Surprise in the Dryer

I am married to a man who does laundry, cleans the kitchen counters, and vacuums. He also keeps the lawn mowed and edged, which is great. As is true for many men, he enjoys doing chores and using implements that entail an element of risk or requires complex steps of action.

Take our Dyson, for example. It has all kinds of bells and whistles. The evening we bought it, Sam vacuumed our bedroom and then the entire upstairs of the house. What sold him on this product is that it has lots of knobs, a long extendible wand to clean the ceiling, and attachments galore. And not only that, but you can watch the dust and dirt whirl around in the canister. It has different kinds of filters and levers on it. Needless to say, our house has been very clean since we got this vacuum cleaner. And I mean, the sofas, chairs, lamps, baseboards, and the carpets.

I am really grateful that my husband takes his household chores seriously. He often comes down the stairs on a Saturday night, lugging the clothes hamper. “I have to get this started before it gets too late” he says, with furrowed brow. He starts the laborious process of sorting the clothes. There’s a pile of towels, a pile of sheets, a heap of Sam’s shirts, and a pile of jeans and dark clothes. He is adding detergent to the running water in the washing machine and adding clothes with great panache.

I adore Sam. He is handsome, dresses smartly and carries himself very well. I am so glad, because not only is he good looking, but handy. His impressive domestic skills allow me to wear clothes of unusual hues several times each week. "Sky-blue-pink" is more than a comment made in levity. Our beige bath towels look cyanotic. I think Sam puts things into the washer together based on their texture, not necessarily their colors. But I don’t have to worry about the wash because it is taken care of every week. I do the cooking, shopping, gardening, and pick up stuff. But I needn’t worry about a huge chunk of the work because my strapping husband is toting the clothes up and down the stairs to the laundry room every week.

Today I wore coral-magenta underpants with a pale blue elastic at the waist. I hope I'm not in a car wreck or something that would require a trip to the Emergency Room. Can you imagine the nurses cutting off my clothes and getting down to my panties. "Whoa! Where'd she get these?" "Is tie-dye back in?" But some nurses would look enviously at these three-tone wonders. They would know that I have a husband who carries his weight around the house. How lucky can a woman be?

Nerves

Today I spoke for 30 minutes on live television. It was a church lesson study and I think I carried it off okay, but wow! Was I ever a bundle of nerves! Unprepared, unsure if what I prepared was long enough or too long, wondering if I'd even be understood.

As I stepped up to the podium, the battery pack for my over-the-ear mic came off the metal holder at my waist. There was no putting it back on. So I spoke with a metal thingie hanging off my waistband and the battery pack lying on the podium next to my open Bible.

I had asked the producer to allow the other items on the program to go over so I wouldn't have so much time to fill. He crept over to where I was sitting during the special music number and told me he'd shaved about five minutes off my time. I thanked him, but honestly, it did very little to allay my concern. By that point, the concern was mostly about not being able to give a coherent, well flowing talk. That was the issue for me.

Mother and her friends from the Villa were all sitting about eight rows from the front. Mother was smiling at me and looking anxiously my way (she looks anxious no matter where she looks, actually!) Her friend, Ken, sat beside her, his six foot four frame towering over her. He looked anxious, too.

Interestingly enough, on my drive down to the church this morning, I asked God to help me do well just for the sake of my mother. I wanted to make her proud and give her something to feel good about. She always gets lots of mileage out of my speaking or singing from those with whom she lives. Life can be so challenging when you're alone, and being able to make Mother proud is a small thing. So that was my prayer.

She could hardly contain herself when I picked her up later today. There was one story after another about this one and that one who commented about my talk.

Good.

It wasn't until about 2:00 today that my nervousness finally went away. I don't know why I agree to do these things. I'm not a preacher, theologian, or philosopher. I just try to put a few thoughts together that will make sense and help someone else.

I don't think that other people knew it was so nervewracking for me.

It really was.

Glad it's over.

Bummer

Yesterday evening I drove down to Long Beach to stay in a hotel near The Village. That way, I wouldn't have to fright traffic at an ungodly hour of the morning just to get there on time.

Last night I worked on a talk I'm giving on Saturday and then turned out the light around 10:45. At 5:30 I was wide awake and started watching the History Channel's Warrior series.
By 6:15 I had a pounding headache and was nauseated. It didn't let up all day.

Now why would a person get such a thing? I've had a bunch of these kinds of things lately and there's only one way I can explain it: they're migraines and are brought on by chocolate, lack of sleep, and stress. I had chocolate last night before driving down to Long Beach. I guess that can't happen any more.
And the stress part? Oh my goodness...how on earth have I allowed myself to get so overextended? Just this month I have five major speaking engagements, plus the book editing I'm doing (three books), and full time teaching. I'm already burned out this quarter and there are six weeks to go yet.
When will I learn?

