For the Fathers

 

"Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up." Brene Brown

Sometime in the land before time, by which I mean the time before I was, my older brother woke in the middle of the night to the low rolling growl of a thunder storm.  Like any young boy boasting a reasonable level of common sense and a less reasonable level of imagination, the house-shaking rumbles and shadow-casting flashes of light scared him witless. 

My father, a young man then, got him out of bed and they stumbled together to sit in the stairwell where they could easily watch the storm as it rolled across the night sky.  They sat side-by-side on the stairs, a large and solid body next to a thin and quaking one and the story goes that as they watched the storm, my Dad explained the science behind it all.  This, I'm sure, helped with the reasonable part of my brother's brain, but I have a feeling that it wasn't what my father said that night that made a difference in the stormy nights to come, but rather his presence. 

When fathers show up, it isn't the knowledge they bring or the tools or (a-hem) cold hard cash that makes the difference.  Every child is grateful, always, for the part of a father that fixes a problem, but what we need, what the world needs, is men who will continue to show up and be present even when they're certain they lack the appropriate tool for the job, even when their hands are empty. 

A friend of mine recently posted a quote from Jean Vanier, the founder of the L'Arche communities all over the world,

"We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours.  We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible."

So this one's for the fathers, including my own.  Thank you for all the many, many times you showed up with and without a solution to the problem at hand.  Thank you for being willing to be one more "tiny sign . . . that love is possible."

Happy Father's Day, Dad!  I love you!

 

 

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.

MEGA-CART (Five Minute Friday: Imagine)

A five-year-old and two two-year-old's in a single shopping cart fight like three cats in a burlap bag.  So, lately, on trips to Target or Aldi with all three boys in tow, I grab not one cart, but two, loading a toddler into each and allowing the oldest to ride on the side like a garbage collector, hoping on and off at will. 

I push the carts side-by-side, holding them together at the seam while Solomon clings to the bow, facing me and grinning with boyish excitement.  We barrel down the aisle, a true double-wide as I announce in the sort of gravelly voice you might hear over the loud speaker at a monster truck rally, "It's MEGA-CART!"  Then, adding for effect, my own version of head-banging, heavy-metal music. 

The bad guys are never far behind and it's often necessary to launch into turbo gear as we pass by cases of diet coke stacked like an armory.  In narrow spaces or rounding a bend, we break formation, transforming into a more stream-lined design, moving and shifting as the space demands, rearranging ourselves like a flock of geese. 

These boys and I glide through the store, soaring on the wings of imagination and we're so busy playing that we forget, for once, to fight. 


Lisa-Jo Baker hosts Five Minute Friday.  Last week's theme was imagination.  Click on the link to read more posts on the topic.

From Grace to Grace

It started with a lean and reach until both hands grasped the first metal bar, then the long, lean body followed, swinging to build momentum, spindly legs pumping as though wading through the air.  Every day of kindergarten my daughter practiced the monkey bars with a focus that bordered on obsession.  Fifteen minutes of recess, twice a day, found her crisscrossing the bars over and over again, walking back and forth through the air on calloused hands.  Reaching the end, she would turn without stopping and repeat or simply swing backwards toward the platform. 

I wrote last summer about Monkey Bar Living and how life can feel so precarious sometimes.  I was facing summer at home alone with four young children, two crawling with focused determination and two exploring the world with boundless enthusiasm.  I felt fearful and anxious as we swung wildly into a new phase of life. 

 

But we survived and thrived and I started this blog and got some good stories out of it all and here we are now again, swinging toward summer with less than three days of school left.  Those two crawlers are toddling now, head-strong and top-heavy and the bathroom closet is stocked with four boxes of band aids because I feel it in my bones that this will be the summer of skinned knees and maybe even broken bones as the older two strap on roller skates and learn to ride on two-wheels.  Then, also, there’s the little matter of having sold our house with no idea of where we'll live in two months time.  

 

We’re again in motion, letting go and reaching, swinging forward with one hand stretched open, the callouses growing as we practice this way of life, this faith lived-out.  And I wonder how long it will take for me to be able to cross these bars with ease, to move from “grace to grace” as the beloved disciple says* with the same sort of confidence and assurance that radiates from my daughter’s capable limbs? 

