Staying afloat

Why is it that shame drives us further and further away from what we need, instead of calling us to repent? It is shame that sends me lurking into the shadows - not the most menacing of shadow, albeit - when writer's block or sadness or pure joy or just plain old life gets in the way of working through my thoughts here with this proverbial ink and page.

I guess I'll shrug that off and take you to this evening, when I threw a ginormous adult sized temper tantrum over the state of my house, which was justifiably dumpster-like and potentially unsanitary in places. I ranted at my kids about the bowls hidden behind chairs or under a blanket surreptitiously lying on the living room rug (carpeted in land mines the likes of gummy worms, Sour Patch Kids, popcorn, dirty socks and old cereal spoons. Honest to Pete.) I pleaded with them that my health was actually suffering, that theirs was as well, that I can't shoulder the burden of the rotten banana peel cemented to my counter with cooked on over-boiled coffee - at least not alone. I wept rather openly (although I tried to choke it back a bit) as I scrubbed mildew from a oatmeal bowl and tossed Clementine after Clementine down the garbage disposal to cure the stink. Then I threatened to retreat to my room. Not exactly...I stated the fact that I would need a grown-up sized time-out for my grown-up sized tantrum and that said time-out would take place in the confines of my room, door locked, and no replies to incessant requests for Mama in any shaper or form unless I could verify that there was, indeed, an emergency - meaning an emergency by nurse definition: blood, limb hanging by a thread, or you just really need a good cuddle because you are falling apart, really falling apart and you really need me.

My eldest handed me a school paper as I retreated to my room, nearly stuttering in horror at the depths to which my housekeeping zeal had disappeared. Her paper was topped with a decidedly unpoetic heading, "The UWEC Nursing Building". I notice she offsets her name, date, etc. on the right side instead of the left. A personal seal. A small "stick it to the Man" á la Breakfast Club. I begin reading...and devour the page, in a single gulp without hardly coming up for mental punctuation pauses, no air, just diving the length of this page of such love and such purity and beauty, I know in a moment why I named her "Katrina" ("pure one"). She describes the details in expanded, imaginative and flourished details seen from a child's perspective. She opens right up and spills her dreams, in all their vivid and glorious beauty, in all their charm and originality, right there on the page in stark and everyday font. Just 26 letters, yet their illusive and expansive possibilities, their ability to save a life or lift one up from the depths or express the deepest of human emotions? My daughter lassoed the loosed words and corralled only the most beautiful and rare for a piece she wrote candidly. She showed us her way of seeing the world, the bias toward a particular beauty her eye and brain possess. In that moment, she chose me, wildly, utterly lovingly and perhaps irrationally.

I feel it heal, this achey old wound, and it's you touching it, child-nurse, you who healed me as you split me in two - literally one of my hearts still beating inside, one teetering perilously close to the sidewalk's edge...the bus route...the Future Leaders club. If ever you do catch fear in my eyes as you press onward, my love, know for sure it is this you see, not what you might imagine: it is that watching you leapfrog the chasms, no matter how ordinary, reminds me what potential loss I have faced down before and of the exact distinct value and beauty of this day here, with all it's troubles.

I'm not the worst mother

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,

The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,

The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1892)

Every day, I know I've failed. I can feel it in my bones. The dangerous, no warnings world I grew up in taught my brain to tune to the negative frequencies. My mind as an adult is bathed in adrenaline and a very motivating sense of shame. It's taken years of therapy to understand that the picture I paint at the end of the day is not realism. It is dark, devious, like one of the Black Paintings by Francisco Goya: an incomplete representation that captures the darkness of the mind, not just the negative facts in the everyday.

Then something happens: I come across a painting like the one above, left for me on the kitchen counter by my whimsical 9 year-old, who thinks, dreams, breaths music and laughter and sunlight. It seems miraculous that anyone sharing genes with me could be so fancy-free. I read the words slowly: Beauty. Freedom. Love. Peace. Everything. Even through the sudden stars of tears in my eyes, the black letters are shouting to my soul. You taught her this!, my brain screams. All that blackness, fear, pain, suffering in your life? You've transmuted the sorrow into thankfulness for joy. You've taken the fear and transformed it into an immutable longing for peace and love. And these translated whisperings of the soul? The faintly glimmering flame of hope that life can be different and perhaps even beautiful? They have whispered their way into the depths of her heart and this is the song she sings, hope and wide-spread arms flung far toward both horizons, unafraid of sunrise or sunset, sunlight or storms.

