Category Archives: Fireflies

Wide-Eyed Wonder

What the Children Are Saying

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With a weathered spoon, I am chasing bubbles in boiling oatmeal when my three-year-old stampedes down the wooden stairs, shouting out with the tree in his sights.

“Shh!” I shake my head, “Your sister’s still sleeping.”

It’s a ruckus when he’s in the room. The ancient quote is running through my brain now, Plato’s words telling me to lighten up:  “A boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.”

A little click and seven-hundred sparkles come on and make the place a little brighter, the bulbs on the tree teaming up with the morning sunlight that stretches down through the gray clouds into our windows.

On the shelf, painted porcelain people and barnyard animals gather around. My loud little boy fits right in with the rowdy crowd of the Bethlehem stable. He scuttles over to the unfinished nativity and reaches out to the wooden box next to it, the one with all the tiny doors hiding little Christmas secrets. Our Baby Jesus figurine waits in a cubby.

I stand with a kitchen towel in hand and wait for him to open the adjacent door where the figurine will sit for the day, another 24 hours closer to Christmas. But instead he looks at me and opens his mouth to speak.

“Jesus growed down into a baby,” he tells me as he lays eyes on the tiny form.

I marvel to hear it spoken so freshly in the words of a child and I marvel again that the Word who’s big enough to create the world and the sun that it revolves around and the planets that move with it and all that is beyond, that the grand, king-sized Word became so small that He had to use baby talk. He “growed down”. The incorrect grammar says it right. I stop a minute to savor the unedited words, keeping all these things in my heart, my son experiencing Mary’s son, the only begotten of God the Father.

Elliot slides his thumb over the swaddling clothes and adds to the sentence, “And then he growed up into a man.” It’s something to tuck away and so I grab the nearest pen to jot down his words under that December date in my journal. But he isn’t finished. He’s getting to the sad part.

“Then His heart wasn’t beating anymore,” he says.

For a while, I had wondered if my son were too young to know the full story yet. I had timidly read to him of the lashes, the spit, the hatred, the cross, and watched him furrow his own eyebrows at the painting of the thorny crown on Jesus’ head, the Baby King all grown up into a dying man.

Is this all that life comes down to…death? I blot my eyes with that kitchen towel. I am afraid for him to figure out that he too will die one day. And maybe I’m afraid to face it myself, forgetting to meditate on the hope that softens the sting.

Next thing I know, he speaks aloud that hope to me, so simple I can’t argue with it. “Then it was beating again,” he says. Not for pretend. Not a metaphor. His actual heart beating again. And so will ours because of Him.

“What next?” I prod him on, wondering at the words he’ll choose, this whole new person relating to his Creator.

“Then God pulled Him up to heaven with his REALLY long arms!” This boy is jumping for joy, reaching high.

I can almost feel those long arms now, God reaching down to here, calling forth His praise from the lips of a child right under my roof. The Savior, meek and mild, has lassoed my little boy with His story…and I am shushed.

Kneeling down, I put my arms around Elliot to give him a squeeze. Then, he opens the door to the new day and stows Jesus away.

We fetch little sister and all bow our heads to thank God for our pot of oatmeal and for the food trough bed where Jesus laid His head. I pray first and then Elliot interrupts. It’s his spiritual gift. “God, I know you have Jesus right now and He is coming to pick us up in a minute.”

We move the Christ child from cubby to cubby, from day to day, and wait not so patiently for Christmas when we celebrate Jesus’ first advent. And even greater, when we log another day in the history books, we’re that much closer to His second advent. We are hungering for more than this season can hold. I can tell it. We haven’t even had our breakfast and already this little one has preached me the whole Gospel.

(Luke 2:19, John 1:1-5,14, Matthew 21:16)

Reposted from the archives

Seeing the World Right-Side-Up {Preserve Your Story ~ Day 12}

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We rolled up to the farm and flung the doors open. The firstborn knew what to do with the  fields in sight. He galloped. He jumped. He turned himself upside down then right side up, somersaulting himself on repeat over unkempt grass and dirt. Like Erika at The Life Artist wrote in her answered prayer story last week, “…you may just need to stand on your head to see the world right-side-up.”

The property was a wild place and in the distance I saw our wild dog trotting around with his new hunting buddies. We had dreamed six years for this wide-open space for him, this wide-eyed wonder for us. We had prayed, begged even, so desperate for relief.

