It's On Like Donkey Kong

My sweet husband. I love him, but he is a hot mess.

I took him to the airport early yesterday morning. You know you’ve grown comfortable in marriage when you’re as self conscious as I am and can still roll out of bed at 5am in your sweatpants, splash some coffee in a couple of travel mugs, and slap some over-sized eye glasses over your mascara-smeared face, and out the door you go.

This is one of the few moments you don’t mind long lines. It just prolonged our time together. Given that American and Frontier just merged, the line to get through security was eternal. Fine by me!

I was strong. Like a rock. Laughing. Knocking out last-minute details as we inched our way forward. Trying to disregard the much younger and put-together woman in line behind us with whom my husband was already conversing and flashing his big blue eyes. I was good up until we reached the rope divider and I realized this was it. He kissed my forehead. I melted. Dang it. A tide of tears suddenly streaming down my cheeks. I watched him disappear through security and instantly the walls grew tall and dark around me. The air became abruptly cold. I felt very small and alone. 

As one might imagine, I was an emotional disaster for the rest of the day. Unwilling and unable to do anything productive, I curled up in a ball of blankets on the floor in front of the fireplace and tried to numb my emotions through mindless Internet searches. I left my nest in alternate attempts to find something to eat and get more toilet paper for the snot bubbles I kept accidentally smearing across my face and into my hair. Too depressed to leave the house, I ate what I could find--a half cup of questionable cottage cheese, some key lime yogurt, and a jar of pickled okra.

Patrick finally called that afternoon. I asked him how his morning went. He gave me some vague answer. So I asked him more pointedly what I really wanted to know. “Did you cry when I left?” 

He said, “Yeah, I did while going through security.” And then there was a long pause. 

I knew where this was going. “Did you end up sitting with that girl in line behind us?” I asked.

“No, she was flying somewhere else.” 

Interesting. They must have had a conversation after I left. He finally said, “You really want to know what happened next?”

I said, “Sure.” He proceeded to tell me that when he sat down on the airplane some other cute younger woman took the seat next to him. 

Now allow me to clarify. Patrick’s secret weapon is his charm. You can sit down next to him without even noticing him, but his charm is magnetic. He can pull anything out of anybody.

They were chatting along when the stewardess stopped and said, “Sir, as military personnel you are able to sit in first class. May I show you to your seat?” Looking at the woman next to him he was so enjoying, he said, “No, that’s okay. I’ll just stay here.” She said, “Are you traveling together? Two seats are available, so you can sit together.” 

He looked at her, she looked at him, and he said, “Do you want to sit in first class?” 

She said, “Sure.” 

And off they went together to share a morning flight that probably went by a little too fast. 

In other words, while I was a blubbering mess, he had already transferred his attention to a pretty young woman to stroke his ego and paint that big smile across his face.

I sucked it up after that phone call. Did a little housework. Picked up my son, went to the grocery store, cooked him a nice meal, and face planted in the couch by 10:00. At 11, my son woke me to go to bed. He said, “Mom, your neck is going to hurt really bad if you sleep like that all night.” And as I snuggled my way into our bed sheets without the ceiling fan going for once (Ha! So there!), a warm, familiar scent lifted up out of the pillow and caused my heart to flutter.

Grrrrr. He sprayed his cologne on my pillow before he left. It’s on like Donkey Kong!

My grandfather always said that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I do have to say, we’re pretty egalitarian around here. He’d better watch it! So I’m thinking his first care package will be a photoshopped picture of me with my arms around a smiling, thumbs-up Bradley Cooper, and his own pillow that smells like me. 

And It Begins

My love leaves in the morning. Orders were issued last week. He’ll be home in December. I don’t feel anything at all. Just numb. I’m sure it will crash over me when I come home from the airport in the morning and the house is empty. No husband. No kids, at least most days. Just me, and Bob the cat. 

I had a flare the day before yesterday. A “flare” means I chill and ache all over. It means every effort is hard and I don’t want to do anything. Dry my hair. Lift my backpack. And yet the longer I don’t move, the more it hurts, so I pace, and rock, and sleep nil, and pop Tylenol over the other four pills I take every day to try to take the edge off. Fortunately it didn’t last long. I felt like my muscles were oozing the sad my heart is refusing to board.

And honestly, I know I’ve been weird about it all. The deployment. My health. I want people to know so they can cut me some slack, but I don’t really want to talk about it or appear weak in front of others. I want to vomit it out on some quiet blank page and let cyberspace swallow the shock without my having to deal with other people’s words or emotions about it. I don’t want to know you’re praying for us; just do it. I don’t want to feel like I need to comfort you in your sympathy for me. I’m working hard enough to stave off my own emotions; I can’t handle anybody else’s right now. Not about this.

