Give Thanks

November 30, 2019 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP Tags: Faith, Give thanks, Gratitude, Heart work, Thanksgiving Leave a comment

I started a gratitude journal once, years ago. I made a numbered list of things I was thankful for and a few months later when I needed a writing notebook, I tore out the single sheet. The entire notebook was supposed to be full of thanks. I’d barely managed one page.

I am better practiced at fear and complaint. And I suppose that is the point of keeping a gratitude journal, to counter the inclination to worry and wallow.

Also years ago, a Lebanese woman named Adele took my hands after a church service in Kuwait. She was tender with her wisdom, and I prayed with her often. That Friday morning Adele opened her eyes at amen and said, Sarah, I see you like a child in a field of flowers. So much joy. Laughing. I nodded. I was glad someone could imagine joy for me. Adele spoke a promise I needed at the middle end of a dark run, and I still keep her words. I remember her warm hands holding mine, that we kissed cheeks at parting. I remember walking into the bright heat of day, looking at the sky and whispering please. Later that summer when I laughed like a child spinning circles I whispered thank you.

I am just out of another dark run. When I look at the shadows I lived in for months I am sad. I don’t want to go back. But I want to carry what I understood in the shadows. A thought came when I curled in bed, unmoving after sobs, to give thanks. A thought came at the tightening of fear in my body, to praise. When I prayed, gladness was like rocks in my mouth. Praise tasted like metal. But I expanded my prayer, reading the Psalms to speak wild glory like a new language. I practiced the sacrifice of praise.

My circumstance did not change. I was not suddenly content in my work, or healed in my body. I was still sad most days. But last spring, a ripple of impatience: I did not want just healing or just satisfaction in the day. I asked instead for peace in the middle. I asked for joy. What I wanted was to know that God really is enough. Enough is a tough measure. Enough is letting go of the scramble for more or better. Enough is trust that what I hold is good.

Last Sunday our church celebrated Thanksgiving. We sang “Blessed Be Your Name.” This was a song at my brother’s wedding. Blessed be your name in the land that is plentiful. A perfect marriage song, our mom said. This was the song I cried with my dear mom friends in Kuwait, the morning after Liana delivered a son who lived an hour in his daddy’s arms. Blessed be your name when I’m found in the desert place. This is the song my friend Els chose for her funeral. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, given slim hope of living another five years. Blessed be your name on the road marked with suffering. Though there’s pain in the offering, blessed be your name. After the service, Els told me that in the weeks after her diagnosis she understood that no part of her illness was a surprise to God. She read from the Psalms. She ached for her young children. She ached for her husband. But she also lived. Els made dinner, read to her children, nurtured friendships. She is alive today, and that is a miracle. All that she knew of her faith was pressed into daily practice during her illness, and she has not forgotten her God who was present in her suffering. She sings her funeral song.

So I do not want to forget what I understood in the shadows. Again and again I read from 1 Thessalonians, writing in my notebook

Rejoice always
pray without ceasing
give thanks in all circumstances
for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus
Do not quench the Spirit

On Sunday the message centered on this passage. Such direct instruction. I have learned this before. I know this. And in the shadows these past months I obeyed. I lived my sorrow deeply, honestly. But I also recognized the everyday swells of joy: the limbs of my children stretched either side of me at bedtime, as we read or talked about the day. My son playing with Lego, scripting the minifigures and animating planes and boats. My daughter bent over her sketchbook, humming. My husband turning to me in the night. The mountains on our summer drive west. The taste of a gin fizz twenty minutes in the making. The fun of a full dining table, a card game, and family stories.

Singing praise as you fall apart is heart work. Singing praise is trust, naming a God whose glory transcends circumstances. There is so much I do not understand. There is reason for this exhortation to give thanks. Gratitude is good for the body and mind. Something intangible turns on thanksgiving.

Knowing my proclivity for fear and discontentment, I couple my sacrifice of praise with another prayer. Renew my mind. I live in a body that will go to ash. I cannot hinge joy on what I touch. So renew my mind, I ask, so that gratitude becomes a natural breath in my day. I do not know what will follow this practice, but I am far enough in my faith to choose to continue on, even after a long stretch of darkness.

I am not starting another gratitude journal. But when I flip through the muddle of my notebook, I want to see thanks between the story drafts, petitions, and wandering thoughts. So too in my day. Amen.

Winter’s End: That Saturday And This

March 9, 2019 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP, Thirty-Nine Stories Tags: Air Pollution, Faith, Family, Fear, Healing, Parenting, Process, Thirty-Nine Stories Leave a comment

That Saturday mid morning I am propped in my bed, my left knee again elevated. I once diligently tracked my miles, injuries, twinges. Now I cannot say how many times this knee has waylaid a day’s plans. Enough. The night before I prayed because I still believe there are miracles even for those of us whose needs are comparatively small. When I ask for my own healing, I also plead provision for Syrians, Yemenis, North Koreans, and when I wake with my knee to swollen to walk, I wonder if there was a choice at the front desk and it just made sense to nourish a child instead. For an hour or so, I think and write about the distribution of miracles, the needs of our world, the fear I have that I am blind to the good I have, the fear I have that I cannot hear what I must, in my heart, to live. And then I use crutches to go from one room of our apartment to the next, to see the children who are just fine, and perhaps glad, at not having to rise and dress for the day, or do anything at all.

The children are sunk in beanbag chairs with their little screens close to their little faces. I ask my girl to help make egg for breakfast. Egg and avocado. Egg and hash browns. Egg and ketchup. Scrambled or fried. Orange juice or milk. Their little faces look up, my girl gets up and she is helpful in the kitchen. My kids know I am broken today but my girl is tender in a way that surprises me, asking can she get this for me, or that, do I need anything, am I okay? My boy remains slouched in his beanbag chair. Unless I say otherwise, he will stay in underwear the entire weekend. My girl too. I look at them both, with their plates balanced on pale legs, screens blinking and singing, and return to my bed.

I make a heat pack from my husband’s sock and two cups of dry rice. I microwave the sock for four or five minutes. Ice does nothing for my knee. The heat feels so good. I arrange pillows to elevate my knee again. I have water within reach. I have a chocolate bar. I have my laptop and earbuds and a ranked list of the Oscar nominated movies.

For three days we eat rice and seaweed for dinner. There is a little restaurant on the block that sells bap for a thousand won and I send the kids to get three bowls. We sit in a line on our sofa and watch Isle Of Dogs, Apollo 13, Castaway. I send them to bed with kisses and lopsided snuggles, and heat my rice sock, prop my knee and watch another movie in bed. The pattern works in a way I don’t like.

That Saturday I was supposed to rise and run, return and make breakfast. Perhaps bacon and eggs, or crepes with whipped cream and strawberries. I was supposed to bike to a French cafe for lunch, a monte cristo or mushroom risotto. I was supposed to return home and make a coffee, write at the table while my children play outside or build a fort inside. That Saturday mid morning I think what is the point of being extra miserable when I am already miserable, and I eat two chocolate bars fast, and a lot of popcorn while watching Can You Ever Forgive Me, which is a truly terrific movie. Then I watch The Wife (Glenn Close is great, but the book is better). I read Moo by Jane Smiley. I write. I read Ephesians. I start a series I heard was good. Before the weekend is over I finish eight hours of an HBO series and one more movie. I cannot remember a more concentrated time of television watching. The last time I might have consumed so much of a screen was thirteen years ago when Justin and I bought the first two seasons of The Office, binged on a hot day with the curtains closed and ac cranked. Then we took a break to pick up pizza. Now I break to rewarm my rice sock.

On Sunday I sit on the couch and look at the smog. The air purifiers are both running high and the apartment hovers at an AQI of forty-seven. I hobble to the door of our drying room and feel a tiny slip of air at the jamb, find packing tape and tape the door sealed. Our AQI drops thirty points. I think about taking a picture of the smog. I cannot. For the same reason I cannot take a photo of my grossly swollen knee. I can remember both well enough, without proof. Years ago I read a blog post by a woman recounting her car accident while on vacation in Costa Rica. She included a photo of herself sobbing on the roadside. The equivalent for me is staring at the middle distance of our view, a forested hill made invisible by smog, and wondering how to write a sentence to explain the fear knotting my belly at the thought of staying in Korea for another two years of bad air, and all the tangential thoughts that follow: the utter selfishness of corporations banking their dirty, under(or un)regulated industry on China’s east coast, the impotence of regional governments to cut coal in favor of renewable or nuclear power energy options, my own careless use of plastic.

I briefly consider another fast, for the sense of control. To show I am doing something to heal my body, in petition. I tell the children we need to tidy the apartment. The girl helps. The boy helps, but grumbles. I say to him, I would like to be able to do all of this by myself but I need your help. That is it, that I need your help. My husband is away, my body is broken, my mind is tired. When my husband messages me from Cuba I hate him just a little.

