With all of the rain we’ve had lately, my son Ezra and I have noticed a common sight dotting the sidewalks while we’re on our way to school in the mornings—earthworms. Most have baked into a crispy twig in the hot sun, but a few still have a little wriggle in them. Ezra rescues the live ones by transferring them to the grass and dirt running alongside the sidewalk. (His benevolence to the worms slows down our trek, but I can’t deny him the good feeling of starting a day of 3rd grade knowing you’ve made a difference!) Ezra asked me why we’ve been seeing so many worms. Why do they come out of their safe burrows just to die on the sidewalk? It’s a good question. Other than drying out in the sun, they could also be eaten by birds or stepped on. Why would they risk it? I just had to find out! Google to the rescue! From what I've read, it was commonly assumed that worms emerged after a lot of rain because they would drown in their underground tunnels. But more recent science disputes this. Worm scientists (that’s probably a thing) argue that worms are designed in a way that they could stay submerged underwater for days. Back to the worm lab (which is also probably a thing)! One hypothesis speculates that the vibration of the rain dropping above them imitates the sound of a mole or some other worm-eating predator, and the worms crawl away from the anticipated danger. Another idea is that they use the slick, wet environment to migrate. I can just imagine the worms watching the weather forecast to see when the conditions would be favorable to travel so they could make a trip to visit grandma. (Okay, that’s definitely not a thing, even on the internet.) Another idea is that the worms surface to mate, but they (worm scientists) say only a few species do this, and knowing that worm babies don’t just appear out of nowhere but not wanting to google “Where do worm babies come from?” I left that hypothesis off my list for Ezra. Even though a worm has no eyes or ears and a teeny-tiny brain, there are way too many similarities between us and them. We often ignore our protective design and take unnecessary risks. There are many times when we fear the wrong things (or people), and our panic makes everything much, much worse. But, if you’re a lucky earthworm, a sweet 10-year old boy will see that you’re stranded on the concrete, and even though you’re there by your own folly, he’ll lift you to safety.

When my husband and I were first married, we lived in an apartment which was conveniently located right next to a Kroger. There were many times when I would park my car in my designated spot by our apartment and walk over to the grocery store after work to pick up a few items for supper. I reasoned that the exercise would do me good, and by the time I waited for the traffic to slow down to make the necessary turns out of our apartment complex and into the store parking lot, do my shopping, then do the reverse, walking was just quicker. (Now that I have four kids—3 teens and one that isn’t a teen but eats like one—and a grocery list as long as my arm, it’s hilarious to me that I would routinely walk out of Kroger with only a couple of bags.) In order to make the trek from our apartment to the Kroger parking lot, I would have to climb down a fairly steep set of steps carved into the side of a bank of dirt. If memory serves me, there was a railing, but, though I was in my mid-20’s and somewhat spry, it could be a precarious climb. On one occasion, I was met at the bottom of the stairs on my way back to my apartment by a tiny elderly woman who had a similar idea. I’m not sure if she lived in our apartment complex or if she was heading to the nearby senior center, but she also had groceries to haul up the steep stairs. I could tell she was trying to decide how she could safely make the ascent as she hung two or three bags on each wrist and stared up at the incline. “Can I help?” I asked, setting my bags on the ground. The woman nodded and handed me her groceries which I carried to the top of the steps. Then I came back down and held her arm as she slowly made her way up. I headed back down one more time to get my bags and made another offer. “Can I help you get your groceries somewhere?” “No, dear,” she answered, revealing a slight accent, maybe something Russian or from a country in Eastern Europe. “I can do for myself now.” She reached into her ancient pocketbook and pulled out a change purse. “You don’t need to pay me,” I told her. “It was no problem.” Ignoring my words, the woman grabbed my hand and thrust a pile of dimes into my open palm. “Seriously. I was happy to do it,” I said as I tried to refuse the coins. But she wouldn’t take no for an answer. “When someone wants to give you something, you should take it,” she barked irritably. She snapped her change purse shut and shuffled off to the left. I eventually headed to the right, the cache of dimes growing sweatier and sweatier in my hand as I walked across the steamy asphalt to my apartment. I felt abused and chastised, wondering what I’d done wrong. I’ve thought about that woman many times, and not because it was an especially unusual moment. It didn’t spark a lifelong friendship Tuesdays with Morrie-style or change my outlook on grocery shopping or stair climbing or the irrelevance of coins in our U.S. currency. Though it happened more than twenty years ago, I think the reason that made that memory stick in my head was her insistence that I be paid for my simple chore and her obvious frustration with me when I tried to refuse it. But that’s the thing about helping others—or really any interactions we have with other humans—there can be a lot of layers, both for the helper and the person being helped. What’s the helper’s motivation? Could the aid being given somehow hurt the person being helped? With all the ways to intentionally and unintentionally offend, it sometimes makes you wonder if it’s even worth it to get involved. I turn to the advice which the Apostle Paul gave to the Philippian church. He said, “If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care—then do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends. Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand.” (The Message) Forget yourself long enough to see the best way to help, offering equal parts dignity and compassion.

