After I got married, my husband Sam convinced me to live in Nampa, Idaho, his college town, a town so far outside my future casting I would’ve laughed in disbelief if you’d told me I’d spend ten years there. I grew up two cities east of Nampa, only 30 minutes away, but we rarely drove out there as kids, past the acres of mint and corn and rolling fields of sagebrush until we crossed the county line and entered what seemed like a whole other world. But then I married Sam and he bought our first home in the only place he’d ever lived since college, and here I am, ten years later, emptying cupboards and finally moving away.

I never liked Nampa. I didn’t try very hard, but childhood prejudices run deep, and the embarrassment of moving outside the “real” city nipped like a dog at my heel. Buying a different house 20 minutes away wasn’t a huge change, but it was enough to silence the angst. Hell, even the angst embarrassed me, because I think not liking where you live shows a discontent spirit. Isn’t it a kind of immaturity to complain about where you live? Just choose to settle in, and if you really need to leave, then go.

But here’s the thing: I’m sad to leave.

I am. I cannot believe I’m writing that, but somewhere between the cheese factory and the smells and the lack of bookstores, I found home here. I’m leaving with a clutch in my chest because leaving means more than I thought it would; it means stepping off the tiny stage of our life here, away from dear neighbors who handed out popsicles and cried on my couch, away from best friends a minute down the road, away from the circle of errands I ran each week (Winco-Costco-Library-Bank-Coffee Shop-Car Wash-Local Mailing Post-and let’s be honest-Target) and now I have to find a new way around a new town and a new gas station and a new mail place, which all sounds easy when I type it out but it’s the actual doing of the thing that’s awful.

I’m also afraid to go because I know what happens when people leave. I have 6 siblings and they all left, even me, and I’ve never forgiven any of us for growing up.

I was never close to my oldest brother. We barely knew each other as kids. He’s eight years older than I am, so he left for college when I was in 5th grade. Still, you know what I did when he left for a university in Ohio? I sobbed. I climbed in his bed with his blanket that smelled like his grown-up cologne, pulled it up to my chin and cried so hard that I fell asleep. I would miss him, yes, but mostly: I knew something was over. Even as a 10 year old, I knew that an era of my family, a particular chapter of our story, was closed forever. We would never all live in the same house again, not ever. As a family of seven children, so much of my identity wrapped itself in the presence of my siblings, in the strangeness of our large family compared to small families. When our oldest brother left, it was the beginning of the end. We were fracturing, taking paths seven directions away from each other, and my ten year old heart knew it and hated it.

I’ve hated leaving ever since. Mine and anyone else’s.

Clara, my oldest child, will be five at the end of this summer, old enough for kindergarten. This feels like a blow. In all honesty, it’s a blow to my ego. For these past five years I’ve sort of marveled at my position in life, moving through the world with a certain amount of pride at the ducklings lined up behind me, my three small children all in a row. I’d state their ages like an apology, knowing the stranger in the store would do the math and be very impressed and very sorry for me, all at once. That felt good.

“Yes, yes, look at all these little ones I’m raising with such love!” I’d want to shout on the street. “Look at me, shaping their world with such intention!” It felt like a badge of honor. It felt like a statement. Even on the bad days, it felt like victory.

So, now what? Clara turns five and then Sammy turns four and then Audrey turns two and then suddenly they’re all going to Ohio for college and I’m crying myself to sleep in their beds?

As I prepare to leave the only home I’ve known as a married woman, or as a mother, I find myself counting steps between rooms, stretching my arms between walls, pressing kinetic memories into my hands and feet. I want to remember the weight of my babies in my belly in this hallway. I want to remember the smell of their hair while they slept in this room. I want to remember everything because for some reason, I can’t see past these days. Some people can’t wait until their kids are older and more independent; they can’t wait to have a bigger house and move on in life, stop changing diapers and paying baby-sitters. Not me. I know that leaving this little house in Nampa means a part of my story is over.  A certain melancholy settles on me when I see my kids exerting independence, taking steps away from me and smiling as they go. I’m glad to see them grow; I’m excited to have parts of myself back that I haven’t seen in years; to think and to write and to dream without them attached to me; but it’s a bitter kind of sweet. A wistful kind of glad.

I pack up this house and I cry. I’m turning a page in our story, a page that changed me, one that holds the early arc of our marriage and the unfolding plot of motherhood, and that’s a heavy thought to carry around as I put pictures in boxes and unplug lamps. I don’t want to stay the same… but can’t we just stay for a little while longer?

A house is just a house and a town is just a town, until it’s not. At some point, it becomes a symbol. Nampa will forever be the place I saw God again. It holds my church, where I found peace after years of darkness, it holds the friends who held me up along the way, and it keeps the home where I really, finally, grew up.

