Playground Lies

I think I’ve been fat all my life. 

I haven’t, of course, and when I look back at photos of myself throughout the years, I realize I really only had one pudgy year in my childhood—third grade. Third grade, I think, must be the hardest grade.  I know that because a little third grader told me so.  It would take some work for me to remember what kind of trauma is typical on a Terrible Third Grader Kind Of Day, but let’s say you lost your lunch money, fell in a mud puddle in front of the whole class, threw up in the lunchroom and forgot to turn in your homework. All on the same day.  

I think that’s the kind of day Charity had when she dissolved into tears in my living room one afternoon and proclaimed,

“Ten is the hardest age ever!” 

On that particular day, I was twenty-seven, the mother of two small children, living in the foreign land of Florida which, everyone knows, is inhabited by child-eating alligators and giant mosquitos, and seldom saw my husband who walked into burning buildings for a living.

I had a little bit of trouble relating to a muddy ten-year-old.

But, now that I look back on being fat all my life, I realize Charity was right.  It’s hard to be ten, it’s hard to be a third grader, and it’s hard to think you’re fat whether you are or not.

When our kids were small, we had a list of things we taught them never to say to anyone, especially if they were trying to insult somebody. We didn’t say “shut up” in our house. We never told anyone they were stupid. And, worst of all, we never called anyone “fat” even if they were. Especially if they were. I knew from personal experience that being called “fat” is an identity  wound you may never overcome, and I didn’t want my kids scarring each other with the label or reminding another already scarred person of how they’d, no doubt, already been labeled.

Every one of those misdemeanors was a crime in our home and would get you sent to your room without dessert—so the punishment would fit the crime.

For a couple of years when he was about five or six, our son had an imaginary friend. And then he had two of them. We’d hear him talking in his room and find out later how silly we were to think he was talking to himself, when he was in the company of Roy and Ernie. Who could only be seen by our son.

Sometimes Lee and Roy and Ernie got into arguments. That’s a trip.  Watching your five-year-old arguing with his three-year-old sister is one thing. Watching him argue with two invisible kids can send you running to the Yellow Pages.

One afternoon we were all in the car—my husband, myself, our son, our daughter, and Roy and Ernie—only I didn’t know Roy and Ernie had come along for the ride until I heard our son, Lee’s, voice begin to rise from the backseat.

“No, I didn’t!”

“Yes, you did!”

“No, I didn’t!!”

"Yes, you DID!!”

His voice rose louder with every punctuated sentence, his head turning side to side as he took turns arguing individually with Roy and then Ernie and then Roy again. Until, finally, one of the two silent partners lobbed a pre-emptive strike voiced by our ventriloquist son:

“You’re fat!” we heard him say, and then he crossed his arms, put on his really mad face, and stopped talking.

“What’s going on?” I asked, with a mixture of amusement and anxiety.

“Ernie called me fat,” he said angrily.

Now, I don’t know if you have some inside scoop as to the ins and outs of a conversation like that, but since Ernie and Roy were kicked out of the car that day and never heard from again, I think it’s safe to say that problem took care of itself. I’m just telling you about it because calling someone “fat” in our house was paramount to an assault with a deadly weapon. It was a really bad idea and our kids knew it.

Unfortunately, no one told the people I grew up around how deadly it is for a kid to be thought fat in the third grade. 

 

“You’re so fat, I bet you wear a bra!” boys yelled at me on the playground.  They were right—that year my mom bought me a training bra.  Training bra.  What does that even mean? Do they still have those? I knew I was too young to wear one, but since t-shirts apparently weren’t doing the trick (do little girls still wear those, either?), the nice lady in the department store sold my mom a training bra for her little ten-year-old daughter.

When the class picture came out that year, I had, unfortunately, been seated on the front row instead of hiding safely on the back one.

“You took up two chairs!” the boys laughed again. And even though I didn’t really take up two chairs, in my mind I agreed with them that I sure didn’t look skinny where I sat in that photo.  What a shame that little kids can spend their childhoods comparing themselves to one another and grow up believing they’re not good enough.

