Dear Tito and Lili (a summer 2014 letter)

Dear Tito, Dear Lili,

You are, as I write this, both asleep in your beds. I love naptime. It gives me a chance to pause and take a deep breath, to recover a little bit, and to gather my strength for the hours ahead. Don't get me wrong, they will undoubtedly be delightful hours (especially when we get over the post-nap grumpies), but they will probably stretch out longer than I want; and they will involve tears in one way or another, probably a few fights, some disappointments, some delights, and dinner, which is usually a bit of all of the above, and always a lot of work.

You know what I was thinking about this morning as we went about our day, not doing anything particularly special at all? I was thinking that all of it was special. I was thinking that it is completely impossible to capture the moment-by-moment delights that are our daily reality in a way that could possibly communicate to somebody outside of this time and this place, how life with my two small children was lived moment-to-moment, many of which were filled with a wonder so ordinary it is impossible to record.

When you are older, you will see pictures of yourselves laughing and playing with bubbles. These pictures will make it seem like bubbles were an event, maybe a once-or-twice thing that delighted you. In reality, it is an event, but it's one that happens every few days and yet still never fails to delight. The happy moments in the bathtub that I occasionally catch on camera? Those are a microcosm for every time you take a bath. Every dinner you make each other giggle with new antics while your dad and I sit back and watch. Every bike ride is exciting, every walk is an adventure. You didn't just empty out the cabinet once and laugh hilariously while you popped in and out. We didn't just read the same sweet book once. Lili didn't just shout "Me, ICE" once when ice cream was mentioned.

Our lives are a series of moments; every moment is unique and special, but the uniqueness is lost when everything blurs together into hot summer days and soon-forgotten lunches or treats or crafts, and bedtimes that mean the all-too-soon end of a day for a little heart that wants to experience more than his little body has the capacity for at this age.

I take a lot of pictures, even recognizing the weakness of the medium to capture memories like a little girl's kisses (loud but not sloppy anymore) and a little boy's laugh (free and contagious). I take pictures because I love beauty, and photos are one way that I can both capture and create beauty. I also take pictures because I want to try my best to capture those moments - the ones where you stand at the window waiting for daddy's car to pull into the driveway, or the way you both laid out next to daddy the other night when we did our evening devotions on the grass, or the way Lili drove most of the way home from the cabin with Tito's sunglasses on upside down, or the way Tito invited Callie the dog to sit on his lap for much of that same drive. You will look at those pictures and see moments, but I will look at those pictures and see them strung together into our life. I will do my best to string them together for you, even though I am now grasping some of the mother's secret that was discovered by Mary when she "treasured up all of these things, pondering them in her heart."

Even knowing this, I take these pictures because I want you to look at them some day and see laughter on your faces and smiles in our eyes. I want you to have a tangible reminder that you were happy and that you were loved. I will save these images not just in my ever-fading-memory, but in a book that we will look at together and we will tell stories of the times that we treasured you, not just in the big events, but even more so in the little moments. I may have been so fed up that I put you both down for naps so early this afternoon that it took you hours to fall asleep, but I wouldn't trade anything for the times that you are awake.

Life will not always be easy, and I cannot protect you from pain. But I will try my best to give you a gift of memories of a bright time, one that laid a foundation of joy and more importantly of trust in parents and in God; and I will pray that these moments light a spark in your hearts that will never go out, a deep conviction that you were once filled with joy and no matter how dark the night may feel, "weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning."

We have so much joy in the little moments now, but it will not always last, no matter how many pictures I take. The best news is that joy always comes in the Morning.

Bless You!

I hope it's okay to post a devotional thought from Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing in its entirety -- it's brief, so I can't really just quote the small bit that I like. I do like this, though, and hope you do, too.

BLESS YOU!

[God said,] "I will surely bless you." Genesis 22:17 (NIV)

People say, "Bless you!" when you sneeze.
"Bless" has turned into a bit of a feeble word.

But in the Bible it's much stronger.
(And it has nothing to do with sneezing!)

When God promises to bless you, he is saying, "I'm going to make you into everything I ever meant for you to be!"

It means God is taking every day and every single thing that happens in it -- good or bad -- to make you stronger, to mend whatever is broken inside, to change you into the person you were always meant to be.

Just as a caterpillar is totally changed into a butterfly, being blessed means being totally transformed.

God is transforming everything - his broken world - and you.

Sally Lloyd-Jones, Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing, pp 48-49

Is there a balm?

I went to sleep with tears on my pillow last night.

My children were tucked away in their beds – safe, secure, healthy, happy. But on the other side of the world, 

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
    lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children;
    she refuses to be comforted for her children,
    because they are no more.”
(Jeremiah 31:15)

My mom heart, probably fueled by some pregnancy-hormone imagination, weeps with them. I see the headlines, “ISIS is decapitating children” and can’t click on the article. That’s all I need to know (although I also know that families who flee to the mountains are watching their children wither and die from hunger and thirst); I wouldn’t sleep at all with those images fueling my imagination.

