A Place to Stake it All in the New Year

I am really happy about a new year coming up, all unsullied, fresh. I used to think, “Wow, I wonder what all will happen this year? I want to make a difference, be all I should be, reach around to the people who need me and make everybody feel happy and celebrated, etc. etc. I want it to be a good year!” Now it is more like, “Wow, I wonder what all will happen this year? One thing is sure, I am not going to do everything right and very likely there will be really yucky stuff mixed in with all the celebrations.”

This is not the inevitable downer of a weary lady who has lost the sparkle of life. It is just my deeply realistic take on seasons… You want fruitfulness and summertime? Well, you may need bleak midwinter first, with yuck and boredom and mud. The thing is, I have more hope now than I did when I wanted everything to be exciting. I have seen the goodness of God, first hand, in the middle of chaos and I am not afraid. That is the marvel of it, because life can be downright terrifying. Like Peter, when I look at the waves, I sink. I am embarrassed sometimes at the things that have made me sink. “Jesus, save me! There is clutter everywhere and I am so weary of keeping house and doing the same old, same old stuff and the children have terrible attitudes about their chores and I just tripped over the doll stroller for the hundredth time and my hormones are all out of whack. I am sinking here!” If I were Jesus, I would probably think that was a pretty silly thing to be going under about, like you are standing in only two feet of water, lady. But He doesn’t, and I feel His hand pulling me up to walk beside Him again. That is why I am not afraid. If He has been redeeming my soul from destruction all these years, He will continue to do it in the coming year.

I am learning that what makes life sweet is not me, because I am flawed and incapable of making cakes out of mud. Jesus is the One who does that. Instead of a list of resolutions, I am asking Him simply to give me grace to hold up the ingredients of life in the coming year and let Him make them, by some miracle of sheer grace, into a celebration.

Last January I resolved to read the Bible in chronological order this year. It was good discipline for me, having used my babies as an excuse for a long time to just skim for encouragement. The plan got a set back when our iPad with the app I was using was stolen, but I found a similar plan online and kept on. I started this week only 13 days behind, and having gotten so close, I determined to finish. My concluding assignment for today is the book of Revelation. I like this method, linking events in the Scriptures in the order they happened. It builds trust to see the theme of faithfulness all throughout the written record. If God says it, it will happen. I am staking everything on that.

Heb. 6:17 So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, 18 so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. 19 We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, 20 where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever …

December, as it Happens

This month I have been a pen out of ink. I scratched a few paragraphs now and then, deleted the whole works, or left them to moulder in the drafts folder. Even the annual Christmas letter was a chore. I like pens that glide along smoothly without sputters and skips. Anything else is insufferable! So I can only thank the Lord that blogging is for writing when you enjoy it and that I have never imposed deadlines on myself.

All this time I was out of Earl Grey, folks. Two weeks in a row I forgot to go to the tea aisle in the grocery store. I drank coffee, which is a satisfying experience all its own, but sometimes a girl wants. just. tea! I have a whole shelf of boxes of other teas. My husband likes variety, and so does Gregory, my little tea drinking buddy. On Monday morning I was reading in the quiet when I heard Greg stirring around in the kitchen. To my surprise he brought me the steaming mug he had been concocting according to his Greg Standard of Perfect Tea. It was so liberally adorned with cream and sugar as to hardly be recognizable as tea. Later I saw that he had served me detox tea, which struck me as extremely funny, taking into consideration all the “bad stuff” he dumped into it. I walked over to my grocery list and I wrote it down nice and bold: EARL GREY. This week I bought a ginormous box, inhaled deeply the intoxicating scent of Bergamot oil, and was happy.

It is such a joyful season, yet I found myself praying, yearning with my heart in my throat for days as I followed the story of a family who was keeping vigil around a gunshot victim in the hospital. Yesterday he died. As I was wrapping a few small gifts, I kept thinking about what a sad, sad Christmas this will be for that family and for his friends. It took me back five Decembers when a beloved friend of mine, the wife of my cousin, lay on life support in a hospital. Her transport to glory left me with the anguished question, “Why? There are six little children here, Lord! Couldn’t you see that?” I have never faced a more severe attack on my faith. As the questions poured out, I received the beautiful assurance of the solid fact that Jesus is Emmanuel: God with us. Here in our mess and our hurt and our confusion, He is Prince of Peace. He came to give life, if we can only see that the passing of His friends is the ultimate giving of LIFE. I have seen the triumph of those who embrace this truth, who refuse to let it go in the midst of the most painful times imaginable.

