Why Johnny Can Read and Mommy’s Lost Her Mind

And just like that, the kids are back to school this week. I am always equal parts sad and giddy this time of year. Sad to lose the laziness, the sleeping in, the break from packing lunches and hurrying off more kids and bags than I can fit through the door, but giddy to get a little break from the 24-hour parenting I've done all summer. This year I send three to school full time and one off to preschool for six hours a week. What on earth will I do with myself?!

The best part about returning to school is that I usually have this “all-is-right-with-the-world” sense as I pull out of the parking lot. Daddy’s working, kids are at school learning and playing, and I’m doing whatever it is that I do; it feels like everyone is where they’re supposed to be. It’s not a feeling that I take for granted. I know how over-the-top blessed and unusual we are to have our kids in a school in which we have 100 percent confidence.

Five years ago this week, I was agonizing over where my children would go to school. (One wasn’t even born, but I agonized for them all.) I had put them on the waitlist for a charter school a year earlier, but with thousands of other kids on the list—most put there by a mother holding her newborn in a hospital room—I figured Braden probably wouldn’t even get in. We were all set to go to our neighborhood elementary school. We had our teacher and room assignment. I had prayer-walked around the building. We had hid a special rock on the playground so Braden could dig it up on the first day of school and know we were thinking of him. And then we got the call.

There was one spot left at the charter school. Instead of walking a few blocks to school, we would be driving 25 minutes. We wouldn't know a soul there. This was a big emotional transition for someone who doesn’t transition well, and I had about four hours to do it. (And another four to buy a year’s worth of school uniforms.) The neighborhood school would have been fine, but I know we made the best choice for Braden and for our other kids.

And that’s the thing that’s overwhelming. Choice. I don’t know anyone my age whose parents made a choice about their schooling. We turned five, they sent us to school, and that was that. The only choice was whether to go with the Shaun Cassidy or the Rick Springfield lunchbox. You likely didn’t know anything about the school’s educational philosophy, its safety record, or its policy on bullying. If you didn’t like Mrs. Hoodenpyle in the second grade, you got over it. I realize our mothers had other concerns—the Cold War, how to work that newfangled microwave, who shot J.R.—but choosing a school was not one of them.

And now the children of those mothers agonize over school choice: private school, Christian school, home school, charter school, online school, or good, ol’ fashioned neighborhood school. Some of us try them all. Some choose one for one child and something different for their sibling. All of us wonder if we’re doing the right thing and are bombarded by friends, acquaintances, and radio ads to change our minds. It’s enough to make us stark-raving mad.

So that peaceful, easy feeling I'll have as I pull out of the parking lot tomorrow is definitely not something I take for granted. Our school is not perfect, but it is home.

Words to Live By (At Least for This Week)

A few quotes to share this week, both of which deeply resonate with me while at the same time make me a bit nervous. Both are from Larry Crabb’s book, Shattered Dreams, which you may be happy to know I have almost completed!

“Oh! [God’s] grace and goodness toward us is so immeasurably great, that without great assaults and trials it cannot be understood.” —Martin Luther

Crabb expounds on this: “Good friends make our lives easier, not harder, so we think. . . . The problem is with our blessing-based, happiness-centered understanding of goodness. It is too small. . . . If Luther is right—that only in suffering do we learn to fully delight in God’s goodness—then it becomes immediately clear why our enjoyment of God is so shallow. We don’t like to suffer. We see no value in suffering. We arrange our lives to minimize suffering. And we believe Christianity offers a God who will cooperate with that plan.”

Note my own emphasis on the words “fully delight.” I believe we can delight in God when life is going just as we like. But can we fully delight in Him under such good circumstances? I’m not sure we’ve experienced the fullness of God until we’ve been with Him in times of suffering. It’s then that we begin to more fully understand His mercy, His sovereignty, His enoughness. And through these things, our delight in Him grows.

Crabb also quotes a friend in the midst of his own shattered dream:

“Faith, as I am growing to understand it more, is about looking beyond my circumstances to a person. To have faith in better circumstances, even in God creating better circumstances, is not true faith. I want to be the kind of man who can watch every dream go down in flames and still yearn to be intimately involved in kingdom living, intimately involved with my friend the King, and still be willing to take another risk just because it delights Him for me to do so. And my flesh shivers to think about it.”

In the past two years, I have made so many grand plans that have gone nowhere. But I, too, want to be the kind of person this paragraph describes. To keep dreaming, to keep risking, to choose doing "crazy" things for Christ over safety and comfort every time. I’m not that person today, and I’m painfully aware of it at times. But I keep dreaming that's who He'll help me become.

Recovering Suburban Snob

I’ve never understood the appeal of living downtown. I’m a suburbs girl—big houses, big yards, big garages, supermarkets on every other corner.

After our move, I still don’t live “downtown” exactly (though that’s how I describe it to people I don’t know very well; it’s my euphemism for “run-down” and “high-crime”), but I’m starting to get it. My early-morning runs are beginning to convince me.

First, after using two keys to get through two doors to make it to the street (no quick garage-door exits here), I pass by the homespun businesses on my street. The lady across the street sells western wear and has a larger-than-lifesize, anatomically-correct horse reared up on the top of her building. (That would never fly in our old covenant community.) We have only one real house near us, and after a month, I already know the woman who lives there better than I did any of my suburban neighbors.

A few blocks away, I glance in the window of the daycare center, whose workers are already, at 5:30, getting their rooms ready. That’s one of the interesting things about this part of town. There’s so much life going on at sunrise! Not just old people walking their dogs, which I used to see occasionally in my old neighborhood, but men, women, and children waiting at bus stops, shop keepers putting their wares out on the street, lots of folks in scrubs walking to the hospital nearby. It’s 5:45, but it feels hours later.

A young woman waiting at a bus stop yells out, “Hello!” to me from across the street. Is she crazy, I wonder, or just friendly? It’s a little like being from Massachusetts and visiting Texas. People in the suburbs don’t holler out to strangers. And even if they did, the strangers are wearing headphones and wouldn’t hear them.

I continue west, crossing over Union Boulevard to where the “nice” kicks in. But it’s different from suburban nice. It’s at least $100K cheaper than suburban nice, too. Who knew?! (Except for you, Tim and Camilla.) Here I pass by yards that suburban dwellers dream of. I don’t so much care about horticulture or architecture, but even I am amazed by what I see. The houses, no two remotely alike, are so old and so interesting that I’m reminded of my little 1,000-resident hometown that was hitting its heyday in the early 40s. Nearly every house has an inviting front porch, an air-conditioner in the window, and cars parked in front. This is the land of single-car garages. Yet people still seem to be thriving here, even without all that room to store their stuff! Imagine! Jog strollers rest on several of the porches, reminding me that people here are just like me. They’re not the Volvo-driving, child-hating, pot-smoking weirdos we tend to imagine living downtown. They’re just living smaller and quainter than most of the other people I know.

Still finding my way around, I get lost often. The streets start to look alike—though the houses are still so different—and then out of nowhere, on a perfectly residential street, I run by a market/deli/organic health food store. Or a coffee shop. Or an antiques store. Right in there with all the houses. Not a strip mall or a Chic-fil-A in site! I love that there are literally picket fences here, and I can picture the women swapping homegrown tomatoes and zucchini over the fence. It’s all so tranquil, so frozen in time, that you’d never believe you’re just a half-mile away from people being gunned down in their meth labs.

I guess that’s all part of the variety of downtown. And I’m starting to really like it.

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.