Why I like Fridays {thoughts on margin}

Fridays are our catch-all day. We use them for finishing up schoolwork, chores, 

piano, P.E. activities, parks, and picnics.

The laundry gets done and the bunny hutch gets cleaned.

And we have time.

Fridays are the built-in margin of our week.

As I learn better how to manage school and kids and classes and home and friends and church and my marriage and myself, I'm learning that I really need more white space than I would think. I have to consciously build-in the margin in order to leave time for rest and focus and peace

and light saber fights.

Tupperware Organization {with full disclosure}

Um. I have to admit something to you. 

I have a discipline problem. 

I'm great with intentions and planning and envisioning the perfect _______ . 

(Just fill in the blank.) 

But I'm not very good with follow-through. If it's a short term, projecty, 

boom-and-then-it's-over kind of a thing then I really shine. But the laundry . . .

Coming to this realization has been really helpful. 

Any new attempts to get my life in order are made with more realistic expectations, hoping for modest gains, and once I find a system I can maintain I feel a real sense of achievement.

Enter my tupperware problem. Does this look familiar to you? 

It occurred to me a year and a half ago that the frustrating experience of never being able to find a matching lid and barely being able to close the tupperware drawer could maybe (maybe?) be remedied.

So I took everything out, stacked like shapes, and threw away any lids with out bottoms and vice versa.  I came up with the brilliant plan (via google) to keep lids in a separate container and I found an old plastic crate in the garage to corral the bottoms.

Then I waited to see if I would follow through and keep up the system. 

A week passed. A month. A year. 

And so, it is with great pride that I present to you my tupperware drawer a year and a half later ~

 

Ta da! I have a new and improved green crate and (you may notice) 

my super-organization has resulted in some color-coordinated decorating pride.

{Full disclosure: This is what the other counter looked like when I took this picture.}

And, my little helper . . .

Three cheers for self-awareness, low expectations, and little victories!

Glorious Backyard Adventure

 Sorry, Mom . . .

Can't come now . . .

I'm fighting the sun!

Some thoughts on peace {and a little bit of Christmas decor}

The Christmas season is a strange paradox. This time set aside to reflect on and remember 

the silent night, the coming of the Prince of Peace, 

is so full, brimming over with scurrying here and there, performances, purchases, post office visits, 

and any number of (good and lovely) celebrations and gatherings. 

Anyone who has spent time with me lately knows that I've felt too busy. I think I need to learn to choose more narrowly, saying no to some of the good to preserve some more of the peace and rest 

that I would love to know in this season. It's a perennial problem. I was in the same mood last year when I wrote these two posts.

 Much as I want our home to be warm and festive 

I just don't have much to give to the decorating this year. So I kept it simple.

~ Christmas cards taped on a garage sale frame~

~ a (very) short stack of red books ~

~ stockings ~

(Anyone know where I can find a third like these?)

~ nativity ~ 

~and a festooned goose~

~  plus the  Fu Manchu and homemade wreath ~

Now the big events are over, the shopping is (almost) done, 

the Christmas forecast is warm and sunny and my wonderful parents are joining us for the weekend. 

I'm hoping to take some deep breaths and enjoy the slower pace, and my dear ones, 

and the many reminders of the Savior's birth, who has brought us true peace, 

lasting peace, and by his blood has reconciled us to God.

May you and yours know the everlasting peace of the Savior, 

who is Christ the Lord, this Christmas.

Vocation and the Sacred {a conversation}

Edie at Life in Grace recently wrote about "Where mundane touches sacred," inviting us to appreciate the "sacred work" of the mundane. Such encouraging words for all of us as we go about the daily drudgery of the many things to which we have been called. I emailed her with a question that she very graciously added to the end of her post. I'd like to expand on a bit on my thoughts here.


This is my email: 

Edie,

Your post today was beautiful, well-written, and brought a tear to my eye. And it touched on some things I’ve been mulling over lately. I’ve been thinking about this idea of all things being sacred–of finding the spiritual in the mundane things. I’d love to know what you think, since I think we approach our understanding of Christianity and the church from similar perspectives.

I’m wondering about the conflating of sacred and secular, or of sacred and all of life. I’ve read others writing similar (encouraging!) things. I certainly appreciate and recognize the reality that God works in all of our life–through the mundane and the routine and the little things. But I wonder if that is the same as a thing being sacred? I wonder if our sacramentalizing all of life actually may cause us to care less about, to lose our wonder at the true sacraments ordained by Christ and the special grace of which they are a means. Maybe it is just a matter of semantics and I’m thinking too much about this. Maybe it’s just because I was an English teacher and I get really interested in the words we use and how the usage changes, but maybe the usage does affect the way we think and then finally what we believe.

