The middle of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

"It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine.)"  --REM

Although our weather hasn't been reflecting it much, the school year is almost over.  Tuesday was Gretchen's last day of PDO.  Most of the time she was in PDO I had a class at church, so her being in PDO was really more about her than about me having free time.  I was, however, looking forward to a few weeks of having a couple of hours a week to myself.  Once the church class ended, though, I had to go to physical therapy.  So I ended up with a grand total of one three-hour stretch of free time: the last day.

That day Doug had to go into work really early, so there was no way for me to go to the masters' swim that morning.  Instead, I went right from dropping Gretchen off to the pool.  I flipped through my little book of swim workouts and found one I liked that was 3250m.  Not being a stunningly quick swimmer, this workout took me about 80 minutes.  Add in the time to get there and change, then to shower and change again afterwards, and I only had time to make a quick stop at Lowes before going back to pick up Gretchen.  Partway through my two-mile swim I realized that I was spending my last free day just swimming.  For a few seconds I grumbled internally.  I swim a couple of times a week.  I shouldn't spend my one little piece of luxury time getting my workout in!  I should be....  And that's where the grumble stopped.  Honestly, what would I rather be doing than swimming two miles?  I am not one for shopping or manicures or any other form of expensive hedonism.  So what if swimming is ordinary and could be considered hard work?  That does not make it not worth doing.  It doesn't even make it something one cannot do with gratitude and joy.  It turned out to be a really good swim.  Maybe the fact that I chose to spend my last day doing something I do all the time anyway means that my all the time is well spent.

This last day of PDO got me thinking about all this second coming hype.  Let me first say that I think the guy who claims to know that Jesus is coming tomorrow at 6pm has some sort of self-aggrandizement psychosis.  I do not believe that the Bible was inspired in such a way that someone can use it to mathematically figure out the second coming.  Firstly, there are all the issues of translation, not to mention that it wasn't written in the scientific age when "truth" had the same meaning.  More importantly, though, Jesus pretty clearly says that God's timing is a mystery even to Jesus, and we non-God types should not to attempt to figure such things out.  So, no, I don't think there's much credence to the May 21, 2011 claim.  If Jesus does come tomorrow, I'm calling it a funny coincidence.

But since this prediction has, for some reason, gotten enough hype to be in my consciousness most of the time, and since I had the last day mentality going with PDO, I've been thinking about how I would spend this week if I truly believed everything was coming to an end on Saturday.  I came to the conclusion that there isn't much I would do differently, even if I believed it was my last week on earth.  Maybe I would have left the tar in my daughter's jacket on Monday morning, but I would have still met with my covenant group on Monday afternoon.  With whom would I rather spend my time?  I would still have swum two miles on Tuesday morning even if there was no triathlon in my future.  There isn't really one now, come to think of it.  It is just a joy to use my body, to be in water, to swim.  I would still have worked on my garden Tuesday afternoon because the world is beautiful and fertile and it's a blessing to contribute to that.  I would still have made risotto primavera for dinner because rice and vegetables taste good and  make me feel good.  I would still have gone to band rehearsal to make music one last time.  And so forth.  I would still have biked to ballet class and the bread store on Wednesday, even in the rain, because it made me feel alive.  I would still have celebrated Adam's seventh birthday on Thursday, even if there wasn't going to be an eighth, because he is a wonderful kid and those seven years are worth celebrating.  I would still have gone to his baseball game even if it doesn't matter if he learns to be a competant first-baseman.  I would still have served my sister and niece lunch and dinner.  What else of more worth would I do?  If this was the last Friday of my life, I would still have woken up at 5am this morning so that I could bike to the river to run.  Maybe I would have biked and run farther, come to think of it.   

I've been finding it easy to get that used-up, underfilled feeling lately.  I do and do and give and help and clean and cook, and to what end?  For what return?  Little praise or appreciation comes my way.  No money or recognition.  No conclusion or resolution or time off.  (Come to think of it, the second-coming might be a nice change of pace....)  Not even enough sleep.  And nothing I do stays done: it all must be done again tomorrow, if not sooner.  And while all of this will probably still be true on Monday morning when I am still here, still in the routine of do and do and give and help and clean and cook, there is great encouragement in the thought that even if I believed Jesus was coming tomorrow, I would still have wanted to do the things I did today.

I don't really blame people who, misled by the hoopla, blew off work and threw a wild party on their supposed last day on earth.  (Well, I blame them for being ignorant and gullible and probably for continuing to be such on May 22 and beyond.)  But I can't be too upset by it because how unbelievably blessed are those of us who, on their last week on earth, would choose to do pretty much what they always do with the people they see every week?  For the beauty of that realization, I'm glad the world is ending again in December of 2012.

For the Hope that is in me

Today I was, in real life, asked to give an accounting for the hope that is in me.  Is a person ever fully prepared for that?  I'm not sure I was, but I stood there and looked in the face of the questioner and made a start.  It would be easy, at least in some ways, to say that I just believe in Jesus and be done with it, but this was a genuine asking, someone looking for a real-life blood and guts kind of answer.

