Old No. 33

Unbeknownst to me as a young person, there's this thing in North America called a "Golden Birthday".  It's the day when your age matches the physical day of the month you were born.  I was born on the 15th of January, which made my 15th birthday my Golden Birthday.  In some places, a Golden Birthday is a big deal.  I suppose I can claim mine as a 'big deal' but not in a particularly positive light.  

I still remember going to bed the night of my 15th birthday so hurt and angry at my family.  I fell asleep thinking, "They MISSED it!  Completely.  Entirely.  They missed my birthday."  

I specifically remember the grocery store check out, the vantage of my mother writing out a check to give to the store clerk to pay for groceries when she wrote "Jan. 19" and paused.  She looked at me and asked what we did for my birthday.  Yep, she realized she'd missed it, but tried to play cool and asked what "we" had done.  

That was the first of many birthdays to be forgotten and by the time I was turning 21, the legal age of drinking and "adulthood" in the States, I just wanted to crawl under a rock and let my birthday pass unnoticed.  The whole idea of something that's supposed to be important, but ends up not being important, to me, was the most depressing thing.  I didn't tell people, didn't get excited, everything was all about managing my expectations and the inevitable let-down.  I spent YEARS with the idea that if I just cared LESS, then eventually, not being remembered and celebrated would be acceptable.  

Three years ago, just before my 30th birthday, a life marker I'd been looking forward to since my first child was born, I told my husband my 30s would be "epic."  I completely forgot that "epic" doesn't always mean great and adventurous.  Homer would not describe his 'epic' journey with the same excitement and gusto as someone who had just gone on an 'epic' hot air balloon ride over the Serengeti.  I planned for the latter, I'm getting the former.  But even so, I'm claiming my 30s as something to be marked, not something to be plowed through, forgotten, wasted time between college and the rest of life.  

My 33rd birthday was Friday.  I was so tempted to fall back into familiar territory, skip over it and let everyone else off the hook for forgetting it as well.  Instead, though, I took a leap.  I decided to throw myself a party of sorts.  The kind of party that might, just might, make my soul a little happier.  

To the outside observer, my life here and now is unbelievably amazing.  I currently live in a first-rate house, overlooking the beautiful San Francisco skyline.  I've lived on three continents, have traveled all over the world, I have an amazing (and hot!) husband of more than a decade who has managed to make THREE successful careers for himself in different organizations all before his 40th birthday. I've had personal and professional success myself, all while making and raising up four of the most beautiful babies I know.  They are each kind and loving and engaging, a joy to be around... unless they're trying to put a sibling in his/her place.  But even so, standing back, my life is hands-down amazing.  Problem is, it's not the life I wanted.  Climbing Everest, surfing the Big Waves of Hawaii, trekking the Appalachian Trail, these are all epic endeavors, worthy of throwing energy and effort into.  But if it's not your dream to stand on top of Everest, when you get there, it'll still be amazing and "worthy" but it won't be something that fills your marrow with soul-satisfying accomplishment.  

In I Samuel the people of Israel argue with God that they want "A king" and God keeps coming back to them that he is "THE king."  English-teacher nerd me, that difference is massive. 

A- one of many, indifferent to which, any old one will do

THE- specific, only one in particular will do

I'm fighting to reframe my perceptions, to reorganize and recalibrate myself so that this amazing, wonderful life I'm living won't be "A life."

Friday.  The party.  My party.  The party I've been waiting to lay claim to for a long, long time.  My house was clean, garage and all.  (This mama was thrilled by that!)  My food was good.  I made things I love, Greek salad and cottage pie, a chocolate stout cake topped with candied oranges. There's nothing about any of it that Martha Stewart would say had a 'theme' but it was mine and I loved the cooking, I loved the taste and I loved feeding my friends, all moms who, like me, needed a break, needed a clean house and a satisfying meal.  We chatted, we laughed, and I promise you, I could feel my soul filling with love and joy and contentment.  I often see people reaching for something, anything to fill them.  Food. Shopping.  Kids' activities, whatever.  I wanted to reach for something concerted, intentional, deliberate... something that mattered to who I am as a person.  It may sound crazy, but the planning, the cleaning, the cooking and the baking that came before the party, the conversation, the laughing, the messy kitchen that came after the party-- these things made me deeply content.  I felt useful.  Needed.  Wanted.  Enjoyed.  Fundamentally seen as a memorable human being.  

