“Lookit Those Baby Blues…”

This tiny girl makes me an utter fool for her. I sit there for hours, playing with her fingers and toes, kissing her soft little forehead, and talking to her in goofy voices that I usually reserve for puppies. I watch her sleep like it’s a feature film that I’ve waited years to see. Something as simple as choosing a shirt for her to wear becomes more exciting than when I picked out a prom dress.

Oh, how in love I am.
Being an aunt is nothing like I expected; it’s way, way better.

“A Good Work”

I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

-Philippians 1: 3-6

This is possibly one of my favorite passages in the Bible. For some reason, it has always felt the most like me. When I picture Paul exulting the people of Philippi, earnestly loving and rejoicing with them, I feel it is one of the small ways in which I can relate to this Biblical giant. Paul can, at times, frustrate me because he pushes so hard. I read his letters and just want to throw my hands in the air and yell, “Okay, okay, fine, you’re right! But jeez, I’m only human, Paul, okay? I’m not Wonder Woman!” (All this imaginary dialogue, while a bit zany, is therapeutic for me — Paul may push, but he also teaches me to push back. I’ve always been feisty, but the encouragement helps — even when it comes from a long-dead Biblical figure.)

Anyway, back to the passage at hand! I love the affirmation of these words — I’m definitely one for affirmation, both in giving and receiving, and it resonates deeply with me for the letter to start off that way. But tonight, as I listened to my newly acquired audio version of the TNIV (thanks Ed Dobson and Zondervan!), the phrase that struck me the most was this: “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.”

Whatever your “good work” is, carrying it alone can be an awfully burdensome thing. Struggling to be enough and do enough within the framework of the kingdom of God is utterly exhausting and in moments like these, there is nothing stronger to fall back on than these words. These words remind me that I am not alone, and I never have been. I have never been the only one stubbornly trucking along in all this mess and no matter what I’m throwing myself into, it all finds its roots in Jesus. He is the one who began this good work in me, and He is the one who will finish it. I have never been going at this thing by myself. This doesn’t make me a puppet or He the master of the strings; it simply identifies Him as the source for all the strength, the guts, the determination and the willfulness that it takes to keep pushing this good work on.

REMINDER TO SELF: We were never supposed to do this by ourselves. We never could do it by ourselves. God designed it that way on purpose.

Thomas Merton is Stalking Me, I Swear

I don’t think anything else I’ve ever read or heard or seen has summed up what I am going through right now better than this prayer, written by Thomas Merton, and know widely as ‘The Merton Prayer’:

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton, “Thoughts in Solitude”

Justice Never Looked So Cute

I want to give a big, ginormous, happy shout-out to my friend Caroline and her amazing new venture, Scarlet Threads!

Now Caroline is, in general, just an incredibly wonderful and heartfelt person, but this is just another reason to love her more! She and her friends, Carrie and Jacob, have been living in rural China for the past two years, working at a wonderful foster home (looking at their blog makes me want to adopt 18 Chinese babies immediately), and now, they have launched a business venture together called Scarlet Threads.

Scarlet Threads is a ‘compassionate boutique’ that empowers women within their rural village through providing them work, dignity, and beauty through making aprons. “Aprons?” you say. “AMAZING!” I say. (I have a small apron addiction…yeah, weird, I know. Potato, potatoe.) Scarlet Threads pays the women in this village a fair wage for their work, turns around, and sells these incredibly cute aprons to you and me. This sustainable, micro-enterprise enables these amazing women half a world away to earn an income, while being able to work from home and be self-employed.

So this is my big push/token of encouragement to visit their site and buy an apron or twelve. Seriously…Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, “today is Tuesday, why not” gifts — good for any and all occasions for the sassy, culinary women in your life!

I want this one so badly I can taste the cupcakes I’d bake in it (hint hint…just sayin’…Santa, if you’re out there):

Congratulations, Caroline! And to rest of you — happy shopping!

A Letter to My Niece, Addison Elizabeth, on Her Very First “Birthday”

To my niece, Addison Elizabeth, on her very first “birthday,” November 1, 2009.

I slept curled up with my phone last night, next to a brightly burning lamp, so if I had to wake up and go to the hospital in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t be too out of sorts. I might have even thought to sleep in my shoes and coat if it would have been comfortable enough. You come from a long line of impatient women, Addie, and I was so anxious to meet you that I very well may have left the house in socks and no pants, running down the street, if I had to.

