The Interim Between Taking Steps

For years I was a stay at home mama, all in up to the part in my hair.  I loved the swirl of activity always around me.  I thrived in spontaneous hide and seek with my kids in the yard, the read alouds every single night while my girls "styled" my hair.  I even relished the night when, all six bathed and in their jammies, my oldest went outside and, wielding a machete.....a machete??  I can't now even remember why we even had a machete!  However, it found it's way into my mischievous boys' shin and off we went to the emergency room, packing the other five with me, where he proudly received his stitches and hardly able to wait until church the next day when he could show his buddies.  He's grown now and his scars come from skiing accidents or harder life lessons.  My oldest girl now styles her own hair far away in Denver as a wife and awaits her own little girl in a few months, already assembling outfits that are so cute I almost pass out.

Years went by and I stepped out as a divorced woman into the work world, landing myself a job at a private airport where I took faltering steps at figuring out what had just happened and who I was and how to walk again and smile real and not compromise and what not to compromise in the first place and who was God really and were we friends?  I'd only known rules and frantic compliance to feel okay, to gain footing.   I dressed up pretty and shook the hands of important people and steeled myself to learn to function in a world of mostly men that felt harsh and assaulting at times. I kicked back mad to make a space for myself.  It was a rumble inside me for five years until I let my flame die trying.  God decided to answer my questions for me and picked me up out of my own dust and set me in a quieter place, a humble place at the foot of others' toilets.  

Seven years came in the door and out the window.  In that time, I cleaned happy the houses of people I learned to love and shopped and ran errands and God began to patch up my heart to give me courage to try again in a brand new way.  He showed me who I thought I was, was not who He made me to be.  I looked in the mirror and saw my reflection, all no make up and yoga pants, and laughed at how lowly I looked, how unimportant my mark on the world was in the grand scheme of things.  Toilets get dirty again and groceries run out.  Everything I do with my hands is temporary.  And then it hit me.hard.  What had changed?  Was my heart had been wrapped in His love and I trusted His voice to be truth and I could relax and walk over the bricks that were crumbling from the wall I'd built around me.  I began to hear Him calling me out of my "safe" place; the heart hospital He'd taken me to.  "You're ready.  Do you trust Me?"  I felt restless, a new wind stirring that made me look around for where it came from.  I wanted to go where it was blowing but I didn't know how.

In eleven days, the wind will blow through a new door  and I feel myself in fast idle, revving to walk through it.  I take my youngest girl with me on this new adventure.  She and I, we're trees sprouting healthy and strong and get so excited at this next adventure we can't stop talking over one another and checking the calendar and counting again how many days till it starts?  But tonight?  The old tapes wind themselves thin through my head and my phone rings and it's my oldest boy.  The one with the machete scars.  He's in Washington D.C. tonight, his gig with the navy reserves takes him there.  But he takes a break to call his mama on the phone and just at the moment his mama needed it.  Because it's Friday night and I'm eating ice cream with fudge sauce and the evening is lovely and I have nowhere to go really, except on a walk, and the enemy of my soul screams loud in my ears that I'm a loser, that I'm good for a laugh but not good enough to "keep".  That I don't matter much.  And I start to panic, the particular sort of quiet panic that no one would notice if they were sitting next to me but it stops in my throat and sticks there heavy.  I tell my boy what I hear in my head and he prays true words that fall on me like a quiet country night.

I hang up grateful.  The voices still sneer at me.  I want the eleven days to pass overnight while I'm sleeping so I don't have to feel what I'm feeling, to hear what the tapes are playing.  I decide to ignore them and pay attention to how the hot fudge tastes and that a walk would be lovely and that I will seize this lonesome moment as real life and hold fast to it and not run from it.  It's what I have right now and I can't wait eleven days to live again.  Because what if eleven days never comes?  

What I've learned, what I'm learning to learn, is that the interim is still living.  And I must be about it.