A Basket Full of Potpourri and the Grocery Store Train
The corporate religious machines of this world love to preach a rigid, solemn lifestyle when a family is hit by a severe medical crisis. They want you to lock your joy away in a sterile cabinet, speak in hushed whispers and let the machinery of illness dictate the atmosphere of your home. But the true gospel script reveals that the refining fire of the Holy Spirit doesn’t produce a solemn funeral home–it produces a space of rowdy, defiant, and unshakeable joy.
When I look back at the years following my mother’s stroke, my memory doesn’t gather a collection of tragedies. Instead, it pulls out a beautiful, fragrant basket full of potpourri–a collection of wild, unhurried everyday adventures where we refused to let a wheelchair steal our class. To see this defiance in full color, you only had to watch our family navigate the local grocery store on a Friday afternoon.
Man’s design would look at a woman with a tracheostomy tube and a wheelchair should stay hidden in the house. But we turned the grocery aisles into a literal amusement park. We played “train.” I would line up at the back, gripping the handles of my mother’s wheelchair and pushing with all my might considering the load I had to push! My now three-year-old son Paul sat in the plastic seat holder of the cart, taking in all the sights facing grandma who in turn would lock her hands on the shopping cart handle to become the middle car. Standing proudly at the very front of the train grid, acting as our chief conductor, was my now five-year-old daughter Jen directing grandpa to the foods we needed especially the box of Freihofer’s chocolate chip cookies; she and grandpa would always fight over, and will show up again at a later time in my story, so keep posted. Then when we were ready to move we all said; chug chug woo woo, up and down the aisles with absolute laughter as we lived in our own adventurous life!
One holiday season, I was busy tidying up around the house, trying to sweep up a massive mess of dried pine needles that had scattered from the Christmas tree onto the living room rug. Because of course we had to make that Christmas the most special homemade exactly like all the past Christmases growing up, complete with a live fresh cut tree, because it would be our first Christmas post stroke. She was still rather weak from her six-month hospitalization, so she sat in her wheelchair watching me. But not for long that feisty mother of mine started bending over trying to help to the point it was easier just to ease her down on the floor, where on her hands and knees started picking up pine needles as we laughed hysterically for the next hour. The comedy only grew greater when we had to figure out the sheer physics of how to wiggle and hoist to get back up into that wheelchair while both of us were completely losing it with the giggles!
On warm afternoons, we could find grandma and Jen busy either painting nail polish on patient Amber, grandma’s toy French Poodle, or Jen giving grandma a full facial makeup session before she went to a concert at the Arena, on a date with her special man. Of course, I always got to go with them as their special loving caregiver!
There were no sterile hospital boundaries in our house; there was only the beautiful, messy texture of relationship. When autumn arrived, we didn’t sit quietly–we gathered the whole crew around the kitchen table, getting our hands completely covered in stringy orange pulp as we carved out giant pumpkins together. Looking back now with a better understanding, there are so many memories that were really orchestrated as “God winks by the Loving Pursuer.”
The Master Potter found described in Jeremiah 18; reminds us that holiness is found right in the middle of the mess. Joy isn’t a future destination you reach after the wheelchair disappears; it is a basket of potpourri you carry with you every single day, turning a messy carpet or a simple grocery run into a glorious parade of grace along the shore.
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