tied, together and tied together

“Hey Riley?”

Zoe’s voice comes light from my phone, which sits on the kitchen island in the center of the room as Kevin and I turn and twist around finishing dinner; Adam, announcing his echolalia, paces a fast, hungry track around the perimeter; and Riley sits at the bar facing us, wearing a listening grin, her face all love.

Mid-turn, I pick up the phone and put it in front of Riley so my daughters will be able to hear each other.

“I’m really sorry you had to go through all that hard stuff this weekend,” Zoe continues, because we have been talking about an unexpected turn for Riley, a sudden drop in blood pressure with a fancy name, a vasovagal attack, the kind of dizzying, upending, unexpected event that feels for all the world like going to pieces.

Sitting in the ER beside my recovering Riley, I remembered (and so, it re-membered me) that the word often translated worry or anxiety in scripture, merimnaó, means exactly this, a dis-concerting, dis-enchanting, dis-integration of soul, of mind, of body—a tearing apart—that often happens when I become consumed with the necessities of life and the unknown future.  I had the thought, finding myself so suddenly storm-tossed, that such is the way of things in a broken, entropic world, because does anyone ever actually consciously decide to be worried or anxious?  Isn’t it always a bit like suddenly, to put it Riley’s way, your legs don’t work exactly right, and your head pounds with a headache, and you find yourself, despite what you really desire, in an emergency waiting room, wondering why you can’t just be okay?

She had smiled, anyway, Riley, waiting beside me to get test results, to maybe understand the why, even though we all know most of the time the why feels more like a slippery fish writhing in the hands, thrashing its mysterious way on without us.

I’m learning: I can jump around, plunging my hands into the water, grasping after nothing, or I can still, and acknowledging God, open my hands to pray.

Riley and I read Psalm 121 together during our Sunday sojourn in the ER, while we waited, and she leaned over to look at the words, careful, attentive, like this was the news she really needed, that he who watches over you will not let you waver and fall, because her shaky, skin and bone legs had actually stumbled.  She had actually fallen.  You’d think her naturally literal interpretation of words would have left her with a few questions.

What does it mean to sing and believe that God won’t let your foot slip when you literally just slipped, to sing and believe He won’t let you fall when you literally just fell?

It’s hard, that faith, and yet the Israelites, ascending in their travels to Jerusalem and very likely tumbling sometimes on pilgrim-weary legs, sang those words as they went on their way.  In fact, in Hebrew scripture, Riley’s exact experience, the vulnerable insecurity of feeling and being weak on your own two feet, is often used as a metaphor for the instability of human life and human plans apart from God’s support. They allowed stumbling to remind them, quite pointedly, of their need for God, and on this point, depending on God as her ever present help, Riley stands unwavering.  Somehow, she seems to understand that rather than saying that God will never let her experience the unreliability of her own two legs, the psalmist points to the solid reliability, instead, of God’s present help, and to a wholistic (rather than merely circumstantial) view of God’s faithful protection.

The Lord will keep you from all harm—
    he will watch over your life;
the Lord will watch over your coming and going
    both now and forevermore.

I read it aloud slowly, letting it flow and flood and soak, pausing at the end of each line to listen, looking up to catch her eye as I finished.

“Aww, that’s so sweet,” she’d said, smiling tired and sitting back again in the hard plastic chair, pressing her back against the wall, her familiarity making me smile too, even though.  Taste and see that the LORD is good, I’d murmured soft, a prayer of response.  Riley was right:  God’s protective watchfulness over us, His hesed love is so sweet.

“Can I pray for you?”  Zoe asks Riley now, her voice a kind balm flooding the kitchen, and I am drawn again to sweetness, how it can only be from God’s hands that we find goodness packaged in with difficulty, that we can find His unwavering stability when we feel our own instability.

Kevin and I exchange a look, a whole paragraph of conversation—of celebration–over the plating of the meal, steam curling, while one daughter just starts commending all this upending of ours to God’s grace, and the other, still grinning humble, bows her head over that cell phone.

Grace upon grace already given, God also showed me recently where from jail Paul wrote to the Philippian church, urging them to confront the reality of dividing anxiety, that distracting worry, by turning to God in prayer, with thanksgiving, promising that God’s eirene—tying-together peace, which transcends all understanding, would then, as a direct and natural result, guard their hearts and their minds in Christ Jesus.

So maybe we suddenly and even continually find ourselves elbow-deep in the trouble of a troubled world, but that doesn’t mean we have to just let it all tear us to pieces.

Prayer with thanksgiving happens to be, as scripture says, the unending powerful action, the warfare, of children wanting to stand firm despite the infirmity of the world and our mortal lives.  Children unwavering in faith that God’s ever-present help will ultimately keep them from harm.

Zoe prays.

Our heads now, mine and Kevin’s, bowed too.

Please keep Riley safe, keep her from harm, keep her strong, establish her steps…

And when Zoe says amen, we are all together echoing.

Riley looks up, her eyes flooding glassy with fresh, joyful tears, her voice now the only wobbling as she says, “Thank you, Z,” grinning down at the phone, and Kevin and me, we’re maybe glassy overflowing too, over a prayer that’s pretty much everything, because we feel that promised bonding, that hesed attachment love tying us to God, tying us suddenly more closely, with the most unbreakable cord, to each other.

“Oh, she’s all teary,” I say out loud of Riley, because Zoe can’t see what her prayer has meant.

“Yeah, I’m all teary, Z,” Riley says, her voice the collapse of relief.

“Oh, me too, Riley.  I’m crying too,” Zoe says, her voice rising and breaking, like a wave of grace, over the phone line connecting us.