Remember

The most daring thing I have ever done, as a mother, is pour out all the cream from the top of our milk late one night when everyone else was sleeping. We don’t ever buy two percent or low fat around here. We drink milk like the cow made it and so I was playing with fire to take the best part all for myself. It was a lovely moment and that’s about the extent of me living dangerously in our quiet little life here in the suburbs.

It’s a very unassuming existence, but I am passionate about it.

Anne Voskamp recently featured a guest blog post by Heather Thompson Day, where she reminded me that passion is “about doing what we feel called to do, even though it brings us great suffering.” That’s why they call the crucifixion ‘The Passion of Christ.’ She writes: “Passion should come with warning signals. It’s a strong wave over all who dare to greet it….there is a fine line between faith and delusion. I know what it feels like to have your dreams bury you beneath them. That’s why I was drowning. I jumped head first into the waves of passion, thinking it would bring me safely to my purpose. But passion does nothing safely. It’s a harrowing first stroke into deep water with a strong current. It offers only risk, pain and reward. Stay on the shore if you want safety.”

Passion, for me, usually involves family or community. I could pour myself out in a thousand directions but, for now, my own family is requiring all of me. I am not very good at multitasking and, thankfully, my ambitions are content revolving around the home front and the community surrounding us. At the heart of it, I just want everyone to have a good mom and dad. Many things move me, but when I hear of children who do not have parents, I cry. Money is helpful and education is beautiful, but the image of a low income man pedalling his small child home from school sends ‘all is well’ signals into my soul. Child on the back, grins on both faces, loaf of white bread and alive chicken in the plastic crate tied onto the front. That’s rich in a world where we don’t have to look far to find breakdown, dysfunction and drama within families.

And so I may not appear to have climbed ladders or reached many peaks, but in having a family of my own, it would seem that there has been a marriage of dreams and reality for me. I mother with gusto because I can and because I was made for this, not because it is easy. Putting my back into family life is my way of investing in the bigger picture. Suffering seems a strong word for my passion – it’s all so enjoyable – but it’s gotten me thinking. Mine is a literal weight in my arms and on my back. That’s why I’ve got biceps. There’s a lot of strength and very little speed. It has stripped me of sound sleep for twenty years (deprivation of this sort is classed as torture.) Clear thinking and uninterrupted thought processes are a thing of the past. It requires much of me physically, mentally and emotionally during both day and night and I am seldom alone. That’s quite a thing for an extroverted introvert to navigate. This is where it’s at for now and I don’t generally do things that might disrupt the peace and order that we have. Drinking all the cream has been the extent of it.

And then my friend asked if I wanted to fly to Victoria Falls with her for the day in the same way she might have asked me if I’d like a cup of tea. The men in her family had meetings there, one of them is a pilot and there was room for me in the plane if I wanted it. I said, “YES!” pretty much instantly even though the craziness of my response made the kitchen floor swirl a little. Eight children to consider, one being a breastfed baby, and yet I behaved like a teenager in her gap year.

I heard the word, “surprising” whispered from the Lord at the beginning of the year and because I wouldn’t have dreamt this up if I’d tried, I saw it as a gift from Him and didn’t delay in receiving it. Surprising for real.

The morning of the flight, I crept about touching children gently, covering this one with his woven, cotton blanket and a little kiss for that one. Light as a fairy with my one bag, off I went. It was all going so well but that’s when the tears began. I wasn’t sad or scared or worried, I was just suddenly moving about way lighter than I have done for a while. The lack of responsibility and permission to be off duty for so long a time was unnerving. I think the tears were my body’s way of dealing with shock.

Operating with passion gives us energy and joy, but it’s taxing and costly and we were never meant to withstand or manage alone.

We all need a reprieve from doing what we know to do. We can ride the waves and be dumped by them too for only so long before a siesta on the beach is in order. Yesterday’s tears helped me to remember where my heart is and also how much I needed to lay the burden down (even though it’s a good one), let go and remember.

In Deuteronomy 11, there is a call to remember woven throughout; a charge to keep the coals burning and the stories told so that our children and their children know about the works, miracles, provision, goodness and faithfulness of our God. Over time they add their stories to ours.

When we see with our own eyes what the Lord has done, we must not only tell the stories but write them down so that we cannot forget and neither can the generation after us.

Climbing into a tiny plane with some of my favourite people in the world, moon still in the sky, took my ‘living on the edge’ tactics to a whole new level. My heart was back in bed under the same roof as the Love of my Life and our children, but my body was swept through the clouds and washed under the roar of The Smoke that Thunders. God is parting skies and waters even today.

He rescues, relieves and, mysteriously, undertakes. We drank tea and sat around the table with friends we don’t often see; we witnessed, with our own eyes, one of the seven wonders of the world and we drove a manual car down a dirt road full of pot holes when we missed the right turning. Those surreal twelve hours, filled with spontaneity and wonder, were nothing short of the work of a God who sees and has been seeing His children since the beginning of time. It was a personal act of kindness from the One who has been making a way all the way.

God’s passion for us took Him to the cross! He held nothing back, suffered and died to make a way for us.

For you.

For me.

As He paid the price for each one of us, the sun stopped shining (Luke 23 v 45) and darkness covered the land. I’m not sure what happened, scientifically, in those hours, but when the Light of the World takes a world-full of sin upon Himself and dies, it would only be right that the greatest star in the sky would cease to shine.

I hope you know the next part of the story because it’s not the end, it’s actually the beginning! Just when you think it’s all over, He makes a way again. We must not forget that men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood by the empty tomb three days later (Luke 24). When the women, carrying spices, bowed down in fright with their faces to the ground, the men said to them,

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here;

He has risen!”

“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls;

all your waves and breakers have swept over me.”

Psalm 42 v 7

“It was not your children who saw what He did for you in the wilderness until you arrived at this place….but it was your own eyes that saw all these great things the Lord has done.”

Deuteronomy 11 v 5, 7

“These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.”

Deuteronomy 6 v 6 – 9

“No half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.”

J.R.R. Tolkien