It's been Tim's birthday. A time of celebration that ought to have included friends and family members, has instead revolved around the four of us and these four walls.
The girls and I sure did try our damndest to make it memorable, and I think we did a good job. While many of the gifts failed to arrive in the post, the photo book that Keziah created arrived quite miraculously, far in advance of the date predicted by the website. There were so many sweet, bunting-draped moments, and I'm grateful.
Getting all Tim's family on a shared Zoom call was one such sweetness; hopefully the first of many calls like it. And yet somehow the chats with family, while precious and lovely, failed to touch that part of my heart that whispers, 'You're alone.'
This particular lie has always presented me with an uphill battle. As far as I can tell, we all have these echoing untruths that penetrate our hearts from childhood on. Mine has always been centred on aloneness and having to take care of myself. Out of commitment to my wholeness, no doubt, in this last season God has permitted several years of aloneness that have pressed me beyond the genuine experience of being alone and into an experience of belonging with him. How can it be that a time of relational aloneness could invite me to more deeply experience my inclusion in God? I can only tell you that it has.
This pandemic-driven time of isolation somehow pushes me again into that still sticky mess of second-guessing and wondering. The place of unmet need in my heart can become a minefield, unless I continue to allow God to meet this legitimate need for inclusion and belonging. Instead of wondering who else is in touch with one another, or why so-and-so hasn't called, I have to turn first to the relational reality of God and then, having grounded myself in that reality, I can move towards others from a place of abundance instead of lack.
Over this weekend, I was struck by the phrase I heard a couple of weeks ago: each of us is supported by thousands of unseen others. From the people who picked, roasted and delivered the coffee beans for my morning coffee, to the family that built the house we live in; from the people who stock the shelves in the grocery store where we buy food, to those who collect the rubbish we put out at night.
The photos that Keziah used in Tim's birthday book span five decades. And they tell the story of a thousand intersections, people whose lives have intersected with ours - with whom we have laughed, and learned, and grown, and grieved. As John Donne famously wrote, No man is an island. If this time of chaos proves anything, it is this. We are all more interconnected and more interdependent than we care to believe.
This morning, we joined the online service of our home church in Exeter, England. There are people in the congregation who knew us when we first left the UK in 1998 to make our life overseas. And it moved me, somehow, to see their faces as we sang, and prayed, and spoke together. In this unexpected season, we are experiencing a shared reality in a way that we never have since leaving England. There is a bonding and a relational closeness that feels more touching than when we were all just trying to have empathy for others' experiences that were not ours.
Could it be that during this time, the Spirit of God might address within us those long-held yet erroneous notions of truth that actually keep us from experiencing fullness of life in the ways he intends? What are those repeated lines that run through your mind when you are under pressure? In what way do they reveal places of wounding in your life that might, even in this season, be offered a new measure of healing? Let's pay attention to these messages our hearts bring to our consciousness. There is deep goodness to be mined, if we are willing.
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