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5/1/2012 Today’s Advice to My Beautiful Daughters – Leave your seat upright

May1

And all my fellow travelers out there:

Leave your seat back up.  Your comfort is not more important than the person behind you!

This is a pretty serious pet peave of mine.  I know the seats are built to recline.  Just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD.  I have been behind people who put their seat back into my lap and then lean forward to work the whole time.  This eliminates my ability to move, work or do anything else.

So not just in airplanes, but in life…look around.  Pay attention.  Be aware of the people around you.  Sometimes a small sacrifice in your own comfort will make a big difference in someone else’s.  Those little sacrifices are worth it, and they don’t cost you much at all.

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4/30/12 Today’s Advice to My Beautiful Daughters – Say no to the status quo.

Apr30

(Inspired by Steve North of Lifeline Ministries)

The status quo is a bully.  Say no to bullies.

I’ve really had to sit with this one for a while.  How can an intangible thing like the status quo be a bully?  Then I started to substitute words and it became a little bit clearer to me.  Conformity is a bully.  Mediocrity is a bully.  “Good enough” is a bully.  Average is a bully.

All of these things tend to convince us that we don’t need to aspire to any more.  We don’t need to stand out.  We need to fit in, blend in, and look, behave and think like everyone else.  The status quo stifles our greatness.  It dampens our spirit for adventure.  It makes us think, “I can’t” or “I shouldn’t, instead “I can” or “I will”.

So my beautiful beautiful girls.  Please know that there is greatness inside you.  There are talents and a spirit that will make you shine.  You are light and salt and the status quo will be there all your life trying to convince you that you aren’t.  It will bully you into submission if you let it.  It will bully others into submission.  Stand up to bullies.  Be more than the status quo.

For more information about the great work of Lifeline Ministries, go to: http://www.lifelinetoledo.com

Today’s Advice to ME

Apr16

In honor of my Facebook advice “column” to my girls, I am feeling the need to turn things around a bit.  So here goes…

Today’s advice to beautiful me:

You are not responsible for everyone’s happiness.  It is hard enough to control your own emotions without taking on the added burden of everyone else’s.

Yet here I sit with  my neck and back holding so much tension that they are tender to the touch and the ceaseless thoughts about how to make everyone happy.  I know it isn’t logical and I know that I can’t possibly succeed.  But the more I know this, the more tightly I hold the thoughts, so tightly in fact that my muscles from the top of my head to my lower back are all knotted up from the effort.

I often feel like a phony in this virtual world.  I present mostly cheerful thoughts and declarations about my wonderful family.  And they are wonderful.  Those who know me best know that I hit the jackpot with my kids, my husband, my mom and extended family.  We have suffered no major traumas and for the most part, I have managed by some miracle to avoid the typical teenage disdain felt by most parents.  Life really is pretty good.

What I don’t tell the world in my Facebook statuses is that life can get messy at my house.  I scream at my kids sometimes, sometimes with cuss words.  I pout.  I stew.  I resent.  I get fed up.  I lose what little semblance of patience I have.  My kids seem to hate me sometimes.  They think I “don’t understand” and tell me so.  They reject my advice and nagging and do things their own way, to varying degrees of success.  And sometimes my perfectly blended family frays at the edges, and I am the thread being pulled tight between the edges that are my daughters and my husband.  The stretching and pulling can be so painful at times that I don’t know how to stitch it back together.

I worry. I fret.  I obsess.  I negotiate…with them, with myself and with God.

This may be the hardest time I have ever faced as a parent.  My oldest is preparing to leave for college in the fall and less than two months from her 18th birthday, she is yearning for the independence that comes with her adulthood status.  And I cling and grab at the little control I have left and wonder desperately if I have done enough to prepare her, if there is still time to teach the things I haven’t gotten to and whether she will be ok without me.  I have been preparing for this for 17 years, 10 months and two weeks.  I knew that her leaving the nest would be hard and I have prepared for how I would feel when I dropped her off at college.  But nobody told me about the ripping away that has to happen in preparation for that.  I wasn’t prepared for it to start so soon and I WANT MORE TIME

My youngest is now in high school.  She is at that stage where she is seeking independence and trying to find the balance between her need for direction and her desire to figure it out on her own.  I recognize the pattern now and am determined to right all the mistakes I made the first time around. I wrestle for more control and she senses a double standard and resists.  Tension.  Conflict.  A test of wills.

Each day seems to bring a new challenge, a new hurt, a new emotion to navigate.  And because I am feeling so unsettled, I do the logical thing…I dig in..  I hold tight.  I obsess.  I worry.

It seems that all I know about my ability (or lack thereof) to control everyone’s happiness is in conflict with the deep longing I feel for the little girls who hung on my words and smile and who thought I was the best thing in the world.  I feel that life slipping further away and my fear and longing resist the logic in the  natural order of things.  Mark reminds me that this is the way it supposed to go.   My mind knows he is right but my heart isn’t ready to accept it.

