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

Perspective

He’s young, maybe 18, in need of a shave, brown tousled hair hanging down. The kind that a Mama wants to cut, comb, sweep out of eyes.

We hadn’t spoken, sitting side by side, only cursory nod, awkward smile. In his green t-shirt, khaki shorts, he’s plugged into the flight’s movie, and I am gazing out at cloud, blue, space above it all. And I doubt I would have said anything, but he did, unexpectedly.

“Do you mind if I eat this?”

He’s holding a Snickers chocolate bar in his hand, but I am confused at his asking, scan his face, catch a glimpse of gentle green eyes behind a mop of hair.

“Just in case, you know." He shrugs, smiles. "Some people have an allergy to the nuts, and just to be sure, you know.”

And I find words that sound too soft by dull roar of propellers and sonic compulsion. “Very sensitive of you to ask. By all means….”

He rips open wrapper, takes a bite.

And I turn back to window and thoughts of seeing the world through different eyes.

Father, today cause me to slow, be sensitive to those whom I interact, honor those near. Today how might I see the world around me through different eyes?

Photo: Paris on the first day of summer

A Love Body

Part One: Common Stones

It’s hard to think that it’s been almost two years since I wanted to quit church, ours. I mean that particular building, that group, not the Body, never the Body.

A Sunday in late August, as the corn dried golden all around that country church, Beryl Martin, after playing the closing chords of the service the way only she can, hair coiffed and soft eyes searching, she found Mama in the foyer, back by the coat hangers and children darting between legs, and she asked after me. Asked how I was doing and all. Did Mama think Ann might be interested in helping with the women’s ministry?

“No, Beryl, I don’t think so.” Mama has a reputation for her nonsensical ways; gentle, warm, but forthright nonetheless. “She’s not good here. Not good at all.” I can hear Mama saying that, the way she’d punctuate “at all,” her voice deep and certain, her eyes peering knowingly over the rim of her glasses, headed tilted down.

It bothered me for days, when Mama told me of their exchange. Laying in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, that line would lay out too, stretching long beside me, prodding me awake. “She’s not good here.”

And I’d say it again, what I’d been muttering all along, “But I am good. No, maybe not entirely with this particular church.” Satin night fell soft outside windows like a headboard over these pillows and I’d look up to Him who names those diamonds strewn across the Milky Way, “But I am good with You, God. Know I am good with You.”

I was.

But still this internal bleeding, anguishing slow drips of sadness that seemed to know no healing.
I was growing estranged from His Bride.

It hurt, my soul did, in this physical, fractured way, to have Mama say what I couldn’t say. That, true, I struggled to sit for a few hours with that particular group of people for whom the Carpenter had stretched out two palms and let hammer staple him to wood. That I shrunk from gathering formally with this group of folks who took His name as theirs. That I wanted to worship God elsewhere, even alone, but not in the midst of that assembly.

I mourned. But truth is I didn’t fit, couldn’t force myself into the shape of the place. I didn’t belong. I came to live on the fringe, a Body appendage exposed and cold. On the outside. This endlessly repeating experience of trudging through chilled blue moon nights looking for someone to open a door into warmth and a seat by the hearth. I think the loneliness though gnawed worse than the cold.

But, really, I wasn’t alone: many wander raw. The church as a whole is full of outsiders, dangling body parts who find themselves far from the heated heart of their spiritual home. So many numb-cold fingers of discouraged outsiders looking for doors, doors into places that read, understand, live Scripture as they understand it, to warm near sojourners who burn within as they do. The Christian landscape swarms with migrating outsiders seeking new church homes, new hearths to draw close to, places to feel embraced, full, wrapped warm.

We stayed. I got up every Sunday, dressed kids, gathered Bibles. We went. I read eyes of other outsiders, wounded ones who stayed committed through long years of cold. I read this line, underlined it, held it as a light through the wintry nights howling:

“God wants you to be in regular close fellowship with other believers so you can develop the skill of loving. Love cannot be learned in isolation. You have to be around people --- irritating, imperfect, frustrating people.” *

Maybe even wrong people. Not on the essentials, but perhaps not entirely right on doctrine as a whole. Could I love frustrating, arrogant, (possibly) wrong people? (And, anyways, haven’t I been all of that and more?) So we intentionally attended. Though worn out we reached out.

