Month: September 2012

“Isn’t it funny how we try to busy ourselves with ‘stuff’ just so we don’t have to think about how far we pushed God out of our lives?”

-Anne Slamkowski, Revealing Faith

I read this question in a book I just received from a friend of mine.  Did I mention that the friend also happens to be the author of the book?  Isn’t that exciting?!  Imagine my surprise when I read in her post on Facebook (of all places) that her “new book is coming out September 1st!”  What???  Of course, I had to order it!!  (And I requested an autograph, too, ’cause I’m kind of pushy like that).

Anyhoo, last week this little gem arrived in my mailbox:

It was complete with a lovely note and autograph, per my request.  (Well, technically I didn’t request the lovely note, but I’d really hoped for one.  What a gift!)

So…let me fill you in on how I know this author!

From the moment I met Anne Slamkowski she was an instant friend who I was so happy (and grateful) to have come into my path.  We’d both traveled (somewhat reluctantly) to the mountains of Utah from the Midwest.  Raising our young families in a valley between mountains was not something either one of us flatland Midwestern gals had ever imagined for ourselves, and we weren’t entirely sure why we’d been brought so “far from home.”  Still, we must have trusted enough– especially in finding each other –that somehow we’d  been brought together for a reason.

One of those reasons (as it turned out for me) was so I could become better acquainted with another friend named Lisa, who happened to be (and still is) one of Anne’s best friends.  Lisa proved to be a tremendous source of strength and support for me when– as quickly as I’d come to know her– Anne was yanked from my life due to a relocation for her husband’s job “back home” in the Midwest.  (And if you’re following this right, you’ll note that I insisted on placing my grief of being left behind by a brand new friend over Lisa’s grief of being left behind by the same person who happened to be one of her best friends.  Dear Lord, do you see why she’s so special??)

Anyhoo, as I was saying  both Lisa and I were saddened to see Anne and her family leave Utah, but her absence paved the way for our friendship to develop.  And to this day it is Lisa that I refer to as  my “sister” because we are of similar heart and mind.  Also, it’s quite fun to have a sister with my same first name.  It makes me think of “Darrell and my other brother Darrell” from the old Newhart show.    Now, six years later, all three of us reside in separate states, but I still hold tight to those memories of the time the three of us spent together in the same “hometown.”

That’s why today  I’m happy to tell you a little about Anne and her wonderful book and this great blog she writes.  I finished her book last night after just starting it yesterday.  It’s probably not exactly meant to be read cover to cover like that since it’s full of reflective questions and all, but since I am privileged enough to know some of Anne’s story, I found myself wanting to read it all RIGHT NOW to know the parts of Anne’s story that I didn’t know.

So I read it all.

And there were things I underlined and put little hearts and smiley faces by because I loved them or they made me smile.

And then there were questions to answer.

About God.

And me.

And our relationship.

And with Anne’s urging (she’s always been a good urger)  I feel inspired to write about something of which Anne calls us all to be mindful.   Between her blog–found on her beautifully titled website “Making Room for God” which you can find right  here— and her book Revealing Faith  (which you can order from the website),   she is determined to make us all a little more mindful of putting God first in our lives.

So, I’ve been thinking about that.

And since Anne asks lots of questions of her readers on her blog, and I almost never do (because my blog is all self-focused and whatnot), I thought I’d go ahead and share some of my answers to the one lingering question I think about every time I visit her site.

Because it’s a really good question.

And that question is this:

How do I make room for God in my life?

And I’ve been kind of curious to see what answers I  come up with.

And I  want to share my answers because until recently (in the past couple of years or so), I’d somehow bought into the belief that there’s was a “right” way to spend time with God.  And that “right” way felt really reverent and formal and kind of forced and uncomfortable for me.  But I still thought it was “right”  and as a result I thought that all the other times I was thinking about God or wondering with God or even marveling at God didn’t really “count.”  But then I found a spiritual advisor and discovered the Desert Fathers (and Mothers), and mysticism, and Richard Rohr and the Benedictines and the Franciscans, and most recently dipped into some of the Eastern practices for getting to know God, and I started realizing that almost any time spent thinking about or being with God is a valid part of developing a relationship with Him.

