Happy

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I remember, as a kid, looking over the forecast for my birthday one year and being so disappointed to see “Partly Cloudy” – complete with a little picture of a sun almost entirely obscured by clouds – next to a day I had hoped would be perfect weather for swimming. When I complained about my misfortune to my Mom, she told me that it was actually a really good forecast – that “partly cloudy” in reality was usually mostly sunny. I was relieved! But I was also confused…like why don’t they just say that then?

I eventually did learn that there is a lot of nuance in the terminology that meteorologists use when describing the weather and that the use of “partly cloudy” wasn’t as strange as it seemed to me in elementary school. Still – the National Weather Service applies that term to days when between 3/8 and 5/8 of the sky is covered in clouds (which is also, humorously the way they define a day as “partly sunny”). That means that my Mom was right (as usual!); the math supports a decent chance that a partly cloudy day will be beautiful weather.

We don’t tend to use quite as much nuance when we describe our own emotional forecast. When someone asks how we are doing, we often offer the terminal response: “fine!” or, these days “as well as can be expected”.

Sometimes if things are particularly bleak we will offer more details. After all, there is comfort to be found in sharing your struggles. Having a community to pray with you and for you is such a blessing and there is no reason not to reach out for support.

But I wonder, if after a season of clouds, we don’t start to become pretty unreliable weathermen. The storm is passing over, but we aren’t looking for the sun anymore; even as we feel the warmth on our faces we are afraid to admit it, lest we be disappointed by the shadows.

I wonder how many of our bad days might be better described as “partly cloudy”. If we are labeling the entire day a wash out, based on between 3/8-5/8 of the sky. How often have we been so caught up in the frustration of an afternoon downpour, we have allowed it to overwrite what might have otherwise been a sunny day.

I know it isn’t always possible…but what would happen if on some of our 3/8 days, if asked how we were doing, we boldly replied “I’m mostly happy!”

Because even in this season of chaos and madness…we are sometimes mostly happy.

Why don’t we just say that then?

Choice

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I’m not sure anything makes us more uniquely human than the power to make choices. We make hundreds of choices a day and probably don’t think much about it. We shape up our hours and our days and our lives with the choices that we make, and yet we often feel so out of control.

When I saw this word on the list for today, I thought back to my high school years. I was meeting with a therapist, in the process of recovering from a particularly traumatic period of time. One day, in defense of something she was challenging me on, I said “I didn’t have a choice”.

She responded with something I hear in my head to this day: “Of course you did, we almost always have a choice. You just didn’t have a choice you liked.”

At the time that was not information I wanted to hear – in fact it is information that someone who has chosen poorly never wants to hear – but it was very true. Choosing between two “bad” choices still comes with a responsibility.

All choices have consequences and some of them are immediate and some develop slowly like film in a dark room. We don’t have a choice about whether or not Danny rides a school bus this year, but the choice we made about what school he would attend was what set that in motion. I don’t have control over what his days look like in hybrid secondary education, but I made the election to send him.

There are things that are out of our control, of course. There will be storms, illnesses, catastrophic events truly beyond the scope of our individual actions. In the cases where we can’t control what happens to us, the only choice we get is how we respond.

And in my life, those are the choices I am much more likely to regret.

Why? I think it is because I think about them a lot less. I could spend more time deciding what coffee to order than how to respond to an internet troll. I might make lists of pros and cons for weeks when I’m trying to determine at school placement for one of the boys but immediately spiral into anxious despair over a few bad tests.

I need to remember that even if my options look bad, I can regain control by refusing to believe the worst and choosing to hope for the best.

Sacrifice

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There were many difficult things about the earliest days of the pandemic, but the hardest thing for me – more complicated even than tracking down toilet paper – was trying to explain the restrictions to my youngest son. He went to sleep one night and woke up to a very different world. I didn’t have the words to explain it to myself, let alone to my baby boy.

His was the first of the quarantine birthdays for our family, the first to wade through the murky waters of celebrating without the usual routines. As a preschooler, his isolation was especially profound. Playgrounds were closed, and the schools never found a way to truly facilitate the special education preschool over distance. We had our zoom meetings and virtual gatherings; his brother found some community connecting with his friends on Roblox.

