Kisses from a 5 year old

Yesterday, I think, was a break-through day. I have been nannying for 4 girls all summer--12, 10, 8, & 5. I will call them Niecy, Annie, Abe, and Mouse. All summer my little Mouse has not seemed to have any sort of affection for me, and I think it is just because she misses her mom, and, well I am pretty firm with her and don't let her get away with much!

Well, yesterday, Niecy, Mouse and I had some time with just the 3 of us. We went to Anthropologie, where they insisted (to my delight!) that I try something on. As we left Anthropologie, Niecy lamented how she wished that she could skip high school and college so that she could be as old as me and live on her own and drive around and go shopping with her friends whenever she wanted to. I smiled, and I told her that being on my own was fun but it is hard too. She asked, "Do you wish you were still in college? Like do you think college was the best time of your life?"

I said, "Well, Dr. C always says that the best time of your life is right now. Whatever you are doing right now, wherever you are, that should be the best time. When I was in college, I didn't enjoy it as much as I should have. I couldn't wait to get out. I love where I am in life NOW, but I wish that when I was in college I had enjoyed the relaxed schedule more."

So at this point we are in the car and driving. My little Mouse chimes in from the back seat, "I know why you should enjoy where you are right now! Because God is always with you! So you should never be lonely or afraid." I smiled and said that, yes, she is right.

Then Niecy said, "Well, I just wish that I could not go to college." I asked her why. "Because it is going to be really hard and I'll be really stressed and then I won't have my friends and family around to help me so I'll be lonely." I told her she could live at home and go to college, but she didn't like that idea too much either. As we were discussing this conundrum, Mouse chimed in from the back seat again...excuse me, YELLED from the back seat, "Niecy!! Were you not listening to me?!?! You should never be scared or lonely because you always have someone with you!! God is always with you!!!!!!"

From the mouths of babes. I have to admit I laughed with delight at this remark and the earnestness with which she expressed it, and I told her that she was absolutely right.

So when we got home we decided to go swimming. We were in the pool and I was swimming with my little Mouse, and I asked her if she wanted to play a game. We played this pretend game for a little while, where I would give her a noun, say, a flower, and ask her what kind of secret said noun would tell if it could. We took turns and we were both cracking up, and then she said, "I want to swim to you!" So I backed up, and she swam to me and jumped up and gave me a kiss on the cheek! This is a big deal, because, as I said, she has not been too openly affectionate with me. Anyway, throughout the afternoon I got about 3 more kisses.

I was thinking about how they were like kisses from God in a way. God has a way of speaking truth into my life through children, and today he reminded me of his affection and of the fact that he IS always with me, so I never have to be lonely or afraid.

Among the wildflowers

I woke up this morning to a quiet house. I like waking up to find that everyone else is sleeping in every once in a while. I also woke up to an overcast day...it reminds me of England or Chattanooga or someplace else...and appreciated that. I tried to sneak around and fix myself some oatmeal without waking everyone else up, and succeeded (I think) and sat down at the breakfast table to eat my oatmeal. There were wildflowers in the center. So lovely. I began thinking about how I had a bag of wildflower seeds in my car, and how I want to go plant them in my grandmother's yard.

When C got up, he asked me what I was going to do today. I said that I was going to do some school work and just hang out...and he told me to go put my blue jeans on...which of course meant we were riding! SO of course I wanted to go and we got ready and caught our horses and saddled up and began. When we got through the woods to the field, we were standing there for a minute and C told me he wanted to work on getting his horse and my horse to be okay with each other, to be able to get close to each other's faces. He inched towards me, and I watched his horse. C told me that I needed to watch my horse's ears and not his horse, and when my horse shot her ears back I needed to pull back on the reigns and scold her a bit. So I tried to do that and felt good about it for a minute.

Well, as we rode, I noticed how nervous everyone else and their horses make me, and realized that I was focusing on the other horses and not mine...which could get me into serious trouble because there is NOTHING I CAN DO about what everyone else's horse is doing! Then I was grabbing on to the saddle horn and not sitting correctly in my saddle. C tried to help me think about how I needed to center my balance more with my feet and sit back further in the saddle, that really my hand could not secure me. THIS got me thinking. I thought about how I ride a horse the same way that I live my life. I try to pay attention to everyone else's horse and live defensively and self-protectively, and I hold on to so many false securities, thinking that if my hand is on them then I am in control. Such a facade.

