Speaking Up

Always looking for something novel to do with Oliver and Charlie in the evenings when Michael is working, we decided to hop in the car and buy our cat Liesel some more food.  (Hey, I didn't say fancy, I said novel).  Liesel is, well, a little on the large side, so she's on a special diet food that we have to purchase at the vet's office.  This place is kind of like a hidden picture book, you know, where you have to really stare at the page to see what you're looking for.  There are several residential cats in their office, and the longer you stand at the front desk, the more you kitties you notice.  There's one laying on a computer keyboard, another on a radiator, another on a stack of papers.  There's even one that saunters around wearing a cloth diaper.  And then there are the birds, two parrots that reside inside the desk area.  The big green one, who we learned today is named Jake, sits in an open-air cage in the middle of all the action; and then there's a smaller one, Shadow, in an enclosed cage on their desk.  Oliver and Charlie were excited to go "see the animals."  The zoo might be closed at 6:45pm but our vet is open and thankfully provides just enough diversion to make the evening a little interesting.


We stood there making the cat food purchase as Shadow squaked, "sha-dow!" I explained to Oliver that some birds can actually say words.  His eyes became saucers.  "Yep," the vet tech said from behind the desk.  "Shadow can say his name, 'hello', 'goodbye', 'thank you', and 'good morning, ladies!'" Oliver was silent in wonder, and I admit that I was a little awestruck too.  Talking birds are seriously cool.  It made me think of the misnomer "bird brain." I can guarantee that Shadow is at least several feathers smarter than I am. 


As we walked out to the car, the boys took a few minutes to wave at Shadow through the window, Charlie saying "Bye!" and "Cheep-cheep," his adorable moniker for "bird." Another car pulled up, and several people exited carrying a small cat bed covered with blankets.  They slowly made their way to the door, and it was then that I noticed they had all been crying.  One of the men stopped to sob for a bit before he entered the office.  It was almost 7pm, when the office was scheduled to close; all of a sudden I realized these people were taking their pet to be put down.   I've had pets die before, but have never had to put one down, and understand it to be one of the most heart wrenching things to go through.  I whispered several prayers for them, and for the vet staff.  After putting the boys in their carseats, I couldn't bring myself to drive home just yet.  I felt like I needed to comfort these people in some way.


I eventually found a piece of paper that wasn't a wrapper or a Kleenex or the backing of a sticker, and began to write a note.  "I just wanted to let you know that I saw your grief, and I prayed for you. I'm sorry for your sadness. Sincer-"  my sentence was cut off by the sight of these people coming back out of the building.  They were all crying a little more.  I looked at my note.  It would be ridiculous to hand them a note.  Oh well, I thought with resignation.  I did pray for them.  But something kept me there, and all of a sudden it struck me that I was being ridiculous, and wrong, to write this note, see them in person and then just drive off.  If I wanted them to know that someone cared, that some one prayed for them, then they should know.  How I told them didn't matter.  But what would they think? I countered this thought with what's the worst that could happen? and stepped out of the car before my courage disappeared.


"Excuse me," I said to the group, as they were still standing in the parking lot.  " I just wanted you to know that I said some prayers for all of you; I'm so sorry, this is one of the hardest things..."


"Thank you," they all said in genuine chorus, "thank you very much."  They didn't look shocked; not even surprised.  Nobody threw anything at me or started a riot or challenged me on religious ethics. Well, how about that.


I wish I was more bold with my faith.  It's so important to be genuine in living out our faith as Christians.  We should be honest, loving, compassionate, forgiving.  Not perfect, but always working to live by example.  But I often use this "living by example" as an excuse to being more passive than I should be.  Driving away because I couldn't leave a note, for example.  I need to learn from that parrot and speak up, because, like that parrot, it's the smart thing to do.  It's the right thing to do.


