Clarity fading away

It's been a week of doing. A week of putting one foot in front of the other, breathing one breath at time deep into friable lungs, trusting God for each moment of consciousness and praising Him at the end of each day for each completed task. A week in which I survived Thanksgiving without having to take a nap. Managed to go to the tree farm per family tradition and decorate the house with my kids without missing (hardly) a beat. A week in which I resumed work, bruises and pain and all, delivered lectures, and looked deep into students eyes, and captured teachable moments and felt my calling coursing through my veins instead of death.

It's also been a week of long naps, early bedtimes, and hitting the snooze button - something I never do. It's been a week of slugging down coffee, putting on a little more make-up than usual, and swallowing tears as I push through pain to get things done.

There's a sticker on my computer that says, "Just become like a child that discovers the beauty of the world every moment again and again." And so I do. On my way to work, I drink orange juice, life blood from a fruit that doesn't grow in Wisconsin winters, and I taste life sweet and tangy straight from some Florida farmer's labor. My husband makes scalloped potatoes for dinner, and I can almost taste the potassium flooding into my veins and giving me just enough energy to sing Christmas carols to my children as they drift off to sleep.

I talk to colleagues about my experience, and their eyes are wide as saucers, and we talk about what it's like to be a professor in the bed. To become a patient instead of a teacher. To taste all the things we lecture about so lassez faire. And there is nothing lassez faire THIS week when I teach my students how to suction secretions from a patient struggling to breathe, because last week that was me, and I know how it feels to choke and want to scream when you can't.

It's odd how life goes so quickly back to almost normal. How I stand in a field, tired and ill, and yet what I am thinking about is how amazing it is that my baby boy is yielding a yellow Swedish saw with his papa and cutting down our Christmas tree. How the hum of the tractors is just as homey as it always has been at the tree farm, for the 20 some years I've been coming here. It's life. It's beautiful. It's no different than it was 2 weeks ago.

It's this amnesia, I think, that makes us human. Christ didn't have it. He had eternity always in mind. I forget. Eternity gets lost in the details almost as soon as I've returned to the mortal world. Every now and then, I remember. But it's not my every thought, it doesn't control every action of every day. I strive to be like Him, but I am not. I am just like everyone else. Caught up in the flurry of work before winter break, scurrying toward Christmas. Making my lists and checking them twice, planning my shopping, budgeting, trying to budget energy too. 

Oh, that heaven were always foremost in my mind. Oh, that I would never lose the perspective I gained in those 40 minutes of clarification, crystallization of what I am here to do, what I am meant to do, what I am meant for. 

I long for heaven. When at last I will never forget. Make me better at this, Lord. Help me remember, now more than ever - this Christmas, more than last, and every Christmas, more than the last.

In a perfect world

I stand accused

There's a list a mile long

Of all my sins

Of everything that I've done wrong

I'm so ashamed

There's nowhere left for me to hide

This is the day

I must answer for my life

My fate is in the Judge's hands

But then He turns to me and says

I know you

I love you

I gave My life to save you

Love paid the price for mercy

My verdict: not guilty

How can it be?

I can't begin to comprehend

What kind of grace

Would take the place of all my sin?

I stand in awe

Now that I have been set free

And the tears well up as I look at that cross

'Cause it should have been me

My fate was in the nail scarred hands

He stretched them out for me and said

I'm falling on my knees to thank You

With everything I am I'll praise You

So grateful for the words I heard You say

~Mandisa, Not Guilty~

My friend's baby, sweet, ravaged beauty from Malawi, her eyes roll back and the first responders are doing CPR. And I could not be there to hold my friend. To bring her meals in the hospital and movies to watch and something arty to do. That's what I would do in a perfect world.

 My friend is raped and running scared, that wild look in her eye that shouts fear. I couldn't prevent it. I couldn't keep her company the night she chose to go out because she was lonely. Because that's what I would have done in a perfect world.

I wake up punching my husband, the nightmare too real, I the string puppet mastered in sleep by the darkness of my own past. I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't avoid the nightmare. I can't change my past. That's what I would do in a perfect world.

I am a recovering perfectionist. This is pretty apparent if you walk into my home, which is more likely to be messy than picked up. You will probably find clean toilets. House-cleaning has become a rolling probabilities puzzle (will my child be hurt worse by toilet germs or the toys on the front room floor?). But I have time for my kids, now that my house doesn't have to be perfect. My kids show it too, messy mismatched clothes, dirty toes, chocolatey grins, skinned knees and grass in their hair. But they are so happy.

My cancer - constant companion since 2008 - is a pretty good cure for perfectionism. Like an instantaneous relief print of a photograph, cancer highlights what really matters and darkens those things that don't. And then there is the special needs kid that gets thrown into the mix out of the blue in 2009. Then you lose all your friends in 2010 and suddenly realize, where did I get these standards from, and are they True or false?

My kids watch more movies now, because it doesn't really matter, and they love it.

My husband occasionally cooks dinner, because it really does matter that I have a break.

We are mulling over school choices for our kids, something we've never done before. (Homeschool or die. Umm, where is that in the Bible?)

I am treating myself with a little more respect as I slowly, surely, begin to comprehend that I am not "filthy rags" to my Father, but a precious, beautiful, flawed daughter He longs to love on, lavish, support and always be with.

