Story of the purple cloth (2016)

26 Mar 2016

First the back story. Then a string of little stories. Hang in there with me; it's cool.

It was 2013, and I was living in Haiti inside a fairly intense situation: living communally, on an active construction site, managing said construction, all projects, and in charge of the logistics for the large teams of Americans that arrived monthly. I had just a few things on my plate. As the year progressed, I was increasingly isolated inside these close quarters and I focused more and more on things spiritual. My prayer life began to focus on the idea of Jesus the human being, the man who walked the earth, who worked with wood and stone, and who walked untold dusty miles. One can more easily picture the stories in the bible when living outside the realm of modern US and particularly in rural Haiti. I'd been watching the construction workers and local farmers for years by this time and saw how their primitive methods and tools so easily illustrated for me the biblical stories. I think that's why I love living there so much. It closes the gap just a bit between our modern life and Jesus. Jesus was a carpenter by inherited trade and that likely involved stone work. One of my most favored sights on the construction site in Haiti was the gravel makers. They would start early in the morning on a pile of huge rocks and boulders and chip away with a hammer or chisel, day after dusty day, sunup to late afternoon, until that pile was gravel. And they smiled. And the stone workers who moved the rocks like so much gravel to create a wall, their muscles so tight and defined despite my knowledge that as a general rule they didn't get much protein. And they smiled. But these guys, they were tough. All of them. And they were dusty and they smelled much different than this American curly headed girl with the nice smelling sprays in her toiletry bag. Well...most of the time.

So I began praying to have a sense of the man who bled, sweated, and hauled rock. Jesus was fully divine and fully human, after all. "Fully human" means sweat, blood, dirty feet, worn dusty clothes. I wanted to equate Jesus with these men who worked all around me because that was the world He lived in and the life He led before we turned it to stained glass.

I prayed and wrote those prayers and went about my time. It was late October/early November and I was about to turn 40. We'd just sent another team of Americans back to the airport to return to their homes and lives and I knew it wouldn't be long til I'd return home, too, possibly for good. A change was coming was all I knew; didn't know exactly what, how, when or where. It was a particularly charged time: spiritually, physically and emotionally difficult to navigate.

The pre-7am morning was beautiful and warm. My body had lately begun to feel the effects of the last few years' work but this day I felt strong. I put on my boots, looked for my dog Diana, and jogged around the compound. The gravel piles mentioned earlier were typically just a little shorter than me, with a good slope to catapult myself up one side and down the other. It added a bit of adventure to the confined jog as I was never quite sure if I would jog or slide down the other side. The sun peeked around the mountain in the distance and the sky brightened toward blue. Diana liked to nip at my bootlaces as I ran and I had to jog-dance around her as I headed for my first gravel pile. As I approached, looking for the best placement for my boot that wouldn't result in a slide backwards, I saw something on the rocks toward the base of the pile.

A swath of dusty purple cloth.

I stopped. I don't remember if I stopped dead in my tracks but I think I did. I know I stopped because everything sort of stopped as I picked up the cloth. It was old, dusty, rough, and dark purple. (Purple is the color of royalty, the color many associate with King Jesus.) The feeling came over me like a wave that I wasn't alone. I actually looked around the deserted area, fully expecting to see Jesus himself walking away, looking over his shoulder and smiling at me. I felt like I'd just missed him as he went out of sight. I could feel the heat coming off the rocks; I stood there looking at the cloth and fighting the urge to run looking around corners, asking anyone I could if they'd seen him. It was like he'd just walked away from his work and inadvertently left part of his cloak.

Later, in my room, I held the swath of cloth. No longer feeling as though he'd just walked away, I now felt as though I held an artifact in my hand. It still felt like it was his. Like he'd popped in from biblical times just for me. To say, hi, you're not alone, I'm with you; we hear you. My artifact went into my journal.

~~~

Weeks later, I was in Louisiana at a 3-day spiritual retreat. Despite my efforts to smile and seem relaxed, people who met me on the day of arrival visibly took a step back when I looked at them. Compared to the other retreatants -- and everyone in polite society -- I was wane, hollow, ultra-thin. I badly needed rest, food, and spiritual discernment. By the second day of the retreat/3rd day on the retreat grounds, I'd had 2 of the 3. After my session, I was walking the lush green of the grounds outside the retreat building, carrying at least 5 different books like a schoolgirl. My brown leather journal was one of them. I could see the frayed purple ends of my artifact poking from the pages and enjoyed seeing them every time I looked down. I was alone with no one in sight. I cut across a field to cross over to an old cemetery I could see in the distance. There was no path, the lawn so meticulously cared for that every green blade seemed uniform. I was wandering and not even sure I wanted to continue on that course because there was a large stone crucifix statue in the other direction that I hadn't gone to visit. I took a few more uncommitted steps and then I saw it: the purple shining up from the green grass.

A swath of purple cloth.

I gasped, thinking I'd dropped mine, and looked at the books in my hand. The purple fray was in its place in my journal. The one on the ground was new. This one was new!

I laughed aloud and sat on the ground. He followed me here. I felt cherished, like a woman whose lover has chased her to lengths to let her know he loves her.

This began a new phase of my relationship with my Lord Abba. Much more interactive, much more tuned in and trusting of the discernment he'd been crafting in me in recent years. After this sweet moment in Louisiana, life got much worse before it got muuuuch better. All along, however, among all the things I questioned, I never questioned his presence with me because I had the two swaths to prove it. Now I have a small collection because every now and then I find a strip of dirty purple cloth laying in my path.

~~~

Fast forward to 2016 and I am diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Whoa, cancer. I was upset; cried. But I didn't feel forsaken; for that I'm grateful. It was more like, "Well, Lord, so this is what we're doing this year: cancer. I don't much like this but I trust you." As the new reality of life with cancer began to sink in and others were brought into that new reality, something was sent to me that showed me the color representing my particular cancer: violet purple.

Well. Of course it is.