The Longest Week

Last Sunday, February 1^st, we Skyped with Brian’s family, like usual. I think just his parents were home at the time and we caught up on the house organizing and my upcoming birthday. I was looking forward to getting Caleb back into his routine after being sick and out of school much of the week before. 

On Monday morning we woke up to the text message from Brian’s family. “Call as soon as you’re up.” Brian’s beloved grandmother, who had been in hospice care at home, had passed away in the night. With that, we were off and running: notifying our workplaces, waiting for plans to be made, making travel decisions, packing suitcases, waiting to leave. We drove into the middle of Tuesday night, climbing over the Blue Ridge Mountains under a full moon. 

Wednesday was a blur of family in the midst of meals, naptimes and a lovely service. 

Thursday was travel again. I have to brag, Caleb is a superior traveling baby. He either slept or looked out the window the entire trip. It was like there wasn’t a baby in the back seat! Driving away was hard. We’re well aware of the need for support with our family right now and we had to comfort ourselves with the fact that we are not the only supporters for my in-laws. The trip home was painful and we finally distracted ourselves with Mindy Kaling’s book on tape, which made us laugh in a difficult time.

On Saturday we spent the day at the house with my family, including my little sister who flew in from LA late on Thursday night for a planned visit. We cleaned up the house, made two kinds of chili and two kind of cake, put artwork and pictures up on the wall and readied ourselves for a celebration of my birthday, which was Friday, with our new Nashville friends. I was so grateful for new friends who showed up to celebrate, but it was an emotional rollercoaster. 

My emotions have felt brittle this week, easy to break at the slightest provocation. It’s hard to go from the low of losing a family member to the high of a birthday celebration with cake and candles. I’m not sure we’re meant to handle that easily. 

On Sunday we Skyped with Brian’s family again. This time my in-laws were joined by my brothers and sister-in-law and our cousins and aunt and uncle. It was so good to see everyone’s face in the screen, looking like themselves and laughing. I’m grateful for all the ways we can connect and the fact that it was an easy decision to pack up the car and head to North Carolina for the funeral. That would have been a different conversation if we were still living in Milwaukee. It was also nice to have my parents ready to feed and comfort us when we got back to Nashville. I’m so glad for the support system that holds us together. It is invisible sometimes, like it’s made of thin fishing wire, but in the midst of the night of our souls it becomes glow-in-the-dark, lighting the path home.

For the Transformation of the World

I work for our beloved church, at a place where “making disciples” is literally in the title. It’s a hard concept, to make a disciple. There’s that sticky word with it: evangelism. As I consider ministry as a vocation, I wrestle with evangelism and how to “make a disciple.” How do you make somebody come to church every week? Or is it better to make a church member, so that you have another number on your roster even if they come to church four times a year? What if they don’t show up on Sundays, but sign up for every mission opportunity? Are you truly a disciple if you don’t participate in a Covenant Discipleship group (It’s only 1 hour a week!)? What if you don’t like traditional worship? What if you only like traditional worship? What if you like traditional worship but sing along to Hillsong in the car? Pastors are tasked with “making disciples” and sometimes it feels like an impossible job. 

I was thinking about this last week in speaking with someone about “my call.” As a tangent, that’s another Christian-y word that I have a hard time with. You can’t decide to go into ministry, you must be called. It’s hard to say out loud that you’ve been called, because what if you’re hearing God wrong? Then you’ve lied about being called. It’s a whole thing. I’m still working on it.

I was speaking about my hopefully legitimate “call.” I spoke about how I found the Methodist church, how I become more and more involved with my local church. I forgot to mention when I went to go see Jen Hatmaker speak and her words lit such a fire in my heart that I came home and told my husband of 6 months that I wanted to be a missionary and that we should look into moving to Africa. We didn’t. But that fire never went out. It occurred to me that I had been made a disciple. I had been made a disciple, and I was out to transform the world! Just like the tag line of my workplace pronounces! I had wonderful pastors and churches that took me in, but it truly was the work of the Spirit that brought me from a between-churches-20something to a disciple exploring entering ministry. 

This was a heartening revelation, to realize that I have seen a transformation. Not in someone else, but in myself, and maybe that’s enough to start.   

At Home

I’ve been walking on air since Friday. Friday, our baby’s first birthday. We sang to him, which he loved and tried to make him eat cake, which he swatted onto the floor. It was not the Pinterest inspired party of my dreams, and I tried valiantly to let those expectations fall to the floor. Too much excitement in one evening makes for a very fussy 1 year old boy. His aunt and very favorite uncle were there, as were both sets of grandparents. 

On Saturday morning the excitement of moving to our house began. I’ve written before about my intense dislike for our apartment. I’m a bit disappointed in myself that I was never able to let that go in the months that we lived there. It was just too cramped, characterless, had too many bugs, not nearly enough light. I always felt like I should have been able to push past it, but that apartment was a damp rag on the home fires in my heart, so to speak. 

Walking into our house with the new carpet, carrying our belongings in, was a breath of fresh air. Light streams into our rooms and the eating area is like eating in a tree house. The nights before we got there I shrunk the rooms in my mind and I worried about fitting our furniture. I should not have worried. Everything fits more than comfortably. My kitchen has become a haven again. The large cabinets house our dishes and bowls, the baby’s plates and cups, my grandmother’s Pyrex collection. We have a junk drawer and an empty cupboard. An entire empty cupboard! The house overflows with the feeling of home, security, comfort, happiness, more than enough. 

One of the best parts is the flow- all the living space is on one floor. The basement is currently storage and entry to the garage. This means that Caleb has the ability to do laps around the kitchen, study, living room and back again. He is free to toddle from the living room into his bedroom (maybe 8 feet away), grab a book and toddle back out again. I never imagined I would like a ranch-style home, but his desire to constantly climb stairs when they’re available to him was a pain in the townhome style apartment. 

The house needs a little love. We have a punch list, like any other homeowners. But there’s nothing we have to do immediately. We can just enjoy living and take a little bit at a time. Finally, we're at home.

A Weekend with Family

I am positively tingling with excitement for the coming weekend. Yes, we’re moving in our new house, but more importantly we have friends and family coming to help us. I can’t wait to see my in-laws, brother and sister-in-law and our local cousins. My parents arrived for their winter stay in Nashville yesterday. I haven’t seen them since Thanksgiving and it was surreal to be out to lunch with them today, discussing my son’s birthday cake and ohhing over the thought of making it blueberry flavored. 

I will be forever, EVER grateful that I have parents with the willingness and means to travel to their daughters. They get out to see my sister in LA fairly often and this is their fourth trip to Nashville since we moved. They’re staying 6 weeks or so, in a furnished apartment close to us. My in-laws are the same way- they rearrange their schedules to get out to see us as often as we get to North Carolina. Brian’s career necessitates our location, unlike most of his families’, who live in their hometown. I’ve written about this before, that we don’t have option to pick up and move to Charlotte. This is common to all of our friends from Milwaukee. The friends that we have living in Virginia and California? Would probably prefer to be in the Midwest, closer to their families. But we’ve worked hard for these degrees and the jobs that follow. So again, I am so grateful that our families will come to us. Weekends like these are precious and I plan to soak up every second of family goodness. I can’t wait to see Caleb’s face when he sees his Nanas and Grandpa and Papaw and Aunts and Uncles. Priceless.