The midnight oil

Mist swirls up off the hot earth into the cool night air, as if the hurry of the day scurries up off the planet into the peace of the sky in drifts like dross.

If you steady your eyes long enough on a single point of black on the horizon, you can watch the stars blur as they fall across the velvet like comets. Shooting stars to wish upon, makes no difference who you are, anything your heart desires will come to you...

And so stare, up at True north, breathe in the quiet, let go the noise of the day, shake loose the dust of too many commitments and close eyes to tasks undone at day's end. Breathe deep the rich misty moist, listen long the cricket song, hold close the early August last days of summer, dream babies sleeping in beds, try to find sleep that somewhere hides elusive in the shadows of the thick night.

Sins swept away with the morning coming soon, held up to heaven by the pine bows worshiping in the moon's happy glow, the clouds gathering close like a silver mirror in a bowl across the western sky. The kittens scramble across the porch boards, learning night vision hunting tricks from mother yowling, two little bodies scurrying with feet as loud as elephants in the stillness. The swing creaks in the humid air, and I sigh a little sigh of regret and longing, thoughts drifting to tasks of the dawn: no milk for breakfast and what-shall-we-eat-tomorrow? I turn toward the dark house and the chocolate sheets where my lover slumbers and have a waking dream of a night of no insomnia. But then who would see the beauty of a mist-laden night in the moonshine when August is just beginning?

I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you. (Isaiah 44:22)

________________________________________

Note: Caleb is doing well! Thanks for all the prayers! His puncture wound is healing beautifully, and the symptoms we thought might be a reaction to the shot he received turned out to be a simple cold virus, just as the doctor thought they might be. In the 24 hours following our last ER visit, Rosy and I both came down with the same cold symptoms, reassuring us that Caleb did, indeed, just have a head cold. God was just asking us, once again, to lean hard and trust Him. We did, and we are through the thick of it and out the other side, just living normal life again, normal busy life, trying to keep hard shoes and socks on a little boy who is used to running barefoot. Please keep the puncture wound in your prayers as it can get badly infected for up to 3 weeks following the injury. 

How I quit gasping for air

An image swirled up from memory, her third birthday. She wore a black coat with a hot pink hood, and her blond hair caught the warm October sun as we ran through a park frequented in my own girlhood. We stood over a Colfax creek, throwing sticks down one side, rushing to the other side of the bridge to watch them pass beneath us on top of the swiftly flowing water. There lay the last leaves of autumn, brilliant scarlet and yellow, plastered on the rocks and sand of the creek bottom, shining in the rays that glinted through the bare trees. I lifted my camera and slowed the shutter speed to blur the rushing water and focus on those little gems of leaves lying still below the deep clear water. I didn't know it was an image that would save my sanity in the weeks - and years - to come.

Several weeks later, she lay semi-comatose on a hospital bed, and I was curled around her in the fetal position, trying not to disturb the tubes and wires, wrapped in a yellow plastic hospital isolation gown to keep whatever germs were making her so sick off my clothes. I counted every breath as it dripped from her perfect, still lips as if it were a pearl of great price, stringing them on a necklace of mother's memories to be tucked away forever in my treasure box of hope. One day, 39 doctors came in and out of that room, with their gowns, masks, protective eye shields, booties, hats, gloves. Their stethoscopes waved over her chest, they pried her eyelids open and pointed flashlights into the perfect hazel of her staring eyes. They hooked up electrical devices to her arms and legs and measured the seconds until her little feet and hands twitched when they sent current through the pads. But I was like the leaves at the bottom of the creek bottom, in the silence there with her. We were on our backs, facing the sunshine. In some other realm. They were just water, rushing over the top of us, and I couldn't remember their names or faces after they left.

Last week, a barrage of doctors lined up again on Thursday's calendar square, and I tried to swim with the current on top of the water, arms pumping, legs kicking, muscles aching. Every now and then, body crying for oxygen, I rolled onto my back and looked up at the sky, breathing beauty, sucking in strength for the next long stretch of swim. I forgot how to not breathe. Forgot how to not fight the current. Forgot how to find the bottom and lie still there facing the sun. Sometimes it feels so, like you have to fight for life, like it's something to be earned, and you put every ounce of strength into the battle. At the end of the day, you are wasted and spent, but have you a string of pearls to add to your hope chest to show for it?

