Category Archives: marriage

great(er) expectations: when His ways are not our ways

Posted on by August 23, 2018

I think I forgot to mention it last time, so let’s pretend it was because I’m a good wife and didn’t want to rub in the fact that VINCE WAS WRONG IN GUESSING THE GENDER OF THE BABY (ahem) but for the record…we’re having a boy. Ta da!

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His name is Kavanagh and we’re at 23 weeks, and both of us are doing great – one morning I ate one bowl of vanilla ice cream, some stewed peaches, two shots of espresso with milk, three strips of bacon, two pieces of bread, some lettuce, tomato, mayo and pepper.

So, yes, that means I had coffee, ice cream with fruit, and a BLT for breakfast, and I’m eating like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Sometimes, most of the time, I go through these days like it’s no big deal because, well, this isn’t our first rodeo. I can feel him kicking right now, and usually it’s familiar enough to not pay attention to. But there are other times when I stop to think about it and realize we are having another baby, there is a tiny human in there, and I’m so stunned I hardly know what to think.

We never in a million years expected this little guy, but this year has shocked us with so many things we never expected, we should get used to it, I guess. His ways are not our ways.

Our expectations are wildly deceptive. I scrolled facebook and saw an ad that said, “Dream of being published?” featuring a gorgeous 20-something, tan, white-blonde girl in a heavy sweater, short-shorts, and messy bun; she sat in a pristine room with an airy curtain and smiled at her iPad. So glam. So attractive.

So false. Don’t fall for it.

Here I am, sitting on the bed with the laptop, next to two cats and a basket full of unfolded laundry (hashtag glamlife), staring at the screen for twenty minutes and getting nothing else accomplished. Let’s not talk about what my hair looks like.

The mission, should I choose to accept it, is to tweak an article. You know, just a couple of simple fixes – add a space for a link here, make a few statements about something there, no biggie – and the editor says, It won’t take you more than a few minutes.

Ha. You can always tell someone who’s not a writer by a statement like that.

He is sort of right; the actual typing will probably take all of 22 seconds. It’s the thinking part that takes at least 45 minutes of staring, typing, back spacing, and deleting until everything clarifies into the appropriate “tweak.” Yep. Piece of cake, no problem. Twenty minutes down, twenty-five minutes to go. Yay.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

– Thomas Mann

That girl in the ad was smiling at her tablet, for crying out loud – not throwing it across the room in utter and complete vexation at 224 pages of misloaded documents and jacked up indentations and formatting. Those lying marketers.

There was no mention of her messy kitchen heaped with dishes and neglected breakfast leftovers, or the piles of papers and to-do lists all over the desk and coffee table, or the computer cords stationed throughout the house so you can charge whenever the low battery alert comes on, or the stifled expletives when documents won’t load correctly on various platforms.

Maybe I should do something with my hair, I thought. Maybe that would make this feel more glam.

(Eh. It helps a little, but still doesn’t fix the formatting in Word for me.)

But we’re just as guilty of having wildly deceptive expectations at the other end of the spectrum, too. We aim too low, we expect too little, and we have not because we ask not because we doubt too much.

We think we will never get there (wherever “there” is). We think we’re not good enough. We think we have to settle. We think our child will never get their act together. We think too much of ourselves and too little of God, under the ruse of piously thinking we’re doing the right thing by not asking too much or expecting too much, because (insert pulpit voice) God’s ways are not our ways, when we forget that that is true because He is so much better than we are…not worse.

I just finished reading Job. This was also not my first rodeo.

I’ve probably read Job between 12-15 times in the last twenty years, but this time I finally realized why reading it has always been a drag for me (is it for you, too?).

It’s not because the subject is about suffering. We read about suffering in pretty much every other book in the Bible, and in most stories in general. But I realized I get frustrated because when I read the Bible, I’m going there to learn about God’s character, and Job primarily isn’t about God’s character – it’s about human nature. And us humans, we’re a piece of work.

These verses are about our presumptions, pride, know-it-all-ness, superiority, and desire to grasp for reason and accusation when life doesn’t make sense. The verses in Job are, for the most part, absolutely no good for a cute Instagram meme (be skeptical if you see one, and check to see what part of Job it’s from) for the same reason we wouldn’t quote the lies of Pharoah in Exodus or the threats of Tobiah and Sanballat in the book of Nehemiah. We can’t take these verses singly without first checking whom (or Whom) they apply to.

Taken alone, they are only half the truth. They are our ways, not His ways; they are the expectations at the low end of the spectrum.

Once I understood that, reading Job this time around was a joy. Well, maybe not a joy, but at least more encouraging, because human nature is fascinating, yes?

And the Lord said to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.”

