i wanna start swinging

You know the list you have of the things your parents were right about? Like, for me- my dad was right that my red tights, red skirt, and red sweater from Benetton in eighth grade did make me look like a tomato. Well, I am finding out that God has been right all along, too. I mean, I have always agreed in my head that God is right, and that his ways are best. But after nodding along during sermons, I often turn around and live very differently from the truth I just affirmed.

I get paralyzed by perfectionism.  I suffered from that pressure long before Pinterest raised the bar.  So the gospel- the idea that God loves me BEFORE I am perfect, just-as-I-am, not for what I do but for who I am- that news frees me like nothing else. But sometimes I get stuck there, and miss a big chunk of God's plans for my joy. Like, I read Bible verses like, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters" (Colossians 3:23) and "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48). And I don't see how that meshes in a live-it-out way with the gospel of freedom, so I kinda ignore those ideas. 

Well, at my mom group the other week, we were talking about whether Christians are called to excellence in different areas of their life. And during the discussion, an idea that had tickled my mind in the past took root. Like many Biblical concepts people mistake for burdens, God's call to excellence is a gift! I have told my kids (students in my classroom, and biological children both) that trying hard is a present to yourself. I've asked kids, can you imagine playing on a baseball team where no one is really trying? The pitches make it halfway to the plate? People shuffle instead of run? No one gets out because throws are lazy tosses, and half-hearted swings never make contact with the ball?  Everyone on the team would be bored and miserable.  It would be worse than trying hard and losing. I'm preaching to myself here when I repeat: it would be worse than trying hard and losing. It would be boring. It would suck the life out of the players and they would hate the game.  Well, that's how I approach my tasks as a wife and mom more often than I care to admit. I resent the pressure to be perfect, and I am aware that God's love does not depend on me dazzling the world with my skills. So, I shlep through my days halfheartedly. I do what I have to do, but don't push myself to do more.

What a recipe for depression and disillusionment!  Kids constantly in front of the TV, kitchen in a shambles, time wasted online. I have so much more fun on days when we swing for the stands (to keep the baseball metaphor going). Moving from a "have to" to a "get to" mindset has been a game changer.  God doesn't ask us for our best efforts because he is some school marm from 1853 with a ruler in His hand, ready to smack our knuckles when we fail! He is like Willy Wonka, with a twinkle in his eye, pulling back the curtain to a land of color and joy that comes when we go for it! 

Now this is long post, I know, but there is another part I can't detach from this. Effort takes energy, and trying hard to engage with my kids and keep up with my housework and also share life with my husband takes a lot out of me. I feel like I am pouring out for much of the day. But my half-hearted days don't leave me more energized either. Instead of wandering through my days on autopilot, which leaves me discouraged, if I run through my days as "on" as I can be, I reach a time where I must stop and truly rest.  The Bible, of course, calls it Sabbath. True life and true rest leaves me so much more satisfied than disengaged life, never truly off and never truly on. In a nutshell, I am learning that my best efforts at an excellent life paired with Sabbath leads to amazing peace and joy, whereas trying to muddle through with as little effort as possible leaves me drained, tired, and stuck. 

There is so much more I could say, about how a life of excellence (while still free from the pressure to be perfect) is what I want for my kids to know, so I'd better model it. About how our witness to the world as believers is so hurt when we muddle through life, detached and vaguely bored. About how God's rhythms are beautiful and life-giving, and we are silly to think they are only "rules" that we "must" follow. That this idea of laying your life down so you can find it, giving up our way of seeing things because God's is better- this works out to be true in how we eat, physical exercise, friendships, marriage, parenting, career dreams... 

Some of you have been operating this way for a long time. You "got this" long ago. Bless your heart. Be patient with those of us slow learners. At any rate, I'd better go. I need to go pick up my bat, get my eye on the ball, and start swinging. #rainyday #gameon #sendmorelegos

hashtag summer

It is 9:30 am. I am huddled in front of my computer, reading the 4 free Jen Hatmaker essays that are bonus pieces from her new book coming out in April. I am also eating the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of Baked Ruffles.