Lord, forgive me when I feel like driving away so I don't have to speak out loud.  Help me to move past the fears I have of sharing my faith, and grant me the courage to speak up. Comfort that family who is hurting tonight in their loss, and strengthen the vet staff and replenish them after witnessing this sadness too. Amen.

That Great Story

I was dyeing Easter eggs with Oliver this afternoon when it occurred to me that I hadn't told him what our plans were for Easter Sunday.

"So Oliver, Easter is this Sunday, and we'll be going to Grandpa's church, and then-"

"Why?" he interrupted.

"Because-" and then it occurred to me that not only had I not told him what our plans were for Easter Sunday...I hadn't told him about Easter. 

"Oliver, do you know why we celebrate Easter?"

"Uh, no?"

Of course I told him all about Easter last year, but last year he was 3 1/2.  Kids understand things differently at age 4 than they did at age 3.  So I needed to tell him again.  And I was ashamed to think of how much we had already talked up the Easter baskets and the Angry Birds Easter eggs and the party we'd have, decorating our own cookies. All of these things...and nothing about the Gospel.

"Well, you know how Jesus loves us so, so much, right?" I began.

"Yep."

"He loves us so much, that he told us that He'd love us and forgive us even when we do bad things.  And He promises that if we love Him, we can live in heaven with Him forever!"

"Oh."

"So when Jesus was here on this earth, some people didn't believe him. They thought he was lying, and they decided to kill him," I said, explaining without gore but with the weight of the truth of how Jesus was nailed to the cross.

"Oh. Did it hurt Him?"

"Yes. It hurt Him very much."

"But I don't want Jesus to hurt. Did He cry?"

"Yes," I said as my own eyes started to tear up. "It hurt Him very much and He cried. It is very sad."

"And then the cross fell down and He died?"

"Well, no, after He died, they took the nails out, took His body down and put it in a tomb, which is like a cave. But here's what's amazing: three days after He died, He became alive again! He wanted to show everyone that He was telling the truth, and that people who loved Him won't die forever because He had power over dying. So then He went to heaven to get it ready for us.  And do you know why heaven is so amazing?"

"Why?"

"Because in heaven, we will never have any owies again.  No scraped knees, we won't get sick, we won't ever, ever hurt again.   We won't be sad, or angry; just happy, for forever.  We'll get to be with Jesus for forever.  And other people that love Jesus too? Will be in heaven with us.  We'll get to see people who already died in heaven.  Like, we'll see Dakota [our dog-in-law who died last year] and Gin [my friend who died this winter].  They'll be there waiting for us in heaven."

Oliver continued to put stickers on his Easter egg, then paused and said, "Mommy! Tell me that great story again."

And I did: over, and over, and over again.

This Easter, may you hear, reflect, and live this great story as if through the eyes of a child: trusting in its truth, amazed at its drama, and looking in expectant hope for what is coming.  He is risen. He is risen indeed!

Amen.

Waiting to Bloom

 "And He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away."

Revelation 21.4

My mom bought me flowers today.  "Pick some out for your party," she said, standing in front of the buckets of blooms at Trader Joe's. "Whatever you'd like."

I chose daffodils that had not yet opened.  I chose daffodils because they are yellow and happy, but also for practical purposes (and now officially in my mid-30's, I have resigned myself to being practical). They had not bloomed yet.  Placed in the fridge and looking similar to green onions, they can last for many days without opening.  Take them out of the fridge and plunk them into water, and they bloom into sunny frills.  I could take them out closer to the date of my birthday party next week, instead of allowing them to open and hoping they'd last until then. 

The daffodils are not the only things waiting on a happier time.  My friend Gin died three weeks ago tonight. I haven't wanted to celebrate anything, so I delayed the party.  I miss her, and I am sad.  To be honest, I've been bristling at inevitable utterings "she's in a better place," "she's not suffering anymore," or "her struggle is over." While I may roll my eyes at hearing them, it's not because they are cliché - as a Christian, these are very, very real truths to me.  But they haven't been sitting well with me lately because Gin declined and died very quickly.  She faced significant symptoms and pain with her cancer and chemotherapy side effects, but she didn't seem ready to leave this earth; not her husband, her kids, her passion for caring for others. She was able to go to school, bring babies into the world as a midwife, care for her family, cultivate meaningful friendships, and organize fundraising for other friends with cancer, right up until she died.  And so in this way, it doesn't seem that her death was a welcome relief from her disease.

