ordinary time

The Hundred-and-Twenty-Sixth Letter: A Season for Everything

/ Elizabeth

 

Dear Daughters,

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent.

Part of me is ready for the new season, the new liturgical year, the cycle to begin again. In a way, I’ve been ready for months, because, well, 2020.

But somehow, paradoxically, I don’t feel quite ready for Ordinary Time to end. 

Ordinary Time has helped me to feel grounded this year, after such a lenty Lent and the ongoing uncertainty of the world around us. 

As a general rule in a normal year, I love November: that we get to kick it off with remembering and appreciated those who have gone before by honoring All Saints Day, that we get to wrap it up with Christ the King Sunday, remembering the end of The Story and the reason we keep on keeping on. Even better, this year, with Advent sneaking in here on Thanksgiving weekend, the month of November feels extra full and complete.

We also celebrated our family’s fourth Covid-19 birthday this month, which would have seemed unfathomable back in April when we celebrated the first one in quarantine.

And yet here comes Advent.

There is a season for everything.

Sort of.

A week or so ago, yet another friend told me she’d decorated for Christmas, but prefaced her announcement with “I know you don’t approve of this, but….” 

It isn’t true I don’t approve of it, I wanted to tell her. I don’t approve of it as part of our family’s tradition, but I’m fine with other families having different traditions. 

I’m known among our acquaintances as being someone who cares a lot about the liturgical calendar, and apparently our family’s progressive decorating and holding off on Christmas music and glam in favor of Advent-themed projects stands out in people’s minds. Because it comes up all the time, especially when others sheepishly tell me they’ve already decorated.

A lot of people this year–because the year is so overwhelmingly sucky–have decided that they are going to do more Christmas stuff. More decorations. More gung-ho. Earlier. Bigger. Better. More.

That’s not me. That’s not our family. Because we are more of the Everything-Has-A-Season kind of folks.

But today, the day before Advent begins, today you found a dead bird in the yard. Your dad wasn’t home because he was picking up our friends at the hospital, so I found myself lugging a shovel out of the shed and burying the bird’s body.

As I carried the shovel back to the shed, I thought about death and Advent and new life and the Coronavirus. I thought about what Ordinary Time means right now, what Advent means, and whether it’s a beginning or an ending and how it matters to the Kingdom. I thought about the changes to our family over the next few months and what opening our home and offering hospitality will look like. I thought about community and I thought about our friend’s daughter coming home from the hospital today. I thought about our neighbor pregnant with twins, another friend’s tiny foster baby unable to have visitation with her biological parents because of COVID-19, the difficulty of knowing how to love our literal neighbors and see Jesus in the least of these. I thought about your 97-year-old great-great-grandmother. Today I made a handlettered sign for another pregnant friend; yesterday I opened a card from my other grandmother that had been quite literally sealed with a kiss of lipstick. I also opened up a thank-you note from a friend whose father-in-law died of the coronavirus earlier this year.

I thought about all of these things, about life and death and hope and sadness and vocation and how we live all of them all the time.

No matter the season.

Yep, I got all of that from a shovel and a dead bird the day before Advent begins.

But what I mean is this:

There is a season for everything.

And sometimes things get all mushed together.

That’s the Kingdom. That’s life.

Love,

Your Momma

The Hundred-and-Twenty-Fifth Letter: The Message of “Meh”

/ Elizabeth

Dear Daughters,

Recently, a friend asked me how my soul was doing these days. 

She wasn’t asking about my salvation, of course. She was asking how I was doing, but asking it in such a way that it didn’t mean the generic “How are you?” It was like asking, “How are you really?”

“Meh,” with a shrug.

That was my answer.

It was as honest as I could be.

The truth is, I’ve been tired and cranky and hormonal and anxious and overwhelmed and aimless. Each of those things, at some point and time, on most days. (Yeah, yeah, there is some beauty and grace every day, too, but there are plenty of other letters you can read if you want that message. Not today. Today is the message of “meh.”)

But I was thinking about her question the next day as we drove out to the local farm to pick up our weekly CSA produce. I don’t know why it came to mind, but it did, and I realized I felt a little bit guilty about not really having a good answer about my soul doing Great! Awesome! Spectacular!

And then I started thinking about why I felt guilty or embarrassed or whatever it was.

