Dear Blog Reader:
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am doing fine. I must admit that I was blown away by the response to the last blog about greeting people as they come to the end of our driveway. Thank you.
Labor Day has come and gone. Fall is here in spite of the high 80 degree temps. The beans are in the turning mode. One farmer, a particularly ambitious farmer, planted his beans the 1st week of April. He snuck them in just as the ground was barely dry enough to support his equipment and just before 2 weeks of rain that kept everyone out of the fields for three additional weeks. As a result, that one field is harvested and ready to plant a good crop of wheat if he so desires. So he has bragging rights and we will wait a couple of weeks as the beans and the corn dry. As we prepare for harvest, try to remember to take it easy as you come up behind that massive equipment lumbering down the road that was paved when the equipment was much smaller and jerks who thought that they were the center of the universe lived in the big city instead of country estates.
Sure you are in a hurry to get to the drive through for your breakfast burrito, but look at the physics of the problem. That tractor or combine weighs a gazillion lbs. It is 12 ft wide on a 16 ft wide road. You take up the remaining 8 ft. Oops! There are only 4 ft remaining. You in your car even with your considerable Big Mac fed girth, only weigh in at around 4000 lbs; a lot less than a gazillion lbs. So . . . Let me get my calculator. Let's see. Now carry the one. Yep, in this confrontation, you are not the center of the universe no matter what you think. No matter how important that meeting was when you left your house late, you will lose. You are definitely going to scrape the paint on your car.
That public service message out of the way. I love this time of the year. The full moons are brightest for September, and October. I have no idea why. But they are bright. I do love to walk through the house at night with the moon pouring through the window. I can look out the window and see the outline of late summer sunflowers drooping over as their heads fill with winter bird forage. As fortune and my 54 year old prostate would have it, I was up at 3:00 the other morning (as usual). I stumbled into the bathroom and was startled by the moon flowing in through the bathroom window illuminating the toilet in that soft lunar light. Yes, the throne looked like a majestic throne. I must admit that I took a few extra moments to sit there and soak in the ambience and specialness of the moment in my royal splendor.
That is the September moon; the Harvest Moon. October's, the Hunter's Moon, will be even brighter. So bright in fact that it will drive people crazy all over the midwest and they will congregate on the banks of the Wabash River in Tippecanoe county and have a feast of the Hunter's Moon. And you GenXers and Millennials thought that you had invented Cosplay. No you just move it from the country side to the city where the newspapers can take pictures and publicize the madness.
Speaking of things out of place, the lovely Miss Beverly and I trekked up to East Lansing Michigan to spend a day with Grace and Chris a few weeks back over the Labor Day weekend. I like the Lansing environs. Michigan's state capital, a rusted out industrial base and a college town all wrapped into one. I do think that the college town part has a biggest influence on the things that I like. College towns are an interesting phenomena. Mom and dad send all of their disposable income to a far away place where it is accumulated 30,000 times and the augmented by college loans and suddenly you have the ability to sustain a hundred or so small independent local eateries. Yes, the food is very good there. Chris and Grace have taken us someplace different every time and I have not been disappointed in the quality of the fare.
I like visiting Grace and Chris. This trip was no exception. The food was great. Getting away and resting was good. Grace and Chris schooled us in the game of Pickle ball. We were Pickle ball newbies and have found that we like it a lot. I am sure that you have heard that Pickle ball is the fastest growing organized sport in America. I know it sounds impressive but since Grace and Chris were the only people playing and now Bev and I are playing; that 100% increase counts as the fasting growing sport in America. If four of you want to continue this explosive growth but are unsure of how to play Pickle ball, it is basically tennis slowed down for baby boomers. The glorified wiffle ball slows the game so that from time to time, I can run across the court and track down one of Bev's tremendous backhands.
