Category Archives: Soapbox

A Place at the Table

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I have the same conversation periodically, and with so many of my friends: “Are we drinking too much?”

It echoes that query, which was also an episode title, from Sex and the City: “Are we sluts?” My memory these days is poor, but I’m pretty sure the conclusion they reached was “No,” which sounds pretty self-serving and possibly inaccurate, looking back, but who am I to judge (fictional characters)?

The question my friends and I ask ourselves is not going to be solved in thirty minutes of “I couldn’t help but wonder” surface-level introspection. It’s an ongoing question. And when we really start looking into it, we know it’s not about alcohol anyway.

At any point in my life, the question could have been asked with the word drinking replaced by something else: Am I gossiping too much? Am I sleeping around too much? Am I depending on caffeine too much? Am I starving myself too much? Am I keeping myself overbooked too much? Am I posting on social media too much? Am I watching TV too much?

We do ourselves no favours if we make one vice a scapegoat for the deeper problem.

This is not to say that specific physical addictions do not exist, or should not be treated. It is, instead, a recognition (an often-flailing attempt at one, at least) that so many of our issues or abuses or troubles come from a singular place, a place of brokenness that is born of not feeling a sense of belonging.

It is excruciating to believe we are alone–especially to believe we are suffering alone. Most of the lies I’ve bought into in my life, and the behaviour borne of those lies, have come from that one: that there’s no place for me. That I am an other.

It is a fear that plagues me and always will. It is a fear that plagues me on behalf of my children–this fear of not being liked or accepted.

Last week, The Kid and Little Brother returned to school after a long holiday weekend plus a couple of extra days thrown in. I steeled myself for their reluctant re-entries: for LB’s clinging to me, rendering me the mother who has to walk away from her crying child and feel like shit in the process. Guilt upon guilt. We arrived at his school and he looked around. He grinned. He asked his teacher for a story. He found his spot on the sofa.

TK and I headed to his school, to his leg of the separation train. As we entered the grounds, his pace picked up. “H is the leader of the game, and I’m the second leader,” he announced to me confidently, preparing for his return to the lava monster festivities. As soon as we approached the other kids, my familiar emotional turmoil returned: what if they’re too rough for him? What if he gets anxious and clingy? What if he can’t find his place? Fear upon fear.

Instead, a friend ran up to us. “I missed you, James!” he exclaimed. Another ran to him for a hug, and another grabbed his hand, saying, “Want to play the game?” His smile stretched from ear to ear, from one side of my fragile heart to the other. “See?” a voice called grace whispered to that heart. “I’m already here. I’m already everywhere.”

A friend and I talked later, about how we parent from guilt. Also–we live from brokenness. From the places where we’ve been wounded, from the needs that were never met. We try to measure up. We try to bridge the perceived gaps. Very often, we use shitty building materials: things that work as hobbies or passing interests or by the glass rather than the bottle, or the mug rather than the pot.

We’re all screwed, is what I’m saying. We’re all doing it–something–wrong. WE’RE ALL EATING TOO MUCH SUGAR.

What if, though, the first thing we did rather than engaging in the shame spiral, or reaching for the distraction, or beating ourselves up, was to just stay in the particular moment that haunts us: the hangover, the high, the sadness–and realise this: that we are loved? That there is a place for us?

I’m just spitballing here, but I don’t think we just hurt ourselves when we aren’t honest about our wounds; we hurt others. We take our fear of “otherness” and extend it past ourselves, turn people we don’t even know into “them” as if that will heal us. We steel our souls. We put up walls and place our salvation inside them.

Meanwhile, the voice whispers: “There is a table where there’s no such thing as too much. You have a seat there. And I am there. I am everywhere.”

The Greatest of No Evils

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electionThe true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him but because he loves what is behind him. –GK Chesterton

I haven’t written about politics lately, outside of quips comprised of one hundred forty characters or less. This was not always the case; if you travel back in time through my Facebook feed (PLEASE DON’T), you’ll see that I wasn’t always so taciturn come election year. I ranted and railed with the best of them, my updates staunch and standoffish and no doubt offensive to those on the other side of the fence from the one I occupied. I marvel that I have any friends left, on social media or in real life, and can only give thanks for the graciousness they displayed in sticking around through my tirades (and keeping their responses, for the most part, to themselves or behind my back).

