All is Grace

"This is it.  These are some of the best days of our lives."

I stood on the stairs yesterday afternoon, looking up at Landon who was about to walk into our apartment with a bowl of grilled meat in his hand.  I held the foil and the tongs, waiting for Christopher to inch his way up the stairs, and conscious of so many pleasures in that moment: cooking food outside; teamwork with my husband; the tow-headed toddler behind me; a joyful consciousness of our second child growing within me.  It's late summer, time for ripening, deepening, and the rush toward harvest.  Like a few other times in my life, I can sense Life settling into me; I feel the growing and ripening of my own self.  There are things growing in my spirit that I neither planted nor planned for, but are sheer gifts of grace.

One recent gift of grace is courage to more fully embrace my vocation of service.  My heart has been cracked open by repeated reminders of the selflessness necessary to love and serve my family well, and an increasing knowledge of my terrible inadequacy to that selflessness.  In this moment, I have been give the grace that allows me not to shrink from that knowledge, but - through the tiniest of baby steps - to allow it to do its work of softening, repentance, and humility.  I am amazed to see these things unfold.

Another recent gift of grace is courage to relinquish the fear of belief.  On Sunday, Landon, Christopher, and I will be welcomed into the Roman Catholic Church.  Landon and I will receive the sacraments of Confirmation and First Holy Communion, and Christopher will receive the sacrament of baptism.  Again, my cooperation with this work of grace is imperfect, and so so slow, like a toddler's fingers pried off of the illicit candy in his hand; this tiny sprout of courage, too, is wondrous to behold.

I know that there are those who, through their love and concern for me, look on these things in a different light.  Some of you worry that I will lose myself in mothering and homemaking, not in the positive loss of unselfish service, but in the frightening loss of sublimation and nonexistence.  Some of you look at the vast gulf between the church of my childhood and the church of my adult belief and are concerned that I have lost my way.  I do not blame you for your worry and concern, and I thank you for the love that motivates it.  Please, pray for me.  But if it is any comfort, know that when I look at my life right now, all that I can see is the work of God.  I know of no other way that could have brought me to this moment.  The circumstances could have come about by a certain stumbling and accident, but the seedlings of courage, the baby steps of virtue, the slivers of openness - grace.  All is grace.  

Tired out

This is a tired blog post, because I am tired.  Not really physically tired, although there's a touch of that, but mostly I'm tired of just keeping on going.  Serving others, even just my own baby and husband, is hard for my spoiled little soul.  I'm accustomed to frantic mental manipulations to figure out how to do enough for them so that I can feel okay about it, but still mostly concentrate on doing whatever makes my frantic soul feel better.  So focusing on my vocation the past little while is giving my flabby self-discipline a workout.  And sometimes, I feel about the middle section of my days like I feel about the middle section of my little thrice weekly runs: I'm not worn out by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm just so uncomfortable and I hate being uncomfortable, and I'm bored because I just keep doing this uncomfortable and unvarying thing, and I just want to quit but that would be stupid, and I've already started counting how many breaths it takes me to run a minute and I haven't even finished half my time yet.  So the end of today feels like the end of a run where I just ramped up my time or distance - my willpower to keep putting one foot in front of the other is ready to snap as soon as I soon as I hit my finish line.  Not because it was a day full of difficult, dramatic, or even frustrating things, but because it was full of making the choices that made my self will uncomfortable.  

This falls, as do so many things that I've written recently, into the category of things that I've learned about all my life, but never really got.  Jesus talked about crosses; St. Paul talked about beating ourselves into submission.  These things are difficult.  Somewhere I had gotten the impression that if you were doing hard things correctly, they would cease to be difficult things.  It would be like wearing yourself out dancing late into the night, not wearing yourself out pushing through that last half mile on the treadmill.  As I've been learning, it's simply not true.  Hard things stay difficult, even if you're doing them for all the right reasons.  Even if, like running a mile and half, you don't think that they should even be hard things.

A Gentle Divine Smackdown

Not quite what my day was like, but close enough

In today's late morning I began to do a dangerous thing.  I began, mentally, to write a blog post for this evening about how easy days aren't really good for me.  The post would discuss how I enjoy these days - the ones where my willpower is strong, the to-dos are practically accomplishing themselves, and I have a schedule worked out to make my complicated afternoon a breeze - but they present a problem because I then want to set them up as expectations for how every day should be.  I would then be disappointed were not the day of the sort where my tiny child sits with his feet dangling in the empty side of the sink while I wash dishes, and we listen to his CD of funky kids sing-along music.  And where, in my morning once-over of the bathroom, I did not hum carelessly to myself as I wiped up the random hair in the sink even though it wasn't bathroom cleaning day.  And where I effortlessly avoided the siren song of internet inanities to knit a repeat in my current project before enjoying a light lunch while reading an edifying book.

I really was reflecting on these very things.  And I really had no idea how much I needed to be slapped.  But don't worry - justice prevailed.  It all went south about the the time I noticed the fire in the oven.

I had turned the oven up quite hot to make pita bread, this being one of my smugly-reflected-upon moments of good planning and strong willpower, whereby I was going to accomplish something in the early afternoon that would render the evening practically struggle free.  Unfortunately, while mixing the pitas I noticed an unusual amount of white smoke emanating from various orifices on my oven.  Investigation revealed a small grease fire burning happily about the element.  Several applications of baking soda, multiple episodes of towel waving at smoke detectors, and a window opened to sub-freezing air later, the bottom of my oven had stopped bursting into flames but my plans for the blog post had gone up in them.

