joy knight photography

It was clear that I had killed it. I couldn’t pretend otherwise. That I had managed to kill it while trying to take care of it, while employing long-practiced skills in extending the life of an outdoor thing that lives inside didn’t really matter. The plant was dead.

Lynne said as much when she saw it sitting sadly in its pot of dirt on the kitchen table. At that point there was only one sprig remaining of what had been a full, trailing, beautiful hanging garden of a thing. One sorry stem barely standing up above the soil. But I had set it in the sun, I had watered it carefully. I had, from time to time, talked to it, encouraging it and telling it that it was wanted. 

To no avail. “That’s dead,” Lynne said, and I still believed otherwise, still told myself we couldn’t see what the root system might be doing. And we couldn’t be sure that the magic of photosynthesis wasn’t working its miraculous thing among the remaining leaves. Er, leaf. The plant could rally, I told myself. 

Some weeks before, I had noticed signs of the plant’s overgrowth: yellowing leaves, thinning stems. It was outgrowing its pot in the breakfast room where it hung in its macrame web. The only way to save and continue to enjoy it there was to pull it from its pot, cut back its roots, and replant with fresh soil. This was something I had done with other plants many times. I had likely done it with this one. But what I didn’t bother myself with this time was the tenderness of this particular plant’s stems, which had entwined themselves in macrame and each other. As I pulled the root ball from its pot and the plant from that macrame net, I incidentally also tore those stems to shreds.  

I didn’t think it would matter. Surely there was enough green left to nourish the plant. But when I packed it back into its pot, I realized how few stems and fewer leaves remained. These struggled to survive for a while, but gradually, stem after stem shriveled. The leaves furled and shrunk, and finally the last stem faded like dry grass. 

I was very sad.

This happened just last summer in the midst of pandemic uncertainty. My sorrow over a dead houseplant was probably overkill (for lack of a better term), an exaggerated response to what had become a metaphor of loss.

Why such an attachment to a houseplant, you might sensibly ask? You might point out, and rightly so, that I have others. Others that have been around longer. Far longer, in terms of houseplants. There’s the ficus tree, for example, that I got in Memphis in 1995.  And older: the schefflera that started as a cutting from one in my mother’s house. Both of these predate my children. This plant– Tradescantia fluminensis, commonly known as an inch plant and dead in its pot on the kitchen table– was only 9 years old.

Still, unlike the history of many of my houseplants, I remember buying this one. It was spring break, 2011. I was grateful for a week off from my teaching job and grateful that my kids were off with me. We didn’t have money to go anywhere, but I loved being at home, and I loved the freedom of a weekday errand with Emma to… where? I don’t remember where I found the plant; I just remember standing at the counter of a coffee shop with Emma afterwards, happy about that plant. And I bought Emma a cake-pop.

When we got home, I stood on a ladder in the breakfast room so I could screw a hook into the ceiling. The plant looked beautiful there, and it was very happy. One could say it thrived.

If you have houseplants then you know it can be tricky to find a place where they’re at home. Any place might be too bright, too dark, get too much of a draft. There are so many ways it can go terribly wrong. And of course this indicator is completely false, but there’s something about a happy house plant that suggests the flourishing of the household. In fact, I’ve often told my daughter that, rather than including a garage, a swimming pool, or even a backyard, what a home really needs is these: sunlight and books, plants and music, pets, and, if you can get them, children.

Real plants, I mean, not fake ones. But real plants die sometimes. And sometimes, accidentally, you kill them.

I was sad about that plant. I think I’ve mentioned this already. And you may already think I’m crazy, but there’s more to say. Because somewhere along the line, feeling sad about my inadvertent but absolute destruction of a plant I had loved, I asked God for another one.

Not just another plant. I had plenty of those. I took an asparagus fern and put it in that pot and tucked it into that macrame hanger and it too was very happy suspended from the breakfast room ceiling. But I wanted a plant identical to the one I’d lost. I wanted Tradescantia fluminensis. I wanted a new inch plant with its delicate leaves and tender stems, with its sweet, occasional flowers. 

Maybe I wanted another chance.

In the years since I’d purchased it, I had never noticed another one for sale. And so asking God for a new one seemed absurd on two levels: first of all, what I was asking for didn’t seem likely. Lowe’s, Home Depot– they didn’t seem to trade in inch plants. Ivy? Yes. Ferns? Sure. And scads of succulents, but no inch plants. We couldn’t find toilet paper. What were the chances of an influx of inch plants? 

And second of all, I was asking God to replace a houseplant in the middle of a pandemic, during a time that my prayers were about the recovery of people on ventilators and the advent of new medical interventions.  I was praying for the survival of my husband’s business, the businesses of friends, the perpetual strain on families with young children at home and parents working from home, teenagers isolated from friends and, maybe, help. Racial injustice and political division and fear that fomented so easily into anger and rage. 

I still pray for these things. But a global pandemic is no time to ask the almighty God for a houseplant. Is it?

God concerns himself with big things, universal ones. By those lights, pandemics are right up his alley. In a pandemic, the complexity of the human body, its myriad systems, and the intricacy of the delicate immune system all cry out for God’s attention. Then too, we become aware of those things he always sees: how poor health and weakened immunity are so often the accoutrements of poverty. Privilege and injustice, those inequities God sees and calls us to correct, suddenly become unavoidably apparent to the rest of us.

And if one believes as I do that he knows every person by name; knows the number of hairs on each head; cares for and watches over, grieves for and rejoices with every single person on the planet, then certainly a pandemic only heightens his acute focus on the people who suffer most.

In this context– now or ever– how could I ask God for an inch plant?

And here’s the truth, oh patient reader: I asked God for this in the midst of a pandemic, and then I forgot all about it.

I forgot all about it, I say. But there were two of us in that conversation. 

***

For a culture (ours) that is so hostile to people judging other people, we are pretty darned judgmental. Have you noticed? That stranger who delayed too long at the green light or who sped through that red one becomes a fool, an idiot, or worse. That’s judging. The pandemic has demonstrated this tendency to judge in bold relief. Take masks, for instance. People who don’t wear masks don’t care about other people. Which is also true, depending on your opinion, research, bias, of people who do. 

Casting judgment is in our bones or maybe our DNA. Maybe we do it to make sense of the world, to make ourselves feel better, or to find allies among people who think like we do.

But we may be less aware of this tendency, one I think most of us have: we judge God. We judge him based on what we think he should or shouldn’t do, does or hasn’t done.

Just as with the driver at the stoplight or the stranger wearing (or not wearing) a mask, there is more to God than what we are judging him for. At any given moment, we forget his wisdom that spun galaxies and unfurled constellations, that designed the marvel of the immune system and the pattern of fur growth on a dog. The best scientists recognize the unlikely brilliance evident here.

And we also forget God’s sacrifice, a love given in such eager pursuit that it spent itself on our behalf. Christ’s death was terrible loss to God. And for Christ, his death was obedience to a love so incomprehensible, we often simply dismiss it.

But would a God who already suffered such loss out of love for us not (also) care about the smallest of things? Where do we find the limits of the mind that conceived the universe? Where does such power find its end? And where does the depth of a love like this stop?

Does it?

***

Last October, we traveled to the North Carolina mountains for a weekend. That Friday we found ourselves in the little town of Spruce Pine, and in that town we came upon a gift shop that also happened to have a large greenhouse. That greenhouse sold absolutely enormous inch plants.

My husband bought me one for my birthday. It was far too big for the pot suspended in macrame from the breakfast room ceiling. So with great care for the tender stems and leaves, I gently cut that inch plant into viable pieces. And now I have three beautiful inch plants in my house.

You can call it coincidence if you’d like, but this is the way it went: in the middle of a pandemic, I asked God for an inch plant, and he gave me three. 

The post Tale of an Inch Plant appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The cat calls for her dinner. 

(This is a post about a poem, and these are some of its lines:)

On the porch I bend and pour 

brown soy stars into her bowl,

stroke her dark fur. 

No. It’s not a poem about a cat, although here at the beginning one might think it is. But with poetry– as with so much else– you have to give it a minute. Wait it out some. There’s more coming.

