Taking God at His Word

A quick entry here--I have been mulling this observation from the devotional Streams in the Desert:

"Miss Havergal has said: "Every year, I might almost say every day, that I live, I seem to see more clearly how all the rest and gladness and power of our Christian life hinges on one thing; and that is, taking God at His word, believing that He really means exactly what He says, and accepting the very words in which He reveals His goodness and grace, without substituting others or altering the precise modes and tenses which He has seen fit to use."  -March 24th

Taking God at His word--how often do I truly do this?  How much more often do I substitute others or alter the precise modes and tense as she suggests?

What does it mean to take God at His word?  It's a heady concept, but I do have some initial thoughts:

1.  I think it means trusting that whatever He is doing in my life today---though seemingly inconvenient, trivial, or unfair---is exactly what is necessary.  It is what I need, not something other.

2. It requires faith that He will work through my circumstances, not just in spite of them (though He may chose to do that too.)

3. It requires that I lean into my spirit and The Spirit.

The Ocean of Things Past

I've been delving into the family genealogy again, which is always a huge time sucker.  People seem to be either fascinated by their family history or largely indifferent.  It's one way or the other. Depending upon how you perceive the past and family, our heritage can either be inconsequential or profoundly significant.

The view from my 2nd great-grandparent's home looking toward the massive grain elevators that line the Buffalo waterfront.

The indifferent line of reasoning goes something like this: Why bother so deeply with the details of those who lived before us?  What's past is past. Their particulars don't impact my life and who I am today. Plus, it's kind of morbid. Ultimately, I am related to everyone if we go far back enough.  If I am descended from person A or B, so what?  Why does it matter?

Then I think about our present culture---how masses of us make a pastime of following the minutest details of celebrity lives or the various waves of pop culture that wash over us.  Is that fascination more relevant? Is the trajectory of our ancestor's lives less? If you are a person of the Christian faith, the first chapter of Matthew would argue no, as Matthew carefully traces generation after generation after generation unto Christ.

 But, that's just one voice in a larger historical choir. One of my favorite quotes hangs from our kitchen cabinets:

“Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses his past and is dead for the future."     -Euripides 480-406BC

Like Euripides, I believe there is a critical bond between the past, the present and the future. To neglect or forsake the individual links is to lose the story and scope of the whole.  And, in sharp contrast to celebrity voyeurism, genealogical voyeurism helps us gain perspective on our present lives.

Norris family immigration: NY Passenger Lists, 20 September 1851, Empire Queen, Liverpool to New York

Admittedly, I sometimes question the relevance of the work too--especially when my children swirl around me doing this or that, wondering how I can sustain such intense interest in obscure details--so many dates and graves--1865 not 1867, Leathy or Letha Geer, Spiers/Spires/Spyres, who cares? It can be tedious and seemingly insignificant work--kind of like pursuing my writing--ha!

David asked me yesterday casually, "So is this your hobby?"  I told him "I suppose so," though to categorize it as a hobby makes it seem light.  I find it anything but light.

For me, the process is emotionally heavy--at least if you are sensitive to the details of so many lives that pass before you.  I feel the heft of the real people I'm sifting through.   They are not abstract details, but flesh and blood people, just like you and me-people that lived, breathed, loved, and ultimately passed from this earth.  Repeatedly, it strikes me that there are so many many people, many more of them than us.  It's easy to minimize them because they wait silently beneath the ground, but make no mistake, we are vastly outnumbered.

Once you push into the generations, it's amazing how fast the names move--once past the surf of the first and second generations, it becomes less about one specific name or line, less about particular people you remember from childhood and more about the sweeping passage of times and lives.  The ocean of family history opens wide at times and calls.  The farther out you sail, the more thrilling the adventure, but the more necessary it becomes to document the journey and chart a stable course back to the shore.  Otherwise you are just lost at sea.

The research becomes a study in people, in lives, in choices and consequences, in unexpected twists, the tale of bad genes or of good ones, of loose commitments and failed ventures, of difficult roads and hard labor.  The lessons? Some acquiesce, others endure.  The choice is sometimes theirs and sometimes not.

Parenting Teens

Vivian Maier, September 18, 1962

Years ago I remember reading a parenting book that concluded that the teenage years are like the unwinding of a yo-yo. Everything that the parents have "wound" for the first ten or so years unravels for better or worse during this time.

The principle: there is a window of maximum investment for maximum impact.