This had been our reality…. Our son couldn’t sing a nursery rhyme without sending the hound into a tailspin, dog claws ice skating across hardwoods, him whimpering all the way. At meals, we had to harness the dog to a spot far from the kids’ plates to keep him from snatching food and gobbling up little fingers along with it. When we set his own food bowl in front of him, he scratched at it and drooled over it and every once in a while gathered the courage to lunge in for a nibble. Some nights he’d get himself so worked up that he wouldn’t eat at all, leaving his stomach gurgling in hunger and anxiety all night long. Hello insomnia.

Then, there was his voice. The bark and bay that were meant to call a hunter from miles away to find a treed raccoon, that voice was corralled into the echoing walls of our home and our small backyard. As for the sweet lady behind us who dared rest her arm on the fence for neighborly conversation, our hooligan hound thought it best to sink his teeth in, sending her off with a puncture wound. From there on out, we muzzled him every time we let him out of the house.

His anxiety and depression were contagious. Even while I worked hard to rehabilitate our hound, I cried many days wondering how my sanity could outlast his lifespan, how our home could ever be a happy one when all our efforts and the meds and the expensive training with a world-renowned therapist at Purdue’s Animal Behavior Center hadn’t done the miracle.

It all came down to the day he bit our son. I wept hard when I made the appointment with the vet. We had scoured the country for a rescue. No after no after no. No one could chance taking a biter. One animal lover, my friend’s husband, continued to search when I had given up. But the date was set. There was no other way out.

At church that Easter morning, a grown woman shared a strange story from her teenage years, how her cat had gone silent for two weeks, not a single meow. In her worry, she had the guts to ask God, whom she didn’t know so well at the time, to step into her little world and give it a try. If He’d help the cat to find its voice again, she’d promise to read her Bible every day. Within minutes, the cat came in to run its head under her hand, purring and full-out meowing.

I held back my sniffles for a bit, but not my prayers. If God cared enough to step in for the silent cat and this curious girl, I felt I could ask Him again for better ending for Hoover.

That night as I bawled my eyes out to extended family, my friend and her husband were chatting about our situation in a town two hours away. “If only there were more time,” my friend’s husband sighed, “Even two weeks more. I’m sure we could find some solution.” My friend calmly said back to him, “If God can save Hoover in a matter of two weeks, God can save him overnight.”

When I got back home that night, I opened my email to a consolation note from another faraway friend who’s dealt with her share of wild animals, and her share of hardship (and answered prayer!). She reminded me that I had to be willing to do what was safe and healthy for my family and that I’d tried everything, even beyond reason, to save Hoover. But had I thought about the possibility of finding a hunter to take him in and train to be what he was meant to be. Good idea, but I didn’t know any hunters. Or did I?

It hit me then, the memory of the black book with the gold hound dog stamped on the front. I picked it up and started flipping pages. Right inside the cover, hidden all these months, was the hunter’s number. And there was this light peeking into the tomb Easter night. Next morning, the door opened in full. One phone call and our life was made new.

A few months later, on our summer night at the farm, we rolled in the grass with puppies and kids. We nuzzled (not muzzled!) our dog and reveled at his new hunting adventures. He’d been adopted into hound royalty by the grandson of the man who started the very breed in the 1930s. And he was happy. We are still wide-eyed in wonder.

I can’t really do the story justice here in a blog post. The details are too many and too significant, all the things God choreographed to write this story for us. Someday, I may tell it in long-form, maybe hardbound, our little version of Marley & Me meets One Thousand Gifts…working title Happy Unleashed: The true story of a hooligan hound, a frazzled mom and the redeeming love of their Creator.

On the other side of answered prayer in all this wide-open space, with all this wide-eyed wonder at seeing the world right-side-up…I could just about do a somersault.

{What wild answers to prayer could you be lassoing into story? Take a few minutes to make an outline of your narrative including: 1. The hardship, 2. The audacious prayer, 3. The people and circumstances God used to lead to the answer, 4. The answer itself, 5. What life felt like afterward. Share here if you feel comfortable.}

This is Day 12 of my series 31 Days ~ Preserve Your Story, linking up with The Nester’s annual 31 Days of Change and The Hollie Rogue’s Tell Your Story link-up.

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Just Two Eyes to See

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I pivot the tiny screen on its hinges and almost slam it away in the ceiling of the minivan. “Don’t even ask,” I tell them, “we’re keeping our eyes on the real world today.”

