The holiday season–that busy stretch of weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year–is often filled with Comings and Goings. Someone traveling somewhere and remaining for a while. Guests. Visitors. We had many. Did you?

Here’s the thing about Comings and Goings: some are more welcome than others. 

We definitely welcomed my parents.

They arrived the day before Christmas Eve and stayed for just over a week. In that window we took walks and ate lots, watched the third season of The Crown and then, hungry for more of England’s royal family, The Queen. We debated politics and theology; listened to Bach and Christmas carols; stayed up late and slept in; made, packaged and delivered Christmas cookies to the neighbors. My father repaired a faulty electrical socket in a bedroom and took lots of pictures. My mother did most of the laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, and played the piano.

It was lovely.

We also welcomed Shanna’s family.

Her parents and two siblings arrived December 20th and left January 2nd. They stayed with Will and Shanna, but we got to see lots of them nonetheless.

We celebrated Christmas Eve with them at Will and Shanna’s house. We celebrated Christmas Day with them at our house. And we celebrated New Year’s Eve together (plus three (most welcome) friends), eating raclette and playing games and finally ringing in 2020 outside at the firepit, where we toasted a new decade and then sang a hymn or two.

We welcomed Bill’s brother Ray, who came to us from Pittsburgh, and also his mother and brother, who live nearby.

All of these were Comings that were, as I said, Most Welcome.

But we also welcomed some Goings.

There was, for starters, the possum on our door step the night before Thanksgiving. Presumably lured by cheeses that cling to empty pizza boxes (stashed en route to the recycling bin), it was captured by my dog when I was heading out the door to borrow corn syrup from my neighbor.

Despite my dog’s having caught it in her teeth (I made her leave it); despite the possum’s proximity to a human’s front door; despite being a wild creature threatened by a dog keenly interested in catching it again, that possum remained. It played dead for hours on our top step, mostly obscured by the pile of empty boxes, but leaving exposed one tight claw and the sharp teeth that circled its open mouth.

We don’t know when it left, but were very pleased that it was gone in the morning.

The thing about Unwelcome Visitors, I’ve found, is that they don’t know when to leave– which was the case with the squirrel that, for a time, inhabited our Christmas tree.

When I awoke a few weeks before Christmas to hear it banging around in our breakfast room, I didn’t know it was a squirrel. I thought it was the cat (our cat doesn’t bang around) or the dog (who was lying on her bed). I certainly didn’t think it would be a wild animal, a squirrel caught in our many-windowed breakfast room. When I came upon it, still blurry with sleep, the squirrel was throwing itself against said windows, trying desperately to get outside.

I called the dog away from the room. And the cat. Then I called my husband. We opened doors and windows (outside it was 30-odd degrees and raining) and did all we could to usher the wild, frightened and somewhat bruised creature out of the house.

So it (logically) ran from breakfast room to living room and hid in the Christmas tree.

The sheriff wanted to carry the tree out and set it free. Durham’s answer (in this instance) to Animal Control, he wore boots and heavy gloves and had Squirrel-in-House Experience. But despite gentle prodding with our broom, the squirrel wouldn’t leave. Yes, it emerged a time or two and raced around, hiding temporarily under the sofa, threatening to go upstairs, and (always) missing the open doors that beckoned it outside. But every time it darted forth, it found its way back to the tree again.

In the end, the tree did not have to be carried out. The kindly sheriff kept at it until–in what was a third or fourth round of mayhem–we assume that it found a door.

We were Very Glad it went.

Yes, we had our share of comings and goings, of both the welcome and unwelcome variety. And we had one other: a Going-and-Coming, a Departure-and-Arrival. But it wasn’t an arrival here. It wasn’t a coming to us. It happened on Christmas Eve, but we didn’t see it.

On Christmas Eve, Emma and her team of nine left Kona, Hawaii for Athens, Greece. As we slept, as we celebrated Christmas, as we enjoyed the quiet Day After, Emma was flying halfway around the world.

She arrived in Athens on December 26th at 5 p.m., and she’ll be there for ten weeks, working with Youth With a Mission to serve refugees. These are people who know Going in ways I’ve never understood it: necessary, frightening, desperate. And their Coming to Greece, too, is likely full of fear. I’m hoping Emma and her friends can bring them some small relief.

We would have loved to have had her home for Christmas, but we’re so glad that she is where she is.