It was the signs in East Lansing that caused me to pause. They surprised me. I don't know why. I think I was surprised because I noticed them. The first was on a bumper. Apparently, a doula was very proud of her chosen profession. That is good. I know of accountants with "accountants do it by the numbers" bumper stickers and "Exterminators are to die for" stickers. Well, we pulled up to a Subaru and there was a bumper sticker encouraging me to "catch the wave; Water birth". What? It made me uncomfortable. I must admit I have an aversion to water. I don't know why. I swam a lot when I was a kid. However, overtime I have become less and less comfortable around the water. I spent two lovely weeks of vacation this summer on the shores of Lake Indiana and never got my knees wet. I think that it comes down the fact that I have no gills. My ancestors made some radical choices a few million years ago to venture out on the land. I am sure that the first few breaths were difficult. There was some gasping and panting going on. However great, great grandpa Jim stuck with it and we have left all of that dissolved oxygen gill exchange behind for lungs. I really don't see the need to take a step backward and see if our babies have any inclination to revert back a few million years.
The other sign that took me aback was actually on the back of a T-shirt. I was behind this guy and I could not quite figure out what his shirt said. It had a lot of words on it and a graphic of this bull's head on it. I wasn't sure but I was pretty sure that the last word ass. I am not opposed to the tastefully done cuss word. However, since I was at church and this guy was in the front row, I was intrigued. I squinted. I used my iphone. I used all of my observation skills. I think the word right before ass was Candy. Then my new friend turned around and I realized that he picked this work of art up at a WWF match. Well I had enough clues that with my handy Iphone, I could figure out the rest. I soon found out that the Rock often ridicules his opponents by threatening to lay a smack down on their candy ass. Grace and peace to you too Dwayne. Don't you hate it when you get your church shirt out of your WWF drawer? I do. I think that he may have realized it about halfway through the song service. There was a lot of shirt tail tucking going on. So much so that I was unable to get a picture of it for the blog.
Why did I even notice? If I would have been in Ingalls or Indianapolis on my home turf, I would not have either sign. If I would have noticed, it would not have risen in my consciousness to the level of comment. Why is that? What had suddenly changed? In the end, I have to admit that I am just a home body at heart. I love home. I am comfortable at home. Away from home, I am on edge. I am in search of all things that make me uncomfortable. Every instance becomes another indicator that things are not right; that I should head home as soon as possible. Proof of the point that I was making; thank you very much. I want to point it out to everyone around me that this place; not my home, is not safe and not worthy of my continued presence. I do feel sorry for the kids. Who wants to be reminded that your chosen hometown is full of people who want to drown their new born babies or lay a smack down during the passing of the peace? I don't. That is why I ignore it around home, and why I point out all of those flaws when I am not home.
They say that home is where the heart is. It is also the place where your babies are born on dry land, and your candy ass isn't about to get smacked down. Yes, home is where your toilet is bathed in royal moon light at 3:00 a.m.
Take Care.
Roger.
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Monday, September 12, 2016
From the end of the driveway
Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my finger tips doing well as I sit at the kitchen table typing. A couple of Saturday evenings ago I had the privilege to share some of my wife's and my experiences with a ten month placement of two girls ages 9 and 10 through the Safe Families ministry. We were asked to speak as the filler between acts of a benefit concert for Safe Families. When asked, I thought that it would be a wonderful opportunity to encapsulate all of the ups and downs of that 10 months. I had even bigger voices in my head because the girls' father has been reunited with the girls and he would be speaking about what the experience meant to him at the same time. It was going to be a dynamite panel discussion.
Well you guessed it. People were there to listen to the musical talent. They were not there to listen to us speak for very long. I get it. However, there were some things that came to mind as I was processing "what I wanted to talk about." Thank you Emma, for encouraging me to put those thoughts into words.
No we didn't just wake up one day with two young girls living with us. There was a call. In fact, it was a call that my wife, the Lovely Miss Beverly, had heard and was prepared to answer. Bev heard, "hey, we have a big empty house. Several rooms were available as our own kids have exited stage right as their adult lives take hold. There are kids and families that have a need. We can make a difference. As I said, Bev heard a call. I did not. I heard the call of riding my bike for 5000 miles a year, putting out a large garden plot, writing a weekly 1200 word blog, and rekindling an old wood working hobby that had fallen in the wake of raising our children. Why did Bev hear the call and I did not? Who knows? Maybe the Holy Spirit saves time by just convincing one of the pair and then let the communication of a marriage figure it all out. Rather than figure out the mystery of marriage, in the end, we signed up and waited.
Then one day Emma said, "I have an interesting placement. It would last a minimum of 6 months but could go longer." We heard six months. Six months doesn't sound like it is very long. In 6 months, we will have flown through two seasons. In six months, the sap on the maple trees will be rising. The winter coat will not have to be worn every day. We will still have to get through the big spring thaw of March, but the days will be getting noticeably longer. In my 54th year, six months is a blink of an eye.
