50+ Musings

At mile marker 50, I’m starting to resemble the Velveteen Rabbit, worn thin, stained and lumpy. My girls are growing up. The oldest just transitioned from college to career. The second has launched into higher education. The third navigates the social and academic jungle called high school and the baby skirts the edges of childhood with adolescence nipping at her heels.

One of my most cherished Mama delights these past twenty plus years has been building a family library, one book at a time, and savoring our holdings.

We had our routine back in the day. We’d choose our favorite stories, snuggle under fuzzy lap quilts in our oversized chair and read them together, the girls and I.

Now, the picture book stage of life has slipped through my fingers like sand in an hourglass and when we moved last year, these treasures, sadly, got demoted to a bookshelf behind closed doors. Call me sappy and sentimental, but it’s bittersweet to tuck them away and I feel like they deserve better so I’m giving them a ceremony of release. I’m sorting through my picture books, touching each story, fingering the pages, admiring the illustrations, selecting the 50 I love best to match the candles on my last birthday cake. What better occasion than this to revisit those tales that have taken us to extraordinary places and on magnificent adventures, that inspired us to live courageously and virtuously, and made us laugh and cry.

These shaping stories have shaped my story.

 Every book I include on my list, I will read to whoever will still listen, one last time. And sometimes I may even videotape the story for posterity. I’ll share my list here then tuck my stories away with gratitude and save them because someday my name might be “Grandma”. And if it is, I’ll set them back out on the handcrafted, pink, pine-stained bookshelf constructed by Grandpa, right next to the Loving Family dollhouse, a large bin of Duplos and that same oversized chair. We’ll cuddle close under cozy quilts and re-live the magic, fresh and new, the next generation of kiddos wide eyed with wonder.

“May I call you Aunt?” he inquired. “You are my sister.” she said.
And so, by God’s design, He expands families beyond blood and bone, as far as our love will reach. Sometimes all the way to Syria and back. This year, we find ourselves together, sharing the fresh new mercies of your first Christmas season in America.  And I sit cozy in my oversized chair, late into the quiet night,  wondering how to communicate to you what this holiday means to me.

Last week, you stood in a long line of customers waiting to purchase holiday happiness. There was ice cream in your cart—in the winter. Some American cultural norms are pretty easy to embrace. And I smiled.

I explained, “Christmas is the most important holiday in American culture.” It’s lights and trees and decorations, cookies and candy, parties and programs, stockings and presents. It’s family and friends hopping planes and driving white knuckled road trips on icy winter nights to be together around a warm and inviting living room fire. And you’re sure to see a white bearded Grandpa in a red velvet suit holding crying babies on his pudgy lap while mother’s snap photos for Facebook. We call him Santa Claus and legend goes that he flies around in a sleigh on Christmas Eve dropping presents down chimneys for good little boys and girls. People greet one another saying, “Merry Christmas” and everybody listens to music that tells the story of all we love and believe about this holiday.

I drove you to your new home, all warm and comfortable, the one you are forging a new life in. “I feel safe here.” You told me that just yesterday. And after unloading your bags, we kissed each other on the cheeks and waved as I drove away. At my house, I plugged in my tree lights and lit a candle for ambience then selected my Spotify playlist entitled “Christmas”. Randomly, Frank Sinatra crooned the classic favorite “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” as I scrolled down my Facebook feed. It was right at the dramatic conclusion of the first verse of this well loved hymn, where he sings,

“Oh Tidings of Comfort and Joy, comfort and joy. Oh, Tidings of Comfort and Joy.”

that I glanced down on the article titled,
“Aleppo has Fallen.”
Dated today.
And I groaned, thinking of you, grieving for you, angry with you.

I’ve heard your story, the one that brought you here to us, at least bits and pieces of it. Enough to know that you feel nauseating tightness in your gut when you read about starving friends held hostage in their homes while radical extremists and henchmen of a cruel dictator utterly destroy your beloved country and its people.

Heaven knows you need Comfort tonight.
Really, we all do.
Maybe for different reasons but everybody feels the broken of living under the curse of sin.
Broken relationships.
Broken bodies.
A broken world.

And we’re all thirsty for a long drink from the fountain of Joy even though we often settle for cheap imitations, like the happy delight of a gift under the Christmas tree. Webster’s defines joy as a settled state of mind and orientation of the heart that results in contentment, confidence and hope.

And the mysterious paradox about Christmas is that it’s the only Comfort that can bring us Joy even when all hell is breaking loose around our busted up, broken down, divided world.

