Fall 2013
The sadness is back. Summer is over. Beautiful Indian summer days have given way to brilliant fall colors and frost is near. The garden that gave us so many hours of enjoyment, a wonderful outlet for childish energy (or slave labor, depending who you ask), and so much wonderful food, is dying--a few last peas and maybe a few more “pickings” of green beans and peppers before frost. Sunlight hours are fewer; the moon is huge and beautiful. Our sixteenth wedding anniversary has come and gone. Hunting season is here. Much to the pride and joy of our oldest son, there is a deer waiting for the freezer already.
And hello, darkness, my old friend...
I am so much better equipped to handle it this year, than last year. I have a much better understanding of this monster that I have fought for so many years. I have an arsenal of weapons to fight with this time around. By now they are battle tested and so am i.
But it still isn’t easy. I know it may never be easy. Some days are good; but many days I still battle the sadness, the darkness, the panic attacks. But it is okay. Jesus died for me...for even me, mind you...He would not have done that if He had not loved me. I am not worthy; but in His love, He has made me worthy. Still shy, still melancholy I am, even on the good days...but finally I am able to be at peace with that, if that is how He made me.
January 2014
And as I battled my way through fall and winter; the joyful chaos of Christmas, once again trying to hold life together and feeling as though I were not succeeding so well; God seemed to come down and wrap His arms around me as my daughter and I watched a movie one night. I wanted to write it down, didn’t want to forget the feeling of being wrapped in God’s love...but the words just would not come. I was more than a bit overwhelmed with life, and while I could still talk if necessary; once again, putting words together took effort. So I gave up on it and just tried to remember...until one night I sat down at the keyboard and typed out a slightly rambling one-sided conversation...uh...i mean, a thank you note, to Sam Elliot, one of the actors who played the scene...and what a relief to be able to talk if only on a keyboard...
“You...tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man...could tear apart. Only faith...poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view the...beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now...ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
Dear Mr. Elliot,
I have always been a fan, from the first time I saw you on the screen. An actor is not so much different from a painter--he tells stories in a series of pictures and scenes, and paints the story for his audience. And you, sir, are one of the great masters of the art. You have one of those unforgettable voices and a knack for timing and making the words and characters come alive. In the grand scheme of things, the film i am referencing may not be your most unforgettable movie; but this scene at the end of the movie Prancer has quite possibly become my favorite movie scene of all time. Sometimes God talks through other people...sometimes He pushes aside that curtain with a story, a film, a poem...and lets us view the beauty and the glory beyond.
I apologize in advance for spilling so much of my personal life as I am going to do, but to properly say thank you I have to explain why it meant so much. So, please forgive me and bear with a bit of background.
A panic disorder is kind of a tough thing to live with. It sort of freezes a person in their tracks when an attack comes on. Sometimes it is possible to tell oneself that one’s fears are not rational...but rational or not, they are very, very real. In the last year and a half I have become well acquainted with how to live with this and how to try to work with it...it doesn’t go away, although there are meds and therapies that do help.
As I write this, it’s winter. It’s the time of year when the days are short and the darkness is long; kids get sick, husbands get sick, roads are often treacherous with plenty of traffic accidents here where i live. My husband works in law enforcement; I have some years of experience working in emergency medical services. Most of the fear; and some of the panic attacks, arise from things I have seen; and things that I know could happen.
So, in this bleak winter landscape, I was battling the unseen foe--because, of course, no one but me can see or know the fears that lay in wait for a time when I am weak. Those battles are fought within. It stings...sometimes people don’t understand. There is glory and honor in fighting battles we can see. No one applauds, no one understands, when you fight the unseen demons simply to get another supper cooked, to finish washing another basket of clothes. To top it off, few days before Christmas, I managed to aggravate an old back injury; I was barely able to walk. I had had surgical recoveries that left me with more mobility. Then my children managed to come down with a stomach bug. In this clever way, God made sure I was firmly ensconced in my couch and flipping channels to find something to watch. And I came across a movie that I had not watched since I was a child.
Two nights before Christmas, my daughter woke me up crying that she was going to throw up. Obviously, there was no sleep for the time being. For her or me. So we sat up with her ginger ale and bucket; and my heating pad and pillows; flipped through Christmas movies and infomercials, and found Prancer on tv. Back in the day, it had been the first Sam Elliot movie I ever saw. (Well, of course. I was 11 at the time--it wasn’t like any sane adult was going to let me watch Road House. :) ) Prancer was the world of the 1980’s forever frozen in a film. It made me a little homesick to be a child again.
