zealous play

Celebration is in the air. Graduates are flinging their caps. Schools are shutting their doors. Lifeguards are grabbing their whistles as throngs of kids sprint toward the water.

One moment frozen in time by the above photograph captures my heart. Some dozen boys took the “stage” at the 5th grade picnic and danced with all their might.  One mother approached me and asked how Joshua learned those moves. “He’s outdancing the girls,” she gasped. She pointed out how it would take hours and hours to learn all the steps to Party Rock Anthem. 

Yep. That and YouTube will set you right up.

You also need a little zeal. Little zeal is an oxymoron. These boys had zeal defined as great energy or enthusiasm. Feeding off one another and singing the lyrics (how’d they learn all those words?), they sang and danced with all the vigor of Bieber if not the finesse. 

I watched on the sidelines and listened to the chatter of parents enthralled. We recognized a rare moment caught between childhood and adolescence. A moment unstained by self-consciousness. A moment of children letting all that they are surface and interact with fun and tunes. Unhindered. Transcendent. Inviting.

Something called out to us. Something grabbed at our hearts. Something tugged our inner children to come out and dance and play.

“Play begets greater good. And the fruit of playfulness is always meant to invite others to the generous bounty of the party,” says Dan Allender in How Children Raise Parents.

In our stuffed-shirt, self-important world, we adults forget to play. Thank God our children remind us every so often. My children continue to change me for the better. Perhaps they really are raising me.

“You can’t have children without being transformed. You can’t let them play with your life without becoming an entirely different person, who then proceeds to become another entirely different person as you allow your children to mess with you. Every day that you get up and help your children dress, eat breakfast, and send them off, you enter a realm of prodigal play that is more serious than life itself.” Allender, p. 208.

Later that afternoon as I went about the serious business of exercise, I danced the entire four miles and improved my pace per mile by 1 minute and 30 seconds. My soul stepped on the clouds and my hands would not remain by my sides. Even with cars passing by and lawn-men gawking, my hands lifted skyward in praise of a God so wild as to let children instruct me.

 

13. Some dozen adolescent boys dancing with all their might and reminding me to play.

well hello cynic

In digging around for gratitude, I have been introduced to the cynic within. 

After the first dramatic entry in my gratitude journal, I had a hard time finding the second entry. 

Something surprising showed up. The cynic. Now few people would label me a cynic including myself. So this shocked me. And instructed me. 

Insomnia heralded the cynic. After an hour in the bed checking the clock at 4 minute intervals, I finally gave up and got up. It was 2:30 a.m. I wrote the post about 1000 gifts #1 being underwear, folded clothes, read some blogs. At 4:00 a.m. the birds started singing. Normally this would indicate the dawn of a new day and new mercies but to the red-eyed and bedraggled, the birds spotlighted the fact that sleep had eluded me.

I uttered: #2. the birds singing at 4:00 a.m. I suppose it was the sarcastic tone that gave up the cynic, undetectable in these black and white words. Nonetheless, gratitude did not live in the text. 

The cynic looks like Randall from Monster’s Inc. A chameleon, he shows up dressed in camouflage wherever hope may flicker. He’s a fast-talker, sell you some dirt in the Mississippi Delta-type. He’s a survivor. We all have a little cynic in us. It’s one way we make life work apart from a grace banquet.

Cynicism works on hope much like the fly zapper. Like the fly, hope meets a quick and certain death. Gruesome even. The electric current of the cynic nukes hope before it has a chance to bloom. Why? Because hope is a scary thing to the cynic. Hope has often been met by disappointment. The cynic chooses to remain safe and lifeless instead of reaching for hope.

When several other “entries” showed up in this sarcastic cynical voice, I started to pay attention. The grateful words did not drip from my pen like I thought they would. I honestly searched for my own voice and not Vosskamp’s sometimes syrupy “bands of garnet, cobalt, flowing luminous” aka a soap bubble. 

And so it is with honesty that I will proceed in the hunt for 1000 gifts. And with courage that I will tame and parent the cynic.

9. Sam’s indomitable smirk after he zapped a fly at 6:55 a.m.

(Note: Vosskamp identifies her own “Pollyanna” language and takes us deeper into her heart. Her journey inspires mine.)

1000 gifts

The tiny journal the color of a robin’s egg snugly fits in my hand. I open it and write the number one, then “underwear.” 

A new friend gave me the journal at our book club - my first book club. I love words and I love books. How I never got in a book club before now is a mystery. Our first book in my first book club was One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. 

On this morning, I rushed to the gym. I have reached a new level of commitment to re-conquer my body and health. This includes a grueling 30 minutes with Joey at Temple Fitness three times a week. As I drove down Del Rio, I realized I had forgotten a towel. I needed to shower there at the gym in order to make it to book club on time. Walgreens is on the way, I’ll just pick up a towel, right? Then it hit me, I had forgotten underwear. 

What to do?