I've spoken of this through gritted teeth: those who know the full depths of the pain proffered in this universe have unique ability to comprehend the beauty, to take each nugget of pleasure and value it, celebrate it. Locked in the inhumane routine of the psych ward in June, trying to piece together a spring season fraught with failure and old threats, I stared out the hazy safety glass at a world bathed in the summer sun. I knew I would feel the sun afresh when I walked out those doors. I didn't want it to take misery to make me appreciate life yet again. I want to remember on my own, that every day is a gift, and suffering always passes, and new seasons bring new challenges and new joys. 

I will my body to remember. Remember the significance of every small smile and momentary joy. Remember not to take it for granted. Remember that failure is often the prerequisite for success. What is it about our frail 3 pound human brains that allows us to forget this? To forget the hardest lessons of all?

And so I write. Think. Breathe. I refuse to forget that bittersweet still has sweetness and failure still has possibility and fear can be conquered. Remembering that gives me the bravery to open my eyes to each new day and believe that my scars are equalled by my sacredness and my pain is assuaged by the gifts from the universe that surround me each and every day.

Can you get over the hump in a friendship slump?

The kids in the back seat are staging a conversational attack on public school when she piped up, in a soft voice, "I might actually make a friend." She paused, "I used to want lots of friends, but now I think I'd be happy even with just one." My heart fluttered, thudded, then sank. I remember that feeling. I had it so strong when I was a kid. Just one friend who really wanted you around. Just one whose mother hadn't forced them into playing with you.

You could hear it in the tone of your mother's voice as she answered the brand new cordless phone out on the stone stoop when evening was already starting to cool, sinking kind of, and then the sound of her lowering herself with a little thud onto the stair, holding the broom absolutely still and balanced next to her. You couldn't hear the words. I'll never know exactly what was said during this exchange, but I know the few neighborhood friends I had were reluctant ones.

What is it that I experienced, and now my children are experiencing? Is it the trifecta of friendship doom: living in the country, being homeschooled, and afraid of making friends at church?

This one, beautiful dear one, she holds her heart so openly. She has "friends for the day" - at gymnastics camp, swimming lessons, gym, the park on a sunny afternoon - that seem to partially fill her friendship tank. But she, perhaps the most, longs for true friendship where you see someone all the time and you can call them on the phone and it's not wierd at all.

The false starts at making friends feels like an almost visceral cycle - the leap, the balancing and almost falling, the inevitable dismount that jams your knees and makes you even less likely to climb up and try again. Does this get better in public school, I wonder? I always thought that was the key, when I was dealing with this myself as a tween. But I don't know, because I never went.

What has your experience been? Do you homeschool or public school (or were you home or public schooled) and what kind of friendship difficulties or successes do you remember as child? What made things work? What made things not work?

The Bad Parent/Horrendous Child Ritual

My youngest daughter, she of the years given back to us, she who speaks in musical throaty sounds as much as she speaks in words, she has a way with animals. I sing a song to her, "There is a love hidden inside your borders just waiting to be free, so keep hoping, St. Francis, you'll be a free man yet, you'll see the sun shine again, over your city streets. Those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength; they will not be put to shame." (Kristene DiMarco)

Sometimes I think she is a better mother than I. She is a born nurturer. She speaks the language of each creature she tames. The kittens of each litter. The birds she sings to and bewitches into landing on the stakes of their fort while she dances with her hands like wings behind her, the little bird cocking it's head and twittering back as if it is having a conversation with this four foot tall girl. She speaks to babies in grunts and moans and pre-verbal sounds and cocks of the head just so until they are laughing or sleeping, entranced by someone so old who still speaks baby.

She can put anything to sleep. Even the crabbiest kitten. Give her a rag to swaddle it in, and a song to sing, and a few minutes later, that kitten will be sleeping her arms, her swaying around the living room in the afternoon light proud as a peacock and happy as a clam.

Bedtimes at our house lately have devolved into 2 hours of battle to get the kids to lay in their beds. Let's face it: we parents take turns chiding, disciplining, punishing, yelling, cajoling, threatening, pleading, and sometimes swearing. The children (mostly the youngest two) take turns crying, whining, charming, stalling, and being mischievous or outright naughty.

After reading up on the issue, looking back at old journals to figure out what worked in the past, and brainstorming and praying a bit to try and figure out what we've changed lately that's made bedtime such an inconsistent and riotous affair in our household, it really turned out to be quite simple. Exhausted since I started my new job, and often working at the computer into the wee hours on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, bedtime rituals went flying out the window. Aaron, unaccustomed to putting the kids to bed, had to think on his feet, and just came up with, a) it's bedtime, b) children should get into their pajamas and get in bed, and c) they should stay there, by themselves, no matter what, for as long as it takes them to go to sleep. This came as quite a shock to the children, no doubt, who've been storied or sung to sleep nearly every night since they were little.

