Destination Discipline

I pulled back the curtains Saturday morning and saw what I had expected; wet pavement. For once, it seems, the weathermen were correct. I paced around the house for a few minutes, killing time until I confirmed the inevitable; I would not be riding my bicycle in the Tour de Cure. I called myself a coward even as I tried to muster up some courage. I looked out of the window again. My shoulders sagged. And then I crawled back into bed and pulled the covers over my head.

I was disappointed. Even angry. I thought of all the people who contributed to my ride. Would they hate me? Would they refuse to support me next year? Should I even go so far as to refund their money? And then I considered the reason I am afraid to ride on wet pavement. I remember approaching the intersection, taking the corner, and the wheels slipping out from under me. My face hit the road with a thunk. A driver called out, “Are you okay?” And I tried to move but I couldn’t. I lay there helpless, gasping for air, even as I tried to make sense out of how one moment I had so much confidence in the bike beneath me and the next moment I was spitting out pieces of teeth as strangers carried me to the side of the road.

For this reason and several others, I am terrified to ride on wet pavement. I was riding last week and got caught in a thunderstorm. I honestly thought I might have a nervous breakdown right there, a mile from my house. Regardless of how fast I pedaled, the dark and ominous clouds had overtaken me. The rain hit me like marbles, but I held onto my trusty bicycle, thanked God for disc brakes(and the sturdy construction of my Jamis hybrid) and prayed like crazy that I would make it home with my teeth intact. I did. And I consider that a tremendous blessing.

June 6th is a day that holds great significance in my life. Every year on this day I stop and reflect on a decision I made that—at the time—had everyone in my life scratching their heads. This year is the ten year anniversary of that decision. And I don’t regret it, even though things didn’t go exactly as planned. It was a defining moment in my life; the day I made the decision to follow my husband to Oklahoma, where against all odds, we would try to rebuild our broken marriage.

This is a tender subject for me and I ask for grace from the reader. For I can never put words to the anguish I endured during that time. Nothing I say will be adequate enough to express the heartache, terror and hope I experienced when I felt the Lord guiding me to a strange land with a stranger(for my husband was certainly a stranger to me at that time). I had prayed for wisdom and guidance and felt the Lord tell me through his word that I should trust Him—and Him alone—to guide and protect me. Let me be clear, I had no faith in my husband, but only in the strong and steady hand of the keeper of the stars.

I had confidence in His strength as I explained my decision to my parents, my siblings, and my church family. They simply could not grasp how a woman could forgive the unforgivable and put her life in the hands of someone who had broken faith with her. In many ways that was when my walk with the Lord changed forever. It was the moment I stopped asking people for advice and leaned only on my faith in God to guide me through the dark and ugly jungle of betrayal. I never felt like I was walking out onto a jagged precipice. In truth, I felt as if I were crossing a rickety bridge held fast and firm by the hand of love. If you want to learn how that ended up, give me a call sometime. I won’t recant the entire story here. But needless to say, we remain married today, and only by the grace of the one who told me on June 6th, 2006, that he would never leave me or forsake me.

I attended a wedding yesterday. I watched two committed Christians enter into a covenant relationship in the most beautiful way possible. I thought to myself that they are so much better than I was at their age. So much wiser. I thought about the first day of their journey and what paths the Lord would lead them on. I wondered how they would respond to the caverns of pain and the oceans of bliss that marriage introduces human beings to. I prayed for them to be true to each other, and faithful to their creator and his purpose for their lives. And then I prayed that God would bless them.

Some might think blessing looks like a good job, a comfy home and a fluffy poodle. So often we pray for the blessing but do not have the capacity to understand what receiving it actually looks like. In my experience, sometimes the blessing looks like a sob. It looks like a broken blade of grass dangling in the breeze. It looks like a cyclist splayed out in the street with the wind knocked out of her. It looks like a woman throwing her wedding band over a bridge on the way home from a failed attempt to save her marriage. I have learned that the blessing is not financial, but rather, spiritual. The blessing comes when God’s favor rests on the heaving shoulders of one crying out in the night for comfort. The blessing comes when the scale reading 5 pounds higher. The blessing is a diagnosis of juvenile diabetes. In short, blessing is the small whisper in the whirlwind that says I have not lost everything because I still have the one and only treasure that really matters.

I drove home from work on Friday afternoon having once again experienced tremendous professional disappointment. And I felt it rise within me—the sob. Tears swelled in my eyes as I considered the tick marks that have been crossed off over the years in my career. Each time I try and fail I consider the best way to respond. My husband suggested ice cream. I told him I’d already been there and done that and it didn’t salve the ache. So I lifted my eyes to the hills and thanked God for my pain. I told him that regardless of my disappointment, I still trusted him. And then I cried the rest of the way home. I didn’t feel it immediately… the pitter-patter on my shoulders. After all, the pain was just too intense. But eventually the blessing began to sink in as I continued to choose to love and trust Christ. Because once you have been saturated by the love of the Prince of Peace, you come to realize that no matter how big the pain, the heartache, the sin, He is bigger still. And the blessing He gives is more beautiful than you could ever imagine. Do you know why? It is because the blessing is Himself.

