My Lovely Dwelling Place

A Luau Devotion or Purpose to Our Pits In keeping with the theme of a Hawaiian Luau, I was asked to present a talk about pits to the lovely ladies at my church. Now they could have asked me to talk about surfing or leis or the hula or poi or volcanoes – but it was pits…I’m not sure if they are trying to tell me something… Now there are all kinds of pits – the Hawaiian one for roasting pigs is called an imu, where the traditional Kalua pig is roasted, but the one we think about when we are talking about our personal pits is the one Webster defines as: Hell, or a place or situation of futility, misery, or degradation . We don’t want to be there, we don’t choose to be there, and we can’t wait to get out of there. My favorite depiction of a pit – is the ‘pit of despair’ from the movie Princess Bride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBaDcOBoHFk The albino enjoys telling Wesley that he is in the pit of despair and to not even think of trying to escape. And tha...

Home building I am blessed with a husband who enjoys the kitchen. He’s the kind of guy who can open the pantry or refrigerator doors, survey the contents, choose a few random items, and put together a meal that folks want to eat. I call this the ex nihilo gifting - making something out of nothing. I, on the other hand, need a plan and a recipe. Frankly, being in the kitchen has never been my favorite haunt. If the food doesn’t make itself wonderful in the crock pot or cook well frozen, I really don’t want anything to do with it. Although I appreciate my husband’s prowess in the kitchen, I often feel guilty. My evident failure in this area of domestic engineering, and the obvious fact that my lovely face will never adorn the cover of a Betty Crocker cookbook has led to transient feelings of inadequacy. After all, good food warms the cockles of the average young man’s heart - and we have plenty of young men around here.   Order and calm, as well, make for a pleasa...

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...