5 Life Lessons I Learned From My Daddy

This Father's Day, I am honoring my husband for the father that he is and celebrating some great men I know, but I am missing my own dad terribly. While he was not perfect, his memory shines in my mind with a glow around it. He brought me such joy and taught me so much about how to be a person who lives generously and brings joy to others. So while I miss him today, I will celebrate him, his legacy that lives on in his beautiful family, and the things he taught me about life.

1. Sing to people. It makes them happy. My dad sang while we cooked, while he worked, and while he went about his daily life in the grocery store, the bank. He sang on stages and made music that lives in history. But he made the world a stage where he performed to make people smile. When I went to run some errands days after his death, the bank tellers gathered around me weeping telling me how they would miss him and the songs he sang them every Friday afternoon. My dad gave me the courage to sing for joy. It's a good kind of courage to have.

2. Preparing and serving food for others is an art and a joy. Savor it. My dad loved to cook. He loved to be creative in the kitchen. He was legendary among family and friends for his signature dishes. He pretended not to want to share his kitchen with us, but we all knew he loved it. And oh how he loved to watch people enjoy his food. This attitude about food has permeated our family. It is part of who we are collectively. And I love that about us. Meal preparation for my family is a time to savor because my dad taught me how. That is a great gift.

3. You're never too old to learn something new. My dad had access to a high school library, the History Channel and EWTN for the first time in his life during his retirement years. He made liberal use of them. He read, he watched, and he learned new things. He loved the knowledge he gained and the conversations it empowered. He taught me that learning is a privilege and a joy and we should greet even the smallest opportunities to learn something new with gratitude and zeal. Learning new things is a great joy to me today and I am thankful to my dad for his example.

4. The way you present yourself matters. My dad was meticulous about the way his clothes were laundered and ironed, about the way he tucked his shirt and were his cuffs lay on his wrists. He knew that presentation mattered. Whatever job he was doing, he wanted to put his best foot forward while doing it. It used to drive me crazy at times when he commented on my clothing choices or whether I had ironed my school shirt, but with a little maturity, I can appreciate his lesson. The way you care for your appearance tells the world a lot about you and what you think of yourself. Think about the message you are sending. Make it a good one.

5. You can decide how you will be remembered. My dad had his fair share of rough seas in life. He made his mistakes. He did not grow up ideal circumstances. He fought some hard battles and lost some. But ask just about anyone and their memories are of a man full of joy, a man who loved well, a man of wisdom and faith and strength. A man who knew how to savor life and the ones he loved. And that is because, I think, somewhere along the way, he decided that is how he wanted to be remembered and he lived it. He didn't look back at the past and disqualify himself. He maximized his gifts and shared them to the fullest. And he built himself into a giant of a man whose memory lives large and full of light and life. It is a gift to know you can choose. He taught me to choose well and let the rest go. It may be the best lesson I ever learn.

Top Ten Reasons Empty Hands Are Better Tools

So it's Friday and I woke up this morning wishing I could go to ALL THE PARTIES on the internets and laughing that I would surely have to scale back my expectations. I mean how could I write one single post about hands (Five Minute Friday) that was a top ten list (The Grove at Velvet Ashes), talked about the joy of finding community (incourage link-up), and a topic that has been rumbling loud in my brain this week, how to approach short term missions with the right disposition.

But as I sipped my morning coffee and my gears  got going, I started to think about our hands. And how one of the things that can be an obstacle from us forming authentic community as well as to our approach to short term missions is thinking we have to have full hands, we have to come with something to offer more than ourselves. We need to bring a gift, a supply. a tool, an answer, a solution for our presence to be worth something.

The problem with full hands is this: there is only one possible evolution for the relationships we enter, whether they be with people with whom we are seeking community or brothers and sisters we go to visit at the ends of the earth. We arrive with our hands full of clothes, shoes, sports, equipment, building supplies, solutions, answers, advice, what have you, and we are burdened and encumbered by them. The only solution is to look for an empty, outstretched hand to dump them in. We dump. The person to whom we dump is now full and has to find something to do with the load, so they must turn away. We end up empty-handed, relieved of the gift we carried like a burden, and lonely.

I think the we need to learn to be comfortable approaching missions and community and relationships with empty hands. So here are my top ten reasons empty hands are better tools than full ones.

1. Two empty hands can clasp together to form a link. A link in a chain that leaves another hand free for the inviting. A chain that can stretch and grow. A chain that is stronger in its collective grasp.

2. Empty hands can cup what is poured into them, then pour it out. Cupped hands receive a different kind of gift than the ones that are dumped by burdened, full hands. Cupped hands hold something soft, flowing and sacred. Cupped hands indincate care and slowness and a pouring into.

3. Empty hands can embrace when there is no way of working out an answer. When all there is to do is sit in the hard broken, place with someone and hold them while they shake with the sorrow of it.