All turned out well, of course.  I baked the pitas - albeit sadly subpar versions of their usual puffy selves - in my neighbors' oven.  And although I could write a whole saga in itself about the preparation of the lasagna for my friends who just had a baby (frozen ground beef, for starters, and triple the prep time that I planned on), that too baked quite nicely in my neighbors' oven.  As the lasagna baked, those same neighbors invited us to stay for dinner, then helped deliver the lasagna and its accoutrements to our friends at what turned out to be a fairly reasonable hour.  After which said neighbors and ourselves put our kids to bed, and hung out at their place eating cheesecake and watching football until late in the night.  By which I mean 9:40PM, because we are parents of small children after all.

The day, then, was salvaged (although my kitchen could use some help), and actually improved by the aid and assistance of some stinkin' awesome people, and I end it with these two thoughts:

1. Good neighbors are priceless, and mine are the best so you can't have them.

2. I will never again muse about the ease with which a day is passing before said day reaches its midpoint.

Corollary: I will never plan fatuous blog posts about a day until the day has proved itself worthy by continuing in smarmy glory from beginning to end.

So there.

On Days and Years

Five years ago, I was 19.  The beginning of the school year in 2007 marked the end of a golden summer, full of the relative independence of young adulthood at home, fun work at a coffee shop, and a solid group of friends. Although a major tragedy in the life of a close friend knocked me flat in August, and in the upheaval I made the decision not to go back to school for a year, I still spent the autumn and early winter working at my coffee shop, talking to my now-distant friends by text and telephone almost every day, and travelling to see them at every opportunity.  The next year I planned to go back to Bible college, then maybe to California to finish my Bachelor's degree, then maybe somewhere else for more school, or for some mission work.

Five years later, I am sitting in the living room of our small apartment in Notre Dame, IN.  I'm married to a physicist who is working on his Ph.D at the University of Notre Dame.  My 8 month old son is playing happily on the floor with our neighbor's 23 month old daughter.  I'm babysitting her so that they can attend the football game this afternoon.  I need to get the dishes done soon and tidy up the apartment so that my little family doesn't go crazy from the disorder soon.  And I need to make food for tomorrow.  I do have the Bible college degree to my name, but only one semester - so far - put in of that Bachelor's degree.

Five years is all that it took to turn a 19 year old student, unbeholden to place or person, into a 24 year old wife and mother, with a little house to keep and friends' children to babysit.  I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised by this; after all, as I look back I can see that five years worth of stuff has taken place.  I met Landon, married him, worked, went back to school, and had Christopher.  The surprise isn't that a lot has happened in five years, it's that I didn't feel those years go by.  It's only in being brought up short by the strangeness of my comfort and contentedness in a situation radically different from where I was at 19 that I feel the movement of time in years, years which seem suddenly to move more quickly than days.  Days I can feel passing, stretching out before me to the horizon, then collecting themselves into weeks and months behind me.  They move slowly towards me, and I can feel the weight of the ones that will pass before the ones on the horizon reach me.  Years, however, seem suddenly to be rushing underneath me, flashing by almost too quickly to note each one.  As I live my daily life, I have no sense of them going by.  One year seems always to be the same as another - only filled with different weather, new locations, and unique days and months - until suddenly they have piled up behind me with frightening suddenness.   

Is this how it always is, I wonder?  Or could it be that as the years pile up behind me they will slow down in front of me to be like the days?  Will I someday cease to feel them like a constant rhythm around me, and instead feel them passing one by one?  Or will they always be invisible until they are gone?   

Questions

I would call myself a casual observer of current events. I don't obsess about ferreting out the latest news, and I don't even have a news feed as my home page. I get an e-mail every day with some headlines from the New York Times; some days I delete the e-mail, most days I scan the headlines and read two or three articles that look interesting, every once in a while I really go through and read half a dozen or more articles that look particularly informative. Other than this I get my news through listening to NPR when I'm in the car.

So I have a decent grasp on the big stuff (there's oil in the gulf of Mexico, South Carolina is a political soap opera, General McChrystal has a big mouth, etc.), but it's not exactly up to the minute, and it's not terribly in depth. You can read all that as a disclaimer and an introduction, because this casual observer has some questions about current events (and by current I mean within the past few weeks).

1) What, exactly, did/do people expect President Obama to do about the oil spill?

This is partly a sarcastic remark, and partly an honest question. From my limited perspective, it looks like a problem that requires people with a more experience in engineering and less in politics. Are there presidential powers of which I am not aware that Obama should have been exercising? Is there something that he didn't do that he could have, or did that he should have not have? Also, isn't it a little odd that people were so angry that he didn't appear angry enough?

2) Are stupid remarks about the boss and difficult coworkers, made while not on the job or in official capacity, just cause to fire someone?

This is, of course, a reference to General Stanley McChrystal, who was removed from his post as the leader of the Afghan war following an article published in Rolling Stone containing some less than satisfied things that he had to say about diplomats and Obama administration members.

3) Is presiding over the opening of a construction project in Ohio really the best way to curry favor with the citizens of that fine state?

Last weekend I had to giggle at the story of President Obama attending the ground breaking of a road construction project in Columbus, OH. Having lived in the area, I can attest to the annoyance felt by all when summer begins and the orange barrels begin sprouting like pestiferous, poisonous blooms. Undeniably it is a good thing that a construction crews worth of Ohians have a job that they would not have otherwise had. Also, road construction is a good thing. It's just an annoying good thing. Especially in Ohio. Thus the giggling.

4) Why did I ever hate Landon Donovan?

This question should be self-explanatory. If its not, there is little hope for you. Also,

5) Where can I get hold of a vuvuzela?

I asked, you answer.