PearlS | The Average Pearl

Those who see

Rich Man Dilemma
Essay 3

Jubal and I visited the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit at the museum in the spring. We are two unapologetic history nerds, our pockets already full of vitruvian man and flying machine facts. Psychology and science have always fascinated me…I might’ve majored in psychology if it hadn’t been for my dad poking fun at it. Not that he paid for my college–he certainly didn’t–but I feared his opinion more than my desire because he was the wisest person I knew. The metaphysical and any obscure philosophy was irrelevant to him, and I was obviously wasting time and energy if I cared to know anything of ids or egos.

The obedient daughter acquiesced.

Of course psychology is, ultimately, man’s finite grasp on human motivation. We could fill up all the tabulas rasas in the world and still be scratching out new notions. Still, I was curious. I am curious. When a baby’s mother walks out of the room, does he really cry because he thinks she has gone forever? Why do my children, upon entering the car and barely pulling out of the garage, insist they are starving and in need of a snack? Is this Pavlovian pull a result of me not feeding them enough, or are they triggered by smell old left-behind Doritos and the motion of a car in reverse?

On the wall at the da Vinci exhibit was a quote of his:

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

I would bet that everyone walking around the exhibit read that quote and thought, ah, I am a person who sees! Da Vinci, in his genius, surely made this observation with himself at the helm of his vessel. He was ignorant to his own cocky nature. Isn’t it the truth? Our pride indicates our very need to be humbled.

I get caught up in this spin cycle on a daily basis. I love (love!) researching things, collecting an infinite wading pool of information. This buoys my power to reason and feel acceptably knowledgeable in a world of confusion. I like feeling as if I’ve got things figured out–only then can I articulate a sense of belonging or security. When I am unsure, I reason that I am only ignorant and must dig for more information. Once I’ve done some research, certainly again rules the throne and I go only my merry way until I hit the next fork in the road.

The evidence of this habit in my life are stacks and stacks of books that are marked and underlined. A hundred tabs on my computer, audiobooks on my phone. In the last two weeks alone I have read and listened to hours of Enneagram books and podcasts. I’ve read about school policies and puppy training, Abraham Lincoln and clownfish (did you know the male turns into a female?), the Khmer Regime, Emily Dickinson. I’ve read about rigid-minded versus high-performing children. I’ve read Francis Chan’s latest book on church and The Denver Post. I watched an entire Netflix series on tacos just so I could practice my Spanish comprehension.

The key thing to note is the time I’m afforded to peruse my interests. The phone in my pocket, the computer on my desk. The car that can get me to a library. The Netflix account. The one-click Amazon life.
I am blind to my entitlement and the power that money affords. Education. Literacy. Freedom to ask questions.

I think I am a person who sees. I think I am a person who knows.

I think I am a person who has scaled the sacred pyramid of Maslow. I’ve surpassed the need levels of physiology, safety, love, esteem; eventually steam rolling on to self-actualization. I check the boxes like it’s my grocery list: well-fed, check. Safe neighborhood, security system, check. Husband and kids, check. Respectable job, meaningful work, check check.

Who can fault me for wanting meaningful conversations, a four bedroom house, and weekend museum visits with my exceptional, talented children? I can stand unashamed because I’ve worked hard to get here. All the arrows point up to hand-painted rainbow framing my American dream-land. Isn’t it my right and reward?

James 1:9-10 says,

Believers in humble circumstances ought to take pride in their high position. But the rich should take pride in their humiliation–since they will pass away like a wildflower.

The truth is, most of us will never see, even when we are shown. I think I am pursuing excellence when all I’m doing is building pride of life–a fragile little wisp, a wilting wildflower. I’m living in the neighborhood of make-believe with the other puppets. Any time I Super Mario-ed my way up to the next level, I wasn’t gaining favor with anyone but me–it was always a game to distract myself from what was real. Ultimately–shamefully–it’s been all about me. All I can take pride in is my own humiliation: I’ve been cultivating contempt for the One who made me.

Perhaps Maslow’s pyramid is shaped a lot like the Tower of Babel. Could it be we weren’t ever meant to summit the slippery slope to the peak?

