I have fields
of leaves galore
but no words

only hours wasted
on posts deleted
plenty more

abandoned drafts
I’d change
if I could

The kids had a cross country meet at home. It was held at what is now their former high school campus. Over the summer we received news that the school had suffered structural damage due to mine subsidence, which is when mines underneath the ground collapse causing the structures above them to sink below ground level. The building has not been officially condemned, but the entire student body and staff have been displaced.

They’ve been holding school in a Nazarene church across town, which is their secured place of residence for the next two years. Nobody has officially come out and said this, but everybody seems to understand that there isn’t going to be a return to this building. Between the state laws, insurance policies, and the damage itself, there are no current plans for rebuilding. They’ve lately begun the process of researching options.

The meet went by. It was the last regular season meet for the year. The temperature was in the 40’s, which is colder weather than August. Last night at the volleyball game was senior night, which included the cross country team’s two seniors. They read thank-you letters from each of the athletes. Our son thanked his dad for pushing him to be better, and his mom for putting up with all his many long hours away from home.

I didn’t make anyone clean today. My husband commented this morning that this was the first Saturday since camp ended, maybe even since camp started, that he didn’t have anything else going on. I stayed home from the pastor’s wives retreat next door. Because of all the Saturday things, it felt like the better choice was for me to stay home and be here to also enjoy the day.

It was a beautiful fall day again. I did get together and walk with a friend who was here for the retreat, and is another pastor’s wife I know from our former district. We’ve had many wonderful retreat times together. Last year I joined the planning committee for this one, but my heart isn’t quite invested yet there. Someday I pray I am able to give a little bit more of myself to such doings.

My husband’s dream version of camp includes a hospitality coordinator who’s in charge of the cooking, the cleaning, settling people into the rooms and/or buildings, and being the contact person while they’re here. I think that’s too much to put on one person, but right now there are at least people who help with those things. Yesterday it made me happy to show a family to their cabin.

By attentive living we can learn the difference between being present in loneliness and being present in solitude. When you are in an office, a house or an empty waiting room, you can suffer from restless loneliness but also enjoy a quiet solitude. When you are teaching in a classroom, listening to a lecture, watching a movie or chatting at a “happy hour”, you can have the unhappy feelings of loneliness but also the deep contentment of someone who speaks, listens and watches from the tranquil center of his solitude. It is not too difficult to distinguish between the restless and the restful, between the driven and the free, between the lonely and the solitary in our surroundings. When we live with a solitude of heart, we can listen with attention to the words and the worlds of others, but when we are driven by loneliness, we tend to select just those remarks and events that bring immediate satisfaction to our own craving needs.

Our world, however, is not divided between lonely people and solitaries. We constantly fluctuate between these poles and differ from hour to hour, day to day, week to week and year to year. We must confess that we have only a limited influence on this fluctuation. Too many known and unknown factors play roles in the balance of our inner life. But when we are able to recognize the poles between which we move and develop a sensitivity for this inner field of tension, then we no longer have to feel lost and can begin to discern the direction in which we want to move…

The mystery of love is that it protects and respects the aloneness of the other and creates the free space where he can convert his loneliness into a solitude that can be shared. In this solitude we can strengthen each other by mutual respect, by careful consideration of each other’s individuality, by an obedient distance from each other’s privacy and by a reverent understanding of the sacredness of the human heart.

~Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life

The cross country meets are getting easier again. Yesterday evening we traveled to Carlinville, about a 45-minute drive from my in-law’s house. My father-in-law doesn’t usually come to the meets, as they occur during harvest, his needed season. The boys and I drove into town to meet my mother-in-law at their house. We took the country roads, as the interstate had recently been backed up with traffic. The drive back home was particularly beautiful. People oftentimes speak of fall as their favorite season. I understand why.

Dad left the pastor’s conference early to make the three-hour drive. He was already there by the time we arrived, and the boys had already started their race. We made it to the park grounds in time to see my son pass through the first mile marker. The loops and design of this course allows for multiple views of the runners without having to travel too far yourself. I’ve stayed pretty stationary for the meets both this year and last, but yesterday I wandered over toward a more remote soccer field. I found a bench to stand on for the girls’ mile two.

