Weather

“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed with the windows open and the stars bright.” – Ernest Hemingway

My two closest friends in medical school went to Stanford for undergrad, and all they could talk about upon moving to Boston was how perfect Bay Area weather was, all the time. It became the launching point for explications on all the perfections of California, and after listening to this ad nauseum for years, I’ll admit I became a bit contrarian. I told myself I’d rather be shivering in my down coat in muddy snow under endingly gray skies than raving on arrogantly about the meteorologic supremacy of some state.

Naturally, I married a guy from California and became potentially the first person to move here predisposed to dislike the weather. I like rain (at least the sound of rain as I’m sitting indoors); I love snow (at least fresh snow); I don’t mind the cold. I knew I would miss the vibrant, crisp autumns of the East, and I do. Autumn here feels slightly fabricated—we’re all still going about in our sleeveless shirts in sunny seventy-degree weather in the middle of October, but oh, it must be fall because Trader Joe’s has come out with pumpkin stuff again!

What I’ve grudgingly realized, though, is that the perfection of the weather here really must be experienced to be understood. There’s the 70-degree sunny days, of course. But there’s also the lack of humidity—at resting heart rates, one never sweats here. There are no mosquitos to speak of. There’s the surreal consistency of it all—months and months and months of predictably perfect climes. It’s not a matter of comfort as much as lifestyle. It has done nothing less than transform our existence. We’re outside all the time, bicycling down the streets or visiting the numerous parks that exist every few blocks. It’s easier to exercise; we can grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables; we leave toys outside and open windows and plan outdoor gatherings without a second thought.

But my favorite thing about the weather happens in the evenings, when a bit of East-coast fall descends every day. It turns a bit cooler; you can slip on a cardigan or shawl, sometimes even a cozy sweater. It turns crisp, a bit breezy. There’s nothing quite so pleasant as opening our bedroom windows or lying in a hammock in the dusk.

I think there’s something about humid green landscapes, brilliantly fiery leaves, blankets of snow, and cherry blossoms in the spring, that I will always miss amid this almost foreign perfection. But well, the weather here truly is a radical blessing. It must be lived in to be understood, as I suppose applies to most truths in life. Somehow I have finally come to a point where I can embrace it without losing who I was. I hope I never lose the wonder of living in it. 

Life Balance

We are on the latest iteration of evaluating work-life balance, that place of pressured reflection which comes after a building sense of depletion. The challenges seem greater here, without my parents, with less flexible and more demanding jobs, greater difficulty finding childcare, and the kids’ needs becoming more disparate as their ages now span three through nine—but in some ways the process is still the same.

Assess for burnout: do we have any of the symptoms (exhaustion, lack of motivation, cynicism and dread, resentment and irritability, or helplessness), and have we built in prevention practices (permission and pacing, community, hobby, physical care, spiritual space) or have those fallen by the wayside? Revisit mission and values: how much margin or focus have we lost? Examine our logistical life and emotional and spiritual health: are we spending our energy and time in a way that is consistent with what we say we believe?

This go-round, I’m being convicted that it’s not primarily about balance, aiming for equilibrium by shifting pieces around on the scales. It’s not about juggling, trying to keep all the balls in the air. There is no growth or joy in that, just survival, and as far as I can tell, Paul never describes the Christian life as a calibration—he uses the language of growth. We are a building growing up, he says, and a building always has a foundation, a cornerstone that provides both stability and direction, that lays out the lines of our lives and provides sure support. Logistical adjustments are okay and often necessary, but ultimately returning to rest and health is not so much a logistical calculation as a reorientation of focus. God is not an item on the list of my priorities; he is the list. My marriage is not a bullet on my to-do list; it is the primary earthly relationship from which so much else, including the health of our family, flourishes.

When it comes to foundational things, there aren’t shortcuts. Manufacturing grace and affection for Dave only goes so far if my heart and mind aren’t truly on him. Resisting the temptation to sin in my thought life or how I treat the kids only goes so far if I’m not closely relying on the Spirit and the Bible through daily engagement. Reposturing is an inward, conscious decision to consistently invest in what is most important, not what is most urgent or clamorous. It can require sacrifice, engagement in disciplines, or expending time or money. But once you have the foundation down, you know what direction to build, and you’re not afraid of how heavy it might be.

Choosing Mediocrity

So, our six year-old plays some chess. At least I believe that’s the appropriate humble-brag. The actual-brag would be: he’s a nationally-rated tournament player.

But the truth is something both in-between and more bizarre. When we first moved here, one of the after-school offerings I rolled my eyes at was the K/1 chess class. I didn’t even play chess! Surely only moronically over-optimizing parents would think their five and six year-olds should!

So the first bizarre thing is that Eric plays at all. Dave showed him the game on a random afternoon and he loved it with the same immediate, inexplicable passion that he had for dinosaurs and Star Wars. Soon enough, I knew about PP-on-the-PP (putting pressure on the pinned piece), Bobby Fischer, and Italian openings the same way I knew about the archaeopteryx and Slave I. There I was, picking Eric up from the same class I rolled my eyes at.

But once the school class wasn’t challenging enough and we looked into the local chess world, we discovered something even stranger—that apparently, Eric was nothing remarkable. We discovered droves of serious-looking east- and south-asian parents inhabiting hotel lobbies every weekend with young boys glued to chess puzzles on their iPads, and probably being coached by private instructors when they weren’t playing all-day tournaments. 

Growing up in southern Virginia, it didn’t take much to acquire the reputation of being a “genius”—just taking some accelerated classes, making valedictorian in a class where no one popular wanted to be one, studying instead of going to the local beach. Where we lived, people didn’t necessarily expect their kids to go to college, much less have their eye on Stanford from birth. I wasn’t challenged much by my peers, but standing out was effortless.

In the chess world here, Eric is strictly middle-of-the-road. He easily beats many kids his age, but neither does he ascend in prodigy fashion to the highest level. I began to understand why no one here has four kids—there’s no way I can put him through the rigors other kids at his level go through with three other kids to take care of. We worked out a way for me to take him to afternoon-only tournaments twice a month; he gets some instruction from a teenage boy he likes; and Dave tries to play him when he can (I’ve given up). Today, they had a pretty even game going until Esme came and moved all the pieces around. That’s sort of his chess life: we try to be intentional, without making it too paramount; we try to keep it fun, but encourage his potential; and you never know when your little sister is going to come along and mess up all your pieces.

A friend once said, when it comes to extracurricular activities in the bay area, pick your poison. No one does anything half-way. Around here, people start their kids early, give them the best resources, and work them hard. Woe unto those whose kids start later, or are just in it for fun, and find themselves surrounded by elite peers—at least, that’s how I feel. Take swimming: I was elated to finally find a sport Ellie likes to do. How graceful she looks, I think, sluicing through the water in beautiful form. But the moment I try to find her some kind of regular opportunity to swim, I’m flustered again by the local offerings, swim teams in which kids her age are already working on perfecting their times. The coach took one look at her in try-outs today and consigned her to the non-competitive younger class. 

But as we were leaving the pool, Ellie was so happy. I get to swim for fun! she told me. I don’t have to compete! And I thought to myself: she’s right. That’s what we’re in swim for: giving her a form of exercise she continues to delight in, while maintaining balance in our lives at this stage. Around here, mediocrity is hard to achieve. You have to work pretty hard at it.

