The First Drop of Rain Read online

  One of the projects the boys recently took upon themselves was to uncover a huge rock buried in the dirt at the base of an old stump. Though Jill’s yard is full of rocks, there was something wonderful in exposing this particular one and rolling it along to a new resting place. They felt hugely satisfied with their accomplishment.

  Jill moved to Seattle to live near my mom, her only sister. My mom has the most severe form of juvenile diabetes, called “brittle” diabetes, which is marked by wildly fluctuating blood sugar levels that are nearly impossible to control. Despite her best efforts, she has “reactions,” episodes of unconsciousness, nearly every week. The insulin in her system becomes a hallucinogenic, and Mom enters altered realities. She has been hurt time and again. Calls to 9–1—1 are frequent. With our demanding travel schedule and two busy little boys, Jill’s move from Texas to Seattle to be near Mom felt like God’s divine guidance providing a guardian angel.

  Jill planned for the transition on sheer faith. She resigned from her church in Austin, said her goodbyes to dear friends and parishioners who grieved her departure, and packed her belongings. Just as she was scheduled to depart, she stumbled on a neighborhood walk and severely injured her knee. Emergency surgery delayed her move. The moving van arrived in Seattle with her boxes while she convalesced in Texas.

  With limited mobility following surgery, her planned hospital chaplaincy work was out—too much walking. In the process of seeking employment, it became clear that her vocational calling would not provide immediate work. Ministry positions for women are rare. Job openings for middle-aged women are rarer still. This bright, gifted, credentialed woman found herself stalled, in a ministry wasteland.

  I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face.

  Katherine Mansfield

  My aunt Jill has been an immeasurable gift. She pours herself out in generous acts of service for all of us. She cares for our sons, John and Jackson, when our intense speaking schedule takes us away, which is most weeks. She is so vigilant in her care of Mom that 9–1—1 calls have been reduced to a minimum. And all the while, she has experienced setback after setback in her vocational search.

  It is a mystery. Jill stepped out in obedience to God’s call and found herself in a spiritual wasteland. She has blessed us, but for her the journey has been dry. She arrived in rainy Seattle from dry Austin only to find a personal and vocational drought.

  This brings us to the growing rock pile on the side of Aunt Jill’s house. These rocks have meaning, purpose. One by one, these rocks have been placed. After an important encounter with God, or a season of prayer, or a moment of meaning, Jill has taken a rock and placed it there as a memorial. The rocks have been gathered along beaches and from wooded paths. Some are simply picked from her yard. As time has passed and year has layered on year, the pile has grown into “a mountain of rock.” There it sits in the midst of her lush, green lawn, a metaphor for her journey through a dry and weary wasteland. It is a holy place. Aunt Jill has arranged those dry rocks into a pile of worship.

  to ponder

  Have you ever stepped out in obedience to God and found yourself in a wasteland? How did you cope with the disappointment?

  How have you continued to worship and trust God when your life seems to contradict what you believe about God’s promises to take care of you?

  Quarry

  Hard as a rock is

  It bows to water

  Scrapes to ice

  With great force

  The frozen water pushes out

  Rock crumbles

  Tumbles down

  Even drops of rain

  That splash against a slope

  Chisel all within their scope.

  Still,

  Ocean floor and canyon walls

  Gibraltar, Garden of the Gods,

  Solid, you defy the odds.

  More than that,

  Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic styles,

  At a meeting place,

  Arranged in piles

  Became memorials,

  What fossils you contain

  What traces,

  remnants of our pain.

  Sacrificial places.

  Geologists can’t begin to explain

  How ignited,

  Metamorphic with God’s flame

  You conferred

  Transformation graces.

  But the water

  And the blood

  Brought on a new age

  Gracious flood

  Eroded rock

  Of sin within.

  Make my life a quarry,

  Mine for stone

  Metal, mineral,

  rarest gem,

  Whatever can be found

  Be used for him.

  death by water

  He passed the stages of his age and youth

  Entering the whirlpool.

  T.S. Eliot

  Arlys grew up in Africa with missionary parents. One day her parents traveled to an outlying village, and Arlys’s mother discovered the red dress she was wearing was causing a stir. Red was the color of evil. So, in her pragmatic spirit, she unzipped her dress and stripped down to her white slip, reasoning that she was still wearing far more modest clothing than any other woman in sight. She worked all day, a relief worker in lingerie. She knew she’d raise an eyebrow or two at the missions board, but that wasn’t about to stop her from doing her work.

  When Arlys was six, the family joined some friends at a river for a rare vacation. Familiar with the site, her older brother ran ahead, eager to jump into the river’s cooling waters. But that day, spring rains had turned the river into a swirling danger zone. Her brother jumped in from a high bank. Arlys, her younger brother, and her parents saw him struggling in the current and calling for help.

