God of Thursday afternoons
of rainy days
and dreary skies
when we try our best to be excited about the work
but may find ourselves struggling
to keep our eyes open.
Give us eyes to see
and ears to hear
and minds to understand
all that you are doing in the world.
Even on rainy Thursday afternoons.
Amen.
djordan
108 S Church
I don’t know why it has all come together in my brain this way.
Growing up, I remember being furious that this rule was put in place, even in middle and high school, that I MUST be present at the dinner table at least three or four nights a week. If I went out after that, that was one thing. If I ate or not was another thing, but my presence at the dinner table was required three or four nights a week. (I don’t remember which, so obviously it wasn’t as traumatic as I would like to pretend.)
As with many things I now reflect back on from growing up, I hated this rule at the time, and yet now I wouldn’t trade anything for it.
And a few nights ago, I joined some incredible friends from present day around their coffee table for dinner. At our home growing up, when I was huffing and puffing about having to be home for dinner around a table, we would every now and then sit around the coffee table, the same one I now have in my den, and eat pizza and watch TV together. I remember being angry that my parents could guess what was going to happen on the TV show, and I was likely more angry about this because I wanted to be anywhere but there at the moment.
But a few nights go, legs crossed over pillows on the floor, eating while sitting around their coffee table, I found myself in a kind of time freeze. The four year old daughter of my friends was pretending to make meals or be a drummer with her metal bowls and plastic whisks, and we were eating sushi with chopsticks out of styrofoam sakura to-go boxes.
There was much that reminded me, though, of growing up. The space for imagination and casualness, and play and informality. The insistence of good food even though it was spread out across a coffee table reminded me of how much has changed, and how little has changed at the same time.
And today, I’m in a counseling session with a family who can’t pay the bills so they share a home with another family. Four parents, five children, three minimum wage jobs, exponential stress. They were sitting in my office, a mom and dad, completely undone by the situation, and parenting skills to reflect the same. As they were talking, I found myself returning to the living room coffee table a few nights ago with incredible friends learning to be good parents, a four year old playing kitchen, and myself wondering how things will be remembered ten years later.
For all of us.
And most of all, I found myself glad that someone made me sit down for dinner three or four nights a week, no matter how unbelievable and unrealistic a request it seemed at the time.
djordan
Pine Tree
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
“The Work of Christmas”
Howard Thurman
I received a book in the mail today from a friend I met through the blog.
Multiple conversations have been had via email, with time and oceans in between, about issues of faith and justice and loss and hope and hopelessness and holding on. When I recently had a time of near blog-silence, she checked in to see how things were. She immediately hit right on the nature of the issues adding to the silence, and gracefully wrote words that echoed like prayers of acceptance of creative silence, and requesting of hopeful imagination.
And today, after waking up to run, pour a slow cup of coffee and then get back to work at Area Relief Ministries for the first time since mid-December, I walked in to see a package on my desk. I opened it up and immediately knew who it was from, as this friend had referenced the book in an email during those dry days.
The following is an excerpt, and the book itself, sitting on my desk in its packaging waiting quietly like the sneaky gift it was is now a reminder, of how the kingdom community is broader and larger and more powerful than I remember on most days. It is ebbing and flowing in and out of our quiet and alive places, keeping us moving and pushing forward, even when we aren’t sure why it’s worth it.
So to this friend, and the other friends of which there are many brave and marginalized kingdom-souls, who are willing to tell the stories of struggle in an effort to sing the true songs of hope, I cannot say thank you enough.
djordan
108 S Church
“Hope is rooted in the past but believes in the future. God’s world is in God’s hands, hope says, and therefore cannot possibly be hopeless. Life, already fulfilled in God, is only the process of coming to realize that we have been given everything we need to come to fullness of life, both here and hereafter. The greater the hope, the greater the appreciation of life now, the greater the confidence in the future, whatever it is.
