Long Days and Short Years

The last few weeks have been a revolving door of serial viral maladies—pretty much the lot of anyone with kids during some period of the year. On the East Coast this usually happened during the (what I now feel was bitterly cold) winters; this year, we’ve managed to escape being sick until being hit now with a double round. Just as the fourth kid is recovering from what’s been passed through the three previous kids, the first kid gets sick again, this time even worse, and down we go through the line again.

So this afternoon found me again holding lethargic, clingy, feverish kids and figuring out creative ways to get a two year-old to drink medicine she hates, while still dealing with the bickering and appetites of the healthy kids. And trying to somehow sort out germy and non-germy things on behalf of my public-health husband who believes we should have been able to contain spread of this contagion (he may be right).

By the time Dave got home, I didn’t feel like sitting through forty-five minutes of bay-area traffic to make some doctor’s meeting I had signed up for, but the best part ended up being the traffic, because I turned on some Focus on the Family podcasts like I used to during commutes in Virginia. Gary Thomas was sharing as an empty nester. He said one time when he was in the mall he saw a toddler run in front of her daddy to say, “hold me; my legs are tired!” The dad didn’t look too happy, but he shifted his bags to one hand and picked her up. And suddenly he was struck by the fact that he would never again hold one of his kids while walking through the mall (his youngest was twelve). These changes happen so subtly, he said. He wished someone could have gone back and told him, “this is the last time you will hold your kid while walking in the mall!” and he would have been more present.

I thought about how just today, I was feeling frustrated about having to hold Esme while walking into school for pick-up. But thinking back now I remember how the wind blew her wispy, sticky hair in my face; how her little chubby arm crooked around mine; how she kept talking on despite her fever about how there were letters on the road! And there was a dog! And she wasn’t wearing any shoes! (always a score in her book)

I remember Ellie exclaiming how nice it is to read a good book when you’re sitting sick on the couch. How she burrowed in my bed when she got chills. That moment when Eric was mad-faced and teary but agreed to be held and then jumped up to hug me hard when I hefted him up. The sleepy way Elijah rolled himself into his special blanket on the couch after waking up from a long nap.

The danger of my present, I suppose, is that it is so engulfing. It is hard to retain perspective or true presence. And I suppose part of wisdom is realizing that there is something in all of it, the good and bad, the healthy and sick, that I will one day wish I could retain but cannot. There is a part of my every day that God has portioned for me not just to function through, but to notice, to be aware in and even treasure, because it will not come back. I don’t want to be so consumed that my gratitude, focus, or curiosity has been sucked up by impatience, efficiency, or tasks. I don’t want to be so worn down by the consuming repetition of caregiving that I write off wonder in the common things.

Quote

"Faith is a refusal to panic. Do you like that sort of definition of faith? Does that seem to be too earthly and not sufficiently spiritual? It is of the very essence of faith. Faith is a refusal to panic, come what may. 

"It says, 'All right, I see the waves and billows but'--it always puts up this 'but'. That is faith, it holds on to truth and reasons from what it knows to be fact. That is the way to apply faith...It is inevitable logic, and faith argues like that. Faith reminds itself of what the Scripture calls the 'exceeding great and precious promises. ...Whatever your circumstances at this moment, bring all you know to be true of your relationship to God to bear upon it. 'All things work together for good to them that love God.' Not a hair of your head shall be harmed, He loves you with an everlasting love.'" 

– Martin Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, 1965: 143-145

Summer Camp Planning

Back in Virginia, summers for kids meant doing nothing. The neighborhood kids would loiter around all day, jumping on trampolines and drinking grape soda (though to be fair there seemed to be quite a bit of that during the school year too). Here in the Bay Area, summers are apparently when the true nature of parenting declares itself. During the school year, I can pretend that everyone else is normal, that all the other kids leaving school are also heading home to eat snacks and play. In reality, they’re probably all being shuttled off by ride services or grandparents to various lessons, but I don’t have to know that.

Then January hits, and with it circulated spreadsheets of camps. Well-intentioned parents coordinate summer schedules six months in advance, so they can get their kids and their kids’ friends into all the best camps before they fill up. The assumption on these calendars seems to be that every week should be booked, with either a camp or a transcontinental vacation. No wonder people say having more kids is too expensive—if you assume properly raising your kids includes flying them to Australia for vacation and shelling out $500-plus for sports camps at Stanford, it would be tough to have four (the two most common comments I get from strangers when out with all the kids are, “wow, you’re brave”—in a near-sarcastic, not encouraging, tone of voice—and “your husband must be rich”—which I find offensive on several levels).

The sheer options of camps has left me mostly in a state of paralysis of choice: every swim club and park has its version of a tennis-swim-arts combination camp; there are lego camps to promote citizenship, engineering, or themed along popular movies; every conceivable type of science, engineering, coding, visual arts, theater, dance, and sport camp is being run somewhere within a short radius of our house.

At heart, I would like to put our older kids in a few camps; the summer seems like a good time to get them to try some new things with short-term commitments, and some variety of routine may be good. But I think the reason I feel subliminally stressed by this whole venture has more to do with the undercurrent of the culture here. The way people approach summers seems to say that parenting is about out-sourcing and optimization. You outsource their care and teaching to specialized experts. You outsource their socio-emotional learning, their skill sets, their cognitive development, all according to the most recent research. You optimize their time, with never a wasted week. You optimize through comparative analysis, seeing what other parents are doing. In the end, you optimize for outcome, assuming you can maneuver your kids into success by controlling the right variables.

