Life is humbling

In case you haven’t noticed, carving out the time to write about a fictional life is pretty low on the priority list for me right now.

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 this 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.

Wow.  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 wow.  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!

~c. a.

 

p. s. Now that I’m on Christmas break, I am hoping to get back to that novel.  Stay posted!  Chapter 6.0 might not be too far away.  =)

 

The Foolish and the Weak 5.0

Yep, it’s finally here!  I’m so excited that this project is actually still progressing, though at a snail’s pace.  =)  I did want to make a quick disclaimer before you read the fifth chapter.  There is a spot in this chapter…and come to think of it, in other chapters, too….where the name of God is included.  I promise, I do this very cautiously and only in particular settings because I don’t want to take God’s name in vain, even in a book…so.  Be reassured that, if God is referenced, it is because the character is actually speaking to or about God.  Hope that makes sense.  Enjoy!

The Foolish and the Weak 5.0 

            The surgeon blinked enigmatically and ruffled the thin ring of fluffy hair that crowned his face.  He breathed heavily, like a man under great strain…or like a man released from great strain. 

 

            Maybe maybe maybe

 

            Brian reached for Jenn’s hand instinctively and together they waited for the heavy folds of tension hanging over the room to shiver and split.  “And…?”

 

Don’t hesitate.  Don’t whisper.  Just say it, say it out loud so that it hurts like it should. 

 

(say you love me, brian. 

 

say that your heart broke when you left me…say that there is still time for us, my love, and that maybe it will be ok)

 

God grant this maybe.

 

            The surgeon drew a worn hand over his face before he spoke.  “I’m very sorry,” he said, his voice cracking and plunging like an echo off a canyon wall.  “We did all we could.  But your son…he died on the operating table.  We couldn’t bring him back.  I’m very sorry for your loss.”

 

            Loss…loss, the sound of the word twirling softly around the room in delicate tornado dances.

 

            The pain was physical and intense, so intense that for a moment there was absolutely nothing within the cage of his ribs.  He had expected it to hurt, but not like this, not so bad that it was all he could do not to throw up from sheer pain.  They say the truth will set you free, but God, if this is truth…

 

            (what is truth)

 

            truth is a harsh and cruel god.

 

           He could feel himself blacking out from the pain.  The room was looping over and over like a damaged video, swirling in grotesque blotches of color.  Strange how a white room could have so many colors…

 

(red black red black red black…and now, whenever he closed his eyes, that was all he saw – emergency flashers in the dark.)

 

red black red black…

 

black. 

 

“Brian…?”  Jenn’s voice filled the void in his chest and his heart thudded.  He hadn’t noticed that, for a moment, it had stopped completely.  Slowly the colors thinned like a veil, and through them he could see Jenn’s face.  “Brian…?” she whispered his name again.  Her eyes had the baffled look of a child betrayed for the first time.  Not comprehending.  Not crying.  Just faded, wilted, like a flower snapped from its stem.

 

Brian steadied himself against the row of plastic chairs and pulled Jenn close.  Now the pain was blunted, crushing rather than piercing.  A few minutes more, he knew, it would be gone completely, and in its place would be deadness, warm and enveloping.

 

After the pain comes the anesthesia. 

 

If life was as kind as the dentist, the anesthesia would come first.

 

He was numb.  He couldn’t feel her head against his chest, couldn’t feel her trembling under his touch.  So he enveloped her with someone else’s arms, comforted her with a voice that was not his own, because, just now, he did not have the strength to do anything else.

 

Nothing you can do for him in there, Mike had said…go in and be strong for your wife, Mike had said.  Nothing is an ugly word, as ugly as black. 

 

And loss.

 

****

 

            “Mr. Tracy…I’m sorry to bother you, but will you step over here for a moment?”  The colorful dotted scrubs couldn’t mask the whiteness of the girl’s face, the anguish in her eyes.  In this strange limbo state of emotion, Brian could feel for her, though he could not feel for himself.  Not anymore.  Not yet. 

 

But he could remember his first week on the job.  They had responded to a gruesome accident…there had been a child, a baby, only two years old….

 

            It had taken seven years for that image to leave his nightmares.

 

            “Mr. Tracy…?” the girl said again, hesitantly.  Shame flushed her cheeks.  That, too, Brian remembered – the clinging shame of intruding on the family’s grief.  He wished, perfunctorily, that he could do something to reassure her.  

 

            “I’m so sorry…but…um…your wife really should come, too.  If…if you want, I can keep an eye on your little boy while you’re gone…”   

 

Jenn’s sudden and swift response caught Brian off guard.  “No.  No, he’ll stay with us.” 

