Amazing Grace

Westboro Baptist Church was coming to our neighborhood. This “church” opposes homosexuality (their slogan is “God hates fags”), and church members get their message across by picketing high-profile events like military funerals. It’s a sad, sick, legally protected attempt at attention, and no one likes it much.

So when a Marine from nearby Zeeland was killed in Afghanistan during his sixth tour of duty, the hate mongers of Westboro Baptist prepared to show up at the funeral. In response, a peaceful protest began to brew in support of the family of Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Price. The goal was to line the streets with people, creating a human shield that stretched the four-plus miles from the church to the cemetery. If Westboro showed up, they would be invisible behind a wall of flag-waving individuals. The call went out on Facebook and by word of mouth, and momentum grew.

On Saturday morning Bill, Kelsey, and I drove to Holland, my hometown, where the funeral and burial were to take place. We left our car near the park where I used to go for family picnics and walked to the cemetery, where we took a few minutes to visit the graves of family members. Then we took a spot on the funeral route, about halfway between the cemetery and what used to be my Uncle Herb’s house (where we would watch the Memorial Day parade each year). We stood with our flags and waited, watching the crowd gather.

All manner of humanity showed up. People with tattoos and interesting piercings, grandparents with their grandkids, people pushing wheelchairs, parents pushing strollers. Some wore the ugliest red-white-and-blue shirts you’ve ever seen, while others wore military uniforms. Most carried flags, some of them the flags that had draped the coffins of fallen soldiers. Some brought lawn chairs and blankets so they could wait in comfort. Although the area isn’t exactly known for racial diversity, this protest was blessed with a variety of skin tones.

A foul-mouthed family with cigarettes and a pit bull fell in next to us. People distributed bottled water. For a while it felt like a parade rather than a funeral. But as time passed, the crowd grew quiet and anticipatory. Finally, at about 12:30, we saw the flashing lights of the lead police car. Following the cop were the motorcycles of the Patriot Guard Riders. This unlikely grassroots effort began to counter the poison of the Westboro group; bikers will escort the funeral procession so that the noise of their bikes covers up the sound of the protestors. Two by two they rumbled by—men and women, old and young, some obviously vets and military supporters and others who seemed to be pacifists—a line of bikes stretching two miles.

They were followed by a white hearse, and then by car upon car carrying family and friends, many of them in uniform. We stood at attention with our flags for forty minutes as they all filed safely into the cemetery, where the honor guard waited to lay Daniel Price to rest.

The funeral route was over four miles long, and people lined both sides of the streets for the entire route. There were rumors that Westboro members were in the area, but there were no signs of their protests. Word on the street is that the number of human shield participants scared them off.

It was a beautiful thing, to see so many people with nothing in common come together to do a good thing.  Certainly some came to support the military and its people. Some came to oppose the message of Westboro. Some came to protect a family in its time of grief. It was good to stand together, if just for a moment, armed with nothing but love for humanity and a desire for peaceful change. You know that cliché, America at its finest? I think that was it.  

Ready

On warm May evening many years ago—our last evening in our first house—I sat on the front stoop, looked up at the stars, and tried to imprint on my memory a moment that was pregnant with both history and promise. It was time to move on to a larger home, and we were ready.  I didn’t want to stay where we were, but I did want to take a moment to honor the many happy moments we had shared in our tiny bungalow.

Generally I have lived my life thinking forward. I don’t want to rush time, but each season has its own beauty, and usually I’m excited to see what comes next, in my own life and in the lives of my kids. As they’ve grown I’ve been appreciative of each stage, each milestone, each challenge, and happy to see them figure out how to get to the next one.

But for the past six months, as Kelsey has finished up high school and set her sights on college, time has gone by so quickly it takes my breath away.  I’ve tried to enjoy this time, and I think she has, too, but she is ready to leave some things behind and begin this next exciting chapter in her life.

She’s not the first child to exit our nest, and not the last, but this transition feels more difficult for me than when her older brothers headed out. Maybe it’s the mother/daughter thing: we’ve always been close, and to date have had little of the tension that can accompany these teenage relationships. Maybe it’s my age or hormones or phases of the moon. Whatever it is, it’s been difficult.

I’m an emotional person, but a month of brooding and tears is extreme. In an effort to shake it off, I tried to focus on the upside of Kelsey going off to college. Although I am crazy about her, she also makes me crazy with some of her behaviors. So here are the top five things I will NOT miss when Kelsey’s at college.

