Giving up strength for Lent

Ok, this was not my initial thought on what to give up for Lent this year. Last year, I gave up obsessing over clothes that I wanted to buy. This year, since I'm eight months pregnant with a bowling ball sticking out of my abdomen, it's frankly not that fun thinking about my appearance.

Instead, I was making an attempt to give up going to bed so ridiculously late every night.

And then last Tuesday happened. Last Tuesday was the day that my body declared to me that it was indeed 32 weeks pregnant. It gave me notice that it will no longer do the things I've been asking it to do, and declared a strike for an undetermined amount of time, during which if I so much as load or unload the dishwasher, it will unleash an obnoxious protest on me in the form of lower back pain, burning and aching muscles, and the threat of heavy waves of false (fingers crossed) labor pain.

It's been a week now since my body called it quits. And I've decided to think again about Lent. I'm not thinking any more about when I go to bed, because my body now hits a point at which it will no longer tolerate being upright and demands sleep. So. Instead: I have decided that this year for Lent I will give up the illusion of my own strength.

It is an illusion maintained for myself as much as for anyone around me. I have always liked to seem, or indeed actually to be, as self-sufficient as possible. I like to make a plan to do something, and then maybe throw a few more items into the mix, just so that at the end of this stressfully great juggling act I can give myself a little pat on the shoulder, and maybe get the sense that people around me are wondering how just how I managed that without dropping a single ball.

Obviously, having kids can just knock the juggler right out of you. Or, if you are someone really committed to seeming strong and capable, they simply provide more of a challenge to prove yourself. It's just an upping of the ante.

Christians, or at least I can speak to American Christians, make this into a kind of a virtue. For years I used to remind myself, and hear others repeating around me, like a mantra: "I can do all things through him who gives me strength." Amen, pray more, and move forward throwing yourself at the million tasks and demands in front of you.

I don't disagree at all with the idea of asking God to provide strength for the day when I lack it. And yet here I am, with minimal strength and increasing pain, and what I want to think is: Ok. Pray. And then get back to the juggling.

But the problem with all this throwing around of Philippians 4:13 is that our English Bibles create a paragraph break between two verses that are clearly tied together. It's something I never noticed until recently. Paul writes: "I can do all things through him who gives me strength. Yet it was good of you to share in my troubles." He's trusting in Christ's sufficiency, but he recognizes his need for other people.

It can be difficult to do, but it is good for me to let myself be weak. And, even harder: it's good for me to allow people to see me be weak.

My weakness opens up the possibility that I could receive the care of other people. It can strengthen and deepen relationships. It allows other people the opportunity to give; it possibly requires some self-sacrifice of them. It requires me to push pride out of the way of accepting that someone else sacrificed something for me. I really hate asking anyone to do anything for me. I hate the possibility that I have irritated someone, inconvenienced them. And yet, in theory, I do think it's good to get inconvenienced. To have the opportunity to give something that actually cost something.

So, since I will be spending Lent in one of the final months of my pregnancy, I am going to spend Lent openly declaring: I am not strong. My self-sufficiency was a lie, even before my body dumped me. For this season at least, my juggling is at an end. I will not be amazing anyone with any feats. If you stop by my house, it will even more of a mess than normal. If you come over to eat, I will buy something from the store and hand it to you. But I will certainly be glad to see you.

There could be something really special about a month of the year spent in transparency with one another. Refusing to cover up the holes in our lives or to deny the needs. And when we help others, not doing it in a way that makes us look stronger or more capable. But instead just getting together, as people who acknowledge what we lack, and who are willing to help each other in the ways that we are able.

The irritation of intimacy

Here is my tribute to Valentine's Day:

Nobody has the potential to irritate you like the people with whom you live. Whether a spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling, a roommate--and there's a reason for it. These are the people who live in your space. Who make demands of your brain, of your time and your energy, and who have the capability and willingness to do all kinds of things within your space that make no sense to you whatsoever.

If we have enough money, we are living at a time and in places where people can increasingly live together and forgo these irritations--to live together without being in each other's space. Maybe everyone has their own rooms, perhaps even with the added retreat avenues of their own televisions, computers, and phones. One can happily close a door rather than suffer the annoyances of another person.

When those physical logistics combine with a culture in which "love" is something that exists to fulfill and bestow happiness upon its owner, we can forget the hidden value of everyday relational irritations.

Because the flip side of letting someone into your space--someone who will frustrate you with their differences, whose needs will encroach on your energy, whose plans will at times completely alter your own--is that irritants can teach things like patience, compromise, and communication. Those differences could take you a couple of steps toward understanding a perspective or a personality unlike your own. That other person's needs could teach you to give, even as they teach you your own limitations.

And the difficulties of allowing someone into your space combined with the level of commitment that a spouse makes to a spouse, or a parent gives to a child--that teaches sacrifice. Sacrifice. A word that I am groaning to type, because Christians seem to throw it around so much that any meaning fell off of it a long time ago.

"Sacrifice" means a death has happened. It could be as small as the death of some plans you'd had for the day, of some rest you thought you'd get, or some activity in which you'd hoped to participate. But it could also mean the death of larger hopes, of something you'd thought you'd do, of ideas you'd had for your own future, of someone you'd imagined yourself becoming. It sounds wrong even as I type it, to say something like that in a culture that values self-actualization above all else. But it's clear that you can't be a husband or a wife in the long term without some of this kind of sacrifice, and you can't parent a child without it either.

The sometimes pain or difficulties or self-denials of intimacy--what could teach us more practically to be like Christ? And yet we can run from it, or at least when we find ourselves in those situations we can assume something must be wrong with our relationship, since those moments are not happy or fulfilling ones. But in reality those moments are symptoms that confirm--yes, indeed, we have allowed someone else's life truly to overlap our own.

