Learning to Be The Light

“When a heart is cold as ice
You can't melt it with advice
No one wants to listen to
A list of things they shouldn't do
So I build a city on a hill
And I light a candle on the sill
Knowing You'll be always knocking at the door
Oh God I just want to love on everyone
All I have is Yours to give so let the people come...”

            On a cool November morning in 1978, I made my early morning dash outside to get the newspaper. It was my habit from the time I was seven or eight to grab the paper before anyone else was up. I would scan the headlines, read the funnies, look for interesting editorials and pictures ,read the advice columns, peruse the sports section if there was anything about horse racing or gymnastics, attempt and occasionally complete the crossword puzzles, and mentally file away which things I wanted to cut out for my scrapbook later. To desecrate the paper with scissors before my parents had read it was, I had learned, not a good thing to do. Daddy did not appreciate picking up the sports section and finding a huge gaping hole where a picture of Secretariat had once been.

            A little over a year earlier, I had been the first to read the horrifying story of the Girl Scout murders at Camp Scott. It gave me nightmares and also justified in my mind my decision to withdraw from the Girl Scouts after one boring year of sewing pillows and singing dumb songs. I had an aversion to outdoor toilets and, although I loved nature, the woods were scary at night. It was not wild animals I feared, mind you, it was serial killers. Perhaps sneaking into my closet with a contraband copy of Helter Skelter when I was only ten was not the best idea. At any rate, I became fascinated at an early age with the workings of the human mind as well as the tragic events of history. These are interests that I have carried with me into adulthood, although I have learned to balance them with other things lest I become preoccupied with the dark and morbid thoughts that consumed me during my teenage years.

            On that day in 1978, I was twelve years old. Middle school had proved thus far to be confusing, confounding, and stressful as I struggled to find my place in the world. I was making good grades and my teachers loved me, but that does very little for one’s social status in seventh grade. I had plenty of friends but they were not cool and neither was I, and, unfortunately, one of the Mean Girls in eighth grade had targeted me as a victim. I made it too easy by letting her know it bothered me, and my mother did not understand why I suddenly had to have expensive tennis shoes and trendy shirts. I had never cared before. But I had never felt like such an outcast before. I hoped that the clothes would help, but so far, it wasn’t working. I was just thankful for weekends. I opened the paper and, in full color that filled two-thirds of the front page was a picture of hundreds of dead bodies. The headline above it screamed MASS SUICIDE IN GUYANA.

            I was in shock. I knew that Guyana was in South America or Central America somewhere. I had heard a few blurbs on the news a day or two before about a guy down there who might be holding people against their will in some kind of weird cult. But the little information I had somehow did not connect, in my mind, with this picture. I studied it with a feeling of cold horror, realizing that there were children lying there dead, children younger even than me. How could little kids commit suicide, and why would they? I noticed a couple of dead dogs in the picture. Dogs don’t commit suicide. Dogs don’t even know what death is. I began reading the article. At least three hundred people were dead. A “preacher” named Jim Jones was responsible. He had somehow coerced his followers into drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. The adults had given it to their children and their pets. Old people had been injected with it. As I followed the story in the ensuing days and the body count rose, I was plagued with questions that no one seemed really able to answer-not my teachers, not my parents, not my minister or youth leaders. How could people do that? How could they kill themselves and their children and their pets? How was this man able to entice over nine hundred people to commit such a terrible act? My questions were no different from those of the people around me.

            I began to read about and research cults. I remembered my reading of Helter Skelter and I saw the similarities between Manson’s “family” and Jones’s “People’s Temple”. Years later, in college, I did a research paper on cults and I saw again the common thread. It was the need to be part of something. Cult leaders are able to build their little “kingdoms” by offering to the unwanted and outcast the opportunity to belong. Those who feel rejected by society are drawn to these charismatic leaders who offer them unconditional acceptance. Jim Jones convinced his followers that they were building a perfect society. Charles Manson did the same thing in a different way. Both men had people who were willing to kill or die for them. Those who came to their senses and attempted to leave were stopped and were made examples of by being humiliated, abused, or even killed. But the majority gave their lives to their alleged “saviors” and never looked back.

            So I have to ask myself this question: what are Christians doing? What is the Christian church doing? Why are we not giving these people the love, the acceptance, the refuge they seek? I have talked to many people who turned their backs on Christianity because they were given a box labeled “God” accompanied by an extensive list of rules and regulations that they were afraid to break. They were never given the gospel message, the real one that is Love, or, if they were, it became obscured by a set of impossible goals of perfection. And because everyone is seeking Something, those who feel ostracized by the church will look for unconditional love elsewhere.

            Yes, I do believe that there is such a thing as sin. Without it, we wouldn’t have anything from which we need saving. I believe that there are basic moral principles found in God’s Word, and that He does expect something from us as we grow in our faith and our understanding. But I don’t believe that sins can be categorized by levels or that the Bible was written to be used as a club. What it is is God’s Love letter to all of creation. The God of the Old Testament is the same God that is in the New Testament. He didn’t change, but the terms of the covenant did. The terms changed because He came to earth and felt everything that we feel and was despised and rejected and finally nailed to a Cross. His Love covers all our sins. His wrath is done. He has made His peace with mankind, and we can choose freely to accept or reject the grace that He offers. When I have kids come to me in tears because they feel that they aren’t good enough, that bad things have happened to them because God is punishing them, or that God is disappointed in them because they have failed in some way, my heart breaks. Who told them that? What are we doing?

            My God’s Love is SO BIG that it can carry all of the sins I have ever committed and fling them far away. My sins alone would be a staggering burden, but He took the sins of the whole world! Because it is a sinful and fallen world, bad things sometimes just happen. Sin has consequences that must be dealt with. Nevertheless, there is forgiveness. Whatever we may have done, and whatever consequences we have to face because of our sin, we still can go to Him and make all of it right. If this message of Love was properly communicated to the whole world, a Jim Jones or Charles Manson could never get a foothold. The beautiful thing is that Charles Manson himself could even now be forgiven if he would cast off his foolish pride and confess all to Jesus. As much as I despise what Manson did, I would rejoice if that were to happen. I would also rejoice if we as Christians would stop being so darn judgmental and learn to love as Christ loves. It is silly to think we can “save” anyone. We can’t do God’s job for Him. But we can be His witnesses. The Great Commission tells us to go into the world and make disciples. Nowhere does it say that we are to browbeat, humiliate, or frighten people into the Kingdom. The Bible even says that we are to meet people’s immediate physical and emotional needs FIRST. I am a proponent of meeting folks where they are, and it is not in my “job description” to decide if I like where they are. I’m sure that God didn’t like where I was at age seven when I first got saved, or at fourteen when I re-dedicated my life, or at twenty when I returned to Him after a three-year prodigal journey. He has never once judged me for who I am, but has seen who I can be in Him.

            In recent months God has revealed to me more and more that I need to learn to reflect His light more and more. When I see “Christians” doing things like protesting at the funerals of homosexuals while carrying hateful signs or holding book burnings or screaming hellfire and brimstone from street corners, I cringe.  Yeah, that’s effective. It turns people off and turns them away and sends them straight into the clutches of Evil. It makes us look ridiculous and crazy and mean. But “a city on a hill cannot be hidden”. So carry the Light. Love your enemies. Forgive those who hate and persecute you. Embrace the unlovable. Everyone has a past and a struggle and a wound of some kind. Speak the truth to them in Love. Just love them like Jesus.

Go light your world.

“I'm learning to be the light
That makes the shadows hide
The light that breaks the curse of pride
The light that takes the weary in its arms
When it all came crashing down
There was only darkness all around
But in the distance I could see
A flame...
It's so much brighter living in Your world
Savior what You did for me
You gave me something I want everyone, I mean everyone to see.”

Family Pictures

“I liked having some time to myself. Our family was such a close one, you could get smothered. Of course, we didn't always agree with one another. Sometimes I quarreled with my brother and sisters, but I couldn't remember hating anyone for more than five minutes.”
― Gloria Whelan

            I keep saying I am going to make a scrapbook of the family photographs. I have a box full of them, and a Ziploc bag with more, and then there are the thousands that are on the computer, and the hundreds at my mother’s house that, miraculously, survived the fire. I have every intention of organizing them, creating slideshows, making some kind of order from the chaos. This summer, I actually have time to do these things, but then I get lost in just looking at the pictures and somehow manage to waste the hours that I should spend putting them together. I don’t know; maybe it’s better that way. Each photo is a story in itself.

            The picture I have in front of me now is one of the five of us children sitting on the pier at my uncle’s house by the lake. It was somewhere near Valdosta, Georgia, down one of many dirt roads that existed in that area at the time. Every summer we went to the family reunion, and every summer we had a pre-reunion get-together at Uncle Julian and Aunt Myra’s house.  I learned to fish from that pier and caught tadpoles in the shallow part of the lake, which allegedly was inhabited by water moccasins and huge alligators. Uncle Julian always had enough watermelon and boiled peanuts to feed an army. I remember that I once participated in a seed-spitting contest with my brother and some of my boy cousins when my mother wasn’t looking. At family reunions I had a bit of freedom from watchful parental eyes-there were so many people around that my mother figured someone would rescue us if we fell out of a tree or tumbled into the lake.

            Of course, getting there was half the “fun”, especially the camping part. Imagine seven people sleeping in a pop-up camper designed for four. Eventually my father added another “room” that was actually a glorified tent attached to the camper. Family togetherness was a necessity in those days, and we were expected to be nice to each other, which included not killing each other over games of Crazy Eights or the best seat in the car. It also included politely eating the bacon and eggs that tasted of Coleman fuel. The best we could manage was to choke it down without gagging and thank our mother, who was grimly determined to keep us well-fed while pretending that she didn’t hate camping with a passion. But we prayed for the days when we had to break camp early and could have cereal for breakfast, eaten right out of those cute little individual packets. The first person alert enough to comprehend what was happening could   snag the Apple Jacks or the Cocoa Krispies. To be the last was to be stuck with soggy cornflakes. These were the rare moments when one could fervently wish to be an only child.

            Sometimes we would forego camping, when finances permitted, and stay at a Holiday Inn. There was air conditioning, there was a breakfast buffet, and there was blue water in the toilets. For some reason, this fascinated my brother. Personally, I liked writing on the hotel stationery with the little pencils, assuming I could get to these items before a sibling grabbed them. When night fell, we would attempt to sleep-I, as the youngest, squished in between our parents so that I could get the full benefit of Daddy’s snoring, two sisters in the other bed, and my brother and Jackie on pallets on the floor. It was lovely, especially when somebody threw up, which was a routine occurrence. Over the sound of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre that echoed and re-echoed from my father’s vicinity would come a vast, deep, ominous urping noise, warning everyone that they had approximately two and a half seconds to get out of the way.

            The family reunion made up for everything, though. The party at Uncle Julian’s was a blast, even when my little cousin Richard, who was so evil that even the grownups were afraid of him, nearly knocked me off the pier. I was minding my own business when he came running at top speed, having caught a fish too small to eat. He hurled an expletive at me while hurling the fish into the water. I asked his older brother, who was, inexplicably, not evil at all, “What is WRONG with that kid?” He shrugged and said, “I have no idea.” It made me realize that I was lucky to have siblings who were merely annoying and bossy as opposed to being potential criminals. My brother and a couple of my cousins helped me catch sixteen tadpoles, but we hastily let them go when Richard, after staring at them for a few seconds, announced, “I think I want to SQUISH them.”  I mean, EWWW.

