Gratitude for it All

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With images of glossy bronze turkeys, fine china, and smiley, happy kinfolk who like each other, Thanksgiving can appear an unchanging stalwart of tradition — if not a bit impossible to replicate. It’s the one holiday that refuses to change more than a slight wobble in the menu. With imagery that perfect, why ask it to? Yet my own memories of Thanksgiving have weathered as much change as a barnyard pen exposed to the seasons of life.

My earliest memories of Thanksgiving have nothing to do with food or fancy cutlery but of me repeatedly singing the nursery rhyme “Ten Little Indians” to my Granny. The crinkles around her corn-flower blue eyes outlined a mysterious mix of tears and joy as she laughed and asked me to sing it yet again. I didn’t quite understand the teary-eyed laughter but I knew it to be good and I sang with gusto.

While it’s been almost 30 years since her passing, I still hear the rhythmic beat of that song drumming in my head bringing me a contended peace that reminds me that the world needs our unique song and listening to others is an act of love that speaks volumes.

I remember the enchanting thrill of sliding down a hill of dead grass on castoff cardboard boxes with my cousins and siblings. The Florida hill was hardy high but we were on top of the world inherently knowing that happiness isn’t determined by what we have but who we have by our side through life’s ups and downs.

Thanksgivings weren’t all downhill on cardboard boxes and songs about numbers and Native Americans, there was also the Thanksgiving after my parents separated when we ate a not so traditional dinner in a dark restaurant which felt sober and sad. I learned that life doesn’t always look the way it’s supposed to or turn out to plan, but practicing mercy towards ourselves and others during difficult times can be a comforting expression of hope that is its own kind of gratitude.

I recall one Thanksgiving when I was pregnant with not only my first son but also all of the hopes and fears that accompany motherhood. Being so close to delivery underscored how the very nature of life teeters on the precipice of change. This Thanksgiving Day we will celebrate that baby’s 23rd birthday; another reminder not only of life’s passing but of the bounty of blessings that fill our years making ordinary, everyday moments some of our most cherished memories. Read more →

Spooky: Challenging Perception

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Every October the word spooky rises like a ghost to the forefront of my vocabulary. Its a month-long torment to my family that brings me uncanny delight. I draw the word out like the two vowels are careening around a hairpin turn until they crash into each other with a high-pitched yelp. It’s about as much fun as my middle-aged self can muster without inducing a medical event.

In reality, I’m a fraidy cat. Roller coasters terrify me. I dread flying. Driving in heavy rain is panic-inducing. And, always, I think someone is going to steal me at the gas station. So, I don’t favor the word spooky because it’s frightening. To me, the word is fanciful like bats fluttering wild and reckless under the veil of the moon’s glow.

It makes me realize how much perspective can change our point of view.

No one changed perspectives more than Jesus. It was unprecedented. Although a king, he was born humbly in a stable. He didn’t seek the finest things but the most broken people.  He knew not only that sinners could be redeemed but how glorious their redemption would be. Jesus didn’t come to rule; he came to weed. He came to pick through the detritus of jealousy, greed, judgment, and selfishness so that we could fully bloom. His gentleness, his mercy, and his unconditional love for every single person are still radical all these eons since his own death and resurrection. His teachings and his example remind us to challenge our perspectives.

With even a small shift in perspective, we can better understand other points of view. We can be more tolerant, patient, and gentle. We can be less skeptical giving ourselves and our neighbor infinite mercies. We can believe in the power we have to affect change in this world through even the smallest acts of kindness. We can look through a different lens and ask ourselves where our perception is clouding our vision. We can either see through eyes of condemnation or compassion and whatever we choose is exactly what we will find.

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We Can do Better for Women and Children

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It feels impossible these days to discuss hard things. We’ve become so comfortable aligning ourselves with the same point of view that we’re sometimes hostile to listening to others. It reminds me of the seemingly innocuous playground game Red Rover I played as a child.  One team calls out a player from the other team, and that player tries to run through the other team’s arms to break the chain.

Firm and rigid, no one wants to bend.  Other points of view get plowed over or knocked down. It’s dirty and messy. People get hurt. Saddest of all, it makes us forget a fundamental truth about our humanity – that we belong to each other. In a primal sense, there is no other side.

Nowhere does division seem more obvious than the contentious issue of abortion rights.

This November, Floridians will vote on Amendment 4 which the ballot summary states “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

The language of this amendment might appear to put limitations on abortion as it states that a “health care provider” is required to determine if an abortion is necessary to protect the mother’s “health.” However, a healthcare provider is not synonymous with a licensed medical doctor, and the broad term “health” also includes, as determined by the courts, the mental health of the mother.

