How to Write a Life Story

“Not much time left, really.”

My father’s voice on the other end of the line reminds me of my grandfather’s, determined, sure. It’s been nearly ten years since I heard that voice, but here it is again on a Sunday morning, me making beds before church, Dad making his customary Sunday morning call.

“At best, maybe fifteen years. I’m on my last chapter.” He pauses and I let the empty space beckon answers. Grandpa died at eighty. Dad will turn sixty this coming year.

“I need a plan. I don’t think I’ve had one.”

I pull the sheets up, smooth out the bed’s coverlet in coming light, then wait, listening to Dad think. I’m hesitant to say anything. Best he find the way. But I’m still, just standing here, knowing that we are moving out into hallowed ground. I wait. Then venture into the space with only a question.

“Well, how do you want that last chapter to read, Dad?”

“I want to end happy.”

I sit on the edge of the bed, sunlight warm on my back, and ask slowly, “And what do you think brings happiness?”

He’s probing in the silence, the back corners of being, looking for what lies in unexamined places, and I’m praying.

“More farming.”



“More farming?” I make an effort but I know the words still sound incredulous, disappointed.

“My father farmed his whole life and made nothing.... But he thought someday folks would pay farmers for their work. That might happen in my lifetime. Can’t quit now. And maybe someday the grandkids will talk about how I could grow a crop of corn.”

I can see Dad sitting at his kitchen table, looking out the bay window, watching rows of pride growing up into light.

“What about the people? The relationships?” I let the words sit. They do.

And he goes in another direction, approaches it all from the other side.

“Alan Strand called the other day. He was trying to figure out whether to spend the time he’s got left restoring another tractor, buying a new engine for it, or if he should try to track down his daughter. He hasn’t heard from her in ten years. Doesn’t even know where she is.”

“And he decided?” That decision seems obvious, blazing.

“The tractor.”

I grope for meaning and the words dribble out. “He intentionally considered the options, voiced them to you… and then decided the tractor?”

“Yep. He knew how to do that. Little risk. The daughter was all risk. And you know….”

I shake my head. None of this makes any sense. And yet it does.

“Do we give up what makes us really happy --- farming, restoring tractors, writing, study, whatever we are good at it--- a lifetime of happiness—for a few days of happiness at the end? Do we sacrifice what makes us really happy day in and day out, for a few days of happiness with the people at the end? And there’s no guarantees with the people.”

I’m stirred. Before I can think, I rush along, finding what I’m looking for, my rock. I say the words more to myself than to him, words leaving my mouth before I can think. “Jesus said, ‘He who loses his life will gain it.’”

The other end of the line is quiet. Tentatively, I step out a bit further. “Maybe making small sacrifices in personal pursuits – doing less of our own thing in our own spheres .... maybe taking the time to enter into the bubble of the other, in the end we will know a happiness we couldn’t have imagined.”

I circle back, wondering if he’s following. “Maybe this is one way we live out what Jesus us calls us to.” I say the words again, deliberately, for they seem new to me, richer in ways I hadn’t considered. “He who loses his life will find it.”

Dad lets his voice expose where he is. “Yeah. Maybe. But maybe none of us can change really. Great artists, great actors, great politicians, its all the same. They do what makes them happy and that means they don’t have much time for people. Balance is a hard thing. Nearly impossible if we are going to do something well. And we’re wired the way we are. Maybe those around us just come to accept it.”

I hurt inside and Dad says, “I am too old to change. I know farming.”

Then he’s talking about the price you can get for a bushel of corn, the weather forecast for the next few weeks, but I’m thinking about the times I’ve been in my own bubble with my own agendas of accomplishments, drifting away from people and true happiness disguised.

I’m remembering with a strange sadness a woman standing amidst the floral memorials of her mother’s funeral, reflecting on her mother’s far-and-wide reputation for the important stuff of bleach and immaculate housekeeping. And the times I’ve chosen to wash windows, tend a flowerbed, answer an email, instead of playing a game of bananagrams with a trio of loud boys, read an Eloise Wilken story to pleading eyes. My pride was tangled up in the tasks. Why didn’t it matter more to love well? Where did I think I really would find happiness?

And I wonder if it’s the fact that relationships don’t bring us paychecks, rarely accolades. Loving well, stepping over hurt, laying aside self and desires, draws on more of our interior resources than investing in a career, a skill, a personal pursuit. And yet, there are no promotions. No public status. No guarantees.

Relationships grow only in a hot house of of humility, selflessness, open-handedness. Hard things that are inherently risky: for all that, you can’t control the outcome.

Investing in relationships requires courage. It mandates daily fortitude and intentionality to make moment by moment decisions to prioritize relationships while balancing vocational demands.

Do my daily decisions support my belief that relationship is the essence of reality? Or do I merely pay lip service while the use of my hours clearly reveals true priorities?

Dad’s talking about what he’s got to get done this week and I am my Father’s daughter.

“Look at the time." I can see him turning there at the table, looking up at that clock ticking loudly over the kitchen sink. "What am I doing here?” He sounds disgusted. That rural work ethic. “I’ve got so much to do and here I am talking the day away with you.”

I have to smile. Dad’s customary call always ends with this customary adieu.

“Good talking with you, Dad.”

And then he’s gone. Off to write more farming, more of what he’s good at, into that last chapter. And I gather Bibles for church and more of hearing Jesus’ words to come crucify self, words I need to hear again and again.

Monday dawns a week of holidays, days of flag waving and patriotism.

Farmers don’t know holidays. Livestock needs feeding 365 days a year, crop rhythms keep time with the skies not the calendar. But we finish barn chores early, eat dinner, gather lawn chairs to head up to the lake and explosions of hues over water. Something we rarely did as kids, but trying to make memories for this generation of farm kids. Leaving the work and investing in people.