Over the past month I’ve been feeling a lot better. For a while it seemed like I’d plateaued in terms of any more physical improvements. I still need to be intentional about where and how I’m spending energy, but lately its been good to go about current normal without much need for multi-day recoveries. This past weekend we chaperoned the school dance. I spent the night walking the perimeter of the dance floor, a cardigan tied around my waist, my hands holding a water bottle close to my chest. For such things I am grateful.

The boys and I went grocery shopping this afternoon. Dad has a pastor’s conference up in the quad cities, so after teaching this morning he left straight from there. We have to go into the school to pick the boys up. They have a buzzer you push near the entryway door, which always makes me feel like I’m bothering the secretary whenever I push it. I’m sure she has her days, but she doesn’t seem to mind when the buzzer rings again.

We made it in and out in exactly a half hour’s time. I made a list of dinners while we were eating our lunch. We parked by a tree and watched a man with a guitar walking around the Lowe’s parking lot. He tried out each of the sheds lined up against the Lowe’s property fence. He’d go into a shed with his guitar and close the door. A minute or two later he’d come out and go into another one. Halfway through this a Lowe’s lady came out.

It sure is a tremendous help to have all those hands. When your kids are little, people in the stores lines often smile and say things like, “You’ve sure got your hands full!” People don’t smile or say things to me like that anymore. We usually roll up to the check-out line with a pretty full cart, to the silent dismay of all those who come behind us. I don’t know that. I just know if I let all the people with less go ahead of me, I’d be there all day.

The beach towels are put away in the back corner of our closet. Fall seems to have come a bit early this year, or right on time depending on how you look at things. While normally we might have a few more days of swimming–one summer we went all the way to October 9th–it’s been cooler here for the past several weeks. I often take pictures at the beach, but rarely share them here. Something about our beach days feels sacred to me, the way we’ve learned to mark the time, the way I remember year after year, September by every passing September, that summer is leaving and won’t be back until May at the earliest.

The boys have been asking when Columbus Day is. Every once in a while I have to sit them down and ask them–You’re not miserable, right? There’s a big difference to me between, “I really hate this, please don’t make me” and “This isn’t my favorite, but it’ll be fine”. One is traumatic. The other is growth. So far it seems to be more the later, not even for all of them, and not even every day. We still pray everyday for their mornings, and for the prayer requests ranging from having the day go by fast to could there not be too much homework after school. I add my own along with theirs. While it makes me happy that they do miss home, I want them also to like these days too.

Whenever a season passes I always wish that I’d shared more, whether in thoughts, or pictures, or details of our days. With all that can be said and overheard on social media, I was scarred for a while by the fear of oversharing, even more so by the fear of losing, that I did the thing people do and swung the other way. I used to think I was writing these blogs for my kids, for them to have a sort of record to read and look back on. It didn’t seem right to think that I was writing them solely for myself. I had to have some kind of nobler reason, I still do. I do hope in some way they benefit from me writing here, this pausing to know more of what is true in my life, this wondering if I could’ve shared and brought someone else joy.

Note that the relations of the three persons of the Trinity never imply the dissolution of the individual person. That the persons of the Trinity mutually indwell each other never means that they become each other. It means that, eternally, completely, they are together. They breathe each other, and dance with each other, but do not collapse into each other. Likewise, our ability to be individuals (made in and for relationship) comes from our being made in the image of God.

How can we express the relationship given to us by being made in the image of God? By loving, first God and then neighbor. Why does that gift of love–for love is a self-donation, self-giving–not result in the loss of ourselves (if done wisely)? It is because loving another is the way that we become the persons that we were meant to be.

