“O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.” (Psalm 139:1)
Perhaps the most frightening attribute of God is that He knows everything about us. Everything! He has “searched” (literally “penetrated”) us and “known” (“understood”) us. . . Furthermore, He is everywhere around each one of us (vv. 7-10), wherever we are or could be. He fills all space, and there is no escape.
Go ahead, ask me where I found that quote. Or even better, how ’bout I up the fun quotient and give you some options. Was it:
I met a woman a couple of months ago who may have saved my life. At the very least, she brought a much needed spark of laughter and joy into a dark time. And I don’t even remember her name. She was a short woman, with slightly beaver like teeth, but it was a faux-masquerade ball at the local science museum for geeky adults and she was wearing a sequined mask, so I never saw her face. I went because not only am I a geeky adult, I’m also a member of the museum so it was free.
In the course of talking I mentioned that I had 5 kids and was separated from their dad. Turns out she was divorced as well. I listened to her story and expressed sympathy for her painful experience. And then she turned to me and said, “well, and I hate to be a Debby Downer here, but you do know you’re never going to get another man again. Not with 5 kids you’re not. No way. You’re going to spend the rest of your life alone.” At which point it took every ounce of self-control for me not to burst out laughing. Who says something like that? What is wrong with this person? How do you even respond to something like that? Do you burst into tears, confess your fear of being alone forever and let her shake her head knowingly at the shame of it all? If you try to protest that you’ll be OK she’s just going to assume you’re in denial and maybe humor you. I could have told her she was rude, but she was such a character I hated to see her leave in a huff. I told her I hadn’t started processing that aspect of my loss yet.
Now, if this had been all the woman said, that would have been enough to make it worth my drive out that night. But I will take it that God knows my sense of humor and put this dear woman in my path that night. Continue reading “The Prophetess of Doom and Gloom”
Remember when everyone was writing their “25 Random Things” lists on facebook? Believe or not, it’s been 2 years since that became such a big thing that news outlets devoted coverage to the phenomena which I think means it’s time to take a look back and see what’s changed, what’s the same and maybe what we wish we hadn’t said. I invite you to share your “25 Random Things” list in the comments below. If you are a blogger, this is an easy blog post – link back here or put a link in the comments below.
Here’s my list from January 17, 2009:
1. I always put the toilet lid down before flushing. You should to.
2. For several years when I was little my dad owned a small Cessna airplane. Except for my dad’s airplane, I have not flown since I was 3.
3. I am very funny. Sometimes other people even agree with me.
4. I am often stunned at how beautiful, smart and funny my little girls are.
5. I’m not entirely sure what my natural hair color is.
6. I have a spiritual director I meet with once a month.
7. I will be putting pictures of the plants I start from seed and grow under lights up on facebook all spring. They make me very, very happy.
8. I’m not a very good gardener. But I am sure that in 10 years I will be.
9. I did prison ministry in college.
10. I am taking the test to join Mensa next Saturday.
11. I’ve never met anyone I like (and sometimes hated) as much as my husband.
12. I enjoy reading stories about people’s near-death experiences.
13. I had my first alcoholic drink the fall after I turned 20.
14. I am currently writing my spiritual memoir and I’m very happy with how it’s going. (Please send any writer’s agents you may know my way!)
15. Two of the guys I dated in college broke up with me because they said I was intimidating. Continue reading “What were your “25 Random Things”?”
A person or thing cited as a notorious and outstanding example or embodiment of something.
A word or expression summarizing a thing’s characteristics or a person’s principles.
My children know one of my old classmates by name. Not that they have ever met her. And it’s not even because I have told them stories about her. I have told them stories about lots of people I have known without bothering to add in their name. No, I’m kind of ashamed to admit that they know her name because when I was a kid, her name became a byword to me. Her name stood in for a set of behaviors which I associated with her and wanted desperately to avoid myself. I called it “Sally Ruthersbrodt* Syndrome” (*Not her real name!) My kids and other people who were very unlikely to ever meet her know her name and what it meant to me. In my mind her name meant thinking that people liked you when they didn’t.
I’m not even sure how that became such a big fear for me, but it was. I got that not everyone was going to like me and I was cool with that (eventually). But what if the people who seemed to like me didn’t really? That was an intolerable thought to me. The idea of thinking that you were safe with people who weren’t really safe freaked me out. And like any good geek, I believed that gathering as much information as possible was the solution. Because then I could figure out how to avoid this perceived threat. So, to that end, I applied my powers of observation to watching the people around me looking for signs that I might be turning into a Sally Ruthersbrodt.