When my mom forgot my birthday, after years and years of my father forgetting it, I felt like I wasn't important.  If not to them, then who?  Celebrating Old No. 33, with new friends, good friends, deep and meaningful friends, it helped me reclaim my own sense of value. It also helped, in many small and one very big way, for me to move from seeing my life here on the West Coast as not just a consolation life, "A Life", but as the Next Chapter in THE LIFE that is mine.  

A Call to "We"

I'm not giften in many areas.  But the places of gifting, I know and own.  It has taken me so very long to not chase after what I've seen others do before me, to go with 'known' areas of ministry, of service, of worship.  I was a children's pastor all through college.  Todd and I ran the Littlest Hearts program for 2-5 year olds in South Africa through two pregnancies and three babies.  I have been on leadership for children's camps, youth ministry, VBS, mission trips and more.  I'm more than capable of putting together a seriously great program, Biblically based and with grit for the kids to remember for years to come.  I can do those things, but it's not my gifting, it's not the thing that I do because I find a worship melody within the work.  Someone once said they do the work they do because it "makes my heart sing."

My heart sings, worships, when I'm calling people into sanctuary.  Ever since I came across the concept in the Jewish faith that each individual home is a temple, a sacred space set apart (after the fall of the actual sanctuary in the Temple), I fell in love.  That's what I want do.  I want to make my home, my space, my sphere of influence into a holy space, a vulnerable and sanctified space where sins are sacrificed to make room for the beauty of the Creator.

I have a friend, and for the life of me, I cannot remember a time in our friendship that wasn't messy.  We were among the few in a small, private Christian college in the heart of the midwest who came from "less than perfect" backgrounds.  There was a bond before a friendship, an understanding that we, we know how to muck through it.  When I look back on our tenure as friends, I see how we have come from hardship to hardship over the years, and one of the reasons why she is such a dear friend is because she has very quietly let me be in my muck.  Not fix it, not start throwing things at me in order to "help" get me out, she's let me be right where I am.  As she put it last week, "this is a holy friendship."

I often wonder why so few other relationships are that connected, that special, that holy.  There are certainly people I see more often, connect with far more frequently.  And then I realize the sheer amount of vulnerability and exposed fears we've shared.  Being real is always beautiful work, but it's never easy work.  I was listening to a sermon by my favorite pastor.  My absolute favorite preacher. (Side note:  When I die, Todd knows to have a bonfire, good food, bagpipe music and at least snippets if not full sermons of Pastor Scott.)  In the sermon, Pastor Scott called out the times when we use the term "we" but really the meaning is for someone else to be the "we".  The example he used was the moment when his wife would say, "we should put away the fall decorations" when really she meant for Pastor Scott and their son to pack the boxes up to the attic.

I feel the "we" in my marrow, the real WE, not the one that calls on others.  I yearn for there to be a call from my life to the world that says, COME BE PART OF THIS WE!  Because community is ingrained on my soul, etched into my very bones.  I want to remind people that WE are a people called to love, WE are called to remember that Christ came as a baby not as a weapon of mass destruction (both actual options by the way... think about it).  I have lost countless hours of sleep because of the state of this world, but more specifically, the state of so many who sit in pews in churches all over this country and mull over gun control and presidential candidates and how glad they'll be when our borders will finally be "closed".  Every fiber of my being cries and weeps because WE are called to be a people who are vulnerable, willing to give not just our coat but our shirt as well to those in need.  WE are called to be a people who fully know and recognize that it is within each and every one of us to turn from the Truth WE know.  That WE all need to daily, if not hourly, remember to "Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee."  Because fear is powerful, and the more fearful we are, the more individually we forget who WE really are.  And I want so deeply to remind people who WE are...