We (even us) learned grace.

But I never knew it like I did this past Sunday, standing there in the last row, holding a toddler, voice rising on hymn’s chorus. She’s standing too, singing there in front of me, holding a toddler of her own. A rowdy, bobbing toddler, playing this riotous game of peek-a-boo with 6-year-old sister who’s darting in and out behind Mama’s shoulder. A younger brother’s running back and forth across the chairs.

“Stop now,” she glares at oldest girl. Daughter giggles, pops around other shoulder. Toddler howls loudly, throws himself in her direction and another boisterous round begins. Singlehandedly, vainly, this Mama shoos away, shifts, shakes an angry finger and the kids play on.

I ache.

She’s bravely here alone, a single Mom trying to manage, no hand from a mate and father. He’s living with a highschool girl who swells with another of his children. It wasn’t that long ago this Mama too ran with that crowd, writing her own wild story.

My brother knows. He’s happens to be standing beside Single Mama and children this Sunday. I look at them both, standing here, side-by-side. They both did the same parties, the same all-nighters. And, incomprehensibly (but isn’t that God’s modus operandi?), they both met the same Jesus. Instead of dragging through a Sunday morning hangover from a Saturday night binge, they are standing here in a little country church singing a two-hundred year old hymn of worship.

Little girl flashes again, toddler shrieks with delight, brother dashes. Single Mama frowns, hisses, sighs.

Then my brother leans over.

Leans over, whispers something, and she nods. He scoops up brother zipping by, wraps arm around peek-a-booing sister, and the chorus crescendos but I can’t sing for the mess of tears streaming down.

I’ve seen grace.

Raymond Petersen’s leading the congregational hymn, and Charlotte Hiemstra’s playing the piano, and widowed Gerald Hayden’s manning the sound system. Ann and Piet Van Den Boogard are on the far side with the ten kids, and bachelor Andrew Versteeg is holding out a hymnal for the seeing-impaired friend he faithfully brings. And through this spilling blur, I see.

I see Bert Struyk across the aisle. Bert shaved bald, that crescent scar arching across his head where they cut into his skull and sliced out that knot of cancer. Bert exposed. Like us in this moment.

I may wash up, dress in Sunday finery, prune and preen and turn out to church looking polished. And in hushed voices (and sometimes a tad too loud) I disparage other pilgrims, point out the hypocrites, the Pharisees, the power hungry, the doctrinally wayward. I, we, try to tear off the masks, deflate the puffed up, set things straight.

But in this moment, we are this, all of us, naked and seen.

We are all as messy as these rowdy kids and an exasperated Mama. We are all as bruised as an abandoned wife with her own sordid past. Without exception, we are all scarred, torn and scraped, battle weary. Me (chiefly). My brother. Gerald Hayden. Bert. The elders. The pastor. All ragamuffins in need of a little help. A lot of grace.

I wipe wet cheeks, try to focus on the next verse of words still swimming when I realize that us ruffians are all He has. The only ones He has to gather here, braid voices together, and worship Him. The only ones He has to lean over, offer a hand, and love each other. The only ones to be His Body here in this wrecked world. We’re it. For all our façades and our masks, we are just a bunch of broken, cracked, messy ones. We, His global church, His beloved Bride.

We'll never get it all right, be all right, create heaven on earth. Because, individually, we aren't. Though I wish, no church utopias on this side. Because each of us as body parts are a bit malformed. (I guess that is what heaven's for, the perfecting yet to come.) But we can be here, together, loving, a bruised bride wooing the Bridegroom with worship.

The hymn’s on the last verse, and the children are asked to file down to Sunday School. My brother helps rambunctious children make their way to the aisle. Relieved, Single Mama smiles up to my brother, nods gratefully, takes little hands, and leads dragging, dancing ones to the stairs. Bert Struyk’s smiling too, because he’s here. Not sick at home or in some hospital bed, but here in the gathering of the saints. Us sinners sanctified into saints… still stumbling, still scarred under it all, but saints nonetheless, headed in the right direction, Crossward.