In accord with this new commitment, I pointed the  grey Odyssey toward Temple Fitness and did not look back. I finished the book on the treadmill at times groaning aloud as my spirit absorbed these hallowed words. After one hour of walking and holding on to the rail and not being able to tear my eyes away from the page, I stumbled outside in the sun to finish it. I bawled aloud as the Tennessee sun baked the back of my neck. 

I collected myself and found the shower. Let me spare you the details but just say that I am not made to shower at the gym and then walk out glowing and ready for the next meeting. I need my space and my stuff. Obviously. 

I arrived a little early to two of my new friends with margaritas sitting in sunlight. My necklace in my hand, I sat down and explained to them that I was still getting dressed and my hair was still wet. Kim says this makes her like me even more. I think, “if you only knew.” 

We enjoyed green corn tamales and shrimp tacos and grazed on Voskamp’s words. Can we live a life of gratitude? Can we thank when God chooses to blow our minds and our expectations? Can we trust when our hearts are blistered? And we even touched on the last scandalous chapter... Can we union with our God? 

What an honor to attempt to map out the heart with these women and to be known. I did not tell them about the underwear. But I busted through the door at home and before I ran to my dresser, I opened my new notebook and gave thanks. Number one of one thousand things I will find.

Opening the hand to receive the moments. Trusting what is received to be grace. Taking it as bread... We take the moments as bread and give thanks and the thanks itself becomes bread. The thanks itself nourishes. Thanks feeds our trust. -Ann Voskamp

mothers love

Today a mother will hold the hand of a son with a traumatic brain injury. She will talk to him and know deep within that he hears her. Her words will call to him and summon hope. Every cell of her being calls him to heal. 

Today a mother of four boys will visit the grave of her own mother. She will sit in the rain and remember. Grief will mark her days. She bears the scars of the fall  - of cells that have rebelled and gone their own way. 

Today a mother prepares for another week of chemo. She checks the freezer for the meals brought by friends. Her daughter sits in her lap and she brushes the braids from her hair. 

Today a mother will dial up her son on Skype. Her daughter runs through their front yard and dark curls bounce. She lives in Honduras and the son in Illinois. This is the first Mother’s Day she will not greet her own mother and thank her. 

Today a mother will call her son. For 40 years plus they were separated. She chose life. She chose another family to raise him. They found each other. 

Today a mother will cry into her pillow. Her daughter is lost. Will she come home? 

Today as I thought about mothers - myself, my own, my living grandmother and the women who have mothered me - I pondered the failures and the victories. 

These are all true stories of people I know. Mothers fight for their kids. Mothers search until they are found. Mothers sacrifice, clean, cook, love and mold. No one impacted my story like my mother. No one continues to call me up to a higher standard of love than my own children. 

Today I thought of my children as arrows. Weapons in a spiritual war. I asked God for the strength to love them well and to launch them. 

my mamaw

Mamaw hand needle-pointed the pillow I am holding... Sunflowers.Today I told someone this of my grandmothers and my childhood: “They were like two pillars on either side of us... holding us up.” 

One the town side: Momice. She had CIA instincts. The first sniff of trouble, she appeared at our door. 

On the country side about a mile and a half down the road: Mamaw. Preaching the Word to us.

I have written a tribute to Momice aka Zelda Bernice Williams Morgan. Read it as posted on 4/8/10 and tagged under “heroes.”

Mamaw holds a power over our lives. Growing up at times I felt like her presence could hold my world together. And on a number of occasions, it did. 

The Sunflower River bordered her back yard. An azure pool separated her house from the river and entrapped all the water moccasins. I remember the snow-ball bushes, aka hydrangeas, lining the back of her house. A lover of roses, she grows a garden of them wherever she lives. She seems to carry a bunch with her whenever they are in bloom.

As an adult, I’ve sometimes thought that I possessed a similar power. Like a quintessential jewish matriarch, I have hoped that I possessed some mo-jo that could ward off evil. If I took communion, confessed sin, read (even memorized) the Bible; wouldn’t that protect me from evil? 

That is not the way of Calvary.

God dunks me headfirst into the world, at times being laid waste by the effects of the fall. For a believer, the power of the cross means that God uses even evil to polish our souls so that we can reflect more accurately the image of our nail-scarred Savior. Broken and healed. Resurrected on our behalf.

We show our Father’s power, His omnipotence, when we walk in our broken places willing to be known. We resemble Jesus more and more as our brokenness is healed in His presence.

We walk with scars. We walk with glory radiating from our faces. Jesus bore our shame in His Body. Our abuse. Our perpetrations. Our sorrows. He bore them, so we don’t have to.

Momice is in Heaven with Jesus. Singing in the choir like she used to belt out praises from the back row. I’ve never felt safer than right under her wing in that back pew. I know for a fact that she is up to a lot more than that, though. Her mischievousness must be a delight to Jesus. 

Mamaw, still with us, is recovering from a fall. She still holds a mysterious power over her family although not in the way I thought of as a child. She is a beloved woman and those she loves are blessed.