The First Drop of Rain Page 8

  A few weeks later, the principal officiously entered the room and called me to the front of the class. My teacher, Mrs. Williams, had a big surprise for me, announced the principal. She had secretly entered my poem in a children’s poetry contest and it had won the first-place trophy, which was now held in the hands of the smiling principal! Stunned and overwhelmed with guilt, I fled the room and hid in the girl’s restroom.

  Mrs. Williams found me curled up on the floor of a stall, sobbing. After a frank talk, we left together. She had me keep my trophy as “a monumental reminder of the importance of telling the truth.” I had to carry that huge golden trophy home with me later that day. I quickly hid it under my bed, hoping to avoid a certain awkward conversation with my mom.

  She discovered my hidden trophy while making my bed the next morning and, thinking I was being modest, she took it out and displayed it on my dresser. I came home to her wide smile and praise. How could I disappoint her? Once again—and so soon!—I took the self-protective path of hiddenness and chose not to tell the truth. But by that night, my secret had drained my soul and I burst into a torrent of tears and confessed.

  All I remember is sleeping through the night for the first time in ages. Secrets are difficult. They divide our focus, distract us from the present, and distance us from the people we would love to know and be known by.

  There are also parts of us that are hidden—not by us, but from us. This is the “blind self.” There is much within us that is known by others but not by us. Perhaps it is a part of ourselves we would rather disown, or a part of our self we can’t yet see. It may be complex or even beautiful; it might astonish us to recognize it. When the people in our lives speak truthfully to us about what they see, we find ourselves expanding, deepening, and broadening, like someone has thrown open a window to our soul.

  A wise counselor said to me, “Leslie, when you talk about things that are deeply troubling to you, maybe even overwhelming or crushing to your spirit, things you feel might break you unless you get support, you say you are hurting, but you say it in such a way that you actually send the message, ‘I’m OK. I’ve got a handle on this. I’m fundamentally fine here.’ So the words you’re saying don’t sink in. They don’t seem real. Consequently, the people who love you fail to offer support because you present yourself as put together. It is confusing, almost paradoxical. We don’t know which message is the truth, but we tend to trust your nonverbal message more than your words. And the nonverbal sends the message, ‘I don’t really need you; I’m just letting you know how I am.’ ”

  I was in a therapy session at the time. There had been a robbery in a little deli across the street from the therapist’s office. Someone had been injured in the struggle, and I had stumbled onto the scene in the immediate aftermath. It had distressed me deeply. Everything about how I conveyed this moment to my counselor became a laboratory for her to address a pattern in me that I was oblivious to. No sooner had the words been spoken than they accomplished their intended purpose.

  When something is true, you know it.

  And when you know it, you can’t believe you didn’t see it before. All of a sudden you realize how obvious it was all along. I was literally preventing myself from receiving the support I wanted. A part of me that had been known to others was finally known to me—a part that was crucial to my ability to love and be loved.

  The fourth and final pane in the Johari window belongs to that mysterious part of our self that is unknown to us and unknown to others. This is the “unknown self.” For Christians, this is the part of us known only to God, perhaps the part that will be revealed only when we finally meet God face to face and become our truest self, our best self, a more full reflection of God’s own self.

  When this moment comes—when every tear is wiped away by the light of the Light—we will feel a sense of “of courseness” about it somehow. But for now it remains utterly unknown.

  I imagine myself atop a sea horse, drawn forward through the deep water in wonder and expectation. Yet some places are murky and clouded. I breathe a simple prayer for the faith to trust God with all that remains hidden and undiscovered within me until the moment it appears in the Light.

  to ponder

  Have you ever had a flash of insight that came suddenly and you then realized a part of you had known this all along? What was it that became clear to you?

  When have you experienced feedback that revealed your “blind self ” to you? How did you react to this insight?

  Grace like Rain

  There are few things more lovely

  Than the scent of a spring rain

  Delicate, earthy, clean

  Forgiveness comes close

  That astonishing moment

  When you see yourself

  Through the eyes of another

  Rimmed in translucent circles

  Of Grace

  And discover

  The ripple effects

  Like a baptismal sprinkling

  Have left

  Even the darkest soiled ground

  Of your soul

  As capable of growth

  As the rain leaves

  A patch of dirt

  scent of rain

  By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept …

  Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

  Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

  T.S. Eliot

  Spring rain smells fresh not in spite of its earthy, dirt-tinged scent but because of it. It’s that perfect paradoxical mixture—the freshest, crispest, cleanest scent intermingled with that unmistakable ancient and earthy smell that hints at the history contained in soil: plant and animal decay, organic material fertilized with all manner of dead and living things. Ancient and fresh—the scent of a spring rain is like smelling the entire life cycle in a momentary whiff of air.