As a Christian, and especially one raised in the evangelical church, I certainly have an ingrained sense of my “spiritual life” and what that should look like. I’ve honestly often wished I had more of a spiritual life, as in more spiritual and identifiable practices and disciplines I could point to as proving a solid spiritual life. 

As if it were a separate thing from the rest of my life. 

Now, don’t get me wrong or misread what I’m saying here. Of course, I do think spiritual disciplines are enriching and important. I see our family’s integration of the liturgical calendar as a communal spiritual discipline and practice to live intentionally. 

But I do think we get a little confused if we think of those spiritual practices as our spiritual life, you know, as something separate from our nonspiritual life.

Are we having an unspiritual day if we don’t start off with reading our Bibles and prayer?

I think not, girls. And what if I forgot to look for God in the mundane today, does that mean God wasn’t in the mundane? Nope.

I just don’t buy it. When I see metaphor in a poem I read, or a movie I watch, or a question you ask me, that is a signpost of grace to me. A reminder of what is always true.

God is present to this moment. Eternally.

I knew someone who used to ask people what God had been teaching them lately. My mind always scrambled when I knew the question was going to be tossed my direction soon. Because I always felt the whole deer-in-the-headlights feeling of OH CRAP, GOD ISN’T TEACHING ME ANYTHING RIGHT NOW.

(For the record, I pretty much never use the word “crap” out loud.)

But guess what? I don’t actually think that’s true.

It is impossible that God isn’t teaching me anything right now.

Because God is always present to me, girls. 

God is always present to you, too. I conclude your nighttime prayer with this every single night: And may you know that you are never alone because God is always with you and God will always love you.

I absolutely believe God is present, even when I’m feeling aimless and anxious and tired and grumpy. “Meh” about sums it up.

But I don’t feel alone. I believe God is right here in this anxiety and exhaustion and grump with me. 

In fact, during one bout of insomnia recently, during the wee hours of the morning, I thought to myself, while tossing and turning, “This is when God gives visions.” I don’t know where that thought came from, but I remembered Jacob wrestling with God in the night, and the time when Jacob saw the angels coming up and down the ladder. In the night. 

And then right there in my own nighttime anxiety, somehow, I fell back asleep, not necessarily confident that God’s visions are for such a time as this, but aware that they might be.

Love,

Your Momma

The Hundred-and-Ninth Letter: Ordinary, Extraordinary Summer (Part 1)

/ Elizabeth

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Dear Daughters,

Today is a perfect day.

It is not too hot, the tree branches are swaying in the breeze, and the dappled shade in the yard is in constant, gentle motion. I’m sitting on a plastic Adirondack chair squarely in the middle of the yard as I write this. The two of you are playing with a neighbor in the yard, going back and forth between treehouse-restaurant-sand-baking and balancing on the slack line your dad set up before he left for work this morning.

This morning, I got up and met a neighbor outside for a run—okay, not a “run” per se, but a series of jog/walk intervals for thirty minutes. We all had breakfast. Your dad left. The Bean worked on your math workbook while I read some Magic Schoolbus books to the Goose that are due back at the library tomorrow.

We got a little lost enroute to a juggler performance in the low-income part of town, and since you’re oblivious to the adult categories of suburbia and poverty and income distribution, you told me how beautiful the neighborhood was we were circling around and meandering through–beautiful, you said, because it was so green (overgrown, I would have said, unmown grass, shaggy bushes, but beautiful in your eyes).

I ended up pulling out my maps app to get us to the right park, and we enjoyed the free “outreach” program provided by our library.

We got home in time to braid hair and lather up sunscreen, then leave again to meet another neighbor family and their double stroller at the corner to walk down to our local elementary school’s summer meals program for chicken patty day. After lunch, we played on the playground, eventually walked back up the enormous hill for quiet reading time at home, and now here we are, living an ordinary summer afternoon.

Ordinary and extraordinary, I think.

It’s been cool enough to have our house windows open all day without the A/C kicking on. I’ve got a fresh-mint-and-oregano seltzer water in a mason jar beside me, my old paint jeans fraying at the knees, a wrist brace for a tendonitis flare-up after a painting project yesterday, and my feet bare, with just a hint of a flip-flop tanline, enjoying the dancing clover.

Did you know that, girls? That clover dances? There’s so much to see when you look for it.