1.       I won’t miss getting up at 5:30 each school day to wake her up. I didn’t mind getting up early to see her off to school, and I didn’t mind making coffee (since most of it was for me). What bugged me was that I’d fill a travel mug for her each day—and at the end of the week, when she finally brought her collection of travel mugs in from the car, I’d pour almost all of it out. She rarely had time for more than a sip. You’d think I would have learned, but I didn’t. That also goes for item #2…

2.       I won’t miss making healthy lunches that she would pass on in favor of cafeteria French fries. She might eat part of the lunch, but she was especially good at ignoring anything perishable, like yogurt, which went bad after a day in a hot locker. I know that at her age I didn’t owe it to her to make a lunch, but I was making them for the younger kids, so what’s one more? Anyway, I did figure that one out and stopped making her lunches…eventually.

3.       I won’t miss her stuff. Everywhere. The car she was using was pretty much a four-wheeled purse, littered with all manner of empty food containers, clothing, and memorabilia. If she’s in the house, there is evidence of it on every flat surface of our ample home. Her purse, her shoes, her keys, her shoes, her sunglasses, her backpack…and did I mention her shoes? Some people have a place for everything and everything in its place; Kelsey has everything and nothing has a place. Which leads us to #4:

4.       I won’t miss looking for things. You name, it, she’s misplaced it: clothing, jewelry, her debit card, important paperwork.  When she leaves her things around the house, I bring them to her room, hoping she will find a secure spot for them, but I long ago gave up asking her to clean her room. It’s fine with me if her domain is a tragic kingdom, but it does mean she never knows where things are, and sometimes I get sucked into helping her look. Even when it costs her time, frustration, and money, she refuses to change her ways. She couldn’t find her driver’s license for more than two weeks and finally went to the DMV for another one; a week after her new license arrived, the old one turned up—in the car, a place she had searched multiple times.

5.       I won’t miss drama. I love knowing what’s going on in her life, but occasionally she gets overly involved in something, or she rehashes the same problems—some of her own making—over and over and over and I want to tell her to LET IT GO. (And just to be clear: I have no idea where she learned this; I NEVER hold onto issues past their expiration date…)

So I guess there is an upside to her moving out. Do I feel better now? Nah. I’m going to miss her—I’ll even miss all the things she does that I think I’m not going to miss. But it’s time. I hold onto this moment that is pregnant with both history and promise, but I let my daughter go.

As long as she takes her stuff with her.

Fighting Fire

Okay, so let’s talk about movie murders in Colorado.

In my previous life as a magazine editor, I traveled to and wrote about some tragic places: El Salvador during some of its dark days of corruption and revolt; Honduras after Hurricane Mitch; Littleton, Colorado, after the Columbine shootings.  After 9-11, I wrote pieces on some of the people who died there, as well as pieces on churches and individuals that did ministry in those trying days and months. All of these experiences touched my soul and forced me to think. Even before I knew I would be traveling I was reading and researching, because I wanted to connect with what was going on: I wanted to understand, empathize, and find a way to move forward in light of awful circumstances.

But after the shootings in Aurora, I feel nothing. I’ve made no effort to read about the incident or to read people’s stories. I know nothing about the victims or the back story of how a night at the movies can go so horribly wrong. I am indifferent.

There is something wrong when the only response I can muster in the face of such horrible violence is, “Oh, well. What did you expect?”

As a civilization we have begun to evolve to the point where weaponry is less important; sane and reasonable people can come up with solutions that don’t demand firepower, globally and locally. I long for—pray for—a world at peace, and the end of warfare. True peace only comes with justice, and I know we are a long way from that, but I keep imagining that we are evolving into a more adult society that can find solutions without death and mayhem.

But here in the United States, it seems that we have decided that mass shootings are an acceptable part of our lives; the unfettered right to bear arms is far more important than the right to stay safe. We must fight fire with fire, and we should expect a certain amount of collateral damage. As a people, this is the path we’ve chosen.

To be clear: I don’t think the solution is to take guns away from those who know how to use them. Nor do I think the solution is to arm everyone, a suggestion that I’ve actually heard from some people. These are the folks that seem to blame the people in the theater for not wearing Kevlar; how dare the movie goers assume that this might be a safe place!

