50+ Musings

I’m a mom of one of those over-achieving smart kids.
I’m not bragging.  The longer I live, the more I realize how little I have to do with my kids’ competencies.
I’m watching them unfold with as much wonder and surprise as the next guy.
God’s the one who wires them together and I just get a front row seat to watch the connections solder and see the light show.

My high school aged daughter signed up to take College Algebra and Statistics at our local community college this semester.  She’s a mathematical whiz but behind the wheel—not so much. Lucky for her, she’s got a reliable taxi driver.  Enter “mama” on the scene.

Community College sits in the hub of downtown right between our premiere hospital campus, the civic theater and the public library. I’ve always loved our skyline built along the river with its trademark blue bridge and the imposing mirrored glass high rise hotel. I’ve never been a “local” in the downtown scene though. We live in the burbs in a ranch on just over an acre. Going downtown is typically saved for intentional occasions and hospital visits.

The first day of class, I exited the highway to Pearl St. and noticed a homeless guy holding his sign at the intersection near the traffic light at the bottom of the ramp. When I turned the corner, there were a couple others huddled in the underpass on an icy winter day.  We parked in the cavernous garage across the street from campus and I walked my daughter to class then headed for the library to study over the next few hours.

I had a list of good intentions in my purse, plans to pursue my own adult education in those hallowed halls over the course of a semester.  I walked briskly along the edge of the cobblestone street.  The wind bit my cheeks and my eyes watered. I passed a couple more urban outdoorsmen loitering along the sidewalk.  Near the main entrance a small cluster of dudes needing their pants pulled up huddled close smoking cigarettes. I walked around them, entering through the tall wooden double doors.  A guy sitting on the bench in the entry vestibule, nodding off to sleep, served as the welcoming committee.

Our main library is a historic building with high ceilings, carved oak trim and marble accents.  The ornate wrought iron staircase leads to a foyer with gold detailing on the ceiling and tables and chairs along the periphery.
Before commencing my academic pursuits, I toured the premises since I hadn’t seen it after its renovation about a decade ago. The old fashioned charms were preserved while updating functionality and moving the grand entrance to its original location.

It was a hopping place that frigid morning.
On the main floor, computers on tables lined the center of the enormous room with bookshelves on either side.  That’s where the folks who enjoy free internet usage park. I noticed that many of the patrons donned overstuffed backpacks or garbage bags that they guarded protectively.  The tables on either side of the shelves were full too, a kaleidoscope of men and women.  It wasn’t primarily a nerdy research crowd sitting at the tables. It was more of a tired looking, bedhead group of people with an occasional book propped in front of them while they worked their phones or engaged in animated dialogue by library standards.  Many seemed pitiful by day and frightening by night.

I wanted a seat by the window wall to watch the snow dancing in the street. So did all of the backpack people. Eventually, I circled back to the upstairs foyer and found a table in the corner of what I’d describe functionally as a modified lunch room. It was mostly men munching bags of chips and drinking soda pop for brunch.  A few had their heads on the tables sleeping off a hangover or a lousy night’s rest in a cold park.

I walked away from the library that first morning to my reliable minivan with a fantastic heater like a student with a new class syllabus. I had a preview of what to expect at the library going forward but I wasn’t engaging the material yet.

It took several weeks of sitting at the tables, watching and listening to begin to connect dots, see patterns and hear common themes.

It was always a sizable crowd at the library but on sunny days when the thermometer tips above freezing, I usually scored a window seat.
The security employee circled her route and passed my table every half hour or so as the guardian of peace in the hallowed halls.
I’m a little ADD so when the conversations got too cacophonous, I’d pack up my computer bag and move to the QUIET study room to concentrate.  I didn’t mind sharing it with the patrons who took refuge there for a few winks of peaceful rest even if they snored but I lost patience with the ones who disrespected the sacredness of silence and engaged in Donald Trump’s brand of locker room banter instead.

