As I sit down to write today, my heart feels heavy beyond what I can bear. As the weather turns cool and crisp to welcome fall, it reminds me of a cool and bright September day one year ago today.
It was the anniversary of the day that one my dearest Philadelphia friends lost her father. Selah rode with me as I drove to pick up our weekly Tastykake donation from the factory. As I shared with her how we needed to be prepared to give lots of extra hugs to our mourning friend, Selah asked a series of probing questions about why people died. I remember sitting at the traffic light at York & Aramingo, turning toward her and saying, “Sometimes God takes people when they are very old, and sometimes when they are just tiny babies or any time in between. It’s very hard but we have to try to trust Him that He is loving and He knows when it is better for them to be with Him than to be with us.”
My belief in my own explanation to my girl was put on trial just a few miles down the road. As I sat at another traffic light, I heard an alert from my phone that I had a new text message. I was on call for a mother in early labor, and also had a dear friend who had been in labor the day before, so I glanced over at the message, ready for some good news on one of those two fronts. Instead, I read words that I could barely digest. Tragically, my friend and her husband welcomed their precious baby boy that morning, but had to say goodbye to him in the same hour of his birth. I made it home through the tears, sobbed for a good part of the afternoon until I had to pull myself together to go help this other laboring mother. Every birth before, and every birth since, I have welcomed each baby with joyful tears sneaking down my face. Despite the joy of this new life, I had no tears left.
This past year and the past several months in particular have been rich with both births and deaths. We welcomed our own sweet Clementine Constance into our family last October and as a labor doula I have been able to witness another dozen first breaths. Yet more than once, death has come and left us sobbing. In the past months we’ve seen two young families lose a father – one just this week to cancer that was ultimately untreatable, another to heart failure after a successful cancer treatment and the expectation that life was settling back into a pre-cancer normal. Heart-wrenching. Our neighbor lost his mother. A young mother I met at the park the other afternoon was figuring out how to do life after her own mother was taken in the span of a 4 week battle with cancer. It’s too much to bear.
As a doula I notice and converse with pregnant women all the time. Suddenly, it feels like we are just as keenly noticing and walking beside people dealing with death. The intensity of witnessing birth and observing death causes one to look at the rest of life in between with a discerning lens. They are the kind of events that rearrange your priorities. You don’t care about fashion or politics when you just lost your loved one. A mother doesn’t think about the pain and work she’s gone through when she sees her baby’s face for the first time. In those moments the bond of love, the privilege of relationship are valued above all else. So why not in between? Why do fear and deadlines and appearances trump loving the people around us well? Being surrounded by life and death, I’m starting to deny those lesser things the opportunity to bully me. One thing matters the most. Love. Simply love.
Love God. Love your neighbor. Love one another. Love like Jesus. Love your enemies. Every other act of glory hangs on these commandments.
So as I write this update under the weightiness of these experiences of life and death, I can’t think of any other way other than to frame our stories and reports than in the context of love. I can’t think of anything mattering more. This is how we are being loved. This is how we are being used to love . . .
We have been the grateful recipients of a magnificent outpouring of love by Goss Memorial Church who sent a team of workers to help us with the repair needs in our home. We knew that our sagging kitchen floor was a sign that repairs were needed that were beyond our ability and means. Until the floor came up, we had no idea just how bad the beams really were. We now have a sturdy floor, the framing for real walls that will hold insulation, functioning electric and even a heat system installed in the floor! Frank has been working hard to complete the work in the bathroom above that will allow us to seal up the kitchen ceiling & walls, after which will come flooring, cabinets, sink & countertop.
Living through several months of a renovation has put us in position of depending upon the love and care of our neighbors as well. We had several weeks where the only running water in our home was in the basement sink. Our neighbors Walter & Diana were generous to let us come shower at their house anytime. Selah had an afternoon playdate with two little girls up the street so Frank & I could go to Home Depot while another friend sat with our two other sleeping kids. This is the kind of loving community that keeps us sane as parents and that we never imagined we would have in our own neighborhood ten years ago.
When self-pity would try to sneak in for my single-sink situation, it would usually be about the same time that we would get a request from our neighbor Priscilla on the other side who has had NO running water in her home. She does however have three small girls. Frank fills up buckets and jugs of water for them, and now that we do finally have a functioning shower in our house, they come over to clean up here.
This month when Priscilla’s third baby was born, I felt overwhelmed with the gravity of her need – a young single mom brining a baby home to a house with no running water, only a dozen or so diapers, no wipes, a pile of dishes and a scant amount of food in the kitchen. As I let her needs be known, people lovingly responded and within the next few days we received boxes of diapers from Georgia and Ohio, baby wipes, meals from across town, and groceries that included thoughtful kid friendly foods for the two big sisters.
As a missionary family we do have a vision statement that articulates our desire to build a community of Christ-centered families and homes in our community. But when it comes down to it, what we are doing, what we are about is love. Simply love.
We love with clean water. We love with a yard full of toys. We love with van rides and scotch tape and wrenches to fix bikes. We love with cute baby smiles on “walks” that are really “prayer walks.” We love with cool cloths on a laboring mama’s brow. We love with tears and sympathy when loved ones pass away. We love with desperate prayers uttered while our thumbs hover over the phone screen, ready to call 9-1-1 when shouts and threats ring out on our block. We love with “I’m sorry” and “I was wrong” to each other when we fail to love the first time around. We love in all these ways because He first loved us. We love because Love is Person, and we think that everybody needs to know Him.
What a privilege to fill this space between first and last breaths with such a mission. Thank you, thank you Lord for choosing this life that holds such wide open space for us to pour out your love. Thank you friends for enabling us to be here and do this, for loving us so that we have more to give.
