Laura Knows

In one of my favorite pieces of writing, an article called 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable, author David Wong describes how the number of close and trusted friends that most of us have in our lives is drastically dropping. Most of us, he says, have at most two people we feel we could confide in, and about a quarter of us have no one.

Given these statistics, I've been fortunate in my life to have a number of close and trusted friends, many of whom I've either been lucky enough to know for a lifetime, or hope to know for a lifetime from now. But for the last 20 years, the good fortune that has been a part of my adult life in a way that goes beyond friendship--that has been companion, sister, partner, and soulmate--is Laura.

Laura is the best, in the way that I know that all your best friends are the best. She is smart, and funny, and brave and beautiful. She is faithful, and always has your back. She is the definition of humility, and sacrifices herself for others. She has a list of other good qualities a mile long. But Laura also has a superpower, and it is this--Laura knows.

She knows all the things that I don't know, like how to re-create a perfect replica of Chico's tacos, and how to do math problems that have "infinity" as a possible answer, and how to put a strip of toilet paper over the sensors on those awful automatic flush toilets to keep them from flushing before you want them to. She knows about science. She knows about engineering. She knows about education. She knows about marketing. She knows about pets and shoes and hair and jewelry and how to make tamales without a recipe and how to lay shingles on a roof. She knows the right questions to ask about everything, all the time, even when she's just hearing about that thing for the first time. She knows how to think about things, and how to think about people--how to listen and learn and understand.

Most of all, Laura knows about me.

By that, I mean that Laura knows the real me. There is no part of my life that is off-limits to her, or hidden from her. She knows all my stories, all my secrets. She has been there, not just for me at my best, but for me at my worst, and then some. She doesn't think I'm some otherwordly saint, or wise counselor, or supermom--she knows I'm nothing special. She has seen, and keeps on seeing, all the ways I'm broken, messed up, selfish, prideful, foolish, wrongheaded, and blind. Laura knows exactly who I am.

To be honest, it hurts a little to know that Laura knows all this. I guess I'd like it if she thought I was the most special person, you know? Sort of a perfect person, without all that bad stuff.

But you know what the best part is? Laura does that too. She does that anyway. She believes I am special. The difference is, I just don't have to live up to the impossible standard of being free of all those other things.

Laura has taught me--is teaching me--the most important thing I need to know in life, which is that this is how love works. This is what it means to be the Beloved. She is helping me learn to be less of all those wounded, broken things; and, even when I can't, she is leading me to live better with myself and others. She is doing all this just by loving me as I am--as if I'm the most special just the way I am.

And I am strangely willing to take her word for it, because if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that Laura knows.

Beautiful

Beautiful (adj.) beau·ti·ful \ˈbyü-ti-fəl\: 

Having a quality or aggregate of qualities

 that gives pleasure to the senses or 

pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit

In case you didn't know, I'm a cancer survivor. Every cancer is different, but the particular kind of breast cancer that was discovered at my (fortunately) very early diagnosis almost 10 years ago now is aggressive, destructive, and fast-growing. As a result, treatment for me was comprehensive. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, drug treatments--whatever we had, we threw at it. I'm luckier than many; my prognosis was good, and my chances of recurrence are low. But my body still bears the marks of the battle.

I've graduated now, finally, to annual follow-up mammograms. It's nice to go less often, but even so, I have been there so much that the routine is familiar. You put on the gown, and answer all the same questions. And then, before the 20 minutes of freezing cold and pain and pressure and holding your breath first because you're told and then because you can't breathe and then again until you hear someone say cheerily from behind the screen of images "Looks good!", there is the moment when you will mark your scar. To clearly identify your scar tissue on the scan, lest it be mistaken for something more ominous, a tiny wire will be shaped and taped along the length of your surgical scar, marking it out for the techs and doctors who will view the films.