Yes, there are plenty of other ways to kill people, and wackos and those who want to make a point will find other ways. Gun control is no guarantee to the end of random violence. But if we’re looking to curtail these incidents, to refuse to consider changing the way we buy, sell, and perceive weapons seems ridiculous. Digging in our heels is no way to solve a problem. If we want to change our future, we have to find a new way of doing things, of reforming laws or procedures. We can talk about all kinds of other things, too, but we need to talk about weapons.

In so many other areas the world is changing for the better. Sometimes slowly, slowly, but at least moving—if not globally, then at least heart by heart. While violence and prejudice still rear their ugly heads on a regular basis, in almost every area—racial and gender equality, increased concern for the environment, world peace—someone, somewhere, is always moving forward, pulling the rest of us along. But on the issue of gun violence, it seems we cannot move at all.

There are those who continue to advocate for changes in gun laws. It seems like the most hopeless of causes now, but great things have come from small groups of dedicated people. I pray for them and their cause. The future rests with them. 

Requiem

I was at the mall when my phone rang. Bill had decided to replace his old van, and he needed my Social Security number to complete the transaction. I was a little surprised that he was buying a new van without letting me know, but I gave him the info and then, in a small passive/aggressive gesture, bought a pair of truly hideous leopard-print fuzzy dice to hang from the rearview mirror of the new vehicle.

Twelve years and 150,000 miles later, Bill removed the dice, along with all of our other personal possessions, and traded the van in for a new car. The van had been limping along for about a year, and finally it breathed its last. We had to let it go.

While it wasn’t altogether unexpected, it did feel sudden. The poor thing had been through the ringer.  Over the years, rust spots seemed to bubble up out of nowhere, eventually eating away at parts of the metal. The big scratch on the side: yeah, that was mine, acquired in when I sideswiped a support column in a Chicago parking ramp while shuttling a group of Girl Scouts. During the past year Kelsey was primary driver on the van, and she did her share of damage. The van wasn’t pretty, but it had a lot of heart, and in the end it was its heart that gave out.

Trading in the van was a more emotional experience than we expected, like a death, but on a small scale.  At some point, the van became a member of the family. Maybe it was during the day-to-day trips to school, to work, to church, to the grocery store, with the kids fighting in the back, as kids do. Maybe it was while it pulled our camper up to Ludington, where we spent fall weekends enjoying long walks and smoky campfire talks with friends, and where the van got a few dings as we learned how to connect it to the hitch. Maybe it was during our family trips to Florida. Each of those trips was special, but one was special for a different reason; my stepmother was failing, and we weren’t sure if we would get to her in time to say goodbye. The van sped through Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and the whole length of Florida, and each mile we prayed that my stepmom would hold on. Our prayers were answered. We were able to have meaningful conversation with Mickie before she died—a gift from God.  A month later, the van carried us to the cemetery where we laid her ashes to rest.

We took our last trip in the van just over a year ago, when we all traveled to Omaha for our niece’s wedding. It was our first, and probably last, trip as a family of seven, and we thought it might be long and boring. But we had a great time together, safe and snug in our aging minivan.

In a few weeks we’ll drop the kids off at college, and for the first time, we won’t have the van to help us. I’m sure we’ll manage, but it is forcing us to think of things differently. That’s not a bad thing. We look forward to better gas mileage, a little more space in the garage, and that, at least for a while, we won’t be slapped with $1,000 repair bills.

We will miss the van, but as we roll on into our future, we bring our memories with us, grateful for where we’ve been and who we’ve been, and excited to see where our new vehicle will take us.  

The Soon-to-Be-Famous Ice Cream Diet

For those of you who don’t know, July is National Ice Cream month. How great is that: a whole month to celebrate one of my very favorite things! July also happens to be the month of my birth. (Coincidence? I think not!) The combination of these things makes me feel justified—nay, compelled—to eat ice cream every single day in July. It would disrespectful not to. Well, maybe not disrespectful, but certainly a missed opportunity.

July is also the season when I am most self-conscious of my body shape, and my extra padding. I don’t want to add to that. So I’ve devised a special July diet that allows me to eat ice cream every day. And I’m willing to share my secret with you.

