The Glory of the Beloved
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
BRENNAN MANNING
There are branches missing from my family tree. I remember sitting at our kitchen table with a printed handout from Judah’s kindergarten class, a sturdy trunk split evenly on each side like a balanced scale with lines for each family member.
Judah held his pencil balled up in his chubby little fist and painstakingly wrote Alia and Josh in the slots for mom and dad. For aunts and uncles, he wrote Sarah and Jordan on my side, and Anna on the other. He filled in his grandparents, Amaji and Papaji on my side and Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Dave on the other, and then he’d point to the slots on his dad’s side, and I’d spell out the names, Great-Grandpa Harry and Great-Grandma Dorothy. But when he’d point to mine, I’d mostly shake my head. I don’t know their names. I don’t know them. And when he was finished, the tree was hopelessly lopsided. There were so many gaps. So much missing history.
Family trees are complicated. Some are so full you can barely cram the names on the page and they start to climb the sides of the paper, like they’re sprouting new limbs. I have friends who can trace their ancestors all the way to the boats that first brought them across the sea. Other family trees have been chopped down short, branches severed, roots dug up.
I don’t know why teachers assign these. There are so many ways we don’t fit in tidy slots. So many ways our roots are just as hard to explain as our growth. Because our growth is seldom linear, seldom so easily charted and mapped out. Many times, it is us, circumnavigating the world in a dinghy that takes on water. Our universe tilts on its axis, spins us wildly about.
Dust to Dust
My ancestors have no graves. At least not that I know of. Only ashes, burnt down to dust in flames, ancient bones to rubble.
After my grandma died, we drove along the switchbacks of Highway 536, gliding easily along the watermelon-hued backdrop of the Sandia Mountains, and found a bluff overlooking a serene scene. I remember trees and a view of a modest canyon, but nothing spectacular. Nowhere I’d want to spend eternity. There is no way I’d ever be able to find my way back there and maybe it was okay that none of us ever tried.
We had a simple box with her remains and her name written along the top. Helene Havens. But we only called her Grandma Skippy. I don’t think I ever asked her why. Where had that nickname come from? By the time I knew her, maybe she wouldn’t have remembered anyway.
The box was cardboard, like a small present you might get in the mail with a toy inside. I stood with my back to the wind, but my mom faced it head-on, and I can remember she didn’t cry as she opened it and we each took a handful of ash. I remember thinking I’d cry if my mother died, but maybe it was different for grown-ups. Or maybe she spent her tears in secret.
The ashes weren’t dusty like I’d expected. Not like the ash left over after our campfire had burned down to powder during one of my dad’s impromptu camping trips.
We’d sit by the campfire and my dad would enthrall us with his stories while my mom prepared fried rice or chili in a giant wok. Our marshmallows turned into tiny torches, crisping into balls of gooey charcoal before plopping into the flames, and our fingers and faces were sticky from the few that made it to our mouths. Once, I tried to grab the burned-to-a-crisp marshmallow off too soon and the center oozed out and burned my fingers, blistering my skin.
I thought about the feel of that burn as I held my grandma’s ashes, and even though I know she couldn’t feel anything, I hated the thought of it. Her ashes were coarse and hard, like tiny pebbles, the color and weight of kitty litter.
I held my fist up and let my fingers open on my palm like a budding flower, the wind catching the ashes and carrying them like dandelion seeds over the canyon. And just like that, she was gone. In a way, it was a small mercy. She had been disappearing one memory at a time, one moment. And she was afraid. The world was no longer familiar, her body was tired, her mind confused. I loosened my grip all the way and she was carried into eternity, my hand once again ashen.
You Can’t Die Out There
My dad’s remains are in my mom’s closet down the hall on the shelf. The box is bigger, and I wonder if it’s because he was bigger than my tiny Asian grandmother. I don’t know how these things work, but there’s some sort of container inside and maybe that’s what is taking up the space. When we went to the funeral home, the director opened a glossy pamphlet and my mom and I chose the most basic options. My dad would’ve hated being cooped up. Someday, we hope to scatter some of his ashes in India. He wanted to die there, where my parents had lived as missionaries for over a decade, but I didn’t let him. I refused him the peace of anonymity, of knowing we would not bear witness to his deteriorating form, to bear witness to his death.
