It feels right when I stop to consider that our shared faith was one of the more driving connections between the two of us, my grandfather– my “Papa”– and I.
When I felt the Lord tugging on my heart to follow Jesus to Alaska without rhyme or reason back in 2015, my family’s reactions were varied:
“Your getting too old not to settle down.”
“That lifestyle isn’t one for a respectable Hispanic woman.”
“You’re out of your damn mind.”
With him, it was different.
“Well kid, if that’s what you feel like He’s telling you to do, ya’damnsure better do it.”
Never one to mince words or be flustered by what his greater life experience had proven to be only a seasonal change, my grandfather was my sounding board, my strong backbone, and simultaneously the safest space my heart had for nearly twenty seven years.
Fifty two years ago, nearly three decades before I was even thought of, this man redefined the idea of family as I would one day inherit it. He and I never shared a bloodline, but rather became family through his choice to adopt my mother. With his quiet stability, he dared to interrupt a storyline and thereby changed the life of my mother, me, his “granddaurter”, and hopefully that of generations to come.
My dark features and string bean build may not emulate his sturdy German stock, but it’s unmistakable that my inability to sit still when music comes on is a trait of his I’ve carried in my body since he first enrolled me in piano lessons at the age of five and taught me how to tap my foot to the metronome atop his old piano.
After years of botched recitals and your standard small child temper tantrums, weekly piano lessons were abandoned and monthly jazz concerts took their place. The scratchy tulle of the dresses my mother would wrangle me into scraped the back of my legs and I would pretend to be far more irritated than I was. But there I would sit, in the second row of a jazz concert one Saturday a month, transfixed with the way the musicians’ fingers danced up their saxophones and across their basses. My Papa would close his eyes and drink it in, moving as many muscles as he could to dance in his seat without being noticed. But oh, how I noticed.
On Sundays such as this, I unlock his car and slide into the old burgundy leather seats. I run my fingers across his jazz tape collection and close my eyes for a moment before I drive. I can’t manage to get the old stereo to work to save my life, but some days in the silence as I drive, I swear I can hear him quietly humming Bucky Pizzerelli’s Stars in Your Eyes.
With every passing Sunday, I learn a little more deeply that maybe the grief that continues to come, even a year after losing my grandfather is just another vehicle. One constantly moving me closer to the heart of the One whom me grandfather taught me so much about, and imitated so well in word and deed.
So I wipe my tears and drive toward Jesus, just as my Papa taught me to do.
Our computer teacher at the Denver Street School gave a simple assignment to her students last October: Write a letter to someone who has been a positive influence in your life.
Later that afternoon, she sat in our weekly staff meeting and explained that the majority of her students took the assignment to heart and began to type out letters of gratitude to moms, grandmas, teachers, and coaches almost immediately. But in the corner of the room, James* sat and stared blankly at his computer screen. Vicki observed the situation for ten minutes or so before crouching down next to him and quietly asking why he hadn’t started his letter.
“Miss, I can’t think of anyone that’s been a positive influence in my life.”
Gut punch.
As she told us this, I took a moment to evaluate the life of this 17 year old boy I was just getting to know.
He was oldest child of a single mother with a dad who took off well over a decade ago. He was a hard worker with an even harder edge to him, but a smile and sense of humor that could make even the crankiest DSS student laugh. He was the same young man that had shown up to my classa month earlier on crutches after having been shot in the legover the weekend.He wasn’t a gang banger; he was shot while trying to sell his Playstation 4 so he could buy new school clothes for his little sister and himself.
Tears caught in the back of my throat as Vicki continued on.
“I pressed him,” she said. “‘Surely there’s someone who has been a good influence in your life.'”
“Miss, really. I can’t think of anyone…”
“I encouraged him to dig deep, to think of someone who has inspired him to be the kind of man he wanted to be, and I walked away to give him space to think. A few minutes later he started typing, so I left him to it for the rest of class. At the end of the period, my heart broke as I stood behind him and read his letter over his shoulder– his letter to the most influential man in his life began:
Dear Bob the Builder,
Thank you for teaching me how to be a hard worker when my dad wasn’t around to teach me what it means to be a man.”
