It Starts to Feel Like Something Big

I measure the grounds, three heaping scoopfuls because I drink my coffee like gasoline, and I get the mug ready. It looks more like a soup bowl than a coffee cup but there is much to be done today, pages-long lists of writing deadlines, emails to send, assignments to complete, calls to make.

It starts to feel like something big, some days.

Writing a book or two, going to college, giving speeches and having a blog and writing deadlines and things filling up a calendar. It’s a dream come true, after all.

I ponder the bigness of it a minute, feeling all of my 33 years for a change, like my words are taken seriously, like my foolish prose might amount to something that buds from my heart someday, something worth these eye-strained hours but just the sheer love of it.

So I pour it dark and sweet and breathe it in, and think much of me with my bowl full of coffee and my little words today. I am glad I have persisted with my tiny big thoughts, glad I have kept click-clacking the keys with contemplation and questions, challenges to those with bigger brains and bigger titles than me.

I think, today, I will have my coffee hot and strong and I will nibble the end of my glasses while I think. I will drink from my bowl over an email to my publisher and feel right distinguished with myself, for a moment.

But the thought is fleeting. 

Five plump fingers rest upon the flesh of my back thigh, just beneath the pink ruffled robe he likes to be wrapped up inside. I did not hear him coming.

“Mommy,” he cracks in his sleep-stuck voice, pulling at the robe ruffles. “I don’t want breakfast yet.”

(I hadn’t offered.)

“Mommy, I just want to snuggle.”

He rubs his eyes and drags his gray blanket across the floor, across dinner crumbs and the shabby teal rug that was new only weeks ago but already looks destined for the garbage. Twelve trampling feet will do that to a carpet. 

They will do it to a mother too, from time to time.

And even though I feel it now, the strain of this body premature for my years, it stings and groans for the hours I have not sat, the years I have not rested.

Bowl-mug in hand, we head to the couch and his head finds my belly, pushing gently into the body gone soft under the laps of three babies, tempered by the gnawing worry over all those not-born babies too, the one whose face I never got to see or kiss and all the ones who wore size 11 Nikes and called me mom just for a season. I am trampled shaggy and soft, body and heart, by those pink baby feet and those smelly boy feet, and those patent-leather-heeled feet. I have gone shaggier than the teal rug in my kitchen. 

It starts to feel like something big, some days.

Like all the mothering and loving and gnawing with worry amounts to more than all the words I could collect in a lifetime.

No title is bigger than mother, I think. None which I am after, anyhow.

So I settle into stale sleep breath and blonde bedhead and savor coffee and feel rightly distinguished, here, in this. 

Not for words, not for notice, not for anything but the elevated place of being the carpet below these precious toes, of a down-pillow belly holding up this sweaty head with its drooping blonde Mohawk.

I ponder the bigness of it, and smile.

It starts to feel like something big, some days.

---

Linking up at Emily's place. Join us? 

When I Was Held Hostage: On Gunmetal and Grace

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
~ Frederick Buechner

Source

Yesterday was heavy with hopelessness for humanity.

I feared for the life of my boys last night inside a fast food joint where an agitated, mentally unstable man paced the floor and rallied angry, held his fist in his pocket grasping what might have been a weapon...and everything I thought I believed about nonresistance challenged me the instant my faith came up against my fear.

Our french fries sat steaming but untouched. We were, in a sense, held hostage. The man's writhing angry body draped across the dirty floor, blocking that swinging door with its golden arches cursing and forbidding any of us to leave, his guttural groans bouncing off walls and tables. My heart beat for the Lord's touch of grace upon this man, for God's will in this scary thing, but when the man pointed and laughed maniacally directly at me, singling me out with a terrifying glare, first I wished my husband was there—a military-trained expert marksman—with the concealed weapon he used to carry. 

With careful hands I texted Ryan, telling him I loved him and that I was scared, and avoided the foreboding words I wanted to say:

If I shouldn't come home, take care of our babies. Make sure they know I love them.

