Spring in our Mouths

It rained hard last night. I was on I-40 coming home from a women’s gathering when it was the hardest. Spring is coming, let it rain.

“SPRING FORWARD”, read the name on the gathering invitation. The soft ground with its now reaching henbit and dead nettle know that spring is opening her sleepy eyes once again. They will race to their heights, sprawl their lovely selves out and raise the humble, old ground into a lavender song. Welcome home, sweet friend. I’ve missed you. Whatever is hard and brittle you soften and expand. Whatever is asleep like death rouses and stands up again. We hold fast in your moving tempest, the williwaw will not carry us away.

When I found my voice atrophied, my heart had atrophied too. Get back into your hole, Rhonda. Close your stupid mouth. Just do what you’re told. My articulations, I loathed. So ungracious I was to my own self. I couldn’t see my royal rebirth, a daughter of a king now, all I could hear were the thoughts of that villan-cast-down-from-heaven. He sounded so much like me, pontificating and accusing. His voice wanted to define me and take me far from goodness and mercy– if it could.

I sat in the chair of the first women’s meeting for me, a weekend retreat 7 years ago. It had been a hard year. A bowl of water and a pitcher were at my bare feet and a towel around my neck. The friend at my feet said my full name with a certain tender tone, “Rhonda Drain”, punctuating the end when she began to weep. As the water poured over my bareness, I heaved at the swell quickly rising from my chest and I wept hard, too, in front of them all because……my name, her tears, my “smallness”, the hard year and my bare feet. The moment was so humble, so holy. Something was being put to death inside of me, drowning around my toes, something that deserved to die, and something else was coming to life. The winter was ending. Spring was a’coming. No one had ever washed my feet before. I would not allow them to.

But she had washed my feet, and she had also blindly poked at my atrophies, not knowing all of my heart-fountains were long closed. She asked me to speak at her retreat. What was THIS rousing? Didn’t she know how small I was? How loathsome my words were? I knew. I was the smallest of them all. Yet, I did speak, feeling the shame afterward, having emptied myself some. I could run back into my hole now. The voice was already chastizing me, demanding my presence back inside. But that was really nevermore to be.

Isaiah tells of the path of the redeemed as he sees with spiritual eyes. I’ve seen it too.

Imagine the wilderness whooping for joy,
    the desert’s unbridled happiness with its spring flowers.
² It will happen! The deserts will come alive with new growth budding and blooming,
    singing and celebrating with sheer delight.
The glory of Lebanon’s cedars and the majesty of Carmel and Sharon
    will spill over to the deserts.
The glory of the Eternal One will be on full display there,
    and they will revel in the majestic splendor of our God.

Isaiah 35:1-2

Every year she asked me, and every year my voice filled until one day it was replete with life, a desert turned to spring–as if spring was in my mouth. Those early zephyrs blew out all of the atrophy within. One day I knew I, too, was like a tree in this gorgeous forest of believers, these metaphoric oaks of righteousness, those Lebanon cedars…not perfect, but fully HIS, and fully belonging to one another. I stood in the congregation singing one Sunday, my voice joining as one, maybe for the first time. I held out my limbs beside them, holding out my offering of fruitfulness to our dear King Jesus who had himself, planted all of us. Now I could tell my tall tales of His kindnesses with no shame at all. We are all meant to–desert the desert and speak springtime into our world. It just took me a very long time to catch up with the rest of you.

With limbs still out,

Rhonda