I started to recognize some of the regulars.
There are the ones who always seem to be on their phones talking to their parole officer or their social worker, securing housing, working out child support issues. Sometimes the dialogue is as colorful as the variation in skin tones.

Then there’s the elderly gentleman who mumbles to himself about everything from World War 2 to what he had for breakfast—incessantly.  He shuffles aimlessly around the first floor on the clock–every 15 minutes- and then returns to his favorite table, the second on the right.

And, there’s the man with the chronic cough on the left.  I strategically try to position myself as far away as possible because I don’t have time for another long bout with pneumonia.

The guy in dreads I sat by last week reeked of smoke so intensely, it triggered my athsma as the woman next to him breathed slow, heavy methodical breaths.  I wondered what she dreams about…

Another lady at the table to my right chatted with a comrade who greeted her warmly and commented that he hadn’t seen her lately. She explained that she’d just been released from the local psychiatric hospital the day before and while she was there her boyfriend went to prison and her mom died.  And it all spewed out in 3 consecutive sentences.
Whew! That’s a lot to hear.  Imagine what it’s like to live in that story.

Homeless people, refugees, cancer patients, criminals, homeschool moms, white collar execs, we’re all people living a story.
And honestly, most of our stories are pretty hard—even if they look easy to spectators.
We’re all broken.
With all these books on both floors of this impressive stone building, the information can’t fix the fractured hearts, bodies and psyches of the people sitting at these tables.
Including me.
I’m sitting at my table in the library hurting too.  I’m quieter about it. And it’s easier to hide.  I don’t smell bad and I carry a computer bag instead of a backpack.  My purse looks designer even though it’s really just a knock off second hand from Goodwill that I paid $4.99 for. I look more put together but I have my own saga of brokenness and it’s good to remember that so as not to get haughty.

I desire wholeness, mental stability, self-respect and security, both personally and societally, for the homeless folks who have been rubbing up against my life the past few months.
But political figures or philosophies can’t create it, Laws won’t either.
Clever photo ops and free lunch are well intentioned but they’re no solution.
Widespread problems are rarely fixed formulaically.

I expect that these calamities are all in the mysterious and redemptive design of the heart of God to remind us that we need Him. He has a long term solution to fix what’s busted but He doesn’t work in the gigahertz speeds we’ve come to expect as products of the internet age.

That lady next to me who just got released from the mental hospital, God’s pursuing her. But He’s patient and kind, willing to let her sit in the mess of her sin until she get desperate enough to respond to His gentle invitation of forgiveness, His promise of an eternal home and His unfailing, unconditional love.
He wants her to know that the cross I’m wearing around my neck changes everything for her…. and for me.
Yeah, we’ll both still will have to walk through this life damaged, broken, scarred.  And yeah, we’ll still need counselors, a justice system, a medical care facility and agencies of compassion; but ultimately, there is hope.

I need to see people, like the lady at the next table through Christ’s eyes- hurting, complex, loved.  Just like God sees me.  And from that vantage point, perhaps even more than a token donation, a prayer and a simple act of solidarity, understanding and respect would be a great place to start to brighten up the dark corners of her day.

Today’s the last day of the semester.  My girl is taking her exam.  She’ll text me when it’s over and tell me how she’s bummed that she missed a point and only got a 99%. Without a doubt she’ll ace the class and walk away with a check mark next to her college math credits. Goal accomplished.

My education hasn’t been like that.  I had no idea that my taxi service would tutor me in homelessness, a sociological condition, a marginalized population that I’d only brushed up against minimally back in my college days. There’s no grading scale for learning new facets of compassion and no letter grades for living wide eyed in a hurting world.  We’ve never mastered the material and there’s no end date to the brokenness this side of heaven.

Maybe that’s actually the best education of all.  The kind that keeps you wondering, that takes you beyond yourself,  that offers you a broader snapshot of humanity and intermingles your story with it. There’s a whole lot of books at this library but it’s the people at the tables, the living, breathing pages of countless narratives that sparked my curiosity, touched my heart and taught me the most this semester.

