And This Is Why I'm Not a Songwriter

I’m not sure I ever feel as hypocritical as when I sing worship songs at church. Last night we sang a new one, something about my purpose being the art of losing myself in praise and giving up control. It was all so light and breezy. In my experience, giving up control is anything but light and breezy. It’s unnatural, agonizing, frustrating, nearly impossible. How casually we sing, “All to Jesus I surrender, all to Him I freely give,” without counting the cost of what that really means. If you truly mean those words, there’s nothing casual about them.

I want to surrender. I try to surrender. But my song would sound something more like this:“I’m a desperate fool. I’ve failed again. This struggle is so great that I want to throw in the towel and just live comfortably, happily, greedily for myself. But I know that’s not where I want to be, either. So I trudge on, fighting against myself, a weary fool, desperate to surrender to you. Shoo-be-doo-wa.”

Years ago, I heard a man confess that he didn’t even believe some of the words he sings at church. He was referring to, “You’re all I want; you’re all I ever needed.” While he may have wanted those words to be true, he could admit that they weren’t. Yeah, I thought. I get that.

Yet I still love to sing worship songs. I do better with the ones that are more about God and not about me. I like statements of fact, things like, “Lord, your name is holy.” God doesn’t need the reminder that He is holy, but I sure do.

I think that’s why I get “goose flesh” (my Southern grandmother’s term) sometimes as those statements of fact are slipping out of my mouth. The truth of what I’m singing sort of sneaks up on me and hits me so hard that my legs get weak. That’s what happens when I sing, “That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
 and has shed His own blood for my soul . . . my sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
 My sin, not in part but the whole,
 is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
 praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”

No hypocritical feelings there. Just a whole lot of thankful. And a whole lot of goose flesh.

Ode to a good Zeekie dog

Once upon a time, a couple of young newlyweds bought their first house. It seemed big and empty, and the wife became obsessed with the idea of getting a dog. They searched the newspapers—this was long before Craig’s List—and found a litter of labs born on a farm in Kansas. The mother was a yellow lab and the father a husky red-fox lab, yellow with a whole lot of red in him. When the couple traveled to Denver to pick out the new addition to their family, they wondered how they would ever choose just one. Then the one with a smudge of dirt on his ear caught their eye. They watched him for the next half-hour until they decided he was definitely the one. It wasn’t until they had him at home that they realized it wasn’t mud on his ear after all, and it wasn’t going away.

The puppy grew up way too quickly, as puppies do, and made quick work of shredding two couches. One day the couple came home to find a pile of snow in the backyard. It was July. He had dragged the couch cushions out the dog door and shredded them to smithereens. Another time they came home to find him sitting on the couch with the TV on, the remote under his paw. He was completely out of control in those early days, and his young, naïve owners felt helpless against his boundless energy and persistence. A coworker sensitively pulled the wife aside one day and asked her, after she showed up with one too many scratches and black eyes, if she was “having any problems at home.” She answered, “I have a dog.”

The wife took him to training classes. They helped. They began running together. The husband took him across the street to an open space with a little stream, and they played for hours. Exercising their dog was not an option; it was a necessity. The couple learned that good behavior is directly proportionate to good exercise—a good lesson for future parents.

The husband bought a business, and the wife spent long, long hours alone. The dog became her baby. When the woman became pregnant with a real baby, the dog gained weight with her. On the day she left for the hospital, she bent down between contractions, held her 100-pound baby in what remained of her lap, and promised, “I will never love this baby as much as I love you.” She returned three days later, startled to find that her dog was really just a dog.

She loved him still. But things had changed.

The babies kept coming, one after another. The dog got less exercise and less attention. But he was fiercely protective of the babies. After the arrival of the first daughter, the wife tried to leave the two children at the park with the grandma and go for a run with the dog, but he would not leave their side. She forced him to go, but when she let him off his leash a half-mile away, he bolted back to the children and stood guard by the swingset.

