Point The Way

Angel Varney

Point The Way

The weekend had been a nice and long one with three days full of good times and laughter and void of a schedule. 

It was a holiday, the first one of the school year to be exact. Time was spent backyard barbecuing, dipping in the pool and watching fireworks at night. For a while mom even got to sit at the waters edge and chat with friends while the littles swam, splashed and dove to their hearts content. 

So when Tuesday morning came and those littles of mine had been dropped off at school I pulled into a parking spot, cracked the windows open and turned the ignition off to breathe and reminisce for a bit. 

(Please tell me that I'm not the only one who finds her vehicle a good place to pray, read, answer emails and just find five minutes of refuge some days.)

My five minutes turned to fifteen before I realized it and I quickly got out and hurried to rush inside. 

But before I even reached the front door I saw her struggling there and knew that I wouldn't be making it to the morning exercise class that I had intended to go to. The Lord had other plans. 

She was wearing a look I'd now recognize anywhere. The look resembles a deer in the headlights kind of fear mixed with a bit of blankness that comes from depression. 

She looked so very tired.

She was me.

Five years prior I had walked that lonely road called depression and by the grace of God I'd vowed after coming out of it to reach out to whomever I met struggling with the same foe.

She has big dark eyes and as I looked into them and saw my reflection it was suddenly me standing at the kitchen sink, or the checkout line, or by my car at any given place on any given day. The heaviness can sweep over you in an instant anywhere or anytime and make you feel as if a cloud the size of Texas has settled over your life.

I shook my own shoulders knowing all too well that my light needed to invade this darkness settling over my friend.

"Here, let me help you," I offered. I reached for something she was trying to carry and she burst into tears and fell into my arms.

That's how you know that you are one step closer to real help and freedom from this beast. When you can feel the brokenness and let the river of tears flow freely then your heart is good and ready for a revival of sorts instead of hardened and calloused to the pain.

I stood there and listened. I let her cry. I said not a word as she told me how angry she was at the disappointment her life had become. I rubbed the back of her head like she was my five year old child and listened some more.

If there's one thing I've learned through the years about an  encounter of this type,  it's that people often avoid helping or reaching out because they are afraid they won't know what to say.

The beautiful truth of it all is that transformation takes place not so much in what you say-but how well you listen to others that God puts in your path.

When she was finished talking we prayed together and I shared with her a bit of my story, because although I might not be able to fix what is wrong in her life, I can point the way to the One who fixed mine.

John has always been my favorite of the Gospels and I particularly love how in the opening verses of the fist chapter John the Baptist is described as a witness of the Light.

Not to be confused with THE LIGHT, he was just a good teacher of the way to the One who could set men free from darkness.

We were never meant to walk this path of Christianity alone. When we open ourselves up to testify and share with someone who is experiencing a pain that we too have experienced before?

It’s like turning a big chandelier on inside of an old musty cave. Light expels darkness every single time.

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Listening

Back where I come from the town is small and the ties run deep.

Friendships are made on playgrounds in Kindergarten and often carry through to adulthood. Such is the case with me anyway.

I'm sitting here watching my boy play the day away with his buddies and I can't help but wonder what bonds are being made over bike rides and dips in the pool.

Some of the little girls that I played hop scotch with at recess in elementary school are the same ones that were bridesmaids at my wedding. We grew up, got married and carried our children through pregnancy and infancy together. We also had to learn, as anyone else who is among the living, how to get each other through some hard times.

And more often than not that meant not knowing what in the world to say, so we got really good at listening over time.

Such was the case when recently a lifelong friend and I were talking our way through the feeling of  a lack of productivity that is often accompanied with the young years of motherhood.

I say feeling of with emphasis because that's exactly what it is. A feeling.  While we rely heavily on them, our feelings can sometimes be a far off illusion of the truth. While I desperately wanted to be able to bust out in a monologue that would bring any woman out of the throes of depression-the truth is that I just wasn't sure I had them.

So I sat and I listened.

I waited and nodded my head in humble understanding because the truth of the matter is that I've spent some time there myself. In that mode of wondering if the days that sometimes seem so long and unstructured are producing anything good.

It's a good breeding ground for discouragement in that space of time where loneliness meets monotony. One load of dishes after another, one load of laundry after another and it can all start to feel a bit less than the glorious making of something wonderful than it is.

I know this to be true because I've lived it.

And let me tell you the last thing I wanted to hear on any given day of a worthless feeling was someone to tell me how to get out of it.

No-what I needed was a good ear to hear me out. Because I think that the Lord puts deep inside of us a longing to reckon with Him about the way we spend our days and the way we feel our worth.

If I spend too much time talking and pitching in an opinion where I'm not even sure it's warranted? Then I risk talking over Him.

I've learned a beautiful thing while talking to my sister over the years. Sometimes we'll call each other, one of us with a big problem pressing to the front of our mind. Most of the time what I've recognized is that neither of us necessarily needs a great amount of advice from the other.

Usually just laying it all out there in the open air is enough. Before you know it, just stating the problem begins to start the working of a solution without even so much as another opinion.

Sometimes truth shines through like a radiant light when someone takes the time to close their mouth and turn their ear to listen.

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April

You know that old saying, "Life can change in the blink of an eye?" Yeah, that's turned out to be true. It's a little like balancing a tight rope for me because I've always been sort of carefree and laid back but with every year older that I'm getting comes another realization.

Be ye therefore careful.

And sometimes even in the midst of being as careful as can be, accidents are going to happen.

Thus was the case on Monday. What would have been known as an otherwise random normal evening grilling burgers turned into a nightmare right in front of my eyes.

