WHAT'S A LIFE FOR ANYWAY?

WHAT'S A LIFE FOR ANYWAY?

Wilbur, the pig, had a devoted spider friend who wrote in her web, the words,  SOME PIG  - TERRIFIC -  RADIANT -  HUMBLE  - which opened the eyes of his animal friends to declare he was, also, phenomenal, wonderful and unique.  Wilbur, the runt of the litter, told Charlotte he did not feel like he was terrific, but she said, “You’re terrific as far as I’m concerned.  I think you’re sensational.”

How many times have our children’s eyes looked up into ours, in despair, and said, “I am untalented, unattractive, worthless, the runt of all of God’s children that have ever lived on the earth.”   And there we stand, with their hearts in our hands, with the sacred chance to bring them to a place of safety where their feelings will not be misinterpreted, but held, valued, nourished and carried across their personal gulf of discouragement to a place of hope and eventual rescue.  It happens over and over again, a child’s need to find a safe harbor, a Wilbur’s barn, their mother’s heart, where blinking, shining lights flash and ultimately glow and penetrate their troubled souls with words that say, “You’re remarkable, you’re magnificent and you are definitely “SOME PIG!” 

One of the most important discoveries I have made in my personal journey through 39 years of mothering 10 spectacularly different children, is the “art of absorbing,” the God-given ability to stand before a needy, desperate child and absorb their pain and frustration.  I believe God fashioned a mother’s heart in a very unique way, with a special capacity to create the safety in a barn that allows a child to look up, and see and learn that they are indeed terrific, at least terrific. The chance to be Charlotte to our Wilburs is a calling of the most sacred kind.

Our story ends with Wilbur working very hard to live up to all that Charlotte believed him to be and he eventually BECAME all her webby words and won a special prize at the fair.  As Charlotte is about to die, Wilbur says, “You have saved me Charlotte. Why did you do all this for me?”  She said,  “I wove my webs because I liked you. After all, what’s a life for anyway?”

PROM

PROM

“Fanny’s Dream,” a book by Caralyn and Mark Buehner, tells the story of a farm girl who decided she was going to marry a Prince.  When she heard that the Mayor was going to give a Grand Ball, she waited patiently in the garden for her Fairy Godmother to appear.

 But the only one that appeared that night was Heber Jensen with flowers in his hand.   Heber said, “Well Fanny, I’m not a prince and I don’t live in a castle, but I have one hundred and sixty acres, a little log house and I need a wife who will work by my side, through thick and thin, sweat and joy, and be glad for good food and great company.”

 They worked the farm, laughed, washed a lot of diapers and grabbed the baby and the twins and ran out of their house that burned to the ground when Davy stuck socks in the toaster…..

Finally….her Fairy Godmother did appear to her in the garden and asked if she was ready to go to the Mayor’s ball to meet a visiting Colonel.  She told her, “No.”

 Heber, who was reading a story to their three sons, asked her who she was talking to in the garden.  She told him it was her Fairy Godmother.  He said, “Oh, sure! And I’m the Prince of Sahiba.”  - to which Fanny replied, “Close enough, close enough.”

I had a close friend tell me, after she had been married to her second husband for several years, that if she had to do it all over again, even though she loved her current husband, she would have chosen to put the time and effort that was required to build a new marriage and deal with the confusion and challenges of putting “yours, mine and ours” together for the rest of her life, in to her first marriage.  

I call this "Prom."  I think there are marriages that fail because someone still wants to “go to the Prom” after they are married and marriages that never take place because someone decides to live their whole life going from castle to castle, to dance with Prince after Prince, Princess after Princess. Media has poured images of unrealistic living into our minds which has produced the age of the Prima Donna and Prima Don.  It is great to go on vacation, go out to dinner, have parties, dress up, go dancing.  It is when someone believes that is what their life should be all the time, that trouble begins.  Building a marriage and family is the most exciting adventure God has ever given mankind.  The chance to create something really beautiful is often destroyed by someone looking up at the castle and wishing that was their life, which ends up being no life at all – just a pretty dress, a tuxedo, a corsage – day after day after day.  And at the end of those days, where is the 39 year wedding anniversary celebration, with children singing “just for you” songs they have worked tirelessly to learn? Where is the rehearsed, choreographed and costumed performances of sweet or crazy remembrances that have piled up over the years by a family that worked hard together, as a team?  The house will burn down…..the baseball will crash through the window a dozen times, the 5 year old will go to church with no socks.   Someone will get lost at Disneyland, and someone else will rub butter all over his body and swim in milk and cheerios that are covering the floor. Cars will crash, teeth will get knocked out, limbs will break, a car will get stolen with all your children’s Christmas presents in it.  You will drive a big, huge, blue van with broken windows that smells like fish for years…and you will have a child ask if the whole family can pray for them before they take the MCAT, or apply for a new job.  You will hear twenty people cheer every time anyone does "anything." You will watch what happens when someone discovers who they really are.  You will watch a child find the love of their life.  You will see a daughter willing to reach up to heaven to bring a newborn child into the world…Big, bright, beautiful life lived by people dedicated to one another who are not distracted by the castle on the hill but look right in their very own garden for the Hebers and Fannys coming over the hill with flowers in their hand.

