The thunderstorm never really came.
We had been preparing for it since last night.
We closed the windows before bed. The sky had turned an eerie orange. After the water overflowing in our bathroom earlier this week soaked much of the rug beside our bed, we weren’t particularly interested in inviting any more water into the apartment.
The fans ran all night.
By morning, the rug was considerably drier.
And then the storm moved somewhere else.
Into us.
It started before we had even finished saying good morning to everyone.
What if we have to go through coordinated entry?
What if we need a case manager?
What if we can’t afford to stay here?
What if we have to get rid of things?
What if we have to move somewhere unfamiliar and loud and frightening?
What if Jessee, the therapist we finally became brave enough to write to, doesn’t answer?
What if Juan Luis changes his mind about asking me to serve as vice president of his Vincentian conference once he understands how difficult things have really been?
What if this little blog never becomes anything?
What if we are simply not doing enough?
Then came the voice that knows exactly how to make all of those questions sound like answers.
You’ve been unemployed for a month. What have you done? Nothing.
That isn’t true.
But terror doesn’t require accuracy to be persuasive.
It only needs precedent.
And we have a lot of precedent.
When Experience Becomes Prophecy
We have spent approximately thirty years of our adult life inside two enormous working lives.
The first lasted twenty-four years.
The second lasted six.
Both eventually collapsed around us.
The second ended just over a month ago, abruptly and without any meaningful explanation, when we were terminated from work we loved and had believed we would continue doing for years.
We aren’t interested in pretending that lived experience has nothing to teach us.
Quite the opposite.
Lived experience is one of the things we most want to bring to whatever ministry comes next.
We know things now that we could not have known without living them.
We know something about childhood trauma.
We know something about occupational trauma.
We know something about plurality.
We know something about institutions and power.
We know something about what happens when people lose control over their own lives.
We know something about family.
We know something about surviving.
But lived experience can become so concrete that it occupies the entire horizon.
It can stop saying:
This happened.
And begin saying:
Therefore, this is what will happen.
That’s when experience begins to feel like destiny.
And that’s when it becomes difficult to hear the Whisper.
“World, With All Due Respect, Please Be Quiet”
We were still in bed with the boys.
We hadn’t finished our morning greetings. We hadn’t opened all the blinds. We hadn’t eaten breakfast.
And already the world seemed to be demanding a five-year plan.
One after another, the boys kept pulling Dad back toward something smaller.
Luke wanted us to finish saying good morning so we could get up, have breakfast, and then come back and lay down together.
Han knew something Dad had temporarily forgotten:
“It will be so much better when we get up, after we open all of the blinds and when we are sitting down at the table having breakfast.”
Eventually Dad had enough and said:
“World, with all due respect, please be quiet.”
Daniel responded.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this came another voice.
Quiet.
Don’t worry about all of this, it will take care of itself, focus on your sons.
The Whisper.
There is an ancient story we kept returning to this morning.
The prophet Elijah is standing on Mount Horeb when a powerful wind tears through the mountains and shatters rocks.
But God is not in the wind.
Then comes an earthquake.
God is not in the earthquake.
Then fire.
God is not in the fire.
And after the fire comes the quiet.
The gentle whisper.
The still, small voice.
We don’t need God to hand us a blueprint for the rest of our life this morning.
We need the Whisper.
Be with your sons.
Open the blinds.
Make breakfast.
Dry the rug.
Listen.
Do the thing that belongs to this day.
Then the Landlord Knocked
Of course, life has a sense of timing.
While we were trying to convince ourselves that the world did not need to end before breakfast, we heard activity outside.
Men were near the neighboring apartments.
Our landlord, Donald, appeared to be downstairs.
Immediately, terror supplied the rest of the story.
He knows.
The water went downstairs.
There is damage.
We’re in trouble.
We’re going to lose our home.
Dad went downstairs.
And something really was wrong.
Water from our overflow had reached the apartment below us. There was damage to the ceiling and walls. Bedding had been ruined.
Donald had been preparing to have a plumber open the wall because he thought there might be a hidden leak.
Dad told him what had happened.
Donald was relieved to know where the water had come from.
