Anxiety and Eternity

There are moments that recur in my thoughts. I know you have them, too. Reels of sights, sounds, smells, sensations, that play in my memory. Faces, diagnoses, situations.  Flashes that sneak up from the stuffed subconscious and demand conscious attention.

• 

Scene: Somewhere in Santa Clara County, California. Skilled nursing facility. COVID Unit. “Barbara’s” room.

I walked by just in time to see her pick up her water bottle and to see her fighting hard against the Parkinsonian tremors she cannot will away. The bottle wobbled back and forth in her grasp before falling briefly onto her lap, rolling onto the floor, then gushing onto the hard linoleum between her bed and her roommate’s bed, a mere curtain separating the two.

Determined, she picked up a wide-mouthed glass of lemonade with a straw in it, the cup waving wildly and the straw dancing back and forth as she tried to draw it to her lips. This, too, fell into her lap, covering her thin gown and soaking her frail body. Her tremors are more pronounced now than they had been this morning, as if she had almost no control over the movements in her limbs. She asked me for her PRN anti-anxiety medication.

I asked the CNA for help getting her clean and dry while I went in search of her medicine. Like so many things in this place, the medicine was missing, and there wasn’t a pharmacy on hand to replenish it.

I returned to find her half-dressed, twisted in her gown. The CNA outside the door raised her hands in a show of innocence as told me Barbara had insisted on putting it on herself. Barbara was breathing rapidly, and I could tell her pulse was racing.

If she was embarrassed, it didn’t show.

Nor was she frustrated.

She was afraid.

I crouched down next to her nearly floor-level bed and asked her if something was upsetting her. She told me she had just gotten off the phone with her sister, and her sister was telling her about the novel Coronavirus. For perhaps the first time, she realized what it meant that she was in the COVID unit.

I took a deep breath and looked into her eyes from behind foggy glasses and face shield, trying to ignore the N95 digging into the bridge of my nose. “Barbara,  let me tell you something: You are breathing on your own. Your lungs are strong and clear. You don’t have a fever. Your body is fighting this. You’re going to be ok.”

And my mind keeps telling me – our world needs someone to look them in the eyes, take them by the hand and tell them:

You are strong.

You are fighting this.

You are going to be ok.

Maybe that’s exactly what you need to hear. I wish I could stop there. I want that feel-good ending.

But that isn’t the whole story, is it? I almost swallowed those words as soon as I’d said them to Barbara. Most of the patients in the COVID Unit I worked in will recover from the virus. But most of them will not recover from the disease and injury that brought them to the facility in the first place. The dementia and diabetes. The Parkinson’s, the cancer, the heart disease, the terminal illnesses. They will not simply be “ok.”

Most of us will recover from the damage this year has done to our bodies and our wallets, eventually. But our souls are crying out. The stuffed subconscious will not be ignored.

We are desperate for SOMETHING right now. And sometimes it feels like a grasping for who-knows-what, because what do you hold onto when all of your handholds break?

• 

  This is not Barbara 😉 This is my delightful housemate, Becki.

We are desperate for deeper. Desperate for truer. Desperate for peace. Desperate for all the headlines to be taken back. Desperate to cling to our sense of control – yet every new diagnosis and every next (un)natural disaster reminds us how mistaken that notion of control must be.

Maybe desperate is exactly where we are supposed to be. We have become proud, defiant, self-satisfied, numb. And yet this year has brought so many to one of two places:

• 1. Desperate to believe that there is a God who is good and omnipotent when all feels wrong.

Or

• 2. Desperate to defy an omniscient God that would allow all this mess to happen. All these lives to be broken. All these dreams to die.

It strikes me that this is probably exactly where an all-powerful God would have us be. Looking up beyond the screens of our smart phones and Zoom meetings to be reminded WHO holds the power. WHO holds the future. WHO will hold us though the world falls apart around us – though our carefully constructed worlds are falling apart around us.

It strikes me that we are being reminded that we have a choice. We can keep fighting with our own faltering strength and our own meager means.

Or we can surrender.

We can recognize that when we’ve offered all the fight we have in our bones, our striving was never meant to be good enough.

Enter Jesus.

