Stay Soft

It came to me in the car, during one of the 26 hours a day I spend taxiing myself or my people the approximate distance of From Here To Eastern Siberia And Back.

Twelve Times.

Squared.

It likely was fueled by a giant mocha that was predestined to spill all over my lap, but the revelation that made its way across my brain was this: I’ve spent the last 44 years waiting for life to just calm down. I’ve put valuable pursuits off while waiting until life settles. Until things stop breaking and people stop being jerks and appliances stop needing repairs and relationships stop needing so much time and attention. Until people stop hurting my feelings and money stops running out and to-dos stop buzzing around my head like pests. What I understand now is that life calming down is nothing more than the fantastic mythical unicorn: It doesn’t exist in the wild, or at least in these parts.

When I walk (or, more accurately, drive) through life waiting for easy things, waiting for an end to inconvenience or to downright hurtful moments, I begin a slow burn toward resentment. I begin to become bitter and angry toward the situations and people in my life who just aren’t making it simpler for me. I begin to be prickly and hard and rage-y, and doesn’t that just sound like the person you want to spill a mocha at Starbucks with? But I don’t like hanging out with that version of myself much either so I am learning to remind myself, over and over again, despite the hardness and toughness of life, to Stay Soft.

All around us, we feel the pressure and the pushing to be hard: to have a hard body, to draw a hard line, to conquer a hard challenge, to take a hard stance.

Stay soft.

Life will hand us challenge after challenge. We can try to protect ourselves, hide ourselves away. But hurt will find us.

Stay soft.

We must not let the painful things make us hard, because in that rigidness, we will fracture and crack and splinter.  And we will cause others to break against our unyieldingness.

Stay soft.

We can be the paradox: That softness is strong, that gentleness is greatness, that giving is gaining, that peacemaking is powerful.

Stay soft.

We can stop letting the fire of life’s agonizing pain burn us down to a hard lump of rock. Instead, we can let that hurt become a match, a light to the fire inside of us. The heartbreak and the injustice we have suffered can burn up and become fuel, not for more destruction but for the battle of fighting more injustice and for the comforting of heartbreak all around us. We can let our own fire become a torch with which we light the lamp of the next person, and the next, and the next.

Stay soft.

It means we will get pummeled again, you and I. But the armor of anger offers no protection anyway; it is more a bludgeon than a shield.

Stay soft.

In a world of cynicism and bitterness and rage, we can be Hope-bringers and Peacemakers and yes, Fighters, too. It won’t be by accident. It won’t be simple. It will only come as we walk into the dark cave of pain with others, sitting with them, learning from them. It will only come as we let ourselves wait in the hurt, not passively, letting hurt do its work of smoothing our rough parts away. But we can’t stay in the dark cave. We must always look for the light…the fire of our fellow torch-lighters, the faint glow of the sky outside, the light that will always lead us home.

Softly.

Outside of the Lines

It was just a routine check-up. He was an oral surgeon, and I expected him to examine my teeth, do an X-ray or three, and send me on my way with a $1262 bill for the 10 minutes of his time, so it surprised me when he finished his exam, leaned back with arms crossed and eyes on my face, and asked my age. Never mind the fact that I'd just filled out my birthdate in triplicate on approximately 18 forms during my sojourn in the waiting room. I informed him that I was, indeed, 44.

And that's when he gave me his treatment plan:

"Almost everything I do now is Botox and fillers. So call me and we'll set that up for you."

Pat on hand. End of appointment. Bye bye.

I must have looked as confused as I felt, wandering out to my car. Of course, if I had had the Botox, you'd never be able to tell that I was confused. He had been so cavalier, as if he were reminding me that I needed a mammogram or my next teeth cleaning. I was the right age for All Of The Things, so of course we should get that filler party started.

There's nothing wrong with changing something about yourself. I know what it's like to feel so self-conscious about something that, once you alter it, you free up the head space you used to spend obsessing over it. That can be a very healing choice to make.

But I also know what it's like to leaf through a magazine where one page encourages investment in your inner self and the next advertises the newest cream, infused with the tears of yaks who wander the mountain plateaus of Tibet, a cream which will certainly change your life and, if not that, definitely your forehead.

I know what it's like to see a photo of yourself and wonder when your under-eye area was mysteriously replaced with something resembling discarded tissue paper. Or to look down at your hands and see those of your grandmother instead. I adore that sweet lady, but she should keep her hands to herself.

Yet here's what I'm starting to know even more: Those wrinkles and lines are on my face because they are my proof, my cancelled train ticket, my stamped passport that I lived this life. I cried those tears from the heartaches that shifted and changed and remolded my heart and the skin around the eyes that cried them.

I belly-laughed those beautiful moments where my soul felt it could not contain the great big joy all around and in me, and the stretch marks across that belly are the train tracks of those travels.

Those parentheses framing my mouth are my souvenir from long, soul-precious talks with friends. These wiry new strands on my head show that I am closing the chapter of my life where I carried and nourished three humans, that chapter where I was given the unique joys and hurts of motherhood.

No one else walked my same steps and tasted the same kisses and breathed in the same sunrises and cried the same heartbreaks as my journey held. And no one else has your same scars and souvenirs, either.

What if we started cherishing those marks for what they are instead of desperately chasing an eraser, one that will never actually be found?

What if we stopped trying to cancel out the years we have lived? What if we, instead, were proud to look 44 if, indeed, we are 44?

What if we traced those lines upon our faces and bodies as if they were journeys on the map of our lives?

What if we stopped trying to look like women who hadn't lived any life and embraced the fact that we have stories to share?

Recently, I buzzed around the crowded aisles of a beauty store in Times Square, sampling products and oohing over the gorgeous scents and shades with my niece. We both left with items that we later spread out like glittery gems across our hotel room bed. And we'll do it again the next time we are there. And I'll still be intrigued by the snail-snot-infused serum (Yes. It's an actual thing.) And I'll still slather the oils and lotions on my face. But I won't be disappointed when the lines linger. Because they draw my story, and your lines draw yours, and that story has its own beauty that can't be bottled.

Love's Side of the Street

There once was a house in which lived a family. Peeking into the window of this house, you would see a perfect little scene: There was no spilled juice on the floor. The refrigerator was always stocked with the perfect blend of nutritious foods and treats. The cars in the garage were paid for and well-maintained. And the people who lived there? The children didn't scream at each other or their parents. They were respectful and well-mannered and knew exactly what was expected of them.

It was perfect. It was awful.

When those tidy little children grew up and moved out, they never came back. It wasn't that they didn't love their parents. It wasn't that they were unhappy people. It was all about that other resident of the house, the one who'd lived there next to them all those years...quietly, silently sliding its way around their home, perching on the roof, always watching. It was a sibling, a parent, a patriarch. It was all of those things, and they never called it by its name: Expectation.

You see, in this perfect house, you were expected to fit into the molds from which you were formed: College-Educated, Middle Class, Church-Attending, Heterosexual. If the mold got stretched or cracked or otherwise bent, you were met with the wrath of Expectation: An anger which sometimes burned so cold that the mold squeezed you tighter, and sometimes bubbled so hot that the frames holding you in scalded you.

But just across the street, there was another house. Looking from the outside in, you'd never choose this house over the first. The yard wasn't quite as tidy. The voices were sometimes raised. There were mistakes made and terrible word bombs that siblings passed around like a dangerous toy.

It was not perfect. It was, however, full of Love.

On Love's side of the street, Expectation did not dare to travel. There was no room in Love's house for silent intruders. Expectation's molds did not work here because Love's fire shattered their restraints into a million pieces. On Love's side of the street, there were hurts, but those were followed by apology. There were erroneous maps studied for family road trips, maps which showed the One Way all good Christian families had to travel. Until the day the family decided that those maps made good kindling for Love's fire.