So after lying on the couch all day wishing I could drift into a coma, I've decided to dig in my heals and create stronger boundaries around my time. Where's the fun in that? Maybe my head will thank me.

Oh--I missed the second day at The Village because I was so sick I could hardly make it home. Well, there you have it. Something has got to give.

The Village

Mental health services in this country have become a real money making scheme. Especially when it comes to the use of heavy psychopharmacological agents--psychotropic medications--pills to control people's behavior. No, I am not at all against mental health practitioners or the use of medications when needed. But I think that we, the mental health providers have created a culture of us (the healers) and them (the sick ones). There seems to be no room in between, and no fluidity between the two roles. People with persistent, serious mental illness move into the system against their will and never leave it. There has to be a better way.

I am currently enrolled in a seminar that is taking place at The Village in Long Beach. This is a novel community mental health center in which people who seek services there are referred to as "members." Note that this connotes ownership and self-determination, not passive compliance with what someone else recommends. Members are given education about their condition and invited to weigh in on creating options for treatment. Mental health practitioners help members decide what they need and then act as consultants while the member takes responsibility for their progress at their own pace. There are discussions about how to cope with life in very practical ways: how to get a job--that's a huge issue; how to find living arrangements that are safe and off the street; how to get their children back and provide for them; how to get and keep relationships. The use of what is called "Natural Supports" is facilitated. This means incorporating friends, families, and peers--other mentally challenged individuals who are in recovery--in planning and supportive roles. Putting people in their own homes and helping them find working arrangements that they can sustain are healing in and of themselves. So many mentally ill people lose respect for themselves as they see everything they own and care about drift away, and for a multitude of reasons.

Language, behavior, and interactions must reflect freedom of determination, the member's sense of pacing, support of people whom they trust, and meaning for living by conventional standards. When these things are lacking, mental health too often becomes manipulative, pathologizing, and debilitating people in terms of their own sense of mastery and personal power.

A group of educators and front line mental health providers have been invited to The Village to learn how their Recovery System works. It is truly amazing. On Thursday I will be going out on the street, to Skid Row, to do "home visits" for the homeless people who live there and who struggle with motivation to change their circumstances. I will report in after I have been out with the case worker.

The way we have been doing mental health for those with persistent, chronic mental illness, hasn't worked. I think this might.

As Good As Dead

It is Good Friday. Christ is lying in the tomb and His devastated disciples are at the brink of sanity in their grief. Everything for which they have put their life on hold, has vanished. They have nothing to show for the days they followed this teacher all over creation. Nothing to prove that they have been in earnest or that they believe He is the Messiah.

Now what?

That was a major question, but the larger issue was that He was no longer with them. And they had loved Him unabashedly. When I read about how they followed Christ and the closeness of their conversations, I wish men in America today could relate to one another the way I imagine they behaved together. It was very Jewish in terms of expressiveness, and it had an earthy, intimate essence to it. There was not that awkward Anglo distance and touch phobia that we have in our society. They could say they loved one another and in fact, Jesus encouraged that because He told them repeatedly to love each other.

Now the One they loved was lying in a tomb.

I think J.S. Bach described their mood correctly when he wrote Erbarme Dich from the St. Matthew's Passion. This piece always wrings my heart. Jesus was dead, in the tomb, and everyone was devastated. The world went from having the Son of Righteousness among them to the darkness of futility once again.



Easter always makes me think of Romans 4 about poor old Abraham, "as good as dead," wishing to become a father. Little old Sarah leaning on her cane, who had never been able to carry a pregnancy during her childrearing years, let alone at 90 years of age, and who hadn't had a period for 40 years. And yet they must have chuckled together as they tried to overcome the effects of age and honor what God had predicted: You shall be the father of many nations. Ummm, right. "Sarah, shall we try again?" So they would try again, their elderly bodies once again trying to defeat nature. Young couples who are trying to conceive keep temperature charts and do all sorts of things to enhance conception. Not least of which, is to have sex as frequently as possible and particularly during certain peaks of basal temperature. Even when there was no particular attraction or desire for sex. Just do it.
Abraham and Sarah were suddenly in this situation. There were few sexual aid products to assist them back then, which means that their attempts could not have been comfortable. So they found repeatedly that both were as good as dead in the sex and fertility departments. Even though they loved one another and probably enjoyed intimacy and closeness as most older adults do. But other than an aerobic workout, these encounters would not be terribly efficient in producing much.

Perhaps they wondered if God would perform some sort of in vitro fertilization for them. After all, the mechanics alone for people of their age trying to have a child were daunting. Paul says that Abraham was "as good as dead." Oh my. I would hate to have that said about me, even though that would be true about my ability to conceive. Yet Abraham and Sarah continued to go through the motions because God had said that something would take, just once, and Sarah would become pregnant. I'm sure that Abraham thought more than once, that he believed what God said but that what he was doing wasn't going to get him anywhere. But because they believed, and because they lived as though they believed by acting accordingly, even though it is not feasible that any component of their bodies could have produced Isaac, God was able to do what He had promised.

