Why we’ve been following Rudolf the reindeer all year

Four angels, a holiday miracle, the lie of self-sufficiency & the generosity of community

I wept through my entire workout that day. We were days away from moving—not only out of our house, but out of the US, and I’d hit a wall. On that December day months of momentum and enthusiasm suddenly slowed to a crawl of fatigue and grief. Tears of exhaustion, overwhelm, and heartbreak took over.

For nearly six weeks my partner and I had worked morning till night doing everything it takes to make an international move. The list was long and included the mammoth task of downsizing all our belongings that filled a 3-bedroom house and 3-car garage down to a 5x8’ utility trailer that we would pull behind us on our 2,000 mile journey south.

While Alan built the trailer for us I re-homed everything we weren’t keeping. Winter in the Pacific Northwest means pouring rain outside so I was managing, marketing, and living in an indoor garage sale. Day after day I welcomed stranger after stranger out of the cold and into our home to peruse rooms full of items we’d listed for sale and the hundreds of odds and ends I’d organized into a dozen free boxes.

After weeks of crafting compelling Craigslist ads and Facebook Marketplace posts while turning our moving chaos into a tidy retail space you could actually hear echoes now in our almost-empty house. But even with repeated price drops our living room remained full of art, books, CDs, gear, tools, kitchen stuff, a floor lamp, mirrors, my teacup collection, and a smorgasbord of great items that lingered despite being posted for free.

Fatigue has a way of dissolving our resistance to grief. On top of that, my period arrived that morning, deepening my exhaustion and shrinking my ability to push through. As I took a break for exercise in the middle of our living room another wave of heartbreak split me open.

For more than a year the pain and intergenerational trauma that threads through my family of origin had been intensifying into a bewildering crescendo. It was 2021, pandemic year 2, and while the world as we knew it continued falling apart I also grappled with the confusing loss of some of my dearest loved ones. The heart-wrenching process demanded I let go of some of my most important relationships, oldest identities, and deepest dreams for familial happily-ever-after.

Through all this unraveling I had a loving partner, a wise mentor, compassionate friends, a great therapist, lots of useful skills, and big-picture perspective…but none of that stopped the sorrow of these unimaginable losses from smashing through me like a tidal wave on a regular basis. On this mid-December day in addition to the now-familiar weighty pain of grief, I was also bleeding. What I needed most was some rest and quiet. So after my last set of weights I decided to end the moving sale. I’d had enough. I needed some space to myself. And I needed to stop managing chaos with hospitality.

At exactly that moment, the doorbell rang. Feeling both irritated and defeated, I walked to the door to greet yet another bargain-hunter. A young couple smiled as I welcomed them in and asked “How are you?’’ I replied with my usual, “Good, thanks.” Then for some reason I paused and changed my answer.

Sure, there was the physical fatigue of moving and menstruating, but in that moment a much larger weariness stepped in and altered my modus operandi of cheerful endurance. The year’s grueling journey of coming to terms with my mother’s capacity for causing harm and my habit of protecting her from the consequences probably had something to do with what happened next.

In that moment, with these two strangers, it somehow felt important to be completely honest. To not act like I was okay when I wasn’t. I watched unexpected words come out of my mouth, “Actually, I’m not good. I’ve been doing this moving sale for a solid week and I’m totally exhausted.”

The unapologetic directness of my words surprised me. I just told these sweet people visiting my home that I didn’t have my shit together and was tired of doing the very thing they’d come for. Speaking this felt edgy, uncomfortable, and empowering. I suddenly felt lighter.

Like so many of us, I’d learned from a young age to push through pain, ignore my needs, and smilingly take care of everyone else. Because as a good girl, as the only daughter and oldest child of two wounded, emotionally unwell parents; as a female person in a patriarchal society, and as a Christian, that was my job.