A friend and her son visit and for an hour or so we talk about the air and our fortune (we can monitor and control the air we breathe, while much of the world cannot), and about books or movies. Our boys play nicely. I tell her I’ve decided to quit drinking coffee and alcohol. I read that both cause inflammation. What I will miss is the ritual of an afternoon latte and open notebook, a glass of wine while I cook, or two glasses with a friend. I can do anything for a time. I can quit caffeine and alcohol. My body will heal. I cannot be inflamed forever.

Can I. There is a flame in my body. If I might have some oxygen to burn. When I do fast, I feel my body burn. I go warm at night, wake with sweat. It’s delicious to be warm of my own burning body.

I want to run. This thought is not far from any other thought. Between that Saturday and this the swelling leaves my knee and I learn to walk again. I watch my ankle and foot through the motion. Heel roll up outside ball big toe heel roll up outside ball big toe. I watch to keep my knee over my ankle. I watch to keep my ankle steady. I watch to keep my toes awake. My foot is tired after one day. Between that Saturday and this my husband returns from travel, marvels at the smog, unpacks souvenirs from Cuba. I want to run. He turns forty and I promise to celebrate better when the air is clean and we can go for an afternoon bike ride along the river, and we will. But also, this year I did not I want to run have the energy I want to run to go out with the kids to let them I want to run choose a gift or decorate the apartment for his birthday with I want to run a banner or balloons. I bake a cake, make a promise and the next morning he is sick.

This Saturday my husband lays on the couch, unmoving. Drink water, I say, and he does. He takes medicine. He sleeps. I take the kids on a bike ride, what we might have done last Saturday if, and I go slow behind my boy and girl, watch my knee when I drive the pedal down, watch my ankle when I drive the pedal down, watch my knee and ankle through the motion to keep the joints aligned. And it is perhaps too much work to heal at all. I am mildly annoyed my husband traveled to clean air and warm climate with health and returned to be sick so that my run of solo parenting extends to the small interventions of a Saturday afternoon. The children squabble while we are out. I speak loudly so they can hear all the way down their bodies that love is a choice. And you cannot control the other. Love between two is never equal. Sometimes you give more. Sometimes your brother or sister gives more. You love without supposing to earn anything. Be nice even if you don’t have to be nice. Be kind. Generous. I am loud enough I see a woman turn to look at me. I am loud enough to hear all the way down my body.

The kids apologize to one another, and to me, and I say what I say, that I love them very much. My girl is put in her own thoughts on our ride home, hopping off her bike to walk for a stretch before resuming at racing speed. My boy asks if his sister is okay when she stops again to walk and we continue on, and I say, She knows the way home.

Sometimes I am afraid I am too honest about how much work it is to be a person, to love at all, to follow Jesus. I am afraid I discourage my children. Or I am afraid that what they might take on as natural and easy, I turn to a hard way because for me being a person, loving, following Jesus is hard.

When I am home again I balance on one leg, and then the other. I do this because I want to run. Yet this Saturday I am made to be slow. We eat two dozen strawberries. I finish reading a book. My boy kicks a soccer ball with a friend. My girl rearranges her room again. My husband rests his body on the couch. I feel how my belly and thighs go soft now. I see the middle distance return to our view. Before the children go to bed they come to me to snuggle and we lay together in my bed. I am glad for my children. They are lights. They tell little jokes they have between themselves or the three of us. We tickle and nuzzle. We sigh because sleep is near, and they leave to their separate rooms to dream. I stay awake a little longer to do this, to remember that Saturday and this Saturday at the smoggy end of winter.

Twelve of thirty-nine. 1894 words.

It Had Been Revealed

February 7, 2019 By Sarah Marslender in Thirty-Nine Stories, Uncategorized Tags: Christmas Story, Expat Experiences, Faith, Panic Attacks, Thirty-Nine Stories Leave a comment

One of my go-to fiction writing exercises is to write from a PostSecret prompt. Most weeks I read PostSecret but I only mine the site for a story idea when I want to write a story but don’t want to commit. So: lightly edited flash fiction. Extend this exercise by choosing a parameter(s) – POV, tense, word count, sentence/ paragraph length, syllables per word – for the piece. This week PostSecret included a video of spiritual secrets and I wrote down a few, including the prompt for the following:

I’m not religious anymore but listening to the Christmas story I grew up with is the only thing that stops my panic attacks.

A fuller piece I want to write is about where the church camp kids are, twenty years on, after we sang all the songs and cried about Jesus loving us, and shared inside jokes, wrote as penpals one summer to the next. I’m interested in why some of us keep the faith of our childhood, and others of us do not, and to consider where parental belief or church doctrine ends, and our own understanding and faith begins.

As I wrote this piece (maybe five or six hours, over four days) I reread the Christmas story account from Luke, the one read before opening gifts at my grandparents’ on Christmas Eve. There is assurance, peace and wonder, and I can easily imagine the words soothing a panic.

On the morning commute to Itaewon Julie could feel the clamping. She got off two stops early just to be out of the subway car, the smell of kimchi and garlic on skin. This happened sometimes, though it wasn’t the close space or the body smells of fellow commuters that bothered her. When it happened – the clamping, as she started calling her attacks when she was a child, before she knew there was a name for drowning in air and feeling her body go numb – Julie had a plan, and the plan had evolved as she did, from a childhood chanting in far bathroom stalls, to an adolescence resting in the spoken words of her mother, to an adult whose three years of therapy was helpful to understanding her panic attacks but did not offer an end to them. That had been a disappointment. Julie stood on the platform. She put her hands in her pant pockets and pinched the flesh of her thighs because this minor physical pain was often enough to shake the clamp loose. She pressed her fingernails into her soft flesh. Anyone looking wouldn’t know the tiny, perfect pain that spiked her brain. It was enough for this minute. Keeping one hand in a pocket she left the platform, walked up the stairs, through the turnstiles, up more stairs to the street, the fingers in her pocket playing with nubs of flesh to give short, bright pain, enough to regain her breath.

When she was in the middle of a clamping, she could not think to take exit four instead of seven, so on the street she turned around slowly to orient herself, and then began walking to work. Autumn in Seoul was gorgeous. The trees went red, gold. Platter sized leaves littered the sidewalks, dropping from shade trees cultured by the Japanese. The air was clean for a last month before winter smog settled the region. Julie pulled deep breaths through her nose, exhaled fully. She was feeling steady again. Julie took out her phone and earbuds.

What worked best was for someone to read to her. Something about the unrehearsed speech quieted her. When Julie was in middle school, home midday after throwing up in PE or dissolving in tears in the counselor’s office, her mom would tuck her into bed, bring her hot cocoa, and read, first from the Bible and then from whatever book Julie had dogeared on her bedside table. The words – and the pauses, mispronunciations and corrections, coughs, throat clearings, water sips – were just the cadence that brought Julie’s mind and body to rest. Her mom seemed to recognize this too, and began to read with Julie each evening before bed. When Julie went to college, her mom sent a box of audiobook cds along, and a couple of years after when Julie started therapy hoping to solve the clamping forever, she realized her mom understood a way to help even if she hadn’t understood a better way to help. And it had worked, hadn’t it, better than a gym membership or therapy or keeping a gratitude journal or praying fervently.

The audiobooks were not the same. The first months of freshman year were a disaster. Julie went home at Thanksgiving and spent two days in bed listening to her mom read Psalms and Harry Potter for an hour or so at a stretch, listening to her family cooking, eating, playing board games downstairs. Julie’s older sibling, Matthew, brought his girlfriend to meet the family, a biology major named Taylor who, when Julie joined the family on Friday, said quietly that student services offered counseling and that might help. Julie nodded and thought to call when she returned to campus. She didn’t call until her junior year. And then, sitting in a tiny campus counseling office with platitude posters on the walls, she wondered why no one saw what Taylor had seen, that Julie needed. But at age nineteen or twenty, Julie couldn’t have said what she needed. For a decade the clamping had been a part of her life and sometimes it was okay, and sometimes it was not.

Julie found the album she liked. Last Christmas she flew home from Korea to surprise her family. She moved to Korea a year after graduating college, at the end of her third year of therapy. The college therapist recommended a woman Julie might continue her work with, and so Julie stayed in her college town, kept her job at Starbucks and picked up more shifts, and talked her way to deciding to move to Korea to teach English. This was an apt fit for Julie. The move itself was a series of clampings but once in a rotation of lessons, Julie was surrounded by such beautifully unrehearsed speech as her elementary students read from slim books about sport games, trips to the zoo, and eating at a restaurant. She often left the brightly lit hagwon feeling relaxed. She went home that first Christmas because while she liked teaching the elementary students to read and write English, she was lonely. Her workday began at two in the afternoon, and finished at nine in the evening. Five of the other teachers had arrived together the previous term and there was no breaking into that group, and the rest of the teachers had been living in Korea too long to care about meeting a new expat. Everyone was nice, but no one was kind. When she went home at Christmas, she wasn’t wholly certain she would return to Korea.