The last part of Romans 4 says this:

That is why his faith was "reckoned to him as righteousness. But the words, "it was reconed to him" were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him that raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

Abraham and Sarah's faith and efforts composed the prelude to the work of the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. It was that power that made conception possible from nonexistant or dead reproductive elements. All they did was respond to the promise of God and He did in them far above anything they could have imagined. No wonder Sarah said, "God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me." There is such a comical gradient between what she and Abraham could do and what God actually did. But as God said to them, "Is anything too hard for the Lord?"

Let's fast forward history to today. Here I am, trying to do what is right--to make right choices and live a godly life. My tools to do that are as good as dead. I'm overcome with temptation time and time again. Every noble resolve is a mockery in the end, because my best efforts are comical in terms of being able to produce righteousness. As Paul wrote in Romans 7 in that tangled passage, in essence, the good that I would like to do I don't do, and the things I don't want to do are what I end up doing. Even though I know better.

For I delight in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?This is not going to get me any kind of righteousness.

Well, that's me. I'm going through the motions--praying, reading the Bible, talking with others about spiritual things, trying to keep my mind stayed upon God. And what can I possibly produce by doing this? Nada. Zilch. Every now and then one may see a glimmer of something that is halfway hopeful, but then it crashes with the rest of everything that I do that is supposed to be "righteous," into the mass grave of all that is holy in my life.

Indeed, I am wretched. Yet God has promised that faith in His death and resurrection will in the end, produce what He wishes for me: eternal life and a godly character. It is all because of the resurrection power that this is even thinkable. Because He "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." (Romans 4:17). Like goodness or righteousness from me.

I think that in the great feast table in heaven, when we sit down to share a meal with all of the redeemed, I will be looking for Abraham and Sarah. Because they have for centuries been reminders for struggling Christians that nothing is too hard for God. Because the same power that enabled them to conceive is what will get me to heaven one day. There will be a good deal of delighted laughter there one day. Because it is God's power, not my puny abilities.

That Power laid in the tomb over the Sabbath day, centuries ago. No one knew it was there, but the power of God would bring Jesus out of the grave to live in an immortal body. Death could not hold Him. Neither will life, or death, or angels, principalities, things present or things to come, or powers, or anything else in all creation be able to separate us from the love of God and His power. This power that called Isaac out of unreliable bodies and Jesus out of the tomb, will one Day be the power that changes my sinful mind, soul, and body, into an immortal and perfect being.

We are all as good as dead. And we all have the knowledge that what God has said He will do for us, He will do.
Thanks be to God at this wonderful Easter season!

So what do you do?

When Sam and I first got married, he couldn't understand why I was very reserved when we first met people. He is out there, heart first, slapping people's shoulders and smiling broadly. I like to be friendly and outgoing, but in certain situations it is best not to get too friendly very fast because the dreaded question will come up: What do you do for a living? It also may not be good for certain people to know that I'm a doctorally prepared professor. Because all too often I get strange responses when I tell people the kind of work I do, or identify my profession.

Sam didn't understand this in the early days.
"You should be proud, honey!" He grins widely. "I am!"
"I'd prefer to just say that I'm a teacher and be done with it."
"That's minimizing who you are," he said.
There are times when that is smart.
Sam just didn't get it.

Then we met the new pastor.
It was over the church potluck that I became more acquainted with him. He had just come to our district and I wanted to be welcoming toward him. He had been a student of my father's many years ago and I wanted to make a personal connection so he would feel more comfortable in a new church with people who could be a bit standoffish. My father had always spoken highly of this man when he was his student. Pastor responded very warmly when I told him who my father was. He had very good memories of living in New York when he was a kid.

