Revisiting: How Eddie Died (The Sweet Escape)

I woke up sad this morning.  Not the can't-even-get-out-of-bed kind of sad but also not the mild variety that is most often cured quickly by a cup of coffee and my morning devotional.  No, I woke up alcoholic-y sad.  Irritable and discontent.  Forcing myself to be pleasant when really I just wanted to lash out at everybody even though the only available "everybodies" were all under the age of six.  I held it together and was a good mommy but it was a whole lot of work.

I can't cruise along at that speed or things are going to get ugly and I know it.  So I did my devotional.  It helped but not nearly enough.  I prayed and asked God for the next step.  And then the next.  And then the next.  I won't go through the whole rabbit trail but eventually He led me to my blog.  I opened up a new post but realized I wasn't here to write, but to read.  He led me to the most painful but most popular post of all.  After I opened it and re-read it, I realized that I wrote and posted it exactly two years ago today.  I smiled my most genuine smile of the day.  I love it when God does that... shows you that there are no mistakes and few coincidences... but a plan and a pattern that He has for you to follow and He'll lead and guide you every single step of the way.

I think He wanted me to read this to assure me that it is okay that I wake up brokenhearted sometimes.  That my weakness was permissible and God-glorifying since His strength is made perfect in human weakness.  For some reason revisiting the most painful day of my life has lifted me up rather than dragged me down and my heart is lighter, my irritability gone, my gratitude restored.

I feel He wants me to repost this and so it is in a spirit of obedience that I do so.  I hope it serves to lift someone else up today or perhaps even introduce someone to the glorious, gracious and unbelievably good Creator, the One True God, the great I AM, who I worship and adore.  So without further ado, here it is.  The tragic, triumphant end to Eddie's story and my testimony as to why I am able to live a joyful life.

How Eddie Died (The Sweet Escape)

Okay, so I know those of you who follow the blog regularly and don't know the story have probably been curious about this particular topic.  I am feeling brave this evening, the kids are napping, and I have had a Chai tea and an L-Theanine.  So here it goes...

In May of 2007, Phillip and I decided we could no longer afford the duplex we were living in so we moved out to a trailer his mother and dad own in Red Rock, Tx.  Red Rock is about thirty miles southeast of Austin and a mile north of the Middle of Frickin' Nowhere.  It was where Phillip lived when we met and I swore to myself I would never, never, never live there.  But, there we were.

The day we moved in, I set one foot outside of the car and a butterfly landed on it.  He sat there for a moment, slowly opening and closing his wings, and, I don't know why, but suddenly I knew.  With a deep-down, uncanny certainty that this was to be Eddie's last stop.  The site where he would shed the chrysalis of this life and fly away from me to the arms of the Lord.  I didn't share this knowledge with his dad.  Oogie-boogie stuff makes Phillip a little nervous for one thing and for another I did not want to rob him of any hope and joy for the coming time we had with our little man, however long it would be.

As the summer progressed, Eddie's liver disease worsened.  The TPN (intravenous nutrition) was necessary to sustain him, but it was killing his liver.  Soon his liver stopped being able to process it altogether.  Although he was getting enough calories pumped through him to be downright chubby, he was steadily losing weight.  His eyes and skin were growing more and more yellow.  The food he was eating was helping a little with the liver and nutrition stuff, but not nearly enough.  Still, these were happy days.  He was a normal twenty month old in every other way:  learning new words, learning to use crayons rather than eat them, dancing and playing.

Let me digress a moment to explain what I mean by "dancing."  He was mobility-impaired...all of the abdominal surgeries and issues had kept him from ever crawling much less walking.  But like his parents, Eddie loved music and he would wave his little hands and clap.  In our bathroom there was a vanity along one wall and a huge mirror above it.  One of his favorite songs in those days was Gwen Stefani's "The Sweet Escape."  It has a really catchy little "woo hoo, wee hoo" at the beginning and throughout and Eddie really got into it.   I would hold him up on that vanity, supporting his little hips, and he would sway back and forth and wave his "jazz hands," laughing and smiling at himself in the mirror.  It is one of my favorite memories.

In the first week of August, Eddie began to have fevers.  It had all the earmarks of a central line infection.  We faced a decision.  His last line replacement surgery had resulted in Eddie wanting to quit altogether.  The point of his central line was to deliver the TPN.  The TPN wasn't really working anymore, except to accelerate his liver disease.  Either Eddie could make it on the nutrition he ate alone or he couldn't.  The inevitable moment had come.  We scheduled a surgery to have his central line removed.

When we were admitted and Eddie had to put on a hospital anklet, he screamed like it had burned him.  It made me feel glad that this was, really, the last time he would have to be in a hospital.  His surgery was quick and easy and we were able to take him home immediately.  Everyone was so loving and supportive of our decision.  Our hospice doctor made sure we had oxygen support and pain medications and we went home.

Phillip and I were still praying for the radical miracle.  I still had faith for it, but, just as with the sinking certainty I had felt with the butterfly encounter when we arrived at our house, I felt that God's answer this time was "no."  For a couple of days, it seemed like things were going well.  Eddie was eating and interacting normally.  But things changed on Thursday night and by Friday morning it was pretty clear that the end was near.

That morning I still prayed for miraculous, radical healing.  Desperately, fervently, I prayed.  As the day progressed, though, and Eddie continued to decline, my prayer changed.  I gave God two options.  He could, as I had begged Him, radically heal my twenty-two month old son.  This option came with lots of promises.  Eddie and I would be on every television program telling our story and giving praise to God.  This was Option A and the desperate desire of my heart.  If that wasn’t God’s will, however, I helpfully supplied Option B.  If He was going to take my son home, He needed to go ahead and do it.  Now.  Not this slow, steady decline.  It was far too painful, both to Eddie and to me.  So, now God had it.  My acceptable two options:  a Lazarus-style miracle or instant death.

God wasn’t listening to me.  Eddie lost his sight, his eyes becoming soft and dry.  He stopped eating and drinking.  The hospice nurse came to check on him.  I asked her how long this could last.  Death was a funny thing, she said.  She could leave and immediately have to come back to declare him dead or this could last for days.  The word “days” resounded in my heart like a shotgun blast.  I could sit here at our bedside and be forced to watch, helplessly, as my child wasted away for days.

By this time, I had run out of words to pray.  In my desperation, I still reached out in faith.  I remembered that when Pope John Paul II prayed, he simply came into the presence of God and said one word:  “Yes.”  This became my prayer as well.  The nurse left around eleven p.m. and as I sat next to my tiny toddler, my heart breaking, I internally prostrated myself before God with that word on my lips.  “Yes.”  Your will be done, even in this.  Immediately, my agony was accompanied by a quiet peace.  The pain did not leave me but I knew that Christ was sitting right there with me as we endured this together.

At two-thirty Saturday morning on August 11th, 2007, I took a moment to be alone with God.  I washed the few dishes in the sink, talking to God.   “Thank you for Option C," I said.  "I don’t understand it.  I don’t like it.  But I know you love me and you love Eddie even more than I do.  So whatever this is, it’s for our good.  So, thank you and I love you.”

I walked back into the bedroom, looked at Eddie, and knew that he was gone.  In those few moments, his spirit had gone home.  I wanted the first words I said to be words of faith.  God’s peace enveloped me and enabled me, even with a shattered heart, to say, “Naked came I out of the womb and naked go I thither.  The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.  Thanks be to God.”

There is no moment like the moment your child dies.  Nothing more heartbreaking, nothing more surreal.  But God was with me.  He was listening to every single one of my prayers.  The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35.  It states simply:  "Jesus wept."  Even though He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead (and He knew it), when he encountered Mary's grief, He cried with her.  I think He did this so that we would know that at these moments, He weeps with us as well.  We are never alone in our grief.  Not in the moment that my son left this earth and not while I sit here, weeping, and write about it.  The Lords sustains me...and weeps with me.

Phillip and I called hospice.  We lovingly and reverently washed our baby's body and changed his clothes.  We placed him in his crib and covered him with a blanket.  It was impossible, but we did it.  We loved him and we honored him, both in life and in death.  When our hospice nurse arrived, her eyes were tear-stained but she smiled and said, "Our boy is free and he is flying."

She didn't even know about the butterfly on my foot back in May or that I had spent most of the day rocking Eddie and singing "I'll Fly Away."  She did know the truth, though.  That as hard as it was for all of us, Eddie was free.  He was running into the arms of the Lord.  Running!  Like a normal nearly two year old.  His stomach didn't hurt anymore.  He would never shed another tear.  He was perfect, whole, and home.