While the seriousness of mental health issues should never be downplayed, this amendment makes no mention of how significant these “health” issues must be. Presumably, any mother seeking an abortion has some level of anxiety as to her condition. As it’s written, it is hard to imagine any instance in which an abortion wouldn’t be allowed under Amendment 4. It essentially allows abortions on babies who could survive outside of the womb for health concerns that may be treatable and temporary.

Currently, Florida law requires parental consent for minors to have an abortion. Receiving “notification” significantly dilutes the existing requirement of parental consent, making abortion the only medical decision for which parents have no say. Considering the epidemic mental health crisis of our youth, Amendment 4 puts minors in the precarious position of making a pivotal life decision without a loved one to help navigate how their decision may affect their emotional well-being. This is a dangerous precedent and an infringement on the rights of parents that is not in the best interest of our children. Read more →

Lesson Learned: Education Is About More Than Good Grades

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The Sisters from Guardian Catholic Schools (Sister Susan is sitting next to me and my sweet mother-in-law.) I was nervous about hosting them because it meant cooking but they were so entertaining (and even gracious about my black chicken!)

As a student, if I had a good report card my parents would let me order whatever I wanted at Dairy Queen, instead of the standard five Dilly Bars for $1 my family always got. While picking something from the big menu was exciting, I realized that as extravagant as banana splits sound, the bananas are a mushy nuisance that distracts from the ice cream.

I decided the smart kids could have them and I moved on with my mediocre grades and discounted Dilly Bar.

The past few years, I’ve been a tutor at the Guardian Catholic School. While I had some experience as a substitute teacher, I was hesitant to take on this volunteer role because I didn’t want to be the reason a struggling student slipped farther behind. In short — I didn’t want to fail.

I knew failure as a student. In third grade, my struggle with math began and it peaked when I failed ninth-grade algebra. I remember the pleading eyes of teachers and tutors after they would explain a lesson. It seemed like they believed if they stared at me long and hard enough, I would understand how to reduce a fraction or cross multiply or find the square root.

Instead, I would just nod at them with a weak, embarrassed smile; too self-conscious from their intense gazing to think of math at all.

Sister Susan Reineck who runs the afterschool tutoring program at Guardian is nothing like that. She’s soft-spoken and encouraging. I’ve watched her teach. She doesn’t rush students or shame them. She’s patient and calm, and starts where the students are; not where they should be.

I’ve benefited from her instruction on ways to approach teaching and am awed by how capable she is and how capable she makes others feel. I sometimes wonder if I would have struggled so much in math if I had someone as patient and resourceful as Sister Susan teaching me.

When I tutor, I try to be mindful of my own negative experiences. I don’t correct every mispronounced word. I try to come up with fun or creative ways to explain different meanings of words and the emotions they connotate. Almost always, I show her pictures of my pets or tell a funny story about my life. We talk about our families, her best friend, places she has visited, and where she wants to attend high school.

We write summaries of the pages we read, and for weeks we practiced a speech she was assigned in one of her classes — writing it, rewriting, and learning to project her soft-spoken voice to the back of the room where I sat cheering. Once, I read her a column I’d written that appeared in the newspaper and she seemed in awe. Read more →

Wisdom of the Ages: Grandparents

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Happy Summer! ~ I wrote this post last summer and I’m just now posting it. So I’m happy to report that my hydrangeas are having their best year ever despite the heat and last year’s questionable guidance from the garden store. Perhaps, I, myself, have become an old wise person figuring out my hydrangea woes without any reliable help. Wouldn’t that be something?! 

Anyway, this post isn’t really about hydrangeas or even being older. It’s about how much we matter to each other. I felt this most keenly from my grandparents. Maybe you feel it from a spouse or close friend, and ideally, we all feel it in our relationship with God. 

Still, I would like to acknowledge the unique role grandparents play in our lives. My own grandparents left an indelible mark on the parts of me that I like the best. And, as a mother who has watched her children grow up in the light of their own grandparents, I will be forever grateful for their love and influence. So for all you wonderful grandparents, pretend like I’m giving you some freshly cut hydrangeas from my yard. After all, it’s the thought that counts and I know your grandbabies think the world of you. I also know how right they are. ~ Love, Lara

I have always liked old people. They were nice to me. They knew stuff and never made me feel bad for all the things I didn’t know. Sometimes they would give me candy or money or tell stories that felt like a comparable treasure.

