Chapters

Today is a bittersweet one for our family.  A new chapter looms before my wife and I.  For me, it will involve a return to two familiar places—graduate school to finish my Master’s degree and the pastorate.  For my wife, continued growth—including college—in her varied artistic pursuits.

This new chapter also involves a move about 90 miles south of our home in the historic Thousand Islands region of northern New York.  And so, fittingly, we’ve worked very hard this summer and today put our house on the market.

It is a poignant and difficult thing.  Our girls grew up in this home which we bought right after the Twin Towers fell in New York City.  It is a place stained with memories both joyful and sorrowful.  As we returned home from town this evening, we were met with the tearful embrace of our eldest daughter as she realized our home will soon become home to another family.  Sigh.

It is a solid old Victorian farm house in a small country hamlet.  It was built in 1914, the year the Great War commenced.  One learns that it is the people and the love they share that make a house a home.  Ours is no exception.

We would appreciate your prayers for us as we launch into this next phase of our lives.  Prayers for the sale of the house.  Prayers for effectiveness and growth as we journey on to new vistas, new experiences, and new friends.  Prayers for the emotional ebb and flow that accompanies such a big step.

We are excited for these new “lines in the book of our lives” (apologies to Dan Fogelberg) that are, even now, being written.

And yet….bittersweet.

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Love: The Less Traveled Road

“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

–M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

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Marry Well (I Was Blessed To)

The title for this post is not original.  It’s from Bill Hybels’ outstanding book Making Life Work.  Were someone to ask of me advice about what it takes to have a happy life, one of the first things I’d tell them is this: Marry well.  You’ve no idea the wonder and joy that follows on such a decision.  Nor the incredible sorrow that follows when you marry poorly.

(Sweetheart, if he’s a bum now, he’ll probably be a bum long after you marry him.  Dude, if she’s a diva now, chances are diva will grow into a monster.  Avoid.  Like the plague.)

I’ve made plenty of mistakes in life.  Most of the unhappiness I’ve ever experienced was a product of my own skill at doing stupid things.  But one thing I did, with God’s help and goodness, was marry well.

When writing about home and marriage years ago, Michael Card penned the memorable line “that half of your heart that somebody else treasures, the one who’s your forever friend.”  The song aptly titled “Home.”

Boy, that sums it up nicely.

When choosing someone to spend your life with, there are few things more comforting than knowing the one who cares about you at your best  and worst.  Who picks you up and puts you back together again when life crushes you.  Who is there in the dark with words of encouragement and sunshine.  And forgiveness.

In today’s sexually-charged culture, it seems that the friendship factor in choosing one’s spouse is given short shrift.  Those who’ve been married for years will tell you that feelings and romance can ebb and flow.  Eros is capricious if nothing else.  But being married to your soul mate, your best friend can carry you through things nothing else can.

Here’s to the one I love and will grow old with.  The one I dream and pal around with.  The one I’d rather be with more than any other person on Earth.

Kath….

Recovering Your Heart

It’s your thirtieth birthday.  You have a successful career as a marketing executive in the San Francisco Bay area.  You wake up strangely unexcited.  You have lunch with your wife whom you adore.  Later, you and your wife gather with friends in a local bar for dinner and drinks, in celebration of your big day.

The evening wears on and your wife decides to go home and turn in.  You elect to stay with your friends.  As you mingle, an attractive woman begins making overtures, coming on to you.  Her message is clear.

What do you do?

You excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, located towards the back of the bar.  You find a rear exit and leave.  Without any goodbyes.  You walk home, to the house occupied by the wife you adore, now sleeping.

Something needs to be worked out of you.  Thirty is a watershed.  You should be happy but aren’t.  You need to clear your head.

What do you do?

You strip down to your skivvies and t-shirt, find an old pair of running shoes in the garage and put them on.  You let your wife sleep.  Clad only in your underwear, shirt, socks and sneakers, you begin running.

You haven’t run in fifteen years.  You gave it up when an arrogant track and field coach laughed at you.  You were, after all, a cross-country guy who ran with heart and had served another coach with heart.  But he retired.

You run thirty miles without stopping except to grab burritos and a Coke and press on.  People think you’re crazy.  And you probably are.

That night is a rebirth for you.

That’s what you do if you’re Dean Karnazes.

Read his book Ultramarathon Man: Confessions Of An All-Night Runner.  The whole story and much more is there.  You won’t regret it.  You may even begin to think about what really matters in life.  It ain’t prestige, position or the other trappings of Yuppiedom.

Dean got his heart back that night and hasn’t stopped running.  That was almost twenty years ago.

What will it take to get your heart back?

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The Importance of Presence

“Presence,” writes Eugene Peterson, “is a delicious word.”

And how.

Time, circumstance and, most of all, God’s providence have permitted me to spend a few days with the three most beautiful women on Earth.

We’ve all been quite involved in pursuing our respective callings and destinies over the past nine months.  These pursuits have taken one of our daughters to Scotland, Turkey and Cambodia.  It has taken our other daughter to the vast and picturesque Flint Hills of central Kansas.  Their mother and I hold down the homestead in northern New York.