Maybe our humanistic approach is so self-serving, so prideful that God must come level the construction. He must confound us back down to the ground.
I say this because no amount of thinking it over and reasoning it out has led me to peace or even a truer, more holistic and balanced life. What happened in my own life looked more like striving for perfection followed by a slow-motion crash and burn. This was evidenced by deep depression and hopelessness. And that was actually when the light broke through, when I understood what it meant to be forgiven for trying to blaze my own miserable path. You see, reasoning never gave me a green light on trusting God. Desperation and confusion did. Poverty of the soul.

I wonder if the rich young ruler wasn’t but an eighteen year old kid when he met Jesus. Was he a philosophical man? Perhaps he grew up and had a life-altering experience that brought his knees to the ground. Maybe he changed– “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” (Luke 18)

Or maybe he just kept clawing his way to the top, forever unsatisfied. Blind, yet convinced he could see.

Whoever loves money never has enough;
Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.
This too is meaningless.
Ecclesiastes 5:10

Jesus and

Rich Man Dilemma
Essay 2

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.”

Luke 16:13-15

It wasn’t only my phone that alerted me to my jealous, self-serving ways. It was how easily it slid in and out of my pocket at a moment’s notice. It was how everyone else had the same lust for theirs. How we all could carry a conversation without meeting one another’s eye. How we could all holler at our children when they threatened to touch it, yet cradle it for hours in our own greedy paws. It isn’t an addiction, we told ourselves. I need it for work. What if my husband tries to call me?

The rich young ruler was, in every sense, addicted to his lifestyle. He was far too content to leave it behind, even when the master of the universe beckoned. It was the ease he didn’t care to abandon; he actually didn’t have an inkling there was anything wrong with it. Jesus and tacos, Jesus and coffee, Jesus, a king sized bed, air-conditioning, puppies and pedicures. Jesus plus the world! The rich man was astonished that Jesus might ask him to leave it behind.

A year and a half ago, my husband and I were raising four beautiful wild children in southwest Colorado, the crown of the mountains. After nine years our souls suddenly felt burdened and we didn’t know why. We finally were making enough money to pay our mortgage and then some. I homeschooled the kids (this adventure in another book) and felt fairly righteous about performing this “ultimate sacrifice” of love for their well-being. We lived among weekend warriors who valued the thrill of adventure–hiking, ultrarunning, mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding. The people around us were beautiful, healthy, successful.
But the have-it-all lifestyle told another story. An obvious disdain for the disadvantaged and underperforming hung thick in the mountain air. A rich man doesn’t want to look around and see his world out of order. He doesn’t want to see anyone struggling, so he will pretend no one is struggling. Most casual conversations barely scraped the surface because no one was admitting to themselves or anyone else that life could be more what pleasures afforded us.

For several years this didn’t bother us. It’s the culture, we reasoned. We became weekend warriors like the rest, paying homage to our youthful bodies by covering miles of mountain trails. But as time went on, it felt like a hamster wheel. Nothing varied. Everyone was always fine, even happy! Not one person needed us, not really, and we felt a little pressure to reciprocate this attitude. Maybe, we thought, maybe we shouldn’t need anybody, either.

Thankfully, this little inkling didn’t grow too big before we shook it off for the lie it was.

We couldn’t ignore the suicide statistics in our county, somewhere triple the national average. We could no longer turn a blind eye to the acquaintances whose marriages were crumbling despite their allegiance to whole foods, recycling, sunrise hikes.

We were affected; we were distraught. We sat on our sofa at night and puzzled what it could mean. What would the future look like if we stayed in our mountain paradise and gave our young family all the benefits of a successful, money-fueled lifestyle? What of homeschool, a season pass to the ski resort, local breweries filled with IPA beers and flat brimmed hats spelled disaster? We could still curb the outside influences, shield our kids from bad news. We could teach AWANA on Wednesday nights after we came home from ski school. It made for a good Instagram account, but the account we were worried about was the one we’d have to give to the Lord some day.

That’s when we realized Jesus was nowhere to be found on our mountain. He wasn’t hanging around behind the curtains, waiting for a spotlight. He wasn’t even the spotlight, shining down his blessing on our stylish Colorado adventure-life. If we wanted Jesus to be a part of it, to reign as king, we’d have to let our lifestyle die. We had to stop caring about fitting it, independence, about what other people thought of us; we’d even have to drop the homeschool facade. Our hippy, privileged laissez-faire, you-do-you attitude actually reeked of superiority and we were beginning to smell of it. Jesus said to the rich man: give it all up and follow me.