And I am here too, across the aisle from Bert, standing behind my brother, scanning the rows, looking for Mama’s face, her crown of white. I want to find her, tell her about loving the messy ones, like a Carpenter I know does for me, about living in community with (irritating, frustrating, maybe even wrong) ragamuffins, some obvious, some not so obvious, tell her about this grace I’ve touched for the wounded and mended ones.

Tell her that I am here, that I am staying here, and I am good.



Lord, today how do you call me to warm chilled outsiders who are scarred deep--scars I too know and carry. How can I love messy ones like me... who may not even know they're messy? How can I love Your broken and limping Bride? Show me. She's all You have. And I am a body part, messy too, made for grace and called to love.


To read part one of these thoughts : Common Stones
* quoted from the Purpose Driven Life

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

A Dwelling Place

It’s the slow, heaving pant on the other end of the line that wakes me. No words in the receiver, just this heavy, exaggerated exhale of a body.

My brow crinkles. I don't open eyes, searching for a way out of dreams, to figure out who, why.

And then a voice, hardly audible:

“I think it is today.”

Today?

It registers.

My sister’s voice.

And today. The Saturday before Mother’s Day.

I know this place, familiar and worn. I been here before.

Thirteen years ago on the eve of Mother’s Day, that was my labored breathing, the muscles of my abdomen contracting taut and iron hard, me riding wave after cresting wave.

I don’t open my eyes to the grey mingling of dark and dawn, just inhale and exhale too. I remember words for this in between place.

“In Him, you can do this, sister.” I press the phone closer, wanting her to hear, get this.

“Just stay fluid, lean back into it. Let it come. The more you tense, the more it intensifies. Let it all flow through you. Channels only.”

They are close, handy, those phrases that coached through our six births. And too, I guess what is true of labor is true of the work of life. Stay fluid, let His current take you, don’t rail. Channels only.

“You think I can do this?” Her teeth are chattering now, nerves jangled, scared.

“Lay back into Him, and let it all just come. Don’t fight it. Then yes, you can definitely do this.”
She answers with long, methodical breathing. I nod, smiling into dark lighting.

“Enjoy this fullness,” I whisper. “You know not if you pass this way again.”

We both know it’s time and she has to go and I step into new day coming. I stretch covers up over sleeping places, comb out Little Girl’s dream knots, set bowls out and around for their coming in from barn and chores and early morning air. But prayers linger on lips, always prayers.

Hope-girl and I, we dress for a Mother-daughter garden tea at the chapel this morning, this Saturday before Mother’s Day. She wears flashing pink and I wear safe black and I don’t know what my mother would have wore, for now she cannot come. Mama will collect my nieces close while my sister lets go of curled child within.

At garden gathering, we choose a table draped in yellow, Hope-girl and I, finger the violet petals strewn about, and listen to this chatting, laughing, weaving of lives together, shuttle slipping back and forth. I am there, surrounded by daughters, mothers, grandmothers, but I am not there, a loose string. Talk of recipes, sipping of cups, but my thoughts are in the same hospital I was in thirteen years ago on the cusp of my first Mother’s Day.

I am with a uterus emptying.

Sometimes I catch myself, this laying a hand on my flatness, over that still cavity, and feeling the pulse of ache’s echoing howl. A woman’s body and soul is hollowed out to create, to weave, to knit in the private spaces. And so the longings come, yearnings to fill, to carry, to deliver.

I remember where I was when Husband looked into these seeking eyes and tenderly agreed, “It is true. The barren womb never is satisfied” (Prov. 30: 15-16). If only he really knew how it can scald...

And yet, I have come to think, does the womb need a seed, an unfurling, embryonic soul? Can any soul fill the void? While not necessarily with child, perhaps we may be with abandoned, with elder, with needy. The barren and deserted may become the dwelling place, the fertile home, of souls seeking mother-care.

“The barren has borne…” (1 Sam. 2:5).