So friends, know that the advice I give my daughters is just as much my advice to me.  And beneath the put togetherness that I project to the world is someone who is figuring it out minute by minute sometimes.  I second guess myself more often than not and every day I long for the “do over” button.

Despite all that, I know that I am blessed with a husband who supports me in my neurotic need for control and with daughters who have made being a mom the greatest joy of my life, even when it doesn’t feel like a joy at all.  At the end of the day, I need to remind myself that I am enough, and I can only be responsible for what is mine…my emotions, my reactions, my example.  The rest I will have to give back to its rightful owner, and maybe then, my faith can take over where my trust has left off.

My Favorite Mistakes

Feb26

Over the last 10 years, I have spent a lot of time and energy focused on my mistakes, the sins of my past. I have also spent a lot of time and energy trying to free myself from those mistakes. I have wrestled with God over control of forgiveness in my life….His, and mine. I have accepted forgiveness and then thown it back in a fit of self-loathing. I have given that burden to God and then yanked it back when the peace that I found in my unburdening became too much for my guilty heart to take.

I have thanked God for the grace that is so evident in my life, for the daily proof that He has forgiven me and doesn’t define our relationship by my past. I have felt the guilt that comes when unforgiveness of myself is sharing space with abundant grace and I don’t know what to do with that tension.

Over and over, I have struggled with what my heart knows and what my heart will allow.

I was inspired yesteday, by a video of an amazing young woman, Sarah Kay, who uses spoken word poetry to make sense of her world. When she is trying to help young people to find a start to their own stories, she asks them to make a list. The first list is always “10 things I know to be true”.

Inspired by that and this morning’s message about Lent, I decided that the list was a good way to get my jumbled thoughts started into something cohesive that I could hold on to, and maybe the words in my list will create a space that God can move into. This list represents that intersection between what my heart knows and what my heart will allow. It is what I know about my favorite mistakes.

10 things I know to be true about mistakes:

1. We all make them. From before our faltering first steps to our last ragged breaths, our lives will be filled with mistakes.

2. We give mistakes more power than they deserve. A mistake is just a mistake, no more, no less.

3. A mistake doesn’t define us, but it can define a moment in time. What we do from that moment on has nothing to do with the mistake, and everything to do with us.

4. God cares deeply about our mistakes, because He cares deeply about us. But when His heart aches for us, at the same time, His tears and His blood are washing our mistakes away. Any scorekeeping that happens is done by us, not by Him.

5. When we refuse to forgive our own mistakes, or the mistakes of others, we are living in the past. When we live in the past, we are missing the present and robbing ourselves of the promises of the future.

6. Sometimes our biggest mistakes, the things we did wrong, are exactly what causes us to be in the right place today. A small wrong can lead to big rights.

7. A mistake can cause us to lose our way, but if we keep our hearts tuned in, we can always find our way back. God’s GPS always has a “take me home” button, and when we get there, He will have the lights on and He will be waiting up.

8. A simple apology (to someone else, to ourselves, to God) is the best first step after any mistake. We should never ever underestimate the power, the beauty or the grace that can be found in “I’m sorry”.

9. When the weight of a mistake is weighing us down, there is sweet relief is giving that burden to God. Sometimes we will take the burden back, but it won’t be because God handed it back to us. It will be because we took it. Sometimes it takes lots of tries to give it up completely. We should keep trying.

10. When we are at the precipice of a mistake, just before we take the leap, we should pause, listen then act. If we make a mistake anyway, we should pause, listen, then move on. The next opportunity to do the right thing will come quickly. If we focus on the mistake, we might miss the opportunity.

11. We can’t protect someone from making their own mistakes. Even if we know better. Even if they are about to do something stupid. Our mistakes are ours and they are valuable. Mistakes are how we learn, and when we try to prevent others from making mistakes, we are also denying them the opportunity to learn from their choices, and yes, their mistakes. Just because someone else may find themselves in the same circumstances that we were once in, doesn’t mean that their outcome will be the same as ours and even if it is, their experience will affect them differently than ours did. Mistakes are important for everyone to make because when we are making mistakes, it means that we are living.

I do know how to count to 10, but number 11 seemed important. As a parent, I put a lot of energy into trying to steer my kids away from mistakes. I don’t want them to feel the pain of the mistakes that I have made. But when I am really honest, I realize that my job isn’t to prevent their mistakes. My job is to equip them for their mistakes. It is to give them a place to return to when their mistakes have left their hearts tattered and their confidence bruised. My job is to demonstrate grace to them, and to give them the same forgiveness that I have revceived from my heavenly Father. It is to provide them with a no strings attached kind of love that they can count on ESPECIALLY when they make mistakes. Because depsite my best efforts, they will make mistakes and they will learn from how I react, not just to my own mistakes, but by the way I react to theirs. I can model apology when I am wrong because I will  mess up my job as their mom sometimes. And if I am really successful and I work really hard, maybe I can even show them how to forgive themselves by giving myself the gift of grace.

If you would like to hear more from the amazing Sarah Kay, I have linked the video below.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter.html