Because it's been years since I have felt real and honest community.

Because it's been so very long since my heart could gather around and say, "You are my people. This is my WE."

And I was made to be in a WE.  I was built, as a living stone (James), to participate in the loving action of building the holy temple into this world, not just storing up and protecting here on Earth where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal (Matthew).

The Greek word for wander, as in stray or walk away, is the same word that gave the planets their name, because when the heavenly bodies were being named, they seemed to wander, with no real connect to each other, totally detached.  I want to propose to the forces big and small from this little hidden dark alley of the world wide web that no matter how much we each think we are our own people, our own unique individuals, that none of us are not detached, independent, unconnected.  Each action we individually have has a reaction on what WE ARE.

My bones call out for community.  My blood demands to be reconnected to the bloodlines from which I came.  I am an adopted daughter, heir to the Kingdom, seeking where I come from.  Would someone, please for the love of God, come and tell me about my people?  Would someone, please for the love of Mercy, share with and in me about our family?  Would someone, please for the love of Peace, come and listen to the stories of the One who called each and every single person, who bears the image of Yahweh, Beloved???

The Day Between That Life and This

It wasn't yet five in the morning, but it was sweltering hot on the tarmac.  Even as the plane was taxing to our parking space, I could see the heat waves rising from the unnaturally black hue of the pavement and for the tenth time in 48 hours, I wanted to vomit, but that action would require more energy than I had to spare.  So I sat, and bundled all the emotions in my soul up, shoving them in some spiritual closet.  I couldn't deal with them, not then, not there.  There was work to do.

The intercom had politely informed me that the plane was more than an hour late because of the miserable storms we'd passed over central Africa.  The storms that had kept my four babies awake, the storms that had tested my nerves, the storms that seemed to go completely unnoticed by my zombie husband.  Mentally calculating the amount of time we had and the obstacles we needed to traverse to make our connection was sapping precious energy.

Original layover was exactly 107 minutes.  107 minus 62 left us with 45 minutes.  Curses and bad words.  Focus, Britt, you gotta do this or this hell will just last even longer.  45 minutes to wait our turn patiently and deplane, get four babies plus all our carry-ons down the stairs, run through the building, passports stamped, personal screenings, security check, down the stairs, out to the bus, back up the stairs and onto the plane sitting two spaces over, the plane I can SEE from my window. Two.  Spaces.  Over!  If you stress or panic, they stress and panic.  Pull.  It.  Together.

Terribly politely, belying the few snatches of unrestful sleep I'd gotten, while waiting in line to deplane, I spoke to a very understanding Muslim flight attendant who recruited two more attendants and like a mass of crows haphazardly circling a blue sky, we stumbled and tumbled like a gelatinous blob trying to stay quick but in keeping with the steps of a grouchy two year old, the sleepy three year old, and the wide-eyed four year old.  I tried to ignore the loud whimperings for comfort and attention coming from the bundle on my back.  We simply had to make this connection.

Standing in the endless sea of people waiting for all the appropriate stamps, scans, and questions, just like us, I thought again of how this punishment, this forced Exodus, this damned flight path didn't fit. I could not believe then (and I still cannot believe now) that anyone, any sane person with love and compassion in their heart would send a family of six, after packing up their lives in 4 weeks time, would willfully choose the flight path we were given.  We were given it and then told to be grateful. It felt like being violated, and then told to be grateful for not being beaten to a bloody mess.  Only, I felt very bruised, very bloody.  None of it made sense.

I cannot believe its been two-year since I was on that tarmac, in that plane, trying to make the connection in Qatar, in the blistering morning heat of that December morning.  I strained so hard because I knew not making the connection would just add time to our already 42 hour journey.  Miriam Webster defines epic this way:  extending beyond the usual or ordinary, especially in size or scope.

