I turned the corner on to my street and something caught fire in me,  I needed to push my body as fast as it could go.  My legs stretched out before me and the world got quiet.  I could hear only my breath as I struggled to break through.  To break through what,  I don’t know.   Maybe I needed to run fast just to show myself I still could.   I passed my house and finally slowed to a stop. I walked past my house and looked through the windows.  My kids were asleep, a single light lit where my wife was quietly working on her painting.   I have always loved those moments when all is quiet and I am just an observer.  Seeing my house peaceful and still makes me smile.  I walk further down the block and sit down to stare up at the moon and steal a little more silence for myself.   As I sat on the curb panting, feeling the cool air,  I notice voices drifting through the air.  They rise then lower, then rise again but I can make nothing out.  One of my neighbors who spends all of his time in his garage avoiding his wife passes by me with a friendly, “howdy” as he walks his dog for the fourth time today.  I wonder if his marriage and life is really that bad.  I have watched his garage expand with a couch, then TV, then weight room, then hobby table, then dog bed/play area and now circling back to bigger LCD TV. Maybe a twin size bed is next followed by a queen size.  It is interesting to me that so many of us spend so much time working on our outside as our insides rot.  The further his marriage disintegrates the better physical shape he is in.

The words that were drifting through the air are now louder and rushing to my ears.  It is a young couple who recently moved into a rental.  She is pleading and accusing at the same time, “Do you remember!?  Do you?” There is a long silence and I picture him saying nothing as he sits on the couch and she paces back and forth.  ”Do you remember all the things you said to me?  Do you remember the promises you made to me!  DO YOU!”  There is some mumbling.  Whatever she wants from him, he cannot give.  At least that is clear to me as I sit in the audience quietly listening.  I feel sorry for her.  She is angry, hurt, madly in love, yearning, pushing and pulling all at the same time.  She doesn’t realize yet that it is too late to get things back to how she wanted them.  She doesn’t realize yet that those beautiful things he said to her he probably meant at the time but he made a mistake…..or maybe things just changed.  They can’t go back to the beginning, they can’t go back to the nights of long talks over wine and making love until morning.  Those times were beautiful but we can’t stay forever in those places….people change….love cannot be stagnant, love changes or dies.

He emerges from the house with keys in hand, walking slowly towards his car.  The door opens and she is now rushing out after him, “What are you doing?”
He stops in the street and turns to her, “I’m leaving, you told me to leave.” He is quiet when he speaks and seems sad and confused.
“I know but….I didn’t think you would.”
“What do you want? I don’t know what you want from me. I’m trying, but I don’t know what you want. I’m trying. I am trying.”
They stand in the middle of the street;  him looking confused, her pacing and occasionally biting her fingernail.
“I want.    I want you to keep trying…….Its cold out here……I want you to come back inside.”
“Ok.”

He slides his keys back in his pocket and they walk back to their house with her in the lead.   As she opens the door I see him with a bowed head, place his hand on her back as she walks in.    She stops to enjoy the warmth of his hand on her back for just a moment more and then walks in.   I feel somehow lucky to have seen this;  the drama of life spinning out in front of me, these tiny moments of heartache, grace and redemption.   As the night returns to its silence I stare back up at the moon and I think of God watching us from above.   I suddenly realize that he, just like me, would love to step in to change things, to help, but he knows just as I did watching that couple that their drama had to be played out.    No wisdom I could have imparted would have helped or been heard. They needed to feel love deeply and joyfully, take it for granted, damage it, revive it, fight for it and finally learn to nurture and care for it.   Who knows what is in store for that young couple…..maybe they will make it, maybe they won’t.  The moment that mattered, the moment that matters to love and God the most is the moment when we say, “I’m trying.”    We might fail and fall over and over again but the words “I’m trying.   I’m doing the best I can.” are the words we must keep deep in our hearts.  Because if we don’t we might as well quit right now, we might as well move our hearts out of our soul and into the garage. You don’t need to be a saint.     You don’t need to be the cutest couple or parent of the year. You don’t need to have the perfect house or the perfect marriage.   You don’t need to be the best at anything.  You simply need to try and to keep trying. No matter how lost or alone you feel the only prayer you need, the only prayer God yearns for is, “I’m trying lord…..I’m trying.”

