Poetry | Monica Kaye Snyder

Nov 1
2016

Still Walking. A Team Danica-Monica Update

by Monica

At home
I still walk.
Doctors, looking
down at me, say
YOUR SPINE IS DISINTEGRATING,
STAY IN THE WHEELCHAIR OR ELSE.
Or else what? I’ll never walk again?
Never stand up? Of that
I am not afraid.
I am afraid
of sitting down
for the last time.

So,
I still walk at home.
Unlock the door,
wheel inside, then
up:
My remembered feet
on the cool slate,
My gaze straight into Gran’s painted eyes.
Someday, I will have to look up
to remember…
or take her down with me.

For now
I still walk at home.
Nothing fast, nothing fancy,
Nothing but one foot in front of the other,
Which is everything, really,
Everything if you appreciate
the shift of weight from heel
to toe, the way your arches
sigh into the carpet, and
the small dance that happens
when you just stand still.–Lynn Goldfarb

I searched for a stock image of a younger person using a walker. One in a medical institution would have worked, but I really wanted one outdoors, maybe a young woman like me walking in the sun and leaves. There were hundreds of photos of older people with someone caring beside them helping them take each next step. There were no photos of a forty year old wife and mama gripping a metal support with wheels praying each step will take her closer to restoration.

In a way it’s sad I don’t write much during the several weeks between major surgeries and days like today when the fog begins to clear, and I’m able to process the pain and grief I’ve endured. I know I’ve lost wise things, and I’m sure I’ve buried others. This is how we survive any recurring trauma isn’t it?

Twenty-four. It’s a lot of anything. It’s a crazy amount of wounding.

I felt afraid. This terror was new and different. Fear is rarely part of these operations anymore. My pain becomes a place I’d rather die than keep living. I get a scan, see the new damage and mark the date on a calendar. I don’t ask myself how many patch jobs we can do before my spine disintegrates. This time as I woke from anesthesia I wondered if we’d gone too far. I had oxygen, but I couldn’t breathe. If I stayed awake I could make myself take breaths, but I was under the plastic bag of too many drugs. I just wanted to sleep. Every time I fell asleep I stopped breathing. An alarm would sound. I’d jerk awake. The nurse would remind me, “BREATHE.”

There was something about the way my body was positioned during this surgery that completely ruined my hips. The op notes are vague. I know part of the pain and inability to walk alone was from the bone marrow aspiration from my right hip. Once we moved to the hotel my sister and sister-in-law would help me to the bathroom. I felt my legs dragging behind me as I held onto the walker for dear life. There were burgundy stripes in the hotel floor, and they became like little mile markers for my marathon.

I’m grateful for hard fought battles won. I’m thankful for the scars, new and old alike. They are my beauty marks.

I won’t JUST sit in a chair.
Not even my “nest” chair.
I will put one foot in front of another.
Which is everything really.
It’s everything.

Jul 19
2016

When I Simply Cannot Pray. Help

by Monica

Some mornings she simply cannot
bring herself to pray. Even so, a prayer
will at times break through her clenched lips,
announcing the slow drain at her heart.
She will raise her face from its cage of fingers
and gape at the fog that has lain itself down
over the field behind her house like
a dream of erasure. Even the green trees have
lost color. No air breathes. Not a wing of sound
flies back from the highway behind the hill.

And then some midnight, when faith
has quite emptied itself, a familiar loneliness
makes itself at home under her ribs.
A ghost of God? An inkling? She holds
her breath, listens as a small draught
weathers its way through the eaves,
into her ears. The next moment she hears her child
stir in the room down the hall, calling
her name, as if (s)he names her longing and in
that naming, names a kind of answer.–Luci Shaw, The Angles of Light

I texted a friend last night. “I’m losing my religion.” Yes, full blown, Michael Stipe singing in the background, losing it.

“Oh no, I’ve said too much.”

It was day three of a new round of plamapheresis slowly emptying the flaring infections attacking every part of my body and brain. It is always grueling. I arrive early to have labs drawn. It takes a few hours for the numbers to come back. Twice, last Thursday and today, my treatments have been cancelled because my fibrinogen is too low. The hospital where I receive treatments is in a major shift in their dialysis unit. It’s left them with only two nurses who know how to run the machine I need. My usual nurse leaves tomorrow for a long vacation and the other nurse is off all this week. We were trying to cram five treatments that should be given every other day into less than a week, and my body appropriately screamed “No way!”

