My Mother's Table

I grew up with my mom’s Bible open at the breakfast table. She wasn’t always there. Work called early for an RN who walked the floors of a hospital. I’d be slopping milk in a bowl of cereal and see where she sat just hours before.

Her open Bible, her notes in cursive fresh in the margins, a mug with one sip of tea left at the bottom, a cooled tea bag resting on a spoon. This was a familiar sight.

If mom ever writes you a note, you know it’s going to include scripture. It’s going to include a verse that she’s praying over you, or something she read that reminded her to write. Years ago, when I was dining with the wayward and drinking my fill of what the world had to offer, my mother would write me notes and slip them into my room, the mail, in e-mails. Floral notecards with her familiar handwriting, a hint of her perfume in each opened envelope. Without fail, she’d speak scripture and it would slice me open, expose me, and make me wonder why I ever walked away at all. Even when she knew I didn’t want to hear it, she sent it. She never defaulted to the wisdom of the world. She knew what had sustained her and offered me the same bread. It was a familiar call from mountain to valley. Echoes of what I had once known.

Mom’s open Bible was so normal and seemed so easy. It was an extension of the rest of her. 

But today, I’m at my dining room table and my 10 year old is trying to explain to me the mnemonic device she learned to convert Kg into mg and gallons into cups. Meanwhile, my toddler is crying that the toast he asked for isn’t the toast he asked for, and that his pencil isn’t blue with a pink eraser as he apparently is convinced is necessary in this moment.

I have re-read the same 10 verses in 1 Corinthians 1 about 5 times now, each time with more frustration, more annoyance, more feeling like a failure to each of these things: my eager 5th grader, my attention-desperate 2 year old, my hungry and tired heart.

And then I remembered my mother’s Bible. No doubt (because I remember) she cracked it open when we all flooded her with questions and conversations. It sat open when I cried about boys. It sat open when my brother and I bombarded her with complaints on her day off. It sat open when the vacuum ran, the dishes clanked, the voices raised. My mother understood something that I’m just now learning.

Sitting at scripture isn’t something to check off my list. It’s not always a solitary feast. It’s where I dip my toes for a moment to remind me of the water that fuels my spirit. Somedays I have time to study. Somedays I have time to open a commentary, to dig deeper into the text, to know it and realize I don’t know it in 100 different ways.

But today I read “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” And I ask my 10yo while she checks her homework and fills her backpack, “What do you think that means?”

She stops. “What does folly mean?” she asks.

Oh, she’s actually listening. 

And we talk. About how the world may laugh. How friends won’t understand. How even we sometimes don’t get it. And yet, it’s the water, it’s the meal, it’s the sustenance, the Gospel that keeps us. She asks more, the Bible stays open, the toddler cries a bit more because now the milk he has is not the milk he asked for, and I am moving around like a blur. A robed, slipper-wearing worker bee who is meeting the needs of body and soul this morning. My coffee is nearly done and yet it sits, cooling, by the open book, my notes scribbled on a small notepad nearby. 

In one moment I look down and I see it. No, I see her. I see my mother and the faithful, well-worn path she laid before me. Our breakfast table wasn’t about the cereal and the tea and the toast and the coffee. It was a feast she laid before us, remnants of what she had found, morsels that whisper “Walk this way.”

So, mothers of young children, lets walk the well-worn path. Let’s open our Bibles while breakfast is served, while the bus watch is moments away, while the coffee is poured and the bananas aren’t banana-y enough, while questions about the metric system and “Can we have a sleepover” are bouncing around the table. Open the Bible, trust that even in imperfect, quick moments, the Bible is far more capable of doing the work it was created to do. To cut, to plant, to grow, to sustain. All right here. 

Help Us to Embrace Obscurity

Photo by Honest to Goodness Photography

“Help us to embrace obscurity,” my pastor once prayed. I scribbled it down in the margin of my notebook. I wrote it down on another piece of paper and put it somewhere to remind me day in and day out.

Yes Lord, help us to embrace obscurity.

Help us to embrace the ordinary ins and outs of a faithful life.

Help us to embrace the steady rhythm of living. The air in, the air out, the one-thing-at-a-time mindset in a world that tells you everything matters all the time right now.

Help us to chew our food and taste it. Help us to choose ingredients that taste like real food and recipes that feed our bodies.

Help us to embrace an empty calendar. Help us to do this by choice.

Help us to shun the cultural mindset that the movers and shakers are sleeping less, traveling everywhere, and starting something new every day. Help us to be moved into a place of trust. To not require shaking in order to anchor ourselves in you. To get enough sleep, plant some roots, and trust the ancient paths.

Help us to embrace quiet. The kind that makes even the sock-covered feet move delicately. The kind that makes the old house creak just to remind us that it’s still here.

Help us to live like our Lord, who went to solitary places, who sought out times to be alone, because the noise and the crowds and the demands wasn’t the goal.

Help us to feel the hot water and the dish soap, to be a part of the simple work that is necessary. To let a finger fall gently on a piano key and feel the way the note reverberates into your arms as though it’s just an old woman doing her duty, humming the song she’s always known.

Help us to pray in the in-between. To take our fears and remember that for all the things I fear will happen, today someone might be actually facing that thing. Remind me to carry them with the same burden of weight that I feel when I dread that it could be me. It is them. Remind me to bring that to you.

Help us to be pilgrims. To open up our hands a bit more. To leave what can be left behind, behind. To talk about home more. And no, not the home where we sleep every night. I mean to talk about the home that we’re journeying toward. The place where we’ll finally lay down our burdens. The place from which our Father runs to meet us. The long dusty road toward the party. Help us to remind each other “We’re not home yet” and to reminisce a bit about the place we know exists but have never seen.

I’m coming up on my 36th year. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this — the world doesn’t need you. It will go on without you. The reminder of age will creak inside you when you least expect it and you’ll suddenly be aware that you don’t want the world anyway. Not the one that is peddled and curated and marketed and on the clearance rack. You want the storied blankets. The golden sun. The early mornings with the people you love. You want the ease of people who know when you’re not fine even when you say “I’m fine.” You want the creaky floors of a life well-lived, day in and day out, faithfully, steadily, mostly in obscurity. Help me to embrace it, Lord.

Numbering Our Days

8 more summers.

50 gardens.

10 Christmases.

I’ve been counting lately. Each day, I feel the tick tock rhythm of a life that is heading from dust to dust. I promise you, not in some dark and dismal sort of way. Something struck me this year as I planted and worked the soil around my old house.

It’s our first year in this 130-year-old farmhouse. These old walls, these ancient trees, this plot of ground belonged to several women before me. Three women, in fact. Two generations of mothers and a daughter. Two families. Two farmers. This was our first full stretch of seasons on this old homestead and since the snow thawed in April, I’ve been daily making note of the land. Tulips under the old maple tree. Irises under the black walnut. Irises on the edge of the woods under a forgotten eastern redbud tree. Peonies and lilacs and rhubarb and lilies of the valley. Every where around me the soil is a reminder that I am not the first to love this land and likely won’t be the last. There’s not nearly enough time to do all that I want to do. And I sit back and wonder — how many chances will I have to try and grow flowers and a garden that do this piece of earth justice? 20 chances? 40 chances? 60 if I’m feisty. 

Tick tock.

I watch my daughter’s legs grow long and her brow furrow more. She has just arrived at a decade of life, and I’m realizing we only really have 8 more years with her until she bursts out of these doors into the the world that awaits. 8 more summers. 8 more years of routine. 8 more years of school concerts, art shows, conversations when she’s off the bus, the sound of her laugh and feet kicking high into the trees. 

Tick tock. 

My parents are aging. My mother speaks of death with no fear. Her silver hair wisps across her forehead and she reminisces of a life that was full of mistakes and grace, joy and sorrow, and now looks to the future without a hint of doubt. I see photos of her at my age and younger, her laugh crinkling her eyes, the same crinkles that I see now when we share tea and a good story. But she won’t be here to walk me through my entire life from end to end. My father, the one who has never failed to pull me into his arms and remind me how loved I am…he won’t always be there to remind me I’m loved or send me just the right song that he knows I’d appreciate at just the right moment. How many more summer dinners? Christmases? Teas and hugs and the presence of people who know you better than you know yourself? Not enough.

Tick tock. 

A few years ago, I hosted a panel of women at my church. One of the women who sat on the panel was a widow in her 80s. A question was presented from the audience that went something like this — “I just got married but I can’t stop worrying about losing my husband someday. How can I fight off this thought?” And the older woman with her white curls just smiled. She briefly reminisced on her 60+ year marriage. The vacations. Their children. The memories. And then she sighed. “It just won’t feel like enough,” she said with tears. “Even after all this time, all of those memories, it really just doesn’t feel like enough.” So enjoy it now, she went on to say to the young bride. Enjoy all of it, every little moment together, knowing that you can’t have your fill. Death will always feel like a thief.

Tick tock.

There’s a reason the Psalmist prayed “Teach us to number our days…” Not so we can accumulate as much as we can in that time. Not for ample time to run wild. Not to fear what we’re losing or try and hold on tighter to sand in the hourglass. But rather “…so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” This seems the most obvious fruit of a Christian heart that knows this world is temporary. By the work of the spirit, we gain wisdom. We know when to say no. We know a yes can be a gift or a theft. We know that time spent here means less time there, and sometimes we have to choose to run out of time for things that just don’t matter.

Wisdom teaches us to put down our phones and make eye contact with our children. Cup their sweaty faces and say “My time is yours.” Wisdom teaches us that an hour on Netflix is an hour not spent walking and using our muscles, working in the garden, or meeting that neighbor who lives two houses down. Wisdom teaches us that sleep is a daily acknowledgement that we can’t do it all, be it all, and continue going going going. We must stop. We must let time pass over us with the night and we must give in to letting God be the sovereign one.

And maybe the goal isn’t to carpe diem or YOLO. Maybe we’re a lot more like hourglasses than we want to admit. Each minute passing with or without our complete attention. Even then, when we try to grasp it and hold it tighter, the sand slips through our fingers and we ache over the brevity.

Even Jesus knew that at the end of our fears and worries and anxieties, we’re all listening to the clock. “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” He asked in Matthew 6. Which of us by collecting all of our things, moments, items, and tallying them all in a list of “life we’ve seized” can actually add time to our days?

Wisdom teaches us that anxiety gets us nowhere. Fear and grasping is vanity. So Lord, teach us to number our days that we might gain a heart of wisdom. That we would show love while we can. So that we’d empty our good-news-filled cups for the thirsty that surround us. That we would pour our lives out for our neighbors, our children, our spouses, our friends while we still have energy, resources, ideas, time. Only so many more dinners where everyone is at the table. A numbered amount of sunsets. Only a few more nighttime book readings, snuggles under twinkle lights with lullabies, seedlings breaking through.

We only have so much time.

Tick tock.