An open letter to the school of hard knocks

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say. ~Flannery O'Connor

Dear life,

You have put ulcers in my belly but fire in my bones.

You have torn friends away but shown me who my true friends are.

You have made me doubt myself yet become myself.

You have put bumps in the road that turned out to be wonderful surprises.

You have beaten me up, so I'm stronger now.

You have thrown me out but in the dark I discovered the stars.

You have cast me down and on the ground I found rest.

You have torn me apart but the scar tissue where I healed will never tear.

You made me feel alone and I discovered I liked it.

You threatened everything so I appreciate it more.

You shipwrecked me at home with my family and I discovered they really are my favorite people.

You isolated me and I read books.

You rained on me and I jumped in puddles.

Your wind blew me off my feet but it also kissed my cheek.

You laughed in my face and I laughed back.

You made me sad, I found joy in small things.

You exhausted me, and I found out how much I love my bed.

You ravaged my body so my soul grew wings.

You tried to silence me so I found words.

You caused me pain, so I gritted my teeth and limped on.

You took my breath away but God gave it back.

You broke my heart and I discovered the courage to heal it.

You left me speechless and in the silence I heard the whisper of my own soul.

You may break me, but never bind me.

You may hurt me, but never kill my hope.

You may force me to change, and I might like it.

I am afflicted in every way, but not crushed; 

perplexed, but not driven to despair; 

persecuted, but not forsaken;

struck down, but not destroyed;

So I do not lose heart. 

Though my outer self is wasting away, my inner self is being renewed day by day*.

The contest is not over.

You haven't won yet.

You never will,

for even death has been overcome.

*2 Corinthians 4

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.

Home for Thanksgiving

The sun glints off the mustard gold of the field across the way. I can hear builders in my parents' new house, pounding nails the day before Thanksgiving. The kids are hooting and hollering in the woods with cousins while Grandma bakes all everything again this year - another year I can't. I slowly remember that last Saturday was my sister's birthday and that I've once again spilt blood all over this day that is supposed to be cake and candles and presents and carefree. Something about that, knowing I wrecked her birthday, just like when I lost Theodore on November 17 in 2009, breaks me and I bend over double in my swing in the morning sun.

I feel it, just like that. I am all the way home here, in this broken world. I feel myself sliding back down like maple syrup on a cold winter morning, through my head, which suddenly glows warm with the knowing of all that has happened, and down into my heart, where I suppose I should have been all along. And though I couldn't know and I couldn't prevent, for whatever part is mine, I am broken. That once again it was November 17. And I am broken all over again that I have been given this beautiful life and this beautiful place and these beautiful people. And taken it all for granted. Poured my ugliness all over His beauty helter-skelter as if I had never been taught this lesson before.

As empty as I feel in that moment, as the tears cascade and my heart thunders loud in my ears, I know this moment is what stopping breathing was all about. It is why He continues to test and try. It is why He pushes limits and allows death to seep through cracks. He wants me here, at the foot of the Cross, fully aware of my neediness, my indebtedness, and my gratefulness.

This is exactly where He wants us all on Thanksgiving - and every day of every year of our short time here on earth. On our knees. Praising, faltering, grasping for more. 

How deep the Father's Love for us...

How vast beyond all measure!

That He should give His only Son

to make a wretch His treasure

~Stuart Townend (sung here by Fernando Ortega)~

I see myself there, for a moment, on that lonely hill of a past time and a foreign land. It's windy, and I pour out my soul like a pot of black mud where the Cross pierces the earth. I cannot look up, for what overcomes me in this moment of pouring out is the magnitude of His love as it pours down. This is the Love I felt in the darkness of those 40 minutes in-between. Who am I, that He would look down and love me, save me, and join me to that Love inseparably, eternally, for no price I paid or deed I've done? This is the Holiness and Awesomeness of God, when you come face to face with Him.

He says that a lucky man can number his days at 70 or perhaps 80 years. I've been given 33 and consider myself one of the luckiest people I know because I know what each day here is worth - the struggles of it, the beauty of it, the having of it. Thirty-three is, historians say, ironically, the same number He was given when He took the bitter cup that was mine and drank it down to it's last dregs, to save every last one of us. For this, I am thankful. For You, I am thankful. 

And for today.

Life is beautiful. My new nephew August with Katrina in the sun.