As Dan was driving me back to the hospital yesterday I was on the phone with Cincinnati Children’s confirming what scans Danica will be having next Tuesday. Realizing my last pheresis will be Monday, the day before we take this oh so hard trip, I was already unhinged. The head ortho nurse looked back in the spine conference notes and said it indicated a CT angiogram that had not been ordered. Trying to get this scheduled at the last minute is nearly impossible even at the main campus much less at the Liberty location where our other scans and appointment is. She said she would work on it and call me Thursday. Yes, this is how things happen in health care. There is clinic and surgeries and other people’s children in the balance. I learned long ago how to walk the delicate line of being a strong advocate and also a compassionate patient. When my daughter is in the exam room or on the OR table I want others to respect and care for us too.

When Dan picked me up several hours later I was ashen, freezing cold in 80 degree heat, crazy nauseous and tired and never more aware of how hard all this is. Anne Lamott writes in her treasure of a book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, “If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.” Yes. This.

I am ruined. My body failing me over and over again in countless ways is the ultimate betrayal. It’s never been about believing God can heal me. It’s surrendering to the fact it will not fully happen in this life. There are some victories. The fight is not in vain, but I have to put out a white flag on this complete healing thing. In eternity, yes. Here, no.

I am loved. So loved. My friend who takes me to treatment and comes to get me whenever she can is love. I don’t call her. She calls me. She knows the asking is my Achilles heel. Her calling her son-in-law to help when she can’t is love. Him coming on his precious day off is love. The same friend’s husband buying our favorite Stouffer’s frozen enchiladas while he’s shopping is love. The expression on his face when he sees me and the wisdom in his words, “There’s nothing I can say,” is love. Another friend showing up with an unplanned meal on a day our family was near implosion is love. Tuna casserole can in fact be manna. A package in the mail with epsom salts, unscented lotion and herbal tea and #pentopaper encouragement is love. A friend showing up with food, pet meds and a check from a lemonade stand her sweet girls had to help with Danica’s trip is love. All your donations on our gofundme site are scandalous love. Your prayers, especially when I just cannot pray for myself, are love.

I am in charge of so little. Really, nothing. I can’t orchestrate the rest of this treatment and plan rides to and from even if I asked for help. I can’t predict exactly how our Cincinnati trip will go. Both outcomes of these scans and appointments are worse case scenarios. I can’t tell Danica it’s all going to be okay and soon she will be able to run and play. I can’t ease her very real fears about the future of this broken metal in her neck that once gave her a miracle. I can’t keep my Laney safe while we are away or heal any of the scars leaving her over and over again all these years have left on her heart and mine. I can’t pay our bills. I can’t stop the constant swirling spreadsheet of debt from cutting off my air supply and sending my body into a stress induced panic every time the phone rings or the mail truck pulls away. I can’t go back to work to try to fix all this. I want to work so badly. I want the prideful, self sufficient feeling of doing anything to make this less of a mess, but I can’t. I can’t give my husband the one thing he wants more than anything in the world–his Moni Kaye back. Worst of all, I simply cannot pray.

After my family was in bed last night I slipped into the pitch black sun room, laid on the cold floor and called the friend I texted earlier. She is always my place to tell the whole truth. I cried. I shook my fists. I told her how mad I am. I told her how I really want to give up. In the same breath I had to talk about the love. I couldn’t not mention the love. Something happened. In Anne’s same book she calls it a “divine limpness.” I was saying all the things to my friend I wanted to get on my knees at my prayer bench and say to my God.

“…In that divine limpness you’ll be able to breathe again. Then you’re halfway home. In many cases breath is all you need. Breath is holy spirit. Breath is Life. It’s oxygen. Breath might get you a little rest. You must be so exhausted…

Through prayer, we take ourselves off the hook and put God on the hook, where God belongs. When you’re on the hook, you’re thrashing, helpless, furious, like a smaller kid lifted by the seat of his pants by a mean big kid. Jesus, on the literal hook of the cross, says to God, ‘Help,’ and God enters into every second of the Passion like a labor nurse.

