Sunday December 28
It’s raining warm buckets today. I let Mrs Horse out to stretch her legs, but the rain is so persistent, she stood by the barn, her hay soaked and untouched, so brought her in. I played the kid’s game of digging out the blocked rivulet under the barn eaves, so it would run away from the doors. Tomorrow that water will be ice. The air is full of energy. My head aches.
The air is so alive the clouds came down. “Heaven came down and glory filled my soul”—a camp song, simple but full of good hope, speaking the wonderful day when a person took Jesus as their own. Some circles mock the idea of Jesus as personal Lord and savior, saying it’s too self-centered, too individualistic, but that’s how I’ve viewed my walk with God since I was five. I have found strength and relationship. People I know, who speak of their spirituality that way, are alive in Christ. They serve him.
The clouds have settled in the trees. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, the saints who are already in the naked presence of God. Am I seeing that cloud settle with the rain pulling it down? Am I seeing “Heaven came down and glory filled my soul” The blessed rain of God’s goodness watering the earth, hopefully breaking the drought?
Sometimes I think Aiden sees the saints, or sees angels, when he barks at what looks like nothing in the field. “The chariots of God are twice ten thousand, thousands upon thousands” (Ps 68:17) Elisha’s servant’s eyes were opened, and he saw them, chariots of fire, beyond the Syrians arrayed and ready to attack. Elijah, wanted to lie down and die, and the angel of the Lord, gave him food to run on, to meet God at the mountain of God. We know about demons around every bush, but aren’t there angels maybe walking out in the open, only we can’t see them and don’t know enough to sense them?
I walk the dogs in rain, pouring down on my head and shoulders, my hat and coat soaked. This blessing is no fun. I pull out my reverse vacuum that blows air drying the dogs’ coats. They wheel and pull away. Since they are full of high jinx, I let them run lickety split, full tilt in the fenced yard. Their coats soaked. The second time I blew them dry, they realized they liked that warm air blowing on their bodies.
I am filled with dread. Will we be hit with thunder, terrific winds, snow? Ryan Hall shows a picture of the cold front, curved along the mid-point of the country, brown. His words rapid, he says there will be a blizzard north of us and possible tornadoes to the south. This bath water warmth will swing hard to twenty below wind chill.
We have been invited to our neighbors’ Christmas celebration. There’s something about them that feels like family. (You know how you can be invited to someone’s holiday and it feels all wrong. It’s like you’re a stone in their shoe; they are a stone in yours?) It’s not like this with these neighbors, maybe because we know their story, we watch their work as the seasons march through our neighborhood—tilling, planting, harvest, snowplowing.
They speak of the trouble in their lives. Bruce and I add names to our prayer list.
The wind roared up, hard as the front moved through. While I was in the barn doing chores, I heard the train horn blow, like hounds being called to the chase, oddly comforting, human, in the hard roar of the wind sweeping the warmth, sweeping the fog away.
December 30
One night, after the snow comes, I walk the dogs behind the garden. The snow crumbles under my feet. It’s not been a heavy snowfall. I walk behind the garden and see headlights, brighter, bigger than normal. I watch as they round the bend by the cattle-raising-neighbor and turn towards us. It feels ominous. Like something to hide from. I keep watching as the full truck comes into view. He turns into the road that T’s into ours. His headlights swing across our field. I am too far away to be caught in those lights. He stops. Waits. Backs up and goes back the way he came. Barely I can tell it’s a township truck with a plow in front and a bright light bar on the cab. Maybe he was salting the intersection. The next day the intersection is glare ice. Even though Oma wants to check out the sniffs up that way, I pull her away and we walk down to the willows.
Every Sunday I listen to Martin Shaw’s Beasts and Vines, where he tells the story of his week or maybe an old story, that can pry under our shell, to reveal our soft, vulnerable heart. In Fear of Waking the Rooks he says:
An abundance of good fortune would always invite the opposite to swiftly distribute its energies into the community. The sheer vivacity of a decent Christmas always has me looking over my shoulder and talking quietly, evoking that brilliant Thomas line about ‘fear of waking the rook.s’
That’s what I fear at the turning of the year. I cringe when people wish that this year is better than the last. I duck hoping that it’s at least as good. I duck hoping our health holds out. Both Bruce and I check out, at least now. But frailty can whip the legs out from under a person as quick as a barreling dog. As I said, we’ve crossed the line into 70. If I tell Doc I get out of the car and walk like an old person, I catch myself and say I am an old person. These days the crows are rare. The fields around here are too open. The buzzards have left for the south. But I have seen seven sitting in a dead oak and have taken pause, wondering what dead thing drew them here.
Lurking like Shaw’s rooks is the darkness of not knowing how or when death will visit even though crows around here are more rare than eagles. It’s like those nights that are especially dark, almost spectacular in their darkness, with the glow of local towns making the sky even more eerie.
And death has so many guises. We can go slowly with our bodies stiffening, our joints aching, our minds socked by a stroke, or plague, our hearts socked by a clogged artery or rhythms gone awry. We can go to sleep never to wake up. Or lose control of a car. Or run headlong into a terminal cancer diagnosis. Losing our loved ones can be worse than losing ourselves.
Disaster looms like a giant stomping just below the horizon but why let the dread ruin a day? My best defense against this fear is thanksgiving because it brings me back to the present. Sometimes the mere words: “Thank you” say enough. And the Jesus prayer steadies. Life has been so kind these last years, well, who knows what 2026 might bring.
This is why my blood runs cold when a life coach urges me to jump on the intention bandwagon and map out my goals. If you ask me what worked well, what didn’t, I draw a blank.
The practice of Examen is an old Christian practice of writing out the sweet and sour things, our righteousness and sin, what energizes and what drains us. But that all seems like too much looking. Too much running through my head and not enough how life itself plays out. Yes without a vision the people perish, but I feel like for me having big dreams is obsolete, that dreams themselves can be an idol, a false road. Who am I to say what my best life is? I’m sure as heck not wise enough. Looking back, I’ve seen the wisdom of dreams not coming true.
What if the key, the secret, the answer is laying ourselves open to our vulnerable God, leaning not on our own understanding—isn’t our understanding sometimes what dreams and goals and intentions are? Isn’t our understanding not so particularly wise? The next part says “In all our ways, acknowledge him.” In all our ways, eating, drinking, walking the dogs, shoveling manure, kissing Bruce, acknowledging him, God’s presence, right here, right now. Acknowledging--bringing the Lord into our ordinary lives. Then he will direct our paths, the road less traveled, the road well traveled, the road whatever, will unfold before us. (Prov 3: 5 – 6).
Also hustling for some kind of adventure takes too much energy. I hustled hard to answer the call to be a writer. That call has played out in unexpected and good ways. I didn’t get published by a traditional or even indy publisher or pull bestseller status. I’m not interested in doing the tricks that might draw more readers. It’s why I’m so grateful for you, for your reading these words, that I can have an audience without knocking up against gatekeepers again and again, the answer coming back: Nope. Not for us. Not at this time. But you have talent. Try again.
On New Year’s Eve I am so tired, Bruce offers to walk the dogs. When he comes in, he says, “You know how you see cloud shadows moving across the field? Well I saw the shine of the moon moving across the field.” I envied him the wonder of seeing how the moon broke up clouds, that he saw a pool of white moving. On the other hand, wonder is good for him, for anyone to see. But I wish I’d gotten up and walked and seen it too.
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