Here’s another insider look at my writing process in hopes that if you’re a writer, this will help you get your own words on the page, and if you’re a reader, it will portray how God is always at work in those who trust him.
Whenever I lay down on the couch to watch TV, Sunshine, my calico cat, likes to join me. She always positions herself on my chest, her face as close to mine as she can get. If I’m really slouched, I literally have to look through her ears to see the screen. But there she purrs, sometimes sparking my nose with hers, or tickling my cheek with her whiskers.
If I’m writing, it’s no different. She walks across my desk and tries to lay down in my lap. If I push her off, she tries to sit on my computer. If I’m reading in bed, she nudges her way between me and the book and nestles under my neck like a fur collar. Wherever I am, she wants to be as close as possible to me, the food lady, the one who lets her in and out, the one who lets her sleep on my bed, even if she might barf up a hairball.
This fact was called to mind a few days ago as I was watching a PBS nature show. Like many I’ve seen before, it featured scenes of big cat cubs snuggled beneath their mother’s head just like Sunshine snuggles with me. Under a leopard’s sharp teeth, or a tiger’s powerful jaw, her cubs are protected, and somehow as small and defenseless as they are, they know this is the safest spot on earth.
And just like that I had the title of this blog, Beneath the Roar. And with it, the theme, If God is for us who shall stand against us from Romans 31-39.
I love the way the Message puts it:
“31-39 So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
…None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.”
Now that’s the encouragement I wanted to send, but how to flesh it out? A flash memoir illustrates what that looks like with real life incidents.
All week, I came up blank until this morning when I first woke up and my mind flooded with moments when I was most vulnerable:
At four days old when I was sent to a foster home.
In fourth grade when my adoptive mom was hit by a bus and critically injured.
As a young married, pregnant with my second child, my marriage falling apart.
As a brand-new Christian without a clue how to live out my new faith.
And who did God send when the enemy was stalking me like prey? His people.
As a baby Christian, God sent my first believing best friend, Sharon Gamble, now an author, speaker, and founder of Sweet Selah Ministries that helps women rest in the presence of God.
As a pregnant young woman contemplating divorce, God sent a neighbor, Gloria, who first shared the gospel and went home to heaven ahead of me.
While my mom was still recovering from her injuries, God allowed me a wonderful summer in the care of my Aunt Ruth, a godly woman now pushing 100 who still sends me birthday cards that miraculously land on my exact birth date no matter who is running the post office.
As a helpless infant, he sent me to a foster mom who loved me so much she had a hard time letting go, so the adoption agency suggested she buy me a new outfit I’d look nice in for my new parents. I never met this woman, but I still have the pink dress and booties she picked out.
So, whether you’re a writer with a hairball stuck in your pen, or a reader feeling as weak as a kitten ( honestly aren’t we all) let’s remember we are cubs of the king.
Last week, I got some lovely responses to my post about how to begin telling your God story, so this week I planned to give you another writing tip, but on what topic?
Every time, I sat down to write, I felt exhausted. I hadn’t slept well all week, my mind busy replaying personal worries and bad news around the world.
This morning I woke up to the thump of a bluebird on the window. I know the sound because during mating season, I’ve heard it so often. The first time, I thought someone was knocking at the front door, but there was no one there. The next time, I thought something had fallen on the floor in the kitchen, but there was no mess. Again and again, thump, thump, thump, until I saw a male bluebird bashing himself against the glass as if his own reflection was his enemy.
This morning when I heard him again slamming himself at my bedroom window, I got up and thought whoever wrote, “If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow why ,oh why, can’t I?” never met a real bluebird.
Yet what a lovely metaphor, Disneyesque blue birds flitting above the cares of this world. Thank you, stupid blue bird for the idea of talking about figurative language.
As a former English teacher, I know the simple definition of a metaphor is one thing compared to another, but not in a literal sense. For example, My grandfather was a mountain of a man. If we add the word like or as, it becomes a simile. He was as tall as a mountain, his hair like a snowy peak. But you readers probably know that already, and I’m no longer an eighth-grade language arts teacher.
So, I want to talk more broadly about how symbols can enrich a theme, adding meaning and depth beyond what literal explanation can offer. Symbols stand for something greater than themselves. And they don’t have to be fancy.
For example, I started this essay with my exhaustion. The next thing I spoke of was the self-inflicted damage a macho bluebird incurs literally fighting himself. I didn’t say there was a connection, but it was there as subtext for the astute reader. The blue birds were a symbol of my blue mood and the way I kept bashed my own head against my worries until I was unable to rest.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Matthew 11:28-29 (NIV)
Using the metaphor of an oxen yoke, he acknowledges that life can be unbearable, full of figurative burdens too heavy to carry alone. He implies that without him we’ll be crushed by the weight of the world, unable to move forward. But by his side, he offers an entirely different experience. With let me teach you he acknowledges our independent nature that wants to do things ourselves no matter how ridiculous the load. By asking our permission to be our teacher, he endorses his wisdom and our need to trust it. My literal explanation seems wordy and clumsy compared to Jesus’ elegant symbol of an immense oxen yoke around a fragile human neck.