It’s how mysticism helped move our relationship forward– God’s and mine– because while He was all Fine and Perfect?  I was kind of stuck.  And when I discovered the mystics and their writings, they pointed out to me that the reverent, formal prayer I struggled with… is right.

Yep.  You read that correctly.  Formal, reverent prayer is right.

But they went on to say that all that thinking and wondering and marveling that I was doing?

It was right, too.

Think of it this way:   it’s like adhering to the belief that the only part of your relationship that matters with your spouse or your friends and loved ones is the time you spend talking to them, and then making the realization that your relationship is based not only on talking to them,  but also any time you spend thinking about them or wondering what they’re up to or remembering something they told you, or sharing stories about things they did or said.  (Of course, Anne does a good job of pointing out that if you’re not talking to them at all, –which  almost all of us are guilty of at least some of the time, especially when it comes to God– then that’s not so good either).   But, I’m working here on the  assumption that you already are talking to them/Him.   Now, I don’t know about you, but when someone says to me, “So… [your husband/son/daughter/mom/dad, etc.] tells me you are…” and they go on to tell me something that  my loved ones or friends shared with them about me, that tells me that even when we’re apart, they are still thinking of me.

And that only adds to the things we say to each other when we’re together.

(And yes, I do realize that God is always with us, and never apart from us, Smartypants, but sometimes we do find ourselves drifting from Him.  Anyway, it’s an analogy.  Which by the way I  stink at.   But it’s the best I could do).

That’s kind of what mysticism is.  And once I embraced this mystical element to my relationship with God, I changed my mind about there being only one “right” way to spend time with Him, (or, as Anne points out in her book:   God changed my mind for me) and I just started kind of hanging out with Him.

And I thought you might like to know how I do it.

Hang out with God, I mean.

So,  later this week I’ll be sharing some of the answers I came up with about how I make room for God in my life.

And I hope you’ll put some thought into how you do it, too.

And then I hope you’ll leave a comment or drop me a note about it.  Not so we can stand up proudly and say, “Isn’t it great that we do this?” (well, OK, maybe a little of that…) but rather in the hopes that if we make a conscious effort to consider what it is we are already doing,  it will help us to see and hear– through each other– more of what God may be asking of us.

Because– as Anne’s question has reminded me– when it comes to having a relationship with someone we refer to as The Eternal One… isn’t there always room for more?

“All too often, we think that God wants us to offer up our individuality, to become something other than who we are, but that’s not what God desires at all.  God wants the exact opposite:  God wants us to sacrifice those things that keep us from becoming unique individuals.”

– Woodene Koenig-Bricker

I can’t tell you how long I’ve tried to be someone other than who I was meant to be.

But as I stare down the big 4-0, I am beginning to see more clearly (and accept more willingly) who that person is.  I also see more clearly the things I need to sacrifice to become that person.  And don’t laugh, but I think who I’m meant to be may have something to do with writing.  (And yes, I realize as you’re reading what I’ve written, that this is shocking only to me).

From the time I was very young I enjoyed keeping journals of my thoughts and dreams.  Over the years I’ve started and stopped countless other journals, too.  It seems that the idea of putting pen to paper has always been something I’ve enjoyed, even though it rarely comes easily.  Plus, there’s the fact that when I was in high school I won a state award for two essays I wrote.  (FYI, so did a good friend of mine who went on to become the best wordhound I know).  And, when I was in college, studying for my English education degree (maybe another clue that I enjoyed the language arts?) , I  had a college professor (a published author herself) encourage me to try to publish a short story I’d written.    So I took her advice,  sent it off to one magazine, received a very polite rejection letter, and decided I was too thin-skinned for that business.

