Part Two
Coffee cups on the counter, jackets on the chair
Papers on the doorstep, but you're not there
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
But you're missing
-Bruce Springsteen
Christmas Eve, 2002
Sarah and her family settled into the sixth pew from the front, on the right side of the church (their traditional spot) for the Christmas Eve 11:00 p.m. service.
Sarah did what she always did - she played her part, and if she said so herself, so did it pretty flawlessly. She had come to think of this as her "World's Greatest Actress" mode. She had gotten pretty good at this over the past year and a half.
She could continue to function, but no one really knew how disconnected she was. She could even carry on a conversation. But for her, the conversations were like lines in a script that she did not understand - something to get through. She tried hard not to make it too obvious when she stumbled on her lines.
Sarah wondered how she had ever gotten though freshman year, and now here she was halfway through sophomore year. Strangely, she had gotten better at school. She wondered whether her newfound ability to shut the world out had somehow helped her in her schoolwork. She seemed better able to focus and concentrate. When everyone else was distracted by everything going on around them, Sarah found that she had an advantage. For the first time in her life, she was getting mostly As and Bs – and without all that much effort. She simply knew that she had to - after all, it was part of the script.
When she thought about it, she understood that her recent school accomplishments were really an inextricable part of the "Actress Sarah" mode. If she could only act out her part in every way, and do everything in the script, and do exactly everything that was expected of her, then maybe things would be OK.
Church was a part of the script as well. Her mother seemed to get a lot of reassurance from the fact that Sarah continued to go to church, so Sarah figured that she might as well continue to go. As a matter of fact, Sarah now enjoyed church quite a bit, because the scripting for the most part was quite exact. She liked having her part actually written down; it even further reduced the necessity of any thinking or spontaneity.
Sitting in the church on Christmas Eve, Sarah surveyed the bulletin, and looked ahead to identify the songs she would need to sing and the responses she would need to make. She carefully noted the numbers of the songs and used some of the other pieces of the bulletin - each year it seemed like more and more miscellaneous pieces of paper were being added - to mark the place for the songs so she would be prepared.
Having completely her preparation, she sat back to let the script unfold.
There were two parts of church that Sarah wished they would change. First, right after the Prayer of Confession, there was a part for "silent confession." Sarah knew from when her father used to be liturgist that in the liturgist instructions, it said to pause for up to 30 seconds for this silent confession. Sarah thought that 30 seconds of silent confession was pretty near an eternity. She was very thankful that most of the liturgists didn't go anywhere near that long. This was simply too much time to go without a script.
" ...and now let us join in silent confession and acknowledge our failures to be faithful to God's plan for our lives."
Sarah silently began counting the seconds off. By the time she got to 10, it had already seemed like an eternity had passed. Despite all of her efforts to keep focused on the counting, she found herself drifting off.
Images of the past year came flashed through her mind. She thought back to their last conversation - if you could call it that. She thought a bout the packed church during the funeral and all the weeks of insanity that followed. She drifted back to last Christmas - the first since the crash. She could feel the emptiness in the pit of her stomach, an emptiness that just would not go away. An emptiness that could only be put on hold by sticking to the script.
She came back from her thoughts with a start as the liturgist ended the silent confession with, "Amen." She silently cursed the extra long period of silence; this was not what she needed, especially on Christmas Eve.
Almost right on the heels of the silent confession came her second worst part of the service, the passing of the peace. You were supposed to just say, "Peace be with you," and then the other person says "And also with you:" But you could never quite tell who was supposed to go first, and who was supposed to reply. In addition, Sarah could feel the unspoken pity each time she shook a hand. Sarah was sure that no one really knew how she felt. She tried throughout the whole exercise to maintain her actress front. '
As the choir followed the "Peace" with some Christmas carols, despite her best efforts at maintaining her usual control, the carols triggered memories in Sarah.
She thought back to some of the movies she and her family had always liked to watch. For years - until this Christmas and last year—they had watched "It's a Wonderful Life" on Christmas Eve. She had always liked the idea of Clarence, the guardian angel who protects the main character, George Bailey, and eventually helps him understand that his life really was good.
There was a lime when Sarah liked to imagine that t here was some sort of guardian angel looking after her. Someone who would mostly leave her alone, but would pop in if she was about to do something really stupid or if she was really upset.