You finally made your official debut this morning at 10:30am, and as we waited to hear the news, you can’t even imagine the excitement we all felt. We sat in the waiting room — your Nana and Papa, your Grandma and Grandpa Rocco, your aunt Rachel, and me. We tried to keep busy with knitting (me) and football (your Papa and Grandpa), but all we could think about was you. When your daddy walked out and told us you’d arrived, at 6lbs 13oz and 21 inches long, we could hardly believe it. Months of talking to you through the barrier of a belly, and now you were here among us, where we could hold you and kiss you and love you in person, face to face.

We walked into your room and when I saw your mama holding you close, my heart felt so big that I thought I might start floating. You were wrapped in a pink blanket dotted with birds (my personal favorite) and the first time I saw you face to face, you gave a big yawn and all I could think was how no little girl in the entire world had ever been so beautiful. You have your mama’s little turned up nose and your daddy’s deep blue eyes; I can’t imagine any baby who could be prettier. (Though watch out — your daddy’s already said no men are allowed near you until you’re 30.) Your hair already has a mind of its own and as you rolled over in my arms, your light brown hair squished up in the middle, like a mohawk of downy feathers. I can already tell you will be sassy, just like your mama, your grandmas, and your aunts. Be proud of that — there’s nothing wrong with being a strong woman with opinions and ideas. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The first time I got to hold you, I was sure I’d drop you. Your head was so tiny and your body was lost in the cavernous folds of your blanket. I counted each one of your tiny fingernails and kissed your soft little forehead over and over again. Looking at you, this tiny, sleeping girl, I was humbled by the love that spilled over every part of me. I look at you and hardly know you at all, but I would do anything for you already.

Did you know you are named after me a little? We share a middle name, Elizabeth, and I tell you this because it is very special. Elizabeth means “consecrated to God; set aside for His special use.” You don’t know this yet, as I could count the hours on one hand that you’ve been here, but there is a Jesus who has loved you since you went from being one cell to two, and before that even. He has counted your fingernails long before I did and placed each soft strand of hair on your head. He knows you and loves you in ways that I can’t even put to words, and His plans for you are something special, I can tell. You are set aside for His special use, and I cannot wait to see all the amazing and unique ways He will use you throughout your life. You are lucky to have a family who can teach you all about this Jesus who loves you and who looks at you and sees His face.

You and your mama are getting rested now, and even as I sit here writing, I can still smell your soft, pink baby smell on my arms. I am formulating thousands of plans in my head for all the things we will do together. We will read books and make forts, we will bake cookies and eat the dough, we will wear our pajamas to movie theaters and throw tea parties for your teddy bears. We will play at the Children’s Museum and we will roll down hills at the park. I can’t wait to take you camping and go wading together in rivers that tickle our toes. The world is an amazing place, and I can’t wait to show it to you, miracle by miracle.

But for now, you are soft and pink and sleeping, and that is enough just to watch you.

Happy very first birthday, Addison.
I love you!

Love,

Aunt Caroline

Everyone Gets Plans…Even Me

“I found myself in the one who made me. The one that knows who I really am. Behind everything I hide, he knows exactly what makes me tick. He knows more about me then I’ll ever think about, he knew me before I had a name. He sees everything… and still has a plan for me.” [original source here]

These few simple lines sliced into the center of me when I read them.

In many ways, I think the incredibly deep-set desire to be known is what forms much of the base of my longings. I want so desperately to be known, to be loved, to be appreciated, to be pursued. And the funny thing is I serve a God who knows me, who loves me, who appreciates me, and who pursues me — and I forget it all the time.

It’s like I think He must still be getting to know me and once He really gets to the core, He’ll run because others have run. Once He really knows me, He won’t want to love me anymore. Once He knows that I want something, He won’t give it to me because I’ve made the mistake of wanting it too much. I exhaust myself with running around in circles, trying to please God, when all He wants to do is love me and I mostly refuse to let Him.

Because loving me means that He chose me…and choosing me means He could also choose to reject me later on. He could choose to say that I’m not enough. He could choose to stop loving me because I’m too much work.

And the blasted stupid thing is that I know none of that will happen. I am absolutely, 1,000% guaranteed that He will never leave me or stop loving me.

