into darkness {He is light}

It is December and there are sparkling lights and upbeat Christmas songs with bells keeping time.  They tell us to wrap it up, put a bow on it: be merry and bright.  It’s a time to gather with family, to enjoy traditions and show our love in tangible ways, bestowing gifts of fun and fancy.

And yet.

It is dark, here.  There is unspeakable sadness in this world.  There is heartache every day, and injustices this wide world over.  People are starving, dying of sickness, fighting in wars, losing to slavery, alone on the streets, victims of violence.  Today, it is the school shooting in Connecticut.  Children killed.  This darkness can weigh heavy on my heart, on my mind.  I try to twist the story lines into something that makes sense, and I end up turning mental gymnastics because here’s the thing: it doesn’t make sense.  Long lay this world, in sin and error pining.

It is dark.

And yet.

“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned”(Isaiah 9:2).

In this epic true life fairy tale, the battle has already been won.  Good will always win.  Light has overcome darkness.  On this quiet night, years ago, Light himself was born into this dark world – Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.  The truth was proclaimed: “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord”  (Luke 2:11).  And the angels sang Glory to God, and the shepherds were invited into the mystery and then told their story.  Kings fell on their knees, offering  gifts with worship.

Sometimes it’s the mere melancholy that the longest night brings.  Sometimes its this longest night that has lasted years.  Sure, Christmas can be about family, traditions, even the good work of giving.  And family is good – until it isn’t anymore.  Tradition works, until it doesn’t anymore.  Celebration, joyous music, good food, presents — it’s all good, until it’s not.  If all your hope is in family, if all your joy is in the twinkling lights, if it’s all held together by tradition – then what do you do when you lose family? When there are no more twinkling lights? Or when it just can’t be held together anymore?  This darkness, it’s wearisome.

For yonder breaks, a new a glorious morn.

The story is not over.  “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). We have this hope, He gives us His peace – that when there is suffering, when there is heartache and tragedy, and our eyes can’t see the light – we know that the Light sees us.  Emmanuel, God with us. In the darkness of despair, He is right beside us.  We can know His light, hold it out to each other. So we pray. We hold hands. We make meals.

No more let sin or sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground.  Today, amidst the unspeakable, we speak.  Our large world seems small as we come together to bear witness to the pain in the shooting.  We honor the stories of those who are living this.  Today, “we weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). God with us, grieving alongside us. He comes to make His blessings known, far as the curse is found.

We share the stories of the brokenness within each of our lives, taking turns walking for one another.  We sit in the sadness together, we cry together.  This night, we come alongside my mother-in-law, grieving through her first Christmas without her husband.  We cannot replace her sadness, but we fill her house with something else: this   food and kids and laughter – it is light.  It is in this darkness that He became Light.  Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace. In this world, we offer grace and love to all, and coats and shoes to those without.  We are the peacemakers, blessed.

Fall on your knees, oh hear the angel voices. Oh, night divine.

And yet – in Him there is no darkness.

offering: real blessing

This past weekend, we all put on our Sunday best and landed in the front pew at church.  It was time to baptize our Littlest.  We worship as Episcopalians, and I am desperately in love with the liturgy of baptism in this community.  We welcome God’s smallest into this great big family of sinners, forgiven and and finding grace together.  We each are invited to revisit our own baptism, affirm for each other again how our lives have been claimed.  There is a lyrical narrative about this holy water.  The priest blesses these babes, and then with a bit of holy oil, crosses their foreheads – sealed by the Holy Spirit, marked as Christ’s own forever.  Forever.  Nothing this child can do can change that.

So here we are, spit shined and squeaky clean, doing our best to do our best, in the front pew.  The Littlest looks like a little man in his proper corduroy pants and button down shirt.  But he keeps ripping his socks off and chewing on them, and then he tires of sitting in the stroller, protesting loudly with his growing number of sounds.  The Middlest has climbed in and out and around every pew and kneeler, commando crawled her way through every pocket book and cup of coffee obstacle on the floor.  The Eldest, first enthralled with the music, has decided that he’s bored now and can’t understand why Daddy won’t play a game with him.  And that’s the thing about doing your best, right?  It’s all you’ve got, and somehow it needs to be enough.  Let me tell you, the front pew is not the right place for us, folks.

