Cleaning at 4 a.m.

Up at 4 a.m., wide awake.  Sigh...well, I must be normal.  This is what's supposed to happen to a grieving person.  I tossed for a while and then decided to be productive.  Somehow I got started cleaning kitchen shelves and sorting coffee mugs (who needs 34 coffee mugs anyway--seriously!).  Then it was dishes and pots and pans and the stove top and the toaster oven (what a charcoal mess that was) and finally polishing the floor.  By 6 a.m. the kitchen was shining and smelled like Windex Multi-Surface cleaner with Vinegar.  I have two shelves I didn't have before.  The floor is slippery from the Pledge.

And I feel better.  I have to admit a certain amount of surprise.  I'm not sure that housecleaning has ever had this effect on me before.  Either it was therapeutic or perhaps I should seek counseling.

Really, it's a page from that wonderful spiritual writer, Barbara Brown Taylor.  Spirituality must be somehow embodied to make any real sense.  We are incarnate people.  As I cleaned I was in touch with Anne in some ways--in touch with her in very physical, earthy and daily ways.  Two of the mugs were hers and have gone to my Annie spot because her lips rested on their rims.  Now I envy those mugs...

But I was also more in touch with me.  Bringing some order to a small corner of the chaos, getting up and doing something, especially something that would please Anne--it helped me to go from early morning grumpy to sunrise wonderful.  And the sun isn't even up yet.

While I worked I listened to one of BBT's sermons--a Lenten message she gave at the Duke chapel last year.  It's a great piece on Abraham's covenant faith and doubt in Genesis 15.  She talked about how it must have seemed to Abraham like he was taking a terrific risk on the promises of God--and they hadn't quite worked out yet.  Then the pots of fire and smoke passed between the slaughtered animals in Abraham's vision.  And he saw that it was God who was taking the chance on Abraham, not the other way around.

Abraham saw that it was God walking the path onto which he invited Abraham.  This is the root of faith, I think.  It is seeing how our God travels the path ahead of us and makes the way safe and clear.  There is nowhere I can go, not even in my grief, where God has not already been and where God will not be.  Even when I cry with Jesus about being so terribly forsaken, that is not news to our God.  He is the one who uttered the cry and defeated the forsaking power of death forever.  God is here and now and forever loving and gracious.  I feel that so clearly this morning.

I do keep asking for some sort of relief from this episodic nightmare.  I don't wonder about God as such, but sometimes I have questions about God's reliability and timing in all of this.  Dare I continue to take the chance that somehow, someday, some of this will make some sense?  Can I wait long enough to find meaning, hope and joy once again?  Suddenly I realize that I'm not the one taking the chance on God.  God continues to take this incredible risk on me.  God continues to go ahead of me, waiting in the kitchen for me this morning.  What a lovely surprise.

Wow, wouldn't Anne be proud of how clean it is!