Matthew 5

It was the wrong week to watch a murder mystery, even the classic, Murder on the Orient Express.  Not because of the movie itself, or the acting but because the world has changed since I read it with my girls for English 5 years ago.  The years spent raising children have a meter of their own.  Days and weeks warp, as if contained within the lives of children is a 4^th dimension that can transport their loved ones back through time with a simple look or smile. By this chronology, 5 years is a lifetime.

Throughout those years, my husband and I spent time talking to our children about the importance of friends: making friends, managing friends and maintaining friends.  Lately, the conversation has turned to the less discussed ability human beings have to make enemies.  The conversations are difficult yet rich, revealing the truth that regardless of how you obtain enemies it is certain that you will make enemies through your friendships.  That can be a startling realization for a young mind. 

An enemy is defined by Webster’s as, “a person who hates another: a person who attacks or tries to harm another.”  How can something as comforting as friendship usher into my life someone whose intention it is to harm me?  This question has come to the forefront recently, as survivors share their stories wherein the pretense of friendship was stripped away leaving harm, pain and fear.  It is difficult to explain these situations if you do not believe in evil or acknowledge the presence of hate (its socially acceptable name).   

Social media and our online lives seem to have made the task of being hateful easier than ever before.  The ability to publish words and opinions, without even talking to those whom we disagree has become our meat and drink.  Why even this week, world leaders have traded insults, engaging in name calling as if it were an advanced form of foreign policy.  It might be comforting to imagine a new leadership will wash away the incivility that dominates our culture, but lately I have come to realize that overt corrosive public hatred is now an acceptable form of communication.

I know.  I’m slow.  Hate in all its forms has been around since the beginning of time, (or slightly after the beginning of time depending on how you measure these things) but to watch global vitriol increase is frightening.  Like the bird in Tinkerbell who hatches and then tries to jump back into its broken shell, sometimes I lack the courage to act in certainty and in opposition to my fear. When fear looms large, hate cannot be conquered.   

Which brings me back to the movie I shouldn’t have been watching… The movie centers on the theme of human revenge in the face of evil.  The apex of the narrative involves is a reenactment of a murder; the consummation of human revenge.  The hatred illustrated was all the more disturbing given the events which took place this week, wherein evil culminated in mass murder.  This violence took place in a church in a small Texas town, new territory for this deranged hatred.  Hundreds of lives lives shattered by violence.  The words, “Human justice is sometimes not enough,” spoken by the character of Poirot carried a weight of truth.  Human systems cannot bring justice to such evil.

My prayers this week join with the countless voices who are crying out for comfort for those who are mourning.  So many in the past few years...  So many who have faced injustice and hate through the decades...centuries.  I am praying that as a church God might grant us the grace to boldly love in the face of hate, to overcome evil with his goodness.  That somehow, our faith would make it past our own front door out into our world.

To those who have served their countries, we thank you for your service.  To those who have lost loved ones, our hearts ache for you.  We are thankful for your courage.  May Jesus, our friend, sustain you and comfort you in your suffering.

And even in our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until in our own despair, 
against our will,
 comes wisdom through the awful grace of God  ~Aeschylus~

xoxKaren

Keeping Score

Anatomically correct hamster on white and lavender

Oh friend! 

It has been a week.  Every time I turned around, someone was doing something weird, surprising, or both. You need to come over and have tea soon.

Monday morning found me with errands to do, so I assigned work to my youngest and left her at the kitchen table with instructions to remain seated until her math was completed.  I returned home, put the kettle on and we sat sipping tea correcting her assignment.

Math question: How many minutes are in one day?  Write a multiplication question and show your answer.

Me: "Darling, I see you have the answer for your question, 1440 minutes in a day.  The answer is correct but the work isn’t there…. How did you get your answer?"

Child: (looks at me blankly, as though I’m missing something) "Well, I just asked Echo."

Me: look of amazement, mouth open

Child:  "What? It was way easier Mummy, really."

Life 1, Karen 0.

