Life

Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. 

~John Lennon

I have been busy making plans for our last-hurrah, final family-vacation-with-all-of-us, trip to Washington, D.C. next month!  I've always wanted to take our kids.  Next summer, we'll be looking at two leaving for college and hopefully working at summer jobs, and we are thinking hard about selling our trailer...so the time has come.

It sure makes sense to use the trailer for this trip, since we have it.  Hotel rooms in DC aren't cheap, and we'd have to get two of them.  Gas is going to cost us an arm and a leg--our rig gets 8 mpg, which has deterred us from many a long trip--but we'll still come out far ahead over getting hotel rooms, I realized when I crunched the numbers.

I've been crunching a lot of numbers lately.  With the college bill looming and finally a little free time this summer, I've been scrutinizing our budget and all our accounts, including savings accounts we set up for kids years ago.  Turns out the bank didn't get the address changed on all of them...and other problems have needed to be ironed out as well.  We set up college and high school checking accounts for B19 and Blondechick17, and I've been gleaning advice on paying for college.  Even with a financial aid package, that bill is daunting!

It's enough to raise one's blood pressure, but praise the Lord, for the last month I've been completely off medication, and my blood pressure readings have been perfect.  I think now that stress was most likely the main reason my b.p. was up.  The slower pace of the summer, having another driver to help with some of the running around, dealing with things that have been piling up, not homeschooling or working...it's taken time, but the layers of stress have been melting away, a little more every day, so that at last, I feel like I've regained some internal equilibrium.  Actually, this feels like the first time in 3.5 years--since we began thinking about moving--that I can truly relax, and I am so grateful!

It's nice to be past a crisis point in my own life, because in the last week, I've been able to go spend whole days back in Illinois, helping out some friends in crisis.  It's felt so good to have the margin in my own life to be able to serve without stress and with joy in the giving.  One day, I joined a team of friends to do a "Clean Sweep" makeover of areas of a mutual friend's house that had years of accumulated clutter--due to issues that go deeper than the layers of stuff.  We sorted stuff into garbage bags and garage sale boxes, vacuumed, dusted, took before and after pics, laughed, joked, and sank into exhaustion at the end of the day--it was great!  Currently, I am watching a friend's youngest kids, two boys about the ages of Chicklet7 and Bantam5, for a few days.  We are going to go to the beach, ride the trolley, maybe do the Jelly Belly factory...gotta keep little boys busy!

One thing about my cleaning experience that struck me was how efficient and energizing it was to clean with 3 other women.  We all were able to look around, see what needed to be done, figure out a way to do it, work non-stop for an entire day, laugh and joke while doing it, and amaze ourselves with how much we were able to get done!  That has not been my experience cleaning with teens, with kids, or with husbands.  And we all noted how much easier it is to be objective about someone else's belongings.  So my takeway is:  Ladies, consider teaming up for a Saturday of deep cleaning or decluttering.  Set your goals, send the kids and the husbands to somebody else's house for the day, and see how much you can accomplish!  Rotate houses and Saturdays, and I'm certain you'll get more done and have a better time doing it than if you chip away at it by yourself.

Besides college, I've also been thinking about our next year of homeschooling.  I can't make too many decisions yet, because the big one has been made.  I've taken the plunge and have B11 and Chicklet7 signed up to participate in a virtual school, free through the state of WI.  Purists would say that I'm technically not homeschooling them, because they will be e-students of a public school system, but I need the schedule and the accountability for this next year.  The last 3.5 years have been filled with the chaos of selling a house, moving, resettling and more, and though we've done well with a relaxed approach, we need to have a solid year, especially with B11 entering middle school.

And I just need a program that I can show up for every day.  This will be my 14th year of homeschooling, and I have grown weary.  I did not enroll B5, who will be starting kindergarten, because I was afraid it would be more work for him than it was worth to me.  I want to spend most of my time with B11 and Chicklet, and I want time for reading aloud together.  But I'll start him on Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, which I've used with all his siblings, and my favorite kindergarten workbooks: Get Ready...  Get Set... and Go For the Code workbooks.  Maybe I'll even let him write in them.

So, life.  Making plans, while the clock keeps ticking away.  Life keeps on happening.  And it's been good.

He's Back

Bantam15 is back from camp.  Those ten days were life-changing, and I am in such a state of wonderment, joy and thanksgiving!

God answered our prayers specifically.  B15 had a great counselor, who understood his personality and challenged him in his leadership gifts.  The boys in his cabin were good kids, really good, and they all are staying in touch through Facebook and phone calls, and planning a reunion already.  (While on the phone with one of them last night, B15 asked me for copies of Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters.  You can imagine how delighted I was to pull them off the shelf for him!)

But the cry of our hearts was that above all else, he would encounter God at camp.  And he did.  He had many opportunities to get alone with God, and he really prayed, for himself, at length, and he recognized God's voice speaking to him in the quiet, and in the words of his counselor and the other boys, especially in their cabin devotion times, but throughout their activities and overnight canoe trips as well.  He came back with specific things in mind that he needed to tell us, and address with his friends, and goals that will help him walk out his new resolutions.

