Heart Writing

We sit long over sliced onions and potatoes while my sick babies rest in the cool of her farmhouse.

There are 40 years between us and yet our hearts both feel the ache.

The longing ache for what should have been had we never distrusted God and left the garden.

We both grew up without Truth poured from the Word into our hearts and, yet, that imprint of God placed on each person at birth bore quiet testimony.  She knew when she watched her parent’s divorce that it wasn’t supposed to be this way.  I knew as I held my sobbing sister while family fought loud in the hallway that relationships weren’t supposed to be like that.  No one teaches you these things: they are innate.  Stamped on your soul with an indelible mark.

Life isn’t supposed to be like this.
What went wrong?

There’s quiet for a time as she stirs the sauce and I clean up scattered toys from the floor.  We contemplate our own hearts, our own hurts, our own failures silently.

What went wrong?

The truth of the matter is that we simply failed to trust God.  Failed to trust in His Goodness.  Failed to trust that what He freely gives is the best thing.

And so when our spouse hurts our feelings, our hearts cry out “Is he really the best thing you could have given me, God?”  Our reaction is sin whether yelling or bitterness or recoiling or simply walking away.  Our reaction is to say “God, this isn’t the best thing so I’m going to take control here.”

Our reaction is ingratitude.

A sick baby wakes coughing and I sit with the nebulizer trying to clear her lungs wishing it were as easy to clear my heart of ingratitude, of sin, of doubting the One who orchestrates it all.

I look over at Carol, busy cooking up something nourishing.  And while her meals bring strength to the body, her real reason for cooking is to nourish relationships.  To bring souls to the meeting place of her table.

Isn’t that what all souls ultimately long for: a meeting place?  A place to lay themselves bare and be honest about who we are in our quiet mix of good and evil, of doubt and belief.

Two days later, as I dip brush in paint and stencil a kitchen back-splash, these moments rush back at me.  I want to create the hallowed meeting place: daily with the five who live here and often with the souls wandering near me.

But how?

How do I release the full weight of who I am in a way that helps others surrender their full weight to be loved?

I just put two very sick feverish listless girls down for their first morning nap/rest since January.  They requested it.

Bronwyn hasn’t slept through the night since Saturday and ofcourse that means that Aeralind has been awoken every night too.  Aeralind just caught the nasty bug last night while B has had it since Sunday.

I’m exhausted.

I want to whine.

I want sleep for at least 6 consecutive hours.

Derek posted the following verse on our mirror a few weeks back and this morning it showed up in my google reader in Ann’s post.

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. Colossian 3:23-24

It’s all I can do to cling to this verse as a grumpy feverish girl clings to me in the middle of the night.

To sigh, grateful (stifling frustration), that she wants nothing more than to be loved on by her momma.

To breathe in the scent of her dirty hair and know that in that quiet moment, I am serving Him.

There might be a theme forming here in the random things that came together to produce Wednesday’s post.  I might be blogging about it for the next century or so.

For instance, yesterday I went to join some friends at a neighborhood pool perfect for toddlers.  Wonderful playdate.  I had a great time.  I was ready to take two sleepy babies home.  So I buckle them up in their carseats and then pull out my keys to start the car.

But they weren’t my keys.  They were one of the other mother’s keys. Oh, the joys of toddlers.

24 hours after that playdate started, I still don’t have my keys or any inkling where they could be.

I know I had them when I got there.  I have no idea where they went after that.

 I could have cried all afternoon.  Actually, I still sort of feel like crying all day (hormones… sigh). 

Did I mention I’m nowhere near perfect?

This morning I find a link to this post in my Google Reader.

Go read it.  It’s all I have to echo this morning.

Right now I need to go snuggle with a baby who is running around with a piece of bird fabric that she’s in love with.  And maybe later this afternoon, I’ll cut her out a perfectly imperfect dress from that fabric.

Somehow I wandered across the internet and found this post on the disease of perfection.

It was sort of sobering.

Today, I was in the parking lot of Lowes after trying to return something.  I placed Bronwyn in the car and told her to climb to her seat (which she did) while I buckled Aeralind in.  I made the mistake of putting the cart up prior to buckling Bronwyn in and by the time I returned she was busily ignoring my requests to come be buckled in while playing with the steering wheel and every button in the car.  It was my fault for not buckling her in immediately and I knew it.  I ended up having to haul her out of the front seat while she threw a tantrum (the kind where they arch their back until they flip out of your arms).  Both of us clonked our heads on the roof of the car as I moved her from front seat to back seat.

The woman in the car next to us rolls down her window.  She says nothing to me and just stares.  I’m obviously pregnant, I’m driving a horrendously messy Toyota Corolla with two babies in it, and one of them is throwing a tantrum.  I buckle in Bronwyn, square my shoulders, and walk around to the drivers’ side.  Lady-in-the-car heaves a very disapproving “Hurrumph! sigh.