The diet is essentially an enhancement of the South Beach diet. South Beach promotes lean protein, lots of veggies, a few healthy fats, and reduced sugars and grains. Plus drink lots of water, stuff like that. It’s a pretty common-sense, easy-to-follow kind of plan, and generally I can lose weight when I follow it.

One of the South Beach proteins is eggs, and I think that eating them helps me lose weight more quickly. So most mornings I have eggs for breakfast, which is enjoyable the first morning, tolerable the second, and from then on feels a little like taking medicine. I try to dress them up with veggies and hot sauce, but that doesn’t always help. Every couple of days I cheat and have something else, but then I try to do eggs later in the day to take advantage of their magic weight-loss power.

Every weight-loss plan is more effective if you increase activity, so I do a half hour of something each day. I hate to exercise—and I’m sure that a future blog will outline this in painful detail—but for now suffice it to say that it’s not my favorite thing. But for the ice cream, I do it. I usually walk, but yoga, biking, running, marching in front of the TV are all acceptable. Even cleaning and gardening count, but if that’s my day’s activity, I usually try to do it for at least an hour. Better still, I take the walk AND do the cleaning.

Then I add ice cream. Now, if you’re a sick and twisted person who would be satisfied with just a spoonful a day, you could probably just eat that without any kind of damage. I am not that girl. Although I have never eaten a full pint in one sitting (so that’s still on the bucket list), I want a full serving, so often I’ll skip a meal and substitute ice cream. Sometimes it’s a scoop, sometimes it’s a sundae, and when I’m really feeling decadent, I’ll have a Dove bar. Usually I just raid the freezer at home, but sometimes I go out for a cone or a shake. Whatever I eat, it’s generous. There’s no sense doing this if you’re not going to commit. In the words of Reformation preacher Martin Luther—taken completely out of context—If you’re going to sin, sin boldly.

During the first week I’m pretty disciplined, and I’ll actually drop a few pounds. But then my resolve lessens, and when the temperature rises, as it is prone to do in July, the exercise is even less appealing. So I cheat a little, and I stop losing weight. But I don’t gain, either, and I get to have ice cream every day. Life is full of these little trade-offs.

Over the decades I’ve made lots of choices, large and small. Not all of them were smart, but I can live with that. Not all of my choices were kind, and those are the things I wish I could go back and change. The reasons behind the choices are more important than the choices themselves. I don’t regret the choices made out of love, or the times I chose to have the right attitude in the face of undesirable circumstances. And it’s never a mistake to choose joy—to choose something that makes you happy.

Like ice cream. Every day in July. 

Manna

I’ve always kind of liked money. I like earning it, I like saving it, and I like spending it. It’s been a healthy balance over the years; we don’t spend more than we make, we put a little something into savings, we’re frugal when we spend, and we try to be generous when we give. Experts might quibble with some of our methods, but over the years that approach has served us well. When income has been steady, we’ve continued to be careful—and grateful. There have also been lean times, but we’ve gotten through.

Over the past couple of years it’s been lean, and recently we thought we were turning a corner, but then we hit one of those seasons where we’ve had several unexpected—and a couple expected—triple-digit expenses, and college tuition bills will be rolling in any day now.  I am a worrier by nature, and I lately finances are my biggest concern. I worry and pray…and still worry.

At this late stage of my life, you’d think I would have a little more faith. Many times in life our finances could best be described as a miracle: on paper, we should never be able to do what we have done. But like the biblical story of the widow of Zarephath, somehow there is always enough for us to keep going. Even now, when I feel like we are living on the edge, we have so much to be grateful for, and a lot of material wealth. We still live in a beautiful house that we are able to heat and cool, we still eat well, we’ve got some money in our retirement accounts, and we’re still carving out a little money to do a few fun things. We have medical insurance and jobs and access to good public education. Compared to most of the rest of the world, we are rich indeed.

When I compare my stressors to the things that keep my friends up at night—children in trouble with relationships or drugs, individuals with unexplained or untreatable medical problems, the pain of being chronically discriminated against, the deep sadness of the loss of a loved one—my problems seem pretty small. Problems that can be fixed with money might be the best kinds of problems to have, because it means there is the potential for a solution. Lots of problems aren’t like that.

So I play a little game in my head: What’s the worst thing that can happen? Whenever my worry is money, the worst conclusion I can come to is that we would have to sell the house. Although this would not be my first choice, it’s not really such a horrible thing. And there are a hundred smaller things that we could do before it would come to the point of selling. See? Everything is going to be fine.

