Archive for the The Journey Category

My children were upset when I told them we were not stopping at Captain D’s for lunch after church. My youngest son screamed and thrashed in the seat next to me. My older son mewled from the back seat like a wounded animal. But I stood firm. No fast food! But I want to be completely honest; I wanted fried fish and French fries as much as they did.

So we made a compromise(i.e. I told them I would not leave them on the side of the road). I wanted to find a restaurant with healthy options and I told them that if they were willing to try something new, I was too. So I pulled into the parking lot of the Asian Buffet in my neighborhood with high hopes. I had been wanting to try their food for several months because the pictures on the front of the building were bright and inviting. My mouth watered as we walked up. I envisioned row upon row of steamed vegetables and lean meats. Maybe they would even have sugar free desserts. Maybe, if I was good I would even allow myself 1 crag Rangoon(my favorite appetizer).

We all grabbed our plates and ran to the buffet like ants to a picnic. Much to my children’s chagrin I saw a fair amount of fresh fruit and vegetables. But since it was a buffet, there was also plenty of sweet rolls, pizza and pasta for my sweet-toothed children. So I did what any honorable mother would do, I loaded up plates with all the healthy stuff first – promising them a big dessert if they would stick to their promise to try the healthier foods. And, true to my word, I began to search for foods I don’t normally eat (that are healthy) so I could show my children that it’s fun to try new things.

I perused the food stations with care – reading each item carefully — in order to determine what I had never eaten before AND that would nourish my body. Then I sat down at the table with my children and we all stared at our plates. My older child grimaced. My younger child moaned. But I assure you, neither of them were as terrified to take that first bite of food as I was. For staring up at me from my plate were the following items: sautéed baby squid(tentacles and all!), fried frog legs, and sushi. Oh the humanity!

My older son looked at me and said, “You’re not actually going to eat that, are you?”

I swallowed and nodded. Then I stabbed at the squid with my fork, placed a squishy bite into my mouth, and began to chew. It was a lot spicier than I expected, but I thanked God it didn’t come back to life, latch onto my tongue, and chew its way back out of my face(yes – I have quite a vivid imagination). My children then watched in horror as I picked up the frog legs and began to nibble off the spindly flesh. I thought my older boy was going to cry(and I was doing my best not to). Because at my house we all really like to catch and play with frogs, and eating them just feels, well, wrong. I then tried the sushi. I have tried sushi before, most notably when I visited my friend Becky in San Diego a few years ago. She insisted I try it, but eating raw fish felt a lot like chewing and eating my own tongue. This sushi wasn’t terrible. In fact, it was almost good. Almost. But after eating the other creatures, I didn’t have the capacity to like it because I kept thinking the squid was going to climb up out of my stomach and kill us all. I think all in all, my kids definitely got the better deal out of our food adventure. I don’t really consider fried ochre or steamed pea pods to be blatantly offensive to the taste buds. And because I am a woman of my word, they both enjoyed ice cream for dessert.

So maybe you are wondering why I chose to share this story with you today. The truth is, eating healthy foods doesn’t have to be gross. We all have to start somewhere. The majority of my homemade meals are multi-colored and very tasty. Green beans. Broccoli. Sweet potatoes. Salmon. Chicken. It’s all pretty simple. Finding a restaurant that provides a healthy and tasty option, however, is often a challenge. For that reason I find it much easier to make my own meals at home. This keeps me happy AND healthy. Because when I look at the ingredients on menus I have to sigh. “Low sodium” usually means bland and more bland. “No sugar added” usually means it contains aspartame or its wicked cousins saccharin and sucralose(unless it’s Menchies and boy I love me some Menchies frozen yogurt!). “Low-fat” tends to be synonymous with more sugar added which is a total misnomer. So generally trying to eat healthy food means clogging up my body with chemicals it doesn’t know how to process.

Today if you are stuck in a food rut, I encourage you to step outside of your comfort zone and try something new. Maybe you hated lima beans as a child(like me!). Well guess what, it’s been 30+ years! Maybe you should try them again. Brussels sprouts are the great love of my adult life. When I consider all of the years I could have been enjoying them, I want to cry.

So often we get hung up on the idea that if we want to live a healthy lifestyle we can’t eat foods we enjoy, but it’s simply not true. Half the fun of being human is living and learning. Learning to love new foods has opened up a whole world of personal happiness for me. Granted, I will probably never eat frog legs again, but the look of horror on my children’s face made every single bite worth it. And that was the whole point of this exercise. I wanted to teach my children that it is fun to try new things. We don’t have to be afraid(or angry or just plain resistant) to trying foods that are healthy for our bodies. Just because it’s “healthy”, doesn’t mean it yucky.

If you take nothing else away from this blog post, please know this, shifting ones mindset from “I refuse to try that” to “I will try that” could mean the difference between never reaching your goals or finding a happier, healthier you.

I pulled back the curtains Saturday morning and saw what I had expected; wet pavement. For once, it seems, the weathermen were correct. I paced around the house for a few minutes, killing time until I confirmed the inevitable; I would not be riding my bicycle in the Tour de Cure. I called myself a coward even as I tried to muster up some courage. I looked out of the window again. My shoulders sagged. And then I crawled back into bed and pulled the covers over my head.