It’s funny to track the differences between my childhood in the 1970’s and 1980’s with the world that my kids live in now. The ways we shopped (from fussy department stores to low-budget Kmart) and played (biking through the neighborhoods with abandon), how we listened to music (records and cassettes) and what foods we ate (TV dinners were a treat! Who wouldn’t want your fried chicken leg, mashed potatoes, corn, and soggy brownie to all taste exactly the same!?) were so different from what they expect today. One big change is how my kids watch TV. With the help of things like online streaming and DVR recordings, they have, at the touch of their fingers, a bajillion (trust me about this number…I’ve done my research) options. But there’s one thing they don’t get to experience much, and that’s commercials. My sisters and I had so many commercials memorized. We knew—and still know—plenty of jingles (“My Buddy, My Buddy, My Buddy and Me!”) and taglines (“Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Roll Pop? Good question…uh one, uh two, uh three, crunch.”) We could sing along to the record compilation commercials which ticked off one snippet of a popular song from some bygone era at a time, the song titles scrolling by with the words in white or yellow. We would act out the Folgers commercial where the older brother comes home early to surprise his family for Christmas and brews them coffee so strong that it literally rouses his family from their upstairs bedrooms. (“Peter! Everyone’s asleep. I know how to wake ‘em up!”) One commercial we talked about a lot, which I often think of when I’m cutting up a tomato, is the one for Ginsu knives. It showed a man breaking a board with his hand and then trying the same method to slice a rather mealy-looking tomato. It should come as no surprise that the man’s hand did not in fact cut the tomato…it shmooshed it. The commercial went on to show an amazing knife which could cut a can, and then, without losing dullness, it could perfectly slice that tomato. It cut meat and halved a block of frozen spinach, and it hacked away at a 2×4. Then the announcer asked us what we’d expect to pay for such a wonder tool. “But wait,” he told us, “Here are some steak knives and a spiral slicer and a meat fork…” It all sounded too good to be true. That’s what I remember most about commercials from that time—products which seemed so good and yet were so cheap. Could we trust these advertisers? Was this a trick, a scam? Could I really cut an aluminum can that easily? We wanted to know! This wariness was the start of my cynicism and mistrust. If it sounds too good to be true, it must not be true. Then I learned about a word we don’t use very often anymore—faithfulness. When we do hear it, it’s usually in reference to a marriage, or less often a friendship. But mostly it’s just in old church hymns. If you dive into the Book of Psalms, we see faithfulness used nearly 80 times. King David, one of the authors of the Psalms, pairs faithfulness with love and says that God’s faithfulness reaches to the skies. But David also says that God’s faithfulness protects him from wrongdoers. The assurance of God’s enduring faithfulness gives David strength when he’s having a rough time. So what is this quality which is as multi-faceted as a Swiss Army knife (and sharper than a Ginsu)? Faithfulness means keeping promises. It’s means being reliable and truthful and following through. It suggests associations which are personal and connected. And to some people, especially those who have been continually hurt and disappointed, it sounds too good to be true. But it is possible and available. Don’t believe me? Well, here’s your homework: Read the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis. Watch God weave His promises all through this crazy drama. Watch God bring it all around to a faithful ending, even down to the burying of Joseph’s bones in the Promised Land. Then recite the following verse to yourself: “The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.” (Lamentations 3:22-23)

