mothers

The Twelfth Letter: Disposable Things & What Is Normal

/ Elizabeth

photo-11

Dear Daughters,

We use cloth napkins at our house.

Not fancy ones, but cloth napkins none the less. Some of them are actually cheap IKEA dish towels. We’ve probably got thirty or so, having acquired them in sets of two, four, or six at a time over many Christmases.

We use these cloth napkins when we have people over for potlucks and I know things will get messy; we use them when it’s just the three of us over a lunch of leftover pimento cheese and slices of mandarin orange, and oatmeal for the baby. We use these napkins to wipe off your sticky fingers or your face, to wipe up drips of yogurt from the floor. It’s easy to toss them into the perpetually half-full laundry basket that lives beside the washing machine. These napkins are stained with spaghetti sauce and yellow mustard, and one is fraying from a hole eaten away by Clorox bleach.

A few weekends ago, your dad and I went out of town and one of your sets of grandparents came to stay for a few nights. Because I didn’t want them to have to worry about doing laundry while they were here—and we normally do a lot of laundry—I got out the paper napkins. Normal, regular napkins seen in dining rooms all across America.

As I set the table for dinner the first evening, placing the napkins on the table, the toddler looked at me and said, “What’s that, Mommy?”

“What’s what, Bean?”

“That.” You pointed to the napkins. The paper napkins.

And then I had to convince you that this little flimsy piece of tough tissue was the same thing as the heavy duty cotton that usually camps out on the table.

I must admit that I felt little bit proud of the fact that my almost-three-year-old child didn’t recognize a paper napkin as being a napkin.

I like that, for you, the default napkin is a cloth one. It’s normal. It’s ordinary. It isn’t anything special.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want “normal” to be for you, what your default will be. I don’t want, for example, having people over for dinner to be an exceptional thing. I want it to be normal, maybe even expected.

I want it to be normal that we sit at the dinner table all together to eat dinner most nights, normal that we sometimes have people stay with us, guests in the guest room for the weekend, or a friend in transition for a few months.

I want it to be normal that some things go in the recycling bin, that Bible stories are part of the bedtime routine, that drawing and coloring and painting and playing with PlayDoh are just as entertaining as kid-friendly TV, that being outside on the swingset is the most fun of all.

I want it to be normal that we say I love you and give hugs and kisses, pray together out loud before meals and over booboos, and even sing the Doxology; normal that your dad and I talk about our days, tease and laugh and sing and dance, that we read so much, and listen to the radio in the car, instead of annoying children’s music to keep you assuaged.

I want it to be normal that if you disobey, you get in trouble. I want it to be normal that after you apologize, we make amends.

But you know what? All of these things take work. Even the ones that seem easy. They’re not. They take time and attention and consistency and, quite honestly, they wear me out.

A lot of the time.

Especially the discipline part.

But somehow I know that being deliberate is worth it, not taking the easy way out simply because it’s easy is worth it, making normal normal is worth it.

That’s what I wanted to tell you this week.

Even in your mundane life routines, girls, choose the harder option that’s better for the long run. It’s much too easy to fall into mindless habits, especially when you’re busy.

Remember how we use cloth napkins? We also normally wash dishes for big group gatherings—even potluck-sized gatherings. We use real plates and real silverware and real glasses and coffee mugs. And we don’t have a dishwasher.

But when I was buying groceries for your birthday party last weekend, I grabbed two packs of paper plates and a large pack of white paper napkins. Just in case we needed them, I thought. I set the plates out for the party and then left them out the rest of the weekend, since we had a house full of company to celebrate with us. Having paper products throughout the weekend made life a million times easier, it seemed, and even so, your grandmother washed dishes quite a few times to help out!

Still, here’s my point. Over the next two days of leftovers and takeout barbecue, all the plates got used. Both packs. And the paper napkins sitting on the table? Well, I restocked them twice, and then for the last few days, we’ve continued using them, even though the company is gone and it’s back to just the four of us at home. Because the napkins are on the table. That’s the only reason. Easy to grab.

