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.

Defying Death: Adventure & Mortality

There is a grievous evil I have seen under the sun: riches kept by the owner to his hurt, and those riches perish by evil adventure... (Ecclesiastes 5)

I am an adrenaline junkie. This trait is the product of the many times I was urged on by my younger brothers, only to chicken out at the last second. So many trees I didn't jump out of...races I didn't engage in...hills I refused to slide down. By college, I pushed myself hard to learn to snowboard. I became a hockey goalie. I tried bungee jumping and sky diving. I kayaked down many dangerous rivers. I once tubed in the buff down a river in Minnesota.

All of these risk taking activities sound pretty mild - but there were other death-defying habits I developed that weren't so harmless. I was a habitual liar. I constantly amped up my own stakes in my own game, at the expense of those who naively believed me. I messed around with binge drinking for a while, at the expense of my body. I think self-harm and suicide fit in the same category of death-defying stunts that gratified that gaping hole in me that could only be filled when I was on the brink of something dangerous, breathtaking or bad. Satan knew just how to seduce me, and I often closed my eyes to his rather transparent attempts to draw me away from safety and truth.

I gave up most of those habits when I was given a family. They still lurk in corners and occasionally I toy with them a bit too much. But, for the most part, I've abandoned risk taking in favor of a more sedate...and healthy...life with my husband and kids.

This insatiable thirst for adventure has cost me many things. One of the most bothersome to me is the dream of heaven. It is difficult for me to imagine how life could be exciting and perfect without any risks to take. How in the world will I enjoy myself if I can never die? Is that why Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil - sheer boredom? Curiosity about how life tasted when the stakes were raised?

One of my cancer-inspired dreams is a good one: I slice through clouds with a snowboard, falling from a thunderhead a thousand feet to the sea of white below. I wonder if you still get that going-off-the-top-of-a-rollercoaster tickle in your tummy if you know nothing can kill you? I have to table my confusion until I get there and can ask Jesus. I simply can't imagine living forever and not losing the thrill of it. But then again perhaps I see life too often in the negative space, the black, not the white. Perhaps I don't really understand what it is to be alive at all.

Don't let the excitement of youth cause you to forget your Creator. Remember him before you become fearful of falling and worry about danger in the streets... (Ecclesiastes 12:1a & 5a)

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 ~

Tilling up abandoned soil of the soul

And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come. ~ Mark 4:26-29 (KJV)

1. Honeydew seeds sprouting in my kitchen.

I started writing at 9 a.m. yesterday morning. I woke up on Memorial Day more rested than I had felt in months, thanks to my dear husband who woke up with the kids shortly after sunrise, fed and played with them. I slept on. At eight, I rose, and took my Synthroid with my morning cup of coffee. Settled in to my computer to edit some photos and type a few words of praise for a glorious weekend.

2. Husband's hands cutting string to mark the garden rows on Saturday.

The seeds of other plans for my day, long slumbering within me, began to sprout. My chest began to ache a bit. A few palpitations - that old, familiar feeling as though my heart has experienced a sudden, magical metamorphosis into flopping, oxygen-gasping fish. I typed on, trying desperately to ignore what was most surely a harbinger of a change of plans, if nothing more. After about an hour, I called my endocrinologist. For four days, these sensations have begun about an hour after I take my morning dose of thyroid replacement hormone. I know that theoretically, this medication can cause a heart attack if the dosage isn't quite right. I thought perhaps the medication was causing my symptoms. I waited anxiously by the phone, repeating Psalm 3:5-6 in my head over and over, to the little tune my mother wrote when I was just a child: Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding; in all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.

3. Tomato cages lie waiting.

Flash forward to the emergency room. Place of humbling. Crisp sheets with their hospital smell. Doctors and nurses who stare in my stoic face - that face that denies pain and turns more to stone with each incremental step deeper into pain I go. Everyone unconcerned. (I would look worse if I were that sick, right?) Something inside me roiling around, shouting to my subconscious, "Something's not right here! Better get some answers! This isn't feeling good! Better start fixing something quick!" I lay silent and somber on the bed, hoping everything will just fade away. That it will be the medication after all. Not my heart...again. I remember, over and over, that I forgot to kiss my girls goodbye in the rush to leave for the hospital. Pray God it won't matter.

