a surrender - 74

(Continuing "a surrender", chapter ten, "in this moment") 

Now I open my eyes and look up from a hospital bed and Heather tells me it’s okay. It’s done, or at least I’m done, and we have a place to go. It sounds like, after another failure, we took the only option left to us. But it seems to be a good one. It’s not simple or easy, like I had initially hoped. It’s big, with lots of interconnected parts and many people involved. I don’t quite understand how it came together. But it’s a good situation, for all of us, including my mother. She will be joining us. We’ll be taking care of each other. Heather will have more time to write, and there’s space for a big garden. There’s also a new teen center being built nearby, for at-risk kids. They’re looking for volunteers. And I hear the  family we’ll live next to has a daughter, a little younger than Ian. And a trampoline.

It definitely feels like God provided this, with little or no help from me. But it also seems like a kindness that God included me in bringing it together. Maybe it’s like a mother making cookies with her kid. She doesn’t need the kid’s help. The kid is just going to make it slower and messier. But she wants to include the kid, because she wants to share the joy of the good thing that she’s making; she wants the kid to feel it and be part of it.

Heather tells me that, in my confusion and helplessness, she asked me if I remembered any prayers. She says I took a moment, then tears filled my eyes. And I started to pray:

The Lord protects 

the simple hearts;

I was helpless 

so he saved me.

Turn back, my soul, 

to your rest

for the Lord has been good.

He has kept 

my soul from death,

my eyes from tears,

and my feet from stumbling.

I will walk 

in the presence of the Lord 

in the land of the living.

The months ahead still look like a challenge. But in this moment, I only feel relief. I feel saved. I feel loved. In this moment, I am with God. And I surrender myself into God’s hands, without reserve. 

And with boundless confidence.

 (Full book also available in PDF or ePUB format)

a surrender - 73

(Continuing "a surrender", chapter ten, "in this moment") 

So we said we’d be willing to help out through the end of this growing season, if they allowed us to continue as volunteers a little longer. That way they would have time to find replacements for us. But where we would go and what we would do next wasn’t easy to see.

I’d like to say that I handled it well. But, from what I remember of the weeks that followed, I don’t think I did. It felt like I was flailing around in the dark. I tried to arrange a simple and easy solution for us with friends from church, but that fell through, leaving me stunned, confused, and depressed. And overwhelmed by the many interconnected needs of all the people involved now. Not just the three of us, but Heather’s parents and my mother too. And I felt like I had nothing to offer, no way to help any of them. More than once I recalled a line from a W. H. Auden poem:

The Pilgrim Way 

has led to the Abyss

It felt like I couldn’t turn back, but it also seemed that there was no way forward.

This continued for many anguished weeks. And a big part of the anguish was that it seemed like this crisis was my fault. I was the one who felt most strongly that we needed to leave the farm now. And it was my choices that had left me without money or property at this time in my life, when usually people are most able to support their children and their aging parents. Day after day, the pressure bore down on me. It got so heavy that there were moments when I felt I couldn’t trust my own judgment any more, or my own intentions. I desperately wanted to believe that God was preparing something, something good. But I felt excluded and alone, with nowhere else to turn, trembling in the dark.

Continued...