In India, when his mouth filled with blood and it poured from his throat, my mom called a friend who helped steer him down the stairs of their flat to get him to the hospital in Pune.
The phone call came and I don’t remember the words on the other end of the line—the connection sounded like it was coming from another galaxy. This might be it. This might be goodbye, a spotty call from what might as well have been a million miles away.
If they couldn’t cauterize the vessels in his esophagus, broken open from the pressure in his portal vein resulting from his failing liver, he would die in a hospital room with only my mom by his side. I had no current passport or visa, no money to buy a plane ticket. No choices. I stayed by the phone back in those days when you had no choice but to be tethered to land.
I wondered about all of the unsaid things. My dad was my hero when I was a girl, but he’d morphed into a man as I aged. He became flawed. He became human and at times, I hated him for it. It felt like a betrayal when I saw he was just a man, with raw blood in his veins and the ability to disappoint. The stories became flimsier, because I knew the man he was when he wasn’t leading, when he wasn’t teaching or telling stories, when he wasn’t dreaming up some grand scheme. I saw where he was sick and dying, where he was mortal. Where he could be wounded, where he could wound.
It’d been years since I’d hidden in my room at night reading my Bible in secret so my dad wouldn’t get the upper hand because I joined his side of things—just like he’d said I would.
We’d made peace, a sort of surrender to the ways things had gone wrong for us, after I gave birth to my oldest son, Judah. I remember being flat on my back with the blue curtain propped up between my breasts and my abdomen, sectioning me off so I wouldn’t see myself splayed open as the doctor cut my child from my body. And when I heard him squeal and Josh brought him around to show me, he tipped his arm forward in a bow, revealing our tiny baby in a pink-and-blue knit cap and swaddled body.
I cried, “Please take him, I can’t! I can’t take him!” For those few seconds I would have gladly given him to any nice family who promised to love him and raise him right, so complete was my fear that I was inadequate.
I was terrified I would drop him on the floor; my arms were still shaking and I could barely turn my head. My vision was a blur and I had a flood of terror so strong it felt like a physical wave, a wash of heat cascading over me from my skull to my rib cage, where it faded into numbness from the anesthesia. It was that old familiar voice whispering, “Who do you think you are mothering a child? You can’t even birth a baby.”
I had been diagnosed with preeclampsia and my doctor decided our best option was to induce me at thirty-seven weeks. After twenty-seven hours of labor, I’d failed. My body erupted in fever, I trembled and vomited and they were saying they must take him now. They rushed me into surgery. They gutted me, pulling him from between my hips, and even though I couldn’t feel a thing, I still felt like I was being ripped open. So when I saw his face, when our eyes connected only minutes later, it was as if he could see inside me. As if he knew I could not do this. I could not mother him.
Later, in the recovery room, when he drew back and his face pinched up in resentment as he struggled to take my breast but could not latch, I knew I had already failed him. I had failed him before I had ever conceived. A night that should have been celebration was filled with sorrow and regret. I realized that no matter how much I loved my boy, I would fail him. I had no choice but to fail him.
It offered me the tiniest glimpse into the fear of a parent, to the leap it takes to love another person with such ferocity that no matter your intentions, you are destined to screw it up.
The next morning, I unswaddled Judah and took in his tiny toes, his red legs still curled fetal across his diapered bottom. I unfolded him and let my eyes gorge on the beauty of my son. I picked him up in nothing but his fresh skin, pressed him to my bare chest, and lowered my nose to his head—smelling the soft cap of downy baby fluff. In that moment I felt my whole body contract, pulling myself back together, rhythmically adding another ring to my trunk. I realized then how much my dad had always loved me, how hard he’d tried to hold us all together.