  Smells have a supernatural ability. No matter our age, a particular smell has the ability to take us back to our childhood in an instant, transporting us through time and space back to a vivid moment of personal history that has been buried in our soil of memory for decades. Most of our stored memories are from experiences we’ve had between the years of fifteen and thirty. But for reasons not completely understood by scientists, olfactory senses trigger memories of an earlier stage, between the age of five and ten. In part, this is because the ability to smell is housed in the “emotional brain” and seems to work like a sort of index key for our most primitive memories.

  We all have triggers—for me the smell of fresh, hot glazed donuts transports me in an instant to the back roads of Texas where my family once stopped at a mom-and-pop donut shop on the out-skirts of Garner State Park. We were all loaded too close together in one car, laughing and enjoying the sunshine and anticipating a float trip down the Frio River. I already felt lighter than air when in through the rolled-down car windows wafted the smell of sugary sweetness and dough and hot oil. It was heady. There was instant agreement that we should pull over and cram down as many of those melt-in-your-mouth treats as we could.

  The smell of orange juice takes me back in time, but not to a happy place. My mom has had severe juvenile diabetes all my life. Her blood sugars are more erratic than 99 percent of the diabetic population. Consequently, she can and does slide into a diabetic coma. When I was two and home alone with my mom, it happened again. It was a Sunday, after church, and my mom was stretched out on the living room sofa, still in her Sunday dress. I couldn’t wake her. My father, a pastor who would normally be home on Sunday, was away on a trip. So I went into action. I dragged a chair over to the refrigerator to reach the orange juice on the top shelf and poured a glass for her to drink. I knew from watching my dad that orange juice helped Mom when she was having a problem. What I didn’t know was that when Mom was unconscious, she couldn’t swallow. The orange juice dribbled down her chin and stained her best Sunday dress.

  Now I was scared and worried that I had ruined her dress. I sat there smelling t
he pungent, acidic scent of that spilled juice and wondering what to do. I decided to call for help. My parents had already taught me how to dial “0” to ask the operator for help. The phone was a rotary, so dialing “0” meant pulling it all the way around the circle with my index finger. Dragging that circle seemed to take forever and required all my strength. I was relieved when the operator answered.

  But when I asked for help, in what was a very young and hard-to-understand voice, the operator scolded me for playing on the phone and hung up. I was devastated. I went back to my mom, curled up at her feet, and sobbed. I had done all I knew how to do, and I had failed. I was terrified. I eventually fell asleep. I woke up to the sounds of my dad and a medical worker reviving my mom.

  To this day, I don’t like orange juice. My husband relishes a glass of orange juice every morning, but I avoid it—totally. Reliving such childhood pain and fragility isn’t a good way to start the day.

  The memory of a particular smell as a trigger may be one of the reasons incense was built into the priestly duties involved in worship for the people of Israel. The incense gave off a unique scent, a mixture of five spices that was never to be used for any other purpose. God understood that the uniquely wonderful fragrance would call his people back to memories of worship and trust. Scent can be a powerful reminder of God’s grace, an anchor in our souls for forgiveness and mercy.

  Spring rain is a kind of heavenly incense that calls me back to moments of sheer grace—encounters with a holy God whose purity mingles with the organic materials of my body and soul, decay and death mixed with heaven and resurrection. It is a scent as ancient as sin and as fresh as grace.

  to ponder

  When have you been transported by a smell that triggered a vivid early memory? Do you have any emotional reactions to a particular scent, either positive or negative?

  What is it that serves as a reminder for you of God’s grace?

  expectancy

  In the mountains, there you feel free.

  T.S. Eliot

  “I wake expectant,” says Annie Dillard, “hoping to learn a new thing” (The Writing Life, 1989).

  To wake expectant is to open your eyes to the mystery of what might happen. I want to live like that. What I find instead, all too often, is that I wake with expectations instead of expectancy. Spoken or unspoken, the expectations I carry with me into each day reduce my ability to live in joyful expectancy. I have expectations of myself, not to mention the long list of expectations I hold for my husband and children.

  Sometimes the hardest days of all are those special days of celebration that I have burdened with expectations I haven’t even fully admitted to myself. It is difficult for people in our lives to perform the roles we cast for them. Even when they try to play the part of our characters, it drains the authenticity from their words and actions until the effect is almost farcical.

  Perhaps that is why some of the best moments in life happen on the most ordinary days—those unselfconscious moments that catch our expectations off guard and invade our beings with the adventure of expectancy. Sometimes our best moments even happen in the graveyard of dashed hopes, the wasteland of unfulfilled expectations, after we’ve surrendered all our preconceived expectations.