“I want you to get a pistol again...soon,” I texted instead, knowing the words would surprise and sober him as much as they did me. I was afraid for our lives, and I wished both for peace and for pistol. He has rallied for having one again, a pistol I know he would never use to harm unless an innocent person's life was at stake.

Unless.

It breaks my heart all the same.

We are none of us innocent people.

I do not like guns in general and I do not believe they are the answer to an epidemic of hate and hurt. I don't honestly know how you can turn the other cheek toward Jesus, toward peace, with a pistol in your pocket. I grieve today that my heart reached for violence in the gripping midst of last night's fear, that it leapt for safety and not first for salvation. 

This is not about politics; it is about peace. Peace that transcends all understanding.

So I muddied the waters of what once was crystal clear because when the fire got hot, I valued my life and the lives of my family more than I trusted in the name of Jesus. I trusted the assurance of my husband's expertise, trusted that a bullet in a crazy man's thigh might really save our lives...every one of them already saved.

Yesterday, I saw humanity at its bleakest, a gray haze over the world I'm tempted to call home.

But it isn't.

It isn't home, this earthen-house, so broken and blood-soaked. It's so tempting to forget its temporal nature when the days run long and the body aches hard and I forget the joys of this life are only notes in an orchestra of heavenly preview. I forget that I am in this broken world only on official business...my passport stamped with redeeming blood, my permanent address given at Calvary.

In fear, I forget.

The police took twenty minutes to arrive, minutes I spent texting my husband, praying beggy prayers of safety and desperation, eyeing the crazy man's pocket and planning our escape at the first glint of gunmetal. By the time the lone officer pulled slowly into the restaurant, armed and heroic, the crazy man had been swallowed by night. Only then did I pray for this man's healing, for his safety, for his soul if it needs it, and his hurt and his life worth much as mine.

He was gone and life went on. No fanfare. No media. The police took interviews. The fry machine sizzled and sparked into business as usual. Hamburgers were chewed by teeth still fear-chattering while we strangers all looked around at each other's goosebumps and stunned faces and wondered what we were supposed to do now, our frail makeshift family, united in an instant over terror and iced tea. 

The boys and I got to the car and headed back southward, silent and shaken on the highway. The scene recurred through my conscious on a loop, restarting every mile until my husband's call broke through. 

He announced that the two kids at home needed an immediate treatment for head lice, which we later learn were passed on by my daughter's cherub-faced friend, curls always adorably tangled, whose home is filled with filth and animal feces but is starkly empty of a mother. Hers is just another kind of broken home, I know, reminiscent of this earth which stinks and crawls with the infestation of destruction. I groaned with the inconvenient timing of this minor plague, so desperately needing something of beauty to redeem.

I stopped at a store and scanned grocery shelves for the three-step RID kit in the white box, the one that makes me nauseous to purchase, but a woman, worn with wrinkles and raspy cigarette-stale breath, began yelling at her husband and the pharmacist behind the counter beside me.

“CANCER?! When did I have cancer? I DIDN'T have cancer, you lying sack of shit! I'm perfectly healthy! I'm FINE, damn it! I WILL NOT DIE!” 

She thrashed tearful at her husband's shirtsleeves; misty-eyed man hushing and pulling her close, the woman swinging and spitting on them both. 

So much hurt, here. So much darkness. 

Have mercy.

Forty seconds later, a different woman passed by, crying into a cell phone that her husband had started making meth again, that she didn't want to live anymore, and the whole black night reeked hard and heavy of Hell on Earth. I wanted to give up my citizenship right then and there in the Beauty department, to cash in the earthly heartbeat I'd been so scared to lose hours earlier just to make the madness stop. 

I tried to muster hope, to bring a holy thought to mind that could bring me back from this nightmare, but I could land on nothing but the question of where gunmetal fits into grace. 

...where gunmetal fits into grace.

Recoiling again at the darkness that flooded these desperate lives, I feared despite truth that evil could triumph on a night like this, and I wept.

