Category Archives: Alaska

how we do it all

Posted on by May 25, 2022

The sun blazed with enthusiasm this morning, but by the afternoon storm clouds rolled over and we had rain pouring off the roof in sheets, and hail pounded the windows on the north side of the house. Alaska was showing off, trying to do it all in the same day. But after about 30 minutes it wore itself out and cleared again, like a toddler after tantrum…or, like a mama whose caffeine-driven spurt of productivity has worn off, and she collapses on the couch for a breather.

how we do it all

It is a year of surprises. The night before I sent the last newsletter, when Vince had only three days left at the business he’d worked for 21 years, we found out we are pregnant.

No, nope, we didn’t see that coming at all. To say we were shocked would be a gross understatement.

But yes, in case you were wondering, we know how this happens, and we like it, but this is still, ahem, another miracle that must’ve involved supernatural intervention, like the one we had a few years ago. You know, the adorable blond one named Finnegan.

So in that newsletter when God had been teaching me for weeks about stretching our tent pegs, I wrote it thinking He was mostly talking specifically to me about writing and business. But when I proofread it before sending it off and He said, You know how to do this, you’ve done it before. You’ve just never seen it like this, I knew He was talking about this gift, which, I’ll be honest, I did not feel ready for.

But Vince has been home for three weeks, and he hit the ground running – putting in a lawn, redoing the kitchen floor, finishing his book, working on cover design, and starting to convert the former garage to a rec room, since the Stagecoach couldn’t fit in it anyway.

I, on the other hand, hit the ground and sunk in up to my waist with all day morning sickness and fatigue, taking two naps a day and stumbling around the house in a nauseous haze. My deadlines are not my own; they are not the priority right now. Right now is for resting and getting through this first trimester, and I’m reconciled to be behind schedule by at least a month or two because we are unexpectedly ahead with a baby.

The night after I sent the newsletter, I sat in the bottom of the shower and poured it all out to God, ready to be honest with Him and myself. I didn’t know how we were going to do this. And, since we’re being honest, I still don’t know how we are going to do this.

But I know that we are. Because really, do we ever know how we’re going to do it? I don’t think so.

…Our false self demands a formula before he’ll engage; he wants a guarantee of success, and mister, you aren’t going to get one. So there comes a time in a man’s life when he’s got to break away from all that and head off into the unknown with God. This is a vital part of our journey and if we balk here, the journey ends.

– John Eldredge, Wild at Heart

I don’t know how I did everything when I was in my early twenties and overwhelmed with one baby – that hard transition we go through when suddenly our life is not our own. Did you? I don’t know how I did everything in the transition from one child to two anymore than I know how I did it when we went from two to three, to four, to six when we adopted two at once and life went completely upside down.

I remember doing the math when I was pregnant with Iree and I braced myself, assuming that two kids would be twice the work. And it ended up being easier than I expected. And then I thought, Well, heck, the transition from one to two was so much easier than I expected that, hey, going from two kids to three kids ought to be a piece of cake. Right? But, au contraire! Not for me, at least. That was a rude shock.

Because there is no formula.

But there is a ridiculously impossible rule of opposites that goes something like this: Kid #2 will be the opposite of Kid #1 (so far, so good), and then Kid #3 will be the opposite of both of them (wait, what?), and every succeeding child will still be another contradicting paradox, resulting in a parenting dynamic that looks like a huge polygon with lines connecting all of its vertices, like so.

This is why we were all mostly perfect parents when we only had one kid to figure out, and then as our families grew, it felt like we were being promoted to a new level of discovering our own ineptitude.

We want answers to fix everything and everyone, and He reminds us that we don’t have those answers, and we are confounded.

Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing…Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life; gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.

– Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

It is not what we expected. Our floor is in a constant state of looking like a scene from Home Alone – where it isn’t padded with Nerf darts, it is carpeted with giant 24-piece puzzles.

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.

– Proverbs 25:2, ESV

One of the phrases I hear most (aside from Wow, you sure have your hands full, ugh, so help me) is “I don’t know how you do it.” I don’t know how I do it either. But I don’t know how any of us do it. I don’t think we’re supposed to know. If we knew, we’d take the credit, and it doesn’t belong to us.

That credit goes to the Day Maker who has always done it all and brings miracles even when we don’t think to ask for them, and He will keep doing it.

daylight savings: finding time in the riot and the resting

Posted on by March 13, 2024

Daylight savings threw us off again like it does every year, and the mornings are bright again – snow melting off roofs and pouring down eaves, gravity gathering it into puddles at the lowest common denominator.
daylight savings: finding time in the riot and the resting
Inside, the surfaces are covered in books, videos, craft supplies, and science materials, the products of last-minute school orders to meet our school’s deadline at the end of March. Stacks of books cover the coffee table and overflow onto the floor by the couch, waiting for us to be done perusing long enough to commit each one to their own shelf space. And I’m a little nervous looking at them, because there’s another stack of books right there – the ones I’m already in the middle of – and they’re staring at me.

