"my first love..."

"You are still my first love,
You're my guiding light
You're with me in the fire
You lead me through the night..."

Last week I returned from a love-affirming trip to California, where I had the honor of marrying two beautiful men, and visiting with my sister and her family.

The drive out had been an exercise in refuting the evidence of the senses. Thirty hours in the car, and all of them spent in prayer. First, because I loved having that time to commune with God. And second, because I was facing a very painful physical situation. Not going, was not an option. So prayer became the only path to getting there. By the day of the wedding, I was pain-free -- but that is another story.

This post is about my return trip -- another thirty hours in the car. And although this thirty hours was not what I'd  expected, it was so filled to the brim - with love and prayer - that it was even more beautiful than I could have imagined. All week, I have loved listening to Chris Tomlin's "My First Love." It perfectly keynotes this experience.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  This story begins on a foggy Monday in San Francisco.

As I drove away from my sister's home that morning, I was completely free of the pain that had kept me awake, and in focused prayer, for the entire drive out only days earlier. My heart was filled with humble gratitude -- for what I'd learned about my love for God, and God's love for me.  During those agonizing hours alone in the car, I'd lived my resolve to completely trust in His care. 

But now, I was looking forward to a peaceful drive home. I was thinking about the scenery I'd actually be able to enjoy this time around, about the sidetrips I was hoping to make in little towns along the way, and the music I was going to be able to sing along to. For just a moment, I indulged in a sigh of relief, after what had felt like a long siege.

Once over the Golden Gate Bridge, I parted with my sister, her husband, and their sweet dogs - Mollie and Bear. I felt confident about my trip strategy, and I had my heart set on an early evening stop in the small mountain town of Truckee where I would grab a light dinner before sunset. 

Leaving Truckee - as the sky turned from blue, to salmon, to lavender - I was a bit surprised that I had yet to fill the car with music. But the silence had been such good company.  And I knew I had a long night of driving ahead. James Taylor, Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt, and others would get their due as I navigated the Great Basin and the Great Salt Lake under a star-studded sky.

Heading through Reno, my heart was overflowing. I recounted with gratitude, all that I'd witness of God's healing/transforming love that weekend. It had been such a beautiful time of devotion to friendship and family. I felt so blessed.

Just after I saw Reno fading in my rearview mirror, traffic came to a sudden stop. No warning, no signage, just stopped. I knew I was heading into the "wilderness" phase of my drive -- hours and hours of empty landscape from Reno to Salt Lake City with very few towns in between. I needed to do it in the dark, as the daytime temperatures had been hovering between 105 and 110 degrees across the desert that week. I had my fuel stops planned, and I knew where the best rest areas were for pulling over and napping. But my schedule was dependent on doing this portion of the drive during the cooler night hours.

After about 45 minutes of sitting at a stand still -- with only a handful of cars coming in the other direction on Interstate 80 -- a car finally pulled onto the medium and told us that there was a wildfire raging in the foothills, and that it had jumped the interstate. We were being turned around and sent back to Reno for a detour.

Heading back towards Reno, I started feeling unsettled and shaken. I knew the detour would take me completely off schedule. Besides that, I would be on a two-lane highway in the middle of the night -- a highway known as the "loneliest highway in America," -- no kidding. But, if that was where I was being taken, I would go there. All plans of listening to my favorite Pandora playlist evaporated. I was committed to a night of silence -- and prayer.

About an hour into the detour, Something told me, "take that left hand turn." So I did -- obediently. My GPS guide went a bit ballistic, so I turned her off. Now, it really was, just me and God. 

 I knew I had gone about an hour south, and then an hour east. Heading north again, I knew I would likely reconnect with the Interstate. This seemed like a tangential, but logical, plan.  Since I would be alone in the middle of the night, the Interstate seemed like the better option.

But when I reached I-80 it was almost apocalyptical. I drove through the tiny side-of-the-highway town, and followed the signs to the on ramp. The town felt deserted, and when I pulled onto the Interstate, it was absolutely empty of cars and trucks. Driving east, I realized I was the only vehicle traveling on either side of the road. Suddenly, I was engulfed in smoke. But the Voice told me to keep driving. So I did.

On my right and left, I saw rivers of flame flowing through canyons and racing down the hillside towards the interstate. "Keep driving," the Voice kept repeating, "I am with you in the flames." So I did. Mile-after-mile of dense smoke, empty highway, flames visible through intermittent breaks in the ash-filled night air. Flames that crested the hillsides to the north and south. And every once in a while, there would be a clearing above --  where stars were cradled in a bowl of midnight sky.

