Why it's OK to spend my Sunday afternoon writing this

I think I might be a discipline addict. Perhaps the reason I get to feeling so bogged sometimes is that my answer to everything is a new discipline. Training plans for running, Daily Guide to Prayer to recommend scripture passages, a promise to myself that I will write every day, and now, as if that was not enough, I started a new book called 31 Days to Clean: Having a Martha House the Mary Way. There are reasons that discipline is good though. It works for me with running. I need the help with the cleaning and the ordinances to keep it from getting overwhelming, and I believe that it is necessary with writing as well.

What I really want to write about today is running, so I'll get to that, but I need to take a quick side-trip to the world of writing. Or, more accurately, to being visible and vulnerable, and writing is one way I am doing that. I was going to write this today on a sheet of white paper and tuck it away somewhere that no one, not even I, would ever see it. But I am struggling struggling struggling (still, again, always) with calling. How am I to be making a difference on this planet given my particular circumstances and non-helpful array of gifts? How can I use the things I do and enjoy to be of service to others? Oh, I'd love to write some life-changing novel and become esteemed and called upon to give inspiring talks.... But here's the problem: I don't seem to have a novel in me just now. And who is that goal serving? Well, I do want to bless people as I have been blessed by some really touching novels. I do. But the esteemed part.... Yeah, that's about me, not you. (I intend to come back to that pride thing in regards to running.) The content I do have available to me is this kind of thing. I've been writing in my journal--sometimes daily, sometimes not quite--since early on in high school. Well over twenty years. Mostly, it's petty and personal and doesn't seem the least bit like service. Who needs to read what I write about my morning run or the trials of trying to clean up tar and bleach simultaneously? But lots of people have read "Why You Should Run," which is really just a spiffed-up journal entry. And some people far away and who I've never met have been inspired by it. And today at church a friend I didn't know read my blog or ran (although I should have remembered this) told me that she liked it. And it occurs to me that writing about running, and maybe sometimes about some other things, might be an act of service. A small, trivial one. A start. And maybe, sometimes, the conversation could include some more important stuff. At the least, it might let people know me enough to say hello, enough to call upon me when I am needed, enough to plant a relationship seed.

Hopefully, that's what happened today. I've been working on some adult education stuff for church this weekend, and so I am reminded that we are supposed to be practicing talking the walk. Definitely we are called to act. We are called to feed the hungry and visit the sick and imprisoned. But we are also called to commune, to include, to form friendships, to be fishers of men, and--dare I say this?--I believe that words actually are as powerful as deeds when it comes to that sort of thing. It sounds too easy. But to some, it also sounds too hard. It's more comfortable for some of us to pitch in and do with a quiet smile and a friendly wave than to be still and reach that wave into a handshake and the do into a tell. It seems like a lot of vulnerability with no visible result. You can build a house for the homeless and see that it is done. You can cook a meal and watch the hungry eat it. Most of the time, when you send yourself out into the world, you have no idea if it has done any good. I believe, though, that if opening your doors and windows helps someone find a home in your presence, it is worth the risk.

After church today, not being burdened with a husband eager to get out of church, I got to spend some time in fellowship hall. I closed the place down, actually. My daughter had a piece of cake and some friends and some unnecessary bleachers to play on, so she was happy. I talked to some people I needed to touch base with about church stuff, and then I noticed a woman with small children who looked familiar, but I couldn't place her. She wasn't talking to anyone, but she was there in fellowship hall.

Back story: A few years ago I took a trip to the east coast to visit a good friend who had recently relocated there and was having a hard time finding a new community of friends. She is naturally far more outgoing and extroverted than I am. Not shy. Really friendly. And not finding friends. Huh. She commented that she didn't know her neighbors. I went out for a run one morning and was greeted by the woman who lived across the street. She apologized for not saying anything the past few months but now wanted to welcome me to the neighborhood. I thanked her and suggested she make an effort to say the same to my friend who actually lived there.  A day late and a euro short, lady.  I began to understand the problem.  On Sunday we went to church.  Afterwards, in an attempt to forge some connections, we went downstairs to coffee hour in the church basement.  There were donuts for sale (feeding not the hungry, necessarily, unless they came to church with cash,) and we bought a couple just to have a reason to stick around.  (A shout out here to the people who brought and served cake today in honor of their 60th wedding anniversary.  It kept the family I was about to meet in the fellowship hall long enough for me to meet them.)  All of the tables in that east coast church basement were either empty or filled to capacity (note to church: leave some empty seats at every table!), so my friend, her husband, and I decided to start a new table and hope that people would join us.  We thought it had worked when, only a few minutes later, someone came up to us and asked if the chairs next to us were taken.  We put on our happiest glowy faces, and my friend is master of the happy friendly face, and said, "No!! Please!!  They're yours!!"  At which point the questioner thanked us and took said chairs over to a crowded table that had run out of chairs, leaving us at our empty table without the possibility of being joined.  Ugh.  Don't worry: my friend is in a better place now with friends galore, but that visit made a huge impression on me.  How NOT to love your neighbor.