In recent times, we have been handed lists of what a Christian should look like, who a Christian should love, and those lists have been met with counter-lists and counter-counter-lists. This is nothing new; these lists have been handed down again and again for centuries. But when people's homes are crashing down around them; and children are slicing open their wrists because they don't match up with any of those lists; and teenagers are afraid to talk to their parents, the very people who should hold their children's hearts most tenderly and prayerfully? Lists don't hold up. Lists are of no use when people are bleeding out on battlefields all around us.

As for me, I choose to put down the lists and live on Love's side of the street. If, in the end, I am wrong, then I erred on the side of Love. After all, there once was a carpenter, a crafter of the wood that went into these very houses who spoke often of such Love. And then he proved it. That's the kind of house I want to live and die in.

 “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?”

 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.  A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.  The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”

Just The Facts

If I were to write my autobiography, I'd need to devote at least three chapters to how I spent approximately 18.4 months of this past year (I'm a grammar teacher, not a math whiz, people) starring in the roles of editor and proofreader for my kids' homework papers.

For most of my kids' lives, I have been their only teacher but, the past few years, we have added in online classes for them. This became a necessity just about the time I began teaching higher maths and sciences to my eldest son. Also known as the time when, forced to choose between that pursuit and the option of being repeatedly stabbed in the eyeballs with a toothpick, I would have told you that x and y need to stop playing passive-aggressive games. Do they want to be found? Why, exactly, do they keep hiding? Now pass the toothpick.

Since my kids now have other teachers reading their words, I am brain-deep into the phase of Motherhood Life known as Checking Their Homework. It's as much a joy as it sounds.

While proofreading a recent paper (and please, take a moment of sympathy here for my poor kids who have to deal with a grammar teacher checking their work. It's as much a joy as it sounds), I realized that the kid who was writing an essay about the events of September 11, 2001 had no actual memory of the day. He had, in fact, not even been alive then. So the essay, while factually correct and grammatically intact, did not capture the emotions for me, a person who had experienced that day in all of its panic and horror.

It did not recall the confusion I felt when, that blue-skied morning, I was gathering my two very young kiddos to board a plane for upstate New York. It did not recall the uncomprehending horror I felt as I watched, on live TV, a huge jet slamming into a skyscraper full of everyday people. It did not recall how my flight home that day was immediately canceled and how, instead, my parents and I huddled in front of the news, none of us able to turn away from the unfolding tragedy. It did not recall how, as news reports came in of other explosions, other planes plummeting to the ground, we wondered what was next. We felt the breath squeeze from our bodies as we could not imagine what sort of attack our assumed-to-be-safe country was under.

As I read the facts of the essay, I realized how, over years and decades, other people must have felt the same as I. How they read the factual accounts of those horrific hours on the beaches of Normandy and knew it did not capture their experience on those blood-saturated sands at all. How others read the stories of  innocents slaughtered around them in genocides and death camps and shook their heads at what a tiny glimpse of their own firsthand tales those stories provided. How I, currently situated in my warm American home, continue to take in the story of refugees fleeing their lands, their own babies being torn from their white-hot grasps. Even in my shock and tears over their plight, what a tiny corner of the story's landscape I actually see.

But this limited viewpoint isn't just restricted to the big events, the larger terror of the world around us. It happens even in the daily conversations, the small moments, the short texts and the typed-out Facebook comments. We don't know anyone's full story. All we know is the facts, and sometimes, not even those.

We don't know the broken heart behind the snarky comment.

We don't know the insecurity behind the backhanded compliment.

We don't know the years of suffered abuse hidden behind the eyes that don't smile.

We don't know the desire to self-harm behind the face of someone who appears to have it all together.

Sometimes, over months and through the slow-growing roots of trust, we will learn each other's real stories. We will learn the pieces that make up the whole. Yet even then, the worn cliche of walking in another's shoes can never capture it all: We may try on their shoes for a moment, for an hour, but we don't inhabit their feet, with all of the weariness and weight and miles they have carried.

Let's put down our assumptions and pick up the practice of being safe story-keepers. Let's be the ones who are willing to look behind the social media data, to know the flesh on the factual skeleton of the tale. Let's not be listeners who read between the lines for hurtful intent or for ways we can make the tale about ourselves, but true story-capturers who hear with our eyes, our hearts, and who then allow that story to change us.

Let us never forget how little we really know of another's journey and let us be safe vessels for another's story, fellow travelers who will walk their road with them.

"...grant that I may not so much seek...to be understood as to understand." Prayer of St. Francis

Pencils and Paper

I'd like to raise three cheers to The Things I am Learning As I'm Getting Older. If only I weren't too tired to raise three cheers. Maybe 2.4 will do.

After a night in which my body decided that, "Hey! Sleep is for sissies! Who needs sleep? Not you!" and the rain and dreariness of the day made getting out bed seem like a resurrection of biblical proportions, I gathered my people and we made our way, along with my brother, to the local elementary school building. There, we spent time unloading and assembling bags of school supplies for kids who, without the generosity of nearby groups of churches, would show up for the first day of school without so much as a pencil.

My kids, despite the intrusion upon their Saturday Sleep-In Sanctuary, never complained. They did ask questions, however. Why, for example, were school supplies such a big deal? Were they a positive thing? Didn't getting up on a weekend to receive those seem like a terrible punishment to inflict upon a child?

These were good, albeit annoying to my sleep-deprived state, questions. I jest. Sort of. They were honest. Which I usually encourage. When I have slept. The thing is, my kids have never wondered where their pencils were coming from. They HAVE groaned over the past few days as UPS trucks/FedEx vehicles/USPS jeeps have bounced down our gravel drive to deliver textbook after textbook. They don't know that their mom can just hop online and order what they need, or borrow it, or be gifted it. They have never questioned if the needed supplies will arrive.

As an adult, I know the crazy amount of money it takes to live this elusive American Dream. I don't foresee ever making that amount of money, and I gave up chasing that dream years ago when we moved to Guatemala. When you drag open the iron gate you live behind to see a man, passed out, with a bottle of rubbing alcohol in his hand...When you and your children walk near people lying on the sidewalks every day...When sweet tiny ones you've cuddled and held on your lap die of hunger...When little girls in villages just down the road are shot as they walk home from school...You start to think differently about The Dream. You start to reject it. You start to wonder if those who offer a cup of water to the homeless...a literal cup of water...are more Jesus than anyone you have ever met. You know that his teachings become, as all things do in this country, messy and divisive, but that those who stop TALKING about it and start doing it are the ones you want to hang around with.

I find it ironic that I moved from Guatemala to one of the poorest counties in all of Virginia. I don't think that's something I can ignore. I drive past people, every day, who are living on land bordering other land from which they were swindled because of their race. I shook hands today with people who, not long ago,  weren't allowed to go to the local school simply because of the shade of their skin. I live near people who freeze in the winter and suffer in the summer. I can't look away from that. Not when Americans, including myself, spend more on trash bags than half the world spends on all goods combined. We are spending more on throwing our stuff away than they have to spend on anything they need. I hate it when those facts are in my face, but the truth is, they are. So I have to either do something or just pretend I can't change anything.

Today was nothing. Other people did all of the work. We were just the delivery van. But the fact that my kids asked questions about how much OUR books cost and wondered about it...maybe, just maybe, they thought a little more about how lucky we are. It's a start. It's not enough; yet we can take that start and not file it away under Nice Feelings We Have Sometimes, but take action on it. There are crazy, ridiculous amounts of need all around us, and around us all.

