Tag Archives: musings

A Satisfying Life

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I love the New Living Translation. If you feel like the Bible is a bunch of gibberish, you should really try reading the NLT. While it may not be as accurate to the original text as other translations, I feel like it makes the Word so very clear.

Yesterday afternoon I read about Abraham’s death during a few quiet moments. Not much is said about it, except that he was 175 years old and had remarried and had other children. But in the NLT Genesis 25:8 says Abraham died “at a ripe old age, having lived a long and satisfying life.”

A satisfying life. Isn’t that what we all want? I don’t want to be rich or famous. I don’t even want to be skinny or more beautiful or have unbitten fingernails. I want to be satisfied with myself and my life.

I love what Matthew Henry’s Commentary says on these verses from Genesis 25: “Whether our stay in this life be long or short, it matters but little, provided we leave behind us a testimony to the faithfulness and goodness of the Lord, and a good example to our families.”

I recently discovered that as an INFP personality-type, I am a “healer.” I want to make everything better all the time. I want to answer every question people ask on Facebook or Twitter. I want to feed everyone, because I think it will make them happy. And I live in frustration with myself because I feel like I’m not changing the world, doing good for mankind.

Unsatisfied.

I focus on all the things I do wrong in parenting instead of what I do right.

Unsatisfied.

I look at my body and come away with disgust, hating myself for doing what I shouldn’t do.

Unsatisfied.

Here is what I do right: I open my Bible and read it and pray. I gather my kids on my lap and read them stacks of books. I tell the honest truth to my friends (and anyone who might listen) about being a parent, a wife, and a Christian. I admit failures. I drink water. I choose playing outside over doing the dishes. I nurse my baby because he still wants to. I keep in touch with my family members. I love with abandon.  I try to make crafts. I color. I make silly faces and make up silly songs.

All in all, right now, I feel pretty darn satisfied. Am I leaving a legacy? Doing what God wants me to do? Setting an example for my family? Time will tell, I suppose. I choose to believe that I am getting there.

I hope when I’m “gathered to my people,” like Abraham, I will have lived a long and satisfying life.

Worth the Living

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On Sunday, Easter Sunday, we sang “Because He Lives.” And the line I can’t delete from my brain is, “Life is worth the living just because He lives.”

Why wasn’t it enough?

For one of our friends, the kindest person I’ve met, the one whom every girl was ready to marry just weeks into the freshman year of college … why wasn’t it enough anymore?

Zest for life shadowed by depression and circumstances. How could someone who loved life and others so much become so isolated? So desperate that life simply wasn’t worth the living anymore?

I don’t know.

I do know the scary edge of depression and the feelings of solitude. I know Paxil and Zoloft and they have been my friends. I know the desire to hide under my covers and sleep it all away. I know screaming and crying and wanting but not wanting to be alone. I know the what-if moments.

It’s hell to find out someone you love but haven’t talked to in years has taken their own life. To wonder what could have made it that bad and not know, have no inkling. To think, if I had called, if I had commented, if I had known …

It’s not about me and it’s too late for thinking. Only time for sorrow and flowers and tears for a ripped-apart family.

Maybe it’s not too late for one of your friends, though. Call somebody you love and say hi. It’s better to risk embarrassment at how long it’s been then to look back and have to wonder.

In loving memory of Michael James Clements, 1981-2012.

Dear 2011

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Sun says goodbye
source: juliejordanscott

Dear 2011,

You have been a strange year.

You’ve been the year of learning to parent two. Despite the fact that sweet David was born in 2010, he only shared 11 days with that equally awkward collection of days. I’ve learned about parenting a boy, about the mother-son connection, about passionate nurslings and mama’s boys. All those things I heard about having a son? They’ve proven themselves true.

I’ve also learned how to survive with only a fistful of whole night’s sleeps in an entire year.

2011, you have not been a year of travel. In the past I’ve gone to Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, Montana. The furthest I flew from Tennessee was Boston. My first venture into New England, and a very fun one.

You contained a lot of heartbreak over our little condo, my first “owned” nest, the home I brought my daughter to and that I still can’t ponder without a slipping-down feeling. God has worked in my life and mind and heart a great deal through this experience, but I can tell you one thing, 2011: this experience gave me a pounding about our idea of ownership. And a lot of lesson about pride in our credit score.

You brought a new home, a new life, a new society. Thank you for that. But you also brought some severe bouts of depression and the worst self-doubt I’ve ever faced. I’m not sure I can handle ten more months of age 3, by the way. Could we move Libbie’s birthday to May, perhaps?

Unfortunately I’ve spent this last day of your melancholy year battling a 3-year-old whilst trying to remember that it’s no good to battle. Nights of lost sleep, post-vacation recovery, and a house that is still sparkling with Christmas lights and mess while my mind is ready to move on has made a mess of me.  It’s 7:30 p.m. and I’m considering going all Bridget Jones’ Diary and eating all the chocolate and singing something pathetic … or just going to sleep. Probably the better option.

Good night, 2011. I tuck my hopes and dreams into your final moon, imagining it as the shield of God and knowing only He can fight these battles for me. The battles against myself, my will, my dark places.

