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.    

Late winter and ready to turn

I just read two chapters of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to the kids.  We haven't had the habit of reading all together at bedtime, perhaps because bedtime is not usually my duty.  LWW might be a little over G's head, but she will get some of it.  A seems to be following so far.  I'm sure it will be years and years before they get the religious implications of it, but by then, hopefully, they will know it well and have read all of the books.  I loved those books when I was little, maybe in third or fourth grade.  I LOVED them.  I refused to read the last one because then they would be done, and I wanted to know it was out there still waiting to be read, something to look forward to and to save for when I really needed it.  Then I never read it.  I guess I never got desperate enough, or else when I did finally come against some hard places, I didn't think to escape them in a children's book, even the best of children's books.  Finally, when I was teaching and in my late 20s, one of my senior creative writing students, not a terribly academic person, was raving about the series and we found common ground in Narnia.  I told him about how madly I loved the books and reread them but never finished the series.  The next day he showed up with a copy of The Last Battle.  I went home and, instead of doing my work, read the whole book.  Amazing.  C. S. Lewis is unparalleled.  I was sobbing and rejoicing and my heart was beating and at the same time I was completely at peace and thinking, "Yes.  This is how it is: awful and wonderful, terrifying and yet inevitable."  Oh, I hope my children can someday love books as I do.  It's far too soon to tell though.  A is a good reader, but he is still quite young.  I believe his decoding skills have probably outgrown his other literary abilities.  So it was a joy to visit Narnia together for the first time.

 

The ice encrusted world was very beautiful this morning when the sun came out.  Even this afternoon the tall grass in the praire preserve by my house was still all coated in ice and sparkled in the setting sun.  If one is not trying to train for a long long race, like the Boston Marathon, for instance, there are few things as magically beautiful as world entirely encased in ice but also melting in the sunlight.

All of this is to say that today turned out so very much better than expected.  My overly-vivid and hard-to-shake dream this morning was about getting my foot diagnosis and finding out other terrible things that had nothing to do with my foot, like that I had breast cancer.  I felt terrified all morning, even though I knew rationally that in real life things do not happen that way.  Then, on the way to G's gymnastics, I decided to take another route.  I keep getting caught on the wrong side of the train tracks when the Monday morning train comes through.  I was ahead of schdule, which is hard for me because I like to keep doing things until the last minute, so I took a slightly longer route that didn't cross the tracks.  As I was approaching the park district building I got pulled over for speeding!!  I wasn't even particularly in a hurry.  I was going 41, apparently, which doesn't feel fast to me.  So the truth was that I just wasn't watching my speed.  I also would have guessed that the speed limit there was 35, but it's 30.  And then I couldn't find my insurance card.  The one in my car had expired.  Nice.  Good morning.  Perhaps it all began to turn when the officer only gave me a warning and a smile.  (Appreciate your public servants people!!  I want this man patrolling my neighborhood.  I do not want people speeding down my street either.  And to be reminded in kindness to do right, well, sign me up to pay taxes.  Seriously.  May the man's family all be safe and sheltered and fed and free to also become police officers.) 

 

And then I had my doctor's appointment.  Who ever thought being told I would need surgery would be such good news?  But it feels like it.  The surgery will require anesthesia and so is not something to be taken lightly.  Never take lightly the suggestion that another human should use chemicals to knock you unconscious and then cut into your flesh, past nerves and blood vessels and other important things.  But as far as surgeries go, this one is not bad.  It will require some healing of the wound but not crutches.  It will require wearing a boot for a couple of weeks and a couple more weeks of going easy on the feet, and then I can start getting back to my running, the love of my life.  Two months from now, I might be able to run again.  Without terrible pain.  It's wonderful news!! 