It was nearly dawn by the time all of the administrative stuff had been taken care of.  The van from the funeral home pulled away from our house just as the sun was breaking over the horizon.  It was a beautiful morning and a cool breeze was blowing.  Phillip and I sat down in the lawn chairs in our front yard and watched the sunrise.  We didn't say anything.  Really, when you've just been through what we had been through, there isn't a lot to say.  A butterfly landed on my arm, opened its wings a couple of times, and flew away.  There was so much ahead of us:  phone calls, funeral preparations, a new baby, and a lifetime of coping with grief and the loss of our first-born son.  But in that moment, I just watched that little butterfly fly away and felt peace in the assurance that my little boy was with his Savior.  That Eddie had found his own sweet escape, from all the pain, all the struggling, all the sickness.  That he was happy, laughing and joyfully showing Jesus how well he could dance.  

Heartbreaker

I love Pinterest.  In fact, I'm pretty much an all around social media junkie.  I can dwindle away countless hours in front of my computer screen or on my smartphone, liking statuses, pinning recipes I will never cook, and, yes, occasionally giggling at pictures of a grumpy cat or two.  For the most part, it is an addiction I have to reign in, a time suck that could and should be spent doing something more productive.  But it's not all mindless, time wasting fluffery.  Sometimes you can use social media as a means to offer and receive encouragement, to share joy, to teach and to learn.  To inspire and spread inspiration.

To this end I have a Pinterest board entitled "Motivation."  For the most part it is filled with diet and exercise stuff, which is not necessarily a good thing for this overly body-conscious mama.  But there is a smattering of pins on there that reach for a deeper kind of motivation.  One is a lovely picture of a woman wading through a river with a simple prayer printed over it.  It says, "Lord cleanse me of anything that breaks your heart."

I remember the day I saw it.  I thought, "Wow," and repinned it.  But I didn't pray it.  Because that is a scary prayer and scary prayers... well... scare me.  Despite what my love affair with running might suggest, I am not a masochist and that prayer is just asking for trouble.  That is a prayer you should not pray unless you really, really mean it.

I've been cleansed from a lot in my life.  I remember when I was first saved I memorized Psalm 51 which says in verse 7, "Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.  Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow."  There was a lot of purging to be done then.  God really had to wring me out and, unfortunately, I didn't learn my lesson.  I went back to most of if not all of my bad habits, and had to ask Him to do it AGAIN many years later.  I was a glutton for punishment, apparently.

Because to cleanse me, God had to break me down.  He had to smash my heart into a million pieces so He could put it back together.  He had to take a wrecking ball to my life, knock down every wall and strip me to the foundation.  It wasn't fun.  I am grateful for every excruciating moment of it since the final outcome was amazing and wonderful, but the process hurt.  Like childbirth, the miracle that follows outweighs the pain that led up to it.  Still, it doesn't change the fact that it hurt like hell.

So these days I do not intentionally sin.  By that I mean, I don't set out purposefully to do things I know I shouldn't do.  That is a vast improvement over my youth.  Additionally, I pray.  I read Scripture.  I attend church.  I even blog about my faith.  So, I'm good, right?  That should be enough.  I'll just hang out right here, thank you.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way.  I mean, it could, if you want to live a life of mediocrity or, as Thoreau would put it, "quiet desperation."  But I don't want to.  I know an extraordinarily awesome life is available through faith in Christ Jesus and I want it.  I have experienced a taste of kingdom living and it has given me a hunger and a thirst for righteousness that outweighs my human desire for comfort.  Sri Ramakrishna cautioned, "Do not seek enlightenment unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond."  Well, at the risk of sounded too terribly corny, I'm on fire!

So a few weeks ago, I did it.  Right in the middle of my morning prayer time I uttered the words "cleanse me of anything that breaks your heart."  And I meant it.  Meant it so much that I was immediately frightened and added a quick codicil.  "But, please, be gentle."

What happened next is best summed up by yet another quote in this already quotation heavy blog post (but I can't resist).  As Margo famously said in All About Eve, "Fasten your seatbelts.  It's going to be a bumpy night."  Holy freaking heck.  If this is gentle, I don't want to know what rough feels like.  (Really, God, I don't.)  Apparently there is a still a lot of junk in my heart that breaks God's and He is drawing it out piece by piece, carving it out of me with a spoon and cauterizing the wound that is left behind.  I'm surviving, singing my praise songs, smiling through it while I feed and nurture this family, but let me tell you... it hurts!  On most days it's a good hurt, like the burn in your muscles that lets you know your workout is effective, but pain nonetheless.  And I have a feeling that I'm only at about a seven and God is going to dial it up all the way to ten before it's done.

The idea is both terrifying and elating.  Terrifying for obvious reasons.  Elating because, if I will endure it with faith and patience, rejoicing in every tribulation, at the end of it I will be more like Jesus.  I will have more joy, know more love, feel more power than ever before.  Things that used to defeat me will seem trivial and I will be better prepared for the next challenge that lies ahead.  God is changing my perspective, opening up my eyes to see wonder all around me, showing me that there is so much more to this life than the things I have treasured more than Him.  It's awesome... and unpleasant.

I had a hard night last night.  I woke up this morning full of resentment over the lack I felt regarding things I need.  I need a good night's sleep.  I need some cash.  I need some new clothes and new running shoes and large quantities of chocolate.  I need five minutes in which one of my children doesn't need something from me.  I need a break.  This morning was headed in a bad direction.

So I read my devotional.  And I decided to write this post.  I'll admit; it is more for me than for you.  To remind myself that I have all that I need.  That I asked for sanctification and that is exactly what I'm getting.  To call me back to gratitude for the blessings I have and joyful anticipation of the those that are to come.  To call my heart to worship the One who breaks it, only to replace it with something newer, better and more amazing than anything I could have imagined.      

Still Life

Like every other Texan in the state, I am loving this July cool front.  While temperatures in the 80s may not seem particularly cool to my friends in northern climes, down here this is some exciting stuff.  So, like every other runner in the state, I have been taking advantage and going on some amazing runs.  I ran an 8 miler last Sunday that was itself something near a religious experience but that is the topic for another post.  This morning (in the wee hours... my two month old has just drifted off again after a 4 a.m. wake up call/feeding) what is on my mind are moments.

Yesterday evening I ran three miles through my neighborhood park, coming to the top of our one and only small hill just as the sun was setting over the lake.  Okay, it's more of a pond but we call it a lake.  It was a beautiful view, the water still and pink, contrasted against the darkening backdrop of my admittedly suburban  neighborhood, street lamps and lighted windows beginning to shine in the deepening dusk.  As I descended, I spotted a crane wandering into the water and as I passed it took wing, flirting with its reflection in the rosy water for a few moments before taking fully to the sky.  I was entranced by the present moment, taking a mental picture.  Still Life with Crane.  Or something like that.  I breathed deeply and praised God.  I wanted to remember that moment forever.

I want to remember this summer forever.  Time passes so quickly and the moments you think will always stay with you sometimes fade.  I look back on my life with Eddie and can pick out a few dozen memories, a few snapshots frozen in time.  The rest, the vast majority of those two years, are a kaleidoscope of feelings and impressions, a mash-up of memory, a collage rather than a still, strong image.  That's okay; that's the nature of life.  But sometimes I just want to take a moment and save it forever.

This is the summer that Baby Boy learned to ride his bike without training wheels, took off and never looked back.  It's a summer of four-square and popsicles, of running outside to catch the ice cream truck and running through the sprinklers in the back yard.  When Baby Girl learned to write "Mommy" and left me precious little notes all over the house, the rest indecipherable swirls and arches but that one word standing out strong and clear, reminding me of who, by the grace of God, I am and what it means to my children.  Of strong, tanned arms and legs and strawberries on knees.  Of all five of our living children under one roof, the sixth one felt even if not seen.  Of big sisters making little ones shriek with laughter.  Of popcorn and Disney movies, Golden Books and Legos.  When the Chipmunk joined this jolly crew and we learned that joy goes up to eleven.  All of that, so much more, and it is only the third of July.

Nothing spectacular by the world's standards has happened this summer.  No one has won the lottery or appeared on television.  No trophies or awards.  Just a whole lot of happy little moments, already swirling and blending into the greater pool of memory.  But this morning, as I retrieve my little cat-napper from his swing and earn a full throttle Chipmunk smile for my efforts, I just want to celebrate the moments, this present moment, and look forward to the next one to come.       

Joie de Vivre

So it's been a little over a month since my last blog post, but, hey...  I've been busy.

Our newest addition, a.k.a The Chipmunk, was born on April 26th at 12:18 a.m., weighing in at a healthy 7 pounds, 11 ounces and 19 3/4 inches long.  We are all smitten.

