Ode to Motherhood

 I love being a mother.
It is my pride,
My point in the universe.
The babies grown up to be
Men and women
Without me.
The baby given away,
The babies died a-borning
Grown up without me
Or gone ahead without me.
They have found their life in me
And gone on.
Whether before birth,
At birth,
Or in grown-up-hood,
They don't need me anymore;
And I am left behind
To wonder
What to do next.
But they have made me
More than I have made them.
Nothing lit up death
More than baby-life.
Nothing brought me lower
Than being scolded by my children.
The paradox of utter self-absorption in pregnancy
To give birth
And then
Utter self-sacrifice in growing up babies
Throws me back,
Stunned.
Being a mother
Has made me
What I am
Without children.

Here I Am to Worship

This summer, I climbed up the tallest "M" in the world built by the School of Mines at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville. The School of mines is gone, morphed into the Engineering School which still comes out to tidy up the "M" every fall. I sat on the crown of the hill above it and saw no sign of the "M" from my lawn chair. I came here to worship God because the "M" is on the Platteville Mound, the tallest hill rising from the midst of the surrounding gently rolling farmland. If it were clear, I could see across the Mississippi River to Iowa. I came because my daughter Sarah, who died a year ago, would have loved it. She would have looked out across the kind valley to the soft hills lost in the haze, listened to the wind in the few trees and bushes on the mound and the sound of blackbirds, felt the cool, humid air, and she would have called God great.

How she loved to worship God! She danced for joy in the Lord, and told stories to children, and played the flute at lunch for the residents in the nursing home she worked at and strove to serve and honor her husband as the church is supposed to honor Christ, and she delighted--delighted--in nature as showing His glory. We know from her journals that she wanted to please God in all she did because He is worthy. 

These days, when we talk about worship, we equate it with the music portion of a Christian service, as if prayer and teaching and testimonies are not worship. I don't know when or why that happened in American history. However, singing is one area of a worship service where emotions are acceptable and it now carries the spiritual burden for the whole hour. 

There is a reason for that. As a music education major in college, I learned the value of music in the lives of human beings. It combines the intellectual, physical, and emotional aspects of every performer, no matter how inept. Since the spirit is defined as the mind, will, and emotions, we can legitimately claim that music touches the soul and that is a primary reason that worship is still found in the music of churches, not matter how otherwise spiritually dead they may be.

What is worship? Most people are surprised to find that in not one single verse of the Bible are worship and singing put together--except when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego would NOT bow down before the giant statue of Nebuchadnezzar when "all kinds of music" played! All possible forms of the word "worship" in the King James Bible number one hundred ninety-six, and yet no one is singing; so what does "worship" mean?

Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary says our word "worship" comes from the Saxon "wyrth-scype"--worth-ship. "Chiefly and eminently, the act of paying divine honors to the Supreme Being; or reverence and homage paid to him in religious exercises, consisting in adoration, confession, prayer, thanksgiving and the like."

Adoration, confession, prayer, and thanksgiving can all be done with music, but there is no requirement that they be. Praise is another matter.

Of the three hundred two references to praise in the Bible one hundred seventy-nine of them are found in Psalms alone. Psalms is, of course, a hymnbook. This doesn't mean these are the only places where praise is associated with singing, but you get the point. While we as modern Christians read the Psalms as Scripture or as personal prayer, they were originally meant to be sung.

When we talk about Psalms, there are two sides to our approach to them: one is as prayer and the other is as song. In "Life Together", Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that as prayer, the Psalms are really only completely absorbable if we understand Christ to be the person praying. Not all of the Psalms are pertinent to us. However, we are part of the body of Christ when we believe and on that account we can pray or sing the Psalms with Christ or for a brother in need. Musically, singing together centers all the singers' minds on one thing, uniting our prayers so that each one's entire spirit (mind, will, and emotions) are aligned with his neighbor's. Jesus said "If two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven" (Matt. 18:19); so singing together intensifies our prayers--we are agreeing in prayer with all our souls.

Is there an order to worship? Any specific requirements? In both Old and New Testaments, we are commanded to sing and the Old Testament goes so far as to say the the earth will sing, too. Paul does say in I Corinthians 14:40 that services should be carried on decently and in order, everyone taking turns and that "God is not the author of confusion, but of peace" (I Cor. 4:33). Aside from that, the last thing that Jesus did with his disciples at the Last Supper, His last time sitting down with them for organized teaching, was to sing a hymn (Matt. 26:30).

Let's get back to the idea of worship. How does the Biblical or Saxon idea of "worth-ship" connect us to praise and singing? 

