Tag Archives: reflections

Christmas in London

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On the Friday before Christmas, I oversaw a bunch of teenagers decorating a gingerbread house while wearing my Christmas tree dress, then went home and changed into corduroys and a big sweater and got a ride to the airport from a friend. My first flight was delayed, then when we did board the pilot had us waiting on the tarmac before take-off for fifteen minutes “because we would make up time in the air,” and then after we landed there was no gate for us for some reason so we waited on that tarmac for about twenty minutes, and I was so convinced that I would miss my second flight and have to wait to travel till the next day that I’d already texted my family and said as much, but when I got off the plane I ran to the other gate anyway in an act of good faith. Another man ran along with me, though perhaps not for the same flight, and more than once we got stuck behind people on the people movers who did not really seem to want to move, but then I made it to the gate, and it was still open and I boarded and sat in my seat and it was a miracle.

This Christmas was a miracle, the kind I often forget to expect.

I landed in London the next morning, and then serendipitously ran into my own brother at Southall Station as if we have spent all our lives living around the block from each other in a small town (which we have not).

The next week-and-change was rich. I wore my sister’s sweaters almost every day. Time passed in a whirl of poems, and foggy Hampstead, and unusual non-perishable food stuffs gifted by my Uncle Jon, and hauling huge pots of paneer and rice to the church, and Christmas carols in the living room, and Asian aunties, and a Christmas group chat with my dad wearing a wig as the icon, and a fourteenth century pub on Christmas Eve, and getting motion-sick on the tube, and walks in Osterley Park (give me a path to tramp across a British field every day for the rest of my life, please), and a brewery in Bermondsey, and dishes done by our friend Zack, and a shop for Christmas dinner at Mary’s big Tesco, and a nativity play with lopsided head-dresses and clear-spoken lines, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at Piccadilly, and egg-white dosas with peanut chutney, and straining cranberry sauce that was much more trouble that I intended, and cream tea at the V&A, and seven adults in a Honda Jazz, and learning that William Buckland once ate the heart of a king, and a clothes dryer piled with all the Christmas goodies like my grandma’s breezeway used to be back in 2003.

I will tell you something: I am unsure if my family has Christmas traditions anymore. Every Christmas of my adult life has been different, this one especially, full of small revelations to bask in. We followed Mary in her hat with its orange bobble through a crowded Covent Garden to track down a Christmas market that had disappeared in the night. My dad sat cheerful and quiet next to an auntie just arrived from India who speaks only Telugu and is hesitant to wear socks. George laughed a lot—often at his own jokes—and rigged up the curtain of saris for the Christmas Mela. My mom bought a floral velvet dress at Harvey Nichols where all of the dresses were very beautiful (except for one which was very ugly). And it was easy to invite in people we haven’t always had with us—my mom’s younger brother and my parents’ student this time. They too can cook and laugh and walk and sing carols and sit on strangers’ couches and hear the good news.

Because every year that news is new, every year we are children again, every year we wait to see what the miracle can possibly be. On Christmas day this year we read Tennyson: “Ring in the valiant man and free, / The larger heart, the kindlier hand; / Ring out the darkness of the land, / Ring in the Christ that is to be.” How much we still have to learn of Him, year after year.

2024 Retrospective

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On January 1st of this year, I wrote with triumph in my journal that all the mice that had been plaguing my kitchen for months were gone: “No more mice!” This did not, unfortunately, turn out to be true—full eradication would take until the spring, but we’ll draw a veil over that. Welcome to the exciting beginning of my 2024. My friend Laura sent me colorful pens for grading, and sometimes I sat in the big chair in my living room and made a mess with watercolors. 

My friend Regula and I joked that this year I entered my “club era”— full of the kinds of clubs that define your thirties. And it’s true that I seem to have become a joiner all of a sudden. Regular commitments include two—and sometimes three—book clubs (only one of which includes my parents), prayer on Thursday evenings, the women’s ministry team at church, and a couple other groups to breathe life into the curious child within me who still sometimes wants to put words on a page that preserve all the good and the odd in the world around her.

