10
Believe in Beginnings
Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
—William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All”
I haven’t told anyone this yet, but my first book is now out of print.
It would be hard for me to adequately quantify the amount of my soul that went into that project. How much time and attention and energy. How many tears and fears and hopes. It would be hard for me to take you through the entire winding journey. A journey that started in the Middle East and ended . . . recently . . . these nine years later.
What do you do when your dream goes out of print? When something you created and nourished is now defunct?
You cry. At least a little, I guess.
And then you question the whole entire experience: You begin to believe in the idea that your work is average, or even below average. You begin to believe that results are the only way we measure success anymore. You start second-guessing what you thought you heard rumbling around in your soul all those years ago, what you thought you heard God say straight to your heart.
I’ve been sitting with these story lines, tugging at them for resolution. I’m wired to want answers to my questions. Why is this the outcome? What was the point of that entire winding road? Why did that happen in that way?
I’m sure you can relate in your own way. Something you’ve poured yourself into does not materialize. Something you believed in evaporates. And, if you’re honest, you admit you’re not quite sure what the entire experience was about. What light is that season shining on today?
My quest for answers got me thinking about the last decade. About God opening a door. About me walking through that door. And then a protracted process of working on my craft. In the midst of that protracted process, I got pregnant with twins, and I—as I’m prone to do—got it all figured out: how I was going to finish the manuscript and turn it in and then give birth to twins and then release the book to modest but meaningful acclaim while holding my two newborns in matching outfits . . . all in that order.
But, wouldn’t you know, it didn’t go that way. At all.
I worked and I struggled and I shredded and I started over and then I did all those things all over again. Like, roughly, two hundred times. I felt like I was using every bit of precision I had, all in an attempt to hit a moving target.
So there I was, a million months pregnant with my Tiny Tanks, realizing my belly wasn’t the only thing growing. What was growing, additionally, was the reality that I was not going to be able to finish the project before the twins came. And I didn’t. And they did. And I cried.
Because I had no idea how to do any of the things God had put in my hands. Or so it seemed.
I was able, a few months later, to get the project finished enough and submitted. I was able to rock and cuddle and admire my gorgeous babies even though I felt like the big fish had come up to the surface where I was treading water and had swallowed me whole.
I sat in the belly of the whale and typed and nursed and typed and nursed. Every fourth day I’d shower. And so on. Somehow, this rhythm sustained me, now that I look back. At a time when I was scared and fragile and unsure of who I was as a person, I had the gift of a place to pour out my creative soul.
I guess I can see how God loved me through that specific journey, in that time and space. He threw me a lifeline. And I grabbed it. I, in fact, clutched at it, clenched it, begging him to not let me go into the dark abyss that felt just at my heels.
And he didn’t. He hasn’t. The days between then and now have not always been easy. There have been seasons since when I’ve sat in the belly of the whale, wondering where I was and how I got there. I have looked for a window, some light, when there has been very little.
But I’ve written. And that has been a grace and a kind of therapy.
Today, I can report that I have been gloriously spit up onto the shore of my life and am no longer in the bowels of the great animal. Don’t get me wrong, Hard still revisits, still knocks on my door. But now I can begin again. Now I have more fight in me.
I believe God is saying to me that the story is not just about a book being written and launching out into the world and then going out of print. It’s not a bait and switch. I didn’t get duped by my dreams. This isn’t a cruel cosmic joke.
In fact, there’s a meta-narrative, a story within a story. And here it is: It’s the story of me being unmoored and God tethering me to his dock, saying, “I will not let you lose yourself.” It’s the story of me with two babies and a deadline. And maybe, just maybe, it all saved me.
“You are loved.
You are loved.
Leeana, you are loved.”
Maybe it saved me from the great animal. Maybe it’s the work I’ve been given to help heal me. As St. Gregory the Great said, “There are some so restless that when they are free from labour they labour all the more, because the more leisure they have for thought, the worse interior turmoil they have to bear.” Um, yes.
Perhaps this work will always be about settling me and saving me as much as it is about sending work off into the world. I hope that doesn’t sound bad, or like I’m not thinking about you.
In fact, I am thinking about you. Because I bet there’s work God’s put in your hands to do, work that perhaps hasn’t unfolded in the ways and timing you’d imagined or hoped. Or you’re being asked to do it and you don’t know exactly how or when or what it’s supposed to look like. But here you are, compelled. And somehow that work is, maybe even without you knowing it, keeping your head above water.
Could this be the truest form of vocation: the work that heals us when we do it, somehow, through God’s economy, ends up healing others too.
Last year, in anticipation of Easter, I kept hearing the following over and over: “What in your life is in need of a resurrection?” Certainly this is the theme of every Easter, but last year for some reason, I kept hearing that same question as it related to my own life, my own journey. Not just as it related to Jesus coming out of the grave, literally, but how that truth is working its way into my own story.
Right before Easter, I got news of this first-book death. And it stung. It stings still. It is incredibly difficult to watch something important to you die: whether that’s a relationship, a person, a desire, a dream. You never get used to it. I don’t think death ever becomes less abrupt.
But the invitation I kept hearing over and over was to identify an area of my life that needed a resurrection and then BELIEVE that a resurrection could be possible. In other words, hope. Not the noun hope, the verb hope. To hope. Actively.
The ability to hope comes from the idea that what we believe is the end may be only the beginning.
Which, of course, is the story of Jesus. For Easter, my pastor spoke on the passage in Luke 24 when Cleopas and his companion are walking on the road to Emmaus and the resurrected Jesus joins them, but they don’t know it’s him.
The story reads, “Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him” (15–16 NIV).
I can think of a few really big things in my life that could use an injection of breath and heartbeat and spirit and vitality. And there’s a certain dangerousness to hoping because it puts us out there on a limb of desire that may not produce.
But I don’t think the cynics win. I don’t think hopelessness wins. And the story from the road to Emmaus makes me wonder if it’s at all possible that, in fact, Jesus himself is walking in my midst and maybe I’m just not yet recognizing him.
For me, one of the ways Jesus himself is walking with me right now is through the lines of Langston Hughes’s poem, “Harlem”: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up . . . Or does it explode?”
What happened to Jesus and his followers and their dreams of a new way of living and loving and believing? What happened at the cross? Did it all dry up? Or did it explode?
I’m holding on to the Easter story today as a reminder that sometimes what we believe is an ending might be only the beginning. And, with Jesus, new is always near.
Death stings. Hope explodes.
So here is what I’m putting my hope in today: I’m offering to the world that which God put in my hands to create. And I hope you are too. I hope you make something beautiful today. Not for the critics or the crowds, who will never be perfectly pleased or appeased. But because you have a gift that is pushing its way up through your soul. Your Created Center wants passage through your hands.
We have a whisper-pink lily growing in an otherwise barren dirt patch beside our house. You can see the tops of its onion-y bulb poking up out of the ground and then the single lily shooting skyward. I walk past the bloom when I go down to my studio, and it catches my attention because of something so delicate coming up from something so desolate.
When I look at where that lily comes from, I can’t help but believe.
Reflection & Expression
Do you have a dream to do something? What does it look like right now?
How does God intersect with this dream?
What does God have to say to you about this dream?
For Your Brazen Board
Find an image of hope.