Life, Anew

When I was about ten years old and still my daddy’s sidekick, he and I set out in his ’64 Mercury sedan one rainy afternoon in search of the sourwood honey that my mother craved. On the way home, on a remote dirt road in the mountains of Virginia, the car caught fire. Daddy switched off the ignition, jumped out, and raised the hood to find the wiring harness in flames. He scooped up wet sand from the road and doused the fire with the dirt.

In his words, years later: “I thought, ‘Oh, God, how are we going to get home now?’ And God answered. I slammed the hood, and the car started, key still in the off position.”

From my little girl perspective, I remember Daddy’s tense expression as he drove home gingerly, coming to every stop sign with trepidation, fearful, I’m sure, that once the car stopped, it might never go again. We made it home safely, and Daddy stopped the engine by disconnecting the battery. Next day, he reconnected the battery, and the Mercury sprang to life again. When he arrived at the garage, the mechanic insisted that what Daddy said happened was impossible; no way the car could run with the wiring in that shape. “But it did,” said Daddy.

A dead car comes back to life when a stranded father and daughter need it most.

Many years later, in 2004, Daddy walked into the hospital for a medical procedure on his foot, fully expecting to limp out that same afternoon. It was one hundred days later before he left that hospital, after having his leg amputated and many, many things go wrong. Several times we were told he would not make it. One doctor stood over my daddy’s bed and declared, “This man will never speak, never swallow, never walk.” Although Daddy appeared to be unconscious, I saw a tear run down his cheek.

Some weeks later, I was at my desk at work when the phone rang. On the other end of the line, I heard my daddy’s voice, barely more than a whisper, “Good morning, Sheri.” When he finally left the hospital, it was to go to a nursing home. He might have given up, but my mother wouldn’t let him. She’d make the staff haul his frail, weak body—he could barely sit up on his own—out to her car, and she’d drive him around. She said she wanted him to remember that there was still a world out there. He was eighty years old when he finally returned home. Before he died eight years later, he told me, “These have been the happiest years of my life. Every day is a gift.”

A man who was told he’d never walk or speak again does eventually pull himself up the steps of his church and resume teaching Sunday School.

I’m sure you can recall a story or two like these—a return to life when all hope seemed lost. Some of our stories may be mundane, although no less surprising. When we built our house, we dug up a crepe myrtle sprout from my mother’s yard in South Carolina and stuck it in our hard-packed yard. The tree managed to survive, and grow, and bloom yearly in late August, until the particularly brutal winter of 1985 killed it. We cut it down, and behold, a year later sprouts grew from the roots. That tree is thirty feet tall now and still blooms later every summer than any other crepe myrtle around.

“Resurrection,” said my wise daughter Carrie Wren, “can happen many times over.” I was asking her to tell me how she remade herself into a different woman. “You tell me what you see,” she said. “Well,” I began, “when you were married, you were doing the thing, keeping everything going, doing what you thought you were supposed to be doing—until you weren’t. And then, when that season ended, you decided who you wanted to be as a woman—and you became her.”

“Wow,” she said, “you described ten years of my life in two sentences.” Carrie went on to say, “Resurrection can be messy, and painful, and we may want to give up when we’re in the middle of it. It’s a choice, every day, to do it again.”

Recently, I saw a quote on a restaurant wall by an anonymous author: “If you don’t like the way you were born, try being born again.” While I don’t think that quote was intended as a theological statement, Jesus gives us similar words: “If you try to hang on to your life you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will find it” (Luke 9:24 New Living Translation). And in case we might fool ourselves into thinking there’s a pill or a TikTok video to launch us into a new life, Jesus also says we must pick up our cross daily and keep moving. In other words, becoming a new creation is going to be tough, and we’ll have to challenge ourselves again and again.

Keep going until you can complete this sentence:
“I kicked aside ______________ (that useless habit or idea that I’d been dragging around), and now I am________________ (whatever you envision your best self to be).”