Listening

In my living room, right now, there's a wonderful sound: the voice of a boy becoming a good read-alouder, entertaining my son with a story before naptime.  

First, they chose stories, then built a blanket fort.  Add flashlights to the mix and Fred the Cat figuring out what this creation might be, and you have a recipe for delight.  

A recipe for friendship.  

Well-Earned Siestas

I googled "at home bike tune up," discovered how dreadfully I care for my bicycle (I add air to the tires about once a year...), and decided to at least wash it a little with the "gentle dish soap suds" described.  I swept and washed all the super-webby spiders off the bike trailer and hooked it up behind my bike.  I adjusted helmets for the past year's growth and fitting over ball caps.

And we were off :0)

It's Farmers' Market season again in Lyons Falls, and we made the most of it with playground, firemen's lunch, running around with sticks, making a new friend, choosing our purchases, and tucking it all into the back of the trailer for the ride home.

Lincoln was given the task of holding the sunbrella, with a reminder to hold on tightly so last year's episode of "it flew away when we were on the bridge" wasn't repeated.  He did a great job :0)

Lewis fell asleep about 4 minutes into the ride home, and Lincoln put up with his brother's wayward bobbing head like a champ.

And now they'll siesta the afternoon away.  What a day!

Oh, and my boy is going to be 4 years old tomorrow.  What the hey?! <3

Circling the Issue

It's a season of introspection.  You know the feeling: when all sorts of outside influences, intentionally or not, speak to your spirit about a particular issue.  You may want to ignore it, but it will not be ignored.  

I've been reading The Circle Maker, which has come highly recommended from every person in my social circle who's read it.  Its subtitle is "Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears."  Now, I have some pretty big dreams--and some pretty great fears.  So ushering in dreams and conquering fears seems like a worthwhile pursuit, don't you think?  

But here's the thing: I thought the book was going to focus on the dreams and fears we have for ourselves.  And yes, these are worth praying circles around.  But what's actually been standing out to me is the Miraculous that God wants to work because we're praying circles around 

GOD'S GREATEST DREAMS. 

And that's a scary thing.  So it becomes true, for me, that my spirit perceives at some level that the mirror-dim dreams that float around in the back of my mind--those exhilarating, mysterious, generation- and region-transforming dreams that the Holy Spirit resurrects in my heart every year or so--those dreams also are wrapped up inside my biggest fears.  

I like my comfortable life.  I don't really want my life to be radically different, turned upside-down for the purpose of investing in this generation of children.  But I know, too, that as long as I hold on to being comfortable, my influence will not extend outside my comfortable walls.  The Lord's work will go undone by me.  

There is no way for me to know What May Be, or What Could Have Been.  I love control, love knowing what to expect.  But the only thing I really have any control over is how I spend this moment.  How will my Present Tense be spent?  And I know that more than any other pursuit, what God desires of me, what He's compelling me to do, is to Pray.  I have to learn to pray.  I so desperately want to be able to learn it by reading a book, by learning from someone else's experience.  But that just won't do.  The only "trick" for getting the hang of being a prayer warrior of any clout at all is to 

just pray. 

So maybe the first circle I need to pray through is 

EXTEND MY WALLS.  Less of me, and more of You, God!

And those of you who are already decent pray-ers?  Would you lift me up?  That I would just pray, and see at a profoundly deeper level what the Lord has for me to put my hands to?  Thank you, friends!

What Friendship Does to Us

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

  “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves 

 “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
― C.S. Lewis

I have a long history of friends.  And I am very slowly coming to understand what sort of friend I am, what sort of friendship my spirit craves.  From the beginning of time God has declared to us, "It is not good for man to be alone," and because we are made in His image--the three-in-one, perfect-fellowship God--we are never whole while we hold ourselves back from loving and being loved.

I tend to think of my life as laid out around groups of friends: my St. Al's friends, my high school friends, my Mansfield friends, my Paul Smith's friends, my Beaver Camp friends, my current friends, with whom I'm doing life and raising my family.  And for the most part, each group is distinct from the others, and so I organize and interpret my life and growth by them.  But every now and then--actually, way more often than I'd expect--members of different groups mingle and know each other and cross boundaries and connect my circles.  Such delightful connections happen most frequently among friends who are part of the family of God, and I recognize what C. S. Lewis spoke of:  “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

It occurs to me that as social beings, we must commemorate significant changes, the beginnings and endings of any season.  When the ceremony, so to speak, does not happen, we feel the lack of closure very deeply, and seem to never quite have peace about the change.