4. Dandelion half-blown in the weekend winds. Beautiful symmetry.

An hour after I arrived at the E.R., my heartrate suddenly dropped. In a gasp of recognition, I knew this was bad. Really bad. Like the worst I remember, an incident in an E.R. in Minneapolis when they had to rush for the paddles and send an electric wave through my body to start things up again. Shock life back into the cells deep within me that were shuddering to a stop. My body reacted, too - my pulse rocketed like an engine slumbering at idle, suddenly roused to life with a jerk. The cold sweat rushed over me, and I saw the room fading off in the distance, dear husband running for the door to call for help, wondering if the wave washing over my face was a long one.

It wasn't a long one. I woke up dazed, and another wave washed over. My body bobbed to the surface, shuddering. My soul recoiling. Slammed into high gear, fighting for breath and consciousness, my body shook, pumping adrenaline through every precious cell. And I came around. Twenty minutes of medical panic later, the shaking stopped, my heart slowed down again, I was covered in tubes and wires..."lifelines", the nurse called them.


I don't want to remember this place. Much less be here again. After five uneventful hours of apparent health, they released me to my own recognizance. Chest still aches. Heart still feels like it's taken a beating today. Back to the cardiologist tomorrow for a Holter monitor. Talk of a pacemaker, maybe, finally. Admitting I may never outgrow this, after all. Abandoning hope that my body will fix itself.

This parable from Mark, the parable of the growing seed, looks different a day later. I typed it last morning, before the pain and the rush and the submergence. Before I had to surrender yet another life-and-death struggle to God. Before I cried out, broken-hearted, exhausted, "why, God? Why would you allow this, now? Why clear me of cancer - again - to plunge me back into heart problems? Can't I have a month off?" My heart is pumping strong, steady, 56 beats per minute. Just like always. A deep ache fills my chest. Part physical ache, part emotional and spiritual. Wrung out. I feel like the swimmer who barely made it back to shore, clinging to the rock on the breakwater, floating up and nearly losing grip when the wave washes in, being pulled back out by the ebb. I don't want to trust anything to anybody. Every human thing in me screams for independence from this failing body. I want a refund! An exchange!

But the parable in Mark says all I can do is scatter seed. Water it. Harvest it. The growing part, the bearing fruit - that's all sun, rain, and Providence. Sleep, rise by day. That's my part. Faith. Rest. I know this pulling me closer to my Maker. The struggle lies in not resisting the pull. The inevitable pull toward the grave, for one. The awesome tug away from self, for another. A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven. He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3)

God, be near, calm my fear
And take my doubt

Your kindness is what pulls me up
Your love is all that draws me in

I will lift my eyes to the Maker
Of the mountains I can’t climb
I will lift my eyes to the Calmer
Of the oceans raging wild
I will lift my eyes to the Healer
Of the hurt I hold inside
I will lift my eyes, lift my eyes to You

‘Cause You are and You were and You will be forever
The Lover I need to save me
‘Cause You fashioned the earth and You hold it together, God
So hold me now

~ I Will Lift My Eyes, Bebo Norman

Growing up

These chubby feet are waltzing toward manhood so quickly. It is one of the consummate sweet joys of motherhood to have children of both genders, watch in incredulous delight the myriad ways in which they are inherently different from birth. Each of my children is magnificently unique, although they share their papa's olive skin tones and a host of other physical features. I have one tomboy and one girlie girl. Then one who straddles the fence on all issues of femininity - my little lioness. And a manly little boy to top off the brood.


It is easy to forget how fast he's growing, when I watch him slumber. The sweet perfume of baby breath draws from me a melancholy chord of regret over lost days nursing and cuddles missed while away receiving cancer treatment. An even deeper note of bittersweet longing begs me linger at his sleeping side, knowing he will so soon toddle off in individual pursuit of a world that is completely foreign to me, the masculine world he has dwelt in from the moment he first drew breath outside of my clinging womb.

He wrinkles up his eyelids in concentration when I disturb his sleep. Stubborn even in sleep. I look forward to all the curve balls parenting a son will throw my direction. I look forward to the dirty nails, and the sand in the hair, burrs in baby clothes, and sticks and rocks for toys. I look forward to toads in pockets and snakes snuck into bedroom, to model rockets and the smell of fire on a little towhead man-child. Yet I am loathe to give up these sweet baby days. I don't want them to be over quite yet, especially with this last little one. The last baby I will birth.