           

            The family reunion itself followed a predictable pattern. One must endure being kissed and squeezed by a variety of grandparents, aunts, and uncles before moving on to tables laden with food. You had to eat fast before too many flies gathered on your potato salad, and you had to make sure you took at least one piece of fried chicken from each aunt so no one would be offended. After gobbling the chicken, potato salad, macaroni and cheese, squash, bread and butter, mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, roast beef, green beans, lima beans, and corn on the cob and washing it down with sweet tea more fit to be poured on pancakes that to quench thirst, you moved on to the seven-layer cake with fudge frosting between each layer. In order to keep from exploding, you then grabbed cousins and siblings and played tag and hide-and-seek in the little cemetery behind the church. My goal was to not let Richard find me, but he always did. Once we were all out of breath from running, we would explore the cemetery and read the inscriptions on the headstones. Later, the grownups rounded us up and everyone went into the church to sing. “I’ll Fly Away” was a favorite, and so was “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”, and of course we had to end with “Glad Reunion Day”. My Uncle Robert always did a solo, usually one with a recitation. He liked recitations a lot.

            Looking back, I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything. There is something about connecting with extended family that makes you understand who you are and where you came from. As the years went by and more and more people grew old and went on to Glory, the family reunions became a thing of the past. There was too much sadness. Uncle Julian died in a house fire when I was eight, and it wasn’t until years later that I learned that my wonderful uncle who took me riding in his rattly old pickup and told stories of gator hunts was a drunk. Somehow, it didn’t make any difference. I learned a lot of things about my aunts and uncles and cousins as I got older, but those skeletons in the family closet mattered far less than the memory of a group of people with a shared history, four generations of a backwoods Georgia clan, singing gospel songs together in a little country church. As I look at the photograph of us on the pier, three of us grinning while Bobby looks solemn and Dona annoyed at having her picture taken, I think of what we shared as siblings. I think of my dad who took the picture, and my mother who was probably standing somewhere nearby admonishing him to hurry up. I think of what it means to be a family. My father has been gone for almost twenty-five years. My mother is seventy-four. I, the youngest sibling, am closer to fifty than to forty. We have a legacy. It is not a legacy of material wealth, but a legacy of wisdom, faith, and love.

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.” ~Erma Bombeck

Pass The Poisonberry Syrup, Please

“It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .”
― George R. Gissing

                Yesterday I ate a waffle with boysenberry syrup on it. I asked my daughter if she remembered that she used to call it “poisonberry syrup”.  Miffed, she said, “Well, I had never heard of ‘boysenberry’, Mom!”  It’s true; she never had. Ally, because of her central auditory processing difficulty, is known for the Malapropism. To this day, if she mishears something, she simply translates it into something remotely understandable to her and goes from there. But she is not the only one of my children to make these blunders and what they do not fathom is that I still laugh about them because they are such fond memories.

                For instance, there is the infamous Muu Muu Incident. Tony has always been an eavesdropper, but unfortunately he would often hear parts of separate discussions and somehow merge them in his head. One chilly Saturday morning my husband was making biscuits.He told me that he was making them and that he was also making sausage and gravy, and that we could have either gravy or jam on them, and then he asked me about the muu-muus he had bought for me to wear around the house. “Oh, they’re wonderful,” I said. “Very warm.”

                Tony had only heard fragments of what we were saying. “Hey, Dad,” he asked, “are the muu-muus for us kids too, or just you and Mom?”

                “What?”

                “The muu-muus. Are they for us, too?”

                “WHAT?”

                Exasperated, he asked a third time. “The MUU-MUUS.The ones that are warm in the oven. Are they for us too?”

                Freddie chuckled. “Son, what do you think muu-muus ARE?”

                “Uhhh…biscuits?”

                To this day, muu-muus are another name for biscuits and vice versa. The incident sparked a series of jokes about Muu-Muu Man and his sidekick, Biscuit Boy, who fight evil armed only with spatulas and butter. Tony finds it much funnier now than he did then. At the time, he became incensed when, after he said he was tired and we asked from what, Ally piped up, “Saving the WORLD!” in a singsong voice.

                But Ally has done and said her share. Unfamilar with the concept of a port-o-potty , she asked if “the potties in the porters ever overfloat.” My husband promptly made up a song called “The Potty in the Porter” to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.” It was suitably gross and the children, who were five, eight, and eleven at the time, shrieked with mirth and later drew a series of illustrations to go with it. Ally used to draw things and then decide what they were. My favorite was “a duck thinking about France”. It turned out that she thought France was a kind of food.Once, when asked at our adoption support group to illustrate “trauma”, she drew a flower under which she wrote, “I AM VARRY HAPPYE.” I explained to her that trauma is not a flower nor a happy thing. She replied that she knew that, but she wasn’t sad or traumatized so she just drew what she wanted. Raina had drawn a little girl crying. “Now, before you jump to any conclusions, Mother,” she said, “I just drew that because I knew they wanted some sad weepy picture. I’m not actually traumatized.” So much for psychology.

                My kids hate being analyzed. If they do something dumb they don’t want us to try to figure out why they did it, because sometimes people just do and say dumb things. There was no deep psychological reason why they thought it would be a good idea to tie the wagon to Tony’s bike, put Ally and the dog in it, and then try to ride the bike downhill in violation of all the laws of physics. It didn’t end well, but like many things I didn’t know about it until years later. The older two paid Ally off with candy to not tell.

                I don’t know why I didn’t notice when Ally shaved off her eyebrows and drew some on with marker, but I really didn’t. I guess I was too busy worrying about why Tony popped the head off a Barbie doll, drew a face on the tiny little ball that remained, and posed it naked on the edge of the bathtub. Or maybe it was because I was slowly going mad thinking we had poltergeists, since things would go missing and then reappear in different places and NOBODY did it. Or maybe I was distracted by my husband’s incoherent ramblings about mermaid hair in his soap and the action figure stuck in the drain. These days it is bobby pins and hair ties that get stuck in the drain, and the paint that used to get spilled on the carpet has been replaced by nail polish that is impossible to get rid of.