I’ve written before about the perils of broken bones. With four active (and possibly clumsy?) kids, we’ve had our fair share of trips to get x-rays. During a recent high school soccer game, our older son Knox added a fifth broken bone to his personal list. From what I could see from my seat on the diagonally-opposite end of the soccer field, Knox had passed the ball, then a player from the other team ran into him like a locomotive and sent him flying through the air. Knox landed on his arm and was escorted to his team bench. We hustled him off to get an x-ray, and the next day he had a new conversation-starter by way of a black forearm cast. Oh, Knox! What happened? Well… It’s not especially serious—just a little buckle fracture on his left wrist—but he got a cast just to keep it protected. It hasn’t slowed him down much. He’s still playing soccer and will wear the cast at church camp in a few weeks. (Yes, that’s just as gross as you think it is.) But if there’s one thing we’ve learned through all these broken bones (other than asking for a waterproof cast, if possible), is that all you can do is endure it. The healing takes time, and waiting for time to pass takes patience (and sometimes liberal applications of Febreze). Unfortunately for our current society, we’ve become abysmally bad at exercising patience. When I was young, it was nothing for me to stand in a long line with my mom at the bank or a store. I’m not saying that I liked it, but we definitely practiced this skill a lot more often than we do now. It’s possible to force ourselves to strengthen this rarely used muscle of patience in specific, intentional ways, but let me give you a motivator for why it’s important to learn to be patience. And it goes beyond waiting for a bone to heal so a stinky cast can come off! It is actually downright spiritual! In the Book of Romans, the Apostle Paul is writing to the church in Rome, encouraging them to remain faithful and righteous, even when it seemed like they should give up. He compared what they were going through to the pains of childbirth. Just like a mother struggling to give birth, they should hold on to a future hope. It would all be worth it! In Romans 8, we read, “We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)” (NLT) Paul doesn’t tell them to ignore their present troubles. He also doesn’t tell them to imagine they’re already living in the time of future glory. He reminds them that the waiting is a gift, a one-of-a-kind, gorgeously-wrapped present. You unwrap it and look inside. What do you see? Hope. It’s quite literally the gift that keeps on giving.  Having an event or holiday or special meal to look forward to can often be just as rewarding as the thing itself. One version of the Bible called The Message puts it this way: “But the longer we wait…the more joyful our expectancy.”

A couple of years after our youngest son joined our family, I took Ezra to a birthday party for a school classmate. When the party was over and we were driving home, he asked me where the birthday girl’s siblings were during the party. “She doesn’t have any brothers or sisters,” I told him. Ezra, youngest of four, was shocked. “Some families just have one kid,” I explained. “Some families have four kids.” “And some have six,” Ezra said. I agreed, but then I glanced at him in the rearview mirror and thought about his response. I wondered what he meant by his calculation. Did he choose it randomly? Or was he counting all of the people in our family? (4 kids + 2 adults = 6) He had only been in the U.S. for a short time at that point, which meant he’d only had about two years of speaking/hearing the English language with all its inconsistencies and eccentricities and double-meanings, so I was accustomed to repeating and rephrasing. He’d also only been in the physical presence of his parents, siblings, cousins, etc. for just a few years, so I had to constantly find new ways to explain the concept of a Forever Family. “Our family has four kids,” I told him. I counted off their names on the fingers of my left hand as I moved the steering wheel with my right. “You, Knox, Ella, and Lucy. Four.” “Six kids,” Ezra corrected me. “What do you mean?” I asked. Then Ezra reminded me about the two college students living with us. They were there for the summer to work with our church youth group, and they’d been sleeping in our basement for a week or so. Ezra was ready to include them in his final total. I explained that the college boys had parents and they were too old to be adopted. “Anyway,” I said. “They’re pretty much already grown-ups.” As we pulled into our garage and I parked the van, Ezra opened the door. He looked back at me before hopping out and said with all seriousness. “Mama, dem boys is our famry.” Then he ran inside to find his two newest brothers. We’ve learned so much since Ezra joined our family more than five years ago, but one of the biggest lessons has been how we define family. More than ever, we’ve realized that family absolutely doesn’t have to involve a shared DNA. We can carve out deep, sacred relationships with people who cross our paths but never appear on a single branch of our family tree. We can make connections with others by being their cheerleaders for big moments and just being available on an average Tuesday night, by making room at the table and making time in our schedule. Then Friends can become Family.

