Selah

Selah.

I love this word, which is weird because definitions are important to me and nobody knows what "selah" really means. It shows up 71 times in the Bible and once on my foot. Where I had it tattooed. The word with no meaning. It makes people ask questions. People like my eight-year-old granddaughter, Tully.

“That’s pretty, YaYa,” she said a few weeks ago. “What does it say?”

“Selah.”

“What does that mean?”

Well, that’s the question of the ages, isn’t it? Since it’s found almost entirely in the book of Psalms which was the hymnbook of its day, most people think it’s a musical direction. It’s a place where musicians pause to take a breath and let the instruments take over for a while. A pause or a rest. That’s the reason I bit my lip for ten minutes while a talented tattoo artist needled it into my skin last year. Because I need a reminder, in a place I often see, to rest.

I have another tattoo, my first one, that actually is a musical quarter rest. “Is that a bat?” a friend asked me when I showed the healed version to her. In the months since I got that one, only two people have ever recognized that it’s a quarter rest—that zigzageddy shape which, when you view it sideways, resembles . . . a bat.

So, I have this hangup with the word, “rest.” I love it. I need it. I crave it. Not the kind of rest like when your bones are weary or your brain is bored and you plop into a chair to watch Gilligan’s Island reruns for a while. I need the kind of rest that refreshes my soul. The problem is you can’t be a worry wart and rest at the same time. Oil and water, that one.

Six years ago, I found out I had cancer. It was terrifying. I didn’t know for a while if this was my final curtain call or if I’d be around for a few more performances. Six years ago. It was not my curtain call. But after my surgery, it took a while to heal. I often sat and read in my favorite chair, my feet crossed and propped on an ottoman, where I had a view of a plaque across the room, a promise inscribed on it.  A promise which carried me through that entire experience. “The Lord will fight for you,” it reads, “you need only to be still.”

It was my literal lifeline for months. Years. Actually, it’s still my lifeline. Just to know that the God of the universe thinks enough of me to literally fight my battles for me, to fight for me, is overwhelming. I sat in my chair with one foot crossed over the other, looking at that promise on the plaque on the wall, and I decided I would someday tattoo that verse on my propped-up foot—a picture of the physical rest forced upon me, symbolic of the spiritual rest I craved.

I thought about it for five years. I wrote it with a pen on my foot. Which tickled. And I made an important decision. Thirty-eight letters is too many to tattoo on any part of my body. Especially when it’s your first tattoo. Which is why it took five years to get that little quarter rest on my left forearm. I couldn’t figure out how to condense all those letters into one.

Until the rest. The one that resembles a bat when you look at it sideways.

Somehow, it wasn’t enough. My sister, who is the instigator of the whole tattoo idea though she’d never had one either, decided to get one of her own once I took the plunge, and wanted me to come along. I spent a few weeks looking at the blank spot on my resting foot where I really wanted that tattoo in the first place. I'd chickened out because everybody said it’s so painful to get one there. Now I made up my mind. Five letters was better than thirty-eight. We made an appointment together, Lynette got her first tat, and I my second.

It’s beautiful. It’s right where I wanted it. It, as well as my bat tattoo, both remind me to rest because God thinks I’m worth fighting for.

“YaYa?” Tully said, breaking into my thoughts. “What does it mean?”

“It’s from the Psalms,” I began. “It means to, like . . .”

I had to figure out how to explain it in language an eight-year-old could understand without all the drama of cancer and surgery and weeping in a chair for weeks while I wondered if I would live or die. Condense it, Eula. Just like you condensed that verse in Exodus to five letters in a tattoo.

“It means to pause, to take a breath. Stop and think about how good God is.”

She nodded like she understood and didn’t know why I’d had such a hard time explaining it to her. “So, it means to just calm down,” she said, in all of her eight-year-old wisdom. Now I was speechless.

I paused.

I took a breath.

I thought about how smart eight-year-olds can be.

And I didn’t have anything better to add to her definition of the beautiful tattoo on my right foot which reminds me to kick fear and terror to the curb while God fights for me.

“Yup,” I said. “It means to just calm down.” Finally I know what all those Bible translators have never figured out. But one word is still better than three when it comes to biting your lip in a tattoo parlor.

Selah.