                Who can comprehend the mind of a child? Raina thought those things that you plug things into were “shock-its” which actually makes sense, but she also liked “corn critters”. I’m not sure what she thought was in the corn fritters. Ally believed that the Statue of Delivery had a pizza box in her hand, and that some Native American had been working on the railroad, “all the WIGWAM day.”  She is still the Lyric Butcher. If she doesn’t know the words, she just makes them up-or HUMS. A lot.

                Often during a day’s play in the backyard there would be odd occurrences and people would come in to get strange things. I decided that some things were best unknown and were maybe not my business, but I did get upset when the girls threw CD cases into the fan and destroyed them while “playing secret agent”.  I never did figure that one out, any more than I have been able to figure out Ally’s cryptic answer to the question of whether her socks matched: “Well, one of them doesn’t.” At least they don’t talk backward anymore. I have to admit, that really did drive me nuts, and they knew it.They also knew that I hated the idea of wasting food, which was why they threw the pimento cheese sandwiches into the far back of the yard and then watched them decay and get eaten by ants over time. Fascinating nature study.

                One day Ally came in to get a broom and my curiosity got the best of me. “Why do you need a broom?”

                “To sweep up the broken glass in the shed.”

                “Broken glass from what?”

                “The broken aquarium.”

                “There’s no broken aquarium in the shed.”

                “There is now.” BAZINGA.

                It turned out that Raina had been trying to get something out of a keeper that was on top of a very tall stack of keepers. She decided that it would be a good idea to stand on the old aquarium in order to reach it. Putting ninety-five pounds of pressure on an item made entirely of glass will cause it to shatter, a scientific discovery Raina made all by herself. Kids have to learn these things. They also have to eventually learn to put on their own Band-Aids, which Raina did that day-she sneaked in and did it herself because she didn’t want us to know that she had once again done something kind of dumb.

                Another time, Tony came running in yelling that a tree had fallen on Raina. My husband was not home at the time. I ran screaming into the yard, expecting to find my daughter dead and smashed beneath a fallen oak. Instead, I found her lying on the ground yowling like a scalded cat with a very small tree limb across her leg. I asked Tony why he exaggerated, and he said, “Well, from the way she was yelling, I just assumed it was a whole tree.” 

                Ah, childhood. A time of innocence. A time of magic. A time when your brother and sister throw your toy into a tree, make you climb up to get it, refuse to help you down, and laugh at you when you pee your pants. Poor Ally. Although she was REALLY annoying, the way she would take everything Tony said and make it into a song and sing it back to him, or lean over to whisper something to Raina and then lick her ear. It’s a good thing that when the social worker, unable to deny Tony’s issues, assured us that the girls were “no trouble at all”, we took it with a grain of salt. There is no such thing as a child who is “no trouble at all” except in books.

                Nowadays we look back and laugh. Memories are wonderful things, and we have more to come. Just the other day, Tony hit a traffic cone with his car and it flipped up and smashed his side mirror. Weird things just HAPPEN to that boy. If he gets the job he’s interviewing for today, at the Hush Puppy store, we will probably call him Shoe Boy or something. Teasing each other is how we show affection. That’s how we roll. Alyssa still often falls for Freddie’s ridiculous “facts” that he tells with a straight face and so does Tony. Raina is a little more savvy and she will just shake her head and say “No, it’s not.”  But he gets her every now and then and is delighted when it happens. When the kids were younger, if I saw them doing something dangerous, I would say, “I had a friend who did that. Know what happened? He DIED.” After awhile, though, they realized that I would have had no friends left if this had been true every time, so now when I start that they just say, “Yeah, yeah. We know. He ate too many potato chips and he DIED.” Oh, these cynical, coffee-drinking, music-obsessed teenagers of mine. Where did those three cute little kids go? I think they have a very bad case…of growing up. It’s sad, but it happens to everybody. I kind of miss the  muu-muu days, complete with a rabbit in a tutu stuffed down into a doll stroller next to an angry but resigned Pekingese in a onesie. Those were the days, indeed. Now please pass the poisonberry syrup.

“Then they do
And that's how it is
It's just quiet in the morning
Can't believe
How much you miss
All they do
And all they did
You want all the dreams
They dreamed of
To come true
Then they do.”

The Great Escape

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

                I don’t really remember when I first knew I could read printed words. I’m not even certain that there was one such moment for me. I was very young, probably three, when I began reading. My mother says that she assumed for a long time that I simply had all of my books memorized, but then when she gave me a new one and I opened it and started reading aloud, she realized that Something had happened. I do recall a day when I was four and I picked up a Reader’s Digest that was on the sofa and flipped to a page with a picture of an animal on it. I had read three or four sentences about the wolf when it dawned on me that this was a magazine for Grownups. It was not one of my “little kid” books. After that, I all but abandoned my picture books in pursuit of Real Stories. Still, from time to time I would return to the four puppies who were sad when the seasons changed, the gloomy camel who found purpose in having his hair used to make a sweater for a little girl, the ill-behaved Cat in the Hat,  the Giant Golden Book version of Doctor Doolittle with the two-page spread of the good doctor with all of his animals, and, of course, Max and his “wild things”.

                Books were, for me, friends and companions. I would peruse the encyclopedia, the world atlas, the dictionary, and the Big Book of Nature for hours on end. The Big Book of Nature had pictures of nearly every animal, plant, and rock that my young brain could comprehend. The picture of the gila monster frightened me terribly but I nevertheless felt compelled to turn to that page every time I looked at the book. I imagined the gila monster to be huge and fierce, something on the order of a fire-breathing dragon. The book was lost in the fire, but to this day I can close my eyes and see that gila monster with its yellow eyes, ready to leap from the page and attack. As I browsed through the book I learned a considerable amount about animals, flowers, trees, and rocks. When the patience of those around me had grown thin because I just had to share, constantly, the facts I had learned, I would slip outside and find the nearest pet . The dog, cat, or pony would then receive the benefit of my knowledge.

