Carolyne Aarsen

Looking Beyond the Present.

Christmas is past us and I know some of us are breathing a sigh of relief. Relief because when life is hard, Christmas only seems to underline the difficulties. When you're in a valley, it seems that Christmas is a light we'd just as soon not spend much time looking at because it seems so far away.

The picture I have attached to this blog is of my mother's family. I got this picture in a collection of old family photos for heritage scrapbooks I am putting together for each of my children. I am working on the fourth scrapbook now for the fourth child, but each time I pasted this particular picture in the scrapbook, I would look at it and wonder why everyone looked so sombre. Especially my Oma who loved a laugh and was always smiling. In other family pictures everyone looked so happy. I asked my mother about that picture and she gave a melancholy smile. That picture, she told me, was taken only a few months after Holland, where my mother's family lived, was invaded by enemy forces. Knowing that, I looked more carefully at my Oma and wondered what was going through her mind when this picture was taken. How many worries and concerns did she have for this family that she and my Opa were in charge of. I'm sure she wondered what kind of future awaited them? What would happen to her children, to the grandchild one of her children was expecting in this picture? Huge thoughts for parents to have to deal with. She didn't know what awaited her in the valley she knew they were going down into. She didn't know if they would come out the other side.

I grew up hearing stories of the hardships, they faced. The people they hid, the risks they took. The privations they endured. The losses they suffered. I'm sure there were many times during those long dark years that my Oma felt as if her prayers went nowhere and I'm sure she wondered many times, How long oh, Lord?

However, we know how the story ended. We know they made it through so we look at it differently and with assurance that they managed.

Many people I know are in a valley right now, we've gone through many ourselves. But when you're in the dark and lonely places, you don't know how to find your way out. I just want to encourage you that valleys do have an end. That things change. That other people have gone through sorrows and valleys and have come out. I pray the same for you.

Pet Perspective

We live on a farm at the intersection of No and Where. We've been through many dogs. Some we had to dispose of ourselves, some got run over, some just disappeared. Mostly we had a que-sera-sera attitude toward the dogs. When you live on a farm, most animals have to serve a purpose and that includes dogs and cats and horses and cows. When we got Toby, the dog in the picture here, we chose her for a purpose. Both her parents were excellent cattle dogs. And, we discovered, so was Toby. She was a natural and lived for the days when we had to move the cows to work with the calves or move them from pasture to pasture. But what set Toby apart from all the other dogs that roamed in and out of our lives is the fact that she was smart, loving, cute - and she stayed alive for fourteen years. She was the only dog that we had this long and, as a result, became a part of our family like no other dog had. She was loved and adored and appreciated by our children, by my family and by our own friends. She loved children and was always gentle with them. She let our 18 month old granddaughter sit beside her and put hats on her head. She would go with me on long walks as I untangled twisted story lines, prayed for my children and simply enjoyed being outside. For fourteen years, as I headed down trails and roads, always in my peripheral vision, was the sight of her black tail, waving like a plume, her head up, sniffing the air.

Over the past year she started showing her age. When we went out for a walk she would stay a bit closer to me and didn't go charging out after deer, or running off into the field following the scent of a coyote or scurrying off into the trees to chase down a rabbit. But she as always game to head out no matter how cold or hot. My husband had always taken her to the mountains when he went out on week long trail rides with his horses. This was the highlight of her year, but this year, we knew it wasn't going to be possible. She was just getting to old for eight hour long rides. We started to think that maybe, one day, this dog might not be with us. I started to wonder when we would have to make that fateful trip to the vet, though I knew it wasn't going to happen soon. Toby was still in such good health and I didn't want to contemplate having to make that hard decision.