Emboldened by my recent committee efforts and my long-ago donut experience, I said to the woman, as she was bent over dealing with a small child, "You look familiar, but I cannot place you.  I'm Cara."  "Oh," she answered, "I heard you speak some time ago about learning how to do triathlons.  Maybe that's when you saw me.  I haven't made it here much lately."  I had, some time ago, agreed to be part of the message at the women's advent service.  It was slightly scary but surprisingly painless, and it meant that I was out there just enough to have a connection today.  And so we began a genuine conversation, sparked by questions about running and running injuries and ending with an e-mail address and an invitation to participate in a future gathering.  It may be working, this being out there thing, this sharing of trivial stories and silly details.

Time to dance on the table

This morning I watched, puzzled, as my mother-in-law dug around in the cabinet for my favorite mug and then poured juice into it. OK. Whatever. The next time I looked her way, she had found an old juice glass and filled it with cereal. And that was when I realized that I am way too uptight.

Why You Should Run

Because some night you will not sleep well, and morning will come both too soon and not soon enough. Later, you will not remember standing up, only finding yourself already up, noticing that although this time last week the days were in the 90s and the mornings were still hot and humid, today it is 44 degrees outside, and you do not remember how to dress for a run in cool weather. You will put on a fluorescent orange long-sleeved shirt, because it is still very dark out at 5:30am this time of year, and you will forget to bring gloves.

You should run because even if you went to bed anxious and grumpy, thinking about all of the things that need to get done in an inadequate amount of time in the coming week, you feel like you have a secret advantage, a stop-time machine, perhaps, when you are running through dark neighborhoods full of still-sleeping people. Or if the people in the houses are, in fact, awake, they are still lying in bed, waiting to hit the snooze button again, or standing blearily under the hot shower. Their lights are off. Their children are asleep. The peace of early morning is irresistible, and it seeps into the muscles between your shoulders and your neck, and more things are possible than were last night. Or, perhaps, fewer things really matter.  This moment is about nothing beyond the hypnotic rhythm of your own feet, the effortless strength of your thighs, the feel of cool air on your calf muscles.

You should run because you need a chance to let it all out every now and then. Because you really don't want to scream or punch things in front of your children. Because your husband really is a nice guy who is doing his best. Because no one, not even the people who already love you, really wants to deal with the full force you, but the track doesn't mind. You should run because 400 meters is just long enough to require both concentration and full effort. There isn't room in your head or your arms or you soul for anything else. You have to remind yourself at every footfall to push push push push. To be strong in your abdomen and light in your heels. Not to dig your nails into your palms, but to relax your grip, to fly through discomfort with as much peace as possible. You should run because your heart pounds in your ears and your lungs push on your stomach, but after you've crossed the line in precisely the second you wished to do so, you get a couple of minutes to calm down and look around, and you do.

You should run because some morning, three sandhill cranes might fly, croaking, just over your head and stalk around the infield while you run around them. They will pretend that you are not there, you crazy human running around and around before sunrise. They are nearly bigger than you are, anyway. Or maybe a hawk will swoop down and perch on the scoreboard, watching the field to your south for signs of snakes or rodents. He will squint at you, as if not sure whether or not to believe in you, not sure he recognizes your particular breed, but he will look it up later in his human-watching book. The killdeer will skitter across the track just ahead of you, not wanting to be trampled, but too silly to remember they can fly.

You should run because halfway through your workout, you will notice that the morning is light enough to show you your breath on the calm-down laps. When you are two repeats from finishing, the sun will have risen enough to blaze over the rooftops of the no-longer-sleeping neighborhood and blind you on the back straight so that you cannot see your watch to know if you are hitting your paces. You do not mind.

You should run because as you are running toward home across dew-soaked fields, the first middle school teachers will be arriving in the parking lot, and the high school kids will be peering out from their thick brushed-forward bangs, and you will know that for them, for you, this is another ordinary day, and thank God for that.

You should run because when you arrive home, sweaty and shaky-legged, your seven-year-old might not want his oatmeal and will dawdle instead of brushing his teeth and putting on his shoes, and as you gently shove him out the front door so he doesn't miss the bus, he will tell you that oh yeah, this weekend he had music homework he forgot about until now. You should run because your four year old's music class has been canceled and rescheduled for the same time as preschool. You should run because the kitchen is still a mess from last night's dinner and rabbits have eaten the delphinium you planted last week. But no matter what may not get done during the day or what may go wrong, you have already had an hour that was yours, and for that hour, all the world was as it should be.

Tomorrow, you should run again.

Summer ends

I did start to write about the triathlon I did a week and a half ago, but it's been very very hard to find time to write anything this summer.  Writing is a thing that I feel I ought to attempt to do with some sort of discipline, something like the way I run, but it also feels self-indulgent when there are children and a messy house and places to go.  But today is rainy, so no one is in a hurry to go anywhere.  I've let the kids watch TV for far too long.  It's the last day of summer, and I am feeling OK with being all manners of self-indulgent.  I've already had a slice of zucchini/carrot/ginger bread this morning.  Just because it was there.  And today I am looking ahead toward days of renewed structure and feel the need to mark the occassion and meditate upon it.