And a little tired.  I'm not complaining, really.  He is the sweetest newborn.  He eats well, sleeps well, and has a very pleasant natural disposition.  But he is, after all, a newborn.  So by "sleeps well," I mean that on good nights I get about four hours of uninterrupted sleep and on not so good ones I get what feels like four minutes.  During the first three weeks of his life, this did not bother me.  This past week has been a little rough.  When I hear the tell-tale rustling in his bassinet that tells me he is awakening in the wee hours of the morning (yes, I'm a light sleeper), it takes every ounce of my being to get out of the bed.  I want to be grumpy.  I want to cry and switch him to formula so someone else (namely, my hard working and little-sleep-getting-as-it-is husband) can take care of Chip's middle of the night munchies.  I want to feel intolerably sorry for myself.  I am one of those people who loves to sleep.  I love nothing better than a good nap, preferably under a light blanket and the gentle breeze of a good ceiling fan.  I need sleep.  I'm like Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde when it comes to the level of sleep I'm getting.  Ask anyone.

So it's no surprise that I've had something akin to suicidal ideations in the middle of the night lately.  New parents get these feelings.  They are natural and a part of this thing.  Or are they?  It would never have occurred to me to even question the psychological effects of new parent sleep deprivation were it not for the fact that for those first three and half weeks or so I didn't have them.  Me, the worst middle of the night mom on the planet, was bouncing of out bed at 2 a.m. full of joy and gratitude for the squeaky little bundle that was building up a good cry if he didn't get his milk STAT.  And while I was sleepy during the day, I was still happy and somewhat functional despite the occasional incident such as leaving the grocery store only to get to the car and realize I left the actual groceries behind.  (The grumpy, unsympathetic checker acted like I was crazy upon my return despite the presence of my 5 year old, 4 year old and infant.  Really?  I have to explain?)  So what's the difference between now and the weeks prior?

I've come up with lots of different ideas.  First, that the sleep-deprivation had a cumulative effect and I had just finally reached my limit.  The problem with this theory is that this is baby #4 for me and with the others I felt the effects of a lack of sleep within days (if not hours) of not getting my usual shut-eye.  Second, dietary changes.  I have given up dairy since, like my others, The Chipmunk is sensitive to cow's milk.  The problem with this theory is that I indulged in a large scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and felt even worse upon awakening (and gave the baby a tummy ache).  There were others, but you get the point.  Finally, I had to admit I did not know what was different.

Then, in church last Sunday, the priest said an interesting thing.  It's a miracle I even caught it since I was actually not in the sanctuary at the time, but in the bathroom with Baby Girl (who conveniently needs to use the restroom almost every single time the homily begins).  What preceded this statement and what followed was, unfortunately, no more than background noise for me, but I heard clearly and succinctly the quote, "Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God."  I googled it later and found it attributed to Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest.  I like it.  It rings true and it provided the key to my midnight misery.  As usual, it was all about God.

Is that to say God has not been present this week?  Hopefully you know better.  God is always present.  What varies is our awareness of His presence.  In those first blissful weeks of The Chipmunk's life, I was overcome by gratitude for him, continually in prayer thanking God for this miraculous little person, for his life and his good health.  Somewhere around week three, for a variety of reasons, worry entered into the scene. I started to obsess over details.  Was he eating enough?  Was he sleeping too much?  And what on earth was that crusty stuff on his left ear?  You get the picture.  I made the subtle and insidious move from gratitude to anxiety and within days (if not hours) the whole happy house of cards came crumbling down.

My children are my life and my greatest joy in the world.  They allow me to live with joie de vivre (everything just sounds better in French, doesn't it?) and I don't know what I would do without them.  So why do they sometimes seem to be the enemy, the ones stealing my peace, my energy, my sleep?  In fact, they aren't.  It's a lie.  Sure, they may wake me up but if I'm grumpy and lethargic I have no one to blame but myself.  If I'm a wreck, it's because I have once again separated myself from the true Source of joy, the One who gives it freely, abundantly and permanently.

Luckily it's an easy fix.  God does not withhold Himself from those who earnestly seek Him.  All I had to do was pray.  When it was time to nurse the baby again and I felt as if my eyes were glued together, I reminded myself that I was not my feelings and prayed a prayer of gratitude.  I forced myself to really look at the baby when I picked him up from his bassinet, to see the miracle right in front of me.  Not immediately, but eventually, my joy has returned.  Even in the middle of the night, running on four minutes sleep, I am grateful and happy, enjoying the presence of God and of the fantastic mini people He has entrusted to me.  My treasures, my greatest gifts, my joys.

Where God Is

So it has been a little over three months since my last blog post and for that I apologize.  I don't have a great excuse.  I have had the time and on some days even the inclination; I just haven't done it.  And today I took some time to think about why.

It started with Sandy Hook.  The day it happened I opened my blog, ready to say something about it all and realized I had nothing to say.  Nothing original to offer; no words to even attempt to address it.  After that day I managed to post a few times about this and that but it seems like 2013 thus far has been a year of shocking tragedies, both on a global or national scale and on a personal one for many of my friends and loved ones.  In the face of it all, I read lots of what others have to say, particularly on social media, and I find myself leaning toward silence.  Toward not throwing another voice into the arena, though I totally understand those who do and choose to process this whole mess in that way.  I just don't really want to.

Because all I have to say is what I always have to say.  My bottom line in the face of everything.  My unwavering belief, based on the cold, hard facts of my own life and journey, that God is good, no matter what.  Doesn't really take a whole blog post to say that, though I guess I have dedicated this entire blog itself, not to mention my entire life itself, to trying to get that simple message across.

2013 has already held some wonderful moments as well, not just senselessly tragic ones.  On a personal level, we have moved to a new house and new community that we love and which we never would have been able to find and afford without God's intervention.  My pregnancy has progressed happily and healthily and I have been surrounded by the unbelievable support of my friends and family as I grow this baby and take care of my littles along the way.  My days continued to be filled with the wonder and hilarity that having a five and four year old naturally brings.  I have no cause to grumble... but when has that ever stopped anyone?

The past few weeks I've been a grumbler.  My pregnancy has gotten to the point where "discomfort" takes on a whole new meaning.  I had my hopes set on a somewhat early delivery and after several disappointing "false starts" it would appear that this little one will make his debut on his due date of April 25th at the earliest or perhaps some day thereafter.  My husband and I have encountered some unexpected financial challenges.  I got stressed out.  I'm not sure if my kids picked up on my stress or if they are just sensing the change in the air that a new baby will bring, but they are amping up the whining and clinging to levels I find... irritating.  And while I've managed to handle it all without blow ups or panic attacks, I am hardly my usual cheerful self.

I had already become self-aware of all of this and was working on it... in a half-hearted, marginally prayerful kind of way.  I certainly haven't been ignoring God and I've prayed but I would be lying if I said it had been consistent, persistent or even more than a cursory nod on some days.  So last night I had an asthma attack.

No, that should not be the beginning of a new paragraph.  I think the first two sentences are directly related to the third.  Am I saying God punished me with an asthma attack?  Not at all.  That is not who He is.  Am I saying He allowed my stress, current physical situation and lack of faith in those areas to carry through to a natural consequence like the perfect "love and logic" parent that He is?  Yes, yes I am.

A scary hour of struggling for breath, a trip to the ER, a breathing treatment and several tedious hours waiting around the hospital in the wee hours of the morning later, I am home and breathing just fine.  Humbled, prayerful, grateful and fine.  There is nothing so revelatory as the reminder that the simple act of breathing is a gift.

If you follow the blog, you know God healed me of asthma.  Does last night's attack negate that truth?  My answer in faith is an emphatic "no."  I simply means my healing, in this and in all things, is entirely dependent on an on-going relationship with my Healer.  Just as my sobriety demands a dependance on Him, so does my health:  physical, emotional, spiritual... all of it.  I'm grateful for the (relatively) painless reminder.

Now before you accuse me of rambling, let me assure you that the first part of this post and the latter part are not wholly unrelated.  Because this morning I found myself asking the question:  How can I know that God is good (not just believe but know) in the face of massacres and bombings, of personal loss and unspeakable tragedy, but not trust Him with my finances?  How can I surrender the loss of my child to Him but begrudge Him my heartburn?  Trust His perfect plan in the face of a world full of evil but swell up like a petulant child because He refuses to cooperate with my personal expectations for the birth of my new baby?     

So my prayer for myself today (and any of you who have stuck with me through this meandering post) is to simply remember that God is good.  He is the hope in the face of fear; the comfort in the midst of tragedy.  He is also the healing balm to sore and swollen feet; the provision when the work dries up and the money doesn't come.  He is there for the big stuff and again for every single mundane detail of daily life... because He is THAT big and that good.  And really, all we have a right to be is grateful... no matter what.  

Glimpsing Abundance

I started this new year with great intentions to faithfully post to this blog at least six days a week.  I'm a little discouraged to see that I have failed already (significantly so) but am going to be diligent in beginning again.  There are some days when I truly just feel that I have nothing to say, at least nothing interesting.  Then there are other days in which I have something to say but just don't really feel ready to say it.

