daily life Archives - Kristen Anne Glover

The clouds were horses, kicking up their great feathery tails across the blue sky. I watched those skipping mares as I hung the laundry on the line. Change is coming, they seemed to say. Change is coming.

I felt it.

The sky was warm and comfortable like blue jeans, faded around the edges, and the grass stuck to my feet in little bits because the lawn mower had beaten me to the backyard. All around was the scent of the wash, fresh and clean, and the song of the robin in the trees.

It was hard to believe that tomorrow, it would rain. Tomorrow, things would change.

I looked out at the horizon and thought about all the things I needed to do before it rained. The laundry was only half done. The yard was full of rakes and shovels and the pile of mulch was not much smaller than when I started that day. There was trim to be painted and a shrub to be trimmed and…

…and suddenly, I was so caught up in the change to come that I was no longer here. I was out on the horizon, where the storm clouds mount and gather their arms. I was so far ahead, wrapped up in the change to come, that I could not appreciate the blessing and goodness of this.

This.

Here.

Now.

Change is coming, but it is not here yet. Here is where the blessing is that God has for this day. Here is where my home is, for a little while longer, and here is where my children sleep and my husband smiles and my neighbors call. Here is where God has put me.

Even though I know I am moving on, I am not there yet. I am here. But my temptation is to look so far ahead that I forget that my feet are not where my eyes are. I am not there yet.

I think to myself that this is why God leads me step by step. He knows that if He gave me a larger vision, I would look so far ahead, I would miss everything in between.

He wants me here.

So I dusted off the mixer that has been decluttered to some remote corner of my kitchen cupboards and made cookies when I should have been painting, and I called the kids around to have one when the chocolate chips were still gooey and warm.

“Mom made cookies?” They were incredulous, because Mom has been so far over there that she has completely forgotten about things like homemade cookies and afternoon tea.

Who has the time to make cookies when they’ve got a house to sell?

Not me. Not unless I remember that I’m still here, and sometimes, kids need a mom who makes cookies when she should be painting.

I found a bit of myself in that plate of cookies, and I reeled her back in. This is still where I belong, I thought to myself. Here.

Every few years from now until my husband retires from the chaplaincy, we will move. We will get orders for some new location and suddenly, our home will start to slip away to make way for a new one. The temptation for me will be to slip away with it, to close out chapters before they are complete simply because I know the title of the next one.

I should know better. The best parts of chapters often come at the end, and I don’t want to miss a word.

I don’t want to miss a cookie break with my kids, or a conversation with a dear friend on my faded green couch in the middle of a living room full of chaos. I don’t want to miss the lilacs that bloom in my front yard, or the opportunity to bring them in in great big bunches that fill up my home with spring. I don’t want to miss a quiet evening on the deck with my husband, when the sky becomes a canvas and the colors spill out over the water.

By evening, the laundry was in off the line and the clouds had covered up the sun. My tea flushed and steamed in the rush of cool air, and high in the evergreens, the robin sang his evening song to me.

Things are about to change, he said to me.

I knew it.

But for now, I am here.

The clouds, heavy with sorrow, bent over the sky, deep and gray and so full of tears they could not cry. It seemed the weight of their anguish would crush the earth, but the weeping would not come.

It had been such a beautiful thing. That was the irony: only a beautiful thing could leave such an ugly wound. Only a beautiful thing could hurt like this.

“It will get better,” they said, as if they knew. They who did not even believe such beautiful things exist.

But she did not want it to get better. She wanted the sorrow to roll over her and consume her. She wanted to feel it breaking her. It was all she had left, this side of love that felt like drowning, like flesh being torn from flesh. She couldn’t let it go, even though it hurt to hang on, because it was the closest she could get to what she once had.

“Someday, this is going to hurt,” her brain had once tried to tell her what her heart would not hear. “There is no easy way out of love.”

But by the time she realized it might be that kind of love, it was too late. Looking back, she was astonished by how quickly it had happened, and how irrevocably she was changed, so that now, in the darkness of her sorrow, she was unable to remember how to see, how to feel, how to be like before. It seemed she could only see in shadows.

Frenzied, her mind tried to find a way to put everything back the way it was. It woke her, desperate to convince her that nothing had changed. It told her they were wrong, that it hadn’t happened, that soon she would find out that it was all a big mistake, and she could run again to her love and hold on for all eternity.

But this was not the kind of thing that could be undone with wishful thinking or sheer power of will. This was the kind of thing that could never be put right, not while one piece of her was in time, and the other in eternity.

The morning came, hushed and dimly lit, with little to distinguish it from the fading of the night. Morning, noon, and evening were nothing but a collection of indistinct hours marked by indistinct rising and falling of darkness. Always there would be darkness, darkness in the air and in the sky, darkness in the shadows that seemed to be a part of her now.

But this kind of love cannot be darkened by shadows. This kind of love, this beautiful love, cannot be divided by death.

The tears came, and with them, the clouds began to lighten. Almost imperceptibly, the light filtered through, pushing the shadows to the edges of the pools where her memories drifted. The shadows sharpened as the light grew stronger, defining and outlining the very things she couldn’t make out before.

Suddenly, she realized she could see. With breathless clarity she saw the radiance of that beautiful love, not taken from her, but given back to her in its fullness, cleared of all imperfections. Indeed, it was more real than ever before.

She ran to it and clung to it, this kind of love, this rare, beautiful love, that had come through the darkness and emerged incorruptible.

*Dedicated to my grandma, who lost her beautiful love one year ago today. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face…”

For more of this kind of love, read the remarkable story of one woman’s grief redeemed in John 20.