A month and more I’ve been reading five Psalms a day.
I even made it through Psalm 119,
Awake in the middle of the night.
Don’t ask me what it was about.
And it’s been good, I suppose.
But it wasn’t until today
That I started to read
And the words that I read
WERE FOR ME.
Exactly what I needed.
Thanks be to God.
God said,
“Of every tree of the garden
Thou mayest freely eat,
But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
Abundance,
With a tiny restriction.
The serpent said,
“Did God say,
‘Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’”
The opposite message—
Total lack.
Eve said,
“We may eat of the fruit.”
Not quite.
God said every.
Eve heard some.
And so Eve walked
In the midst of abundance
And focused on the lack.
May we not do the same.
There are parts
Of my property
So jaw-droopingly beautiful
I can hardly believe
This is my backyard.
In prayer for a friend,
The Lord said, “Send this email.”
I wrote it up . . .
But didn’t send it.
It felt presumptuous,
The preschooler instructing the professor.
Two weeks later, I was preparing
To write about the importance of obedience.
“Send this email.”
So I did.
And heard back,
“Thank you for listening.
God is at work.”
His ways are perfect.
For an hour, after finding a missing piece,
Caleb said, again and again,
“Thank you, Mom, for finding it,
And thank you, God, for showing you where to look!”
Thursday night I had prayed and said,
“Lord, I think Caleb is close to your kingdom.
Let tomorrow be the day he chooses to follow Jesus.”
On Friday, Caleb was playing with play dough,
But a vital piece of an extruder was missing.
And had been missing for months, I remembered too late.
“Lord, please help me find it soon,”
I prayed aloud.
A minute or two later, deeper in the box, there it was.
“Look, Caleb, what God did!
How wonderful to have that prayer answered so quickly.
Do you want to follow Jesus?”
“Well, I don’t want to be baptized.”
“We can work that out later.
For now, do you want to follow Jesus?”
“Yes.”
While five went to an opening day movie,
Caleb and I had a six hour tete a tete.
I’d made plans.
We recorded an unboxing video.
He read through a reader.
We made vanilla maple marshmallows.
He read through a second reader.
We spent a pleasant hour in the trailer,
On a treasure hunt.
I went through boxes and organized;
He played with play dough and wooden puzzles.
We ate marshmallows.
He read another reader.
He started some old CDs of Bible stories.
We put together three puzzles.
He played with pattern blocks.
We read Go, Dog. Go!
We made pizza.
And then the brothers were home.
I had plans for what I would do this last weekend.
But they were vague, and I didn’t accomplish them.
I had a great time, but my prayer challenge
Languishes.
Sometimes resistance is subtle.
I took the three youngers to Totier Creek.
Caleb didn’t remember it.
Joe walked in front,
Listening to an audiobook.
Abraham and Caleb walked side-by-side,
Shooting pretend enemies,
Admiring oil in the trees (really pockets of water),
Chuckling as they walked along.
I walked behind,
Smiling and praising God for his grace.
Sometimes we all ran
For the joy of being alive.
This Resurrection Sunday
The sermon Began
With a quote by J.C. Ryle:
“As soon as the blood of
The Great Sacrifice
Began to flow,
The Great High Priest
Began
To intercede.”
A precious octogenarian
Brought this message:
If you look at Elijah’s life,
He saw many miracles,
Some lasting several days.
Fifty-four days of miracles.
Amazing.
But when you look at the timeline,
All of those miracles were spread over
Fifty-four years.
One day per year.
So if you’re not seeing many miracles
In your daily life,
That’s okay.
One per year, and you’re on par
With Elisha.
Opens with
“The beginning of the gospel
Of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
I have thought of this like,
“I’m starting to tell this story,”
A very finite, limited statement.
But this could also mean
The beginning of a story . . .
That keeps on going.
Does not only mean
Enticing to do wrong.
It also means
To test
To prove
To determine character or quality.
I watched my son step outside.
The cat, cleaning herself, sat.
My son, ear-to-ear grin,
Bent and picked her up
Around her middle.
Grinning, he carried her
To the door, called,
“The cat’s in,” and went off to play.
Is my face ever split by a spontaneous grin?
Two weeks in a row, I indulged.
Waking the next morning,
After a three hour stretch of wakefulness in the night,
I remembered that I had felt
Exhausted,
Lackadaisical,
Without my previous motivation
All week long.
Probably should have skipped the pizza.
I was dutifully recording notes
From a book on prayer.
They were probably helpful reminders.
And my son, bored, joined me.
I noticed his feet were uncomfortably close
To my open computer, and warned him.
“Be careful.”
But he’s five.
If I really worried,
I should have been the adult, and moved away.
And, yes, sooner or later, he tried to stick his feet
In a pillowcase, and that rebounded on my keys.
“Stop! Don’t hurt my computer!”
And I could feel the anger suffuse my face
As I threw the pillow off the bed.
He stared at me, impassive for a moment.
Until I recollected myself,
And closed the computer,
And said, “I probably just scared you, didn’t I?”
Then the face crumpled, and the tears began.
Sobbing, he hid his face.
And I needed to ask his forgiveness.