Tuesday morning I was out the door early to take a youngling to physical therapy.  Rehearsing the situation won’t get us that far, but even I was surprised when I found myself entering the PT room to tell the physical therapist I found her rude.  No one was more mortified than my daughter who had turned scarlet and actually had her hand over her face.  That took some sorting out I assure you.

Life 2, Karen 0, Physical Therapist 10 (she phoned and apologized bless her sweet pagan soul.)

Mid-week I heard someone was trying to scalp tickets to the Homecoming dance. 

The home-school Homecoming dance. 

The Christian home-school Homecoming dance.   

Yep.  I want that to sink in, so we are pausing there.   

Not disparaging the kids I love the most but Christian home-school dances aren’t generally the hottest ticket in town. That was until this year.  When my girlfriend told me that someone was trying to move a dance ticket for an extra $25 I knew I was witnessing something from the book of Revelation.   Not clear if it was a trumpet, lamp stand or a horse but whatever it was clear knocked me over in shock.  Maybe my Canadian roots are showing but trying to make an extra $25 off someone’s lack of planning seems a bit capitalistic even for the right wing conservative crowd.  

That was Wednesday.

No wait!  I was rude to someone that afternoon!I had to text her later to apologize for being such a troll.

Life 3, Karen -1

Thursday started with a minorly major catastrophe that I brought upon myself.  If you were intending to bless a child by doing their laundry, you might be forgiven for taking the clothes in the laundry basket (on top of the washing machine might I add) and sticking them in the wash. It wasn’t as if I damaged anything by doing her laundry, unlike last week when I threw a purple shirt in with the whites and turned everything mauve. Apparently, the clothes in the aforementioned laundry basket were clean and I had washed them a second time much to my beasts' consternation.  She came into the room to give me a hug, “Mummy, I totally release you from needing to do my laundry.  You are nice to me but that is why I do my own, so it doesn’t go missing.”   I smiled and bit my lower lip. 

Actually, my girl does her laundry because some years ago I had a laundry crisis wherein almost every pair of underpants in the house went awol.  When I found them 24 hours later in a laundry basket in my car underneath a garbage bag of coats on the way to the junk store, I realized that for sanity’s sake, my girls should start doing their own laundry, or risk public humiliation. To be released from laundry duty by a child who started her journey in cloth diapers was a bit galling bless her precious twice washed socks.    

Life 4, Karen 0 (I had 3 cookies at tea time when no one was looking.)

Friday was all about biology.  In a conversation not to be repeated, nor the participants named, it turns out that a hamsters’ testicles do not reside under its arm pits. Not much to report except that by the end of the day, I had texted my husband diagrams of hamster privates.

Life 5, Karen 0, Husband 3 (because he didn’t ask for a divorce) Hamster 2

I could continue throughout the weekend and mention the gossip train that sideswiped my Saturday.  Then I would need to confess swearing at the bird on Sunday when it tried to jump into the washing machine.  Repeated failure gets boring and uncomfortable, especially when it is my own. 

And so, dear friend, life is rushing along, precious moment after moment.  I have no idea if I am effecting change, staying afloat or succeeding from one day to the next.  Do you ever feel like you are moving quickly but getting nowhere?

I heard the voice of Jesus say,

"Come unto Me and rest;

Lay down, thou weary one, lay down,

Thy head upon My breast."

I came to Jesus as I was,

Weary and worn and sad;

I found in Him a resting-place,

And He has made me glad.

I heard the voice of Jesus say,

"Behold, I freely give

The living water; thirsty one,

Stoop down and drink and live."

I came to Jesus, and I drank

Of that life-giving stream.

My thirst was quenched, my soul revived,

And now I live in Him.

I heard the voice of Jesus say,

"I am this dark world's Light.

Look unto Me; thy morn shall rise

And all thy day be bright."

I looked to Jesus, and I found

In Him my Star, my Sun;

And in that Light of Life I'll walk

Till traveling days are done.

Thank goodness we are not alone.  We have the friendship of one who is infinitely wise and eternally compassionate.  He understands the mundane, sees our failures and blesses our efforts.  I pray, that as you make your way through this week, you might know his presence in the ridiculous, the raw and the raging.