That’s because symbolic events, and images condense and deepen meaning.
Take the ultimate symbol of the Catholic crucifix bearing the broken body of Jesus. It tells the complete gospel without a word. One God/man taking the brutal punishment for all our sins. Likewise, the empty Protestant cross denotes a risen Messiah that death could not hold.
All this to say, as you record your story, events and images will fly into your writing just like my blue bird did. So, look for them. Be aware of their symbolism and use them to strengthen the meaning of the story, the Lord has given you.
And remember, don’t be your own worst enemy, bashing yourself with impostor syndrome. Don’t exhaust yourself like I did, losing sleep over what the Lord offers to carry for us. As a Christian writer, you’re not working on your own. The Holy Spirit bears the other side of the yoke placed on you as one of the Lord’s storytellers. He’s right beside you, just as he told you he would be—using a metaphor.
“For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:30 (NIV)
Translated that means don’t be a hard-headed blue bird when you can fly over the rainbow.
Because many of you readers are also writers, let me show you how to begin telling your own flash memoir.
Just let memories float to the surface, one by one, not knowing how they’ll connect, but trusting that as they pour out, the Holy Spirit will reveal a theme, a phrase that encapsulates a truth He’s leading you and your readers to understand more deeply.
I’ll start with a memory of watching TV as a little girl when June Cleaver was a sitcom mom, wearing a shirtwaist dress and heels, yes heels, while she blissfully ironed her husband’s shirts and cooked meals inspired by Betty Crocker. She was my mom and every other mom who manned my Leave-it-to Beaver neighborhood.
I remember watching Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room until I was old enough to catch the school bus. I remember boys fastening playing cards to the spokes of their bike wheels with clothespins, so their two-wheelers sounded like motorcycles. I remember the neon pink streamers I stuck into the white rubber handles of my first blue bicycle and tooling around the neighborhood looking for playmates.
I remember the door-to-door Fuller Brush man, and the truck that delivered Charles Chips in a yellow can. I remember the galvanized milk box that the milkman filled with glass bottles capped with a thin cardboard stopper and a pleated paper lid.
Saturday nights, I recall watching the Laurence Welk Show, the stage in front of his bandstand haloed with soap bubbles while women in chiffon dresses danced with tuxedoed partners to his champagne music. I remember Myron Floren, playing “The Beer Barrel Polka” on his accordion and Jo Ann Castle plinking out honky-tonk piano while I romped around the living room.
How can I forget Liberace flouncing onto the stage in a glittering cape and seating himself with a flourish at a grand piano topped by a candelabra. I was sure if my parents just bought me a piano, I could perform like these icons.
That calls up the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, an old school American Idol that featured teenage girls in majorette boots twirling batons and ventriloquists who talked to dummies with wooden faces like Howdy Dowdy’s. My favorites were the tap dancers in spangled costumes who slapped their patent leather shoes on the floorboards mimicking Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
This leads me to the Ed Sullivan Show where I first saw the Beatles. But way before I had a crush on Paul, one of the show’s regulars was a mouse puppet with an Italian accent named Topo Gigio who joked with Sullivan, calling him Eddy.
Italian Americans reminds me of Perry Como, a crooner who also had his own show. I remember him wearing a collared shirt and V-neck cardigan long before Mr. Rogers ever zipped up his sweater. When I Googled Perry Como, I found he was nicknamed Mr. Casual because of his trademark outfit. I also stumbled upon a video of him singing “Catch a Falling Star.”
That triggers an image from the depths of my brain. I’m less than five years old in a little blue dress with bands of rick rack above the hem. My head is bowed over a star-studded locket around my neck. When I open the case, a miniature music box plays Como’s tune, “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. Never let it fade away.”
Never let it fade away. I am no longer that little girl who watched Ted Mack and Captain Kangaroo. The milk bottles and Fuller brushes of my childhood are now antiques found at flea markets. This week three people in my orbit passed from this life into the next. One of them was the husband of the woman who taught me to tap dance, finally, at my local senior center.
What I remember about her husband was she called him Mr. Wonderful. He was ready to meet his maker, and I am grateful for the way his faith and kindness brushed my life.
When it’s time for my star to fall from this sky into eternity what do I want others to catch from my life and put in their pocket? The grace of God that can never fade away. How about you?
So that’s how you start my friends. You don’t have to be a Hollywood Star, for your story to matter. As believers we can make God’s power and love visible in our ordinary lives. Try it, and see where the Lord leads.
For now, we can only see a dim and blurry picture of things, as when we stare into polished metal. I realize that everything I know is only part of the big picture. But one day, when Jesus arrives, we will see clearly, face-to-face. In that day, I will fully know just as I have been wholly known by God.
I went to church my entire childhood, but coming of age during the Woodstock Generation, I drifted farther and farther away from God. Looking back, no matter how far away I got, God was drawing me closer to his plan for my life. If I hadn’t resisted, I wouldn’t understand his faithfulness.