I won't say that I failed to give an accurate accounting.  I said some true things: that what looks to others to be something profound and unwavering and focused is, internally, a constant seeking and questioning and, frankly, failing to live up to expectations.  And if what this person wants is to have what I have, she may already be there.  The next step is just to keep showing up and showing up and showing up and showing up.  It is the kind of devotion that was the content of the sermon.  For once a sermon meant to hit the heart, to spur us to action, the type of sermon that usually reveals to me my inadequacy actually showed me that, hey, I'm doing it.  Endurance I got.  Persistance and stubbornness, check.  The tedious, the mundane, the repetitive: yup.  Devotion just may be one of my gifts.  I'm there, man, and I mean literally, almost every day of the week.  Sometimes twice.  And that, blessedly, is where today's conversation started.  It started with me taking credit for something.

My friend asked me about running.  I ran 38 minutes this morning and said so.  Last year I ran a marathon, but I'm proud of that 38 minutes.  Running after a long long injury, one that still hurts some and still swells and turns purple, is a good indicator of devotion.  Particularly when one wakes up and hears the wind howling and the rain falling.  There's a good example of putting in the time and training even when you don't really feel like it.  Of course, once I was doing it, I was greatful, and there's a lesson there too, but I'll leave that for another day.  Having just sat next to me through the sermon, the friend said, "Well that is your passion, right?  Running? The thing you are devoted to? Or is it?"  I said that, yes, it's one of the things, and that devotion must be one of my most valuable strengths.  She asked were I get my devotion.  After thinking a moment, I credited my mom.  She and I are devoted to different things, but I am certain that I learned from her the "just keep going" ethic.  She will care for people until she drops, literally.  She never begs off of anything: work, childcare, hosting a meal, tailoring a whole show-choir's worth of costumes.  So I guess I believe that you can learn devotion by example.  I smiled inside to think that maybe my kids will catch devotion from me.  Maybe they will not think I am just crazy, or maybe they will think I am crazy but also will learn how to be crazy about their own things.  Maybe the daily repetitive work of sticking to it, whatever it is, really does witness to the world around me.

The friend asked, then, what it is I am devoted to.  It's a fair question since it was asked in the sermon.  I was ready for that one.  I am devoted to running, to music (to a lesser extent,) to my church, and to getting my family through every day.  I should have added in reading.  I probably also should have added in that I have some friends for whom I would drop everything.  I am devoted to loving my kids and my friends.  Add those things up, and there you have pretty much every minute of every day.  Seriously.  I don't leave room for anything else.

"You grew up in this church, didn't you?" asked my friend.  I told her I had.  "I think that makes a difference," she said.  We talked about her early church experiences and her mom's faith, and then there it was: the demand for an accounting of the hope that is in me, even if not in those words exactly.  Although in my own head, I am failing to live up to the demands of Christ, although I know of myself that I have a good deal of unworthiness, to someone who is seeking, someone who is paying attention, I am focused and full of faith.  I am the one of whom the question "How do you do that?" is asked.  It is the moment any disciple should live for, is it not?

I assured her, out of a need not to misrepresent myself, that I'm not by any means as certain as I look.  That's a long conversation.  So I will send this friend some of the things I have written about faith and faithlessness, about walking the walk (or stumbling the walk) in the face of doubt, about keeping at it day after day in a number of little ways if not in the grand gesture.  But right on the spot, in a matter of minutes, while my children were probably anxiously wondering why I was not picking them up from Sunday school, I was able to point to something concrete that helps me, that would help her.  I said, "Well, I'm in a covenant group...."

For me, that was the truth.  I'm just as flawed as the next person, truly.  I'm flawed in ways I won't post on the internet, but you can trust me that some of the flaws are big.  But because I am tenacious if nothing else, I don't just give up and let the flaws be the only things that define me.  Love, if you can find a way to do it, is worth the effort.  One of the ways I keep going is by leaning on and loving people who look to me to be doing even better than I am.  I am not unaware of the lovely irony there: you could become cynical in the sudden knowledge that probably everyone who looks faithful is also unfaithful.  I could be shocked to realize that I could be for someone else the inspiration that others are for me.  Or I could see that as Jesus, through the body of a friend, taking my hand during church (as did someone I love and admire after today's sermon) and saying, "See?  Keep going.  Hope."


"Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.  And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved."
Acts 2: 46-47

Simple

Today I feel like writing more about me.  Of course.  Sigh.  The trouble with my writing, or one of the troubles, is that I get caught in an endless loop.  I tell people I'm not doing it because I have nothing to write about.  They, being friends all of them, say that of course this is not true, and they are right.  I don't know much about much, but I do know about being me.  I could write about being me every day.  To tell the truth, being me feels like a hard job most of the time and only getting harder.  That's interesting--to me.  But does it contribute to the wider world?  Hard to say.  I will confess that I like reading about other people much the way I like seeing their living rooms and kitchens, just to see what it's like to live somewhere else, and, often, to see what I can do better.  Somehow details about others' lives turn out being about me too (how self-centered can I be?), so maybe my writing about me turns out to be about others for them (if I ever let other people read what I write, but that's another topic.)  I hope so.  May God's grace make it so sometimes because I don't have much else right now.  Maybe I'll grow out of this phase that's been going on for 36 years.  Maybe.