This post is one of the latter posts, a few days in the making.  Because, more than anything, this blog is my tribute to Eddie, my touchstone in remembering the beautiful lessons his life taught me, my way of keeping his memory fresh and sharing him with others, especially those who didn't get to know him in life.  So I felt that I should post my dream about him Thursday night.  Every time I sat down to do so, however, I felt my throat tighten and my heart break a little and I stopped.  I put it off.  But I really don't think I'm going to have it in me to write about anything else until I get this out there into the cyber-sphere so I'm gutting it up and getting through it.

It wasn't a bad dream at all.  In it, Eddie was standing on a chair in front of our kitchen table, frustrated with some project he was undertaking on the table's surface.  He looked just as he had in the last months of his life:  a gorgeous little man-toddler, hardly larger than the average twelve month old but with a maturity of expression befitting an adult.  The fact that he was standing should have clued me in that this was a dream, since he was never able to stand on his own, but it was overshadowed by his terrific frown, which was definitely true to life.  In my dream I was laughing at the intensity of it and he was not pleased with my giggling.  I scooted next to him in the chair and hugged him, snuggling my head into the curve of his back and closing my eyes, loving every grumpy inch of my curmudgeonly son.

I then remember holding him, cradling him in my arms as if to rock him to sleep.  I was smiling at him and bent to kiss the curls that lined his high forehead.  Someone was there with a camera, taking our picture.

An unremarkable dream, really.  That's it.  No big revelations, no visions, no lessons.  Except for the fact that he was standing, those moments could have been snatched from any number of the days that we shared together.  But we don't share days together anymore, at least not in the way we used to.  I feel his presence with me, some days more than others; I talk to him in my heart.  But I don't get to see that hilariously frightening frown or kiss those beautiful curls, so these dreams are precious to me.  I wouldn't trade them for the world.  They give me little glimpses of the person I miss most, that I will always miss most, but that doesn't keep them from being painful.  I woke up Friday morning feeling as if my chest had been hollowed out with an ice cream scoop.

These are the mornings when I have to breathe a little deeper.  A little more deliberately.  When I have to get on my knees (figuratively) before I even get out of bed.  I give praise to the God who is going to get me through this day, through this life, without my first born son.  Because the answer to the comment I get more than any other, "I don't know how you do it," is, honestly, really, I don't.  I wake up some mornings and can't imagine surviving the day.  I don't know how to get out of bed and have something that resembles a decent day.  I don't know how to do it, but I know someone who does and I trust Him.  So far He hasn't let me down.

So I prayed and I got out of bed.  I prayed a little more and made coffee.  And by the time my husband and bounding preschoolers were up and about, I was able to give them all a genuine smile.  We played music and watched cartoons.  I drank a hot cup of coffee and could appreciate its taste, its rich aroma, its magical reviving power.  We decided on the day's adventure, a trip to see the "Dinosaurs Alive!" exhibit at a local nature park.  On the way we stopped and ate donuts.  I didn't have a decent day; I had a great one.

One of my go-to Bible verses is John 10:10 which reads, "The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy.  I have come so that may have life and have it in abundance."  The latter part of that verse was printed on the memorial cards from Eddie's funeral and I know it probably seemed a strange choice to some.  After all, 22 months of life does not seem "abundant" by the world's standards and in many ways, no, it wasn't enough.  But abundance is not about quantity but quality.  It's not about money or material possessions.  It's not even about bountiful amounts of food, though those are always nice.  Abundance, Christ's abundance, is about starting the day lost in loss, crippled by the pain of the past, but finding God's hands ever open, doling out much more than sufficiency.  Pouring out joy overflowing, "pressed down, shaken together, and running over."  Were it not for Eddie, I might have missed what an abundant life looked like.  Through his short little life, my eyes were opened to who God was, what He could do, and what He offers, freely, daily, and without reservation.  Love divine, all loves excelling.

So, yes, it hurts to close my eyes and see those images from my dream, not to mention all of those from my memory.  I yearn to hold my little boy again and the promise of our heavenly reunion seems too remote, too far away, to ease the longing.  But God is with me in these moments, covering me with His comfort and waiting for me to go to Him for help.  To ask Him to get me through, to which He responds by lifting me up, above and beyond any height to which I could have aspired.  I ask to be able to cope; He gives me the ability to flourish.  I ask not to cry; He calls me to laugh.  I ask for life to be tolerable; He makes it phenomenal.  So through grateful tears tonight, I find myself whispering, simply, "Abundance."  Much more than enough.  The best I could hope for and better.          

Art and Other Messes

One of my favorite things to do with my kids is art.  I don't really know how else to put it, though the phrase "do art" doesn't really make me happy.  I guess I could say "create art" or "make art" but that implies an activeness on my part that is very much absent when we have our little art sessions.  Not because I don't want to participate.  Sometimes I have to restrain myself from becoming more actively involved.  Instead I try to provide interesting materials and mediums and let them do the creating.  This process is always different, always interesting, and always extremely, extremely messy.

Today's art lesson, such as it was, was no different.  It started with an idea I saw on Pinterest that I liked and thought would work well for my twos class at preschool.  My kids are testers for all art and sensory projects, even though they are a bit older than my demographic.  For one thing, they prepare me in advance for the fact that, whatever the thing looks like on Pinterest, the result is probably not going to be the same if toddlers or preschoolers are given free reign.  For another, they always have a whole lot of fun and that makes me happy.

So today's project, initially, was relief painting with tape.  I masking-taped the first letters of their names on a piece of paper and had them paint the paper around it.  Tomorrow, when everything is dry, I'll take the tape off and see if it looks cool or if I should relegate it to the "fun at home, not so much for school" list.  My kids had a blast splashing paint on the page and rubbing it over the taped letters.  After they were done with that I provided more paper so that they could paint at will.  Baby Girl covered a page with green and began drawing designs.  Baby Boy did what he almost always does... mixing colors together until everything is a really strange purply-grey-brown blob.

Here is where my restraint comes in.  He loves to mix colors and he loves to use a lot of paint while experimenting.  Like, a lot of paint.  He would go through gallons if it was available to him and he would take all of the lovely bright hues and, by process of experimentation, produce gallons of purply-grey-brown.  With all of it.  I grew up in a household where mixing play-doh colors was punishable by death.  Okay, not really, but you get the point.  Watching him swirl and swirl and swirl until we go way past pretty is hard for me.

But I am a woman of strong resolve and I am resolved to let my children be free.  To let them explore their world within safe parameters and to suspend judgement when possible.  As I bit my tongue to prevent myself from saying something to the effect of "that's really probably enough," I repeated to myself the mantra, "He's exploring the medium.  He's exploring the medium."  And he was.  Baby Boy was learning and doing so in a way that made him spontaneously erupt in a fit of joyful giggles.  I was immediately glad I had not "corrected" him and had let him create in the way he wanted to create.

Once the paintings were all done and the little Picassos deposited in the bathtub, I cleaned up the mess and then took a look at the drying masterpieces.  They are beautiful.  There is no doubt whose is whose; Baby Girl's deliberate swirls and twirls are a totally different style than her big brother's excessive Jackson Pollack-esque works.  But one of his in particular is pretty fantastic.  It is purply-grey-red with a big swipe of red (squeezed straight from the bottle) down the center and another of yellow in the corner and it's... beautiful.  I would take a picture of it to post but I'm a terrible photographer and would not do it justice.  Not that I'm about to show it to a gallery or anything.  It's just interesting to me that the moment that my "grown up" brain was shouting in alarm, "Too much paint!!", my child was creating something really striking and... well... beautiful.

Pablo Picasso said, "All children are artists.  The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."  I don't pretend to have the answer to that problem, but I'm going to do my best to protect my little artists' hearts and spirits, to let them be them and not have to be anything else.  It's not always my first inclination.  Baby Girl loves to take pieces of construction paper and a pair of safety scissors and cut the paper into tiny little slivers and squares, triangles and squiggly spirals.  My "grown up" brain screams "Messy!" (and it is) and "Wasteful!" (which, really, it isn't) but I've never complained.  Consequently, the girl has mad scissor skills that were remarked upon by her preschool teachers.  I breathe and decide I'm doing something right.

At the risk of making this blog post too quote-heavy...  As I was looking at Baby Boy's artwork, I was reminded of a quote from Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (which is nothing short of brilliant if you've never read it) which says, in part, "Let others bring order to chaos.  I would bring chaos to order."  Not that I'm an anarchist or anything, but I do believe this world is chaotic.  There is nothing we can do about it and probably nothing we should do about it.  The chaos is a big part of why it is so beautiful.  The less we try to control it, the happier we will be.  

God tells us the kingdom belongs to children and children don't follow the rules.  They don't try to impose order when chaos will do.  These perfect little artists don't know well enough to have "grown up" brains yet and it suits them just fine.  So I'm going to continue to tell my brain to hush when it's being a spoil sport and let my children inspire me.  Let's get messy.