Last night, we put our bedtime ritual back in place. Although it did take over an hour and I nearly fell asleep with the kids in the process, it worked! Only problem: my husband, just as exhausted as I have been, was also asleep when I came downstairs, so we didn't get any evening bonding time. Hopefully we'll get that back over the next days or weeks. But at least we didn't do the Bad Parent/Horrendous Child routine for 2 hours at the end of the day as we have been for weeks! We both woke up more cheerful than we have in months - and feeling ready to start our work day with a more peaceful heart.

Do you ever drop the ball suddenly on routines or family rituals and only realize after the fact that you've screwed up? Ever done the Bad Parent/Horrendous Child bit at your house?

Sharing with Joy this week, getting real!

The one ingredient for wherever you are

It's funny how you can think you've failed at something before you're even half done. My children are beautiful, transcendental almost, smart as whips, hilarious, easy on the eyes, little gemstones of people. But there are days when I think I've failed them hopelessly, and a good friend of mine similarly gifted in sarcasm laughs with me over an old joke: 

They are only 8, 7, 5 and 4. There are many years to set right the chaos and the lost chances, the depression, the days I've spent wandering the floors of this house walled up in my own brain, the days spent studying for my PhD, the days spent grieving things maybe too hard, the days spent trying to be perfect and the days lost giving up on perfect and giving in to totally way less than perfect instead.

There have been many days redeemed already, but a struggling perfectionist often fails to remember those, and Satan crowds in and threatens to steal small joys all the time. There is a revolutionary out there who is beating a strange new drum, marching like the Pied Piper, singing a strange song that captivates and it truly teaches us, the recovering perfectionists, and we drop everything and climb this alien hill listening to her song with only one verse: COUNT JOY. She doesn't say, forget sorrow. She doesn't say, life will be easy. She doesn't say, you will not fail. She doesn't say, it won't matter that you fail. She just says, COUNT JOY. 

I started, this simple, paradoxical, and yet difficult practice, first on paper and now mostly in my head. It is odd to me still, how it whips my head the opposite direction, away from the mesmerizing power of grief, shame, dirtiness, failure, imperfection, poverty, and questions without answers. A bird flits by silent, and a day full of failures is lost in the splendor of one moment. A daisy on the lawn, and I forget about the unmown long grass in the symmetry of six white petals and one yellow center. I turn my swing around, and the fingernail moon catches my eye and a dark night of depression is light again and the tentacles of a nightmare loosed and forgotten. Yet a little verse nags at me - "weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth..." (2 Timothy 3:6b) - oh, let that not be me! A love of knowledge, a women always with many pans in the fire, head easily turned by this new theory or the dozen books on the nightstand, a new way to cure poverty or another way to bring peace in this war-torn region of Africa... How do I fight this? Not with more of anything. But with less. 

I don't need more answers. I don't need more faith. I need a certain kind. Faith like a little child.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me." (Matthew 18:1-5)

I find my answer on a bookmark in the book I've been reading for months, the one in the bathroom that I can't swallow unless I read it a page at a time. It's a picture Rosy drew for me, one of hundreds she's delivered to my bedside table, and on it is my answer about how I'm parenting and my answer about how I am to live this torn and tattered life of questions without answers. On one side of an imperfectly cut paper heart, in black and white, is the word HOPE. And on the other, in a rainbow of colors, is the word LOVE. This child, at age 7, knows.

You may be a missionary far afield, holding the beauty of a fragile orphan in the palm of your hands. You may be on Wall Street, juggling millions and striving for integrity in a business plagued with character demons of all shapes and sizes. You might be a nurse trying to slog through a dozen patients and still provide loving care to that one individual that tugs at your heart strings through your overworked shift. Are you the Starbucks barista who hands desperate soccer moms love in a steaming cup with a smile and a "have a nice day"? Do you check peoples engines or sell them used cars to help them make it to their next big payday? Or are you the mom down the street who's slogging through mountains of dirty laundry, mapping out Charlotte Mason homeschool curriculum and trying to make good choices about organic food for your brood?