Later, when my parents came to meet their first grandchild, I looked at my dad through teary eyes and passed Judah to his familiar arms, with the menacing butterfly tattoo. He looked down and his eyes filled too as if he was saying, Yes, Alia, I know. I know. I love you just like this.
And I realized how hard he tried. How we try to be strong for our kids, how sometimes we try to be everything to everyone, and we fail because we were never meant for that kind of glory, that kind of heroism. Over time, we become known, and this is hard. Because when we’re known, when we’re seen, there’s a reckoning. Do we love the inglorious bits? Do we love the reality? Do we love enough to weather weakness?
I forgave him that day in the hospital. Not all at once, for forgiveness isn’t immediate, and I had the deep scars of a girl whose daddy seemed to forget her in those teen years when his eyes were so fixed on her brother. When keeping him alive and on the right path took up so much of my dad’s attention that he all but forgot he had a girl who adored him. Maybe it was a sort of seesaw—I was a dying girl first while my brother looked on and then it was my brother’s turn to come back from the grave. Maybe it was just hard to keep fighting death? But I forgave my dad all the same, in increments over time. I allowed my dad his weakness because I felt my own. Only I didn’t speak those words aloud. I didn’t tell him.
So when I wait by the phone to hear if I will ever be able to tell him, I think of this. Of vulnerability and saying what we mean. Of forgiveness and grace, weakness and wonder. Of death and birth and the new life that comes from both. I wait to see if I can say goodbye.
Attending Weakness
My dad didn’t die in a hospital in India. He died in hospice, almost four years after he had his first esophageal bleed. He died a few feet away from my mom and me, who sat clutching each other on the couch. My parents left India because I petitioned them to let us help shoulder the burden of his care. I couldn’t imagine my dad dying so far away with no way to get to him. No way to stand with my mom and hold her hand in mine and tell her I was there for her. No way to be strong for them both.
In my father’s last days, his hunger vanished. As he shrunk like a hollowed-out husk, his spirit being gathered by the very hand of God, his appetites died within him. The hospice nurse handed me a pamphlet about the stages of death and closed her palm gently over the back of my hand. It said your loved one may lose their appetite and have no need for fluids or foods at this point. Their body is conserving energy for the end-of-life changes that are occurring. They may be going through emotional and spiritual changes as their body focuses on the task before them. An IV might be necessary for your loved one’s comfort. Loss of appetite is one of the final stages of death.
Skilled hands slipped on latex gloves and threaded an IV into his veins to keep him hydrated and to limit pain, but his lips had already spoken their last words and eaten their last bites. His eyes never opened again once the ambulance arrived to maneuver him down the steps of our house and on to hospice for his final days.
I knew my dad was dying long before his body actually failed. His personality was siphoned off slowly at first; he’d find himself confused or muddy brained. He would sometimes act like a child, irrational and upset about things. He’d get irritated with my children, and sometimes I’d have to settle disputes between them like he was one of their siblings instead of their grandfather. He lost context and told stories that no longer made much sense. Some part of himself still recognized all he was losing, all he had lost, and he retreated into himself. He was no longer loud and gregarious. He no longer wanted to entertain company. He no longer required an audience. This was the hardest part to endure. To watch the man I adored, the man I had made peace with as human, be so very human. So very frail and broken and hurting. So incredibly weak.
He could no longer feed himself or make it to the bathroom on his own. One day, before he was unable to move on his own, he fell in the shower while Josh was at work. I backed into the bathroom, covering him with a towel while my mom and I strained to lift him up and out. He was shivering like a child, crying in my arms.
I’ve never known such a desperate weakness. Such a deliberate pain as losing yourself completely. Mind and body and soul.
In hospice, he slipped easily from consciousness into a hushed body I no longer recognized as my dad. I didn’t know my dad without his appetite for life. Without his taste for loud music, James Taylor or the Traveling Wilburys on vinyl. Without his quick wit and the ability to make everyone in the room laugh at one of his jokes. Without his stories.
