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Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

hope

Hope Springs: An Easter Story

April 3, 2013 By Michelle

She’d been gone one month.

As the greenhouse plastic flapped in the autumn wind, the boys and I filled five white paper bags to the top with tulip bulbs. We carefully studied the placards posted over each bin and selected the perfect shades – plum, yellow, scarlet and orange – aiming for a symphony of raucous color come spring. Back home, surveying the raised beds in our garden, we intentionally chose the box in the back corner, the one we could see from just about every window facing the backyard.

I had envisioned an orderly display of flowers, concentric circles ringing the box like a proper English garden. But before I could stop him, my youngest son Rowan dumped the contents of all five bags into a single, mixed-up mound of bulbs in the dirt. It was just as well, and in some ways, perfectly fitting for her memorial garden. The boys’ grandmother, my mother-in-law Janice, had never been distracted by perfectionism. She would have much preferred Rowan’s enthusiasm and his eagerness to begin the planting over a formal garden any day.

As the elm dropped golden leaves, swirling like butterflies, the boys and I dug hole after hole and settled the bulbs snugly into the earth. Trowels clanking stones, clods of mud flying, we swished soil over papery skins and patted the dirt smooth. Hands aching, fingernails filthy, our faces streaked with grit, we sat back on our heels, satisfied with our work. I tore open the plastic from around the brand-new metal sign and pressed the sharp stick into the dirt near the front of the box. Janice’s garden was finished. Now we would wait.

All winter I watched from the window over the kitchen sink, the glass steaming from the hot water, my hands in warm suds. The bulbs slept beneath slush and cold snow as I scoured fry pans, rinsed stemware and brushed crumbs from the countertops into my cupped palm. Winter felt long. We grieved hard.

Spring was cold that year, just like this year. It was late March before we bent low, hands on our knees, and peered into the corner garden box. My oldest son Noah and I surveyed the dirt nearly every day in early spring, and when we spotted the fissures slicing jagged beneath layers of desiccated oak leaves, we knew. Something was happening in that cold earth. The first tender shoots surprised us with their hue, not green at all, but tinted pink, like tongues eager for a lick of spring. But as they shot taller from the softening ground, unfurling leaves then stems then buds, the tulips burst into a chorus of color even I didn’t quite expect.

Janice’s memorial tulip garden still thrives, three years later. Last week, bundled into my parka and gloves, I braved the March chill to crouch next to the raised bed. And there they were, tips of pinkish green pushing through the cracked earth. A dusting of snow, fine like powdered sugar, coated each tender leaf. Although the temperature didn’t hint at what was to come, I knew. It won’t be long now before color prevails over steely gray.

All winter long I dream of glory born from grit and gloom. And every year, this ritual of rebirth in my own backyard reminds me that even after the darkest season, hope springs anew.

Edited from the archives. This story also ran last week in the Lincoln Journal Star.

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Filed Under: Easter, grief, hope Tagged With: grief, hope, Jennifer Dukes Lee TellHisStory, Laura Boggess Playdates with God

March is the Cruelest Month {but greenhouses are a Godsend}

March 20, 2013 By Michelle

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the opening lines of his poem The Waste Land. Clearly he’d never been to Nebraska in March.

“In like a lion, out like a lamb,” Rowan chants, and let me tell you, I am ready for the lamb. March in Nebraska is steely gray skies and branches stripped raw by squirrels. It’s sand-caked city streets, cracked mud, Dairy Queen cups squashed flat, peeking from beneath soot-blackened snow. It’s sidewalk salt ground into carpets, windows streaked with grime, oak leaves still, still falling, one at a time, piling under the peeling patio furniture, a sheen of dirty ice on the table.

We spot the delicate lavender and cheery yellow of crocus blooms pushing through sodden leaves, and we celebrate spring as the thermometer creeps past sixty. Only to awaken the next morning to four inches of snow, heavy as cement, crushing petals into pulp. We tuck chins to chest, brace against the Great Plains wind barreling down from the Dakotas.

March is dull. Dirty. Withered. Weary.

March is the cruelest month.

Which is why we head to the greenhouse on Sunday. We need to feast our eyes on green. To breathe in the lush, fecund scent of soil. To remember that beauty still exists and that we are, in fact, on the cusp of rebirth.

I need another plant about as much as I need another purse. Some boys collect Pokemon cards; mine collect plants. Succulents, cactus, bromeliad, rubber fichus, dracaena marginata. You name it, we’ve got it. I live in a biosphere. You’d think my highly oxygenated brain would have produced the Pulitzer Prize-winning sequel to War and Peace by now. Yesterday when I took a swig from my water bottle, I felt something limp and furry in my mouth, like a spider. When I spit the mouthful into the kitchen sink, I saw that it was merely a shriveled African violet petal. Noah had been pruning a few hours before.

