Transparent Christian Magazine

IN LAST WEEK’S COLUMN I mentioned my wife’s inability to move without pain in her back. She is better now, but it is still a work in progress. We’ve both had to adjust to the change in velocity. Her usual lightning speed has slowed to the pace of a good book. Still, in all the caretaking, in becoming her crutch, the prop that helps her conduct life at a primary level, in helping her with the simplest of tasks, a funny thing has happened. We have always been intimate, but not like this. We’ve always had this acute physical attraction to each other, a small bright madness that God allows between a man and a woman in love. Conversation between us has always been as much physical as it is verbal, by a type of Braille the heart employs.

But this is a new and different type of intimacy, a new closeness, a new submission we have both had to answer to. Always serving, it has been as difficult for her to be served as it has been for me to serve. I’ve had to register every painful moan, every tear, every wince, every groan. We have celebrated the smallest of gains. We have also found moments to laugh hard in the process, activating those good medicines between us. Even more than these things, she has taken on a personhood outside that of being wife, partner, lover, best friend. And something has sweetened in the midst of it all. Love has deepened. At times the sweetness has been almost unbearable, and from an altogether different place. But that is how God intended it. He meant for us to exercise these feelings, this part of our humanity he fashioned from some part of himself. That we might know love from all its angles, all its lovely geometries, to seek it out from all its doors and hidden passages. In love he has made us to be pioneers and adventurers, explorers and inventors, saints and medicine men, to find in us the stuff of Mr. Rogers and Indiana Jones, of Captain Kirk and Mother Teresa.

We went to the store this afternoon. Normally, grocery shopping is a solo enterprise. Not today. She could walk and move about, but only slowly, deliberately. She wanted the challenge. She wanted to meet this physical adversary head on. I dig that about her. I did all the gathering, the picking, the choosing, the squeezing of produce, the rejecting, the accepting. I even smelled the cantaloupe, which was a pretense only. I was not sure what it was I was smelling for, or how it was supposed to smell once I smelled it, but at least it had the look of wisdom.

At her request, I left her behind in produce and did the remainder of the shopping on my own. Being summer, and by tradition, I bought popsicles [banana popsicles—the best]. When we finally left Kroger, she waited out front under a canopy while I got the car. It was very hot today, mid-nineties. Anyway, I drove up, put the groceries in the car, and though I helped her get in—one foot, one labored movement after the other—it still took quite a lot of effort on her part, a lot of time, and small touches of pain. She wanted to do the finishing work herself, easing her last foot in, shutting the door, adjusting the seatbelt. I sat patiently, by now holding two popsicles in my hands, one for her and one for me. I waited. I waited some more. I watched with curiosity. Finally, in the midst of all her busyness, all her concentration, and looking at my hands, I said, “I question the wisdom of buying these popsicles.” Her laughter was immediate. In spite of the effort it took, she couldn’t help herself. It was deep, it was true, and more than that, it was music to me. Enjoying what was left of our popsicles, we laughed about it all the way home.

David Teems is a published author, songwriter and stellar musician, who has lived ‘by means of the word‘ for over 20 years. David was “Indie” long before that term was used to described working artists and writers. It is the privilege of Transparent Christian Magazine to have David ’sign on’ for a regular column. “With Love in Mind” will highlight his writing, and from time to time will reference his book “To Love is Christ” (which is an amazing devotional that I am reading) and his upcoming publication “And Thereby Hangs a Tale–Finally, it was my dogs who taught me to stop and smell, well, everything.“. (Click here for an excerpt).