Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

parenting

Time Wants to Show You a Different Country

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I walked with my oldest son Noah on the prairie Sunday night as emerald dragonflies swooped over a landscape abloom in a riot of wildflowers. The air sung, a symphony of trilling insects and rasping cottonwood leaves, a bobwhite’s questioning call, a goldfinch’s exuberant twitter. All around us the hills shimmered with sunlit bluestem.

It was astonishingly beautiful. And yet, I was gripped with sorrow.

My mind was on the young man who had taken his life the day before. A boy Noah had grown up with through elementary and middle school. A boy with a mom and a dad, with siblings and grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. A boy with a whole life yet unlived. A boy.

::

Last week I sat on my back patio and watched, rapt, as a large wasp with iridescent midnight blue wings straddled a dead cricket on the cement near my feet. The wasp hitched the insect to the underside of its abdomen and then scooted with its cargo toward the dirt under the barberry shrub, where it backed down into a hole, dragging the cricket behind it.

I was curious – curious enough to Google “black wasp and cricket” to see if I could find more about this puzzling behavior. From my research I learned that the cricket wasn’t actually dead; it was paralyzed. Turns out, after mating, the female black wasp doesn’t scavenge for a dead insect but instead immobilizes one that’s still alive – typically a grasshopper, cricket or katydid, a bug with substance. After dragging her paralyzed prey into the hole she’d dug earlier, the wasp lays a single egg onto the insect. She then goes back out to capture two additional insects to add to her lair, ensuring the nest is well-provisioned. Upon hatching, the larvae, safely cocooned in the host, have plenty of food to sustain them until they mature and are ready to emerge from the burrow.

As strange and perhaps macabre as it might sound, I admit, as a mother I can relate. Like the female wasp, I, too, endeavor to do everything I can to protect my children – to cocoon them in safety, to provide for them, to ensure their health and well-being. I, too, would like nothing more than to keep my boys swaddled forever in the security of my home and my protection, as far as possible from the many threats and dangers this world presents.

And yet, I know that like the mother wasp, I, too, must release my children into the larger world and allow them to emerge into themselves.

The truth is, this scares me. I am afraid to let my children go. I am afraid of the many threats I know about and, even more, the many I can’t even begin to fathom. I am afraid of what I can’t control, afraid of the fact that as they venture farther and farther away from the nest, the less I am able to protect them, provide for them and help sustain them. I am afraid, too, that the more they begin to emerge as themselves, the less I might know them, the less I might understand them.

Sunday night I opened Facebook Messenger to send the young man’s mother a note of condolence. I typed in her name, still at a loss as to what I should or could say in the face of this inconceivable tragedy. There in the chat box, unexpectedly, was the thread of our last online conversation. It was from August 2010, a note confirming plans for Noah’s ninth birthday party – pizza at Old Chicago and a movie, Despicable Me. It was a quick exchange, noting the time for drop-off at the restaurant, the time for pick-up after the movie – mundane, ordinary. My heart broke over what we couldn’t have foreseen then. My heart broke over everything that was still possible nine years ago.

“Time wants to show you a different country,” wrote the poet William Stafford. Sunday evening I walked with my eighteen-year-old son on an astonishingly beautiful evening on the prairie. Side by side we bent low in the grass to peer at an elegant orb weaver, remembering the spider we once nicknamed Clem after we discovered it nestled in the clematis vine in our garden. Side by side we snapped photographs of sunflowers, purple thistle, feathery bluestem. Side by side we walked the grass path to the top of the hill, where we leaned against the weathered fence and waited for the setting sun to paint the clouds before it slipped below the horizon.

I think nine years ago I naïvely hoped I might be able to keep my children safe forever. I think I pretended that we could stay cocooned. As each year passes I understand more deeply, more painfully, how impossible this is. Each year I also see and understand a little more about the country time is revealing to me, a country that is both more beautiful and more heartbreaking than I ever could have imagined.

When Walking is Prayer

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Though I’ve never met her in person, I’ve admired Hilary Yancey for a long time. She’s a deep thinker and a beautiful writer, and, lucky for all of us, she’s recently released her first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith – a memoir about becoming a mother to a child with disabilities and the impact that experience has had on her faith and on her relationship with God. I haven’t finished the book yet, because it just arrived in the mail today, but let me simply say that I picked it up while I was sitting here at my desk, read the opening few pages, and really, truly did not want to put it down. It’s a privilege to welcome Hilary to the blog today; I know you will be touched by her words.