I’m praying for you this week,

xoxKaren   

**For those of you that don’t home-school, imagine someone trying to charge an extra $20 to get into the community center’s Christmas craft bazaar to buy crochet Kleenex holders.  It seemed a pretty bold move for a rather selective group of folk.

Plans and Puffins

Behold the noble Puffin...

I was sitting with a group of ladies when I heard my phone ring.  Picking it up, I plugged my left ear and said, "Hello?"  There was quite a bit of swearing going on the other end of the line.  Swearing and yelling to be more specific, so I thought it would be wise to move outside with my phone before one of the tender homeschooling mama’s I was sitting beside heard what my friend was suggesting her ex-husband do with his new motorbike.  “Hold on babe,” I muttered.  “Let me go outside so we can chat better.”  Truth was we were nowhere near chatting.  My friend had a lot more poison to get out of her soul before chatting would be possible.  I walked out the door into a well-timed gust of wet. It was cold and grey, a Northwest fall special.  The rain was falling heavily and splashing up from the pavement in order to soak my feet twice and the wind was blowing the whole mess sideways.  I headed for an alcove and waited for a break in the storm, figuratively speaking.  

“Yes, I know. No, I’m not.  No, you didn’t.  No, you shouldn’t…”  A running list of affirmations and directives fell from my mouth as I tried to keep pace with the crescendo of disappointment I was hearing.  I practiced deep breathing in order to keep my blood pressure down, my dear friend was really letting loose and I realized that something had upset her deeply, this was more than an unfortunate incident, this was a wounded heart.  

We talked.  I shivered. We talked some more.  Finally, the crux of the issue became clear, “I spent so much time... snup... days, years, to have things end like this…why did I even bother?  Snup! Where did God go?  I’m not even sure I heard him in the first place. Snup! Snup!”
“Umm….Seriously, are you hiccuping right now?  Did you just cry until you have the hiccups?”
“Snup!” My friend said some rude words while crying and hiccuping some more.  

“I was tracking with you, until the hiccuping.  Then I got distracted.  Do you need to hold your breath?  Can I go inside now?  You can’t hiccup and yell at the same time can you?”  I like to believe I exhibit a strong balance of compassion and practicality. As it turns out, my friend was not finished hiccuping or venting and we talked for a while longer.  Disappointment with God figured heavily in the conversation.  

I got off the phone 20 minutes later feeling blue.  Letting the wind propel me, I walked the parking lot while I prayerfully handed the entire incident back over to the Creator.  One of the best spiritual disciplines I was taught was to spend time after difficult conversations in prayer.   Processing disappointment with God is hard work and I have found it helpful to spend time acknowledging my inadequacy in front of the one who created both puffins and accountants.  The former being something strange I really like, a swimming bird, and the latter being something I really appreciate, a human who likes math, yet want to stay far away from. 

While I acknowledge that disappointment has made me more compassionate, I still dislike the experience.  Disappointment is defined as the feeling of sadness or displeasure caused by the nonfulfillment of one's hopes or expectations.  My biggest problem in dealing with disappointment is that I need to acknowledge that life isn’t about me.  It is amazing how often I want the world to cater to my expectations.  Equally as staggering is the amount of times the world refuses to play along.  It’s rough.

At the center of it all lays the issue of faith.  Am I able, when life deviates far from what I expect, when it causes unbearable suffering, to process the disappointment honestly with my faith intact?  I confess I found that difficult when I was my own highest authority.  Without a creator, we cease to have purpose or meaning beyond ourselves.  Puffins are a weird bird that decided one day it would be great to go swimming and accountants have a lot to answer for in choosing that whole math thing.  

So I’m thinking about you if you are processing disappointment.  If you are one of the many, who look at your life and wonder if there is a way forward after failure, or if you are simply tired because so much of the journey seems to tilt uphill.  I pray that you might come to know Jesus listens carefully to those whose prayers go unanswered.  That although your well-crafted plans have come to naught, His plans for your eternal good, so different from your own, are moving forward, fashioned in his faithfulness.

Praying for all of us this week,

xoxKaren