Bees in My Bonnet

 "Oh teach us to pray!" the disciples yearned: As children try on language, stumbling, awkward, We long to speak with words our God, our Maker, will hear. In settled calm, He teaches us, "Pray:     "Your will be done. Here in me, on this earth,     Do as You will, as it goes in Your homeland." First He teaches; then, He shows, "This is how:     I come to a Garden. Remain with me, Pray for me.     Pray with  me. My prayer is still, 'Your will be done.'" To stay with Jesus, here, now, in darkness, uncertainty,     Can I  pray, "Your will be done." ? "You found me sleeping," I confess. "Your spirit is willing; your flesh is weak."     My struggle is held with grace. He taught us once to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread." Then later, He breaks the bread: "This is my body: I am the manna."  I need this daily bread! The bread given.  In it, I am for given. How God is for  giving!! He gives His...

 I have been slow in bringing words to the blog. I began to process the past two years, and I guess my whole life, actually. And then I stop and get sucked into the current dramas of my life and days. There have been plenty (I'm sure this comes as no surprise). And part of the process is realizing I can't share everything that goes on in our household. There are other people's lives navigating the twists and turns of life. There are young people emerging, finding who they'll be, what they'll believe, how they'll engage with the world. There are pleasant and unpleasant discussions. For me, there is a moment-by-moment discernment of how much to correct and how much to pray over and trust the Lord to correct. I see my children growing, considering the things that go on in the world, form opinions (some or many of which I might find disturbing!) and realize they were never mine to own, only mine to steward for a season. That said, when children hurt, make terrible j...

 Just a poetic meditation for today. And that is all. Where we hurt Can I find the place,  The hidden cavern Crested , unexplored,  The fountain-head,  That point of pain - Where it begins  Its crimson stain Which flows, reaching  Every stream of me?  Can I wonder over Every part of my being - What is seen, what is unseen,  To detect where hurt resides,  Seeking a blanket, a balm,  A cool cup of water?  I will seek I will find There I make a nest, Cradle the ache. Tread softly  Listen  It speaks, "Hear me!"  I will go Leave the place I've come to know  Let rest unbind tight-woven dread Take slowly life's breath Into every crevice yet to be seen; I entrust myself to Love.  "My burden is light," I am told,  And laughing, gasp, allowing doubt to speak, "Oh really?"  A burden - light? How can it be?  The answer came long before: "Cast your burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain you." 

For previous post, Click here    I already told about that 2nd night, how it was worse than the first. What I didn't mention was the anxiety storm I was in. I was awake all night imagining the worst - the mounting medical bills, the needs Timo would have for the coming months, my own inner world feeling like it was hanging by a thread. Was I prayerful? Kind of. More whiny, and perplexed, trying to figure out how we would manage. As the sun began to rise, and I was still panicky and fearful, I knew I couldn't carry that load anymore in my soul. It just wasn't sustainable. My prayer became different then. Instead of, "But God, what about this? What about that? What about my limited capacity? What about Timo in pain? What about bills? What about healing? What about hope? None of this seems hopeful. Oh, and by the way, thank you for sparing his life." Yeah, I caught myself on this last one. The storm I was in had overcome me. I could barely scratch the surface of grat...

 Infancy is weak, fragile, cute, maybe even a bit scary. I know infancy. Not only holding my own infants, but the infancy of hope in my own soul: the infancy that seems only a tiny spark of light in a long, dark, tunnel - this is a fragile and even scary dawning of hope.  These 24 hours are some of the hardest of the year for some: there are hopes, fears, expectations, longings, moments of despair, regrets, losses, hardships - this list is not exhaustive. And somehow the hopes and expectations seem to all land on this day, and how easily we forget space must be made to accommodate the losses and hardships as well. In fact, even the lack of fulfilment of hopes needs space to be grieved on a day set aside for celebration and joy.  "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight" - and as we sing this Christmas hymn, we mean it. The hopes AND fears - of this loooooong   year - these meet together in this infant child, Jesus.  I imagine the time of J...

