June 29th

Today something extraordinary happened. I held a little box full of plastic toys in my hand while explaining to my son and daughter all the reasons why we couldn't keep those particular toys and their corresponding cards in our home. Our son, the eldest, willingly gave them up, his hands open and his heart accepting that his parents, in their love for him, wanted to protect him completely. I hugged him and told him how much we loved him... how he blessed us with his trust in us. Our daughter immediately followed suit and received the same affection and benediction.

Some 25 years ago, almost to the exact day and hour, I sat crumpled in a corner of a room, completely doubled over in grief. I remember my dad coming and and hugging me hard... sobbing with me. In that too-warm Texas twilight, I was ill with sadness. I remember the color of the sunset reflected on the wall as I sat dumbly watching the light fade on that day. A single, weak candle was lit on the dresser... the only light in the room.

Not quite a year prior to that event, I remember begging God for a relationship that seemed impossible. And yet, somehow, I was noticed and pursued by a young man I'd admired from afar for some time. But even as I prayed, I knew I was asking amiss. I knew it every single time. I badgered my God and eventually, He succumbed to my persistent requests. I was not a flirt. I was so shy around this young man that he had to be pretty bold to help me understand that he was interested. 

On June 29th, it all came crashing down. Investigators believe that a solitary hike led to a fall from an extraordinary height, but the only evidence was a bike chained at the bottom of a mountainous trail. I couldn't make myself attend the memorial service. I couldn't believe there was anything to memorialize. It took ages to convince myself that he would never return.

A few months later, I stood singing the Vaughn Williams Mass in G Minor to a congregation with my college chorale group in an Anglican cathedral-style church we jokingly called Fort God. There was a gaping hole in the tenor section. The church sat at the top of one of the only hills in Ft. Worth just above the line of apartments where he had lived. I struggled to sing as I remembered an evening when we'd watched the sun set from a ledge outside a stained glass window full of moons and stars. Gazing above the men, I watched the sun set from the other side of the same pane that evening, struggling to hold back the tears and survive the performance. I heard the Kyrie on my way to church this morning, but those measured patterns did not bring the same sensation today as they did that night over half a life ago. 

Graduation and teaching and seminary happened in there somewhere, but it all seems like a blur. I remember getting extraordinarily angry after coming home to an Arlington apartment and trying to prop my hood to make sure the oil change I'd just received was a proper one. Only, the hood prop was broken in two and laying on top of the engine in my little five speed Civic. I gunned it back up to the garage and stomped in with the rods in hand, furious and weary with those battles, yet too defensive and afraid to dismantle the wall around my heart.

This evening, standing in dappled light on the western edge of our garden, a perfect calendula stem lay broken in the straw. I couldn't help but feel it deep... something so perfect, delicate, young, and beautiful, broken against a hard reality of earth. I left it to dissolve there.

I remember sitting near a sprawling live oak in our big yard in Rendon, Texas. I might have been four. I might have been younger. I loved wildflowers even then. My mother explained to me as she pulled weeds out of our gravel drive that God could make Himself so small that he could sit on the tiny yellow cushion of the dandelion I gripped in my sweaty little fist...small enough to inhabit the heart of a tan, tow-headed, barefoot little girl.  

Somewhere between June 29th, 1994 and June 29th, 2003, my fists loosened. Always looking to the future, I had a list of short-term goals on one side of my bathroom mirror and a list of long-term goals on the other. I'd given up on one dream to pursue another. I loved mountains... particularly Colorado mountains. I had oodles of credits towards a master's degree and an almost-complete master's thesis sitting in a plastic filing box. I could get many of those credits to transfer towards a Christian counseling degree at Dallas Baptist University. I'd decided to become a licensed professional counselor, move to Colorado Springs, work for Focus on the Family, and climb and hike on the weekends. I'd also decided that marriage was clearly not in God's plan for my life. Colorado 14'ers were calling my name. I had cousins in Denver. With God's help, I would make it happen.

In Spring of 2003, my aunt drove to Arlington and accompanied me to Dallas Theological Seminary. I'd turned her on to Elisabeth Elliot and we were going to hear her speak. I'd read just about everything she'd ever written and I was hungry for her spoken words... her countenance. In all my contradictory self, in all my shyness, I needed to see her, hear her, experience her, breathe the same air as this woman who knew what it meant to give in grief. I needed to know how to do that... how to give up the images I'd always held in my consciousness of how it was all supposed to be. I could see that stained-glass window, all the moons and stars in tiny fragments on the stones, but I couldn't walk away from the horror of it.

I remember smiling as soon as her husband, Lars, came to the podium to introduce her. I knew his face from photos I'd seen. And then, there she was... tall, thin, queenly, and yet simultaneously so completely ordinary. In that hour, it was her ordinary self that was so comforting. Lars was her third husband. Would she tell me how she'd done it? Was there a formula to transform a heart turned to stone?