I was a junior in college in the fall of 1973 and had the privilege of a semester abroad in London. One night my roommate, Lydia, and I took the Tube to Picadilly and wandered the West End looking for a club that was hopping. We entered a small establishment with a dance floor crammed with bodies flailing under a disco ball. I ordered a hard cider from the bar and swallowed its tang.
A guy in a gray suit asked me to dance. Shards of light glinted off his wire-rimmed glasses as the base throbbed. He shouted, “I’m Swiss.”
I shouted back, “American.”
We gyrated with the others until the music slowed. He took me in his arms and said, “My family is wealthy. Would you like to visit Switzerland? Go skiing?” He checked his glittering watch. “We could go to my apartment and get to know each other better.”
I looked over his shoulder for Lydia. She was at a table on the perimeter sipping a foamy stout.
“Not tonight.” I slipped his arm from my waist. “I need to check in with my friend.” Before I even settled on the bench, there was a voice behind me. “Mind if we join you?”
A tall guy with shaggy chestnut hair sat down beside Lydia, and with an Irish brogue, said, “Names Ian. What’s yours?”
Another guy, with straight black hair and smiling brown eyes took my hand. “I’m Selva. Want to dance?”
I followed him back to the dance floor. “Selva means jungle in Spanish, right?” I suppose I was trying to impress him.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” he said with a British accent. “I’m from Malaysia where Selva means lucky person or jewel.” He pulled me closer for a slow dance and grinned.
“What if I don’t believe in luck?” I pulled back slightly from his embrace.
“Well, something has brought us together.” His white teeth flashed another smile, and I danced with him the rest of the evening until we were both sweaty and exhausted.
Finally, Ian hailed a hack and we all climbed in the backseat.
The driver asked, “Where to?” with a Jamaican accent.
Ian leaned forward. “Croydon.”
I turned to Selva. “No one in England seems to be English. My landlord and his sister are from Poland. I buy naan from a Pakistani tandoori. The kebab shop on Bayswater is run by Turks.”
Selva smiled and put his arm around me. “No escaping The Empire.”
After a twenty-minute ride, the car parked in front of what looked like a haunted mansion. Selva helped me out of the vehicle.
While Ian paid the cabby in November moonlight, I surveyed the vast lawns and dormant flower beds. Skeletal bushes and swaying tree limbs scratched the sky.
Lydia took my arm. “Is this where you guys live?”
Ian opened a rusty iron gate and said, “Yes.”
Selva walked through the opening. “But we also work here.”
Lydia hesitated. “What do you do? What is this place?”
Selva laughed. “It’s an asylum.”
“As in insane?” I remained beside Lydia.
“As in psychiatric hospital. Ian and I are attendants, and we have rooms on the grounds.”
Ian beckoned. “Come on, we’ll show you.”
Under the circumstances, I couldn’t believe I said no to Swiss aristocracy.
I took Selva’s hand. Lydia took Ian’s, and we entered the side door of what looked like a long dormitory.
Selva opened one of the doors and turned on the light. “These are my quarters.”
I saw Lydia and Ian disappear into the room next door. There was nowhere to sit in Selva’s room but on an iron bed pushed against the wall. A sink opposite completed the accommodations. Above the sink was a mirror and a glass shelf featuring a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a figurine with multiple arms and the head of an elephant.
Selva sat beside me. “That’s Ganesh, the Hindu god who removes obstacles whenever you begin something new.” He grinned and laid back on the bed.
“Oh.” I remained upright with my feet on the floor.
He caressed my long hair. “You remind me of my mother.”
I twisted to face him. “Your mother?”
He smoothed the bed for me to lie down beside him. “She’s beautiful and kind.”
I squinted at his line. “You’ve only known me a few hours. How can you know I’m kind?”
“Well, you danced with me, and I’m not a very good dancer,” he burst out laughing.
I laughed too and laid back. “This whole situation is bizarre.”
“Yet, you are here with me.” He smiled.
When Lydia interrupted by opening the door, I agreed to see Selva again.
Next weekend Ian and Selva invited us to go dancing at another club. When we took a break at a tiny table, Selva leaned in. “I’m going to visit my parents in Kuala Lumpur for three weeks. Would you like to come?”
I was tempted to ask if his family was wealthy and would there be skiing. “You’re kidding right? About me going with you—halfway around the world?”
“No, I am not kidding.” He suddenly sounded so formal. “I want you to meet my mother.”
“My semester is over in about three weeks, and Lydia and I have already booked a flight to Paris before we head home to the States.”
“Bummer.”
I hated the word bummer, but his accent made everything sound cool.
“Can I at least call you when I get back? I really like you.” The light in his eye told me it was true, for now, but I didn’t really expect to hear from him.
The week Selva left for Malaysia, Princess Anne and Mark Phillips were married in Westminster Abbey. Lydia and I were among the throng gathered near Buckingham Palace, the destination of the royal couple’s fairy tale coach. We watched stoic guards in red coats and bearskin hats open the iconic gate and waited with the crowd for the newlyweds to enter the palace and wave from the balcony in all their finery.
