Monthly Archives: December 2019

Celebrating the Day

26 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Christmas, Redemption

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Blame it on Thanksgiving being late, or having too many major home repairs, or the flu knocking everyone off their feet for a week, but Christmas has come and gone way too quickly this year.

We didn’t beat last years record of six hours to unwrap our presents. We only took four. Although today we’ll finish up with Oldest Son and his girlfriend and we may come close.

Life moves too fast. The first semester of Middle Son’s college career, the holiday season, the clock ticking until Husband has a hip replacement next month.

Where can I find time and space for Christmas?

It’s not an easy thing. The world doesn’t value slow.

Yet I find I need quiet and stillness to receive the information I’m wanting, I’m needing to know exists. Because if I can’t get out of the rush that has been this Christmas season I may totally miss it.

I’m one of those odd birds that doesn’t like Christmas music, so listening to the radio has gotten tedious and irritating. The rare surprise is a handful of songs that DO stop me in my tracks and make me think about why we celebrate Jesus’ birth every year.

One in particular, and a poem that starts running through my head in the odd moment of quiet and calm.

This year it came together for me as I sat in the packed service of the church where I attend Celebrate Recovery. On Christmas Eve.

I’m a visual person. There was a powerful light and sound show depicting the incongruity of God, in his immeasurable pervasiveness, making himself so small as to zoom in to our universe, our solar system, this earth, and become a human like me.

If you can fully grasp that, try to explain the logic of it to me, because I cannot.

In the 2000+ years since that event happened, the world has written myths and folk tales of gods and superhuman heroes that we idolize. Just look at the top-grossing movies in recent years.

Heroes in stories have had humble beginnings only to at some point step into their places as the true leaders they were meant to be.

Jesus was born in a stable, laid in a feed trough, and died on a cross meant for the worst of criminals.

It’s hard to wrap my head around this. I mean, I’ve studied the Bible and I get the need for Jesus to die for the sin of the world. What I shake my head about is the means. The actual meanness of the place he was born.

The lack of a super power making clear he was Messiah, Emmanuel, King of Kings and Lord of Lords to everyone he met.

I have to ask myself, why did God allow his son to be born like this, among farm animals?

As a girl a farmer who raised sheep would use space in our big barn during lambing season. There are smells and sounds, a density to the air made up of animal body humidity and dust, muddy floors, fresh hay and buckets of formula with long nipples attached to feed the rejected lambs, layers of straw for bedding hiding the slickness of urine and manure.

This was the stable of my youth. What was that one like?

More importantly, what purpose did this serve, for Jesus to be born in this place, in this way?

How unlike a hero story the birth of Jesus was. He didn’t swoop down and single-handedly wipe out the evil forces threatening to destroy our world.

Or did he?

Because when I read the Bible I find that the goal isn’t to save the world. It’s to save you. And me. To make us impervious to the evil in this world.

Out of the stable of our lives where we nose around like sheep for a bite of something that appeals to us, choosing to ignore the filth we allow to fall around us, seeping into the ground or drying in the warmth of the day until we’re so used to our sin we forget how badly we need to be made clean.

And yet Jesus took us on. Took on our lowest, meanest places, literally at his birth. And in a more real and eternal way than I can imagine when he offers to come and live inside me, inside my heart, in this filthy, inadequate stable he calls the temple of the Holy Spirit.

So I read the poem “Let the Stable Still Astonish” by Lesley Leyland Fields, and I hope you will read it, too.

Slowly. Word by word. Sinking in deep.

“Let the stable still astonish
Straw — dirt floor, dull eyes
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough
Who would have chosen this?

Who would have said ‘Yes,’
‘Let the God of all the heavens
And earth
Be born here, in this place’?
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
of our hearts
and says ‘Yes,’
‘Let the God of Heaven and Earth
be born here –
in this place.’

Let this sink in – this truth, this injustice, undeserved mercy, pure love looking straight at MY darker, fouler rooms and stepping in before I realized how much making me clean had cost him.

Even though I know Jesus conquered death, I tend to accept it as if I somehow deserve it.

So here’s the song, the one that always breaks me to tears.

As you click I pray you, too, will slow, taking a quiet moment to listen until you see it.

See the reason.

