Harvest (I want to be home when the combine comes)

Photo Source: HERE.

The neighbor’s dog killed

our kitten.  He’s an old

speckled hunting hound

who hobbles painfully

through a large fenced yard.

Our kids feed him handfuls

of bone shaped biscuits

through the fence

and run back and forth

calling his name. 

The kitten, slender and spry,

climbed the fence, curious,

and the old dog found

youth coursing through his

veins.  It was quick, they said, 
she didn’t comprehend the threat, 
he acted on training and instinct. 

The daycare children who played

nearby watched it all go down.

Crying, they were hurried

inside, to where the classroom bunny

sat safe in its cage. 

We weren’t home at the time. 

Later, when I sat in the grass snacking

with my boys, the neighbor called me

over to break the news.  We stood there

on opposite sides talking for a long time, 
our conversation divided by the fence.

He was apologetic, I was trying to figure

out what to tell the kids. 

“I didn’t think he still had it

in him,” my elderly neighbor observed.

We talked, as usual, about the woman

who owned this house before us - 
born here and died here at the age of ninety-seven -

and about the neighbor's own twin brother, a monk

in his seventies still making plans to teach overseas. 

The cat was handed back

over the fence, stiff and oddly heavy

in a plastic bag.  I put her in a box,

then went to wait for the school bus

to crest the hill, delivering

my happy children back home to me. 

//

The farmer has started cutting down

the dried brown corn that shines golden

when the sun hits just right.  Any day now

the field across the street will be empty

again.  The harvest feels like an inevitable 
end, the cutting down of it all and already 
I feel a sense of anticipatory loss.

I want to be home when the combine comes,

to witness the transformation.  Then 
there will be the long wait of winter
before seeds are sown in the quiet earth
and green shoots break through again. 

This is our sweet Tiger who loved to curl up and nap in my Asparagus fern.

Linking with Jennifer Dukes Lee for #TellHisStory.

For My Tall, Slender and Serious Daughter (Trust Yourself)

This week I'm honored to be guest posting over at Kelli Woodford's place, Chronicles of Grace.  Every week I help her and a handful of other writers host the Unforced Rhythms linkup.  Click over there at the end of this post to continue reading and visit other posts in the linkup.  

He’s a heavyset, gray-haired man, short and jovial who honed in on my daughter, tall, slender and serious.

“Smile!” he commanded and she obeyed.

Standing nearby I was overcome with a strong desire to whack that man, not really, but just mostly in that mama-bear, leave-my-kid-alone-kind-of-way. 

I too was a tall, slender and serious girl.  I cannot tell you the number of times men, mostly in passing, reminded me to smile. 

“Smile!” they’d say, passing me in the mall, in the college lunch line where I worked, on the street.

Sometimes it felt like a harmless flirtation, but underneath all of those commands to change the way my face looked, I got the message that it wasn’t ok to be me.  To be a woman, young or old, who rests serene in her own quiet seriousness is to shirk cultural expectations of the bubbly, giggly girl who lights up the world around her with her pearly whites. 

//

I took my daughter to the Dr. this week after she’d suffered through a baffling array of symptoms.  Was it allergies, a cold, a stomach bug, Strep?  We had no idea. 

She sat alone on the high examining table wrapped in a paper gown while the Dr. tried to puzzle things out.  Every time we visit the Dr. she worries about needing a strep test.  She hates the test, gags every time and occasionally vomits on whoever happens to be administering it. 

Finally the dreaded moment came and her eyes grew wide, as if to say, “Really, Mom? This again?”

To continue reading, follow me over to Kelli Woodford's place where you can read more posts in the Unforced Rhythms link-up and leave a comment. See you over there! 

Six Children's Books that Deepen My Faith

Sitting on the old leather couch or rocking slowly in a rickety glider, I’m surrounded by my children as we read together.  I feed my little ones on stories morning, noon and night.  Serving up Harry the Dirty Dog for breakfast, The Magic Tree House becomes an after nap snack, and the evening ends quite often with the quiet words of Goodnight Moon, lulling them off to sleep like sips of warm chamomile tea.  

Once children starting filling our house my own books – the ones from a bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies and the others from a Master’s of Divinity – were packed away to make room for cribs and changing tables and piles upon piles of children’s clothes and books.  A voracious reader, my appetite was now sated by short stories set on colorful pages and, much to my surprise, those books began to speak to me in all kinds of surprising ways.    

The Carrot Seed taught me about simple faith and perseverance in the face of discouragement as I watched the little boy tend with care and conviction that which was being formed in places he could not see.  The Runaway Bunny gave me new images for and insight into the story of the prodigal son and God’s great mothering, fathering, loving pursuit of the ones who belong to him.  