But what I’ve come to realize is that all these years–until only very recently– I was only willing enough to be that  one-in-a-kajillion person who sits down and writes a flawless rough draft of a book that gets sent off to a big publisher, becomes an instant best seller, and then goes on Oprah to tell about it.

(I know.   Should be any day now, right?)

Yes, somewhere inside me that’s still what I want.  The only problems are that

1.  I have no ideas for a book,

2.  Oprah’s show is over, and

3.  the loss of anonymity that fame requires scares me a little.

 (Ok, it scares me a lot).

So now what?

Well, I’ll tell you what.   I’ve realized if I want to be successful at all, I need to open myself up to more.  More failure.  More rejection.  More, well…writing.

And to do that I need to sacrifice some things.  I need to sacrifice my fears;   Fear of failure.  Fear of rejection.  Even fear of success.  And I need to sacrifice my expectations;  expecting fame, expecting validation, expecting acceptance.  And I need to sacrifice my time;  time doing anything other than what I claim I want to do so much– write.

Do you know what occurred to me the other day?  It occurred to me that I couldn’t possibly count for you the times in my life I’ve thought, Oh, I’d love to be a writer because I’ve thought it so much.  But I’d almost never write.   Especially not for others to see.  I felt like I wasn’t “qualified.”  I only wanted the “How to  Write a Best Seller for Dummies” version of writing.  Not the raw, gritty, self-sacrificing kind of writing.

But the other day, I had to ask myself, what does “qualified to write,” even mean?  Lots of people write.  Books even.  So I took a look at my “credentials” and you know what I  saw?  An award-winning writer (I’m fighting the inclination to put “award-winning” in quotes since it was from high school and all…), who received a nod from a published author and who holds a college degree in English.   Hmmm…seems like maybe my “credentials” aren’t so off the mark after all.

Sure, they may be outdated.  But the experience is still my personal truth.

So what occurred to me the other day, then, was that what I’ve been doing up to this point was actually no different than if someone said to me, “Oh, I’d love to be a marathoner.”  And I’d say to them, “Oh?  How often and how far do you run?”  And they’d reply, “Oh, no.  I don’t run very often, because I only want to run marathons.”

Essentially what I’ve been doing is no less laughable:  writing when I felt like it, sometimes publishing it on Facebook, sometimes not.  Bit by bit, I’ve gotten more ideas, and I’ve gone with them.  Piece by piece I’m feeling my way through this interweb of stories and blogs and articles out there trying to make a go of it.  But I’ve not been able to accept that this is what I want to do.  If “this” is anything at all.

And then I decided something.

I decided to exercise a little discipline.  I decided that since I can see small dots of encouragement and nods in this direction throughout my whole life…well, then this may be worth connecting those dots to see what picture they create for me.  Of course, the scariest part is, I really don’t know how it will end.  I honestly don’t even know how I want it to end.  The truth is my little blog here?  It may be a stepping stone to something else.  Or it may become just another blog in a large bloggy graveyard of forgotten blogs.

But I won’t know unless I try.

And I can’t try unless I’m willing.

So I’ve also decided that rather than focus on the possibility of failure, or the possibility of success, I’m going to focus my willingness to accept my fate by getting to work writing.  (At least my heart has decided to accept this…my mind is still pretty bent out of shape about it and holding onto the dream of writing a best seller and landing on Oprah).

But I found this little gem to keep me going.  I don’t know where it orginated, but I found it on Pinterest and I’ve pinned it to my board:

“You’ll have to wake up tomorrow just like you did today.   If you despise repetition, what you’re really saying is that you despise life itself.”

-Kathleen Norris

“Spring cleaning” is something I try to do at least once a year.  I said try since housekeeping in general is not something I’m very motivated to do on a regular basis.   And the very fact that we’re well past spring and I’m just now getting around to it should be a good indicator that it doesn’t happen on a regular basis.