Despite what popular culture tries to tell us by way of fancy memes, everything will not be okay. We can’t always pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and conquer the world(much less ourselves). We can’t always be awesome. Sometimes we can’t even connect the spoon to our mouth by way of simple nourishment. Weakness. Pain. Sorrow. Anger. We live in the real world where–more often than not–happily ever after is the successful flush of a toilet. If you’re anything like me, you look up and see the storm clouds forming and sigh. Because like it or not, you know what’s coming.

I loved my old house. It was this fabulous old brick bungalow that was built in 1927. It had a wonderful covered front porch and the obligatory swing. I loved to sit on that swing during a gentle rain and watch the rain drops pitter-patter on my butterfly bush. Rain makes me happy; excess water, however, does not.

My old house sat under a large Maple tree which was, quite literally, a pain in my back. That weathered old tree liked nothing more than to drop tree litter in my gutters. And because my life is busy, I didn’t get to clean them out as much as I would have liked to. Under normal circumstances, overflowing gutters are an inconvenience, but at this particular house, they were a disaster. The previous owner told me when I moved in, “The basement only floods when the gutters are full of leaves.” Quite frequently, instead of sitting on my front porch enjoying the rain, I was cleaning the gutters. It became kind of a joke between my husband and I because no matter how many times he told me NOT to clean the gutters in the rain(because he didn’t want me to get struck by lightning), I nearly always did it. Because I’m stubborn and because I didn’t want my bunnies(in the basement) to drown.

Gutters exist for rain. In a perfect world, they are cleaned regularly and function properly by guiding the water away from the structure of the house. But let’s be candid, life is busy and cleaning the gutters often takes a back seat to more critical activities(like making dinner, chasing errant squirrels out of the attic, and trying to determine where “that smell” is coming from). This is how I live my life; reactively. I feel like I live in a constant state of “cleaning the gutters in the rain.” For instance, this week I’ve been dealing with physical pain. And by pain I mean teeth chattering, bone grinding, struggling to sleep, pain. It’s a pain I can’t escape no matter how many ibuprofen I take. It makes me angry, and sad, and frustrated. But mostly, it makes me feel very, very fragile.

We live in a broken world where people are in a constant state of trying to relieve pain. Prince is our most recent example. He literally died from trying to relieve chronic pain. And let me be clear—we all have pain. Emotional pain. Relational pain. Physical pain. Truth be told, no one wants to live under the cloud of a constant ache. So here we all are, standing on the roof, with lightning and thunder clamoring overhead while we try to unclog our gutters so the basement doesn’t flood. Our tears mingle with the rain but nobody seems to notice(or care) as we stick our hands into the black muck and sigh. If they do, they are usually too busy with their own gutters to stop and offer a kind word.

This week I really needed a hug. Well, at the very least I needed someone to look into my eyes and see my sorrow. I spent the early part of the week reading my bible and praying. I pleaded with God to help me. And I kept bailing gutter sludge as the rain poured down. Yesterday, every step I took was an agony. I went out at lunch in search of pain meds, and when I walked back into the office a co-worker asked me if something was wrong. She said, “You seem out of sorts. Is everything okay?” After I told her that I was in pain she said, “Why don’t you go home and rest?” I smiled and lied. I said, “I will be okay.” Because I didn’t have time for the truth. Because my truth looks a lot like me curled up in a ball in bed for a month. That’s the kind of rest I need. But I have children to raise, and a paycheck to bring home and that kind of rest just isn’t always possible.

But here’s the beauty of my life, pain isn’t an excuse to stay miserable. I often find that when in times of excruciating pain, I experience God’s grace at its most full. In order to take my mind off the pain and other uncomfortable life circumstances, I have been memorizing a Psalm that reminds me of God’s goodness. That is why when earlier this week when another co-worker was complaining about the cold and cloudy weather, I said, “Yes, but the sun is shining above the clouds, and even though we can’t see it, it is just as lovely as it ever was.” And it’s true. Pain clouds our perceptions, just like clouds mask the sun. But that doesn’t mean the sun has stopped shining.

So here’s the thing I have learned about cleaning gutters in the rain, I actually like it. The reason for this is simple; gutter sludge stinks. When you dip your hands into it, it soaks into your skin and then your hands reek for days afterward. When it rains, however, the rainwater washes the gutter sludge away. I only need to pull out the gunk from the downspouts and the water rushes through the gutters and washes them clean.

