I know this: I can’t live without corrected vision.

  to ponder

  Do you ever feel like life is blurry? Do you feel as if you are straining and squinting for spiritual clarity and sight? When are you most likely to experience this “blindness”?

  Have you ever experienced the grace of “corrected” spiritual vision? What insights did you gain?

  broken images

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  And the dry stone no sound of water.

  T.S. Eliot

  My dear friend Kathy is a delicious combination of articulate and obstinate—she once misspoke her own birth date and then proceeded to defend her error with such passion and principle that I half expected her birth certificate to change.

  Kathy and Kevin, her husband of eighteen years, live with their daughter, Meg, in Kansas. Friends for decades, our families have become vacation buddies—over the years we’ve traveled to several countries and what feels like most US cities. We’ve hiked jagged glaciers in Alaska, sipped cappuccino in Paris, gone swimming in the warm turquoise waters of Baja, California, and shivered through odorous cheese factories. We like doing almost anything, and we love doing it together.

  On our last visit, at our home in Seattle, Kathy had a low-grade fever and the same persistent cough she’d had the last two or three times we’d been together. Six weeks later came the diagnosis: lung cancer, small cell. Kathy, my health-conscious, non-smoking, active friend had cancer. It was unreal.

  Every day since, Kathy has been locked in the fight of her life. She interviewed doctors, settling on the most aggressive specialist whose passionate commitment to battle cancer gave him a colorful vocabulary. Somehow, it seemed appropriate to have him curse her cancer—talking to it like the enemy it is.

  What do you think when someone who has poured her life into blessing others now feels the fire of poison poured into her own veins? How can you pray when cancer begins to take the life of the person who always prayed for you?

  When I could no longer endure physical separation from my friend, I finagled an open window in my schedule and a miraculous last-minute flight to Kansas. I landed in the kind of storm we rarely get in Seattle—an electric storm, rising water, power outages. Kathy was in the hospital. It was the day before her birthday. Three months had passed since we’d touched; her skin was translucent and tight and her healthy frame was skeletal. Long blonde hair had fallen out. Radiation had burned her esophagus, making talking and eating excruciating.

  The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.

  John Vance Cheney

  I sat beside Kathy’s bed that night. Outside, lightning flashed and sheets of water spread across the dark city. Wanting to protect Kathy’s searing throat from further injury, I struggled to carry on a one-sided conversation. I somehow felt I could hold off her suffering by creating a wall of words that would be a hedge of protection around Kathy’s thoughts, filling them with amusing anecdotes and updates. I followed my stream of consciousness down every tributary, chattering on about things. Like the time my friend Bonnie, who had spent ten minutes looking for her lost cell phone in her car (while talking to me on that very cell phone) until it dawned on her what she was doing and she sheepishly told me she’d been utterly distracted as we chatted by the serious search for her phone. Kathy smiled, fueling my chatter. There was nothing I could say that was important enough for this moment, and yet somehow everything I said was made important by this moment, no matter how incidental and inane. All that mattered was our proximity: Kathy supported by her angled hospital bed, my body draped sideways over the visitor chair so I could slide up closer beside her.

  On the flight home, I scrawled this poem on a paper napkin. Hot tears rolled down my cheeks as images tumbled onto paper. As soon as the plane landed, I called Kathy and read it to her, the lump in my throat pressing hard against the words.

  For Kathy

  It didn’t rain, it poured

  Flashes of lightning,

  Power outages

  We watched the creek rise

  But you were all

  I could see or feel—

  Your cancer was the real storm

  We were all brave

  Telling stories

  And you let me rub

  Your fuzzy “Velcro” head

  We turned on the TV

  For tornado warnings

  But it was the blood draw results

  That made our news

  White cells in the decimals.

  We washed, pulled on our masks and gloves

  Not wanting our very presence

  To become another threat.

  We hung a bright banner

  Opened little gifts—

  Tomorrow would be the dawn

  Of a new year for you.

  I didn’t make a birthday wish

  I prayed,

  God give her grace

  Pour health into her body

  And soul

  Dissolve fear

  Give us reason to celebrate.