So my mom took me to the doctor who listened to our fears of how fat I was and put my ten-year-old self on a diet of carrot sticks (which I hate to this day) and a half sandwich for lunch. No more cookies or hostess cupcakes to make the other kids jealous at school. It was all serious business for me to lose weight.

My grandmother, of course, had the perfect solution for helping me get thin.  It’s the same answer most people come up with today when they figure out I have some weight to “release.”  (I just heard that description of weight loss efforts.  I like the sound of it much better than Biggest Loser.)

“Just tell her no more seconds,” she said matter-of-factly.  

 I considered that plan for a minute, and then asked,

“Can I have thirds then?”

At least she had a good sense of humor, even though she had no idea how hard it was to be ten years old in the 1960’s. She grew up in the 1910’s when people washed their laundry in a galvanized bucket, scrubbed their own floors with horse hair brushes or something, baked their own bread in a wood burning oven, and chopped wood for the fire that kept them warm all winter.  If I’d been as lucky as her and lived at a time in history like that, I’d have been a skinny little kid, too.

My dad said I was fat because I watched too much television. I did watch as much television as I could, but that consisted mostly of I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and Let’s Make A Deal, which came on once a week. Maybe I was fat in the third grade because we lived in a retirement trailer park where there were four other kids to play with. 

We made the most of what we had, though, and I got pretty good at kickball and avoiding the cars that interrupted our games. I rode my bike sometimes and skated up and down the rows of trailers. Sometimes we played at the playground with the two swings and a slide, and in the summer there was a swimming pool to swim in when it wasn’t sixty degrees outside where we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I guess that means we swam once a week. If we were lucky.

So I went on the doctor’s diet at the end of the third grade. Then I went to summer school for fun during the month of June because I got to take an art class and a science class and a class on dinosaurs. But the fourth class was required of everyone—P.E.  I hated P.E., which I thought stood for Punishing Eula because she’s fat.  In P.E. I got to do fun things like jumping jacks and running around the track—over and over and over again. I still hate P.E., too.

And when I started the fourth grade, I weighed ten pounds less than when I left the third grade.  I also was several inches taller. 

 And that’s my point.   

What no one seemed to understand when I was a kid is that children—even babies—get growth spurts that begin with eating more than  normal, putting on a little weight and then growing taller and going back to their normal appetite.

If grownups don’t interfere with this natural circle of life, kids might grow up with a fairly healthy self-image. If all the adults in a ten-year-olds life agree with a child’s peer group of third grade authorities, then a growing kid may spend the rest of her life in a self-imposed prison of unworthiness.

Maybe I was born at an unfortunate time. It was the decade of Twiggy.  Ever heard of her? She made a skinny, boy-body famous by wearing it when she was a girl. Suddenly curves were out and boobs were a no-no.  With her bobbed, slick hair and androgynous looks, she most resembled, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Justin Beaver today. Only she was a girl and he isn’t.

 

And once a girl like me hit puberty, she couldn’t compete with Twiggy’s supermodel look. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t deflate the curves predestined for me by heredity and sexual orientation. And since I blossomed earlier than my friends who were doing a much better imitation of Twiggy than I was, I stood out like a sore thumb.A swollen, sore thumb. 

I was different than everyone, it seemed. I couldn’t compete with my mother’s cheerleader, Southern belle story of having a “twenty-one inch waist” when she met and married my dad at sixteen. I couldn’t compare with the Miss America pageant contestants we watched every fall on TV. I sewed for and dressed countless Barbie dolls who flaunted their lopsided figures and mocked my poor self-esteem.

 

And now, forty-five years after a doctor first put me on a diet as a ten-year-old, I’ve been on and read so many diet plans I think I qualify as the world’s most defeated professional dieter.

But do you know what’s really sad about that? When I look back over photos of myself between infancy and age forty-five, the only year of my life where I really was pudgy was that one year as a kid when I first believed the boys on the playground. 

I was slender on my wedding day when I felt I wasn’t. I was slender through two pregnancies and bounced back to a healthy weight, though I chased an elusive desire to lose “ten more pounds.”  I ate like a pig that whole, busy time my kids were growing up and never gained an ounce, but I hid behind everyone in family photos for fear someone would point out that I was “fat.” There’s hardly a single photo of me in all our family albums where it looks like I even have legs. I’m always standing behind someone skinnier than me.