The children are in the other room playing some game that involves a whacking sound that should make me nervous.  One of them is dressed in fresh clothes for the day.  One of them is in the same clothes they wore yesterday. One of them is in... a diaper.

Sesame Street is playing, ignored, in the background.

 Is this the best I can do?  I don't know. Give me a minute. After Jen Hatmaker makes me sigh and chuckle, I will get my act together and maybe we will craft something, and I will attempt to make sorting laundry seem like a cool game. #summer

can i just say?

Tonight was my son's penultimate baseball game of the season. Side note: I have been waiting for a chance to use the word "penultimate" in a fitting circumstance since Ann Furlong taught it to me years ago in her first grade classroom.  No, I was not a first grader at the time.  I was a colleague.  Never underestimate the power of a primary grade teacher. And for those of you who, like me, did not learn that word in high school, it means, "second-to-last." You're welcome.



Anyhoo, I digress. At my son's games there is a concession stand. It sells the stuff that kids' dreams are made of.  Ring pops. Airheads. Walking tacos, and nachos with delectable unnatural cheese sauce. Something like the pixie sticks of my youth, but like ten times bigger and in a plastic straw. (Forget the internet and cell phones- what this generation should celebrate is never having your flavored sugar get stuck in a gooey mess on your disintegrating paper pixie stick straw!)  And my three year old loves the Icee Pops, and often asks if he can get one at the "confession stand" as he pronounces it.  It may be my favorite of his mispronunciations.  I purposely steer conversations around to get him to talk about the "confession stand" and its Icee Pops.  So cute.

As I chuckled about his confession stand faux pas, I got to thinking.  I need a confession stand.  Not in quite the same way as the confessionals of my Catholic upbringing (although, maybe that too. That's a topic for another time.)  More like- a safe place to gently let fly some of the vulnerable thoughts and feelings I've been having.  I mean I technically have those places- my marriage, my weekly mom "support group".  My friends, my parents.  But I am in a new place. We moved a couple months ago, to a new town. New church, new schools, new grocery store, new neighbors, new, new, new. And I have not been quite brave enough to say out loud to new or old friends:

Can I confess that I am afraid of repeating patterns from my past, that sabotaged my friendships?

Can I confess that I only got part way done organizing and unpacking, and I really don't want to do the rest of it?

Can I confess that some days this moving transition is embarrassingly easy, and others days it is really hard and lonely?

Can I confess that I have overdue library books already?

Can I confess that I fear that people are just being nice to me because I am new and they feel like they should?

Can I confess that I don't want to shop at Aldi even though everyone says it is cheaper and amazing, etc., because I am a creature of habit and ease, and I love Hy Vee?

Can I confess that in this season I keep getting mixed up feelings that God is more pleased with my clean kitchen than he is with my broken prayers?  So I keep the buzz of life turned up so loud that I forget how much I miss him, until when I do remember, it makes me cry? All this, even though I know that in my past I have gone through at least three Bible studies that cover the story of Mary and Martha in detail?

And lastly, can I confess that it's hard to be on the trapeze between places, between friends even, so that I have so many people who care about me and are nice to me, but no one I can talk to long enough to get to these deep places in conversation.  Where I can process out loud until I say my vulnerable thoughts, and hear theirs, and laugh and cry in the same conversation.  I. miss. that.

I could end this blog post with a neat little statement about how in the meantime, Jesus is my best friend anyway, and He will listen and He never fails.  Or I could say that it is growing my faith to go through lonely times. Or that he will answer my prayers for deeper friendships in His time (or he will, once I get around to praying them.) All these things are true, but those are not my take-aways tonight. Tonight I am just going to breath, and feel these yucky feelings. It has been a long stretch of being "fine" because I think I'm supposed to be.  And I don't think it makes God happy when we pretend to be fine, and find ways to numb our uncomfortable feelings.  (Hello, facebook, sugar, and caffeine!) So here I am, owning these "confessions." If faith is moving forward (and I believe it is) then I don't think I can move forward until I say aloud where I am.  I am hanging onto the bar of a trapeze- with one toe on the new platform.