As I watch the sun rise over the Tennessee River and Lookout Mountain tomorrow morning, I will breathe deeply and pray thankfully.

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Love Loss Hope Repeat.

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Night Time Sky
source: Craighton Miller

I’ve never lost a son, but I know two women who have. Both dear, both young, both undeserving of that kind of pain.

In One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp writes that perhaps those tears in the canvas of our life ― the places where we are raw and hurt and wonder Why God? ― are the places where we can see Him most clearly. If we choose. I think those are also the places we can try to patch up with tar and feathers, using scathing words against the One who allowed those rips in the first place.

I think of another mother, a very young one, who wondered why she was going to have a son. I have been there, although unlike Mary, I was not a teenager nor unmarried. But I’ve flipped those flashcards around in my head, too: Why me? What am I going to do with a son? Am I ready for this? Will I ruin him? Scar him for life?

Those perhaps not rips but puckers, places where we’ve doubted the goodness, the grace, the all-knowingness of a Heavenly Father.

We have a second son, a Compassion child, who lives in the scattered islands of the Philippines. Does his mother wonder, too? Why so many? Why so little to work on? Is she embarrassed to have to reach out to help support her children?

All different tears in varying stages. I’m sure at one time or another, we’ve all asked the same questions in different wording, different languages.

Do we see God in the pain? I imagine my heart with tiny pin-pricks straight through, some larger than others … and a flashlight shining from behind, revealing stars. There’s something about stars, isn’t there? Hope. Vastness. Waves of feeling the universe.

I want to swim in the pools of light instead of hiding in the shadows. Finding myself closer to the Comforter, the Giver, whether I feel He is those things at that moment or not. 

Because He is in there, somewhere.

At Christmas, I miss those two unknown men who were lost, my uncle and brother-in-law. I reflect on the hurt of their mothers. And I pray extra-hard that God will seep through the holes and continue to heal, twenty or forty years later, with the promise of glory-to-come.

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Cloudy October

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Cloud over hills, Scottish borders, 2010
source: S John Davey

I’m not sure I’ll ever become accustomed to
being so close to the clouds.

I drive through them, can reach up and touch them if
I just stretch my fingers far enough.

More than ten years ago,
I saw the black like ink on the ground, moving,
and I thought it was some kind of plague.
I had never been close enough to the clouds
to see their shadows, shifting on the wheat-grass.
Montana was so wide,
the amber fields of grain.
(But not purple mountains majesty, she said. Those were back in the Virginia homeland.)

The clouds have been so thick, so dense
I’ve rarely seen the moon for weeks.
I miss its guidance but know when it does show itself,
my heart will sing.

We’re still scraping our ways out of the shadow,
waiting for the sky to clear,
poring over Scripture and longing
for the still, small voice.

When we can see over the cloud cover and straight to the eye of the moon.

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Rainy September

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It’s another day where I feel like I’ve failed in everything.

Clothes don’t fit,
but I eat macaroni and cheese.
Try to stay calm,
but I still snap snap snap. Pull glasses back, point angrily, try to get the lightbulb turned on above her head.
Grump at other cars,
write Better Business Bureau reports in my head
instead of offering forgiveness
and remembering it’s a first world problem.

In the solitary night,
I cling to what I try to imprint
on my babies’ brains.

SNV31045

Today Libbie said to me, “God loves me when I obey Mommy and Daddy.”

“NO.” I am scared of this lesson, this untruth. “God ALWAYS loves you. He LIKES it when you obey. But that doesn’t change His love.”

Does she get it? Do I?

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On Writing, and Fear

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Writing = Breathing
source: joeflood

I want to write, but I am crippled.

I am afraid I don’t have a story. All I have wanted all my life is to write a book, and I don’t know if there is one inside of me.

I read what I have written and I hate it. It’s too much truth … too many people who could claim libel for finding themselves in my so-called tale.

I’m afraid that in so many years of blogging I’ve lost the ability to talk about anything but myself.

I write magazine articles: recrafted stories of others, dictated to me and simply made palatable. I write blog posts: a messy conglomeration of stories, recipes, wonderings, life.  Some of them are good and interesting, but nowhere in there lies a true tale anyone would want to read from start to finish.

I want to write Matlida. I want the stories to come to me in dreams and flow onto the pages effortlessly. I want to see the movie of it in my head and move it forward without thinking. Instead, I stare at two sentences and then click delete. It’s all I can do to make myself write anything, fiction or not. An e-mail. A sentence.

And then I wonder if I have the knowledge to write nonfiction. I want to write about our possessive culture, how we think we have rights and everything belongs to us and even Rachael Ray calls it “my cilantro” and “my tacos.” I want to write about God as Father and Jesus as Husband and how those two relationships figure in to the literal relationships we have with earthly fathers and husbands. I want people to read my words and not be able to help being drawn to the bosom of God.

I want the words to come and I’m afraid I’ve lost them in the midst of “Mommy I’m hungry” and wailing and library storytimes and coffee making and having one stinking minute to myself.

