#27: TAMING THE DRAGONS, Story 4 - Mary

I'm releasing Taming The Dragons, available in 2020—originally published by HarperCollins. This excerpt is from the Martyr section, illustrating that there is always redemption when the choice ot martyr ourselves is our own.
_______________

MARY

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

- John 15:12, 13 (RSV)

The Puritans, fleeing religious persecution in England, came to the American colonies to preach religious freedom, yet in that “freedom” they committed unspeakable horrors against the Quakers. In a text we don’t often read in the study of our history, we come to words too shy to speak full truth:

"William Brend, though the oldest of the band of [Quaker] missionaries, was called to pass through the most cruel sufferings that were meted out in Boston to any prisoner. The tale is too awful to tell in detail, but the inhumanity can be judged from the fact that one incident in his round of torture consisted of one hundred and seventeen blows on his bare back with a tarred rope. He was found dying— “his body having turned cold” and “his flesh having rotted...” John Norton, however, was still stout in his remorseless attitude, saying of William Brend: “He endeavored to beat the gospel ordinances black and blue, and it was but just to beat him black and blue.”

Things deteriorated quickly in Boston. Quakers were fined in excess of £1,000, their were ears cut off, their children sold. Holes were bored through their tongues,they were imprisoned without food or heat, chained to logs, laid neck and heels in irons, publicly whipped, “H” for Heretic burnt into their hands. Their appeals to England were denied, their houses and land seized, atrocities culminating until, finally, in 1658, the clergy of the Massachusetts Colony executed a law that, after railing and abuse against the Quakers, stated:

“And the said person, being convicted to be of the sect of the Quakers, shall be sentenced to banishment, upon pain of death.”

The test wasn’t long in coming. In August of 1659 a Quaker minister by the name of Mary Dyer went to Boston to request a repeal. She was apprehended, tried, and banished upon pain of death. But the day she was released a colleague was apprehended and imprisoned. Mary Dyer turned right around and went back. This time, William Robinson and Marmeduke Stephenson joined her.

All three were brought before the General Court on October 19, 1659, and asked by the Governor why they had come. To request the repeal of the unrighteous law, Mary stated again, “in obedience to the call of the Lord.” With that “affrontive” reply, Governor Endicott chose to back his edict. “Hearken, you shall be led back to the place from whence you came and from thence to the place of execution,” he thundered, “to be hanged on the gallows till you are dead!”

“Take her away, Marshall!” screamed Endicott.

“Yea, joyfully,” said Mary, “shall I go.”

October 27, 1659, they were marched to the gallows. William, Marmeduke, Mary between them, held hands. “Are you not ashamed,” an official accosted Mary, “to walk thus between two young men?”

“No, this is to me the hour of the greatest joy I ever had in this world.”

The men were hung first, then Mary took her place, arms bound, now legs, now the handkerchief laid over her face, and finally now the noose about her neck. Suddenly, “Reprieve!”

Actually, the Court never intended to hang her. Governor John Winthrop of nearby Connecticut had pleaded on his knees before the Boston magistrates not to hang the Quakers. They let him have Mary, with this order written into the records:

It is ordered that the said Mary Dyer shall have liberty for forty-eight hours to depart out of this Jurisdiction, after which time, being found therein, she is to be forthwith executed. And it is further ordered that she shall be carried to the place of execution and there to stand upon the gallows with a rope about her neck until the Rest be executed; and then to return to the prison and remain as aforesaid.

But Mary Dyer refused to accept her life—so long as the law of death against her people remained. She returned for a third time in May to appear before the next General Court.

“Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?” Governor Endicott asked.

“I am the same.”

“You will own yourself a Quaker, will you not?”

“I own myself to be reproachfully so called.”

“This is no more than what thou saidst before. But now, it is to be executed.”

“I came in obedience to the will of God at your last General Court, desiring you to repeal your unrighteous laws of banishment on pain of death; and that same is my word now, and earnest request, although I told you that if you refused to repeal them, the Lord would send others of His servants to witness against them.”

One more time marched to the gallows, one more time arms bound, now feet, now noose about her neck “We will not hang you,” said the authorities, “if you will promise to go home, back to Rhode Island.” I wonder what her thoughts might have been. No one knows, but we do know what she said.

“Nay, I cannot. In obedience to the will of the Lord God I came and in His will I abide faithful to death.”

