Category: family

The Life We Choose

The Life We Choose

Life is a funny thing. In so many ways, it chooses us. When we live, the family and communities we are born into, and where. The traditions we know, the language we learn.

We choose none of them and yet they form the foundation of who we are and how we see the world.

And for most people through most of history, that was it. Those parameters defined their lives, the choices available to them prescribed already.

But even the most constrained, I think, had to choose to live, choose to be awake to life. To seek beauty and goodness and faithfulness with each breath.

Born in this time, to my parents, in a place called the United States, I’ve had the privilege of more choices than most. The privilege to make choices for myself that matter. To choose where I live and how, to know that there is more to learn, and that what I believe need not be the same thing my parents believed.

In so many ways, a field of options has been opened before me.

But in all of those choices, I must still choose to live.

Near the beginning of the movie The Way, Martin Sheen’s character tells his son, “My life here might not seem like much to you, but it’s the life I choose.” His son replies, “You don’t choose a life, Dad. You live one.”

They are both right, of course. We make choices that shape our lives – our homes, families, work, education, worship, beliefs – but we must still choose to live them.
And choosing to live our lives goes far beyond those other choices we make.

There’s an embroidered sampler that hangs in my kitchen. It is the Serenity Prayer.

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

There is so much I cannot change.

The faith I was given as an infant, its names and symbols and stories. They are with me – embraced or abandoned, I must wrestle them. But I can choose the shape of my belief and how I live it out. I cannot choose what that faith has done in the world – done to the world – for good or ill, but I can choose what it will do in the world through me.

For the most part, I’ve had no choice in the people I meet. But I can choose who I seek to know, whose lives I invite to shape my own, who I choose to partner in the project of humanity with. And I can choose to put myself in places to meet new people, to learn new stories, to allow my vision of humanity to be expanded and changed.

I cannot choose who will accept or reject me, but I can choose who I accept or reject. I cannot choose who will love me, but I can choose who I will love.

I cannot choose the days that will be given me to live, but I can choose to live them, all of them. The ones filled with the choices I have made, and the ones filled with the choices others made for me, and the ones filled with things no one chose or we all chose in some amalgamated impossible way.

The ancient text presents a choice to the people: “Today I have placed before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Now choose life.”

It is the one choice we have every day, with every breath. Today. Whatever it brings to us or we bring to it, we can choose to live it, to the depth of our lungs and the tips of our fingers and the reaches of imagination and hope.

Now choose life. This life. Your life.

Whatever you do. Live.

My Father’s Voice

My Father’s Voice

I turned forty-five a couple of weeks ago. I’m fourteen years older than my father now. He died from ALS a month after my third birthday. He was just thirty-one.

I don’t remember the sound of my daddy’s voice, but I remember how it felt. He had a deep bass voice and a rounded, barrel chest I loved to snuggle into and lay my head on. I remember the feel of that rumbling bass.

I have other memories of him, but they are all the memories of a small child. The book he read me every night cuddled up on my Bambi sheets. (The same book. Every night. Buzzy, the Funny Crow.) Looking for him early one morning to get him up to make my breakfast, only to find him already in the kitchen at the stove. When he lost the strength to pick me up any more, but I could still crawl up into the big green recliner our church bought for him. The day he fell and couldn’t get up, and I went and got my big stuffed bear to put under his head while someone went to get the neighbor boy to help get him up.

There’s a short clip of tape from an interview the local news station did with him. I managed to find someone to record the reel to reel on VHS years ago. I only watched it once. He could only say a few words before he had to work to breathe for a few more. It hurt too much to hear – there was so little to recognize in his voice.

But there was one time I’ve heard his voice. It was around fifteen years ago, and I was working at the small, fundamentalist Bible college where my parents met. I was helping prepare for our big donor event of the year when my boss introduced me to an alumnus who was there to help with the decorating. We shook hands, and as he heard my name, a startled look crossed his face. “Are you Gene Ould’s daughter?” he asked, and when I said yes, he started to cry.

Will* had been in school with my folks in the 60s, and had known them even before they’d started dating. He’d been friends with Daddy, and they had long conversations in the dorm talking about life and theology – the things most college students talk about but with a good bit more Bible and religion in the mix.

Eventually, they also talked about the fact that Will was gay (though I doubt he used that word then, and when I knew him would describe himself as “same-sex attracted”). “Your daddy was the only person I told who didn’t treat me any differently,” he said with tears in his eyes. “He didn’t need to leave the door to his room open when I was there. He didn’t change the way he talked to me.”

And I heard it. I heard my father’s voice loving his friend, accepting him just as he was. I don’t know what my daddy thought about homosexuality – though it was the 60s, and I know he had a conservative sexual ethic. But I do know that whatever he thought it didn’t change the way he loved his friend.

Nothing anyone has told me about my father has ever meant more to me.