Savior I come

Quiet my soul...remember

Redemption's hill

Where Your blood was spilled

For my ransom

Everything I once held dear

I count it all as lost

Lead me to the cross

Where Your love poured out

Bring me to my knees

Lord I lay me down

Rid me of myself

I belong to You

Lead me, lead me to the cross

You were as I

Tempted and trialed

Human

The word became flesh

Bore my sin and death

Now you're risen

Almost dying

I quit breathing sometime on Saturday afternoon for 40 minutes or so. My brother did CPR on me. My children watched me through all of that. For three days, I didn't get any answers. I floated in and out of sleep, recovering. Nightmares.

There is a room somewhere in the belly of every hospital, a room I love working in. It's called the trauma bay, the trauma room, or something like that. It's a huge room where they bring people who stop living on ambulances. I had no idea what it would be like to wake up there, splayed out like a fish on a gutting table with 30 people working on you, disoriented, confused, unable to make any decisions for yourself. I've always had an instinct about working there, been next to the person's head, comforted them. Because somehow I knew it was terrible to wake up there. When I woke up there, there was a friend at my head. But still, it was one of the absolute worst moments of my life.

I'm glad Saturday wasn't my day to die. I keep leaning hard on the verse that says there is one day appointed for me to die, and only He knows the hour. However peacefully I felt myself floating off, and however chaotically I felt myself pulled back into life, it wasn't my day to die.

"Each time the mystery of suffering touches us personally and all the cosmic questions arise afresh in our minds we face the choice between faith (which accepts) and unbelief (which refuses to accept). There is only one faculty by which we may take hold of this mystery. It is the faculty of faith, and "faith is the fulcrum of moral and spiritual balance." I write as one who desperately needed a refuge. The bottom has dropped out of my world, as it were, more than once. What, exactly, is going on?  Where was I to turn? To God? Is He God or is He not? Does He love me or does He not? Am I adrift in chaos or is the word true that tells me that I am an individual created, called, loved, and purposefully placed in a cosmos, an ordered universe, a universe designed, created and completely under the control of a loving God and Father? It helps me, at such times of bewilderment and sorrow, to go to some of the simplest words, such as I am the good shepherd." (from A Path Through Suffering, Elisabeth Elliot, p. 98)

A red-haired legacy

She asked me months ago, when it was just a feeling in her bones - intuition that something wasn't right. She wanted portraits taken. Live in living color portraits of a woman in her 40s who's overcome just about every kind of suffering a woman could endure. A gift for her boy. Her son reminds me constantly throughout the photo shoot that photographers in Germany used to stop her on the street to ask her to model for them. She still has all that model flair - the perfected far-off half-smile, the statuesque posture, the way to tilt your head just right to seduce someone right through the camera lens.

Years ago, she was a battered wife. Then a homeless divorcée, living in shelters with her little boy and on the run from an abusive past. Somewhere along the line, she found Jesus. And although she is a skeptic among the best of us, when the tests and trials come, it is verses and prayer she murmurs under her breath, a little German lullaby she sings aloud when she is faced with a medical procedure and as scared as a child. She is as stubborn and strong as any German, fire-cracker personality to match her red hair, enough character in her little finger to intrigue people for decades of friendship.

These photos aren't about capturing her beauty. They are a legacy for a son. Just floundering through the speed bumps and detours of his 18th year, he's not afraid to kiss him mam while the camera clicks. You must have gotten it right, I think, for a son to be like this when he's more scared then he's ever been before. He isn't pulling away, insulating himself from fear, laughing life away so he can cope.

He's feeling every heavy moment, soaking up every piece of advice, learning to cook potato soup to care for his mom after a painful biopsy.

She worries she hasn't taught him the important things - where to pay the bills every month, how to get money out of the trust for the property taxes every year. But what she has taught him are the things that remain, even if bills go unpaid and taxes are forgotten and he were to lost all he would inherit, financially speaking. She's taught him faith, hope and love. 

She wakes up in the morning wondering, "is this day I'm going to die?" I remember those days...the days of waiting for test results, the uncertainty about surgery, the wondering how many years I had left to feed my babies from my soul, my life experience, all the things I wanted to tell them before my voice went silent forever.

But I also know that a bad day - even a bad season - does not mean you've had a bad life.