We’re called up front for the baptism part of the service, not a moment too soon. Though once in front of the crowd it becomes clear that maybe we’re not right to be up here, either.  Maybe, next time, we’ll just arrange a private thing in the bath tub, eh?  Because now the Littlest will not be still and is just about doing back flips trying to escape my grasp.  His protests are getting more extreme, and eventually I can think of nothing else but putting him down. On the ground. Where he is desperate to explore.

So I do.  I put him on the ground, kneel down with him, hold the brass pitcher of water to keep it from tipping over as he pulls himself up to it, checks out his reflection.  He taps it, smiles at the deep echo.  He crawls over to the font itself, begins to climb up the steps.  All the while, I’m following him around, kneeling on the floor of the church, murmuring the bits of call and response that I can remember, priest beside us, godparents surrounding us, family and a whole big congregation looking on.  I wear an apologetic smile.

Eventually, we get up off the floor, the Littlest and I, when it is time for the water.  I brush the dust off my legs, and hand my babe over to the priest.    The kids are mesmerized when the priest poured the water into the font.  The priest scoops handfuls of water onto the Littlest’s forehead.  Water runs down his eyebrows, follows the bridge of his nose.  The priest drags his fingers in that space between his eyes and his hair, writing the promise of grace into his life.  I am mesmerized by the magic of spirit and words, by ritual and poetry.  The symbolic becomes tangible. We pray these words: “Give him an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”  And all I can do is offer up my loudest Amen.

By the end, I think we were spread over three pews, and had left a trail of crayons and cheerios in our wake.  I doubt that any of the pictures will have us all looking at the camera. I hardly even remembered to take a picture.  It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t graceful, but it was full of grace.  Afterwards, we gathered with family and friends, to break bread, to laugh at the ordeal of it all, to rejoice in the mess of it all.

And that’s when a friend spoke into my heart: “Blessed is the mama who gets down on her knees to crawl around the floor with her little one,” she said.  She said this as I was, in my usual way, trying to make light of our embarrassing display.  I think what she meant was that in God’s eyes, this is the path to glory – this dusty position of prostration, of work and heart and honesty.  It is setting aside expectations to embrace this dynamic life, and being able to give what is needed within each moment.  That though I may have wrinkled my outfit, and that the happy squeals of the Littlest competed with the rhythm of the liturgy,  I was doing the work of mothering, which never stops, not even for a priestly blessing.  I was so caught up in the ways that we had made a spectacle of ourselves, crumpling up any church protocol and throwing it out the window that I had failed to see how my family, each of us doing our best to do our best, was there at the altar, at the place of grace.  That in letting the Littlest down and crawl around instead of scolding him to be still in my arms, I was offering him just as he is, not as he should be.  My family is real – not some prescription to fit a churchy image in my head.  My Jesus is real, too.

So when the Littlest naps straight through his own party, so when the Eldest throws a fit because he’s not the center of attention, so that when the Middlest can’t.stop.moving.her.mouth because she hasn’t had a nap and is bit manic, and when we all have scrambled eggs for dinner – this all is real, too.  And I know that God is there.  And this, too, is full of grace.  And I’m on my knees crawling hard after these babes of mine, chasing them around the altar of the One who made it all, who knows this mess better than I, and makes it all beautiful.

Though I doubt we’ll take the front pew again any time soon.

and the living {ain’t} easy

It it “glazing” hot, as the Eldest has been known to declare.  The Littlest keenly focuses his eyes on his big siblings.  Those bigger ones know how to keep cool: they romp and run and dunk and splash in a cheap blow-up plastic baby pool.  The shade shifts; I adjust the Littlest and I to keep us out of that strong sun.  I declare now: this is how we will spend our summer.