“These things happen,” he told us.
Dad asked directly about our housing.
Donald told us we were not in trouble. He told us not to worry about our housing security. He asked that if something like this ever happens again, we call him.
Dad also told him something we hadn’t expected to tell our landlord that morning.
We have Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Donald said he understood.
He has a friend with DID.
Of course, lived experience immediately had an objection.
Why should we believe reassurance?
After all, people at our former employer reassured us.
Someone who would participate in ending our employment hugged us.
That happened too.
Lived experience has evidence.
But something important happened downstairs this morning.
Our alarm detected something real.
It wildly overpredicted what it meant.
There was water damage.
There was not an eviction.
There was a landlord asking what happened, arranging repairs, and telling us:
“These things happen.”
We don’t know what happens tomorrow.
But we do know what happened this morning.
And we need to let that be true too.
A Work Truck
A little while later, there was a work truck parked on the sidewalk in front of our building.
It felt like an indictment.
Solis, RT.
“It’s okay, Solis.”
And this time Dad caught what was happening.
That’s what we’re feeling.
We need to acknowledge what we’re feeling and contrast it with what Donald actually told us.
Donald told us we are not in trouble.
Donald told us our housing is not insecure because of this.
Donald told us these things happen.
Those are facts about the present conversation we actually had.
The other voice comes from things that have happened to us before.
It deserves to be heard.
It has reasons for being afraid.
But those things do not necessarily predict the future.
A truck can be a truck.
A repair can be a repair.
And fear can be fear without becoming prophecy.
“I love you, Solis.”
Jude, RO.
Daniel, RG.
“I love you, Jude. I love you, Daniel.”
Proverb, LP.
“I love you, Proverb.”
Daniel, RG.
And there we were again.
Not solving the future.
A father sitting with his sons inside a frightening present, trying to distinguish what has happened from what is happening, and what is happening from what must happen next.
The Entire Field of Vision
Yesterday, something about our conversation with our friend Kim felt different to us.
We don’t know whether anything actually changed for her.
But we felt a trajectory of worry.
Coordinated entry.
Case management.
Employment.
Housing.
What happens if we cannot support ourselves?
These are reasonable things for someone who cares about us to worry about.
They are things we have to think about too.
But if they become the entire field of vision, then the family can disappear behind the emergency.
And the emergency is not the whole field of vision.
There was a family painting a watercolor mandala with Kim yesterday.
There was Daniel drawn to Lake Blue.
There was Daniel stopping Dad from changing something because he liked it exactly as it was.
There was Proverb speaking directly to Kim and then simply saying his name.
“Proverb.”
Dad explained that it was Proverb who had spoken.
“I got that,” Kim said.
There was an artist recognizing monoprint and sgraffito and suddenly remembering things he knew a lifetime ago.
There was ministry.
There was creativity.
There were relationships.
There were eight boys with ideas of their own.
There was a family.
The emergency is real.
But it is not the whole field of vision.
And Then There Was Hope
It is Hope’s Day, after all.
For most of the morning, lived experience had been making its case with terrifying confidence.
Lived experience had evidence.
Hope had Sunday.
At first, Dad thought Hope was joining the argument against us.
“Kim doesn’t see any value in us…”
Dad’s heart sank.
But that wasn’t where Hope was going.
What if we went with Kim to Canticle Farms on Sunday?
What if we asked her to take us over to St. Paschal and show us the property she has been imagining?
What if we walked it with her and listened to her vision?
What if we let ourselves become excited about it again?
Not:
Let’s see what Kim is building.
There isn’t anything being built yet.
Kim herself calls the whole thing a longshot.
Maybe that’s exactly why we need to go.
Let’s see what she is envisioning and who and what we might bring to it.
A vision like that needs other people to see it.
It needs people willing to imagine alongside it.
Maybe it needs relationships.
Experience.
Ministry.
Creativity.
Ideas.
Maybe it needs things we have.
And maybe we need something it has.
Possibility.
Hope wasn’t proposing that we persuade Kim that we are worth something.
Sunday doesn’t need to become another audition for our right to have a future.
Maybe Kim will see again whatever she saw before crisis and contingency began occupying so much of the foreground.
