Bring on the Rain

May 7, 2013 By

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“Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink . . . Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:17-21

Yeah, yeah.  I read that over and over and just couldn’t get my hands around it. It sounds good in theory, like love your neighbor and tithe and eat your broccoli.  My therapist texted me this verse, with no comment but the underlying “read this, you idiot” and I went home and stared at the words while sucking down a re-heated breakfast taco.  Then I folded laundry, and held my kids so tight they wondered what the heck had come over me, and after they went to bed I sat rocking back and forth like it might sway away the pain and swish out the hate and I then drank wine like the tannins might draw out forgiveness and tomorrow I’d wake up with a dull sense of benevolence.

But I just lay there in silence, drawing mental pictures of hate and revenge and the unfairness of this life.  I curled up tight because all my prayers were spent and used up like tissues, all wadded up and tossed aside.  I drug myself upstairs in the wee morning hours and typed out a long prayer and just demanded that God read it directly off my computer screen, because I was too angry to speak and all I could do was write in a choppy bulleted list.  I sulked and stomped back to bed like an impetuous toddler that had just screamed at her father.  Because honestly.

I want to repay evil with evil, and I am too tired and haggard to do what is right.  Maybe I can just repay evil with a little tragic harm?  The next day, I got pulled over for going 50 in a 40 and I sobbed big fat tears.  I lay my tossled, unbrushed head of hair on the steering wheel because Enough Already.  The officer just handed me a warning and a look that was as compassionate as I’ve ever seen and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he reached over right then and hugged me through the window.  I just drove home with a tear-streaked face, going 20 miles per hour and lusting for a cheeseburger.

Sometimes, it’s easy to hate.  Let’s not kid ourselves – it’s always easier to hate.  Because this life is full of disappointment and pain and fear and when we put our trust in humanity it just bites us in the ass.

What’s hard, friends, is to love.

And I don’t mean love as in butterflies and roses and beautiful cards and elusive smiles on second dates.  I don’t mean love your children or love your mother or love your BFF’s who come over and bring you brownies. I mean loving the man who betrayed you.  Loving the stranger who raped you.  Loving that father who beat you and the mother who abandoned you and that dirty, rotten, self-absorbed, abused pitiful self that you’ve been dragging around for so many decades.

Evil is banal and hideous and frankly, doesn’t deserve your respect.  Because friends, you are above it.  You are mightier than it is.  You have the power of God crawling inside your veins and the Holy Spirit dancing in your vessels and your heart is made anew with light and life and freedom from the chains that only darkness brings.

So bring on the rain.  

Let it pour and soak and drench you with sorrow.  Lament and cry and curl and drink and scream.  But in the end, realize that it doesn’t own you.  Allow yourself to look at that man, woman, teacher, stranger, drug, depression, or self, and say: My God is more powerful than you. You can pound and beat down this house but you’ll never consume me. You are standing in this body and the walls might be falling down around you, but you aren’t dead yet, and you have power unimaginable.  Power that moved mountains and raised the dead and caused the lame to walk.

When the mask is removed, that demon is just a poor needy child, so here’s a sip of cool water for that parched tongue, my sweet darling.  I’ll sit with you and smile at your ugly and stroke your dirty, vodka-soaked hair.  You hear me, darkness?  You can’t survive with me around, because I’m all light up in here and rats flee and Satan runs and evil just bares his teeth but it’s all a mirage that disappears when I get close.  Begone, you fool.  I ain’t got time for your stupid, cunning ways.

What are you afraid of, anyway?  That the person that hurt you most will get away with it?  That they might take you for a fool? That they might get a free hall pass for all the damage they’ve caused?  Oh dear friends, they will have to live with the consequences of sin, and vengeance is not yours to take.  Make room and step aside as God enacts his own wrath.  Our job is only to love, and love when it’s hard, and love when it’s not realized, and love even when we are bruised and torn and left alone in front of that mirage we thought was water.  But we can repay evil with the pure, clear, smooth freedom of love, which washes much more clean.

And then nothing will ever chain us.  Nothing will bind us.  We can stretch out our wings and stand before God with bulleted lists of prayers fluttering to our feet, our soul smiling and our hair getting drenched with dew from heaven, and God’s redemption, and we can know that we are living, leading, learning.  Uncurl.  Unclench. Undo the chains around your hardened heart, and bring on the rain.

Overcome evil with good. 