Sun’s sunk deep down into water, only a glow of embers burning along the horizon, when we find a place on shore’s edge. A place beside a man sitting in a lawn chair in the deepening dark. A man with a farmer’s cap silhouetted in night drifting in.

Shalom turns and the man sihouette turns and then she laughs, runs through the shadows. “Grandpa!”

And I smile for time made and the sacrifice written onto this day’s page.

My hand finds the shoulder of that flannel plaid jacket and he finds my hand, pulls me closer, brushes my cheek with that leathery skin.

“Ann…” He nods, his voice soft, full of things he can't say.

“Dad.” I squeeze his hand, a long, lingering pulse of all I feel.

And then fireworks bloom, mirror images rocking gently on water, two spaces merging and petals of color falling. The children pull up on Grandpa’s lap, lean in close, and I think how children will talk about this yield of time, and how in our dark places, we sacrifice and find faces and light and happiness unexpected.

The skies explode and light rains down and I think of who I am in this story with these people, and what the plan is for this flash of days, and how I am my Father’s daughter.

Tonight we are not too old to take courage, sacrifice the accolades of accomplishments, and linger long with souls on the rim of time, and somewhere in the dark we forget what was lost for the tender wonder of what has been found.

Lord, today how can I die to accomplishments, pride, tasks? To do the better work of Loving well.


Photos:
Two paths in our wheat field
Dad's work clothes flapping in the wind
Dad working on tractors in his shop
Fireworks, family, and small sacrifices

Living in His Heart

I have meandered through the city for nearly a week, but I haven’t figured out why I’ve come really, what I am doing here. This pervasive, quiet ache awakens me to what I hadn't fully known: I am lost.

True, I know the street I am staying on, the way down the cobblestone streets of the Left bank to the flat at 30 Rue Mazarine. And yes, a friend invited me, needing a friend, an ear, a heart. So I took wing, came.





Certainly, the history has stirred and the art’s deeply, profoundly, moved, but this farm girl’s walked tentatively, uncomfortably, through the haut couture of the Avenue des Champs Elysees, grown homesick for fields in the churning milieu of faces, voices, bodies of St. Michel square, kicked ball with laughing children in Jardin des Tuilleries and longed to hear the simple happiness of my own loved, far-away children.

Joining my friend on long walks along the Seine, down cobbled streets of cafes, delis, perfumers, of the Maurais, I can’t help but wonder: If I am called to go into all the world, why am I not rocking babies in an Ukrainian orphanage? Serving food in a Greek refugee camp? Building a school in Peru? What am I doing in Paris?

I’m a sparrow misplaced.

The week has nearly drawn to a close, less than 24 hours left in this city, when I see the plaque there high about the massive blue wooden doors leading into our courtyard. It’s commonplace, though passing by it is easy to miss. A plaque down the street, over the café Le Voltaire, notes the floor, the day, on which the philosopher died. The day before I had stood outside the house where Renoir had lived, now painted a shy shade of pink, in the steep, winding Montmartre neighborhood, overlooking the rooftops of the city.

But the name etched here in stone on the wall next to where I’ve slept these handful of nights makes me catch my breath. Not an artist, or a philosopher, but of a patient man who probed for meaning, wrestled a mystery, for nearly twenty years. One who fingered lines and pictures scratched in stone, the language of an empire, a civilization: the Egyptian hieroglyphics. And found the key, decoded the cipher. Understood.





My head laying in the dark loft, hand reaching up to finger centuries old beams, I pray. Can I too figure the riddle of being here, in a few short hours unravel the language of life that led me here?

My last day in Paris we do what we’ve done everyday: touch her past, taste her breads and cheeses, listen to her sounds on every street corner, violins, guitars, cellos, watch her international faces and vibrant colors.



I find an island of quiet in a monastic bookstore off Rue de Rivoli, a spray of blushing heritage roses creeping up sun-washed stone. A young nun in a long blue robe gracefully serves browsers in hushed, lilting French, her fawn eyes inviting, welcoming.



I too drift through stacks of Bibles, French titles, and back by old wooden stairs climbing up stone wall, standing in a pool of afternoon sun, I pick up a CD of hymns entitled “Eucharisteo.” I lay my hand over the word. I remember, this word to live and die by, this life key. Key.

I run a finger over “eucharisteo” like it's Braille, touching meaning. Isn’t this too a bit of deciphering why I am here, what every day means? God gives grace, we give gratitude, together we experience joy.

I take up the word, turning it over again and again in my mind, feeling its truth, as I walk across the cobble courtyard from bookstore to church. Inside, the vaulting space is still. The air feels old, the floor, holy. In the shadows of an arch’s lofty heights, I sit on a low stool and talk to God. I tell Him what little I do know. Tell Him I don’t know exactly what I am doing here in Paris, what my purpose is, what the meaning is for my time here. I tell Him that long waves across the ocean, home is loud, I am sinful, and there too I wrestle to figure what He’s writing on my days.

I tell Him I am a sparrow misplaced. Here, there. Everywhere?

A hand touches my shoulder and I look up. My friend’s found out which church we’ve wandered into, hands me St. Gervais’ welcome brochure. And the words that I happen to glance upon shimmer, flash:

“Since human beings are created as the most beautiful image and likeness of God, the monks and nuns want to pray and to meet God in the city, among its inhabitants…. In the heart of the city they are called to love, prayer, work, hospitality and silence, called to be chaste, poor, obedient, humble and joyful, all while living in the heart of the world.”

And the riddle cracks open. I walk out of the maze. The words, the world, falls open, understood. I understand.

Living eucharistically, gratefully receiving now, wherever, however, in the world that may be, one meets God. In the heart of teeming Paris. In the heart of my noisy home. In the heart of my own soul chaos.