I began singing in children's choir, much to my surprise when the pastor's wife dragged me there, when I was ten years old. By eleven, I had played the flute with the adult choir, one of the top five in the city of Chicago broadcast over the radio every Sunday. That led to singing in youth choir, playing in bell choir, leading Sunday school music, leading singles group worship with five chords I remembered from ten weeks of guitar class in college. I have participated in crusade festival choirs with two hundred people, led children's music with a guitar, led Sunday worship with a piano and organ, brass or a worship band, or no instruments at all. 

All of these musical arrangements were in the service of bringing praise to God, but what else did they have in common? Only one thing: a willingness to serve because God is worthy. Participants might be as young as three or as old as eighty-five or more. Sometimes, it was electrified, sometimes not; but above all, people were willing to serve because God was worthy of our praise. We didn't have to have degrees in music or even ever had a lesson. We just had to be willing to serve and willing to be used, to be God's instruments.

In I Chronicles 25, David was organizing his musicians. He chose three men and their children, both male and female, to serve in two week stints over the course of a year to play music in the temple. The three men, all of whom wrote Psalms, were Asaph, Jeduthun, and Heman; but listen to how they are described.

Asaph "prophesied according to the order of the king" v. 2.

Jeduthun "prophesied with a harp to give thanks and to praise the Lord" v. 3

Heman was "the king's seer in the words of God, to exalt his horn" v. 5.

Their service with instruments and music was called prophesying (v.1). Prophets brought a message from the Lord. They weren't simply workmen skilled in the use of musical instruments and poetry, but prophets bringing God closer to man and man closer to God. These were no court musicians; they were ministers of God.

They also taught their children all the songs of the Lord (v. 7), which I'm guessing were the Psalms they were writing, and to play on cymbals, stringed instruments and harps. When they divided responsibilities, they were put in groups of twelve and the Bible says they all served, "the small as well as the great, the teacher with the student" (v. 8). No auditions for David!

We lead singing at church because of the ministry we are called to, not because we are professionals or passionate for it, but because God is worthy. He is worthy of our humiliation when we don't do well and our glory when we do. We are not playing or singing for a congregation, but for an audience of One. We lead the congregation to meet with God, to bless them so that God will be blessed and it doesn't matter if the congregation or even one person in the congregation thinks we did well or poorly; our service was as a guide for people to the presence of God, prophesying with voice and instruments, worshiping God in spirit and in truth. 

So again, what is worship? In the Bible, when people worshiped, they bowed down before the object of their worship. In America, we don't do that in public and rarely in private; but we can bow down in our hearts and minds before the Lord to acknowledge His worthiness; and when someone asks you to sing or play, or run the media, or if you are moved to share a song that has touched you and shown you a great truth about God don't hesitate to volunteer. It is a tremendous honor and a means of great humility and a gift to the God of the universe.

"Life in the Trenches" is for Everybody

Being a homeschool parent isn't just about teaching reading and math; it's about life and who we are as parents and who our children are becoming. Even if you are not homeschooling, do not have kids, and are not even married, this book is about applying the Bible to every area of your life.

 My book, Life in the Trenches

Old-Fashioned Lessons That Never Go Out of Style: Cursive

 Who writes in cursive, anymore? Mostly people over the age of thirty-five. Why is it important? Is it important?

I mentioned to our local postmaster once that I homeschooled and he looked at me very sternly and asked, "You're teaching them cursive, aren't you?" Taken aback, I said, "Yessir!" It wasn't until I left the post office that I realized that you can't work for the post office if you can't read cursive! There are too many people who still use it and too many young people who can't deliver a letter!

But why should we teach cursive to our children? In my book Life in the Trenches, I address the development of the right and left sides of the brain. As I have said in previous "Old-Fashioned Lessons", the more you stretch your brain, the more it can do. The more you use both sides of your brain, the faster it can work because you have laid pathways across the divide between them. Cursive does this astoundingly.

We usually think of writing as being on the left side of the brain, the verbal side. However, the left brain doesn't just do words; it does details, it does trees. The right brain does forests, global thinking, and spatial skills. How does cursive work? It writes words, spelling them out letter by letter, which are left brain skills; but it forms them spatially, with the pen changing direction, more drawing the word than writing it, and it forms the entire word, not letter. letter. letter. And don't get me going on crossing your T's and dotting your I's!

Nothing works like cursive to train the brain every day to work holistically, to stretch the ability of the brain to jump from one side to the other. While it is a strain to learn, it actually changes the brain in a way that is more effective than any other everyday activity.

Why Does Grandma Have to Die?