Epic.

I used to think that was always a good thing, always in regards to an adventure, a voyage, something spectacular that you tell your kids and grandkids about.  Right here, on this blog that no one reads, this is the first time I've told even part of the story of that journey.  It is still so very painful, so very, very raw.  Because it was decided to be "best" for me.  "Best" for my family.  "Best" for the church. And we just had to take it.

Johannesburg to Qatar. Southern to Northern Hemisphere   
*Epic layover marathon.  No food, no water, no toilets. Too many check points. Too many babes still in pajamas.

Qatar to Chicago.  Eastern to Western.  
*Epic layover in the middle of the night in miserable and drafty O'Hare airport.  No food.  No place to lay down. Night two of no bed, no shower.  Too many check points.  

Chicago to Philadelphia.  Three and a half hours.  We'd flown three and a half hours too far west, so we had to backtrack three and a half hours more back East.  It would have seemed more cruel had I had any ability to care.  

I know who made those plane reservations.  I know him personally.  I know the rational he gave.  I know because I heard it all from his lips... over dinner... that I cooked... at my old house... in my old life... the life where he was a near, and dearly loved friend.

I miss my old life, I miss my old house and my gardens and my dog and the crazy way that ANYONE on the street could see directly into the lives of my family.  I miss my fire-pit and my clothesline.  But more than that, I miss the naiveté I had back then about friendships, about right and wrong, about love and compassion.  I know things now, valuable, helpful, wise things.  Things that make me a better person, give a finer age to my fermentation.  But today, on the day that marks the Day Between That Life and This, in the space where I was living into the reality that sometimes, just because you call it compassion, doesn't mean it is...  just because you call it Christian charity, doesn't mean it is... just because you call it love, doesn't mean it is; in THAT space, I sit.

I sit and I mourn.

I sit and I mourn what was, what might have been... who I was, who I might have been.

I mourn for the person who is living her Day Between That Life and This right now.

I mourn for the person who cannot see that words and actions must match up, because if they don't you're living a lie.

"Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food.  If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?" James 2:15-16

I mourn because the world we are living in, the world most of us are settling for, isn't right.  I mourn because there are words for these wrongs: lies.  Lies of mediocrity, lies of substandard living, lies of complacence and lies of bureaucracy.  And some days, when I see very clearly how wrong certain 'compassions', certain 'charities', certain 'loves' are, on those days, like today, I'm sad.  Because it wasn't meant to be like this.  It was never meant to be like this.  But God's promises remain, His love is never a lie, and there is always, always promise yet for a new dawn, a new life, a new world.

"I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness." 

Jeremiah 31:3b (NIV)

"I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty.  I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.  I can do everything through him who gives me strength" 

Philippians 4:12-13 (NIV)

"We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that reaching past all appearances right to the very presence of God" 

Hebrews 6:19 (EST and The Message)

A Declaration of Affirmation

amen:  
     a declaration of affirmation

I was up early this morning.  There were a hundred and one things to do and I was awake, snuggled down deep under my blankets, trying to calculate the seven things I had time to accomplish and which were the most pressing; my own personal Top Things To Do.  One of the things I went about tackling was moving a car seat from one car to the other.  I love my car seats.  I spent innumerable hours researching them, picking just the right brand, color, all of it.  I'm emotionally attached as much to the metal-and-plastic as I am to the crazed and driven person I was in the choosing. That said, I loathe moving them.  Every parent does.  It's a chore that is just beastly, you end up smelly and sweaty, and when it's o'dark thirty, it's not nice to worry about losing a toe or finger should you allow your mind to wander for even a split second and drop said safety device.  My seats are particularly heavy, my sole complaint.  As I stepped into the predawn repeating my mantra, "focus Britt, focus and don't drop this" I was engulfed by tiny pink particles that seems to be spun, or rather, spinning sugar.  It was as if the sky was trying on bubble gum pink cotton candy, but was fickle and teasing deeper color out of the mixture, settling finally on a stunning coral.  I could see it.  I kept expecting to be able to stick my tongue out and actually taste the cotton candy, the spun sticky sweetness of my own childhood in the very air around me.