It is the first time in days that I let my shoulders fall back in ease, release the breath I didn’t even know I was holding.  This picture of summer, alive in front of me, is familiar with echos of my own childhood.  I know how the blades of grass get stuck on wet feet.  I know that taste of sunscreen as it migrates with sweat and hose water to my lips.  I need this afternoon of innocence.

We were in our second car accident in a month last Wednesday.  Both times were not my fault; both times I had all three kids with me.  (Yes, we are all fine).  Since last Wednesday, I’ve been wrestling with my words, choosing carefully how to talk about all of this with the Little Ones.  The Eldest, with his tendencies towards worry, is afraid to get in the car again.  He tells me, frankly “But Mommy, you said a few weeks ago that we weren’t going to have another accident for a while!”  Of course I did.  I thought it was a safe assumption: in his four and a half years of driving in the car with me, we have never come close to being in a car accident before. The Middlest tells me “Mama, I don’t like car accidents” with a quiver to her voice.

So we talk about it.  The Eldest takes his job seriously, telling each new person in detail exactly what happened.  His words are concrete, his hands full of action.  With each telling, he gains strength over his worry: he begins to own this tale.  But in the quiet moments, his fear is undone.  I want to smooth his hair, hold his hand and tell him that there will be no more car accidents. I want to assure him that it will not rain and there will be no storms.  I want to promise a life full of sunshine and playing in the pool.  But that’s not life, is it?  And if I’m honest with myself, I know that my little boy knows that already.  He knows heartache.  He knows sadness and worry and he knows that life can be hard, and scary.  My best bet here is to sit in his worry with him.  To hold his hand through the sad and scary and hard.  To walk it out with him.  And in that, to show him my footprints through the tough stuff, sometimes as a guide, but more than that to show how it’s possible to come out the other side.  Addie Zimmerman says this:

“The world is infused with pain and with evils of all shapes and sizes, and they will encounter it, our children. It will get under their fingernails, on their toes. And in the end what I want most to do for my children is to teach them to walk well in a world that is sharp and hard and broken. I want them to love bigger, to love stronger, to be able to stay healthy when they encounter dirt of all kinds.”   Safe for the Whole Family

This accident we had was just that: an accident.  The man who rear-ended us has his own story; his own dirt and his own hurts.  I will forgive him for not paying attention.  I will forgive him for creating a mess of the car I was driving.  And yes, I will forgive him, too, for the burden of worry he helped heap onto my Little Ones.  I will forgive him for making my ten minute trip to Target feel painfully long and difficult because of the mind-game that we now play just to get in the car.  I will love bigger and stronger, because I’m teaching my Little Ones to do it, too.

Though my adult self can get wrapped up in worry, it is often triggered by these small bodies carrying more than I feel that they should.  As a child I was not a worrier.  Maybe it was my sweet acceptance that the world was no bigger than my backyard, my problems no bigger than practicing hard to run  faster than the neighborhood kids and earn those bragging rights.  One thing I know is that God can use these soft hearts that my Little Ones have: He can break their hearts for the things that break His.  He can use their hearts to move their hands, their feet in loving this broken world.  And this worry that they carry can be a window for them to see God: to see how He walks with them, to see how He answers prayer, making the sad things come untrue.  To allow them to know His faithfulness.

I want for my Little Ones to remember running hard in the backyard, hair matted down with sweat around their foreheads.  I want them to remember the force of  their strong round bodies jumping and landing in five inches of water.  But it is just as likely that they will capture the scary moments, too.  I want to honor it all.

