Comings and Goings

Almost before my feet hit the floor I could feel the lump forming in my throat. Standing in the kitchen a few minutes later, the tears started to flow. Sad. Lonely. Discouraged. Those were the companions that greeted me yesterday morning. Feeling the urge to grab ahold of them, I took a slow, deep breath instead. Rather than attach myself to them, I quietly named them out loud. This created a tiny space between me and them. Instead of ramping them up a notch with an old story about what they might have to say about me and my life, I poured a cup of fresh French Press Coffee and took a sip. Tom showed up, poured some coffee, and sat next to me.

Climbing into the red pickup a few minutes later, we headed out to meet a friend at the bottom of the logging road we hike a couple of times each week. I invited my feelings to come along if they wanted, which apparently they did. Twenty minutes later we all headed up the 1.7 mile stretch of hallowed ground found on that ordinary dirt logging road. Three humans and two dogs, my emotions bringing up the rear.

Somewhere along the way my emotional companions must have taken another trail, because when we climbed back into the truck an hour later, they were nowhere to be found.

There was nothing to fix or mend or do with those feelings. They weren’t there to derail my day unless I let them. They simply needed to keep me company for a spell. The tears helped. The deep breaths helped. Naming them helped. Tom simply being there helped. A hike with a friend helped. And coffee helped (duh).

By inviting them along, they were free to take their leave.

Fruitful

Let’s just put this one to rest—life is hard. No two ways about it. While it isn’t necessarily hard all the time or every day, over the long haul there is plenty of hard to go around.

For example:

The other night Tom and I went to bed at odds with each other. That doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I hate it. We both do. Neither of us had the capacity to deal with it, which meant we had to sleep with it. As I turned over, and closed my eyes, a thought occurred to me. May it be fruitful.

The next morning on the porch in the cold pre-dawn darkness we sat with our coffee, trying to make sense of what had happened. It was a hard, emotional, and painful conversation. It wasn’t fun. I cried a lot. It took listening on both of our parts, and eventually we found our way back to each other.

The fruit of that hard thing was that we discovered how to be better partners to each other.

Life is harder than ever right now. For me, and for the people I love, and most of the time there isn’t much we can do for one another other than to listen and bear witness to the hard. That, and pray that whatever it is will bear good fruit. That we will lean into the pain, or the fear, or the conflict, or the anxiety, or the anger, or the loneliness, or the grief, and turn it into something fruitful.

Nothing else makes sense.

Because the only thing that makes something hard even harder is when it doesn’t bear fruit.