The Woman Who Talks with God

“People are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God,

speaking and being spoken to.” Dallas Willard

One of my dearest friends is a Woman Who Talks with God. She is not necessarily on her knees in a closet or screaming prayers from a corner sidewalk. She is conversational, I believe, in a way of someone who loves another with all her heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And more importantly, she knows she is loved passionately and without judgement by the One she loves.

Being soaked in this knowledge infuses her with an innate ability to love lavishly. Her metaphorical table is constantly being set with her best plates and drink glasses whenever she meets a new person. She wraps the stranger and the friend in a warm embrace and she listens deeply and comforts richly. To know her is to know love.

When she says in conversation, “I was talking to God,” you can trust she was, in that constant casual way of friends who, because they know each other so well, seek constant communion. The fact that God speaks back should surprise no one.

It never surprises me.

What does surprise me at times, though, is the depth of insight that she receives from the Creator of all things. There are times that the word spoken “just for her” is so profound that it transcends just her own life circumstances.

And I am still reeling from her last communication received in her life of prayer conversation.

My friend has been going through a relational situation for years with someone she loves with all her heart…someone whose life is characterized by issues beyond his own control in many ways. Someone for whom she would willingly give up her life.

Someone for whom she has literally endangered her own health and safety.

Because she has felt so helpless to know what the “right thing” is to do, she has been sharing her heart with God for a decade or more, wanting so badly to discern the best way through. She has not asked for the struggle to be lifted, because she is a woman who never gives up on anyone. A woman of great courage.

But she has sought counsel and direction from an omnipotent Creator.

A few days ago she shared that in her latest time of conversation, she kept asking for help in knowing how to proceed and kept listening for a answer that would help her best serve her commitment to love no matter what the circumstances. And God, as always came through.

You need to let him go, or he will never find his way to Me.

That was it. And that was all that was needed. Because this woman, whose capacity to love is limitless, would never have enough love to equal the love that was waiting in God’s embrace. Because sometimes human love is not enough.

And sometimes, the greatest act of love is to let go.

Ever since our phone call, I have been haunted by that Sacred voice speaking into my own life. Who are the people in my life that I love too much to release to a greater, more redemptive love? What are the situations that I seek to control out of the best intentioned love that need to be released to a universal source whose wisdom has no boundaries?

And what is it in me that is drifting in uncertain, treacherous waters that needs to be released to the One who calls the sea to be still.

As Rilke always reminds me, it is going to have to be enough for right now to love the questions…to let them permeate my heart and cleanse my soul.

But in my wondering, I was reminded of a conversation with an elderly woman of great wisdom years ago who had endured so much in her family. She shared openly of her struggles with various children and a less than perfect husband. I asked her how she handled all of her concerns. Her answer was immediate.

I put ‘em in a box and give ‘em to Jesus.

My friend has been given this insight. And since she shared her wisdom,

I am out searching for a large enough box.

An unillustrated life.

My daughters were grown, their rooms were vacated, and the possibilities of developing a creative life again inspired me to consider how I might decorate one of the rooms to make a dedicated space for writing. Seeking inspiration for my newly acquired home office, I had scoured old boxes and files and crudely stapled and pinned evidence of my former life as a musician and songwriter on an entire wall of the room.

But I was still deep into my real life of teaching, and rather than encouragement, staring at that wall haunted me with a pressure to create I could not muster. I remember standing in front of that wall of memories and having a “Come to Jesus” moment with myself.

That life was my past.

Those memories were too raw for me. To move forward and not live in a constant state of discontent, I had to exorcise that former life from my heart. I stared at the images and letters on the wall one last time. Then, one by one, I slowly ripped every memory from that wall, shredding them as I did, leaving a blank wall dotted with the tiny remnants of push pin holes and staples.

And I said goodbye to my old life.

But somewhere in the back of my brain, I took comfort in knowing that there were keepers

of those shared memories living their lives in places throughout the country. Perhaps, they, like I, had moments in their mundane lives where they recalled those days of life filled with with creativity and laughter.

Perhaps they, like I, recalled days filled with the dark shadows of lives lived without common sense and boundaries, which often left a trail of human misery in its wake.

But you know how it is.

Mostly the memory of misery dilutes with time, and so, over the years, I had been sporadically trying to locate old band mates through social media, usually in moments of boredom or discontent with the daily grind of life. I wanted to reconnect to those memories…to find someone to relive the stories with.

Of all the musicians I had worked with, there was one whose image loomed large. He was inordinately talented and sadly addicted, a flaw that had kept him from true greatness. He was charismatic on stage, unless the alcohol took over. His passion ran deep for music, for drugs, for alcohol, and for just about any other vice.

But I loved that guy.

Over the years, Tim and I talked about how cool it would be for them to meet. My husband had heard some of his work on recordings and came to view him with the same admiration I did. I envisioned our getting together, playing music, and getting caught up on decades of lives apart.

My research was sporadic over the years as work consumed all my energy. But one Saturday in my fifties, I decided to actively pursue finding him so Tim and I could plan a reunion trip. The rabbit trail I followed was time consuming, hitting dead end after dead end until I saw one article with his name in the headline.

The headline, dated three years prior, announced to the world that he had died at 58.

My heart exploded. A chasm opened up and into it dropped all the corroborating evidence of that old life, the life that floated in a sea of possibilities and the life lived outside the lines. Gone was the corroboration of nights of music in biker bars and drinking vats of cigarette flavored coffee at the local IHOP while the sun rose over the plains of Colorado. Gone was the corroboration of long drives with a car crammed full of sleepy musicians and instruments, just me and the moon awake and a trucker's radio station blaring to cover the sound of their snores.

Gone the corroboration that there was a time when the music was all that mattered and being broke for the love of the muse was a badge of honor.