Yet I choose to fight with Him, insisting that I’m not good enough for Him to love me yet. I choose not to believe in His plans for me because I think He’s somehow secretly trying to punish me for not being The Most Devout Christian in the World.

Here’s a secret:
God doesn’t love me because I’m a Christian.

God loves me because, before I was formed in the womb, before I was even two cells, before I had hair or fingernails or thoughts or a religious preference, I was His, I am His.

My friend Charity told me the other day that God was proud to have me as His daughter. I didn’t realize it, but I had been needing to hear that for a long time.

“He sees everything…and still has a plan for me.”

A Prayer on October 24, 2009 at 10:00pm

I use You sometimes, You know. I grab You and shake You in front of me, like a rag doll, just to prove that yeah, I’m that Godly woman that people can admire and love, and somewhere inside, it all feels like a big sham. Because I know that I’m using You and sometimes, I don’t care.

And then minutes later, hours later, when the glow of the world’s approval has faded and I realized that I misused and assaulted and abused You again, I’m disgusted with myself, and fall to my knees, begging Your forgiveness. And of course, You give it to me, knowing You will be forgiving me again shortly for something else.

Sometimes all I feel like is a huge failure. Sometimes I feel like all I do is disappoint You and fail to live up to these expectations that so many have laid before me. Reading the Bible gets painful, because Paul (and everyone else) is ruthless, hammering the demands of Your kingdom into me so hard that I’m left clamping my hands on my ears, screaming that it’s too loud, it’s too much, it’s too hard.

Following You is really, really, really freakin’ hard.
Harder than anything else I have ever done.
Harder than anything else I will ever do.
Harder than marriage and friendships and people and community and the lids on pickle jars.
I don’t think anything else could be so damn hard.

It’s like walking through an antique shop with a blindfold and roller skates on. You know that every time you even breathe wrong, you will be bumping into something, knocking off this, breaking that, and destroying something else that is precious and valuable. For me, it’s my self-control, my selflessness, my willingness to listen. I knock these things over all the time and break them over and over and over again.

And yet You never seem to get tired of sweeping up the pieces, throwing them away, and insisting I owe You nothing.

I don’t get it.

Your love, Your unfailing, uncontrollable, infallible, reckless, senseless love makes absolutely no sense to me. And sometimes, I resent it because I know I don’t deserve it.

I wreck and break and drop and destroy and trip and fall all over everything that You gave me and all that You made and still You can call me Your beloved? How is that? What is WRONG with You?

But here’s the thing:
I don’t understand it, but I need it more than anything else in the world.

Without this ridiculous love, nothing else makes sense.

No husband would be good enough, no relationship secure enough, no work fulfilling enough, no distraction appealing enough – none of it would mean anything without You and this crazy love of Yours.

So I’m left with no choice but to run – in this blindfold and these roller skates, I will still be running for my life, even if I look like a cartoon character while doing it. Even though I will inevitably fail much more than I will succeed; I don’t know what else to do. I know nothing else that is worth doing.

Loving You is the only thing I will ever be sure I want to do my entire life.
Even if it seems to be the thing I do the worst.

Lessons from My Dying Basil Plant

I wrote this sometime in September, perhaps near the beginning? I have a billion thoughts spinning through my head tonight, after a heady eight-hour training session at church today for small group leaders. It will take me days to process all of this, on top of all the other stuff I’ve been processing — I am unsticking myself from inside my head and, in the meantime, didn’t want to leave you hanging in the wind.

So here you go…here is what I was thinking in early September (and probably still am…I hang onto thoughts for awhile):

My basil plant is dying. Every time I leave my house, I see the naughty, fading, lime-colored leaves creeping in on the healthy, shamrock-colored ones. I pick off the little white flowers that the tag in the pot told me to, and I poke a finger in the soil to make sure it’s still well-watered.

And I leave.

When I come home, even if it’s just a half-hour later, I look at it again, expecting it to have made a glorious recovery. Instead, it’s still drooping, growing towards the waning sunlight, and slowly drawing rattled, chlorophyll-deprived breaths.

“I’m taking care of it the right way, aren’t I?” I think. “I’m doing what I’m supposed to. And it’s still not working.”

My basil plant, when it was a baby and still healthy.

