Category Archives: Christmas

rattle my cage: learning what we’re made of when our safe places are shaken

Posted on by December 13, 2024

Snowy gloves pounded the window while the kids played outside. I overheard Vince yell, “We don’t hit windows!” and someone’s answering protest, “I wasn’t hitting, I was knocking!”

And here, friends, is the irony: We survived a 7.2 earthquake with no major structural damage, only to almost lose windows to children beating on them with Gortex mittens.

rattle my cage: learning what we're made of when our safe places are shaken

Local schools shut down for a while from all the damage, but the earthquake happened on a Friday morning and our homeschooled kids fretted all day about finishing their assignments for the week. I tried to talk to them about priorities – we were all alive, people were working to get the power back on, and everyone we knew was safe. As we waded through debris I kept telling them, for crying out loud, earthquakes are educational – you might forget half the stuff you read last week, but you’ll never forget living through this. You never forget learning that your shelters and safe places can be shaken.

I’ll never forget the feeling of being sifted as the house shook east-west, hearing the ground rumble and the walls rattle and glass and pottery shattering everywhere. I’ll never forget jumping out of bed, racing upstairs to find five of the kids on their beds, then running back down two flights of stairs to check on the other two kids, only one of whom was there. I have no idea how I made it up and down all the stairs while nine months pregnant and the house was still shaking. I’ll never forget seeing the entire west wall of library shelving slanted across the room, books smeared knee-high and spilling across stairs and entryway, and wondering if a cat was buried underneath.

We found the cats, all safe, all hiding under the kids’ beds. We found the kid who was missing; he ran outside when the shaking started. And we found the toilet upstairs, our only significant damage, cracked off its bolts on the tile floor — though the antique mirror and framed prints in the same bathroom were still hanging on the walls, just fine.

Early labor (which can last for weeks) started here around the same time as the earthquake. And it’s weird going into labor as aftershocks diminish; it’s like the earthquake in reverse. Contractions increase in intensity to the final, long-expected big event, while the earthquake shocked us in its suddenness and then decrescendoed to these little shakers that we mostly don’t even feel anymore.

Just in time, we officially decided on spelling Kavanagh with no U, in spite of the overwhelming results in our highly scientific polls on social media.  I almost had it – with a U, I mean – arguing with Vince that this isn’t the first baby we’ve given a last name as a first name to, and we didn’t arbitrarily remove vowels for Chamberlain or Reagan just because they seemed extraneous. And since the man is already familiar with Google, Wiki, and Justice Kavanaugh, I went to the next highest authority on the name I could think of: The Mitford series.

It’s the main character’s last name, and I thought, This will prove the spelling without a doubt, no contest. I’ve read this series all the way through twice – once when Vincent was a baby and again when I was pregnant with Afton – and then blew through some of the books again this year as comfort reading during the gruesome months of morning sickness. I know these stories and characters; this series remains the only modern fiction that I truly love.

So I grabbed one of the books off the shelf, confident of winning my case. Turned the pages. Skimmed the lines. Looked for it…hold on just a minute…lo and behold:

Kavanagh. No U.

WHAT.

Well, I’ll be et fer a tater.

I wanted to put more effort into walking him out in those weeks of early labor but a round-ligament-snappy-action prevented it, in league with a hip socket on strike that kept sending me in a slow melt to the floor without warning. (Yay forties!) So instead of causing alarming scenes in public, I made myself useful by staying home for two weeks and making pitiful requests to people around me: Can you bring me water? Can I have the orange yarn and the blue tape measure? Can you put on my socks?

Vin came over, picked up the pair of socks I brought with me, and briefly inspected them before he threw one of them back on the couch and started putting the other one on my foot.

“What, you don’t like that other sock?” I asked him.

“It’s the wrong one,” he answered, wrestling this one up my ankle, angling the heel just right and straightening the toes.

I know where he’s going with this; it’s one of our oldest arguments. For 22 years, since our college days when we first shacked up in Anchorage, he’s tried to convince me that Socks Are Not Interchangeable. Socks, he says, go on certain feet.