My motivation for shouting political rhetoric from the (online) rooftops was simple: I clung to politics as a facet of my identity. I needed to proclaim my particular values, grounded as I believed they were in faith but upheld by political party affiliation, to project a sense of self into the world. I saw it as a sign of strength that I fought so publicly for what I held dear–and I valued strength because I didn’t see that weakness and failure are valid parts of any narrative rooted in grace, for it’s grace that answers weakness and failure–not strength–with redemption.

I’m so tired of politics. But I’m so not tired of grace.

For awhile now, an unholy hybrid has been brewing between faith and politics that belies an actual separation between them–a gulf of cognitive dissonance. The opposing trajectories of the two render them never fully reconcilable. At some point, we have to renounce the supremacy of one to acknowledge that of the other. Here are the differences I see.

Politics is a climb through the ranks of power. Grace is a descent down the ladder to be among the “least of these.”

Politics eschews forgiveness as a waste of time and chases revenge as a show of strength. Grace confronts me with my own flawed nature, offers forgiveness in return, and leaves me with no option but to offer it to others.

Politics is cling-wrap for labels that would legitimize its agenda. Grace repels all labels or attempts to categorize it; it shuns predictability; it operates outside cultural and ethnic and racial boundaries created by men and dissolves them.

Politics embraces strategy. It shows up with tools to build a kingdom and sets about creating that kingdom according to the design we see fit. Grace recognizes that the only kingdom worth living in will not be constructed by human hands but ushered in by divine ones apart from all our strategies, for it holds the only blueprint for heaven.

Politics assumes that peace will be created by policy. Grace recognizes that while we are invited to be a part of peace on earth, we will never fulfill it on our own.

Politics seeks to protect self-interest among a sea of selves who have different interests. It is insular and, therefore, creates islands. Grace recognizes that we are held and protected outside of strategy and policy by hands we can’t see, and those hands bind us together with commonalities that outweigh our differences.

Politics burdens us to protect our own freedom. Grace brings freedom wherever it shows up.

Politics rejects any space between what is and what should be. Grace allows us to see that that space undeniably exists, and gives us the freedom to mourn it, to recognize the constant “not yet” of living in this world, to be unafraid of it because we know that completion is coming–and not by our own doing.

Politics is full of bad news that charges people to prepare. Grace is full of good news that frees them to change.

Politics tells me I am a guardian. Grace tells me I am a recipient.

Politics demands unwavering consistency. Grace recognizes that the path of redemption is full of change.

Politics demands an either/or decision, a vote often based in my most palpable fear. Grace sets me free to vote, or not vote, according to my deepest belief.

Politics ennobles the basest emotions–anger, fear–into battle cries. Grace uncovers what lies beneath anger and fear and frees me to face it, knowing my truest safety is never in danger.

Politics puts me in a position to choose between the lesser of two evils. Grace tells me that I and my vote are not the ultimate answer, and points to the one who is.

Politics is temporary. Grace is eternal.

Part and Whole

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both“Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.” –Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

I woke up a few days ago in a bed that was not my own. An unfamiliar room. No husband next to me or four-year-old who had crept in during the night sleeping between us. Total darkness, still air. The clock read 7:24. I felt relaxed. Rested.

Incomplete.

A friend and I spent almost twenty-four hours on a staycation at a local hotel, escaping our lives for a day to refuel and commiserate and support. We deal with special needs every day–our kids’ and our own–and we needed a break. We lounged poolside and bobbed in the water, sacked out on individual beds and perched at tables with meals we did not cook or clean up. We talked about our shared and separate histories, our shared and separate presents. We drank. We listened. We slept. It was so much, yet not enough. I couldn’t wait to see my family again, and I could. I loved the independence, and I felt adrift.

This is my life now, the mystery in which I am daily mired, the ambivalence I walk like a tightrope, the insanity I try to manage: deep, deep love and consuming frustration. Emotions that contradict each other and always run high. An instant away from either jubilant laughter or seething anger.

This morning I parented mostly through gritted teeth and tears. Then, from a couch with a boy on either side of me, Dr. Seuss’s rhymes issuing from my lips as I nearly fell asleep. It’s a lot for one morning. It’s a lot for a lifetime. I’m doing a good job, and I’m failing miserably. None of this makes any sense the more I try to make sense of it. None of it makes sense unless…

Unless there’s more to it. Unless it’s part of a greater whole. I hold the pieces in my hands every day, some of them broken because the world delivers that way, some ragged because I’ve slammed them to the ground in my own ire. I hold them, and I pray that they will be sewn together in a way that dissolves the seams and renders a masterpiece because I can’t do it. I can’t turn this into something beautiful.

