we are not the river
I laugh in disbelief. It is the initial sputtering sound of my mind and heart agreeing, I believe, help me in my unbelief, which is what I feel right now, even if my lips have yet to utter the prayer, as I laugh out loud over the mess of how-in-the-world splayed out in front of me.
This is how I’ve been starting weeks since I became a mother.
“What?” Riley says, wanting in on the joke, and I pause, wondering how to respond.
I sit as I do at least once every week, twisting my wrist in circles, with a pencil poised over my planner, strategizing over the what and when, and it feels exhausting, like putting together a puzzle when I know some of the pieces are missing. I rearrange things; I stare at a list of food Kevin bought at the grocery store and try to decide what dinner will look like on Monday, and Riley sits perched on a chair at the bar with her own planner splayed open and a fist full of rainbow-colored pens. I write in pencil, because I want even the soft, graphite, erasable lines outlining my day to testify that for all my strategizing, time is not held in my hands or under my control. I need to hold my plans loosely.
Riley keeps looking up to tell me cheerily about the plans she’s made for us.
“Okay. Mom, these are the days I’ve written down for our walks,” she said just a moment ago, stopping to wait for my attention.
I tapped my pencil on Wednesday, rapraprap against the paper, noting the soreness in my feet, the fact that it’s just Sunday and my neck has already started to spasm, how the muscles connecting my neck to my back feel ropy and bruised when I lean my head just so. I looked up to let Riley see I was listening.
“Yes?”
The doctor hasn’t put a label yet on whatever it is with me, which means that it stays vague on paper, like Paul’s thorn, the sting of which feels no less significant for having no name. I often ignore that fatigue is a part of it; I often forget to factor that into my plans.
“Monday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday, and…Sunday,” Riley said, ending on a contemplative slide, and immediately I imagined our shadows stretched long over neighborhood sidewalks as everything wanes, the light especially, dying in a burst of wild color. I wondered if somewhere it could look just as beautiful for me to let go of the last of a day’s energy in favor of love. I do enjoy our walks.
“So, every day but Tuesday, then? That sounds wonderful.” I smiled, looking back down at the grid of my week, knowing if it works out isn’t a phrase Riley likes to hear, and then, I laughed, not the she can laugh at the days to come kind of laugh, not Ann Voskamp’s oxygenated grace, but the laughter of disbelief.
I have been reading lately about Abraham and Sarah. Just this morning, I imagined how it must have been when grizzled Abraham fell face down and laughed over God’s promise of a son, a son that would be born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age. Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? It seemed impossible to Abraham, more impossible, in fact, than my week now seems to me. Sarah overheard an angel telling Abraham, and she laughed too. She was ninety and God kept talking about fruitfulness coming from her body. I will make you very fruitful, God had said to Abraham. I will make nations of you. So, they laughed, a how-in-the-world laugh like mine, but maybe wilder, with just a hint of reckless insanity. And God said, Is anything too hard for the Lord?
A friend of mine, knowing how depleted I feel this week, sent me the Word of God, a stunning Bible with a perpetual sunset playing out on the cover, the words of life, sitting on my table in an Amazon box, power in a cardboard shell, a paper cloak. Another friend brought me a little pot of tulip bulbs just sending their shoots up from the dirt, life surging forth from a dead seed. You need these, she said, when she put the pot into my hands. Another friend sent me a card she had made herself. May you find rest in Him, it said, her handwriting scrolling at the bottom. Another friend sent a text, saying simply, out of us who are in Christ, flows the river of God. Wonder of wonders! We are not the river. Wonder of wonders! I am also not the light, nor the wisdom, and especially not the Spirit, and I do not need to be, but God’s gifts pour forth to me and from me.
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.
If the world truly depended on me, we would never make it.
Staring at the page now, I remember that just as God promised to make Abraham and Sarah very fruitful, He has also promised to bear much fruit in and through me—me with my broken perspective; me, with my screaming limitations, me, the special needs mama who feels tired ball up in her muscles like a fist. The grace of that promise is arresting. It’s enough to make me stop laughing.
Jesus said, the one abiding in me and I in him bears much fruit, for apart from me, you are able to do nothing.
I can tend to parse a scripture like that down to something I need to do, when the point is really in whom I need to be. It’s not the how or the what or the when but the where, the with whom, that leads to fruit-bearing. Jesus claims that bearing fruit comes as a natural result of living in union with the vine.
God does what He wants, and so in Him and by grace, Abraham and Sarah made and birthed a baby despite their very old age and their wrinkled, resistant bodies screaming unfruitful.
I look down at my planner and scrawl a different question over the top, not how-in-the-world will I manage, but is anything too hard for the Lord?
When Isaac was born, Sarah laughed all over again. She said, God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me. She said, who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age. She laughed, and this time, it was the laughter of joy, of grace. It was the laughter of a woman who knows the river of God flows from her but that she is not the river.
Riley sits, fisting those rainbow pens, still waiting for me to tell her why I was laughing.
“It’s just that I can’t imagine what God will do,” I fumble, shaking my head, looking down again at that planner, “but I know He has to do it.”
“It’s okay, Mom Jones,” she says to me. “It’s going to be o-kay. Because God is with you, and He can do it.”
And just like that, she goes back to writing rainbows.
