More Train Days

It’s Monday again, August 31, the very last day of August. It’s just after six in the morning, and I’m sitting on the deck in my pajamas, my burgundy cardigan, thick socks to keep the mosquitoes from eating me alive, and Crocs. Ponytail, coffee, candle lit on the table in front of me. I ran out of creamer, so there’s heavy cream in my coffee this morning, which turns out to be just fine.

The moon is still bright in the sky, but the sun is beginning to come up along the eastern horizon in pink and peach and cream. I can hear traffic somewhere in the distance, but closer are the birds and crickets and locusts and frogs, all the things that make an early morning on the deck feel like an early morning on the deck. September begins tomorrow, and even though the forecast apparently believes September should arrive somewhere around 100 degrees, the trees are beginning to change. Tiny little reminders that the seasons move whether we are ready for them or not.

We have company coming today, some of our absolute favorites, and I’m really looking forward to seeing them. They won’t be staying the night, although I wish we had a guest room ready for people who wanted to stay. Maybe we will again someday. They told us they would rather stay here for dinner, watch TV and visit than go out somewhere, and truly that is everything I need right now. I don’t want the hassle of getting dressed and going somewhere, and I don’t want the expense of eating out. Sitting around our house, eating something simple and visiting sounds about perfect. I just need to figure out what I’m feeding everybody for the next couple of nights.

The funny thing is that normally having people come would kick my hospitality instincts into high gear. I would be cleaning bathrooms and floors, clearing counters, planning meals, making sure there were drinks in the refrigerator and trying to make everything feel just right. I can see all of those things that could be done today, but my hospitality bucket is pretty empty right now. I’ve got nothing extra, and I’m learning to be okay with that. The people coming to see us aren’t coming to inspect the baseboards. They’re coming because they love us. There will be food and coffee, probably something sweet, places to sit, conversation and laughter. There will be people we love sitting together in the same room, and maybe that is hospitality in its truest form anyway.

John understands where I am right now. Yesterday he vacuumed the floors and stairs, folded blankets, put dishes away, cleared counters, picked up shoes, helped me fold laundry and carried it upstairs, all while asking what else he could do. He wants people to feel welcome here just as much as I do, but he also understands that right now I am reserving energy for the things that really have to be done. Sometimes I don’t even know what those things are until they are standing directly in front of me.

Yesterday was a pretty good Sunday. We stayed home because Rachel’s fatigue had ramped up after Saturday, and she described it as a different kind of tired, the kind they talk about with chemo, not something that can necessarily be fixed by a good night’s sleep. There is a lot happening in her body right now, and there is a lot happening in all of us. With some new questions on the horizon, there is also that familiar work of keeping our minds from running ahead to places where we don’t need to be yet. What is this? What does it mean? What happens next? As hard as we try to let those questions go, sometimes letting them go takes a surprising amount of work.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate the difference between worry and surrender, and this morning I keep thinking about driving versus riding a train. When I’m driving, I am responsible for staying on the road. I have to watch the curves and the lines and the traffic. My hands are on the wheel, my eyes are ahead, and even if I am incredibly intentional about staying on course, it requires constant attention. Sometimes it becomes white-knuckled attention, and that is exhausting.

Surrender feels more like being on a train. The train is already attached to the tracks, and someone else knows where it is going and how it is going to get there. I don’t have to steer it. I can sit down, look out the window, take in the view and trust the One who knows where the train is going. God, of course. That doesn’t mean I always like where the tracks appear to be headed, and it doesn’t mean I don’t look ahead and wonder what might be around the next bend. It simply means I don’t have to drive the train.

I think that may be the difference between my days filled with worry and fear and my days filled with trust and faith. I need more train days. I have a lot of them, actually, but the driving days are rough.

I’ve also realized that if I follow so many of these fears all the way down, underneath them is the oldest human fear there is: death. I don’t say that because I am anticipating it for Rachel. I’m not. I expect treatment to work. I expect doctors to address whatever needs to be addressed and change course if they need to. I expect her to get through treatment, recover and go on living a beautiful, full life.