How does a girl get over a lifetime of believing a lie?

By replacing it with the truth. One painful step at a time.

There were wounds that set me up to believe that third-grader lie. Many of them have been healed and many others are currently being healed. We all have them. We’ve all been hit by lying arrows that want us to believe we’re inferior, we don’t measure up, and we’re a disappointment.

But those are lies. Playground lies. I don’t know what lies you heard during recess, but make no mistake, they’re deadly.

The problem isn’t what we eat. The problem is what we believe. And it may be time to kick Roy and Ernie out of the car for calling me fat.

Out of the mouths of babes.

With thanks to Brian Talbot for the use of the wonderful picture seen above. Brian's work, including the site for this photo, can be viewed at  https://www.flickr.com/photos/b-tal/529005135/in/photolist-NKhNc-wkNAjd-zUBp1c-cdgvBS-pgcQF9-oYMnVH-8vGUiZ-fknqzT-cZn14C-fMJEQU-8pxv1t-9VdSmL-o7oLp3-qTHCiZ-avdu4D-7Vuayz-nv6Cg2-96tiyM-kVkx24-qVri8V-dwh3Nw-amTKxT-sU3na4-nMhykc-3L2apG-2Cc6nD-5LKkfs-q9UusR-avdj8K-pG8xRh-nxNjZM-avfWwd-9PpC6f-99gWfo-p6dt6x-pNHFBz-oRRxpD-q8sYDJ-d3Agcb-reSKne-e4uH89-9muSvg-5LF6tT-5LF6qK-djwF1N-afxHME-wWCYnz-oWEaJh-9nox94-q7FNHe

Puzzling Pieces

It keeps me awake at night.

This story—the mystery I’ve stumbled across. Like Alice, I’ve tumbled into the twisting, gravitational pull of someone else’s rabbit hole and I have no idea where or when I’ll land.

Thrilling, captivating, and surprising, I’ve been stunned and shocked by what I’ve discovered. But there are still too many gaps to reveal whether he was a hero, a zero, or just another human being with feet of clay.

Like me.

I blame it on that photograph.

It’s just a simple framed picture of my great-grandparents on their wedding day, taken more than one hundred years ago.  Which sounds like forever until I stop to realize that, if life had not been so hazardous at the time, they would have both lived long enough for me to have met them. After all, my grandchildren still have three living great-grandparents and will always have their very own, personal memories of them.

All I have is a faded photograph. And the internet.

The wedding portrait hung in Grandma’s bedroom. For a few years following her death, it hung in my dining room. Eventually, I gave it to my aunt in exchange for a smaller version, and now it adorns her wall. Ironically, it’s traveled almost as many miles as the couple who gaze out stoically from within its frame.

Grandma told me she barely knew them. Her parents, the couple in the photo, both died of tuberculosis by the time she was ten years old.

“I was born in South Carolina,” she said. “My mother was disowned by her family when she married my Irish Catholic father, because he was divorced. I had no siblings and, when mama and daddy died, I was raised in Arizona by my foster parents,” she said. “Now eat your potatoes.”

Grandma rarely minced words, so I thought that’s all there was to the story. She was born. She was orphaned. She was adopted. She grew up. Life was hard, but she got over it. End of story. End of questions.

But one afternoon, years after I passed the portrait on, replacing it with a tabletop version, I ran across a handwritten family tree that Grandma gave me forty-five years ago. Then I sat down next to my husband, Rob, plugged some of the names into Ancestry.com, and out of Pandora’s internet box tumbled hundreds of puzzle pieces—completely out of order—containing a  fascinating story of Grandma’s parents.

It’s incomplete, though.

It reminds me of bagged yard sale puzzles I’ve bought a few times—lots of pieces, no idea what the end result should resemble. If not for a couple of facts in the family tree Grandma gave me, we’d have never discovered anything about her family. She didn’t say much about it when she gave the booklet to me, but I think she knew that, someday, I’d go looking for another picture of her parents and I’d need a little help.