The first Sunday home she went to church. Since leaving for college, she’d only gone to church on the weekends home. Julie thought she still believe in God. But she had prayed for the clamping to go away. Beginning as a girl in elementary school when her prayer was as uncomplicated as, Please, God, make me feel okay. And Julie prayed in middle school and high school, with her mom, or alone, praying for this sensation and the fears to leave her alone.

Julie pressed the arrow and adjusted the volume to hear her mother’s voice. At church that first Sunday home, she listened to the advent reading, watched the candle flame waver. She almost prayed, or prayed in a way she didn’t know was prayer. Her parents wanted to know about Korea and Julie made the move sound like the right choice. It was as right as another. They were happy she was happy, and she was happy, but also lonely and the thought of returning to lonely kept her in bed for a day, which she passed off as jetlag. She made her whole body tense, and then let go. She tracked her breath. She pinched her inner thighs, she burrowed under the heavy quilts. On Christmas Eve, Julie sat with her parents in the living room. The tree lights were on, and Christmas music, and they drank hot cocoa or eggnog and briefly Skyped with Matthew and Taylor who were in South Dakota where her family lived. Her dad took his Bible from a shelf and opened to the book of Luke. He began to read and Julie felt her chest open for a full breath. Wait, Dad, she said and found her phone charging in the kitchen. She opened a recording app and pressed start. He began again. In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.

After her dad read through the angels and shepherds, Julie asked her mom to read the same passage and she did, continuing to tell of Simeon and Anna the prophetess, and the holy family’s return to Nazareth. Julie began to cry a little. She could return to Korea and she could make a friend. Julie saved the recordings and pulled one up when she needed to listen to someone read: on the plane returning to Incheon, during break her first day back at the hagwon, through the smoggy spring and humid summer. She walked more now and that was helping too, to be outside with sky and trees, the rivers and hills. The clamping was less frequent now and Julie thought of the recordings as her talisman.

Now she stood on a residential street, a short cut to work, and listened to her mom read. Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. Julie took her hand from the pant pocket. She tucked her hands instead into her jacket, closed her eyes and continued drawing steady breaths. When she was a girl she thought the Holy Spirit was like wisps of fog on country roads and when her pastor prayed that the Holy Spirit be present here, now, she peeked to see if the aisles of church were misty here, now. Someone bumped by her, and then another someone. Julie listened again to the story. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. Julie’s phone rang, pausing the reading. She answered. She’d lost track of time. She was coming in, yes. Julie removed her earbuds. One day she thought she might understand Simeon, his certainty at seeing the Christ child because of a whispered promise, but she could not now imagine carrying such hope for so many years. She walked along, scuffing leaves, thinking, like a child.

Nine of thirty-nine. 1699 words.

The Holy Posture Of Whatever

November 26, 2018 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP, Process Tags: Expat Experiences, Faith, Hope, International Teaching, Peace, Substitute Teaching, Thirty-Nine Stories, Waiting Leave a comment

Last week I interviewed for a teaching position at our school. For international educators, autumn is a season of big decisions and Justin and I already made ours, signing on to stay in Korea for two more years, but then I had the opportunity to apply to return to a high school English classroom. When we left Kuwait, there was no English position open for me at our new school, and I was relieved for the year rest. A year in the utility department allowed me to see the elementary, middle and high school equally. I learned more about our school. I am glad to be at our school for the many ways I see learning happen, for the many colleagues I observe and collaborate with. This time last year, I was energized by the newness of every day. When asked if I was interested in joining the middle or high school staff, I declined to apply. I liked the fun of each day different. I liked the work I was doing with school publications. This time last year I didn’t think what I might want now, during my second year as a full time substitute, when the unpredictability of each day is more tiring than energizing. So when talk started of who was staying and who was going, I listened for rumors of English teachers whose contracts were up and wondered if I might fit with the department.

Fit is one of my idols. In college I roamed from one group to the next. This is a fun way to learn a little about a lot. And after college when I was keen to move abroad, my secret hope was to find a place where I fit perfectly. I imagined cobbled streets and sun dappled sidewalk cafes. I imagined solitude. I imagined a crowd happy to land me in their crew.

But now when I thought of how I might fit in the English department, I was a little nauseated. I couldn’t dredge any storyline of how my presence was essential to the department, or how wonderful the school day would be, to have my own classroom. To open my own door each morning, to greets students I know, to know where the projector remote is kept, to always have a tissue box. I can picture returning to the classroom. My year away (and this second year away) from teaching literature and writing confirms I really like teaching literature and writing. Yet I cannot pretend that I am absolutely the best fit for a teaching position at our school because I know two things: I would do well, and so would someone else. I was nauseated at the thought of fitting not because it was the idea I might fit the English department or fit the needs of our students or fit the high school community, but because I already do fit where I am. As kindly pointed out by a friend when I lamented this chase to find my place. Why do I question where I am? I am here. And so this is where I belong.

I am here in Korea for two more years. Maybe longer. As long as I am here, I am right where I belong.

Unfinished. A week or two before the announcement internal openings I was laying in bed one night when I felt my upper body slowly paralyze. I lay still for a moment. The sensation is familiar, born of fear. Two years ago at the start of our job search to leave Kuwait, I woke in the middle of the night to pins and needles across my chest, down my left arm and most alarmingly, in patches on the left side of my face. I called my dad who the summer before suffered Bell’s palsy. I thought maybe that was it, that or a stroke. The pins and needles did not indicate palsy or stroke, only anxiety at a new height.

I like to think I am calm. I like that idea that following Christ grants peace that passes understanding. So that night a couple of weeks ago when my upper body went numb I sat up, flexed my fingers, rolled my neck and said to the dark, Where is my peace?

Rolled into this present experience is a past hurt and a potentially wrong conclusion. Two years ago I was set to go to Kenya. I remember a near maniacal hope. I remember believing that since I wasn’t seeking anything overtly wrong for my life or my family, since I wasn’t scrambling for money or comfort, that my want had to be answered by a move to Nairobi. This could not possibly counter what God had in mind for us. But we did not get hired by a school in Kenya. Instead, in the days after that option closed, I cried and wondered what am I supposed to want. This question persists. What am I supposed to want? What do my desires matter? When we planned to leave Kuwait, Justin and I made a list of wants. Our kids added to the list too. We wanted to bike to school. I wanted to run outside. Claire wanted snow. One night after losing Kenya, I could not sleep. I walked through our dark apartment and stood at the big windows where I watched the cars and buses below. I stood in the middle of our playroom. I wept. I was so sad. When I think about this night, I am there again. I could not see how the months ahead would open to where we are. For me to even consider where we are now, I needed to absolutely lose the chance of going where I thought we belonged. A day or two later, we got an email from Korea.

The same friend who kindly reminded me I fit where I am, at the outset of this current search, also said to me, Trust the process. He may have said this half jokingly. Let go and let God, he said, Trust the process. Years ago in Colombia I worked with a couple who eventually left international teaching to open a Bikram yoga studio in southern California, and when I saw Katy in her new life wearing a tee shirt that said Trust The Process, I wanted the shirt. I’ve long adored the idea of process, if not the real in-the-middle work of process. My notebooks are full of the reminder to trust the process. Faith works out through experience. Writing is crafted during revision. Relationships strengthen or break by the addition of a day, hardship, disagreement, joy. Raising my children is an illustration of process. Such comfort to know I am yet unfinished.

But what process do I trust? This last week, before and after interviewing for a teaching position, I practiced articulating what I want to say about this current process, my waiting to know what more the next two years in Korea might hold. There is God at work. There are people at work. There is a lot I do not know about what happens if I teach literature and writing, or what happens if I remain in my current role at the school. And I can see both ways working well.

Losing Kenya comes back to me now as caution not to want too much. Losing Kenya comes back to me now as a question of what I really want. Losing Kenya comes back to me now as a rebuke that I may not know what I most need. That was my angst when my friend grinned and said, Let go and let God. Trust the process. We play glib about this. But I’ve come around to the glib repose of whatever. I want to teach so I applied to teach so I interviewed to teach so I wait to teach. But whatever. Next year I will teach or not teach, and I cannot say now. Losing Kenya may have wrecked me for hope in me, and perhaps that is the point. I continue to pour into marriage and parenting, with hope. I continue to write and work, with hope. I continue to daydream where to live next or where to travel, with hope. But my hope is not in my own ability or achievement. I follow Christ who exacts the high price of everything, to know the love of God now, to live in love now and forever. Faith necessitates a hope in what I cannot see in full: that God is good. All of me is one line of a story, one thread in a tapestry, one note, one brush of paint that adds to his name, defines his glory. If I accept God is at work in and through me as I seek to be more as Christ, then I am free to trust that any bit of this time on earth (this process) is useful. And then I am free to accept, or even welcome, all the little bits that make up my time on earth: relationships, work, writing, Korea, losing Kenya.

