"Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces
Calling out the best of who we are"
-Add to the Beauty, Sara Groves
She was a worm. It was the smallest thing she knew how to be and be safe. Ants were smaller, but definitely not safe, always scurrying around out in the open. She wanted small, dark, still and invisible. She would be a worm. Nobody noticed worms, they burrowed into the darkness and everyone forgot about them. Worms were good hiders.
They were yelling again. She hated the anger in their voices and the cruelty in their words. She hated that it wouldn’t stop at yelling. Someone would get hurt. Someone was always getting hurt. She didn’t want to get hurt. That was the biggest thing she knew how to wish for: that it would all just go away, and leave her in peace. Not-hurting was the highest joy she could imagine. She crawled under the bed. Would it work this time? “I am only a little worm,” she whispered to herself.
Once she had seen inside a grave. It was dark there, and she could see a worm burrowing back into the fresh-turned soil. It looked so safe. Maybe dead would mean not hurting any more. She knew where the graveyard was – down the next corner and round behind the little yellow church. She knew she was not supposed to cross the road on her own, but she wouldn’t get into trouble if nobody saw her.
There was a scream, and a crash that sounded like broken glass. Under the bed was not safe enough; it was time to find somewhere better. It was too dangerous to go to the door, they would see her on the way, but if she could just open her bedroom window, and climb onto the sill from the bed it wasn’t far to the ground. All she needed was to take her little blanket so she could cover herself up.
The drop hurt more than she expected, and the world looked so different at night, but it was still a lot less frightening than what she was leaving behind, so she resolutely got up and took slow, careful steps towards the gate. She was just tall enough to unlatch it, and she knew to draw it quietly closed behind her so that it would not bang and be heard.
There was no traffic, and the night was dark and cold and clear. She crossed under a streetlamp, looking both ways as she had been taught, but crouching down low as she ran across the open space. She was safe if she stayed a worm.
The gate to the churchyard was locked, and for a moment that frustrated all her plans. She very nearly cried, but she was used to holding back her tears. Quietness was safety. Then she saw a space under the fence that was just big enough for her to crawl through. Of course, isn’t that what a worm would do?
It was a strange place at night, wanly lit by the streetlights beyond between dark pools of unidentifiable shadow, oddly comforting in its very darkness. It never occurred to her that anything here could be more frightening than what she had left behind; the darkness had always been her friend. She found herself a place on the ground, where fallen leaves had filled in a hollow place beneath the bushes, wrapped herself in her beloved blanket and quickly fell asleep. She could not remember ever feeling so safe before.
It took a moment for the voices to wake her – they were soft and gentle, not at all what she was used to. She was lifted in strong arms, put in a car and taken to what she was later told was a hospital, where more strong, quietly spoken people undressed her, touched her, said sorry when it hurt her, and spoke to each other in slow, sad voices. There were bright lights, and lots of people, but even though she couldn’t be a worm here, she didn’t feel unsafe. They asked her lots of questions and she was proud that she could give them her name and address, and tell them exactly why it was so important to become a worm. One of the ladies, dressed like a nurse, seemed to be crying. That was strange; she’d never seen anyone cry about worms before.
They said she would have to stay in hospital, and then they would find her a new family. She heard them talking to each other using words like “mess”, disaster”, and “too late to save them”. She had no idea what had happened, but it didn’t worry her very much. Someone gave her a big cuddly yellow rabbit, she tasted chocolate, and she learned that there were shows for children on tv, not just grown up stuff. One afternoon a blonde lady who smelled like flowers came and told her that she would be her new mother as soon as she left hospital. “Will I have to be a worm anymore?” she asked.
“No, sweetheart,” said the nurse who had cried who was standing in the room. “I think you’re going to become a butterfly.”
Showing posts with label Stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stories. Show all posts
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Fish and submarines
Another sermon illustration:
If you were to climb into a submarine you might think that, as long as it held watertight, you could glide on down to the bottom of the ocean. Sadly, if you tried to do this you'd soon discover how mistaken you are. Submarines can only go so deep before the pressure of the water crushes them like an empty soft drink can being crumpled by your hand. Indeed, a number of years ago submarine called the Thresher went down too deep. The water pressure rose to the point that the submarines heavy steel bulkheads were crushed. The sub was torn apart, leaving pieces of debris scattered across the ocean floor for searchers to find.
If you want to go down really deep you need a specially designed research vessel shielded by heavy steel armour. Now imagine you jumped into one of these heavily clad research vessels and headed down to the ocean depths. Guess what you'd find? Fish. Fish! Fish with skin just millimetres thick.
How is it that fish with just a thin skin covering can survive the pressure of such great depths, where a submarine with thick steel plates cannot?