I think that may be a start. I’m counting on it, anyway.

The other morning I was headed through the bleary early-morning haze toward Little Brother’s room, and before I cracked the door I heard him through it: “Mama. Dada. Bubba.” I opened the door and stepped through, his grin meeting me through the crib slats. “Mama! Dada! Bubba!” The Kid is doing it too, taking stock of the situation as if to confirm for himself and us that he’s seeing everything, that he gets it, and here is what he sees: our family. “Mommy. Daddy. Will. James,” he says, then turns to The Husband and me, smiling. They know they are a part of something, their worlds now so much smaller than they will be, their universes currently rotating around this family unit that they always return to, that opens and finishes their days. They get it, and I wish I did too, in those moments of gritted teeth and tears: that this is so much bigger than a moment, than a mistake, than me.

I wish sometimes that we would think of it when we talk about politics, and our country, and what’s next: that we fundamentally and perpetually misidentify and mislabel ourselves according to communities that matter so much less than the ones that matter more. We forget to take care of each other because we feel compelled to take care of ourselves. We forget that we are held; instead, we hold. We grasp. We cling. We think we can control the world from a voting booth, that one channel or candidate has all the answers. We strategize how to protect our best interests because we don’t know what they are. We don’t believe that someone else does. We don’t believe that our deepest needs are already met, and our greatest hope can never be lost. So we vote as if our lives depended on it. They don’t.

I wish sometimes that my husband, so sunnily dispositioned, didn’t have to deal with a partner whose bouts of melancholy, of over-analysis, surely confound his even-keeled level-headed kindness. Then I remember that I am part of a unit here. That the first time we saw each other was not orchestrated by either of us, that the friendships that led us to that moment in a lobby were orchestrated on a timetable that defies earthly understanding, that we were each created to fit and balance and be part of the whole. We didn’t engineer this shit. It is not going to fall apart because I have a breakdown. We may end up walking better on hobbled legs than we did on sound ones; or in the right direction, at least.

I wish sometimes that I would see, more often and readily, that it is all so much less about doing than belonging. I wish that I would remember that all the things I said I would have and do, that they have been upended in favor of what I now have and do, and that this is somehow for my freedom. I wonder if the rest of the things I said I would have and do are going to vanish as well, if it will even matter if I never skydive or live overseas or guest star on Saturday Night Live. Maybe by then I’ll look back and see how much more beautiful it was the way it turned out.

I wish. I hope. I pray.

I climbed into my car the other morning, headed away from the escape and back toward my family. Toward church, where we would meet. The drive was empty of traffic–a quiet Sunday morning studded with calm roads and towering trees, green lawns and a new route to the same place. I thought about how I longed to see them, how after a few minutes in their presence I would long for a break. The constant mystery and ambivalence. I pulled into the lot and waited, and an image from the week before came to mind: LB at his puzzle station, placing into my open hands, like communion wafers, letter after letter of the tiny pegged pieces that are so prone to lostness. He knows them now as individuals, As and Ms and Is, but soon he will string them together, see how they can fit to create something new, the way his brother, for so long wordless, now sits beside both of us on the couch and, just when I feel too tired to read another rhyme, chimes in, the words issuing from his lips to tell a whole story.

Dear Church–A Companion Piece

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pumpkinThe optimist looks at the world and thinks, “The situation: serious, not hopeless.” But the Christian looks at the world and thinks, “Situation hopeless, but not serious.” –G.K. Chesterton

(Yesterday I wrote a piece over at The Wheelhouse Review mocking the Church’s delivery of the Gospel to the world. I like satire, cousin that it is to sarcasm, my love language. And I believe that humor can be the balm to many an ill in this world. But I also believe that it needs to be mixed with a hefty dose of heart to do any good, and that’s where this companion piece comes in: as the “heart” side of the coin to yesterday’s “humor” side.)

We were late, which is better than absent, which we often are on Sundays. After dropping The Kid off in the nursery, The Husband and I claimed our back-row seats in the gym and settled in for the prayer. TK’s name, uttered by our pastor, jarred me out of my sleepy reverence. I poked TH–we hadn’t put TK on the prayer list. We didn’t have to.

I cry at church every week now.