I’ve been using them instead of the cloth napkins to wipe up the mushed banana, to catch the sweat from my glass, to wipe the marker off of your little whiteboard.

When you spilled water on the table yesterday and I grabbed the paper napkins to soak it up, I realized that even for me, with my love of cloth napkins and real dishes, and a closet of rags to be used for these exact purposes: It’s just too easy to grab the disposable thing, when the disposable thing is right there.

It’s harder to wash the dishes by hand than toss out the paper plates.

It’s harder to make the pizza instead of order the pizza. (Maybe not harder, actually, if children aren’t hanging off your pant legs. I wouldn’t know.)

It’s harder to invite people in to a usually messy home than meet at a restaurant, hardest yet to invite them in and treat it as normal, a non-special event.

It’s harder to provide creative activities for you, read books to you, cuddle with you and tickle you and play the ridiculously boring, run-in-circles, “Ploops and Pleeps” game you made up, than to just pull up Amazon and turn on an episode of Diego.

It’s harder to enforce discipline, to apologize, to forgive.

It’s so easy to do… the easy thing. The disposable thing. The fast, multi-tasking thing. The least amount of sacrifice thing. The squeeze the most out of every day thing.

But I hope that’s not your default, girls. Go for hard instead. Invite the friends for dinner.

Use the cloth napkins.

Love,

Your Momma

The Eleventh Letter: Unbelievable Things

/ Elizabeth

phonto

Dear Daughters,

I remember praying for my grandmother to be healed from cancer and really, truly believing she would be. Believing it. Knowing it.

I was away at a summer leadership camp the summer before my senior year of high school when I got a phone message to call home. I remember my stepdad crying on the phone when he answered and told me she was gone.

I don’t know when I stopped praying for unbelievable things.

As a teenager, someone once was praying “over” me–that is the lingo I would have used a lot back then–and he touched my hands and told me that my hands would be used to heal people some day.

He really said that. My hands.

I hear people pray a lot. We’ve got prayer lists in the bulletin, prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. So many meetings and occasions when we gather and “open in prayer.” It is such a normal thing.

I pray a lot.

We are already teaching you to pray. Before meals. When we’re sick. When the booboos need healing. For our friends and family.

But rarely do I hear any of us pray for unbelievable, miraculous, specific things, and rarely do I expect them to happen. Most of what I hear when I gather with other Christians are prayers for God’s peace and comfort, that God would be felt within tragic circumstances. We might pray for a medical treatment to work or for wisdom for doctors. Of if we do pray for healing of the physical body, we usually throw in a “if it is God’s will” or “in God’s perfect time.”

I’ve even fallen into the habit of simply praying for God to have mercy on so-and-so, and leaving it at that. God knows, right? God’s got it covered.

But I’ve been wondering recently whether we are afraid to pray for healing–real, miraculous, crazy healing–because we know it might not happen. Because our faith will be judged according to the success of those prayers.

And so we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that in the unanswered prayer, too, God is still working behind the scenes, in unseen ways, knowing the good better than we do.

Okay.

One of my best friends has multiple sclerosis.

I went to a women’s’ conference recently and during the first session, I thought–and I don’t say this lightly–that God was telling me to pray for her to be healed. Healed. Not for her treatments to work to suppress the disease’s progression, but healing. I felt like I was also supposed to tell her that I would pray for her.

I didn’t.

The following morning, a different speaker at the conference shared about having cancer and how she knew God had called her to pray for miraculous healing–to believe the unbelievable, even while seeking treatment. I knew again that God was telling me to pray and believe the unbelievable.

But what is strange is that in the midst of this conviction, I knew that it didn’t matter whether the healing took place–that the efficacy of my prayer was not to be judged on the outcome of the prayer–but that the important thing was for me to believe that healing could happen. God wasn’t saying, If you pray for her, I will heal her. But rather, Why don’t you believe she could be healed?

That was over two months ago.