He may or may not have loved the children, but he endured them well. He let them sit on him. Pull his tail. Brush his hair. Dress him up in superhero costumes. They, in turn, let him eat their toast crust and slobber on their feet.

And then time slipped away, as time will do. He calmed down. He calmed way down. He began sleeping the better part of the day, only really coming to life when the family was seated at a table full of food. One day (literally, one day) he lost his hearing, and he became more belligerent. He still obeyed the husband’s commands, but to the wife, he gave a look that said, “Really? What are you going to do to me?” Then he stole the food off the baby’s plate when she wasn’t looking.

One day, the family moved. They planned to take the dog with them, but as he struggled to get up the stairs at their old home, it became clear that he wouldn’t make it living on the second story. Besides, at the equivalent of 90-something years old, this was his home, and the wife became convinced that this was where his days should end.

In his final weeks, he received more love and attention than in his final four or five years. He went on walks (slow, short walks) with the family. He sat on the deck for hours with the breeze blowing through his ears. The day before he died, the oldest daughter threw the ball down the hill for him to retrieve. He went after it, making his usual concentric circles in the ravine below, sniffing everywhere, until at last giving up and making the slow, burdensome trip back up the hill. The family was planning to take him for a walk, but he seemed too tired. They stayed at the house for a few hours, but he stayed alone in his basement, sliding door open, breeze in his ears. And that’s where he died the next day. Today.

They don’t seem like the same people they were when they picked him up that day 13 ½ years ago. They have tripled in number. They’ve lived more, hurt more, loved more. Zeke was there for it all. They grew up with him, and he grew old with them. He had a good life, and he was greatly loved.

Just Enough Space

No secret that Francis Chan is one of my faith heroes. Not only do I love his teaching, but I love that he practices what he preaches. I just read an article about his family in Thriving Family magazine, about how they scaled their household way down to move into a small tract house far below what his near-celebrity-status income could afford. They have chosen to live modestly so they can give grandly—and also so that they can reap the benefits of living so close as a family.

Francis’s wife Lisa, though slow to warm up to the idea, says in the article, “Moving into that smaller house was one of the biggest turning points in my whole life. It caused me to be detached from stuff. It has radically changed my whole outlook.”

It was a timely read. While in no way does the motivation for our move compare to that of the Chans, I can relate to the idea of scaling way down. Of detaching physically and emotionally from so much stuff. Of trying to re-program a family of six to share one bathroom. In the article, Lisa talked about privacy becoming a thing of the past: “There was no hiding from one another. There was just one space, and you heard what everybody was doing.”

In our new home, half of our square footage is one room. Right now it’s chaos, but once we get it set up, I imagine that’s where we’ll always be. All of us. Together. While I love the idea of this in theory—especially at a time when we’re trying to “sell” family culture over peer culture to our tweens—in practice, I’m a girl who likes my space. It will take some getting used to. (Though I am enjoying saying, “Braden” in a regular voice when I need him, rather than yelling down the stairs at the top of my lungs several times a day.)

We just left the ideal house for teenagers to sequester themselves in their rooms in the basement, communing with a computer and their ear buds, far away from the hard relational lessons of family life. It’s that image that makes me OK with a six-year-old walking in to potty while I’m in the shower.

I don’t know where we’ll be when they’re teenagers, but I’m hoping that the lessons we learn from this experience will go with us. I hope in some small way we end up like the Chans. “There were days when silence was no option,” says their 14-year-old daughter Rachel, who often had a hard time just finding a place to do her homework. “But I would not trade it for anything. I love the noise and joy that constantly surrounds this house that the Lord has given me.”

Movin' on Up

Observations from a Week of Moving and Cleaning:

Moving is like childbirth. It sounds like a good idea until you’re in the middle of it, at which point you vow to never do it again. Until you forget how horrible it was and do it again.

