An Easy Life

I've not posted anything for a couple weeks...

Mostly, I've not been emotionally capable of it.

Even writing that sentence makes me want to cry.

Old friends from my youth were tragically killed in a car accident.

These are the scenarios no one wants to think about...
they exist in some other alternate universe.

Ty and Terri were their names and they lived in Omaha.
But I knew them when I was 14 as youth leaders here in California.
And, just two weeks before their death,
I saw them in Omaha when we were visiting our family.

I've spent some time thinking about why this death has in so many ways immobilized me.

Is it the memory of innocent youth?
Or that time when I loved Jesus with a whole and infatuated heart?
Maybe it's just remembering how much they loved me...and all of us.
How they took time.
How when they were with you, they were all with you.

And, while I think the missing of these dear people is all of this,
I think mostly it's that last piece...their presence.
I learned once that if you don't have words or advice or anything like that to give someone,
just give them yourself, your presence.
BE with them.
And I think that for the last 30 years of my life,
even though so much distance in so many ways existed between us,
I still knew their presence in my life.

I think the same is true for the thousands of people who watched their funeral.
And the handful of us who were together a couple weeks ago here in California to remember them.
We feel their death so deeply because they were with us so completely.

It couldn't have been easy on them,
but they made it look that way.
It was their gift...this gift of presence.
The gift of being.

We live in a day when to live in a present way is challenging,
not because we carry any different pressures than any other time,
but because it is so easy  to escape.
I can slip away from my children with a simple swipe of my smartphone.
I can enter the lives of those I haven't seen in decades
Or shop
Or read
Or listen
and not BE.

Even now as I write my children have woken from their nap
and I find I must come to a place in this post where I stop
so I can be with them.
Not just because they have physical needs,
but because they need their mom to BE.

This is not easy...
and I find myself craving an easy life.
I don't want to do the hard work of being present,
I don't want to have to give up my life,
myself in order to be with them
or anyone.

And.
I want more for my children
my marriage
my friendships.

I'll be blogging about these things over the next few weeks...
please join me.

Working Mom

A piece I wrote several years back when having to go back to work with our first baby...

Today at 4:15 ~ dawn still dark~
I woke and fed my daughter,
then put her back to sleep.
I showered, dressed, and made myself up
so I could go 
to an 8 a.m. job interview.

I have to go back to work
and this new mama heart
can hardly balance the ache of leaving
my girl with the need to provide.

I watched her sleep~
this, the first morning I won't be here to greet
her tiny face when she wakes,
her smile filling my cup.

I know a mom
who rises early
to work at a dump
sorting trash
so she can feed her family.
Her harried existence
missing early morning smiles.
And yet missing the growing of her children,
does not lack the glow of sacrifice,
that fills her children's cup.

I don't pretend that my
going to work is anything
like this woman's daily
demonstration of selflessness.
But in the moments before I left,
I pumped my love into a bottle,
a cup that will feed~
and I think I knew what it meant
to exist to love.

**This picture was taken about 6 years ago and is the woman in the poem. I saw her children about two years ago on a visit to Romania and she was still working at sorting trash. It is used with her permission.

Confessions

I remember before leaving for Romania eight years ago,

Driving though tract housing developments in Southern California and thinking: I don’t want this. I don’t want the perfect house with the perfect life and the picket fence.

You know what I’m talking about, right? Those developments that give a home buyer several models to choose from and those models are then repeated every fifth house or so.

What I wouldn’t give to have one of those houses in one of those developments now.

The space!

The pretty kitchens with granite counter-tops and stainless steel appliances!

The new bathrooms with clean toilets and bathtubs!

And even if it was a previously owned house in one of those developments, oh, THE SPACE!

And here is where I express my discontent.

Here is where I confess I want the picket fence. I want the perfect life. I want the security all of it symbolizes.

I never did before. Back then, I worshiped simplicity and saving the world by living smaller, using less, buying yard sale furniture and Goodwill silverware and staying out of debt by paying cash for cars.

And here is where I confess the idol I made of debt-free living. How I’ve worshiped having less.

And I’ve  thought myself better because I didn’t care whether I lived in a tract housing development in Southern California with space, granite countertops in the kitchen and never before used bathrooms.

Discontent with less, I am a recovering simple living addict.

And talk about tension.

Because I believe it is good not to have debt.

And I don’t think we should live beyond our means.

I really do like yard sale furniture.

But I hate what I think all of this says about me.

And I hate when I want more than what I’ve been given.