I am here, wherever I am, because He is here.

I don’t have to get away from the people to find God; I don’t have to seek out a retreat to commune with Him. He is not confined to the prescribed, the predictable. He is everywhere. He is in the midst of the masses, the grime, the cacophony. Open-handedly receiving the gift of the present, we receive His presence, His work for us in the moment.

I read the hieroglyphics of here: While living in the heart of the world, I may live in His heart.

I turn to face my friend, look into her seeking eyes, warm face. I am here, available, present to His presence.

I’ve flown home to the heart of God.

Father, in the heart of today, let me live in Your heart. Wherever I am.

Scripture drink:
"Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it..." Gen.28:16

Photos: taken in the heart of Paris

Third Birthday

(Notes from this weekend...)

She slides close in the coming light and I bury my head in her tendrils, damp and tangled, this night halo she wears through dreamworlds. And then I remember. Today (I can hardly breathe) is the last day.

Tenderly sweeping back these gold strands from around her face, I watch her eyelashes flutter but a moment, her lips slightly open, breathdreams rising and falling softly. On this very pillow she lay the night she first breathed air of this earth, this sliver of heavenlight. That night I cupped her head in my hand, fragile moon, and slept the night us two nestled near, while lightning bugs blinked celebration at the edge of the woods. And in a blink I wake to this morning, to this, the last day of her being two.

Her and I, we’ve always only known two.

Two from the meeting, from the soundless, cosmic settling, the forever light unfurling, the knitting into me. Two from the watery womb swelling, her skin stretching mine, her heart staccatoing under mine, us two in time together.

Cutting the cord on the emerging day changed everything and nothing at all. Heads close on this pillow, we breathed into each other faces. My life flowed out, nourishing hers. Our skin now touched, melded, us two. Though two, we lived entwined, mingled, one.

But today two slips away and she, this gift child, blooms three.

The intake of breath, the realization, pierces sharp.

But He comes quick, soothes with Truth, " But hasn't Two always been Three?"

And I close eyes, nod a half smile, caress her soft cheek, and slip out of bed to bake a cake for tomorrow in the peace of always Three.

"A cord of three strands is not quickly broken" ~Ecc. 4:12

Lord, braid us, these ones near to us, our lives around You, a strong strand for these days...

(To those who sent Shalom birthday wishes, you make us smile, together we delight, and we thank you for sharing this journey with us... We'll write soon...)

Common Stones

Our shadows stretch us long across this field, us bent low, rock pickers combing earth. This is spring's song. Always has been, as long as I can remember. It’s what I know and what those before knew, what those now coming are coming to know.




The ground moans after winter’s weight, working stones to the surface, and we, all of us, young or worn, come again with spring, pluck this sod, play this song. Fingers pry around hard edges, dislodge rock from soil beds, then haul limestone and granite to trailer. I watch us, silhouettes on dirt, scan, swoop, carry. We are outlined clay.


Here, it is clear. This is what we are, all of us without exception. Peel off the degrees, strip the careers, tear back the status symbols, this is who we are. We are dirt.

And in a moment I am twelve again, heavy with rocks, racing my brother in this same field, arms cradling rocks bigger I hope than his, to trailer heaped. Grandpa, near deaf, slows tractor, clutches, waits, but doesn’t idle back the throttle. Tractor engine screams for us to hurry, press harder.

We did. We do.

And now time’s raced on, returning Grandpa, returning him to the dirt whence we’ve all come, never to know these kids who walk this same soil, this same field, leaving footprints here too. But here in twilight, we somehow meet, dust bending down to touch dust.

“The earth is what we all have in common,” writes Wendell Berry.

In common with those in the past. In common with those in the future. In common with those now, all of us walking and living off this dirt beneath our feet. This earth, loamy and rocky, sandy and gritty, it’s where we live these now days, that from which we came, that to which we all return. We all return to our fathers, to what we all are.

“You picked this field, Mom?” Our 13 year-old future man pants the words, his arms too full, his face red with work.





“Every year. This ground’s been picked and picked and picked.” I toss two more rocks onto the trailer’s rising mount and think of the years of gilded harvests before the late autumn rains, the shift of clouds and winds, and white flakes falling, years of warmth returning, and us with it, to work up soil and pick these rocks, rocks, rocks.

“Is there a volcano or something underneath this field, just bubbling them up? Where do all these stones keep coming from?” His brother, sweaty, grimy, weary, hollers from the other side of the trailer. He’s kneeling down, both hands gripped to a stubborn one, thin muscles quaking it back and forth.

I laugh, motion him out of the way, kick at the embedded granite. “When I was your age, my brother, sister and I, we used to fill trailer load after trailer load with rocks and these crazy dreams of some spray we’d invent to disintegrate stones.”

Farmer Husband, wearing this mask of dirt, teeth smiling white, heaves a big one up to the trailer’s edge, rolls it in.

“You too? I thought only my brothers and I had those kind of wild ideas.” I look into those eyes ringed in dirt, and he into mine, and I remember him young, us farm kids, like these kids, us dreaming the same dreams.

Our oldest reaches up behind the tractor seat for the thermos and some cold wet for us all standing here for a moment. “Guess nobody can figure out a spray or anything better than just this, eh?” He grins, a raccoon of grime, then glugs that water down.

“Nope. This is really the only way. Bend down, pick it up, carry it off.” Farmer Husband takes his turn at thermos spout. He swipes away water dripping from chin with dusty, untiring arm.







“Just one rock at a time.”

I smile at the patch of skin he’s washed clean.

Just one rock at a time. Generations of us dirt-ones, bending low, picking up sin-boulders, asking Jesus to carry them off. Each growing season turning up more stony edges, more that needs prying, kicking out. So it goes for us who are dust.

