One of my favorite writers, Kelly Chripczuk, has a new book of poems out called Between Heaven and Earth. What I love most about Kelly’s writing shines through in these poems – her honesty, her awareness, and her determination to pull the sliver of good out of every situation. You can buy her book HERE. In the meantime, here is one of my favorite poems from the collection, “The Hardest Part”:
I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking. – Song of Solomon 5:2
. . . you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. – Romans 13:11
They come to our room in the night,
nose dripping blood or underwear damp.
“Can you help me with this?” they ask,
and we are stirred from the heavy
darkness of slumber.
I never want to wake in the night,
never want to throw back the warm covers,
to search for glasses blindly.
I dread the wet sheets
and sitting in the cold dark of the bathroom
pinching his nose until the red river stops.
But when he shivers, stripping the wet
in exchange for dry, or when he waits
oddly stoic for the clotting to begin,
I feel compassion rise.
By the time I tuck them
back in, I can say I love you and
mean it as I rub their short-cropped hair.
I pick up the teenage boy in the south of the city outside a house that sits on a dark, narrow street. He climbs in without saying a word, tall and lanky and barely fitting. We drive off, making our way around the southern edge of town. It’s night time, and there are only few cars on the road.
Just when I reach that point in a fare where I think it’s going to be a silent trip, I hit a pothole and he groans.
“You’ll never find potholes like this in Texas,” he says, and I grin.
“It’s like driving on the moon,” I say.
“They’ll swallow your car.”
“What were you doing in Texas?” I ask.
“Oh, that’s where I’m from. I grew up there. I want to go back, but I’m up here,” he pauses, testing the words he might use, “for a reason.”
I don’t ask. It seems the key to getting people to open up in this business, if that’s what you want, is not to ask anything too direct. A person’s stories are like wild butterflies, flitting in and out of view. Chase them, and you’ll never catch a thing. But if you sit still, every once in a while they’ll drift around your way, maybe even stay a while.
“I lived in Texas for a year or two when I was a kid,” I say. “Laredo and Mesquite. All I remember is heat. And dust.”
“Mesquite had a good football team this year,” he says. “They did real good.” Again, he pauses, and the next sentence comes like something finally released. “I had to move up here after my mom died.”
“Man,” I say. “I’m sorry to hear that. How long ago?”
“A month,” he says, and his voice is unsteady. “A month. Man, they didn’t even help her. The paramedics, they didn’t do nothing. I should have carried her out myself and drove her to the hospital.”
“So you were there when it happened?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I was there. She had some serious problems after her accident – she tried to hit a cop with her car.” At least, I think that’s what he said. I was kind of shocked by it, and I didn’t follow up on that particular point.
“You doing okay?” I ask.
“I guess. I don’t know. I got family up here, but I wanna go back. I’d like to get back down there.”
We pull up outside his destination. Sometimes, a ride goes too fast. Sometimes, I’d like to take a spin around the block just to finish up what we are talking about.
“Man,” I say, “I wish you the best. I really do. I hope you get settled up here. I hope you make some friends.”
“Thanks, man,” he says quietly. “Thanks for the ride.”
*This is your regularly scheduled, completely honest post about the ups and downs of freelance writing and self-employment. If you have had your fill of these posts from me, feel free to move on, nothing to see here. Tomorrow, we will return to our regularly scheduled programming*
A week ago, in all of my optimistic glory, I nearly wrote a blog post about how much better I’ve become in regards to waiting. Imagine that! I felt like Mario at the end of the level, hanging onto the flagpole, trotting gamely towards the next challenge. I was all set to write about how I’ve got that old anxiety about waiting under control so bring it, God, I’m up for whatever the next challenge is.
Yesterday, for some reason, my optimism came crashing down:
There is a silence in these post-Thanksgiving days, these almost-winter days, these early-Advent days, that can be enough to squelch hope in most of its forms. It is a natural season of waiting, in so many ways, a season in which there seems to be so little response, that it should not surprise me, it should not catch me off guard, yet nearly every year it does.
* * * * *
In desperation, I turn again to the Advent readings from this last Sunday, and the first was from Isaiah.
Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes of your heritage. Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you, while you wrought awesome deeds we could not hope for, such as they had not heard of from of old. No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you doing such deeds for those who wait for him.
The second from 1 Corinthians:
He will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
The third from Mark:
Jesus said to his disciples: “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.
* * * * *
Wait, the readings implore. Wait, but not with your own strength. With mine.
Also, Be watchful! Be alert!, as if to remind us our waiting is not in vain. Our waiting will be rewarded. Sometime. Somehow.
Here are some of my favorite articles, videos, and blog posts from the web:
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The world’s last night came as a black surprise with its low groan, its fiery canisters, its torch-bearing ants marching. It came ribbonless, boxless, a series of presents carried in the bellies of airplanes. It came and unwrapped itself.
So here are the results of that launch in all the ways I can measure. I share them here because I know that it has always been so helpful to me to see other’s publishing and sales figures as a way of both anticipating costs AND have a benchmark by which to place my own publishing costs and profits. I hope these numbers will help you in the same way.
I pull up on the side of a busy street, and a Hispanic woman and her son climb into the back. She is well dressed. He is toting a backpack and sounds excited about getting new glasses.
