The Best Part of Being a Parent

For me, the best part of being a parent is watching how all the wiring and gifting and experiences come together to shape our children. We know nothing about our babies when we bring them home from the hospital. We have dreams for them, and on our best days we have ideas about how we want to raise them, but truly, they are little 8-pound mysteries.

And then who they are--the person God created them to be--gradually comes into focus. We moms and dads begin to see patterns and connect the dots. On our best days we create opportunities for this emerging person to try new things and think new thoughts. We create spaces for them to expand and to hear from the One who knows exactly who they are and who they're meant to become.

One of my little people, Brooka, began talking about "preaching" when she was 4. She learned about a specific country she wanted to go to, one across the world that her dad and I had never given a thought. A little later she learned the word "missionary." Before she even started kindergarten, she would tell her sister she was sorry she wouldn't make it to her wedding, but she'd be too busy preaching in a far-away land. We all looked at her like she was nuts. Who was this child saying such strange things?

But even stranger, it lasted. While Addison grew out of her desire to be a fireman and a farmer, and Braden left behind his Indiana Jones days and thoughts of being an archaeologist, Brooka hasn't wavered. And the dots seemed to line up: her steady faith, easy-going nature, fearlessness, ability to make quick friends, enjoyment of children, ease and comfort with people from other cultures, ability to sleep and use the bathroom literally anywhere, and the way she does sick so well, pushing through anything no matter how she feels.

God gave this child to a mom who hadn't been out of North America until she was 43. Who has no vision for living anywhere but Colorado. Who eats five foods, none of which can touch (as my mother says of me). But I'm also a mom who prays daily for my children to have godly vision for their lives. And I'm a mom who has learned to create space for God to give them that vision.

Our space next week will be Fiji. Brooka and I are going to serve with a ministry that works with sex-traffic victims. These are girls approximately Brooka's age who have young children of their own. How do you prepare for something so intense, so radically different from anything you've ever known? No idea, except to pray. Pray and trust that God has been preparing Brooka for this her whole life. He must have been preparing me as well because there was no way I was missing out on seeing my daughter on her first missions trip. She can go alone every year from here on out, but wild horses (which in this case look like $2,000 and 13-hour plane trips) couldn't keep me from processing this experience with her in real time.

I'll get to cheer her on if this feels like the direction God is sending her. And I'll have to put on my Big Girl Pants and begin the hard work of setting her free, surrendering my fear and sadness at the thought of her living a world away. Or, I could end up sitting with her in the confusion of her calling if she feels like this just isn't it, telling her it's OK to dream different dreams and creating space for new vision. Either way, I hear God calling me to hold it all loosely. To trust Him and remember that He knows exactly what's best for Brooka.

Will you pray for us?

• That we'll know how to love and bless the girls we're with and will give generously of ourselves.
• That we'll keep our eyes and ears open to what God wants to show us.
• That Brooka will be sensitive to the Holy Spirit in knowing if this is the way of life God is calling her to, and that I'll have wisdom to know how to process with her. 
• That we'll hold it all loosely, letting go of our agendas and expectations and enjoying whatever He has planned for us. 

Tomorrow

Hear that giant door slamming shut? Pay it no mind, it's just a season of my life (a third of my life, but who's counting?) closing shop. Tomorrow my youngest child finishes elementary school. The school down the street. The one we bought a house next to because we practically lived there. The one where we've deeply, intensely invested the past 14 years of our lives. The place our kids entered as nervous, needy 5-year-olds and emerged as confident, independent adolescents.

We're ready to go. Junior high beckons my girl, and she's eager to move on. She has new friends to make and new interests to discover. I'm ready, too. I am done with art shows, spelling tests, living museums, costume days, field day, and freezing cold trips in May to the Botanical Gardens. I don't need to make another trip to the Capitol with 80 rowdy 4th graders or eat a sack lunch on a cold, hard floor. I don't need to bring in another pack of juice boxes or attempt to grade another logic packet. I definitely don't need to spend another minute in the elementary carpool. I'm truly grateful for every blessed day I got to do those things and that I got to do them times four, but I can be done. I need to be done. The elementary moms with their baby slings and tattoos remind me that it is time for a new generation to take its place. (It already has, actually, I've just lingered far longer than the other Gen X moms.) But still, it won't be an easy goodbye for historical me. I can't say goodbye to a pair of socks without a whole lot of processing and reflection.