And to stave off my fears for what this experience will do to Patrick, I am trying to stay positive. I need others to stay positive with me. He is going to be in a part of the world he has never seen before. He will experience the landscape and the culture and the simple living he craves. The camp bumps right up to the Gulf of Aden. The weather is rather stable. It will be in the seventies at night and eighties by day. He will have unlimited access to the sunshine I crave. He will make friends with people who share his experience, and have space for reading, and music, and working toward another promotion. He will have a smorgasbord of healthy food laid out before him three times a day. His meals and dishes and laundry and trash will magically disappear and reappear. And he will be doing powerful ministry there. Separations like these tend to remind people of what really matters. When we’re spoiled we tend to let really stupid things affect our relationships and emotions. Things like dirty dishes in the sink when the dishwasher is empty, and the empty peanut butter jar deceitfully squatting in the cabinet. Those things just mean there is somebody in your life whose presence you get to take for granted. The absence of these things just means you’re alone.

But then I go out visiting my little old widows and widowers, and I see the way they survive. Systems they create so they can reach the bread and ration the butter to make the toast. Leaving laundry day otherwise unplanned because that one or two loads will utterly wear them out. They budget to the dime their groceries and prescriptions, and then they send me out the door with the wave of a crippled hand from their recliner, my head humbly hanging with a check for the church in my bag and a belated Christmas gift in my wallet. My goodness. What generous, lovely, life-giving people they are. And when I leave they will return to the norm that has no end. They will be utterly alone for most hours and days, sitting in that chair, reflecting on the good ol’ days of peanut butter and dirty dishes. If you ever want to peer into the face of God, then visit these hidden among us. Their little homes and apartments are as holy as a manger bed.

I really am okay. This is just a little bump against the reset button. Somehow Patrick and I will come out of this better people, better lovers, better parents, better pastors. The long months will provide the discipline of mindful living as we make mental recordings throughout each day of what we’ll share in letters. This will do good things for us. And my, what a wonderful present Christmas will bring this year.

A Thanksgiving Reflection

I remember those days...

When I couldn’t wait to be a big kid so I could reach the pedals AND the ground from the seat of my bicycle, and fix my own plate at family dinners...

When I couldn’t wait to be a teenager so I could drive myself to get those last-minute sewing or food supplies for home economics without having to ask my mother... or have my own job so I could buy my own $100 jeans with holes in them from Brass Buckle...

When I couldn’t wait to have my own house to not clean, my own career, my own money, my own family, my own life...

When I couldn’t wait for the opportunity to sleep through one whole night, or never again have to manage another poop-up-the-back diaper changes...

When I couldn’t wait until my kiddos could tie their own shoes, and fix their own breakfast...

BUT...

I never really wanted my kids to be old enough to drive, or be any older than they already are.

On this Thanksgiving morning, waking up at the in-laws, I’m watching them sleep. In. Something they do on regular occasion when the opportunity presents itself. Their long legs all accordion-like on the couches, their big monster feet poking out the ends of their blankets.

When they were small, I would hide in the bathroom for refuge. Now I’m the weirdo poking my needy zombie fingers under the door so they’ll come out and play with me.

When they were small, they would bring me books to read to them. And games to play with them. And ask me for cookies. Now I follow them around with my laptop, “Here, read this clever thing I wrote.” I guilt them into playing games with me. I bake them cookies so I have an excuse to go up to their rooms.

On this Thanksgiving I am thankful. Thankful to finally be at a place in life where I am not wishing I could be anywhere else than I already am. Thankful I can savor the moment I’m in. My parents are healthy and well. My children are healthy and well. And so far as I can tell, my husband still likes me. Taxes will get paid this year and Christmas will come. And while I sure wouldn’t mind having a few of those wished-away years back, I wouldn’t wish this one away for anything in the world.

Prayer

Patrick and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary this week at a Contemplative Prayer Retreat. I'll be honest. This was not what I had in mind. I am not that holy. I imagined our anniversary with lots of lounging... on a beach, listening to the waves roll in. Or sitting on the patio of some darling little gourmet restaurant with mountains and sunshine in the landscape and a glass of wine. I imagined rest. Rest from schedules. Rest from technology. Sleeping in. I imagined having Patrick all to myself. No phone calls, or text messages, or E-mails, or MLB play-offs, or NFL to compete with. Just him, me, and lots of fresh air.