Anger

“Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.” – Proverbs 14:29

In the last few weeks, I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that I still struggle with anger. About four or five years ago, I confronted and worked through having angry outbursts, explosive episodes that happened after we first got married and then after we had our first child—those have pretty much disappeared, but I’m coming to realize I still don’t know how to handle anger right. My anger flares up in response to chronic misbehavior, and manifests as berating, yelling, going to my room and slamming the door. It’s not as extreme or consuming as before, but the damage is still done: I’ve lost my ability to accurately perceive the situation or my kids; I’ve reacted in emotion instead of instructed through discipline; I’m said or implied things I regret; I’ve created fear or an unsafe feeling at home; ultimately, I’ve harmed a relationship.

I listened again to a Keller sermon on anger, to a few words from Piper, did a serious word study. Here are the thoughts that captured my attention this time:

1. I have to be aware of my anger. Anger has this strange, hidden quality—have you noticed that, when it’s got a grip on you, it’s one of the hardest emotions to admit to having? It’s the emotion you feel most defensive of when someone points it out in you? Keller claims it’s the emotion that is most like an addictive substance: there is a strong element of denial, then in order to maintain that denial you have to get even angrier, feed the anger with even more destructive thoughts. I will never be able to control or use my anger in the right way if I am not aware that I have it, so this is the first thing.

2. Anger is destructive by nature; thus I have to make sure it is not disordered in cause (angry about sin, not my ego), proportion (not to a disproportionate degree lest it start to distort my very perception and ability to see if it’s disproportionate—hard one), duration (not allowed to fester into bitterness), or goal (against sin, not the sinner; never to tear down, hurt, seek revenge against the person; never not in love—also hard).

3. The ideal is not the absence of anger, or uncontrolled anger, but slow anger: what is slow anger? What does it look like; what is it really? How do we have it, or is it even possible to have? This is the part Keller didn’t go into as much, so to figure this out I looked up all the instances I could find of Jesus being angry, did a word study for “anger” in the New Testament, and looked up all the direct commands regarding anger for believers (which overlapped with the word study, thankfully).

Instances of Jesus being angry: the first remarkable thing is that I couldn’t really find many—definitively, only two. In only one of those is the word anger actually used (Mark 3:5), when he heals a man with a withered hand; the other instance he is widely accepted as acting in anger (John 2:15), when he cleanses the temple, though the adjective used there is actually “zeal.” What stands out? He reacted to sin, in one case eradicating evil, in the other case with grief and a demonstration of truth. It wasn’t selfish or personal; in fact, what stands out are the many times he could have gotten angry, when betrayed or tired or hurt, but didn’t. In John, he rebuked but it doesn’t say he yelled it; in Mark, he didn’t say anything at all, not to blame or even teach.

There are basically two Greek words for anger in the New Testament. Orge (noun) or orgizo (verb), literally “to be provoked,” refers to a “settled or abiding opposition.” Thymos, literally “to kill, breathe hard, consume by fire,” refers to impulsive outbursts, anger that boils up and soon subsides again. It is worth mentioning the Greek prefix para, which means “close beside, alongside” and stresses a nearness and intimate participation of the verb to which it is affixed.

God has both types of anger. Jesus was orge in Mark. Orge describes the anger of masters and kings in three of Jesus’ parables (Mt 18:34, Mt 22:7, Lk 14:21). Of the 18 times thymos is used, 10 of them are in Revelation, referring to the anger of Satan, Babylon, or (more frequently) God. The two words are used together only twice, in Revelation, describing God: “the fierceness (thymos) of His wrath (orge)” (Rev 16:19).

It’s different for us, though. As you can probably guess, the other 8 times thymos is used is in direct command not to have it (ex. Eph 4:31, Col 3:8), or to describe an instance in which it was bad (Acts 19:28; Luke 4:28). In both those instances, thymos riled up the crowds to drive out good, hurt others, and remove reason, a far contrast to the two instances of Jesus’ anger. Thymos is never okay; it describes God at the end times, not us now.

For us, orge is more complicated. In only one place are we commanded, expected to have it: “Be angry (orgizo) and yet do not sin, do not let the sun go down on your anger (parorgismus)” (Eph 4:26). We should be provoked into an orge-anger, yet most of the verse is devoted to warning us against letting it stay too near us (parorgismus). I particularly loved the verse that Paul seems to be quoting, Psalm 4:4, which is in Hebrew: “Be angry (ragaz- lit. to tremble, be violently disturbed) and do not sin (chata). Meditate (amar- lit. to say in one’s heart, to command) in your heart (lebab- lit. mind, will, understanding, soul) upon your bed (mishkab) and be still (damam- lit. to be silent, to wait, to not speak).” Six words, that tell us what it means to have and recognize anger, to control and reflect upon it, and to slow it down.

In two places, we are warned against orge: “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger (orge), for the anger (orge) of man does not achieve the righteousness of God” (Ja 1:19-20). Matthew 5:22 warns us that everyone who is angry (orge) with a brother is liable to judgment. Again, orge is not a sin, but we should be slow to it, and wary of it.

So, what is slow anger? What is the anger we are supposed to have? What I come to is that it’s actually a very different thing than what most of us experience day-to-day as anger. It is never an emotional flare-up. It is used like a scalpel, a dangerous and destructive instrument to oppose sin and eradicate evil. It is used only rarely, accompanied sometimes by verbal rebuke but more often by silence. It is always focused on sin, not selfish frustration.

Frankly, it is more silent, more controlled, more settled, more grieved, ultimately more loving than anything I have experienced. The anger we commonly know is loud, uncontrolled and distorting, momentary, full of malice or selfishness. This slow-anger, this orge-anger: it is a good thing, and I think sometimes I capture a bit of it. But it easily turns into thymos-anger, or para-orge-anger, so practically speaking for me right now, I think slow-anger means to let that initial provocation point me to the sin, then just to stop. To not act or speak immediately. To take measured action, to rebuke or instruct, but with the patience of Galatians 5:22, a word that is in Greek makrothymia, lit. macro-thymos: a forbearant temper, long-suffering. Sometimes, orge-anger, but more often makrothymos-patience. Good place to start.

Deep Friendships

I’ve been thinking lately about what it takes to make a deep friend. I don’t mean the kind of person you wave at in the school yard, or schedule the occasional coffee date with, or even have the rare long conversation over dinner with. I mean someone who checks in regularly to see how you are doing, who walks through your deepest struggles with you, who you can call if you really need to. Someone who will make their calendar open for you and for whom you would do the same. A keep-for-life friend.

Why are those so hard to find? I think for most people, those friends are born in the high school and college years, when it’s so easy to linger and live daily life together, to process formative experiences together—certainly that’s true for Dave. I really didn’t prioritize relationships at that stage in life, though, so most of my discovering deep community has come post-college. And that stage, the friends-after-thirty stage, is challenging. Relationships are transient with moves for school, training, early career development. Getting married and having kids is a threat on several levels: you have less time and energy for friendships at various stages of marriage and parenthood; the dynamic between your friend and your spouse has to be okay; and it can be harder to maintain friendships across different stages of life.

You enter a stage where deep friendships are more important than ever, yet are harder to find than ever. Sometimes it feels like friend-dating, gauging how much energy and time to invest into a potentially deeper friendship. Maybe first a coffee date, then a dinner date, then go over to each others’ houses? Is meeting with this person worth paying for childcare? Does this person communicate best by phone, text, email, or in person? How much is okay to share, how soon? Sometimes you’ll invest significant time and resources only to find the commitment level is not mutual, or the friendship is too full of gossip and negativity. Or the hurdles come earlier, because the person doesn’t have an opening in their schedule for two months.