“See?” He holds the other one up. “The big toe is longer on this one, so it goes on this foot.” He commences wrestling that one, too, and I can see that he’s sort of, kind of, maybe a little bit right, though I’d never admit it to his face.

But this neediness and confinement also shook my safe places. I know labor and birth; this is our sixth delivery. We like to think that experience prepares us for what to expect. And sometimes it does.

But other times, it deceives us – not because our expectations are wrong, but because, however much it is, our experience still isn’t enough. Our expectations might not be big enough. Our endeavors might be too safe, or our safe places might be too small. Our priorities might be too narrow, focused on marking tasks off our lists and missing the fact that we can do truly hard things; we can live through and thrive in far more than we give ourselves credit for.

God has been preparing us for familiarity to take a flying leap for a long time. Last Christmas, when we didn’t know where He was sending us, He said, When you find yourself where you never thought you’d be, I’m positioning you for something you never could have planned. He kept saying, It’s a surprise, Love. Sometimes the surprise starts off with a shaking.

And then in April when we knew big changes were ahead but didn’t know Kavanagh was one of them, He said, You know how to do this, you’ve done it before. You’ve just never seen it like this. And we’ve been trying to roll with all of the surprises ever since.

So at 3am one morning, when early labor suddenly looked less like aftershocks and more like the big event, and the prospect of waking seven kids up to go to two different places in the middle of the night seemed so much harder than just having a friend come over and letting everyone else sleep, we rolled with that, too. After months of planning on a homebirth at the lighthouse, we threw out that plan and drove to the birth center in the wee hours of the morning. Just like we did for our last two babies.

The highway was snowy, the sky was dark; the midwives had the tub running when we got there because they knew how fast it went last time. And they knew the story of the one kid who was supposed to be a waterbirth but ended up being delivered on the bed while the tub was still filling, before the assistant arrived.

That, too, was the end of familiarity, because no matter how many times you’ve done this or what patterns you’ve come to expect, there’s no guarantee you won’t get your cage rattled. And I did. All our birth experiences have gotten easier and faster, except this one.

And “labor” doesn’t come close to expressing the amount of work and travail put into birthing a human…or anything else. We use the word so much that it has lost its impact as we gloss over the clawing, writhing pain of turning yourself inside out to do the work of bringing something (or someone) into the world.

The heat was terrible. She felt scorched to the bone, but it did not touch her strength. It grew hotter and hotter. She said, “I can bear it no longer.” Yet she went on.

– George MacDonald, The Golden Key

He is our stability, with us, among us, upon us in the heat and the friction and the shaking, regardless of what everything looks like around us or feels like within us.

After twenty-three hours of off-and-on that eventually progressed to hours of hard labor, we met the one we’ve been waiting for. And he is so worth it.

So often we give up on opportunity or calling because we think, I could never do that. That is for other people, stronger people, bigger people, people who are different from me. But what we really mean is, I don’t want my world to be shaken. Our excuse is our inadequacy but what really stops us is fear, or laziness, or a combination of the two.

Because labor is work, and shaking, and life-changing. We pooh-pooh ourselves while putting those who do bigger, harder things on a pedestal, while God wants us to see what we are really made of. We want a simple to-do list, a school chart of basic assignments to check off. But God calls many of us to the earthquake and the aftermath, saying, Hey Love, you have no idea what you’re capable of.

You’ll never forget living through this.

______

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under pressure: staying ahead when the chase is on

Posted on by June 16, 2023

Eight months pregnant, which means thirty-six weeks down, and four (maybe) to go. I’m at the clumsy stage, and I don’t mean cute-clumsy – I mean, I am JarJar Binks playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey after drinking three shots of espresso spiked with whiskey. I can barely put on socks without help, and attempting to put shoes or pants on while standing up is now prohibited.

under pressure: staying ahead when the chase is on

We’re also at the stage where the general public feels free to let loose with comments like, “Wow, you have got to be overdue by now” and “It doesn’t look like you could possibly get any bigger” and other thoughtful, sensitive, encouraging insights. But that’s okay, because it coincided with me losing my filter around the same time, and I don’t mind responding like an old woman who has lost all sense of manners, tact, and decorum…and let’s be honest, those already aren’t my strong suits. Sometimes the snark flies fast and furious.