In the meantime, instead of getting frustrated when my 13 year-old breaks his mechanical pencil for the 82nd time in one day, I'll decide to be grateful that we have more pencils and that, thanks to the love and tender care of people all around us, children down the road will, too.

(Poverty statistic: John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002. Quoted by Jen Hatmaker in Interrupted, NavPress, 2014.)

Always We Begin Again

I love memes. I love the laugh-out-loud-sarcastic ones. I love scrolling through sappy inspirational quotes superimposed upon pictures of trees and puppies and sunsets. But sometimes I'll be having a Monday and will come across a quote that instructs me to: "Be present! Enjoy the moment! Don't waste a second of today! Be thankful you have today! Today is amazeballs! Kick some today booty! Change the world today! And look perfect doing it! Today!"

My first instinct is to tell the author that she is NOT the boss of me. Maybe I don't feel particularly seize-y today, thank you so very much. This feeling is promptly followed by guilt for NOT world-changing and booty-kicking and thoroughly, inspirationally utilizing all of the times and the days and the minutes.

And then I begin the day already exhausted. Thanks a lot, puppies and trees.

What I'm trying to remind myself of each morning is this...

Some days begin with a deep breath before the leap into the waves and the swim against the current of life.

Some days begin with the gentle call of a bird and the bob of the blossoms as the air bends down to brush the petals with its wispy fingers.

Some days begin with everything going wrong.

Some days begin with the sleepless anticipation of the celebration ahead.

Some days begin with the deep-sighing despair that we cannot possibly accomplish all that is laid out before us.

Some days begin with inexplicable confidence and certainty that we will check everything off our list and blaze halfway through tomorrow's to-dos.

Some days the coffee pot shatters and the traps catch mice and the children are grumpy and there's a nagging, heavy pressure in the air.

Some days there is a respite from work and a warm walk by the ocean and a soul-filling view before us.

Some days the anger overflows and the traffic builds our rage and the bills weren't paid on time and we just want to run far, far away.

Some days we deny the feelings of defeat, ignoring them, but those tricky feelings will chase us down like a relentless, questioning toddler, demanding that we look and notice and answer. Some days we downplay the desire, tamping down the joy, shooing away the flitting wings of exhilaration, knowing that all good things are a vapor. Surely they will not last, we say, and in the saying, we let the fear of joy's certain disappearance tear the good moment from our hands.

Some days are utterly spirit-defeating. Some days are heart-filling. But in the midst of all of the the days, we get to walk out the truth of St. Benedict, who gently reminded us that, "Always we begin again."

Always we begin again. And again. Imperfectly but gratefully. Failing but held. Without guarantees but with grace.

Again and again and again. Many days I treat this as monotony, as drudgery, but some days, when lives are taken and children are mourning and the whole world seems to be spinning into chaos, I remember. I get to begin again, and while I'll mess it up, I get to apologize and start anew. Over and over. I get to receive it, not as a dictate to feel guilt-ridden or pressured over, but as a gift to receive with gratitude.

So let us all keep beginning again, in the mornings of our actual days, and in the mornings of our hearts, in the sparkling moments and in the shattering ones, in the pain and in the peace, in the sickness and in the wholeness.

Beginning again today, tired and battle-sore or exhilarated and fresh, but here...here kicking today's booty or here wanting to tell today goodbye and good riddance. Thank you, St. Benedict, for the reminder. You didn't even have to be a meme to inspire me.

Inspire

I'm pretty tired of being bossed around by inanimate objects.

It all started with a particular brand of chocolates deciding that, when I opened their bite-sized squares of lusciousness, I should be greeted with instructions on how to live my best life. Excuse me, what? I just want to put something yummy in my mouth. Be quiet already.

Next, soft drinks decided to enter the bossy-pants game by determining that personalizing my drink wasn't enough.  Now I'm feeling the pressure to match the can's words to my mood or my tribe or whatever catchphrase I'm willing to adopt for the moment. To this trend I say, 1. I'm exhausted and 2. Just no.

It all came to a head when I twisted open my cough drop yesterday, assuming I'd find within its paper cell a....hold please...cough drop. Instead, I was assaulted with the completely non-common-cold-related advice printed within: "Inspire Envy!" it screamed at me.

CAN EVERYONE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE TO EAT CHOCOLATE AND DRINK CHEMICALS AND NOT COUGH IN PEACE?????

Once I finished rolling my eyes at the absurdity sitting in my hand, I decided that this phrase should be filed under Absolutely and Decidedly The Worst Advice Ever Received.

I don't think most of us consider ourselves to be particularly inspirational people, but we are. We are all inspiring something, and I'd hate for my offering to be Envy.

Let's inspire Laughter, with our people and even at ourselves.

Let's inspire Reflection, taking a breath, pausing to create quiet in the middle of the noise.

Let's inspire Grace, both quickly-offered forgiveness and long-fought redemption.

Let's inspire Change, a dissatisfacton with the status quo.

Let's inspire Contentment, a lack of comparison of our homes and bodies and accomplishments.

Let's inspire Bravery in the larger moments of great action and in the smaller, quieter moments when just getting through the day requires our courage.

Let's not use up our days inspiring envy and jealousy, swallowing the lie that we must look and own and showcase a comparison-breeding life.

There's a whole world full of Better Things to inspire. Let's spend our rapidly-disappearing days inspiring those.

Although, let's not get crazy: I'm totally still buying that chocolate. Chatty wrappers or not.

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time, there were two young folks...kids, really....who embarked upon a journey together, one quite common to the human race. Marriage.

Now, these two kids were adorable. They knew their marriage would be different, special, so much better than the other commonplace marriages all around. Arguing? Wouldn't happen. Financial woes? Not a chance. Figuring out how to have a healthy sex life? Not a problem. They were prepared. They had read all of the books. They had this thing nailed down.

Their expectations of such a union lasted about as long as it took them to get into the getaway car post-wedding ceremony. Their honeymoon was lovely, but imperfect and not the stuff of fairytales which, come to think of it, ended before the honeymoon ever began. Their first year of life together in that tiny apartment with the rowdy college neighbors and the dusty pink carpeting was, yes, full of happiness, but it also bore tears and rejection and fear and mistakes.

In the years to follow, during moments of sadness and hurt and disillusionment, they assumed they'd failed. After all, marriage wasn't supposed to be this way. There was a standard, and the two of them had woefully missed that mark.

Except they hadn't. It turned out that marriage was exactly supposed to be that way. It was, as they discovered, a union of two humans: Two individuals with different ideas and tastes and baggage and families and hormones and hearts. Two very human people walking together on a long road over many years; and those two people would change so much over that journey that they'd resemble their foolish young selves in very little ways after awhile.

It turned out that this marriage road, with all of the steep climbs and the hidden holes and the lovely vistas was never supposed to be a flat, smooth trail. It was, instead, meant to be an adventure where the one who happened to be ahead on the path would stop and wait for the other and the one who happened to be stronger in the moment would reach out a hand to the one who was weaker in the moment, knowing that she would need the same familiar hand to pull her to her feet further down the road.

If I could travel back in time and talk to those two young kids, so idealistic and optimistic at the start of the trail, I wouldn't lecture them about the dangers ahead. They would be too full of light and hope to even take in any of my wise words anyway. Instead, I would give them water and a smile and tell them about the places of rest along the way. They would stare at me blankly, not comprehending the need for such a stop but, when they found themselves exhausted and foot-sore, they would remember. And sit. And gather their breath for the climb ahead. Together.

Memorial Day

It was the only place the kids had stated they really wanted to visit when we moved from overseas back to the States. So one sweltering June day, we made the trip to Washington, D.C. We did the touristy things. We visited the museums, stood outside the White House. Walked and walked. Visited the pandas at the National Zoo. Walked and walked. Took the obligatory selfies by the monuments. Walked and walked.