Mary Dyer died that day in Boston, May 21, 1660. A minister of the Gospel, she chose to sacrifice herself that others might live. That day the governor and clergymen rejoiced, but the people who had witnessed the brutality did not. A petition was sent to England. Because of Mary Dyer, who committed herself thrice to die that others might live, religious persecution was immediately and henceforth stopped. By edict of King Charles.

Today a bronze statue of Mary Dyer stands on Boston’s capitol grounds, within sight of the Commons where she was hung, a larger than life reminder to us all that there is always redemption in sacrifice—when the choice, once, twice, thrice, to give is ours.

#26: TAMING THE DRAGONS, Story 3 - Christine

I'm releasing Taming The Dragons, available in 2020--originally published by HarperCollins. This excerpt is from the Innocent section, Story 23.

_______________

CHRISTINE

So now, since you have been made right in God’s sight by faith in His promises, we can have real peace with him because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us.

For because of our faith, He has brought us into His place of highest privilege where we now stand, and we confidently and joyfully look forward to actually becoming all that God has had in mind for us to be.

We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials for we know that they are good for us—they help us learn to be patient.

And patience develops strength of character in us and helps us trust God more each time we use it until finally our hope and faith are strong and steady. Then, when that happens, we are able to hold our heads high no matter what happens and know that all is well, for we know how dearly God loves us, and we feel this warm love everywhere within us because God has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with His love.

- Romans 5:1-5

MY COUSINS WERE ALMOST HOME, pushing their bikes up the last of the hill. It was a winter evening early in the new year of 1974, and a slight drizzle hurried them along; Patty was thirteen, Christine eleven. Lights from the kitchen window could be seen through the trees. Nearly home.

A car driven by a young man blinded by the setting sun came suddenly gunning up over the ridge. Patty ran the half block home screaming. Uncle Stan, the town doctor, was paged. Christine had been in an accident.

Seventeen hundred miles away and a few days later, I came home late from work. A letter from my folks was in the mailbox. “I’m sorry to be the one to break the news,” my mother wrote, “but Christine was killed today while riding her bike home for supper.”

I let the letter fall to the floor, my eyes automatically sliding to the wall where I’d hung a small hooked rug Christine and I had made together a few summers before. It was all I had of my sweet little cousin. “Oh, Christine,” I wept, tears stinging the moment I buried my face into the dusty wool. I beat my fists against the rug and cried into her careful work. She was dead because—why? Such a needless, pointless death! I was inconsolable for days.

Then came a second letter from my mother. “Uncle Stan,” she wrote, “went into Christine’s room after everything was over and sat down at the new little table he’d gotten her for Christmas. Her Bible was open. She’d been reading it before going off to school that morning, and she’d underlined the first five verses of Romans 5.”

So now, since we have been made right in God’s sight by faith in his promises, we can have real peace with him because of what Jesus Christ our Lord has done for us…

Christine spoke from heaven. Evil receded.

....we are able to hold our heads high no matter what happens and know that all is well, for we know how dearly God loves us… (LV)

Evil slid back further, finally to vanish in the victory of God’s ultimate promise. We are not without hope, even though none of live in the Garden of Eden anymore.

#25: TAMING THE DRAGONS, STORY 2: Innocent--Lucy

I'm releasing Taming The Dragons, available in July--originally published by HarperCollins. This excerpt is from the Innocent section, Story 2.

_______________

No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he also provides a way out so that you can stand up under it.

- I Corinthians 10:13 (NIV) 

SOMETIMES WE USE THIS VERSE to deny the power of evil, but by doing so we let evil reign. Interpreting the word “temptation" to mean circumstances or events, or crushing stress, rather than what it does mean—temptation to do wrong—we blind ourselves to people’s burdens too heavy to bear. Erroneously assured in our minds that God will not allow too much stress to accumulate in a neighbor’s life, we sit back and allow our neighbor to suffer more than he or she can withstand.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel that sparked the Civil War by exposing the evils of slavery, Tom watches a Christian woman kill herself in despair.

Mr. Haley is the slave trader. At one spot along the Mississippi River, while taking his “gang” south to sell, he leaves the steamboat to bring aboard a slave woman chirruping happily to her ten-month-old baby. She tells Tom she's on her down to Louisville to be hired out to work in the same tavern as her husband. Haley interrupts; he's bought her and is selling her South.