I guess it's all relative.  When I was planning to give away a kidney, the prospect of not running for six to eight weeks was almost as much sacrifice for me as the removal of the actual organ.  (Oh yeah, and I am terrified of surgery and anesthesia.) Now, six to eight weeks is nothing compared to the months and years of injuries I've been dealing with.  The surgery thing is still scary, but having a stray fragment removed from a foot joint is just not quite the ordeal that having a vital organ removed would be.  And then more perspective arrived.  I had talked to Cassie last night, and it seemed likely that she had a really really really bad condition that was going to plague her the rest of her life.  She is down to 93 lbs and cannot eat anything.  No meat, no fat, no dairy, no fiber.  There's nothing left.  The treatment for what they thought she had was more drugs that would affect her current drugs. Ugh.  When she called today, I was thinking I had such good news to tell her about my foot, but what is that compared to her struggles? And then she had really really great news.  She has a bacterial infection that is often lethal and somehow wasn't this time, and they can give her antibiotics for it and she'll be better in a couple of weeks!!  Woah.  So in comparison, saying "Yay! I need surgery!" seemed less exciting, but we are still both happy for each other.  Then we laughed that we should be so rejoicing to hear that we have infections and surgeries.  But it's all a matter of perspective.

A day of badness turned all good.  I like when that happens.

A rose by any other name....

For reasons that I will write about at another time, I find myself not eating meat.  I'm having trouble with expressing this succinctly and purposefully to both my loved ones and myself.  What does this mean?  Am I a vegetarian now?  And why does saying, "I am a vegetarian" feel so very uncomfortable when the actual decision not to eat meat happened so effortlessly that it was almost unintentional?

It's made me think about other labels and the value and discomfort in them.  I have two friends who became addicted to running fairly recently, in their mid-thirties.  Friend A has done a number of races, 5Ks, 10Ks and a half marathon.  Friend B has worked up to a similar pace and has done a ten-mile race.  Both run regularly and with some discipline.  Friend A will begin tales involving her running with the preface, "Well, I'm not a runner...."  Friend B joyfully and proudly embraces the label of runner.

And how about "Christians."  There are those who go around with WWJD bracelets and cross necklaces and would proudly proclaim to anyone they came across in the grocery st"ore that they are Christian and will be so bold as to ask their not-yet-acquaintance if she has been "saved."  (Yes, this happened to me.  I told the Christian that hopefully we won't know for some time.)  But there are those who would hesitate to call themselves Christians but quietly go about studying Jesus and trying to live by his example. 

Why does the name matter?

Perhaps it is inevitable, this desire to label and name.  We are linguistic creatures, hard-wired, or so it seems (if you haven't read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, I highly recommend it.)  We begin to order the world with words before we can even move through the world on our own.  The things that a baby can name are always most exciting and most eagerly sought out.  It's comfortable to know the names of things.  Labels help us order who we are and what we do.  They keep every moment and every act from being a surprise, from distracting us from things that are truly new and unpredictable.  A runner is a person who runs, a person who knows about chafing and can have long conversations about shoes or certain bodily functions or injuries.  A vegetarian is a person who is not going to be appreciative of the steak you serve her.  It's helpful, the label.  If nothing else it gives others a fair warning.  And Christians?  Well, that one's a bit more tricky.

A name can be a tool for inclusion and community.  We runners hang out together; we have things in common.  It's also good for discipline.  You get up and do your morning run even though it's raining and still dark because you are a runner and that's what you do.  I find these aspects of the vegetarian label both useful and disturbing.  On the one hand, it's helped me find cookbooks.  (All this time trying to cook without milk and eggs, and I never thought to check out a vegan cookbook!)  On the other hand, I had just told my friends that I might now be a vegetarian, and then they asked me to join them for sushi.  I did not care to put the discipline of my new eating habits over the relationships that I so value, to cherish the label more than people.  And anyway, is sushi considered meat?  Would eating it be breaking the discipline? 

