All Saint's Day

Sunday is special, it's All Saint's Day, Reformation Day and Chris' name will be read as one of the saints that was born into the new life in Christ during this past year.  We are fortunate to have a church that streams its services live on Sunday mornings.  So, for those of you not in Seattle, both the bulletin and the link to the 10:00 a.m. PDT service are on the website
http://www.upc.org/

Chris LOVED the hymn "For All the Saints" and it will also be sung at UPC.  This particular Sunday tugs at the Moravian roots of this Presbyterian woman and I am reminded of mine and Chris' even more favorite hymn which I share here for your contemplation in prelude to our universal celebration of the Church Triumphant.

The graves of all His saints Christ blest, And softened every bed;
Where should the dying members rest, But with the dying Head?

Thence He arose, no more to die, And showed our feet the way
To follow Him, enthroned on high, At the great rising day.

Then let the last loud trumpet sound And bid our kindred rise.
Awake, ye nations underground; Ye saints, ascend the skies.

And from the liturgy of the Moravian Church for All Saints Day:

Let the great cloud of witnesses, the unnumerable company of those who have gone before and entered into rest, be to us an example of godly life.  May we, with patience, run the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith; and obtain an entrance into the everlasting kingdom, and with the glorious assembly of saints, worship and adore Thee, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen!

Thanks and praise to our Lord Jesus Christ for the Church Triumphant, the truly glorious cloud of witnesses surrounding us and for the Presence that is ours even in this life.  At almost eight months after the most stunningly hard moment of my life I say with complete assurance that we worship a loving and good and very present God.  He is indeed both Mystery and Lover of our souls and we are a blessed people.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh

Music!

When I think of Chris in heaven I think of him understanding all of those economics models that he pondered all the time.  I also think of his trumpet.  Surely the heavenly music is beyond our comprehension and hearkens to the angels proclaiming the news of Jesus being born.  So, while Eric primarily plays his bass in jazz band and his baritone in concert band, we still love our trumpet music in this house and yesterday was really special.

Chris found Jonathan on Trumpet Herald, an online community of people as rabidly trumpet oriented as Chris always was.  Jonathan is the first trumpet for Sammamish Symphony Orchestra and Chris was ELATED when he was invited to try playing with them.  Long story short, Jonathan is an engaging, graciously kind guy who, a couple weeks ago, treated us to an evening of playing Chris' trumpets in our living room and filling our house with the sound of music at the level Chris played and it was blessing beyond measure.  Yesterday, Sammamish had a concert and they needed a C trumpet and Chris' is quite nice so Eric and I loaned it to the Symphony and they sent us tickets for the concert.  Actually they sent the season's worth of tickets but yesterday's concert was something special. 

Once again, on the stage of Eastlake Performing Arts Center, Chris' C trumpet brought a joyful sound to an amazing concert of Overtures.  Eric was in his new suit from the Harambee the other night and he was ever the gentleman, offering an arm to his mom and amazing me at how mature he really is.  Intermission found us in the midst of a conversation about how he wants to take in more classical music, that we should search the Seattle Symphony website to see what works for us and can we go some.  Surely, SURELY, Chris must have been rejoicing in heaven upon hearing his son yearn for more classical music.  I whispered a "way to go Dad, he is truly your son" towards the sky and am looking forward to taking in more concerts with my son.

Music is Eric's passion, he's a heavy metal loving guy, who also loves jazz tremendously, sports an i-pod with Guns-n-Roses, Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller and now Haydn.  He loves Ella Fitzgerald and Metallica and is searching i-tunes for a Concerto from yesterday's concert.  Music is a healing art and a connecting one, joining us to the saints that have gone before.  And we LOVE music in this house and always have it on, from classical to metal and always always our beloved jazz.  I get teary at the thought of Chris in God's Immediate Presence, along with Handel and Haydn and so many others.  We share that music with him and we keep him in our hearts.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh

Dinner, Wine, Friends and CLEAN WATER

Last night was MAGICAL!  We attended the Women's Enterprises International http://www.womensenterprises.org/ Harambee.  We got all dressed up, we took the money we had collected from our loose change each day, we took our friends and we drank wine, ate dinner, talked and listened.  Once again I was reminded that life is pretty easy here and VERY hard for so much of the world.  And I say this with more feeling than I can express, even in the midst of our lives, life is so much easier here than we EVER fully grasp.  I looked across the table at my beautiful daughter, dressed up, boyfriend on one side, another dear friend on the other, enjoying a nice dinner and with a clean glass of water at her place.  She never had to walk miles to help find it for our family, she simply turned on a faucet.  And, in fact, we don't drink water from our faucet, we've deemed that not healthy enough for our western bodies, so we filter out the impurities.  We are water elitists.  She got to go to school as a little girl, she is now in college. 