So instead of going to live with her husband, she'll never see him again. At Louisville, the distraught Lucy tucks her sleeping baby into a corner and runs to the front rails of the boat in hope of catching a last glimpse of a husband she’ll never again see. While her back is turned, Haley sells her baby for forty-five dollars to a man who slips away unseen.

Harriet Beecher Stowe pounces on the Northern reader for turning a blind eye to such evil. “The trader,” she wrote, “had arrived at that stage of Christian…perfection which has been recommended by some preachers…of the north…in which he had completely overcome every humane weakness and prejudice. His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be brought, with proper effort and cultivation. The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast upon him might have disturbed one less practiced; but he was used to it. He had seen that same look hundreds of times. You can get used to such things, too, my friend.…”

Tom tries to comfort Lucy, to tell her of a caring Jesus. But, says Stowe, “the ear was deaf with anguish.”

“O! what shall I do?” Lucy moans in the black of night. “O Lord! O good Lord, do help me!” At midnight Tom awakes, feels a stir of air, then a brush past his shoulder. In the silence of the night he hears the splash. When he looks, Lucy’s place on the deck is empty.

Today we don’t have slavery. We have refugees fleeing for their lives, children kidnapped from their parents at the border and housed in concentration camps. We have a whole new working poor in the world’s wealthiest country. We have sexual discrimination, gender bias, and whole cities where crime, violence, and despair are as common as safety, peace, and hope are to white, middle-class Americans.

But like the Northerners of 1852, and like Haley the slave trader, we’ve grown so used to the face of evil “out there, down there” that the anguish no longer means anything. Evil runs rampant, and people—even Christians like Lucy—kill themselves (or go crazy, or get sick, or live emotionally paralyzed lives) from the despair of it all.

Sometimes the burden is too great to bear, and like the Northerners we can’t rest in religious triteness because for others “the ear is deaf with anguish.” We need to wake up because NONE OF US LIVE IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN ANYMORE.

#24: TAMING THE DRAGONS STORY 1: Innocent--Mary

I'm releasing Taming The Dragons for online sales, available in July--originally published by HarperCollinsSanFrancisco. The book has 8 sections. In each, I introduce a specific choice women have when facing conflict, tell nine stories of women who made that choice, and then conclude with further information about what it means to be an Orphan, Pilgrim, Martyr, and Wizard. 

This excerpt is from the Innocent section, Story 1

MARY'S Story

Because you have made the Lord your refuge,
the Most High your habitation,
no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent.
For He give His angels charge of you to guard you
in all your ways.
On their bands they will bear you up,
lest you will tread on the lion and the adder,
the young lion and the serpent you will trample under foot.
Because he cleaves to me in love,

I will deliver him;
I will protect him, because be knows my name.

- Psalm 91:9-14 (RSV)

“I AWOKE e shortly after midnight, and within minutes I’d been shot and my house burglarized. My life turned completely upside down.”

Mary was asleep in bed with her three-and-a-half-year-old son when an intruder broke into her home through a bathroom window. Her husband was working the night shift as an airplane pilot. “Because of a previous burglary attempt,” she reported, “I’d been praying for the ability to quickly discern good from evil.” In God’s answer to prayer, she awoke the night of April 15, 1989, sensing something amiss. She called 911 only moments before the intruder forced his way through her bedroom door and shot her in the face. She remembers feeling strangely detached and overwhelmed as she folded to the floor. “I kept talking in a soft voice, saying, ‘Please go away. Please go away.’”

Mary, a member of University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, Washington, didn’t live in the Garden of Eden, and for her, evil invaded the safety of even her own home. “I felt the struggle between good and evil,” she told me. “But as I lay there, watching the pool of blood grow larger and larger, I felt like God was dealing with that person, not me.” The paramedics arrived and her son, awake by now, said, “You better get a Band-Aid. My mommy has an owie on her head.” Hearing his voice, Mary wondered if she’d live to see him again. “Even so,” she said, “I felt really calm. I felt God was with me.”

Evil lurks and even strikes, yet there is a bigger truth. God is with us. In the midst of Mary’s trouble, God answered. He was there. He gave her peace. And he himself dealt with the evil raging all around. So while the Psalmist may sing “no evil shall befall you,” two stanzas down he also sings, “when he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble.”