 

Brian could see the plea in her eyes and he knew the unreasoning terror behind it.

 

I know, my love.  I feel it too.

 

Christian stays with us.

 

So he turned and picked up his son, and together he and Jenn followed the girl in the polka-dotted scrubs down the hallway.

 

Decades passed before the nightmare was over, long aching hours full of strange and horrible things.  On TV it never showed this part: the impersonal, practical, nauseating details that followed.  It always cut to the grieving family at home. 

 

Real life wasn’t that easy.   

 

In real life they didn’t let you just go home and try to grieve.  There were papers, questions, merciless decisions to somehow be accomplished, and, meanwhile, a fog kept drifting…

 

(In, out, over, around…sometimes it surrounded him like the sea and he found himself drowning in it, half-tempted to never emerge.  And sometimes it faded suddenly, cruelly, so that that it was like losing her all over again.)

 

            See, I know how this goes.  But I don’t know how I am supposed to get through it again. 

 

            I don’t know if I want to.  

 

When it was all over, Brian and Jenn and Christian walked out in the twinkling night.  The rain had come early and so even in the dark everything was clean and sparkling and dewy. 

 

They were three.

~c. a.

 

           

The Foolish and the Weak 4.0

Would you look at that!  I think I just broke some kind of “longest chapter to write ever” record!  Well.  Hope it’s good enough to make up for the wait.  In my opinion, even though I tried to dial down the emotion a little bit for breathing room, it’s still pretty raw.  But at this point…I mean, realistically in a situation like this it would be raw.  And wriggling.  =)  I also thought I’d try out a little experiment regarding punctuation and grammar in parts of this chapter, so if there are sections that seem like they maybe don’t fit with similar sections in other chapters…it’s ’cause it’s an experiment.  Let me know what you think! 

The Foolish and the Weak 4.0

             It was not what he had expected.  Jenn, sitting at the other end of the waiting room, dry-eyed and furious – Jenn, reading Sports Illustrated of all things, refusing to look up at him because it was his fault, once more, that her son was hurt.

And the worst of it is that I know.  She doesn’t.  She thinks he just broke his leg or needs stitches, and she doesn’t know because I didn’t tell her.  If I had the guts to just out and tell her, she wouldn’t be angry…

 

Let her be angry.  It’s the best thing for her, now.  Better that I carry the burden of this knowledge for her.  I’m strong enough to carry it for us both. 

 

The shadows began to creep forward again, began not to whisper but to shroud his mind with words that were his own and not his own.

 

no…no, that’s not it at all.  you’re not strong.  you just don’t have the grit to tell her the truth.  you didn’t have the grit to tell yourself so let her be angry brian.  let her be angry and let yourself be a coward

 

And then there was Christian, sitting in the exact middle between the two of them, uniting them by his presence… and, because of their distance, sitting alone.  His chubby legs swung restlessly against the plastic seat and in one arm he cradled a worn baseball cap, the Giants one that Matthew wore most.  He wasn’t crying, either, just staring at his jerking sneaker laces and clutching his brother’s hat. 

            He was a little trooper today.  Handled himself well, but man, kids shouldn’t have to see things like that. 

 

            (the rain that night fell as blood falls from a wound, sweeping down the road in irregular throbs.  in the light of the emergency flashers, the water was red.  as red as love and as red as death.)

 

            Nobody should have to see things like that.

 

            Brian drew his hand over his eyes.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said to Christian, “you look lonely.  You want to come sit on my lap…”

            “No.”  The word came out rough and scratched, as though Christian were speaking through sandpaper.  “No…sir.”

            Then Brian knew that his youngest son was not so much a trooper as scared, too scared to cry or to snuggle close to him or to call him Daddy.  He wasn’t a trooper at all…he was a frightened child who had lost all bearings, and unexpectedly Brian felt that there was this link between them that had never been there before.

            (Always there was a wall, a vine-covered wall that separated him from his youngest son, just as the rose-covered wall separated him from his wife. 

 

            Matthew had no walls.)

 

Never any walls with Matthew.  But now there was something between them: a river.  Red, like a river in Egypt.

 

            I can’t help you across the river, son.  You’ll have to do it yourself; you’ll have to fight it out alone.  All I can do is wait for you on the other side. 

 

            Abruptly Brian got up and went over to kneel next to Jenn’s chair.  He took her hand, like he had that day when he knelt and offered her his bleeding heart, and he bent close and whispered because, if you whispered, it didn’t hurt as much.  “Jenn…I gotta tell you something.”