I grew up with a nearly perfect church attendance record. If the youth group had an event on the calendar, you can bet I was there. And I was the consummate student–in fact, “student” was practically my whole identity until I was almost thirty–so I think I would have heard it if they had delved into the whole grace thing. But I didn’t. Which is why, my first Sunday as a resident of New York City, I showed up at Redeemer and found myself being introduced to grace. To the idea that my preceding record (which I had, until recently, been quite proud of) was not the measure of my worth. This was news to me.

I never used to cry at church.

And I grew up in the Southeast, where emotional appeals run rampant in church services, where altar calls and prayer are paired with plaintive music like a steak with red wine. There seemed to be a veneer to the whole thing, and it’s funny that I picked up on that veneer but not my own, because I was sporting a similar one. There are a lot of people out there pretending to be something they’re not. And a lot of them are at church every week. And that’s not so much a disconnect as it is an exposure–a revealing of misplaced faith.

I heard the Bible preached as instruction, never narrative. Jesus was more of an image–all tan skin and crinkly warm eyes and flowing hair and good deeds–than a real person. Our congregation clutched its collective pearls after our pastor, a widower, dared to marry a woman who dared to have a past that included divorce. There was a Bible verse to support any opinion–people read Scripture; we didn’t let it read us. It was all very orderly and regimented and sanitary. Four-alliterative-point sermons, a couple of hymns, sign the attendance book. Lather, rinse, repeat.

No wonder The Dad never wanted to go. None of it felt real.

There are all kinds of churches, and there need to be. Let me tell you about ours, now: this week, our pastor held up a t-shirt he owns that reads, “I love Jesus but I cuss a little.” His wife has a matching one, except it says, “but I drink a little”. I want that shirt. I get asked about TK’s neck every week by people whose stories I know, whose struggles have been shared. I can’t fly under the radar here (though I earned my pilot’s license in that very activity long ago). And every week, like clockwork, something sets off the tears in my eyes. There is more of Jesus in one sincere moment than a thousand kept rules.

I cry at church now because it means something more than signing an attendance sheet and keeping up an appearance. Because the notes strike a chord deep within me, deeper than conformity and technique and behavior modification and self-reliance. If I want to know how to be a better person, I’ll hit up the self-help section at Barnes and Noble (who am I kidding? I’d go to Amazon so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone). Before grace, the closest I came to a transcendent moment was nailing a yoga pose (RARE). Now I find myself lifted out of the commonplace all the time, because it has become sacred.

The Christian church needs to stop preaching strategy. The only technique to grace is open hands.

Yesterday, TK and I had a double-header at Children’s for physical and speech therapy appointments. His PT is always hard, full of his tears and often ending with him passing out from exhaustion on my shoulder. When we headed to his speech appointment, we passed multiple patients whose problems are arguably much larger. The wheelchair-bound, those who can’t feed themselves, the guy with a dramatic limp. I looked down at my guy, clenching my hand as he trotted alongside me, collar on his neck to prop his head upright, and familiar tears sprang to my eyes. This pool of water on my lower lid, so commonplace now that grace and TK have arrived, is sacred. The water clears my eyes and the mask is gone and I see now, see the brokenness all around me. But I see the hope too: the hope of people who don’t have to pretend, whose insides are on their outsides because all of us are walking around with a limp and a tilted head.

“The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints,” goes the quote, and I wonder what we would look like to the world if we stopped chasing prosperity and numbers and perfection and rules and started opening our hands to grace as it comes: messy, limping, tearful and true. I wonder if, to the world, we would just look more like them.

 

 

 

Blame-Shifting

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sunWe had gotten to the “Confession” part in our program, and Catholics aren’t the only believers who are familiar with that word. As a recent convert to grace even after lifelong churchgoing (as if those two are undeniably linked!), I’ve focused on abandoning the guilt-mongering and self-deprecation and faux humility that goes along with confronting my shortcomings. But this week, the voice from the front clarified. The world at large tends to, when the bill for such shortcomings is due, glance around wildly and look for a target to which we can pin the blame. Make excuses. Look for an out. But this confession, in its upside-down kingdom, counter-cultural way that is so the mark of grace, was not about that. It was about fessin’ up so that the bill could be paid not by the one we blame in our abdication of responsibility, or by our own morality, but by the only one who never owed anything.

So in this vein, I admitted to God the ways I’d put my own mark upon being an ass that week. And the vaults of forgiveness were released, flowing in response.

