Filled with immense gratitude despite the current chaos

I was made to do something. Too much time on my hands drives me over the edge. And I've had too much time for the past week.

Tomorrow will be two weeks since my official last day of work, but the end came a week and a half before that. I'm so stubborn that my gut told me this was over for the past four months, and I've lingered on, hoping to re-engage. Like a friend told me this morning, "you've known, but didn't do anything. So the universe hit you over the head with a 2x4." Pretty astute. That Monday, I felt like I had been hit by a 2x4. And the concussion hasn't healed.

This afternoon, another friend checked in with me. I told her I had an interview Tuesday, and hoped that this wouldn't go on very long.

"It won't -- have you met you?"

I have to say, that phrase just planted me. Yeah. I have. I've met this woman who has pulled all-nighters to make sure a project comes off perfectly or grant is submitted on time. I've met this woman who can pull together and motivate amazing teams of people. I've met the woman who hasn't found a technology she can't conquer. I've met this woman who worked two jobs while finishing her degree -- an opportunity she earned by writing an essay in a national contest. I know her. I'd have hired her twin in a second.

I like me. I'm damn proud of me. And some company or organization is going to be lucky as heck to get me. I'm tired of underselling myself.

That's my motivational speech for the day.

But there's more. Whether I'm hired next week or months from now, I'm just filled with gratitude. I have the best friends anyone could ask for. I just counted 11 amazing woman and one special guy friend. The kind that would drop anything for me in a minute, or kick my butt when needed. And I'd do the same for any of them. Seriously? Who has 12 friends like that? 10 years ago, I knew just one of these people. I'm so grateful for the people in my life.

Going to the mountain to find life again

It was the last of my 2015 resolutions: "I love living in Arizona and enjoy being outdoors. Hike at least twice a month." Almost an afterthought to the other six, and certainly no stretch. That's just 24 hikes a year.

Has my life come to this? That I have to resolve to hike? That I have to clear my schedule to do what I love?

That I have to lose my job to be myself?

Valentine's Day, 2015. I've dropped my husband at work. Six and a half hours until the end of his shift, and I'm headed for Granite Basin Lake and Trail 261. Destination: the mountaintop.

Granite Mountain has always seemed like sacred space to me since I moved to Prescott Valley. As one orients to a new community, some landmarks are necessary, and mountains are visible boundaries. Granite Dells, Thumb Butte, the Bradshaws, Glassford Hill,Spruce Mountain, Mingus Mountain, the San Francisco Peaks in the distance. And Granite Mountain.

Rugged, bare Granite Mountain, where water and wind and earth and fire collide. I hiked it in April 2007, on a day with nary a care in the world, blue sky, artistic clouds providing a backdrop to the sand and rust blends of the earth and lush green vegetation.

Today was different. As if allegory for my life was necessary, the trail provided it.

The descent from a trailhead crosses from the real world into a mystic place, a wilderness where I could disappear forever if that was my intent. And today that thought lingers. Lots of people would know and care, but at this juncture, would it make that much difference? I resist the impulse to actually think through the answer.

Juniper and ponderosa pine, scrub oak and mesquite scents mingle to fill my lungs with the final border that my eyes and ears already have accepted. I am as alone as I will be today, and I am grateful.

Snow melt continues to create little water crossings through and over the trail. As the vegetation thins, bare winter trees turn to bare blackened trees. The fire zone. Here the Hotshots fought, just two weeks before their deaths in Yarnell. Here the fire blazed out of control, but storm and wind created no confusion or trap. Alligator junipers became charcoal monuments to a wilderness in a cycle of death and life. At one tiny rivulet, eroded granite soil shows a line of baby ferns, a fragile and unique ecosystem that will last just a few weeks.


Surrounded by burned trees,
Death.
But not quiet.
There a bee buzzes, a bird sings.
And in the distance, a mountain.
Granite. And water. Life begins again.

Out of darkness, light
Out of death, life.
The cycle continues.

The trail turns and steepens. Past the barrier fence that leads to Little Granite Mountain, and a certain alligator juniper. The one that serves as a monument for the Yarnell 19 (or is it 20 -- certainly the remaining young man's life is altered forever).