I have a reminder on my phone that buzzes at noon every day to tell me to pray for her to be healed. You, my toddler bean, even know to pray for her now, and it really does give me the warm tinglies when I hear your little voice ask God for such a big thing. And you don’t even know it is a big thing.

The truth is, I don’t know what it would look like to be healed of multiple sclerosis. No more relapses? No progress in the disease? No more secondary issues of energy levels and depression?

But what does the unbelievable look like in any situation? What is the miraculous?

Of course it seems ridiculous to pray for cancer to just disappear, for broken marriages to be healed. Those are impossible things. And that’s not even touching on the biggies of our broken world, the structural inequalities and injustices that are hurting so many people. It may not seem crazy to pray for them in general ways, but it sure is crazy to believe a miracle that big, that impossible, can happen.

Why bother praying at all, girls, if we aren’t going to pray and believe the unbelievable things?

This is a strange letter for me, because I don’t often get preachy.

I’ve been slowly adding more reminders to my calendar to pray for people I know, people with real hurts and pain and brokenness, so now my phone buzzes or dings at us multiple times a day. Sprinkling it in is the only way I’ve found to add prayer in at all and, at the very least, it pulls me out of the four walls of our home every few hours, out into the world of real, hard struggles, and gives me some perspective.

And, of course, it teaches you to pray, too.

You don’t know what miracles are yet, but I want you to pray for them. I want you to believe in them.

I want it to be normal.

Love,

Your Momma

The Tenth Letter: You Are Not My Whole Life

/ Elizabeth

IMG_2483 Dear Daughters,

Part of me wants to be—someday—one of those older moms in my church who is able to say that being a mom was the most rewarding, amazing, hardest, joyful thing I’ve ever done.

Someone with perspective who can encourage young mothers to cherish the moments when the children are young because the time goes by so quickly, or, more sacramentally, to encourage them to see beauty in the mundane, to remember that we really are being shaped and formed by those repetitive seemingly unimportant loads of laundry and bath times and buckling and unbuckling the carseats ad nauseum, because we will blink and they will be teenagers and teenagers are so hard and babies are so easy and…

And the truth is, I hate hearing those messages. I resent them. As a mom. As a woman of God.

For one thing, I don’t want to cherish these days. I want them to be a season that will come to an end, and I don’t really want to find beauty and peace here. I want to be discontented because I don’t want to forget that I have gifts and a calling to serve the world—and not just your world.

I love you, my girls, but I don’t want you to grow up thinking I exist for you. Because I don’t. I exist for God. I exist because of God.

When I was pregnant the first time around, an acquaintance from church asked me what my biggest worry was as I faced motherhood. I thought about it for awhile and finally said that I was afraid you would swallow up my life, afraid my entire life would revolve around you, and that there would be no “me” left.

This acquaintance responded—presumably trying to encourage me—that being a mom means your life revolves around your kids. That’s what it is, and that’s how it should be.

I’m sorry, girls, but my life doesn’t revolve around you—it revolves around Kingdom work. You are part of that work, you are, sweet ones, but you are not all of that work.

I want you to know that you are loved, girls, but I also want you to know that you are not my whole life.

Maybe every mother feels like this, I don’t know. But what I do know is that when I point-blank told a friend of mine recently—a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile, a fellow mom in the trenches of the everyday chaos that is raising toddlers—that I kind of resent this whole mom thing, that often there is no joy for me here in the nitty-gritty of diapers and laundry and messy houses, do you know what she said?

She said she was thankful I said it out loud.

Actually, I believe she first said, “I can’t believe you said that out loud.” And then she said she was grateful, because we moms feel like we can’t admit these things.

Well, nobody, except those writers who then go on miraculously to find the sacred in this mess of legos and crumbs and naps that never fit the schedule and croup and the double ear infections. I admire that. I read those blogs. And I find them encouraging.

But here’s the thing: I don’t see sacred, girls. Not most days.

Most days, I see survival.

And I want to flee.