It’s not quite night.

Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.

See? No more cat.

Some people don’t like poetry– or they don’t think they do.

But that’s not you, is it? You like poetry. You do. I mean, you like a party just as much as the next person. You can do loud and noisy, no problem. But you don’t judge. You like quiet people, for example. You’re willing to sit a minute and listen and then find out that the quiet person has something to say.

Poems are quiet. Mostly. And you like them.

This is a quiet poem, anyway. See:

On the Back Porch

The cat calls for her dinner.

On the porch I bend and pour 

brown soy stars into her bowl,

stroke her dark fur. 

It’s not quite night. 

Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.

A poem, like– somewhat– a person, is an invitation to see something in a new way. And here, the poet is inviting you with her out onto her back porch. She wants to show you something.

This is just the beginning of the poem. And what– so far– does she want you to see? You can answer that: dusk. The cat and her food. The way the light leaves the sky and the stars begin to come out, those “pinpricks of light” that match, without the poet saying so, the star-shaped food she just a moment ago poured into her cat’s bowl.

She gives us more:

Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent

moon, a pink rag of cloud. 

Ah, you say. I see, you say. Because you, too, have done this– whether or not you have a cat. You have stepped outside late in the day, when the light is going but still held there by a bit of cloud. “A rag of cloud,” she says. How apt. You have definitely seen clouds like that before. You have stepped outside late in the day, just in time to see that day fading, to know that all of it will soon be closed up in the dark.

And now, reading this poem (and because our poet is a good one), you are standing on the back porch with the poet. And with me. We are all three standing on the back porch, and we are each of us alone. Except (perhaps?) for the cat.

It’s quiet out here. The light drains away but is held by cloud, by moon. The stars are coming out.

The poet says,

Inside my house are those who love me.

This is going to be important.

Inside my house are those who love me.

My daughter dusts biscuit dough.

And there’s a man who will lift my hair 

in his hands, brush it,

until it throws sparks. 

Who is in the house behind you? Whom have you left inside? Are there people who love you and know (or don’t) that you have stepped outside for just a minute to pet the cat, say, or look at the moon? Is someone who loves you inside the house and looking at her phone or reading the paper?

Or maybe you live alone. Or with people who don’t love you. Or with people whom you don’t love. If so, it’s okay: this poem is (also) for you, because anything (everything) can be a metaphor. Stay with me. Our poet has more to say, and so do I.

Everything is just as I’ve left it.

Dinner simmers on the stove.

Glass bowls wait to be filled

with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley

on the cutting board.

“Everything is just as I’ve left it,” she says. There’s stillness here, both inside and out. We’ve seen it outside already: the cloud, the faintest stars, the moon. No sign of breeze. Even the cat has disappeared.

But inside, too, everything is just as she’s left it. And how has she left it? At the edge of ready. Her daughter makes biscuits, the soup is done. It’s time for this family’s supper, just as it was for the cat. Everything inside that house is quiet, waiting for the poet’s return.

And here you stand, I stand, on the this otherwise empty porch. The world is silent, waiting for night. And behind us, what is waiting? Who– or what– is waiting for you?

Maybe your dog waits, curled in his bed. Your phone? Your supper. A bowl of peaches on the kitchen table. Your email. A project you have to return to, that has taken too much time already, that you cannot wait to finish but abandoned just for this moment to read this blog post, this poem, to step out onto your back porch and watch nighttime overtake the world.

Here, the poet stands (we stand) on the porch, and the world– inside and out– waits.

I want to smell this rich soup, the air

around me going dark, as stars press

their simple shapes into the sky,

I want to stay on the back porch 

while the world tilts

toward sleep, until what I love

misses me, and calls me in. 

This is a poem about love. And, I believe, about contentment.

Our poet stands here on her back porch, and what waits for her inside “are those who love me,” she says. Yet she “wants to stay on the back porch….”

And I’m asking you: do you want to stay on the back porch, too?

You have things waiting inside for you, just like I do. Maybe they are people who love you, and maybe not: but they are what has been given to you and, for the sake of this poem, this conversation, they are the things you love.

In my reading, the poem here asks, Are they enough? When you are standing out there and the world is somehow both dusky and radiant, are those metaphorical persons and things– the things you have been given– enough to compel you inside? Or are you– like me– sometimes tempted to the edge of the porch, to the steps, to the cold, damp grass and the woods that line the yard? To the promise of the unknown and different, the new and exciting, the adventure that might look like love but cannot be love, because “inside my house are those who love me” and inside the house is “what I love.”

Maybe that’s a metaphor for another poem. Or is it?

I want to stay on the back porch 

while the world tilts

toward sleep, until what I love

misses me, and calls me in. 

Here’s what I’ve learned and am learning: love calls me in. It’s mine to choose, to turn my back on beautiful moon and rag of cloud, to lawn and woods, to new and different. To go back inside.

Love returns to love again and again. That’s how it lasts.

Poem by Dorianne Laux

Laux, Dorianne. “On the Back Porch.” 365 Poems for Every Occasion, The American Academy of Poets, 2015, 236.

The post On the Back Porch (looking at a poem by Dorianne Laux) appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

This is the fourth post in a series meant to be preceded by an introductory letter. Please read that here. 

Listen here:

Click here to download the audio file.

Foster Intimacy, part 2

“Shame and death are the two great enemies of the Gospel.” ~Jay Thomas

“Much dysfunction is a function of denying brokenness.” ~Ann Voskamp

“Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you. He rises up to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!” ~ Isaiah 30: 18

As you can see, this post is a “part two.” When I first conceived of writing about intimacy, I thought its value could be summarized in a single post– and then, clearly, realized I was wrong.

What’s more, writing about it for this series has convinced me that an atmosphere of healthy intimacy in the home might be the single greatest gift parents can give their children and the very best means through which we teach our children the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

In the previous post, I described many of its gifts to a growing child and their family, and I claimed that intimacy is invaluable for parenting teenagers. I also described some ways in which Jesus’ teaching enables intimacy when lived out in the home, and that this is key for current and future joy.

But as I said, there’s more to say. So here we go.

The Nature of Intimacy

The best gift of intimacy is joy. We are made to be deeply known and deeply loved, to be delighted in for who we truly are. This is what God does with every individual, and it’s a gift intended for human relationships, too. I think true intimacy is one of the greatest joys of being alive. 

But it must be desired by both parties. Everyone wants it at some level, and children show this innately. In this regard, intimacy feels easy with infants: the physical nature of caring for them bonds us, and they can seem blissfully unaware of our emotional tensions and troubles (more on that to come). But as they get older, they naturally present with difficult behaviors and –unhappily– they are more aware of ours. Within this context, children and parents can pull away from one another.

Which leads to a third aspect of intimacy: it is constantly threatened. We are broken beings. Overworked, overtired, overwhelmed, we fail to be compassionate. Wounded by past relationships, we are insecure. Selfish and self-absorbed, we don’t clearly see the needs of others. 

The vulnerability of family and home exposes our fault-lines. We have tools to help, and the honest apology (as I said in the last post) is chief among them.

But maintaining an atmosphere of intimacy is a responsibility falling chiefly to the grown-ups. As parents, we must deliberately cultivate it–which means we must also look to the ways that we are inadvertently threatening that intimacy. And one of the ways we threaten intimacy is by not tending to our own pain. 

Pain Leaks

Pain hurts because it’s crying out to be dealt with. If our hurt is mild–say, a skin abrasion–we know how to make it better: antiseptic and a Band-aid. The same is true of emotional pain–say, a hurtful remark, for which we might need an apology. But if our hurt is deep, or if it stems from something shameful to us, we might ignore rather than deal with it. The pain is only ours, after all. We can shunt it aside.

This may enable us to function well enough. The wound isn’t healed, but we cope with it by pretending it isn’t there. This is called avoidance. 

The problem is that pain leaks. We all know how it goes: A poor night’s sleep or a bad day at work can readily translate to irritability with others. 

The same is true of unresolved, deep-seated pain, but its impact is more insidious: we have found ways to ignore it, so we are often unaware of how it is impacting others. But just as an untreated wound will eventually infect the healthy tissue around it, my emotional wounds don’t exist in isolation. Sooner or later they impact others, even if the connection doesn’t seem obvious.

The fact is that parents’ pain is visited on their children. This happens in a variety of ways, some of which begin in infancy. Unresolved pain can hinder a parent’s ability to be attuned to the needs of their baby, which can result in maladaptive coping strategies in the growing child. As children grow and mature, their natural egocentrism can cause them to blame their parents’ troubles on themselves, breeding shame that they may not be able to voice. There are other ways, too, that emotional pain in parents harms their children.

No parent intends for these things to happen, and –again– we are often unaware that it’s happening. But our own pain stands ready to hurt others, and our children stand on the front line to receive it. The ensuing pain, passed on from us to our children, erodes the parent-child intimacy that enables children to thrive. 

If we want to foster intimacy in our homes, we must look to our own emotional health.

Emotional Pain and Shame

It’s natural to want healing from physical injury or illness, and we have all manner of ways to find it, from Band-aids to hospitals. In our churches, we also pray for the physical healing of others.

Christ’s life on earth included myriad physical healings; the apostles carried on with the same. Paul names healing among the many gifts of the Spirit. 

But emotional pain has traditionally carried a burden of shame with it. Perhaps we think we should be stronger than this, that we can and should get over it already. Or perhaps the circumstances that caused the pain are embarrassing or shameful, and so we ignore them or wish them away.

It’s a natural and destructive progression. Shame is a lie that compounds an injury. We are already carrying an emotional wound and we are ashamed to be carrying that wound. That shame visits more harm on us while also preventing us from seeking help. Pain begs to be protected. Covering it might seem the only way. And so we walk around with the emotional equivalent of a broken bone or an abscess or worse, and we try to deal with it all by ourselves. Or we avoid it and pretend it isn’t there. 

But remember what we said before: pain leaks. 

Shame and Vulnerability

In order to deal with pain, we have to be vulnerable. We have to expose the wound. We have to turn our own gaze on an ugly, ulcerating injury.

A challenge of emotional pain is that we often don’t know what caused the wound, and we’re afraid of what we might find. Or, perhaps worse, we know exactly what caused the wound, and its exposure will open an appalling vulnerability that we’re not really certain we can bear.

And so shame, left unexposed and unanswered, compounds itself. Like a ripening wound, it expands. We’re ashamed that we’re injured. We’re ashamed of the cause. We’re ashamed to be vulnerable. And so we hide.

That avoidance translates into our relationships, too. We are afraid to be vulnerable, ashamed that others will see our injury, and so we refuse to let others in. This impedes the intimacy we all long for. It creates barriers between us and others– most specifically our spouses and our children. 

Meanwhile the ugly ulceration gets worse. We slap a cupped hand over it and make our limping way through the world, deeply hurt and hurting others.

Here’s what we need: someone who loves us. Someone who understands. Someone who will never be shocked or dismayed by what we have done or by what has been done to us. Someone who will listen. Someone who will continue to unconditionally love. Someone who can wipe our guilt and shame away and make us okay again. 

We need Jesus Christ, whose willing vulnerability led to his death so that he could show us his love.

And maybe we need to see a therapist.

How Do We Know That We Need Help? 

Because of the nature of shame and vulnerability, recognizing our need for help can be difficult. I’m nothing like an expert on the subject; I’ve learned what I’m sharing here from experience (more to follow) and some rich conversations. But in consulting with some professional therapists, I’ve learned indicators we can watch for:

• excessive sadness, anger, or irritability
• food issues
• anxiety
• absence of emotional and/or sexual intimacy with your spouse
• immersion in social media
• overuse of addictive substances

The above may describe any of us at some point or other, so there’s more to consider: Does the presentation of an indicator here create a disruption to you or your family? Would you fight to maintain it? Is it heightened in any way? 

In the fall of 2007, I was teaching full-time and developing brand new curriculum, writing my Master’s thesis (due Thanksgiving weekend with no chance of extension), and mothering three children in grade school. During that semester, when multiple claims held every inch of my time, I also began going to counseling.

Why? Because my husband and I decided that my rare but intense fits of anger were caused by more than obvious stress. They were hints at a deeper emotional problem, one related to my marriage but that we couldn’t see clearly to resolve on our own.

Sure, we all get angry sometimes. Many of us experience anxiety. We may occasionally get lost on Twitter or Instagram. But in paying attention for a good minute, can we see that maybe it’s not just circumstance? These behaviors might actually be a Band-aid, and the injury underneath is beginning to ooze.

In September of 2007, I knew I was in over my head with some anger issues, so I added that weekly appointment. There was no way I had time for it, but I went anyway for the sake of my marriage, my children, and me.

The Gospel and Healing

Pursuing healing for our emotional pain is enormously instructive to our children. From the outset, it shows them that we haven’t reached perfection. No one has, and no one will. In a culture parading false images of perfection everywhere, we can offer ourselves in contrast: imperfect, and honest about it.

Meanwhile, the pursuit of healing models hope: we can all learn and grow. Even in adulthood we can improve–and the need for growth is nothing to be ashamed of. Growth is intended, I think, to be a source of delight.

All of this is Gospel truth. Jesus came to earth because of our brokenness. He understands that each of us bears pain: both from ways we’ve been hurt and the ways we’ve hurt others.

In his suffering, Jesus took on all the shame of the world, so that we never need to be ashamed of anything in his presence. And in his death, he paid for all the sin of the world, so that we can be forgiven for anything when we ask.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is about healing. But when we don’t seek healing for our emotional wounds, we wound our children and we limit our vulnerability to them, marring our intimacy with them. And we also inadvertently tell them a lie: that Jesus is inadequate to help us face our pain, expose our vulnerability, and heal our shame.

My therapist helped me and my husband immensely over those months of counseling, and since then, my husband and I have gone to counseling together and will do so again. I’m growing. He’s growing. But we’ll never be perfect. 

None of us will. We can never create perfect worlds of intimate harmony for our children. Pursuing help is the best we can do, and when we do, we tell our children these gospel truths: Christ is the ultimate source of all healing, and all of our hope is in him. 

The post Teaching the Gospel to Children: Foster Intimacy, part 2 appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Grow Up.

“Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.” ~ W. E. B. Du Bois

“There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone’s doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.” ~ Mister Rogers

“My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’ Your face, LORD, I will seek.” ~Psalm 27: 8

My parents came for a week after the birth of our firstborn. Our son was born on Thursday and they arrived on Saturday, just a few hours after we got home from the hospital.

During the week of their visit, my mother took care of me and helped us with the baby. She, my father, and my husband also packed up our apartment and moved us to a townhouse, where they proceeded to unpack us again.

By the time they left the following Saturday, we were well on our way to being settled and I was recovering nicely. But I wasn’t quite ready to let them go.

That afternoon, with Bill out on an errand and my parents just departed, I stood with my newborn wailing in my arms, and I cried too.

There we were, otherwise alone in the house and both of us crying, when I realized that someone was going to have to stop crying–and that someone would have to be me.

I had to be the grown-up.

More than Maturity

We all understand that the best-case scenarios find babies born to mature adults, emotionally prepared to rear a person into maturity. Not all babies get this in their parents; not all people are equipped to be parents. And many of us (I’m raising my hand here) learn to be parents along the way.

It’s impossible, prior to the arrival of your first child, to know everything you’ll need to know. We learn as we go. And even though a firstborn schools us in ways the next child(ren) won’t have to, we learn from our children all the time. It’s not enough to be a parent: we learn to be Auggi’s mom or Piper’s dad. The uniqueness I wrote about last week demands unique attention.

I think it’s fair to say that it takes more than maturity to rear a child. What we need is wisdom.

If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. ~ James 1: 6-8

In light of our need for wisdom, that first sentence there is absolutely fantastic: you need wisdom? Ask God! He’ll give it to you!

But there’s more to it than that. In my isolated paraphrase (just verse 6), God dissolves into something resembling religion, a system of behavior-and-consequence. Here God is a genie or vending machine: I ask for wisdom, he dispenses it. Voila!

The difference between Christianity and religion is that Christianity is a relationship. God is a real person, and we are his beloved (unique and inimitable) children. Among the scads of virtues that make up his character, wisdom–like the rest of them–is not something he totes in a box or jacket pocket, ready to dole out like so much candy. Rather, wisdom is an aspect of who he is, imparted to us as we know him more.

The more we are changed by his love, the more we love. The more we receive his patience, the more we are patient. The more we know his grace, the less quick we are to judge. The more we know his wisdom, the wiser we become. 

The verses following James 1:6 bear this out. We ask God for wisdom, but we must believe he will give it to us. We have to trust that he’ll answer our request. In other words, we don’t sit around waiting for wisdom to hit us between the eyes. We go about our business, trusting God, because we rely on who we know him to be: good, faithful, true to his word.

And wisdom comes. Why? Because God is good, faithful, and true to his word.

If as parents we are paying any attention at all, we know we need wisdom. We also need patience and gentleness and a host of other things.

We need God.

Which leads me to the whole point of this post: parents who want to teach the gospel to their children must absolutely grow up.

Growing Up

Crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. ~ 1 Peter 2: 1-2

Peter’s words here are an admonition and encouragement to people who already have put their faith in God and in the gospel of Jesus Christ: you have tasted the goodness of God, and you know how delicious, satisfying and nourishing it is. Want more. 

We appreciate the metaphor. If I’d never had a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit from Bojangles, I would never miss one. But now that I’ve had one, well. Suffice it to say that they come to mind from time to time.

In a similar but far more challenging and satisfying way, the delights we have known through the love of Jesus should make us want more of the same. In craving him, we pursue our relationship with him, and this causes us to grow. We become mature, joy-filled, obedient, faithful servants of the living God who are sources of blessing and comfort to the people and world around us.

Including our children.

How Do We Grow?

So, how is it done? What are the actions that result from the craving Peter recommends?

I’ll be honest:

1. they’re familiar
2. they’re beautiful
3. some upcoming posts will focus on some of them.

But the simple answer is the best: spend time with God.

If you’ve been a church-goer for any time at all, you’ve heard this before: read your Bible. Pray. Spend time in honest joy and pain with people who also have put their faith in Jesus. Be taught from the Bible by people who take it seriously. Receive communion with a full heart.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

This is all so familiar. And it’s also spot on because of what I said before: Christianity is not a religion. It’s a relationship.

The Relationship

I’ve been married to my husband for almost 30 years. Being with him has made me a less judgmental person because he is less apt to judge than I am. I also have a better sense of humor than I used to because he is funny and has an excellent sense of humor. I hear music differently because of how he appreciates it. I also regard money differently. And entertainment.

These changes wrought by his influence come off the top of my head, but there are other changes, deeper and more vast, that have come from years of being with him, talking with him, learning to see things from his point of view.

Spending time with a person changes you. Same with God–but far more mysteriously, richly, and abundantly than with anyone else.

I’ve known a lot of beauty in my life, but this quiet and real transformation is among the most beautiful things I’ve seen.

Two Additional Notes

1. Peter tells us to “crave pure spiritual milk.” I translate that as having a desire to know Jesus. But just like enjoyment, no one craves anything all of the time. We won’t crave Jesus all of the time. We just won’t. Here’s the thing: I don’t feel like going to the gym all the time, but I go anyway.
2. An important but less frequently made note about pursuing a relationship with God: do what he says. New understanding of him comes through obedience. I’m not exactly sure why or how, but it does. There’s this fabulous moment in John’s gospel where Jesus is once again being confronted by people who can’t figure out who he is. Jesus says, “If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak it on my own” (John 7: 17). In other words, Jesus says that revelation of truth comes through obedience. Mysterious and true and, once again, beautiful.

Growing Up and Teaching the Gospel to Children

I began this post by pointing out our need for wisdom. God, as the father and source of all wisdom, becomes our pursuit as we seek what we need to nurture our children.

But nothing about God is transactional. We don’t seek him to *get the stuff we need.* We seek him, and we get him. Beauty and grace result.

As we grow in Christ, we are transformed by him. Our children might not witness that transformation. Being young, they may not track the changes and growth he is working in us. But they will see the beauty of his life in us. They will live in an atmosphere of increasing grace and mercy because of that life. And this may very well awaken in them a craving to know him, too.

I wrote a post before this one on enjoying our children. Read it here. 

The post Teaching the Gospel to Children: Grow Up. appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Enjoy Your Children

“Children should be seen and not heard.” ~ English proverb

“The LORD your God is with you, 

He is mighty to save. 

He will take great delight in you,

He will quiet you with his love,

He will rejoice over you with singing.”

Zephaniah 3: 17

“It’s you I like.” ~ Mister Rogers

When we were children, my sisters and I spent Julys with our grandparents. We lived in Pittsburgh; they lived on Long Island. We would travel there at the end of June and my parents would stay for a week, then they would return home while we stayed behind. 

Over those weeks, my grandparents pretty much left us to our own devices. Our grandfather taught us to sail and dive and occasionally took us on errands; we helped our grandmother with chores. But on our own, we walked to the beach and home again. We played with our cousins and some neighborhood children. It was a normal and quiet life, unmarked by special activity: we never once went for ice cream or to the movies, never played a round of mini-golf. Our outings were to church and library, grocery store and, with our grandfather, the lumberyard. For the most part, we lived with our feet in the sand and our noses in books until our parents returned for us at the end of the month.

But one thing was certain about that time with our grandparents: they enjoyed it. They enjoyed us. They wanted us there with them. 

One way my grandmother made this clear was at the start of the day. I remember coming down the stairs looking forward to my morning greeting, because it was always full of delight. “Well, good morning!” my grandmother would exclaim, all smiles, with an embrace as if I had just arrived after an absence of months. My being there–the mere fact of my presence in her kitchen–was for her an exaltation. 

Looking back on this as the mother of grown children, I’m grateful and a little amazed. What a beautiful thing for a child to be welcomed like this, not just at the beginning of a visit, but every day.

It was a gift to be enjoyed.

The Problem with Enjoyment

Fact: (with rare and tragic exception) parents love their children. But do they enjoy them?

Here’s something I’ll bet you’ve noticed about caring for children: it’s daily. Sometimes it’s tedious. It looks like meeting needs and weighing demands, keeping schedules and finding socks. It’s preparing meals and cleaning plates, teaching chores and repeating yourself. Through and under all of this runs a deep and necessary love. It’s that love, in fact, that motivates it all. It’s why you make them brush their teeth and take them to soccer practice.

But it’s that very ordinariness that can make it all lackluster, that can suck the enjoyment clean away. You are tired, they are tired, and if they don’t go to bed five minutes ago, you may very well lose it.

The enjoyment of our children is embattled in another way, too: sometimes we don’t enjoy our children because of our children. I, for one, have known first-hand what it’s like to have my child turn into a screaming dragon in the check-out line at the K-Mart. And while I’m not naming names, I am willing to admit that there was absolutely nothing I found enjoyable about her at the time. 

Our children have tempers. They have moods. They have quirks and tendencies that can amount to maddening. They are mean to each other; they are rude to us; they embarrass us in public places. Their knock-knock jokes stop being funny somewhere near round five or they were never funny in the first place and we are too tired to muster a laugh. What’s to enjoy? 

No one is enjoyable all the time.

And yet I argue that we do best not just to love our children, but to enjoy them. I think one of the best ways to teach our children the gospel love of Jesus is all wrapped up in enjoyment. 

Isn’t Love Enough?

Quick answer: Yes.

But bear with me a minute, because love and enjoyment communicate differently. See: 

When I was in middle school, my dad had to change jobs. Suddenly his daily commute became an hour each way, a tedium that he really disliked.

We could have sold our house and moved to a different part of the city, but he and my mother weighed this option against the needs of their three daughters who were thriving at school and church. To move meant upending this–and they didn’t want to do it. So we stayed in our community and my dad commuted to work, and that commute brought him a lot of stress.

He chose to do this out of love for us–but love can’t always communicate the way we want it to. At the time, my sisters and I couldn’t comprehend his sacrifice. 

Love is essential to parenting, but it can be hard. It provides your meals, your home and your clothes, but it also disciplines you so that you know right from wrong. Love makes you make your bed or write a thank-you note or miss a friend’s birthday party because you’re sick. 

Enjoyment, on the other hand, always communicates joy. And it isn’t just joy in a general kind of way. Enjoyment of a child communicates joy to that child about herself. It speaks approval and delight. It says, “I like you.”

A child who lives with this kind of a blessing is far more likely to believe the gospel, because when we enjoy our children, we are telling them something True.

God’s Delight

The Bible shows us that God delights in his creation. And above all other parts of that creation, he delights in people. Of everything he made in the Genesis account, God said it was “good,” but when it came to human beings, he called them “very good.” 

We’re told that we’re made in God’s image, but that doesn’t simply mean that we are, like him, thinkers and creators. It means that each of us bears his imprint, and uniquely so. We all know this at some level. Deep down, we recognize the inimitable value of the other: no matter how much we appreciate or fail to appreciate someone, we know that that someone is–in a world of billions–irreplaceable. 

Parents know this better than anyone else. 

Which is perhaps a reason why, when God sought to show his love for us, he sent his Son. As Father, he knows what it is to watch a child suffer and die. This was his son, his only child, the one of whom he said, “I am well pleased” (Matthew 3: 17, emphasis mine). The Father delighted in his Son, and this Son in his Father.

And now, through this Son’s death and resurrection, the Father makes himself adoptive parent to anyone who will have him. He wants everyone to be his child. There isn’t an unredeemable soul in the world.

Each person is precious to him. Each person uniquely bears his mark. He knows mole and freckle, penchant and habit. He knows what we enjoy doing. In fact, he made us to enjoy these things, and part of our enjoyment is God’s own pleasure in it.

The Bible says that he counts the hairs of our heads and stores our tears in a bottle. Why? All scripture points to the answer: because we are his delight. 

He enjoys us.

Our Delight

Enjoying our children, then, communicates just a piece of God’s own enjoyment to them. Or, at the very least, it opens a way for them to receive that enjoyment. It makes God’s enjoyment of them more believable. 

Parenting provides us a unique view on to the value of the other. And the truth is, despite their challenging tendencies and our exhaustion, we value our children deeply. We know more intimately than anyone the moles and freckles, the penchants and habits. We know their favorite foods and colors, their ticklish spots and where their scars came from. We delight in their uniqueness, in what makes them inimitably them. 

The trick is in showing them that they are enjoyable.  On any given day we tolerate them. We certainly love them. But we want to actively enjoy them.

Please remember what I said earlier: no one is enjoyable all the time, but here are some thoughts that might help. 

1. Your child wants to be enjoyed by you. While it was natural for my grandmother to exclaim her delight, that might not be at all natural to you. Show your child your delight in whatever way works for you. You might be a hugger. You might be a hair-tussler. You might write notes on the lunch napkin or make pancakes on Saturday mornings. Anything works as long as it’s real and well-received. And the beauty is that children naturally know how to read enjoyment in a wide variety of ways. You don’t have to do what my grandmother did. Your child wants to be enjoyed by you. 
2. Enjoyment of the other expands us. Learn to enjoy what your child enjoys–even if it’s the smallest aspect of the thing. Your daughter may adore playing Lego and you simply can’t abide it; but if nothing else you can appreciate your daughter’s appreciation. And you can work to find something else that you can enjoy with her. 
3. Practice self-care. Despite our awareness of enjoyment’s value, the barriers remain. Fatigue is real, as are the demands that keep us from enjoying one another. As parents and guardians, we need to take care of ourselves. We need breaks from our children just as much as they need downtime. Tending to our needs makes us better able to tend to those of others–and it creates space for us to better enjoy our children. 
4. Establish routines. A means to self-care is to create and live in routine. Regular bedtime works magic for a weary parent–and it’s pretty great for children, too, even if they resist. I wrote more about this HERE. Maybe you’d like to read it.
5. It’s perfectly normal to find your child unenjoyable. Children go through developmental stages that make life difficult for everyone, even themselves. They also go through phases we find maddening (endless poop jokes, anyone?). Be patient with your child and with yourself. Find help in the wisdom of your spouse, other parents, and in the community of your church. Ask for wisdom in your prayers (James 1: 5-7). And remember that parenting not only guides children into adulthood; it also changes and cultivates us. When we bring our needs–in parenting and anything/everything else–to God, he meets, strengthens, teaches, and blesses us with more of himself.

Enjoy!

Last week I spent time with a friend who has been a mother for just over two weeks. As her darling newborn slept in my arms, she told me about her labor and delivery, the trauma and fatigue and nervousness of having this baby.

And we laughed together over the absurdity of leaving the hospital. As new parents, you barely know what you are doing, and yet they send you off as though everything will be fine. And, often enough, it is fine–but maybe you’d like an instruction manual of some sort, a reference guide to consult in those inevitable moments of confusion.

It would tell you when to feed the baby, how to discern an angry cry from a pained one, how to clip fingernails without clipping fingers, how in the world to swaddle.

And, in my opinion, it should have one last little word of counsel, appended to the end of the list. Just a reminder when the nights have been sleepless or when the baby finally sleeps through the night, when you realize you have no idea what you’re doing or when you don’t have the energy to think about it:

This child has been given to you for just a little while, yours to comfort and care for and delight in. Enjoy! 

The post Teaching the Gospel to Children: Enjoy! appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Last year I was invited to speak to a Mothers Of Pre-Schoolers group on “teaching the gospel to very young children.” I immediately agreed, interested in returning to a subject I haven’t considered in a while. 

But I was surprised by some further dialogue between me and the woman who invited me to speak. She said they were all eager to learn of any resources I had used and might recommend.

Resources? I didn’t recall any specific resources I’d used to teach my children the gospel. Yes, we had taken them to church and Sunday School. We had talked with them about Jesus and sung songs about him and read Bible stories together. But we never had a regular time of family devotions. I had never routinely used a specific Bible story book. 

I was pretty sure that I had no resources to recommend.

Instead, as I thought it through, I wondered if maybe we teach the gospel to our children not only through church and Sunday School attendance, through Bible stories and songs, but also by living it ourselves. 

It seemed to me that the latter was essential. And so I began thinking about those aspects of our lives that might most impact our children’s reception of Jesus. And I began to think about the small world of our homes–the foundational space in which children spend the majority of their time and through which they perceive the world–as having an atmosphere through which Jesus might be understood and welcomed.

We all know that our words can only go so far. What we say–if not aligned with what we do and how we live–will soon ring false. While our children are young, we might believe these misalignments have no impact: for example, my failure to forgive someone who hurt me might not affect my child at all.

But maybe you’ve heard this: “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison yourself and waiting for the other person to die” (Marianne Williamson). We know that a hard heart is a hard heart, that failure to forgive–no matter how far removed the offender might be–impacts us far more than it does the person we’ve failed to forgive. And that hard heart impacts our children–no matter how young–because, as parents, we create the atmosphere our children live in. 

That’s how I began to think about sharing the gospel with children: as an atmosphere. Yes, we teach them, we tell them that Jesus loves them; that he died to save them; that they are, in fact, in need of saving. We take them to church and Sunday School. We read the Bible stories, we do the crafts. We may have the Advent countdown wreath and calendar and candles, the resurrection eggs for Easter. But if we ourselves are not living in a relationship with Jesus that opens us to change by the Holy Spirit, then all that we’ve taught, read, or said to them will somehow and ultimately ring false.

The atmosphere of our homes will show our children that Jesus is beautiful–or it won’t.

Since I began keeping this blog, I have valued it as a place that would be welcoming to everyone: Christians, people of other faiths, and people of no faith. That said, this series of posts is patently Christian. It is also (clearly) for parents, care-givers, guardians, or for those who wish to be. Still, I hope this series won’t alienate anyone. No matter your faith or family, what is true about Jesus is true for everyone, whether or not you embrace it. And by that I mean, in part, that the things I write in these posts will in many ways be applicable to child-rearing even if the parent is not a Christian. The upcoming post about criticism, for example, has meaning for all children and households. It’s also true of forgiveness, as mentioned above. It’s true of wholeness in relationships and in oneself. So if you are a reader of this blog (and especially if you are a parent), I heartily invite you to read–even if you don’t believe the gospel.

Which requires another point of introduction: What is the gospel? The gospel is fundamentally this: peace with God through Jesus Christ. 

It is the basis of Christian belief: 

• that a loving God created this world and all humankind in order to live in a joyous and fulfilling relationship with him. 
• That all people are fundamentally broken and hurting, choosing *not* to live for God but for themselves, which means that each of us is in desperate need of God’s mercy and lasting kindness. 
• That God so deeply desired a relationship with us that he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to die. 
• That in dying, Jesus paid the price for our rejection of God. 
• That in his resurrection from the dead, Jesus demonstrated God’s absolute power over life and death. 
• Now every person, through Jesus, is offered full forgiveness for their rejection of God and can enjoy a relationship with him in this life and in the one to come, a life in which they are guided by his Holy Spirit to live in faithfulness and growing joy in God. 

Again, you don’t have to believe in the gospel to read these posts, but they will reference it often, because the gospel is not just a system of belief, but the means to a relationship with the living God, and this relationship changes us, heals us, makes us more compassionate and loving. These changes impact how we live in the world and–of course–how we treat our children.

Finally, before I begin the posts themselves, it’s vital that I say this: my husband and I never lived up to all that I’m going to recommend. Never. We certainly tried, but as are the other components of the gospel, that bit about everyone being “fundamentally broken and hurting” is true, and we are no exception. 

No one parents perfectly. Ever. 

These posts are based on my experience as a parent, a friend of other parents, a daughter, and a teacher. They are meant to be an encouragement and a reminder, ways we can check ourselves and think about how we are living in front of our children. We can always do our best, and each of us means to. But all the good that we do–and all the good in this world–comes from the goodness of God. And the more we rely on him in everything–maybe especially parenting–the more we see his kindness, mercy, and joy in our lives.

I’ve thought and prayed about these posts a lot. I’m excited to finally be writing and offering them to you. I welcome comments, conversation, and questions. 

And I pray that reading them is a gift to you and your family.

With Joy,

Rebecca

The posts will be available here beginning on Wednesday, January 29 and will appear thereafter on Mondays. That’s my plan, anyway. 🙂

The post Teaching the Gospel to Children: A Letter of Introduction appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa

At a baby shower in October, I talked with a woman whose younger son had just left home. He graduated from college a few years ago, so this is not that departure. This is a son who has gone and come home and now, finally, has gone away again.

“There just aren’t any opportunities for him in our town,” she explained. So he is off to a larger city to find a job in his field. Off, as we might read from a fairy tale, “to seek his fortune.” He is on his own now, “coming of age” as it were, as he must, as this mother wants him to. What parent doesn’t want to see her child thrive in the world?

Her older son, she explained, moved away years ago. He’s in Chicago and doing very well, she is happy to say. She and her husband are grateful for and proud of both their sons.

They are also trying to become accustomed to this: life with their children grown and gone.

Her throat closed. “Would you please write about this?” she asked, her voice lowered and keen. “There just doesn’t seem to be much about it out there.”

***

I don’t know if there is much written about it or not. I haven’t looked, busy–as I have been–with sending my own children out into the world. Two weddings in two years, and these only two years (give or take) after each of the grooms graduated from high school. Their empty bedroom still holds their furniture; their posters are still on the walls.

I haven’t found time or heart to do anything different with the room yet. But Emma has a bedroom here, albeit an unoccupied one. She graduated from high school in May and in September left home for six months, two and a half of which are spent.

Not that anyone’s counting.

***

“There doesn’t seem to be much about it out there,” she said, but I don’t know if that’s true. Surely there must be books about this transition in life, the whole “empty nest” thing. So many people go through it.

In fact, I have known many people to go through it: nearly everyone who has children. Seems to me my own parents went through it years ago–not that I noticed. I was too busy in those days to wonder if they were sad or missing us. I was married, making a new home with my husband in our apartment, finishing up school and thinking about my life ahead.

If asked, I would have said that my parents were absolutely fine.

I would write about it, I want to say to my friend’s friend, returning to our discussion at the October baby shower. I would write it about it, but what is there to say? One’s children growing up and moving out is the way of things. It’s how they must go. Why comment on it?

Yes, it’s a change. An ending. But it’s not a death. It’s not remotely comparable to those real tragedies abroad or close to home: not a story of horrors in a refugee camp or a school shooting, not a terrible injustice that forever upends all one holds true and good and right.

No, we anticipate the empty nest. We know it’s completely natural. Maybe it makes us sad–but it’s an ordinary sadness.

***

Life with children was an ordinary life. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, just as now. But also on those ordinary days there was school and time for play, sports practices, music lessons, games and concerts and recitals.

We developed routines to make it all run smoothly. During my children’s youngest years, I got up extra early to exercise. When I was teaching full-time, I often stole free class periods to go to the school’s gym. I knew the time with my children was short and, especially in those years, they needed me so much. I wanted to be available.

Routines shifted. We used to tuck them into bed at night. And then came the nights when I lay in bed half awake, listening for the car to pull into the driveway. There’s nothing like the sleep that comes when you know that everyone is home.

Now we have no way of knowing whether or not our children are in bed, because they don’t sleep here. We don’t need to know what they are doing because they don’t need us to know.

Which is not to say that they don’t need us. There are ways in which our children still need us–and one of these is that our children need us to thrive on our own. They need us to be stable and happy and moving along in the world. They need us to be able to proceed without those routines that were built on their needs.

This is difficult, because for twenty or so years, our thriving hinged on their thriving, on meeting their ordinary needs in ordinary ways on ordinary days.

Now we need new ways of being.

On our first night at home after Emma left, Bill and I stood together at the front door before we went up to bed. He locked the door and looked at me. “No one else is coming home,” he said.

If I were to write about the empty nest, I would say all of this. But I can’t write about it–can I?–because I have so much to be grateful for.

All of my children are still alive, of sound mind and body. They are making their way in the world. Not only that, but two out of three of my children currently live right here in my town. If I needed to, I could get to either of their homes within fifteen minutes.

Each of these facts is a gift. For any one of my children, it could have gone some other way. It still could.

In the face of such gifts, is it fair to be sad? To be sure, Bill and I are adjusting, but we are adults. We can handle this. We need to get over it already, move forward in gratitude.

Once I asked my mother how she felt about her children growing up. “Didn’t it make you sad?” I asked her. At this point, I was a mother myself, facing the specter that is now my reality, the empty nest that I can’t bring myself to write about.

My mother’s answer was so wise: she said that she was sad, but that children must grow up; it’s the only way. Any other possibility–a child somehow frozen in her development, stuck perpetually in any phase of childhood–however adorable it is–would be all wrong. “It’s like a record player with the needle stuck in a groove,” she said. Dissonance and static. Loss of (so much) purpose and meaning.

Ask any parent who has had the process interrupted. They know.

***

Yet the truth is that our children in this house framed our days. Nearly all the decisions we made were necessarily tied to them. I took them to the library because they needed books. I took them to the grocery store because they needed food. And people would comment to me as I steered my shopping cart (daughter in the baby seat, two young sons clinging to its sides), “You sure have your hands full!”

And I would answer–every time–“Happily, yes.” Because I loved having them with me in the grocery store. Even when they quarreled (and they did). Even when they asked for things they couldn’t have (and they did). Even when they did not listen to me (and they did not). I loved having them with me in the grocery store because I loved having them.

I knew that their time with me–with us–was fleeting–but it was so ordinary. It was full of frustration and exhaustion and occasional, terrifying doubt. It was full of making meals and cleaning them up again, of doling out snacks and doling out screen time and fighting back fears in the middle of the night because one or another of them had presented with something that might be a symptom of something terrible.

I knew–in this context– that the time was fleeting. But how–again, in this context– does one manage an understanding like that?