  One of the grandest days of my life happened in just such a way. My husband Les and I took a road trip from Seattle to Banff National Park in the Canadian province of Alberta. Life had been so busy, and graduate school, jobs, and family crises had exhausted us. We needed a true vacation.

  Within minutes of leaving Seattle, we entered a soothing mountainous wilderness. The drive through western Washington captivated us. Then we crossed into Canada. Something about a border crossing formalizes the mental distance you feel from the dragging demands of ordinary life. Hour after hour, with our attention focused on the landscapes of the Canadian wilderness—soaring mountains, clear gurgling rivers, and massive retiring moose—we began to feel like true adventurers.

  We had tried to anticipate our pace and made a few over-night reservations, but one evening at sunset we arrived at the little hamlet of Lake Louise, nestled in the heart of Banff National Park, with nowhere to stay. The lake and mountains were scarcely visible in the dark, but our eyes were drawn to the spectacular beauty of the Chateau at Lake Louise, a lovely old castle-like hotel perfectly placed at lake’s edge. This glacial lake is surrounded by snow-capped peaks that evoke images of the Swiss Alps.

  Without a reservation, we approached the front desk. They were full. We looked at each other, knowing it meant spending the night in the car without blankets or supplies in the chill mountain air.

  We did secure a reservation in the Chateau’s restaurant, a cozily appointed cafe with wood-paneled walls called the Walliser Stube. The menu of cheese, meat, and chocolate fondue seemed perfect for the occasion.

  We tried to convince ourselves that a warm meal would sustain us through a cold night. We lingered until the lamps were being dimmed by staff eager to get home. It was nearly midnight. We were trying to be brave about spending the night sleeping fitfully and frostily on bucket seats in a parking lot.

  Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

  John Ruskin

  On impulse, Les decided to check with the front desk one last time before we headed out to our car. The clerk smiled and told us he could offer us the finest room in the hotel—for the price of a regular room. We were filled with gratitude—and looking forward to quilts! As he handed us the keys to the Presidential Suite, he told us our room had a deck that would be ideal for the night’s meteor shower, commonly known as “the night of a thousand falling stars.” He encouraged us to check in speedily, since the light show was about to start.

  I’m the person who always looks up at the black sky just seconds after someone else sees a shooting star. The prospect of viewing an actual meteor shower was exciting. Tucked away far from city lights, and at a high altitude, Lake Louise offers a night sky with a rich black canvas. We hurried to the room, grabbed quilts and blankets, and opened the deck door.

  We saw first one streak of light, then another, as the meteors began to sail across the sky. Les and I sat side by side, at first pointing out each arc of streaking gold and squealing with delight. Eventually we watched in reverent awe as literally hundreds of meteors with glowing tails blazed across the sky. That night is one of the peak experiences of my life and, in a way Les and I can never quite express in words, one of the most intimate. Only the two of us will ever know the deep mystery and surpassing beauty of that night. It felt like extravagant love and generosity was being lavished on us. Our cups were full and overflowing.

  We slept that night like infants. It was the most glorious contentment I can remember this side of childhood.

  Rain of Stars

  The black night

  Seemed dull

  And long—

  Not just that,

  But also wrong.

  Then came the rain

  Of stars

  That silenced me with

  Awe.

  Like a shepherd

  Hearing a choir of angels

  Or a wise man

  Sighting the Christmas star

  It moved me—

  Out of failed plans

  And into your transcendent

  Hands.

  Early the next morning, I awoke to what seemed like the sound-track to my dreams. Throwing open the deck doors, I was astonished by the sight of Lake Louise in the early morning light. The glacial water had an other-worldly appearance of milky blue green singular in its purity and vibrancy. Snow-capped mountains formed a clear reflection. I was stunned.

  My eyes finally focused on the source of the melody. There stood a man, bathed in the light of dawn, clothed in lederhosen and blowing a twenty-foot Alphorn. These are the horns traditionally used by Swiss mountain dwellers in those pastoral communities so cha
racteristic of the rural Alps. The pure harmonic sound of that larger-than-life instrument was ringing out “Amazing Grace.” The music was literally reverberating off the mountains and filling our valley with the most enchanting sounds I had ever heard. It forever changed my vision of heaven.

  That experience happened on the heels of imperfect planning, disappointment, and unfulfilled expectations. It filled me with a greater desire to live in a state of expectancy—to believe that every moment of the day and night ahead, no matter how divergent from my expectations, will be crammed with the presence and purposes of my loving God.