On our way out of town, we accidentally missed a turn (because really, it's not a family vacation until Mom and Dad engage their Let's-Pretend-We-Aren't-Upset-Voices while trying to decide who was right about the directions), and detoured to Arlington National Cemetery. It ended up being a profound detour.

Endless white crosses stretched before us, around us, encompassing us. To us silent observers, the crosses represented a group of people who had died. Yet to others, each cross was a singular: a person, an individual... a husband or wife or daughter or brother who would never share a laugh at a family cookout again, who would never hug a mother goodnight, who would never again kiss a cheek, who would never rub a dog's belly, who would never again be given the chance to love anyone.

The breadth of loss to us, the recipients of the sacrifice, was overwhelming, and it reminded us anew of the truths we conveniently forget:

We don't need to agree with the war in order to support the warrior.

We don't have to agree with the politics in order to support the person who is serving.

We don't have to be so busy persuading others about the right answers that we neglect to pray for the hearts of the broken today.

Memorial Day is about honoring those who gave all. But today, as we go about our weekend, let us also not forget those who were companions to the ones who gave all, those who question why they survived when friends fell all around, those who need acknowledgement and understanding as they navigate a new minefield now: the minefield of memories and flashbacks and rebuilding a life in a world where they often feel they do not belong.

Thank you sounds weak and thin in the face of the mighty gifts these warriors have given us. But we say it. And we say it again. And we will not forget. Today and every day.

Not So Very Far From Here

Not so very far from here, a mother waits by her front door for her daughter to come home. Or for the uniformed officers to knock on that door and tell her the worst news a mother's heart could ever know.

Not so very far from here, a father sits by a hospital bed, his child's hand in his own, knowing that there will be physical agony and emotional horror ahead for his teenager, that the bomb which lasted but a moment has brought a new resident to his doorstep, a terror which has forced its way in and will never be forgotten.

Not so very far from here, those whose job it is to investigate, to identify, to interrogate are working without sleep, without respite. Those of us who are protected by their work will never comprehend the terrible things they see, the things they do not turn away from, so that all of us may be safe.

Not so very far from here, my kids are waking up and walking a dog down a very safe road. They are eating breakfast and sighing over final exams. They are putting dishes away in the wrong places and forgetting to do homework, and not listening to the 10,000th time I tell them what time we need to leave for the dentist.

And I couldn't be more grateful.

Because I could be that mother not so very far from here. In fact, we all are. Those babies who died because of someone else's rage and insanity belong to all of us. May we love each other better and love each other more. Because there is no difference between here and and not so very far from here.

This is For the Woman

This is for the woman who measured the cost and made the soul-wrestling decision to stay so her kids could grow up in an intact family.

This is for the woman who worked when everyone else went home and took on the extra hours and didn't take a sick day so her kids could have a Christmas.

This is for the woman who is scared her childbearing time is ticking away, who worries that the right partner and the right time and the right circumstances have passed her by.

This is for the woman who fought against the demon-hot breath of hell so that her kids could have a mom free from the chains of addiction.

This is for the woman who opened the tender spaces of her heart to a child not her own, who chose to mother when another mother couldn't.

This is for the woman who waits until the quiet stillness of night and weeps and wonders if the parenting road she's taken has been all wrong; who wonders if she has done enough or failed too much.

This is for the woman who stands over the long-lashed, sleep-flushed face of her toddler and carries the guilt-joy mix of the day: How she could love him to her depths and yet want nothing more than an hour away from him so often.

This is for the woman who counts the days on the calendar until she can take another pregnancy test. And she waits. And she is afraid to hope again.

This is for the woman whose once-busy days are too slow, whose once-full arms now hold nothing but memories.

This is for the woman who is afraid to admit she has never wanted children, who holds back and hides her true heart, hoping to escape the judgment-filled murmurs of the mob.

This is for the woman who nurtures and mothers her students, whose own wallet is emptied so that their classroom bins can be filled.

This is for the woman each of us is today, the woman we have once been, the woman we may be tomorrow. The woman who, in all of her failures and wonderings and fears, is worth celebrating. Not one of us is on the mothering path we once assumed we'd travel: The joys are deeper and the hurts are more complex than we could have imagined. Yet today, in whatever form our mothering has taken, we join hands and honor each other, whether we are in a hard place or a peaceful place or an unsure place or a quiet place along the way.

Happy Mother's Day.

Saturday

Maybe you're living in Saturday. Maybe you just watched the darkest Friday of your life unfold.

Maybe you awoke Saturday morning to find that the horrors of Friday were no nightmare but were, in fact, your new reality.

Maybe after the tears have been poured out and the pain has been named in screams, you sit in the shattering, the pieces of what you thought were true all around you.

Maybe it's Saturday.

Maybe you have no idea that there's the hope of a Sunday. And if someone threw that phrase to you, it would be such an insult to your grief that you'd throw it back at their head if you weren't wrung out, wrung dry, wrung completely empty.

There is no escaping the middle ground that is Saturday. You cannot rush the sunrise that will lead to a Sunday. You cannot hurry up the unfolding of the day. You cannot fix anything, change anything, undo anything that occurred on Friday.

Maybe on Saturday, all you can do is Still. Be. Here. And that is enough. For Saturday, it is all you need to do.

Maybe your Friday has already happened; perhaps the trauma or the betrayal or the loss or the diagnosis means you have awakened Saturday morning into a new and alien landscape where the ground seems unstable and the sky seems upside down. You cannot begin to hope for the pink rays that will come from the Eastern sky until you have wept and grieved and been still and fought through each moment of today.  Don't let anyone take away the hours of your Saturday. There is no Sunday without today.

If it's your Saturday, you are not alone today. There are other Saturday dwellers around you. Sit. Wait. And when the inkiest hours are enveloping you in their shadows, that, too, cannot be skipped, cannot be ignored. Reach out; find a hand to hold as you feel your way through the night. And when the night hours squeeze your heart tightly with fear and the unknown, then and only then can you turn your eyes to the East. And watch for your healing to come.

The Smile

I have the world's worst mouth. No, really. If I were a horse and you had to check my teeth before you chose to associate with me, I'd be put out to pasture before I finished saying, "Ahhhh." Or whatever it is that horses say when undergoing a dental exam.

It all began when, as a little girl, I sat in a dentist's office and was told that my teeth issues would be "an albatross around my neck" for my entire life. After I looked up that literary reference, I was pretty sure that this was not good news for my future.

Many years and thousands of hours, thousands of dollars, multiple surgeries and procedures later, I'd like to go back and tell that accurate (albeit insensitive) doctor what a prophet he was.  And ask him for a winning lottery number. Except I couldn't afford the plane trip. I have yet another dental procedure to pay for.

A few weeks ago, I was informed that a new operation was on the table, so to speak. It would be painful enough to require general anesthesia and necessary enough to schedule quickly. Calendars were cleared and prescriptions were filled. Estimates for cost were given, but followed by the caveat that, hey, this estimate was the worst case scenario estimate. And did they mention that it was merely an estimate? For the worst cast scenario?

Until it wasn't. Until the love and compassion that is known in these parts as Medical Insurance Coverage decided that they would cover exactly.....zero....of the thousands of dollars necessary to cover the surgery.

Well. I lit up my phone with emoji-laden texts to friends who, exactly as I'd hoped, joined their voices (or at least their own appropriately-angry emojis) in chorus over the injustice of it all. They stood in cyberspace solidarity with me over just how wronged I had been. Didn't the insurance company realize that TEETH were a necessity?

