Why the Resurrection Matters

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Why the Resurrection Matters

It’s another terrifying story of a mother’s worst nightmare, and it makes my heart stop. “God, NO. This is enough. Please let there never be another story like this one!” I bang my fists on the counter, looking at my own children and cannot fathom how I could ever endure the loss of them. Sometimes the fear smothers me. My faithless heart screams, “God, you say you are the Comforter, but how could there ever be enough comfort for this? How will you ever comfort her?” My kids scream for more juice, and I find myself grateful for their screams, desperate for them to always be around to scream.

I’ve never been in a place where my faith has to hold up under the weight of something this heavy, but oh, how I have railed at God on behalf of those who have.

Just the night before, a dear friend of mine was in an unusual position, watching her brother play the part of Jesus in a local Passion Play. She said it was startling, overwhelming, to watch someone you know and love, someone you laugh with, be beaten, nailed to a cross. It was a reenactment of course, but a powerful one, and my friend noted, “It’s just so crazy to remember that it actually happened.”

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Monsters

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Monsters

I live with at least two monsters. I am married to one monster, and I birthed the other. Their monstrosity is most evident when they are eating, a task that typically leaves onlookers bamboozled and slack-jawed. Husband Monster Luke's favorite thing to eat is a whole roasted chicken from the grocery store. About four seconds after arriving home with prized, newly-purchased chicken, Luke will plop it on the counter, still cocooned in the plastic bag, and eat it straight out of the container with his bare hands, shoveling one pile of chicken flesh after another into his mouth at astonishing speed. It's grotesque (bah, there’s chicken in his beard!) yet awe-inspiring (look at the determination in this man’s eyes!). Recently, he bought one of these roasted chickens for dinner, but since I was heading out the door for a girls' night, he quickly discovered that it's difficult to double fist chicken flesh with two screaming toddlers at one's feet. Much to his dismay, he had to surrender the completion of the chicken for another time. 

The next day, as he microwaved the remaining chicken, I noticed that he was standing about two inches from the microwave, watching it sizzle for a bit longer then seemed necessary, with a look in his eyes that I can only compare to the frizzy, maniacal, bloodthirsty intensity of Mel Gibson in that hatchet scene in The Patriot.

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Cardboard Boxes and Comfort and Courage

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Cardboard Boxes and Comfort and Courage

This is the room that would break me, I just knew it. 

I’d been packing up to move with relatively little emotion, but that was because I had not yet ventured upstairs.

If the walls could show you a montage of the life we’ve lived in their midst, you’d see a younger me, showing her friends the room just at the top of the stairs: “This will be a nursery someday!” 

Then you’d see me a little older, sitting in this same room, crying, broken, because “someday” wasn’t today or the million yesterdays before. “Someday” felt like it would never come. 

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God Is Not Intimidated by Your Personality

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God Is Not Intimidated by Your Personality

To put it mildly, my husband is decisive and strong-willed. To put it metaphorically, sometimes getting him to see things my way is like pushing over a very big tree, only your arms are made out of noodles and you can’t find them. (Hidden noodle arms, you know. That’s a thing.) My husband is never afraid to say what he’s thinking, even if it’s harsh, and sometimes he skips the whole thinking part entirely and just jumps right to the saying part, and I’m sure you can guess how that goes.

Here’s a story to back me up: I’m in labor with our first (I’m talking days and days of BIG, BRUTAL contractions, no sleep, and SO MUCH freaking out). On the way to the hospital, my husband said, with completely sincerity, “My stomach hurts.” I was too weak FROM SIX PLUS DAYS OF INTENSE PAIN to stab him or even tell him I wanted to stab him, but everyone should know that I mentally stabbed him. And here’s the thing about Luke: he still stands by this statement, like, “What?! My stomach DID hurt.” You’ll never be able to convince him the statement was a bad idea, although I welcome your attempts, as noodle-armed as they may be.

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Stillness in a World of Hustle

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Stillness in a World of Hustle

I saw it on Pinterest and had a visceral reaction: “Good things come to those who hustle.”

It’s the rallying cry of the perfectionist, the list-maker, the big ball of stress. I am all of these things by nature. I need an A from everyone, and I will sacrifice sleep and sanity to get it. If I know I can’t get an A, well then, I better make people like me. In moments when I’ve lost the most control, when I battle the most anxiety and fear, I find myself telling joke after joke and story after story, desperate for the comfort of approving laughter, until eventually I get home and collapse in exhaustion, like an overworked circus clown, forever juggling juggling juggling on a unicycle. Hustle, man. Sometimes it looks like a list, and sometimes it looks like a red nose and face paint.

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