God's Word teaches that He will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and that with Him there will be no more suffering.  And I do rejoice in this truth for Gin.  No more treatments, pain, worry, fatigue, scans, any of that.  But I have still been feeling unsettled, and truthfully, angry, that she has died at age 36.  Alongside countless others that loved her, I have cried, and cried, and cried.  Not a day goes by when she's not on my mind.  Grief is hard work.  It is exhausting and painful. I know this because I am a hospice nurse, but I also know this because I loved her. 

It has started to occur to me this week, through this pain, that Gin has been promised a heaven with no more tears and pain...but it has also been promised to me, and all who love Jesus as their savior.  You don't have to have cancer to feel pain.  The tears God Himself will wipe away are also the tears of disappointment, anger, sadness, and grief that each one of us feels.  We can rejoice for Gin, who has bloomed into life, like my daffodils will be doing next week.  And through our tears, we can rejoice in our own hope of heaven, where pain even this deep will be no more.  

Finding Jesus...Sort Of

I always wonder if I'm doing enough to help Oliver and Charlie understand God's love as he grows.  We pray, we talk about Jesus, we read Sunday school material, and I point out things that God has done for us here and there.  But it's not like we're doing sit-down devotionals, and truth be told, bedtime prayers are hurried so that Oliver won't have time to think of another excuse to procrastinate bedtime. 

But yesterday, I heard something out of Oliver's mouth that took my breath away.

"I found Jesus!" He exclaimed.

Michael and I looked at each other, surprised.  "Wow, you...?"

"I found Jesus!," he repeated, "under the bed!"

He dove underneath the bed and when he crawled out, had something in his hand. 

"See?"

We looked closer to find a keychain...of Hagrid, the burly groundskeeper character from Harry Potter.

Some see Jesus in nature, others in art, and yet others in Warner Brothers licensed characters from a story about wizardry. 

Because You're Happy

 

 

 

A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.  Proverbs 15:1

"I can't believe the way she's talking to her kids! How awful!"  "No wonder her kid is throwing a fit, he's just imitating how his mother is behaving." I know I'm in good company when I say that I have often thought these things, judging parents who are impatient, harsh, and speaking disrespectfully to their children.  And I know I'm also in good company when I admit that sometimes, I catch myself turning into that very parent. How easy it is to do.  I struggle with responding to misbehavior, whining, or disrespectful words- all of those normal, button-pushing behaviors of a 3-year-old- with a tone that is both corrective but loving.  If the tone of my voice sounds too sweet, I'm afraid Oliver won't get that I'm that serious about correcting his behavior.  So I change my tone to one that is serious, lower...but then it becomes louder.  It becomes harsh.  It begins to mimic the very whining and back-talking I'm trying to correct.

And then you add the element of human nature.  Facing challenging behavior is exhausting.  It's almost always repeated, and frequently surrounded by other factors such as I just burned dinner, Charlie just spilled milk all over the table and is now eating toilet paper.  And I have a migraine.  I'm in no mood to stop and calculate the volume and tone of my voice, and sometimes the words that are being said.

Oliver had a particularly good day today.  He whined and complained only a fraction of what he usually does. He actually volunteered to help me clean the house.  It was easy for me to be patient with him, and kept me in a very good mood. I took my time with him.  Instead of getting exasperated when he kept whining for a Batman toothbrush we don't yet own, at his sixth request I suggested we sing a Batman song while we brushed his teeth instead.  He cheered, agreed, and all was good.

"Do you want to pick out your pajamas?" I asked.  The answer is always yes, he does this every night.