I suppose life is just like that sometimes. Rules and tags in plant pots only can take you so far. Sometimes it’s the sun. Sometimes it’s the unusual coolness of the air or a simple growing apart or a natural death. I tend to these plants, to these relationships, to these people, and wait expectantly for their curved spines to straighten up because I did or said the right thing. I suppose sometimes things just grow away from each other, growing towards what they want and away from what they don’t. I guess at times, I have to be what someone doesn’t want. And I have a hard time with that.

My best friend’s mother once told her, “The right thing to the wrong person can still be the wrong thing. But saying the wrong thing to the right person doesn’t have to be.”

My mouth is brimming with the wrong things – with the nervous giggles, with the obvious statements, with the rambling stories, and the things that milliseconds later make me want to smack myself. I want to say the right things, but unless you give me a couple of hours and a pen, it’s not likely. The right words are in there, but they are usually buried in the wrong ones.

NOTE: This dying basil plant is now dead as a doornail and has been taking a joyride in the backseat of my car for the past two weeks. I meant to drop it off at my parents’ house for composting, but keep forgetting. When the heat in my car gets too warm, my whole car still smells lightly of basil. It’s strangely comforting.

“Jesus Wept”

I am not much of a crier.

In fact, I hate crying in front of anyone, and the last time I cried more than a single tear was when I watched “Hotel Rwanda” last winter. The last time I cried (and I mean, cried) about something personal was probably the summer of 2007.

I find this fact about myself strange and uncomfortable, as I would consider myself to be more on the emotional side.  To be honest, I wish I cried more as I find it incredibly cathartic and a wonderful release. But for some reason, I just don’t. I’m not sure what that says about me and my psyche, but hopefully nothing terrible.

I was comforting a friend a few weeks back, who confessed to having cried so much that she was now talking to me with red eyes and a nose full of sniffles. I’m not the best with crying people (my go-to is usually jokes or feeding them), but I did the only thing I could think of at that moment: I pulled out the Jesus card.

“You know what my advice is?” I told her. “Just cry — cry as much as you want, and cry even when you feel stupid about crying. Because crying is important. It is cathartic and beautiful and sacred — even when it feels wet and snotty and pathetic. It’s sacred and beautiful because it reminds us of our dependence on God; it reminds us that words only take us so far. We use our words to shape and control our emotions, but sometimes, there are places and parts of us that only God knows, and He meets us in those places, He understands us in those places. Crying at times might be the only language we can speak, but God understands it, even if no one else does. Jesus wept — He would sit there, head in His hands, snot running down into His beard, and just bawl. Sometimes we just need to cry because we’ve run out of words.”

Now I took this “Jesus wept” thing out of John 11, when he arrives at Mary and Lazarus’ house to find the latter dead. Scripture tells us that he was “deeply moved in spirit and troubled.” His weeping was an act of solidarity with Mary and her family; it was His way of participating in their pain through the most basic human experience, tears.

Thinking about this, I was just sitting here tonight, eating dinner and reading Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination. This book for the most part floats somewhere above my head, but I am working hard to understand and process it; it is a small kind of victory when I can truly grasp something he writes. I came across this passage as I was munching on a roasted potato, and was struck by its message:

“Tears are a way of solidarity in pain when no other form of solidarity remains…Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again: (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the kingdom to come. Such weeping is a radical criticism, a fearful dismantling because it means the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do without losing their thrones. Yet the loss of thrones is precisely what is called for in radical criticism.”

Like Jesus, I feel deeply moved in spirit and troubled by this. In fact, I feel sort of guilty (am I a “numb one?”) for not crying more. However, I don’t think Brueggemann’s point is that we should all go around opening our optical floodgates at every moment. His point is birthed out of his discussion of Jeremiah and his experience as a prophet, preparing Israel for the coming of Jesus. He wanted them to understand the grief that had befallen them as a people, as they drew away from God, and for him, his tears were his last resort.

Looking around myself, at a world that seems to always be falling to pieces again and again, I wonder if perhaps we all have become a little numb. Perhaps, like Jesus, like Jeremiah, and like so many others, we need to learn what it means to weep once again.

This Weekend, This is What “Wild Things” Brings to Mind

I’m taking a class at my church right now on Wendell Berry, and slowly, naturally, like water in earth, I am absorbing this man and his words. This poem in particular struck me and left my heart reverberating, like a violin string.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

(I think Max would approve…he and Wendell might understand each other…and perhaps share a wild rumpus together. I really need to see this movie.)