When you get your hooks out of something, it can roll away, down its own hill, away from you. It can breathe again. It got away from you, and your tight sweaty grip, and your stagnant dog breath, the torture of watching you do somersaults and listening to you whine ‘What if?’ and ‘Wait, wait, I have ONE more idea…’

You can go from monkey island, with endless chatter, umbrage, and poop-throwing, to what is happening in front of me. God, what a concept. It means I stop trying to figure it out, because trying to figure it out is exhausting and crazy-making. Doping it has become the problem.

So when we cry out ‘help’, or whisper it into our chests, we enter the paradox of not going limp and not feeling that we can barely walk, and we release ourselves from the absolute craziness of trying to be our own–or other people’s–higher powers.

Help.

We can be freed from a damaging insistence on forward thrust, from a commitment to running wildly down a convenient path that might actually be taking us deeper into the dark forest. Praying ‘help’ means that we ask that something give us the courage to stop us in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else; to our feet on the sidewalk; to the middle distance; to the hills, whence our help comes. Something else. Anything else. Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle.

It may be one of those miracles when your heart sinks, because you think it means you have lost. But in surrender, you have won. And if it were me, after a moment, I would say, ‘Thanks.'”

I hung up the phone, wiped my eyes and blew my nose. I peeked into my girl’s rooms on my way to bed. I remembered my Danica’s prayer, the one I was almost too jaded to hear, “Dear Jesus, Thank you for this day. HELP mommy to get her treatments and to get better. THANK YOU for my friend’s lemonade stand to raise money so I can see my doctors in Cincinnati. THANK YOU for my stuffed peas in a pod. (A gift from her friend she held tightly as she prayed.) Help grandpa and grandma to get home safely. HELP Anna Mae at her new home. THANK YOU for Jesus who died on the cross for our sins. HELP us be more like Him. Amen.” (This is a variation of her same bedtime prayer every night.) Her childlike faith and Sleep Sound in Jesus lullabies tucked her heart and mind safely in when I could not.

I crawled into my own bed, put my earbuds in and listened to R.E.M.’s old song “Losing My Religion.” I was transported back to the summer I saw them in concert at the Gund Arena. I was so far from God but wanting Him and needing Him so badly it ached. I held up my lighter during “Everybody Hurts” as tears ran down my face. Even then I know He heard my “Help.”

This morning Dan and I left our house at 6:30 am so he could drop me at the hospital for labs before he headed to work. A few miles down the highway I felt utterly sick, and we took an exit so I could run into a McDonalds and empty my stomach of the curdled worry and grief I’d ingested the night before. After the needle and the many tubes of blood I waited for hours to get the results. The director of dialysis found me in the sixth floor waiting room. She felt so badly about their staffing issues pushing me to come on days I clearly was not going to be able to proceed. She told me she called the nurse who was on vacation locally. Her daughter had a baby, and she took the week off to help her. She would come in Thursday to get another treatment in. I cried. More love. More thanks. I called my sister, Alecia, who has managed more nonsense in the past week than any one person should have to. I said, “I’m sorry. I need HELP. Can you come get me?” She rallied her girls, got them dressed and drove the twenty minutes to pick me up. I sat in the light filled atrium waiting. I turned my face towards the bright sun, and the Spirit groaned for me what I could not utter and then I said,

“Thank you.”

Amen.

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”–Romans 8:26

Feb 18
2016

An Inch Of Daylight. If I Want To Live

by Monica

“My heart is troubled, my strength fails me,
And the light of my eyes, even this is not with me.”–Psalm 37:11

It was a shadowy week.
Not just Ohio cold and grey.
Not just smudged with Lenten ashes grey.
Not just a big inky cloud I can’t explain away grey.
It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

Every morning I woke early with my family to move through our routine. As soon as they left for work and school I would make the girl’s beds, wipe the kitchen and bathroom counters and sinks, straighten the house for Better Homes and Gardens and then stumble to my own bed. Curled in the fetal position under six heavy blankets I was gripped with a paralyzing fear this would be the time I might not find my way out of the chasm of despair.

If you’ve ever tried to die before you understand there’s nothing worse than failing at it. If you’ve ever endured intake for an attempted suicide you understand the high stakes to get it right the next go round. I don’t believe in levels of hell, but if I did a hospital psych ward would be at the very least level one. This knowledge makes the slipping even more frightening. I can make a way of escape once and for all or I can hold on here. The lie is there is no real help to be found in the middle.

