When a Christian Blogger Doubts: Permission to Walk Away

All photos today courtesy of Katrina

She reminds me of a time when I had so much hope that even the dying flowers on the sill lit me up with faith. She holds the camera steady, checks her settings; sighs at the image that flashes up on the screen. I've started her off on a joy hunt from the time she was an infant, and it strikes me that she has perfected it in ways I haven't yet.

She tells me, with elation sparkling through her words like bubbles through champagne, that you can get rid of all the mess with your camera. Hold the angle just right, and dusty piano keys glitter and gleam. At ten, my daughter has learned that happiness is mostly a matter of perspective.

I feel the warmth of her candle next to me, and it brings me peace. She is demonstrating a lesson I've worked for decades to learn - one that still slips through my grasp. She accepts imperfections but it doesn't take away from her joy.

I've come up against one giant imperfection in my life story. It has threatened to wreck havoc on the delicate framework of joy that I've built around this yellow house and the people within her four walls. I remember worrying about this at 14, 19, 22. How do you quit living a double life? How will people react when you parade your ghostly and imperfect reality into the light for the very first time?

People around me ask for grace. They ask me to wait. They ask me to pray. I love them, and so I do. But faith has gone like a forgotten misty morning, and with it most of my suppositions about how the world works. What is good and what is bad. What is worthy or unworthy. Beautiful or ugly. Truth or lies.

I try to focus on what I do know rather than what I don't. Every now and then, I wonder if I waited long enough. But 34 feels like long enough to wait for a whisper in the darkness. The logic in me quells the fear: I believed once, so I am giving myself permission not to now. Fighting against my disbelief was just carrying me farther from myself and the very peace I sought. Instead I accept it. Maybe my disbelief has been trying to talk sense into me for all these years.

It's scary to give yourself permission to walk away for a while. It's even scarier to admit - and accept - that you are in limbo. But answers seem much less important than joy. The way I figure it, truth exists just fine without me understanding it.

I live now in the concrete, the measurable, the things I can see or hear or feel or smell. I live in bear hugs from children; in snow angels in the crystalline below-zero air; in lectures that wring me out because I pour everything into them. I am finally meeting the world head on. I am out of my cave and here in the world everything looks just a little brighter and a little more hopeful. You and I? Maybe we are the ones to find hope in.

Encouraging compassion

We watch the disaster footage from Oklahoma, and my little bleeding-heart 6 year old went running for her piggy bank. I tried to convince her that our family donation through Samaritan's Purse was enough, mostly because I didn't know where to send $5 cash and a letter from a 6 year old, but she wasn't easily deterred. After a few tears and begging from her, I started to look for somewhere to send her letter and donation. I found a church on the ground helping those in need, and we sent off her little note with the instructions to give the whole envelope to a family with children if possible.

It's easy to dismiss or belittle our children's small gifts, the small bills and the quarters they save for months and then suddenly want to give away to someone in need. It's easier to click "Pay Now" on the internet than it is to deal with these seemingly petty donations that come from our children's treasure coffers. Does this rob them of their desire to help out? I think it can.

There is a jar on my oldest daughter's desk that holds over $70 in coins that have been collected by the children over the past 6 months. In swirly hand-colored mosaic print, the label reads, "4 are sponsered chidren", a 7 year old's attempt at "for our sponsored children". The kids want to send small gifts for birthdays and holidays to the 4 children we sponsor in Mexico through World Vision. At first, I encouraged them to put only 10% of their birthday and cleaning money into the jar. They dissented: we don't really need spending money, Mama, they said. "You already buy everything we need, and those children don't even have enough food!" It can be overwhelming as a parent, trying to decipher how to teach your children to be generous while also teaching them financial responsibility so that they don't become another mouth for givers to feed. There are times, though, when their childish logic makes better sense than mine, and I can't deny them the opportunity to give to others.

It is more blessed to give than receive, the Bible tells us. Having been on the receiving end of many delivered casseroles and helping hands to clean my home and tend my children when we've suffered through major illnesses like cancer and brain infections and heart failure, I understand this, deeply. I hate being the receiver. It has taken many years to learn to accept help gracefully. I wonder about the stoic Mexican mama pictured with one of our sponsored children. How does she feel when her child goes down to the school to eat two meals a day, meals that she couldn't provide? Is it difficult to sign your starving child up to receive aid from some more fortunate family half a world away? I imagine it is.

I admire the grace with which hurting people are able to receive our gifts. I admire my children's giving spirits. Sometimes it is a little more work to help them develop this character trait - compassion and empathy - but it will be worth it someday. So we let them take their hard-earned quarters to the children's Drop in the Bucket offering at church, we mail letters off to tornado victims, we go to Target to buy gifts for two 12 year olds and a 13 year old in Mexico.

The smiles on their faces tell the whole story: yes, it is a blessing to be the giver.

How about you? Do you help your children give of their time or money? What activities have worked best for your family, volunteering together, making donations, serving food? We are always on the look-out for new ideas!

A promise of snow

Autumn whirls by like a flutter of leaves emancipated from the backyard by a rake, lifted and swirling in one iridescent moment of final glory, and then gone forever into the black plastic of a lawn bag. Long night shifts caring for sick strangers, hockey practice, first flurries of snow. The week hurtles on and I don't pause to write or hardly to think. The incomparable adrenaline laced rush of joy after physical accomplishment washes over me and drowns me in happiness after hockey practice. Nine years of having babies, and I can still stop a puck and have fun out on the ice with a group of women. 