Hope-girl beside me, she brushes up against my arm, yogurt-dipped strawberry kissing her lips. She's laughing with her friends. How did that babe I once enveloped in watery womb, unfold into this long lissome dreamer? She grows and I lay fallow. And yet…

We are hardly through home’s door when the phone rings, her voice again, her breathing now undetectable.

“Already?” I glance up at the clock over the table.

“She’s here.” Her voice is light, wearily happy. “We have four.” I shake my head at the wonder of those four sisters laughing and weaving old together.

“Ana… after you.” My breath catches. Words scatter, leaving me stilled.

“Ana Jordan… Jordan cried when we told her. Who knows? Jordan may never marry or have children. And there is always this little one to love.”

The barren has borne. Both of us.

And I realize: We never cease to be with child. Those of us who have birthed, and those of us who never have. We may make spaces within us for all of humanity, for their dreams, their stories, their hurts, their lives. Do we not, over the years, line our lives with the stretchmarks of love?

The privilege of carrying a soul is always ours. We may choose to never let our wombs languish empty. Always we may open and welcome another person to find nourishment and comfort within the empty places we have made just for them.

Somewhere under this night pinned up with stars, Ana Jordan sleeps near her mother’s face, her warm breath falling, her fists clenched tight. And we of empty uteruses still swell, making ourselves homes.

It’s my last act on this Saturday before Mother’s Day. To fold a card and write a haiku of feelings for my own who loves and harbors yet:

Silver-crowned mama
Still you swell, full with child, an
Always dwelling place.

Lord, show me today how I can make space in my life to be a womb...

Related:
On Mothering
In Mama's Honor

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....

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

Best Beauty Tip Proven ...

To the dentist today... and thinking more on the Best Beauty Tip...

Smile: Happier Marriage

"Another study, by Dacher Keltner, correlated the smiles that female graduates displayed in two yearbooks with later life satisfaction. It was found that the bigger the smile, the more satisfying later marriage and the greater their well-being."

"Women who displayed more positive emotion were more likely to be married by 27, less likely to have remained single into middle adulthood and more likely to have satisfying marriages 30 years later," said Dr. Keltner. ~cited here and here

Smile: Better than 2,000 Chocolate Bars

True! The British Dental Health Foundation cites research that "a smile gives the same level of stimulation as eating 2,000 chocolate bars or receiving £16,000 in cash. The results were found after researchers measured brain and heart activity in Scottish volunteers as they were shown pictures of smiling people, given money, and chocolate." ~read further here

Smile: Grow in love

"Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other -- it doesn't matter who it is -- and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other." ~Mother Theresa

Sent this way from "At the Feet":

"Browsing through the blog world, I found myself at Holy Experience... I happened upon 7 simple words. Yet, in spite of their simplicty, these words have been ringing through my mind.

"If you are saved, inform your face." ~Unknown

What does my face show? I really had to ponder this for awhile. Reluctantly, I succumbed to the truth that there are many times that my face is completely unaware of the amazing saving grace of Jesus that it has directly benefitted from." ~the entirety of Sonja's thoughtful post At the Feet

Smile: The Best Cosmetic

Fenelon :

"Those who are wholly God's are always happy...Happy are they who give themselves to God...Happy are they who throw themselves with bowed head and closed eyes into the arms of the "Father of mercies" and the "God of all consolation"....

"There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness." ~Marguerite, Countess of Blessington

Lord, help me put on the best make-up of all: that which isn't made up. Joy!

Related: Best Beauty Tip, Radiate Beauty , At Study in Brown: Gaze
Photo: Ann chosing true beauty

Of Faces and Shadows

I stand at the window, rapt. A luminous globe catches in the top branches of the spruce right outside the window and spills her light, cold and milky white, over fields blue with snow’s chill.

“And that’s us. Yes?” I can just make out a rim of grey edging, inching up swollen, glowing orb.

Farming husband flicks off the last light and we watch.

“Our shadow, anyways.”

A full eclipse on a frigid night in February (when your warm breath hangs like a smudge snagged and etched in the air), the moon’s a rarely held mirror before earth’s shy face.

The words come lost-like, hardly audible.

“We exist.” I try to catch my breath, but it’s gone, just a whisper left behind.