So yeah, we certainly don’t need to add another plant to Biosphere III, but we do anyway. In fact, we add two. Because I can’t say no when Rowan begs to pay for a Venus Fly Trap with his own money. And Noah goes all moony over a petite pink bromeliad. When we get home, Rowan feeds his Venus Fly Trap a cricket. Like it’s not bad enough that we own a lizard who eats live crickets. Now we own a plant that eats live insects, too.

I almost bought the Resurrection garden for myself. Until I remembered that Ann Voskamp and her kids make their own every year. Buying one pre-assembled felt kind of weak. Plus it was like $69.99. So instead I just looked at it for a while.

Despite the fact that we bring home two more plants, one of which is carnivorous, the trip to the greenhouse is worth it, if only to rest our eyes on color for a bit. If only to breathe dense, moist air that smells like dirt. If only to touch a pansy petal, soft as my grandmother’s cheek.

“It smells like a breath of spring in here,” Noah says as we push through the double doors and into the humid, light-filled space.

It does. And something else, too. It smells like hope.

Want to listen to T.S. Eliot reading The Waste Land? I know it’s not supposed to be funny, but it cracks Brad and me up every time (even funnier is Brad imitating T.S. reading The Waste Land. That one never gets old).


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Filed Under: hope Tagged With: March in Nebraska, T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Shining Hope: A Review of Chasing Silhouettes

September 28, 2012 By Michelle

 
“Mommy, am I fat?” he asks one morning, as I stand with my hands under running water at the kitchen sink.

“What? No! Of course you’re not fat; you’re not in the least bit fat,” I answer, not turning to look over my shoulder at Rowan, who’s perched on a bar stool at the counter. “Why would you even say that?”

“Well, you say you’re fat all the time, so I thought maybe I was fat, too,” he says, holding his toasted bagel half in one hand, his glass of grape juice in the other. I turn off the water, dry my hands on a dish towel and lean against the kitchen counter.

“Honey, you’re not fat, and I’m not fat either,” I tell him, resting my chin in my hands and looking him straight in the eye. “And I shouldn’t say I’m fat. It’s just a bad habit for me to say that all the time, and I’m going to stop.”

I know my boys have heard me say that I’m fat more times than I can count. I know they’ve seen me poke at my stomach through the folds of my cotton tee-shirt, lamenting aloud the doughy roll, vowing to nix the nighttime Wheat Thins snack.

I thought I could get away with complaining about my body because I have boys. I thought it didn’t matter with boys, that they wouldn’t notice, that it wouldn’t have any influence. I thought I could call myself fat without fearing it would impact my children.

But I was wrong.

This is one of the many reasons why Emily Wierenga’s new book, Chasing Silhouettes: How to Help a Loved One Battling an Eating Disorder, fills such a critical need: because there are so very many misconceptions and misperceptions surrounding eating disorders. My assumption, for example, that boys don’t succumb to eating disorders is simply wrong. Of the estimated 8 million Americans who suffer from anorexia, bulimia or other eating disorders, one million of them are male.


Not only does Emily weave her real-life story of suffering and recovery from anorexia with research and facts about the illness, this book is also a spiritual guide for those of us who love someone suffering from an eating disorder. As is often the case, a book like this might answer our questions from a physical and even an emotional perspective, yet it often leaves the spiritual perspective untapped. Emily artfully weaves all three perspectives together into a coherent, gracefully written narrative.

I appreciate, for instance, that Emily includes a prayer at the end of each section. So often, when we are ravaged by hopelessness and fear, we simply can’t pray, we can’t find the words. Emily offers us words to pray, even when we fear prayer is impossible.

 
This book is not a dry, statistic-filled, how-to tome. Written in honest, evocative, lyrical prose, Chasing Silhouettes shines truth, hope and grace into the darkest corners of an illness that ravages so many millions of women and men. And while she doesn’t shy from telling the hard truth, Emily also insists that the reader comes away from her story, and this book, with the knowledge that all hope is not lost and that, above all, those who suffer through this illness are never alone.
 
A person I love struggled with anorexia. I dearly wish Chasing Silhouettes had been available to her and to my family in the midst of that darkness. 

: :
Purchase Emily Wierenga’s new book Chasing Silhouettes:How to Help a Loved One Battling an Eating Disorder within the first four weeks after its September 25, 2012 release date and receive a special invitation to watch an online forum on eating disorders with bestselling author Dr. Gregory L. Jantz, FindingBalance CEO Constance Rhodes and author Emily Wierenga.