I resisted the life out of this up until the very last second. "I am an introvert," I tried to explain to him, "An exhausted one who needs to not be 'on' once in a while." The last thing I wanted to do, was spend our only tenth anniversary on a schedule of 6am and 9:30pm prayers, taking meals in silence (actually, that part was optional), four group sessions a day between prayer sits. Oh, and yoga. Which he loves. Breathe in... Breathe out... take your left leg over your right shoulder and wrap your toes around your throat three times. Yoga only reminds me how weak and inflexible I am becoming. For days after yoga my legs and arms feel like those little pencil erasers from elementary school--the ones shaped like a little man with floppy arms and legs that wiggled all over the place when you used it. Today I'd have better luck climbing stairs with my teeth.  "I'm already contemplative," I tried to explain to him. I spend time alone every morning. I keep a daily prayer journal. I don't need this.

Not until the very end, just a few days before the retreat was to begin, did I relinquish. We were eligible for a little bit of continuing education grant money, so this would be much less expensive than driving out to Breckenridge or taking that cruise. Besides, I'm doing a worship series on prayer in November. This could help me prepare for that. Fine. I would use our anniversary to work. Patrick called. Phileena, who along with her husband, Chris, directs the retreat, inquired whether the retreat center could squeeze us in. Yes. We were off to Schuyler, Nebraska. (I'm still not even sure how to pronounce it). It's in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of cornfields. No cell phone reception, no cable television, no Internet. At least I got that technology fast I was hoping for.

It was definitely not what I was looking for and exactly what I needed. 

The space felt holy, "bathed in prayer" as Phileena said, by the monks who lived there. We prayed with the monks, received our blessings during the Eucharist, and we practiced many forms of prayer throughout the day. The gift of contemplative prayer is that it makes manic, controlling "J" types like me shut up and listen. I did a lot of listening this week. The further into stillness and silence I went, the more aware I became of the weariness of my own body and the creative ways I find to run away from God in the name of God. And as I felt Christ lifting burdens from me, I felt Christ lifting the burdens of others--the ones from church who have lost sisters and brothers, the ones who are caring for life partners whose minds and bodies are failing, for my own family. As that space within me was opened and lifted, I knew that room, even for the next ten years of marriage, was widening.

Chris likened our prayer lives to body building. If we only do one kind of exercise, say for our triceps, over and over and over, we're going to end up with really strong triceps, but the rest of our body remains unattended and, consequently, pretty weak and lopsided (that must mean I'm going to have really strong teeth).  This is my paraphrase, of course, so I hope I've honored his illustration in good faith.  The point was that having different forms of prayer we practice helps provide a well-rounded, well-strengthened spiritual life.

If you're interested in learning more, or attending a retreat hosted by Phileena and Chris Heuertz, their website is gravitycenter.com. The tab "Practice" offers different forms of prayer. If you've been thinking about entering into or deepening a practice of prayer or meditation, this is the place for you. I would highly recommend doing a retreat. Learning these prayers and practicing them in community was the jumpstart I needed to expanding my listening skills, leaving room for God to speak into my life, my marriage, and my work. And instead of returning to my life feeling overwhelmed and behind like most vacations, I'm returning feeling full and ready to give. I met many wonderful people there and am thankful to have had this experience. 

10 Lessons from Hosting my First City-wide Garage Sale

1. The nifty little remote that opens the garage door also activates rain clouds. Who knew?

2. When the husband laughs out loud at your sticker prices, you might want to add an “Everything 1/2 price” poster to the display.

3. Your family will take zero interest in an item for five years until you put it into your garage sale.

4. “It almost fits” means it doesn’t fit.

5. Your bladder will punish you severely if you drink two cups of coffee and a Gatorade and you are the only person manning your garage sale.

6. Devise an escape plan for strange and awkward conversations. In advance.

7. You’re the only person having difficulty getting rid of things your children have outgrown and left behind.

8. Never leave the husband unattended to negotiate prices.

9. Actually, just disallow husband from attending your garage sale.

10. Store favorite charity thrift store moving truck in I-phone “Favorites.”

Low Day

I’ve had several different people ask me what happened to my blog. I stuck with it for about a week or two, and then it dropped off. I know. It takes a lot of emotional energy and time to write. And then I began making the mistake of checking the stats to see how many “hits” my page had. At first I was curious, but then assuming the costume of people-pleasing and hunting for human affirmation that I often wear to my own detriment, I turned it into a game. Each day: How many hits can I get today? Can I reach 500 before the end of the month? But the thing is, is that there are these low-life spamming softwares that scan random blogs dozens of times a day. Mine was one of those. So, as far as I can tell, there’s really no way to tell how many people were actually reading the blog. Which is good. It should never have mattered. That wasn’t the point of writing it. I started it because I needed the discipline of creative writing in my life. A skill I feel I am losing. A skill I want to hone. A skill outside of church life.