“There we really are.”

Darker, deeper, longer, that’s us moving through the heavens, casting our outline across moon’s lustrous loop. Why am I surprised to see our shadow, and didn’t I really think these cosmic balls were all threaded together, spinning at His Word?

A child captivated with her own silhouette, I’m riveted, stuck, to this place. Farming husband pecks me goodnight, turns towards beadboard bedroom door. His head hurts, a long night of directing a hundred kids running, leaping, diving through games for the church kid’s program. And like he says every night, tomorrow comes early.

I grab his hand. “Backrub?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “You’re busy. I’m okay.”

“Never too busy for you.”

His eyes smile quietly. The same way that threw me into a flutter of butterflies in Mr. Schurter’s grade nine math class. Yes, I have time to rub and touch and know you in this moment while God choreographs the sparrows, stars, planets, universe. I don’t say any of that but I don’t have to because it’s been two full decades since we learned (and I’ve forgotten) integers and angles so he already knows what unconnected, flimsy thoughts flit about inside of me. And takes me anyways.

Lightly touching his back, circling, then pressing deeper, orbiting muscles and sinews tied too tight, I rub in love and he closes his eyes. He wordlessly unknots, and somewhere inside he drifts away, and I am left alone with the moon.

Through the spruce's drowsing limbs, I see our shadow now fully embracing her. She flushes red, warmed.

Standing at the edge of this room, these fields, this planet, rubbing away this man’s headache, it seems clear that the only way to see us--- really know that this globe exists, is, rotates in the blackness--- is solely in the reflection seen on the face of the moon.

I watch God stretch His fingers across the night sky to align the sun, earth and moon in the universe, and I feel Him line up something in me too. This soul eclipse ripens: Maybe that too is the only way we know for certain that we exist, rotate and spin—that we are. By the shadow our love casts on the faces of those whom we orbit.

Then earth begins to drift away and I’m left in the frozen quiet of a February night to think about watching faces to see the outline of my own soul.

Father, cause me to slow and watch the outline that I cast. Do the faces around me reflect the shadow of Your love shining past me? Does my soul silhouette look like Your love?

1 John 4:12 "No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us."

Love Notes

The Gift List continues... and I tip toe slowly... not wanting it to end. Must it?

The earth is filled with Your love, O Lord
Teach me Your decrees...

~Ps. 119:64

984. For great is his love toward us...

985. Candles and juice dancing in light on Mama's table

986. His love endures forever

987. Mama's towering amaryllis, a gift from farming husband, blooming over Levi curled in sunshine and words

988. May Your unfailing love be my comfort

989. Pudgy wee hands slipping and sliding through suds

99o. Turn my heart toward Your statues, and not towards selfish gain

991. Heart cookies waiting in sunlight to be delivered to the neighbors

992. I run in the path of your commands, for You have set my heart free...

993. A bouquet of roses from Caleb, stamped from the heart of celery...using what we have to express love

994. You are my God and I will give You thanks... ~Ps. 118:28

Father? There are no love notes like Yours... Let me read You everywhere...

Never too Late

It's never too late for cold hearts to warm...

It was just doughnuts and hot chocolate. But I, sadly, hadn’t even thought of it. Until I arrived at the home of a motherly, older friend’s home last night for Bible study and found her arranging long stemmed red roses.

Nancy’s face beamed as she snipped stems before setting fragrant blooms in the vase. A single woman, Nancy felt love on Valentine’s Day, a bouquet of warm sentiment from her married daughter. Imperceptibly, I winced.

Earlier in the day, my single mother had graciously delivered a plate of homemade toffee cookies along with love gifts for each of our six children. My feeble Valentine’s Day offering in return: a well-intentioned hug.Through the whirling flakes and howling wind of the night, I drove home after Bible study, envisioning my mother sitting at home alone in a darkened, lonely house. Was there any love gift wrapping her up in a warm embrace on blustery Valentine’s evening?

In our back door, I unbundled children ones from a tangle of scarves, coats and boots, tired bodies home from our fellowship’s mid-week kid’s program. After tucking children into bed, whispering prayers with little clasped hands, I stood silently in our kitchen, gazing out the window at the bitterly cold night. I glanced up at the clock.