Mary had been praying for discernment between good and evil, and before evil could strike, she woke in time to call for help. In the days that followed, the police, medics, and hospital staff, who seldom see victims survive a gunshot wound to the head, were astounded. A miracle unfolded before their eyes, for Mary lived.

And because she lived we know God is still with us, even though we don’t live in the Garden of Eden anymore.

#23 - When the Someone Else Takes Over

I SOMETIMES LIVE in a small community of SE Alaska. I used to come up here for work; now I come for friendship and the solidarity of divergent people. Polarized politics, different work ethics, varied lifestyles, religious disparities, over-the-top personalities. These things don't matter between us. The greater good prevails. And it’s the perfect place for a woman whose mother has early stages of dementia.

I’ll call the mother Sally. She’s my friend. We see each other at morning coffee and sometimes senior lunch. The other day at lunch I had my phone out, texting back and forth with someone else over when I might stop by afterward. It sat between Sally and I. But when I went to get up, it was gone. “Hey, anyone seen my phone?"

I’d been warned. Once Sally tried to take a whole stack of menus from the Sweet Tooth. One day I watched her try to tuck a spoon from the Smoothies shop into her pocket book. Another time, she picked up a plastic cup. “You can leave that here,” her daughter said when she came to pick Sally up, no big deal, just taking it from her hand and putting it back on the table. I can’t imagine what life would be like for Sally in the Lower 48. Would someone try to have her arrested?

Up here, though, she’s safe. Her daughter, I’ll call her Nora, can drop Sally off and go to work, and let the rest of us manage the complexities for a bit.

But what was I to do about my phone?

The first step was to confirm where it was.

“Does anyone have a phone I can use to ring myself?” I asked the group.

No one.

I went into the kitchen. “Renata? Do you have your phone?”

“I do.”

“Can you call me? I think my phone’s in Sally’s pocket.”

“Ahh…” A knowing look came into her eye.

My phone answered from where I thought it would. Deb and Wilma and I pretended to try and track the sound. I was hoping Sally would figure it out; she didn’t have a clue. Finally Deb said, “Sally! It’s in your pocket!”

Puzzled, Sally put in her hand and pulled out my phone. She was flummoxed. I put my arm around her. We all laughed and gave her a smile, but Sally began to get agitated and walked about, retreating into herself. I finally had to get her and bring her back to the table. “Sit ye doon,” I said, bringing out a poor imitation of my mother's favorite Scottish idiom. We bantered back and forth. She calmed down. Then she leaned toward me and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

I thought my heart would break.

We live hard lives, but I can’t imagine a harder one than that of dementia. My mother died of it. I've see it in others. It’s a cruel disease that steals us from ourselves and we find other peoples' phones in our pockets. But where I sometimes live, there is an eclectic collection of people who help bring Sally back to herself whenever she's confronted with that "dark someone else" who is determined to take over. And sadly someday will.

#22--Barbie Doll & Missing Body Parts

After breast cancer and mangled attempts at reconstruction, I was looking a bit like Birch Bay Drive (where I used to live) after a vicious storm took the road out. My friend Judy was a buoy during the storm, keeping my head above water. But she wasn't a lot of help when the tide went out and it was time to face the damage. No one was. And I wasn't about to take my clothes off just to show folks exactly what we're dealing with here.

Here's the truth, and trust me. I am throw-up-to-look-at ugly. My body is nothing Michelangelo would ever sculpt, or DaVinci paint. Lying through my teeth in front of a mirror with daily "affirmations" contrary to reality is less than helpful, a useless escape into some fantasy land I refuse to enter. Truth? I don't recognize the mangled body I've been left, all torn apart, disconnecting me from myself. What was this stuff from my neck down? Where did I go? Judy and all my other friends had no idea how to help me. But one of my doctors assured me many women feel exactly like this.

Look at it this way, she told me. As we age, time slowly allows us to adjust to a different body. One gray hair at a time, one more wrinkle. A pain in the hip. A kink in the knee. But when we undergo radical removal of body parts, our minds can't process the all-at-once shock. It's a defense mechanism in order to function in the horror. "It takes women, on average, a year or more to begin feeling connected to themselves. "Give yourself time," she said. "It'll happen."

