Bookmarks. A Personal Communique?

November 11, 2023

The rain on the roof last night had a very pleasant sound. It’s been months since I’ve heard that sound. It was drizzling a little when I walked over to visit my neighbor for a few minutes. It was a really soft rain that I walked in coming back home. I’m not usually a fan of walking in the rain. But this was a special rain. I’ve not seen, felt, or heard rain in months now. Thank you, Lord.

I’m just another little sparrow

Blown about by the hard winds of life

I’m missing a few feathers these days

But I still know how to fly

A personal communique from the other side? It certainly has the scent of it.

I was looking through some books that have been collecting dust. Books. Books galore. Shirli and I thought of ourselves as people of books. I enjoy reading on a number of subjects of interest. And Shirli was a voracious reader. How many times did we load totes of books and donate them to the thrift store so we would have bookshelf space to fill up again? It never took us long to refill the shelves.

They were in one of those books I was reading while we were still living in the tiny house. It got packed up, put on a shelf here, and it’s been sitting silently on that shelf collecting dust now for over three years. The bookmarks were in that book. Shirli colored them and gave them to me during the Covid lock-down fiasco. They are priceless treasures to me.

There is another book that I’m looking for that has to go to John, Shirli’s son. It’s a library book from the church library at the church where Shirli attended as a little girl being raised by her grandmother. We visited that church not long after I moved to New Jersey to set up housekeeping with Shirli. She saw it on the shelf, took it down, pulled out the library card and showed me her name where she had checked it out and read it. It filled her with so much joy that she was beaming.  It was a story about a horse. Imagine that. I think that was the first time I caught a glimpse of Shirli’s little girl that had been so badly wounded when she was abandoned by her mother and other circumstances that befell her. The church gifted the book to Shirli. I watched that little girl heal and grow strong.

I did everything I possibly could have done to help and nurture that little girl who became so alive and active again in Shirli. And, the truth be known, Shirli is the one who rescued and nurtured the little boy buried inside of me. My little boy is alive and thriving because of Shirli's love for me.

You know, timing is everything.

And here I am in a zone of time where I am searching, praying, and questioning everything while seeking some divine direction about what to do and how to do as I continue pushing through and moving ahead in this crazily beautiful, however difficult, life-transition. Oh. I’m not fighting it anymore. I am, rather, embracing it.

I may very well now be a solo free moral agent passing through what’s left of life for me. I am, however, not entirely my own … something I remind myself of daily. I still bear the marks of a calling that was placed on me when I was but a child. I remember it well. I pulled a proverbial Jonah. I ran from it as a youth. And the running from it became for me a great fish that swallowed me up. I still wear the scars left by that decade of running. And what now? How does this calling affect and come into play in this life that I am living now this side of the hell that I’ve lived through? 

It’s an important question begging to be answered.