the exceptional need to be ordinary

 I awoke this morning with a word on my tongue left over from a shadowy world that played like the highlight reel of an epic movie. Mind groggy and brain slow moving I reached for the word before it crumbled to ash just as I got to it. Gone.

What was it, I wonder? That singular word that had the power to change worlds, alter realities and usher my conscious into light filled realms of joy and glory. If only I had retained it.

And now? Just the ordinary day stretched out before me. No deep sense of rightness with the world, no bursts of glorious light as music swells, just today.

I have an exceptional need to be ordinary. To feel the thrum of life grinding on towards...? Without this grounding of ordinary, what framework would I have laid for light strewn days? I am weaving a trap of ordinary days to catch the outlier. In one glorious moment I shall have it in my grasp, and this time it won't escape me.

My will or Thy will...

This is what I've been contemplating today, God's will. I actively pray that God's will be done in my current landscape of hard things, but under that prayer runs the current of my own will. What does my will really want? To escape having to watch my son suffering. To be released from hard things. I think true surrender to God's will is absolutely impossible without the empowering of his Holy Spirit. My humanness is just too strong. 

Maybe this is why the life of a Christ follower is often described as both easy and hard simultaneously. Christ in me truly bears up under every hard thing in my life, carries the load, is the source that fuels a life of following God. Yet surrendering to, resting in Christ is maybe one of the hardest processes we humans go through. We are so very finite.

Parenting

You know, being a parent is not for the faint at heart. This month my youngest turned 18 and I realize, I have second guessed myself pretty much every step of the way. 

I was not a young girl who dreamed of becoming a mother. To be completely honest, I never really thought about it. As a teenager I took babysitting jobs because I needed to make money, I wasn't really equipped for the job, truth be told. Siblings would fight and I'd introduce an art project. Tears would flow and I'd dig around in my bag for a craft to distract. I had basically one answer to all babysitting dilemmas, do an art project!  Honestly, it got me through. Even once I had my own children crafts and art projects were VERY often pulled out to entertain, to distract, and to soothe. But of course they could only take me so far. I had very little equipping to support the title of "mother".

Somewhere around the time that Alex was 2 or so our church was facilitating parenting classes which Daniel and I readily signed up for. We were meant to shepherd our children's hearts and also not let them get away with murder. One of the methods prescribed was that of 3 chances. The first infraction on the part of the child received a warning, the 2nd a firm rebuke and the 3rd was either "time out" or a spanking, whichever the infraction warranted. I dreaded it all. I'm pretty sure that in the realm of discipline, I was getting an "F" most of the time. I knew that I couldn't hold up this 3 chances method consistently. I was going to need to do something that I could maintain for the duration and I settled on leaning into the shepherding of the heart side. This didn't mean I never had to correct one of the 3, or that I very evenly and moderately parented 24/7... it just meant that I mostly tried to hear what was happening internally in that child who was being challenging and address the core issue (if I could discern it). I still don't know if this was right. The proof is in the pudding as they say, and in my view the pudding is still setting.

I love my children. Wouldn't give up the experience of being their mother for the world, but I'm still not sure I've done a very good job with the whole thing. I can only do what I know to do in that moment, that space and time. In that exasperating, fraught moment. There are no do overs. Mistakes are made, words are said, feelings are released and wounds are often inflicted. There is only admitting fault, being humble and loving through the challenges one moment at a time.

At the end of the day I'm hoping this is what I've lived out as a parent, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins." I Peter 4:8 

Selah.

art

This morning I made the "mistake" of watching a video on the process of one of my favorite artists. It was like getting a taste of sugar after weeks, months, of abstaining. Instantly I feel the lurch in my gut, the longing to have space and paints and paper and space and margin and freedom and all my art supplies in one place, at my fingertips. For whatever unknown (to me) reason, all the health chaos in my world is taking up all the art space in my brain. You'd think it would be an outlet, (and it has proven to be so from time to time), but mostly it's just a longing.  

About 8 months ago when I thought things were just ticking along and it was kinda only a matter of time before we emerged from this tunnel, I dove back into art. It was lovely. I took deep gulps of creative air and frolicked in all the possibilities, and then in April I came crashing back to reality and closed all the lids, washed up all the palettes, left stacks of unfinished ideas strewn across my art desk and returned to the grind of hard things. Art feels frivolous at the moment. A tantalizing slice of a world without struggle and pain, where the brain is free to imagine light in every corner and color spills out laughing and joyous. 