But my main commitment, in both time and heart, has been my job—spring teaching this year was hectic and sweet and occasionally made me want to tear my hair out. I cared about the kids so much I got honest-to-God angry at them sometimes and in turn they cared so much about what I had to tell them or teach that they cried earnest tears. A student told me I looked tired and when I told him that wasn’t polite, he took it as an invitation to elaborate on my lack of make up. I bought gold confetti from the dollar store to help teach a George Eliot novel, and it still lives on in my classroom to this day. And one day in mid-spring when we were all tired (not just me), I pressed pause on an honors Lit class so we could spend the period talking about the theology of clothing and I could pretend I was in grad school again.

In April, my friend Katie and I went to London to do teaching research, and it was sweet to see her experience it for the first time and also sweet to see the Victoria and Albert Museum and my sister and other people and things that matter. The week felt intense, but good for beauty and good for friendship. When it rained we sheltered under the awning at Royal Albert Hall. This coming June we’re going to go back and take eighteen teenagers with us. The planning process has sometimes been frantic, especially the financial side, because though I’m a reasonably sensible person, I’ve never been in charge of eighty thousand dollars of other people’s money before, but it will be so good to take the kids. Perhaps we too will wait out the rain at Royal Albert Hall.

My birthday was at the end of April after we returned and though some of those days felt very low, Katie and her husband threw me a birthday party with sparkly pink cocktails and at school students brought me flowers and a cookie cake and general frenetic excitement. 

And then came summer and I returned to writing (though it did not always return to me). I painted my kitchen cabinets and my bathroom. I sorted through nearly every item I own (especially the papers) and worked on applying for foster certification—including fingerprints, interviews, a fire inspection, CPR training, and a map of my home. I watched inarguably too much TV, got set up on a couple dates, listened to most of The Chronicles of Narnia on audiobook, went to the mountains for a day, and spent every single night in my own bed.

School started earlier than usual in the thick blue heat of August and for the first time I was teaching opposite one of my own former students. I took on a new role, helping manage our new(ish) house system, and spent most days teaching kids I’ve taught before, whose handwriting I know and whose growth over the years is a quiet source of hope to me, though many of them cannot yet see it. I had the same study hall advisory as last year and sometimes they argued with me about rules and facts the way kids do with their own parents perhaps because my classroom—sometimes too warm and cluttered—has some home to it. They are used to me and I am used to them.

Laura used to send me emails asking both facetiously and sincerely to hear about my adventures, because my life at the time was full of lots of unexpected newnesses, fresh delights and anxieties, but, as I’ve sifted back through, this year hasn’t seemed even to have many separate events in it, much less adventures. It has merely been long continual rhythms in various parts of my life, all layered on top of one another in syncopation. 

These have been the days of small things, the days of inviting people to this and to that, of getting a french bob and watching it grow out, of my car shutting down as if possessed while driving home from work but then continuing to operate as normal, of a long weekend in Minnesota for a cousin wedding reception by a river, of going to Trader Joe’s, of borrowing a dress to wear to a high school friend’s wedding, of leading a Bible study on Ephesians, of bringing my cello to school, of realizing that there are too many small things and I cannot, in reality, foster a child right now, of driving to Greenville in the quiet, and of going to a reading at a bookstore, hearing flash fiction, then becoming entranced by small things all over again.

December has been a gift. When I walked into church on the 1st and realized it was the first Sunday of Advent my heart made a little leap. I always love this season, perhaps because for much of it the corners of my mind become preoccupied (and therefore filled) with light. When there is more darkness than usual, things that glow become precious: light hanging from trees, light nestled in windows, light bursting out of a night sky in a blinding choir singing “gloria in excelsis Deo!” 

Tomorrow I fly to London to spend Christmas with my family, and I’ll land on the winter solstice when there will be less than eight hours of daylight. But oh, there will be candles and oh, there will be stars. In all these small things I keep remembering some lines of T.S. Eliot I discovered as a teenager, stumbled upon as if they were El Dorado:

For all things exist only as seen by Thee, only as known by Thee, all things exist

    Only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies

      Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.

Late September

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The waters are still high in the mountains right now. In all the pictures I’ve ever seen of this or any flood the water is a creamy brown—dull, unassuming, lethal only in the way it wraps itself around the waists and necks of buildings, carries in its depths the shards of bridges it has washed out and whole shells of cars and porches.