My goal for this week, and for the last few weeks, although I hadn't moved toward the goal at all until two nights ago, was to get better at prayer.  Some weeks ago I had checked out a book titled, simply, Prayer by Richard Foster.  While reading chapter one, it occurred to me that my prayer life has many of the same troubles as my writing life.  I don't want it to be all about me, but if I take me out, there isn't much substance there, just some well-wishes, really.  Not really a relationship.  No depth.  And then there are plenty of things about me that I don't want to either write or tell God about.  Of course, if there is a God and God is who we think God is, God already knows.  And then there is the concern that I'm just so darn not good at it.  My attention wanders.  I don't know what to say.  I fall asleep.  I just stop and stare blankly at whatever is before me.  Who am I to be writing or talking to God?  There are so many people who are so much better it almost seems silly to put myself out there at all.

The book starts out by giving permission for all of those things to be true.  It says to start out with Simple Prayer, in which all of those problems are OK, maybe even good.  For example, it may be good to be bad at prayer: "Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto-mechanics.  That puts us in the 'on-top' position, where we are competent and in control.  But when praying, we come 'underneath,' where we calmly and deliberately surrender control and become incompetent" (Foster 7-8.)  Oh boy.  That hits the mark.  I do not like to be underneath, to be clearly and humbly incompetent, and I never have.  How ironic that in thinking myself too lowly to pray or write, that the thing that is shutting me off is out-of-control pride.  Foster says it's OK to have some selfishness mixed in with the altruism when it comes to prayer.  As Foster explains, you can see it like a child talking to parents.  Just because my children have crazy and selfish and confusing requests, how much better to have them tell me than to have them be afraid to tell me.  Foster says that prayer begins wherever we are because wherever we are is the only place God can meet us.  Simple and obvious.  He writes, "We must never believe the lie that says that the details of our lives are not the proper content of prayer" (Foster 12).  He makes sense, and I think, as I read about simple prayer, I can do that.  To make matters better, we believe, and scripture promises, that God's grace makes even a lousy prayer holy.  Even the worst prayer is still prayer.

When I sit down to write something and find the same old inhibitions haunting me--I have nothing to say worthy of being read, it's all about me, this may not be any good, etc.--I wonder if maybe I should give myself permission to continue on with my simple writing, as Foster gives permission for simple prayer.  To just write from where I am with the stuff I have and allow it to be shoddy or laughably bad or ignorant or boring.  What, after all, do I have to lose?  Pride perhaps, but I'll admit here that pride isn't serving me very well.  I am risking the low opinion of others, which is very scary to me, but the opinion of others is not something I can ever control.  Their opinions are their problems, not mine.  They can stop reading at any time.  I may suck at writing and have only drivel to contribute, but for some reason I am drawn to it.  I feel little tugs.  I feel better while I'm writing.  Maybe it's worth being mediocre and self-centered and vulnerable.  Maybe good will come of it.  Maybe it's OK to be simple.  The alternative, it appears, is to be nothing, and there doesn't seem to be nearly as much room for redemption (or blind luck or grace or whatever we want to call it) in doing nothing.

"'Tis a gift to be simple. 'Tis a gift to be free. 'Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be."  --Shaker hymn 

More than just a mess

This morning Gretchen asked to play with the fake grass from Easter.  I wanted to say no.  I almost did say no.  My mouth was open and my tongue was planted behind my upper teeth with the word already formed.  I was envisioning little strands of green plastic all over the house, and we have guests coming tomorrow and plenty of things to do other than clean up plastic grass.  But then I considered whether or not my "no" was for a good reason or merely selfish impulse.  Really, what's the harm?  There's a limited window of time in which something like fake grass is so alluring.  I asked what she needed it for, and she said she needed to make something out of it.  She looked so excited and full of 3-year-old joy that I said yes, but only in one room, and it must all be picked up. 

Ugh.  The result, as any sensible adult could predict, was a house covered in green plastic strings and a crying three-year-old who claimed it was too hard to clean up.  Well, yeah.  I made her do most of it, but once she had buckled down and was working, I went in and helped; I was feeling annoyed though--with her for the mess and with myself for not preventing the situation that was always a foregone conclusion.

"What were you making with this?" I asked as I hastily and impatiently raked my fingers through the carpet.

"A bed for Jesus," replied my sweet girl.  Oh.  That stopped me for a few seconds.  "I know he's not a baby anymore," she continued, "but sometimes I like to pretend he's still a baby, and I wanted to make a bed for him."

Suddenly, I wasn't angry at either one of us anymore.  Turning the stupid secular/pagan tradition back into something about Jesus?  Worth the mess.  We cleaned it up together with more patience, fewer tears, and loving hearts.  I consider myself wiser for the situation: (1) Put the plastic grass away immediately after Easter, but even though I didn't, (2) to a Godly heart, even  a mess can be something holy.

God be in my head and in my understanding.
God be in mine eyes and in my looking.
God be in my mouth and in my speaking.
God be in mine heart and in my thinking.
God be at my end and in my departing.
                                            --Sarum Primer via John RutterGod be in my home and in my parenting.

Prairie Fire

The restored prairie near my house was recently burned.  My children are fascinated by this, as, indeed, am I.  We were lucky enough to see a bit of the burn as we drove past: the workers standing around in fire-fighting gear, the emergency equipment at the ready, the trails blocked off and the fantastically orange flame that formed the line between the charred, blackened ground and the pale, non-descript ground covered in last year’s now-dead prairie grass.  To me, a one-time ecology student and lover of nature, this was a moment of wonder and terrible beauty.  To my children, it was those things as well, but also it was completely puzzling.  Why are they burning the park?  So we have had several conversations about how a native prairie relies on the occasional burn, once manifested in an uncontrolled prairie fire and now in the form of a carefully controlled man-made event, to clear out the plants that are not supposed to be in the prairie, to kill off things that are brought to the prairie from other places and that might out-compete and kill off the native plants if not for the fires that prairie plants have evolved to survive and even, in some cases, depend upon.  It’s how we, who have destroyed most of the prairies, make our little attempts to return prairies to what they ought to be.  I have promised my concerned three-year-old that although right now the parklands are large swaths of black, char, and ash, in a few weeks, it will be a lovely yellow-green, and by summer the plants will be four feet high and dotted with white and purple and yellow flowers. 