It’s what we all, every one of us everywhere, have in common: this earth. These bodies of dust. This rocky soul soil.


We all must wrestle, wrench out, pray for Him to come do what we can’t do with these sin boulders so we can harvest a crop. Season after season, generation after generation, dirt dealing with dirt and all its stones.

All of us, we’re the same, working with Jesus on our soul fields.

We’re all just picking rocks.

Picking rocks with Him who does what we all only wildly dream of.

Working with Him who rolls the stones away.

Lord, I am just simple dust, dealing with a lot of rocks. Help me. Roll away my stones. And help me see what I have in common with all of us living after the Fall: that we are all just picking rocks, asking for Your hand.

Part two of Common to follow
Photos: us, dealing with stones

Support System

Turbulence shakes his balance, and his hand flashes for steadying,
something sure, like a seatback,
but my shoulder, curved and strong too, will do.

Never turning or noticing the feel of bone, he presses hard, and I know purpose,

a body made like a staff.

Lord, who today would You have me undergird, uphold?

(Photo: collecting luggage, cluster of thoughts, in Detroit airport)

I left on a jet plane... and am back again, the bags unpacked, mind settling. Now to collect thoughts, offer thanks for the grace ... grow. Thoughts from the journey....

Seed Bed

She’s laid bare, exposed and waiting. We, all of us, watch as he stands on her tilled edge, opening bags, preparing to fill soil’s barrenness. Something about the sound of ripping out stitched string, hope and promised unsealed.

The open seed bags line the tailgate, ready. The truck bed sags under the heaviness of seeds, millions of diminutive, near-weightless-in-my-hand seeds. Across the field, edging toward us, the tractor with planter behind, seems to enlarge, grow up out of the dirt. Engine drones louder, closer. That horsepower’s filling earth’s emptiness with seeds, 16 rows drilling 29,500 embryos of life into every acre of naked ground.

Farmer Husband kneels down into land already planted. Like a prayer, he scrapes back the surface, searches.



“Found one.” The wind carries his voice to us sitting in the ditch’s grass. “We’ve got the depth, the spacing. Looks good!” His grease-creased hands move slowly, carefully, folding the seed back into its dark earth slumber.

Granules, sediment, is all she looks like. Dirt. Kick a foot at her, and she flies away, a cloud of dust. But beneath her, still and hidden, lies millions of seeds about to awaken, stir, burgeon, swell with life.

Farmer Husband’s brother backs up tractor and this planter empty of seed. Time to refill. These brothers, whose blood comes from a land far across the Atlantic Ocean, heft seed bags and pour into planter hoppers.

Little Girl stands beside me watching her daddy work, her cheeks full of apple, her hair riding wind. She’s standing on dirt I stood on as a little girl, watching my own Daddy pour seed to fill this farm with.

Seeds and dirt. Isn’t that what we are, really? Seeds planted deep into loam, growing, living, dying, dust returning to dust, new seeds planted. Seeds as many as the stars in the sky.

I reach down and touch her silken hair, touch all the children within her to come, and think of Abraham and Levi before Levi even yet was… and yet he was:

“Because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor,” reads Hebrews 7:10. The New Living Translation offers,“For although Levi wasn’t born yet, the seed from which he came was in Abraham’s body...”

Inside the frames, the bodies, the souls of our children, reside the children still to come. And the children then still to come. Like nestled dolls, future generations dwell within the child whose eyes I now look into, whose hands I now touch.

Stars in the sky, seeds in the earth.

We parent not one child, or even a few children, but every day, we parent innumerable, countless children. When I raise my voice, frustrated with a child, I speak to generations of children. When I wipe away a tear, comfort, listen, I honor centuries of children.

When we meet our children, children we will not live to meet on this earth, are, in very real ways, met, shaped, formed. Parented.

She bites again into white apple flesh, looks up with smiling eyes.

Face of clay, she is. Made of the dust of the ground. But, oh, the seeds within.

The planter drops back down into seedbed, heads across earth, and I take her hand and whisper a prayer.

God, give grace to tend her well.

Honor

She calls me the other day, wondering if there is anything I need at the grocery store and I ask for 4 cans of blueberry pie filling, dishwasher detergent, (the gel kind not the powder), and hair conditioner for dry hair and... I stop mid-list. How audacious this is, a grown daughter asking all this of her mother. I might as well just ask her to give me the world while she is at it.

And then with startling clarity I realize that as a mother, she already has.

"Honor your father and your mother,
as the LORD your God has commanded you,
so that you may live long and that it may go well with you
in the land the LORD your God is giving you."

~Deu. 5:16

Lord, today how might I honor the woman who brought me into this world?

Related:
We's all jes Walkin'
Feathers for a Nest

Photo: My Mama with her Mama

Interested in Easing Parental Stress?

A university student (and mother) who reads here contacted me, inquiring if any parent who passes through this out of the way place might be interested in participating in a research study to reduce parental stress--- through practising gratitude... Yes! Care to join me?


She writes:

WANTED: Parents who desire to reduce child-related stress.

COST: A little bit of your time.

PERKS: Improved outlook and better parenting relationships! HOW? Introducing an exciting study in the works with an outcome that will benefit you! We are happy to present you with the chance to participate and hope that you will find this helpful to your daily life. Read on for more information ~

The Purpose of the Study:

- To consider gratitude as a method for reducing stress in parenting
- To measure instances of parenting stress using the method below
- To measure the potential benefits (and maintenance) of gratitude as a means of stress reduction in parenting

The Method of the Study:

The 2 Simple Steps:

[Prior to beginning, compile a list of 10 specifics for which you are grateful. This should make the required expressions of gratitude easier.]