This is true in the plant world as well--yes, you can grow basil in a sunroom through winter, and you can plant lettuce in July, but there is an ideal season--a range of temperature, precipitation, and growing conditions when things are easier, when your plants are most receptive. Although you can grow a plant outside of these parameters, the work will be harder and your efforts ultimately less successful.

There is an ideal season for gardening and an ideal season of influence in the lives of our children.

With our children now 11, 14, and 16, I suspect most of the foundational growing is past. Don't misunderstand, there is still much more work ahead--much unknown that humbles me, but I suspect most of the "winding" has passed.

The season has shifted, requiring a different kind of work, a more subtle type of tending. We continue to water and stake, we ward off the invasive insects and pluck out weeds, but much of the work must transfer to the plant itself now.   The root systems should be mostly established, and the plant needs to bear weight, to take on height and heft.

It's a different kind of tending---one I'm not sure I'm good at.  Wiping noses and giving time-outs seems straightforward and inviting in retrospect.  This teenage work is muddier, not as cute.  And I feel my growing age--I am all-at-once wearier, my edges and limitations clearer.

And what will grow from what's been planted? God alone knows. I can only hope.

I do know that what grows is somewhat different than my early hopes from their childhood days: not all bad, not all good, certainly less ideal, more real--yes, just different.  Very human. They are surprisingly turning out to be imperfect creatures like the rest of us.  Why is this even remotely surprising?  As if my children would not bear the same frailties and frustrations of those who conceived them?

Unfolding, unraveling, unwinding...

We watch and pray. We listen and guide. We advise and remind. We encourage and gently admonish. We point to Him and His ways.  The need is more and more apparent...

It is a mostly a long-suffering, gradual kind of letting go. Some days, I long to completely release all at once, like a balloon released to the sky, to be free of the responsibility entirely, to call an end to the work, free to embrace whatever season comes next.  But this is just more romantic idealism-- an illusion---we never will or can let go entirely.  My father was fond of noting, "Your children are always your children, no matter how old..."

Other days I find myself grabbing on with full force, tenderly winding whatever string is left on the yoyo, embracing the tension, wishing for more string, holding tight to Indian summer of their childhood...

Admittedly, I'm not so great at "in-betweens," months like March that are neither here nor there--half spring, half winter, with weather that can't make up its mind--a gently sunny day, followed by one of cold winds and even flurries.  I much prefer the consistency of May weather...I feel variable and vulnerable enough without help from the elements, from the emotional storms of teenage life.

I suspect women feel this tugging more than men, and perhaps even more particularly mothers who homeschool, as we have chosen to make an entire career out of this growing....

Grace shared this Steinbeck quote with me awhile back:

“Women can change better’n a man,” Ma said soothingly. “Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head.”“Man, he lives in jerks-baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk-gets a farm and looses his farm, an’ that’s a jerk. Woman, its all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on-changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.” -Ma Joad, Grapes of Wrath

So, women adapt. Sometimes the adapting results in a train-wreck. Sometimes it goes better and feels right. I adapt to their growing independence, to stepping back a bit, to trusting in what has been sown, to fostering and facilitating whatever will grow...

In the final analysis, it's all His seed anyway.  I didn't knit them together, He did.  At my very best, I am a hopeful handmaiden, a diligent garden tender.  At my worst, I'm yet another imperfect human, frustrated by myself, birthed by another imperfect human, frustrated with themselves.

We remain frustrated and limited--there's no changing that, at least not in this world. But, the good piece is that this frustration can lead us to the foothills of His immovable mountains of mercy.  His mercy and love toward both us and our children is infinite.

He's doesn't demand perfection from us or our children, just relationship. He loves us while we are imperfect---as we love our limping children--but with an even higher love.

Yesterday was a bad day...

Yesterday was a bad day.  Though I know bad days will come, I hate when they ambush me so completely.

Because afterwards, I am a double fool---a fool for the sin and a fool for not knowing the signs, preventing the overflow, for not initiating damage control.

Yesterday was one of those days when all the yucky pieces of me spilled out everywhere, with abandon.  It's never pretty.  Tim Keller suggests that most of us would rather be exposed physically, running down the street naked, than have God see our rotten naked hearts.

My naked heart is a great discouragement to me.

Paul told it like it was, is, will be...until I made made complete in Him:

"For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. 

For I do not understand my own actions. 

For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate."   -Romans 7:14-15 

I do the very thing I hate. And, I hate that I do the very thing I hate.  But I still do it.