“Now, we didn’t get them today, son, but we will soon. Mommy has to pay for them little by little.”
We make a turn and head towards their home, two miles away.
“How are you?” I ask. “Sure is a beautiful day.” The sun is warm through the windshield and the sky is a blue that pops.
“I’m good,” she says hesitantly, and I can tell she makes a quick decision in her mind to answer honestly. I see this often, this split second of indecision, this wavering between an answer of “I’m good” or the truth. She keeps going.
“It is a beautiful day,” she continues. “But I’ve been to appointments all day. First, I had to take my youngest son here to an eye appointment. And there were other things.”
She pauses again, and again I can tell she’s thinking, thinking, thinking about how much to tell me, a stranger. “You know, honestly, I’m fighting the school district right now. My oldest son is autistic, and I’ve had to pick him up from school ten times this year.”
“Oh, wow,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sit back, son, keep your seat belt on,” she says to her son, then turns to me. “He has trouble sleeping. He has GI issues, which isn’t unusual for children with autism. And now he’s crying a lot at school. He doesn’t speak. He’s so tired, and they don’t know what to do when he cries, so they tell me to come and get him. I just don’t know what to do. I’m at the end of my rope.”
It’s a short trip to her drop off spot. We’re there in what feels like no time. She opens the door, barely finished speaking.
“I’m so sorry,” I say again. “My sister has fought those battles, too, for her daughter in Florida. I hear from her how draining it can be. I hope you’re able to get your son what he needs.”
“Thank you,” she says emphatically. “Me, too. Thank you.” She turns to her son. “Follow me out this side. What do you say?”
“Thank you,” he says.
“Thanks, man,” I say, turning around and smiling at him.
He giggles. “He called me man,” he tells his mother, stifling a laugh. They climb out. I drive away.
There’s a book I’m writing that I haven’t told you much about. I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you the title yet, so I’ll keep quiet on that for now (although I love the title Revell came up with). This book comes out next fall (about four months after the release of The Edge of Over There). It’s a book I wrestled with writing – whether or not I should do it, and, once I decided to do it, how exactly to go about it. It’s a book about the friendship that’s formed between me and a man named Mohammad.
Here’s a quick peek at a very rough draft of a section I’ve been working on, a simple retelling of a conversation the two of us had not too long ago. Shhh. This is top secret.
* * * * *
When I first met Mohammad, there were things I never could have guessed about him, things I never could have imagined. The stories of other people are always hidden from us at first, waiting in the shadows. They are tentative, skittish things, these hidden stories. They are frightened of what might become of them if they step out into the light.
A man rides his motorcycle through the Syrian countryside, his wife and four sons somehow balanced on the bike with him. He has received a tip that his village will soon be bombed. Their combined weight wobbles the motorcycle from side to side, and he shouts at them to hold still, hold still.
A man sits quietly on a friend’s porch, drinking very dark coffee, watching bombs rain down on his village miles away. ‘That was your house,” he says, then, ten minutes later, “I think that one hit my house.” He takes another sip of coffee. His children play in the yard.
A man walks through the pitch black Syrian wilderness, his family in a line behind him. He can feel the tension in his wife, the fear in his older boys. Someone ahead shouts, “Get down!” and they all collapse into the dust, holding their breath, trying to keep the baby quiet. ‘Abba,’ his boys whimper. ‘Abba.’
There are things I never could have imagined about him.
* * * * *
“You know,” he says, “in Syria, we are always having coffee together. Almost every day, I go to a friend’s house and we sit for two hours, for three hours, drinking coffee together, talking about things. Why you not do that here? Everyone stays here, here, here,” he frowns and jabs at the air, pointing at our individuality. “No one knows their neighbors. No one has coffee.”
“You’re right,” I say. “You’re right.”
“I tell this to Muradi,” he says, smiling a reluctant smile. “I tell my wife I will start having coffee with people. Soon, everyone will come to my house and we will all know each other and talk together. She says, ‘Mohammad, Americans do not want this! They do not want!’ But I tell her I will show her. I will start. We will meet here, there. Maybe at a coffee house. It is good this way, for us to drink coffee together.”
He laughs. I laugh, too, but the truth of what he says reaches me. We are, as Americans, very good at being independent. I struggle to think of the last time I needed someone, truly needed someone. We are so busy. Too busy. There is very little time for that kind of community, where we meet together regularly, not rushed, to simply drink coffee.
“When you find a house out here in the country,” Mohammad says again. “Find me a house, too. We will live beside each other, and we will drink coffee together. We can invite all the neighbors!” He laughs again, grinning that boyish grin of his, and I can’t help but be amazed at what these refugees have to offer us, if we will only reach out our hands and accept it.
* * * * *
Mohammad is a Syrian refugee, and together we are telling the story of his journey here, the story of my journey in meeting him, and the story of our friendship. This is not a story of how I helped him – this is more a story of how a man from halfway around the world taught me more about being a friend than anyone else I know. I can’t wait for you to get to know him. He and his wife and his boys are amazing.
If you’re looking for a gift for a young (or young at heart) reader in your life, consider my book The Day the Angels Fell, described by Anne Bogel at Modern Mrs. Darcy as, “Neil Gaiman meets Madeleine L’Engle.” It’s a book that asks the question “Could it be possible that death is a gift?”