Sometimes words are too much for me. I turn on Debussy and even the notes are like chatter. I open the screen door with it's creak, and I am in the sun again, the slow buzz of mid-summer's flies, the wind soft through the long grass of the field, the heat shimmering off the freshly cut hay. I can almost hear the world turning on her axis as the long summer day grinds slowly on. Stillness comes slowly back to me, a practice I've forgotten for too long. Even in the long days I've spent pushing the world out to the perimeter, holed up in bed or cocooned with the kids here in the country, my mind hasn't been practicing stillness, my heart has been fluttering far too fast. My thoughts have been swimming, pumping, trying to keep up with the current.

How do you practice stillness among little ones, the antithesis of stillness? Their chatter, their busy little bodies, their minds that crave information and experience every day? There is a good chunk of it in the center of every day here in our home..."Quiet Hour", we call it - what used to be naptime (and still is, for the littlest two), an hour of silence, no reading, no singing, no art, nothing. Just lying in bed, thinking, staring, praying, or sleeping. Now to find more little bits of stillness in the rest of our day...havens from the busy that plagues modern family life, moments to lie at the bottom of the stream facing the sun, times to remember we don't have to breathe, we don't have to swim with the current, we don't have to work so hard to live life to the fullest. The King James Bible says, "Be still and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10a) In the NASB, it's translated, "Cease striving..."

Busy is what saves us from our own minds when we're trying to drown out pain. In the stillness, you have to sift through all the voices and wait for them to be quiet so you can lie there on the bottom in peace, just you and what is important, lying on your backs in the sunlight. My challenge for myself, today: no music, no movies, no crowding of thoughts. Just stillness, and some works for the hands. See what flows out of quietness and peace. What do I see and hear when I lay at the bottom and stare at the sun, without trying to work so hard to keep up, keep on, and keep breathing?


Because the key to not staying in the valley, where it is dark and dreary? It's that I am always looking up, and there, in the sky and on the mountain peaks high above, the sun is always shining. When I'm on my back at the bottom of the stream, no matter how dark it is there, I am looking at the sunshine, and picturing what it's going to be like when I get to soar again.

On tiptoes

Taking time to sniff the flowers and give thanks for the spring rains this frigid late April Saturday. How about you? What are doing in your neck of the woods?

That in the fullness of time He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth. (Eph. 1:10 exc.)

Links for this slow weekend:

• Memorize Scripture quickly and easily (perfect for both kids and adults) at Scripture Typer
• Check out the return-on-investment statistics of your college (or one for your child)
• Sign up for the upcoming American Cancer Society's Relay for Life
• Check out the heart-wrenching video on The Best Job in the World from P&G
• Listen to some slow soulful new music from Portland's Josh Garrels
• Read about a student expelled from BJU for demanding accountability for sex crimes
• Jamie, the Very Worst Missionary, writes here about short term missions strategy
• Watch the most beautiful baby bath ever

Small fruit

Slow progress. I feel like that's what I'm making, up out of the deep dark pit that swallowed me whole in April. I see others making slow progress, too, and it hits me kind of like the sun on a 70 degree day. Slowly, the warmth builds and spreads, and yes, you will sweat just as hard as a hot day if you stay long enough. 

We planted a few tomato plants in a long-abandoned deck garden at the beginning of summer. They've been blasted with sun, never have seen a watering can, and are at the whim of every passing downpour or hailstorm. Yet there is some fruit growing on these vines. While we might have hoped for a huge crop - 20 tomatoes or so - we have seven. And we are thrilled with the seven who have survived the craziness of a in and out again hospital summer.

I know believers like these. Lots of them. They never will give a 20 tomato crop, but they are slowly moving toward the seven. It takes a lifetime for the fruit to be revealed. I've heard many Christians dismiss these believers, saying fruit would be more visible in their lives if they were truly converted. And then they refuse to stay around for the lifetime to see the drunkard, the gambler, the smoker, the adulterer slowly bear small fruit.

I spoke to my uncle the other day, and he talked about supporting his sons as they start their careers. He laments being able to be a help to his mother, now gone. He talks about continuing to pay down his debt of child support even though his sons are long grown. He has made many bad choices, and is plagued by their consequences, but He vehemently professes Christ and quotes the Gospel to you if asked.

Can a Christian be alcoholic their whole life and still make it to heaven? I think of the thief on the cross, the one to whom Christ said, Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43) WHAT? Someone entering paradise with NO fruit? Then again I think of James 1:27, which says that religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. An alcoholic might never be unstained by the world, but he can watch out for widows and orphans. (or divorced wives and lost sons)

What do you think? Can you judge salvation based on works? How long would you wait before condemning the person who doesn't give up their bad habits or start going to church?