It didn’t matter.

Grabbing my coat off the mudroom hook, I stepped out into the frigid black. Fifteen minutes later found me standing in a foot of snow at a side door, juggling two hot chocolates and donuts, ringing a door bell at a rather unrespectable hour. I glanced over my shoulder at the Smith’s well-lit kitchen window. Did they wonder who was visiting their neighor so late on Valentine’s in sub zero temperatures?

Sheepishly stepping into Mama’s foyer, I shook the snow off my boots, clumps off my pant legs, and, with outstretched arms, offered, “Just a little something warm and sweet before bed for my Mama on Valentine’s Day!”

Mama’s speechless face broke first into a smile, then hearty, delighted laughter. She threw her arms around me and whispered, “Ah, thank you, dear daughter!”

The clock in Mama’s kitchen proclaimed the lateness of the hour. But it wasn’t too late to express love; it wasn’t too late to turn around to take a path nearly missed.

It was just coffee and doughnuts. But Mama and I sat eating and sipping together in the dark, watching the snow fall in the night, love warming us through.

Lord, warm my heart. With You, it's never too late... Who can I show Your love to today?

(Posted originally Valentine's Day 2007. Today, Valentine's 2008: a wee gift for Nancy, and my mama too... and my Dad ... cookies and cards ready... and hearts too...)

Where to Go when it's all wrong...

From the archives... a thought I keep revisiting...

In the still before night ebbs away into morning light, a whimper, soft and muffled, comes and nudges me out of slumber. Beside me Darryl too stirs, sensing, even in deep sleep, that a child calls. Again, it comes, a quiet sob.

Soundlessly, Darryl rises, and sets out in search. I lay awake waiting, eyes on the door. He returns with arms full of a crying four-year-old.

“I think it’s growing pains,” Darryl gently offers, laying Malakai down on the pillow.

I pull Malakai close and under the blankets, whispering into his hair, “What’s wrong?”

“I am,” he sniffles.

I wrap around Kai with both arms. I know that feeling.

“I am glad you are here with us.”

“Me too.”

I squeeze him tight.

Sometimes life’s growing pains leave me aching too, soul whimpering and limping. Sometimes what is wrong is that I am. And coming to Abba Daddy with all the hurts makes me glad too…

Lord, too often what is wrong is that I am. And yet You draw me close and comfort me. Being with You makes it better. Always.

Scripture:
Ps. 73:21-26

When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant;
I was like a beast toward you.
Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

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

Word Melts

Part of this week's prayerful focus on Listening to God

"He showers down snow, white as wool,
and sprinkles hoar-frost thick as ashes;
crystals of ice he scatters like breadcrumbs;

He utters his word, and the ice is melted.

O praise the Lord."

~Ps. 147

Lord, fire cuts steel, Your Word melts ice. Heart can be hard. Melt Mine.

Photo: ice on bedroom window

(A full post was written, but inexplicably eaten by Microsoft. I am listening, accepting. Not those words for today.)

A Story for the Sixth Day of Christmas

A short story by Leo Tolstoy... gather the children around. Read long and thoughtfully... and be deeply moved.

"In a certain town there lived a cobbler, Martin Avdéitch by name. He had a tiny room in a basement, the one window of which looked out on to the street. Through it one could only see the feet of those who passed by, but Martin recognized the people by their boots. He had lived long in the place and had many acquaintances....

To read all of Where Love is God is....

Hearing

Today, snuggled with fevered, sick little one under love-blanket from dear friend, toy basket close at hand, we looked up and just quietly watched the snow fall...and fall... and fall... I whispered into the curl of Shalom's ear:

God shakes

Falling flakes

Confetti of the angels

And if we listen, I think we can hear the party:

Does He really rejoice over us with singing?

Let it snow, snow, snow.

Father, let us still today, long enough to really hear the refrain of all the universe: Father loves you, Father loves you, Father loves you...

Heart Habits

“Love is an act of endless forgiveness,

a tender look which becomes a habit.”