There comes a certain age at which you should stop schlepping everything you own yourself. We’re just about there.

People actually clean their grout. I had no idea, nor did I realize that my own grout (kitchen floor) was supposed to be anything other than black. Five toothbrushes and a few hours later, it’s no longer black. But seriously, don’t people have better things to do?

In nine years, I managed to completely avoid cleaning my refrigerator. Kevin cleaned it a few times and my mom cleaned it each time I had a baby. Thankfully, the babies were numerous. I aim to live cleaner in my new house.

Moving offers a fresh start. I’m full of vision about how we’re going to not only live cleaner, but be more organized, eat better, pray more, and spend more quality time together. (Nevermind that if someone were telling me this, I’d be thinking, “Yeah, good luck with that.”)

My mom and I now listen to the same music. This says much more about me than I care to think about.

Even those of us with a high tolerance for organizational chaos can only live so long without certain necessities—like a belt. My solution seems to be eating ice cream every day so that belts are no longer necessary.

Any place where your family is starts to feel like home. Even if it’s a car repair shop.

Binge and Purge

When I was a kid, I moved once a year on average. My dad wasn’t military; he was just restless. So besides those precious (horrific) journals I wrote about a few weeks ago, I have very little in the way of childhood memorabilia. I learned to stifle my inner packrat and live with whatever could be stuffed into a few boxes. Two items were especially dear to me (don’t laugh): a plush Snoopy toy with a missing nose and the Walt Disney song book. At some point I started recording my various addresses on the inside covers of the song book. Both flaps are completely filled.

I don’t know how many times I had to yank these treasures out of the trash during one of my parents’ packing frenzies. I learned to be crafty, to pack them along with my clothes. Surely no one would throw out my clothes?

When Kevin and I moved into our current house, I settled down. Way down. I envisioned my grandchildren visiting us here some day. I filled every nook and cranny. We built a storage shed in the back yard to create more nooks and crannies, and those too were filled. I accumulated my way through my thirties. I accumulated children who joined right in with me. Like most of the rest of America, our life became about managing our stuff.

Then God redirected our path, asking us to live among the poor. In case we were tempted to ignore this, He shook up our own economic realities to hasten our obedience. At the same time, my eyes were open to the futility—and the burden—of all this stuff. I don’t want my kids to grow up to be stuff managers. I want something bigger for them. I want less for them. So the purge is under way. In the past several months, I have hauled out a couple dozen trash bags full of toys and clothes. I have thrown away most of their artwork and school work. Today, we have a tub of stuffed animals, a tub of hard toys, a tub of books, and a tub of games. Four simple tubs. I feel like one of those people who lose half their weight and have a new lease on life. I feel free!

But I still feel a little sad and guilty, too. Though I’ve explained to the kids the importance of scaling down and being free from our stuff, I still feel like I have to sneak the toys out of the house. In a careless moment, I left a bag of “trash” out, and Brooka stumbled on it. She asked me what I was planning to do with the animals in it—the ones she had spent hours painting. It was one of those ethically-challenging parenting moments: Do I fudge the truth, or do I just ’fess us?

I told her they were headed for the trash, and her eyes immediately filled with tears. (Remember, this is my very not-sensitive child. God help me if it had been one of the others.) “But those are really, really special to me,” she whimpered, offering me another opportunity for parental growth. I did something then that I wish my dad had done for me. I got down on the floor, looked her in the eye, and asked her to forgive me. Then I let her pick out an animal for each year she’s been alive—a total of six out of the dozen or so in the trash. She seemed to think that was fair, pulled them out, and went on her way.

I went downstairs and found my Walt Disney song book. (My Snoopy dog is already packed in the kids’ stuffed animals. I still have them both.) There’s a fine line between allowing your stuff to control you and allowing it to positively shape the moments of your life. Lord, help me as I figure this out.

Fabulous

I’m teetering on the brink of fabulous. I’m two-thirds of the way there.

