I was painting this afternoon, finally, for a good block of time.
I’ve been really distracted by so much, recently.
As I listened to music, painted and thought about various things, I was wondering to myself…how, if or when might I even hear or know when my youngest son’s twins are born – my grandbabies – since he has decided to have no contact with me.
I got to thinking about a story a dear older friend told me. More than once, I’ve listened to this life story of hers, and many others.
I love her life stories. There are three in particular I will always remember in detail.
These would be 1) how she met her husband, 2) the story of the big party in the snow storm, and 3) the story of when she first became a grandmother.
Sometimes, when phone conversations have gone toward long blocks of listening to the beautiful and challenging life stories this elderly, widowed woman has entrusted me with, I can almost feel like a kid.
You know, children can be like this: “Tell me that story again. You know, the one where…”
Because we all tell certain stories over and over.
When someone tells you a personal story more than once, listen again.
When they tell you a third time, take deeper mental and emotional notes about that.
When they tell you a fourth time, maybe…put down what you are doing, turn off your watch and listen, again.
Keep listening until they stop telling that same old story. Because, for whatever reason, in their world, that story is still worth them telling and re-telling, for a variety of reasons you may never fully understand. (OK, I’m an idealist. We all have feet of clay and are not always in sync with these moments nor in a position to simply set everything aside to listen, but we can all keep trying just a little harder in this skill).
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Stories are like stars in our world…navigating reference points, especially in dark times. Some people are able to connect lines between the dots, or stars, and form some constellation that might have to do with part of our life story, or one of our life themes. And especially, some bigger story that we can be caught up in.
Others may not have the ability to connect dots very well.
Transforming woundings, scars and difficulties into star-like stories, reflections and lessons, can help us weave parts of our lives and our selves into one whole. I think wholeness comes from continuity and connection, even to the negative or seemingly negative parts. They all must form some type of evolving whole.
The Bible is full of quite a lot of guiding stars, or transforming stories, that help enable us to navigate this world.
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I’m anxious to keep telling this story my friend shared!
First, she told me the backstory why she was not able to be present at the birth of her first grandchild – due to physical distance. Her husband, the love of her life (and I love to hear of his stories, too, even after his passing), and she, loved to ballroom dance and many other companionship activities through their years together.
When my friend was downcast that she was so far away when the baby was born, he told her, “Put on your dancing shoes, Grandma!” and he took her out to celebrate.
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God has given me quite the imagination, and though I have never heard some “audible voice” and said that was “God” speaking to me, I absolutely believe God speaks to us in so many ways all the time. We just need to listen for His still, small voice – whether it comes through a Scripture passage brought into our minds, some “God Wink” , or some intersection of our own thoughts and positive, useful imagination, or dreams, or nature.
I just thought of the OT passage where God spoke to someone through a donkey, as I recall. I’d have to look that one up. It’s not the first story that comes to mind about God-speak…normally…but, it just did! Ha ha.
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It is very easy for me to link or re-assemble varying thoughts/genres/sources/external happenings together into some perceived “God sequence.” As long as I stay within parameters of that which I know first and foremost to be true of God, as revealed in Scripture and inherent in the world around us, I think these experiential things have great purpose and power for connection to God and a sense of God’s presence in my life.
God’s eternal power and character cannot be seen.
But from the beginning of creation, God has shown
what these are like by all he has made.
Romans 1:20 (CEV)
I think of one of my favorite quotes by James Taylor, that I once heard in an interview and paused and hit re-wind, taking it down word for word.
He said, “To me, very much of what is artistic is people’s very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations – life situations – and they show us a path when they do that. They make a trail or they make a mark of some sort when they do this thing – this daring daylight escape. And when we see this, it looks like ART.”
What my friend’s husband did for her in that impossible situation was no less than an art form.
In my imagination, I can hear his voice saying to her, with affection and kindness…what was implied and between-the-lines in his simple words, “Put on your dancing shoes, Grandma…we’re going out!”
He was present…and he recognized her feelings…
He cared…
He perceived her need…
He thought of an idea…
And they went out together, and today…I am telling a small part of her story and re-incorporating it into my own.
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I consider myself pretty much in an impossible life situation at the moment, in a number of things, but in particular, this gulf between my son and myself, and things even bigger than that part of this gulf, is high on my lists of wounds, weights, griefs and concerns.
I know that the babies are due the end of July or early August. Other than knowing this from back in mid-April, when I first learned through another person that my transgender son had fathered twins with his partner, a woman. So grateful for the empathetic way I learned of this; a friend said, “You mean you don’t know???…I don’t even know how to tell you this…”
Since the complicated full relationship break with me in January of 2021 that had begun at some point prior in various ways, I see or know of no means to rectify (though I have attempted), nor can I wrap my head fully around (though I have attempted), nor can I compromise my own self any further than the center line of the football field since there seems to be (in my view) some hidden battle…some hidden War being waged over territories I personally would classify as spiritual, emotional, psychological and familial…so therefore I pray, work through it, accept, and I think to myself, “How can I continue to survive through this ‘sanction?'”
I say sanction, because I can only assume, that is what it is.
In a War, sanctions are leveled. Make it hurt… and hurt…until the goal is achieved.
Only there seems to be, no real goal. There is nothing redemptive I know of this choice he has made, no pathway for reconciliation.
I have been a bad, bad, bad parent, and I am in time out! Only, there is no length to my sentence in that chair. So, I can only presume, it is a lifelong sentence.