He wanted our radical dependence on him, not some fake self-glorified version of piety. God or Money, the good Teacher said. “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts.”

This is hard to let past our stubborn ears. I’ve often comforted myself with the old sermon on how it isn’t money that is the root of all evil, but the love of it. It’s actually pretty easy to convince myself I don’t love money, and then I can go right on spending it. I can go on worshipping the lifestyle it can buy me. My kids can still be outstanding musicians as long as I can afford private lessons. I can live on the mountain, have a manicured yard, hire babysitters and housekeepers, go on dream vacations, buy all my groceries from Whole Foods. It all has God’s stamp of approval, because I’ve convinced myself I don’t love money. I just kind of love what it affords.
See, money can become a snare. It looks so pretty. So attainable. So worth getting caught up in. But it is still a trap. It becomes the master of me, and Jesus said there can only be one master, God or Money.

Jesus asked the rich young ruler to do less, to be less. To take up less space on this green earth biding time on his own terms. Jesus asked the guy to risk it all, to ditch his rich-man lifestyle. He was asking him to take a chance that there was more, bigger, better, holier in store for him.

This is precisely why the man went away sad–the Savior told him to pick a Master. Yet the man spoke with Jesus in the flesh! How could he have not followed! Every good little girl or boy in Sunday school has wondered. We root for him, pick Jesus! As if the matter is as simple as honey or jelly on toast. But it is no tidy matter, this I can tell you. It turns out money can buy happiness, at least for a while. You just have to keep acquiring it and spending it to keep up the momentum. The rich man–he “became very sad, because he was very wealthy.” (Lk. 18:23) He could see his whole, promising future with a little price sticker at the bottom, and he could afford it, the lakehouse, the boat, the whole shebang. He was heartsick because he already had a master, and it wasn’t God.

Every day I face the rich man’s dilemma.
I admit, It is a heck of a lot harder to look Jesus in the eye when I have two cars parked in my garage and nice clothes on my back.
But I’m changing. In the last year alone, I’ve learned more about who Jesus is, and it’s made me aware of my former fickleness. It’s made me despise my old Master and how easily I used to agree with the world. The scratched-up, thirteen-year-old, paid-for car no longer beckons me to trade it in for a slick minivan. My kids are public schoolers, and I don’t even try to justify this fact in the eyes of others. We have left some things to follow Jesus, even recently. Everytime we say no to the world, to the expectations of culture and even well-meaning friends, we say another yes to Jesus. We tilt our heads to listen to what the world is saying, then we crack open the Bible to see what His Word is saying.
And we choose Jesus–only Jesus–to be our Master.

You want, and cannot have

Rich Man Dilemma
Essay 1

When I wake up in the morning, before I get my coffee or even roll out of bed, I look at my phone. I want to know what time it is, of course. It’s the only clock I have. However, it also has a convenient, horrid little feature where the whole internet appears before me with the press of a button. Like habit, as if it were my very solemn duty, I check three things on my phone: email, texts, instagram.
Let’s be clear: this is available to me because I am a stay-at-home mom. I can afford to sit in bed for a few minutes and scroll the news. I do not have to take a shower or get dressed or do anything besides feed my children breakfast on a summer morning.
To be honest, sometimes I cannot stand it, that I know I will not get anything done today. I might raise my voice in frustration–this is pretty much a given, since boys do not usually brush their teeth or pick up the living room out of the abundance of goodness in their nine year old hearts. I will inevitably make meals for picky, ungrateful children. I’ll listen to a three year old scream for a half hour before she gives into a nap. There will be no checklist to mark off, no paycheck at the end of my two weeks. It’ll just be another two weeks and another two weeks times a hundred at snail’s pace.
So when I look on instagram and see people on their ninth day of vacation in Italy while the grandparents watch their kids, I will burn with a self-righteous jealousy. At least I care enough about my kids to not abandon them for shrimp scampi, wine, and grownup adventures.

I comfort myself with pride: I am getting a lot of nothing done, but maybe it is a good kind of nothing. Maybe dragging them through Walmart and never giving into buying Pokemon cards builds fortitude. They are experienced with folding clothes and digging in the dirt. If out of boredom they have become hopelessly addicted to books and odd sink-plugging science experiments, does that not suffice as a good mom badge? They play well with others… Perhaps it is all related to a mom who stays at home and yells at them five times to get their teeth brushed before noon? Sure, I’ll settle for the consolation prize.

