Threshold

Threshold: The figurative use was in Old English, "border or beginning of a region or place;" + Hold, the Germanic verb "generally accepted" [OED 1989] to have meant originally "to keep, tend, watch over." (Etymonline.com)

Lent is arriving—my favourite season of the Church calendar, beginning in the chilly darkness of late Winter. Arriving is often a word I consider more around Advent, but this year it feels very fitting for Lent. Many things are expected to arrive in this Lenten season: We're packing items, ever-so-slowly emptying our cabin, preparing to exit 'the village' as it is lovingly known. This place has been my home for nearly seventeen years, just seven years shy of the time spent living in my first home. My parents still live in their 'starter house.' Nick and I wouldn't mind our roots going down deep like that for our family in our first home. 

As we pack and transport various items, my ever-burgeoning womb reminds me that I'm in more than one liminal space. Moving toward arrival, but not there yet. It is unsettling to live at the threshold of a season or space, it is uncomfortable as even the familiar becomes unfamiliar. If I'm not choosing presence in the liminal it can be disorienting—but if I offer my attention to the discomfort, something shifts. I find this a time of slowly saying goodbye to one season and place and gently entering into another. It is less abrupt than a long-weekend move or the (relatively) few hours of labour before baby arrives. The shift is happening in slow motion. Sometimes it's frustratingly slow and other times I remember to be grateful for this pace.

Thinking of this leisurely transition, I am met with an image. In my mind's eye I see a stone house with a weathered threshold at the kitchen door (the real entry point of a home)—from outside to inside. It is one step, but we feel the difference of out-of-doors to indoors keenly. When we step out, the world becomes brighter, open, bigger and we shrink down to size. When we step in, we are welcomed into warmth, beauty, safety, and cosiness. The threshold is a brief space, not a lingering place. It is that fascinating 'liminal' space in a building or home. We are lingering at the threshold, the border, from one place to the next—from one season (renters, newlywed couple, living in community) to the next (homeowners, parents, settling into a neighbourhood where we've yet to meet anyone).

The word 'threshold' also conveys the idea of tending, keeping, and watching over. We are caretakers of our bodies, home, yard, child, and to some degree, our neighbours. We are to tend time and toils, skills and souls. We keep watch in the night via prayer. And we remember Who it is who cares for us, tending our souls, feeding our selves. Sometimes He offers me a word for the year and often it shifts over the dance of the days. For this season of Lent I believe the Lord is offering me the words 'liminal' and 'threshold'—we'll see if they tarry into Eastertide and ordinary time. And I trust God to know what I need next if I'm to move into something else this year. . .

So, I breathe out a final hallelujah! before Ash Wednesday, praising God in this lingering at the border, at the arriving of Lent.

Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash

The Stripping Away

Last year I turned 40...which is ridiculous, because I'm still 22, 26, 35, 39 and all the other important ages of my adult life. I'm still making silly puns and laughing at life, looking for shapes in the clouds and listening to the evensong of robins. And now there are more and more times when my wide-eyed wonder at the world feels replaced by the gritty exhaustion of mundane reality. The poet in me feels lost and the pragmatist slides into the driver's seat.

As I entered the year I was well aware of forty being a significant number in Scripture... The rains came forty days and forty nights during the Flood. The Israelites were enslaved for forty times ten years in Egypt—then they wandered in the dessert for forty years, awaiting the death of an unfaithful generation before entering the Promised Land. Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days at the start of His prophetic time. Forty crops up in so many places—always it comes with challenges and hardships, it involves a stripping away. So, one can imagine my trepidation at turning forty last year. I could tell change was coming... Change is unknown and the unknown is scary. 

There were hard moments that Nick and I shared alone, and some we shared with others. There were some blindsiding moments, like when we found out in a group of people we were expected to move, without anyone telling us personally first. Panic, anger, and betrayal made sleeping flee in a flood of tears. Prayer and some conversations brought order, though we were still unsettled about our next steps. 

And of course, there were lovely moments, too. Times shared with family celebrating my nephew's high school graduation, visiting friends and family for our anniversary, sharing a lot of meals with friends, going on dates, seeing moose in the wild, and cosying up reading aloud together in the chill of snowy days. 