Example: “Wow, this is your eighth child!! Don’t you know how that happens?”

Well, yes – 21 years of a (mostly) rocking marriage. Do you have any idea how many times we haven’t gotten pregnant? Thousands. Bless your heart…

But it’s a season of speeding up when it seems like things ought to be slowing down. We ought to be resting, nesting, and preparing before Kavanagh comes, but his birth coincides with the holidays and book launches and accelerating ministry. And none of those things are negotiables that fall into the “everything is permissible for me, but not all things are beneficial” category – they’re all good and necessary right now.

Everyone was much too tired to speak or eat. The Horses, without waiting to be unsaddled, lay down at once. So did Aravis and Shasta.

About ten minutes later the careful Hwin said, “But we mustn’t go to sleep. We’ve got to keep ahead of that Rabadash.”

‘No,” said Bree very slowly. “Mustn’t go to sleep. Just a little rest.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

This is my favorite of the Narnia books; I don’t know how many times I’ve read it or how many times I’ve quoted it in posts, chapters, and teachings. This is the story that speaks to me about His Presence in all of our seasons. And here, the two Humans and the two Horses are running ahead of an evil army, to bring warning in time to a kingdom that doesn’t know it is under attack.

“P-please,” said Hwin, very shyly, “I feel just like Bree that I can’t go on. But when Horses have humans (with spurs and things) on their backs, aren’t they often made to go on when they’re feeling like this? And then they find they can. I m-mean – oughtn’t we to be able to do more even, now that we’re free? It’s all for Narnia.”

And here, God is working on my expectations and shifting my paradigms of what ought to be, as things continue to ramp up even when we’d normally take it all down several notches.

….In reality she was quite right, and if Bree had had a Tarkaan on his back at that moment to make him go on, he would have found that he was good for several hours’ hard going. But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.

We often think that even the presence of pressure is wrong. My train of thought usually runs something like this: If I feel pressure, that means I’m stressed, and if I’m stressed, it means I’m not calm, and if I’m not calm, I’m not trusting God, and if I’m not trusting God, I must be fearful. It eventually equates pressure with fear or sin. But what if that’s not always the truth?

“I hope we’re in time,” murmured Hwin.

Then they began going up, slowly and zigzagging a good deal, for the hills were steep….

“Hullo!” he said suddenly. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” said Bree, turning round. Hwin and Aravis did the same.

“That,” said Shasta, pointing. “It looks like smoke. Is it a fire?”

“Sand-storm, I should say,” said Bree.

“Not much wind to raise it,” said Aravis.

“Oh!” exclaimed Hwin. “Look! There are things flashing in it. Look! They’re helmets – and armor. And it’s moving: moving this way.”

“By Tash!” said Aravis. “It’s the army. It’s Rabadash.”

“Of course it is,” said Hwin. “Just what I was afraid of. Quick! We must get to Anvard before it.”

We tend to interpret pressure as a lack of faith, or poor planning – and sometimes it is those things, but not always. Not right now in this season we’re in. Because sometimes the pressure is there to provide safety and margin so we can relax and rest later, so that having done all, we can stand.

This race was very grueling for the Horses. As they topped each ridge they found another valley and another ridge beyond it; and though they knew they were going in more or less the right direction, no one knew how far it was to Anvard….

“Quick! Quick!” shouted Aravis. “We might as well not have come at all  if we don’t reach Anvard in time. Gallop, Bree, gallop. Remember you’re a war horse.”

….And certainly both Horses were doing, if not all they could, all they thought they could; which is not quite the same thing.

We experience pressure in labor so we can deliver our babies. We go through pressure in labor to deliver anything else, also.

He’s teaching me to abide hard amid the increase in activity. To take every component and event and non-negotiable to Him, one thing at a time, and ask Him about it – keeping short accounts to continually communicate and hear His will in what to do.