The answer is quite simple: fish have equal and opposite pressure inside them. Submarines do not.
The world will try to squeeze us into its mould, to respond to hurts with jealousy hatred and bitterness. But if we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we will have the strength to resist.
If you were to climb into a submarine you might think that, as long as it held watertight, you could glide on down to the bottom of the ocean. Sadly, if you tried to do this you'd soon discover how mistaken you are. Submarines can only go so deep before the pressure of the water crushes them like an empty soft drink can being crumpled by your hand. Indeed, a number of years ago submarine called the Thresher went down too deep. The water pressure rose to the point that the submarines heavy steel bulkheads were crushed. The sub was torn apart, leaving pieces of debris scattered across the ocean floor for searchers to find.
If you want to go down really deep you need a specially designed research vessel shielded by heavy steel armour. Now imagine you jumped into one of these heavily clad research vessels and headed down to the ocean depths. Guess what you'd find? Fish. Fish! Fish with skin just millimetres thick.
How is it that fish with just a thin skin covering can survive the pressure of such great depths, where a submarine with thick steel plates cannot?
The answer is quite simple: fish have equal and opposite pressure inside them. Submarines do not.
The world will try to squeeze us into its mould, to respond to hurts with jealousy hatred and bitterness. But if we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we will have the strength to resist.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Apricots
Something different -- a short, short story I wrote some years ago
“Where’d they come from?”
“Jessica.”
“What for?”
“A gift, I suppose.”
“What’s she want to go giving us gifts for, all of a sudden?”
“She grows them, you know.”
“That’s no reason to go giving them away.”
They sat, one either side of the table, and contemplated the bowl of apricots. It was a focal point of brightness in the dingy room. Once, forty years ago, this kitchen had been her pride and joy with its bright linoleum and its modern, practical, red and white formica table. But the floor had been dulled by the long defeat of years to the colour of tropical mud, and the battered table had acquired the same cheap air as a hundred sleazy cafes. The pot plants on the windowsill had withered (she never remembered to water them any more) and only one of the light bulbs was working (he had been meaning to change the other one for the last two weeks.) The Holland blinds were drawn against the heat of the afternoon sun, and the room smelt of tea that had been left brewing too long, and the beer glass that had not yet been washed up from his lunch. Surreptitiously, each leant a little closer to smell the rich sweetness of the fruit. It was the smell of memory.
“Jessie used to love apricots when she was little”
“Did she?”
“Oh, you remember, George. She used to raid the fruit bowl and the boys were always complaining because she hadn’t left any for their lunches.”
“I remember they were always complaining. Those ones would complain about anything.”
“Including their father?”
“Cheekiest kids around.”
“Not half as cheeky as the Travis kids.”
“They were terrors, those ones. Needed a man’s hand, of course.”
“Of course,” she answered, but he knew she was really laughing at him, and glared at her suspiciously.
“Then again,” she added, when she felt he had glared his fill, “Jessie wasn’t the only one in the family who loved apricots.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember Bellbird Ridge?”
He looked at her blankly for a moment, then his face creased into laughter. “You,” he said, “you and old Bob’s apricot tree! I remember something else too, ”and he shook his finger at her till a blush crept over her tired skin and she giggled, “I remember a girl who couldn’t sneak off to me in the night like we planned because she was so sick afterwards!”
The word girl brought it all back to him. She hadn’t been the only one who was sick, so to speak. While the other guys were playing the field and boasting of conquests which nobody could quite disprove, he had been sick with longing for Em Stevens, the girl from Sydney with her clear soft skin and copper hair. She had been the prettiest thing to come in their direction ever, and he still remembered the awe that had kept him tongue-tied with wonder on their wedding day, the awe that this marvellous person had actually chosen to marry him!
Forty years did hard things to a woman. The copper in her hair had changed to silver, and long years of work and weather had hardened her skin and spotted it with age. Her body had grown sturdy that had once been sapling-slender, and her beautiful eyes had taken refuge behind glasses years ago. Yet she was still quick to smile and always ready to laugh, and she still baked the best scones he had ever tasted. He found himself looking at her as if, after forty years of day in, day out familiarity, he was seeing her for the first time. She caught his eye as he looked her up and down, and he knew that she knew what he was thinking. For a moment he wanted to retreat to the safety of surliness, then, with a rush of feeling that surprised him, he decided he didn’t care.
She read his face with the same long-practised skill that she could demonstrate in interpreting a knitting pattern or a recipe, and was glad that her glasses hid the unexpected misting of her tears. Moved by a sudden impulse, she rose to her feet, proceeded to the window and tugged at the Holland blind. It shot up abruptly, and a stream of bright sunlight flowed into the room, cascading down upon the bowl of apricots. For a long, silent moment they contemplated the rich fullness of them - the swelling globules of orange gold sitting full, round and opulent in the shocking glory of the light. Dust motes danced up and down the sunbeam with the intricate, ceaseless grace of Jacob’s angels going up and down the ladder to heaven, and with the same sense of heavy purpose borne with wonderful lightness. It was as if God dwelt at both ends of the beam.