At my latest appointment, not that many weeks ago, after the gown and the questions and the rest, the nurse who was prepping me finished her notes, packed up her paperwork, and said briskly, "All right, now let's see your scar."  I lifted the gown in the now-familiar motion, turned and gestured so that she could see, and her businesslike bustle came to an abrupt halt as she drew in her breath and just stared for a moment. "Oh my god," she said. "That's beautiful."

It isn't the first time someone has had that response to my scar. Actually, it's never once been shown to a nurse, doctor, lab tech, or any other medical professional without getting that response, and it's because they know what they are looking at. But if you are not a scar professional, if you don't know what you're seeing when you look at my scar, or at any scar, you might be tempted to look at it as just the opposite of beautiful. Scars are just one of the many things that we often view as physical faults or imperfections--things that destroy beauty.

In my past, I was given that message--that the scar was a flaw, a blemish, something to be ashamed of, something that ruined me. That it made me unlovable. That it destroyed my value. But I am learning, slowly, over time, that it is a thing of beauty. I have had great love and care given to me in my life, have walked through deep valleys, have experienced enormous good fortune. The scar tells all those stories. If I foolishly wished it away, I would erase with it all the power and love its story holds.

I know this is true, because it is true for others besides me. I think of the little one dear to me, and the birthmark that is simply a testimony to the miracle of her existence. Of my own two boys, and all the bumps and scars and faded marks that are the witness to the adventures of their childhood. Of the partner in my life now, and those deep, crinkly laugh lines around his eyes, which cannot come overnight, but tell the story of a life lived oriented toward joy. The marks on our bodies are the marks of our lives. All these things we view negatively, and too often, we can begin to view ourselves negatively because of them, yet all the imperfections that we believe mar us, mark us, are actually the things that illuminate us.

Once upon a time, I was often told that to find me beautiful would require changing the definition of the word; and this, unknowingly, was a profound truth. There is a distortion running deep in our society, a stunted definition of beauty that revolves around an artificial, superficial flawlessness. But if we cannot see beauty in those around us, we are using a faulty definition. A true beauty is found in the stretch marks that tell the story of the birth of our children, the calluses and bruises of hard work done well, and even the generous waistlines that speak of good food, warm hospitality, and time well spent with family and friends. It's found in scars, those stories of battles that have been fought and won, and of those who carried us through them, of things greatly dared and bravely endured, of adventures that have changed us and that define us. These are moments and memories that could not be traded for a superficial snapshot or a slimmer silhouette. These are the beauty marks, the marks of all that matter. This is beautiful.

Monarch

I have never been much of a flowers-and-frills, sunshine and butterfly type of girl, but I love the monarch. 

I first learned to love them from my grandmother, and my mother--as a child, it was simply a routine activity to scout yards and fields, pastures and road ditches, looking for milkweed plants and their tiny inhabitants, the caterpillars that we would take home, house, feed, watch, and eventually release to their new lives. I learned how to recognize the eggs and capture them before the caterpillars had even hatched. I learned how to collect the milkweed leaves and keep them fresh in the refrigerator, and how to use nylon stockings to make the perfect breathable jar lid that doubled as a safe place to attach a chrysalis. Grandma showed me how to use sugar water on a cotton ball to feed the butterflies once they had hatched, until they were ready to leave and fly. 

Once I had children of my own, I passed this part of my childhood on, and my boys became avid monarch caterpillar collectors. The large jars with their homemade lids, the Ziploc bags full of leaves in the refrigerator door, the kamikaze missions to the nearby road ditches for supplies, all became a normal part of the rhythm of our household; and as I've grown older, my love for the monarch has grown and deepened too, as I've come to understand the profound mystery behind its magic.

Often, you will hear people talking about how a butterfly "makes" a chrysalis or a cocoon. But the monarch, like other butterflies, doesn't actually make a chrysalis. (And, a bonus PSA, cocoons are made by moths. Not butterflies. No, not ever.) The chrysalis is not a constructed thing, it is a developmental stage. It is the pupa stage in the life cycle of a butterfly. The monarch, as you can see in the video above, does not make the chrysalis--he simply sheds his skin to reveal it. He has shed his skin many times before, and this last time we see what he has always known, that the chrysalis has been there the whole time, underneath it all.