My last major hike didn't go so well. Heat, pollens and pace combined to set off my asthma. I pause for water and my inhaler before I start the climb. I write some notes, let two groups of hikers pass.

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
    from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
    who made heaven and earth.

The opening two verses of Psalm 121 bury themselves in my head, an apt thought. Where does my help come from? Mike's surgery and my joblessness have left us reeling...what a strange transition. Will I find something better? How long before our finances will force my decisions?Will I have to grasp something for income and then look for a meaningful, fulfilling job later? How soon before Mike will return to work? When that happens, will he want to return to this or something more?

Back on the trail. Switchbacks and rock hopping to the top. I pass a group of local hikers, headed back down, hear a snatch of conversation about their weekly trek. Today is madness, they're saying, the Presidents' Day weekend free public lands crowd. One of them knows me from somewhere and stops to note, "If a few more people were on the top, Granite Mountain would fall over, making it much easier to reach the summit." I chuckle. I'm one of the not-so-often hikers who is cluttering up the trail today.

I make the decision not to climb around the summit to the trail's end, where the crowd will be. Instead, I will climb to the saddle and take a less known short hike to the back face, looking out over Williamson Valley rather than the lake. Hopefully, I will have a little more solitude.

Charred trees continue to surround the trail, occasionally seeing one that only took half a hit. One side dead, the other side still struggling and green. Is that me? Dead on one side, still struggling on the other? I take a broad view and realize the fire claimed everything in my view. The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Can I still recite the entire Psalm from memory. Yes. Because the valley part is a bit too close right now, literally and figuratively. What's next?

...I will fear no evil for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

I can't find any, but I know the burned soil and trees will give way to seedlings soon. It's the cycle of life in a forest:

Where there are trees, there will be fire;
where there is fire, there will be ashes;
where there are ashes, there will be seedlings;
where there are seedlings, there will be trees.

I'm tired, and my poetry is gone. I'm focused on reaching the top, and it's just a couple more switchbacks away. Oddly, the charred trees give way to bright white ones. The fire was hottest here, at the top, and all the bark is gone, but the fire raged past without charring the timber. Like a handful of transfiguration statues, the trees mark the turnoff to the north face. I drop my backpack and grab water and an energy bar.

The fire didn't completely claim this face. While some blackened trees are

evident, I'm surrounded by healthy green ponderosa, brimming with pinecones. Grassy hillsides and moss. I've passed through.

I'm alone for approximately five minutes before seven teenagers find the same turn. The main trail is the other way, I tell them. But one girl says she doesn't care -- this is beautiful. Music blares from their iPhones, laughter and friendly chatter surround me. For a moment, I am irritated. Then I realize -- it is the noise of life. I am surrounded by joy and life and humanity. The valley is gone. Celebrate...you are new again.

It is time to come down from the mountain. My eyes stray away from the dead trees surrounding me, and I keep finding signs of life. New prickly pear cactus. Tiny wildflowers. The bright mahogany branches of manzanita.


Through the dead parts, through the darkness,
Through the regrets, through the emptiness,
Until one by one, you find the living again,
And you move on.

What if...?

I'm a different person than I was six months ago.

I don't know of any other half-year in my life that has changed my outlook, my passions, my spiritual center more than this one has. A chance comment in March turned into a lunch, a plan, study, and a weekly commitment. Along the way, there have been joys and challenges, frustrations and discoveries. And I'm not sure where this journey will lead.

I knew writing would re-open some history, which it has. I still agonize over words and ideas, and become obsessive. I stress myself out over things said and unsaid.

Writing for worship takes hours of study time, reflection and feedback from my mentor. It's like an intense Bible study, a creative writing exercise and a technical writing project blended together. The funny thing is, it seems to have this unusual way of changing me, far more than I've impacted it.

Every week, some new insight fills me with wonder. It would have made sense to be filled with revelations in the first weeks, but the inspiration seems to grow stronger, week to week. The past two epiphanies have left me awed.

Along the way, I've joined a handbell ensemble, started to practice the keyboard again, and remembered that I have a gift for taking photos. I've committed to learning the multimedia system for worship and have been nominated for church council.

