Repotting

Mothers all over the country are exhaling a deep sigh of relief that the endless, restless hours of summer are coming to an end, and with it their need to referee sibling fights and entertain bored children. But we parents slightly ahead of them don't share their back-to-school glee. For many of us, the middle of August means not just that our kids are going back to school, but that they're leaving the house, the state, even the country. 

Oh, August, how I love your long, hot days but resist the hard transition you bring into our lives each year. 

This August I send off my three oldest kids to three different states. One is leaving for the first time, which I think is always the hardest for the mom. Nothing quite pierces your heart like that first very long goodbye to a child who's never been gone for longer than a week at camp. But I'm a veteran of college drop-offs now. I can pretend to hold it together while hauling tubs of bedding and laundry supplies into a dorm room. I'm getting quicker at recognizing when my thoughts are dragging me down into what could become a big ugly cry in front of my kids' new friends, and I know the tricks to interrupt the downward spiral. 

I know what I have to do to survive the next week. Stay busy. View the departing children as full-grown eating machines who need to take care of themselves and not as cuddly, cherub-faced preschoolers who gazed at me with total adoration. Keep only peppy, happy songs on my play list. Limit my journal to only gratitude and excitement. Fix my mind on what's ahead, not on what we're leaving behind. This is how I fight for joy: focus on the goodness of this moment, because it is so, so good. There will be time for mourning and feeling all the feels when the house clears out. 

In his most recent writings in Second Drafts, my friend Craig, also in the midst of dropping a kid off several states away, quoted a prayer from Douglas McKelvey's "A Liturgy for Missing Someone": 

"Grant us the courage to shrink neither from the aches nor from the joys that love brings, for each, willingly received, will accomplish the good works you have appointed them to do." 

God has ordained both the love-induced joys and the love-induced aches I'm feeling today. He has purpose in them both. Good Father, give me the courage not to shrink from either.

And speaking of life transitions, I'm starting a new job when I return from the college drop-offs. For the first time since 1993, I filled out a job application, and for the first time since 2008, I'll be a regular on someone's payroll. (That thunderous sound you hear is me celebrating over heath, vision, and dental insurance.) In His goodness and gentleness, God confirmed this move for me in a number of ways:

1. College tuition
2. Giving me vision for a job I had no vision for a year ago
3. Showing me how I can be part of the Great Commission in my sweatpants with my dog at my feet (I get to work mostly from home), helping my husband pay college tuition, and getting health insurance
4. Noticing the 14 1/2 year pattern in my life

That last one needs some explanation. 

My first job out of college was at The Navigators, where I stayed 14 1/2 years. I loved every minute of that job. I told people I would never leave. I said I would die there, and they'd have to haul me out in a pine box. Except that's not what happened. My job ended suddenly, devastatingly. I wasn't sure I'd ever recover. 

Although I didn't want to start a new life in 2008, that's what my circumstances required, so that's what I did. It was the life I didn't know I would love. I stayed home and focused on raising our kids. I made them three meals a day. I poured juice and milk into sippy cups all day long. I danced and played games with them. I volunteered in their classrooms. I went on field trips. I was a room mom. I invested in relationships with their friends and their friends' parents. I went all in with our school community. I gave my kids the best of myself instead of what I had left over when I got home from work. They were the greatest years of my life, all 14 1/2 of them. 

I'm not good with numbers, God, but even I can see what you're doing here. 

It's been another 14 1/2 years, and He's calling me to my next season. Because no matter how much I've treasured this season, it wasn't meant to last. No one needs juice poured anymore.

I'm a plant who can only flourish in a new pot.* Uprooting, moving, and replanting are not my favorite things. There might have been a little kicking and gnashing of teeth at the thought of a new pot because the old pot has been the very sweetest of pots. But here once again, God's grace is abundant. My job is at a place where I've worked as a contractor for the past eight years. My boss is a friend. My coworkers are familiar and lovely. The work fits me like a glove. And the very best part is that I still have a spectacular 15-year-old daughter in this pot. She's self-sufficient and busy, and there are no more classrooms to volunteer in, but I still get to be a big, daily part of her life for the next three years. Thank you, God, for her. 