In the past, I've been excited for Adam as he starts a new year, but mostly I've been weepy and nostalgic that my baby is grown up and going off into the world without me, to learn how to be something other than mine.  He goes off and does and learns things that I am not at all a part of, both because I cannot be and because he would not choose me to be.  As the bus drives away with my boy, I miss him.  Our house feels funny.  The day feels sort of empty.

But this year, except for just now as I wrote that and started to tear up, I have been looking forward to school starting up again, even though it means that my boy will ride off on a bus and even my little girl will walk into a school building without me twice a week.  I haven't looked forward to the starting of school this much since I was a little kid.

I used to secretly disdain mothers who said things like that or who would say things like "how many days until school starts?"  I will now publicly apologize for my secret thoughts.  I see now that there might have been something more going on than just some lazy desire for someone else to take over the job of raising a child.  I do not believe myself to be lazy.  I do not want someone else to raise my child.  But I do want him to go off to school.

I think what's happening here is similar to how we as people deal with the change in the seasons: the first snow is beautiful and exciting, but by early March, we cannot wait for it to melt.  By August we are more irritable about the mosquitos and the need for a heat index.  We are ready to tun off the air conditioning and love the occassional whiff of autumn on the breeze; we are enchanted by the red appearing on the apples and think wearing a sweater would be lovely.  So too with family life.  We had a great time spending all day every day together: going to swimming lessons, camping, travelling, having picnics in the park, playing with toys for endless hours with no concern for the clock, but now it is time for something else.  The routine we needed a break from in June now seems like a break from the every-day-is-different chaos of summer.I look at our September calendar, already stuffed to bursting with the start-up of school (we have back-to-it events [all involving food: a corn boil and two ice cream socials] on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) and park district classes and cub scouts and soccer and PTO stuff and Doug's high school stuff and church classes, and while a part of me inhales sharply, braces myself, and thinks, "here we go again," another part of me sort of grins: it's good stuff.  It will be fun.  We will learn and grow and be with our community.  It's energizing.  This craziness coming up is why we come back from vacation at all.  It is how we survive the decreasing hours of daylight and the eventual death of the over-abundant cucumber plants.  We are not busy against our wills but because there are just so many things worth doing.  School is one of them.  I loved school, and I want my children to have that same transformative experience.  I am happy for them.

I suppose it may also be possible that I have learned from experience.  One can always hope, right?  Yes, my son has a whole life away from me at school, but then he comes home in the early afternoon, and I get to be his mom still.  Someday he will go off and not come back.  Some day he will move out.  He might get married.  He might get a job far away.  He might just realize that his mom is a wacky and intense person.  But for now, he is just going to second grade, and he'll bring his homework back for me to force him to complete.  I'll still be the one who packs his lunch and who deals with his allergies.  I'll still be the one who takes him to soccer practice and to play dates.  I'll be the one to whom he will show his lego creations and read funny poems and jokes.  I'll be the one who sets bedtime.  And those hours while he's at school?  Well let's just say that he and his sister will not be bickering and whining, the mosquito equivalent in the domestic weather of August.

So this morning I sat here and wrote, and my kids watched PBS kids for over an hour (gasp) and are now happily playing in their rooms, one huming and one whistling, one of them still in pajamas as we approach lunchtime.  It's storming, so we are blowing off the errands we maybe ought to do because today we can still do that.  Tomorrow our busy lives resume, and I may feel a little weepy as my boy drives off on the bus.  But then we have a lot of things we need to get done and not many hours before we have to be here for when he gets back off the bus. 

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is dehydrated

There was a time, oh, a long long time ago before I had children, when I used to run several races per summer and with very little expectation.  I did them because they were there, because they were fun and challenging, because someone handed you water mid-run, and because other people were doing them.  If I did better than previous races, I was happy about that.  My ambitions were modest.

After I quit my paying gig and finished grad classes, running changed.  It became less of an incidental and more of something around which I centered my days.  I planned races in advance; I looked up or borrowed training schedules; I set goals and trained to meet them.  I used running to get me up in the morning, to get me through the day, the week, the season.  I am grateful to running for being that for me when I was in the otherwise landmark-barren wilderness of early motherhood.

The problem with false idols, though, is that eventually they fall over or crumble or get lost or stolen.  When it comes to athletic excellence, my spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak.  It gets pregnant.  It gets neuro-muscular dysfunctions.  Muscles get strained or pulled.  Joints swell up and get stiff.  It has limits far below what I am willing to endure.  And when injury happens, as it always does, it takes longer to recover than I expect, and I am sad and lost and isolated from the mists of early morning and the full force of the heat of mid-summer.   

Having just reemerged from the dark days of injury, uncertainty, surgery, and rehabilitation, I intended for this summer to be one of rejoicing in my recovered ability to get out and go, to push, to be outside in and part of the elements: to run in the rain and the heat, to go fast or far.  To appreciate. 