“On a scale from one to ten how likely are you to harm yourself?” The wrong answer to this question lights a fuse you have no power to put out. It’s really better to fudge the numbers. “Have you thought of specific ways to end your life?” Never, ever tell them how you would do it. People who love me and have sensed me slipping away say, “Call me. I mean it. Anytime of the day or night. I’m here.” They remind me I have to let them know when it gets this bad. If I’m faking being okay when I’m not they can’t help. I run through the short list. Lord, people have so many hard things to deal with. I can’t be one of their hard things one more time.

“My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.
Stay here and watch with Me.”–Matthew 26:38

Until a few years ago, when I was finally diagnosed with Autoimmune Encephalitis and Adult PANS/PANDAS, I could only explain the sudden onset of the episodes as if a demon was coming over me even though I knew I was ultimately protected from them. I was mostly happy and hopeful even in the midst of intense daily pain and extreme life stress. Out of no where it would rush over me. I wanted to die. My healthcare professionals continued to try to understand and treat me as some variation of Bipolar, the best diagnosis they could squeeze out of the DSM. I now know there are chemicals, bacteria and viruses able to hair trigger me into debilitating physical and neuropsych symptoms. These are things completely out of my control, and my autoimmune disorder sets me up for continuous infections and cycles of sickness. As soon as I begin to feel unwell physically I become disoriented by hissing lies about the worth of my life. I have never really fit the depression diagnosis. I’m just not a sad person. Serious, yes. Sad, no. Every time it happens there is a moment when my mind and heart fade to black. The physiological starting place is compounded by a life of what can only be described as continuous pain that is often excruciating. This means I am already always standing on the ledge.

You want to live a long life. You want a future and a hope here on earth. You are maybe even afraid to die. I want release. I know there are people who need me now. I believe God has a purpose for me or I wouldn’t still be alive, but I want to go. I’m ready to go.

“Then they cried to the Lord in their afflictions,
And He saved them from their distresses;
He sent His word and healed them,
And delivered them from their corruptions.”–Psalm 106:19-20

This year I am working through the She Reads Truth Lent study. It’s good. The best part is it’s mostly just straight up God’s Word. When your heart is torn wide open and fleshy with need the living and breathing part of Scripture finds an especially perfect soil to take root.

I am crying to Him in my distress.
I’m LISTENING hard.
I’m pointed east.
I’m looking for the light.

Another Lent resource I have used for many years is a small book of daily readings by Emilie Griffin titled Small Surrenders. She suffers from chronic illness and tells of one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, as an example of a man “plagued by frailty and weakness, not just physical but psychological. At times he would plummet into an abyss of darkness, what he called ‘cliffs of fall.’ The steep dropping-off places of the soul seemed worse than any physical distress. This, therefore, was Hopkin’s prayer, his hope: ‘LET HIM EASTER IN US. BE A DAYSPRING TO THE DIMNESS OF US.’“

The sun was shining this morning as I drove to my counselor’s office. I played the JJ Heller song “Daylight” over and over and over again on the way there and the way back.

There is an inch of daylight underneath the door.
It’s enough for me to fill up my canteen.

If I want to live
Your love is what I need.

Be near me.
Be near me now.
Be near me.
Be near me now.

There is an inch of daylight underneath the door.
It’s enough for me to fill up my canteen.

If I want to live
Your love is what I need.

“You do not want a sacrifice or I would give it; You are not pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. God You will not despise a broken and humbled heart.”–Psalm 31:16-17

Photography by Cindee Snider Re. Used with permission.

JJ Heller’s “Daylight.”

(Thank you for praying for me in the “Shadowlands.” This is the first February in several years I haven’t been able to escape to Arizona. Those trips were times of retreat and healing but also reminders I could be some better. I’m missing the desert. For me it was a little like the Promised Land.)

Sep 6
2015

If I Leave? Why I’m Going Away

by Monica

I’m sitting here in bed with a blinking cursor pushing me to keep adding words to this sentence, this paragraph and this post. I have six windows open on my laptop. My email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and WordPress are all places I share community. They are good. The relationships I’ve made and sustained on the web keep me from feeling isolated in my mostly home bound life. I connect with beautiful TRUTH here. I learn your stories. I watch your lives unfold for the glory of God. I share in your pain and struggles, and I pray for you. I celebrate your victories and accomplishments. I also channel my online life into real life with paper to pen, care packages and, if you live close enough, by inviting you to rest awhile on my yellow sofa to know and be known by me. I schedule phone dates with far away friends and even strangers who need pieces of my story to take the next step in their own. When I am not doing these things I am managing my own health care, wrestling with insurance and debt collectors and getting treatment. These things fill my days until my children and husband come home. I try to pour into them what I have left which is often the least of me. Every night I swallow five crazy pills supposed to slow down my brain and my body enough to rest, but I fall into bed with a racing mind and bursting heart. I make lists in my head or on scratch paper on my nightstand in the dark. I am overwhelmed by all the people I need to pray for. I am wanting to remember your birthday or send you a note of encouragement, because it might be the only real mail you get in your hard this week. My life is full because of this screen. I am grateful for it. I also know it is time to step away.