This launched a last-minute blitz of all things British whenever I wasn’t studying for finals. I checked out Covent Garden where Eliza Doolittle sold her flowers and the British Museum full of foreign gods and ideal marble men plundered while Britannia ruled the waves. I took the Tube to The Tate Museum full of moody Turner landscapes, and massive Henry Moore figures. I wandered through Kensington Gardens and discovered the Peter Pan statue. Lydia and I made a point to return to Johnny’s Fish and Chips served in newspaper, at the foot of Tower Bridge, a stone’s throw from Big Ben, Parliament, and the Tower of London where Henry the VIII lopped the heads off wives he’d grown tired of.
It was so hard to leave that legendary city, I neglected packing until the night before our flight to France. How to fit my few mementos into a small blue American Tourister? I rolled a package of British biscuits in my pajamas and folded a mohair shawl from Scotland for my mom on top of my sweaters.
As I was trying to figure out what to do with the black derby I bought on Portobello Road for my dad, and the antique safari helmet for my brother, the phone rang.
“It’s Selva. I’m back. How about a party at a friend’s house tonight? I have gifts from Malaysia.”
“I’m leaving in the morning.” I looked at Lydia, also packing, and mouthed, “Croydon?”
Lydia shook her head, “Are you crazy?”
“Yes,” I spoke into the phone, and wrote down the party’s address.
It was almost midnight by the time I navigated to a townhouse jammed with people. I was introduced as Selva’s American girlfriend. We drank in the kitchen, danced in the living room, and around three in the morning, as the crowd thinned, he pulled out a cheap necklace dangling a crucifix. “This is your gift.”
I took the crucifix, “What am I supposed to do with this? Put it on a shelf beside my toothbrush?”
“Very funny. You wear it over your heart. You’re a Christian, aren’t you? You’re American.”
He hung the broken man on a cross around my neck and hooked the clasp before I had time or words to explain the distinction between culture and faith or the fact that I and my young country were drifting farther and farther away from Sunday School and closer to New Age spirituality that felt more mysterious than singing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” like a dirge.
“Thanks,” I whispered, “but I really have to go,” thinking I would ditch the superstitious hunk of junk ASAP.
“Wait,” he put another slim package in front of me. “These are for your mother.”
I opened the box to find four placemats made from tightly woven palm fronds like the ones I received as a child on Palm Sunday. “These are beautiful!” This time I really meant it.
Selva beamed. “I bought them from an indigenous tribe and paid for them with salt.”
“Salt?” I tilted my head.
“It’s more valuable than money in the jungle. It’s used to cure fish and meat, to flavor bland cassava, and as an antiseptic.”
“Interesting. My mom will love these, but I really have to go.”
“There are no more trains at this hour.” He plumped a pillow from the couch and laid down on the living room floor. Why don’t you spend the night? Gatwick is only twenty minutes away.” I looked at others already crashed on the carpet and curled up in his arms.
In the morning light, heavy headed and rumpled, I checked a map of London and realized the airport was twenty minutes south of Croydon. My flat, where I still had to retrieve my stuff, was twenty minutes north. Panicked, I stepped over snoring bodies, and Selva helped me call a hack. We kissed good-bye, and I pressed my face against the window as the cab pulled away.
When we got to my flat, I told to the driver, “Please, wait!” and ran up three flights of stairs, strapped on my brother’s safari helmet, grabbed my suitcase in one hand and my dad’s derby in the other, dashed back down, and lunged into the vehicle.
When we got to Gatwick, Lydia was wringing her hands at the gate. I sighed. We boarded and took off for the City of Lights.
High above the earth, where country and kingdom vanish to the human eye, I peered out the tiny airplane portal and thought I was indeed lucky to meet a young man with a light in his eye that made me feel beautiful. A young man who offered me far more than our short courtship deserved, an extravagant invitation to his home far away along with so many symbols of a God I didn’t know back in 1973 when I was a swine before pearls.
But I’m no longer that vulnerable, young woman without a clue. Now I understand the crazy love of the cross that offers me a fresh identity as the beloved child of a living God.
I have a place set at the wedding feast of the lamb.
And until that day, I’ll shout Hosanna to the King of all nations—along with my brothers and sisters called to be the salt of the earth, bringing hope and healing to people hungry for a God too big to sit on a shelf.
I have been crucified with the Anointed One—I am no longer alive—but the Anointed is living in me; and whatever life I have left in this failing body I live by the faithfulness of God’s Son, the One who loves me and gave His body on the cross for me.
Everyone I’ve talked to this week is stressed to their breaking point. Problems at work, problems at home, problems with health both mental and physical. With the war in Ukraine, a global pandemic, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, high gas prices—and a cat food shortage—the whole world seems to be crumbling.
Years ago, someone asked me in desperation “What’s wrong with the world?”
I answered, “We were created for a perfect world, but we’re not in one.”