Then, one night, last month, she and a visiting dog, headed off to check something out in the back field. The visiting dog returned and Toby didn't. I called and called, and when she didn't come bounding up to me, mouth open, tongue hanging out, looking as if she was laughing at some private joke, I knew something had gone horribly wrong. But it was 11:00 at night and cold and I didn't know where to start looking for her in the forest surrounding our home. Neither my husband nor I could sleep that night and as soon as it got light, we went out to look for her. Awhile later, we found her, dead, in the snow only fifty yards from the house. Killed by two wolves according to the tracks we found and the way she had been killed. As I knelt down beside her broken body, I could not believe how deeply I grieved the loss of this dog and how much it hurt. I used to chuckle at people who grieved pets, thinking, how much can you love a dog? Well, last month, I choked on my own words. I found out exactly how much you can love a dog. I found out exactly what kind of a hole they leave in your life when they go. Especially when all the kids are out of the house and sometimes the only conversation I would have was a one-sided one with my dog.

Toby now lays under a pine tree on a sunny hillside overlooking a field. A fitting final resting place for a dog who loved to run up and down those self same hills or sit beside us when we would enjoy the warm sun. My husband and I have had deeper, harder sorrows in my life. We buried a child, each of us a father, grandparents and cousins. We've stood by graves of friends, of children of friends. I know where to put this sorrow for our dog in the grander scheme of things. But it is still a sorrow and I know that anyone who has ever had a beloved pet understands.

Someday I'll find a way to channel this into a story. I'm a writer. That's what writers do. We take the good and bad events of our lives and shift and re-shape them and then put them in a book. It's a way of dealing and controlling events we have no control over. So some day, when you're reading one of my books, you might have the privilege of meeting Toby for yourself. I hope you enjoy her as much as we have.

Mary, Mary

Easter is coming. And we are going to get together with our children to remember and to celebrate this highest of holy holidays. We will be together as a family, but this Easter I'm seeing things from a different perspective.

A few weeks ago, I was Mary the mother of Jesus. During the past few weeks of Lent, each Sunday different people did a monologue from the point of view of some of the main characters in the Easter Story. Judas one week, Mary Magdalene, Pontius Pilate, Mary the mother of Jesus and Peter. I did the monologue for Mary. It was a full page of text and it seemed daunting. I can barely remember a phone number or my grocery list and now I was going to recite an entire page in front of our congregation? I felt my responsibility keenly and went over and over this monologue, memorizing it piece by piece, reciting it in my mind when I went on walks, when I was baking, cleaning house and then I finally felt I had a handle on them.

The monologue deals with Mary calling God to account for letting her son die this horrible death. And Mary then thinks back over her life with her son, puzzling over the fact that the God who sent an angel to tell her the news of her son's birth, who blessed Elizabeth with a child after years of barrenness, who sent angels to shepherds, sent wise men to worship her son, who gave her a son who was such a blessing - could stand by and watch her son die.

I wanted this to be meaningful and as I recited the words, stumbling over mistakes and starting over again, I prayed. Prayed that they words would become meaningful to me and to my audience. Then, slowly, as the words became a part of me I saw Mary from another light. This was a woman who had to watch her son die a horrible death. A woman who had heard her son cry out to God in anguish and had received nothing in response. A woman who wondered how the God who had given her this blessed son, who had given her such joy could take that son away so cold, hard and cruelly. She didn't know how the story ended. On Good Friday, she only knew that she had lost her son. I never fully appreciated the sorry and anguish she faced until I did that monologue and became Mary, if only for a few moments. And as I spoke her words of sorrow, imagining my own son up there on the cross, they became the words of any mother who has lost her son.

We of this time and age, know how the story ended and, after a few days, so did Mary. And over time, she also came to realize how necessary this death was and what was accomplished with it. The victory and the power of it.

However, I know that there are many mothers out there, this Easter season, whose sons are not home. Who will not be celebrating, but who will be grieving the loss of a son as hard as Mary grieved the loss of hers. For these mothers and parents, the story is ongoing and the sorrow will fade but always be there. The victory is not as easily seen and the reason is not always understood.

This Easter season I want to remember those mothers who have lost sons and daughters. Family's who are missing someone around their table and I pray that they may find comfort in the knowledge that Jesus promises us so much more than this world can offer. And that though it may be Friday now, Sunday is coming!