On my birthday this year I was surprised by a message from an old friend of my parents from those Bible college days, a man I knew as a child and haven’t seen or spoken to in over twenty years, though we’ve been connected on Facebook for a bit. He wrote to wish me a happy birthday and tell me how proud he is of what I’ve done with my blog. He talked about how Daddy was always asking questions and about his courage. And he said he was glad to see my father’s DNA in me.

My voice is my own. And my journey has gone far beyond where my daddy’s life allowed his to go. But I hope that somewhere in that undeniable DNA, when I speak, the echoes of my father’s voice still rumble in this world.

 

*Name changed    

Too Much to Bear

Too Much to Bear

“God won’t give you more than you can bear!”

No. Nonsense. Hogwash. As one of my heroes, Fr. George Clements, would say, bull excrement.

If you’ve ever personally told me something like this, I’m not holding it against you. I’ve learned to hear the care and desire to encourage it’s intended to express.

But…no. Just no.

God – or life – gives people more than they can bear everyday.

The ones bombarded and decimated by war, running from one nightmare to another? It’s too much to bear.

That child being molested by a trusted adult? It’s too much to bear.

The five year old whose mother just died? It’s too much to bear.

The child who knows their body doesn’t fit who they are, forced to pretend year upon year they are someone else? It’s too much to bear.

Those parents who lost their child in a terrible accident? It’s too much to bear.

The kid being vocally rejected, mocked, and bullied at school every day? It’s too much to bear.

The one watching their mother trapped in an abusive marriage by abusive religious rules? It’s too much to bear.

The litany could be endless. The things life does to us – the things we do to each other – can be unspeakably brutal. Adults and children in this world are given too much to bear every day. And it’s different for each of us – what destroys me may leave you relatively unscathed. But whatever the cause, pain, unrelieved, is too much to bear.

It crushes us. It kills something in us, part of who we are. Something goes dead to avoid the pain that is too much to bear.

Jesus felt it. In Gethsemane, praying again and again for relief, for a way out. But he didn’t get it. His friend betrayed him. He died excruciatingly, and in the end, while he didn’t lose his love for others or his compassion or his ability to forgive, he did lose his faith that God was with him.

It was too much to bear.

Even for Jesus.

The Bible says that eventually angels came and “ministered” to Jesus in Gethsemane. I don’t know what that means. I know it didn’t change anything. But maybe, when his friends fell asleep on him, it just helped not to be alone.

Too many of us stay alone – because either no one comes or because we’ve been so hurt we refuse to let anyone get that close.

But we can try. We can try to stay with each other.

And then there’s Jesus’ resurrection three days later. Too many people never get that either. Never get to feel the pleasure of the breath of life filling every inch of their lungs again. Never get to feel a heart beating for all it’s worth again.

But sometimes they do. Sometimes things that were dead come alive again. Too many times they don’t, but they can. We can hope for that, if we can bear to. And we can work for it.

The longer I live the more I think that if Love and Life show up in the face of what is too much to bear, in the face of all the deaths, it’s because we show up for each other and bring them.

Because, yeah – sometimes it’s just too damn much to bear.

The Shapes and Spaces of Love

The Shapes and Spaces of Love

Love changes us, or at least it does me.

Being loved has changed me. It’s helped me recognize who I am and dive deeper into who I’m meant to be. Seeing myself as capable of inspiring love, regardless of how life may get in the way, has been profound.

It’s impossible to quantify, but sometimes it feels like loving has changed me even more.

Loving someone makes room in my heart for them, a space that grows to accommodate and welcome a particular person. And the thing is, that’s not a generic space – it’s a space uniquely shaped to who they are. Other things get adjusted and changed to make room as the space takes shape.

And it goes beyond the person themselves.

I notice things I would have missed before. I ask different questions – of myself as well as of the world. I’m continually inspired to try to see things through a different perspective that is not my own.

And in the process, how I see changes. What I see changes, and how I understand it. I’m stretched and grow into – not someone else – but someone who is both a broader and a deeper me. I become more myself in ways I never imagined, and I find things in myself I never knew were there. I love that journey (even while it’s scary as anything).

Venturing into love is always stepping out into the unknown. It will always show us things we didn’t know about ourselves and the world. And all those things won’t be pretty.

I’ve discovered things within myself I’ve wanted to look away from and forget, but love means facing them and dealing with them, as hard as that may be. I’ve encountered things in our world, things that wound and shape others, things that should never be. But love doesn’t look away. Love steps up and steps in closer to embrace it all.

Kiss the demons and name their lies.

But I also discover profound beauty, both in myself and others. Strength, kindness, generosity of spirit, courage, forgiveness, hope, longing. Minds that are dreaming a better world and turning those dreams into reality.

Love is always an adventure. If you’re in it for an outcome you already have all the architectural drawings for? Well…then you’re in love with an idea that’s dead. Life is always changing – growing and fading and creating something new along the way.

Love creates shapes and spaces that weren’t there before. It recreates our lives and it recreates the world. We can enter and embrace that with wonder or with fear (mostly we can’t help but have a mix of both).

But if we can let the wonder win out…the possibilities of the journey are glorious.