FROM MY BACK PORCH IN THE SPRING
Thoughts on Seasons, Storms and Resurrection
If you’ve received my letters for any length, you know I often talk about my back porch. There’s nothing special about it except that everything about it is special to me. I do most of my writing from here, often beginning as the sun rises just over my right shoulder. I’m starting this letter to you on a Sunday in early April. It is overcast, with intermittent light rain and songbirds as my soundtrack. There is no construction noise to pollute the sounds of nature, just the occasional car driving by, perhaps on their way to church or to gather donuts or groceries for a morning at home or the week ahead.
It’s mildly windy, and there is some humidity in the air. The weatherman predicts storms in the wee hours of the night—something you grow accustomed to living in the South. Like magic, the grass that just last week was mostly hardened, and brown is now a lush green. I like to step barefoot on the grass each day, and I must say this is much more pleasant on the feet. The trees are blooming. First come the Bradford pears, the redbuds, and the dogwoods—their bright white and pink buds- bursting onto the scene full of personality as if to shout from the end of their branches that winter is in our rearview mirror. The variety of oak trees that live in the south are on deck. They will fill in the tree line in my yard, blocking the view of the farm with which we share a property line. Their pollen triggers allergies for many of us—an unpleasant side of a season that otherwise brings good news.
It is Monday morning now, 9 am on the dot, to be exact. The rest of my house is still quiet—the kids nestled in their beds after a long night of interrupted sleep. The storms did indeed blow over us last night. Our mid-south area won the lottery in receiving tornado warnings, so as it is safest to do, we huddled in the closet under the stairs, waiting for the all-clear for the storms to pass. Thank goodness for YouTube and meteorologists who have dedicated their lives to keeping us up-to-date by the minute, telling us when to take cover and when it is free to return to bed. These nocturnal storms are the worst. Your imagination can run wild when you can’t see exactly what is coming.
As my daughter has gotten older, she has become increasingly scared of storms. Her little body was shaking next to mine as we studied the radar and listened to the men telling us what they thought was happening. It didn’t help that the alarm went off on my phone every two minutes loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. Thank goodness for warnings, and also—phew. We practiced praying out loud, asking for protection, and mostly, we just cuddled in the closet, waiting for it to pass. As my daughter was learning real-time lessons on the impact of storms, my sweet son mistook it for bonus time to hang out and laugh.
As for me, I am utterly fascinated by storms—how it takes the right ingredients at the right time to get them going and how they can form these lines and cells that make their way from west to east, leaving, at times, all sorts of damage in their wake. And how is it that something so destructive can also display any kind of beauty that takes your breath away? It’s a mystery to me, and such is life. We can’t always predict the date and time of storms, and we certainly can’t predict how long they will last. Most of the time, just like seasons, they will eventually end, but they reveal things in their wake.
It’s Sunday again, and I sit in the same spot I was in a week ago. The scene is similar. It’s raining, and the birds are singing. The green grass is more vibrant, and the trees are filling in. This is all happening on the heels of the wildest week of storms that I can remember in my combined seventeen years of living in middle Tennessee. On Wednesday, we had a system come through that produced a record-setting number of warnings in its lifespan—one number I saw was 728 warnings, with 284 of them being tornado warnings. One touched down in our neighbor to the west, Selma, Tennessee. It did extensive damage, even tragically taking some lives.
In times like these, we stop to notice just how vulnerable we are in the face of storms. I’ve struggled a bit to write this letter. It doesn’t usually take me weeks to gather my thoughts, but something in me has told me to wait, pay attention, and listen. The transition from winter to spring has felt particularly acute to me. This winter was undoubtedly the harshest winter of my life. Never before have I felt the sting of death and the silence of dormancy as I did in those months. I have been through seasons of hope deferred before, but I had never been in this place where all hope seemed lost.
I received an invitation to a retreat at the beginning of March, sometime in February. That invitation lit a very dim light for me at the end of a long, dark tunnel. I remember thinking that if I could keep my eye on that light and make it to March, if I could cling to things I know to be true even when I don’t feel them, the winter would indeed end, and we would see the spring.
