Of All Things Most Sweet

I found a bird’s nest on the sidewalk yesterday evening on my walk with Gracie. I picked it up and carried it home.

It fit perfectly in the palm of my hand, light as a breath.

The tiny, weaving work of a tiny creature.

Pine needles and grass and fuzz and a curly strip of blue paper, a few baby feathers left behind.

I couldn’t help but picture the little life that labored so diligently to make this, and the one that found warmth and safety here.

It reminded me that I also am a tiny creature on this earth, engaged in my own tiny work. I settle here fleetingly before my times yield to other seasons.

What can I do but give thanks for joy, for meaning and even satisfaction in all my fragile toil, for the security of knowing that I am not only carried in my Father’s hands but carved there forever?

A few hours ago I looked up from my book as the day faded to washed denim dusk, then deepened to indigo.

I listened to the birds calling to each other as they found their nests for the night.

Truly “life of all things is most sweet”.  ~ Matthew Lawrence

Entertainment Purposes Only

Because I am tired tonight – soooooo tired – I have decided not to think. Therefore, the following is for entertainment purposes only. Please note this post is in no way intended to reflect negatively on my brothers’ current levels of maturity.

*Titter!*

No, really – it’s not.

This is what happens when you give a 10-year-old girl a hot pink camera. You get classic sibling photos like this one:

Brother on the left:

I hate this.

This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. 

Approach any closer with that comb, Mom, and I will wither you where you stand with my searing glare.

I hate these stupid overalls. 

Brother on the right:

Yeah, that’s right – I’m awesome.

My grandpa sweater is awesome.

I look like a J. Crew model in this sweater.

My poofy bloomer pants are also awesome – so don’t mess with me.

I love these two little brothers of mine.

They’re not so little any more; in fact, they’re both over 6 feet tall. They’ve matured in many essential ways since this picture. For example, they can now brush their teeth without getting toothpaste on the ceiling. I think.

So, clearly, they’ve changed. But in many ways, they’re still the same to me.

Still cute, still hilarious.

And their clothing choices are still questionable.

Collin, if you’re reading this: that jacket you left in the dryer over Christmas, the one that makes you look like a giant yellow and black checkerboard?

It

Will.

Be.

Destroyed.

The End.

Morning Hair Diaries: What Can Your Hair Do?

I’ve been convinced for many years that were I to enter a Best Morning Hair Contest, I would surely win. Granted, it isn’t the most glamorous title – Queen Morning Hair? – but, it’s a résumé builder. I’m not ashamed. In fact, I’m rather proud of the acrobatics my hair can do in the night!

Exhibit A: “Ocean Wave at Sunset”

This self-portrait was taken several years ago and, as you can see, even borders on the artistic:

Here’s a picture from this morning, entitled “Volcanic Eruption”:

And before anyone comments on my facial expressions in these pictures, this is my “Wow! My hair is standing on end and not even because I’m scared!” face.

Many moons ago while waiting in line at the grocery store, the man behind me started talking about how he loved my hair, and how his hair was curly, too, and how women just loved his hair, etc. Awkward situation for me – was I supposed to return the compliment and tell him that I in turn loved his hair? Not knowing how to respond, I said: “Curly hair…..it’s fun!”

Curly hair is fun; my brothers had fun turning on their remote-controlled race cars and then holding them up to my head while the wheels were spinning. My mom had fun cutting the race cars out of my hair. And also cutting out the pony-tail holders that couldn’t be extricated…and I’m sure you sense that I could go on and on. However, my main point is that curly hair is so much fun that it’s always having a party, day and night, and it doesn’t need any help!

So – what can your hair do?

**If you think your morning hair can top mine, let me know. And be brave enough to send me a picture!

My Foot Hurts: A 10-Item List

Since I sprained my ankle last Thursday (following my dog through several holly bushes as she hunted for someone’s discarded hamburger), I have realized several benefits to being temporarily gimpy. I shall proceed to enumerate them, in no particular order:

1. Your coworkers will give you this helpful (and, incidentally, impossible-to-follow) advice: “You need to stop walking on it.”

2. Your coworkers will pick up your papers from the printer for you.

3. Your coworkers will ask you about your foot 10 times a day.

4. Your coworkers will indulgently allow you to glory in your puffy green-gray-purple bruise.

5. You will learn how to correctly wrap your ankle in an Ace bandage.

6. You get to sit at your cubicle with your foot propped on an upended copy paper box.

7. You can occasionally get away with whining.

8. You can appreciate your ankles for all they do. (This newfound gratitude may lead you to waste valuable time web surfing in trying to find out whether a “feet appreciation day” of any sort has ever been declared. You will learn that Measure Your Feet Day - perhaps somehow equivalent or related to feet appreciation? - is January 23.)