"Uhhh....no!  Mommy do it!"

"Really?  You want me to pick them out tonight?" fully expecting him to correct himself.  He must have just said it wrong.

"Yeah, Mommy pick out my pajamas.  Because you're being nice to me.  And because you're happy.  That's why you can pick out my pajamas, because you're nice, and you're happy today."

Lord, please grant me the grace today to be patient, happy, and kind to my children, especially when they're being particularly challenging. Thank you for showing me what they see and the impact that this makes, and thank you for the blessing of being their Mom. Amen.

Figgy Pudding

Every year for six weeks, listening to Christmas song after Christmas song, I begin to ponder all of the weird-o lyrics that everyone has been singing for decades.  Such as the lyrics about toasting marshmallows and sharing ghost stories on Christmas (The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.)  Wrong holiday, folks, that's Halloween.  Or the snowman that asks the kids if they're married in Winter Wonderland.  Huh?  (Although I vaguely recall a fourth grade art class where two of my classmates, who had been boyfriend and girlfriend for some time, got "married;" we all tore up construction paper into bits of confetti after Mr. Zander, our off-beat art teacher, read them their vows from a dictionary.  The marriage dissolved the next day, before the confetti could be cleaned off the floor, beating even the Kardashian record.) Yesterday the lyrics that played over in my head were, "Bring us some figgy pudding, now bring us some figgy pudding, now bring us some figgy pudding and bring it RIGHT NOW."  Have you ever heard such demanding carolers?  Who asks for food when they're singing cheerfully at your door, and then asks for a specific dessert, and oh by the way bring it to us immediately?  Not to mention that even though I don't know what a figgy pudding is, it sounds nasty.
So today I was reading about figs in Matthew, chapter 21:18-22:

"Now in the morning, as He returned to the city, He was hungry.  And seeing a fig tree by the road, He came to it and found nothing on it but leaves, and said to it, 'Let no fruit grow on you ever again.'  Immediately, the fig tree withered away."

I laughed.  Sorry, but I did.  Because in my mind I paralleled Jesus' response with something I would want to do.  Take, for example, the day when I craved a BLT wrap from a favorite local coffee shop.  It was 2pm, and pregnant me was very crabby, cuz I was very hungry (something my brother-in-law has an actual word for: "crungry".)  I went through the drive-through, voracious, only to hear the teenager say through the loudspeaker, "I'm sorry, we're not serving hot food through the drive-thru today."  I wanted to set the drive-thru speaker on fire.  Did they even know how nearly-fainting hungry I was?!  Should I tell them I'm pregnant and that their decision of convenience may put my health at risk?

So I read this passage like: Jesus was hungry, saw a source of food, then was denied by the drive-thru fig tree- and because He's Jesus, he just cursed the life out of the tree because He was crungry. 

Okay, so maybe there was more to it.  The disciples were in awe that the fig tree just withered like that instantly.  They asked Jesus how He had done it, (note: not why), and He told them in verse 21, "Assuredly I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what is done to the fig tree, but also if you say to this mountain, 'Be removed and be cast into the sea,' it will be done."

So perhaps He was crungry and used the episode to teach the disciples about praying with faith.  Or maybe He cursed the tree all along with the initial intentions of teaching the disciples this very lesson.  It was good for me to hear today, anyway.  My prayers get so stale so often.  They're repetitious, and often without fervor- or dare I even say faith-behind them.  I want to put reverence behind the routine, passion into the petitions.  Not just go through my list.  But pray with belief that God will answer, in His time, in His way.

I'm sorry, Lord, for listing off my prayers as a to-do list for myself and for You.  I'm sorry for breezing through prayer as simply part of my day and not as an opportunity to sit with you and really pray with faith.  For my repeated prayers especially, I pray for a new way to put life, intention, and faith into my words, believing in Your power and promise to answer them.  Amen.

