if…

I found something the other day that I had written in high school. It said that “Life is just an L and an E with a big IF in the middle.”  This was long before Snoopy and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company used the same theme for an advertising campaign. I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of the idea.

It’s that IF that causes so much angst in life. If I fall in love…If I lose weight…If I get that job…the list goes on and on. One of the most common “if I”s that I’ve heard is, “If I die…” That is one of the few things in our lives that is not an if, and we treat it so at our own peril.

The unknown is frightening exactly because it’s a mystery. There are many Christians who, by virtue of the fact that they have been saved, feel that they have taken the if out of the afterlife. I am not one of them. I hope. I pray. I try to live my life so that maybe God is His unbelievable mercy will choose to welcome me into His kingdom when my life here ends. But I don’t know for certain what awaits me in the hereafter.

I’ve been participating in a class using the Father Barron’s Word on Fire Catholicism series to explore what we believe as Catholics and why we believe what we profess. Last week’s topic was prayer. I shared my own experience, when, as a 27-year-old mother of a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a week-old baby, my husband was diagnosed with a tumor that his doctor came right out and said that he thought was cancer. Later that night, as I rocked our newborn son in my arms in the wee hours of the dark, I tried to pray. I so wanted to ask God to take away the tumor in my young husband, but what right did I have to demand that of God? And, so, I prayed that whatever happened that God would give us the strength to handle it. I asked for His will to be done. And I wasn’t sure if it was lack of faith that I couldn’t ask God for the outcome that we so desperately wanted, or if it was how God intends for us to petition Him.

I’m still not sure. I shared that I felt that prayer probably didn’t change the outcome of the concerns we go to our Father with, but that prayer changes us. Some agreed with me. One of my fellow classmates challenged my thinking. He said that prayer can change God’s mind and that we can’t possibly ask God to answer our prayers if we don’t have enough faith to believe He will.

When the parents of a child who is ill pray for their son or daughter’s health, it is not the child whose parents have the most faith who survives. Sometimes we get what we pray for, and sometimes God has another outcome in His plan.  I don’t know what is the correct way for us to approach the Almighty. I fervently desire to be closer to God, but I don’t where I will be when I die.

 If there’s really a pearly entrance, and we really meet Saint Peter as the gatekeeper, I won’t have a list of reasons why he should let me in. All I’ll be able to say is that the only way that I’ll gain admittance is by the boundless love of God and by the mercy of His undeserved forgiveness.

I like the way that Father Barron explains it. Quoting Saint Augustine, he says, “If you understand it, that isn’t God.” Father Barron continues. “God is the one you never can control.”

So, I cannot say what will be my ultimate fate and hold God to my decision. If that’s lack of faith, I’m just going to have to live (and die) with that uncertainty. 

Daily Prompt – I Want To Know What Love Is

I’m a wife. I’m a mother to three adult children. I’m a grandmother to an 18 month old, and there’s another grandchild on the way. I have two adorable Shi Tzus sitting right next to me as I write this. And I’m a Christian. Certainly, I must know what love is. But do I always feel it? No way!

Love is deciding to forgo a career because I made the decision to be a stay-at-home mom with my kids. Love is cooking and cleaning and shopping and all the mundane details of organizing a happy, healthy home. Love is sticking through 33 years of marriage and all the inevitable ups and downs that go with it. Love is suffering with those in pain and rejoicing with those who have something to celebrate. Love is sometimes giving advice, and sometimes keeping my mouth shut. Love is giving a hug and giving space. Love is moving away because it’s important to someone else. Love is watching your children move away to make their own lives. Love is accepting new people into your family and embracing their gifts. Love is nursing and healing and sometimes watching someone die. Love is giving birth and burying and learning how to handle the additions and subtractions that are a part of all of our lives. Love is knowing when to fight and when to surrender. Love is hearing the needs of others and really listening to them. Love is seeing what is really there, and not just what I want to see. Love is sitting and waiting with someone when you have no control over making something happen. Love is teaching and learning. It is accepting what you cannot change. It is patient and dogged and stubbornly loyal. It is getting angry at injustice and celebrating the little victories when fairness prevails. Love is daily and it’s eternal. Love is an emotion and it’s so much more than mere feeling. Love is a choice that sometimes you make when it’s the last thing you feel like doing. Love is opening up yourself to be cherished and to be hurt. It is making yourself vulnerable so that maybe you’ll be understood. Love is sometimes forgoing sleep and comfort so that others can rest in you. It is giving without expectation. It is putting the needs of others before your own. It is seeing the beautiful in those who sometimes behave in ugly ways. It is forgiving those who do things they regret. It is loving those who aren’t always loveable.

Love is wonderful and awful and enveloping and lonely. It is the best gift of a loving God to His children. And it is a choice I make every single day of my life. Love is the only thing that matters and it is all l around us.    