Just my two cents, for what it’s worth. I love your thought-provoking writing, Edie. No need to respond unless you want to.

Love to you,
Laura
the given life

I agree with so much of what Edie wrote ~
              the significance of the small, everyday things,
                                        that our work, no matter how mundane, is truly vocation ~
                                                                                                                       that is, divine calling! 

In fact, I think that we have lost the meaning of the word vocation, or allowed our understanding of it to shrink to include only special professions, especially those related to ministry, and to exclude those things that are unglamorous, menial, or temporary.

I stand with those who would broaden 

our understanding of vocation, 

elevating our little things 

~ like laundry and diapers, paperwork and planting ~ 

giving them standing as worthy work, 

part of our divine calling as humans 

made in the image of God. 

T. David Gordon writes, "Human life is never 'on hold'; it does not begin when we find 'the right job' or the ideal job. It begins when we imitate God; and if we labor productively in his created order . . . , we are doing what we were created to do."

We can find deep fulfillment and satisfaction in knowing that God worked for six days

creating the material world, the ordinary things and the small things, 

and he proclaimed that it was "good." 

By working in this ordinary, physical, world

(cleaning, feeding, tucking little ones into bed)

we are participating in God-ordained tasks; 

this everyday work "is essential to our very nature and dignity as human beings." 

We can find significance in the small things, 

and "in whatever [we] do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, 

knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. 

You are serving the Lord Christ"

(Col. 3:23-24).

By recovering a large and full understanding of vocation, we can avoid losing the special meanings held by the words "sacred" and "sacrament." The Westminster and Heidelberg catechisms both ask the questions "What is a sacrament?" and "How many sacraments has Christ instituted in the New Covenant?" And they answer, in my summarized paraphrase, that a sacrament is a holy, visible, sign and seal, which mediates grace to the believer by more fully declaring and sealing to us the promise of the gospel. And that there are only two sacraments, namely baptism and the Lord's supper.

I want to enter into my menial workaday life 

with passion and meaning. 

But I also want to regard the means of grace that Christ instituted 

as holy and unique. 

I think I can do both. 

But the words I choose matter, they designate categories. 

All things do not need to be set apart in order to be significant. 

If all things are set apart, then nothing is set apart. 

But God, by the act of creation and by creating us in his image 

has made all things good, and made our lawful work noble and dignified. 

So, we can find deep satisfaction in our menial tasks, 

while also reserving the words "holy" and "sacred" for those things 

that God himself has designated as such.

 

(I have borrowed heavily in my thinking from T. David Gordon's article "Vocation: Work Quietly with Your Hands," published in Modern Reformation, Vol. 20 and from the Westminster and Heidelberg Catechisms.)

Dropping By

I live in a place where walking over and dropping by are possible. Part of me wants all my loved ones in this place, where the ease of connection is natural and personal, where our friendship is mediated by sidewalks and fences. It's a gift that some of those loved ones do or have lived in this circumference reachable to me through physical and human means.

I have a neighbor who (for a season, when we were both home and getting very little ones through the day) would drop by. She just wandered over and I welcomed her in, or we sat on the stoop, and she saw my unswept floor and my piles of laundry. And I wandered over, in the long days, past her house and she welcomed me in and served me coffee, and neither of us had the time  or concern in those moments of contact to worry for more than a moment about tidying up or hostessing well.

I have another friend who lived nearby for a while and I loved how she found me at times, still in my pajamas, late in the morning, but happy to see her. And she would make the kids an impromptu picnic and we would chat.

It's not at all that I want constant involvement, or a full house (I like an empty house a lot of the time, introvert that I am). But when I am looking at you, when we are both present, there's a grace that flows more freely, there's a different kind of knowing, and being a part, and accepting.

If you know me well at all, you know that I don't carry a cell phone and I don't text and I'm not much for talking on the phone. Honestly, all those ways of developing and maintaining friendship make me a little anxious. But I'd love to wander over and see if you're home. Notice if you are busy, and if you are, just say hello and keep on going. And if you're not, maybe stay a while and catch up and laugh at the kids or the dog or just the mess.

I'm not really ready for it. There are dirty dishes here and there and I haven't dried my hair yet, but if you didn't mind a lot of imperfection, and you were wandering past, or wanting some human contact, or just getting through the day, wouldn't it be great if you could just walk over and drop by?

The Old Ennui

I've been on a bit of a binge lately. A reading, thinking, longing kind of a binge. Sometimes things coalesce in just the right (or wrong) way to bring about the old ennui. Or, The Old Ennui, I should say. A familiar sort of friend. Do you know about ennui? You must.