Time for introspection and reflection shrivelled in my fortieth year, giving way to time together as a couple experiencing our first year of marriage. It's been a shift for us both, and sometimes for me it feels like a loss of my inner world and of my very self in ways. I'm being re-made, no longer a single woman but a wife, a vital component in a marriage, yet still a self. It's a process which keeps fluctuating and will change again and again as we develop new habits and patterns together.

After weeks of casual browsing, we abruptly plunged into the loan-approval/house-buying process in the autumn. Talk about challenges and treading the waters of the unknown! But there was an even more life altering part of forty... The firework spark of forty weeks, burgeoning into new life arriving this coming spring. A little wriggling, stretching, prodding lively person, pushing out my tummy skin, smooshing my stomach space, enlarging my heart. My body is no longer my own, an uncomfortable sensation physically (especially now), but emotionally and mentally as well. The freedom and breadth of life are feeling their limits more keenly... 

And yet, a door is opening as I look down the narrow galley of pain to come. Our little one is due during Holy Week: a tunnel of sorrow, pain, and stripping away for Jesus. What a time to experience the stripping away of myself—my old self—and being remade not only as a daughter of God (and my earthly parents), a sister, a friend, and the wife of Nick, but now as a mother, too. I'm becoming a new self as the Lord is growing a new person within me. 

Currently I feel like an utter failure, being so scattered in my focus between work, home renovation, cabin upkeep, appointments, the impending stress of moving away from the space I've lived in for 16+ years, and my mind, my heart, my body, my work, and my norms all shifting. I feel the most un-me I've felt since I was an insecure child. Perhaps even more than that, as I wasn't self-aware enough then to know what it was like to be me or not be me yet...

Forty has held more change and shifting than I initially foresaw or feared. I wasn't planning to jump into the tides of change with both feet, being swept into the relentless waves of peeling back layer after layer until all I feel is both raw and numb at once. Yet here I am. Myself and not myself. A squishy, messy, metamorphising self. 

Who will I be on the other side of moving, nesting, birthing, and shifting into new roles? I still want to be that wide-eyed-in-wonder lover of God and His world. One who offers hospitality. Warm and loving and quirky and quick to laugh at the absurdity of being forty and still feeling like I'm 22 and 26 and 34 and not-quite-married. And I want to be the new person God is shaping me to be as He shapes our little person in me (and re-shapes my brain, literally!). 

My Anglican soul feels this pull in a liturgy of sorts...

Do I fear the waves of hormones that come with birth? I do. 
Do I fear the rage and numbness of those hormones? I do.
Do I fear the stripping away required to be made new? I do.
Do I fear the loss of my inner world because my time has been refocused in being a mom? I do.
Do I fear getting stuck in bad habits when I want to create rhythms of Truth, Beauty, and hope for my family? I do.

Do I feel the world is broken? I do.
Do I feel the shadows deepen? I do.
Yet do I know that all the dark won't stop the light from getting through? I do.
Do I wish that I could see it all made new? I do.

Is all creation groaning? It is.
Is a new creation coming? It is!
Is the glory of the Lord to be the light within our midst? It is.
Is it good that we remind ourselves of this? It is!

Does the Father truly love us? He does.
Does the Spirit move among us? He does.
And does Jesus, our Messiah hold forever those He loves? He does.
Does our God intend to dwell again with us? He does!

Is He worthy? Is He worthy?
Of all blessing and honour and glory
Is He worthy? Is He worthy?
Is He worthy of this?

He is!


To see it all made new, to be made new, I must pass through the narrow confines God has set before me. They are my birth canal, birthing me out into a world that is bright and loud and feels anything-but-cosy at times. Like a baby who has to leave the warm, dark, safe womb and learn everything about the world and existence little-by-little, I'll be learning little-by-little how to be the who God is re-making me. I'm thankful that God doesn't expect me to start by running. He starts me with a snack and a nap, with rolling over and crawling, with pulling up and taking a step, long before I'm able to run in the stride of being the new creation He is making.

Is He worthy of all blessing and glory and honour? He is!

_____

Call and response and some above lyrics by: Andrew Peterson and Ben Shive