Flurries

I see it out of my eye’s corner… a flash of white. Shortly after comes another, and another…

My son tromps out of the house, all backpack and water jug and breakfast hanging on his body like ornaments.

“Look! Snow flurries!” I smile at him.

He smiles back, that toddler grin still residing in his 15-year-old body, long and lean and fit. “I see them! Its funny how they are so tiny, like out of nowhere.”

Slowly the flurries multiply, they melt on the windows of my warm car that has sat idle waiting on my always slow boy, my daughter sitting silent with her headphones in ears behind me. Brooding, quiet, she will turn 13 in 12 more days. I beg her to look at the swirling of flurries, in a voice loud enough to call over the headphones, and I get a flat “oh yeah”. I silently grieve the little girl magic that’s lost in there, resisting.

In 12 more days, I will officially have two teenagers. Time continues its merciless march. I drum up gratefulness and put the car in reverse, steadying breakfast plates and coffee mugs and the eager pup in the middle of it all, and we take our usual route to school. Small talk, check lists, reminders, a quick prayer, love you’s and have a good day’s and then quiet.

Oh, the beautiful quiet.

I am a painfully slow processor, which can be great for creativity but hard for emotions. They set in slowly, blankets of down settling heavy. And when they settle, I am paralyzed under the weight. I feel it deep and full in my soul. It overwhelms and overtakes. It is not a fun place to be when the feelings come. When something is unpleasant, the human reaction is to avoid. And so that’s been my practice, not to feel, not to trudge through, but around. Smile, react with positivity, put it high on a shelf, a relic, out of sight, move on to the next activity. As a mother, necessity calls for this in a way. We are the keeping-it-together-ers of everything. We have to hold everything up, support everyone and everything and manage the feelings of everyone else so we put ours aside. Our feelings take last place, always. Leftovers. Scraps.

The problem with not feeling, of ignoring and looking away, of burying and avoiding and deflecting, is that the feelings stay. They implant and slowly grow, an entanglement of weeds over time. You have to treat them, or they remain. They wrap around your life and block the sun with their growing shade. And we all know you need sunlight to thrive.

And so here I am, with my feelings. This is how they get weeded out… writing. Singing. Creating. Praying. The heaviness, the hurt, the reality of this broken world… this is how the burden is lifted.

There has been a lot of heavy these past few weeks for our family. Big changes, hard news, stress and unknowns. It has been overwhelming. Hard, unbearably at times. Harsh words and worried words and words of comfort that feel hollow as we grapple with the reality. There are a lot of feelings, but not the good kind… the kind I want to run from. The kind of feelings that threaten to choke and tear apart. The kind that come for hope, run at it full force, weapons drawn.

But if there’s one thing I know, one thing that clings to a soul saturated with sadness at times like these, that there is always hope. Always, always, always hope.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” -Romans 15:13

That first tiny snowflake this morning… that beautiful, tiny, unexpected gift that landed on the glass next to me… hope. It whispered to me as I watched it melt into a vapor… I’m here. A few seconds later, with the second flurry… I’m here. And again, and again as the swirling specks swirl around me, dancing in the wind, landing silently… I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

I’m currently in a Bible study about trust. Oh… the discipline of trust. How much easier it is to worry, to fear. We are commanded to trust, but the world shows us otherwise. This broken world is harsh and cruel. It beats us down and works us in circles and things happen in this life that make us cry out and act out and want to hurt others right back. How do we trust in a world like this?

Last night I picked up Ann Voskamp’s beautiful book One Thousand Gifts, of which I have read a little more than half, and jumped right back into her wrestling with this very thing… trust. How do we trust in the throes of pain and fear and broken? She comes back to one word… eucharisteo. A Greek work which in its origin explains:

2168 euxaristéō (from 2095 /eú, “good” and 5485/xaris, “grace”) – properly, acknowledging that “God’s grace works well,” i.e. for our eternal gain and His glory; to give thanks – literally, “thankful for God’s good grace.”

Thankful for God’s good grace.

Thankfulness.

When we are buried in despair and hopelessness. When we get the bad news. When we have to make the hard decision. When someone hurts us. When we don’t know the next step.

Thankfulness.

This is not to discount our time to grieve, to process, to take the time to go through the feelings. Because you feel them. They are there, not to be ignored, but to go through. We must have our wilderness moments; the suffering. It’s hard. It’s uncomfortable. We don’t want to be here, in the suffering. But it’s the only way, the through. You must let the hard emotions ebb and flow, let the wave come and crash over you and then get up and take on another. And another. It is not thankfulness instead of, it’s both/and. We take on the waves and give thanks for the water. We give thanks that we can withstand the crash, find our footing again. We give thanks for the taste of salt on our lips, of the coolness on a hot day, of feeling the aliveness of it all. If we can find the smallest amount of thankful, we find hope. And our trust and belief in God’s goodness will tame the weeds of the soul.

This morning, hope fell upon me as a tiny flurry. The smallest, quietest reminder to trust. To be thankful, to find the smallest glimmers of hope and to cling to them… collect them as treasures for this weary heart. Even in the darkness of this cold winter morning, I can find beauty. Flurries of hope. Something that whispers, in the smallest but mightiest of voices…

I’m here.

I’m here.

I’m here.