the SS Honest Purpose

Today I ran across this little piece of literature written by a woman named Mary Brooks Picken in 1924:

"I made a declaration to the effect that I never let Fate paddle alone in Mr. Wish's leaky boat.  I learned long ago that a happier, safer ride could be had in the good substantial boat, "Honest Purpose," especially when I was helping with the oars....I say, always, that sincere desire is unworded prayer and that if we are earnest and have an honest purpose, our prayer will be answered, and answered wholly in accord with our own sincerity and unselfishness.  Wishing for things and praying for them are vastly different.

Every day is ours to mold as we will.  If we wasted it in idle wishing, we must pay.  If we build for the future by being faithful to our desires, we lay paving stones that make a safer and more comfortable road for the rest of our lives."

I found this in a fabulous book called Amy Barickman's Vintage Notions.  She has a lovely website...www.amybarickman.com.  Great stuff, and very timely for me.  Ahoy!

lesson learned

Our last autumn was tough.  I mean, tough.  As in, October our car was totaled with Kellan and me in it on the way to school.  A family member had a bone marrow transplant that required Nathan to spend his Friday-through-Sundays in Pittsburgh.  Since our car accident happened on a Friday morning, he had to leave us in the emergency room to get down to the hospital, and I had to text around to find a friend to bring us home.  The next week our garage door broke with the rental car inside (again while Nathan was on his way to Pittsburgh) and I couldn't get Kellan from school.  On and on and on...

Let me state, this is not a pity party.  I'm just setting the scene for what was, for us, a really challenging time.  Our life plans seemed to be put on hold and we were left wondering why why why.  (Oh, did I mention that our new, certified-preowned car turned out to be a lemon?  The first day I drove it to school it died in the carpool line)

Oops.  I forgot this isn't a pity party.

Here's what happened next:

The family member got to go home from the hospital early

A very kind garage door repairman heard the panic in my voice and dropped everything to come right over to get me out in time to get my son from school.

I was surrounded by love as a dear friend picked Kellan up from school, kept him at her house, and fed him dinner while we went emergency car shopping.  Did I mention that she did this on the fly because I called her as we were stuck in traffic and couldn't get home until after bedtime?

The other driver claimed complete fault for the accident.

A friend left her work to come get us at the emergency room.

The Subaru dealership (Day Subaru on West Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh) took back our car, apologized and offered us a wonderful deal on a brand new one.  Who does that?  Jeff and Tony at Day Subaru.  They said if you don't have your integrity than you don't have anything.  Not your stereotypical car dealer.

My books made it successfully to the publishing stage.

Another important thing:

On a Wednesday afternoon while all this craziness was happening, Nathan called me from work.  "The circus is in town," he said.  "I think we should go."  

At that moment, the circus seemed like the most irresponsible, expensive thing we could possibly do.  "No," I said.  "We don't have the money, or a car, or the time."  But Nathan was pretty adamant, and so off to the circus we went.  

I can't describe what that did for our family.  Nathan said we needed to do something fun and he was so right.  He stopped by the dollar store on his way home from work and bought $20 worth of glowsticks, necklaces, bracelets, light up rings, and glow-in-the-dark swords.  Let me tell you that $20 will go a long way in the 'glow aisle' of the Dollar Tree.  We drove into Pittsburgh through a beautiful autumn sunset.  Somehow the promise of the circus helped us to leave off the endless discussions about value for money, gas costs piling up, scary garage door bills, Kellan's hard time with Daddy being gone.  We just had fun.

The life lesson here is obvious.  But just to make sure I don't forget, here is the reminder: 

  The Circus Came to Town, 2015.

check the lost and found

Well, call me Bloggy McBloggerton today (I usually write one journal entry after months of forgetting I even keep a blog), but this was too good to pass up.  Also, after all the existential crises in the last post it seemed important to think about something a little lighter.  And this is so funny... 

After closing my computer and before heading to my studio, I happened to glance at my son's "art desk" (the raised hearth of our fireplace that is a perfect height for an eight-year-old to kneel down and create masterpieces).  Before I relay the story, let me tell all you moms out there that this is not fiction!  Yes, expensive glasses were left at the bottom of the taekwondo gear bag, under a mouth guard, chest protector, and most notably, a heavy plastic helmet with durable face protector.  Wince.  Cha-ching to Dr. Soderburgh.  His Christmas bonus came early this year.

But I digress.  Here's where it gets fun.  I saw that Kellan was in the middle of writing a new book with the working title The Glasses in the Big Gear Bag.  It goes like this:

"One day there was a pair of glasses on a boy named Kellan's face.  He was going to ATA.  He soon noticed that his glasses were on his face.  Kellan didn't like to wear his glasses at ATA so he dropped them in his gear bag.  See illustration below:

 The glasses thought they'd look around.  They saw songjobongs and a bongmongee (both items used in taekwondo and completely misspelled here) and sparring gear.  When the glasses saw the songjobongs and bongmongee they were thinking, "Oh no!  Weapons!"  But when the songjobongs and bongmongee introduced themselves and told the glasses they were nice, the glasses weren't scared anymore."

