So over here, school has started again. I may have subconsciously avoided my boys’ room this morning, which at last sight looked like someone flipped it upside down and shook it. My daughter’s room was pretty similar as she rushed out the door. Hers just smells better.
What I want to do? Overfunction just a little.
This week, my family and I shoved in the car ski boots and a sled and carefully calculated food to feed a family with three teenagers. In the 2-hour drive through the mountains, cell service dropped abruptly about twenty minutes in. Our friend’s cabin, swaddled in 3 feet of snow, has no internet (brilliant!), no reception, and is primarily heated with a potbelly stove.
The plan originally seemed dicey. My friend with cancer is declining. And after this trip, my husband leaves for two and a half weeks.
Back in high school, I took a crazy-cool trip with an organization, performing evangelistic street theater as we camped through Europe. It was unforgettable.
But I’m sure it was no easy feat. Our team consisted of 90 teenagers (not a typo). Tents were lined up with military precision, and meals were planned down to the number of boxes of macaroni and the packets of oatmeal.
In a similar spirit, free time wasn’t called free time, but “O Time”: Organized time. As in, be intentional. Don’t fritter it away.
So I should probably tell you that generally (weirdly?) I do not go to the doctor when sick. I’ve taken kids for ear infections and all that, and certainly that time when my son’s staph infection on his jaw made him resemble Jay Leno (also weirdly. And yes, I remember writing about the importance of getting your kids’ behavioral diagnosis.
But still.)
Blogging can be a little too much like having an imaginary friend.
Picture sitting at the smallest table at your coffee shop. (I’m having a seasonal special with half of the pumps, decaf. …Because as someone told me, with natural enthusiasm like mine, I should remain uncaffeinated. You?)
While I was on vacation, my parents were in an accident.
I don’t know where I was, what I was doing. But before seven one chilly Iowa morning, two deer collided with their Chevy–one over the hood, one beneath the car. My grandmother, traveling a safe distance behind them in her own car, slammed into them when my dad hit his brakes. Airbags billowed to life everywhere. Both vehicles were totaled.
I probably don’t need to tell you how relieved that of the three of these dear people, all walked away completely unscathed—not even sore the next day. I am thankful for insurance companies and rental cars and wise engineers (go, airbags!) and the helpers God places around us when bad things inevitably happen on this mortal coil.
Perhaps you’ve noticed the blog’s been a little quieter than usual. I’ve been enjoying a series of delightful days, on vacation at last. Everything in me feels like I’ve finally set down an overstuffed backpack.
But I’m not what you would consider great at vacation. Africa has stained itself on the inner walls of my cranium. Ominous lines from parables ricochet in my head about a rich man “in [his] lifetime receiving good things” (Luke 16:25), then spending his eternity in anguish. Guilt and I have always had a tight-knit relationship, while I have a complicated, historically unhealthy relationship with desire and pleasure. In college, I was literally wasting away by my ability to suppress my desire for food.
So there’s that.
Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.
Mindset of the man too busy: I am too busy being God to become like God.
Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild: Trusting in the Character of God
Sometimes it can feel a little like my schedule has me on a leash, rather than the other way around. During the school year, when asked how we are, how many times could we answer, “Busy”?
But, as I like to be reminded by Peter Scazzero, we’re human beings, not human doings. We are more than what we do, more than our usefulness, like some machine or hired hand.
When I was young, my dad regularly mortified me at restaurants throughout the Midwest. We’d be at Hardee’s, say. And he insisted in calling the waitress—there behind the counter, awaiting my straightforward order for a chili dog—by the name on her plastic nametag. As if she were another old friend, of which he had innumerable others not just in our small town, but a substantial radius around it. She would inevitably smile beneath that brown visor. At twelve, I simply wanted to crawl beneath a Formica table next to the French fry fragments and Rorschach blots of dried ketchup and wait out my dad’s exuberant friendliness.
Nowadays–you saw this one coming: I’m the one using the Starbucks barista’s name.
Maybe my dad primed me for one of my perennial takeaways from Africa: greeting everyone, even before you, say, ask where the olives are at the supermarket. There’s even a greeting, I learned, for people you pass on the road. (When I use it, yes—I’m the one now drawing a grin from a stranger. All they need is a visor. Or a nametag.)
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
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