9. You can finally find a use for the bag of frozen cranberries whose presence in your freezer you cannot really explain.

10. You can exercise your creativity by inventing new ways to elevate your foot and still be able to do daily chores like vacuuming the apartment.

BONUS: You can swap foot-injury stories with other gimpy friends around the camp fire!

**I dedicate this post to my wonderful fellow gimp and friend Carroll, who has worn a boot for many weeks without even knowing why for most of the time, and still has a beautiful smile on her face!

Passing Away

Another year of my life is complete. Time passes so quickly, sometimes I long to stop it for only one moment, so I can take a few deep breaths. But no, time continues to hurtle me towards my end on this earth. Though I’m a Christian, I’m not immune to fears of death and aging, and I live in a world that madly, desperately denies that we are, in fact, passing away. Death is not a popular reality.

Unable to sleep a few nights ago, I picked up a poetry anthology and randomly flipped to Christina Rossetti’s “Passing Away” which beautifully depicts the emotions stirred by thoughts of life and death:

Passing away, saith the World, passing away:

Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day:

Thy life never continueth in one stay.

Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey

That hath won neither laurel nor bay?

I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:

Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay

On my bosom for aye.

Then I answered: Yea.

 

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:

With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,

Hearken what the past doth witness and say:

Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,

A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.

A midnight, at cockcrow, at morning one certain day

Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;

Watch thou and pray.

Then I answered: Yea.

 

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:

Winter passeth after the long delay:

New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,

Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.

Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:

Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,

My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.

Then I answered: Yea.

Am I gradually passing away with the passage of time? Yes. The author does not shrink from this reality, and the World and the Soul, everything around us and inside us, witness to it in the poem. But Rossetti recognizes that root-stricken decay is not the Christian’s end. In fact, the final stanza completely reverses the sense of the poem. In the first two stanzas, we mourn for the loss of beauty and youth, “gold” and “bud.” We despair as we see the earth renewing itself each year the same, while we grow steadily more “dim” and “grey” physically.

Yet suddenly in the last lines, all we love and vainly cling to in earthly life becomes nothing more than a winter preceding the true spring, night preceding the day. For the final, wonderful reality is not death, but the Bridegroom’s call. There is a “certain day” approaching for me when I will hear it, and this is a reality both exciting and sobering, for which I need prepare, that I may respond joyfully: yea.

“He he who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” Revelation 22:20

Laughing at Myself

Let me tell you a secret: I dance to the radio in my car, under the illusion that no one is watching.

I discard my awkward, nonrhythmic self and become the sequinned Dancing Queen while sitting at the stop light. For 60 seconds I’m no longer the inelegant and stiff no-thank-you-I-really-don’t-dance girl who embarrasses herself at the company Christmas party. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I have all the moves. Disco ball lowers from the car ceiling. I’m getting down with my bad self (as the saying goes)…

Then I happen to glance out the window and catch the eye of a little girl in a car a few lanes over. She is looking at me. She smiles tentatively. I smile back. She’s cute. Her mom sees that I’ve seen that her daughter sees me. She throws her head back and laughs. I laugh, too, thinking this is a lot of unnecessary mirth for having merely exchanged smiles with a 7-year-old.

But the mother continues to laugh. Hard. She’s pretty with a cool urban style. And she’s alternating between wildly banging her fists on the steering wheel, laughing at the roof of her car and looking over at me, which redoubles her hilarity and the wild pounding. Wow – she is really getting a kick out of the fact that I smiled…at…unless…

Had I been…dancing?…in the car? My fist is bouncing on the wheel while I wait for the light…to the beat of the music… Maybe I was playing some air drums…but in a very understated way…surely?

I look over again. Now the girl’s face registers a grin of obvious amusement. More exaggerated gesticulating from her mother, and it’s clear - she’s imitating me! It’s also clear that my air-drum playing was not as understated as I thought. In fact, it may even have been subconscious (a possibility that truly scares me given the scale of the Cool Woman’s mockery).

Caught in the act. What was one to do?

I laughed out loud with two complete strangers, at myself. And loved it.

The light turned green, I hit the gas, I was back to being country-girl-who-doesn’t-do-salsa, and three people drove home smiling.

The moral of the story is:

People can still see you, even in your car – but keep dancing, anyway!

The End

Best Friends For Never

Yesterday I stumbled upon an article in The New York Times online titled “The End of the Best Friend.” The article describes the efforts of certain educators to monitor friendships and “discourage anything that hints of exclusivity.” Apparently, The Best Friend has become “unhealthy” in our Tolerance-worshipping society. One New York summer camp even employs “’friendship coaches’…to help every child become friends with everyone else.”

Ah, yes, that is the goal, is it not? Everyone being friends with everyone. A sterilized emotional world in which toes are never trampled, feelings never hurt.

“’I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, the camp’s director. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child’s ability to explore other options in the world.’”

