Holding on to Gratitude

Thanksgiving was a couple of days ago here in the United States and I’ve discovered that with each passing year, this holiday becomes more and more my favorite.  Most other holidays have a commercial component to them now and each one involves gifts except for Thanksgiving.  

Even though each year Thanksgiving grows on me on a bit, this year I think I finally understood why.  In church on Thanksgiving Eve, we were challenged to list all that we were thankful for out loud.  Pastor assured us to go on as long as needed and to not be shy.  As I started to say those people that I was thankful for I realized that after a short time, I could no longer speak.  Tears streamed down my face because how can you thank a great God who owes us nothing for everything we have?  I am breathing right now because he allows it.  Where can I even begin?  Pastor encouraged us to start small and continue to live a life of gratitude.  I was profoundly moved by this. 

Where do we begin?  First, start with our smallness – start with the fact that we are dust and then thank God for life and health and air to breathe.  Maybe family is next and then possessions.  But here is the tricky part – thanking him for pain and loss and all that challenge us in this life.  This is not easy, but if we are still breathing, that means that God has a purpose for us and he promises to be with us to help us.  

While the concept of constant gratitude is something I have been studying for nearly three years, I realize that I have much to learn and will probably never get it right in this life.  But starting somewhere is all we have to do.

The food is gone, the family has left, and I have almost recovered the kitchen from the madness.  The kids want to decorate for Christmas.  Me too…but I’m hesitating a bit.  Looking around at the simple orange pumpkins, cornucopia, leaves, and grasping the gratitude for just awhile longer. 

Love Personified

I keep listening to the Jars of Clay song Skin and Bones from the Inland album which speaks of love being people - both the object of love and the action of love.  Recently I read that love is a person and his name is Jesus.  This means that love is not a feeling or action – but a person.  A person embodied in what love really is – all actions flowed from love of others, love of the Father, love always at the forefront, love as the focus, love personified.  And isn’t that what we all need to learn?  Love is who we should aspire to be – love is “skin and bones”.  It’s not a theory or a concept, science or philosophy, but an embodiment of us acting out our highest calling. 

 

I think of my days at home.  I express love through doing things for others – “acts of service” as a famous author describes it.  Checking off the to do list all in the name of love.  But are these tasks received as acts of love? 

Maybe it is not enough to show love in the lists, but to be present and hear and touch and hold and whisper into a little ear and play “This Little Piggy”.  For my children, being present – “quality time” is likely one of the few love languages they understand.  Love towards my children is my presence fully engaged and focused on them in the midst of the everyday tasks and experiences.  And as I come to this realization, I remember how much I have to learn. 

Facebook Fast – Thirty-One Days

I wake up blurry eyed and foggy and fumble to turn the alarm off my phone.  Before I even sit up, let the silence sink in, or turn on a light, I login to Facebook.  What am I missing that happened in the five hours since I last logged in?

One of the kids asks me a question, but I don’t hear them as I scroll through the newsfeed – blue and white glow discoloring my face.  She asks me three times more, “Mom, mom! Can you hear me?  You need a time limit for your phone, just like you give us.”  I hear her this time and put it down.

It’s October 1 and I’m reading the latest rant over the government shutdown and Obamacare as my federal government employed sister sits at home wondering her fate.  Suddenly, a wave of anger envelopes me.  Livid that I’m wasting time reading garbage from arm chair “politicians” insisting on an opinion they know nothing about. 

I leave a couple of posts on groups and my wall that I’m logging off – for the whole month of October.  I sign off cooling my heels over ice water. 

Oh, I’ve logged out before for a whole month – did it just last June, but it didn’t lose its hold on me.  I logged in ravenous consuming Crackbook oblivious to the dissatisfaction and frustration that continued.  I trudged on for more than a year, unchanged and unrelenting.  I meant to write about it back then – to share with the world the revelations uncovered from a month “disconnected”.  The truth was the epiphany never came.

This time was different.  The first couple of days, I pondered my struggles with the blue and white frames.  I remember signing on for the first time over four and half years ago under the guise from family and friends to stay “connected”.  It was fun finding old college friends and grade school pals that I had not spoken to in over 30 years.

Months go by and our third child is born.  While I wish I could remember vividly the times I snuggled close and gazed into her perfect sweet face, I barely can.  The memories I recall are thumbnail pictures scrolling by, blue letters, red notifications delighting me.  I’m ashamed at these cheap excuses for memories.

When I stopped working to be home with our kids, I craved any type of adult interaction.  My phone stayed logged in, I stood at my laptop in the kitchen until my legs ached, relentlessly scrolling, devouring “social interactions”.  In reality I was feeding my addiction, barking at the kids when they interrupted me, recoiling at my shallow existence.  I was terrified to admit it – I envisioned the audience at a 12-step meeting.  I stand trembling before them.  “Hello, my name is Jennifer and I’m a Facebook addict.”

The vision fades and I step away for short bursts…a week here, a week there, holidays, birthdays, many Sundays.  But I always wake up the next day and I log back in – as if I had never left - returning to where I left off. 

After the first few days of this fast, I get an email from my “dealer” – I am missing notifications.  Sorry Crackbook, I can’t do that.  I delete the message.  Again, an email – two days later.  I ignore it.  After day five, I get an email every.single.day.  On day eight, I unsubscribe.

By day 15, I don’t think about Facebook anymore.  I have a big announcement I want to share, so I login quickly to post it.  I do not look at notifications.  I do not look at the newsfeed.  I realize in despair that I don’t ever want to login again and that soon I will have to decide how to manage this.

The world seems brighter and calm and there are no distractions to keep me from reading a book or playing a game with my children…some of them old enough that they have stopped asking me to do those things.  Is it because I hardly reciprocated?  Because I wasn’t listening?  I shudder at the thought.

My eight year old asks me to sit with her and talk.  I’m floored and honored and my phone is not on my person and I do not hear it and I am fully here with her in this place.  I hug her and count her freckles while I tell her that I will always listen and for once I really am and please tell me God that I have not missed too much!

October 31 rolls around and I wait.  I do not login until nearly 11pm on November 1.  Most of the notifications are not worth reading and I can’t get past the second item in the newsfeed.  I start hiding things like mad in a desperate attempt to focus on those people that drew me to this “connecting” tool in the first place.  I don’t login again for a couple of days and I don’t think about it and I’m not drawn in and is this what normal life is like?

I close up my laptop having spent just a few minutes – but a few minutes more than I wanted.  I walk out into the living room where my sweet four year old is singing and dancing and I take her hand and join in. 

Why the Best Part of the Trip is Going Home

I love a good road trip.   Getting in the car and appreciating the journey to elsewhere reflecting on where I am at in life and anticipating the destination.  While I enjoy traveling, I realized occasionally in the hustle and bustle of a trip, what I actually love more is the trip home. 

Kids snoozing in the dim quiet, softly glowing dashboard lights mixed with red hazy taillights.  Warm coffee thawing my hands.  Hushed conversation with Jerry amidst periods of silence – two hands linked together.  The moon lighting our path, pointing us home.  

Do you enjoy traveling?  When is going home more desirable (if ever)?

Labyrinth + A Snake = God's Heart

I took a walk yesterday – in a garden – alone (except for the snake) – isolated in the woods.  All things about that statement pretty much terrify me.  I’m not a nature gal, but appreciate it.  I’m rarely alone…so much so that my ears ring when it is quiet.  And snakes – don’t get me started!  I drive into the gardens and trails with an air of fear agitating me.  I pay to park, seeing only a mother and her young boys and the guide in the welcome center.  He says, “Take this path to the labyrinth…it’s…um, just better…you’ll see.”

I step forward, all fear dissipating…the beauty and wonder before me.  It is a blue sky, breezy, sun prism day – early fall, the crunch of leaves under my feet – not cool, not hot.  I head down the path, past the tended gardens, into the woods; enveloped in greenery overhead, beside, in front.  I turn and see the wooden bridge over the algae blanketed pond.  Noises of crickets and katydids welcome me.  I cross and enter the path.  I listen to the babble of the brook, the steady rush of the waterfall into the stream.  

I almost step on his chain-linked pattern body – tiny snake in the path.  He has heard me pounding up and is still…head poised up, listening.  I can’t resist him and stop to take a picture – the only picture of this trip.  He enchants me and I whisper, “You are so cute!”

I twist and turn on the path…the leaf and tree markers a blur in my peripheral.  As much as I would like to read them all and linger, I’m keenly aware of my mission and the fact that the sun sets earlier these days and I’m alone in this desolation.  

I approach the last bend before the labyrinth.  I pause at the opening and read – instructions, etiquette.  Labyrinth – “an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit.  A maze of paths bordered by high hedges, as in a park or garden, for the amusement of those who search for a way out.” (www.dictionary.com)  While this is the formal definition of the area I am about to enter, I made the pilgrimage here to find something and rest in the confidence that I am not lost.  In fact, I am sure I am found.

I pray as I walk into the limestone labyrinth path…silently, surely…trudging quietly; grasshoppers and locusts spraying outwards from the prairie grass as I disturb their rest; sun warming my face.  I am euphoric in my thanks and praise – not the usual tone of my discourse with God.  I listen, crunching feet, sun hiding in a small rainbow behind a cloud.  God tells me he loves me.  Of course, I knew, but like any relationship, it is important to be reminded.  He keeps saying, “Be quiet, my child.”  Why is this so hard for me, for us?  I prattle on in my mind.  I pray quietly and slowly.  In the middle of my quest God says, “I am mighty and strong and it would do you well to remember.”  Oh how often I have forgotten!  Put God in a box – limit him to my own understanding of the circumstances and situation.  And when we hurt – don’t we restrict him further?  Our pain in constant focus and his universe blurred, distorted…greatness lost in our human amnesia.

Somehow this makes me laugh – because I am his child and there is a bit of scolding in his voice.  I promise that I will remember.  I reach the center of the labyrinth.  I sit in the quiet – sun blazing past the cloud…I move to another boulder, to feel the heat on my back.  

I don’t want to walk out, but I perceive the sun sinking.  I am quiet now and I hear the words to an old, old song my mom sang in church.  I see a shadow pass over me – a hawk.  The song echoes in my memory, “And he will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breadth of dawn, make you to shine like the sun, and hold you in the palm of his hand.”  A reminder, promise, wonder, majesty, glory, our smallness, his infiniteness. 

 

I take the sunny path back through the prairie grasses.  I hear the crackly, ocean-like sound of the breeze blowing through the birch trees.  This experience so ordinary from the outward appearance, such mystery, and over abundant gift to my inner psyche.