WAITING

We are now in the church season of Advent.  This is a season of waiting and of expectation.  As I have been thinking on this for the last week or so, I realized that it is a true season of waiting for me.  I have been praying for contentment during this time, because I tend to spend a good deal of the time during waiting seasons trying to get to the other side.  Expectation is a great thing, but I have found that there are many beautiful experiences during the waiting that I miss out on when I am focused on what I expect to happen.  It is very possible that I miss out completely on the joy of the "coming" of an event because it did not occur like I expected it to.  Does this sound familiar?  Some of the things I love about the Christmas season are the quiet opportunities it offers up for reflection.  This Advent season I am going to sincerely try to be still and wait joyfully.  I am going to strive not to miss out on life's joys because I am focusing on what is next in my life.  I pray that I will be able to live each day in an attitude of expectation.  Not the expectation that all will go as I plan, but in the expectation that God's hand is on my family and that He is working in and through our lives to bring about something beautiful. 

But If

The other night I had trouble sleeping as my axieties swirled around in my brain.  I thought of the nonsense poem "What If" by Shel Silverstein.  In this poem, Silverstein personifies anxieties into these little creatures that are called Whatifs.  The Whatifs crawl into the narrator's ear as he tries to sleep.  The poem is considered a nonsense poem because the anxieties that the narrator is experiencing are seemingly silly, but the picture that the author paints is an all-too real one.  I began to list my Whatifs as I lay there trying to fall asleep.  I won't list them out here, but most of my fears deal with security and money.  As much as I wish I could say that all of my Whatifs were nonsense like the ones in the poem, but I can't.  In reality everyone of them could happen and many have happened before.  Not an uplifting or sleep-inducing thought. 

So where do I go from here?  In his gospel, Matthew tells me not to worry because ultimately God is in control.  For a chronic worrier this is not easy advice to take.  In fact, it is near to impossible. I have mastered the art of worry to the point that when stressed, I have an allergic reaction similar to hives on my palms, I either can't eat or eat too much, and I get heartburn that is straight from the devil himself.  I am learning though to surrender my Whatifs to God.  This is a slow lesson with me, but when I do surrender my Whatifs cease to become Whatifs and change into what I call Butstills.  The job doesn't come, but still I will be o.k. because I am not alone.  He is here with me.  I know this because when my worst Whatif became a reality, the world did not stop.  I didn't die.  I felt awful for awhile, but at my darkest point, He was there.  In my weakness He strengthened me or sent someone to be strong for me.  I must surrender the right to understand why life happens and allow Him to bring peace in the midst of my storm.  When I do this, I rob the Whatif of the power it holds over me and rest comes.

Changes

Nobody likes change, or I should say most people do not like change.  Change forces us to reevaluate ourselves, determine what our core values are, and take giant leaps of faith. There is very little that rouses my deepest sense of fear than an unwanted/unexpected change. 

This summer our family was faced with, you guessed it, a huge unexpected moment of change.  It wasn't one I asked for.  It was a change that was given to me and it wasn't wrapped up with a nice bow.  I went through my normal range of emotions:  tears, intense anger, questioning, and semi-resolution.  I say semi-resolution because some days I have forgiven and moved on and am able to appreciate where the change has taken us.  Other days I feel betrayed and deeply hurt. 

I have walked away from every change, every redirection in my life with lessons.  Some of them unfortunately tend to the cynical side.  Lessons like I can't trust people, most Christians are hypocrites, and I am better off when I keep to myself.  These are lessons that I need to unlearn.  Some lessons however make my life richer and these are the ones that I am trying to embrace.

When the bomb went off this last time, and it was a bomb for us, I was reading a book by a man named Don Miller.  In his book, Miller compares our lives to a narrative that is being written.  He puts forth the idea that if we don't like the narrative we are living, we simply need to rewrite the narrative.  Unfortunately, he points out, we seldom have the courage to do this.  We simply go on each day doing the familiar.  He goes on to say that often it takes an "inciting" action to force us to change the narrative we are living.  This couldn't have been truer for me.  As I began to sort through the pieces of confusion and disappointment, I realized that I hadn't been truly happy in awhile.  I came home each day from work tired and strung out.  I didn't have the energy that I wanted to devote to my family and my home.  The things that I used to be passionate about were just dull memories.  As I was complaining about this to my husband one day, he asked me, "What do you want to do?"
I didn't know the answer to that question, but I did know what I didn't want to do and that was to return to my job.  At that moment I began to rewrite the narrative I had been living.