Unfortunately for me, if there is a disorder which is the opposite of Asperger’s that makes you inappropriately hyper-sensitive to non-verbal social cues, I have that. Continue reading “I’m a byword for neurosis”
Suck it up, kid. You'll get a better one in heaven.
A friend recently sent a note in which she commented on the lack of “why me?” talk on my blog. Silly girl – I was raised Catholic. I can think of at least 100 reasons all of this is my own fault right off the top of my head! That, plus the fact that life has been handing me inexplicably little help for as long as I can remember means that I let “why me?” go a long time ago. There are only two answers: “you’re doing it wrong” or “because this is the way you need to go“. Either I’m screwing something up and should fix it – hence the Catholic guilt – or this is one of those things that will only make sense later. Frankly, Catholic guilt gets a bad rap – it’s downright empowering in light of the alternative!
This was a tough week. It was one of those weeks where an emotional rough patch and a life rough patch collided and made a mess all over the highway of my life. (I keep telling God he needs to pave the damn thing.) And just to make sure that all of this doesn’t get to be too routine, my wonderful parents were visiting, so I had an audience. (My poor parents; I’m glad and grateful that they were here, but I know it’s only marginally more fun to watch someone you love go through things you are helpless to do anything about than it is to go through it yourself. I have to remind myself that God must have his reasons for asking them to walk a path which includes me and my mess of a life.)
If you read my book The Upside Down World ~ A Book of Wisdom in Progress, you will remember that I first met God in a fit of enraged blasphemy. Which means that I’ve always felt free to itch and moan and be as upset as I want to be in prayer. Besides, Jesus was said to have prayed with “loud cries and tears” himself. So by the end of the week, my prayers had devolved into demands: “I can’t do this. I’m not going to do this. You need to fix this. Not just spiritually, but for real. In the real world. Continue reading “It Will Be Alright. Or So I’ve Been Told”
One of the worst things I ever did in my life was pull my sister Shannon’s hair. Well, it wasn’t just the hair pulling; hitting her repeatedly just before pulling her hair was pretty bad too. I was in my early teens and had been left to babysit my younger siblings, including Shannon who is 8 years younger than me. I have no idea what started it exactly, but I do remember that she was refusing to do something or another that I had told her to do. So, I hit her. And she laughed. Which enraged me. So I hit my very slight little sister again harder. And she laughed harder. Completely besides myself with frustration and anger, I hit her again and again and she laughed at me again and again. Finally, I yanked hard on her hair and she suddenly started sobbing. Which shot right through my anger to the part of me that can’t help but feel empathy towards someone in pain.
Saying that it was one of the worst things I ever did is a bit of hyperbole. More accurate would be to say that out of all the things I have ever done, this was one that I felt worst about. I had lashed out at someone smaller and weaker than myself in anger. I love her and had been entrusted with her care, but because I had not been able to control myself, she had wound up being hurt – emotionally if nothing else. As an adult, I went and apologized to her for this incident and learned (not too surprisingly) that she has no memory of it. Honestly, I’m quite certain it wasn’t the first time I had hit one of my siblings in an attempt to get them to do what I wanted or needed them to do. But her hurt this time was so raw it made a huge impression on me. I was married before I ever let myself get that angry again. Continue reading “Drinking Anger’s Poison”
After a longer string of good days that I’ve had in I don’t know how long, I woke up pretty out of sorts this morning. Which is bound to happen. Especially, you know, every four weeks or so. So, rather than ruining my whole day by pushing myself until I’m too overwhelmed and drained to function, I grabbed my still groggy, crabby 2 year old and went back to bed to cry like a baby myself until it passed.
After a couple of minutes, Olivia looked up at the corner above the bed and began pointing towards the ceiling. She does this fairly often. I always say, “do you see an angel?” although I never see anything in the corner she’s pointing to. Continue reading “Angels in my Bedroom?”
I have been resisting the temptation to look for a couple of weeks now, but . . . SEED CATALOGUES ARE HERE! I love seed catalogues. I can sit and pour through them over and over again during the short days of winter. But this leads to dreams of turning my scraggly 2 acre yard of reclaimed brush land into a lush garden oasis. I develop delusions of having a thriving vegetable garden with well planned rows and patches. Maybe this will be the year that we try our hand at growing giant pumpkins. Visions of sunny sunflower patches. Rose bushes! A koi pond! Maybe even cluster of blueberry bushes and a few fruit trees at one corner of the yard. I can just see my children frolicking about the gardens, stopping to pluck a flower to adorn their curly hair while I sit with a glass of iced tea and soak in all the beauty of it. If only my yard didn’t actually look like it was waiting for a Chevy on cinder blocks to adorn it. One day.