The nursery where I rocked each newborn to sleep.
The tiny hallway I paced on endless nights of early contractions.
The kitchen sink where I gave three babies their first bath, one year after another.
A patch of front yard where we spent our afternoons learning how to be neighbors.
A front porch for sunset drinks and cracking pistachios, where Sam and I laughed at each other’s jokes and talked about our future.
The kitchen where I learned to use knives, to follow recipes, how to slice raw chicken.
The front door where my college diploma arrived on the same day as my infant son’s birth certificate.
The living room where I learned how to write.
The floors where my children crawled, toddled, and finally walked.
The walls that heard Sam and I learn how to fight, on painful days and through hard years.
The corner by the fireplace where we had our first ten Christmases.
The quiet bedroom where I taught my children how to pray.

I never meant to stay  in this house or this town for this long. But I wouldn’t give back one minute of it, not one second.

This little house made us so happy for so long, and I’m afraid to leave because what if we’re never this happy again?

It’s nonsense. I know. People move. They survive. But me and Sam? We’re stay-ers. We land and we stay. We don’t move houses, we don’t move churches, we’ve both had our same friends for 20, 30 years- we stay. Leaving is uprooting, which requires replanting, and I’m nervous. Not just to start over in a new home, but to leave behind everything that this home represents. My identity is moving with my address. The kids are getting older. The house is getting bigger. The world is getting harder to keep out. The warmth and safety of our tiny life is slipping through my hands with every box I tape shut.

The future is too big to try and carry around while I pack my past, so I won’t. I’ll let myself be here for now. I won’t shame myself for being sad that someday soon my babies will be big kids who don’t remember the yellow walls of the nursery where we sang them to sleep.

I know we’ll have great joy in the coming years in a new town in a new house where my kids are big. We can’t possibly know the joy that waits, or the sorrows, or all the normal days in between.

But for now, in this nearly empty house? I already miss my ducklings, and I miss the place they called home.

 

All of these pictures were taken by Audrey Choate of Raft Media, for an At Home session that turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of our life.  If you spend your money on anything this year, make it one of these sessions. Put all the beautiful, honest pictures in a book, and give a book to each of your children as the most valuable, lasting gift  I can imagine; a glimpse of a regular day of their childhood with you. 

Click here to contact Raft Media

Dear difficult child,

Sometimes I wonder if I’m exaggerating how much trouble you make all day. Am I being dramatic, I wonder, just collecting your mishaps like funny postcards to share with people, or laying them out like a storyboard to explain why it’s not actually my fault that you are so hard? Here’s how I know you’re a difficult kid- I suddenly relate to all the other parents who have difficult kids. We exchange stories like shell-shocked war reporters, still stunned at the lives we suddenly find ourselves living, lives where we have no idea how to parent our own children.

I know you’re difficult because I have other children who are more compliant and easier to sway, children who cry and ask forgiveness whenever they even perceive my disappointment. They, of course, carry their own battles, a life spent overcoming their need to please and their desire to be “good,” which isn’t something I want for any of my children. ‘Good’ is false. I want you to be true. To be kind. To be passionate. To be wise.

So while other kids will fight their own battles quietly and with a little more grace, you are different. Your battle is not against the desire to be liked, or to please others. Your battles have no grace. Your battles are trench wars, dirty and transparent and exhausting.

Speaking of grace in the fight; have I mentioned all the ways I’m afraid I’ve already failed you? All the moments I fought with you instead of for you? All the days I wished away? All the times I couldn’t see your precious heart past the blur of your busy hands? The times I heard your name on my lips in a voice I pray you won’t remember?

I feel guilty writing about this. It’s your life. Your childhood. It’s your basic personality. Do I really want you to know how I felt so useless and inept being your mom? Do I really want you to have evidence of the war I carried in my own heart to do what is best for you? When I actually just had no idea what to do with you at all?

But this is my life too, right? You’re mine. For better or worse. For all my failures, for all your challenging ways, we are in this together. I am the sieve through which you are being sifted. You can’t go unchecked. I have to raise you up, I have to guide you towards adulthood, I have to hold your hand even when you’re yanking it away from me, because parking lots are dangerous and you may disagree but guess what? This is just the small stuff. The world is coming at you, and I have to get you ready. Ready for drivers who aren’t paying attention. Ready for friendships. For jobs. For love. For life outside these walls.

And being your sieve? It’s a sharp kind of work. Sharp learning curves. Sharp detours. Sharp words directed at me. Sharp words directed at you. Sharpening of us both. Being the sieve doesn’t mean I can’t have a voice about doing the sifting. Or that I can’t write about the pain. But it does mean I have to remember something important.

Here’s what I need to remember:

You are not broken.

You’re not broken. 

You are difficult. Some days you are impossible. Some days I am out of ideas before breakfast, so overrun and overwhelmed with your stubborn push and pull that I want to melt into the floorboards and be mopped away with the 3rd cup of water you just knocked over while disobeying again. I kneel by your bed most nights in tears, praying while you sleep, asking forgiveness for my mistakes, begging God for a small measure of mercy as I stumble through these days with you.