She looked at me like I’d just spoken the secret of the universe. But this is simply the story of Adam and Eve in a nutshell. Created as innocents in paradise without knowledge of evil or its presence, they were built for trust and reliance on God, not independence. So, the minute they trusted the devil instead of their creator, everything fell apart. The very paradigm of the universe shifted, and every day since the arc of chaos and disharmony has swung wide.
That said, I don’t mean this to be a theological treatise, but a practical issue we wrestle daily. As believers we know that Jesus has settled the problem of evil on our behalf forever, yet as long as we walk this earth, we are physically separated from God and must trust in his invisible existence and power on our behalf because on our own, like our ancient ancestors, we are designed without the ability to cope with sin or its consequences.
What does that look like? Surrounded by worldwide calamity, my struggle this week (at least the one I’m free to share) has been my writing. My creative brain was clogged with self-doubt and demotivated. My mind screamed does it even matter if you tell your story?Who will read your memoir? How will it benefit others? Who cares? I just wanted it out of my head. On the page. Done. Honestly, I’d rather refinish furniture, make my house pretty, and participate in book studies of other people’s books.
But then I’d feel like a loser, jealous of others who’ve been able to cross the finish line. Wondering what’s wrong with me or my story? Am I even a real writer if I don’t traditionally publish? Do I have the stamina to go that route?
Then I recalled the words in Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art. “Most of us have two lives, the life we live, and the unlived life. Between the two stands resistance.” I thought of Thoreau and his quote about the mass of men living lives of quiet desperation. I thought of Mick Jaeger who sang, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Maybe this is just part of being designed for a perfect world and not living in one. No matter what our struggle, we live with the constant hiss of the enemy in our ears.
Pressfield would tell me to be a professional and keep doing the work. He would tell me to separate my identity from my work. The apostle Paul would tell me to cling to my core identity and worth in Christ. Maybe this is part of the work, spitting out my emotions and realizing that my true feelings are often infected with the devil’s lies. Certainly, there are more colossal things going on in the world, but this was the battle I had to win this week.
So, I posted a message about my discouragement to my online writer’s group, and in response a writer friend sent me this quote.
“I also needed to hear other women’s stories in order to see and embrace my own. Sometimes another woman’s story becomes a mirror that shows me a self I haven’t seen before. When I listen to her tell it, her experience quickens and clarifies my own. Her questions rouse mine. Her conflicts illumine my conflicts. Her solutions call forth my hope. Her strengths summon my strengths. All of this can happen even when our stories and our lives are very different.”
Sue Monk Kidd from her memoir, The Dance of the Dissident’s Daughter.
These words reminded me that earlier in the week I’d read Mark 6:48 where the disciples, caught in a tempest, were straining at the oars. Jesus had told them to cross the Sea of Galilee and meet him on the other side. Matthew 14:32-33 adds while they were bailing to keep the boat from being swamped, they saw what looked like a ghost walking towards them on the water. When Peter recognized it was Jesus, the Lord called to him to step out of the boat and come to him. Against the wind, Peter obeyed and walked on water himself until he focused again on the overwhelming waves.
Clearly, I’ve been drowning in a squall of self-pity. But here’s the part I need to remember. Jesus reached out, caught Peter by the hand, and calmed the storm, just like my writer friend reached out to me. And as you can see, my fingers are once again flying across the keyboard, my heart full of hope.
This side of paradise, we’re all straining at the oars, so reach out to God and other believers in the myriad troubles that threaten to sink your boat because Jesus saves.
And remember, this is practical not just theological. These days every time I find cat food on the grocery shelf, I praise God, knowing he is faithful with the big stuff as well as the small.
It’s March, the month of St. Patrick’s Day, but I’m sure St. Patrick would agree there’s more to the day that bears his name than leprechauns and a pot of gold. Here’s what I mean.
My first conscious memory is of a one-bedroom, summer cottage on a skinny spit of land at the confluence of the Housatonic River and Long Island Sound. In front of the grey-shingled rental was the beach. Behind and across a dead-end road was the tidal river opposite Stratford, Connecticut. Based on a handful of photos, and what I now know about my adoption, I was probably two and a half. But memories at such a tender age are not recorded equally. Some details leap out with searing brightness while others remain a vague slurry of emotion. And so, I can still see the tiny black snails, glossy with sea water, embedded in the sand at low tide. They were everywhere. I was afraid to step on them, so Daddy carried me into the waves on his shoulders.
One day Daddy announced we were sailing to an island for a picnic. He lifted a small red boat he called a dinghy over his head and led the way across the road paved with crushed shells. I followed down a narrow path lined with marsh grass taller than I was. When we got to the river’s mucky edge, we all crammed in the dinghy, and Daddy sculled to the sailboat with a single oar. After clipping the little boat to the mooring, he climbed onto the deck of the larger vessel. Mommy carefully lifted me onto the deck and climbed aboard herself.
