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.
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
So I have a teenager, and another just about. Most of me is tickled pink about all the real conversations we get to hold, all the fun we have as a maturing family, all the crazy jokes they tell me that leave all of us laughing.
And there’s this leeettle part of it that scares the bejeebies out of me.
Seemingly separate note: I have recently acquired an agent for a non-fiction book I’m writing, which makes my heart do little cartwheels of happiness. It was a moment I wasn’t sure would ever happen.
And…we’re gone.
By the time you read this, my family will likely have wrangled our carry-ons into that taupe-colored hum of a 757, bound for six months stateside. (After the lunacy of this week, preparing to abscond for six entire months, I surely hope we make it to the plane.)
I feel conflicted over this.
I’ve written before about this whole idea of our opportunities versus whether we’re actually called to do something. Oh—and about the true cost of my overcommitment.
And I’m happy to report that I have proudly mastered these concepts in full. And it seems I’ve still got a looooong. Long. Way. To go.
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