All we have to do is accept it. And then, give it away to those around us…

are we having fun yet…

Can I Have Fun if I Don’t Know How to Play?

That is not a rhetorical question. I’m serious. I’m serious in my asking the question. And, yes, I’m serious by nature.

Play is one of those words in the English language that has several meanings. It can be a dramatic presentation where those participating pretend, if you will, to be someone other than who they are. Theatrical plays have a purpose of entertaining or enlightening their audiences. Play is also something that children do to learn how to do tasks that will help them in later life. Play is a fun way of learning. Children try out different forms of play and through them, learn where their gifts and talents lie. They find out about perseverance and commitment, and they discover a sense of fair play. Some people play a musical instrument; they play sports; they play games. All of these types of play involve learning how to do an activity, practicing the skills needed to do it, and, then, after working hard at it, having fun with it.

Play can be a lot of work. The reward of that work is fun – if you’re good at it. But what if it never reaches the level of becoming fun, because the player lacks the talent to excel enough to enjoy it?

Whenever I picture people at play, I think of them as freely, unselfconsciously having fun. They aren’t thinking about how they look. They’re not thinking about whether or not they’re playing correctly. They aren’t thinking at all, they’re just enjoying themselves. Maybe, that’s an accurate picture. Maybe it’s not.

If I were given one talent that I definitely was not given, it would be the ability to dance. I’m in absolute awe of anyone who can leap across a stage, seemingly unfettered by the gravity which holds down the rest of us mere mortals. To be able to leave one’s self behind and just let the body move what it feels, to express physically what one feels inside, seems to me, utter bliss. Yes, it takes immense talent to do it well. Yes, it takes hours and hours of practice. Yes, it takes commitment and dedication. But, the reward!

The reward looks like fun! Maybe I’m just not good enough at anything to have fun with it. Maybe I’m too concerned with how others will perceive me if I let go. Maybe it requires me to pretend to be someone who I am not.

I don’t know the answer.

That’s why I’m asking the question.

Daily Prompt: Second Time Around

Daily Prompt: Second Time Around.

I have been reading the Bible for about 40 years of my life. While I have never started at the beginning and read straight through, there are certainly parts that never fail to teach me a new lesson. Some words that I have come across have been little more than words on the page, but at another stage in my life have served as terms of powerful inspiration.  As I get older, some texts have taken on different shades of meaning. The lyric poetry of the Psalms is breathtaking in places. I especially love the gospel of Luke. The way he tells the story that is so familiar to many of us  speaks to me in a way that is more personal than his fellow writers of the Good News. Isaiah and Paul’s letter to the Romans are also favorite books of mine in this lengthy tome.

I hope to read and reread the Bible for the rest of my days and to gain something new from its wisdom upon each reading.

the song stuck in my head…

Lately I can’t hear enough of a song titled “Show Me.”  It’s written and performed by a talented young independent artist by the name of Audrey Assad. What a gorgeous voice! Her soft, breathy vocals speak of her deep abiding love for God with a passion that is so refreshing in a twenty-something who has not joined the ranks of her generation in rejecting all things organized and religious.

Audrey doesn’t sugar coat the world in which we live. Hers is not a Disney-esque naiveté so common is some of today’s Christian music. In “Show Me” she speaks of the power of the Holy Spirit in His gift of strength in the spiritual battles we all encounter. But she also calls upon the same deity to just comfort her and just let her cry.

One of the lines that speaks to my very soul is “Mercy, bend and breathe me back to life, but not before You show me how to die.”  Wow! I could listen to these words of a poet delivered in the voice of an angel all day.

I’m so pleased that Audrey just recorded a new album and I breathlessly wait for the release of her latest creation. Check her out at audreyassad.com

love isn’t never having to say you’re sorry…

We fall in love with someone and think they’re going to complete us. We expect them to be our soul mates, and we become so disappointed when they are unable to completely know us. They can’t meet our every need, and it’s not their job to do so. God creates those desires, those very needs in us, hoping we will turn to Him, eager to accept the gifts He knows will please us. We need to forgive those who don’t meet our expectations, because they are only being who God created them to be – imperfect – just like us. God wants us to be partners to our spouses, to help each other get to know Him. We come closer to true intimacy through our capacity to love, our unique abilities, but also through our limitations.

We’re all a little broken. Let us stop fooling ourselves into thinking that any one person can possibly succeed in putting us back together. After all, Jesus redeemed all of mankind through His brokenness. He chose Peter, the archetype of the Everyman, to found His church. Peter was the man who in one moment was so certain of God that he stepped out of a boat in a storm and tried to walk on water towards Jesus. When doubt crept in, he sank into the stormy sea. Peter was one of the men, one of Jesus’s closest friends, who could not stay awake to pray with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter was the one who denied Christ three times in short order when Jesus was arrested. He was full of fear and pride and doubt. He was the one who knew that Jesus was the Son of God. He was with Jesus at the Transfiguration. He was the one who was later crucified on a cross – upside down, no less – in Rome because of his teaching about Jesus. He was the best and the worst of all of us. This is who God chose to spread the Good News of Jesus and His plan for our salvation.