My hope is that as I chase wants and needs, I am not lost to those wants and needs. I trust that God attends the moment and tomorrow. I do not quit my dreams, and I am not lazy at my pursuits, but I am beginning to understand there is a holy posture called whatever: whatever the day is, whatever the year is, let my heart be right. Give me the wisdom, fun, creativity for the moment and again, tomorrow.

Still. After the interview I walked home with Grant. Along the river path I wondered if my levelness was peace or passivity. Am I just totally at peace with what comes next, or am I surrendered instead to familiar passivity, accepting least resistance as the right way forward. Later at home I was in the kitchen and stood quiet. Do I know what I want at all? I am now partnered for sixteen years, raising two children, living abroad for over a decade. I want to teach, so I applied to teach. But is there a deeper want yet? Is there something more for my time? I worked in the kitchen, worked my way toward whatever. That is where I am now. I will continue to think about what to want, peace and passivity, surrender to whatever may come today and again, tomorrow, but now I wait while there are other minds at work to set in place where I fit next year which is, always, right where I am.

Story One. 1769 words. Drafted 25 & 26 November.

Ordinary Suffering

September 21, 2018 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP Tags: Faith, Healing, Ordinary Suffering Leave a comment

This is a draft I’ll revisit. Right now, wandering. While I have talked around these ideas with a few friends, and written much in my notebooks, I was uncertain how to shape ordinary suffering into a single piece. And maybe ordinary suffering will be the thing I explore for a while, uncovering/ discovering the equality of suffering. That’s what I’ve come to, that suffering is suffering. Or maybe the equality is in our human needs, no matter the degree of suffering.

Seven years ago my right knee swelled. My quads were tight, the knee joint twinged when I squatted to help my son put his shoes on. The next day my knee was swollen. For a year and a half I couldn’t run. Some days it was difficult to walk. Swelling extended above the knee joint. The swelling would come and go, a routine of so many days fine, so many days swollen. There was no physical pain in the joint and when I finally got an MRI after nearly a year, because something must be wrong for my body to behave like this, the imaging revealed a perfectly fine knee joint with no ligament or tendon strain, no cartilage damage. But still, the knee swelled.

This year my left knee swelled. One afternoon in June I rode my bike home and noticed my knee popping. That night I massage a tight muscle in my calf. I woke up barely able to walk. My knee was puffy and unstable. I texted my weekend running partner I couldn’t make it that morning. I elevated my leg and massaged my lymph nodes. We had brunch plans and I hobbled to the subway, hobbled to the restaurant where a waiter brought me a plastic bag of ice. I spent two weeks moving very slowly, limping when the knee was swollen, and going about my usual day when the joint returned to normal. Again, there is no pain in the joint. Over the summer I saw a sports physical therapist who manipulated my knee to check for pain, any pain at all, nothing? I suspect an MRI would reveal no damage.

But I am damaged. My routine is damaged. The way I make my day is changed because I cannot rise, leave the apartment and run for an hour or so before going to work. I do not have that time alone on the river path, to think or pray or wonder. All summer I was in the way of myself. I went grocery shopping one day and hated how slowly I had to walk, how careful I was of moving my body through the aisles, of getting into or out of the car. A man noticed I was limping and said, I thought you had an artificial limb! But I see you’ve got your foot. What happened?

When I explain these injuries I say the joint swells in reaction to a muscle imbalance. Probably hip flexors or glutes. Or maybe a weak ankle. I do physical therapy exercises. A strong core is not magic. I go to an osteopath, which is also not magic. I pray, and wish that was magic.

I get to run again, I know. There is nothing I can do for this except to wait for the body to sort itself, for the muscles running from the top of my head to my toes to align and strengthen again, to support my stride and cadence down the river path. But the waiting time –

Always there is a waiting time. Before we moved to Korea, we waited to know where. When we moved to Korea, we waited to feel like we fit here. We wait for test results. We wait for babies. We wait to accept, wait to wake up and feel whole again, wait to eat with an appetite. We wait to call because we don’t know what to say. We wait for the end. We wait, to test trust. We wait in faith or anger or doubt. We wait to heal. We wait to grow. We wait for understanding, comfort, peace.

Last year one of my first friends in Seoul was a woman named Sabrina. Only a few months before, her husband of seven years died of cancer. She has a daughter and son, like me, and we spent a lot of time together that fall – her kids joined mine on the playground or at our apartment while she visited a variety of doctors to figure out what was happening to her body. What was happening was grief. Over the course of her first year of widowhood, her body turned on itself, weakened, reacted in fear, until she finally found a diagnosis of PTSD. We were alongside Sabrina, loving in practical ways. I listened. We talked about her grief and our shared faith in Christ. Sometimes I could feel myself talking to a point, like if I could only find the right way to empathize, if I could only find the right word of encouragement, Sabrina might then lift.

Last year was difficult for me too. While we were pleased with our move, glad for our new school environment, all the new was overwhelming and I was unsteady in my professional value and place. My daughter also had a tough adjustment to our new school and I carried concern and fear for her. At home I frayed. We didn’t have a housekeeper helping to run our home. I couldn’t find ingredients to cook what I liked. I didn’t want to cook anyway. I wanted to hide, or go to bed early. My marriage was okay but neither Justin nor I were satisfied in our partnership, or glad at how our family dynamic worked.

But I was ever conscious of how small my complaints were. I had a widow friend whose regular day made my sorrow ridiculous. This tension was familiar and I hated it – the scold that my everyday sorrow is lesser because someone else is always in the middle of a greater trial. By springtime I was finding words to sum up what I first remember sensing seven years ago. Seven years ago I was just leaving a brutal postpartum year. I lost running. I confronted sin in my life. I felt like a mess. And I had a friend who gave birth to her son at nineteen weeks, whom her husband held for an hour before the infant died. In the months after, I watched Liana navigate deep grief. We were part of a small group of women who studied the Bible, prayed for one another, endeavored to live our faith, and I remember wanting to qualify my prayer for healing. Should I ask God to heal my knee because I miss running? We asked God to keep Liana well through her pregnancy.

One afternoon last spring, Sabrina and I were talking on the phone. We were each ready for the school year to be over. She was ready to move to China to live near family friends. I was ready to place the transition year in the past. I remember the call as thoughtful, revisiting some of our open conversations, affirming our trust in a God who is good even in the middle of most difficult stretches. Sabrina talked like she was on a beach, lounging in a hammock. Totally relaxed. In the background her son asked a question and then we returned to the idea that God meets us where we are. I believe this, absolutely. We work out our faith in the regular day. When Sabrina said she believes God doesn’t give us more than we can bear, I murmured agreement because she should know, really, going through her first year of widowhood, wondering what the stretch of decades ahead will look like for her and the kids. But I also felt a kind of rebuke.

Can my faith be measured by the suffering I endure? By my right heart in the middle of most difficult stretches? My faith increases when pressed. My trust is tested. Sabrina’s comment is cliche because plenty of us figure it’s true that God gives us only what we can handle.

What does that imply about my faith? Am I so immature a Christian, so lacking in faith, that the most burden I can endure is a move to Korea, a change in my routine, a sadness? The prosperity gospel suggests we can measure our faith by the material increase we’re granted – while I believe that is false doctrine, did I just draft an equally false suffering gospel that measures faith by the sorrow I’m entrusted? I wanted to climb out of my body. I turned inward.

For the past few months I’ve sifted the years for stories of suffering. My own, those losses belonging to family and friends. In that same afternoon conversation with Sabrina, I told her about a few women I’ve watched endure great loss. Selfishly I wonder why I was placed in Liana’s circle, or near Sabrina, because I often wonder how to love, and I question the merit of my own dull sorrow in light of greater loss. This is how I know Sabrina is a friend, that she did not hang up. Instead she encouraged me to see what I learn from these suffering women. So that is what I am doing even now, writing this. Pulling threads from all the stories to braid a conclusion.

Here is what I have:

A couple of weeks ago I had a big fight with Justin. He likes to say I am always in the middle of a crisis. This is probably true. I am always in the middle of thinking or working out some emotional/ mental/ spiritual idea or question and it can feel like a crisis because I want to talk with Justin and then I cry and feel like I’m never ever going to be okay until I’m dead. So, sure, always in the middle of a crisis. And a couple of weeks ago, nearing a summary about suffering and what I’ve learned from Liana, Sabrina and others, I thought:

This is suffering enough.