It’s true and noble, this way of thinking, but it would have been better for me to not frame it against my internet not-even-real-friend’s vacation pictures. “Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life”–it isn’t so much about preventing bad things from coming in, but sieving my own water so my well isn’t a muddy pig pen. James alluded to this:
“Do you not know what causes quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.” (James 4:1-2)
Everything boils down to jealousy, and we wouldn’t be feeling jealous if we’d just drop the things that cause us to feel so darn jealous. I might be happy if I wasn’t an internet busybody. I’d be less worried about me time, less ruffled over my inability to keep up with Joneses, less proud of my mundane victories. All in all, I’d have more room to love Jesus and the people around me.

This notion hooked its claws in my coattails and I dragged it around pitifully for several years. I want, and I cannot have.

I write chapters in three minute increments, the time it takes for a kid to find me hiding with my laptop and interrupt with something of extreme importance: He hit me! I pooped and there’s no toilet paper. Teach me how to fold this ice cube into a paper towel (what?). Can I eat some cake? Mom, if you were a Viking, would you trust a vegetarian hunter dragon to catch food for your tribe?
Sometimes I allow myself to feel supremely irritated by their blatant disregard for my writing time. I think for the last ten years I have been raising kids that still cannot get their own dang toilet paper or cut a piece of cake. Aloud I say, “Stop playing with ice cubes!” and “No, I wouldn’t trust a vegetarian hunter dragon to catch my food.”

I am home with my kids, my husband is working hard to pay my bills, I am sleeping through the night, we are all healthy. I woke up this morning and took a hot shower and tonight I will kiss my people before I fall asleep. Tomorrow I will buy them Pokemon cards in payment for a summers’ worth of mowed back yard. This is all enough, it is plenty. Still I want, and I cannot have.

I lie on the couch at night, hanging onto the silent hours when I should already be in bed. I berate myself for not getting more done, for not having a cleaner house. I review the days’ events in my mind, wish I was a better mom, wife, friend. I let myself feel aggravated with people whose problems play footsie with my own insecurities.

My thumb mindlessly scrolls. I’m a couch potato, my eyes trained on a glowing miniature screen. And this is what those Instagram busybodies are singing to me, even as they innocently paint it glossy, empathetic, or empowering–”You’ll get your Hawaii timeshare/speaking gig/book deal/successful business someday!”

It smells rotten, and what’s worse–I keep picking it up to smell it. I want and cannot have–this is true, but I am tired of it, the wanting. And I hope, because I know: there still is potential for it not to fully maim me.

How many years can a body go on coveting without it costing your very soul? How long can I try to convince myself that I’m not really covetous? Who owns me, who feeds my well when I greedily swallow all the pictures of things I want and cannot have?

James cracks a whip with his words.

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. James 3:13-16

The wise man–he says–lives quietly in deeds that are humble, undeclared, non-pixelated. Influencers and self-promoters, they wither in wisdom’s sunlight. They are, ultimately, the gatekeepers of disorder. Stay away! James warns.

You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes and enemy of God. James 4:4

This truth hit me like a slap in the face. I decided to unhook Facebook and Instagram from my coattails. As if I owed Mark Zuckerberg or his cronies a blessed thing! Not my pictures, opinions, privacy, joy. I might very well want and cannot have, but I can certainly limit its loud, mocking voice. I could walk away from that little phone with the one magic button. I could get an old fashioned alarm clock to wake me up in the mornings.

This, I think, is the struggle of the rich young ruler Jesus speaks with in Luke 18. He is the Bible character to whom I best relate. The rich man, greedy and good as me, wanted to have it all, be it all. His cell phone tucked in his back pocket, he approached the Master and asked him what he needed to do in order to inherit eternal life. He was willing to add a new title to his resumé, sing at church on Sunday morning, sort out his recycling bins. So he was caught off guard when Jesus said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Lk. 18:22)
I imagine there was an awkward pause as the man thought about his latest Amazon Prime purchases and instinctively felt for the cell phone in his pocket so he could text his girlfriend what Jesus said (shocked emoji + bawling emoji). The story says, “When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy.” (Lk. 18:23)

I know this feeling. I want, and I cannot have. Jesus, I want to follow You, but You say I must let go in order to have more. I especially have to let go of the things of this world, the things that look harmless but suck me into disorder and dirty my well.

Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”

Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”
(Lk. 18:24-27)

I have started to hate that phone in my pocket, the phone that wakes me up in the morning, the phone that causes desires to battle within me. How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!
But Jesus says what is impossible with man is possible with God.
This is the shred of hope.
Hope for the rich man.
Hope for me.

July 4th

I hope you are raising your flags and donning stars and stripes this weekend. I hope you are remembering the price paid for you, that you might be able to mark a holiday rooted in freedom. There have been generations of great men and women who thought of you, their own future generations to come. Many were they who sacrificed their lives that you might have the privilege of choosing what is best along the lines of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In the baby stage of our country there must have been several sanguine folk who knew the story of a Life laid down for another. I don’t believe their courage was of the diesel truck, guns n’ guts variety. Nor did they stand, bawdy and proud on the cusp of a sexual revolution.
What they valued and held dear were their families, food in their bellies, and the right to defend their lives. In this spirit, they gritted their teeth and sent their beloved sons off to war.

I’ve seldom heard a veteran tell stories without tears staining his cheeks. A dear friend of ours, a WW2 bomber pilot, never spoke of his service. It was too costly to mention.

I am wondering at the cycle of history and how quickly we are abandoning our reverence for freedom. Perhaps this shows how indifferent we have become. Maybe we’ve so acclimated to our rights that we are flabby in our convictions. It seems our culture is too thinned-skinned and tolerant to even be bold enough to step out as free-thinking individuals–what used to be the cornerstone of our democracy. If your right to think and act freely is limited by my idea of what I understand to be acceptable–well, then, that is hardly freedom. We are only tossing lassoes around each other’s necks, hoping to throttle one another. If we keep running in circles around gun control, abortion, immigration–well then, I think we are missing the root of the issue. I wonder: what will become of America?

There are two things to consider, and they are these:

The first: We are all living in an infinite space that we feebly approach as finite. Whether you believe in a God or not, the cosmos are immeasurable and expansive. Numbers continue to count up to infinity. We are only humans with a bit of reasoning humming in our heads. The rules we have determined to make a government have evolved from intuition fed by experience. Observing the if-thens, causes-and-effects–these are our best, most humane (as we understand them) tools to govern men. For example, if a proven murderer isn’t justly punished, he may go on killing people. Therefore, we lock him up to prevent him from doing so.

The second thing to consider is–there are some things we cannot control–things that are out of our power to reason. How can hate and bitterness grow so prolific in our hearts? How could a person come to the point of murdering? Yet each of us is fully capable of the very act! It is a scary, overwhelming thought, to face the depth of depravity inside our own souls. It has been clawing instinctually in our bones since the dawn of time. We dare God himself, hate burning in our eyes: What if I did whatever I want?

And so these two things–our feeble, limited understanding of controlling what we think is right and good and our inner, out of control me-me-me! monster, fight constantly. It is manifested in every institution: family, work, school, government. Every hot topic is in a tug of war between perceived control and selfishness, both of which quickly run amok, because we cannot rightly source the why behind our motives. When our feathers are ruffled or expectations are not met, we stiffen and throw a tantrum.

Perhaps we have reached the pinnacle of freedom apart from God, and this is why we must begin chaining up those who disagree with us. It is an ugly cycle, the push-pull of souls who are inwardly divided.

Our capacity to rage self-righteously and our out-of-control urge to get what we want–as well as the desire to watch others scratch each other’s eyeballs out over the matters of the day–is ultimately ruining us. Plain and simple, we are sinners.

Sin? Who even talks about sin anymore? Not just the dirty, fleshy kind, but the self-righteous, fake kind? We sprinkle these pesky attitudes with soft admonitions–Talk kindly to yourself! Be open-minded! But only with an undercurrent philosophy of do what makes you happy. We sabotage our own best intentions simply by being under the influence of the world. We will not make peace unless someone bends a knee, till a major sacrifice is made.
George Washington said,

The Nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.

This is a curious thing to say in 2019. That a nation might be founded on Christian principles and held up by duty…or carried off by hate or pleasure–look around! It is not impossible! In fact, we are staring this disaster in the face. We have taken a holy God out of the picture–replaced him with our own cockroach-level ideas of freedom.
But Jesus still offers peace–marked by the blood He once shed on a cross. His life for yours.
You might lay down your life and find He hands you a new one, a better one. This is the way to freedom. This marks the path of liberty, where even a whole nation can be healed.

