A Road Less Travelled

I humbly apologize for this, but I have turned on the word verification. I was loathe to do such a thing and I was holding out against it, but then I realized that Raquel goes through and deletes all the spam usually before I see it. I hadn’t thought to turn on the word verification because I thought the spam wasn’t that big of a problem, but it turns out I, as usual, was wrong. So now I have turned on the word verification to foil the wicked plans of those evil spammers. And I did it before Raquel had the chance to write a post about how she’s been going back and forth about it. Ha, I foiled so many plans with this post.

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So I decided to come downstairs and check my e-mail before I went to bed. It’s late, the children are asleep, and all is serene as I sit by the computer screen. Until Peter starts coughing. And keeps coughing. And whooping. And coughing. He’s not really awake but he’s moving around, sitting up. I know exactly how he feels and I can’t do a single thing about it. I hear him doing exactly what I did in the middle of the night last night. The coughing. The choking. The struggle to breathe when there’s no air left, and the cough is still coming. More choking. And just on the brink of a real breath of air, the coughing starts all over again. The cycle repeats again. And again. I think it was worse than this for me last night, but for him it probably feels like forever. Maybe I just coughed for a few seconds that felt like forever to me. I can’t tell to him to relax. I can’t tell him the next breath really will come, that it always does, even if it feels like your lungs have forgotten how to do this breathing thing. Even if he really were awake he wouldn’t understand. I put my hand on his head. He moves away, stands up, his feet tapping out an odd little coughing dance. Eventually the coughing makes him throw up and he almost makes it to the toilet before he does. Almost. But it’s such a little bit of vomit, and he’s breathing now. The coughing is over until the next time. He walks away, lies down on the floor, and by the time I’ve finished wiping up the vomit he’s asleep. I hate to move him. He looks uncomfortable, but I can hear him breathing. He’s breathing, and it sounds lovely. I know just how hard it is to find a position that allows breathing without coughing so I leave him where he is. Now it’s time for me to go to bed. It’s time for me to sleep–at least until the coughing wakes me up.

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My sister Adiel has been sending out e-mails every now and then to our family just talking about things she’s been thinking about. She calls them her “Quotes and Thoughts” e-mails. I was re-reading some of them recently and I came upon the one she wrote for July 19th. It made me cry again so I though I would share it. It is reprinted with permission. Here you go, Adiel, your 2 1/2 seconds of fame. Quotes and Thoughts July 19, 2005 Do you remember the movie Forest Gump? In it, Forest has a problem with his legs so he has to wear these cumbersome metal braces. There is a scene where Forest and his friend, Jenny, are walking along a road and all of a sudden the town bullies appear and start chasing Forest. They are on bikes and he is weighed down with those terrible braces. He starts to run. His legs don’t bend right and he hobbles along as quickly as he can, the bullies gaining on him rapidly. Then, suddenly, the braces break. Forest looks down at his legs, shocked, and then a smile stretches across his face and he runs like he had never run before. He was no longer hampered by those braces, his legs were healed and he ran like the wind. That was my mom. Two years ago today, the braces of sin, sickness, and pain were broken and crumbled to the ground at her feet. A smile lit her face as another Smile beamed down on her and she was able to run like the wind. Don’t look back, Mom. Keep running and dancing with your King. We’ll be there to join you soon.

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“Moriah had yarn stuffed down the front of her pants today.”

 

 

“That’s because she was being a super-hero.”

 

 

Sometimes I just don’t want to know.

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Every now and then I will be moving through my life and part of my mind says, “Hey, this would make a good blog post.” For instance this morning I was on the phone with my father. I thought this would be a good time to do something I had been planning to do that would require my hands, but not an important part of my brain. So I got out a screwdriver, a hot glue gun and some super glue and set out to fix a toy Buzz Lightyear. First I had to find the leg that had fallen off. So Dad and I are talking about symbolism and Leviticus when I finally locate the hidden limb and set about gluing it back in place. When that is done I make some coffee while we talk about my Bible reading habits. By the time we were talking about current events in my church one child was standing in the kitchen awaiting discipline, I was holding a baby and Noah kept coming to me and wanting me to fix Samuel’s Lego toy that was losing various appendages. By this point I was starting to lose focus and so Dad and I said goodbye after I had explained why I was having difficulties. He laughed and said, “Ah, multi-tasking.” Oh to spend a day single-tasking. No, I take it back. Sounds boring.