Emily's counterparts in Kenya are rarely so privileged.  Girls walk miles for water, they carry heavy containers on their backs and they are often easy prey for people who would do them harm.  They are often raped, infected with disease and live very hard lives and many do NOT go to school.  School is still a privilege there, not like here.  Kids don't wake up in Kenya wishing it was the weekend so they could sleep in, they truly feel the honor of education because they know the alternatives.

And so we went to dinner and we listened.  An amazingly radiant Kenyan woman shared about lives changed from something so simple, clean water.  Two mostly full carafes sat on our table, adorned with lemon slices and ice cubes...western privilege.

I missed Chris last night but I felt him intensely.  Chris was changed by Africa, he was changed by Central America, he was changed as a little boy by Antigua and he appreciated the value of clean water.  Chris didn't waste water, he HATED when we did.  And by supporting the cause of clean drinking water we also honor him and his life and continue the good work that was begun in him.  And we honor and worship and love God when we care for His people.

What exactly IS western privilege?  It's not just the fancy cars and overly large houses we have, or our clothes or furniture, it's not our fancy degrees from years of education.  It's as basic as turning on the faucet...running from it is western privilege.  That's a really powerful image to me.  I am confronted with it over and over every day...water, at the ready, from a faucet.  I rinse my toothbrush in western privilege.  That's an incredible thought. 

Last night was amazing.  We were surrounded at our table by the people we love the most, at an event we care deeply about.  But the most important thing was what was said, CLEAN WATER SAVES LIVES and it should NOT just be a western privilege. 

Thanks Chris, thanks for being you, for fussing when I left the sink dripping, for reminding us of how much water we used when we showered, for not being happy when we poured it down the sink because we didn't drink it all at dinner.  Thank you for making me so aware of the less developed world that I can't possibly be content in mine without helping them too.  That's ministry, in it's purest sense.  God started a good work in you and we are picking that up. 

Grace for your journey,
Leigh

New Beginnings

It's been a busy couple of weeks, high school football, relearning geometry so I can lend Eric a helpful homework hand, me back in school, commuting with Emily, which is seriously FUN.  Still my daughter but also increasingly my grown up sister in Christ, she went to bible study at church with me this week and spoke up intelligently and asked insightful questions.  At one point someone mentioned what a great group of women were in the room and the word women included my little girl and I was especially proud.

I have met new people, new classmates, new friends at church, but people who only know Chris from my descriptions and that's very weird to me.  And that's part of what my future holds, creating and maintaining relationships with people who don't see me as Chris' wife when I still very much see myself in that way.  I think always will.  And I think that's okay.

Cancer changed my life.  It came in to my home and my world and took an integral part of the definition of Leigh away and I'm left with this space that is begging for definition and which I am not yet ready to define.  In one of my classes we went around the room and were asked to say our name and something about us...I said this, "I'm Leigh and God has me on a need to know basis and all I need to know today is to be here."  Definition will come, I'm just not yet ready to know that part yet.

I miss him.  I am confident I always will.

God has tight hold of me.  I am confident of that too.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh
 

Prayer

"Regarding Prayer -- Circumstances may not change but you will be unrecognizably transformed." 

  Wish I could give credit to whoever said that in my presence.  I know roughly WHEN it was said and am sure of where but not a clue as to who.  It's in the margin of my bible, the one I used in college, in Intervarsity.  Intervarsity was the first place where I saw people writing in their bibles and not just a little bit but a lot and I have lots of little notes in the margins...nuggets that were thrown in my direction, reminders of a campus ministry that supported and sustained me in my undergraduate days. 

