Words of encouragement and support for those ministering "in the fields."

The thunderstorms that assaulted our farmhouse in Michigan were cataclysmic. The sky turned the color of bruised plums, purple-blue with greenish undertones. Thunder raged. Lightning split trees with smacks of earth-thumping explosives. The overhead light in our kitchen invariably was hit and incapacitated while my mother and I bowed our heads and covered our ears at the bottom of the stairs to the basement, where there were no windows. When we dared to look at the gale we saw furling curtains of rain, and trees bent in wind-choreographed tai chi, limbs parallel to the sotted earth. Sometimes, before the onslaught, when my dad was around, we would count the seconds between lightning flash and thunderclap to gauge the distance between us and the coming storm.

One day when I was maybe 11, I announced that I loved storms. I didn’t really, but Jo March in Little Women did, so why not me? I loved storms. I delighted in the wind. I stood by the back door and watched the rains sweep by. Fast-moving dark-swirling clouds let me glimpse their remote, self-absorbed beauty. I still flinched when lightning split lumber, or cracked heads with other species of electricity.

Fast forward fifty years. The storms that assault me now are pitiless. We won’t escape alive. That’s the thing. The death blows are raining down. Slamming us senseless. Expected, yet never prepared for. As in parents who had lived long. But my sister? friends my own age? their spouses and companions and children? Unanticipated. Overwhelming.

The lightning flash of alarm that is set off by the positive results of a biopsy, or an ominous hike in the T-cell count, or a fever of frustratingly unknown origin doesn’t carry with it a formula for calculating how close we are to the full force of the storm. Whether the death thunder will ravage us with its flesh-consuming zeal. Or if, this time, the thunder claps with only one hand, and waves us on past this construction site on life’s highway, with mortality subdued, kept at a safe distance for the present.

My mother, who shrank so abjectly from nature’s sturm und drang, was neither startled nor discomfited by her life’s final lightning flash. She smiled into soft northern lights of welcome, sweet faces framed among the stars. My father slipped away in his sleep, answering a silent call that roused no fear, no need to calibrate the drop into eternity. Both passed beyond this life with grace, gifting their heirs with the legacy of expansive testimony that both life and death can be accomplished well, if not perfectly; faithfully, if not without faltering.

Just a few days into this new year, members of the Conference Staff, Board of Directors, PAAM, and Annual Meeting Planning Team were present at the memorial service for Ben Encabo, husband of our Conference Moderator, Eppie Encabo. Most had not known Ben, yet were moved to tears. “Why am I crying?” was a repeated question for which there are many answers: We weep with compassion for Eppie’s loss; we weep to hear of the passing of a unique and irreplaceable human being, who loved much and was deeply loved; we weep because death reminds us of how fragile and yet how strong are the ties that bind us to this life and to one another; we weep at the sudden end of life, and the regrets and residues that we worry might linger. And we weep, together, because, in the church, we are family, related, with matching spiritual DNA, self-identified offspring of the Great Love at the center of the universe. Because, in the church, we really mean it when we say that God is Love, and that the embrace of love is ultimately stronger than bonds of death. That we will never be separated from those to whom we helped reveal the boundless love of the Almighty, and through whom we received the grace of the Eternal One.

So we come together to wait out the storm of grief that that numbs us and leaves us in disarray. We keep watch and hold hands and tell stories that help us make sense of our days on this dizzily spinning planet and give us heart for the future.

My 11-year-old self brashly declared her affection for storms as a gesture of reconciliation with their inevitability. That’s something I am not yet ready to do for the deluge that’s building as the colliding air masses of transience and transcendence meet over steamy seas. Yet, with my family, my church, I am blessed to sing,

Take courage my soul and let us journey on,
Though the night is dark and I’m still far from home.
Praise be to God, the morning light appears.
The storm is passing over. Hallelujah!

                                                                                                        ~ Mary Susan

Your comments are welcome
Send to msgast@ncncucc.org