One of my favorite words is the word wonder. As a mom, it reminds me of my kids when they were all little. I loved watching them as they looked at the world from their vantage point, asking why and how about everything. They would construct new realities where they were teachers or bus drivers or soldiers. To make it seem real, they would use the information they had about their own experiences and then fill in the rest with their imaginative sense of wonder and possibility. What they chose didn’t always make sense to me, but, with a little reflection on what had happened in the days prior, I could usually uncover their reasoning. For example, our youngest son loves to pretend he’s a dentist. He grabs a pair of latex gloves and a couple of plastic spoons and a straw, and he instructs me to lie down on the sofa as he places a pair of sunglasses on me. Once he’s draped a paper towel across my chest like a bib, he tells me to open wide. He puts the straw in the corner of my mouth like that sucking tube at the dentist office and begins poking around with one spoon while the other spoon is his “mirror”. After a few minutes, he says that I have fifty cavities (which makes my cavity to tooth ratio a little off), and I should relax while he calls a different dentist to come in and pull out all my teeth. He pretends to make a call on an old, out-of-use cell phone, then he comes back and says that before the new dentist comes, he’s supposed to clean my teeth. Although it seems like a waste of time to clean teeth that are about to be pulled, I go along with it because I get to lie on the sofa while simultaneously playing with my kid. Mom Win! He asks me which flavor of toothpaste I would prefer, so I ask him what my choices are. He says (and this is verbatim because I wrote it down right after we played) he has grape, orange, applesauce, Dr. Coke, alcohol, and Sprite. I tell him I’d like orange, but he says not to pick that because it’s too boring. “Okay. Then what do you want me to pick?” I ask. He says, “You should pick alcohol so that you will be like this…” and he acts like he’s drunk, stumbling around and tripping over the footstool. I tell him I don’t get drunk, so I’ll just stick with orange flavor, thank you very much. Now I could be concerned that my 10 year-old son is talking about alcohol and getting drunk, but I use my own sense of wonder and remember the episode of I Love Lucy he recently watched when Lucy drinks too much of the Vitameatavegamin while filming a commercial and gets tipsy. I know he’s communicating what he’s seen in the world through imaginative play, so I can react accordingly. This works with my son, because we spend a lot of time together and I’ve made it my personal mission to become an expert on him and his three older siblings. But what about when people act or say things that are questionable and we don’t know them so well? I heard a couple of therapists on the radio a few months ago discussing what life may be like for people venturing out on the other side of this often frightening pandemic. They said that many will suffer from PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a serious condition which may have long lasting repercussions. The therapists recommended that we should strive for PTG, or Post-Traumatic Growth. The trauma is still there, but the emphasis is on the growth which can occur. They also discussed how we should regard those people with whom we come in contact who may be suffering, and their suffering manifests itself in ways that make them a bit unbearable to be around. One of the therapists said, “Instead of judgment, turn to wonder.” I had to park my car and write down this phrase, because it was so perfect. What if instead of judging someone, we asked the question: I wonder why? How would that change the interaction or even the relationship? Our youngest son, the aspiring tooth-puller, spent most of his first five years in an orphanage on the other side of the world. Because of his rough start, we have had to wonder a lot—about behaviors and motivations and unknown history—and so has he. Back in April, when we celebrated having him home for five years, the same number of years he spent away from us, he told me, “Before I had a family…before I was five…my life feels like a long, black line with no words on it or a blank piece of paper. Mom, what was there when everything was blank?” I had to stop right then and write that down, too, because sometimes my hearts feels like it’s being crushed into tiny pieces and those pieces become lodged in my throat making it almost impossible to swallow, but wonders never cease.

I had a friend in elementary school named Jill who was allergic to chocolate. I knew she tried to avoid it, but I didn’t know exactly why or what would happen if she ate it. That is until we were in the same homeroom in the 3rd grade… Without any warning or explanation, Jill jumped up from her desk and ran out of the room. She just bolted like a flash of light. My teacher instructed me to go after Jill and see what was wrong. Now, had this been any other teacher, I would’ve asked where I should look for my friend. I would’ve requested more guidance as to how I should best care for Jill, but this was Mrs. Yells-A-Lot. She was mad all the time and not so very fun. I was a ball of anxiety for all of 3rd grade, because this teacher was as predictable as a tornado. You could see her coming across the horizon, but you didn’t know which way the funnel would swerve, toward you and your paper without a name at the top of the page or toward your neighbor who had forgotten to clean up his crayons. (Crayon Kid was probably Kevin, a boy who was a bit disheveled and indifferent to learning and always in her path of angry destruction. To make matters worse, when the teacher would holler, “Kevin!” it would inexplicably sound like she was saying my name and I would answer. Then she would yell, “Is your name Kevin?!” I was so anxious I would say, “I don’t know!” and start gnawing on my Smurf erasers. Yeah, I was a stressed out 8-year old.) Back to Jill…I ran out of the classroom to search for my friend. Using the detective skills I had learned from The Bloodhound