– Job 40:1-2, ESV

Sometimes I’m a slow learner, which is why I’ve needed to read it so many times to understand even this much. It’s probably why He’s surprised us twice now: He is continually calling us to raise our expectations.

This is where God calibrates our nature against His.

Our ways would’ve had us done having kids before Finnegan. We would’ve missed out on his bright sunshine, and all the joy Kavanagh will bring with him.

Our ways would’ve struggled and striven for another ten, twenty years, never finishing books and wondering why hope deferred was a constant way of life. But Vince’s book releases next Tuesday, and my next one comes out in October.

Our ways would’ve ruined our marriage, our parenting, our friendships, and future ministry. But He has us growing and learning in each area.

Our ways are not His ways…and He says it as an assurance, not a threat or veiled burden, as it is sometimes communicated to be.

My way would have me throwing the laptop across the room when adding page numbers ruined the spacing of the last half of the manuscript.

But His way is to bring calm, so I can learn how to fix it, and approach the dilemma as writers have for centuries – which, of course, is researching Youtube videos until we get it figured out, and then watching funny cat videos on Facebook for stress reduction therapy.

Which, also for the record, is probably the real reason the lady was smiling at her tablet.

routine maintenance: when life is under construction

Posted on by June 23, 2018

Fourteen weeks. Past most of the morning sickness, still soooper tired off and on, and always hungry. As I type this, a salad bowl the size of a small bathtub is next to my laptop.

Vince has been home for the last seven of those weeks and we’re (slowly) getting into a routine. I’m starting to get some work in. Not as much as I’d like, but now I’m more productive than the cats, who just nap on piles of laundry all day and chase after loose Nerf darts.

routine maintenance: when life is under construction

I’ve been plowing (ahem – “plowing” should be loosely interpreted) through my book to get it ready for the editor in two weeks. Vin has been working on his website and it’s entertaining in a sadistic sort of way, watching him struggle through the aggravation of navigating WordPress’s bleep-bloop room like I’ve done for years; now he yells at his computer as much as I do. It’s sort of like those contraction and labor simulator belts that let husbands in on the joy of pain in childbirth.

The kids still do school a few hours a day because we’re fun parents like that and don’t like reviewing how to add and subtract in the fall. Finnegan roams around with his own agenda, playing with a pair of tongs he pilfered from the kitchen. Or drawing on himself and the floor with dry erase marker. Or licking the solidified residue at the bottom of Vince’s ice cream dish from the night before.

But at least he’s moved past the phase of dumping popcorn kernels onto the kitchen floor, or trying to put Reagan’s barrettes in his hair, or walking down the hallway with no pants, but wearing someone’s pink slipper on one foot and a blue slipper on the other.

Toddlers are awesome. I still can’t believe we’re doing this all over again.

I love routines, but they’re hard to fight for during seasons like this, and it’s going to be like this for a while. Life happens – a new baby, a major illness, a move, a new nap schedule, a new school or work schedule – and our structure is shaken and sifted. Sometimes I am shaken and sifted with it.

House-wise in this season, we’re used to the noise of traffic, trains, and planes from JBER flying over us. And now we’re getting acquainted with summer noises, like every night around 10 or 11pm – it’s still bright as day then – when someone buzzes around the trails on a machine that sounds like a hybrid between a moped and a weedwhacker.

Added to that, our stretch of the highway is under construction right now, with all the rumbling, beeping, digging, and spraying, and if you listen closely, there’s probably also an undertone of children whining and exasperated drivers using expletives at various decibel levels.

For example, when I tried to leave our neighborhood Wednesday night: My blinker was blinking left, I was in the lane that turns left, and the way left was clear since traffic was blocked in both directions, but the flagger sent me north toward Willow instead. This is a good time to let you know that I still need Jesus.

I buttonhooked at the first opportunity and came back south, and within a quarter mile a line of cones appeared out of nowhere dividing the two lanes in front of me – no flagger, no signs, no indication of what the cones were there for or which lane to take. Being lazy, I stayed in my own lane, which is a good thing because around the bend in two-tenths of a mile, the other lane was closed off with cones. Whiskey-Tango-Fill-in-the-blank. Anyone in it would have to stop on the highway, get out of their vehicle, and creatively rearrange cones on behalf of the DOT in order to escape the maze and continue on their way.

Passing a mile of vehicles headed north at a standstill, I determined to take the scenic route home. It worked until I was within sight of our house – I could see the eave of our roof from where we were parked on the highway.

I know the construction is for maintenance. The disruption is to a good purpose, just like the life events that rock the routines I lean on, sifting and stretching me. The truth is, I always need Jesus – and sometimes He sees fit to shake my complacency and remind me how much.