America is fascinating. She has birthed her own breed of beautiful misfits and adopted many more. She has welcomed the “tired, the poor, the huddling masses yearning to be free” (Emma Lazarus). This has not been without a price, and I am thankful that people who have never known me have paid it.

In G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, he makes a study of order and grace. It makes me think of the opportunities we still have in our country as Americans:

We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
(Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

God bless America, the land of the free, the land of heroes. May we turn back to Jesus so we might find peace among men. May we make room for good things to run wild.

Today, and “things used to be better” mentality

I considered being vague at first in this post regarding location, but then realized that a year has passed. This feels like plenty of time for people to stop caring about where we used to live. At least no weirdos will be able to track me down…not that they would, but you never know. Maybe it is only a dot on the timeline, a span of a few marks–nine years to be exact–but if I were a tree it would make a solid, stabilizing ring in the trunk of my life. And now a new ring has already formed.

We moved away from our Durango home to the Denver area almost a year ago. It’s been a full four seasons–well, if you count snow as a summery sort of precipitation.
On the mountain there were always two weeks in June we could declare as summer–it actually was warm enough to detect some small discomfort inside the house. Having no air conditioning unit or swamp cooler, we bore it, knowing it was quite temporary. The windows remained shut until dusk when we reopened them to let the house fill back up with woodsy-fresh mountain air until morning. After these two weeks, thunderstorms rolled in nearly every afternoon, so that we kept our windows open all the time. On the fourth of July we would rush home from the parade, throw on our coziest sweatpants and down-filled jackets, and sit on the deck to make s’mores and watch the downpour. On an off year (of the drought variety) we would pray for rain and feel sorry we couldn’t watch fireworks over the lake while eating buttered popcorn from the back of a pickup truck.

A hardy tolerance of winter, a woeful intolerance of heat and humidity–this marked our mountain conditioning.

It is no longer familiar to me, the born and bred midwesterner, to hold an ice cream cone in my hand and watch it completely melt out of the cone before I even taste it. In Colorado you can lick ice cream at an enjoyable pace instead of spinning the cone horizontally on the tongue, racing to consume it before it disappears or the bugs overtake you. Here at altitude the biggest concern eating al fresco is whether you can finish your sandwich before the bread dries out.

Summer is eagerly anticipated, a warming balm to the weary, thermal-wearing winter warriors. This is doubly true for the non-skiing family (us, obviously, because it’s expensive and our kids are like refrigerator magnets to trees) who bides the cold season mostly tussling in a fit of cabin fever.

When summer finally appears we revel in it. We plant seeds and hold our breath. We roll up our pant legs and wade in icy streams–snow melted straight from the mountains. We build bonfires to share with friends. We spend cool nights camping, food boxes securely locked and hidden to ward off bears. We huddle together and shiver (as opposed to shooing fierce mosquitoes and junebugs out of the tent). We loathe the morning for its chill and pray the kids don’t hear any sounds of squirrels chattering above them. We pack backpacks full of water bottles and granola bars and hike as far as we can go–till the water runs out or the kids on our shoulders become insufferable. Heat doesn’t consume us, only the threat of sunburn causes us to pause and re-apply lotion.

This was our life in the southwest corner of Colorado, till we moved a year ago.

It was beautiful, just like they say, a ‘slice of heaven’.
But we drove back through there a couple weeks ago, and you know what? I wasn’t sad that we’d left. It was exactly the same. Just as beautiful and unchanged. It holds dozens of people I love, yes, as well as our first home. It was the place I was handed the gift of solitude and independence and where I became a mother four times over. But I don’t miss it.

Maybe I’m too practical, or maybe this is proof that I’m terribly cynical, anti-sentimental, and have some childhood anxieties to overcome. Frankly, I think memories can be sneaky, lying little buggars. We can tend to polish them with such reverence that they ultimately no longer resemble their original selves…Were they even ever good? Nostalgia applies a sort of patina that gleams incandescent and luminous. We hold memories as idols…if it is good, it becomes a trophy we point to, over and over. If it is bad, it gets thrown in the compost to rot away. If we get an optimistic hair, we might try and dig it out now and then to polish it for posterity’s sake.

The truth is, we can never again reclaim a trophy (good or bad) because it has already been fairly won. The glory or disappointment was in the moment, and now the moment has passed. The victory will not–must not!–be repeated, for the race is different every generation.

