Watch out for that ... ouch

If you wear glasses or have ever worn glasses then you know what I am about to tell you is the absolute truth.

Flying objects, defying all laws of physics, are somehow mystically and magically attracted to your face.

When I was a kid that meant basketballs, kick balls, dodge balls, softballs, errant hands waving about, just about anything and everything seemed to be heading one direction and then take this crazy curve and crash into my face.

When I was sixteen and on a class field trip to Quebec, a Nerf softball (yes, I said Nerf) hit me in the face, knocking my glasses off and bending them at a horrible angle.  Our tour guide wound up taking me to the local mall to get them fixed all the while explaining my predicament in French, French that I’m sure included the words, “Elle est stupide.”

Even as an adult, I am a magnet.  A few years ago I was babysitting the kids of a friend of mine when out of nowhere a ball slammed into the side of my glasses, knocking them off into my hands.

A few years before that, I was trying to blow out a candle and not having much luck (does it surprise you that a girl with glasses as thick as mine would be too wimpy to blow out a candle) so I took one last deep breath and blew as hard as I could … sending wax that had pooled around the wick flying up into my face.  The only reason I’m not blind is because of my glasses.  Try removing dried candle wax from your glasses someday when you’re bored and have an afternoon to kill.

And then yesterday, I was trying a craft project where I use binder clips to hang a picture on the wall and the next thing I knew, the binder clip popped off, shot across my right shoulder and landed ten feet behind me, stopped only by the laundry room door.

And I laughed.

My friend Jennifer and I laugh all the time about our horrible eyesight giving us zero depth perception, but fortunately for me, I’ve played a lot of video games in my life and I have excellent reflexes, either that or a very patient guardian angel.

Whether you wear glasses or not, though, I’m sure you can appreciate feeling at times like the world is taking shots at you, that everywhere you turn, something horrible is flying in your direction and you’re spending every minute of every day trying to dodge family squabbles, or trouble at work, or sickness, or your own interior Incredible Hulk that seems to pop out every time you get stuck in traffic.

The holidays are a time ripe for this type of thing.

I practically had a coronary (does anyone say coronary anymore) the other night trying to figure out my Christmas list, who I always bought for and how I was going manage giving gifts when, for the first time in my adult life, I have no source of income at Christmas.

It’s been frustrating, but it’s also allowed me to be more creative and thoughtful in my gift giving this year.  In a few days I will begin sending my mom’s Christmas gift to her.  For years, she has given me an Advent calendar.  But this year it’s my turn.  She’s been begging me for pictures that I’ve taken of flowers and wildlife and I found about 24 of them that I had printed on postcards and shoved in a drawer years ago.  So she will be getting one picture a day and on the back will be a verse from the Christmas story.

Other gifts, I won’t spoil here, but the plan is, after two Decembers in a row of dealing with one fever after the next, to spend this December relaxed and comfortably busy. 

There is a Capri Sun commercial that I love that has a mother watching over everything her son does day and night, answering questions for him in class, biking home with him and, during a game of dodge ball, standing in front of him, knocking the balls away.

We tend to make New Year’s pledges and Lenten sacrifices, but my Advent pledge this year is to let God do what God loves to do, which is take care of us. 

Psalm 91:5 tells us, “You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day.”

God is our protector, our redeemer and our hope—always. 

Even Angels Get the Blues

Yesterday was the type of day that when I lived up north, I would pray for snow instead.  The local weatherman had our high temperature predicted to be in the low seventies, but if it ever got out of the 50s, I would be shocked.  All day it was gray, cloudy, windy and cold and then later in the day, just as I left to drive to the church seeking a good walk in the labyrinth, it began to drizzle.

I began to feel a little like the Pink Panther, not the bumbling French policeman, but the cartoon pink panther who would sometimes walk around with a single cloud of rain right over his head, following him wherever he went.

When I pulled up to the church, Robin opened the door for me and asked if I was coming inside and despite the misty air, I said no, that I was going to walk the labyrinth and that was exactly what I did, hands shoved in my pockets, bitterness trailing after me in the rain.  Walking the labyrinth has always given me a sense of journey, a literal vision of paths we take.  But when I walked that path yesterday, my future seemed as muddled as the weather.

I headed out behind the church next, searching for the bridge, a key focal point in the new book I’m trying to write and though the path back there had been recently cleared, the bridge was now in disrepair and the angel, the one that graces the cover of my latest book, had suffered some sort of catastrophic injury and now had a jagged hole in her head.

And I thought, wow, even angels aren’t immune to crappy days.

I was ready to leave the church, disappointed that coming out there had not given me any real deep insights or at least vanquished the cloud over my head, but before I left, I headed inside, so that I could say a simple hi and goodbye to Pastor Debbie.

But in the few minutes it took to give a few pleasantries, something quite wonderful happened.  Heather showed up with her four-year-old, a little girl carrying with her a child’s Bible.  And I flashbacked to the story Bibles I had when I was little.  So while Heather talked business with Pastor Debbie, I found myself asking this little girl about her book and sharing with her the stories I remembered, while she told me what she thought the pictures were saying.

It is an interesting thing about the Bible that as I flipped through it, it was virtually impossible to find a story that wasn’t horribly frightening, especially to a girl who had just admitted that the movie “Brave” frightened her.

Oh here’s Adam and Eve, followed by the story of their sons, one of whom killed the other.  Oh and here’s God destroying the world in a flood and here’s God killing the Egyptians in the Red Sea and here’s Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers and here’s Daniel with the lions and why don’t we just skip to the New Testament?