Everest, Part I: Jesus, Our Sherpa

Staying up late doing some documentation for work one night, I perused our Netflix on-demand for some background entertainment.  I wanted to find something that would keep me interested enought to stay awake, but wouldn't distract me too much from getting my work done.  I came across Everest, a documentation series on the Discovery channel that follows an expedition group in their attempts to summit the highest point on earth. 
I was absolutely hooked.  All footage of this series was taken on the mountain, between cameras on the helmets of those attempting to suumit, and cameras at various base camps along the way.  You see maps and diagrams of their route, graphs of weather trends, and statistics of injuries and death.  You watch as the climbers become weaker and weaker with High Altitude Sickness, suffer frostbite, severe hypothermia, and even brain swelling.  Some climbers make the summit; some have to turn around due to physical limitations, at times mere feet from the top.

As I listened in the background and glanced up time to time from my charting to follow the expedition, I found myself discovering all kinds of illustrations of God's grace though the documentary.  In this blog entry, I'd like to talk about Sherpas.

Sherpas are Tibetans living in the Himalayas who specialize in guiding hikers throughout their expeditions.  They are small, often described as "wirey," and they have abnormally strong hearts.  These two things make them physically more advantaged to navigate the mountains that they live among.  The less body mass a person has, the more able they are to carry themselves upwards.  A stronger heart means they are able to tolerate the very low oxygen levels as found in higher altitudes, much more than the average person.  This means that they are less prone to altitude sickness.  They move faster and easier than anyone else.  The Sherpas, quite literally, were created to live among these mountains.  This makes me shake my head in amazement at God's perfect plan.  It it no accident that a people who are native to their land are actually built to survive the extremes of their environment.  God did that.

The Sherpas not only climb along with the hikers next to them, but they go ahead of them first to lay safety ropes and set up the next base camp with tents, food, oxygen, and other provisions.  They are literally doing twice the work, to make things clear and safe for the hikers that will be climbing alongside them later.

Isn't this what Jesus has done?  He has gone before us, here on earth, to pave the path that we should follow.  He gave us His Word for guidance, to lay the ropes for us.  He gave us the assurance that he has already walked the path in our shoes.  And though He has already gone before us, He is coming back down to take us back up with Him.   As I write, He is busy preparing our eternal Base Camp at the summit.

I had some stress-inducing meetings this week at work.  I'm trying hard to not allow my anxiety to rule my thoughts and heart, but I'm finding this to be a difficult challenge.  They've been my Everest.  But one thing that has helped me has stemmed from something God taught me one evening in college.

It was my junior year at St Olaf, and on this particular Monday night, it was the eve of my first clinical experience in a hospital (I was going to school for nursing).  I was so full of anxiety.  I wasn't necessarily worried I would mess up badly or hurt anyone; I just didn't know what lay ahead.  I didn't know what the precepting nurse would be like.  I didn't know if my patient would like me.  I didn't know where anything was on the unit.  It was just simply a big day with a lot of unknowns, and it would be a long day starting with getting up at 5am for the morning commute.  I sat in the back stairwell, one of the quieter places in my dorm, and prayed.  But truthfully, worried more than prayed.  After a while of quietly fretting, I had a sudden vision.  A blip, it was so fast.  It was a vision of a huge pair of arms, which I understood to be God's, and he was holding the hospital I would be working at the next day.  and I understood.  In an instant, I understood God to be telling me that He is already there.  He will be with me as I get ready to leave, and He will be there waiting for me when I arrive.  He will be with me the whole day.  He will be with my patient, my precepting nurse, and in the supply closet I'd get lost finding.  And I found peace.

So before I have something anxiety-producing, I remember God's teaching to me, and thank Him for going before me.  He's already in that meeting room, He's with the people in it, He knows the agenda, He knows the outcome, and He loves me. 

Thank you, Jesus, for being my Sherpa; for laying the ropes for my path, going ahead of me, going beside me, and coming back for me.  Amen!