After trying unsuccessfully and repeatedly to insert the button from Ann Voskamp’s “Walk with Him Wednesday” meme button, I am resorting to this:  Please travel over to Ann’s lovely website to read other inspiring and reflective stories of resurrection living during the month of May:  http://www.aholyexperience.com/


This post was originally written on the Monday morning after Easter Sunday.  It is not so much a description of a resurrection practice as it is a grateful reflection on resurrection glory in our family story this year.  After about six years of critical health issues, two terrifying wildfires, and the deaths of 3 close members within our immediate family we are living into the reality of the empty tomb with this sweet story.  I have shared it elsewhere as you will see below – but for me, it’s the shining, shimmering ray of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.  So it bears repeating this Eastertide season.

Well, to be honest, she’s not exactly a girl anymore.  And she’s not the only wonderful female who blesses my life by calling me “Mom.”  But…today, tonight…as I sit and savor what the Lord has given, she is still (and always) – my girl.


She came as a bit of a surprise to us – young, idealistic couple that we were, living thousands of miles from home.  But come she did, and this girl (and her two siblings) changed our lives in ways that were profound and wonderful.  Our first-born was always a study in interesting contrasts: full of energy, but loving to sleep; cute as a button and surprisingly petite for such tall parents; winsome and thoughtful, yet sometimes stubborn and hard to read; an artistic soul who was also gifted at mathematics and logic.  A huge, compassionate heart with a deep-rooted desire to be a wife and mom – all of this we witnessed with wonder as she grew to young womanhood under our roof.


She met the man she would marry just before her 16th birthday, at our dining room table.  He was the son of a long-time friend and we had invited their family over to celebrate his 2-year remission from childhood cancer.  Their eyes met over the dessert and love was born. 


Six weeks after that first meeting, her young man entered into a serious 2nd go-round with cancer and began about six months of heavy-duty chemo, followed by major surgery and radiation.  All of this served to push their emotional connection into fast forward, and they were married just after her freshman year of college.


They took out loans and both finished school – he with a master’s in IT and she with a bachelor’s in anthropology and an art minor.  They moved 400 miles away and began to produce beautiful grandsons for us to enjoy and marvel at – something they were never sure they’d be able to do, given his medical history.  Three boys and about 18 years later, her sweet man began to suffer from a whole series of difficult after-effects from all that life-saving but terribly hard-on-the-body treatment.


And she walked right with him through all of it – a trial by fire for them both.  When the end came, it was swift and sudden.  A widow at 40, with boys aged 17, 14 and 10.  Their bedroom door stayed firmly closed for a full year, collecting odds and ends as she and her kids moved through their grief and sorrow.


On the one-year anniversary of his death, she went from the small den where she had set up a single bed and a big desk for herself into the bedroom they had shared.  She looked around and thought, “It’s time.  Time to remodel this space and make it lovely once again.”


So she found a gifted contractor – on the recommendation and introduction of her associate pastor.  He was gentle, gifted, artistic and they had a really good time working together on the details of house and yard.  It was wonderful to see her creative gifts being set loose again and we all marveled at the transformation in her spirit as she made plans and chose colors and began to move into this lovely space.


And last Easter, she invited her builder to come to dinner – “Because he has no where else to go, Mom.  Don’t make a big deal out of this.” And so we met him, this man, the builder.  And we liked him immediately.  Her boys liked him, too.  And we all wondered…is God doing a new thing here?  


About two months later, she called and said,  “OK, Mom.  You can make a big deal now. I think I’m in love – and it feels like a gift straight from God to me and the boys.”

 It’s been a strange week. 

       1st Holy Week in many years where I have not been up to my eyeballs in worship planning and leading.
       1st Holy Week we have not been worshipping with our usual community of faith.
       1st Holy Week in which I’ve seen and experienced some devastating changes in my mom’s ability to interact with her world and with me as she spends these days in our home.


These are the ‘holes’ in the fabric of my life just now as I sit in the quiet, reflecting on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and the coming of Resurrection dawn.

But here are some of the shimmering new threads that are beginning to criss-cross their way into, around and through those holes in the year of our Lord, 2011:


       A noon-day Good Friday service that was far different than any I have previously attended, planned or led – one that was moving, intriguing, lovely.


       A Holy Saturday filled with COOKING of all things.  Really, I thought I had given up cooking for Lent about 15 years ago and just extended that ‘sacrifice’ through most of the rest of the year(s).


       An Easter Sunday in a different church than usual, followed by traveling in a car which will be loaded with way too much food for our crowd of two dozen, gathering this year at my eldest daughter’s home one hour south of here.

       And each day laced with some time here at this keyboard – reading blogs, editing pictures, trying to figure out how to make my own blog work more effectively when I have ZERO knowledge of HTML, ‘buttons,’ ‘subscription widgets,’ ‘sidebars,’ and no clue whatsoever how to post a video of any kind.  


What I am observing about myself through these days are these things:
   – I am feeling well and strong for the first time in many, many months;
   – I am finding deep, almost profound, enjoyment in writing and thinking about writing;
   – I am willing to relax into the rhythms of kitchen and laundry without feeling overly stressed about it all;
   – I find myself in a spirit of almost constant prayer – not prayer filled with lots of fine-sounding words, but rather prayer consisting of these simple, important ones:  thank you, thank you, thank you.  Or your grace through me, Lord; your grace through me.  Or beauty all around, Lord, beauty all around.

All in all, it’s a good place to be.  I haven’t done much reading during these first months away from work – a wonderful memoir written by a friend, a couple of books on prayer.  Not a lot of mental energy these early days.  But I think I’m okay with that – it will do for now.  I wait with growing expectancy for what will come.  And as we head out for worship in the morning, I look forward to joining God’s people in yet another new-to-us congregation as we joyfully shout, “Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!”

Once again, it’s Friday.  And that means it’s time to try and link up with Lisa-Jo over at the Gypsy Mama.  Five minutes of unedited writing, this time on the topic of hard love.  For me the topic today is about 180 degrees from where Lisa-Jo went with it…

She waits in the guest room, right next door to me as I type these words.  I can hear her shuffling things around, waiting for me to emerge from my Good Friday afternoon nap.  We’ve been to a remarkable service today at the local Episcopal church where we heard a male sextet sing an Atakhist – a song of deep thanksgiving written by an Eastern Orthodox monk while living out a difficult life in a Russian gulag in the 1930’s.  It was gorgeous – such a contrast to the events we were there to commemorate – and yet such a powerful reminder of the glorious gifts of God in this world, this place, this home of ours.


And I think she got most of it.  It’s very hard to tell.


She is nearing 90.  16 months ago, her youngest and most troubled child died in his sleep.  Six years ago, her partner of 64 years died after three years of a lingering, wasting illness in which he became unable to say to his wife, “You’re wearing yourself out caring for me – let’s find me a place to be where you can rest at night and I can be tended.”  In the last 5 years, she has slowly, agonizingly lost almost all of her vision to macular degeneration and she’s also lost an increasing amount of her ability to hear conversations.

She has lost a lot of her independence.  And most hard for me, most difficult for her, she has lost the ability to respond to life as she once did: with spunk, fiestiness, joyful laughter and an amazingly creative ability to rise to the challenge.


It is sometimes very hard to love her as I once did.  And it is very hard for her to love anyone as she once did.  So we rely on a long history of shared affection, commitment and memories to get us through the rough times.


In some ways she reminds me of my 5 year old grandchildren – volatile emotionally, insecure at times, frightened by abrupt changes in life or schedule, confused by what’s happening around them.  So I am learning that the best thing to do to show her my love is what I do to them – wrap my arms around her, kiss her soundly on the cheek and say something like.  “All better now.  I love you.  You’re the best (kid) (mom) I know.  I’m here to help.  What can I do?”


She’ll be heading home again on Easter afternoon, to that little apartment at the retirement community about 2 and a half hours south of me.  And I will be both sad and relieved.   That’s what’s hard about love right now.

STOP

This reflection is written for the community writing project at “The Higher Calling.”  Check out the others at http://denadyer.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/04/community-writing-project-crossing-cultures.html

Oh my goodness, we were young.