“Can you believe it? Look at her opening up those new recruits already. She only read five pages outta me last night.”

“She hasn’t looked at me in a week,” mutters another one.

“Please,” Les Mis sighs. “She’s been working on me for over two years and still has 251 pages to go.”

It’s true. If I were better at book hoarding ordering, I’d bust my tail to finish a few books while waiting for an impending order to come in so that when they get here I can look at them guilt-free.

But there’s been no time. Over the last few weeks, the bathroom floor was torn apart and put back together, the water was turned off and turned back on again, the heat was messed up during an inspection and then put right again, all the repairs were finished, and we closed on the house. During those same weeks, we wrote (and edited) 160 thousand words for three projects. Vince took the month off for that purpose, and it was a blissful hurricane. But still, there was almost no time for reading.

And on a perfectly normal day (feel free to insert hysterical laughter over the reckless use of “normal” in this sentence) when he went back to work, we (and by “we” I mean one of the kids, absolutely not me, I had nothing to do with it) broke a shelf in the refrigerator door, spilling its contents all over the floor, but it was no big deal, mostly just glass and raspberry jam over broken kitchen tile, piece of cake, no biggie, and I didn’t even realize how disturbing it looked until I texted Vin a picture of it and he immediately replied, PLEASE TELL ME THAT’S NOT BLOOD.

It wasn’t. Jam, I told you.

The kids kept Finnegan out of the kitchen while I cleaned the mess. By the time I was wiping up the last shards with a damp paper towel we were almost in the clear for the day, but he skidded around the corner, slipped and fell, and tore his – ready for this? – frenulum. Yeah, I didn’t know what that was, either, but it’s the little attach-y thing between your upper gums and top lip. I made frantic phone calls while he was bleeding to two medically-experienced friends, and also learned that it’s a super common injury and generally heals without stitches.

I sent Vince a photo of it, too. He texted back, Oh, that. I’ve torn that plenty. Once knew a guy who cut it with scissors on a dare. To which I immediately replied, PLEASE TELL ME IT WASN’T YOU.

It wasn’t. But this is why his life insurance is almost four times as expensive as mine – because men are ridiculous.

The cost of life insurance was fresh on my mind because I had an appointment scheduled with our insurance guy that day, but somewhere between the fridge and the frenulum he called to warn me about possibly needing to cancel our appointment. An injured moose was in his backyard, and he was on the way to meet the troopers to assess if it needed to be shot and subsequently butchered – because Alaska is also ridiculous.

Like I said, just a normal day. No time for reading those books.

These are our seasons: phases of ebb and flow, resting and rioting, constantly overlapping each other. Usually our routines follow a schedule like the tide, but sometimes we go through a shaking – one area brooks a tidal wave, and its gravity sucks our time and attention away from everything else.

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

– Matthew 10:34, ESV

He was talking about the contrast between the Kingdom and the comfort zone. It’s like Jesus was saying, Spoiler Alert, it’s going to get messy. Get your Xtra Tuffs on.

But this is the same Jesus who said:

Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.

– John 14:27, ESV

Just for extra credit, I checked the Greek and He uses the same word for “peace” both times. But I checked the word for sword, too, and it’s the same one used when referring to the sword of the Spirit (aka the Word of God), here and here.

So we have peace, a sword, and the Word of God, and they merge together as events rock our world, sloshing us around like water in a stormy sea. He is always the anchorage in our unrest. He brings our peace through hearing Him, which leads to heart-wholeness, and this heart-wholeness, this calm we carry in the shaking, is the weapon we use. It wields wisdom, humility, maturity, truth.

He brought peace to men, not the earth, and the logbook of our days proves it. Today, for example – the only road from the Valley into Anchorage is shutdown from an 18-wheeler taking out an overpass, effectively turning Palmer and Wasilla into Hotel California – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…

In lieu of taking the seven (yes, seven, seite, onetwothreefourfivesixseven) hour detour, Vince opted to stay home for the day, resting in the riot. I mean, from the riot. But really, who are we kidding.

We’re using it as found time to help a kid through some tough-love heart issues, and to get some house projects done, and yes, to finish some books – but nope, probably not those school books. We’re wrapping up edits on one project this week before sending it off to the next phase…because books, too, have seasons, and they are also ridiculous.

P.S. Finnegan also learned to use voice-to-text this week, but fortunately he sent it to Vince. It read: PPQQRO HEY WHAT ARE YOU DOING ARE YOU VOICE TEXTING WHAT DOES IT SAY WOW

True story. And, here, bonus – a frenulum.