—

photo:

Rainy Day 4

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, My life, Religion Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Trouble I’ve Seen

April 24, 2013 By

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Eleven years ago today, a ruddy-faced doctor in a white coat took off his glasses and informed me that there was a raging tumor living inside my eyeball.  News so strange I had to ask for it to be repeated, the words cancer and melanoma all jumbling up inside my head with other strange words like success rate and surgery and I found myself sitting with my hands folded calmly asking for a tissue.

From there, I headed straight into a CT scan full of beeping red dots and IVs pumping toxins.  My wrap-around shirt landed with a soft thud on the floor while I bore my gown of misery like a soldier, trudging forward to get a mammogram before my thirties had even dawned.  My lungs and my liver and my brain and my breasts were all needled and raped, but it was all in the name of progress because melanoma’s a devil’s son.

A week later, my husband and I headed to the world-renowned expert in Philadelphia, eating cheese steak while hearing bullets zinging around in the distance.  We huddled together waiting to for what seemed like hours to see the doctor, in a room filled with foreign languages and travel-weary patients.  We earned ten precious minutes where I rapid-fired questions to the doctor that I had saved in a three-ring notebook.  Year after year we trekked back through sleet and blizzards and pouring rain, cobbling over stones and bricks toward the end of Walnut Street, crossing our fingers for the joyous refrain that life’s tentacles were still strong, holding us together in times such as these.

But radiation is a sniper that shoots to kill, taking down tissue and muscles and solid respectable youth.  I sat in the waiting room with the grey-haired diabetics waiting for lasers and four-inch needles and news that my retina was simply too weak to stand. It just needed a wheelchair like an old war hero with a slug in the shoulder, so they filled my eyeball up with oil like a slab of wood puddy in an empty, hollowed-out hole.  When I was pregnant with my son, I got a cataract so thick my eye almost exploded with pressure and I endured three hours of surgery without anesthesia, which I would never ever recommend to anyone in a million years of Sundays.  What we do for our children, and concurrently to save our own lives.  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, I sang to the old people, and they nodded like honey child, I hear you.

I carry stress in my eye, drooping like Friday before lunch, weary of being held together with ribbons. I go back every year praying that a rogue cell won’t burst like a terrorist out of hiding, since it’s fatal and the success rates are hopeless and my oncologist tells me it’s useless for me to come see him anymore since a metastasis only buys me a year, maybe two.  He reminded me of that again today as I asked for another appointment.  What do they know, these doctors. No one wants to stare mortality down like a cobra wondering if it will strike or just slither off into the ether, and the difference between one year and two is hundreds of more days.  It matters, you doctors who count years like pebbles.

Those years, they are diamonds to me.

I think about all the happy times since then – babies and birthdays and laughter like bubbles floating large and fat over the driveway.  It’s been a lovely ride, hollowed-out and plugged, with one eye that’s crippled and propped up like the old man in Weekend at Bernie’s.  But despite it all, beauty abounds. Every day I stumble into God’s masterpiece with a depth perception so poor I can’t even thread a needle, and yet somehow I survive, and see, and have vision beyond my own present darkness.

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, I sing to our babies, rocking and shushing and rubbing their backs until their eyes droop.  But you see, Father.  God and son and spirit and healer, master of this worn-out veteran life.  You plug up this eye and this hollowed-out heart and you never have failed me.  All these years.  All this sorrow.  Nobody but you, Jesus.

Glory Halleluiah.   

—-

If you want to hear this song sung the way I like it sung, you need to hear it by Mahalia Jackson:

—-

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/supersonicphotos/4312101907/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Health, Inspirational, My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

The Perfume Basket

March 23, 2013 By

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A few months back, my son dropped my bottle of perfume on the bathroom floor, and rose-scented shards littered the tile.  So off I went to Nordstrom to replace it.  I stood there for hours smelling and wafting and scrunching up my nose. Finally I chose one, and as I was paying, the saleslady said she would put my name in a drawing for a gift basket.  Yes, yes.  Something with an $800 value.  Lots of designer fragrances.  I never win anything, lady, so have fun with that.

Fast forward to the following week.  I get a phone call from Nordstrom that says I won.  I stood there in the kitchen, in the middle of loading the dishwasher with a dumb look on my face, speechless.  “Come by and get it any time,” she prattled on.

That afternoon, with two kids in tow, I trudged to Nordstrom to pick it up.  For some reason, I was afraid they would think I was lying about winning, or that it wasn’t really mine.  The minute they placed that shrink-wrapped basket in my greedy little hands, I told my kids to jump into hyper speed and we bolted back to the car.  I wouldn’t even stop at the grocery store on the way home.  I’m sitting on real value here, people, and it needed to be safe on my bathroom counter.

When I got home, I took my time in unwrapping it.  Bottle after bottle was arranged inside a Jimmy Choo shoebox.  Tall and short and heavy and lacy.  Fruity and musky and spicy and soft.  Every perfume had their own emotion, and their own set of colors and meaning.  I felt so guilty, like there was no way I deserved all this value.  I’d save them for gifts, send them to friends, and select one I really loved.

But I didn’t.  I kept them all. 

At first I just sprayed some in the air, or squirted a dab on my arm before church.  But they go bad in two years, and I have all these bottles, and why not use them to their fullest?  What’s the good of saving them and not enjoying them?  So I began my perfume campaign. When friends came over, I’d march them to the bathroom and encourage them to shower themselves in Flowerbomb.  When I feel particularly down, I spray Prada on the pillows.  After my bath, Versace is liberally applied.  I use Chanel as my interior car fragrance, and when the bathroom smells particularly stale, there is always Gucci to make things right again.  You’ll never see such liberal application of Burberry in all your born days.

It’s been magical.

Perfume will never again have the same meaning that it does in this season in my life.  I totally get why Mary anointed the feet of Jesus with rich oils, and why the wise men brought the child of God frankincense and myrrh, both prized for their alluring fragrance.  They were all gifts fit for a King.

I’m no queen, but I have felt so rich. I’m keeping the bottles for my daughter as a testament to His glory, and to the power of our senses, and to explain that in the darkest of days, when the sun hasn’t yet risen, there is power in unexplained gifts, and reminders of beauty.  There is indeed a story woven into all things. But most importantly, the wisdom of the ages:

There ain’t nothin a little Chanel won’t fix. 

—

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilivanili/8097442306/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Inspirational, My life Tagged With: , , ,

Fan Mail

March 12, 2013 By

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So the big important news this week was that Taylor Swift’s fan mail was found unopened in a dumpster.  All those glittery heart raspberry letters wasted, dumped by the used syringes and old saggy diapers.  Someone found them, and THANK HEAVENS alerted the appropriate authorities.  It just really makes me teary-eyed that we Americans [that haven’t a clue about starvation or submission or selflessness or hunger or political issues] stand up for what’s right. Because these letters were found, ya’ll. It’s a miracle. 

So it made me think about what it would be like to get a bunch of fan mail from 14-year-old girls that include pictures of their grandmothers and boyfriends and are sprayed eerily with Bath & Body Works perfume.   I mean, who really likes the smell of sun-ripened raspberry? I say no one.  In an imaginary world, letters to me would go something like this:

Yeah so Amanda:

I like it when you write about your kids throwing up, so if you could tone it down with the Jesus references that’d be cool.  K?

My Dearest Amanda,

Get over yourself.  My kids were killed in a horrific accident and here you go rambling about how you can’t find concealer to cover up your dark under-eye circles and how whiny-bad your cute little life is.  Are your children alive?  Okay then. Find some priorities.  Included with this letter is a bottle of Raspberry room spray to remind you to be freaking happy about your life.

Manda Panda,

I’m 13 years old and live in Nebraska and I just don’t understand all these references to macaroni and cheese, peas, baking bread, and Neimans.  One minute you’re all fun and bubbly and then you’re all “let’s rise from the ashes” and “oh, the suffering.”  And OMG did you really include a recipe for bran muffins? How old are you? Can you have a theme or something? Because I’m getting confused.  #hillpenblog #randomnthoughtsareboring #macaronirocks #ilovehashtags #callme #sunripenedraspberry #Gohuskies!

Amanda:

I think your photo is manufactured and you’re really a robot. Can you meet me Friday in person so we can pick berries together and I can see if you have real teeth?  I’ll borrow a car and we can eat at ihop after.

For the record, I’d be so happy to get these letters to I could personally respond.  After wading through the glitter, I’d write this:

My dear friend:

I hate raspberries.  I don’t like the way they taste or the way they feel in my mouth and if I’m forced to smell one more sun-ripened raspberry I’m going postal on you and writing about squirrels for the rest of eternity.  You’ll have to go through some sort of unsubscribing process, which would take you like 2-3 long minutes.  You want that?  Huh?

And about Jesus.  Well, he’s a dear friend and rules my life and carries me on days I can’t stand, or bake bread, or cover up the circles.  So it’s hard not to talk about Jesus, or God the Father, or how the holy spirit fills up my empty spaces.

But now all I feel is bad because I went crazy on you about raspberries.  And you were so nice to send me the scratch-and-sniff stickers.  Just for being so hateful I’m eating a handful of them right now as my penance, and spraying my 7-year-old’s room with some sort of [insanely awful] spray sent to me from a grief-stricken woman, and hoping that the smell of cinnamon buns comes back into favor. #cinnamonbun2014

So go huskies.  And grief counseling.  And perspective.  Go Jesus and letters and kids throwing up and even raspberries.  It makes up the big basket of life, and that’s good no matter what it smells like.

Love and kisses,

Me.

P.S.  I’m not a robot.  Hence the dark circles.

P.P.S.  I only ate one raspberry, because I accidentally spilled the carton on the floor and I couldn’t stand to pick up their hairy, spiny, squishy little bodies.  So I swept them up and smeared red all over the travertine like blood and now I’m angry again.  But I ate one, so let’s just stick with that.

—

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/7162961683/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Humor, My life, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Was Jesus Beautiful?

January 18, 2013 By

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One of Chris Bohjalian’s characters in Midwives dressed two-clicks above.  You can wear wrinkled slacks and smell like used cigarettes if you want, but I’m showing up in heels, my blond highlights blowing past you in the dust. Being beautiful is the closest thing we know to power.  And in this world, power is life.  So yeah, I get it.  I understood the urge to hide what’s inside and cover it all up with a jacket.  Our insides are dark and insecure, and the meek don’t live long in this bitter place.  You can say all day that beauty is skin deep and only comes from the inside, but when you want a job on 11th Avenue, you shed that fallacy and get with the program.  Bust out the Bergdorf suit.  The black one that makes you look slim and intimidates the competition.  Because you only have one shot and one first impression. Wear quelques fleurs.  Buy Burberry. Make it count.

So it makes total sense that Jim Caviezel got the part of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.  He’s stunning, really.   Just peer into those brown eyes and neatly-trimmed beard and tell me you wouldn’t want to listen to that man talk just to see his mouth move.  Who wouldn’t want to see Jesus with straight teeth and soft skin and strong biceps?  It makes us cry quicker and weep more deeply and feel more connected with a man who is attractive. It’s more tragic to see Marilyn Monroe die than some prostitute from the Fifth Ward. Because Marilyn was beautiful, which to us means she was more worthy.

And yet Jesus was not beautiful.   “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces,
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” Isaiah 53:2

I thought of the Sermon on the Mount, where the poor in spirit inherit the Kingdom of Heaven and the meek prevail.  Where we should be less attuned to beauty and its false sense of security. Jesus turned the whole world on its head, and suddenly all we ever saw as value just fades like blood from a cut that bleeds in a bathtub with a champagne glass and a handful of pills.  What a waste of a beautiful life. 

And I stop in my tracks, with my expensive blond hair and a diamond burning a hole in my finger.  I rip the pearls from my neck and they spray around the living room like popcorn in a movie theatre, dirty and scattered.  I stand with my head thrown back and scream at darkness, this dying and rotting skin holding up my broken heart.  Beauty can’t be trusted.  We gravitate like animals to what we believe will breed more cleanly, and will produce a more perfect fruit.  Yet as we click toward this devil, who lures us so strongly in the name of self-preservation, Jesus stands.

He looks at all that caged-in ugly, and we are suddenly free.  And I am filled with awe.  Because I have never before been faced with such raw power.  Something that grips my insides and holds still my heart and quiets my rage. A power to raise the dead and clean wounds and move mountains.  I’m not worthy, as all this darkness pours out at his feet, from my blond roots to my trembling fingers to the buttons on my Bergdorf suit, and there surrounded in pearls on the floor I lay all my shit bare.

I just lay it all out bare at his feet and weep.

We should all strive for “the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.”  1 Peter 3:3-4.  Past the skin and the suit and the jacket of insecurity, there is great peace.  I want that peace to penetrate through these blue damaged eyes, two-clicks above this world, walking tall.  As it turns out, beauty is not power.  But God’s power is so exceedingly beautiful.

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Photo Credit:

The Passion of The Christ: Philippe Antonello

Filed Under: Inspirational, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

The man who saved the world

December 15, 2012 By

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News flash: some people smell.  They are dirty and have bad yellow rotten teeth and are downright creepy.  There is mental illness and instability and greed and lust and all kinds of nasty in the world.  People hurt.  People harm.  People leave damage in their wake.  Others cover up their scent by brushing their teeth and shopping at Nordstrom.  But on some level and in different ways, we all have dark sins raging.  We fail to trust and wait and submit. We are told to give up all our wealth and follow Jesus, and yet we balk and twitch.  No Superbowl Sunday?  Nuh-uh.  Crazy fool.

Even way back in Jesus’ day, there were men lying in fields who didn’t choose to lay with their wives and bounce children on their knees like respectable people.  They smelled the same as sheep because they lived with them.  They never cleaned behind their ears or washed out their mouths with soap and chose a dirty profession like animal wrangling over jail to escape the reality of doom that befell them in the real world.  There are always broken people that don’t fit well in the real world.

These people.  These shepherds.  These men without hope and women who sold their bodies and slaves who bore deep red marks of shame?

Jesus came for them.  On a dark night thousands of years ago, he came.  Jesus came for the f*#k-ups. 

Don’t be fooled that you have some sort of special place in line.  That by churching it up and having monogrammed napkins you earned a place.  You are just one of these dirty huddled masses.  God looks at the soul not the skin, so you can skip brushing your hair for Christmas Eve Service because it doesn’t much matter in the long run. Jesus wasn’t born in Upper-Middle-Class Suburbia, in a garden tub surrounded by the glow of an Orange-Vanilla Yankee candle.  I think it’s harder for us middle-class, brushing-teeth types to fall on our knees.  To drop it all and follow.  To hear the heavenly chorus.  We have surround sound, and microwaves, and our hearts are too plugged up to ache.  We have pills for that these days.

Shepherds didn’t ask for Jesus.  They didn’t pay for tickets.  They certainly didn’t earn the right to see him face-to-face.  And yet as they were lying by a smoking fire in the middle of nowhere, angels appeared.  Legions of them shrouded in golden light.  And these dirty travelers?  These jail dodgers and broken hearts? They dropped everything and ran to the child.  They followed the brilliant light to feel peace in the mere shadow of the prince.

Jesus came for the blind and deaf and weak.  The man who hates himself and loathes what he has done and feels inadequate with his life.  The screwed-up mess of a woman who is ripped and addicted and empty.  Jesus came in the night, piercing through clothes and expensive perfume and black mascara straight to broken, aching hearts.  He came for you.  And all at once, it all falls away.  A calm beyond words.  A peace beyond understanding.  The wings of angels cover, and you know.  Sweet Jesus.  There in the street and in the wallpapered hospital room and in the bathroom stall.  He comes to you where you are, smelly or not.

We don’t deserve such love.  And yet God reaches to the farthest corners of the world for us.  There is no field dark enough or prison wall thick enough.  He peers into the very essence of death and pulls out life.  All we have to do is leave the old and follow.  The light is blinding.  The angels are calling.  Jesus is whispering in the night, in dreams and visions and is saying our name right there in front of our bloody faces.  He is born!  Come, and follow.

Merry Christmas.  From one f*#k-up to another.  

—

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/khrawlings/3805370725/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Eat Your Peas

December 14, 2012 By
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“Eat your peas,” I tell my kids as a plate of lukewarm food sits in front of them. “They’re good for you.  And delicious.”  But no one really thinks peas are delicious.  They are just placeholders, something I opened from a can to fill space.

“But they are cold,” my daughter pouts.  “And you know very well that I don’t like peas.”  The fact that my daughter says things like “you know very well” and “if you don’t mind, I’d rather be excused” and in her free time dreams up song lyrics and imaginary worlds full of sparkles and iron gates with swirls – this alone I should cherish.  And yet all I want is for her to eat her peas because bath time is coming up on the evening schedule.  I toss away the remains of dinner to avoid a fight and allow her to eat applesauce against my better judgment.

I sigh at the waiting times.  I watch peas roll into the trash after dinner and I think to myself – what a waste.  I can’t see joy or light or give thanks and all I want is for bedtime to come so both kids are protected and safe. Sometimes it’s hard to sit through the raw edges of empty life spaces.  It is hard to be grateful for routine, mundane, headache-laden days. My head hurts and my soul hurts and this big world is full of heart-voids that I run around trying to plug up with duct tape, the edges frayed and worn.

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord! Psalm 27:14 

I hate waiting.  The very definition of wait is to remain or rest in expectation. But another definition is to delay, or remain temporarily neglected, like “the vacation we planned for years will just have to wait.”  I can’t just remain at rest with anticipation. I’m not good in this space. I don’t have skills that others have to tolerate it, and I start to get anxious and nervous and pace around like a crazy person. When will it get here?  How can I fix it? Is there a way I can hurry up this process?  Eat your peas already! It reflects so loudly my own anxiousness.  What am I afraid of?  Why am I not able to accept things that I cannot change?

Wait on the Lord.  In everything, give thanks.  It’s a refrain that repeats like an annoying Christmas tune I can’t stop humming.  Yes, yes.  Thanks for children and a home and health and all that business.  Lists and lists of joyful things.  Someday my prince will come and life will turn up roses and patience is a virtue. Jesus gave thanks and Ann Voskamp gives thanks and everything is filled with joy and thanksgiving and waiting for the child to be born under a shining star.  Blogs and books and little plaques with words.  Give thanks!  Find joy!  Tis the season!

And yet life is so full of hurt that it’s painful to sit down on all the tacks.  In my own life, I’m so focused on damage that I can’t keep enough duct tape around, constantly plugging and ripping and mending holes.  Then I pace around and bite my nails to make the time go by faster.  Bath time is a comin, kids.  Let’s get this dinner thing wrapped up.  I guess I don’t trust God’s big enough, or strong enough, to patch me.

And yet God is big enough.  He is powerful enough.  I don’t need to be in charge this time.  I stand up, red and blotchy from the tape marks, and begin to laugh.  Through my tear-stained eyes I laugh and dance to Taylor Swift with my sweet little girl and suddenly find myself offering a thousand little thanks.

Thank you dear Father, for this Christ child, who was half-man and half-God.  Thank you for peas and curling irons and children with big thinking brains.  Thank you for the ability to walk and write and drink clean water. Thank you for love.  Thank you for my warrior friends who pick up my deadweight and carry it on their backs until I can stand again.  Thank you for messages woven throughout the world in signs and emails and articles and dreams.  Thank you for the bible, that instructs me when I need an operating manual.  Thank you for never-ending grace that washes me clean.

The next time we eat peas, it will be a conscious act.  I will buy them split and simmer them with ham and garlic and sautéed vegetables.  I will spoon them in between my hungry lips and I will be grateful for their warm, comforting saltiness.  There is even hope for peas.

Sometimes it’s hard to wait in periods of stillness.  It’s hard to give thanks in those times.  That’s okay.  Keep telling yourself it’s wise and true, so that when your eyes are opened, you can see that angels were carrying you through the dark and warrior friends were shouldering so much of your heavy.  Then you will begin to smile again, and be thankful for God’s far-reaching mercies, and say thanks to the world and God and little green peas. There is no need for me to manipulate solutions and fix my own holes.

God’s bigger than you think.  Wait for him to do his work.  And in all things dance, and sing, and eat your peas.  Because they are delicious, after all. 

—

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/haprog/4002891340/

Filed Under: Cooking, Inspirational, Love, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

When sin puts down roots

October 9, 2012 By

I think it’s a disservice to teach our children that good rides around on a white horse and evil lurks in shadows.  When they grow older, they will be attracted to what is sparkling and beautiful.  They will think that church always means goodness and prayer pills are popped for headaches and sour stomachs.   They might think that shiny happy people would just naturally have pure intentions, and fail to see truth.

Because evil lurks in beautiful things.

Sin is alluring, my sweet children, pushing a small seed into a pure heart, surrounded by warmth and lifeblood and privacy. A woman’s breast and curved back.  The shiny feel of money.  A message that tickles your inner euphoria and make you think, just this once.  It’s harmless.  No one will ever know.  The devil sticks his tentacles around the vessels and grows ever stronger, wrapping and leafing and blooming into a great darkness. And for a moment, during the pulsing and the beating and the loving and the looking, there is a sense of power.  Everyone is on even footing. No one is sanctimonious.

And just like that the heart grows hard, choked out by all the weeds and guilt and shame.  Out of it flows tainted blood and it’s no longer full of grace.  Because the heart is the key to power.  Sampson was stripped of it.  We are all bound by it.

It’s where evil grows best.

Jesus said that what comes out of a person is what defiles them, not what’s put in.  “For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come – sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.” Mark 7:21-23. But what if darkness has grown so deep and so intertwined that the flesh is rotten underneath?  How can one ever crack open their chest and pull it from the roots?

I honestly have a hard time answering that question.  I hear things like be washed in the life-saving blood of the lamb, but try telling an adulterer this odd phrase as a helpful pocket tool of wisdom and watch them run for cover.  Try to find a way to explain the power of Christ or how hearts can be healed or how darkness abhors the light. It falls on deaf ears, because old habits die hard.  Humiliation and addiction are so strong that it’s hard to pull against them long enough to get a word in.

But the truth is more powerful than evil.  My daughter attends a Christian school, and last year I heard many renditions of Psalm 139. I remembered these words being uttered from my six-year-old’s tongue and they suddenly took on new meaning.   You have searched me, oh Lord, and you know me.   For where can I go from your spirit?  Where can I flee from your presence?  Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light becomes night around me.  But even the darkness will not be dark to you.

God knows the heart.  He sees the trunk of sin.  There isn’t anyone too broken to kneel down and pray those words in Ezekiel that a heart can be renewed.  There is no sin too great and deep to be forgiven.  Jesus did it over and over.  Put away your stones.  Walk away from judgment.  Accept the grace and mercy and new blood that so naturally flows from a pure heart.

Evil is everywhere, my children, and we must simply be strong enough to recognize it.  To pull it toward the light.  To ask God to rip it from the roots with humility and honesty.  And then we are finished.  Our jobs are done.  Our prayers are laid bare.

God can handle the rest. 

—

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/e-coli/5519738897/

Filed Under: Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

keepsake boxes

June 12, 2012 By

I’m a keepsake packrat.  Like the outfit my sweet baby wore home from the hospital or that brown plaid shirt my husband wore on our very first date.  It still has a little tiny hole in it from where his pledge pin went.  How cute is that?

These things mean nothing to anyone else, but to me, they are priceless.  I never take them out and run the tattered fabric though my fingers, or line the walls with monogrammed onsies in shadow-box frames (thank goodness, because we put people who prefer to do these things in group homes). Instead, I vacuum seal them, keep them in our attic, and freak out if my husband tries to move them to a storage unit or sets them anywhere near the corner of the garage reserved for Salvation Army Pick-up.

Ridiculous, our attachment to such things.  Are we thinking that somehow, we can transfer the memories to our offspring so they will also save them, and then we’ll have five generations of sleepers and Christmas dresses to store until the end of time?  “Oh, look honey.  It’s a tiny little t-shirt that says Back Seat Driver that some ancient-relative-I’ve-never-met wore! And this glass bottle with a cracked yellow nipple? Priceless!”

I have two huge keepsake boxes for my children, because I’m sure they will want to use the same napkins from my very first baby shower (I was given three extra packages!).  I’m absolutely positive my granddaughter will want to see the coloring books given to guests on her mother’s fifth birthday.  I even saved cupcake toppers, in case my great grandson wants to stick fifty-year-old toothpicks with rotten paper elephants in mounds of chocolate icing.  Because they so totally will.  Don’t spoil my dream.

To make matters worse, I included little cards indicating the significance of each one.  Like “you wore this dress on your 5th Birthday!” and “this was your favorite night-night book!”  I document such things because I want you, dear offspring, to at least feel shooting pains of guilt as you load this crap into your minivans and head to the Goodwill drop-off the minute I pack my bag for the nursing home.  Or, worse, it will force you to cram you children into old smelly clothes that have been sitting in a box for half a decade to please your delusional mother.  Then you can store them for another forty years until they are eaten by rats.  See how awesome I am? You can totally thank me later.

I thought of all this as my mother was lamenting how kids these days don’t sing the same songs that we did when we were kids.  No one in this century runs around whistling Father Abraham. And if they did, I feel kinda sorry for them. Because there are new fabulous songs with movements and catchy tunes that are more exciting than the old. We can’t transplant everything we loved into our children so that they will see them the way we did.  They have different eyes.  They live in a different world.   They don’t really want used and worn-out baby shoes, or every Christmas dress.  They want to experience it for themselves.  They want to start brand new keepsakes.  They want to bloom.

I went to the attic and stared at the boxes I’ve been saving.  Shoes and bonnets and recital pictures.  Albums and records and hundreds of pictures. I wonder why I feel it’s so important to live in the past.   Why I can’t free myself of the dusty memories.

If Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said simply Follow me, I might just put my hands in a time-out for a sec to see if we could have a tiny little discussion about all these keepsakes.  I’m so totally there, this whole following God into the wilderness business, but can I negotiate a rider?  Like a teensy weensie addendum regarding the wedding album?  After all, it took me weeks to chronicle all that happiness and paste the little stickers in the scrapbook, and I’d hate to throw all that out.  Right?

As it turns out, it might just be stuff after all.  If those boxes burned to the ground, the stories are already saved in my heart.  They are woven throughout bedtime stories and summer nights and lightening bugs and popsicles.  My children will smell fresh bread and cut grass and strong coffee and be transported back home, where the pillows are soft and the sheets are dried on the line.  They will have so many memories and jewels in their crown that come from their childhood, and the stories that I write, and the love between their mother and father than transcends space and time.

Help me, Lord, to build up keepsake boxes in their hearts.  Today, when I lost my patience and yelled for everyone to just be quiet and said we were never, ever going to get smoothies as long as they lived if they were just going to sling them around the backseat, I didn’t mean it. These are the years of keepsakes, every one. Help me relish it and drop those moments into storage, to be pulled out, and laughed about, and treasured. 

The boxes can burn.  Because I’m filled with all those lovely memories that can’t be stripped away. These keepsakes don’t rot or get musty with mildew or bear someone else’s monogram.  Now that’s worth saving.  And passing on.

Filed Under: Love, Motherhood, Religion Tagged With: , , ,

lessons in carols

December 30, 2011 By

I love to sing.  I sing in the kitchen and in the car.  I sing as I mop and as I dress.  I dictate instructions to my children in song – sometimes changing the key midstream to see if anyone’s paying attention.  You don’t want me all up-in-your-business singing “you came from my womb, now clean up your room, I’ll fill you with doom if you refuse me,” and don’t think my daughter can’t whip out some do-re-me action on a dime.  That’s hard-core training, people.   I can’t wait until my daughter is in junior high so she can fill up her little journal about how her mother is a total lunatic and is so totally unaware of how annoying she is.  Oh I know, sweetheart.  It’s all part of my master plan of totally family domination.  Breaking down spirits with excessive vibrato.

 

Given my natural affinity for song, however, I was naturally pumped to sing a solo at Christmas eve service. I wore black and had a wonderful pianist and stood in front of my church congregation, candles-a-ready, and began.  I was a bit worried about my lip gloss.  Priorities, you know.  But it all started out fine.  It was calm and serene, and after a moment, people started to smile and close their eyes.  It was a story told long ago, about a child born of Mary. A song of peace and new birth.   About pure hearts and renewed spirits.  A song of –

 

Uh oh.

 

Out of nowhere, I hear a bellowing cry from the back of the church. A man is practically falling over himself to escape from the aisle with a child in his arms.  A child who happens to be my son.  After getting a glimpse of his mother at the front of the church, standing alone with a spotlight on her face, he decides to declare to the people sitting around, and the old-folks home next door, and to the Burger King down the street, that his mother is there. In case they didn’t notice.

 

“Ma MAAAAAAAAA!” he shrieks with delight.  “Hi Mama!  Hi Mama!” He is fervently waving with both hands in the air.  He must think I can’t hear him, although the room is silent except for my voice and you can literally hear fabric rub together when someone crosses their legs.  He bumps the volume up a bit.  “Mamaaa!  Mama SINGGGGG!”  He is thrilled at my existence, even though I just saw him five minutes ago. I can see my husband apologize to someone as he barrels past knees and blazers and candles on his way out the door.

 

I try to remain calm.  If Oleta Adams sang this song in front of thousands, I can surely keep it together as my husband takes my screaming son into the foyer. Where, as it turns out, he sees me again on the video screens and starts with a renewed round of heartfelt hellos and fervent waving.

 

All of a sudden, out of embarrassment or distraction, I lost my place.  I was in the middle of a stanza about finding inner peace when I had a panic attack.  I drew out the note, ran through a mental checklist of oh crap, where’s the coda and I freaking sang that part already and I’m screwed, and my kind accompanist just slowed things down like the whole thing was planned.  I smiled and turned the page, which made no sense since it was the wrong page to begin with.  I’m pretty sure I did some sort of corny hand gesture. Awesome.  My husband will never let me live that one down.

 

I had exactly four beats to make a decision, so I just picked right back up, singing the exact same thing I did before, making up additional words when necessary. My daughter, now parent free, is standing in her beautiful Christmas dress at the back of the church just waving at me.  She is beaming with pride.  She doesn’t know I’m sweating and hoping no one noticed I repeated the entire second verse and praying for the song to end.  It finally did, and I sat down with a solemn heart.  What a waste, I thought.

 

But my family was so proud, and my husband laughed so hard, and when it was all said and done I felt that this is what the Christmas story is all about, anyway.  It’s not calm and morose and black and perfect.  Birth isn’t filled with candles and sweet syrupy lyrics and everyone sitting around in navy blazers.

 

Birth is crying and screaming and pushing and sweating.  It’s seeing a part of God come out in human form in front of you.  Your heart is bursting like a water balloon and you feel surrounded and sustained by pure, unaltered, unabashed joy.  Joy at living.  Joy at this child you created.  Joy at seeing someone you love in front of you, not caring how your reaction looks to the world around you.  Thank God for our son, who reminded me of this. Thank God for Jesus, born screaming out the love of God and not caring who heard it.  And thank God for Mary, who probably thought she was screwing it all up.  But she wasn’t.

And that’s the best lesson of them all.


Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood, Music, Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

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