I am now a stay-at-home mom again, and I am homeschooling for the first time, something I swore I would never do.  I am enjoying reading to my children again.  I am enjoying cooking and taking care of my home.  I know longer drown in anxiety and stress on Sunday nights and I am beginning to find myself again as the days unfold.  This is not to say that everything is coming up roses, but there is light.  The Reverend Mother in The Sound of Music said that "Whenever God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window."  I firmly believe this.  I would never have had the courage to quit my job if I wasn't faced with an "inciting action", but it was what I needed to do.  A wise friend told me that one of the worst things she had to go through brought with it one of the best results of her life.  I believe this is true of me. So for now, when I am faced with unwanted change, after the dust has settled and the air has cleared, I resolve to pick myself up or let someone help me up, and look at the opportunity I have to allow God to turn that change into something beautiful.  I will lose the cynical lessons and embrace the beautiful ones.

COMMUNITY

            I was reading today in a cooking magazine about a neighborhood that had Sunday dinner gatherings.  The writer used the term community building when describing their group.  This led me to think about the importance of community in my own life.  When Chris and I first moved to the area, we lived in student housing.  Chris was in grad school and I was teaching at a local private school.  Caleb was just a year old.  We lived in the older section of apartments.  The apartments were arranged in courtyards and we spent many evenings together with our neighbors, often just sharing the little and odd assortment of food we had.  I remember these times fondly because it was through this time that I realized how important it was to feel as if you belong to people, and that the people you surround yourself with understand what it is like to walk in your shoes. 

            Since this time, we have moved from student housing to a neighborhood that models itself after Mayberry, and now to the wooded retreat that we live in.  Through all of this I have found that a sense of community is crucial to my well-being.  We have the privilege to be part of a home-group that breaks bread together every week.  We don’t pretend to tackle any deep theological questions.  We don’t really even tackle the shallow ones.  We simply eat together and pray together as best we can with all the children running around.  Our church had a meeting one evening for each group to discuss how we felt our individual groups were doing and what we could do better.  We listened to other groups discuss what they were studying and how they felt that things were going and we decided as a group that we were just awesome!  You may laugh at this, but I found it refreshing.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I am not knocking the other groups.  They are at different points in their lives.  It just was nice to know that we as a group understood the importance of community, relying on each other.  This group of people is often my lifeline.  I can share what my weekly struggle is and know that I am going to enjoy the fellowship of their laughter, food, and wine every Thursday night and have a night off from cooking two to three times a month.  This is where true friendship is birthed, in the everyday.  It is in the stress of life, the poopy diapers, the vomit, the crazy coworkers, that we find connections with each other and can offer each other a way outside of all of that.  I am extremely thankful for the love and honesty I find each week when we finally sit down together and I am challenged to be more honest with myself and with my friends each week.  That is what community is.

My Place

            There are many places that represent peace to people in the world.  This summer I got to spend some time at my place of peace, the beach.  I enjoy watching the water.  It is a place where I feel I can just sit and be.  I enjoy watching my children play.  The boys ride wave after wave and every so often bite it.  I got to sit back and watch them get up and “shake it off” and return to the very waves that just sent them sprawling.  It occurred to me that we have to do that in life.  Events occur that send us sprawling face down and eventually we have to climb up and get back to life.  The question is do we do it with fear and trembling or with a sense of adventure and positive expectation?  I, I must admit, usually return with great fear.  I’ve have come to believe in my inner-most being that the proverbial floor is always about to drop out from underneath me.  This is no way to live.  It is draining and frankly no fun.  I want to have the joy that my younger son possesses.  He is a child of great passion.  Joy and furry course through him and boy does he know how to have fun!  He wants to be able to fly, never mind the impossibility of this.  It looks adventurous, so he wants to do it.  This is a gift.  We all need to possess this care-freeness that comes so easily to him.  I have spent many hours at the beach throughout my life.  This year however, I came away with something more than just nice pictures.  As this school year unfolds, I am resolving to meet each wipeout, not with fear, but with expectation of the adventure that is to come.

Serenity Now!

            This is my first attempt at blogging.  I do not consider myself a good writer, but I have learned the therapeutic value of writing at times.  I chose serenity now as my blog title for a couple of reasons.  First, I believe we all desire peace in our lives, but for many reasons peace seems to elude most of us.  Secondly, I have found in my life that peace is not always an absence of chaos, but a condition of the mind.  There is a Seinfeld episode in which George’s dad shouts out “Serenity now!”, whenever he feels stressed.  I have done that myself half-jokingly, but I do believe there is some truth in it.  Ultimately, I believe that true peace comes from recognizing who I am in relation to my Creator, but practically speaking, that doesn’t always work when there are four small children screaming at you.

            I don’t know that I have any grand aspirations with this new project other than to share some of my thoughts/struggles with marriage and motherhood and how that is blended with working outside of the home.  Each day is a new day with no mistakes in it as Anne Shirley would say, and I try to remind myself of that as I get up.