A few hours later, as I pulled down the dust-clouded road toward my home, still fuming and crying over the stupidity of it all, still listing each family expense I needed to be spending thousands of dollars upon, still mourning the loss of the next vacation I'd never get to take, I stopped to open my mailbox and retrieve the pile of bills and credit card offers to throw away.

And then I saw it. It was a postcard from our friends working in a tiny village in Guatemala. It was one photo, one image, one close-up view. On that card I saw the smiling face of a man, his cheeks bunched up in joy, his eyes crinkled in laughter.

His smile cracked wide in happiness, revealing something in its openness: He only possessed a few teeth.

My gut constricted as I looked down at the pixelated image. I drove home and propped it up on my desk.

I'd like to say I immediately lost my outrage and sadness at my perceived injustice, but I'm apparently, while not good at growing strong teeth, quite gifted at maintaining my hard-headed and stubborn tendencies. But every day, as his nearly toothless grin watched me work and read and type and continue to fume, I could not ignore the truth that kept circling my brain like an annoying pest.

A mouthful of teeth is not a necessity.

A denied dental surgery is not an injustice.

In my privileged, middle-class white woman mindset, I had built my anger and sadness upon an false foundation. In the places where I work and socialize and spend 28 hours of each day running errands for my people, a perfectly-straight, brightly-bleached smile is considered normal.

In the sheltered cocoon of the life I live, teeth have a rubric: They must be lined up in orthodontically-precise rows. They must certainly not have a gap between them, unless you are a celebrity and it is randomly decided that your particular gap meets the subjective definition of "charming." They must not be too big or too small or too pointy or too...toothy.

Now, I get it. I am spending, each month, hours of my work week paying for metal torture devices to rest upon my children's smiles and correct the genetic malformations of their bites. I know there are practical, medical reasons to fix one's canines and molars and incisors. But I also know, from my brief sojourn of living in another country, that it is possible to exist without teeth. It is possible not only to exist but to smile and to eat and to laugh without self-consciousness.

I know teeth are only one example of the ways our brains quietly, insidiously lull our souls into entitlement. We deserve piping hot coffee with precisely four squirts of mocha sauce and you'd-better-believe-that-milk-needs-to-be-skim. We deserve our steak cooked exactly right, and we will let the waiter know if it's not. We deserve wifi that streams our favorite show without buffering. We deserve a grocery-store experience where we don't have to wait more than 5 minutes in line. If we are ever required to stand longer than that, the sighs and eye-rolls and passive aggressive time-checking on our phone should do the trick of letting the cashier know exactly how important and busy we are.

If I'm honest, I not only live this way, I want to keep living this way. I want to be comfortable and safe and I want my smile to be something people admire in photos. I want my friends to agree with my First World Complaints when I text them my frustrations. But, if I do choose these things, I also choose to shut my mind and my heart, to limit them to my Very North American Standards. I choose to close my ears to the sounds of empty bellies of children in my very own county. I choose to turn away from the woman in front of me at the store, slowly counting out quarters to buy her baby a can of formula, 1. Wishing instead that she would hurry it up and 2. Quietly judging her purchase.

Instead, I can be grateful for the income my family makes that allowed my dental surgery to even be considered an option.

Instead, I can be grateful for the giant metal screw that now rests in my jaw, ready to be adjusted in yet another procedure.

I can be grateful for this one beautiful word that I take for granted in my life: Options. I can celebrate my choices without condemnation, without guilt, without feeling shame that I have those options. But in my choosing, I cannot forget that others will never even entertain such choices, that these very choices are not my right in life but are, in fact, privileges.

And in my choosing, I can decide to live in a way that opens my heart and my wallet to give others options as well. I can practice gratitude for the way others have provided those options for me, and I can pay them forward to others, creating a world where medical procedures and full bellies and clean water and a mouthful of working teeth aren't limited to my circle of the world.

I can be grateful for this sweet man I'll never meet. May his open-hearted smile not just move us, but may it change us as well.

The Monster at the End of the Book

When my kids were little, reading a book (or twelve) before bedtime was the delight of their days. Mostly because it delayed the whole getting into the bed part of bedtime.

Hours were spent in the rocking chair, Golden Books in hand, as my tired voice (or the equally tired one of my husband) read aloud the tales of a talking train and his pals, a talking bunny and his friends, a talking veggie crew. Sidenote here: Why did they all talk so. very. much? Where are the books about quiet  fictional characters? When my kiddos were toddling toward the bookshelf to pick out a tome, I'd sent them silent messages with my brain: Please choose Goodnight Moon. Please choose Goodnight Moon. It only has a few words. Kudos to all the children's authors who leave out all that dialogue nonsense. Exhausted parents everywhere rise up and bless your name.

One of my kids' favorite choices was the Sesame Street classic, The Monster at the End of the Book. I supported that choice. How could you not adore "lovable, furry, old Grover?" If it's been a year or eight since you've read it, let me give you a plot summary of this classic:

Grover hears a terrible rumor that there's a monster hiding at the end of the book. He then spends the next several pages trying to convince you, the reader, NOT to turn the page!  He ties intricate rope knots! He nails the pages together! He builds brick walls! Alas, nothing works. The mighty reader turns the pages and, spoiler alert, finds the monster at the end of the book, who turns out to be sweet, dear, cuddly Grover. Sigh. The end. Let's all go to bed now.

I hadn't read the tale of Grover's plight in far too long, until recently, when a little preschooler who lives nearby began spending a few hours a week at our house and turned out to be Grover's biggest groupie. As I walked about the kitchen each afternoon, wiping the invisible-to-everyone-but-me crumbs off counters and pondering about the great life mystery that is the plastic container drawer, I overheard my daughter reading and rereading the story to our little pal.  And I understood that I, in my Very Adult Life, function exactly like that furry friend Grover.

I walk about my life with an undercurrent of worry. Sure, everyone is healthy now. But it's been awhile since we have had an E.R. visit. There must be something dreadful up ahead in the next few pages of our story!

Two of my kids are of driving age. What if they text when I'm not in the car with them to tell them not to? What if they don't yield when merging onto a highway?  Maybe the new drivers don't realize that one little mistake is not a little mistake when you're piloting a passenger-laden vehicle. What if some idiot driver runs a red light? What monster could be waiting to hurt them?

All of my kids spend hours a day online. What if they accidentally reveal too much information to the wrong person? What if someone fools them with charm and the right words their tender teenage hearts need to hear? What monster could be waiting to harm them?

We have enough money to pay our bills and take a family vacation this year. But college looms very closely ahead. Cars are falling apart and need repairs. Medical expenses apparently grow on trees, or at least the ones in my yard. Septic tanks overflow. Wells collapse. Experts (who live in some mysterious perfect world I have never visited) tell me to have three months of income stored up. So I worry.  What monster could be waiting to bankrupt my family?

Monsters feel very real. They take the form and shape of hurting people who, in turn, hurt us. They appear as worrying medical diagnoses. They wait in the dark, cloaked as addictions ready to upend our lives. They hide under our beds as relational betrayals we think we will never recover from. They hover in the shadows as pain-shrouded issues our precious kids are struggling mightily against.

I recently read a quote, a gem buried in what I thought was a fun, escapist novel: "In the absence of facts, we tell ourselves stories." There is so much wisdom packed in that little line of dialogue. In the absence of real data, I will spin a horror story of monsters and their encroaching dark figures.

In the absence of facts, I will believe the new path I'm choosing to walk today will have the same old, tired ending it always has.

In the absence of truth, I will believe the lies that snake around my brain and twist and root in until they begin to feel more real than what I know to be true.

In the absence of peace, I will corrupt the power of my brain and my imagination. I will take the dark shapes and make them into something they are not, giving them power over my life. I will allow that undercurrent of fear to become a tumbling, roaring white-water river that will knock away my oars and upend my raft and capsize all who ride with me.