For what it’s worth, I think these keep-for-life kind of friendships are rare. We live in an age where people have hundreds of Facebook “friends” and Twitter followers, where you make nice conversation during playdates and soccer practices, but how many truly deep friends do any of us have? I would say most people have a wide circle of acquaintances, maybe 5-10 mid-level friendships, but you’d be lucky to have one or two deep friendships.

What does it take to form these deep friendships? One NPR piece says: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting conducive to letting your guard down. My sister’s pastor says: tenacity, authenticity, and vulnerability.

When I was younger, I would have said common interests and values, like C. S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves: “Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.” And I think that spark has to be there—an ability to communicate well, similar hobbies or values or experiences.

But the older I get, the more I feel like what it really takes is something much harder to come by: mutual, unwavering, unconditional commitment. I have moved into a land where it is not difficult to find other people like me. But it is just as hard (and may be harder) to find someone who is willing to commit.

And what is most mysterious and maddening about it all of course is that these types of friendships are impossible to orchestrate. They are often unpredictable and always take time. I think about the very few friends I have like this, and they each arose and evolved in an unexpected way. They each took different trajectories, took months or years to solidify. Those friendships are like gold to me now, and having experienced them, it’s hard to settle for less, hard not to compare what I don’t have yet here to what I had before, but that’s just the nature of moving—grieving or adjusting to the loss of old friendships while feeling out the new.

So for now, I am keeping my eyes open, orienting my life so I am open to what may develop, intentionally initiating when I feel prompted to. But in the waiting I am also trying to press in closer to God, choosing to believe he provides all I need, realizing to wait in the not-yet is still a form of worship. How much would I like to speed along the process! But then, how many of us long for a type of intimacy or relationship that we do not yet have? How many of us still choose to walk forward day-by-day in faith and contentment?

Buckets of Community

In Virginia, the people we knew and hung out with were all from church: those were the people in our small group, who came over for playdates, who we met with for meals out, who we played disc golf or fantasy sports with. The one exception were my parents; we hung out at their house when dropping the kids off, went out to the park or beach, met with them after the kids were in bed for conversation. But those were our two buckets: church, and parents. We never hung out with people from work, BSF, or school.

Here, people seem to have many buckets of community, and we are no exception. I counted eight: school, Sunday-morning church, small group, one friend, one family, neighborhood families, guy friends, and BSF. In each of these buckets, we have spent significant time investing in relationships, and sense a need, desire or opportunity to go deeper. Take school—community is huge. I get three emails a week about events going on; there are constantly one or two playdates each kid is asking me to arrange; we have met regularly with one or two families. Take church—the people in our small group go to a different branch than where we go for Sunday mornings, but we are committed to both and have met individually and communally with families in both groups. We meet regularly with a family or two in the neighborhood. The guys get together every week for game night and basketball.

The amazing thing is, people seem open to hanging out. Folks here are typically known to be busy and detached, but we sense people are lonely, that few have true, deep friends, that many are interested in building relationships if asked or if we make ourselves available.

People are open to community: so, there are buckets. But the interesting thing is that very few of them overlap. I kept trying to merge them at first: to find believers at school (no luck), or neighborhood-school attenders at church (no luck), or BSF group members at church (no luck). I have one friend who is a bucket all her own; I know her from the past and we meet regularly to share and pray, but our families share no common involvements.

I think the merging is tough because of the sheer number and diversity of opportunities for involvement here. There isn’t just one big city, with a few big elementary schools; there are tons of small cities in each county, and a different neighborhood school every few blocks. Commuting from one city to another is common. There are activities tailored to meet any conceivable interest, need, or demographic preference. And people do involve themselves in a high number of them. Even if you want to be intentional about not spreading yourself too thin, it seems hard to establish community outside of this framework—you are unlikely to find natural, comprehensive overlaps between buckets, and while people are open to community, it is rare to find a friend who is willing to give up a bucket for the sake of merging lives.

And that’s what I wonder: deepening community can be inconvenient, and I wonder if it may involve forsaking or merging buckets to better walk through life together. That’s what I hope for: to walk through life with another family or couple or two, with shared vision and values, with mutually sacrificial commitment and deep vulnerability and understanding. On one hand, that kind of friendship is a gift, not necessarily something you can orchestrate, more organic than devised. On the other hand, being overcommitted with shallow buckets makes it hard to have the margin and space to discover or grow those friendships (and we haven’t even added any extracurriculars for our kids—ha!).

For now, we are figuring out what it looks like to be intentional about relationships where we live. I’m accepting there is no family exactly like us, no family naturally in all the same buckets. We’re functionally living the eight-bucket community life. But I’m also trying to not be too constrained at heart by that, to let relationships drive activity sometimes rather than activities drive relationships. It’s early; we are yet at the cusp of our time here. We’ll see how it goes.

Control

“Sometimes we need to plunge our minds into the ocean of God’s sovereignty. We need to feel the weight of it, like deep and heavy water pressing in against every pore, the deeper we go. A billion rivers of providence pour into this ocean. And God himself gathers up all his countless deeds — from eternity to eternity — and pours them into the currents of his infallible revelation. He speaks, and explains, and promises, and makes his awesome, sovereign providence the place we feel most reverent, most secure, most free.” – John Piper

Have I written about this cat? She deserves a separate post (with some photos). She is a gorgeous, four month-old ragdoll kitten who follows us around the house like a devoted puppy. She purrs like a maniac if we get within a foot of her, tolerates awkward petting from toddlers, lets us clip her nails, likes being held, and has fur like a rabbit’s.

But I guess I had forgotten that well, kittens are a bit of work. Not-quite but sort-of-like having another kid to take care of and train. I sometimes find myself getting mad at her for occasional poor behavior, and I feel terrible. It’s not good for the kids to observe, and it’s not always fair to the cat. Even though I’m supposed to love the cat unconditionally, secretly I’d like her to be perfect all the time.

That got me to thinking how much this desire to control others, to control outcomes, can be at the heart of my frustrations or anxieties. Desire to have a perfect cat; to control my kids being able to nap at the usual time each day, how they act and are perceived at school, how neat the house is, how many errands I can get done, and more.

Control is a huge thing here. People want to control their kids getting into colleges, their health being perfect, their work being productive. There is a sense that we should be able to optimize our lives—increase lifespans through particular diets, increase “success” by hiring college counselors, increase productivity by outsourcing tasks. I think that sense of optimization is so strong here because there is both a good amount of unspoken pressure—financially, to afford being able to live here; achievement-wise, because often achieving parents expect their kids to do the same—combined with a cultural emphasis on grassroots innovation. In an area this talent- and resource-rich, one ought to be able to figure out how to optimize conditions to achieve the right outcomes. Even our kids having unstructured play time must be something we deliberately schedule after being convinced by evidence-based research.

But in the end we can only control so much, and it seems to me the kind of fear that’s pervasive here is the fear of not being able to control outcomes, seeping out as a sort of pervasive anxiety. Someone has their kid in five activities—should I be putting mine in more? Someone is eating all-organic or no-sugar—am I losing out if I don’t do that? Someone just left a big company to join a start-up—am I getting in on the right opportunities?

Sometimes I need to refocus a bit on God’s sovereignty. Because that is the truth that shatters the illusion of control: to remember that everything belongs to God, that all occurs as he wills and nothing can occur that he does not will. That there is no global issue nor smallest detail of my day that is beyond his purview. And this is no stranger sovereign, but a God that has shown his love for me beyond any other, and has promised that all works for my eternal good. To plunge my mind into that is to be more reverent, more secure, more free. Freedom from anxiety or fear; free to enjoy the unpredictable; free to love people, and cats, for who they are.