4. Empty hands can pat backs. Can acknowledge the contributions of another. Give affirm and uplift.

5. Empty hands can steady the ladder while someone else climbs. What a great gift to enable someone else to climb to the top while we steady the base on which she climbs.

6. Empty hands tell our stories. The wrinkles, the scars, the ring, the nails. The sun-baked glow or hard callouses. They tell our story. There is much we can learn from studying one another's hands. If only we are allowed to see them freely. It is much easier to be KNOWN with empty hands.

7. Empty hands reveal our need. When we stretch out empty hands to another, we let them know that we too are needy, we too do not have it all. We too are beggars of grace and good things.

8. Empty hands don't make the ability to work a prerequisite. Sometimes while we mean for our full hands to be a gift, we don't realize that we are saying to those to whom we offer them, if you want to walk with me, you must be able and willing to help me accomplish my goals. But what if physical, mental, spiritual health make that person unable to do so? Then we have laid a road block where we meant to build a bridge.

9. Empty hands can open doors and hold them while others walk through. Enough said.

10. Empty hands look like Jesus. Extended in blessing. Offering an embrace. Calming the seas. Stretched out on the cross. Empty-handed but with so much to offer.

My life in missions has taught me that is okay to approach thing empty-handed. That often it leads to the very best relatioships and the deepest places. Lately, I've learned to bring that to my own search for community as well. And I am so the better for it. So, friend, lay your burden down today and offer your empty hands to someone. And if you headed out on mission soon, consider what might happen if you did so empty-handed. Share your story insead of your stuff. Stretch out and offer yourself, empty and open. I promise, good things await.

Linking up at The Grove at Velvet Ashes

and Five Minute Friday: Hands

AND

(in)courage!

The Mommy Question I'm Not Asking Myself Any More

I have had a lot of conversations with some long-time mom friends lately about the challenges we are facing as we move beyond the phase of the hazy little people years and into the very different but not less challenging years of having mostly middle-sized or narly full-size people in our homes. As I have thought about this phase, one thing I have noticed about myself is that a lot of things I once put a lot of priority are on are just not that important any more. Things I once spent a lot of time trying to get just right haven't turned out to be the key things to raising healthy kids with whom I have a healthy relationship. I am shifting a bit in the way  think about raising kids in general, in homeschooling and in passing on our Catholic faith to our kids.

There are some questions I used to stress and pore over that I now think were either the wrong questions to ask or that I was asking them seeking the wrong answer. I'm trying to move away from placing so much emphasis on these thoughts and replacing them with questions that seem to address the real needs of bigger people trying to navigate a bigger world.

Am I being a good example to my kids?

It's not that I've stopped trying to be a good example to my kids. It's that what I used to think that meant is changing a lot as my kids get older. I used to think being a good example meant showing my kids what it looked to pursue holiness. And by that I meant that I was kind and nice and gentle and didn't say curse words out loud when people cut me off in traffic or I dropped a heavy object on my feet. It meant I didn't let them see me fight with their dad or get mad at other people. It meant I always looked happy to go to church, didn't get distracted in Mass and never let them see me wasting time on the computer or my own pursuits. A good example equalled some imaginary perfect mom that my kids have never and will never have. Because of that, I spent an awful lot of time beating myself up and feeling like a bad mom.

I haven't given up on trying to be a good example to my kids. But my definition of what that means has changed quite a bit. I know that most of all my kids need me to be myself and be okay with who I am. And the truth is, I am not a naturally gentle person. Thoughtful, kind? Yes. Gentle, not so much. And I curse. And dance. And sometimes find getting ready for church to be my Waterloo. And get annoyed in church and I get distracted in Mass and sometimes it's too darn hard to pay attention in Spanish any more so I zone out. And their dad and me? We are passionate and verbal. And we have lots of heated discussions. And as an adult human person with her own needs and dreams and desires, I have things I enjoy pursuing outside of these kids. Some of them involve being on the computer. And I'm learning that none of that makes me wholly a good example or a bad mom. (Okay, I should probably curse way less. I admit it.) Because they are essentially the wrong questions to ask. Instead, when I think about being a good example to my boys, I am asking myself these things instead:

