remember

Share Your Story

| Marie Griffith

Each of us has a tale to tell if we would only tell it.
Frederick Buechner

Your story matters. Your little stories, your big ones, the whole story of your life so far.

We learn about ourselves and others and the world through stories. They change us and connect us. Stories deepen our understanding of one another. Stories help us see what really matters…..past what we wear, our age, and the color of our skin. Past what we fix up and try to hide. Stories help us see the heart. A friend recently wrote, “Stories push us to grace.”

But I’m not talking about our Instagram stories, or any of the ones we post to social media. I’m talking about sharing your life. Your life is a story and a collection of thousands of stories and your stories are best told within relationships.

I’m talking about the kind of stories shared with a group of friends over lunch. The face to face kind you share with your teenager because he’s struggling with his faith. Listening to a story that makes you laugh so hard your face hurts. Sharing the stories of triumph or fear, tragedy and faith, joy, failure, hope and love. And especially the stories that bring tears to our eyes.

So no matter how you do it, keep up with your stories. Write them out in a journal. Share them with those you’re close to. Type them out on a blog, whether you publish it or not. Because it’s important to keep track of our stories. Our real stories. The messy ones we prefer no one to know. The ones about living inside ourselves and those that make us uncomfortable.

We keep track of our stories so we don’t forget who we are. So we remember what we’ve seen and felt and lived through. Because when your friend goes through the same thing, you can be there, sharing your story, and making your friend feel less alone. Or you sit there and say nothing at all because you remember the times it was all you needed.

Keeping track of our stories help us remember those things. If we lose track of our stories, we lose the ability to connect with people in the most essential way – heart to heart. We forget how to be with people and try to fix them instead. We forget compassion and empathy.

We forget how it feels.

Jesus was a storyteller and ever compassionate. He was weary and thirsty when he met a woman from Samaria. The woman was an outsider, looked down upon by those around her because of her lifestyle, but Jesus didn’t treat her any differently than he treated anyone else. Possibly for the first time in her life, she didn’t feel shamed. Jesus told her everything she ever did. She was seen and understood and known. The woman was so heartened by this she went into town to tell the story.

She didn’t wait until all her problems were solved or her circumstances changed. She shared Jesus with others right in the midst of her messy, complicated life.

God uses the stories of our lives. The happy times, the messy ones, the ones that almost killed us, and even the ones we think can’t be used. All for His glory.

Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony,……. John 4:39  ESV

Share your lives. Tell your stories. Live like it matters.

She Was Seventeen

| Marie Griffith

I was at the funeral home last night, gathered with extended family I don’t see often. A lot of us together in one place. There were moms and dads, and brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and cousins…..lots and lots of cousins. We’re happy to see each other, even under the circumstances, and we say so.

We smile and hug each other, ask about our families and can’t believe he’s driving already or she’s graduated college. We wonder at the children growing up and getting married and having children of their own. We ask “where did the time go” or say “how time flies.” Funeral homes make us more aware of time. More thankful for it, too.

After we catch up with each other, we remember. We think of the ones who aren’t with us. We think of the good times, maybe the hard ones too. We laugh and share stories. My cousin shared long ago stories about his brothers and sister, of growing up with lots of cousins and playing on Sharrott Hill. Then he recalled something about Mom and told me the story.

IMG_5522He was in 2nd grade and she was 17. She took him and a bunch of her other nephews to see a movie called The Blob. He remembers having nightmares that night. He told me Aunt Jan was always so much fun.

My cousin told me a story about Mom I’d never heard.

I’m glad I was there to hear it.

Passed Down

| Marie Griffith

I have a place in my home where old things are displayed. Worn books, my grandmother’s hurricane lamp, Dad’s horsehair drafting brush, eye glasses and a pipe, my other grandmother’s woven hand fan, and black and white photographs from long ago. All of it sits on an old wooden chest built by my great-grandfather.

Things passed down from one generation to the next. Reminders of who came before and how they lived. Connections with the people who, for better or worse, loved and taught the ones who loved and taught me.

But the most important things passed down to me aren’t books and photos or wooden chests.

“If you don’t know where you’re from, you’ll have a hard time saying where you’re going.”
― Wendell Berry

Pedigree

Green Thumb

| Marie Griffith

My grandmother had a green thumb. I have bright memories of her, or maybe I remember someone else’s memories of her, in the yard with her long sleeves and sun hat, weeding her flower gardens, pruning her roses, or moving plants from one spot to another. She was an award winning rose gardener. According to old, torn and yellowed newspaper clippings, roses were her specialty.

I don’t know if she was ever recognized for her daffodils and irises but they’re beautiful and bountiful. Decades after her work of transplanting, dividing bulbs, storing rhizomes, and tending to them they still burst through the top of the earth.IMG_5050

Patches of irises and daffodils (we call them buttercups) are all over our and the neighbor’s yard which was my grandmother’s place a long time ago.

The cheerful yellow flowers are the first to show their colors as soon as the sun warms the cold winter ground enough. The irises come up later and stand tall. Buttercups are my favorite.

Grandmother’s green thumb is still coloring the landscape.

Done

| Marie Griffith

The past week was the most difficult one of my Lenten journey. Not just in the remembering of the events of Holy Week or from my devotionals in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, but personally challenging in ways I thought were behind me.

That is part of the reason for my delay in writing this post. The words wouldn’t come. I’m unsure they’re going to come the way I want them to now but I will try.