Four years ago, my friend Amanda and I
Drove to Richmond for a viewing.
After a long battle, our friend’s mother had passed.
And as we drove the miles, I gasped.
Gorgeous purple tree after purple tree,
Like a Dr. Seuss book, except more vivid.
“What is that amazing plant?”
Surprised I didn’t know, the answer came:
“Wisteria.”
How lovely that the word was not
“Splooch,” or something else
Easily forgettable and vaguely off-putting,
But glorious and evocative.
And now, every spring,
I drive past wisteria,
And every spring it’s a reminder to me:
This is a season of loss.
And I remember my friend
And her mother.
Learn for two
Was one of the messages
I took away from
Funnel Hacking Live.
I had seven or so nonfiction books
That I finished since I turned 40,
So I have been slowly writing notes for each.
If they’re good enough to read,
They should be good enough to implement.
It’s been a good exercise.
Almost good enough to make me want to go through
All my books.
What a wealth of knowledge is in my house.
(Though not in my head.)
In a deeply, bizarrely, painful episode,
I hired two virtual assistants
To help with a task I didn’t want to do.
A brief sample from the first
Showed that I had not clarified well,
And that, realistically, this was not a job
For a non-native English speaker.
For weeks I prayed, and cried,
And tried to figure out the right thing to do.
But when I finally just said honestly,
“I don’t think you can help me.
I’m not trying to cheat you.
If you want full payment, that’s fine.
Or partial payment, as you’ve worked some.”
We settled on partial payment, and I am free.
At least from one.
May the other prove as easy
To extricate myself from.
Waking in the night,
I was excited about an idea.
By light of the morning,
I was less sure.
So I called my Dad,
To lay out the issue before him.
My Mom listened, too,
And in the end we were all agreed.
Not a good idea.
And the rest of the day, I was so relieved.
Jadon specializes in the one word answer.
Are you learning anything interesting?
No.
What are you studying in psychology now?
Conditioning.
Phil walked in to find
Joe and Caleb working together
To build a train track.
By the end of the day,
It was an intricate mass of swirls,
In some places three levels high.
From recommendations of “slowdown” and “limited release,”
To cries of “convention booth” and “immediate,”
I can hardly keep up.
There’s certainly a lot to do!
I sent several products off for shipping.
They went without barcodes.
The thought never struck me.
Why do we not have a system built-in?
This is not the first time we’ve missed
That important labor-saving measure.
I will spend $350 on two foreign workers,
Who will maybe offer unnecessary lists.
I gave a request, but did not know enough
To know the questions to ask,
The instructions to give.
I did not offer a small fee for a small product, to test.
None of these thoughts struck me at all.
And now I am left feeling a fool.
And poorer, by $350.
“Notre Dame is on fire,” Phil said.
And I wondered which sports team was tearing it up.
Except this isn’t a day for college sports.
And I wondered if the campus was
Right now being destroyed.
Until his next words stopped me cold.
“The 850-year-old cathedral
Is right now collapsing.”
I groan in my spirit as tears come to my eyes.
That beautiful edifice.
That incredible rose window.
Under scaffolding when I visited.
But at least I saw it.
What will be left for my boys?
For my grandchildren?
I sent a letter of desperation
To an acquaintance from church,
Feeling prompted, perhaps,
By my own life situations.
I wanted to hear that
Adoption is not always destructive.
But . . .
She was not the one to tell me so.
It is hard, very, very hard for her, too.
Saturday night, the start of my Sabbath,
I suddenly thought,
“I want color.”
So I spent a time spreading color,
Acrylics on a small canvas
I’d kept for some years.
The result was not what I’d hoped—
Colors not my favorite, with a canvas to keep.
But it was soothing, to listen to worship songs.
And I read poetry,
A collection I’d grabbed on an impulse.
Robert Frost has many of my favorites,
But his earliest publication surprised me:
So many ghost poems!
I had no idea.
And I almost quit, fearful I had read all the good ones.
But then came a poem so tremendously sweet,
I could do nothing but sit and quiver.
Then, for the first time in months,
I slept through the night.
Nine full hours.
In Roman times,
Adult males were adopted
For purposes of preserving the lineage.
Today, children
Are adopted to nurture.
In the families I know, this has been
Shockingly,
Tremendously,
Destructive.
My new 9x12” mixed media sketchpad
Is my paper whiteboard.
I have not yet dared doodle,
But these enormous sheets of whiteness
Make me happy, just to see them.
Manjiro, shipwrecked,
Survived, barely.
Became a whaler
And a sailer.
Longed to return home.
Back in Japan,
He survived trial after trial—
Eighteen in all—
Before, ten years after his departure,
He returned home.
In the end, he became
An educator
A translator
An integral part of opening Japan.
Born in the year of courage, indeed.
When I read my poems from years ago,
I am always amazed by how much I love them,
Followed quickly by remorse that
I don’t write
More.
I mostly manage to avoid gluten,
But every once in a while on a Friday night,
I am hungry enough,
And the oozy cheese and salty pepperoni
And crisp and chewy crust
All call to me loudly enough
That I thoroughly enjoy
My pizza dinner.
