spring break pictorially.

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We took to the mountains; retreated into snow to forget for a moment and remember all that really matters, what we truly know.

Spring break in Colorado couldn't have come at a better time.  No infringing schedule or deadlines other than hiking times, a snow tubing appointment, restaurant reservations, movie times, late nights anticipated, later mornings, and of course, naps.

I'll let my words sink into the photographs and give way for them to tell the stories of our week together well lived.

One last thing, you know vacation is truly good when in the end a smile still stretches across well rested, satisfied faces.

together, in the branches.

 

Nothing beats late nights with amazing friends meandering through conversation of all that was, is and hopefully will be.  Of equal irreplaceable delight is waking up late into morning with family and those friends to another day of snowy mountain adventure.

And this is vacation; a definite break from busy, from striving and reaching and worry about not being formidable enough for the dreams swirling inside.

When we leave the Colorado mountains, nights return to earlier endings and my alarm sounds annoyingly before dawn waking me to another day, I will be rested and ready after more than 2 weeks of vacation and time away to reset and heal.  But for now, I write into a quiet morning beside a steaming mug of chai tea awaking me even more, all while lost in the view of snow capped mountains whispering adventure both now and into life ahead.

:::::::

As we continue together into Lent, discussions of the heart deeper unfold.  Words of challenge and grace fill our conversations together throughout our days away in the mountains.  I anticipated a break.  In the weeks leading up to vacation, we followed a pattern of reading and praying together for grace to help us engage in giving up of conveniences to grasp a greater understanding now of God in our day to day.  Instead of our pattern completely vanishing in the snow and easy days, each of the girls asked how and what we would fast and more importantly, when.

In their asking and reflecting of our togetherness in this Lent journey, a conversation from before the mountains, snow and rest, returned to me; a conversation of heart and words with Elizabeth, my eldest daughter.

There we sat.  The two of us words hanging in grace sheltering our weakness and covering our mistakes.  The greatest erasing of wrong leaving no sign except what we redraw in our effort earning unbelief that God could possibly be that good and undeservingly accepting of our human hearts.

She sat in sadness judged by her own heart, tangled in thought.

“Dad, ...sometimes I get so angry and frustrated at life.  I feel confused and lost.  Sometimes I say bad words in my head, really, really bad words, Dad.”

I allowed for the pause between us to encapsulate the moment, her helpless sinking knowing that scripture reading, prayer and conversation all shared together had been raking over her heart ...and finding her.

“What words do you think when you’re angry?”

“Uhh ... really, really bad words.”

“I see.  They must be really bad if you don’t want to say them.”

I sped up our conversation out of her lingering words suspended in guilt with a hopefully lasting image lifting her sinking.  Often I describe our life together in terms of journey, a landscape of rising mountains, descending valleys and sometimes treacherous impasses.  This image lifting her out of guilt and mistakes was one of a towering tree stretching substantially over us.

Grace like a tree shelters us from guilt striking down from darker skies and together we are safe in its impenetrable branches.

“Um, what?”

All three of my daughters deal with my words dragging romantic and descriptive.  They are used to just staring at me until I’m done and I’m used to their blank looks lost in words loaded with meaning.  I like our conversations that way.  Questions are sure to ensue giving way for their ownership pulling understanding into little hearts.

I pulled back the curtain a bit and assured Elizabeth that emotions exist very real in our hearts and our responses, even the bad unrepeatable words, don’t separate us from God’s fierce love.  To her surprise, I told her that often those words, even the worst offenders launch from my heart, too.

“...and that’s okay, Elizabeth.”

Grace’s strong branches will always hold us up and cover us wholly.  As a parent, no greater gift can be given than the assurance that all will be well and all, despite emotion and weakness of heart.

Grace given. Grace received.

...all in the branches together.

*image copyright inmenlo.com

together, into the undoing.

Another step down into the hazy, deeper, covered parts of our hearts where words are better to be whispered intently as to let them escape into normal conversation.  This is new, hallowed ground for all of us to be treading together. Grace like a scandal frees hearts held unknowingly in much more than innocence - in ignorance.

Child, you are not free.  Since our eyes first witnessed life and day, sin holds both you and me.  Liberty, a mirage vanishing in the heat of day burning hot and older.