Is this another 14-and-a-half-year pot? God only knows. But I will settle deep down into it and offer Him all I have for as long as He has me there. Carrying my aches and joys of seasons past with me, trusting He will use them to accomplish the good works He has appointed me to do. 

*Thank you, Jen J, for sharing that analogy. It was a game-changer for me.

Funerals and Pancakes

 My third child graduated from high school last week, and we have celebrated bountifully. But just as my second child's graduation will always be intricately tied in my mind to the COVID lockdown, this graduation will be tied to 19 murdered schoolchildren and their teachers in a small Texas town I'd never heard of before. 

This post will not be about gun control, police response times, or tragically disturbed young men, which all need to be addressed. My post is about joy. Because mourning and joy are traveling partners in this journey of ours.  

One of the things I love most about my kids' school is the senior defense. As the capstone event of their K-12 classical education and as part of their rhetoric class, every senior gives a 15-minute speech answering one of a number of philosophical questions: What is the good life? What does it mean to be human? How does one pursue truth, beauty, and goodness? They must provide evidence of their points through the study they've done in literature, history, science, and math, but the defense is also supposed to be personal, based on something they're passionate about. 

My daughter Brooka can best be described as playful. So, a few months ago, when she set out to prepare her defense on how suffering is part of what it means to be human, I wondered how that would go. The answer is that it didn't. She stopped about a week in, realizing she could not spend the next two months thinking, studying, writing, and talking about suffering. So she switched her topic to joy. She argued that to live the good life, one must, in the face of tragedy and suffering, choose to hold onto the childlike joy and wonder we're all born with. She said that no matter how terrible life feels, when she sees an open field, she's going to keep running and twirling her way through it. She talked about making pancakes after a funeral, a reference from The Brothers Karamazov, and how in a world full of pain, she wants to be a pancake-maker. 

The news from Uvalde brought a dark cloud--another one--across our nation. As much as I wanted to tune out and close my ears to it, we can't ignore the hard, brutal parts of life, which was also part of Brooka's speech. The good life isn't about running from reality and pretending suffering doesn't exist. We have to sit with it and process it. I watched the news every night last week. I read the newspaper. I looked at every face and read every name of every child who died in Uvalde. I cried and I prayed. Then I went out and celebrated the joy of my here and now: Brooka's final beautiful run at state track, playing cards with our family visiting from Michigan, praising God with other senior families at baccalaureate, walking on stage and presenting our daughter with her diploma, hopping from one party to another, eating delicious food, enjoying warm sunshine, and relishing the past 13 years with families who have become dear to us. Under our nation's dark cloud, we made and served pancakes, literally and figuratively. 

Our baccalaureate speaker said that joy is a sword, a reference from Tolkien. It was a helpful picture as I navigated the emotions of last week. I don't need to feel guilty about my joy. I don't have to mute my own rejoicing because I know others are grieving. My joy, our collective joy, is a sword, and it's doing battle for them. Joy pierces the darkness. No matter how bad things get, no matter how ugly and heartbreaking the world seems, there's always going to be joy. The prince of this world (John 12:31) may throw his evil at us everywhere, but he is not the King. He does not get the final word. We're a people made for joy. Sometimes we have to work hard to choose it. Sometimes we have to fight for it. But when we latch onto it, it's a sword in our hands. Keep fighting for joy, friends. 

As Good As It Gets

 If you're really lucky and you're paying attention, every once in a while, you get one of those "this-is-as-good-as-it-gets" moments. I can think of a handful of them off the top of my head, like my family sitting on a picnic table watching the sun drop behind the Pacific Ocean. They're the kind of moments where you forget that your backyard is full of weeds, that your shower's broken, that someone you love is sick, and that there's a war happening in Ukraine. All you can do is sit in the goodness of that moment, most likely with a tear making its way down to your chin, and think, "God, thank you that this life is so beautiful." 

It had been a while, but I had one of those moments earlier this month. I was sitting in a basement surrounded by the young women I've led in Bible study the past nine years. It was our last meeting before they graduate from high school. The room and the fellowship were cozy, intimate, and so sweetly familiar as I poured out my "parting words" to these girls who have been my spiritual children. "My girls" I call them. 