You know the story. Do you feel it, too? The pull to bring out the lights and the decorations and the merry earlier this year? The need for something to celebrate?

How about THE reason to celebrate? It’s not about twinkling trees and glowing store windows, folks. It wasn’t joy because of a gift-laden tannenbaum. It was Jesus’ birth that has caused people to sing joy to the world for more than two millennia.

Barbara’s tremors remind me just how much our bodies betray what our spirits sense: that we have a desperate need for hope and reassurance. A need to be reminded that all will be ok – ultimately. If we chose to believe in Him who does not change with the next outbreak, the next earthquake, the next lay-off, the next devastating loss.

One day, we will all be in a situation from which our bodies will not heal. And there will be weeping. Or there will be celebration.

I don’t just want a Xanax to appease the anxiety. I want the Jesus who offers eternity.

• 

 

Flashes

Fall is arriving early in the 49th state.

Already, dwarf birch trees are turning myriad blends of yellow, brown, and orange. Patches of the thick leathery leaves of the bearberry plants are turning alternately a deep burnt sienna or a vivid bright red. Fuchsia flowers growing up the stalk of the fireweed plants have all but fallen off, and they say that when the plant turns dark red and the flowers go to seed, the first snowfall of winter- eight months of winter- is six weeks away. Morning comes later and the sun sets earlier. Although we still see the sun until 10:15pm, we have four and a half fewer hours of daylight than we did on summer solstice in June, when we gathered on the gravel landing of the airstrip at the end of the Park Road, chatted in groups, tossed Frisbees, drank the last dregs of beer from a single keg. Sunrise today was at 5:58am. One month from today the run will rise at 7:28am and set at 8:30pm. Nearly three hours less daylight in the course of 30 days. Thirty 24-hour revolutions around the sun and three less hours of light. Nearly 6.5 minutes less light in a day, each day.
In May, the light is nearly interminable. 11:00pm light here is as 4pm in Colorado and by the time the morning alarm sounds the sun has been up for hours and warmed the earth with it. In September, the sun goes dark before the last of our work finishes, and dawn hides her face from early morning work while frost begins to form on wooden porches.
This morning, neglecting to ignite my propane heater overnight, my first impression was of having a cold scalp. Of hitting the 4-minute snooze button on my alarm for the better part of an hour. That magic alarm that has used a single AA battery since 2005 and still runs. Inside the down covering of my unzipped sleeping bag was warm and cozy. Inside the canvas walls of my tent cabin, my breath showed thick and cold. The thermometer on the front porch of our lodge read 43 degrees at 8am, meaning the temperatures must have dropped to near-freezing in the earliest morning hours.

The light itself is more muted now. Still brilliant midday at these high latitudes, the undertone of crisp fall wind takes the summery heat out of the glare, and the suffused light of long mornings and long dusky evenings lingers. The quickly decreasing temperatures and quickly increasing fall foliage sing “Soon! Soon!” to the end of summer and arrival of winter. Fall but a brushstroke of vividly painted colors that fade on a two-week timer.