But if struggle is the process of evolution from spiritual emptiness to spiritual wisdom, hope is a process as well. Hope, the response of the spiritual person to struggle, takes us from the risk of inner stagnation, of emotional despair, to a total transformation of life. … The spirituality of struggle gives birth to the spirituality of hope.”
from “Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope,” by J.D. Chittister
the 1st is easy enough
to be big
to be bold
to be daring
to be hopeful enough about the future
to set big goals
to make big promises;
we reflect on a year that has passed and
choose what we hope will be better
or more
or truer
or braver in the year to come.
But most days of our lives
happen on the 2nd
the day after we make
big decisions
bold promises
daring declarations
hopeful comments about the future
big goals for the days and weeks ahead
big promises for the future that waits ahead.
And so we ask that
the prayers and hopes and energies of our 1sts
become the fuel of our 2nds.
And that we hold out hope,
and join with others who do the same for us.
Happy January 2nd.
djordan
Pine Tree
It’s no doubt that the things which are the most important for us to know are the things which, once heard, feel the most obvious. The things which, once said, feel the most simple. And yet, it is these things which are often, once heard and said, the things which change us the most. The things which make the biggest impact in our worlds because even though they are obvious and even though they are simple, they are still the things which are most important and have the most impact.
A New Year’s resolution has been to read an article a workday. Workday means ultimately five articles a week, and article means a research or peer-reviewed journal article, so what to do when throwing a party or how to build biceps fastest doesn’t count as articles.
I was reading, a few days ago (because I’ve also learned that New Year’s resolutions I wait to start until New Year’s are 100% less likely to happen than New Year’s resolutions I start a few days before) an article* about depression, anxiety and rumination. I was reading for a client that I’ve been making little progress with, and also reading for myself as is almost always the case whether any of us in the field choose to admit it or not.
The article speaks to depression, anxiety and rumination, or ongoing perseverative thoughts about situations or details, as moderated by the intolerance of uncertainty. And while the phrase “intolerance of uncertainty” feels as common and as known and as obvious as any other phrase that’s said over coffee or in elevators or across lunch tables, I felt myself freeze in the phase of the written words, as if the obvious and known was suddenly becoming an answer to a mystery.
The more we are intolerant of what we can’t control and what we don’t know, the greater our anxiety, depression and stalling.
With multitudes of caveats and uncontrollable variables, the notion has stuck with me since. The ability that I, or others, have to tolerate uncertainty influences the way we see the future and handle its impending realities in the present. Since all of the future is uncertain, no matter the degree at which we enjoy misleading ourselves, my ability to tolerate that uncertainty is a predictor of my emotions, attitudes, and decisions.
Since reading this article, no doubt an encouragement to keep up my New Year’s resolution, I’ve been challenged to face each day with a reminder to myself that what is to come is unknown, and my trust in the fact that all things are done well and that all things work together is and will be a major factor in my ability to move forward well into the grief and joy that lies ahead in 2013.
Here’s to an uncertain new year.
djordan
Pine Tree
* Liao, K. Y. & Wei, M. (2011). Intolerance of uncertainty, depression, and anxiety: The moderating and mediating roles of rumination. Journal of clinical psychology, 67(12), 1220-1239.
it’s one thing to sit with a huge twenty-dollar coke
watching the story unfold on the big screen
making decisions pretending like we don’t know how the story goes.
of course, i would vote for the thirteenth amendment.
i’d be a monster otherwise.
i know it has to do with money.
i know it has to do with the economy as we know it.
i know we don’t know how to move forward without slavery.
but, i’m a good enough person to know that i’m in favor of it.
i think to myself, eating popcorn,
watching the story, ending already known, unfolding on the screen.
and I think about the stories unfolding right now
the stories in congress
the stories in the courts
the stories in the projects
the stories in the suburbs
the stories in the churches
the stories in the living rooms
the stories in the villages
the stories in the high-rises
the stories unfolding right now
across not only this city
across not only this nation
but all over the globe
and i wonder,
as i eat my popcorn and drink my twenty-dollar drink,
do I have it in me
to stand for justice
to take the risk
to make the jump
when i have no idea what it will mean about money
when i have no idea what it will mean about the economy as we know it
when i have no idea what it will mean about how to move forward
when i have no idea what it will mean
but, on this side of history,
where will i be standing
one hundred and fifty years from now
when people will be eating popcorn
imagining what they would have done
had they been me.
may we be courageous.
djordan
Pine Tree
My house is actually clean because I threw a party here a week ago.