But somewhere in the midst of appreciating it occurred to me that I spent a good half a year getting most of my exercise in the pool and in the saddle of a bike.  And, on top of that, my foot was recovering more slowly than I wanted.  I couldn’t just jump back into the mileage where I left off.  Hence, I supplement with some bike rides and swims.  Since I cannot get in shape for a marathon this fall, and since even the half marathon seems like it will be a long-shot, I thought I ought to sign up for a triathlon.  For fun.  Because it's there and I think I can.  And because the goody bag includes a new bike shirt, and I need another one.  Why not earn it by doing something cool?  So I signed up for my third olympic-distance triathlon.

I signed up only a month before the event, which, even if I was going to be home and have tons of free time for the entire month, is just not enough to do a real training program.  Most plans take 8-16 weeks.  Plus, one of the weeks left to me will be family vacation: no bike, no pool.  And one of those weeks should be taper.  Hmm.  That leaves me, oh, this week to train.  Suddenly, the "I'm just going to do this for fun" attitude became a little harder to maintain.  Panic lurks just beneath my one-day-at-a-time exterior.  I got up in the middle of the night to write down a training schedule for the next week.

I meant to do a long run and a long bike ride over the weekend, but I realized I had not been swimming much for the last two weeks.  So Saturday I swam.  It was a good workout.  I couldn't run that day anyway, having run the previous two, and my legs were truly tired.  Sunday I did a 51 mile bike ride, which was also good, but it was hot, and I didn't feel like doing a brick long-bike, long run in that heat.  I was pretty much finished after 51 miles.  (Sort of dampened any thoughts of half ironman I had been secretly harboring.)  Yesterday was my kettlebell class, so I only had time for five miles after that.  Which meant today had to be the long run.  But now I haven't been swimming for several days, so I was going to do that mid-morning.  I had it all worked out in my head so that I was getting at least a little of everything. 

Alas.  I woke up this morning to windows that had not only steamed up on the outside but were also dripping.  I had read, only two nights ago, about how/when to modify running workout goals based on dew point.  Anything over 74 degrees, it said, should be written off.  The heat is just going to be too oppressive.  The dew point this morning was 76 degrees.  I had put the long run off for so long and for so many different reasons that I decided I had to just go for it.  I vowed to go easy on the pace and to reassess when it still made sense to turn around early.

I ended up going 11.5 miles, a little over two and a half miles more than my longest run of the last nine months.  My surgery foot was fine: only a little stiff and sore after I stopped and was stretching.  I can live with that.  My hip occasionally felt a little uneven, but I concentrated on form and never lost control, so I can live with that too.  I didn't even feel like I was really being affected by the heat that much, other than being thoroughly drenched and having squishy shoes, until I was already on the way home, and there was nothing much to do but keep going.  Those last couple of miles, which were mostly uphill, I was lamenting that 11.5 miles would feel so hard when just last year I was in shape enough that 11.5 was common.  Endurance is so hard to win and so easy to lose. 

Upon arriving home, I took a cool shower, but I was still hot and sweaty and was apparently acting unwell enough that Doug, who has left me home alone with a stomach virus and a toddler, asked if he should stay home from work.  Although I didn't feel it happening at the time, apparently I gave myself something akin to heat exhaustion.  Boo.  I lost a little over three pounds of sweat, which is almost 3% of my body weight.  I just didn't have it in me to do another workout of any quality, even one in a pool.

Another plan to get it all in ruined.   Another occasion to accept that I am naught but fallible flesh.  Another reason why this triathlon should be done for fun, for the finish, and for the shirt. 

Vacation From

We are home from a weekend of camping.  We left around noon on Friday and returned home around 6pm on Sunday.  Not a very long vacation by most standards, but it felt like we had been gone for a long, long time.  I was the first one into the house, and stepping into the laundry/mud room, usually a cramped place that torments me with its constant dirt and piles of shoes, I felt like I was stepping into the height of sterility and extravagance.  After dinner, I was so very excited to take a shower (!!) and to sleep on a bed with cotton sheets in a temperature-controlled room.  The sign of a good vacation, I thought: it makes you feel better about being home.   Deep, grateful sigh.

And then I paused.  Because it occurred to me that there is another kind of vacation:  in this world of well-off suburbia there is vacation from and vacation to.  There are people who vacation to all-inclusive resorts, where you pay for someone else to do the cooking and cleaning, where the towels are washed every day for you, where there are vast pools or hot tubs, even next to the ocean.  Where there is a menu selection for every meal that isn’t an all-you-can-eat buffet.  Where Disney characters entertain your children while you sip an adult beverage.  Where the women are evenly tanned and wear mascara and expensively casual sandals.  Where you lie around all day and drink all night.  Or so I’ve heard.  There are probably more luxuries associated with those sorts of vacations that I haven’t heard about.  I have no first-hand experience. 