Some nights I lay in my tent cabin and listen to the rain falling around me, a peaceful sound of plings on a tin roof and taptaptap tap on alder leaves. At times I feel peaceful with it, embracing the stillness found in refuge sought from the soggy weather outdoors. Other times, when my position requires I guide others through the sodden tundra, I brace myself for the layers of rainproof gear that will need to be donned for a day on the trail and am less at ease. Hiking through this terrain means weaving through water-laden leaves before climbing above their shelter from the breeze into the land above the trees. Whipping wind chills wet skin and we quickly snap summit photos before descent, cold fingers fumbling numbly with zippers and gloves. On some of these days, we hike with the clouds, yea even into the clouds, and find ourselves in a fog that makes the journey feel like an undertaking of the Fellowship of the Ring. We fall into quicker steps downslope and warm ourselves with thoughts of dry clothing and hot chocolate.
Other days, the cold sky of clear nights allows for a rush of warming rays unimpeded by cloudy haze and the pristine beauty of the landscape inspires silence. Sitting on a mossy patch of tundra, 180° of mountain range in view defies apathetic glances towards majestic gleaming slopes. My “office” view shaming the most imposing of high-rise overlooks.
Like all of life, there is beauty mingled with the mud, beauty rising above it. Seasons of warmth often overlapping the bone-chilling froideur of fall. Abundance of daylight waning to lack thereof and back again. Here, where the ice melts to green and green flashes into fall, and fall fades to winter within the span of four months, the contrast is all the more striking. I think it a gift to be allowed to see this changing in such stark relief. There are seasons of weather and seasons of life and seasons of the soul. And we are given the opportunity to step back and ponder it all. And yet our souls, impossibly, extend beyond the here and now and catch foretastes of the eternal in the midst of the immediate. “You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe,” as Dallas Willard phrases it.
This summer job is will cease soon. The warmth here will cease soon. Contact with the many who come and go through the Roadhouse doors will cease soon. And yet we, living souls created in God’s image, are UNceasing. To quote Dallas more fully, “The most important thing in your life is not what you do, it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity. You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.”
Seeds become plants that bud into flowers and wilt soon thereafter, releasing new seeds for next years’ life.
So like we in our seasons of growing and dying and planting new seeds. But our purpose more eternal. Our growth more concentric. What are we becoming?
Most days my vision is small. I awake to a cold scalp and I layer in long johns and envision escape to longer seasons of summer in the lower 48 (states). I ache over broken or distanced relationships and write another email, envision hopes of mending old relationships and making new ones. I hunger for warm food after a long hike and calculate how soon I can sate my appetite, how I will feed myself in subsequent meals to come.
Few and farther between I glimpse that which is forever. I look at people and, for flashes at a time, see them as eternal spirits, sense elation at the possibility of sharing eternity with them. Somehow it is the most ephemeral flashes that strike with the deepest of eternal sensations. A look of knowing in a friend’s eye. The wave of unexpected warmth at an affectionate touch. The sound of voices in perfect melodic harmony. An uninhibited giggle from a word well spoken. A mutual sigh over longings unspoken. The first shared moment of satisfied rest after a long days’ work.
In nature, too, a reflection of eternal that arrives in flashes. The perfect flutter of aspen leaves in the afternoon breeze. A glint of sunshine on the surface of water. The effortless flight of a falcon riding the wave of a thermal. The convex magnifying beauty of simple raindrops on leaves. Wafts of upturned soil, cut grass, fallen foliage, new snow. The immaculate and yet deafening sound of true silence. Even the cacophonous and yet symphonic patterns of clouds that are both familiar and yet entirely new in each day’s sky.
Each new day seems a cacophonous symphony of what is to come. What is becoming. Each day closer. Each day an opportunity. Each day an invitation to see that which is deeper and truer. The flashes of eternity in finite things.
We avoid thoughts of eternity because the unknown can frighten, if not simply evade comprehension. For me, I want to dwell in the belief and ever-increasing awareness that I was made for more than here. To encourage you to consider what your forever looks like, and if it scares you, to confront it and respond accordingly.
For me, I want to live grateful for what is good here and now. I want to live ecstatic for the brokenness that will no longer be, the good that will continue to be, and all the glory I don’t yet know to be experienced in the untainted splendor of Heaven.
In the “place” where the bodies which here on earth sigh for in brokenness will be transformed into eternal likeness.
My friend, Melanie, expressed this fulfillment of the eternal as best as I have heard it. I met her while she was a volunteer chaperone for the African Children’s Choir, and now she works in Uganda ministering to street boys in a nonprofit called DOORS-Don’t Overlook One Redeemed Soul.
She is engaged to a Ugandan man named Bryan, who has the most beautiful Jesus-like smile I’ve ever seen. While she holds her Texan family dear to her heart, her physical body and her life are now in Uganda. She shared the other day,

“My heart physically aches at times missing my family. Seeing them together and knowing that in this life I may only ever experience weeks at a time with them. It is literally painful.
But there is not a day that I ache for them that God does not quickly and sweetly remind me of His precious truth. ‘This is not your home. Whether here or there, the ache will continue because you will not be fully satisfied by the presence of people. The day you come Home to Me, that is when you will ache no more and the pains of the world will look so small in comparison to the Sacred Place you will forever find in me. Press on my pilgrim.’

Through the years. Through the seasons. In each day that arrives. Press on towards the eternity He has set in your heart, and look for the flashes along the way.