The Christmas tree has stopped shorting out with the help of an extra extension cord.
All the gifts are in and waiting to be wrapped.
Money is in the bank, and a job waits for me when I return from the holidays.
Evenings and meals with candlelight and laughter are planned nightly for the next week.
There is plenty to be joyful for in the days approaching Christmas for me.
But couples wrestle with miscarriage.
Clients wrestle with families falling apart.
Participants wrestle with utilities being shut off.
Loved ones wrestle with pressing in depression and hopelessness.
Men wrestle with finding a bridge under which to put a pillow for the night.
Strangers wrestle with missing six-year-olds for Christmas morning.
Friends wrestle with the murdered son, husband, wife, daughter.
There is plenty to be broken-hearted for in the days approaching Christmas for me and others.
Enter the truth of advent.
Beyond flashy Christmas programs and shiny Christmas cards
taken twenty times until we liked the way our chins looked,
Beyond rhetoric over guns and entitlement and taxes and “wars on Christmas,”
sits a spinning world that while some goes well,
much goes not well.
Enter the truth of advent.
Skipped for Christmas morning by many churches and Christians
following in line behind consumers and the mighty dollar,
Advent waits in the dark nights before Christmas morning
telling the truth
allowing the tears
holding out hope
that while the world goes not well
the kingdom comes.
And when advent is allowed to enter
and linger under candlelight,
the words of the old hymn make a little more sense,
and make Christmas morning a little more important,
because we were allowed to wait for Christmas.
O ye beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.
For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophets seen of old,
When with the ever-circling years
Shall come the time foretold,
When the new heaven and earth shall own
The Prince of Peace, their King,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.
Until the new heaven and earth own their King,
May we tell ourselves the truth of Advent
before we sing the song of Christmas.
Amen.
djordan
Pine Tree
The following post was written by a friend living and working in Mozambique whom I first met through the blogosphere. After exchanging emails, we realized we shared a mutual friend and kingdom-bringer in Cape Town, South Africa. This writing is for World Aids Day which is today, December 1, 2012. Thanks to Rebecca for her, as always, honest and difficult while hopeful and hopefilled words.
+++
Thuli was standing in front of us, telling us that she “should” have been dead—but that she was alive, thanks to anti-HIV antiretroviral medication. While others were crying tears of joy, I left the celebration banquet sobbing with anger and jealousy. I rejoiced in Thuli’s health, but I was angry that she would probably have already lost her life if she had been living in Mozambique instead of South Africa. The year was 2004, and antiretrovirals, or ARVs, were not yet widely available here. What was the prescription for most Mozambicans who were recently diagnosed with HIV? A healthy diet (not an easy task for the average subsistence farmer), treatment of opportunistic infections, and hope. Many people told me they’d rather die not knowing their status than find out they were living with HIV and “die early” from the associated despair and shame. Hope, while potentially a useful supplement to medication, seemed to me to be a sorry substitute for it.
One evening this October, a woman was admitted to the health center in Cobue, a small village in a remote corner of Mozambique. Because of the Anglican Diocese of Niassa’s comprehensive “Salt, Light, Health” community health project and many “Life Team” activists who work in the Cobue region, Cobue offers better health services than most communities its size.
I had been told that this woman was “not well.” The next morning, upon meeting her, these words proved to be a dramatic understatement. Infected ulcers and bed sores covered large areas of her body. These raw wounds left her unable to sit up or walk.
Cobue’s seasoned doctor, made woozy by these oozing sores, began removing dead tissue. A traditional midwife and the patient’s mother waved cloths to keep the flies at bay.
Her prognosis was poor. But her name? Esperança. The Portuguese word for “hope.” And for Esperança, hope proved to be stronger than the bacteria that fought for her life.
A team of dedicated people worked for hours each day to clean Esperança’s sores. Though I imagine the process was agonizingly painful, I never heard Esperança complain or grumble.