Something bred out of this culture of continuous sharing is the absolute inability to believe the world can and will go on without our input. We don’t know how to do real retreat. We don’t know how to stop the whispering or the shouting long enough to decide who and what we really are without it. I see this as blatantly in the Christian community as I do in secular media. Those of us who write are particularly prone to feeling we must keep our words out here. Isn’t that why God gave us the gift? I have been blogging since 2008, and it has been one of the most beautiful and challenging things I’ve done in my life. I’ve told truth here I would have never been brave enough to bare in any other place. This has wrecked me and healed me. The hundreds of people from around the globe who joined our Team Danica journey encouraged me to know people are hungry for community, and we are all more the same than we are different. My blog and social media gathered an army of prayer warriors for us. It became a place we humbly made our great need known and where God chose to meet much of it. I am grateful for it. I also know it is time to step away.

My heart aches to have been writing and submitting a book for publication before all this. I wish I could tell my story, birth it and give it away. No build up. No platform. No marketing plan or commerce. Just a year and a half of heart work poured onto pages. God, do with them what you will. Take my name off. He is the author. I am merely a character in this narrative of redemption. I’ve been told I am naive. I’ve been asked if this desire is driven by fear of failure. I’ve been asked if I want to be a writer or if I just have this one amazing miraculous tale to tell. Publishers don’t just want one good book. They want to know if you have another and are worth the investment they make in you. I wrestle with the deep threads of faith in my book making it a book only Christians will buy. Do I really want to shine my light into an already lit room. If not, do I pull a few golden stitches out and hope the Jesus shines through the strength of the story itself? I’m asked to focus on my target audience. Is it people who have suffered and are suffering? Is it my ever growing community of EDS and Chiari people who hurt exactly like I do? Or is this a story about finding gifts no matter what your gauntlet making it a book for almost anyone, because none of us are immune to the struggle?

If you’ve been reading here you know I had my twentieth surgery and seventh neurosurgery on June 24th. I never wanted this “new” blog to be focused on my continued pain, treatment or disability and especially not about our ever growing need for support. This is why I’ve been very quiet. Here’s the rub. This is my life. I spent the first eight weeks of my recovery without words. It scared me. I cried more than I have ever cried in my life, sometimes hours at a time. The loss of range of motion in my neck and the new normal I was facing terrified me. The pain from having skin and muscle and nerve cut down my head and spine for the third time in the same place was driving me into despair. I wanted to quit, and I felt the story I’ve labored over was a farce, because I couldn’t see a gift anywhere. At the bottom of the valley I had my finger on “delete.” God stopped me.

I cannot answer many of the questions I’ve asked above. I do know God is asking me to be quiet, pull away from ALL this here and focus completely on what I know for sure He called me to do. This means saying no to people in all kinds of ways. This means my children and husband will lose even more of me as I set my jaw like flint to finish this work. This means I have to believe my presence in your life on this screen is not necessary for a period of time and trust God to bring you other encouragement. This means I’m asking you to respect the absence but promise me you will be here when I return, because I will miss you all, and I need you too.

I remember a poem written by L.L. Barkat in her precious book “God in the Yard.” I found it quickly tonight as I pulled my well worn copy from the shelf. I had forgotten she wrote it for Ann Voskamp. I wondered if Ann was feeling these same struggles as she poured herself into her first book. I will leave you with it tonight.

Stayed: for Ann Voskamp

Why do we not
leave home.
Is it really for fear
of what lies
beyond, or rather
for fear that the
roof will abscond
with the doors
and the shutters
we’ve always known.
And who would they
blame if it happened
just so, if the whole
curtained place simply
picked up its stakes,
disappeared on the wind
in our absence. What
are we really afraid
of, why do we not
leave home.

