I wrote that poem a year ago. It was a frigid November night and the moon shone blue on the gleaming road. My boots crunched on the frosty grass, my breath billowed in front of me, and I turned my eyes toward our farm. Warm light glimmered from the windows: the light of living room lamps and candles and the fireplace. Everything about it beckoned me home.
Outside, I was flanked by empty cornfields with stalks shorn six inches off the ground. The lines of Farmer Bob's plow were frozen in place, soon to be covered by a merciless snow. As I passed the fields in their moonlit state, the shadows of the plow-lines burrowed into the distance and disappeared in a sea of similar cuts. The snow, when it comes, fills these gaps. Until the blizzards of late winter cover everything in a blanket of white, the brown fields are striped: A kind of healing in the running scars.
How could I know what was coming? How could I know, when I followed that poem by writing
an Advent series on the problem of evil and infant death, I would lose not one but
two babies – one of them less than a month later? What was I thinking?
I suppose I wasn't thinking. Not about my future, anyway. I was thinking, though, about this world we live in: How the earth itself labors under the pain of brokenness, and how it comforts me, somehow, that the earth and I are broken together.
That night under the moon, the fields were scarred. Bob broke the soil when he took down the corn. But it was the corn that fed the cows all winter; it was the cows that fed us all winter. What if our brokenness, and the scars we carry, is fruitful in ways we fail to see?
Someone recently told me that my acknowledgement of a broken body (secondary infertility) was new to her in the fertility conversation. “Many people want you to say your body isn't broken, as a way to comfort yourself,” she told me. “But you've admitted the brokenness, and somehow, that's more of a comfort.” I admit I'm new to the infertility world. I don't know what conversations have been had or are continuing, and I'm standing at the window with my hands on the pane (secondary infertility comes with its own imposter syndrome). But one thing I can do: I can and will admit that the reason I walk this road is because of a broken body, not because of a malevolent God. For me, owning the brokenness is the path to faith and fruitfulness, even if the fruitfulness doesn't look like it did in years before.
But the story doesn't end with what's broken.
The story ends with what's redeemed. In Advent season last year,
I focused on a beautiful line from Longfellow's “Christmas Bells”:
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.’
When it feels like God is dead, or that He is asleep, the Right is still prevailing. Peace and goodwill are still going forth because Christ is going forth; redemption can't be stopped. Yes, what grew here once is chopped up. But what feels lost and gone is instead transformed to something substantial; something eternal.
Like snow settling in the little ditches of a plowed and frozen field, the goodness of God fills the gaps of a broken heart. Maybe the place you're bleeding is where God wants to come in.
There is still beauty here. There is beauty in the stillness, the quiet of loss; beauty in the ability to be alone with God. There is beauty in the way the sun sets and the moon rises, signifying another day alive. There is beauty in the food on my table and the sound of a tinny piano mid-afternoon. There is beauty in the way we heal, the way we fight for better, the way we grieve with hope.
There is beauty here… settling in the cuts our lives made.