For now, the land is almost 400 acres of black.  It smells like soot and destruction.  When the winds pick up, as winds do in early spring, they lift ash into the air, and it gets into your nose and throat.  It burns, figuratively as well as literally. 

I am tired of being confined to my house, to missing out on the subtle shifts of the season and even the chance to be nasally irritated by the prairie burn, so, in spite of some pain, I walked to my 5:30am kettlebell class on Monday morning.  I walked along the burned prairie and noticed these things—a little bit.  Mostly, though, I noticed that my left foot, one of only two feet I use to walk, hurts.  It hurts more than I think it should four weeks after surgery.  This is, at this point, both a bad and a good thing.  Bad for obvious reasons.  Hopefully it’s not infected.  Good because the Boston Marathon, for which I am both qualified and registered, is taking place in two weeks.  Good because the pain makes it absolutely out of the question that I might have been able to make an attempt at the 26.2 miles.  In truth, the marathon has been off the table for a couple of months.  But the pain in my foot saves me from feeling like maybe I should have left it on the table, just in case.  That’s the kind of second thoughts to which I am prone.  It is absolutely not going to happen.  Yes, the plane tickets and hotel reservations were already cancelled, but the pain makes the change of plans a physically experienced certainty. 

Good.  Because lately the Boston Marathon is calling me and mocking me.  A couple of weeks ago I received via e-mail my race number and wave time.  Last week I received via USPS a thick packet of race information which I have not touched.  I cannot decide if I should open it or toss it directly into the recycle bin, and so it sits in my family room and gets in the way and reminds of what I have lost.  Today, another e-mail.  Yesterday, the mom of another student in my daughter’s tumbling class was talking about doing her last longish run before Boston.  That could be me.  It is not me.  This morning the lane two guy who almost lapped me at the masters’ swim said that he’s doing Boston this year to make up for the Boston he ran last year.  Boston Boston Boston. 

Limping along in the chilly dark of pre-morning, through the blackness of a burned prairie, the pain in my foot made me accept the fact that those Boston Marathon people are not me.  Evidently, Boston is not my thing.  My time is almost certainly not good enough for me to get in under the new procedures that will be in place for next year’s Boston.  And then the qualification times get even tougher.  So it’s entirely likely that I will never get in.  The raised standards are not in themselves a reason not to try again, of course, but with this injury following so closely the previous long-term injury, it does seem that maybe I’m just not meant to run marathons.  Maybe marathoning is not “my thing.”  Perhaps it is sour grapes, but perhaps it is realism to admit to myself that even though I have long defined myself as a runner, maybe I’m just not that good at it, at least at that distance.  I was just barely good enough at it once, and now good enough has slipped out of my fingers, has raced on ahead far enough that I may not catch up.  And, truth be told, I’m a little too demoralized to see myself trying.

The last time I had to face up the likely loss of myself as a runner, I joined a concert band.  I am still in the band, and this concert cycle we are playing songs that may be the hardest I’ve ever played in my life.  I think it may be a cumulatively harder concert than I ever played at the peak of my career back in college.  So there too, I fail to measure up.  I did not bring this to mind on a chilly Monday morning to berate myself for my shortcomings as horn player.  After all, I did put my horn away for a good decade, and truth be told, I do not get around to practicing it every day now, as I should.  I could improve, with some effort, and I will have to improve by early May.  But the reality of the situation is that although I may be able to get myself to a point where I can survive this concert and not infuriate my conductor, I will be acceptable at best.  It may be that had I decided to major in horn performance in college, had I practiced hours per day since then, I could be an honest-to-goodness horn player.  Who knows?  The reality, though, is that I did not do those things, and therefore I am never going to be any better than an acceptable musician.  It’s too late for me now.  Horn playing is not “my thing” either.

If, as Robert Frost proposes, life is a path off of which “way leads onto way” and one usually does not get back to the original path and the original set of decisions, then I am too far down the path already for a number of things.  Although I once envisioned myself as a scholar or a researcher or an intellectual, the reality of my current situation and responsibilities and, yes, loves, is that I took other paths long ago, and I will probably not intersect again with my former aspirations.  Professorship is not “my thing.”  Since third grade I have wanted to be a writer, but it turns out that I don’t have all that much to say beyond my own experiences and my own self.  I am not as creative or edgy or appealing or prolific or poetic as I would need to be to really be a writer.  I missed that path too, somehow, even though I thought I was looking for it.  And so, walking/limping in the dark, I quickly mentally compiled a good list of pursuits at which I have failed or at which I have been nothing more than mediocre or that I somehow missed, and now I am too old to make any them “my thing.”  Sigh.  What to do with my life.

And then, out of nowhere, an asinine sentence popped into my head: “You’re never too old to make Jesus ‘your thing.’”  I actually, limping along in the dark through a burned prairie, laughed out loud.  God (and I mean that both epithetically and as a form of address,) what a cheesey, hokey sentence even to think!!  Where did that come from? 