Plenty of things are still the same and may never change. Finnegan, at almost any time of day, can be found eating oatmeal and drinking his tea from a sippy cup, flaunting the British side of his heritage in all its glory. Meanwhile, also at almost any time of day, bigger kids loiter in the kitchen like it’s some recreational arena, getting in the way of my genuine, desperate American need for bacon and coffee.

And at almost any time of night, Alaska is still awake and making noise, though we don’t even notice most of it anymore.

Except for the other night. Around 12:30 when we were climbing into bed, we heard the familiar high-pitched, cranking buzz going down the road.

“The guy riding the weedwhacker is running late tonight,” I said.

Vince turned off the light. “Probably got stuck in construction traffic.”

something out of nothing: how He moves us

Posted on by April 29, 2024

Our thoughts turn into prayers, and I don’t know if they were our thoughts first or His. But when our thoughts are His thoughts, our prayers become reality because He is such a troublemaker sometimes.

something out of nothing: how He moves us

There was no railroad there now, but someday the long steel tracks would lie level on the fills and through the cuts, and trains would come roaring, steaming and smoking with speed. The tracks and the trains were not there now, but Laura could see them almost as if they were there.

Suddenly she asked, “Pa, was that what made the very first railroad?”

“What are you talking about?” Pa asked.

“Are there railroads because people think of them first when they aren’t there?”

Pa thought a minute. “That’s right,” he said. “Yes, that’s what makes things happen, people think of them first.”

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake

Two years ago I wrote a list of things I would do if I had more time – all the millions of things we couldn’t do because Vince commuted (and did all of our family shopping) for almost 60 hours a week – and none of them were ambitious. They were pathetically in the vein of survival mode.

Find a therapist for one of the kids. Attend FreshStart with one of the other kids. Read all the books and watch all the videos and resources and trainings for our kids’ special needs. Buy pajamas for Finnegan, and get a haircut, and start putting effort into cooking better meals again. Clean the bathroom, and eat breakfast before noon.

Most of them never got done. Well, sometimes I cleaned the bathroom. And the older kids learned to cook.

Many of those things, looking back, I wish we could have done somehow. Seems like we would have benefited from them, but for crying out loud, we must breathe sometime. And there was no time.

We wanted to be together more, and together less. We needed one-on-one time with each of the kids and each other. Vince needed to be home more for the kids, and I needed to be out of the house more for my own sanity.

But other things were on that list, too. We both wanted to be more involved in ministry. I wanted to visit my grandma more often. I wanted to write daily, and study, and not feel guilty about it because there was always something else I should be doing.

I wanted to finish the books I’d started. And Vince did, too.

And maybe you noticed – I purposefully left that goal vague when I wrote it, unsure if I meant the books I’d started reading or the books I’d started writing. Because I wanted both, but was afraid to hope that big.

It was a someday-but-probably-never kind of daydream.

Until about five weeks ago.

What results is almost miraculous. We create new alternatives – something that wasn’t there before….What is synergy? Simply defined, it means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means that the relationship which the parts have to each other is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Five weeks ago, Vince went back to work after taking a month off to finish some backburner projects we’d been praying about for years. On the last day of his vacation, we closed on this house. And we felt strongly that even though he was going back to work, it was only temporary.

We had no idea how it could possibly be temporary; we only knew that God had been talking to us for a long time about a big move and it didn’t just mean our physical location.

We asked Him for years for this move, and He finally said, How bad do you want it? If I give it to you, will you really take it?

The next day was the day of the fridge and the frenulum, and in that post I mentioned a phone meeting with our insurance guy. What I didn’t mention was that during that discussion we learned that a smallish, forgotten nest egg we’d plugged away at for years had actually made itself useful.  And God asked us, Do you believe Me now?

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don’t know what new dangers and challenges you’ll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness.

– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

And it’s sort of like when we got married: We eloped, but we talked to my dad ahead of time. Just like then, Vin was a little terrified to tell him, but also just like then, Dad was full of encouragement and good counsel. He said, in so many words, you have to take the risk to know if you can make it.

So, friends: Vince has worked for the same company for 21 years, and he put in his notice this week.

We’ll be home together, out and about together, and working together and separately. His first book is already off to the editor and should launch early this summer. My second book is a month or two behind his (can’t wait to show you the cover!), and the third should come out this fall.

We have a kid who’s on his last year home with us, and we want to do this thing together. We have six other kids we want to make great memories with, and we want to show them what’s beyond the fifty mile radius around us. We haven’t ventured past that in over five years.

We have a bazillion other ideas involving print and publishing, business and ministry, fellowship and community, deep and wide. But mostly, we are available for whatever He has for us, because He is always making something out of nothing. And He’s still moving us.