Wherever you are in life, you are commanded to be like a little child in faith. Close your eyes and jump. I remember two glaring details about being a child: being horribly afraid and being dangerously adventurous. I was, at the same time, plagued by fear and amazingly immune to it. I was afraid because I was small and vulnerable, but I was often unafraid because I had no idea what to be scared of. Looking back, it's a miracle any of us survive the jumping from high places, pummeling down steep hills, and racing across monkey bars, bleachers, logs over streams or anything else we dared to do in childhood. Yet in Psalms 116:6 it says, The Lord protects those of childlike faith. So squeeze your eyes shut, just like you used to do, and let go. You don't need the kind of faith that moves mountains. You don't need to be the sage that fills commentaries or writes an amazing blog filled with nuggets of knowledge, answers to poverty, or solutions to world peace. You simply need to hold one little truth, a Holy piece of truth, always in the palm of your hands, always deep in your heart, and always on your lips. The King James Bible said it this way:

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think [dwell, fix your mind] on these things. (Phillipians 4:8)

Rosy Thul, at age 7, simply said, HOPE; LOVE. Ann Voskamp says, Count 1,000 gifts. An old hymn says, Count your blessings, name them one by one; count your blessings, see what God has done.

I may fail at a million things a day. Some days it feels miraculous to clothe, feed, and love my children enough by days end. To greet my husband with a smile and a kiss, and sometimes yes, I'm still in my pajamas when he walks through the door at 5:30. It's a stretch to get the cats some cream and let the dog out the door to run the woods by 9 a.m. I drink cold coffee many mornings. I don't even crack my Bible by noon on a good day. I have no idea what I'm going to do about homeschool curriculum for the fall. All my plans for kids sports, hobbies, pool dates, and our already struggling home chores are on serious hold until we find out if Amelia will be in chemo in July.

But I am not a failure. I am just a child. Loving. Learning. Counting up joys. And holding fast to the only thing I know for sure. That Jesus is God, He is my hope and my rescue, my peace and my provider, and He will keep us and help us until the end of our days, whatever comes.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will fail; where there are tongues, they will cease; where there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love; but the greatest of these is love. (I Corinthians 13 NKJV/ESV exc.)

It's just like falling in love

I'm in the land of dreams, that sunset-gold bright hazy world where light floats on the breeze like cotton in the spring and there's magic layered on magic. I'm talking to a friend about to be married, explaining the difference between how you fall in love with a man and how you fall in love with a baby.

You fall in love with a man tentative, even though it feels like a brick wall falling, love booming miraculous and echoing loud through the halls of your heart that have been aching to hear those sounds since the beginning of time. You don't know anything about him, this alien life form all hairy and full of new smells and sounds and coming into your shared space one morning with his raggedy t-shirts from old concerts and jeans stained and smelling of gasoline, a bunch of tools you don't know the names for, shampoo you'd never buy from the dollar section, and socks on your floor, boxers in the bathroom, and hair. Everywhere. (Don't cry to me about clogged drains with long hair, boys. It's payback for the million times we've swept around the tub surround, believe you me.)

My very first non-date with my future husband

But a baby is a whole different experience. They explode out of your body in this other-worldly, out-of-body don't-care-if-you-refuse-drugs you may as well have taken heroin before hand sort of experience, and there they are on your belly that you'll never recognize again anyway, slippery, slimy, blue and squealing like a piglet, and something shatters inside you in a silent and irreversible process that you can't orchestrate or prevent, and you are in love. Now, having a baby is different for every mom. But for me, there was nothing alien about my babies. Not their smell, not their sounds, not their bodies, not their schedules, not the way they latched on to my breasts, which I thought would be the weirdest part of it all (how I thought that would trump, *ahem*, the way they entered this world, I don't know, but I thought it would). 

Sniffing Caleb at 8 weeks, 2 weeks before I was diagnosed with cancer

I spent 24 hours a day either smelling or nursing my babies. I rarely washed them because they seemed perfectly perfect the way they were. (Okay, I'll admit it. About day three, they started to smell like goat cheese, and so did I, and so I showered with them in this incredible - albeit crazy, hippie, and potentially creepy - experience of a co-shower. I didn't bathe them in an actual bathtub unless we were at Grandma's where this weirdness would be, well - weird. Or until they were six months old and I'd come out of my baby-having induced coma and become a baby-escaping psycho instead.) Incredibly, I can't find many pictures of me smelling them. Kind of like I have about 4 photos of me kissing my husband even though I kiss him all the time. Curse of the photographer - you're always on the other side of the lens. And there's no way I'm posting pictures of me nursing them on my blog. Although I did make my husband take photos of me nursing them so someday I can look at them and remember. I doubt I'll ever show them to anyone else, unless maybe the girls want to see them if they go crazy, gung-ho hippie when they have their own kids in similar fashion to their own mother who made the switch from conservative, short-cropped hair SUV driving snowboarder to baby-wearing, co-sleeping, baby-sniffing, coo-coo for CoCo Puffs baby lover in less than 5 minutes postpartum.

Sniffing Caleb when my hair started to grow back 4 years into my cancer battle in early 2012.