What does this mean, then, to the story that the caterpillar will go inside a cocoon, this hiding place that he has constructed, and inside, through some secret process of transformation, he will become a butterfly, and then come out? Well, it blows the entire idea out of the water. If the chrysalis is not the caterpillar's construction, but is simply his next stage of becoming, then it is not a hiding place for transformation, but a part of it--what you become while you are becoming a butterfly. We can see that this is true because the chrysalis, far from being a shield that conceals transformation, only to reveal it when it reaches completion, actually becomes more and more clear as transformation takes place, allowing all to see the butterfly inside. And when he sheds his skin, that hard chrysalis shell now thin and brittle, for the final time, there can be no doubt--this is what he has been becoming from the beginning.

So if you are in the process today of transformation, as indeed we all are, understand that transformation is a process that happens from within. We are transformed, as my own Great Story says, by the renewing of our minds--or, as Eugene Peterson puts it in his own translation The Message, "You'll be changed from the inside out." As we grow, we will shed our old skins again and again, and this may even be painful at times, may even require help from those who love us, as in my most dearly loved passage of the Narnia stories, where Aslan's sharp claws dig deep to strip the layers of dragon skin away until only the boy, Eustace, can be seen. But eventually, be seen we will, because what we are becoming is already inside us. The caterpillar skin sheds to reveal the chrysalis, and the chrysalis skin splits to release the butterfly, and by this we know the mystery of the monarch:

The butterfly is inside the caterpillar all along. 

There is no need to worry if right at this moment what is seen may not seem, to the unknowing onlooker, to be worthy--if it looks ugly, or plain, or unfinished, or if it's hard to see the beauty. There is no need to hide our transformation away from the world until it's complete. Everything we will be is inside us, and we are only in the process of becoming.

Eyes Off The Ball

So, as you may have heard recently, I missed my son's school registration and failed to get him signed up for his sophomore year of high school. It wasn't just a one-day thing. I missed the entire two-week period of online registration. And when I was done missing that, I missed the day of make-up walk-in registration.

It's not that I wasn't paying attention. I knew he needed to register for school. It's just that I had a lot of other things going on. His older brother was starting college this fall. I was trying to manage housing assignments, book lists, dorm furnishings, parking permits, financial aid, and all the other things that go along with starting that new venture. Plus, on another front, there were all the things involved in moving a child out of your home. The packing. The cleaning. The organizing. For that whole two weeks, it looked like another house threw up inside of my house. And then there are the normal things that go along with starting school for everyone--haircuts, doctor appointments, new glasses, clothes shopping. Every day, high school registration was on my list. And every day, I thought that in another day or another couple of days I would have the time and money to take care of it. And then it was over.

Moms are supposed to be great at multi-tasking, and most of the time we are. One reason, I think, is because we seem to have been gifted with a brain that is laser-focused on everything that needs to be done. You've heard that saying, "Keep your eye on the ball?" Moms are some of the best people I know at keeping our eyes on the ball, even when there is more than one.

But what happens when there are just too many balls in the air? That saying seems like good and necessary advice if you want to hit it out of the park, which is why it's so often used, but let's face it, folks--it's a BASEBALL analogy. And in baseball there is only one ball. I don't know about you, but I have significantly more than one ball in play at any given time.

All the things I listed above are just the extra things that are happening at a snapshot in time. I haven't even addressed all the balls that have to be kept moving every day, just as a part of living. The house, which has to be cleaned, repaired, maintained. The meals that have to be cooked, the groceries that have to be bought, the dishes that have to be washed and dried and put away. The bills that have to be paid, and paid, and paid. The car that needs fuel and insurance and tags and oil changes and new wipers, tires, brakes.