The Israelites had been in the desert for forty-five days (a month and a half!) from their miraculous escape from slavery when they began moaning and groaning, reminicing the good old days…when they were slaves!

If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt!” they said. “There we sat by pots of meat and ate our fill of bread, but you have brought us into this desert to starve this whole assembly to death!” Exodus 16:3

After two years into the desert, their story was even wilder:

…again the Israelites wept and said, “Who will feed us meat? We remember the fish we ate freely in Egypt, along with the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. But now our appetite is gone; there is nothing to see but this manna!” Numbers 11:4-6

Things used to be better! Remember the good old slave days in Egypt? It was LUSH.

Do we, ten years (fifty years?) removed from “bondage” (too harsh a word?!) –recount blissful babyhood while in reality those moments were marked by struggle? What about the morning I spent arguing with the insurance company on the phone while dragging a fit-throwing two year old (clinging like lichen to my foot) to her bedroom?
Is yesterday always preferable to today?

I do think it is a gift to turn old grapes into fine wine (this the gift of storytelling) but it carries the danger of drinking too much, intoxicating the mind with longing and notions of “better” days. Worse yet is compelling others to sip it rather than make their own.
Maybe there have been some good, good times. You won’t forget them. Maybe your babies were the sweetest, funniest, tenderest little love morsels. I’ll be you have pictures galore. But maybe you’ve outgrown some friendships, or something is compelling you to move and change. Maybe you look in the mirror and you no longer see who you were thirty years ago. Can you be okay with that? Can you face today?

In Durango, the bright red poppies I’d sown in the front bed of our fixer-upper home were the most beautiful I had ever seen. I sat on the deck in the mornings drinking coffee, watching bees and hummingbirds gurgle and dive in the garden and tree pollen float through the air like tiny fairies. In reality, this happened maybe a dozen times total.
In Durango, I slept less than I’d ever slept in my whole life. My kids did not sleep. They weren’t sleepers or eaters. They cried and fussed. I so badly wanted a break, some relief from the work. I threatened to leave my husband. I cried a lot and lost a lot of weight. I wondered what in the world I was doing with my life. I had no family within a seventeen hours’ drive of our house. I was lonely on a mountain, scared of bears, mountain lions, and leaving the house at night.
(I actually think I might hate tent camping, but still can’t bear to convince my better senses of this.)

There’s been pain mixed with beauty–I can’t try to sort it out, because they like to walk hand in hand. Memories are not trophies–they need no upkeep.
It’s okay now, because that chapter has been written. Someday, if I get there, I might pass the stories down, stories without strings attached. Maybe I’ll convince my unsentimental self that today’s moments are tomorrow’s treasures.
All I’ve really got is Today, and it doesn’t leave much time for polishing old trophies.

Seasons

We had a little dinner party last Saturday night. In preparation, I raked the who-knows-how-old green turf rug that covers our back patio (believe it or not, the tool for the job is called a perky carpet groomer) and considered getting rid of the old nasty thing. It irks me every time I find ketchup dripped and drying on it, paint and paint brushes, random containers of water, mudpies, crushed rocks (the boys are on an endless quest to find geodes)–basically all the signs of kids enjoying their summer.
I try and remind myself: there is a season for everything, a time for this and a time for that. This is a sincere, unending quest for perspective in my own messy sphere of living. I am not an orderly person, but I sense there must be, naturally, an order to life, because I’m quickly overwhelmed by a lack of peace when I busily try to multitask and ‘seize the day’. Kids have upped the ante when it comes to keeping all the plates spinning. To what lengths, exactly, should I go to ensure their well-being? What must I sacrifice on the altar of good parenting?
For a season, everything. Time, I think, a paying job, and a bona fide resumé. A porch and home swept clean, maybe some dreams. It is not a cheap or sparkly endeavor.