As we moved into the second week of Lent together as a family, I read aloud a story in Scripture that moved my daughters’ hearts (Luke 7:36-50).  In the story, a man named, Simon, who was a righteous man known by good deeds and effort invited Jesus into his home for dinner.  Jesus accepted and reclined at table as Simon’s guest.  Upon hearing of Jesus’ presence at Simon’s house, a woman enters into the story and not with little disturbance.  Her affection interrupts Simon’s dinner conversation as she kisses Jesus’ feet washed in her tears and expensive perfume and wiped clean not with a towel but with her own hair.  

In judgement, Simon, the right doer, reduces the woman to a dirty sinner unfit for their company and Jesus to a disproved prophet fooled by the woman he allowed to care for him.  How could this woman share a table with Simon who deserved a seat with Jesus?  Why wouldn’t Jesus correct her and send her away?

He must not be all that He claims to be, not by my standard or god I know.  This is what raced through Simon’s right doer mind.

How often we judge right and wrong by our own hand and effort. And how wrong we are with repetitive regularity.

Last night we read through this story again and the question still hung between us.

“Dad, did she really kiss Jesus’ feet and use her hair to dry them?  Why would she do that?  Seems kinda inappropriate.”

And maybe that’s the best description of grace: inappropriate.  Appropriately, we should be accused called guilty for the sin we harbor within - the anger, the hatred, the lust, the lying, the selfishness - but we are not.

Together we talked about the gift of God, grace, and like the shameless woman, our response to God’s inappropriate love of us.

My challenge as a parent is to lead us into the undoing of our hearts bound by sin and marred in two dimensional right and wrong; to allow grace room enough for its roots to press deep down and break heavy soil loose and free.  For my daughters to know God as a plenteous giver of grace and acceptance is to set their hearts free ready for their days ahead.  One day they may find themselves marginalized by their decisions, dirty in their doing, cornered in by mistakes and rejected by all right.  Grace will be there and I want them to recognize its fearless reach.

::::::: He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. [Psalm 1.3]

together, into the thin.

  Today I didn’t feed the kids.

Well, almost.  Sure they had breakfast and lunch, and I’m sure a couple necessary preparatory snacks between the two, but their after school routine was void of the coveted snack.  They went without and not without a fight.

In fact, I reminded them in the morning, “Remember, nothing after school.  Nothing.”

Even before I reached home, a text message from one of my dear daughters popped up on my phone begging for a snack.  As soon as I graced the doorway of our home in obvious distress, the pleading began. “Dad, I’m sstttaaarrrving!  There’s no way I can make it to dinner!”

“Well, you have to.  That’s what we agreed on and committed to doing.  And that’s it, ok?,” I replied with the edgy frustration of going a day, a single day, but not quite a whole day yet, without food.  I meet so few people who are fans of fasting, maybe the idea and even the discipline, but not mid practice.

This was their first go at fasting: not a whole day without, nor a skipped meal, but a single, small and limitedly nutritious snack.

I knew it would be a challenge for them and their desires, but during this first week of Lent we focused on temptation, how our immediate desires do not have to be satisfied and dictate our way in life.

Wants are different than needs.  That was the teaching focus as we embarked on celebrating and observing Lent together.

Once the opulent petitioning subsided and they halfway believed that they would in fact make it from lunch to dinner with little difficulty, I reminded them of our reasoning.  Lent.

O Lord and Master of my life! Take from me the spirit of sloth, faint-heartedness, lust of power and idle talk, But give me rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to my servant. Yea, O Lord and King! Grant me to see my own errors and not to judge my brother; for thou art blessed unto ages of ages.  Amen

- St. Ephrem, the Syrian

Lent marks a time when the Gospel is internalized and accepted deeply.  It spans the observed time between the excitement and expectation of Advent, the coming of the Christ, and the eternally joyous resurrection.  Lent gives space and opportunity in the in between for us to repent of our indifference toward God, meditate on His goodness and pray for help to be more like who we should be.

My little daughters don’t fully grasp the gravity of Lent, the humility, the repentance, the letting go for a tighter hold.  I’m not always completely sure I do, but one thing I do know fully is that parenting is about showing and doing not telling and pointing.

Together, for the first time, we committed to observe Lent as a family.

So I set a course for us to travel together over the next several weeks through this season of Lent into dimmer waters, the abyss of our hearts not always visited, not always wanted.