I will be gone literally as much as figuratively over the next two months. I leave a week from today for a trip to Maryland for a scan and fusion check up with my neurosurgeon. I plan to head further south to the Virginia valley I love between the Blue Ridge to see my Angie after this. God has provided for me to take an overnight trip with dear girlfriends, a very long weekend at the beach with one of my most faithful five and an entire week of writing on Lake Michigan as I finish out my thirty-ninth year of life. Will you please pray for me physically as I continue to heal and learn how to live once again with new challenges? Will you please pray for the decisions I have to make about further PANDAS/AE treatment? I have decided not to continue chemo or add long term steroids, the next suggested steps from my physician, until my symptoms become unbearable and dangerous again. Will you please pray for God to provide for our family as He always has and for us to live this manna life with great joy. Will you pray over the words I am committing to write as I finish “Gauntlet with a Gift” and for God to make clear the path where it should land for His glory? I humbly thank you for taking these things to our God who already knows what we need and still beautifully invites us to enter in by asking.

(I will continue to publish Thursday’s Gauntlet Story Feast here, because your stories are important and are one of the main reasons the book was conceived. I have made commitments to several author friends to help launch and promote their own soul work, and I will be showing up, because their books are changing me, and I want you to read them and be changed too. Besides these things I will be quiet. If you truly need me I will check email and messenger daily.)

Jun 12
2015

Recapture My Heart

by Monica

I wish your care was always easy, predictable, safe—
a cool drink
a soft pillow—
but you are too wise,
too loving,
too committed to your work of
transforming grace.
So your gracious care comes to me
in uncomfortable forms:
the redeeming care of
disappointment,
the unexpected
trial,
suffering, loss,
These things don’t tell me you’re
cold-hearted,
absent,
uninvolved.
No, each is a sign of
zealous grace,
redeeming love.
I struggle to grasp how much you
care,
so I struggle to rest in that
care.
You care enough to give me what I
need,
not what I want.
You care enough to break my bones
in order
to recapture my heart.

By Paul David Tripp

May 13
2015

A Quote. A Poem. A Song. On Hope

by Monica

“The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can’t stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope–and the hope that has become our joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend up on it) disappoint us.” ― Walter Wangerin Jr., Reliving the Passion: Meditations on the Suffering, Death, and the Resurrection of Jesus as Recorded in Mark

I wanted to write today, but my head hurts so badly I cannot form complete sentences. I need to take some pills and crawl into bed. Dan will leave work early to help with the girls. I do it rarely, but we both know when it hits like this I have to clock out.

On the way to my cool, dark room I got on my knees at my prayer bench. I couldn’t even muster a guttural plea. Not even a “Dear God, Please.” Nothing. Numbness. I held my favorite heavy gray stone in my shaking hands. It is engraved with my life word. HOPE. I thought of a song I’ve claimed as “mine” for eight long years. How do the lyrics go? I came back to my computer to find my folder on hope. It’s a digital scrapbook of anything I’ve ever read, watched or listened to on the subject. Next to the download of Natalie Grant and Christa Well’s song, “Our Hope Endures,” the above quote is saved in a text file. I listened to the song. I read the words, and I wrote this. It is only the second poem I’ve written since my early twenties. I’m going to lie down and soak my pillow now.

Pain.
I call him Sorrow,
Because there are no new words.
I’m crying out,
“How long, Oh Lord?”
Does He hear?

Happiness.
I miscarried her early on.
I don’t visit the grave.
I won’t miss someone I don’t know, but
She didn’t deserve to die.
Should I believe this?

Joy.
Born of suffering.
Endurance was the doula’s name.
Her mother was Hope.
I held her wet with vernix.
Would I clip the cord?

Grace.
The place we live together now.
Adoption is true religion.
Character is the swaddling cloth.
Suffering is transfigured.
Could this ever disappoint?