I know that there has never been a day I've been alive that I could wake up in the morning and say for absolutely certain that I'd be alive still at bedtime. It is appointed unto us once to die...only He knoweth the hour... (Hebrews 9:27a & Matthew 24:36)

I know that when the cracks of our broken heart grow bigger and wider, He pours of Himself in to fill us up, until we are saturated with such Grace that beauty sparkles from every dank corner of life and, through the worst of life's situations, we are given eyes to behold the majesty and wonder of life, loss, living.

These aren't lessons I can preach. They're only lessons I can live out in broad daylight for her to see. I see her, through my lens, just being a mama. Giving advice to her son. Accepting his love, so freely given when just weeks ago they were at odds. I see the beauty sparkling. I see already the beauty for ashes, though she might not yet. I see her edges growing softer. She is luminous in her softness. A heart bent to submit to whatever plan God has in this worst of times. A mother any son would be blessed to have, for whatever amount of time God allots.

Though the Lord is exalted, He looks kindly on the lowly;

though lofty, He sees them from afar.

May they sing of the ways of the Lord, for the glory of the Lord is great.

With Your right hand you have saved me.

Though I walk in the midst of darkness, You will preserve my life.

Your love, O Lord, endures forever --

Do not abandon the works of your hands! 

(from Psalm 138)

Terribly wrong yet wonderfully right

I go to work 9 to 5 and the kids slam dunk me with hugs and kisses when I come in the door limp as a dish rag at the end of the day. I envisioned my first day as a professor in the front of a classroom looking out at the bright eyes of students, but instead it is my bright eyes looking out at instructors teaching us about technology, how to make students read their assignments, how to use the library and other campus resources.

I'm sitting in chairs instead of standing at lecterns and my legs swell up like watermelons, like elephant legs, with skin dripping off them in folds. Cankles, like I used to have when my babies swelled my belly like I'd eaten a whole watermelon for dinner.

Stress is a silent river, the undercurrent of change, and my heart doesn't like stress, bucks and kicks and doesn't pump right. Anxiety is the tree falls, hazards in the stress river, where you can get hung up and drown under the current. I walk into the familiar red brick building, and all the mistakes of college come rushing back, all the times I thought they were going to kick me out because I was handicapped by my heart condition, the one that made me faint 20 or 30 times a day and sometimes made me stop breathing. I walk into the skills lab, and I remember waking up on the floor with the florid over-lipsticked lips of a professor coming at me for another mouth-to-mouth respiration, the gawking eyes of my classmates watching me be resuscitated. How could I be a nurse if I needed to be resuscitated?

I go over the waterfall of the river of stress, dragging the treefall of anxiety over with me, and I stop breathing again in the ER, and my cardiologist says yes, it's stress again, along with all these other things wrong with my very wrong body. How am I to believe I am perfectly created when I am so wrongly made, so terribly made that I stop breathing because I am stressed out by change?

There is only one answer. I remember learning always be ready to give an answer to every man that asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear (I Peter 3:15b) and I mulled that over for years. How could I give an answer for hope when I was constantly facing death? How could I tell my patients to have hope when they were facing death, if I couldn't give an answer for why I had hope myself?

Sometime in my 21st year, while reading Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? I found an answer. An answer for how I could be made terribly wrongly and beautifully rightly. An answer for hope in a dying body. An answer for being willing to put my life on the line to serve the dying while I myself might be dying any day.

"The God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast." (1 Peter 5:10)

That is my answer. In my weakness, His glory is all the more evident. In my sacrifice, His sacrifice shines through brilliantly. In my submission to the trial He has placed in front of me, His Grace is on the pedestal it deserves to be on, exalted for all to see. And all that is required of me is a small, minute measure of faith. “Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.” (Yancey)

He will keep in perfect peace all those who trust in Him, whose thoughts turn often to the Lord! Trust in the Lord always, for in the Lord, Jehovah, is your everlasting strength. (Isaiah 26:3-4)

Written on Lisa-Jo's prompt, "Change"

One Right Choice: A Letter to My Younger Self

I don't know why you were born in the United States to intelligent parents who had decided way back then to raise you earthy in the hippie way, homeschool you, love you unconditionally like Jesus taught them in the few simple verses they clung to even before they really knew Who they were following. I don't know why your childhood was golden, filled with woods and brothers and beauty. I don't know why it shattered because of one person who chose evil instead of good, and bludgeoned you with sexual abuse when you were just a tiny person of seven or eight years. Even now, at 33, I don't know the rest of the story. But I do know now a lot more than I knew then. I have a lot to tell you, the mixed up you of high school and college, the you that couldn't seem to get anything right, the you who didn't even know what Right was for her.