And I've lost my alienation with celebrating the anniversary of the Christmas event, year in and year out. I've gained a new perspective on heaven and hell, the second coming and the desire to change my corner of this world in the meantime. I've gained a connection between my daily life and my spiritual life that never existed, a blurring of the lines that makes me wonder where one part of my life ends and another one begins.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened had God succeeded in that little tug at my heart at 16, when several people around me nudged me toward ministry: pastoral ministry or another call. And I turned my back, went to school and wrote professionally for 15 years. Had I gone another direction, would I have always longed for the writing opportunity I missed? Is this God's way of redirecting, refocusing, repurposing me, some 35 years later?

I will never know. God is patient and finds ways to use us for good, wherever we are, at the moment in life when we turn around and look. God's love has no limit.

No stones here

I read something I wish I could wish away. Someone I know is in trouble.

I wish my first thoughts were as gentle and Christ-like as I hoped they would be in this situation. But they weren't. Here they are, raw and uncensored:

"How could you? You've ruined everything. You had everything going for you, and you destroyed it."

It took me most of a day to get that out of my head. I have a long way to go on my Christian walk.

Finally, the part of me that I'm nurturing came out: "pray for him. pray for his family. pray for the other people affected by this. pray that good will come out of this. because when God's involved, everything works for good."

I'm working my way up to expressing that to him. Not sure what I'm going to say, or maybe I'm just going to express it in a note. Something encouraging. Something that wraps him in grace, because he is a man of God, human and frail, but first a child of our heavenly father.

"We all are broken-heartened at the recent news. But the good news is that we are all broken. Period. We've all made bad choices that we've regretted and hurt other people. There are no stones here. We're praying for you and your family. We love you. I hope the people in your life surround you with love and forgiveness."

Impatiently waiting for pretty much everything

I've said it before, and I'll say it again for emphasis: There's no such thing (to me) as patiently waiting.

I'm impatient by nature. I want things to happen now, if not yesterday. At a meeting today, people chuckled when I clapped at someone else's comment that we can't wait any longer. I imagine they were surprised I didn't say it first. Apparently I have a comrade in arms.

It's been a challenging week. I'm waiting for something to happen that I'd prefer not happen at all. But if it has to happen, get it over with. I don't want to wait until next week. Just do it.

I remember my mother saying, "Watched water never boils." Actually, if you have enough flame under a kettle, it has to boil. But her point was, why stand there and watch it? It will seem to take longer that way. Go do something else.

So I'm not watching the pot. The week is busy enough. I have more than enough to do without fretting over something that will come anyway. There's almost nothing I can do about it.

There are lots of frustrations in life like that. Meetings that are cancelled or delayed. Having to wait at an office. Getting stuck in traffic. Watching the little wheel spin when a computer process takes a minute. Submitting an application and waiting for an answer.

Most of the time, that's just the way it is. Sometimes it's someone's decision or inaction that causes it. While there's rarely a point to getting steamed, I often do. I recall hearing that getting angry shortens your life. So, how much time have I lost?

The more I have to wait, the less patience I seem to have. I'm not getting any better at being patient. In fact, I seem to be growing more impatient about my impatience. Frustrated about being frustrated.

I'm not watching the kettle, or thinking about the week-off event. I think I'm going to bed. I have no impatience about sleep at all.

Change and changing, our actions impact the lives of others

In His time. Such a hard lesson for me to learn. I think I've learned it and then I find myself out there doing it again, pushing for something to happen. Thinking that I have any control. And finding myself up against a wall of impossibility. Frustrating myself. Blaming others. Then realizing it wasn't mine to determine at all.

We live in this world. We have the ability to act and move, communicate and feel. But in all truth, if we are who we say we are -- Whose we say we are -- we are acting as His hands, feet, mouth and ears in this place. He is in control. Or She, if you like that picture better.

I catch myself observing life sometimes as if I was the third person, watching the interactions. Just glimpses of how our moments are so fleeting, yet so complex. We see many of our moments wasted, even as we know our time is so limited. Why can't this succeed? We needed this to happen yesterday. Come on! Don't you see how important this is?

Then, all of a sudden, a break through. Something changes. Another situation comes along to impact the first one, like the pool ball from a second shot dropping the stationery ball into the pocket. Except it's not so random. It occurred, not in my time, but His time, the right time.