The thing about love is, it doesn't matter how it forms in your heart, how it grows once there, or whether it's the curious, still-getting-to-know-you kind of love I have for my husband of ten years or the ferocious, lioness, kill-you-if-you-look-cross-eyed-at-my-cubs kind of love I have for my four kids of 8 years. And the kind of panic that love can bring out in you - that's exactly the same, no matter what kind of love you're talking about. 

Panic is all around these days. Panic that I'm failing - again - as a wife and mother. Pain in my heart and pain in my body have got me cocooned in my bed again, slipping down the slippery depression slope faster than I can pull myself back up it with meds and coping skills and therapy appointments. How can you hold a heart together when it is breaking? I still don't have an answer for that one. 

Panic that we are not ready - our family is so unready - to face another season of storming. If Amelia does have cancer - something that the doctors seem to talk about more matter of factly with every passing doctor's visit and I'm trying to get to a place of mixed denial-acceptance (?) about - how are we going to shore up for this one? Where is Jesus on this stormy sea? Will He come and stall the storm or is He going to have us ride it out until we think we're dying like the disciples? Katy is head over heels for sports, and needs time outside every day with Aaron or I, feeding her dreams, fueling her body. Rosy is at some 7 year old angst-ridden cross-roads, trying to find her identity, wanting to be herself in our family, pushing for some freedom to follow her own dreams. We need to find ways to make it happen for her - an instrument, a sport, some art lessons - something that is just hers, something to captivate her heart and make those eyes glow again and her little soul sing. Amy's too tired to want much of anything. We're focusing mostly on building her up physically for the physical battle to come - focusing on immune health and trying to put a little meat on her bones in case chemo is in the works for her. Caleb is his usual fitful, boundary pushing self. He needs more to do, no doubt about it. More structure, more boundaries, more to engage his mind and his body. And here's where you can queue the "Mom's failing" music again. So many things to do, and I feel like I can't even get meals on the table or my house cleaned! How can I meet the needs of their souls? And how do I decide what to put first? How can I meet soul needs in a house full of chaos but how can I put off soul needs until I quell the chaos who knows when? 

When did love get so complicated? 

There is panic about my marriage. It is so easy, in times of stress, to slip into old habits of survival. He goes to sleep early, and I stay up late, dogged by nightmares and insomnia, and we are two ships passing the night and intimacy is a rare thing. We've learned how to be comfortable together in these seasons, but fear is an old enemy that launches into my soul, and I worry that I'm abandoning him out of selfishness and that he won't want me the way I am now and he will find comfort somewhere else more attractive, less real, less raw. We cry together, and he holds me in my dark moments, and I hold him in his. We both have faith that there will be better days again, nights in the darkness when we are safe in each others arms and the bedrock of marriage that God guards and planted and protects will still be there. 

In the cracks and crevices, in between the chaos and the sticky floors, the dishes piled high and the surviving of the busy schedules crammed with doctors appointments and kids ball games and trying to find time to have fun as a family, there is always joy. Twenty minutes on our bed looking through old photos with the kids remembering days before cancer when we were two kids in love with babies to sniff and toddlers running around buck naked and a clean house with just a smattering of toys and dinner always on the table at six and long kisses after his work day. He puts on the telephoto lens and captures a gold finch flitting in the afternoon sun and we look at those images together and my heart melts right into his, and we are one, two made one, two pieces of one whole, two halves that found each other in a big wide world of strangers. We struggle to keep our eyes open in the cold dark night at the drive-in movie theater while the kids sleep in the back of the suburban and his big brown hand finds mine and he anchors me, in the silence we remember that we love this, we love the same things, and when life is over and done it will be reduced to moments like these when we loved each other and loved the same fleeting beauties on a sea of changing circumstances and through every hardship and difficulty. Two cardinals fly by the porch while we perch in sorrow, a male and a female, and suddenly it is my grandpa and grandma, three years now gone to heaven together, and we remember their love story of loss and brokenness, and the tears dry and we are laughing at this little wink from heaven that life goes on and life is soon over, and remember that, though time is short and times are tough, we are a cord of three strands not quickly broken.

When did love get so easy?

Make me a daisy

 Turmoil surrounded by sweet scented lilacs.

Dandelion cottons looks like owlet feathers as they wait for the wind.

My friend and I go for a long hike and muddy our 

shoes and legs in the coulees of Pepin County.

And I pray, and I pray, and I pray that my life will soon be back to yellow. Bathed in sun. Flowers blooming, and my soul free to accept that gift from Father God.

For now, I'll take the yellow that splurges out of the darkness, the buds cheerful against the dark foliage deep.

Make me a flower, whose scent pleases you, Lord.
Make me better as I become less.
Fill all the holes in my soul Satan is digging
with your love, grace, mercy, peace, long-suffering.  