You were all mixed-up inside, an identity of confluence, two rivers so muddy you couldn't tell which defined you better - stoic Scandinavian or earthy Native. Tom-boy or girly-girl. Intellectual or athlete. Sister or daughter, friend or enemy. Straight and narrow or wide and easy. Straight or not straight. In the shadows or in the Son.

You tried to hammer it out in silence, writing poetry under a pseudonym published in the University art journal, yelling in your soul to a God whose very existence you sometimes questioned, beating your body on the ice at late night hockey practices even though your cardiologist told you to take it easy, for heaven's sake.

Sometimes you were obedient, even though it was hard. You didn't touch beer until your junior year, even though you wanted to at all those college parties, warning labels from cardiac meds ringing loud in your ears about sudden death and other side effects of mixing substances and the life-sustaining little green pills you popped like candy to keep you upright and breathing like a normal person. There were boyfriends you'd never had and wondered if you'd ever have. Girlfriends you had and wished you didn't. Confusion roiling where your uterus ached in that empty late teen way, full of latent dreams of babies and sexual perturbation, a womb full of memories of sharp physical abuse and the duller, deeper psychological wounds of the words that your abuser sank into your soul like poison arrows.

You kept classes on an altar because you couldn't go back and erase the mistakes that would derail your lifelong dream of being a professor like your dad. Your dad and your mom...those who sustained you, believed in you even when you proved you couldn't be trusted, who loved you when you weren't lovable, who were your scaffolding to a faith you'd lost faith in...those two people you wanted desperately to be like and desperately to love yet held at arms length, afraid of your secrets, afraid of consequences, afraid of disappointing them again. Afraid of breaking their hearts.

There were places to go and things to see on this great green earth, and you ached so badly with desire to see all of it and do all of it - the paddling, the descending of the mountains on your snowboard, the breathing of the thin air of mountains, the humid air of jungles and the salty air of seas. You were afraid of death just because how could heaven possibly be as beautiful as earth? And so you prayed, long and hard and often, even though you weren't sure He was listening, to live.

There were mistakes almost made, a man almost married just because he was a man willing to marry you, a man who didn't ask questions, who didn't seem to notice that you were a woman confused, a woman who loved other women a little too much, a little strangely. He didn't ask where all the hurt in your eyes came from, or why you hungered after marriage ravenously, as if it was salvation from some invisible curse you never mentioned. In return, all he asked of you was the same - that you ignore pornography and little white lies that really didn't matter, unexplained losses of time that should have been yours, pieces of his heart that should have been yours but never would be. And were you wise beyond all your confusion and your years, or was it just that tiny chip of remaining faith that kept you from peace, kept you begging questions about what love really felt like and whether or not it was okay to marry someone you didn't love that way? No one came out and told you not to marry him. But you remembered a snippet of a verse - the peace that passeth understanding - and one hot summer day, you realized beyond a doubt that you didn't have that, and you handed that little band of gold and glitter back to him and broke your promise and said you just couldn't. Even though you couldn't explain why. Somehow you knew that just good enough wasn't good enough at all and that there was more to life than just enough.

There were days you dreamed of nothing other than moving far, far away and giving up all you knew and giving in. Your heart broke because you were a sinner and you wanted that sin more than anything else you'd ever wanted. Yet at the same time, your heart broke for all the things having that sin would ruin - family, friends, life here in this place and time and space. All the people who would never be the same if you chose the hard and difficult and damning sin instead of the hard and difficult and tooth-and-nail fight of Right.

Because you chose the tooth-and-nail fight for Right, because you didn't throw it all away and flee to a far-off freedom away from the prying love eyes of family, He gave you family, more and more love eyes that pry and see when you falter and hearts that break when you stray - and shout Hallelujah! when you survive, thrive, and get it Right. 

Because you didn't choose just-good-enough, a husband who didn't ask questions because he really didn't care, He gave you a romance that has lasted 10 years and promises richer and fuller love for decades to come. He gave you this man, this oh-so-much-better than you deserve, kisses that flood your bones with a hunger you didn't know you had.