I’ve had an unplanned long weekend down here in the low hills, since school was canceled on Friday. I read a novel set in Seoul, as well as Ephesians, did some laundry, waited out a power outage on Friday then helped put on an event at church. I walked to the corner farmer’s market in the sunshine on Saturday. Tonight I’m bringing shortbread and roasted veggies to contribute to dinner at community group, and I’ve gained a tiny, stinging blister on my finger from peeling rutabagas.

In the meantime, folks evacuate homes or drive up into the mountains themselves, toward that softly ugly water, to search out family they haven’t heard from since the storm came.

Tomorrow for me is work and Arabian Nights and Wordsworth and grading and leftovers for lunch in a classroom that’s just slightly on this side of too warm and coming home rightly tired at the end of the afternoon.

All these are the facts of the matter, and I balk at the task of ripping the threads of meaning from their core and arranging them before your eyes. You can see them well enough yourself. 

It’s late September. The sun is golden warm, knives are busy in four p.m. kitchens, and He holds our lives in his hands.

On Being Eleven (and All the Other Ages)

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When I was sixteen years old and taking AP Lit, Mr. Powell had us read a story called “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros. I still think about it often. In fact, I’ve thought of it at so many stretching, tender junctures of my life that I suspect it’s framed much of my perspective on growing up and aging (which, though we don’t always articulate them the same way, are in practice essentially identical.)

In the story, the narrator is turning eleven, but she is having a hard birthday—hard in all the small ways that feel searing when you’re a preteen. An abandoned sweater is found in the coatroom of her elementary school, and a classmate tells the teacher it belongs to our birthday girl, who is then, to her bone-deep mortification, made to put on a sweater which is not hers, which is old, stretched out, and smells bad. She cannot find the words to explain that it is not hers, and she bursts into tears in front of the whole class on her eleventh birthday. Because, she explains, she’s eleven that day, but she’s not only eleven.

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t…You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay.

It was half my life ago when I first read that passage, so now I’ve spent years and years being conscious of those layered ages as each new one stretches over me like another skin: seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two and twenty-six and twenty-eight and thirty and so on and so forth. And I know this is ridiculous, but in the last year or two, I’ve begun to feel that those previous years have gotten to be too far away, separated from the surface of myself by too many coats of film, that I’ve got to mine down into myself to reach them, and mining takes effort and a pick-ax. 

I want to reach them, though. My fourteen-year-old self was foolish and dramatic and selfish, but boy, did she know about joy. And myself at twenty-two, though terrified of nearly everything, knew the value of growth. She knew how much she needed it and, more than that, she knew how to make it happen. I am firmly adult now and I too easily to tell myself the lie that the main goal of life is good administrative functioning—writing the to-do lists, making it to as many meetings as possible, being eminently reliable, having answers to all the questions that anyone might ask at any given time—when, if I remembered to be eleven and eighteen and twenty-seven as well as thirty-two, I would recall that the actual main goals of life are simpler and larger: to walk faithful and humble, to allow Love to make me new, to laugh without fear of the future.

So here’s to letting the oil of gladness soften the layers the years have made, to becoming like a little child, and to trying to make time for everything, but always leaving an hour slot open for nothing, an hour when I can walk my neighborhood in the sunshine or the rain, softly telling myself strange stories of what could be.

Adult Cool Kids

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You grew up, I think, watching movies and TV shows full of the cool kid archetype. The cool kid was good-looking and confident, had boundless social goodwill with others (usually even the grownups) and got away with being mean to the not-so-cool kid: the shy, the smart, the self-aware, the try-hard, the poor, the awkward, the lonely. The cool kid usually had hair which was a sinister shade of blond, while the outcast (never blond) was inevitably the hero. You liked these stories—everyone liked these stories—because they taught you that you did not deserve to be treated badly, that one day the cool kids in your own benighted school would be penalized (probably publicly) for their meanness, and that all underdogs would ultimately win love, respect, admiration, and maybe the country of Genovia.

Of course the word cool, when applied to a person’s general demeanor, really just means that you have social capital, that you are well-liked without seeming to make too much of an effort, that you carry yourself with confidence. But a word is never just a word, so for most of us who have ever had the excruciating gift of being an adolescent, “cool” carries the weight of all of the above. Even now, all these years into adulthood, there’s cool food and cool clothes and cool music and cool cars and cool shoes and cool water tumblers and cool bedroom furniture and probably cool gas stations, and God forbid any of us ever forget it.