I had a mortifying experience yesterday. I took all the kids to a brand new cello teacher. While my oldest was having his hour-long lesson, my third boy began puking all over the white-carpeted basement. The cello teacher’s dogs rushed to lap up the barf, my little girl began crying because the dogs were no longer playing with her. She hit her head in the drama and began screaming. The cello teacher’s wife rushed down the stairs, I picked up FC and ran to the toilet because he was choking…I wanted to run away and cry. It was terrible. I sort of hope I forget the incident, that it gets wiped from my memory like it never even happened. (If I write it down and force it into a single black-and-white paragraph, maybe it won’t haunt me?!)
God sure knows how to keep me humble. What a lesson in patience and compassion. I couldn’t have hustled my way out of that nightmare, I could only endure it.
This makes me wonder: maybe there’ll be seasons, even whole years of enduring so that God can reap a bounty of righteousness in your life.
Living seasonally isn’t only a natural progression, but a catalyst for God’s work. For things to grow and bloom properly, for the wheat to fall and produce seed for the next generation, we must submit to the rhythm of seasons.
The world tries to fool us into a twilight zone lie…that there are no seasons, that beauty and joy senselessly fades, and we must pour our energy into fighting it. Look around and ask yourself, where am I finding examples of seasonal, fruitful living? Put down your phone–you won’t find any answers on social media or CNN–they are empty cesspools promoting a doctored life. They will tell you that coveting youth is only natural, that you are only appreciating la vida pura, nothing more. Your home, body, wealth, possessions, freedom: this is the tangible, ultimate proof of happiness.

Today’s inspirational speakers and dreamers argue there are no seasons–there’s only hustle. You can have it all–the hallmark illusion of the American dream–is bound up in your own strength to wrestle it into existence. But we know this isn’t true. If success is only found in your ability to hustle, you will miss whole seasons of your life. Ask any old man who wished he had worked less and spent more time with his kids. Ask any old woman who has nothing to show for her life except bitter complaints that her own grown children won’t visit her. Muscling the dreams of youth to the ground only reaps neglected acres of weedy thorn patches.
We flat out ignore this to match the pace of the world around us. We shamelessly neglect important things. We forget about seasons. We age, and we are shocked when regrets crease and multiply like wrinkles in our soul.

At our dinner party, my newest friend, Mary, a sweet ninety year old lady, sat across from me at the table and matter-of-factly uttered profound observations on living. On traveling to Egypt and Italy in her twenties, “I knew I had to see the world before I settled down.” On quitting her job in her thirties to raise her children, “I just didn’t feel comfortable leaving that job to a stranger just so I could keep my career going.”
She spoke sans regret. I could see her confidence, her joy in looking back on years of trusting God to use her life intentionally. She was peaceful, beloved by her children and husband. Hers was a testimony I long to hear.

The reality of aging, the falling apart of our bodies (vessels we once thought we indestructible)–only crystallizes with each passing year. No wonder we flinch when we see odd hairs sprouting, new bumps and wrinkles and aches popping up…it is the sting of death! Pain is the surest response to puncture. We loathe it, but we cannot halt it. If we deny the law of time, we must make the world our home, the people in it, our temporary audience. We worship our youth and despise our future. It becomes self-fulfilling and bitter, a war to the end. We forget that beauty fades, but there are far more valuable things to treasure.

On Mother’s Day, I took pictures of families at our little church. I printed them off and passed them to all the moms the following Sunday. Ruby, eighty-something–a witty, sweater-and-pearls walker-pushing wonder (and the best friend a three-year old girl could have)–chuckled when she saw her photo.
“Well,” she joked, “I suppose it won’t get any better than that.”
The people who age with the most grace seem to be aware of seasons. “She is clothed with strength and dignity, she can laugh at the days to come.” (Psalm 31:25)

They aren’t surprised by the passing of years. They are weathermen and weatherwomen, anticipating atmospheric change, preparing for the coolness of fall, stocking their cellar for the frigid winter.

Mary’s husband, Richard, stepped from the green turf patio back inside our house after dinner was over. The kids had entertained them with singing and music until it had gotten dark. He leaned on his cane, dark eyes gazing around my kitchen and dining room. He noted how comfortable it felt, how familiar it was to his own home.

“You haven’t updated any of the kitchen since the house was built, have you? Ha, this is the same range and oven I have in my house!”
I shrugged and remembered the crusty patio rug I was sweeping only hours earlier.
“I guess there’s no sense in changing anything if it isn’t falling apart,” I said, because my own ears needed to hear it.
“You have a beautiful home,” he nodded, patting my five year old on the head.
I knew he was talking about more than just the house. His words ring with truth. He is wise–a new friend, an old weatherman, hinting at seasons to come.

Since my youth, God, you have taught me,
And to this day I declare your marvelous deeds.
Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, my God,
Till I declare your power to the next generation, your mighty acts to all who are to come.

Psalm 71:17-18