Post by Hilary Yancey

I remember the first time I prayed with my eyes open. It was on a drive home from high school, late in the winter of my senior year. I had just gotten my driver’s license and was nervously winding my way down the same roads I had been traveling for years. I could feel the car swing into the familiar right turns and how my foot anticipated the next stop sign. But my eyes darted from side to side, my hands sweated at “10 and 2” on the steering wheel and out of my mouth slipped a decidedly complex prayer: “Lord Jesus do not let me die on this road I JUST got my license!”

I’ve always been the kind of person who prays with her eyes closed. I found it easier to concentrate on the ideas of my prayers, to imagine how they were being sent upwards and meeting Jesus in heaven. I prayed in this way to stop being distracted by the things I saw around me, by a book I wanted to read or a pile of laundry I was supposed to do. I thought that by closing my eyes I could close out the world and so through my prayers ascend somewhere else, wherever it was I thought God was.

A few years ago, my prayer life changed. I was pregnant with my first child; we’d received a challenging medical diagnosis at our 20-week ultrasound; I’d never needed to pray more. But when I closed my eyes, it was darkness. There were no feelings of ascent, no sure footing. The world had interrupted my old patterns and it was impossible to close out the world because the world had shrunk to the space of my body expanding for my son and the world was with me everywhere I went.

By the time my son was born, I had given up praying with my eyes closed; I had almost given up the practice of praying. But I walked: to and from his crib in the NICU, to and from the family lounge where doctors met with us to share further diagnoses, treatment options, to and from my bed to the shower to the hallway again, and around the outskirts of the hospital building when I would call my friend to cry. I could not speak to God directly, except to yell, and so I walked.

And my footsteps became words, they became prayers, but open-eyed prayers, prayers of pressing into the world instead of pushing away. My footsteps took me both where I hadn’t wanted to go and where it turns out I needed to, to the place of being surrounded, immersed in the very experiences I had once prayed to avoid.

I walked my son to the doors of the OR, I walked the floorboards of our house listening to the breaths in and out of his new trach, I walked us around the lobbies of his follow up clinics and through the hospital hallways too many times to count, memorizing the turns – up one floor, left then right and around to the desk where they check your ID, down the hallway, slight right to the sink and then left and then Jack, my son, is on the right – all of this walking and I emerged with prayers carved into my feet, with prayers left on those floorboards and hallway tiles, echoes of what my mind couldn’t say but my body could.

I am still at the very beginning of learning to pray. I am still working on finding a new rhythm of conversation with God. But now, when I can’t find a way to say what I mean, when I close my eyes and feel only quiet dark, I start walking. And the footsteps become words, and the words become prayers.

I turn the corner and I am somewhere new.

::

Hilary Yancey loves good words, good questions, and sunny afternoons sitting on her front porch with a strong cup of tea. She and her husband, Preston, and their two children, Jack and Junia, live in Waco, Texas, where Hilary is completing her PhD in philosophy at Baylor University. Her first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith was just published by FaithWords. You can read more of her writing on her website and follow her on Instagram at @hilaryyancey.

When God Is a Lot Like the Parent of a Teenager

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Two days ago I sat in my car in the parking lot of the local nursery. It was cold and gray out. The plastic of the greenhouse flapped noisily in the wind, making me grateful for the warm rush of heat that blew from the dashboard vents as the engine idled.

I was waiting for my son, Noah, who was inside the greenhouse having his first-ever job interview. We’d prepped the night before. My husband had asked Noah some mock questions, and we’d reviewed the basics of Interviewing 101: firm handshake, maintain eye contact, speak audibly, show enthusiasm. That morning Noah had carefully chosen his outfit, a pair of kakis and a navy blue polo shirt.

Brad and I had done what we could to help him prepare, and now I watched from the car as Noah walked through the front entrance of the nursery, the glass door closing behind him.

Truth be told, I wanted badly to run after him, push ahead, and convince the manager of Noah’s attributes myself. I wanted to tell him that everything I know about plants, flowers and trees Noah had taught me before he even knew how to tie his own shoes. I wanted to explain that sure, my son was shy, soft-spoken, but he was a hard worker, committed, responsible and smart. I wanted to declare that the greenhouse wouldn’t find a more qualified teenager for the job than this quiet boy with the too-long shoelaces and the neatly gelled hair.

Of course, I didn’t do any of that. I stayed in the car, where I sat quietly, nervously hoping for a good outcome, marveling over the fact that my son, who it seemed just moments ago was toddling around the backyard thrusting his nose deep into the tulips, was somehow, inexplicably, now old enough to interview for a part-time job.