Suddenly, it struck me as strange that I have no first-hand experience with such a vacation.  I strained my memory to come up with something that might qualify as staying in the lap of luxury, and I couldn’t come up with anything.  As a child, vacation almost always consisted of a trip to a cabin in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.  The cabin had a small kitchen with antiquated and only questionably functional appliances: the toaster, for example, was a metal pyramid you could lean bread against and set over the burner on the stove.  And no, I am not 95 years old.  There was a similarly perfunctory bathroom with a mostly-functioning toilet and small shower.  There was one bedroom large enough for two double beds, one sleeping space short of what was needed for the five of us, so one lucky person got to sleep on the sofa in the kitchen.  We fought over that privilege because it meant not sleeping within feet of both parents, one that snores, and in the same bed with a sister.  The floor was always rather dingy and gritty with sand; the bathroom floor was always wet.  And there you have it: vacation.  We were near a lake, so we considered ourselves lucky. 

We did take a couple of trips to Ocean City during my teen years.  We did not stay in one of the fancy high-rise hotels with complimentary towels and beach umbrellas and drink services (and, strangely enough, pools.)  We rented a little condo a block or two from the ocean and used the public beach.  We packed sandwiches for lunch and hauled everything down to the beach for the day.  We sometimes went out for dinner.  We’d walk along the shore at dusk or go for ice cream.  It was, in my mind, all-out heaven.

Since then, my tastes for vacation have become increasingly more far-flung and adventurous: scuba diving in the Florida Keys, kayaking and hiking in national parks in Oregon and Washington and Colorado and Maine. The Galapagos Islands. Montreal and Quebec.  Death Valley.  Never once, even on our honeymoon, did we stay in a fancy-schmancy hotel.  We’ve stayed in some lovely places, clean and in great locations.  In particular, I love a hotel near a hot-spring, even if it’s so unmodern as not to have telephones or televisions or internet hook-up.  We have stayed in hotels we never saw in daylight, so the existence of pools and tennis courts and movie channels was not only unknown but irrelevant.

Since having children, our destinations have been closer to home, usually a rented condo or small cabin near a big lake.  And since having a child with multiple food allergies, our vacations have not even included much dining out.  Since last year’s job loss and ensuing examination of expenses, our vacations have been further reduced to $15 per night campsites in state parks.  And so….

Vacation, now, so far from the luxury hotel with impressive pool, involves multiple days in a row of sweating and getting muddy and bug spray and no showers.  The food is what we can make over a wood fire.  If a piece of it falls into the dirt, we consider for a moment whether or not we should eat it.  (We almost never do.  I am still me, after all.)  We use one small towel for all four us, shaking out the bugs and tree pollen between uses.  Gretchen’s hair did not get brushed between the time I put it in ponytails Friday morning and the time I took it out of the ponytails for her bath Sunday night.  Adam asked if he could wear the same shirt to bed he had worn all day and then wear it again the following day.  I considered for a moment and declared that if he really wanted to, why not?  I have been known to do that while camping.  We spend all day every day outside, and our schedule is reduced to one or two activities per day: a hike, a canoe ride, an hour or two of fishing. 

Considering this and contrasting it in my mind with what I imagine other family vacation are probably like, for a moment I was jealous.  I will admit that I thought I wouldn’t mind a bit of luxury.  But then I really tried to imagine myself lying beside a pool all day, caring that my bathing suit is faded and was purchased at Dick’s Sporting Goods some years ago, going to a fancy dinner and being late because I have to tame my hair.  And you know?  I can’t imagine that I would be any happier doing that.  At least, not after a day or two.  Because what I really love about camping is the shift that happens in myself and in my family.

When we are camping, I think we revert back to our best selves.  At home, I am furious that I have to spend my time cleaning up after other people, scrubbing mildew out of showers and trying to keep the house in a state that I imagine a house like mine ought to be kept.  My day is a series of interruptions.  I forget how to have fun, and I get bogged down with all of the stuff that hasn’t gotten done and never will get done.  I’ll confess that sometimes I run just to get away from the person I am when I’m not running.  When we are camping, though, I don’t worry if my hair is messy or my clothes are dirty or sweaty, and I really don’t worry that my shoes are unfashionable.  Nothing I do is weird.  In a campground, anything goes.  When there is a moment of downtime, I pick up my book.   While a child is napping and the other is playing a card game with my husband, I have nothing to do but read, and I do so without guilt, feeling, even as I get pelted with acorns from squirrels in the trees above, even as I swat away flies, even as I keep moving my collapsible chair to stay in the shade, that I am living a life of decadence and luxury.  Heaven.  We take walks to the toilet, and, if we are in a really deluxe campground, longer walks to the sinks and showers.  While we are camping, my husband is in charge, and when a plate of hot food is set before me (yes, I will admit that one of the perks of being vegetarian is that my tolerance is nevermore tested by choking down semi-thawed naked chicken nuggets,) I am truly grateful and appreciative.  When we roast s’mores, I don’t keep count of how many I’ve had.   Instead of trying to be in control of what everyone eats, how they are spending their time, and how much food has been dropped on the newly cleaned floor during the course of a meal, I deal with the genuine crises (bugs on dinner plates, scraped knees, bathroom emergencies, sudden rainstorms) and let the rest of what happens just happen.   The closer I am to the dirt, the less I worry about the dirt.  The scruffier we look, the less I care about appearances.  The less there is, the less I need.   When there is no schedule, interruptions never bother me.   While camping, life slows down and distills to its basic elements: eating, trips to the toilet, avoiding poison ivy, being still, being out in the real world: the heat, the rain, the bugs, the darkness.