At that moment everyone’s feelings were completely altered by a sound from behind. It was not the sound they had been expecting to hear – the noise of hoofs and jingling armor, mixed, perhaps, with Calormene battle-cries. Yet Shasta knew it at once. It was the same snarling roar he had heard that moonlit night when they first met Aravis and Hwin. Bree knew it too…And Bree now discovered that he had not really been going as fast – not quite as fast – as he could.

Seasons of pressure are no time to take things for granted, and we’re learning (again) to depend on Him and abide at a deeper level than we otherwise would if it was a more comfortable, slow time. It’s not that we’re not resting. But we’re not resting as much as we normally would.

 “It’s not fair,” thought Shasta. “I did think we’d be safe from lions here!”

He looked over his shoulder. Everything was only too clear. A huge tawny creature, its body low to the ground…was behind them. And it was nearer every second and half second.

In our house, in this season, we are writing, formatting, and finalizing the Companion Journal to Oh My Soul, and praying, discipling, and ministering. We are finishing a term of homeschool and pushing through a few last deadlines before December, when early labor will probably start in earnest. And amid All The Things, we’ll get a Christmas tree and lights up, spend days and evenings with friends, and nest the house into a frenzy as we prepare for a homebirth here at the Lighthouse.

And in your house, you’re doing All The Things, too. The trick is not to get out of as many things as possible, or to do as many things as possible, but to do everything He calls us to in His perfect time…which is often different from what we expect. Sometimes, harder than we expect. And sometimes, faster than we expect.

The Lion chases them and spurs them faster to safety; without His pressure they never would have made it in time.

He is the same Lion who chases us. Every time we’ve run with Him, we’ve been right on time. He’s leading us to birth and new life so we can rout and vanquish the enemy.

____

Related: How do we deal with the pressure and still find margin, creating a sustainable culture of rest and refilling? The November newsletter is all about this and it comes out next week. Subscribe here if you need to.

starry night: when we find ourselves in unexpected territory

Posted on by December 13, 2024

Not sure if it’s denial or just complete rebellion, but we broke out a 1000-piece puzzle to work on for Christmas, even though we’re moving in a few weeks.

And, friends, this is not your normal puzzle. No, no, this is Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a thousand pieces of beautiful insanity requiring a magnifying glass, good lighting, and (probably) an inordinate amount of sheer stubbornness.

So, I’m in.

starry night: when we find ourselves in unexpected territory

Up close, Starry Night has trillions of faint lines that look like bones – a tibia here, a broken fibula there – and the subtlest shades of color make the light seem to fall against blue-black darkness. It has scratchy marks you’d never notice until looking intently at a magnified thousandth of it. None of the pieces give any indication what the big picture looks like.

We’re making slow progress on it while procrastinating through more responsible moving and house-selling duties. The last time we worked on puzzles was when I was pregnant with Finnegan, and I could justify slowness and rest with the contractions of early labor and all the other discomfort of late pregnancy. And in a way, we’re right here again – we’ve been pregnant for months, bursting at the seams in this house we’re overflowing out of, and restless for this new season, new structure, new routines.

We’ve been in labor for this move for a long time. Years.

We thought we wouldn’t be here this year. Actually, two years ago we thought we were spending our last Christmas here, and last year we were absolutely certain we would be living somewhere else by now.

But we’re still here. It’s a “finally suddenly” feeling; it seems too fast after all the slow waiting, and I want to hold on to certain pieces while flinging others into oblivion. It all melds together though. Just like days, years, memories, brushstrokes – they refuse to sort cleanly; they bleed into each other.

We are hip-deep in selling the house – repairs, paperwork, phone calls, oh my – and since it’s December, we’re also up to our ears in gatherings and festivities. Texts about scheduling and signatures come in rapid fire, and my phone sounds like it’s dinging “Carol of the Bells” on just one note.

We strive for margin, and in our striving sometimes we lose more white space. We imagine life to look a certain way, and it violently veers an entirely different direction.