(I wrote this article last May. I miss those mornings in the library and I’m grateful for the life learning I experienced.)

“You’re pregnant.”
No words more profoundly shape a woman’s future than these.
But at forty six, that new mama, she’d mistaken pregnancy for menopause and maybe another gallstone.
The doctor’s diagnosis, it felt surreal, like a dream.
Flatly, the doctor continued, “It’ll be retarded,” followed by silence.
Maybe it was actually a nightmare.

She glanced over at her newlywed husband, reading his expression as the physician suggested an abortion on the east side of the state. Seven years before Roe v Wade, disposing of products of conception was more inconvenient. “Absolutely not,” that new daddy rebuffed protectively.
When you’ve spent five years fighting for your life in a tuberculosis sanitorium, you cherish each breath God gifts you with and you wouldn’t dare take that away from anyone else. No matter what.

Everybody has defining moments, the ones that give shape to the rest of your story, the ones that take you down a path who’s steps can’t be retraced.
That daddy, he pointed his compass north and grabbed hold of his long history of fresh new mercies and projected them forward with hope and bathed them in prayer.
And waited.

Then one balmy August morning in 1966, that baby introduced herself to the world, a perfectly healthy 8 pound girl whose only blemish was a big strawberry birthmark on the back of her head.
“Congratulations,” the same doc extended a hand to that new daddy in the waiting room.
There were no apologies or accusations between them, just gratitude intermingled with sheer delight.
Friends and family came to celebrate asking, “What are you going to name her?”
And the Daddy, the words rolled off his tongue like a blessing.
“Her name is Hope Jewel because we hoped for her and she’s a jewel.”

That’s how my story began. I came onto the scene a miracle, right down to my very DNA. A surprise to my parents, maybe, but not to the God who knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I’ll admit, I didn’t appreciate my name when I was a girl. I wished people called me Kimberly or Kathy or Lisa, so I’d feel more popular, but I coasted through childhood using a nickname, saving my real identity for the monumental leap into adulthood when I traded my pink bedroom for a college dormitory.
And with time, my name, it grew on me.

You see, names give definition to our lives and personalize our story.
I slept upstairs all by myself when I was a little girl.
“Lay by me, mom. I’m scared,” I’d plead after bedtime family prayer. And she would. She’d sing me to sleep repeating a handful of her favorite tunes, indelibly tattooing their lyrics into my soul. One of them went like this:

When He cometh, when He cometh,
To make up His jewels,
All His jewels, precious jewels,
His loved and His own.

He will gather, He will gather
The gems for His kingdom,
All the pure ones, all the bright ones,
His loved and His own.

Little children, little children,
Who love their Redeemer,
Are the jewels, precious jewels,
His loved and His own.

Like the stars of the morning,
His bright crown adorning,
They shall shine in their beauty,
Bright gems for His crown.

The amazing mystery of our identity and value as unique persons is not just that God formed us according to His distinct design, He also chose us by adoption. He calls me daughter, giving me a double guarantee that I am His. And as my Creator and Father, his formative influence on my identity shapes my value fundamentally and His appraisal deems me a precious, intricately chiseled, treasured, priceless jewel.

Names inspire us to be what we’re called.
I have a hefty Spotify playlist entitled Hope. I listen to it loudly and often because I need a constant perspective alignment from the moment my alarm rings to the final twitch before sleep prevails. Being melancholy, every chapter of my story has a bittersweet element and this particular chapter is being written around a storyline featuring parental aching. Left to myself, I could easily be swallowed up by despair but Hope anchors me when the wind is wild and I’m tossed around like a dingy in a gale. And every fresh new morning, regardless of how stiff my fingers feel or that chronic ache in my back and my heart, I tell myself my name and it helps me scan the horizon beyond the storm for the rainbow of fresh, new mercies and the everyday graces too.