• Am I letting my kids see me maintain relationships? Do my kids know what it takes to stay connected to someone even as life transitions to a new phase? Do they see me articulate my needs and feelings to others? Do they see me respond to the needs of my friends? Do they see me disagree with people, get angry. and work through the mess? Do they see me get it wrong and apologize? Have they seen me work my way through the pain of losing a friend?
• Insert with their dad in the place of friends above. Add do they know what the sacrament of marriage means to me and their dad? Do they know that quitting is not an option for us? Do they see us share affection in front of them often? Do they see us work together as a team often? Do they see us pull away from them to spend time together often? Do they see me set aside my own pursuits when the needs or desires of their dad take priority?
• Do my kids see me doing the same with them? Connecting, finding joy, saying yes as often as I can to their messes and mess-ups and cray chaos? Do I apologize AND confess my sin to them when I have wronged them? Do I make reparation in some healthy way? Do they see me set aside all other things for them, collectively and individually, when duty or just the stuff of life demands it? And sometimes when it doesn't but I just want them to know that they are special and they are loved fiercely.
• Do my kids see me pursuing things I enjoy? Seizing opportunities to educate myself further, use my gifts, take on new challenges, step out of my comfort zone? Do my kids know that I have dreams and passions of my own?Could they identify them? 
• And do they see me living out my relationship with God? Do they see me seeking out God throughout the day? Do they see me working my through spiritual struggles? Giving real, authentic thanks in all things? Expressing fears and doubts and seeking answers? Confessing my sins, being honest about my falls and getting up and starting over again?
• Am I showing my kids what it looks like to live as sinner who is redeemed by Christ? As a Catholic who relies on the grace of the sacraments? As human who loves imperfectly but keeps trying?

Now, I realize that's an awful lot of questions to replace just one. But I think that's the heart and the hard of this phase in life. The simple, surface question and answer will not serve me well with kids who see through the facade. I have to dig deep, ask big, hard questions and live the answers authentically in front of these growing people. If I had to, however, take all that stuff up there and create one new question for myself, I think this would sum it up:

Am I living a life in which my kids see me try to love God with all my heart, mind and soul and love my neighbor as myself? And do they know that I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am loved and redeemed no matter how many time I get that right or wrong? 

P.S. I'll try to curse less too.

When Word Trends Collide

I am so happy to be posting over One Word 365 today. If you don't know what this community is all about, take a look here. Want to know more about my journey with my one word in 2014, check out the KNOWN tag.

Two popular words I see floating around blogging communities a lot this year are “authentic” and “intentional”. Authenticity is lauded in comments sections in every corner of the internets. From admitting to having days as a mother that you can’t wait until bedtime to revealing your struggles with anxiety and depression to breaking the silence that you don’t know how to cook pasta, people rise up and cheer you on for being so authentic.

Likewise, there are so many advisors and pundits out there in the blogosphere telling us all to slow down and think about how we are living, parenting, eating, praying, loving. To be intentional about what we do and why we do it in every realm of life imaginable.

I like these two words. I really do. I like how they sound and I like what they mean. I try to live them. But I find that more often than not, either my authenticity ends up bulldozing right over my intentionality or my intentionality makes me feel less than authentic....Read the rest here.

Ever Before Our Eyes: Five Social Media Follows For Those Fighting Slavery

Credit The Exodus Road

Trafficking. Commercial sexual exploitation. Modern day slavery. However you choose to label it, I think we can all agree that the atrocity of human beings bought and sold for the satisfaction of others is a great evil. And the fact that it exists in a day and age with adequate social and legal systems to stamp it out completely is unfathomable.

It is easy for us to shake our heads in pity over the statistic of between 10 and 30 million people trapped in the conditions of slavery today. Easy for us to voice that something must be done to stop the atrocity. But it is more difficult to know what to do. Read the rest at Catholicmom.com

On Co-laboring and Having a Soft Place to Land

This Scripture was the first reading read at our wedding almost seventeen years ago. Its last line is engraved inside our rings. I fell in love with its imagery and the truth I perceived in it the first time I heard it. And I have learned just how true it is in the seventeen years I have endeavored to live it, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing miserably.

Ecclesiastes 4: 9-12: Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

And I love the connotations in this version from The Message:

It’s better to have a partner than go it alone.Share the work, share the wealth.And if one falls down, the other helps,But if there’s no one to help, tough!11 Two in a bed warm each other.Alone, you shiver all night.12 By yourself you’re unprotected.With a friend you can face the worst.Can you round up a third?A three-stranded rope isn’t easily snapped.

The lovely ladies at Velvet Ashes have been talking about marriage this week. And they have had some really good stuff to say that has had me thinking. Actually, I've been thinking a lot ever since I read Amber and Seth Haines' letters on co-laboring a couple of weeks ago. This business of making one life out of two is interesting stuff, no? The way we all go about it differently, the way there is really no formula for making it work other than making it work, the way it is so hard and yet so beautiful at the same time. Its seasons and transitions and ups and downs all shaping us into better versions of ourselves if we let them.