And when she gets home in March, we’ll be overjoyed to welcome her.

All photos by Richard Brewster with the exception of the above, which was sent to us: Emma playing guitar on Mars Hill in Athens.

The post Holiday Visitors appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We’ve lived in Durham, North Carolina now for 23 years. I find this hard to believe; I find it difficult to believe that I’m old enough to have lived anywhere as an adult for anything like 23 years, but there it is.

I love living in Durham for many reasons. Here are some. But this post isn’t about the Bull City, as much as I love it. It’s about one of Durham’s upsides and just now, one of its downsides. It’s about friends and saying goodbye.

With universities in each of the towns (Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh) that make up this region called The Triangle, our population swells during the academic year. We are an incubator of sorts: students come for undergrad and graduate work; we connect with some and love them; and then, so often, they leave.

Nick and Jenny were different. They met as undergrads at Duke, and when they married after college, they settled here. She is a native Durhamite with family nearby, and Nick’s family isn’t so far away. I had known Jenny peripherally for a while through mutual friends; we met Nick when we ran into them at a Duke football game once. I enjoyed their wedding photos on Facebook.

Then came that Sunday morning when, new bride and freshly minted graduate, she approached me after church. She told me that they had decided to attend our church, which meant that our lives might now overlap in regular ways. There was nothing for it but to become friends. Which we so gladly did.

But Durham is an incubator. Sometimes people move here from Pittsburgh to attend grad school at Duke and are still here 23 years later. And sometimes people move here to start a life and then realize, five years in, that they have to go, that life and work are beckoning elsewhere, that obedience to God can be making a life outside of San Francisco. And that’s when you realize that five years is not enough time.

***

At times like these, I’m grateful for how memories surface. The incidents, conversations and episodes that, once the stuff of everyday, newly assert themselves.

Nick running the Disney Marathon (fast) without even beginning to think of training for it.

Jenny taking a thirteen-year-old Emma Christmas shopping, just because she wanted to spend time with my daughter.

Nick diving headlong into a lake and then horrifying me with the photos of his split forehead on Facebook.

Lunches and long walks with Jenny, talking about work and family and rearing children and whether there is a right way for any of it.

Emma and I, post soccer game on a Saturday morning, sidelined on a busy road with a flat tire. We couldn’t change it ourselves and Bill and the boys were unavailable–but there was Nick, in moments, it seemed. And in moments we were on our way again.

Their first wedding anniversary was our 23rd. We perched on tall chairs in the window seat of one of Durham’s finest restaurants and talked, among other things, about how difficult it can be to be married.

Dinner at their house. Dinner at ours. They introduced us to Settlers of Catan. We introduced them to Julia Child’s braised lamb. We stopped to see them unannounced; they stopped to see us, too. Once we had a difficult conversation involving some tears and some confessions of sorts. I love friendships that can go to the bone.

I love how Nick can’t be made to care whether his shorts are the “right” length, but will commit himself to loving and enjoying a group of middle school boys throughout the most trying three years of their lives.

And how he has loved my sons: by mentoring Everett, by helping Will find and buy (and make some repairs to) his car.

I love how Jenny thinks about things, how she turned her magnificent gifts of intelligence and compassion to serving refugees in Durham and to the women of our church. And how she entrusted herself to me in some difficult times–like that day when she was feeling awful. We sat under an umbrella at the pool and tried not to think about how overdue she was, and then, mercifully, baby Stone arrived the very next day.

And how, when Amazon decided without notice or fanfare to release my novel a full month early, they brought me an orchid to celebrate.

So many memories, and this one, from late June:

After dinner, Emma and Jenny and I in rocking chairs on their porch. Baby Ford is sleeping in his seat next to us, and Stone is playing: first on the porch with us and then out on the lawn, where Bill and Nick and Will are playing with Stone’s basketball hoop. The hoop is a tiny thing, its rim only a few feet off the ground, and the guys are playing horse, inventing new and near-impossible ways to get the ball into the hoop. It’s growing dark and the crickets are singing, summer is still ahead of us, and we are all talking and laughing, unaware of our sweet assumption: that life will carry on very nearly like this well into the foreseeable future.

***

Nick left a week and a half ago, driving his family’s belongings across the country. Today Jenny and the little boys leave, with assurances that they’ll all be back in town at Thanksgiving.

Last night, Jenny hosted a handful of us for a last visit, and I learned of another value we share: neither of us likes to say goodbye.

In truth, I’m not completely sure why Jenny doesn’t like it. And I respect that, despite her distaste, she addresses it anyway. Jenny is one to see the value in things, even things she doesn’t prefer.

And she’s right, of course. They are right: It’s good to say a proper farewell, good to acknowledge the official change. Maybe saying goodbye better makes space for navigating the changes that lie ahead. I don’t know.

But I know why I don’t like to say goodbye. I don’t like the pressure it puts on things, the heavy weight of the sadness. It’s all I can do, when finally saying goodbye, to not hold on too tight and to not say exactly what I’m feeling: Don’t go. Please don’t go. Just don’t.

The post Saying Goodbye appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Except for the mall part. (I actually hate going to the mall, due to its uncanny propensity to awaken desires for things I don’t have and didn’t even know existed until I entered the mall.) So I don’t go to the mall unless I absolutely have to–and on this particular Friday, early Christmas shopping compelled me. The quickest of errands. In and then out again. I knew exactly (well, nearly) what I was after. I would only be five minutes. Ten, tops.

I was halfway up the escalator when I heard my name and turned and saw my friend Kyle coming along behind me.

Kyle McManamy.

(Yes. His last name is McManamy, and if you haven’t tried that aloud yet, you should. McMANamy. See? There. And you should also say it again. It is wonderful to say.)

Kyle is a friend from church. He is the minister to our college students and, living where we do, surrounded by universities on every side (pardon the hyperbole), that means his ministry is large and busy. He and his wife are very busy ministering to and serving and enjoying the college-population of our church.

Meanwhile, we Stevensons are very busy in our ways doing our ministering and busy-ness things, which means that most interactions with the McManamys include conversation about how we really ought to get together. These conversations take place in the church foyer or in the parking lot, or once–between Mary McManamy, Emma and me–in the Back-to-School section of the Target.

Once Kyle said of us that we are among their favorite friends that they never spend time with.

To which we answered, Likewise.

But once–that Friday–Kyle and I had a conversation at the top of the escalator in the mall.

***

I was in a hurry. I was in and then out again, remember? I had to get a thing (or a pair of things) and then be on my way.

Kyle, on the other hand, was leisurely. He was waiting to meet someone. On that Friday morning he had that rare commodity: Time.

So he walked with me. We went to the specific store. He helped me pick out the things. He helped me find a good deal and commended me on my selection and waited for me (browsing the sunglasses?) as I paid for them. And he walked with me back to the escalator.

That Friday was a beautiful morning. Sunlight was sliding through the high mall windows; it was glinting off the (early) Christmas decorations. I was happy to see Kyle, happy to be checking items off my list, happy to have taken the edge off my Christmas shopping–a new goal (to get Most of It Done by Thanksgiving) that wise mothers all around me have long since realized and accomplished but which I have only recently awakened to, being slow like that.

I don’t remember what had comprised our conversation (other than the shopping). I don’t know what we did in the way of catching up. But there at the top of the escalator it was time to part ways, for me to be off to the Next Thing. To say farewell to I-Never-Spend-Time-With-You-Kyle.

Then he turned and said he wanted to ask me a question. I wasn’t allowed to give it much thought, he said. He wanted whatever came to mind. I should answer it quickly. I could have fourteen seconds, tops.

Okay.

“What is the essence of friendship?”

***

Fourteen seconds, my eye. The essence of friendship? How to distill such a priceless abstraction within fourteen seconds–in the mall or anywhere else?

***

I thought of my best friendships, of what makes them work, of how long they have worked, and why.

I thought that “love” was both the obvious and the non-answer–because one can love where friendship does not exist. Indeed, one must. But friendship rests on something else, and while love is there, love is not friendship’s substance.

If one does actually “hem and haw,” if hemming and hawing is a thing, then that is what I did.

Meanwhile, Kyle waited.

He waited in that way that Kyle has: fully engaged, patient. He watched me with a smile brimming on the edge of his eyes, pleased and unbothered. Unlike me–remember?–he wasn’t in a hurry that morning. He would take whatever it was I had to say; he was confident I would say something good. He thought absolutely the best of me–that much was clear, is clear, with every interaction I have with him.

***

I wanted to say: Why are you asking me this? This is not a typical question for a shopping mall. It is not, in fact, a typical question at all. Moreover, I have to get to the gym–because sometimes my life is like this.

I thought he might have a reason, but also he might not. This question is actually the sort of profundity one can expect from Kyle: a rather stunning thing of substance that he makes quietly present in the middle of the ordinaries. It is, with Kyle, even in passing, a warm hello and honest interest, and a residual sense that he very much likes you.

It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it? to be liked. 

***

I thought of something, an answer to his question. I wasn’t sure it was right– but it seemed profoundly true. It was unsettling to say so, lest I was wrong, but I only had fourteen seconds. I said,

“Deep mutual regard.”

Because where love forgives and forbears (and certainly does so in friendship), one can love where one regards little or ill or even not at all.

But a friend is one you heartily like, one you think  very well of. Whose advice or perspective is helpful, valuable, even invaluable. Whose foibles or failings are easy to overlook–or forbear–because you esteem her so highly.

Yes, one can regard another in this way and not have it reciprocated–but that is mere admiration.

In friendship, you like each other very well. Very, very well. Each–to the other–is profoundly valuable, deeply important, uniquely precious.

Deep Mutual Regard. That’s what I told Kyle was the essence of friendship, and I agreed with myself. Yes, I thought. That’s right.

***

Then Kyle explained: the college Sunday school class has been discussing one’s relationship with God. Kyle had saved the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas on the subject for last, and Aquinas held that our best relationship with God was one of friendship.

Which would mean that, if my explanation were right, we are meant to be in a relationship of deep mutual regard with God. 

Standing there at the top of the escalator in the sun-soaked shopping mall, I was stunned to consider that God would have deep personal regard for me.

***

Does He?

***

Everywhere around us, the mall cried, “Christmas!” Shining bells and balls and strings of lights, evergreen-wrapped railings and an enormous and sparkling tree–

All of it, whether we like it or not, regard it or not, know it or not,

coming to us because of the birth of a baby

who became a man who is also God

who sees every living person who has ever lived

–regardless–

with the Deepest Personal Regard.

***

The life of His Son is His invitation that we Try Him Out and see if we can’t deeply, personally (mutually) regard Him, too.

***

I had to go. The escalator beckoned. The required items were ordered, were bagged. The clock ticked. The car waited (somewhere) in the parking lot.

But I thanked Kyle for his companionship and–far better–for that moment of (Yes, it was!) worship at the top of the escalator in the sun-ridden shopping mall.

I returned to my car, and I went to the gym, and I was changed yet again–because God’s friendship does that always in the most beautifully satisfying of ways, even if it only requires fourteen seconds.

***

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8

Kyle and Mary McManamy

The post Fourteen Seconds appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

He is before all things

You can’t know–when waking at the gray cat’s paw to a dark sky–how the light will come through the trees at noon.

Other things come first: the sliced turkey laid just so on the bread, carrots and cherry tomatoes, the mandarin, the note on the napkin.

Coffee.

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

The very bad traffic at the light.

In the car-line, Emma’s friend waved at me while I stared blindly out my sunglasses. Then he pulled his hoodie over his flume of hair and kept walking.

Meanwhile, news was of bombings in Aleppo and the child mortality rate in North Carolina, of strategies toward peace in Syria and the horrors of opioid addiction. Of forest fires in the South and a new presidency.

Of four-year-old Susie in the UK who called the emergency hotline and saved her mother’s life.

In Him all things hold together.

But last night you played board games and ate brownies and enjoyed the first fireplace fire of the season, and today you sipped coffee and talked with a new friend about books and guilt and the portrayal of guilt in books

and you realize a thing you are just beginning to know, which is that guilt is like grief, that guilt is, in fact, a kind of grief. And as grief, it won’t go away. It can be denied or pretended against. It can be shoved into a corner or hidden neatly with compassion and the magnanimous gesture

but It Will Out.

He is before all things

And you say to your new friend what you know is true: that there are no easy answers. That even though you believe absolutely in an Answer, that answer isn’t easy.

If it were easy, it couldn’t possibly be the answer.

But in Him all things hold together.

It’s on the way home that you see how the yellow leaves filter the sun like lace inflamed; how the scattering of leaves pointed like pins rolls like a flume in the wake of an SUV; how air and light and color are caught and impossibly suspended together around you; how the loosened maple leaf, drawn down by its stem, inscribes circles on the air.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. 

Colossians 1: 19-20

(Amendment made with gratitude to Lynne, who understands so well.)