  On the flight home I see you there

  Determined (or is it defiant)

  Enough

  To down hospital scrambled eggs,

  Oatmeal with no brown sugar

  And meatloaf.

  It hits me

  You’ve re-defined everything

  As in “If Kathy

  (Who can’t so much as order eggs

  in a restaurant because she can’t stand them)

  Can eat hospital eggs

  With a burned throat

  in searing pain,

  then surely I can …”

  My eyes fill with tears

  mostly of joy.

  I didn’t know I could love you more

  but now I do.

  to ponder

  Have you ever experienced a time when life felt like “a heap of broken images, where the sun beats”? What was that experience like for you?

  When have you been a traveling companion for someone walking through their own wasteland? How did it change you?

  relentless sun

  Burning burning burning burning

  O Lord Thou pluckest me out

  O Lord Thou pluckest.

  T.S. Eliot

  These are the moments when what is most real is unseen. The desert of the soul and the unbearable heat. This is life
beneath the relentless sun of suffering.

  Have you ever felt plucked and dropped by the hand of God into the burning? Where is your desert place? Do you feel desolate, dry, and fragile? Is the sun beating on the broken images of your dreams? Is there no sign of God, no sound of water?

  We keep walking even when the journey isn’t one we planned. My friend Kathy’s way of traveling her cancer journey is to be reverent about the things that matter, irreverent about what doesn’t, and wise enough to know the difference.

  Yet it doesn’t make the trip any easier. The shadow of a rocky landscape darkened Kathy’s eyes. There was real fear and grief; there was deep physical suffering. The constant pain of cancer and chemo left her utterly depleted. Dehydrated, malnourished, and severely sleep deprived, Kathy was in the hospital again.

  The well-meaning words of a visiting doctor sounded like a death sentence to Kathy. The doctor was sympathetic—too sympathetic. The weight pressed down. Fear grew into panic. She felt her life becoming nothing more than statistics and pessimistic predictions.

  Kathy couldn’t sleep. Her normal brain function began to fail. Too many days with too little rest had left her with no resources. Her fear intensified, like a song playing over and over in her mind. Darkness closed in. Depression had a stranglehold.

  If it can be verified, we don’t need faith…. Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

  Madeline L’Engle

  Kevin calls us in Seattle to invite us to support Kathy in this dark night. We begin to pray. In Kansas, Kathy’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law lock hands around her hospital bed and pray for release from fear. They pray for rest. In Washington, we do the same.

  Kathy remembers her eyes growing strangely heavy before she drifted off to sleep, awash in peace. When she woke up, the cancer was still there, along with the pain. But the restful sleep had been real. Walking through the wasteland, she had found a sliver of shade, tasted a drop of cool rain.

  to ponder

  When have the words or actions of a well-meaning “helper” been damaging to your spirit? Were you able to recover and forgive? If so, how did you do this? If not, can you now consider forgiving that person?

  Have you ever had the experience of unexplainable peace or rest in the midst of personal suffering? How did that occur for you?

  unreal city

  Unreal City,

  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many.

  T.S. Eliot

  Seattle is a city of distinct neighborhoods that perch on wooded hillsides. Magnolia is manicured, Phinney Ridge is funky, Capitol Hill is edgy, and Queen Anne Hill—my neighborhood for over fifteen years—is cozy. A. J. Meat Market has been providing fresh Thanksgiving turkeys for over fifty years; The 5 Spot serves a delectable spinach and mushroom scramble; Macrina’s Bakery makes the best brown sugar shortbread cookies I’ve ever tasted; and I know the clerk at the grocery store. I love the neighborhood.

  So when we made the surprising choice to leave our cozy home nestled on a cul-de-sac for an apartment in the heart of downtown Seattle, our friends figured we were either bold or dumb. Our new place is just four blocks from the Space Needle, on the seventeenth floor of a high-rise, and it has a Starbucks in the lobby. Still, why did we choose to leave such a wonderful neighborhood for an unknown one?