I think maybe pain is God’s method of showing me the gunk in my gutters. So often I’m too tired or lazy or whatever to climb onto the roof and unplug the downspouts. When that is the case, the water pours down the roof, over the gutters, and into my basement where it causes a big stinking mess. But when I use God’s word to cleanse my heart—even when pain is at its most wretched—I experience the rain as a mechanism of cleansing. Make no mistake—it’s going to rain. And honestly, there is no magic umbrella that will keep us from being affected by it. However, if we are wise, we turn to the maker of the rain and let him use it refine and purify us.

Still, it behooves me to say that waiting for the rain to clean the gutters is not a good approach to life. That is why I really do try to read God’s word daily. I began to memorize Psalm 19 when the sun was shining as a means to praise him. And when it began to rain, Psalm 19 was an excellent reminder that even though the clouds had come, his promises were still true. Pain, like rain, will come. But as I always say, it’s how we respond to adversity that really matters.

I spent the weekend hunched over the gravel-filled flower beds in my yard. The decades-old river rock lost its luster years ago. Now, weeds and stumps jut out from the jagged dirt like crooked talismen. I am their undertaker as I plunder their roots and rip them from the earth. Someone thought the rocks pretty once, but time has stolen anything that ever resembled beauty. So I take my hoe, and I rake out the brambles and misshapen pieces, and I throw them into an old bucket. Then I stuff lawn waste bags with mangled stems and roots, and when I’m feeling frisky, I burn the rest. And when my body won’t cooperate any longer, I crawl into a hot bath and soak my aching muscles in magnesium-laden water. And I sigh.

It’s such a slow process. I have spent the better course of a year trying to find the earth beneath these awful rocks. I’ve lost track of the weekends–the sweaty mosquito-laden skin–and the unrelenting sun. And there are still truckloads of rocks to remove. I sometimes wonder if I was mad to attempt such an arduous project by myself, but I had a vision in my mind of my house not looking like the house even a ghost wouldn’t want to inhabit. I have a vision of roses and butterflies, and hop-toads perched beneath broad leafed ferns. And so I press forward. Because it’s not the first time I’ve looked at an impossible project and decided to chip away at it until my dream becomes a reality.

I did my first 3.5 minute plank last week. I’ll be honest, I didn’t think my body was capable of a 2 minute plank, much less more than 3. But I hit the 3 minute mark and I just held steady. I held until I couldn’t hold any longer. I tapped the stop button on my stopwatch and marveled over the mental toughness mingled with sweat on my brow. Because I’m just Margaret. I’m not super Sporty Spice. I don’t look great in a bikini. And I’m generally pretty humble about my accomplishments. Maybe it’s because I’ll never forget huffing and puffing up the hills of Ferguson, Missouri and feeling like my legs were going to give out beneath me. At one time I couldn’t imagine not consuming fast food. Shoot, I met my husband at Dairy Queen and I got my current job through a woman I met at Taco Bell. I remember the first time I attempted a plank and thought my back was going to break. I honestly didn’t know how horses do it. But here I am a few short years later and I’m still pushing past my limits. Not because I’m trying to make the cover of a magazine, but because I enjoy being strong. I spent my whole life being physically weak and dreaming that I could run. Strength should never be confused with physical perfection.

Still, some projects are just not fun. Ask the Roto Rooter man how much he enjoys his job as he snakes out your sewer drain after it backs up into your basement. But once that drain is clear, Hallelujah! But if you looked at the drain and figured getting it unclogged was impossible and decided to just let your sewer fill up your basement, well, that seems stupid. Any sane person knows you don’t want to live in a house where the sewer has backed up. For obvious reasons, if left unchecked, the house would be condemned. Funny how we can’t condemn and move out of our bodies when they become uninhabitable.

My home will never be on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens and I’m okay with that. I don’t need fame. I don’t even need to win a “Best in the Neighborhood” award. I just want flowers and bees and caterpillar-strewn parsley. And so I’m working in that direction–one ugly rock at a time. It’s the same way I lost the weight…one dreadful pound at a time. And one day I plan to sit back on my wooden rocking chair(that I haven’t purchased yet) and smile into the breeze as I watch the Swallowtail butterflies flit from flower to flower. That’s what I think about while I’m plucking rocks and roots from the dirt. So when my neighbors see me smiling and waving, it’s not really a mystery. If they ask me I’ll simply tell them… I am already reaping the harvest of joy–even as I’m planting the seeds. Because dreams are lovely and purposeful and fun. And who really knows what tomorrow will bring? That, my friends, is why I use two buckets; one for the ugly rocks and one for the pretty rocks. Because somewhere in my re-landscaped yard there will be a space where I can reflect on where I once was so that I can celebrate where I ended up.