When I’m not satisfied with what I have.

I know no life is perfect.

Perfect houses with kept yards behind white fences do not equal perfectly kept lives.

But they are a symbol for them.

Just as used and painted furniture symbolize something other than new and for me, the danger of pride.

In all honesty, right now, I just want to find the balance between humility and contentment.

I think they only symbol of that is the cross.

Jesus said: pick up your cross and follow me…

Lose your life, and you will find it.

Here’s where I find myself losing my life today

Picking up a cross in hope of finding life:

In gratefulness for the tiny dirty house where I live.

The disheveled children who scream for what they want while I try to remain calm and patient and in control.

Thankful I’ve been able to spend the last four years of my life spilling my life into theirs.

And,

Losing myself in the knowledge that the next step of providing for those little ones means getting a job.

It isn’t what I want…

I want the big house

The white fence

The granite,

Alongside old silverware and repurposed furniture.

I want to stay home with my kids.

I want the perfect American life.

And I never thought humbling myself and picking up a cross,

The symbol of humility and contentment,

Would mean getting a job,

NOT being at home with my kids,

So that we can simply provide for them.

I'm finding,

that living a simple life,

is simply wanting to provide for our three little ones.

But it is.

And it’s hard.

And I’m praying that as I move beyond symbols and talks of confessing my discontent and pride,

I am able to hide in the shadow of THE only Life that matters.

And there, find my life.

That Broken Piece: more on depression

I wanted to say
that usually something triggers depression.
Mine, I thought, was being old and single.

It wasn't.

The trigger,
was not belonging.
That life wasn't what I wanted it to be,
or had expected.
And so maybe I wasn't who I'd thought I was.

And the woman that emerged in that time,
I didn't know her or recognize her.
She did things, thought things, became things
I wouldn't have believed.

Because I believed a lie,
that left me hollow
and hating my life.

I also fell into this pattern
of needing to be something more,
something else
other than who I was. Who I am.

And these lies,
these triggers,
I still feel them.
I fall and fall and am swept away.

And so,
this is what I mean
when I say,
that this broken piece,
keeps me laid low
before Love.
So I can listen to it
whisper it's sweet song of belonging and truth.

Our brokenness is a mercy.
Our brokenness can speak truth.

Beauty and a McDonald's Playland

The other day

I was with my kids at Mc Donald's (again).
My husband was gone for an 11 day trip,
and I was doing whatever I could to make the time easier.
This included a playland and happy meals.

And it seems in that sticky maze of tunnels and slides,
I'm usually led to something beautiful.

This day it was a little boy named Alex.
He had Down Syndrome.
And because I'm having a baby later in life,
I view children like this differently than I did in the past.
My heart doesn't ache with the hurt of their life,
but rather the promise.

We were the only ones in the playland that day,
me, my kids, Alex, and his big brother and girlfriend.
Sophie was singing from the Frozen soundtrack to Alex and asked him if he wanted to dance with her.
He didn't respond,
but followed her around anyway.
I thought: should our baby be born Down Syndrome,
our kids will never know life any differently.
The life this baby adds to our family,
will be the only life they ever know.
It will be the norm.

And my heart grew huge with this beauty.
A big sister asking a baby to dance,
singing songs,
asking him if he wants to build a snowman,
much like any other child.

I asked Alex's  big brother how old his brother was and he said: almost eight.
And then added: he's had a difficult time.
I thought he meant having Down Syndrome, and so I nodded,
but then he added: On December 11, 2012,
he was diagnosed with leukemia.
He continued: but he's been fighting it and right now he's doing okay...
It's harder, you know, with the Down Syndrome.

I looked at that little boy again and tried to understand
the how and why of justice when
this sweet boy, who already had so much stacked against him,
would be handed the further complication of cancer.

And in the muggy haze of a Mc Donald's playland,
I was not given an answer
to the justice questions of our world.

But I was a witness to this:
The first time Alex climbed to the top of the bright tunnels,
and rode a salty slide down,
he hopped off the lip of the ride,
looked at his brother
and threw his fist in the air.
With pride.
With joy.
And his brother threw his fist in the air, too.
And there they were,
celebrating something so tender
so vulnerable,
but so strong,
that it could only be described as Beauty.

And I think,
in that victory,
I saw something living and breathing and eternal,
more real than anything we can see or touch or feel.
I watched injustice shake with the promise of defeat.

And I heard the echo of a promise:
a little child will lead them.

I think that child will look a lot like Alex.
Beauty.

I burst with the promise of this hope.