That weekend came. I loaded my car and headed east, arriving six hours and one flat tire and heading to a magical place on a lake in South Carolina. I arrived on fumes, tired and worn from the winter. I knew only one of the women of the twelve or so there. We gathered around the cozy living room the first night and shared some of what we left behind. Those souls who became dear to me over the next few days spoke of their families, their burdens, and all the things they carry on any given day. There is a lot of invisible in what we do as women—married or not, children or not. We have a way of carrying loads outwardly, often seemingly with ease, but inwardly, often with weight that we won’t often talk about. As it was, I went last. It was my turn to share, and all that came out was a steady, ugly stream of tears. These women whom I had never met saw my winter fully exposed, and I didn’t even have to speak a word.
Over the next 24 hours, grief poured out of me in that place. It was the first time I had been away since my miscarriage in October, and so much had happened since then. Loss had been stacking on top of itself, and much of my functioning was a mixture of survival mode and shock—but what I found was that when there is no breathing room for grief, you eventually crash. Our bodies aren’t meant to carry acute stress and heartbreaking loss without a break. Speaking of Breathing Room, that was the name of this retreat. My beautiful friend who hosted this weekend guided us gently and swiftly into a place where we had the space for whatever we needed.
I needed to cry. I needed to allow all the emotions I had been damming to surface. I needed to feel them fully and let the tears flow with no time limit or expectations. Those hours were sacred, healing, and exhausting. At one point, I sat with some dear sage women who guided me through a time of prayer. When I had thought I had cried all of my tears, there were more. I came to see during that time that I have never been alone in my pain. They took me to a place—a hammock tied to two tall pine trees in the middle of a forest, to be exact. Just getting there was powerful. It was the first time in a very long time I had used my imagination for something filled with hope instead of fear, and hard as it is to explain, that hour set me on a path where my heart has been slowly but surely coming back to life. I have had another group of dear women speak over me that this year would be one of resurrection—a form of life that would begin to emerge after a long season of death. I’ll be honest: I didn’t believe that even a few weeks ago, but just as the trees have begun to show signs of life, so has my soul.
It’s somewhere near the end of April now. Yesterday, we celebrated the resurrection of Jesus. This letter is coming to you more as a few journal entries. I hope you don’t mind. I have quite a few new subscribers here, so this isn’t necessarily the norm, although nothing feels normal—mostly everything feels new, and not all new is welcome—at least not yet. Like a baby deer born in late spring, I’m just getting my legs under me, wobbly as they may be, exploring a new season—maybe even better to say, a new life. A life where I believe that this cornerstone of our faith is as real as the trees I look at off of my back porch. Yes, I am here. Again. But the older I get, the more the sting of death of all kinds attempts to eclipse my 20/20 vision—that childlike faith we are called to carry. I see it every day in my kids. They still have it. They are not yet tainted by the world, although even I know that isn’t entirely true for my son, especially.
I sat at a service yesterday, singing songs that I believe no matter how dark the days get. In Christ alone, my hope is found. That may be more true than ever—may be more earned than ever, too. But not in a gold star way, in a way that may be asking to slim down the syllabus for a while. Maybe you feel that way too. Maybe your world in its micro form is falling apart. Maybe someone dear to you is gone. Perhaps you are sick or tired or sick and tired. Maybe storms have come through your zip code, and you can see the destruction with your own two eyes. Maybe you zoom out, and boy, oh boy, do we all know that picture is too much for any of us to carry. No wonder it is hard to have faith like a child. We have all seen too much.
And also.
And also, maybe, like me, you still can see with your own two eyes how all things are being made new. Spring reminds us of that. Entire landscapes change as winter gives way to spring. It’s as if it happens for the first time every year. At least for me. Call it longing or maybe even the last bit of childlike faith that just believes I will see the flowers bloom around the same time every year. The flowers that bloom around the same time the storms begin to roll through.
Absolutely beautiful words. I had to stop to wipe away the tears and to say thank you to our Lord for guiding you through this very hard winter into the spring.
God bless you in this season! Thank you Jesus for resurrection hope for eternity and for the here and now!