My answer came later that day from a trusted friend to whom I confided this embarrassingly Bible-beater sounding story.  We had been discussing the Holy Spirit, certainly the part of the trinity to which I devote the least thought and about which I have only a vague and shifting non-understanding.  My friend’s comment was that the Holy Spirit is the thing that whispers into your head, that nudges you to speak or act.  Oh ho!  So HS would be the guilty party in that silly Jesus thought, not me.  Phew.

Wait.  Phew?

  Luke 3:15-17 (New International Version, ©2011)

 ¹⁵ The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. ¹⁶ John answered them all, “I baptize you with^[a] water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with^[b] the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Crap.  And ow.

I’ve had this thought before, that maybe, darn it all, maybe such and such an injury that takes me away from running is really a good opportunity to do such and such….  Yada yada yada, grumble grumble.  Been there; had enough of that.   Except that I haven’t had the thought in quite the same way, nor while walking through a scorched restored prairie.  A prairie which, if I’m remembering correctly, gets burned every year.  Every year.  Again, crap.  Every year burned down to nothing but ash and blackness and, we know from experience although we cannot see it now, some roots and seeds that will, in time, grow to be just as green and beautiful and tall as ever they have been.  In theory, they will be even more green and tall and prairie-like than if they had never been burned and if the invader species had been allowed to grow unchecked season after season and out-compete the native plants and turn the prairie into something other than what a native prairie should be.    

Sigh.  So maybe (sigh again) I have a few non-native plants that are keeping me from being what I ought to be.  Yes, I’m pretty sure there are several, and they are good hardy ones.  For example, that darn pride thing keeps growing back and repeatedly needs to be stripped off me, by force, or fire, if necessary.  Maybe it’s good for me to have to get back into the pool and get almost lapped in lane two while swimming 200m repeats.  I’m not talking just about how it’s good for me as an athlete or a well-rounded person, a Jack-of-all-trades.  I’m saying maybe the HS is right.  Maybe I need to be stripped, repeatedly, of my reliance on the identities I try to make for myself, my attempts to define out loud what “my thing” is.  Maybe once all of last year’s dead growth is burned away, between this burn and the next one, the right me will grow back, preferably a pretty yellow-green, or something with flowers.  But there I go again.  Perhaps I am not to be the judge of perfection.  Maybe I should just wait and see what my native seeds are, what I was designed to be before I was even old enough to be striving after any particular goal or status or label. 

Maybe this is what sanctifying grace feels like: like a prairie fire.

One Banana Peel at a Time

I suspect there are probably people out there who do not feel the need to be constantly seeking out the dark underbelly of their own lives, people who are not obsessed with saving the world with their every little action.  For entertainment, they go and watch a nice little action flick, and they happily drink their over-sized pop and eat another form of high fructose corn syrup.  If they are hungry, they eat whatever is handy, and they are not consequently consumed by massive amounts of guilt.  They probably just toss their apple core in the garbage when they are finished, if, it so happened, an apple was what was most convenient.  These are probably people it is very easy to stay married to.  I suspect that every now and then my husband might like to live this way.  I think this because once upon a time we were interested in save-the-world documentaries but would also go out for a completely carnivorous meal, including bacon in the dessert.  And because the other day, when I was not home in time to prepare lunch in advance, I caught him putting a number of meat-free leftovers on a plate next to some chicken, and then adding ham to the previously meat-free dishes!  I, of course, thought this was some sort of passive-aggressive way of getting back at me for suddenly removing meat from the family diet, but I have since come to believe that his explanation was sincere: he added ham to the mac-n-cheese because it was there and because ham in mac-n-cheese is good.  (Side note: I do not consider mac-n-cheese a healthy food.  I made it as a concession to my daughter who is, after all, only three, and thinks mac-n-cheese is the height of delicious meat-free cuisine.  So I was already fallen off my high horse when this occurred, yet I was still miffed.)  He wasn’t out to ruin society or poison our children or even to annoy me.  He just wanted to take a break from saving the world and eat some comfort food like the good ol’ days.  I tend to take everything seriously.    

Poor man.  There was a time when he was a biology major with a particular interest in ecology.  He was dating a nice little English major with a particular interest in women’s issues, religion, music, and ecology.  We went about our ordinary lives finishing college and getting married.  We lived in an apartment for a couple of years and wished we had a garbage disposal.  Oh, wouldn’t life be easy with a garbage disposal?  It was all about easy then.  Although he taught science and we both liked nature, we did not go to extraordinary measures to do anything about environmental issues.  We maybe donated to some causes.  We were not inconvenienced much though.  In fact, when we bought our first house, it came with a little compost bin out in the back corner of the back yard.  We had no idea what to do with it, and it smelled a little, so we took it out, spread around the contents, and planted a small garden atop the soil which we assumed was probably a bit better for growing things.  We didn’t know.  We didn’t particularly bother to find out either.  The rabbits ate everything we planted because we didn’t bother to put up impenetrable fencing.

