My Lovely Dwelling Place

Where is the Victory? I usually start a post on this blog with an amusing anecdote about my life and family. There is often something in our experience that we can laugh at – it’s better than crying, right? Sometimes, however, things just aren’t that funny. Sometimes we need to cry. There seems to be many things in life that don’t get fixed, that don’t resolve neatly, that don’t turn out the way we hoped. Sometimes the best advice we’ll get is, “It is what it is; deal with it.” All the same, I have found myself wondering lately - where is the victory? Time and again, it seems we fight the same battles. We fall for the same temptations. We fail repeatedly. As the psalmist seems to lament: As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away (Psalm 90:10). That verse is reminiscent of Jacob’s response to Pharoah when asked how old he was: The years of my soj...

Random thoughts for a Sunday One of my tall dark and handsome sons was combing his luscious hair while looking in the mirror as most of us were walking out the door to go to church – he did it again while gazing at the living room mirror on the way to the car – then again in the reflection of the van window upon arrival. This is the same son that not too long ago had to be deprived food unless he showered and be commanded to apply deodorant. How can the son who never puts anything away and whose room looks like the aftermath of a tornado be so concerned with other people’s inability to put their things away and will search the house for the owner of stray underwear he found in the bathroom? Why does someone knock on the bathroom door as soon as you enter the room? After spending the last thirty-some years of my life reading aloud to my children from various quality children’s literature, I cannot see a train without saying in my head, but often out loud, “A train, a ...

Surrender Some days I am fairly confident that if I were Sherlock Holmes, Isaac Newton, or Socrates I would still struggle keeping up with the mental maneuvering of my men folk at home. It really shouldn’t be that complicated. There are, after all, only chiefs living with me, no “injuns”. Hence one of my darling savages is usually jockeying for the upper hand. If I shed that light on their behavior, most of the irritating things they do and say make sense. The problem with my ability to cope lies in timing, lack of sleep, and lack of coffee. They give me their best shots when I am least able to repel the advance. Don’t moms get downtime? Isn’t 40 years of caffeine addiction portent enough? Is there no compassion from the young and strong after ten hours of blissful repose for the middle-aged, menopausal, out-of-shape, overworked, lucky if she got six hours of restless sleep due to a mind that ruminates on an endless list of responsibilities and the state of aff...

Nobody My daughter bought me some pretty measuring cups for Christmas last year. They are so pretty I don’t use them – they sit on the window sill above the kitchen sink as a decoration. The prettiest one somehow cracked in half – nobody did it. The chicken Alfredo from the Italian restaurant left over from a romantic meal my husband and I shared disappeared from the refrigerator – nobody ate it. The delicate laundry that had to be hung to dry was thrown into the dryer and shrunk – nobody forgot the Laundry Rules. Dried mud was found in the kitchen and down the hall – nobody apparently has dirty shoes. An entire bag of Twix bars evaporated leaving only the empty wrapping – nobody must have been hungry. A missing music theory book miraculously appeared after a week of fruitless search – nobody claimed to have found it. This nobody is rather sloppy and careless – not to mention a tad of a glutton – although he can also do good deeds, and not want any reward. ...

Merry Christmas The Christmas season is a sentimental time. It lends itself to memories and attempts at memory making - family get-togethers and all the dysfunction that may or may not go along with that. We sing about romantic ideas like chestnuts roasting on an open fire somewhere, of sleigh bells and silver bells, of mamas kissing  Santa, and grandma getting run over by reindeer…okay, maybe we’re not always thinking romantically about Christmas. There is the housecleaning and decorating and cooking and shopping and gift wrapping and event coordinating that goes along with the high expectations we have for this particular holiday. For some of us, it may only feel like a whole lot of work. Some of us might struggle with disappointments, broken relationships, or unpleasant memories that return with the season. So much gets added to Christmas, sometimes we can forget why we celebrate. When I was a little girl, I would sit under the Christmas tree listening to my m...