Labor

Morgan Man died June 5th. His aggressively re-growing brain cancer resurfaced in January after four solid years of intermission, and it grew aggressively until it disabled him, until it sent him to Seattle for desperate treatment, it sent him to Health and Rehab for chemo which only bled him, and finally, it took his language, and then it took him. 

He didn't die alone; on the contrary, many of us died with him. We died of heroics and logistics and details and exhaustion. We died praying, keeping the vigil, at bedside and memorial service. We died of letters of remembrance and long distance. I died. I died of dreams hamstrung and hope obscured, of 30 years of service that seems to have been lost somehow in the shuffle, leaving me a refugee, out of place. 

Well, it is a tumultuous time for many people; so many of us are treading water, hoping for a lifeboat or a shore before we are too wooden to move. 

It's a transition, we know this. Transitions are life and death matters. It's not simply a developmental stage, where, for example, all of a sudden now you can manage riding a bicycle. This is a wounding to the bone; cleaving between joint and sinews. Like Jacob, we wrestle with an Angel, and though we refuse to let go, and we demand a blessing because we are despairingly brave enough to be desperately optimistic with God, the encounter leaves it's wounding scar, and henceforth we are halt and not swift of foot.

It is the same with carrying to term. How vulnerable, the closer to deliverance one is, the more vulnerable. I know enough to cry, and to laugh, and to panic, and to soothe my own fears. But it is in full sight of my weakness and my dependence on Grace. At some point, in this hard labor of transition, you have to scream and push.

Oddly, the more relaxed you are, the easier it is to go through. Learning to relax into loss, into pain, into uncertainty, into vulnerable compromise, (into screaming) into the possibility (and inevitability) of death, and that this is normal, this is what we can expect here, it is common to all people throughout history forwards and backwards, this is the transition. 

What shall deliverance be? 

I still hold so much tension. I have strongholds of hesitation and frozen feet, of reticence and emotional shut-down, of behavior loops that go nowhere like an old TV with a malfunctioning horizontal hold. I am called on it daily. My body reacts to this interior/exterior tension with nagging complaints and physical expressions that will not lie for me, which make it very clear that I am under siege and taking flak. I want to heal, but I am hyper alert.  I want to rest, but there is still the hardest work to be done. I want sanctuary, but here is only now and the rest I seek must be taken as a host, as a pledge. 

Well, I have not broken faith with You, but I'm sure I have broken all my suppositions and many of my boundaries.