Sisters

Today is my sister’s birthday. I’m not going to tell you how old she is, and not just because I can’t remember. I’d have to start counting forward from me, which is not helpful because I can’t remember how old I am either.  And not that she should care at all if I disclose her age because she's beautiful. But there’s girl code, and above that, sister code. So you won’t hear it from me.  Unless I can figure it out by the time I’m finished writing this.

My sister is awesome, and not just as sisters go. She’s the best friend you’ll ever have. Devoted, honest, wise, funny and ever-reliable, she makes you feel special on your worst day and smart on your dumbest. She can talk you (or maybe it’s just me) into anything with three little words: “It’ll be fun!” I fall for it every time. And even if “it” wasn’t any fun at all, it was worth it just to watch her try to get me on board, arms flailing in big dramatic motions in an attempt to glamorize this monstrous activity I want nothing to do with.  In addition to being a great talker-into-er, she’s an amazing teacher and spent years of her adult life doing just that, teaching young girls, including her children, how to grow up into amazing women of God. And by the looks of my nieces, she nailed it. Now she has a heart to teach parents, and let me just say if you have half a brain, you’ll sign up for her class - whether she has one or not.  Just be her friend, watch her life, and you will learn amazing things. She has also spent her life singing. And by life I mean, since birth. (Our daddy is a music minister, so this was not an option. Good thing we love it anyway.) She has a beautiful soprano voice but always willingly sings alto when we sing together just because I ask her to. (Although I don’t get away with that much anymore. She’s on to me.)  I just can’t think of anyone who deserves honor and esteem on her birthday, and every day, more than my big sister.

Our relationship can best be summed up by a story my Aunt Karen once told us. We were somewhere around the ages of 4 and 6 and all of my Dad’s family was gathered at my aunt & uncle’s house in Houston. As was typical of my parents, their siblings and in-laws, they were gathered around the kitchen table playing a board game, probably “Careers”, which was way better than Monopoly but for some reason we were the only ones who knew that.  All the kids were upstairs taking baths, when, as Aunt Karen tells it, there came a blood-curdling scream from on high. My mom and aunts shoved chairs away from the table and headed for the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. When they reached the bathroom door they found Lauri and I in the tub, me standing, screaming at the top of my lungs, and her just staring at me. “What in the world is wrong?” asked about 7 breathless adults, to which Lauri replied, “Nothing. She always does that when the water goes down the drain.”

And there you have it. That’s pretty much how it’s been all our lives. I’m in full panic mode and she’s sitting down next to me, explaining to the rest of the world why I’m freakin’ out.  And that’s just the way I like it.

That’s not to say that she never has moments of mania and I’m never calm. For instance, I remember when she found out that Mary Hart was issued a new pair of pantyhose every day to host Entertainment Tonight because her legs showed on camera underneath the desk. Being the smart shopper and always mindful of her money, she was somewhat incensed. "Why can't she recycle her pantyhose? Does she really need a brand new pair every day? Surely they don't have runs! All she did was sit there! She should have to wear the same pair for at least 3 days!"  It was just too much for her practical, no-nonsense mind to grasp, and I had to talk her off the ledge for once.  Actually I don’t think I talked. I think I laughed her off the ledge on that one.