Just a few blocks from home the radio sang loud, “Though darkness fills the night, it cannot hide the light. Whom shall I fear?” but the song ended before the darkness did, so the music faded into a radio interview. A meek and whisper-thin voice gathered strength in narrating her own horrific survival story through the car speakers, and our scathed spirits sat seatbelted stiff in our bodies, wincing at the endless grief of the night.

“I love Jesus,” the woman declared in shaky whispers, “because I know He forgives me for being a battered woman.”

The airwaves went silent; the interviewer, wordless.

Did you catch that?

She loves the Lord who forgives her for being battered...beaten and stabbed by a man whose heroin addiction split her lips and broke her legs, whose violence killed their unborn child. 

Forgiven. For being battered.

After hearing the story, I only know what I don't know at all. 

I don't know what forgiveness even is for a God like that, for a person like me. I don't know what it looks like to act justly and to love mercy anymore, when evil breathes near enough to tickle my neck hair.

I don't know what faith looks like so full there is no fear. I don't know how to long for the heart of Jesus more than I do, how to gather trust up around my neck and settle into its warmth and assurance when it's all I can do but to whisper, "My God," at the madness. "Have mercy." 

I don't know how to pray or what to pray for when the world seems eclipsed with suffering. I only know that no bullet can take me. No bullet will save me because a nail already has.

What I know—all I I know—is that there is no genesis in wickedness. Evil cannot create. It can only destroy. Darkness disintegrates and deteriorates the sound of that angel orchestra, the familiar melody of home still faint in the weariness of my heart.

Demolition does not stop demolition. In response to creation, we create. In response to destruction, we create even more. We can cover gray haze with orange paint, redeem hopelessness with the redemption and beauty of words made gospel, songs and movement and laughter and wonder that shines pinholes of grace-light through cloaks of fear, singing the joy-song of home.

In creation alone, I stop wishing for safety and start seeking my Savior. I call Him in with words in graphite, words of sacrifice, of love, of the home my heart sings for. Evil destroys but holy creates. Holy redeems and holy survives. Holy glimmers bright with glory, brighter than bullets and gunmetal, brighter than anger, brighter than fear. 

Have mercy.


Linking to:

Coming Home. Becoming Home.

The last day of the year and I have to scrape windshield ice but I don't even care. My broken laptop has been resurrected and I whisk it off to a coffee shop to warm its chips and wires, to warm my belly with fancy mocha and pumpkin bread, to warm my hands and my soul with inspiration and words, again.

It's been too long, friends, and I'm sorry. Life and hiccups have kept me away but all is well and all will be well.

Happy New Year.

Our Jacob is finally home, and we are grateful. The holidays are still lingering in a hush, woven into this creamy gray vapor that hangs around us, barely noticeable upon the cracked cement sidewalk, the aged headstones peeking out behind bare branches at the cemetery I drive past to get here. It's a fitting sort of state, as weather often is, for the end of things, this year, a little dreary but not unpleasant…a wash of whiteness and stillness like a curtain being dropped. The romantic in me will see the same sights in Technicolor tomorrow. I'm a dreamer that way, and new years always hold new promises, new adventures, and I'm game.

I declared 2012 the year of Home. I thought, perhaps, after much weariness from our nomadic years that it might have been the year of settling down, the year of tying up loose ends, the year of holding down the fort in pajamas and feeling like a normal family for a change. It sounded so healing just a year ago, so safe and warm, a year of Home, a year of family and laughter and too much good food. What I wanted, looking back, was a quiet place for my heart to nurse its wounds, a space to linger long on whatever was supposed to come next.

It was that. Sort of. In some ways.

Just not like I expected.

Because the year of home…the year I planned for coming home, was really about becoming home, in a million ways that were nowhere in sight on the milky gray horizon of last winter. And this next year, too, will be a series of blind-sighted developments, surprise plot turns, and new things big and small. I return to college in seven days, four days before I turn 33.