And now.  Now it’s one thing after another.  There is no easy any more.  We recycle everything, a practice which is cleverly encouraged by our city’s waste removal plan.  Recycling is free; garbage removal must be paid by the container.  So no biggy.  Then a few years ago I acquired a bin of worms so we could do vermicomposting in our basement.  Yes, this started to cross the line into unusual, but although I was not always doing the things I am now doing, I was always a little intense and unusual.  So my vermicomposting thing was met with little more than a raised eyebrow and a bit of teasing.  I was due for some new obsession.  Of course, once we started composting, my eyes were opened to how much composting we could actually be doing.  We each eat a banana every morning with breakfast, for example.  In a week, that’s 28 banana peels.  They can either go in the garbage and add to the mountain of garbage not-quite-rotting in the plastic bags in landfills, or they could be composting and making the world more beautiful.  Since we are going to keep eating the bananas, the peels could be something slightly bad or something slightly good.  Maybe one banana peel doesn’t make much difference either way.  But maybe 28 peels a week does.  Maybe 1460 peels a year does make a difference over a lifetime.  Regardless of how much difference it makes, it came down to a choice: in this tiny thing, do good or do harm.  I chose composting.  Then add in the potato peels, the carrot peels, the apple cores, the lettuce we didn’t eat before it started to go bad: the worms, it turned out, couldn’t keep up.  So I bought a big compost container for the back yard.  Ah, now I see what that was about.  Too bad it took me a few years to get back to where I could have been when we bought our first house.  Husband went along with this new commitment to composting.  Having carried the tub of worms to the basement, he then went to pick up the compost bin from the university extension office.  For Christmas that year  he bought me a nice little bucket for the kitchen counter with charcoal filters, so the whole kitchen doesn’t need to smell like rotting fruit.  At first, I think he missed the ease of just throwing everything in the garbage.  I would frequently find rotting banana peels on the counter after breakfast.  I pointed out that throwing them in the bin on the counter was actually less time and effort than walking to the garbage can, and I’ve not heard any complaints. 

Then I started to get annoyed with things we were still needlessly throwing away.  My husband is a lifelong devotee to the plastic zip-lock bag.  This is both a nature and a nurture inheritance from his parents.  All left-overs are placed in plastic bags at their house.  To travel, everything is placed in a separate plastic bag.  And, I kid you not, their banana peels are sealed in plastic newspaper sleeves before they are thrown away.  For the sake of maintaining family relationships, I aggressively bite my tongue and lips and occasionally a few fingers every time we visit.  To some people the plastic bag is the epitome of all that the modern age can deliver in terms of sanitation and convenience, and I married into a family of those people.  So cutting down our use of them was an uphill long-term battle.  I would point out that things could be put in washable containers.  I bought sandwich-shaped containers for the lunchboxes.  My sister-in-law even caught onto my intentions and for Christmas gave me reusable, dish-washer safe food bags.  I knew last night that my transformation in that department was going well when my mom was helping my son pack up some game pieces for the purpose of transporting them to school the next day.  She told him to go ask daddy for four sandwich baggies.  Husband did not just hand over the baggies but questioned why they were needed and why so many.  My mom said, “They’re just plastic sandwich bags.”  Ah, the taste of revolution in the early evening.

I started in on the second wonder of the modern age, and something on which we used to spend a good deal of money: the paper towel.  Thanks to husband’s influence, we used to use several rolls of paper towels a week.  We used them to clean counters, clean stove and microwave, clean bathrooms, dust, and clean off kids.  The last item there was a big one.  Husband used at least one per kid per meal.  It made the decision to stop reproducing one that would save hundreds of trees.  At first he was leary of the washcloth thing.  Not very sanitary.  I promised him, though, that I would WASH the washcloths and that he could use one per kid per meal and another for counters.  Or, more accurate, I would use a separate cloth to clean the counters.  I bought several bunches of washcloths, and lo!  We hardly ever have to buy paper towels.  Of course, now we have piles of wet washcloths on the counter, but at least we are not needlessly consuming and disposing.  Then we moved to cloth napkins too, although I don’t quite have enough of those yet, so we still supplement with disposable.

All well and good, until I messed with my most lovable quality as a wife: the delicious (and, we thought, healthy) dinner.  Good cooking can make up for a multitude of quirks.  I started to really get into the politics and purpose of food.  For reasons that are both self-serving (i.e. health related) but also economic and ecological, I have stopped purchasing or serving meat to my family, and I have stopped eating it completely.  From what I’ve seen and read, it seems that eating meat is a habit that is neither healthy nor sustainable.  We already eat very little processed food, and most of that is not purchased or endorsed by me.  For the most part, the effort I put into making most of what we eat from scratch has been appreciated.  We joined a CSA to do a better job both with eating whole vegetables and with eating locally.  Still, the no meat thing still came as something of a shock.  I think it seemed like one dietary restriction too many.  We already have wheat, dairy, egg, tree nut, peanut, and fish allergies to deal with.  Take out all animals as well, and we’re left eating…well, pretty much exactly what most non-corporate sponsored experts agree is a very healthy diet.  Expressed that way, it doesn’t seem like such a radical move. 

In practice, however, it turned out to feel very counter-cultural.  It’s pretty difficult to eat that way anywhere but in my own kitchen.  On a little three day vacation, I was not the one in charge of packing meals, and such meals have always been heavily centered around the main dish: meat.  So that was tricky.  I was a little hungry, but for once I didn’t complain.  Eating out is nearly impossible.  Go to Chili’s or Cracker Barrel or Colonial and try to eat vegan or even vegetarian.  All of the salads have meat on them.  The vegetable side dishes are cooked with meat or meat fat.  There are entire roads full of restaurants where a person trying to eat only or even mostly plants couldn’t find a bite to eat.