Maybe we will see it again too.
That last possibility may matter even more.
Because the danger isn’t merely that other people might stop imagining a future for us.
The danger is that we will.
A Cloud as Small as a Man’s Hand
There is another Elijah story that keeps coming to us today.
It happens one chapter earlier.
There has been a terrible drought.
Elijah prays for rain and sends his servant to look toward the sea.
Nothing.
He sends him again.
Nothing.
Again.
Nothing.
Seven times.
Finally the servant returns.
There is a cloud rising from the sea.
A cloud as small as a man’s hand.
That’s it.
A tiny thing on an enormous horizon.
Elijah sees enough.
And there is something almost comically familiar about that story today.
At 2:30, Dad checked the email again.
No Donald.
No Jessee.
Nothing on the horizon yet.
We probably shouldn’t check seven times just because Elijah did.
But we understand the impulse.
Can you see anything yet?
We don’t know what St. Paschal means.
We don’t know what our friendship with Kim will become.
We don’t know whether anything imagined on Sunday will ever support our family financially.
We don’t know when or whether Jessee will answer.
We don’t know what Juan Luis will say when Dad calls him.
We don’t know what will happen with disability, ministry, housing, or this little blog.
We don’t know.
The small cloud isn’t the completed future.
It isn’t a guarantee.
It isn’t the rain.
It is enough possibility to take the next faithful action.
Giving It to the Longshot
Right now, our whole future feels like a longshot.
Maybe we have reached a place in our life where giving ourselves to the longshot matters more than desperately constructing another certainty.
We have constructed certainty before.
Twice.
We know what happened.
There are contingency plans.
Some of them are dark.
We don’t need to pretend they aren’t there.
But we need to make the darkest ones less possible.
Less necessary.
Less able to masquerade as solutions.
We know where hopelessness has taken us before.
Twice in 2019, we reached places where death seemed more concrete than the possibility of another life.
We survived those places.
Our sons survived those places.
Our family is here.
So this isn’t an argument for distrusting lived experience.
It is an argument for refusing to let lived experience obliterate the Whisper.
Once the emergency becomes the entire field of vision, the longshot disappears.
And once every longshot disappears, lived experience begins to feel like destiny.
The Whisper opens the field again.
Canticle Farms is still there.
St. Paschal is still there.
The blog is still here.
The mandala is sitting on our game table.
Juan Luis is still waiting for a phone call.
The ministry remains ours.
The blinds are open.
The rug is drying.
The boys are here.
And it is Hope’s Day.
One Little Thing
Maybe this is what we need right now.
Not certainty.
Not another enormous structure erected in terror because we are afraid there will be nowhere for us to live if we stop building.
Not a five-year plan before breakfast.
The Whisper.
Enough hope to do one little thing.
And then another.
Open the blinds.
Make cinnamon toast.
Keep the fans running.
Listen to Solis.
Listen to Luke.
Listen to Han.
Listen to Hope.
Write the blog.
Call Juan Luis when Dad is ready to have the conversation.
Go to Canticle Farms on Sunday.
Ask Kim if we can see St. Paschal.
Listen to what she is envisioning.
Tell her what we see.
Discover who and what we might bring.
None of those things is the future.
They’re little things.
But perhaps little things are how longshots begin becoming concrete.
The world is loud.
Fear is loud.
And lived experience may be loudest of all, because lived experience can stand before us with thirty years of evidence and say:
You know how this story ends.
Maybe we don’t.
Maybe that is the point.
Lived experience can tell us what happened.
We can honor it.
We can learn from it.
We can carry it into our ministry.
We can allow it to make us more compassionate toward other people whose lives have taught them terrible things.
But lived experience deserves to be heard without automatically getting to prophesy.
Somewhere beyond everything we can presently see, there may be a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.
And somewhere beneath all this noise, there is still the Whisper.
The truck outside may feel like an indictment.
The unanswered email may feel like rejection.
The longshot may feel almost impossibly small.
But feeling is not destiny.
Today, we don’t need to know where the Whisper will lead.
We need to become quiet enough to hear it.
And then do the next little thing.
Notes from the Treehouse 