It's a small thing, really. But it's catching my eye at unexpected times, in unexpected places, and I can't seem to shake it.
Over a year ago, I set up a card table in my family room and covered it with craft supplies––paper, stickers, glue, jeweled embellishments, decorative tape, ribbons, and glitter. Yes, glitter, fine red glitter, contained and congregated in a small jar. When family gathered at my house, some accepted the invitation to sit at the craft table to play and create valentine cards.
No one played harder than Calvin, my three-year-old grandson. To him, there was no such thing as sprinkling glitter, only pouring glitter. Red specks generously billowed about him, with just a fraction landing on their intended target. Calvin happily created a brightly colored, sparkly, shiny, sticky, beautiful mess.
During February, it was a mess I enjoyed. But at month's end, I bagged up the craft supplies and put away the card table, taking broom, dust cloth, and vacuum to the area, cleaning it up as best I could.
Like sand that comes home from the beach with you, later found in your children's ears and hair, in the creases of your car, the bottom of your purse and your washing machine, my red glitter inhabited unlikely spaces. It rested between and within books on the shelves, couch cushions, edges and ledges of my home. I can't trace their journey, but some of those invasive red flakes traveled to my mountain cabin fifty miles away.
Though they sparkle with the same brightness as they did the day I bought them, now when the shiny specks catch my eye, they no longer hold the beautiful memory of fun times at our craft table. Instead they carry condemnation. They tell me I am sloppy, that I always leave things undone, and that there's no hope for me. They were intended to embellish cards celebrating love, yet now, weightless as they are, they transport heavy, damning messages:
I can't contain my glitter. I can't contain me. I haven't finished cleaning up from a project I started 13 months ago. How dare I move on to the next thing, not having tidied up from the last thing? The accusations fly and land me in a decades-old memory.
I returned home from Los Angeles, where I had completed a two-day examination to become a certified court reporter. I was tired but elated, floating on a wave of emotions, and still dressed in an outfit that made 20-year-old me look and feel professional, competent, legitimate.
"How did it go?" my dad asked from his chair in the corner of the living room, while I was just a few steps into the entryway. Through a beaming smile I told him how well I believed I had done, how relieved I was that the test I worked two years to prepare for was behind me. My words spilled out.
Having overheard me describe my time, my mom marched from the kitchen and planted herself a foot from me with her fisted hands on her hips. She was a beautiful woman, but the anger scribbled across her face in this moment blotted out any signs of that beauty. "Yeah, but is your room clean?" The words, uncontained, flew from the jar. Like the glitter I still can't clean up, they were red, they landed in unintended spaces, and just when I think I’ve remembered the last of them, they catch my attention yet again.
Anymore, it doesn't really matter what comes after the "Yeah, but." I can quickly render as illegitimate the ideas that rise up in me.
“Oh, I’ll send Carol a card,” I think to myself. “Yeah, but what about Shirley?”
“I’ll weave those thoughts that have been dancing through my mind into a poem,” then, "Yeah, but what about that piece you never finished, or those writings you thought about but never even started?”
I long to speak hope into others during this weary, drawn-out time of the Covid pandemic. “Yeah, but I myself am often weary and discouraged,” and, “Yeah, but there are so many voices out there hoping to bring light into dark places." The "yeah-buts" circulate about and get too much time on my mind's stage.
From the ampitheatre of Earth, I look up at the night sky and see the stars, still multiplying, God lavishing the universe with sparkles. They swirl and float, those captivating curlicues, brightening my dim eyes, satisfying my thirst for wonder and awe. If there is more room for stars in the sky, is there space for a sparkle, a fleck of light, another word carrying a glimmer of hope? Can I yield to God's pouring into me then through me words that bring courage, trusting they will land on the hearts of those who need them?
A scene I recall from a 9/11 documentary re-enacts two men buried deep under rubble from an exploded building next to the World Trade Center towers. The men lay injured and trapped a good distance from each other. A small stream of light from above squeezing through the rubble could be seen by one of the men, while the light's ray was blocked from his comrade’s view. They knew as long as there was light, there was an opening through which someone could reach them, a sliver of hope. The man who could see the light kept reassuring his friend of its existence, until the rescuers reached them.
I look down in church on Sunday, and my eye catches a miniscule red sparkle in the center of my phone. I sigh. Again I look down, this time at a Bible placed on the end of the pew. White glitter, catching the light, is strewn across its cover. I look up to see the pastor's wife has decorated the sanctuary for winter, with glimmering snowflakes resting on green pine boughs surrounding the ceiling’s edge. I smile to realize she also could not contain her glitter. It feels like hope, for me, to know that others move forward beautifying the world with their creative ideas, even though they may leave a bit of a mess behind.
If I can see the sparkle when you can't and you can see it when I can't, let's tell each other about it, shall we? Let's remind each other of the light, even if just a flicker.
It's no small thing, really.
