Got it together

Lizzy feeding Buck mango with chopsticks because we’re nothing if not cultured

Last week on my regular grocery run, there was a refreshingly patient older man in the unfortunately long line. He declined to go ahead of a full-carted customer who offered, waving her off and cheerfully saying he wasn’t in a hurry.

Caleb commandeered Buck’s tunnel that Lizzy constructed so he could move freely between the school room and the playroom (it requires an elaborate rubber-band-and-bent-paper-clip latch system on both ends to keep the doors closed up to the tunnel so Buck can’t escape to the general house, which is also pretty effective at keeping humans from being able to escape to the general house). The wire tunnel cuts directly across the bottom of the staircase, rendering it miraculous that no human has yet killed themself tripping over it. Lizzy was not pleased to find that Caleb had constructed a double train track through it so his trains could move freely between the school room and the playroom.

He ended up right behind me (and my heaping-full cart) when I got to the cashier. With mild amusement, he watched me unload my massive pile of groceries and commented, “This isn’t your first shopping trip.” 

He continued to watch as I repacked my cart with my now-full reusable shopping bags as the cashier handed them to me, getting out my wallet and swiping my card in between bags.

Whether he was commenting on the capacious volume my bags hold, or the efficiency with which I Tetris-ed them into the cart, or something else, he pronounced, “You’ve got it all together.”

Reader, I do not have it all together.

Could it be, though, that I’ve arrived at a ripe old age of occasionally looking like I have it all together?

I got a text from a church acquaintance a couple days ago asking if I would mind talking to her sometime about homeschooling older elementary kids. What curricula do you like? What is your philosophy? How do you handle grades?

I told her I’d be happy to talk to her, at which point she asked if another friend of hers could join the conversation to also hear what I have to say.

My knee-jerk reaction to this upcoming conversation was anxiety. I don’t know anything! Why would someone ask me?! What if I tell them the wrong thing? But even I see that response is unjustified. By virtue of having been alive longer, and having homeschooled for longer, I have experience; ie, the form of knowledge my friends can’t get from googling it. 

As the man in the store said, it’s not my first shopping trip.

Nor is it my first day of school. Or my first day on the planet, or even of being a mom or a homeschooler. I don’t have it all together. But maybe once you’ve lived long enough, you’ve done enough of “it all” that some of it inevitably gets itself together.

God-shaped hole

It’s February.

Ergo, I was feeling angsty the other night. I had to drive somewhere, so I pulled up the anthem of my dark early-twenties days.

I’m standin’ on the bridge

I’m waiting in the dark

I thought that you’d be here by now

There’s nothing but the rain

No footsteps on the ground

I’m listening, but there’s no sound

Through a confluence of choice and circumstance, I found myself at age twenty-two professionally aimless, avoiding church and my Christian friends, partying heavily, and desperately lonely.

I had greatly desired to graduate from college with an MRS degree, as it seemed to my adolescently hyperbolic brain that all my friends were doing. Four out of five of my roommates senior year came back from Christmas break with diamonds given by their boyfriends—an occurrence that made a painful and depressing impression on me, as there was no one in sight with a diamond to offer me. 

I hardly had any greater desires.

When graduation came and went (and ALL my friends went off and got married), my support system crumbled and I grew disillusioned with a God who wouldn’t give me what I wanted. 

By wintertime, when natural daylight shrinks, I was spending plenty of time in an ill-lit basement indulging in wanton revelry to fend off the bewildering tears that would inevitably pop up in quieter moments.

It was so dark.

That November a teenage Avril Lavigne released the anguished ballad that played repeatedly like a soundtrack on all the pop stations. Maybe she was lonely too, in the literal and metaphorical dark, desperately sad that the hoped-for love of her life hadn’t materialized, and having given up hope that he would.

I’m standin’ on the bridge

I’m waiting in the dark

I thought that you’d be here by now

There’s nothing but the rain

No footsteps on the ground

I’m listening, but there’s no sound

Isn’t anyone tryin’ to find me?

Won’t somebody come take me home?

How I wanted somebody to find me—to take me to a comforting kind of life, out of the life I was living that I really didn’t want. 

But I had left behind the respectable life and it was impossible to return. Now of all times I did not deserve any good things from God. I concluded that He didn’t love me, because how could He? I was an unregenerate. 

It’s a damn cold night

Tryin’ to figure out this life

Won’t you take me by the hand

Take me somewhere new?

I don’t know who you are, but I

I’m with you

I’m with you

I did not predict what would happen in February 2003, or what would come of it.

With God all things are possible.

~ Matthew 19:26

God brought Jason into my life.

At the time I was just happy that someone I liked significantly better than any of the other guys I knew was actually, unquestionably, expressing interest in me.

It was only as time went on that it slowly, gradually dawned on me… that this was the man I had been wanting to find me. 

His quality was deeper than just a marginal improvement over my binge-drinking peers. He was longing for the same kind of life that I was longing for—abundant life…life in the light.

Somehow Jason found me lovable, and when he loved me, I started to think maybe God could love me after all.

As I came to realize that God had given me the husband I wanted, at precisely the time when I least deserved it, my heart melted at the kindness of God.

God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance.

~ Romans 2:4

My life changed after that. And not just because I got married. I understood what grace meant, in a way I never did before I went prodigal.

And I loved Him for it. 

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

~ Ephesians 2:4-7

I came home that night from my angst drive, humming Avril and telling Jason how thankful I am that he’s in my life.

But like the Hebrews and their Red Sea moment, Jason coming into my life was just a picture of a much, much bigger salvation. God just used my husband, whom I could see, to teach me about His gracious hand, that I could not see.

The cry of my heart that Avril so ably captured wasn’t, at its deepest, my longing to get married.

I’m standin’ on the bridge

I’m waiting in the dark

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

~ John 1:9

Isn’t anyone tryin’ to find me?

Won’t somebody come take me home?

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

~ Luke 19:10

Why is everything so confusing?

Maybe I’m just out of my mind

For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.

~ 1 Corinthians 14:33

Avril Lavigne, “I’m With You”

Sledding party