Except it’s not. It’s not our job to keep people comfortable. Especially at our own expense. This is what I had finally come to realize in my 2021 year of letting go of everything that wasn’t working. I could no longer parent my parents. I could no longer continue abandoning and sacrificing myself. I had to be fully honest, even if it came at a high price. I could no longer do the protect-the-other-person-pretending I’d always done with my mother. Or two strangers from Craigslist, apparently.

They were lovely. You could see the kindness in their eyes and hear it in how they spoke to each other with caring respect. I felt it as they thanked me for the free items they selected and insisted on paying more than the posted price for the brass crescent moon cradling a clear glass ball. She had come for free books but this piece had visibly moved her. She said it called to her.

After they left I took down the ads for the sale, locked the door, and drove into town to finish my last remaining errands. As I walked from the medical office to the consignment shop I realized this was my last trip downtown. This was goodbye. I felt an odd mixture of sadness and relief.

My stride got stronger as I walked and soon I found myself talking to the city herself. It’s not uncommon for me to have a heart-to-heart with the ocean, or my favorite nearby meadow, but I’d never talked to a town before. It felt outrageous but also important to allow the potent emotional energy inside to flow out as words—

“Eugene, you’re a great town. Thank you for being the down-to-earth, funky, artsy, great place that you are. I’m so grateful I’ve gotten to live here and get to know you better. I love you and I’m glad we came. I was born here and you’ll always be my hometown. But this isn’t where I belong and it’s time for me to go. And I need some help getting out of here.”

Um. I’m talking to a town?!? What in the world? Why? Is this processing? Prayer? Am I losing my grip? I didn’t know. But what I do know is that when the inner nudge to act or speak arises, it’s not to be ignored. Even when, especially when, it seems crazy. I’ve learned the hard way on this. So I continued—

“Eugene, I need help. I don’t even know what kind. I’m too tired at this point to figure it out. I’ve been at this move for so long and I just can’t do it by myself. I need something to change or someone to show up, or something, somehow, that makes this easier. And I really need the stuff in the living room to disappear.”

It was bewildering to voice all this out loud walking down a public street. And humbling to feel desperate enough to need to. But identifying a clear need and making a bold ask felt energizing. I realized there wasn’t anything else to say so I walked into a bookstore to buy a gift for my niece. When I came out, my final errand finished, I heard a ding as I walked to the car so I dug out my phone to see who had texted me. Because of the moving sale my phone was full of texts from numbers I didn’t know and this was another one. But this one wasn’t a moving inquiry—

“Hey thank you again for the gifts and sharing your things. If you need or would like any help - I know it’s the end of it for you and there may not be anything left to do but if there is, I have time I would like to donate. Be that if you need anything going to dump or goodwill or need the house cleaned or wiped down let me know.”

I stood there in awe. For the second time that day, I cried. This time it was tears of amazement and tenderness. I was touched by the kindness and generosity of this human. I was moved by the mind-blowing intimacy of a universe that can orchestrate an immediate reply to a desperate plea for a help. Help that arrived tangibly, immediately, and via someone I didn’t know, reaching out to volunteer exactly what I most needed, to take our unsold stuff and haul it away.

The thing about amazing grace is that receiving it isn’t necessarily easy. Especially when it’s generously given. When you’ve adapted to sacrificing yourself to “earn” what you need or to provision being a costly struggle, anything bountiful and freely given feels humbling. Generosity breaks the rules of what you believe to be true: that it’s all up to you.

But this is what my life keeps insisting—it’s not all up to me. We’re alive in a big universe, and an abundant one, and there are people who care. But receiving what we need requires being brave enough to ask. And when you make an audacious ask it means you’ll get to expand your capacity to receive. One stretch necessitates another. Audacious asking requires radical receiving.

So I received. Feeling grateful, raw, and shaky, I texted the mystery stranger back and said yes it would be awesome to have stuff hauled away to Goodwill. I didn’t know who would be showing up at 5:00 pm with their pickup but I had a hunch it was the kind woman who was excited about our books and bought the brass and crystal moon.