But besides her occasional indignant semi-tantrums at celebrity over spending - and shouldn’t we all be appalled at that?! - she’s darn near perfect in my book. A fiery redhead with a hearty laugh that makes you want to tell another story. And her taste in clothes is impeccable. After all, I won best dressed in my 8^th grade class because of her. True, it was without her permission because I snuck into her closet after she left for cheerleading practice at the crack of dawn every morning and wore her clothes, but a win is a win. And speaking of mornings, she has greeted them with nothing less than a kick in the face and a smile into adulthood as well.  A machine when it comes to discipline, she would get up at 5:30 AM when her babies were still babies and work out.  I know because I was there. Usually. OK, just sometimes when I didn’t call at 5:15 and whisper “I’m going back to bed.” So I was rarely there, but still. And now that her girls are older, she gets to sleep a little later, but you can bet she’s gonna be throwing some weights around the living room at some point in the day, every day. And there is no greater model, save our parents, for a true, authentic, sold out follower of Jesus Christ.  While the rest of us say we struggle to have a solid, consistent relationship with God every day, she just does it, and makes it look simple. She listens to God, spends time in His Word and applies it to her life. Period.  All of it. Not just the parts she likes. Not just the parts that are warm & fuzzy. She does the hard stuff. The unpopular-even-in-church-cuz-it-makes-the-less-dedicated-uncomfortable stuff.  And she does it with an incredible combination of boldness and grace. And if you’re lucky, as I have been, she’ll rub off on you. She has always been a great source of wisdom and insight for me. As a young married woman I remember calling her about the crazy and infuriating things my husband did, like leave his underwear in the floor. "Who does that?" I asked. "Am I a maid? Is he 5?" And then she would explain to me that this is something pretty much all men do and this is when you have to employ that whole “choose your battles” thing. And dirty underwear wasn’t worth the fit I’d thrown.

But sometimes she would surprise me on the spiritual front. These are my favorite talks! Because it’s really annoying to have a best friend who’s always right. Like, not just kinda right, but it’s-in-the-Bible right. How do you counter that? You don’t. You hang up the phone and have no choice but to go on with your life having full knowledge that throwing dishes is not allowed. So the days when I get to find out she’s human after all are downright delightful.  Like when I left the house in bare feet, no money and no place to go and just got in my car and started driving, all because my husband had been operating in his own time zone. Again. So I decided to not be available or on time and see how he liked it. She happened to call as I was driving around and asked what I was doing. “Running away from home,” I said. “I’m gonna make him worry for a change. I’ll call and say I’m on my way and then not show up for another two hours.” I thought I knew what was coming. Something like, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be right with God?” I braced myself for the onslaught of correctness.  But to my surprise, all I heard was, “OK. Call me later and lemme know you’re all right.”  I had never been prouder. I think I might’ve wept with glee.

So happiest of birthdays to you, my beautiful, brave and bold to the core big sister. Thank you for all the times you gave me sound advice, and for the all the times you just let me get away with being mad.  For the closet full of awesome clothes you never knew I wore. (And there were shoes, too). For all the “it’ll be funs!” and always being the first one I call after I’ve eaten pavement in public because I know nobody will laugh with me as hard as you.  Thank you for being my wingman when people say clueless things. Thank you for calling me when I was 20 and saying you were sorry you didn’t let me sleep with you when we were little and I was scared. And thank you for always, always, always being there when I’m scared now. I love you more today than I did in that bathtub. And that, my redheaded hero, is quite immeasurable.

Rules Girl

My mom made the best pumpkin bread in the history of pumpkin bread. Ever. Now when I was 12, I'll admit I didn't see the value. It was just something she did every holiday season.  Sure it smelled good, but it wasn't nearly as delectable as her cherry o'cream pie, which I asked for on more than one birthday instead of cake. But as I got older, got married and she passed away, I started to realize how much I missed that smell. It was the definitive "it's Christmas" odor. And I wanted it to fill my house. So, I called my big sister who inherited our mom's knack for cooking, hosting, and all things holiday and asked her for the recipe. I started to just listen (who does that when it comes to a recipe?!) But I soon realized I was going to need a list. So I wrote down the ingredients as she told them to me. Nutmeg and all. I felt like such a grown-up. Surely they're the only ones who use nutmeg. 


I went to the store and bought all my ingredients and began the process of infusing my house with the smell I'd come to miss so much. I was pumped. I was even going to make loaves for the neighbors. This was big. But my completed product seemed to be lacking something, and my husband - the same one who cut me out of the duct tape - had not become quite so sensitive at this point in our marriage and was not afraid to point out said lacking. "What is that?" His tone was accusatory. As if I'd offended the whole culinary world. 