Okay, one last confession.  I confess that I cannot imagine actually posting this on my blog. But I'm going to!  Take that, fear of vulnerability!

compulsive much?

In the category of things that make me gently, forgivingly rueful about myself, is my recently noted addiction to Pinterest, directly related to our moving.  There is very little I can control about our move.  The only tangible thing I could control in the entire process is how clean our house was when it was time for showings... and I really don't get "into" cleaning anyway.  Now our house is sold, and that part is over.  Our closing date is penciled in on my calendar. Cue the "William Tell Overture" music as we now have more pressure to pick a house in our new town, and buy it.  And that isn't as easy as I thought it would be.


And this is, understandably, stressful.  Each time a house listed online seems like a possibility, there is a process I can't speed up.  We have to wait- wait to see the inside, wait to get an expert friend look at the roof, wait to get an estimate about renovation costs, wait to decide if the floor plan will work for us.  I have two ways of coping- first, staring at houses for ages on zillow.com in an ever widening circle around our future town, and secondly, trolling Pinterest for ideas on how to fix up and decorate a given housing candidate.  We looked at a house with an 4 season porch with dark wood paneling.  So I pinned ideas for painting paneling.

from Southern Living House Plans

We were hopeful about a Tudor revival English cottage style house, with garishly red painted trim.  So I pinned modern paint color palettes for Tudors.

from Country Living

When the inside of that house turned out to be a money pit fit for a sitcom episode, we heard about a possible ranch coming on the market.  Within a couple hours I was pinning pics of ways to improve the curb appeal of plain jane 1960s ranches.

found on Houzz.com

While these hours were fun, and gave the illusion of being (mildly) helpful, they were in fact a lovely distraction and a waste of time.

I am very conscious of the ways this move is stretching my faith.  I have had to ask myself some hard questions.  Do I really trust God with this move?  Can I let go of trying to control the details and timing of this?  Am I really listening, I mean, REALLY paying attention to what he is calling our family to invest in?  Can I wait for a while, not knowing everything in advance and not scrambling with regards to our next home?

Here are some things I know.  We will move.  We may buy a house in time, we may need to rent.  It could go smoothly; it could be a stressful transition.  But our problems are small in the grand scheme of things; any homelessness we face will be temporary.  We have loving friends on both ends of our move.  We have been supported and cheered on.  And I also know deep, deep down, in that almost wordless place inside, that we don't have money for Pinterest ideas anyways.  Praise God that he is so gentle and forgiving of my (sometimes) silly worries and preoccupations.  He keeps taking them out of my hands, so that they are free and open to receive the better plans He's had all along.  It may cause me stress to fill out mortgage paperwork and have nothing to put in the "forwarding address" blank (especially as a rule-following firstborn- I can't leave a question blank!) but whatever our address, we will be the same goofy people living out the same kingdom life Jesus called us to before I knew how to spell mortgage. And so maybe tomorrow I can spend more time in prayer, service, and friendship, than I spend on zillow.com and Pinterest.  A-men.

deck the screens

For no particular reason other than the fact that I like to share, here are some of our family's favorite holiday youtube clips.  Some are funny, some may well draw a tear to your eye.  At any rate, I hope you enjoy them.

1. The Christmas story as told by precious children from New Zealand in funky costumes.

2. From Slugs & Blugs (which  makes the best music for kids) a song about a shepherd dad and his son on Christmas.

3. A look at modern shepherds in Bethlehem and what they understand of the story of Christmas.

4. Mariah Carey, the Roots, classroom instruments, and children.  And Christmas.  Yes, please.

5. Last but not least: Rend Collective's "You Are My Joy" Christmas video.

One more? Okay, here it is.  Kid Snippets takes kid's voices telling stories, and their adults lip sync to it. This particular one is the kids telling an old family story of a Christmas from when their parents were young.  I love the rambling way kids tell stories.  And the lip sync skills are prodigious.  