So we said sure. Six months is fine. If it goes longer, it will be fine. I remember telling Emma "we will take them when they get to the end of our driveway and keep them until they leave the end of our driveway." The "end of the driveway" has become a go-to metaphor at our house. For ten years, we raised organic vegetables for sale at local farmer's markets. One of the ways that we survived is through accepting summer interns who would wander to our farm through Internet contacts. They lived in our house, shared our meals and became an integral part of our family life. In any given summer, we could have several college students spend four to twelve weeks with us in an ever revolving door of personalities. At one point we had a self-proclaimed anarchist lesbian and a fundamentalist evangelical under the roof at the same time. Unlike me, the rest of my family understandably wanted more information, so they could prepare a little before the next eclectic personality showed up at the end of the driveway.
I had other priorities. I needed someone to pick beans, hoe weeds, and, if they weren't too squeamish, help dress chickens. Their religious or political leanings were of no concern to me. I would get question after question from our kids and Bev about the next intern that I had just interviewed over the phone. Where are they from? How old are they? Do they shower often? Where do they fall along the lifestyle spectrum? So many questions that I had not asked. I asked, "when can you be here and how long are you staying?" So in response to all of the relevant family questions, I would just shrug my shoulders and say "we'll find out when they get to end of the driveway."
So in face of the uncertainty of the girls' and their father's story and duration of the placement, we just said we'll take them when they get to the end of the driveway and keep them until they leave the driveway.
I believe that accepting whoever and whatever God brings to the end of our driveway is what Bev and I are called to do. I thought that I was prepared for living life that open handed, accepting whatever God brought our way. I was wrong. I want to control. I want to judge. I want things my way. Keep that in your mind for a minute while I bring you up to date about the girls.
Imagine for a moment, that you are 10 and 9 years old. You are being taken to the library by grandma and grandpa to meet with a social worker and an old man and woman who are going to give you a safe place to stay. Dad has hit a tough patch. You haven't seen your mother since you were 2 and 1 respectively. And while grandma and grandpa were watching you at the start of dad's rough patch, their circumstances mean that they can't watch you for six months. In the middle of that storm you hear your grandpa say, these people, who you don't know, who he says are good people and safe, are really what is best in the circumstance. If I am 10 years old, I would have thought that things were pretty bad if these strangers are the best that we can do in the circumstance.
I thought that I was empathetic. I thought that I was patient. I thought that I had wisdom and excellent parenting skills that had been hard won through 54 years of life and 31 years of marriage. I thought that Bev's and my marriage could thrive through any adversity. I have now learned that those things are true to a certain extent. But not enough to overcome the strain that 10 years of varying degrees of chaos had affected the two young girls who came to stay with us. They came to us having each other and any normality, or structure would have to penetrate the coping mechanisms they had used to navigate a chaotic road that put them at the end of our driveway.
If I had truly accepted the girls that had shown up at the end of our driveway, I would have accepted the circumstances that had brought them to us. I would not have tried to fix them. I would not have compared them to our kids and the decisions Ben and Grace had made while living with us. I would not have wondered why bed time was so difficult if I would have thought about what life was like when you know that a new day may bring you unexpected things.
Accepting life at the end of the drive is difficult. There is such tension between accepting and expecting; come as you are, versus you can't make poor decisions. We will help you get to sleep, versus you have to go to sleep early in order to be rested for school tomorrow.
That tension was with us throughout the entire placement. Everything was a negotiation. In coming along side the family, all situations had to be negotiated. We would say, "we are partners with your dad and you can't do this or that," which wasn't always true. That is what was negotiated at that time. Their father wouldn't have given two rips about the situation we were negotiating about if we weren't partnered. I would have dealt out much greater consequences if we weren't partnered. So we spent a lot of physical and emotional energy walking the girls along this difficult balance beam between our world, and their dad's.