You’d think  since one of the main parts of being a stay-at-home is to be at home, I’d like to have things clean while I’m here, wouldn’t you?  Well, I DO like to have things clean.  I really do.   I just don’t necessarily want to be the one who cleans them.  So, more often than not, I settle for things to appear to be clean, even if I know they could be cleaner.

For instance, every once in a great while I’ll pick something up and dust under it, but most of the time, if I can get away with dusting around it, I will.  Sometimes if people are coming over and I haven’t had time to prepare,  I’ll dump excess papers and clutter into empty drawers (my kitchen desk drawers are deliberately empty for this very reason), and I have also been known to hide heaps of clean laundry that has yet to be folded inside my closet until the company disperses.  In other words, if I were “Dear Heloise” you’d be far more likely to get a tip from me that says something like, If company’s on the way and you need to do a quick clean up in the kitchen, load up the dishwasher as full as you can with dirty dishes and hide any other dirty dishes in the stove until they’re gone,  because I’m just not into making my own household cleaners out of baking soda and seltzer.  Or whatever.

I’ve had this love/hate relationship with housekeeping as far back as I can remember.  As kids, it was our job (my brother’s and mine) to dust on the days that our mom  vacuumed.   We also either washed or dried the dishes after supper.  These were our primary chores, with some others sprinkled in from time to time.   And oh, how I’d always want to rush through the cleaning to get on with whatever fun  was to be had that day!  I’d push dust around, I hide dirt behind, I’d scoop crumbs under any nook or cranny I could find.  (Which wasn’t much because my mom kept the house pretty spotless).  So this was  clearly not learned behavior.  At least not learned from my mom.

But, I can remember going to a friend’s house one day and seeing a sink full of clean dishes stacked high in the dish rack of their sink and a dish towel draped across the top.  “What’s that?”  I asked, pointing to the pile of dishes.

“What?  The dishes?” my friend said.

“Yeah.  Why are they like that?”  I asked (my friend clearly thought I was a total idiot, but I’d honestly never witnessed such an event).

“They’re in the rack so they can dry,” my friend said.

“Dry?  By themselves?”  I asked, dumbfounded.  And folks, I think it was right then and there decades before Pinterest existed that I “pinned” that picture to my memory and decided I would someday use my dishrack to let the dishes “dry by themselves” too, instead of drying them all by hand.  And so it seemed that from a very early age, I was more inclined to  “tuck things away” and “tend to them later” as a way of housekeeping, than “clean as you go” the way my mother taught me.

The only problem is, it doesn’t take long to fill up that dish rack.   And very often there are many other dirty dishes waiting their turn to be washed and dried.

Oh sure, I’ve tried a few things over the years to better stay on top of things.   I’ve assigned jobs to the kids (who almost never do them to my standards, which, as I already stated don’t seem incredibly high) or they whine and bicker so much about how unfair it is that so and so always get the easy jobs, etc. that assigning the jobs became more work than the actual housework.  That’s when I tried letting them pick their jobs for the week and I assigned an allowance amount to each chore with the understanding that there were also things I’d expect them to do without being paid at all.  This has worked better, but they seem to only be motivated to sign up for work when they are running low on funds.  Suffice it to say, it’s still a work in progress.

But enough about them.  How about me?  How could I get excited about doing housework?  That was the burning question.  Or, if I couldn’t be excited maybe I could at least make it all somehow seem worthwhile.

I will admit that I’d already realized good housekeeping was really nothing more than forming good habits.  And I’d recently read this very funny post over at zenhabits.net that made me realize that I’m not the only one who starts with very grandiose ideas about starting new habits only to fail at them…and quickly.  So I realized that if I was going to have any success at this, I would have to tie housework to something that I wanted to do everyday and insist that I do the chore (or chores) before I could do the fun thing.  This seemed simple enough, but what could I tie it to all the chores that fall under the umbrella of “housework” that I would want to do badly enough that I would do the chore…without cheating?

Hmm…nothing was coming to mind.

Except nuns.

