Thanksgiving: Part One

The Holiday Season has been progressing in complexity during my life. The first 14 years were the simplest because we simply shuffled between my dad's family (a special version of laughter and tensity) and my mother's family (the bigger the gathering, the more step-relatives I never knew I had). Complications increased when my parents marriage ended, but after 8 years of that schedule (Christmas Eve in Mansfield with mom, then back to Columbus with Dad for Christmas morning) we had finally adjusted. And then I went and got married and threw in a whole other family on top of it all. This was Dave and I's first year negotiating what, in my family, is already an area of extreme territorialism. Yeah, there were a couple fights.

In the end, my gracious Dave volunteered we spend Thanksgiving with my father's family. For the first time in a few years 3 of the 4 children were going to be at my grandparents' Akron home with most of the grandchildren, so I called my Nana to tell her we were coming and to ask what Dave and I could contribute. "Everybody else is bringing food, but you can bring drinks. Can you afford to bring drinks? Don't bring any pop. You should bring punch. Do you know how to make punch? Here, I can give you the recipe." And - she's off! Not wanting to be greedy, I put my cell phone on speaker so Dave could enjoy the monologue as well. She had just got to the part about which flavor of sherbert ice cream to bring. I grinned at him and laid my head back on the loveseat arm and pretended to listen to her meandering 10-minute instructions for the 4-ingredient recipe.

I hung up the phone to her happy coos about our attendance; the next day I texted my cell-phone-bearing family members asking what they would like me to bring for drinks. I had zero intention of obeying the "no pop" commandment. My inbox filled as I shivered by the bus stop on High Street, awaiting the #2 to rumble up and bear me home after class. My younger brother immediately responded, requesting sparkling grape juice. My father and sister were ambivalently Diet. My Aunt Susan asked me to bring Dr. Pepper for her son Jake, and a couple of bottles of wine "just in case". I laughed sharply through my orange wool scarf. During past holidays my Nana has run off to motels, pouted when her attempts at micro-management have been foiled, and stealthily pulled family members aside for dreaded private interrogations. Wine was an excellent idea.

Dave and I drove the two hours to Akron the next day, bellies leaden with dreaded resignation. The muscles in my shoulders were coiled and aching, a familiar tension. By noon, our car tires were crunching on the white gravel of their driveway; we were the last to arrive. My father's and uncle's cars were pulled against the grey retaining wall between the yard and the drive; the garage door had been pulled up, and the side door into the house was visible. My nerves tripped and tangled while I unbuckled my seat belt, as they always do in that uncertainty before entering the house my father was raised in; past that door there could be, and has been, any number of dramatic scenes. We gathered ourselves and the drinks, and headed toward that old aluminum screen door.

The house was quiet when we walked in (calm before the storm?), the plastic bags rustling around Dave and I's knees as we took off our shoes, our cheeks dry and rosy from the November air. From the kitchen, I scanned the adjacent living room and listened for where people were gathering. The other half of the house is split-level, cream-carpeted stairs leading up to the bedrooms and down to the game room. I heard my brother and cousin Jacob on the lower level as Nana breathlessly descended from the upper level, taking two steps on every stair and tightly grasping the black metal railing. "Hi, darlings!" She always greets people with "darling", the last of her lost Boston accent in the "a". I hugged her; my head was embraced into her shoulder and my nostrils were filled with her powdery scent. Then Dave and I were shuffled over to the closet to get out of our coats; the old Jesus portrait looked down at us from the top of the stairs where he's always been, hues of brown and slightly parted lips. Dave and I had prayed earnestly about the dinner on the drive up. I looked up and repeated my plea as I shoved the corners of a brass hanger into the sleeves of my jacket and headed toward the voices downstairs.

Motivation

Prayer has wrought a mess of good havoc in my life.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how praying had boosted my self-confidence and given me a "holy spunk". One of the essential ingredients to that lesson was the taking away of both a fear of Man and a desire to please Man; they were invaders in place of holy desires to fear and please God.

An unexpected new issue has arisen in the wake:

Apathy. And a resulting lack of motivation.