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My wife and I sit across from each other in Penny’s Diner in Dunsmuir. Our kids are happily shoveling pancakes in their mouths as they simultaneously drive their toy trucks through the syrup and up their sleeves. We had been driving through the night to take the kids to the snow and to give me some time to write but the snow got too anxious and decided to come down the mountain and meet us. Like a playful cat it batted our little Honda around until we finally wised up, pulled over, and checked into a hotel.

Six hours later the kid’s steam engine bodies are excited by fresh snow and needing fuel. My wife is staring at me intently with a willow of a smile as I take off my hat springing my hair to jump for the ceiling as I rub my eyes.

She likes the grey in my whiskers.

I guess I should be grateful but something in me is disappointed. I put down my hat and reach for my coffee. “Really?” I say. “yaaa,” she nods. I had just played a show the night before we left, “but what about when I am in my rock n roll clothes, hair slicked, sweat pouring from my face, black leather shoes pounding the stage? Lots of girls find that sexy.” She laughs and shakes her head no. “Really?” I repeat. “Yep, oh and I also like it when you climb trees. You are beautiful when you climb trees.”

My head pulls my hands up and I can’t stop rubbing my forehead. How can this be true? I look old and haggard like a trucker with a long way to go and a short time to get there. Hair unwashed, eyes sore from being up late then up early with the kids. I am cold, hungry and about an inch away from throwing Easton’s toy truck if he drives his syrup mobile one more time across my ear.   This is what she loves? This?   Easton begins to lick the snow off of his boot as Wilder tries to see if he can get his entire hand in a small glass of water (And by the way, yes we can all rest easy, he proved it can be done).    “Boys, lets let your father have a moment to finish his coffee and breakfast,” she says as she zips them up in puffy swollen jackets.    In a moment the diner is empty as she leaves and the cook/hotel clerk tells me he is going outside to snow plow the parking lot.

I sit staring out the window through the trees watching the cars on the highway as they move like dogs on tile. I wonder what it is that makes us push away and turn our head when faced with accepting love. Why are we all so skeptical when grace is offered so readily? There is a casualness – a wonderful absurdity in Grace that it seems we all are a bit disappointed in. We seem to think there must be something wrong with it to embrace us so completely without a care for gray hair or scars or hidden shame. Maybe this is why we turn to religion because so much of it seems to appeal to the places inside us that finds grace so unsettling. We want something to tell us it is not so easy to get. We nod our heads in agreement when religion speaks to us saying, “Grace does not come easy, you have to earn it and here is a list of things you must believe, say, and pretend to be to get it.”

The snow seems to be getting bored and begins to wonder off. I think to myself, maybe it is our need to believe in something sterner- less accepting that actually leads to our disbelief – our disappointment. We finally get so lost and exhausted jumping through ever shrinking hoops that we wander away. Maybe we all have a little Groucho Marx in us that says, “I will not be a part of any Club that would have me as a member.” I hope God is a patient God who is only waiting for us to fall down in a heep unable to fight or run away…..waiting for the chance to pick us up and hold us close.

The trucks and cars are now once again confident in their direction and purpose and begin to stream up the highway. The snow has gone back home to the mountains and awaits our arrival. I pick up my hat, drink a half a cup of coffee in one gulp, and walk to the door. As I put on my gloves before stepping out to the cold I see my children jumping in the snow. My wife’s loving gaze watching over them. She senses my stare and turns to me and looks at me with the brightness of a face of one who has not seen their beloved for a long time. She opens her arms wide and sticks out her tongue to catch the last of a few falling flakes. She then stretches her arms towards me and beckons me to her laughing. Something in me breaks like ice against a bridge and I feel this river inside of me begging to be let go. I can’t help but laugh and shake my head. Grace is absurd – beautiful and absurd. I let go of my disappointment, my doubt, my skepticism, and fear and open the door.