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correspondence: we are what we keep

Posted on by January 21, 2020

Our boxes are (mostly) unpacked and we (mostly) know where everything is here at the Lighthouse. We can even find obscure utensils in the kitchen. But up ‘til now we had plenty of frantic moments trying to find stuff – for example, when you’re on the phone and need to write down information and the only thing in sight that even remotely resembles a pen is a blue Nerf dart.

correspondence: we are what we keep (copperlight wood)

Or when a child falls outside and comes in bleeding, and you can’t find the bandaids anywhere – not in the boxes, not in the cabinets or bathroom drawers, not on top of the fridge – until finally one of the boys confesses he has a stockpile of them in his closet, which turns out to be a good thing because in lieu of a real bandage I was this close to cleaning out the wound and slapping a feminine hygiene product on it.

Before we moved, I cleaned out all the neglected catch-all spots in the old house – those places that accumulate old papers and nostalgic items, the stuff we don’t know what to do with but aren’t sure we can throw away. And you may not believe this, but I was actually looking forward to the prospect of moving twice because it would force me to purge through these items more than once and really get them weeded out.

It was a brutal gift to be able to sift twice through things that had been shoved aside and buried, a forced priority that I knew would bring freedom once I put the work into it. And cleaning out the physical spaces dovetailed with cleaning out the heart spaces – What am I holding on to? Why am I holding on to it? Are my motives pure? It’s life-giving routine maintenance if we can bring ourselves to do it.

All the closet corners, neglected cabinets, and old boxes were examined. I went through art projects, physical records, old correspondence, concert tickets, birth announcements, photos, and obituaries. The Keep file was slim; the Burn pile fed the woodstove for several nights running.

Some of it was easy to get rid of. Some of it was emotionally hard to sort through. And some things I wanted to keep for the wrong reasons, but He reminded me Love keeps no record of wrongs and I didn’t need to pass a legacy of offense onto my children. So those were burned, too.

I was pretty ruthless about it. Newspaper clippings, letters, a high school friend’s obituary – most of it was prayerfully tossed. I didn’t even keep all my old notes from Vince.

One particular letter I kept, and I never even knew the person who wrote it.

Through an odd string of events, in college I became friends with an elderly woman who I met through a mutual friend at the airport, back when you were actually allowed to meet people as they got off the plane and say goodbye when they left again. We must’ve been there to see off our friend, but I can’t remember the details. I do remember that afterward, she took me out to lunch. She listened to me talk about my struggle as a flailing, failing, compromising Christian, living with my unsaved boyfriend. And she didn’t lecture me; she loved me.

She told me to pray for him. She told me, picking up the glass of water in front of her, that every time I took a drink, to pray that my boyfriend would be thirsty for Jesus. And that I would be thirsty for Jesus.

She must’ve known I wasn’t, but I wanted to be.

We exchanged phone numbers and caught up every few months or so. She sent me cards, and mentored and counseled me through my fledgling relationship with Jesus. A couple years later she came to our wedding, and mentored and counseled me through my fledgling marriage with that unsaved man. Then I got pregnant, and during that pregnancy the man came to know Jesus. And seventeen years ago when the baby was born, I sent her a birth announcement with our Christmas card.

The following March a letter arrived. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but I knew the last name.

Her husband wrote to tell us she had died in her sleep a month earlier. He wrote, Her death was as unexpected as it can be at our age. Our marriage was the best 30 years of my life and I miss her. We received your Christmas card. Congratulations on your new baby. He included a copied slip of her obituary.

I kept it, envelope and all. I knew her for less than five years, but she was one of a few women who poured into me when I had less than nothing to offer back and needed the investment desperately. She helped shape me.

I looked up her husband, thinking he must’ve died years ago. He did; it was shortly after we moved out to the Valley and his obituary said his memorial service was held at our church. We were so new here I’d had no idea.

At that same church a couple of weeks ago I got to help a friend teach a class on prayer. She had collected a bunch of books to give away to the students at the end of class, and after everyone had chosen one, one was left for me – a little green paperback about a Welsh missionary I’d barely heard of.

…the first thought that came to Rees was, Had he correspondence with God? Could he say the Saviour was as real to him as his mother? Did he know God as a daily Presence in his life, or did he only think of Him in the prayer meetings?

– Norman Grubb, Rees Howells Intercessor

I took it home, thumbed through it a little, and put it aside. The next morning I was drinking coffee with Vince and picked it up again. The inside of the front cover had an old bookplate with another friend’s name on it, which was a happy surprise. Houses or books, it’s a joy to live among things that have already been loved by people we love.

Then I noticed that there was another, smaller bookplate under that one. I held it up to the window to read through the page, and I recognized that name and address, too.

Before it belonged to me, or my friend, or the church library, or my other friend, it belonged to my mentor, Virginia.

And it turns out that since God played the nicest trick in the world on us and we’re not moving twice but instead we’re buying the Lighthouse (the story’s here in the newsletter if you missed it) we still had to purge twice. We cleaned everything out when we packed it up, and we combed through it again as we unpacked, before we even knew we were staying.

We’re holding on to the things that make a home – our books and projects, plants and pets, and each other. But if you come over and need a bandaid, well…

Just kidding. We’ve got those, too.

_____________

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