Because you yelled in your soul at a God you weren't sure even existed, He walked with you out into the light, and He filled the light with dozens of tiny people who proved to you He existed. He swarmed you with love so much greater than the greedy, paltry, carnivorous false love of that sin that enticed you, love that piles right on top of you and clings to you and never, ever lets go, even in the twilight when you'd rather be going to sleep instead of giving more kisses and telling more stories and tucking them in again.

For every beer you didn't drink at those parties, and every obedient swallow of those pills that helped your heart keep beating, He rewards you with crazy joy in oceans and on mountains. Your heart is still sick today, and there are still pills to swallow. A tiny machine in your chest keeps the ticker ticking. You still go to ERs and falter at the ledge of death sometimes. And when you're at the ocean and on the mountains, you aren't young and you aren't strong - all you can do is sit in those waves. But the joy in those experiences is richer because it was almost stolen, and you grip joy with both fists, for you are richly blessed and oh, how deeply you know it!

Even though you can't snowboard down real mountains anymore, hike 14ers, surf the big waves, He gave you little people to show the ways of adventure to. And when they grin at the end of the day when they've mastered a new trick, or when their squeals fill the air as they rocket down hills and flip on skateboards, it's your heart that explodes with glee, because you get to do this. You are still here. And behold, He is Right again - it is more blessed to give than to receive.

You didn't know that all those lessons about living and dying would teach you how to face cancer. You didn't know that fainting in public was your dress rehearsal for the public humiliation of wearing disease in the form of a bald head. You didn't know that when you got cancer at 28, you would skip to the head of the class because you'd already learned so many lessons about sickness and living with it and thriving anyway.

And for all the sacrifices of momentary pleasure for the sake of good grades and a good reputation at your university, He gave you your very own office at that same university. The opportunity to teach thousands of young nurses as they're just starting out. To teach them how to live their faith as they follow their calling. It was worth it, wasn't it?

Every prayer you offered up to travel the world and see every beauty this green earth offered, every prayer to defer heaven just a little bit longer so you could revel in the gift of time on earth...He took it and changed it, and sent you with your stethoscope and your wide eyed dreams to the corners of this impoverished planet.  And instead of a passive traveler, He let you be the hands and feet of Jesus, holding His beautiful, broken people in your hands and healing, and at the end of those days, you were speechless, and you sat in red earth and stared out at the alien landscape and all you could do was breath as tears ran down your cheeks. Because true joy is that incredible and profound - it silences and stills and leaves you completely wrecked.

You had no idea that the real break-down would come in your thirties, and leave you twitching, dead-eyed and afraid in a hospital, trying to find a lifeline in a whole Bible full of words that seemed suddenly empty. You didn't know that all those blessings you'd racked up in 10 years since choosing the Right would suddenly dry up and blow away like chaff in a puff of a hot wind of depression beyond any sorrow you'd known even in the darkest night of your sinning. You didn't know that the path out would once again be one simple choice, one little snippet of one little verse that you would anchor to and haul yourself out on, a bloody mess. 

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19)

When we name the heroes of the faith, we rattle off Amy Carmichael, Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, Billy Graham, Susanna Wesley, Helen Keller, Martin Luther, Elisabeth Elliot. Those who followed hard after Christ, sacrificing all for His glory, single-mindedly and whole-heartedly soldiering for the Gospel.

But I am not of their ilk. I am the sort who found one small Truth on which to cling in a stormy darkness full of questions...a C.S. Lewis, a Hudson Taylor, a Corrie ten Boom, an Augustine. I can only hope that in my remaining years, my questions will lead me to greater faith and actions that will bring God glory, that I might walk in the path of these great heroes of the faith, not just in their doubts, but in their belief as well.

When you were 20, you thought it was an either/or proposition, this living thing. Happy, or sad. Accepted, or rejected. Joyful, or living in darkness. Sinning, or following Jesus. Believing, or questioning.

It's not. It's a melting pot of all of this, a beautiful soup of all kinds of emotions, experiences, blessings and difficulties. Sometimes you are saved by just a glimpse of Truth that shines on the path and directs your steps. Sometimes you are defined by one little choice that cascades through your life like rain through a canopy of forest - first a drop or two, then a rushing waterfall, and finally the whole forest floor is watered and springing up with new life.

Thank you, Lord, for helping me make the Right decision when it counted. Thank you for this life. Thank you for these blessings. What a life it's been so far!

Celebrating my friend Bonnie's 1st FaithJam in 5 MONTHS!! Be sure to click the link & read some of the other letters.