  Arlys remembers the scene vividly. Her father sprinted to the river’s edge, her mother trailing behind and pleading, “But you can’t swim!”

  Her father, before he leaped in, replied, “He’s my son! I can do nothing less!”

  Father and son drowned together in the river, and Arlys was left standing with her little brother and mother on the riverbank. Alone in Africa.

  He who was living is now dead

  We who were living are now dying

  With a little patience.

  T.S. Eliot

  Arlys’s mom struggled alone to care for her two children. Her son was hearing impaired and had special needs. Arlys was only six when she was put on a plane and sent to boarding school. She’s been an adult since first grade.

  Arlys has the kind of beautiful soul that sometimes emerges from the chrysalis of severe loss. She isn’t waiting to die; she’s learning to live. This year she signed up for swimming lessons.

  to ponder

  Have you ever had a loss so severe a part of you had to grow up too soon? How has that shaped who you are?

  Have you ever attempted to overcome a deep fear and rewrite your life story? What is one thing you could commit to doing that would help you to get unstuck in an area of fear and loss?

  feet in the sand

  Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

  Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand.

  T.S. Eliot

  Death Valley averages two inches of rain a year. Now that is dry. It also boasts the hottest temperature ever recorded in the United States—134 degrees. Summer temperatures of 125 degrees are common. And the Atacama Desert in Chile once went for fourteen years without rain. Almost a decade and a half—that’s a dry season and then some.

  Have you ever known someone in a similar place? A drought so long you can hardly believe it’s true? Life doesn’t flourish in such desert places—it clings on, barely surviving, and often dies.

  My son John was a preemie. At birth he weighed a pound and a half and was one foot long. A full-term baby is about five times heavier and more than half a foot longer. A mother can wrap her thumb and middle finger around the leg of her baby; I could place my hand on John’s back
and touch my fingertips at his belly button. John weighed only a little more than a Venti Frapuccino.

  Preemies struggle to eat. To learn to suck, swallow, and breathe is a large task for such a small being. It was almost impossible for John, whose digestive system hadn’t formed properly. There was a gap in his intestine that was infected. He was losing weight. After two weeks, John had to undergo surgery.

  The surgery was successful. John slowly recovered. He was able to eat, and we slowly began to settle into a routine. From the day John was born, I committed myself to providing breast milk. Preemies need every possible way to strengthen their immune system.

  But John was never able to feed naturally. At first he used a tube and then tiny bottles that were smaller than the ones I had used with my baby dolls as a child. He drank two cc’s at a time, every two hours. That’s about a teaspoonful of milk. This regimen required that I pump all of my milk, every two hours, twenty-four hours a day. I froze and labeled meticulously all the breast milk that I could. I pumped for almost a year before my body rebelled. Hormones are not released by a pump like they are with a baby, and the supply dwindled. There was nothing cozy in this arrangement. I felt as cold as the vials of milk in my freezer.

  Many chronic challenges followed. After spending so many months tethered to a ventilator, John developed a hyper gag reflex. It took almost nothing to trigger that ref lex, causing him to lose much of what he ate. Preemies are extra sensitive to food textures and tastes, and John’s sensitivity was even more extreme than most. Food was threatening, not pleasurable. He refused to eat most things. Those he did try came back up more often than not. The simple task of eating, of taking in nutrients to nurture his little body, became insurmountable. At the age of one, a speech therapist began working with John on feeding issues. More than a year passed with little progress.

  At the age of three, John was still being sustained by baby formula designed for infants under one. He couldn’t tolerate formulas designed for older kids, even ones designed for kids with food resistance. One day in Nashville, where we were speaking, John was struggling. In desperation I went to a snack stand to ask for hot water to make a bottle of formula. The woman at the stand berated me for having a toddler on a bottle. I was devastated. I also was afraid that John was becoming old enough to feel ashamed.

  We discovered a new experimental group program and jumped at the opportunity to participate. Every week we journeyed to Children’s Hospital and met with Lynn, our speech therapist, and a small group of young children and their moms who shared many of the same challenges with food that John had.

  We played with food, created things with food, tasted food, and processed our reactions. We moms were coached in how to react to our children’s choking and gagging. The strategy was to never seem overly concerned. This wasn’t easy. Every time John choked on something, I felt that old familiar panic rising within me. It was a relic from John’s failure as a preemie to master the suck, swallow, and breathe sequence that caused frequent chokes that triggered alarms in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit that prompted medical teams to give immediate emergency care. It was as if those alarms had been installed within me and the message to my brain was “Emergency!”

