A leggy, blush pink geranium sits soaking up the sun in its crock near the kitchen window.  When it came time to pull the annuals last fall our dear, disabled friend protested loudly.  He lobbied hard for this one and I didn’t have the heart to uproot it.  We kept watering and he checked on it all winter whenever he visited.  My reward has been these blooms gracing our kitchen long before the new spring flowers reach the nursery.  Very often, sentiment beats out practicality around here. I never regret that.  

 This particular passage never fails to convict me.  It is easy to overestimate the strength of our self-command until we are irritated, contradicted, or spoken to (or about) unkindly. They say the true test of what is inside of us is what spills out when we are upset. If so, there is still room to improve over here.  

As so often happens the spiritual and the practical overlap in our lives, applying layers of meaning to both. This lent coincides with some tremendous home improvement and spring cleaning. 

Tremendous. 

Cleaning and sorting our physical space provides a visual for the sort of work lent invites us to do. Likewise, spiritual discipline encourages me to look around my space and see where it could benefit from similar purging and reworking.  Short answer: lots of places.

Our tired little kitchen pantry has gotten some attention.  It had not been painted with the kitchen years ago and the shelving was peeling. The baseboards were still dark wood and didn’t match the rest of the kitchen.  and This was a low budget effort to be sure. Leftover paint and contact shelf paper brightened things up.  

For the record this is not the sum total of all the dry goods I keep on hand. We also have bulk bins of brown rice and oats nearby and a ridiculous number of spices and cake making items sorted in dish tubs in a cabinet. I’m finding less is more by way of storing food however.  We hit a critical mass point when we can’t easily see what we have.  That leads to wasted food and purchasing doubles.  For this reason I don’t plan to fill this space up too much more. 

This overlap is fleshed out in this essay. 

I don’t have many stories about my paternal grandmother, but one of them made a big impression on my mother.  When she was newly married she spent the day with her mother in-law.  After my grandfather left for work, grandma jumped into dinner preparation.

 That’s right. Dinner. 

She set the table, arranged the centerpiece, and began dusting. She finished everything the way it needed to be when the day was over and her husband would return.  She sprayed a bit of Pledge into the air with a flourish for good measure. Then she was free to do any fun things the day presented her with. 

As a very young woman who had not yet run a home, my mother suspected this was “cheating” in some way.  For that reason perhaps, I viewed this routine with some skepticism myself at first. Now, with many late dinners and messy evenings under my belt I look upon my grandmother’s morning chores with new appreciation. 

My house is still full all day, so I can’t always set my table first thing. This happens after lunch when we can.  I can still use that inspiration to start with the end in mind, always.  Later today  I am taking some older folks to a meeting.  After breakfast, I laid out my clothes and printed directions to each of the addresses. (I have no sense of direction and tend to get turned around last minute) A call to the venue confirmed the meeting room name and directions to it. We will clean out the van, pack the meeting items, and have some time to do other things before we go.  

I was not born organized. I’m still not there. At 51 there is no pretending things are going to fall into place without glitches.  Looking ahead to minimize those is a huge stress reducer. 

What does the end of your day look like?  What can you do early on to make sure it’s stress free?  Can you:

Defrost something

Set out materials or pajamas or bedtime books

Check the car for gas

Confirm directions or reservations 

If it’s the morning that starts off with a flurry of activity then all this can happen the night before. 

“We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”

Tolstoy

A long car trip afforded me many hours of quiet reading.  Truly this is a luxury right now. Though I do not share all of his positions, I so appreciate Tolstoy’s pleas for compassion and empathy and resisting the tendency to categorize each other.  We are indeed always classifying.

 I have begun to tell this story many times over the past months.  While my heart was overflowing with so many emotions, words escaped me. 

This story did not begin last fall, nor nine months before that, but rather two years ago when our daughter married a most wonderful young man.  She had a fairy tale courtship and a wedding fit for a princess.  They worked so very hard – juggling multiple jobs and school – to scrimp and save and make a lovely life together.  When they saw that little pink line shortly after they married we all naturally began to look ahead expectantly.  Plans were made, tentative first tiny booties were purchased – more out of pure delight than anything.  Ten weeks passed and two tiny babies were seen at the doctor's office.  Quickly it was determined they were no more.  

What followed was not one, but two more losses and a cancer scare.  We braced ourselved as they went for more tests to send along to the oncologist.  By this point we had come to expect bad news.  Once more there was a surprise, however.  There was no postpartum cancer.  There was Will, at that time just the promise of him, growing stronger week by week.  It took many weeks, months really, for the disbelief to wear off and the reality to set in.  By summer we were making maternity portraits and planning for a birth, though I still couldn’t bring myself to say much.   

In October, as the pregnancy began to wrap up, we drove east to meet our grandson. I don't know exactly how I envisioned that to unfold.  I don't think I had any expectations.  Just hope.  Fervent prayers.  I was still worried after all, and worn down from months of often frustrating advocacy work at home. While our daughter was growing a baby, we had taken in an elderly disabled gentleman, requiring a short course in social work and more actual hands-on work than could be imagined.  He needed respite care in order for us to leave and we just barely got that coordinated as contractions became more frequent.

On our drive to baby day, during an early morning coffee stop in the middle of Wyoming, I ended up chatting with the singular employee at the gas station while she made me coffee in a Keurig machine.  By the time coffee was in hand I had told her our story and she had told me about her daughter, newly pregnant after years of infertility, and we stopped and prayed together for the grandchildren we each dearly hoped to hold in our arms. I remember she took my hand in both of hers and assured me that if we honor God He would take care of us.  Without it being said, we both understood that was NOT a guarantee of smooth sailing, but assurance we would not move through the storm alone.  I left there buoyed by her prayers and with her email in hand to report back. (Yes, I still check in with dear Judy the coffee lady)

Two days later we were in a hopsital room watching the nurses place Moira’s IV's and our son in law change in surgical scrubs.  Baby Will was securely tucked, right-side-up, snugly under his momma's heart, so her first delivery would be c-section.  Amazingly, it was one of the most peaceful births you could imagine.  While we talked over birth plan preferences during her other pregnancies, she went into this one quite literally full of grace.  No white-knuckled grip on a particular plan.  She said she had a strong feeling it was going to be clear to her how it needed to be and she resolved to flex with whatever presented itself.  And she did.  When prepped, she quietly stood up from her bed, smiled, and they walked down the hall to the OR.  

When we all met again they were parents of a wide eyed little boy with a head full of black hair.  With that we became grandparents.  

I’m sharing a bit of back story to illustrate a few truths: first, that we can never know what the future holds – good or bad.  You never know all there is to know about someone else’s story, but it is safe to assume it is much more challenging than it appears. Even when your heart breaks for some time, circumstances can suddenly erupt with unexpected joy. And finally, some stories are better told once you see which way God is taking them.  The older I get the truer this verse is:

“….she pondered all this in her heart.”