Exactly what happened when and all of the details aren't anything I care to rehash at this point-I don't even think I could accurately recall myself. In short, April and I were just trying to light the grill and make some hamburgers and it blew up on her.

Sometimes a flurry of activity in an emergency situation is a bit like watching a lifetime flash right before your eyes.

Suddenly I was seven years old again, walking that sweet little thing into a Kindergarten classroom on her first day.

I still remember walking her off the bus and up the stairs into the school and the proud way I held her little hand in mine.

Two years her senior, it was my job to safely deliver my little sister to her classroom and to calm those big eyes full of uncertainty and fear. I'm sure I left her with comforting words but I do remember her Kindergarten classroom was at one end of the hall on the first floor of the building and my classroom was upstairs and all the way on the other end of the hall. It seemed forever away to me.

What was I going to do if she needed me? I wished that I could bring my class downstairs to be close to her.

All these years have passed and I don't know that I've ever thought much about that first day of school for her and the way I hated to leave her until now. Now we're in our thirties and just this week I stood and watched a helicopter take her away to the hospital and that was as much as I could do.

Helpless would be one way to describe how I felt.

Help-less but HOPE-FULL because time and again in my life as a mother, sister, friend I have went as far as I could for somebody and had to leave the rest up to the Lord. I'm human and humbled by the fact of just how little I can do and how incapable I am and how big and how capable He is.

What I have found is that it's times like these that we can experience the richness of our Lord so near. I believe that He's there all the time for us-He doesn't come and go. He's constant. It's just that we're more aware of Him when He is all we have.

I'm so grateful for God's healing power. April's airway could have easily been compromised. Holes were burned through her clothing but her body didn't get burned nearly like her neck, face and hands.

Just like years ago when I turned and went away into my own classroom, I am standing on the sidelines now watching her heal.

And I know that our God walks with her every step of the way.

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What To Do When the Scrambler Stops Spinning

The scrambler is always my favorite ride at any theme park.

Not much of one for a roller coaster with even as much as one loop, I'm the girl who sticks to the small rides. With two little people following along who are near waist high now, the scrambler is the perfect size for them and all the more fun for me.

I've stood in that line of anticipation a few times this summer and with one passing group of riders after the next,  I've noticed something.

Standing on the brink of what I call the next phase of motherhood, this summer has felt a bit to me like I'm on the exit side of a wild ride, about to exhale.

While some might call that a breath of fresh air, I call it frightening.

For years before I became a parent I would wonder what it was like. I remember walking through Gymboree and baby Gap and picking up the little clothes, the tiny shoes and wondering what my baby would someday look like. Would it be a boy or a girl? I never had a preference really and surely never dreamed I'd one day be blessed with both.

When my son was born I was so much at the beginning of the learning curve that something as little as changing his diaper intimidated me. I was in complete and total awe of him and I just had this eager anticipation to get it all right. I probably had a big fear of failure too, thinking there was a chance I'd also get it all wrong.

My children are close in age so soon thereafter it all began again. Just the simple marvel of a tiny little onesies, the smell of a newborn, the way that those tiny little fist's close and open up slowly-those are little breath's of Heaven given to a new parent.

I don't remember when exactly when it was that I took those little pieces of Heaven and jumped on a wild ride, but I did. Oh my goodness, I did.  We all do.

People try to warn you, "Take it all in, time flies I tell ya!"

Or, "Honey you better enjoy them while they're little because they sure grow up fast."

You smile and nod because that's polite and that's what you do but the minute they turn and leave you retreat back into changing diapers and cleaning up spilled sippy cups and breaking up fights and doing what it is that you do to get through the day. And the day after. And the day after that.

Until one day you're like me and the diapers stay on the shelf at Wal mart and there are no sippy cups to be spilled and all is silent and fighting has ceased. Baby fat legs turned into long lanky ones and walked themselves into school like big kids.

The ride spins, it turns whirly twirly and my stomach aches-oh it's a good ache and not a bad one. It's pure bliss.

It's a day in the pool, a day at the park, a trip to the beach, a trip to the library. It's meeting friends for lunch at Chik-fil-a for that hour of blessed chicken and regrouping while they play. It's afternoon naps, evening walks, catching fireflies past bedtime. It's building forts in the living room, crafts at the kitchen table and dance parties to Disney music.

It's a few times of, "If you do that one more time you're going to be in time out forever."

And every now and then a few scares and trips to the pediatrician with uncertainty that builds the faith of a patriarch.

Sometimes it's a moment so big it's like you're watching a movie and living outside yourself. They hit the ball out of the park, show kindness to a friend, walk away from a fight, read a verse of scripture aloud, bow their head to pray unprompted.

It's all that and more, this wild ride of motherhood. I wouldn't trade a moment of it for anything.

The funny thing about a scrambler ride is that though much of it is the same, it never starts and stops exactly as it did before.

There is no cookie cutter recipe for how to do motherhood. There's no instruction manual for a tiny human given out at the hospital when you check out to go home.

You step on to your ride, your own wild adventure and then hang on for dear life as the joy unfolds.

You belly laugh and giggle your way through because you never thought living like a kid again would ever be this good.

While my youngest goes to Kindergarten in two short weeks, I feel like we're walking out of the gate and they're two steps ahead of me running on to the next ride-one that they're big enough to ride alone.

I'm catching myself looking over my shoulder wondering how we ever got on there, rode and off again in what seemed like less than a minute. It all went by so fast.

Now I follow them along and into the rest of the park. A new adventure awaits.

 Theres a lot of uncharted territory out there.  Preferably, I would like to hit rewind and just get back in line and ride that scrambler again- but I'm sure this next one will be just as good or better than the ride before.

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