  The power of peer influence was a great tool for both children and parents. John faced each session with anxiety for twelve weeks. Eating was downright scary. The demands to eat were exceedingly hard for his little “pleaser” personality. The therapist and the treatment were excellent. At the end of the course, Lynn handed out “graduation” certificates to all the children—except John.

  John received a carefully framed “invitation” to come back for the next group. Which we did. And the next one after that.

  Time passed. John’s food aversions continued. He learned to run down the hall to the toilet every time he needed to throw up. He took care of it all by himself without a fuss—the directive from the therapist. Les and I came to see it as a “normal” part of our lives. We have memories of John throwing up in every possible location that you would want to avoid: restaurants with white linen tablecloths, grocery store aisles, church pews, airplanes. Once Les, his clothing badly soiled, had to wear a waiter’s uniform home from a local café.

  Having a child unable to eat made me doubt myself. I saw his tiny bony frame and my heart felt like it would shatter. I took it personally. My failure lodged deep in my spirit at a place I had never felt an ache before. I woke up every morning to despair.

  Looking back, I can’t identify when things began to change. They just did. At five years of age, John finally tasted, and swallowed, and digested his first bites of fruit and vegetables and meat. Until then, the only food he had mastered was cheese. Cheese probably saved his life.

  John was finally expanding his menu, slowly, haltingly, cautiously, and not without a fight. The chronic physical symptoms had created an emotional fallout in his relationship to food. Eating brought with it new issues. How can we increase his volume? How can we whet his appetite? Bit by bit, things began to change.

  John is still a picky eater. Recently John was diagnosed with “failure to thrive” because his body weight isn’t on the chart for his age. Tests continue to evaluate his hormone levels. Labs are taken on his digestive system. Doctors remain uncertain of what, if anything, should be done for him.

  Every time I see John take a bite of salmon, or spinach, or even lick an ice cream cone, I marvel. It’s a miracle. Two miracles, really. We all survived the drought and, somehow, John adapted.

  In the desert, after a rainfall, color explodes everywhere. Flowers bloom overnight in response to the rain. They last for only a short time, but they make an appearance. They celebrate.

  So do I. Grace before a meal is less a ritual than a time of true celebration. “Give us this day our daily bread.” And thank you, really, for the ability to eat it.

  to ponder

  Have you ever had a season so dry you awakened every day to a sense of despair?

  How did you adapt to life in your dry season?

  dew drops

  I sat upon the shore

  Fishing, with the arid plain behind me.

  T.S. Eliot

  Dew beautifies. A spider’s web, although a wonder of nature, is more often a symbol of neglect and disrepair than of loveliness and a fresh beginning. As dust collects, they become cobwebs, unable to trap wary insects. Yet covered in dew, this symbol is transformed into intricate, shimmering lace. What was a haunting symbol of the passage of time becomes a captivating work of art. Effective spider webs don’t call attention to themselves. But when dew forms on a web, it has the opposite effect. Moist drops highlight the brilliance of the web with stunning clarity. They make us see the invisible.

  When my friend Larie turned sixty, she decided to throw a party. As a single woman, she had never experienced a wedding, a wedding shower, or a baby shower. In fact, she couldn’t remember even one occasion when she had celebrated lavishly with her friends. She decided it was high time.

  Larie is a bright, gifted, modest woman. She was dedicated to ministry and has served on mission fields in Japan, in denominational offices, and at Christian colleges. But money is tight. Her physical disability payments don’t come close to covering her medical expenses, never mind a bash. But she had a small inheritance and she decided to earmark it as “party money.”

  When her friends discovered she wanted to throw a party, they asked for the privilege of helping. So, against her protests, a committee was formed and the party began to take on a life of its own. They created invitations, came up with a theme, and the guest list grew. Larie was paying the bill—she was crystal clear on that point—because she wanted her friends to be lavished with love. The party committee created a mock “prom” theme to evoke a sense of youthfulness and fun.

  Tables were decorated with fancy cloths and centered with teeming fishbowls (my son Jackson won the newest member of our family, Bluefish Bob, during one of the party games). Food tables lined the walls. D
uring the hilarious program, Larie sang a solo with total commitment, completely off-key. It made us nervous to watch, which she enjoyed immensely. Finally she was crowned “prom” queen and escorted around the room by a tuxedoed nephew.

  I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

  Mother Teresa of Calcutta

  The entire evening was fun, funny, and absolutely off the wall—did I mention her name is Larie Wall? Larie, whose disability produces more physical suffering than any one person should have to endure, was filled with joy from the top of her crown to her glittering high-heeled shoes.