It’s been a year since James wrote that letter; I know Vicki read the rest of it to us in our staff meeting, but that devastating first line is burned into my heart and mind for one reason:
The most influential, positive role model one of my students has is a fictional cartoon character created for toddlers.
Before you continue reading this, I want you to take a moment– let the gravity of that sink in.
Where are the strong men in his life? The valiant heroes? The patient, loving father figures? The mentors? The invested disciple makers? Where are they and why haven’t they shown up for so many of my students?
I don’t know. And neither do they.
What I do know is that the absence of Christ-loving, positive role-models in my students’ lives likely explains another tragic phenomenon we’ve come up against in the last few years at the Street School — the headline phenomenon. It’s the other gut punch I’ve written about experiencing on a horrifyingly regular basis when familiar faces show up in my newsfeed or my inbox with a news headline attached to them.
As my staff and I returned to our students after our fall break last week, I was reminded that the week away from DSS that was so refreshing and full of adventure for me, was full of bad decisions, abuse, neglect, and struggle for my students. For many of them, the Street School is the safest place they have in their lives. While I’m thankful that DSS can be that refuge for them, that realization simultaneously took me back to the feeling of urgency that I felt in late August– the urgency that overwhelmed me on August 29th as I drove away from the hospital in which one of my former students had just died from a gunshot wound. That afternoon I screamed and cried in traffic while I beat my fists against my steering wheel wondering how we got “here” and I haven’t been able to stop wondering that since.
That urgency for my students, for the teenagers of the world like James who may not have anyone cheering them on, lovingly placing boundaries around them, mentoring, parenting, or discipling them, has me by the throat these days. It’s an urgency that is threatening to kill me and I am begging the world to hear me out, to listen attentively to James’ story as well as to the call of Jesus in The Great Commandment:
“Meanwhile, the eleven disciples were on their way to Galilee, headed for the mountain Jesus had set for their reunion. The moment they saw him they worshiped him. Some, though, held back, not sure about worship, about risking themselves totally.
Jesus, undeterred, went right ahead and gave his charge: “God authorized and commanded me to commission you: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the Threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16-20, MSG)
Your ministry niche or the burning burden on your heart may not be inner city teenagers; it may be coworkers who don’t know the Lord or social justice for the sojourner. Whatever the urgent burden on your heart is, I am begging you with all of the fire-y urgency in my heart to “risk yourself totally”, as The Message puts it, and “go therefore and make disciples” (Matthew 28:18, ESV).
And as you personally go, I am also begging you to join me by falling on your knees for my kids, for those in our city (your city) who are lost and needy.
Would you join me in interceding for these students like James? My students are the future of our city and they so desperately need to know the love of Our Heavenly Father; they need to know that He can redeem every moment of pain, neglect, and every poor decision they have ever made.Would you pray for mentors to come alongside my students and support them? And for their advocates and teachers at the Denver Street School who have the joy of doing so everyday?
It truly is our honor to spend our days discipling our students at DSS, but the truth remains that they need more people who love Christ pouring into them. Our world needs bold followers of Christ to shape our culture with Love; our future truly depends on it.
Because I don’t know about you, but I can’t fathom letting another teenage boy make it to the age of 17 and have to say, “Bob the Builder is the most positive influence I have in my life”.
{If you are interested in partnering with The Denver Street School and The Hesed Project as we disciple students through our Journey to the High Places Conference this spring, you can do so by visiting our GoFundMe page here.}
*Student’s name changed to honor their journey and privacy.
In my 10 months in the Alaskan bush, I only saw fresh flowers once. I never knew how much I cherished having green plants and flowers in my home until I moved to the scenic middle of nowhere, where the closest vegetables, fruits, and flora to me were 165 miles and a flight away in Anchorage.
At times, I became so desperate to have foliage in my
home that I took to cutting pine branches and willow buds off of trees and “potting” them in old growlers around my kitchen.