There were a lot of things that got very unclear after the airplane that her Dad was on crashed into the Pentagon. But for all the things that got hazy, one thing quickly got very clear for Sarah. If she ever had a guardian angel, he or she had checked out when she really needed one.
Sarah thought back to everything that happened after the crash. On September 11, Sarah had been watching everything on television that was going on at the World Trade Center along with the rest of her classmates. When the report first came on about the crash at the Pentagon, Sarah had at first even forgotten that her Dad was flying that day. As soon as she heard that the plane had taken off from Dulles, and had been headed to Los Angeles, she knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. When the principal showed up at the door of her classroom and asked her to come with him, that's when it hit home.
It had seemed like the merry go round that followed would never end. It was during the endless phone calls and visits and the press coverage that Sarah first realized that she was not really present at any of these activities. It was like she was an actress, acting out the part of the grieving daughter. She stood with her mother and her sisters and tried to be brave and thank the endless parade of people who cared about what she and her family were going through. They really did care, but it was all too much for Sarah. In order to get from one day to the next, she needed to be "there" for her mother and her family. But in order to preserve her sanity, she also needed to be "not there."
Oddly enough, it wasn't until after the anniversary commemoration that her Dad's death really hit home. There were many images that flashed through Sarah's mind as she thought back to that day. But one stuck with her. The Washington Post had done a special article one year after the crash in which they listed all of the victims. Each short article featured a picture of something that was important to the person. Sarah's mother had put in the paper a picture of a small piece of shell, with bits of purple at the edges. When she allowed her mind to wander, Sarah often thought about that article.
As the minister began the sermon, Sarah almost visibly jolted as she came back from wherever she had gone. After reading the traditional Christmas story from Luke, the minister began his sermon.
God doesn't often use the people we think God should use. God doesn't often act in the ways we think are most sensible. The Scripture is full of testimonies of people who were completely taken aback when God revealed to them what the plan was for their lives.
Abraham's wife Sarah was ready to enter her nursing home, when God announced that the plan for her was to have a baby. All she could do was laugh.
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God encounters Moses through a burning bush and reveals that the plan is for him to lead the Hebrew slaves from the powerful Egyptians. Moses probably wanted to laugh at this idea too because to him it seemed like a plan that would surely fail. Moses replies with excuses as to why this is not a good idea.
In the New Testament, God encounters Saul who is the lead persecutor of the Christians and turns him into the Paul, the lead apostle and evangelist to the Gentiles.
And of course the entire New Testament tells of the most surprising and seemingly crazy plan of all. That the Creator of the universe would be born to a poor, Jewish teenage girl, and would come to dwell among the creation so as not to destroy it, but to love and to redeem it.
At the mention of the Mary, Sarah suddenly thought back to Anne and the journal. She hadn't even thought about Anne or the journal since the accident. It was almost like she had blacked out the whole experience. It had taken weeks before everything got back to normal at school after the funeral, and by that time, no one really even cared that Sarah had never turned in the journal. They were all so conscious of not doing anything to upset her that they never even asked her about it.
She wasn't even sure she knew where it was, and for that memory gap, she was thankful. She had to laugh at herself for having been such an idiot with that journal. It embarrassed her now to think that she actually had imagined herself writing back and forth to Anne. What on earth had she been thinking?
Thinking about the journal again led her close to the place that she had avoided for the past year and half. She thought fleetingly about the letter she had left for her father, but then quickly refocused on whatever was going on in the sermon in the hope of diverting her mind to something - anything - else.
In the stories of Scripture we are reminded that this is the way God works - it's almost always a surprise. It almost always comes in a way that we cannot predict.
And not just on the large scale, but even in our own lives. Sometimes I wonder how Mary actually heard the call of God.
Did she tell anyone about it? Did she tell Joseph?
Did it come as a surprise to her?
Did she ever think, "No way. Not me. "
I know this has been true in my own life. Like all children, I remember having many dreams of the future and what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I've got to tell you, being a Presbyterian minister was about the last thing I saw in my crystal ball. And not just when I was a child, but also when I was in high school and college. It wasn't until my second year in seminary that I got a glimpse of the vision that this might be where God was leading me.