Apr 13
2015

The Peace of Wild Things

by Monica

I know many of you are waiting for a health update after so much prayer and love over the past few weeks. I am slowly recovering and trying to write. Today was the first truly beautiful day this spring. Despite my exhaustion from driving myself to the doctor, waiting, having blood drawn, having a mast cell reaction to the receptionist’s hand lotion, grabbing a few things we needed at the store and driving home in time to pick up Danica at car rider, I felt this deep need to meet God outside. Instead of coming straight home and falling into bed I pushed my body and surprised Danica with a drive to Quail Hollow State Park. I brought my camera. I breathed deep and long, and my heart slowed for the first time in a long time. This is how I feel in the woods, on the trail and by the pond. This is how I feel walking the labyrinth in prayer. This is how I feel with the breeze in my hair and the sun in my face. This is how I feel when I quiet the noise and listen to His voice. I find Peace in these wild things.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.–Wendell Berry

Mar 12
2015

Taking up My Cross in the Valley of Vision

by Monica

When I was young I was completely infatuated with my dad’s library of Banner of Truth books. One of my favorite books he owned was The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions. He has a beautiful leather bound copy now, and I own his tattered and worn copy published November 1, 1975, the month and year of my birth. The top, bottom and side pages are stamped with his name in elegant script. All his books were marked in this way. The Valley of Vision was my first introduction to prayer as poetry which has become a very important part of my spiritual walk. I now have an entire shelf of books that are written prayers. Many of my personal journal entries and very old blog posts end with my own heart cries. Even during the years I spent far from God I kept this book with me. Imagine the prodigal daughter moving from place to place with whatever I could fit in my powder blue, two door, 1992 Chevy Cavalier with dancing bears on the back windshield and a pack of Camels in the center console. In a milk crate of books on the passenger side, in between Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, was this touchstone of faith. After the Bible it is the single most influential book in my life.

On Ash Wednesday I began my Lenten journey by reading the prayer titled “The Grace of the Cross” from page 172. I copied it and put it in my Bible to pray through daily during these 40 days. Monday I didn’t look at it at all as I forced my way through the motions of devotions and prayer. Yesterday I didn’t even open my Bible. This morning, after my family left for work and school, I sat here in my nest chair with my coffee and reached for the photocopy sticking out of my Bible. I only had words of lament in my mind and heart, but I knew it was time for this prayer:

O MY SAVIOUR,

I thank thee from the depths of my being
for thy wondrous grace and love
in bearing my sin in thine own body on the tree.
May thy cross be to me
as the tree that sweetens my bitter Marahs,
as the rod that blossoms with life and beauty,
as the brazen serpent that calls forth
the look of faith.
By thy cross crucify my every sin;
Use it to increase my intimacy with thyself;
Make it the ground of all my comfort,
the liveliness of all my duties,
the sum of all thy gospel promises,
the comfort of all my afflictions,
the vigour of my love, thankfulness, graces,
the very essence of my religion;
And by it give me that rest without rest,
the rest of ceaseless praise.

O MY LORD AND SAVIOUR,

Thou hast also appointed a cross for me
to take up and carry,
a cross before thou givest me a crown.
Thou hast appointed it to be my portion,
but self-love hates it,
carnal reason is unreconciled to it;
without the grace of patience I cannot bear it,
walk with it, profit by it.
O blessed cross, what mercies dost thou bring with thee!
Thou art only esteemed hateful by my rebel will,
heavy because I shirk thy load.
Teach me, gracious Lord and Saviour,
that with my cross thou sendest promised grace
so that I may bear it patiently,
that my cross is thy yoke which is easy,
and thy burden which is light.

The past two days I have been buried in the self love and the carnal reason. I have turned my mind and heart away from the Grace that brings the patience to bear this pain, walk this pain and even profit from this pain again. Knowing what He suffered for me how can I shirk this load?

Today I am taking up my cross, my appointed portion in this life, and carrying it through His amazing love and sacrifice for me. This is easy. This is light. This is GRACE. This is the essence of my “religion.”

May I rest in ceaseless praise for the minutes, the hours, the days and even weeks God gave me a higher view, a healing view, a hopeful view of where I’d been living.

May I rest in ceaseless praise for this return to the “Valley of Vision.”

(If you’ve never heard Sovereign Grace’s album of songs taken from this book you must find time to download it and add it to your playlists. This is the beautiful song taken from the title prayer. It is on repeat today.)

Photography by Cindee Snider Re. Used with permission.

Feb 16
2015

Renewal of Vows in Tucson

by Monica

My heart is nearly bursting. There is much to write as I sift through the free flowing scrawls in my pen to paper journal during this precious time away. I want to share a photo of Dan and I on Valentine’s evening before our dinner date. It speaks volumes about the time we have been gifted here and the change in our bodies, minds, hearts and spirits.