  Years have gone by and this statement written down in the margin of my bible a long time ago speaks total truth to me. Unrecognizably transformed...the result of prayer.  I've been engaged in a lot of conversation about prayer lately, have been reading a lot on the subject and that one statement says it all.  Circumstances may NOT change, but you will.  Prayer changes our hearts, it realigns them with His and it deepens the level of intimacy in our relationship with the Holy One. 

  My life is not what I had planned, nor what I wanted when I lifted up my prayers a year ago but I am unrecognizably changed, even to myself and the intimacy with Him is rich.  What more could I ask?

Grace for you journey,
Leigh

Alarms, Panic and God

I had a moment of panic this morning.  It probably wasn't helped by the fact that I need to be up at 5:30 a.m. each morning to make our mornings flow smoothly and the clock was saying 6:19 a.m. when I first opened my eyes.  How could I have forgotten to set the alarm clock??  Eric had a moment of panic too when his frantic mother burst in and told him we were late and to shower fast.  In retrospect it wasn't the most loving way to wake your son for a mom.

As soon as I had Eric on the bus and I reached for my coffee to get centered, panic spiraled.  I'm going back to school next week, how do I make it fit in and how am I going to pay my part of the tuition in the long run and how this and how that...  So I opened my Bible, mine falls open pretty naturally to Lamentations because I live in that book, I devour that book.  And there it was..."The Lord is my portion..."  How could I not have remembered that when I was panicking over time?  How could I so panic myself about the future that I worry about bills for tuition that haven't even arrived yet?  The Lord is MY portion.  The LORD is my portion.  The Lord is my PORTION.  The Lord IS my portion.  No matter where you put the emphasis that statement speaks truth...life giving truth. 

"The Lord is my portion, says my soul."-Lamentations 3:24

Life is going to bring mornings where alarms don't go off, it's going to bring car repairs unanticipated, jobs ended, all forms of grief, it's going to bring bad days and good days and all the in between days.  It's going to bring...LIFE and we all know it and we all live it.  But the Lord is our portion and we are held and we are LOVED.  If God has grace for us, what more can we ask?

If my alarm had gone off properly I wouldn't have spent the morning reaffirming this Great Truth that is mine.  The Lord really is my portion.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh

Gentleness

When Chris died and I found myself sitting in my pastor's office, I remember asking him "So am I crazy or are you supposed to feel this way?"  You can fill in the blank for what I was feeling.  WHAT I was feeling doesn't really matter so much actually, it was just all new and I felt so helplessly at the mercy of feelings that were swamping me and I was so very much needing grounding.  Well, I have not only a good pastor but an EXCELLENT one.  He gave me the advice, the admonition actually, to be gentle with myself.  So I then drove home tossing in my mind the definition of being gentle with oneself.

In the last six months I have learned a lot about being gentle with myself, about the nature of all of us and our need to care for ourselves as human beings.  The first thing is that things take the time they take and we grieve what and when we need to grieve and it's all okay.  I've learned to say when I can't do things and I've learned to pursue the things that are healing.  I think we naturally gravitate towards healing.  We gravitate toward healing best, however, when we feel the hurt and lean into it enough to let it teach us.

And I've learned a lot about prayer.  God can handle ANYTHING I have to say and its important for me to say it.  It's easy to sit back and say "Well God knows everything so He obviously knows my heart and I can't say it right anyway," but I NEED to say it.  In laying my heart out before God and crying out to Him I let go of my own need to control and direct my life and give that to Him, where it truly belongs.  That's a part of being gentle with myself too.  I can't guide my life, I can only align my heart with God and go with that.  Gravitating towards healing is gravitating towards the God who heals.

The immature part of my soul wants to say "Make my life easier" and yet the call is simply to surrender my life and realize that easy or hard, it's given over to God.  The real challenge in life isn't to ask for better circumstances, it's to engage God amidst whatever circumstances we have and be honest about them.

God has this very graceful way of meeting us in the hurt and bringing genuine peace...it's the Living Water thing.  And things take the time they take and protecting your soul's need for that time is pretty important.  God is at work...just stay in relationship with Him...and He will transform your life.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh