Before my first trip to Belarus as a fifteen-year-old, I, along with the rest of our team, went through extensive training on how to travel overseas. We learned behavioral differences between our country and others (Americans are loud), we learned how to properly and respectfully address the people we would meet, the rules for public transportation, and how to react to a plate of jello filled with sardines if it was placed before you.
Hint: Don’t make gagging noises and push it away. Act normal, swallow hard, and prepare for a culinary adventure.
By the time we left, we were fully ready to conquer the world, and for the most part we did a great job. There were a few instances, of course, when our American senses would overwhelm and we’d let out a shriek of excitement only to be met with the tsks of a nearby Babyshka. And really, no matter how hard you try, you couldn’t parade a group of 15-18 year old Americans down a Belorussian sidewalk in 1994 and not expect some sort of gawking.
Mostly, though, we handled ourselves well. Until that one day…
We made a stop in Frankfurt, Germany on our way home. It was a day and a night to decompress and explore. We grabbed our monstrous, rolling suitcases after making it through customs and in a long line, we made our way to the train that would take us to our hotel.
But there was a problem. We had to get down a long, very narrow escalator in order to get to the train. Perhaps, looking back, wisdom would have dictated that maybe we find an elevator that would better accommodate our bags, but we were running late, so we were instructed to turn our bags sideways and go down.
Only the first person in the group missed the instruction about turning the bag sideways.
He got to the bottom of the escalator and stepped off, but his bag did not budge. It was wedged tight. He yanked and pulled and in the meantime, the person behind him tried to step up and over his bag, only to lose her bag behind her in the process.
On and on it went with each of us trying to dive over the now growing pile of baggage, piling up like the players in a really bad, painfully humiliating rugby match. The ever moving escalator continued to propel everyone behind us downward, though some of the smart ones turned and fought the current to get back to the top.
It was the most hysterical mess as we all tumbled to the bottom, then slowly began to disentangle the unfortunate bags. We brushed ourselves off, held our heads high, and made our way to the train trying to communicate that we weren’t always this cool.
These last few days have felt like another ride on that fateful escalator. As one “bag” after another piled up at the bottom, I could see the mound approaching, and I hoped I could leap over it.
I tripped and fell yesterday. It all hit me. The stress of a job change, last minute flights to Arkansas that had to be changed into last minute flights to Houston for job interviews. Last day of school. Cancer diagnosis.All of life piled up before me, and instead of gracefully leaping over it, I fell miserably, a hyperventilating, panicked mess of a woman who thought she could hold it together.
It’s my fault, really. I forgot I’m pregnant, and that emotions when pregnant tend run a little…um…hotter than normal. I forgot to sleep, and I didn’t eat properly. I tried to do everything, and to be everyone to all my people. I wanted to be the strong one – the one who held it together.
Instead I’m the one who had a panic attack in the school parking lot.
I’m better today. It’s a new day, and releasing a lot of the pent up fears and heartache helped to dislodge the baggage waiting to trip me up. That’s the problem with keeping everything squelched up inside. It’s like trying to fit an oversized rolling bag on an undersized escalator.
It’s bound to cause a fall.
Are you feeling overwhelmed today? Is there a mound of life piling up before you? Before you try to jump over it, can I encourage you to call a friend, or meet with someone face to face who will let you unload some of the emotions?
Trust me – you will much prefer that to hyperventilating in a parking lot. I’m not always this cool, folks…
Here’s to a restful, balanced, baggage free weekend.
Last week I wrote of Love, and of the beautiful, mysterious pain that accompanies such a surrender of emotion. When I typed those words, I formed them in the context of watching my child graduate kindergarten. They were framed in the knowledge that Love requires separation, and in my innocent state of mind, I could only see the separation of parent and child that comes through space and time.
Then we got the phone call no one wants to receive.
There was a mass. The biopsy reveals cancer. We wait and we pray, and we hope for the best – the miracle of healing. Today the confirmation brought unwelcome news.