Or I can learn a little lesson from my friend Grover and his adventures in Monsterland: In the upheaval and stress and overwhelming moments and pain of life, I don't need to wait in worry for the monster at the end of the story. I don't need to pull out the hammer and nails and bricks and mortar and rope and attempt construction of some sort of protective barrier around my life and my loved ones. In fact, I can't. I can't possibly protect the ones most dear to me. While that knowledge used to cause panic to rise like bile in my throat, I now am learning the practice of acceptance: That I am not in control. I do not have to wonder if I have prayed the exact right words of a "hedge of protection" around my family. (By the way, that much-called-down "hedge" is a description found in the ancient story of Job when the character of Satan describes Job. Before all the tragedy befalls him.)

I can stop being my own worst monster lying in wait. Instead, I can spend my days embracing the small, beautiful moments and knowing that, yes, the scary and dark times will come, but I will only exhaust my resources ahead of time if I waste them on worry. I can open my heart to the small pleasures of today:  of ducks squawking in the pond, of chocolate-studded ice cream treats, of good books and better friends. I can breathe out a prayer, knowing that it does not act like a magic spell cast around my people. Instead, it turns my heart to what is good and right and true.

Thank you, Grover. Who knew you'd turn out to be such a wise teacher to us all. And by the way, forget that usurper Elmo. You've always been my favorite.

(The Monster at the End of the Book, John Stone, Michael Stollin, 1971, Golden Books)

(Quote from Before the Fall, Noah Hawley, 2016, Grand Central Publishing)

Broken Places

It looked like a simple, sturdy brown box. Its unremarkable brown color just added to the everydayness of it.

It really was no one's fault. No one could have guessed the treasures that little box contained.

No one could have known that a mother had painstakingly wrapped thirty years' worth of memories, thirty years' worth of collected Christmas ornaments, thirty years' worth of moments: impossibly tiny ceramic Baby's First Christmas shoes. Ballet slipper remnants of childhood dreams. Wedding photos held in delicately carved rose frames. Piece by priceless piece the mother wrapped them all.

No one could have known that she had cradled the brown canvas box in her hands through two plane rides, through security checkpoints, through customs check-ins, all to deliver it to her daughter living in Guatemala. All to watch her daughter's eyes overflow with the tears only sentiment and thirty years' worth of Christmas-collecting moments could bring.

No one could have known that, in the flurry and chaos and unsupervised stacking and packing that only a move to a new home could bring, a kind teenager who was simply following directions would grab the brown box and toss it to his friend waiting on the pickup truck. Or that his friend would miss. That the box would fall with a sickening crunch to the ground.

The box would be shoved away in the house, stashed in the To Be Needed At Some Point But I Cannot Deal With It Now pile. Until the December evening arrived. Until the little open-air market-purchased tree was ready to be transformed, to be layered with the memories that made it beautiful. Until the box was opened and the shattering was discovered.

There were more tears that night, but not for reasons of Christmas Joy. Instead, amidst the tears, there were plain plastic balls hooked on the tree in place of the babies' framed photos. And the box was put aside.

Every year, when that December evening rolls back around again, and the tree is waiting to receive its sparkle and shine, we unpack those broken pieces. I hold the delicate, crack-etched porcelain memories in my hand, and my heart squeezes with a new kind of emotion. I see the lines where my husband used every kind of gorilla glue and adhesive he could find to attempt repairs. I run my finger down the faces put back together, the eyes not quite matching up and the holiday words a bit off-center, and my eyes well up at the new kind of beauty I see.

I recently read an essay on the Japanese art form known as kintsugi. According to the story, when a gorgeous piece of pottery, a bowl, a plate, something meant to be lovely, is shattered; when it breaks through the hands that hold it to become shards at one's feet, an entirely new beauty emerges. Those pieces, instead of being thrown into a bin, being discarded, becoming useless, begin their metamorphosis. The cracks, the very places of brokenness, are filled with gold: precious, glowing, illuminating gold. And a new piece is born, a piece in which the very places of breaking become, instead of something to be hidden or covered up or filled in, the most beautiful parts of the whole.

There is gold in the broken places. There is value in the shattering. There is beauty in the broken.

We have all been broken. We all have lines carved upon our hearts. Yet when we begin to tiptoe into the wide-open space of knowing this: That the very places of our greatest pain become shimmering, shining redemption, become gold. Then there is healing.

When we hold our broken pieces up to the sun and see the precious lines of gold running through our brokenness: There is healing that offers wholeness.

There is healing when we hold in our hands new pieces of pottery, new gold-streaked bowls and platters, no longer useless, but open to be piled high with bounty, enough for us to share.

There is healing when the brokenness is no longer hidden, but shines with the glory of redemption.

There is healing when the lights of the tree shine through the cracks in the ornaments, reminding us that life is not only pieced-together perfect moments, that the most valuable parts of ourselves often are a result of our shattering.

Whether your cracks are new and fresh or old and brittle, they can be filled with gold. They can become places where your pain, instead of being pushed to the corners, swept into the dark places, turns into the very lines where light and love and a new kind of wholeness shines through....enough for others, enough for ourselves.

("Kintsugi" concept as described in "Chasing Slow," Erin Loechner, 2017)

Out of the Box

It was just a little chat between friends: Kids, new slow cooker recipes, books we were plowing through, and the omnipresent Florida heat were the usual topics of conversation. Oh. And the little detail that I was garage-selling most of my household items, packing up the leftovers with husband and aforementioned kids, and moving to a third world country to do some missions work.

That's about the point where the awkward silences occurred, or the suddenly-remembered appointment popped up. That was the dividing line: Either my friends thought I was slightly across the border into Crazyville or they immediately set me up upon the dreaded Missionary Pedestal. Which of course could not be carved out of marble. Please. What a waste of funding. Let's use some leftover VBS cardboard props.

This particular conversation had a new twist, however. My friend's eyes skeptically roamed down the length of my long, expensively-highlighted blonde hair and she remarked, "Well. I know something you'll have to change. Missionaries don't care about their hair."

I probably gave the fakest of polite laughs and threw out a supporting Scripture or two about the lack of hair love. I mean, surely there are some. I know I must have steered a wide path around that hair-loving sinner, Samson, but we all know he didn't really love Jesus. So vain.

But later, in the quietness of my minivan (and by quietness, I mean the blank brain space where all 90s moms went when VeggieTales was on a loop), I confronted the vanity of my heart:

The thing was, I didn't think I would stop caring about my hair. I liked a fresh blowout, which gave me the option of not washing for days. I loved the feeling of newly-shorn locks and the way the blonde streaks in my ever-darkening strands matched my hair to that of the little towhead I used to be. I cherished the only quiet moments I could find: Reading a new book while floating in a sudsy bathtub, some sort of Amazon-ordered unicorn oil combed through my hair, and emerging with new fortitude for what the day required of me.

But if I wanted those things, did that mean I was shallow, less cerebral, less spiritual, less-missionary-able than my friends who just didn't care so much about clothes and hair? Did my happiness about a new mascara take away brain space I should have been putting toward the Big Things?

Why did my choosing to swipe a peachy color on my cheekbones mean, as someone recently told me, that I gave the appearance of someone who did not know what it was like to feel alone or in pain? That I couldn't relate. A swath of sparkly color on my skin has never provided armor for the shattering my own heart has experienced.

Why did my shopping at Sephora mean that a friend's husband could point a barbed jest my direction, his jokes revealing a preconceived notion about me, implying that my shopping there meant that I might give my friend shallow advice on a completely unrelated situation?