 Different families have different cultures around death. My experience was very sterile: grandparents go into nursing homes or hospitals, maybe you get to visit them before they pass, maybe not (I was in Russia when my grandfather died), then you see them at the funeral home looking--not quite themselves. It's no criticism of my parents. Our family culture was ensuring privacy and dignity and letting the professionals take care of the unseemly stuff.

My children are having a different experience. Steve's mom has been living with us for four years and over that period of time my children have seen her less and less capable to the point where Steve was holding her up so my daughters could change her pants because she couldn't stand. She is expected to go home any hour now.

Yesterday, the hospice nurse told us that if we turned off the extra oxygen, she would be gone in ten minutes. Steve wanted his brother to get there, so the oxygen concentrator was still going strong all afternoon. We called our kids and by mid-afternoon all the kids except the college student were there along with our grandchildren. Grandma was in the room off the kitchen and kids were running up and downstairs playing and grownups were talking and making dinner and running errands and making phone calls to people in transit--all because Grandma was dying in the next room. 

My granddaughters, four and close to two, got to play with Grandma last summer. When the little girls came into her room, she perked up and poked at them and laughed with them. She did call my daughter who assisted her the most last summer by her great-granddaughter's name, but everyone was okay with that; we got it. When the four-year-old was told that Grandma was dying, she insisted, "I have to see Grandma! I need to ask her why she has to die."

Why does she have to die? Why did Jesus weep at Lazarus's grave? He knew He could raise him from the dead; He knew He was going to. Why did He weep? He wept because "the wages of sin is death." (Romans 6:23) Sin made us have to die; and the Lord of Life--"I am the way, the truth, and the life"--knew that death was wrong; that without sin in the world, Lazarus would never have to die, no one would ever have to die, and that included Him. There may be such a thing as a good death as the hospice nurse told us, but we were not made to die; we were meant to live forever in a perfect world.

My children, my grandchildren, and Steve and I, as well, are getting to see what dying means. We are having a change in our family culture: from home birth we have progressed to home death. Our older children got to see their younger siblings being born; our younger children got to see their grandmother die. Along the way, they learned that birth and death are not pretty or sterile; but they are both common to us all, hardships that we all go through. I hope they learn from these experiences that God can help them through every hard thing.

The Family: A Mini Body of Christ

 I was just sick for a month. It was probably the icky-c. Suffice it to say, I was down for the count. Not eating, not working, not thinking, sleeping six hours during the day. However, I had seven people in the household and they still needed to be managed. How was I going to do it? The answer: I didn't.

The Bible says in I Corinthians 12 that the church is the body of Christ, made up of a whole bunch of parts that all need each other to function. Each part does its part to take care of parts that need it and weak parts are just as necessary as strong parts. In these past weeks, I have seen how the Christian family can be a mini body of Christ. 

In Ephesians, the Bible says we are all to submit to one another. Wives are to submit to husbands as the church submits to Christ; husbands submit to wives by loving them to the point of death as Christ did for the church; children submit to their parents by obeying their parents in the Lord.

If we parents are in the Lord, what are we teaching our children? Of course, there are the verses in Deuteronomy 6:6-9 about teaching your children about the word of God at every moment of the day. In addition, having sifted through all the verses in Proverbs, I have found that we are to teach our children to 1)respect authority, and 2)work.

Our little body of Christ submitted to each other over these past weeks. I listened when my husband told me to go lie down. He did chores he never does--laundry and cooking dinner. The kids didn't complain about their regular kitchen chores and went the extra mile. The week I couldn't lead music in church, my twelve-year-old son led with the guitar and his sister home from her internship led singing.

What really warmed me and tore me apart in humility was the kids' spiritual leading. You may have heard of icky-c brain; I got it. I couldn't think. I would wake and pray and the only thing I could say was, "Jesus!" Speaking has been exhausting. Dad was still leading prayers in the evening, but in the morning, the kids took turn reading the Bible, leading our scripture memory and everyone prayed, a change from our practice of one child praying a day. They prayed when I couldn't. I wanted to, but I couldn't and all of them praying filled up my prayer cup when I couldn't pray for myself. 

For you moms and dads out there, this is what you see after twenty-nine years of teaching your children diligently. I was fortunate to see the fruit vividly. I didn't do it all; their dad told me what he wanted and helped when he was there; grandmas and grandpas put in their oar when we needed it; but above all, we filled our family up with the Bible so they knew what God wanted from us all and what He would give us: our own little segment of the body of Christ.

The Beast of Grief: Losing a Child

After over a year of not writing, I knew I had to write about Sarah. I talked the article through in my head and it went fine, but when I tried to write, it just wouldn't come. It was cold, awkward, disjointed. 