We all know what a hard week feels like. Or months or years. Some of you are in the middle of a hard season and it’s been so long you’ve stopped keeping track.

All I know is that it felt like I was fighting to be okay. Not working hard to be okay. Not fighting to be victorious. I had to fight to be okay.  That meant not giving in to certain thoughts. It meant doing the things I had to do…..and following through with plans I’d made. Fighting meant being honest with myself and focusing on Truth. It meant resting but not isolating. It meant me not asking someone else to do what only God can do and remembering what He’s already done.

“We begin our Christian life by depending not upon our own doing but upon what Christ has done.

When you cease doing, then God will begin.”    Watchman Nee, Day 44, Bread and Wine

And I’m learning I’m able to make it through the hard weeks. Because He is with me.

“We go through that valley of the shadow of death with him. But with him. With whom? Him – the Savior – the Agnus Dei – this figure on the Cross.”  Thomas Howard, Day 36, Bread and Wine.

 

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.     1 Peter 1:3-9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Clear View

| Marie Griffith

Though my daughter and I climbed the mountain for about two hours, our view didn’t compare to this guy’s atop the imposing flatiron.

Blake and I were content to watch others as we rested and shared our snacks.

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Several teenagers climbed a rock below us to see the other side and get a different view.

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High or low, on a mountain or in the valley, the happiest of times, the sad ones, and the scary ones too…..the best view is the one where you look back and see God’s mercies.

And when you can do that…..

you have the best view of all.
Scale

Keep Track

Image | | Marie Griffith

 

He knows us far better than we know ourselves…….that’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.      Romans 8:28 (MSG)

 

How we look ahead has a lot to do with how we look back…..how we keep track of where we’ve come from and the people we’ve known and who have known us along the way.

Who we are now is because of who we were then. The people who raised us and taught us and the ones who hurt us. Our parents and siblings and childhood friends. Aunts and uncles and cousins. Our teachers and preachers or strangers and lovers. All of them had and some still have a part in our lives.

And because God gave us the gift of memory we can’t get around it. That’s just how it works. So it’s important to remember well and truly……the wonderful and happy and the scary and tragic. All the good and all the bad.

A gracious thing happens when you remember well.

The good memories are treasured. They come unexpectedly and make you smile. Sometimes they bring tears but it’s the sweet, cleansing kind.

The other memories….the painful ones and scary ones…..the lonely ones…….the dark ones……all of them can become a source of thankfulness and compassion.

Thankful….because you’ve either made it through or are making it through. And compassion for those who have endured or are enduring the same pain or darkness.

Because we either make our worst memories work for us or they’re going to work against us.

All of them make our story. God takes all of it and uses it for our good.

We just have to let Him.

“It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happened to us over the years, God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later.”      Frederick Buechner

In response to Beloved.

Storms

| Marie Griffith

It was unseasonably warm last night. The air was heavy and the sky dark because the moon and stars couldn’t shine through the thick clouds. The wind was wild and the rain came fast and hard. Then it calmed and the rain drops were big and slow.

The news and sirens told us there were tornado warnings but I could feel it in the air before they told us anything. I wasn’t scared when I went to bed last night but I woke up several times because the thunder was loud and the wind was making the trees hit against the house and the barn was creaking.

The sounds of the storm and the strange low way the thunder rolled reminded me of one night when I was a little girl…maybe ten years old.

I remember Daddy sitting in the doorway on the steps that led to the carport. The screen door was propped open and all the windows were opened too.

Daddy was watching the weather. He said he could feel it in his bones that it would be really bad weather. Probably tornadoes.

He sat there lifting his cigarette to his mouth and taking a deep draw so that the tip of it turned bright orange. The smoke came out of his mouth fast. He rested his hands on his knees then clasped them together while holding the cigarette. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth for another draw. Over and over again until there was no more tobacco to burn. He threw the cigarette down onto the concrete of the carport then stepped on it. Then he bent forward to comfort the dog. Bojo stayed at Dad’s feet even closer when there was a storm.

The rain wasn’t heavy but the big trees all around our house were moving wildly because of the wind. Then the rain and the wind stopped and it was calm. The lightning flickered across the sky and the thunder rumbled deep and long and far off.

But I wasn’t scared.

Daddy was watching the weather.

 

 

Unusual

Quitting

| Marie Griffith

The sound of the doorbell startled me. When I opened the door the man asked for Wayne. Before I answered him, the man asked if I knew him. He had a familiar smile but his face was aged and different. And the voice……..the voice was familiar too. For the next few seconds my brain tried to match a name with the kind face and his recognizable voice.

Before I could make the match he told me who he was. I was glad to see him and especially happy that he came by to see Daddy.

Daddy would have been thrilled for the visit. The man was shocked and saddened to hear that Wayne, my dad, had passed away. After he gave his condolences, we caught up.

It was a strange mixture of emotions…….remembering what was, learning what is, and trying to summarize thirty years of life in thirty minutes or so.

Then he asked the most amazing question. “Did your dad ever stop drinking?”

Oh how I wish he’d have known the man that Dad had become. The gracious man that cared for Mom so tenderly while working his job from his home office. The man that overflowed with generosity…….with his time and resources. The man that forgave so easily because he knew he’d been forgiven so much.

Daddy stopped drinking in 1990 or so. Never took another drink.

He quit to save his life.

His quitting saved our lives.

And who knows what else his quitting did. Whatever it did, it was good and right.

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.          

                            1 Corinthians 15:10

Names