The front porch was the door to the world “out there.” As a kid, it was the stepping off point to the world that never forced us to step off. It was the place through which the outside world would come into mine; monitored and managed in a way that didn’t make the world safe, but that pared and neutered it sufficiently to make it safe whenever it was granted entrance. As a kid, other than it being huge, I didn’t know everything that was out beyond the oak planks and cement steps. What I knew howeve...
The front porch was the door to the world “out there.” As a kid, it was the stepping off point to the world that never forced us to step off. It was the place through which the outside world would come into mine; monitored and managed in a way that didn’t make the world safe, but that pared and neutered it sufficiently to make it safe whenever it was granted entrance. As a kid, other than it being huge, I didn’t know everything that was out beyond the oak planks and cement steps. What I knew however was that the front porch would unflinchingly manage its entrance into my life.
It was a rarely used place because I found the solace of home much better than the turmoil of a world I didn’t understand. The front porch was that first step out into that world; the threshold to whatever was out there. I suppose it was something akin to witnessing terribly frightening realities from a vantage point of absolute safety; vulnerability rendered neutral either by safety or the sturdy knowledge that safety breeched would not be unsafe at all on the porch.
That’s what made it the safest place of all. It was the stepping off point to a big world that I knew little of. It seemed like the portal from the safety and embracing warmth of my world to whatever lay out there; fixed and firm but never naïve. In the child of my mind, the front porch edged right up to the world, but it held me perfectly safe and completely secure all the while. It provided me a front row seat as the happiness and horror of life paraded by, holding me, it seemed, entirely in perfect peace. I loved the front porch.
George Moore astutely pointed out that "a man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." Somehow I knew that I would someday step off the front porch and go out there into whatever the world was, and that the journey would eventually return me to this place. But for now, it was a magical and certain haven on the sidelines of life.
Fall always graced the front porch with vibrantly colored leaves from the massive maples that lined the street as mammoth sentries. Hardwood behemoths, they would rain color; drops of searing reds falling in torrents when the wind blew firm. Blown onto the front porch the spun in royal red eddies; dancing with abandon as the wind courted them with a mix of tease and intention.
The turn of the season always invited me to the front porch to watch fall hand itself off to winter. You could watch it all safely from the front porch, as you could watch anything. It was, it seemed, somehow the best of all worlds.
With three or four bulbous pumpkins, several stalks of dried corn cinched tight with flax cords, a ragged bale of hay and a handful of incandescent leaves as trimming, we would dress the front porch for fall. It became a stage of sorts from which we would celebrate the departure of fall; pulling onto the front porch all the assorted things that symbolized the season. It was all staged right there on the oak tongue and groove flooring. We said goodbye from the safety of that place, acknowledging a passing from the kind distance that the front porch afforded us.
Adulthood and Distance Gone
They were other dying eyes the weekend my Mom died; one pair so much younger and entirely unexpected. I met them on the front porch. It’s not a long front porch, other than being long with the kind of miles that memories pave; lined generously with so much of my childhood. If memories were to define its breadth, it would stretch beyond any home to contain it. The tongue and groove flooring is yet firm, having welcomed and ushered feet both wandering and intentional to a sturdy oak door for nearly one hundred years. Friends, visitors and strangers have all crossed its planking in order to engage the family within; that defining portal to the world out there.
How do you grasp a place framed by towering pines and muscular maples whose width and breath hem you in above and around? Beyond the reach of their canopies, a sweeping lawn paints a tender, green expanse mottled with the glory of fall scattered about in leaves of gold, explosive red and scintillating orange. Out past the fringes of its grassy mantel stand more forest behemoths that seem to challenge the enormity of the sky itself. The old porch is surrounded by a mantel of nature’s best.