Tomorrow the other kids, grades K-5, will line the hallways outside their classrooms. Someone will cue the tears, and Chariots of Fire will be blasted over the loud speaker. The sixth graders will enter at the kindergarten wing and run through the halls, high-fiving the younger ones who will take their place. Their former teachers will cheer them on, and as they make their way to the sixth grade hall, a clump of weepy parents will try to forget about themselves and instead clap wildly for the achievement of their children. Oh, it won't be easy. Ugly crying is my best possible outcome. Worst case scenario involves the MERT team and an ambulance. It is Chariots of Fire, after all.

But good is rarely easy. And this is good. This is "How-blessed-was-I-to-get-to-do-this-for-14-years-of-my-life?" good. The very, very best kind of good.

On Mother's Day

Twenty years ago on Mother's Day, I was just beginning to fill out my maternity clothes. Strangers were asking with more confidence, "When is your baby due?" I was signing up for Lamaze and baby CPR classes, practicing different boy and girl names in my head, and making tentative peeks down the baby aisle at Target to see what in the world I was getting into. I didn't know it then, of course, but what I was getting into was the greatest experience of my life. I would not have said that six weeks in, or even six months in. I wasn't thinking that during all those Mother's Days photo ops when you could bet money that one of my kids would be kicking and wailing. But this morning, walking around my prayer track, I could think of nothing else: Getting to be part of this family and being a mom to these four kids has been the joy of my life. As I thanked God this morning, some thoughts came to mind:

• There was a toilet paper commercial in the 80s that sang out, "Because little things mean a lot." This is my anthem as a mom of nearly-grown children. I'm not looking for grand vacations or life-altering family conversations. I'll happily take the six of us simply inhabiting the same space. Last weekend, Kevin and I went to church by ourselves. This Sunday, four kids sat with us. That means a lot. Riding in a car with every seat full means a lot. Asking for a table for six at a restaurant means a lot. Overhearing my kids all laughing together means a lot.  

• I no longer want peace and quiet for Mother's Day. I want loud and rambunctious and all in. 

• I'm so glad I couldn't really freeze time when my children were 4, 7, 9, and 11. I thought those were the perfect ages, that our life couldn't get any better. I was a little scared of the thought of teenagers. But I can say now that 12, 15, 17, and 19 is as good as it's ever been. Younger moms, please don't dread the passing of time and the aging of your kids. It keeps getting better! 

• As a mom, I live with constant tension between the short term and the long term, between what is best for my kids and what my heart wants. I could write a book or preach a sermon on raising independent kids who have the space to learn from failure, but I always have to fight my natural urge to rescue them. Two days ago one of my high schoolers got herself into a big pickle. I spent the entire day forcing myself not to help her. It nearly killed me, until she walked in the door at 8 p.m. and said, "That all turned out really well." It turned out well because of her, not because of me. 

• Bulldozing my firstborn child out of the nest and sending him 1,500 miles away to college was more gut-wrenching than I could have imagined. But hearing him say, in one of our prolific emails to each other, that "this is why it's probably good to go far away to college," made it worth all the heartache. 

• I suspect that the hardest part of my mothering experience is yet to come, the part where I have to grow beyond my identity as "mom" to become the full "me" God created me to be.  That growth, I imagine, will come in a very quiet house. I have to talk myself into believing that that stage, too, will be every bit as good as the parts that came before. 

Happy Mother's Day to all of you, mother or not, who have loved others tirelessly and selflessly. You're better for it, and so is the world around you. 

The Week Before Easter

Easter is coming. It's late this year, but it's finally on its way.  It feels like we've been waiting a long time.