Last Wednesday evening, Ash Wednesday, on our normal family cook nights, we cleared the table after the made meal and read scripture.  We read about Jesus’ temptation following His 40 days alone and without food.  The girls asked questions and began to connect the dots between temptation, prayer, scripture tucked away in our hearts and response.

Then, several days later, came our day to fast.  They squirmed through it and begged for a different course but we were walking together, together we would stay.

There’s so much to go wrong in parenting, so many pitfalls and mistakes, so much to seep through the cracks.  One can’t possibly always know exactly how to be, what to say and which correct way to go at every fork and bend.  But I do believe the key to parenting and getting those little hearts nipping at your heels one moment and running from you the next is to show, display, guide - live life out in front of them giving them a pattern and context to mimic and to own.

In the weeks ahead, they will be challenged to go without other things (for a day) often clouding and busying our hearts.

...without television ...without sweets ...without internet ...without music

...and a couple others that will undoubtedly provoke more opulent begging and pleading.

Trim the fat.  Prune the branches.

Pray for them, friends:)

interlude, the music plays on.

Every person both great and small is who they are behind the scenes, inside of closed doors where they are truly who they are removed from pretense and pretending faces of happy or important. As twelve worn months piled high, slightly leaning, giving way then to the year new ahead, my bones yearned to rest, to stop again with no rush to start again.

Another year, called 12.

In the sway of one year moving in to another, the gentle and timely transition of a year aged to completion and the anticipation of the next arriving, I only felt flat.  Months unnamed and unnoticed were moving by like the sky stuck in fast forward moving too fast to settle familiar.

My manuscript stood finally nearest completion than ever before.  I couldn’t wait to write about being so close to finish especially given the questions and my writing timeline that felt more like a noose tightening most days.  Recounting the struggle and happy drudgery, I should add, the near holy like perseverance to the end and the discipline forged in the learned experiential craft of writing a book of inaugural importance, yes, I couldn’t wait to write about my writing.  But when my pen laid down and my fingers recoiled from the keys following the closing line of my book, I wanted nothing more than to disappear a little.

one day you realize morning sounds monotonous the music faded, notes blurred, verses leaked into puddles, a dull echo eats the chorus and you know then better than when the music first began that monotony is the sound of dying, the stop of trying the laying down of arms to sleep through another day eyes still opened

This first book that I’ve written and shaped together from the learning and finding of God, hope, love true and unfailing and overwhelming grace in the thinnest of life took a lot out of me.  My writing schedule stretched my life and time out leaving little time for me to breathe and just be.  Part of me needed to be busy to distract my mind and cover over the hurt of loosing a life that I loved so.  So I started writing myself - who I was and would be.

I started recaptured slices of life in little pieces.  Everything felt tragedy stained.  Even the good was good notably because of how stunningly it balanced the bad.

At times, I felt myself to be more of a character, the wounded hero, in the story I was living out: a good man who lost his wife now learning to raise their three little daughters alone.  This feeling motivated me to be greater, to live more courageously and start all over again.  I leapt into a whole new life as a writer and a single dad and for the most part, I looked at myself and situation from the outside in.  The external motivation of who I was living to be pushed me ahead.

finish the book :: tell the story :: change our lives

In essence, I was shaping together my new life and our family from the outside, drawing strength from the hope of all that could and would be.  We would be healthy together as a family because of what we were - single dad and three little girls learning life again.  I would be a writer because of what I was doing - writing our story.  I would be whole again because of all that was ahead.

That’s when the music sounded flat and faded.  I was a character bound to the story, a fatalistic pace to where every day began to bleed the same way.

In the finishing of my manuscript, I pulled away from the table and determined to break from writing for a bit.  I had to remove myself from myself in order to be myself fully.  I got back to living on the inside, behind the scenes shaping my life and my family again.

I stayed out later with good friends talking about life and listening, slept in a little more, read a little more and met a girl.

I learned all over again that life is formed and perfected not out on the stage but behind the scenes where you are who you are, diligently and faithfully tending to the life given.

And I heard the music swell again and separate into verses full of vibrant context and a chorus echoing free.

a manuscript, two lives pulled closer together.

