They were men, that day, our boys who ran, and fought, and flew through the air like we had never seen them do before. And I remember thinking to myself, "Remember what this looks like. Remember how beautiful he is, my son, as he runs, and how fluidly they move together, each boy knowing his position, his place on the field, like a perfect wave that curls and crashes, then recedes and comes back again, always knowing exactly what form it should take. Remember this now."

But the thing that seemed most clear about that game was the pattern of the blades of grass at my feet, and how hard it was to find a place for my water bottle to stand up straight on the sloped, uneven ground. Maybe because the ground was easier to look at in those moments when the game hung on a split-second decision, a reaction, a moment's lapse of concentration.

Or maybe because they were too much to look at, those men-boys who played for us. How could we look at them without seeing all of them, the ones whose shorts hung below the tops of their shin guards, the ones trying to take control of limbs too long and skinny for their bodies, the ones with tow heads and missing teeth smiles, as if see-through skin contained each of the ages they had ever been and each of the games they had ever played. A gift of clear that makes them bearable and unbearable to watch.

Is this how God sees us, with clear Jesus skin? Us, but filtered through the image of His beloved son? How much dirt and shame and loathing does that clear skin filter out? Enough that we can look down at our hands, our feet and see what could be, now that they bear that unbearable likeness?

We are the gift of clear in those places where there never seems to be enough hands and feet to do the work. If only we would see ourselves clear. What could we do with hands and feet and bodies so light they bear the touch of God? Or maybe the dirt is easier to look at.

There was a patch of carpet in the house where I grew up, just beyond the doorway leading from the kitchen to the dining room, where my father would lie down to take a nap, sometimes, after lunch. Not long, just 20 minutes or so. Long enough to absorb the warmth of the sun that seemed to fall on that particular spot at that particular time of day, before going back outside where the steam from the cows' noses reflected the mid-winter sunlight as they crowded around the feed in the barnyard. Years later, my mother would still fuss about the dirt on his overalls, and I noticed that sometime along the way she had put a throw rug down over that spot.

The sunlight seemed to grow out of that carpet, harvest gold, with a vaguely sculpted floral pattern, that scratched for the first few seconds, then softened as I settled into its warmth. I would lie there sometimes, in the afternoon, when the patch of sun had moved farther toward the other wall of the dining room, when I had nothing else to do, or my sister was busy reading and didn't want to play, or I was waiting for my turn at the piano.

Doing nothing was easy then, lying on the carpet listening to the choir on the radio singing, "Holy, Holy, Holy," or the recording of My Fair Lady, borrowed from the library for the umpteenth time. With my bare feet up on the rungs of my mother's metal typewriter stand, I would wonder what it was that I would do when I got to heaven, that one thing that I could do better than anyone else, the thing that God really needed me to do. I knew from Sunday School and listening to my older sisters that heaven was a place where we did things for God. I could play the piano, but so could every other little girl in that Dutch town. How many piano players would God need, after all?

I thought I've known, a few times in the years since, what God wanted me to do. The one thing I could do better than anyone else, that thing that would make Him need me.

What is that thing? Is it talent, or work, or money? Are you richer, faster, better, smarter, taller than anyone else? Surely God needs you to do that for Him.

And over and over, the thing that I thought I could do for God, because He needed it, was gone, and I was left with nothing to do but lie on His carpet. Over and over we cling to what we think we need to be worthy, and over and over He says to us, "Aren't I enough?" Until the answer is, "Yes."

Golf outings - what we do to lure those otherwise too busy or too distracted, to our cause. Even if they don't have time to pay attention to their own grass, perhaps they will play for a few hours on our grass, and do something good too.

This is the time of year when anything seems possible. Homeless people don't freeze to death overnight, food pantries stock their shelves with fresh tomatoes, and no one worries if there will be Christmas for their children, yet.

The summer stretches out in front of us like that perfect game we know from behind the first tee. And then we actually play that game, and the grains of too many sand traps stick in the creases of our elbows and scratch our forehead as we wipe off the sweat and smearing sunscreen.