Stage 4. Metastatic.
Suddenly the pain of Love grew wings and took flight. Lee’s dad – our patriarch, our hero, our mentor, and a steady spiritual guide – now faces a fight that, short of a miraculous touch from God Himself, will result in his passing from this life on earth and into the gates of heaven.
“…Now it may surprise you to learn that in His (God’s) efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks;some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
There is no irony in our present circumstance. We cannot point to these days with a flippant laugh and label them a coincidence. For on the very day we got news that cancer had invaded one we loved, Lee was in process to make a transition at work.
His division was cut loose from the company. We’d known this for weeks, and while the news was met with some disappointment, suddenly it seemed that he had lost his job for such a time as this.
Severance gives him a cushion to absorb the blow of his father’s illness. We have the freedom to leave, he and I, for the weekend, and fly to Arkansas where we will fold into the arms of his parents and brothers and all face this new challenge in the race together.
What a privilege it is…
When we told our kids of their grandfather’s illness, I felt a tightness pinch my heart. My sweet little ones will now taste the sting of illness. They can no longer be sheltered from the fear of grieving and, given the statistics, they may face the searing pain of death far earlier than I would have wanted them to.
And yet I cannot escape the thought that this journey we are about to walk as a family is a privilege. One thought has rumbled across my heart all day as I’ve processed this pain of a Love torn.
What a privilege it is for my children to know the sting of illness and the reality of heaven at a tender age.
We’re gearing up for a road filled with hope and unknowns. We cry out for a miracle, with full belief that God, in His mighty power, is capable of banishing the cancer from Herb’s body with a simple touch of His Hand. We pray for this, that we may show our children the power of God, and proclaim Him to the world.
And yet…
We accept the reality that God may have a different path planned. One in which we must say goodbye far sooner than we ever hoped or imagined or desired. And if this is the path we must follow, we will show our children the power of God, and we will proclaim Him to the world.
Cancer is an ugly word. It sucks the marrow of joy right out of a soul. But we have been given the grace of time. We pray it will be longer than the statistics predict. We pray it will be sweeter than the treatment’s effects. We rejoice in our current state of jobless unknowns, for it gives us the sweet freedom of time to process.
What a privilege it is to walk this road of grief and hope, for in this trough I feel God so near. He is real, a balm to the sting.
My ten year old and I took a walk today. Hand in hand we made our way down the sidewalk, and his sweet innocence blessed me.
“I’m excited to see heaven now,” he said to me, a smile spread across his face. “I can just imagine it, and what I’m imagining is awesome.”
What a privilege it is to walk this pain. We covet your prayers in the days, weeks, and months to come. They will be hard, and they will be sweet. They will mirror the mystery of Love.
Join us in praying for a miracle – no matter what shape it may take.
We still have a week of school left, but already I’m gearing the kids up for summer expectations. More and more, Lee and I have felt pressed to teach our kids how to fill their time wisely. This is a difficult task as it requires us to fill our time wisely. That whole “leading by example” mentality that’s supposed to be so effective in parenting, you know?
As we head into the summer months, my goal is to have plenty of fun activities planned, with a fair amount of downtime built in. So, without further ado, I give you…
The Stuart Family Summertime Agenda of Awesome
I doubt this will drastically curb the desperate pleas for help entertaining themselves, but hopefully it will give them a reference to look to instead of tugging on me day in and day out with all their woes of boredom.
This sign hangs proudly on the laundry room door, right outside the kitchen. It is our agenda of all the awesomeness that’s about to go down this summer.
See how exciting I’m making it sound?! Think they’ll buy it?
So sprinkled in between visits to Adventure Island and the beach, my hope is that all of us will enjoy a little more downtime this summer. Time spent reading, relishing the silence, electronic free mornings and maybe…juuuuuuust maaaayyybeeeee, my children who love to hop out of bed before the sun even peeks over the horizon will sleep in just a teeny, tiny bit.
