I Want to Write Love

As I was driving my son to school on Wednesday, we got into a conversation about what he'd like to be when he grows up. The conversation went as follows:

Me: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Josh: (with an unsaid "duh" in his voice that I particularly appreciate coming from a four-year old) "A man."  Right. Rephrase.
Me: "When you're a man, what would you like to do with your spare time?"
Josh: "I'd like to write. I'd like to write love all by myself."

It took me a minute to catch up with him but I got there. At first glance it sounds like this incredibly spiritual and deep answer that reflects his desire to explore the concept of love. The truth is that I'm always making him sign cards to people and he's got the whole writing of his name thing down.  Lately, though, he's been wanting to write the whole phrase, "Love, Josh" all by himself and he's having trouble. It seems that his current life's ambition is rooted in his most pressing frustration.  See problem, make life's destiny solving that problem. Very practical and I can respect him for that.  I definitely wish all of life's problems could be dealt with by having a clear goal in mind and just putting your whole self into it.

However, the bigger lesson I took from the whole exchange was not his problem solving skills. It was his answer to that first poorly phrased question that we ask of people of a young age all the time. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Not a question about what you'd like to do (although that's what we mean by the asking), but a question that ends up revolving around identity. I was so glad he responded the way he did. He told me exactly what he'd be- a man. Now, hopefully there will be some wonderful adjectives that precede that identity that are rooted in his relationship with God, but at the core, his identity will not be wrapped up in what he does.  It will be in who he is.

I will be 32 years old in about one week and I still feel like I ask this question of myself all the time. What do I want to be when I grow up? And I think my screwed up self still attempts to attach my identity to some sort of career, some job. When I took this job with InterVarsity at the ripe old age of 23, I did not foresee doing it for this long. I'm not sure what I thought I'd do after it, but I sure as heck did not envision raising my own salary for 9 years and still walking around college campuses every day of my life, wondering how it's possible that 80's fashions have made a comeback or why people are running around with water guns and headbands in the middle of midterms.  And while I'm glad to be on campus this year, I've felt a certain restlessness, a certain desire to reevaluate that question of what I want to be. Of  whether or not this is still my calling. I was certain of it at 23. Now, I'm not so sure.

Don't get me wrong. I love my students. I still think I have one of the most interesting and challenging jobs in the world. It invigorates and exhausts me all at the same time. But I'm finding my mind wandering more than it used to. The fear of what it would be like to stay home with my son full time was conquered last year during sabbatical.  My very real sense of his leaving for kindergarten in less than two years has created this urgency in me to make sure I enjoy every minute, particularly as I can't be sure he won't be my only child and I really don't want to miss a moment of his growing up. Do I regret having worked these last four years? No way. But I am at a place of wanting to be sure that if I continue to work it's for the right reasons, that God is continuing to call me to minister in this way, rather than staying out of comfort, momentum or fear of change.

That leaves me in an interesting place. I had hoped a job decision could easily be made by a pregnancy but have learned, yet again, that waiting for that to decide anything is a procrastinatory copout and could really prolong any decision, well, for forever. There's no real way of knowing if or when that will ever be a deciding factor.

Sabbatical last fall was an intense time of exploring who I've become and growing in who I understand my God to be.  It was a phenomenal journey that set me free in so many ways to embrace who God has made me to be as woman, wife, mother, friend, secure in the love of God.

For the first time in a long time, I'm asking some hard questions about my calling and desires, trying to dig deep and figure out if there are new steps to take or whether the path I'm on is still the right one. This new season is a whole different type of dreaming and praying that I never really did last year.  What do I really want to do? It may lead me right back to what I'm already doing or it may not. 

Either way, I thankful that I'm not looking to answer the question of who I want to be and hopeful that I won't confuse the two questions as easily as I have in the past.

Ice Cold Soy Milk, Omnipresence and Growing Up

Lately my child has taken to making really specific requests of us. Whereas in the past, I could count on him to ask for a "drink" or a "snack", now I most often hear things like. "Mom, I could really use some ice cold soy milk and thinly sliced apples." Um, ok. Glad you specified since I was planning on giving you warm, spoiled milk. Sometimes it feels like he is three going on 15. Throw in the mood swings of late, rooted in his desire to abruptly and adamantly refuse to nap anymore, and it does feel like I'm living with a teenager.  Last week he even started a sentence with the word "apparently" (used correctly, by the way) and went on to tell us a delightfully narrated story about a friend of his from school.