His golden locks fell like shafts of sunlight as I gave him his first real haircut today. The curls I've loved, that cupped his sea-shell ear lobes, fell last. I briefly contemplated a Hasidic aesthetic, just so I wouldn't have to cut those forelocks off. Vestiges of babyhood. I comforted myself that he's still not even walking...that all this motherly nonsense about growing up quickly is simply that - nonsense! But there it is again, that ache deep within as I watch them grow up right before my very eyes. I bent my head, looking down at those golden curls on the floor, and whispered the prayer an elderly woman at church told me of this past Sunday, "Lord, let me be here to watch his life unfold. Lord, protect my life so that I might be here to protect his."

Mother, oh mother, come shake out your cloth!
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing and butter the bread,
Sew on a button and make up a bed.
Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking!

Oh, I’ve grown as shiftless as Little Boy Blue
(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due
(Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).
The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew
And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo.
Look! Aren’t his eyes the most wonderful hue?
(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

Oh, cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,
But children grow up, as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust, go to sleep.
I’m rocking my baby, and babies don’t keep.

~ Ruth Hulburt Hamilton, Ladies Home Journal, October 1958

Bittersweet produce of parenting

A trip to Kansas City with Grandma Nel. Katy received it for Christmas, and was so excited...and also a bit trepidatious. We assuaged her fears by reassuring her that Rosy could go along for company. When I was little, I used to read a book called The Maggie B, in which Maggie goes on a sailing voyage with only her brother James as "someone nice for company". So Rosy is Katy's "someone nice for company" this week in Kansas City. We put check boxes on the calendar two weeks ago, and the countdown began. They began packing their bags a week ahead of leavetaking, packing, unpacking and repacking their stuffed animals, dolls, and books. Bittersweet moments, watching them prepare for this milestone, knowing I would be a lonely mother at home with two lonely little ones while the "bigs" were gone.

It's pretty easy to give in to fear when you're preparing your two beloved girls for a trip to a destination - however safe and welcoming - four states away. A road trip of that magnitude conjured up all kinds of grotesque images of car wrecks, and kidnapping at reststops, and lost children at zoos in strange cities. I worked hard to teach them my full name and my phone number so they could call if they were lost or stolen. And then tried to put it all out of my mind. Relax and revel in the joy of packing with them.

It got the better of me the night before they left. Midnight rolled around. Their bags were all packed and piled by the front door for our morning departure. The velvet blackness of the night sky mocked my insomnia as I muttered frantic prayers begging for their safety. Finally I comforted the ache deep inside by taking a few photos of the girls sleeping...just in case.

We made it through the next day - even packing them up in Grandma Nel's car without a tear falling. Amelia and Caleb and I headed to the park, and I felt remarkably unfettered by anxiety, having poured my cares out on the shoulders of Christ, for He has promised to bear my burdens (Psalm 68:19; I Peter 5:7). We made grand plans to be rid of Amelia's "nuksies" (pacifiers) once and for all; to cuddle every chance we got; to read lots of board books; to teach Amy the ABCs and Caleb to say "bottle". It will be a fun week...albeit lonely. This has been the end goal of all my attachment parenting...all those nights cuddling with babies in my bed, all those achy backs from slinging them all day long, all the times I haven't left them with a sitter or in nursery because they cried such bitter tears when I tried to leave. All so that, at four and five, they can smile and wave as they go off on a five day adventure with beloved grandma and longed-for far-away aunt and uncle. Have a great trip, girls!

I found this excellent tidbit from Shepherding a Child's Heart very intriguing. I am including it here in the hopes that you may find it challenging and useful as well:
"Discipline exposes your child's inability to love his sister from his heart, or genuinely to prefer others before himself. Discipline leads to the cross of Christ where sinful people are forgiven. Sinners who come to Jesus in repentance and faith find grace and mercy. Jesus' redemptive work entails forgiveness, internal transformation, and empowerment to live new lives. The alternative is to reduce the standard to what may be fairly expected of your children without the grace of God. The alternative is to give them a law they can keep. The alternative is a lesser standard that does not require grace and does not cast them on Christ, but rather on their own resources." (p. 120)

Understanding the sting

My mammogram results came back negative for cancer today! The lump on my sternum is a piece of bony scar tissue, probably from an old multiple rib fracture I suffered while playing goalie in college.

