[God in the Yard] “remember how / the birds were eaten / by the sky”

I am, I think, playing toward God at my own pace – my twelve-week study of God in the Yard could be twelve years. I learn slowly like that, play at my own pace. Piper is the same way, actually. I grow impatient with her; I should remember how patient He is with me. I have spent the last three weeks knowing and then not knowing how to respond to Barkat’s fifth chapter. As a poet, she writes lines that carry deep weight in the simple prompts that she shares; it has taken me a while to sort my thoughts and choose an image to engage this chapter.

The words fall here
and there, and come together;
they make a weaving, weave
a making

and I become.

♥

L.L. Barkat opens her fifth chapter of God in the Yard with a quote from Lewis Hyde: “Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude.” It didn’t catch my eye, however, until I understood its context upon beginning Hyde’s book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. I began it yesterday, and stopped ten pages in, with too much to process at once.

Hyde’s explanation of “the gift” flies up into the face of something I thought I understood, something I’ve just determined I don’t understand at all.

Sometimes I am given a gift, and I do not know it is a gift, because it looks like something else.

I think this is the reason Hyde says we “suffer gratitude.”

♥

I started schooling Piper this week, and as part of our school, I am reading stories to her. Our story for Thursday morning was about Adam and Eve in the garden, about their temptation and subsequent sin, about God’s response. I found myself near tears as I read, and I began to turn over the story, the God in the story.

I do not believe that God has a Plan B. I believe He is fully sovereign, that He wrote all of my days in His book, that He is not surprised by the choices that we make, that He allows us to make. I believe that He has given us a free will, but that He also knows what we will choose as we use that free will.

So this sovereign God would have to have known that Adam and Eve were going to eat of the fruit before He ever created them, before He created the world. He knew that His Son would have to die – Scripture says Christ was “slain from the foundation of the world” – in order to restore the Garden-fellowship that would be broken by their sin.

What, exactly, was He thinking? What kind of Person walks into that kind of pain?

L.L. shares an anonymous poem from which I took the title of this post, writing that “[t]he sky, vast and changeable, sometimes beautiful, is not seen as trustworthy. Any sparrow with its wits about it might consider staying grounded.”

I consider myself a sparrow with wits. (Ahem. I am cracking myself up with that line. So sorry.) I do not trust easily; the changing sky fascinates and frightens me at the same time. Watching the sky (and the sea, even) I begin to think that the “fear of the Lord” referenced in Scripture may not be only reverential fear, that it may begin with terror, with understanding that God is God and I am not, that there is ferocity in His power, that He may not be restrained or manipulated.

I am truly afraid sometimes that His sky might just eat me, that if I trust myself to it and spread my wings, I may get knocked to the ground by some unseen, uncontrollable gust of wind.

♥

I could not respond to this chapter with a photo of an open sky. I wanted to, but I kept returning to this one, to the spot of murky blue behind the light-pierced clouds. I know that there was clear sky beyond, but the glory behind the clouds wove the dark into it. The dark only served to intensify the passion of the light, to block and scatter it, to capture my attention.

L.L. wrote of that she had always considered herself “a fairly open person, thankful for life and its gifts,” but that “it appeared that the gratitude [she] thought was [hers] either didn’t exist or wasn’t making it through to the outside. At least to certain people.”

That short passage stopped me for a week, for this is something I have lived.

I was given a gift once, a love gift, and I believed by faith it was a gift. I opened my heart to God to receive it, to receive Him in it. But in the receiving, there was a breaking, a parting of the clouds that darkened with a weight of glory I’d not previously understood. Close friends did not understand this breaking, me falling real and taking flight into faith, and they identified only my struggle, for I had learned to despise clichés and cover-ups.

They told me that my gift couldn’t possibly be a gift from God – or it would produce identifiable fruit.

They expected a full heart-overhaul in mere months to prove that God was really in it. Nearly ten years later, I know more fully now what I believed then, that it was a gift, and that my gratitude then was not unwarranted. But I suffered it. I literally suffered the gratitude, because crisis-grace is given to the person in the crisis, not the person looking on. They could not enter it with me.

The gift, I think, is known by the recipient – it speaks to the heart, and so, in a sense, the birds are eaten by the sky, winging up under the clouds, into them, beyond them into glory.

L.L. concludes this chapter with a picture of children playing at the shore, children who are initially afraid to walk into the sea and play in the largeness of it. Instead, they create their own small pool for the water, and as they run to the water’s edge to fill their bucket and transfer the water to their smaller pond, they become less and less afraid of the ocean itself, and they are drawn more fully into its inviting waves.

God draws me to Himself in this way, turning my heart-eyes to Himself and inviting me up into Him with my questions and my fears. As I look through the break in the clouds, behold glory I could not observe without the clouds filtering the light, I begin to see the gift of Him, and I begin again to receive Him, grateful.

♥

related:
the weeping: freeze-frame celebration
“how grace used to drift in with the night”
quiet spaces
“playing toward God”
“find / the moon”