Readers must email a scanned receipt, a picture of them with the book or tell us when and where they purchased the book to [email protected], and they will be logged in to receive a special invitation to watch the event. They may also submit questions for the panel to answer, some of which will be selected and answered during the forum.


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Filed Under: anorexia, book reviews, books, Chasing Silhouettes, eating disorders, Emily Wierenga, hope

Because 223 Days Seems Like a Really Long Time to Wait

September 12, 2012 By Michelle

Letters from Pedro and his sister


Dear God,

Remember when I laid awake the other night praying for Noah? I was worried about him, and I prayed for your help.

I thought about that this morning as I clicked through a dozen pictures of kids in need of sponsorships on the Compassion site. I stopped for a long time on the picture of one boy, Niyomugisha. He was wearing a yellow shirt, yellow shorts and sandals, and he stood on a patch of dirt near a wooden shack. The description said he lives in Rwanda and is one of six kids.
It also said he’s been waiting for a sponsor for 223 days.

223 days.

That seems like an awful long time to wait for a breath of hope.

I wonder what those 223 days have felt like for Niyomugisha’s mother. I wonder if she lays awake at night, praying that You will bring a sponsor for her child. Praying for hope. I wonder what she worries about. How to get enough food for her six kids? Where to find medicine for her sick little ones? How her husband will find work?

It makes my worries about my kids seem so silly. Our doctor is a phone call away. Medicine and food are less than a mile up the road – three minutes by car. I worry about problems that can be solved.
But Niyomugisha’s mother…does she worry about losing hope?

This morning as I looked at his picture on my computer screen, I prayed for Niyomugisha and his mother – that they will remain faithful and hopeful in You.

And today I ask that you bring Niyomugisha a sponsor. May this day be the end of his long wait.

Amen.
: :
Our assignment from Compassion for this week was to write a letter to God and publish it online, which, I admit, felt slightly awkward. 
The good news, though, is that as of Monday, 837 sponsorships have been made — isn’t that amazing?! So…three weeks remaining for Compassion Blogger Month and 2,271 sponsorships to go — I really do think we can do this thing!
Will you click over to the Compassion sponsor page, pick one child and pray for him or her?  
And if the Spirit so moves you, please consider sponsoring Niyomugisha or another child today. Thank you!!!


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Filed Under: Compassion, hope, Pedro

Sometimes A Small Sea of Green is Enough

August 15, 2012 By Michelle


I hear the sound before the “Uh-oh.” The distinctive suctioning of a sandal wrenched free from reeking pond mud.

“Mommy, you do not even want to see my sandals,” he warns, calling from across the dry bed, cracked uneven in the blistering sun. “You are going to ground me for a week for sure!”

{Like I’ve ever grounded him for a week or even a day. My dramatic, hyperbolic redhead.}

We’re at Pioneer’s Park the day before the start of school, soaking up every last bit of summer possible. Because even though I’ve been counting this day down for a couple of weeks now, it’s still bittersweet. Even for me, my fingers itching for the keyboard as I’ve dashed out words between backyard badminton and afternoons at the city pool.

Rowan wants to catch a frog so we head to the marsh that’s nearly dry after these long weeks without rain. The water has receded so much only a sliver remains, grey and stagnant, grasses on the bank dried to crisp stalks, leaves curled brown.

But as I get comfortable on a bleached log and the boys approach the water’s edge, the forsaken earth jolts into wild life as hundreds of frogs leap. They go off like firecrackers, chiming cheeps and chirps and jumping one after the other in rapid fire, fast and furious in their zest for survival. White bellies glinting in the dazzling sun, they look like sardines flipping wildly on shore. Even the boys, quick in their mud-slogged sandals, can’t capture them, save a single, tiny baby weary of Noah’s pursuit.

Later we rest our chins on the wooden rail and peer into the watering hole as the frogs croak a symphony of groans and the turtles swim silent. We don’t see them at first, but as we stare longer and harder into that green gloom, a world springs to life and suddenly the dismal hole is a plains tidal pool, teeming and swarming and slithering.

Somehow, in this barren, rainless season, when leaves crunch autumn brown beneath our shoes and the scorched front lawn prickles bare feet and the sun beats relentless from the ceaselessly blue sky, hope springs fresh from this small sea of green.


 

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Filed Under: drought, hope, summer vacation

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Triple Type A, “make it happen” (my dad’s favorite mantra) striver and achiever (I’m a 3 on the Enneagram, which tells you everything you need to know), but these days my striving looks more like sitting in silence on a park bench, my dog at my feet, as I slowly learn to let go of the false selves that have formed my identity for decades and lean toward uncovering who God created me to be.

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