My name not only informs today’s gifts, it assures me of future mercies.
And I sing along with my Bluetooth speaker,

I have this hope
In the depth of my soul.
In the flood or the fire
You’re with me and You won’t let go.
So, whatever happens I will not be afraid.
Cause You are closer than this breath that I take.
You calm the storm when I hear You call my name.
And I believe that one day I’ll see Your face.
I have this hope.
(Tenth Avenue North, I Have This Hope)

And as I sing I’m reminded that someday I’ll trade in my non-descript image of God’s reflection in my hazy mirror for a face to face gaze at the One who gave me something to hope for.

Names connect us to others, to family and to culture.
My little girls, they poured over our dogeared, marked up paperback entitled 2000 Best Baby Names. They’d underline and circle their favorites selecting something personal to initiate every new stuffed animal or dollyhouse figure into our family. Some names we get to choose and others we don’t. Our four year old didn’t understand this yet when her baby sister was born. A friend phoned to congratulate us and big sister announced authoritatively, “Her first name is Starla. Her middle name is Rose but we haven’t decided on her last name yet.”

That name on the mailbox, it’s about more than delivering letters and bills, it tells what family we’re connected to. It indicates the ethnicity that shapes our values and traditions. My given family name is Dutch, which is a synonym for frugality. And frugality isn’t the only badge of honor the Dutch adorn themselves in. They’re respected for their integrity, faith, family loyalty and work ethic. “You’re a Vander Meiden,” my dad reminded me proudly and often, like I’d been inducted into some sort of elite club and I better act like it. Digging deeper for the message embedded in those words, my dad was communicating, “You’re not just your own person. You’re in our family. You’re my daughter. You’re one of us. Forever. No matter what. And don’t you forget it.”

Names can hurt and names can heal.
Like Eve in the garden, Satan whispers cunningly as a serpent distorting our true identity as sons and daughters of God. And before we are old enough to understand it, shame bores super highways into our souls. Sometimes we hear it in the cruel name calling of people who label us small in an attempt to enlarge themselves, or the insensitive tags slapped on us based on achievement or looks or money or beliefs. Over time we’re convinced that we’re inferior goods and our real names are replaced with aliases like Unlovable, Failure and Reject. Then God comes to us tenderly, quietly through his Word and his Spirit exposing the deception, reminding us that he’s inscribed our names in his Book of Life penned with His blood and sealed with the emblem of the cross and the words Unconditionally Loved and Accepted.

The best gifts aren’t necessarily the ones wrapped in shiny paper with a bow on top.
My dad, he gifted me with a name.
And a good name is better than great riches. (Prov. 22)
That internal compass, the one that informed his decision about an abortion, he passed it on through naming.
My name, it anchors my identity to the eternal pointing my own compass true North.
How I ache to put my arms around his back and feel his scruffy whiskers along the side of my face and tell him, “Thank you, thank you, dad, for my name”.

There’s a lone daffodil in the wild part of my garden today. It’s the first bloom of spring and it whispers Hope.

Just call our house the Webster Infirmary.
They started dropping like flies. Victim One, the hubs.
After that, it was the domino effect. One after the other, they coughed their way under the covers and slept for days. The outbreak commenced on the weekend before the annual ice storm when the city shuts down and waits for a melt—including the doctor’s offices. So, no Tamiflu for us.

It was kind of fun at first, nursing my loves with chicken soup and experimenting with homeopathic remedies until it took me down too. Then I began to wonder if my back ached from the flu or too much alone time with my mattress. The dog sniffed out the dirty Kleenexes lying around and gobbled them up like fine European chocolate. We  all rode it out teeth chattering under a mound of blankets but it went on and on like 20^th century minimalist music. To entertain ourselves, we watched internet episodes of Fixer Upper on HGTV because we can’t even escape home renovations when we’re sick.

In my most lucid moments, an hour after a dose of Ibuprofen, in the supine, I prayed.
And I reflected on my parents and their individual elongated bedridden seasons of life.

Dad spent years in the tuberculosis sanitorium coughing his guts out—literally. Drenched in his own sweat, cut open from neck to navel, lung packed, wondering about a cure. It was in the supine, he met God and the two became friends. It was the supine that postured him for a lifelong rhythm of prayer.  And a long life it was, thanks be to God and Arythromycin.

