Keep a Posture of Gratitude

Dear Jacob,

When I was in elementary school, I was a Bluebird.  A Bluebird was a precursor to becoming a Campfire Girl.  And Campfire Girls were essentially a Boy Scout rebellion group.  Girls couldn't be Boy Scouts so Campfire Girls was established by a compassionate farmer's wife.  Girl Scouts eventually came along, but Campfire Girls were here first.

By the 1970's, Bluebirds and Brownies (a group for young Girl Scouts) existed concurrently. And we did the same kinds of things. We didn't sell cookies; I think we sold nuts. We had cute little blue caps and we'd sew our activity patches on cute blue sashes and we simply had cuter uniforms all across the board, hands down, no contest. I have a shrinky dink Christmas ornament that I made when I was a Bluebird. Other than that I don't have anything left from that era of life. Except this memory.

There was a span of ages in my little troop.  It was probably only from age 7 to 9, but it felt like there were girls in there a good five years older than me.  One older girl, Kristen, was having a birthday party and she passed out invitations to everyone in the troop.  We were all excited to attend.  My mother and I went to Kmart one day to shop for a birthday gift to take to the party.  Because I didn't really know what else this glamorous older girl would want I chose a big carton of Whoppers for her gift.

I was getting ready to go to the party and I was a little nervous. Maybe I was going to be the youngest girl there and maybe my mother knew this. The gift was all wrapped and ready on the table and when I went to pick it up my mother stopped me, squatted down to eye level and asked if I wouldn't rather just stay home. To make the deal sweeter she even suggested I might enjoy just keeping the gift for myself. All of this, in retrospect, suggests that my mother was trying to protect one of us in some way. Like her Spidey sense was engaged and active.

At this stage of life I'd say that you and I were completely different kinds of kids.  Here's what kind of young child I was: shy. I hid under the table in Kindergarten. If you had a gregarious personality I was actually frightened by you. If you were an older man who was trying to be friendly on Sunday morning by complementing my dress-my-mother-made I would nervously smile and hide behind her. I didn't raise my hand to speak in class. I liked to read but not read aloud. I could be a happy kid, loud and energetic for a while and then if someone walked in that I didn't know, or if I was left out of the central activity in any way, I would close up in fear. Taking risks was not in my nature and going around the neighborhood selling those nuts for Bluebirds just about killed me.

I chose to have my mother drop me off at the party with my other Bluebird friends that day.  We played croquet on Kristen's front lawn and opened gifts and she didn't seem at all put off that I'd only just given her candy and nothing at all from the Hello Kitty store.  I was the youngest girl there and by the slight interaction the other girls offered me, it began to feel evident that mine was a mercy invitation.

When it came time for lunch Kristen's father manned the grill and we filled our plates with food and then went to him to receive a hot dog. When I got up the nerve I walked over to him with my plate held out. He said, "Well?"

I froze. It was a man. He had a man's voice. He was bigger than me. I didn't know him.  All kinds of triggers were happening for me. I said nothing.

He said, "In our house we ask politely for things. We say, 'please.'"

I said nothing. Tears were forming as I thought, " I AM a polite kid."

He seemed to have some kind of mercy pool in his heart and he let out a little of it and placed a hot dog on my plate. "What do you say now?"

I said nothing and hurried back to the table.

When my mother picked me up from the party she chatted in her friendly way to Kristen's mother and that woman actually told on me. When we were in the car my mother said something about what had happened, about being rude to others and then she said, "That's not the little girl I know." And I was deeply remorseful, not for what I had done, but for who I was.  I hated being shy. I hated the places it led me. I hated the doors it shut and the damage it did.  But mostly, I hated that I couldn't just get away with it and be this way without having to confront it all the time. This was the moment when I realized that I couldn't just be how I was and expect other people to constantly adjust to it.

That man didn't label me as shy.  He labeled me as ungrateful. And I think he was right.  I felt that I deserved to have a hot dog even if I didn't use the expected social constructs to receive it. I felt that it was okay for me to be silent because I was shy. I hid behind the "that's just the way I am" alibi.  Being shy was my excuse for being rude and it poured out in the form of ingratitude.

I read a book a couple of years ago that taught me something about gratitude, about thankfulness.  The word in the New Testament for thanksgiving is eucharisteo.  It's the word we use for the Eucharist, or the cup of communion. This means that thanksgiving is the posture we need to take when we approach the story of Jesus, his death, and his shed blood that God essentially looks through to see us as perfectly acceptable to him.