Author, Cynthia Bourgeault suggests in her book, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, that the spiritual life is composed of a series of embodied gestures, the chief of which is surrender.  These gestures or postures, as Bourgeault describes them, aren’t primarily learned through the mind, but through the body and through a great deal of repetitive practice.  So we sit and pray, we kneel and bow with open hands all the while practicing this act of trust that seems so counter intuitive, so difficult to wrap our grasping minds around.  Or, we swing, leaning, and reaching like my daughter does, allowing a deeper sense of focus that resides deep within the body and extends outward all the way to the tips of our fingers, to guide us. 

 

Over time we realize that our sitting, our kneeling, our open hands are as much the prayer as any petitions that manage to pass our stumbling, mumbling lips.  The act of letting go, the act of moving from grace to grace is the prayer.  In the end, we are silenced, as our prayer is transformed from words to being and we find ourselves home at last where we always have been - "in him."**

 

So, that’s where you’ll find me this summer, practicing again and again the art of letting go, in grocery stores and swimming pools and wherever the adventures of summer lead us.  And maybe, just maybe, my husband and I will turn into some sort of spiritual Tarzan and Jane as we learn to swing our way through life, letting go to receive, moving, as always, from grace to grace.   

*John 1:16  **Acts 17:28
This post is linked with Playdates with God and Tell His Story.
Image credit here.

A Tree Speaks

I left the house in a huff of anger and frustration, pulling away from the curb without a plan.  I wanted quiet and space and a place to use my computer and phone, but beyond all of that I needed to be near water. 

I needed to sit and watch it moving, to allow its gentle current to move me back into the larger stream of life, a place more hopeful and healing than the dark corner I’d backed myself into.  So I headed to a park a few miles out of town, a small strip of land bordering a creek that boasts a walking trail with heavy, old picnic tables dotting the water’s edge.

It took me awhile to settle in, I paced talking and texting on my phone, moving from table to table to avoid the noise and dust of an industrial sized mower that seemed intent on following me.  I fidgeted and fussed, like a bird looking for the perfect place to land. 

Settling at last at a picnic table in the shade near the water’s edge, I watched the water and the insect world at my feet; the ants that ran in a fury and a caterpillar making its deliberate way across the ground.  As I watched, I felt myself being slowed to the pace of the world’s breathing.     

I suppose the tree was watching the entire time.  Observing the texting, the talking, the hopping from table to table and then finally, the slowing, sinking into time and space.  She watched waiting, reading me and holding her silence, like the wisest among us often do, until the moment was right. 

She spoke while I was praying, in a voice that sounded, at first, like a cry. 

I turned at the sound and there she stood, just a few feet behind me, a statuesque sycamore.  Her trunk was bent, jutting out like a woman’s hip does when carrying a young child.  Her arms and shoulders lifted at an angle as though she had thrown her hands up in the air at some point long ago.  She wore the beauty of her leaves like a giant head-dress that fell around her neck in a waterfall of shaking, shimmering green light. 

I wondered how long she’d stood there watching the slow movement of the murky water, the endless turning of the world and how much she knew of the fallen branches and logs, the trees now dead on the opposite bank, bleached white like bones in the sun. 

Despite her cry, she looked happy to me, standing with her splotchy bark peeled white in some places, her branches humming with the singing vibration of cicadas.  

I noticed she was smiling and as I sat, listening, she spoke again as if answering my unspoken question.    

 

“I have deep roots,” she said.  “Besides, who do you think gave me this voice?  And who gave you yours?” 

Her face softened then with compassion, “Don’t be afraid to use it, to lift your voice and your arms and cry out like so many before you, ‘Lord, don’t you care?!’” 

She paused, as if to let this sink in.   

Then she said, “Watch the water and grow deep roots.  The deeper your roots, the louder your cry and the further your arms will reach until they’re knocking on the very doors of heaven.  Then you’ll know that this is what you were made for; to stand here, with your gnarled roots pressing down into the cool darkness, your weathered arms raised and shaking in the wind, crying out, until you are reached and known by the One who gave you this voice.” 

I wrote quickly, listening to the voice that came from without and within, all around, until she grew silent again and still.

