Milestones

We have company at church. A youth group has arrived to help us clean up some of the mess left by the ice storm. They are a good group, their leadership is organized and easy to work with. They are working hard and really require very little care. Food three times a day, a place to shower, a place to sleep. Not very demanding.

They happened to arrive in my birth week. This time of the year always makes me so reflective about life in general, my life in particular. Not really so much about what it has been about, or even what I have accomplished, but how I see it each year when the anniversay of my birth arrives. I would be much more about accomplishments but once I am done with them, I am truly done. I dont think I could point to many accomplishments outside of my children because most I don't remember, and my children never let me forget.

Our guests are a timely reminder to me that my life has changed significantly since the days when I was a member of a youth group. I was a deeply dissatisfied youth, always digging for the bottom line, always doubtful, always skeptical yet never abandoning the search for something more. I had many friends and I was involved in lots of activities including my church, but I was so hungry for more. More of everything, more love, more time, more stuff, more talent. Like the Greedy in Raggedy Ann, I could never get enough. There is a very pretty young lady with the group who seems, based on the very surface and superficial interaction I have had with her, to be the exact opposite. She seems to be fairly content. Content to work, to content to play, content to talk, content to be quiet. Her younger brother seems to be very much the same. It is no longer a grief to me that I did not have this experience, and every year that I look back I am more filled with gratitude that God is satisfying my soul in new ways all the time. Instead I wonder, where will these two go, when they start so much farther along the journey than I did.

I think I have changed very little on the inside. I am still the same little girl who used to make deals all the time with her siblings to get what she wanted. I am still the "it could never happen to me" teenager who thought I was invincible and nothing major could ever go wrong. I am still the new mother who marveled at the wonder of birth and was stunned that the world didn't stop the day I had a son. I am still the hustling bustling twenty something who cannot understand why everyone who wants something has to get in line in front of me.

The change in me is more about vision. It's more about a shift in the center. I am not far from center, let me be quick to confess. But I am not dead center as I once was. I have begun enoying life a little more because I require from it a little less. My job is just my job, not who I am. My friends are my friends but not my self worth. My children, God bless them, are their own people, not a refection of my hopes and dreams. I see life I hope a little more how God sees life, it is what it is, but not all there is.

I am glad for our visiting clean up crew. They helped me this year celebrate the touch of God in my life, a definte mark that evidences the fruit of the Spirit, alive in me. Thanks be to God.

Lessons from the Dark

My Steelers had just won the AFC and were heading to the Superbowl. My mother was wrapping up her visit to Kentucky. I had a great time painting pottery at Girls Night Out and I was standing in my kitchen with a cookie in one hand and a glass of milk in another when the power went out. I mean, blink and it was gone. I stood still for a long time. I mean a long time. I mean I didn't even eat the cookie.

I do not like the dark. I have never liked the dark and I have never overcome the panic I feel when I am left in the darkness. I fill it with every monster I can recall from childhood. I kept waiting for my eyes to adjust and in the meantime tried not to move so the monsters couldn't find me. After a lifetime, finally enough moonlight filled the room so I could find my way down the hall way to my room where I could wake up someone and have them be scared with me.

Nearly two weeks later, Superbowl Trophy in hand, I am finally out of the dark. I have had moments of light of course, but for the most part it has been dark and it has been chaotic. Schedules have been non existent, work has been off the charts and though I have run fast and hard, I have stayed behind. I have stayed weary and I have dreamt the most vivid things. In fact, I have been typical of many who endure a disaster. I just hate being typical. I had complained for several days about the room spinning and the floor feeling like it was moving under my feet. I cannot tell you how irritated I was to discover this too is a typical response to stress. More typical. How very humbling.

The world has changed. The trees are sad, they are broken and twisted. Many of them are dead, there has been much too much damage to save them. Many more look naked and deformed with tops missing, limbs gone. There are utility people everywhere. There are new poles going in all over the places, wires that for weeks have been resting on the ground are being reconnected or replaces. The sound of generators has been replaced with the sound of chainsaws. Yards filled with fallen trees are being cleared and the debris is lining the roadsides. We aren't recovered, but we are recovering and there is a sense of survival when people talk these days. We will be limping for sometime to come. There is much yet to glean from such moments in life, but for now here are a few things I have learned:

Such times truly to bring out the best in people, and also the worst. I have seen grown men cry as they shared opportunities to help others and I have seen people who were so self absorbed that I wanted to scream. I wanted to slap them silly but one is not allowed to confess such things. Why some people radiate good stuff and others do not is more than I can answer. I just know it is true.

Our minds are incredible filters that help us to process enormous amounts of stress and frustrations, fears and failings. God has wired us with His thumbprint and it evidences itself in so many ways. We dream away stuff we cannot deal with in our waking hours and we find wholeness in rest. That's amazing.

God wastes nothing. In the midst of devastation, He uses clean up crews to awaken the interest of people who have left the church years ago. Even in injury, God brings healing. This is grace. How good is that?! Even in death, I saw the gift of new life in a family who lost a mother but found that their needs would be supplied.

Even in hopelessness, a small ray remains. God nurtures the seeds of hope inside of us, so even when we feel that no hope remains, somehow we find that is has. Even in complete darkness, if you stand still long enough some tiny bit of light will find it's way in. I know this for a fact. And if you will wait for it, trusting in the darkness you will find light, you can eat the cookie. It's all about light, and a little about cookies.