I need Easter, especially in the spring. I'm running on fumes in the spring, depleted by my own commitments and self-focus. The days come fast and furious, one event after another after another, the calendar an unrelenting taskmaster. Rest and reflection are elusive. I have to fight for them. Holy, transcendent thoughts are suppressed by those that seem more urgent: I must figure out this new computer. Who will drive to the track meet Saturday? Do we have enough bread for sandwiches? Can she possibly get a good enough scholarship to afford that college she dreams of?

But Easter's coming, and I want to be ready for it. I force my thoughts in a different direction. I wake up each day to a devotional full of scripture, art, music, poetry, and meaningful reflections that lift my thoughts upward. (It's from Biola University's Center for Christianity, Culture and the Arts, and it's worth checking out.) As it's still winter in Colorado, I bundle up and walk circles around my track, trying to do the nearly impossible work of shutting out the calendar's demands to focus my mind on Christ and Christ alone.

I am transfixed by something I read a few days ago. Anglican pastor and famed writer John Stott told of visiting a temple in Asia and encountering a "placid, remote-looking Buddha statue." We've all seen them and instantly recognize the fat belly, the closed eyes, and the slightly smug expression. Stott's mind immediately turned instead "to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. This is the God for me!" This is the God of Easter.

My girls and I recently saw The Thorn in Denver. Although it was my fourth time, every show is a little different, and this one had an addition that caught me by surprise. As the man playing Jesus hung on the cross, the stage was completely silent. No one moved or spoke. And for one long minute, all we heard was painful, terrible gasping from the man on the cross. His whole body shook as the guttural, horrific sounds escaped from his chest. It was almost unbearable, even as I knew this man would get down and celebrate at a cast party an hour later.

This is the God for me. The one who knows what it's like to be human, who knows rejection, suffering, and death. The one who understands my distracted, undisciplined thinking, my forgetfulness and faithlessness, my continual temptation toward sin, and loves me anyway. Help me lean in, Jesus, to those unforced rhythms of grace (Matt. 11:29-30, MSG) that run so contrary to my world and my cluttery mind.

I'm ready for Easter.

My "Why?" Box

A few days in to the new year, a friend of mine was in a bad car accident. It was not her fault, and the other driver fled the scene and has yet to be found. While her injuries were mercifully minimal, the toll on my friend's life has been anything but.

For months and months, I had been working with this single, young friend to help her move beyond a stuck place in her life. She was beginning to take some baby steps toward becoming unstuck. I had new hope for her. She had new vision for herself. God had heard our cries, and things were looking up. Then she went out to pick up burgers one night, a mile from her house, and her progress was hijacked by a guy who ran a red light.

It wouldn't be enough to say we were back at square one. We were at negative ten. This is where, for the purposes of this blog, the story stops being about her and starts being about me and God.

I am not new to this faith thing. I committed my life to Christ at the age of 10 and got really serious about Him at 23. I have years, decades, of experience walking in faith. I have seen Him meet needs time and time again. My roots are deep, and I've lived a lot of years feeling mostly unshakable.

But this senseless car accident, so devastating to someone I'm heavily invested in, dealt a blow to my faith. As I made hundreds of circles around my backyard prayer track crying out to God, I latched on to just one word and held on with all my might: Why? Why, God, would you allow this to happen? Why would you allow my friend's progress and hope to be stolen? Why did it have to be her car? Why did it have to be so bad? Why would you leave her traumatized, carless, and unable to work? Why, why, why?

Yes, I could be grateful that she came out alive. That her injuries weren't worse. I thanked Him for those things, but only when my obsession with "why" allowed me a quick breather. Then the questions came right back.

I'm not much of a visual person, but it seems that the more time I spend with God, the more He gives me pictures to make His points. He began putting a picture in my mind of a big, heavy box labeled "WHY?" And then He asked me (in that way in which God speaks to us without literally speaking while still letting us know it's definitely Him) if I would be willing to put that box on a shelf. He wasn't asking me to destroy it, just to set it aside.

