home | contact

I Just Want to Live While I'm Alive

She has found a way, most days, to be present to whatever she encounters: An insect hiding under a tomato leaf, the sweet aroma of bay leaves, words on a page, a person she’s just met, or a task that is new to her.

Val Waring deliberately chooses mindfulness. She’s attentive to what’s in her backyard and in the community around her.

These summer days, she tends her garden. She digs in the soil and peeks under leaves for errant bugs. To the dinner table, she brings cucumbers, pole beans, and Purple Cherokee heirloom tomatoes.
Tomatos

She’s no horticultural expert. But as a Rock Island Master Gardener, she’s not afraid to try a new variety or a new method.

“Gardening helps me focus,” she says. “I don’t think about other things. I just think about what I’m doing at the moment. It’s hard work and it’s relaxing. It’s creation there in the garden, from the sprouting of seeds to the finish. It’s humbling, I guess. I don’t make the plant grow. I can only help things along and tend them.”

“You could say that it’s an everyday thing. You hold a seed in your hand and it can become a plant that takes over your yard. I say every growing plant, every human, every animal is a huge miracle.”

God doles out some surprising gifts, Val knows. Eight years ago, she endured the surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and recovery that accompany breast cancer. And for Val, the gift has been a renewed “sense of joy of being able to breathe.”

She thought to herself, “My gosh, this is maybe going to kill me, and there are so many things I want to do. There’s this struggle about being fearful, and not wanting to waste time worrying when I could be living.”

As she recovered from the cancer, Val had some good heart-to-heart conversations with God, “and I feel like God answered me: ‘Live each day.’ You know, I love that Bon Jovi song, ‘I just want to live while I’m alive.’”

So Val lives. She set down a career as a computer programmer. These days, she makes deliberate and expansive choices to live, to let go and open herself up to soil and ideas and people. She gardens. She reads. She volunteers. She is present to the moment.

She tries new things. She works the Rock Island Hort Hotline, fielding garden questions from stymied growers. She “nurtures different areas that interest me”: the Bible, beaded jewelry, the German language. When she and husband Joe bike, they’re
in no hurry. “We don’t go fast but we go far. We stop and take pictures of wildlife.”

She loves this church where “questioning is encouraged, where I leave a class with more questions than when I went in and just feel great about it.”

Val Waring has discovered a way of life, a way of being present to everything along the way. She has learned, as pastor-theologian Eugene Peterson writes, that “we embrace what is given to us… and sit and stare and look and listen until we begin to see and hear the God-dimensions in each gift, and engage with what God has given, with what God is doing. Every time we set out… a wider vista opens up before us, a landscape larger with promise.”

We set out to “live while we’re alive.”

  ::  

"The new Eve or Adam which comes forth in Christ Jesus, takes shape not over and above the ordinary, but deep down in the contrariness and complications of the everyday." ~Jack Fortin