I was disappointed. Even angry. I thought of all the people who contributed to my ride. Would they hate me? Would they refuse to support me next year? Should I even go so far as to refund their money? And then I considered the reason I am afraid to ride on wet pavement. I remember approaching the intersection, taking the corner, and the wheels slipping out from under me. My face hit the road with a thunk. A driver called out, “Are you okay?” And I tried to move but I couldn’t. I lay there helpless, gasping for air, even as I tried to make sense out of how one moment I had so much confidence in the bike beneath me and the next moment I was spitting out pieces of teeth as strangers carried me to the side of the road.

For this reason and several others, I am terrified to ride on wet pavement. I was riding last week and got caught in a thunderstorm. I honestly thought I might have a nervous breakdown right there, a mile from my house. Regardless of how fast I pedaled, the dark and ominous clouds had overtaken me. The rain hit me like marbles, but I held onto my trusty bicycle, thanked God for disc brakes(and the sturdy construction of my Jamis hybrid) and prayed like crazy that I would make it home with my teeth intact. I did. And I consider that a tremendous blessing.

June 6th is a day that holds great significance in my life. Every year on this day I stop and reflect on a decision I made that—at the time—had everyone in my life scratching their heads. This year is the ten year anniversary of that decision. And I don’t regret it, even though things didn’t go exactly as planned. It was a defining moment in my life; the day I made the decision to follow my husband to Oklahoma, where against all odds, we would try to rebuild our broken marriage.

This is a tender subject for me and I ask for grace from the reader. For I can never put words to the anguish I endured during that time. Nothing I say will be adequate enough to express the heartache, terror and hope I experienced when I felt the Lord guiding me to a strange land with a stranger(for my husband was certainly a stranger to me at that time). I had prayed for wisdom and guidance and felt the Lord tell me through his word that I should trust Him—and Him alone—to guide and protect me. Let me be clear, I had no faith in my husband, but only in the strong and steady hand of the keeper of the stars.

I had confidence in His strength as I explained my decision to my parents, my siblings, and my church family. They simply could not grasp how a woman could forgive the unforgivable and put her life in the hands of someone who had broken faith with her. In many ways that was when my walk with the Lord changed forever. It was the moment I stopped asking people for advice and leaned only on my faith in God to guide me through the dark and ugly jungle of betrayal. I never felt like I was walking out onto a jagged precipice. In truth, I felt as if I were crossing a rickety bridge held fast and firm by the hand of love. If you want to learn how that ended up, give me a call sometime. I won’t recant the entire story here. But needless to say, we remain married today, and only by the grace of the one who told me on June 6th, 2006, that he would never leave me or forsake me.

I attended a wedding yesterday. I watched two committed Christians enter into a covenant relationship in the most beautiful way possible. I thought to myself that they are so much better than I was at their age. So much wiser. I thought about the first day of their journey and what paths the Lord would lead them on. I wondered how they would respond to the caverns of pain and the oceans of bliss that marriage introduces human beings to. I prayed for them to be true to each other, and faithful to their creator and his purpose for their lives. And then I prayed that God would bless them.

Some might think blessing looks like a good job, a comfy home and a fluffy poodle. So often we pray for the blessing but do not have the capacity to understand what receiving it actually looks like. In my experience, sometimes the blessing looks like a sob. It looks like a broken blade of grass dangling in the breeze. It looks like a cyclist splayed out in the street with the wind knocked out of her. It looks like a woman throwing her wedding band over a bridge on the way home from a failed attempt to save her marriage. I have learned that the blessing is not financial, but rather, spiritual. The blessing comes when God’s favor rests on the heaving shoulders of one crying out in the night for comfort. The blessing comes when the scale reading 5 pounds higher. The blessing is a diagnosis of juvenile diabetes. In short, blessing is the small whisper in the whirlwind that says I have not lost everything because I still have the one and only treasure that really matters.

I drove home from work on Friday afternoon having once again experienced tremendous professional disappointment. And I felt it rise within me—the sob. Tears swelled in my eyes as I considered the tick marks that have been crossed off over the years in my career. Each time I try and fail I consider the best way to respond. My husband suggested ice cream. I told him I’d already been there and done that and it didn’t salve the ache. So I lifted my eyes to the hills and thanked God for my pain. I told him that regardless of my disappointment, I still trusted him. And then I cried the rest of the way home. I didn’t feel it immediately… the pitter-patter on my shoulders. After all, the pain was just too intense. But eventually the blessing began to sink in as I continued to choose to love and trust Christ. Because once you have been saturated by the love of the Prince of Peace, you come to realize that no matter how big the pain, the heartache, the sin, He is bigger still. And the blessing He gives is more beautiful than you could ever imagine. Do you know why? It is because the blessing is Himself.

