9. Janice

Tags

100, affection, character profile, death, drugs, girl, http://ibecameashepherd.blogspot.com/, hundred, one hundred words, past, prompt, relationship, writing exercise

Janice, with her ponytail over her shoulder.
Janice, with her apple blossom cheeks, flushed when they smiled sweet.
Janice, arms draped around and around, limbs askew on him, on you.
Janice, with her long lashes touching, droopy-eyed, lost too long in her high.

Janice, always in a Mister’s lap.
Janice, wearing your baseball cap.
Janice’s arms lazy and limp around your neck.
Janice, climbing in that car, minutes before you left.

No nights, no days, no sleep to differentiate.
No tears for you, no coffin in the ground.
Just a daze, eyes all a glaze.
Years before you would awake.

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Butter Pecan

Tags

butter pecan, choices, coping, death, family, father, flavors, grief, groceries, ice cream, Jonathan, memory, parents, remembering, son

When you went through the grocery store today,
your mind was stuck on your dad.
When he was around, alive, yours.
Before he died
when you were small.
Before it was just you and mom,
two sisters, that’s all. All women,
no dad. Smiles, but sometimes nothing but sad.

In the freezer aisle, long glass doors, sealing sounds as they close and keep in the cold, you swing your basket, half full, not heavy. Near the frozen treats, you tap the toe of your shoe and scan the flavors. Don’t usually keep ice cream in the house where there’s only you. Mint chocolate chip, moose tracks, cherries jubilee, you see a label shouting fat free. Vanilla, French vanilla, vanilla bean, something else vanilla-y but not quite so vanilla-ish. The labels are giving you a headache. Maybe popsicles, you consider. But before you move on, your eyes fall on butter pecan—dad’s favorite flavor. A pint of the creamy flavor falls into your basket, halved shells of soft nuts, cold from fossilizing in the ice cream, buried deep like treasure.

It becomes a butter pecan week.
For Dad.

Too Soon

Tags

conversation, death, discussion, friends, friendship, love, memory, past, shame, sickness, suicide, summer, time

She doesn’t mind talking about it. After all, it’s been three years since. In mixed context, they make jokes and say, Too soon? in jest, with smiles. I’m the only one who thinks it still is. I wonder if ever it will be otherwise. If ever Late enough.

I hate to narrate the day. Loathe the way we lean over the details. When we remember and rehearse the hours before and after she didn’t die. I hate my mind’s rememberlessness of every moment. I’m angry at the slices of time wedged in the in-betweens, the pieces of chaos pasted haphazardly brainward.

I’m selfish, too, lost in shame that I couldn’t be the savior of the story. That it wasn’t me who found her obsessively cleaning, drunk on drugs; me who drove her to safety, soaking in every warbled word; me with reams of wisdom, righting all wrongs past. She’s better now. It’s fine. She’s my friend, still. She’s alive.

But they don’t mind talking about it. And I’m stuck in Too soon.

Call

Tags

advice, call, caution, community, crash, death, driving, friendship, love, story, storytelling, wreck

Being cared for is such a funny thing. Such a wonderful thing. I believe, a necessary, healthy, human thing. Such an almost-manipulative thing, though, it can be blurry.

Call us when you get there. My mom always says. To let us know you got there. I’ve always feigned strength, like nothing can stop me from getting here to there. Like there are no mistakes, no dangers, like the course of my life is in my control. Yet I always called or sent a text, because otherwise Mom would worry.

I had a friend, from a wonderful community of believers, who was on the way to loving me, if not already there. I couldn’t make myself feel the same, and we had to part ways. He always wanted to drive me home. I was out of the way and it angered me so, but I often let it go. On nights that I drove myself home, he made me call and confirm my safety. I always fought, saying it was fine, saying I’d be fine.

My strong will in this was a mistake. He had a past with the complexity of travel. Some of his closest friends had died in a car crash a few years back. He was from the South―the most charming gentleman you can imagine―so instead of crash, like us, he said wreck like other Arkansans do. The wreck nearly broke the man, I learned over coffee and late nights out. But it helped bring him fully to the Lord, I reckon.

