Shepherding Kids

Doors and Tigers and Reading to Children

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DSC_0169 One thing about home school I despaired giving up was reading to my kids…until my husband reminded me it just might be possible to still read to them before bed every night.  I love reading to my kids maybe because I love reading.  I also love how good literature sparks conversations we might never have otherwise.

Like the time our home school curriculum told us to read The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli a month after we learned two of the families we were closest to would move…and we would stay.  The Door in the Wall is the tale of a crippled and abandoned boy rescued and taken in by a priest in the Middle Ages.  This boy with real suffering both emotional and physical must find a way.  The guidance from the priest?  “Thou has only to follow the wall far enough and there will be a door in it.”

My kids, one in particular, looked at their future and saw a big wall.  Life as they’d known it would change and the future contained real challenges.  The encouragement to hope and to keep following the wall…to run your hand down the wall…to stay close to, even touch, the challenge, suffering, and pain while looking for a way through resounded inside us.   I had no good vocabulary to draw their hearts into the light of conversation about all this transition in our lives but this book provided the means to talk and I am grateful.  For the other child, the wall is what keeps us from God and the door is Jesus.  Needless to say, I recommend this book often.

After sitting on a shelf for a couple of years, my daughter recently discovered and devoured Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo.  Having received the book as a gift from a thoughtful friend, it sat on our adult bookshelf (by the way, what do you call places that you store things for adults but that are not profane…I really wonder this!) after I read and pondered it.  When she pulled it down and began raving and telling me to read it to her brothers I felt compelled to understand what touched her so deeply.

The first chapter describes a boy with tremendous loss in his life that he will not allow himself to grieve.  He stuffs his thoughts into an imaginary suitcase and mentally sits on them so they won’t escape.  He has every reason to cry buckets but not even the mean bullies at school can squeeze a tear out of him.  Hmmm.

As we continue to grieve losses, I see what my daughter sees.  It is the time in grief where it is tempting to just stuff in the sadness and pain and just not remember what Halloween was like last year and the year before that and the year before that.  It would be so easy to not talk about our old friends even as we make and deepen new friendships.  It seems it would be easier to not remember but the need to avoid the pain begins to need something bigger and fiercer to keep all of it in.

In a way, we all as a family need these books to talk about the doors and the walls and the memories and the tigers in our lives.  The books mediate our conversation better sometimes than a one-on-one coffee date.  Something about dialoguing our struggles through the lens of someone else brings up what’s underneath in a way my efforts at direct assault fail.

So, we keep reading and we keep talking.  I don’t know what my kids will treasure about their childhood but this is one aspect I will treasure.

Hotel Life

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Tonight is the ninth night in the third hotel over the past month. Such is not our normal life but, then, I wonder if normal really exists. It is our chosen life.

Yes, I chose this, I remind myself as my son emerges from the connecting room with his nose gushing blood. Did I mention Asian hotels love white duvet covers and sheets? Something about a broad, fluffy white bed drives my kids bonkers with desire to wrestle and jump but tables often get in their way.

Hotel manners must constantly be reviewed in such months as this one. Quiet in the hallways. Avoid pushing the doorbells to other rooms lest a sleepy man open the door on you.

Sometimes we discover that the fire in the lobby is actually an illusion you can stick your hand into. Then we converse long and hard about fire dangers.

New arguments begin about buttons in elevators and key cards to rooms. A confusing rotation ensues and I seem to always be the last to find out but the first to mess it up.

For all the extra stressors of hotel life, I started learning a lesson seven years ago when we spent 3 weeks in a hotel with a 2 year old and a 6 month old. I dreaded it, assured in my heart that boarding the flight for that trip meant entering some level of hell. Instead I discovered that hotel living yields its own sweet fruits.

An afternoon break means we pile on the bed together and watch cartoons in foreign languages. Bed time means scouting out creative places to make pallets. Two year olds and four year olds can share a bed but they do tend to use each other as pillows. We explore and sometimes our hotel hosts an Indian wedding with real Kuwaiti princes who own airplanes.

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Our transient months surely take their toll but today my heart fills with the treasured memories made when I chose to slow down and enjoy our crazy life.

Another day I may write a horror story or ten…we don’t always get connecting rooms…

 

Lost!

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 3 Comments

20121101-132501.jpg“Mommy! We’re lost!” my son piped up from the back seat. We cruised around previously unexplored sections of our side of town. Our new car made it possible to explore more extensively and I like exploring. As I pondered the intersection I replied, “I’ve never been here before, but we’re not lost.”

How often I feel like him! I sit in the back seat, out of control and my soul is screaming, “I’m lost! I don’t know where I am or how to get home!” I hold no roadmap or sense of direction. I sweat and scramble to make a plan and carve a path in the thicket of life so I know where I stand or how to arrive at a destination, any destination. So I feel secure. I pretend to save myself.

