Keeping The Candles Lit

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Before we had children, Andrew and I lived frugally but adventurously on our budget, listened to NPR in the evenings, strolled pillow-faced on Saturday mid-mornings to the St. Louis Bread Company in U. City for chocolate chip muffins and good coffee, exercised, flew to Chicago for Christmas, watched Masterpiece Mystery, camped our way to Rocky Mountain National Park, studied, and rang in the new year with champagne toasts and friends.

And then we had our firstborn, and those two people changed overnight.  The sweetness of this new phase, parenting, was so overwhelming, so charged with love and purpose, we didn’t miss the old life.  Of course, all new parents miss sleep.  And we missed the freedom to get up and go somewhere and browse.  We never browsed again.  That word drops from a parent’s life forever.

But still, we didn’t miss the no-kids days.  Because we loved the cherubs so much, and we still had some control even in the hairy days of the new human in the house dictating everything.  Then a second new human.  Then a third.  Even then, we had the ability to impose a grid on life that formed our days and ways.  The growing kids occasionally chafed at the grid, and now we are finding that though we meant well in forming our particular grid, we made mistakes along the way.  I guess we do our best at the time, making decisions with the factors and convictions in front of us, and then inevitably find that our earnest, horse-blinder determination could have been done better another way.  But that is only seen in retrospect, with the benefit of years and wisdom that I didn’t have back in the decision-making moment. In any event, right or wrong, the grid at its best was our attempt to listen to God’s voice rather than the culture’s.  At its worst, it was my lazy remote control for an easier life.

And then a moment comes when we realize that while it is good and God-honoring to create the family grid, the grid is no guarantee for a pain-free, perfect life for our children.  There will come a day when they don’t take their vitamins and go to bed at 7:30, when at midnight we are lying in bed waiting for the sound of the back door slamming. And until it comes, the heart hammers and the imagination does Oscar-worthy work.  There comes a day when their big-people tears show us our failures.  That is a good and humbling day because it drives us to our Savior in clear-eyed recognition of our need of Him.  We have no illusions of adequacy then; we just see that at our very best we are sinners.

The college-children years are a time of finding peace in the whirlwind of those children all on different trajectories, and very little time with everyone at the dining room table.  They are the years of having our hearts spread out on different continents, on airplanes, packing, planning, going, going, going.  And it is all good, and it is all completely out of our control. It is like our poor mama cat, Midge, the first time we bring the kittens down from their safe lair to hold them. They are all squawking in different locations and all Midge can do is dart from one to the other and lick them a little comfort.

The decisions kids make at the tender age of 17 are enormous; and we tremble and pray and look up at God and say, “In Your mercy, look at my child!  Protect her.  Protect him.”  And somewhere in there I realize I never had control to begin with!  These children, along with every molecule of creation, are His!  My job is and has always been not to control the grid, but to trust the heavenly Father of my children.  And even to pray the brave prayer my friend Nancy prays – Lord, I am not asking that You make it easy for them.  The grid is good; but it is not God.

So we breathe in a prayer for our peace and breathe out a prayer for their safety and growth.  And we cook and we keep the candles lit and we goon-smile when we hear their voices on the front walk.

There is a chapter in this phase of parenting that I don’t know yet, that many of my friends do know.  It is the chapter called, “Look what God did through your weakness!”  It is an amazing chapter.  I look forward to reading it.

(photo explanation:  the Scottish flag flies awaiting the Easter visit of our Covenant College students)

These Simple Instructions?

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Dear Unnamed Cable Provider,

This is a cordial heads-up that you will soon be receiving a bill from my new counsellor.  The process of packing and mailing back my dad’s no-longer-needed cable paraphernalia, which I entered into with can-do optimism, reduced me quickly to quivering congealed salad. The responsibility for this can be laid squarely at your office door.

First, just as a side-issue:  Did you really need this stuff back?  Yard sales, flea markets, and dumpsters are filled with used electronics.  Are you telling me that your products are somehow different?  Forgive my friendly skepticism.  Plastic is plastic.  Yesterday’s tech marvel is today’s chuckle.  As heavy as this box is, your postage costs will far outweigh your savings in little circuits and chips.  I don’t know.  This just seemed like a waste of all our time.

But, to the point – the traumatic procedure of following the simple instructions printed on the box for mailing the multiple pieces back to you.

Let’s start with the warnings.

“Stop!” read a flyer in the box. “Check the model number on equipment to ensure the unit being packed matches the one on the shipping label.”  There was a definite “or else” implied by that exclamation mark.  Anyway, number matching is not happening.  I don’t have time to find and match tiny numbers.  No one does.  Isn’t your company logo etched into each piece enough?  Enclosed is all the equipment you gave us.

Next, I was warned more than once that severe fines will be levied for incorrectly packed boxes.  I’m sure you have your war stories about shattered equipment rattling around in unpadded boxes and the like, but your tone terrified me.  It was so draconian!  It assumed the worst of me having never met me.  As I struggled to understand the diagrams, I expected at any moment a jackboot at the front door and a blindfolded ride to the nearest gulag.

This was made worse by your warnings that severe fines would also be levied against boxes not packed within a certain timeframe.  Apparently a meter began spinning the moment the packing boxes left your warehouse and I, instead of standing ready with the tape gun, was out appreciating the first robins of spring whilst fines accrued left and right.  Naïve fool!  And since this was my parents’ account, it wouldn’t be me fined, but my mother.  Do you begin to understand the pressure?  Incidentally and ironically, my dear father, who no longer needs this equipment because he is now in heaven, was no doubt watching from heaven and nodding at the familiar scene.  Not one of us knows how to read instruction manuals except him.  He enjoyed them like a good novel.

In my defense, though, these “simple” instructions made no sense.  Yes, there were diagrams, drawn up by people who understand this stuff.  But don’t you see?  99% of your customers don’t understand this stuff; they just want to watch TV.  You need me to write up the instructions and to draw the pictures.  For example, you told me, and I quote, “Place the client in the Styrofoam containers as needed.” 

???????

Wasn’t my dad the client?  And what do you mean by as needed?  I take Tylenol as needed.  As needed implies an extended relationship between me and the Styrofoam.  And should I have known that one of the 55 gadgets I was attempting to tetris into your box was called a “client”?  Remember, I don’t know this and don’t have time to know this.  Call it a rectangular black box the size of an open wallet with two nozzles on one side, and I’m your gal.  The one thing that would have fit well in the slotted Styrofoam boxes was the 10 remotes, but of course they were an inch too long.  So they now rest, riskily in my opinion, in a vague zone the diagram referred to as “open area.”

It’s out of my hands.

As I trembled and jigsawed, I could well envision how this will play out.  You receive my box in the warehouse.  Daryl opens the box.  He turns to his buddy, “Earl, you’ve got to see this.”  Earl comes over, whistles his shock, and calls the supe.  “Boss, we’ve got one.”  The headman comes over and reverentially picks up my sweat-soaked, fear-packed shamble and hands it to Jonas, the wunderkind who makes the blooper video for the warehouse Christmas party.  Yes, my box will be the centerpiece, your laughingstock, and I your Joe-idiot-packer who can’t even read a clear-as-day diagram.  I am including a picture of myself so your mirth will be complete.

But it’s Ok.  I can handle being laughed at.  As I said, I’m getting help.  And good luck getting into the box.  My son grimly said that our only revenge was to tape the box up like Fort Knox and also, maybe you will get a paper cut.

Sincerely,

An Overcomer