His story, the truths, these gals, those friends who held his heart strings, all together, it confirmed that a drive home is never just a drive home. There are mistakes, and dangers, and deaths waiting on the sides of the road. And if I don’t call when I come home, it’s reason to worry, because it’s happened to him before.

I never said no again when he said Call.

Just a Visitor Here

Tags

Albania, blood feud, church, death, earth, eternity, friendship, Heaven, ministry, missionary, missions, murder, violence

There are things I don’t understand. Like blood feud. I’d maybe heard of it before, but it became personal and real to me last week, when I had close friends who lost someone to blood feud in Albania.  You can read a really great article about blood feud with solid references to other material here.

The family I’m currently living with–they are a lot of things to me, but we’ll call them my adopted family for the purposes of this discussion–they had a friend from Albania, Tani, pass away this week.  He was a long-time brother in Christ and partner in ministry to my family.  He and his wife pastor a church in Shkodra, a city in Albania.  Tani was sought out for years by this other family because someone from Tani’s family had killed a member in their family.  This blood feud goes back for generations between these two families.  Tani was a firm believer in the Lord, Jesus Christ and ran a ministry pastoring a church along with his wife, Elona and their two children, Gabrielle and Sarah.

What I don’t understand is the rationale behind this long-standing cultural custom of blood feud. It’s steeped in the concept of avenging death with death. For years, decades even, families will seek to violently and heartlessly murder a male member of the opposing family to avenge the death of one of their own. For Tani, this involved imprisonment in his own home.  He could have left Shkodra, his town and home, left his family and his ministry but he chose to remain and continue in the work that God had given him to do there.  He spent years sneaking around, driving cars with blackened windows, never walking through the plaza or across the street.  This is insane.  For generations this can go back and forth, with grown men acting like kids playing war, giving no recognition to the irrationality of this practice. Jerry, my adopted father, says it’s a waste of time to try and make sense of it all. They’re making rational something that’s completely irrational. That doesn’t make any sense and there’s nothing to figure out about it.

This is really the world we live in, isn’t it?  This mess, this disaster of a heartbreak. I’m saddened to call this my home. And so, I won’t.

I’m just a visitor here.

Join me in praying for Tani’s family, Elona and her children. And for his church in Albania.

And The Other Thing Is…

Tags

Bailey, death, doctrine, evil, God, graduate school, guilt, Moody Bible Institute, Moody Theological Seminary, Parkview, Satan, sin, theology, writing, youth group

In consideration of the previous discussion about doctrine and summaries, here:  The other thing is guilt. I’ve written doctrine for a lot of things. I’ve covered a spectrum of issues and essentially figured out what I actually believe about things. Good stuff. It’s foundational, essential legwork if I’m really going to live my life for this and mean it. And I am. But in all of that, I don’t really have a theology of guilt. This is my fault, but it’s also someone’s fault. Why don’t I have to? Why isn’t it important? It’s not need-to-know knowledge like the characteristics of God. But when I feel it and I’m not sure what’s going on, it sure feels need-to-know to me.

The thing about guilt is that because I’m not sure how to process it, it tends to come and go without too much fanfare. It feels uncomfortable and so I escape it, like I do with uncomfortable things. Escaping is something I do skillfully. They do not pay me, so I cannot adulterate the title “professional” but my expertise in the area far supersedes anyone who has sought and achieved sponsorship for escapism. Escaping guilt doesn’t need to last long. Guilt fades with sleep, with social setting, with scene change. Guilt gets swallowed up by life. It recurs and I hate it, but I hit “repeat” and run from it again, always in ignorance.

When I read about the conscience I enter into a discussion of guilt, but still wonder if any of them are for me. Guilt creeps in when we violate our conscience. We know when we’ve disobeyed rightness like a child with a mouthful of gummy worms face to face with an angry Mom minutes before dinner. But that’s not the kind of guilt I’m worried about today. I screw up and I feel guilty. Seems fair.

But what about false guilt? What about when I don’t screw up and I do feel guilty? And I’m not talking about a little pain-in-your-stomach kind of gummy-worm-eating guilt. I’m talking chemically unbalancing force attempting to hurtle you into a physiological and mental state of depression from regret. Days of this. Worse, nights after sleepless nights. For weeks, maybe. Months? And then some rest. And then all of it crashing down on you again for some number of dark days that all blend together. Horrible.