When I travel I always buy a new book of poetry to bring along. The Singing Bowl by Malcolm Guite was my choice before this trip. It is rich with word-art. I have read through each poem several times now, and have begun to make notes on certain passages that particularly speak to me. The following poem titled “A Renewal of Vows” explains what is happening in Dan and I’s marriage through this precious time away.

So, open up the treasure-casket, love,
the treasure is still there, the hidden things
that love contains. Old words, like wedding rings,
surround their mysteries, they live and move
as breath renews them, burnished as the gold
around our fingers, glowing as we make
the vows that make us new again: I take,
protect, and comfort, cherish, have and hold.
The same old words, that cannot stay the same,
for they have grown, as we have, more than old.
They change and deepen like all things that live,
they compass more and still have more to give:
All that I have is yours, all that I am
I give again, with all I will become.

Feb 1
2015

Calvary Love. A Month of If

by Monica

Three years ago, while I was recovering from my brain decompression and fusion at a friend’s beautiful lake house, I had the blessing of entertaining angels. In May, 2010, a girl across the world reached out to our family. She became one of the most faithful to love and pray for us on this journey. We became friends in a way that I never thought possible without meeting face to face. She and her mum traveled here from Australia to get her settled so she could begin her call to seminary. That snowy January night we shared a meal together. After dinner we moved to the living room and sat across from one another in front of the crackling fire. The fellowship was sweet. I found myself bearing my heart to them with an ease I rarely feel because of my pride. We wept. They prayed with me. They asked things of God for me that I have never really been brave enough to ask for myself. The time slipped away, and it was very late when we headed to our beds. I loved having a place for them to stay. My particular gift of overnight hospitality had been buried because of circumstances, and it meant so much to be able to offer them such a pleasant place to sleep even though it wasn’t my own home. In the morning dear Bethany came down and gave me a gift. It was a little blue hardback book. I gasped when I saw the two gold letters imprinted on the binding.

IF

When I was a little girl I found my mother’s copy of this book by Amy Carmichael. I didn’t know much about Calvary love then, but I was drawn to the simple paragraphs and the pressing of the heart. I was drawn to the white space left on each page as if to say,

“STOP HERE.
YOU CAN ONLY ABSORB THIS TODAY.
MEDITATE.
PRAY.
LIVE THIS BEFORE YOU MOVE ON.”

In the short time we had together Bethany reminded me how powerful words are, and how my words here on the screen had changed her. It was God once again speaking to me about how this journey is definitely not just about us. He is working in ways we may never know until eternity. He was asking me to keep telling the truth and pointing to Him. He was asking me to suffer awhile longer because He suffered for me.

I keep the beautiful vintage copy of Amy’s book on my prayer bench. I return to it over and over again.

She writes this in the opening of her soul searching book:

There are times when something comes into our lives which is charged with love in such a way that it seems to open the Eternal to us for a moment, or at least some of the Eternal Things, and the greatest of these is love.

It may be a small and intimate touch upon us or our affairs, light as the touch of the dawn wind on the leaves of the tree, something not to be captured and told to another in words. But we know that it is our Lord. And then perhaps the room where we are, with its furniture and books and flowers, seems less “present” than His Presence, and the heart is drawn into that sweetness of which the old hymn sings.

The love of Jesus, what it is – None but His loved ones know.

Or it is the dear human love about us that bathes us as in summer seas and rests us through and through. Can we ever cease to wonder at the love of our companions? And then suddenly we recognize our Lord in them. It is His love that they lavish on us. O Love of God made manifest in Thy lovers, we worship Thee.

Or (not often, perhaps, for dimness seems to be more wholesome for us here, but sometimes, because our Lord is very merciful) it is given to us to look up through the blue air and see the love of God. And yet, after all, how little we see! “That ye may be able to comprehend what is the breadth and length and depth and height and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge” – the words are too great for us. What do we comprehend, what do we know? Confounded and abased, we enter into the Rock and hide us in the dust before the glory of the Majesty of love – the love whose symbol is the Cross.

And a question pierces then: What do I know of Calvary love?

The entire month of February I will be posting If questions from this powerful little book. I invite to you follow along this journey. I pray you will be drawn to Calvary love.

I am giving away a copy of this book every Sunday this month. To enter please share one of the daily “If” posts on social media (facebook or twitter) and comment here on the blog post you share. Let’s meet at the foot of the cross together.

Photography by Cindee Snider Re. Used with permission.

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