 But you aren’t broken. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re incredible, in fact. You are a force, an enigma, a complicated tangle of bad ideas, brilliant solutions, and paths that I can’t imagine taking, but that you somehow see without even trying.

There’s such a power in you, difficult child. I can feel it when you fight me, I can feel it in your defiance, I can see it in your pursed lips. Your body is strong. Your mind is set. Your will is flint. These traits are not easy to parent. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. With wisdom and time, these will be your greatest gifts.

Here’s what I’m not going to do: I’m not going to leave you to your own devices. Let you be. Ignore every “stage” and hope you mature out of yourself.

I promise you this, baby. Look in my eyes, you tornado of a person-

I will not give up.

I will pursue you and your heart to the ends of the earth. I will ask you to grow. I will sit with you in the dark of your cocoon. I will lean in and lean hard and hold you as you pull away, hold you until it’s time to let go, because you are my person and I am your mother, and the love I burn with puts the flames of the sun to shame.

Spill 1,000 cups of water. Break the things I love. Wreck our car. Fail a class. Skip curfew. Fight with us. Fight with all you are, with all you’ve got. We aren’t going anywhere.

And one day, you will be grown. So God help me, God give me everything I need, moment by moment, God be my manna in the desert of the hard days with you: I will fight for you. I will kneel by your bed each night. I will lay beside you when you fall. I will stand and rejoice as you become exactly who you are meant to be, sharpened and softened in all the right places, not by your tired and inadequate mother, but by the God she called out to when she did not have any answers at all.

You are my child. You are the dream of my heart. You are a million answered prayers all at once. And yes, you are difficult. You unbalance me, you shake me to my core, you humble me in every single way I can express.

Believe this: You, my love, are exactly who I wanted.

 

Love, from this day in this year and all the years to come, 

Your mama

Every mother prays.

She whose faith is her marrow.
She whose faith chirps timidly on her shoulder.
She who claims no faith at all;
every mother prays.

In gasps, in whispers, in sighs and shouts,
every mother recognizes their ineptitude, along with the sacred ground upon which they walk. And there is no better recipe for prayer than
fear and longing and love,
those three currents which push the blood through a mother’s veins.
Fear of failure. Fear of loss.
Longing for answers in dark nights.
Love that buries her and brings her back to life.

Every mother prays.
We pray for the children we never knew. For the children we lost.
Deep cries for the children we hope to hold.
We pray for the ones who run to us,
who call us home.

We pray for the ones who already grew, who cannot possibly understand the moaning prayers poured over their lives, the impossible scales which balance what a mother intended to do,
and what a mother actually did.

And what the child will remember instead.

Every mother prays.
She does this because even when God is not who she imagines or
even someone she believes exists,
in the thick of mothering, prayer escapes without a word on our lips.
Wordless poems of fear, longing, and love.
Feelings explained with a shrug because who could guess what happens under
a mother’s breast,
in that ever-expanding heart of hers,
that space which smells
like her neck in a hug and tastes
like her mouth in a kiss and sounds
like her breath in a song?
Every mother prays. Because what else can one do in that holy ache of kindred love?

No one would write this article except a millennial, you’re thinking with a roll of your eyes, and you might be right. You’re correct in assuming my status as a millennial, about a childhood spent knowing I could’ve crushed “Legends of the Hidden Temple” and an early adulthood that started with MySpace and ended with Snapchat. So yeah, I’m a millennial, and while there are certainly traits of my generation that are not only embarrassing, but appalling, there’s a reason that 32 year old Damien Chazelle just became the youngest director ever to win an Academy Award, for directing “La La Land.”

You heard me right- 32. That means he wrote the script for “La La Land” in his twenties and won an Oscar for directing it a few years later. His composer, Justin Hurwitz, who won an Oscar for Best Score? Also 32 years old. Two millennial friends, making history.

I know why Damien Chazelle and Justin Hurwitz won those awards at such a young age, and how Damien made that movie happen. There’s a lot of talk about us millennials, a lot of well-deserved disdain towards our general attitude of entitlement, but let me tell you something- we are also poised to change the world. Here’s how:

We think we can.

Sounds assine. Let me explain.

Damien Chazelle won that Oscar because he wrote a movie and then believed he could make it. He shut down a freeway and directed a complicated musical number using an entire freeway on-ramp because he had vision. He won an award for a very millennial trait, which is that we are willing to try impossible feats because we tend to believe in ourselves… because you told us to. It was written on every pencil in our teacher’s prize box, on every cat poster in the counselor’s office; you said it when we were nervous to try out for a play, our coaches shouted it during our games; pop stars sang to us about it…. And we took you at your word. We think we can do anything, because that’s what you told us. So when you think we’re crazy for wanting fulfilling jobs with amazing paychecks, a happy family, and a successful side small business that we start in our garage: remember, you told us we could do it. We might sound crazy and yes, some of us are entitled pricks, but a lot of us simply took you at your word and decided to do what we set out to do.