Driving home that evening, I had a difficult time ordering my thoughts. My aunt is a talker, so I listened and nodded and drove. When I sat down at my computer that night, my old seminary study buddy, Jon (a youth minister in Mississippi), had emailed. We kept a running correspondence. Always delighted to hear from him, I brewed up a mug of hot decaf. tea so that I could savor the note and the refreshment together. A fellow introvert, we conversed best through email. He was going to be in town in late June and wondered if we could meet up. His good friend was getting married in Fort Worth and he wanted me to join him for the festivities. I hadn't dated anyone seriously for some time. I wasn't interested in starting anything now. I'd lived on my own for quite a while by that point and I'd learned to enjoy my independence. I was busy getting my paperwork in to register for classes at DBU and scanning magazines for pictures and information concerning life in Colorado Springs.  I wanted a space to make my own.

On June 29th, 2003, Jon and I walked in on a guy sitting at a computer. We'd just met up at the groom's bachelor pad, and this young man was spending a couple nights there. He'd just pulled into Fort Worth in a beat up Nissan truck with a small U-Haul trailer attached... a friend from Mississippi State who was heading down to College Station to complete a master's degree in Macro-Economics and Foreign Affairs at Texas A&M after the big wedding. We all went to dinner that night and returned to play board games. This guy, Jason, was a marathon runner, well-read, super energetic, and super smart. He'd been a teacher too and spent his summers working at a Christian guest ranch in central Colorado. Oh, and he'd hiked a few 14'ers along the way. 😊

The wedding happened and Jon went home. Jason had passed around a little note pad to get everyone's contact information before our little gang parted ways. I simply scribbled in my email address. While definitely intrigued and overwhelmed at everything we had in common, I was trying to be a good wedding date to the very end, and I'd decided quite a while back that I wasn't marriage material. Why bother barking up that tree again? Once I was back at my apartment, I received a phone call. Jason and Jon had shared a hotel room and Jon carelessly left my phone number laying on the nightstand. Jason, a numbers guy, memorized it quickly. I was shocked to hear his voice on the other end. We went out that very night and when we returned to my apartment, we talked for hours.

Just outside our second story bedroom window are sunflowers growing in garden boxes that my husband built and filled with soil. He knows I love the flowers and the scads of goldfinches they draw when the flower heads begin to fade. Between those boxes is another enormous box full of sand for our kiddos to play in. Shading that sand box from the western sun is another box brimming with black raspberry canes because my best friend heard me say the first summer we spent here in Western Loudoun County that the black raspberry had to be the most perfect berry in existence. I walk to those canes for my breakfast almost every morning when black raspberries are in season.

On June 29th this year, we marked 16 years of knowing each other by helping each other replace some parts and pieces of the suspension and the alternator in our older model van. I got a little annoyed at one point during the day because apparently the thing that's actually creating the weird noise we've been concerned about is a tie rod on the driver's side. He started working on that at about 6:45 pm that night. The day wasn't going the way I'd pictured it in my head... a common problem for a person who deals with life in images. But watching our son sit and hand socket wrenches to his daddy... listening to all the questions and answers, I caught a vision of a daughter and a daddy at the same activity years and years ago... a daughter who was well-trained by a man who could easily have been an engineer and who wisely insisted that his daughter and sons assist him whenever he worked on any of our vehicles. That experience was very much appreciated when I found myself with a killer headache trying to get out of a busy intersection in a vehicle with a swiftly expiring alternator. I knew exactly what was wrong with the van the instant it began to act up, and I knew exactly what to do about it, all thanks to a wise father.

Overwhelm is the only way to describe it. Overwhelm that God knew all those years ago that I would need that information to get myself and my children to safety. Overwhelm at the incredible difference between two June 29ths separated by nine years... that sweet reminder that, out of 365 days, He would pick that day of all the days on the calendar to bless me with Jason.

Driving from Keller back to Arlington that day, I had a knot in my throat. I knew I'd just met someone important. I knew it so well that I called my mom and told her that I felt like I'd just driven away from something predestined, but I didn't quite know what it all meant. It felt just like that day with the dandelion. Running my fingertips over the soft yellow cushion I sang "Jesus Loves Me". I recall peering up at the enormous cumulonimbus clouds expanding with the summer heat in the distance. The sight reminded me of the pillar of cloud in the desert from the Old Testament Bible story. I asked mama if God could be big like that too. "Yes, honey. He is any size He wants to be... any size He needs to be to take care of His children."

June 29th doesn't mean much to many people, but it's a little whispered "I love you and I didn't forget about you. And as much as you've resisted... as much as you still resist... I won't stop loving you and I will prove it to you over and over and over again." A little over a year later, Keith Sanders, the guy whose wedding Jason and I attended just after we met, married us in the little Baptist church where I was baptized when I was nine years old. We honeymooned in Colorado on the slope of Long's Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. The Father who asked me to open my hands a decade before had to pry them open in His love for me. I did not give up willingly. But once they were open and He could trust me to keep them that way, He filled them to overflowing.