Fall foliage

And a new narrative

50

dear friends. can you believe our little newsletter has been chugging along for fifty mondays in a row? thank you for enjoying the ride with me. today’s snippets are a bit more somber. praying it brings us pause for a moment, to sit at the foot of the cross in awe, wondering how both sorrow and love flow mingled down.

a gravesite liturgy

My baby brother is teaching me what it means to caringly fold others into grief. It’s less of a vortex. And more like communion. A sharing of weight and tears made strangely sweet when borne together. He asked a few of us to join him at his friend’s grave, his first visit in nine years. We hear words like closure and healing. Important. Yet I sensed grace more profoundly, an outpouring of something we cannot fully comprehend, and yet can fully feel.

An excerpt we read aloud from A Liturgy for the Anniversary of a Loss:

When I look again at that loss,
I see you in the deepest gloom
of it, weeping with me,
even as I hear you whispering
that this is not the end, but only the still
grey of the dawn before the world begins.

Do not waste my greatest sorrows, O God,
but use them to teach me to live
in your presence—fully alive to pain and joy
and sorrow and hope—in the places
where my shattering and your shaping meet.

an album 💿

Eight years ago this week, I got help. Panic attacks and suicidal ideation had become ingrained as my frayed embodied soul’s default response to life’s difficulties. I was desperate for a new way to live. Jesus is kind. He gave me help in many ways I can see, and some I may never fully realize. In 2020, I made an ebenezer stone: this hymns album alongside a digital booklet with my story (like those old-school CD cover jackets with behind-the-scenes notes from the artist 💿 heh). I needed to mark the Lord’s active work in my life. That I really am not my own, but belong body and soul to Him. This is providence.

In some sense, it feels like I am only eight years old. 2016 was the beginning of my unmaking. Like the undragoning of Eustace Clarence Scrubb, the Lord has gently ripped me raw. Unmade. And now am being remade. The dark days of suicidal ideation have been brought to the light. Sunning, softening, dissipating under the rays of Another Way, remolding into hope. Sometimes it feels like I’m a completely different person. I was a shadow of myself. Perhaps that’s what the point of this side of eternity is—to keep walking toward the Light, knowing that one day, we will cast no more shadows. Until then, we can live like resurrection power is on our side. For we have a suffering Savior who changed the narrative so our story does not end in death.

See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:19

a hike

How poetic that it is fall. A visceral reminder how only a good and powerful Creator can make even dying be beautiful.

fall foliage is us. dying and rising. jesus is the greatest palliative doctor 🥹

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be well, friends! will bring back the lighthearted next week 🤭

love,
reb