Gang, I determined which way to look for her: to the right which would lead toward an outside door and eventually the nurse’s office or to the left toward the bathrooms? I found the clue I needed when I saw a trail of blood on the linoleum floor to the left. I followed the little red drops to the girls’ restroom. (The restroom which, according to school lore, was home to the Bell Witch, a ghost who could be summoned if you said, “I hate the Bell Witch” three times while staring at the mirror. Then she would savagely claw your face with her razor-sharp fingernails. Childhood is such a magical time.) When I threw open the restroom door, I saw Jill standing at the sink, her blue and white romper with the smocked pictures of hot air balloons across her chest now covered in blood. She turned to look at me, blood dripping from her chin, and I scanned the room for any sign that the Bell Witch still remained, but Jill just squeaked out, “I ate chocolate! I know I shouldn’t do it, but I did it!” And then she broke down and sobbed. Just like Jill eating chocolate even though she knew it would cause her to have a severe nosebleed, most of us do the opposite of what we know we should do. In this way, we’re all too often our own worst enemy. The Apostle Paul knew this. In the Book of Romans, Paul says, “I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I can’t. I do what I don’t want to—what I hate. I know perfectly well that what I am doing is wrong, and my bad conscience proves that I agree with these laws I am breaking…I know I am rotten through and through so far as my old sinful nature is concerned. No matter which way I turn I can’t make myself do right. I want to, but I can’t. When I want to do good, I don’t; and when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway.” (Living Bible) But thankfully that’s not the end of it. “So there is now no condemnation awaiting those who belong to Christ Jesus. For the power of the life-giving Spirit—and this power is mine through Christ Jesus—has freed me from the vicious circle of sin and death.” Praise the Lord that we aren’t stuck slouching over that nasty sink in a haunted bathroom with the temptations and anxieties of the world keeping us on a never-ending loop of our own foolishness. There’s a better way and a heavenly prize waiting for us. “For all creation is waiting patiently and hopefully for that future day when God will resurrect his children. For on that day thorns and thistles, sin, death, and decay—the things that overcame the world against its will at God’s command—will all disappear, and the world around us will share in the glorious freedom from sin which God’s children enjoy.”

When I was 6-years old, my dad bought our family’s first microwave oven. It was a giant behemoth with its own designated piece of furniture, a cart made of lightly stained oak which sat on little caster wheels and had a cabinet underneath to store all the sundry accouterments a microwave might require. This included cookbooks full of recipes designed especially for the microwave, such as the Betty Crocker one which contained such favorites as “Parmesan Sole with Mushrooms” and “Chicken Fricassee with Parsley Dumplings” and “Egg Foo Yong Casserole.” If memory serves, my grandmother wasn’t overly pleased with it, at first. Those of us who do a lot of cooking aren’t always quick to embrace newfangled gizmos when it comes to making our tried and true, ordinary weeknight to special holiday recipes, but my mom was sold. She used the microwave for everything—from cooking eggs to making meatloaf, boiling water for iced tea to browning meat for spaghetti sauce. In the years that followed, it became a regular occurrence for Mom to leave a side dish in the microwave. We’d finish up our meal, and then she’d remember it—the  covered Corningware dish full of corn or the broccoli slathered in now-congealed blobs of Velveeta still sitting in the microwave. Disappointed, she would place the uneaten dish in the refrigerator to be eaten at the next meal, easily warmed up in the…yeah, you guessed it…the microwave! Microwaves are fairly commonplace now, but when they first hit the scene in American homes, the major selling point was their ability to simplify our busy lives. This rationale was revealed by the ad slogans for some of the brands: “Life becomes more convenient when you have one of the Easy Waves from Toshiba” and “Whirlpool…making your world a little easier.” The commercials would show frazzled housewives who can barely keep it together. They had to deal with various disasters and distractions, simultaneously: the son knocking over a lamp with his baseball in the living room and the daughter screeching away on her violin and the dog running through the kitchen with muddy paws and the phone ringing incessantly. Enter the microwave…ta-da! In spite of her crazy household, she now has a perfectly roasted chicken, in no time! With school starting back for my four kids and all that goes with it, I feel a little like that woman before she gets her time-saving microwave. I’m always in a rush, always behind, always wondering what I’m forgetting. But I’m finding that the easy way isn’t always the best way (just like microwaved Egg Foo Yong Casserole might be fast, but not so tasty!) There’s something to be said for taking it slow when we can. I love this passage from Isaiah: “The path of right-living people is level. The Leveler evens the road for the right-living. We’re in no hurry, God. We’re content to linger in the path sign-posted with your decisions. Who you are and what you’ve done are all we’ll ever want. Through the night my soul longs for you. Deep from within me my spirit reaches out to you…In the land of right living, the wicked persist in wrong living, blind to the splendor of God.” (The Message) I’m pretty sure there are way too many times when I am “blind to the splendor of God.” I think I need a microwaved day, quickly done and over with (and not cooked all the way through in the center), but then I’d miss the contented lingering our Father offers. Microwave ovens have their good points, but don’t zip through life too quickly and miss out on one of God’s guiding sign-posts.