Rosy danced on a red ant hill today, and came running to me, arms waving, a familiar look of terror in her eyes. I remember that feeling of consternation and panic so well from my own childhood. My mother once told me (the only girl in the family, bolstering female stereotypes faithfully by being petrified of bugs, snakes, and toads), "Oh, that ant won't bite you!" I wrongly interpreted her statement as "ants never bite". My first foray on a red ant hill found me bewildered and shrieking in pain as they crawled all over my body, stinging everywhere. My best friend, also covered in ants, knew exactly what was wrong and began flailing wildly, slapping them out of her hair and off her skin. I continued my crazed dance on the ant hill, trying to determine what in heaven's name could possibly be causing me such ridiculous pain. My father finally came to my rescue, and I will never forget my mother's horror as she bathed the thousands of red welts all over my body later that morning.

Do we, as children of God, do this with the words of the Bible, I wonder? Do we take statements like that in Jeremiah 29:11 (plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future) and assume that means we won't ever find a lump on our chest? Or that the lump on the throat the doctor discovers will either be harmless, or that we will be miraculously cured?
I would argue that sometimes the plans include lumps that turn out benign and draw out a response of new praise from our hearts; and sometimes they turn out to be malignant, and bring us through a million fires we would never have chosen but bless us indescribably in ways no human would ever request. When we read the assurances of scripture, shouldn't we also balance them with the suffering of scripture? Shouldn't we read them with the eternal perspective always fixed in our minds - that, in the end, all sorrows will be healed and all tears will be wiped away? I need to learn to recognize ants that bite, and ants that don't, in a figurative sense. To throw off the naïveté of spiritual infancy, and recognize the realities of adulthood in the servanthood of the faith: wars, battles, scars, wounds ministered to through God's compassionate - and unknowable - mercy.

And to the two secret servants of Christ who brought His love to my doorstep today in their beautiful, love-worn faces and backs bent to ease my labor:

How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news, proclaim peace, bring glad tidings of good things, proclaim salvation, and proclaim to Zion, "Your God reigns!" (Isaiah 52:7)

A Jonah day

"The trouble is, I've got things the matter with my conscience," sobbed Anne. "Oh, this has been such a Jonah day, Marilla. I'm so ashamed of myself. I lost my temper and whipped Anthony Pye."

"I'm glad to hear it," said Marilla with decision. "It's what you should have done long ago."

Marilla passed her hard work-worn hand over the girl's glossy, tumbled hair with a wonderful tenderness. When Anne's sobs grew quieter she said, very gently for her, "You take things too much to heart, Anne. We all make mistakes . . . but people forget them. And Jonah days come to everybody. As for Anthony Pye, why need you care if he does dislike you? He is the only one."

"I can't help it. I want everybody to love me and it hurts me so when anybody doesn't. And Anthony never will now. Oh, I just made an idiot of myself today, Marilla. I'll tell you the whole story."

Marilla listened to the whole story, and if she smiled at certain parts of it Anne never knew. When the tale was ended she said briskly, "Well, never mind. This day's done and there's a new one coming tomorrow, with no mistakes in it yet, as you used to say yourself. Just come downstairs and have your supper. You'll see if a good cup of tea and those plum puffs I made today won't hearten you up."

"Plum puffs won't minister to a mind diseased," said Anne disconsolately; but Marilla thought it a good sign that she had recovered sufficiently to adapt a quotation.
Anne of Avonlea, Chapter 12, L.M. Montgomery

It all began with a two hour battle with Caleb over nap. A brief reprieve came mid-morning in the form of a trip to the farm in rain coats and mud boots, camera in hand.

The smell of freshly loaded silage, warm milk, and spring seed greeted us as we emerged from the car. We spent a lovely hour visiting the calves and petting barn cats and feeding the goldfish in the farm wife's amazing pond. We picked some rose buds off her tree, which was just beginning to flower. I marveled afresh at the co-mingling of ugly and utilitarian with beautiful and rare. The freedom of routine that has allowed these hearty people to flourish under back-breaking work and endless responsibility, planted as they are on this windy hill a mile from our home.