Our cultural moment, this post-modern, post-patriotic, post-post-9/11 era, is marked by the most excoriating and simultaneously permissive bunch of confused, over-analytical navel-gazers (whose ranks I join every time I indulge the luxury of writing a blog). The Husband and I watched Lincoln the other night, and other than revealing how shrunken my attention span has become, it made me wonder what the president and his contemporaries would think if they could see us now: a generation of freedom-fighters and slavery-abolishers beholding hipsters in Starbucks typing on their Macs about how they shouldn’t be required to pay back their student loans. (“Hold my musket while I punch this whiner in the face,” is a response I imagine.) Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” updated for the new century would read something like: Two roads diverged in a wood and I/I rued the lack of options and wondered, “Why?”/And my lack of commitment has made all the difference. The bombings in Boston this week brought out the best of society (hospital caregivers, people offering homes) and the worst (Twitter feeds of the far-right and -left). We yearn for a name, a face to hold the blame, even as we try not to be too hard on the poor guy. We’re all over the place.

I feel the urge to blame take root in my own life, when the doctor says we can’t perform The Kid’s MRI today and it sounds like he’s equivocating but these are maternal ears now and therefore not so objective, until he tosses out a teething statistic that I know is wrong and I bite my tongue because nothing good will roll off it even as I silently push pins into a voodoo doll bearing his likeness in my head. Later I tell TH, in a moment of raw honesty, that I’m really mad at myself–for not going to bat more for TK–and he reminds me that if it happened this way, it was meant to–which is just a dialect of “God is sovereign and doesn’t need you to gather ammo and run his office from down here.” Then I go to work and pull the front teeth of two one-year-olds in a row and want to get someone to hold my musket/drill so I can punch their parents in the face, and when I go to the bathroom to cry and have a come-to-Jesus I’m reminded–and gently provided with foreshadowing–of all the mistakes I’ve made and will and it turns out that my floorboards may have their own secrets.

Which is not an argument against the dispensing of justice as much as it is an admission that none of us can deliver it perfectly–being a little less than free to cast the first stone and all. When it comes to evildoers who kill innocents (interesting that the Boston bombers and Gosnell populated the same news week…), there are laws broken and punishment to be meted. (Sidenote: METE IT, criminal justice system–mete it HARD.) But when it comes to the guy who just cut me off in traffic, or the mom who’s doing it differently than I would…I have some work to do and grip to loosen before the stones are freed from my hand.

Because these cultural wars between left and right and radical and fundamental are mirrored in my own heart, the back-and-forth of flesh and spirit, flawed and forgiven. I have been freed from duty, but that doesn’t always stop me from showing up to the battlefield, musket in hand, ready to assign blame. And the recipient is others (what a jerk!/how could she say that?/they’re just so wrong) only when it’s not me: how can I do better/try harder/make fewer mistakes? Then the light turns green in this moment at dawn, and I look up (it always happens then). And the response to all my blaming and misdirection is a rising sun, the same one that rose yesterday, now a golden ball of glory that I would miss were I not on my way to work–and the war within, the self-motivated guilt as I drive away from TK, is a tiny candle beside which I try to warm myself while the blaze of grace beckons to a story written just for me.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Voting Booth

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I remember voting for the first and only time as a New Yorker, walking over before work to the retirement center on the next block and waiting in line. I pulled the curtain closed behind me nervously–it was also the first time I wasn’t a part of the majority. In a sea of liberals, I unenthusiastically picked McCain, shrugging at my lack of trendiness and my inability to renounce my red-state roots.

I grew up in a home where Crossfire aired on the weeknights and football on the weekends; there were always the “us” and “them” teams. Good and evil were like black and white: clear-cut and omnipresent. The bookshelves were adorned with the writings of Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza. I loved the intellectual side of it–the study of issues, the understanding of words like budgetary and gravitas–even as I grew into a mentality that limited its own breadth of knowledge by only reading the stuff written by “us.” I kept my political friends close and my enemies? Screw ’em.

Then I moved to New York and was met by liberals dressed as friends. And I went to a church that didn’t try to influence my vote. There were even Christians (real ones, not just the Southern kind) who were Democrats! And I wondered if it was possible that the other side wasn’t evil or misguided but just…different.