Like win an Oscar for an old-school Hollywood musical that we wrote and directed with our friends.

This particular strand of chutzpah has an obvious parent: Google. YouTube. Reddit. Instagram. Facebook. We know that social networking, search engines, and community information canvassing aren’t simply recreational. These laptops and phones attached to our fingers are passports to a world of knowledge. Why argue a detail, like how far it is to the moon or how many people live in Somalia, when the answer is in your pocket? Why hire a plumber when you can just learn the basics on YouTube? Who needs a wedding DJ when your friend curated a killer Spotify list? You might say this means we don’t think for ourselves anymore, or that we are lazy learners, but we know that it just means we can do anything we want to try. There is a freedom that comes with access, and the motto of our entire age group might as well be: “Let’s try.”

Also- we live a life examined. Ok, yeah, selfies aren’t actual self- examination. But the truth is, even though a lot of us didn’t have social media until high school and college, we spent our formative young adult years in a fishbowl society, where The Real Word made us want to be watched and then the internet made it possible. Our lives are on display in a manner unknown to any previous groups of people, which makes us self-conscious, self-aware, self-centered and  self-deprecating. In light of all that self, we have another skill: when you ask us how we’re feeling, we know the answer. Thanks to you, of course.

You asked about our feelings a lot when we were kids, even developed curriculum around the idea of sharing our feelings, probably mostly in reaction to the fact that your parents did NOT ask you about feelings. Did this also create a group of kids who can’t believe when college professors and employers don’t care about their precious emotions? Well, yes. Does our generation put too much stock in an emotional currency that changes by the moment? Absolutely. But we are also connected to ourselves in a layered, nuanced manner, because we’ve been allowed to explore our psyches.

Encouraged our entire lives to look inward, some of that prompting produced selfish masses of navel-gazers, but it also produced an entire generation of feelers. And feelings are what draw us into the plight of others, because mature feelings develop into empathy, and in this age of technology and connection and GoFundMe accounts, we know how to create change that is powered by our empathy. Which is why we give our money away, and start non profits, why we take jobs for less pay because they mean something to us, and why we actually think we can change the world.

So please excuse our occasional selfies and our obsessive need to stay connected. Don’t worry when we change jobs with the wind and still live with our parents in between traveling gigs. It might not make sense, but trust me: we are working hard, and we want to leave this world better than we received it, just like every generation before us, and every generation after.

Speaking of which, I can only imagine the articles my children will write to convince all of us that they’re not really robots, and they care about the world too.

I probably won’t believe them, either.

 

I learned how to lie when I needed to learn how to lie, which was early and often. In our family of seven children, of which I was fifth in line, I was small, often sick, and well-liked by my siblings and parents. And I developed a certain knack for getting what I wanted. Some of this was innocent, a girl discovering that being good at reading people and liking them without requiring much of them meant a world of friends and favors; some of it was less than innocent, a realization that people believe you when they like you. So if I needed to lie, I did. It seems strange, maybe, to say one might need to lie, but you know what I mean. When the truth was less convenient and potentially even hurtful to those involved, why not simply skip over it?

I lied to get out of trouble. I lied to avoid hurting people’s feelings. I lied to smooth over painful problems. It was easy. I was good at it. And it didn’t feel like lying. It felt like making a way to do what I wanted to do, which was usually even good stuff, a kind of lying that most people find completely acceptable. So I wove my reasons, my excuses, my schemes, and constructed a world for myself. An acceptable world to most.

But really, in the end: I was a liar.

Not a big liar, of course. I’m too good at lying to be a big liar. Every good liar knows that big lies don’t work- they just cause big trouble, and you will get caught. Liars live inside the protective hedge of many small lies, like organized rows of low foliage, so pretty that at first you might think it’s a garden. But it’s not. It’s a maze. It’s twisting rows of thick bushes, designed to keep you on a certain path but never letting you see the whole picture- there is no aerial view of the liar’s maze. That’s off limits, and even if it wasn’t, often the liars themselves don’t have the whole picture. It’s too hard to keep straight. The lies aren’t just for other people, they’re very much for the liar’s sake as well.

My lies evolved over the years into a complicated kind of information-keeping. I tell this much to this person, less to that person, nothing at all to the rest, and all of this information holding and distributing is based on one thing: control.

If you know me casually, you would not call me a controlling person. I’m easy-going. I make plans and cancel them in the same breath. I don’t hold grudges. But there is a tightened place inside me, so tight that all other parts of me twist around it. That’s my control valve. I clutched that valve all day long, the notches of the handle impressed in my sweaty hand, trying so hard to control people’s expectations and how they felt about me. Expectations crush me, and I cannot bear to disappoint, so I turn and turn and turn in order to avoid people expecting anything I can’t (don’t want to) produce and to avoid the pain of  your (even perceived) disappointment.

For 31 years, I lied in every small way necessary to protect myself. I didn’t tell anyone everything, so that I could control what people wanted from me, and how they felt about me.