“I Celebrate The Day” by Relient K (written by Matt Thiesen)

And with this Christmas wish is missed
The point I could convey
If only I could find the words to say to let You know how much You’ve touched my life
Because here is where You’re finding me, in the exact same place as New Years Eve
And from the lack of my persistancy
We’re less than half as close as I want to be

And the first time
That You opened Your eyes did You realize that You would be my Savior
And the first breath that left Your lips
Did You know that it would change this world forever

And so this Christmas I’ll compare the things I felt in prior years
To what this midnight made so clear
That You have come to meet me here

And the first time
That You opened Your eyes did You realize that You would be my Savior
And the first breath that left Your lips
Did You know that it would change this world forever

To look back and think that
This baby would one day save me
In the hope that what You did
That You were born so I might live
To look back and think that
This baby would one day save me

And I, I celebrate the day
That You were born to die
So I could one day pray for You to save my life

All I want for Christmas

19 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Childhood, Christmas

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We’re less than a week away from Christmas, and I feel like I haven’t had a minute to just sit and think about it.

Yes, there have been hours spent searching for a relatively few number of items online compared to most years, but that’s been about the gifts I want to give, not the reason why I love to give them.

And if you read last year’s Christmas post I’ll give you a little spoiler: our time spent opening presents won’t be as crazy long this year, because we are skint and need to pare down on the buying.

But will we still be celebrating Christmas? And what is it that we are looking for in the boxes and wrapping paper? Whether giving or receiving, there’s an internal motivation that drives us to take time away from careers and schedules and gather with family and friends.

I cannot speak for you. I can only speak for me.

Because at its heart, Christmas is a deeply personal celebration.

As a child the cold weather always came first, the short days. Visits to Santa at some shopping center, and eventually Christmas Eve when we would open one present each: handmade pajamas from one of our grandmas.

Then all the rituals of Christmas morning. Sitting on the landing of the stairs while Mom and Dad started making coffee and prepping the turkey.

We would gradually scoot down one stair at a time, but we knew we were supposed to stop before the open railing to the living room. As we got older we took turns as to who got to go all the way down and run across the floor without looking too hard and plug in the tree lights.

And then we would crowd together on one stair and see what we could make out by the light of those big, colorful bulbs.

The tree would be set up by the front windows near the fireplace. It took a day to put it up every year. When it was new the individual branches were color coded, but over the years it took longer to see the specks of paint left on the hard wire stem ends. It often became a guessing game, stacking up like-sized pieces, hoping they would fit into the holes on the tube in the center.

We’d start at the top, poking each branch into the “trunk”, adjusting the angles as we went down to avoid large gaps that let you see through to the metal frame. There were extra rings of greenery to put on between groups of branches, and then we’d load on everything we could find in the attic boxes to fill it out.

And last would be the tinsel, my personal favorite, flung willy-nilly all over the branches and ornaments, many of which were handmade as school projects. I loved my styrofoam egg carved out to hold a tiny nativity scene with a background painted in art class.

When we were teenagers we would go get a cut tree instead of the fake one. Some years Mom and Dad would head down to North Carolina and bring back a Frasier fir tied on the top of the car.

That’s the version I’ve always preferred in my own home.

Our Christmas morning growing up would continue with Dad lighting the laid wood in the fireplace. And once they had hot mugs in hand and a crackling fire going, we took our places around the room to open presents.

I know some years were lean, some were more generous in the amount of gifts we got. Funny thing is I don’t distinguish between them in my mind. I liked getting new things, but even better I liked having Dad home all day, watching him help prepare food.

Up until just the last couple years I would have my time with Dad in my head as I made his cornbread for my dressing and chopped the onions and celery like he always did at the kitchen table. All on Christmas morning.

And I liked having people over our house. We almost never had anyone over. I felt like people saw the preacher’s family as untouchable, off limits for the normal interactions I saw them having with everyone else.

So sitting around the dining room table there would be a few true friends to our family that I loved and feared and felt honored to spend this day with every year.

We’d eat at 2, and play games and try on new clothes or try out new things, and add wood to the fire, and drink hot chocolate and eat dessert or leftovers or both.

I don’t remember the t.v. ever being turned on unless we knew for sure there was a special show we wanted to watch together, and then only in the evening. Our time was spent interacting and cooperating with each other in games, and cooking and cleaning up in groups. I’d sneak off for solitary times to avoid overload by reading a book or writing for a while.

If I had to boil those growing up days down to a few words they wouldn’t focus on things. Togetherness, relaxation, feasting, companionship.

It was a magical day, when we might complain about the tasks we were asked to do, but we did it eventually because there was plenty of work to go around and the day wouldn’t be as much fun if we were waiting for chores to get done before we could play pinochle.

So as I prepare myself for our several Christmas celebrations over the next week or so, I’ll be running around trying to get my gifts bought, but I always reach a point where I look at my lists of what I’ve gotten and say that’s enough. I could always get more things, but we could also be just as happy with less.

I get to a point where I have to look inside and ask what I’m really hoping to get for Christmas. And while things are nice, I really want what I got in my childhood home of modest means and hard-working parents,

I want to gather together with people I love.