And that's when it slipped from from my subconscious to my lips.

Amen.  

I've historically been an early riser and being an athlete helped cement that tendency.  There's something mythic about watching the world wake up, the people, the land. all of it.  Here I was, perched as our rental is, almost atop what my mother refuses to call 'a hill' because it's simple too steep for that inadequate definition.  I stood, breath taken away, imagination completely captured, and I was again reminded that I was, in fact, in full agreement, in firm affirmation with the world around me.

Amen.

Ha Shem, LORD, I agree with everything I see and call it good, just as You did.  

Amen.  

It was a fleeting moment,  the sheer weight of that car seat jerked me back to cruel reality all too quickly.  Reality that I am in agreement with very little these days.  My body and soul are still groaning, but I, as yet, cannot understand the words behind the sounds, nor can I identify all the bruised and broken places in my soul.

Eugene Peterson, in The Message phrased Romans 8:26-28 so poignantly for me.

     "...God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along.  If we don't know how or what to pray,

 it doesn't matter.  He does our praying in and for us, 

making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.  

He knows us far better than we 

know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition,

and keeps us present before God.  

That's why we can be so sure that every 

detail in our lives of

love for God is worked into something good."

Maybe it's because I've been pregnant for the better part of the last decade.  Maybe it's because I feel something in my bones which I know is so incredibly common and yet so incredibly unique as well, my own quiet, ordinary miracle.  Maybe, I just need to believe in impossible things.

I'm battling today, as so very very many other days.  I'm battling homesickness and frustration, depression and defeat.  I'm battling lessor demons that seem to be much scrappier than their bigger, more ominous counterparts.  Loosing faith, belief, God Himself all seem common place.  Loosing purpose, community, sanctuary... not so much.  I feel today, as I often feel, left without words in a storm, no blanket, no lighted window, no direction. I know I must trek on.  A few years ago I was really struck that whatever the reason for embarking on the current trajectory that is my life, I had to be in each step, owning where I stood.   I know the journey is a beautiful, holy sojourn.  But that doesn't change the loneliness, the cold, the sadness.

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese soil, the Emperor Hirohito, over a crackling radio, called all of Japan to allow the war to end.  "The hardships and suffering to which our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great," he warned.  "However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unedurable and suffering what is not sufferable."

This journey of hurt, of wounding, of gut-wrenching sorrow, of "enduring the unedurable" is not unique to me.  Having a baby is not unique to me.  But each of my babies was their own miracle. And each step of this journey is my own unique, beautiful disaster... pock-marked by spun sugar sunrises and sweet friends at my dinner table.

"... making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans ... and keeps us present before God..."

Amen.

Singing Amazing Grace

I've been inside of a church since I was born.  My father worked for a Christian organization.  My mother sang in the church choir.  My first step-father was an off-again-on-again music minister and my second step-father has been an off-again-on-again church board member.  I come from what most would classify a "religious" family.

As such, I followed the rules, the 'truths' as they were presented, both whole truths and the slightly broken, damaged truths.

Whole.
Don't murder.  Done.

Broken.
Go to a Christian university and marry right after graduation.  Done.

The thing of it is, I never questioned any of these rules, this path I was being herded down.  If I did ask, it was explained that it was "for my best" and a bunch of other nonsense like that.  It worked out well for me.  Really well.  I may in fact be the poster child for why those cultural practices are around, but even so, I still find myself deeply, deeply wounded by the lack of conversation.  I find that I'm terribly discontent and grappling with ideas and concepts that I have no vocabulary with which to explain because there was no communication ever to be had.  You either believed and accepted or you were out, needing to be 'prayed back into the fold', wayward.