I was not afraid. I knew the truth -- that beyond all that smoke,  there was a clear night sky. I knew that I was not alone. Just as I had not been alone on the drive out -- when pain tried to suck any sense of peace from my experience.  I knew that I was not a fragile mortal, alone in the car driving across the Great Basin. I was with the One I loved. I was with the One who loved me even more than my husband, my children, and my community. I was with my first love -- God.  I was clear about one thing.  I only knew how to love anyone -- including my loved ones -- because of this first Love.

So, I listened the way one listens to their first love. I listened to my Beloved tell me about Him. About His love for creation. About His beautiful universe. About His love for me.  About His love for the couple I'd married earlier that week.  About His love for our children, my sister's work, my friends, the geo-political world I'd been so concerned about all winter and spring.

I'd always loved taking road trips with those I loved -- boyfriend, finance', husband, girlfriends -- and eventually, with my daughters. I loved listening to them tell stories about their lives. I loved asking things like, "when you hear this song, what is the first memory that comes to mind," or "what are your dreams, your hopes, your plans."

But that night, I listened to God with the same eager intimacy -- with a sweet sense of being alone together in the dark on an empty highway with the one I loved -- with my first love.

In the book of Revelation, John admonishes the church at Ephesus saying:

"I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience...
and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted.
Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee,
because thou hast left thy first love..."  

I smiled thinking of this verse that night. It had always been one of my favorite passages in Scripture. I just loved it, but I didn't know that I always knew what it felt like -- really felt like -- to know God as my "first love."  That night, I felt it. 

 On the drive out, the pain had demanded that I needed to turn to God -- to know Him -- in order to simply get through the night. But this was different.  This was love. 
There was a sweet intimacy to our time together in the wilderness of the Great Basin, with wildfires raging around us. Right there, in the car, we were quietly, intimately, peacefully in oneness -- amid the smoke, and the darkness, and the emptiness of that lonely highway.

Sometime during the night - after I seemed to have driven well-beyond the fires - I pulled into a rest area.  I hoped to take a short nap before the sun came up, and the temperatures in the desert rose. I curled into the backseat and felt so tenderly held by my "first love." However, when I awoke in the cloying heat, I was feeling very ill.  But it just didn't matter -- I knew I was going to be fine. I was with my Love. I called a Christian Science practitioner for support, and pulled back onto the highway, letting only His voice speak to me, and tell me what I felt. 

Seventeen hours later I pulled into our driveway. It had been such a sweet, holy journey.  After I turned off the engine, I just sat there in the silence. It had been the most beautiful road trip of my life.

I will never forget this time with my first love -- my always, and forever, and eternal  -- first love.


offered with gratitude -- and with Love,

Kate

"...in your name I find meaning..."

"...I'm hanging on another day
Just to see what you will throw my way
And I'm hanging on to the words you say
You said that I would...would be ok

I'm falling apart, I'm barely breathing
With a broken heart that's still beating
In the pain there's the healing
In your name I find meaning
So I'm holdin' on
I'm still holdin' on,
I'm holdin' on
I'm barely holdin' on to you..."
-     Lifehouse

The other day I felt like I was "falling apart," in much the same way that Lifehouse articulates in this lovely, plaintive song of hope, and longing, titled "Broken."  But it was also just the reminder I needed.   When I heard it, I was feeling particularly lonely in the aloneness of a moment, and it immediately brought me peace. 

I love that line, "in your name I find meaning."  And the "you" in whose name alone I "find meaning" is the great "I AM" whose presence feels as intimate to me as my own hopes and dreams, sorrows and joys...the very private thoughts I cherish in the dark silence of the night. 

When I was still a very young woman, but thought I was all grown up and more than ready to fly solo, my mother and siblings...with whom I had been living since my dad's passing...moved to another state.  In some ways one might think I would have been happy and relieved.  I'd worked two or more jobs for a few years in order to help pay for our rent, utilities, food and family expenses, and this might mean a bit of a break from those demands.  But that wasn't how I was feeling.

Yes, I was excited to be out on my own.  I'd found a Manhattan couple who'd purchased a gentleman's farm in our rural community and talked them into letting me renovate the loft of their beautiful barn into a loft apartment in exchange for rent.  And I was thrilled by the opportunity to creatively redefine the space, by their trust in my twenty-one year old chutzpah, and for my first real privacy...I'd always lived in other people's spaces and had always dreamed about my own apartment.  But there was also a sadness about living away from my mother, sisters, and brothers.

I moved my few belongings into a small storage space in the barn that was heated, had been insulated for winter, and had a tiny bathroom in the corner.  I'd cook on a hot plate and use a tiny little dorm-size refrigerator until I'd finished the renovation.  I had a twin bed pushed under the barnwood eaves and a little table with two chairs. I'd brought three small paintings I done in high school, ones that the school had had framed for an exhibit at the local library.  I used my simple cedar hope chest for storing my clothes and I'd hung my three dresses (and two waitress uniforms I needed for my second job) on a nail at the end of the room.  An antique embroidered linen pillowslip folded over a wooden dowel served as a curtain on the one small window framed by rough barnwood.  I loved way the sunrise looked through the ripply green-tinted glass each morning and vowed to make that window a centerpiece in the renovation. 

