Morning Devotions

Kneeling on the cold stone

hearth each morning,

facing yesterday’s ashes

cold and gray as death, 

ignites a necessary humility.   

Today’s fire must be made

from what lies at hand -

life and heat coaxed

from pages of an old newspaper, 

kindling and a match

placed just so and the one log

that sits in the wood box, big

enough to snuff it all out. 

Dare to try, for you must

face this possible failure

again and again if you wish

to stave off the chill, to warm

the house before the children wake

in their innocence unaware

of this wrestling with wood

and flame, the effort it takes,

the faith. 

Linking with The High Calling for their community gathering on the topic, Create Good.

Gathering Mystery (a poem)

Eggs arrive 
one-a-day,
like manna.  

We run 
to check
the nest box,

Israelites leaping
at first light,
hands open,

to gather
the mystery
of provision

from 
unlikely

places.  

Photo Credit.

Linking with Playdates with God and the Unforced Rhythms community.

All of the Things of Fall

 

All of the things of fall
are as beautiful in their dying
as they were in their birth,
as if it were a farewell party,
a last hurrah, a riotous wake.

May I also be beautiful
in my surrender, fading
from green to brilliant
orange or red, and may
the moment of my letting go
be as precious as the leaf 
that falls, unnoticed, 
to the ground
that catches it.   

Still, there always remains
those few leaves that cling
and hold on, withered brown
in their stubbornness. Refusing 
to fall, they face the stark white winter 
alone while, below, the others return 
to that from which they came; 
returning, as it were, to home. 

Photo Source.

Come Rest With Me

 The cornfield across the street preparing for its winter nap.

The only way I can get my three year old twins to nap is by joining them.  

It started last week, the day after a horrid night of fevers and chills that kept the littlest one and me up until well past one a.m.  The fever broke by morning, but we were all haggard with a chest cold that refused to let us go.  I don’t remember how we made it through the morning, but by afternoon I had only one priority: sleep.

My boys gave up napping last spring and since then we’ve instilled a daily practice of “quiet time” which is routinely loud and filled with interruptions, arguments, loud crashes and the daily dismantling of their entire room.  The other day I ventured upstairs to investigate an alarming racket and found one boy hammering the pine paneled wall above his bed with a giant metal hammer.  

Most days I flee to the kitchen during the “quiet” hour, the room from which I can hear the least.  One day a few weeks ago I laid down on the kitchen floor and took a nap on a small rug, right there beside the sink and cupboards; I curled up like a cat.

After lunch last Wednesday I announced my plan – we would be napping, together.  The boys were excited, curious.  Where would I sleep?  Would I have a sleeping bag?  Would we really all be in the same room?

I tucked them in with their blankets, curtains closed, lights out.  They watched me stretch out on the thin wool race car rug with my pillow and a fleece blanket. 

“No talking,” I said.

I lay still, sleep settling like a fog and listened as they each sat up to peer at me as if to call my bluff, but I stayed silent and still and one by one they took it as truth – we were going to sleep.

Isaiah was first to give in and I listened as his breathing deepened, his body relaxing into a restful rhythm.  Levi tossed and turned, fidgeting, then he took up his stuffed kitty with the rattle inside and began shaking it rhythmically, forcefully.

“Levi,” I said, “No.  You need to be quiet.  Close your eyes.”

He laid the cat aside and I don’t know which of us fell first, but two hours later I woke to the quiet of two still-sleeping boys.   

They LOVED that we napped together.

Yesterday I pulled the trick again.  Since the change to daylight savings time our rhythms of rest and wakefulness have been oddly skewed by early morning waking and early evening meltdowns.  My boys were tired and needed rest, so I tucked them in again, this time leaving the room to head downstairs for a much-needed break. 

They were quiet, but restless, tossing and turning and I knew with certainty it wouldn’t be long before the whispering, then shouting began.  Sitting at the computer I could feel my own exhaustion weighing me down and eventually I gave in.  Climbing the stairs with a pillow and blanket in hand, I pushed their bedroom door open to find two bright-faced boys sitting up in bed. 

I sent them to the bathroom, then tucked their blankets in again.  I told them we would all be napping and stretched out on the dirty blue rug with my cell phone on vibrate beside me so we wouldn’t over sleep and miss the bus bringing the older kids home. 

Isaiah fell first again and Levi and I had our usual back and forth, then we all sank together in that small dark room.

I’ve been learning lately about the sacredness of rest; how sleep can be prayer and worship rolled into one.  In the silent stillness of my boys’ room, I felt us all enveloped by the holy, as though returned to the womb of life, the place where we’re nurtured in darkness and formed in our inmost beings. 

I’m teaching my boys the art of surrender, of giving in to the body’s need for rest – here, lay your head down like so, cover yourself, be still, be silent – or is it they who, in their evident need, are teaching me? 

This is what I pondered when I woke before them yesterday and slipped downstairs to stare out at the empty cornfield with a sleepy kitten in my lap  – how rest is a learned behavior, something modeled.

Resting with my boys, I am reminded again that God rested, right there in the beginning of the bible, before all of the other good and exciting things, God took a day off.  Almost as if God was sure we would never figure it out on our own. 

I believe God rests still, with us, when we stretch out long on an old wooden floor or snuggle up sweet like the twins in their big boy beds.  God models rest and invites us in whispering as the silent night settles and wraps her wings around us, "Here, lay your head down like so, cover yourself, be still, be silent, rest." 

This post is linked with Playdates with God , Unforced Rhythms, and #TellHisStory.

I Die A Hundred Deaths (Halloween and the Grouchy Ladybug)

This post from 2012 is one of my favorites.  The twins were just over a year old, Solomon was four and Sophia was in first grade.  I can't find the pictures that go with that Halloween, they're on an old computer, but the story should suffice.  I hope you enjoy it and find some grace for your own moments of surrender and resurrection.  Happy Halloween!