I couldn't place where it came from at first, mostly because it neatly coincided with the end of Fall Quarter. But as the days passed, the apathy remained in atypical forms. I usually pack my schedule full of hangouts with different people, cramming in coffee with someone at every gap in my day. But for some reason now, even with multiple whole days free from work and school because of the break, I would feel no compulsion to schedule time with even a single person. It was such an uncharacteristic thing that I started asking questions about my motivation.

I then remembered the two taskmasters in my life that I had just demoted: fear of Man, and the desire to please Man. I had taken their whips away. And the immediate consequence was not having False Guilt barking in my ear to get off the couch, you lazy bum.

It wasn't that I no longer cared about people or stopped enjoying time with them. But the wrong motivation had been nipping at my heels so long I had forgotten why I was really running. The apathy frightened me at first; I wanted to crawl back in the shackles of fear and pleasing, just so I could get motivated again. But I knew better than that; I know that those two Man-centered poisons are not sustainable healthy motivation. So I went to the Bible asking -- what IS a healthy motivation?

It wasn't a scholastic scouring of the book, but I saw that our healthiest motivation is:

Love. Love for God and Man because God loved us.

That's it? Love?


I was irritated by such a simplistic answer.


What does that even look like, to be purely (or at least mostly) motivated by love? Sure, I know what it looks like in Christ's life, but what does it look in Average Joe's life? Different passages kept confirming that, at the heart of it and beneath the surface, love is the best motivator. By this point, I know that I'm in trouble. Because love does not speak as loudly or prick as sharply as fear and pleasing did. Not that I don't love the people I spent time with, but the fear and Man-pleasing sure helped spark the motivation when love hadn't been enough to get me moving before.


Honestly, part of what I hated is that I knew I don't have enough love. Half of the time, love doesn't even motivate the things I do for Dave - they're often things that I benefit from or will keep me out of trouble. And he's the person I love most, my own husband. I do not want my actions in our relationship to spring from fear and desire for compliments. I want to love him because I love him.


The apathy, as it turns out, was a good thing. When the false unhealthy motivations were stripped away, like weed vines tangled into a rug across the ground, apathy was what I found beneath it. Where I hoped to find fertile soil for and budding branches of loving motivation, I found bare gravelly dirt. It was discouraging, but at least it was no longer disguised by self-motivation.


I'm not even sure how to cultivate love as a motivation. Like I said, I don't really know what it would look like in everyday life. But unlike the weeds that keep sprouting up, I don't think it's something that will grow on its own. I don't even know how much I myself can cultivate it. After all, what love I have was first His, and that plant is not native to this soil. But I want it to grow here; I would like to be motivated by love, even though I know I'm not.

Day 365: Paper Anniversary

One year and four days ago, I woke up quietly at seven in the morning, wide awake long before my alarm went off.  The metal rungs of my bunk were cold against my feet as I climbed down. Energy was surging in me, a great and quiet pulsing.  The house was quiet that last morning; all the girls were still asleep.  The stairs creaked under my steps as I went to the first floor bathroom.  I pulled aside the brown shower curtain, and reveled in the hot water.  If it could be washed or shaved or scrubbed, I did it all twice.  I came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam; it was cold outside, but the sun came warmly through the dining room window.  I ate a bowl of cereal at the sunlit dinner table.  The quiet throbbed with anticipation.  After I had rinsed out my porcelain white cereal bowl, I laid down in the tan leather couch to edit my vows in green ink.  Then the floors began to creak, doors slammed open, and the happy shrieking began.  But for an hour, the morning before my wedding just belonged to me, full and peaceful.

It's quiet now, too.  Memories have been coursing through my mind this week, about that day and the following 2 weeks in Florida.  And I keep trying to reflect about the past year, because that's the kind of post this should be: summing up the past year of marriage.  But for some reason that's been difficult.  I keep sitting down to write this, and I just keep rewriting it, scrapping the last idea and continually trying a different one.  With so much to say, it's difficult to sum up.