"It's pumpkin bread!"


"No it's not."


"Excuse me? Then what is it? What do you mean?"


"I'm not sure. Maybe that's spice bread. That's all I'm sayin'."


I was livid. What did he know? Did he grow up in my house? Never mind the fact that my concoction tasted nothing like it was supposed to and that the smell was no where near right. He was crazy. It doesn't matter if he's right. When I say he's wrong, he's wrong.


Those loaves ended up in the trash that year, but I hadn't given up. The next year I tried again. Only to get the same result. Again, my husband, who was still not sensitive and clearly was not afraid to have any kitchen utensil hurled at him at warp speed, insisted that I had not made pumpkin bread. "Stop saying that!" I demanded. "It's....it.....it is so."  This time he was so wrong there weren't even words to tell him how wrong he was.  


Year three rolled around and I thought I'd better do some investigating before mister rain-on-my-pumpkin-bread-parade reared his ugly head again. I called Lauri. 


"This pumpkin bread thing has been a disaster and you've got to tell me what I'm doing wrong! What are the ingredients again?"


"OK, let's see, flour, sugar, baking soda, 1 can of pumpkin..."


"WHAT?"


"Baking soda, 1 can of pum--"


--"YOU NEVER TOLD ME I HAD TO USE A CAN OF PUMPKIN!!"


"I -- in the pumpkin bre--?"  (she senses I'm losing it. The water is swirling the drain and we are all. going. down.)


Trying to calm me, she uses her most soothing, big sisterly voice. "OK, I'm pretty sure I did. But, honey, even if I didn't -- did I really need to tell you that you need pumpkin for the pumpkin bread?"


"Yes! Clearly! Apparently! Absolutely!"


As I hung up the phone I realized the unthinkable was true. I HAD been making spice bread. He'd been right all along. Oh the humanity.

My man loves to recount this story. And I don't mind telling it either. It's a good one. Yes, it seems unthinkable that I wouldn't realize you need pumpkin for pumpkin bread. It's taken me this many years to realize why in the world it never occurred to me that something was missing.


I'm a rules girl. I asked for specific instructions. I made a list. I followed the list. Maybe she said one can of pumpkin and I missed it, maybe she didn't. (This is still a point of contention in an otherwise perfect sibling relationship). The fact is, it wasn't on my list. It wasn't in the rules. And I was just following the rules.


I like instructions. And I LOVE lists. Maybe that makes me a visual learner. I don't know. I just know I need you to keep it simple and let me write it down. One step at a time. I'm convinced that if someone had only known this about me when I was a teenager, my math tests would have been a lot less terrifying. This particular trait of mine frustrates my youngest daughter to no end. She likes to read things to me. Things I can't see. She'll be in the midst of a project, read instructions to me from another room, and I'm supposed to know what to do. This makes me insane. I can't think. Have you seen the movie 'Clue?' It sends me into Madeline Kahn's flames, flames on the sides of my face speech. Anyway, not too long ago when she was rattling off words and I could not discern any of them to be English, I stopped her. She hasn't seen Clue, so I had to go with something relatable. "Honey, you know when Charlie Brown talks to an adult on the phone and all they let you hear is 'wau wau-wau wau-wauh wau-wauaaaa?' That's what I hear when you talk to me about instructions and I can't see it. I need to see the list. Show me the rules."