"So what do you do for a living?" he asked Sam. Sam was delighted to share that at the time he was in sales. They chatted several minutes about the product that Sam dealt in while I braced myself for him to turn to me. I tried to keep the conversation going about Sam, but Pastor suddenly turned to me.
"And do you work outside the home, Barbara?"
I smiled and tried to look enthusiastic. "Oh yes. I manage to stay busy these days."
"And what do you do for work?"
I gave my standard answer: "I'm a teacher."
"Oh!" he exclaimed, "How nice...what grade do you teach?"
It always irks me when it's assumed that I teach grade school just because I'm a woman.
"Older kids," I said, truthfully.
He smiled, condescendingly. "Do you teach in middle school?"
I might as well get it over with. "No. Actually, I teach college students."
His smile faded and he looked surprised. "Oh. What subject do you teach?"
"Well, I teach counseling."
"Ah!" He laced his fingers together on the table in front of him and looked down at his hands.
I tried to move the conversation on to other things. "Didn't you just move from Cinncinati?"
"Well, yes....Are you a counselor, then?" There was hardly a pause between the two sentence clauses.
"Yes." There was nothing more to say about that.
"Do you practice therapy?" He looked sick.
"I have a small practice." Pastor looked down at his hands again. Perspiration stood out on his forehead as he turned in his chair away from me to face the people in the room (none of whom were directing their comments toward him at that moment).
The excited chatter from the potluck was ringing in my ears. I turned to look at Sam. He was looking at me with a questioning expression.
Wheeling around in his chair, Pastor asked tentatively, "So you have a master's degree then?"
"Yes, I do." I nodded, glad he hadn't asked anything else.
Pastor turned back to the crowd. I looked at Sam, who raised one eyebrow at me in a kind of unspoken comment: How strange!
Pastor seemed deep in thought. He was smiling as if in a conversation with someone else, turned 180 degrees away from where I was sitting.
Again, he lurched around in his seat to face me. "Do you have a PhD?" There was a sound of hushed horror in his voice.
"Uh...yes."
"You are a professor then?"
"Yes."
Pastor turned back toward the others in the room, with his back directly to me for the rest of the meal. Sam and I carried on an almost voiceless conversation, with lots of nonverbal commentary about what had just happened.
Pastor gave me the cold shoulder and behaved very strangely around me for the next year while we lived there. Very odd. Either he had issues that he believed I could somehow divine, or he'd had a bad experience with a therapist and didn't want to deal with me, assuming that I would respond to him in exactly the same manner as his nemesis. Or, he could have been insecure, since he didn't attend seminary and held an associate degree in computer science. Not that this would matter to me if he did a good job with the congregation. But it didn't feel good to be on the receiving end of whatever issue he was projecting onto me.

These kinds of odd responses are frequent. I'm sitting on an airplane and a nervous young woman is trying to make conversation with me while we lift off.
"So what do you do?" she asks, her hands clutching the sides of her seat.
"I'm a marriage and family therapist." There. Let's see what happens when I just say it straight out.
Her eyes widen and she turns toward me. "Oh! I can ask you this question then." She then leans into me and in a rapid whisper says, "I just found out yesterday that my sister is having an affair. I am so shocked. And I want to do something to help her but I'm so mad at her for being so dumb. She has three small children and while she's getting ready to leave her husband and children they're asking, "Where are you going, Mommy?" And it just breaks my heart. Why is she doing this and what should I do?"
I open my mouth to empathize, purposely avoiding engaging her about her sister, and she leans closer to interrupt me: "You are the perfect seatmate for a direct flight! Talk to me!"
I wish I'd told her I was a ditch digger from Omaha. Why would anyone think that I want to do my job during vacation--and for free? To most people, doing what I do seems like a non-job (I'm just a kind person who likes to listen), or else so exotic that they think I'm always "on," eager and ready for what they feel is a good story. Not so.

So after all of these flights and awkward introductions, I've come up with the perfect response when I'm asked what I do: "I'm a social scientist researcher." No one knows what that is, and when I say the word research, they turn off. If they press me, I can launch into a boring discussion about postmodern influences on family structure. Research is actually, one of the things that I do, and being able to say this suits me well. Then the conversation can be about incidental, human interest things in my life or what is going on with their lives without concern that I'm having to be perfect, looking through them, reading their minds, or that I'm interested in solving their family issues.
I am decidedly not the only person who has this happen. But it drives me nuts. And a therapist who feels like she's going nuts isn't really good, is it?

The scent of heaven

I have the good fortune of living in a part of the world that is filled with perfume at this time of year. It comes from the blossoms on orange trees. The trees that are typically quite shiny with their dark leaves, now look as though snow has dusted over them. They are covered in white blossoms, the fragrance of which is sweeter and more delightful than any other pleasant scent I have found in nature.

My daily commute takes me down several roads that are lined on either side with orange groves. Since the trees have begun to bloom, I have made it a practice to open my windows and inhale deeply as I slowly drive through. I'm sure that some people who are driving in the opposite direction think I've lost my mind--my head hanging out of the car window, me looking like a goldfish, breathing in with an exaggerated movement of my head. But there is no other way to savor this wonderful aroma.

As I've gone through these groves, the wind blowing through the car (and my hair being blown to bits), I've often wondered whether heaven smells like this. All of heaven, not just the little pockets of good smells, but the entire place. And maybe I won't have to work so hard to get to the scent: opening all the windows, trying to catch a waft of air, etc. Yes, in heaven I think that everything is perfect: looks good, sounds good, smells good. So in my book, orange blossoms are part of the picture. I surely hope so.

Only a God could create something so exquisite.

News Flash!

For the record, Astrid and Phil announced their engagement the day after his wife's service. They have set the date for May.
Next month.
Oh my.