I was talking yesterday with a dear friend.  She is in the midst of being a leaning post for another who is walking the very hard and broken path of marital separation.  And my friend, the one supporting a load of weight, she's struggling to support while giving her friend the vocabulary to explain.  I found myself hurt over a situation I have no stake in, my heart deeply entangled with a person I have never met, simply because I have been to that broken place.  And no one talked to me about it either.  Because as I came to understand in my finite wisdom of pre-pubescence, we, the little "c" church, the ones who come and worship but are always broken and human ourselves, do not talk about BIG things because we serve a BIG God who can overcome all.

Hear my heart.  I firmly believe and have staked my life, my children's lives, and my husband's life on the very truth that says I serve an infinitely big God who can and will overcome any and all obstacles, in my life or anywhere else for that matter.  Period.  That is as core to who I am as the marrow which makes up my bones. He is big, and He will do big things.  That doesn't mean we have to leave every child in the midst of a separation to their own devices to "pray it out" with Jesus.  That does not mean that we have to heap judgement on each other because we don't "have enough faith" to overcome a situation and that most certainly doesn't mean we were somehow lacking and this current trial is God's way of teaching me about that lack.

Bull.

Shit.

Every good and perfect gift if from above above, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights, who does not change like the shifting shadows.  James 1:17 (NIV)

To put it another way...

Every generous act of giving and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father who make the heavenly lights, in whom there is no inconsistency or shifting shadow.  James 1:17 (ISV)

I may be totally out in left field here, half rantings of a mostly crazy person.  Maybe.  But if music is the theology of the masses, and so many "old" hymns are coming back into popularity, then I wonder if I really am that far off or if, maybe, just maybe, I'm not the only one yearning for more.

More commitment to the Body of Christ, the big "C" Church, the one who is supposed to hold up my arms when I am no longer able to raise the staff to win the battle.

More transparency and conversation about these broken, half truths we've been told, we've ingested, and are now getting sick from.

More authenticity and vulnerability to big, tough questions like How is your soul?  Followed immediately by more grace and compassion and accountability when the answer to that scary question is Not too well.

One of my children's favorite songs is Fight Song.  They sing it incessantly and at the absolute top of their lungs.  One of the lines in the song makes me so deeply grateful to the writer of the song and to Rachel Platten for birthing it into popularity.   It is a line that will be forever embedded in my children's souls... and that, is good.  Maybe the church can figure out how to grab a hold of the concept and run it all the way, teaching a whole new generation that truths aren't truths until they are whole... and whole truths are the only ones worth having, worth fighting for.

"I might only have one match, but I can make an explosion."

My heart yearns and breaks to be part of a people who realize that we are the Church.  Full stop.  The Bride of Christ.  Called to be together, called to purity, called to unity through all our many and diverse parts.  To celebrate at the wedding feast the union we have through Christ Jesus our LORD, our bridegroom, our co-inheritor of the riches of the the Father.  That we are called not to aspire to be from a "religion" but to fight the powers and principalities in our minds and in the world, all the while singing out the amazing grace of the LORD who calls each and every one of us "beloved."

Soundtracks

I don't watch a lot of movies, but when I do I generally look forward to the sound tracks most.  The way someone sitting at a desk with a script and a stack of music can artfully (or sometimes not so much) pick just the right song, the right tempo and cadence to fit in a particular scene, it fascinates and  astonishes me.  It's a gift I don't have.  In fact, I can't sing at all.  Don't get me wrong, I love making my joyful noise to the world, but I have managed to squeak out actual notes on less than a dozen occasions in the last decade.  I know this because my husband is lovingly keeping track.  Thanks sweetie.