Flames in the city

The waning sun gets caught in the framework of skyscrapers

a sun dog shoots straight up from the basilica

buildings are lit aflame by the sunset

and we dress up and go out for dinner, just the two of us,

and love burns fresh and new with promise of even better years to come.

.........

Gratitude journal, numbers 116-187:

123. God's vigilant pursuit

127. Grace = "one-way love"

130. Driving with the window down

139. A break coming soon

144. Tapping trees

146. "if a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many." Ecclesiastes 11:8

148. Holding Uriah Fugate

150. Garden planning in a blizzard

157. Sweet southern drawl on the telephone

159. Best friends to whom distance matters not a whit

162. Laughing hysterically because Caleb doesn't understand sidewalks

169. Sunrise white light through the piney hill pendulous with new snow

174. Two whole days with my niece

178. Honesty with my Mama

180. WAKING UP from nightmares

185. God welcomes cripples to the table

187. He makes "all the stones of the altars like chalkstones crushed to pieces" Is. 27:9b

All I want for Christmas

I am a second-generation homeschooler. Meaning I was homeschooled myself - all the way through high school - and now I homeschool my own little brood. In this season of sickness in our home, it is hard to imagine how the kids are going to get enough book learnin' - yet harder still to imagine how I would get them on a bus every day!

Somehow, in the cracks of the day, the learning slips in. We bake pies for Thanksgiving, and Katrina learns fractions and volume. We put photos into a calendar, and Rosalie practices reading and learns the months and the seasons. Today is Hannukah, so we're watching a video and doing an art project to learn about it.

Christmas, likewise, is a season that begs me be more intentional. I read about it everywhere on mommy blogs - Jesse trees, Advent activities, such organization! I called my mother yesterday..."You know that felt tree we did every year as children? The one with the devotions? Could we do it with my kids now? I've been meaning to make this thing called a Jesse tree..." My voice trails off, the doom of another failure as mom and teacher and mentor choking the words out. I can hear Mama's smile in her words. That felt tree is a Jesse tree! And how perfect to celebrate Advent down the road at Grandma's, carving time out of each day for devotions, a song together, the ceremony of placing the next symbol on the tree branches.

I wonder if this is how it was, in olden days. You learned by accident, you soaked up tradition through daily work instead of planned activities, you learned at Grandma's knee, too, not just Mama's or teacher's. You read whatever literature lined your parent's bookshelves.

I do wish to be intentional, organized, a woman with a plan.

That's the woman I used to be.

But life has squeezed that desire into the margins. Cancer, a brain infection, therapy every day for my youngest daughter, daily chores that overwhelm me as my heart beats too fast even while I sleep. These things split my soul, letting the bottled up emotion spill out in rivers, cracking the crust of my perfectionism, the crumbles washed away in a river of tears - tears of joy, tears of pain, tears of anguish. I didn't used to be this way: quick to cancel any appointment that doesn't really matter, quick to see when my children need a day with me at home, quick to throw myself into something messy or time-consuming when logic tells me to clean my house instead. I didn't use to cry at the drop of a hat, the tears running silent down my cheeks for no reason I can explain. I didn't say no to my kids, and recant in the next 15 seconds because it really does matter to them and it really doesn't to me. (Tea last night, for instance. I just plain didn't want to make herbal tea at 8:30 p.m. with their bedtime snack. I wanted them to hurry up and go to bed. But was that 5 minutes of work worth breaking hearts over? Really? I said no, my voice harsh with frustration. And then turned soft and said yes. And made them their tea.)

This Christmas, these lessons are seeping over into the busy season. I'm not crafting this year. I spent money on pop-up tape dispensers and razor paper cutters and paper with lines on it. All so I could teach my kids to wrap gifts, instead of doing it in a hazy flurry on December 23rd myself. We wrap on the front room floor because my dining room table is still piled with the summer/winter clothing change-over (I lack the strength to carry the 8 tubs downstairs).

This Christmas is going to be slow. And I'm going to be loving every minute of it.

Linked up for Bonnie Gray's Faith Jam Thursday

Christmas Card Choices & a Give-Away!

I have had the pleasure of reviewing* two Christmas card options this holiday season...which means that, even though this year has been chaos beyond imagination, my Christmas cards are already done on December 1st! Miracle of miracles!