It's funny to watch a whole person develop. To go from drooling, high-maintenance, non-sleeping, refusal-to-eating, crying machine to physically miniature version of your husband who has specific desires, interests and quirks, someone who can generally hold a reasonable and rational conversation and asks to go to bed when he's "too tired to keep my head up."  And I think to myself, as I'm interacting with this tiny human, "how in the world did he become who he is?" The answer to some of those questions are easy. Where did he get that funny way he quirks his mouth after he asks a question? Well, Reed does that exact thing. Why is he a perfectionist? Both parents, bingo.  Why does he need to know the meaning to every word ever spoken in his presence? I'll take credit for that, thank you very much.

But the bigger things. What causes him to absolutely shiver with joy at the passing of any kind of construction site? Why is he completely fascinated by his esophagus and trachea and can tell you at any given moment what part of his body his food is now working its way through?  Why does he hang back at social events for at least 15 minutes before he engages anyone besides us?  Why does he always, always wake up at 7 am on the dot, always follow the exact routine(bathroom, get dressed, play with matchbox cars for roughly 2.3 minutes) and then come smashing into my room and wake me up with the words, "Mom, are you ready to play?" And why does he always ask me questions that are way beyond what I think he should be worrying about. "Mom, if God is with me, is he also able to be with someone on the other side of the world?" Hmm. Omnipresence definitely sounds like a topic for a 3-year old. Don't even ask me how I tried to answer that one.

One of my favorite songs when I was younger was "I Won't Grow Up" from Peter Pan.  Some of you might know it- my favorite line is "If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up, not me!" I sing this song a bunch and then like to tell Josh that I don't want him to ever grow up, that I like him just the way he is. He'll usually say something ridiculous like, "Nooo, Mom, I'm GOING to grow up and be big and strong just like you and Daddy. You can't stop me!"  But there are days I wish I could just freeze him. Stop time at this sweet phase of unabashed curiosity, where the world is this huge, mysterious place to be explored and conquered, and where his new pajamas with rockets on them bring him more joy than just about anything else I could think to give him.

This whole parenting thing takes a lot of trust.  It's hard for me to think of sending him off on a school bus to kindergarten in less than two years and not knowing what is really going to be said to him by other kids or if he's going to be bullied on the playground.  I have no control over some of the words he will hear in his young life or what mature concepts might get introduced to well before I'm ready to explain them. I can't predict who he'll meet and what kinds of teachers he'll have and who our neighbors will be when we move, most likely, for Reed's post-doc in a few years. All I can do is play with him a ton now, answer his crazy questions to the best of my ability, help him understand who God is and pray like crazy that he'll himself trust God enough to help him through the challenges to come.  That's hard, friends. That's so hard when I want to be in control of everything that happens to him!

But, as I step back and watch him in this growing up thing I'm struck anew by how crazy God is. By how beautiful it is that he's told us to have faith like a little child because when I hear the questions my son asks about God, when I hear his trust that God is with him and answers his prayers and will give him courage for the things he's afraid of, I'm reminded that sometimes I just make things too complicated. I worry too much about so many little questions, about ridiculous things like whether my son will lock himself in his room when he's a teenager, that I can just miss the bigger picture, miss the ways that God is changing me and growing me as I watch my own son grow.

So, I'm trying to step back a little from all those little ways I could panic. Let myself chuckle when the soy milk requests come and help him know that no matter how he changes or how quickly it seems he grows up, God and I are right beside him all the way.

And that we'll never, never be too old to climb a tree!  

Grief, Sapphires and Shooting Up

Last week I found myself sneaking up the stairs to the second floor bathroom of the building in which our large group meeting with InterVarsity takes place each week. In my hand I held a small, zippered pouched filled with, I am not kidding, drugs and needles. Worried that an overzealous student or security guard might decide to answer the call of nature while I was in the middle of administering said drugs, I figured the second floor was safer than the first. The last thing I need is to be written up in the paper the next day by a media that dearly loves catching us religious folks in all kinds of tom-foolery. "Campus Minister Discovered With Needle and Drugs: Investigation into Campus Activities to Follow, Dean Says."