They shook their heads and looked at one another, each wondering how he or she came to be thinking of God at all when it wasn’t Sunday and they weren’t in church. There was something deeply uncomfortable and vaguely shocking about the notion of God Himself coming into their kitchen. It wasn’t His proper place. There was a tinge of fear in their eyes as they involuntarily sought each other, needing a human ally against this terrifying irregularity.
“It’s only sunlight,” he said, deliberately dismissive.
She was not so easily convinced. Her eyes lingered on the shaft of sun, and the dancing dust, and the apricots glowing quietly in the full splendour of the light. Her eyes softened, and she felt the welling prickle of tears. She knew he would see her crying as a weakness in her argument, but she was too moved by wonder to care. The tears could do what they liked. She thought of trees, and the mysterious way they drew life from the very stuff of earth, how the sap carried the mystery from the deep place of the roots, up though the trunk to the tips of the branches, where it burgeoned forth as fruit. She thought of the sun, nothing but a ball of burning gases, or so she had been taught, yet somehow the thing that all living and being depended on. It seemed to her then that nothing was mere or only, that just beyond their tight brick walls and their carefully pulled down blinds, the whole universe pulsed with terrible life, waiting to break in upon them the moment their defences should falter. Why should her kitchen be immune?
“It’s the glory of God,” she amazed herself by saying.
He wanted to laugh at her, to mock all such fancies as absurdity, but when he focussed his eyes on this blazing wonder in their midst, he couldn’t do it. “I am no stranger to miracles,” he thought, with a sudden surge of awe. He thought back across the long years of his marriage to his wedding night, to their first kiss (under the willows down by Jimmy’s creek), to the time when he had first taken her tentative hand in his and, after an agonising second, had felt her soft fingers trusting curl around his own. He was such a plain, ordinary guy, and all these years she had stayed by his side and given to him and kept on giving! They had never been rich, but they had always had enough for the glad things of life, the birthday cakes and children’s treats and something to share with the neighbours when times were hard. It suddenly seemed to him a crime that he had lived all these years amongst such bounty and never been thankful.
He became aware of his old gardening hat which he hadn’t bothered to remove when he came into the kitchen. Such courtesies had slipped from his life a long time ago. Now it seemed horribly out of place, and he tugged it from his head with an impatient gesture, and bowed his head. Would Em laugh?
She did not laugh, merely smiled softly to herself in wonder. She reached across the table and took his hand. Their eyes met and held across the apricots. “Yes,” he said, “the glory of God has come down to our kitchen.”
Simultaneously they reached out, picked up an apricot and each handed it to the other. A phrase from a lifetime of church going flitted across her memory and she repeated it aloud, “From His mercy have we all received.”
“Where’d they come from?”
“Jessica.”
“What for?”
“A gift, I suppose.”
“What’s she want to go giving us gifts for, all of a sudden?”
“She grows them, you know.”
“That’s no reason to go giving them away.”
They sat, one either side of the table, and contemplated the bowl of apricots. It was a focal point of brightness in the dingy room. Once, forty years ago, this kitchen had been her pride and joy with its bright linoleum and its modern, practical, red and white formica table. But the floor had been dulled by the long defeat of years to the colour of tropical mud, and the battered table had acquired the same cheap air as a hundred sleazy cafes. The pot plants on the windowsill had withered (she never remembered to water them any more) and only one of the light bulbs was working (he had been meaning to change the other one for the last two weeks.) The Holland blinds were drawn against the heat of the afternoon sun, and the room smelt of tea that had been left brewing too long, and the beer glass that had not yet been washed up from his lunch. Surreptitiously, each leant a little closer to smell the rich sweetness of the fruit. It was the smell of memory.
“Jessie used to love apricots when she was little”
“Did she?”
“Oh, you remember, George. She used to raid the fruit bowl and the boys were always complaining because she hadn’t left any for their lunches.”
“I remember they were always complaining. Those ones would complain about anything.”
“Including their father?”
“Cheekiest kids around.”
“Not half as cheeky as the Travis kids.”
“They were terrors, those ones. Needed a man’s hand, of course.”
“Of course,” she answered, but he knew she was really laughing at him, and glared at her suspiciously.
“Then again,” she added, when she felt he had glared his fill, “Jessie wasn’t the only one in the family who loved apricots.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember Bellbird Ridge?”