Celebrate

As I prepare for the arrival of another bundle of joy, it occurs to me that I now am in need of a new pseudonym for one of the boys.  For so long it has been Baby Boy and Baby Girl with no need to disguise the "real" identity of Eddie since he is, after all, deceased.  But there is a little guy on the way who needs his own name.  Or, perhaps, big brother needs a change in his.  Not only is he no longer the baby-est boy, but he turned the ripe old age of five in December, taking him solidly out of the baby category (at least by his own estimation).

Yesterday marked the one month anniversary of this momentous occasion, a whopping five years in the making.  It's been a really big deal.  I mean, birthdays are a really big deal in our family anyway.  Part of this stems from my husband's Mexican heritage, a culture who loves to celebrate and can stretch a birthday party into a month's long event if they so choose, complete with live music, bounce houses and feasts that feed a crowd of hundreds.  I'm really only exaggerating a little.  It's awesome and I love it.  Added on to this cultural penchant for larger than life celebrations, however, is the fact that we only got to celebrate one birthday for Eddie.  I was in the process of planning his second birthday extravaganza when he left us.  Luckily, we had celebrated every week while he was in NICU.  I will never forget that Eddie was born on a Tuesday, because every single Tuesday was a big, big deal for those first three months.  After he was home, I calmed down just a little and it went to monthly celebrations.  Not always the big thing with cake and presents, but an acknowledgement, an excited "You are seven months old today!" when he woke up that morning.

With Eddie, every day was something of a celebration.  Even on the hard days, there was an underlying gratitude that he was there, present, drawing air even if only through the aid of machinery.  I found a random journal entry, scrawled in the pages of a Mead notebook between old meal plans and to do lists.  I was sitting at our kitchen table in a duplex in Bastrop, Eddie napping a few meters away in his crib in our bedroom.  I was grateful and writing about it.  Midway through the entry, I noted that I heard him stir, no cry or call of "Mama," just a simple rustling of body against sheet, the kind of noise that would be easily missed by many parents, those not hyper-sensitively attuned to every single sound (we, the parents of critically ill children, whom God blesses with our own bizarre brand of spider-sense).  I wrote how that tiny little sound shouted joy to me, screaming, "He is alive!"  For as long as he stirred, he lived and as long as he lived, I had hope.

In those days, I could not look ahead to a future where Eddie no longer slept in his crib, no longer awoke with a small stirring followed by the sing-song "MA-ma" which was music to my ears.  The times when my mind would wander toward the possibility of  different days I would feel a tearing in my heart, a pain so acute and sudden, that I would shy away, take a deep breath, and focus on the present moment.  He was there now, I would tell myself, and that is enough.  Life beyond Eddie seemed something I could never bear, never survive.  I imagined that if and when the time came I would just heavily medicate and drift away to la-la land, living a sort of half-life until I got to follow him home.

God had other plans for my life and He gave us Baby Boy, already five months in my womb and completely dependent on me by the time his big brother died.  From those first kicks and wiggles, I had someone else that I loved much more than myself, someone who wasn't going to let me escape into oblivion.  Even as my first tears fell after the breath left Eddie's body, they fell onto my full, round belly and I knew I would go on.  That somehow I was going to survive this; we were, my new Baby Boy and I.  I didn't have any other choice.

What I didn't know was how much better we were going to do than merely survive.  How we were going to thrive.  The laughter and joy we were going to share; the indescribable hope.  I love this picture, one of the first pictures of Baby Boy and me, taken the day after he was born.

There is so much in my expression.  If you didn't know, you would only see the face of a happy, if a little tired, new mother, never guessing that this was also the face of a mother who had lost her child a mere four months before.

Do not make the mistake of thinking I replaced one child with another.  That is impossible and mental.  I grieved for Eddie; I still do.  The tearing, ripping, unbearable pain of loss came in waves in those first years and still comes, crashing and impossible, but I have the strength and fortitude to sit with it, to allow God to draw me near to Him and comfort me.  I breathe through them like a woman in labor until they abate.  I can do this only through God's strength, not my own, but I choose to seek that strength because my children give me a reason to.  A purpose, a direction, and I thank God for that.

"I'm a grown up now," announces Baby Boy with confidence.  "Because I'm five."  I look at him and smile because in so many ways he is, compared to the tiny little bundle born five years and one months ago.  Yet I'm grateful that there is still so much of the baby there too, in no hurry for him or his sister to grow up.  Not just yet.  So perhaps I'll let him keep his moniker for now and we'll wait and see what we'll call the new one when he arrives.  My big Baby Boy crawls into my lap, gives me a kiss, and tells me he loves me so much... can we play Mickey Mouse Clubhouse now?  I laugh and tell him we can.  So it is with a heart full of love, hope and gratitude for this present moment that I sign off, wishing you all a joyful day full of moment to moment blessings.           

Anchors Aweigh

Instead of making my usual list of New Year's resolutions for 2013 (which would have read something like: eat more vegetables, lose baby weight... once I have the baby of course, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah), I'm trying something new this year.  In my search for new and interesting teaching methods for my kids, I ran across a blog called Fairy Dust Teaching and caught onto her recommendations for a mindful beginning to the new year.  I'm only two days in to a five day series, but geeking for the next installment.  I love it when I try something and it really, really works.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The first day's exercise was a reflection on 2012.  Workbook pages that made you reflect on what worked, what didn't, what you accomplished and what fell flat.  It was eye opening and encouraging, showing me where I had excelled in 2012 (physical fitness) and where I had fallen flat (sadly, service to others and creativity).  Instead of using this as an opportunity to beat myself up for not serving meals to the homeless or building a house in El Salvador or something, I reviewed it in non-judgment.  My focus had been on getting back in shape for 2012 and I'd done that, quickly and impressively, if I do say so myself.  So what could I accomplish this year if I shifted that focus to where it needed to be for 2013?  The idea stirred an excitement in me that threatened to overcome the perpetual heartburn of my pregnancy and it was with a sense of anticipation that I put the day's reflection to bed and looked toward the next.

The second day brought a challenge to choose one word to define the year to come.  One word, to provide clarity and focus for what I wanted 2013 to be for me.  Looking at a list of words, so many of them looked good to me.  Create.  Adventure.  Learn.  Live.  Be.  Imagine.  Choosing one was going to be torture.  I just knew that when I found that one word, though, I would know it.  That there would be a click and that would be it.  Going throughout the day to day tasks of a busy homemaker, part of my mind kept wrestling with it, turning the concept over and over like the clothes in my front-loading washing machine.  Then it came to me like a flash.  From Disney Jr. of all places.  I turned on the TV in order to make lunch (if you are a better mom than me and don't use your TV in this manner, hats off to you and all that) and at my kids excited cheers that Jake and the Neverland Pirates was on, I found it.  It resonated like a tuning fork, bringing all those words together into one:  Neverland.  I want this year to be Neverland.

I rushed to write it down in my New Year's workbook.  Neverland.  It was beautiful.  It was creativity and child-like joy, possibility, imagination and endless adventure.

Now, do I know how to instantly transform my home, heart and surroundings to fit the Neverland theme?  Not remotely.  Do I even know what, precisely, that would look like?  Ummm....  No.  But I do know about the power of intention.  I do know that when you plant that seed, that when you voice a desire of your heart, even one as nebulous and undefined as J.M. Barrie's imaginary island, you create a ripple, you throw a stone into the stillness, and things come to you.  You knock and God answers.

I watched the movie Finding Neverland many years ago, which is an adaptation of the story surrounding Barrie's creation of Peter Pan.  I remember crying, not only because of the content of the plot but because it made me realize that being a "grown up" was not necessarily compulsory.  That we could keep a child's heart, if we devoted ourselves to its preservation.  That the world could be full of wonder and discovery every day of our lives, not just those days in which we glimpse the Grand Canyon but also those that we glimpse little more than meatloaf and ketchup stains.  

So it is with a deep breath of salty sea air (produced by my Scentsy burner) and a swig of hearty brew (to wit:  decaf Constant Comment tea), that I embark boldly on this adventure of 2013, my wee first mateys by my side and even a stowaway in my belly (due to arrive in April).  I look forward to seeing what it brings me.  What pirate attacks, what treasures to be found, what dreams to be discovered and realized, as we set sail through stars and sky for Neverland.  

Spinning

I love meeting new people.  My husband and I are both ridiculously social so even in the years before Eddie we loved to be introduced to a group of new faces and start making acquaintances from strangers, friends from acquaintances.  Since Eddie my love of this process has only increased because every new batch, if you will, is a new audience for the amazing testimony God has entrusted to me.

Don't get me wrong.  I don't walk into a room, stand up on a chair and start laying it out to the crowd.  But as any parent who has lost a child will tell you, the subject invariably comes up.  Especially now that I am pregnant again, it is downright unavoidable.  Upon seeing my two little peanuts running around wild, there is an assumption that this is my third child and it is almost always commented upon.  So I can either treat this as a discomfort and a pain or I can see it for the opportunity that it is:  an opportunity to share the tremendous blessing I was given and the affirmation that God IS, He is good, and He was, is, and will always be a God of miracles.

I'm frank and upfront.  I say that this is our fourth child, sixth for our family since I have two stepdaughters.  I explain that our first son died just before his second birthday but that he was not "supposed" to live longer than a couple of weeks.  He was our miracle baby and we are very grateful to God for him.  For some people, this is their cue to back away from the conversation with varying degrees of grace and disappear.  I don't mind; part of the mixed blessing of my theatrical personality has always been a very near disregard for other people's comfort levels.  But for the vast majority of people, this is quite an icebreaker and the more they realize that I am perfectly happy, thrilled in fact, to talk about Eddie all day long, the more they want to know.  They ask more questions and I get to share how amazing God is, how he spoke truths to my heart when men said there was no hope, raised my son up time and time again, gave me peace when he died, and has blessed me with peace, hope and joy every day of my life since calling Eddie home.  These are conversations punctuated with laughter, though sometimes through misty eyes.  They are conversations of redemption and hope and I love it every time God gives me the opportunity to have one.

As much as I hope these talks bless other people, my reason for loving them is more selfish than that.  I love talking about Eddie because it reminds me not to worry.  It brings me back to a time when I knew with a deep, concrete knowledge that God was in control.  That His love was complete, infinite, and I could lean on His everlasting arms and find peace.  Amidst the clutter of everyday life, I lose sight of that truth so often it is embarrassing.  I get stressed about things like my kids' birthday parties (to which I say to myself, "Really?  I mean, Abby... really?").  I forget that God is large and in charge and that He loves me with a love so perfect I can only begin to comprehend it.

When Eddie was in the NICU and we were finally able to hold him, we soon discovered that he really liked to be held in a very interesting way.  One hand on his tiny chest, the other under his even tinier bum, he leaned forward, hands gripping my hand, head propped up on my fingers.  And then we bounced up and down, up and down.  It's great for mommy's biceps and apparently is very soothing on the baby end of things if you suffer from tummy pains.  We would laugh, though, because Eddie took this practice very, very seriously.  He would get a look of concentration on his face that rivaled the fiercest endurance athletes.  Because of the angle and positioning, we called it his "spin class."  He so clearly thought that he was controlling the whole process through some sort of telepathy, not realizing that he had no control whatsoever.  He was safe in my stable, loving hands.  I would bounce him as long as my strength allowed and never, ever would I let him fall.

When I was sharing about Eddie with some new friends yesterday, I realized that lately I've been "spinning."  I've been assuming I have control over this process, this life.  That somehow I am what is making it all go.  The truth is, the whole mess is 100% in God's hands and I am free to relax and enjoy the ride, wherever it may take me.  It's only a scary concept if I don't trust Him.  But I know God and I know He is always trustworthy.  He is tireless, good, and, no matter what, He is never going to drop me.  

Tethered

For the first three months of his life, Eddie was always attached to something.  For what seemed endless weeks at the beginning and then too many times to count after that, it was a respirator, making it impossible to hold him and cradle him the way that I longed to.  Even when he was breathing well on his own, however, he was still hooked up to something.  He always had a tube coming out of somewhere, the ever-present IV nutrition, an antibiotic here, a painkiller there.  He lived in a ward with seven other babies, a dozen or so nurses, and whichever parents came and went.  The nearest thing we had to privacy was a thin screen that could be opened around our crib but we rarely used it.  Once, right before we were transferred from the NICU to Children's Dallas, the nurses gave me the gift of allowing us to go to an adjacent, empty ward together.  They put some physical therapy mats on the floor and for the first time I could put Eddie on the floor next to me, play with him like most mothers were accustomed to playing with their infants.  It was wonderful, but I still had to be very cautious.  Even mobile, he was attached to a pole, monitored, fed through IV.

The transfer to Dallas was a crazy rush.  While we'd signed up for the move, we never knew when a bed would be available, when he would be next in line.  The transfer team loaded him onto an incubator, I grabbed a couple of bags, said hasty goodbyes to the nursing staff I had come to love as family, and we boarded a small plane for Dallas.  The transfer team was funny and friendly, Eddie was comfortable, and as we rose above the clouds of a gloomy January morning into the bright, blue light of day I felt a rising hope, a sense of excitement and adventure I hadn't felt in a long, long time.  A short flight, a short ambulance ride and we were out on the GI floor of a new hospital.  After a quick assessment, the medical team all left and Eddie and I were... alone.

Not only was it an eerie feeling to finally be truly alone in a private room with my baby, but even more shocking was the fact that he was not attached to anything.  Nothing.  No leads to a monitor, no IV tubing... nothing.  There was my tiny little man, laying free and loose in what seemed a ridiculously large bed.  Tentatively, I picked him up.  I crossed the room and sat down with him on the small, plastic covered couch.  It felt so foreign, so strangely frightening, for him to be free.  No wires or tubes to be cautious of, nothing between me and my baby.

It is hard to describe the anxiety I felt in a moment that should have been pure joy.  I felt like at any moment someone would come in and scold me for taking him out of bed.  That any second there would be a mad rush of activity and this moment would be taken from me.  I tried to just breathe and soak it in, sure it would be over sooner than I could imagine.  Minutes ticked by and still no one came.  I realized I wasn't doing anything wrong.  There was no mistake.  Soon there would be a monitor and his nutrition but there was not a great rush.  He was not in crisis and everyone was perfectly happy for me to hold him until it was time to hook him up.  In fact, no one there realized that this was out of the ordinary for me.

When I think back on that moment, on the strange mixture of fear and elation, the almost out-of-body detachment I felt at the mere privilege of being able to freely hold my three month old son, I can't help but get misty-eyed.  I was so traumatized, so fragile.  We both were.  We had survived so long in a state of emergency that peace felt foreign and wrong.  A thing to be feared.  Living the way life was meant to be lived, untethered and free, was downright terrifying.

God wants us to live untethered lives.  His Word is full of calls toward freedom but almost all of us are too frightened, too uncomfortable to free ourselves.  What are we hooked to?  There are, of course, the usual addictions, but what else?  The lure of material possessions, of prestige, of physical comfort.  The need to live the status quo because it is all we've ever known and we can't stand the idea of the disapproval we would face if we changed.  Sometimes we are hooked to anxiety, to worrying about the future, to trying to plan it.  We do our best to monitor every moment of our lives, trying our best to have control over the next moment and the next.  If we take the time to be honest with ourselves, our tethers don't make us happy.  They don't make us healthy.  But to live a life free of the need for money and material possessions?  It's a nice concept but shrugged off as an ideal.  To live a life free of anxiety?  We snort.  That is impossible... isn't it?

Through Christ all things are possible and, I would add, especially those things which are explicitly mentioned in the Bible are possible.  God doesn't give impossible commands and through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are free from the tether of sin, the only one that can hold us back.  Christ said, "do not worry" so we don't have to.  He said to scorn material possessions, to trust God to provide for our daily needs, to focus on nothing more and nothing less than following Him.  When this call starts to move from concept to action, however, we get really, really uncomfortable.  Sometimes we are downright terrified.  But it is not a call to a life of hardship and struggle; it is a call to a life of freedom.

So today I am praying to be untethered.  For God to examine my heart and show me where I'm still connected to the ideals of this world and to help me to get unhooked.  Because in the light of eternity, none of that stuff matters.  Because through the birth and death of my son, God showed me a radical example of His love, made perfect by the birth and death of His Son.  I want to remember that and cling to it.  I want to move freely through this big wide world that God has gifted to me, to all of us, in love.  Some of us live paralyzed, stuck to what we believe, falsely, is "life" support.  Others of us have evolved enough to get a little more mobile, but we're still dragging a whole bunch of junk behind us, careful else we take a wrong step and rip out something that we think we need.  I want to be brave enough to invite God to rip it all out.  To let the only source of sustenance be the One that dwells within me.  To hold this life in my hands and allow God to hold me in His, untethered.

Slow Learner

One of my favorite movie moments comes from an unlikely source.  For the most part, "Evan Almighty" is a cute but forgettable comedy and certainly not the stuff of legacy.  But there is a moment in it that lives with me.  God (played brilliantly by Morgan Freeman) tells Evan that, like Noah, He wants him to build an ark in preparation for a flood.  Evan, who is in the midst of running for political office, tells God as nicely as he can, "that's not really in my plans."  God chuckles in a soft, kind way, then says, still laughing, "I'm sorry.  'Your plans.'"

As I said, I don't remember much of anything else from this movie but this moment rang so true to me that it reverberates.  I see God as benevolently looking down on us making our plans, big or small, and lovingly shaking his head.  Fully aware of the incalculable discrepancies between the perfect, solid blueprint He has drawn out for our lives, since before we were even conceived, and the strange, haphazard Tinker-Toy structure that we keep trying to plot out for ourselves.