Sometimes when I feel like life has thrown me some non-English wauh wauh-wauh wauh wauh stuff, I throw my hands up and say, "Lord you know what I need. I need a list. I need to see it. You explain it, and I'll write it down." The funny thing is, He all ready has. I just wasn't looking at the list. He absolutely does know what I need, what with Him being the One who made me and all, and I usually find that He's been whispering "Look at the instructions and just follow them" for quite some time. Pray without ceasing...Our Lord God is near to us whenever we pray to Him...but in everything, by prayer and petition...But the human brain is a funny thing, not nearly as miraculous for what it can remember as for what it can forget. (Like maybe there should be something with the word pumpkin in it on a list of things for pumpkin bread). In any crisis or time of questioning, I know my first line of defense needs to be prayer. And yet I forget. I might even be reading my Bible thoroughly and relentlessly. But I forget to pray. Even though I've experienced revelation and peace from those precious conversations, I manage to forget to have them. How utterly insane. You would think I would never want to come out from under the cover of that glorious place of rest and protection.  But how quickly I run to any and all other solutions first. I keep making the same recipe with disastrous outcome. Never remembering to just follow the instructions that produced such an incredible concoction of calm, understanding and the blessing of His presence in countless other instances. How tragic to forget. How tragic not to notice what's missing. It completely changes the result. I have got to write this stuff down. 

Timing is Everything

Every good and perfect gift is from above. Got it. Wonderful marriage, check. Beautiful kids, check. Amazing family, great friends, great church, check, check and check. I appreciate what I have. I get it. I know what gifts are.

Joy comes in the morning. Yep, got that one too. Everything will look better after a good night's sleep. The pain will lessen when you can see the sun again. Jesus rose from His grave in the morning. Check. I know what joy is. And I know what gifts have been given to me.

At least I thought I did.

I was recently reading about the word anguish and how it can co-exist with joy. Synonyms are mental distress. Not just pain, but pain and anxiety. Not just suffering, but suffering and dread. The origin of anguish includes the meaning "to choke." Reading these words took me back 14 years to a place in time that I thought would do me in for sure.

The year I was pregnant with Tristan, our first-born daughter, was madness. I had suffered two miscarriages just months before and was not emotionally ready to be pregnant again. In the first 8 weeks, I showed indications of another unsustainable pregnancy, but 2 weeks of bed rest, my God in Heaven and a stubborn and strong little girl held us all together. But those few days were the easy part. This was the year that my husband would lose his business, and I would lose my mom. I didn't know it at the time, but four years later, Greg would lose his Dad and we would also lose our home. Our first home. I loved that house. It didn't have much curb appeal, but my husband, carpenter extraordinaire, had made it Builder's Magazine worthy on the inside. It was less than 5 minutes away from my parents' home and less than 60 seconds away from my sister's. By this time we had lived there 3 1/2 years and I was pretty sure we'd be buried in the back yard some day. But God was moving in a different direction. If I'd been paying closer attention, I might have been able to see my hand in front of my face in the midst of those winds of change, but I wasn't looking. I was reeling. I couldn't fathom why God would choose this time to bring a child into our world. Into our mess.

During that year we were in & out of endless meetings trying to save our business. I remember hoping people would take pity on us once I began to show. We had no income. The weight of the world was on my husband's shoulders. No work. Pregnant wife. I look back and I honestly don't remember how we ate. Our families must have literally kept us alive, but it's really all a blur. I think if either Greg or I had had any money at all, we'd have called a cab and told the driver to go as far as he could, as fast as he could, and we'd walk the rest of the way to anywhere but here.

Mom died in late summer, and 4 weeks later her granddaughter came. I'd love to say I lay in that hospital bed and all the troubles of the world went away at the sight of her face, but that wasn't our reality. I was still trying to deal with loss on so many levels, and it was about to get worse with a little something called postpartum depression. We took our daughter home in Greg's truck, now the only vehicle we and the bank owned, and had to borrow $20 from his parents to pick up diapers on the way. We had nothing that had not been given to us. And I mean nothing. My husband had not worked in months. It was oppressive, and seemed so wrong to me that we should be under this cloud when we'd just had a child. My mom was gone, and I had no idea what I was doing as a mom myself. I couldn't even form the thought "I don't understand" because my mind was so shrouded and angry and in what I now can recognize as anguish. Mental distress. Pain and anxiety. Suffering and dread. And all the while people were sending me congratulatory messages and cards and bringing me gifts and asking to see this beautiful new little life, while I was dying inside. My very existence was one big contradiction. And I was choking on it.