Even at home, it’s not so easy.  It’s a hard change to fight off a lifetime of nutritional training, quietly but heavily subsidized by the meat and dairy industries.  A few nights ago my son said of the “main dish” (a concept I am trying to phase out), “Do I have to eat this, since I already ate my vegetables and this is vegetables too?”  And he’s only six.  (A week or two later he tried a more suave tactic: “Mom, this looks so good, I don’t even want to eat it!”)  It’s also hard to set aside years and years worth of acquired favorite recipes.  Because of the various dietary and allergy issues of my loved ones, I have always been aware of how eating differently from others becomes a social issue, but I did not realize how very awkward being vegetarian would feel.  After surgery this week, a friend offered to bring lunch.  I wanted to accept, and I did, but I had to mention I was vegetarian and if that was too inconvenient, I would just like the company.  It feels like a constant series of dilemmas.  Every day.  Every meal.  I believe, though, that as we get used to it, it will start to feel more natural.

Yesterday, as I was making homemade granola bars while standing on one foot  (yes, I’m that far over the top,) I got to thinking about all of the stuff we do that started out feeling uncomfortable or difficult:  cutting out wheat, milk, eggs, fish and nuts.  Composting.  Cloth napkins and washcloths.  Reusable containers.  Unprocessed food.  No animals.  Little TV and no commercials.  And why do we do these tiny, nagging, daily things?  They are very small things, each of them, and the problems of the world are very big.  Sure it’s not fair for me to eat meat when the land used to feed my meat could feed six other people instead.  But will the meat I am not eating really be noticed?  Will the meat industry scale down it’s operation because one person abstained from their products?  Not likely.  Have I saved six people who would otherwise starve to death?  Not necessarily.  Is there any guarantee that if I eat well I will not suffer from some terrible disease?  Of course not.  So sometimes, the siren song of convenience is very powerful.  What if we just went back to living like everyone else?  Would it really make a difference?

For me, the answer is yes, it makes a difference.  For one thing, every change must begin somewhere, and I am not the first.  I recently watched Food Inc, which has the potential to be incredibly discouraging.  How can one person ever succeed against corporations that own everything, including the government and regulatory bodies?  Well, if we’re talking about changing the world, one person can’t.  But one person can and must and every day does take a stand on one side or the other.  In a capitalist society, one person votes with her dollar.  If I start buying organic produce, and others start buying organic produce, the grocery stores will buy more organic produce.  More organic farms will become financially viable.  It might happen.  But if I do nothing, why should anyone else?  I cannot change the whole world, but I can change one person, and, seeing that I am the one who makes the meals around here, I can maybe change four people, or at least exert some heavy influence.  And I have a few similarly nutty friends taking the journey with me.  Why should I expect more of others than I expect of myself? 

But it’s more than being the first to take a stand; it’s more than being the last straw; it’s more than being a drop in a bucket.  You get the idea.  There is one thing that gets completely transformed by the daily decision to be a little different and inconvenient and annoying.

C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, suggests that hell is not something into which a person is cast by an angry God.  In his version of heaven, everyone gets to make the choice: heaven or hell.  The thing is, all the decisions you made during your earthly life have prepared you to make that final decision.  I see it like training for a triathlon.  Sure, it’s possible that if you spend decades sitting on your recliner eating chips and never go swimming or biking or running, you might possibly be able to slog your way through, say, an Ironman, if your immortal soul depended on it.  But probably not.  And more importantly, you might not even have the courage to try it.  Likewise, if you spend a lifetime not caring, going along with what’s “normal” or what’s easy or what just happens without a lot of introspection, well, you might not be ready to choose correctly when it comes time to do so.  It’s practice.  It’s training.  Sure, it’s tiring and time-consuming and doesn’t leave much time for watching TV or shopping, and yes, I still remember how delicious meat can be.  But with each little decision (garbage or compost, homemade or processed, more laundry or more trash, what’s available or what’s counter-cultural) I get a little more used to making choices based less on what’s easy or comfortable and more on what I believe to truly be responsible and compassionate and good.

I doubt that Jesus is ever going to speak to me and ask me if I recycled and composted and ate in an environmentally sustainable way.  Those are real issues, but they are my issues, specific to my circumstances, my location in history and geography, the choices I have the power to make.  People with fewer or greater resources or different political or environmental situations and responsibilities might have different issues entrusted to them.  No, the question Lewis is talking about is not part of a standardized test, and we don’t all need to study the same stuff.  But from what I can tell, the thing that is always the same about questions Jesus puts to people is whether or not they are willing to walk away from what’s easy and normal and comfortable for the sake of doing what’s impossible and crazy and inconvenient and caring.  I like to think of myself in training, one banana peel at a time.

Maybe it's just not about me

The last couple of days have felt like wasted days to me.  I get to the end of them and think that I’ve accomplished nothing, failed to rejoice in much or make any sort of difference on the planet.  Nothing really rotten has happened, but nothing very inspiring either.  Just basic everyday survival, and what’s the point of that?  Well, maybe there is a point that has not yet revealed itself.  Perhaps every little thing we do and say matters to someone somewhere.  Today’s blessing was the knowledge that on a throw-away day I barely remember from a little over a year ago, something I said and subsequently forgot lived on and changed someone’s life for the better. 