~Peter Ustinov

Father? Would my family say that a tender look is a habit of mine? Make me like You, Lord: endlessly forgiving, always embracing with eyes of love. I pray, Lord, for habits after Your heart.

A Life Roadmap

Remember The Question?
~from Mary Oliver's Summer Day from a Poem a Day for American High Schools :

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

Debbie dropped a line to the inbox that read:

"I, too, have prayerfully, reflected on the Question this week. I copied the poem and left it on my daughter's bulletin board, above her desk. Last night, she came quietly into my room and whispered, 'Thank you, Mommy, for the poem that you left for me.' She and I will continue the conversation later, after we have had much quiet reflection."

Yes... quiet, prayerful reflection these weeks, Debbie... now fragments of the answer scratched down...

Life is the little walk before. How one takes this walk determines the forever destination. Doesn’t the jaunt require a map, an intentional, purposeful course? For we are a pilgriming people, en route to Somewhere. This is my plan, my chart for the one and only glorious life I’ll ever have:

I plan to rise and pray. Eat and pray. Work and pray. Laugh, cry, dance, wonder, read, wander, embrace…and pray. So I’ll intimately know the curves and deep places of His heart when I birth out of this life and into His arms and Home. I have no other end but Him, and it will be but the beginning. I needs know the language of my country when I get home, the culture, the landscape. So I plan to pray now and enter into His presence, enter into Him, enter in. I plan to make this life about communing with Him whose hands are upon me, who has shaped and formed me, who bends low and whispers, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” I plan to pray and fall in love too.

I plan to tilt it all back, and drink the marrow right out of this gift cup, right to the last drop. I know: joy’s cup is sorrow’s cup by another name. But I am going to wildly drink it dry—entirely empty---anyways. So that just before I take my flight Home, I can turn to Jesus and whisper with Him, “It is fulfilled. Yes, all of it.”

He gives only one life and there are places I choose not to go: I plan (give grace, Father) not to go to the places, innocent though they may seem, that dull me, weaken me, impair me, blind me. For these places, though they may gleam in the sunlight and be marked as “must-sees” sights, are sin to me. I plan to detour that wide and deceptively alluring road, and take that steep and stony path off to the side. I have faith it leads to better sights and heights. And along the journey, I plan to scratch it down, testify, give witness. Leave traces of His grace.

I plan (give grace, Father) not to grumble over the way, the stumble and the scuffing of knees, but to keep pointing, rejoicing, singing over the brimming dawn on the Horizon, the coming of the Son and the wondrous forever light that is seeping into time.

I plan to take this little while and walk before and use it all up with love. To fall, head over heels, in love with Lover, so I may love and pour it all out for those who cross my path. I plan to use the power of His love to grace others with happiness’ warmth, with care’s touch, with hope’s hand. By His grace, I have the power to make others feel love, hope, joy. That is something I can do.

I plan to take this one and glorious life, and use it to die.

That is all: I plan to pray, to drink the cup He gives, to take that stone-strewn way, to leave tracks, to give thanks, to love. It doesn’t seem like much. But this little plan may be enough: "He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God" (Mi 6:8 RSV).

I plan. But only You make it so, Father.
Please do.

Retuning Relationships

It had been a long day, with a few jarred hearts and some soul-bruising.

His young frame filled the doorway. (When did that happen?)

"Wanna play this game with me? I think it might help things... you know?" He shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other, waiting.

"Yes. I can do that. Let's."

He laid out the board, set up the stack of cards, and rolled the dice. I took a deep breath and waited as he drew a card from the deck: "What do you dream for your future?"

His gaze drifted out the study's bay window, over the fields towards the woods, as he opened up his heart to things new to the light... and me.

My turn led to the query: "Have you felt scared today?" I paused...and then tentatively peeled back my own heart.

Thirty minutes of reciprocating, talking, reaching out, being vulnerable, bandaged up the days' wounds, weaving in the day's unraveled threads. Authentic, genuine connecting, retunes a relationship; a wise time investment.

The Ungame, indeed.

For these relationships that weave through our days are not game, but the essence of reality.


See Rocks in My Dryer for more Works-for-me-Wednesday ideas....

This, too