As my laptop battery runs out, we’ve got a plan for homemade stromboli for dinner, which is basically the same as homemade pizza and we just had that three days ago, but whatevs. I need to move my Adirondack chair a few feet back because the shade has shifted and my jeans are getting toasty, though the breeze its still amazing. Your dad has a meeting tonight, and we’ve already picked a readaloud book for the time he’s away. You’ll need showers for sure after all of this outside-sunscreen-sandy time. Later, we’ll stick a star sticker on a handprint canvas to mark the passing day, a just-started-yesterday tradition we’re working to incorporate into this ordinary, extraordinary season. Your dad will close the day out with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which you’re listening to for the first time.

That’s what the day is, girls.

Today.

It’s not profound in its parts, but it is in the whole, mostly because I’m paying attention, I guess.

I don’t always pay attention. I don’t even know if I do most of the time, but sometimes, sometimes I do. Sometimes I notice.

And sometimes I write it down.

Love,

Your Momma

 

The Twenty-Second Letter: Labor Day & Marking Time

/ Elizabeth

phonto

Dear Daughters,

I shared a story in church a few months ago that I hadn’t shared widely prior to that morning. It was kind of a big deal, standing at the pulpit, telling my story.

We’d decided as a church to “mark time” together during the liturgical season of Ordinary Time–that long, uneventful season from Pentecost to Advent–by sharing stories of the ways we individually keep track of time, the significant events in our lives that have shaped the way we see the world. These can be beautiful moments, but usually, if we’re honest, it’s the painful ones that we remember most vividly. The painful ones that keep coming back to us.

After I shared my story, a friend of mine, someone who is also a writer, asked me if I was planning to write the story out to share it more publicly. I said no, probably not, because while I’m pretty comfortable with strangers reading things that I write, I’m aware that much of what I write for public consumption has been tweaked and edited in such a way as to distance myself from the message. Most of what I write isn’t personal, even when it may seem personal.

There is something about being vulnerable I just don’t like. But my friend thinks that it’s important for us as writers to be as vulnerable and honest as we can because that is what offers hope to the world. Hope to the world.

She really thinks that voicing our pain and our trials and our struggles–being honest when life is hard–and saying me, too, is the way we offer hope.

So.

Maybe there is hope here.

This is the story I told our church:

On Labor Day 2013, I was six weeks pregnant and I had a miscarriage.

I called my doctor, and we decided that it was a textbook case and as long as nothing out of the ordinary seemed to happen, I didn’t need to go to the hospital or even make an appointment for his office–which was good, because I didn’t feel like sitting in a doctor’s office, crying my eyes out. I could barely talk to my mom on the phone to relay the news.

This was the week of our revival at our church. I went to every service but I didn’t tell anyone who superficially asked how I was doing.

I had never experienced loss like that before, though many of my friends had. It was a difficult and dark time, to put it in the most generous terms possible, and I decided, within days, that I never wanted to be pregnant again. My eldest daughter, my sweet girl, would be enough. I couldn’t risk this kind of heartbreak again. I wasn’t strong enough. I cried a lot.

A week later, I was dry heaving on runs and throwing up, and so I did go to the doctor. I found out that there were two embryos in my uterus. A nonviable embryo, which had caused the miscarriage symptoms, and an embryo with a heartbeat. It was good news, shocking news, and also nerve-wracking news. There was reasonable concern about this pregnancy, and it was considered high risk.

You might not know this about me, but I am a worrier. And not just a little bit. A lot. So this whole “high risk” business was excruciating. It weighed me down. Every day. I came to terms with every worst case scenario I could think of. And I still worried.

I worried in Advent as I began to share the news that we were pregnant. As friends and family expressed excitement, I worried inside. I couldn’t be excited because I was afraid.

I worried through the season of Christmas when we had our ultrasound and found out the baby would be a girl. Even her on-screen health didn’t reassure me very much.

I kept worrying through Epiphany and then Lent began. Would she come early, like her sister, and be a Lent baby, or during Easter? I wasn’t the only one wondering. My OB didn’t think I’d make it past Palm Sunday.

She arrived April 25, the Friday after Easter.

Our baby girl’s first name means “light.”

Her middle name means “pearl.”

Two of Jesus’s images for the Kingdom—a light in the darkness, the pearl of great price.

All of that—the darkness and light, the worry and the pearl of great price—is wrapped up in Labor Day for me.

Love,

Your Momma