#1: When you experience a moment of stress related to one or more of your children, “reset” your thinking by verbally expressing gratitude, either in reaction to the current stressor, or by reading/saying something from your list.

#2: Add a mark to your daily tally (so that we have a record of how many times this happens each day).

That’s it.

This exercise will be carried out for seven days, beginning on Tuesday, April 1st, followed by a seven day break, and then repeated for a second seven day period.

If you want to participate, please e-mail gratitude.study@gmail.com by Tuesday so we can have an idea of the size of the study. Give your name, age, and gender—although you are welcome to participate anonymously, if you like. Feel free to spread the word to as many adults that you know that wish to participate. (This would make a fun project to do with friends and/or a spouse—men being specifically encouraged to participate as most studies tend to neglect the impact of gratitude from a male perspective.)


What’s in this for you?

Multiple studies have shown that people who feel more gratitude are much more likely to have higher levels of happiness, lower levels of depression and stress. They are seen as more empathetic, agreeable, and extraverted. Grateful people should be more likely to notice they have been helped, to respond appropriately, and to return the help at some future point.

You mean, you’ll get all that, just by adding some gratitude to your life? YES!


Definitions, for the purpose of this study:

Gratitude: Being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen; taking time to express thanks.

Parenting Stress is defined as those moments when life as a parent seems overwhelmingly unpredictable and uncontrollable (based on the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale). Within the context of parenting,

- you become upset because of something that happens unexpectedly.
- you feel you are unable to control the important things in your life.
- you feel nervous and “stressed.”
- you feel you cannot cope with all the things you have to do.
- you become angry because things are outside of your control.
- you feel difficulties are piling up so high that you cannot overcome them.

Obviously, this will be a largely subjective assessment—that is the difficulty in measuring an emotional state. Just try to be as aware as possible.

Thank you! We look forward to sharing the results of the study.

Join us at gratitude.study@gmail.com by Tuesday.
(Feel free to repost this post in its entirety. Let's give thanks in all things!)

The Parenting Pursuit

We reject Him, sin against Him, betray Him. But He pursues relentlessly. In the face of heartache.

Our behavior drives Him deeper into relationship. He knows full well that the relationship problem is not a result of His failure to love, but the stoniness of His children’s hearts. It is not an issue of how much Father loves His children, but how much, if at all, His children love their Father. Undaunted, He gives His immediate love attention to the rash of our sin.

In hopes that His love will stir our hearts.

Read more... at this month's CWO column

The Importance of Touch

I don’t remember when I stopped touching him.

Lanky legs, stretching back were signs for me…signs to distance and retreat. Signs of Caleb emerging as a man. And, who was I to touch the skin that clothes a future man?

Perhaps it was mere self-protection, withdrawing before he, inevitably, rejected his coddling mother? Or maybe it was where I came from: cuddling babies was appropriate; embracing boys was not.

Yet on some other level, a deeper one never visited, I must have felt the absence of 12-year-old Caleb’s heart pushed up against mine, this son’s arms wrapped tightly around my neck. For I purposefully filled the emptiness with pink newborns held close, with the cheeky jowls of the irresistible toddler, with tickling and bear hugs and snuggles with preschoolers. But my stretching son? True, he and I rarely longer touched, and that whatever he grew in height, he, tragically, lost in touch. But wasn’t this the normal passage of mothering? Birthing, holding, stroking, touching, nursing…and beginning the long goodbye…letting boys become men. Little did I know that the retreat of my touch left our growing boy adrift, alone in his own skin. That the more he became a man, the more he needed my affirming touch.

Touching the skin of these who live and learn beside us has far-reaching, profound ramifications. Mothers and science know that massaging babe for 15 minutes reduces babe’s irritability, improves her learning and accelerates her development.

The significance of touch continues as babe grows into preschooler: massaged preschoolers showed better performance on tests for design, animal pegs and mazes compared with non-massaged peers. And touch into the upper schooling years? Studies have clearly indicated that massage and deep pressure touch aids children with attention difficulties to not only increase on-task behavior, but also results in greater relaxation, and less acting out. For after touching time, such as a massage, the hypothalamic area of the brain experiences a reduction of action, decreasing the body’s level of stress hormones, and increasing the level of endorphins, which leaves our child with a greater sense of well-being.

Dr. Virginia Satir of Wisconsin goes as far to suggest that human beings need four hugs a day to survive, eight hugs for maintenance and twelve hugs for growth.

Modern science can only concur with Biblical truth and Daniel’s experience with a touch from God: “Then the one who looked like a man touched me again, and I felt my strength returning” (Dan 10:18 NLT).

A simple touch on Joshua’s shoulder while reciting Latin paradigms, an arm pressed close around Hope during read alouds, a massage on Cale’s tense shoulder while bent over math questions, these were simple things. But a simple touch that could revive, like strength returning.

Tucking tired ones into bed after the Homeschooling Achievement Program, I stepped into Caleb’s dim room to say goodnight and again offer my congratulations on a fine recitation of Casey at the Bat.

He propped himself up on the pillow.

“You know how Kevin Smith played that piece on the guitar? And then how, afterwards, Kevin sat with his Mom and she just held him for a bit?”

I recalled the moment, and how awkward I felt. “Yeah…”

After a long, expectant moment, Caleb spoke his heart into the dark. “I wish you had held me like that.”

What was knowledge and learning and classics and Latin without love…without the unique, direct expression of love that only touch can articulate? Unintentionally, I was living Leviticus with it’s “do not touch” laws, and not embracing the vibrancy of Christ’s life-giving, healing, resurrecting touch --- a touch to bridge across the gaping chasm of being alone inside one’s skin.

