I want so many things.

I want so many things.

Why do I want so many things?

I love people. I want to listen to them, cry with them, teach them, inspire them to be the selves they were created to be. I want to feed them and free them from prison and sing with them and help them find wholeness. I want to love them, to love them in North Carolina and Maryland and Minnesota and Gaza and Bangladesh and Tanzania. I want to reconcile us all with each other—the women and men, the liberal and conservative, the rich and poor, the young and old, the black and white and native and Latino and Asian and Arab and Jewish and everyone in between.

I love the arts. I want to write beauty and vulnerability and redemption. I want to sing with the spirit, to play the melodies and harmonies of hope.

I love this earth, this creation. I want to run and hike and swim and climb. I want to learn and teach us all to eat the fruit of the land rather than the factory, to find goodness and simplicity in the everyday processes of growing and eating and coming and going and waking and sleeping.

I love the church: its babies and nonagenarians, its liturgy and communion and song and scripture, its touchy-feely sharing and tearful prayers and most of all the God who is creating and recreating us all. I want to see the church willing to die and come alive anew.

I want so many things.

I cannot have or do all. This life, this in-breaking kingdom of God is too rich for me to drink it all in. And if I am to give myself fully to this world, I will have to choose: between the piano and the garden or between Maryland and Tanzania or between the incarcerated and the nonagenarians.

What I mean is that I have this one fleeting chance, as we all do, to run at the world holding all the love I can.

And when I choose where, specifically, to run, I will choose also where not to run. I will lose pieces. I will let go of the other dream, the other country, the other song. I will release them into the air and pray one day they come back and find me further on the journey.

I suppose in all truth, it is a good problem to have: the desire to love and create and heal more than is humanly possible. A heart too full to narrow itself to one passion.

The fullness in this heart, though—I just want to bring it to the right place.

I want so many things.

Autumn in Cherokee

Autumn has blown through Cherokee. It came so quickly, now the leaves are almost gone. And with autumn has come fresh, crisp air.

Maybe it started with running in the mornings, beating my body on the pavement at my least favorite time of day, with a couple local ladies. Getting to know them a little. Coming to find that I like being up early, when there is time to pray and wait for the light.

Or it started when I got assigned to teach the night GED class. Which I disliked at first because on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I come home from morning GED class around 3. I lie on the couch like a zombie until 4:30 catching up on TV, then drag myself off of it and head back for evening class. But then, it’s such a good class. Molly is the first student who has ever told me she enjoyed the Sylvia Plath poem, and she writes beautifully, and I wonder if I might just graduate my first English major. James is 65 and has worked his whole life as a carpenter and wants to get his GED just to see if he can—and he can. Ashley and Jake are so young, only 16 and 18, and it’s only when Ashley writes her essay I find out their baby daughter has cystic fibrosis. They are going to get married, and the world is stacked against them, and I want them to beat it so badly.

Or it started with this writing project. When I decided to write only the things I want to write, the stories that are inside me and want to be told. My marriage. My faith. My family. When I started collecting stories about my Grandfather who died earlier this year and writing them down for the family. When I connected with people through this writing.

Or it started when I went to seven weddings and a funeral this summer, and I started missing the feeling of being home.

It starts in a lot of places sometimes. Sometimes that’s the only way. But then one day I wake up and realize this might just be called joy.

And suddenly I have a new fear: not of plodding through this next year hazy, but of leaving yet another place I have grown to love. Grown to love slowly and skeptically and with many asterisks, sure, but nonetheless—yes, I must name it—grown to love.

It’s not a straight path, of course. This doesn’t mean I won’t be lonely again, couch-ridden again, resigned to anger again—this year, probably even this month.

But for the moment, I roll down the road playing my music and gawking at the blue sky and the orangey-red trees and the sparkling river and I feel amazed at the beauty of it all. I feel desire and drive and purpose and I revel in it, because it seems like it’s been so long. And it is a gift.

Letting someone wash your feet

Photo credit

For as long as I can remember, everyone remarked how well he was doing for his age. Played golf and tennis and walked a mile a day up to about 90. Took us skiing at 79, because he thought we should learn how. The third day in we saw a sign: "over 70 ski free." The pacemaker has slowed him down a little, but even last summer, at 92, he jumped in the ocean with us for an afternoon.

The real slow-down started in January, with an infection, a hospital visit, a return home and slow recovery, weaker, then another infection, repeat, weaker, repeat. When I went to visit end of March, he was walking with a cane, sleeping a lot, but nonetheless doing better than he had for a few months.

We went to church on Maundy Thursday, and I was introduced to foot-washing. At their last supper together, Jesus washed his followers' feet as a symbol of humility, love, and service. Tonight, we were to come to the front of the church with a partner and wash each other's feet. Grandfather motioned me forward I handed him his cane and walked him to the front. I carefully removed his shoes and socks and washed his feet, taking care to avoid the ingrown toenails we'd gone to the podiatrist about earlier that day. When I finished he stood from the chair, put aside his cane, and to the dismay and shock of everyone standing nearby, knelt down on the ground. He washed my feet in the bucket, dried them with the towel, and then rose halfway and whispered in my ear, "The Lord bless you and keep you." I helped him the rest of the way up and we returned to our pew.

This was the truest reenactment of the gospel story. Grandfather is the one who deserves to be served and prayed for and taken care of. Earlier that week, hired home health aides were giving him a bath. And he washed my feet and blessed me.

On outgrowing the stars

I remember being 15 or 19 and sitting at the dinner table with some adult dinner party and thinking how boringly practical the conversation was, how adults seemed complacent about the meaning of life and love and destiny and the big ideas that consumed me then. I hope I am never satisfied with comparing the price of milk and gas and analyzing the county school bus routes.

I remember being 15 or 19 and lying beneath the stars with a group of friends, or a cabin at camp, or someone I was interested in dating, and talking about life and love and destiny and the soul and identity and purpose and dreams for the world. I have never felt so full or alive as at these moments of opening my heart of big ideas to those I love. I have never felt so content and loved and certain there is meaning.

At what point do we outgrow looking at the stars? My thoughts and conversations these days are more like those adults at the dinner table, and when I do see a clear sky it is usually too cold or too busy to pay them much mind.

But I just moved to Western North Carolina, and the moon hasn't risen tonight and the sky is clear and the Milky Way is dancing, and I locked myself out of the apartment and my husband is an hour away. So I drive into the park and pull off into the gravel at Towhorse Creek, and lie on top of the car and shiver for a few minutes. I don't want to be too old to notice beauty. I don't want to be too practical to care. I don't want to be too jaded to believe in a God who knows the stars by name.

God once told Abraham he would be blessed by descendants as numerous as the stars. I think as I look up that God has blessed me with gifts as numerous as the stars. I want to learn, or re-learn, how to count the gifts.