For example, when I was in middle school my great-grandmother died.  And do you know what stuck with me most about her passing?  It was sometime after Christmas, and my mother had nagged me over and over again to send Granny Bill a thank you note for her gift to me.  And I never did.  And then she was dead, and I never could.  It doesn't seem like a big thing, but I knew that I had failed to show her honor when it was in my power to do so, and it sat heavy on my conscience for a long time.

When we celebrate our personal beginnings and endings, we acknowledge that our lives are significant.  When we celebrate the milestones of others, we acknowledge that their lives are significant, and that who they are matters to us.

For summer staff, Beaver Camp is a microcosm of Life: for two months, we do life together in very intense ways.   We all set our watches to the Camp Clock, we dine together, sleep together under the stars and in crowded cabins, shower and poop together.  We train together, brainstorm together, fail and succeed together.   We pray together, study together, laugh and cry together.  We build each other up.  We wear each other down.  We come alongside each other and lay aside our differences for the common goal of transformed lives; we think we're there to transform the lives of campers, but almost without realizing it, we are transformed ourselves.  The Lord does a mighty work, because we have determined that what matters most is Love, and we watch Him pour it out for us in remarkable ways.

And we mark the milestones throughout the summer.  We have a welcome and introduction to kick off training.  We have a test and then a commissioning service to end training and begin Summer.  For the next seven weeks, we have ceremonies, for campers and for staff, to mark the beginnings and the ends, and we have ceremonies to celebrate what happens in the middle.

It is so intense.  It is exhausting.  It is WONDERFUL.  And around week 4, everybody secretly begins dreading the End.  For a couple of weeks, it looms in the future as something we don't really want to face.  Then we realize we're tired, and begin to look forward to the comparative rest of college life and other pursuits.  And suddenly, the End arrives, and we're almost surprised.

Sticky Church: we are like legos, with a finite number of friend connectors.  When a dear friend moves away, it frees a peg to connect with someone else with whom you could share a beautiful friendship.

Hope is a Verb

I've only seen the first half of these photographs, and the tears are running down my face.  Wonder, pain, beauty, faithfulness, despair, the inevitable forming of the stories that might have branched out from every one the images--but above all, Hope.  And Love.

Perfectly Capturing the Human Experience

Waiting for the Paint To Dry

For months after we moved into this home, Lincoln would proudly take any visitor upstairs to "see his pink room."  And it isn't just that it was pink.  But it was this pale, sickly pink wallpaper with antique floral bouquets and pearl strings all over it.  And definitely pink carpet.  

For the past year, I've been talking about painting the boys' bedroom, and discussing my ideas with Lincoln for a Charley Harper-inspired woodland mural.  Is it a mural when it goes around a whole room but is more of a motif than a detailed surround-picture?  

After awhile Lincoln transitioned from showing off his pink room to asking, "Mommy, why haven't you painted my room yet?"  

And the truth is because I've been afraid of this project.  We have lathe and plaster walls with multiple layers of wallpaper.  They are the opposite of perfectly smooth, straight surfaces.  Then there's all that paint PREP, that isn't really painting.  Ugh.  And then what if my painting hand does not match my imagination?  I have a very particular, precise style I'm going for here.  

And then I realized two things: yes, plan such a project for Spring Break, when it's ok to span across multiple days and I'll have the help of my hubby; and just get over the fear.  Dive in and create something on those walls that will be on no other boys' walls, ever.  It will be awesome.  

So I'm not finished.  I'm waiting for the paint to dry.  But the first coat is finished.  And the rest should be easier.  And more fun :0)

Chopping Days

April has arrived, which means Chopping Days have begun!  

Chopping days happen every year at the border between winter and spring, when I get the itch to help the sunshine dispel the snow and ice ASAP.  So it's not a calendar date which begins this Event, and it isn't (officially) celebrated beyond my driveway.  (But I'm sure there are other Choppers out there--North Country winters drive us to some drastic measures.) 

They begin with a certain intensity of the sunshine, punching microscopic holes in the ice that slowly grow and connect and make the ice noticeably weak.  Chopping Days begin with a low boil in my blood that insists we go outside, and inevitably I stomp around with my boots to see if the ice is old enough yet.  

And when the time is right, I just go at it!  Make way for spring!  Make way for picnics!  Make way for play!

Plus there's real satisfaction in swinging a mattock around and smashing ice...especially when those ice chunks are immediately fashioned into an ice palace by my boys, so thrilled to be outside in fleeces and helping the spring come faster :0)