Oh, and then there's work. Just a minor detail.

And while we are doing all this, there are the children, who need more, so much more, than just being housed and clothed and fed. They need someone to encourage them and comfort them. They need opportunities to have and solve problems, to learn how to have strong, healthy relationships, to find their power and their voice as they increasingly step out into the world. They need to be led, launched, listened to. They need to be loved.

So all these balls I have to juggle are not just the trivia and logistics of living, but also the stuff which makes a life. They are the tasks on my to-do list, plus all the things I need to teach, and model, and pass on. And therefore, of course, all the things I need to learn, understand, improve, and heal--all the ways that I myself need to grow. The spinning, flying, rising and dropping balls represent everything I have yet to do and everything I have yet to do better. So where, I ask you, am I supposed to keep my eye?

It's no wonder the school registration ball was dropped.

I don't know if you've ever tried juggling in real life. I have made a couple of half-hearted efforts at it, just for entertainment, and based on them, I can assure you, I'm not a juggler. But I've recently learned from someone who actually possesses this skill what is required to do it successfully. It turns out you have to take your eyes off the ball.

No one, apparently, can actually simultaneously watch that many moving objects. If you try to keep your eye on all of them, monitor them, catch them and release them all at just the right time, you will inevitably lose track of one, then more than one, then try to go back and catch the ones you have lost, and the whole operation will come crashing down and they will fall.

The secret, it seems, is to pick a focal point beyond the balls.

When you focus your eye on a distant point, rather than trying to watch each individual ball, you're able to see the big picture--it lets you pay attention to all the balls at once. You can know where your hands need to be for each one, the perfect time to catch and to release, because you can see them moving together, making up a coordinated whole.

In my life then, with all the many balls that I have in the air, what is the thing I can keep my eyes focused on? 

It can't be the house or the finances or my work. They are still all just balls. It can't even be kids or family or all the people, places, and causes I love, even though those are the things that I live and serve for and that motivate me daily. None of these things are significant enough, beyond enough, to bring order to the whole picture. I am too close to all of them. And "what is essential,"  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince reminds us, "is invisible to the eye."

Being the Beloved, it turns out, is the focal point.

I've written often in these pages about knowing ourselves as the Beloved of God, and about the writings of theologian Henri Nouwen that expound on this idea as the core truth on which everything turns. I've talked about how understanding this idea will impact all our relationships and all our actions, how it will change the way we see ourselves and all the others in our lives. So it should come as no surprise that it is also the key to the juggling. Knowing you're the Beloved, Henri says, "you can handle an enormous amount of success and an enormous amount of failure." This is true because your acceptance, your value, your Beloved-ness, will never rest on whether you keep all the balls in the air or you drop some. And, strangely, just knowing this will make it easier to keep them in the air. You can forgive yourself (and others) for the failure to love perfectly, or to do perfectly, and just go ahead and love. You can celebrate what matters, and let go of what doesn't. You can focus on being there for others, just being with them; you can stop experiencing them as another thing on your list of things to do. You can even let go of the list from time to time, and just put all those balls down for a minute--if your worth is not measured by your success as a juggler.

In a photo, bringing one object into focus will make the other things fade into the background, blurry and indistinguishable. Focusing on our Beloved-ness will not work that way. Instead of making all the other things unclear and hard to make out, it will let you see them better, more clearly. Looking beyond will sharpen your vision to see things as they really are. You will be able to know where you really need to be, and what you really need to be doing there, what to catch and what to release; you will see the big picture, the coordinated whole. Some balls might still drop. But they will be the ones that did not belong in the first place, the ones that never mattered.

Tomorrow is a Monday, and Mondays are often the hardest day, when all the things I have to do seem to pelt me unmercifully from every direction, demanding to be held and caught, to be coordinated and managed, challenging me to prove my mastery of them or be beaten down to a shameful defeat. I just hope I can remember, even once the onslaught has begun, to keep my eyes off the ball.