When I was a girl, he would hoist me onto his lap and offer me love straight from his plate. He taught me that to offer a seat at a table was to invite communion and community.
He sat on mud floors in dung huts beneath the Himalayas scraping small handfuls of dahl and rice into his mouth, eating hot momos cooked in the hammered pot full of sizzling oil that spit and hissed on the open flames.
He held the white cardboard cone with frites and fritesaus, each bite warming me as we walked hand in hand from the street vendor in Holland. He ate oxtail soup and kimchi and lau lau in Hawaii. He scooped up menudo and posole with our Mexican friends. He ordered lengua tacos from the tiny taco stands and doused them with fiery hot peppers.
People always made room for him at their table. His fair skin and blue eyes were readily invited into so many cultures because of his love and respect for others’ customs and foods. For his humility to sit and be a guest. They welcomed him because he truly appreciated the great wide world of tastes and flavors, the halo of fragrance from steaming pots and sizzling pans.
I remember once, before my dad’s worsening health, I was awaiting my parents’ arrival. They had flown into California from India and were driving up to Oregon to stay with us while on sabbatical. When hours had passed, I began to worry. I came to find out they’d met an Indian man and his family at a convenience store and got to talking. In the end, the man invited my parents to their house for tea and to see their garden. They offered my parents clippings of Indian herbs and spices to take home with them. No one remained a stranger when my dad was around.
He was happiest sharing a meal because a meal shared meant an open invitation to belong to each other.
But his hunger was no longer for this world. I watched sober eyed as my dad slipped from his body into eternity.
The hospital bed looked garish and oversized with his shrunken torso. The edema swelled his belly, feigning a fullness he could no longer get from food, and in those days it deflated like a balloon steadily losing air. His body sagged in dying, like the very soul of him had leaked out bit by bit.
And this was just one more part of it. This exhale where his body couldn’t contain him anymore. He was letting go of this world as God called him home, and releasing his appetite was one of the final tethers that broke.
I didn’t cry after my dad passed away. At least not right away. In all honesty, I felt a flood of relief as we sat watching. None of us imagined he would live as long as he did. By the time we were gathered around him in hospice, we were ready to let him go because he had suffered for so long. Because at that moment, we could only deal with the reality of his medications, his mind shrouded by disease, his constant pain, and his longing for heaven. He finally slipped from us that night, but he had been leaving us for years.
The nurse leaned over his hospice bed, cold stethoscope pressed to his chest, not needing to be warmed first. His breathing had been labored and rattly, then shallow, then silent.
My mom and I sat, sides touching on the couch, and the nurse rose, draped her stethoscope back around her neck, and shook her head slightly. Her voice was gentle and consoling, telling us what we already knew. My mom laced her hand in mine, tucked her head to my chest, and let out the tiniest muffled sob. She poured herself into me like I was the mother and she was my child. Her whimper shattered my heart, but I didn’t weep with her. Not then.
I had already spent my tears the day my dad went to hospice and I dropped my mom off with him. I promised to return later that evening after I ran home and made dinner for my kids. I went upstairs to my parents’ room and knew that the portable toilet and walker, the maroon sweatshirt he wore that was draped on his chair, the scrapbook I had made for him in his final weeks, these remnants of him would all need to be sorted or discarded. I wanted to remove the medical equipment before my mom came home because I knew how hard it was to lose someone and be left with the reminders. I still remembered the baby car seat and the onesies I had returned home to after I miscarried years ago. How the sight of them broke me open all over again. But I couldn’t move. I stood in the doorway, doubled over, and wept. I had the sudden realization that he was never coming home. We’d never listen to another James Taylor song like we did when I was a girl. Me, riding shotgun, windows rolled down, lapping up air like a spaniel while singing along. My dad was gone.
After he died, it was all very businesslike. The nurses left us. We called Jordan to come before they took his body away. We stood in a half circle around him. I stared at his hands. His hands were the only part of him that still looked like my dad.