And so I accepted the ugliness and my disconnect.

The other day at breakfast in Skagway, AK, Ken-with-the-blue-coat started talking about when--once upon a time, a long time ago--he was in charge of showing the Red Onion strippers what he was learning at a terrorist class over at the firehall. I butted in and tut-tutted, "My-my-my, but aren't you the regular little Ken doll!"

Doug leaned over and whispered something about a Barbie doll, and my friend Judy, across the table, gave me a look and burst out laughing. "Yea, Brenda a Barbie doll, all right! Barbie with missing body parts, you mean!"

The image of a Barbie with her breasts cut off struck me so funny I guffawed. That set Judy off. Egged on, I cracked up, the guys beside us clueless as to what was so freaking hilarious. "Bet you never thought you'd see the day," wheezed Judy, "when you'd laugh about this!"

"No I did not! Ha-ha," I laughed, giving her a high five. Another high-five.

And just like that, I found my way through the rubble to the other side. My head connected to my body.

Devastation yes, but with friends, finally, a way through the rubble.

#21 - The Devil and Divine

A FRIEND ASKED on Facebook if any of us had ever experienced God's intervention. I wrote back, sure, all the time. Here is just one of those times.

I used to live in San Jose, CA, and so was familiar with the demonic elements of Highway 9 that wound through the mountain to the town of Felton and Mt. Hermon Christian Writers Conference. In 1978, I moved away from CA--but in the mid-80s drove down from Seattle to the conference using the main drag, Highway 17. Mid-conference, I was asked to take an editor back to the San Jose airport and on my return decided to take Highway 9. I'd missed the beauty of this old road with its majestic dense woods.

I was driving a V-dub pop top camper van at the time and was coming up around a curve to the summit, cliff to my right, and needed to shift gears. My clutch gave out. Having no control over my car, I slid back, off the road toward the cliff. Before I could react, my van stopped. Gingerly I climbed down from the driver's seat and went around to look. All that stopped me from plunging backwards down a steep cliff was one small mossy log. The only log. We didn't have words back then like "shock and awe." But that was me. Shocked. Awed.

I did know I couldn't stand on the roadside, or get back into the van, or walk the nine miles downhill in my pretty pink heels. All three were far too dangerous. I'd not yet started to panic or even had time to pray when a humongous red pickup truck came roaring up from behind, muffler rattling, passed by, and then pulled over to the side. A red-neck vehicle. Rusty, dinged bumpers, guns on a rack in the cab. A big burly man with red beard and bandana on his brow got out.  Dear God in heaven...

I stood numbly while he gave me a nod and took a long, hard look at my right back tire snugged up to the log and then down the cliff to probable death. He gave me a look of surprise. "Someone's watching out for you. And it seems God sent me and my wife to get you safely away. This is a dangerous stretch. Eight women disappeared off this road last week alone."

My knees started to wobble.

"We weren't going to come this way, but something made us change our mind. Get your stuff, climb into the cab with my wife. We'll take you down to Felton and I'll help you find a tow truck."

I hopped in and met another red-neck angel, sent to deliver me from evil. They were as good as their word, got me safely to Felton and arranged for a tow. We parted teary-eyed, all three of us grateful for divine mercies in the dark shadow of evil.

So, yes, I have known God's intervention. Not always, but enough.

#20 - Living Stone

 Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple.

I WAS NINE when my parents moved to Meteor Ranch, a Christian Camp and Conference Center in Northern California. One of the things Dad did while we were there was to build a fifty-foot rock wall at the end of the swimming pool, and it was a lovely hot summer day when he made the stone plaque to be set into it. My two sisters and I watched as he first tried one thing and then another to create the letters. He finally used medical rubber tubing.

“Let yourselves be built, as living stones, into a spiritual temple.”

The plaque was duly installed and remained for more than fifty years after our departure.

At Dad’s death forty-one years later, in 2003, I used photography of that wall for his funeral brochure; something about the wall and plaque has always comforted me, and challenged me. How does one become a spiritual temple?

I didn't realize at the time my mother was doing exactly this. The woman who ran the ranch took in welfare cases as cash flow and didn't trouble herself with their care. I learned for the first time the shadow of evil; how it hid in the light and presented a persona of oozing holiness. She abused and misused the vulnerable, she robbed the elderly, she manipulated those fleeing addiction. She cheated them all, toyed with them all, skewered them all to their weakest points. She was a force of her own. No one stood up to her. I developed a healthy fear.