And there are still cool kids. Wherever people gather, however old they are, they seem to eventually stratify, and some effortless folks rise buoyant to the top. Who these people are depends on context. Some groups of adults still unfortunately reward the mean among us, allowing them to rule: those who call the new hire “weird” behind their back, who text their friends under the table when the woman they don’t like speaks up in a meeting, who form ranks and never break them, who are horrified at the thought of inviting an outsider to book club or run club or crochet club. I hope you have managed to avoid the murky communities that foster this kind of adult cool kid. 

You probably have. You probably know that in many places it is cool to be the welcomer, the warm laugher, the one who remembers everybody’s names, who tells good stories and better jokes, who listens, who shares their cool resources indiscriminately. In the right sort of adulthood, the cool kid is the kind one.

But you cannot, under any circumstances, tell them that they’re cool. That is the rule. Sure, they will be flattered that they are well-liked, but the truth of the matter is, they watched the same movies you did when you were all twelve. They, like you, probably identified with the underdog’s journey, and they too are innately suspicious of blondes for no good reason on God’s green earth. If you tell them they are cool they will worry that rather than “having friends,” which is what they thought they were doing, they have actually been existing in a semi-isolated sphere of potentially sinister social power, awaiting their eventual humiliation which may well take place on the stage of a literal school auditorium.

I mean, fine, if they actually are as confident as being “cool” implies, they won’t worry about all that. But you still can’t tell them, because none of us like to look at our most immediate spheres of influence and think about some people having more social capital than others. And to some extent, that’s the right impulse. “Cool” is a juvenile concept. Yet the things we learn as children shape our core indelibly—they mold our bones.

And maybe the part of what “cool” has always meant to us that we can’t shake is that to be cool means to be effortless, not to have to try—not even a little bit—and still succeed anyway. But, of course, that describes none of us, not a single solitary one. We all put in so much effort. If we are accomplishing anything positive—even simple kindnesses—on a regular basis, then we are trying. So adult cool kids are kind of a mirage. If you get to know them well enough to see behind the curtain where all the strivings and the worries and the failures and the getting back up and dusting themselves off live, you will find no longer a cool kid, but a person: an underdog who does not want to have their hair laughed at and who would probably very much like to be your friend. (And so you should be. That would be cool of you.)

The Summer of the Project

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This has been the summer of the project for me. Said projects have included sorting through all my papers stretching back to childhood, painting the bathroom dark purple, beginning the application process to do respite foster care, cleaning beneath the sink where for a few dreadful months a legion of mice took up residence, organizing students to come into school on their summer break so I can interview them on camera for a larger undertaking, painting the kitchen cabinets dark teal, listening to all of Narnia on audiobook, making lists of things to read and places to clean and food to cook, emailing with a travel agent about the course I’m leading to London with a teacher-friend next summer, hanging curtains in my living room that actually block light, finishing the non-fiction piece I started last summer about my endless adventure on Amtrak, and coming across a bag of cut-up t-shirts and deciding to make a quilt, though Lord only knows when that will happen.

All these things are for more than keeping myself busy. I paint because it improves my home, and therefore, by gentle degrees, my life. I plan to foster so that I can share that gently improved life with others. I take on creativity of various kinds to give myself a stable basis for joy.

I suppose on a larger scale, projects in general are all part of the good life, perhaps most of all in their unfinished state—when we are in the midst of the doing, the nailing the roof tiles, the writing the chorus of the song, the signing of the umpteenth form. Because we were designed to try. We are the strivers, the dreamers, the sweat-ers, the laughers, the wanderers and the wonderers, and the pursuers of goodness.

And the best of it is that though in our bones we are tryers, we do not finish the good work. The Lord is the one who brings it completion, who perfects our faith. That truth makes trying much easier, the burden of it light. His promise that he will finish the project that is us, the project that is all creation, his promise that he has already done it, means that we are free to try our best and understand just how little that is, to receive participation trophies in the form of abundant grace, to be prodigal children stumbling home reciting our apology speeches as our father crosses the finish line to meet us, to become transformed children of God waking up with paint still staining our nail beds to each fresh morning in which we can do it all again.

