The Sylvr Pen

Sometimes I felt dead inside. Just dead…

This also looks like certain death, but okay, I’m going to do it: take the plunge and try the drastic approach to overwintering geraniums I saw on this video.

In the past I dug up whole plants, potted them, and kept them in the basement, watering but a little. It worked—sort of. But planted out, come spring and summer, the geraniums produced but feebly, stood pathetic where I tucked them, obscure.

Now this video lady claims her drastic method makes geraniums more powerful, to bloom rich and full come warm-time. She even calls them “miracles” and says they “resurrect.”

So… Here’s what I’m supposed to do:

Uproot them from their comfortable place of happy growth. Check. Did that.

Knock loose from them what’s hugging close and nourishing rich (their soil).

Shake off whatever can be shaken. (More will die later; then shake that off, too.)

Cut away anything moldy or diseased—even if that means lopping branches, stems, parts of their botanical personhood. (Keep checking; keep lopping.)

Place them upside down in a big empty box.

Close them in, and keep them away from light and warmth and off the floor.

Soon they look dead. Just dead.

What a way to make powerful plants!

Will this work?

God knows. I don’t. And I’m not much with the green thumb, so that makes the whole venture more daring. But the one who knows says this is how power and growth and rich production of beautiful blooms happen.

And…

Here’s the thing:

God did that, all that, with me—and produced blooms I know I never would have had otherwise:

When family alcoholism, and resulting money nightmare, left me utterly overwhelmed and capital-D Depressed…

When the alcoholic spouse left me a single parent holding the empty bag…

When my dear mother died so unexpectedly…

When my pilgrimage toward God just seemed to go in circles…

When even lately, doors kept closing, instead of swinging wide…

Yes, He uprooted me,

knocked loose from me what hugged close and nourished rich,

shook my life—and with that shaking shook much away that I held dear

cut away even parts of what I considered my personhood,

turned my life upside-down,

and closed doors like box lids, shutting off light, holding me in darkness of uncertainty…

till sometimes I felt dead inside. Just dead. 

But always, always, in the past, He (eventually)…

manifested His power in my weakness as never in my “strength,”

gave my life rich blooms beyond what I had ever known,

opened windows to views of heaven I’d missed in my earthbound pell-mell chasing of dreams and remedies.

grew my hope through situations hopeless.

So now I know—I ought to know—What to hope in. Not an outcome, not a fellow frail human. But the God of hope.

The irony: True hope in what’s reliable (God/Jesus Christ) often begins with the shattering of hopes placed elsewhere (Hebrews 12:27 NIV).

 *****

[Linked to A Holy Experience]

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And may the Good Shepherd bless your grazing today!

By dawn, the temperature plummets to freezing. It’s an excellent day.

Excellent for

poaching a breakfast egg (boiling the water long and lovely ahead of time)…

for baking a pie, using the French rolling pin Husband made from cherry wood that grew on the hill. (He made the pin, and he’s been hounding for another peach pie—so it’s only right and fitting, as well as housewarming…)

For canning peaches…

For cooking up a big pot of tomato sauce—to finish and can up tomorrow (when it’s supposed to be cool again).

This day excels all others this month so far—for these things.

Other days excel it for other things, like diving into a pool and swimming.

But how could I say any day excels another for prayer, because prayer belongs to every day, and all days need it equally, whether they seem to or not.

Prayer excels…

Genuine prayer excels nearly everything else.

May my day—may your day—excel.

*****

They sat here. In these chairs, on these sofas. And I had the camera, and took no pictures.

I’d intended…

to frame hands feeding yarn to hungry spinning-wheel bobbins, and sandaled and sock-clad and bare feet, working treadles.

And smiles, and laughter-lit eyes, and earnest faces talking words more serious.

Circle of women with lives wound together by common craft, common victories, shared griefs. Circle of warmth, wound around this room, circled around noon’s table, hand joining hand, sharing lunch, sharing prayer for absent sister, whose lovely fabric shop “is no more,”—victim of the filthy flood’s assault, sickening defilement from polluted river-mud-water.

