Comfort upon sorrow

Being on the children’s ministry team, especially during recruiting season, is an effective way to find out a lot of otherwise-classified information. 

This struck me anew at our last team meeting when we were discussing different people we could ask to volunteer, and one team member said No, she can’t do it because…shhhhhh…..she’s pregnant!!  

Besides secret-but-happy news, I also become reluctantly privy to such things as who’s leaving the church, whose marriage is on the rocks, who has chronic illness, who can’t stand to work with whom. 

In other words, sometimes I’m burdened with additional secret sorrows. 

This past weekend our family attended the memorial service of a dear woman hardly older than I am who is finally at rest after a twenty-year battle with cancer. And at church a friend of mine confessed that she couldn’t make herself go to the memorial because she just couldn’t handle any more death—after one after  another after another of her family members have passed away recently.

Sometimes I’m burdened with additional public sorrows.

I think of another family enveloped in difficulty whose sorrows I don’t even know the specifics of. And another friend rushed to the hospital just last night with unexpected, debilitating, serious health failure, leaving a passel of kids at home and a wife torn between sick husband and dependent children.

How to bear up in the storms of this age? How to survive sorrow upon sorrow? Sometimes it seems like demons are swarming up from hell itself to maim, blind, and destroy those I love.

O Church of Christ in sorrow now,

Where evil lies in wait,

When trials and persecutions come

This light will never fade.

For though the hordes of hell may rage,

Their pow’r will not endure;

Our times are in the Father’s hand,

Our anchor is secure.

Matt Boswell & Stuart Townend, “O Church of Christ Invincible”

This no-matter-what security in Christ is what I’ve been working with the elementary students on for months. I’ve taught them to memorize Question and Answer 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which they finally recited last week in front of the whole congregation. 

Me—shaking with nerves—leading the kids, after reminding myself that I can get up in front of everyone because I am not my own.

Q: What is your only comfort in life and death?

A: That I am not my own, but belong

—body and soul, in life and in death—

to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood,

and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

He also watches over me in such a way

that not a hair can fall from my head

without the will of my Father in heaven;

in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to Him,

Christ, by His Holy Spirit,

assures me of eternal life

and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready

from now on to live for Him.

The memorial service we attended was almost just incidentally about the dearly departed one. It was really much more about the Lord she loved until the end—and now loves face to face! 

How do you bear up under raging cancer and steady loss of ability year after year? How do you face life without your mom when you’re only just emerging into adulthood? How do you cope with the loss of a most beloved spouse?

The memorial service gave a resounding answer to these questions and reminded me again of my reason for hope in life and in death.

Here and now and age to age

My grateful song will be the same

Thank you, thank you, I’ve been saved!

I’m tethered to the cross.

Danny O’Callaghan, “Tethered to the Cross”

Reunion

I recovered in time to play some badminton for FFN, and then to travel to my brother’s house for family week.

 

the welcome committee and adder of joy, aka Ruby

Stories were told, lawn games were played. Kevin and I beat our two older siblings at cornhole via a glorious, once-in-a-lifetime swish by yours truly on the last play, prompting us to break out in our shared alma mater’s victory song.

Kevin and Angie and the boys hosted Caleb at their house; the rest of us stayed in a hotel 3/4 of a mile away and breakfasted together every morning.

couple o’ good looking guys; they must be related to me

Maddie came along with us, despite Jed and Ada both staying home to work, which added greatly to my happiness (Maddie coming, not Jed and Ada not coming). I think she enjoyed the aunt and cousin time, having only met some of them once before, at her own wedding.

Guess how many trains we viewed inside this building?

So. So. Many. Trains.

Kelley steadfastly refused to tour anything train-related until the only other option was hiking, at which point she enthusiastically climbed aboard the train tour wagon.

After the Railroad Museum, we visited the very delightful and possibly-named-by-a-toddler Choo Choo Barn.

I may not care endlessly about trains (spoiler: I do not.), but I can get into tiny adorable motorized models of towns, parades, circuses, and farms.

It was actually quite amazing. 5/5 would go again.

I was reminded of Ruby’s exuberance when a friend told me about her own dog getting the zoomies and her three-year-old asking what the dog was so excited about. She told him, “He’s just happy to be alive,” to which the boy wondered, “Was he dead?”

back home, watching You’ve Got Mail around the firepit

What I talk about when I talk about aging

 

I’m not getting old.

It’s just that a lot of days have passed since the illustrious day of my birth.