Images of nuns (albeit probably from old TV shows, especially because they were images in my mind that were in black and white) of nuns humming to themselves content with jobs like scrubbing a giant floor with a toothbrush, or looking totally at peace while ironing one drab piece of clothing after another.  Maybe that was more the idea.  Rather than how to make housework fun, maybe I could figure out how to be at peace while doing housework.

And then I had it!  Meditation!  Meditation is one thing I want to do every day (I’m lousy at it, too, but I do enjoy trying) and maybe there was a way to tie housework to meditation.  (Quick sidebar here on meditation because so often meditation is misunderstand to be some deep, complicated, introspective quiet time where one must sit cross-legged, with closed eyes chanting “OOOOOOOhm,” over and over again.  It’s my understanding that while that is one way to meditate,  what I’m talking about is the bigger picture of meditation that I once read best described as this:  If prayer is talking to God, then meditation is listening to God.)

So I wondered, could it be done?  Could I hear God in the soapy water of my kitchen sink, or in the hum of the vacuum?  It seemed too good to be true!  I Googled the web and found some other posts and articles on the subject and it seemed as though this was no new idea.  In fact, I realized, how many books had I read (have on my shelf, in fact?) about the early Christian fathers and mothers of the desert whose very existence it seemed was to find peace in everything they did…including housework?  Wouldn’t that be something if I could do housework and feel…at peace?

That’s when I found this article and realized the one BIG STRUGGLE I always had with housework.   It was the fact that I could never be done with it.   Sure, chores could be done for a while, but never done-done.  Only done-until-next-time, which, when you throw kids into the mix it usually means whatever you’re cleaning is getting dirty as you’re cleaning it.   So…what was the point?

The point, I suddenly understood was peace.  To be at peace with never being done.  To understand everything as a “work in progress”.  What if I just did the chores accepting that they would get dirty again?  And what if I focused instead on the process of cleaning them for right now?  I found out that to be “mindful in the moment” of anything you’re doing is really a form of meditation.  It’s a chance for God to enter into your life in the simplest of ways.

I had to try it.

I decided to start with the dishes.  And even though the dishwasher was still partially empty, I decided to do all the ones that were on the counter by hand.  There were quite a few pots and pans, our drinking cups (which in a brilliant shopping move one day I decided would be “no big deal” that they weren’t dishwasher safe), and several odds and ends like the kitchen grater, a few plates and bowls as well as several annoying cans and whatnot that needed to be rinsed out for recycling.

OK.  I dove in.  I filled the sink,

I washed.  I rinsed.  I tried to focus on what I was doing.

Immediately my mind would wander to my To Do list, to wondering what the kids were up to at school, to anything but the task at hand.

I tried again.

I’d think of something else.

Focus.

Wash.  Dry.  What do we need from the grocery store?

Stop.

Focus.

Wash. Dry.

After several startling realizations of just how difficult it was to stay in the moment and think about the thing I was doing, I finally had some success.  And you know what?  I think God did visit me in that moment.  As I looked down and saw the suds in the same sink as the brown water from the brownie pan I just washed I saw cleanliness and dirt coexisting together.  Seemed a lot like me.  After all, don’t I have spots on my soul that glisten with the sun, and spots on my soul that really need another look?  A bit more cleaning, if you will.

Then I wondered for a moment how those pans felt about getting cleaned.  And how the sink felt about sitting there with the paradoxical parable of my soul inside  of it.  And I thought about my intentions for them as their (now mindful)  Cleaner of All, and I realized something I think God wanted me to know:  that the intentions of any Great Housekeeper are never to make something (or someone) feel bad for the stains they hold.

No.

Because a Great Housekeeper knows that no matter how much cleaning has been done, there will always be more to do.  Sometimes it involves cleaning up the same messes again and again.

Simply put, I realized Our Great Housekeeper’s intention is nothing more than this:  for us (and all those who share life with us)  to feel better for having been cleaned.

However long it may last.