But behind Esperança’s wounds lurked an even more concerning problem: her immune system had been decimated by HIV. HIV works within the human body by attacking CD4 cells, which serve as commanders in the body’s defense system. Someone with a healthy immune system typically has a CD4 count of maybe 1000. A CD4 count of 350 or below indicates widespread damage to the immune system, and is a cause for significant concern. Esperança’s CD4 count was 12.
She had first been diagnosed with HIV in 2008 and had faithfully taken her ARV medications twice a day, as instructed. But the ARVs were no longer working.
In hushed discussions with the doctor, I compassionately hoped that Esperança could at least recover to the point of being able to sit up before she died.
How rational—or naïve—I was.
Three days into her wound care, with thousands of milligrams of antibiotics circulating through her body, Esperança greeted us with glee. Giddy, she explained that she had managed to leave her bed overnight to go to the bathroom outside. This was something she hadn’t done in weeks.
Esperança, already all too familiar with death (having lost her only child), now admits that death was on her mind during these days of hospitalization. But that morning, her joy of having been able to get out of bed overwhelmed her thoughts of death.
A team of efficient and dedicated people in high places got authorization from the national Ministry of Health for Esperança to begin a new regime of ARVs—a significantly more expensive set of “second line” medications that are only available to a small proportion of Mozambicans living with HIV.
Within days, Esperança’s increasing mobility and healing sores proved that these new ARVs were effectively halting HIV’s reproduction within her body. Esperança continued to improve, and was discharged from the hospital only a month after I’d dreamed that she’d be able to sit up before she died.
She arrived home to surprised celebration. Friends and neighbors told her they didn’t think she’d ever step foot in Mala again. The “Mother’s Union” women’s group surrounded her with prayers of thanksgiving.
Esperança had clung to the hope that too often eludes me. She had the courage to live beyond the facts, fully aware of the possibility of being humiliated in that hope.
William, a fisherman turned HIV technician extraordinaire, and one of Esperança’s primary caregivers, explains “most people didn’t think she’d live to seek the weekend.” “I praise God.”
Esperança has gained seven pounds in the past two weeks.
Today’s global World AIDS Day theme is “Getting to Zero: Zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS related deaths.” Properly managed, HIV is no longer a death sentence. We are still far from that reality here in Mozambique, where tens of thousands of people still die annually from AIDS-related causes. But Esperança’s life gives flesh to the vision of zero deaths.
Esperança wouldn’t be alive today without second line ARVs. She wouldn’t be alive if her family hadn’t received treatment and teaching about HIV from Salt, Light, Health and Life Team activists. She wouldn’t be alive if her mother, her primary care-giver over the past months, had given up. She wouldn’t be alive without the daily wound care she received from a team of informally trained lay people. She wouldn’t be alive without the thoughtful conversations between several different doctors, hundreds of miles apart. She wouldn’t be alive without the activists around the world who lobbied over the years for lower ARV prices, and the PEPFAR funds that made her medication available. But the obligatory prerequisite to all of that was her own deep hope. Esperança’s esperança.
Yes, medicines saved Esperança. But had she had any less esperança, she would never have made it to the phase where she could have received these medicines. Esperança lives today not only because of the miracle of newfangled medicines, but also because of good old fashioned hard work and her resilient human spirit.
I didn’t know Esperança before October. But I imagine that she must have practiced living out her name for years. Only a well-practiced hoper could have hoped like she did.
Cobue, 1 December 2012
Rebecca J. Vander Meulen
rvandermeulen@fastmail.fm
www.rvmphotography.com
it’s in life
as much as writing
and no matter what we think we want to do
we can’t force anything
but we can give it our best shot
when we are brave enough
there is a dryness around the edges
of inspiration in all its forms
our only option
is to wake up and write
is to wake up and work
is to wake up and sing
is to wake up and pray
that we will make it past the dryness
into the aliveness
that we know is real, because we’ve felt it before.
and in the meantime,
we can only trust
that we once loved to write
that we once loved to work
that we once loved to sing
that we once loved to pray
that we have made it through the dryness
into the aliveness
many times before.
so we sit down to try
to write, to work, to sing, to pray,
to tell ourselves the truth we don’t believe
and discover it is altogether real
and has been this whole time.
djordan
Pine Tree
most hopeful 