Taking a word and it definition too seriously, one gets all tangled up in a new mess of names and definitions.  Does it really matter if sushi is meat?  It does not seem to violate the ecological, political or health principles which motivated my abstention from meat.  Not eating the sushi would have interrupted a precious opportunity for communion with people I love.  The definitions can get in the way of good things.  Commitment to the label rather than the spirit of a decision is perhaps why, in spite of our need for naming and ordering, I tend to pull away from declaring myself one thing or another.

As far as I can tell, all good things have the potential to also be bad things.  For all of the understanding and fair warning a name often provides, it can also mislead.  It can assume a life of its own, more unmanageable than the thing it was meant to tame.  A label is intimidating.  If you call yourself a runner, will people assume you can run a sub-8:00 mile?  Will they assume you do marathons?  Will they be disappointed if you do not?  If you start down that vegetarian road, will people think you're little more than a poser if you go out and gorge on sushi?  Will your entire faith journey be discredited if you wear your religious affiliations on your chest and then are discovered to be, in private but in reality, your everyday unoriginal sinner?  Yes, a word may call one to discipline, but it's almost certain to set that same one up for miserable failure when the discipline turns out to be more of an ideal than an achievable reality.  

The truth is that a single word never ever tells the whole story.  If you study the Bible, you see that even a whole single story never tells the whole story.  Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna illustrates over and over that the most important part of the story is the hole within it.  A person takes an entire lifetime to tell the true story of who they are, and it is constantly subject to revision and, for most of us, a few literary techniques, like hyperbole, just to make it more interesting and, sometimes, more true.  This is why my husband complains that at every social gathering attending mainly by my running friends, he gets dragged into multiple 30-minute conversations about races, about injuries, about shoes or even about shoe stores.  And the stories are all different.  There isn't one "runner" story.  I have a running friend who wins her age group at major international marathons, a friend who runs 80-100 miles a week, friends who never run faster than a nine-minute mile, even in a short, fast race, and some friends who don't race at all.  I have friends who train all year for one marathon and friends who do a few a year without being too concerned about any particular one.  I have friends who don't care to run in snow and cold and friends who run every day, no matter what.  And don't get me started on the Christians.

So here's some of my story: I have not eaten meat (except for sushi) for a week and a half.  While I find that I haven't particularly missed the meat, and I've been pretty comfortable with my internal rationale for my behavior, I haven't defined well enough for myself what that means to be able to declare anything to the world.  Two days ago my husband came home with some grocery bags, one of which contained a package of sun dried tomato and chicken sausages, a meat product I have in the past eaten without much concern.  This morning, he suggested we eat them for dinner, grill them outside, given the lovely warm spell and extended daylight we are enjoying.  I haven't decided what to do about that.  And if I do not eat the chicken, how will I explain that?

For you

Today was the day I spoke at the iwitness service.  I didn't cry; at least, not until I stumbled back into my pew and into the arms of my fellow sopranos.  And then I cried again when people came up to hug me afterwards and tell me that what I had said was something they needed to hear.  Oh, and people said all sorts of loving and encouraging things, things that made me take another deep breath and be thankful that I seem to have done something for people with words.  I do want to be able to "speak" to people, to start conversations that people secretly want to have.  One person thanked me for being the one who is willing to go to the uncomfortable place for the sake of others, and that just about perfectly expresses what I was hoping I could do.  God (if He's there) knows I was shaking and asking over and over again that my mouth be stopped if what I was going to say was not going to be a blessing to others.  But if that discomfort eased the way for someone else, I would do it again tomorrow. 

After church I mentioned to someone who told me I should write that I was going to start this blog, and she was overjoyed at the possibility of sharing with someone outside our church the things I had said in church.  So I'm making good on my word, only sooner.  No need to wait until that hypothetical "tomorrow" if the blog is here waiting for me today.  It's still scary to me, but while I have the momentum, while I still have some affirmations echoing in my head, I will offer this to you, reader, and whomever you think would feel better about their own doubts and personal sense of hypocrisy if they read about mine.  And so I humbly submit to you what I said in church today.  I send it out into the world for you to use in whatever way makes the world hurt a little less.