We can approach his story with skepticism, disgust, or ambivalence and we'll get different, disunifying results. In essence, if we aren't thankful we close a lot of doors and build a lot of walls where God is simultaneously trying to build a community of grace.  In short, we're always working counter to his purposes when we choose entitlement over gratitude.

Non-eucharisteo, ingratitude, was the fall -- humanity's discontent with all that God freely gives. That is what has scraped me raw; ungratefulness. --  Ann Voskamp

I wonder what Kristen's dad would have done if I had stood in front of him confident in my ability to be loved by God, grateful for the gifts he gives me day after day after day?  I wonder what cooperative interaction would have followed?  What inclusion I would have received? What deeper nourishment would have ensued from the day's celebration?  I'll never know.

Obviously, I haven't forgotten this experience and since then I have had many chances to know a different outcome, to respond to people with gratitude and thanksgiving.  To choose to wrestle that posture of shyness to the mat so that I can make my exchanges with others less about me and more about them.

My posture now is to see others as people who are loved by God and this perspective has made all the difference. You, my dear, are loved by God. So, is that kid who bugs you.  So is that parent who nags you. So is that brother who comes in your room. We can choose to respond with thanksgiving even when the scene is grim, the blood is shed, the insult has been given.  I'm still learning this one.  Would love to have you join me.

Love,
Mom

Do The Thing You Really Love

Dear Jacob,

When Grandma bought the Baldwin piano I was six years old.  Buying a piano from that particular store meant the owner's wife would give us a month of free lessons. Those lessons went to me. I don't think I asked for them, but I think my mother worked her magic and made it sound like a really good idea. And after I spent a month going C-D-E, E-D-C, C-D-E-D-C-C and maybe adding something right after that with my left hand, I kept going.

I think we continued lessons at the piano store for just a short while and then Grandma found me my next teacher, Yvonne. We'd go to her house for lessons for the next five years.  One day a week after school we'd rush to get to her house and on the days that I'd forget and ride the bus home, Grandma wasn't too pleased with me.  While she was always cheerful when we walked in the door, Yvonne got down to business quickly. That was the part I was always a little afraid of because at that point things got a little spiritual with her being the priest and me confessing that I hadn't practiced very much. I never really felt absolved, just guilty. Which I think is usually how confession works if I rightly understand my Catholic friends.

Yvonne made me do things I didn't want to do. Like theory. And practice. She and Mom were in cahoots with one another on that one, involving scratch-and-sniff sticker charts and other suspicious tactics.  I loved practicing once I knew the song well but all that time in between was, I'm pretty sure, agony for my family. But when I got good enough to play a song in church or perform well at a recital where I eventually claimed that coveted "last performer of the night" spot, I caught a wind that inspired me to become prodigious like Vladimir Horowitz.  Look him up.

And then we made a big move and I said, "Whew! I'm never taking piano lessons again!"  and did the happy dance and didn't even care if my mother put the piano against an interior wall in the new house. But a year later I was begging for lessons and there was a woman down the street, Pam, who gave them.  There was this impulse inside that I couldn't ignore and yet I couldn't pull it out on my own. I needed a guide, a helper to let me use music as my language to express all the things I was feeling at fourteen.

Piano was my therapy. Oh, I abused it sometimes. I can still hear my mother yelling from the kitchen in our home in Wisconsin, "Stop banging on the piano!"  But when I'd play well and sit down and easily push out a Clementi Sonatina or sweat through some Debussy, she'd come lay on the couch while she waited for dinner to cook and say, "I love to listen to you play." And when I'd play an offertory song at church, usually on Father's Day, sometimes my dad got teary.  Maybe my therapy actually came in the words of affirmation I received.

I continued piano lessons all the way through High School.  I would proudly tote my binder of books with me to practice in the music rooms during study hall. I planned a Junior Recital with my teacher and a Senior Recital with my friends from school who were also in the band. Oh yeah, your mom was in the band.  She played a clarinet for 8 years of her life and marched in a zillion things and did fruit fundraisers and competed in Florida and won awards and all that.  But band wasn't really about the music, it was about the community. Piano was about the music, about the expression, about having a voice.

There were only two pieces that I ever really wanted to get good enough to play.  One was Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini which I attempted at both my Junior and Senior Recitals. The Junior Recital turned out okay but at the Senior recital I utterly murdered it, which was so embarrassing in front of all my friends. If my best friend and I hadn't have nailed the funny Victor Borge duet all would have been lost.