This was not the glorious death of a martyr, like the missionary biographies we read when we were little. It was not the saintly surrender of the strong and faithful. My dad died slowly, painfully, his humanity on display in ways that were undignified. He did not die with a chorus of angels singing, or at least not that we could hear. His last words were mumbled incoherently as were most of the words before that and before that.
And in the end, we let him go because we had so little left to hold on to.
I often wonder about those who remained at the foot of the cross to bear witness to Christ’s death. Jesus’s mother and Mary Magdalene, the soldiers, the priests, the disciples, and the crowd of spectators. Did they think Jesus strong for enduring or did they think him too weak to save himself? Did they watch death win and worry that it was all for naught? Did they wail and grieve and question how or why God forsook them? Jesus died an undignified death in abject pain, weakness, and humiliation, and I’m certain the world felt dark and silent, adrift in the storm with no anchor.
What Glory Remains for Us Mortals?
If you’ve ever felt lost at sea, like you are going in circles, in cycles, in seasons, it’s probably because you are. I wondered in the writing of this book, in the decisions of which stories to tell, if it would seem redundant. This carnal yet sacred journey between trust and doubt, belief and unbelief, life and death, knowing God intimately and also wondering where he is when I’m bailing water on my dinghy while a tsunami warning blares.
I’ve been shipwrecked for glory, I thought, and that’s okay. Just give me Jesus. “I’ll lose it all if it means being close to you,” I prayed. And when I flip back through the pages of my life, I see it again and again. That X marked out for me, when my world goes sideways, it looks like the cross. It is the goodness of God poured out before me in places no one would expect it. God’s always been there. So often when the world feels like the harshest truth we go quiet. We don’t want to admit we went down with the ship. We don’t want to confess we are clinging to debris afloat in a sea of nothing but our losses.
But we are a beacon of hope for others who’ve lost their way. We share our stories and are vulnerable not because we wish to make an exhibition of our failures, our messy houses, our chaotic minds, our broken places, or our soiled linens. Vulnerability isn’t just no-makeup selfies, or letting someone see our piles of laundry or dirty floors. True vulnerability is a confession of the places where we doubt, the places where we’re not sure God is going to heal or touch or show up—the places we worry will always remain a little too broken, a little too human, a little too frail for polite company and pristine Sunday mornings. It’s admittance that on our own we are lacking, desperate, and in need. True vulnerability says, “I believe, help my unbelief,” and goes on to tell the story of how, if we’re honest, we all reach our fingertips toward hope, grasping for a hem to make us whole again.
I’ve wondered if the end won’t tie up as neatly as some hope. Maybe these things are true. Yet, so many of us live a life of sacred rhythms in the liminal space between hope and doubt. Day easing its burdens into the cool dark of night, sun slipping lazily in the sky. And darkness giving way to dawn break and the rising hope of new mornings. Chubby newborn thighs and the dying hands of a man too young to be lost in such ways.
There is a grief that lingers, that pops up with tears brimming at the sight of the oysters on sale in the crumpled Thanksgiving flyer. The oysters my dad loved. Or at the GIF of the elephant wearing pants he might have sent in an email had he stumbled across it first. He would have gotten a kick out of that and shared it with me. I could see it becoming his avatar. I would’ve rolled my eyes and smiled.
It might have become one of our inside jokes. We had many. One line and all of us would be howling with laughter, heads tipped back with abandon. We had history. And history and humor make for good memories. Sometimes grief is a smile as we remember and sometimes it is tears. There is room enough for both.
Growing toward Glory
Are any of us really so different from the disciples? How often will we see the face of God in our midst, the miracles, the hand of our Savior reaching toward us in the squall, ransoming us, the stone rolled away, the bread and wine still fresh on our tongues, and still we forget. I am three rooster crows cackling in the wind before I remember what it is to know Jesus.
Our growth isn’t linear, it’s circular. It bends back on itself and overlaps in ridged swirls and curves. We aren’t marching forward on a time line so much as we’re adding rings to our core like aged oak, firming up roots, breaking bark raw, the shedding of ancient skins, limbs reaching and stretching and yearning for light. We are grafted into a family tree far beyond what we ever imagined when we plotted names on a worksheet and wondered about the empty spaces.
