And So It Is

Spring break let me off from lessons last week. So Jo’s folks came north to transport both her and Everly south to Colorado Springs, where I would meet them after a bleak 1,000-mile haul to the far side of Kansas to fetch our car; fixed after our wreck on New Years Eve and awaiting pickup. Great excuse for a few days visit.

Visiting family is good. Not easy, but maybe not supposed to be. We’re always pulled two directions, with both her parents and mine in the same town. Our time was further complicated by my Grandfather’s failing health, and recent admittance into a high-care facility.

Wrightson Tongue Sr. was born in 1916 and served the Methodist Church for 50 years or so, and raised 4 boys across nearly 20 of them. The two older boys followed suit in profession, the third in heart – my father. He’s traveled around the world several times, and I’ve lost track of the number of churches he pastored in Virginia; my mother’s family came to faith (and my parents met) because Granddad was sent to a small church called “Wesley UMC” at just the right time.

And as we sat in his room together, his body losing heart (quite literally) after years of use and abuse I couldn’t help seeing some kind of grand rhythm to it all. Everly was working to play ball with him, I was making simple conversation and my Dad was manning the camera. 4 generations in one room. I saw myself in him somehow; saw Jo and I there, sitting together 60 years from now, nearly used up – Everly and her grandkids in the room working to connect.

“Granddad, were you ever that small?” I asked, pointing to Everly.
“Yeah-” he said with a quick grin, shrugging his shoulders.

He doesn’t say as much as he used to; the shrug said it all. Almost as if he was adding, “and so it is.” ‘So it will be with your Dad, so it will be with you, and we can all expect this rhythm – until the end.’

I couldn’t help but walk away a little sad that day, though grateful my folks are quite close and can still be a support to him. Old and fatigued as he is, Granddad believes in Jesus and so I will see him again – on our next visit or otherwise. So there is hope still. But humbled by the moment, I felt the urge to protest, “this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

And yet – so it is. We are born, we live, and we die.

We drove back to Fort Collins the next day, back to ‘normal’ life where we’re working hard, paying bills, weeks fly past and Everly continues her brisk climb into toddlerhood. We don’t have any ailing friends, and our church family is mostly too young to have any near death. It’s a side of life I’ve managed to avoid, if I’m honest.

So I wonder, is there a way – in the midst of our overarching protest – to embrace a life that knows an end will come? While our culture fights it with everything it’s got, how do those with hope beyond this world live with that hope on display? How would that begin to shape and change us if we did?

Common Language

As Jo and I prepared to wed, and were neck deep in a period of premarital counseling there seemed to be no end to the advice that people gave to us. “Marriage is the greatest journey of your lives,” “oh you’ll have hard days,” [but] “just keep being open about your expectations,” and the like.  And though we cared to improve our chances and welcomed most of the advice, much of it fell on deaf ears all the same.  Almost that it was a vocabulary we couldn’t yet fully understand.

We were caught up in the euphoria; drenched in optimism and so preoccupied with the last minute details of the ceremony that we had little time to really give all what seemed distant concerns a second thought.  As Will Rogers put it so aptly, “There are three kinds of men.  The one that learns by reading, [the] few who learn by observation, [while] the rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.” It didn’t matter how prepared we thought we were - saying “I do” was about to give us the greatest jolt of our lives.  So much so that at times, each of us would look back and think, “wow, life before marriage was so easy.”

And so it has been with kids.

Having been Everly’s parents for the last 17 months, and having delighted in her the entire time, we nevertheless looked back on our year or so of marriage pre-kids with this “wow, just being married was amazing; we were so free…” Yet no amount of advice or encouragement as we expected our first child could have prepared us for it.  Again we learned by doing, for the common language we were straining to understand wouldn’t come without experience.  We had to take the leap ourselves. 

Perhaps much of life is this way, surprising us with busyness or stress or consuming our time with things we never imagined would.  If that’s more normal than I realize, then I only hope that the backwards-looking, “life was so _______” moments won’t be.  Perhaps the only common language we should hope for is “depend on God, and see what he does.”  Though change is certain, he longs to surprise us with mercy that is new with the dawn. 

And dawn never ceases to come.