The other piece was called Sing Your Praise to the Lord that an old Christian music artist, Amy Grant, recorded. That one began with a Bach Fugue that absolutely thrilled me because I loved all the technicality of Bach. I learned this piece later in life, after I was married to your dad and all of your grandparents went in together one year to buy me a full-size, electric, 88 weighted key piano.  I began taking lessons yet again from a flamboyant woman, Beth, who was ADD with two inch nails.  She always assumed the best in me which, of course, always exceeded my talent. For four years, she taught me to be a worship leader from the keyboard, which I became in a B-string sort of way in my church.  And she also taught me that song.

When our church worship band got together to practice I had been working on SYPTTL for a long time and they loved it and they followed my lead and we nailed that piece to the wall several times, to my great enjoyment and worship (truthfully). This was kind of the apex for me. I didn't have any other pieces hanging out there calling me to learn them. I was eight months pregnant with you, going to seminary, working full-time and it felt like playing piano was this lingering coal in a fire that was going out.

After you were born, I tried to practice some and it always got your attention, just as it had when you were in the womb. I remember when you were in your busy-being-formed stage that whenever I would play you would quit kicking me from the inside. This was a helpful discovery.  But it was also formational for you, all tucked away waiting to be born with nothing to do but learn to love music. When you came out and made eye contact with us all slippery and new, you had rhythm. You still do. You're welcome.

And then you started toddling around, pulling yourself up on everything and sometimes that included the keyboard while I was trying to practice. That just became too much to take on, so I closed the fall board and that was that.

Here's the thing. When I was five I wrote my first poem. When I was turning sixteen I wrote a book and passed it out to all my friends on my birthday. When I was 20 I declared an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing.  When I was 36 I started blogging and writing articles online. And I've kept a consistent journal since I was in college.  Though I miss the music sometimes, the words have always been the thing that called me forth. While piano was a skill I learned, it was never a talent that I had. But words just come whether I want them to or not. I don't need a guide. And these are the gifts we need to pay attention to.

You're wondering what your purpose is in the world. To that I say, let your life speak. Your true vocation comes out of who you are which, of course, is fueled by what you love. Pay attention to that and you'll know when it's time to know.  In the meantime, practice something, anything, that inspires you.  And even if it isn't the thing that you end up doing, as you're making that discovery it just might be the thing that determines the direction for someone else.

We're all connected. God doesn't waste anything.

Love, Mom

Know Where You Come From

Dear Jacob,

When I was young I visited my grandmother in Southern California often.  My grandpa died when I was ten and she still lived in the house they had shared together, the only one I remember them living in. This was the house where the lawn was thick and prickly, the fish always needed to be fed "just a little," and the twin beds in the guest room could be pushed together to make a perfect tumbling mat. It was an eleven hour drive from our house to theirs, but if we left early enough we could be there in Orange County by dinner time.

My grandmother -- we affectionately called her Mema -- was an opinionated woman.  She had worked for the California Youth Authority for many years, and though she had an office job I think you had to have grit just to walk in the door there.  She was the one who told me about sex, smacking her lips when she reflected on her own fulfilling marriage to Papa.  She was the one who came to visit once and promptly rubbed her hands straight down my chest when I opened my arms for a welcome hug. "Just checking for boobs," she said.  She would have rules like, "No bottles of dressing on the dinner table, no cheating at card games if your name is Scott and no eating tater tots with your fingers.  And while it was fun to tease her just so she'd clear her throat and loudly proclaim in her broken cackly voice, "A- hem!! " we all figured it was also a good idea to obey her.  You know, out of respect.

She was just one in a long line of strong women that I come from.  Her mother had been some kind of an ambassador to the UN for the Salvation Army and she did some amazing things to promote the rights of women.  Her youngest daughter was a minister in the Salvation Army for forty years.  Her oldest daughter, your own grandmother, has lived a life of compassion for the disabled and has a generosity which, in my eyes, goes unmatched. So there's this stream of strength that I naturally draw from when I think about who I am and what I need to be paying attention to in life.

Mema was a really cool and confident woman.   When she laughed she made a choppy "git, git, git" kind of a sound and when she and I would watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson she would laugh a lot. She was a short woman who would pay her grandkids $5 when we grew taller than she was.  I think I surpassed her somewhere in Junior High.  When we each turned sixteen and had worked for at least six months straight she'd give us $1500 to buy a car.  And she always gave a million gifts at Christmas.  She made it really clear that when she wanted the family together it'd be a good idea if we all showed up and she bought us tickets to shows and restaurants and nearby islands to make the "invitation" sweeter.

She was also pretty sick.  Whenever I go to the doctor they ask my family medical history:  Cataracts? Heart Disease?  High Cholesterol?  Cancer?  I have to say yes and it all traces back to Mema. So, if you want to know why I work out it's because I know that this stuff is right behind me, biting at my heels. She suffered from angina attacks a lot and while I didn't know what that meant, I knew it had something to do with her heart and she literally spent those days in bed.  She had open heart surgery twice in ten years, double and quadruple bypasses. That first time I was in fifth grade and when I went to visit her afterwards I was the one she instructed to take all the strips of tape off her healing scars.  One ran all the way up her leg where they took out the vein to create the bypasses they sutured to her heart.  The other, of course, was a big slit all the way down her chest.  When I'd take off the tape, she'd tell me, "Do it fast, even if it makes me cry."  And so I'd try my best. And she'd cry.  And I didn't want to do it again.

One time, when I was finishing high school I asked her, really off-the-cuff one day, if I could move to Southern California to go to college and live with her.  She didn't ask my mother what she thought.  She didn't ask me a follow-up question.  She simply said, "Yes." My mother seemed a little stunned by this authoritative move so I think there was a little conversation that followed, but in what seems now like about fifteen minutes, my future was decided.  Mema figured it all out.  Because, like I said, she was smart and opinionated and we usually just found that it was better for all of us if we just did what she said.

When I moved in with her it was the greatest thing ever.  I was on my own, but I really wasn't. She found me a job that supported me through college for five years and she'd even cook for me sometimes. She flat out told me one night over dinner that I needed to break up with the boy I was dating because he wasn't right for me and she was afraid I'd marry him and he'd finish his forestry degree and take me off to the woods to waste away all my talents. Which I think was actually the exact same conversation she'd had with my mother at one point when Grandma was first dating Grandpa who was a forestry major back in the day.  So, I guess it was odd to her that I was doing the same thing my mother had done -- even though Grandpa never did take Grandma off to the woods. I did eventually kick that boy to the curb much later than Mema would have liked. I was rebellious a little and stupid in love a little and she was right but I wasn't going to admit it.

One day in March came the appointed time for Mema to go in for her second heart surgery.  She was nervous that morning.  I was a sophomore in college and had to go to class which made me feel conflicted. But Aunt Cyn had come to town to be with her and she took her to the hospital. Before she left she gave me a hug and said, "Good-bye, Angel," which was disturbing because ten years earlier when Papa was in the hospital after a heart attack I talked to him on the phone and he had called me the very same thing.  And then he died.  So, I said to her, "I'll be there right when I'm done with class."  And she looked at me calmly and nodded a little and the two of them left.

Those were the last words she said to me. It was supposed to be a triple bypass but they ended up doing a quadruple.  During the surgery her chest cavity swelled up and they couldn't close her up and something else must have gone wrong that I wasn't clear on, but nearly seven days later when she hadn't woken up they were declaring her brain dead and we were having to say, "Turn the machines off."  We buried her Easter weekend.

When someone formidable in your life dies it challenges our own mortality. And when that person is in your family line, the very stock of who you are, it moves you up a little in the hierarchy of responsibility.  Suddenly my mom became the family matriarch, so I only had one person keeping me from being at the top, being looked to to remember the stories, settle estates, and call the family together from time to time. It's unnerving. There are some people that you think are just gonna keep going on getting their way, who seem to have the power and will to create life.  Those are the people you want for your teachers and mentors and Memas. And when you get them, you pay attention to every quirk and every word and maybe you only pretend to listen, but still you let their courage and nerve melt into your skin and challenge your heart.

This is what you come from, Jake.  You come from a family of humanitarians --  people who help other people. Your people are the kind who endure their own health and hardships and still lean over and offer a hand to someone else right in the middle of it.  It reminds me of Jesus.  When he was hanging on the cross, suffocating and bleeding, he had a significant conversation with the thieves who hung next to him and he made sure that at least one of them was going to join him in the new world he was creating. Then he looked down at his best friend and gave him the nod to take in Mary, his mother, because he knew the other numbskulls he was hanging out with, and even his own brothers, didn't quite understand who he was, or what she would really need family to be in the days to come.

We can sit in the middle of hard things, and we often do, and we can make it not about us.  We can have swirling clouds of doubt and despair all day long, but we can step outside of it by keeping focused on who we are and who we come from.  In your case, you come from a father and a mother who know deep in our bones that you were made for a purpose, that there was some dark age you were born to change.  And you also come from a Father who loves you more than we ever could, who knows what it's like to grieve and wish that things were different and still not give up.

I believe pretty strongly that he wants you around.  He worked really hard in these other people's lives just to get you here. Trust him.

Love,
Mom

When a Mom Won't Give Up

Dear Jacob,

You know that every year we do this thing called Lent which leads us up to Easter in the same way that Advent leads us up to Christmas.  This is a fairly new practice for me -- for us; I don't approach it as a ritual or an obligation. Spiritual practices give us the opportunity to become more fully formed into the image of Christ. You know, we are all made in God's image and finding out what that means is a discovery process. So, Lent is a season in that discovery.

What I like about Lent is that it is a different practice for everyone but it takes us to the same place. I love that we're all working together in a million different areas to create a more purified "body of Christ," an image the New Testament gives us to explain the church, and we all get to rise up new on Easter Sunday. It's like working on a house with the framing, the electrical, the plumbing, the paint. I can't criticize someone else's practice for Lent because if we're talking about building a house or even if we are Frankenstein-ing a body together every little thing should matter. Every part contributes to the refinement of the whole.  And so we all choose the area that our small part makes in the body of Christ and then we show up on Easter unified in our sacrifice and ready to be filled with his wholeness.  It's beautiful.  It gives me chills.

Many people give something up, others take on something new.  I've done both over the years and you've somewhat been a part of those things.  Last year, you remember, we gave up a quarter of our income and gave it to a children's home and a church in Delhi, India.  Our contribution did some wonderful things and went so much farther in rupees than it would have in dollars. Thank you for tolerating that time with us, giving up eating out, stretching the groceries, trying not to ask for things. It was a sacrifice for everyone.

The year before, we decided to give up meat and so dinners were very creative and different.  That one didn't affect you as much, but you still witnessed the practice.  Prior to that my practices were private.  One year I practiced forty minutes of writing each day and one year I practiced intercession, where I prayed for other people, and I would email the first person who came to my mind to tell them I was praying for them and to ask if there was anything specific I could hold before God.  That year I wimped out.  I prayed for you, but I didn't tell you.  I guess as a Christian mom you just assume your kids know that they're being prayed for. But I don't think you know.

This year, when I asked God, "Where am I the least like Jesus?" what came back was, "In your parenting." Ug.  I've known this, felt this, owned this for quite a while. When you were born I studied the scriptures to find out just how God fathers his children so that I could parent in the same way --  nurturing and compassionate, wise and discerning.  I think in many ways I nail it, but in may ways I miss the mark of parenting like God.

So, for Lent this year I am "taking up" my kids. And my practice for each of you will be different.  I have been listening to you.  I have heard you say that you don't feel encouraged, even loved.  I have heard you say that you are afraid.  I have heard you say that you believe the gospel, but you don't think you can know Jesus. And I think, that if I did a better job of showing him to you, that maybe you might find new ways to respond to life, to frustration, to the gifts that God gives you every day.

My lenten practice will be to write you a letter every day.  And in order to be as vulnerable as I can and as accountable as I can, I will put it up here on my blog so that you can read it and so that we have a record of that time when your mom desired to be more like Jesus in your eyes.  A time when your mom gave up pride for Lent and told you about her own brokenness, mistakes and questions.  But also a time when she told you her story with God and how that story changed her.

Our stories are intimately intertwined -- you, God and me -- but sometimes, lately, it feels like they're at odds.  I sat down at the table the other night and said to your dad, "I can't believe that this is where we're at."  I never imagined that our relationship with you would be as broken as it is.  But I want to let that brokenness push us into something new. Like our new friend said this week, "Crisis is just a turning point."  I hope that he's right.  I want to begin a new thing.

At one time, you were my new thing, all fresh from the womb and simple and needy.  I've failed to think of you as my new thing for a long time.  I keep moving on to other new things. But in this season I want to look at you anew and let you sit back and consider how God is making even your mom new as well.

For Lent this year, my practice is to "take you up," to meet the challenges you give for me to speak into. And yours is simply to read. And hope.

Love you, Jake. More than you can ever know.
Mom