February 6, 2010
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Four Seasons
If you’d prefer the warning of Jodi, consider it given. This one might take awhile…
Had things gone slightly differently, this blog might be titled something along the titled line of thinking. Fidelicharis House is the name of my house. Fidelis being the Latin for “faithful” and Charis the Greek for “grace”, I knew there was *no* way I’d ever be able to own a house with the very faithful grace of God to provide for my needs. However, back in the day when I was still living with my other Grandma (not the one in the article below…I don’t write this Grandma’s last name, it being the same as mine and making this blog more ‘findable’ than I’d prefer it to be), I was making plans, big plans towards home ownership.
Home ownership has always been something in my mind–a place to rest, to set down and to feel slightly settled, a place where others can come and feel welcome, a place of respite and contentedness for all who enter–and while living out of a front bedroom at Grandma’s house at the ripe old age of twenty three, I had big plans towards having a place to call home.
For quite some time, those plans included a large old (1831) farmhouse on ten acres east of town that had seven bedrooms and was just perfect for all my dreams of making my home a cozy B&B for all weary travelers. I think the fact that the house had once been a stop on a stagecoach line, and possibly had connections to the Underground Railroad fed those ideas.
For some reason, I had it in my head that my big farmhouse and barn would be called (something along the theme and variation of) Four Seasons. I know I’ve waxed lengthily in previous posts on here regarding my deep and abiding love for Summer…and it, of course, remains. But I have always had a love and a thankfulness for the satisfying eternality of living in a place that has four distinct, beautiful seasons, and so it was that I was determined that my farm should be named Four Seasons.
Tonight is one of those February nights that comes straight out of a storybook. Snow is literally raining down and has been since about noon. We’re supposed to get between 10 and 14 inches by tomorrow afternoon. For once, we are right smack in the middle of the heaviest bands of snow and it is *just*gorgeous*. The temperature has been hovering between 29 and 32 degrees, as well, so as long as one is not directly in strong wind, it doesn’t feel too badly out there. After walking in the winter wonderland over to Erica’s house for an oh-so-tasty dinner of homemade beef vegetable stew and organic spelt bread (unbe*liev*ably scrumptious!), I arrived back home around ten ’til ten. I then became inspired to love my neighbors, spend a little more time outside and burn some calories all at once and for the next 70 minutes, I shoveled out the sidewalk on my side of the street. According to various websites, I burned anywhere from 400 to 1300 calories. That’s pretty cool.
I came in, got a shower, fixed some hot cocoa and climbed into bed with the cats and the laptop while the Great Silence of Snow blankets the house and the far-off hint of the radio on low to ‘Sounds of Majesty’ gives yet another piece of evidence to the fact that it is Friday night and that I can sleep in tomorrow morning. My Facebook status was updated to read, “Deborah…the walks are shoveled, the cocoa is warm, the bed is soft. Thank You, God!”On Facebook, I went to a site that I check as many times as I turn on my computer throughout the day. Penny Miller (now Hoffman) was my boss for several years at BBC and she was great at it. I’d venture a guess that she is approximately five years older than I, and I really enjoyed working for her. She was one of four siblings, a Columbus girl, older, single, and while being real about her desire for marriage, she had a good sense of humor and contentment in God and His character that spoke volumes to the really-wanting-to-be-married-but-wasn’t-willing-to-admit-it-because-she-didn’t-want-to-look-desperate-Sophomore who worked for her.
I reconnected with her on Facebook awhile ago and was *thrilled* to learn that at the age of 31, God had allowed her to marry the love of her life and in the next five years or so, they were blessed with four children. Last January, she was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cervical cancer and has fought it valiantly for the past year.
As so many of us who love her have prayed for her over these months, I have to admit that I found it difficult to watch how she had waited so long to be blessed with a husband and children, and now, all-of-a-sudden, had to face this enormous threat to herself and her family. Penny, being Penny, has responded to each facet of every challenge with grace, trust and hope in her Father Who loves her.
Over the past several days, the news that her family and friends have posted to keep those who love her and her family updated has not been hopeful…Penny is at her home now, being given medicine for pain, but the cancer is raging in her body and unless God decides otherwise, she will be leaving her husband, four kiddos, three siblings, parents and a whole host of friends and family to head to Heaven sooner than we would have liked to see her go.
I was praying for Penny while I was out shoveling. And thinking of how thankful I am that I have the ability to be out in the beauty of a white February night. And thinking of how incredibly amazing it is to know that you’re going to see Jesus soon. And thinking of how hard it would be to leave so many people I love, especially at that point in my life.
And I’ve wept as I’ve read updates from her sister such as, “Had some nice sibling time this afternoon. J, P & I got to sit in the room with Penny looking at old albums and sharing memories of days long ago. It seems this is the way it should be forever…” and, “OK-So I just witnessed a moment I will never forget. After helping Penny to the restroom to “take out her contacts eight times”, Tim and Dustin [her husband] were helping her get back to bed. Dustin and Penny’s hands were interlaced, so Dustin said, “One last dance?” She didn’t reply, but simply slipped her other arm around his waist. They stood in a motionless dance for about a minute, but it will live in my heart forever. I love you Penny!” from her other sister.
And yet, as I was thinking about the beauty of the night, and how deeply I *love* the four, distinct seasons, and how I enjoy being able to do physical work again and thinking about Heaven and what it will be like there and wondering if there will be any snow there, and praying for Penny, I think God was putting it all together in my brain, so that when I came inside, and got comfy and sat down and read about this family, and specifically, this couple who have been blessed abundantly with a deep, deep love for one another and who have had seven lovely years of marriage (their anniversary was Monday) and who are facing such hurt with an honesty of the pain that is inextricably blended with the reality of love for one another, a pure trust in God and a factual hope for the future, I was overwhelmed with that whole element of the eternal that reaches into everyday life and leaves one practically gasping for breath with the sweet, intense pain of it all–that whole concept of God placing eternity in our hearts, this immortal mortal, the tug-of-war between the tangible and the intangible, between the limits of time and space and the call of Eternity that I Peter sums up so aptly as ‘joy, inexpressible‘.
C. S. Lewis said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” His characters Psyche and Oruel, in Till We Have Faces address this idea in prose, with Psyche telling her sister, “I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death… It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine… Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”
He adds, in The Problem of Pain, “You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported . . . All the things that have deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want . . . which we shall still desire on our deathbeds . . . Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”Or, as my favorite, in The Last Battle, when Jewell the unicorn says, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”
What does all this have to do with Seasons and Houses and Snow and February and Friends and Sorrow and Hope? Well, my idea for my Farm House to be named the Four Seasons came from Genesis 8:22:
“As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest
cold and heat
summer and winter
day and night
shall never cease.”And that’s one of the main reasons why I love the four seasons God has given us–a promise, made post Flood to His children that He would never destroy all living creatures, that until the day He called us Home, His earth would continue to experience seedtime, harvest, cold, heat, summer, winter, day and night–the Eternal One speaking to the created. That’s why experiencing the beauty of even this fallen created world is enough to make me sometimes catch my breath with the sharpness of pain–a pain directly forged from a longing so intense that I could not really put it into words if I tried for a thousand pages or years. That’s why I will burst into tears reading of the deep, abiding love of siblings for their sister, a husband for his sweet wife, achingly glad for the joy they share with the sorrow they face and yet be inexplicably jealous of her imminent approach to Home.
Words really do fail me. Better to go with that Word, Who above all earthly powers (no thanks to them) abideth.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.
In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”