Why I’m Still Here

        The way Pastor Bill explained this service to me, it’s not my job to speak about why I might not be here, but rather to explain why I am still here in spite of the kinds of things Andrew and Matthew just pointed out.  However, having been educated in the classical strategies of persuasive argument, I don’t want to minimize the fact that I really might not be here.

          On the most obvious surface level, let’s just say that I have other things to do.  Like most of you, I am over-busy.  I could do some of these things on Tuesday mornings while my daughter is in PDO, but I go to Pastor Bill’s Bible study instead.  I could do them Thursday nights, Monday afternoons, Sunday mornings, Thursday mornings, or the times when various committees and planning groups meet.  Instead, I’m here.  I could be cleaning or cooking or running or practicing music or writing or reading or biking or swimming or volunteering at the elementary school or tending a garden or decorating my house (you get the picture,) but I’m doing religion.

          Not only am I busy, I am also undeceived.  I may have grown up an innocent in the church, but at this point I’ve been to college and graduate school.  I’ve met some get-ahead non-Christians and befriended confirmed atheists.  I’ve glimpsed some of the ugly side of religion in general and of this church in particular.  I love you people, and I’ll say more about that in a minute, but I’ve served on the Staff Parish Relations Committee; I’ve helped hire a youth pastor and spent nights and weekends in conflict resolution over performing that duty.  I’ve seen what happens when someone starts saying something about how we should love and include everyone, even, say, homosexuals.  It’s not always an easy or heartwarming experience to stick around.

          So obviously there’s more to this church membership thing, and some of it is this: you people are my family.  Literally, my parents and sister and nieces also attend this church.  But it’s also for me as Pastor Bills says it will be at a baptism.  The people in this church are parents and siblings to me.  The people in this church helped raise me, and they are currently helping me to raise my children.  On any given Sunday, I can sit in the choir and see out in the congregation the people who taught me the songs “Jesus Loves Me” and “All God’s Creatures Got a Place in the Choir.”  I could point out the people who taught me to give thanks before eating, the people who taught me the Ten Commandments, the people who taught me the Lord’s Prayer, the people who, when my youngest sister was hospitalized with kidney failure, showed up at our door night after night with multi-course meals for us two girls still left parentless at home and who showed up at the bloodbanks for the sister who was not.  Here are the people I sing with and the people who came to my band concerts this past December.  And there’s a whole other list of people who are raising my children, who are their family and therefore mine.

          One reason I am here every week, almost every day, is that I know that what you do in a family is show up.  Even if you’re busy.  Even if you know someone is going to say something annoying or act predictably irrationally.  You show up at holidays and birthdays and graduations and baptisms and hospital beds and band concerts.  It’s what a family does.  I’d be lying if I said no one here ever made me want to stomp out muttering self-righteous things.  But I’ve also done that to my mom.  She’s still my mom, and I’m every day thankful for that.  I’m here because, as Jesus said, you are all my mothers and brothers (Mark 3:33-35).  You are stuck with me.  I appreciate that when I show up, you hug me and smile and almost never stomp out of the room muttering.

          But now for the harder stuff.  I have some bigger issues with the church than being busy and having been shown the dirty laundry.  The bigger issues are the ones that make me balk when asked to speak in church and the ones that make me hesitant to represent myself as a Christian when I’m not in church.  I won’t get into the details of how I disagree with some of the interpretations of the word “Christian” and how it’s portrayed in the media.  I won’t mention any of the historical “Christian” moments I so vehemently disagree with.  Let me jump right to my own heart and, after many years, make my confession before you: the reason it’s really and truly surprising that I continue to participate in religion the way that I do is that I am not sure that there is a God.  Yes, I was born into the United Methodist Church to parents who also grew up in the Methodist Church.  I’ve been attending this church in particular for 32 of my 36 years, and I’ve never been really certain that you all aren’t completely deluding yourselves.  So now it’s out there and you know it.  It’s a very uncomfortable thing to say aloud anywhere, much less standing in the front of the church.