If this flawed, but loyal and loving man was good enough for God, how can we possibly expect perfection from the one we chose to partner with in creating a family? We fall in love with a person – a person who will love us and hurt us and make us laugh and cry and scream, a person who will frustrate us and accept us and need us and disappoint us.  Love may be patient and kind and all that, but love for one another just isn’t enough. We need what Father Robert Barron calls, “the transcendent third.” We need, in addition to our devotion to each other, to both be in love with something else.

In my husband’s and my marriage that something else is God. My husband is my partner in life. He is the father of our three children. He is my closest confidante. He is the one I love more than any other person. But he will never complete me.

So many marriages don’t make it. Some shouldn’t. Some people give up because of infidelity and abuse. Some give up because of the stress of financial and health problems. Sometimes, we give up because we just can’t be enough for one another. We find out that our spouse is flawed and imperfect, just like us, and we find ourselves wanting more, certain we deserve better from the human being we decided to love.

Maybe we’re expecting too much from someone who isn’t God.

writing under duress…

Ernest Hemingway did it. They say F. Scott Fitzgerald did it. Stephen King claims he was also guilty. All these great writers supposedly wrote while under the influence of alcohol and drugs. There is almost a cache of being the talented, yet tortured great artist. I’ve never been sure if the pain informed the art or if creating the art took so much out of these men that they turned to the solace of the bottle, be it a 1.75 liter or pill-size. But there is a connection between those who create and the influences they abuse in a form of self-destruction.

It always seemed kind of weak to me. But the past few days, I’ve gotten a taste of WUI, that’s Writing Under the Influence. Let me tell you – it’s hard!  Two days ago, I had some gum surgery, so I’m not exactly sick, but I’m laying low and I did want to try to get some work done. I’m currently under the influence of oxycodone, and after having discovered a new allergy to yet another class of antibiotics, Benadryl. It’s difficult enough trying to put together coherent thoughts in the best of circumstances, but under the influence of drugs and fueled by a mostly liquid diet, I’m struggling.

The first problem is the distractions. There’s pain, to start with. There’s hunger. There’s fatigue, and then, there’s a fog of ennui clouding over everything I think and feel.

On somebody’s blog I read yesterday, a writer referred to the “Fifty Shades of Grey” book as “Mommy porn.”  I’d never heard this term, but he put it in quotes, so I’m guessing he did not invent the phrase himself. What I’ve been experiencing is what I decided to call food porn. Food porn comes in the form of commercials of cheeseburgers literally dripping with juiciness – their big fluffy buns scattered with sesame seeds which envelope  a patty of perfectly medium rare beef, at least three-quarters of an inch thick, topped with sinfully melting cheddar. The hamburger doesn’t get placed on the plate – it bounces onto the plate. The top part of the bun opens just enough to give the viewer a hint of the crispy dill slices, ruby red tomato slabs and lettuce so perky it crunches as the actor takes a voluptuous bite out of this food masterpiece. Okay, you can admit it, you want, you really want a cheeseburger right now, don’t you?

I literally moaned when I went into our pantry this afternoon to retrieve a new liter of Gatorade, when directly in front of me, was a huge bag of popcorn. I don’t just like popcorn. I adore popcorn. It’s only been a few days, but I miss it’s salty, slightly buttery crunchiness. I miss the fact that it’s perfectly acceptable to sit down on the sofa with a bowl the size of a large family’s serving vessel, overflowing with those wonderful clouds of puffed corn, and eat the whole thing yourself.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the milkshakes friends have brought. I’ve eaten avocado soup and apple/peach soup. I’ve got enough ice cream, yogurt and fruit in my fridge to open my own smoothie counter. One friend even brought over some lobster bisque today. I’ve got great friends, don’t I? But, I’m pretty hungry.

It will likely be more than a week or so before I can even entertain the idea of something I have to actually chew, and even longer before I’m allowed to eat something that crunches as I bite into it. But until then, I’ve got commercials and color photos of staged platings  on other people’s foodie blogs to lust over.

My husband just came home and is sitting not ten feet away from me – eating right out of that aforementioned bag of popcorn as I write this. That’s got to constitute cruel and unusual punishment – don’t you think?

But I’ve gotten a taste of attempting to perform my craft while on drugs. Those tortured, haunted geniuses who write that way can have it. I’m looking forward to thinking clearly and forming sentences more easily. I’ve never been a fan of being out-of-control, and this week hasn’t changed that.