Letting go and letting God

We weren’t originally designed to keep everything in play all the time. Something got broken in us when we left the Garden of Eden. We stopped trusting that God was good and that we were the apple of His eye. We have this suspicious feeling about letting go and letting God take us through the natural course of things.  ~ from (in)Courage, posted by Bonnie Gray

Sometimes God fills your hands so full, you are forced to realize you cannot juggle everything yourself.  Grief fills up your heart until it finally overflows and you cry embarrassing tears in front of people you would never cry with normally (like, say, your doctor).  And then the cup you thought was full of tears is miraculously overflowing with joy, and the laughter leaps out of you even though your sister-in-law is taking pictures and you normally wouldn't smile like that for the camera.

And you wake up too early and your eyes are scratchy with sleep and your son is crying at the top of his lungs because you pulled his sleeping fingers away from your neck to get up for devotions.  You look out the window and sigh because, even though it's not the way you wanted to wake up, there is a turquoise and gold sunrise outlining your favorite tree anyway...and You know that He knows exactly how you would wake up.  And sent you a visual gift to make it better for a moment.

Need opens your eyes to see when God is sending love and strength your way.  Your fridge is almost empty, and even though there's money in the bank account, your week is busy and you haven't planned a menu and you feel inept and overwhelmed.  And then, in the midst of those swirling thoughts, you put the sausage on the griddle and open the egg carton and you see God is there taking care of the details with the perfect number of eggs left there for breakfast, despite your lack of planning.

And it's seeping in deep...this Truth for the day that you are insufficient and He is sufficient and provisional and perfectly loving.  You turn around from the griddle and sigh as you look at the days work...the mess that extends along the 8 feet of the kitchen island and the clothes still in various stages of the summer-to-winter clothes sorting task piled a foot deep across the 8 feet of your dining room table.  Your mid-week leave-taking nags at the back of your mind and the 5 eggs in the carton are fast disappearing from your consciousness.  But there in the middle of the mess and the work is a dash of beauty that you didn't expect and still takes your breath away.  A "just because" bouquet from two women who know you better than anyone else and sent flowers to tell you you're still important, even when you fail and falter and wail and wallow!

On a day when you suddenly feel adrift in a sea of unfamiliar choices, when the familiar has given way to the unknown, and fellowship to loneliness...you reach evening time and realize that God knew exactly where you would be on this day, too.  And months ago filled your calendar with Family Sunday and your hours with improvised guitar duets, and children twirling to family music, and laughter ringing through the hardwood hallways and your mother's voice calling from the kitchen.  And you realize that He didn't just mean that He would be there, deep in the bottom of your soul when you are alone in the dark, when He said He would never leave you nor forsake you.  He fills your days and fills your cup and wipes your tears and soothes your flailing soul.

.................................................................................

What's ordinary about extraordinary

there is prognosis and data.

there is following all the recommendations.

there is following none of the recommendations.

there is prayer and attitude and hope.

then there is luck.

the unpredictable nature of one person's cells to one specific compound at one moment in time.

for better or worse.

some surprises are celebrated, others mourned.

oh wait...sort of like the rest of life.

i knew i'd seen it somewhere before.

~ "surprise", by kindred spirit, oncRN

I've heard it a thousand times if I've heard it once: "I don't know how you do it."

(Fill in the blank: raise four kids born in a 4 year span of time; go to graduate school; survive cancer; keep smiling; don't become murderous when you clean up the 10th poop mess of the day; live with a husband on call...etc., etc....)

The reality is, God selects the trials that fit us.  He shapes our lives to change us.  My life ceased to be ordinary the day I surrendered my soul to Christ, NOT on the day I was diagnosed with cancer.  And still, my life doesn't feel the least bit out of the ordinary.  I have come to expect nothing less than the cancer/kids/school/work/financial woes life that God has called me to lead.  How about you?  What is "out of the box" about your life?  How is God stretching you?  All of us are works in progress...and the master Craftsman selects just the right medium and just the right chisel to shape us best to draw others to eternal life.  The chisels He's using on me are cancer, school, a busy schedule, a heart condition, a crisis in relationships.  The chisels chipping away at your granite doubtless look different.  But, if you're a believer, they're accomplishing the same end.  In the end, you are supposed to look - not like yourself - but like Christ...as close as possible to that unattainable Perfection we call Abba, Father.

Christ presses the shape of his own face into the clay of our soul when we cease to be hard and resistant, and when we take our own amateur hands off and admit that we are not such good artists as he is. Here we can see clearly what faith is. Faith is the assurance that what God will make of you, as Christ is formed in your life, is vastly to be preferred over what you can make of yourself. Faith is the confidence that the demonstration of Christ's work in your life is more wonderful than all the praise you could get for yourself by being a self-made man—or woman. Faith is a happy resting in the all-sufficiency of what Christ did on the cross, what he is doing now in our heart, and what he promises to do for us for ever. ~John Piper, May 15, 1983

Monday mish-mash

I finished coursework for my PhD yesterday! Somehow the big push to finish three papers in less than one week has put my brain into hyperdrive, and, now that it is free from the pressure of school commitment, it is going everywhere.

One of the things I have been contemplating this morning is the fact that being a photographer means I am altering my children's visual history. I constantly crop out the mess by stepping closer. Seriously, have you ever really seen a truly messy photo on my blog? Well, today I'm 'fessing up. This is what the house of a PhD student often looks like.

What I love about these two photos is that, regardless of the mess, there are two happy kids in the pictures. I do think I need to be more authentic as I document family life, so that when my kids are 30 and pulling their hair out because they haven't put away any laundry for a month, they won't think they're inferior. Sometimes failure needs to be normalized...otherwise it is too depressing! To err is human, right? And then, of course, I turn to my response to my failures. Do my kids see me failing and just wallowing in the fact that I'll never be perfect? Or does my failure refocus all of our eyes on the one true Perfect One?