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We recently got another fix of Babylon 5 from our supplier and immediately set to watching them. We are at the beginning of season four and things have gotten wonderfully tense. There are many themes in Babylon 5 that are profound and it is a worthwhile thing to analyze the episodes and the running themes that move through the show. One such theme is caught up in two questions- “What do you want?” and “Who are you?”. There are two races who are and have been warring for thousands of years. They each have taken one of the questions as their own and it is what sort of sums them up. It is the bad guys who ask the first question and the others who have just been revealed to be not as nice as we thought who champion the other. A third question has just been introduced- “Why are you here?” Because I am a geek I have been reading what other people have thought about the series and even interviews with the creator of the series. Someone pointed out that it is not only the answers to the questions that matter, but the order one answers the questions is pivotal. If someone answers “What do you want?” before he knows who he is what he gets will not be what he truly wants and it will destroy him. If he answers “Who are you?” first and then “What do you want?” what he asks for will be what he truly wants and it will build him up. With the third question now it is important to realize where it goes in the order. It actually goes second. “Who are you?”, “Why are you here?” and then “What do you want?” If you answer the questions out of order it will be bad for you. I found this whole train of thought highly profound. I have thought about what my answers would be. What my answers would truly be, not the answers I think would sound right. Who am I? I am a daughter of the King. I am one who has been adopted from the filth I used to live with and I have been brought to the mansion set in the side of a glorious mountain to live with my Father who always has a smile for me. Why am I here? I am here to say thank you to my Father. He rescued me from where I was and even though I keep trying to run back there He is patient and loving to me. It would not repay Him if I spent the next million breaths doing nothing but saying thank you. What do I want? Oh, here’s the tricky one. There are so many things I want. So many desires that live in my heart and try to unseat my Father. Ask me the question tomorrow and I might give you a different answer. But when I look at the first two answers I know the answer to this question. I want to make my Father proud of me. I want Him to smile at me and tell me He loves me so much and that He is not ashamed to call me His child. That’s who I am and that’s why I am here. And when I search my heart of hearts and unseat the desires that are not worthy to sit on the throne of my heart that is what I want. It will be no bad thing to spend the rest of my life refining these answers and asking the questions again and again. I pray the answers will only get better.

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I was helping Arianna work on her penmanship today while Seth worked at the table mocking me. See, I have horrible, horrible, handwriting and here I was teaching someone else how to write. He was amused. I said that we all want better for our children and it is my hope that my children will surpass me when it comes to handwriting. It won’t take much, but that is my dearest wish. The conversation quickly got silly and then I went to go do some menial labor and he went back to work. I got thinking about it seriously then and I do want my children to surpass me. I want them to be weirder than I am. I was thinking about being weird because of this and the comment verveben wrote. I am weird, but I am not as weird as I could be (a scary thought) because there is still a part of me that fears what people will think. I am more weird and less afraid than my mother was at my age and I want my children to be able to say the same thing. We are all made to be us and us tends to be weird. Just about no one is normal, but for some reason we all want to be. So we all try to be normal which looks nothing like how anyone actually is. And so we are diminished because no one is being who God made him to be. I heard a sermon on tape recently wherein the pastor was talking about, among other things, community. He said, “We need you to be you so we can be we.” I thought that was a profound thought. We need to be us so that we can benefit and enriched the community. No community needs cookie cutter people. We need to be weird. But so often we aren’t weird because what would people think? We are afraid of man and so we hide behind what’s cool. But if we aren’t being us then nobody wins. Have you ever met someone who is okay with who God made him? They just reek of calm and they are annoying to be around because you can’t shake their opinion of themselves. There isn’t the doubt that keeps us second guessing everything that tries to come out of our mouths. They are at peace. You ever been around someone who hasn’t a clue who they should be and so they just copy who they think is cool? I will place a hefty bet that you have because the world is full of ‘em. The church is full of ‘em. There is a tension about them, a force field you can’t breach because then you would know who they are and how uncool they are. It a stress to interact with them because you keep banging your nose against this wall. I used to be one of these people. I still am, to a degree. And I have the most fun with life when I am with people who make it okay to be me complete with all the peculiar bits. They are enriched by me being me and I am so much more useful and helpful than when I try to be who I think they want me to be. It is strange to come out and say that I am important to my community. It feels proud. But if God says that some of us are hands and some of us are eyes and we are useful in different ways then, by Jove, we are useful! And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I look at Arianna especially and see someone who has such potential to be both unperturbed by what people think of her and greatly bothered by it. I pray she will take the first course because I need her to be Arianna. If she isn’t Arianna we all lose out on something grand. The same goes for you. I don’t even know some of the five people who read this blog, but if they aren’t being them then I lose out. And when it comes to this matter I think it’s okay to be selfish now and then.

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“…Harry was in a mood to deeply appreciate a vote of confidence from somebody who was not wearing radishes in their ears. ” Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix

Sometimes it seems that the people who agree with me are, after all, just the people with radishes in their ears. That I’ll never have any credibility with the ‘normal people’ in the world because I’m just ‘one of those radish people’ whether I ever wear radishes in my ears or not. That if I tried to convince them otherwise it would take all my time and energy away from my real goals in life. And then I wonder, “What’s so terrible about being one of the radish people?”

