Honeysuckle Blooming

I’d never seen this before.

The scent of honeysuckle hangs in the air, a reminder that it is once again June. There are stories you hear so often growing up, they become as much a part of yourself as the color of your eyes. Like how, according to my mother, the woods were alive with honeysuckle blooms on the day I was born. So much so that she fought to give me the name Honeysuckle (Tell me your mom is a hippie without telling me your mom is a hippie). My pop, concerned about avoiding a brutal middle and high school experience for his kids, shut the idea down hard. Honeysuckle? He repeated. You want to name our daughter something that has the word ‘suck’ in it?

The ironic part is that, being resoundingly homeschooled from 3rd grade to graduation, I never attended either middle or high school. But, in first grade, I still met a bully—Jeff—and he made fun of my shoes. That’s right. We are never safe. If somebody is bound and determined to make fun of someone else, they will find an achilles’ heel.

Me and every third girl born in the eighties was named Jessica (much to the chagrin of my Enneagram 4/intense creative personality, THANKS MOM AND POP), so Jeff The Bully couldn’t very well take on making fun of my name without angering a third of the entire female population under the age of ten. But he saw my shoes, my prized jellies, and took aim.

My pop couldn’t believe that, after all THAT—naming me the most under-the-radar normal name (I am saddened about how horribly white-bread-generic my name is to this day), the bullies still came for me. Perhaps bullying has more to do with the original sin than it does avoiding naming our children after inspiring, albeit unique, wildflowers that bloom in forests as a sort of herald for our child’s birth.

Anyway, I have always been rather strangely proud of what my name almost was. It’s not like I lead with, Hi, my name is Jess, but it was almost Honeysuckle or anything, but deep down in my consciousness I cherish the fact that I was almost Honeysuckle. It means something (or nothing, you could argue). How cute would it be for the whole world to be forced to call me by a term of endearment. Please pass the sugar, Honey! Or How are you doing, Honey? Or Honey, I shrunk the kids! (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Here are the things I know about June:

Honeysuckle always reminds me what month it is. And it comes in an instant. I walk past the same brush, bushes, and forest every single day, never seeing a thing that’s different, and then suddenly, the bush is on fire with blooms and the air is telling me a story about June having come again.

This reminds me of the Gospel of Mark. (Really, Jess? How does a wildflower that almost became your name remind you of one of the four biographical accounts of the life of Jesus? you might be wondering. And I am so glad you asked, Dear Reader. Let me explain.)

In the gospel of Mark, the word immediately is used over 35 times. This is almost half of the amount the word is used in the entire New Testament. Mark threads his whole narrative with urgency. Action. There is less exposition and more event after event after event.

Jesus is up to so much good trouble. He disrupts the story the religious are telling by healing someone on the sabbath, a day that is set apart for rest. The religious leaders clutch their pearls in shock while Jesus explains that what God has intended to help people (sabbath, a day of rest, drawing a boundary, a built in reliance on God as we acknowledge we are finite, need to stop, cannot add an hour to our own lives, cannot provide for ourselves, by ourselves), the religious leaders of the time have made a heavy burden for people (there are 613 laws established by the religious— observing the sabbath being just one. Six hundred and thirteen reasons why you do not make it into the Kingdom of God).

And if that isn’t enough, Jesus also disrupts the story the marginalized are telling. He does this by touching/healing the ceremonially unclean—those whom the established religious leaders of the day would never touch. He is busy eating enough meals with and spending enough time with the outcast to be called a “drunkard,” a “glutton,” and a “friend of tax collectors (political sellouts for power and favor with Rome) and sinners” Himself.

Jesus speaks with and honors women in a time when a common prayer spoken by Jewish men was, “God, thank you for not making me a Gentile, a slave, or a woman!” His longest recorded conversation out of all four of the Gospels is not with an impressive leader. Not with a king or a prophet or even someone seen as righteous. It is with a woman. And not just any woman—a woman whose mixed ethnic background makes her despised by Jews in general.

And Jesus doesn’t stop there, He invites this social pariah into the Kingdom of God. He tells her wild news. First, He knows “everything she ever did” (as she excitedly tells everyone she encounters right afterward), and then He explains that God is not in a single building or on a mountain or behind a curtain. God can be encountered here. And here. And here, too, if you simply open Your heart in spirit and in truth. God is accessible. And if the gatekeepers of God’s kingdom refuse to go in themselves, then God is inviting anyone else who will. Samaritans, sure. Women, yes. Anyone willing to know God in spirit and in truth is invited in.

