need ye a bonny breakfast, aye?

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Very well, then!

I just posted our family's very favorite breakfast over at 350.

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a crushing mercy

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 9 - A Difficult Road: The Christian Life

Those who have gone before us have left a clear witness: We may seek God or we may seek ease, but we cannot seek both.

Our surgical and medical advancements lull into false security, causing us to forget that we are one missed heartbeat away from heaven... The physical and social luxuries of our world also make it more difficult for us to face the hard internal issues because we don't have to -- there are plenty of escapes... We can literally hide from the truth of the Gospel and our responsibility to serve God by filling our lives with noise.

Former saints had nowhere to turn but to God; we can take our pick.

How do we talk about the cross to a generation that finds unfluffed pillows intolerable?

Scripture says the disciples "strengthened" or "encouraged" each other with the words, "we must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God." (Acts 14:22) Notice Scripture doesn't say they "threatened" each other with the possibility of suffering. No, they encouraged and strengthened each other.

It is not a coincidence that Jesus chose twelve disciples who would naturally have problems with the beliefs, attitudes, or dispositions of the others. If I were seeking peace and harmony, I certainly wouldn't put a tax collector with a zealot -- two natural enemies. But Jesus knew that real spirituality is proven in our relationships with others and He was willing to call people into relationships that would put them beyond their comfort level.

How many of us have used a gift God has given us to serve Satan's ends rather than build God's kingdom? How many of us have been given the gift of making money and then let that money waste away on selfish pursuits? How many of us have been gifted with serving, but perverted that gift of service by trying to make others feel indebted to us? How many of us have been given the gift of leadership and then turned that gift into a tool of manipulation and control? If we forget the law of sin in our lives, if we forget how very difficult it is to obtain mastery over it, Satan will have a field day with our self-righteous carelessness. Even our strengths can become weaknesses if we're not careful.

The most dangerous Christians are those who have forgotten their tendency to sin -- and Satan's agenda to capitalize on that tendency.

Difficulty teaches us to be pastoral people, something that does not come naturally to us. If we deny our own pain, we must also blind ourselves to the pain of others. We also need difficulty because without it we become proud, self-centered, and uncaring monsters who are full of ourselves.

I used to be a vicious discipler. I never missed a quiet time, and if someone I was working with did, I questioned the sincerity of his or her faith. Then God in His mercy crushed me for eight long years. Sins I had never faced before came roaring to life. Prayer became difficult. Ministry felt strained and awkward; there was no sense of God's power coursing through me. At the end of this period a door flew open, the darkness was lifted, and I was changed. I realized God didn't need someone who could preach better than anyone else or who could fast longer, pray more or evangelize more. He wanted somebody who would love His people. I knew a lot about discipline and commitment, but I knew nothing about love.

The sweetness of pain can woo us from the world if we are determined to learn from it rather than complain about it. Teresa of Avila wrote, "The soul is left with greater contempt for the world than before because it sees that nothing in the world was any help to it in that torment and it is much more detached from creatures because it now sees that only the Creator can console and satisfy it."

Chapter 8 quotes
(You can follow the link trail to prior chapter notes from there. Or you can go to our November 2008 archives and start with the first post on Chapter 1.)

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please help yourself

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Yes, this affects you.

And it's about a whole lot more than just handmade goods.

Please click on the bear

for more information

and contact your Congressman now

to protest this ridiculous, invasive, punitive law

that affects all of us

before it's too late!

And please pass it on!

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Merry Christmas!

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We just exchanged Christmas presents with my parents and my brother. No joke. Hey, we march to our own little drummer boy around here.

(And you thought we were oddballs about New Year's!)

And now we're listening to ice hit the roof and sipping Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride tea. Amazing stuff, by the way. Truly tastes just like a sugar cookie!

Ho ho ho!

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one year

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My day has finally come.

My fourth and final surgery for breast cancer was one year ago today. How I wish that on that day I could have read the paragraph I'm about to write next.