            She lifted her eyes, blue and dewy like a rain-washed sky.  There were a few furtive grey streaks on her face where tears had drawn lines in her makeup.  So she had cried a little, after all.  That was bad.  Brian hated to see her cry.  But if he whispered…maybe it would make it all right.  

            “Jenn…I told you that Matthew crashed his bike.  I told you…”  His lips went dry and he ran his tongue over them. “I told you he was hurt pretty bad.” 

            “Yeah?” she breathed.  The magazine dropped to the floor, crushing the pages as it fell. 

            “I didn’t tell you how bad.”  Brian shut his eyes and gathered himself together for the hurdle.  “I didn’t tell you—”

            “Excuse me…Mr. Tracy?”  A girl in pink polka-dotted scrubs came in, her face blanched as though she were in secret, physical pain.  “I…um, the doctor sent me out to give you an update.  Your son is still in surgery.  At this time I cannot say how long it will be before you can see him.”  Her words jerked over each other mechanically.  “The car was going pretty fast when it struck…the damage is extensive…please be assured they are doing everything they can.”  Her eyes ducked and swerved to meet Jenn’s, and then she turned and fled from the room with her hand pressed against her mouth.

            The clock ticked once, twice…five times, each silent slice of time longer than the last. 

            “You didn’t tell me…” Jenn echoed, vacantly.  “What didn’t you tell me, Brian, what – didn’t you – tell me!”   She beat her clenched hands wildly on his chest, her breath coming hard and fast when it came at all and all he could do was hold her close.

            “I’m so sorry, darling – I tried and I couldn’t…I couldn’t, you know…”  All he could do was hold her close and whisper.

****

            Four hours later, when the girl in the polka-dotted scrubs returned, she was followed by the surgeon. 

 ~c. a.

Where

I don’t normally like to blog about happenings in the life of c. a. except as they directly relate to my work here.  This is a blog with a purpose.  It’s for creative scribblings, attempts at something like photography, and a forum for constructive feedback.

But I’m breaking my rule tonight.

This is a personal post.

Because it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for…the reasons why c. a. went awol approximately two months ago, taking Brian, Jenn, and the rest of the Tracy family with her! (Not including the very inadequate, useful, and over-fondled excuse of my very inadequate, useful, and over-stuffed day planner*, even though that is playing a huge role in c. a.’s absence as well.)  Megan already had this moment some time ago, but since I’m assuming not everyone read the comments on my last post, I figure I should probably make it official.

Two things.  *drum roll, please*

Thing Two (because Thing One is far more important than Thing Two, hence it is called Thing One, and because Thing One is far more exciting than Thing Two, hence I am saving it for last):  I’m heading into two years of study, CLEPs, Dantes, and more CLEPs in quest of my BA in English.  That, having a tangible deadline, is taking up more of my brain cells at the moment than my already-dragging story.

Thing One: Our family is adopting!  Which is extremely exciting and slightly scary.  We are so looking forward to having babies and toddlers in the house once more, and again, just at the moment, my tangible soon-to-be-expanded-family is taking up more of my time and energy than my fictional Tracy family.  Not that I’m actually involved in all the paperwork, but adoption is expensive and my sister and I are involved in making things to sell to aid the adoption fund, as well as in figuring out the legalities of such fundraisers.  (Tax and income laws are so horribly confusing…)

Anyway.  That’s what’s going on in my life right now.  I feel like God has us right at the edge of something big and I’m not entirely certain what that something big will involve, but I’m excited to see what He has in store.  I sincerely hope that it will include time to finish my novel, and I sincerely will try, but it may be a while.   Not too long, I hope…because I’m just as eager as you are to find out what happens with Brian, Jenn, Matthew and Christian!  In the meantime, I’m going to try and post some photography here and there so that my blog won’t entirely die.  So until then, get out and enjoy some sun!

~c. a.

p. s. *Oh yes, and about that day planner…I never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d actually keep a day planner on a regular basis and find it actually useful.  Well, I’ve lived to see the day, all right…my piano students will tell you that I wouldn’t know what day it was without it.  =)

I Heart Faces Challenge: Pets

This week’s challenge at iheartfaces is Pets! Our backyard being the size of a postage stamp, we don’t have a dog.  We have a bunny.  That thinks he’s a dog.  He scratches at the door when he wants to come inside, he gets cuddly when we’re about to leave on a trip, and he comes hippety-hopping when you call him.  Just like this:

p. s. I’ve recently begun shooting in RAW but when I convert to jpeg to post on my blog it comes out much blurrier than it actually is.  Any tips?

p. p. s.  This is a last-ditch effort to get the Linky to work because I can’t get it to upload from my stored files.  See how very tech savvy I am?  =)  This is not a part of my entry, just my thumbnail.

~c. a.