Checking out of Walmart last week with my grocery order including plenty of fruits and vegetables and a 25-ounce can of the very cheapest beer in the cooler (Busch Light) to make a roast beef marinade, I was unable to make even a negligible human connection with the cashier, who had clearly worked long enough in exclusively fluorescent lighting conditions for the spark to entirely disappear from behind her eyes. When she got to the beer, she paused, and my fingers started hopefully creeping toward my driver’s license in my open wallet. She looked up, stared me dead in the eye, and silently scanned the beer without breaking eye contact. 

Lizzy returned from camp last week with a bug that knocked her out completely for one day and kept her on the couch for several more. 

I have now embraced that bug. 

Or I should say the bug has embraced me. I’m not exactly welcoming it. 

One thing mild illness is good for is working through the stack of books on my nightstand double-quick. I just finished What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which was okay, but I couldn’t help feeling annoyed by the I-run-ten-miles-every-day-and-I’ve-never-been-injured-or-sick-a-day-in-my-life motif. Somehow my running memoir would be more like 

I run thirty minutes a day, and by “run,” I mean when I answered my doctor’s question about my pace, he said, “Ok, so jogging.” I sweat a lot, and pant like a juicy piglet with a wolf in pursuit. I specifically tried hard to shave a few minutes off my time and succeeded in adding a few minutes instead. And then I got a cold and haven’t gotten out of bed since.

The author talks a fair amount about aging, and the struggle to accept his decreased limitations. But the man is fifty-six, as of publication, and still completing one marathon and one triathlon every year. But not as fast as he used to! 

So is it inevitable that a normal person like yours truly would struggle to find it impossible to move as fast or recover as quickly as I did thirty years ago?

I don’t know if my memory is rose-tinted or I’m just so old that not as many viruses had evolved yet when I was a teenager, but I do not remember staying home from school for a week every time I had a cold. 

And yet, here I am, flopping on my bed and wondering if this is how it all ends: with clogged ears and a chest cough, wondering when was the last time I went outside.

I’d like there to be a scientific study documenting the immune-destroying effects of any spoken question starting with the word “Mom.” As in, Mom, can I play Minecraft? Mom, want to ooh and aah and hear all about the latest thing I did? Mom, who’s taking me to volleyball tomorrow? Mom, can I buy this off of Ebay? And most soul-sucking of all, Mom, what’s for dinner? 

I feel my T-cells in retreat every time a question reaches my ears. And I can’t even tell you how my lymph nodes shrivel into raisins if I glimpse the mess in the kitchen.

So maybe I just remember a world where someone brought me homemade chicken noodle soup and medicine and didn’t ask me hard questions, and thus I was able to go back to school before the illness even transferred to long-term memory. 

I wonder who that would have been? Mom, do you know where the chicken noodle soup came from? Can you call the school and tell them I’m sick? Will you ask them if I can retake my math test? Can I still play in the game on Friday? Oh, and Mom, what’s for dinner?

Dreaming

I notice every year that school planning is enormously more blissful than the year-long school doing. On paper, lessons fit neatly into time slots and move along in regular sequence. I’m in full control and move on to the next thing as soon as I’m satisfied with the last. And everything gets neatly checked off without challenge or opposition.

Just like real school.

School planning is long done and I’m deep into let my brain melt away mode, but I think I’m experiencing a similar detached-from-reality effect when I think about my discretionary time this fall. 

I’ll have so much free time! School will only take an hour a day! I could get a part-time job! I can finally clean All The Things and reclaim my long-lost sewing room! Maybe I’ll even learn to sew! I’ll have a flower bed! Maybe I’ll take up weightlifting! I can do Anything!!

So I’ll simultaneously reclaim twenty years worth of letting the housework go and learn several new hobbies and get an outside job and have hours of beatific leisure. At least that’s what will happen if all my disparate ambitions come to fruition. 

Regretfully, registering Lizzy for volleyball today and seeing the practice schedule injected a micro-dose of cold reality into my daydreaming. I may not actually accomplish much of the pleasure or business I dream of, unless driving to volleyball every day counts as a part-time job.

But I have several weeks left of envisioning an upcoming life of bliss wherein I also magically get to do All The Things.

Tuesday Ten

Ten Things I Asked Google This Week

1. Where was the bridge on the River Kwai?

Inspired by a friend’s daughter who visited this bridge in Thailand, I looked it up. I always thought it was in Vietnam, although I’m not sure why I thought that. My historical context is a little shaky since I mostly know of it from We Didn’t Start the Fire (the same source for my [extremely limited] knowledge of Dacron, Brigitte Bardot, thalidomide…and an embarrassingly large number of other lyrical references).

2. How do you make bread crumbs?

I brought back several loaves of stale-ish sandwich bread from the beach and needed to replenish my freezer supply.