I made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to write about church, not because I don’t love it, but because I think sometimes church leaders get so sucked into our own little church worlds that we lose touch with the reality that most of the rest of the world is living in. Not everybody gets the privilege of praying, and serving, and loving, and nurturing community, and encouraging other people to live into their best selves for a living. Don’t get me wrong, we deal with a ton of stressors, too, but most days I know I have it pretty good. I can get so steeped in it, so immersed, so manic in my church thoughts, that I forget to come up for air. It doesn’t occur to me to look up and see things. Like that my husband’s eyes are still so very blue. Or that my youngest child now towers over me with the rest of them. Or that the grass has gone to seed.  I noticed it yesterday.  That’s when I wrote, “This time of year it just makes sense not to mow the lawn. Why should I pay for seed when I can just grow my own?”

Low days have a way of boiling in overnight, like a morning storm. They kick me right out of bed and onto the floor, and I pretty well stay there for a day or more. Just for the record, this is not clinical depression. Clinical depression is diagnosable if it lasts for weeks or more at a time. Sometimes I (and I suspect most of us) just have sad days. I can only speak for myself, but I will share with you, the kinds of thoughts and things in my church world that happen that put me there:

1. When I come to terms with the fact that most of the friends I have ever had, have nothing to do with church because a.) they think the church is judgmental, detached from reality, and hypocritical, and they think the story of Jesus is irrelevant and shallow, or b.) because they don’t have time and do not feel it is a necessary priority for their lives.

2. When I come to terms with the fact that the future of the church is probably going to look very different by the end of my life than it does right now. I think that the decline in the American church has not yet been arrested and that it will get worse before it gets better. I think that we will be shedding things like real estate, seminary education, denominational allegiance, and paid clergy. As a clergy person, this just sounds grave and dreadful. I grieve the possibilities of these changes because a.) I have a sneaking suspicion that the most faithful among our churches are most adamant about keeping, funding, and maintaing our buildings, probably because they’ve invested their hopes, wishes, dreams, and money into it over their lifetime. They are the builder generation. They are the bravest and most generous generation of the century. They are also slipping away from us rapidly, a huge loss for our world. b.) Without  seminary education and denominational allegiance, I cannot see what will keep us from continuing the dynamic we learned in the Westward expansion of tucking our Bibles up under our armpits and heading out in isolation, where our scriptures begin to tell us what we want to hear and there is no accountability to challenge us otherwise. We seem to be forgetting that community, where the scriptures are interpreted with the guidance of Christ’s Spirit, is fundamental to the Christian faith. The community is not just the group of people we gather with today, but 2,000 years of community from which we must be willing to learn. c.) Most people I know who serve in ministry do so with their whole hearts and their whole lives. We eat, breathe, and sleep church. I know I am not alone in saying that I would serve the church for free if I could figure out how to find an alternative source of income that would not keep me from fully devoting my attention to the church. If someone can figure out how we can make this happen; I’m all ears.
3. When people hit the end of their ropes and they come to me expecting me to solve their problems. Like when a husband is threatening to go back to selling drugs to make ends meet for his family if I don’t buy their son a birthday present today for his birthday. Like when a young wife complains about having no money after finalizing their bankruptcy hearing and posting pictures of their new handguns on Facebook all in the same week. Like when a disabled man and his wife come to me for rent assistance and food, but her story is blatantly inconsistent in the first three minutes of conversation. When members of the church want programming, like Bible studies with curriculum, and childcare and learning opportunities for their children during church events, but they give nothing financially, not even the value of a cigarette or a Coke, back to the church. When the Council members evaluate my “effectiveness” through measures like wanting worship attendance to increase, but they don’t bother to show up regularly for worship. When a young woman tells me she was raped when she was ten, but she refuses counseling. When a mom takes a bottle of pills and calls me and then turns her back on the church because I called 911which consequently saved her life. Every single week a crisis is presented to me, folks relating to me exactly as they relate to God. So often they are angry with God, the church, and especially me, for not fixing their problems. The church is not here to fix each other’s problems. We are here to abide in community with one another, lending support in a way that the answer arises in truth and love from within. I’m not saying that life doesn’t throw us curve balls. I am not saying that we don't need to carry each other sometimes. I'm saying that Jesus meets us in our hearts before he heals our lives. True change happens from the inside out.