Now if by some strange turn of events I allowed you a peek at my closet, after first gasping in horror you would then see that there is no room on a shelf for even a small box, let alone a big one. But in His graciousness, God's picture to me included a nice, clean, open shelf, ready and waiting to receive my large box.

Was I willing to set aside my need for understanding? To trust that He is always working for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes, whether we can see that happening or not? Was I willing to move past "Why?" and receive whatever He had for me on the other side of my letting go?

My fingers were clenched. It wasn't an easy release. It also wasn't a one-time thing. I had to do it over and over again; in fact, I'm still doing it, weeks later. When "Why?" pops back into my mind, bringing its discouragement with it, I have to keep releasing it and putting it away. There are a number of things that compel me to do this.

First, I see the ridiculousness and arrogance of it, as if God ever needs to explain Himself to me. ("Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth; tell me if you know so much." --Job 38:4.) Second, it's a big, heavy box, and carrying it was exhausting. And third, I knew that if I kept my hands full with it, I wouldn't be able to receive anything else. I also see His patience, kindness, and understanding in asking me to place my questions on a shelf. He didn't yell at me for picking up the box in the first place, and He didn't demand that I burn it. I just needed to set it aside. I'm sure He also knows that on other occasions, I'll find a step stool, pull the box down, and fill it with different contents. What's inside might change, but the "Why?" label will stay the same, and the box will always be tempting.

Still, I've seen that those roots of faith are deep. Way down deep, they anchor me to a truth much bigger than any boxes I may pick up along the way: I can trust God with everything.

"I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

Justice, Yes, But Also Forgiveness

The sound of careers--lives, really--crashing to the ground echoes out of my television every time I turn on the nightly news. One more movie star, artist, athlete, journalist, or politician is brought to trial in the courtroom of public opinion, and a guilty verdict is all but guaranteed. It doesn't matter if the statutes of limitations has passed by 20 years. It doesn't matter that whatever incident has placed them in this position wasn't even illegal. The only thing that matters is that someone has messed up, and justice must be served.

Justice is good. Justice is important to God. It's important in keeping a society safe, intact, and healthy. No one wants to live in a world without justice. But no one wants to live in a world without forgiveness either.

One of the most important parts of being human is our ability to be vulnerable and tell the truth about ourselves. We've all messed up. We all did something colossally stupid at some point in our lives. Our imperfections, mistakes, and failures unite us as human beings. No one's doing this life thing perfectly. We're all tripping all over ourselves, if not today then yesterday, and if not yesterday then tomorrow. Wisdom is hard won. The Bible says all we have to do is ask for wisdom and God will give it, but it doesn't usually come in a beautiful package wrapped in a bow. His gift of wisdom often comes on the other side of a mess we've made. Growth through mistakes is another uniting human force.

My concern, as I watch the evening news and hear the crumbling, is that people are going to stop telling the hard truth about themselves. We'll be denied their stories of growth and transformation because they're too afraid to admit they were flawed in the first place. 

My concern is that no decent, respectable person will ever run for public office again because of something foolish they did at 19.

My concern is that we're headed toward a world where justice is everything, and forgiveness is seen as weakness.

We need both. People need to be held accountable for their actions. We all need to know that what we do and say matters and has consequences. We need to become wise enough to recognize when "I'm so sorry" is the only acceptable thing to say. But we also need to forgive. We need to live graciously, understanding that people make mistakes, and that those mistakes don't necessarily represent the sum total of a person's life. A consistent pattern of bad behavior is one thing. A foolish, ill-timed comment is another. I made two yesterday. What about you? And aren't you thankful that your life didn't come crashing down as a result? What about a horrible act of bad judgment that hurt another person? Yes, I've done that as well. Thankfully, the acts have gotten less horrible, the judgment less bad, and the hurt less severe over the years, but if anyone wants to dig around my high school past, they'll find plenty to condemn me with. It may not be recorded on fuzzy 1980's video or plastered on my yearbook pages (especially since I was the yearbook editor), but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Oh, but the grace of God. The forgiveness of God and other people. These have transformed me. This is my story. If you want to know who I am today, who I really am, you're going to need to hear about who I used to be, and how grace changed me. How it's still changing me.

