Coals

Mary always woke up earlier than I did in Sudan. So many mornings when I filled the kettle with water from the filter by the back door, one of our girls would trot over to her porch in their nightgown, the metal tray of our charcoal stove swinging by her side. Mary, naked baby boy balanced on her hip, would wave a greeting to me across the way and then, removing the steaming kettle from her lit stove, she would carefully scoop a couple of coals from her fire with a long spoon and place them in my daughter’s tray. My girl would then pick her way back across the compound to our porch, both eyes on the coals she balanced carefully in front of her.

Many late afternoons while her babies napped or chased chickens, Mary would lilt gracefully across the space between our houses with her metal bakhur basket, (neither motherhood nor refugee camp life would ever remove the ballerina from her body or soul). She would lean cross-armed against the cement half wall, barefoot and chatty, while I dug into my own fire with a long spoon, charcoal grating against itself in the chamber like pumice, before clinking neatly onto her outstretched basket.

This ritual was repeated for years. Breakfast fires and dinner fires. Or, I just had unexpected guests drop in, do you have a fire going? Or, I saw you were later getting back from the camp tonight, so I sent some coals over with your girls.

It was a task that became a ritual that then morphed into a metaphor. Daily grunt work slowly evolving into liturgy. A chore canonized.

My fire is cold. Can I use some embers from yours?  

***

By the time we moved away from the Sudans and to where we are now, just under three years ago, I was squarely the keeper of my own coals.  

People think the hardest things we have been through have to do with bullets and bombs and thieves in the night. And admittedly those moments haven’t been awesome. But without a doubt, it’s been the separation from people I love which has left the most lasting mark. Jonathan Haidt says, “People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely or useless.” I’ve felt a lot of things in the red and blue sectors of the wheel of emotions chart over the past decade and a half. Lonely has almost never been one of them.  

Until recently.

Over and over again, as consistently as the waxing of the moon, God has provided friends at just the right moments. Neither the worst nor the best seasons of the past 16 years have been faced alone. And over and over again, as consistently as the moon wanes away, one by one we have said goodbye. And sometimes we haven’t even had the opportunity to do that.

Heather, Lydia, Bethany, Melva, Bre, Jessica. Katie…

The overnight goodbyes of rushing to the evacuation planes that take us to different places and never returning to our old neighborhood. The babies born with devastating challenges that led to the long strange drift of a goodbye. The change in roles and location that have been marked with full-hearted, cry-just-as-hard-as-all-the-kids kinds of goodbyes. The goodbye that wasn’t even a goodbye but just an unexpected Whatsapp message from a mutual friend: “I don’t know how to tell you this but she didn’t wake up this morning. She’s gone.”

All that to say, when we showed up here and started settling into a new community, I was pretty set on sitting out the sisterhood part of life for a while. Maybe not consciously at first, but the instinct was real. No, I don’t want to join a ladies group. No, I’m not eager for new teammates. No (thank you), I don’t want to go to coffee with you.

I’m pretty self-sufficient on most fronts. I’m an introvert. My husband is my best friend. I’m fine (clearly). Friendship – the kind that pushes beyond chit chat at school pickup – is nice and all. But early on I decided it was 100% not worth the heartache on the other side of the goodbye.

Don’t mind me over here fanning the crap out of this dead wood. It’s just ash in my eyes.    

***

You and I both know that was an absurd place to land and that my resolve wouldn’t last. And it hasn’t. But it has taken almost three years for that to change. I told Amalie (my German Spiritual Director) the other day with both tears and laughter falling over each other in a race to get out of me, “I don’t think I’m grieving anymore. But I think I am grieving finally letting go of my grief. Is that a thing? Does that make me neurotic?” She smiled and said “Does it feel like healing?”

I thought about that for a second and decided that no, it doesn’t. Healing makes me think of perfect baby skin where there once was leprosy. Or of cool skin where there was a raging fever. This feels more like new life. Like the living Jesus letting Thomas feel around the purple edges of his scars. Alive again where I was dead for a little while. But the scars are still there. He kept his. He lets me keep mine.

And, as it turns out, I’m not the only one who has them.

This month I have taken a step deeper into community with a group of women I care about more than I want to admit. And their hearts have some wear and tear too. Collectively, we have close to a century’s worth of living cross-culturally. And though in some ways we are starting afresh with each other, in other mysterious ways there’s a built-in familiarity. It’s a little like dropping in at the 10-year mark. Yes, I still have so much to learn about these women, and I confess I had a bit of a vulnerability hangover when they discovered this blog. We’ve got a ways to go yet. But we’re steppng into this pre-seasoned, pre-aged. As though there is something already built.

Because even if I wasn’t the one there when K’s siblings died, someone was there prostrate on the floor with her. And even if J wasn’t the one walking quietly beside me as I took in the gutted shell of my war-looted home, there was someone who did that for me. We haven’t always been each other’s people – through the dramatic stuff as well as the years worth of dumb jokes and hurt feelings. And, God help me, I know there may come a time when we won’t be able to be each other’s people in the same way anymore either.

But it feels to me like we are accepting the batons of friendship from those women who have gone before us in each other’s lives. They’re holding out a wire basket of glowing coals. We know how to do this.

I know how to do this.

And I feel happy and grateful. And I cry.

If one were to look closely, they could see the inside of my right wrist is lined with a number of literal scars from the edges of scalding cookie sheets pulled carelessly from our old beast of a charcoal oven. Sometimes I’m a little embarrassed of them; they kind of look like evidence of delayed onset juvenile angst. But I mostly love them. They are tiny, tangible reminders of a life that sometimes feels like a dream. They tie me to what was. But also what is, now. And what may yet be. Not healed exactly. But alive.