  I can't believe September is done. It feels like a gap in my year - that a whole 30 days was swallowed into some black hole or vortex of suffering. I don't know how all those days went by when I wasn't paying attention. On October 3, I usually remember the line in the sand of my life - that fateful day when I witnessed violence and fear like nothing I'd known before or since. (Link to that saga here)  It is one of those days - a before and after, where my life is forever marked as having crossed a bridge that can never be reversed. In other words, I can't unsee that.  This September feels strangely similar. Timo's motorcycle accident has thrown me face to face with the unpredictableness of all of life.  One moment I was heading to bed, the next, I'm riding an ambulance...it's still so surreal that I actually lived through this, and even more, that Timo did! And then two all-nighters, back to back. And to sit dazed in a hospital room, stunned, numb, and...

 The existence of fairy tales and their universality tells me something about the condition of the human heart: We love neatly contained stories with closure. It comforts us to feel the end of a story coming, and to know there will be a resolution, even if imperfect, brings a kind of relief. Most fairy tales have happy endings, some have gloomy endings, but they all seem to have a kind of solidly-footed ending. It wraps up the package, the telling: the journey for the hearer is complete. And I wonder if this universal yearning isn't also re-worked within Christendom to promote ideals that may yield fervour on the one hand, but despair on the other. For our fervour, consistency, zealous striving, and success are all prone to wane at times, and we may expect more from ourselves than is possible or realistic. Yet that doesn't stop Christian publishers from churning out books that beckon more from each seeker.  Who am I to complain? I wouldn't read such things anyway - though I...

 These are the days I walk around seeing life with new and different eyes. They are eyes bathed in the furnace of suffering, with understanding unobtained before now.  Those dreaded words landed like a thud: "They discovered cancer." My Mom has been diagnosed with Small Cell Lung Cancer, typically a cancer only seen in smokers or their partners. It feels heavy and dark, and menacing and cruel, and so many other things that words don't seem to describe.  (Taking Mom to the hospital in Arkansas with my sister) It is one thing to hear about it. And to feel sad. To think on it. To learn of it. To wonder where this goes - typically nowhere good, except, I suppose, heaven. Heaven is good. I'm okay with the heaven part. It's the process of getting there that somehow unnerves me. I've had little fear of death in my life. God gives us these years, some more, some less, and we must reckon with the undeniable reality that 100% of people die. The statistic stares us blank...

 Sometimes I wonder about things...random things...things that I then wonder if anyone else wonders about. Lately I've been with people in their pain, and with myself in my own, and finding my own pain somewhat inescapable, I began to wonder more about pain - what it does to me, to others, and where does God fit in all this? I haven't spent long on physical pain (" such a bother," I tell myself). Instead, I've allowed my (admittedly very small) encounter with physical pain to launch me into exploration of emotional pain.  Here's the thing: I have a wound on my forehead, covered by a bandaid, and a blog and facebook page where I talk about my wound, and people ask me about it, and it's kosher to talk openly about a physical pain because of the thing on my head. Now let's imagine it differently: what if my pain were in my soul, where I find immovable burdens press down on me and I spend every un-spoken-for-moment in a desperation I can't explain? Wha...

A month ago I was meeting with some friends and confessing how I struggle to do the normal medical updates of, like, going to the doctor for an annual physical ('What's with going to the doctor when you're not sick? It's like another chore!') Or, if I did make it to the checkup, to actually schedule all the follow-up things that they send you to.  I've written about having A.D.D. (I like to term it: Alternately Designed Diva), here before, but this is just one more peek into what it's like to live with chronic distraction, impulsivity, procrastination and bizarre rabbit trail hunting. A.D.D. never goes away. It is with me for life. It has affected every area of my life, and the medical realm is not left out of it's clutches. That's why A.D.D. sufferers (and, those who wear it proudly!) need many supports to keep us on track. Like friends. You know, friends who know   things - and will DO things, like, text you the name and number of a dermatologist y...