Today, I had a normal day. I took a shower all by myself. I sang a hymn. I braided my own hair. I brewed hot tea and read a book. I listened to a dozen beautiful children recite poetry and heartily sing "Count Your Blessings" and giggle at Shakespeare and lose themselves in a Liszt prelude. I toted a book bag. I stretched my arms over my head with ease and fetched a bowl from a high shelf. I rubbed my young son's blonde head and bought him a hot dog and laughed with him in the ridiculously gorgeous Texas sunshine. I pumped gas. I bought groceries for people I love. I washed sheets and Jonagold apples and swept up broken glass and arranged flowers and cooked wild salmon in basil butter. I wrote in my journal with my new fountain pen. I had an easy, long, happy conversation with an old friend.

It was, as I said, a normal day. That may not seem like much to you, but listen to me well, my friends:

Normal is given, but it is not a given. Normal is a miracle.

At my post-op checkup six weeks after that final surgery, I was very discouraged. I still felt like I'd been thrown under a bus and I had zip zero energy. I felt like my own body had died and I'd been yanked out and hastily crammed into something half-numb, half on fire and lacking hinges. I lamented to my eternally optimistic surgeon, who had downplayed everything heretofore. But now he finally got real. "You don't know the half of what your body has been through. It's going to take you a full year from the final surgery to recover from all of it."

I've been counting down the months ever since.

For many of those months, I simply could not foresee how I could ever know an easy, happy, ordinary day again. I could write a chapter here on what it's like to have everything easy, familiar and normal erased from your life, but I wouldn't enjoy writing it and you wouldn't like reading it. But I can tell you truly that I have grieved for my old, familiar, normal life more than I have grieved for my old, familiar breasts.

There was a time when I wondered if the chronic, relentless pain would ever fade or if it was the secret torment of all breast cancer survivors. There was a time when I wondered if I'd ever take an easy breath without a merciless boa constrictor tying sailor knots around my torso. There were whole months when I wondered if my hands would ever obey my brain again, when I dropped everything and could not bend over to pick anything up. When pens fell out of my fumbling grasp and my signature was not my own. When my fingers curled up on the piano keys like chicken claws. When I couldn't remember yesterday to save me and coherent conversation was something I could see happening just a few feet away but somehow couldn't reach. When tears were always exactly three seconds away.

But my dearest friend Jesus Christ hovered over me with healing in His wings. My Jesus is Lord of all redemption and rebirth and renewal and unfathomable mercy. Little by little, the pain and frustrations have faded. Whatever remains He will give me grace to manage.

And so it is that today, One Year Later, I had a pretty normal day. I lived to see that sentence glowing in front of me on this screen. God is so good that there is no sufficiently superlative superlative for the kind of good He is. God is God. Maybe that is the only way to say it.

I think I want to type it again just to see it materialize on the screen:

Today I had a normal day.

Normal is fantastic. Normal is perfect.

Great Scot even sent me flowers. I think I should throw a Happy Normal Party, and soon. Don't you?


(And say, if you'd like to bake a happy normal cake and stick a candle in it and sing the Doxology and dance a silly jig for me, please consider that a happy, holy, and perfectly normal urge and do not resist it. Just be sure to take pictures and send them my way.)
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the pursuit of happiness

There are times when you fritter around in a dull fog waiting for happiness to find you. There are times when it dawns unbidden and radiates everything; you lift your face and glow to the bone. And then there are dark, raw times when you must fumble for a lasso and hoist what's left of you into that tall saddle away-up-there and charge full-gasping-hard after happiness, because the blasted beast is hoofing it for the horizon and it ain't likely to wander back on its own.

Breast cancer taught me about that last one.

Hey, wait a minute. Look at that. How utterly psychiatric of me to conjure up a lasso as a metaphor for this. Because right after I was diagnosed, that ubiquitous pink ribbon looked like nothing but a noose to me. Prior to August 3, 2007, I doubt there was a single pink ribbon under my roof. But within a week they were marching through my door on everything -- cards, books, hospital binders, pamphlets, tshirts, flower arrangements, socks, baseball caps, you name it. They were everywhere. I hated everything about breast cancer and that included all those stupid pink nooses that had invaded my life like sugar ants in a jam factory. I wanted to scream them to shreds, torch them, hack them into pink confetti. Anything to make them go away.