So I'm pondering today all the words that I think might mark 2013 in a way I can't even imagine from where I sit right now. Bloom. Revel. Embrace. Worship. Jubilee. Inspiration. Wonder. Explore. Listen.

I hope, no matter what, that this new year will be full of words, full of life and connection and a still sort of dwelling on the magnitude of every present moment, for me and for you, my friends.

Stay safe, tonight.  

In Which I Break Up With Martha Stewart

"Every child's holiday will be made infinitely more magical if your holiday décor features a homemade gingerbread replica of your home, and don't they deserve a magical Christmas, you lazy slacker?"

That was printed in the lifestyle magazine that showed up in my mailbox yesterday. Well, it basically said that. Pretty much. A magazine I felt guilty sitting down to read because there was probably some linen I should be ironing or yogurt I should be culturing or fresh evergreen wreath I should be fashioning out of clippings from the indoor ferns I didn't kill because of course I'm an excellent horticulturist and I even know what a horticulturist is. (You believe me, right?) But since this magazine held wisdom on perfecting my technique of all of the activities above and the holiday spirit was upon me, I settled into the guilt and flipped away at the glossy pages.  

You know the magazine – it's the one that suggests stuffing your Thanksgiving turkey with figs and pancetta and roasted artichoke hearts with butternut squash (not slathering a half-frozen bird with Jell-o powder and orange juice like I do) while you wait for the sautéed escarole on the stove. I'm not sure what you're waiting for the escarole to do exactly because I don't even know what escarole is and I'm too busy trying to figure out where to find fennel and endive for the fennel-endive-pomegranate seed salad every decent human being can whip up for a light lunch when having surprise company.

You know the magazine. Martha Stewart Living.  

Because of Martha, I know how to make handmade marshmallows in Christmas-y shapes and create my own hand-beaded bag, which I should be making unique for each outfit or at least for every day of the week. Page 3 tells me I need a $10,000 oven to ensure my cream puffs are baked with the most even heat distribution possible, which must be true even though I've never baked cream puffs in my life, but I still feel good about myself for a split second because at least I know what a cream puff is, which is more than I can say for the endive. I'm pretty sure the oven in the Dollhouse retails new for about twelve bucks.

With every page, I wonder things I hadn't even thought of until this very minute. Things like whether my hair is thick enough or my kitchen mixer can make pasta. I start realizing things I need that I never needed before. A hybrid. A wine cellar. A sheep whose wool I can make into fashionable winter clothing for my family. I see things I probably should make because I'm sure every other person in the universe is making them and the instructions are right here! In my hand! Page 26 alone gives me all I need to know about making both a catmint pillow bed and bracelets/tassels made with the hair cultivated from five Friesian horses…and I'm not even making that up.

Page 69, spice-infused milk and sugar-dusted macaroon trees. Page 71, scented tree ornaments. Page 37, a $520 makeup bag. Page 45, perfectly complected laughing children in matching outfits. Page 53, hand-punched paper doilies. Page 55, patterned men's socks, folded, lined up in a drawer and organized by shade. Page 61, handmade bell jar terrariums with miniature skiers and tiny penguins on snowy glitter mountains. Page 62, toast in the shape of the USA. Page 82, chamomile-yogurt panna cotta. Page 112, a hand-carved menorah. Page 124, a miniature winter forest in a $172 bucket. Page 145, a "simple desert" – lemon mascarpone crepe cake made with 62,789 layers of crepes and lemon curd made with eggs from your own personal chicken who is also a designer poultry model.

Plus 186 other pages I didn't mention.

None of this resembles my life. Martha's calendar (which she graciously shares with us on page 2) features twice-weekly appointments with her personal trainer and other ridiculously unrealistic pursuits like "harvest citrus from greenhouse," and "write thank-you notes."

But somewhere during my mental vacation to Bedford Farm, I become overwhelmed and tired. Those hand-beaded purses are kind of ugly. Escarole sounds a lot like cooked snails. I have zero desire to dust or even possess a collection of tiny skiers in glittery jars.

