Five Minute Friday: Song

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Childhood, Five Minute Friday, Joy, Mothering, Parenting

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LalaShakingTree'sHand

(Lala shaking the hand of a “Dr. Seuss tree” on her way home from preschool) 

Lala’s snuck another bowl of cereal, and I tell her it’s time to be done snacking — the smells of garlicky pizza from school now mingling with layers of cinnamon and milk on her breath.

“I have to do something,” she says, running up the stairs. Minutes later, from across the hall, I see the mess-making in full force.

Blankets are laid flat across every empty space of bedroom floor, stuffed animals snuggled together on the edges. Then she calls that it’s time for FunLand to open.

“If you wanna come, then come here now. If you wanna come, then come here now,” and it’s her song of beckoning.

I tell her I’m almost done getting ready, that we need to go to school to pick up her sisters and that I will be there in just a minute. And then another minute.

And I almost miss my chance.

“FunLand is closing!” she says, pulling the bedroom door shut.

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Love that drains, love that fills

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Faith, Grace, Imperfect Prose, Open endings, Perspective, Rest, Truth-telling

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LalaPaints

I am struggling to love well.

This big dream I shared a few weeks ago that felt like a small dream — to do whatever I do with a heart of love — yeah, it’s probably a big no-duh to you, but it’s hard. And I was right the first time: it’s big.

After the retreat high and all the dream talking and the trying to see beauty and accept my human imperfection and receive new mercies, I am worn out. I am limp as the cloth hanging across my sink, as drained as the milk jug that’s dripped its last drop into the bowl of cereal.

Maybe for two reasons, probably lots more:

One, loving is hard work, and so doing it wears me out.

Two, I struggle to ask for what I need, which might mean that, even more, I struggle to receive what I need. When I can’t feel the love coming in, I feel the pull of all the love that’s coming out. 

Let me say: I know that I cannot do life with a heart of love without God living in and through me. I know that opening my home and tending my children and teaching and classroom volunteering, or whatever — it’s all filthy rags, a clanging racket if it is without love, and so I am trying (in messy and imperfect ways) to allow love, and not obligation, to be the foundation and overflow of my doing.

And I am trying to soak up God’s words and his encouragement and his adoring and learn what it means to allow Christ to shine straight through my cracks, receiving that it is gift and not failure when he is my strength in weakness.

Yet, friends, all this trying, and I still feel wrung dry and confused.

In the midst of lots of other stuff that sits in my head bowl with the clarity of fog, I’m starting to think that in my desire to be “used” by God I may have been praying a prayer and thinking a thought that needs a little tweaking.

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The Frame

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by in Concrete Words, Family, Just Write, Mothering, Perspective

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ArtFramed

We zoom in. We squint. We tilt heads and thrust necks forward.

We walk to the next case, the next frame and hold hands behind our backs so as to notice without touching the strokes of oil, the blended hues creating glen and chin and river and belly.

We look intent at the dark and light contrast revealing the sheen of the family photograph, the sorrow and glory, steadfast.

We count mysterious objects pinned to the wall and examine beadwork and see again the way color becomes new.

After church and Mother’s Day brunch at our table and homemade cards and squeezes around the neck, we visit the art museum, and it’s the first time with all three girls, and I remember my smallness and how I hunger to share beauty and mystery with the ones I love.

The inside of these frames doesn’t tell the whole story, nor does the white curtain in my living room nor the chartreuse leaf in your garden nor the arching brow on the face you know so well, but they are no less true for only being part.

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White curtains

07 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Family, Grace, Gratitude, Just Write, Perspective, Truth-telling

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WhiteCurtains

Last night, I flopped myself into bed at 8:30 after prayers with the girls and final tuck-ins. It’s so hard to get them to stop with the beautiful sunshine streaming through windows, and I felt bone spent weary.

Michael kissed me good night and left for Home Depot to get a replacement toilet handle. The crack I’d made in the old one last week with some inexplicable power flushing had finally done its work.

My body ached, and I felt the residual frustration of justice buttons pushed by adults who should know better and remembered how I’d been like a character in a movie with all the one-liners and the I-could-have-told-them’s flowing from my lips into the kitchen, hoping the girls couldn’t hear me as they played in the backyard.