But I can't only dwell on the idea of what you could gain in Christlikeness when your spouse or child or parent or sibling or roommate presents you with irritation or pain or difficulty. Because in these relationships, you also will fail. You will misunderstand, you will get angry, you will annoy, you will make demands, you will cause pain.

And in those instances, you grow in yet another important way. You can be humbled. You can be changed, for the better. And, best of all, you can experience the grace of another person bestowed upon you, another person who has actually seen and felt the lash of your lowest self. But who continues to live in your space, and to love you.

Happy Valentine's Day to those who have shared their space with me, and who have given me grace.

Neither here nor there

At the tail end of a long day of traveling from Scotland to my parents' house in the States, my four-year-old started to lose it. My mom distracted him by giving him his first taste of a GPS system. He has recently become fascinated by the idea of maps, so an animated talking map that noted our destination with a happy checkered flag was a clear winner.

Soon, every time we hopped into their minivan (a "huge car with magic doors," according to my son), we'd hear him, buckled into his seat in the corner of the back row, making sure we hadn't forgotten that he wanted to hold the GPS.

When we drove on various errands around the hills and farmlands of Pennsylvania, my mom showed my son another way by which we could locate ourselves: the small mountain range on which they live. Otherwise known as "Gran's mountain" (um, within our family only), it could be spotted above the trees and fields, a sure marker toward home.

On our airplane ride back to Scotland, my son sat next to the window, his head bobbing as he looked around intently. Finally, he confessed, "I can't see Gran's mountain anywhere." At this moment he knew for sure that Gran and Gpa were far away.

What I think he was feeling is akin to something I feel often. Looking for home.

When I was in the States, I felt for a couple weeks what it would be like to be at my nieces' and nephews' birthday parties, and for my son to have a birthday party with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents in attendance. For my kids to have play dates with their cousins, while I chatted with my sisters. It seemed like such a luxury to me, those moments. And the time together strengthens those family bonds, though I feel the pain of it even more when it is time to leave.

And so a part of me wants to be home, thinks of "home" as where our families are, in the States. But another part of me wants to be home, thinks of "home" as Aberdeen--where I have watched my son grow from babyhood into boyhood. Where my daughter was born. It's where we have become a family ourselves and created a horde of memories. It's the only place my son knows--watching the 17 bus drive past our house, riding his bike around the park, running across the stone floor at church toward the chocolate biscuits at the back table. This part of me feels the timer counting down our time here, and I can't imagine being a family anywhere else. As my son's been telling me, "I like Scotland. When I'm big I'm still going to live here."

Some days, I feel like I don't know where I belong. I can't get my bearings on a particular "home," because home in recent years always seems to mean a place where our roots can never firmly take hold; home also means time with family in locations scattered around the States in which we have few personal ties or memories. Something inside me as a person feels very strongly that I should be able to plot "home" on a map and settle down there. But maybe that comes from an idea of a kind of life that very few people have anymore: a place where you nurture friendships and memories for decades, where your families are and continue to be, a place where you might also stick around for your older years.

Other days, I can celebrate that moving has taught me an important truth: I never knew what I could do until it was just my husband and me in a strange new place. Stuff college-aged me could never have imagined, like gaining the legal right to drive on the wrong side of the road. Forcing myself to poke holes in my own terrible shyness and instead discover that new people have all sorts of fascinating stories and information tucked inside of them. Seeing God provide for me as I could never have known if I hadn't needed so much.

When I was in the States, and wrestling with these kinds of thoughts, I happened to read an old Daily Bread sitting around my parents' house. In the February 5 entry, a couple of sentences jumped out at me: "The following were words on a sign outside a church in England: 'It doesn't matter where you live as long as you live where you are.' If God is your dwelling place, you are living where you are. If you're not content where you are, put your trust in God and thank Him for all He's given you."

I think at least one element in my struggling has been the struggle to trust God, thinking my own unmet desires for my family are what we most need, rather than trusting God's own purposes for us. Perhaps I need to grab a permanent marker and write Isaiah 49 every place I look during the day:

¹⁴ But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.”
¹⁵ “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
¹⁶ See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me.

Overwhelmed by the bad

In too short a period of time, I saw, felt, and heard about too many bad things. Someone's near-fatal, crippling accident. A friend's parent's death. A friend's child's death. My dad's cancer, resuming unabated. Watching Hotel Rwanda for the second time. Reading a book about the Holocaust through a child's eyes. A miscarriage--the experience of death from within my own body.

I felt overwhelmed by the fragility of life, the ease with which horrendous disasters happen. As I drove with my one-year-old to the supermarket on a dark, wet road, watching a bicyclist's reflector blink red in front of us like a heartbeat, I felt certain that even a simple twist of the road could send all three of us hurtling through the fence into the river down below.

It is so hard to reconcile these dark moments with other moments--my son runs through the park, chomping the grass under his feet with squeals of delight for every dog, bird, and plane he sees. Somehow the earth gives birth to both. A free preview of both heaven and hell. The Life-with-God and Life-without-God.

All I know to do when these moments overwhelm, and it is too terrible to look ahead, is to imagine myself instead burying my face into the fabric of God's chest. When I know what I can ask for on behalf of someone else, I ask. When I don't know what to say, I imagine myself like those friends who wordlessly lowered their crippled friend through the roof.

And I pray for myself, that God would help me never, in the face of whatever, never to loose my grip on him. He is my only hope for what's to come. I think of my college Old Testament professor, summing up the book of Revelation, its words written for a church coughing up the blood of its martyrs: We know who wins in the end.

In the end, there is a new earth. A new order birthed by Christ. With only the heaven. The God-with-us. And none of the hell.