Patience, Come to the Front

The checkout cashier in Lane 3 cranes her neck and looks past me to Lane 2 as I dig in my purse for my wallet. The lines that day are several shopping carts deep. Her co-worker over in the neighboring lane is busy scanning frozen foods on the conveyor belt, but the Lane 3 cashier calls out to her and manages to get her attention.

"Hey," says Lane 3, seeking to alleviate the demands of accumulating shoppers ready to check out, "is Patience back there?"

Patience. An interesting name you don't hear much these days.

"I think so," the Lane 2 cashier answers, distractedly.

Lane 3 picks up the store-wide intercom and steadily intones in her most professional-sounding intercom voice, "Patience, come to the front, please. Patience, please come to the front."

I almost told my Lane 3 girl at that moment that I wanted to go home and write about what she just said, but I refrained. Too much profundity to explore in the time it would take to swipe my card and grab my groceries from the plastic-bag carousel.

If only I had an intercom to summon patience to the front, in the very literal sense, in those times when it eludes me.

When the kids are fighting and the baby is crying. When homework is tough and I can't find the words to explain it for the twentieth time. When I am ready to go out the door but nobody else is. When harsh words want to fly out of my lips. When a new life chapter needs to start but the page just won't turn. 

Patience, please come to the front. Come to the front in me. Don't hang back when you're most needed, when the line of shopping carts in my life that hold all my stresses and responsibilities is backed up. Patience, come to the front so that you are clearly evident, so that the ones I love the most can recognize you in me - the ones who really, really notice when you're absent, more than anyone else. Come to the front on those evenings at 6:00 p.m. when everybody is tired, and everybody's blood sugar has dropped, and everybody is all prickly and cranky with each other. Come to the front when I burn dinner and have to start over. When I pick up shoes from the kitchen floor for the 5,000th time. And while you're at it, just go ahead and send Exasperation and Irritation to the BACK. The way-back. Out with the trash. They're fired.

Just get up here. Front and center.

And to the real Patience, who must have made her way to the front that day, who probably lives in my little town, and who may even see this post - I like your name.

Conversation in an Elevator

The elevator doors opened and they walked in - a young couple with brand new baby in tow. She looked haggard, he looked flustered, and the baby in blue with thick black hair was ruling their world from his carrier in that moment, tiny fists flailing, tiny lungs working, powerful infant screams filling the enclosed area.

The gray-haired lady and I shifted to make room, watching them as they desperately glanced to make sure that "P" for parking level had already been pressed, anxious to escape the stares of strangers who could not help but stare under the circumstances.

"Awww," I said to the mother. Because that is what you say when you're standing right next to someone with a baby in a carrier. "How old?"

"One week," she answered, as the father gripped the carrier in one hand and awkwardly tried to shush baby with the other, glasses precariously sliding to the tip of his nose.

"He's precious," I said, the standard compliment bestowed upon new mothers.

She thanked me quietly, staring straight ahead. Because that is what you do in elevators.

"Your first?" I asked. She nodded.

I decided to go a step further. "I have a 9-weeker at home," I said. "Number three."

There. Connection made. I know. I understand. I've been there.

With the establishment of the connection, she was then free to break elevator protocol and turn to face me. Pale with pleading, bloodshot eyes, hair a complete mess, she posed a question that spoke volumes.

“Does it get better?”

Here is what she really meant -

Please, stranger. Tell me that I'm going to survive. Tell me that sleep deprivation won't kill me. Tell me that this screaming little general will morph into something I can handle, something I can cope with. Tell me that I'll enjoy it. I don't know you and you don't know me, but you've been where I am, and you're still standing, and I need to hear it from you. Will he ever stop crying? Will I get to hold him without wondering, what is WRONG with you and why aren't you happy? Is there a way out of this tunnel? Aren't I supposed to be in maternal bliss right now? Tell me I will find it one day. In the 10 seconds we have left before these doors open, tell me. I beg of you.

