#18 - Thanksgiving 2016

This Thanksgiving Day of 2016, I woke to the wind and rain of the Pacific Northwest, thinking about what I am most thankful for this year. I came up with the retro date of August 17, 1969, the day I died and came back. The event came to mind, no doubt, because I'm thinking of writing my own story, and my life is anchored by this watershed moment. It hasn't mattered which way my life has spun out of control in the past, it's always come back round to this. You see, once you meet God--a divinity our limitation of language cannot articulate--you find that life looks and feels differently. If you're interested in reading my author's statement, here it is. I invite feedback.

“A watershed moment. Changed my life.” People say this when something alters their life trajectory and sets them on a new course altogether. Sometimes it’s a wonderful thing. Like for Anne (with an e), when she finds a home at Green Gables. Sometimes it’s a crucible. Like Pip in the Kent marshes, accosted by an escaped convict. Life ruptures with a jerk and a tear, launching us elsewhere. Sometimes watershed moments come more than once in a life time. Sometimes twice, sometimes three times. But for some of us, they come too often and life devolves into a tumultuous thing—wild and undefined, twisting and turning, nothing stable, nothing to count on, nothing to stem the dizziness as we’re tossed off metaphorical cliffs with a roar and a prayer, slammed into corners with no way out. My mother often told me, “You remind me of those fashioned baby clowns with fat round bottoms. Babies bat at them and they tip, but the ballast bounces them right back up. You have such bad luck. But no matter what life throws at you,” she’d say, “you always find your feet.”

I was in my mid-thirties when I started to ask, “But what if I break and my ballast scatters?”

“You won’t."

But I have broken and I did break.

This book is my story, for other broken women. Women who’ve known too many watershed moments and who find landing on their feet painfully problematic. It’s for women who can no longer be made whole by biblical talking points, bumper sticker theologies, or Facebook triteness.

My story is for women who stand in the food bank lines, who come trembling from behind their doctor’s door, who lie beaten at the feet of someone who claims to love them, who endure unspeakable horrors; women kicked in the teeth and around the block, clobbered by greed, oppressed by power, abused by the unrelenting self-interest of others. It’s for those who know life can become meaningless and disappointing and full of pain. My story is for these women because this I know: Despite our pain, confusion, and grief, God sends us the ravens when we find ourselves in isolation at the lonely, barren shoreline of Elijah’s creek, Cherith. He finds ways to penetrate the evils of this world to give us hope and, in my case, to whittle away at the false doctrines of health and wealth to a greater understanding of God’s infinite capacity to inspire awe.

I was once shared some elements of my story to a friend. She interrupted me. “And you still believe in God?”

I do. Because my story begins the day I died. I was seventeen years old. And once you meet God, it doesn't matter what assails. Life always comes back to Him.