Neon lights flickering
Outside the cafe
Ice on the windshield
Stars in a black sea
On a winter road
Flurries of snow
I'm ready to go

Past farmhouse and pasture
Our voices together
Rise to the drumming
Of big-rigs and trailers
Long hours to daylight
A rumbling bus
Our bed and our board

Heavenly Father
Remember the traveler
Bring us safely home
Heavenly Father
Remember the traveler
Bring us safely home
Safely home

In the towns off this highway
The people are kind
They welcome us in
I sing in their church halls
Old hymns and prayer songs
With lifted hearts
We rejoice in the Lord

Heavenly Father
Remember the traveler
Bring us safely home
Heavenly Father
Remember the traveler
Bring us safely home
Safely home

I long for my family
And friends to remind me
Of where I have been
And where I am going
And where I come from

Heavenly Father
Remember the traveler
Bring us safely home
Heavenly Father
Remember the traveler
Bring us safely home
Safely home

-Fernando Ortega, Traveler

prayer and cancer

A few days ago I was faced with the deadly sins that I see in my life...my pride, my slothfulness, my unbelief, the fact that I put my hope in things other than the Lord...and as I went to bed I was thinking about prayer. And this was my thought: I know that Jesus Christ is my ONLY hope, but sometimes I kind of think of prayer as taking some new and unproven medicine to cure my cancer. Sometimes I don't think prayer is really going to work, but I know I have no other hope and it's my best bet.

How awful is that? And yet totally normal, and I am sure other people feel like that sometimes...right?

Fireflies and such

Is anyone else ready for SPRING??? I mean, it is March 2 and 40 degrees. I sometimes wonder why God DOES things like this. Have you ever thought about how when God does something with the weather, he has to purposefully affect EVERYONE? Like when it snows, if the roads are blocked, for some reason God has decided that he wants EVERYONE to be stuck or to slow their lives down. Some things seemingly affect only one of us. I know that because we are the Body of Christ, nothing really affects only one of us, but weather changes VISIBLY affect everyone.
So today it was cloudy. I noticed that affecting my thoughts, motivation, and general mood. I know it affected others, too...but God for some reason chose to do that. And he is sovereign and has a really good reason for it. Because my mood has been lower, I have noticed my need for Jesus. Which of course is a good thing.
Tonight I am procrastinating writing down my lessons in the Memphis City Schools lesson plan format. Doesn't that very sentence just make you fall asleep? It kills me. My plans are all written out, but I have to put them in a certain format. If you are reading this in your cozy home while you drink tea and sit by the fire reading a book, think of me and say a prayer.

Scruffy

Do you know that Bible verse that tells us not to worry? Where Jesus says to look at the birds of the air, who do not plant food for themselves or reap their harvest or store away their food? Jesus says that God still feeds them. Then he tells us that we who are constantly working or worried about working and planning our futures and how we are going to provide for ourselves (do we really do that? provide for ourselves I mean?) are of MUCH greater value than those birds to our Father.

I have become a bird watcher. No joke...and it is not necessarily my job to feed these birds that come to the farm every day, but I am sitting here looking at these bird feeders and my bird friends who are visiting them right now, and noticing that the birds need more food. So I will be right back.

*****
Ok. So don't worry, they've all been fed. I put my cowboy boots on over my pajama pants, donned my robe, and went outside. If I had done that in the city, I think that neighbors like Agnes from the TV sitcom Bewitched would have thought that I was crazy.
*****

Anyway, I have become a bird watcher. In Early Childhood Education we talk about "just in time" learning. This is the type of learning that is not forced or staged, but occurs just when the child is most interested and NEEDS that information. Like rather than forcing a child to memorize measurements from a math textbook, a child might think to himself one afternoon, "Tomorrow is my mom's birthday, I think I am going to make her some cookies. Let me get a cookbook...now which one has cookie recipes in it? This one does not have cookies listed in the index, but this one does. Hmmm...it says to turn to page 85. Ok, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85! Ok, this recipe says I need a half cup of melted butter. The butter is measured on the stick in tablespoons... I wonder how many tablespoons are in a half of a cup?" And then the child has to figure it out, so he is LEARNING, but he is learning the information at a time in which he is most interested because he really wants to make his mom these cookies for her birthday. The child is much more likely to remember that 8 tablespoons equal half of a cup at this point than if his teacher had required him to memorize that information from a book for a test in class.

That is how I have become with birds. I have never in my life been interested in birds, and had you tried to tell me about them through a text book or some film I might have fallen asleep. But I have so enjoyed watching the birds at the farm that now I flip through books to find out what each one is, and I have named a couple of them, and I have become a bird watcher.