Our two sons are both on travel soccer teams. This means that they seem to be playing ball all the time. In the winter, we’ve watched them play in high school gymnasiums and indoor soccer facilities, but most of the action is outside. We’ve stood under umbrellas watching them play in the rain. We’ve stamped our feet to keep warm at spring tournaments where there was still snow on the ground. And there have been plenty of games where we have sat, sweaty and sunburnt, in the blazing heat. This was our experience the last weekend of August. Last Saturday, our older son played in Murfreesboro on those beautiful new turf fields. As nice as they are, that hunter green rubber grass also seems to draw in the heat, creating an atmosphere similar to the surface of the sun. Now I’ve been watching him play soccer for more than a decade, so I was mostly prepared for the magnitude of the heat. I started the morning drinking from my water jug, hours before I ever sat in my camping chair in the noonday sun. I had chugged 32 ounces by 10:00 a.m. and brought along more to drink during the game. I knew from experience that once you begin sweating, it’s almost too late to start drinking water. You have to start before you even feel thirsty. This idea of storing up what you need before you get to a moment of crisis isn’t particularly profound. You can see it exhibited in the grocery stores at the first sign of a snowflake. The bread aisles left bare, with only a few loaves of raisin bread remaining. But there’s more to stockpiling necessary goodness besides just water and other staples. We can also store up sweet memories and miraculously puzzling developments. The light of these reminiscences brightening future darkness. You have to wonder if Mary, Jesus’ mother, did just that as she held her newborn in her arms. She couldn’t have known the scope of Jesus’ ministry or the horrific death he would suffer, but the Book of Luke paints a beautiful picture of a mother treasuring the sweet moments in her heart. Mary had given birth. Then a pack of shepherds came bursting inside the stable where Jesus was born. They must’ve blurted out crazy stories about an angelic choir announcing the Savior’s birth. They were joyfully spreading the news all over Bethlehem, and people were listening. Then, in one brief verse, we read that “Mary kept all these things to herself, holding them dear, deep within herself.” (The Message) She tucks away the image of the shepherds and the story that they told about the hillside concert, almost as if she knew she might need this precious memory for later. Perhaps she knew she’d need to take out the sweetness of that night and hold it, turning it over in her mind to escape a challenging time. How are you preparing your heart for future difficulties? What’s the spiritual equivalent of building a Y2K shelter? Make a list of the good things God has done for you, counting your blessings and thanking the One who provided them. Commit Scriptures to memory, giving yourself an arsenal of God’s Word to have at the ready. Store up treasures, just like Mary. Ponder them and then share them with a thirsty world desperately in need of relief.