Parenting babies and young children is busy. There’s a lot of movement and doing, a lot of action – changing diapers, spoon feeding pureed pears, towel drying dimpled skin and wispy hair, turning the stiff, cardboard pages of Goodnight Moon, picking up Legos, picking up Legos, picking up Legos.

And then, at some point, almost without our noticing, the physicality of parenting begins to ebb. Suddenly we are much stiller. We find ourselves doing a lot of waiting (punctuated by a lot of shuttling to and from various activities). We wait in the orthodontist’s office for the metal wires to be tightened. We wait at the soccer field as the coach gives his pep talk for tomorrow’s game, dusk creeping along the edges of the tree line. We wait to hear whether it will be a spot on the varsity team, a role in the musical, a ‘yes’ to the Homecoming dance, a college acceptance letter, a job offer.

As parents of teenagers, we prepare, we advise, we guide, and then we do the hardest thing: we let go. We step back into the shadows. We stay in the car. We sit on the sidelines. We wait. We are still with our teenaged children, of course, but we are with them in a different way.

Is this, I wonder, a little bit what it’s like for God? How easy it would be for our Father to push ahead through the  doors of the greenhouse — to intervene, to fix it, to snap his fingers, to bring about the results we so desire. Instead, he lets us go our own way. He allows us to fumble, to fail, to make mistakes, to make the wrong choices. He allows us to achieve, to succeed, to prevail, to triumph. God is still present with us, but at the same time, he allows us to step out on our own accord while he waits for us on the other side, no matter the outcome.

When I saw Noah emerge from the greenhouse with a sheaf of paperwork in his hands, I knew it was good news. “Well?” I asked expectantly, as he slid into the front seat. “I have to go to an orientation, so does that mean I got the job?” he asked. “Yes, it means you got the job,” I laughed, feeling a mix of relief and pride and a twinge of something like sadness rise in my chest as I looked at the young man with the too-long shoelaces next to me, the boy who always stopped to smell the blooms.

I often want the kind of God who will just do it all for me. Fix it, Jesus! I implore. Make it all better! Make it happen exactly the way I want it to! And sometimes God does fix it the way I’d hoped. He heals. He blesses. He forgives. He brings justice and shows mercy.

Mostly, though, it seems, at least in my experience, that God is a lot like the parent of a teenager. He lets us go, though he is still very much with us, and then he waits with open arms for our return.

Fighting Consumerism in Kids…One Flip Phone at a Time

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phone

I chose my hill to die on last week, and that hill is called Verizon.

Saturday morning my 11-year-old son and I visited our local provider to purchase his first cell phone. It’s a rite of passage in our household: Entrance into middle school grants you the privilege of owning your own mobile phone … with one caveat:

You start with a basic, no-bells-and-whistles flip phone. Rowan’s older brother had received his own flip phone in sixth grade and graduated to a smartphone halfway through middle school, and Rowan would follow suit.

Rowan understood and was on board with this. In fact, he was excited about the prospect of owning his very own cell phone.

But all that changed the moment we stepped through the double doors. Faced with the tantalizing array of smart phones and tablets lining the walls and festooning the display tables, complete with all their technological accoutrement—shiny cases, colorful earbuds, miniature speakers—Rowan crumbled. He argued and pleaded for the entire forty-five minutes we were in the store, and when we finally stepped into the parking lot, flip phone in hand, I could tell my son was trying hard to suppress tears.

…Read more about how and why I held my ground on the uber uncool flip phone over at For Her magazine today...

How to Forgive Yourself When You Have a Universal Meltdown

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Harry Potter Dragon2

I had a universal meltdown. I mean literally, a Universal meltdown.

Two weeks ago we spent spring break in Florida, with our first three days of the trip dedicated to visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Orlando. I’ll tell you straight-up, theme parks are not in my wheelhouse. The crowds, the lines, the $29 hamburgers, the fact that despite my vat of hand sanitizer, chances are still good that I will succumb to the 21st-century version of Black Death as a result of the barrage of germs. And to say nothing of the expense! As I mentioned to my husband when we  clicked “Purchase” for the three-day park pass: “We could sponsor two and a half more Compassion kids for a year for this!” Not to put a big fat damper on the fun or anything.

That said, I was pretty psyched about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. My boys LOVE Harry Potter. We’ve read all the books, and watched all the movies ad nauseum, and plus, I’d heard really good things about the theme park (red flag: sky-high expectations).