He is with us! “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) That is all we need to know, really. There is a sturdy quality to such faith that confounds even the staunchest unbelievers. I hear my little girl singing her version of a children’s song: “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy… down in the guts of my heart!” Her siblings say, “Depths, not guts!” but she is sticking to her version. It reminds me that faith touches us in the visceral regions where logic and reason are no comfort at all. I see the impossible joy and peace blanket the soul and I say,

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Occupational Hazards of Parenting

About the time my first born turned two, old enough to trundle things around, we became aware of a facet of parenting that we hadn’t considered before. It became clear to us that we would have to become comfortable with mystery. Up till then, the screws had their own designated spot in the organized utility drawer, the flashlights stayed in the closet, the pens in the tin can designated for pens, not pencils or markers or stray tinker toys. Oh lovely adage: a place for everything and everything in its place. Now five children later, the mysteries have deepened and surround all of life.

It is a little exasperating that, despite having very keen hearing and the use of a proverbial set of eyes in the back of my head, I simply do not always catch on. It is humbling to acknowledge that they probably are smarter and faster than I am.

When I was a child, our family would kneel at the couch to pray every evening at bedtime. The little ones would kneel beside our parents and my brother Nate and I got the outside edges. We hit upon a conspiracy to back slowly into the middle of the living room while my dad was praying, then creep forward again, suppressing giggles. I don’t know how many times we did this before we got found out but I do remember how daring it felt to do something so utterly unapproved of and be undiscovered. Boy, did we ever think we pulled it over our parents.

Now our children do it to us, and sometimes it is funny and sometimes it is really irritating. Just the time we think we have things figured out, they change it up on us. I give you Conundrums in the Kitchen:

Just yesterday you hated tomatoes, and today you are picking them off the salad before I get any. What is up with that?

Why is there a can of worms in the fridge?

Who drank my coffee?

How come it isn’t possible to eat a cookie without 299 crumbs on the floor?

Who let the cat(s) into the house?

How did that box of Cheezits get empty so fast?

Then there are the Black Hole Mysteries:

Does anybody know what happened to Rita’s fuzzy brown boots?

If you had five pairs of undies last week, they must still be somewhere. ???

Where in the world did that Popular Mechanics library book go?

What can possibly have happened with my sister’s prized Cricut cartridge?

Where is all the toilet paper going?

Has anyone seen my driving gloves?

I also have a category of Generally Inscrutable Events:

Who splattered the bathroom mirror with toothpaste?

How did the new colored pencils get so short?

Why are there rocks in your bed?

How can you possibly be hungry when we just ate supper an hour ago?

How did we bring home “Baby Easter Bunny” from the library without my knowledge?

Where did you learn that word?

How do you know how to type and print a document?

What happened to the chocolate chips that were on the pantry shelf?

When did you get so tall?

And last, but not least, there are the Lovely Surprises:

What did I do to deserve a child who loves to sort all those screws and thumbtacks and assorted beads and marbles in the utility drawer?

Who passed on the cleaning gene to the little girl who runs for the vacuum cleaner when the house is a wreck?

How is it that the child who ate all the chocolate is so adorable in his contrition?

Who can resist the mischief-maker who cuts hair, snips sheets, shears stuffed animals, and doles out hugs that nearly crack the ribs?

How can the baby of the crew be so grown up and articulate, yet such a total mush pot who wants to be rocked with her blanket?

How could this life get any more interesting?

EDIT… One final whodunit:

Who published this post before I was done?

Unthankful, adj.: not feeling gratitude

Well, it has been a while! I sat down at least three times to write a Thanksgiving post. It is my favorite holiday, the one with absolutely no controversial pagan underpinnings. 🙂 I love the traditions of turkey and cranberries and family. This year we had our traditional meal almost a week early to include two of my siblings as well as two of my aunts and their husbands.

The actual Thanksgiving Day found me cooking a birthday breakfast and playing Catan with my husband and little boys until I had to stop and cook up some delectables for an early afternoon supper with the aunts. No turkey at all, but such a fun day. Camaraderie with loved ones, good food (possibly the best date pudding ever constructed in Osterburg, if I do say so myself) and good cheer. Do you ever feel like you are so blessed, it isn’t fair? It is easy to list all the cozy things, the smiley things, the kindnesses.

I set myself a challenge, every year, to find the things I am most tempted to grouse about and be thankful for them. The list is both revealing and embarrassing. Also private. But I will give you one example.

A few weeks ago a bunch of us ladies from church were polishing fruit for baskets to distribute to our neighbors. My nurse friend who works nightshift and I were talking about how nightshift just stinks, me from my perspective and her from hers: how the rhythms of normal life get so mixed up, the social life withers and all but dies, etc, etc. Someone else observed, kindly and truthfully, “There are probably worse things.” I suppressed the sudden urge to lob an apple across the room and we dropped the subject.

But it kept coming back to me, “This is your unlikely thing to become thankful for.” Okaaay. I started thinking about it. I write in the evenings when I am alone, after the bedtime drama is over and I don’t have my husband to converse with. Without so much night shift this past year, the blog would probably only have half the posts, or fewer.

Nightshift means much less cooking for me, since “the rhythms get all messed up” and my kids think Ramen noodles are a party. It means long evenings to read stories to the children and play games and having all the pillows and the bed to myself. 🙄 Nightshift is mostly calmer for the nurses and pays a teeny bit more.

It is easier for me to be thankful for nightshift, since my man now has enough time at his job to state his preferences for next year, and he stated his preference to be day light hours. Oh glory! I think I can stay thankful for the month of December, yet.

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!”- Shakespeare

How to Outsmart the Flu

Because I think you are all such nice people, and I would really hate to hear of you getting sick, I urge you to make your elderberry potions now before you get hit by the nasties.

I have blogged about this before. You can find my recipe for homemade Berry Well here, as well as links to sources to buy the ready made stuff. I looked for elderberries this summer, which is when they bloom like this:

(for wallpaper dot com)

I actually found some at my father-in-law’s place when we visited them this fall, but the birds were ahead of me, and every ripe berry was carefully picked off. So I bought my freeze dried berries online at Sunburst again. However, my sister’s sister-in-law was kind enough to tell me of a source that is really, incredibly, much cheaper. (Thanks, Beth.)

You can’t find their website since the Amish don’t have them, but this is such a delightful herbal supply store in Ohio. If you can wait for a mail order catalog, and then wait for them to process your order, the prices are well worth the time. If you live close by, you can step inside to rows and rows of aromatic herbs in gallon jars with the prices painstakinglymarked on the lids, and watch the fresh faced young girl carefully measure out your stuff into a little paper bag. I would haunt a store like that if we had one locally. 🙂 Ask for a catalog at:

Backyard Herbs and Flowers

8128 Maurer Rd, Apple Creek, Oh 44606

Now, for those of you still unconvinced that this stuff works, a story…

When we left for our extended trip this fall, I packed our usual first aid kit of stuff we would likely need, including Vitamin C, Vicks, and Elderberry Syrup. The children played outside in slightly damp weather for about 3 days, and I watched them closely, because every one of them is prone to croup in those conditions. Sure enough, they started sniffling and wheezing and running out of the noses. I dosed everyone with about a tablespoon of elderberry syrup three times a day, and it all cleared up, just like that. In two days, we didn’t even need tissues anymore. It isn’t just a flu fighter, but colds as well.

We have a child with a compromised immune system, a condition that we were warned would probably end up in emergency room visits every winter if the flu hits her. By the grace of God and, I am convinced, the immunity builders in elderberry, she has not been in the ER once in six years.

Try it! It is the one potion I wouldn’t want to live without in flu season. Dose up as soon as the very first little itty bitty germ manifests itself. See what happens. 🙂 You can thank me later.

*Dorcas steps delicately off her slightly rickety soap box.*

“Earth’s Crammed with Heaven…”

My posts on dreams kept veering off in a different direction than I wanted them to go. I am unhappy with that, and I remember now why I scrapped writing about it earlier. The subject is too vast, our lives are so varied… And what if we are just plain lazy, so our dreams stay only in a nebulous section of our lives titled “Impossible”? The more I thought about all these qualifiers, the worse it got, until I was too muddled to remember where I actually wanted to go in the first place. Maybe it was because I wrote in third person. You can blame E.B.White for that. He said it is bad style for writers to constantly refer to themselves. “To air one’s views gratuitously is to imply that the demand for them is brisk…” What would he say to bloggers?

But I have thought about it, and I have come back again to what I really wanted to say. Assuming we are talking about children of God here, those who earnestly wish to please him with their lives, especially those who want to change the world, make a difference, share the Gospel…there is much heartfelt desire behind all the cliches. Most times the grand dreams spring up when we are young, inexperienced, but feeling at our core that we should do something. Many of my friends and I did just enough travel, short term missions, volunteer work, that we could never just comfortably sit and claim blissful ignorance about all the things that need to be done. This is a good thing. We have been richer all our lives for the interaction with other cultures and countries. We cannot live a casual American dream without being pricked in our conscience. We understand better the urgency of living counter-culture in an incredibly selfish society. And almost all of us still live right here in America. What is up with that?