But there I was, belly bared, alcohol swab at-the-ready and needle glistening in the likely unhygienic glare of the flourescent lightbulbs. And I laughed.  I couldn't help myself. And I thought to myself, "Now, how did I ever get to this point in life? What the heck? I'm hiding out in a dirty bathroom, injecting myself with drugs and in near hysterical laughter over the whole thing." No doubt I was very lucky that no one did walk in.

So, how did I get here, actually? Well, I chalk it all up to the process of grief. A few months ago I got fed up with my sadness. Fed up with feeling like I wasn't over my miscarriage, that I hadn't moved on. After all, it was over a year and a half ago. I should be healed, I should be well, I shouldn't think about it all the time. Last fall, my sabbatical director had suggested I think about some counseling to help. I had shrugged it off. While I was more than happy to tell other people I thought counseling was great, the thought of getting some myself was just terrifying. However, after many more months of frustratio and sadness and after getting a little flyer in the mail in June that offered free counseling at our church, I signed up. Couldn't hurt, right?

So, here I am about 6 weeks after it started. The first thing I learned is that I'm not "over it" because I never actually grieved. Turns out it's not a passive process. You'd think I know this- I've said it enough times to others. I've told people to take their time, to grieve well, to let themselves feel something and talk about it. And after being asked how I felt about the whole thing multiple times, I've come away with the very strong realization  that I don't know how to express my feelings about any of it (Enter two helpful handouts with words like sad, frustrated and numb to help me choose). Seriously, I have had to look at a piece of paper to figure out how to express an actual emotion.

Now I'm showing up every week and trying to use feeling words and not thinking words, which is no small feat for me. I'm trying to talk to people outside of that time who can walk with me through it. I'm trying not to feel annoyed at myself that I'm not over it, to give myself the room to grieve that I never gave myself two winters ago.  And you know what? It's not as terrifying as I thought. I'm not dissolving into uncontrollable sobs that prevent me from functioning as a human for the rest of the day. The risks I've taken in sharing have turned out well. And my newest risk, buying a (very tiny!) sapphire necklace to commemorate the baby I'll never meet, who would've been born in September '09? Well, I find myself reaching for it a few times a day and rather than it reminding me of my sadness, I have been infused with comfort and hope, that it's okay to move on, that it's okay to hope for a new baby not to heal myself and replace that other child, but just for the sake of getting to know that new little person for who he or she will be.

In the midst of all this, my doctor suggested going on a drug regimen for my infertility that included multiple days of injections that had to take place between 6 and 8 pm. Hence, the lugging of earlier stated materials to campus.  At first, I panicked. I thought, "this costs money, there's nothing wrong with me, we'll just keep waiting." And as I began to think through all the reasons why I haven't grieved well, not the least of which is that I hate getting help from anyone, I realized here was yet another opportunity to move forward. To admit that for some reason my body won't do this on its own right now and that it's alright to get a little help from the medical profession. That it's perfectly acceptable and, indeed, beneficial to need other people. 

Well, friends, it looks like I'm on my grief journey. Finally. Not that the last 20 months haven't been part of it. In fact, I think God was doing a lot in my heart through those months of denial to prepare me for this point. I needed to come to a place where it was a good thing to ask for help and where asking for help is leading to hope.

So, I'm taking each day one step at a time, letting myself talk about the grief with actual people, occasionally reaching up to touch my unborn child's birthstone and hoping against hope that I don't get caught shooting up on campus. 

Navigating Mom World (and why sometimes I'd rather do it sans other moms)

A friend of mine recently posted an innocent status to her facebook profile asking people who knew her to pray that her newborn son would eat and sleep a little better.  By the time I even read the status, there were so many replies it took me 10 minutes just to read them. All but one of them included unsolicited advice about breastfeeding. Join a La Leche league group, call a lactation consultant and, of course, that oh-so-Churchillian adage to "nevah, nevah, nevah give up."  As someone who thought that nursing was just about the most difficult thing I've ever done and whose child wanted nothing to do with it, I myself received a lot of unsolicited and, frankly, demoralizing advice. The last thing you want, when you already feel like a failure, is for about a hundred people to help you understand even more deeply how much of a failure you actually are.

