All Is Grace

Today is the last day of the hardest year of my life. 

Normally I look forward to the last week of the year as I set aside time to reflect on the year behind before moving into what is ahead.  This year, I found myself resistant to my usual practice. And I knew why. Looking back to the first half of this year takes me to places that are heavy, hard and dark. 

I’m so much better now. My “undercoat” of hair is about 3” long which means it’s not quite my old style yet, but I don’t look half-bald anymore. My pulmonologist recently described my lung function as “almost normal” as opposed to “dismal” last April.  The recovery has been so slow and gradual that I’m not sure I remember what normal felt like anyway. For the most part, I can do what I need to do and I’ve learned to accept help in ways I couldn’t before.  

So why look back? Why go into those dark days of isolation and doubt in the hospital?  Those humbling days of having to waited on hand and foot  after I came home?  Those fearful nights of thinking I’d never be able to be untethered from that oxygen machine? I don’t want to remember how weak my body or my faith felt as I entered the hospital on January 19, 2022.  I don’t want to recall my anger at God for not holding up his end of a bargain that only I’d made.  (He’s not transactional, BTW). I don’t want to remember the helpless and hopeless feeling, when I couldn’t even pray anymore.  I don’t want to remember eleven days with no shower and no privacy. I don’t want to remember the agony of thinking I might never see or touch my husband or children again. 

Wouldn’t  it be compassion to let myself off the hook this year?  No one would fault me for saying, “I just can’t do it.”   A wise friend suggested yesterday that perhaps this practice of mine was put in place all those years ago for just this time and situation.  That resonated. For a few years now, I’ve wondered if I had a core message.

 If all my writing, teaching, and conversations could be boiled down to one message what would it be? 

 It’s this: ALL IS GRACE. 

Even though it meant yielding to some tears, I sat on my screen porch yesterday in the soft glow of my “porch Christmas tree” with redbirds, crosses and all white lights, and I made a list of all the graces that had come to me in 2022, most of them a result of being very sick.  These are gifts I want to remember. They are gifts I received in the valley. 

I  want to remember that when I couldn’t pray anymore and I didn’t have faith, I asked for an army of angels to surround me.  I want to remember that friends drove around the hospital parking lot that very night praying, a friend sent me a compline prayer every night, my husband prayed evening prayer for me  on speaker phone because I was lying prone trying to get my saturation % above 90. A family sent me a book of angel paintings, another friend sent a stone with an angel painted on it, and another a journal with an angel cover. (You can’t make this up!). 

 I want to remember the songs people sent, the flowers - the very greening of God in that sterile room, the priest who went to the rail for me on a Wednesday morning at 8:00. I want to recall the friend who had a dream for me then sent me a crucifix to my hospital room which I held in my hand constantly for the next several days. I want to remember the sister who took over my at home care and scheduled meals and sitters for a solid month. I want to remember the friend who did the Heimlich maneuver on my screen porch when I swallowed water and it went down the wrong way. 

I want to recall the professors and the advisor who bent over backwards to help me stay in school, the seminary that cared more about my body and my soul that my deadlines. I want to remember the people who did my job for me and the students at Christchurch whose texts, signs and posters were so full of love. 

I want to remember the gumbo and the meatloaf, the french toast and the scones. I want to recall my mailman who walked up on the porch and prayed for my healing. I want to remember the neighbor’s generator that kept oxygen machines running during a storm the second night home from the hospital. I want to remember the girlfriends who cleaned out the pantry, changed sheets, swept dog hair and stocked the fridge.  I want to remember the puzzle and the scented soap sent from faraway friends. I want to remember the coffee brought to the bed, the priest with pen in hand recording every word of his listening prayer for me. I want to recall the trio interceding in the darkest night that I would know Jesus in my weakness.  (I did.)  I want to remember the off-duty nurse who sat with me two hours after her long shift had ended and held my hand when no one else could touch me. I want to remember the respiratory therapist and techs who made conversation with me at 2:00 a.m and the nurse who got me an insane number of towels and spread them on the floor so I could “shower” by squeezing wet bath cloths over my head. 

I could keep going. The list of graces is twice this long in my journal and I have a feeling there are more to be discovered as time goes on. Memory is funny like that; it doesn’t bring you everything at once. It also doesn’t sort the good from the bad; that is the seeking and finding work that we must do.  The invitation to lean into the resistance, to look for the light of grace where we thought it was only dark, is in itself a gift from God.   It is both hard and holy to revisit those days and weeks of the first half of 2022. It is costly and yet I am richer for it. 

 Here is the midst of Christmastide, as we celebrate Immanuel, “God WITH us” holds more meaning for me than it did this time last year. My little story fits into a bigger story where suffering and weakness become power and presence. I saw him in a thousand ways this year, in the hundreds of gifts he’s bestowed on others and they in turn shared with me in my neediness.  

Last night, just after I finished my list, a text came through from a friend. She sent me her “Most Played Song” in 2022. “My Leah Song” she wrote, “The comfort song I played to remind me who held you.”  Like me by my Christmas tree, she cried again remembering those months of praying for me and helping care for me.  She concluded with these words, “What an Ebeneezer….I’m thankful for your life, the breath in your lungs today!”   

Me too! 

Another grace. 

It keeps coming. 

I do not want to live this year again, but nor do I want to move on and forget. Grace was all in it and all over it. I want to live clear-eyed in fearless in light of that truth. 

God is with us. Jesus is everything. All is grace.