For the most part, my husband and I were raised as city people. A half-acre lot was plenty for our folks. They had their vegetable gardens and rosebushes. Brent’s dad even had some fruit trees. But our homes were situated in suburban neighborhoods (in Nashville and Knoxville, respectively) with weekly garbage pickup and streetlights and city buses and access to nearby interstates, not out in the country. Now we still live in a city surrounded by neighborhoods, but we have a little bit of land—almost 5 acres—and sometimes our citified upbringing surfaces. We accidentally neglect parts of our property, and then a Saturday free of obligations rolls around and we spend all day catching up. Mowing and weed-eating, digging up unwanted plants and trimming back hedges. We get to work, sweating and toiling like we’re preparing for the arrival of royalty to our humble village. Last Saturday, I decided to tackle the forest of weed trees growing unchecked below a line of tall pines along our driveway. I used everything in our gardening tool arsenal: long-handled loppers, an electric hedge trimmer, a chainsaw, and a small hatchet. Many of those weeds I drive past every day had grown taller than me. Some of their trunks were thick, as much as 6-inches in diameter. How did this uninvited grove grow right under my nose? I suppose I was looking elsewhere, my mind wandering, sussing out both the important and unimportant, and the weeds just became the expected backdrop. They were green, so I didn’t look too closely. If I had, I would’ve seen thorns and ivy snaking around the trunks of the pine trees. I wasn’t heeding the Scriptures which remind me to be watchful. “Dressed and ready with my lamps trimmed and burning,” as Jesus told his followers. “Ready to answer when the master knocks on the door.” I was caught off-guard by what can develop when I’m not vigilant. But it’s not always just our negligence or laziness, those weed trees suddenly towering over us. Sometimes we actually invite the invasive and insidious. Take kudzu, the widespread vine from Asia, for example. It was introduced to the U.S. at the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia as an ornamental plant which could be handy for shading front porches. It was eventually seeded all over the country to combat soil erosion in the face of the Depression-era dust storms. The government actually paid farmers to plant it. At first, it seemed like a good idea and who could blame them? It grew quickly, could be fed to livestock, and smelled like grape bubblegum. But now we see what happens when kudzu goes unchecked. Without cattle to graze on it and keep the vine controlled, it chokes out the nearby native plants. We see it cascading by highways, mountains of green originally planted there to fill in the gashes made by road crews. There seems to be no stopping it. (Although the Japanese kudzu bug, which somehow traveled to a garden near the airport in Atlanta, according to a fascinating article in Smithsonian Magazine, is working hard to suck the juices from the vine and may reduce the spread of the invasive plant.) Nature is a reminder of God’s creativity and majesty and power, but it can also be a metaphor to apply to our day-to-day lives. Even the weeds can teach us. As I hacked away at those vile weed trees on Saturday, I pledged that I would do better at keeping them in check. I made promises to my Lord and myself that I would be vigilant, both in my landscaping and my life.

As I was sitting on the sidelines of one of my sons’ soccer games recently, I heard a familiar question, “A little help?” It was part request, part heads-up. A ball had rolled from one of the nearby fields and was heading toward ours. The kicker wanted us to stop it from rolling onto the area where a game was being played, but also he wanted someone to toss it back to him. A dad scooped up the ball and sent it back to the boy, and play continued on our field. Though the exchange was commonplace and unremarkable, I kept thinking about the phrase: a little help? It wasn’t formulated as an actual question, but it was a request for assistance. I suppose the phrase stuck with me because I’ve been pondering how much help I’ve needed help lately myself. I started using a hearing aid a few weeks ago to help with the hearing loss in my left ear. I had told myself for a while that I could live with the constant buzzing and the muffled sounds on that side of my head. I’d just work around it and pivot my good ear toward what I wanted to hear, I told myself. It was just an annoyance. Eventually, with the encouragement of my husband, I saw a few medical professionals and now I can hear pretty well again. It’s funny how many of us refuse to ask for help. It’s silly, really. I’ve been blessed many times to be on the giving side of the arrangement, so I know there are plenty of people ready and willing to step in and help, so why am I so reluctant to be on the receiving end? Maybe it’s because we’re taught to be independent D.I.Y.-ers who just need to figure it out. Maybe it’s a control thing, and we don’t want to give the task to someone who’s going to botch and blunder his way through it when we could get it done so much better. Or maybe we’re afraid of what others will think. “Will they say I’m a bad ____ (mom, wife, daughter, employee, neighbor, Christian, etc.)?” There are plenty of excuses not to ask for help, but there’s also countless reasons why our reluctance is complete foolishness. That’s why we have to ask ourselves the tough questions: Are my claims of independence and high standards actually plain arrogance? Is my worrying over what others will think superficial and, let’s face it, such a waste of time? Am I harming the people I’m in charge of caring for when I don’t seek assistance for myself? Another important question I’ve had to ask myself is this: Does my refusal to ask for help from the people in my life translate to how I petition my Heavenly Father through prayer? In other words, if I don’t use the help me muscle with the loving humans around me, can I be expected to use it with my loving God? In Timothy Keller’s book Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, he says that “Prayer is both conversation and encounter with God. . . . We must know the awe of praising his glory, the intimacy of finding his grace, and the struggle of asking his help, all of which can lead us to know the spiritual reality of his presence.” I sure could use more of God’s presence, and prayer is the door to enter into it. So, in case no one has told you this today, it’s okay to ask for help. Actually, it’s not just okay, it’s a holy command. We read over and over in Scripture, that we should cry out. And Isaiah 30 gives us an example of God’s willingness to help: “So the Lord must wait for you to come to him so he can show you his love and compassion. For the Lord is a faithful God. Blessed are those who wait for his help…He will be gracious if you ask for help. He will surely respond to the sound of your cries.” Take that first step to get the help you need.