For years I started seeds in a spare room under lights each spring. Each morning one of the first things I would do is go into the room to check and see what had sprouted or put up a new leaf overnight. Frankly I couldn’t even tell you why, but not much makes me happier – especially when it’s snowing in April – than seeing these little green shoots emerging from the soil. A few years back I had to leave town for a few days in late spring before I was able to plant out that year’s crop. The qxh, apparently not understanding that my request that he water them daily while I was gone wasn’t really optional, didn’t. When I got back about a third of my plants were dead. I’m normally a pretty tough cookie, but I cried for days. Continue reading “Seed Catalogue Dreaming”
Because I am a self-confessed former political junkie in recovery, I sometimes miss stories when they first happen (which, trust me, isn’t really a problem). Which is why I’m just now hearing about this Santorum, dead-baby deal. For those of you who like me were fortunate to miss this story as it developed, here’s the brief version:
In 1996, Rick and Karen Santorum lost a child just past 20 weeks gestation. The baby died 2 hours after birth. The Santorums held and spent time with their deceased infant. They took the baby home for their other children to be able to do the same. They also had a funeral service and burial. We know all of this because Karen Santorum wrote about it in her book Letters to Gabriel which came out in 1998.
The reason it is in the news is because two commentators – one real liberal and one token “liberal” hired by Fox News to lose arguments – both made reference to this event on TV recently. Both spoke of this story as being so strange, distasteful and crazy that voters who heard about it would reject Santorum as a disturbed wack-job. Controversy ensued. The Fox news talking head claimed in a tweet to have apologized directly to Rick and Karen Santorum who were brought to tears when asked to comment on these fools’ words. (They don’t deserve to be named. Fools is name enough.) Continue reading “Gabriel Santorum and our Rituals of Grief”
There’s probably nothing guaranteed to make you feel worse on a day-in-day out basis than those unfinished tasks we just keep putting off. Unsent thankyou notes, unfolded laundry, bills, making that doctor’s appointment. Whatever. They just hang over our heads like big neon signs screaming “irresponsible”, “lazy”, “unorganized”. I know that a lot of people swear by lists, but that has never worked for me. I am completely unrealistic about what I can get done in a day, I am dissatisfied with anything less than near-perfection and the list thing just puts those two tendencies on a collision course with burn-out and discouragement. But in my relentless quest to be both healthy and happy – at the same time – I have hit on something that works for disorderly, easily discouraged, unrealistic me.
The way things usually work is that in the back of my mind, I will know there’s something I need to get done. Sometimes these things will pop into my head at an inopportune time. And because it’s not done, I just have a gut level reaction to the task which is a combination of guilt and dread. So I put it off again. It’s waited this long, right? Over and over. Continue reading “Mindfulness and Procrastination”
I met a woman a couple of months ago who may have saved my life. At the very least, she brought a much needed spark of laughter and joy into a dark time. And I don’t even remember her name. She was a short woman, with slightly beaver like teeth, but it was a faux-masquerade ball at the local science museum for geeky adults and she was wearing a sequined mask, so I never saw her face. I went because not only am I a geeky adult, I’m also a member of the museum so it was free.
Remember when everyone was writing their “25 Random Things” lists on facebook? Believe or not, it’s been 2 years since that became such a big thing that news outlets 
After a longer string of good days that I’ve had in I don’t know how long, I woke up pretty out of sorts this morning. Which is bound to happen. Especially, you know, every four weeks or so. So, rather than ruining my whole day by pushing myself until I’m too overwhelmed and drained to function, I grabbed my still groggy, crabby 2 year old and went back to bed to cry like a baby myself until it passed. 
Because I am a self-confessed former political junkie in recovery, I sometimes miss stories when they first happen (which, trust me, isn’t really a problem). Which is why I’m just now hearing about this Santorum, dead-baby deal. For those of you who like me were fortunate to miss this story as it developed, here’s the brief version:
There’s probably nothing guaranteed to make you feel worse on a day-in-day out basis than those unfinished tasks we just keep putting off. Unsent thankyou notes, unfolded laundry, bills, making that doctor’s appointment. Whatever. They just hang over our heads like big neon signs screaming “irresponsible”, “lazy”, “unorganized”. I know that a lot of people swear by lists, but that has never worked for me. I am completely unrealistic about what I can get done in a day, I am dissatisfied with anything less than near-perfection and the list thing just puts those two tendencies on a collision course with burn-out and discouragement. But in my relentless quest to be both healthy and happy – at the same time – I have hit on something that works for disorderly, easily discouraged, unrealistic me.
The Upside Down World 