So far, I’ve spent about four months coaxing my computer to spit out their records. And while the internet plays a mean game of cat and mouse, I’ve earned its respect by being tenacious. All I knew of my great-grandfather before Ancestry.com came along was his name and birthdate. And that he was from County Cork, Ireland.

But he wasn’t from County Cork.

Nor did Grandma’s own grandparents disown their daughter for marrying him.

I assumed he was an only child, just like Grandma, since all I knew was his name and birthdate. But imagine my surprise and delight the evening the names of his eight siblings surfaced on the internet and revealed that he was from Galway County, Ireland.

But here’s the thing—Grandma wasn’t an only child, either.

Her father was married once before marrying Grandma’s mother and fathered five children, including two who died as infants. Also, Grandma’s parents lost a baby boy the year before she was born. In all, her father welcomed seven children into the world. So while she grew up as an only child, and though she knew of them but never met them, Grandma actually had three half-brothers. Somewhere.

Guess who now knows where they grew up?

Oh, internet. You are a remarkable, magical thing.

You are also my tormentor. You supply the facts but make me analyze their hidden meanings. You prove existence but not intent. You name names but hide hopes and dreams. You expose heartache but ignore conclusions.

How can I assemble a jigsaw puzzle when all I have to go on is speculation?

He was always a shadow of a man to me, just one photograph away from being invisible. Now I have over a hundred documents proving his existence but no explanation of his choices.

Except for one. The one where he adopted out the only child he ever had a relationship with—because he was dying of tuberculosis.

In all the years he spent in America’s military and all the years he traveled the world, the most important act of bravery he ever exhibited was when he found a family for his daughter, my grandmother, in the months before he passed away. He gave up all his rights to her while he was still living, but found a family to love and protect her at the end of his own life.

In the end, he died alone and uncelebrated, two thousand miles from his wife’s grave in South Carolina, five thousand miles from his childhood home in Ireland, his name mentioned in dozens of newspaper articles but missing from his own headstone.  Today his body rests under a eucalyptus tree in an unmarked grave in Phoenix, Arizona.

I don’t know why I know more about Grandma’s father than she did. I don’t know why her story was so condensed as to blur the lines of reality. Maybe it’s because I was a kid and kids don’t need to know the pain their grandparents experienced when they were kids. I bet the internet won’t explain any of that to me, either.

For now, I have that photograph. And the internet. And my own speculation. And gratitude to the man whose protection of my grandmother led to my own birth and the powerful bond I once shared with her. He was not a zero. He was a hero.

That’s a pretty good piece of the puzzle.

Unbuttoned

I am a terrible Facebooker.  Or bookee . . . bookist?

As I said.

Today I discovered how to get to a hidden place for messages sent via Facebook, and began answering all twenty-six of them.  Twenty-six.

“I read your post today,” a new blog reader of mine wrote. “Love, love, love!” she said.

“Oh, thanks,” I replied. “Hope you keep reading!”

She at least kept writing. I heard back from her a few minutes later when she pointed out how long ago she sent the compliment—two years ago.

Hoo boy.

Am I the last person on earth to learn about . . . the OTHER box? I hadn’t heard of the OTHER message box Facebook created until last week when I tried to send a private message to a friend that I can’t friend.

“Your message will go to their OTHER box,” Facebook interjected, “because you're not their friend. Unless you pay one dollar,”  they added.

What? Is Facebook charging tolls now? I’m not paying a dollar when I can email for free. Especially when Facebook won’t let me be her friend.

My friend emailed and asked me to be her friend, which seems kind of backwards to me since we’ve been friends for a while now. But once I found her on Facebook and tried to friend her, there was no friend button to push on her page. So I emailed her back to ask her where her button is.

“My daughter came over this afternoon and we can’t find your button, either,” she wrote.

I didn’t know I don’t have a button. Now I’m missing both my button and my OTHER box.

Why do I even have an OTHER box? What was wrong with my FIRST box?  And where did I lose my button?

I think I figured it out this afternoon, though. They must have put my button in the OTHER box.

That’s just no way to treat friends.