Square one.  I am right back at it.

Walking in early spring--consider the marsh marigolds

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin..."                       -Matthew 6:28

As with the rest of Asheville, Rose and I have been getting out more this week with the warmer weather.  Yesterday I walked and she roller skated one of our favorites--Reed Creek Greenway which runs alongside Broadway and Montford.  We cross Broadway, skirt UNCA's Botanical Gardens and then connect up with their Glen's Creek Greenway to Merrimon at Luella's Barbecue then back.  I think it's about three miles total, a nice jaunt.

Rose is learning to use the rollerskates she got for Christmas, so yesterday we stopped often.  Along the bank of Glen's Greek, there was a particularly picturesque section scattered with what we initially thought were dandelions.  But, we quickly realized they were something else.   There were also clumps of daffodils sprinkled through; we've recently begun to call these "Daffo-down-dillys" after reading Secret Garden.  We love fun names. Perhaps the daffodil clusters were remnants of old homesteading activity.  I've read that they last generation after generation, long after homes are gone.  Or maybe the bulbs relocated after washing down the creek during a storm.

I remember reading in some local history that Glen's Creek was once very polluted and smelly.  Now this creek and the greenway are mostly well-maintained.  It's particularly inviting where it runs through the Botanical Gardens.  Here it is shallow and wide, with large rocks to rest and linger.   We often see parents with young children wading there.  Yesterday there was an enclave of hippy-mamas picnicking on the grass nearby.
Ah, Asheville, ever keeps things interesting.

On the return leg, we stopped by the Botanical Gardens Gift Store in hopes of identifying the shiny yellow flower growing all along Glen Creek's length.  Ever the shopper,  Rose was motivated more by the "gift store" aspect than the identification, but you catch more flies with honey.

Unfortunately, the woman at the Botanical Gardens gift store had no clue or interest in the flower (ironic, but sadly unsurprising).  Instead, she awkwardly directed us to a series of large posters that catalog the various flowers in the garden family by family.   Asters, orchids, fascinating to me--not so much Rose--in the end, no matches.

Rose found a pencil made out of a twig, and I eventually tracked down the correct identification in one of the field guide books there.  For the record, I believe it to be a variant of a marsh marigold---caltha palustius L.  As often happens, Rose and I waged battle over her latest hope of purchase, the twig pencil.  I won the skirmish, but the fallout was covert sulking.  I stopped to enthusiastically inform the gift shop lady that we had finally figured out the flower--marsh marigold--but she still had no interest, just polite but blank eyes, a pat "oh, good."

I've thought through this before---are my expectations too high?  Does it really matter if we know the flower's name?  Why are some humans so eager to categorize and label and others could care less.  Is it some kind of latent desire of dominion (Adam named the animals) or the beginning of a journey to better understand something?

Certainly, we can enjoy a nameless flower or bird. Often these finds are more intriguing for the not-knowing.   They lend an air of discovery to things, as if we are among the first to notice.

There is also an enormous educational lesson in teaching curiosity---teaching children and ourselves to slow down, ask questions, and wonder about the world around us--in this case, a flower.  It forces us to notice the details: kidney leaf shape, nine petals not five, shiny petals, fuzzy center thing, and what's that part called again?  It initiates a mental and sometimes literal dialogue.

Next we were thinking more precisely about the time of year (early spring) and growing conditions (sandy soil, near a stream). Quick research this morning even brought a wisp of Latin into things as "palustris" translates to "swampy, marshy, or of wet places."  Yes, they flourish happily by the stream.

This morning, I learned that if I were a bee, I would see the yellow marsh marigold as purple and yellow because the upper portions of the petals appear as ultraviolet "bee purple" to them. This could lead us into a study of the light spectrum, of the differences in color and color perception.  Because I read an article about dandelions as important early spring pollinators last week, I could also teach that the marsh marigold is important to insects in this regard.

Some people find this type of teaching too unquantifiable, messy, or even sideways energy.  But, I've found many of our brightest educational moments in stopping to wonder, in following the muddy path of serendipitous curiosity.  I often remind myself that I am modeling a way of  seeing, of learning,  of being curious and engaged.  The best learning is not isolated chunks of processed knowledge distributed in a classroom and regurgitated for a test, but is interconnected to the larger world and stems from a sense of wonder---that leads to a question---that leads to research---that leads to more questions, more wonder:

To see what is in very front of us--to be present today, to not have blank eyes.