Perfect way to spend the day before the Fourth of July, when young men with internships have the day off, and it’s 40 billion degrees. 

3. How can you see a chart of your running times on Apple?

I’m working toward a sub-30 5k and I use the workout app on my watch, which tells me my time each time I finish a workout, but it took forever to figure out how to view my times from past days. With help from Gemini, I created a shortcut on my phone that takes me to a list of my running times.

4. Was it Jim Justice who showed his dog’s hiney during a speech?

Yes it was.

5. What are common side effects of SSRIs? 

Asking for a friend who’s been on Zoloft for thirteen years and is wondering, now that her husband’s high-stress job is gone, if life would get better, worse, or stay the same if she lowered her dose.

6. When is the World Cup final?

I’ve surprised myself with how much interest I’ve shown in the World Cup (ie, more than zero). I think it helps that I understand who is playing whom. (The rest of the year when Jason is watching soccer: Me: Who’s playing? Jason: England. Me: Who else? Jason: England. Then why…are they…playing…?)

7. What is The Last House Guest about?

After being blown away by All the Missing Girls, I added every single Megan Miranda book to my TBR list. I just finished both The Girl From Widow Hills and Such a Quiet Place, and then noticed that The Last House Guest was missing from my TBR. I added it before bits of the plot started coming back to me and I finally remembered that I have read it—and that it was a letdown after All the Missing Girls, which cooled me on reading the others for a while. But I’m on board again, having finished (and enjoyed) The Last to Vanish last night (very apropos in thunderstormy weather!) and looking forward to starting The Only Survivors, still sitting on my nightstand.

Fourth of July, waiting for it to get dark enough for fireworks

8. How much does heat affect running time?

Before the thunderstormy weather there was the surface-of-the-sun-except-more-humid weather. Having finally figured out how to view and compare my running times since June 1, I was dismayed to realize that I’ve gained two minutes, when I’m working hard to get faster. 

You can pretty much find any answer you want to find if you look long enough, so I stopped as soon as the internet gave me a formula that, when calculated, told me that an equivalent time in the current temperatures would’ve had me gaining five minutes since the relatively cool early June. 

9. What does 77º, 81% humidity feel like?

For the aforementioned calculations.

10. How does the pacer function in the Apple workout app work?

Pretty neat, assuming it works as stated—you can tell it what you want your distance and time to be and it’ll give you a live graphic during your run showing whether you need to speed up or slow down to hit your target. They also added a custom running workout option where you can set up interval times you want to do and it’ll ping you when it’s time to sprint or recover or whatever.

Now if only it had a function that said It’s so hot you’re amazing for even being here and your two minutes of gained time in fact proves how incredible you are!

Fun with birds and Maggie

Although I’ve been spending the majority of my time this summer reading a book or ten, (morning runs notwithstanding) I have done a few minor adventures.

Last week, for example, I accompanied Lizzy on a bird club field trip for the first time. Wow, those people are seriously good at birds.

Here, we have a bluebird: 

Here we have a bluebird eating a giant gross grub:

Here we have a bird that is blue sitting on a tree, but I’m not sure if it’s a bluebird or an indigo bunting or the other bird-that-is-blue that they were talking about:

Various other birds:

Goldfinch sitting on the tree:

Flowers, because they’re pretty:

Sheep (I nailed that identification):

Some more birds that they were excited about:

Sunset.

Bluebirds.

A swallow, I think:

Not sure if this was the bird they were all really excited about and came out to see…but probably not:

The next day we hosted four-year-old Maggie, who took one look at Lizzy and imprinted.

They played critters.

They played in the sand pit.

They pet the bunny.

That was all before lunch. We had a picnic

and then they went to the playground and Lizzy pushed her on the swings.

We chased each other around the skate park, where the floor was lava, or the bumps were lava, or possibly Maggie had magical dust that made both of them, or neither of them, lava. Although I can attest from the brief moment I kicked off my flip-flops that the concrete may, in fact, have been actual lava.

Then we went to the pool while Lizzy took a break at home, where fortunately Maggie made some new best friends who were enamored with our rainbow unicorn floatie and played very nicely with her for an hour.

After we got home and changed, I set her up on the couch with a tray, Cheerios, and a stack of colored paper.

“I like my office” - Maggie

Just before her mom picked her up, I escalated the art to glue and glitter, in which I overestimated the fine motor skill of a tired four-year-old with an open jar of glitter. So now our whole house has a fine sheen of magical purple glitter dust that just may cause or prevent the floor to become lava.

the kids and Charlie making mocktails for FFN