I Miss Parking Lots and Plastic Bags

I’m starting to get used to some things here. I compost instead of using the sink disposal. I don’t look up the daily weather report. I put sunscreen on the kids every morning. I remember to bring a cardigan for evenings out. I (mostly) remember to factor in time-of-day-traffic when going places. I have had coffee at Philz and Peet’s. I buy a lot of organic (mostly because I can’t find non-organic). I automatically check the bike lane before backing out of my driveway or making a turn. I remember to ask about allergies and dietary restrictions. It’s not as strange hearing multiple foreign languages spoken most places, and Mandarin everywhere. I even wore tights outside once (closest thing to yoga pants I own).

But sometimes when I go out, I still say to myself, man. I miss parking lots and plastic bags.

Suburbs are supposed to have parking lots. Your biggest problem is supposed to be, “can I snag the spot closest to the cart returns?” or “which of these fifty open spots is closest to the entrance?” not, “which lot three blocks away has an opening?” or “how many times should I circle around hoping a street-side spot opens up?”

There needs to be a word in between a suburb and a city, because that’s what this place is. This place is like if you took a regular suburb full of old houses, set rules preventing it from turning into an actual city with high-rises, then poured in a bazillion people, and more who probably want to move in. The main streets are narrow. There’s always traffic. Our elementary school of 600 students has ten parking spots out front. Costco is constantly crowded. There are shacks that cost more than mansions, sitting next to actual mansions on renovated lots. The parking lots that do exist are small, squeezed full of one-way lanes with spots on a slant. I look along my street and feel like I could be in a normal suburb—then I look across the street at Philz with the line going out the door and people talking about start-ups at the tables outside, and the tiny parking lot in front—and think, not so much.

And I’m an evil person, but I miss plastic bags. Plastic bags seem to be outlawed here. You can get them, but you have to pay extra and everyone glares at you as you walk out. I’m constantly forgetting to bring along reusable bags. So I’m usually juggling items by hand out to the trunk, or stuffing them one at a time into the storage area under the stroller.

Apparently plastic bags are terrible. They kill all kinds of wildlife when animals ingest plastic particles; they are made using non-renewable resources like oil; they are some of the most commonly littered items and can clog up drainage systems; they are hugely difficult to recycle and end up taking forever to decompose in landfills. I should have educated myself and stopped using them anyway; instead I am being forced into it by the government, which seems to happen a lot here.

In general, I’m starting to fit in more here, but I’m aware it’s a huge bubble. As Dave said today when flying out, the rest of the country is a lot more white, obese, and poor. They’re not all skinny Asians with terminal degrees and disposable incomes. I say that without judgment on either side; only with a strange sense that my world no longer reflects the reality that is most of this country. Where people probably use plastic bags and have parking lots.

Weather

So Bay Area weather is essentially all it’s touted to be. But my favorite thing about the weather here isn’t the perennially cloudless, sunny days, or better yet, the transformative lack of humidity and mosquitos—it’s the evenings. Every evening, the weather magically gets cooler and crisper. It makes me want to breathe deep and wander long. It reminds me of that first thrill of fall on the east coast, when months of oppressively muggy, hot days finally give way to a brisk coolness that makes you want to open windows and slip on long sleeves. Nearly every night here is like that. Dave used to go on and on about how he loved as a child to open his bedroom windows and sleep to a cool breeze, and I have to admit there is something to that.

One of the strangest things here is the lack of rain over the summer. It rained and thunderstormed aplenty in Virginia: we got used to radar-tracking storms to see how long thunder claps would keep the kids up from their naps or sleeping at night; a small tornado uprooted one of our trees a few months before we moved; we checked the weather app every day to figure out how to dress, or whether to bring rain jackets to school. Plenty of times, I’d forget to check in the rush to get the kids out the door, then groan when it starts to pour and I’m not wearing my wellies or raincoat. I haven’t checked my weather app once since moving here. Our chalk drawings stay on the sidewalk for months. We leave toys out on the deck. It’s all rather bizarre.

The first novel I’m reading since the move is The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, a strange amalgam of science fiction, Chinese history, theoretical mathematics and astrophysics, philosophical treatise, and epic quest. My favorite part of it (spoiler alert) is considering what life would be like if a planet existed in a stellar system with three suns. Because of the mathematically unpredictable movement of the three suns, at times the planet can be drawn into the orbit of one of the suns (at which time the planet has regular day-night cycles and mild weather), and at other times it cycles irregularly between them (resulting in completely unpredictable cycles where nights can last for weeks, and deadly temperature extremes). The planet can be far from all three suns (extremely cold conditions where it snows water, then dry ice, then the atmosphere sort of congeals), can be exposed to all three together (every living thing erupts into flames and the surface of the entire planet becomes a lake of lava), can be affected by the gravitational pull of all three suns in one line (all things and the atmosphere itself gets sucked up into a vortex and pulled to the closest sun), or can collide with some or all of the suns (splitting the planet in half and forming various rings that later collapse, destroying all life).

The inhabitants have no control over these events or how long various periods last, and the extreme weather often wipes out a civilization with millions of years passing before another develops. Civilizations devote their energies to trying to predict the motions of the suns, before realizing it is impossible and deciding to leave their world altogether.

I don’t understand the mechanics behind why the weather in the bay area is always so mild and dry—why there are rarely ever clouds during the day, or why the evenings are always perfectly cool—but it’s interesting to mull on how completely it is all out of our control. One day I am going to stop remarking on how nice the weather is here; it will just seem normal, much less the fact that, well, I don’t have to worry about suddenly erupting into flames when my planet gets too close to a few suns. But for now, I’m going to sit in the mystery of it all a little bit, that of all places in the entire universe and galaxy, I have landed upon a place where I can open my windows every night to a cool breeze. 

Created

The weather is getting colder, so I’m dusting off my knitting again. Knitting exists nearly in the realm of something magical for me: how one strand of thread can be wound around itself continuously to create something like itself, yet utterly different. You never really look at a sweater the same again after you learn to knit.

When you first start, you’re clutching the pattern and counting every stitch off carefully in your head. But after a while, you come to understand the pattern, not because you’re reading it off the page, but because you can tell where you are by how the previous stitch is looped. You gain an intuitive, big-picture feel for how the rows work together, why something looks different on the right versus the wrong sides of the work. You learn how to read the signs.

You’re flying along, feeling pretty good about yourself—I’m an awesome knitter! After this, socks!—then you make a mistake. You drop a stitch, or realize you did the whole last two rows wrong. And you realize you never really understood the pattern at all, and only now, as you painstakingly work each stitch backwards, as you hook up the dropped loops, do you really grasp it.

I think of myself as creating when I make scarves out of yarn, but really only God can create, can make something out of nothing. No other living being can do that. God the Father spoke through the word that is Jesus, as the Spirit hovered, to bring everything we know into existence.

We don’t, I think, in our postmodernist mindsets, think of ourselves as created beings. We think of ourselves as dictating our own narratives, writing our own meanings, constructing our own identities. Our culture has plenty to say about self-fashioned identity: blame your parents if you don’t like the mask they gave you. Watch the ads to figure out what you should look like. You’ll seem perfect if you get the spouse or career you want. Figure out who you want to be and self-help your way there.

