daylight savings: finding time in the riot and the resting

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

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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in port

We knew the tether that held us to it was thinning when we started calling it “the old house” instead of “home.”

in port

We ate weird meals in attempt to clean out the fridge and freezer until we started sleeping at our new place. One day I served biscuits and gravy, which sounds normal except that the biscuits were actually English muffins and I served them with a side of lettuce (I mean, salad) and the last tablespoon of some balsamic dressing from the 1940s.

That night I wandered through the kitchen looking for dinner, but I’d already fed the kids all the leftovers, I didn’t want to cook, didn’t want to scramble up a couple of eggs, and didn’t want to eat the last of the stale bag of tortilla chips. So I took one for the team, and dove into the vanilla ice cream and topped it with cranberry syrup.

The walls were bare and our voices echoed. We touched up paint and trim, using a wood stain marker over every scratch we’ve made over the last ten years in attempt to conceal the fact that we’ve had enough children here to populate Gilligan’s Island.

The highest concentration of scratches was on the corner cabinet by the lazy Susan, where Sophie used to paw when we were slicing meat for sandwiches, cooking burgers, or carving the turkey. I cried covering them; her grave is in the woods over there, and I grieved over leaving it more than anything else.

I moved to the stairs and worked my way up that railing with the stain marker, covering pale spots where the wood was exposed, trying to make them blend and look new again. We put on a lot of miles here in ten years.

It’s a beautiful house, but it’s been loved and lived in, and we hope the new owners appreciate it – not just the work we did to prepare it for them, but that they appreciate the home that’s been made here and continue that legacy. I hope they know the wear and tear are from living life, and they will have many years of adding their own dings and scratches.

Iree said she hopes the people who bought the house have kids so the woods, trails, and clearings will still be played in, instead of growing over neglected. And I hope the owners of our new house – wherever that is – feel the same way.

I hope they’re being good stewards, cleaning up, touching up, praying for us. I hope they love their house and have similar mixed feelings about leaving it. I hope they’ll want us to love it there.

Maybe houses are like people: As children, those of us who have learned attachment early are able to attach in healthy ways later, and maybe a house that has been loved-in by one family is increasingly able to be loved-in by another family.

During our last week there I was mostly on an even keel, but at times out of nowhere the thought of not being in these walls made me all emotional. Overwhelmed. Leaky. After so much waiting and working to move, suddenly it was time and I wasn’t sure if I’d crossed everything off the list.

We get this way with life events and transitions. Am I ready? Did I do everything I was supposed to? Do we have everything we need?

I berated myself because it’s just walls, floors, and air, and I’m not sentimental. But it’s also memories, and more than that – it’s a milestone.

Because what we really mean when we ask all those questions is, Does this mean I passed the test?

This was the place we brought four kids home to. This was the place we learned to fight for healing in the midst of black brokenness. This is the place we got our war wounds, where we learned about friendly fire and mutiny, and about brotherhood and who we bury the body with. It’s where we learned that fear dreads the curveball, but faith knows God will catch it.

This was our battleground.

Just air, and space, and walls, and floors. But the Breath of God moved in this place.

The morning of the day we moved, I prepped dinner in the old kitchen so it would be easier to make in the new kitchen that night. As I chopped veggies, this song was on repeat and my eyes started welling and stinging, I swear it was the onions – and I threw the kitchen window open to 17 degrees and prayed it wouldn’t kill my aloe plant before we moved it to the new house.

We ran out of time to finish the puzzle and in disgust resorted to breaking it into chunks to pack in its original box. It was a sorry mess when I opened it again; the edges of every section had crumbled in the transfer and loose pieces that I’m certain had been fixed in place were everywhere.

This is ironic, I thought. You think you’re putting something together, and this is what happens.

But we’d already learned that starting over is not the same as going back to the beginning. Sometimes it moves the starting line forward. Sometimes it means the tether has snapped, and a gust of wind fills the sails to send you where you needed to go.

He who walks righteously and speaks uprightly,

who despises the gain of oppressions,

who shakes his hands, lest they hold a bribe,

who stops his ears from hearing of bloodshed

and shuts his eyes from looking on evil,

he will dwell on the heights;

his place of defense will be the fortresses of rocks;

his bread will be given him;

his water will be sure.

– Isaiah 33:15-16, ESV

And that is where we are right now. In between, if you missed the newsletter, we’re renting a beautiful place from a friend while we wait for the next direction.

We’re on a bluff and the views are incredible; we can see for miles and pray over the highway in both directions. Our kids have room, our books have shelves, and after three tries, we even figured out where to put the catbox.

It’s a lighthouse for us, a temporary refuge to recuperate and rehabilitate after so many years in choppy waters.

Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience – or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.

– Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

It’s not where we thought we’d be, not where we planned to be. We’re not sure how long we’ll be here.

And now that we’re looking back, we can see that that’s been the story of our last couple years. Except before, we thought we knew what we were doing, and now we know that we don’t…and we’re okay with that.

We’ve made port in safe harbor. He is the anchorage. We’ll rest until He moves us again.