Crystalized-"Put the Lights on the Tree"

 

One December morn, long, long ago, I woke up. I was young. I was hurting. I was fourteen. Do you remember what it feels like to be fourteen? You may remember, but what you don't recall is how it felt for me at age fourteen.

When I was fourteen I wanted to die.  On December 10, 1989, I didn't want to wake up the next December morn. December is a month most miraculous yet most cruel.

When all the families around me celebrated the beauty of the holidays, dressing up their homes, dressing up their trees, dressing up their car trunks with store-wrapped gifts and receipts for things they surely couldn't afford, dressing up their wardrobes, faces, and fancied feet, dressing up their appearances... When all the people and things around me were putting on a show for a Jesus born long, long ago, I didn't get it.  I just didn't get it. I loved the magic, yet it felt so false and empty, so putting on a show.

Why did all these people put on a show for Someone who knew how they were feeling on the inside? I knew He knew how I was feeling inside. I was ashamed at all the hurt inside.

Why did all these families pretend that all was well?  Why did all these folks I knew make everything not so wonderful a magical, glittering tale? Tall, tall tales steeped in sugar plum fairies and avoiding reality. Escape was my answer. Finding a way out was my key.

Yet, I woke up.  My plan didn’t work. I did not escape.   

Someone held me. Someone had a better plan.

Life, in many ways, hasn't gotten a lot easier over the years since 1989, but what has become more real is love. Love sees us through the magic and the tragic. Love sees us through when we look in the mirror and love what we see. Love sees us through when we ignore the mirror, when we ignore the evil inside of you and me.  For though things are not so holly and jolly overall for me this year, keeping up appearances helps the joy surround. And as it turns out, the only true joy is found in the darkened caverns of our hearts, a place as far as I know only Love can go.

     We can hide out in these caverns. We can lose ourselves within. We can hate and scream in darkness, yet somehow escape won't do.  When we most want to hide somehow we become crystalized.

Have you ever seen the beauty of light shining on crystals in a deep and drippy cave? If you haven't, treat yourself to a trip! They are a sight to see! Howe Caverns (New York) and Crystal Cave (Pennsylvania) present some of nature’s perfect wonders!

     Do you know how these magnificent crystals form? I'm no scientist, but I do know part of the process is called supersaturation.  It involves water (essential to life), pressure, change, and time. 

     Today, I thought about crystals...

     Today, I thought about crystals of water frozen on grass. Walt Whitman is one of America's favorite poets and a favorite poet of mine. I saw those frozen blades of grass, the leaves of grass he once described, and I saw them as extraordinary.  What was an ordinary walk with the family dog became extraordinary. And I thought more about the crystals.

     Diamonds in our midst… Crystals and wonder in the dark places… Moments of light on crystals of ice... Sunshine in a month of much darkness…  So much to consider this ordinary day...

     Water, pressure, change, and time… They make the crystals strong. They have made me strong as well.  Yet, there's a distinct difference between the light we can as humans create and the light only God provides.  

What I didn't understand then I'm beginning to understand now. Illumination is a natural process-light to the heart. It too takes provision of water, from a constant Source.  This nourishment under pressure, change, and time becomes brilliant in His Light.

     That fourteen-year-old girl had a lot to learn, but how could she have known? 

What started as tears 22 years ago has been transformed into crystal, strength grown in darkness, brilliant when you hold it up to Light or allow the Light to shine upon it.

I don't create my own source.  I don't create my own light. I have been safely guarded as I've longed to hide, especially at this time of year when Christmas and Love can seem all but a show.  

I want the real thing.  The real thing here is only a glimpse of what we as believers in Christ will experience as reality-Eternity.  But when I realize I can tap into the Christmas Spirit, today, or any day of the year, come December or come June, I realize jazzing things up a bit is alright; it's more than okay!  

“Put the lights on the tree…”

     We need the visual reminders; we need to set the mood. We need try our best to share the light inside us lest it be forgotten, rotting in a forgotten cave somewhere.  Unless we purposely expose ourselves and let ourselves be touched by the Light, we do indeed have everything to hide.
    

Today's much less than perfect.  Today, I hurt too. Yet, I have a million blades of grass right around the corner, the sunshine in the sky, a priceless child to hold, and a million other blessings besides.

We each have a story, a burden to carry, a secret yearning or mistake we try to hide. If I was not alive today though… This tale would remain true. I just wouldn’t be here to tell it.   What a shame that would be…

As a wooden plaque on my desk says, "Every life is a fairy tale written by God's Fingers."  Tapping into the magic is what makes the "tall tales" real.  Merry Christmastime! No matter what you feel, BELIEVE.  It’s in the darkest hours of December we so desperately need His strength, His life, His light.

Believe.

It's all Real. 

 

"...but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." ~John 4:14 (NIV)

"Let me Princess Print this..."

It seems like everyone I know has a blog these days, and typically, almost tragically and stereotypically, everyone starts the blog kind of like I am...
So, “am I a part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?”

Perhaps it's some sort of stage fright we all go through, putting ourselves on the line, or in between the lines of some imaginary cyber space margins.
Daily I have a soundtrack to my life, but it's in the accompanying lyrics that I make sense of the pauses between the notes. One of my all-time favorite movies is High Fidelity, and although albums are rare treasures and mixed tapes are things
of the past, except for melancholy individuals like moi.

Anyway, on any given day I have some sort of soundtrack, some sort of personalized, customized play list stuck in my ever busy head. Finding space or peace in the in-between, in between the notes the drawn out pacing and beat helps me to make sense of days like the past week have captured, days drawing blood from my very soul itself.