I reached out and pulled Caleb close. It had been too long since I had felt the skin close of my once-baby, future-man. His warmth against mine, Caleb wasn’t alone anymore. And neither was I.

~~

A related post on touch :

Also, I would like to spend 15 minutes per day with everyone nurturing someone else. Make a row of children and Mommy, rubbing the back of the sister or brother in front. The 10-year-old rubs the 6-year-old who rubs the baby. Mommy rubs the 8-year-old who rubs the 3-year-old. My theory is that the time spent loving will reduce the time spent fighting, because you don’t want to hurt someone who is meeting your affection needs.

She quotes another study:

... research at the University of North Carolina showing that a simple hug can lower blood pressure and reduce stress. The research team is touting it as yet another health benefit of marriage.There is not only reassurance in such moments of touch, but the release of oxytocin, a human hormone associated with maternal love. This is why a simple hug can bring comfort, calm, and for a brief moment, be a shield against the world.

Lord, give me courage today to touch. Who? And remind me: often.

Photo: Shalom touching Kai
A repost from the archives

The Order of Love

Love is patient...

Yet love can only be patient when it is first grateful...

And it can only be grateful when it remembers:

• There are no emergencies
• There are all, only, gifts
• There are never fears...

That is what I am thinking as we pour pancake batter into the griddle on a Saturday morning.

Milky, buttery circles loop about the pan in interconnected rings, misshapen hearts that sizzle and pop. A toddler looms dangerously close to heat. A preschooler anxiously slops more. A lanky one flips prematurely, batter oozing, dripping. Sensitive child bursts into tears that the hearts are all smeared, the rings mashed. Oldest, with egg poised to crack, asks if I want more? More? More of this careening ride? I sense a loudness, akin to a pleading howl, surging close to my lips.

The Spirit soothes, strokes the frayed edges: “Love is patient.”

Love is patient.
How can I be patient in the tipsiness of this domestic chaos? How can I be patient in the pain of now?Click to read the rest of this post over at February's Christian Women Online

Everyday Liturgy: Holy Habits

They say a mother wears an apron and a myriad of hats. I say she wears a collar too. A collar which can never be removed. A collar which cannot be observed by the material world: a clerical collar. For she is a priest in her home, before a congregation of children.

True, she snaps wet sheets onto the line, mashes heaping bowls of steaming potatoes, kneels to scrub the grime that rings the toilet; she cares for a home. And yes, little bodies wiggle up in her lap for tales of Peter Rabbit, press close to study the topography of Israel, follow her lead through the wildflowers to the woods; she cares for minds.

But she never fails to know the essence of who she is: “But you are… a royal priesthood…that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of the darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9-10). While a mother continually changes her hats throughout the hours of the day, her collar remains: she is a priest proclaiming Christ’s glories. She cares for souls.

The Cross rent the veil; the priest now lives openly in the Presence of the Holies of Holies, leading little ones to the altar to worship too. The banqueting table is spread; the priest invites these young persons to come and feast on Him Who is sustenance. There is no intermediary, there is no spoon feeding. She is a priest, serving not only God in this domestic, hallowed place but inviting her children to come and do likewise. As Martin Luther wrote, “all we Christians are priests… as priests we are worthy to appear before God to pray for others and to teach one another divine things.”

Holy Habits

So a mother consciously chooses to live out her priesthood as a believer, so that her children might be taught ‘divine things.’ As the Old Testament priest’s days carefully stepped to the beat of His expressed laws, so the New Testament everyday priest thoughtfully orders her days to the divine rhythms of Father’s heart. While the Old Testament High Priest wore the apron-like ephod, the New Testament ministering mother wears apron and holy habits. Holy habits of communing with God, reading and memorizing His Word, prayer, fasting, service, worship. Holy habits of putting on the garment of Christ (Gal 3:27 NEB).

The domestic priest cannot forcibly dress her children in holy habits, for these are not outward mantles of routines and checklists, but the interior attire of the heart. One can only clothe one’s own soul. What is a mother to do? She can faithfully adorn herself with her own ardor for Christ, her own daily, holy habits stirring the desires of her children, all the while thoughtfully laying out threads for young souls to take up in their own life’s tapestry. She prays and fasts and sings hymns and serves and loves and meditates on Scripture before her children. Then she creates space, stillness and opportunity for her children to also enter in. She lives so that each child feeds not on her devotionals, prayers or worship, but from his or her own. She kneels beside her child and helps him gather his own spiritual food with his own hands, rather than simply eating from hers.

“Lazy people take food in their hand but don’t even lift it to their mouth” (Proverbs 26:15). I wonder: do (my) children sit in Christian homes (like ours) with cupped hands, waiting for someone to take food to their mouths, for a priest to spiritually spoon-feed them? (Do Christian parents attend Sunday morning services, then meander home with hands full of food…but spend the next seven days not even lifting food to their mouth?) Bibles on shelves, hymnals on table, prayer journals in baskets. Food is plentiful. Yet there must be purposeful effort to take it up in hand. The familial priest’s holy habits show how one daily lift’s food to mouth.

Relationship

Yet it is not solely a mother’s life or holy habits that will make her a model for her children. For children to model a believing priest taking up food rather than emulating bewildered, malnourished peers, they need to be close----spiritually, emotionally, and physically close. A mothering priest’s words and routines are critical but insufficient. Unconditional love, support, connection are the necessary, compelling magnets that draw a child close. Close attachment stokes a desire within a young person to be like mama, to take up holy habits too. Modeling, in short, is a function of relationship and heart strings. The mothering priest focuses, above all, not on parenting skills or behaviors, but on relationship—first with God and then with her children. Without an intimate, emotionally-supportive relationship with mother, young people are less likely to take up the holy habits modeled in a home. Why purpose to be like someone from whom he or she is emotionally distant? Thus, in a mother’s daily service before God, relationships—horizontally and vertically—are the paramount priority. “Have time for a walk down through the woods this evening?” “ Can I give you a back rub while you tell me about your day?” “Let’s make popcorn and play a board game together tonight."