Can we be a society that upholds justice while leaving plenty of room for grace and forgiveness? I pray that we can.

No Getting Around Love

Anyone who's spent an hour in the New Testament knows that love is a big deal. You're only a few pages in when Jesus starts talking about love. Funny thing is, the first time Matthew quotes Jesus talking about love, it's about loving your enemies. Right off the bat, we can tell this love thing isn't going to be easy.

Three of Jesus's biographers quote what's come to be known as the Great Commandment: Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength--and if that's not challenging enough, love your neighbor as yourself. We've heard it so often we can quote it in our sleep. But do you ever pause and think about what it really means? Jesus is telling us to love Joe next door with his loud music and barky dogs, Mrs. Smith holding up the carpool line as she chats on her cell phone, and the 16-year-old girl in youth group who rolls her eyes at us with tangible disdain. To love your snoopy mother-in-law and the soccer coach who won't stop screaming at your kid. These are our neighbors. The ones we're supposed to love as we love ourselves. Oh, my.

And then there's the Apostle John, who lets us know that if we don't love our brothers and sisters, we don't love God. We don't even know God. And worse yet, if we say we love God but hate someone else, we're liars. I like to give myself a pass on this one. There's no one I actually hate. But would someone know that by the way I complain against Joe? The way I'm so easily irritated by Mrs. Smith? By the way I judge the hard-to-love girl I'm supposed to be discipling? Hate doesn't mean I'm cussing people out and slashing their tires. Hate can also look like judging, ignoring, grumbling, and slandering.

I've spent a lot more than an hour in the New Testament, and I've read all about the importance of loving other people. But until recently, I didn't quite get that this is what it's all about. Two books have redirected my attention to these commands on love. Commands. That's what they are. Not suggestions. Not "it would sure be nice" recommendations. Commands from God Himself.

In Letters to the Church, Francis Chan proposes that the greatest missionary strategy of all time and the only one necessary is for Christians to love one another. If we were to follow Christ's command to love one another and live in unity within the church, the world would: a) be dumbstruck, and b)see that Jesus was who He said He was.

The second book has stirred up plenty of controversy. Last year Andy Stanley created a firestorm by suggesting that believers "unhitch" their faith from the Old Testament. In Irresistible, he explains what he meant. While I resist his general premise and shock-and-awe strategy for getting his point across, what I got most from his book was vision for the priority and urgency of love. His unpacking of 1 John leaves no loopholes or work-arounds. God is love. We know God, grow in relationship with God, and love God by loving the people around us. I would so prefer to love God by sitting on my quiet deck reading a book about Him. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's also no biblical precedent for sequestering myself at home with the latest, greatest theology book. The precedent is washing my neighbor's stinky feet. Or at least enduring his barky dog with grace and patience.

As I read both of these books, the thought kept occurring to me that they're not talking about loving devil worshipers, bullying atheists, or ISIS recruiters. They're talking about loving other Christians, our brothers and sisters in the faith. It shouldn't be so hard.

It also occurred to me, repeatedly, that I don't have to pound the pavement looking for people to love. The people who need me to love them the most, and the ones who are sometimes the most challenging, live right inside my house.

I can't seem to get around the fact that love is what it's all about. And my excuses--"I'm just not good at love, I'm not wired for it the way others are"--aren't cutting it. When it comes to loving others, I may be a kindergartner, but I can't stay there. I've got so far to go. In His goodness, God has put people in my life who are love grad students. They give me a picture of what I'm shooting for. They give me hope that I can get out of kindergarten, that I can get serious about following the Great Commandment, that my hard heart can become soft and gooey.

When we love others, we pass from death to life (1 John 3:14). Anyone who does not love remains not only in kindergarten, but in death. That's motivating. Even more motivating is this example from Stanley's book: Is there anything that brings parents more joy than watching their children love, enjoy, and care for each other? I can't think of anything. What if that's just a hint of how God feels when we're loving His other children well?