Why do women do this to each other? Why do we, upon reading a simple status, a simple plea to listen and hear, immediately unload our entire experience and opinion on the unsuspecting shoulders of a sister? Why is it so hard to just listen, to just pray in response, to just love people without feeling the need to hear our own selves talk, to contribute our own personal feelings on any and all subjects?  I know I have this tendency myself and am praying hard that God would keep my mouth closed, unless I'm specifically asked to weigh in.

I've been a mom for almost four years now. Some of those days, in fact many of those days, have been among the most delightful of my life. There were some, though, that have been among the most challenging. Kids don't come with instruction books. Parenting takes a lot of trust, involves a lot of mistakes and, mostly, calls for a lot of hope that God is doing more work in my child than I could ever do and that love will cover over a multitude of my own parenting sins.  When I've kept my eyes on Him, I've experienced more peace in parenting than I could ever hope for, even when I'm still not sure about the answer to a specific problem.

A lot of my own glitches with parenting self-confidence, however, have mostly arisen after conversations with other moms. What could be a helpful community of people messily trying to raise their kids and love each other well in the midst of it often turns into insipid competition and overly-opinionated advice giving. "My three year old is reading, isn't yours?" "I think it should be a law for all women to have to breast-feed for the first six months, don't you?" "My 2 year old is 4 feet tall, isn't yours a little shrimpy?"   Ok, ok, I've never heard that last one, but I wouldn't be surprised if I did.  I wonder what parenting would be like without the internet, without pediatric percentiles to make us virulently aware of every little pound and 1/2 inch on our childs bodies and without so much of our need to play the comparison game.

I for one am hoping that the Lord will continually make me a better listener, both to Him and to the women and men around me who are just trying to love their kids well and trust God in the process.  Maybe one result will be that I myself won't fall into that comparison game- both for myself as a parent and for my child's sake! What freedom that would be.  

Tarheels, Spiders and Culture Shock

The last time in my life that I really experienced culture shock was when I studied abroad.  I distinctly remember ordering a pizza and having the person on the other side of the counter ask me, "And would you like sweet corn or tuna on that?" Huh?! I learned quickly in the midst of that to avoid most British food establishments, to answer the question "Are you alright?" with the words fine or good because the actual American translation of said question was actually "What's up?" and that it was apparently perfectly normal for me to have to walk through a pub to get to the student gym.

However, culture shock is once again in full swing for me. I spent 13 years of my life as a Spider, first as a student, then as a volunteer and staff with InterVarsity.  Richmond is a cozy little University settled on a fairly relaxed-feeling campus with relatively abundant parking, a chaplain's office that actually supports campus ministries and the ability to see a lot of the same faces as you walk across campus each day.  In InterVarsity-land, our group was about 100 students, give or take a few over the years, with a leadership team that hovered between 20 and 30 students and one staff, me, to make decisions.

Last Thursday I kicked off my life as a Tarheel. My new leadership team? 100 people. The university? Not a cozy little place where you see the same people all the time.  We've met more people at Carolina in our new student events than actually show up as freshmen on Richmond's campus. Happy and informative little organization fair? No, picture the most crowded concert you've ever been to, add lots of free food, about a billion organization tables advertising their wares, multiple inappropriate tshirts that could probably get you kicked off Richmond's campus and then set the whole thing in a sauna.  They call this Fall Fest. Oh, excuse me, "we" call this Fall Fest.

You see, I'm having trouble changing my prepositions. For 13 years I've been a Spider. Any other mascot has always been "they."  And at Richmond, while we were loyal, we weren't exactly a bastion of school spirit. In fact, the most school spirit I saw each year there was usually displayed at the volleyball tournament at our annual InterVarsity camp when competing for the spirit award. 

