Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

autumn leaves

When the light shines brightest {or We’ve got work to do}

I told you some of how I’ve been feeling since Election Day and those things are still true. I’m sad and confused and hurt and taking on the pain of others so much so that I’ve had to limit my social media use so I can function for my family.

But there’s something else stirring and while it’s not as noticeable yet, it gives me hope that what I’m feeling now is not all there is to feel.

—

It was a Monday of all days, and I had walked the kids to the bus stop. Fall mornings around here offer a chill, foreshadowing the season to come when we’ll be bundled up like snow adventurers just to walk a few feet to the bus. But the sun rises and warms the day and by afternoon, we’re outside again, with or without jackets to play and soak up as much time on the porch and in the yard as the season allows.

Fall has been fickle this year, giving us summer-like days and winter-like chills, all the while the leaves have taken their sweet time in changing colors, but change they have.

And when I walked back to the house that morning, this is what I saw at the end of our driveway.

The leaves on the tree next door turn sunshine yellow and fall onto our driveway like a carpet. It is my favorite part of autumn, I remember, and the sun glinting through the branches on its way to its peak stopped me where I stood. I felt like I had stumbled into something holy.

—

I’m not in the van as much these days, but when I do have the chance to put a CD on repeat, it’s Andrew Peterson’s The Burning Edge of Dawn, mostly because of the first song, The Dark Before the Dawn.

Take a listen or look up the lyrics. It helps me identify what I’m feeling and have felt. That dark days will come but dawn will follow. That we will have pain but there will be a balm.

I’m not just speaking of politics here because my life has seen plenty of dark days before last Tuesday, but it all reminds me that light shines brightest in the darkness. The sun almost blinds me first thing in the morning because my eyes have adjusted to the dark of night. It is the same reason the first colors of spring seem so bright after a winter full of brown and white.

I am in no way hoping for dark days ahead. I will not celebrate anything like that. But I know that no matter what the days ahead bring, I have a job to do and that is to bring Light into the world. In our church tradition, we culminate Advent with a candlelight service to symbolize the birth of the Light into a dark world.

We are constantly bearing this Light today and birthing it into the world.

When I watch the news, I am not thrilled by it but I see the potential for the bearers of Light to get to work and continue to work. As bleak as the future might seem, I am hopeful that the Church will do its best work in the days ahead. That we will stand against injustice with a loud voice instead of a whisper. That artists will create their greatest pieces. That beauty and love will be the hallmarks of a people who sometimes appear the opposite.

I do not hope these things as some sort of naive Pollyanna. It is not my nature to be optimistic. But I know that to Be Light in the midst of darkness is to be noticed and that millennia ago we, the Church, were invited to Be Light because the Light had come. In those days the world loved darkness more than Light, and it may be true in our day, too. But Light will always overcome.

Our work has always been the same, but sometimes we forget. At least I do. Or I cast off my responsibility because maybe there’s already enough Light in the world. But our world needs the Light more than ever.

And there are all kinds of light. Some of us will be a blazing fire. Others of us will be like a single candle. But it’s all Light and all bearing Light and it doesn’t matter if you’re a bonfire on a hill or a flashlight in the basement.

It is past time to Be Light in the world, and I say this to myself knowing that it might get darker before it gets lighter, that the light might be dim or faint, but to look for the Light is to make a declaration that all hope is not lost.

How have you seen Light in the darkness? How will you Be Light in this world?

Margins

I’m never sure what to do with a week like this. You know the kind, the ones where nothing goes according to plan and everything seems chaos and you sigh with relief that this week is O-V-E-R. (Except it really isn’t when your husband works Saturdays. Sigh.)

Next to me is a girl home from school with a fever. She shuffled off the bus last night and said she couldn’t keep warm at school, but she didn’t have a fever when the nurse checked her. She was feverish by the time she got home, so we nursed her a little and sent her off to bed, and my “plans” for today became laced with contingencies.

Of any day this week for her to be home from school, today is a good one. I didn’t have concrete plans and I wasn’t meeting with my first-ever writing client (squee!). That was yesterday. I was dressed and ready to take a jog/walk when we made the call that she wouldn’t be getting on the bus. In the hour she was awake this morning, her fever rose by a degree or more, so I did the grown-up thing and decided she’d stay home.

She’s missing apple day in her class and I’m on the fence about whether I should let her go trick-or-treating tonight if she’s feeling better. And even though her presence in the house today won’t be a bother, part of me is still selfishly annoyed that my day is not my own today.

I’ve gotten a little too used to this kids-being-in-school-all-day thing.

But it doesn’t even have to be a sick kid to throw me off. I’m not the kind of person who leaves space in her days for the unexpected and unplanned. If I have a calendar, I want to fill it, even if that means filling my time with reading or writing, not necessarily appointments and coffee dates. I start the day with an idea of how things are going to go. It’s a control issue, I think, or maybe something deeper. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll talk to my counselor about it.

Today is just one indicator of how chaotic our week felt. On Sunday night we discovered a patch of carpet in the kids’ room that was soaked. All along the wall their room shares with the bathroom. We knew there was a small problem with the shower but further investigation has led to the revelation of a bigger problem. Monday, on my husband’s day off, was spent clearing out the kids’ room, removing all the furniture against that wall and clearing the floor of all the kid crap that accumulates unwanted. It was exhausting, and the work isn’t done yet and our house is extra messy because we have furniture and books in places they don’t normally belong.

We alerted our landlord. We’re still waiting to hear from the plumber. In the meantime, we discovered that we can’t use the shower unless we want to rain water into the basement on top of all the stuff we have stored down there. So, baths it is for the foreseeable future. (And don’t get me started on the mold potential.) Four years ago, in our last rental, we survived three feet of water in our basement but our souls are still recovering from that ordeal.

It is emotionally draining for me when I have to handle the unexpected and I think that’s because I don’t plan for it at all.  My basic assumption is that everything is going to go exactly as I think so there’s no need to allow for other possible outcomes.

Unrealistic, I know.

I don’t know how to plan for what I don’t know is coming except to keep my schedule free in spots and my attitude open. I know I need to slow down and not always be in such a rush. I don’t have to tick off a dozen things on my list just so I feel like I accomplished something today and am a productive member of society.

My value as a person is not in how much I contribute but simply in who I am. [bctt tweet=”My value as a person is not in how much I contribute but simply in who I am.”]

—

In the midst of this week, there has also been beauty. We had a lovely visit with friends we haven’t seen in years on Sunday. Our son lost his first tooth, which was stressful at first because it was so close to falling out but he wouldn’t let my husband pull it. But it was fun to see him embrace the magic of the tooth fairy this morning.

And it’s the peak week for fall colors around here so every tree is bursting bright with oranges, reds and yellows. I feel like the colors are especially vibrant this year, and the beauty makes me pause every time.

On the way to the bus stop yesterday, I caught a glimpse of the moon lingering in the morning sky, perched just above the trees whose leaves are changing. And later I read in a devotional how a busy schedule makes us miss out on important things.

chaos quote

I wondered what I had been missing this week. Or really my whole life.

There are busy seasons, I know, some more than others. But I know that if I don’t leave margins, if my schedule doesn’t include empty days and white space, then life will become overwhelming when an emergency or unplanned event strikes. If the mantra of my life is “I don’t have time for this”–and I’ve said those words more times than I’d care to admit–then I’ve got it wrong.

I want to have time for this. For quiet snuggles on the couch on a sick day. For a long look at the moon or the stars or the autumn leaves. For the chance to help someone in need. For the stopping and the pausing and the lingering.

How do you make room in your life for what’s important? How do you know when your life is too chaotic?