                I ran into some trouble when I entered school already literate. Like the young Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, I was an object of suspicion. My mother earnestly explained to the teacher that I had somehow learned to read. I remember her saying, “I don’t know HOW it HAPPENED” in an apologetic tone. I wondered exactly what it was I had done wrong. My schoolteacher aunt had already chastised my mother for my ability, saying that I could not possibly have learned to read “the right way.” Since in those days phonics had been discarded, for the most part, in favor of the Look-Say Method and Whole Language instruction, I had in fact learned in precisely the way the schools were teaching. I had simply done it rather early and by osmosis rather than intentional reading “lessons”. Thus kindergarten and first grade were an endless bore. I was relegated, during reading instruction, to the library, where the librarian was made to understand that I should be allowed to choose books from the Junior section rather than the Beginners. Since I had already begun, at home, to read fascinating stories from my sister’s high school literature books, this didn’t really help very much. Furthermore, I still had to complete what was required by the Great State of Indiana, so I zipped through the Getting Ready to Read workbook in one evening at home, then tore into the books and workbooks that centered around the dog Tip, the kitten Mitten who, disturbingly, never aged over the course of three primers and two hardback readers, and Jack and Janet, who spent a lot of time flying kites and pulling their pets in a wagon.  I finished all of this nonsense in record time and then was allowed to pursue my own pleasures.

                Unwittingly, I had already begun the process of a slow but inevitable social suicide. By the age of seven, I was firmly convinced that something must be terribly wrong with me. I had friends but they didn’t seem to understand a word I said. I was consoled by being permitted to help some of the slower students  with their work. One little boy named Stephen wanted to read so badly, and I desperately wanted the same for him. I tried everything I could think of, but at seven one’s resources are a bit limited. Still, he did eventually learn to read the first two primers. Sort of. I think he actually mostly had them memorized, but he was happy and proud and that made me feel good. I did not know then that God was already working to prepare me for a future career as a teacher. I just knew that Stephen was sad when other kids told him he was stupid, and that he felt stupid, and I sympathized because I felt…weird.

                I continued to feel weird throughout my school years. Okay, in some ways I WAS weird. I was very shy, to the point where I did not talk at all some days during my first couple of years in school. I more than made up for it at home, where I seldom shut up. The older I got, the more of a handicap my shyness became. When I was in third grade we moved to Texas, where my best friend on the school campus was a tree. The school had a great library, though, and I won a prize for reading the most books in my grade that year-over a hundred. I also won the  third-grade spelling bee. These accomplishments served only to secure my place as the School Nerd and I never really shook that image. As hard as I tried to become a Bad Girl during my high school years, my love for books did not diminish and the school library remained my sanctuary. You can’t really be a total Bad Girl if you are seen reading Les Miserables  for fun. My image of myself became completely distorted, but reading was my constant refuge which made me a big hit with my English teachers.

                I discovered recently that there is a name for the “condition” I had as a child. It is called “hyperlexia” and is characterized by precocious early reading with precocious comprehension abilities. It just figures that the experts would slap a label on it. I have always felt that God made me that way to make up for the fact that the part of my brain that should be able to do higher math is either damaged or missing. For whatever reason, He did make me that way.  The gifts I have received from books far outweigh what I had to endure. Last night my husband commented on the fact that, with the daily downloading of twenty or more books to my Kindle, he has at last found a way to keep ahead of me. I can read three or four books a day during the summer. I love my Kindle. But I will never give up real books.

                There is a smell and feel to books. There is something special about turning the pages. I like to revisit my childhood favorites from time to time, and I relish the thrill I get when I open a book. A few years ago, my husband  found the Windy Foot books for me on Ebay. Of all the horse books I devoured in my youth, the Windy Foot stories were my favorites. The ones he got me were discarded from libraries so they have the same bindings and covers that I remember.The stories are warm and sweet, if a bit cheesy. No matter. They are comfortable. Last night I read Lad:A Dog, which is about as sentimental and melodramatic as a book can possibly get. I cried anyway, just as I did when I was eight years old. I go to book sales and find copies of favorites that were lost in the fire, like Stuart Little and The Phantom Tollbooth, and I feel as if I am at a family reunion. Books connect me with places and people and animals and things I loved. I cannot read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn without thinking of my father, who introduced me to the book and loved it as I do. I think of my fourth-grade teacher when I read Watership Down, and each visit to Pooh Corner takes me back to a bedroom strewn with stuffed toys where I sat in rapt wonder and listened to a recording of Sebastian Cabot reading In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Into a Tight Place. I rather adore that Bear of Very Little Brain.

                There is no substitute for the wonder and the magic of reading. I only wish that I could get every student to understand that. I wish that they all could have heard my dad read A Christmas Carol . I try to duplicate his Scrooge, but I just don’t measure up. I wish that they could understand what a gift it is to be able to read, to be transported to faraway places and Places That Never Were, and see the impossible made possible.  Even if I cannot make them love reading as I do, I wish that I could at least make them see its importance. A few do. Even fewer of them love it, maybe one or two in every class, but that small handful makes my time worthwhile. And among the many who aren’t readers, there still will sometimes come that moment when they do connect with a particular book, and say to their own surprise, “Hey, I really liked that book.” And my heart sings. For just a moment, a soul has been touched, and a student feels the way I feel about reading. These glimpses assure me of the goodness of God, and of my Purpose. It is He who gave us the gift of words and language. He made me This Way. Call me “hyperlexic”,  a “bookworm” a “bibliophile” or even a “freak”. It doesn’t matter. No one else need understand it, really. It is just a part of the way I am designed-designed by God.