Turn, turn, turn. So tight I could barely breathe some days.

This lifestyle is not without consequences, because you can’t keep everyone far enough away to keep up the facade. And if you can, you are probably very lonely. But I can’t. So my husband and I had the same fight for nine years: the one where I didn’t tell the whole truth and then he finds out and reacts about whatever particular truth it was, and he reacts just the way I imagined he would which is why I kept the information from him in the first place. Except I never even gave him the chance to process the whole truth, so I never really knew who him in the open, in the air. He looked different in the shadow of my hedges, just like everything else.

“But isn’t staying quiet (hiding the truth) (lying) better than having someone mad at you?’ I spent my days wondering. This is my pervasive darkness- that which says, “Preserve yourself. Find safety behind small walls. The truth hurts more than it helps.” Like a jar of vegetables in the pantry, pickled to the point of sour. Preserved, yes. But always hidden. Always altered.

Here’s the thing about loving Jesus, about being loved by Jesus. You can’t stay the same. You can’t. And if you are trying to, you are probably very lonely. Because to be loved by your Maker is to be continually made, and in the making you will be revealed again and again, unmasked and unraveled and then recreated, a new creation, fresh (and vulnerable) in the potter’s hand. This is incredible. This is painful. This is love.

And last year, I had to answer a serious question. On a day of suffering by my own doing, a day when small lies threatened to topple me, the Maker spoke into my hardened heart in the middle of my kitchen and asked with kindness:

Are you ready? 

I knew right away. I knew it was time. I fell on the floor, I did, I fell down in tears and called out my yes, called out that I was done living half a life. I wanted what God had for me, and I was ready to let Him unravel me for the sake of truth. For the sake of light. I’m done lying.

There is voice inside each of us that has been whispering some version of a certain story since the day we started looking for way to explain why the world hurts so much. It usually starts early. Childhood, probably. Once you feel the shame of being disregarded; after someone acts in a way that surprises and hurts you; when you realize the enormity of your own shortcomings and your own brand of selfishness, a frantic search begins for a protection mechanism. I don’t know yours, but I know mine well. I know this maze. I know these corners.

You might be reading this and shaking your head at how bad I am- if you’re not a liar, and I find that you either are or you aren’t, then this probably sounds like the machinations of a sick person. I mean honestly, isn’t it though? Don’t we all fight against the circuitry that we’ve allowed to flow for so long, those sparks of bad reasoning wired through our brains, the electric shocks that keep us from peace?

I don’t know your darkness. I don’t sit there with you. I don’t hold your hand through the night; I’m too busy hiding in my own tight spots. But I’m here to tell you this:

Someone has conquered your darkness. Someone has come to set you free from the destructive short-circuiting that you cannot seem to escape.

Either Jesus is everything, or He is nothing. The gospel, the good news that I have been saved from myself, is enough to shatter all of my lies. The ones I tell you, and the ones I tell myself. In the warm light of Jesus’ love, information remains simply that: information. It does not bear the weight of all my fears and old patterns. It does not hinge on your reactions. In the blinding light of the King, the truth isn’t subjective. The truth isn’t controllable. The truth will set me free. 

I want to be free.

Break me out of this pickle jar, Lord. Burn down my hedges. Let me breathe again. I don’t want to be kept, to be altered, to be suffocated: I want to live at ease with myself, because I have found an ease in your presence. If I am approved, accepted, beloved: There is no need to try and prove otherwise.To me or to anyone else. There is no greater relief in my life than this new wild open air, the pure oxygen of absolutes.

The year God healed me was a year draped under a banner of the word “Claim.” I kept a growing list of all the things I claimed, or took rightful possession of: Peace. A sound mind. A place at the table. Healing. The grace of God that brings new life. And most of all, in a stunning, decades old plot twist, I claimed the truth. I claim it. I proclaim it. May I never, ever, give it back in exchange for some cheap version of life alone in the darkness. May my face be a reflection of the one true light. And most of all,

“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” Psalm 19:14

In my journey away from lying, this book changed my life, my marriage, and my patterns, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It gave language to what I knew was true about myself, and helped me find healing. It’s a lot of work, but it’s so worth it. Let me know if you have questions about it or are interested in reading it. It’s better done in a group of trusted friends, which is where I found tremendous change and healing this past year.

There is no darkness too terrible for the light. You are worth more than whatever is threatening to choke you, and there is a way to change. And take it from me- the air tastes so much better out here in the open.

 

 

 

 

Greetings from February 23, from overcast skies and wind whipping the neighborhood American flags, from a dishwasher whirring though a wash cycle, from the muffled clatter of jeans in the dryer, from a baby crying half-heartedly during nap time, from the squalls of two kids playing together after many days of doting grandparents and holiday weekends; greetings from a Thursday in this little life of ours.

Hello from coffee on it’s third reheat. Hello from three kids still in pajamas (a rarity at 10am these days, for better or worse). Hello to a “normal” I appreciate more than ever, when we are healthy and have jobs and happiness; when I don’t have a lot of emotional energy to write but I do have a lot of people I love; when being a grown up means a lot of things, but mostly it means figuring out the Tetris of needs and responsibilities that surround us, letting the false pressures fall away and the true pursuits build up.

I’m jotting off a postcard from this second, from right now, because if we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that nothing is certain.

So I sit here in this hour and consider the absolutes: Bodies fail. Kids get sick. Marriages implode. Friendships are hard. Church stuff sucks. Faith is less an absolute and more a moving target, in which we are the ones who keep moving, and then expect God to look the same from every angle.

I can’t say I wish you were here, because I don’t. I’m happy to be in these walls with these people, my four year old and my three year old and my baby who will be one year old this weekend. I’m glad for the quiet, for scattered story books, for a pretend camping site, for the birthday decorations slung cheerful and bright over walls and doors, for the smell of this morning’s waffles, for Sammy’s laugh and Clara’s ever-so-accurate impression of me as she plays house, for Audrey’s screech as she toddles to and fro on those tiny legs of hers, for the faint wind chimes across the street and the way winter stomps out like a tantrum as spring pokes in like a nervous new friend. I’m glad for today. I’m glad for a normal hour. I’m glad for a reprieve.

Tomorrow is coming. I know. This February wind is blowing in a change of seasons, in every sense, and normal won’t keep. It is also a moving target. But, like our faith, we don’t chase old normals. We don’t look for God in old ways, because as we evolve, so does the way we know Him. Today is today is today. It cannot ever be again. I am learning to be content in all situations; to appreciate when a day is kind to us; to let normal move and shift like the weather, so that when this quiet dissolves and new worries rise up, and new concerns overcome: I have stored up past hours of goodness and peace from which to draw deep breaths. Waffles for breakfast. Babies learning to walk. Coffee in my own home. Kids happy. Spring coming.

Hi, from today, from this morning, from the only moment I am promised, which is right now.

Greetings. And blessings.

-Jessie

 

It’s dark and early and cold, snow piled in my front yard in heavy berms from Sam’s constant shoveling in the constant winter storming, my house a cocoon of sleeping children. I only make it out of bed before my kids a few times a week, and the silence is a rich reward. So is the hot coffee. And the silence, did I mention the silence? You could trade quiet as a commodity to people who live with small children, honestly; who needs bitcoins when you could buy or trade 30 minutes alone?

Christmas is just past, my table is lit with the candles I’ve been burning all month in anticipation of the season. I don’t know what we’ll do today. We don’t have many scheduled hours during these holiday weeks. Soon the baby will call for me from her crib, Sammy and Clara will shuffle out with bleary eyes, and we’ll begin our little life together again, easing ourselves into the routine of breakfast and questions and crane trucks and combing out curly hair and changing diapers, drinking warmed up coffee, playing in the snow, reading new books. Calling friends. Carrying ourselves through the hours of the day, trying to do what we’re meant to do, trying to keep up, trying to mean something.

Trying to mean something. Those words seem to be typed over our hearts from birth.

A few nights ago, as I nursed Audrey in my bedroom after a particularly chaotic evening and a disappointing day, I flung a desperate prayer heavenward. I couldn’t believe how badly I had done so few things, how many people I had left out of my loop, how many times I’d questioned my decision making abilities, how many untied ends my hours had produced. I’m more of an initiator than a finisher anyways, that’s a clear downfall of mine, but there are times when I go to bed by 8:30 at night because I can’t stand to face all the projects and ideas I’ve begun, with no clear path to an end in sight. So I bury myself in sleep and cross my fingers that everything will be different in the morning.

I’m a hider, through and through.

That night, Audrey warm in my arms, filling herself on my milk, I closed my eyes against the pressure of all my unfinished business and parenting mistakes and personal failures and cried out to God,

“I cannot be three places at once!”

I mean, I can’t. I try. But I can’t. And I needed to say it. I needed someone to know that I hate that pressure, to be and do and mean something; so I told God.

And then- this doesn’t happen all the time, and I’m sorry if it freaks you out when I talk about it- but then, God spoke back to me. Not like, a booming voice across my bedroom, shaking the lamps, but in a thought that didn’t sound like me at all, planted firmly in my head.

“Then be one place at once, Jessie.”

Be one place at once.

What a thought. Of course. One place. Wherever I am. That’s the one place.

 

I don’t have to hide when I only expect myself to be one place at one time. The pressure recedes. The demanding tide rolls back. I can breathe again. My failures, my shortcomings, my desperation to be and do; Those rising waters drain and I find my breath again.

This sounds impractical. Of course we must be doing many things at once, because we are many things at once. For me: mother, wife, friend, sister, writer, etc etc, of course I nurse a baby while I text you back and while dinner is in the oven and while answering a question from Sam and while contemplating what I’ll write tomorrow. Of course. The idea of being “one place at once” sounds ethereal, sounds like blog fodder, sounds like an idiotic bumper sticker.