This is where I ran into trouble, comparing the ordinariness of my life (sorry, E.B. White, but here we go again) with what I thought would be a better way/place to live it. I had two little boys when I went through this joyless tunnel. “I just feel so stuck, so unproductive,” I would sob to my husband, as I peered down the vista of years of diapers and interruptions and needy, needy people. It was a little difficult for him to understand why I felt like I wasn’t “doing anything.” (This begs the question, what was I thinking it would be like in an orphanage? Had I so soon forgotten the neediness of my school students?)

Quietly, kindly, God showed me a flaw in my youthful dreams, a streak of self-aggrandizement that was going to produce only ugliness. He showed me that I loved projects, neatly finished up and displayed with a happy, “I made this.” My children were not projects, they were people: real, needy, little people. This life, this very place where I was living was His Best for me, and all He was asking of me was faithfulness, the same as if I lived in Mongolia or Malawi. I learned to offer up each task, no matter how menial, to Jesus. It started to sink in, the amazing truth that no offering is too small to please Him, no place too quiet or hidden for Him to see. I learned to simply “do the next thing” in Elisabeth Elliot’s words, but I also found, to my astonishment, that nothing is wasted.

Guess what, the joy was back in life, the sun was shining again! The people were still needing diaper changes and clean clothes and food and endless training and every. day. dying. to. self. I was living my dream, not the way I had imagined, but the way God planned.

That teen- age ideal of living like Hudson Taylor, waiting on God to supply our needs? Well, three years of back-to-school for the family bread winner may have qualified for that one. It was very, very good for us. The dream of going to college for writing and English classes? I don’t know whether that will ever happen, but technology has brought us the blog and such nice readers like you. 🙂 Learning to read Greek/Latin? Not going to happen. Ever. I am not going to tell you the rest of my dreams. You might laugh. 😛

I am not very old, but I have enough years under my belt to see the unmistakable traces of God, directing my way. In the words of one of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God,

And only he who sees takes off his shoes;

The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

Overheard at my House

The 4 year old: I feel deep down in my heart that I am a big girl.

Little A: But, Mama, I already went potty… last week!

G: I tell you, Alex, skunks are not related in any way to civets!

A: So why do they have musk glands?

G: I don’t know, but I read it in the encyclopedia! No matter what anybody says!

O. haltingly sounding out: The… bad… pig… sat… on… the… cat. Hahahaha.

R. out of the blue: You know what? I am gonna be true to the end!

Me: True to what?

R: To God, of course!

Two little girls looking at an American Girl doll catalog: We will probably never get dolls like this…But sometimes when little girls don’t beg and just be sweet, they get what they want for Christmas.

R. dreamily: There must be something inside us, like in our hearts, that makes us just love things.

G: If anybody ever says they want a female cat, we could just tell them our story.

Me: I love my life!

Dream On

We humans seem prone to disdain the familiar and long for the sparkle and delight of the stars. Yet I have never met a single person over 30 who says that their life has turned out just exactly the way they dreamed it would when they were teens. We pretty much all end up having to work, do some stuff we don’t really enjoy, be faithful in the minutiae of life. You know, grow up.

I am not suggesting that we give up on dreaming. People without dreams are sort of walking dead. (“Without vision, the people perish.”) Those who dare to dream and work toward what they long to do are those who achieve great things.

Did you ever notice how many people have long periods of waiting in seeming obscurity before they are able to realize their dream? There was a prince, with his high education as a royal in Egypt, who took high-handed action to save his people and ended up fleeing to the wilderness to stay alive. For forty years he was “lost”. I have a hunch he thought many times that seeing his people freed from slavery was only a pipe dream.

One of my more recent favorite stories is of Grandma Moses, who showed artistic promise when she was just a child. Then life got so busy and full of serving her family that she didn’t pick up brushes and paints until she was 78 years old. But then- Wow! She painted nearly 1600 pieces before she died at age 101.

I don’t understand God’s timeline, and I certainly cannot assure you that your dreams will come true. So when the doors don’t open, the plans fall through, the sickness is not healed, the spouse never materializes, the travel visa gets snarled in red tape… what then? Solomon said this: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick…” Sometimes there is not a shred of evidence that the thing longed for will ever become reality. We can choose to accept the present as a gift (pun intended), as the Best, right now, from a loving Providence. He gives joy instead of heart sickness.