Relationship is the essence of our daily reality. Our relationship with God, nourished by holy habits, is the essence of our spiritual (and eternal) reality. Our relationship and connection with our children, nourished by attachment and time invested, is the essence of our mothering reality…and our modeling. Priesthood, mothering, holy habits: they orbit around relationship, the essence of all reality in the universe.

Feast

So a mother adorns herself with apron, priestly collar, and holy habits. And there, daily handing out bowls for the Feast, her apron strings ties love knots to young ones gathered around. (Bowls and feasts are nothing without love.) “So, daughter, let’s lay out on the hammock tonight and talk to God under all the stars He knows by name.” “Son, would you like to lead our worship tonight?" "Might you pray for us tonight, dear?” “Anyone have any ideas of what might we do to serve that family at the corner?”

Care to have the next generation of kingdom priests know how to feast themselves with both hands, from their own bowl, wearing their own holy habits? Put on your own collar, take up your own habits, eat from your own bowl.

And love them to His Love Feast.

From the archives...

Our Home is Timelessness

from e.e. cummings:

--how fortunate are you and i,
whose home is timelessness: we who have wandered down
from fragrant mountains of eternal now
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day (or maybe even less).

Lord, we live in You... who lives outside of time. Thank You for this dip into these mysteries...and then forever.

HT: Mama Monk

For Things such as These: Free

The catalogues are tucked away, their glossy lures apprehended. What was once wondered is now known, felt.

The real gifts, the good ones, cannot be manufactured with their own USP bar codes. Real gifts aren't shipped, but fall down from heaven, His fingerprints still fresh.

In the quiet, after the wrapping paper is tossed in the trash, I open His Catalogue.

Gift: Light and space and children....

little dreams, long talks, whispers at twilight.

Cost: Free gift from God -- $0

Gift: Hands, a brother and sister, holding.... like ours, their parents, once began.
Love in the flesh.

Cost: Free gift from God -- $0

Gift: A girl to live here, with eyes thoughtful and deep, full of Hope....
a Hope girl

Cost: Free gift from God -- $0

Gift: Bare toes, old hands, young minds open to Grandma stories...
stories she once read to me

Cost: Free Gift from God -- $0

Gift: A funny boy, a laughing boy, a wildly delightful boy... with grinning eyes and tugging smile and arms that encircle and squeeze just right

Cost: Free gift from God -- $0

Gift: Simple, oozing creativity...
time and courage to express, make, dream, without fear,
for we are children made in the image of Creator Father

Cost:Free gift from God --$0

Gift: A path to walk, a soul to hold,

a place, just around the next corner, to call Home ...

His daily graces

Cost: Free Gifts from Father --$0

What catalogue can compare?

But I come a beggar, with no possible way to pay, certainly not for things such as these.

And yet I hear rumors, whispers, the wind of the Spirit: "and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift..."

I wish. And --can it be true?---I take. Free! Gift! Such Benevolent God!

Father? Your gifts are free. Your gifts are good. Your gifts are glimpses of You... if I will but open my eyes to see...and my heart to receive. Today, You offer freely. Today, I take... with grateful awe.

Make your own "Free, Good, and of God" Catalogue

Grateful Children: Thanksgiving Tree

Part Two:



Father, we purpose to bend the knee each day and offer up hands of Thanksgiving. We count our blessings in our Thankful Journals; we nudge our souls: Forget not all His benefits. We do--forget, that is. And then You, (such grace), remind us (again).

Before we think of putting up the tree, Father, perhaps we should put up this tree, a Thanksgiving Tree?

For really, when we think of a Tree, we think of You dying on one.

And we have only one staggering, stumbling response.

Thanksgiving.

Part One
Part Three to follow...

Of Angels and Miracle Allowances

notes from my journal on a day last week...




Outside this house of windows, flakes fly. The first snow of this year whirls through the air. I can see the children now leaping with open hands, capturing frigid white lace, wildly celebrating as they head in from the barn. They twirl about, waving their arms, their hands, making invisible snow angels in the air as they run down the lane.

Shalom presses her nose against the cool windowpane, watching too. Her blueberry eyes turn, reflecting light and life. “Snow, Mama? Snow?”

Yes, Shalom. You are two and this is your first snow to talk about, to ask for mittens and hat and scarf. Your first snow to really know.

And I feel cold. Deep down. Chilled. A few hours from this farm near Lake Huron, down by Lake Ontario, a Mama too watches the snow, thinking of her children, of these days, and what comes down from heaven. She does not want this winter to be her last snow.

She is young, vibrant, with a riant smile, radiant eyes, and an irresistible, unpredictable sense of humor. I have never met her, we have never corresponded. I only know her from words on a screen, from pixels of color, memories downloaded and posted. Each night, as the lights go off, I check in on her too, prayers in lantern light.

Eleven months ago, December 20th, 2007, she tucks in her three blonde headed little ones, with ocean blue eyes like her husband and her endearing smile, then she squares off, digs deep, and hunkers down. She will out gun, outwit, outrun this thing called breast cancer. She has too much living to do, too many years ahead with these just sprouted kids, with this man who calls her “hero.”

Her husband prints up and wears a T-shirt that reads, “If you’ve got Cancer, I’ve got Cancer. ~Jesus” Jesus tenaciously holds the line with Marisa. Time and again this beast stalks close in the night, and lunges, tearing up their world. Marisa calls it “another punch to the face.” She takes it again and again over the course of this year. Hanging on the edge of a chair in some colorless doctor’s office, the beast rips into their dreams: chemo fails, cancers spread. Tumors found on her liver. Spots materializing on her lungs. No traditional treatments or options left. Incurable metasticized cancer.