To taste July

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim / objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death. ~Oscar Wilde

The cup overflows so fast and furious, my feet are sticky with the drips that cascade through my toes and over flip flops all the summer day long. Joy is everywhere we go, at gymnastics class where Rosy's soul expands until it fills the whole room with its radiance, and the little kids do headstands and tumble like weeds in the corner, copying the instructor's every move. In October, I caught fire from a little book and dreamed of a clutter free house, and now finally in the damp July air the seed of a dream flowers full, and our garbage can overflows with broken toys, unmatched socks, scratched cd's and chipped dishes. The wood floors gleam in expanses of emptiness we haven't seen in this house since cancer came to call in 2008. The kids and I stop by the local thrift store today with a truckload of donations, and we sit in the parking lot in fits of giggles over the antics of a blow-up balloon man they use to advertise sales, flipping over and punching himself in the face in the summer wind.

It's the time of year when the summer sun hangs forever in the evening sky, there's the constant sound of laughter on the breeze, the sprinkler sends glitter cascading through the air and the crickets sing a different, mid-summer song.

Love is all hot and sweaty and altogether real, like midnight cuddles with naked kids sticky under the thin sheets with the fan blowing full blast through air as thick as velvet.

We've long since learned to quit listening for the other shoe to drop, and to listen instead for the tinkling of laughter like a spoon clinking glass, the panting of the dog that comes with the smile on her face in the hot afternoon, the smack of a son's kiss through chocolate and vanilla ice cream after snacks on the porch.

The hay's been cut twice, and the corn is higher than any of the kids. The oats are burgeoning gold and the whole earth smells sweet. The cows' milk is like candy from summer grass, and the farmer calls us to tell us our beef will soon be at the butcher's. Summer is half gone before it's half started, but I've never been one to look back at the pages already torn from the calendar.

We are reveling in summer. Every t-ball trick taught. Every bug bite to scratch. Every lake swum. Every frog song and cricket call. Every late night sing-along and early morning walk through the dew-dripping lawn. Every bonfire and every charred hot-dog. Every firecracker, every sparkler. One marshmallow, burnt or brown, at a time.

Oh, how we give thanks, for small gifts and large ones.

Oh, if there’s only one song I can sing,

When in His beauty I see the great King,

This shall my song through eternity be,

“Oh, what a wonder that Jesus loves me!”

I am so glad that Jesus loves me,

Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me.

I am so glad that Jesus loves me,

Jesus loves even me.

In this assurance I find sweetest rest,

Trusting in Jesus, I know I am blessed;

Satan, dismayed, from my soul now doth flee,

When I just tell him that Jesus loves me.

~Jesus Loves Even Me, Philip Bliss, 1870~

Warrior children

You are my tumbleweed children, hurtling down the gravel of the country road in a fury of dust and dreams and flying off into the dandelion ditches when you hear the hum of car wheels approaching. It is that sweet mix of childhood, the daring-do of your young bodies coupled with the innate sense of vulnerability that scatters you far off the road if danger approaches. We've been vulnerable together, these past years, through the dissolving friendships following a church rift, through the darkness of depression when all your mama wanted to do was sleep, through the deep mid-winter of my cancer and your uncertainty whether I would live or die.

You know vulnerable as well as your own skin. I look at you, the fragile strong, and I wish I had been able to protect you from the knowledge that life is brief if beautiful, wish I had a shield that was impermeable to the dark darts of fear and trembling. We huddle like embattled Narnians on our homestead, lean hard into each other's warmth, and there is joy found in family although we are adrift from civilization. You gather "wish-lions", dandelions gone to silvery seed, and we blow a tornado of trouble off into the spring breeze with eyes squeezed close.

Perhaps it will be the family gift within the family curse, this early understanding of life's difficulties. When you are all grown through the stage of scrambling with fresh tears at night from your bed to ours...grown out of checking that Mama is still here when you wake alone in the dark...you'll be left with the fragile-strong, singing the Psalms as you face the brave new world of your own generation.

Let the weak say I am a warrior. The Lord roars from Zion, and the heavens and earth quake. But the Lord is a refuge to His people...(from Joel 3)

You are my hiding place,

You always fill my heart

with songs of deliverance.

Whenever I am afraid,

I will trust in You.

I will trust in You.

Let the weak say I am strong

with the strength of the Lord.

~Selah~

Linked with Emily for Imperfect Prose