There are droughts and rings like slivers, scratching out our captivity like hash marks on a prisoner’s wall. There are monsoons when we soak up the earth and we drink so deeply the atmosphere expands. If we’re lucky, we’ve been paying attention to it all. This is what it means to discover glory. It is not one side of the equator, where the light shines. It is all encompassing, a magnet directing our eyes to see the work of God in our midst.
Children dance in soppy wet puddles and you see a bit of miracle in the aftermath when the storm clouds tuck themselves back into bright blue skies, because you’re here to bear witness to it all. The black sky’s sorrow and the glory of noonday. And then there are our ordinary days, and those make you doubt growth and glory the most. Because the world expects you to grow forward, march down a time line. Do more, be more, have more. Then you will see the hand of God and his blessings.
If you are #blessed, you’ve traded in your beater car for a luxury SUV, your one-bedroom apartment and a roommate for a soul mate and a four-bedroom house with walk-in closets situated in a nice neighborhood with good schools. We are a culture of upgrades—always moving forward, moving upward.
But God is not about upward mobility so much as inward expansion. God’s kingdom lives in the ever-widening rings, the core and the hollows. God’s kingdom growth starts in the dark and hidden places, in holy ground. In a seed busted open and yearning.
I’ve written about the good days and the bad days. Life with bipolar disorder can make you feel like that’s all you’ll ever get. The highs and the lows and nothing in between. No steadiness to the rocking, swaying storms. To the dark nights and the blistering days. No respite from the mania and the thoughts that come feverish and frantic. I live my life in cycles a day at a time. We all do, really. Mine are just more noticeable.
Grief can feel like it tore your world open, ripped it end to end so that all you see are the ragged places that once were whole.
Lack can make you feel like there will never be enough. You’ll remember the stories of heroes of the faith, how they went out with praise on their lips. How they never faltered. Like Job, saying “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15). I clung to that verse for years. How would I know the faith of Job? How would I turn my sorrow into joy, my doubt into obedience? How would I hope when it felt as though I were slain by the hand of God? How would I spin gold from the piles of hay at my feet from my house blowing down once again?
Years later I read it again and I saw what I had missed, the next part of that same verse: “yet I will argue my ways to his face.” We can be honest that this is not at all what we expected. That death is a catastrophe, a giant cosmic hoax. That we want no part in it. And Jesus would get that look in his eyes, that long, deep remembrance. Maybe he’d even glance at his wrists, at the scars he brought with him even out of the tomb, to remind us all of the cost to his body and soul and spirit, to say, “My child, you are absolutely right.”
Josh told me to write the reminders of that. So this is me cut open, rings showing. This busted-open trunk is my altar to remember glory. To remember what it is to put my hope in the Lord. To keep that language of hope fluent on my tongue.
I’m shedding skins and grafted in, abiding in Christ; those rings are expanding, and everything is tender with new growth.
Suffering will visit us all; grief makes its home with the death among us, in us. We revisit our humanity, our frailty, our weakness. We are dust. There are no warranties for the wear and tear we encounter in our lives. Only a promise all will be made new. We hope. We know a God who saves in so many ways. Sometimes he gathers the weak from hospice beds and carries them home. Sometimes he sits with the dying and weeps with them for a little longer, and sometimes he brings them back to life to bear witness to the stories from the edge. To tell everyone there is hope here too. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve lived to tell the tales.
We keep company with sadness. We learn the lament of everyone who holds quietly to the knowing: things are not as they should be. And still we hope. Still we see our Redeemer come. We speak in the dialect of our kin, our native tongue. We are fluent in the language of hope. We bear witness to the goodness of God in the most unlikely places. He is our all in all—we know this from the desperate spaces when we had nothing else. No other route, no calmer sea, no other choice but surrender. And that is a gift. That is our glorious weakness.