It is a leisurely Sunday that permits me to write this appreciation.  The girls, all three of them, are at the movies.  Somehow, the unearthly hotness of Zac Efron was not enough to persuade me to join them as they watch The Lucky Ones.

I’ll survive, I think.  I’ll bide my time appreciating them.  They’re marvelous ladies.  I am a blessed guy.

Time passes more quickly than most of us imagine.  While you have your tribe in your sights, enjoy and savor their nearness.

It is one of the supreme gifts of God.

Carpe diem.

 

Lighten Up!

The best advice I ever received came from an eighty-four year old spitfire named Helen Easterly.  We worked together in the summer of 1987 in northern Ontario near Hudson Bay.  We happened to be part of a team of missionaries bringing the Gospel to a remote region amongst the Cree people.

Grandma Easterly—as she became known to me after she “adopted” me—had terminal cancer at the time.  Yet, she had more energy than gals sixty years her junior as she worked amongst the Cree children.  She had lived an adventurous life ministering all over the world with lots of remarkable ministries.  She was vibrant, humorous and kinetic as she stared death in the face.

Some months later, I was about to get married.  Grandma Easterly sent Kath and I a very nice card with this advice:

“Don’t take yourselves too seriously.  Learn to laugh at yourselves.”

I’ve many besetting sins.  One of them is I tend to be way too serious.  (Kath doesn’t have this problem.) Those who know me well are no doubt chuckling, Wow Christian, you’re just now figuring that out?

Easy now.  Some of us are slow.

And thick.

So I thought I’d pass on a few tips to help my friends who trip over the same banana peel:

• Listen to jazz.  Really.  Leonard Bernstein once said, “Jazz is real play.”  When I listen to jazz, I chill out. Always. Music affects the mood more than you can imagine.
• Realize that you alone can’t fix the world.  You’re one in about seven billion inhabitants on this planet.  Do what you can where you can and then let it be.  If everybody just did a little in their own orbits, things would be a lot better in the world.
• Exercise.  Free and legal high.  Endorphins.  You will feel better.  Trust me on this.
• Watch films with Robin Williams in it.  For tougher cases, break out the Three Stooges.
• Read Dilbert.  Just do it.
• Smile.  It’s proven that deliberately smiling makes you feel better, not just those who look at your mug.

Now lighten up!

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Treat Her Right

Syndicated talk show host Hugh Hewitt has made the important point that success is not a zero-sum enterprise.  In context he discusses the idea that in order to move up and succeed in one’s career, one has to think win/win.  An example of a zero-sum outcome is best seen in a sporting contest—in order for one team to win, the other team has to lose.

In career mobility this means that you are best equipped to succeed by helping others do the same.  You don’t step all over people to get ahead but rather lift them up as you climb.

Today we discussed this concept in our weekly leadership training gathering in my home.  I meet once a week with younger men and we discuss leadership, integrity and the how-to of making a hall of fame life during our sojourn here in our world.

One area of life that is important to avoid zero-sum thinking is the way in which we men relate to our women.  A man who has a wife at home with little children and more on the way needs to be attentive to her need for understanding, tenderness, and interaction.  Adult interaction.  “Can we please talk? I’ve been home with kids all day.”

It is part of our Judeo-Christian heritage that we see each human being—man, woman and child—as creatures of infinite value and importance demanding the respect a creature made in the image of God is entitled to.  Corollary to that is women are not chattel.  We don’t own them though we’re married to them.  Some of the most pathetic individuals on this planet are men who dominate and demean women in the name of God.  They are insecure and losing every time.  Don’t be one of them.

Treat her right, as the Lenny LeBlanc song made famous by Sawyer Brown says.  Here are some very practical investment tips that have the potential to yield enormous dividends as you and your lady journey through life together:

• Get her out of the house regularly, even if you’re tired and have put in a long day at work.  And especially if she does not work outside the home.  She needs a change of scenery to keep drudgery at an arm’s length.  Her time with you on dates and out with her friends is oxygen to her.
• Talk with her.  One book recently had the provocative title Men Are Clams And Women Are Crowbars.  Humorous but it highlights our differences and the need to appreciate what it takes to make life full for both of us.  Don’t diminish her with laconic answers.  This may take effort, but open up.  Give details.  It may not be important to you but it is to her.  Just do it.
• Help her cultivate her talents and skills other than being a wife and mother. She’s so much more than that.  Husbandry is an agricultural term.  It is the craft of nurturing plants to growth.  Do this especially while you are both young.  If she’s inclined to business or furthering her education, do whatever you can to help her along those paths.  Don’t wait until the empty nest is upon you and years of frustration and unrealized pursuits and dreams leak their toxin all over your marriage.  You’ll be much happier if you cultivate her now, I promise you.
• Only have eyes for her.  Avoid the empty thrills of skirt-chasing and p*rn.  Besides simply being wrong, these are a setup for boredom because they are so out of touch with reality and a dead-end.  They are cancer to a marriage.  Being fully involved in this marvelous woman with whom you’ve made vows is far more adventurous than the novelty of the forbidden fruit.

You have a garden.  Now go and cultivate it.  The fruit will amaze you.