In Mark’s telling of the Gospel, Jesus does a lot of things immediately. Now, Jesus still takes 30 years or so to grow in wisdom and stature and favor with man and God. It’s not like Jesus is awful for thirty years and then wakes up and remembers Himself. It’s not like He’s not doing a lot behind the scenes, memorizing the entire Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), learning skills with his hands, and relating with his community and family. He is. But then there comes a time for doing and He seizes it. He’s ready.

When Jesus is baptized, He immediately sees the heavens open and the Spirit descending on Him. The Spirit immediately drives Jesus out to the desert to be tempted by Satan. Jesus immediately calls James and Andrew from their fishing boats, and right after that, immediately calls James and John. In Capernaum, Jesus immediatelygoes to the Temple to teach on the Sabbath. Jesus immediately casts out a demon from a man in the Temple. After leaving the Temple, Jesus immediately goes to Simon and Andrew’s house, where He immediately heals Simon’s mother-in-law of her fever. Jesus immediately begins healing the whole town’s sick, as well as freeing them of demons. Jesus touches a leper, immediately heals him, and then immediately sends him on his way with instructions.

And the honeysuckle comes out immediately, announcing June.

They are in wait through the fall, winter, and early spring. And then, they know: it’s time to bloom.

Last October, I was feeling discouraged. There are things I want to do that I haven’t done. It’s easy to unfavorably compare my own life to the incredible creators and contributors of our time. I wonder if Jesus ever felt like He was hidden in Nazareth, a tiny agricultural town with a population that historians estimate between 200-400 people. It was so devalued by even its own citizens, that when Jesus started to speak and move with authority in His ministry, they famously questioned, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

I wonder if Jesus ever wrestled with the contrast between His calling and His lived experience in a tiny, barely-on-the-map town. I wonder if He wondered if “immediately” would ever come. I bet he had a lot of days that were similar; I bet this was his life for years.

This past October, I was outside with my dogs, walking on the same grass, by the same woods we’ve walked for years. I didn’t expect anything different. I didn’t expect an immediately. When suddenly, I noticed some color among the still-green brush. I walked closer, marveling at what was before me: a perfect branch of honeysuckle in full bloom. It was strangely late and out of season. October. I’d never seen this before.

I thought about the word immediately. How we can keep grinding, stewarding the small things we’ve been given. Writing a song here. A show. A book. I thought about how I had thought my life was over in my twenties (Oh, girl. I had no idea how much more life there was!). How I had decided a long time ago that, no matter what, if someone asked me to sing—and it was appropriate to do so—I would say yes. How this decision led me to sing on the subway in NYC. How that ended up on YouTube and then, a lot of performances later, my now husband TJ reached out to interview me. How that all felt like another story that started with the word immediately, but really, I had spent years practicing those songs late into the night in the laundry room of the building I was living in so as not to disturb my roommates—and before that, any other nook and cranny that I could.

The moment came, and I immediately said yes, but what I offered took years to cultivate. I thought about how I keep saying yes to what lights a fire within. Teaching a few things—movement, theater, the Bible, whatever is needed. Mothering my girls, carrying Luca in such a vivid way that my girls tell strangers about their dead brother and I feel badly for the innocent person who is suddenly introduced to the story that broke my heart while just waiting in line for the bathroom at brunch.

I looked at the honeysuckle blooming in October and felt this rush of assurance. Time isn’t up. What I thought could only ever bloom in June could also bloom in October. Just like I’d thought life was over in my twenties when my heart broke the first time. I didn’t know that June flowers could miraculously bloom in the fall. I didn’t know that just about anything is possible.

Something else I know about June:

I lost Luca in May, but I had Willa, my rainbow baby, in June. I would never skip May, I would never skip Luca. I can’t skip him any more than I could skip my own soul sewn into my own skin, anyway. I thought May and the grief it brings would always be the month that dwarfs the rest. But then I was pregnant with Willa and I went into labor at 38 weeks. There was a moment I was still pregnant, and then—one could say immediately—she was born.

And this happened in June.

May no longer stands out in a terrible way. I mean, I breathe a sigh of relief when it’s over again, but I’m okay. May does what she must. She offers me a cup I must drink from. The same cup she has been offering since the first May we met, and I’ve learned it’s not poison, not even close. It is love. Hard and terrible, sure, but also love.