How do you engage a place that sits back just far enough from a sleepy street to muse as the world goes by while finding ample space between you and it? What do you do with hedges, thickets and sweeping canopies thick with the chatter and chorus of birds singing out of the sheer rapture of living? What do you do with squirrels that skirt precariously on thin limbs as if taking no notice of the peril they place themselves at, leaping vast expanses of air from one forest behemoth to another? What do you do when life affords you just such a place?
But what do you do with it when you’ve engaged the sordid world out there in ways entirely unimagined by the childlike mind that staged fall on its expanse? What do you do when it seems no longer a portal because you’ve stepped out so far beyond it that you can never again step back to the other side of it; even when in your most dire moments you desperately wish that you could do so? What do you do with something that provided the most gracious and sacrificial protection imaginable but whose role seems to have been long terminated by time, circumstance and this mysterious thing we call adulthood? What do you do?
If something this grand and yet this quiet is afforded you, then I would presume that you needed it. If you don’t think that you needed it, there’s a good chance that you’re oblivious to your own needs or you’re oblivious to the provision God affords us in our times of need. David sings, “The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer, my rock, in whom I take refuge” (Psalm 18:2, New International Version). Weave the metaphors and realities of our rock, fortress and deliverer together and we have an impenetrable place of deep and certain refuge. We all need such a place for such times as those that were about to befall me. We need a front porch.
Permanent Provision for Grief
Is there always a front porch of some sort or other? Can there be a consistent place of unexplainable solitude that provides us a place of refuge? Can God carve out this kind of oasis in the midst of the most searing grief, an oasis that does not remove us from our grief but gives us complete sanctuary in it; that lets life move and circle all around us but provides us tranquility in it? More than that, do we need a place of such solitude and security that allows us to invite grief right into the middle of it, knowing that this place is so secure that nothing can shake it even when it is invited into the heart of it? Is that possible?
“I am with you always . . . “ (Matthew 28:20, American Standard Version). “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1, American Standard Version). We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in the midst of our grief in order to determine the provision made within it. Grief is consuming, wrestling away the sum total of our attention and energies in order to deal with it and attempt to flee from it. If grief becomes our focus, the hand of God is something other than our focus.
We don’t think to look for any provision as grief assumes none. Grief assumes a process by which grief is navigated and resolved; a process which rarely assumes a place from which to do it. Grief renders us vulnerable which leaves us with the assumption that the struggle is ours alone. Grief calls us out. It strips us naked. It renders us helpless in our helplessness. It assumes little else and it does little else. Yet, what kind of front porch has God given us in the midst of our grief?
Loss Strikes Twice
Into it all, Paul walked onto my front porch and into my life again. He had walked into my life some thirty-five years earlier as a dear childhood friend, settling into my developmental years; navigating the tumultuous journey of adolescence alongside me until I left home for whatever it is that calls young men outward and sometimes upward. However, the demands of living and the scurrying about that seems so much wasted energy had long ago drawn us apart. He had changed over the gaping hole of the twenty-six years since we last said goodbye. The Paul that I knew was gone but there all at the same time. After over two and a half decades of unforgivable separation, Paul came by to visit.
Sitting there on that same front porch, we shared the passing of time and events, of life unfolding for each of us mostly in ways unexpected; the unanticipated and circular journey that led us from that front porch and back again decades later.
Trials and successes, painful failures and lost relationships, dreams realized and other dreams that we surrendered to the cold hands of reality. We talked about life through the eyes of middle age when the ever-increasing distance from the past rolls dim off some subconscious horizon of our minds, while the shortening days of the end of it all draws ever sharper. It was all amazingly rich. In a few moments, the years seemed erased.
With the friendship rejoined, Paul gazed into my eyes with a thick pause wrapped in an unexplainable intensity. With a frankness that belied the length of his own struggle, he cast a longing glance at the hearty trees that surrounded the front porch, ran his finger around the ring of his coffee cup, drew a breath of sweet fall air and muttered that he was dying. It was not some sort of speculation that there might be a cure or that the treatment might yet stop the advance of cancer that relentlessly pushed forward on multiple fronts throughout his body. It was the surrender of a valiant warrior who felt that the battle might not be fighting cancer, but closing out a middle aged life in front of an audience of friends and family as a man of integrity, faith and bravery. It was not about survival anymore, but about legacy.