No, partnering with hurting people creates a tension. A tension that shows how difficult life is for the families that it serves. You want to fix that difficult life. You want them to know that if you don't drink pop for supper, you will be able to get to sleep at a good time and wake refreshed and your concentration will be so much stronger tomorrow at school. With stronger concentration, you will get better grades; graduate from high school, go on to college and meet a good man to create a family; a safe family. You have to give that desire up. If you don't, it will drive you crazy. No! You still can' t have pop for supper for a whole host of reasons, but not because it will fix your life.
Probably nothing done in Safe Families will fix the children. Certainly, nothing that Bev and I did fixed the girls who lived with us for 10 months. It took us a while to understand it. But when we recognized that, it became easier. I finally came up with the metaphor of the asteroid. In this metaphor, the girls' lives have an asteroid streaking towards them. It is a big one. It will cause great devastation. Nothing we can do will stop it streaking toward their world. No, at our point, at the end of our driveway, we can only push, pull and tug at the circumstances. Hopefully, that asteroid is deflected. Hopefully, the time to impact or the angle of deflection is great enough that no harm will come; maybe not. Maybe there will be some impact. Who knows?
We still have contact with the girls and their father. We give rides, help in emergencies, have the family over for supper once a week and have even started working with their dad to establish a budget to corral their tight finances. Maybe, it will be a fairy tale ending. Maybe, it won't. Either way Bev and I will not have fixed the situation. It wasn't the calling. We were simply called to show up.
From the end of the driveway, take care.
Roger
I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my finger tips doing well as I sit at the kitchen table typing. A couple of Saturday evenings ago I had the privilege to share some of my wife's and my experiences with a ten month placement of two girls ages 9 and 10 through the Safe Families ministry. We were asked to speak as the filler between acts of a benefit concert for Safe Families. When asked, I thought that it would be a wonderful opportunity to encapsulate all of the ups and downs of that 10 months. I had even bigger voices in my head because the girls' father has been reunited with the girls and he would be speaking about what the experience meant to him at the same time. It was going to be a dynamite panel discussion.
Well you guessed it. People were there to listen to the musical talent. They were not there to listen to us speak for very long. I get it. However, there were some things that came to mind as I was processing "what I wanted to talk about." Thank you Emma, for encouraging me to put those thoughts into words.
No we didn't just wake up one day with two young girls living with us. There was a call. In fact, it was a call that my wife, the Lovely Miss Beverly, had heard and was prepared to answer. Bev heard, "hey, we have a big empty house. Several rooms were available as our own kids have exited stage right as their adult lives take hold. There are kids and families that have a need. We can make a difference. As I said, Bev heard a call. I did not. I heard the call of riding my bike for 5000 miles a year, putting out a large garden plot, writing a weekly 1200 word blog, and rekindling an old wood working hobby that had fallen in the wake of raising our children. Why did Bev hear the call and I did not? Who knows? Maybe the Holy Spirit saves time by just convincing one of the pair and then let the communication of a marriage figure it all out. Rather than figure out the mystery of marriage, in the end, we signed up and waited.
Then one day Emma said, "I have an interesting placement. It would last a minimum of 6 months but could go longer." We heard six months. Six months doesn't sound like it is very long. In 6 months, we will have flown through two seasons. In six months, the sap on the maple trees will be rising. The winter coat will not have to be worn every day. We will still have to get through the big spring thaw of March, but the days will be getting noticeably longer. In my 54th year, six months is a blink of an eye.
So we said sure. Six months is fine. If it goes longer, it will be fine. I remember telling Emma "we will take them when they get to the end of our driveway and keep them until they leave the end of our driveway." The "end of the driveway" has become a go-to metaphor at our house. For ten years, we raised organic vegetables for sale at local farmer's markets. One of the ways that we survived is through accepting summer interns who would wander to our farm through Internet contacts. They lived in our house, shared our meals and became an integral part of our family life. In any given summer, we could have several college students spend four to twelve weeks with us in an ever revolving door of personalities. At one point we had a self-proclaimed anarchist lesbian and a fundamentalist evangelical under the roof at the same time. Unlike me, the rest of my family understandably wanted more information, so they could prepare a little before the next eclectic personality showed up at the end of the driveway.
I had other priorities. I needed someone to pick beans, hoe weeds, and, if they weren't too squeamish, help dress chickens. Their religious or political leanings were of no concern to me. I would get question after question from our kids and Bev about the next intern that I had just interviewed over the phone. Where are they from? How old are they? Do they shower often? Where do they fall along the lifestyle spectrum? So many questions that I had not asked. I asked, "when can you be here and how long are you staying?" So in response to all of the relevant family questions, I would just shrug my shoulders and say "we'll find out when they get to end of the driveway."