Mom lived like the Energizer bunny until God laid her low in that last decade of life. A massive stroke set the wheels in motion. She lost her mobility, then her mental clarity. Productivity vanished and she became utterly dependent on others even to bring the spoon to the mouth. She spent years in the supine, looking up at ceiling tile from the prison of old age.

Both of my parents were promoted to eternity as winter was on the cusp of going green.   On the calendar this day, we’re sandwiched between their heavenly birthdays. So I am musing with gratitude for their example and pausing long to reflect on life, death and the forces of evil.

In my family’s story, we all started to come alive again after about a week. The bedding got washed in hot and we were starting to feel happy when I got hit with round two. The cough set in–the deep jolting one that starts to talk in my chest when I breathe. I’d been here before—a few too many times. Hesitantly, I made an appointment with my doc. An Xray confirmed what I already knew. Pneumonia, again. I’m not sure what’s worse about pneumonia, the jarring cough or the anxiety I experience about treatment.

It took me about three rounds of pneumonia to connect the dots and realize there was a correlation between my erratic heartbeat and and my prescribed antibiotic. Those were scary days and weeks. A person is powerless to tell the heart how to behave. I took for granted the master design of my autonomic nervous system and when it malfunctioned, I was unnerved. Eventually that drug got added to my black list but it’s replacement is even more foreboding—a drug with more warnings than a child’s list to Santa. The only thing that makes me more fearful than taking a med that hasn’t agreed with me, is taking an unknown med so I tried to negotiate another plan with my doc but she was not to be convinced.
I picked up the prescription from the pharmacy and opened the bottle, multiple times over the next 48 hours. I tried to ingest the first pill but I just couldn’t. I was like little Piglet in Winnie the Pooh, shaking and cowering saying “Oh deary, dear,” so I wrote the doc an email and asked again. “Can we try a different plan?” And she responded, “No. Take the medicine.” So, I breathed deeply and swallowed the first pill with a big glass of water. While I smiled on the outside, just below the surface a battle raged. And it was about more than just the antibiotics.
It’s a Thirteen Year War.

It started that hot September day I got introduced to the great state of Texas. We’d arrived at our new home the night before and were all disappointed. The baby spiked a fever. It was 100 plus degrees outside and almost that inside as the movers propped the door open delivering our belongings. Meanwhile the baby lay in a sweaty, lethargic heap on cat hair covered carpeting. It was just me and the girls  again, first packing up on the Michigan side then unpacking in Texas, the hubs already teaching in his new classroom. And on that day, my sense of aloneness was more staggering than the heat index. As I stood on the sidewalk watching the movers drive away, my own version of Wormwood whispered this accusation.  “You’re going to die here.”
“You’ll never go back home.”
The end.

Rationally, I reminded myself that God’s words promise “a future and a hope” rather than morbid, despairing pronouncements but some things known are still a battle to feel. Messages that permeate into vulnerable places within our souls can be talked sense to all day long. You can read scripture to them and even pray about them but the psychological and spiritual battle feels like a marathon with demonic soldiers hiding behind a forest of trees shooting their arrows unsuspectingly.

I remember that first spring we packed up the van to go back home for the summer.
Wormwood whispered again and I was consumed with irrational fear and anxiety.
On our road trip, we ran out of gas in Arkansas and coasted over to the berm. Cars whizzed by. Our van shook incessantly.
It was just me and the girls again. The hubs took a ride from strangers to the closest gas station. Back in the day before everybody had cell phones and Find Friends, I wondered if he would return safely. I questioned the folks who gave him a lift. I hoped they were benevolent angels and not dark demons. I projected possibilities while stranded and alone with three little girls in the dark of night. We waited and sang and prayed until the hubs returned with a gallon of gas then we kept driving until we spotted the “Welcome to Michigan” sign and tears fell like Niagara Falls. I’d made it. Home. Alive. Wormwood‘s curse  defeated.
But while I tucked this monumental victory under my belt, that demon continued to torment me.
Like the times my mammograms were abnormal.
And when the antibiotics made my heart go wonky.