I’m lecturing by now, a woman with a diatribe, “There’s so much beauty around us….” A song is running through my head. I think of the lyrics I’ve accidentally quoted: “There’s so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see but everywhere I go I’m looking.”

I’ve communed with God through those words and ones like them, plain-speaking words that roll out of my mouth a decade and a half after the artist up and went to heaven in a chariot. I want to be looking. I want us to be looking.

I pull the lever to reverse out of the driveway. Our wheels are rolling and my firstborn blurts it out: “The world is beautiful even though it’s broken.”

I am stunned for a moment. I expected to be arguing with him about the little silver screen. I am quiet, nodding at him, my foot on the brake. My eyes go blurry before I focus and take a mental picture to pack away as a keepsake.

We drive out of our little town and take the scenic route through the farmland on our way to the doctor’s office in suburbia. The kids are quiet, not even asking for the radio. They are looking.

I roll down the windows as I turn onto the road that traces the edge of a river. An old white barn gives way to gravity and lets the shingles sink low. Splintered cornstalks shake like tambourines in the breeze. A gnarled wire fence crouches in prairie grass. One, two, three, four and more. We count the spiraled haystacks.

And then we see it. On top of the haystack nearest to us, just past the claws of the fence, two eyes stare us down. I look in my rearview, press my brake and click on the flashers. The kids hold their awe to a whisper. The engine idles at a low hum.

The fine-feathered fellow stays still, not paused on a screen, but steady, fixed in real time. Right there on the river road, at these exact coordinates on real earth, I study him with out even the glare of a window to cloud the view.

Strapping chest dappled white and brown. Ochre beak tipped in fashionable gray. Batik print detailed on brawny wings. Football player neck. He eyeballs us from his perch, the self-assured bird.

There in all that brokenness sits bold-faced beauty, and each of us with just our two eyes to see.

Surprised by Summer

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I started last summer with a list.

Cloud gazing.
Firefly catching.
Bird watching.
Running through sprinklers.

I was all set to lead my kids on a tour of the season’s simple joys.

Strawberry picking.
Bare feet on grass.
A boat ride on the lake with friends.

I had plans for them to take it all in.

Fresh-squeezed lemonade.
Buttered corn on the cob.
Growing a watermelon from seed, then sinking teeth into the ripe red.
Walking to the local parlor for ice cream.
Cotton candy at a carnival.

I was writing their future memories.

Reining in the wind with pinwheels and kites.
Waving flags and watching the parade.
Swirling their sparklers and gasping at fireworks.

It was all I planned for summer, these little pleasures, this simple list. I needed this intentionality to kick me out of the phase of weariness that had carried over from the previous fall and winter and into spring.

But then the first week of this new season started with surgery to uncover and leash my unruly canine tooth, the one that had been hiding in my palate since childhood, one that we meant to pull forward to join the rest of my teeth. A few weeks later, I learned the surgery was useless and that I’d need another.

I felt a bit foolish to look at my summer’s simple joys list now, to revisit all of the idealistic pleasures I had planned…. What did it matter if joy came near, anyway if I couldn’t smile?

As soon as I’d stumble on a happy event and my lips dared to open, I’d slap my hand over my mouth to keep people from seeing my flared teeth and the horrible empty space in the front of my smile. Behind the scenes, it was even worse. One of my teeth had been pushed so hard from orthodontic treatment that it was thrust outside of my arch, its root protruding, almost piercing my gums.

But in the midst of the leftover cloud of anesthesia, the haze of pain meds and the almost-daily visits to the surgeon when the recovery went awry…in the middle of it, joy found me.

I visited my newborn niece and talked misty-eyed with her mom about the pretty things that hang on discipline and hard times, and I thought how pain is often the backdrop that makes joy stand out all the more. And vice versa. As I shared in the comments section of the Stars Dancing in the Water post the other day, in Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis wrote, “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”

When joy finds us, we feel the full meaning of the moment. We soak in the good, but we also feel the pain of knowing that all is not perfect…yet. These little joys in the middle of hardship, they are glimpses of the full redemption to come, when we will have these gifts as they were meant to be.

Like Ann Voskamp and her list, I was starting to keep one of my own, not things I planned to find, but things that found me….

My little beauty playing behind the sheer curtain in her room, looking like a veiled bride.
Her eating strawberries right from the field, this confidence that all He makes is hers to enjoy.
My little boy clipping his sailboat tie on his T-shirt before heading to the playground, a creative-type surely starting a new fashion trend.