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”  -Scout Finch

The Things We've Handed Down

Don't know much about you
Don't know who you are
We've been doing fine without you
But, we could only go so far
Don't know why you chose us
Were you watching from above
Is there someone there that knows us
Said we'd give you all our love..

                As Father’s Day approaches, I think about our adoption journey and how we arrived where we are now. I think about my struggle with infertility, the elation over two blue lines, and the crushing blow three days later when the doctor said I was not pregnant. The truth is that I probably had been, maybe just a few days along, but for whatever reason it just didn’t happen. Once we had gone as far with fertility treatments as we were able and willing to go, the talk turned to adoption. I have two adopted siblings and I always figured that I would adopt at some point, even if I was able to have a child. My husband wasn’t quite there yet. Then one day, we got a call from my doctor, who, along with his wife, often works to help unwed mothers place their babies. A baby had become available, but we would have to act right away, for within 24 hours the child would be given over to foster care. At the last minute, the mother had decided she didn’t want him.

                Now we were faced with an on-the-spot decision. At that time, we were living in a tiny one-bedroom cottage. I was teaching and I had to continue teaching because we needed the money. Where would we put a baby? What would we do about child care? Furthermore, my husband wasn’t even sure he was ready for this step. We hadn’t talked about it much. We hadn’t prayed about it. But in the car on his way home that day, my husband did pray, and he very clearly heard God’s voice. The words were very simple. “I adopted you.” Now it was obvious-we were supposed to adopt. The question of whether or not this was our baby still remained. We went down on our knees  and asked God to give us some sign. Within five minutes, the phone rang. It was my doctor, and he said that another couple who had been waiting for a baby for three years had said they wanted the baby. They were all prepared for him and everything was in order, but he still wanted us to have first choice since he had contacted us first. We looked at each other. That was our sign-this was not our child and not our time. So, with tears, we told Dr.M. to let the other couple have the baby.

                The purpose in all of this was not difficult to see. Even though this was someone else’s baby, it had brought my husband to his epiphany regarding adoption, and after that we began pursuing it more earnestly. In the time between, we were able to buy a house and I got a job making more money. Things began falling into place, although it took an additional four years. We began to see that a baby was not God’s plan for us. Of all the insane things, we came to realize that God probably wanted us to adopt, not only older children, but several at once- a sibling group. This excited the social workers and caused raised eyebrows in some other people. I was actually told that I must be crazy. Then when we had our home study, the social worker commented that our house was big enough for six or eight kids, which freaked me out a little. Ultimately, we were approved for up to four.

                I remember so well the first day that they arrived, and I cannot explain in any logical way how we knew these were our kids the minute they walked in the door. After two weekend visits, my husband called the social worker and said we had had enough back and forth-we needed them and they needed us and we wanted to take them permanently. And so they came to stay on a Friday afternoon. On Saturday we went to buy clothes and school supplies. It was raining, just a light drizzle, and we were all very quiet. We were all stunned, I think, by the momentous thing that was happening. I had stuck a tape in the car stereo. It was called “Hand in Hand” and was a selection of songs about parenthood. Mark Cohn’s “The Things We’ve Handed Down” came on and I started crying.

“Will you laugh just like your mother
Will you sigh like your old man
Will some things skip a generation
Like I've heard they often can
Are you a poet or a dancer
A devil or a clown
Or a strange new combination of
The things we've handed down...”

                I thought about how long and how hard we had prayed for God to give us children, and there they were. We knew very little about them then; we only knew they were ours. Over time we began to see exactly how perfectly God had designed our family. Not only did they look like us (except for their striking blue eyes which I say they got from my father), they were like us. Their quirky sense of humor, their love for animals, their appreciation of music and art and literature, their out-of-the-box way of thinking. They had had to take the long way around, but they were finally home.

                My husband stepped into the father role as easily as though he had been doing it for years. I was less confident about my abilities as a mother and was especially nervous about balancing motherhood and work. I had a few guilt moments and meltdowns, but really, I need not have worried. Our kids had no desire for a helicopter mom; they wanted to learn the skills that would make them independent, even at the ages of eleven, eight, and five. They began helping with chores right away, with great enthusiasm (which has, I might add, waned over the years, but they still do what they are asked to do.) They each took responsibility for and bonded with a pet, and we added to our menagerie over the ensuing months and years. As the children matured, they became some of the most fun people to hang out with. We had a blast. We still do.

                We also have tough times and we are not model parents by any means. There are a lot of arguments because we all think we must have the last word or die trying. But we enjoy each other’s company and we talk about many things. Now that Ally is thirteen, she can watch most of the movies the rest of us watch and we can all read the same books and discuss them. My husband never misses an opportunity to teach something, but he does it in the most natural way. I, too, am always seizing those teachable moments, but somehow it seems more annoying when I do it. Still ,when filling out a survey in Bible class, my older daughter Raina listed me as her “life coach”, so something must be working. All three children have given testimony at various times regarding how God worked in their lives to put them in just the right family, and about how good it feels to know they were chosen.

                My husband has assured me many times that he is very fulfilled. I had a moment right before my hysterectomy six years ago , and he leaned down and whispered,  “I have everything I could want. Everything. I am very blessed.” The moment passed. He is an awesome husband and father. Our family is exactly the way God wanted it to be. It is as if we have had our children always. A lot of people don’t even know they are adopted until it comes up in conversation. Invariably, the response is, “Wow, they look just like you! I never would have known!” Perhaps God redesigned their DNA; I don’t know. But by His grace, we have handed things down after all.

“And these things that we have given you
They are not so easily found
But you can thank us later
For the things we've handed down.”

Angel By Your Side

“I’ll be the angel by your side
I will get you through the night
I’ll be the strength you can’t provide on your own
‘Cause when you’re down and out of time
And you think you’ve lost the fight
Let me be the angel
The angel by your side...”