Nerd Night

I know I'm dating myself, but there was a time when being a nerd was not cool.

Some of you are old enough to remember the time I mean. (Some of you may be old enough that you just found out being a nerd is now cool. It's OK. Don't worry. But unfortunately it doesn't apply to us, only to cool, young nerds. It's hard to explain.)

ANYWAY. Back to the time when nerds were lame. My pastor at the time, who was also our youth pastor, told all of us high-schoolers that we were going to have a special event called "Nerd Night". Our instructions were to dress for the occasion, to look as nerdy as possible. The picture above is a bit the worse for wear, but you can see some of us ready to go. As you can tell, my friend and I decided to go retro instead of hard-core nerd, and are wearing some old dresses of my mom's that we scrounged up, with some fairly tacky costume jewelry. Not strictly dorky, but definitely not on fleek. And yes, the biggest nerd there in the middle is Brad, our pastor. I'm guessing there was not a pen left in the church.

Brad came to pick us all up in the church van for Nerd Night. Needless to say, we had never participated in a Nerd Night before, and we didn't know what it might consist of, so we were surprised--and not in a good way--when Brad drove to a local hangout, parked the van, and informed us that we were all going inside, and were going to stay, hang out, and order pizza. Then he got out and went inside.

Easy for him to say, right? At least that's what I was thinking, I don't know about you. He may have had a little bit less to lose by appearing in his nerd getup in front of whichever of our friends and classmates might be inside. It's just possible that it may have taken a few people what seemed like a long time to get out of the van and get inside. In fact, if I were to speculate, I would say that one or two people may have had to make a couple of tries--going all the way to the door only to return to the van and gather courage for a second attempt. It's so difficult, isn't it, especially for teenagers, exposing yourself as vulnerable in front of your peers? Eventually, though, we all made it in.

Once inside, a funny thing happened. At first it was just as you would expect. Mortifying. We shrunk down in our chairs. Glanced surreptitiously around to see if anyone was noticing us. Looked reproachfully at Brad, who was ensuring that we couldn't escape notice, as he employed full Nerd Mode, sitting up as straight as possible with his six-foot-plus frame in the chair and saying loudly to our server, "WE WANT EXTRA DOUGH. CAN WE GET EXTRA DOUGH ON THIS PIZZA?" But you know what? Amazingly, the world didn't come to an end. Maybe some people looked. Maybe they even stared or laughed. But it turns out it wasn't really that big of a deal. In fact, after a bit, it actually started to be....well...fun. Our nerdiness stopped bothering us. We began to embrace it. In fact, in a weird way, we felt kind of proud of it. When we finished eating pizza, we asked Brad if we could go downtown and walk around, and he was only too happy to oblige. We wanted to prolong our Nerd Life--we wanted to see more people and have them see us; we wanted to flaunt the weirdness of our nerdity in the most public space possible. We weren't ready to go home and go back to being normal, non-nerdy teenagers again. (Well, not intentionally nerdy, anyway.)

What we learned was that there was something freeing in it, in this total disregard of the standards we would normally work so hard to observe. The rules of the teenage world often center around striving for mastery of whatever will make us liked, accepted, envied, and looked up to by our peers--and avoiding whatever it is that will cause us to be judged, looked down on, rejected.

The adult world is not so different.

After Nerd Night was over, Brad took us all home, but first, he stopped in the van to talk to us about how the Bible says that we are aliens and strangers on the Earth, how our citizenship is in Heaven. We should not be afraid to be different, he said, because we belong to a different country.