Remaking with Layers

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We’re starting again before the planned six months’ hiatus is up, stepping gentle back into this space.

There is not much new to tell you except that all things are being made new. This is hard to remember because usually newness comes in layers, like pale watercolor seeped over paper again and again or translucent fabric laid over and over itself, until what was sheer becomes solid, vibrant, real. This imperceptible, unhurried layering is how relationships form roots, how children grow, how people are transformed. 

The last few weeks my classroom has held more tears than usual: over Henry V, over test grades, over The Velveteen Rabbit, over friendships, over Dickinson poems, over endings, over everyday—which is to say eternal—pains and joys.

None of these tears have been mine—teenagers’ emotions have the volume turned up on them—but I have been grateful for them each time because they’ve reminded me of the becoming that’s happening before my often-short sighted eyes. On one hand these are just kids, but on the other, no one is just anything. Their tears, their laughter, even those occasional holy mixtures of the two are another sheer layer of film, another millimeter’s thickness in the story God is telling. We forget too often.

But sometimes we’re reminded. Thursday night was the much-beloved Senior Recognition ceremony at Caldwell and as each of the students—some of whom I frankly struggled to teach last year—rose in turn to be spoken to by their teachers, I thought that though they stood quiet, they were loud in feeling. So many of them looked raw, just-hatched, shining, frightened, hopeful, transformed. For a moment, I could see all their layers at once.

I was struck by the same changed look on their faces, the different angle to their shoulders, the next evening at their graduation. This newness was a wild mystery, and it brought home to me my own ineptitude. After, I drove from the graduation venue to school to see the newly-minted seniors paint the rock—their rightful territory—for the first time. But the whole drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids I’d left behind, whether I had taught them well enough, whether I had loved them well enough, how badly I had failed them, and most, beyond my own sometimes-misguided efforts, what a strange, unknowable work God was doing and would continue to do in their young souls and frames, what he was building with a thousand repeated whispers.

And then, as I stood at ten p.m. in the parking lot of what was my high school and is now my vocation, watching students chase each other to slap wet pink handprints on their friends’ arms and legs, the mystery of divine remaking sat heavy on my shoulders. They blasted country music from one speaker and then another and I wondered whether these kids could understand the color, the wholeness, what the Lord wanted to build within them.

I suspect the answer is no, they do not comprehend, just as I do not comprehend. We will none of us understand what it means to be real, saturated purple and gold people, to step fully into the presence of the God we were made to image until we reach that other shore. But I am glad that these kids can weep with remorse when they have hurt someone and shriek with joy at a song they love, that they can abandon self-consciousness, tilt their faces to the sky, and let God get down to the slow and certain work remaking his people, his world.

2023 Retrospective

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My 2023 started with a walk with my friend Heather, visiting from New England. That evening we sat in my warm living room across from each other and wrote poems about the year and other stuff we’d seen. Then those first few days brought some difficult things at work—quiet things, heavy things, which in retrospect I may have mishandled in many ways. An inauspicious start, but I’m not grading this year on my own performance.

In very rough chronological order, this is what followed:

I took a cold little hike out in Rockingham with Karen and CJ and a hundred strangers. I read a lot and chatted with my coworkers even more in the quiet cracks of planning periods. I got more colds than usual and collected and organized all the digital curriculum guides in the two upper schools.

I had a writer’s retreat in the grey winter hills of the Piedmont where I wrote a bit and took more baths than there were days. I covered the walls of my bedroom in curtain rods, so I could hang my clothes from hooks like garlands. I let students read my novel in bits and pieces, and while waiting for planes and trains I made use of long layovers the best way I know how: talking to friends and walking to see the art.

I flew to Jolene’s wedding and let the Vancouver drizzle permeate my skin. I wrote postcards for my students before their AP exam, and spent two months preparing in excess for a half-hour chapel talk for the high school. Now that I have a place of my own I discovered that I am sometimes unsure of what to do with myself when I am in it—I rattle and chafe—but at school a coworker friend bought a TENS unit so the kids could simulate period pain, and I knew the best response to that was laughter.