I find that guilt is always just a question. Never does comfort follow. Or assurance. Or any answer at all. Just a weighty question and a void. And I wonder how much of it is consequence for some sin, some negligence or failure on my part. I sometimes think this haunting is my due condemnation. I mean, I’m not sure, but my God is not a God of torture. That’s heresy. He is just, but I do not know Him like this.

And I can live in tension, but this is My Healer we’re talking about. My Provider. Who comforts me when I’m a hot mess and puts my crushed self back together. He challenges me, yes. But this whole question plus the void plus the pain pressing guilt in on me doesn’t seem like a formula He would be into. Which leads to a bit of a scary thing for someone like me…I think there is something evil about false guilt in this particular sense that I’m imagining/experiencing it.

One year ago today, I began my battle with guilt because I somehow thought that I had the power to mess up everything God had planned for gals that I felt were in my spiritual care. I woke up every day in deep apology to my Savior for severely failing Him. My soul became callous to forgiveness. I thought He had put me somewhere, in a season of life I didn’t really ask for to begin with, for a purpose, and I had failed to achieve that purpose in the worst way.

I honestly don’t know why God let me be a youth leader. Fact is, I don’t know a lot. Probably not enough to guide these beautiful girls in their walks with the Lord. That time in my life was actually a very painful season for me, and youth leading had everything to do with it. It hurts to fall in love with people. To hurt when they hurt, to worry about them, to want to make all the right choices for them. When my heart breaks for “my girls,” I wonder if God feels that way about us. Maybe He was trying to give me a slice of His heart. I love them, even though they’re all off at college caring about whatever college kids care about. If love is tangible, I don’t do it well. But I’ve never wanted more out of this life for anyone as I have for these three Daughters of the King.

In this year, I’ve learned that guilt isn’t right. Maybe false guilt is evil, I don’t know. But it sure ain’t right. Everything that went down went down right, because more than anything, I believe my God is in charge. Nothing gets by Him. Nothing surprises Him. They crucified Jesus, His Son…but it was okay – remember? And so is this. It is okay.

To you, Bails.  Loved you with all I had, girl.
Elise. Jess. Katie. Thinking of you today.  Love you, dearly, gals.  So dearly.

Critical Reactions*

Tags

church, counseling, crisis, death, doubt, God, healing, love, ministry, mystery, suicide, trauma, youth

Bridget is concerned. She’s hurting hard for the family. The two girls crossed paths a time or two in life, and their families with them. There was grade school and junior high. High school started with the two girls from different worlds together among a mass of freshman, but soon Anna left to attend a behavioral school. Folks said it was better that way. Bridget wonders how to speak with Jeremy, the little brother. She doesn’t know how to say “sorry” or how to teach him about this God, as good as silent to his sister in these recent days. She’s aching for him, but sometimes kids can absorb these kinds of things. We don’t expect anything, then there they are, drawing their families with crayons when their families are falling apart in sorrow.

Ebony gets jittery when she doesn’t know how to handle a situation, when she has no outlet for the mess inside of her. She’ll calm as time goes on, reaching down into the splinters of her heart to speak of times she remembers. She’ll repeat and repeat that no one sits in Anna’s seat on the couch. Months later, she’ll marvel at how no one still sits there. Ebony has a maturing mind; in her carefree naivety I see sense and calm. Her family is her rock, her twin brother closer than their sarcastic banter shows. I watched him stand up in the back of the worship center, stepping over people crammed into the rows of chairs, all to come to the front row and squeeze his too-big body in next to her. So that he could touch her and love her and make sure she felt safe in this uncertainty.

Lizzy becomes quiet. When she gets really excited, she starts to open up vocally, but when she’s bothered, she doesn’t usually bother with words. I remember her how she closed and caved inward when her Grandma died. Clams up about the war inside of her, even though the hurt is crimson on her shirt. She doesn’t fight hands on her shoulders or the way others wipe her tears, and she loves to hang on to hugs. Anna’s hugs are what she longs for. She’ll let go a bit, crying hard and long, on and off. And I’ll want nothing more than for her to feel my arms, my tight hug, my hand combing her hair behind her ears, and for her to know perfection and see a plan in this deep mystery.