You see, the real Christmas story starts back more than two millennium ago when after 400 years of God’s silence to His prophets, He speaks and the sound of His voice is the whimper of a newborn baby that He names “Immanuel” which means God With Us.
And in this lavish act of miraculous affection, God wears skin. He intentionally chooses to live in our stories. He puts on sandals to walk in our shoes. And every beat of his human heart says, “I love you.”
And that is the real reason I celebrate Christmas every December.

That baby we call Jesus, He understands displacement because he left His home in heaven, abandoning all it’s glory.
He introduced himself to humanity humbly in the womb of a virgin.
His first home was a feed troth lined with hay in an old barn shared with livestock.
His family fled their country pursued by an evil despot breathing death down their necks.
And that’s just the prequel.
Read past Christmas in the Bible– Matthew, Mark, Luke or John- and you find Jesus living an itinerant life, misunderstood and misrepresented by respected members of his community, speaking truth and doing good until He is falsely accused, framed and crucified at the hands of intolerant religious zealots threatened by His non-traditional ideas about kingship.

The Bible says,

He was despised and rejected—
a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.
We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.
He was despised, and we did not care.
Yet it was our weaknesses he carried;
it was our sorrows that weighed him down.
And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God,
a punishment for his own sins!
But he was pierced for our rebellion,
crushed for our sins.
He was beaten so we could be whole.
He was whipped so we could be healed.
All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.
We have left God’s paths to follow our own.
Yet the LORD laid on him the sins of us all.
He was oppressed and treated harshly,yet he never said a word.
He was led like a lamb to the slaughter.
And as a sheep is silent before the shearers, he did not open his mouth.
Unjustly condemned, he was led away.
No one cared that he died without descendants,
that his life was cut short in midstream.
But he was struck down for the rebellion of my people.
He had done no wrong and had never deceived anyone.
But he was buried like a criminal;
he was put in a rich man’s grave.
But it was the LORD’s good plan to crush him and cause him grief.
Yet when his life is made an offering for sin,
he will have many descendants.
He will enjoy a long life, and the LORD’s good plan will prosper in his hands.
When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied.
And because of his experience,my righteous servant will make it possible
for many to be counted righteous,for he will bear all their sins.
I will give him the honors of a victorious soldier,
because he exposed himself to death.
He was counted among the rebels.
He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.
Isaiah 53: 3-12

And so Christmas introduces us to this God-man.
The One who understands our sorrow and feels our grief.
That part is the Comfort.
The One who came on the scene intentionally and with a plan to restore the broken relationship between us and God, and accomplished his  task lovingly, perfectly, courageously and victoriously, offering us the gift of peace with God and hope for the future.
That part is the Joy.

There is no gift under any tree that could equal the true gift of Christmas because
“God’s gifts puts man’s best dreams to shame.” E B Browning.

A few weeks ago we decorated your first Christmas tree together. The twinkling multicolored lights sparkle as brightly as the potential for your future and there are countless reasons to celebrate, to anticipate and to hope this Christmas season. But the best reason of all is Jesus, Immanuel, God With Us.

And I can’t wait to see what He will do.

Last week they were working 12 hour days, sometimes 15, including the girl with a shy smile who’s only sweet sixteen.
And waiting for exit visas.
And wondering what kind of place they were coming to that would elect a presidential candidate like Donald Trump.
When you’ve lived up close and personal to national chaos, corruption and war, it’s your prerogative to feel afraid.

But today’s a new day with fresh mercies and we’re grabbing a fast food lunch together instead.
Good old fashioned hamburgers and fries.
“You choose your own drink,” I tell my new friend. He matches mine, diet root beer, takes one sip and his expression speaks louder than words. “You don’t have to drink it,” I assure him as I pour it down the soda dispenser drain and add Sprite to his cup instead. Just enough to taste this time. And it’s a hit. He smiles.
“Not so much ice next time,” he comments thinking he didn’t get very much pop in his cup .
“Actually, it doesn’t matter,” I reply. “You can go back and refill your cup as much as you want.”
“That’s good!” he states emphatically.

There are five of us snuggly seated in a booth. Before we eat, I pray. Hearts and hands connected around the table forming a circle of friendship and God right there in the middle of this great adventure.

I give the boy-man my fries because I must decrease while he must increase.
And then it’s time to choose our frozen custard.
“You eat ice cream in the winter?” my friend asks.
“We eat ice cream winter, spring, summer and fall,” I respond.
With that, his cup overflows.
“America is beautiful. You have a good life here.”
“It so easy. It is so nice.”