I know this.  I know the best place to be is in a flexible, loose space with God, waiting to see what He has next for me.  I know it's best to keep my plans penciled in, ready at any moment to replace them with the plan God has for me, for that day, week, life stage, whatever.  I've lived in that space.  But it takes work.  A LOT of work and discipline.  The moment I forget to start each day grateful, prayerful, and open to God's plan for that day, I begin a slippery descent into old habits.  Into pulling out the legal pads and binders to plot and plan the future to a degree of precision that gives me a solid (entirely false) sense of security.  To setting those goals and then doggedly pursuing them with laser-like intensity.  Until God throws a monkey wrench in the whole darn thing.

My plans were not bad in and of themselves.  They involved lots of running, a handful of races including a full marathon in December, and continued increase in my overall physical fitness.  Beyond that, there were thoughts of what life would look like a year or two from now, when my little ones started public school.  There was a change of location thrown in there as well, a move to a more desirable zip code.  They looked like pretty good plans to me.

Then God threw the curve ball.  He shook my snow globe, as He is apt to do, and I discovered that I was, very unexpectedly, pregnant with another child.  The next part of this I am not proud of, but in the interest of transparency, I'm going to be honest about it.  I was less than thrilled with this news.  A bit tearful in fact.  I looked at that plus sign on my home pregnancy test and cried.  Not because I don't think children are gifts from God; I know they are.  Not because it was the end of the world; I knew it wasn't.  But because it was the end of my plans.

It's embarrassing, really, because I know better.  I know God's plans are always the best plans.  I know so many friends who would rejoice at the sight of that plus sign with shouting of hosannas and hallelujahs to a God who had blessed them.  I knew I was being an ingrate.  But even in that knowledge, I didn't stop.  I felt like I was doing "better" than I did with the news of Baby Girl's pregnancy, which took me a week or so and a missing heartbeat to get out of my selfish moping and into gratitude.  I was mostly happy about it, after all.  I was putting on a good face, shifting my plans accordingly.  But I was also grumbling.  Just a little bit and mostly in fun, but grumbling nonetheless.  Zipping up my size 4 skirt with a sigh, mourning the impending loss of my skinny body.  Cursing the fatigue that made my daily tasks in raising my children just that much more difficult.  There were plenty of moments of smiling and daydreaming as well, thinking of names and nursery themes.  But these were all peppered with an underlying complaint:  This was not a part of my plan.

God doesn't ever let me get away with anything for long.  For that I am grateful and I believe it is a direct result of my own desperate, sincere wish to live in harmony with Him and His will no matter what.  He doesn't let me go along on cruise control, getting steadily off track as I do so, for even so much as a month.  First I begin to feel the side effects of separation... the grumpiness, the irritability, the general blah-ness that can ultimately lead to depression if I allow.  Then, finally, He has enough and He hits me with the big guns.

Last Thursday night I began to have abdominal cramping.  On Friday it was worse and other symptoms of miscarriage joined in.  It is amazing how quickly I went from not really wanting this pregnancy to praying that I would not lose it.  From mourning the fact that I could not run to willingly lying down for hours with my feet elevated.  From hoping I didn't get too fat to praying that I could just get this baby to term.  Sometimes your perspective changes so quickly it gives you whiplash.

The scare seems to be over.  I am hopeful that this was an "attention getter" and nothing else.  A way for God to get me to set aside my selfish grumbling and enter into the joy of the blessings He is offering to me.  But beyond that it is an overall reminder that I am not in charge of this vessel.  I'm not charting the course, I'm not in control of the wind, the waves, the setting of the sails, none of it.  I am hopeful that this will be a happy, healthy pregnancy that results in a happy, healthy baby but I need to be surrendered to the fact that I am a passenger on this journey.  I need to place my trust in a perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful Captain, relax and enjoy the ride, whether it takes me into peaceful waters or a tsunami.  I know all of this so I need to start putting it into practice again, grateful for a God who perpetually teaches and is infinitely patient with this slow learner.

The Awkward Evangelist

This may come as a surprise to many of you who read this blog regularly...I am a terrible, terrible evangelist. There are those people who can't talk for longer than five minutes without their enthusiasm for Christ and the gospels bursting out of them.  Those who do this well do so in a way that makes you smile and feel their enthusiasm, even if you are not a believer.  Remember, please, that I have not always been a Christian.  I know what I'm talking about here.  Even when I was my angriest and at my most doubtful about the existence of a kind, loving God of any kind, much less the divinity of Jesus Christ, I encountered people whose belief and love for Jesus was loud and infectious.  Those people have a gift.

Unfortunately the kind of "evangelist" I normally come across is a different breed.  We'll call him The Awkward Evangelist.  You've all met him in one form or another.  The one who comes to your door and refuses to leave no matter how politely you try to encourage him to move to the next house.  I had one of these evangelical encounters recently at the train station in downtown Dallas.  My husband and I had struck up a conversation with the gentlemen waiting next to us.  He was carrying an instrument case and we started talking music.  He showed us his tenor saxophone, a beautiful instrument, black inlaid with gold, mother of pearl accents on the keys.  He pointed out the golden cross gracing one of those pearl keys, letting us know by that simple act that he was a Christian.  A few moments later, we were approached by a man holding water bottles out to my children and asking if they would like a drink.  After checking to make sure the tamper-proof lids were still intact, I thanked him.  He then asked if we would accept the religious flyers he was passing out.  We agreed happily and thanked him again.  He walked away.

At this point, I am fine.  The tracts had a simple breakdown of the gospel citing Scripture, an invitation to become a Christian, and information about his church.  My husband and I glanced over it, chatted a bit about the church's location, then put them away in our pockets and purse.  We continued to chat with our musical neighbor.  A few minutes later, our evangelizing friend was back, asking us if we'd had time to look over the information he'd given us and what we thought.  We said it looked great to us (or something to that effect) and told him we were already Christians.  There was an awkward silence.  He then turned to the man with the saxophone and said, terribly, awkwardly, "So!"

Let me pause right there.  If you ever, ever, ever have to preface your conversational direction with a loud and falsely enthusiastic "So!," just shut your mouth, walk away, and try again later.  It comes across strange, awkward, and not genuine.  I would never approach a jury in final arguments and say, "So!  What'd you think about that case?  I was pretty persuasive, don't you think?"  No, no, no, no, no!

Anyway, he asked our neighbor a few questions about the tract then he went in for what, clearly, he had been trained was the kill-shot.  "So,"  (AGAIN WITH THE "SO!") he said, "if you died today, do you think you'd go to heaven or hell?"  The saxophone player answered calmly, "Oh, I think I'd go to heaven."  The next word out of the evangelist's mouth was a dubious, "Really?"  I don't know what he planned to say next because I couldn't take it anymore.  I piped in, "Dude," (yes, I say "dude" a lot; I still say it's better than "so!"),  "that guy has a gold cross on his saxophone!  I'm sure Jesus can't wait to hear what he has to play on that thing."

I have the feeling some people are reading this and saying to the screen, "but, but, but!"  I know.  We, as Christians, are all under Jesus' directive to make disciples of all men.  I think how we go about this, however, is a varied process.  If I were a non-believer, the musician's simple act of showing me the cross on his instrument would have touched me.  Because he was a groovy guy, laid back and peaceful with an easy manner and attractive style.  My conversation with him, coupled with the receiving of a religious tract, might have made me check out a church, probably even the church the evangelist was working for.  But what happened next would have pushed me far, far away.  Back to thinking Christians were judgmental, creepy, and wrong.

Matthew 5:17 teaches that we are supposed to let our lights shine before men so that they would see our good deeds and follow God.  People should see our joy and our peace and wonder what we have that makes us that way.  To put it a different way, we should be about attraction rather than promotion.  Because God is calling everyone to himself; everyone, regardless of their background, their past or their present.  Everyone has a seed of longing for a relationship with the loving God who made them and we, as Christians, can either nurture that seed by our actions or add another layer of distrust, anger or misunderstanding.  And walking around telling people that they are going to hell, either because they aren't Christians at all or they aren't Christian "enough," doesn't really help our cause.

When our train arrived, I told our evangelical friend, "God bless you" and I meant it.  He is trying, God love him, and I am sure God will bless him for it.  I hope that someone he hands a tract to goes to church and finds out that God is real and God is love.  I hope some of his conversion conversations went a little better than the one I witnessed.  But he did not spread the gospel to me that day.  I did not see Christ reflected in him.  I saw Christ reflected in the kind eyes and easy smile of the saxophone player with a cross emblazoned on the instrument he loved.  God can use us, all of us, to reach people.  We need to trust Him to have us at the right place at the right time, using words the Spirit tells us to use in a spirit of genuine concern, interest, and love for our fellow man.  So let your little light shine (please note the proper use of the word "so") and, as much as it lies within you, live at peace with all men.  Let's set aside the awkward side-hug of a judgment-based evangelism.  There is no better way to spread the good news of Christ's love than to be loving, no better way to show His peace than to be peaceful yourself.  I pray God's blessings over every single person who reads this blog post and I hope it reads as it is meant:  to make you smile, to make you laugh, to make you think, and to let you know that you are loved, completely and with a warm embrace.      