But as I knit, I think about how the person I give the scarf to will never really understand it the way I do, because while they use it, I’m the one who created it. I’m the one who sees exactly how the threads overlap to create the warmth for which it was made; who sees the beauty of the pattern’s workings because I fixed it when it fell apart. How much more does God, who created us, understand me? I’m realizing more and more that he asks me to know and follow him because he means it so much more fully for my good than even I initially comprehend, and not only that, he wants to reveal himself to me in how he created me and in all of his creation.

Because, of course, there’s a bit of me in the scarf I created: in its gauge and tension, in the aesthetics of the pattern I chose. God too has written himself into the story, so to speak: in infinite and undeniable ways, he calls to us if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. He tells us this life is the prelude to and preparation for the eternal reality of our love relationship with him, and the more fully I live the redeemed life he gives me, the more fully I understand that story. The more fully I understand myself.

Sabbath

I went on a girls’ trip this past weekend. We made a point of doing things we couldn’t normally do with kids (go on a strenuous, uphill hike; eat at a fancy restaurant; watch girl movies), but I think the part I enjoyed most were the leisurely mornings and conversations. It wasn’t until I was away from it that I realized how often I live at home with a sense of what must be done: chores, monitoring the kids, always a sense of multi-tasking and planning ahead.

I’ve been thinking for a while about this concept of the Sabbath. I like thinking of it as acting out our belief and trust in God as creator and sustainer. As William Willimon said, “Sabbath keeping is a publicly enacted sign of our trust that God keeps the world, therefore we do not have to. God welcomes our labors, but our contributions to the world have their limits. If even God trusted creation enough to be confident that the world would continue while God rested, so should we.”

I also like thinking of Sabbath in the context of our work-driven culture. We live in a world where work defines our value and identity; it’s all about productivity, efficiency, and doing it all. We bring work home through email, texts, and pagers. Those who work at home—take online classes, telecommute, parent—have an even harder time leaving work.

In our culture, we work until we’re burned out, then splurge on a vacation to get away from it all: but the Sabbath is not retreat so much as rhythm; as Eugene Peterson describes it, “entering into the rhythm of creation.” Even God, who is all-powerful, chose to rest for one of the seven days—to shabbat, which literally means to stop—and so we are created to do the same.

I also like thinking about what it means to make time holy. Marva Dawn brings this up in her book Keeping The Sabbath Wholly: how Abraham Heschel argues that we have a faith that aims at the sanctification of time, as opposed to Western civilization’s drive to conquer space. The first thing in the Bible that is designated as “holy” is not a place, but a time, the seventh day.

“Time,” insists Peter Forsyth, “is a sacrament of eternity.” When I set apart time to sabbath, I am acknowledging that time itself belongs to and is created by God, a God who is himself outside of time and will one day draw us outside of time as well. Time is not something I must control and bow down to and be driven by.

What does it mean for our family to observe a Sabbath? For me, since I can’t exactly stop being a mom one day a week?

Often a weekend day is when we stop our “regular” work (school, day jobs) so we can catch up on “other” work (yard work, errands, meal planning, laundry) and feel good about what we’ve done. But I think Sabbath is more about separating our identity from any work.

For me, even though I still am at home, it means I stop doing the kind of housework and parenting that feels like a chore—and instead enjoy. It might mean I cook something because I or the kids really love it, as a special feast. It might mean I don’t harangue Ellie about doing a math or piano lesson, but instead draw a story with her or go outside to collect snails—things that help us enjoy creation and how we are created. It might mean we hang out with friends. If Sunday is our sabbath, it means going to church with an attitude of special anticipation rather than as cultural obligation or drudgery.

To approach the Sabbath not legalistically, but intentionally, probably looks slightly different for everyone. But it should make us look different to everyone around us. In a work-harried, achievement-focused world, to stop, to rest and feast and enjoy creation, not just once in a while but every single week, is to spell out with our time what we’re living for in this life.

Emotional Intelligence

I’m learning how to understand and manage my emotions rather late in life. Growing up, I thought of myself as a rational person; I would have sudden, severe bursts of anger but didn’t much know how to manage them. After leaving home, I never got close enough to anyone to feel that angry; I didn’t cry much—so it was rather a shock when my first year of marriage involved all kinds of angry and emotional outbursts that I had great difficulty managing.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about regulating emotions—and it is something that has to be learned. Emotions aren’t just something that you “fall into” or have no control of, and you can’t fully address behavior sometimes until you address the root emotion. Looking back, the process has involved a few steps.

First, identifying my emotion. Calling out what I’m feeling before it automatically starts controlling my behavior and mind, which requires a certain level of awareness and intentionality. Before I start banging doors or shutting down from someone, stepping back to ask: okay, am I feeling frustrated? angry? hurt? sad? What’s going on? And where on the spectrum of that emotion am I? How far has it already carried me?

Then I think I sort of acknowledge and process the emotion. Okay, I feel hurt. Why do I feel hurt? How long have I been feeling hurt? I talk to myself about it. Because sometimes it’s easy to suppress how I feel, particularly if it seems illogical, or high-maintenance, like it would take a long time to deal with. But repressed emotions always come screaming back later, often to a degree that’s much harder to manage and ends up hurting someone.

Then I figure out how and whether to express the emotion, which involves evaluating the emotion and being aware of others. Evaluating the emotion is asking: is there a constructive or okay way for me to let this emotion out? Sometimes when I’m sad, I need to curl up in bed and cry awhile, and that’s okay. Sometimes when I’m mad, I need to close myself into a room to throw some pillows until I calm down. But sometimes the emotion is bad, or bad to express, and I need to help myself get out of it. If I’m feeling disgust I may need to call out the selfish or judgmental attitude that led me there and stop my train of thought. If I’m feeling overly anxious I may need to recall some verses to mind to reorient myself in the truth.

The second part of regulating expression is being aware of others: how are my feelings affecting the mood of the whole house? How are they changing my facial expressions or tone of voice, and what are my kids picking up on? Am I crossing a line of behavior I shouldn’t be? Am I getting so bogged down in the feeling I can’t function enough?

Learning how to identify, evaluate, control and express emotions is something we try to teach our kids. We try to give them the words for how they are feeling, which sometimes involves drawing cartoon expressions, or offering them suggestions to pick from. We encourage them to tell us why they feel this way and understand their perspective. We try to be present with them in the emotion—usually that means holding them, or telling them it’s okay that they feel sad, or hurt, or mad. We try to help them be aware of how their emotions affect other people, and be clear on what lines can and can’t be crossed. It’s okay if you’re angry to have some alone time in your room, or maybe punch a pillow, for example, but it’s not okay to hit someone, or say a bad word about someone. I try to explain to them how I’m feeling, to help them get used to the vocabulary and hear someone else processing how they feel.

If it sounds exhausting, it is, particularly at the beginning. But it gets easier and easier. Right now Elijah has prolonged tantrums and I have to walk him through the steps as best I can, but Eric can come up and tell me he feels mad without hurting someone else to show it, and tell me he needs some time alone but then can I hold him, but without talking? And Ellie will disappear and I’ll find out later she went to her room because she was feeling frustrated from being tired. Of course there’s plenty of line-crossing too, but if they’re going to learn how to manage their emotions anywhere, how to appreciate their feelings but not be ruled by them, home is probably the place to do it.

Imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” - Einstein

I’m finally starting to realize that I have an unusually vivid imagination. I not only love, but need stories. I am very empathetic. I get spooked easily in the dark. I process and retain information visually; I can remember the outfits and colors from significant events that happened years ago. I envision the future more easily in terms of my own projections than logical reality.