He looked at her blankly for a moment, then his face creased into laughter. “You,” he said, “you and old Bob’s apricot tree! I remember something else too, ”and he shook his finger at her till a blush crept over her tired skin and she giggled, “I remember a girl who couldn’t sneak off to me in the night like we planned because she was so sick afterwards!”
The word girl brought it all back to him. She hadn’t been the only one who was sick, so to speak. While the other guys were playing the field and boasting of conquests which nobody could quite disprove, he had been sick with longing for Em Stevens, the girl from Sydney with her clear soft skin and copper hair. She had been the prettiest thing to come in their direction ever, and he still remembered the awe that had kept him tongue-tied with wonder on their wedding day, the awe that this marvellous person had actually chosen to marry him!
Forty years did hard things to a woman. The copper in her hair had changed to silver, and long years of work and weather had hardened her skin and spotted it with age. Her body had grown sturdy that had once been sapling-slender, and her beautiful eyes had taken refuge behind glasses years ago. Yet she was still quick to smile and always ready to laugh, and she still baked the best scones he had ever tasted. He found himself looking at her as if, after forty years of day in, day out familiarity, he was seeing her for the first time. She caught his eye as he looked her up and down, and he knew that she knew what he was thinking. For a moment he wanted to retreat to the safety of surliness, then, with a rush of feeling that surprised him, he decided he didn’t care.
She read his face with the same long-practised skill that she could demonstrate in interpreting a knitting pattern or a recipe, and was glad that her glasses hid the unexpected misting of her tears. Moved by a sudden impulse, she rose to her feet, proceeded to the window and tugged at the Holland blind. It shot up abruptly, and a stream of bright sunlight flowed into the room, cascading down upon the bowl of apricots. For a long, silent moment they contemplated the rich fullness of them - the swelling globules of orange gold sitting full, round and opulent in the shocking glory of the light. Dust motes danced up and down the sunbeam with the intricate, ceaseless grace of Jacob’s angels going up and down the ladder to heaven, and with the same sense of heavy purpose borne with wonderful lightness. It was as if God dwelt at both ends of the beam.
They shook their heads and looked at one another, each wondering how he or she came to be thinking of God at all when it wasn’t Sunday and they weren’t in church. There was something deeply uncomfortable and vaguely shocking about the notion of God Himself coming into their kitchen. It wasn’t His proper place. There was a tinge of fear in their eyes as they involuntarily sought each other, needing a human ally against this terrifying irregularity.
“It’s only sunlight,” he said, deliberately dismissive.
She was not so easily convinced. Her eyes lingered on the shaft of sun, and the dancing dust, and the apricots glowing quietly in the full splendour of the light. Her eyes softened, and she felt the welling prickle of tears. She knew he would see her crying as a weakness in her argument, but she was too moved by wonder to care. The tears could do what they liked. She thought of trees, and the mysterious way they drew life from the very stuff of earth, how the sap carried the mystery from the deep place of the roots, up though the trunk to the tips of the branches, where it burgeoned forth as fruit. She thought of the sun, nothing but a ball of burning gases, or so she had been taught, yet somehow the thing that all living and being depended on. It seemed to her then that nothing was mere or only, that just beyond their tight brick walls and their carefully pulled down blinds, the whole universe pulsed with terrible life, waiting to break in upon them the moment their defences should falter. Why should her kitchen be immune?
“It’s the glory of God,” she amazed herself by saying.
He wanted to laugh at her, to mock all such fancies as absurdity, but when he focussed his eyes on this blazing wonder in their midst, he couldn’t do it. “I am no stranger to miracles,” he thought, with a sudden surge of awe. He thought back across the long years of his marriage to his wedding night, to their first kiss (under the willows down by Jimmy’s creek), to the time when he had first taken her tentative hand in his and, after an agonising second, had felt her soft fingers trusting curl around his own. He was such a plain, ordinary guy, and all these years she had stayed by his side and given to him and kept on giving! They had never been rich, but they had always had enough for the glad things of life, the birthday cakes and children’s treats and something to share with the neighbours when times were hard. It suddenly seemed to him a crime that he had lived all these years amongst such bounty and never been thankful.
He became aware of his old gardening hat which he hadn’t bothered to remove when he came into the kitchen. Such courtesies had slipped from his life a long time ago. Now it seemed horribly out of place, and he tugged it from his head with an impatient gesture, and bowed his head. Would Em laugh?
She did not laugh, merely smiled softly to herself in wonder. She reached across the table and took his hand. Their eyes met and held across the apricots. “Yes,” he said, “the glory of God has come down to our kitchen.”
Simultaneously they reached out, picked up an apricot and each handed it to the other. A phrase from a lifetime of church going flitted across her memory and she repeated it aloud, “From His mercy have we all received.”
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