We were discussing a chapter from George MacDonald’s ‘The Princess and the Goblin,’ in which the princess is so frightened that she runs out of her home and up the dark mountainside, and gets lost in the welling night. In the distance, she sees her great-great-grandmother’s lantern shining brightly, leaves her fear behind, and follows the light home to safety.

I have a terrible tendency to get too caught up in the big picture, to try to communicate the whole grand vision to my students, rather than keeping it to their level of understanding. But then, isn’t that the point of classical education? To chase the white deer (Elizabeth Goudge reference. . .I may be slightly obsessed), the fleeting vision, though we cannot comprehend its entirety? Yes, let us describe what they can see and understand. . . but let us also tell them of the grand things they have yet to understand, and let us help them to move a little closer to that understanding, if we can.

And so, while we talked of the metaphors of fear and darkness, and we recognized together that the true Light is Jesus and His Word, I could not help but take the discussion a step further. I tried to play an Andrew Peterson song in class, but when my internet connection made this impossible, I read the lyrics, choking on tears and probably causing the seven- and eight-year-olds to wonder why Mrs. Raynor’s voice sounded so very strained and tight:

‘I am weary with the pain of Jacob’s wrestling
In the darkness with the Fear, in the darkness with the Fear
But he met the morning wounded with a blessing
So in the night my hope lives on. . .

I remember how they scorned the son of Mary
He was gentle as a lamb, gentle as a lamb
He was beaten, he was crucified, and buried
And in the night, my hope was gone. . . ‘

I stopped there, tried to catch my breath. And then I tried to explain to the wondering faces why, after we had just discussed the great hope we have in Christ, I would read such a line. ‘In the night, my hope was gone.’

You see, if Christ is dead and buried, we have no hope. There is no situation, no circumstance in life that could ever be as utterly, perfectly hopeless as the one in which the disciples found themselves on a Friday almost two thousand years ago, with their Messiah hanging, dead, on a thief’s cross.

But neither the song nor the story ends there, I said. A blond eight-year-old raised his hand, concerned that I had not finished the story: ‘But Jesus rose!’

Yes, Jesus rose. Speak this truth again and again, little heart. Jesus lives. And because He lives, He proved the Father’s wrath completely satisfied, proved our sin forgiven. Proved that the Light shines again in the darkness.

And so, we have this Hope. Because Christ died, and because He is no longer dead, there is a lantern in the darkness. The darkness is real, of course. . . but if we are in Christ, we will never face a darkness so great as that of the Friday long ago. Never. Neither sickness in our own bodies, nor death of the ones we love, nor political tensions, nor any other created thing can ever present us with a darkness as deep and as terrifying as a dead Christ. . .

The darkness that was banished forever on the Sunday that our God rose.

‘But the rulers of earth could not control Him
They did not take his life–he laid it down
All the chains of death could never hope to hold him
So in the night my hope lives on. . .’

I don’t know how much of that sunk in to the little minds I taught on Wednesday, the minds who cannot be familiar with very great depths of darkness yet. But I pray that they will always hope in the hope we have in Christ. I pray that as they grow in their knowledge of the darkness of the world, that they will understand and love the Light of Christ all the more.

Oh, thank God that our Hope lives. . .

but tonight i am driving up to colorado to meet him, and there our grand adventure will begin: a whirlwind three weeks spent tough mudding in colorado, conferencing and friend-visiting in virginia, and then a glorious 8 days of adventuring in iceland for an early anniversary trip.

right now, i feel mostly tired and ready for preparations to be over. . . and above all, ready to see my beloved again. but more and more, i am growing excited to begin our grand adventure, and excited for the stories and pictures and memories that we will collect on the way.

‘gathering stories. . . the story, it belongs to you. . .’

]]> http://teaandfigments.com/2015/09/11/gathering-stories/feed/ 0 http://teaandfigments.com/2015/05/18/gypsy-soul/ http://teaandfigments.com/2015/05/18/gypsy-soul/#comments Mon, 18 May 2015 19:19:40 +0000 http://teaandfigments.com/?p=1754 this is the land of enchantment. this is my home. and i love it here in the high desert. i love the adventures we have found here, the trails that etch our back mountains like the lines on an old man’s face, the ever-changing weather, the brightening-darkening sky.

but we have been longing, lately, robert and i, for a different sort of adventure. a different sort of beauty. we think it is a combination of the travel bug and the longing of two california natives for our ‘home’ state. i hope that we will return to california someday, if we can find work there and a place we can turn into home. i also hope, wistfully, and almost certainly impractically, that maybe between here and california we might have the opportunity to pack up our backpacks and be wanderers for a time, to take months or a year to see some of this big and beautiful world that God has placed us in.