One issue on which I have spent a fair amount of semi-wasted time the last few days is whether or not I should have surgery this coming Tuesday.  I have had foot pain for a number of months.  I ran for a few low mileage weeks in late fall, but otherwise I have not run since the marathon in mid-October.  That’s a lot of weeks of not-running for me.  And as a result of all that rest…  nothing changed.  Sometimes I even felt like the problem was getting worse, and so I was finally ordered an MRI which revealed a “loose body” in the big toe joint under the ball of my foot.  Apparently, that explains the pain.  A relatively minor surgery should fix me right up, and I should be back to normal in a month or two.  I am tired of having a sore foot and of having it restrict my running and biking and yoga and going on walks and hanging around my house barefoot and wearing pretty shoes to church, so I agreed to have the surgery.  I saw the doctor on Monday.  Of course, my foot didn’t hurt on Monday, but I suspected that was temporary.  I’ve been faked out by it before.  Then it didn’t hurt on Tuesday.  I went running on Wednesday, and it hurt for a few minutes but then was not all that bad.  So I ran a little again on Thursday.  Still pretty good.  I ran this morning in the rain.  It felt fine.  Gah!  So my resolution is deteriorating.   I will have to make a decision by Monday.  Part of me really hates the idea of surgery if I can possibly avoid it.  Part of me says I should just get the darn thing removed and have done with it and not have worry about it every time I run or bike or walk or try to lunge (yes, I like to know I could lunge if I wanted to do so.)

Anyway, in order to have the surgery, I had to have a routine physical, and since I was a bit overdue for my annual exam anyway, this morning I saw the nurse practitioner I’ve been seeing for a few years now.  I like her, and she’s been very sympathetic and helpful.  In the process of being my caregiver, she has learned a fair amount about my athletic endeavors.  Last year she confessed to me that she is secretly a little envious of my athleticism, even if it does bring on the occasional medical issue. 

In my experience, secretly being envious of someone else’s job or hobby or sport is a pretty good indication that you secretly want to and ought to do that thing.  I used to secretly envy teachers, even as I outwardly and even inwardly declared I had no intentions of teaching.  My inner teacher was a secret even from myself until finally I listened to my envy and tried it out.  My repressed inner teacher was thereafter liberated, and even though I am not currently teaching, she doesn’t bug me nearly as much as she did before I admitted her existence.  The same thing happened with triathlons.  As much as I truly love running, a little voice used to whisper to me that triathletes are cooler than runners.  “Yeah, well, good for them.  No way I’m doing that.  NO WAY I am swimming across a lake,” I used to respond to my repressed triathlete.  She was devious enough to cause a neuro-muscular malfunction that ruined my running and forced me into the pool long enough to think a triathlon was worth a try—as a last resort.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun than I did in that first triathlon.  Plus, I do not know how many times this winter, foot aching, I’ve been thankful to have become a swimmer, to have that to fall back on when the road are iced over or when, say, an unidentified loose body is lodged in my first metatarsal joint.  Those quiet voices of longing, envy or discomfort are worth listening to on occasion.

So I told Sarah, my CNP, that her secret little envy means that she is really a runner at heart, and maybe she should just try it.  Just for a few minutes.  Just to see.  And then I forgot we even had that conversation.  I went home and put off coming back until I was forced back. 

When Sarah walked into the room this morning, I almost did not recognize her.  Her hair was longer, yes, and had been highlighted.  Interestingly, since I had lowlights put in my hair this fall and also grew my hair out, we have almost the same hair, but that is not my point.  I was sure that the difference was not just in her hair.  I thought she looked thinner too, especially in her face.  I almost said, “Wow!  You look great!”  but I don’t really know her that well.  Maybe it was a sensitive issue.  I might have been misremembering.  And who am I to say such a thing anyway?  After we discussed my needs and my foot situation, she told me to change and that while she was examining me, she had a good story to tell me.  It was a lovely story, actually.

Last spring, not long after my last visit, she started walking.  She thought about what I said; she thought about the possibility that there was a runner somewhere inside.  So she ran for one minute at a time.  Just to see.  It went OK.  So she decided to try three minutes.  Then five minutes.  Then she ran a mile.  I saw right where this story was headed, and you probably can too.  She ran a 5K at the arboretum and beat her goal time.  She lost 30 pounds.  She lost enough weight that she had a gall bladder attack, which apparently sometimes happens to people who lose a lot of weight.  She sprained an ankle running.  She had gall bladder surgery.  And the worst part of recovery?  After about a week of not running, she starts to go crazy.  She is a runner.  And now she knows it.  She will be running the Shamrock Shuffle 8K this spring.  8K!!  She says she has no marathon ambitions, and quite honestly, at this point, I rather think that’s good for her.  But more good for her is that she went out and tried it and changed her life and has one more thing to love, one more way to enjoy her own body and her time on this planet.  She looks wonderful and feels good about herself.

So these last couple days were perhaps not as wasted as I have been assuming they were.  I may feel that I have very little show for them, but maybe, just maybe, it’s not all about me.  Maybe, hopefully, someone else has something to show for them.  Maybe, hopefully, it doesn’t really matter if I serve leftovers several times in the same week and my house is a mess and I didn’t get anything “done.”  Maybe, hopefully, God is in the details and the moments/hours/days that are, to me, not worth remembering are very memorable to someone else because I was in them.  Maybe, hopefully, when I’m not doing much, I’m still doing good.