The most beautiful stories are often the ones we never expected, and maybe even hoped wouldn’t happen. The ones that are odd, embarrassing, confusing and heartbreaking to live, and leave us answerless, bathing in wonder. I have one to share with you tonight.
I’m 15 years old, laying on my back in a giant pile of snow, the piercing silence fading me into winter twilight. My dog is sitting peacefully next to me, because as we all know, dogs get it. They won’t break the pact. My slow breathing and crackling nylon jacket are my only true companions.
This is not my first taste of ecstacy, but it is one of the deepest yet. I’ve been encountering God in all the places I never expected to find anything, since I saw Him blow by me on a warm Florida breeze when I was just 5, a girl in her pajamas, looking for the mailman.
I found Him in the bottom of the swimming pool (and the top), in the mist hanging over it on cool winter nights, and in the steady rain falling into it on grey afternoons. I found Him in lizards, magnolias, cats, and muddy rain puddles in the driveway (especially the splashy, messy ones). It’s the only story of my life, really.
I was 10 years old when life threw it’s first curveball – a move from Florida paradise (and the only home I’d ever known), to – upstate New York? I mean, who does that?
This also meant leaving behind the only real friend I’d ever had, a strawberry headed, resentfully freckled boy, John. I can tell you, Costco trips just aren’t the same when you’re the only one playing make believe down the endless aisles of boxed goods. Life felt quite unbearably lonely and lifeless for a time…except for the ecstacy I found in riding my horse over the rolling hills, endless summer afternoons (because the length of day actually changes when you don’t live on the equator), in drippingly beautiful sunsets oozing between the blinds in my little sanctuary, and other such wonders as found me in the emptiness.
This is the part where things get strange. You see, I made some deals with God in my life, like that I wouldn’t get married, have twin babies or do something as despicable as, you know, fall in love. Ew.
I got married at 19. Had twin babies at 26. And fell in love at 30. Very messy, all out of order, and definitely not possible – I mean come on God, we HAD this conversation – why the nonsense?
But of course I can’t actually blame myself when I found every moment of numinous bliss I’d ever experienced, looking back at me through the eyes of another human being. What followed was basically inevitable. In my own defense, I very faithfully did not let myself consciously feel anything, until it hit me 9 months after meeting this person that the most awful thing had happened quite without my permission. I was in love.
The 5 year old in me stills says “EWWEWWW!!!” when I admit it, but nonetheless it stands that at the end of the day my blood is red, and I’m a girl just like the other ones. This is the kind of stuff that goes down on earth, I’m told.
The thing that is so typical of this Wild God of mine, is that this accidental brush stroke on the canvas of life became the most prime evidence that this Divine I’d been in love with since forever, was real. That all the dreams in my little mystic heart were based on something real, something true. Shock over took me for days each of the few times I shared with him, my cells remembering a place I’ve been weaving in and out of since before memory was.
Of course in the way things often go, I left the whole experience broken, broken open to a much bigger life that I could have possibly pictured prior. Two and half years later my whole being still bleeds with longing for whatever that is that I now know actually does exist – IN HUMAN FORM – but I’m still really not sure, what for.
I’ve prayed so many times from the belly of that ache, to be able to experience the kind of touchable, flesh covered hope I mingled with those few precious days, again. In any form. But mainly in the form I had experienced it in because I’m human, and we often ask for things as we know them. Whether we’re meant to have them that way is a story I don’t know the answer to.
After months of this cycle of praying, longing, and letting go (while going through some of the most hellish experiences I’ve had, extra thirsty for evidence that God was still around), one day I had the same feeling of imminence I used to have before I would bump into Walking Hope. About 30 minutes later in the grocery store check out line, I caught a carbon copy of Hope looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
Because life is a funny thing, Mr. Carbon’s face mask fell off long enough for me to return to that state of cellular shock, feeling like I was experiencing the Real Thing. I ended up falling behind him in the line of dutiful Costco receipt holders, studying his hands, hair, and height, trying to figure out what was happening. Even after finding that we had parked nearly nose to nose, and following the beat that was drifting out his windows to a nearby intersection, I failed at at seeing the sense in it, and went on to have a very normal Sunday.
Two weeks later, it’s a muddled snowy night in the no man’s land of life’s present curve in the road. I’m checking out at Costco again with my kids, and in this beautiful alchemy of memory, I look back at that moment and feel so deeply full of hope for my life. Real, elusive, right here, right now…hope. A profound sense that everything will be okay. And I think to myself – I live in a world so reckless that a certain skeleton, with dead cells that curve a certain way and very straight nose with a calm demeanor and hands that look like home, can restore hope for my ENTIRE LIFE.
And I began to wonder who has ever looked at me, listened to my story, or maybe saw heaven in my daughter’s eyes, and felt the same thing. That something so trivial as an appearance, a face, some shapes and cells that hide an eternal spirit of it’s own design…could remind someone of the very goodness of all that is. What a beautiful, mysterious, careless and endlessly attentive world this is! How strange and glorious!
And once more, like a current under the ocean itself, I begin again. Full of hope.
The Eye of the Needle 