This all is the brain-child of a woman who might as well live on another planet, a woman with a team—nay, an enterprise, dedicated to this kind of fluffery. I don't have a maid or a stylist, and my entourage is populated with small people who still pee themselves. She wears tailored pantsuits; I pick kid boogers off the knees of my mom jeans. She hand-glitters her letterpress holiday cards; I haven't sent a Christmas card since 1998. She loves propagating rare plants from cuttings (her words); I kill silk flowers. She has an entire day marked off her calendar for Frederic Fekkai's birthday; I get my hair cut once a year...at Walmart.

Like so many others, this magazine is designed to make me want this life, to be convinced that I need this life, and even more, that I should spend time and energy and loads of money in the pursuit of it. But the whole thing really makes me want to climb back into bed, on my drug-store sheet set in my thrift-store pajamas, and give up the glittery ghost. I don't want to live at Bedford Farm and I don't want to be Martha. I don't want chickens with headshots or a beagle in Tartan pajamas. I don't want to teach Snoop Dog how to cook or practice perfecting the recipe for chocolate kugelhopf (or give myself a headache trying to pronounce it). I don't want to tolerate the message that I am not enough and don't do enough, and I sure as hell don't want to pay for the privilege.

So here it is. So long, Martha. Your pantsuits are lovely. Your home is impeccable (both the gingerbread and brick-and-mortar versions). Your holiday table is splendid. Your cider-braised slab bacon looks delicious. But we have to break up.

Because here's the thing. My bacon is just fine like it is. I would rather strangle myself with tinsel than create a to-scale gingerbread replica of my home. Sheep stink and so do chickens. You should consider changing the name to Martha Stewart Can't Even Live Like This magazine, because at least it would be truthful.

Consider my subscription cancelled, my ticket for the guilt-trip torn to bits.

How's that for Living? 

Thank You for the Dollhouse

He is bringing me to surrender.

And while I spout words and thoughts about freeing my heart to Jesus on a regular basis, surrender is a difficult place for me. Sure, I'll surrender my worship, surrender my words. I'll surrender time for Scripture reading and some crumpled bills for the offering plate.

But what about stuff? Comfort? The redefining of need?

Back in January (or was it February?), I pegged this the "year of home."

Home.

It has come/is coming to mean something other than what I thought it would, as these things usually do. Adoption. Moving. Again. Paring down. Letting go.

We get keys to our new place in 16 days, a townhouse on the university campus with faded pink paint and a blue door like the one on my daughter's plastic dollhouse. There is a clipboard on the front door for family game night flyers and street sweeper notices, clothing exchange announcements and resident-only softball league signups. Our next-door neighbor is crafty, if the Halloween swarm of paper bats and a cardstock moon fastened across her front door and window is any indication, so I wish like a 6-year-old that she will be my friend. Maybe we will ride bikes to school together.

The usual new house excitement and chaos is underway now and all the preparations loom ahead. Except that it's more of a stateroom than a house, really. Part apartment, part dormitory, part submarine berth, part communal abode. Our new back porch is wide open to the grassy common play space and I'm about to have all manner of neighborhood children up in here, up in here.

I wonder whether we'll be able to fit very much more than a couple of forks and some warm bodies into the dollhouse with us. The dimensions of the dining room are actually smaller than the dimensions of our dining table, without any chairs. I call about borrowing a saw to hack two feet off the ends off my brand new dining table, a handmade anniversary gift from my husband. I am nothing if not determined, and resourceful.

But the line between need and want is a dashed and dotted one, I think, and life with four forever children means a hard process of purging the comforts I've always treated as deal-breakers. The dollhouse has no dishwasher, for instance. No washer/dryer hookups either. I am accustomed to clean laundry piles that reach my chin, a daily soundtrack of washing machine chugging and spinning, and the truth is, I don't really want to spend half my hours in a coin-op Laundromat with my neighbors. I don't want to end up with someone else's underwear by mistake and have to locate the rightful owner. I don't want to be a goldfish in a glass bowl again, inviting people in when my floors have crumbs and my sink is full because I have no dishwasher, and my kid is covered in purple marker. I don't want to revisit all the boundary-crossing that happens when you live in community, blurring those lines between yours, mine, and ours. 