Caring how my hair or eyelids look does not make me less than. Not giving a fig about your hair doesn't make you less than either. It makes us different. And in the name of all things peroxide, we need some differences. We need some creativity, because it doesn't just bring us art and beauty, it brings us beautifully useful ways of problem-solving when we offer our differences to each other. It brings us together instead of apart.

Opening our eyes to the palette before us and wielding a makeup brush as an artist would her tools does not mean we can't use those same eyes to understand deeply the innocent victims around us, the children whose legs are blown off their bodies as bombs scream around them, their cries for their daddies lost in the dust and blood and booms.

Taking a quiet moment to enjoy newly-lacquered nails in the brightest colors we can find does not mean we cannot use those same hands to write an email to our Congressperson, to type out a text to a brokenhearted mom, to hand out some cash to a stranger in need.

Choosing to place hair color upon the strands atop our heads does not mean we don't use those same heads to worry about our devastated friend, to create new and effective ways of helping our neighbors, to educate ourselves on the most effective way to help the refugees.

Painting green or purple or whatever shade we desire upon our eyelids does not mean we don't keep those eyes open to the pain, keep looking for the vulnerable among us, the ones who might need a kind word, a sweet note, a moment to sit quietly together in the loud inner agony of their pain.

Let's stop putting each other in boxes and set each other free to embrace whatever woman we choose to be: One who walks into the world fresh-faced and lovely and one who walks into the world with the shades and scents upon her that make her path its own journey, no less lovely, no less aware of the planet around her.

Let's stop making assumptions and start applauding for art in whatever form we find it expressed: On a gorgeously-painted face, on a computer, on a page. Your canvas won't be the same as mine. Your art is the beauty of your soul shared with the world, and we need that brave sharing now more than ever.

”I love makeup, and its wonderful possibilities for temporary transformation. And I also love my face after I wash it all off....There is something exquisitely enjoyable about seeing yourself with a self-made new look. And for me that look is deeply personal.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author, feminist, makeup-wearer

My daughter's canvas and my mother's canvas: 

The Girl In The Backseat

I wasn't sure I would make it home safely that night. I sat in the backseat of the car, my fingers grasping the small, shaking hand of my friend.

We thought it was a joke.

We thought they were playing around.

We thought all guys were good, Christian boys like the ones we had known.

We were wrong.

We made ourselves tiny, quiet, and still as the two boys in the front seats determined our fate. At first they were angry. After all, we wouldn't "put out," I believe were the words they used to describe our shortcomings. Their anger began its climb to simmer and, fueled by the Circle K slushies they mixed with the contents of a large, clear glass bottle stowed under the front seat, began to boil and burn.

There were taunts. There were words we had never heard before. There were brakes squealing as the laughing boys pulled off the road to relieve themselves in the ditch, in full view of our innocent eyes.

There were prayers sent up from the back seat. There were spines of steel which began to forge. No. No. We were going home. And they were going to take us there.

Of course, we had no recourse, no control, no cell phone with which to summon help. Only a prayer, whispered again and again. And a sense of guilt: Had we brought this on ourselves? How did we land here?

We did make it home safely that night, leaping out at our doorstep as they slowed down in the vicinity of my driveway, and we clung to each other with tears and vows to never, ever tell our parents what had happened.

They found out, as parents are mysteriously able to do. And the anger they felt was not, as we'd feared, toward us, but toward the truly guilty party: The boys who'd endangered us that night before they squealed tires into the darkness, threats and expletives tossed out as a parting gift.

There are other girls, mere babies, around the block, across the street, just a train or plane ride away who don't have any protection tonight. The threat of violence against them is not just the bludgeon of nasty words and the control tactic of fear: It is enacted upon them in the searing sun of day and the dark anonymity of night. Their bodies are pummeled again and again by those who will never recall their faces, those who never care to know their names.

Their souls are shattered by the actions of fathers and mothers who, feeling their own entrapment, sell the bodies of their daughters and sisters and sons and cousins in order to repay the crushing boulder of debt that sits upon them, squeezing out their family's life breath. The young become slaves, their bodies available to the highest bidder, their value increasing in proportion to their lack of sexual experience.

I used to think of brothels as brash, bosomy, whiskey-laden places in western movies, where the cowboy's sex with the heart-of-gold prostitute led to love or at least some kind of romance in the days after the camera faded to black.  Now I know more. I know real, personal facts: That there are girls who are trapped, stuck, used. There are girls who aren't even women yet. There are girls and boys who are used by men and women who have no thought of romance, no thought of the partner at all, except for a means to scratch an itch, an attempt to fulfill a Hollywood-derived fantasy which will never live up to the hype.

Those who have been branded, emotionally and quite literally, from sexual abuse and slavery are not the mysterious, shadow-hidden strangers of our imagination. They live close by. They walk, not just on street corners, but on Your Street. They shop next to us in the self checkout line. They are daughters. They are sisters. They are brothers. They are us, without the luxury of a safety net.

The problem is overwhelming but, as so often is true, there are little things, tiny steps we can take to start helping. We can buy, whenever possible,  from stores who support ethical practices. We can not shut up when we see something that just doesn't seem right. We can be communities where families will thrive, where young boys and girls know they have trusted adults to talk to, where there are options other than running away and becoming vulnerable to those who prey on those who are alone; where they have a chance to escape becoming another sex trafficking statistic.

Some of us have been our own type of statistic. Some of us have darker parts of our past we would rather pretend never happened. While we cannot erase the smudges or smooth out the creases, we can turn our eyes toward redemption: Not that the pain and the wrongs didn't matter, but that they mattered enough...enough that we will battle for the girls and the women and boys all around, that we will stand as a wall between them and the evil waves battering against us. That we won't stop standing until the girls in the backseat come home safely: Because any girl in the backseat is you, is me, is one of us. She just needs us to be her safe ride home.

("Human trafficking makes more money than Google, Starbucks, Nike, and the NFL combined." Stat from fairtradewinds.net, an excellent resource. If you search for "fair trade shopping," you'll see a growing list of companies who fit this definition. It costs more, definitely. But even trading out a few purchases a year in this direction is a good beginning. Front-line organizations to check out include Exodus Road and Branded Collective).

When Helping Doesn't Help

The words "storage room" were much too generous a term. It was a dust-piled, dirt-shrouded mass of shelves and rodent-attacked cardboard boxes and bins.

Our job was to sort the hundreds of bottles in those boxes...to cull the pills and liquids and organize them into manageable stacks that the workers in this small Guatemalan building could use.

There were pills for dogs. Tinctures from veterinary offices. Large, chalky tablets that would choke a full-grown adult.

But this was a malnutrition center for babies.

To add insult to the already-overflowing pile of useless items, the great majority of the medicines were completely expired, vastly outdated. Something a U.S. parent would never, ever risk giving to her infant or young, sick child.

Yet that's how people helped: In ways that didn't actually help.

In another village nearby, teams of generous volunteers donated water filters in places where children's bodies were so wracked by waterborne illnesses that they were vomiting and defecating worms from their tiny frames. These filters would, quite literally, save lives. Yet in the rush to disperse the gifts, no instructions were given on how to use those filters and so, months later, when other teams visited the village, life-saving filtration systems had been turned into upside-down storage vessels to hold dry goods.Or planters to grow some herbs.

Yet that's how people helped: In ways that didn't actually help.

In the closets and classrooms of a local Guatemalan church building, volunteers spent hours hand-sorting tangled masses of clothing, pieces donated to the poor of our town. Nearly two-thirds of these stained, unwashed, often-disintegrating items were ones you or I would never consider wearing. They would have been cast aside or cut into rags to wipe down our toilets. They should have been. Sending them was, instead of useful, another burden. Now precious volunteer time and building space were wasted on what was no better than trash.

