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.