How interesting. Is not a child’s choice of friend an integral part of ”exploring options”? And where do these programmed relationships leave those – like myself – who by nature are not social butterflies? Who flourish in small groups and one-on-one interactions? Will the disappearance of The Best Friend indeed eradicate bullying and cliques – in a word, pain? The logic in this thinking is wrong on multiple levels, but for one, preference does not necessarily equal exclusivity and neither does forced social diversity necessarily result in “courtesy, respect, and kindness to all”.

What about the Bible – are we not commanded to refrain from showing favoritism? Yes, we are – within the context of showing love to the Body of Christ. The Bible also clearly promotes close – not superficial – friendships. In fact, Proverbs 18:24 says that “a man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”

The educators referenced in the Times article miss the opportunity to teach that we can show preference without being cliquish. We can love all while at the same time only opening our hearts to a few.

But how can they teach what they have not known? The article reflects a longing for an acceptance deeper than mere social inclusion. Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we are called to exemplify love to a culture so desperate for it that its adults, acting from a history of pain, will attempt to clone it in the test tubes of childhood.

Happy Kisses

As a little girl, I feared the normal kid things, like: Roman chariots attacking and burning Portland, the house catching on fire, the open closet door at night, getting the chicken pox, getting the flu, burglars, being bombed (we lived by the airport during Desert Storm), the creepy basement with the dark doorway leading who knew where. I slept with slippers on my feet in case there were foot-loving bugs in the bed. Each night I scrupulously cocooned myself with stuffed animals, making sure the side near the scary crack between the bed and the wall was well defended.

It didn’t help that I had the misfortune to attend one really horrible public school for 3 months, during which time I was scarred by the librarian’s ghost story readings. After hearing one story in particular, I added an extra level of protection at night  – there now could be no empty space behind my head.  Thanks to that librarian, my imagination introduced a new ghost to my bedroom’s cast of characters: a pale, wailing woman behind the headboard, rocking….rocking….and somehow, with a pillow helmet, I was safe from her.

For me, night was the time for monsters. Even when bribed I refused to sleep with my back to the door. A witch’s hand might creep slowly up over the edge of the bed to snatch me while my back was turned…or worse – Something Scary might come through the door, so I needed to be watching. 

This was why Dad instituted the Happy Kiss tradition. After I was tucked in with the lights out, I hugged Sarah Doll and waited. Not afraid as long as the hall light was on. That meant Daddy was still awake, still protecting me. And in a little while he would come to check on me and give me one last kiss before going to bed – the Happy Kiss. How comforting to see his familiar teddy bear frame softly shadow the doorway. A memory I can almost reach out and touch…almost.

Eventually I became Too Grown Up for Happy Kisses, but I never outgrew my fears. I find in a spiritual sense I am still afraid to turn my back on the door of my life. I struggle to trust my Father to keep watch over it, to trust Him when He tells me everything that crosses the threshold does so only because He allows it to. And sometimes all seems total darkness; the comforting light seeping under the door isn’t there. I see no evidence of His presence. Is He sleeping? Maybe I need to make sure He’s awake? Is He really keeping me safe?

But unlike my earthly Dad, my heavenly Father neither slumbers nor sleeps. His faithful assurances of love and protection I could never outgrow. He is watching, so I can rest.

“For darkness is as light to you…” Psalm 139:12

Macro Lens

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body with be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” Matthew 6:22-23

The macro setting is my favorite camera feature. It focuses minutely. It ushers me inside the tulip, it shrinks me to the size of gritty sand grains on the beach, it turns raindrops on lily pads into silver mercury. Ironic, isn’t it? That though my camera is merely a technological copy of the human eye, and my eye has all the “settings” (with a few exceptions) of a camera, I rarely use my eyes to see outside myself.

No, it usually takes a CanonA620 lens to reflect my inverted focus out onto the beauty, the people, even the suffering, around me. Photography completely removes me from my murky internalizations. I literally lose myself in the color, the light, the composition. It’s not the camera, really, though. The camera is merely a filter, a tool, a messenger between the world and my eyes. In fact, I don’t need the camera to see outside myself – I only think I do.

I recently read in The Age of Wonder about a man named Mungo Park who, in addition to being someone with a really awesome name, was an 18th Century Scottish doctor-turned-explorer who ventured twice into Africa to trace the Niger River. A young man in his 20s, he left London at the behest of the Africa Association on a primitive quest, passionate and prepared to die if necessary.  

Park’s travel journals, eventually published as Travels in the Interior of Africa, describe an incident on his second journey in which Moorish bandits strip him, rob him of everything including his horse, and abandon him in the woods to die:

“After they were gone, I sat for some time looking around me with amazement and terror. Which ever way I turned,
nothing appeared but danger and difficulty. I saw myself in the midst of a vast wilderness in the depth of the rainy season, naked and alone, surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage. I was five hundred miles from the nearest European settlement. All these circumstances crowded at once on my recollection, and I confess that my spirits began to fail me. I considered my fate as certain, and that I had no alternative but to lie down and perish.”