We paused on the way home to get out on the "troll bridge" - an unexpected treat. We marveled together at a small deer carcass graveyard (fascinating stuff to children, jawbones and ribcages!). We listened to the distant hum of an approaching train on the rusty tracks...until the sensible mother in me hauled the entranced wee ones off the rickety rail high above and back to the safety of the blacktop on the other side.

Home again. Kids with the flu. T-ball practice to prepare for. Lunch and dinner unplanned. A stressful doctor's appointment in the afternoon. T-ball practice, right at dinner time. Dinner was late, Aaron called in to work - good for the finances, a strain on the wife's workload! An e-mail announces a crisis at school stemming from the spring semester, which has just ended. An error in textbook writing discovered and in need of correcting. And so it went, on and on.

I wanted to throw my hands in the air, throw my head back and holler - perhaps even swear a bit!

I thought about not writing this. I prayed about it, actually. I don't write these words to be a discouragement. I write them because they are real. I want to nail a name to something that doesn't get hung up in public in the Christian community. I want you to know that living with cancer doesn't immediately transport one into the realm of the saints. It is a process of daily working out my faith, working out the difficult little details with God. For instance: why, God, would you pile on trouble after trouble today? On this day when cancer is rearing it's ugly head and I have to come to grips with the fact that my future is that uncertain, why allow all these other tests to enter in to the picture? In that sense, perhaps it was more a Job day than a Jonah day: I'm sure Job had these same feelings, multiplied a thousand times, when God allowed his livestock, children, wife and health to be swept away in one awful day!

At t-ball practice, Katy was pensive. I marveled afresh how my attitude seeps into the soil of these little souls. I prayed hard about what to say to my husband, so that I wouldn't drag him down to the depths along with me. I wrestled with God about how to be authentic, and open, and yet spare those around me the ripping and shredding that was going on in my spirit today. How to ask for support...to express my need to be lifted up, without dragging down.

And so it went for me today. There are days in everyone's life when the clouds gather and the thunder starts to roll. Today was unexpectedly awful, and I am praying that tomorrow will be unexpectedly beautiful. I have storms to weather at school, in my work as a freelance author, as I serve others in church and family, and in my health. Thank God I have His wings as my umbrella!

Under His wings I am safely abiding,
Though the night deepens and tempests are wild,
Still I can trust Him; I know He will keep me,
He has redeemed me, and I am His child.

Under His wings, what a refuge in sorrow!
How the heart yearningly turns to His rest!
Often when earth has no balm for my healing,
There I find comfort, and there I am blessed.

~ Under His Wings, William Cushing, 1896

Spinning in the circle

I'm still searching for answers. What purpose do suffering and death serve? It is the deep moan of a cello reverberating through my heart, sighing out a rumbling question as this new experience, this living with cancer business, draws it's bow across the strings of my soul. I see the circle of life all around me, in the Wisconsin spring. Out of last summer's leaves and grasses, now dead and rotten, burst a new vista of johnny jump-ups and lily shoots and iris stalks. The manure from the winter milkings spread on the field across the road is still rich with life, and the crows pick happily in the fecund new soil from dawn till dusk. Where slippery black mold formed on the chilled forest floor in November now lies light, dusty soil, formed out of the death of last autumn's flaming maple glory. From death comes life, and from life comes death. It circles and hums all around me and from it resounds those aching questions: why cancer at 29? Why would any baby, anywhere, have Down syndrome? Why do children die in Eastern European orphan institutions while they grow fat on fast food and video games here? Why all this unevenness, and unfairness, and unhappiness?

I found an answer, for the moment, half way through Romans, one of my pet books of the Bible. Romans and Hebrews read like a great debate: all the big questions get asked, and there is a logical response in almost lawyer-like exposition.

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:20-21)

...subjected to futility...
Useless. Frivolous. Helpless. That's what we see all around us...things that don't work right; things that are broken; things that are malfunctioning. Things that seem to be completely without purpose or plan.

...not willingly...
This assures me that God does not hand down suffering and brokenness like a cruel father bent on teaching His children painful, necessary lessons.

...but because of Him who subjected it, in hope...
There is a reason behind all of this. Cancer isn't a cruel punishment and it's not a turn of bad luck that struck randomly, either. It was designed with hope by a tender, merciful God who bends to this earth and calls softly to each of our hearts.

