What did you collect as a kid? Might there be a vital clue buried therein? A small truth worth pondering all these years later?
I cadged Lipton tea tags, those one-inch squares stapled by string to pleated, porous bags—after Mom steeped them with lemon and sugar.
I loved those tags, counting them, aligning their edges, shuffling them to hear that singular papery whisper. They seemed quietly ripe with promise, like tickets to a secret club: Admit One.
Treasures, with no strings attached.
Author Tim McCreight writes: “Since our first days, we know the world by touching, our network of senses completely enclosing us like a web of awareness drawn up from the soles of our feet to the follicles at the top of our head.”
How ingenious, these God-given neural networks that collect and curate incoming sensations!
More often than we realize, perhaps, we still find our way forward via what we feel. And by what touches us. This is one of the ways we measure relationships, gauge surroundings and opportunities. We probe our latest experience. Suss out new boundaries, mining their essential substance.
Perhaps we ache over a poignant story, simultaneously awed as we intuit God’s interactive presence.
Two of my dear friends, both of them believers and sublime poets, are currently beset by ravaging cancers and perilous complications. Their treatments, which involve painfully invasive procedures and disagreeable temperatures as well as textures, alarm and worry me.
Heartache crops up.
Yet the radical grace these women communicate through their words and faith and outlook—despite being steeped in protracted suffering—also inspire me, nudge my faith onward. Because of them, I’m seeing both sides now, and I thank God for their example and the practical ways I see them maintaining an immovable stance of gratitude.
Gratitude, so often, is one part awe, one part ache.
I’ll bet that you, or a friend or family member also see, then collect glints of unexpected treasure amid life’s inevitable horrors.
Let’s keep sharing this wealth freely, no strings attached. Let’s offer one another a ticket to enter new states of grace. As we witness each other’s experience, no matter how temporarily bitter, we vicariously strengthen one another, thus sweeten the cup set before us.
As a kid, what did you collect? Do you see any connections to your life today?
You might also enjoy this musical offering from the archives, on gratitude
Or this post: Gratitude: Develop, Break Free, Generate Life
Fern photo: Mario Dobelmann on Unsplash
Faces photo: Soroush Karimi on Unsplash
Gary M VanLandingham says
Dear Laurie
As year 80 is beckoning me in early November the “other side” seems more and more desirable and yes real. In prayer a short time ago the whisper to my soul was simply this, immortality must endure mortality until the transition occurs. We are so wrapped up in our emotional security blanket we forget we were known before the foundation of the world and will continue the journey after this one is over. Your words are like golden spider silk that easily attaches to my heart and mind. Thanks
gvl
Laurie Klein says
Dear Gary, how marvelous to once again hear your voice through these words you’ve written. I immediately flash on the challenging, sometimes comic, and always contagious inspiration of your teachings all those years ago when our paths aligned for a season.
Nor can I completely take in the fact that your eighth decade beckons. We just turned 70, a continuing amazement. I, too, long to cross over!—meanwhile, choosing to trust the timetable.
Thank you for reminding me today of Love’s timeless depths . . . and our place therein.
Jody Collins says
Gratitude is one part awe, one part ache. So true, Laurie. It’s the both/and of walking with Jesus. Believing amidst the awful that He is with our friends.
Laurie Klein says
Jody, thank you. It’s a gentle grace to be reminded afresh today that we are never alone in “believing amidst the awful that He is with our friends.”
Gail Larson says
Laurie., I always learn something and am inspired to explore life a bit deeper after reading your words. I must admit my vocabulary is always in need of expansion. So today you nudged me to investigate the humble little acorn. I collected them as a child growing up in New England. We had magnificent oak trees and I loved the little two-part nuggets they dropped. It was important to me for some reason to keep the little hats (cupule) with the nut (pericarp surrounding the cotyledon). They needed to stay together. Maybe its my instinct, graciously given to us all, that we can’t survive apart from our Maker. We are inseparable. Covered and loved.
Laurie Klein says
Gail, I am imagining you filling your pockets with acorns and bringing them home. “Cupule “is a new word for me, and I am delighted to learn it!
I’m also really taken by the spiritual and practical parallels you draw on survival: the need “to stay together,” and how we are “Covered and loved. . . . inseparable.” What timely truths brimming within those childhood memories.
Feels like you just gave me a ticket to a fresh state of grace. : > )
Jenneth says
Dear Laurie, thank you for your tangible images of tea bag collecting, and yes the ache and awe…a few days ago our friend died of cancer and another friend is suffering with stage 4. I’m so sorry to hear about your friends. My friends are a huge inspiration to me as well. Prayers to gather in love around them all. Love to you Laurie x
Laurie Klein says
Oh Jenneth, I am saddened to hear of this great loss. May God comfort you. And I feel for (and with) you amid the ongoing struggle as your other friend endures. May healing come!