But Ezra…he had us. And that was it.

We did everything we could to make it a good, if small, world for him.

When we did see people, outdoors and through windows, we tried to prepare him for the reality of what that visit was going to look like. Ezra’s first instinct in social situations is to give hugs and kisses and be as physically close as possible; the polar opposite of what was necessary.

We tried explaining the virus; how dangerous it was and how important it was not to pass it around. That we didn’t want him to get sick. He was unimpressed with those concerns.

What eventually made a dent in his understanding, however, was when we emphasized that WE could be sick, and that it was important to protect our friends and family. When his focus changed from protecting himself to protecting his people, he dutifully accepted the rules.

That is the nature of sacrifice; you put aside what best serves you in favor of a higher need, or higher cause. Life is full of big and small sacrifices, some as small as the time it takes to let someone step in front of you in line; some as big as your life and safety in defense of a nation, or an ideal.

For Ezra, this was a big one. He was only 4, so what he was asked to lay at the altar of quarantine was nearly all he had.

It was devastating to watch, but I took solace in knowing that this is the kind of sacrifice that Jesus sees particular beauty in.

41 Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. 42 But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. 43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.”

Mark 12:41-44

This last year has demanded a lot of sacrifice; offerings which were not evenly expected of us. It was and is financially, emotionally and physically expensive to be human in this season.

It says in 2 Corinthians that “God loves a cheerful giver”, but in the passage above, nothing about the widow’s demeanor is mentioned. Only Jesus’s interpretation of her offering and what it said about her soul.

If this year broke your spirit and took all that you had; if your offering was presented through tears and gritted teeth: take heart. Your gift is precious; great is your reward in the eyes of the Father.

Remember

On By skrosenfeldLeave a comment

I like to think I have a pretty spectacular memory.

And yet, I never remember just how much of a mess tie dye can be. If I did, I would probably never ever do it.

This is the thought I was having this afternoon as Danny and I were tie dying masks in the kitchen and the incredibly pigmented dye was making a run for it in all directions. It has been a few years since I have embarked on such a project and it will likely be quite a few years before forget I said I would never do it again.

I’ve been thinking today about the large and small things that we remember. The pieces of our lives that remain in crystal clear in our minds, the parts we throw away completely, and the things in the middle that we file away to find again some day with the right prompting.

Memory can be tricky business; though it may start off as a record of the events and interactions that we experience, what you remember will ultimately be little more than the story that we tell ourselves about our lives. How reliable of a narrator you are determines the details of your story is, and that story is used to shape who you are and what you do.

Because remembering something comes with a certain responsibility; if you don’t believe me, just think how often “no one remembers” how the mess got made or who broke the Thing or How School Went Today. Admitting that you have an answer to any of those things could lead to consequences or, even worse, further questions.

To remember something or someone should be more than just an emotional response – its an action item. It should inspire you and inform your decisions. It may help you discern a calling, or warn you of potential danger. It could do all of those things at the same time.

A few years back I had the words “fearfully and wonderfully made” tattooed on my forearm. At the time I was working in a special education classroom with a child who was uniquely gifted but intermittently aggressive. He reminded me a lot of Danny at the time, and supporting him left a mark; emotionally and physically. The tattoo had nothing to do with him – I had dreamed and decided on it years before I had even met him.

The week after my arm was done, I found myself wrapped up one of the worst moments for my student at school. Even as I sit here right now, most of what I know I would have described as unforgettable about that afternoon has fallen away. What I remember most is the end: when he was calm and the storm had passed, he was so exhausted he fell asleep on the other side of the mat that I was holding between us. We were outside and mercifully, it was a beautiful day. The breeze stung my arm, as my fresh tattoo had been scratched and hit so much it was raw and weeping. And I saw him sleeping there, waiting for his Mom, and felt the whole of my soul remember: fearfully and wonderfully made.

They aren’t words I ever forget; I can’t imagine ever not knowing them. But because I remember them, I know what parts of that story will make it into my story.