How different it would be, wouldn't it, if we learned to embrace the things that we fear will bring us rejection, judgement, and shame? Our world honors the smart, the strong, the cutting edge, the pulled-together, the always-rising. But what freedom, what joy there could be, I suspect, in no longer being afraid for others to see our weirdness, our brokenness, our imperfections. If only we could know, with the certainty that would set us free, that we belong to a different king, a different country, and in the economy of that kingdom we are valued, treasured, beloved, none the less and all the more for the things we believe we have to bury away. Maybe it would be best if every night was Nerd Night. Maybe if we tried it, we would find that the judgements of others we fear are just that--our own fears, and nothing more. Maybe it's time to try it and see.

Life in the Hub

"Sometimes I think of life as a big wagon wheel with many spokes.

In the middle is the hub. Often in ministry, it looks like we are

running around the rim trying to reach everybody. But God says,

'Start in the hub; live in the hub. 

Then you will be connected with all the spokes, 

and you won't have to run so fast.'"

~Henri Nouwen, in From Solitude to Community to Ministry

 I don't know about you, but to me, that sure sounds good. Not running so fast. In my ministry to my family, my friends, my co-workers, and the people I actually serve in my work every day, I often feel like I'm running a million miles a minute. There is never enough of anything to go around--not enough time, not enough money, not enough attention, not enough ability--just plain not enough me. I can't make it all the way around the outside of that wheel. And I have been thinking a lot lately about what it looks like, how it would look different, to live in the hub.

It's hard to imagine, and I guess that just proves that maybe I've never been there, in the hub, but I sure know what it looks like here around the outside. It's hard to keep up, and doing so is a full-time job. That means all of the focus has to be on accomplishing the next impossible thing, meeting the next urgent need, leaping the next intimidating hurdle. And the worst thing about the inability to slow down that this creates is that there is never time to take a breath, or to gather your strength, or to say, "Whew! Now that that's finished, what do I need right now?" 

This is largely how I've become the Worst Ever, in the world, at taking care of me. I didn't do it all at once. It took me a lifetime to get there. I know what I need. (That actually puts me ahead of a lot of people, I know.) I need sleep. I need to eat food. Actual, good-tasting, nourishing food, that I eat at regular intervals throughout the day. I need connections with other people that are deep and meaningful and real, and I need tiny indulgences like an extra $3 on something at the store that tells myself from me, "Hey, you are worth this!" and I need time, oh, how I need time--time to think, to read, to write, to plan, to pray. But instead, I stay up late, skip meals, spend more time on work and chores and obligations, worry and stress and find myself too busy or too tired for meaningful connections, and even my time in prayer is simply a chore, another item to be checked off the list. 

I have neglected to prioritize the things that give me life. 

I choose instead to sprint on to the next spoke, always hoping that maybe if I'm just a little faster this time I will make it around. Running around the outside means always dashing to the next place and the next task without stopping, without thinking, without hearing what your body and soul are crying out for.

In the hub, I'd guess you stand still.

Around the outside, there's not a moment to spare.

In the hub, there's no hurry.

The last few months have been a time for me to think a lot about that--about how I can walk right down one of those spokes to the middle, and about what changes I would need to make to do that. Tonight, forcing myself to take the scheduled time to sit, read, think, and rest that I put on my calendar a couple of months ago, I opened up to these words:

"He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,

Which yields its fruit in its season,

And its leaf does not wither;

And in whatever he does, he prospers."    ~Psalm 1:3

  

I thought about what it means to prosper--the dictionary says, "to become strong and flourishing; to thrive." I've heard this passage so many times, but it's amazing how different things can sound when you slow down. How I needed to hear those words tonight, to see this picture. The roots drinking deeply from that slow, continuous stream of life-giving nourishment. The fruit appearing slowly, seasonally, in its own good time. The tree that experiences and is touched by everything around it, but is not shaken or moved from its base, and is never deterred from its primary task-- to grow. Thrive. Bloom. Bear. Rest. 

Oh, how I hope I am learning to be like that tree, and how I hope I am leading my sons this way too, leading them to the hub where I am slowly learning to find grace, peace, rest; and may they reach it sooner than me, because it is taking me a lifetime to get there.