We muddled through the first few months of her life, although I'm not really sure how. Did I mention we had nothing? Tristan was a delightful baby. Her only flaw was that during the day, she would only sleep 45 minutes at a time, when I could have used 3 hours! But as babies go, that's pretty remarkable. I remember walking into her room at night and thinking, "I get it Lord. I know why you sent her now. Because we never would have held on for ourselves. But we did for her." I thought I'd tied up all the crises in a neat little bow with that theory. Every good and perfect gift is from above. Yep, I get it. There she is, and she's perfect. Check.

Chris had come to live with us when Tristan was 10 months old, having no idea the landmine of financial distress and emotional depression he was coming into, so we put on our best brave faces and had some good times. He was and still is an amazing big brother. I regret terribly the fog I was in during his young years. He has a fantastic sense of humor and completely charmed his little sister with it. No one could make her laugh like Chris. Lacie came along two years later and, as funny and delightful as Chris and Tristan were, Lacie was that sweet. She just melted me. But I had never healed or recovered from the depression I went through with Tristan, and her little entrance only made it worse. We lost Greg's Dad that year, too, just one week after his sister's wedding. Again, I couldn't understand God's plan. Why could there not be lasting joy? Why were the good moments so fleeting? Still hanging by a thread to that house, we lived there the first 18 months of Lacie's life, and then the very thin thread had to be cut. Once again, and still, I was in anguish. Loss. Anxiety.

I look back at pictures of those times and I'm amazed that we're smiling. I've said to Greg, "Why in the heck were we smiling?! We were miserable! And exhausted!" As I said before, some of those years are truly a blur. I don't know how we made it. Financially, emotionally, and every other -ly, we shouldn't have.

Fast forward a little over a decade, and here I sit reading about anguish, what it means and how it can coexist with joy. So that's what that was, I thought. Huh. And then it hit me. As I was mulling over those years and the tornado of emotions I was caught up in, and wondering how there could be any good in the midst of so much bad, I realized that, up to that moment, I had realized absolutely nothing! Those few simple moments over my child’s crib, moments thinking I was recognizing the gifts that had been given to me, were so brief and sped by me so fast that I didn't hold on. I couldn't. But with a clearer picture, I see that those years of mourning were immediately turned to joy. Lasting joy. I just didn't know it. A death, and then, a life. My mother gone and then a delightful child. God doesn’t always give and take away. Sometimes He takes away, and then He gives. He took my mother from hell on earth and gave her ultimate healing. Then He sent this beautiful baby who, thirteen years later, is the most exuberant young lady I've ever known. Just watching her love and zeal makes me tired, but marvelously tired! In the midst of great loss and sorrow and anxiety, joy was growing up right before my very eyes. In the midst of pain and fear and dread, I had been given a son. A beautiful, gifted, witty blue-eyed son, the spitting image of his father, who just wanted to be loved and enjoy life with us. In the midst of choking on everything dark and oppressive, I was given another daughter who has wanted nothing for every day of her life but to spend time in my lap, draw me a picture, and tell me she loves me. Joy. Times three. Right in my own house. Right in every house I've ever lived in since then that isn't my own. And my husband. The man who stayed. The man who could have thrown up his hands and said he couldn't handle the mess, the spider-webbed dungeon that was my mind. He could have said it's too hard. I can't take care of you. Being on my own would be easier. But he kept getting up every morning to provide for us. And coming home to me every night. And miraculously, at some point, he made me smile. And I have the pictures to prove it. Such good gifts. Perfect gifts. Not just perfect in their creation, but in their timing. They were given to me at precisely the moment I needed them. There would be many, many mornings before I could recognize them in all their goodness and perfection. But thank God I have finally opened my eyes. Thank You for opening them for me, and thank You for the anguish. I don't believe I could ever have recognized perfect joy without it.