As months passed, I realized my survival had depended on so many things that were funded by pink ribbons. I began to see them not as a noose around my neck but rather as a lasso that charity had laid in my hand.

Did I just digress? Maybe not.

As a survivor I have had to lock down hard on the pursuit of happiness. It's common for cancer survivors to take anti-depressants long-term, particularly in the year after the battle is over and everyone thinks life should get back to normal -- that's when post traumatic stress settles in. That's rough stuff. I don't blame anyone for resorting to the happy pills. But every pain med I took after the surgeries made my life feel like a post-it note with no sticky. I wanted my sticky back. So I passed on the Effexor prescription.

I committed to take happiness seriously. Pray for it. Study it like a school subject. Read Psalms daily and ponder Philippians, the book of joy. I subscribed to The Happiness Project. I searched for quotes about happiness and copied the ones that either rallied my spirits or slapped me upside the head.

That quote collection has been floating down the left margin of this blog for many months, and I've read them over and over. I love those quotes, and they have served me well, but I think it's time for something new. So with this post, I'm moving them out of the margin and into the archives.

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”
~Robert Louis Stevenson

"For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am in, therewith to be content."
~Paul, in prison (Philippians 4:11)

"You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy."
~Eric Hoffer

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."
~M. Scott Peck

"Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible."
~Augustine

"There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do."
~Freya Stark

"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is."
~Maxim Gorky

"One filled with joy preaches without preaching."
~Mother Teresa

"Happiness is a form of courage."
~Holbrook Jackson

"It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis."
~Margaret Bonnano

"The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied... Earthly fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, children and earthly friends, are all shadows. But God is the substance. All earthly delights are but scattered beams. But God is the sun. All earthly delights are but streams. But God is the ocean."
~Jonathan Edwards

"Nothing compares to Texas at sunset."

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Nothing indeed. Welcome home, neighbor.

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sentenced

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Quotes from Seeking the Face of God by Gary Thomas

Chapter 8 -- Living in a Dying World: The Remembrance of Death

Fenelon believed we avoid the thought of death so we are not saddened by it. But this, he said, is shortsighted. "It will only be sad for those who have not thought about it."

Young people have a distorted view of life. We forget that funerals are waiting on the other end of weddings and baby showers. When we segregate ourselves -- when we don't know anyone who is suffering from arthritis -- we can be lulled to sleep.

The ancients found great spiritual benefit in looking death in the face, seizing its reality, and making it their servant. They used death to teach themselves how to live.

Remembering death acts like a filter, helping us to hold on to the essential and let go of the trivial. Climacus pointed out that "a man who has heard himself sentenced to death will not worry about the way theaters are run." His point, of course, is that all of us have been sentenced to death; it's just a matter of time, so shouldn't we live our lives accordingly?

Eternity turns everything around. I'm reminded of this every year when I figure my taxes. During the year, I rejoice at the paychecks and extra income, and sometimes I wince when I write out the tithe and offering... At the end of the year, however, all of that changes. As I'm figuring my tax liability, I wince at every source of income and rejoice with every tithe and offering check -- more income means more taxes, but every offering and tithe means fewer taxes. Everything is turned upside down, or perhaps more appropriately, rightside up... I suspect Judgment Day will be like that.

Death not only filters our priorities, it also filters our passions. Pascal wrote, "To render passion harmless let us behave as though we had only a week to live."

What person would risk entering eternity in a drunken stupor? What fool would ignore his loved ones and his God for one last night so he could make another quick ten thousand dollars just before he died?

It is only the denial of death that allows us to continue rebelling against God. It is only because we are presuming on some future time to set things right that we ever even consider letting them go wrong.

I want to enter death tired. I want to have spent what energy God has apportioned me... An eternal rest awaits all who know Christ, so why are we preoccupied with rest now?

The supreme way for a Christian to keep the thought of death alive is to remember the crucifixion of our Lord. Every time we take Communion we should do so with the awareness that, just as Christ's work on earth had a beginning and an end (as He ministered in a human body), so the mission He has given us has a beginning and an end.