I chose to review Mistle Mail because I used it last year with great success and fell in love with the ease of this form of Christmas card delivery! Mistle Mail is offering all my readers a 25% discount on their service, which costs only $39.95 for unlimited delivery and online access. That's almost $10 in savings! Simply visit the site, design your card, and just before check-out, use the coupon code GATES2010. The discount will be reflected when you pay.

Mistle Mail is an online only service that allowed me to e-mail a beautiful Christmas greeting, photo and letter to everyone in my e-mail contact list. This service was easy, fast, fun, and affordable. I saved over $70 in postage alone! The only drawback to this service was that I didn't have a hard copy to mail out to older relatives who aren't online and the Grandmas, who like to put the Christmas photo up on display.

Here is a preview of the Mistle Mail card I sent this year. You can also access the entire card and the Christmas letter sent with it by clicking here to view the actual online version that is e-mailed out today.

This year, I decided to do a mix of print cards by snail mail and Mistle Mail for my large list of online-only contacts - Facebook friends, blog acquaintances, and the many friends and family from my own generation for whom I don't even have a physical address!

Studio Dayspring offers beautiful print cards, either flat or half-fold styles. I chose to review the flat card style because it allowed me to get all of my print cards for my budgeted price. The card prices start at $1.49 per flat card (25 cards or less) and $2.49 per folded card (25 cards or less). Dayspring Studio is currently offering free shipping on orders of 25 or more cards. One of the features I was most impressed by was the publishing tools, which are similar to those in Photoshop or Publisher, allowing you to send frames forward or backward and lending a lot of leeway in editing text on the card. The folded cards offer the additional feature allowing you to publish more photographs inside the card. Had budget not been a factor for me, I would have loved to use this feature to print individual photos of each child within the card!

Here is a preview of the cards I selected, two different photos and different verses. I liked the flexibility of ordering cards in 25 card bundles, which allowed me to select different designs. That makes the mailing more fun!

Finally, the give-away! Mistle Mail would like to give one dear reader 1 free Christmas mailing! To enter the drawing, please comment on this post below, telling me you would like to win. For one additional entry, mention http://mistlemail.com in a tweet, Facebook status, or blog post, and then comment here telling me you did so! Mistle Mail is a local family business that could use our support - let's stir up some online buzz to help them out. The drawing will end Friday, December 4th, giving you plenty of time to get your free card designed and sent!



*Disclaimer statement: Mistle Mail provided me a substantial discount on their product in exchange for this review and hosting their give-away. Dayspring Studio provided 50 cards for my review at no charge to me. However, I do not normally review products, and chose these two products because I have used them in the past and been pleased with them. My primary intent is to direct my readers to companies I would like to see receive additional business, and to pass on savings to my readers.

Weekends are for heritage

The ribbon lips drawn up in excitement, the little mini roller pin grasped and floured, the timbre of joy in the voice as she waits for her ball of dough to roll out...

The finesse of chubby little fingers and concentration in her eyes...

Finally, sneaking a nibble and getting caught.  The sweet grain of flour and butter and lard and salt and sugar all blended up according to Julia Child's French pastry recipe melting on the tongue.

She gives the pin to her big sister, and that sister hands it on to the biggest, and a very rustic pie crust is the result.  Fumbled edges and over-floured, it still crumbles like butter cookie dough as I teach the eldest how to shape it to the plate.

(I love how these hands are still dimpled 7 years later.  I dread the

day I look down, and the dimples are gone.)

(I look down at my own rough housewife hands, and wonder at past decades.

Who manicured these nails after the pie crust embedded there deep?)

We sprinkle the little bits with cinnamon and sugar and put them in with the first crust to bake.  The warm aroma of the baking butter and spice floats on the heavy, humid late summer afternoon air as I listen to the kids playing some hilarious game out on the porch, a mix of going-to-the-eye-doctor and Almanzo-courting-Laura Ingalls.  Only in a house of girls would you ever hear that mix!

The crusts come out all golden and flaky and I...as usual...bemoan the little errors and my own "rustic" edging style that never is as perfect as my mother's, or my aunts...

