grace under water, under pressure, under construction
09.18.2010
Susan exemplifies the concept of God at work in the unraveling. She embraces it. If you want a fellow soldier in the bunker with you during an episode of unraveling, Susan’s your girl. She asks probing questions. She draws you to the truth. She envelops you with love and caring. And in a rare gift of humankind, Susan is present to those around her.
Inside at Fellowship Bible Church on Saturday, May 1, Lloyd Shadrach opened the Bible and taught on The Flood. Outside God illustrated. Sixty or so of us weathered the flood to hear about The Flood. On the way home from church, my friend Susan Babcock texted me. “Send Matt over. We are moving furniture upstairs.” I replied, “On way home. Be there in 10 mins.” She sent back, “I don’t have 10 mins.”
Surreal. Is this really happening in Cottonwood? To a friend of mine? Will the water get in her home? Will it get in mine? Where is the rainbow?
It rained Saturday all day. And Sunday ALL DAY. On Sunday evening, we went to see the water line. While we were there, the National Guard drove up in its Amphibian Vehicle. We called our children back from the murky water. We watched with bug-eyes as canoes brought out downcast souls from their homes. Some people embraced these creatures crawling out of the water. Some said, “I’m sorry.” I wept as my friend, Charlie, waded out of the river with his phone held high over his head.
The next day, we awoke to dry ground. The water receded! Now what?!?!???????
Matt and I took off to the Babcock’s house. A small crowd was gathering there. People looked around. What do we do? Charlie and Susan vacillated in and out of presence of mind to pinch-me-this-can’t-be-happening. One second, they had a home. Next one, they did not. How do you make that reality?
Phone calls were made. Experts showed up like J. Mac Brown and John Farkas and Rob Marrero and Brad Taylor. People brought food and water and drills and extension cords. Children pushed coolers with popsicles. The experts barked orders and warm bodies went to work. Some of us (I won’t mention names) sneaked next door and looked through the window to see what the paid experts were up to.
I’ll never forget meeting a man named Matt. He climbed the front steps of the Babcock home with an orange extension cord adorned around his neck and waist like Clint Eastwood’s artillery in A Fistful of Dollars. (I watched it with my Daddy when I was 4.) His drill weighed down his left hand like a Colt 45. I stuck out my right hand to introduce myself. He smiled (no toothpick) and said, “What can I do to help?”
He got right to work marking the walls, cutting the dry-wall, pulling out insulation. When everyone broke for dinner, he asked what time he should return. I mumbled something about being done for the day. He said, “I’ll be back tomorrow.” And he was.
That is one story of sacrifice. One snapshot among millions of the way neighbors served neighbors personifying the “Volunteer” in Volunteer State. Words cannot contain the goodwill spilling over from Cottonwood during flood-week and for weeks afterward.
While the newness has worn off and the mold has grown, many of the flooded are still without homes. Long-suffering, they eek out a life moving from pillar to post. Among these flood-victims are my friends Susan and Charlie Babcock and their beautiful children – Jacob and Anna.
The Babcock family could have walked out of the pages of a J Crew catalogue. Blue eyes blaze forth an inner light unveiling their LIVE SPIRITS. In other words, their spirits are even more gorgeous than their forms. Even as they endure the trauma of a natural disaster, they have exhibited grace and love.
A few weeks ago, I ran into Susan. “Words,” she said, “are so important.”
Really? I told her of my difficulty. Truth is I had hardly blogged since the flood. Who has words for this event? Who can attempt to contain all of it in a blog entry?
“Words,” she said, “are so powerful!” She bore through me with her steel blue eyes. Some wayward path within me corrected on the spot. This is all I had been thinking about words: they are impotent. They cannot contain this. From then on, I plotted to bless her on this blog.
She exemplifies the concept of God at work in the unraveling. She embraces it. If you want a fellow soldier in the bunker with you during an episode of unraveling, Susan’s your girl. She asks probing questions. She draws you to the truth. She envelops you with love and caring. And in a rare gift of humankind, Susan is present to those around her.
Now, don’t think she is a saint. She would not want that. But she is a daughter of the King. She wakes up each day with a desire to live that identity out well. We’ve talked many times about how the unraveling leads us to freedom.
Today or tomorrow, Susan, Charlie and a host of neighbors will begin to move in with couches and crayons, portraits and pots, linens and lamps. Keenly aware of the fact that none of these things constitutes a home, we will nonetheless place these things back into the shell of a house that has been virtually demolished and rebuilt. In the construction vernacular, they were “down to the studs.” Susan will tell you it is a metaphor for an inner process. A flood takes your soul down to the studs. The journey spotlights what is in there: some things to keep, some to cull, some to hold you up.
Sue Monk Kidd, author of Secret Life of Bees, once endured a hurricane. She penned these words. They beautifully convey the unraveling.
It’s as if I am being pared down like a piece of fruit, stripped, peeled, distilled to a simplicity of spirit. The events are exfoliating. They shuck me down to some place that is thick with luminosity and resilience, an enduring inner ground. What comes rising to my lips is the word God, and in the next breath, home. The whole thing is so palpable it carries an actual physical sensation.
I learned all over again that intensely fraying events in life, like hurricanes, sometimes have a particular effect. They plunge us into a mysterious, inward divestiture, a distillation we could truly call sacred, because for a while we know – in a way that we rarely know – what matters. I mean what really matters. We know it utterly. And this unimpeachable knowing ushers us once again to the authentic ground that resides at the heart of life. We seem to understand – if only partially – this is the Ground of Presence. It’s as if the foreground of life, where we spend the majority of our time, fades away, and we are left in the great background that is God, against which all life exists.
Sue Monk Kidd, Firstlight
Asking Why, Wait on God, grace, heroes
Reader Comments (5)
Oh, glory. I'm not blogging today. sending everyone to read this. Thank you, Gigi!
Thank you for writing this. I love Susan and have known her since fifth grade. This is so true of her and brought me to tears reading it. I love the pic you posted!!
Beautiful post and a great reminder to me that words do matter - especially when I sometimes feel like that's all I have to offer - a few paltry words.
Thx for those words. I feel so blessed to know Susan and Charlie and their sweet kids! You have an amazing gift with your writing and insight- so looking forward to reading your blog!
Thanks for sharing this glimpse of grace, Gigi. Words so matter. Susan's, yours... His. John 1:1-5