water the earth with your tears

life is passing you by.

day by day, and with each passing moment, things just seem to get away from you.

jobs. romance. dreams.

how it feels is that you’re getting left behind.

yes, like Kirk Cameron.

time flies when you’re having fun — that’s what they say.

but what about when you’re not? when the days keep on slip, slip. slipping by1, and you ? well, you’re slipping away, too.

that’s what’s on my mind brushing my teeth in the thursday evening darkness.

the family is nestled all snug in their beds, but visions of failing dance in my head. because right now every part of life is in-between. just like me.

between asleep and awake.
between night and day.
between here and there.

and what you have to do, spitting out the minty froth, cleaning out the sink, is promise yourself that you can make it.

make it to awake.
make it to dawn.
make it to the other side.

you have to promise yourself you won’t fail.

and, here, you lay yourself down to sleep, and pray the lord your soul to keep, and as your head hits the pillow, what’s on your mind is gardeners and seeds.

because there on your window sill, shining in moonlight, are three little plants. you water them with your kids in the morning, and they wonder how come tomatoes take so long to grow. flowers, too.

why don’t they blossom, poppa?

and you have to tell them: all good things take time.

you have to tell them: these things are out of our hands.

we’re not in control.

sure, we water, but it’s God who makes things grow. at least, that’s what Saint Paul said.

it took a bit of time, but, we sold our apartment.

to do that, you have to clean it up for showing after showing after showing. and it takes a lot to order the chaos of a two bed, two bath place; so i don’t really know how God did it for the whole cosmos. probably because he didn’t have two boys.

but, on second thought , He has been cleaning up our mess for a while.

what you have to do, for most of life, is divide and conquer.

what you have to do is optimize the time; and for us, it looked like me taking afternoons off, taking the boys out to parks and grocery stores and burger joints and beaches, for hours and hours and hours, while my better half got the place all edenic.

we’d time it out so she’d finish just before the showing, and meet her three exhausted boys snacking and laying on the grass or ripping down slides or trying to catch turtles and grasshoppers.

her smiling, tired eyes, would meet ours; and we’d all lay in a field or have apples at a picnic table or throw rocks into the river.

what’s really great is selling your place.
what’s really hard is buying anything else.

and since we have to be out of here by month’s end, we’re going to be renting up in the mountains, still searching for a place to land. a place to live. our own red sea and wilderness. waiting for some milk and honey.

instead it’s manna. and quail.

and you get it.

you’re in-between, too. wandering and wandering, just like me and my growing family.

complaining, just like me. wanting everything now, thank you very much.

oh Lord? if you’re there, i’d very much like the Promised Land.

on Pascha we celebrated.

Jesus was in-between for a bit there, too. killing Death, descending into hades, setting the world free, rising again and leading us into life.

so when that perfect Dawn rose, and when we four rose from our Sleep, everything was all Joy and smiles. capital letters because of the very obvious spiritual analogues.

resurrection sun is beaming through our windows and eggs are cooking and coffee is incensing and the giggles are echoing through our in-between house of boxes and messes and life and death.

life is what you bring with you.

death is all those things you shove into desks and drawers and need to sort. the things you have to leave behind and throw away.

in the warm glow of morning we’re all waiting for our church’s Pascha brunch. the kids are playing, Ais and I are talking and packing and cleaning. a bit every day.

do you know how hard it is to tidy up the wilderness? so much dust.

what we hear next is :

screaming.

and then :

crying.

so we run out an my oldest, ransom, says that our youngest, cassian, fell and hit his head. we pick him up and there’s some blood in his mouth.

classic.

happy easter.

what you have to realize, is that on this side of things, even on resurrection sunday, mistakes happen.

we open cassian’s mouth and there’s a cut, and also, turns out, his back, top right molar is hanging on by a thread. he’s just chewing it.

this stupid tooth, the one that took four weeks and so many sleepless nights to burst through a set of swollen gums, is now gone. all that work for nothing. his and ours. teething is a war a of attrition.

and we had won.

and then, well, it was all for naught.

so what we have to do is call all these emergency dental lines and make sure there’s no remaining molar fragments in there, make sure his jaw isn’t cracked, make sure the little guy is good to go.

to pascha brunch, I mean.

we get in with our dentist and turns out, even when things go bad, they can go so good. the whole molar popped out, roots and all; so no issues.

we’re a few minutes late to brunch, and when we walk in the door, everyone is yelling:

Christ is Risen!

and we all respond:

truly! He is risen!

there’s baskets of food, filled with bread and beets and eggs and butter all symbolizing new life and sin and sustaining and everything. there’s icons and there’s prayers and there’s feasting after so much fasting.

a kind of end of the in-between.

you say no for so long that saying yes, well, it feels earned.

and i think you have to learn that, too. while you eat your eggs and meats and cheeses and breads, while you cheers! to the Risen Lord, that being stuck, in-between, is part of how it goes. all of life.

you’re gonna be in-between until we get to the other side.

but there’ll be resurrection sundays, too.

the day after it’s aislinn’s birthday.

and what we do, together, is drive to check out a potential house. we have apple slices for ransom and cassian, though, cass is down a tooth. so what i get is a vision into his 80s, when he’s missing teeth and gum gum gumming.

ais and i have some coffees, and as we stream the roads, we keep talking about how everything feels like we’re just missing it.

like life is passing us by.

every house we love has an offer on it or a seller who won’t budge.

every spot to settle is plucked up from underneath us or galvanized so firmly in the grip of a different strata of tax brackets

aislinn’s nesting instinct is hitting an all time high, and the market is hitting an all time sucksville, and, so, what you have to do, even when the house you visit is great, is learn to say no.

because what Great Lent is supposed to teach you is the cost of the wrong yes.

the kids fall asleep on the way home so we just driiiiiiiiive and we have to tell ourselves, as the east wind dances through our open windows, the same thing we tell our kids waiting for life to blossom.

we’re not in control.

but you know, we’re not saints, so we worry.

we fret.

each in our own way.

what you hope is that here, in-between, in the desert, these seeds will blossom.

it’s dry, out there, in the wilderness.

and it’s hot, too.

life passes you by like a dust storm, and damn, if it doesn’t rip your skin off in the friction.

sometimes it feels like we go so slow.

like we don’t move.

like we’re stuck.

and all you can do is weep.

you weep and you weep because you’re not in control.

because everything is falling through your fingers.

because everything is taken from you.

but you know.

water the earth with your tears.

and join St Paul.

let God give growth.

Every Day Saints is a torchlight searching for quiet miracles, the beautifully human stories and ideas that exist all around us.