The girls' crust is ready to go in, weighted with parchment and beans and the crust rolled over in silly little girl fashion.  We mix blueberries and sugar and make a fruit pie while we wait for it to bake.  A storm rolls over the horizon, and Aaron takes the kids out on the porch in the monsoon rain and the yellow light and takes pictures.  He bends over me as I bake, and we look at photos.  There's flour on the camera.  Kids disobey, and there is a ruckus, and the headache pounds, and I bend exhausted over the last of the baking and the dinner preparation and wonder that this is what we are called to.  The constant bend and repeat, make, eat, repeat of womanhood.  That worship and sacrifice are bound up in the litany of everyday chores that are never completed by day's end and must be repeated tomorrow, anyway.

The kids watch me make the lattice for the top with mathematical precision, and I remember the words of my sister-in-law, that "this part is the hardest".  Her sentence sounds ironic, because it's the easiest for me, the precision part, the part I can control and plan out and do according to formula.  I am good at lattice tops.  I am not good at edging or rolling out...too many ways for things to go wrong.  No plan can possibly make that go right.

And so it is with life.  The precision parts - school, study, jobs, even routines and plans for the day - those I handle with aplomb.  But the messy bits of life, the pie edging parts, where the plan goes awry and things get askew, that's the difficult part.  I lose it when the kids are unkempt when it is time to leave for town, or I don't get the alloted amount of housework done in a day and I am faced with a mountain of laundry or three loads of dishes or stinky food remnants in the bottom of the sink at the very end of the day, when things should be winding down and sleep should be coming.

In my life at least, this is the saved by childbearing truth.  Because this life surrounded by kids, it is a noisy, flour on the countertop and berries smeared on the floor sort of life.  It isn't precise, mathematical, predictable, or controllable.  And so, in losing those parts of self that demand precision, predictability, controllability, there is a little less of me left to fight for the space in my soul.  And the part emptied out by the daily grind is the space left for Savior to fill.  As His half grows slowly bigger, I feel the shift there, deep inside.  I feel softened and quieted.

At the end of the day, as we eat the pie dripping with berry goodness and melting ice cream, the mussed up edge is so much less important than I thought.  Somehow we have a happy evening, with mountains of clothes...folded now...consuming the couch and dishes still crowding the sink.

As we slowly savor the pie in the last moments of the day before the kids are tucked into bed, my husband says it and I blink and think about all this in a few seconds time and wonder at the way life really is: "This crust is the best part."

A full weekend

Summer seems to be gathering speed as July waned quickly into August, and we were adrift in birthdays and barbecues and baseball games.  Aaron turned 36 on Saturday, in the midst of a weekend on call, full of procedures and disasters to tend to at work.  I love how the children look like sparks flying off his fire in this photo, as they bend like reeds in the glee of giving gifts.

Amy's weekend was full of partial seizures, and a few full-blown ones as well.  I have noticed they are clustering on the weekends, which is a call to slow down again as a family.  Just when things seem to be under control, and we start to pile on the fun as we dance in joy that sickness is abating, the seizures come thundering back to remind us that this is not a temporary change in our lives.  It is for good, at least for now, and our lifestyle must reflect the fact that we have different needs in our family than before.

I remember arranging respite care for families when I was a nurse.  I remember thinking it was long overdue and feeling some amount of confusion at the reaction we usually received from parents when we finally had all the ducks in a row so they could leave their kid for a few hours to go on a much-needed date.  They were usually guardedly thankful, with a pervading sense of trepidation.  I remember one mother crying at the door of the hospital room as her husband propelled her out - "is it really worth it?"  I didn't get it then, but I do now.  As much as we needed a date on Saturday, as much as our hearts longed to celebrate Aaron's birthday in some way, it was hard to leave a little one who would seize while we were gone, and harder still to know that we would probably pay the piper for the stress of yesterday with a crummy, seizure-filled Sunday.  Figure into the equation the fear on the part of our poor sitters (thank you, Auntie Shera, for a great date yesterday), and it is very difficult to make yourself go anywhere.

And so, after a weekend filled with work, fun, freedom, and adjustments, I look back and wonder how to cope better with this new life.  Amelia is definitely not the same.  Almost a year has gone by now, and we are still in the thick of it.  Today at church, surrounded by people with mental disabilities and physical handicaps in the foyer, my whole world felt like it was crashing down around my ears.  How do I accept the fact that my daughter sometimes fits in there, in the foyer when all the healthy people have filled the sanctuary for the message and the healthy children are happy in Sunday school, and only those who can't make themselves fit a mold for that one whole hour are out in the foyer where they can be themselves?  How do I help a little girl who is sometimes just fine...and other times not?  How do I comfort her, how do I teach her so she can function best, most often?  How do I grieve and adjust to what it means to parent a child with a handicap of sorts?