I want to not think about the constant stresses of life, and instead consciously let go of the hold they can have on me.

I want to cook and eat food that satisfies my heart and my stomach.

And I want to be with people who are on this journey of life alongside me, recharging and refreshing each other as we look ahead to the new year to come.

And I hope you can take time to celebrate in a way that leaves you better for all the hard work and planning.

Because Jesus didn’t come to make a lot of work for us once a year. He came to give us life. Abundant life.

And I’m ready to enjoy that abundance.

Dark Day Memories

12 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Death of a child, Parenting

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I keep hemming and hawing about what to say this week, because Monday was my dark day.

Except I didn’t have the time to sit with my thoughts and let memories wash over me on that day. And the rest of the week had work and appointments and few quiet moments.

So I’m using this exercise of putting thoughts into words as my time of marking the passing of my third child. The one I was just beginning to know, and now will wait until eternity to meet.

Those of us who have been through the loss of a child by miscarriage have these dark days. They aren’t always on the ones you mark.

Day the baby died. Day I miscarried. Day we buried the child’s remains. Day the baby was due. Day he or she was conceived. Every birthday.

Sometimes they’re the day I think, “I wonder if that child would have liked…” and off I go, missing the things I just might have convinced that child to do with me. Things the others have no interest in doing.

For me it has been 22 years since I lost my baby.

I’m not over it.

It’s not something you get over. It doesn’t get better, because you always come back to a baby that died, and there is no happy in there.

The day I first felt pain I had been wrestling with an old vacuum cleaner, taking it apart and putting it back together, cleaning it out and trying to force it to have some suction. It was heavy and clunky and frustrating.

I always wondered, what if I hadn’t been messing around with the vacuum?

I was leading a Bible study in the next town over, and even though I was very crampy I headed out. People were counting on me.

And in the restroom I saw the first bleeding, the first visible, physical evidence that something was wrong.

The next day was a roller coaster. We had workmen right outside the patio doors in the addition that was being put on the back of the house.

God had told us to add on this huge room, and even though we only had two kids we started building. And within a few weeks I was pregnant.

Every morning they were working I would print off a Bible verse and stick it on the glass door so they could see it. The kids and I would usually do a walk-through at some point to see what progress had been made each day.

And on that second day of labor, I found myself out on the porch area, discussing rooflines with the contractor, smiling and chatting, all while my womb was weeping in pain and sorrow.

On the third day our daughter had a Brownie meeting, and Dad took her as I was in so much pain. So my son and I were home alone when the labor ended.

So did the pain. Immediately.

And I knew right away I had lost the baby.

This labor was honestly my worst. It was longer than any of the five others I’ve had. It hurt with great intensity for most of the time. I tried not to let it show, I didn’t want to worry the kids. I have a really high pain tolerance, which was a good thing as I attempted to act normally.

But three days of pain, and no baby at the end is…

why I have a dark day.

A curious thing happens after you lose a baby. If you tell anyone. You find that you are not alone. Women I had known for many years shared that they, too, had miscarried. But they never told until they saw my open grief.

I must have the universal friendly face, because strangers are drawn to talk to me in grocery store lines and waiting rooms, and even complete strangers opened up to me about their own losses.

In this journey when I felt lonely for my child, I found I was not ever the only one this had happened to.

There’s something comforting about that – knowing at least one other person you can call and say, “Hey, can I talk about my baby for a while?”

And in the past 22 years I’ve been privileged to be that listening ear many times.

Every story is different. Every ending is the same. And every mom remembers.

With my five kids, there are countless memories. Sometimes I have to really think through a story to be sure I’ve assigned the right children their part in the drama, but I could sit and talk for hours about funny things each of my kids has done, or what they’re up to now, or tell you some of their milestones.

I also know things about my kids that I’ll never tell anyone, because the thought of special times with them, sweet words they’ve spoken, the look of love in their eyes, those are the things you keep safe in your heart. Ready to be pulled out when you need a smile or a reassurance of love.

And when there are no pictures of a face, no funny escapades, no muscle memory of how they feel in your arms, where do you harvest the memories?

I’ve never pictured what this child might look like. I’ve never dreamed him or her. But they were part me, part their dad, and sometimes I choose to think through what their unique self might be.

In the not knowing there is a freedom to imagine endless possibilities, as different as one day is from another, new choices every time I think of Isaac Fred.

But the thought that gives me the most comfort is that my child is safe in the arms of God, he sits on Jesus’ lap, and maybe they say to him, the way you smile reminds me of your mom.

Measuring Success

05 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in faceliftbook journey

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Last Thanksgiving Day I started blogging.

I wasn’t sure I’d make it this far at all. I wasn’t sure how often I wanted to post, how long I wanted my posts to be, what subjects I’d explore.

