Author Archives: emily

About emily

I love home in all the ways. I love being content and still pushing ahead to more. I love fresh air and how it makes me realize I'm so small in this great, created universe.

all saints’ day: a letter

For those unaware, in May 2018 my father died after nearly a decade of living with Alzheimers’. All Saints’ Day and All Saints’ Sunday in the Christian calendar provide an opportunity to remember and celebrate our loved ones who have died, those saints who have left this life and are now wholly in the presence of God, having gone before us as fellow members of God’s family. Today I give thanks for my dad and direct my thoughts to him.

Hi Dad. Still miss you. You may know – I don’t know what is revealed to you – we have a baby girl. Your first granddaughter. Now the season between your birthday and death day will be marked by this new life, just before Easter.

I wish I could hear your advice about parenting. About so much. This time of year is a wistful one, and it reminds me of going to school, soccer, homework, walking in the hills, raking… remember when you helped me rake leaves at that big house for hours and hours, when French club was raising money? You are such a good dad. You were so invested in us and what we were doing. You didn’t seem to have big plans for yourself, your career. You focused on living quietly and faithfully.

Saint. You were a saint. Not because of your perfection (who has that?) or your great successes in ministry (you might not even think you had any). Because, good grief, you loved Jesus. You loved all of us because of how He loved you and you Him. Your heart was transformed and you turned away from so much of what you had formerly loved to follow Christ.

You were and are a saint. Now your faith is sight, fulfilled through the passage of death into God’s presence and entire, whole life. You’re experiencing what I long for — wholeness. Completion. Healing. Utter joy. What range of emotions do you have? I wonder if new emotions exist that we don’t know about here.

Saint. Faithful to the end. Just like Mom was to you. Believing, trusting, serving. You went through the door far too soon for my liking. But my will did not make the determination; God decided. He decided you had run your race, kept the faith, fought your good fight. He decided you needed to go Home. He’ll do that on my behalf too. I hope I accept it as you did. I hope I keep praising, praying, loving, even when my end is in sight.

One thing I loved about your particular sainthood is how you kept creating. Your art grew simpler and more abstract, but that mark of the Creator lasted on you a good long while. You knew, in someplace deeper than memory and cognition and speech, Whose you were. You knew your allegiance, and you knew your destination. And I know the Lord never departed from you or your heart, even after we couldn’t communicate, even after you stopped getting out of bed. He never left, and you never left His presence. In fact, you may have mysteriously been more and more in it, even as you seemed more absent to us.

Until, one glorious and grievous moment, you were no longer in our company, no longer breathing scraggly gasps. No longer diseased. One moment you died and lived. Your eyes gave up their sight only to see anew, fully, and you saw God.

We saw only you, not much different from the hours before. We saw only that your chest stopped moving. We sighed, somehow both saddened and relieved at your relief. We wept and didn’t leave. I think people always did want to be around you. Now we still couldn’t leave. I felt that the funeral home people came to take you too soon, yet at the right time. They wheeled you out and I haven’t seen you since. Not in the same way.

Gosh I miss you. I want to walk with you through leaves and dirt, hearing your harmonica waft in the woods. I want to tell you about our life and see you play with my cat and maybe you’d build us a crib for this baby. I want to play word games and beat you at Dragons and try to get better at frisbee under your guidance. I want to sing worship and hymns to your guitar playing and hear your joy as you eat my scones. I want you to read my writing and tell me it’s good.

You might want those things too, but you have something greater now than all you had before. You have life abundant, permanent, in the unfiltered presence, unmasked love of Almighty God. As magical as it is to watch copper and golden leaves drift to earth in the autumn sun, still I long for what you have. I long for you, yet more for what you have now. And I long for what’s to come, when Jesus makes all things new, even these leaves and light.

Saint. My father, my brother in Christ, my fellow image bearer. Pray for me. That I would follow in that good way your feet know so well.

I love you always.

Your Emmie.

This is a good time for Where I Belong by Switchfoot.

of age

Today I turn 32. WHAT.

Honestly, at this point it’s mostly just weird. I find it hard to fathom time. If I think too deeply about it, I might grow depressed – only because it all feels too big and hard to understand. I guess it’s a little sad, because I’m that much closer to death, and I wish we had more/older kids by now, and I feel my body being unhappy.

On the other hand, I’m that much closer to my cancer cure date, death means being with God, I have more life experience now as a parent, and our marriage is more solid since we’ve had this forced parental delay.

Age, like any change and transition, means both loss and gain. Grief for sure, and then newness. More discovery, deeper understanding, greater perspective. It means I’ve had more time to spend with Jesus. Also, we’re that much closer to our kids being out of the house, our retirement, and more; apparently internally I’m a much older person. There’s a lot of good stuff that comes with the passage of time.

The sky is now hidden as rainclouds have moved in. Things are changing all the time. When the rain starts I miss the sun. When the sun shines I miss the clouds. I can welcome the rain and then tire of it again. I am constantly grieving change and longing for it. This tension hurts sometimes, this tug at my heart.

I love this world, yet I’m weary of it. I don’t want to leave it, but it just isn’t satisfying. It’s not enough. Only in You can I rest. And You – You are unchanging, always the same forever.

“You cannot change, yet You change everything.” (All Sons & Daughters)

The everlasting arms, the utter foundation of all that exists, of reality. Talk about something hard to fathom. You are fullness; there can never be more than You. Nothing can alter who You are, and no one can make You do anything.

Only in You can I rest, Father. Only in You, Christ, can my tensions resolve – You who are God and man, who used death to defeat itself. Only in You, Spirit, can my grief be comforted and my eyes lifted to beyond myself and my heart resurrected.

Turning 32 without You would be a wholly different experience from what it is; You number my days and determine when it rains. With my life literally in Your hands, every next year matters little as a number. Where I stay is every next moment in Your company.

What else is there? You are Life.

On the edge of now and then

[in which I provide no answers]

Is there really going to be a day when all my longings are answered? When my frailty forgets itself and my poor eyesight turns clear?

I imagine the routine pangs of disappointment will fade suddenly into the kind of joy that hurts.

I imagine the shadowy echoes of the trauma which has shaped us against our volition will reveal a new kind of glory and praise previously impossible or unknown.

I imagine there will be stories told for eternal ages about all the times we thought everything was lost, but actually the rescue was around some surprising corner.

I wonder if there will still be storms and torrents and ice, but we will all rejoice in the inclement weather because we not only have utter shelter in Christ, but entirely new bodies that come alive in the elements.

Maybe opposition will cease even as variety remains.

Maybe there won’t be fear, but right now my body aches, my heart pines and yearns and cries, and my eyes yield to the ache and yield their own music of tears, in the song of longing the earth is belting and whispering, whimpering, shouting:

COME!

Come.

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy and come.

My outlook is brittle. I’m parched and tired. My imagination might not pull through this drought. How long?

Is there really a day of fulfillment of hope? When hope can at last be laid to rest forever because its object is with us?

Even on the best days – especially those – I find I might crack, like a great root breaks through a sidewalk or wall on its search for more. Desperate.

So little satisfies. I want to burst through the heavy clouds of mortality and this old creation and find myself in unspeakable wholeness.

I want an awful lot of things, but this one longing is greater, its wound more persistent than any other I’ve felt in this life.

Now there is only hope. Then there will be only substance. Answer.

There, I imagine the everlasting arms are waiting and will embrace me. There, I will look at God and in an instant nothing else will matter, yet everything else will mean more than it did before.

Is this day really coming? Why so long, O Lord?

Come, Lord Jesus; make me as I should be. Make this dying world new. And if not yet, make me what I must be for this time.

And make this ache matter.

////

I can’t do justice to this feeling. It could be depression, except that it’s more forward-looking than that. I feel it in moments like these:

  • Looking at the galaxy
  • Spectacular sunsets
  • People-watching
  • A beautiful musical strain
  • The perfect words coming together like a family
  • Flocks of birds
  • A deep blue sky
  • Lines of traffic
  • Nursing my child
  • Playing the piano

It’s a feeling like I just want to RUN. And never stop running. And run right into the air and over the horizon, over the clouds, right into the sun.

Is this why I used to try looking right at the sun? Is this why when I snuggle my husband or my daughter I wish I could get even closer than skin? It’s like I’m tapping my head against the door into the fullness of reality, and on this side is the minute bit I can know, and on the other side is You, God. Like I’m always just missing You, kind of like seeing a flash in my peripheral vision. Like a thought that flees only as I Just barely know it’s there.

I’m on the wrong edge of utter happiness.

////

How is it that every single thing that happens on this earth is on Your watch? That this leaf falling and those people laughing and that cigarette factory and every molecule and every world war are in Your hands, and – I believe – haven’t existed in vain?

Surely such a thing is beyond me. You are beyond me. That’s at once my problem and my reassurance.

Maybe I need far less than I think. Maybe now, as it will be then, I just look right at You. Just look right along that beam into Your astonishing, sweet, holy Face.

So I think I’ll try to live like that’s true, and let You handle the rest.

O, have mercy.