Scruffy is a chickadee. He visits the feeders quite often with his friends, and he is one of the braver ones. When I go out to the feeders and refill them, it takes some of the birds a little bit of time to realize I have gone back inside and will not be bugging them at the feeders anymore. But Scruffy, he just comes back almost immediately. What Scruffy and some of his friends have taught me is just how amazing those verses in Matthew 6 that I talked about at the beginning of this post actually are. Birds eat ALL DAY. And they do not sow or reap a harvest, they do not store away their food like bears and such. They just eat when they are hungry. And if you think about it, they are fluttering and flittering and gliding and hopping and escaping from foxes and cats and rainstorms and windstorms all day long, so they work up a huge appetite! God still provides for them. And I don't think they worry about it. I don't think that they stop and say,"Oh man, what is wrong with me? I expend way to much energy so I have to eat all the time...what if one day there isn't enough food left???"

No, they just eat and play and do what they, as birds, were created to do.....fly.

On the farm

Where I live right now: the farm.

And I love it. I live with some good friends, who are really like my second parents, and they have been more than kind to let me stay here and play and live. C & V are out of town right now, so I am responsible for the horses. This morning I woke up around 7:30 and just lay in bed for a while. I got up around 8 and got dressed with Sarah the cat under my feet and on my bed and pressing onto my clean clothes with her paws. I loved it. Then I put a load of laundry in the washing machine. I am pretending that this is my home and sometimes pretending that I am Anne of Green Gables and sometimes Fern of Charolette's Web. I was Fern of Charolette's Web (or maybe I was her mother...) this morning when I put clothes in the washing machine. I was Fern when I walked to the barn to get the horses' food and then walked over to the pasture to feed them.

I am watching 3 dee[r run through the far pasture right now. They must have been hiding in the tall grass. I am also watching C's brother's horses walk and talk with each other.

Misty, one of C's horses, was standing by the water trough a few minutes ago and she just stood there, so I thought maybe she was trying to tell me that she needed more water (I can see the horses from where I am sitting, and they are pretty close to the house, so they might be able to see me...I wouldn't be surprised). So I got out of my chair, opened the door to the screened porch, and walked outside towards the pasture. Actually once I got outside I ran. So I was running over to the water trough, and I know Misty saw me. Horses are so aware of everything. And I got over to the trough and turned on the water and Misty jumped up in the air and got skiddish and shook and jumped sideways and then scampered (yes, I mean scampered, not galloped, because really, I scared her and she did not look like a brave galloping horse) over closer to the hay trough where the other horses were. I just cracked up...laughed OUTLOUD at the silliness. Then May, the Belgian workhorse, walked over to Misty and I imagined her saying, "What in the world are you doing?" Except May is really a gentle horse and I think she probably said something more like, "It's okay, Misty, it was just the water."

Oh, the country. So now I am just visiting with the birds. Of course they are outside and I am inside, but they are just on the other side of this window next to which I am sitting. Toby the cat is napping on the back of his couch, and Sarah the cat is playing in the attic, so they are not very interested in birds at the moment.

I have decided I like being responsible for the animals, and I don't think I ever want to live in the city again.

Snow Day!!

There is something so sound about snow. I woke up this morning and dozed for about 45 minutes, thinking of all that I had to DO today. Then, around 7:30 a.m., I thought, “Oh, the weather forecaster said that there was a chance of snow last night,” and I leaned out of bed towards the window, thinking, “There’s no way…” and then oh my gosh!!!!!! I jumped out of bed and practically ran downstairs to see Vicki. “Vicki!!!” I called. “What in the world??” She said, “I know! Everything is cancelled. We have about 6 inches.” And I bounded around the house, buzzing and flittering from the window to the coffee maker to the window again, and then to the refrigerator, and then to the microwave, and then back to the window, then to the phone, and then to the chair next to the window, where I sat, dumbfounded, for the next hour. I drank my coffee, said hello to the birds, watched Sarah the cat say hello to the birds, and just took it all in. I called my best friends and exclaimed again, “What in the world?!” It was just so amazing to see how God surprised us today!! Most of the day was spent just admiring the snow. I did some school work, and then tonight I flittered outside because it is snowing AGAIN! I stood out under the snow in nothing but my regular clothes and gazed up and stretched my arms out and just soaked it in. God is so good. Tonight I made some Valentine’s Day gifts…cute little fabric scrap bookmarks for my friends. And now I am lying in bed listening to the sleet, and thinking how snow really is comforting. It’s like a blanket across the land, and it silences everything. The only sound is the crunching, and I just feel as though I am in another world. Memphis, Tennessee: second snow day in a week. Incredible. I wonder if we will be out of school tomorrow?