The post All Things Hold Together appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Note 2: Not long after I posted this, my parents bought me a new violin. They understood that a new violin was not–is not–the point of this post, but they did it anyway. The photos here are pictures of the instrument I have now. It is not an antique, but it is lovely.

On Envy

It is my pleasure, in the back of the second violin section in our church orchestra, to share a music stand with Emily. Emily is my dear friend, and it was she who encouraged me, sometime during the summer of 2004, to get my violin out again and join the orchestra. And although I play badly (Badly), I will always think of that encouragement as one of her many Great Gifts to me, because I enjoy playing the violin So Much.

My parents bought my violin for me when I started taking lessons at age ten. It was a school instrument, used, not of anything like High Quality. But it served. It served for seven years, waited seventeen, and is serving again. It is a brightly lacquered thing with an orange hue and a pinched tone. Not a rich sound, not a beautiful instrument. But I am used to it, and it Works.

Emily, on the other hand, has a beautiful violin. Hers is an antique. Hers is not shiny, and the wood is grained in rich browns and yellows. And its sound? Well.

One afternoon during rehearsal, Emily had the bright idea that we switch instruments. Just for a little while, she said. Just to try it.

I did not want to. No. I knew what would happen.

But she was grinning like she does. She thought it would be such fun. Here, she said, holding out her precious and antique violin to me. Here.

We couldn’t have continued the swap for more than a minute, maybe two. I didn’t play her violin for long. But oh, I enjoyed it. A violin like hers just feels different in the hand: softer somehow, as if wants to be played, as if it intends to conform itself to the player and help one make magnificent music.

And her violin vibrated differently. The sound wasn’t just something the violin made; the sound was something the violin embodied. It bore the sound with its whole, soft self. It was wonderful. Those few minutes were proof of something I already knew: her violin is Much Better than mine.

I wish I had a violin like that.

* * *

The house I live in is not large, but it is, in many ways, charming. It is far from perfect, but I love it. It is all I want in a house, and I am vastly contented in it and deeply grateful. When we first bought it, I was ecstatic.

One afternoon I enjoyed the visit of Kathy Russell, wife of one of our pastors. She is, by gift and hobby, an interior designer, and she was delighted to let me show her our house. I showed her the closet space, I showed her the bedrooms, I showed her the bathrooms, we discussed paint chips. And I said to her– as I’ll say to most anyone– “Isn’t God good to give this to me?”

She and her husband and their five children were living in a tiny house at the time with, she told me, no storage space. But she looked at my house and admired it and was quite simply happy for me. Her answer to my delight, to my overjoyed question of God’s goodness, was simple and direct: “Yes,” she said. “And isn’t He good not to give it to me?”

* * *

I think sometimes we get it all wrong. I think sometimes we look at what we have, and at what others have, and we look too hard at the Thing Itself. We compare our homes, our violins, our bodies, our hair, our talents, our virtues, and we are quite plainly Dissatisfied.

And that is because we are looking at the wrong thing. We are looking at the Thing We Have compared to the Thing That Belongs to Someone Else.

We are not looking, as we should be, at the Hand that holds Our Thing out to us, the Hand that gives it, in absolute kindness and perfect wisdom, and declares it to be ours.

We are not looking past the Thing to the Hand itself, nor are we looking carefully into the hand– we are not seeing the Scar.

The post On Envy appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It’s hard to find time to talk with her, what with the time difference and our busy schedules and all. But tonight I found her home and we chatted for a little while. It wasn’t long enough.

Yesterday Beth called me while I was still at work. It was after 3; the school day was over. And she was away last week, so that our conversations had been limited to two short ones. I missed her. But grades were due at 4 p.m. yesterday and I Just Couldn’t Talk.

Emily called while I was on my way home from school. Our communication of late has been limited to wall-messages on Facebook and the fleeting conversations one can have between pieces at orchestra rehearsal. But I had just retrieved my children from after-school care. I wanted– and needed– to talk with them.

And when 9 p.m. rolled around and the homework was done and the kitchen cleaned up; the children read to and tucked in bed; when Chopin’s Preludes were on the stereo and my hot tea was in my mug; when for the first time all day I had a little time to myself, I was Just Too Tired to call my friends.

Sad, isn’t it? These friends so dear to me, whom I love and miss, and I am Just Too Tired to talk.

And also I had about thirty pages of reading to do for class today. But that’s another story.

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