I’m not saying that if someone offered me the chance to try out some luxury, I would turn it down.  But I don’t believe it’s a thing I will ever prioritize.  Even offered free luxury, I can’t envision myself enjoying it much more than a day or two.  I hope to camp in increasingly more interesting places: places out west, places up north, places with mountains and geysers and canyons.  I am yearning to travel and see the world that is out there and not visible from my Midwestern suburb.  I want to hike up to the top of creation and back.  I want to bump into elk and sea lions.  But given that neither free time nor money is abundant enough to squander, I don’t foresee myself ever valuing the accommodations over the nature.  I want to vacation to more places than I can possibly get to in a lifetime, but more importantly, I want to vacation from the person I sometimes become living in the midst of a shiny, clean, and well-decorated suburb.  Let’s be honest: it’s not really vacation if you have to worry about your hair.

Thy Kingdom Came

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”  Matthew 5:4

In church one recent Sunday, we were asked to discuss the things that we know for sure about God.  Honestly, I couldn't come up with much.  Frank said he knows there is a God.  I couldn't in all sincerity claim even to know that for sure.  Things were looking pretty ungodly to me.  Since then, though, I've been taught a few things I'd like to add to my list. 

Jesus spends a lot of his red print time trying to convince us that the Kingdom of God is weird and unexpected.  It's not like a mighty tree; it's like a mustard weed.  The prodigal son gets a party after dividing the inheritance and wasting it away in profligate living.  Jesus hangs out with lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, fishermen, and partiers.  The enemy is the friend.  Death is not death.  If you're really thinking about any of it, and not just hearing the same stories you've heard hundreds of times, it's pretty clear that the Kingdom of God is crazy, scruffy, ugly, and somehow enchanting anyway.  But even if you are thinking about these things, reading thoughtfully and considering how they might look in your own life, it's shocking to come face to face with it.

We spent the following Tuesday getting ready for my uncle's funeral.  I've already written about him and some of the conflicting feelings we had about his death.  It only got worse as more and more of the mess was revealed.  I drove to his funeral with my parents, and we had one of those rare real conversations that for some reason doesn’t occur all that often in our family.  My mom cannot let go of the indescribable filth in which he was living, and since she had to sort through it for an entire weekend, I don’t blame her for that.  My dad had some theories about how some of it happened, but eventually all of them break down.  How can a person go so far past the line and not care, not even seem to notice?  Yeah, leaving tonight’s mess to clean up in the morning and then not getting to it in the rush to get somewhere else makes sense.  How often do I do that?  But eventually things calm down and you clean it up.  And I would never ever leave meat rotting on my floor, finish a can of Coke and drop it, or see the bugs infesting everything I owned and decide to buy a little roach motel.  Honestly, for as creepily brilliant as my uncle was, he was also a complete moron.  Or else he was the laziest most disgusting person any of us had ever come across.  It just didn’t make sense, or else it only made sense in a world without grace.

I had shown my family what I wrote about Rick, and they all said it was right-on.  So in conversation, from the advantage of being a generation removed, from the sheltered position of beloved niece, I tried to remind us, occasionally, of his good qualities.  I have seen them, although, truthfully, only a little, and not enough to wipe out for us all the far more powerful and tangible reality of his brokenness.  We arrived at the funeral home, my aunts, a cousin, my parents and I, still not sure how to feel, and really not sure how a funeral service for such a person would turn out.  We all commented on how bizarre and surreal the whole thing was.  We were all shocked and grieved and a little bit nervous and uneasy.  In our experience, Uncle Rick was frustrating and uncomfortable to be around as a rule, and we fully expected his funeral to reflect that.  We wondered if anyone but us would come.

And that, my gentle readers, is when the Kingdom of God arrived on the scene.

Right at the beginning of the visitation a few people arrived.  They were normal, friendly, kind people.  Some were from his church.  Some were from work.  Some were wearing suits.  Then more people showed up.  The people from his work were in shock.  He had gone to work on Wednesday night/Thursday morning, called in sick Thursday night, and when everyone arrived back at work on Tuesday morning after the holiday weekend, they were told he had died.  They said they had no idea he was so sick.  They said work was very somber that day.  They all dropped everything to come to his funeral.  "Nice people!" we said to each other.  Really, very nice of them to come (especially for someone like Rick, we added in our heads.)  Then more people came.  The room in which the service was held was one of those double-long rooms that could probably be divided for very intimate services, and by the time the service began, it was perhaps more than two-thirds full.  Huh.