...will be set free from its bondage to corruption...
The purpose of it all is so stunningly clear. We suffer to be set free. Just as Jesus suffered to set us free. Suffering is what brings me to a place of need. Suffering is what teaches my heart humility and opens my eyes to the real purpose behind it all. Only in infinite grace and wisdom would the Creator set this world spinning in such a way that even the bad things, evil things, despicable things, and painful things can be turned into beauty and treasure and glory. When I take the smudged, smoking embers of the physical beauty of the body He gave me and turn the very fire of my pain into glory for His name, what is ugly becomes beautiful. Dust becomes diamonds, agony becomes emeralds, rags become rubies. For I have obtained the freedom of the glory of the children of God!

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:22-28)

My hands hold safely to my dreams
Clutching tightly not one has fallen.
So many years I’ve shaped each one
Reflecting my heart, showing who I am.
Now you’re asking me to show
What I’m holding Oh so tightly.
Can’t open my hand; can’t let go
Does it matter?
Should I show you?
Can’t you let me go?

Surrender, surrender
You whisper gently
You say I will be free
I know but can’t you see
My dreams are me, My dreams are me

Say you have a plan for me
And that you want the best for my life.
Told me the world has yet to see
What you can do with one
That’s committed to your call.
I know of course what I should do
That I can’t hold these dreams forever.
But if I give them now to you
Will you take them
Away forever?
Or can I dream again?

~Surrender, Barlowgirl

Frugality at it's worst

Caleb is in a new stage of discovery. The object of his most recent inquiry: the toilet. Ahhh, dreaded moment of every mother's existence! He learned to flush it a few days ago, and is entranced. Various objects have already been put to the test. We lost a small wool sock yesterday, and one of the girl's headbands. Luckily, the hair products he tried to flush this morning wouldn't go down. Unluckily, each one would be replaced to the tune of $8 or more, so back in the drawer they went after their brief foray in the toilet and long foray being scrubbed and sanitized. Don't sniff my hair too closely next time you give me a hug! Aaron may argue this is yet another reason products shouldn't be put in hair. He is an "au naturale" sort when it comes to hair and make-up.

Today is Good Friday. The day He hung on the cross for me. An aura of awe and the pall of grateful - yet sickened - loss hangs about this day. He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5) The girls and I had a wonderful time talking about the meaning of Easter in the car today. Singing this beautiful new hymn. Learning afresh that He conquered the grave. Rosy piped up and said, "He conquered the grave for you, Mama. He sent you back to us from cancer." I wept. We wept together - thinking of Grandma Fern again. Rosy misses her often, little tender hearted one. She was weeping because Grandma's body is in the grave, and I was able to help her understand, for the first time, that what makes Grandma Grandma is up in heaven, not in the grave. That through His death on the cross, Christ conquered the grave for us all, purchasing us a ticket, with His blood, that our souls might ascend to heaven.

Oh Lord You've searched me
You know my way
Even when I fail You
I know You love me

At the cross I bow my knee
Where Your blood was shed for me
There's no greater love than this
You have overcome the grave
Your glory fills the highest place
What can separate me now

You go before me
You shield my way
Your hand upholds me
I know You love me

You tore the veil
You made a way
When You said that it is done
~At the Cross, Hillsong

Vanquishing vanishing

Today I had to write a card to a dear friend. The same card I've been writing every year for seven years now. In which I try to express my gratitude and heartbreak to those parents, who suffer a million times more heartbreak and a thousand times more gratitude. Impossible words. There are certain affairs of the heart that will never pour out in writing.

And this year it falls on Easter. The day sweet Caleb died, April 12. What a juxtaposition: the day Christ conquered the grave...conquered the grave...the day Caleb entered it, and through it, the doorway to the Savior's arms. Caleb was the last person, among many, who drew my husband to Christ. It was through the tiny example of 5-year-old faith, unwavering belief as he walked toward Jesus and away from his parents, that my husband finally understood the depth and breadth of grace. How am I to thank a grieving mother and father, arms still empty, for forever filling mine? For eternally giving me Aaron? Through their willing sacrifice, he was brought finally to salvation. When they laid their baby down on that altar, that funeral pyre, he looked on and saw the cross, beautifully and lovingly displayed.