So what makes the cut for Christmas screen time, for your family?  We love the classics: the Grinch (animated, duh), Charlie Brown and his friends crooning at the sky, and this year we will introduce the kids to "YOU'LL SHOOT YOUR EYE OUT!" You? Any recommendations?

instead

Oh, has Elf on the Shelf arrived!  It has crossed the line from "cute idea exploding all over Pinterest" to "controversial idea debated on blogs posts shared on facebook." Or is it just my friends linking to Huffington Post articles about how the Elf is ruining Christmas?

I wrote last year about my conflicting thoughts about the Elf. (<-- Click to read). And I ended up deciding not to do it, a very sound decision for me and my family.  (And a tricky one, I'm finding. More and more of my kids' friends have elves living at their homes this month, and it is a minefield for my kids. I coach them frequently about how not to ruin Santa for others; now I have to add the elf to the lecture.)

In the interest of disclosing holiday traditions, we may not have creepy charming plastic dolls wrecking havoc and taking marshmallow bubble baths, but we do plenty of other memorable activities.  We always get new jammies on Christmas Eve, and play "hot-and-cold find the hidden baby Jesus from the nativity set" at Grandma and Grandpa's. We always make decorated sugar cookies. We have special ornaments with traditions and stories.  We do Advent readings and Advent calendars with daily cheap pieces of chocolate therein. We always have Christmas tree waffles the morning of the 25th.  We always stand in a circle and sing "Joy to the Word" with family at Nana and Papa's house. But my favorite tradition that we are developing as a young family is that of our "shepherd's pouches."

Like all good traditions, this one came from the Bible.  No, just kidding, it came from Pinterest.  The idea is, each kid has a rough burlap pouch with their name on it (seriously rough- I sewed them, and I'm no seamstress). They are meant to hang in the place of their stockings, but as we have no mantel, and no stockings yet, we just place them haphazardly around the house.  Did I mention this is a tradition-in-progress?  Throughout the season of Advent, the kids earn money by doing extra chores- ones above and beyond what is expected of them.  The money they earn goes in their pouches.  Christmas Eve we count up what they made, and use it to order from the World Vision Gift Catalog. That means they are giving a practical, special gift to a person in need around the world- a mosquito net, a chicken, a Bible, or a soccer ball, for example. Then when they wake up in the morning, their shepherd's pouches are gone, replaced by stockings.  Just as they experience the joy of giving, they get the joy or receiving.

Here's the thing: my kids get into this.  My oldest boy remembered doing this last year, and begged me to let him start early- about 2 weeks before Thanksgiving.  He has begged me almost every day for jobs to earn money- money that he knows will not be for him.  We watched the videos online at World Vision's site, where short clips explain the hows and whys and whos of each gift- medicine, fishing gear, educational supplies, seeds.  When we got to the video about clean water, and the effects on children who walk miles to get muddy water from a polluted source, my seven year old buried his head in my shoulder and started shaking with sobs.  Which made me cry too- in part because my heart and head are so numb, so cynical, that I forgot how shattering that truth is, until my boy's tears reminded me.  I had to get his attention and show him the end of the video, with the joyful children frolicking in the clean water of a new well, to remind him of the hope of change- and the fact that he could be part of it.

So all my kids are wiping windows and dusting and taking out the recycling.  And asking, "how much will you pay me for that job?" like some money grubbing Wall Street wannabes. And they take the quarters and dimes and dollars (thanks, Grandma and Nana!) and stuff them into their burlap bags.  Christmas Eve will be amazing, because each one has a chosen goal: a Bible, a mosquito net, and a share of a well, respectively- that they are working hard to meet.  The Bible says that whatever we do for the people who are "the least," we do for Jesus.  So like the shepherds, we will come to his birthday party, ready with His gifts.