Thankfully I’ve never been near death in an African wood. But I have known the temptation to despair, give up; felt myself lonely, helpless, weak, beaten, exposed. Allowed circumstances to trump what I know about God. That’s why I love what Park writes next:

“At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss, in fructification, irresistibly caught my eye, I
mention this to show from what trifling circumstances the mind will sometimes derive consolation; for though the whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and capsula, without iration. Can that Being (thought I,) who planted, watered, and brought to perfection,in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and sufferings of creatures formed after his own image?–Surely not? Reflections like these would not allow me to despair. I started up, and disregarding both hunger and fatigue, travelled forwards, assured that relief was at hand; and I was not disappointed.”

At this point in The Age of Wonder, author Richard Holmes writes that “it was Park’s scientific curiosity that saved him,” though “a theologian might convincingly describe this moment as an example of the power of the Argument by Design.” Really? Well, I didn’t wrestle my way through all those journalism classes to allow myself to be spoon fed that kind of…well… Anyway, I looked up the full text of Park’s work online and found that between the two highlighted quotes above, there is another which Mr. Holmes conveniently forgot to include in his book:

“The influence of religion, however, aided and supported me. I reflected that no human prudence or foresight could possibly have averted my present sufferings. I was indeed a stranger in a strange land, yet I was still under the protecting eye of that Providence who has condescended to call himself the stranger’s friend.”

In reality, Mungo Park himself describes with certainty his revelatory moment as evidence of God (a.k.a. “Argument by Design”). His savior is not “scientific curiosity” alone; he writes of the created eye being directed by the Creator to evidence of Himself. The beauty of the infinitesimal reminded Park of the Big Picture. He didn’t need a macro setting – and he didn’t even need a camera.

My Week (So Far) in Bullet Points

PREFACE: The author will hereafter refer to herself in third person to distance herself from certain events listed below.

WEEK (SO FAR) IN BULLET POINTS:

1. Meredith arrives at work on Monday, checks voicemail, and receives acidic message from angry homeowner: ”Meredith, this is BA at 3409 WJ in the B subdivision. Once again, I return home from a business trip to find a letter in my mailbox saying that a shrub needs to be pruned in my front yard. If you guys don’t get off my butt, I am going to go ballistic. I have really had it. My yard stays immaculate all the time. There is nothing out there that needs to be pruned. You need to ride around and look at some of these houses that are falling to the ground and have them do repairs. Spend time doing something besides harassing me all the time. There’s no need to call me back, I won’t be home. I’m going on yet another business trip, and I hope that I don’t come home and find another letter in my **** mailbox.”
2. Homeowner visits office and demands his HOA install speed bumps in the community. Meredith says politely – many times - that neighborhood streets belong to city and HOA cannot install speed bumps without first petitioning city. Homeowner unhappy with answer. Argues. Starts muttering about “nasty notes.” Finally accepts that streets do not belong to HOA, but says, “OK, but we can spray paint them, right?”
3. Homeowner noted above unwittingly reveals himself as person who previously sprayed SLOW DOWN in large graffiti letters on street.
4. Homeowner calls management company instead of 911.
5. Meredith receives taste of own medicine. Arrives home to find yellow violation note rubber-banded to door knob. Violation tells her to “Be Courtesy to Her Neighbors.” And to remove old shoes by front door.
6. Meredith laughs at grammatical error in above violation.
7. Laundry machine eats quarter when Meredith tries to do laundry. Meredith takes piece of plastic to retrieve quarter and finds 5 additional quarters stuck in machine. Laundering assets doubled. 
8. Homeowner brings entire family to office to have pool photo IDs created without calling ahead. Finds out IDs are not made at office. Becomes passive aggressive. Yells at daughter in middle of lobby. Creates awkward moment. Leaves office.
9. Anonymous gift received in mail. Meredith happy and thankful!
10. Meredith takes personal time off work for 2 pm court date. Drives through road construction traffic. Parallel parks downtown. Pays for parking. Receives second court date.
11. Homeowner calls office to complain about rat floating in swimming pool.
12. Meredith takes car with repaired horn to be re-inspected. Does not have cash. Must put 85 cents on debit card.
13. Friend L randomly stops by for a visit after work. Makes everything better.
14. Meredith walks dog. Is bowled flat by dog while picking up dog’s poop. Dog lunges at passing jogger with dog. Meredith has arm raked back and forth in wide arcs across ground while lying on back. Only receives dirt-and-grass burn on entire right side of body. Jogger laughs at her.
15. Meredith decides to go to bed early…