That first night after I washed my mug and bowl out in the bathroom sink, dried them with the worn blue and white checked dishtowel I'd begged my mom to let me keep with me, I brushed my teeth and climbed between the soft white sheets and under the colorful quilts that represented the entirety of my dowry.  I'd always loved vintage linens and had gathered bits and pieces over the years from my grandmother, a generous neighbor who'd shared her treasures, and a dusty antique shop in the village we'd lived in while I was in high school.

I turned off the small lamp that sat on an upturned fruit crate that served as my first bookcase and lay in the dark.  I'd grown up in a family of eight children.  I'd shared a bedroom with as many as four of my sisters, depending on the size and number of bedrooms a house had, all my life.  We'd always lived in small houses.  Houses in which our rooms were so cozy, and close to one another, that I could hear my brothers whispering in their room while I read in my bottom bunk across the hall.  I'd never, ever, heard or experienced the kind of visceral silence I was greeted by that night once I'd turned the lamp off.  It was as if someone had sucked every bit of sound out of the room.  I was aware of my heartbeat, my own thoughts, the sound of my nightgown rustling against the soft cotton of my sheets.  I was aware of the unique rhythm of my own breathing, in and out, in and out, in and out. 

This was so new to me.  New, and lonely.  Soon I was aware of more than just my breathing, and my heartbeat.  I was aware of the sound of my own crying. I was alone in the dark, I was falling apart, and I was hyper-aware of everything around me.  And more importantly, everything within me.  I discovered that if you listen closely you really can hear the sound of tears dropping from your eyelashes, rolling along your cheek and falling to the pillowcase under your face. I discovered just how much I really did miss my family.  I missed all the sounds I'd complained about throughout high school when I'd thought all I wanted was "a room of my own."  I missed my sister purring in her sleep, my mother's tapping of her fingers on the kitchen table as she enjoyed a late night cup of tea in the quiet of her own house long after midnight.  I missed the mewing of babies and the turning of more than a half dozen children in their beds while I read.

I missed them. And I was aware of missing them.  It was quiet enough that nothing distracted me from the sound of the love that was happening in my heart.  

This missing them in the silence of the dark was my first awareness of the deep intimacy we each have with our God.  In my aloneness, I discovered that I was really not alone.  There were new thoughts coming to me every moment.  I was feeling the seeping in of a new awareness of my love for my mother, appreciation for my sisters, I could feel the presence of my dreams for the future, and my hunger for meaningful love and purposeful work.  I could actually feel my desire for my sister Nancy's bony spine against mine as we slept back-to-back in the double bed we'd shared at times during childhood.

This awareness of "me", my hopes, my desires, my thoughts, my sadness and longing, was rich with being, was full of the "I AM" of conscious being...God. For me, this is what Mary Baker Eddy is talking about when in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures she refers to:

"...the conscious infinitude of existence and of all identity..."

I learned to love the silence of that small bed under the eaves, because it introduced me to myself...the self that had an inner life.  The self that was no longer being drowned out by all the hustle and bustle of being one of many voices, movements, breathing in a big family.  The self that was conscious of the infinitude of her identity and was discovering that right there, within her own conscious being, lay all the important answers she'd been looking for. 

My silent life in a drafty barn didn't last long...but I have never forgotten it in the ensuing years, as the quiet spaces started filling in with husband, children, phone calls, patients, guests, dogs, washing machines, dishwashers, computers and babies. 

And to this day, when I am feeling most alone in the world, it is not people I seek to surround myself with...even the people I love the most...it is the silence of a darkened room.  My favorite time of day, the time of day - the space - that fills me, and satisfies me most...so that I have something real to give others...are those moments just after waking, when I have not heard a sound, moved even a single finger or probed a toe seeking to feel the sheets or rustle the bedclothes. Those are the moments before I have opened my eyes to see the light of day playing on the pear colored walls of our bedroom. And it is in this timeless time that I am aware, in that profound silence, of the "great I AM" that is me, my conscious being. 

In these moments of great intimacy with my God, I am most keenly atune to the "pain" of missing loved ones...a profound love that heals.  I am most appreciative of the joys of having thoughts that are beautiful and rich with purpose...even if just to me.   I am most conscious of knowing that I am never alone...but always filled with Him...with Her...with the I AM that is the only real oneness that matters...the only I or US that all other relationships spring from.

In the silence of a my first waking thoughts, I find God...the kingdom of heaven within. And this same infinite nearness of the divine is there for each of us...all the time.

with Love, 
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS