God & Grace in the Garden & Coop

"Hen Party"

I try to make it a habit to walk around our yard most days after work.  I circle the house, then head down to the garden where yellow and red Zinnias occupy one row and red-and-white striped ones form another. The heads of the sunflowers hang heavy, drooping and brown, and the yellow finches are happy to pilfer their drying seeds.  Our tomatoes grow nearby, dark and dense as a forest, with heavy fruit twice the size of my hand hanging like red water balloons on nearly every vine.

Our garden is a riot, an explosion of weedy chaos that cannot, in our current tropical conditions, be tamed. But, we try. We summon strength and courage to weed one bed, then another. Hidden, we find the small watermelons the grew from last year's seeds, the pale winter squash growing in inexplicable abundance.

This year, with our hens no longer free-ranging, we're freed the alarm of their endless infiltration of the garden gate. No more pecked-at tomatoes. No more chasing five, six harried hens, trying to shuttle them out through the narrow gate.

This year, the hens are confined to a large fenced yard attached to their coop and they've managed to peck the ground there bare of any sign of life. Noticing their sparse conditions this summer,  it dawned on me that our garden’s endless supply of weeds might be a welcome addition to their otherwise bleak landscape.

We started taking weeds to them by wheelbarrow and wagon-load, tossing the leggy green plants over the fence handfuls at a time.  The hens were elated.  They ran, pushing and shoving, to scour the windfall of succulent greens.  Our rooster, Joker, puffed out his chest, making several announcements to his girls, waiting until they set-in before taking his own. Within minutes, the stems were bare, stripped to frail, skeletal forms. 

What a grace this is, what a miracle: our chickens take our garden’s accidents and turn them into eggs.

There’s more, though.  Standing in the kitchen, on any given night, I’m frequently confronted with routine kitchen scraps (the peels, the cores, the wilted ends) as well as bowls of mystery food left too long in the refrigerator.  These too, the hens down enthusiastically, clucking and tutting.  When I feel weighted by the guilt of chili left too long in the back of the fridge, the knowledge that this too can feed to hens gives me solace.  These hens are teaching me grace again, reminding of the power of redemption, the truth that our mistakes are never the dead end we imagine them to be. 

Richard Rohr sums it up this way: God writes with crooked lines.  By which he means, God connects all the dots of our lives, the much-intended ones AND the ink blots that splatter accidentally on nearly every page.  God writes the story of our lives with a view so broad, so imaginative, even hens turning old tomatoes into eggs ought not to come as a surprise.

Seeing Better (#SmallWonder Link-Up)

"I could die tomorrow,” I told her.  “Without ever having pink glasses.”

The sales associate looked at me with her head cocked, eyebrows raised and conceded the point. 

I’ve had the same small, brown glasses frames since 2011. I chose them not long before the twins were born in that end-of-pregnancy flurry of getting everything done before life changes irrevocably.  Dentist? Check.  Glasses? Check. 

In the exam room the optometrist looked up, surprised, from his chart.  “This says I haven’t seen you since 2013?” he asks. 

“Yep.” I reply.

“And you bought contacts then?  How often do you change them?  Do you have any left?”  He voice conveys incredulity.

“Well, yeah.  I don’t wear my contacts much.”  I fumble through my memory bank, drawing a blank.  “I don’t know,” I finally reply, “I had twins, so the last couple of years are a little blurry.” 

The answer seems to satisfy. 

In the sales room, a young woman follows me around among the frames.  I ask her what’s “in” these days and she tells me bigger plastic frames. 

“What are you looking for?” she asks, calm and detached behind her half-framed lenses of dark blue metal.  Her dark hair is long and perfectly straight. 

“I want something fun,” I said, “some color.”

What I really wanted, before I even walked in the door, was pink glasses.  I wanted happy glasses, but I wasn’t sure I dared get them.  What if I made a mistake?    

I feel like a failure when the optometrist pulls up letters I can’t read.  Blinking, I watch letters flip and wiggle like so many small black ants waving their legs.  I make random guesses, occasionally upping my odds by offering two answers at once.  “Um, I think it’s an E . . . or a P?”  One line I cannot read at all.  The exam room is so strangely intimate, dimly lit, with the optometrist scooting around on his rolling stool, peering into my eyes with a little light that he moves in circles like a magic wand.   

My left eye, weak as ever, has worsened again, but, good news, I’m not yet in need of bifocals. 

Back in the sale’s room, the associate hands me purple glasses and offers red.  But I don’t want purple glasses, purple glasses don’t make me happy and red glasses bring to mind Sally Jesse Raphael (please tell me I’m not the only one who remembers THAT).  Then she motions toward an almost translucent light pink pair, but before she can pick them up, I say, “I think I had those glasses in fourth grade and I don’t really want to go back to that.”

In the end, I whittle it down to two pairs, identical in shape, one navy blue and the other a cheery magenta.  Both frames have funky squiggly patterns in complementary colors along the temples.  Both pairs are cute, but the blue look better on me.

Still, I hem and haw.  A second associate is called over.  She put the glasses on her own face for me.  “See,” she says, “these blue ones kinda blend in but with the pink ones, the frames are all you see.”  I see what sees and know she's right.  Then she adds a third pair into the mix, shaped like the others, but in a deeper shade of purple.  "These make a nice compromise," she says.  But her well-intended suggestion only further confuses things for me.    

I circle the room, I sit again and slip frames off and on. 

“I’m turning forty in a year,” I tell the original associate, “maybe these will be my mid-life crisis glasses.”  I'm only half-joking.  Do I like the pink glasses or do I only like the ‘idea’ of pink glasses? 

“You’ll want to think about the clothes you wear too, not just what you have one today,” the second woman adds. 

“But pink goes with everything, right?” I ask, “Except for red?”

The younger woman agrees. “Pink goes with everything in my book,” she says.  I find her patience endearing.

I apologize for taking so long.  Then, finally, “I want the pink ones,” I say, scrunching my face up as if to offer an apology.

“I knew you did,” she says.  

(I knew I did too.)  

(Friends - it's my birthday this week!  Hop over to my facebook page to see a picture of me in my new glasses and, if you haven't done so already, LIKE MY PAGE.  I've been hovering near 600 page likes for a long time now and there's nothing I'd like more for my birthday than to finally cross that 600 mark.  Thanks!)
   

*   *   *   *

I'm super excited to be joining with Andi Cumbo-Floyd and Shawn Smucker to organize a weekend writer's retreat this summer at God's Whisper Farm in the beautiful mountains of Virginia.  Visit Andi's website for more info!

Welcome to the #SmallWonder link-up.  

What if we chose to deliberately look for small moments of wonder, the small sparks of presence, of delight or sorrow, of true humanity in which we meet God?  

That's my proposal - that we gather here each week to share one moment of Wonder from each of our days.  You're invited to link-up a brief post about a small moment of wonder.  Don't worry if your post is too long, too short, or not just right - you're welcome to come as you are.  

While you're here, please do take a look around and encourage at least one other blogger with a comment.   

Sucker-Punch (a story of Openness and Vulnerability)

I was so grateful a few weeks ago to receive an invitation from Amber Cadenas to write something for her blog, Beautiful Rubbish: the everyday art of learning to see.  Amber's running a series of guest posts under the topic "Tales of Beauty from the Rubbish Heap," in which she's asking several writer friends to write about story of redemption or beauty found in unexpected places.  Today I'm writing a little more of the "behind the scenes" story of how we found, then lost, then found again this old farm house.  

*   *   *

We wrote an offer on a big old farm house – a solid, happy looking place with great bones, two acres and a “tenant house” – the day after Christmas 2013.  Then we waited a week for the bank representative to return from vacation and reply to our offer.   

This was the fourth house we bid on over an eight month period.  We'd been through enough ups and downs to be cautious, but this time around we were very, very excited.  We tried to simmer down about it, but one day I brought home a stack of Organic gardening magazines I found on the free shelves at the local library, then my husband started researching chickens on-line.  Soon I was scanning Craigslist for the cabinets and fixtures needed to bring the place up to speed for a family of six.  

But it wasn’t until the last day, the day before we would hear back, that I really let myself get excited.

It felt so right . . .

 

Follow me over to Amber's place to read the rest of this surprising story, won't you? And while you're there, be sure to click around to get a flavor for her writing.  Thanks so much, Amber for this lovely opportunity!

 

Photo credit: www.jeremybinns.com 

Bearing One Another (Breast Feeding, Potty Training and Twins)

“Let me tell you a story,” Estevan said. “This is a story about heaven and hell.  If you go visit hell, you will see a room like this kitchen. There is a pot of delicious stew on the table, with the most delicate aroma you can imagine. All around, people sit, like us. Only they are dying of starvation. They are jibbering and jabbering, but they cannot get a bit of this wonderful stew God has made for them. Now, why is that?  They are starving because they only have spoons with very long handles. As long as that.” He pointed to the mop, which I had forgotten to put away. “With these ridiculous, terrible spoons, the people in hell can reach into the pot but they cannot put the food in their mouths. Oh, how hungry they are! Oh, how they swear and curse each other!” he said.

“Now,” he went on, “you can go and visit heaven. What? You see a room just like the first one, the same table, the same pot of stew, the same spoons as long as a sponge mop. But these people are all happy and fat.  Perfectly, magnificently well-fed, and very happy. Why do you think?  The people in this room are feeding each other.”  

Then he pinched up a chunk of pineapple in his chopsticks, neat as you please, and reached all the way across the table to offer it to Turtle. She took it like a newborn bird. 
                                           adapted from Barbara Kingsolver's book, The Bean Tree

*   *   *

Two cheap plastic potty chairs sit side-by-side in the kitchen.  On them sit my twin boys, half-naked, both nearly two-and-a-half years old. 

Pajama-clad, I sit cross-legged in front of them, flipping my way through picture books.  Outside, the wind-chills are below zero and here on the old wooden floors it's drafty and cold.  Isaiah sits primly on his potty, hands folded neatly, a look of delighted expectation on his face and Levi looks similarly happy with the addition of a palpable sense of confidence.

By the end of the morning I'm frazzled.

There's pee on the floor and I'm not sure whose it is. 

Wet spots lay scattered throughout the house and I'm unable to accurately discern between melted puddles of snow and urine.  There was a poopy incident, which we all know is the worst, and as I'm putting shoes and socks onto still-pudgy feet in preparation for taking the older ones to school, I notice poop on the bottom of a little foot.

They're diapered in the van and it feels like oh-so-much of a relief that I wonder whether I can hack this potty-training business at all.  Some have suggested that I train them one-by-one and, driving along, it does seem simpler.

But here's the thing, one boy has the ability, but lacks the will, while the other has the will, yet lacks the ability and I'm hoping, secretly, that they will somehow pull each other along.

It's happened before.  

//

Levi, our baby B, was pulled into the world feet first after what Drs refer to as an Internal Podalic Version.  After a good five minutes of wrestling he emerged breathless and badly bruised on his ankles and feet.  The bruising and trauma led to a tough bout of Jaundice which left our wee-little-warrior exhausted nearly all of the time.

All of our babies experienced Jaundice so we were prepared and stripped him down to nurse, hoping the fresh air would keep him awake, but after an initially weak latch, he would drift off to sleep, too drowsy to be bothered with food.  Between blood draws and dropping weight, we worried about our little man.

My husband learned to finger-feed him milk I pumped, teaching him to suckle a syringe.

Meanwhile, his twin brother, Isaiah, was a nursing champ.  Born a good ten minutes before his brother, he latched on with a ferocity in the recovery room. 

Finally, desperate to be home with our older two, longing to get the all-is-well signal from the pediatrician, we decided to try tandem nursing.  We practiced popping Isaiah on, letting him work for the let-down, then bringing Levi in on the other side at the crucial moment, so that both could get the gush of milk. 

I don't remember if this was something we read in a book or if a helpful nurse gave us advice, but I do remember watching those boys and realizing how the one was leaning on the other already, how one's strength was carrying the other's weakness.

//

This is how it is with twins, with two who fit together like puzzle-pieces in a womb for nearly nine-months.  They enter life paired and they learn both to lean and support from an early age because there are times when life depends on it.  One runs to get me when the other is hurt and each serves as the other's primary interpreter. If one has a cookie, he waits expectantly to be sure his brother will too and, when they have to, these two two-year-olds share and take turns for as long as their desire-filled bodies can stand it.

What I'm noticing is not the peculiarity that it happens to be this way for them, but the possibility that it might be this way for all of us.  

Paul tells the church in Galatians that in bearing each other's burdens, they will be fulfilling the law of Christ (Gal 6:2).  Of course, this can be taken to unhealthy extremes and the phrase "one another" is key to the verse, but Paul is getting at the heart of the bible in his teaching here.  Elsewhere the apostle persistently refers to his readers as "brothers and sisters in Christ."

We are related, whether we like it or not, both as believers and members of one body, but also as human beings.  One of the most significant aspects of the creation account in Genesis 1 is the clear depiction of the interdependence of all things - all things made to exist in interdependent relationship with each other and with God. 

So let me ask, ever so gently, have you learned to lean? To be carried by the strength of another (which is to be the recipient of sheer grace)?  Have you learned to carry? To lift another along without resentment or judgment, but to simply give of your own deep giftedness (which is to be a conduit of sheer grace)? 


//

This is the law of Christ, this is the kingdom of God come down in our midst, when we carry each other, when we bear with each other in weakness and strength. 

This post is linked with #TellHisStory.

Inheritance (Letting Go of Guilt)

 

We inherited several gallon-sized bags of blueberries when my in-laws sold their house and moved to Florida.  I like to think that they were handpicked by my mother-in-law some time ago, back before the brain tumor and multiple surgeries left her partially paralyzed, before we lost her without really losing her in so many ways.  She was a force to be reckoned with in the blueberry patch bringing them home by the bucket-full and urging them onto her grandchildren who wandered her house like a little Blue Man Group, stained with perpetually blue hands and faces.  

After helping his parents load their truck, John can back home with a few frozen roasts and the blueberries.  That was last March and if those berries were excavated from the depths of my in-laws’ deep-freezer, carbon-dating may be required to get their exact age.  

But here’s the thing – I don’t use a lot of frozen blueberries.  

So a lot of those berries sat in our freezer – like two of the three bags – and then got moved with us when we sold our house and moved this past summer.  And now, here we are, preparing to move again and I’m cleaning out our deep freezer and there isn’t room in our small freezer for everything.  So I was getting ready tonight to make some blueberry muffins because – God forbid I throw out my mother-in-law’s blueberries.  

I was planning to make muffins while my husband worked at a mountain of dishes and small children melted-down all around me; planning to make muffins after waiting for over two hours at the Dr with my daughter and getting pulled over on the way to the pharmacy; planning to make muffins I was pretty sure my kids wouldn’t eat.  

Why?

Because I wanted to honor my mother-in-law.  I didn’t want to feel guilty about throwing out all of that hard work and I didn’t want to lose one more connection to the woman she was - I wanted to do the right thing.

Sometime later, after the twins were to bed and the dishes done, after thawing and straining the dark purple juices into the sink, I realized that I don’t really have to make those muffins. 

“It’s ok, Kelly,” I thought, “Let it go.” 

I just don’t have a double-batch of muffins in me tonight, nor do I imagine I’ll have it in me sometime in this next harried month before me move.  And, oh my, I can’t imagine lugging them along with us to the new house like some big blue ball and chain.  So I’m cutting myself loose, cutting free of my own self-induced guilt. 

My mother-in-law’s will, her spirit – neither the essence of who she was or who she is – cannot be found in those old berries, it just can’t.  And my tossing them isn’t any more a betrayal of her than it is a betrayal of people all over the world who’d give their eye-tooth for those berries. 

It’s just a simple act of surrender, another form of letting-go and laying down the ideal self in favor of something more real which looks a lot more like a very tired, worn-out mother of four young children. 

My mother-in-law has four children – grown now – and my husband remembers picking blueberries as a child, bringing them home in buckets and eating more than he picked.  He wants to plant blueberries at the new house, who knows how many, but it’s part of his plan.  I look forward to walking out among them with my kids in tow, picking and eating and maybe even freezing a few and thinking of my mother-in-law from time to time. 

When their hands and faces are stained and their bellies popping, I’ll ask them if they remember how Bunia used to let them eat all the berries they wanted.  I’ll tell them how I dreaded changing their blueberry-filled diapers and how I tried to subtly curb their in-take.  I’ll tell them how much she loved them then and how she loves them now, only differently.   

And it will be enough.    

This post is linked with Playdates With God. 

Photo source HERE.

What is Being Born (Nothing is Wasted)

Kneeling on the dirty living room rug, the twins swarm and climb on my back, my legs, my shoulders.

With focused determination I slowly piece together a ridiculously complicated floor puzzle.  Over time a large smiling farmer perches happily atop a John Deere tractor.  The man and the words, "John Deere" are easy, but the rest of the pieces - black and yellow tires and the plain green body cut in strange shapes and sizes - have me turning piece after piece in circles.  I try and try for a fit as little hands and feet dislodge whole sections mere seconds after their completion.

It's sheer chaos and the stress of focusing in the midst of it all rivals the near panic attack I have every time I try to put together our ridiculously complicated tree-house tent.

As a mother of young children, I've learned to focus like a ninja, because it's the only way I can get anything done.  There are always two or three people talking at me, no matter what I'm doing.  Raising four children isn't like walking and chewing gum at the same time, it's more like walking and talking and building a miniature model of the International Space Station while humming a lullaby and taming wild shrews.

I am this mama on the floor doing the impossible day after day after day.  

Kneeling there I feel the intensity of my focus, the intensity of this skill that's being tested and forged every day and I wonder, what's this capacity that's being born in me, even here, even now?

*   *   *

Later in the week I sit typing at the computer, writing a sermon for the first time since the twins were born.  I've preached in the years since their birth, but without manuscript, speaking from notes scribbled in colored crayon and marker on (I kid you not) pieces of paper towel scrounged from the bathroom at Panera.

My preaching style has relaxed, you could say, since my life exploded, but for some reason I'm sitting, typing, word for word, what I already know I want to say.

It's a familiar passage, one I explored with my students every semester of every year I taught and I already know what God is asking me to do, but I'm scared.

What I believe is that I simply need to offer the passage and the people in it as a space where the congregation can enter in and encounter Christ, everyone receiving something different as we all gather together around the table of God's word.

The passage tells the story of Jesus' dinner at Simon the Pharisee's house and, for years, I've had the idea of telling that story while setting a table.  But setting a table as I speak, laying a table cloth, plates, napkins and cups, means no notes, no manuscript, just sheer presence as we all enter, together, into the meal.

I know that I know the story, but I'm worried about my ability to focus, to tend to so many things - the sermon, the spirit, the table - while speaking.

Then God stirs within me and I see myself kneeling on the floor with that ridiculously complicated puzzle in the middle of all of that Crazy and I hear my question anew even as I know the answer.

*   *   *

"What capacity is being born in me, even here, even now?"

Advent is a season that calls us to ponder, to wait and wonder, to listen for the stirrings of what new thing God might be doing in and through us.

God is always at work, preparing in us that which will be needed. All of the moments of time that seem wasted - the detours, distractions, the many, many pieces of the puzzle that simply seem not to fit - none of these are without purpose, none without reason, none wasted.  

My question was one born of frustration and curiosity, but to even ask the question, to wonder and wait for the answer to be revealed, is an act of faith.  Because our inability to see or understand what God is doing, doesn't mean that God isn't actively bringing into being what's most needed in us and in the world.  

So let me ask you, as we enter the season of Advent together . . .

What capacity, what new thing, is being born in YOU, even here, even now?

Writing It on the Walls

Don't tell my two-year-olds, but in a classic case of role-reversals, I've been writing on the walls while they nap. 

It all started in the morning when I woke in the darkness and smacked my head straight into the wall of things I hadn't done the night before.  My mind crowded instantly with images of the bags that needed to be packed, the lunches to be made, the papers waiting for initials, the clean laundry that sat souring in the washing machine, and so-on and so-forth, so that I was sinking from the start. 

Then, as the morning progressed, I yelled at my son and brushed coldly by my daughter when she wouldn't stop crying over banging her shin on the stairs. I had an all-out screaming competition with a two-year-old that consisted of the word "no" being exchanged at louder and louder volumes until my throat was sore and he collapsed in tears.

And then, after loading the stroller into the van and out and packing it with toddlers and pushing it through three sets of doors, they wouldn't let me walk my kindergartner to his classroom (did I mention this was his first full day of school?).

Yes, that's how it started. 

But there were the emails too, and dishes and the crumby, crunchy floor and two two-year-olds climbing in and out of the cupboard with a seemingly unending barrage of "Poop! Poop!"

Then we had the WIC appointment which, thankfully, didn't require finger-pricking, but the twins whined the whole way there and all the way to the farm stand where we spent our checks on tomatoes and corn, cucumbers and peaches.

I relished the silent ride home while the twins crunched on cucumbers, I thought things might turn out OK after all.

Until we parked and I backed into a tree with what I'm hoping was my bumper.  

I didn't even stop to look at it because I still had two little people to get out of two buckles each and across the street and even on that short little trip, shoes fell off and had to be replaced and they battled over crossing the threshhold of Home just. because. they. could.

Then the neighbors came home from the funeral, home from burying their baby boy who never saw the light of day, who died in-utero at thirty-nine weeks because the cord got pinched.

And I didn't know what to make of it all, only that it wasn't going well and I couldn't fix it, not any of it.  

But somewhere in the middle of it all, as I stood desperate in the kitchen, the words of Julian of Norwich came to me.  Julian, who lived her life cloistered in a cell with two windows - one that faced out on the world and one that faced the alter and cross.  Julian, who lived in a time of war and plague and deep anxiety, yet dared to believe and claim that we are all held, all sustained by the love of God, her words echoed through me,

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Julian's words sank into me like an anchor, a life-line, restoring, reconnecting me to the One who is life, the One who was and is and will make all things well.  So I wrote them down on contact paper and posted them over the sink.

I think of that baby, so close to life, but cut off, inexplicably from its source, and I think that I am often not so far from that. I wrote Julian's words on the wall, so I could remember, when everything seems dark that there is something, someone, who holds it all, holds Us all in the palm of his hand.

The Distance Between Branch and Ground

"Of course, there's the coming-down too.  Backwards."
And then he said:
"Which would be difficult . . ."
"Unless one fell . . ."
"When it would be . . ."
"EASY."
 - from In Which Tiggers Don't Climb Trees

*   *   *

At five years old, he's all skin and bones with straw-colored hair that sticks out in every direction.  In loose-fitting “crogs,” as we call them (Crocs to most others) he positions one foot in the crook of the Red Bud tree that stands on the slope of our small front lawn.  Reaching with wirey arms, he pulls and pushes himself up into the tree, then continues climbing, no longer the tentative four-year-old of last summer, but eager and confident as he explores the higher branches that until this year were his sister’s domain.

Once he reaches his roost, he stands there waiting.  Waiting for her to come home or for the neighbor boy to come out or a stranger to walk by, because, apparently it isn’t climbing if no one’s watching. 

I squat weeding the flower beds a good ten feet away, obeying his command to “Look, look!” and keeping a wary eye on the distance between boy and sidewalk.  Where he only sees height, I see the distance to the ground.   

*   *   *

It seems to me that the process of growing up has a lot to do with comprehending the distance between branch and ground and maybe, just maybe, the second half of life has to do with regaining the joy of ascent even while armed with the knowledge of the fall.


*This post was written for Five Minute Friday in which the rules are to simply write for five minutes on the prompt.  The body of this post was written in five minutes last Friday, but I needed to let it sit for awhile and I added the quote and final sentence today. 

Where the Wild Things Are

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God . . . John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Mark 1:1-4 adapted

I met my friend in the wilderness the other night. Well, it wasn't exactly the wilderness, but it was a bar of sorts, which for me still qualifies as a real and somewhat alarming wilderness, being the good Christian girl I was raised to be. She was late and I sat there in the dim light trying to appear busy on my phone and constructing to-do lists on the white placemat in front of me.

She arrived full of unnecessary apologizes which I quickly brushed aside and we dove in head first. Between us there's little need for small talk and right there in the middle of that noisy wilderness we each pulled open the layers of our lives and sat back, listening through tears as our hearts talked for awhile.

This is the friend who tells me how her marriage really is, tenuous and struggling, and shares how she slapped her son in a moment of exasperated rage that has melted now into a messy pile of regret. She is the one I can tell how I yelled at my own son, threw a royal tantrum of rage that scared him and me and how we all ended up on the couch in tears trying to figure out how that day could be redeemed.

* * *

I have to admit that I never really liked Maurice Sendak's book, Where the Wild Things Are. I tend to like books that are warm and pretty, books that affirm my need for a world that's safe, orderly, and predictable. But, it’s possible that the fact that I don’t particularly like the book is an indication that I do get it, a little bit at least. What I do understand is that Max is struggling with the wilderness, with all that is wild and untamed both inside and outside of himself.

Something about the unrelenting, all-humbling job of parenting leaves me too familiar with this wilderness. If my life were a children's book, then one might notice a forest of sorts growing in my house most days right around four pm or any other time that happens to be about an hour before my husband is due home and a half-hour before I lose it.

Too often by that point the day is been played out - patience is gone. I'm wresting dinner onto the table while kids are whining, fighting, hanging and swinging off of my legs like the little wild things they are. By then we're all wearing our wolf suits and if the windows are open the whole neighborhood can hear the roaring, gnashing of teeth and rumpus that ensues.

As a parent, as a human, I'm well acquainted with wilderness and wild things, within and without, but it doesn't mean I like it.

* * *

It's significant that the gospel of Mark places the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ right smack in the middle of the wilderness. This gospel has no time for angels, places no stock in genealogies or other such small-talk as a means of introducing the striking, challenging figure of Christ who emerges in the pages that follows. Mark begins like my friend and I do, by peeling back the layers and starting not in the skies full of stars and angel choirs, but on the bare, dusty, rocky ground of the wilderness.

Something about this gives me heart, gives me hope.  Something about it resonates with the prophecies of Christ and the prophets who spoke them, those craggy ill-kept men and women who lived on the edges of civilized life and thereby lived and spoke that much closer to the heart of things.

The good news begins in the wilderness. What a challenge, what a hope.

* * *

The friend I met with told me how she'd shared with her counselor that she has few real, close relationships, few relationships where anything beyond the bright cheery small-talk of this season might be appropriate. Her counselor said, "Yes, but what about this Kelly? It seems like you have a real relationship with her, why do you think that is?"

My friend, God bless her, said, "Kelly's real. I mean, she told me shethrew an apple peel at her children, for goodness sake, so I feel like I can be my real self with her."

After telling this story she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, "Why is it so hard to believe that our humanity is what's most attractive about us?"

* * *

Oh, my friends. How deep and wild is the wilderness within you? Who do you have who's willing to meet you there?

* * *

This is the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ - the One who came and dwelt among us, who meets us in the fullness of humanity. Christ, who "sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year" to meet us here, "where the wild things are."


I'm so grateful for my friend who gave me permission to share from our conversation - she's one of the flowers in this beautiful field.

Reposting this from December in honor of Maurice Sendak's 85th birthday and is linked with Playdates with God and Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday.

The Rescuer

I had just emptied the dishwasher and was bent, filling it with plates and forks from lunch when I heard the loud crash.  It happened during those few quiet moments of contentment, when the sunlight pours through the kitchen windows and the three boys, with sated stomachs, mingle contentedly in the living room.   

I heard the crash and looked up and start running all in one swift movement, plowing  through the dining room and over the hip-high baby gate without pausing, straddling it without breaking stride.  Twelve-month-old Levi lay on his back underneath the record stand which had fallen forward onto him, pinning him to the ground.  As I ran, in the split second between kitchen and living room and holding him, I watched his older brother swoop in and throw the table off.   

Then the crying started and I scooped that baby up and pressed him to my chest as the wails pierced my ears.  His brother started in immediately with explanations and I resisted the urge to accuse him of causing the table to fall, resisted the urge to pin one more child under a weight of any kind.   

Levi paused in his crying and lifted his head to look at the table, as if wondering what happened.  Convinced that nothing was broken, I started to breathe again.   

Like all moments of crisis, the situation bonded the kids and I as we sat together on the living room floor sharing what we saw, what we heard, what we feared.  Solomon was buzzing from the action and bounced on the couch, talking loudly.   

I was impressed by his quick thinking and said, “Good thing his older brother was here,” finishing with words I knew he’d relish, “to rescue him.”   

His face lit up like the sun through those kitchen windows and I knew he’d greet his sister and father at the door with the story of how he rescued Levi.   

Later I remembered how the “Jesus Storybook” children’s bible refers to Jesus as the “Rescuer,” and it seemed to me to be an entirely appropriate title for Jesus, for One who comes when we need him most and throws off the pressing, crushing weight of sin that lies heavy on us all.