I feel sure you’ll agree it is both a sorrow and a costly privilege to bear witness to journeys like these.
Thank you for your understanding and for expressing your empathy for me and my friends as well. May Love keep you and yours.
Susan says
Ache/awe reminds me of the fear/love of God. Perhaps there is about our position as saved but still in the midst of sanctification that allows for holding seemingly disparate things in one hand. Our brokenness allows us to connect them. Oh the ways the Father draws us closer to know him better!
Laurie Klein says
Oh my, that comparison to fear/love gives me a shiver as I read it and think about it.
Seeing brokenness as a means of connection arrests me, too. I’ve not looked at it from quite this angle before. I think I’ve heard someone refer to this handling of disparate experience as faith finding equilibrium amid “cognitive dissonance.” A lot of syllables there.
I return to the image.
Thank you for extending a picture of the conflicted yet engaged human hand (always) invisibly held in the hands of a healing God.
Linda Jo Reed says
Offering one another a ticket to new states of grace. Lovely.
Laurie Klein says
Aw, Linda Jo, thank you for that. You’ve offered me tickets, from time to time, in person, and through your blog. Grateful for you.
Bethany Rohde says
The “papery whisper” of the tea tags. <3 I just love this, Laurie.
I am so sorry your two precious friends are going through such painful seasons. I will pray for them today.
Thank you for offering us both an acknowledgment of suffering's reality and an encouragement to allow a nod to beauty nonetheless. (Your writing does this beautifully.)
Laurie Klein says
Bethany, thank you so much for expressing your empathy as well as offering prayers for my friends.
I have thought from time to time that if ever I learn to speak Bird, I might sometimes function as a scribe for the mourning dove, a favorite bird of mine with its plaintive, fluting sighs. I hear them often, and their song feels like a nudge to search out the hidden loveliness in unexpected places. Sounds fanciful, but I’m finding it increasingly practical too, the older I get!
Nancy Ruegg says
As always, thank you for a cup of grace at the table of your writing, Laurie. I’m remembering your personal siege of self-isolation a year or two ago, and how your faith and gratitude kept you afloat. Your posts during those months did include glints of unexpected treasure in spite of your suffering. Praise God when trouble comes, He provides the grace and strength not only to bear it, but to turn it into treasure. P.S. I collected paper dolls as a child–some store-bought, some hand-drawn. I don’t see any connection to my life today except to share the hobby with my young granddaughters–a sublime pleasure!
Laurie Klein says
Nancy, thank you for pulling up a chair. : > )
You are reminding me of the lone set of paper dolls once in my care. Alas, I’m picturing ripped tabs as I type, my impatience in ever-trying to “make things stay.”
Might I venture a possible connection for you? Your consistent, irrepressible sense of style: Weekly, year in, year out, for as long as I’ve known you (virtually), you clothe your website posts for your readers with vivid, sometimes vintage/sometimes new/always long-wearing truths and fitting images.
Rick Mills says
“Perhaps we ache over a poignant story, simultaneously awed as we intuit God’s interactive presence.”
Ache – it’s deep.
A word that resonates and echoes over these past 10ish of my so far 62 years.
Learning to listen to and welcome the ache.
“Gratitude, so often, is one part awe, one part ache.”
Got nuthin to add here besides, “exactly!”
“No wonder ache and awe are kin, etymologically. Other word-cousins include awful and achilles—as in heel: according to myth, an area of chronic, lifelong vulnerability.”
This one got my attention.
Had my achilles worked on this week. Hearing of too many people who tear or pop theirs.
So I’m trying to be proactive in keeping mine well.
Had just gotten off the phone with my cousin from asking him how his torn achilles injury was healing, when your email came in.
He lost his job at 60 years of age – suddenly.
Then his injury.
I hurt for him.
I’m gonna pray for him to greater depth.
That in his anguish, he be awed.
How?
I don’t know.
I’m not God.
The older I become, I’m learning not to complicate such thoughts as these.
The want to know exactly what is being said in the moment.
But to rest, in the ache.
Laurie Klein says
“That in his anguish, he be awed.”
That prayer arrests me, Rick, as does “rest, in the ache.”
And it is so personally heartening to read that things that strike me resonate with you as well.
May your achilles tendon, and that of your friend, be restored to sturdy as well as limber response with each step you take.