And then, if only you could have seen my son when we went to the farm to visit Hoover, our original unruly canine. My boy saw the open fields and he didn’t need a list of summer’s simple joys to tell him to do this, he just felt it, real freedom, and he ran with all his might and turned himself upside down in somersault after somersault after somersault, open-mouthed grinning all the way.

And, sometime I want to tell you the whole story, how my children piled puppy after puppy on my lap that night, all eight of the little Hoovers, just days old. I want to tell you bit by bit how I went to the farm that night with teeth gritted and shoulders squared, a fighting failure of a mother and homemaker, and how they piled those sweet, sleepy, trusting puppies on me and made me know my worth. I ended the night with open hands, fireflies landing in them and taking off again over fields of soybeans, a joy hoped for that summer, but until then, not yet seen.

The summer went on. I kept on playing despite the pain and uncertainty. We read Feathers for Lunch, made nests out of salad and got to our bird watching. We ran through sprinklers. We twiddled our toes in grass. We walked to town for ice cream…more than once. We grew our watermelons and chewed them down almost to the rind where they curved like toothy little grins. We waved our flags and swirled our sparklers, checking off some more boxes on our original summer to-do list. And still, the spontaneous surprises came.

I clapped at the sight of my friend and her new husband kicking off their sandals on the dune where they said “I do,” laughter and grains of sand soaring. Afterward, my non-dancing husband twirled me and pulled me close in the low light of the bandstand. I laid my head on his shoulder, trusted his lead. Earlier, at the wedding ceremony, I had read from Joel, and the words came again to me now: “I will make up to you for the years that the locust has eaten.” I needed to trust His lead, too, to count on Him to make up for the months ruined by my unruly canine(s). And soon, He would do it– He would lead my family to one of our favorite restaurants, not even on our usual night, and cross my path with a friend who works for a different orthodontic provider.

I felt we were getting somewhere, but then, on my birthday, I lay in bed depressed again. Unlike my old provider, this new one was confident he could lure my tooth back into the arch, make my smile presentable again and even close my bite. But my first two years in braces would count for nothing. We were starting from below ground zero. I would have to pay the full price for a completely new orthodontic plan. This had been weighing on me for weeks, me feeling like a money pit.

Then the phone rang. I wiped my eyes and put some cheer in my voice so as not to give my mood away. It was my husband. He had gotten a call from his boss just then, an unexpected raise, six months before review time. And it covered all but twelve dollars of the monthly fee for my new orthodontic plan. A surprise…just for me.

The boss didn’t know it was my birthday, but God did. And He knew just what I needed that day. The attentive One who sent me a heart-shaped tomato in the garden in the heat of summer, He had a birthday gift picked out for me, an all-expense-paid trip to healing and wholeness. I needed to know I was not a burden and that my situation hadn’t escaped His notice and that I didn’t have to plan or provide for myself. He knew all that.

He has a list, too, these simple joys He’s just waiting to give. And when He surprised me with it all last summer, in the middle of trouble, I couldn’t help but smile…with my teeth showing.

{So far, this summer is much less eventful than last! Have you ever been surprised by what a season had in store? What do you have planned for this one? Share your story in the comments.}

Stars Dancing in the Water {Gift from the Sea 1: The Beach}

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We drifted over silvery waters from the big island to the tiny one. I looked out the panoramic window onto open sea and atmosphere. It was like scales had fallen from my eyes to take in that view, that true blue sky. For four months, I’d been living under a man-made sky, a firmament of soot, in the city where I was studying abroad. But there on my holiday away in Thailand, the sunlight glinted so hard off the waves that I couldn’t even make out what was underneath.

Next to me, my sister gave in to the boat’s gentle rocking and fell asleep with a pair of headphones in her ears. My friend scratched something in her journal. I had a stack of books to read and postcards to write and a lot of thinking to do on our ten days on the island. I was looking for closure on a bad relationship, looking to get out from under that kind of grey. The happy island life, away from cars and computers, and near the sand and sea and people who loved me– it was just what I needed.

When I thought of our destination, somehow I had pictured a hill of sand with a scattering of palms. But as we neared, what I saw out the window made me gasp. No one told me it would look like this. I wanted to nudge my sister, but I couldn’t look away from the sight of the two enormous limestone cliffs glowing bronze in the morning sun. They stood like twin guards to the secrets beyond the gate. Our boat entered slow, the engines relaxing, bringing us inside the huddle of rocks.