By the by, I have been having a hard time praying recently. Just really dry prayers. Then two nights ago, I finally just prayed--I lay on my stomach and prayed. I usually have just too many words going on in my head; I read other people's words with a constant ear for what is true and usable in my own work; I plan talks or articles. Too many words. 

Last night, I was going to try to get back to my clugey article on child loss after my church meeting. As I drove home, I suddenly didn't want to try to describe it--I wasn't having any success, anyway. I just thought, "Sarah!" And I suddenly began to moan. I moaned and sobbed with every movement of my breath in and out, unceasing sound. I had to keep my eyes open because I was driving seventy miles per hour, but for the first time, I cried with no words. 

I use words as my sword and shield and they have been the means of great healing. I truly believe--and know--that naming something takes away its power. But it has also buffered me from my emotions. After Steve got off the phone with the Tennessee state trooper who told him Sarah's car had run into the back of a parked truck on the interstate, Steve made a sound that I have never heard from him before or since, a sound of wordless, animal agony. I did that all the way home last night. When I stopped occasionally, I would think of words. I would get angry--just a flash--at their coldness and insufficiency--and the animal came back.

When I was in high school, we had a cabin in Indiana. On the first night of a visit, I went into my room to get my pajamas out of my drawer and a rain of little thumps hit my ear. I looked in the drawer and saw four little pink lumps, baby mice whose mother had made a nest in my pajamas. After running shrieking to my mom, she calmly suggested I dump the drawer outside, which I did. I was creeped out, but finally went to bed. As I lay there trying to fall asleep, I heard something I will never forget: the mother mouse crying for her babies. I killed them and she mourned. She just squeaked and cried for hours. A mouse in a mousetrap is a horror; but this one mother mouse was grieving and I felt with her. 

In all my losses of my children, words were a tool of healing and I've been grateful for them. When I gave up my daughter for adoption, I told the story to anyone who would listen for years and it was not until I wrote a memoir of it thirty-five years later that I really felt I had recovered. When I had my first miscarriage after baby #8, I spent an entire day writing letters to all my other children to work through the loss of that dream child. For a year-and-a-quarter, I have been talking and crying with dozens of people, including my husband and children who love her just as I do. But words really cannot express that raw, unnamable pain and for the first time time I resist them for how they buffer that emotion, trying to make it tidy and contained with this pain that is ragged and boundary-less, able to tear a hole in the sky--for what? For what? To reach her? I don't want to reach her. I have wanted to before. It just doesn't feel right to feel this way and want to reach into heaven to bring her back because I hurt when I know she's so happy there--and I do know this. I had a vision of her in heaven looking new and fresh, even though she was only twenty-two when she died. I don't want to reach her or bring her back; I just want to be allowed to feel this great dim mass of grief and the only place I could was alone driving down a dark highway without even the stars and moon looking on, just the beast of grief. I could see how alluring it might be to live with him, to feel so very much, a way of feeling for her, even if I can't feel her. I can't live there though. I have other children. How would that make them feel?

The beast will not overcome me; he will not win and rule my life. The words have come back and I can name him and contain him. He is there and I had to face him, to acknowledge him. I wanted to experience him to indulge myself. I needed to do that to recognize that he is there, that he could win if I let him. He will live with me for the rest of my life; I've seen him in the eyes of a woman who lost her first son to SIDS and all three of her next sons spent their first two years on sleep monitors. She was transformed from who she was before her son died--a wildly joyful young woman--into a woman who carried the beast of grief on her shoulders. There is a difference between him being in your pocket and him being on your back. As I discovered when I wrote my book on giving my daughter up for adoption, just because you don't feel the grief doesn't mean it's not there. Thirty-five years later, after all the talking I'd done, there were things I had forgotten, tentacles of grief that had gotten into the crevices of me that I hadn't explored. After Sarah died, I wanted there to be some reason for her death. I was so insistent that she had an appointment with God; she knew she did. She and her husband Caleb had been asking God what His plan was for them; God said, "You'll know it when you see it." I assured people that her death would be for God's glory; her sister Becki told us how often she said she wanted to die for God. I knew she was where she longed to be; my vision of her confirmed that. I was so bright and "godly" about her death. But the beast was still there. He will always be and I know how big and dark and consuming he can be. But, he is not all there is in my life. I will take him out of my pocket and squeeze him every now and then just to let him know I know he's there--no more secret explorations into my interior with those insidious tentacles. I will moan and cry like the bereaved mother mouse, wordless and nameless, and then I will pack him back in my pocket, button him up, and NAME him, describe him, dissect him so he will do me no lasting harm. And one day, I will be in heaven with her and will have no baggage, no pockets even for him to hide in. He will be left behind because he doesn't belong where "there is no dying or crying or pain."