His condition was terminal. Terminal is such a final word. It’s the ultimate period that’s put at the end of last sentence on the final page of the book. Nothing follows it other than nothingness. Its finality is so unfathomable that you have no alternative except to hope that it really might have been mistaken for a comma; that it’s some other sort of punctuation about the person’s life that might legitimately suggest a pause before moving on again. But terminal . . . how I wished it was something other than the chilling finality of a period.
My mind instantly teetered, tipped in the emotional imbalance and then plummeted. Whirling in wild gyrations, Paul's face immediately blurred and spun. A thousand memories, variant clips and fragmented mementos of our shared childhood raced across the forefront of my mind at speeds that were emotionally deafening. My heart dropped so far that I had no sense of it any longer. An emotional paralysis humanly halted it all.
And then Paul's voice, soft and firm, grounded me. He said, "you don't need to say anything. Just thanks for listening and thanks for the years we had." The words, so needed, were wrapped in a silken veneer of complete peace that gently wrapped itself around me.
My mother was hours from death, Paul was two months or so away from the same thing. I bore both on that front porch. Stunned and pummeled twice. Blackness had fallen once, and then once again. Sometimes you are convinced that life has struck you sufficiently for it seems that its task in irrefutably crushing hope and driving you into some sort of trackless abyss has been so thorough that there is nothing left to destroy or maim. But sometimes life strikes twice, insanely attempting to kill that which has already been killed; finding some savage and sadistic pleasure in touting its victory and superiority by striking one more needless blow on its way back to wherever it came from. If life doesn’t make sense, it’s at times like these.
Being Truly Lost
Struck with a deafening blow by the pending passing of my mother and sent reeling again by Paul’s disclosure; I was dead-center in that place; ground zero in grief. In those places there is no sense of bearing, of true north to at least know where you’re at. Most of the time when we talk about being lost, we have some general sense of direction that provides us a place to start heading off to. We at least have some vague and diffuse sense of where to go.
But being truly lost is nothing of the sort. It’s having absolutely no idea of where you’re at because where you’re at is a place you’ve never been before and could never have believed existed except for the fact that you're now there. It’s having no idea where you should go because all that was once familiar is now terrifyingly unfamiliar and entirely uncertain, rendering the place that you need to go to as unknown.
All of this takes on the horror of a rapidly escalating panic as we suddenly realize that we are utterly and irrevocably alone in it all. Life at its worst isolates us because the more devastating it is, the more unique our experience in it. We become abjectly alone. That’s lost. It is a rare, horrible and deathly place that engulfed me on the front porch that day.
A Path Out of Being Lost
It was all too much had I not bore the immensity of this while sitting on that front porch, that place of deep solace wrapped in majestic trees and God’s thick arms. The front porch offered me a place of solace to watch two people that I loved embrace the reality of a world that is turning and turning dramatically. Oddly and unexpectedly, it was in the watching that I began to find my way out of the lostness.
Both were dying with great grace and valor. There was nothing of surrender in it at all. Surrender implies a weakness that renders us inadequate in conquering that which stands before us. Rather, death with honor and a chaste spirit was hardly weakness. It was bravery of the greatest sort. And on that front porch, surrounded by this place of refuge that God had granted me, I could see it all with great clarity and conviction.
It was not about searching for some path out of the lostness. It was all about watching. The keys and the compass were handed to me in the very things that had thrust me out and down into the abyss that I had plummeted into. Pain frequently results in panic. Panic seeks an immediate resolution and remedy by whatever means that resolution and remedy can be achieved. Panic frequently leads to a flailing and an impulsivity that only deepens and constricts the darkness that wraps itself around us with long, constricting and chilling fingers.