There are great things about imagination: it compels me to create, to sketch or play or write. It makes reading novels an acutely immersive pleasure: I inhabit the fictional world, speak the dialogue, picture the scenery and movements of characters in my mind. It’s a world that I can live in and go back to even while say, doing the dishes or supposedly-parenting my children. I enjoy colors—seeing what hues are trending, envisioning how I would redo a room’s décor, noting pairings in a good outfit. I’m easily awed by nature, in the grandiose or miniature. My career is visual: compared with other specialties, it’s based much more on what I see over what a patient tells me. One removes a cataract more by sight than feel.

And being highly imaginative makes parenting so much fun. I can invent silly rhymes (my latest one, after Eric got frustrated when Ellie tried to tell him he was wrong about something: “thank you for the education, I’ll use my imagination!”), spin any situation into a narrative, craft spontaneous things from a motley of items. If imagination is what connects our perceptions, what builds fantasy landscapes, what powers wonder, then kids live in the stuff, and being prone to it myself helps me connect with them.

But it’s not all good. In a talk on cultural imagination, David Brooks quoted someone as saying being alone with your imagination at night can be like opening a “drawer of knives.” It’s easy to be affected by fears. Sometimes I can’t stop picturing over and over how I should have done a particular step of a surgery differently. I’m seized with scenarios of my kids getting kidnapped and have a hard time letting them go outside unsupervised. I’m particularly affected by shows or books that are too frightening or sexually explicit. I don’t like reading about tragedy unless I know I have the space to process it. The only scary movie I ever let myself watch was “The Sixth Sense,” and I remember suffering from insomnia while backpacking through Europe years later because of it.

Part of discovering myself as an imaginative person—which, as a daughter of an engineer father and a no-nonsense mother, is coming to me rather later in life—is delighting in all the ways imagination helps me connect with my kids, create and enjoy creation, and moves me forward into the future with vision. But part of it is also discovering that I need an unusual kind of discipline: I need to be more intentional than most about my mental life. I must be careful of what I feed my mind and eyes, about what I let my thoughts stray to. What I think isn’t peripheral; it is the world I inhabit, and therefore how I am changed. In a way, it is what I worship and who I become.

Francis Parkman was an American historian who longed for the West as a young man. He later described his younger self: “His thoughts were always in the forest, whose features possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy.” I live much of life with my thoughts in the forest of my imaginings—and, to follow the metaphor, if I feel I have never really arrived, it is because, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.” When one day we experience our bodies, our earth, our loved ones, and our God as it is meant to be, maybe we’ll find it was less about what we knew than what we imagined.

Hope

"Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.”

- The Lord of the Rings, p. 922, J.R.R. Tolkien

I’ve been doing a study of the Holy Spirit recently to answer a question that came up in our small group, and I came across this reference in a sermon by Tim Keller. He was describing how being filled with the Holy Spirit is like and yet totally unlike being drunk. Alcohol fills us with joy, warmth and courage, but by knocking out reality. Being filled with the Holy Spirit shows us more of reality: it heightens our understanding of life; it is like truth shining. And if we have that reality and hope, what is there to worry about? He talked about how it was like Sam, traveling with Frodo through Mordor, and seeing beyond the darkness a beauty that smote his heart. Seeing that the Shadow was but a small and passing thing; having hope.

I’ve been thinking about hope lately, because we’ve been studying through Revelation with said small group, and I think so much about the book is to give its readers hope. It’s like that story about two people in prison, one told that his family and all he loved is gone, another told his family was alive and waiting for him, and how the first died but the second lived. Or about two people screwing widgets on in a tiny room all day, one told he would be paid ten dollars per day, the second ten million per day, and how the second lasted longer in the job than the first. Our hope in the future determines how we live today.

What determines our hope? I’ve been thinking about the difference between faith and hope—faith is what I believe in. It’s what I know. But hope is an emotive expectation: it is belief mixed with will and desire. As Luther wrote, “faith resteth in the understanding, hope in the will.” I have faith that my boss will pay me tomorrow; I have hope that with that money I can go on a road trip. I have to have faith in my boss to work at all, but it is my hope for the road trip that lets me stick through tough times at work.

That’s why hope in God and the future he reveals to us in Revelation is so great. Of course, the future is full of objective truth that all of us can put our faith in, but since God created me, and knows me better than anyone, he also better than anyone knows what it is I hope for. He knows my desires and feelings; what I delight in and what I suffer through, and the more I learn about the reality of who he is, where he dwells, and what he has in store, the more I find hope that puts daily things in perspective.

We all need hope to live. Maybe that’s why God calls himself a God of hope, and why being filled with the Holy Spirit causes us to “abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). I think of Proverbs 13:12—“hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life”—and I think of the literal tree of life, the one we forfeited in Eden but that will be waiting for us in eternity.

We visited an assisted living facility with the kids today to hand out daisies from our yard. The residents were parked in wheelchairs on either side along a hallway, just staring off into space. Some of the ones we handed flowers to brought them to their faces, but instead of smelling some tried to eat them, and that oddly reminded me of Esme, who had just done the same thing. Both ends of life, but one with bright eyes and squirmy skin stretched with fat; the other with glassy eyes and paper-thin, wrinkled stillness (“I didn’t know people could be so old,” Ellie said. “Really?” I said. “Yeah,” she replied, “I thought they died before they got that old”).

My hope in heaven now is hope in a place where there will be rest, fulfillment of all aspects of who I am and what I enjoy, and intimate understanding. Since, you know, I’m in a period of life full of unpredictable sleep, no me-time, and where it takes real effort to connect with adults. But I imagine when I’m at the end of life, I’ll be hoping in a new body, in eternal community instead of loneliness. I imagine it makes all the difference, and the greater the suffering, the more difference it makes. In the end, I don’t need to distract myself with leisure or fantasy: I need to sink my teeth into the reality of scripture, the source not of distraction or defiance, but real hope.

Arriving

One of the things I have the hardest time not believing is life will better when _______. Some of the things I have subconsciously filled in the blank with in the past include: I get married. I lose weight. I have kids. I have the right number of kids. I find the perfect house. I remodel my house. I get this outfit. I get this bag. I get a full nights’ sleep. I have this kind of sex life. I have these kinds of friends. I earn this much money. I acquire this reputation at work.

Obviously it’s okay to look forward to things, but I can get to a point where I hinge a certain portion of my thought life on arriving at a certain material or circumstantial place that has nothing to do with godliness. And it’s subtle, so subtle it’s nearly subconscious.

It probably has to do with the fact that so much of earlier life is about arriving somewhere: passing a test, getting into a school, passing another test, getting into another school, etc. And it probably relates to the world of constant advertising we indwell, in which it’s easy for a healthy material anticipation to edge into obsession or relative discontent.

It’s the world’s paradigm, that we should always be looking for more, looking for what’s next, to be happier. But the gospel shifts that paradigm completely. It says both that we can be completely content in our current circumstances, and that we ultimately anticipate and work towards eternity, which could come at any point. Nowhere does it say, life will be so much better when you design the perfect house. In fact, from an external perspective, Jesus didn’t “arrive” much of anywhere: he was never married, never had kids. Never got a degree. Probably didn’t own a house or earn much of a salary.

Part of this is reminding myself that my life should reflect what is most important now, and not put off working on things until I arrive at this or that landmark—for example, waiting to work on marriage until we have more time. Part of it is enjoying where I am now, not looking to the grass being always greener in the next stage of life or parenting. I think God created us to anticipate—and we’ll probably always anticipate and hunger to some degree until we get to heaven—but this is a good reminder to me to not base too much on the future.