According to the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the Trinity, this mutual inherence is the expression of the monarchy of the Father. There is a relation of asymmetry in that the Son and Spirit have a relation of origin with the Father, but what that relation of origin indicates is that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit mutually inhere in each other and mutually define each other. God is God irrespective of creation, but that the Father is Father necessarily includes the Son (and vise versa). “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Mt. 16:25); this is not merely a text that applies to the created economy. Christ crucified reveals this salvific dynamic to us as the eternal life of God. It is both our salvation and our true humanity to participate in this life, just as it is the Son’s eternal being to give his life away. And, the Son, exactly reveals the Father; by Christ’s dying for us, he showed us what it means that God himself is truly alive.

The life of the open hand (not clenched fist, holding onto what is ours), is the life in which we become true selves, true persons. It is the image of God who forever is self-transcendent, who forever gives, whose life is the mutual in dwelling of the Trinity…

What is the image of God? Love God with all you are, and love your neighbor as yourself.

~Steven Cone, Theology From the Great Tradition, Module VI: Human Beings

Last month instead of traveling like we normally do when camp season ends, we took a week for a family staycation. Earlier in the summer I’d proposed the idea of having a staycation where we focused on thoroughly cleaning the house. I thought it’d make for a great vacation, and everybody else was pleasantly supportive. The idea was to spend the morning and afternoon hours on house projects, and the evening hours on doing something fun as a family.

We actually had a really good time. Several nights we went out to eat. One night we explored a downtown record store with old pinball machines. One day we spent the day at the waterpark. I tried out three of the slower slides, then did well spending the rest of the time reading under an umbrella. Another night everyone went to the drive-in (me and one of the boys stayed home). My personal favorite was the night we walked the streets of downtown Springfield.

You can’t really tell anymore that we cleaned. I knew a week wasn’t a whole lot of time to cram in everything I would’ve liked to get done. The one exception to this was a project that wasn’t even on the list, which was our homeschool timeline wall. Several years ago, I ordered a ten-foot timeline from Answers-in-Genesis to display on the wall as a teaching tool. It outlines the 7 C’s of history: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation.

I rarely used it. We’d bought trim and made a border for it, and it was on the bottom third of the wall where little ones could walk by and see it at eye level. After several tries to find an accent color to go above it, I gave up and for years it’s been a darker mauve. Since we were already painting over a deep blue accent wall, I thought we might as well just go ahead and paint the hallway. It was a labor of love on several people’s parts, and I absolutely love how the wall turned out.

It’s just a plain white now. While for a while I loved the colors, the symbolism of the arrows I added from Hobby Lobby, and just the overall busyness and stimulation of the wall, now the wall is soothing and peaceful. Every time I walk through it makes me happy, as the satisfaction of productive work returns. The hallway is one of the places where the house gets natural window light, and now with the lighter color, the wall is able to reflect the light back in ways it couldn’t before.

You hold tight to your umbrella
Well darlin’ I’m just tryin’ to tell ya
That there’s always been a rainbow
hangin’ over your head
~Rainbow, Kacey Musgraves~

After playing more than I should’ve over the weekend, I got my work done. I’m not exaggerating when I say that every time I finish a paper it feels like a small divine miracle has happened. I can’t even explain exactly what’s hard about it. I don’t mind the title page and I can handle the reference page, but the pages in between are what I never quite know how they’re going to get done, especially when we have to be official and write using research.

I actually was jealous of people who seem to be able to do this much easier. It wasn’t the innocent and loving kind of jealous. It was legitimate I-don’t-like-you-right-now kind of jealous. I guess me writing about it here is me repenting. I’ve actually been jealous of a few things lately, each one having to do with words. Where do people get the confidence to say anything with certainty, to communicate as if they actually know something? I have to cite every word I say.

I recently saw a rainbow in the morning sky, but without rain. To be more specific, here’s exactly what I was envious of–the ability to put experience, knowledge, and understanding into words. And not just any words, but words that exude a supernatural radiance. I know time and practice must have to factor in somewhere. I don’t want to bury or misuse talents, however non-utilitarian certain talents seem to be, like writing of a rainbow without rain when I see it.