  I can’t explain why. I only know that we needed to move. We felt drawn, if not called, to center our family in the soul of Seattle. And we have. There is so much about it that is inherently good. After dinner we walk to Lake Union, where an old fishing vessel has become a “pirate” ship in the imagination of our boys. We gaze at colossal dinosaur fossils at the Science Center just four blocks away. My son John had his birthday party aboard the monorail and devoured the world-famous “Lunar Orbiter” dessert atop the Space Needle. The city is a place of endless adventures.

  But the city is not always a place of light. One of the dark places that our family cares about is the park across the street from our condo. Denny Park, Seattle’s oldest public park, is a welcome patch of green amid the towers of glass and cement. Overgrown trees and gigantic rhododendron run rampant. Patches of grass look fresh and inviting. Our boys imagine a zip-line straight from our deck to the heart of the park.

  But Denny Park has another side. It’s not unusual to find used needles or to catch a glimpse of an exchange. I have seen a woman behind a flowering rhododendron jab a syringe into the back of her knee. The cool shade of the park becomes cold shadows. The things that lurk in those shadows scare me.

  And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

  G. K. Chesterton

  One hot summer day, while sitting in the park watching my boys play, my thoughts turned toward Jonah and how God called him to the city of Nineveh. Jonah tried his best to ignore this call and keep his safe suburban life, far from such an obviously wild city. But safety wasn’t what God was calling Jonah to.

  It is amazing that God was so personal with Jonah—one solitary man—and at the same time with the whole city of Nineveh. We all know the story—the storm, sailors casting lots, the whale, and, finally, the obedience. But then comes the time afterward. Jonah sits in the desert, shaded by a single plant, to await the destruction of Nineveh, when God’s judgment fire will rain down and wipe the city out with apocalyptic drama. Thankfully, his wait was in vain.

  to ponder

  Have you ever felt called to something totally unexpected? Do you feel a nudge at this time toward transition into a new call? Describe what you are feeling.

  When have you been challenged to move out of your comfort zone and into a new context? Remember what that was like.

  beneath the shadow

  I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  T.S. Eliot

  A few of us formed a group called “Friends of Denny Park.” Linked by nothing more than a passion for Seattle and this park, we gather, often in my apartment, to collaborate on vision, strategy, and funding to restore the beauty of our park and renew its ability to serve as a safe space of shade and play. Our circle includes a representative from the parks and recreation department, a graduate student pursuing city planning, an urban architect, area merchants (including the owner of an “organic” vodka bar), a journalist, an advocate for homeless adults who need safe public spaces, and neighbors who care.

  We gather over coffee (sometimes donated by Starbucks) with our clean pads of paper, and we brainstorm. Who should we involve? How can we drum up funding? What might the park become? We make presentations to urban alliances and neighborhood groups. We organize volunteers from nearby churches and schools. We hold workshops in low-income city housing to hear what the children most want in a play park. We canvass the neighborhood and pass out brochures. We’ve won a few grants from the City Council and the Department of Neighborhoods and enlisted the support of our local Starbucks and a major Seattle developer. We are planning the inaugural Block Party in the Park, with musicians, artists, merchants, and locals. In this city of rain, we long to see this wasteland begin to grow again.

  Meteorologists tell us that cities can literally create rain; clouds form more quickly in the heated air. The features of the urban wasteland—cars, concrete, factories, and fumes—are catalysts for life-giving rain.

  It ain’t no use putting up your umbrella till it rains.

  Alice Caldwell Rice

  In the same way, cities call forth the presence of God. The heat of longing, secrecy, and sin rises like prayers to the heart of God, and God’s presence rains down in showers and storms of grace. Maybe that’s why I’m here, in this place so close to Denny Park. I want t
o get my hands wet—I want to see the storm up close.

  to ponder

  Have you ever pursued a call that opened doors to unlikely relationships or partnerships? If so, how did that enrich your life?

  Are there any “shadowy” places in your sphere that you would like to impact with light? What is one thing you can do to make a difference?

  waiting for rain

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  T.S. Eliot