Last March, the winter ice thawed off of the trees and village trails, giving way to blossoms and ankle-deep mud– a sure fire sign that spring had sprung in Alaska. As I walked the trails to and from the local school every day and felt the thick mud tug on my goulashes, I also began to feel a familiar tug in my little Coloradoan heart– the desire to plant. The desire to see fresh, green growth.
I’d made the conscious decision when I was 17 that I would become a woman who gardened. And thus, every year since, I’ve cleared a semi-sacred afternoon in March to plant seedlings for what I hoped would one day become an autumn harvest. In years past, I’ve proceeded to take over the dining room table, window sills, and any other sunny surfaces of the houses I’ve lived in, filling them with trays of dirt and seedlings (which I’ve learned my lesson about trying to plant in the ground until after Memorial Day in Colorado…).
That clarity is what my soul longed for last spring. As I walked those muddy trails home from work, my heart physically ached for the familiarity of my annual tradition. But due to the fact that I was surrounded by hundreds of miles of tundra and moss, I continued to cut willow buds on my “commute” and struggled to be content in the season the Lord had placed me in– one where my only interaction with dirt came from the slurping noises of mud as it threatened to suck my rain boots right off my feet.
My inability to physically plant a garden in the face of said longing made sense for that season, as Jesus was teaching me to desire other things. As such, my longing for familiarity and tiny garden seedlings went unfulfilled for my entire season of life in Port Alsworth.
In fact, my only opportunity to physically plant anything in 2016 came at beginning of summer, the beginning of a season of death that seemed to muddy most everything about my heart for the remainder of the year. This opportunity to plant a garden caught me entirely off guard because in the blink of an eye, I’d been called away from Alaska and was on my hands and knees in my “adopted mom’s” flowerbed in Iowa. As she worshipped through tears and planned her son’s funeral, I knelt outside the kitchen and planted her marigolds and petunias.
While tenderly planting Arlene’s flowers was an answer to the longing in my heart to be reunited with soil, those flowers were bitterly watered with tears. Those tears, ones that stemmed from pain and doubt, mixed with the soil, and created the metaphorical mud weighed heavy on my heart.
Last week, I sat on our back porch one afternoon as I struggled to process that mud and doubt that still lingers in my heart, even 10 months into this strange season of loss and readjustment. Between sentences in my journal, I stared at the empty garden in the corner of our yard.
As I did so, images of me walking the muddy paths of Port Alsworth, kneeling in Arlene’s garden, and of my own hands tending the Yarrow garden in years past flashed through my mind. In that moment, my throat constricted. Grief threatened to overwhelm me.
For better or for worse, I shook off that feeling, set my journal down, and took a walk down the street to Home Depot. I spent the rest of that day doing what my heart so desired this time last year. Acutely aware of how thankful I was for the familiarity of my own tradition, I thumbed seeds into trays of dirt in the sunshine and ceremoniously prayed over my little seedlings.
Grow, little seeds. Thrive. Struggle up through the dirt. Come toward the sun.
As I planted and half-mumbled my prayers, words from Hannah Anderson’s new book Humble Roots came to mind:
“We must create space for questions and doubt that lead to growth. But to do this, we must be comfortable with questions and uncertainty ourselves.” “This process can only happen in relationship; it can only happen as [we] depend on Him” (p. 130-131).
It’s exactly that space– space where I’ve learned to question, wrestle, and doubt– that the Lord has dug out and created in my life this year; even though I admittedly wanted nothing to do with it.
Since those late May days on my knees in the Miller’s flowerbed, I’ve wrestled with doubts I’m not proud to admit that I’ve had. I’ve cried and screamed, asking God if He’s real. If He’s Good. If He even cares. If I can trust Him. Where He was in the midst of tragedy, cancer, transition, loss, and death after death.
But it has been through this process and my hokey tradition of planting yet another year’s garden, that I have found Him in the dirt and myself in the seeds.
In the winter months, I felt half-dead, silent, dormant, awaiting new life to spring forth. Yet I fought the Lord every time He tried to root me to Him in the darkness. Little did I know, the dark hole in the soil, that place of questioning and doubt, was exactly the environment that would allow my seeds and questions to find nourishment and Truth in Him, and thrive.