So in face of the uncertainty of the girls' and their father's story and duration of the placement, we just said we'll take them when they get to the end of the driveway and keep them until they leave the driveway.
I believe that accepting whoever and whatever God brings to the end of our driveway is what Bev and I are called to do. I thought that I was prepared for living life that open handed, accepting whatever God brought our way. I was wrong. I want to control. I want to judge. I want things my way. Keep that in your mind for a minute while I bring you up to date about the girls.
Imagine for a moment, that you are 10 and 9 years old. You are being taken to the library by grandma and grandpa to meet with a social worker and an old man and woman who are going to give you a safe place to stay. Dad has hit a tough patch. You haven't seen your mother since you were 2 and 1 respectively. And while grandma and grandpa were watching you at the start of dad's rough patch, their circumstances mean that they can't watch you for six months. In the middle of that storm you hear your grandpa say, these people, who you don't know, who he says are good people and safe, are really what is best in the circumstance. If I am 10 years old, I would have thought that things were pretty bad if these strangers are the best that we can do in the circumstance.
I thought that I was empathetic. I thought that I was patient. I thought that I had wisdom and excellent parenting skills that had been hard won through 54 years of life and 31 years of marriage. I thought that Bev's and my marriage could thrive through any adversity. I have now learned that those things are true to a certain extent. But not enough to overcome the strain that 10 years of varying degrees of chaos had affected the two young girls who came to stay with us. They came to us having each other and any normality, or structure would have to penetrate the coping mechanisms they had used to navigate a chaotic road that put them at the end of our driveway.
If I had truly accepted the girls that had shown up at the end of our driveway, I would have accepted the circumstances that had brought them to us. I would not have tried to fix them. I would not have compared them to our kids and the decisions Ben and Grace had made while living with us. I would not have wondered why bed time was so difficult if I would have thought about what life was like when you know that a new day may bring you unexpected things.
Accepting life at the end of the drive is difficult. There is such tension between accepting and expecting; come as you are, versus you can't make poor decisions. We will help you get to sleep, versus you have to go to sleep early in order to be rested for school tomorrow.
That tension was with us throughout the entire placement. Everything was a negotiation. In coming along side the family, all situations had to be negotiated. We would say, "we are partners with your dad and you can't do this or that," which wasn't always true. That is what was negotiated at that time. Their father wouldn't have given two rips about the situation we were negotiating about if we weren't partnered. I would have dealt out much greater consequences if we weren't partnered. So we spent a lot of physical and emotional energy walking the girls along this difficult balance beam between our world, and their dad's.
No, partnering with hurting people creates a tension. A tension that shows how difficult life is for the families that it serves. You want to fix that difficult life. You want them to know that if you don't drink pop for supper, you will be able to get to sleep at a good time and wake refreshed and your concentration will be so much stronger tomorrow at school. With stronger concentration, you will get better grades; graduate from high school, go on to college and meet a good man to create a family; a safe family. You have to give that desire up. If you don't, it will drive you crazy. No! You still can' t have pop for supper for a whole host of reasons, but not because it will fix your life.
Probably nothing done in Safe Families will fix the children. Certainly, nothing that Bev and I did fixed the girls who lived with us for 10 months. It took us a while to understand it. But when we recognized that, it became easier. I finally came up with the metaphor of the asteroid. In this metaphor, the girls' lives have an asteroid streaking towards them. It is a big one. It will cause great devastation. Nothing we can do will stop it streaking toward their world. No, at our point, at the end of our driveway, we can only push, pull and tug at the circumstances. Hopefully, that asteroid is deflected. Hopefully, the time to impact or the angle of deflection is great enough that no harm will come; maybe not. Maybe there will be some impact. Who knows?
We still have contact with the girls and their father. We give rides, help in emergencies, have the family over for supper once a week and have even started working with their dad to establish a budget to corral their tight finances. Maybe, it will be a fairy tale ending. Maybe, it won't. Either way Bev and I will not have fixed the situation. It wasn't the calling. We were simply called to show up.
From the end of the driveway, take care.
Roger
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