I watched her deny twelve-year-old Richie needed shoes; my father had to cut the toes out of tennies to save him foot pain. She stole his birthday money. She made him grow petunias in the roots of a tree and punished him when they wilted and died. She kept him at endless chores, and Saturday nights he sometimes fell asleep buffing the dining room floor for Sunday church. I can still hear the hateful shrill of her screaming only a few nights after our arrival, startling me awake and up out of bed with thudding heart and goosebumps like gravel on my skin. She had him outdoors in the moonlight, bare chested and skinny, hanging up his bedsheets while taking swings at him and brow-beating him with a tongue so sharp it made me bleed in my soul. I hid under my covers. His crime? He'd wet the bed. These things I witnessed and didn't understand. Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple. A month into our stay, she came after my sisters and me.

Through those double doors she flew 50 years ago
and the tableware flew

Linda, Tresa, and I had just set the tables for the summer's first campers when in she stormed through the kitchen's swinging doors, sails unfurled and raging like a wind out of nowhere, sweeping the tables clean, first one arm and then another, tableware and cups flying. The metallic clattering, the skittering, the dull thud of plastic bouncing, the purple-faced screaming, the shock of it all put my sisters and I into paralysis. Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple. Our crime? We hadn't dusted the tables. No one told us to. My mother charged in, double doors swinging. That day on the ranch the battle line between good and evil was drawn.

I spent the remaining seven months watching my mother build herself, like stone, into a spiritual temple of protection--though I didn't understand it at the time and not until now. But her love for the afflicted never withered in the face of cruelty. She was a fortress for each man, boy, and troubled woman on the ranch. She lent a listening ear, offered a kind word, gave out special favors. When we didn't feel like going out of our way, she made us embrace the sad and lonely. She sent us on evening walks with blind Uncle Earl, joined us in playing afternoon dominoes with him, using his set of olive wood dominoes from Jerusalem with their shiny brass dots and interlocking pieces. She played tricks on Jack to make him laugh. She made friends with the women. She gave Richie a nickel for every spelling word he got right.  Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple. 

Dad's Wall 2012

A few years ago I went down to the ranch and, with my son's help, brought Dad’s plaque home. I asked Mum if she'd like to have it.

"Where did you get that?"

"Meteor Ranch."

"Meteor Ranch?” she asked, agitated. “I don’t remember this. Did we live there?”

"Yes, California."

Mum was fading into dementia.  She could hardly see or hear as it was. She shuffled around the house constantly looking for things. A far cry from the woman who’d loved the unloved: the young boys, the old men, the recovering alcoholics.

"Yes, do you remember Richie? You were going to adopt him." I thought this would jar her memory, but she shook her head in frustration. "Dad made this plaque for the stone wall."

“You hauled it all the way up here?”

I don’t know if she remembers dad’s work or not. From time to time, perhaps. And while I'd known it could be a gamble, I was still disappointed the plaque wasn't quite the gift I’d hoped. But reading the words again and remembering what Mum couldn't of the day Dad had created each letter--my sisters and I watching, wondering what they would spell--I finally understood. My mother was a spiritual temple, not only at the ranch but throughout her life, befriending the lost and loving those very few would. Love as solid as stone.

My gift to her suddenly became hers to me. An answer to metaphor I finally understand.

Prayer: Thank you for the living example of my mother’s love for those we tend to ignore. May we all be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple.

Jack Kimble and me with Lucky, 1962
Mum wrote to Jack, a recovering alcoholic, for years.
He called me Brinder. I loved it.

Roy Wilbee's stone wall, 1962

#19 - Prolog for Possible New Book: Living With Ravens

Once God sent Elijah into hiding at Creek Cherith, a barren and lonely place. "You will drink from the brook," He said. "And I have ordered the ravens to feed you." Sometimes life is lived in the hard places. And waiting on ravens is the last thing we want. Wait. Is it?

I received your biopsy results. I’ve scheduled an appointment for you to come in and talk with me on Monday.”

Most of us can recall a time in our lives when bad news hits like a knock-out punch to the gut, a stunning blow that floods our senses with all the force of an imploding dam, frigid backwater coming at us in a swift noisy din and leaving us unable to breathe, flailing for the surface—wherever the surface might be. I sputtered, “I have cancer.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, you have DCIS.”