Yet three nights ago I found myself with my sweaty arms around several people I didn't know, swaying to the Carolina Alma Mater in a Krispy Kreme parking lot. I wondered to myself if the freshmen who were there were as shell-shocked as I was, but began to realize that maybe they chose Carolina because they already knew about this culture, the, well, "hugeness" of everything I've been encountering. 

So, classes started yesterday. My husband is hard at work on year two of his Ph.D. Large group, the weekly meeting of our whole InterVarsity community, is tomorrow night and I am working hard on wiping my brain of all prior large group experiences and expectations. We have 20 people on our welcome team alone. We're using a room that can hold more than 500 students in the full hope that we'll fill it. My staff team, (yes, being a part of an actual team is a part of this), has been hard at work trying to make sure we've thought of everything that needs thinking about as we maneuver this all-important first week back while figuring out how the heck to care for each other in the midst of physical fatigue and campus transitions.

I will always be a Spider. No question. I graduated from there, saw my own faith grow exponentially because of the community there and will, likely, continue to be badgered semi-annually to give to the University's next big building project. But right now I'm trying to figure out how to identify with being a Tarheel, how to think the words "me", "mine"and "we" when I hear the alma mater and fight song. How to fully own and enjoy this huge group of students who have been entrusted to this team I'm on and to trust the Lord in the middle of a culture-shocked transition.

I may be Spider-born and Spider-bred but for right now I am Tarheel-immersed.  Someone better teach me the right cheer to follow that up with! (Particularly one that doesn't involve damning all of Duke to hell, please.)

Soulmates, Seven Years and Wedding Season

The life of a campus minister tends to include a lot of weddings. I consider this a perk because (a) I love to dance and (b) it's great for my own marriage.  This summer I've gotten to be involved in a few of those weddings, reading scripture and singing.  One of those weddings was of two of my former students to each other. I watched them start dating, saw them wade through the chaos of senior year decisions, stand tall through tough family adversity, celebrate their engagement and, through it all, learn how to trust that God was guiding them together towards Him. They aren't getting married because of fireworks or passion, because of feelings or circumstances. They've taken a slow meander through the last few years of life together and learned how to do it together with God's lead.

Being a campus minister means that for a lot of the day I end up talking about relationships. Listening as people talk through crushes, dating, breakups, engagements...and all the while hearing a lot of theology inadvertently woven into their expectations. I've heard a lot of people throw around the word "soulmates" or the phrase "the one." A few times I've actually been asked what I think about those, probably because of the look on my face when a student slowed down long enough to notice. I'm not sure my answer is particularly popular among Christians who seem to, more than others, hold a kind of storybook, Hollywood view of courtship and dating.

The bottom line is that I don't believe in soulmates or "the one." Some may call me unromantic but what's so romantic about finding someone who is supposedly perfect for you who through a series of cosmic orchestrations has been thrust into your path? There's no work in that, there's no doubt in that, there's no real risk-taking and commitment, no trust in God. What I find romantic is the idea that God has given us the opportunity to walk alongside Him as we choose someone to love. To wake up each morning, as the pastor who married my husband and I said, and "decide to put that person ahead of our own needs" each and every day. To know going into it that life was made for trouble and marriage won't be easy. That the point of the commitment is to make it, stick to it and choose to out-bless that other person each day in a way that honors God above all, even when and perhaps especially when our feelings don't match our choice. This view takes out a lot of the what-if's I've heard. "What if I've already met "the one" and I didn't know it?" "What if I never find my soulmate?" Is God some capricious God who withholds good from us unless we know the specific 5-step way to place ourselves in the exact right situation to meet someone? I say "no".

My husband and I just celebrated our seventh anniversary. Neither one of us, when we met the other person, ever thought we'd hit this point. He wasn't my type, I wasn't his. Our first meeting was atrociously awkward(and could potentially take up a whole blog post of its own). No fireworks. No weird niggling feeling in the back of my mind that this could be "the one." He took a chance and asked me to coffee and my roommates made me say yes. I tripped up the stairs on our first date and he barely spoke. It did not end with a romantic and unawkward perfect meeting of our lips on my doorstep. Just like Hollywood, right?