Because I am the opposite of super-mom, I cannot do both this, and the Elf. And I know that the long-term lessons about joy, and the power they have to actually change a little of the bitter sadness that is truly in the world- will serve my kids well.

But I still reserve the right to have a random toy dinosaur start some nightly shenanigans, sometime in January.

Find out more about World Vision's gifts by watching this video:

Also, Compassion International does a similar gift catalog.  World Vision just got to us first, and we stuck with them. Both feature domestic and international gifts in many categories, but of course there are countless other charities you know of that would fit the bill just as well.

Here's the blog where I originally found the idea:
http://blog.jamesandjuliepaquette.com/2011/12/02/shepherds-pouches/

PS- I know none of you reasonable people will jump to any crazy conclusions, but in case some person I don't know actually reads this all the wrong way: I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH OTHER PEOPLE DOING ELF ON THE SHELF. MORE POWER TO YOU. YOU ARE A BETTER PARENT THAN I.  IF I COULD DO IT ALL, AND DO IT ALL WELL, I WOULD TOO. There. (wink).

call me mawm

I just spent a few minutes sorting through a pile of clutter.  (Cue the parade!) And in the pile I found some papers created by my oldest a couple years ago, wherein he wrote of his love for me in giant tipsy letters, on construction paper, surrounded by crayon flowers.  Of course looking at those papers made my heart swell up and burst into a thousand tiny pieces.  I didn't cry or anything (this time) but it was marvelous to see love, young and wholehearted and innocent, made visible on paper. My boy still loves me, and we have a great relationship.  Today he asked me roughly two dozen times if there was anything he could do for me, that would help me and the family.  Seriously.  But he no longer writes, "LOV YOU MOMY" over and over on decorated papers.  That stage is gone.  I love the stage we're in now, but I'm glad I have a few examples now filed away to remember the way it was.

In the interest of that, I wanted to blog today to capture for posterity what my youngest has been doing.  He's two, and when he wants to say something to me, he launches into a building crescendo of, "Mom! Mom! MOM! MOM!" But he pronounces it more like "MAWM!" Without a hint of annoyance, almost like a bleating sheep.  And even after I answer him, "Yes, honey?" he still throws a few more "Mawms" my way, winding down the refrain. Sometimes his song varies to, "Hey mom. Hey mom. Hey mom." About a dozen times. And if he is in range, he gently grabs my cheeks between his hands and steers my face to look at his.  And if I'm talking, he puts his open hand softly on my lips, to get my attention.    It's too cute to be annoying, and I respect his tenacity as a third child.  He could resort to more violent ways to get me to pay attention, so I appreciate his peaceful ways.

I noticed today that the fall is advancing.  The first trees have transitioned from changing colors to actually dropping their leaves.  And that was just too much for me. I liked the beautiful leaves, but the barren branches were going too far.  Silly, I know, to rage against the turning of the seasons.  Summer was so good, so sweet, it's hard to let go.  I know that in the coming months more than just the trees will change- our family is planning our next phase, our next big growing adventure.  I don't have the luxury of thinking that we can hit "repeat" and do the same summer all over again, next year.  We won't be where, or who, we were.

And I don't want to grieve over the growing of my boys and my girl.  The sweetness of their affection is not going to vanish because they become more sophisticated and self-conscious.  I've worked with older kids, so I know. These little pieces of who they are will still be there- they will just be under the radar, coming out in funny ways that make them just as sweet.  Instead of reams of love notes, I may get the smallest smile and a nod in a room full of his peers.  On a good day. Whatever, I'll take it- because it will be the same love from the same kid. I still have this time, for now, to enjoy the clues adding up, revealing who each of my kids are- the good, bad, and ugly- we are still together for them
to call me, "MAWM!"

*In rereading this post, realize I don't want you to think that we have been in some state of constant harmony over here. We have our fair share of conflict and tantrums, and "You're the worst Mommy ever!", etc. And I know that as they get older, those jabs will get more sophisticated, too.  But hey, it's worth holding the sweet moments in your hand and pondering them a while, isn't it?