Exist

Pete pulled out an L’Engle book for me last night, A Circle of Quiet. Diane Cole from USA Today describes this book: “L’Engle’s chronicle is filled with a sense of the adventure of life, as well as with an awareness of the terrible surprises that lie in wait for all of us… [A work] by turns joyous and melancholy, painful and touching.” She describes my own life too, not just this memoir, and I have to admit to a tear or two last night, wishing L’Engle hadn’t died last year (or was it the year before?). She is someone with whom I think I could have been quiet, and I know very few people like that.

L’Engle writes, “… I’m apt to get drunk on words, to go on jags; ontology is my jag for this summer… Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.”

When you get sick and go two years collapsing undiagnosed and then receive misdiagnoses and go through car accidents and get your heart broken and have babies and lose loved ones – you learn a lot about life and about how it ought to be lived. You learn in the not-able-to-live that there is life to be had, and that you weren’t placed here to become something else. You were born to be. You exist. This is God’s image in you, that you simply ARE, and you are conscious of it.

This is why Gospel means so much to me, why Jesus’ death and resurrection are the battle cry for my being. In Christ, I am a new creation; there is nothing holding me back from simply being before God. Like a child, fully in whatever moment I am in.

The moments stretch out, and time means more than it did when I was racing it. It is almost like taking tea with God, and we sit near one another with eternity to figure “us” out; our relationship exists in the ease of grace. In my pain, I am all too aware of how life turns, too sure of its inevitability – but finding this rest here, now? I begin to understand how to love life and be loved by Him in it; I begin to see how I may love Him too, in spite of the fact that I cannot do, only be.

I feel the ache in my body, bugs and arthritis and pain shooting up and down and everywhere, and I lose my will to pull myself up by my bootstraps and fix things. I watch life play out around me and invest as I can, laughing where I can, leaving control well enough alone.

I am breathing. I exist. And the doing, that can be set aside for now. After all, I suspect that He changes us most in our being.