When I’m tempted to trade the truth of who I am for something the world wants me to be, The Story of Ferdinand, that peaceful little bull who’s carted off to the bull fights in Madrid reminds me about the truth of identity.  Refusing to fight despite the expectations of the taunting and teasing crowd, Ferdinand helps me find the freedom and resolve to make my own quiet but firm stand rooted in the truth of my identity as a beloved daughter of God.  

Tempted to judge the wilderness within myself and my children, I remember the little wild thing Max from Where the Wild Things Are.  When the wildest parts of me “roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth” I’m learning to, on occasion at least, join in with the “wild rumpus.”  Then, when I’ve had enough I, like Max, return home tired and spent to the place of truth where I am loved just as I am.  

I Love You Just the Way You Are, the simple board book about the little bear Ba and his caretaker George, reminds of the truth that sometimes love is the only thing that can pull us out of a “grumpy, frumpy, stumpy” sort of day; love is the trump card that breaks through every time.

And The Lotus Seed, the story of a refugee from Vietnam who carried a lotus seed half way around the world, affirms for me the truth that beauty and life can come even from great darkness, 

                           It [the lotus] is the flower of life and hope, my grandmother said, 

                           no matter how ugly the mud or how long the seed lays dormant, 

                           the bloom will be beautiful . . . (Sherry Garland)

In times when I’ve been unable to search and study scripture as I once did, the themes of the gospel continue to find me as I sit reading with my children perhaps because my heart is open and listening like a little child.  Now, as time and space open up around me and I return to the ministry of spiritual direction, writing and preaching, it's no surprise that I carry these books with me, replacing my church's usual movie clip sermon intro with a reading of The Runaway Bunny or The Carrot Seed. These books, through the grace and mercy of God, have influenced my "business"  and faith as much or more than any others. 

Are there any children’s books that influence your faith? 

Curious about these books? Here are the full titles and authors:

The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss
The Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown
The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
I Love You Just the Way You Are, by Virginia Miller
The Lotus Seed, by Sherry Garland
also check out The Curious Garden by Peter Brown which offers such a beautiful analogy for the way the kingdom of God can be tended and spread among us.  

This post is linked with the High Calling community linkup around the prompt Best Books for Business.  Click over to find more takes on the topic.

Half Moon Heart (a poem)

My heart is like
the half-moon peaking
out of the mid-day
blue sky.

There is more, always more,
hidden; more than I can
know or see.

Lord, teach me to tend,
carefully, the shadow
places where deep
roots dwell.

Teach me to love,
tenderly, the cool
darkness, to prize it
along with the light. 

This post is linked with Playdates with God and Unforced Rhythms.

Three Days (a poem)

(I recently spent six days inpatient in a local Behavioral Health unit due to the onset of severe and debilitating panic attacks.  I continue to work now, on the other side of that darkness, to process the experience, to understand its place in my story.  To read more you may want to check out these other posts, Homesick and Brown Paper Bag (Unpacking my Recent Hospital Stay.)

Three Days
 

The papers I signed in the ER

committed me to seventy-two hours

in-patient in the psychiatric unit.  Three

days is the initial standard of care

approved by insurance companies everywhere

before reassessments are made to extend

or end a stay. 

Three days also, I read, is what it would take

to sign myself out, even though it was a self-committal.

This gave me pause; I thought I could leave

when I wanted to, three days is a long time

to wait for freedom when you feel you are ready.

Now, on the other side of those locked doors

I cannot help but think of the symbolism of that number –

three days – the biblical symbol for the fullness of earthly

time. 

Three days Jonah spent in the belly of the whale,

before he was vomited onto the shore of his calling. 

Three days walking into Nineveh, speaking the words

he feared would cost his life, the message he didn’t

want to give. 

Three days blind it took for Saul of Tarsus to learn

to see again, to be reborn, renamed as Paul;

three days to shed the old life like an empty skin

before he could open his eyes and face the light again.

For three days also, Jesus was in the tomb before the

grave clothes fell off.  The stone scraped against stone

and he emerged transformed but the same, more himself

now that the old ways of death and decay were sloughed off

like so much dead skin.

I was in the hospital for six days, twice as long as I’d hoped

while my family waited and worried at home.

Lazarus also was an exception to the rule, for four days

he laid in dark cave of his own grave,

that extra day signifying that he was beyond repair.

“He stinketh,” his sister said, but hearing his name,

he walked out rank and disheveled, but Alive.   

Six days I waited while the old

skin, the old life cracked and peeled back a little,

six days before I too was vomited out those doors

to face again the blinding light,

the One who calls my name. 

Call it what you will – resurrection, transformation, conversion –

the tilting of a life from darkness to light takes its own sweet time.

Now I tell myself when darkness descends, give it time,

three days or more in the belly, the grave, the old decaying skin,

maybe even four or six, but as you wait, remember the light

that put you there, the voice that calls your name (even in the dark),

the feeling of that sandy shore beneath you when you emerge again,

reborn.