The Waiting Place, Part III

Tonight my husband lies in a hospital bed just a couple of feet away from me as I write this. He is resting on the edge of what feels like is going to be a long night. An extension of a long day. I am tired and feeling a little more vulnerable than usual. And I have been plenty vulnerable lately.

Today we crossed a threshold in our Waiting Place. And I have to say that it is a relief I can't quite verbalize.  I am all about forward progress, and until today we have only been taking baby steps toward wellness for many months now. Baby steps can wear a person out. Today was a big step forward.

Who knows, in a week we may get news that makes the relief of today nothing but a vague memory. But to be honest, I don't care what we learn a week from now. I care about today. I care about the man lying in bed a couple of feet away from me. All I know is that today is better than yesterday. Tomorrow can worry about itself.

Peace be with you

Last week I attended my first yoga class. Like real deal at a studio with a real teacher. Walking in felt a lot like walking into class on the first day of kindergarten. Which is not necessarily the best feeling when you are dealing with fear. Which in all honesty, is why I found myself there to begin with.

At the beginning of class, the teacher encouraged us to let our mind settle on a word, our intention for that hour. What we came there seeking, what we needed. I very quickly settled on peace. Throughout the class when positions became difficult (and boy, did they become difficult) she encouraged us to call on that word. She also reminded us to breathe. With every motion, she instructed us to inhale and exhale. This seemed a little silly at first, but when things quickly became difficult, I found myself forgetting to breathe. When I found myself in a bind, the first thing I did was stop breathing. I cut off my own oxygen and made it even harder.

I thought a lot about this on my way home that night. Today marks one month until my husband's surgery. A surgery that will tell us whether or not he has cancer. Until now, I had also thought of it as the event that would let me finally be able to breathe again. One more month is a long time to hold your breathe when you have been holding it since Christmas. It is a long time to never feel the deep cleansing breath of being fully engaged in the world around you. It is a long time to want for something desperately, but to have to wait for it. But I'm learning that waiting feels a lot less like a spectator sport and a lot more like yoga now that I'm learning to breath through the hard parts. It isn't easy, it takes practice because it is a practice.

The Waiting Place, Part II

Earlier this month I wrote about waiting. I went on and on about waiting with hope and peace. Then a couple of days ago I shared what I still consider to be an incredibly valuable video on a talk about vulnerability. And of course, I made this public proclamation of sorts on the value of vulnerability. I vowed to myself to seek to live in a way that is more wholehearted, walking through the good and the bad in a way that is real and honest.

Let's talk for a minute about what happens when you choose a posture of vulnerability for yourself. It may look like this: You find yourself in a situation in which you risk your personal safety to protect your personal property and hopefully, that of someone else. And as absurd as the interaction with a criminal who has taken too many Xanax can be, a couple of days later you find yourself afraid. You begin to deconstruct the actual events and you begin to realize all that could have happened. And despite reminding yourself the danger playing "What if" can do to a person, you can't help but wonder what is going to happen in the future. You dream about chaotic events and mugshots and you find yourself feeling exposed and edgy, completely vulnerable. And while you are normally pretty big on sucking it up, you cut yourself some slack, realizing that being vulnerable means starting with yourself. You show yourself some compassion.

Then there is the whole waiting thing. You want to sit reverently in The Waiting Place? It might look something like this: Your husband has a rountine doctors appointment on a Friday. After a short discussion, you suddenly find yourself on an accelerated course of treatment.  Radiation after Christmas isn't ideal, for sure, but after some thought and discussion, maybe it is for the best. Let's get this behind us. So the routine ultrasound a few days before Christmas is followed almost immediately by a highly concerned phone call from the doctor. Biopsy. Next week. And then you know that the door that closed behind you and the one that is yet to open leave you in The Waiting Place. So you cry a little bit because who wouldn't, right? Afterall, you are still counting your blessings from the beginning of this whole ordeal when you found yourself sitting in a waiting room holding your spouse's hand. Staring out the window, aware of the changing light of Fall, you asked of yourself and God: Is this what it feels like to have taken it all for granted? You realize once again that you aren't ready to know the answer to that question. So you hope. You promise that you won't rush the beauty and mystery of the humble birth of your Savior to get to next week. You will wait quietly. Actively. You will wait with hope, knowing that one day you will speak of this time as the time you learned to wait with peace. You cut yourself a little more slack and you share your real self, your fear and the questions that go with it in a public way, a way that let's people see you, because you remembered the truth as Brene Brown shared it: vulnerability is necessary. Perhaps you are learning. Just in time.