                It’s been an interesting week. Interesting...and sad. We suffered a loss in our horse “family” on Friday, when Legend’s pasturemate Gallant fell ill with sand colic. He declined so quickly that the vet was unable to save him.  The death of this beautiful, gentle black gelding has affected all of us. He was not actually our horse, but we have watched our friend Kara grieve the loss deeply. Besides, we had grown to love him, too. The kids affectionately called him “Emo Horse” because of one large strand of mane that was always in his eyes. When we would arrive at the pasture, Gallant was always standing by the fence, a small distance from the other horses, just watching. Silently protective, he was the leader of the herd. Now he is gone, and there is a hole in Kara’s life.

                In my son’s college biology class, life forms are reduced to atoms and molecules and strands of DNA. Breaking it all down like this shows both the simplicity and complexity of life. But DNA cannot account for so many things that are present within human beings, or even within animals. What causes a horse to be able to know and bond with its owner? How can a horse or dog know when we are feeling sad and lonely? How do they know do give comfort to a friend in need? All of the scientific studies in the world cannot truly explain the connection that human beings have to their pets-or, indeed, to one another. If Darwin’s theory were followed to its logical conclusion, life forms at their peak of evolutionary perfection would be similar to the monster in Alien- living machines that kill and destroy with no thought, no reason, just an instinct to survive. Yet we are not that way, nor we were ever intended to be.

                We were not designed to deal with death. In the beginning, everything was perfect, and human beings and animals were all meant to live forever. Then sin entered the world, and...well, you know the rest of the story. With sin came death and disease and sorrow. The biggest flaw in the evolutionary theory for the Christian is that, in order for evolution to be achieved, millions of organisms would have to die. Even if you believe in the long-day theory or the gap theory, death would still have had to happen before the Fall. Thus, it makes no sense. But there is, for me, another flaw. We are made up of beautiful things far too complicated to be accidental. Scientific theory doesn’t truly explain acts of heroism, self-sacrifice, and love. It does not really explain human emotion. I mean, after all, a pet dog or cat or horse is an awful lot of trouble. Why would we be bothered with such trivialities in the absence of Something greater? Why would we keep animals around us that don’t do one thing but provide companionship and aren’t going to be a food source? The answer is that our need for companionship was put into us by the Creator, and He created animals like the dog and the horse to answer some of that need.

                In my lifetime I have owned many pets of all kinds. Kara has described her Gallant as a friend and companion, something far more to her than “just a horse”. Whether he was acutely aware of her feelings or whether she simply projected this onto him is truly irrelevant. The point is that God put him there in her life to be an angel of sorts. An angel by her side. I have had quite a few of those. When I was young, my dog Misty was the angel by my side. I could talk to her and she would listen when no one else would. What I realize now is that my “conversations” with my dog at the age of seven or eight were often heart cries to God. As I grew older I never stopped talking to my animals, and my experiences with God’s Creation were a way of relating to Him. I had a beagle, Sam, who I know was a gift from above. In the absence of my father, Sam helped fill a void. Oh, he didn’t fill it completely. No one and nothing ever could. But he certainly helped.

                I cannot explain the love I have for my children. The scientific theory of natural instinct is blown out of the water in my case, because I did not give birth to them and they were far past the stage of being tiny and helpless when they came into my life. And certainly the love that continues to exist between couples well past the time for procreation defies anything “scientific”.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made, with atoms and molecules, amino acids and RNA, perfectly designed, in a sense-but none of us are perfect. Yet we love one another in spite of imperfections. That is the God part of us. That spark of the Divine enables us to think, dream, communicate, and love. God loves us unconditionally, and in Him we can love one another in the same way. In fact, we can even love a goldfish. I was once very attached to a goldfish named Pisky. I had had her for almost two years when Hurricane Ivan came and knocked our power out for eight days. I tried desperately to keep Pisky alive, but she died on the fifth day, and I cried. Why? It was only a fish. But I felt Something. There is absolutely no scientific explanation for loving a goldfish. She certainly was not capable of loving me. I was simply The Giant Hand that fed her every day and The Giant Eyeballs that watched her swim around in her tank. As far as I know, she felt no affection for me. It occurs to me that maybe we treat God the same way at times. He is the Giant Hand that doles out pleasure and pain, the Giant Eye that’s always watching, waiting for us to mess up. That’s what we think, sometimes, but it’s not true.

                If God didn’t love us, He wouldn’t be bothered in any way with us. I think those who resort to deism or atheism often do it because they are afraid. First of all, they don’t believe it can be that simple. Secondly, if they really understand that God’s grace is extended despite our wickedness, then it puts them in an awkward situation. You see, if God’s grace is unearned, if we don’t have to work for it, then we have a dilemma when something bad happens. We have to accept it despite our questions and our anger and our sorrow, because we never had anything to bargain with. God gives us everything, and we must then, like Job, learn that He is not required to explain anything to us-because He is God. Of course we get mad at Him and we do question and scream at the unfairness of it all, but fortunately He is big enough to take it. Were I saying this from a position of someone whose life had been relatively without suffering, maybe I could be dismissed with, “Yeah, easy for YOU to say.” Actually, it is not easy for me to say at all. It took a long time for me to get here, and I often go back, because I am human and I don’t like to lose people I love, or have financial problems, or be betrayed by those I trusted, or have physical sickness and pain. I don’t have to like it. I just have to trust that I am too small and limited to see The Big Picture, but that God is in control.

