Fixing the pyramid: Marriage Letters

Your back is permanently stooped from bearing burdens. Everything I'm too weak to do, you are strong enough to carry. I marvel at it, your endurance, your love, your perseverance when I'm giving up.

I had brushed my teeth, done my hair, and I was looking for socks. I told you I was leaving, going to tend some friendships that desperately need tending. We'd already agreed. But there was this defeat in your voice when you said, "Will you be back for supper?" I looked at the clock. 4:30 p.m. No way. You looked forlorn. I asked you to sit on the blue chair and talk to me, and we sat across from each other in our messy front room. The first 10 times I asked you what you wanted me to do, you said, "I don't know," with your frustrated shrug and your half angry, half brokenhearted eyes. This time, though, I waited. I prayed. And you told me what you really wanted, laid your heart bare in a few simple words,

"I don't know what's best. I love these people, too. But I miss you. And I just wanted to have a quiet evening at home with you."

And so I put on my mismatched socks, and we cleaned up the kitchen island together. Then you made chicken piccata. We had a glass of wine, we laughed at dinner with our children, we ate that feast you'd made. It was so good - this time with you.

I remember a time I had you at the top of my priority list. We'd been on the rocks and adrift at sea, and I knew it was time, crisis time. Do or die time.

Sickness crowded in. You are so tender. Such a servant. A helper, a fixer. When I was drowning, you drained the water out of the house and settled me gently into bed, went to work rehabilitating our home, our routines, our lives. I forgot about priorities I used to hold dear, because my vision was cloudy, and I was so wounded.

I put myself alone on an island on that bed with God. I was distracted by the suffering of others, by my "calling" to help others. Our children were begging for attention. Family events crowded the calendar. Somehow, you floated upward until you hovered with our parents and our siblings somewhere just below our marginalized church life.

Last night, we talked deep into the soul of our son. The two of us, teaming up. It's been way too long. We've settled again for ships passing in the night. Trading responsibilities and stalling in survival mode. Why do we let ourselves do that?

I'm calling an end to it (again). I'm sure I'll have to do this re-arranging of the pyramid of priorities a hundred times if not a thousand. You get to be top priority, right next to God, where you're supposed to be. Because when I follow your lead, when you LEAD, everything falls into place. The stars align, the world starts spinning again, and pretty soon we're thriving instead of surviving.

So here's to day 1 of thriving again!

When your Advent path seems crooked

Even the decorations are hanging crooked already, the bows of the Christmas tree hanging low with ornaments, wilting before the big crowning moment on December 25. Maybe it's the new job that has me tied in knots right up until Christmas Eve. Maybe it's the late wrapping of gifts. Maybe it's how my children seem to associate "Christmas" more with Grandma and less with our own home. Everything about this Advent season seems to have come out wrong.

I've been on a crooked path for as long as I remember, and I guess my expectations of my myself are probably getting in the way. Shouldn't I be used to this by now? Failing expectations? The Advent devotionals so carefully prepared gathering dust on the kitchen island. The baking sheets that have yet to see any cut-out cookies. The Jesus we lost from one of the Nativities earlier in December still unfound in the chaos of the upstairs that hasn't been cleaned for months. My bedroom, the sanctuary of the home, buried under a pile of work clothes and undone grading.

Before the tears can fall, a whisper comes that stills my soul. Advent has been crooked since the very first Advent. Mary on a donkey, uprooted and on her way to a foreign town. Arriving to a town already full to capacity. A birth in a barn. Was any of this what she expected after that Holy visitation by the angel and the filling of her womb with the Holy Spirit?

We are in a constant battle to get it right. Get it right with ourselves, our children, our neighbors, those we witness to. Wear the right clothes to church, sit down and stand up at the right times in the service. Remember how to take communion here at THIS church. Follow the protocol, follow the rules, follow the followers who seem to be following better than we.

What if the Gospel points in a whole different direction? What if following the Gospel is following a path as crooked as my own this Christmas season? What if we're all supposed to be following down a thin mountain path, rousting along on the back of a lowly donkey, heavy with promise but laden with exhaustion and a feeling that this can't possibly be the WAY? What if the end of the path doesn't lead to a gleaming pile of gifts perfectly wrapped and chosen, but three gifts odd from three odd men who don't speak our language? What if the birth of Christmas is not some hushed moment around the perfectly stoked fireplace where all the children sit at rapt attention while the passage is read from Matthew? What if it's a smelly, painful, bloody birth onto the hay?

If He came to confound the wise with simplicity, came to bind up the broken-hearted, came to make the crooked paths straight underfoot - maybe I haven't missed Christmas this year at all. Maybe He is showing me a new layer of how crushed expectations sometimes reveal the very everyday miracles He's chosen for our blessing. Maybe this year it was more about helping a student on one of the last days of Advent, or sharing the Gospel in my office with someone who doesn't yet proclaim His name. And maybe, really, it's more than any of that: maybe it's me He's cradling along the crooked path, redeeming, revealing, reconciling. Maybe through all the crookedness He's drawing ME close to whisper, "You'll still find me in the most unexpected places." Like the very bottom of a bruised heart ready to admit that I haven't got it right, I can't get it right, and Advent is empty unless I'm leaning on the only One who can carry me through.

Come, thou long expected Jesus, 

born to set thy people free; 

from our fears and sins release us, 

let us find our rest in thee.  

Israel's strength and consolation, 

hope of all the earth thou art; 

dear desire of every nation, 

joy of every longing heart.

~Charles Wesley, 1700s~