Which is why, on our first morning there, when Rowan announced, “I don’t think I’m going to ride any of the rides. I think I just want to walk around,” things began to fall apart. Not at first, mind you. Initially I tried, really I did, to be The Rational and Empathetic Parent. We talked about his fears. I suggested we scale back to the tamer amusement ride options and ease into the more dramatic experiences later. We rationalized and hypothesized and psychologized and psychoanalyzed. But no, Rowan would have none of it. In fact, he was quite specific about which rides he would not partake in: “the ones with the conveyor belts.”

In other words, pretty much every single amusement park ride ever known to mankind.

We had basically remortgaged our house and our favorite neighbor’s house in order to purchase tickets to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, and my youngest child decided he preferred to “walk around” and “look at stuff,” and “maybe have some popcorn.”

People, can I just say, this is like visiting the Swiss Alps in order to drink hot chocolate in the chalet.

This is like flying from the United Emirates to the Mall of America to “window shop.”

This is like holding front-row Adele concert tickets in your hand and then deciding, “Eh, I’ll just watch one of her music videos on YouTube instead.”

Catch my drift?

Commence Universal Meltdown.

I’m making this sound funny, but believe me, it was not funny. Not Funny, in capital letters and boldface type. As Brad later described it, “We ride-shamed our kid.” There was whisper-yelling (mine). Threatening (mine). Bribing (mine). Guilting (mine). Sighing (mine). Eye-rolling (mine). Bitter retorts (mine). Shaming (mine). Pouting (mine). The Ice-Cold Shut-Down (mine). And crying (mine and Rowan’s).

In fact, at one point, as I sat on a stone wall next to Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls water ride and cried behind my sunglasses, I actually thought to myself, “There are 15,638 mothers in this park right now, and I am the only one who is crying.”

Ultimately we salvaged the vacation. Life dramatically improved when we left Orlando and headed for the beach. And we did actually have a few good moments at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (I captured all two of them and posted them to Instagram and Facebook, because, you know, even if we’re not having the time of our lives, it’s important that we at least look like we’re having the time of our lives, right?).

I apologized to Rowan. We made up. And as is always the case with Rowan, he was quick to forgive me and move on.

But here’s the clincher: I couldn’t forgive myself. I couldn’t move on.

A week after we’d returned from Florida, I was still inwardly berrating myself for my atrocious behavior. I prayed the exact same confession five nights in a row. “Please forgive me, Lord, for shaming my child and for being a terrible mother.” By the third night, I’m sure God was thinking, “Have we not sufficiently covered this yet?”

The thing is, God may have forgiven me the first time I confessed, but I didn’t believe it. I simply couldn’t believe my terrible-parent behavior was forgivable. I refused to trust the fact of grace.

I suspect I’m not the only one neck-deep in this struggle. I suspect I’m not the only one who has sinned and repented and yet still struggles to accept the real truth of God’s grace. In moments like these, grace simply seems too good to be true. In moments like these, grace seems possible for everyone else but ourselves.

Friends, let me remind you of what I’ve had to remind myself this past week (and Holy Week is a very good time for this reminder): Jesus Christ died for this very reason.

Think about that for a moment. A real person, a human being who is at the same time God, died a painful, humiliating, lonely death on a cross 2,000 years ago for this very reason: so that we would not have to continue to carry around our failures and our faults forever.

Jesus Christ died so that we could be free from the very weight I have insisted on clutching and carrying ever since we returned from Florida. He died so that we could be free.

Refusing to accept God’s grace, a grace that comes to us at the highest cost, defeats the whole point of Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice. Holding on to our guilt and our shame and our inability to forgive ourselves not only hurts ourselves, it also hurts God. Because Jesus died for this moment – this moment right here, the ugliest moment that feels impossibly broken, the moment that feels definitively unfixable.

When we insist on holding as tightly as we can to our guilt and shame, when we refuse to relinquish our sin and accept God’s grace, we deny the ultimate sacrifice God made for us. We deny his life. We deny his sacrifice. We deny his resurrection. We deny him.

I’m not going to lie. A big part of our spring break stunk like giant smelly deviled eggs, and it was almost entirely due to my own bad behavior. It hasn’t been easy to let that go, to forgive myself and hand every last bit of my guilt, shame and regret over to God. But that’s exactly what I am doing. I am handing it all over to him. I am allowing God to take it. And I am stepping fully and completely into his grace.