I could write a lot about what I call the psychobabble of the younger generations.
I could write about the making of “gratitude” and “shaming” into mis-contexted buzzwords, rather than understanding its real meaning.1
I could write about issues of honor and dishonor, the honorable and the dishonorable.
I could write about boundaries, too. And my first statement would be, “boundaries are not weapons you use on someone when you don’t like something.”
If I were to begin to write more here of my perception of goals, it would not be what this piece is really about. I would need to write other pieces about all I keep learning about top-down, destructive and weaponized agendas that have ensnared our most precious children in this current culture. I would need to share things I keep learning and exploring, and more importantly experiencing…and my own sensings and inward guidance from God.
I would need to talk about Light and Darkness.
I would need to talk about spirits of control…and pressures for compliance.
I would need to talk about someone repeatedly telling me I have a “daughter,” and admonishing me to stop speaking my son’s name and to use correct pronouns…OR ELSE…
I would need to talk about the hidden forces that ensnare us all in various ways and means, at times.
But right now, I want to talk about my Jesus.
I want to follow through with what I sensed to do after painting…which was to make dinner, and then write.
And illustrate.
And prepare…
I have always loved movement and dancing, and as my years increase, I find myself daring, especially some nights alone here…outside…in the dark…in the field on the way down to feed my lambs under moonlight, or when I’m doing other things outdoors during the day or night…to actually “Dance like nobody’s watching…”
The Bible speaks so positively in a number of places about dancing.
Dancing is a form of powerful celebration.
Dancing is what happened after the Crossing of the Red Sea. Miriam took up her tambourine and began to dance, and the other women joined in with her.
There is a dance I used to know to the chorus, “I will sing unto the Lord for He has triumphed gloriously – the horse and rider thrown into the sea!”
I was in two churches for years where there was open worship dancing. Whirling in sync with others in a circle, to worship music, with hands joined, at a fast-paced speed, was one of the most exhilarating and invigorating physical experiences of my lifetime. I wish I could do that now, in the same way.
As I write, I recall co-leading a worship dance group at once church when Jonathan was young. He was a toddler, and still nursing. I can remember bringing him along to those dance nights with the women – I believe it was a Sunday evening – at “The Barn.” I can remember giving him things to do, and there were sometimes older girls to watch children, or our children played together, while we put on worship music, and worked through choreographed dances, mostly, in circles…holding hands.
In the past week, from my bed during the night time, a fragment of an old worship song I hadn’t thought of in years came into my mind…it was the line…“My Jesus…my Savior…Lord there is none like you…Tower of Refuge and Strength…”
I searched on Spotify, and received this beautiful version I knew so well years ago into my soul, once again. Maybe that would be a wonderful song to dance to…when these children are born!
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Dancing shoes? Hmmm.
I still have the shoes I selected for my second wedding. If any reader hasn’t noticed, I seem to live in metaphor. Once, last summer, I walked into a friend’s house and announced to her, “I am a poem!”
Ha ha…I just had some things on my mind…and I figured she knew me well enough to not be shocked by any strange thing I might say.
The theme of my second wedding was “Hope.” We had decided upon this, and I recall someone saying that it was a slightly unusual wedding theme, but made sense…usually, the theme is “Love.” We had both hoped, I suppose, that this second marriage would have healed the wounds of our lives and first divorces. Sadly, it did not. And while God works all things together for the good of those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose, I can honestly say that in many ways it compounded and multiplied our woundings on so many levels.
But we do not have the luxury of knowing trajectories that might have been, nor the trajectories yet to come. I think of a piece, now, that I expressed a few months back called Is it Written?. And, I also think of My Life Wasn’t Supposed to Be This Way.
Anyway…shoes. With the theme of hope, I had a friend make me a simple, short white wedding dress with a rainbow sash and a rainbow veil. And I found a pair of spring green shoes that I thought would work well.
So…there are those shoes. I did dance in them once…but…hmmm…no, not those shoes for a time such as this.
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I also have a pair of actual “red ruby slippers” I bought myself to wear to the difficult divorce mediation in Alabama. I was fearful of so much, and an Alabama-born friend had said to me once, with what appeared might be a few tears in her eyes, “I just wish I could give you a pair of ruby slippers and send you back HOME.”
When people speak life-giving words to us, they are a balm and get imprinted deep within us.
Ha ha…I bought the reddish velvet shoes that I turned into my “ruby red slippers” at Walmart, a few days prior to that part of the whole ordeal. I also bought red glitter, and actually wrote the words in glue/glitter “Roll Tide” on them. I was following the observational advice (above) of James Taylor, I suppose…I just thought it might give me some self-esteem boosting, confidence, a sense of dignity of sorts (I mean, what more dignified than a middle aged woman who has found herself 800 miles into the deep south in a situation going and buying “Please God, get me out of Kansas shoes!!!”) and at least, something concrete to focus on as I awaited that dreaded day.
I don’t think those shoes would be suitable, either, nor the green ones…to go out dancing in the back field when I (hopefully) learn of the births!
No, not those shoes for a time such as this.
As I think about what shoes to wear when the time comes…I begin to think out-of-the-box.
Go figure! Now, why would I do THAT?
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I think I need some invisible dancing shoes.
That’s it. Some shoes only visible to Jesus. I mean, I’m not even sure what they look like, yet!
Ha ha…I think they would be best and most visible…on bare feet!
That’s it.
When the time comes, I’ll dance barefoot.
Then…I’ll have my dancing shoes already on at any given moment!
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