Now I don’t know this woman.  I’ll never have a conversation with her.  At the moment, she’s just an example.  She’s just a critical person who wonders why others can’t “get it right.”  Actually, she’s probably more of a mirror of myself that I care to admit.

She’s infected with the disease of perfection and I obviously don’t meet her standards.

Those “Hurrumphs!” of disapproval happen to me quite often, even when I’m in the midst of friends.

“You know you could kill them if you keep doing that!”  (referring to letting my perfectly capable children eat whole grapes)

“I don’t understand why you’d want a VBAC, you could die or your child could die. It’s a stupid decision”

“You shouldn’t say ‘no’ to your children.  You’ll regret it because it’s so easy to repeat.”

“You schedule sex with your husband?!  How unromantic!”

And the list goes on and on.

More often than not,  I sit in a room and say nothing, more afraid of what will be said if I’m real than if I just joined in on the perfection game, pretending everything is right.

I have a massive Fear of Man.

I always have.  I want to hear “Well done!” from everyone around me, more than I want to admit where I am weak or be challenged by a friend toward growth.  Hearing things like those listed above just make me withdrawal into the shell of pretending perfection even more; those things make me quieter, more introverted.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.

But the thing is: I’m not being part of the solution.

I’m not being real.

Being real takes courage.

Being real is saying: “I’m broken.  Only God can fix me, but you can pray for me.  You can apply scripture to me and I’ll listen humbly.”

Being real is saying “I fear God more than I fear man.  I know that His strength is showing perfect through my weaknesses. So I’ll admit my weaknesses and forgive others for theirs.”

Being real is pushing aside your own critical nature and seeing people for where they are, where they’ve been, and where they could go if they had someone who listened to them and pointed them to the One who can cure everything that is broken.

But most of all Being Real is hard.

Nothing worth doing in life is easy.

Let’s Be Real.

I’ve been stuck now for weeks on Chapter 5 of Ann’s perspective altering book.  I’ve read the whole book and I keep coming back to Chapter 5.

“Daily discipline is the door to full freedom, and the discipline to count to one thousand {gifts/graces from God} gave way to the freedom of wonder and I can’t imagine not staying awake to God in the moment, the joy in the now.

But awakening to joy awakens to pain.

Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who don’t numb themselves to really living.  Pages of the gratitude journal fill endlessly.  Yet I know it in the vein and the visceral: life is loss. Every day, the gnawing…

What will I lose? Health? Comfort? Hope? Eventually, I am guaranteed to lose every earthly thing I have ever possessed….

What in the world, in a world of certain loss, is grace?

And the more of the blessings I name, this theological problem deepens, the kind that manifests itself between the breakfast table and last light out. If I am numbering gift moments to one thousand and now beyond–what moment in my life count as blessings?  If I name this moment as gift, grace, what is the next moment? Curse? How do you know how to sift through a day, a life, and rightly read the graces, rightly ascertain the curses?
What is good? What counts as grace?  What is the heart of God?

Do I believe in a God who rouses Himself just now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on hemorrhaging humanity? A God who breaks through the carapace of this orb only now and then, surprises us with a spared hand, a reprieve from sickness, a good job and a nice house in the burbs–and then finds Himself again too impotent to deal with all I see as suffering and evil? A God of sporadic, random, splattering goodness–that now and then splatters across a gratitude journal? Somebody tell me:
What are all the other moments?“

What about those weeks and weeks of babies being sick and waking in the night.
What about the miscarriages of friends?
What about those moments in a room where the things that are said cut you to the marrow and tears only form later?
What about the misplaced dreams?
What about cancer?
What about the 45 minute search for your daughters shoes when you’re already running late?
What about cameras and the favorite lens broken?

What are all the other moments? 
And most of all:
Where is God in these other moments?
I’ve wrestled with this before.

But Chapter 5 nails it.
Literally.
If Jesus can break bread and give thanks just hours before being betrayed by someone at the table…
If He can give thanks knowing that the morning will bring His own people begging to have Him murdered…
If He can give thanks when He already feels the scouraging, the crown of thorns, the heavy cross, the nails…
If He can give thanks knowing that soon He will loose communion with His Father and bear our sins…
If He can give thanks while enduring the vileness that brought sinners to the throne room…

What is the difference between our suffering and the God-man’s suffering innocently for our mistakes?

The difference is simple: He endured it, He gave thanks for the suffering, because He knew that the end result was endlessly good.

Was the Father-God on vacation when Jesus was crucified?
No.  He was the Mastermind behind the suffering that brought us back to communion with Him.

Is the Father-God on vacation when another virus attacks my home?
No.  He is the Mastermind behind that suffering.

Now I might not understand the suffering in the moment, but my job is to trust with a grateful heart that, like the crucifixion, He is weaving my sorrows into something endlessly good.

Endless Grace is present even in the suffering.