I wanted to always have a few pieces written ahead, so I could spend some time honing them before they went live.

And mostly I wanted to get into the habit of writing regularly, proving to myself that the books I feel I have in me could become a reality, that I have the stamina to work steadily at this thing that is not a chore, that I have loved since before I could read or write.

This thing I was made to do.

So I want to offer my sincere thanks to every person who has read any of my blog posts.

I’m not sure I can tell you how encouraging it is just to be read!

I started writing as soon as I could as a child. The other day I came across what my mom always said was one of my first masterpieces at about 3: a toilet lid cover on which I printed my formal name – Rebecca – with my mom’s lipstick. It never did wash out.

At about four years old I could spend hours going through school textbooks bigger kids gave me to “read” and circle every word I knew. Mostly “a”, “an”, “and”, and “the”. I recited a book to my first-grade class that my teacher thought I was reading, but I had memorized it from hearing it so much.

And by third grade I was finally published. My teacher mimeographed my story, “Sally and Her Horse”, and passed the beautiful purple pages out to the whole third grade! Thank you, Mrs. Brinker, for launching my career at the age of eight. My first book is going to be dedicated to you.

Has the blog been a success?

I feel like that’s a question some people may ask. I’m not a person who is driven by winning. I’m very competitive, but I love the doing of a thing while racing others or trying to produce the best thing I can for the excitement of the doing. I’m not focused around being the winner.

So success for me isn’t defined by how many people follow or read regularly. It’s more about, did I put forth my best effort? Did I dig deep and try to get to the heart of whatever I’m writing about? Did I say it in a way that entertained or enlightened or provoked thought in someone else?

Those aren’t things I can quantify. I can’t count the “Aha!” moments or the healing tears someone else was finally able to cry. I will probably never know if any of you have felt led to lift your face and cry out to God because something I wrote stirred a longing for more inside you.

But if I could, those would be the statistics that would bring me the most satisfaction. Because my goal is to help others not be afraid to face their own feelings by reading about some woman facing hers.

For those of you who like data, here are some of the things that can be numbered over my first year of blogging.

I’ve posted 55 times. That’s since November 22, 2018. One a week, with a double post during one week in January 2019.

So far I have 14 categories that I parcel out my thoughts into. There could have been a lot more, but I didn’t want to get too detailed.

I have 12 followers on WordPress (my blog home) and email, 83 on Facebook, and 1 on twitter.

I know, not high numbers. I sometimes get jealous when I hear of friends who launch something online and end up with a thousand followers before they know it. But I have to ask myself if large numbers are my goal, or if touching one person a week is worth it.

Speaking of that, I don’t get many comments or likes, but that’s ok with me. I don’t “like” everything I read on social media either. You’ll never find me sending along anything that requires you to type “Amen” and like, or send on to 10 of your friends.

But responses are appreciated when they happen.

My blog has been seen by 804 visitors over the past year, and they have looked at 1,220 posts. That’s an average of 22 views per post. I like that when someone comes by to read, they will browse a little and read a second post. Or more. Please feel free to do that as much as you’d like. That’s what they are there for.

My average words per post is 1,004. I don’t know if that’s a good number, but it’s about how much I need to round out a train of thought each week. No one has ever commented that they are too long or too short. And the one double issue was because I needed to tell a whole story and didn’t want to leave anyone hanging for a week. And it couldn’t be said in 1,000 words.

Most of my readers are in the United States where I live. But I have been tickled to find that 97 times people in 16 other countries have stopped by to see what’s up. As the child of very mission-minded parents, that’s something I’m proud of, that people in other countries can read my thoughts, can see what God is doing in my life.

And looking forward, I plan to keep on writing and posting once a week.

Because I didn’t run out of stories to tell. (That was a real fear at first.)

And though I am not mainly about reaching milestones of how many views and followers and likes, I am about reaching people. So I would like to ask a little favor of you who drop in from time to time and like what you read.

Please share it with others.

I’m not going to imagine all the ways you could do that. But I’ll make a couple suggestions.

If you read a blog and really like it, feel free to repost it to your friends. I make my blogs public so that they can be spread, and you have my permission to pass them on, especially if you think someone would enjoy or benefit from them.

If you’ve ever enjoyed one, take a minute to visit the site and look through the categories and maybe catch a couple more related ones that you missed. They are there to be read, anytime.

And if I quote a scripture or a song and it speaks to you, pass that on to someone else who needs it as well.

Because our stories aren’t just ours to savor and relive in our own minds. They are to share, to connect with others that we may never meet in this life.

But we weren’t made just for this life.

Thanks for being a part of faceliftbook on my site at haasmom.blog.

I wrote it just for you.