 As a parent, I am just so grateful to God that He chose to work through this camp...that He supplied the money to send him...and that when he was begging not to go, because he would miss out on so much while he was gone, and we almost inquired if we could cancel and get our money back, that we decided to send him anyway!  That was God.  (He told me that next year, if he says he doesn't want to go, he wants us to make him.)

I am just floating in gratefulness to God, and amazement at what He's done in our teens' lives in the past year.  Both Blondechick17 and B15, when we moved here two years ago, were just at that age where, when pulled away from the accountability of their Christian friends, they were tempted to reinvent themselves and try out "the dark side" for awhile.  Without a youth group or many Christian friends, it was easy to find kids to get on the wrong path with, plus they were at that point where rebellion--throwing off the shackles of parental dependence--appealed to them.

So far, all of our teens have reached a point where we parents realize that there is little we can do about their walk with God.  We can encourage, shape, guide, direct, give advice...but ultimately, a young person has to make their faith their own, and it seems like Mom and Dad are the last ones they want to listen to about how to do that.  It's at this point that we need interventions, like camp, like the private Christian school, where peers and other adults have the opportunity to speak and reinforce the same message.  But our teens can hear it from others as they will not from us!

We have had to do a lot of forcing--had to force both kids to go to Honey Rock last year, had to force Blondechick to go to the Christian school, and B15 to go to camp again this year--but in each case, our kids have ended up thanking us for it.  In each case, we were reluctant, because of the expense involved financially and emotionally (and in the driving time commitment, too), but in each case, God had planted the conviction that this was what was needed, and we trusted that the expense would be worth it.

I remember reading She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, the teen girl who was asked about her faith just before she was killed in the Littleton High School shootings years ago.  In this book, her mother shared their story of Cassie getting in with a bad group of friends, and the lengths the family went to to intervene, even selling their house and moving to the other side of town to get into a different school district, and finally pulling her out of public school and sending her to a Christian school.  They switched churches, they found a good youth group, and Cassie was so transformed that she begged to return to the public school to be a light and witness there.  And that's where she was when the tragedy happened.

The thing that struck me was their commitment to intervention, despite the personal cost and sacrifice--moving!!--and the good results that came of it.  I know that book gave me courage and conviction as a parent of teens myself.  It is pretty neat to look back and see how God was working years in advance of the actual crisis!  I'm also grateful for how he led us away from a couple of "Ishmael" plans that weren't really of Him.

While we were at Honey Rock for Family Day, the last day of camp, B11 was begging to go next year.  We'd love to send him, but the cost is prohibitive, and there is another good, more affordable option that we might look at for him.  "Besides," B15 advised me, "he doesn't need it yet."  I knew exactly what he was saying:  Wait until he needs an intervention, or the spiritual boost to make his faith his own.

It was one of the several ways that he has said "thank you."  As I say, "Thank You!!"

Grace

I heard a sermon last week that gave me a picture of grace.  Some concepts my head knows, but my heart has trouble grasping, and one of the most troubling questions to my mind and heart has always been that problem of falling short.

"For all have sinned and fallen short," I learned as a kid.  And I learned that only Jesus measures up, and in his perfection and sinless sacrifice, there is salvation for me.  So I cling to Him...but still I see between us that chasm of sin that separates.  I confess my failures over and over, I receive His forgiveness without measure, but I despair sometimes.  I want to "be holy as He is holy."  I want the fruits of the Spirit:  love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness and self-control.  I want to "be transformed by the renewing of my mind."  I want to see some improvement!

But still the chasm looms.  I know Christ is the bridge across it, but it's hard to keep my eyes off the awful, ever-present separation.

So last week, this friend, Paul R., preached at church.  We think of the distance between God's holiness and our sinfulness as a chasm, he said.  But imagine, he suggested, that separation as the distance between the places where a string is attached on either end of a violin.

There is tension created along that string, just as there is tension between who we are and who we want to be, between holiness and sinfulness, between how we view ourselves and how God views us.  But there is grace in realizing this:  A bow can be drawn along that distance bridged by one tense string, and music can be created!

That metaphor struck a chord with me.  I knew it was truth.  Out of my very failures and lackings, God can draw forth music.  Because I cannot measure up, I need Christ to be that string connecting me to God, bridging that gap, and even heightening that tension in my soul between what I so often am and what He lovingly wants me to be.  But the grace is in the music He creates from the tension.

And it's in the dance He invites me to join--the dance of grace instead of self-condemnation.  "For there is therefore now no condemnation."  "In thy presence is fullness of joy!"

Attune my ears to hear that music, Lord.

Thank you for the music you've already drawn from my life, even when I did not have ears to hear it (to my sorrow). You are always gracious with me, though I am not. Draw me close, Lord. Let my need of you be the peg that tightens the string and holds it there, ready to be played.

And may my soul rejoice in the music you draw forth!