I'd like to tell you that I've got this marriage thing down now, but that's not true.  We do have a much better handle on it than when we threw ourselves into this life a year ago, but this first year also served to reveal our problem icebergs and their true size below the surface.  Marriage sonar has been pinging against such issues like my selfishness and it is titanic.  You see, one thing I have learned is that since marriage is for the rest of your life, there are infinitely larger levels of patience and endurance required.  Here, problems in character and sins of temperament are excavated with depth and precision never before possible because there simply wasn't the time.  Who else are you going to see almost every day for the rest of your life?  That first layer of dirt and debris has been chipped away, and the ugly bones are coming out now; we can see the mammoth skeletons of some problems, and we've got whole decades together to dig them out bone by bone.  The thought of working shoulder to shoulder with Dave on this is thrilling.

Also, it really sucks to let down your spouse.  You promised that this would be the person you would be most devoted to for the rest of your life; little did you know that this would also be the person you let down most in your life.  With your lives so intertwined, you're too close to keep your failures to yourself; like it or not, you share them.  If I think about it too long, it makes me want to file for divorce and run away to the smallest Galapagos island where I can't hurt Dave by my mere existence anymore.  Unfortunately, hurting is an inseparable part of living and loving that must be accepted.  Rather than crawling into a hermit crab's shell, it's better to be able to keep getting back up every time you fall down.  You're both too broken to perfectly love each other, no one is surprised by that, so you have to learn that pattern of helping each other up.  Life is full of falling, and marriage is designed for you to have a partner to pull you up when it happens.  Marriage isn't perfect, but it is designed to deal with life's Imperfection.

God also seems to delight in balance in this world; he did not make a situation for repeated failure without also endowing it with one of the highest potentials for joy.  This year has not been easy, but oh, it has been so good.  When we ungrateful malfunctioning creatures do get some things right, it's a pretty big deal.  And I think of the very long list of things that went right this past year with Dave.  Like Dave buying that fake miniature poor-quality absolutely-perfect Christmas tree and decorating it with me.  Teaching ourselves how to argue effectively with each other, with both compassion and reason.  Spending late nights on campus doing homework together.  Slowly but surely organizing our tiny over-stuffed apartment.  Watching movies on a blanket and pillows laid out on the living room floor.  Adventuring together this past July in Summersville, West Virginia.  Buying our new hamster, Dave's anniversary gift to me, together and laughing at his tiny furry antics.  All those things and more, profound and simple and silly, were joyous victories.

So, to my husband:  thank you for your everlasting patience, for your loyalty and trustworthiness, for working hard next to me to make us good, for paying the bills every month, for saving Youtube videos that you think I'd like to watch, for double-checking to make sure I turned the stove off, for my lovely dwarf hamster Tychicus, and for loving me.  I will never say "thank you" enough for all you are to me.

Holy Spunk

I wore a uniform from my first day of 6th grade all the way through to my high school graduation.  For seven years, my only clothing options were a limited number of colored polo shirts, navy blue or khaki uniform pants, and a plaid skirt.  Technically I could've worn a jumper too, but the socially cognizant stopped wearing those the day they left the 6th grade.

Options to stand out were rather limited, and with that high school herd instinct, not many wanted to.  Even though we got to choose our own shoes and socks, there were a lot of girls wearing black Mary Janes and white knee highs those years in order to fit in.  I, however, chose my shoes specifically because of their uniqueness: a pair of purple Converse All-Stars.  It was my small way of defying the status quo.

Some people think the words "God" and "church" equate with losing your individuality, and a mandated rigid conformity.  If that were the case, I can say honestly that I would not still be here.  What I've instead discovered these past few weeks, as I've prayed more than ever before, is that my spunk and self-confidence have both multiplied significantly.

For the past several weeks, my self-confidence had been declining as my anxiety was on the rise.  As I became more anxious, I became needy and clingy with Dave.  My emotions were on a hair-trigger, and the nights it got set off were late ones for Dave.  I was consistently self-conscious and asking for compliments.  I felt lost whenever he would have a bad day, and never wanted to disagree with him.  I felt increasingly depressed and I didn't slow down long enough to figure out why.

The first smart thing I did was stop over-scheduling myself.  I used the new-found time to cry (which I hated), to read, to write, and to pray.  I've never been good at praying, but I prayed a lot that week.  Probably more than any other week before.  And most of those prayers were pretty ugly; but at least I was praying.  