It’s rainy and cold and we’re all keyed up and worn out from being trapped indoors for two days by Hurricane Sandy.  I wake up late and squeeze in a shower while the twins, still in dirty diapers from the night before, wander around the living room.  Their whining amplifies to full pitch as my shower cues them in to the possibility that I’ll be (gasp!) leaving for the morning.  The preemptive separation anxiety continues through breakfast and packing everyone into the van to take my oldest to school. 

After drop-off I cart the remaining three kids back into the house.  We mull around, waiting anxiously for the babysitter who'll stay with the twins while the four year old and I head to his Halloween party at a local nursing home.   

The twins settle for a few minutes, their anxiety lulled by the fact that I haven’t left yet and simultaneously my son's anxiety about the party rises.  He peppers me with questions, 

“Will there be people from the nursing home in the party?”

“Um, I’m not sure, honey.”

“Will they see me in my costume?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to dress up?”

“No”

“I don’t want to wear a costume.”

I've been dreading this party from moment it was first mentioned, knowing that my son, so robust and cheerful at home, will be shy and clingy in a new place.  Committed to accompanying him, I hired a babysitter for the twins, despite my own teeth-clenching, foot-dragging antagonism toward it all. 

“Solomon,” I say, “what if I wear a costume too?”  I emerge from the back room wearing the fuzzy black antennae from my daughter’s ladybug costume.

“Ok,” he says, brightening, “you can be a black beetle.”

Then, I can feel myself giving in, letting go a little more as the idea strikes and I say, “What if I’m a ladybug?  I can steal Sophia’s costume.”

He approves and I have just enough time to gather the red and black-dotted wings and my camera as the babysitter arrives and the oldest twin dissolves into a raging stream of tears, protesting my impending departure.  I run in circles grabbing things, carrying the littlest one and nearly run out the door with him, before the sitter stops me and grabs him saying, “This one’s staying.”

Then we’re off to a party I don’t want to go to, but also don’t want my son to miss.  We drive through the rain and find his friends in a large room coloring at a table while elderly people in wheelchairs are set in a wide circle around them.  The residents watch, their eyes hungrily absorbing the beauty and innocence, the luxury of so much youth in one small space. 

My son is clingy, shy and tired, overwhelmed by the noise, the crafts, the games and I do my best to get into the spirit of things.  I help with glue and tear bits of tissue paper, I assure another child that it doesn’t matter where he puts the eyes on his pumpkin.  I laugh with the other Moms over the resident who rides in on a wheelchair, pretending to scare the kids with a mask, all the while giving a growing peep show as his robe slides further and further open.  I take a smiling picture with my son, a little Iron Man snuggled up on a ladybug's lap. 

By the time we get home, though, I’m over-stimulated and frustrated at my inability to love Halloween, to love loud parties and candy.  The twins are exhausted and hungry when we walk in and they’re drawn to me like magnets, pressing their tiny bodies onto me in desperation.   

It’s all I can do to untangle myself, causing more tears and desperation, as I head to the kitchen to make lunch.  Solomon is sorting and dumping candy, dancing and singing and blowing the whistle from his party bag and the twins are screaming in their highchairs, desperate to make it clear how deeply my absence has wronged them.   

Then I’m yelling, “Stop it” and throwing an apple-peel all the way across the kitchen til it bounces off of one twin and they both sit staring, shocked into silence and my son, that sweet four year old boy, offers to play his whistle to settle them down.  

//

There are days when being a mother feels like dying a hundred tiny deaths.   A hundred letting-gos, a thousand surrenders to more noise, more movement, more demands than I feel capable of handling. I’m not complaining, I simply want to be honest about the stretch of motherhood and how quickly, how fiercely, I shrink back from it.  

I died a hundred little deaths this morning and will surely die a hundred more before nightfall on this, the day of the dead.  But I know, thank God, that this dying, this surrender, makes me new again.   

I may die a hundred times a day, but I'm just as often made new, reborn in the face of a chubby, gap-toothed grin, a gentle hand seeking mine for reassurance.  Just today I was resurrected by the voice of my son calling cheerfully from the back of the van as we made our way home, “I can’t wait to be old so I can go to the nursing home to live.”

//

Later in the day as I'm making chili for friends who're coming to trick-or-treat with us, as the twins again stand whining at the gate that divides them from me, my Dad calls with the news that my maternal grandmother has died in the nursing home where she's lived for years now in North Carolina.  

Standing over the stove, stirring the chili, I find myself surprisingly grateful.  Grateful that, athough I couldn't be there with her, I was here, at a nursing home with my son, the very same morning.  I think of my Grandmother's life and the many little and big deaths she endured.  I think of the ways I get so focused on what I'm giving up, that I nearly miss what I have right here, right now in front of me.  It occurs to me that I live such a grace-filled life, full of opportunities for surrender, continually pressing me toward the edge.  

//

Dinner is finished, the kids and husband are home and the poor older twin, who just can't pull himself together, sits crying on the floor.  I scoop him up and settle in the rocker and watch as he drifts into a heavy sleep.  I love the moment - the rocking, the sleeping child so sweet.  

Then he lifts his head and looks around, disoriented, before throwing up all over both of us.  Leaning forward, exhausted, he lays his head back on my chest with that pile of warm, smelly goo spread like a layer of glue between us.  I died again in that moment and rose again to hug him tight until my husband came to help us both get cleaned up.  

//

Every day of the dead, every Halloween, gives way to all saints day and I wonder if we too, dying in our little and big ways, aren't also being moved, continually, from death to new life.  This dying is a surrender, a stripping bare by letting-go until all that remains is love.  

 This is the whole gang this year.  Aren't I a lucky Mama?!