I watched a hundred Marys as they walked their sons and daughters to that familiar doorstep. I stood by deathbeds and saw this passion played out, over and over again. What was a final knell for these mothers...a last touch...one more kiss...a precious child's body cooling under their caresses...that is what Christ conquered. Because of His sacrifice two thousand years ago, Caleb's mama and papa can look forward to a reunion someday in heaven.

Once again this year, I praise...through tears. I weep and worship. Remembering his hands, that gripped our hearts without thumbs, blue eyes that pierced us with their surprising joy, a tiny child who submitted so completely to parents and God that he laid still...stock still...under the most impossible physical conditions.

And I am once again led to deeper faith, taken by that tiny little hand and brought closer to the cross. Thank you, Caleb, for turning my eyes to Jesus in new ways each year as I remember your miraculously mature example of faith.

Another kind of pearl

It is the million little things God does for me along the way that whisper of a love and tenderness too deep and precious for me to comprehend. Our friendship, this love between Creator and creation, is not a single moment of epiphany, but a long string of small pearls that I save and treasure. Woven on the strand of my ordinary days.

"Friendship isn't a big thing - it's a million little things."


I remember the day my aunt found the first tiny sharp edge, like a grain of rice, budding out of Katrina's gums. It is a visceral memory, one of those that wrenches you to the delightful yet jarring realization that your baby won't stay a baby for very long. For a week now, that very same tooth has been wiggled and waggled. I prayed all week that it would fall out before I leave for my scan. It is one of the hardest parts of these leave-takings - the fear that I will miss something big, a first something. Today, after I persuaded Katy to let me tie a string around the tooth so she could wiggle and waggle more effectively, the tooth fell out, painlessly and anticlimactically. And I praised God once again for small, tender mercies as I walk this stony path.

Your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.

How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!

Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.

~ Psalm 139:16-18

Soliloquy on ceding the self

An hour of faith and fractured prayer as the grooves in the floor ground into my knees through the velveteen of my pajamas. I knelt before the familiar curve of the cranberry couch, the tattered green cover of my 5-year-Bible for Katrina rough against my outstretched hand. My ear glowing like a hot coal against the arm in which my face was buried, wet with tears.

What brought me to such prostration? Nothing out of the ordinary. Living with cancer at a young age carries with it the consequent awareness that time may be of the essence. Whatever areas of my life are closed off to God, wherever I am retaining that old, desperate grip on self...they show painfully, like a tattered square of aged fabric on a new scrap quilt. Whatever notes I keep in the margins of a Bible, whatever struggles are transparent in my writing here, there is always another level God is trying to nudge me towards.

My life is a long string of chapters with one central theme: resistance. Various personality tests and peer reviews through the years have marked me with words like "rebel", "visionary", "leader", "counter-cultural". They herald strength of character inexorably mixed with the deep veins of ore that God is currently mining and carting out of my mountain - stubborn, immobile, conviction, opinion, anger. What begins as a trait of character is substantiated in a thousand tiny sins with which I, the clay pot whirling on the wheel, laugh up at my Potter, "Trust me, I've got it under control. It's not a problem for me. I'm o.k. with this. You don't need to supervise."

That evening bowed in front of my couch in prayer was weeks ago. For the first time, from the pit of my soul, I cried out for help in a few key areas I've been holding back from God for years. What I couldn't do by willpower alone I prayed fell under that almost unbelievable umbrella of God's power...with Him all things are possible. (Matthew 19:26) I asked God to "root it out of me", an expression I heard first from my mother, who learned it from her mother, Fern. If Fern could give up a 2 pack cigarette habit in the 1970s, before the patches and pills, and psychotherapy and support groups, what are my little sin areas to God now?

I've been walking around in a haze ever since. You know how it feels when you wake up from a deep, vivid dream, and it takes full minutes to absorb the reality of the mysterious mounds and shapes that surround you in your dark bedroom? I feel that way...for days. Afraid I might wake up and God will have abandoned me to my own devices, and I will fail. Of course I expect to fail...perhaps almost too much so! It has been difficult to believe that I could just be done with these areas I've tried so hard to ignore, forget, or destroy in myself. Almost like it is a figment of my imagination. Almost like maybe I could have done it myself if I would have just tried harder.

(Ah, there's the old familiar rub...)