                There was never a promise, ever, that the Christian life would be easy and trouble-free. What the Bible says is, “In this world you WILL have trouble-but take heart; I have overcome the world.”  When Kara said to me, “I hate death,” I could only echo the sentiment. I could not disagree with her. Most of us hate death. We don’t understand it and we don’t want to deal with it when it comes. God is good, and so when bad things happen, He is there to hold us. He sends angels to be by our side, and some of my angels wear fur. I dread the day when I will have to face the loss of Miney, who I am convinced is God’s emissary in the form of a small brown dog. I have said harder goodbyes than that, but each loss brings to mind all of the other losses. For Kara, Gallant was connected with seven years of memories, and so his death represents much more than simply a pet horse. I pray that God will send another angel to be by her side. I feel certain He will. He always, always does.

“There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of one small candle.”

As it Seems

 Well in this life you must find something to live for
Cause when the darkness comes a callin'
You'll go back to where you were before
Cause this life is as
Fragile as a dream, and
Nothing's ever really
As it seems...

                I have a lot to muse on of late.  My son’s graduation. Getting lost and getting found again. Sunflowers. Elderberry jam .The Biblical hero Samson. Growing up and growing old and dying. Figuring out who we are and why we are here and what is really important in life. Realizing that nothing is really ever as it seems, but also knowing that the important stuff lies beneath the surface. Only ten percent of an iceberg is visible above the water; ninety percent is beneath, where no one can see. That ninety percent cost 1500 lives on the Titanic. And it wasn’t because of one long gash in her side; it was because of a series of small gashes. Greek and Shakespearean tragedies are made up of men with single tragic flaws, but in reality we all have many small ones, some more obvious than others.

                I watch the show Toddlers and Tiaras. Yes, I admit it. I am morbidly fascinated by the entire concept. The fact that it is shown without any commentary so that one can draw his own conclusions notwithstanding, the editing is cleverly contrived to show people at their worst. Take, for example, the mom who said, “I live vicariously through my four-year-old daughter.” Gotta give her credit for her honesty. Some episodes make me smile, some make me cringe, and I have cried over several. I have felt outrage and horror, but mainly what I feel is pity. The irony of this “reality” show is that these people live in a world that is utterly unreal. It is plastic, it is counterfeit, it is as shallow as it gets. How sad. These mothers truly don’t realize what they are doing to their daughters. They make their lives all about appearances and about winning. They are not concerned, by and large, with character, although there are a few exceptions. They dress their cute little girls in skimpy clothing and paint their faces with makeup. And, let’s face it-how many really gorgeous children grow up to be stunning adults? Not many. Most people just look ordinary. What will happen to these girls when they hit their teens?  I shudder to think of it.

                The Biblical hero Samson was strong and brave. He was also lustful. He wanted to marry a Philistine girl because of her looks. He allowed his flesh to rule him continually, despite the vows he had made to God. In the end, it brought about his destruction. When we abandon good character in favor of what appears wonderful, we often end up in a place we didn’t really want to go. It was true in the Garden of Eden and it is true now. So many times the things we go after turn out to be meaningless, and the enemy is a master of that kind of deception. We put our trust in the things of this world-looks, popularity, money, gadgets. We think if we can just have that one Thing, we will be happy. In reality, there is Something that is eternal and abiding, but we miss it in pursuit of the stuff that is fragile as a dream. The stuff of earth. We worship it instead of its Creator, Who made everything good. Who makes everything beautiful in His time. I am reminded of The Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”  Those little “divas” on Toddlers and Tiaras have not been taught that “pretty is as pretty does”. I am not impressed by anyone who is merely a pretty face-child or adult. The most beautiful people, to me, are the ones whose goodness of heart is apparent in their eyes. The ones with a light.

                Elderberry jam is a delicious thing. I just ate some for the first time on Friday evening. However, from what I have read about elderberries, they just don’t taste that good on their own, with no sugar added. They are bitter. People are pretty much the same way. Left to their own devices, we do not tend to always do what is right or kind. Were we to act on instinct alone, we quite possibly could have a society resembling the island in Lord of the Flies. That’s why we need law and order. It’s also why God has put into us a basic sense of decency that hopefully overrules our baser impulses, but until our spirits are regenerated it cannot come to full fruition. Children must be taught to be selfless and obedient, despite what some people may say. Yes, we are all born with a basic personality, and some people may be naturally more compliant, more gentle, more kind than others, but those qualities still must be nurtured and encouraged. We are all born with a sin nature, even though very young children cannot sin on a conscious level. All one has to do is watch Toddlers and Tiaras, or the dreadful Supernanny, to see what happens to children who always get their own way and are never corrected or disciplined.

                My daughter’s horse, Legend, is scheduled to be gelded this week. Hopefully, it will make him easier to control. He is a sweet-natured creature but he is also a victim, right now, of his own hormones. Some days he willingly takes the bit; some days he runs away. He doesn’t want to be made to do anything that wasn’t his own idea. Neither do we, really. We become frustrated when things don’t go exactly as planned. On our way home from the beach the other day, after stopping at Sweet Home Farm to buy jam and cheese, we made a wrong turn and ended up taking the “scenic route” home. It was annoying, but then we passed an amazing field of sunflowers which we wouldn’t otherwise have seen. And, as our kids pointed out, maybe we would have gotten into a wreck if we had gone the usual way. Perhaps so. Only God knows. We must trust that His way is best. We cannot always look at things as they appear on the surface; there is nearly always Something that is deeper, bigger, and greater.

                So, what do we live for? How do we fight off the darkness that comes with disappointment, disaster, loss, failure, and death?  We just have to understand that, if nothing is as it seems, then God must be working even in situations that appear awful. If what we think of as “good”, like physical attractiveness, is really not all that important, then quite possibly our answers lie in the things that are small, or unexpected, or unlovely. God makes all kinds of people into heroes. He uses small and weak things, unforeseen events, and tragedies to mold and shape us into who we are supposed to be. Taking the road less traveled enables us to see so much more than if we simply try to remain status quo. If you open up an ugly brown geode that resembles a mudball, you will find on the inside a glittering treasure. Nothing is as it seems.

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”