So there I went, talking about church. So be it. I hit a really low day yesterday. Patrick asked me three times last night if I was okay. I never really woke up yesterday. It’s a fog I can’t quite explain. I laid out on a blanket on the lawn the whole day with my face in the Bible and an eager pen begging for a sermon. The fog remained into the evening during the car ride to my oldest son's football game, and through the first quarter. It was not until one of my son's friends tripped rather largely over a step in front of me that jolted me out of it. It made me physically jerk and then laugh out loud. I know, I'm evil. But his demise was a gift to me, more than he can know.

I want so, so, so much for our church to rise, and grow, and thrive, and make a difference in the world, but I can’t make that happen. I don’t have that power. Jesus has to heal the heart of our church before we will see results in our church body. The change has to begin from within. We have to pray, show up (enough for it to be significant to our own lives), give (enough for it to matter, enough for it to be a gift from the heart), work, and know for ourselves that what Christ is doing in our own lives matters. Not until what Christ is doing through the church matters to us will it's significance become evident to anyone else around us.  It's hard to sit bedside and watch something you love dying and to let it take your life with it. But I guess that's the story of God in Christ. The hope I hold onto is that someday it will be worth it. Giving my whole life and my whole future to this. Somewhere after the grave, resurrection will come.  I want so much, with my whole heart, to see it and be a part of it in my lifetime.

Fish Buckets

Dichotomy. Whoever invented or defined this word should have invented it as a palindrome (I totally had to look that word up). But you know what I mean--a word that is spelled the same backward and forward... Radar. Madam. Kayak. Dictionary.com defines dichotomy as a “division into two mutually exclusive, opposed, or contradictory groups.” It goes on to give the example of the divide between one’s thoughts and one’s actions. When I think of the word I imagine a pendulum. Not the kind that whacks off people’s heads, but the kind that might sit on somebody’s desk. Like an attorney’s, where Newton’s laws of physics go into effect: the action of one end of the pendulum evokes an equal and opposite reaction from the other.

It seems to be the crux of human thought. Our entire justice system is built upon it. The “this or that” phenomenon. Innocent or guilty. Black or white. Right or wrong. Good or evil. Ugly or pretty. Smart or stupid. Love or hate. Liberal or conservative. Traditional or contemporary. Gay or straight. Flesh or spirit.

And yet anybody who is currently living in relationship, like the trapped kind where you can’t get out of it very easily, like owning or renting property together, sharing a bank account, sharing a contract or covenant of marriage, being mutually responsible for parenting a child, has probably figured out to some degree that human beings are not quite that distinguishable. That human beings are more often both/and than either/or. She is pure and evil. He is brilliant and a jarhead. All at the same time. Sometimes more of a paradox than a dichotomy, perhaps.

And yet we spend our lives trying to dehumanize people who are not like us, dumping them into that “other” category without really acknowledging the complex creatures they are. It’s easy to do when we don’t know them. But when we know them, and our heart strings are attached, it’s much more complex than that. Like when you’re married to an addict. Or your grandson is going to jail for murder. Or your brother is being tried for rape. Or your fifteen-year-old daughter becomes pregnant. Or your sister is homeless. Or you nephew is gay. Or your best friend is having an affair. Or your chemistry partner is Muslim. Then it gets complicated, because our judgement becomes rooted in their story. Sticky.

I have seen this at work in the church. Handing the homeless a sack lunch feeds them lunch. But sitting at the table with them week after week, learning their names, hearing their stories, will get you to thinking about the systemic issues of homelessness, and the cycles of poverty, and the addictions that form as an effort to live with the horrors of mental illness. The irony of a friendship like that, is that the person making the sack lunch and choosing to sit at that table is the one whose life is changed, because friendship forces us to see through the eyes of love, the eyes of Christ. But until those relationships are formed, we are the ones who remain blind. Only through relationships will we figure out that we need “them” as much as they need us in order to grow closer to the heart of God--to see the world as God sees it.

I guess maybe I have my own dichotomies to get over, because my assumption is that when we dismiss another person’s humanity, somebody that we do not know, that our judgement is rooted in hate. But when we know them, our judgement gets all tangled up in our heart strings, in the fullness of our knowledge and our attachment and affection for them. In our love. That’s when we realize it’s more complicated than that.

And that’s how I think God sees things. We are fully loved and fully known. And when God sees something God doesn’t like, I don’t think God severs the heart strings that are attached to us. But I do think God grieves most when we sever ours to each other. Or when we’d rather dump each other into the fish buckets of “other” than actually take the time to learn each other’s stories. I suspect we reflect the image of God most fully not as the source of light, but as a mirror reflecting light. We reflect the image of God when we reflect to the “other” that they are fully known and fully loved in all the complexities and dichotomies of the person that they are. That is the best evangelism. Where transformation begins. Not just in the other, but in both of us, drawing us all into seeing from the very heart of God.