Disrupted

There is this intrusion in growth…there is death in new life. The moving aside of the comfortable to make room for the New. Hope is there…existing quietly inside the uncomfortable space of torn-down walls and bared plaster, newly revealed x-rays and sonograms with bad news…just existing…while holding onto the imagination of something beautiful yet to be. She is tenacious….the “song” of feathered fragility from a throat of determination, through a powerful breast throbbing with—

But the ugliness of a disrupted nest. Of a disrupted womb. Of a disrupted body…a body intended for eternal strength and creativity, disrupted by age and death and injury and brown slime that creeps over nerve endings, making the loveliest of memories fade into meaningless static. 

Death. Death comes before Life. Sorrow before joy. Always sorrow before joy. Night before morning. Babies are born after wombs shudder and tremble and fall and burst and erupt and writhe and— “Aaalright, I’ll just die, then,” I said to myself when my last daughter was crowning. I gave over my body to the pain, I resisted no longer, I gave over to death for a moment….just a moment, and then plop—she was born. In the twinkling of an eye, after  months of bearing and mourning and sorrow in carrying, in making room, in giving her space inside me, in moving my flesh aside for her. I finally died and gave up my body and there she was. Brand new. 

I feel this same thing again now. My x-ray revealed a fractured spine. It’s old, they said. It’s not going to heal. It’s slipping and will just get worse as you age. Now I am once again making room for a new sorrow. I have given over my flesh to something else uncomfortable and overpowering. Now I must move over to a softer part of the couch, and adjust my posture, and change my shoes, and say No to long walks, and refuse to bend over and pick up one million things off the floor. I must close the door on ever being athletic again. I must lie down with the pain and sleep with the pain and dream with the pain and wake with the pain. But Hope lives there, too. I feel the movement of some kind of Life within, the disruption that Life inside earthen vessels must make. 

“There is a crack, a crack in every thing! That’s how the light gets in.”

Somewhere out beyond or hidden deep within is a stirring, a strange stirring of some unseen hope. It promises a tiny thing now, but I see in my imagining that it carries a great weight, a heavy and true promise. I know Who put it there, and Who tends it. I see it not at all, but I trust the Planter, whose promises are true. It was He who said to the man, “Stretch out your hand!” and he was healed.

And so, I sit. Disrupted. And, like Mary, I await the birth of something New.