Every morning as I water my little trays of seedlings and turn them toward the Colorado sunshine, I’m reminded that I’m not the one responsible for making them root down into the soil or stretch up toward the sun any more than I’m capable of controlling my own journey out of the mud and muck of grief.
Jesus is faithful to allow growth in its time, even when the precursor to growth feels a lot like being buried in the dirt and covered with manure.
“For neither the one who plants nor waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” (1 Corinthians 3:7)
Whenever I hear that song, I’m immediately back in Hannah’s car driving the stretch of country highway between Kalona and Riverside in Iowa last May 31st. That night the humid summer air broke and gave way to a storm unlike many I’ve seen in my life.
As I drove, Latifah Phillips’ voice filled the car with that old hymn. I sang along so loud, so hard, for so long that I couldn’t breathe. As I continued to mouth the lyrics, I started bawling too hard to be driving so fast. The rain that had begun as a steady shower picked up to a downpour and I couldn’t see a thing. Seeing out of the windshield seemed to be a moot point though, given the ferocity with which water was coming out of my own eyes.
Still I kept driving, straight down the highway. Occasionally I would turn the steering wheel a smidge as lightening struck on either side of the car, illuminating slight curves in the long country road.
With the blinding lightening came claps of thunder that shook the car. On the fifth or six, I swerved the car off the highway, onto the dirt shoulder, and punched the brake out of panic. As the car skidded to a stop, I felt my heart pounding in my fingers as they death griped “my sister’s” steering wheel. I turned on the hazard lights to avoid further tragedy in our week and I screamed.
In hindsight, I don’t really know why I screamed. In that exact moment I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t feel helpless. I wasn’t angry or overwhelmed, and yet I was. I was all of those things. And in addition to every single emotion (and I mean every. single. emotion.) that surged through my body like fire in my veins, I was out of control.
I couldn’t fix anyone’s problems. I couldn’t bring our loved one back. I couldn’t heal, or resurrect, or be the one to bring anyone joy. Like Peter and John speaking to the lame beggar in Acts 3:6, all I could do was kneel beside the heartbroken people I loved and say, “Silver and gold I have none. All I have to give you is the name of Jesus Christ.” And in this pain, in their agony those words seemed to fall so short. In that season and in those moments, Jesus didn’t feel like enough, no matter what truths my mind tried to proclaim over my heart or the hearts of those around me.
Two months later and again eight months after that, I sat next to my sister and in silent solidarity with my brothers and sisters in Alaska and wept. Even though I understand that these circumstances are only our earthly losses, and that they have brought about our departed’s gains in the glorious presence of Christ, I still have days where I feel as though I can’t do anything but weep.
Daily I continue to wrestle with a lack of words and control– an agonizing experience for a writer and closet control freak like myself. No matter how much time has passed, I remain out of control, unable to heal the wounds of the ones I love and unable to do anything except kneel beside them and quietly offer Jesus.
This is a season in which my pride has been broken down– surely for the “better”– but in a way which my seeming capabilities as a writer and counselor have taken a hit. I’m learning to be “okay” with the fact that I still have moments in which gasping and crying and wordless screaming replaces speaking, which is likely for the better, even though it often hurts like hell.
Because it is in (and after) those moments that I am back on that highway, skidding to a stop, allowing the truth to wash over me:
“What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
His power does not fall short in my inability to express the thousands of inexpressible emotions in my heart or comfort those around me. For here at the end of myself, He begins. And that is all any of us truly need– the blood of Jesus. Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
On the heels of a year where the Lord taught me to live vulnerably in tight-knit community and through writing my heart out on this website, I came to a place at the beginning of last summer where words felt entirely inadequate to express the thoughts and emotions that flooded my body on a daily basis. In the span of two months, I had unexpectedly lost a dear friend, my “adopted little brother” in a motorcycle accident and a childhood friend to cancer. As I traveled last summer, I continued to journal and write privately, figuring that this lack of “words to share” would pass in due time.