5 years ago a host of friends moved away and I felt abandoned on a road I wanted to abandon, too. I enjoyed the journey before with my friends but now with the space cleared the openness and silence overwhelmed me. The expanse left felt like the valley of the shadow of death to me and I was no happy, contented sheep. Why was I on this road anyway?

I knew little of the shepherd on the next stretch though I learned. By the rod and the staff I learned as I felt poked and prodded through my fears. I learned His voice and His ways more in the coming years. Now, 5 years later I experience the same phenomena, a host of friends moving at the same time.

His peace and His rest reside in green fields and bubbling brooks but before that, and after and all around sometimes, come the valleys of death. I know my weakness and fear. I feel lost and I hear His voice more clearly now echoed in my son’s words.

“You have never been here before but you’re not lost.”

Slop

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 2 Comments

photo (1)Some men occupy their days and fill their pocketbooks carting slop.  Bicycles carry huge, blue, open vats of slop to unknown places where the pigs live.  It sloshes around, a thick, chunky mixture of food scraped from plates or expelled from woks.  The muck on the containers repels a pedestrian before the smell ever reaches the nose.  No one washes the containers between loads.  I do not ask to know this…I see it clearly.

I never pictured slop in my mind until I encountered it overseas.  America is clean.  Slop travels mysteriously through some opaque tube into a closed truck with some words about sanitation written in green or white on the outside.  Only a few come face to face with this ugly reality of life.

My children, however, grow up smelling smells and seeing things I never set my eyes on as a child.  Slop is one of them.  I say slop and they know…their minds pull up a picture of a nasty blue container crusted with who knows what.  Slop is real to them.  Their faces contort when I talk about slop.

So, last week when I read the story of the Prodigal Son and they listened again…I added some detail and brought it home to them.  I told them that pig food he ate?  He ate slop.  Their faces dropped.  Unimaginable.  How desperate.  How disgusting…eating slop.  Anything is better for dinner than slop…even slavery in your own home.  Going back as slave became a totally reasonable and necessary choice to avoid slop.

photo (2)We walked along puce green for a few minutes as we imagined eating slop.  I hope they remember slop for the rest of their lives.  The smell, the look, the grime…because maybe the grace of the Father offered to them will astound them.  Instead of slop…or slavery…a beef barbecue as a treasured son?

I hope and pray they choose the barbecue because they know a life apart from God resembles eating slop.  I pray they know the grace of the feast that the Lord offers when the best they dare expect hope for is slavery.

And, for myself, I hope I receive the gift daily to enjoy the barbecue instead of trying to earn a meager meal…the best I fear I deserve…as a slave.

Teaching My Boy to Read

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I’m teaching my boy to read these days.  Reading is a passion of mine.  If I was not so responsible I’d be up late with the light on to finish a book.  Who am I kidding? I’m not very responsible.

Luxury these days would be reading as long as I wanted rather than only as long as I could manage to put off other things.  I dream of the day when I will be the one at the pool with a book instead of the one with the bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

But my boy, he seems oblivious to reading. He’s compliant so he sits and participates in the lessons and he’s learning.  He’s also the one who told me quite clearly from the beginning that “some people read and some people build things.  I am the kind that builds things.” He thought that would get me off his back.  It did not though I’m pretty sure he will pursue a Bachelor of Science degree if he goes to college.

So, I sit five mornings a week and wait patiently for him to remember the sounds, figure out ways to help him blend sounds together, offer encouragement and correction, flash through cards.  It’s exhausting!  He even tells me to back off and not say “good!” after every successfully sounded out word.  Fair enough.  A guy’s got to maintain his dignity. I get it.

Recently, I noticed my son looking at some words and then trying to sound them out in his spare time. Up until that point, he’d been content to just see a jumble of words and let it be. Why try when Legos beckoned? Now, he looks, he assumes meaning can be found and he tries to unlock the code. I smile. It’s clicking. I’ve been waiting for it to click all year.

Perseverance.  That’s what it is my son does with such constancy in his learning that speaks to my spiritual life. Persevere. Keep sounding out what needs sounding out.  Keep reading the next word on the page even if I read it poorly and someone corrects me.  Even if I read it well and someone says “good!” in a way that makes me feel like a child.  Keep going until something about God, grace, and life clicks. Celebrate.  Then, move on to the next word and keep going.

Persevere.

When Boundaries Get Crossed

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Picture me standing in line for the lady’s room at a coffee shop with my daughter mentally pondering my spiritual growth.  Just a year before at the same shop I’d struggled with impatience.  Women in our host culture seem to take eons in the restroom. Eons.

Maybe its just that personal spaces are few and when privacy comes, it must be enjoyed…for awhile.  Now, look at me waiting patiently! I felt thankful to be in such a place and be able to recognize this growth. I mentally patted myself on the back.