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I can see it there.  Hiding in the corner.  I finish washing the dishes in the sink and then turn to look at it.  I can see it’s big eyes staring back at me and when our eyes meet I well up with deep tears.   My shaky voice stammers “Not now, ” and then I walk outside to the garage to fix my son’s bike.

This grief has been trailing me for awhile.  It started out as a draft or push of air and when I felt it I walked the other way or shut the window in my chest.  About a week ago I awoke in the middle of the night and felt its presence like one feels the weather about to change.  I sat up and felt a deep,  almost sick feeling in my stomach.  I searched the room and found only grief’s shadow flickering against the wall, “not now” I whispered and rolled over in my bed.

Now as I walk the hallway of my house I see him more clearly as the days past.  Sometimes I find him huddled in the corner staring back at me, sometimes I find him sitting next to me as I drive to work and recently I woke to find him laying next to me.  I screamed at him to leave, “NOT NOW!” I shouted and he scurried out of my bed back into the corner pulling his legs up tight.  I put my hand on the pillow where he had laid and feel the damp salty water.

It was 4 a.m. and I couldn’t sleep.  I tossed and turned trying desperately to quiet my mind.  It felt as if I had a hot ember in my throat that I was too afraid to swallow and too afraid to bring up so it stayed there burning.  I could sense the amount of effort my body spent on trying to stay in this “middle place” this grey burning…..it was time we spoke.  I sat up, “are you there” I whispered.  ”Yes” said Grief.  ”What is it you wanted to show me?” I said.  He stands and then sits next to me in bed.  He is a liquid figure with nothing I can really make out except his eyes and he smells of the sea.  He begins to hang memories like pictures on a wall but in the air in front of me.  They dance with light, movement, sound and emotions.  We sit and watch these memories laughing, crying and sometimes in quiet reverence.  Finally the memories fade back  into the night and there is only one picture left hanging, the one of those I have lost.  They smile at me as light burns in their eyes and fingers.

Grief speaks, “Do you see it?”  ”Do I see what” I reply.  ”Do you SEE it?” Grief says calmly.  ”No…..I don’t…..I’m sorry.”  Grief blows a cloud of fog from his mouth the fog reveals a river running through them…..running through them and into me.  I see all the love they poured from their hearts running through mine and then through my wife, my children, my brothers, my sisters, my friends, my music…..my life.

“Do you see it now?” says Grief.
Yes.
“Why do you try so hard trying not to look at the love given to you?  Why do you try so hard not to look at me?  It is the reminder of love that I bring, a love that is not gone.”

“Because I hurt, I miss, I long and the tears won’t stop.”  I reply.
“Yes I know, I am the one who brings the tears.  Even in your longing there is love.  Your tears add to this river between you, they don’t take away.  Yes, the are not here but they are not gone, they are just…..hmmmmm……how can I explain it to you…AH!!!…..It is like cosmic peek-a-boo.  Have you ever played or seen a toddler play peek-a-boo?  The parent pulls up a blanket covering their face and the child is confused and suddenly sad, ‘where did my Dad go?’ then the parent lets the blanket fall and the child is delighted beyond measure.  MY Father has RETURNED! their face shines with glee.  But he was never really gone was he?  It seems silly to us that the child ever thought they were gone but we are no different.  This is just  a bigger game of peek-a-boo.  You tears and sadness are real but at some point the blanket of night and stars will fall and you will see your beloved again.”

I could feel a weight lifting from my chest, “Are we done?” I say to grief.
“Yes” he replies as he opens the window in my room and climbs out, “for now”.

Everything we try and hold on to so we don’t hurt only causes more hurt. It is only in the surrender that we overcome. How does that make sense you might say. I need to surrender in order to win, to get over, to move past? That doesn’t make sense. The thing I am trying to defeat I must surrender to? The thing I am trying to push with all my might away away away from me I must embrace? This makes no sense. No, I understand that it does not but the rain falls on us all does it not? What would you say if you saw a person standing in a field swinging a sword at the rain trying to get it to retreat, or swinging their fists as the drops fall or thinking that curling up in a ball will stop them from getting wet. The rain falls on us all. Put down your sword, unclench your fist, put away your maps detailing how you will avoid the rain and let the rain wash you clean.

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