It's a French word. The French are perhaps more inclined than we are to dwell long enough on a particular vague experience or feeling to call it out of the shadows and give it shape. Years ago, in reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening, I came upon the word and something previously felt but unnamed became clearer. The naming helps I think.

But as she sat there amid her guests she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. It was something which announced itself, a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed. There came over her that acute longing...

(p. 232)

Perhaps Chopin overstates the experience with some hyperbolic drama. Her allusion to the pounding, pulsing, emotional cacophony that is Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" might tip the balance that way. But still,

The Old Ennui arrives, unasked, perhaps overwhelming, but at the very least insistently tugging at the edges of the day, in the quiet moments or in the ones that are so busy and loud and full that you turn inside for just a moment of respite and there you find it, the intangible, unarticulated longing brought on, no doubt, by some half conscious reverie.

For me, this time, brought on by reading an analysis of neuroscience and culture (Nicholas Carr's The Shallows) alongside quiet stories of lost simplicity, unspoken commitments, and joyful work (Wendel Berry's That Distant Land). Add to that a long solitary airplane flight with time to be still, a daily infusion of laundry and dishes, and a disposition bent toward . . . well, toward ennui. Deadly, I tell you.

It's a struggle, with a kind of sweetness. To pull oneself up out of the romantic vision and see, engage, and enjoy or endure the real moments. To know that the longing yearns toward what cannot be attained, and that it can lead one onward always into discontentment and worse. However, to recognize also that it speaks of something better, the way things ought to be. C. S. Lewis knew this pull mingled with promise and called it "joy." And he found, finally, that it hearkens toward heaven. In the sharpest moments of ennui, in the caverns wherein discords wail, it is good to have these names, and to have this hope held out.

Neighborhood Ride {a guest post by Melissa}

My dear friend, Melissa, inspires me to slow down my pace and appreciate the beautiful moments and places in our lives. She recently documented one of her favorite neighborhood bike rides. Enjoy . . .

This is my neighborhood bike. She’s only been mine for a few months. She has a longer history than I will ever know.

My grandmother passed her along to me this summer.  At 86, Grandma hasn’t been riding for at least a few years. Grandpa had built the bike for her in the early 70s, to be her neighborhood bike. He found the abandoned Gitane mixte frame in an alley in Isla Vista, the neighborhood my newly married hippie parents were living in at the time.

Grandpa, by the way, though also 86, continues to cycle, averaging around seventy-five miles a week. We recently asked him to calculate his lifetime mileage. (He always logs his miles but had never added them up.) 90,617: that's how many miles my grandfather has cycled since 1976. Yep, that's nearly four times around the earth's circumference.

This is my home, my starting point for today’s neighborhood ride. It was built in 1906. I’ve only lived here for 6 of its 105 years of existence. I feel toward my home and my neighborhood like I do toward my bike: nostalgic for memories that are longer than mine and hardly my own.

Two things I’ve added to my home’s rich history are my vegetable garden and my bees that help pollinate it. I’ve had some luck with my zucchini plants this summer, so this morning’s harvest just begged me to make more zucchini bread than I could possibly eat. I have three loaves of bread to deliver to my neighbors: hence today’s neighborhood ride.

First stop: Laura’s house. She’s one of my oldest friends, and we’re pretty much committed to living within walking distance from one another.  That way we can either grow old together gracefully or intervene when one or the other goes nuts. Her kiddos, just-turned-seven Elizabeth and almost-five Jack, want to ride around the block with me. Sounds like fun and I’m in no hurry.

I make sure to ride past the duplex that my dear friends used to rent. The house is still empty. I wonder who will live there next, but I doubt they’ll be as great as Rebecca and Gavin (who, for the record, restored vintage Raleigh three-speeds as their neighborhood bikes).

Next leg: up the hill to Katie’s, the only bit of work required on this ride. I remember when I thought riding up this hill was climbing. Now the incline just adds a bit of variety. Katie and her family are super healthy eaters but I made the zucchini bread with whole wheat flour this time to make up for its generous amount of chocolate chips. 

Next stop is my niece Madeline’s house (oh, and my sister & brother-in-law’s, too).  My mom lives in an apartment just behind their house. Whenever I bring them zucchini bread, I have to let her know right away, so that she makes sure to snag a piece before it disappears. 

Sometimes my sister Steph and I go on neighborhood rides together, with Madeline in the toddler seat on her bike. On a recent ride, Madeline noticed how my hands were placed atop my handlebars and said, “Your hands look like bird wings, Lala.” Such a poetic imagination.

I love to think that Steph and I rode together just like this around our old neighborhood twenty-some years ago.

Last stop today is the local market for a six-pack of Fat Tire.

My next door neighbor, Alli, might just want to sit on the porch this evening and enjoy some beer and zucchini bread. I kept a loaf at home just in case!

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