Ordinary suffering is the most difficult stretch. (Now is where you may choose to quit reading, because what follows is tenuous, and I haven’t got my phrasing just so, to make any of this less offensive). (Also, if you like me, you may not like me after this next bit). There were times last year when I was navigating the new culture and food, when my daughter was so needy, when my husband seemed far away, when I would have liked to have one giant horrible loss to point to and say, That is why I feel so awful. That is why I don’t want to wake up. That is why I can’t be bothered with dinner. That is why I am crying on the subway or screaming into my pillow. Surely I am not so sad because I miss the Gulf, or because the old women here rarely smile. Surely I am not so overwhelmed by feeding my family, or sharing a bed with my spouse. I got sad and dark. I recovered. I got sad and dark. I negated my need to see how deep my suffering was because always, always there is another whose suffering is deeper still. I wondered if God dolloped out peace in accordance to the true measure of suffering his children experience. For the child in Syria, a bucket poured out in the morning and evening. For Sabrina, a liter a day. For me and my whimpering, a half pint meant to last the year. What if I want the bucket of peace? What if knowing that I have more than most, I still feel so sad, so dark that I really do need a sloshing bucket of peace dumped over my head?

There is more to this ordinary suffering.

Sorrow, loss, hardship, challenge, frustration grows us. What is the purpose of this light momentary affliction? Refine me. Make me as Christ. Make me loving and kind. Make me patient and joyful. The suffering is selfishness burning up as I yield to what is holy, as I yield to living the gospel in the practical, uncomfortable, unremarked everyday situations. I am entrusted with ordinary suffering. One day Justin and I stood with the kids on the subway platform and he made that comment about my crisis to crisis life, I practiced how to express what I am learning about the necessity of ordinary suffering. What I said was cutting and crass. What I said was, I don’t have a dead husband. I don’t have a dead child. But I am walking through the regular shit and it is fucking tough. Justin hushed me, like the kids hadn’t heard me say fuck before and I turned on him. It is fucking tough! It is hard to surrender self! It isn’t fun!

Now, I believe we have giant moments in life that radically alter our course. And so I do not say that extraordinary suffering is less. But in the years I have thought about suffering, I began to bump against a thought that both comforts and offends, that suffering is equal. As Sabrina said God does not give more than we can bear, I also suppose that in his mercy he does not pour out all the suffering our bodies and minds might withstand. What refines Sabrina now is the stretch of her trust in a God who is good, though this same God did not heal her husband for life on earth. What refines me now is the daily slog of marriage and parenting, the test of practicing hope. What I understand is that I must live the gospel where I am, applied to present, ordinary suffering. I know that one day I will endure extraordinary suffering but the gospel does not wait for awful need. When James exhorts us to consider it all joy when we meet trials of various kinds, he really does mean trials of various kinds, because every kind of trial may test our faith, establish steadfastness.

Without running I have a difficult time balancing my mind. I joke that Justin misses my endorphins. For a couple of decades I have reliably used running and exercise to manage my emotions, steady my thoughts, calm my body. Movement is such an easy way for me to abbreviate anxiety or depression. When I cannot run or exercise much, like now while my knee heals, my brain is off. I have to make myself aware of what is true. I despair. I don’t want to do anything. I imagine how to punish myself for feeling like shit. I get angry that I feel this way at all, when I do not have a dead husband or a dead child, when I can count my suffering as truly light. This time I am belligerent though. I do not want to sink into this depression but I also do not want to pretend my upended routine is okay because at least I do not have cancer, at least I have two legs, at least my husband is tender. Praise and gratitude is necessary practice in my faith. But praise and gratitude do not pretend away the present suffering. There is reprieve or perspective, when I ride my bike along the river and name the ways God is worthy of praise: the blades of grass, the wisp of clouds, the apartment towers full of people he knows and loves. There is joy when I name what I am glad for: the way my daughter and son curl into me for a bedtime snuggle, the honey taste of espresso, the clean air.

One day I will write from the perspective of a woman who endures extraordinary suffering. I thought about that yesterday afternoon when my husband called in a panic because he couldn’t feel his arms and his whole body hurt. He’d stayed home sick, vomiting, and hadn’t taken any water for twelve hours. Later, I was mad at him for his carelessness. Drink water, I said that morning when I left with our kids. I told him to add electrolyte tabs to his water. And then he was calling, afraid, sweating and shaking, feeling like this body was quitting. On the taxi to our apartment I thought briefly of his death. It has to happen, at some point. He will die or I will die and we will be apart. Of course I thought of Sabrina. I thought of life insurance we are applying for. I thought how stupid if he died of dehydration. I found him in the apartment, got him to the taxi, and took him to the ER. There was a row of patients with IV stands sitting along one wall. Gurnees with elderly patients. Husbands, wives or daughters attending the needs of their patient companions. People vomited. People lay or lolled unresponsive. People went into one of the side rooms to get an IV or oxygen tube. I stood next to Justin not wanting to touch anything, watching the doctors, nurses and orderlies move through our sick mass, and thought I could never work in healthcare. Justin would be fine. He had food poisoning and was careless about taking water during his illness, nothing more, but we stayed at the hospital for four hours.

I helped Justin wrap in a blanket and pushed him out of the ER, to the Starbucks in the lobby where he dozed and I read while his IV dripped. In Korea, patients wander the hospital and grounds. Sons or daughters wheel their elderly parents on gurnees. Aides offer a stable arm to the infirm who want to walk. Near the end of the night, I saw an older woman sitting in a wheelchair. She had her head wrapped in a scarf. She had no eyebrows. Her skin was sallow, slack, with purple bruising on her arms and legs. A man, maybe her husband, stood near her. When I walked by this couple again, she was part of a small circle of men and women who stood with their heads bowed, and I stopped a few meters away to be silent. I listened to a prayer in a language I hear but don’t know. When the minister finished his prayer, I walked over and touched this woman’s shoulder, then touched the shoulder of her friend or sister who stood near.

Do you work here? the friend asked. I answered no, but that I just saw and – I said, I hope you have peace in your spirit. The friend nodded and I dipped my head in a bow and walked away. Outside the lobby entrance I leaned against the smooth, cool wall. It was raining, lightly, and the fresh air felt nice on my face. Justin was well enough to walk, only waiting for his discharge. I messaged I didn’t want to return to the ER. He could come to me.

There is one more thing I want to observe about ordinary suffering. Years ago I was at a church service, feeling the mess of my heart and a pinch in my shoulder, when a man redirected the service to prayer, calling out three or four specific needs, including a hurting left shoulder. The gathering was small. I may not have been the only woman with a knot beneath the left shoulder blade, but I turned to the group near me and said, I think that’s me, and they prayed for healing and I stood there wondering if God really works like this anymore, to give anything instant. I stood holding my son, my head bowed to kiss the top of his head, and inside I fought to believe this was possible, that my God loves me enough to just give relief. That afternoon and for the next several days, I tested my shoulder. I searched for the knot I was accustomed to kneading. I was healed. In the weeks that followed this tangible healing, I sensed my heart accept God’s equal ability to heal my intangible, hidden pains.

I do not know how to trace the way I came to think that ordinary suffering is undeserving of God’s attention, why I suppose the regular everyday does not merit his care, but I doubt I am the only one who wonders if God has the time or love to meet me where I am, when there are so many others with greater needs. My suffering is ordinary. Yet I believe the same God who comforts the widow, who gives peace to the dying, can also meet me in the middle of meal prep or on a bike ride to work or when I kiss my daughter and son goodnight. What I have decided is to trust God completely with my ordinary suffering. Teach me, refine me. Make me as Christ. I cannot wait for extraordinary suffering to work its excruciating, glorious change to my spirit: instead, let me be faithful now.

Chance Chanced Upon Us

May 27, 2018 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP Tags: Be Where I Am, Expat Experiences, Faith, Korea, Mindfulness, Psalm 16, Ruth, Substitute Teaching, Sustain Creative Momentum, Transition & Change Leave a comment

April was rough. Claire named one of our tough spring events The Devastating Time and by mid-April I decided the title was apt for the whole month. Now near the end of May I can’t remember exactly what made all of April a slog but I do remember one evening at the dining table when the kids suggested a game, we started playing and I was totally blank. I played my turns, but I couldn’t laugh. Inside, I wondered if I’d finally broken something. April was the month I considered revising our four or five year plan to settle this place. Perhaps just one more year. I was sad again we’d missed moving to Kenya. I was tired of the effort of being here.

This weekend I met my friend Erin for coffee. I am so glad we get to be near one another again. That wouldn’t happen if I were in Nairobi. All year Erin has encouraged me with her kindness, listening and wisdom. She has heard me draft versions of my experience here. What happened when we got jobs and planned to move to Korea was Justin and I were certain we belonged in Korea. And when we arrived, we were certain we belonged in Korea. We are still certain this is a good place for us, a right place, and we are glad for the events and people and ideas that brought us here.