My transformation at the hands of grace didn’t send me to the other side of the political spectrum, but it did leave me tempered. I changed my mind about the death penalty. My Facebook posts, especially around election time, weren’t quite so vitriolic. And I didn’t see hatred as a necessary component in discussing whether some of my more fabulous, well-dressed and witty friends should marry whom they wanted. I even dated one Democrat just to piss The Dad off (his response: “Don’t ever bring that son of a bitch around here”). But I ended up on the same side of the fence as always, just at a better vantage point.

One of the keys to not hating the other side was realizing that government, just like anything else I had put my hope in before, would not solve all my problems; nor was it the only problem in a world full of them. The stakes for each election consequently dropped; the hope put in each candidate was regulated by their tendency to be human and, therefore, fallible. It turned out there was only one Savior and, to my shock and surprise, he had never claimed to be a registered Republican. (Or Democrat.)

There’s a nice moment when you realize that all the stuff the world gets up in arms about is exactly what faith allows you to rise above and see as ultimately ephemeral and, often, childish. When your “I voted” sticker or party affiliation doesn’t have to be your source of identity. When you can wake up the day after the election and know that the whole world is still in his hands–and they’re not the hands of the guy who got the most votes.

Sure, I still have my opinion, often vehemently. Ask Salt-n-Pepa–everybody does. And to that end, I’ll be standing up for all the other squares when my venerable Soul Sister and I begin our series on political discussions over at The Wheelhouse Review soon. But at the end of it, expect more of a James Carville/Mary Matalin relationship than a Rachel Maddow/Ann Coulter one (I love these comparisons because she has to be James and Rachel for them to work). Because there’s something–and someone–who matters more to both of us than all this political nonsense. And that allows us to watch all the panicky, angry people who have way too much riding on this (I’m looking at you, Chris Matthews and Hank Williams Jr.)  and say, “Screw ’em.”

Occupied

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“There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chuses, and that is, his duty…”

“I cannot make speeches, Emma…If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”

Jane Austen, Emma

 

As I watch the news coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests, I find myself asking the most important question about it all, perhaps the one you are asking too:

Where are all of these people going to the bathroom?

I grew up in a home where conservatism was taught during the day and Bible stories were read at night. I intertwined the two, and from the youngest of ages believed in the holy virtue of hard work. What I recognized only later is the principle that occurs by default when one group is extolled–another will be judged. I did most things by default: I was a rule-follower, an instruction-seeker, a color-inside-the-lines type. So I obediently ascended the ladder set before me even as I scorned the base degrees by which I did ascend. The Sis and I rose early a few Saturdays, selling doughnuts door to door and using what few bad words we knew to curse The Dad’s entrepreneurial spirit; we found jobs at sixteen and showed up for them; we received college scholarships. I worked hard every day and developed my resume and my sense of duty, along with a sense of entitlement to accompany both: work hard, reap rewards. I missed, in all the fervor, the chip that brings passion and joy into that work. I arrived on time every day to school or the office to do my job, but I often brought a bad attitude with me.

Now I watch these protests and I realize that once again, Americans major in extremes as our political divisions drive our ideology. I find that my gut instinct is to tell these people to get a job. I want to yell at them to stop blaming other people, to push a mop or a pen or whatever they can find rather than piss on street corners and complain. And, as The Husband can attest, I do tell and yell. There is a sense of moral indignation within me that rises up anytime I see a hemp-necklaced, cargo-panted man on a mattress waxing philosophical about corporate greed. I want to find my student loan statement and shove it in his face.

Then I remember my own unemployment, the little boy I see on Thursdays who already knows the F word and visits playgrounds with broken swings, and I know that while right and wrong and us and them may be frequently-used words in the context of politics, there is something called grace that complicates humanity beyond that language.

Without grace, we all operate from a sense of entitlement. One group objectively measures its worth according to its accomplishments; another idealistically demands recognition for its passion and struggles. Politically, we each tend to fall to one end of the spectrum, but personally, a sense of duty leaves one cold without passion, and conversely, passion rings hollow without duty to accompany it: a suit without compassion vs. a protestor without direction.

I know which end of the spectrum feels most comfortable to me—which seems most right—but I also, thankfully, know the joy now of pursuing a dream that makes no sense; I’ve learned that it’s possible to be poor even while working hard (thank you, New York City). I vote one way and read another way: my favorite stories’ characters are those like Mr. Knightley, who delivers a speech on duty in one chapter and, later, finds himself at a loss for words when describing love. The complexity of a person who embraces virtue and feeling. Duty and passion side by side. I know of only One who ever accomplished the combination perfectly.