In 2012, they came together in my mind. For two years I had been leading a group of my older daughter's friends in Bible study*, and it was time to start thinking about a group for my next daughter, a third-grader at the time. With a heavy reliance on the Holy Spirit, I assembled a list of names, and on a Friday afternoon in August 2013, 11 fourth-graders showed up on my doorstep with lunchboxes in hand. 

They were wild little monkeys. 

I could just barely corral them for a 20-minute lesson. After they'd eaten and played and written in their new journals and humored Mrs. Jones by trying to pay attention to her lesson, I shooed them out the door to the minivans waiting in my driveway and collapsed. We did this one Friday a month all year long, talking--between squirms and giggles and endless bathroom breaks--about how God sees us. I needed a nap after every meeting. 

I kept asking them to come back, and they kept showing up. Year after year after year. They all grew at least a foot, and as they did, our group changed. Three girls left along the way, and another one joined us. When the group got to 12 in junior high, I recruited another mom to help me lead. We changed days and changed locations and eventually settled into our cozy basement spot at Lizzie's house. 

All of a sudden they were starting high school, and our meeting seemed more urgent than ever. The giggly little girls had vanished, replaced by teenagers who hungered for deep conversation about how to live out their faith in the challenges of high school. So we kept talking. We talked about doubts, calling, modern-day idolatry, and the cost of discipleship. We talked about how to view our bodies as spiritual vessels, guys and dating, and anxiety. They requested a lesson on angels, so we did that. I was learning right alongside them. 

In March 2020, three-fourths of the way through their sophomore year, the world collapsed around them. Over Zoom we talked about processing loss and a biblical perspective on grieving. 

We've walked together through homecoming dances, finals, illnesses, and pandemic lockdowns. We talked about how to hear from God as they began applying to college and making some of the biggest decisions of their lives. We have covered so much ground in nine years.

This has never been easy. Nine-year-old girls grow up to have very different passions and interests. They all have their own friends. Four of my girls have transferred to different high schools. At times it's been nearly impossible to plan around their schedules, so packed with lessons and performances, games and tournaments, church and family commitments, jobs and boys and homework. But somehow, they kept coming back. 

And now those sweet and silly little fourth graders are spreading out to Minnesota, Arizona, Tennessee, Texas, and New York City, while some of them stay a little closer to home. My work here is done. Yikes, my work here is done. 

Have I done my part to prepare them for the big, scary world where faith is challenged every day and so many things don't make sense? Have I helped build into them a strong enough identity that when they're lonely and afraid and insecure and overwhelmed by not being enough that they'll remember the truth of who God says they are and that will get them through? Oh, God, I can only believe the answer is yes because I believe in You. 

Has this been hard? Yes. But so much more than that, it's been a privilege, one of the greatest of my life. I would have paid for this experience.

On Sunday, this group will meet one last time, this time with the girls' parents, to celebrate the amazing ride we've had. As I'm choking back tears and trying to get my words out, I'll surely be thinking, "This is as good as it gets." 

*The other two groups I started for 4th graders ended when they finished 6th, though they picked back up in some form or fashion as my other daughters entered high school. All of them have been such an honor to lead.  

Confetti and War

 Some thoughts on the war in Ukraine, which makes me cry nearly every day.

First, why has this international tragedy gripped me, gripped a lot of us, like no other? Shortly after Russia's invasion I heard about a journalist who answered that question by saying it was because people speaking English were fleeing their country in cars that looked like ours. He was thrown to the wolves for saying that, of course. Culturally insensitive. I get it. It surely is insensitive and even inexcusable to weep over the Ukrainians while brushing off war victims in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan, and Ethiopia. But I don't understand those wars. And try as I might, beyond our shared humanity, it's hard for me to relate to those victims. What I can relate to, sort of, is an IT specialist picking up her drycleaning one day and the next day leaving everything behind and running for her life. A mom planning her son's graduation and helping him with college admission forms only to realize that neither are relevant any longer, and there's a good chance he won't even be alive in six weeks. A dad who's watching his 16-year-old son play soccer only to see his legs blown off mid-game by a Russian bomb. 

I've never been to Syria or Yemen or Myanmar. But I've been to Russia. I met dozens of teenagers there eight years ago who may be fighting a war today with little knowledge of what's actually happening. They're told to fight and win or don't come home. They can't ask questions. Their young wives can't object or protest. They, too, are the victims of a tyrant, one whose motives are devastatingly easy to understand. 