"It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart." Eccl 7:2


Chapter 7 quotes
(You can follow the link trail to prior chapter notes from there.)

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happy new yuck.

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The Beehive New Year's Eve bash foretold here last Thursday has been put on hold for a day or two. Beatrice and Spuddy are suffering from stomach virus. Poor dears.

But we are resolutely determined to party, have no fear. Plans proceed apace. We'll keep you posted.

Happy Ides of January!

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Okay, so maybe that was an odd salutation; I'll grant you that. I'm greeting you in that fashion because I never got around to wishing y'all a Happy New Year. I'll get to that next week. On Monday, to be precise. Because here in the realm known as The Beehive, of which I'm sure I needn't remind you I am The Queen, 2009 officially starts this coming Sunday at midnight, straight up.

That thing that happened two weeks ago was just a dress rehearsal sort of thing, see. Those of you who fell for it as bona fide may continue in your delusion if you wish. Or, like us, you can have a nice dinner and a feisty, festive family bash on Sunday evening and strike a fresh match on your dwindling new year's bonfire. Up to you. But I know what I'd do if I were you.

Yes, I know, you're polishing your Valentine cookie cutters already and thinking the whole New Years deal is so last week. Or so week before that. Whatever. But I am an absorbent experientialist, see, which is an impressive way of saying I'm a tad slow on the uptake. Here on my planet, seeing as how it's not February yet, New Year's salutations are still timely and relevant, and not a tad passe'. Why not join me here on my planet? We could flambe the plum pudding leftovers and maybe finish up our advent readings.

You can carpe any diem you like if you live in a time warp. If it's December 31st you're after, so what if it's January 15th?

Seriously, now. The truth is that we had to put the proper arrival of 2009 on delay here in the Beehive. Our usual focus on wrapping up the old year and getting all zinged up for the new was put on hold by Gigi Louise's passing. We travelled to Memphis for eight days to celebrate her life and to spend some rare, suspended time enjoying the comfort of family and friends who also loved her and revered her remarkable life -- it was lovely. How God stirs joy into our sorrows.

And then we returned home to find ourselves woefully Behind Schedule. The sort of Behind Schedule that threatens to derail the old family choo-choo till June. Oh, well. We're not exactly calloused to that, but we are veterans.

Besides those detainments, we've simply felt quieted by her passing. It well deserves a pause. Her death, or perhaps it was her life -- yes, that -- has left us all in a whirlwind of reflection. There's so much to ponder from such a life, and I feel a little desperate to glean all the wisdom the moment offers before it fades, as moments always do. It's a paradox that fully facing death compels us to look hard in the face of life, and to consider anew how it should be lived. I'm certain the coming weeks will find me writing my way through that whirlwind.

But now it's mid-January, the Ides of January if you will, and we begin to feel we missed something elemental and essential to the ordained rhythm of time. Just a nagging feeling that this 2009 thing is not in full play because we never had the kick-off.

All of that brings us to this. Sunday has been proclaimed New Year's Eve here at the Beehive. We're having ourselves a party. Writing resolutions. Raising our Ebenezer* for 2008. Because it's important -- and entirely scriptural -- to reflect, to remember, examine, to have a fresh starting point for living the best life you can, to have hope. You shouldn't miss that. It's good stuff. And besides, it's a great excuse for chocolate mousse cake with raspberries and cream good family bonding time.

Carpe diem, my friends! Even if you have to carpe yourself some two week old diem, carpe diem anyway!

[And if you think you could also use another whack at New Year's Eve, well, so much the merrier. Better squeeze the zingy juice out of the January lemon before it dries up. Jump on in here and let us know and we'll lift a virtual glass of bubbly to you!]


*In 1 Samuel 7:12, Samuel raised a memorial stone which he named Ebenezer, meaning "stone of help," to mark a remembrance of a time and place in which the Lord had preserved and upheld His children by His own mighty hand. "Then Samuel took a stone, and set [it] between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us."
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