I tried to stick to the positive.  Joseph had a beautiful coat.  Did she have a coat?  What color was it?  Purple, I think she told me, a purple raincoat that was too big for her.  And after the flood?  There was a rainbow.  That was God’s promise.  Rainbows are a way God speaks to us.  “I saw a rainbow,” she said.

Finally she pointed to the last page, to the three paragraphs given to Revelation.  “What’s this story?”

By this time, I was standing with her in the office with Heather and Pastor Debbie and both chuckled wondering how I would explain Revelation.

“Here’s where everyone goes to Heaven,” I said.  “The end.”

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of reading a chapter from my book Sunburner to a class of seventh graders.  It filled me with joy to share my book with them, to talk to them about writing after, to answer their questions, to see their curiosity, to see the budding writers, the ones who couldn’t help themselves but had to write every day. 

I mistakenly thought that my joy was just an ego trip.

But sharing the Bible with that little girl yesterday made me realize that the thing that brings me joy is simply sharing stories, in telling stories, and in teaching, that it doesn’t have to be my story.  All it has to be is a story I love, something that is already a part of me and the story that is my life.

I finished the day watching the PBS documentary on the Dust Bowl, a seemingly depressing way to end a dreary day.  I have read about the Dust Bowl before, but it was something else to hear ninety year olds speak about it like it had happened yesterday, to see them weep still for something they had lost so long ago. 

One woman spoke of their move to California.  She said their dad had rented a small house, built on stilts on the side of a hill.  She said there were towering pines all around and that when they walked to school, they frequently left without hats and coats because they wanted to feel the mist that settled on the land each morning.

The land they had left wasn’t the only thing that was parched, she said.  We were parched too.

It gave me a new respect for cold, damp days and reminded me that perspective is everything.

Lost and Found

In the opening scene of the most recent Spiderman movie, Peter Parker is playing hide and seek with his parents.  It’s nighttime.  The house seems huge and foreboding, empty and dark.  Peter enters his father’s office and finds it a wreck.  Someone has been in the house, looking for something.

When I was a kid, I remember not liking hide and seek very much.  I didn’t mind hiding.  I still remember fooling my dad by hiding in between the shower curtain and liner, so that when he pulled back the curtain, thinking I was in the tub, I was still hidden.

But I never liked the “seeking.”  It caused me a great deal of anxiety both because I was afraid that whoever was hiding would jump out at me and because I was afraid that I would overlook them even when they were hiding in the most obvious place.

I don’t play hide and seek anymore, but like most people, the older I get, the more I find myself misplacing things and turning the house upside down in order to find whatever it is I’m looking for.

Last January, I drove up to Daytona to buy a car.  I brought the title of my old car with me, sticking it in my bag.  In the end, I left Daytona in the same car I came there in, unable to make a deal.  When I got home, I put my bag on my desk chair and forgot about it until a few days later when I came down with one of my crippling fevers and wound up in the emergency room.  Before I left for the E.R., I emptied my bag, including the title for the car and stuffed the bag with things I might need for an overnight stay at the hospital.

That was the last time I saw the title.

Now I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to papers.  I hate clutter and I’m good with throwing away most everything else, but for some reason, every piece of paper seems important to me, so I have boxes and boxes of papers.  So when I lost the title, I knew it was some place in the house.  I knew I hadn’t thrown it away.  But I looked in all the obvious places and it had just vanished.

Until yesterday.

For whatever reason, I decided to sort through the watches I had stored in my nightstand.  I tend to kill analog watches and clocks.  Don’t ask me how; it has nothing to do with the batteries, trust me.  But if I buy an analog watch, it is almost guaranteed to die within the year.

So I sat down in front of my nightstand and started making a pile of watches that still worked (the digital ones and the self-winding ones) and a pile that needed to be trashed.  And while I sat there, I said, well since I’m here, I might as well straighten up the nook of the nightstand where I had shoved books and a few loose papers.

Wouldn’t you know it?  When I made that decision yesterday to throw things out and straighten things up, I found the title to the car, buried in the nook of my nightstand.  Never in a million years would I have thought to look for it there.  I don’t even remember the last time I looked in that nook, but if you had asked me, I would have said it’s been years.  But it hadn’t been years, because there was the title.

“Seek and ye shall find,” the Bible says.

But I had been seeking for months now and hadn’t found that dastardly elusive title.

I’ve heard people say that when you stop looking for things is usually when you find them, but I think something more was going on here.  It wasn’t that I had stopped looking, it was that yesterday I made an effort to straighten up the house, to clean up, to dust, to throw away things that no longer mattered or were of any use to me.

And it was only when I made that effort that I found what I was looking for.

Our lives are filled with clutter and not just in the literal, physical sense.  Our lives are filled with emotional clutter.  I have said before we are emotional hoarders.  We allow our lives to become so tangled and messy that even though we know that God has another path or direction for us, we can’t see it because we’re lost and tied down by other things.

This morning was a church work day and I watched Donna pulling vines off a tree and I saw other vines, dead and hanging from pines.  During previous work days, when we have pulled vines off of trees, we have revealed treasures, oaks and other trees stunted and craving the sun.

We have to make an effort in our lives to clear away the vines, to let go of things, so that we can clear the path and find what we are seeking.

It occurs to me that I’ve also lost the key to my filing cabinet.

I’m sure I’ll find it somewhere in a part of the house I’ve been neglecting.  That’s one of my goals.  Which part of the house have I been neglecting the most?  When I find that, I bet I’ll find the key.

Which part of your life have you been neglecting?  Address that and you’ll find another key, a key to open the doors you’ve been searching for.