Sometimes it takes fresh eyes to see what’s obvious.
And my new friend, the one I’m supposed to be helping,
He’s helping me too.
Giving me pause to wonder at the normal.
To appreciate the mundane.
To acknowledge the gifts and then start counting them.

It’s not that I don’t carry my own set of concerns and they’re legit. They weigh me down by day and keep me up at night.

But, here I am in this place where we held a presidential election last week. And everybody got to vote. Somebody won fair and square and as of today, all hell hasn’t broken loose–yet anyway. And those who flee to Canada are doing so by choice, whining like toddlers as they go.

I own a home on a large piece of property and so many possessions I’m selling stuff off on craigslist half the time. And I feel safe here. I lock the doors at night without fear of intrusion or harm.

I educate my children my way, with my values and my curriculum choices in my four walls. And if they want to, they sit around in their pajamas and a nice warm pair of slippers drinking hot chocolate with a great big dollup of redi-whip while they multiply decimals and write essays all day.
And when they earn their high school diploma, my girls enroll in college, buy themselves a car and become independent, respected members of society.

I go to church each Sunday and worship God freely. Every demonimation and faith tradition has a gathering place in my community and we all get a choice about where we want to attend and what we want to believe.

My husband works hard, makes sacrifices and travels a lot in order to provide for us. And some months, it’s hard to see clear how to pay all the bills but our grocery budget keeps us well nourished and we’ve all got multiple pairs of shoes for every season.

And if that’s not enough, this past summer I spent one afternoon every single week, basking in the sun, toes in the sand and riding the waves on the Greatest Lake ever.

I’m prone to take these gifts for granted, but my new friends, they’ve lived a different story and the contrast reminds me to be Grateful.

You see, not everybody everywhere gets a fair vote. Corruption thwarts the process and factions of political and religious groups go wild taking revenge. Then all hell really does break loose.

Some people leave their homes to escape the draft and flee war. They love their country, they just aren’t safe anymore so they run away. And they don’t get to take their photo albums. They store their memories in that beautifully complex organ called the brain instead. And some of those memories, they hope the brain will selectively forget because the pain of recall could snap an already traumatized psyche.

Tweens go to work with their parents instead of school. All day long, six days a week, in order to eek out a subsistence level income.

Families are divided and wait for re-settlement all over the world.

There aren’t options about how to worship and who to worship. Heads roll when people opt out of the religious party line.

And there’s pretty much no time for recreation, especially not a leisurely romp at the beach.

So, this Thanksgiving, I’m taking a new look at all of His fresh mercies, confirmations of His faithfulness, evidence of His love.
I’m acknowledging the privilege of my citizenship in the USA and I’m doing so in the company of those who don’t take this blessing for granted.
I’m documenting it on my shirt, the one my daughter designed, the one I will wear when we walk the trail together this Thanksgiving morning recounting the goodness of God written all over our stories.
And when we sit around the bountiful buffet with family and friends this Thursday and reach for the hand of the ones we love gathered around the table, we will give credit where credit is due, to the same God the original immigrants thanked. The one who caused produce to grow and feed the Separatists and Strangers alike.
The One who fortified those brave men, women and children with courage and stamina to persevere through incredible loss and hardship.
The One who gifted the immigrant with Native American neighbors to befriend them.

And I will try to continue that neighborly tradition going forward. Befriending the immigrant and sharing the bounty.

Happy Thanksigiving!

A couple dozen teenagers dropped their shoes by my front door, devoured five large pizzas, a pan of brownies and 3 dozen cookies in about three seconds before gathering around the TV to watch the presidential debate. For some of them, it’s their first opportunity to cast a vote and they’re trying to choose responsibly. I scanned the crowd, pondering each teenage boy seated around our family room. I’m convinced they are good men in the making but growing up is an art, not a science and each of these guys are on a serious learning curve.

My mind wandered back to the first teenage boy who shaped my story.
I met him at church camp. He was 14 and had a crush on more than one girl that week. That should have been my first clue. But when you’re on the cusp of turning 13, you might as well walk around with a sign reading “GULLIBLE” across your chest.
The last day of camp, we went for a walk. He asked to hold my hand– to pray.

“Lame-O,” my daughter interrupts at this point in the story.

I don’t remember what we talked to God about but the thrill of connecting our hands felt supernatural.
After camp, he came over to my house a few times. His mom drove him and we walked to Baskin Robbins together for ice cream cones.