I don’t think I believe that. I believe parenting happens at home, where the difficult decisions aren’t which lego camp to put them in, but how to help a middle child develop self-confidence, or a strong-willed child learn to be a servant. I believe the most important things I want to teach my kids—values, worldviews, character; not just knowledge and skills—are best learned by modeling at home. I don’t think parenting is about optimization, but shepherding. Imputing skills so they can navigate a system for outward success isn’t as important as knowing them deeply, in every stage, and understanding how to reach and guide them in ways they need. Ultimately, I think about what I want for them in their lives—would it be nice if they went to an elite school? Yeah, I guess so; but what is more important is that they love and follow Jesus, that they marry the right person, that they grow in character (and when I think it’s crazy I’m thinking about colleges, I remember that line from Semple’s book Where’d You Go, Bernadette: “Let me rock it straight: the first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station”).

I think the conclusion we’ve come to is: spend no more than half the summer with the older two in camps. Go for low-key camps, not necessarily the most competitive or popular, based mostly on interest, though it’s okay for us to require one for the sake of pushing them to try new things. But mostly, I’m trying not to get sucked into this extremely pervasive sense of pressure and stress, which takes some level of conscious effort. It’s probably good preparation for the future.

Sojourner

The process of adjusting here has been a lot more complex and prolonged than I expected. During the first six months or so, I was mostly taken by all this area has to offer and the thrill of finally having settled, but this past month, I’ve been consumed more by what I would call adaptation fatigue and situational dysthymia. The logistical hurdles, the flush of introductions, the initial wonder at available resources have passed, and now I am faced with day-to-day life in a place where I don’t quite feel like I belong yet. I feel oddly tired of introducing myself to new people, of forever putting myself out there without feeling truly understood. I feel blanketed at times with a heavy sense of loneliness or displacement. I find myself withdrawing or becoming easily judgmental of others.

Part of the challenge is finding sufficient space to process this all, I’m finding. Space to breathe in it. I’m constantly on the verge of burn-out from childcare: to my bitter discovery, living near my parents in Virginia meant not only more breaks from childcare than I had fully realized, but also a level of support in the practical and spiritual parenting of our kids that I now shoulder largely on my own. Secondly, this process has been different for me than for Dave, who is a native returning to his closest friends—it is still a process for him, but instead of naturally bringing us together, it tends to bring out our differences, in values, personality and upbringing. Lastly, if possible I tend to disregard my emotions in favor of function and appearances; in reality, I haven’t chosen to give my emotions space as much as felt, rather frustratingly, that I can’t escape them.

In this space, there are two truths that are seeping into my consciousness. One, we will always be creatures who long to belong and are shaped by where we live. I thought before the move, “well, places are less important to me than to Dave; I care more about just being settled inside our own home”—but the reality is, while it’s true that I never wanted to live in Virginia forever and don’t necessarily want to move back now, I am apparently very much a product of the culture in which I have lived most of my life. This is inescapable. I am adapting in superficially functional ways—I now expect bikers and pedestrians at every stop sign, only “landfill” if it can’t be composted or recycled, own yoga pants and hiking sneakers, have upgraded Mac products, can push my way through the constant crowds of Asians at Costco—but in deeper ways I still feel like I’m swimming against the tide. I choose following Jesus over ideologies that value self-determinism, personal freedom or total inclusivity above all else. I tend to feel that chinos or jeans equal casual wear. I value common civility, maybe even a tad of Southern gentility, in public. I feel wary of the pervasive stress and busyness, the sense that success can be maneuvered into with the right kinds of programs and activities.

So I am more of a southern Virginian than perhaps I had appreciated, and it is no wonder that I feel more displaced than I had anticipated. There is a kind of grieving that must happen, a kind of loneliness that must be walked through, a kind of reconstruction of self that must grow out of this space. I don’t want to lose some of the good things about growing up and starting my family in the south, but I want to be willing to be challenged in some of it. I don’t want to lose sight of some of the more insular aspects of this place or take too much for granted. More than anything, I need to stay humble in all of it, not to fall into disengagement or judgement, so that I can receive what I need to grow how I need. I suppose any major life change—a death, a loss of relationship, a change in life stage—is like this.

Second, in this space I feel more keenly aware of the truth that I will never fully belong. Not really, not anywhere. Reading through chunks of the early Old Testament, I see a sweeping pilgrim narrative. Why did God choose his people, only to ask them constantly to leave—Abraham from his hometown, the people from their lands for Egypt, then from Egypt for the wilderness? Throughout the law, God values the sojourner: don’t forget, he says, that you wandered in tents; provide for the outsider because you once were one too. Remember that your forever-home is ultimately not here. The narrative is not of earthly belonging as much as God’s presence in the journey. There was never Eden again, but there was the cloud, there was the tent, there was the temple, there was Jesus, there is the Holy Spirit. The deepest part of me will always be sojourning, but it will always be with God present.

There is the temptation, particularly at this stage of our lives when we’re looking to settle in houses, kids, cars, jobs, geographies, to look to all that for belonging, but this instead is the truth which one day catches up to us all. We are sojourners. Life is full of goodbyes, and nothing we have do we grasp too tightly. Maybe one day I will feel like I completely belong here—maybe I never will. I don’t know. But in the not-yet, to be sustained by the I-Am: this is what it means to walk in this space.

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.