If I were looking at signs or what I expected when meeting the man who eventually was to be my husband, I would never have said yes to Date Number 2. Or even Dates 3 and 4. But at some point in that early courtship, God made it clear to me that this kind of thing takes a risk. Mostly it's risking that God might think I need someone very different from who I think I want. And knowing that that's a risk worth taking. Even looking back on over nine years of knowing my husband and seeing how very different we are and knowing that each excruciating moment of discovering just how wide that gulf sometimes is is ultimately worth it because, more often than not, those differences and the working through of them bring us closer to God and one another.

Going to all these weddings reminds me of this. That marriage is a gift from God, one not to be entered into lightly. That the commitment is unkeepable on my own and that I need God's strength and perspective to wake up each day and fulfill those vows.  Sitting in the pews when these former students have said their vows over these last few months has been an amazing reminder of what we said to each other more than seven years ago.  I'll take a good wedding over a chick flick any day.  Hollywood's got nothing on the real thing.

The Biggest Gainer

I'm finally there. 8 months, roughly a billion glasses of whole chocolate milk, 10 pounds and two points on the BMI scale later and I have achieved my goal.  The interesting thing about this journey has been how difficult it has been to ignore what society shouts at me. I've always known that body image is one of the most marketed issues out there but until now, I mostly was in line with what it was preaching. I was trying to be thin, trying to be athletic and look good and avoid high fat foods.  I passed billboards encouraging the consumption of skim milk and would think, "Of course, who would drink anything else?" 

So, when I was told by a doctor to pack on some pounds for a reason I really wanted to believe in, I went for it.  I weighed myself regularly in the hopes that I'd see the pounds increase. I did the calculations to figure out that BMI and was glad when it went up one and then two points into my target range. I ate second and third helpings at most meals. I enjoyed the psychology of watching men and women react differently to my doctor's orders. Some women would either sort of stay quiet and look like they were trying to be sympathetic and others might joke that they've never had that problem. Some reacted by giving me wonderful recipes to fatten me up.  Most men would state longingly that they would like to make an appointment with my doctor and then humorously point me towards some ridiculous food that would surely do the trick but that would also, likely, give me an instant heart attack.  Needless to say, it's not the kind of doctor-ordered regimen that most people have experienced and can empathize with.

Last Sunday, I woke up to an unusual 70 degree temp in steamy Durham. Wanting to take advantage of the first opportunity to wear pants since April, I excitedly pulled out my favorite dress pants. No go. Well, maybe my 2nd favorite pair. Nope. May as well try some jeans on while I'm at it. And...no.  I settled for a pair of pants I used to wear a lot the spring after Josh was born. Part of me was really excited - knowing that I'd really hit that target I'd, ahem, "worked" for.  But the part of me that was conditioned for 31 years to freak out if my clothes were getting too tight was not pleased. It ended up being a tough Sunday. These two sides battled with each other- the healthy side that knows what I'm doing is to help reach that goal of having another child and that I'm actually at quite a healthy weight and the side that still finds some self worth in how I look, the skinnier the better.

You see, there's no show out there called "The Biggest Gainer". Everything around me, from facebook ads to reality tv to billboards is screaming at me to want to be as skinny as I can possibly manage. The crazy thing is that I had to work to even notice how prevalent it was until these last 8 months when every decision I was making was going against the so-called standard of beauty. 

Well, I'm tired of what's preached. At some point, I hope, I will be in a position when I'm not trying to put on weight. There may even come a time, God willing, that I've had another baby and do need to lose some weight to be healthy. Will those ads still seem so sinister? Will I be able to resist falling back into those lies and be happy with being a healthy weight, even if it's not the standard of beauty, the skinniest of skinnies?   I truly hope so.  It helps that I have a husband who has pretty routinely told me through this whole gaining escapade that I look healthy and full of life.  He's great at reminding me of my inner beauty, that I am beautiful because of who I've been created to be.  (And I will freely admit that I don't mind that he does occasionally throw the word "hot" into the equation - after all, it feels good to be attractive to your spouse!) 

So, the next time I put on some clothes that fit a year ago and won't quite zip up, I'm hoping that the side that trusts my husband and my God will win out over the side of me that is still tempted to listen to what society preaches.   As each year of my life passes, I realize more and more that there's pretty much nothing worth listening to in those sermons anyway.