The life of a kid

Since we've arrived in Frankfort, the overwhelming pressure of the every day has lifted. The small things are easier. We're not walking along the edge of a precipice trying not to fall. There's less yelling. There are, however, bigger things to be concerned about. My mother-in-law Holly had open-heart surgery less than a week after we arrived. All went well, and we thought we were all on the road to recovery, at least a three month process. A couple days later she had to go back in for pneumonia. When she got out 2 days later we thought the relaxing times had finally arrived. The next day she got a phone call: the lump she had found in her breast a few weeks earlier was not benign after all. The question was how long do you have to wait after open heart surgery to have another surgery? Sadly, the cancer had aggressive tendencies, so the surgery needed to be done as soon as possible. A week ago yesterday she had it removed. She came home on Wed. and we celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, certain that we had much to be thankful for and looking forward to things being somewhat normal (perhaps even getting fully moved in to our new home).

My brother-in-law Kiel turned 21 on Saturday and had a big party. We relaxed some on Sunday. Monday came and we were finally going to get on a schedule, something our poor children desperately needed. I left in the morning and studied all day and came home to a much cleaner house. Robin had been busy. The kids seemed happy. Yesterday morning I took them to school and they were happy to be there. I went to the library to study. I shortly received an email: Robin's grandma had died. I returned home to be with Robin. We're now leaving tomorrow to drive to NW Iowa. Robin's sister Rachel, who also had surgery 2 weeks ago, and her 4 yr old son are flying in from Little Rock today. Kiel is driving in from Grand Rapids tonight. We're all loading up in two vans tomorrow and driving to Sheldon, Iowa - about ten hours. We'll probably drive back on Sunday.

My heart is heavy today. So many people around me need care - some that I can give, some that I cannot. It's not like I've lived here my whole life. I have a visitor's relationship with my in-laws, yet this is no visitor's burden. It's all rather surreal. Most of the time all I can do is simply be, just keep doing what I have to do - mostly taking care of the kids. Yet somehow, that simple being feels divinely ordained, as though God brought me here, placed me in the midsts of this so that I could simply be.

However, the more I think about it, I'm not so sure my presence here is as ordained as is my childrens'. Their ever-forward-moving liveliness is helping drag the rest of us through all this - ever presently reminding us that Life does not stop. And there's something very good in the forward motion. Something that avoids stagnation, avoids depression, and doesn't let death get the last word.

I hope for all of us that when we look back on this time we will not see a triumph secured by running away from death, but rather a triumph found by means of holding adoringly on to life - at least partially in this case Risa and Karis.

Losing my self

Somewhere between throwing my college graduation hat in the air and entering the library where I currently sit I lost my self. It's like the time I got pulled over by a screaming policeman who asked for my id and I reached into my wallet to get it and it wasn't there. My identity had disappeared and the last time I could remember having it for sure was over a week before the graceless policeman started yelling. But I'd been a million places in that week, mostly in a different state than where I was. Retracing my steps would be impossible.

How did I lose my self? Was I too focussed on other stuff - grad school, marriage, kids - to focus on my inner self? Perhaps I should have been more disciplined in the spiritual art of centering I learned from Richard Foster and yoga while living in Yosemite. Or perhaps I should have invested more into cultivating those aspects of my self that most deeply fulfilled me - prayer, writing, peppermint sticks. Part of my Christian heritage encourages this - focussing only on the relationship between my self and God, or getting the plank out of my own eye before helping another. Culture also encourages this; requiring self-help programs or at least enough self-medication to conform us to acceptable social norms.

Or perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps as I turned my attention toward things in my own life - grad school, marriage, kids - I lost the magic of fulfilling my self through service to others. Maybe the experience of ethics and theology and culture is necessarily primary and their study can only be secondary if one is to remain grounded in reality. Perhaps serving my own family and the navel-searching of academia is too self-interested or overly laden with duty to satisfy my deeper being, my purpose in life, my calling to go out.

I don't know where I lost my identity. I don't even know what state I was in. But I suspect that if I tried to retrace my steps, I'd spend too much time in the wrong places, searching in the dark with a flashlight low on batteries. Besides, the policeman is here now, demanding an answer to the question of who I am, threatening to throw me in jail until the laws that govern this life can figure out what to do with me. And who knows what identity I'd come out with on the other side.