How Decluttering Changed My Life

“You own things, then they own you.”

“A proper place for every thing and everything in its place.”

It started when we visited the home of an older mentor couple at church: their living room had two sofas and two end tables, and that was it. Nothing very large or fancy, but the feeling was clean and spacious: refreshingly simple. I found out one of the wife’s favorite books was Don Aslett’s Clutter’s Last Stand; after reading that, I went on to read about Marie Kondo’s method (she’s so huge—see article here—that a bunch of googling was all I needed). Last summer, I decluttered our entire house, and it’s really changed the way we live.

My biggest roadblock to decluttering was feeling like it was a waste to get rid of stuff: but Aslett argues that we should consider the time and effort it takes to store, clean, insure, transport, and protect our stuff. Consider the cleaning alone: Aslett, who owned a cleaning company, estimates that only fifty percent of cleaning is the actual scrubbing things clean; the rest is moving around all the stuff. Clutter is one of the greatest stealers of efficiency and time: it can take more time to get what we need than to use it. Aslett suggests that the mental and physical toll of keeping an unused item around is greater than throwing it out. Aslett quotes the 80/20 rule: 80% of value comes from 20% of things. We actually rarely notice that something is gone.

Then there are the economic principles. There’s the principle of sunk cost: you’ve already incurred irrecoverable cost in the stuff; you shouldn’t let that factor into your decision about its future. There’s the principle of status quo bias, when you let most of your stuff stay just because you can’t think of a good reason to get rid of it (instead, for example, of every item you own being thrown away unless you can think of a compelling reason why it should stay). Finally, there’s the folly of prediction, which states that we systemically make bad guesses about the future: we shouldn’t hang on to something because of potential future value, but should only use present-day valuations.

But I think decluttering also reflects a deeper mindset, a prioritization of your life. It is being respectful of and thoughtful about what you own. It is taking attentive care of what you have. It reflects for us a discipline of simplicity, where we consciously try not to acquire too much.

Practically, the process is simple: 1. decide what is clutter, 2. throw it away, and 3. take good care of the rest. Tidying is not the same: that simply shifts clutter from place to place. Similarly, storage solutions aren’t really the answer (Aslett likes to say, “room is doom”). I liked Kondo’s technique: you go by category (clothes, books, papers, etc) rather than room, and decide what is clutter by asking yourself: does this spark joy? If it doesn’t, thank it and let it go.

I didn’t quite get that anthropomorphic about it, and as I read I began to doubt Kondo has kids—I had to stage the process and do it when they weren’t around—but it worked. Probably the biggest (and easiest) category was clothing: it was so freeing to give away stuff I had hauled around since college that didn’t even fit anymore. I liked the thought process for gifts: thank the gift for what it’s done for you in the gift-giving moment, then let it go. The most enjoyable part was decluttering our closets, which now have more space than things. Aslett says, “when you clutter your closets and drawers with things, you’re cluttering your feelings and thinking—freedom in your dwelling allows freedom to dwell in you.” Interesting.

The ultimate change was really in mindset, which is the only reason these techniques last: we’ll habitually give or throw things away, we keep things in their places, and we try to be careful about what we acquire: we consider not just the moment, but the future keeping of it. I care more about cleaning and it’s easier to do so. Looking back, it helped me take greater ownership of our home, which made it easier to stay home more, which has certainly changed our lives.

Life-Giving

Dave’s sister coined that term a while back and it’s a concept that’s stuck with me. Even when she’s out here spending time with the kids, she’ll schedule life-giving things for herself: a jazz concert, time for deep conversation.

I think to me, something life-giving is something that restores a part of myself that I’ve maybe lost, or lost sight of. That’s the thing about mothering: it’s all-consuming in a way no other venture really is. God created me to enjoy and be good at a lot of things: to write, to play music, to travel, to teach, to knit, to draw, to study, to enjoy stories, to linger in deep conversation, to be in nature, to shop, to bake, okay, to sleep—the list goes on. Some of those things are incorporated into what I do with the kids, sure, and there’s a unique kind of pleasure in that, but the parts I did for myself just fade away. Not so much amputated as atrophied, until one day I find myself with some time off and don’t even know what to do.

You would think doing something life-giving is automatic, but it’s not, especially when you’re out of routine. My default isn’t really to ask, “what can I do to restore a sense of myself?” My default is to eat chocolate ice cream (which I’m doing right now—why aren’t there more ice cream places around here? that’s one thing I miss about Boston) and read escapist novels. Which usually leaves me more loath to return to real life rather than refreshed for it.

Everyone’s list probably looks different, but things that generally fall into this category for me are: a deep conversation with a friend (away from the kids; play-dates don’t count). Playing the piano for a length of time (again, away from the kids, who like to join in—sensing a theme here). Visiting a yarn store. Browsing in a bookstore. Meeting with a friend. Shopping for myself. Taking an art class (taking any kind of class). Journaling to God. Eating something new. Being surrounded by nature. Giving a good lecture. Taking a nap in a quiet house.

Sometimes I don’t know I need to be doing something life-giving until I’m at the point of burn-out, but one of my resolutions this year is to be better at taking care of myself. I tend to get obsessed with a task at the exclusion of all else, and since parenting is one non-ending task, I actually need to remind myself that it’s okay to leave the kids, to get out, to do something that helps me remember who I am. The more I enjoy myself in the different ways God created me to be, the more I enjoy God, the more I enjoy the kids, the more life I can pour into them. I actually need to put some forethought and nearly always some planning into it, since it’s not a default, and since doing anything without kids involves planning. But it’s always worth it.

Connecting with Jesus

If I've been hearing God saying anything to me lately, it's been to plug in more regularly with him. With Jesus. I heard a talk recently about spiritual pathways, the seven to nine different ways (depending on who you read) that people can connect with God. It wasn't hard to identify myself as a contemplator and an intellectual: I experience God most when I am thinking and reflecting, usually involving journaling and solitude, and when I discover a new concept or learn something I didn't know, usually through exegetical sermons or Bible study. It wasn't difficult to identify Dave as a naturalist: he always feel close to God in nature. The last moment I can think of where we were both awed by nature together was on high sand dunes in a park in the outer banks, and it was as memorable spiritually as it was aesthetically.

But knowing how important it is to connect with God, and even how to do it, it's amazing how little we do. We hear about him, sing about him, read about the Bible more than we actually read the Bible and personally encounter him each day. We pray as if we're talking to ourselves more than spend time in true listening dialogue. If we transcribed our prayers, we'd probably be astonished at how self-centered, rote, or devoid of sincere meaning they sometimes are.

I heard about a study that found that people who read their Bibles less than four times a week had outward lives that were indistinguishable from non-believers. The magic number appeared to be four or more times a week. How often do you read? Are you following Jesus, or your notion of Jesus? Are you growing closer to him every day, or do you not think about him at all most days? Do you ever ask him where he wants you to go in life this day, or two decades from now, or do you pretty much make those decisions on your own and get nominal approval from him?

Sometimes we can get through life seemingly fine without being aware of our relationship with Jesus at all. Then sometimes we have difficult experiences that make it obvious where we stand with Jesus. I find parenting to be one of those experiences-- it is, as a friend once pointed out, a spiritually formative experience. You are going to know where you stand with Jesus whether you want to or not. You can't get by in the end on your own strength of will, or intellectual knowledge: you'll get broken down eventually--it might be the fifth tantrum, or the seventh sleepless night, or the same daily battle to get your kids to eat or dress, but eventually it will become obvious whether you've been coasting on your own powers or are bearing true spiritual fruit.

