Moments in Grace

It happened in the spring, when all the world was a flame with its blooming. The dying of me. It was a chilly day in April, when the blossoms were blowing full, that I walked into school a girl of sixteen, and the world began to reel and spin.   There are times that a life can completely lose its compass.   And I don’t remember how I got there, how the ripping away began, but that day I ended up face down, undone in my sobbing mire in the guidance counselors office and I didn’t get up again for hours.   It’s strange how a life can rip apart at the bloody seams. I was junior class vice-president, I was planning prom only weeks away, I was a straight A student who failing trigonometry.   All the pressures of   nasty teenage politics, a teenage relationship gone so very wrong, student activities board, sports that I played; that day the pressures of perfect overwhelmed, and I found that I was far from it.   Oh so far from perfect. By fall I woul

I always wanted to live on the mission field.     I wanted to travel to faraway places, to take the gospel to people who had never heard.   I wanted the adventure, the passion, even, the sacrifice.   I thought that surely this is what God would have for me.   He would have wanted this, He would have made a way for me to go.   But when I married, two weeks after my 21 st birthday, it only took me a short time to realize that missions were the farthest thing from my husband’s life agenda.   Not because he doesn’t think they are important but because … he doesn’t travel well.   He hates eating anything remotely resembling foreign food.   He is just not the missions type and missions is not his ministry calling.   And I soon realized that moving to the mission field was not an option.   We’ve been married for almost 15 years now, and not much has changed.   There are no plans to become missionaries in Ecuador or Mozambique or Thailand.   Just life in suburban Midwes

It started out as a science experiment.   A way to watch how plants respond to changes in temperature.   So in the middle of the snowy February cold we cut thin, lithe branches of a bush, and kept them snug in our little house.   And soon, they began to bud.   And each day we watched the buds appear as we sat around the kitchen table at mealtime, watching, waiting, marveling at the unfurling.   Weeks went by, budding and then the delicate yellow blossoms came out.   We all enjoyed their beauty in the cold of winter.   Until.   Until the end of March when one day one of the kids noticed that the blossoms were wilting, shriveling, ugly.   Then they fell off, all the way off.   Next the leaves began to wilt, and hang limp and lifeless.    “Mom, look at our branches!   Why is that happening?   Why is it dying?   I thought it was blooming for spring?   Why didn’t it stay alive?” “ Because it is not connected to the vine.   That is just a branch.   It ca