Something happened today that I've waited three years to happen. Impatient me, thinking my frustrated thoughts about the people who had the ability to act and didn't. Yet something changed, and started the chain in motion. In September 2014, it was the right time.

How often am I on the other side, not acting when someone desperately wants something to happen? Frustrated that life is happening too slowly, an excruciatingly painful pace.  

Here I am, actor and acted upon, changed and changing. A piece of His hands and feet, interdependent on others to be the continuation of the action.

Welcome to the world. Be the change you want to see, because the piece that only He sees is that we are the change agent for someone else.

A gift of time to contemplate and do the inner work

What do you do when you expect a 90-minute blank space in the schedule? It would be so easy these days to fill it with music, phone conversations, information and other electronic noise.

But today marked a drive to the Valley. And I don't drive to the Valley much anymore. With my mind filled with personal, local and global concerns, I shut off the radio and phone and just allowed myself the space to "contemplate the universe." Connect with myself and God. Listen. Wait.

I went back to a place I experienced in my teen years. Solitude. Before the noise of life increased. No cell phones. No internet. Our youth pastor collected some appliance boxes and directed us to occupy said cardboard. She wasn't thinking homeless simulation. Just isolation. Time to think and pray and be alone with ourselves. At the time, I didn't want to admit it was actually useful. Today I could use that box more often. I'd add a cushion or pillow -- these 50-year-old bones don't do unpadded surfaces very well these days.

Rarely is there a time of solitude from my first waking moment to my last thought before sleep takes over. Spouse. Co-workers. Work. Music. Social media. Email. Maybe television or a movie. If there's any solitude, it's in my truck or the shower.

So, once I shared a few thoughts about current situations with God, I just let the time pass. And clearly, my mind wasn't vacant. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

Enemies? I don't really have them. But there are certainly people who rub me the wrong way and seem to do everything in their power to work against me. Just because there isn't outright warfare doesn't mean there's not conflict.

It's easy to pray for the people you like. It's fairly easy to pray for those you don't know very well. But how about those people who oppose you? Those who you don't think deserve a shot of your attention? The words catch in the back of your throat as you say, "God, I think ________ needs your help." Or better yet, "God, help me to see ____________ as a child of God with the gifts you have given him/her." A handful of names quickly came to mind, and will remain there until my prayers turn my heart.

Then add two more people to the list. My husband. Yesterday didn't go very well. And the last couple of days, and if I'm really truthful, the last couple of weeks. Lately, it doesn't take much to make one of us snap at the other. "Heal us, God. Work from within to knock down The Wall.*"

And then there's me. It's easy to pray for what I think I need, but harder to pray for what I actually need. Patience. Self-control. Harder still to look for those sharp edges that God still needs to wear down.

I love the way The Message explains this piece of the Sermon on the Mount that I've heard over and over. Matthew 5:43-48 ^43-47 “You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.
⁴⁸ “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”

*The Wall, an anonymous poem.

The Wall
Their wedding picture mocked them from the table,
These two whose minds no longer touched each other.
They lived with such a heavy barricade between them
That neither battering ram of words
Nor artilleries of touch could break it down.
Somewhere, between the oldest child's first tooth
And the youngest daughter's graduation,
They lost each other.
Throughout the years each slowly unraveled
That tangled ball of string called self,
And as they tugged at stubborn knots,
Each hid his searching from the other.
Sometimes she cried at night
And begged the whispering darkness to tell her who she was.
He lay beside her, snoring like a hibernating bear,
Unaware of her winter.
Once, after they had made love,
He wanted to tell her how afraid he was of dying,
But, fearing to show his naked soul,
He spoke instead about the beauty of her breasts.
She took a course in modern art,
Trying to find herself in colors splashed upon a canvas,
Complaining to other women about men who are insensitive.
He climbed into a tomb called "The Office,"
Wrapped his mind in a shroud of paper figures,
And buried himself in customers. Slowly, the wall between them rose,
Cemented by the mortar of indifference.
One day, reaching out to touch each other
They found a barrier they could not penetrate,
And recoiling from the coldness of the stone,
Each retreated from the stranger on the other side.
For when love dies, it is not in a moment of angry battle,
Nor when fiery bodies lose their heat.
It lies panting, exhausted,
Expiring at the bottom of a wall it could not scale.