Later, when I took a book out to the beach, I fell asleep to the rhythm of the waves and got the worst sunburn of my life. If only I had read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s words by then, how “one carries down the faded straw bag, lumpy with books, clean paper, long over-due unanswered letters, freshly sharpened pencils, lists and good intentions,” I would have been wise to the fact that the “books remain unread, the pencils break their points and the pads rest smooth and unblemished as the cloudless sky.”

The body and mind need first to breathe fresh air and clear out the smog of urban noise, busy schedules, and complicated relationships, and to become “like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.” Oh, that…and the body needs sunscreen.

In the morning, I walked to the empty beachfront from our bamboo bungalow. The sandy path was strewn with fragrant flowers, good morning mercies fallen from the trees overhead. I had this sense that my Maker was romancing me, bringing me simple joys to erase complicated hurts.

Out on the sand, smoothed by the night tide, I sat in a tattered lounge chair. In the cove, the cliffs shone golden and the water lapped gentle. A kitten sneaked up and batted his paws at the strings of my swimsuit. I sparred with him, then tickled him under his chin. Soon, two wild pups trotted out and put their paws to the sand, each in their own spot scratching for something just beneath the surface. The alpha quickly left his post and nuzzled his brother away from the hole he was digging. He took over and worked fast, flinging wet sand into his white mane.

Suddenly, I noticed a little surprise poking out from the little pit, a claw of a different sort. From its hiding spot, a crab danced out into the open and clicked his claws like castanets, the prey teasing its predators. The pups ran in circles around their little jester, snapping their teeth and pawing at the creature. Right within reach, the crab could easily have been breakfast, but they missed him on purpose and chased him in silly circles back into the bubbling surf.

When we three girls came to the spot that night, the pups were out again wrestling, one taking the other by the scruff of the neck, both growling with their tails up like little exclamation points. “Remember when we used to act like that?” my sis asked. Lights glimmered in the distance from the karaoke stage. We took our footprints as far away as we could.

In pitch black, where the sand met the foliage, we threw our towels into a pile and waded into inky water. When we got waist high, we double-checked that it was still just the pups keeping watch. Then, we tossed our suits in the pile, too, and giggled at the freedom of nothing between us and the water. I ducked under to wet my hair, then rose up and kicked onto my back to look into the dotted deep of the sky. “It’s like we’re snorkeling in the stars,” I said.

When I turned toward the girls where they were treading water, I saw something strange. Glints of light followed their arms and legs as they moved. I shook my head. We were too far from the stage lights for this to be a reflection. There was so little light that I could hardly see the details of their faces. Again, they moved their arms and the fairy dust followed. I dragged my fingers through the water. Flourescent glitter shimmered there, too, stars dancing in the water. I blinked my eyes to check my vision. “Do you see that?” We were all watching by now. Again and again, it happened, magic before my skeptical eyes. There are no words to do justice to the feeling that came over me. This water was alive and I was fully alive in the moment, jumping and clapping like a happy seal at the wonder of it. I thought of the One who thought this up, this bioluminescence. I looked up, down, all around…surprises everywhere.

As Anne Morrow Lindbergh said, “One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind….”  The wild pups went digging for their pleasures, but I don’t have to. I can wait in faith for all-out joy.

In C.S. Lewis’ memoir, Surprised by Joy, written the same year as Gift from the Sea and situated on the same shelf in the bookstore, I read that “…Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is,” and then meditated on the fact that, “All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” Anne concurred, expressing that “to dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith.”

No one told me just how breathtaking that place was going to be. Instead, I got to be surprised by joy, to walk and swim in the moment by moment attentiveness of my First Love, every wonder leading my thoughts away from man-made troubles and back to Him.

{This week’s post is based on Chapter 1, “The Beach” in Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. View all entries in the series here. Special thanks to a fellow blogger who got me thinking on the theme of Surprised by Joy this week. Also linking up with my friend Charity at Wide Open Spaces for the High Calling’s Summer Writing Project.}

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So, what’s your take? Pick one or more of the reflection questions in the comments section and enter a reply to share your thoughts. All subscribers’ comments on the weekly Gift from the Sea posts (shared on Mondays in June and July) will be entered for a drawing at the end of our Summer Book Club 2012.