Is there a balm for these kinds of tears? The trauma may fade (it may not – much of Rwanda is still raw), but I cannot imagine such a balm this side of heaven.

Speaking of heaven, I saw a quote on Pinterest a few weeks ago that didn’t interest me enough at the time to save it, but it has stuck in my mind since then (fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be popular enough for me to be able to find it again through searches). It was an old-style picture of the Paris skyline, and had written over it, “What if when you die … they ask you, ‘how was heaven?’” Obviously, the impulse was to encourage the reader to seize the day, make the most of life right now, count your blessings, etc, etc. It was probably created by a white girl who was a college freshman feeling angsty about finals or only having an iPhone 4, so she sat on her fluffy dorm bed and used her Macbook to make a cute reminder that life really isn’t all that bad (sorry, I snark). 

I’m so glad the sentiment isn’t popular, though, because I ultimately find it not just an object for snark, but deeply offensive. Should we speak of blessings and be grateful for God’s gifts? Yes, but to suggest that this world is remotely heavenly belittles human suffering and belittles the glories of heaven. I’m offended on behalf of these weeping moms in Iraq. I’m offended on behalf of entire communities in West Africa that are stricken with an incurable hemorrhaging disease. I’m offended on behalf of trafficked little girls. I’m offended on behalf of American soldiers with PTSD. I’m offended on behalf of moms whose wee ones are battling cancer. I’m offended on behalf of those who have suffered the pain of divorce. I’m offended on behalf of hard-working people around the world who are trapped in poverty. Hell, I’m offended on behalf of myself, not only because I have an achy back and a sin-filled heart and I long for heaven even amidst the genuine joys of this earth, but because I have identified myself with a Savior who experienced hell in order to bring heaven back to us after mankind arrogantly opened pandora’s box and let loose hell on earth.

Every Sunday morning when I eat that little piece of bread and drink that little cup of wine, I am proclaiming that very suffering and death until He comes again. Tomorrow morning, I will eat and drink not only to have my fill of grace for the coming week, but also to proclaim that the Body and the Blood were also broken and shed for tiny broken bodies and gallons of shed blood in Iraq. For moms and dads whose tears may as well as be blood. Oh, that they may somehow taste that grace right now, although it may taste more now like the gall that was offered to Christ on the cross, than the sweet, life-giving wine that will cross my lips.

Miroslav Volf, arguably one of the most theological, articulate and winsome voices on reconciliation of our time, has written that there can be no peace (temporal or eternal) without justice; and in cases like these, it requires a sober and appropriate view of divine justice. Hell is real, God’s wrath is real, and it will come when Christ returns like no disaster that has ever been known to mankind in history.

Excuse the long quote:

A nonindignant God would be an accomplice in injustice, deception, and violence … Without an eschatological dimension, the talk of God’s wrath degenerates into a naïve and woefully inadequate ideology about the self-cancellation of evil. Outside the world of wishful thinking, evildoers all too often thrive, and when they are overthrown, the victors are not much better than the defeated. God’s eschatological anger is the obverse of the impotence of God’s love in the face of the self-immunization of evildoers caught in the self-generating mechanism of evil. A ‘nice’ God is a figment of liberal imagination, a projection onto the sky of the inability to give up cherished illusions about goodness, freedom, and the rationality of social actors.

…There is no trace of this nonindignant God in the biblical texts, be it Old Testament  or New Testament, be it Jesus of Nazareth or John of Patmos. The evildoers who ‘eat up my people as they eat bread,’ says the Psalmist in God’s name, will be put ‘in great terror’ (Psalm 14:5). Why terror? Why not simply reproach? Even better, why not reasoning together? Why not just display suffering love? Because evildoers ‘are corrupt’ and ‘they do abominable deeds’ (v. 1); they have ‘gone astray,’ they are ‘perverse’ (v. 3). God will judge, not because God gives people what they deserve, but because some people refuse to receive what no one deserves; if evildoers experience God’s terror, it will not be because they have done evil, but because they have resisted to the end the powerful lure of the open arms of the crucified Messiah.

…Should not a loving God be patient and keep luring the perpetrator into goodness? This is exactly what God does: God suffers the evildoers through history as God has suffered them on the cross. But how patient should God be? The day of reckoning must come, not because God is too eager to pull the trigger, but because every day of patience in a world of violence means more violence and every postponement of vindication means letting insult accompany injury. ‘How long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood,’ cry out the souls under the altar to the Sovereign Lord (Revelation 6:10). We are uncomfortable with the response which calls the souls to ‘rest a little longer, until the number would be complete both of their fellow servants and of their brothers and sisters, who were soon to be killed as they themselves had been killed’ (v. 11). But the response underlines that God’s patience is costly, not simply for God, but for the innocent. Waiting for the evildoers to reform means letting suffering continue.      (Exclusion and Embrace, pp 297-300)

There are two sides to every coin. When I sing “Jesus Loves Me” to my children every night, I sing a comforting promise of forgiveness for sins, no matter how great (even for mass murderers). Peace be upon those moms who can understand so much better than I; but the promise of God’s love also includes a promise of his wrath.