The truth is that if I felt about a career the way I feel about being a mom day in and day out, I’d have quit a long time ago. But I’m dealing with human beings here, as beautiful and wonderful and frustrating as you are, and of course I wouldn’t quit. Never.

Still.

Still. At some point every day, I want to flee.

I don’t mean in a metaphorical sense—I’m serious. At some point every day, I don’t want to be a mom anymore. I don’t want to change the seventeenth diaper, kiss the booboo, run for the tissue as snot drips down your chin. But somebody has to do it, and that somebody is me. In this season. This mind-numbing and life-sucking and just-not-fun season.

These are important things to say out loud.

Sure, there is much I will miss about these days of mothering young children. I will miss the hot baby skin against my neck as I rock you to sleep when you’re fighting a fever. I will miss your dimpled butt cheeks in the bathtub. I will miss the imagination of an almost-three-year-old transforming our couches into rocketships or boats or airplanes, the Frankenstein-stride of an almost-one-year-old learning to walk.

But, truth be told, I will not miss how it feels to live through these mind-numbing days. And I will not miss having company in the bathroom.

Love,

Your Momma

The Ninth Letter: Seasons of Grump & Maundy Thursday Do-Overs

/ Elizabeth

photo 1Dear Daughters,

It’s Maundy Thursday, and the truth is, I haven’t felt very Lenten.

It hasn’t felt like Holy Week this week since, on Sunday, I stayed home with a double-ear-infected child and missed the palm-branch waving. I’m kind of grumpy about that. I’ve been kind of grumpy that it’s spring break for the public schools this week and so nobody else seems to care it’s Holy Week either. I’ve been kind of grumpy about the fact that all of us are sick for the seventeenth time this year, and I’m a little tired of following children around the house with tissues while hardly being able to breathe myself without coughing up a lung.

So there’s that. Lots of grump.

And then this morning it was warm, so I said we could go outside and play for a little bit. The toddler ran out onto the deck in socks because the neighbors were already outside getting into their van (and she’s an unashamedly nosy creature, which she gets from her mother), and then before I even had time to pour myself a cup of tea, she hollered that it had started raining and scurried her little feet back inside.

Sigh.

Some seasons are just grumpy seasons. Days, weeks, months, years. Call it Lent if you want. Or call it life. I call it motherhood. That’s how it feels to me.

And then it rains and you feel even grumpier until you hear those drops on the back deck and the windows on the north side of the house and you remember something. Something you’d forgotten. You like rain. You do.

I do, at least.

I’d almost forgotten because it has been awhile since I’ve been able to enjoy it.

In that hazy, previous life before children, I would open the windows when it rained and squat down by the floor and breathe in that strange beginning-of-downpour scent and open up the laptop or the journal or get out the scrap paper and write. I used to run in the rain or walk in the rain or just reach my hand out the door and feel the rain on my bare skin.

With little ones circumnavigating me during all waking hours, however, this just doesn’t happen anymore. Rain means I stay inside and incubate germs. And get grumpy about it. Windows stay closed because the draftiness generates whininess and goose bumps. With little ones, the only rain I hear is the white noise machine imitation of rain.

Three years into this business of motherhood, and I’m pretty tired of the white noise, girls. Pretty darn tired of it.

But: rain.

Rain has always Inspired me. Capital-I Inspiration. There’s something alive and refreshing and starting-the-day-or-week-or-month-or-season-over that happens when it rains.

And I need those do-overs.

I need to be reminded, as I remind you when you grump about the weather, that God created the world to work this way. Rain nourishes the ground so the lettuce seeds in the garden can germinate. Rain nourishes. Seeds germinate.

We get a do-over.

Lent’s nearly over and, I’ll be honest, it’s unlikely that the upcoming weekend is going to be very meditative for me. Good Friday. Holy Saturday. Easter morning. They’ll come, I’ll go through the motions, tissues and cough drops in hand, maybe get around to filling that antibiotic prescription, and then they’ll be over. I’ll probably be a little grumpy. Or a lot grumpy. But, girls, that’s okay. That’s the way it is sometimes.