Over spring break I went to Tennessee with my mom and, with my aunt, we walked around Cheekwood and saw model trains and spring blooms and paneled libraries. My freshmen illustrated Dante’s circles of hell (and added Where’s Waldo to many of them), I went to a Kentucky Derby party for the first time since childhood, and while on my way to a sweet and full family reunion in the brown and green mountains of Colorado I received news that my client Bonnie, who took up most of my working hours when I lived in Wisconsin, had died.

I went blonde, later covered that in henna, then a few months later chopped it all off, because changing my hair has always been a reliable constant. I took a long train journey for all of July, leaving my life behind to take up temporary residence in the lives of half a dozen friends: attending the birthday party of a little girl I’d only barely met, watching Survivor, chatting with the neighbor kids, and peering up at fireworks from beneath an umbrella. Then I came home in August and killed a couple house plants through well-intended negligence.

I watched Love Island with friends, because you can’t be teachers all the time, and waited six months to get my car repaired after running into a tree. I purloined a couch from storage at school for my classroom, was immediately asked to return it, and then, in perhaps the greatest miracle of the decade, was gifted an armchair and ottoman. My sister came home for a few months, taking lots of walks and visiting every thrift store and church she could find. I made new friends here and there, but struggled to maintain the friendships I already had as I sank into fall. Regardless, I watched people’s dogs for them and cleaned out my gutters.

I went to Charleston with my family where we ate at The Obstinate Daughter and played trivia, and I discovered that I do, after all, like the beach. A student cried over a test I wrote for the first time in years, and I planned trips to London and maybe to Tahoe for next year. I went to the zoo with a friend and her kids, and was asked to write two essays for church, one of which led to me teaching a George Herbert poem around a campfire to a bunch of open-faced grown women. And despite my own grown-ness, I found myself more and more often the recipient of generosity from those around me—rides and patience and time.

God has been just as good to me this year as he is every year, and many of the gifts enumerated above echo his long goodness, but I’ve felt myself straining to keep afloat, despite all that. I know this primarily because writing—which used to be so full of joy, like stepping into sunlight—has become stale, difficult, full of grey sand. I’ve posted here every month since I was eighteen—more than thirteen years—but I’m going to take a sabbatical now. I’m working only within the framework of my own rules, but those rules have often been fairly definite things, so I need a fancy word to feel as if this is allowed. Sabbatical it is. I will return to this space—I think—in six months.

The fact is, I’ve felt both older and younger—more squinting, childlike, and lost—recently, and I might as well dwell in that, holding my empty hands out and taking what others have to offer. Last week, my friend Katie gave me a basic lesson in watercolor and told me she was going to start at the beginning, like I knew nothing, and, sitting at her kitchen table with the paint brush I wasn’t sure how to hold, I said that made sense. Wendell Berry wrote that “when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,” and he may be right. Yesterday was Christmas. I sat with my family for nearly two hours opening the presents that were piled under the tree. It was a very good day, and I thought of Mary two thousand years ago, picturing her as the song does: “not used to the light, but having to squint her eyes in the sunshine,” yet chosen and beloved by God, nonetheless.

The day school let out a week or so ago, my siblings came over in the evening. I was very tired, so they heated up dinner and we ate together. After, as we were cleaning up, my sister asked for a container for the little bit of peas that were left. I reached into the cabinet and pulled out a tiny container the size of two bottle caps stacked on one another, and held it out to her, giggling hysterically. In the space of about five seconds my laughter dissolved into tears. Mary took the container from me, told me to sit down, and began to rummage in the cupboard herself. So there you have it—I don’t always know what to make of things anymore, or what to say about or do about them. But I will treasure them all up, and ponder them in my heart.

Boxes of Glory

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In my bedroom, there’s a box on the low shelf next to the armchair that’s usually piled with the clothes I think I may wear the next day. And in that box is everything: every bulletin I came home with from a church service, every pamphlet from a historical house I toured, every name tag from every retreat weekend and every map of every camp I’ll probably never go back to. That box contains the last few years of life: sparkly leis, birthday cards, notes from students, lists of my own hopes and dreams when I was feeling low, and lists of chores on Saturdays. 

I don’t forget that the box is there—I’m always stuffing more things into it every few days, every time I tidy, but I do forget that what it holds is so good. The conventional wisdom says that to remember is to feel melancholy, to compare what we have now to what we had then, and wallow in a sort of gentle sadness, to miss what we once were and now lack. But I’ve never really thought that argument held much water. It never made sense to me.