The Tooth Fairy Is My Hero

Jules isn’t a baby anymore.

She reads a little, swims a lot, and in a couple of weeks is going into kindergarten. But most of important of all, she has loose teeth. When you’re four going on five, that’s almost as big a deal as getting married.

Last night was exciting for her—her first baby tooth departed this life, leaving her a tiny bit toothless.

But it didn’t go without a fight. She and Allie and Will came to play at our house while their mama taught a few piano lessons at home yesterday, and Katy texted us before we picked them up.

“There’s a good chance Juliet will lose her first tooth today. You gotta take a picture for me if she’s at your place!”

Jules was pre-occupied all afternoon, focused on wiggling the little escapee with her finger and not so much on playing with the dolls. She definitely had a lot on her mind. But when it was time to take the kiddos home, there were no pictures.

The tooth was still hanging on.

We picked up a pizza on the way, and sat around the table with Katy and the kids, talking and eating. Suddenly, Jules was crying—that little tooth was trying to make a run for it. Turns out, hand tossed crusts are as good at twisting loose teeth as caramel apples.

But the tooth was still there—just a little sideways now. And instead of excitement, Jules had fear in her eyes.

“I don’t want you to pull it, Mama,” she said, as tears ran down her face.

“My teeth didn’t hurt at all when they fell out,” big sister, Allie, tried to encourage her.

“It’s just like pulling a carrot out of your garden,” I told her. “It doesn’t hurt the carrot and it doesn’t hurt the ground.” Guess how well that sage advice went over. Grandmas can’t remember how it feels to lose teeth. Well, some of them can.

But Katy had the magic answer. 

“Do you want to talk to Daddy?” she asked.

Jules wiped away a tear and nodded. So they got him on the phone, switched it over to face time so he could see the renegade tooth all the way from his fire station, and Jules started smiling again.

“You don’t have to pull it out,” he told her. “Just keep wiggling it with your tongue.”

“Yeah,” she said cheerfully, “I think it’ll come out tomorrow on Dependence Day!”

Firefighter daddies save the day every time. Jules went back to eating, we went back to talking, Daddy went back to working, and a few minutes later Katy asked Juliet to open her mouth so she could check on the dangling tooth.

“Jules!” she said in surprise. “Your tooth is gone!”

We all looked at each other and then at the gap in her mouth. Sure enough, the tooth was gone. Really gone. It wasn’t in her mouth or on her plate or stuck in her pizza. We expected more tears then. Cuz how do you explain to the Tooth Fairy that you still want her money but it might be a lot harder for her to retrieve the tooth she came for?

But Jules was jubilant. And trusting. She knew the Tooth Fairy would do the right thing. She and Allie went in to the craft table in the other room and, pencils in hand, explained everything—Jules with a hand drawn sketch of the whole event, and Allie with a written explanation on behalf of her little sister.

They put the documentation under Jules’ pillow later that night, and the Tooth Fairy—who wasn’t attending her first rodeo—made good with the money.
 

I think of all of childhood’s heroes, the Tooth Fairy is my favorite—even more than Santa Claus.

She doesn’t care if you’ve been good or bad, she doesn’t watch you while you sleep, and she doesn’t make you wait all year before she brings good things to you. Most important of all, though—if you accidently swallow the evidence, she still keeps her end of the bargain.

And whether you’re four going on five, or forty-nine going on fifty, we all need that kind of grace in our lives.

Thanks, Tooth Fairy. You rocked it again.

What's The Problem?

I drove into the drive through. I ordered my iced decaf at the triple-caffeine-beverage-store. I waited patiently as the car in front of me waited patiently, too, and finally got his drinks. Then I waited even longer to get mine. I drove out the other side of the drive through and took a big gulp . . . of a fully caffeinated drink.

Until that happened, I had no signs of hormonal dysfunction. Which is the reason I drink decaf.

So I drove around to the beginning of the drive through line again because it’s in the triple digits here and that’s why God invented drive throughs—no one walks outside in the daylight in Phoenix in July.  No.One.  Now there were three cars in front of me and I’d already waited four times too long in this line thirty seconds ago.