My friend from afar is in Ecuador, meeting children helped through the Compassion International program. It is a hard thing to have a missionary's heart and not bend to the constant plea of so many people. But in uncertain times, when we are making budget cuts $10 at a time, that $38 a month seems like a large commitment, especially when so important and a must every month for that one family. All kinds of things fly through my mind, my doctoral degree, so expensive - really necessary? Well, yes, if we're going to go to Central America and start a nursing school. The winter boots for kids - should I have looked longer at thrift stores in search of cheaper options? Well, no, not when the snow is already falling. What about hockey? How much money do you spend just to rediscover an old joy?

It's hard to be the bud holding promise of next spring, a handful of snowflakes to water the earth when the frozen times are done. Yet this is what young families often do, hold the snowflakes to point to the thaw. We are still growing and learning, learning this one income life, learning what it takes to be a missionary, stem frozen in time by cancer and encephalitis. We can't go yet. We will go one day, to the vast reaping fields. The fields holding the promise for the spring yet to come. They will still be there when we are ready...for the poor you'll always have with you. Perhaps that is one of God's great and incomprehensible gifts: a world where we stay in touch with our poverty. For without a visual picture of poverty, if every man were rich, would we really keep needing God? Not until the grave's doorstep, when we finally realize we can't take it with us. Money is just a dusting of snow on frozen ground...the promise of food for this life while we wait for the next. Autumn holding spring's thaw.

Linked up to Joy's life: unmasked writing project

Honey in my cup

The half-moon hangs like a dollop of gold, the honey in the bottom of my tea cup.

It is late at night, past midnight really, and we are heading home from a night bathed in music.  Just me and my oldest girl.  She sleeps now, beside me in the front seat of our 1984 beater, bathed in the warm light of the dashboard lights.  I am surrounded by the glory of God in the nightscape, and my heart is at peace tonight.

It's been a few weeks since I felt His peace so deep.

My seven-year-old, with her delightfully still dimpled hands the only remnant of babyhood about this blossom of a girl - she lifts those hands into the dark haze of the arena as we worship, and sings aloud with all her heart, her two grown-up teeth glittering in the stage lights with two matching black gaps where the teeth haven't come in yet.  She smiles to the God she already knows so well, "Take me, take me as You find me, all my fears and failures, now I surrender...Savior, He can move the mountains, My God is mighty to save, He is mighty to save...Forever, Author of salvation, He rose and conquered the grave, rose and conquered the grave!"

And now, driving home under the last vestige of a yellow moon, my heart echoes the song, too.
Everyone needs compassion...love that's never failing...let mercy fall on me...
Everyone needs forgiveness...the kindness of a Savior - the Hope of nations...

It is so easy - so easy! - to forget that this is mine!  Compassion, love that's never failing, mercy, forgiveness, kindness, hope.  Has been mine, since I was five years old!  When the voices of this world crowd out the voice of your Savior, do you know the emptiness of loneliness and the dread that washes over you in the morning when you open your eyes?  He never intended you to feel this way.  It is unequivocally the consequences of the Fall.  It is so imperative that we find ways and places, as Christians, to constantly reconnect to our Source for love, mercy, forgiveness, and hope.  These days, I have been cracking my Bible open more than ever - but looking not for peace and comfort but for confirmation and reassurance that I am, indeed, on the path He desires for my feet.

But He is faithful.

The chords of the music pulled the cords of my heart, and I was bathed in His love as the hymns thundered around me last night.  Thank you, Lord, for finding a way to speak to me even when I find it hard to still my soul to listen.

Helping parents with really sick kids

Ever have a friend whose child is hospitalized? I found an excellent resource online today, with a list of things to put in a gift basket for a parent whose child is in the hospital. This is THE LIST I've given a dear friend twice now (thank you - you know who you are!) when a day in the hospital turned into a week. It would greatly bless any friend of yours facing similar difficulty, and may be a good idea for hospitals or even church small groups to provide as a service to those thrust suddenly into need.

Survival items

• phone card for long distance
• tooth brush/tooth paste
• shampoo and hand cream
• small box tissues
• Tylenol (adult)
• sanitary pads
• razor (there are never ANY in the hospital, for whatever reason)
  
• mints, gum, instant breakfast, calming herb tea, chocolate
• trial size antibacterial hand gels
• digital thermometer (paranoid parents always double check)
• a journal for parents to record experiences or medical information
• note cards/writing tablets/envelopes/stamps/several pens

Special touches

• pillow from home
• crayons/coloring book/drawing pad/stickers/book/small kids games
• blanket/tee shirt/hat/underwear
• slippers/soft socks
• coffee mug
• wonderful body refreshing spray - purse size (lemon/citrus is the most universal scent)
• cash, cafeteria gift card and/or parking tickets, gift certificate from hospital gift shop
• a list of nearby restaurants that deliver to the hospital

Services

• Pick up, launder and drop off laundry
• Babysitting of other children
• Offer to organize or pay bills, bring bills to the hospital, or contact service providers such as phone, power, cable, garbage, post office to alert them to the family emergency
• Mow lawn/shovel snow/weed gardens/feed pets
• Make meals for those stuck at home
• Bring homecooked food to your friend who is stuck in the hospital (a friend brought me homemade buffalo chicken pizza at the hospital while Caleb was sick and I will seriously never forget it!)
• Offer to sit with the sick child in the hospital so the parent can run an errand, go outdoors for a few minutes, make phone calls, or get food out of sight of their child, who may be unable or not allowed to eat

Thanks to Ped-Onc Resource Center for the great list!