          So then why church?  Sure, the people here are my people, but I do have other ways of making friends and finding community.  I belong to a running group and a concert band.  I have friends from college.  I could join the Geneva Mother’s Club and the school PTO.  I could even come here only on Sundays, or better yet, just on the big holidays when everyone else is sure to be here too.  Why spend a lifetime showing up to and reading about and talking about something that might not even exist?

          Perhaps part of the answer is that I’m really hoping to be convinced.  Those of you who have seen God, felt God, heard God, and claim to know Jesus are the kind of people I want to be.  Sure, there are unappealing Christians in the world.  But there are also Christians like Joan P and Judy B, and I wouldn’t mind being either one of them when I grow up.  Sure, there have been terrible things done in the name of religion, but there have also been things like Kids Alive and Appalacia Service Project and Third Tuesday Suppers and all of the things that are happening in Taurage as a result of our church’s support.  Missionaries have conquered and trampled and killed in the name of God, but they’ve also run homeless shelters and soup kitchens and built orphanages and drilled wells, no questions asked, and it seems to me that those are the people who are really following the Jesus I keep studying.  I want to do those things too.  I want the courage to love the world as much as the Bible claims God and Jesus do.  I want to make it hurt less. 

          I take communion once a month along with the rest of you because even though I’m sometimes pretty skeptical about the existence of God or the reality of the resurrection, I still do want to sit down at a table where a guy like Jesus is host.  I really really like what he did and said.  I adore his stories.  I like the God he claims to know.  If there is a God, I hope he is as Isaiah says.  I hope he cares less for the rituals than for the people who are sincerely and unintentionally hungry.  I hope God is as Jesus claims and that he will chase after the one lost sheep even if that means leaving the rest of the others to take care of themselves for a while.  I like the vision of the way the world would be if Jesus was, in fact, Lord. 

          I long for the world to look like the Kingdom of God.  I like the thought of a world full of forgiveness and not violence, a world where no one needs to go hungry, a world where the most valuable possession one has is love.  I ache for a world where no one feels like a widow or an orphan.  I like the thought of love covering a multitude of sins, of love casting out fear.  I may not be ready to leave my net full of fish and my father in the boat; I may not feel like I can leave my family or sell all of my possessions just yet, but it seems like as noble a goal as any to someday be like some of the people I’ve met while spending a lifetime in the church.  And, quite honestly, I don’t know anyone outside the church as worthy of emulation as some of the mothers and brothers and sisters who have been in this room today.

          Jesus promises, “Seek, and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7, Luke 11:9).  I stay in the church because I know that a person rarely finds something she isn’t taught to see.  A couple of years ago, in trying to find the answer to a bizarre dysfunction in one leg, I saw a number of different medical professionals.  The physical therapist found a muscle imbalance.  The chiropractor discovered that my hips were out of alignment.  The surgeon didn’t even examine me: he only looked at the MRI results that showed two herniated discs in my lower spine.  The neurologist couldn’t find any reason for the problem at all and told me to just run.  It was a very frustrating experience, but from it I saw firsthand that a person eventually finds what she has been trained to look for.  For me, having sincere doubts is not a reason to leave the church.  It’s the reason I stay.

         

          So now you know.  I am perhaps not who I seem to be.  Perhaps, for me, a state of complete conviction is impossible.  If that is the case, I imagine I will seek forever because equally impossible for me is the state of lazy capitulation to my doubts.  I may sometimes doubt the existence of God, but about one thing I am sure.  If there is a God, yours is it, and He’s the One who will seek out every last wandering sheep, even the ones who were lost while standing at the front of the church.

Amen.