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Because Sometimes I Throw My Blankie Over the Side of the Crib, Too

May 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Some days Keegan does not want to nap. On those days, after listening to him play in his crib then whine then cry for Mama, I hear a heart-breaking wail: “Dah!” And I know he’s thrown his blankie over the side of the crib and regrets it.

I know I should leave him and leave blankie so he learns to stop throwing blankie over the side of the crib and that he can’t get out of nap time with such antics.

But I’m not different from Keegan. Some days I do not want to do what God has placed in my life to do and I avoid it or I whine or I cry, and then I throw my blankie over the side of the crib. And I regret it.

God should leave me and leave my blankie right where I threw it and let me deal with the consequences so I learn that I can’t get out of things with such antics. Sometimes he does.

But sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he gets my blankie and cuddles me and lets me know he loves me, and then he returns me to the situation because I still have responsibilities.

So I go in and retrieve blankie (named Dah by Keegan for some unknown reason) and cuddle Keegan, and then I put him back in his crib with blankie because he still has to take a nap.

Also, I know how important blankie is to Keegan’s well-being. After all, that blankie was made from the blankie I carried everywhere at his age.

Filed Under: motherhood Tagged With: , ,

On Reading

May 15, 2012 By 2 Comments

I’ve always loved books.

I fell in love with books before I could read, when my parents would read story after story to me, and I’d memorize the stories, and my mom would tell her friends that I could read before I could because I not only knew the books word-for-word, but I knew when to turn the pages and where to look at which words. (Don’t worry–she always revealed her joke before they called the nightly news.)

Year after year, I handed my parents my Christmas list–a list of books. Then I’d spend Christmas day and the rest of the week finishing those books. At the annual school book fair, I’d dog-ear the catalog and make my selections, parceling out the little money I had to spend on lengthy books that would last longer.

I read books because I wanted to be like the people I read about (especially Anne of Green Gables, but that’s no secret). I wanted to live in their worlds. I wanted to bring something from their worlds into mine.

Sometime later, I noticed how all the smart people analyzed books, and I wanted to learn how to do that. I wanted to glean more and more from the book. I had learned how to analyze music, and it made me love and understand music deeper and wider. I had learned how to analyze Scripture and theology, and it made me love and understand God and his ways more. I wanted the same for books. I wanted to love books and short stories I hadn’t understood before. I wanted to see deeper into the books and stories I already loved. I wanted to know why I loved them, what made them so great.

At first, learning different ways that people tell stories and develop characters and unfold themes and paint images did just that. It opened up the wonders of a book and its construction and the genius of the writer. I began to learn how to discern between a fun read and something much deeper. But sometimes, it became something ugly.

It became a way for me to feel superior to people who only read those kinds of books. And it became a voice censoring the books I could read and enjoy.

There is something objective to art, what makes a book well-written, well-developed, and long-lasting, what makes the characters linger on our palates, the stories mingle with our memories, the themes sneak into our theologies and ideologies and all those other -ologies that guide how we choose jobs or clean our homes or love our neighbors. Analyzing a piece of art can help us understand its meaning and why it means something to us.

But here’s where I erred: I forgot to first enter into the story. Sometimes I forgot to enjoy reading. I looked first at what I was supposed to think about it, what the author said about the book, what the critics said about the book, what the smart readers said about the book. I forgot because I feared not looking smart.

We fall in love with reading because we enter into these stories, into the lives of these characters, and they mean something to us. The stories reflect our own. We realize we’re not alone. We understand something we didn’t understand before about ourselves, our world (micro and macro), or about the woman down the street.

When I enter into a story, I may (gasp) miss something that the author intended or the critics got, but I may also get something else entirely out of it. It may relate to me in a way that it never related to the author because we have different experiences, different backgrounds, different lives.

I learned to be okay with looking dumb when I read and talked about a book (or play, for that matter) because here’s the other thing: I can learn from a community of readers who also entered into the story and gleaned something entirely different than what I did. I learned to be okay with admitting that the most influential authors on my life and writing include, yes, Chimamanda Adichie and Richard Russo and Jennifer Egan and Anne Tyler and (now) Jonathan Safran Foer, but they also include Carolyn Keene (or the group of writers who make up Carolyn Keene) and L.M. Montgomery and (here’s the big reveal that may destroy my reputation [in my head, I have a grand reputation]) Janette Oke. I learned to be okay with admitting that some days I read a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, some days I read a whodunit, and some days I even read an Oprah-pick (don’t judge me).