We gather up our bags, and our courage, and hustle to the door.  I hoist long legs into Daddy’s truck, click car seats and buckles into place.  Before I turn up a little Johnny Cash to ease the drive (the Eldest’s request), his brave voice beckons from the back seat: “Mama, can you pray?” And so I do.  And we pause a little longer at our stop signs, look one extra time before making a turn.  But we together we sing loudly, and come home to put on our bathing suits again.

fortress

It is standard dinner conversation: “Tell me about your day, Daddy?” the Eldest asks, in between bites of burrito and giggles of nonsense.  The interruptions, routine: the Littlest spurting protest cries, demands to be picked up.  The dance-call, familiar: I’ll hold the Littlest while Mark eats a few bites, then pass him over the table to into Mark’s grasp, taking turns holding this family together, and dishing out seconds.

It is this common family life that is now settling back in our house.  Mark has finished the work project that had him tied up with night shift. Now I eagerly peck him on the lips, barely awake to wish him well as he heads out the door to work at 5:30am.  This is familiar to me: knowing that he will be at our table for dinner.  The Little Ones run down the front steps to greet him in the driveway when he comes home, still covered in the day’s dust.  They, too, are thankful for his presence at the table.  They rejoice in their father’s hands tucking them in to bed at night. I take comfort in him by my side when I’m turning lights off, locking doors for the night.  I sleep easier when he is the last thing I see before I close my eyes.

We are now in transition, though.  When Mark was gone, I couldn’t rely on our old rhythms to get us from one shore to the next.  The benchmarks of how to mark time no longer made sense.  We needed new structure: the day was divided off differently, now.  New routines were created, new rhythms established.  And I built a fortress: a tower to protect myself.  Brick by brick, slowly, daily, I stood these supports together to steady myself in the darkness of parenting alone.  Mark is back now, and I have a partner again, but I find myself stuck, still alone in this fortress that I made.  I didn’t have an exit strategy in mind.  Now we’re doing the hard work, together, of knocking down this tower.  We’re reconstructing our home.

These past two months of upended family life have pushed me to my edge, and at moments passed it.  I did what was necessary to keep our family going, not always with grace or finesse, not always thriving.  And that’s the thing, isn’t it?  We want more than survival — we’re made for Life, Abundant.  And it’s not enough to hold my breath, wait until this one stress-test-of-life passes, because there’s is always another.  I’m beginning to understand more what it means to fix my eyes on Jesus, “the author and perfecter of our faith.”

Tonight, it’s bath night.  We’ll have dinner together.  I’ll try to hear about Mark’s day, in fragments.  The Little Ones and I will tell him about ours.  We’ll set the table together, fold laundry together.  We’ll hand Little Ones around, corralling and cajoling; admonishing and teaching; praising and encouraging.  Together, we’ll take down my fortress, fight through the hard conversations, step on each other’s toes more than we care to.  Together, we’ll hammer these new beams into place, build new rooms, with windows for the view.  Together, we’ll remember what makes this our home.

the pause

We’ve been moving through life: through spring colds, through warm spring and cool breeze, and those thunderstorms that come with it.  We’ve been marching out our footprints, through running races (like, real actual races) and hamburgers on the grill; through dirt and seeds and water; through Mother’s Day and work days and school days, and just good ol’ days.  And books, always.

Let me tell you: I’ve been reading some good stuff.  In  7: an experimental mutiny against excess, Jen Hatmaker takes on seven areas of her life over seven months, eliminating all of the “too-much,” fasting from the things that gunk up our lives and pressing into the calling of Christ on her life and family.  There is so much good stuff here, and I’m sure it’ll be oozing out of me for a while, but tonight it is this last month of hers that has held me captive.

The last excess that she ousts from her life is stress.  Now, obviously life is stressful; it just is.  We can’t actually cut out stress from our lives any more than we can cut out breathing.  It comes with the job of living.  And the flip side of stress is often beautiful and glorious: mountains and valleys.  While we can try to dial down excess stress, the stuff that only adds stress for the sake of stress, the best way to work this stress is to figure out how to cope with it  For her last month of this experiment, Jen embraces seven sacred pauses that she takes throughout the day to focus her attention: with prayer, with scripture, with an intentional pause to breath.