Yesterday a friend texted me to ask if I could find a page of Christmas songs from the year before, so I pulled out the box and disemboweled it on my lap and across my bed. And there were all the good things—joyful, painful, unremarkable, and otherwise—of the last three or four years in pink and yellow and scrawling pen. As I unfolded creased papers and spread open folders, I was aware that remembering these things, these past realities, makes me just as happy as I was the day each of them originally arrived in my hands—often happier, because I’ve wised up to their significance. In fact, upon reflection, these paper and ink memories often reappear from the box infused with a divine purpose, a little extra glow that I couldn’t understand when I first received them. “Oh,” I think as I flip through one by one, “Of course! God was doing that, and that, and that all along.” Their small, matter-of-fact glories don’t fade, but become brighter every year.

So sadness, even the gentle kind, doesn’t come into the equation for me. I sat in church this morning wondering why that was as the preacher read from Isaiah: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.” And when those words found their home burning warm in my chest, just as they have the hundreds of times I’ve heard them before, just as they have in the chests of all the children of God through the millenia, I remembered. I remembered that to recall the Lord’s blessings is to recall that he is capable of blessing, that he desires to bless, and that he promises that he will again. The fact is, in the kingdom God is building, every ordinary glory is the harbinger of a splendor even greater.

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end

And the first coming of the second coming.

-T.S. Eliot

A Thanksgiving Blessing for My Students

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Your dreams will change one day. They will be less ideal, less monetary, less shiny. The chrome will wear off. I suspect you will dream of reasonable estimates on car repairs. Of a comfortable afternoon sat on a friend’s couch or porch, of the far-scattered people you love all together in a room for once, of keeping the sticky fingerprints off the glass of your storm door.

I can’t tell you much more than that—only that you will change and your dreams along with you. What I can tell you is that I have dreams for you, hopes for you, blessings I want to lay across your shoulders like an ancient robe. There are already too many of them to count and I am sure they’ll only multiply with time, but they begin like this:

May your fingers and toes stay warm in bed and may you laugh so loudly for joy that it startles the birds out of the trees. May you wander to the far ends of the earth, but never be gone from home too long. May you gain calluses from chopping wood or making music or knitting very small hats, or any number of the good tasks hands are for. May reading fill you rather than drain you. May everything you cook make the kitchen smell good. May you learn to love The Wind in the Willows and may you own at least one truly comfortable chair. May you treat both your grades and your bank account with the dispassionate responsibility which is all that ephemeral numbers deserve, and may you, at least once or twice, need to wait for the city bus.

May you learn the strange wisdom of both patience and action. May you always sing out. May you resist resentment and get good sleep and may memorized scripture run through your mind when you least expect it. May you sometimes stand alone in the stillness of the woods. 

May you never assign a number or a letter or any pronouncement from human lips to your worth, but instead consign your worth to Love. May you weep most often for others and laugh most often at yourself.

May your bar for those you allow to be in community with you be as low as the wide threshold of your front door. May it admit the weak, the wounded, the weird, the sick, the sore, the huddled masses who have very little in common with you beyond the hearts in their chests which are twisted into the same tight knot. 

And may your bar for kindness be high. May you be quick to listen, slow to speak, and quickest of all to forget yourself. May you be like my grandpa Billy, so certain in the knowledge that Jesus is his friend and that his life is greatly blessed through no particular wise act of his own, that you regularly allow those around you to take advantage of your gentleness and generosity, because what are those blessings of your life for, if not sharing.

May you do the work that falls to your lot and ask for help when you need it. May truth always be more important than success. May you remember that, like every person around you, you carry great power to both heal and destroy, and that you will rarely know when you are wielding it. Step softly and don’t worry so much about the big stick.

May your life, over its many years, become a map of the many things that both you and those around you may have intended for evil, but which God intended for good. May wildflowers burst forth from cracked pavement and fresh springs from dry ground. At each turn, may you raise an ebenezer to remember what he has done. May you carve it into your heart as eternal blessing and pray its words over your children and all that fall into your care. May you not be shy in thanking the Lord for his gifts.