I want to point out right away this isn’t a book for the fearless and faithful—like my friend Billi Clem, who met her DCIS breast cancer with gratitude, wonder, and a delightful sense of humor. I’m not like her, more’s the pity, but there are a lot of women who are. They face devastating loss with fortitude. I envy them, but I am not one of them. This book isn’t for them.

It’s for people like me. People who are afraid, who find faith difficult. People who seem to endure one thing after another until it becomes difficult to see light at the end of the tunnel. You see, cancer isn’t my first crisis. Nor is dysautonomia my friend Valerie’s, or macular degeneration Barbara’s. With each new trauma or disappointment, people like us stumble about in familiar darkness of heartache and want, unable to navigate our way to safety while everyone else seems to lead normal lives.

Scott Peck had it right when he opened his book The Road Less Traveled with “Life is difficult.” Yet for some, life seems to be more difficult than for others. And here’s the bad news. There are no snappy answers. This is the whole point of Job in the Old Testament, is it not? He’s the most victimized man in the Bible, yet despite his anguished beseeching, his weeping and wailing and wearing of sackcloth and ashes, God did not answer his questions. His friends sure did—citing bumper sticker theology and Facebook simplicities, dishing up isolated scripture that had nothing to do with the whole. A torment unto itself, make no mistake. Until finally God did step in. Not to comfort Job or answer his questions—but to rail at his friends for their audacity and smugness. Which begs the question then, is there hope for the troubled?

Remember Elijah? He too was from the Old Testament. He’s the chap God assigned to take on Queen Jezebel and her wicked god Baal, a god who demanded the sacrifice of babies and whose rituals involved eating feces. In a maelstrom of fire, Elijah burned down Baal’s altar; and Jezebel, in a white-hot fury, came at him with all the resources of her arsenal and army. A scary time for Elijah—much like cancer for us, and financial ruin, kids on drugs, betrayal, chronic pain, debilitating disease, divorce.

Elijah ran pell-mell for the desert where God hid him amongst the stony outcroppings of Cherith Creek. There he was, on the “Most Wanted” list, his life in peril, and all he’s got is a crummy little creek in a beastly hot desert. Oh, yes, the ravens. Foul, glossy black things they are, eating nothing all day but road kill. Yet in Elijah’s extreme deprivation and isolation, fear pummeling his gut, the ravens became God’s saving grace. They brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening. Who would have thought that carrion-eating birds would be a man’s only hope of survival? It’s almost offensive. At times it feels offensive. But then, sometimes that’s what grace looks like.

This is the good news. In the tight spots, God sends us grace by way ravens. I know, I know, not exactly what we want. Filthy birds with decay in their beaks. We want “cured,” “livable wages,” “love.” We all have our list. We all want that window when the door slams shut, boxing us in with no way out. And so it’s easy to dismiss the ravens—not even see them—these creative gifts of grace in the chaos of our fear and anxiety and grief. And thus we cover ourselves in sackcloth and ashes as did Job, and we cry along with him, “Oh, that I was never born!”

My mother used to tell me I reminded her of a 1950’s baby toy, the plastic happy clowns with roly-poly bottoms that babies batted at. Easy to knock over—but, with beans in their bums, the clowns bounced right back up. Bat, bob, bounce. Up and down, bobbling around. Oh such fun! But not in real life. Such treatment for real can depress the most spirited of souls. “Life keeps taking a whack at you,” my mother would say, “but you always bounce back.” I used to ask, “But what happens if I can’t bounce anymore? It’s getting harder and harder.” I was in my fifties when I began asking, “What if I break?”

“You won’t break,” she’d say.

But I did break, and I have broken. Cancer broke me.

Living With Ravens: An Odyssey of Fear, Faith, and Grace is my story—the latest episode, at least, in a history of sometimes bitter disappointment. You see, my whole life can be viewed as a struggle between fear and faith—and grace. And so I write for people who can’t be made whole anymore by biblical talking points, bumper sticker theologies, or Facebook triteness. Because this I know, despite our pain, confusion, and grief, despite our illness and in His silence, He nonetheless sends us the ravens when life puts us again in isolation at the lonely, barren shoreline of Elijah’s Cherith.