Marbles

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I’m currently dusting out the cobwebs in my head to make room for more words and some Halloween decorations, and all this random stuff keeps falling out. Here’s what it looks like:

–Can I get paid $1 million by Oman to not go hiking in Iran?

–I’m starting a new website. Actually, it’s been up and running for months now (thanks to The Husband), but due to a contract I signed to join a women’s blogging community (and get some ad dollas), I’ve received the push I needed to post solely over there from now on. So starting next week, I’ll be posting the link to that website (www.plansinpencil.com) instead of this one. You know how it is–sisters doin’ it for themselves and all (with the help of their tech-savvy husbands).

–What makes oatmeal cut by steel better than regular-cut oatmeal?

–“The Power of Love,” by Huey Lewis and the News, totally holds up over time as an awesome song. Especially when coupled with a workout and the image of Michael J. Fox climbing over a convertible to land on his skateboard.

–Last night’s Troy Davis execution debacle was profoundly sad on every level and shouldn’t have happened. I don’t say that because I think he’s innocent (the evidence would suggest otherwise), but because our system is broken. I disagree with the death penalty. This may sound strange coming from someone who supports the right to bear arms and thinks that the rich already pay their fair share (and a lot of other people’s). But while I do think plenty of people deserve the ultimate punishment for their crimes (I’m looking at you, Scott Peterson), I don’t think I or any other human beings have the authority to pronounce that a life should end (see also: abortion). That’s God’s job, and we’re all under-qualified for the position.

–OMG! Thursday night comedy is back! Who will be the new boss on The Office?

–I prayed for encouragement, and God decided to show off when he answered in the form of a couple of emails, then a call from a New York City area code. The conversation was a response to a deeper prayer than I had uttered–a validation that I am on a genuine path. I was set free by someone else’s words, words that reminded me that there is a Yet to this path and a joy in the process. I’m so grateful.

–I’m 25 weeks pregnant now, and depending on which website you read, that means The Kid is either the size of a rutabaga or a loaf of bread. Regardless, he is elbowing and kicking and loves coffee, weekly sips of red wine, walks along Chicago’s riverfront, the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and Sunday Night Football. And making me pee.

Whew. That feels better.

You Can't Have It Both Ways

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On my way to work, I pass a group of two or three people who are holding signs and pamphlets outside an office building.  These people have been there for as long as I’ve taken this route (two years) and they don’t let the weekend stop them.  When you get within a few feet of them, you notice some things.  One, these men and women are senior citizens.  Two, they look a little crazy.  Seriously:  hair pointing in all directions, layers and layers of clothing (long pleated skirts and sweatshirts for the women, Members Only-type jackets and sweatpants for the men), gaping, twisted mouths instead of smiles.  Finally, the signs they’re holding are pictures of developing and aborted fetuses.

Last week, I read more about the massacre at Fort Hood and the charges to be brought against Nidal Hasan.  One of the women he shot and killed was a female officer who was pregnant.  Officials are still deciding whether or not to charge him for a fourteenth murder, that of the unborn child.  The basis for that charge would be the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, also known as Laci and Conner’s Law.  You know why.

The people I pass on the way to work are repugnant to me.  The other day, I watched as they banged on the glass doorway of the building in an attempt to get the attention of a man and women standing at the front desk , checking in.  I can only assume that abortions are provided in one of the offices and one of the protesters’ tactics is to try to divert people from keeping their appointments.  I have daydreams of yelling to the protesters about the difference between fear and love, and telling them about Midtown Pregnancy Support Center, which is about ten blocks from where they’re standing.  It’s a non-profit agency that provides counseling and material support for women who are facing unexpected pregnancies.  Post-abortion counseling and support groups are also available.  In other words, they hope you don’t get an abortion but if you do, they’re not going to start hating you.

But an abortion is a choice.  And when the baby is an unwelcome surprise, its termination is legal.  When the baby is a planned addition to a family and is wanted and nurtured and anticipated, his death at the hands of another is not a choice, it’s a murder.  Where is the logical integrity in this double set of rules?

And where is the spiritual integrity in hating or intimidating someone until they do what you believe is right?  Where was the scare tactic in Jesus’ response to the prostitute who washed his feet:  “Your sins are forgiven”?  Fear changes actions, not hearts.  And unchanged hearts are the stuff of criminals and Pharisees.