I think we as caregivers can forget that we need to relate with Jesus. Just for his sake, just for our sake, not for the sake of anyone else. When I experience his love, when I connect with him, when I read the Bible, I have something to draw on through the day. I have this mental image of a garden, where I have to go if I want to bear any fruit. Most of the gardens in the Bible are fruit gardens. I was reminded last week that Judas knew where to find Jesus because that garden was a place he had often gone to before—a place Jesus went to connect with his Father. And of course, when he rose, Mary first walks with him in a garden. How do you most naturally connect with God? What has he been saying to you today?

Overcoming Angry Outbursts

So in my last post about anger, I thought about how anger could be bad or good, and how the point is learning how to be angry the right way. This book we’re studying for our marriage class (Love Busters by Harley) says something more extreme: “there is no place for anger in marriage.” Angry outbursts should and can be completely eliminated in marriage.

He gives several reasons for why angry outbursts should never be tolerated: it never evens the score or solves problems. It withdraws units from the love bank and erodes your spouse’s feelings of love for you.  It is a form of abuse and control. It is a like a psychotic episode: you are irrational, you think your spouse is your worst enemy and deliberately trying to hurt you, your sense of the truth is distorted, and you often forget afterwards exactly what you did and said.

He describes the following steps for overcoming angry outbursts:

1. Acknowledge the fact that you, and you only, determine if you will have an angry outburst. No one “makes” you angry. Until you take full responsibility for your angry outbursts, you cannot learn to control them. You can avoid them if you choose. As soon as you give yourself any excuses for your outbursts (other people, how you were raised, etc), you will not overcome them.

2. Identify instances of your angry outbursts and their effects. Ask your spouse: how much unhappiness do my outbursts cause you? How often do they occur? What do I do/say during them? Which ways you are attacked causes you the most unhappiness? How have they changed in frequency or other ways over time?

3. Understand why your angry outbursts take place. Ask yourself: why do I lose my temper? What are the most important reasons why I have outbursts against my spouse? What do I typically do? What do I think hurts them the most? Do I feel better afterwards and why? Do I feel a score is evened? Do I ever try to control/avoid them; why and how? If I decided never to have another angry outburst, could I stop? Am I willing to; why and why not?

4. Try to avoid the conditions that make angry outbursts difficult to control. These could include physical conditions (time of day, hunger, fatigue), making too many sacrifices (generosity leads to resentment and anger; he says marriage should involve not sacrifices, but solutions about which both people are enthusiastically happy), having assumptions about unspoken understandings, patterns of communication such as demands or disparaging remarks, circumstances like bad traffic or stress at work. Ask: can we control any of these conditions?

5. Train yourself to control your temper when you cannot avoid frustrating situations. This means walking away, or, as the author urges, learning to relax. Practicing relaxing, by imagining something your spouse does that frustrates you, then relaxing after thinking about it—instead of feeling increasingly resentful, feeling more objective. Picturing yourself thinking of solutions without becoming angry. Training your physiologic response.

6. Measure your progress. Ask your spouse to keep track of the day, date, time, circumstances, description of your angry outbursts. Address each one immediately to avoid more in the future.

Thinking over all this helped me realize that deep down, I think I have a right to angry outbursts. I think I need them so Dave understands the depth of hurt that underlies a surface frustration, or so that he gets the intensity of my emotions. Often I see my outbursts as even being productive, because it helps me get it off my chest so I feel better afterwards, and it leads us to discuss some deep issue that we may not otherwise have.

But I’m realizing that my angry outbursts hurt him more than I realize. It erodes at our relationship and is actually counter-productive to problem-solving and negotiating, because I become temporarily irrational, and because it erodes at our basic sense of love and trust. I’m wrapping my mind around the fact that it is necessary, and possible, to make a commitment to never again having another angry outburst.

I think the key to handling anger well is to allow my initial feelings of anger to help get us to that place where we have deep discussions, listening to expressions of hurt, and problem-solving without having an angry outburst. My initial prompting of anger, my feelings of frustration, hurt, jealousy or whatever it is are legitimate. I have to trust that Dave will listen deeply and seriously when I tell him it is serious. I don’t have to have an angry outburst, and when I feel myself becoming angry, I can commit to mentally and physically choosing to relax instead, to walk away temporarily to calm down if I can.

So we’ve worked through those questions with each other, and I think we’re both going to commit to not having angry outbursts. When I’m in a situation where I feel increasing frustration and early anger (which pretty much seems like every night sometimes with the kids acting up), I think, okay, you are starting to get angry. You can choose not to let it burst out. You can choose not to step through that door. It’s not as bad as it feels right now. The world is not as bad as it looks right now. It is not all Dave’s fault, and he is not purposely trying to hurt me. It’s better for you not to say anything right now. You can calm down; you can walk away.

In some ways it’s rewiring how I react, relearning how I communicate. Sometimes I look at the kids, who burst into anger at the slightest provocation, who make selfish demands and lose sight of rationality, and I think, well, it’s born in us. It all has to be redeemed. God has redeemed me. He loves me and I live in grace as his child. I can learn to do this; I can walk in and work out my salvation in this way. He won’t give me more than I can handle in that moment. He will provide a way out for that temptation to have an outburst. I can do it, and he can do it in me.

The Little Things

One thing you learn pretty quickly living in little-kid world is that small things matter. Her headbands must be worn with the bow or flower on a particular side. Making sure Bunny has his blanket tucked in tight is more important than being on time for school. The blue sippy cup, purple spoon, and orange bowl go to Ellie; the green sippy cup, yellow spoon, and butterfly bowl go to Eric. He likes his sandwiches without the crust and his food no warmer than room temperature. She was really touched that I remembered to pack a Kleenex (not a napkin, mind you) into her lunch box.

Kids have this odd attention to detail that would be considered inconvenient at best and dysfunctional at worst in adult terms, but sometimes it can be a refreshing reminder to rethink what is most important. There are definitely plenty of quirky preferences I hope they grow out of, but when I get into their heads, I am reminded that to them what is relational and speaks love is always more important than some task or something more convenient, and that can be good. It is very important to show Nana, their stuffed dog, that we love her by making a house for her and tucking her in properly. It is very important to finish the drawing we are making as a gift for Daddy, even if it means dinner starts late. It is very important to closely examine each other’s (nonexistent) boo-boo’s immediately.

Rick Bass writes that whenever he is confronted with a difficult task or struggle, he thinks about glaciers. A glacier forms from the accumulation of snow that hardens into ice, over years, and once it starts moving, nothing can stop it. He writes that “glaciers get built or not built, simply, miraculously, because the earth is canting a single one-trillionth of a degree in this direction for a long period of time, rather than in that direction.” And then, “When I am alone in the woods, and the struggle seems insignificant or futile… I tell myself that little things matter—and I believe they do. I believe that even if your heart leans just a few degrees to the left or the right of center, that with enough resolve.. and enough time.. the ice will begin to form.. then one day—it must—the ice will begin to slide.”

Kids notice the little things. God notices the little things. The little things matter. The struggle I win over not saying out loud the selfish thought I have in my head. The determination to avoid the source of an unhealthy fantasy. Deciding to wake up with grace towards my kids instead of grumpiness. Listening to a patient for a few more moments instead of rushing out the door. Deciding I’m going to be vulnerable even though I’m scared. The little things are usually unseen, rarely lauded, often unscheduled, but I think they are where life happens. They are what life is. They are the difference between living life in asynchrony and living life with integrity; they are what make us who we are in the end.