At church we just finished a study of the book of Ruth. Through the story of Naomi, Ruth and Boaz, the author illustrates the perfect provision of our God – there’s a phrase used at the beginning of the story to show the happenstance of Ruth gleaning in Boaz’s wheat field. Chance chanced upon her. Reading now, and knowing the lineage of Ruth and Boaz, knowing that so many generations away is King David, and so many generations after is Jesus, we know this is not chance but divine orchestration. After church today we all headed to the Han for a picnic and I sat with an older woman named Els who echoed in her own life the care God has to place us here or there with this person or ready for that event. Els said, God is sovereign. I know that chance chanced upon us in our coming to Korea, a country and region that we had not considered but then recognized as our fit.

But once I arrived, once I had my work and routine, I wasn’t certain why I am here. That is what Erin hears when I talk. That I am glad we are here. That I think we belong here. And that I have no idea what I am doing here. But this weekend when she and I talked, I understood something in a new way.

My position as school is in the Utility department. I am a full-time substitute teacher. Most of the time this is really fun. Some of the time, it’s really difficult. Rarely, it’s terrible. Being a full-time sub means I may wake up one day and teach junior kindergarten and wake up the next day to teach AP Psychology. Sometimes I am in the elementary, middle and high schools in a single day.

One of the reasons I am here is to learn how to be where I am.

Being present is important to me. I try. I really, really try. And in the years since my son was born, I’ve felt less and less a fight to stay with what’s in front of me: marriage, children, work, writing, relationships. In Kuwait, I meditated on Psalm 16:5, 6.

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places: Be here, now. Grow here, now. Enjoy here, now. So while I was in Kuwait, I started learning this practice, to be where I am, to be useful and open and ready where I am, to love and desire what is right where I am. And in Kuwait I had the lines I traveled to school, to the Gulf, to coffee, to church, to the Gulf, to the Avenues, to brunch. I had so many little routines, like a coffee order each morning or stretching each evening or running my miles each day or walking a loop around campus between classes. All these little routines I could expect or anticipate just made the day work.

And then I move to Korea where my work day is just not the same from one to the next. Outside of the school day we scrambled for a new routine of walks or games or dinner, a new way of gathering with friends, new transportation. And inside the school day, we made our way too. But instead of enjoying a sense of control or competence in a new classroom, I’d surrendered to this odd, challenging role as a sub. What I love about the work is seeing the school from the unique vantage of stepping into a variety of grade levels and subject areas, appreciating the work of so many of my colleagues, enjoying the fun of so many different student ages and personalities. But the work can feel disjointed. On Friday I conferenced with grade seven writers, but unless I make a point to return to their classroom in another week or two, I won’t read the finished essays. One day I was in the pool encouraging kids to kick with straight legs, put their faces in the water to blow bubbles, while one boy didn’t want to get into the water at all, despite gentle coaxing – and I wonder if he got his body wet by the end of his swimming unit. My first day in junior kindergarten I sat cross-legged with a couple of boys building Lego and one girl walked up to me, put her hands on my cheeks and made a fish face. We laughed. So I really love this job but it’s stretched me to be where I am.

I think that’s why I’m here. One of the whys of Korea is for me to better learn how to be where I am. Love and serve where I am. Surrender to the moment, the work, the conversation. Chance chanced upon us and we are here in Korea, nearing the end of our first school year and it is good we are here and I am glad we will return.

(1094 words)

Yet I Hold What I Have

May 17, 2018 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP Tags: Faith, Fear, Grief, Loss, Ordinary Suffering Leave a comment

For a few years I expected the worst. Justin would be late from work and I’d stand at the window looking out at the desert, certain he was dead. When he traveled I would imagine if he didn’t return. I realized I didn’t know anything about chunks of our shared life. He tracked our finances. He knew how to fix a wobbly chair. He planned our summer vacations. For years I expected the worst but continued to allow the kids to climb, jump, run and bike fast. Now the fear that my spouse or child might die is a fear that keeps quiet, but during my early motherhood that fear would swell to a point of certainty. If I called Justin and he didn’t answer, I began to cry. The afternoon I saw my two year old daughter had opened her bedroom window by standing on a little chair and was sweeping dust off the sill with her hand, I went cold. I didn’t shout but I held her tightly, feeling dizzy at the thought. We found a way to lock the sliding window and screen.

I might have expected the worst because I understand that the worst can happen to people. I was Polly Klass’s age when I saw her picture on People magazine at the checkout. I was twelve or thirteen when I read The Diary Of Anne Frank. I heard about an Olympic runner in Bosnia who trained despite having to dodge bullets. I learned about mental illness. I read about the Holocaust. I didn’t understand Rwanda. My great-grandmother told me her mother and infant brother died in the flu epidemic and when her father could not raise his remaining two children, he gave my great-grandmother and her brother to a couple who provided, but were not warm. The worst can happen to people.

And people live through. Continue. During those early years of motherhood, two things happened that started to shape my relationship with fear, suffering and grief. Midway through a difficult pregnancy, my friend Liana gave birth to her third son who lived one hour in the hands of his dad. That is now seven years ago but the memories of Liana on bedrest, and the phone call that told me she’d lost her son, still turn my heart. A few days after she was released from the hospital, I stopped by a cafe to pick up a coffee and saw her a moment before she saw me. She was sitting at a table waiting for her husband who was inside with their boys. She was empty armed and blank faced. The mercy was, Liana didn’t try to rearrange her features to make me okay. The second thing that happened was my parents’ neighbor Rose died weeks after a cancer diagnosis, leaving her husband and eight year old son. I did not know Rose well, but I knew she loved her son, wanted another baby, was excited about homeschooling. One summer I talked with Rose in my mom’s kitchen, encouraged by her straightforward faith in Christ. But when Rose died, I ached with shame at how much I worked at love, how uncertain I was at parenting. I ached with fear I might die before I learned how to love my children simply, sacrificially.

The following few years I practiced more honesty in my faith, more neediness. Motherhood was a catalyst to surrender, heart change, fuller joy. Fear subsided as I learned my identity in Christ, as I preached to myself the great care the Father has for each of his children. But fear also subsided as I witnessed others suffer loss and walk sorrow.

I am still finding a way to say this next part. During this past year I imagined myself inoculated against those losses we count as worst: spouse or partner, child, body. I am so comfortable with my ordinary suffering. The low grade depression like a background hum, ready to swell or lessen with the roll of my month or year. The pains of having much and so managing or neglecting gifts, like hiring help with housework, deciding where to get take away, sorting a closet full of clothes, or choosing what to do on a wide open Saturday. I like my ordinary suffering. I have witnessed others’ suffering. I have empathized and entangled. I do not want to wash my child’s dead body. I do not want to kiss my husband’s dead body. When I stepped into a conversation about suffering and grief with Sabrina, she surprised me by saying God does not give us more than we can bear: a platitude I would not say to any bereaved person, she could say within the year her husband died. She carries so much. She is as loved as I and we are both held in the Spirit, but when she said that I thought, Well, there you go. I can’t bear it. That single truth summed up my supposition that God understood I could be near grief, intercede, care for others, but that I am also ill prepared to suffer anything more than a lifetime of mild depression.

All of us are ill prepared to suffer anything more than a lifetime of mild depression and some of us can barely handle that. While I pretend proximity to great loss might inoculate me against great loss, the better comfort is this: we all suffer, we all lose. I move toward and away from this thought but find such comfort in the connectedness of my experience and yours, the lack of anything new under the sun, the truth that we all suffer, we all lose. I do not need to stand at the window waiting my turn. I am allowed to live with peace and joy. I surrender fear. Let my husband go away from me and return. Let my children bike ahead and arrive. Let me run alone at dawn. Liana and Sabrina live and grieve and live. Rose grieved and died. I hold what I have. I cannot do more today.

(1011 words)

Chapel On The Lake

May 11, 2018 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP Tags: Church Camp, Faith, Holy Spirit, Writing Leave a comment

Quick note: Starting in middle school I attended summer church camp. I was raised in the church which sometimes tricks me into thinking I know exactly how God works or how I work within my faith. Attending church camp gave me more opportunities to talk with all kinds of people who loved Jesus or wanted to or weren’t sure how to. For a while I wavered and wandered and wasn’t sure how to find a way back to a relationship that once felt full. I am so imperfect but I am loved by God who is good. I want to write about this faith, the experiences that build, assure, surprise us – I want to write about the Spirit in a way that doesn’t simplify or frighten. This piece is based on nights at summer camp. I think about the boys and girls who are now men and women and I wonder which of us still seek.