I tried retreating this evening to an epilepsy support group online.  That failed dismally.  The children in that group sometimes have a seizure once a semester in their classroom.  The big kind.  They don't have partials or absence seizures that go on for hours and confuse everyone around them.  The place I do find comfort...other than in the pages of my Bible...are the encephalitis support groups online.  Encephalitis is an awful disease, and it wreaks havoc in the lives of those who suffer it.  There I can fit in, Amy can fit in, our story fits in.  There I find a little slice of support that soothes the wounds of the day, and I can leave with a smaller lump in my throat.  So I will retreat now to my bed, where the thoughts can swirl and sort themselves into some sort of pattern to fall to rest for the night.



I was comforted today, reading Philippians 4 from the Amplified Version that is written on a piece of paper and taped to the windowframe above my kitchen sink:
Do not fret or have any anxiety about anything, but in every circumstance and in everything, by prayer and petition (definite requests), with thanksgiving, continue to make your wants known to God.  And God's peace shall be yours, that tranquil state of a soul assured of its salvation through Christ, and so fearing nothing from God and being content with its earthly lot of whatever sort that is, that peace which transcends all understanding shall garrison and mount guard over your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Up North

Some places just run through your blood - whether or not you've ever been there before, you get there and something in your soul screams recognition.  Lake Superior is our ocean, the closest expanse of water we can easily drive to, something of the rhythm and serenity and unchangeability of the waves beating against shore soothing the most tousled emotions.  We went, for a brief 24 hour visit, to see Grandma and visit the birthplace of me.  As much as the fields and rolling hills of Wisconsin are home, as much as I love my yellow farmhouse and the simple wildflowers that burst everywhere this time of year, the North Shore is a birthplace of a sort that cannot be replaced.  The Prairie is this way for Aaron...the Lake this way for me.  Our kids are bound to become the stalwart sort, whether they get the Prairie or the Lake genes.

As we returned to civilization, we noted how perfectly our little trip fit with our homeschool unit - navigation.  We sang a little song we wrote for our unit study, over and over as we made our way across the long miles home...

The sun rises in the east,

the sun sets in the west,

it's COLD when you go up north,

it's HOT when you go down south!

...a perfect reminder that, through all the fog and the storms and the wrong turns and the blind paths, the Maker who set the sun and planets in motion is ever attentive to our hearts and longs for a friendship that surpasses all others.  He set the sun to rise in the east and set in the west, a sign for all time that He is there, even when He seems far away. "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." (Genesis 8:22)

Rushing

It's echoed in everything from Alice in Wonderland to cancer blogs to mothering conferences and executive training seminars. All of America, it sometimes seems, is in a rush. We "suck the marrow out of life", "live like we are dying", we're "supermom", the dad that holds down a top level job and has time for t-ball practice. At each stage of life, we wonder what we are missing...and if perhaps we'll find true happiness in the stage yet to come.

One child won't put his feet on the pedals, and shuffles along on his too-big bike like a little old man. The other not only finds the pedals, but finds her balance and freedom all in one long Easter afternoon on the cul-de-sac at Grandma & Grandpa's house. It's so easy to push ourselves, to overfill calendars, and take on ministry after ministry. I find myself reaching for a camera - not only because I love the art of capturing images in still frame, but also because I live in fear of forgetting the scenes that go rushing past too quick to capture in the depths of my mind. Instead of enhancing joy, instead of growing relationships and building trust in God, I know there are times for me - for all of us - when service to others and the flurry of relationships burden instead of uplift, disappoint instead of fueling hope, scatter brains instead of gathering memories.

Cancer threatens to push many young survivors into fast forward. "Living life to the fullest" may not include the porch swing, the lazy Sunday afternoon. Or it may put too much emphasis on small joys, stealing from the larger joy of understanding our place on the continuum of mortality and eternity. To balance the bittersweet newness, fleetingness of all that is life post-cancer with the responsibilities, the ministries, the opportunities whose doors open in cancer's wake...not an easy task, made even more difficult by the age at which we young survivors embark.

I pray I find peace between the high gear life has been slammed into and the ability to truly savor. The French - savur or saveur - takes on so much richer meaning in Dutch (schmaak) and Italian (gusto). I want to schmaack life on my lips with gusto. Life is very, very good. Yet what follows will be so much sweeter.

For we know in part...but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (I Corinthians 13:10-11 exc.)