Grandparents were the ultimate old people. They were this magical mix of love and wisdom that assured me that the world was good and that I was too. I haven’t had a grandparent in decades.  The last time I did, the internet didn’t exist. If we wanted to know something we had to go to the library or ask an old person. I preferred the latter. This summer, my treasured hydrangeas that once boasted showy blooms and giant emerald leaves became stunted and deformed dappled by the powdery mildew of fungal disease and rust-colored spots.

I searched the internet and read until I was thoroughly confused by the array of diagnoses and conflicting remedies. For the sake of clarity, I went to the garden store fanning my sampling of diseased leaves like a bad hand of dealt cards similar to the one Kenny Rogers cautioned about in his song, The Gambler, “you got to know when to hold ‘em; know when to fold ‘em.” I told the sad story of disfigurement as if I were writing my own country song. All the while, the garden store employee hmmed and hawed making twisty faces with her mouth at all the right parts of my lamentation as if she understood both my plight and the solution that would cure it. When I finished, she pulled out her cell phone to do her own internet search.

I left dubious with a $20 fungicide and a deep longing for old people. I grew up when music television was the rage and neon clothes the norm so I hardly feel nostalgic for anything old-fashioned. But my longing isn’t so much for the good old days (whatever they were) but for grandparents. In these days of information overload, I miss the simplicity of the plain way that old people spoke that could tell you whatever you needed to know in less than a sentence. There was comfort in their knowing. Read more →

If You Know Love – You Know Enough

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When I had my first child a friend sent me flowers with a card that read, “You know more than you think you do.”

 I knew nothing. Those early days of motherhood felt like ninth-grade algebra all over again. I failed algebra.  I didn’t know how to solve for X to determine the time Tammy would get to her grandma’s house if she was driving 53 mph; had 315 miles to travel; and needed to stop at a rest area three miles off the highway to buy strawberry-banana flavored Hubba Bubba chewing gum with the $1.50 she had in her pocket.

Nor did I have any idea how to compute how much sleep deprivation it takes to enter a state of psychosis where hallucinations appear of Tammy blowing giant pink bubbles big enough to make her car fly like in the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  I just knew I was close to that level of sleep-deprived psychosis after only the first week of motherhood.

Days were a rotation of nursing, changing diapers, moving my son from the bouncy seat to the swing to the second bouncy seat, back into my arms where I jiggled and cooed and sang ridiculous songs of my making while I paced the house careful not to trip on the baby paraphernalia that multiplied like some other kind of advanced math which used exponentials and ellipses into infinity.

My children are grown now. I’m no longer on the carousel of routines, rules, homework schedules, extracurricular activities, adolescent moodiness, or teenage drama. Things are pretty quiet now, sometimes uncomfortably so.  I miss the strangest things too– such as the orange clay at the threshold of the front door from their baseball cleats and the smell of their hair at the end of the school day. I can still picture my oldest son grinning amid the branches of the crape myrtle tree that he would climb every day after school, and I can hear my younger son’s laugh exploding like endless bubbles of carbonation.

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Rise to the Occasion

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Hi ~ I thought I would send this a little early as I hope it will be a good reflection for Holy Week. I haven’t had the best Lent. It’s felt a lot like wanting to run but not having the endurance I need. So many stops and starts and even meanderings into driveways to pet random cats that it’s easy to feel like quitting. But one of the things I love about God’s mercy is that it allows us to start again, wherever we find ourselves. So that’s where I am this Holy Week — laying down my failures and preparing my heart for his rising that redeems us all. So if you are like me and huffing and puffing to the finish line ~ keep going. It’s never too late. love~Lara

Sitting on the couch one afternoon, I asked God what his will was for my life. Trying to answer such an important question sometimes feels as amorphous as wondering what life will be like in another millennium or what ice cream flavor best describes my personality. It’s both too big and too maddening to solve.

Besides, I was recovering from a stomach virus and feeling particularly puny so the only answer that kept going through my head to the weighty question of what God’s will was for my life was merely to lie down. It hardly seemed like a directive from God. Even a self-help guru would perhaps find the suggestion counterproductive. After all, we are Americans. We stand up. We work. We get it done. Lying down is not a solid life plan for anyone other than a cat.

Yet when I think of the glory of Jesus’s resurrection, I realize it was only by laying down his life that his miraculous rising was possible. While seemingly paradoxical, I think this is true for us too. By laying down resentment, expectations, estrangement, disappointment, ego, and envy we make life better for ourselves and others. The triumph of Easter was only possible because of the surrender that preceded it.