When I resumed my “normal” life in Colorado in August, I felt strongly that I was being called into a season of silent processing with the Lord and I decided that a break from public writing was what I needed to do to respect that season of life. But as time here in Colorado wore on and transition turned to stability, my ability (and desire) to vulnerably share “where I was at” began to wane. Over time, I closed into myself, shutting nearly everyone else out so dramatically that most days I didn’t know how not to. (Aside: If I’ve done this to you, please, please, please know I didn’t mean to hurt you if I have. I want to sit down over a cup of coffee with you. I want to mend relationships. I want you to know that as much as it sounds like a cheesy relationship line or an excuse, “It’s not you. It’s never been you. It’s me. I’m a mess.”)
In the days that preceded the disappearance of my friends and our plane in December, I felt a shift occurring in my heart; I knew my season of silent processing was being called to an end. I knew I was supposed to start writing again. And yet, when the plane went down, a part of me went down with it. Obviously, the part of my heart that held Scott, Kyle, Zach, & Kaitlyn dear, but the articulate part of me was also lost that day.
For months, I’ve struggled with and through depression, trying and failing to express anything of real value without bursting into tears. Despite feeling the Lord pressing me to write or express my heart in whatever way I could, I couldn’t do it. Time and time again, as I’ve tried to write, I instead closed my laptop and retreated back into my own introverted brain.
In those moments, a part of me knew I was being disobedient to what God was calling me to in my grief. I knew closing myself off wasn’t a true solution to any of my problems, and yet in this complex season, I didn’t know how to stop.
Thus, I’ve spent my weeknights and weekends largely holed away from community, avoiding my laptop, and wrestling with the Lord in coffee shops and counseling, or while crying with my roommates on the Yarrow kitchen floor.
In the individual nights of these last few months I’ve felt the extent of just how little I have “it” together (whatever “it” is…). And to be honest? This realization of the extent of my weakness paired with this “calling” to be vulnerable in that weakness?? It’s scared the living daylights out of me.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know how to not tell other’s stories while telling mine because they’re so intertwined. I’m scared of unintentionally drudging up pain for the people I love, those who are walking through this complicated season of grief too. I don’t want to be “that sad writer” or ever come across as though I’m seeking pity, because I beg you to realize, I’m not.
I so desperately want to feel “normal” again. I want to stop crying. I want to stop grieving from the core of my being.
But that’s not where the Lord has me…
Instead, I’m here in this weird in-between– the place where I thought I was finally “okay” enough to attend a symposium on gospel-centered grieving and most days am more hopeful than I am bitter with God.
I’m here, in the muck and the mire of loss and redemption, joy and grief.
I’m desperately seeking contentedness with God’s plan when in actuality? I feel like I can’t handle being content with this new reality without the people I love. And the mere thought of trying to do so spiraled me into a panic attack Friday night at said grief symposium where I ended up running out of the sanctuary and ugly crying/ snotting into a close friend’s hair on our church steps.
This season isn’t cute.
It’s rendered me a mess. One giant freaking paradox.
Yet daily throughout this season, I have heard the invitation of Jesus to the weary in Matthew 11– “Come to Me.” And privately, I have. Through His sweet grace that I know I possess and yet so desperately crave more of, I come to Him a little more each day.
Today’s come to Jesus moment has been through obedience and tears; it is through a long overdue introduction/ continuation to this convoluted season through writing although I’d much rather remain silent and still, alone with Him and my little blue journal.
It comes through breathing life back into this dusty, neglected blog and it comes in the same vein as the words I’ve read time and time again this year: “The only way out of grief is through.”
Part of me hopes that maybe writing again will be the beginning of the end of this messy chapter. Most of me knows that more than likely it’s not; but I simply hope am confident that somewhere in this mess, in this journey through grief, I will see more of Jesus and I pray somehow you do too…
{To be continued}
“I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”
Premature planting isn’t the only lesson I’ve learned from gardening though; over the years, the Lord has taught me so many sweet lessons about 
of the year. This opportunity to plant a garden caught me entirely off guard because in the blink of an eye, I’d been called away from Alaska and was on my hands and knees in my “adopted mom’s” flowerbed in Iowa. As she worshipped through tears and planned her son’s funeral, I knelt outside the kitchen and planted her marigolds and petunias.
Louise in the Light 