The pastor's address was excellent.  He used a passage from Isaiah and Romans 8:18-30:

¹⁸ I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ¹⁹ For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that^[h] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

 ²² We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³ Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

 ²⁶ In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. ²⁷ And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.

 ²⁸ And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who^[i] have been called according to his purpose. ²⁹ For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. ³⁰ And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

I remember thinking at the time that he had taken our mixed emotions and started to unmix them.  I felt better.  I felt better about being baffled by Rick’s life and death.  I felt better about Rick, and I felt better knowing that he had been in relationship with such a man as that pastor.  I felt, even, hopeful.  Maybe God had a secret and bizarre plan; maybe it was OK, even though I would never see how.  I thought, at the time, that I would remember that sermon for quite a while.  But now I don't remember much of it, because after the minister spoke, he invited others to speak.  I had not prepared anything.  I had written something, but it was not material for a memorial service, so I didn’t even bring it just in case.  I am the writer in my family, so if I had failed to come up with a eulogy, I honestly wasn't expecting many other people to have one.  I was wrong. 

The first person to speak was the leader of the "study club" at my uncle's church.  She was a retired teacher and had started a program to provide at-risk kids in grades 2-5 from a local school with a mentor.  She said she beat the bushes looking for volunteers, and Rick was one of the people who agreed to help.  The bubbly study club lady didn’t make a face at this point, but I have to wonder if she thought, “Oh great!” at the time.  I promise you, my uncle was unkempt looking, had no teeth and smelled funny.  There are reasons for that that no one at his church knew, but there was no way to avoid seeing and smelling him.  I have to wonder if the study club lady thought his participation was going to be interesting at best.  She never made any indication, though, that she was anything but grateful to him.  She was without doubt a woman with great compassion and grace in that regard, and thank God for her.  The first year, she gave Uncle Rick a little girl with an attraction to breaking the rules.  The little girl would not sit still and would not stay focused.  When my Uncle Rick found her exploring the sanctuary one day, he offered to give her a tour of the church.  My uncle, as we in his family know, didn’t like to play by anyone else’s rules.  When the study club lady told that story, we got it.  Brilliant.  Student #1 breakthrough.  My family and I looked at each other.  One of the frustrating things about Rick used to reach out to a child in need.  Perfect, but we had never thought of it.

My uncle’s student the second year was a boy with a behavior disorder.  He would get dropped off after school and be angry at the world.  The cheerful study club lady only pissed him off.  He was surly and uncooperative.  And then my uncle stepped in, said, “I got this,” and took over.  Ten minutes later, my broken uncle and his b.d. student were talking and laughing, leaning back in their chairs.  By the end of the session, the books were open and they were talking academics.  I physically felt my jaw dropping open a bit.

The third year in the program my uncle was given the toughest case, a girl who had been referred to the program repeatedly, a girl with whom no one had made any headway.  My uncle’s summary of her was that she was “working hard at becoming functionally illiterate.”  And yet, when he died, he had school materials for her in his car.  The study club lady looked at his picture and said, “I’m not letting you off the hook with this one.  You’ve got some big guns on your side now, and I expect to see evidence that you’re using them.”

I won’t attempt to write down everything everyone said.  The Disciple Bible Study teacher talked about Rick’s encyclopedic knowledge, surprising close reading skills, and photographic memory.  Of course, these things would not be apparent except for my Uncle’s willingness to share his opinions and to talk at length.  Yes, we knew that.  But the teacher said it was wonderful and added to discussion and that Rick never argued or corrected anyone without kindness.  His entire Disciple class was at the funeral.  They wouldn’t have missed it. 

A man stood up and said that he and Rick often stood around and shot the breeze while the man’s wife cleaned up.  We chuckled because of course Rick wasn’t involved in the cleaning up.  Although my uncle did not look the least bit athletic, his exceptional intelligence and memory, not to mention the amount of time he spent watching TV, gave him the ability to discuss all sports at length and with detail and depth.  So that’s what they usually talked about.  Then one day, the man told us, Rick said, “Well that’s enough of that.  What do you think of these new Broadway revivals?”  He then started to summarize and critique The Pajama Game.  The man raised his eyebrows, shrugged his shoulders and said, “And that’s all I’ve got….”  He was shaking his head as he returned to his seat while the rest of us laughed.  Yep.  Rick talked as if he knew everything about everything.  And maybe that wasn’t too far off the mark.  The hundreds of books in his apartment were too bug infested to consider saving, but his co-workers cleaned out his office and sent the personal items to my parents.  Among the three books he had at work were two political thrillers, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, with a number of bookmarks and dog-ears.  Seriously.        