But.

When I find my life in Christ shockingly similar to a life outside of Christ, it always looks like this. Striving and struggling rule my thoughts. The voices of the world become my guide- “DO MORE. BE MORE. EARN MORE. SAY MORE. EXPECT MORE. CARE LESS. CLOSE YOUR DOOR. YOU MATTER MOST.”  If there is any one thing I want to say with my life, it is the opposite of all that: It is to cease striving. To worship a true God, rather than the gods of my thoughts and my legacy and my comfort. To abide and be in one place at one time, always in the center of the One who whispers when everyone else shouts.

My kids are awake now, of course, it’s midmorning by now, so they’re watching a show while I write this. The baby is napping. I need to call my friend back. I need to answer an email. I have laundry to fold, meetings to plan, books to write. Can I, should I, do any of that? Can I, should I, dream and plan while living here, in this space, one moment at a time?

I don’t know, you guys. I have no idea. But I’m going to listen to that still small voice, because the message is such a relief. It’s the only peace I’ve found in a chaotic world.
Abide. Be still.

“Be one place at once.” Not two. Not three.
One.

-Jessie

 

My mom used to stay up until dawn on Christmas morning, cleaning the house, wrapping gifts, creating a Christmas dream in our family room. I never knew why she waited so long to get everything done until I had my own kids, and now realize that anything I could prepare before Christmas Eve would need redone by Christmas Eve, because kids live here. I have 3- she had 7. It would be like preparing a special morning for a pack of wild dogs, and doing it while they were off leash.  It is impossible to understand our parents until we are parents ourselves, and while I know that I can’t possibly comprehend the pain and joy of a lifetime of parenting after my measly 4 years of doing that work; understanding my mother’s holiday rituals is a small step in understanding her and her love for us.

As the mother in this particular home, I also now get why people dread holidays. It’s a lot. The self-created expectations often suffocate the joy, and I’m beginning to see why some people (including my husband) hate Christmas. Or, honestly, just don’t “do” Christmas at all. But the reason I anticipate this time of year with such delight isn’t Christmas- it’s Advent.

I love Advent, the season of celebrating Christ’s coming. I grew up with Advent as the focal point of our year as a family. December was the one time we consistently spent together with our Bibles open as a family. My Dad was a pastor and our church was very small, and he and my mom didn’t exercise great boundary setting with their congregation, so I don’t have that many memories of my dad being my dad versus being my pastor. He was always gone. Besides the church, he also owned a remodeling company, and, of course, there are also 7 kids in our family. He was busy. He even told me recently that he doesn’t really remember much from our childhoods, so I know he felt that distance too. The most concentrated memories I have with my dad are when all of my siblings and my parents gathered in our big upstairs family room around the Advent candles, learning the story of Christmas and how it tells the entire story of our faith.

We lit 4 Advent candles over four weeks: a candle for the prophets, the angels, the shepherds, and the wisemen. We studied their purpose and place in the story- and I mean, we studied. My parents were not afraid to push us into the Old Testament, to ask us to fight through the sacred texts of Isaiah and then connect those promises to the telling in Luke; they made us work for our faith. We weren’t allowed to come by it easy, they didn’t make excuses for the Bible and how weird it is sometimes, or for the hard work it takes to dig through the word of God. Christmas in our house was a deep abiding in the promises from the prophets, the fearful glory of the angels, the unadulterated joy of the shepherds, the relentless seeking of the wise man.

Looking back, I know that these 4 weeks each year were what made me love the Bible. I’ve always been a story-teller, and I’ve always loved words, and the word of God is like nothing I’ve ever encountered.

My childhood faith was formed in an eccentric, tiny, conservative baptist church. We were pretty hip, using new fangled stuff in the early nineties, like praise books instead of hymns and overhead projectors in the sanctuary: we were real trailblazers. We rented a church each Sunday afternoon and every family had to help set up and tear down each week. Church was an extension of our whole life. But even as a child it all felt void of tradition, so the Advent season appealed to me in it’s liturgy, in the repetition, in the candle lighting, in these ancient stories and how they still meant something now.

There’s a weight to this tradition that calls to a deeper part of me. Advent. Jesus coming. It’s the nucleus of our entire faith, and it rings with the truth of who our God is and who we are- it’s the pinnacle of everything that matters, the point when everything changed.

Advent is when we remember that our God is a God of kept promises. And what I’m realizing as I learn to trust Him with more and more of my life, is that God works in layers, in layers upon layers, concentric and tangent and angled: an entire geometry of truths connected to truths. I love that the transparency of the Gospel, the message of that revolutionary love and sacrifice, works like double-paned glass. There are two visible planes, two equal and undividable surfaces on which He works: the sweeping narrative of a universal love story, God coming down and saving all of His people; but also, the intimate love story in each individual human heart. 