And what I've learned from this experience is that you never really know where God is going to lead you. And often when you think God 's leading you somewhere, there is usually some kind of a turn along the way. The journey is always somewhat of a surprise. And I've learned that if there is anything we should expect, it's that God will work in unexpected ways.
Sarah reflected that that certainly was true - you never know where God was going to lead you. She also reflected that if the past year and a half was part of some magnificent plan, it sure was a pretty crappy plan. How about pick someone else to be the recipient of all of this "planning?" God had certainly worked for her in "unexpected ways." Unexpected was an understatement.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself struck down by some virus going around. And while I was lying around the house one day, I came upon an interesting episode of Oprah.
It began with Oprah talking to the audience one day after the show. And a woman stood up, her name was Peggy Plunket, and she said in her sweet, southern accent that I won't try to imitate, "Oprah, everyone from my town just loves you. And you've just got to come visit us sometime in Nakatash, Lousianna.
It was the nice, expected thing anyone might say to a celebrity. What Peggy Plunket didn't know was that Oprah thought it'd be fun to surprise her and take her up on her offer to visit. So the episode showed Oprah traveling down to the small town of Nakatash, Louisiana and knocking on Peggy's door with no warning. And Peggy opened the door, and after she got over her initial shock, she invited Oprah in and they spent the day together.
Oprah played with Peggy’s two little black dogs. Oprah answered Peggy’s phone calls. She dined with Peggy at her favorite restaurant where she drank four glasses of the traditional southern almond tea. And for that one day, as Peggy and Oprah walked around town together and as everyone slowly found out just who had come to their small town, Peggy felt like she was a celebrity.
And as I watched this show, I thought that's kind of like the way it is with God. God sometimes shows up in our lives in totally unexpected ways. Just as Peggy asked for something she thought would probably never come true, sometimes we find that the prayers we pray asking for God to show up in our lives, really do come true. And I think that God, like Oprah, loves to surprise us. God loves to surprise us with coming in unexpected ways that knock us off our feet.
Thinking about Oprah as something of a guardian angel to this goofy Peggy Plunkett made Sarah think back again to all those years of watching "It's a Wonderful Life" with her family. Wasn't that the greatest joke of all? They had all sat there, year after year, getting teary at God coming into the life of George Bailey through Clarence. Where was her message from God? Where was her messenger?
She felt like standing up and screaming at the minister, "OK. Haven't we all been through enough? God knocked us all off our feet. Where is He to pick us back up again? I'm listening. How about a message? Just a clue? How about some sort of guardian angel for us? How about sending Oprah if she's not too busy?"
"Where were you or Oprah when I wrote that damn letter to my father? Were one of you too busy to stop by and maybe break my pen or my arm or something? How could you let me write that and then never have a chance to explain it? Or take it back? Or apologize? Even Anne in the diary had a chance to explain herself to her father once she wrote her letter. Everybody's blabbing about Christmas and Your presence and all that nonsense. How about a sign? Something? Anything?"
Sarah felt herself shaking slightly and realized that if she did not get back - and quickly - to being the consummate actress, she was going to make a complete idiot of herself. She took a deep breath and refocused on trying to make it through the rest of the sermon.
Now of course, God often doesn't come in the ways we always want. The cure may not be found. Our loved one may continue to suffer. Loved ones will die. Circumstances may not always get easier.
But if we just pray for eyes to see, we can be assured that God will be there in the middle of that stressful time or that difficult situation, whatever it is - often in ways that we least expect, God will surprise us with God's coming.
Our prayers will not always take the form of the neat lists of polite requests that we remember from our childhood. The anguish of a broken heart cannot always be expressed in a neatly ordered list. Sometimes our cries seem irrational; even angry. But God knows what is in your heart and He will not forsake you.
The New Testament reads, Christ will come like a thief in the night. The only promise is that it will come as a surprise. We can expect to be caught unaware. Christmas is the perfect time to practice looking for God as God comes in unexpected ways. Be still and listen for God's messengers. Amen.
After her near brush with disrupting the entire Christmas Eve service - now wouldn't that have been a nice addition to all of the holiday plans of those from out of town - Sarah refocused on staying on calm. On staying in control. And on sticking to her part in her family's tragic play.
The Journal