Breathing Grace

The ring Sara sent me in June, it didn’t fit my middle finger.

She’d worn it on her middle finger — until its sterling silver weight had made her enflamed knuckles burn.

That’s when she wound it off slow, slipped it in an envelope, and had it dropped off at the post office.

Because she knew — the fire in my bones had been about extinguished.

And if I wore it, would I feel the heat ignite?

The letter she’d tucked in with the ring read:

I don’t know how Sara knew this season had battered hard. Don’t know when I told her that fear sometimes made my teeth chatter. How to keep breathing when your bones feel a bit deadened and ash-gray?

I wrote to her one night, my first real letter to her:

Sara had turned all the pages in that story of eucharisteo that I had stumbled to scratch awkwardly down.

Her very first letter to me had said her vocabulary had a new word: eucharisteo. She wasn’t simply reading it; she was living it. She wrote it on her wall, painted it on canvas, pinned to her inspiration board. Her spine was fusing and her lungs ached and she smiled a bit weakly to think she might live decades with an eight on the pain scale, housebound three years because this world’s air would kill her — but she was taking every moment as grace, charis, giving thanks for it, and finding joy, chara. Grace, gratitude, joy — eucharisteo.

Sara chose joy.

And I told her I carried her with me wherever I went — on planes, across the mountains, out to the ocean, right to the edge. Me, the woman terrified to leave her house, wearing the ring of the woman who couldn’t leave hers.

When I didn’t think I could walk out the door and keep breathing, I’d feel the ring. Sara would stand at the door and dance if she had this chance. I couldn’t contort this blessing into a burden.

She had told me once, “I had to choose fear — or completely trust Him. One cannot exist if the other is true.”

So I walked out my door and I breathed. Stepping into fears can be the first step into real faith and focusing the eyes on all the grace here keeps the focus on His all-sufficient grace.

Fear is banished in this present moment when the presence of I am fills it.

We could do that: Practice the awareness of God’s filling present.

Sara had written it too:

Sara chose joy and saw grace and she waved back.

I sent her photos of the flowers on the front porch, practicing the praise of God in the present, sent photos of smiling friends who choose joy with her.

And in a few weeks Sara smiles back from the screen’s webcam and tells me in this gravelly voice, coughing it out, that she is saying it too: Yes to God. I have to turn from the screen, everything running liquid. She says it too? She knows it too: When we need peace, we only need to say yes to God’s purposes.

How can she say that? Because she lives what she believes — and she scrawls it everywhere and all over my heart: eucharisteo. Yes, God, yes!

Grace, gratitude, joy — eucharisteo.

And a night in late September, after hospice is called in and she knows she’s finally, thankfully, turned homeward, Sara writes:

I close my eyes tight, blink it all back. Sara knows what biblical scholars know, the very name of God — YHWH — sounds like our breathing — aspirated consonants. God Himself names Himself — and the name He chooses is the sound of our own breathing.

When you are weak, take a deep breath. That’s what Sara said at the end: Breathe. Say His name. Say yes to God. Eucharisteo.

Her last words to me, they blink up in an e-mail: “You will never be alone or need to be afraid.”

I reach out to touch the screen, touch her one last time, ring touching her last pixels and she is still breathing.

As long as she breathes, she says yes to God.

I keep my hands there on the screen, on Sara’s words, on Sara — her encircling me in silver, my bones all burning love and Him and joy.

And my daughter, Hope, she’s playing it in the night shadows again, playing it again tonight, “Cherry Blossoms in Rain” on the piano, the song she now calls “Sara’s Song” — her fingers, all her fingers, playing the notes.

And again there’s an ache, a haunting echo, and the notes like the Oriental East, like a winging or a long leaving, like standing at the edge of what once was and witnessing the losing of something pure and prayed for.

After the last high note, Hope whispers it into the stilled dark: “Mama? That whole song, it’s played on the black notes.”

The black notes. The black notes make music too.

Somewhere in the house, in the dark, I can hear it — how a door opens, how Sara now walks straight through into light.

When she turns and waves back to grace, I’ll take a deep breath and wave to the extraordinary joy of her too, her silver ring shimmering on my hand here …

The weight of all His sheer glory.

Lord God, my every breath is saying Your name. Even when my life seems to be playing only black notes — how can I not choose eucharisteo: grace, gratitude, joy?