And when it all inevitably–even appropriately and beautifully–disappears, how in the world does one write about it?

At the baby shower, we sat in a circle and offered, one by one, a word of advice for the mother-to-be. And so came the perennial encouragement: “Enjoy every moment.”

How many times has a young parent been told this? A parent who hasn’t slept in weeks because of the baby’s teething or newness or stubborn resistance of sleep? A parent whose child’s terrible two’s have extended well into her four’s? A parent who feels themselves on the edge of mental or emotional frenzy because parenting is actually the most difficult thing they’ve ever done?

It is impossible to enjoy every moment of parenting, because not every moment is enjoyable.

Happily, another shower attendee, given her turn to offer advice, gently amended the earlier counsel. “Don’t feel like you have to enjoy every moment,” she said. “That is impossible.”

And yet, there it is: “Enjoy every moment.” I’ll tell you why we say this: to a person, every parent I’ve ever known will tell you that it goes by far too fast. They may very well remember how difficult it was to parent children-at-home, but so many of them nonetheless would wish to have it back.

***

Last week I made Christmas cookies with my mother-in-law, and as we worked side-by-side in the kitchen, she remembered doing this with my children, young teenagers, in this same kitchen a few years ago.

She remembered other times, too: when they were very little and would sometimes go to her house. “I would rent a movie for them and we would make cookies.” She recalled this aloud as she rolled peanut butter dough into perfect balls. “They would spend the evening with me.” And in the next breath: “I want those days back again.”

Christmas is in one week, and this is the first Christmas in twenty-three years that we will wake to a house without children.

I’m not going to write about the empty nest, but I’ll admit that this Advent has been a sad one for me. In truth, I keep forgetting that it’s Advent. I’m taking care of the Christmasy things (gifts, cards, mailing packages), but without any children here it all feels a little half-hearted.

At dusk in previous Decembers, I used to send my children scurrying around the house to turn on the Advent candles in every window. This year I do it myself, making the trek into our sons’ otherwise empty room and saying aloud, every time, as if they were there, “Hello, boys!”

I don’t wish my children home again. I do not wish them little. I’m so grateful for their lives now, for their strength and independence.

But this is how we know the world is broken: the right and natural course of things can also break our hearts.

***

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1: 5

A friend reminded me today that Advent is actually about the broken heart of the world. It’s about everything that’s ever gone wrong: crop failures and mine collapses, and the floods and eruptions that destroy homes and claim lives. It’s about the delusion and wickedness of white supremacy, the terrors of refugee camps, the horror of school shootings, birth defects and infant deaths and terminal diagnoses.

Advent is about every kind of loss, even ordinary sadness.

Because Advent is about the God who knows our need and decided to answer it with himself. The eternal and omnipotent made human and finite: newborn, cold and hungry. He lived in this world knowing perfectly what it was meant to be and how desperately far from perfect it was. Then he paid for the disparity with his life.

And so I think no loss is insignificant to him, no grief too small. He cares more deeply than we do about all of it.

Which means, among other things, that it’s all right to miss one’s children, all grown and gone. It’s fine to be both grateful for their lives and sad that their time at home is over. There is room–during Advent and always–for both gratitude and grief.

That’s what I would say about the empty nest, if I were to write about it.

All photos by Richard Brewster

The post Ordinary Sadness appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

This year, Sunday, December 1 is the beginning of Advent, the four weeks of the church calendar leading to Christmas Day.

Once again I’m posting the four readings I wrote last year. Each one considers a different person in the nativity story, and each offers thoughts as to how we might respond to the birth of Jesus: in celebration, in history, and in our lives.

This year I’ve also recorded the readings. Click on them below to listen, and click to download the text.

May the reality of the grace, hope and truth of Jesus Christ make your Christmas truly Merry this year!

Week One.  Mary: the Accepting One

Week Two. Joseph: the Trusting One

Week Three. Herod: the Angry One

Week Four. The Wise Men: the Seeking Ones

Photos by Richard Brewster.

The post Advent 2019 appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

 Martin Buber, I and Thou

On the morning of Everett and Olivia’s wedding, I had to pull Everett’s box out from under my bed.

I have a box for each of my children under there. They contain those things I’ve saved over the years: programs from band and chorus concerts, an essay or two they’ve written. Artwork from school or our kitchen table. Those special papers culled only once in a while from the folders they toted home weekly during grade school.

That morning in Everett’s box I’d hoped to find some photos, but instead I found the camouflage watchband he’d worn daily in fourth grade, and also his Batman suit.

***

The forecast for the wedding was rain. After so little of it that spring, we were promised rain for the entire second half of the week and also the weekend.

Which shouldn’t be a problem, right? They say that rain on a wedding is good luck. But the wedding ceremony was to be in an open field encircled by woods. There were a few refurbished, century-old buildings for the preparations and reception, but the wedding itself would be outside.

I was on my weather app almost hourly that week, mentally shoving the radar report toward Sunday. As far as I was concerned, it could rain buckets on Sunday. It didn’t seem that clear skies –for just a few hours on a May Saturday afternoon– should be too much to hope for.

As it went, the weather looked (potentially) positive: the rain was delayed later and later in the week, with percent-chances on the decrease. We had hope for our Saturday afternoon.

And when it came time for Friday’s rehearsal, all signs of rain–in the sky, not the forecast–had disappeared. The air was warm, the light golden. After dinner, we all spilled out of the reception barn and onto the lawn for cornhole and Frisbee and, as the evening went on, a long and laughing game of hide-and-seek.

***

I suppose some might argue that Friday evening was the time for them to get married. Wedding party and some family were assembled, and here was the weather they had certainly envisioned when, a few months before, Everett and Olivia had discovered this beautiful venue.

But they didn’t get married because of weather, obviously. And the date had been chosen; the guests were invited and planning to come. You don’t just arbitrarily choose a day to get married, do you? We certainly don’t decide to get married based on barometric pressure.

So, how do we decide? Which are the elements that must converge in order to have a wedding? We have happily married friends who did it at the courthouse, pulling obliging strangers from the hallway to serve as witnesses. We have friends who eloped. We have friends who got married in intimate ceremonies with no one invited but their families–and then we joined them to celebrate in a reception the next day.

The date of the wedding–and even the how (the horse-drawn carriage that fetches you to the reception, say; or the destination to a glamorous city)–can’t begin to matter. Not near so much, anyway, as the why. 

***

When Bill and I married, the weather was insignificant: both wedding and reception were indoors. But we remember the weather that day nonetheless. In the morning, I sat in my bathrobe on the deck of the house where I grew up and watched clouds slide fast across a clear sky. The sun and wind continued until late afternoon. Then clouds moved in and we, now married for about six hours, stopped at receptions held at Bill’s father’s and then mother’s homes.

That night after dark it rained and thundered, and we have since commented to each other about it: we’re glad the weather was varied, glad it wasn’t all-day-perfect. If weather on one’s wedding day holds any kind of meaning for what a marriage might be like, then at the very least turbulence seemed honest.

***

The appearance of the Batman suit should not have surprised me. I was digging in Everett’s box, after all. The thing is chock-full of “Everett artifacts,” if you will, the place where I keep most of the treasures pertaining to him.

And I will admit that the Batman suit, which he wore as daily as possible throughout the entire year he was four, was less of a surprise than the watchband. It took me a moment to recall what it was, especially as the watch itself (broken and thrown away, I assume) wasn’t there. I don’t remember where he got the watch, but since its re-discovery on the morning of the wedding, I have noticed it on Everett’s wrist in old photographs. Ah yes, the watch that Everett wore for months during –was it?– fourth grade.

And then one day, presumably, it broke. Or one day he just stopped wearing it. And his mother knew that here was a piece of his life that was precious enough for the keeping. Into the box it went.

As was the watch, the moment of its interment in the box is also lost to memory, as are many of the moments of his fourth grade year. But I have that watchband.

I suppose my keeping it is testament to foolish sentimentality. Or to love. You decide.

***

In any case, the fact is that the watchband only matters because of its wearer, but the wearer himself is not something I can keep, stored in a box (creepily) under a bed. No, the life of the child will progress regardless of whether or not we are paying attention, of whether or not we are storing things in boxes or, as did the mother of Christ with her blessed child, in our hearts.

