As a biographer I am used to hearing accolades and stories of suffering in equal measure, but this is the first time I have encountered someone who seems so transparent yet full of mystery. I have witnessed in her a personal understanding, a love relationship with her designer, her creator and as she has let him love her, the overflow has created puddles of grace that invite those who meet her to jump up and down in them and make footprints of love as they play.
This paints a playful picture of this home. A home, a landing place for many, which I have come to learn has been forged by suffering and overcoming.
“How did you do it?” I asked her. “How did you come to be standing here, fully alive, youthful even in your latter years?”
Her children, both those she birthed and those she chose to embrace as her own, are grown and gone, with lives and families of their own. I have spoken with each of them and learned that they all share the faith of their mother and each has a determination to be and raise changemakers in their own spheres. All of them attribute their ability to live well to the one I stand with now.
In spending these few days with her, I have come to learn she thinks in pictures. In telling the story of a picture, she awakens my imagination to the moment she is seeing.
She describes one exceptionally painful experience as being like tripping and landing face down in the mud, with the bag that contains her dreams scattering and her most precious things flying everywhere for all to see. Exposing. Humiliating.
I can see it. Anyone can relate to how that might feel.
She then tells me that when she was face down in the mud Jesus quietly came and lay there with her. It was in finding him there with her, time and time again, that she learned that her pain matters. She learned that her suffering, while acute at times, was an offering he gladly took so he could collect up those dreams and treasured things and restore her to dignity.
A powerful picture that feels too true to make up.
This woman has been described as transparent and while it is true that the authenticity in her and around her is both disarming and inviting, I can see too depths in her that only God can know. Like hidden secret notes passed between them, as though she knows an amazing secret and he knows she knows and she knows he knows she knows.
Maybe this is where her energy comes from? Still serving homemade food to whoever turns up at the table each day. Still daily walking miles to chat with her maker her quirky spaniel in tow. Still hosting her children and now grandchildren every weekend as the family come together to be home and to welcome the newcomers – there are always newcomers.
As I witness this, I see this is not labour to her. It is not even a labour of love. It is just love poured out in all the ways possible.
And she knows too how to graciously lean on those she knows truly understand the why of her. The sense of belonging she talks of finding with her husband, who I have come to know in these past few days, paints a stunning picture of partnership. Dovetailing her natural nurturing with his passion to build and serve, makes them a dream team for holding a constant sense of family – whether or not they are in the same room.
They tell me their stories and I learn what can be born from truly knowing Jesus in the face of great loss. This home, this heart of hers, this house is a temple. A place to gather and find God, to worship and learn together, with the table at the centre.
Hugs freely given, tissues for tears on hand in every room ready for laughter, grief, joy, sorrow.
Fresh bread is baking when there’s another knock on the door. This time a neighbour borrowing some pasta.
“Keep it,” she says. Then, as she starts to lay the table for who knows who, she calls out “even better, join us for dinner.”
I smile and shake my head as I make more notes. The home I am sitting in truly is born from a heart weathered by love.
naomisarah
naomi sarah 
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