Hollowed out and bruised, she whispers to her husband after another negative test result, after the shards of shattered hopes scatter across their future, “I know God is here. I just can’t find Him.” This man looks her in the eye. “People are saying they see God in this. In you.”

Last Thursday, Marisa celebrated her 33rd birthday. Jacoba Ann, Zion and baby Zekijah, Marisa's children, circled the birthday cake and sing loudly too. I think I know what wish swelled in Marisa’s heart before she blew those candles out.

Snow flies. I stand at the window, watching too. There will not be enough for snowmen today. Can we hope for enough for snow angels?

On this snowglobe morning, I think of Marisa, her downy soft hair growing in, sitting in the Juravinski Cancer Centre. She looked into the eyes of Doctor Tozer, nodded towards her husband and said clearly, “Yes. We are still holding out hope for a miracle.”

I read her words, her plea, on the screen and something catches, hurts. I howl, pounding on that door. “Father! Do you not hear your children? We are crying out for a miracle. Have you not heard us praying early, during, and late? Where are You? Wake up! We’ve crawled out of bed in the lightless pre-dawn, and cried out to you for the healing of this mother. Hear us!”

And He catches me up, me all in whirl of flailing and scratching and beating this air, this time, this world. He catches me up to Himself. I am surprised at how quickly He comes, soothing, assuring with unexpected words, words of a poet. He hushes this aching angst with this:

“Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world around me;
And with tomorrow begins another.

Why am I allowed two?”

~G.K. Chesterton

Does the God of the Psalms speak still now in poetry? He did this morning, wrapping me up and swaddling me close with these words, this truth. I have been blind. I have howled and begged, prayed and twisted at His hem. A very small part of me, a part I don't really even want to acknowledge, think about, has thought Him deaf, dumb, locked away in the deepest of sleep. I was wrong. Dead wrong. He has been here answering all along. Again and again. Without fail.

We miracle beggars have wept, and so He has heard, bestowed. Has He not given another day? And yet another. Why, indeed, are we graced with one, allowed even two? Why lavished with three? A whole string of days? Is each one not miracle enough?

I want to yell, “NO!” No. No, it is not. I want to take both fists and splinter that door with a demanding for more, for a necklace of days with no end. No end at all. Why can’t we be allowed days indefinitely? How can He ever expect us to say good-bye to this great and glorious world around us? To the eyes, ears, hands of those we cherish more than our own?

Because His eyes, ears, hands, heart await us at Home. Open, ready, longing.

Because if we don’t say good-bye here when will we say hello there? Because it is true: Precious in His eyes is the homecoming of the saints.

In a fractured, diseased world of cancerous bodies, broken marriages, dying babies, illness, starvation, poverty, we are a people, en masse, holding out for a miracle. His ear is low, His heart attuned. We need but whisper and He swings open the door and graciously, abundantly gives.

The miracle falls softly, imperceptibly.

We are allowed two.

And then, heaven. We are allowed to cross that threshold into our forever Home and rest right next to the beating song of His forever heart.

I pull Shalom close and the snow falls soundlessly on the spruce. No, today, there is not enough snow for men, not enough for the men of this world to gather and make things well, right, whole. But I warm anyways, this little chest pressed close to mine.


For always there is enough for angels. And for the miracle of now.


Father, today, this week, the angels that minister to You, mingle their voices with our prayers. "The angel of the Lord encamps beside those who fear the Lord and delivers them"(Psalm 33:8). Origen of Alexandria wrote, "So, when the saints are assembled, there will be a double Church, one of men and one of angels." I can hardly imagine it, Lord: Always angels, a double gathering. Today, this week, there is not enough for us men to work anything good. But there is enough for angels, gathering round, pressing close, delivering.

Thank you, Father, today that we are, breathtakingly, allowed two. And that "all angels [are] ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation" (Hebrews 1:14).

Today's Scripture: For the Scriptures say, ‘He will order his angels to protect and guard you. Luke 4:10

To read Marisa's post of yesterday, of how she is seeing God in her days...

Fill on Soul Bread...

They are known as the fleeting golden hours. Do they arrest you, too? Those gilded moments when a day is unwrapped and beheld, or packaged up and sent off. When that glowing ball of fire touches the rim of our understanding and we are startled awake. Radiance explodes and saturates the sky. Hues, surreal and otherworldly, suck the breath right out of our lungs.

Sunrise upon sunset, millennia after millennia, the Master drenches our celestial ceiling with celebratory color.

So that we know. We cannot miss it.

He wraps the day extravagantly, lavishly, so we grasp it, there, unmistakably before us, larger than life: every day is a gift.

Ribbons of that fading light fall across the dinner table. We finger the ethereal streamers, and consider the day given. The song comes softly at first, spontaneously sung by the preschooler between mouthfuls of rice and vegetables.

“Count your blessings name them one by one, count your blessings, see what God has done.”

His smile is mirrored around the table. He bursts with a name of an older brother. Older brother contemplates and chews. Then acknowledges a gift, “Riding with Dad down to the other farm.”

Dad nods his gratitude too, and the refrain begins again, this time joined by many voices. So it goes: refrain, then a name of one chosen, then a counting of the blessings of the day’s bestowment. An unpretentious way of seeing “to it that no one misses the grace of God” (Hebrews 12:15).

The meal is nearly done. But we are eating again. This is the bread from His hand, like that which war-torn children clung to. Do you know the story?

It is a true, historical story that will stay with you forever... one that will change you. Read on at this month's CWO's Home and School column for the rest of the story... and for recent research on how to foster well-being in children ... Read on