There was little wind. The sky was overcast, the air humid. Our sails luffed as we bobbed over glassy swells. I remember wearing a red striped sun suit because its elastic legs pinched my chubby thighs. By the time we spied the island, I was hot and starving.
We beached the boat on a narrow ring of sand that rose to a crown of stunted pine.
Daddy lifted me out of the boat, and before my little sneakers hit the ground, I informed him, “This is where the leprechauns live.” I’d heard stories of a faraway emerald isle. Surely there were men less than half my height just out of sight.
While mommy unpacked a red metal Coke cooler, Daddy and I combed the sands for teeny footprints. I climbed over driftwood hoping to surprise a miniature man in knickers and a waistcoat. We turned towards the trees. I led. Daddy followed.
“Time to eat.” Mommy’s voice pierced the magic.
But how could I turn back when so close to their secret kingdom? I confess, potato chips, was all it took to lure me back to our green army blanket.
When lunch was over, Daddy glanced at his tide tables. “Quick, gotta go, or we won’t have time to sail back before low tide with this little wind.”
Mommy packed up, but I dawdled, my ears perked, my eyes wide, for any sign of wee men. The slight breeze granted me a lingering search of the shoreline before releasing our vessel from the island’s spell.
By the time daddy clipped the small sailboat back to its mooring, the brackish water was too shallow to float our dinghy all the way to shore, so Mommy lifted me out of the boat and held my hand as we slogged through stinky black mud up to my thighs. How vividly I recall those endless sucking steps before we got to solid ground.
Daddy pulled the dinghy the rest of the way to the riverside while Mommy stripped off my soiled sun suit and we rinsed clean in the outside shower. Staring at my feet and shivering in the frigid water, I realized my sneakers, PF Flyers, which promised I could run faster and jump higher, were lost in the mire.
Mommy put me right into pajamas and readied my foldout cot in the living room. Time only for cereal and a quick story before bedtime. Through the open window to the porch, I could see my parents enjoying their cocktails, as the sun slipped below the horizon. I could hear ice cubes clinking in their glasses, as waves crashed on the snail-speckled beach. Windchimes tinkled, and I remember thinking, if only. If only I hadn’t turned back for potato chips, surely, I would’ve found my leprechaun.
In the wake of that long-ago voyage, I see my child’s heart unbounded. No line of demarcation yet drawn between the ordinary and the extraordinary. No curtain yet pulled between the natural and the supernatural. Completely unaware I was looking for far more than a leprechaun, surely my child’s heart was already on the hunt for the divine. The door back to Eden still ajar.
From the beginning, creation in its magnificence enlightens us to His nature. Creation itself makes His undying power and divine identity clear, even though they are invisible;
The growing war in Ukraine has made me much more aware of the freedom, comfort, and family I enjoy. Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s threatened or gone. Such was the case when I was in fourth grade on a cold, gray day in March 1963.
It was snowing when I raced off the school bus, eager to get home, out of my wool skirt, and into my snow pants. Helen Thompson and I were were going to build a fort in the massive snowbank at the end of her driveway, but Mrs. Thompson flagged me down in the middle of the street before I got home. Her dilated pupils, searching for light in the storm, focused on my face. “Your Dad called to say your Mom had an accident. He wants you to wait here until he comes home.”
Worry lines pinched her black eyebrows, as I pondered the word accident. Polly Handel had a skiing accident, broke her leg, and everyone signed her cast. Laura Leary had broken her foot fooling around with a baseball bat. She got a walking cast and could still hobble around the bases. It never occurred to me that accident meant Mommy would be in the hospital for five weeks. That her accident would make the front page of the Schenectady Gazette, “Woman Hit by Bus.” That the photo would show snowbanks on the corners of Balltown Road and Route 7 even more colossal than those at the end of the Thompson’s driveway. That the police would report an impatient bus driver rushed a red light, hit Mommy broadside, threw her barely hundred-pound body out of our two-ton Ford station wagon, across four lanes of traffic, and onto another snowbank the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.
No, the reaction Mrs. Thompson was looking for wasn’t on my own face. My ten-year-old mind was intent on simply filling my snowball arsenal for an icy Armageddon. Me and my friend against a world of invisible enemies on the other side of the driveway.
Daddy picked me up from Helen’s and my brother from Eric Snell’s. I slithered out of Helen’s borrowed snow pants and hung my frozen mittens on the heater grate. Daddy popped my favorite TV dinner, Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes and peas, and Bruce’s, spaghetti and garlic bread, into the oven. Bruce and I set up TV trays in the den because Daddy said we could watch a Tarzan movie on the Early Show while we ate supper–something unheard of unless Mommy and Daddy were going out.
I had no idea Daddy had been waiting for the doctors to remove Mommy’s ruptured spleen, set her broken collar bone and pelvis, and re-inflate her punctured lung. I had no idea that while I was heaving snowball after snowball at the invisible bad guys, Daddy was waiting to see if Mommy’s brain still worked after sloshing around her skull like the contents of a snow globe.
