Yearly Archives: 2011

Doing the Right Thing

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I’m proud of my daughter Linnea. She’s good at doing life and doesn’t shy away from challenges. But what impresses me most is her strong sense of compassion for others.

Today I was given an unexpected treat. Linnea began helping at a local pregnancy center a couple of years ago, and last summer she joined the staff part-time, one evening and one morning each week. Because she’s been on vacation with us at Sanibel Island but is now home, she needed to catch up on her work at the center, and I tagged along.

Linnea is responsible for a 12 week teaching course encouraging first-time parents through their pregnancies and into the early days of parenting. They’re coached to think about their babies long-term and are also given practical tools about finances and budgeting, marketability and careers.

The teaching task is immense, but the women working at this pregnancy center have a vision to save babies and assist the young mothers into their new roles. The center offers an incentive for coming to meetings: Baby Bucks to be spent at the baby boutique there.

Girls who come to meetings and do the homework can accumulate enough Bucks to purchase a brand new baby bed for their little one. Smaller amounts buy baby clothes, blankets, diapers and toys. Maternity clothes are also available and can be checked out like library books, no charge if they’re brought back after use.

Linnea showed me shelves full of baby gift bags for mommies who return after giving birth to show off their newborns. Each bag is assembled by a couple that donates the contents and wraps them festively.

I also got to see and hold soft, plastic baby-models, weighted correctly to represent in utero babies in different months of pregnancy. The girls can cradle these babies while visualizing their own, beginning to understand what’s going on inside of them.

I saw counseling rooms, a large group meeting room, the room in which results of pregnancy tests are made known, the various offices and the door leading to an ultrasound room. It’s a rare mother-to-be who sees her baby on an ultrasound screen and still opts for abortion.

The center was quiet today, so while Linnea went about her work, I found a chair in the reception area to spend time praying. Soon the director of the center arrived to do some work of her own. I introduced myself as Linnea’s mom, and she said, “I can’t tell you what an asset Linnea is to our team. She’s done wonders for our entire teaching program.” If a heart can be warmed, mine was.

Linnea works hard to free herself from the at-home mothering she loves in order to be at the center two days each week, but she does it because she feels compassion for the girls, and because there are eternal consequences to the work. Her desire is to help as she can and to prepare each mother-to-be for the challenge ahead.

God is pleased. And so am I.

May God “make you worthy of his calling, that by his power he may bring to fruition your every desire for goodness and your every deed prompted by faith.” (2 Thessalonians 1:11)

The Black Club on Vacation

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The Black Club recently convened in Florida. Jack and his cousin-dog, Sydney, have enjoyed a week of daily fun together on Sanibel Island, working hard to keep cool in their black fur. The first day, when both dogs were panting hard, Skylar suggested they might feel cooler if they took off their fur coats. When I asked her how to do that, she demonstrated the movements of removing her own invisible coat, first the zipper, then each arm. I said, “Ok, let’s take the dogs’ coats off,” she looked diligently for their zippers but never did find them.

The Black club members couldn’t believe how salty the ocean tasted compared to Lake Michigan but kept sampling it, shaking their heads in disgust after each gulp. Regardless, their happy dances continued uninterrupted, and both of them were pleased to be included on the family trip.

Dogs are well-liked on Sanibel with quite a few of them out on leashes strolling the beaches every morning and evening. Jack and Sydney wagged their way up to enthusiastic strangers but lived for off-leash romps in the Florida greenbelt (a tropical substitute for sand dunes) when other dogs weren’t around. Both Jack and Sydney adapted to vacation life quickly, and as long as we were nearby, they were completely content.

I wish it was that easy for the rest of us to find contentment. God offers to provide it for us if we’ll take him up on it, but most of us quest after it through our own methods, ignoring the Lord’s ideas. One perfect example is a family vacation. Looking forward to it usually includes an expectation of contentment that’s very rarely realized. Instead we work hard (while on vacation) to adjust (to our vacation), and struggle to resume the routine (after our vacation) when we get home.

It’s curious that the words contentment and contention resemble each other closely but have opposite meanings. The first is to be emotionally satisfied, the second to struggle in opposition. Much of our effort to find contentment is really contention with God’s scriptural principles.

What are his ideas on how to experience contentment? Here are just a few, taken from biblical passages:

  • Appreciate what’s in our closets.
  • Express gratitude for our homes.
  • Tell our complaints to God not others.
  • Take care not to love money.
  • View crises as tests we want to pass.
  • Share what we have.

Each of those may, at first, seem to oppose contentment, but they work. The age-old theory “more is always better” is a fantasy, a trick of the devil leading to permanent discontent instead.

But if this list is too hard to pursue all at once, we can always do what Jack and Sydney did to be content: dig a hole and crawl in.

“Godliness actually is a means of great gain when accompanied by contentment. For we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either.” (1 Timothy 6:6-7)

Force of Habit

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Even on vacation, needs arise for routine errands to the grocery store, the airport or a gift shop. Today I was at the Sanibel post office to finish a few mailing tasks. When I walked back into the parking lot, without even thinking I went right up to a white Chrysler mini-van identical to the one I used to own. My clicker wouldn’t open the locks, of course, which let me know of my mistake. My red Highlander was the next car over but had failed to break the hold of “what used to be.”

All of us are creatures of habit. We find comfort in routine and like regularity in our schedules. Even children have a rut-like mentality that causes them to love a rut. For example, it’s taken all week for Skylar and Micah, ages 2 and 1, to adjust to their vacation home-away-from-home and to sleep past 5-something in the morning.

I’ve had trouble adjusting to Nate’s absence this week, because our Sanibel “habit” began with him in 1980 and continued many years after that. It was our routine, our tradition, the way it was meant to be. Being here without him includes a measure of emptiness and makes me wonder if we should even come back next year. Yesterday Linnea and I both got teary talking about it.

In the past year I’ve spoken with quite a few widows. No two stories are alike, but the one constant is a radical break in “the way we were.” To be married several decades is to come into a period of the relationship characterized by the word “comfortable.” The two of you have become one entity, and you both like it that way.

When death disturbs the routine, happy habits are forcefully broken. After a husband (or wife) dies, every life pattern changes, and adjustments never end. It’s like being in an airplane that’s been flying a straight course, when suddenly it begins doing loops, dives and spirals. It’s hard to get our bearings.

Death wasn’t God’s plan, and he never intended we’d have to adjust to it. Apparently he meant for Adam and Eve to continue forever in the perfection of Eden. But sinful choices deep-sixed that arrangement, bringing spiritual death immediately and physical death later on. The Eden routine surely must have been a hard habit to surrender.

After sin, the break from “the way they were” changed everything for Adam and Eve including their home, their neighborhood, their work and their walk with God. Separation. Division. Disconnection. The adjustments must have taken quite some time.

Old habits die hard. It was true back then and is true today. But Adam and Eve finally did adjust, and God stuck with them in their new life. That’s true for us today, too. As long as we live, change will yank us from our comfortable ruts and insist we adjust.

We see these disruptions as painful endings, but God views them as fresh beginnings. And he will help us.

“The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things.” (John 14:26)