The Waiting Place

This month, in celebration of Advent, our Sunday morning conversations have revolved around the theme of waiting. So far, specifically, what it means to wait with hope and wait with peace. It is a sticky subject, this idea of waiting.

These past two Sundays have brought forth memories of specific moments in my life when I have had no choice but to wait. And "the waiting places" as Dr. Seuss calls them, are not always happy places. I know what it feels like to wait with hope when my brokenness tells me I should be hopeless. I know what it feels like to sit very, very quietly when circumstances scream chaos. I'm not saying these were my finest moments, moments that prove me to be the woman God calls me to be. I'm just saying I kept breathing. And somehow found people and moments in which I could find great beauty. And I held faith in a God who was keeping me alive for something I couldn't quite see yet.

I had a conversation with some students tonight about why my husband and I don't have children. I've learned that conversation is just a natural occurence when people are trying to get to know me--us. Tonight, it went much differently than it often does with adults. These young people sought to understand--the process of how I got to where I am today--sharing hope and peace with them--after reconciling myself to the fact that I would not be a mother. Hear me say: They simply sought to understand.

I wish I had a dollar for everytime an adult thought I misjudged the meaning of hope when we were unsuccessfully enduring surgery, treatment, physical sickness, debt beyond our capacity to pay without damaging our financial future, and heartache and disappointment beyond our capacity to share verbally outside the privacy of our home. Enduring those things and being sad, scared, and confused, yet still moving forward was nothing if not an act of hope. Prayerfully deciding to stop subjecting ourselves to those same things was not an act of hopelessness, although many people said they were sorry we gave up hope. There are people still saying that. I choose to think of it as a tremendously hopeful act. It was an act of hope with a heavenly perspective. When we stopped waiting to see what the next month would hold, we started waiting to see how God was going to heal our hearts. That is a faith healing of the miraculous sort and I find that it many ways, it is still happening. But while I wait, I do so with hope, and by sharing peace, I am receiving it, as well.

You see, I know what it means to wait. I have known season after season of waiting. Weeks that seemed like months, months that seemed like years, and years that seemed like one long, painful, unending present. I have waiting down to an artform. But tonight, I knew that without learning to wait with hope, I would not have been standing there among beautiful young people who are learning what it means to live a faith that is so new for them. A faith that will be challenged. A faith that at some point will teach them about waiting with hope and peace. A faith that can be damaged when someone tells them the wrong story about their own hope. I told them a little bit about my story and then later, while waiting at a redlight, I thanked God for keeping me alive.

Be Still...

from Sue Monk Kidd's When the Heart Waits:

"…I sat beside her, unable to resist the feeling that we shared something, the two of us. The wounds and brokenness of life. Crumpled wings. A collision with something harsh and real. I felt like crying for her. For myself. For every broken thing in the world.

That moment taught me that while the postures of stillness within the cocoon are frequently an individual experience, we also need to share out stillness. The bird taught me anew that we're all in this together, that we need to sit in one another's stillness and take up corporate postures of prayer. How wonderful it is when we can be honest and free enough to say to one another, 'I need you to wait with me,' or 'Would you like me to wait with you?'

I studied the bird, deeply impressed that she seemed to know instinctively that in stillness is healing. I had been learning that too, learning that stillness can be the prayer that transforms us. How much more concentrated our stillness becomes, though, when its shared…."