Promises, Promises

I make promises to my kids.  Not just the regular kind of promises borne from constraints on time and/or budget ("We can't go to Chuck E Cheese today but I promise we'll go Friday") but big, important promises too.  Like, "I promise that I will always love you no matter what" and "I promise I will always be proud of you."

My promising habit started with Eddie.  It started even before he was born.  I was tremendously overcome with the awesomeness of being the incubator to a brand new life and I started straight away promising him and myself all kinds of things.  I wrote them down.  I promised to remember that he was a privilege and a blessing.  That he was here to teach me just as much as I was here to teach him.  I promised to listen to him, to respect his spirit, to love him enough to allow him to follow his own path and not try to force my ideas of what it should look like onto him.  I promised to remember that God made him just the way he was and not to try to change him.

Those promises ended up being harder to keep than I had anticipated in those giddy days of pregnancy.  Because he was born sick and wanted him healed.  It was hard to remember that God made him just the way that he was, that his body was flawed for a purpose.  Instead I wanted to just to freak out, pray and fight to fix it.  But I reflected on those promises I'd made and I changed my mind and waited for my heart to catch up.  I respected him just as he was, I praised God for him just as he was, and I celebrated him.  I told him I would fight with him as long as he wanted to fight but, if he ever wanted to let go, that this was going to be okay too.  It wouldn't change anything, not how much I loved him, not how indescribably proud I was to be his mother, nothing.  And I kept making promises.

I promised if he would fight through those first crazy weeks and months, those days of hardship, surgeries, chest tubes and IVs, poking, prodding, and heart-wrenching pain, that I would make it worth his while.  I told him about the beautiful world God had made, outside of the NICU walls.  I showed him videos of the sun and the sky, of grass and trees, animals and bicycles and I promised him we would see all of it.  That if he would just stick it out, keep fighting even when it was all too much, when it hurt too badly, when he was just exhausted, that I would do everything in my power to make the rest of his life beautiful.  I whispered this promise to him on the days I was able to hold him and even more fervently on the days that I was not, when he was forced to be motionless, hooked to what seemed a million machines, swollen and sick with infection.  I would rub the tiny stress lines that appeared between his eyes, kiss his knees and toes, and tell him I would do it all for him if I could but that, since I couldn't, I would make up for it later, anyway that I could.  I told him that he was Superman.  And he was.

Eddie made it out of NICU and I did my best to make good on my promise to him.  I showed him God's beautiful world and worked to make sure he saw me laugh much more than he ever saw me cry.  It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but I did it.  Not perfectly.  There were bad moments and hard days.  But he had fun.  He saw grass, trees and bicycles.  He went to the zoo and the circus.  He smiled and laughed.  We picked out fruit from the farmer's market together, played on the playground, danced in the kitchen, and celebrated silly everyday moments, everyday.  He ate chicken nuggets, popsicles, and crayons.  He lived his life and he saw that it was beautiful.

I was making plans for his second birthday celebration when he died.  The assumption people make that I was in some way prepared for his death isn't entirely true.  In the few days before the day of death itself, I felt it.  Felt a finality in my spirit, an urging toward seeking God's peace.  I don't know if that makes any sense to those reading this, but I can think of no other way to describe it.  But on this day, five years ago, I did not know that my little superman had only a week left to live.  That he was exhausted after the long, hard fight and ready to go home and rest.  That I would be called upon to fulfill my promise, respect the path that God had laid out for him, and let him go.

I did it, somehow, impossibly, and by the grace of God.  That chapter of my life drew to a close.  Life didn't stop though.  There were still promises to be made and kept, no less important.  I didn't get to bury my son, crawl in a hole and stop living, literally or figuratively.  Because there was another brilliant, beautiful Baby Boy on the way and, soon on his heels, a magical pixie-like Baby Girl.  And they deserve no less than their big brother.  I have promised to show them this beautiful world that God has made and I'm going to do it even when it feels like it is going to kill me.  Sometimes, especially around this time of year, it would be so much easier to turn on the television and parent in cruise control, wallowing in loss and self-pity.  I choose differently, because I promised them better; they deserve better.

So these days are filled with sprinklers and roly-polies, paint and petting zoos.  Trips to the Asian market to buy fish served whole, silver and shiny, watching with wonder as the man slices off heads and opens bellies.  With life:  mushy, messy, smelly, sticky and wonderful.  Because life is no less beautiful without Eddie in it; it is more beautiful for his having been here.  And I am going to experience and enjoy every single moment of it.  I promise.
 

Silence

For those of you who follow the blog regularly, let me begin by apologizing for my lack of posting.  It's not that I don't think about the blog or that I don't have enough time in a day to stop and write (though sometimes this feels as if it is true).  I have pulled it up several times, chosen to start a new post and then stared at the blank page... mentally hearing crickets chirp.  Nothing.  I've had nothing.  Nothing to say, nothing to offer... nothing.

If you know me personally, you know that me having nothing to say is a rare and strange life event.  I ALWAYS have something to say and I am more than happy to shout you down in order to say it.  I'm downright annoying (it's okay, you can agree; I live by the motto "know thyself").  I have literally had friends hold up their hands, classroom style, in order to get a word in.  I live to talk.

That being said, I know that there is much to be gained by silence.  By listening.  I don't have all the answers and the longer I live the more I realize the less I know (wow...that's a sentence to be reckoned with...).  The only way to learn more is to listen more.  I know that in order to "Be still and know that I am God,"  I need to shut up.  I agree with the theory that we should all spend a portion of our day in complete silence, mental and physical, if we are going to draw near to God, if we are going to be spiritually open to all that we have to be taught that day.  I just don't do it.

For one thing, I get bored.  Really bored.  I am envious of those people who can spark up some incense and hum softly to themselves for an hour.  They seem to be so refreshed and, well, deep.  I have tried on more occasions than I could possibly name to meditate in this way.  I've been successful... twice, maybe?  I keep cracking my eyes open to see how much time has passed and usually it is somewhere in the range of 30 seconds to 2 minutes.  I'd make a terrible Buddhist.

Some people get their quiet time in while exercising and, you would think, that as a runner I would fall into this category.  I never, never, never, never, never go on a run longer than ten minutes, however, without my iPod and earbuds.  My running mix is several hours long and filled with up-tempo, pounding beats intended to keep my feet moving and my mind off the pain.  I end long runs feeling proud, exhilarated, even euphoric but not exactly spiritually grounded.

It is not only a poor attention span that accounts for my lack of quality quiet time, however.  To be honest, silence scares me.  Distractions keep it interesting, keep it all moving and keep me from having to think about things I don't want to think about.  Not that those things go away; they are always lurking, ready to pounce on me at the most inopportune time possible.  But I still operate under the mistaken impression that if I can just keep busy, maybe I will never have to go there again.  Never have to walk down the dark corridors, never feel the lurking pain of sorrow, of loss.  It doesn't work, but as an addict I am particularly fond of doing the same things over again and expecting different results.

So it was with great horror that one day, in the middle of a six mile run, my trusty iPod ran out of battery.  One second I had Eminem blaring his encouragement, the next moment... nothing.  Just me, the sound of my feet striking pavement, and my thoughts.  There was no way around it.  I was three miles from my car any which way I looked at it.  I was going to have to face my fear and be quiet.

An amazing thing happened.  Nothing.  No sudden deluge of thought and feeling that I could not control.  No three miles of embarrassing ugly-crying.  I thanked God for the run, for the beauty of His creation that surrounded me, for the health of my body, and prayed for the health of my mind and spirit.  Then I stopped praying and focused my mind on being still.  On being quiet.  Any errant thought that drifted in, I gently excused and cleared it away.  

At the end of my run, I felt different.  Stronger.  Surer of myself.  I still don't know that I would want to extend it to a two hour run or even an hour, but I think I would do well to incorporate at least one quiet run into my training schedule.  It does very little good to have a fit body and a sick soul.  If I'm going to do this life thing right, I need to start with the foundation and build up, not keep ignoring the cracks and hoping they aren't as bad as they look.  I'm going to try to wake up earlier than my kids (this is a very ambitious goal) so that I can spend even ten minutes in the morning practicing silence.  Until I get good at it.  Until it comes naturally.  Because I know I don't need to fear it any longer.  And, strangely enough, I think the more time I spend in silence, the more I'll find that I have something to say.  Something of quality, something pure and true, to share with you.