And we sat long and longer in the bigger room, drew out the time to finer, longer length, treadling, spinning, plying, and talking yet more: of deluge and cut-off isolation, of chewed up highways, twisted like ribbons and turned into dirt roads in sections, of the adventure it had been just getting here, to this gathering…

… and of where we were when the earthquake reverberated all the way up from Virginia, and did we feel it, and did it rattle or did it roll?

… and what were the gas drilling companies doing now around each of our homes, scattered through the county, and what might the future look like in these rustic settings?…

… and how to ply a cabled yarn, and spin cotton, different ways. And what great new DVD’s we have as a guild.

And smiles. And quiet looks, serene.

No, I never took a picture. And my camera sat right there beside me, demanding no more than a reach and an aim and a quick button push or two, or three, or ten.

I wanted to, I did—but wanted more what I already had. Not to lose to camera beeps and flashes: the warmth of gentle camaraderie.

So. No pictures on the page but of the empty room, my own wheel standing alone, looking bereft. Yet pictures aplenty etched on a heart still basking in warmth left behind by the large hug that is the gathered circle of friends.

It’s doing it again—only worse.

I’ve never seen it so bad here, the mad rushing of water out of heaven and over meadow and lawn and garden and roadway. We’re house-parked, sequestered, and going nowhere, but safe. “No non-emergency driving.” And what can we do but pray: for evacuees, and rescuers risking life?

Meanwhile, Texas: dry, so dry, and burning, burning, and more people evacuated and more homes gone.

Too much or too little. And things unexpected get shaken, like buildings where we sat, not many days back, buildings that were never quake-shaken before. Unfamiliar rattling somehow surreal, impossible but true.

The day my mother died, I heard it on the radio: “The things that can be shaken will be, so that the things that cannot be shaken will remain.” I’d turned it on out of boredom, sweet boredom, in a time I thought now finally crisis-free. And somehow the words flew straight to my heart, said, “This is for you“—which made no sense, everything settled serene for once, a summer of freedom ahead and birthday plans on the phone that same morning, with Mom, sweet Mom.

And the voice on the radio spoke of floods and people gone and a man standing alone on the bank of a river, his house gone, his family gone, all the life he knew gone, and him just repeating, repeating, “What am I going to do?” And the things that can be shaken, shaken, and shaking, still shaking and shaking.

And the message: that anything you count on, anything you love, can be gone in a flash, in a blink, in a whimper. And there you are, standing on a floodbank, bare of all you’d known.

So what could you count on? Nothing…

except…

Jesus.

Always Jesus. Always the same: yesterday, today, forever. Never shaken, never changed, never abandoning His own. And so it is okay. It still will be okay.

And I knew, somehow I knew, God was speaking to me in that message. But it made no sense. Nothing was shaking. For once in months, years, things stood solid. I thought…

And the program ended and three minutes later—no more than three—the telephone rang—and who would call at 10:03?

My father. His voice was shaking: 

“Are you sitting down? No? Well, sit down….

“… Mom died tonight.”

The heart attack, the fumbling, bumbling around at home, everything shaken. Gone.

And my mom, I did so love my dear mom.

But it was okay, somehow. I knew it was okay. Because how could I have ever prepared myself better than God had prepared me that night?

For the shaking. For the flooding away of a life I held dear, and Dad there alone, all alone in the night in the house, four hours away, and shaking…

“No, don’t come now! Please wait until morning! I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.” I knew he was fearing more shaking, more loss, and I waited.

In the stillness, in the darkness, while in the next room, my toddler slept, unshaken. And I wondered at the coincidence, another holy happenstance, like so many lately, in every event of shaking.

I shake, often. And, more often than I like to say, fall apart in the shaking.

But God, but Christ, remains. Unshaken. To steady me, pull me back together. The same. Yesterday, today… and forever… where I’ll see my sweet mother again. And Him Who always remains.