Yesterday I woke up to find a flower from my husband with a card that said, “Happy 8/12 Birthday.” (I remember just enough about math to know that’s the same as two-thirds.) Yep, two-thirds of the way between 39 and 40.

For the better part of my 30s, I’ve been preaching the gospel of “Fabulous at Forty” and writing “One step closer to Fabulous!” on my friends’ birthday cards. My reasoning was that most women in their 20s are trying to figure out their place in the world (and, let’s be honest, looking for a husband), and for a lot of us, our 30s are our little kid years: planning for them, making them, carry them, pushing them out, feeding them, changing them, teaching them, raising them. I started that journey at 28 ½ and end it, 11 years later, with my “baby” headed to preschool in the fall.

To get me through those chubby, sleep-deprived, sour-smelling years, I started dreaming about how fabulous I would be at 40. At the very least, I figured I would at least like my hair. Maybe have some grown-up furniture and drive a car with a sun roof? I’ll have time and energy to spend on me, right? I’ll have outgrown all those pesky sin issues, right? Maybe I'll even start eating vegetables. Yes, it will be fabulous. I will be fabulous.

So now that I’m here, teetering and all, what does it look like on the other side of 39? It certainly looks different. I’m moving for the first time since I turned 30. I’m giving away half of my household possessions and preparing to live in a much smaller place with no yard, no closets, no bathtub. (It does have air conditioning and room for the kids to rollerskate in the living room. Give and take.) I'm essentially unemployed. I spend the great majority of my time in a 1999 minivan. At 35, that would not have seemed so fabulous. But here’s the thing—at nearly 40, I’m more in tune with what really matters. I'm not so concerned about impressing people. I'm more concerned with who I am than what I do or how I look doing it. I’m more likely to feel joyful, no matter what my circumstances. I’m more thankful for the things I’ve got than disappointed in the things I haven’t got.

When October rolls around, I’ll still have stringy hair and jiggly arms. I’ll still make biting remarks that I regret and struggle with chronic impatience. But in the ways that are most important to me, I think I’m gonna be pretty darn fabulous.

Wanting and Waiting

What is that restless longing I feel way down deep within me? And why does it seem to be making its way closer and closer to the surface? Every day, I am ever-so-slightly more anxious, more dissatisfied, more aware that I was not made for this world.

Maybe it’s age? Is this a racing-toward-40 phenomenon? Or a natural feeling that results from nagging debt, fighting children, sickening oil spills, and lingering wars? It’s true, I wasn’t nearly as dissatisfied in this world when it seemed more pleasant, when it was all about me. In high school, my only restless thought was getting out of my little hick town and escaping to California. In college, I was anxious for the next fun fix and the excitement of starting my own life on my own terms. “Don’t come back now, Lord! I have things to do: marriage, children, travel, a meaningful career. This is my time!"

Larry Crabb writes, “Satan’s masterpiece is not the prostitute or the skid-row bum. It is the self-sufficient person who has made life comfortable, who is adjusting well to the world and truly likes living here, a person who dreams of no better place to live, who longs only to be a little better—and a little better off—than he already is.”

Guilty as charged.

And now? I’ve still got goals, but they’re different now. They’re things like loving better, giving more, living a fully surrendered life. The biggest dream of all can’t even happen in this lifetime. It will only come in the next, when I finally go Home. How I hope to be greeted by my Father with the words, “Well done, faithful one.”

“Come on back, any time, Lord,” I think to myself more and more often. In the meantime, I wait, thankful that He’s given me so much to enjoy in this life. Still, the longing intensifies.

“The Spirit’s masterpiece is the man or woman who much prefers to live elsewhere,” Crabb continues, “who finds no deep joy in the good things of this life, who looks closely in the mirror and yearns to see something different, whose highest dream is to be in the presence of the grace-filled Father. It is the person whose life here is consumed with preparing to meet Him there.”

Yeah, that’s it.