This is just how I feel right now. In this exact moment. Maybe I will feel differently tomorrow.

2 weeks post scan

Today marks 2 weeks since Alex's last disappointing PET scan. It's been a bit of a tumult. I'm not going to re-hash the results here, it's all on CaringBridge if you care to know. Instead I'm going to ramble. This is my perogitive since this is my blog and sometimes rambling is just what a soul needs. I was talking to someone the other day about this scripture:

  "So don’t feel sorry for yourselves. Or have you forgotten how good parents treat children, and that God regards you as his children? My dear child, don’t shrug off God’s discipline, but don’t be crushed by it either. It’s the child he loves that he disciplines; the child he embraces, he also corrects. God is educating you; that’s why you must never drop out. He’s treating you as dear children. This trouble you’re in isn’t punishment; it’s training, the normal experience of children. Only irresponsible parents leave children to fend for themselves. Would you prefer an irresponsible God? We respect our own parents for training and not spoiling us, so why not embrace God’s training so we can truly live? While we were children, our parents did what seemed best to them. But God is doing what is best for us, training us to live God’s holy best. At the time, discipline isn’t much fun. It always feels like it’s going against the grain. Later, of course, it pays off big-time, for it’s the well-trained who find themselves mature in their relationship with God. 12-13 So don’t sit around on your hands! No more dragging your feet! Clear the path for long-distance runners so no one will trip and fall, so no one will step in a hole and sprain an ankle. Help each other out. And run for it!" Hebrews 12: 6-14 

 It's very helpful for me to mentally re-frame this season I'm in as a season of training. My much loved mother in law, Janie, had a scripture verse that she prayed over each of her boys and daughters in law. Her scripture for me was: Psalm 18:34..."He trains my hands for battle, So that my arms can bend a bow of bronze." There's no simulator training for bending a bow of bronze, there's just real time training, and it's hard.

One full rotation around the sun

 One year.  It's been one full rotation of the sun since we found out Alex has cancer. One full year of losses, hopes held and hopes dashed, dreams put into mothballs, suffering, enduring, waiting, learning and struggle.  It's felt like a very long year.  And now?  Here we are right at the edge of a major mile marker on this journey, the next PET scan.  Ugh.

Honestly?  I haven't wanted this scan to come.  I've tried very hard since Alex started getting healthy to hold space for a result from this scan that isn't favorable, but my space has been diminishing.  At this moment, I don't want to know.  I just want to go on as we are, Alex living life, feeling good, juggling a million supplements and meds, reading everything he can about cancer and how it works so that he can get a handle on how to go forward, us chopping and juicing and cooking constantly.   I want to stop time and live right here.  It feels doable.

But time waits for no one.  Time is relentless in it's march onward.  It doesn't slow down, it doesn't turn back.  I can't freeze it, stop it or get outside of it.  Scan day will come, whether I want it to or not. It's relentless.

The Slog.

me living my best life in Georgia

As a young believer, what I thought walking with God would be like and what I experienced when I gave him my whole hearted yes were pretty different things. In 1992, at the ripe old age of 19, I moved to Tbilisi, Georgia. I had arrived in Sakartvelo (საქართველო) starry eyed to be an official missionary.  I was really putting my faith into action, following God's call on my life, risking everything for the gospel. Wow. This was it. Not just a hypothetical, but reality. I had trained for this, 6 months of Discipleship Training School (DTS), I was ready. Or not.

What I experienced in that year is a story all it's own, but today's reflection is on how very mundane and often tedious my days there could be. My experience was much more of a slog than a highlight reel of glorious sun drenched moments. It was a shock to my Christian system. I had gone into it braced for hard things, but for the days that stretched on forever?  Not so much.  I feel a bit of the same right now.

 

What can I say here in this moment that I'm inhabiting?  That I feel a bit claustrophobic and I would like to get out of the discomfort? That saying to everyone around me (+ myself ) that God has his purposes in this season doesn't change how hard it is to live every single moment of this season. It's a slog. It's just one foot in front of the other. Just do today. This too shall pass.

I clearly still have so much to learn a full 32 years after my bold step into unknown lands, but one thing that came home to my heart then and resides there still is that God is with me every single slogging step of the way.  There's no place I can go where He isn't with me.  (Psalm 139)

So if you're looking for me, I'm just over here slogging along.  Thankfully, I have great company.