Because today, today, I did open the windows downstairs for a little while. I did listen.

And when your feet got cold, I put socks on you.

Love,

Your Momma

The Sixth Letter: Everything Is a Letter

/ Elizabeth

photo 4

Dear Daughters,

Maybe it is because I’m a writer, but ever since I’ve been a mom—or at least, ever since I came out of the post-partum haze of will-I-survive-this and why-does-anyone-have-more-than-one-child chaos—I’ve wanted to write everything down. For you.

And by “everything,” I mean everything. Everything about me, about you, about the world, about your grandparents, the important things in life, love, loss, brokenness, joy, good books, beauty, creativity, sacrament.

Everything.

It’s ridiculous. And ambitious. Impossible. Overwhelming.

Not that I don’t write a lot, trying to take a stab at this “everything.” I do. I jot notes, mostly, notes and bullet points and sentences and paragraphs, things that are important that someday I can flesh out a bit more, someday when we aren’t in survival mode, aren’t fighting pink eye, aren’t dealing with diapers and potty training, aren’t picking goldfish out of the carpet.

Those somedays probably won’t come.

I realize this.

But I also realize something else—there is a sense in which everything I write and live and do already is a letter to my daughters.

I have a journal for each of you where I write notes about what you’re doing, how you’re growing, the funny things you say, when your teeth come in and you crawl and walk and faceplant. So those are letters to you. Real letters. You’ll read them some day.

But those poems I write? I think they are letters to you, too. Even the poem about the man in the coffee shop who reminded me of a piano player we knew in Texas, the poem about slicing open an avocado, the chamomile poem that became an epigraph for my friend’s novel—someday you will read these poems and others and yes, I really think so: they are letters.

When I highlight in the Richard Foster book I’m teaching in that Wednesday night class at church, when I jot notes in the margins, these are letters to you, too, aren’t they? They would be, at least, if I were gone and you were looking through my things.

I remember my mom looking through her mom’s Bible after she passed away, and the same for my dad, looking through his dad’s Bible, and they talked about what their parents had underlined, poring over it, wondering about it. Will you read through the verses I’ve underlined? Will they be meaningful to you? Will you wonder about me and my conviction and my pain and my joy?

Or, creases on the binding of my favorite books—will you look at those pages some day?

Splashes of food on the recipes in my cookbooks? A note about adding extra broccoli or one-and-a-half-ing the cake batter to make a layer cake?

The handprint Jesse Tree we made this year that hangs on the back of the basement door?

And what about those things I hang onto? So many things. In closets and drawers and boxes in the basement. Old T-shirts I save that are steeped in memory–races I’ve run, theatre productions of your dad’s, second-hand-thrift-store-thread-bare T-shirts from high school. That collection of old Pyrex bowls, my grandma’s glass bell, our wedding quilt. The index card love notes your dad used to hide in my things when he went out of town.

It matters to me that you’ll “read” these things some day. I think about it and about what you’ll discover and learn and love.

So, daughters, while I’ll keep jotting those ambitious notes about the important things in life, keep hoping that someday, someday I’ll write even more, I’ll also just keep living life.

Because I have this crazy hunch that life, all of it, is itself a letter.

Your Momma

The Fourth Letter: Big Eaters

/ Elizabeth

Daughters,

Today for lunch, the toddler ate a bowl of vegetarian chili, 1/3 of an avocado, a scoop of cottage cheese, and two banana cookies. And that wasn’t an exceptional meal for you.

Then, after the six-month-old woke up and nursed—yes, first you nursed—you still seemed hungry so I heated up the leftover baby oatmeal in the frig and mixed it with unsweetened applesauce. I started with what I considered to be a hearty bowl for you, considering you only began solid foods a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t until after your second bowl that you even turned away from the spoon to hint you may have had enough.

You both like to eat.