It turns out our season of hope is not a game, isn't found on the golf course. True hope grows between the cracks of concrete in this season, in this city, where grit blowing off the sidewalk sticks to our arms. Hope is a truck, and a hot dog, and a rap song, and neighbors dancing in the evening, together, where only fear had played for too many years. Hope is the S.H.A.L.O.M. that lives on a street for a night, in the city, because a few people, who have long forgotten about their own grass, have chosen to sow life.

I grew up in an old house. Not someone else's old house, my old house, where my father grew up, and his father, and before that his father and grandfather in an even older house in the same place. I know that even the act of tearing down that first house did not root the collective memories of the generations from that spot.

I know because I would lie awake at night in my old house, and imagine a gathering of grandmas and grandpas I had never met, balancing on the rafters of the attic in their wooden shoes, looking down on what we were doing, the women pressing their skirts against their legs to peer past the fullness.

This is the day we remember. They fell doing something that most of us can't imagine doing, sacrificing, for people they knew and people they didn't. For us. My uncle died in World War II. Long before I was born, he had joined that crowd with the wooden shoes in the attic, looking down, somewhere beside Grandpa Matthew who they say had been shot in the leg in the Civil War.

I wasn't frightened, imagining them looking down at me at night, but somehow mildly annoyed, wishing they would mind their own business, and leave me to do what I wanted with my life, not live up to theirs.

How great a cloud of witnesses they are, these fallen, who take their places in the rafters of our old house, the one we all live in, the one where we are free to live our own lives. Maybe we sometimes wish they weren't there. Because they remind us that sacrifice is unpleasant, and unfair, and mostly hard, and painful, and unsung. But today they remind us that it is possible, and that for generations before us, ordinary people have done extraordinary things. And this great cloud of witnesses, whispers, and cajoles, and encourages, from the stillness of the rafters, for us to do the extraordinary too.

We attended an event last week, a lovely event where people doing great things in our city had a chance to tell their story. We were happy there, sharing dinner, seeing faces of children and parents, smiling, lives changed, so eager for everything to be right about this chance.

And then she spilled the tea, the woman standing behind my chair, trying carefully to serve everything so precisely. It was a simple thing. A tilt of the tray became a cascading stream of tumbled glasses and flowing tea, sweetened and iced, and some of it landed on me, running down my arm mostly, and seeping through the side of my dress between me and the seat cushion, becoming a cold, sticky damp feeling. It was not much. It was a lovely event. But the woman behind my chair, trying carefully to serve everything so precisely, vanished. And all she remembers about the night is the iced tea.

I know. I once lost the pastor's grandson from my Sunday School room. It was a simple thing. On a November day while too many parents and children came and went through the classroom door, he was simply gone, with his parents searching the room for him, and then the hallways, and then frantic others joining to look, until they found him. And after we had driven home, my family and me, I crawled back into the garage and into the car, to sit alone until the shame of it had cooled from my skin.

C.S. Lewis paints a picture of hell as a place where we are constantly moving away from each other. To be alone, to be in control, to be the center of our own god-shaped soul, this is what we desire most. Not to be close enough to spill, and lose children, and make messes in each other's lives that cause us shame.

It's not the messes, but the shame we give up to be together. And the opposite of hell is the place where we are together, living the iced-tea stories of our lives.

What does this word, "grace," mean? What does grace have to do with playing with shoe boxes and toy tractors in the lawn behind the house? The grass seemed so huge, and we thought, in our minds, for a minute that we might be helping. We sat in the grass, seeing it close up, cutting it with that hand-held clippers, mostly rust with some red flecks of paint still clinging to its handle, enough to feel both rough and smooth against our skin.

My mother was the one who cut the grass, those big lawns, with the self-propelled mower that took you along with it if you held tight to the handle while it bounced over the bumps of dirt and occasional ant-hills. It was a farmer's lawn. My mother, who worked too hard and wrapped her anger around her like a fuzzy shawl, because the men ran the farm, milked the cows, mowed the hay.

