Serendipity

Her favorite word was serendipity. The movie released sometime in the 90’s was exceedingly charming to her and whether it was what she searched for and thus, noticed each occurrence, or whether it was a mark on her life bestowed by a kind God who knew of her obsession; it seemed to follow her.

It was the gentle nudge to keep going when all else seemed to be falling all around her. In a marked dream she’d had, it was as if it painted a picture of her circumstance and what was to come. She stepped out into an open field littered with shrapnel and dust slowly settling. She was alone and crying and observing and walking through what struck her as a battlefield recently vacated.

She knelt down in the dream and realized that the shrapnel was bits of her life. Her belongings, her furniture, the “my little pony” bed sheets she had owned as child, children’s books, familiar broken bits of vases she had arranged wildflowers in as a little girl for her mom and thick stalks of oat grass that her dad had taught her to make whistles out of…now laid to rest on the desolate battlefield charred and trampled.

Among the remnant bits that summed up her life up to that point, there were also journals. They were discarded and singed and left ajar pages blowing in the slight breeze that carried the smoke away. They were intact but scattered and when she woke up, what she had dreamed reflected exactly how she felt.

In the wake of watching her father drift further and further from life, his light growing dim and somehow observing it dim the light and life in her entire family, she wrote poems. It wasn’t intentional. It was instead the wine extracted as she went through the press and process.

Writing was survival as was cooking and gardening. She sunk her hands into soil in effort to foster new growth in her garden, soul, and spirit. Her mom was a gardener and given the level of opposition, difficulty and defeat she experienced at this stage within her family, it was really lovely to put a seed in the earth and watch it grow. Her raised planting beds though, had long been plagued by a root system that had spread across the for decades. Digging tree roots out of hard packed soil proved an epic battle. She put her hands to work digging, pulling, ripping at roots that seemed endless and interconnected in every possible way.

As she did the thought entered her mind, “these roots are impossibly grafted in and I’ll never get them out!” Almost like a lightning strike, she knew God had orchestrated this moment in time to demonstrate to her the way in which her family had been grafted into the kingdom of God. And similarly, could never be removed.

“You need to publish your poems! Make a blog!”, a friend has said. She had decided to title the blog Grafted-In since she could not get away from that imagery. Largely, her poetry touched on family anyways. It was a means to an end. She continued writing because she couldn’t stop, but her efforts seemed…disconnected from any real sense of purpose.

Life, messy as it was, had not yet broken her and she had still kept in touch with most friends. She had discovered a friend a world apart (literally living on the other side of the globe where she had once lived) had moved into another career field doing freelance writing. Writing seemed a lovely and safe career for someone in an otherwise chaotic and heartbreaking season. “Hey, let me know if they need more writers!” she said jokingly. Her friend enthusiastically obliged her lighthearted suggestion.

You could imagine her serendipitous delight when she was hired. She’d been asked to fill out some paperwork and submit a meet and greet sort of email to her new boss. Delight soon followed up with gob smacked shock when she read through the email and noted the sign off.