I watched Mom and Paul courageously course their way through the onset of death; deciding to face it head-on with defiance and daring. They had each embraced a posture of bravery and faith; seizing the inevitable, turning death on itself by celebrating and cheering past victories and savoring the innumerable gifts life had lavished on them. It became a recitation of glories, gains and gifts, and deeply flowing gratitude. It was the most genuine celebration of life that I had ever witnessed. I could not grasp it and felt that if I were the one facing death that I would be absolutely nothing of what they were. It was joyous and marvelous, mixed into some sort of wild and terribly rare concoction that I had no right to sip, but was handed by the glassful nonetheless.
Virgil stated, “They can conquer who believe they can.” Conquering for Mom and Paul was about seizing the apparent untimely arrival of death and choosing a posture of celebration and savoring. I confess my inability to grasp it all other than I know it to be real because I watched them grasp it. They seized it in a manner that not only ministered to them, but ministered to others as well. They believed that they could conquer . . . and conquer they did.
It was in this that I instantly found my bearings; both where I was and where I desperately wanted to go. Lostness dissipated by simply watching. The birds seemed to hold their songs for a moment and the trees leaned ever so slightly as if to hear a heart grasp a profound reality. The porch provided me the place. The examples provided me both keys and compass.
In the end, those keys and that compass allowed me to find myself so thoroughly and center myself so precisely that my sense of myself was honed sharper than it had ever been. It was nothing short of stunning and astounding.
God as My Front Porch
“My God -- the high crag where I run for dear life, hiding behind the boulders, safe in the granite hideout; My mountaintop refuge . . . ” (2 Samuel 22:3, The Message). Carefully listen to the metaphors of safety and security that are richly interwoven in this verse. God is place of perfect security. It’s not that life can’t reach us there. God is not a god of seclusion, sweeping us away from all harm and setting us far out of the reach of a world of pain and inexplicable circumstances. He is our refuge right in the middle of this kind of world. He is the place that grants us the place to be found and to find. He is our front porch.
God is that place of perfect security in perfect insecurity. He is that place surrounded by enduring beauty, filled with his marvels so that we might not forget all that is good in all that is wrong. He places us just far enough from the world to muse at it while being separate from it; to find a place from which to learn the lessons that we need to fearlessly engage it. In Him there is a quietness that doesn’t deny the cries of a hurting world, but a quietness that keeps it all at just enough of a distance to grow in it, but not be consumed by it.
“Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life” (Philippians 4:7, The Message). That can only happen in just such a place. In our grief, God affords us a place like that . . . a front porch. And this place is strong enough to weather all the grief that life can throw at us. It is entirely sufficient.
It's a place quiet enough, safe enough and sufficiently spacious for the keys and compass that we need to be handed to us in manner that we fully see them, fully embrace them, and allow them to fully impact our lives. The front porch is then a place of safety, but a place that creates enough space for the miraculous to have plenty of elbow room.
It is an odd, indescribable, nearly inscrutable thing to be able to feel the searing intensity of a life unraveling, and to feel it all in the midst of perfect security that affords me both a path out of my own lostness and opportunity for amazing growth. That is what God affords us in our grief. It is a most marvelous thing indeed.
Paul took it all in stride. He smiled, laughed with a contentment at the life he had been able to live, glanced at the trees and vast expanse of lawn covered in fall’s flaming bounty and said, “it’s been a good life . . . it really has.” Dying fully at ease, that’s what he was doing. He exemplified God’s security in a way most marvelous. God in our grief, that’s what I saw in him. I know it works because I saw it in Paul. Mom exemplified it all of her life. The front porch created a place safe enough and expansive enough to see it.
Because I saw it, I was released to release that which was being lost to me. I was unexplainably released to come alongside my losses and tearfully, yet boldly escort those very losses to the next place.
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