When your dad and I lived in Texas, we had dinner at the apartment of some of our friends, and they mentioned in passing that since they invited us to dinner, they knew they had to make a lot extra.

Our reputation for eating had apparently preceded us.

We’re big eaters, ya’ll. Big eaters.

Now, most people wouldn’t know that from looking at us because we’re exceptionally tall and slender. But we come from eating families.

It’s no wonder that the toddler is in the nearly 100th percentile for both height and weight and already has your daddy’s strong and lean figure.

Baby girl, you will catch up soon, I’m certain, though you were two pounds smaller at birth than your big sister. You’ve already outgrown the sizes she wore last Christmas at nearly 8 months old.

I remember meeting a coworker of my mom’s when I was maybe twelve or thirteen—old enough to be a lot taller than my mom, strikingly tall for my age. The friend said—out loud—in reference to me: “Just think of all the extra weight she could carry!” Or some such ridiculous thing to say to a young woman.

But she was right, of course. My being tall has led people to exclaim that I was “all baby” both times I was pregnant, despite my having gained over fifty pounds each time. It’s an optical illusion, I’d say, because there is no polite way to continue that line of conversation.

You will probably be big girls.

I always hated the word “big.”

It’s what everyone said about me, for as long as I can remember. Big and solid. Big.

And we ate a lot.

We do eat a lot.

We’re eaters.

I love this about us.

But I wonder how to raise girls who love to eat who don’t think about food all the time, and calories, and pants sizes, and all the silly baggage of growing up as a woman in our ridiculous culture.

And there is baggage.

I have a husband who loves the extra fleshiness that carrying two babies brings, but I still drag around a couple suitcases worth of baggage when I look in the mirror these days or see pictures of myself. I hate that because I know it’s silly.

And I hate it because every time I catch myself being unhappy, I think about you and how I want you to love your bodies, your strong limbs, long torso, and broad shoulders.

I also hate it because it reminds me of those I know and love who carry heavier bags on this self-image journey.

In the last two years, I have known two beautiful and exceptionally talented women—and I mean head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest-of-their-class kind of talented—who’ve been treated for eating disorders at in-patient facilities. Two in two years.

It breaks my heart as the mother of young girls, because I know for these two who did begin treatment, these I know about, there are probably dozens of others in my community struggling, too, those I don’t know.

I look at the healthy and amazing and inspiring college students I see walking around our local college campus, and I want to ask them if they know they are beautiful.

And by beautiful, I don’t mean skinny or stylish, air-brushed or pearl-adorned.

I mean inspiring and vibrant, intelligent and passionate, articulate and fun, wearing their skinny jeans and Toms shoes and colors and cuts I never thought would come back in style.

And the young women I know who also love to eat? Those who come to our house and eat the meals we serve and ask for seconds? Those who come to our Sunday school class and eat a donut? They make me happiest.

Because here I am, raising you, my beautiful, big girls, to be eaters.

Of course, I’m also raising you to know that you are beautiful and to be confident, with your solid frames and muscular legs, your clear blue eyes, and brown curly hair, and your dimples. I hope you keep the dimples.

“I so tall, Mommy,” the toddler tells me, as you make faces at yourself in the mirror. You love mirrors. Love them.

I know I can’t make you confident, but I can soak you in confidence, even now, sending those roots down deep to nourish you through the difficult years. Those difficult years will certainly come. But now, even now, I tell you how smart and gorgeous and funny and strong you are. How proud I am of you for the little things—the alphabet, the playdough, the painting, the singing for the toddler; the rolling, cooing, grabbing, observing, and jabbering for the chubbalub babe-ster.

And yes, I even tell you how amazed I am at the quantity of food you can pack away. Because it is awesome.

Stand tall, my girls.

Now let’s go eat a snack.

Your Momma

The Third Letter: The Important Things

/ Elizabeth

Dear Daughters,

I really like lists.