Despite what popular culture tries to tell us by way of fancy memes, everything will not be okay. We can’t always pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and conquer the world(much less ourselves). We can’t always be awesome. Sometimes we can’t even connect the spoon to our mouth by way of simple nourishment. Weakness. Pain. Sorrow. Anger. We live in the real world where–more often than not–happily ever after is the successful flush of a toilet. If you’re anything like me, you look up and see the storm clouds forming and sigh. Because like it or not, you know what’s coming.

I loved my old house. It was this fabulous old brick bungalow that was built in 1927. It had a wonderful covered front porch and the obligatory swing. I loved to sit on that swing during a gentle rain and watch the rain drops pitter-patter on my butterfly bush. Rain makes me happy; excess water, however, does not.

My old house sat under a large Maple tree which was, quite literally, a pain in my back. That weathered old tree liked nothing more than to drop tree litter in my gutters. And because my life is busy, I didn’t get to clean them out as much as I would have liked to. Under normal circumstances, overflowing gutters are an inconvenience, but at this particular house, they were a disaster. The previous owner told me when I moved in, “The basement only floods when the gutters are full of leaves.” Quite frequently, instead of sitting on my front porch enjoying the rain, I was cleaning the gutters. It became kind of a joke between my husband and I because no matter how many times he told me NOT to clean the gutters in the rain(because he didn’t want me to get struck by lightning), I nearly always did it. Because I’m stubborn and because I didn’t want my bunnies(in the basement) to drown.

Gutters exist for rain. In a perfect world, they are cleaned regularly and function properly by guiding the water away from the structure of the house. But let’s be candid, life is busy and cleaning the gutters often takes a back seat to more critical activities(like making dinner, chasing errant squirrels out of the attic, and trying to determine where “that smell” is coming from). This is how I live my life; reactively. I feel like I live in a constant state of “cleaning the gutters in the rain.” For instance, this week I’ve been dealing with physical pain. And by pain I mean teeth chattering, bone grinding, struggling to sleep, pain. It’s a pain I can’t escape no matter how many ibuprofen I take. It makes me angry, and sad, and frustrated. But mostly, it makes me feel very, very fragile.

We live in a broken world where people are in a constant state of trying to relieve pain. Prince is our most recent example. He literally died from trying to relieve chronic pain. And let me be clear—we all have pain. Emotional pain. Relational pain. Physical pain. Truth be told, no one wants to live under the cloud of a constant ache. So here we all are, standing on the roof, with lightning and thunder clamoring overhead while we try to unclog our gutters so the basement doesn’t flood. Our tears mingle with the rain but nobody seems to notice(or care) as we stick our hands into the black muck and sigh. If they do, they are usually too busy with their own gutters to stop and offer a kind word.

This week I really needed a hug. Well, at the very least I needed someone to look into my eyes and see my sorrow. I spent the early part of the week reading my bible and praying. I pleaded with God to help me. And I kept bailing gutter sludge as the rain poured down. Yesterday, every step I took was an agony. I went out at lunch in search of pain meds, and when I walked back into the office a co-worker asked me if something was wrong. She said, “You seem out of sorts. Is everything okay?” After I told her that I was in pain she said, “Why don’t you go home and rest?” I smiled and lied. I said, “I will be okay.” Because I didn’t have time for the truth. Because my truth looks a lot like me curled up in a ball in bed for a month. That’s the kind of rest I need. But I have children to raise, and a paycheck to bring home and that kind of rest just isn’t always possible.

But here’s the beauty of my life, pain isn’t an excuse to stay miserable. I often find that when in times of excruciating pain, I experience God’s grace at its most full. In order to take my mind off the pain and other uncomfortable life circumstances, I have been memorizing a Psalm that reminds me of God’s goodness. That is why when earlier this week when another co-worker was complaining about the cold and cloudy weather, I said, “Yes, but the sun is shining above the clouds, and even though we can’t see it, it is just as lovely as it ever was.” And it’s true. Pain clouds our perceptions, just like clouds mask the sun. But that doesn’t mean the sun has stopped shining.

So here’s the thing I have learned about cleaning gutters in the rain, I actually like it. The reason for this is simple; gutter sludge stinks. When you dip your hands into it, it soaks into your skin and then your hands reek for days afterward. When it rains, however, the rainwater washes the gutter sludge away. I only need to pull out the gunk from the downspouts and the water rushes through the gutters and washes them clean.

I think maybe pain is God’s method of showing me the gunk in my gutters. So often I’m too tired or lazy or whatever to climb onto the roof and unplug the downspouts. When that is the case, the water pours down the roof, over the gutters, and into my basement where it causes a big stinking mess. But when I use God’s word to cleanse my heart—even when pain is at its most wretched—I experience the rain as a mechanism of cleansing. Make no mistake—it’s going to rain. And honestly, there is no magic umbrella that will keep us from being affected by it. However, if we are wise, we turn to the maker of the rain and let him use it refine and purify us.

Still, it behooves me to say that waiting for the rain to clean the gutters is not a good approach to life. That is why I really do try to read God’s word daily. I began to memorize Psalm 19 when the sun was shining as a means to praise him. And when it began to rain, Psalm 19 was an excellent reminder that even though the clouds had come, his promises were still true. Pain, like rain, will come. But as I always say, it’s how we respond to adversity that really matters.