Looking back I can see how that tree, so at home in her body and being, rooted deep by the water’s edge, was calling me home.  Speaking to my heart, she bypassed my fear and anxiety, my questions and calculations, reiterating the truth that this, indeed, is what I was made for.    

This post is linked with Imperfect Prose (click on the button to the right to read more links).

Like the Sun on a Cloudy Day

"Where there's surrender, synchoronicity tends to follow . . ." Cynthia Bourgeault


After binge-cleaning and crashing with an episode of Glee late the night before, we woke to the sound of the twins hooting and hollering in their cribs and the anxious chatter of the to-do lists in our heads.  Isaiah woke up grumpy and soggy, like a little polar bear fresh out of hibernation and the twins, my husband and I all stumbled down stairs, a whole parade of sleepy-headed grizzlies. 

It was Sophia's birthday and we were scheduled to get pictures taken of our house for posting it for sale online and Solomon also needed a chaperon for his end-of-the-year field day.  In other words, it was "go time" and my husband was taking the morning off from work so we could have all hands on deck.

Solomon wandered out, obviously dragging and stated that he might not go to school after all.  But then the birthday girl came out and the sun shone in the windows, bright and the kids settled into reading with Daddy on the couch and it started to feel like our cobbled together plan for the day might just work.

It wasn't long, though, before we fell behind schedule because once you've started reading about the plagues in Egypt, you can't just stop in the middle and then the rushing began.  I thawed out pancakes for Sophia and used some painter's tape as a ribbon for her morning present and John headed out with all four kids and 24 sparkly butterfly cupcakes for the morning round of drop-offs and I set to work.

When John returned we both set into cleaning with a fury while the twins tore through the house like locusts, methodically undoing all the work I'd already accomplished.  Emptying the back pantry, they built pyramids out of bottles of juice, cans of coffee and diet coke.  They clanged and banged their way through the kitchen, dragging out pots and pans until Levi pinched his finger in a cupboard door and dissolved into a puddle of screaming and tears.

As the tension mounted and time slipped through our fingers like sand, the clouds rolled in, literally, and what had started as a sunny morning turned heavy, dark and gray.  We had delayed listing our home by several days because of the forecast, hoping for a sunny day to get the best pictures possible, and here we were, listing late on a cloudy day. 

Despair seeped in and I told my husband we should just give up and leave the house as it was, but we still didn't know whether we needed to be home to let the photographer in, so we slugged it out, tag-teaming the twins and chaos. 

There was just so much I couldn't control - the weather, the twins - so I started praying that the sun would come out, because I really wanted it to, but I also let go a little and the thought came to me, maybe there'll be a rainbow just as the photographer arrives.  This was enough to cause a little seed of hope to take root and my heart and hands opened a little further as I found compassion for my tired self and for those two little boys who were wondering where I'd hidden all of their toys.   

Then I started thinking, maybe the photographer will buy the house and we won't even have to go through showings, or maybe someone out there needs to see a house on a cloudy day with just a smattering of food on the kitchen counter, or a pink plastic calculator laying in the corner of an otherwise spotless living room.  Somehow my heart turned the corner to surrender as I realized again that what I do not know and cannot control is not always a bad thing; there's always so much more to life than the very small and finite piece of the puzzle that I can see and shape. 

By eleven, my husband left for work and I took the twins to pick up Solomon and they sky was still filled with smokey gray clouds, the worst we'd seen in weeks.  After pick-up I drove back home to let the photographer in and as we sat waiting in the van I said, "Let's pray that the sun comes out," and we did. 

Not five minutes later, just as the photographer pulled up, the sun came out and I shouted to Solomon, "Look," before leaping out of the van to unlock the front door.  I was so relieved, ecstatic, but I still couldn't keep from saying, "You'd better go ahead and get that outside picture while the sun's out."  The clouds were there still, rolling across the sky and I guess I still believed that such grace is fleeting, like the sun on a cloudy day. 

If I gain anything from this whole process of house selling and buying, I hope it's a deeper sense of this grace that permeates life, this sun that shines endlessly, faithfully, whether we have the eyes to see it or not.    

This post is linked with Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday and Playdates With God.