Married all of 8 months, recently graduated from college, heading across the country, across the Atlantic, halfway up the continent of Africa.


We went as an alternative to military service during the Vietnamese war – to work for peace in a place that was strange to us, paying our own way except for about $150/month in ‘allowance.’


But we had a great house to live in, located on the campus of a secondary school in the southern province of Zambia.  Far larger than the tiny apartment we left behind in West Los Angeles, it was set amidst the rolling hills and curiously flat-topped trees of the high savannah that would be our home for the next two years.  The same home we brought our first-born back to after her birth in a bush hospital five months before our term was up.


And we had good work to do – distributing educational supplies to the entire province the first year, teaching eager students, some of whom were older than I was, during the second year.


I remember standing in the train station in our town – the kind of station where an actual steam engine pulls in about 3 times a day – and looking out over a crowded sea of African faces.  Beautiful faces, interesting faces.  But faces that looked distinctly different from our own – a sensation that was at one and the same time slightly disquieting and curiously satisfying.  That was our first experience of what it felt like to be members of a minority culture – and it changed our lives forever.


We came in with high ideals, youthful enthusiasm and a commitment to make a contribution of some kind.  What we didn’t fully understand going in was that we weren’t just crossing one set of cultural expectations and experiences – we were crossing two, each with its own share of complications and adjustments.  We were surrounded by an African culture – and we were surrounded by a missionary culture.


And I would have to say that the first one was far easier to deal with than the second.  Although sometimes we were puzzled and challenged by the strange realities of teaching students who were literally making the jump from one century (at least) to another – the weirdnesses of the missionary life around us were much tougher to figure out.


Over those two years, we came to deeply appreciate the slower pace, more practiced art of paying attention to the now, and gentle sense of extended family that characterized the mindset and lifestyle of our African friends.  It was the legalistic and sometimes judgmental attitude of many of our missionary neighbors that rattled us.  Too often, we thought, the promise of an education – the deepest desire for most African children – was held out in exchange for certain behaviors and ‘right’ answers to questions about faith and commitment.


And there was too often a whiff of entitlement that seemed to go along with being a missionary in those days.  My somewhat lofty, middle-class American sensibilities were offended by the idea of hired labor, especially live-in help.  But I was brought up short by the comment of a young man seeking employment as a gardener when he angrily asked me why I did not want him to be able to help his family.


How do you navigate the tricky waters of offering people honorable work to do without either exploiting them or upsetting the economic dynamics of a neighborhood by paying more than the ‘going rate?’  How do you maintain a Jesus-like respect for each person’s dignity and worth if your primary relationships are more like master/servant than neighbor/friend/colleague?


Nor was I at all easy about the fact that almost every one of our missionary neighbors sent their children to an all-white international school over 500 miles away, beginning at age 7.  And the single exception, a couple who kept their only son at home and sent him to the primary school in our town, were somehow seen as less-than fully devoted in the minds of their co-workers.


What do such choices say about the priorities of those in ‘full-time Christian service?’  Work over family?  Others’ children of more value than one’s own?  Discipleship and personal mentorship for students but not your own kids?


Wrestling with questions like these during our two years in Zambia proved to be profoundly formational  for us – as a couple, as a growing family, as followers of Jesus.  We would not trade the experience for anything – and we always encourage young couples, including our own kids, to have some kind of cross-cultural experience – mission trips, travel, sponsoring a third world child – even if they don’t ever live cross-culturally as we did.  Learning that Jesus is Lord in any and every place on this planet – and that the Jesus journey quite often doesn’t look like what we’re used to as western disciples – this is a priceless lesson and a gift beyond measure.

The lovely and terribly talented (and also very tired new-mommy to #3, the beauteous Zoe) Lisa-Jo has given us a corker this week. 5 minutes of unedited, non-stop writing on this topic: “On distance…”

He turned five in September and his favorite toys ever are a collection of basters given him by his other grandmother and me.


Yes, that’s right. I said basters – as in those brushes you use to coat chickens while they roast.

Joining up with Laura’s blog for the first time this week…