But poetry set to music... there's something universal and completely personal about that.  You approach a song from your distinct background, your particular color pallet of life.  Sit in a concert of any kind though, and you realize among the raised cell phones and giddily hoarse voices that you all are coming to the same song, at the same moment, experiencing a new together.  That's powerful.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I'm too deep or too shallow or something like that.  For me, though, I love the moment when I can sit back and pick out the soundtrack to a certain year or period in my life.  My husband had his garage band/grunge years, full of Green Day and who knows who else.  Thankfully, I didn't know him then.  This year has been a year of seriously powerful songs, ones with a quickening tempo, a general trend towards minor falls married to major lifts.  Many of these songs, for better or for worse, have been shared with my offspring.  My two year old knows just as many words to the Fight Song as her six year old brother.  Not my proudest mamma moment but most certainly not my worst.  Besides, she's so stinking cute!

In those times of reflection about the validity of letting said two-year-old continue in her path of pop music, I often slide down the steep slope of deep, unbridled and unapologetic concern over my kids.  I don't worry about sex or drugs or grades or college.  I worry if they'll travel enough, if they'll be open to new experiences or view points.  I worry whether I'm identifying and cultivating each of their deep-seeded uniquenesses that are woven into the fabric of their hearts.  It's not a worry in the sense of paralyzing fear nor is it something I'm particularly attached to, something that helps me keep them small.  It's me, being their mamma, trying to figure out how to help them be who they are and not stop short at seeing only what they can do in this life.  My biggest fears for my children are not that they'll be hurt.  My biggest fears are that they'll be centimeter deep but kilometer wide people.  That life, for them, will be a college level 100 class, even now.  I don't want them to be the kind of people who read CliffNotes, abide in someone else's summary, or deign to be a subcategory.  No pressure, right?

I know, someday, somewhere down the line, they'll come to me and tell me all the ways I did or did not screw them up for life.  And I'm honestly terrified and totally at peace with whatever they say about me and my parenting.  The thing I want to know, in that instance (or at least what my current self thinks I'll want to know then) is what was the soundtrack as they heard it?  How did event play out from their vantage point?

I can watch the exact same movie as my husband but he will have missed the music completely 90% of the time.  I, on the other hand, have the grit of the guitar strings still phantomly causing my fingers to ache.  Same experience, different take-away.

I know the sound track to my mommyhood, my children's lives as it were.  It's filled with Leonard Cohen's Broken Hallelujah and Rachel Platten's Fight Song, Bob Dylan's Forever Young, Avicii's Wake Me Up and the rasping sweetness of Jason Mraz, all of it.  Without fail though, every single sound echoing from my beautiful, strong, kind-hearted and terribly forgiving first-born is always tinted with the twang of South Africa, the lilt of her preschool teacher and the brashness of the township on my soundtrack of mommyhood.  It's possibly the most lovely sound I've ever heard, my baby's voice.  The problem is, she no longer speaks in that voice.  She's become an American speaker, body language, facial expression and all.  Somehow, somewhere along the way, in the space between her first "he-yur" and her last "eish" my baby realized how harsh and big the world can be.  I've been told, more than once, that I'm too melodramatic, that it was all just a move.  I know things in my heart the way a person knows their own marriage.  This was more.  It's more than a changed time zone or a slight vocabulary adjustment.  In a dozen big and small ways I know this was a divorce, an inability to get back to a certain degree of trust, of security.  And the worst is, my child was just old enough to have learned to read the letters on the wall as it happened.

I am sure the soundtrack for my Steadfast One will be full of Eye of the Tiger type songs, a few love sick ballads and a whole lot of dancing.  Of that, I'm sure.  But what I'm not sure is if I'm willing to own up to my part in the making of that particular soundtrack, in that particular order, at that particular time.  I didn't get the choose the time or place for this, our Love is a Battleground number, but I know for certain in my very marrow which formed the lungs that now sing that song, I would have chosen differently.  Not for me, but for her.

Ebenezers

I have a passion for Christmas.  Not the decorations (although I do cherish every single last scrap of decor I have made, been given, or painstakingly saved to purchase myself over the years) but the whole spirit behind the thing that is Christmas.  There are many who say that Christians should look rather to Easter to love and have as the highest of the Evangelical high holidays but the truth for me is that there is no Easter without Christmas, and that baby who was born fully knowing the "Easter Story."  So I decorate on November 15th (yep, it's a "thing" around these parts) and I have multiple ways to help my family prepare for the BIG DAY.  Possibly my favorite part of all the trappings is the library.