Jesus loves me, this I know,

For the Bible tells me so (bank on his promises, dear Iraqi moms; they may not feel true right now, but they are. This is your only comfort and hope.).

Little ones to Him belong (in heaven now, even as they did on earth),

They were weak (beneath guns and swords),

But HE is strong (“Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done. – Rev 22:12)

Yes, Jesus loves me (“O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
         blessed shall he be who repays you
         with what you have done to us!
      Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
         and dashes them against the rock!” – Psalm 137:8-9)

Yes, Jesus loves me (“He who sits in the heavens laughs;
         the Lord holds them in derision.
      Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
         and terrify them in his fury.” Psalm 2:4-5)

Yes, Jesus loves me (“When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been. – Rev 6:9-11)

The Bible tells me so (He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! – Rev 22:20)

Is this hope of balm?  It comes not from Gilead but from heaven, and it is red as blood. Come quickly, Lord Jesus!

Crunchy Mom Stuff (warning: inane mom post)

I've got a bit of crunchy mom inside of me; here's how some of that is working out right now (I spend a frightening amount of my time thinking about things like this when I'm not keeping children happy, clean(ish), fed or not fighting).

• After 14 weeks of morning sickness (started getting sick at 4.5 weeks, just passed the 18 week mark last week), I've decided that I've got the gaggies enough under control that I'm going back into cloth diapering, starting today. The first cloth diaper I had to change this morning was a doozy -- almost made me change my mind ... permanently!  But I survived with no gagging!
• I've been doing the super frugal water-vinegar cleaning thing for almost every part of my house, but I bit the bullet and bought a tub of Seventh Generation essential oil disinfecting wipes for the express purpose of teaching Tito how to clean his own bathroom. It's awesome. Now every few days, T wipes down his own toilet and sink ... a very important skill for him to be learning now since he is a boy and boys are, um, messy in the bathroom.
• Since I'm doing the mostly-natural house cleaning route, I have a lot of vinegar and baking soda on hand, which also turns out to be great for science experiments for kids. Last week, we made exploding ice chalk, which they loved. This week, we're going to put drops of vinegar in trays of vinegar and watch it fizz and explode. It's too hot for this pregnant lady to go outside for most of the day, so I'm having to get creative with ways to keep two energetic kids busy inside.
  
• I was disappointed to realize yesterday that the Method hand soap that I have next to every sink in my house has Sodium Laurel Sulfate (SLS) as its second ingredient. Here, I've been working so hard to avoid that ingredient in other body care products in our house, and the item we use the most is full of it! (SLS is a skin irritant, generally avoided now in the "natural skin care" community, and particularly of interest to me because I have a few charges with sensitive skin in my house). I'm thinking of checking out The Honest Company's soap, but I'm wondering if there's a cheaper option available. I like The Honest Company's marketing (hello, ADORABLE diapers!), but it's not exactly cheap.
• I take a lot of baths in epsom salts: it's supposed to be detoxifying, and the magnesium that your skin absorbs is supposedly a mineral that many people are deficient in, purportedly -- according to some people -- a contributor to morning sickness, which is why I started it in the first place. A side benefit is that the salt stays in my hair after I rinse it, and if I have it braided while it dries (or I sleep on it), it creates that "beach hair" look that's so coveted on Pinterest right now. That's me: fashion forward.
• This isn't really a crunchy thing, but I made this Bobby Flay citrus grilled halibut recipe for dinner last week, and it was really good. I'm going to try it next week using salmon (we have a freezer full of fish due to a recent spousal fishing trip to Alaska). The citrus-butter-thyme sauce was also delicious over some carrots that I grilled in a foil packet (with butter) alongside the halibut.
• More on the food front: JR and T are going camping for two nights next weekend, and I'm trying to come up with frugal, healthy, easy meals to send with them. I think I'm going to make a lot of use of foil packets that they can just throw on the grill -- sausages with veggies, breakfast burritos wrapped in foil, and maybe even a variation of grilled cheese sandwiches (literally grilled over the campfire) for lunch? I'm also going to make banana bread cookies for breakfast and snacks -- I haven't found a recipe for that specifically that appeals to me, so I'll probably use my regular recipe for banana bread and drop the batter in balls on a cookie sheet and see how it comes out. Seems like a more camp-friendly way to consume your banana bread, plus, the kid will be super excited to be eating cookies for breakfast.
• One more food item: have you guys ever had grilled onions in foil packets? You can either peel and core a whole onion and fill it with butter and salt and pepper, wrap it in foil and grill it for a long time, or you can cut it into quarters and do the same thing, maybe over medium heat. Wrap it tightly enough that you can flip it a few times, leave it on long enough for the outside layers to get nice and brown (use lots of butter!), and it turns out to be melty soft and sweet and caramelized and delicious. We (the adults) each ate a whole onion cooked like this the other night.  Mmmm... I love not being sick any more so I can cook and enjoy my food!