I love books. The bookshelf in my bedroom is reserved for the books dearest to me (except for some that I purposely display in the living room because I think they’ll tell you something about who I am–books like Nancy Drew and Anne of Green Gables). I want to see them when I go to sleep and wake up. And this is why I read.

Filed Under: books

Belonging: Finding a Home in Church

May 10, 2012 By 2 Comments

Ed Cyzewski has been doing a series on Belonging (I highly recommend following both that series as well as his Women in Ministry series). Inspired by his words (as I often am), I decided to give you a snippet of my story and how I’ve learned that I can belong in a church that hurt me.

A few years ago, our church canceled the service my husband and I attended.

A word about this service: it was more than a place that played the kind of music with which we connected, that worshiped the way we wanted to worship, that included people who looked and thought and felt like we do. It was a place of community, a place where we belonged. I hadn’t felt like I belonged in church–or really anywhere–in over a decade. But in that service, in that community, we belonged. We ministered there, and that service, which was more than a service, became the gateway to our connection with the church.

When the leadership canceled the church, it tore open old wounds and for good measure, added a dash of salt. I had worked and volunteered in churches, served and served and served and finally found that no place like home. Now it was gone.

Several people in the service left the church. Some planted a new church. Chris and I looked and prayed: where do we go?

We stayed.

We stayed because a couple of our closest friends stayed, and we stayed because we didn’t know where else to go. The new church plant was a little far and a little trendy (my friends will tell you I’m no hipster Christian). There’s nothing wrong with trendy and hipster, but we didn’t know how to serve there, how to belong there.

Not long after that happened, on a road trip, Chris and I listened to Life Together by Bonhoeffer. I remember Bonhoeffer talking about these moments when you taste eternity in community, when you meet with Christians and everything is beautiful and ideal and home. But these are not the everyday. We treasure them, we suck nourishment from them, and we go back to our ordinary, hard lives.

That service had been my taste of eternity, I thought, and now I must return to the ordinary, the hard, maybe even the place of unbelonging.

We leaned on each other and the few friends left, and we complained a lot. Sunday after Sunday, we attended service, we read the Scripture and prayed and took Eucharist with this group of strangers in this larger, stranger service. We sang to music that sometimes made me want to take a mallet to the speakers. Chris got involved in men’s ministry; I had my book club (which, in part, got me through that difficult time).

I don’t know how it happened or when it happened, but love snuck in.

One day, as I approached the altar for communion, I looked up and saw the church–followers of Christ who loved and hurt and made mistakes and sometimes hurt each other. People like me. In a mass of strangers, I saw people who knew and loved me, and I knew that somehow, in this place where it made no sense to belong, where a bookstore sold Christian kitsch next to C.S. Lewis, where sometimes the approach to missions made me want to take my theology degree and my cross-cultural studies and tell someone off (on my more mature days), where women wore wide-brimmed hats on Easter Sunday, I belonged.

Because the truth is, this church does amazing work for Christ through Christ. This church loves and serves God, hungrily leans into him and into what he has revealed about himself through Scripture and the Holy Spirit and church history.

I think of the Jerusalem church, making their way in the mess of Jews and Gentiles becoming this new thing, this Church, as fellow followers of Christ, how they both sacrificed for the sake of fellowship and unity and mission.

And I fell in love again with my church. Some days I have to remind myself of that (especially when the choir strikes up a Maranatha song again), but all I have to do is see the people who pray for me and laugh with me and stood with Chris and me as we baptized our son and rejoice with me and cry with me.

And sometimes I even like the hats because the hats tell stories.

 

Filed Under: ecclesiology Tagged With: , , ,

Going Small

May 2, 2012 By 3 Comments

There’s that commercial that begins with a montage of people, in corporate meetings, on the news, on stage, on talk shows: “big, big, big, big” when one guy says, “small.”

I feel like that one guy.

We like things big: bigger houses, bigger ideas, bigger audience, congregation, or reach. The smallest coffee we can buy is “tall.” We shop at Costco to buy big quantities and swear to big resolutions for big weight-loss. We want the biggest opportunity, biggest impact, biggest legacy.

God works in the big: mass exodus from Egypt, the 3000 added to the 150 believers at the fireworks-like Pentecost, Billy Graham’s evangelistic meetings.

But sometimes God works in the small: Abraham and his only son, Jesus and his training of the small group of twelve, the church where my parents have faithfully served for over fifteen years.

I dreamed of the big, of performing with a big, top-tiered symphony; of impacting Italy developing worship in church-plants; of writing a best-selling novel. These days, God works in and through me in the small, in a dinner with friends, in days spent with my little boy, in a small group Bible study on Acts. I write short stories because that fits my lifestyle these days. Which means that when a short story is accepted to a literary journal, it reaches a small audience. Which means that I craft story and tap my fingers over word choice and write and rewrite and rewrite for few readers. This is how God works.

I’ve been thinking about smallness in another sense: not just in word count or audience but also in the nature of the story itself. What does it mean to write small stories about small people in small neighborhoods? What does it mean that I leave behind the big story of the big events and big suspenses and big ideas to find the small, the unknown, the intimate?

At the Festival of Faith and Writing, Larry Woiwode talked about his early days as a writer. He had been reading Samuel Beckett and the like and felt the need to write METANARRATIVE about the FRAGMENTATION OF TIME. One day, he wrote a sketch about his grandmother. This was the first piece he had published (by The New Yorker, no less). He learned to be comfortable writing about North Dakota, writing sketches of his grandmother.

So while I have a freedom to experiment, to take risks and do crazy things and fail, I do so not for the sake of experimentation but in order to work out the short story (or someday perhaps novel) that comes from the smallness of my life and neighborhood, to work out the globalness in my own little corner in my own little chair, the humanity in the people I see in my walk and history rather than in the headlines or in history books, the everyday tragedies and mundane beauties of suburban people not spotlighted on American Idol.

Big, big, big, big.

Small.

Filed Under: writing Tagged With: , ,

The Road Trips and the Book Crates

April 26, 2012 By 1 Comment

The unspoken rules of packing for the car trip: one suitcase max per person. Unlimited books allowed.

We packed the minivan with cooler and blue and red crates of books, removed the middle seats and spread out the sleeping bags (this was before all the crazy seat-belt and car-seat laws–anyone else feel nostalgic for those days?), cued the tapes (nobody knew his secret ambition), and settled in for 26 hours of reading.

Of course, after the 26-hour marathon, we had several weeks ahead of us–time spent at grandparents’ homes, time spent in Ocean City, time spent at family reunions where you might need to sneak away for just a couple of minutes–and one must be prepared. And when we ran out of books (which we often did), I’d scrounge my grandparents’ houses for old books like the Polly series from my mom’s childhood or the Grace Livingston Hill books my dad’s mom brought home for me from the bookstore where she worked.

My dad packed mostly theology books. The rest of us, fiction. We tried to coordinate as much as possible. We all wanted to try out this John Grisham guy. And yes, we all read Frank Peretti. Then there was Anne of Green Gables, which I think I took every year because you never know when you’ll absolutely need to reread them.

When I was old enough to drive (and therefore could not be reading), I made up stories about my fellow travelers. I made friends with other cars on the road and bade sad farewells to them when they exited before I did.

I loved those car trips. I loved how we all sang, “Sittin’ in the rain / water on your brain / got a hole in your boat” when someone had the foolishness to admit they had to pee. I loved finding a good rest stop for lunch (which we noted on our maps for next year; interesting fact: after Bill Clinton became president, Arkansas rest stops improved 135 percent).

But mostly, I loved how we immersed ourselves in books. My family breathed the written word. We hounded each other to finish a book so the next one in line could read it.

Even now, my mom and I have a long-standing disagreement about who really owns those Nancy Drew books. (I claim my mom gave them to me. She claims she lent them. Potato, potato.)

I loved those crates of books, the anticipation of working through the crates one story at a time, of a summer vacation filled with murder and vindication, romance, old-fashioned dress. To be honest, I don’t remember most of what I read in high school. I remember Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451 and Sense and Sensibility but not much else. (I remember more about what I read in elementary school, oddly enough, but maybe this is because I really fell in love with reading–and writing–in elementary school.) But I remember vacations of words and stories, and I remember sharing these stories.

Maybe this is why I’m excited about getting a minivan, though my husband tells me that since I’m a rebel without a cause (his words; I think I have plenty of causes; I also think I’m a rule-follower unless the rule is stupid), I shouldn’t want to be a minivan-driving mom. But to me, minivans mean road trips and music and crates of books.

Now I own a Kindle. Don’t get me wrong–I love my Kindle. I love having any number of books at my beck and call at any given moment. I’m not one who feels the need to lament the growth of the ebook any more than I lament the passing of scrolls. (Also, I’ve bought more books since owning a Kindle, so writers and publishers should be happy.) But I will miss the crates of books.

Perhaps I’ll still have them when we take car trips with a minivan full of kids. Or perhaps we’ll listen to audio books together, as my husband and I already do (although he only does nonfiction, the crazy kook). But we’re in the market for a used minivan without a DVD player, and I want to pass on this love of word and story that my parents gave me.

Thank you, Mom and Dad.

Filed Under: books Tagged With: , , , ,

Magic and Craft: Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing 2012

April 24, 2012 By 5 Comments

Chimamanda Adichie said fiction is magic and craft. This sums up not only fiction (and indeed all of art) but also the Festival of Faith and Writing.

I attended because I think Jonathan Safran Foer takes risks with the form of fiction that few take and because I’m slightly in love with Chimamanda Adichie. I couldn’t wait to hear them speak about their writing and, specifically, their writing process. I was not disappointed.

They challenged me and encouraged me to play, experiment, take risks, and yes, fail. Art reflects life, and since life changes, so should art. We have freedom in this. We have freedom in the stories we tell and how we choose to tell the stories. Once we learn and understand the rules, we have freedom to bend and even break them, to see what works in this global yet fragmented society. Safran Foer quoted John Ashbury’s famous essay, “The Invisible Avant-Garde”: “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful.”

As a music major, I fell in love with experimental and modern music, sometimes with the beauty of the project itself, and sometimes just with the risk and the ideas and, yes, even the failings of the attempts. Over the past several years, I’ve learned more about avant-garde and experimental art through a friend sharing her love of it with me, through reading books about it, such as God in the Gallery by Daniel A. Siedell, and, most of all, through going to museums and immersing myself in the art. And the more I’ve learned about this and other forms of modern art, the more I’ve come to understand its relationship to life, and the more I’ve come to understand it, the more I’ve come to love it. I’ve also wondered–and it was gratifying to hear Safran Foer chat about this very thing–why does literature seem behind visual art and music when it comes to experimentation in order to reflect life?

Now, I leave this conference excited about the possibilities of experimentation, not for the sake of experimentation, but for the sake of stretching myself and my readers. For we do this in the service of humanity. As Adichie reminded us, we create meaning and radical truth to remind ourselves and others of what it means to be human. We enter into the conversation of humanity through literature because life is always changing and yet unchanging.

I don’t know how experimental I’ll be. Heck, I don’t even know what experimentation means for me yet. But I want to see what I can do. I want to see what magic I can conjure while playing with craft. Perhaps playing for me will be a minor thing, or perhaps it will be drastic. But I hope it means something that is both personal and global (meaning, reflecting my love of cultural studies, not necessarily something that will resonate with the whole world–I’m not that delusional yet), something that holds together tension and resolution, something that is intimate and small and echoing.

I confess: I am afraid. I fear failure. I fear not being good enough for the grand ideas in my head. I fear looking the fool. But I remember what someone once said about Miles Davis when he was a rookie, that he was brilliant but he didn’t yet have the chops. Or what Picasso said: “I am always doing that which I cannot do in order that I may learn how to do it.”

I do not claim the brilliance of Davis or Picasso, but I can pattern my artistic endeavors after them, striving, striving, striving, in the face of failure.

 

Filed Under: writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Empire-Building and Homemaking

April 18, 2012 By 3 Comments

Fine print: This post inspired by Sandi Glahn’s recent post, Gender Difference: Lose the Boxes. Also, I’m currently on my way to Calvin’s Festival of Faith and Writing!

A few years ago, I was lamenting my struggles with my writing, work, and fulfillment. A friend commented, “Sometimes you sound more like a man.”

I say this to my shame: I took pride in that comment.

I grew up with dreams of becoming First Woman President!, or a lawyer, or a flutist in a major symphony, or a concert pianist, or a professor.

I grew up discussing theology at the adult’s table. My dad challenged me to think and participate. While we discussed gender issues, there was no woman’s theology or man’s theology.

I grew up thinking all of this compatible with marrying and having children or remaining single (though I assumed the former). (Also, on a mission trip where we bestowed awards on each other for fun, my travel mates awarded me “Most Feminine,” and I’m still trying to figure out what that means.)

Then one day someone told me that men dream of careers and women dream of families, that men struggle to find their identities in work and women in relationships.

Oh.

If that’s the case, I thought, I’d rather be like a man because to find identity in relationship seemed like weakness to me. (I neglected to consider how identity in work is also weakness.) I wanted to leave a legacy, and I wanted to do so through music (or books or students or, at one distant time, law).

When I got married, I made the decision to forgo my latest dream–to plant churches in Italy. I was all dressed up in a Masters of Theology and nowhere to go.

Until I found a new dream–writing (rediscovered a very old dream, is more accurate, but that’s neither here nor there). This, like other dreams, did not pan out how I imagined it would. I wanted to have a book published before starting a family (you may notice I have a son and no published novel). I wanted to make my mark, change the world, connect with people (preferably lots of them).

These days, I don’t know what my writing dreams are anymore. I know that I write and will continue to write, and that, for now, I write short stories that I stubbornly send to journals whether they like it or not. These days, I strive to be a homemaker not because I suddenly love house and home and all things domestic but because I see homemaking as a way of being hospitable, a value Jesus holds and models for all Christians, men and women. (Side note: I don’t believe homemaking a necessary trait of hospitality. Jesus was homeless yet practiced hospitality. Chris and I practice hospitality in part through inviting others to fellowship in our home.) These days, I also love knitting and (mostly vegetable) gardening, and also, we’re in the market for a minivan, so maybe I am becoming the suburban mom as I once feared.

Whether empire-building (a term from Sandi’s amazing post, see above) or homemaking or–dare I say it–both, I cannot do either in order to find my identity or define myself or my gender. And I must do both in service to God. Ay, there’s the rub, because I have a tendency to do all things not unto Christ but unto myself, so that others may look at me and marvel (in a good way preferably).

What does this mean for my womanhood and femininity? Thankfully, God created men and women in his image, men and women who think theologically, who serve God in career, family, church, neighborhood, who use their unique mixes of gifts to welcome all into fellowship with God and each other. Maybe I don’t have to figure out what it means to be feminine, what it means that I enjoy watching sports more than my husband (except for basketball) but that I do so while knitting, what it means that I hate heels (or shoes in general) but that I prefer long, flowy skirts to jeans (also, I can never be sure what matches and what’s in style), what it means that I’ve often burnt dinner because I was writing or reading or that my husband is a better cook than I am (and a better-looking cook) or that I can’t seem to figure out how to organize all the necessary components for a trip while all the women in my life can pack a family for a week in one carry-on, remember the sunscreen and look good. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe I can just be me and let the rest of the world figure it out.

In the meantime, I’m going to settle down with a good book.

Filed Under: women Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Choosing the Better

April 16, 2012 By 3 Comments

When I became a mother, I considered a new role I wished to take on: homemaker. I considered what it meant to make a home for my husband and son, for my friends, neighbors, and even strangers. I considered words like hospitality and service and beauty.

And I discovered Pinterest.

Pinterest fascinates me on numerous levels: the human desire for expression (and how this can become dangerous when separated from community), the way people connect, the visualness of our world, the beauty found in unexpected places. But Pinterest also became something else to me. It became a way of defining hospitality and service and beauty in the home.

I thought: I can make my child feel loved by creating this kind of birthday party, or I can make my guest feel special with these place settings, or I can make my home a haven of beauty with these projects.

And these thoughts made me miserable, for I would have to do things for which I have no talent and be someone toward whom I have no inkling, and when would I write or relax with my husband in the evenings or simply read?

Then I remembered Jesus’ words to Martha: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.”

I don’t believe Jesus was telling Martha to abandon her pots and pans completely, for as matriarch of the house, this was her service to Jesus and his followers–to care for him, just as the women who, through their own financial means, clothed him as they followed him. Throughout Luke, Jesus taught about the importance of hospitality, especially around meals, how meals, being the center of fellowship, the place where community and insiders and outsiders were defined, should be a place where Christians welcomed and served all.

Jesus taught Martha that hospitality doesn’t mean doing everything, being everyone. It doesn’t mean taking away from the fellowship the meal fostered but creating an environment that nurtured and cultivated relationship.

I don’t mean to say that beautiful centerpieces or homemade party games aren’t important. One read through Leviticus shows us that God cares about details and beauty, especially in worship and community. But we create based on our gifts, abilities, and time. We can find beauty in the design and decor of a home, in the display of a dish, and I have friends who do this well, but we also find beauty in the conversations between friends, in playing with pots and pans and wooden spoons with our children, not just the homemade toys, in feeding a stranger in need.

So this is what I’m learning about homemaking and hospitality: it’s okay that I don’t have a floral arrangement worthy of flickr. It’s okay that I chop up strawberries and spoon them on store-bought shortcakes because I didn’t have time to make berry pie from scratch. It’s even okay that a layer of dust insulates my furniture (though I at least attempt to keep this at bay). It’s okay that I use Keegan’s nap time to write instead of load the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. It’s okay that I don’t have a house that makes one contemplate beauty in color, line, and its relationships to art and nature. It’s also okay that sometimes I knit a stuffed animal for Keegan as I watch TV at night (though Chris argues that we could buy one for less, and then he could watch TV with the lights off, as he prefers) or grow my own tomatoes or bake my own bread because I love these things, and maybe doing these things with Keegan will show him something about life and our choices.

I won’t give up Pinterest, though it can intimidate me and make me long to be the type of mother, friend, homemaker who and sometimes tempt me to use my time unwisely or sneak peeks at my mobile app while Keegan builds and knocks down his blocks because it can also be a place where I find beauty and books and time-saving crockpot ideas that let me play in the sandbox with Keegan longer and books and laughter and did I mention books? Even in this, perhaps we can approach it as unto the Lord.

Filed Under: homemaking Tagged With: , ,

Why I Pack My Computer and My Kindle and My Suitcase and Head for Grand Rapids

April 11, 2012 By 3 Comments

Next week, I leave for the Calvin Faith and Writing Festival. Besides the wrenching of the heart at spending so many days and nights away from my Keegan, besides having to use frequent flyer miles because when did plane tickets get so much more expensive?, besides the sadness that my other writing half won’t be there this time (Gina, can you hear me?), I wonder, what will this trip, this festival, mean?

Two years ago when I attended, I was caught up in the hopeful, self-assured place in my writing. I had won awards! I had several short stories published! I had short screenplays produced! I had started a new novel, and I liked this novel as I liked the previous two novels I’d finished. I loved those characters (still do, if you must know the truth), and I thought about how these characters had life and how maybe someone, some reader, could relate to them, could connect with them and know she isn’t alone. While several agents had given me the form “not for me” rejection, others encouraged me: love your work, but I can’t sell it in the CBA. At Calvin that year, I met with a publisher who gushed over my writing (she gushed in my memory–give me that, at least), though she decided she couldn’t publish it because it didn’t fit in the CBA. Okay, I thought, okay, so my place is ABA, and this excited me because isn’t this what I wanted anyway? And it was all so good because people told me something there that I wrote was good, and this made me happy and gave me hope.

Two years ago when I attended, I felt at home with my critique partners and writing friends, and we laughed and laughed and I thought, I belong here, with these people, they know me, they get me, and moments like those carried me through sitting alone at my computer wondering what would ever happen to these characters, when would they get to meet the world, when would the world get to meet them?

Then I got pregnant and had a baby and (mostly) stopped teaching piano and flute lessons and started editing more and started teaching Bible study at my church. And the quest to find an agent in the ABA has been abandoned, much to Don Quixote’s chagrin. And though the novel from Calvin had a finished draft, it lay unfinished, untouched, and I don’t know when I’ll return to it, for I’ve fallen in love with short stories, with the compactness of them, with the way there’s so much more in them than the 5000 or so (or less) words that make them up, and I want to write like that, and so I write short stories these days.

And wonder what this means? What kind of writer am I? What, if anything, does God want to do with my writing? Will my characters ever meet the world, will the world ever meet them?

I wasn’t going to attend Calvin this year. What do I have to show for my writing the past two years? How can I justify the expense, the time, of attending? But Jonathan Safran Foer is speaking, and oh, so is Chimamandu Adichie, a current favorite, and maybe they’ll have some words of wisdom for me. And friends will be there, one of whom I haven’t seen in years (has it been that long?).

So I’ll pack up my computer and my Kindle (for saving samples of all the books I’ll want to read because of the conference–the expense of the conference goes on and on and on) and suitcase, and I know it won’t be last time, it won’t be the nonsensical picto-game, laughing so hard I could barely speak, or the hopefulness of a meeting with a publisher, but I hope it will be something, that it will be connection and refreshment and encouragement, that it will challenge, and that maybe, just maybe, I will discover something about my writing that will remind me of why I write, why it’s important that I continue to tell these stories about these characters even if I don’t know what God will do with them, if God will do anything with them.

Even still, don’t you think sometimes it would be nice to know just a little of the future?

Filed Under: writing

Something to Think About, Something to Drink About

April 9, 2012 By 4 Comments

The Lenten season has ended with the triumph and vindication of resurrection–my favorite day of the year because how can you contain the excitement of today?–and we enter the joy and beauty and resurrection of Easter season. And I, I want to do more than return to my pre-Lent patterns, to my hustle and bustle (which, if I must be honest, marked my Lent as well), to a little here and a little there and the half-heartedness and the hurry and the nerves twisted up because is nothing ever done, is the kitchen ever clean and the writing ever good and the garden ever weeded?

Because this is Easter and Christ has risen and everything has changed, and while the dishes still get dirty and the words still get stuck and the weeds still grow, we live in the promise, the in-between, the hope of joining his resurrection, and this transforms everything about the everyday.

I recently finished teaching through Luke in my church Bible study, and as his journeyed neared the end, Jesus taught his disciples about the everyday that would come when he was no longer with them. They would be like the days of Noah and Lot, with people marrying and working and sleeping, and then so suddenly the end would come. He would return, and for those who aren’t prepared, calamity.

But for those who remain faithful, for those who go about their everyday lives, their marrying and working and sleeping serving God’s kingdom plan, we will have resurrection. We will join the cosmos in Christ’s triumph.

In our Bible study, we will continue with Acts–part 2 of the story (thank goodness we don’t have to wait for the release date for the sequel!), how the Church lived and ministered in the everyday, how she continued Jesus’ work of restoration.

So I consider my everyday, my writing and blogging and editing and housework and gardening and knitting and changing diapers and playing with Keegan and (mostly) making dinners and caring for family and for those around me, and how these small actions serve God’s kingdom plan, how they have purpose. For this is what I want my everyday to be: a continuation of Jesus’ work of restoration.

Sometimes this means remembering the joy. Sometimes this means ignoring the dirt to make time for someone or to play with Keegan (okay, I’ve not struggled with the latter much–Keegan does a good job of convincing me that playing in the sandbox is more fun than folding the laundry). And sometimes this means being more thoughtful.

I fear that my blog has become more thoughtless–a haphazard collection of bits and pieces scattered from the day, pushed and squeezed together in the minutes between this and that. And I want it–and all of my writing–to be more than that.

When I began my blog, I did so as a writer and theologian, as a place to summon these things inside of me, and I found a congregation of writers and theologians on blogs, a community. Together we thought through the everyday and the exceptional. We corresponded. Then I had a baby, and I didn’t know why I blogged. Am I now a mommy blogger? I considered this during Lent.

Heaven knows the world doesn’t need another mommy blogger. We already feast on dishes of the delectable, the hearty, the refreshing, the involved, the simple, the lingering. (So the world didn’t exactly need another writer or theologian blogging either, but I turned a blind eye to that fact.) Here’s what I thought:

It’s time to call it quits. I am no longer a blogger.

But then, in the last inning, I read a new comment on my blog: “Seriously excited to read more when you return” (Thank you, Amy!) Perhaps my ego stepped in, or perhaps that desire for community, the community I’ve had here for so many years, rekindled, but I thought about what it would really mean to leave this space and I thought about what I named this space: L’Chaim. To life. This term that means so much to me not just because it’s one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite musicals or because I loved studying Hebrew and easily remembered chai when learning vocabulary because of said song but because of what it embodies–life, the kind of life found in Christ, a restored, resurrection life that embraces the everyday. And I realized that it doesn’t matter if I don’t know what kind of blogger I am–mommy, writing, theology (knitting, gardening…)–because the focus of my blogging is restored, resurrected life, the already-not yet reality of the everyday in-between.

But still, in my Easter resurrection celebration, I want to practice thoughtful writing, even when I blog on something silly just because it makes me laugh (hey–laughter’s part of the resurrected life!), and consistent writing (both in blogging and in my short story writing). So for my Easter practice, I commit to blogging twice a week, essays that revel in the everyday resurrected life. (I’m also committing to working on my short stories four days a week. I’d love to commit to writing every day, but some days may be consumed with editing–work I enjoy and for which I am very thankful.)

“So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective” (Colossians 3:1-2, The Message).

May my life, and my writing, be alert to and absorbed with what God’s doing.

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