One more thing, my husband TJ and I were on a plane this week. I am in the middle; on my right is TJ, but on my left is a 17 year old boy named David. When we start talking he has a thick French accent and keeps searching for the correct English words. He is sweet and shares how he is from Montreal and has just spent his junior year of high school in Orlando with his father and grandparents. We talk for 45 minutes or so when he pulls out The Odyssey and says he needs to read, I smile and let him be.

A little later, David shows me his phone, sharing something he’d written, and I mean it when I tell him he is a beautiful writer. Then, he just completely drops the French accent and bluntly says, “I don’t know why I pretended to be French and not speak English very well. It’s not true. English is my first language, I was born here.”

My mouth drops open and I laugh long and hard.

“I had no idea we’d get into such a deep conversation and I’d start sharing as much as I did,” he explains. “I had no idea you and your husband were such special people and I’d just keep talking…”

“I get it,” I tell him. “It’s fun to pretend to be someone else with people who will never know any better.”

“Honestly, it’s exhausting, though,” he smiles. “I can’t spend the whole flight in a fake accent, it’s too tiring.”

I laugh and laugh some more.

Then he tells me he is an artist. He shows me a painting of his—it’s a girl he hasn’t seen for six years. “I’m madly in love with her,” he says, matter of fact. The vulnerability of it takes my breath away.

“You’re madly in love with a girl you haven’t seen since…you were eleven?”

He nods emphatically.

“And this is a painting from your memory of her?” I ask, floored.

He nods again.

“Is she on social media?”

“I don’t want to find her if she is,” he says.

“Why?” I ask the obvious.

“I’m not ready for her. I’m not mature enough. I want to make sure I am the man she needs by the time we meet again. But until then, I will have this painting to give to her, in case I do run into her.”

I keep asking him if he knows people who know her. I am invested now. He says her mother used to teach him; he could probably find her when he’s ready. Again, I am astounded by the gravity of the responsibility this seventeen year old boy is taking to cultivate maturity so that he can be strong enough for someone else. I am still astounded at his complete lack of a French accent and mention this from time to time and we both crack up.

This is the strange part: there is something inside of me that keeps wanting to call him Luca. I actually have to stop myself from saying the name. I am not sure why. I am not sure if it’s his sensitive, artistic self. Not sure if it’s the way I am wildly impressed by a seventeen year old total stranger who is carrying a painting of a girl he hasn’t seen since he was eleven, on the off chance they might be soulmates, as he suspects.

Or maybe it’s that beauty reminds us of beauty. This boy with Colombian parents who was born in the states and raised in Montreal who sits on a plane and pours his precious soul out to strangers makes me think of the boy I love whose voice I haven’t ever heard. Maybe it was something about hearing him talk about his love for a girl he hasn’t seen for six years. I have something like that. I mean, it’s different, but there’s a boy I love who I haven’t seen for nine years. It’s the kind of love that makes me see the painting he carries with him and find it utterly reasonable. It makes way more sense to me, anyway, than bitterness or closing your heart or the decision to agree with nihilism and bury yourself in the stories that a love-less algorithm feeds you.

Immediately.

I sat down on a plane and immediately met a boy named David who spoke way better English than he let on for the first 45 minutes we talked. He reminded me of the son I don’t know so well with my eyes, but know in my soul in ways that make me ache.

And also—David told me one more thing. He gets so serious as the plane is about to land. “There’s something else you should know about me,” he says. I brace for another surprise. Maybe he’s a hit man, like Jason Bourne.

“Kendrick Lamar is the greatest lyricist that has ever lived and I am reborn in his music.”

He says this with all the weight of a doctor who reads you the results of your biopsy. This boy is dead serious and I immediately match his energy. We spend the rest of the flight talking about Kendrick. Well, and Bible studies and prayer. He says it is hard for him to find the time for prayer; I tell him prayer is a posture of your heart, you can do it anywhere, as long as you have your heart with you. You can even do it with a French accent (though God is not as easily fooled as I am).

I am not sure why I wanted so badly to call David Luca. They are not the same age, and probably don’t look the same, as my Luca is not Colombian. But something about his spirit reminded me of my own son. Or maybe I just cared a lot about him in the moment—enough to remind me of my own boy.

Anyway, you might bloom now or you might bloom later, but blooming can happen any time. Be ready for the moment when ‘immediately’ presents itself.

And love is everywhere. It is startling and hopeful—like honeysuckle that dares to bloom in October.

---

My book Monochromatic Heart is available now.