I don't want to be the corrugated metal panel patching up an old factory.

...we pray for you always, that our God will count you worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified in you, and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (II Thessalonians 1:11-12)

How much, how much

Do you really know

How much, how much

Well let me tell you

How much, how much

You are loved

These words go out to anyone

Who's ever felt so unlovable

I'd just like to say to you

That lie is so not true

This message is for the broken down

They say you can't turn your life around

No matter what you do

Well that lie is so not true

Take the depths of the deepest ocean and go deeper

Take the top of the tallest tower and go higher

Take the best day that you've ever had

Try to imagine better than that

And it still don't come close

To how much you are loved

Don't worry about what you've done

God's love goes out to everyone

And here's the wonderful, beautiful truth

That includes me and you

So let it find you where you are

Wrap it's arms around your weary heart

And all the love you're longing for

You'll find all that love and more

~How Much, Mandisa~

Looking in on grief

He left her - this whole earth - early in spring. Her jaw was tight and tears fell silent through all our conversations. We walked down the steep hill in back and cried with her while the children swung on the swings he built, played with the dogs he loved.

Summer came and she seemed better, the tears weren't her constant companions any longer. She showed us the garden she somehow managed to plant and we marveled at the pumpkin vines growing thick amongst the weeds. Neighbors mowed her lawn and it seemed like every time we brought her a meal there was one still warm in the fridge, the gift of another helpless friend who brought food instead of words.

Autumn. She seemed to be recovering. She talked more about her children and their futures than she did the husband she lost. She seemed to be settling into a routine. Our visits slowed and I quit bringing meals (did everyone have the same thoughts, I wonder?).

It is winter now and we've all retreated inside and shut our doors against the snow and the cold. Christmas is coming. With a million memories for her? I held her last night as her body was racked by shaking sobs and her lips spilled questions I couldn't possibly answer. She is sorrow wrung and no warm meal is going to heal this wound. How do you face your first Christmas alone?

Dying to be beautiful (part II)

The thing about autumn - this season whose hallmark is death - is that it falls short of our expectations. It cuts short our sun-splashed summers, the boating and vacationing; the harvest is over, and whatever food we've stored from our gardens is it. Often it brings a sense of failure: failure to capitalize on a limitless amount of fun we could have had, work we could have done, yard improvements that languished and friendships we left fallow. In his classic book, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why, author Laurence Gonzales tells us that our survival - eluding death when the moment beckons - depends mostly on our ability to change our expectations.  If you continue to exist in the old reality - "Holy crap! I am about to die! Here it comes!" - then you probably will do just that.  But if you construct a new reality - "Holy crap! This is dangerous! How do I get out of this?" - your chances of surviving are vastly higher.

So consider this your moment of truth.  You watch the world around you spin slower and slower and farther away from the sun, the plants going into hibernation, the animals hungrily feasting on any food they can find to sustain them through the months of hard winter, the people scurrying to and from cars exhaling clouds of cloying exhaust to the stores that breath their exhaust from high stacks into the thin, cold air.  You know, deep inside, that this world is dying.  You know, even truer and closer to the surface, that you are dying, too.

You are the pumpkin plucked at the height of harvest, now shrouded with the fringe of frost and dripping condensation after the last lingering warmth of the 4 o'clock sun.  Your days are numbered.  Someday soon the blackness that even now lies coiled in your cells will explode in a haze of mold all over your beautiful skin.

You are the grass growing ever drier and more yellow as the land leeches it's water deep within, preserving itself - the earth - while it's ornaments die a slow and beatific, colorful death.  Soon you will flutter away into the winter wind, or you will be buried deep in the icy piles of snow crystals where you cannot breath or see the sun, the whole world become a giant prism of white-blue light forever dancing meaningless around your rotting remnant.

Do you accept this fate, this reality?  Do you shut your eyes and sigh and think this is just how it is - dust to dust, perhaps, or maybe (if you're lucky), reincarnation (do it all over again, endlessly, living life forever on repeat) or re-absorption into something greater than yourself?

If this is true, why do little children smile that knowing smile, that smile that knows that life is beautiful and joyful and purposeful and meaningful?  If it is true that life is meaningless, why go on at all?  If life is all about becoming part of a great Spirit, or coming back again to try again, aren't you a little exhausted just contemplating it?

You've got to see yourself, first of all, as the tiny speck of nothing on the grand span of illustrious time.