I have plenty of Everett-moments stored away. There is the time when, age three, he came back inside to invite me to investigate with him an anthill he had discovered in the yard. And the times, younger still, when he would come to me, busy as I was and pregnant with his sister, and say, “I hold you, Mommy,” at which point I would abandon whatever I was doing and hoist him into my arms.

The times he had trouble leaving me to go to school and then the glorious day when he didn’t. The morning I walked with him and my father to the beach and then watched Everett celebrate the water. The evening we picked him up from his first middle school dance. The afternoon I picked him up from his first day of high school. The early morning we sent him off at the airport on his gap year travels and the golden afternoon, six months later, when we welcomed him home again.

But I don’t know exactly the day he knew he loved Olivia, the moment he knew –as once upon a time Bill and I did of each other– that he had found the Someone he wanted to do the good and hard work of marriage with. That’s really not the sort of thing one necessarily tells one’s mother. It’s not something a mother needs to know.

***

An outdoor wedding, we all agreed, is “just so Livy.” This young woman who loves my son also loves sunlight and growing things, bare feet and daisy chains. Of course she should get married outside.

But the weather, as we all know, is something we have yet to control. Despite the extraordinary advances given us by science, the weather vexes and concerns us in ways both small and great. After a week of watching the forecast, Friday’s glorious evening seemed to portend the blessing we’d all be hoping for: Saturday would be beautiful.

Still, did it need to be? With all we’ve been given, did we need also to insist on good weather? Days before the wedding, speaking of exactly this, I said to a friend of my about-to-be daughter-in-law, “I just want her to have what she wants.”

My friend’s response was full of wisdom: “She already does, doesn’t she?”

And Olivia did. I know she would agree. She had the about-to-be husband she had prayed for, the person to do the good and hard work of marriage with.

In that context, good weather on May 11, 2019 would be extra.

***

Bill and I were ridiculously young when we got married, but we knew this much: we wouldn’t always be happy. We wouldn’t always seem to be the best partner for the other. We would sometimes disagree and argue; we would apologize and forgive. We would do the good and hard work of being married to each other, come what may. Like so much weather.

And this is why we’ve been glad that the weather was so varied on our wedding day: because the imagery, if you will, was perfect. We knew the trouble would come, although we didn’t yet know how. And we knew that the trouble is what forges the marriage.

Certainly the good days, the joys and ease of a healthy relationship forge a marriage, too. But it’s those times you struggle through, the fights you resolve, the times you think you might like to walk away but you don’t— that’s when you know that happiness isn’t what keeps you there.

Happiness comes and goes. And comes again. A marriage based on feelings of happiness will disappear like the sun behind a cloud.

In this context, a little rain on a wedding day –if you’re wanting symbolism– is nothing short of a blessing.

***

About an hour before the wedding ceremony, Olivia did a wonderful thing. I’m guessing it’s somewhat commonly done these days, but on my wedding day, I had never heard of it. I wish I had.

Dressed in her gown and ready for the wedding, Olivia met her father Tom in a quiet corner of the field, away from any guests or onlookers. It was her father’s “first-look” at his daughter-now-bride, a moment for the two of them to be together before this momentous change in their lives.

I didn’t have a moment like that with my father. I know I rode with him to the church, that he waited with me and my bridesmaids before the ceremony. And after I sent my precious flower girl ahead of me down the aisle, he turned to me and asked, “How do I look?”

He meant to be funny, and he was, but I was nervous and distracted. And sadly I was unaware of the enormous weight of this moment for him, so I brushed him off. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished that I had responded differently.

Separated from the busyness of last-minute wedding preparation, Olivia and her father had time to talk together. I didn’t watch it happen, but I’ve seen the photos. I’m sure that both of them treasure the time.

It’s good to make time for moments like these, because so much of life becomes lost in the everyday.

***

The truth is that –on the one hand– it doesn’t matter when you get married. Weather, time-of-day, glamorous location (or not) aside, it’s what happens on the wedding day that matters. And what happens on the wedding day actually occurs before the wedding day itself.

It’s at some point before the wedding day that you decide you’ve found your person. That this person and no other will be the one for you. That you can trust the other to know you at your worst. That this person, above all others, can help you be your best. That they, like you, will fight for the other and, sometimes more importantly, for your marriage.

The decision to that commitment happens some time before your wedding day, I say. Your wedding day is just the moment when you formally declare it to the world.

And that moment matters. Enormously.

***

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. -Genesis 2:24.

***

At the beginning of their wedding ceremony, Tom stood with Olivia in front of the guests. When Malcolm asked the question (“Who gives this bride?”), Tom’s answer was out of the ordinary. He didn’t just say the traditional, “I do.” Instead he replied, “Her mother and sister and brother and I.”

Their family, like ours, was once a family of five. On May 11, 2019, they simultaneously became a family of four and a family of six.

This is mystery and reality together. It’s difficult and beautiful. And it’s good.

***

On the morning of Everett and Olivia’s wedding, the sky looked like it might conceivably turn blue, but as the day went on, the clouds settled in. It looked like rain, but we continued to hold out hope even when Tina, the wedding organizer, trotted out baskets of umbrellas.

The guests were assembled and we all continued to watch our weather apps, passing along word of percent-chances, this time reckoning them by the minute. The bride and bridesmaids stood at the ready, and it was a question of waiting: should we wait ten minutes? Fifteen? What were our chances to avoid the rain?

Tina asked Olivia, and Olivia said we should begin. The music swelled, we assembled for the procession, and off we went.

We had the darlingest of twin flower girls, radiant bridesmaids, and an utterly beautiful bride. But I will admit to mostly watching the groom that day. It’s an infrequent gift in life to watch your son promise himself to the well-being of another, to declare before God and with his help that he will be committed to her for the rest of his life. To enter– so young, so bold, so humble– into this adventure that his father and I have known: the good and hard work of marriage, the appalling views it affords onto your own selfishness, the apologies and forgiveness that make a life.

And then they were married and the bridal party was off, two by two, behind the husband and wife. There was music and all the laughter and congratulations. We parents and grandparents made our way out, and the guests after us.

Moments later it began to rain.

all photos courtesy Sarah Darnell Photography

The post Like So Much Weather appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Our backyard maples are skeletal now. It happened in that sudden way that means I haven’t been paying attention.

I know they flushed to gold about two weeks ago. Emma called me to the window, and we stared at them together for a minute. They can seem incandescent in those early yellow days, like we don’t really need to turn the lights on inside at dusk.

I may have seen a leaf or two take a turn downward. There was that day I worked at the kitchen table and watched so many drifting free. Some of them sailed, some turned in tight circles. One I watched fall and catch itself on a lower branch.

And now today these trees are mostly empty.

***

Today, too, is word of loss. 48 dead in the California Camp Fire. This was the news that woke me this morning on my radio alarm.

On Sunday during our worship service, phone alarms from around the congregation reminded Bill and me of the alarm we too had received that morning: another Amber alert. A child taken, and a parent–unknown to us–inconsolable.

And last night, news analysis about pressure potentially brought to bear on Saudi Arabia: the chance that the kingdom could relieve the crisis of famine in Yemen.

***

I don’t begin to know how to pray for these things–and prayer seems ineffectual. But I can do nothing about the forest fire. I am powerless for the stolen child. Yemen’s distress grieves me–but also, for now, anyway–I cannot help.

***

I think He saw the leaves fall. Sees them fall. Saw with me the one cut loose then drift to resting on a lower branch.

So too He says He sees the sparrow–that small and unconsidered life. During the life of Christ on earth, two sparrows made the cheapest meal. A solid source of protein for less than an hour’s wage.

If He knows the death of the sparrow, how much more the life of the one who must eat it? Child. Woman. Man. Person. Image of God.

***

So I do pray for Yemen. For California. For the stolen child and her mother. I hold them up to him–fist full of sparrows. Lord, have mercy.

***

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Matthew 10: 29

“Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God, and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love.” Psalm 62: 11

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