I’d been trying to hold the frustrations down, and they’d made their way out in ugly fashion, and even though I’d said to Michael, “I’m just mad, and it’s not your fault,” I’d closed the door behind me without saying good-bye to him anyway.

I walked and the air felt thick and hot, and I tried to imagine burdens falling from shoulders, but they clung. I saw people gathering on porches and wondered if I looked as mad as I felt. I saw a dad from school riding his bike and longed to not see another person I knew.

Then I heard my name, sun shining in my eyes. And this friend and her sweet little girl walking on the bike thoroughfare, they are navigating through some first-class pain and fear, and they were so dear and gracious — their words so gentle — that I left feeling a shift to my perspective and questioned what I’m entitled to anyway.

So much so that when I came home and dinner was ready, I felt some kind of thankful. And when we sat around the table, I had enough energy to initiate talk of the day’s cherries and pits and not grow too frustrated that the girls kept talking over each other.

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Five Minute Friday: Brave

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Fear, Five Minute Friday, Risk-taking

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BeBrave

I see the word prompt, and I feel the dread rise because how do you write brave? For that is the stuff of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Corrie Ten Boom and Mother Teresa and those putting themselves in the way of harm and releasing slaves and risking life and laying it down to speak and to save.

If I’m honest, I fear that I will minimize bravery by talking about everyday types among the relatively comfortable. The kind of bravery that is sometimes more about simple truth telling and kindness and ordinary acts of love.

I look up the definition of brave and see two from Merriam Webster: the first, having or showing courage (courage being the ability to do something that frightens one) and the second, making a fine show.

That second one makes me feel a little sick because I want nothing to do with the type that’s veneer and bravado (bravery gone puffed up with self), but that first definition seems the heart of brave and for all of us.

To do something that frightens. Yes, I’m guessing we all know a thing or two about this.

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On dreaming and the good of contradictions

01 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Faith, Fear, Hope, Risk-taking

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So, I’ve been home for a week and a half from Nebraska and a retreat I do not flippantly call life changing and a game changer and whatever other words mean monumental and encouraged and a little undone.

I am living my regular life of soccer, dance and gymnastics, house work, volunteering at school, church, work, child care. Yesterday morning, I almost succumbed to the scheduling monster — it was touch and go for a while there — and then Lala and I went to story time at a quaint little book store, and the reader’s voice was like a tinkling mobile over a crib, and I felt my heart slow.

Since returning, I am changed, and I am the same.

I am filled up and empty. I am energized and weary. I am enough and not enough.

Maybe you know what I’m talking about.

And, friends, I am beginning to accept the fact that I will not be able to put into quantifiable words the entirety of my Dreaming a God-Sized Dream experience, nor do I think most of you would like to embark on a 50-Part Series as I try.

As is true of many game changers, my weekend was built by profound words and quiet moments. By ever-so-slight shifts in perspective and yeah-me-toos with nodding sisters and brothers. By not only the great bigness of God, but seeing myself as his little lamb, as the child who sings loud and clear the words of the song, “Jesus loves the little ones like me, me, me.”

I learned over the weekend that a God-sized dream is filled with some contradictions. It’s mine, but God’s. Filled with the great and seemingly impossible, yet touched by the small. Asks me to be brave, yet knows I will feel afraid.

GodSizedDream

The God-sized dream in me and you isn’t about what we’ve designed after all, but about the life song the Creator’s placed within.

Where do you see beauty?

Where do you see need?

Where do you feel closest to God?

What are the absolute yeses in your life?

Where do you brush up against the eternal?

The answers to these questions and the journey to find the dream aren’t like the world’s. For in this God-sized dream, success isn’t ours to make, and it’s so different than the messages that circle around our heads, flash across our screens. It’s not about numbers and accolades and dollars, nor about posting the right inspirational posters in front of your face or reaching out to the right people.

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Five Minute Friday: Friend

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Community, Five Minute Friday, Love

≈ 35 Comments

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AlexAndMe

Alex and I at the Denver Airport

She and I walked around the room at this holy reunion, and I hugged long and hard those I’d never met, but already knew. I squeezed them like I’d been waiting my whole long life to see them — these dear ones I’d met through words across a screen.