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Appearance of Love

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The kitchen sink

I wield my vacuum as a weapon, valiantly sucking away the crumbs and hair and dust that tells of our everyday existence. Creating a story that is not my own, one where I am tidy and my children are constantly bathed and my stove does not have dirty pots on it. All for the sake of someone I know doesn’t truly care.

I still feel the urge. The need to hide what’s there, what is true. The knowledge of what I need to fix in myself. The disgust with my body, my home, the ants dancing across the bathroom floor.

Do I do the same thing here, in my home on the Web? Show only what I think others can stomach; make myself look better, holier, thinner than I am?

I revel in the sacred moments but fail to reveal that they are too rare. I’ve not shared with many my Lenten sacrifices, because I would be forced to admit I have fully kept to neither.

I tell of my battle with depression, but not about the day where I couldn’t stop crying and screamed at my babies and had to have a friend take them somewhere else.

I don’t ever want to be too proud to be true. In love, I show you who I am. Run quickly, or stay around and have a cup of coffee and confess that you, too, screw up. I’ll love you either way.

_______

I want to turn Romans 12 into a painting, something I can see in my house every day:

9 Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. 11 Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. 12 Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. 13 Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.
 14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. 16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.
 17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. 18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 19 Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,”  says the Lord. 20 On the contrary:
   “If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
   if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (NIV).

Here is some of Matthew Henry’s commentary on verses 9-16:

“True Christian love will make us take part in the sorrows and joys of each other. Labour as much as you can to agree in the same spiritual truths; and when you come short of that, yet agree in affection. Look upon worldly pomp and dignity with holy contempt. Do not mind it; be not in love with it. Be reconciled to the place God in his providence puts you in, whatever it be. Nothing is below us, but sin. We shall never find in our hearts to condescend to others, while we indulge conceit of ourselves; therefore that must be mortified.”

True Love. Reconciled.

I seem to recall a fitting picture of those words.

Heddal Cross

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Working for the Lord

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Oven Fried Chicken

I am standing in my kitchen wondering what I would make Jesus for dinner.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I don’t particularly want to be in the kitchen for hours, as I have been. But prepping several meals at a time saves time during the week … time I need when my kids are having meltdowns at 4 p.m.

I am starting to get bitter, especially when I ask my husband to watch the baby and he says he doesn’t really want to, but he will. I can see the sparks coming out of my ears. I brace myself against the counter and think my own personal mantra:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men (Col. 3:23).

And my mind wanders, considering doing this very task for Jesus. I certainly wouldn’t make Him Chicken and Dressing casserole, which is what I’m currently composing at the counter. I did make the cream of chicken soup from scratch, but boxed cornbread stuffing? Not for my Lord.

I know many cooks have a specialty, but I don’t. I often try new recipes on guests, because I’m a little crazy. Baked Ziti is something we often take to friends who need a meal, but I’m not sure Jesus would appreciate the pork products.

Finally, I decide I would make him what my earthly father always asks my mother for: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

I don’t really know how to make fried chicken; but for Jesus, I would learn.

I’m not sure this is what Paul meant in Colossians.

Sharing this post on Feels Like Home as my Sunday Best!
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Finding Thanks in Bugs

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It plagues me regularly: the feeling that our home is not enough.

It’s certainly large enough for us. Four bedrooms with our current set-up. Adequate living room, two bathrooms, one even graced with a jacuzzi bathtub. OK, so the jacuzzis don’t work, but it IS big.

Right now the bathroom is being invaded by ants, our stove is approximately 80 years old and the burners are uneven, our bedroom carpet is hideous, and there is no door between Libbie and David’s rooms so I am not sure how I will ever move him in there. Teddy-bear border is scraped off Libbie’s walls; it appears to have been stuck back on with hot glue when it was falling down. Her walls await green paint which has yet to have been procured in the appropriate color.

Not to mention this is not even the house that we own.

I saw my parents’ new house for the first time Saturday evening. I immediately got the tingly jealous feelings. Gorgeous kitchen. Amazing floorplan. Beautiful tiled shower. Space. Lack of insects. Not 61 years old.

Right away, I do a double-check of feelings. Because? My parents have been married 32 years and are in their (EARLY and do not act it at all) 50s.

One of my biggest annoyances is that people my age and younger think they “deserve” everything RIGHT NOW that their parents have spent many years working toward. When my parents were my age (also with two small children), they lived in the same sort of older ranch house that we do now. They had the same financial struggles.

It’s a constant cloak, the want for what I don’t have. How do I shrug it off? Joy and thankfulness for the much I have. Clinging to the robe that I have in Christ.

Today, I am thankful for:

- the sweet curl-framed face of a toddler whose enthusiasm for life makes me crave a childlike faith
- the first laughs of my baby boy
- a home that is more than adequate for our needs and wants
- a stove that simmers soups and an oven that bakes fresh bread
- a safe and uneventful car trip from Chattanooga to Pennsylvania
- parents who adore me and my children and play on the floor and shower all of us with affection
- singing songs from 1998 in the car with my sister and trying to teach them to Libbie
- sweet sleep with an electric blanket

What are you thankful for today?

Join us for Gratituesday at Heavenly Homemakers!

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