To be continued...  

trompe l'oeil: our own personal Jericho

Recently Nathan told me about a visual he had had to describe where we've been in the last couple of years...he pictured a completely dark room with no doors.  In that room, God seemed to be marching him around and around inside of the perimeter.  As he walked, he kept asking for an open door to walk through that would take us out into a more spacious place, one that wasn't so confusing, and would make the trajectory of our lives more apparent.  But God seemed uncommunicative and so Nathan kept walking.  He described feeling lost...Where was the blasted door?  And why couldn't he see his hand in front of his face?  Silence.  Finally he came to the understanding that there was no door.  The only direction he was receiving from God was to keep him from walking into false doors...trompe l'oeils that were really just walls in disguise.  The Holy Mystery was protecting him from arriving into the wrong place.  Since he shared that image with me, I can't get the idea of stumbling into walls out of my head.

"As John says, God puts out our lights to keep us safe because we are never more in danger of stumbling than when we think we know where we are going.  When we can no longer see the path we are on, when we can no longer read the maps we have brought with us or sense anything in the dark that might tell us where we are, then and only then are we vulnerable to God's protection.  The only thing the dark night requires of us is to remain conscious.  If we can stay with the moment in which God seems most absent, the night will do the rest." (Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark).

Which brings me to Jericho.  That crazy story in the Old Testament in which the Israelites are commanded to walk around the city's walls once a day for a week.  It's found in the sixth chapter of the book of Joshua if you want to look it up.  Brick by brick and stone by stone, walk, walk, walk.  At risk of sounding sacriligous, it seemed like the Israelites were sent on a fool's errand.  Then on the seventh day the instructions sounded even more absurd....walk seven more times around, God said, and then blow your trumpets and give a war cry.  But don't storm the gates or do anything else to take the city by using the tactics you know.  I will make the walls fall down by my own strength.  Not just open a door, but obliterate the wall completely.

What does that even mean?

Well, the Israelites had two choices:  they could take a disorienting, week long walk around a wall, or go home to relative safety that came at the cost of permanent defeat.  

Barbara Brown Taylor (you've got to look her up!) says:
"...the good news is that dark and light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist on opposite poles.  Instead, they exist with and within each other, like distinct waves that roll out of the same ocean and roll back into it again.  As different as they are, they come from and return to the same place...This faith will not offer me much to hold on to.  It will not give me a safe place to settle.  Practicing it will require me to celebrate the sacraments of defeat and loss, but since the religion I know best has a lot to say about losing as the pre-condition for finding, I can live with that.  I think I can even live inside this cloudy evening of the soul for a while longer, where even my sense of God's absence can be a token of God's presence if I let it." 

Here is a picture of what is outside my window today:

Barrenness and beauty.  Warmth and freeze.  The sun illuminates while the snow shrouds everything.  In other words, a picture of Jericho both before and after.  

"If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it." 

(Jesus, Matthew Chapter 10)

In grace and peace, amen.    

ww.kellansbuttons.com

One of the delights of my heart is when my son says, "Mommy, can we go to your studio and make art?"  When he says that I am willing to drop pretty much anything and head downstairs.  His latest venture is making buttons with oven-bake clay which he then glazes with nail polish.  And they are beautiful.  I've already sewn one onto a scarf and am receiving daily compliments.  

And I am so proud of him.  He has a plan to sell his buttons at Penn State's Earth Fest in April for $1.00 each and he has decided to donate half of his profits to an organization that is working to conserve Wolf Creek, which runs behind our house all the way to Slippery Rock, PA.  If it goes well, he says, the next step will be to start a website or possibly an Etsy store called ww.kellansbuttons.com.  Not sure where the other 'w' went, but nevermind.  

We have been praying for years that our son will develop a sense something greater than himself and a passion for positive change in the world.  Now my prayer is becoming one of thankfulness for evidence of God's answer to that prayer.  To God be all glory and honor and praise.  

 "But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind."

              -Book of Job 12:7-10 

Sailing For Home

Here's what I was reading today:

"Nothing good comes easily.  You have to lose things you thought you loved, give up things you thought you needed.  You have to get over yourself, beyond your past, out from under the weight of your future.  The good stuff never comes when things are easy.  It comes when things are all heavily weighted down like moving trucks....We become who we are in these moments."

                                                                                      -Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines

Thank God that losing the things I love doesn't mean my precious family.  But giving up the things I thought I needed does mean letting go of this Beulah-land fantasy I've been harboring that all will be glittering and perfect when I arrive in the hallowed ground of The South.  And I won't lie...I still secretly hope that if I can just give up the dream, God will appear like a holy vending machine and give me the location of my choice.

So what does sailing for home mean exactly?  In terms of the atlas home means Duluth, Georgia, USA, planet earth.  But in the spiritual sense, home means something that is much harder to define.  It means letting go of the things that are (ironically) "weighting me down like moving trucks".  It means resting in the Holy Mystery and trusting that He will guide the boat.  Which, in turn, leaves me free to practice giving thanks and living presently.  I want to look out the window and see the blessing instead of the curse of more snow.  Nathan reminded me that complaining about the weather was tantamount to insisting that the Weather Giver got it wrong that day.  Yikes.

So that's what it's all about...dreaming dreams while being fully anchored in the present.  Giving thanks for my stable husband who loves me enough to not force me to sit down in the boat.  Taking joy in my precious little boy and his dreamy inner life.  In other words, peace in the center of the pull and tug of life which is slowly forming us into "who we are."