And then I ran smack into the face of Satan this morning, jolting me out of my daze. I felt like a warrior in an unknown land, the familiar heft of the Sword of the Spirit in my right hand (Heb. 4:12); white fog surrounds me, and I am awash in oblivion, walking forward in faith. For just a moment, the fog lifts as I walk up a particularly steep and challenging hill, and I see the face of the Enemy suddenly before me. When I walk back into that peaceful, silent fog, it is with new awareness, yet requires the same confident steps of faith.

So on I fight in my fog. Praying for special protection today as I face renewed temptations. Let me not be lulled to sleep by the age-old tune, "It Doesn't Really Matter". Because it does, deeply, awesomely matter. To God, to me, to my legacy. Let me be faithful today in small things.

How should we then live?

Use your good dishes...
make lots of messes...
want what you have...
Turn up the music...
Turn it up loud...
take a few chances...
Go to the ballgames...
kiss all your children...
dance with your wife...
tell your husband you love him, every night!
Don't run from the truth...
make peace with God...
in the end, there's nobody else...
~Point of Grace, How You Live

We turn it up, once a day: dance hour in the morning, the loudest and craziest music the kids crave, turned way up and break-dancing and hip hop moves all around. We take chances, rainwater rushing through culverts as we feel the pull of the current on our tall boots. We go to the uncles' ballgames, we kiss so many times a day, we dance, and we tell each other we love, we look the truth of cancer treatments and consequent separations in the eye. Our peace is in God, we know He is the beginning and end, the Alpha and Omega. Still, I find myself ransacking my memory, mulling over this day. Was it enough? What if it is the last season together? What if cancer shreds this reality, children running through mud puddles and splashing in February thaws with Mama? What if next February finds a sickbed, or a coffin? What purpose does that serve, God? What is your agenda, God? I ask this not in bitterness, or consternation. I struggle to align myself to the Truth laid before me. What shall I now do? How should I then live? What next, God? Where is the map?

New parallels

Mother with children, blush of new cheeks, young skin, florid, ripe. Savoring joy in moments like shards of glass left in a broken mirror, reflecting beauty in their brokenness. Handing over mortality and receiving back laughter and a million sensory pleasures. Mother, maybe dying? yet loving, yet joyful.
::
Mary, so many Christmas mornings past, Jesus lying before her, young, ripe, beautiful...mortal. The fragrance of burial spices hovering over the toddler, born to die. Handing over mortality and receiving back Divine Son for thirty years of a million sensory pleasures. Mothering Him. Holy child, suffering woman. Pushing back destiny for present joy.


Grandmother savors Christmas moments, revels in joy on the Eve of the Savior's birth. Gives over daughter with heartbreak and lament, tears herself away to praise God in new ways. Lingers in the explosion of exuberance over tiny momentary blessings. Turns willfully away from a soul of suffering to a spirit of thanksgiving.
::
Another Mary archetype. Given a child to enjoy, then given an expiration date. Nay, not even a date...just a warning. Born to die. Mary packs the myrrh away, and teaches her child to walk. Enjoys the deepening of His voice as He transforms from boy to man. Tends His wounds from thorns and the bite of the whip. Walks in agony up the rocks of Calvary, anguish and praise coexistent.

Wind-swept field, viewed from my kitchen window, snow blown like waves in the sunshine, frozen in time. My heart feels crystalline, bare, polished, exposed, like the field.
::
Christ-ones the world over, century upon century, realizing the breadth of their sacrifice. Swept bare by evil, death, suffering. Glittering in the icy sunlight. Beauty in bareness.

Fruit standing on the dry vine in a winter field, waiting for spring. Soldiers guarding precious stores, waving stiff in the December wind. Stiff like my mind as it unwraps from longed for vision of the future, and reshapes to a new reality.
::
my Bible, dead and alive at once, Word of God standing like a dry, seed-covered stalk, waiting for a breath of warmth in my soul.


Father's hand extended, toddler gripping index finger. Her tiny fingernails are white as she holds on tight, walking a new balance beam with which her chubby feet are unfamiliar. Father slows his step to match hers and never lets go. She looks down at the oak of the beam, concentrating on every step. He looks ahead, keeping track of her progress.
::
A new beam is underfoot: I think there might be splinters, pain; that it might end before I get a chance to perfect my skill; that I might fall off the side, unsure of my footing. Eyes squeezed shut, I raise a hand tentatively for my Father. Know He sees the end of the beam. I keep looking down, putting one foot after another.