I looked in the rear view mirror and saw no one.

I turned down both side mirrors and began easing out of the circular drive through, praying with perseverance and asking with full-on faith that no one would plow into the back of my truck while I backed out. That’s when I saw her—the woman in the red truck who impatiently waited for me to finish my circus act. Still, prayer works and we did not meet by accident.

I parked, leaving my truck at the mercy of the sun where the air conditioned temps disappear through the cloth and glass interior like water through a sieve. I went inside where no one waited in line, two people sat at separate tables in the gigantic room, and three baristas stood behind the counter. In short, it was human error with no extenuating circumstances. So I politely told one of employees I had ordered a decaf but didn’t get it.

“Not a problem,” she answered, taking my cup and starting over.

Have I not blogged about this before?

Yes, there IS a problem! 

It’s a first world problem, admittedly, but it’s still a problem!  It was a problem for me. I didn’t want to park my car and walk out into the furnace we call ‘summer in Arizona,’ or I would have done it the first time around. I didn’t want to order this drink twice. I didn’t want to back out of the drive through because there was no “through” happening in the drive.

Not only that, I’m not the one who caused the problem. So why did the person who made the mistake tell me she wouldn’t hold it against me if she had to re-do the order she messed up?

I’ll tell you why. Because no one says “I’m sorry” or “You’re welcome” anymore. Polite responses, appropriate to the situation, have been dumped. Now the universal, one-size-fits-nothing response, “not a problem,” is all we’ve got left.

And. It’s. A. Problem.

How do I explain this? It’s a toughie, but I’ll give it a shot.

The very answer implies that a problem does exist but, through the graciousness of the offended/guilty party they’re willing to overlook your stupidity just this once. Or, in a situation where “not a problem” substitutes for the more appropriate “you’re welcome”, you can just take it at face value that you are not welcome and, again, it was a problem.

We’re not telling the truth, folks. “Not a problem” insinuates that there was a problem or we wouldn’t even use the word “problem.”

See the problem?

Sigh. I don’t know how to undo what’s been done to manners with this pathetic phrase. I could write a letter to my senators, but in light of foreign affairs, they probably won’t think it’s a problem. I could put it on a t-shirt, warning people I will stand for nothing less than “you’re welcome” or “I’m sorry”, but then I’d feel stupid and everyone would agree. And that’s a problem.

So, I’m throwing it up here, again, on my blog where I’ll look like a whiner who needs to focus on positive thinking a little more and stop making mountains out of molehills. AND be grateful that I have enough extra cash to order overpriced drinks in the drive through from the air conditioned comfort of my giant land barge.

I’m sorry. Thank you for listening.

I know. It’s not a problem.

 

 

 

 

 

With thanks to my husband for letting me post this photo which I unashamedly used to get your attention so you'd read this blog. And because I couldn't figure out how to use flickr.com to borrow other people's photos. I'm sorry. You know the rest. Still, it does make you wonder if he has a problem.  :)

That's The Difference

“YaYa,” my seven-year-old granddaughter told me, “you’re just a tiny, little bit, not too much, but kind of a little . . . old.” 

It’s true. I already knew it, though. Allie’s little sister, Juliet, had recently let the cat out of the bag.  “Pretty soon you’re gonna need a cane, YaYa, because you’re kind of old.”

And you know what they say—two out of three professionals can’t be wrong. The third one is only two and hasn’t figured out the obvious about his YaYa yet. But the mirror doesn’t lie. I am kind of old.

Fifty-six. Next week I’ll be fifty-seven. It feels a lot younger than it sounds on this end of my life, except when my joints hurt or I get brain fade or when I find myself on the wrong side of a generation gap. I’m so old, I’ve lived through about twenty-five years of disappointment and experience that my younger, adult self couldn’t have imagined.

When I was in my thirties, I had a lot of answers. After hitting rock bottom emotionally, I’d just been set free from the religious legalism I grew up with. I began to learn the truth about Jesus and God and the Spirit: God is for me.

But I didn't know everything. I didn't know there's more to life than easy answers.