He called on my 13^th birthday, and told me he had a gift for me.
“I love you,” he spoke tenderly into the phone.
I laughed mockingly. “No, you don’t.” I replied.
I sounded strong, independent and discerning but it was a façade and if he could have seen my heart, he’d have known he melted it.
I’d actually believed him or at least wanted to.

Such is the drama of teenage romance.
My guy, he wanted something from me. Maybe he hoped to wear my affection like a charm for others to admire validating his own desirability. Perhaps he longed to hear his own words reciprocated, to feel something inside him melt too. And he probably imagined bigger, better thrills than just holding hands.

I doubt he analyzed his motivations and at 14, he couldn’t begin to see his self centeredness.
If we’re honest, we’re all pretty much out for ourselves at that stage of the game. And it’s not just in romantic explorations. Everybody wants to feel desired, admired and relationally connected and we do what it takes to get what we want.

3 weeks after his declaration of love, he moved on, found a new conquest and my phone never rang again, at least not with his voice on the other end.
The next 4 years were like the inter-testamental silence, until one day he showed up at my back door, with his fiancé, proudly wanting to introduce me.
Go figure.

“What a jerk!,” the same daughter interrupts again.

It’s one thing to be self absorbed, a manipulative player at 14.
While it’s not nice and people on the receiving end get hurt, it’s understandable because growing up is messy and who, if given the chance would really want to do a repeat performance of the hormonal hurricane of adolescence.

The good news is that 14 year old boys grow up. I’m betting my guy did. He’s probably a fantastic husband, dad and maybe grandfather today.
They muddle through the relational confusion of adolescence. They live and learn and eventually, many of them start thinking about what it actually means to be a man, to love the girl they’re waxing eloquent with. They learn to protect, provide, defer to and respect others instead of using them. Even better, some take God’s instructive prescription for healthy relationships to heart and lay down their own self interests for the sake of others as their modus operendi.

Not so with Republican party Presidential candidate Donald Trump.
At 70, he still reminds me of a boy time-warped in adolescence.

Having spent a lifetime using whatever and whoever strengthens his image and feeds his ego personally, professionally and politically, he’s committed entirely to his own interests.
And I think it’s time for him to GROW UP!

Lately, he’s crushing on Republicans telling us how much he loves us, assuring us of his loyalty to our platform and confirming his commitment to sharing our values.
From my vantage point, it’s purely manipulation.
He wants our affection in the form of our votes.
But when and if he gets what he wants, he’ll strip his voters of their innocence and dump them, pursuing new conquests that feed his gratification and insatiable ego.
He’ll be the Winner and we’ll be the Losers.

There are a whole host of substantive and thoughtful reasons I can’t vote for Donald Trump. Honestly, I can’t even imagine why I’d need to explain them. And that’s not the point of this rant.

The bottom line is that I’m not 13 anymore.   The sign across my chest at 50 reads “SCHREWD”. These past 37 years, I’ve done some living and learning myself, and I think this country needs something more than an overgrown, unrestrained teenage boy functioning as Commander in Chief and living in our White House, or for that matter, a woman married to one.
But those are our options.
And as a woman, I’m offended. As an American, I’m embarrassed.

So, I’m not voting for either of the party candidates.
In good conscience, I can’t.
How could I face my daughters with integrity if I did?
I’m not taking responsibility for either of them being granted the esteemed privilege of shepherding this great country.
And I’m grateful I have that choice.

For the first time ever, I’m going to do a write in.
Mickey Mouse, Joe the Plumber and Santa Claus were popular choices in the last election but I’ve decided to make my vote more personal.
So, I’m casting my ballot for the guy who wasn’t flip when told me he loved me.
The one who respects rather than exploits my femininity.
He’s the man who gets up everyday and works to provide for me and the children we share.
He’s the fella who cuts his own losses if it means his family can win.
Some might call it a wasted vote.
I’m calling it a vote of confidence for somebody who’s Apprenticing Jesus and learning His model of servant leadership.

And on November 9, I’ll wake up to the news of a new president elect in the United States of America.
I’ll be sure to have plenty of chocolate on hand.
And I’ll need to remind myself that history records a copious list of bad leaders. The Bible introduces us to a host of unqualified, morally corrupt, evil people who had no business holding the distinctive and prestigious responsibility of leading a nation but did.

Utlimately, God’s will or plans aren’t constrained by political systems or authorities.
And there is no leader on any day or year that can interrupt His fresh, new mercies sufficient for the times.
And in that confidence alone, I have hope.