regardless of where we roam, where we drift and settle, however, i most sincerely hope that we will never find a place so beautiful or a home so comfortable that we lose our urge to wander, our sense of feeling that ‘our place’ is just a little too narrow. i hope that we will wander, and i hope that we will settle, and wherever we go, we will be home if we are together. but i hope that even the world itself will always be too small a place for us.

on april 27th, my beloved grandpa left this earth for a very much better one…he went Home to be with our Lord. it is painful to know that my best friend will never know him like i did. that we will have children who will only know him through stories…and whom he will never hold as he held me. that my little sister will not have memories of those brown polyester pants he used to wear, the brown shoes and the white undershirts with the v-neck.  i miss the jokes he won’t tell anymore, the donald duck voice he won’t greet my someday-babies with. the paper towels he kept in his pocket and the stale popcorn he kept in his truck. i miss the dances he won’t have with my daughters clinging to the tops of his shoes with bare little feet, swinging around the room to the sound of his vinyl records.

but i am so, so glad that he is Home. he is face-to-face with the Savior i love and long to see. the pain he has suffered for years is gone…he has been made new. his hands don’t tremble and he doesn’t have trouble breathing. and he is with Jesus.

i am thankful–inestimably thankful that i am home, living with my best friend and dearest love. i have never been as supremely happy as i am now, living and dancing and adventuring and lounging around watching movies and drinking lattes and getting up early and just simply breathing with him every day. i am thankful for the many things we share…including a restless heart, an urge to travel. i am thankful that regardless of where we travel, it will be home if we do it together. i hope that we will keep exploring, keep wandering this world, and always find it too small. i pray that we will settle into a more permanent nest, and never find it quite comfortable enough. i pray that we will never be Content until we are Home, too.

you see, home is not a place, but a person. my earthly home is robert. he is where i love to be. our heavenly Home, our mutual Home, is Christ. grandpa is Home now, and i rejoice for him…and for us, for my best friend and for me and for all of the believers who are wandering this beautiful earth right now, home or far from home, who are on our way Home, too. we may see a great deal or very little of the world between here and there, but one day we will be Home.

praise God for His marvelous grace.

(from “the little prince” by alexander de saint-exupery)

(our view from the bench where we shared lunch and where, a statement, a question, an answer, and a ring later, began to share a lifetime)

(some hikers offered to take our picture in exchange for taking theirs. until this point, nothing felt real to either of us. as soon as the shutter clicked, so did the realization of what had just happened.)

(after a tardy and expensive experience with sunscreen, and a delicious and sticky experience with gelato, we spent the rest of the afternoon roaming the beach together.)

(a fellow beachgoer obliged us with the picture below, at great cost to the dryness of his shoes.)

I’ve had something better to do, and that is…be humbled.

By many things.  By the incredible generosity of the body of Christ.  This last Saturday we held an open house boutique in order to raise funds for our adoption.  We sold all kinds of hand-crafted items which either we or generous friends had made.  The only tags in the house had our web address on them in case people wanted to special-order any items — not prices.  We wanted the event to be totally pressure-less for other people and we wanted to trust God to provide for what He knew our needs to be.  We didn’t have any idea of what to expect, but we hoped that we might make about $250.

When we counted up that evening, there was well over $900 in the box.

And right now there are tears in my eyes because I am lost for words at the love which our brothers and sisters in Christ poured out on us on Saturday.  My family is so thankful, so very much in awe at your generosity…I don’t even know what else to say but: thank you.

I am humbled by many things.  By my own inability to do anything apart from Christ.  By the way in which a cold, a College Math CLEP, an adoption fundraiser, and an insanely busy week can reduce me to an exhausted ghost of myself.

Over the past week, swamped in logarithms, baby hats, cleaning house, babysitting, and the most stressful testing experience yet I discovered Sandra McCracken’s beautifully encouraging music.  Particularly the songs In Feast or Fallow,  Shelter, and Jeremy Riddle’s Sweetly Broken along with were comforting to me as I studied past midnight the night before my test.

Yesterday, realizing that I could very possibly fail my math CLEP, I went in to the testing center.  I came out an hour and a half later, blown away by the condescension of God.  Not only did He not allow me to fail, He enabled me to achieve one of my highest scores yet…and this on a test for which I had very little study time and very little natural affinity.

Oh, yes, I’ve been busy being humbled.  It’s a process and it’s not exactly pleasant, but it is precious.  It’s beautiful because in my weakness, the power that is always Christ’s is more evident, more deeply revealed.  And that is both humbling and comforting.

In the harvest feast or the fallow ground, my certain hope is in Jesus found.  We will find shelter there.  Praise the Lord!