It was. That evening Stephanie and her family showed up at our door to empty our living room for us. She introduced herself, her partner, and her two kids and handed me a gift saying she knew we were getting rid of stuff but she wanted us to have this. It was Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer; a clever Christmas ornament she and her kids had crafted out of wine corks, pipe-cleaners, wire, and beads.

Rudolf led the way as we departed Eugene days later.

As the four of them went to work hauling our stuff out to the curb and loading it into their pickup I felt something potent. We worked quickly but time seemed to slow down so that I could register the significance of what was happening. As I handed the kids light items to carry out and Stephanie and her partner strategically stacked everything into a transportable tower of stuff, I noticed that instead of feeling like a weight was lifting, it felt like the ground was shifting. The world was changing in some way.

In the middle of a time in human history where fear had sky-rocketed and trust was eroding, this family had decided to spend their holiday-time evening helping a couple of weary strangers. It was beautiful what this couple modeled for these kids—that going out of your way to give people a hand is a normal thing and what you do together as a family.

I stood in the dark not knowing what else to do. While Kyle and Alan strapped everything down Stephanie told me about her move down from Alaska to Oregon with everything they owned in the back of a car. She shared that she and her kids had been homeless for a few weeks shortly after the pandemic hit and that in that time she’d had some profound experiences. Life-altering spiritual experiences that she didn’t know how to talk about, but when she saw our books and that brass moon that spoke to her she felt we would understand. She told me about a mystical experience that altered her perception of reality. I listened and reflected the beauty of what she’d shared. I began to realize that her wildly generous gift was also a divine appointment with a reciprocity to it that I didn’t understand but was somehow contributing to simply by hearing her story.

When the living room was empty and the truck loaded I thanked Stephanie again and she said simply, “This is what community does.”

For most of my life I’d thought of community as one of three things 1.) the people with whom you share place, like a neighborhood or town, 2.) a group with shared values and purpose, such as a church or an online community, or 3.) the like-minded friends you spend your time with. Stephanie and I were none of those. Standing there on our front lawn this stranger that now felt like a friend expanded my definition of community to something much more generous.

In a culture constructed on the false assumption of separation and a society that holds up the myth of rugged individualism it’s easy to fall for the story that we’re supposed to be self-sufficient. But we aren’t. We’re part of the glorious miracle of Gaia—a living, breathing planet that sustains this grand, messy organism called humanity. Every single cell of our body is made of plants and animals that someone else grew for us, transported to us, and perhaps even cooked for us. Every oxygen-rich inhale we draw in is also the generous exhale of the earth’s trees.

There is nothing self-sufficient about us. As lonely as we might feel, we aren’t actually separate from anything. Our existence is inherently communal. Humans need each other and always have. And even more so in times of change and transition.

The next day I hung Rudolf from our rear view mirror so that as we moved from Eugene to México we would be reminded that angels are real, community is everywhere, and help arrives when we ask.

December 2021, Alan driving down the Baja toward our new home.

It’s December again. Next week we’ll have been in our new home in Baja, México for a full year. I’ve been writing this story off and on ever since we got here. The experience with Stephanie is still working on me, re-arranging how I perceive life. Alan and I still drive with Rudolf and his little red nose at the lead. His antlers are getting a bit worn and droopy but I keep him there on the rear-view mirror to remind me that:

• We’re not alone, even in grief and overwhelm

• Angels are real and miracles happen

• Asking for what I need is necessary and powerful

• Community is whoever you include, and whoever includes you

• What stands between me and everything I need may very well be the belief that I should be self-sufficient and do it on my own

Thank you, Stephanie, for showing up and showing me how inherently communal our existence is. In American suburbia, it’s easy to forget. In times of overwhelm it’s easy to forget. In our modern civilization built on the illusion of separation, it’s easy to forget. I’m glad I have Rudolf to remind me.

Rulolf still leads the way.