I watched tiredly. I was weary from interrupted sleep and the anxiety that kept popping up no matter how faithful I was with my meds; no matter how hard I tried to focus on other things. As I had many times over the past days and weeks, I asked God to please take away my fear. At least enough to get me through the next hours, the next day. At least enough so I could function with some normalcy for my husband and children. God is not a magic genie in a bottle. It’s not like we can rub the bottle with our prayers and get what we want. But He sent His Son to die for us. How can we doubt that He loves us beyond what we can ask or imagine? I was finding that He sent me the strength I needed, at the time I needed it. Not before I needed it, or too little too late...but just at the right time.
So He sent me this movie. What’s up with that? This is a story about a little girl who lost her mom. For a mom with young kids, this taps into one of life’s great fears. We can’t leave these little people motherless...but what control over it do we have? Our times are ultimately not in our hands. I watched with a lump in my throat as Jessica sat in front of her mother’s picture with her tea set, talking to her mama as little girls do. Missing her; needing, for a moment, to remember things as they used to be.
It made me ache for my children; the panic attacks were not great but it had been much worse. At this time last year my children’s mama was a shell of what she used to be. Closed into her own world of pain and fear. In spite of the deep depression I was in, I couldn’t leave them; but I couldn’t mother them. i was surviving day by day, sometimes hour by hour. Just fighting to get better. In the past 12 months I had improved a lot. After long months of darkness, the day had come when I was finally able to engage with life; my husband said I began to talk again. I began to enjoy my kids again. I felt as if I had been asleep for months, and was finally awake. But while I was sleeping, my babies had grown up. My little girl was fast becoming a young lady. My sons were so tall and had somehow become protective of their mom. I was so thankful to be awake again that I tried not to waste too much time in regret of what I had missed. Why lose more? But watching Jessica’s tea party brought it back, that ache that stuck in the back of my throat and choked me. What’s up with that, God? This is supposed to make me feel better? But I was riveted. I followed the story, almost forgetting the little girl across the living room from me, almost becoming a little girl again as i went back in time to when I first saw this movie.
And then, on the screen, Jessica asked her daddy to read from a book her mother used to read to her, an excerpt from the 1897 editorial “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.”
“You...tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man...could tear apart. Only faith...poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view the...beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now...ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
As he finished, and Jessica began talking, i found her words echoing what I had been saying to God in the last weeks and months...
...”Daddy, I didn’t really want to run away. I just wanted you to find me and bring me back here and tell me things were gonna be okay.”
Oh, God, how I want You to tell me things will be okay. Please tell me that the horrible images that pop into my head--patients that i have cared for who died in my arms, the sad and terrible things that have happened to other people, will not find their way to my home. My sweet and self-sacrificing husband and my precious children. My other family and my friends. My dear, dear friend who has a genetic condition that could take her suddenly, without warning, before I even get to say goodbye. Please, Jesus, please tell me things are going to be okay...
“Oh, Jessie, I can’t tell you that. I wish I could, but I know things are always going to be hard around here.”
It was as if God were saying to me, “My precious girl, things will always be hard, here on earth. I wish I could tell you they wouldn’t be, but pain is part of living here. Ever since the garden of Eden, when sin and death entered the world, things will always be hard around here.”
Tears...does God shed tears? Does He weep over His children? Tell them how He aches for their pain?
“...Don’t cry, Jessie. You’re home, honey, and that’s where you’re going to stay.”
And somehow, God seemed to hold me like I was His little girl. He will not let me go.
Sometimes I have asked Jesus, “what do You look like?” Not that I need to know, I just wanted to. It would be comforting somehow, when I feel so alone. I know I won’t really know till I get to heaven and He welcomes me Home. But here, on earth, does He sometimes wear an old Carhartt coat and a few days growth of beard? Does He hold us and cry with us? For me, He did, in the wee hours of Christmas Eve morning.
Later, after the movie was done, I looked up the full text of “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” Here is another bit of it. God is so real, but sometimes I think He speaks most through things that seem so unseen and unseeable...
“Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.”
You might as well not believe in God! But just because we don’t see Him, what does that prove? I don’t understand why life has to be so hard sometimes; why and how pain and beauty are so closely intertwined...I don’t pretend to understand Him or His ways, or why he allows suffering and pain at all. But I don’t have to understand it all to recognize when He is there. Thank God, He lives.
And so, Mr. Elliot, I must say thank you. Thank you for putting your heart and soul into this movie so many years ago. I am 35 now and most days don’t feel like a little girl anymore...but I needed to be one again, just for a little bit. I needed to see a glimpse of Jesus and how He loves me. Thank you for painting the picture for me...
many, many thanks...
(“Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus,” by Francis P. Church, first published in the New York Sun in 1897.) Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus--full text
(Prancer, written by Greg Taylor, directed by John D. Hancock. Nelson Entertainment, Cineplex Odeon Films. Released November 17, 1989.) Prancer wikipedia
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