There’s nothing funnier than an embarrassing story–even if it’s about me—as long as I get to tell it. There’s nothing more humiliating than finding out that others have been telling embarrassing stories about me and I’m not there to spin it sufficiently toward funny and away from devastating. I assume that’s true for most everyone. Sharing past slip-ups and faux pas are very entertaining and, I think, a very healthy way to keep your ego in check. It’s like a colon cleanse without the laxatives. I’ve been a professional “self-embarasser” for years now but I realized that I could reach new heights as a “child embarrasser” when my daughters were in preschool and I had volunteered to drive on a field trip. As I loaded my car with my four-year olds and the three extra ones I had been assigned, I asked the question we always asked at the beginning of a car ride: “Is everybody buckle-dee-buckled?” (I think it’s my husband Brent’s homage to Ned Flanders from the Simpsons but I’m not 100% sure.) My daughters groaned, “Mommmm…” I was aghast. Had I embarrassed them? I knew it would happen eventually but I assumed it would be at a mall or a slumber party. Maybe it would be in the school drop-off line as they were getting out of our minivan and I would yell, “I love you sooo much!” They would be pre-teen, not preschool. This meant I had years and years of “Mommmm!” groans to look forward to! The most effective method for embarrassing yourself is to do it on television. I know this because I’ve done it and have the reruns to prove it. Four years ago my family was on HGTV’s “House Hunters.” If you know the show, you know that a realtor takes a family to see three houses and by the end of the half hour episode they have chosen and signed all the papers for their new house. My husband took a week off work to tape the episode. This involved sound and light checks, costume changes, and exterior shots (but no craft service, unfortunately). We are a very accommodating couple in most respects, so when the director said she wanted a shot of me riding through the park on my bike with my son in the toddler seat I did it. When she requested a shot of Brent pretending to look at a patient’s chart with his nurse at his office she had it. When she suggested shooting me planting pansies in a rocky flowerbed near the trashcans, I was totally cool with that. That’s why we were both completely invested in the scene that consisted of me calling for Brent’s help while struggling to stack our nuclear holocaust supply of toilet paper in the closet of our old house to highlight our need for more storage space. In an Oscar-worthy performance I cried, “Brent, can you help me?” and he came running to my side. “That Charmin looks mighty heavy, little lady.” In the “I-Can’t-Believe-We’re-Gonna-Be-On-TV” environment of that week, we didn’t question much of anything. We just went along with any idea that came to the director’s mind. (Is that how Hitler got the Nazis on board? Why would anyone sign up for that insanity unless they had been meticulously lured into it with promises of their own cable TV show?) When our episode aired for the first time, we watched it on a giant screen in the gym at our church with a bunch of our friends. That will go down as one of the top ten most embarrassing yet hilarious nights of my life. It was a like a car accident—I wanted to close my eyes but I just couldn’t look away. We had spent hours and hours taping what would be about 22 minutes of footage (after taking out the commercials). If you subtract every sixty-second update of the riveting storyline after the commercial breaks, then it would be more like fifteen minutes. So much had been edited out and some of the parts they did use—like the toilet paper scene—I barely remembered. Not to mention the things that happened off camera, like the time that I put pantiliners inside my shirt so that I wouldn’t have sweaty armpits. Somehow one of the pantiliners slipped out and made its way to the bottom of the sound guy’s shoe. I noticed it just as they were releasing Brent and I to leave so that the crew could stay and shoot some B-roll. I was in the van with the engine running before Brent knew what had happened. Gland control of a woman in her thirties was not something I wanted to explain to the twenty-something sound guy who had just worked on an episode of MTV Cribs before coming to shoot our show. When I look at the whole experience—embarrassing parts and all—I’m still glad we did it. I got to spend a week with Brent doing something new. We gave our kids a wonderful gift—a readily available fun fact to use at freshman mixer games. We put our city on the map, hopefully in a good way. My one regret (other than the toilet paper wimpiness and the pantiliner), was the brown capris I wore one of the shooting days. In the shot of us walking up the front porch, I look like I’m wearing a “Big Momma” fat suit. Apparently, the camera added all of the fifteen pounds to my rear. Phew! I’m just glad I got to say it instead of hearing someone else say it first. I feel so much better now! A little dose of embarrassment from time to time is good for what ails you!