I apologize for being insensitive, really I do, but this all feels so much closer, and the closer the tragedy, the more profound the heartbreak. 

Second, I'm freshly aware of my own impatience. Fourteen days into the war, I was worn out from praying and frustrated that God wasn't answering. Then I led a Bible study on James 5, which talks about Elijah, "as human as we are," praying fervently. As we talked about what it means to pray fervently, I could only shake my head at my sorry impatience after 14 days of prayer. I think God has something to say to me about fervency. 

And finally, I've been struggling to hold the tension between my happy everyday life and what I watch on the evening news. As I'm prone to doing, I woke up at 3:30 the other morning, with Ukraine one of the first thoughts in my mind. And then I sat down at my computer and spent 40 minutes and $50 ordering basketball confetti and other frivolous items off PartyCity.com. My parties go on as planned, while children bleed out in Ukraine. What in the world do I do with this? 

This poem God put in my inbox this morning doesn't answer everything, but it helps. (I should point out that I am not a poetry person in the least, so it's a big deal for a poem to speak to me.) I share a portion of it with you, in hopes that it will help you buy--and enjoy--your confetti, too. 

A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because it's what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn

would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between 

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while

somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their depravation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the 

ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil." 

A New Hub

We're past the halfway mark in January, but Christmas break just ended yesterday for me. My oldest daughter loaded up her car to return to college, and I'm slowly moving all my stuff back into her bedroom/my office. It's a bittersweet endeavor that symbolizes the emotional adventure of sending and receiving college-age children ... in my house, out of my house, in my house, and back out again. Over and over. 

Have I mentioned that transitions are hard for me? I really have to work at them. And yet my family is in a perpetual state of transition, with no end in sight for the next decade. OK, God, I'm in. Teach me and grow through all of these changes. 

One of our family's transitions snuck up on me over Thanksgiving break. The six of us met up in San Antonio to do something different, explore a new city, and eat great Mexican food. While I knew I was going to learn more about the Alamo and fresh salsa, what I didn't expect to learn was how our family dynamics have changed. 

Kevin and I have always been the hub of our family. We made the plans. We set the schedule. We did the driving. We made the food. We led the discussions. We did the instructing. We solved the problems. We negotiated the peace. (That last one felt like a full-time job sometimes.) Our kids' schedules and interests drove the majority of our decisions, plans, and conversations, but everyone knew Mom and Dad were the hub. 

Beginning with San Antonio and then while having everyone home over Christmas break, I'm realizing that Kevin and I have moved to the periphery. The hub is now this bursting-with-energy force arising out of two young adults and two teenagers. The hub is loud, raucous, and a little disorderly. It's unpredictable. It's laughing, singing, whistling, teasing, pushing, wrestling. It stays up into the early-morning hours and eats at odd times of day. And the two 50-somethings on the periphery of it all just pay the bills and try to keep up. 

This is an astounding, tremendous thing! It seems to me that this is the way it should be. We parents want to work ourselves out of a job. We don't want to spend our entire lives holding everything together. We want our kids to hold themselves, and each other, together. We want them to choose to be friends, and we've got to step out of the way a bit to allow that to happen. We want our families to grow and evolve in the best possible ways, and it seems to me that the best way for that to happen is for Kevin and me to settle into our new place on the periphery and enjoy the ride. 

I'm not ready to be old and boring. I don't want to be the old lady in the flowered dress who no one wants to sit next to at Christmas dinner because she can't follow the conversation. As long as my mind is intact, I will work to stay as relevant, clued in, and connected as I can. I hope my grown children will continue to seek my advice and counsel, be it on God, life, or the difference between a hyphen and an en-dash. 

But I don't need to be the hub anymore. I'm happy to relinquish the hub. Someone else can pack the sandwiches and start the conversations. (Even if it's all about memes and I'm still not totally sure why memes exist.) I am happy to sit back and marvel at how these four fascinating human beings feed off each other's energy, creativity, and wit in the best possible ways. 

(Well, until it goes south and someone ends up with claw marks on their arm, which also happened over Christmas break. Turns out there's still some negotiating the peace to do from the periphery.)