But it's time I did.

It makes me worried, the thought of giving up so much of my stuff. But I'm grateful for the process, grateful for the paring away of internal, emotional clutter that comes alongside getting rid of the things I think I need simply because I like them. Grateful we'll be part of a culture again and that letting go of things often means making room for people.

So as I try to downsize, it's with that end in mind: blessing people, making room, living in community. Though I've taken a few sizeable car loads to Goodwill already, I'm aiming to be more intentional about finding needs to meet with our excess rather than merely discarding or selling it. There is something about giving it away that energizes and brightens so much more than simply giving it up. Furnishing the new home of a friend who had to leave everything behind, bundling up extra toys for the foster babies to bring along with them when they leave, adding resources to the church library… it is all His way of turning paring down into building up.

And the truth is, I can't wait for the dollhouse. To be stepping on the toes of my family all day, piling up together on the day bed we'll be using as a couch, rubbing elbows with my neighbors at Taco Night, tossing scraps in the complex compost pile to feed the community garden that will feed us too. I can't wait to wonder aloud about Jesus over a pint with the girl in my algebra class and meet my babies for lunch in a crowded student union. To learn. To grow. To live with less.

It's appropriate, I think, that we are moving in over the Thanksgiving holiday. The time for gratitude is here. 

When It's Time to Breathe

Like others in this season of politics and tension, I am thirsty for grace. And in my thirst, I realize how much grace I fail to show, how strong my desire that others see things my way, how hard I have to fight my own nature to reflect Christ's character.

But today, I'm asking you for grace.

Grace because I'm far from this place lately, wrapped up in a budding life ahead, a bunch of big changes on the horizon.

I'm going back to college, God willing, and I've brought my kiddos home to learn at the kitchen table again too, navigating a public charter school curriculum program that looks exciting but still has me a little lost and anxious while we get our bearings.

The foster babies are very nearing their own transition out of our home, a home the lot of us are moving out of at the end of November to be nearer to school and other things. I'm neck deep in editing a book and writing another one, and I can count the days until our newly adopted son will be here without having to even turn the calendar page.

Deep breath.

I've had to pull away from blogging and reading blogs for now, and I just thought I'd tell you all why. Soon, the dust will settle and life will look like something I recognize again, and we'll begin to build something new, brick by brick.

Love you friends. Thanks, as always, for grace. 

Rinse (First Rain)

I've been dry as the ground, this season. The grass had turned to straw and twine. Smoke billowed from a new hill every day and even the deck wood and telephone poles looked thirsty on the backdrop of crispy beige foliage, parched.

Crumpled and bitter, I've fought my tongue around every corner. Thirsty, threadbare, and dried in drought, dust was all I could manage to cultivate upon these lips, and from this weary heart, gasping.

And though I had better things to do, things that couldn't wait, I pulled out the paint box and dirtied my brushes and smothered the canvas large as life with paint and longing. It felt like air and space, so I opened windows, then, and dotted frantic with the mix of pink and white, and I was a fish, brushstroke by brushstroke, caught and released, and released, and released, and released.

Children slept and hours passed, one and then another, dark but for the colors on the canvas, and with the music swirling, I smelled it strong and sudden. Struck with alertness like a whiff of strong coffee, I recognized in the dryness the aroma of rain.

The ground opened to receive it and my heart opened to receive it and I could breathe again, breath so full it tasted like color. I swam. And the music and the rain and dust made painted fingerprints upon that canvas where my soul spilled in splats and curves. I laid awake and watched it fall until clouds and trees were backlit with foggy air and it's all still hanging there this morning…a misty linger like even the air doesn't want to let go.

The TV tells me we'll be dry again in an hour but I plead silent with my eyes to the sky like I'm pleading with a lover not to go, not to go. 

Don't go.