One evening we have chapel on the lake. Benches are built into the slope of a hill so we all look down at a cross in front of a few pines, the lake behind. At this time of day the water is like glass. We can see the swimming area roped off, the dock that ends at the deep end, the buoys we swim to. At this time of day, our bodies are tired from sun and activity and some of us have already cried at our small group, some of us have decided we almost believe, some of us are not sure. There is a boy named Clay who calls himself a Jesus Freak. There is a girl named Melissa who says Mother Mary comforts her. This evening we all sit and listen to the Word. Some of us take notes in bubbled cursive. Some of us trace an arc in the dirt with the toe of our sandal. At the end, we pray and there is a pause after Amen. The pause is met by one of us who stands.

When Ben stands it is like we all knew he would stand. There is a push forward in our chests. He walks to where the youth leader is standing and the youth leader does not look surprised or concerned by this bear of a boy. The youth leader steps aside. Ben puts his hands in his pockets, takes his hands out of his pockets. He looks up at us and squints like the sun is in his eyes, but the sun is behind him, low.

This is not enough, Ben says. We understand. All of us understand. He says it again and again. Each time, his voice is louder but he does not shout. We are all sitting, alert. Ben opens his arms wide and says, This is not enough. This is not enough. This is not enough.

Now we want to move but we aren’t certain how this goes. Ben goes quiet. He drops his arms to his side and we all wait in the hum. Angela stands. This is not enough, she says, I want more. And then a wash and whoosh of Spirit and we breathe like our lungs are deep. Angela calls out, More! And we stand or stay in our seat or go weak but more, more. Ben is standing like a tree. His body does not sway. He keeps his head bowed. Angela is swaying and tears fall from her eyes. She looks at heaven. We are all for a moment not at chapel on the lake. We are all together and alone with God.

No one sees the girl with red hair leave chapel. A few of us catch a movement at the swimming beach and see Kat walking loose limbed across the sand toward the dock. She begins to jog down the dock and those of us who watch hear her feet on the planks as she bursts faster at the end and leaps over the water, her arms outstretched. Those of us who watch see a baptism. Kat plays in the water for a minute or two. She floats on her back. She swims to the shallow water and hauls herself onto the dock where she sits with her feet in the water. She is too far away to know her expression but those of us who watch know it.

This evening ends. A couple of guitars are out. We sing praise. We sing slow. Kat wraps herself in a beach towel left draped over a canoe and rejoins us. She is glowing. We pray like we mean it, in our head or heart, with our lips. This evening ends. Ben finds his feet can move again. Angela dries. We hug one another. We see one another. The youth leader and his wife are tired and pleased. The counselors invite us to make a fire, toast marshmallows. Some of us are tired by the evening and drift down dark paths toward cabins. We brush our teeth and swat mosquitoes and climb into sleeping bags on top and bottom bunks. At this moment we are alive to the work of God in us and we are afraid and not afraid. We cannot see after this evening. One evening we will be older and closer or further. But this evening we rest, full.

(732 words)

Every Time I Draft A Piece I Ask Why

September 20, 2017 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP, Process, Uncategorized Tags: Death, Drafting, Faith Leave a comment

Here is something I’ve been thinking, in essay form. Well, in a first draft form I’ll let sit for a while. I always think I’ll let a draft sit, get ready for that magic day when I have the best way to finish the piece. But then I think, For what. Why am I writing this. I get apathetic enough that I don’t bother with question marks. Instead, it’s flat, unanswerable. Why am I writing this. For the piece below, I have an answer: I couldn’t not. There’s a memory that’s hard to look at and spiritual truth I barely touch and as is usual of my personal essay drafts, the writing itself was unpleasant because I think there is something more to say and a better way to say it, but I can’t yet. I hope there is a reason I commit any of this to a page. More, I hope I find a magic day to rework this draft to honor two of my repetends.

With that. I know I am not the only one.

I keep thinking about this boy who died. I was junior in college and he was freshman. We lived in the same residence hall at the edge of campus and fell into step one afternoon. I was a community advisor who put up bulletin boards and hosted ice cream parties and floor meetings but I rarely saw him around the hall. He lived on the third floor, went home on the weekends and ducked his head when walking by the front desk. I remember the day being cold. Maybe an in between day in Wisconsin when autumn is over but air doesn’t yet bite. He had his hands in his front pockets. He was lean like some boys are when they just graduate high school and he walked like he felt too tall, making his shoulders narrow. Maybe because we were walking side by side he could talk a little, tell me he was from a small town on Lake Michigan and that’s where he went every weekend to fish. He had a boat or his father had a boat.

I think we talked about siblings. I think he had a sister still in high school. I think he was studying in the College Of Natural Resources.

I keep thinking about this boy. His name was Nathan. That first afternoon, walking side by side back to our residence hall on an almost winter day, he smiled. I remember feeling like I won because here was this quiet boy who ducked when he walked by people and he’d just smiled at something we said.

He went home on the weekends to take his boat or his father’s boat out on Lake Michigan so I didn’t see him much and had no reason to knock on his door and ask about his day. One night I couldn’t sleep. I laid in bed thinking of his sloping body he hadn’t yet grown into, thinking of that smile I caught when I glanced up.

I thought about boys like that. Boys I’d just met or boys I knew and saw in a different way, suddenly. I constructed so many lives from chance smiles or gestures, from a name called on a roster the first day of a history class, from a long bike ride with childhood friend. At twenty, the years spin out in any direction. I could see myself in Ireland, Alaska or Kenya as easily as I could see myself married to a bank teller, artist or fisherman. When I had class with a boy from Portland I imagined us walking under a shared umbrella. So when I met Nathan, I imagined his whole family I’d never meet. His mother cooked a full breakfast and put an arm around her son’s waist when he came in from an early morning on the lake. Her cheeks flushed like his did. His father was as silent as he was. The house had windows in the right places to send squares of sun on scuffed hardwood. At breakfast his sister and mother talked, pulled Nathan and his father into conversation, and after, each carried his or her own plate and glass to the kitchen counter.

That winter I came in from a night class, carried my bike to the basement room where the residence hall staff had weekly meetings. I opened the door and there was a group of guys having a Bible study. I was surprised. They were surprised. Nathan ducked his head. I rolled my bike to its place against a wall, apologized and left. I thought, He is a brother.

Nathan drowned that spring. He and a friend or cousin were out on the lake when a storm came up and capsized the boat. I remember hearing the boy he was with lived. I remember hearing Nathan saved the boy he was with by pushing him toward floating debris. I remember seeing this story in my mind, the thrash of Nathan’s legs, the heaviness of his wet clothing and boots, the whiteness of his face and hands in the frigid water, the last energy in his limbs propelling another to safety. I remember feeling a little sick. I remember being conflicted that I’d imagined meeting his mother.

I google combinations to find the story again: Nathan uwsp lake michigan drowning, 2001 lake michigan drown uwsp student, uwsp student Nathan drown, uwsp student Nate drown 2001. I can’t find anything. Instead I dredge articles about annual numbers of drownings, reasons why the Great Lakes are dangerous, drunk college students walking into water. There’s an article about another underclassman who killed himself over Thanksgiving weekend that year, after dropping out of college to go live with friends in Madison. I try to remember Nathan’s hometown. I try to remember was it 2000 or 2001. I think about emailing the alumni office but I’m not sure what they could tell me about a freshman (was he a sophomore) who drowned in Lake Michigan before graduating from the College Of Natural Resources, before deciding to move north to Superior or west to Denver, before falling in love and staying awake thinking how to marry this woman, before losing his heart or holding his firstborn, before waking tired each day, before eating slivers of ripe peach on a long summer morning.

I used to think about dying all the time. I’ve wanted death at different times. In middle school I was on a youth group camping trip and a few of us went to a playground, spun around in tire swings and talked about the best way to die. One girl said she wanted to drown because it sounded romantic to drown. She leaned back to watch the sky circle above.

My family camped on Lake Michigan for a few summers, going for a week after the season was over when the water was the warmest it’d be for the year. The campground was nearly empty, the beach ours. Mom talked to us before going into the water. She told us about the undertow and what to do if we got pulled under, how to swim parallel to the shore, not to panic. We were strong swimmers. I went into deep water, where the waves rolled before taking a cap and crashing. In water up to my chest, I could feel the suck of the water, pulling back into the lake, but my feet didn’t go from under me, the sand didn’t slip. I didn’t drown or almost drown or save anyone from drowning. I put goggles on, sank my belly to the bottom of the lake to pretend I was in the bigger ocean, touching the undulating sand and, for short moments, holding everything in my body still to feel the weight and weightlessness of water and death.

When Nathan died, we must have talked as residence hall staff. One of my friends lived on Nathan’s floor and told me the guys made a bulletin board in remembrance, writing notes about Nathan on small construction paper fish. I heard his parents were coming to clean out his side of a room he shared with another freshman boy. I had this idea that Nathan, now dead, could see the story I’d made up for us. Still when I think of this I am embarrassed, a little defensive, a little angry at all the alternate lives I’ve made and loosed while I wound my way to now – a small apartment in a suburb south of Seoul, a late thirties version of myself I couldn’t have thought up when I was twenty because this present version has stretch marks, Legos underfoot, a pretween daughter. But I keep thinking of this boy who died because he isn’t here to be any version of who he made up when he was out on his boat or his father’s boat each weekend.