After nearly two years from beginning, my manuscript is brushing the rim of done, the first draft at least. The words are all written from start to finish.  Re-editing looms and parts may be rearranged and reworked for clarity, but (and a huge conjunctive but it is) the manuscript awaits the transformative process of words and files into an actual book.

Quietly - slowly - and in the dark of night and the fog of shadows, life re-found, rebuilt and rediscovered in words and paper thin moments.

Less than two weeks ago now, I sat quietly at the ruggedly aged table where I wrote the last words that seem to appropriately echo the words that open the manuscript some 50,000 words earlier.

“My eyes open slowly, knowingly to a new world.”

Two years ago when I sat freshly wounded from the then still warm, pulsating memories of my wife’s death I was so lost and emptied, ravaged by such a blow, from death taking all that I measured didn’t belong to it.  I started to write words that bled pain and suffering and confusion and doubt, memories that held happiness and good and reality broken in tragedy.  Those words captured in my manuscript echoed out like prayers and hopeless tirades reaching for something to break the speed at which I felt the falling happening.

And God did find me.  Over and over again, remade and strengthened in faithful frequency.

A new fortitude for life glowing on the horizon dawning emerged in His helping.  Two lives pulled closer together - the good one I once knew and the better one now laying before me, tangled in difficulty and unknown.  I’ve come to confess the life after my wife’s death better because in it God’s sweet grace causes even the most difficult of times to bow low and every impassable moment able to be crossed.

And this is the book that I have written, a story recounting life beautiful ending and another beginning eclipsing even the greatest moments of that once beautiful life.  These days will always be loved the most.

Below is the opening of a chapter currently entitled, “Surely Goodness and Mercy.”  It reflects the pulling together of both lives and fortitude only found in God’s ridiculous grace that found me so aptly.

I will not allow myself to be the man hollowed by pain, afraid of shadows and those things which lie in waiting.  Life may indeed only seem to take from us, days, memories, happiness, but courage is mine to give.  And the source, it is immeasurably and unfathomably deep.  It is unending.  Through darkened spots and failing strength, the reason -- or reasons -- for courage remains.

Three reasons.

I saw a man alone, subdued by pain, frightened by the fear of all that may be some day and I quietly asked to never be that man.  I can’t.  I won’t.  The man fumbling through fading memories like a thief clutching a leaking bag.  The man stumbling, drunk on why things settled the way they did, talking to himself, mumbling angrily and hurt.

That will not be me.  My daughters will not know this man.  They might see me wince and wrestle to ground life haunting and yesterday hanging, but they will never know that kind of fully hollowed heart comfortable only in shadows.  I may not have much greater to give them than that, but my healing will be an echo that resounds like bells of freedom in their warm little hearts.

And their little hearts will warm.  Never could I leave us stranded roadside and stuck forever by the sourest of moments in life, an undoing reaching so deep into the fabric of who we were unraveling the strongest of loves, ours, sewn together by life’s untroubled waters and God’s goodness then.

Life was good then it ended in her death lessening us remaining, those who loved her most.

But the days continued.  And they demanded to be lived.

Currently, I’m working out a deal for publishing and anticipate my book to be available maybe even as soon as mid-year.  I say this with an undying happiness.  There were so many days I thought it more worth quitting than completing.  Little by little, in inches and through day by failing day what I once considered an audacious reach and grand wish has been pulled closer; two lives pulled closer together.

DEEPER FAMILY :: noel.

"How will this be, since I am a virgin?"

“So Dad, uhh... if Mary was a virgin, you know, that means she never, umm, had s-e-x, how did she get pregnant?  I don’t get that.  How can that even happen?  Don’t you have to kinda have s-e-x to get pregnant?”

What confounded my little eight year old daughter is the same thought that alludes each of us and all human minds before and beyond: incarnation.

God, with us.

Christ for us, right there with us, invading sin diseased hearts in plain mystery.  Confounding and concluding, noel, an invitation to end and begin again forevermore.

My answer pointed all explicable responsibility back to the story itself.

“Well, it says that God just made it happen.  He created her body, just like yours, and if He could create her, God could obviously just make her conceive a child.  He did.”

And the angel answered her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.  And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren.  For nothing will be impossible with God."  And Mary said, "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." And the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:35-38)

“Okay. That makes sense,” as her eight year old head returned back to her pillow satisfied.

(Really?)

CONTINUE READING AT DEEPER FAMILY