Unless the worst case scenario involves harm to a human being, it’s not worth worrying about. So I work on replacing worry with prayer, and replacing concern for self with concern for others. It’s not easy. I think I like to worry; I’ve been doing it a long time, and I’m good at it. Just ask my husband. He’s a worrier, too, but somehow the two of us balance each other. He’ll hug me and say, “We’ve faced way bigger problems than this. It’s going to be okay.”

I know he’s right. We’ve faced some hard stuff, and we will likely face difficult times in the future, but we’ve also experienced everyday miracles for as long as we’ve been together.  There’s no reason to lose faith now.

Note: the story of the widow of Zarephath is found in 1 Kings 17:8-16: “Then the word of the Lord came to him:  ‘Go at once to Zarephath in the region of Sidon and stay there. I have directed a widow there to supply you with food.’  So he went to Zarephath. When he came to the town gate, a widow was there gathering sticks. He called to her and asked, ‘Would you bring me a little water in a jar so I may have a drink?’ As she was going to get it, he called, ‘And bring me, please, a piece of bread.’

 ‘As surely as the Lord your God lives,’ she replied, ‘I don’t have any bread—only a handful of flour in a jar and a little olive oil in a jug. I am gathering a few sticks to take home and make a meal for myself and my son, that we may eat it—and die.’

 Elijah said to her, ‘Don’t be afraid. Go home and do as you have said. But first make a small loaf of bread for me from what you have and bring it to me, and then make something for yourself and your son.  For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: “The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land.”’

 She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family.  For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the Lord spoken by Elijah.”

Lost

It’s been on my mind that I should catch up on about nine years’ worth of scrapbooking for my five kids. For the younger ones it should be fairly easy, since they’ve only lived with us for three years. The older boys should be easier, too, since I only need to complete their books through high school graduation, and they’ve already been out for a couple years. Kelsey’s will be more work, but since she’s still at home at the moment, I drafted her to help sort pictures, which will make the rest of my job much easier.

She and I made relatively quick work of organizing the prints from the old film camera and then began going through the digital photos. We found photos back to about three years ago, and suddenly there were no more. No photos of her first homecoming dance. No photos of Phillip’s graduation party. Most devastating, no photos from our trip to Ethiopia, when we brought Lewi and Lily home.

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If that is true, then it is also true that I went a little crazy. I checked both of our desktop computers. I checked the camera’s memory cards. I went back and did it again, and then did it again. People would ask, didn’t you back your stuff up? Well, no, because I thought everything was on two computers and the memory card, which seemed like sufficient backup. I never delete anything, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone else would have, but since everyone uses the computers and the camera, the opportunity for mistakes is extremely high.

Phillip, our photo buff, used to upload his many photos onto our computer, but when he got his laptop he took all of his stuff off the home computer. I asked if he had grabbed our photos by mistake, but he looked, and looked again, and then helped us search our computers. Nothing.

If physical photos are misplaced, it’s certain they will turn up eventually. Things do not just disappear. I have heard that said of the digital world as well (be careful what you put on Facebook; it can come back to haunt you!), but in my experience, unless you know a computer god who owes you a favor, digital data can vanish.

They were gone. We had resources to reconstruct some of the things that were missing, including photos from Ethiopia, but it still made me sad that we had been careless with something irreplaceable.

Jesus told the story of a woman who could not find a coin, and she searched fervently until she found it. He tells another story of a father whose son ran away from home, but when the son returned the father rejoiced. Both the woman and the father threw parties. The precious thing that was lost was found; order is restored. All of the frustration and sadness melted away in the moment of reunion. There is no more amazing feeling than that.

Son Daniel, our resident computer geek, was out of town the weekend we discovered our treasure was missing. When he returned, I asked if he could delve into to the computer’s memory and look for the photos. We didn’t know when they had been deleted, or how, but perhaps he could perform some miracle and find them.

“Well, let me check,” he said. He returned moments later to report that, at some point, he had wanted to load a game onto the family computer, but since there wasn’t enough memory, he had (without telling anyone) taken all the photos off and loaded them onto his external hard drive. And there they were, safe and sound, as they had been for more than a year. 

He thought I would be mad. I was not. Not even a little. I was too busy rejoicing.