In the morning Daddy dropped Bruce and I off at the Palmeris, family friends. Mrs. Palmeri gave us strawberry Pop-Tarts, and we watched Captain Kangaroo with Tony Palmeri until the school bus arrived.
After school, Mrs. Spath, a gray-haired woman I’ve never seen before, was in our kitchen making ham steaks and succotash. She didn’t know I didn’t especially like ham and Bruce hated succotash because it contained lima beans. But every day the old lady in the belted black dress came back to do our laundry, make dinner, and babysit, even though we weren’t babies anymore.
My teacher, Mrs. Barrington, was teaching us how to add fractions and find the lowest common denominator. One Thursday during math, my new best friend, Marie invited me to sleep over. Since Mommy was still in the hospital, Daddy said an easy yes.
Friday after school, I rode bus number four instead of bus number twenty-two, and Marie and I got off at her stop. Marie’s mom was divorced and worked, so we walked into a motherless kitchen. Marie got a Pepperidge Farm chocolate cake out of the freezer and handed me a fork. We hacked at it until the whole package was gone. She showed me the phone in her tiny room. It had a long, curly cord that we stretched into her closet to make prank phone calls.
When her mother came home later, she said we could sleep in Marie’s older brother’s room because he had a double bed. There was a TV right in his room, and we stayed up way past the Flintstones watching the Tonight Show with Jack Parr. The audience was laughing, but I didn’t get the jokes. When the only thing broadcast was the Indian chief test pattern, Marie turned off the set, and hauled an 8mm projector out of her brother’s closet. I fell asleep watching home movies of her father with her whole family skiing down Mt. Fujiyama in Japan where her dad was stationed before the divorce.
I didn’t see Mommy until they took all the tubes out and she could smile. She was cranked up in traction as I told her about Lum Fung’s Chinese restaurant where Daddy took us after church for Sunday dinner. I told her how Bruce and I tried moo goo gai pan, egg foo young, egg rolls, and wonton soup, and how there was a huge picture of a red dragon hovering over our table.
After Easter, Mommy came home, but not before I learned what it was to have a kitchen without a mother in it, and that a father could leave you without a trace of his existence except grainy films taken in a foreign country. And not before Marie showed me the broken-down piano in her garage and taught me to play my part of the duet, “Heart and Soul.”
So, sisters in Christ, let’s pray for those caught in the war in Ukraine, and may it remind us that daily we walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. That sounds ominous except as an encouragement to trust God to fight the battles we could never win on our own and to hold each other tight until kingdom come.
Even in the unending shadows of death’s darkness,
I am not overcome by fear.
Because You are with me in those dark moments,
near with Your protection and guidance,
I am comforted.
You spread out a table before me,
provisions in the midst of attack from my enemies;
You care for all my needs, anointing my head with soothing, fragrant oil,
filling my cup again and again with Your grace.
Certainly Your faithful protection and loving provision will pursue me
Like the whole world, I’m transfixed by the David and Goliath conflict in Ukraine and how it has illustrated truth I know, but need to trust as if my life depended on it, as if I were fighting my own war.
I think it was Plato who said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
Sisters, no matter what Goliath you’re fighting in your private war, remember it was God who directed David’s smooth stone, and Goliath fell dead.
So, let’s pray for each other and the people of Ukraine and Russia for Jesus calls us to be more than kind–to love our friends and enemies.
“The most important commandment is this:
Listen, O Israel! The Lord our God is the one and only Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. The second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these.”
Don’t we all love before and after shots. My favorite version of before and after are home renovation shows on HGTV. It’s what I binge watch in bad weather while I use the treadmill. And, I confess, sometimes I fast forward to get past the ugly pictures of the house before the amazing transformation at the end of the show. That’s the payoff after all, what we’re waiting for, the after pic.
“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”
1Peter 2:9 (NIV)
Then he challenged us to describe what it looks like to be called out of darkness into his marvelous light—a kind of before and after pic with and without Jesus that shows the payoff of trusting Him with your life.
Personally, I can sum it up in two words: shame and grace.
If that sounds a little churchy, let me be more specific.
For years, actually decades, even after I was “saved” at age 29, I still identified myselfwith my sins as a stupid high school girl who should have known better, as a college girl who thought she was too smart for God, and finally as a young, insecure wife ready to betray her faithful husband. That’s shame, the before shot.
The after shot was the relentless revelation that trusting Jesus’ death wiped out the score against me and gave me a new identity under his name. As a Christ– ian, I am holy, chosen, and beloved (Col. 3:12). That’s grace. The incredulous relief, that I’m not that girl anymore! In fact, I’m not anything I do. I’m who God loves. That’s the payoff!
I’m unchained from my sin, past, present, and future.
I’m no longer confused about my self-worth. It’s rock solid.
I’m no longer pointed towards sinful dead ends, but towards an awesome eternity.
I’m accepted without having to perform or prove myself?
I don’t have to compare myself to others. God has a plan just for me.
I have a place to belong in the family of God. I am never alone.
I can relax and be real, free to love others and not condemn myself.