ART OF MENDING

I was reading the book, “The Art of Mending,” by Elizabeth Berg, and came upon a paragraph that I have treasured ever since.

“My relatives still make fun of me for my love of things domestic, especially my Aunt Fran, who, whenever we visit, always tells me she’s saved her ironing and mending for me. Actually, I wouldn’t mind doing it. I like ironing. It’s the physical equivalent of staring into middle space. I think it waters the mind, if you know what I mean. As for mending, I think it’s good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. It’s an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see the whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You’ll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there’s an art to mending: if you’re careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the thing, because it is a testimony to its worth."

I had an experience that made me understand this idea personally. I have a favorite painting that I found while we lived in Boston. It is easily over 100 years old and over the years has become all the more dear to me. One day someone was playing ball with our dog, near the painting. There was a candle burning on the table below it. The ball hit the candle and the wax sprayed all over the painting, the furniture and the wall behind the painting. I grabbed my painting and my daughter, who was standing in the other room, and dragged them both into my bedroom. Through tears, I looked up into my daughter’s eyes and said, “Tell me it’s a thing, tell me it’s a thing.” She consoled me in her inspired way and we went on with the evening that involved a house full of relatives and friends. Later that night, around midnight, when everyone was asleep, I brought my painting out and laid it on the counter under the bright lights. I then worked, for hours, to lift the wax off my painting and the antique frame that surrounded it. Finally, I had done all that I could. I stood back and looked at it….it wasn’t the same…. But it was still beautiful, and in light of what I learned about “the art of mending,” it had become more beautiful, because now it had all the marks of my efforts to restore it, which was in the end, a “testimony to its worth.”…… and then I see the Lord, looking at His masterpiece -- beaten, battered and bruised by life ... and I see him working tirelessly in the garden, on a tree...to ultimate victory....His work and His glory...the wax is peeled away - and there we stand, glorious - His grand testimony of our infinite worth.

LIT BY LIFE

LIT BY LIFE

A child is born…a child dies

A soul is rescued…another cries

A song is sung in brightest tones

A melody lost in weep alone

A heart that soars on love’s sweet wings

A broken heart that cannot sing

The light, the dark…the ebb and flow

Brings the softness of a glow

Faintest glimmer held in hope

Shines e’er brighter in the grope

Combining in the end all light

The darkest black and lightest white

And gleaming, golden, through the fire

We mold our souls and all desire

To stand pure white in heaven’s gaze

From all our wandering through the maze

And in the mirror of our life

Recorded all our joys and strifes

Will through the mend then all turn bright

       Through clear, transcendent, perfect sight…

          by Karen Nelson  

EYE PHONE

EYE PHONE 

I have lots of favorite things. If I were Maria in the musical, "Sound of Music," jumping on the bed with the seven Von Trapp children, singing “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things,” the list would go on and on. One of those very, very favorite things would be looking into the faces of my children. There have been times, I have to admit, when my children have looked at me, and whatever I was about to say to them just goes away –the lecture, the admonition, the counsel…just melts away into complete adoration as I behold their freckled, dimpled, green/blue eyed, smiling faces. 

This favorite thing, however, is something I find much more difficult to find now. The tops of my children’s heads are now becoming more familiar to me. Technology has transformed my accessibility to those shining “Eyes” to “I’s” . . . I-Pad, I-Phone, I-Pod. 

My brother, who is a doctor at Stanford University, commented that there is a new general posture among the students there, as they walk across campus . . . bent over, absorbed in their cell world. 

At church we used to be able to cozy-up to one another, share a hymnal, and join our voices together to sing praises. Now, we sit next to hard, heavy I-Pads, and while our “eyes” used to be fixed upon the speaker, who worked so hard to provide us with an inspired message, we now peruse the scriptures or the planets or other gospel related topics . . . or check e-mail. Eyes down, I-Pads open. Little children can’t help but be distracted by the wealth of possibilities for distraction provided by the magical I-Pad, the new-age “quiet book.”

We all walk around “hooked up,” or rather “hooked down,” unable to “see” all that is around us that continually testifies, in beautiful ways, that God is all around us . . . especially in the eyes of all the people in our lives, which is the ultimate gift of Life. 

I believe the greatest “scientific” discovery that Leonardo Da Vinci made is that the eye is “the window of the soul.” http://www.theawakenedeye.com/leonardo.htm 

my daughter Annie's eyes 

I wonder if we participated in an experiment together, we could get our “eyes” back. When we are in the presence of a real, living, breathing human being, we could make sure our cell phones are not visible, hidden and turned off.  We could leave our I-Phones and I-Pads in the car whenever we enter a restaurant, or a church, or a movie or anywhere we might have the chance to look into the “windows to the soul” of the person who, at that moment in time, is our gift from God. These moments are often lost to whoever happens to be on the phone at the time, who becomes more important than the person standing at our side. We could discover that the grocery clerk just returned from Hawaii where they celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary or that the teenager working behind the McDonald’s cash register is about to compete in a State tennis tournament. We can create small town familiarity even in a big city. 

We, along with the students at Stanford University, could stand up straight again and behold the wonders of the earth – the expansive wonders of God’s gifts – and enjoy, once again, the greatest wonder of all – each other, Eye to Eye.