This year my best friend, my beloved, the man I’ve clung to for forty years, had his second stroke and third dangerous blood clot. This year we’ve struggled with the surprising and sometimes painful adjustment of living in a small space in full-time retirement. This year there has been stress. There has been failure. There has been a lot of pain we can share with nearly no one else. Few understand any of what we’ve been through together in the last year alone.

So at 2:30 this morning, anxiety rolled in on me and robbed me of a precious hour of sleep. Which wasn’t nice, because old people like me really need sleep. Even worse, Anxiety brought its sidekick, Guilt, along to condemn me while I lay there in the dark. Every reaction, every fear, every harsh sermon I’d ever heard ran through my mind like a horror flick until my heart cried out for Truth.

And the truth I had learned while I lay crushed and broken in my thirties was still the truth this morning—Jesus isn’t expecting anything from me, and He loves me as I am in the ever-now.  Ever since I first learned that, I have sought to know the One who will be there for me in the frightening times when I have no one else.

And then I heard Jesus whisper to me, “That’s the difference.” 

See, you can live with a harsh, angry God when you are young like I used to be—youthful and strong, loved by your family, surrounded by your children, beginning your career with your whole life ahead of you.

But when the nest is empty, when your health fails, when your spouse is ill and you sit in hospitals alone, waiting endlessly for medical tests and results, fearing for the future, listen to me—an angry God doesn’t cut it.

At that point, you’d better hope you are strong enough not to need a God like that because that God knows better than you do how weak and imperfect you are on your own. There can be no comfort from that distant God.

But the God of the Bible condescended—He came down to our level. He identified with us. He carried our sorrows. He bore away all our sins. He proclaimed, “It is finished!” He forgave when no one asked for it. He included even the thief hanging beside Him who never expected that much. Jesus went to the failure, Peter, and lifted him up.

This God is not one of my imagination or indulgence. Jesus is not harsh to His lambs. He doesn’t demand they find their way back to Him and walk on their own two feet. He goes after them, His lambs, and He carries them.

In all the days of old, He felt what they did, suffered with them, and carried them. The more candles I see on my birthday cake, the more I must know how to hear God speak clearly to me of His love and promises. I must know He is for me. I must know confidently that He has my back—He is my rear guard. That He sees and understands my wounded, fearful, desperate heart when no one else can or does.

I must know He is the Lover of my soul that the Song of Solomon describes. If I don’t, I will not make it. I can no more cozy up to a rigid God than I could to an offended rattlesnake.

It scares me to realize how close I came to losing my beloved or, at least, to losing his cognitive companionship. I weep to think how close I came to losing his comforting strength and leadership. We have both come close. I have faced cancer twice and survived with my body mostly intact. Now I deal daily with disruptive hormonal surges that make me hard to live with sometimes. I mourn the loss of my youth. The years are both a gift and a curse, it seems, though by far they are a gift.

It’s taken me nearly a thousand words to try to capture the meaning of what Jesus said to me in the dark this morning:  “That’s what makes the difference.” I need the intimacy and acceptance and unconditional love of God because as life gets more fearful, this Love is my constant.

God is for me.

That’s not cheap grace. It is extravagant Love.






Many thanks to DVIDSHUB for the use of this beautiful photograph on today's blog. The photo can be viewed on the artist's home page at https://www.flickr.com/photos/dvids/13938506188/in/photolist-neGuhd-jUDqd-7MRry1-5DFA77-fgGQy-fgGQz-4G1hVB-8m4ziq-4Mbiwi-oD1h4b-73NbmV-c5M6v-9pwnhG-54qaR7-48Aidp-6w8rqS-4ySPp-73Nezc-b8sSUX-7NonnM-7iD7Xm-b8sTkg-48Ee93-6NBGnK-fxS9Sa-5LkBpb-eQQiy-7izd6F-7zMty-8AJPok-6oMLu7-7jaapo-2auEY-5uQCsu-7gHLEc-qhL4cZ-o2JN7f-5kveWz-7eH9ho-5kzxHf-4x6a9q-bVNDPB-8SxPYu-9TJu72-4Tb8H4-mJA43C-8WEW3M-h3Qah4-nZPnmQ-dZ31kb/