And Anna, well, Anna is gone. Will they call her selfish, stupid, sinful? She let the lies of Satan, the maybe-literal voices that haunted her, convince her of something she knew wasn’t true. We talked so much about the voice of truth. We sang it, studied it, socialized in the light of it, got tired of it over and over, gluing her together over dinner and coffee and truth. Over and over she said she couldn’t take it anymore. And over the months and years, hearing a chorus without a plan, it became stale. So, she did finally take her life to break our hearts, but not so that she’d break them, but so that she wouldn’t have to feel hers heal anymore. On a giant post-it note to Anna I said, These are your girls, Anna. Look at how brave they are. I want her to see, even though I don’t believe she can. I was proud of the girls, but broken like they were, crushed under the weight of “maybe” and “what if”. I’m sorry, my post-it note said, for your questions I couldn’t or didn’t or waited too long to answer.

*though non-fiction, due to the nature of the subject matter, the names in this post have been changed.

Dependant and Cancerous

Tags

body, cancer, death, disease, family, Gram, grandma, memories, memory

I was reminded today of my first (?) true publishing credit, Clean.  That essay about body and my Gram.  It was so soon after she died that I first drafted that, hmm.  I remember writing sections on that stupid vinyl corner couch that we had in our “E5” townhouse.  Seems like a forever or two ago. 

A few things bother me about that essay, though.  The first is that it’s not very good.  Sure, it has its moments as most legitimate writers can pull off in anything they write, but all things considered, it’s sort of amateur.  Which is fine, I guess, because I am (still).  But it bothers me to know I could have done better.  I could have handled the close friend connection better, but I remember being so stuck on the details of Whitney because my Gram always asked about her and my camp friends, but mostly about her.  The sentences are wordy, and I’ve learned a bit how to reign in my serious obsessions with description and detail since.  The focus could be more pinpointed, either the fear of cancer, or the time with Gram and the woman that she was, or my journey to learning beauty.  It just seems to spread a little bit thinly across too many things.  I digress…

I was surprised the have evoked a small cup of tears when I re-read the piece tonight.  The parts that tugged insistently on my memory were the descriptions of those 10 days between the Dr. O’Reilly visit and when she died in the sunflower room.  I remember everything the way I’d like to remember my dreams, vivid, in color, sequentially, and like it was literally last night.  The sitting in the too-small corner of the bed and listening to advice on how to live my life was a more valuable 15 minutes than anything I can think of.  I remember the move to the brown chair beside the bed – 30 minutes maybe to move less than 2 feet.  And the last day, when she hadn’t eaten for some time, the one bite of banana cream pie – not even able to try to key lime, though she insisted it was delicious.   That was our Christmas party, the pie day, can you believe that?  I still cannot believe the Lord gave us that week and a half.  I wonder why?  Because that wasn’t the regular Gram, loud and playing games, fixing things in the kitchen, telling jokes and using words like ‘bonnet’ and ‘carriage’ far past their time.  But it was also kind of eternal to see her so calm and peaceful, gentle and still making fun of her sons.

Plus, I’ll never stray from my understanding that it was all orchestrated to fit our family back together like puzzle pieces, having strayed far from the box.  Since I had been small, I was silently aching from violent severance in too many directions, as far as that family goes.  The Healer has such an orderly way about Him.  I wonder where my cousins are fitting in to that, even now?

Aside from latent memories and a few fresh tears, I read headlines like, “Report: Cancer to become world’s leading killer”, and “Antiperspirant Increases Risk of Breast Cancer” from this organization and that agency.  I guess the shocking facts and the ever-elusive cure for cancer don’t much phase me because if one thing in that essay were true without moving or twisting of the facts, it’d be that I think it’s probably already in me.  The stealth image of cancer lurking unknown inside my body is the scarier of this mess of feelings.  The suspense can handicap you if you let it.  But it hasn’t and I won’t.  It’ll be a pain, and I’ll cry a time or two, but a part of me hopes not get any gruelling treatment.  Another part wants to keep it secret, not tell anyone to avoid the pity that accompanies disease ,which I loathe.  Will my Mom undergo it all first, or don’t they say it skips a generation?  The lurking in her body might be a deeper pain than the idea of it living in me.  I’m still the little girl who can’t do a thing without her Mom, and…