here comes the sun

Here we are, rolling out of bed at 5am on a Saturday, Kevin and me all stumbles and limping, our voices stolen overnight, and so, we communicate with light touches and knowing nods, passing on our way around the bed to open drawers, dragging ourselves awake.  We groan and creak and sigh without knowing we’ve made a sound, like loose boards or a couple of old threadbare chairs.  I feel like I have cobwebs in my mind and it makes me smile, the idea that our rising feels like a kind of haunting, might even sound that way to someone unfamiliar with our movements, our pillow-lined morning faces, the way we pause a moment to peer through the fog of sleep still clouding our eyes, blinking, groping for a door jamb or the edge of the bed before launching ourselves forward.

I tap the power button on the lit tree that sits on one of our dressers, the one I like to call the burning bush, particularly as I tease Kevin (but not this early in the morning) about the fact that he can’t sleep with any kind of light, about the way he shrouds anything even glowing to make our room as dark as a tomb and then even covers up his eyes, and I slide the curtains at the window apart with my fingers just to see that it is, in fact, still just that dark outside in the waiting world.  Not even the birds have started preening or stretching their wings or lifting their heads to sing for the morning, or so I imagine, anyway, because the hour feels early to me even for anticipation.

But is there really ever an hour too early, too cold, too waiting, too heavy, too dark, too burdened for worship?

There are those signs beside the coffee pot (which only now has begun to clear its raspy throat downstairs, getting to its wakeup work), the one that says, todays good mood is brought to you by coffee, and the other–first I drink the coffee, then I do the things, the ones that make me chuckle (inwardly only, silently only, right now, it being, as I said, too early yet for sound) because they’re true, and I lean heavily on the stair rail as I make my way down, having spied the golden light from Riley’s lamp glowing below her bedroom door.

It’s funny how I have no trouble saying that the coffee must precede the things, will awaken and ready my body, will put me in a good mood, even. It’s funny how that’s not even weird, to believe that the coffee must come first. I am not, of course—not even for a second, don’t you think it—bad-mouthing the morning coffee, just wondering if maybe I’ve given it a bit too much responsibility.

Always when I see that lamplight throwing gold across Riley’s threshold, even on these o-dark-thirty mornings when we rise like old bones suddenly inhaling and alive again, I hear in my mind a snatch of an old Beatles song—here comes the sun, which is of all things, in the Beatles’ uncomplicated way, in a Riley kind of way, a song about the end of Winter, the end of the cold, the dark, the sleep. It might as well be Riley’s theme song.

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes

Here she comes, before I am halfway down the stairs her door swinging wide, and all that light spilling, molten, into the still dark hall, and even though the floor feels chilled against my bare feet, it’s as though some sort of fire has caught, warmth inspiring, throwing color.  It isn’t words, not at first, that change the temperature in the hallway, and it isn’t just the light from Riley’s lamp.

“Oh hi, Mom,” she chirps finally, brightly, discovering me, as though somehow my bedraggled presence on the stairs is in fact her true delight, and the hour itself, which still feels like some sort of barrier to me, is to her nothing at all worth noting.

When you carry the sun, like some kind of inward, holy, renewing fire, outwardly even bedazzling, perhaps the night itself becomes by comparison so bland, so utterly uncompelling, as to hardly be worth mentioning. Or maybe it’s only that she’s so focused outside herself, focused on loving me, she hardly feels the heavy drag of sleep still burdening her eyes, but anyway, she stands at the top of the stairs, pausing to smile down on me as I make my way on in search of coffee.

Riley is—for me long has been–the bursting arrival of light at any hour, the kind of person who beams and ignites everyone else, giving her warmth and energy away. She is generous with good cheer, with gratitude and joy, these things being so natural to her as to make her self-forgetfully radiant. In fact, this radiance is so much a part of her nature that even our most challenging circumstances don’t seem able to overwhelm the light within her, the light pouring out of her. This, Christ said, is what it means to see with healthy eyes.

“Good morning, Rilo,” I say, testing my gravelly voice and offering her a smile.

She shines, sings, good morning back, like it’s a song, before continuing on down the hall toward her morning ablutions.

Meanwhile, I’m still standing on the stairs, still looking up, stopped still with seeing that this is what it means to live gratefully.

I’m remembering that recently a compassionate and caring friend of mine asked Riley if these long weekend workdays were hard for her, and she said, “No, they’re not hard.” She said, by way of further explanation, that she liked being able to serve her patients all three meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or in other words, that what she got to do, what she got to give, overwhelmed any sense of burden she felt in her work.

So ahead of the work then, and regardless of the hours, Riley feels grateful to be able to give.

I like to treat people to things, that’s how she put it to me once in another conversation, and I realized this is how she thinks of giving through her work, as the opportunity to treat people, to be generous, to be kind. The idea that she gets to do that, even if it means getting up before dawn to do so, feels to her like a wildly lavish gift.

I have been thinking a lot lately about work as worship, about how Christ’s natural work was to serve—He came to serve, Word says, not to be served, about the way scripture clearly attaches the fullness of joy to the downward mobility of humble giving, about the suggestion that any work can be good work if its object is to draw attention to God and away from myself.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, Jesus said, for my yoke is kind and my burden is light, and I have wondered, in heavier, darker hours, how this could actually be so, that a yoke—the weighty burden of work–could ever be kind or light.

But I hear Riley say her work is not hard, not even on an early-long day, because on those days she gets to serve more, and I begin to understand how it is that a giving heart could be lightened by giving itself away, how she could see it as a kindness to get to serve.

Here we are, tumbling a fiery, leaf-blown way toward Thanksgiving, the thanks always bonded in some kind of union with the giving, always, always reminding, thanks and giving, and I think of Christ, how before giving He always first gave thanks.

I can hear Riley in the bathroom, narrating the steps for getting herself dressed and ready, her voice a happy, lilting spill of light, and I realize giving thanks before the giving can be as much about how I approach my work and my day as it is about what I have to say.

Finally, I settle into the sofa, sipping coffee as steam curls and drifts (I told you—I’m not bad-mouthing the coffee), turning my mind toward a gratitude practice for waking, thinking for what or for whom can I be grateful today, and I see that this gratefulness for getting to give has Riley forgetting to groan.  It is itself a way to precede the work, the giving, with a practice of thanks. Gratefulness, it seems, is not just about an accounting of gifts.