It's a bit like going to your high school reunion and finding out you are the last one standing. With whom do you swap tales of memorable moments? With whom will you muse, "remember when” and then share the tears and laughter such reminiscing brings? With whom will you imagine that you still have what it takes to do that again?

At the time, I wished I could go back and piece together those torn photographs and memorabilia ripped from the walls of my home office. The pictures told the tale of a life lived passionately and, sometimes, recklessly in the pursuit of creativity.

But, as Thomas Wolfe stated, you can’t go home again. That was a home that lived its purpose. And my life now is lived not in the memories of what was, but in moments of what is…

A quieter creativity floods my life now, free of the tyranny of schedules and unembumbered by the weight of bad decisions. It is soaked in a desert landscape that fills my life with inescapable beauty and inspiration.

And for that, I need no pictures on the walls.

The addiction of adventure.

My friend is 82. She’s travelled the world already. For her, a rich internal life characterized

by a deep curiosity is adventure enough. It made me wonder when she started

to recognize her own contentment with smaller things. Nadia Boltz Weber

Adventuring has been an avoidance strategy I have used my whole life. Perhaps it was born with me in my life as a military brat…the moves, the having to get comfortable with being unsettled, the never knowing when the school would change or new friends would have to be made.

Friends I made along the way shared rich memories of mom at home, pre-school, church… all American things. In my youngest memories swirled the smell of tatami mats and sliding rice paper walls, art deco fish flags and dancing dragons whose movements were punctuated by Taiko drums. My friends had memories of trikes and car rides. My three year old brain stored memories of the U.S.S. Gaffey and the deck chairs as we crossed the Pacific from Japan to San Francisco, in calm and in storm.

Other kids’ moms cooked and cleaned and welcomed them home from school. Mine started her own business and set us out into the world unsupervised. Other families had friends for dinner, or for cards or for barbecues in the backyard. In eighteen years in our family home, we never had a visitor, except for the day my dad was killed by a drunk driver and the lady next door brought over a foul smelling casserole to comfort us in our grief. It was literally the first time we had exchanged words.

That is not to say mom was not social. While my dad did his soldier thing and then went off to run a theatre at night, she reveled in collecting characters at work, eventually making them part of “our work life”. I say our, because she made child labor a major part of her children’s existence when we were old enough to help.

While our friends played games with neighborhood kids, my younger brother and I would be collating some mimeograph job having contests to see who could do it faster. And there were stuffing envelopes contests and licking envelopes contests, being careful to not have the sharp thin edge cut into our tongues.

The adults in our lives were introduced to us at her place of work and most had recently stepped off the greyhound bus from a station across the street, a street once walked by John Steinbeck in our shared home town.

There was the older man named John, who was a Watcher from Mars, here only to observe those of us on Planet Earth. His stories about outer space were shared as I stood carefully watching the mimeograph barrel circle rhythmically, hoping for no jams.

And there was Erickson, the escapee from a mental institution who lived with Lilly the bird lady in a Miss Haversham style home. The curtains were always drawn against the light and her parakeets fluttered in the dusty light from curtain rod to curtain rod. In a short amount of exposure, I came to learn he saw dead people and had conversations with spirits no one could see. He haunts me still.

It seemed for most of my life I was trapped in situations that wrapped me in a state of dis-ease and from which I could not escape, only disappear. Except for family adventures in nature. On those occasions, I could escape because the first thing my parents would do once we arrived was disappear, leaving four children to be free of any expectations. Only then did my life seem safe.

I couldn’t run from my life then. But set free as an adult I could, and I did. Whenever some growth opportunity reared its painful head. Whenever I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Whenever I felt my life on the edge of conflict, I moved. I called it adventure.

And thus, adventure became a distraction. From the reality of my circumstance.

But these days, the siren’s call lands on ears damaged by time. The lure of dotted white lines has disappeared in the rear view mirror. Everything I ever have wanted to see, I think I have seen. Everything I wanted to do, I have done. And as the landscape of my heart has undergone exploration and renovation, I have grown weary of my addiction.

And so, I begin a new journey…to stay rooted in one place…

to find contentment in the small things

Because it is in the small things that hope lives... the sun in the morning appearing with its Ta Dah rays over the Santa Rita mountains….a drop of dew clinging delicately on a tiny flower in a jungle of cactus…a sunflower with its face turned towards the morning reflected in a small lake.

Here, in this desert place, I find adventure in turning over stones as prehistoric creatures with frantic legs flee from the light. I move agave plants from one location to another one I have deemed more suitable. But I take great care to keep the siblings together, as I feel they have become accustomed to one another’s sharp embrace, and I cannot bear to separate them. I move gravel from one place to another and back again reveling in the sound of its sharp stone edges hitting the the metal blade of the shovel.

So, like Nadia’s 82 year old friend, I am making friends with small moments.

Around me, war swirls across the globe, and here, in our own borderlands, the dance of hope and the finality of death weave in and out of the dry, sharp landscape of the desert. Sirens scream in the night, and though I hunger for a sense of peace, it eludes me in the onslaught of cruelty that pervades our human landscape.

I feel helpless. I have no where to turn.

And so, in my inadequacy and the paralysis of my heart, I turn to these stones, these pebbles, these plants. I dig in the dirt in the morning heat, and I stand under the night sky and soak in the stars. I cry out to God in the darkness and beg for release of the suffering of this world. For healing. For peace.

And then in the morning light, like Sisyphus of ancient lore, I begin again, finding small things to love and to move again, from one place to another.

In the face of such tragedy bombarding our hearts in the world today, one might find this work of little value or consolation.

But like Camus, I believe that in this never ending task I am learning that “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart…and… imagine Sisyphus happy…”

And in these small moments, so it is with me.