Storming the Castle with Spirit and song takes courage, and although some days this Princess feels pretty satin and pristine as opposed to warrior-like and able to bust out the weapons I possess to do battle with the world weighing heavily on
me, nevertheless, this Princess fights in her ballerina slippers, braids, and some days even pig tails.

And on days I don't have time to put those precious puddle hoppers on my feet they grow calloused and strong. I truly believe that no matter what life rains our way, we can always face what's up ahead with Spirit and song.

Music, memories, the quiet spaces I find and claim to be my very own write the soundtrack to my life, and the soundtrack is pleasing. The soundtrack is freeing. On a night such as this the rain gently bathes the soil, the siding of my house, the naked, budding trees, and for me washes away the worries of the day. God's kind of good that way... He knows just how to meet us, right where we're at, especially at trying times like these in life.

Recently, my baby brother was in a very serious car accident. Please understand that my baby brother is five years my junior, and is very much a grown man. Yet, this week, for a few hours, even over the course of I'd say a few days, the music paused for me. Time stopped. My very heart seemed to stop. Hyperventilating, I listened as my mother, last Wednesday evening, said all that she could-"he's been in a car accident and is being airlifted to _______."

For about five to seven minutes the reality of my brother's presence and memory was the weight against my very chest. Collapsing, screaming, sounding almost insane, I cried with screams and nonsense, but few intelligible words came out. "Sometimes my mind is too strong to carry on..." (Alexi Murdoch). During those moments I felt overwhelmed by an emotion I can't begin to name but one I'm quite certain others face daily, especially during the last few months, few years, during natural disasters, wars and nightmares of the past.

Is there an emotion we can claim, an emotion we can name absence? Is there a feeling we can identify as tragic absence? For at the very end of those moments I stood there trying to pace my breathing back to normal again, before I received the follow-up phone call that is precisely when I harbored tragic absence. For those few minutes everything disappeared but my love for a brother I hardly know how to talk to anymore. He and I are very different, but I've always understood him, deeply, the portions of his personality buried deeply, the portion that means something, and for a few moments I thought him dead.

Tragic absence-we all feel it; some call the emotion grief, some call it loss, some call it shock, but I call it life altering, for since that moment last Wednesday, nothing, and I mean, nothing has felt the same. It's as if the worries and weights of this "look right through me" world dissolved with the release of my wails.

No more was my schedule important, deadlines, an evening of fog and rain, what I had to do tomorrow, the next day, nor any day really after that. Just as my baby brother, thankfully alive, can only be appreciated right now for who he is, not what he can do, or how he can be, I can only reciprocate such emotion toward life itself. I value it for what it is-Life. I now have a sense of the immediate, the what life has given to me at this very moment versus all the "important" plans I had made. A very wise woman told me the other day it's about presence (the "what is the what" in her mind is PRESENCE).

How present are we with others? How much in the present moment do we actually live? How do we honor each other and the presence of mind and life each person carries our way each and every present moment? Another woman told me today that people no longer practice the presence of consideration. Do we really no longer consider the other people in our midst, all the weight the individual is carrying, all the joy the man or woman wishes to share, all the raw, uncensored opinion, emotion, and, well, stuff of life?

For a few moments I lost my brother's very presence and in its place, in my imagination (that definitely ran away with me), I replaced his life, his presence with loss. I replaced all emotion with the void of tragic absence. The loss is ours when those we care for go to the next kingdom, but it's humanity's loss when we live beyond the present, stifle the emotion, and try to simply "carry on."
This is when none of us stop to recognize the tone of the moment, the tempo of the person standing right there directly in our path. To me this is even more of a tragic loss. To me this is even more of tragic absence.

Some may call me sensitive, but shouldn't we all be a little bit more so? Sometimes just showing up, just being present means more than anything you can say or anything you can do for a person. Being present in attention and intension brings life back to the very situations in front of us, brings life to the very person in front of us. You'll never know the difference you make to another human being just by showing up, focused, not distracted by your own "stuff," the things you "think" are important. Take a moment to contribute to the living while, well, they still ARE living... "Our Town," is one of the most disturbing and wise plays I know of. I've been a part of the production, have taught the play, and have now been on the other side of the cemetery where Emily realizes how precious the little moments are, the ones we take for granted, the ones we don't realize contribute to someone else's soundtrack.

God gave us music for a reason-like prayer it's universal. It stirs something inside of us to worship, to "suck the marrow" from the brief moments we're given in this life. Take time to sing into someone's Spirit today-you don’t even have to open your mouth. A pat on the back, direct eye contact, holding a hurting person’s hand for quick moment, or even a hug sing into others’ lives. We live in such a cold world when it comes to the simplicity of showing up, either physically or mentally.

Grrrr, people, storm the Castle in whatever shoes ya got! And if you don't have shoes, go dance barefoot in the rain with someone, go jump in puddles with a friend, go paint your toes with a girlfriend, go running through the dirt on the ball field, or go drumming through the dusty street. Fight whatever's coming your way with Presence. BE present for someone today and let another BE present in your life today. (Oh, and a little prayer goes a long way too...). ;0)

To my brother, Jonathan, I love you. I used to watch you sleep when you first came home to us. When we first adopted you I thought all my prayers had been answered. I was your protector. Though I can't protect you from the scars or trauma you've been through this week I do look forward to being just that much more present with you when you come through this. We'll have our own jam session when you're through with this for sure! We'll invite some other Castle stormers who've been praying you through this too, bud. Sometimes, folks pray, sometimes all they can do is to sit there and hold your hand. Times like these are when notes play most triumphantly... "Love, rescue me..."


Good night ya'll (or is it good morning?), Get on into bed and sleep to the sound of the rain. Get out there in the morning and watch the grey turn to green.

Blessings,
Rebeccs (unedited, raw, and random all heart me...)