We can be rich, easy with fantasy when we are nineteen or twenty. We can’t know any different then. Our years are long.

My brother was teaching in India when one of his students died in a car accident over a break. My brother wrote that as teachers we think we are adding to early parts of a person’s life with the introduction and encouragement of passions or pursuits, the space we make to hear a student’s theory or doubt, the sense we have about a student, that he or she will -. But sometimes we are adding to the last lines of a student’s life.

I think about how to close a piece of writing. I think about the revision and edits I make when I write. What makes a last line. One of my college composition classes I took my junior year, the year I met Nathan and the year he died, my professor told us to write a page from our autobiography. Page two twenty-something. I can’t remember what I wrote but I remember wondering how long the book was. Now I am thirty-six and thinking about Nathan and I can’t answer why that smile stays in my mind, why now I want to understand why he was finished then and I am not now. My page two twenty-something might be years away. I might have written it yesterday. I have this wrong view of how death might work.

A couple of years ago we were visiting my brother and his family in Nairobi, my niece’s friend Anna died. Anna was playing on a jungle gym in the yard of her family’s compound when she fell. She was in a coma for a couple of days. She was brain-dead. My sister-in-law came down the stairs one morning and I saw her tiredness, knew she had been awake praying for this family, praying for her own daughter who was going to lose a good friend. We were in Nairobi for the week after Anna died. At different points, we talked about the accident and death. Anna was eight or nine. She loved Jesus. At Anna’s memorial, her family described her kindness toward others, a sense of compassion already whole in short years, love in her conversation with and care for the needy around her. I look at my own daughter differently. I have this animal need to wrap my body around my daughter, around my son, when I think of either of them leaving this earth. I am not afraid but I am aware.

My sister-in-law, in her grief for this girl, wondered if God is merciful like this, allowing death to spare a greater suffering. Life is hard, she said. She spoke carefully. She spoke like she’d been thinking how to say why Anna died when we believe a God of miracles. And she said what some of us (how many of us) think when a person dies at the cusp of more because we want to think it matters, when a person dies. A death at eight or nineteen is different from a death at eighty-one. There must be reason.

When Nathan died I was sad in an abstract way. I was secure and insecure in my youth. I glanced at Nathan’s death. I was sad for his family but I didn’t know them and felt weird I’d even imagined knowing them at all. The made up visit to his home, the made up rock of his boat or his father’s boat, the made up smiles I’d win. Now I am sad in this way: he was spared but this suffering is sweet. This hard life is sweet. I have wished its end. I have made up escape.

Sometimes I think what I still need to get right. I forget the gospel. I am whole in Christ. The Spirit works in and through me to finish the good work begun. My wrong view of death comes from this idea that it’s the good work in my life that needs to finish – the good work in my small, forgettable life. But the good work spans time and place to tell God’s glory, to show his great power and love and I am a stroke of the pen. I might be a smudge in the margin. I might show up on two pages. I might be a footnote. I believe Nathan and Anna had more good life. They had suffering ahead, and sweetness. They had days of wonder and sorrow and rest ahead.

Nathan and Anna are repetends to me. I think of each irregularly. I did not know Nathan and I did not meet Anna but I think of them. I think of how their lines in the story show up in all sorts of books. How many of us in how many places know their lines in the story and how many of us in how many places are now shaped by their lines in the story, thinking about what it means to love a merciful and frightening God who can work the drowning of a boy, the sudden death of girl into a plot that holds. I don’t know how the plot holds. I haven’t gotten to that part yet.

Part Two Of Leaving Kuwait: Can’t Be Smug About Waiting, Can Doubt

December 19, 2016 By Sarah Marslender in Daily WP, Uncategorized Tags: Doubt, Expat Experiences, Faith, Moving 1 Comment

We don’t have a job yet. We probably won’t get a contract until January or February. Friends who ask if we know where we are going yet rearrange their faces when we say no. There isn’t much exciting or possible about no. The other day a friend I hadn’t seen in a month assured me, “It’s still early. If it were March I might be worried for you guys.” If it were March I’d be negotiating rent and commune-like cooking promises with my parents who still have four kids living at home. If it were March, we might fire sale our belongings and put up rent for a year of homeschooling in Budapest. If it were March we might look for a rental in our college town and scrape by on sub pay. But it isn’t March. It’s mid December and international schools are starting holiday break and our applications are in a few someones’ inboxes, waiting for whim or vision to turn into an interview offer.

There isn’t a lot to say about waiting. Except waiting works your character.

Can’t be smug about waiting.

Last week one of my students said to me, “Pray for me, Miss. I find out if I got into NYU at one in the morning!” I pictured her refreshing her email. Please please please. I do the same. I check my email. No one wants an interview yet. I wait another hour or two and check email again. No one wants an interview yet. When it is midday in South America, I check email again. No one wants an interview yet. Later, a quiet voice tells me not to check email again but I open my email again and still no one wants an interview. I whisper fuck.

At church this week, a woman talked about doubt. What do you do with doubt? She preached from Matthew 11, when John the Baptist wonders if Jesus is “the one to come, or shall we look for another?” So John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus even though he knew. He’d already leapt in his mother’s womb when Elizabeth greeted Mary. He’d already spent years in the wilderness, unbound by convention, prophesying Christ to come. But Jesus didn’t show up so bold as John might have imagined a savior should, so John had to ask, “Are you the one to come, or shall we look for another?” John’s doubt wasn’t unbelief and Jesus didn’t belittle his cousin for wanting another confirmation. Instead, Jesus sent word back: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”

Doubt that God will do as he says can grow faith. Consider the disciple Thomas. Others went around talking about the resurrection and Thomas is like, I’m not buying it unless I touch the wounds, put my hand in Jesus’s side. Imagine Thomas later when he sees Jesus standing in front of him. I might feel shame or embarrassment. I might try to duck out because Jesus knew what I’d said, my bluster about putting a hand to his crucifixion wounds. But Jesus invites Thomas to touch the wounds. Thomas’s doubt led to an encounter that radically confirmed his faith. I listened to the sermon.

Last night I didn’t sleep. I have a pinched nerve in my neck that sends sparkles down my left arm, numbs the thumb a little. I bit the pad of my thumb to test if it was worse. I sat up in bed. I laid on my side. I turned on my belly. I thought about the perfect will of God and his permissive will. I rolled over onto my back. I pressed into the cords of my neck and shoulder, looking for the muscle that cut my nerve. When I woke, I felt terrible.

On the drive to work I yelled at my son because he lost his winter coat, the puffy inside jacket and the heavy shell. I’ve been telling myself I am not anxious about this move. We are fine leaving Kuwait. I want to go. But I want to know where we go. And this week showed me in boldface underline highlight that I need to learn how to wait. How to pray. How to hope. How to trust. I need to learn how to wait because it matters to God that I rest in his love and peace. It matters to my husband and kids, colleagues and students. If I am consumed by fear, I lose this place in front of me. But I can’t make myself rest and that’s an accepted mystery of faith for me, that I go to Jesus and say my questions and lay down my fear and doubt again again again, more often than I check my email or refresh job postings, and I trust God kneads the tight cords in my heart and body, works out the fear I hold.

When something is out of my control, I like to look around and pick up what I can control. Sometimes this is a friendship I stoke for the pleasure of being liked. More often, it is the food that goes in my mouth or the miles I put on my body. I like physical, measurable control. This week I wanted to tally my food, I wanted to run when I hurt. But I saw this behavior in a new way, the sin of holding part of my life with my own hands when Christ says to follow him is to surrender all. To follow Christ is to surrender even this waiting time to God’s glory. I am not supposed to wait in worry or feed my pride with what I manage to hold on my own. Over and over in the Word, I see God is for me. What happens if I say, take this body too, the knots of anxiety I pretend aren’t there, the belly that eats doubt, the legs that want to run away forever: work out this waiting perfectly, physically, in my bones, in my blood and brain, over my muscles and skin so I rest and wake in peace.

I know doubt. And like Thomas, I’ve put up challenges to more faith. God answers and I believe. I falter and God answers and I believe. This year, I don’t doubt God provides. I don’t doubt his faithfulness. This year, I’ve got no one to seek but Jesus, like John the Baptist sending a message directly to his cousin to find out if what he believed really was true. I want to know where we go. I want to know do I teach. I want to know what relationships wait for our family. Instead of worrying these questions with a best laid plan, I press into doubt, honestly and a little afraid. This year I wait, sit with uncertainty, and read the Word for assurance. I know my God. But like John the Baptist, like Thomas, I want to know again.

Piecemeal

this is how I write

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