In my ponderings, I have come to see a pattern that emerges in my married life. It is a rotation that marks our days and seasons as either co-laboring or being the soft place to land. In our life of parenting, ministry and work, I find that we have seasons where we as a couple have a shared goal and purpose and we dedicate ourselves fully to making it happen, dancing the dance of how to work together well and leverage our collective strengths against our collective faults. They are intense, focused seasons geared toward a particular goal. Sometimes they last months, and sometimes they are days. It might be the month of planning and execution we just had to coordinate a full scale medical mission or it might be a day when we commit ourselves to getting the yard raked. Or it might be a week where we huddle and commit ourselves together to the hard work of grieving or forgiving or repenting. Surely, the whole of marriage and family life is one long season of co-laboring to get to heaven.

On the Indian Ocean in Tanzania in March

These times where we co-labor, sometimes they come easily. We shift responsibilities seamlessly, we each seem to understand our part and shoulder it well, and we can see the reward for our labor right there in our reach, so we work with energy and strength.

Other times, shared work is not as simple. We hit fits and starts, not able to figure out who is pulling from the front and who is pushing from the back, ramming into obstacles and stubbing toes on rocky paths. We co-labor through sweat and frustration and sore backs and scraped arms and lots of slip ups. Words fly that would have been better left unsaid and unthought. The shared reward seems far away and vague and not all that worth it. And yet, somehow, in the economy of grace, we keep working. And in the end, I have found that the greatest reward of this kind of co-laboring is who become in the process. Not who we are in the moment, mercy, no, but who we become when fight on until the end, snap open a cold beer, celebrate with a high five, put our feet up and apologize for our behavior in the midst.

After a season of co-laboring, I find we often hit another stride, a routine where we grant each other space, where one flies the coop for a while and the other stays back to guard the nest. Each of us finding rest and liberation in our solitary pursuits or cocooning into ourselves to process and rest. Then, we become for each other a soft place to land. 

Oh how I need soft places in my life. I am not a naturally soft person. I am an achiever, a doer. I prize competency and strength. I am openly vulnerable only insofar as it shows that I have triumphed, that I have overcome, that I have it together. It is easier for me to lay my mess out there to a crowd than to look one man in the eyes and say that I need him. But I must. Because that place, where I admit that I am not capable not competent nor able to go it alone, that is the place where God meets me. In my deepest fears lay my deepest needs. And God knows the way to meet them if only I will lay them before Him. And the man he has given me to keep warm with.

And when this man curls into me and just needs me to be his safe place? It takes my breath away. It brings me to my knees. And honestly, it scares me to death. Because who I am? Really who am I to be worthy of that responsibility? That kind of trust? And it is a holy fear, the way my voice cracks and my hands tremble in those moments. Because in knowing that he knows my unworthiness and keeps coming back to me anyway, keeps trusting that I will soften to his need and cup his sacred needs in holy hands, I hear the call to become. To become the one who is worthy, who is faithful, who deserves to be trusted.





That, friends, is holy ground.

And I am blessed beyond measure to get to walk it every day. To see its physical and spiritual fruit. To experience its physical representation in satisfying embrace. To weave a cord with the Master Weaver that in its beauty and brokenness will not be easily broken.

Join us at the Grove at Velvet Ashes for more.

When Women Reach Out

I cannot tell you how many times over the last few years that we have been living overseas that I have found myself battling back the gathering clouds of loneliness. Perhaps a stretch of days or weeks when I just felt so isolated from family or friends or maybe even just a moment in the day when an idea popped into my head and I wanted to throw it out to someone and it wasn't possible. It can be hard this part of living as a missionary.

On the other hand, I also cannot possibly begin to count all the ways I have been blessed by women who have reached out beyond all the challenges of a friendship with someone with a sketchy Skype connection, and chaotic life and ride the emotional roller coaster of this journey with me. Some of them have shown up as strangers and left as friends. Some walked into a conference with me and now walk through life with me. Some are old friends that have had to figure out a new plan for maintaining closeness in this phase of life.

We've had to work through stuff. I've gotten it wrong more than a couple of times. But some very beautiful life-giving relationships have been born in these years and I count them among my greatest blessings.

I know social media and the blog world have their flaws, but for me, they have been a sanity saver. I have met and also maintained relationships with some amazing women that could have only been possible through their help. One of the ways I have found sisterhood and community online is through the the (in)courage community groups.

They are small groups of women connecting over something that draws them together. And oh the connections I have made! If you are looking to dig into relationships and find a safe place to reach out to other women, I strongly encourage you to check out this list of groups for the spring session and join one. Registration starts today and goes all week. If you happen to be a fellow missionary or someone working in or interested in global care, I will be co-leading a group just to encourage you! You can join us here!

Today, in the aftermath of a full scale medical mission that now looks like it blew up in my kitchen, and a house full of kids with scratchy throats and stuffy noses, I would like nothing more than to sit down with a friend over a warm cup of joe and make it all make sense. Won't you join me at our virtual kitchen table? I'll be waiting with warm Costa Rican coffee. Now that's an offer I know you can't refuse.