To know oneself, is above all, to know what one lacks.  It is to measure oneself against the Truth, and not the other way around.  ~Flannery O'Connor

God puts it another way: None is righteous, no, not one (Romans 3:10). Even in the Bible, we hear the echo of the long exhale as one of the grandest men of Scripture concludes that life on this earth is meaningless: Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9:9)

Okay, you've got the picture in your mind now, right? Kind of like a scene from "Where's Waldo?" Your tiny body in a sea of billions of other bodies, on a planet spinning beyond your control toward a fate you cannot comprehend much less predict or change. It's a depressing picture, isn't it?  Almost makes you want to give in to it, just lay down and give up, and say UNCLE! Everything's upside down anyway, headed toward disaster, and you're just along for the ride. Right?

Wrong!  Here is the moment of decision.  Your moment of truth.  The moment in which you decide whether you expect the reality you've been given - the reality you understand and can casually navigate on a daily basis without even having too many deep thoughts.  Do you want the old reality, the one that has you dying during heart bypass surgery when you're old and wrinkled, or maybe riddled with cancer and begging for pain killers in hospice, or suddenly in a car wreck you never saw coming?

Or are you going to try to change that reality?  With a change of plans, might it be possible to survive death? To become beautiful in death?

One guy did it.

And He says you can do it, too: For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (I John 5:4-5) How does everything end in this world? With death. So if we overcome the world, that's what we overcome. Death.

Now you need to move yourself from one plane of reality - the one where death is inevitable - to the other plane of Truth - where death has been overcome. To do that, you need to know just one thing: Christ modeled this for us and tells us exactly how to accomplish it.

If you don't want to rot back into the soil only to feed the next generation;

If you don't really care to repeat this meaningless life a few thousand times until you get it right and head to Nirvana;

If you don't want to be re-absorbed by a changeable, amorphous Spirit being you've never been able to understand;

If you don't want to try to navigate some class-based or deeds-based hierarchy along with a bunch of other dead folks in an Underworld or Afterlife...

This is what you need to know:

There is a home for you...a nice one, without any hierarchy to navigate, any Spirit to become part of, or rules governing your next go-round on the planet earth.

It's called heaven.

The lights are always on, and Jesus is always sitting by the phone waiting for you to call.

As you call, you need to know a couple of things.

1. God sent his son, Jesus, to earth to be born of a virgin - fully God and fully man. Jesus never sinned.  Not when he was 2, 12, or 20. Not once.
2. As a young man, he was persecuted, beaten, and crucified on a cross. During the crucifixion, God poured out the wrath He had stored against the sins of all mankind on the shoulders of his dying son. When Christ died, he descended into hell as payment for the sins of all the world. A curtain was torn that freed men from living by the law (10 commandments) and allowed them instead to live by grace (undeserved favor) because their sins have already been paid for by their Savior's death.
3. On the 3rd day, Christ rose from the dead. He walked, talked, and ate with his followers and met strangers on the road. A short time later, he ascended into heaven, where he now sits at the right hand of God, hearing our prayers and waiting for the day that he is reunited with all those he loves - yes, even you and me, chief among sinners!

Okay. So pick up your spiritual phone and dial heaven. Admit that you want to overcome death - that you want to be made beautiful in death. Just say four simple words: I believe in You.

He told us himself, to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God (John 1:12).

Think you're going to "lose it" - this new paradigm, this new understanding, this new boundless joy - the next time you screw up or are plagued by questions or can't give an answer when someone asks you about your new faith?  Not so. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life. The key word here is KNOW. You have a ticket to the greatest dance of all time. It's not a paper ticket you can lose or even an e-mail that maybe won't print right when the concert date gets here. It's a tattoo on your heart called the Holy Spirit, a tattoo that matches the piercings on the hands of your Savior, Jesus. He invited you to the dance, He knows you belong there, and He is never going to turn you away.

Because you are beautiful in death.

Just like He was.

And that is the key to this "dying to be beautiful".  As your die, your colors come through as all you are squeezes the life deep inside - the Holy-Spirit-life - out to the surface, and your skin glows and you are a rose dappled with mist against the hole-bitten green leaves; you are the golden grass in the green field; you are the tree waving her arms in a dance of praise to the gray heavens; you are the aged green-eyed cat queenly...you are the rusty red tines of a well-used spade...you are seeds on the dying wheat.  You are beautiful because death is beautiful...because it will never again be the final moment. Because of Christ, death is no longer extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come (Rabindranath Tagore).