I need to stop for a minute, slow down, and put a few of these pieces together; get some perspective.

I turned 41 last week.

(This is a good time to mention that last summer, Chamberlain asked what scallops were – lines, not shellfish – and I told her they were sort of like waves, and pointed to a nearby wooden crate with scalloped edges as an example. “Oh, like those?” she asked. “Those are scallops?” She was pointing to the wrinkles on my forehead.)

I’m 41 now, and we’re moving, and none of this looks the way I thought it would. We have a back-up plan to rent from a generous friend, but we haven’t found the right house to purchase, we don’t know exactly where we’re going, and we’re not really sure what we’re doing.

I’m not really sure what God’s doing with us.

But I’ve been looking way too closely at one or two pieces of this, and they are only thousandths of the picture. I know He sees the whole picture. I know He has a thousand reasons for having us where we are. But not knowing what those reasons are, or where He is sending us, or what He is doing, is hard.

I told a friend that this not knowing is doing many of the same things to me that fasting does – it brings up the dross, the hard questions, and tests my willingness to receive hard answers.

It also tests my ability to trust Him for good answers.

He and I have been talking about it a lot (a lot) lately. I’ve asked Him over and over, and He keeps saying, It’s a surprise, Love.

I’ve mouthed off something about not liking surprises and He hasn’t stricken me down. I’m the one who finds presents early, shakes them and squeezes them, and hides them in new places just to be a stinker.

Sheer stubbornness. See, told you.

But the season feels off, unfamiliar – it’s not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s not what we envisioned. We don’t picture the cramped house, people overflowing out of bedrooms, the special needs that interrupt daily interaction and normal activities, and children losing years to poor choices and mental illness. I talked to a woman recently who is also struggling through this season, wanting life to be the way it is supposed to be, instead of revolving around her husband’s addiction.

It’s not the way it’s supposed to be, because we never envision the angry, distant family member, or the job loss, or the person who’s always been there but suddenly isn’t because death took them too early.

None of it is what we expected, dreamed of, or asked for.

He meets us in the mess we are in, whether the mess is from our own choices, or the choices of someone else, or because He has a surprise in store to teach us that we’re not in control.

He’s telling me that when you find yourself where you never thought you’d be, He’s positioning you for something you never could have planned.

On that starry night, Mary probably never imagined her first experience of childbirth and motherhood would occur in unfamiliarity, in a barn, in the dirt.

Maybe Jesus was born where He was because we needed to know it is okay for things to not look the way they’re supposed to. Maybe it was so we’d know we have a King who doesn’t fit the mold. Maybe it was a thousand different reasons.

Maybe one of the reasons is to show us that our expectations and plans fall short. Maybe we would settle for mediocrity when we were made for more.

…. The rest of his days he spent…wondering and pondering why he had not found a way to the East. He blamed the unknown continent that barred his way. It never occurred to him to be grateful that the unknown American continent had been in his way. Otherwise he and his men would have starved to death on the endless way to Asia.

For the world was three times as wide around as Columbus had believed.

– Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaire,  Columbus

Maybe we dream too small, too stubborn.

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

– Ephesians 3:20-21, ESV

Saul the Pharisee never dreamed of becoming Paul the Evangelist. Columbus never planned on discovering America. John Adams, Abraham Lincoln – neither of them had any idea as children that they would be presidents who would direct and define our nation’s history.

And until the angel told her, Mary never imagined being the mother of the Messiah.

But when her plans were changed she gave the sacrifice of praise. Mary sang her magnificat though she never imagined being pregnant and unwed, shunned and suspected by society for the rest of her life. When she was engaged to Joseph, she didn’t think her wedding would be compromised by pregnancy and scandal.

All through history, none of the great figures and heroes had any idea what the big picture of their life would look like. They only saw a thousandth of it at a time, like you and me.

Except for Jesus. He was the only one who knew what He was getting into – way beyond inconvenience and into the depths of messy humanity. That’s where He chose to meet us.

And He is still meeting us here, right now, wherever we go.

__________

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