One side of the glass is The Story- the big story- of an entire human race in big trouble. Right? The sin of Adam and Eve stamped forever on our DNA, a darkness each of us is born carrying deep within. Although we are presented with great evil at every turn – we look around this world, we watch the news, we cringe with the harsh realities of what sin unchecked can produce – it’s hard to understand the destitution of a newborn soul, the cloud of poverty we live under when still sinners without a savior. It’s hard to look at my baby daughter and imagine that she carries in her very blood enough sinful tendencies to require the full blood of Jesus Christ.

It’s a little easier to understand when I look at my 2 year old and four year old, admittedly, because they clearly need saving. It’s also easy to understand when I examine my own heart, when I parse out my own past, when I consider the uncertainty of my own future: I need a Savior. While that truth, that all of us are born with such great need and hurt, isn’t a popular view, I think we all know. When we are quiet: we know. We have no peace. We are desperate for something better, something clear.

And that’s the other side of the glass. Each one of us. 

I am at this point in my life where I often feel fragile, worn to the bones by the children I’m raising. They’re little and they’re always with me, and they always need me, and honestly, sometimes I feel so alone in that weariness. Like, surely the Lord has bigger things to deal with, even in me, than this tired place of defeat I often operate out of. But I read this verse recently, and it made me cry, because it told me once again how tender and personal the Lord is to His people. To me.

Isaiah 40:11 says,

“He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to His heart; he gently leads those that have young.”

He gently leads those that have young. I just couldn’t believe it when I read that. He knows I’m tired. And he knows how often during each of my hours I fail my children. And how emptied I am in their needs. And he leads me gently. Because he knows I have young.

 And the thing is, I won’t always be in this place. Life will move and grow and change, these kids will grow up, my needs will change, and in that, He will move ahead of me and come behind me, and will give me exactly what I need in each season.

He will answer our calls. He will clothe the poor. He will care for the widow. He will comfort the bereft. He will guide the teachers. He will be faithful.

 

God promises to save the whole world from sin and sorrow, and then he does it. So we know He will also keep every promise he lays in our own beating hearts. He came to rescue all of us, but that’s just the harmony. The melody is being sung over you: He came to rescue you. 

This also means that we mustn’t look away from suffering. If Jesus was for all, we are for all. We cannot actively or passively avoid the pain around us. We cannot ignore our family we can’t stand, the stranger we don’t understand, even the person we sleep beside each night, while wondering how to stand with them at all. In fact: We must be advent to them. Caring for the widow. Comforting the bereft. Guiding. Teaching. Giving. We are Christ come, the kingdom in a willing pair of hands and feet.

God says in Isaiah 43, He says this to every single person, “Since you are precious and honored in my sight, and because I love you, I will give men in exchange for you, and people in exchange for your life.”

That is advent. That’s advent for me, raising my little kids, that’s advent for you in your season of life, that’s advent for all the kids who didn’t eat yesterday, for the men who are dropping bombs, for the leaders we love and the ones we hate: He gives people in exchange for their lives. 

The gospel story is in the entirety, and the story is entirely in the individual. Two panes. That’s how our God works. And it’s beautiful. It’s incredible. Advent reminds us that the long narrative of the gospel, told through the prophets and the angels, told to the shepherds and the wise men, is the story of all mankind; but also, it is the promises kept to each and every one of us. He saved every Jewish slave from Pharaoh: He also kept his promise to Moses. He made a nation from Abraham as numerous as the stars in the sky; but first, he kept his promise to Sarah. He saved all of us through his beloved son; but also, he would have done it for even just one. Just one of us would have been enough for God to sacrifice His only son. 

And that’s what we see in the movements of Advent. A gospel story that began the moment God breathed us into being; a story of kings and nations, of prophecy and war, a story that stretches throughout all eternity, the width and depth of which we cannot fully understand this side of heaven.

But also.

The story of Prophets who spoke truth through history. The story of a blessed Hebrew girl named Mary. The story of shepherds who heard and then shouted the news to all. The story of angels who obeyed and believed. The story of 3 magi who risked their lives to bow down to a baby. The story of that baby, played out in that stable, now present here, to all of us, each of us, our personal savior. He who came to save the world called my name. Calls your name. 

God’s love is that glass window, those two equally weighted planes of glass, inseparable- the story of us all; and the story of each one. 

I used to wonder if I love Advent just because it reminds me of my mother, up until dawn on Christmas, of my father and his steady belief, and if maybe my faith is too wrapped up in memories and my family to be valid. Then I grew up. And life got hard. And I had to find God on my own, had to burn my own idols before I could really worship the King of Kings.

But now, as a parent, as a woman being led gently as she leads her young, I can only hope and pray that someday, when my kids blow out a candle, the smell of that thin smoke will remind them of our family room and our Advent candles, and will draw them back to the story, draw them back to the window where they will press their faces to both panes of glass and know that they have been called to glory, along with everyone else who would confess that Jesus is Lord.

Merry Christmas, but really:

Welcome to Advent.