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I just read The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. For some reason I felt a great kinship with the main character. Yes, toward the end there are some annoying bits mostly in how the romantic interest is handled. No, the ending is quite as satisfying as the rest of the book. But overall I did enjoy it a lot. For one thing the heroine has a nasty cough for part of the book. I can see at once that this is the most natural thing in the world, and so very applicable to my life. Except that she got her cough from accidentally breathing in dragon flame while killing a dragon. It seems so much more heroic than the usual kind of cough which requires cleaning up after children who cough so hard they vomit and pausing from that to have a coughing fit myself. I suppose there could be something honorable about the second scenario as well. Right. Thanks anyway, but I’ll take the dragon fighting cough. Or would I? I realized for the first time that I’m nineteen and I have money in the bank. I could be anywhere I wanted to be right now. But I’m here and I don’t plan to leave. There’s a whole lot more to that than just the surface desicion to stick around for now. It comes to down to authority and submission and community–and yet on top of all that I just don’t want to be anywhere else right now. If I really wanted to be somewhere else I already would be. This comes as something of a shock to me. I’m here voluntarily coughing and cleaning up vomit. And somehow, this is actually a comforting thought.

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Someone recently asked me a Question I had not been asked before. It is strange because it seems to me to be a rather central question. He asked, “Why do you want to do what you want to do?” I have never been asked that question before. I’ve been asked a multitude of questions about why I don’t want to go to college, but never why do I want what I want. The Question took me aback and I realized I had never thought about it in the front of my brain before. I have certainly considered the Question in the back of my brain, but never where I noticed. Why do I want this mother thing? Why do I want to spend the rest of my life in a life that looks very similar to mine currently? Why do I want what I want? The answer went all over the place and I found myself formulating a reason using all kinds of things I hadn’t put together in the same place. And since I answered the Question I can see how I don’t have to wait until I am married to begin. That is such a helpful thought because I fall prey so very, very easily to the idea that I am waiting for my life to begin. Life right now is, you know, practice for when my life really starts. I’ll get married and I’ll work at crafting a home and then life will be moving. Right now I’m just waiting. I fall into that thinking so easily and it is so dangerous. Life isn’t to be lived in the future. God gave us Now for a reason. We are supposed to be living now and serving and worshipping and working now. It don’t work to constantly be thinking ahead to when you get married or when you have children or when anything. Life is now, not then. So with this in mind I look at my answers to the Question Posed and I saw that they, like me, were Now. I want to change to world. I have these hopes and dreams for the world. I have hopes for the church. There are aspects of the church I would like to see changed. But they won’t change in my lifetime and my influence is the influence of one. But I look at my mother and I see that her influence is the influence of at least five. She used to say that her gift to the world was her children. She raised us up so we could go fix the world. And if we couldn’t fix we were supposed to raise up children so they could go fix it. She still influences the world and she will continue to for as long as her line exists. That sounds pretty cool to me and I want to do something like that. Side note-Please understand that I am not discounting my father in all of this. I talk about my mom a lot and I worry sometimes that I make it look like he had nothing to do with us, but that is far from the truth. It is different because my mom did what I want to do. My father’s role is different from mine first because he’s a man and second because his influence is greater than one. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it’s bigger than I expect mine to be. The second part of the Answer is that I want to craft a home. Not just make a house look nice, but I want to craft a home people feel welcome and safe in. People have told us there is peace in our house. Weirdos and freaks would stream through our house when I was growing up and they all felt welcome. We have had people stay with us recently who have found rest and haven in our house when they needed it. I want to craft a home like that. I want to craft a home that people pass through and come out changed on the other side. A place where there is safety from the world that wounds us. I know that such a house is a powerful witness. And I know that such a house needs a woman to craft it and keep it. There is a saying that behind every great man is a great woman or something like that. I’m not sure exactly what I think about that, but I have seen what men can do when they have a woman to support, encourage and uphold them. These are the men who go out and do great things, but right before they get burned out their wives drag them home and make them rest. Respectfully, of course. I want to be a wife like that. I want to support a man so that he can use his energy to do great things for the God who saved me. Some people say women shouldn’t be dealing with the finances, but I say why not? Wives are here to help their husbands. If it is a real help to your man to not have to think about the bills then why not? I want to be a helpmeet. I want to support a man and see what great things he can do. So, like, all of these answers involve me being married and having my own home and having children. If I settled down to just wait I would be wasting time. So, what do I do with these desires now? For the most part I can fulfill my dreams of what the future holds now. I am a big influence on the children I live with. I am their aunt and something of a nanny. That’s a big responsibility. I have been blessed that I live with children who are only one step away from being mine. One very important step, but they are close enough to me I feel like a parent sometimes. These are the children I should concern myself with for now. If I never get married and never have children of my own I will still have known these ones. I can still help craft a home even if it isn’t mine. This home I live in has served as a haven and I can help keep a place of peace. I don’t need my own. I would like my own, but it is not necessary to fulfill the desire in me. I can help Crystal help Seth. It’s one step away, but it’s enough. I support and encourage her and she takes the energy she didn’t use doing the things I do and she uses it to be a better helpmeet to Seth. I don’t have to wait to be the sort of person I want to be or do what I want to do. I can do them now, they’re just one step removed. I am not just waiting, though I am waiting. And whenever I feel like strangling one of the children I can remind myself that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

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