All I’m asking for is 7:00 WHICH SEEMS ENTIRELY REASONABLE TO ME!
I’m not holding my breath…feel free to send coffee and Peppermint Mocha Creamer my way.
So tell me – how do you keep your kids active, engaged, and free from the summertime boredom blues? Do share!
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
…Now it may surprise you to learn that in His (God’s) efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks;some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.
The reason is this. To us (the demons) a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience that the Enemy (God) demands of men is quite a different thing.
One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.”
C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters (emphasis mine)
Life can throw us curveballs when we least expect it. Sometimes we barely manage to push ourselves off our knees before we’re brought low again. We are undulating through life in the ever constant shift between highs and lows, goods and bads, troughs and peaks.
This is where our passions, our imaginations, and our eternal, spiritually connected souls take shape.
I’ve spent the morning digging through The Screwtape Letters once again. When life feels curvy, I find solace in books. My anxious heart calms in the rhythm of the written word. There is equal comfort to be found in music, which Lewis describes in The Screwtape Letters (from a demon’s point of view) as “a detestable art…a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.”
“Something like it occurs in heaven,” he writes. Then he describes laughter as producing a similar effect on the human soul.
I don’t know where you are in life today, whether you’re down on your knees, trying to dust off yet another disappointment, or recoiling from the aftershocks of unexpected news, but I offer you this encouragement:
Look for comfort in beautifully penned words, and seek the peace of the scriptures.
Listen to music that pulls you into that realm of celestial experience.
And, if at all possible (and it’s always possible), find a way to laugh. Look for fun wherever you might find it, and for however brief a time it may appear, for as Lewis writes, “Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct.”
I watched this film last night, and I was struck by the simple beauty of the message. Don’t let life pass you by. Grab hold, live full, go big, and stay in it. Don’t miss the beauty of the moment lost in day dreams, or mired down in the need to document each moment in time.
Two main characters captured this film, though we only saw one of them for a few brief moments at the end. Walter Mitty was a man who let the difficult moments of the past define his present. He quit living when tragedy struck, and he pushed aside his dreams and passions for a life of practicality.
The consequences of this decision left him with nothing but his imagination, and he lost himself in daydreams, longing for a life he might have known if he hadn’t let it slip through his fingers.
The other character, Sean O’Connell, was a famous photographer, a man who grabbed life by the horns. He had no address, no phone, nothing but his camera, and his vision of the world around him. They were unlikely friends, a relationship having been forged through letters and photographs, until Walter needed to track Sean down to find a particular photo, and he finally began living life. Really living life.
When he finally caught up to Sean on a mountaintop in the Himalayas, he watched as the man let the beauty of nature sink in. Though Sean’s camera was set up and ready to capture an elusive moment in nature, when it finally came around, Walter wanted to know why he didn’t snap the picture.
“Sometimes if I like a moment…I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera,” Sean said. “I just want to stay in it.”
I love this line. In fact, I really liked this movie. I loved the message, and I found myself chewing on it for a bit as I drifted off to sleep. I think that everyone has the potential to fall into the trap of Walter Mitty. We all let life swing past us as we give in to responsibility, to laziness, to fear, or simple apathy.
We could all use a little more “Sean O’Connell,” though.We could all stand to grab life by the horns just a little more. To live fully and bravely in this world that threatens to pass us by.
The real trick is recognizing the moments when we simply need to stay in it. Without the distraction of a camera, of social media, of the pressure to document and record. We just need to stay right there.
Right here.
As kids finish up school and you head into summer, I encourage you to make every effort to stay in the moment. Don’t be afraid to unplug, to step away, to capture a moment by living it rather than recording it.
I’m issuing myself this very challenge, and maybe together we can push each other forward to a life more fulfilled, more purposeful, and better captured than we thought possible without the benefit of a device in hand.