Dream on, my friends, and believe that your times are in His hands!

Ordinary, Infused with Everlasting

So when she was single, the girl didn’t dream much about ordinary things. The thing about dreams is that they are wonderful. In them, she was the heroine. She was visible. She was on top, making a difference, feeling fulfilled. She didn’t think so much of dirty, gritty details like insufficient toilet facilities and sickness in missionary families far from good medical care. She didn’t dream of difficulties; she dreamed of adventure and achievement. Of course, she reserved a very private place where she dreamed of the love of a good man and the security of marriage. To her amazement, she really did get that love and marriage (and the babies, and the baby carriage)! Wow. Things settled into a somewhat frantic routine of not neglecting the thing that was right in front of her. There really was not a lot of time for a head in the clouds.

She was sort of a hard learner, and it took a while for her to “get it” that as a married woman, there would be glory in the meld of her dreams with her husband’s dreams. Her role was cast by God as a supporting role, a helper without whom her husband would be a bit disabled. 🙂 With the years and a good bit of trial and error, she came to understand that it was a wonderful place, a privilege to stand behind her man, to help him achieve his dreams. I am not suggesting that she was on such an exalted plane that she never whined, “But, what about Me?”

Here is what she wishes she had known all along. The happy woman keeps her dreams portable. There is only frustration and unloveliness in doggedly trying to make things happen the way she thinks they should happen.

Life is seasons. There may come a time for some of the obscure dreams to become reality. But for now, she is free to revel in the everyday, sometimes camouflaged goodness that is given. I have learned something from that girl. (Work with me here. Pretend you don’t see through that third person thing. 🙂 ) Just because living is lots of sameness and hard work doesn’t mean it is not valuable. The things which endure grow out of the ordinary.

(for wallpaper dot com)

…. I am not done yet…

Girls With Dreams

(forwallpaper dot com)

Sometimes the oddest things bring up a blog post. This morning’s trigger was when I sent my man out the door, early, with coffee and an Advanced Trauma Life Support textbook for a class at the Altoona Trauma Center. Suddenly I remembered a post I struggled and struggled to write, and finally ditched this spring. Here it is again, trying to get out, so I will give it another shot.

“Do you married women dream?” a sweet young lady asked me after a discussion on life choices/destiny. “Of course,” I said, although I can only speak for myself and the few friends I cornered for my unofficial survey. Consensus: Our husbands dream. We go along for the ride. 🙂 If you think that is impossibly restricting, stay with me. I am not done yet.

Not so very long ago, the larger percentage of the female population dreamed of marriage, homes, children. There were very few respectable options available, unless they wanted to be governesses. A hundred years later the world is wide open for women to travel without chaperones, pursue degrees, buy their own homes, etc. The modern barrage of choices can be downright bewildering, especially considering that it is inappropriate for a girl to initiate the fulfillment of the dream for a husband. (Yup, I am that old fashioned.)

Women in the Congo dream about owning a sewing machine so they can get out of a life of prostitution. Haitian women dream of having enough food so they don’t have to give their babies away. Young girls in Afghanistan dream of becoming teachers so that they can teach other young girls in the remoter villages where there are no female teachers. I am afraid a lot of American girls dream about being thin super star actors. Our dreams are as varied as our lives.

I am going to have to zoom way, way in to one aspect. Let’s bring this subject down just to girls who want to honor God, who have noble aspirations. How should they dream, when should they pursue their dreams, and what about if they get sidetracked? I am sorry, I don’t know all those things.

But I do know a girl who was absolutely sure she was going to be a missionary (or a missionary’s wife… how romantic…). Her cherished dream was to work in an orphanage, to rescue and love children who were scrapped by everybody else (how fulfilling). She also hoped to continue her education (what fun). She traveled enough to see how vast the world is, how unending the needs. Then she proceeded to foster one little baby, teach school to well-adjusted, secure little church children, and she fell in love with her co-teacher and married him (how predictable 😛 ). She had babies, she stayed home with the babies, and she kept house. Hey, what are you looking at? Oh, you think you recognize her? Well, maybe you do.

Sometimes after she had spent a day of nurturing babies and preparing good food for her husband, she would think about her orphanage dream and wonder where it had come from. Where had it gone? And when her life felt narrow and restricted she would wonder for a few fleeting seconds if she had chosen the wrong path? Oh, she loved her husband and her children fanatically, but it felt so… ordinary?

…to be continued…