But cancer makes you look at things you would rather not look at. It reminds you of our mortality and of how little control any of us ever really had over the number of our days. And I think that is part of what makes cancer so frightening. Even when treatment is over and life moves forward, there may always be an appointment, a scan, an ache or some unexpected question that tries to wake that fear back up.

Maybe that is why the heart of my faith feels especially important to me right now. When I follow all of those what-ifs to the very bottom, I eventually get to the one thing human beings have always feared and the one thing Jesus has already overcome. Death. That doesn’t mean I want to think about it, and it certainly doesn’t mean I anticipate it. It just means there is nowhere my fear can take me that God isn’t already there.

Fear can whisper all kinds of things about tomorrow, but fear doesn’t know tomorrow. God does.

Knowing that doesn’t make me want one single day less here. Quite the opposite. I want all the days. I want long, ordinary, beautiful years filled with family and laughter and coffee and dinners around tables, babies growing up, projects and trips and holidays, work and rest, arguments and reconciliations and all the wonderfully mundane things that make a life. I want that for Rachel, and I want that for all of us. I believe there are many, many days ahead. Maybe faith isn’t pretending the scary possibilities don’t exist. Maybe it is knowing they exist and still getting on the train.

There are so many other things happening in our lives at the same time. Hyfield is becoming real, along with all of our dreams for it and all of the work and decisions that will come with making those dreams real. Josh and Christina are already putting down roots there, and we are figuring out what it looks like for all of us to make this place something shared, something that belongs to all of us in the ways that matter.

There are decisions about what goes there, what stays here, what comes home from camp, what we continue investing in and what maybe has served its purpose. My vision for some things is changing, and maybe that is simply part of this season. I’m realizing more and more that time is the resource I value most. John’s retirement is coming, and sometimes I think we will be rich in time and poor in money. I know which one I choose. I’ll take time with John over progress any day.

This season is changing me in other ways too. I think it is changing all of us. Maybe part of realizing how much I value time is realizing how much I value what we do with it and how we show up for each other while we have it.

Relationships look different in different seasons. Friendships change with children and responsibilities and geography and the simple reality that everybody’s life keeps moving. People who once had hours to sit over coffee may barely have time for a text. I’m learning to accept some of that, but I’m also paying attention to what I want to carry forward from this season.

One of those things is remembering to ask the deeper question. Not only what did the doctor say, what are the plans, what happens next, how is the property coming along, what are you doing about this or that, but simply, how are you doing? And then having enough space to really hear the answer.

There have certainly been times in my own life when I didn’t know how to enter into someone else’s hard thing. Maybe I worried about saying the wrong thing. Maybe I assumed they would tell me if they wanted to talk. Maybe life was busy and I simply didn’t recognize what they needed. This season is teaching me that I don’t always have to know what to say. Sometimes asking is enough. Sometimes sitting there and listening is enough. I want to remember that.

By next weekend, we may have some answers we don’t have today. We will know something then that we don’t know now, and there is a lot contained in that thought. I suppose that is where the train comes back in, because God is already there. He is already around the bend I can’t see, already present in whatever answers come and whatever decisions follow them.

So this morning my prayer is simple. God, please be the comfort to us that only You can be. Help us live in today instead of borrowing trouble from tomorrow. Help me loosen my grip on the steering wheel and trust the tracks. Help me look out the window and notice the moon still hanging in the morning sky, the pink and peach along the horizon, the candle flickering on the table and the birds and frogs and crickets carrying on with their morning as if this were simply another beautiful day.

Help me welcome the people I love into an imperfect house without believing I have to make it perfect first. Help me remember that today is still a day we get to live, and there is so much good in it.

And when my mind starts racing ahead again, remind me that I was never driving the train anyway.

More train days, God. I need more train days.