Here they were now in jeans and little tops, and the hair that covers her face in her picture has two sides, and her smile is so radiant.

Here they came from Indiana and Missouri and D.C. and Alberta. And I learned again what I already knew. That these words released into internet air are heart pulses and flesh and blood, and they are human sisters and brothers bigger than a thumbnail.

And my long time friend, Alex, who used to live in Portland with me — each time I heard her asked, “What brought you here?” her answer was the same.

“Ashley.”

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Anxiety’s antidote

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Faith, Fear, Trust

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I woke at 4 am Friday and felt the same heavy nagging I’d felt all week as I prepared to leave my family — the feeling that this preparation is really for the end.

The end of me.

In the early morning dark of the girls’ bedroom, I kissed them good-bye, and thought I am really saying good-bye, as I tried to memorize each detail of their faces, the smell of hair and skin.

I hugged Michael hard at the passenger drop off area, and I tried not to cling, as I saw hints of tears forming in his eyes. Rolling my suitcase into the compartment of the revolving door and into PDX, I felt alone.

Over the week, I had prayed and joined with others in prayer. Over and again, tried putting fear out of my mind to stand on what is real and true. Yet this, this felt not just of the head, but of the body and heart. A steady ugly spiral knitting itself into the very fibers of me.

I knew I might possibly return home after the weekend away, but prepared myself that I might not. God is my safety and protection, but that doesn’t always mean people make it back home.

Peace, I told myself, as we readied for departure. Peace.

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Permission to dream

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Community, Faith, Hope, Love

≈ 28 Comments

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You are loved

Do you feel it rattling, stirring, thumping?

Do you recognize it calling from the deep, across the din, through the echoes of these ordinary days?

Do you watch as it runs across the hills and soars through the skies and lands in the sparkling light upon your hair and proclaims that you are made for something?

In the rare moments of still, in that nodding yes, in the open hand cupping, do you feel the God life in you?

For you — you are made for more than the dirge of “not enough” and “not me.”

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What we say to our children and ourselves in the face of tragedy

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Faith, Fear, Hope, Mothering, Sorrow, Truth-telling

≈ 22 Comments

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FromDarkness

I check the email on my phone at about 5:30 on Monday evening — right after we say goodbye to the little friends I watch every Monday and Tuesday — and read the words, “in light of what has happened in Boston today…”

And I feel the familiar sick feeling that I’ve missed something big in the world, and I wonder what sort of horror I will find this time.

I am dreading learning of Boston today and read Boston Marathon. Explosion. Amputated. Injured. Killed.

I feel sick, and it is so senseless and familiar. I hate that this feels familiar. At an event, in a place I would not have thought to worry about, and that feels familiar too.

Just then, Michael arrives home, and we all rush to greet him, and the girls don’t know what has happened, but we all seem to hug him with extra vigor, and when they are not around, I whisper in his ear about Boston, and he says there were Sandyhook families in the stands along the last mile of the race, guests of honor.

That gets me so down deep, and I think of those survivors fragile and re-traumatized, and hate again that this is the world we live in. I think of the conversations we might need to have with our children and that the comforting words about them being safe feel so false.

No place this side of heaven is safe, I am crying into the sink, and I am so angry.

I let Michael hug me, and we feel this together in the middle of our kitchen, and it is like prayer.

The kids run up the back stairs into the house, and I splash water around my eyes and when she asks, I tell J that my eyes hurt, and they do. All of me does.

I drive to the hairdresser and then out for long-scheduled drinks and appetizers with a dear friend, and life keeps moving as usual. The voices on the radio seem unphased. Cars on the road whiz right by.

From the stylist’s chair, I see clouds part, and the light is stormy, rich and deep. Chartreuse leaves glowing more brightly, blossoms shining fuller pink. I am looking for hope and tenderness and beauty. I am hungry for it.

At the restaurant, my mind wanders, and I see the shape of an oak tree with a solid trunk and long roots right there in the foam of my beer.

I am saying to my friend, We’ve got to keep bringing light and hope and love. We cannot stop. I am reminding myself more than I’m telling her, and we both probably know this.

I’m aching for the roots to go down deep. I need them to sink deep so I can keep showing up to this world.

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