The Birdhouse
The taste of honey in the dry winter wilderness that God led us to was a spoonful of profound undeserved beauty. The minutes were growing into hours and then days as the spinning stopped and the eyes were steady. It was if the Lord reached down and said, “continue to take refuge in me and I will show you how sweet of a God I am. But the road ahead is still hard and unknown. Look for me everywhere and you will find me.”
It took work to adjust to the new normal of cooking form scratch at every meal for a family of five. There was nothing convenient, little you could “cheat” on, and a large learning curve to climb. Food was chemistry and biology, learning nutrition from a different pyramid angle. The cookbook, a manual, became a daily science experiment with materials, a procedure, and a hopeful hypothesis that it should be edible. Sometimes the results varied, but God always provided the conclusion. There was food on my table three times a day, including a refrigerator of leftovers. I saw God in the stacks of Tupperware that took over my ice box. We ate it all, not wasting a morsel of the sacrificed time and expense.
Grocery shopping became an event–gathering materials, reading scientific labels, and understanding code words like: “natural seasonings”, “glutamate”, and “maltodextrin”. Having the wrong materials would produce the wrong results and I’d had enough of the wrong results. I wanted to continue with Super’s calmer demeanor, hoping some of it would help my body surrender to sleep. It would take another eleven months before those results came in.
We had to re-evaluate our budget, studying what we could afford. We started the journey of healing by faith not knowing how God would provide, but hypothesizing He would. In the center of His will we discovered pain and financial provision, concluding this was the way. We obeyed, cleaning out the pantry of food our bodies could no longer tolerate. Love Bug slowly ate through the sugary snacks while the boys had raw vegetables, zucchini chocolate cake, and homemade jam. I started celebrating the little moments discovering I had a dash of the Pioneer Woman in me after all, as I whipped up my own salad dressings.
Appliances hidden in cabinets found permeant locations on the countertop for daily practice. Three years prior, when we moved into our home, the kitchen was not a suitable laboratory for our future test. The Pink tile, rusted dishwasher, dripping faucet, and leaky sink were demolished. At the time, it seemed like an extravagant luxury to put in brand new appliances, cabinets, and granite countertops. The former missionary in me said I could make a broken kitchen work, arrogantly thinking cooking in kitchens the size of small bathrooms overseas qualified me for the job ahead. My guilt led me to pray that God would use this luxury to bring hospitality and service into my home. He would do both adding a third, healing in the midst of brokenness.
God knew 3 years before I would need a new dishwasher to clean the massive amount of dirty dishes I made on a daily basis to bring healing to my family. He knew 1,095 days before that I would use every inch of granite countertop to roll out love day after day mixed with His grace. He knew 8,760 hours before that a dripping faucet would not be adequate for the kind of healing and cleansing He had in store. He knew 525,600 minutes before that He was providing a new well for us to drink from, so that we could be ready to see Him with eyes clear and steady at the chosen time. The kitchen became the tabernacle, a place to thank and worship through work and pain. He knew it all before I ever did.
We turned off cable TV, ending the subscription, and started watching the DVR of our own family live. We stopped snapping pictures and snapped with our eyes living in the moment, not the memory. Phone plans were decreased, settings turned off, stopping the outside noises and voices that competed for our attention. We didn’t need talking political heads, TV dramas, or do-it-yourself covet-building shows to stir us up, give us an escape, or make us want a different life. We needed to escape into the restful hands of God and each other. We had to learn how to find joy right where we were, in hardship, like Paul learned the secret of being content.
A secret implies a layer of mystery, a quest after the unknown. God’s ways were still unknown to me though I have it scribbled on journal pages I can read at any time. But Paul learned God’s secrets by thinking and looking at beautiful things regardless of his jail-like circumstances. I put my God googles on and looked for beauty in mounting dirty dishes, broken tear-filled mornings, and the safe arms of my husband. I was slowly learning, like a growing sapling, how to live.
Suffering can produce a grief that is too deep to speak–the pain is suffocating. It can squeeze all the air from your lungs leaving you mute as your face cries a river of tears and your body quakes under the agony. Sunday after Sunday we went to church and we stopped asking for prayer. There was nothing new to say, the bags under my eyes spoke wordlessly week after week. It wasn’t arrogance that stopped us from asking, it was the weight. There were no words to describe the density of insomnia that hung over our home as we fought for healing in Super. But sleep or no sleep, I wanted my son. I wrestled with God for him like Jacob wrestled for God’s blessing.
It wasn’t just Super I was fighting for–it was my whole family. I was still nursing the Caboose at the time. His digestive system lagged behind, averaging one bowel movement a week instead of daily. His reflux had reduced, but his skin broke out in hives. After a week of watching and waiting he was still covered in redness. My diet had changed so much that his body was adjusting too. Taking sugar from my diet left little sugar for him, which revealed the problem in his digestive tract: yeast. Though I wasn’t fasting, making the sacrifice to believe God was sweeter than a powder mixed in every food I ate revealed a problem hidden for six months. He’d had thrush at birth, which moved down to his belly creating reflux and constipation. Cutting off the sugary food source made the yeast reveal itself in hives. A prayer answered in a valley of God’s glory. When we treated him for it orally, the hives went away and hello poop! I’d never been so happy for messy smelly diapers day after day.
After a month of eating differently, everyone’s tummies started to feel better. Squish scarfed down lentils as if they were mini M&M’s. “Thank you” rolled off my boys tongues more often, singing a sweet joy to my heart. One sweet joy was a bird house we put together in the backyard. Super had won a DIY wooden birdhouse as a prize for memorizing facts at our Co-Op. Normally DIY was DI-Mommy with tears, battles, and frustrations from Super that left us all exhausted. I secretly hoped this prize would find its way into the trash, though my face revealed nothing. DIY translated into More-Work-for-Mommy and I didn’t need more work. The package included pictures of happy kids painting the wooden box with glee. If we built it, we’d have to paint it just like the picture per my five year old’s request. But the clear eyes and non-spinning body said it was time to try a messy craft again.
I stripped Super down and lumbered outside with paints, brushes, water, and our cardboard box to bird sanctuary bliss. Squish joyfully followed along as joy always came with his package and Caboose took a nap. We slowly read the instructions putting pegs in holes and pushing pieces together. So far so good. He was able to follow instructions without my voice on constant repeat. It was time to paint –a perfectionist five year old’s tribulation and a sensory child’s straight jacket. But this time his arms were free and his fingers were agile. His finger tips were covered in paint, but he didn’t care. I sat back taking pictures with my eyes, watching as he mixed colors, painted angles, and shaded a design as if his hands had always wanted to paint, but his brain hadn’t let him mix the colors. This time he let himself be free because his mind was the most free it had ever been. The smile on his face declared it all, God was still good and He was rescuing my son one day at a time. That day I took a picture.
We tied the bird house on a rope and hung it on our front tree for all the world to see. We announced God’s beautiful song with a fluorescent orange, pink, yellow, and green bird sanctuary. It remained up for months with a few string replacements because I needed it to stay up. Every day that I drove by it was a memorial to my weary soul that God loved my children more than I did. It was an insignia that God was zealous, creative, and intimately involved in our broken lives–my brokenness–teaching us how to sing in the unknown, though not one bird perched on that house. The Creator made His abode there instead, giving us more tastes of honey beyond eye contact, bird houses, and food masterpieces.