Before trips I make lists, we keep a running grocery list, and my journals have always consisted of lists upon lists—gratitude, to-do items, prayer requests, essay and blog and poem ideas. I write them on post-it notes, on the backs of envelopes and scrap paper, in the margins of books, on graph paper I keep on a clipboard. If you look in my purse, books I have only half-read, my striped go-everywhere bag, back pockets of unwashed jeans, under the seat in the car, you’ll probably find some of my lists.

When I was pregnant the first time around, I went on a retreat with one of the women’s groups from our church, and the theme of the weekend was “Of This I Am Certain.” Prior to the retreat, we were encouraged to think about the things that are most important to us and, what’s more, the things we hold deeply and with certainty.

I made a list:

* The red sock will always turn pink if you wash it with your 
    load of bleached whites.
* It is always better to invite someone in, to share food, 
    to listen, to cook from scratch.
* Few things in life are as rewarding as freshly baked bread.
* There will always be enough food at the potluck, so don’t 
   hesitate to invite more into your home.
* Exercise is never a bad idea.
* Checking your e-mail will always take longer than the 
   few minutes left on the oven timer.
* Community is hard work.
* Memorizing Scripture is always a good idea.
* Recording what you are grateful for will make you more grateful.
* Thank-you notes will never go out of style.

That’s it. And that’s the order the items came to me at the time. You’ll find the original list handwritten in the first pregnancy journal.

Maybe you can tell, but my train of thought has always been nonlinear (so less like a train and more like a… traffic jam), and I almost never number my lists—just bullet points, or check marks, or arrows. Actually, lots of arrows. And squiggles. And underlines and asterisks and usually multiple colors of ink, as I’ve gone back and added more items.

I’m really good at the brainstorming stage of the writing process, by the way.

When I was pregnant the second time around, I decided to write a second “Of This I Am Certain” list, without going back and reviewing the first. Only two years had passed, but I was curious what would strike me as worthy of being called “certain.” In that pregnancy journal, you’ll find these goodies:

* Hand-written notes are always a good idea, and 
   making them personal is important—thank yous, 
   condolences, encouragement, love.
* Coffee is good to drink for social reasons, but 
   tea is better.
* An item's value and quality is more clear after it’s been 
   handed down—that new leather couch might be fake leather 
   but you wouldn’t know it until it flakes off.
* Sitting, resting, reflecting, and making lists of 
   gratitude, of prayers, is what mental health is.
* Crying is okay. Never feel bad about it.
* Having friends who are older than you, who have 
   made it through, will get you through.
* Keeping in touch with people is all your responsibility. 
   If your friendships fade, blame yourself and do 
   something about it.
* Always invite someone to eat—there will be enough.
* Making bread for other people is never a bad idea.
* You shouldn’t write things down you don’t want other 
   people to read. Ever.
* You don’t need to clean up for guests, but organizing 
   the clutter might make you feel better, let’s be honest.
* There are always things you can do to help people.
* Public libraries are great resources.

It’s now a year after I wrote this list, three years after the first one. Are these the certain things?

You’ll notice that neither time did I think to put religious belief on these lists.

Why is that, I wonder? It seems strange, considering I am a Sunday school teacher, have been in the pew all my life, even when it was a folding chair at youth group, have been ordained as a deacon. You know. I’ve got the street cred of Christianity.

And I am happy to confess the creeds, which are, of course, lists.

Does an “Of This I Am Certain” list need to include an “I believe” statement? Should it all be “I believe” statements?

Huh.

Maybe the reason I didn’t include religious belief or faith issues here–didn’t even think to include them either time–is that I take the lists of religious belief for granted. That you’ll believe, too. That those are the easy things to believe.

The hard things to believe are the nitty-gritty people-in-your-home kinds of things, the dirt-on-your-floor kinds of things, the being-real-people-in-the-real-world kinds of things.

The being-hands-and-feet-of-Jesus kinds of things.

Which is really why we confess those other lists, right? We do these things because we believe those things.

At least, I hope you will do these things. Because they really are important.

I’m certain.

Your Momma