Here is what I wanted to reply -

Nine years ago I went through colic-land and lived to tell about it. I was right where you were, toting an infant in a carrier to a pediatrician after many sleepless nights in a row, demanding to know why the child wouldn't stop crying, needing a remedy and finding none. I remember the tiny fists, the furious eyes in little narrowed slits like diamonds, the toes that never unclenched. I remember the fits of baby rage and the bleak feeling of helplessness. I remember trying the reflux meds, trying white noise, trying rides in the car, trying swinging and bouncing and flying her around, trying 80 million different kinds of pacifiers. I remember the futility of my husband saying, "This has GOT to stop."

And then one day, it did. The sun came out from behind the clouds on her face. She became a gurgling, cooing, pleasant little Gerber baby. A Gerber baby who turned into a toddler who turned into a preschooler who turned into a kindergartener who turned into a pre-tween. Oh, she still had her moments. But it got better.

In the 10 remaining seconds, all I could say was, "Yes. It gets better. You'll make it. You're in baby boot camp right now, but you'll make it through."

She exhaled loudly as the doors opened. "Good," she said, allowing a bit of relief to show on her face. And then the rambling wreck of new parenthood made its way off the elevator.

It gets better.

Not long ago I was on the receiving end of those words. A fellow pastor's wife spoke them to me on the heels of our move to a new town. She had been in my position many times before, and somehow, those words were a consolation to me. She kindly let me know that I wasn't the first person in the world to have the oh-my-gosh-I-am-leaving-everything-behind experience. And that it would not always feel so foreign. In fact, one day it would become home. Actually, she was right.

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God." 2 Corinthians 1:3-4

No life experiences are worthless. No matter how difficult, we hold them carefully in our portfolio of memory, knowing that if and when the moment is right, they can be taken out and shared for a purpose. God comforts us, we comfort others with the comfort we've gotten from Him. One day down the line, that frazzled new mother in the elevator is going to be telling another poor haggard soul that the crying will stop one day. And maybe by now, I'm equipped to talk to someone who has uprooted everything to start anew somewhere else.

Remember the power of It gets better – both the giving of it and the receiving. Those three words might just be the wind in the sails that we need.

Tinkerbell and Social Land Mines

“Tinkerbell lunchboxes are for babies."

So my third-grader was told by a peer in the lunchroom this week. I may have told her to tell the classmate that she happened to have an extra knuckle-sandwich in her Tinkerbell lunchbox that day, and would she like one?

That was me half-joking with my daughter, half-growling, hackles up.

Third grade. Tinkerbell has evidently fallen out of favor with that age group, unbeknownst to me. I suppose all the Disney princesses are on the outs now, too. Not cool enough, it seems. One would think that pretty dresses and fairy dust would be enough to ensure a spot in the in-crowd forever, but not so for poor Tink and her socially-scorned group of gorgeous girls whose dreams always come true. They've been traded in for the Disney channel and Taylor Swift, notoriously serial dater with broken dreams that she is “never ever ever getting back together” with her exes.

And then, back at school this week, came this comment from a classmate, upon my kid's disclosure of her 20-Cinderella-valentines-in-box-plus-a-sticker-tattoo planned course of action for V-Day: "No way are you gonna give ME a Cinderella valentine."

That interchange prompted a hasty switch to a much-safer "puppies and kittens" theme. Why puppies and kittens are more acceptable than big C, I still don't understand. But whatever.

I remember playing with dolls until age 11. Maybe that was late by today's standards, but I felt no shame and have no regrets. Then middle school happened, and with it came the force of change in tastes and interests that is expected and natural. But I sure don't remember anybody telling me in third grade that Barbie and the likes of her were not okay.

If I were in a situation where I needed a lunchbox every day, I would like to pack up a Disney princess one and carry it myself in full view of my daughter and the world, so she could see that at age 36, even I can like the Disney girls, and I don't care who knows it. I want her to be free to like what she wants to like in third grade, without having her tastes dictated to her by peers who are in an awful big hurry to grow up. Those little kids don't realize that once they get all grown, they can't go back. As I read on Jon Acuff's blog recently, you can always fast-forward childhood, but you can't rewind it. When she's ready to put away childish things, I will be there to pack them away, like the Toy Story mom. But I want it to be on her terms.

Someone commented to me the other day that adults are relentlessly plundering children's stories these days for their own purposes - Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, the new Wizard of Oz coming this summer, the Once Upon a Time series on TV, and others. We'd sure like to go back to childhood, but the only way we can go there is to go through a veneer that is still decidedly adult in nature. Because that is what we are.

Do you remember what it was like to be caught between wanting to be little and wanting to be big? It's a tightrope that children walk from the time they are toddlers until the time they graduate, and they have to walk it themselves. We can call out to them and talk to them while they're up there on it, offering whatever advice and encouragement we can from below, but they are the ones who are shakily making their way across - Tinkerbell at one end, adulthood at the other, and a whole bunch of land mines in between. They need sympathy and understanding. They need wise words in their ears. They need earnest prayers going up for them.

And they need extra knuckle-sandwiches in their lunchboxes. Pack them carefully.

Not a Real Blog Post

Pay no attention to the paint swatch possibilities behind the curtain.

Or-nee-ment

There are ornaments. And then there are ornements.

Most of the English-speaking world would say that they hang ornaments (noun - lovely, decorative adornments) on their Christmas trees. But not all of them. The following label ripped from a recent dollar store purchase proves the point --

The Chinese manufacturers of this lovely, decorative adornment could not have known that they were actually referencing the down-home version of the word ornament that is used here in the southern United States, as in:

"VERN! Git up 'ere and hang them ORNEYMENTS up high on the tree!"

But then, things could always be worse --

Please Write on Our House

Last weekend we invited our friends to come out on Sunday afternoon to write on our house. Permissible graffiti. We were asking for it – everywhere. On the floors, on the walls, on the ceilings, and over the doors. We brought the sharpies, cookies, and drinks. Our friends brought their graffiti A-games.

It is all soon to go away from sight, because the sheet rock will soon go up, the flooring will soon go down, and fresh paint will forever hide the precious autographs that were once there.

But maybe someday, decades from now, another family living in our 2012-era home will decide to strip everything out to make way for the latest and greatest trends in Extreme Home Makeover style, and will find – maybe to their puzzlement - sharpie-scrawled God-promises all over the wood frames.

Nothing superstitious about it. Not even a little bit stitious as that guy on The Office might say. No magical abracadabra pixie dust being sprinkled. Just an affirmation of the faith in our hearts as we wrote, and affirmations from friends and loved ones who blessed us as they penned for us the reminders of ancient words.

“Write them [these commandments] on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates,” said God in Deuteronomy 6.

So why not?

Even when the sheet rock goes up, we will remember what is underneath. And thanks to these pictures, we will even remember where. That old hymn “Standing on the Promises of God” doesn’t have to be just figurative anymore.

The ten feet that are soon to inhabit this place will be standing on them for real.

Punkin Muffins for Remedial Cooks

I cook to live. To provide sustenance for my family. Not for the sheer love of it. I wish I could stir up in my heart a great love for mixing, sauteeing, roasting, grilling, and baking, but alas, it’s just not there. Sometimes the things we eat to live are righteously good. Sometimes marginal. Sometimes fit for the garbage disposal.

But just like the next person, I like to make people think I’m a super good cook. My husband got a phone call recently from a family friend who needed my phone number because she wanted the recipe for my deliciously moist and perfect chocolate brownies. He chuckled on the inside, since he knew the truth, but gave the lady my number anyway so that I could be the one to sheepishly explain to her that she could find the Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge Brownie Mix in a box on aisle 5 at the Winn Dixie.

These are the reasons that this is not a cooking blog.

But today, for the first time ever, I’m posting a recipe because it’s so easy and yummy that even a remedial cook could do it. It came to me by way of my friend Amy Dorsey, and it came to her by way of someone else, so therefore I do not claim to have authored these instructions of pure autumn goodness.

Here’s what you need to buy for Perfect Pumpkin Spice Muffins. 

This -

And this -

That’s it! Just a can of pumpkin and some spice cake mix!

Then, you mix them up like so:

Looks a little thick and muddy, but not to worry. I do recommend doing a better job than I did of getting those little white clumps of cake mix smoothed out.

Spoon into greased muffin cups and bake at 350 for 30 minutes, then presto! Punkin (yes, PUNKIN) muffins that your friends won’t know had only two ingredients! Unless you sheepishly explain.

Pure. Autumn. Goodness.