Yet that's how people helped: In ways that didn't help.

There were gifts of livestock to families who had no means of feeding and caring for such animals. There were stacks of children's DVDs. In English. To children who spoke two other languages fluently. And while the intent was love, the receivers felt only burdened with a new problem. 

As citizens of a generous nation, we can often skew toward a particular mindset: Across our nation's history, we have a tradition of being the fixers, the doers, the pioneers who fearlessly blast through geographical boundaries, who are among the first lining up to give our time and our aid to the least of these.

But sometimes our helping does not help. In recent days, as innocent people have faced shattering blow upon blow, we long to help. And we should. It is not a time to sit. It is not a time for inaction. Yet as we move forward, let us ask ourselves these questions: What do our friends and neighbors really need? Have we bothered to ask them? Have we decided we know best for them? Have we looked for the organizations already at work within their own communities? Have we, instead of choosing what we in our great United States ingenuity decide is best, asked the frightened ones what they really need?

In our little efforts in the villages in Guatemala, during our short years there, we slowly and often awkwardly, and with the great patience of our local friends and citizens, had to learn as well. We had to learn to be humble, to be listeners more than Master Plan Writers, to slow down and hear our needy friends instead of blasting down their fragile doors with our oh-so-privileged ideas of what they needed. And as we listened, the children began to receive the life-saving medicines crafted just for their sizes. The water filtration teams learned to spend hours with the communities, to teach each person exactly how to use the system that could bring a family back to health. The volunteers learned what kind of clothing was needed or, better yet, took the mother of the family shopping in the local markets for what her family required. Because the mamas always know best. Start with the mamas.

Let's be unafraid in these days of fear: Unafraid to admit what we don't know. Unafraid to be learners. Unafraid to be listeners. Unafraid to fall into step behind those already leading their hurting communities so well. Because we don't know. But we can learn and, in that learning, truly, beautifully help.

In The Bleak Midwinter

"In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone.

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow.

In the bleak midwinter,

Long, long ago."

I'm not sure when I first heard this song, but its words were stuck in my brain this morning; as stuck as the front door that wouldn't budge, its handle squealing its protest of my opening it to the cold world outside.

As I walked along my morning path, the ground beneath my booted feet could only be described in the words of that poem, "Earth stood hard as iron." My steps and the light prancing of the furry puppy next to me pounded against the rough, unforgiving surface, not even making an impression into its brutal coldness.

The world was so hard.

The world IS so hard.

We have all been hurt, sometimes in devastating ways...ways that shattered our whole being against the hard earth, ways that made us think everything we believed in was not true, not real, a wicked lie that made fools of us. Sometimes, the pain came from those who had promised to love us best, and sometimes it was in little, petty ways that were more of our own wounded heart's interpretation of another's intent. But still, there was great hurt. All of the things...big or small...have punctured our tenderness with their frozen steel-tipped arrows.

Just this morning, while the epiphanies of my stroll were still simmering in my brain, my impossibly cold hands wrapped around a steaming beverage in the hopes that some part of me could be warm; in the midst of breakfasts being eaten and dishes piling in and out of sinks and laundry never leaving and school questions flying around the air, there was a brief email that came in and took my breath away with the sheer insensitivity of it. Eyes began to sting. Heart dropped and sickened.

And I felt my heart close as tightly as a fist.

Hard as iron. Hard as iron. Just like the ground.

I wanted to be angry in the justifiable RIGHTNESS of my rage. I wanted to lash out and tell the world what a jerk it was being today.

But I've been as hard as iron before. And it's terrible. It means I look all around me just waiting for people to screw up and hurt me. It means I view everything through the scratched, fogged-up lenses of Let's See How This Must Be About Me glasses. It means I push people away with my prickliness. It means I'm cynical and closed off and eventually alone with my blanket of self-pity which, by the way, is a very thin and moth-eaten and lonely cover.

Instead, in the bleak midwinter of my hurt, whether that hurt is something simple that I can choose to step over and be done with in an hour, or whether it is something brutal that will take work and tears and years, I can be, instead of a hard ground, a soft and yielding place.

Instead of holding the hurt tightly in my icicled hands, I can become humbled and understanding and YES, ABSOLUTELY allow myself to feel pain and to cry and to say words that I don't want my kids to hear or repeat, but then...then, I have to allow my hands to open and release. I have to remember the things that I can change, which usually...well, actually, never....include other people.

Instead of allowing the hurt to fashion me into something hard and unyielding that shatters people when they come up against me, I can become a gentle place for them to fall. Because they will fall. I will fall. Instead of breaking against each other, we can catch each other.

Choosing the softer way means I will get hurt. A lot. It means I have to look at myself and say, Yep, I'm sensitive. Way, way sensitive a lot of the time.  I know that it means I have the beautiful, breath-catching capacity to Love Big, but it also means I have the terrifying, soul shaking capacity to Break Hard.

If we have lived on this Iron Earth for any more than a few years, we have loved and we have been broken: wide open, brutally and unfairly. And we can let our hearts be terribly frozen. But the wide open warmthness of heart and the way of gentleness and of love and yes, oh yes, of wisdom in how to navigate this way of love is too gorgeous to miss. It requires our boots and gloves and scarves, not to protect us against the pain (oh no, there's no armor for that). Instead of shields for our souls and our hearts, the gear we drape ourselves in becomes simply  a way for us to keep walking longer, to keep loving harder,  to keep reaching that hand to another and finding more warmth as we join those hands. To keep walking on the iron-solid ground of this planet, our footsteps together treading stronger than we ever would alone.

And what was once Cold and Hard and Stone becomes Life and Soft and Green. The bleak midwinter always gives way to spring. It always has, a million times over, and always will again. It is unstoppable. May it be unstoppable in our hearts as well.

In the Bleak Midwinter, Christina Rossetti, 1872

The Quiet Work of Justice

There is a moment for mouths to be opened, for shouts once locked up behind closed lips to be set loose.

There is a place for placards to be held high.

There is a space for slogans to be written.

There is a time for treading the path of the marchers.

This is the loud work of justice.

But what about the quiet ones, the ones whose hearts pull deeply down into the depths of grief for their sisters and brothers and lovers and friends....

For the quiet ones, the ones who will never stand behind a podium, lift a hand-scrawled sign, step into the footfalls of a protest....

For the ones who, every day, scrub and wipe faces and bodies and scrub and wipe again and again; who hold babies their own and babies not their own close in arms...arms not raised aloft holding markered words but arms wrapped warm around a fractured heart....

For the ones who walk, not in a march, but beside a needy neighbor, a broken stranger, a shattered soul, a bruised child....

For the ones who pass behind the blinding lights and the brocade curtains of the stage; who catch the falling pieces and right the crooked lines....

For the ones who do the quiet work of justice every day: You are the living, pulsing life-blood of peace in our world.

You may never be a name in bright fonts for others to admire. You may never be a sound ringing through the speakers, a face spotlighted with fame. You may never be feet worn through with marching and protesting. But your feet are still beautiful bearers of justice: Quiet Workers of justice in a world that is often too loud for you.

Walk on, dear one. Walk on behind and around and with your sisters and brothers who march in the lights. Your arms under and near are the beams that hold together the stage of solidarity.

Your feet, making your own way in the dimly-lit moments, will pave the way smoother for those who will walk in the noon.

Your eyes, watchful and waiting, will see the needy in corners, the hiding ones others will miss. We need your eyes and arms and feet. We need your Quiet Work of Justice to strengthen our own shouts, to hold high our tired hands. We need your particular brand of strength.

We are all doing the work of justice with different weapons, different methods, different volumes to our voices. But we are doing it together.

Walk on.