For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. (Romans 8:13-17)

I will die, Father, a thousand little deaths of cancer - I will lose the strength of my voice, I will lose my youthful vigor, I will give up my early mornings to aches and pains and pleadings at your Throne; I will plod through homeschool, and give up field trip opportunities for my kids and trust that You are feeding them in ways I cannot; I will live in a messy house that I don't have energy to pick up; I will suffer physical pain; I will be quiet when someone tells me they think my cancer is because of my sin; I will humbly accept all the myriad pamphlets, web-links, and mass e-mails about healing and I will never laugh in the face of someone who offers me this help; I will pray every day, all day long, that someday I won't have cancer anymore; I will recant and pray for hours on end that you will take me home via cancer if that is your will; I will spend lots of time I would rather spend elsewhere at the doctor's office, the hospital, and the operating room; I will go on "vacations" for weeks or months at a time because of treatment.

This is my way to the broken/beautiful - the way to which He called me - sharing in the suffering of Christ.  I pray that He makes me more like Him with every day we suffer in this way.  And that He bestows on me a mantle of beauty that overshadows the bruises of life.

Creation brings an offering

As autumn leaves turn to gold

The trees bow down in highest praise

Now made bare before Your throne

The western sky an amber blaze

At the end of the day

In the darkest night of man

we found Your saving hand

For everything must die to rise again

And so we wait in joyful hope

for you to take us home

And so we join beneath the Cross

a suffering from whence we go

~from On the Third Day, Matt Maher ~

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.

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

The dark path

But that was a long time and no matter how I try

The years just flow by like a broken down dam.

There's flies in the kitchen I can hear 'em there buzzing

And I ain't done nothing since I woke up today.

How can a person go to work in the morning

And come home in the evening and have nothing to say.

Just give me one thing that I can hold on to

To believe in this living is just a hard way to go
~John Prine~

Searching.  I am sure I have questions answered, so positive I practically skip instead of walking.  And then, in the darkness of a new time of testing, I turn my ankle in the same holes.  One minute, I have the clearest sight and surest perspective, as a worshiping woman confident in her faith.  The next, I am blinded by my ignorance and my tears as I struggle with the weight of the world and wonder from where help will possibly come.

Last week was Amelia's worst week.  I was suffering the worst heart rhythm issues I've had since last summer, and it was demanding my attention so that I might employ the limited means I have learned to prevent major catastrophe.  And I failed my comprehensive exam in my doctoral program.

I've been told that the testing and the agony and defeats are all signs that I am on the wrong path.  That the spiritual path planned out for me is a smooth one, with only an occasional divot...not like this one I am on, riddled with dents, rocks, and sticks on which to stumble.  I used to picture my "life path" as a mowed path through one of those ethereal forests I read about in books.  A smooth path, perhaps a short growth of grass, clover or wildflowers.  Filtered sunlight dappling the landscape.  Bird song lifting the spirit as I danced and twirled through the life God planned for me.

This place is very different.  It is a real forest.  The path is just a footpath trod by a few before me.  The thick underbrush hides the stones on which I turn my feet.  I constantly bend to push the branches away from my face.  The air is thick and close, and the sun shines through only rarely.  The light is a strange, dark and hallowed green.  There are thorns that scratch my legs, and the trees and brush on either side grow so thick they are impenetrable to my eye.  Am I navigating correctly?  Should I turn and go back, revisit some milestone to be sure I am still headed the right way?  What dangers lurk in the forest surrounding me?  I feel exactly how I feel coming home down the long valley behind my house, on a footpath just like the one I've described.  I have "peace that passes understanding".  If you are a stranger to my path, to my home, your only response to my sureness will be consternation.  But I am sure this is the path home.  I know it in my bones.  It doesn't matter a whit what the path looks like, nor how many stumbles, scratches or bumps attend my way down it.  It leads home.

There is so little I am sure of right now.  I am not sure how life will go for my sweet Amelia.  I don't know how epilepsy will affect her siblings.  I have no comfort for my tears at night.  I don't know how God is expressing love and mercy in my life right now.  I don't know with what clarity I will reflect back on this time in 5 or 10 years.  I don't know if the tens of thousands of dollars I've spent on a doctoral degree I have been called to study for will be wasted or not.  As my heart flips awkwardly in my chest, I don't even know what the next seconds hold.  Life is uncertainty, at best.

But I do know that the words of John Prine in the song I quoted above - however achingly beautiful and reflective of the struggle that is this uncertain life - are not my life's song.  I have found that "one thing that I can hold on to, to believe in this living is just a hard way to go".  Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, who have set their hearts on a pilgrimage, in the valley of weeping (Psalm 84:5-6).  God - the one who "will be who He will be" - the one I cannot understand...He is my one thing that I can hold on to.

In the morning, when I rise

Give me Jesus.

You can have all this world,

Just give me Jesus.

When I am alone,

Give me Jesus.

And when I come to die,

Give me Jesus.

Take time to watch this video. She says it better than I.

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?