One day in the parking lot of my son’s workplace, I was again in tears. Cancer’s complications were taking their toll and each visit to the plethora of doctors only served to deepen my despair. Like Job, I was on my knees, wailing, weeping, beating my chest, dressed in sackcloth and ashes. Like Elijah, I was back at Cherith and stuck there—isolated in the beastly heat and dribbling creek of the desert. It can be a nasty business for the beleaguered. How was I to go on? I looked up and saw love and a kind of anguish in my son’s eyes.

“All I want right now,” he said to me, “is to enjoy the day with my mother.”

There it was, a raven in the desolation; divine grace in the wilderness. Suddenly all I wanted was to spend a day with my son. We went out to Marymoore Park where we biked through the trees; we kayaked, too, along the riverbank where dragonflies zip-darted over the water’s surface.

You see, God will find a way to penetrate the evils of this world to give us hope. 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. The riverbank, the dragonflies. A son who loved me. And in the end, is this not what God did for Job? Inspire awe? No answers to Job's brow-beating questions. No insight into the evils that befall. Just questions of His own. “Who set the stars?” he asked Job. “Who carved the mountains? Who put the leviathan in the sea? Who turns the earth in its seasons and sets the birds on their course?”

Last summer and in between reconstructive surgeries, suffering chronic pain and uncomfortable disfigurement, friends and I went on an exploring mission in the Canadian Yukon for our boss, taking his posh, brand new ATVs up to Paddy’s Peak. We bounced over waist-high boulders, crisscrossed glacial creeks, wound our way up an old stream bed, climbed steeply to the alpine and a carpet of wild flowers I’d never seen before. Everyone scrambled out, headed for the glacial lake our boss intended to make as a stopping point for new tours out of Skagway, AK. Able only to scrabble the glacial rock with difficulty, I carefully followed. When I finally caught up, Bill hollered over to me, “Well? What do you think?”

I stood fully and slowly turned, taking in the 360° view. I couldn’t speak for the tears in my eyes.

“Who made this place?” God asked in my silence. “Who sheered the cliff face, dropping it 6,000’ to Lake Bennett below? Who cradled the glacier, who empties its icy lagoon? Who guides the feet of the mountain goats and who feeds the artic squirrels? Who sets the breeze to rest the birds’ wings?”

In that moment, overcome by all that God was, all that He created, all that He gives us, all I wanted to do was to bow before God, as did Job. “I did not know my soul could still sing,” I simply told Bill—and turned a corner in my soul.

My premise is that we ignore ravens at our peril. But if we can learn to recognize them, appreciate them for what and who they are, we can then know we’re not forgotten or abandoned on the stony outcrop of our pain. The same God who sends us ravens in our darkest hours is the same God who sets the universe.

He loves us.

And nothing else matters.

Not far from the glacier lake, looking down from Paddy's Peak onto Lake Bennett below.

from brenda: if this would be a book you'd find helpful, please let me know.

Brenda@BrendaWilbee.com

#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.

#17: Hard Times Can Teach the Joy of Giving

Taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves...to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over.  —Hebrews 13:8 (RSV)

When my children were younger, I often worried about the permanent effects our near-poverty might have on them. My daughter Heather remembers being forced to sit alone in a classroom because she didn't have enough money to buy pizza with her classmates. I remember her putting the labels off her friend's cast-off Keds and gluing them onto the heels of her cheap imitations. She also remembers missing social events because my illness or work prevented my driving her to them. All I could do was pray for God's blessing on my children, and that He would keep all of us from bitterness.

This past Mother's Day, I began to see how God was answering my prayer. The first evidence was a lovely bouquet from Heather, who was away at college. It spoke to me of her love and understanding. The other, oddly, was a bill that arrived the same day. It was Heather's monthly reminder from an international charity. How can she afford to do this, I wondered, when she needs every penny she earns for school?

It was then I realized that her painful memories had not been a burden but a blessing. Hard times had taught my daughter the joy of giving to someone less fortunate than herself. I forwarded her bill, grateful that my children were turning out fine. Exceptional, in fact. And I breathed a prayer of gratitude.

Dear God, thank You for all of the abundance You bring when we trust You to turn our very little into so very much.

Originally published May, Saturday 18, 1996, by Guidepost's Devotionals