I've been collecting Christmas-ish books for a number of years and every year, they get wrapped so that one by one, my children can unwrap a book and have it read.  I have a copy of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  It was given to Em by dear friends for her first Christmas. I secretly place this one early on so the kids can listen over and over to it because I treasure the story.

Scroooge.  Ebenezer Scrooge.

There's no story without him and his horrible taste in life choices.  He's this rather awful, slightly vile and pitiable character not a stitch of him endearing.  There's no part where I want to pick him up and carry him around in my back pocket the way I do my grandmother or my kids' old teacher or Atticus Finch.  Maybe it's because the warning he is constantly repeating is to carpe diem and unfetter ourselves from the chains we make in this life.  A bit morbid and depressing sometimes to think every drive through Starbucks, every slice of chocolate cake, every pair of shoes, every moment of anger is forging something within my soul.  A chain of accountability of my time, my resources, my health and my personal attachment to stuff.  Way too heavy for every day.

Funny how one thought can lead immediately to another.  Ebenezer Scrooge and his story is overlaid by my perspective of Ebenezer Stones inextricably.  I cannot think of one without the other.  You can go to the Old Testament/Torah and look up the context, but basically Samuel marked a place between Point A and Point B when God came to his aide in a very real, very profound way.  He wanted to mark the spot, have a sacred remembrance and celebration of exactly what God did for him at a specific moment.  Like the slight indentation in the grass on the exact spot I married.  A symbol in itself, but also an exact locator of that moment, that physical space and time when something truly divine happened.  Something big.  Something real.  Something tangible and worth celebrating year after year, generation to generation.

I have many Ebenezer Stones, and a good many have been laid in the last two years marking our exodus from Point A, that place I called home, the land of milk and honey that fed my soul and my spirit in a way I only just now starting to have words for, to Point B.  I'll tell you when we get to Point B, because I'm not there yet.  But marking that path is achingly important to me, remembering things that have been lost but also things that have been gained.  Either way, the journey is sacred. Scrooge's warning that "no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused" rings loudly in each tombstone of death.  Things lost- friends, favorite haunts, school, holidays, our dog.  Ebenezer Scrooge, doomed and fated by choice, and Ebenezer, joyful celebration, aide in time of trouble.  They are two separate.  They are one.  They are my reminder that making a sacred space, whether in a desert or a homeland, is important work.

So often I find my soul groans to be... Be more.  Be less.  Be present.  Be a part of.  Be separated from.  Be in community and be solitary.  Ebenezer and Ebenezer.  I'm beginning to think that it's not one or the other, sacred or crotchety old miser.  It's not coexistence and it's not "either or."  I used to believe the old adage that says you can't have joy without sorrow.  These days I'm leaning more towards the idea that it's the tension between the two, the effort of wrestling down the sorrow and the effort of soaring to high heights.  Because the effort is something that you do, something not to be grasped but something to act within, act upon, sit and wallowed in.

As I type, my children are playing 'Native American' and they are now covered head to toe in bits of branches, dirt, sand and filth.  They are sublime.  Not because I love cleaning up their messes, Lord knows that's not the truth.  And not because I love cleaning them up after they've already been bathed (my poor water bill!).  They are sublime because in the process, the effort of getting dirty, they became slightly better friends, they learned from each other, they did the work that creates siblings. A sublimely holy and sacred act.

Somehow, this new blog has become an Ebenezer Stone, something worth celebrating, something good and lovely.  I've already had (and am sure to have more) Ebenezer Scrooge things here.  Posts that are sad and regretful, of "opportunity misused."  But please be assured of this:  this space, this little corner of bloggerworld is my little slice of heavenly musings, things that make me remember it's Ebenezer AND Ebenezer, a sublimely holy and sacred act.