There is so much to glean from here.  I’m pretty sure that she was standing in my kitchen today while Mark was (blessingly) using his free time at home (he’s still on night shift) helping me to fold and organize clean laundry (I cannot begin to tell you how big this mountain of laundry – all clean! – had become).  I was moving, frenetically, setting the bigger Little Ones up at the table to paint, nursing the Littlest, back to refill paint, let the dog out, change a diaper, back to clean up paint, all the while trying to get back to the laundry.  And then those neatly organized piles of laundry were upended (by the dog? by an overly enthusiastic Little?) And those Little Ones are hungry, again!  I knew that my body was tensing, my shoulders beginning to tighten.  My breath was short, and so was my fuse. And then Jen Hatmaker whispers in my ear: time to pause.  Take it Heavenward.  And though I haven’t committed seriously enough yet to engage like she does, with some prescribed prayer and scripture to match, it was enough.  Not to slow down the demands of what swirled around me in laundry and lunches, but to recognize my place in it all, my contribution to the atmosphere of stress.  Using the regularity of my breath, it forced me to let my shoulders drop, and slow the pace of my feet through the kitchen as I reached for the mayonnaise from the fridge, the pretzels from the cabinet.

Jen writes this about the mid-morning pause (which was pretty much where I was):

This mid-morning pause has two emphases: the first is mindfulness of the Spirit’s abiding presence… This pause can redirect our morning trajectory from “efficient” to “inspired.” 

Second, the Blessing Hour is about the sacredness of our hands and work…. Kahlil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible”; what if we approached our work as an opporutnity to show love?  To our coworkers, those we serve, our children, to our students… visible love is possible if we work mindfully, as carriers of the sweet Spirit of Christ.
pgs 186-187  (emphasis mine)

Right? Right.  This just gets me.  Or me, it.  As I’m pausing to invite God’s Spirit into my stress, I am inviting Him to show me how to love.  As I’m patting dry the Middlest’s hands after washing the paint from them, I’m not just perfunctorily doing a duty: I’m loving her.  And not just me loving her but Christ loving her, too.  I’m making visible something that is so strong in my heart, so fierce in my brain and my belly.  Under His precious breath, it becomes more than my small offering: it becomes enough, more-than-enough.   Instead of moving through the blur of the day, heaping the daily chores onto my shoulders, already hunched, unable to straighten from the weight I’m bearing,  it’s bringing attention to what is in front of me.  What is it that is causing stress for me?  Is it the laundry? (Yes!) It’s being mindful in my choices, then.  What if I allowed my actions to be inspiration, instead of broken down into some energy input-output strategy of efficiency? What if I allowed God to fill those gaps?

And then, as the day closes, here is what Jen says about the last pause of the day, “the Great Silence”:

It begins with a gentle evaluation of the day.  The focus is on awareness, and we include not just weaknesses but the strenghts and accomplishments of the day.  The Great Silence teaches us to be healthy sinners, living in neither denial of our sin or despair because of it.

We welcome soft darkness that is exquisitly beautiful and healing. God dims the lights on our weary bodies, making the way for sleep, allowing us to see the stars. There is a beauty to the darkness, the natural rhythm of the earth that invites us to be still and rest.
pg 190. (emphasis mine)

Because to me, that’s what this is all about.  It’s my hands, palms up, loosening  my grip on the things I hold.  It’s not despairing in the mess  I’ve made today: in how I haven’t trusted fully, or served whole-heartedly. Not dwelling in  the mistakes I’ve made or the way I’ve squandered my one “precious and wild life”.  It’s recognizing the things I’ll do differently tomorrow.  It’s the mystery of Christ in me, the hope of glory.  It’s knowing that I’m loved, simply loved, and not for anything of my doing.  It’s having the perspective to know that this is just a teeny tiny part of the bigger picture.  And it’s receiving one more gift before we get the fresh start of tomorrow: the gift of rest.

It’s all in there:  all this glorious and not-glorious stuff; the bits and pieces of life. Sometimes it just takes fresh eyes.