sweet suburbia >>>this is our story

My Greatest Fears: The comforts of home

Love has me stumped, because it is so difficult in its simplicity. We simply are told to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves. I don't know how to do this. I am not sure I know when I have loved or when I have merely performed a behavior that assuages my guilt and pleases the people.

"There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend." But how. By taking a bullet or dying on a cross? By washing feet. Yes. By presenting my body as a LIVING sacrifice. Yes. But how.

One of my greatest fears is that I'll shape my understanding of love around the comforts of home and that love will take on a meaning decided upon by how relatively much I have sacrificed of those things I didn't really need to begin with.

So perhaps love is like this: the disciples standing in a row watching the hands applying water to the feet of Peter, drying the feet, setting them on the dirt floor, mud filling the bucket, His white linen turning muddled, a splash or two on His cheek, His great joy in getting dirty for the service of another because this was why He was sent.

And so I am sent not for perfection or separation from but for kneeling down into the dirt and making feet clean, refreshed, new.

Amen.

My greatest fears

In the mornings when I leave home I fear I won't return so the night before when Abi asks me to lay in the bed with her, when Ben asks me to do the same, when Sarah says she wants me to hug her and hold her and I would rather move onto the adult tasks of sitting on the couch to read or sulk about the day, instead I lay with my kids and hold them, I rub Megan's shoulders, listen to details about Disney World, watch House M.D., or something else she might like me to do (housework) that might when I die be remembered as "He was always willing to spend time with me." In other words, I show love because I might die. This isn't love, I don't think. This could be called sentimentality.

One of my greatest fears is not that I will die without having been sentimental. It is that I will have died without having mattered, without, in other words, having loved. "Without love, I am nothing but a sounding gong or clanging cymbal," writes Paul in 1 Corinthians.

So how do I love? By lying in bed, holding and hugging, rubbing shoulders, giving a high five, looking at 6-year-old Benjamin through the backseat window as I'm pumping gas and praying, praising, thanking God for my son...and all of this because He loved me first, because at the right time Christ died for me and my dung heap of works (including sentimentality).

Amen.

Sunday Hike

It was a moment you could hear every sound. Rare and cold. An unfallen leaf captive and raking against its branch, the kids’ coats chaffing against the granite we sat on, a distant dog’s barking, the imagined creaking of the darkening hardwoods readying their limbs for snatching the unsuspecting. No child’s voice above a whisper for we all sat in awe at this cold, crisp, clean moment no one had ever lived. Then the moment broke.

Abi noticed the pink line of the sky as the sun descended so we headed down the mountain with Ben the guide illuminating possible stumbling rocks and roots for me and four year old Abi and two year old Sarah as we walked in the dark.

Thank you Creator of moments like these.

Amen.

We need all the pieces

We naturally value order and de-clutter, but love is not neat and clean so neither is family. "I love that our garage is full of kids toys," Megan said as we pulled in, our kids dead to the world asleep in their seats. She was serious about the big wheel stacked atop a scooter leaning against a Spiderman bike leaning against the back wall.

This is our merry life. Soccer balls buried and brown in old leaves, a swing hanging from a retired climbing rope hanging from a branch on the Maple in our front yard, a plastic swimming pool reassigned as a sled for sliding down the hillside pine island in our front yard. Tunnels made from couch cushions, blankets everywhere, piles of stuffed animals, rogue Legos. Dirty shirt sleeves from Benjamin's food, and other, wipings.

Love is not safe, clean, orderly, efficient, but all the pieces are important to make love real.

When Christ became flesh and dwelt among us, no one could hide their humanity from Him and still today He brings all the pieces—ugly, smelly, human—to light and says "now we know what we have to work with." And He goes to work.

And through me and in me, and in any of those who are His, He works in the rubble, in the dark corners of our homes where we think no light could reach.

Amen.

What am I going to do?

I've taken a long break from blogging because there just comes a point when silence is a little bit better than whatever half-cocked thing you could have written. Unfortunately my point of silence came only a few months into beginning this blog, but fortunately I've not been stagnant in my thought-life or in life in general.

The holidays and the new year offered me a break in routine to consider what to do and what not to do with my time, given that I have a very small amount of it when compared with the age of the universe, the length of eternity and just how much one must accomplish to make even the smallest of dents in history.

And here is what I've concluded about my dent. It doesn't matter as much as I want it to. "Unless the Lord builds the house he who builds it labors in vain." My dent is as small or as large as my Lord wants it to be. I'm not even promised that anyone will remember me or attribute to me anything that I've accomplished.

In all likelihood I'll be forgotten in two to three generations at most, but this doesn't cause me to despair. Instead it reminds me and drives me to Jesus Christ. He actually gives meaning to my actions and determines whether they are as much a vapor as my life is.

So my prayer is that He humbles me to the point of making my life mean more than flesh, blood and mist. And out of this humility will I work, write, think, parent, and have my being.

Amen.

a theology of seeing, part 1

I am working on a theology of seeing. I'm using the word "seeing" in a loose way to mean "observe," "sense," "experience."

The question I'm attempting to answer is "If I believe the Gospel, how should this affect the way I experience the world."

Ernest Hemingway in talking to an aspiring writer said "always think about other people." This is a rule for the writer and for the Christian. Christ says "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Paul writes "consider others better than yourselves."

Flannery O'Connor wrote in Mystery and Manners that one should "never apologize for staring."

Wendell Berry writes to the aspiring poet: "Sit down. Be quiet."

I am too quick to speak. I've been told I'm a good listener, but I'm really a good actor. And I become angry far too easily. (Read James 1:19)

So how do I see truthfully. How can I learn to see through the lens of the Gospel?

My intention with this blog has become to pay attention to where I am. Time and attention are the most abundant yet non-renewable of resources. They are what create the story of our lives, and they allow us to experience the world.

Our attention is always on something as we float downstream on time, and to see the world for what it is depends on where along the banks we fix our gaze.

Speaking of streams, this has been my stream of conscious approach to seeing. I look forward to providing better definition along the way.

Garage soccer

Sometimes there's so much beauty a day can't hold it like when your six year old carries in the groceries, puts himself to bed then is caught asleep and standing peeing on his toys in the closet. Or when as the day grows dark the garage turns into a soccer field and any number of other things. Kids make things, silly things, unpleasant things, everyday things come to life

Resurrecting leaves and cardboard boxes

Yesterday we built a mountain of leaves and watched the kids jump from rock to pile in daredevil plunges under the royal blue sky. Was a blast watching kids have a blast with so little and simple a thing as a pile of dead vegetation. My kids make leaves ... and cardboard boxes ... and video games that don't work ... come to life.

Read 1 Peter 1:13

Benjamin is memorizing for money. Not sure if it's the best tactic for helping him appreciate, absorb and apply the Bible, but it's what works for now. This morning's recitation of 1 Peter 1:13 was punctuated by scenes from the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with Peter (how apt!) readying his sword and Aslan's army for battle against the ferocious and ugly army of the White Witch.

I need this verse more than he. I've found so much more to be drunk on. Technology, banter, theology, sex, drugs, rock and roll, this blog and the everbiquitous Twitter account. I am drunk most of the time on something that helps me forget the battle waged inside me and around me. Somebody wants my blood, somebody wants my soul and somebody wants them right now. (to borrow from Johnny Ringo) So I prepare my mind for action, I don't shy away from bloodying a gleaming sword, I don't forget that grace will come and often with a roar. Grace will come.