That brings us to today. We’re on the cusp of a great adventure. Our Texas house has a For Sale sign out front and I’m going shopping for a new one in Michigan next week.
But Wormwood came to visit again. He’s hissing threats and my melancholy imagination runs wild.
It’s the same old story, like a song on constant repeat, “You’re never going home. You’re going to die here.”
And while I’m not afraid to die, honestly, I’m just not ready to go here or yet.

So as I write, I expose my vulnerability, mostly for the sake of my girls. I take my responsibility to live authentically seriously and name my demons, in part, so they will know they can name theirs.
I want to remind them that we don’t fight against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers.
To invite them to process their struggles, to wonder at and articulate the secrets of the soul.
I hope that they will see me embracing the mysteries in each  new day, trusting the sovereign, loving hand of my Father who knows my story beginning to end and everything in between.
Pneumonia or not.
Antibiotics or not.
Michigan or not.
It’s all good because it’s all going somewhere. And God knows where.
The end.

(I wrote this in March 2015 then tucked it away in the rush of our cross country move–back to Michigan where I’ve continued to live my story for almost two years now.)

I walked in the back door and found her sobbing. Tears streaming down my Little’s face, I approached her magnetized by her pain and wanting to fix it with a hug.
“Whats wrong, honey?” I inquired all concern.
“Teddy bit me!,” she snarfed.
I looked down at her hand and there were two fresh skin wounds seeping red from sharp baby teeth. Daddy was looking for a Band-Aid to contribute his fix. But it wasn’t the flesh wound she was sobbing about, it was the gash to her heart.
The terrible ache of betrayal.
The shock of loving someone or something and then it bites you.

Every morning she gets up and walks the pup at sunrise then feeds him and trains him, cleans up his messes, brushes his teeth, even gives him a bath
and then he turns around and attacks her when she thought she could trust him.

My Big Girl describes betrayal like this, “It’s as if someone punched your soul in the gut and knocked the breath out of your childhood.”
My Little is living it out tonight with her puppy.

And who hasn’t been winded by a relational punch in the stomach? And who hasn’t dealt the blow?
It might be a friend with whom you shared your deepest, darkest secrets and then they used them against you.
Or someone at church, who slandered your reputation with gossip.
It could have been a backstabbing co-worker or a boss who misused his authority to shame you.
Or maybe it was a relative who should have protected you but stalked your innocence instead.
And what about those boyfriends who told you they love you then threw you under the bus for a new crush or a better dream.
Or worse yet, a husband who cheapened your vows by gawking at 2 dimensional images of naked women instead of doing the hard work of relating to the real person he made promises to.
And sometimes it’s your children who squander your love and wisdom in pursuit of folly.

Like my Little, at some point we all walk wounded, aching and bleeding.
Then Jesus invites us to come to Him with our relational breaches and cry.
And He counts our tears in His bottle.
And carries us in His arms close to His heart.
We have a high priest who understands groaning.
Jesus knows what it’s like to be stabbed in the back.
He’s been on the receiving end of injustice till all His red blooded humanity spilt out on behalf of the whole ungrateful world.
And He gifts us with resilience and discernment so that instead of an exit strategy, we choose to fight for love and beauty in the trenches instead, partnering with his Spirit in the grunt work of relational repair.
Or sometimes He frees us to walk away and entrust all the brokenness to Him.

That injury we cleaned and sanitized, it’s actually a life lesson.
And I admire my Little. She’s learning to be resilient.
She’s out training her doggie right now.
But that bite, it will leave a scar.
All betrayals do.
And scars are nothing to be ashamed of because they make us look more like Jesus who embraced betrayal and loved us even when we didn’t love back.
That’s mercy.
Severe mercy.
But still mercy.
Morning by morning, always fresh and new, always enough.