They mowed the hay in fields so big, that at night, during haying season, my father would sit at supper with a fine green veil of hay dust clinging to his face, just to the line where his cap covered his forehead. He and the hired hands took the big tractors, and the truck, and the hay wagons out to those fields, where you could look far out over that same green hue, lightened by the sun.

We played at haying. We cut the grass, enough to fill the shoe box we pulled behind the wobbly tractor, connected with a string. And then we were done, with nothing much to do with that pile of grass, unloaded from the shoe box onto a spot on the lawn, until the blade of the lawnmower would blow it away.

What is this thing we call grace? It is the thing we can't possibly do. It is the thing we work too hard to do. It is the thing that's too big. It's the thing we give up.

I know strange things. I know to drive past the airport in Minneapolis 
to get to the closest gas station. I know that the clock in my kitchen 
is four minutes slow. I know that when my son was two he hated to get 
his hands dirty. I know that in one of the women's restrooms in the 
Seattle airport the door of one stall flies open when the other stall 
door closes. I know that no one will ever ask me those things.

"No experience is ever wasted," my mother would say as I grew up. Would 
she say that still? Would she say that about the bathroom stalls in the 
Seattle airport, a place in an airport in a city she will likely never 
see, having decided she is too old to go to somewhere new?

I once had a dream that we pulled our character behind us like a 
rollaboard suitcase, labeled for everyone to see. Honest, arrogant, 
kind, loyal, thief. Trailing the consequences and the evidence of the 
things we had done to each other.

We pull the things we know behind us, the strange, the obvious, the 
remarkable, and the helpful, unlabeled and invisible, until we give them
away, until we get close enough to read the questions in each other's 
eyes, and recognize the wisdom in the lines of a face. We give them away
because eventually, we have enough to carry.

I'm waiting for someone to ask me about the bathroom doors in Seattle. 
Some day it will happen. Some day, that thing that I know that I pull 
around behind me will matter to someone else, and on that day we will 
both be lighter for it.

There is a boy, in that small place we heard about a few weeks ago, who prays, I hear from Tim. Tim, who prays with him on Tuesdays, and tells me of the simple things the boy prays for. "Keep my mother safe, let me live another day, do this simple thing for us."

Do we have too much to pray for? What would be the first thing you ask God to save, your job, your house, your reputation, your car?

When there are only simple things left to pray for, when we push our way past the things that are too big, our arms reaching up and through them, like we would push our way through that fluffy prom dress we wore when we were sixteen, and settle them down around our feet, when we stand alone, at the face of God, what simple things do we pray for?

Would simple be enough? Be all I need. Be everything.

I cry over those, "give people a new home" shows, over the pictures of smiling people with hammers, building someone a house. I cry because it seems so real, this thing that we can do with our hands that changes everything for one family. I cry, but I think I could never do that. How good am I, really, at swinging a hammer? Not very. Not since I was a girl on the farm and I played at scraps of wood and leftover nails, tagging along with my dad in the big shed where he fixed and built the things that made the farm run.

But if someone asked me, it might be something I would try, once.

People call and ask me to give money. People who don't know me. I guess if they had the choice they wouldn't want to know me. They want my money.

What if someone asked me to do something I was good at, if it were someone I knew, or could imagine knowing, and if that something I am good at did good for others too? Would I try that, once? Would you?

Fear is a child that sneaks into our lives. Uncertainty in the form of a fleeting, shadowy, disheveled, mischievous child. A thing we loathe and can't resist. What has it come to visit on us? We don't know, but we can't not look for it, having seen it out of the corner of our eye, once, outside the kitchen, on the way to the sink to do the dishes. And then another day in the hallway, just inside the white painted door, we see its darkness go by.

We stay inside. We go away on business, or vacation, or we just leave, telling ourselves it will stay behind. We breathe false relief while we're away.

We stop. We stay inside and walk a smaller path. The one that keeps the shadow in the corner of our eye, just beyond the place where we will have to meet it, face to face, and shout, "Not here," and, "By the grace of God, go away." How much easier, how comforting, to let it hang around, let it keep its smallness encircling our lives.

Fear is a child that sneaks into our lives.