Since infancy when we balled our tiny hands into fists, it seems like our instinct has always been to hold tight. Conversely, surrender is a radical act of love, none more so than Jesus dying on the cross for our salvation. For many of us, surrender sounds wobbly and weak. Or gazing at the crucifix, it just seems painful. So, I get the great reluctance that surrender invokes. Yet the plain truth is we can’t rise without first laying down what we were never meant to carry. There is so much in life that we hold on to that entombs us. The more we lay down our hurts, put to rest both big and petty grievances, and surrender our whims for God’s Holy Will, the closer we are to our own rising. Read more →

Greatest Love Story Ever Told

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I love that Valentine’s Day falls on Ash Wednesday this year. There’s a certain yin and yang to it.  The commercialism of heart-shaped love contrasted with the stark smudge of an ashen cross gives a whole new meaning to opposites attract. Both symbols convey entirely different perceptions of the nature of love.

There is an element of realism inherent in the black ash symbolizing death that the puffy red heart celebrating love glosses over with its shiny facade. And when you have a holiday as syrupy as Valentine’s Day, à la doilies, hyped-up expectations, and besotted poetry, that darkness is surprisingly refreshing.

I know I sound terribly unromantic, but I have loved long enough to know that true love has little to do with those trappings and more to do with the ashen cross on the forehead. (My poor husband is probably not feeling too wooed right now.)

Ash Wednesday is a day of penitential prayer and fasting. It marks a season that is purposefully non-celebratory, while Valentine’s Day is about bubbly champagne, decadent deserts, and red roses. I like the juxtaposition of it. But there is a commonality that exists between the two. At the core of each is love, and there is no greater example of that than God sacrificing his only son for our salvation. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, NRSV). Read more →

Gift of Time: Use it Well

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I sometimes suspect that my 15-year-old dog stole one of our two cats’ nine lives. Besides the obvious signs of aging — gray muzzle, cloudy eyes, and limping gait — he still acts like the overly needy, exuberant black lab that almost caused me to wreck the car on the drive home from the shelter the day we adopted him.

Without warning, he leapt into my lap and completely obscured the windshield with his shiny black head whipping around to give me kisses until I frantically explained that really it is OK for us to sit 8 inches apart. All these years later, he’s still not convinced.

When I came home one day a few months ago to find him with his eyes glazed over, his breathing labored and unable to stand, I figured maybe he wasn’t going to live forever after all. He wouldn’t eat, barely drank and he went hours without lifting his head. My husband and son had to carry him in to the vet since he couldn’t walk.

The three of us sat in the cubby-size examination room while our vet, ever so gently, said there was not much that could be done for him. It was time. With everyone in agreement and despite any logical reason to hope, I decided it wasn’t. I knew it was unreasonable, perhaps, even unfair to the dog.

This time, I was the one who couldn’t bear separating.

In the tentative days that followed, after Gus had an IV and some medicine to help with arthritis pain, I kept wondering why I was fighting so hard to eke out even a few more days with this dog. Death is a natural part of life and Gus had lived a good, full life. No one likes to lose someone they love, but we all get that life is finite (even if love isn’t).  We all understand that grief, no matter how painful, isn’t something to fear. It’s just a higher plateau of love.

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Hope: It Means so Much More

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When I was little, I thought the best gifts came in big boxes. If they were both taller and wider than me then I knew with certainty there was a great gift inside. Once I discovered shiny trinkets, I felt quite the opposite. It was tiny boxes that magnified the glimmer of something costly and precious that I most coveted.  Nowadays, I just buy my own gifts and I am not very particular about the shape or size of the box. I give them to my husband to wrap so he has an inkling of what he bought me, giving him special instructions to put any clothes in a gift bag in case I happen to need to wear them before Christmas.

I don’t pretend that any of this is romantic or that the Three Wise Men would be impressed with my self-giving. It just seems like a practical solution to the pressures of gift-giving. And, there’s so much pressure. So much of gift-giving feels transactional. Christmas lists have been replaced with links that specify everything from size to color. We ask people what they want so they won’t be disappointed or so we don’t waste money on something that would otherwise end up in the top shelf of the hall closet. Just as often, we give money as a gift because we’ve been conditioned that it’s the one-size-fits-all solution to the woes of the world.

We look to material things to convey the genuineness of our love and affection, and inevitably they feel inadequate. Perhaps that’s what the Grinch realized when he said, “Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas…means a little bit more.”  Yet it isn’t a little green man that I think about at Christmas no matter how wonderful it is that he converted from greed and grumpiness. It’s a baby in the manger. Read more →