A few minutes later, after stepping in to have our moment, an older women enters the restroom and waits about 2 seconds before she starts pounding on our doors.  Literally, pounding.  The locks rattled, the door shook.  It was a shocker!  She loudly complained of how long we are taking and asks us to get out so she can have her moment.  She continued to grumble and berate us loudly and did not cease to pound.

I know enough language to be sassy.  I can express things I wish I could not.  What proceeded to transpire still fills me with a mixture of pride and shame.  Pride at the fluency and shame at my use of my fluency.  We conversed…ok…spoke loudly…ok…argued.  I suggested she find other places to have her moment.  She asked me to show her one.  I replied I could not do that at this moment.  She continued to loudly complain and urge me to hurry up.  I offered to learn from her vast experience about how best to do that.  And it went on. It was a charged conversation.

Ten minutes later when the adrenaline dissipated in my veins, I doubled over in hysterical laughter at the absurdity of what transpired in that restroom. To have someone literally try their level best to evict you from a bathroom stall, well, it just crosses a boundary.  Apparently, it’s a boundary I did not want crossed.  Isn’t that how it is with boundaries?  We realize their importance to us when they are crossed.

I’ve heard it called “Hulking Out”, what I did.  It’s not pleasant, attractive, or in the slightest bit useful.  I had to explain and apologize to my daughter.  Actual repentance in my heart occurred later that day.  I realized just how short my fuse can be…so very short…which humbled me.  All that pride of how I learned so much patience?  Gone. Back to square one, I stood there with a truer picture of who I was and it was not who I wanted to be!  I hulked out, tried to force my right and win by argument…by power. It’s not the first time in my life that I’ve hulked out.

A crossed boundary often kicks in my survival instincts. I try on being dangerous. But that’s not the dangerous God wants for me.  His power came in His laying aside His life and rights for others…not claiming them for Himself.  He gave everything.  Am I willing to forgo survival?  To pass on using my strength which is no strength at all?  To be truly dangerous God’s way is to be the right kind of dangerous.

I think being dangerous for God’s kingdom that day would have been using my 10 minutes of language ability on my captive audience toward a much different end than protecting my right to a bathroom stall!

My Little Girl Dress

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Purple, pink, and yellow striped.  Shiny satin and lace and completely impractical, the kind of dress an adoring father buys without consulting the family budget.  Lavish.  When I opened it as a girl, I remember trying to hide my delight.  Trying to be not my age.  I’m sure I failed.

I loved that dress and remember the disappointment when all of a sudden my body betrayed me and I outgrew it.  I’d become to tall and not a little girl anymore.  I don’t know what happened to the dress, whether it was stored away or given away.  I wish I’d saved it knowing now what I wish I’d known then.

Dads care about clothing.  Well…good dads care about clothing.  They care that their daughters reflect who they truly are, cherished ones with a strong protector.  Every daughter should get a surprise gift sometime in their lives, a beautiful dress from their dads.  Clothing is such a tangible display of a love that cherishes.

Now I find I don’t wear clothing to reflect much, I wear it to attract much.  Attract friends, attention, praise, a coveted business class upgrade (it’s never happened).  But, I’m reminded this week that God clothes me to reflect Himself and my identity as belonging to Him.  What’s even better is I’m still me!  His covering makes me more beautiful than I could ever be on my own!

God clothes me and covers me with much more than clothes to reflect His freely bestowed and lavish grace.   There’s nothing I need to attract anymore.

What does it look like to reflect Him in my actual clothing though?  In my daily life?  In my speech and in my responses?

I’m still pondering that one!  I’m pretty sure it means beautiful so I’m excited.

Watching the10K

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Watching the 10,000 meter Olympic race becomes a teachable moment when watched with your mom.  My kids learned this Saturday morning.  After 2 laps they all stirred having decided the Japanese team would win for sure.  Then transpired a long conversation, 20 laps long, of race strategy.   “Don’t be too sure”, I urged.  I threw out definitions of pacing.  The kids stuck around just to prove me wrong.  The Japanese would win.

The Japanese women finished near the back with looks of agony and streaming sweat.  The first place finisher blazed across the finish line with a huge smile having cruised to a strong lead in the last 5 laps.  A 10,000 meter race elicited shouts and exclamations from the kids.

Sticking around gave me 20 laps to verbally ruminate on the spiritual analogies of racing, cheating, finishing, pacing.  That’s what mom’s do, beat a lesson to death, and so I did that because that’s what I’m supposed to do.

Towards the end of the beating I realized I needed to see the 10k for myself.  For my walk with my Lord.  My race.  The reminder to give it my all and plan for a whole lot of laps.  I needed to feed my desire to finish strong and blaze across the line.