I had finally slowed down long enough to look down at my own feet, and I saw I was wearing those damn Mary Janes.  I had been striving to meet a status quo that wasn't mine to fulfill, trying to win approval from people who could not satisfy my anxiety, and hadn't been asking The Man In Charge what job He had just for me.  So I started praying more, and I started asking.

It really was the praying that made the difference, which surprised me, I think because I've never really understood it.  The more I prayed, the bolder I became.  I wasn't making decisions to make people happy; I was learning to separate my Self from their reactions.  

Dave and I spent yesterday together, and our interaction was vastly different than the past few weeks.  When Dave teased me about my clumsiness, I laughed along and teased back.  I was already happy and confident, and therefore not pleading for compliments.  When he got tired and slightly grouchy at the end of the day, I easily shrugged it off.  I wasn't depending on his reaction to define me.

Earlier this week, I confronted a friend on a minor disagreement.  Not only did I initiate that discussion, but I didn't need emotional reconstruction after my friend disagreed with me.  If the disagreement had come up a week earlier, I would've been paralyzed and said nothing.  But this time I myself was marvelously gloriously separate from their reactions, buoyant and resilient.  

Prayer had put my purple shoes back on, and God was commending it because they came from Him; He had given me a holy spunk.  Since I've been praying more, I have felt more whole and full of spark, bolder and steadier.  I've been anything but blending into the ranks or becoming monotone.  My roots are deeper and my colors are brighter and my voice is louder and my laugh is fuller since I've been praying. And that's what The Man in Charge is all about.

The Unlocked Gate

In her life, my grandmother has tried many tactics to get the love she longs for from her family.  She'll throw a fit at my brother's ballgame to draw attention.  She will show up unannounced on doorsteps.  Many Christmases I've received a set of "Thank You" notes under her tree.  She is generous; and often that generosity comes with fine print.  She works very hard in all the wrong ways to get the affection she's so desperate for.

All my life she's been like a woman holding a handful of water, not understanding that the tighter she grips, the more drips away; rather than having more control, she only has less of it to hold.

My grandmother is an intelligent and well-read woman who has been in church almost every single Sunday of her life.  I have no doubt that she's read and heard and been taught the story of the prodigal son many times.  And I wish so badly that she could've really listened to it and heard what the story had to say about who God is.

There's one specific instance I know that illustrates her lack of understanding:

It was my father's third year at Ohio State that he met and began dating my mother.  After the school year ended, she invited my father to come down and stay for a while in Florida at her father's home.  My grandmother was against this arrangement from the start.  On the day of my father's flight, she barricaded the second car in front of the driveway and hid the keys in order to keep him from going to the airport.  Of course, my father called a friend to drive him and went anyways.  Later that month, I was unintentionally conceived.

The prodigal son did far worse with less resistance.  After telling his dad to "drop dead" by cashing in early on his inheritance, the prodigal son walked right out the front door and through the unlocked wrought iron gate.  There was no car blocking the driveway; his father let him go.

I have no doubt that if there were a gate at my grandmother's house that day, it would've been locked (interestingly, the manner of exit didn't stop either son from doing what he wanted).  So why did the God-figure in the parable leave the gate unlocked?  Out of trust - did he not think his son would leave? No - it was respect for his son's free will.  Unless he could choose to leave, it didn't mean anything if he stayed.

That unlocked gate has taught me much about the great value of free will.  I think about it when I want to drag a friend kicking and screaming into the right decision, and am reminded that it's not mine to decide.  The times I am angry when God doesn't force someone to do the best or right thing, I think of that freely-swinging gate.  As I've learned before, God wants to be chosen - enough to allow people to not choose him.  So who am I to choose for them when even the Almighty does not?

I've also seen that it remains unlocked, no matter which side of it you are on - an equally difficult lesson.  When the prodigal son came back with pig's food smeared on his chin, the gate was still open then.  And his father was watching the road from the kitchen window.  He gave his son freedom, even at great cost and injury, but he waits at the window and hopes.

God is not so foolish to try and control us for our love.  As a shepherd, he doesn't pen the sheep in - they willingly follow the sound of his voice.  And as a father, he leaves the gate unlocked.  I hope my Nana sees that next time she thumbs through the book of Luke; she would find her hands much fuller if she learned from Him to relax her grip.