Uncle Rick’s boss stood up and said that Rick was at work just as we had heard from everyone else.  He had worked at the same job for 28 years.  He was, by all accounts, very good at what he did and remembered every little thing that ever happened at work.  My dad told me Rick was once offered a promotion, but it meant moving to Indiana, and he couldn’t be bothered with that and so stayed in his same night job for the rest of his life.  When his current boss first arrived, he asked her how she could be his boss when she didn’t know anything.  Sometimes he would just mumble something incoherent as he walked past her.  But eventually she won his respect, and he would stop and talk in her office as he was leaving work and she was arriving.  They talked about their faith lives. 

The most amazing story, though, is worth repeating at some length.  My uncle’s church was Friendship United Methodist, and being Wesleyan, they believe in community.  Clearly, they also believe in grace.  They are encouraged, during the fellowship hour between services, to talk to people, to reach out, to be friendly, to be part of the community of faith.  My uncle, a loner who smelled and talked loudly and didn’t like to play by other people’s rules, nevertheless took this to heart.  The church secretary told us that Rick’s habit was to circle around the various conversations happening during the fellowship time until he found one to hover near.  He would stand outside the circle, listening, and then suddenly be in the midst of it.  I could picture that. 

The church secretary had, in this manner, talked to Rick in the past, although never about anything personal.  She had of course never mentioned to him that she was having some personal struggles.  One Sunday, while she was standing in a conversation group, Rick circled around the outside of the group, reached in, and dropped a bag at her feet.  “This is for you,” he muttered, and walked off.  Have I mentioned he was an unusual person?  I imagine conversation stopped while some eyebrows went up.  “What is it?” asked someone else in the group.  A third person picked it up and pulled from the bag a brand-new book with the receipt still in it.  The book she held up as a prop was not pristine and had, she said, been read everywhere, including the bathtub.  The book was titled God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours and looked like a self-help type of book with some spirituality sprinkled in.  She wasn’t much of a self-help book type.  I don’t blame her for setting the book aside.  A few days later when she saw Rick again, he asked her, “Have you read that book yet?”  She said she had not.  The following Sunday he accosted her again and asked, “Have you read that book yet?”  She explained that she was really busy and getting ready for a trip but would take the book with her on the plane.  She did so.  She said that she cried most of the five-hour flight to California because it felt like the book was written specifically for her, about her, maybe even by her.  She kept reading parts of it to her husband and saying, “Doesn’t that sound just like me?”  He verified later that she had been doing this even after the plane trip, sometimes calling him into the bathroom to read a passage.  She said the book spoke to her so deeply and was so exactly just what she needed that she keeps it next to her bed and expects she will read it over and over.  How did he know she needed that particular book?

When she returned from her trip and saw Rick at church, he asked again, “Have you read that book yet?”  She was able to say that she was almost done with it.  He asked her which chapter she liked best.  She was surprised that he had read the book, since it had come to her looking pristine and unopened, but then he said, “Chapter ten is my favorite.” 

She went home and reread chapter ten, which was titled, “God never gives us more than we were designed to carry.”  It was a chapter about a family with a Downs’ Syndrome child in the early 1970s, a time when more often than not such children were institutionalized and were nearly always marginalized.  To make matters worse, the mother died, leaving the father with five children, the youngest with Downs’ Syndrome.  The father, rather than treating his Downs’ Syndrome son as a burden, made him the center of the family, and when the father grew old enough that his children began to make arrangements for the care of the youngest sibling when the father passed away, they all wanted him.  The child who was different and disabled was not a burden but a blessing.  That resonated with my uncle.  And now with my family as well.

As my dad said at the funeral, Rick was a frustration to his family.  He always had been.  But the stories we heard that Tuesday night opened our eyes to the possibility—no, the reality—that no soul is too broken, too odd, too smelly, too opinionated, too irresponsible to be an instrument of the divine.  In fact, maybe people like my Uncle Rick have less getting in their way when it comes to being infected with the Holy Spirit.

The trouble I have with the Holy Spirit is that it doesn’t have as many compelling Bible stories.  The Old Testament has hundreds of stories about how God is with God’s people.  The gospels are story after story about how Jesus acts with God’s people.  But other than the story of Pentecost and some testimonials from Paul, I don’t hear much about the third part of the trinity.  I’ve been taught that it exists, but how?  What does it look like in the world?  It occurred to me, as I listened to the stories of the mysterious behavior of my oftentimes difficult and disgusting uncle, that I was at last hearing stories of how the Holy Spirit finds its way into a human life, and from there, into more lives.

How can one possibly explain what happened to us at that funeral except to say that the Kingdom of God was among us?  Just as Jesus promised, it found us through the prodigal son, the leper, the unclean.  We were shocked and then humbled and brought to tears.  The world turned inside out for us, and we left a funeral rejoicing.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 1:26-30, explains it better than I can:

 ²⁶ Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. ²⁷ But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. ²⁸ God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, ²⁹ so that no one may boast before him. ³⁰ It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.

Amen, Paul.  So be it.  And thanks, Uncle Rick, for teaching me a few things the way no one else could have.  I hope I never forget.  I suspect you’ll be laughing and rubbing your hands for a good long time over that one.  That joke was on us, and it was your best yet.  In fact, I’m going to retell it….