This may seem petty and ironic, but sisters, pushing 70, I finally feel pretty enough, and smart enough because I don’t have to be perfect.
I have more than enough to accomplish any and everything the Lord intends to do with and through imperfect me as I trust and obey him.
Sounds pretty lofty I know, andat times, I confess all this comes crashing down. I can be a worried mom, a selfish wife, a bad friend, a judgmental observer, even a doubting believer. But here’s the thing, we can never blow it with God because of who he is, not who we are.
Photo by Anton Murygin on Unsplash
One of my favorite shows on HGTV is called “Rehab Addict,” filmed in Detroit, a rust-belt city full of neglected, often abandoned properties in such bad shape no one else would think they’re worth the purchase price. Maybe Rehab Addict is a good nickname for God because he comes to us in our dark disrepair, and loves us enough to take us down to the studs, rip off our rotten roof, the stubborn wallpaper, and replace our sagging foundation with Jesus the living corner stone.
And even when he discovers our old wiring has to be replaced, or our furnace is no good, he keeps on working, day after day, moment by moment, sticking with us, building, building until the end of the show when our total transformation is revealed. This is what it looks like for me to be called out of darkness into his marvelous light. What does it look like for you?
Photo by Kitera Dent on Unsplash
“But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you– from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.
PERFECTIONISM AND THE CREATIVE MINDSET REQUIRED TO FINISH A BOOK.
During the Olympics, there’s always lots of talk about sports psychology. The Apostle Paul also talks about what it takes to finish the race. In Philippians 3:13-14 he advocates leaving the past behind and trusting our new ID in Christ, so we can run the race marked out specifically for us until it’s time to go home to heaven and receive our eternal rewards. If I know all this, why am I struggling to finish a book I’m sure the Lord called me to write?
At the suggestion of a new Hope*writer friend, I picked up Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art, a book dedicated to the psychology of creativity. The quote below hit me right between the eyes.
“the amateur…overidentifies with his avocation…He defines himself by it…the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he isoverly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure.The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.”
Steven Pressfield from The War of Art
Ouch and hallelujah, the fraternal twins of truth!
It took me ten years to complete and publish my first book, Teacher Dropout, Finding Grace in an Unjust Schoola creative non-fiction based on teaching in an urban middle school. It took a decade not only because I needed that long to sort out the spiritual issues of the most difficult teaching assignment of my career, but because it took that long to let go of my written work.
Why? Because Pressfield is correct. Because I overidentified with my work, I wanted my book to be perfect. Ironically, the theme of the book was escaping what I call professional co-dependence, relying on my professional identity for self-worth above my root identity in Christ. Even believing this concept, my fear of failure impeded my first book’s release. I guess I’m learning the same lesson over again, not as a teacher, but as a writer.
Now I see, according to Pressfield, it’s impeding the release of my second book. For ten years, I’ve been dabbling with my blog, and writing a personal memoir about coming of age and coming to God when female role models did a head-spinning 180 from June Cleaver, Leave- it-to-Beaver TV mom, to Grace Slick, sexy, psychedelic lead singer for the Jefferson Airplane who invited the Woodstock generation down the rabbit hole. Yes, it’s taken a long time as Marion Roach Smith says to sort out what I learned from what I’ve been through, but it’s more than that.
Photo by oPhoto by Arnaud Steckle on Unsplash
The deepest human need is to be loved and accepted. We all want to belong, to be affirmed for our gifts and talents, to find our role in the community. If I already believe the grace of God offers unconditional membership in the family of Christ, why am I still frozen with fear of failure and rejection?
After reading The War of Art I understand that as long as my imperfect book defines me, I’ll never finish it. I’ll be afraid to launch it into a world where it/I can be lampooned.
Pressfield’s advice in a nutshell is to keep what he calls resistance at bay, that internal, insidious voice that whispers relentlessly we are disqualified, lazy, and untalented. Or that our story is too revealing, too personal, and nobody wants to read that stuff, anyway, so why don’t we just give up and do something more important! Do anything else ! Watch TV or sort socks! Anything to keep us away from the creative work God has called us to do.
And how do we resist? By being what Pressfield calls professionals, not amateurs. Stand up to the bully he names Resistance and simply do the work. A professional doesn’t have the option of not going to work. We must show up day after day and as Jane Yolen says, keep butt in chair. Day after day, trusting God to be with us leading the way, calling to mind the script we were born to write. Yes, born to write!
Although Pressfield’s psychology isn’t based strictly on Christian dogma, in many ways it rings true with God’s word.
“Farmers who wait for perfect weather never plant. If they watch every cloud, they never harvest.”
Ecclesiastes 11:4 (NLT)
Yes, craft matters. Yes, we always want to do our best. But in a fallen world, even our best will never be ideal. What we need to keep right between our eyes is not our own perfection, but the power of God made perfect in our weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:9)
So, sisters, whatever your creative bent, believe it is from God, cast it to the winds, and trust Him, to carry it to the hearts He intends. This is my advice to myself and my prayer for anyone who needs to complete their work for the Lord above.
