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Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

family

Because There’s More Than One Way to Love

July 9, 2014 By Michelle

coins

As kids my sister and I were instructed to refrain from hugging or kissing Papa. He doesn’t like physical affection, my mother always reminded us as we clamored out of the car and up the sidewalk toward the screened porch.

“Hey, Pops,” I’d call out with a wave as I breezed through the back door and into the kitchen, the scent of apple pie a welcome greeting on the doorstep. In later years, after his stroke when he was wheelchair-bound and hunched over the kitchen table, I’d pat his shoulder, bony beneath his soft shirt, or his veined hand. But I never hugged or kissed him, not once.

When we were little, Papa made my sister Jeanine and me pancakes from scratch on Saturday mornings when we slept over, shaping the batter drip by drip into gingerbread men or fish or flowers. Our favorites were the ones he called “the smallest pancakes in the world” — really just the errant droplets of batter that sizzled on the griddle, but we didn’t know that. As he slid a pile of brown dots off the spatula and into the syrup on our Fiestaware plates, we’d laugh, sorting them with sticky fingers to find the tiniest speck of them all. Standing over the electric griddle with his back to us he sang the chorus to “Michelle, My Belle,” a song I thought he’d created just for me.

It was my grandfather who taught me the art of rolling coins. He’d lived through the Depression, and although he didn’t suffer as much as many people did during that bleak time – he held a steady job making guns at the Springfield Armory – he wasn’t one to waste even a single penny.

We sat side by side at the dinette, the gentle clink of change and the tick tock of the wall clock the only sounds in the small kitchen. He demonstrated the method, selecting a coin wrapper — orange for the $10 quarter wrappers, green for the $5 dimes, blue for the $2 nickels, red for pennies — and gently squeezing the edges until it popped into a slender tube. Slip your pointer finger into the bottom to make a platform, and then drop in the coins one by one, he cautioned. Impatient, I always tried to rush the process, pushing three or four coins at a time into the wrapper. It never failed; the coins would jam sideways, and I’d be forced to dump out the entire contents of the tube and begin again.

When we finished there would be four piles of rolled coins stacked like pyramids on the table. Then Papa would meticulously inscribe each roll with his name, address and telephone number in ballpoint pen, each letter curling in an elaborate script. My grandfather had the most beautiful handwriting, elegant and sophisticated like calligraphy. He graced all correspondence, from the electric bill to birthday cards, with this penmanship – even the humble penny roll rose to regal status under his hand.

I once mentioned to a friend that I’d never hugged or kissed my grandfather or received such affection from him. “That’s a little weird, don’t you think?” she’d asked, noticeably disturbed.  I’d shrugged, because I’d never thought it strange. It simply was just the way it always was.

My grandfather was a stoic man. He kept his thoughts and emotions so closely contained, none of us, including his own son — my father — could ever really tell what he was thinking. But we knew one thing for sure: he loved us. In his own unique, non-traditional way, Papa wore his heart on his sleeve.

Filed Under: family, love Tagged With: family, how to love

Because Sometimes You Make a Cake for No Reason

May 10, 2013 By Michelle

I baked a cake last Saturday. A lemon bundt cake with lemon glaze. When I saw the recipe at Katrina Kenison’s place, I knew I had to make this cake, in part because I admire Katrina Kenison and I want to be just like her, and in part because it was a cake-baking kind of day, all drizzly and cool and gray.

I bake a cake about once a decade. Brad is the baker around here – he makes the boys a homemade birthday cake every year, in fantastical shapes like Thomas the Train and Nemo and Bowser Jr. I’m the birthday cake dish-washer. Twice a year I sigh at the eight bowls of frosting in every color of the rainbow scattered across the kitchen and I wonder why we can’t just head to the bakery department at Hy-Vee. For Rowan’s second birthday Brad worked on a Winnie the Pooh cake for about five hours, and when he lifted Rowan up to the counter for his first glimpse of the masterpiece, Rowan yelled, “Elmo!!!” We still laugh about that.

Katrina claimed the lemon bundt cake was super easy to make. But I think that might be a relative term. Maybe super-easy for a person who makes a cake more than once a decade. Still, even though my glaze looked a little funky, in a slightly curdled kind of way, and even though Brad and Rowan sucked the juice from the lemon and made lemon rind lips before I realized I still needed the freshly squeezed juice for the glaze, the cake tasted good. So good, in fact, I ate two slices one right after the other, and then promptly cut a generous slab, wrapped it in tin foil and gave it to a friend. Some cakes, especially those with two and a half sticks of butter, are simply too good to have around.

Katrina wrote a beautiful story about her cake. She baked it every day when a friend was dying. He couldn’t eat much toward the end, just a forkful or two of this cake, but that was enough to keep Katrina baking and delivering cakes to his door until she didn’t need to anymore.

My cake story is a little more mundane. I made a cake on Saturday, and as it baked we read our books, curled into the couch, the sweet aroma settling into every corner of the house, the rain pattering on the windowpanes. We admired the cake as it cooled on the rack. I took pictures, because that’s what you do when you make a cake once every ten years. And then we cut huge slices when it was still faintly warm, and sat at the kitchen counter eating cake in the middle of the afternoon. I even made a pot of coffee, because you can’t eat two slices of lemon cake one right after the other without a cup of coffee in your favorite mug to go along with it.

And as I pressed the back of my fork to the crumbs on my plate and let the last remnants dissolve on my tongue, I leaned back on the kitchen stool, satisfied. Because sometimes, once every ten years or so, you have to make a cake for no reason.

So tell me, what was the last fun or decadent thing you did for no reason? 

{And about those multiple birthday cake pictures … I apologize – I got way carried away on the cake nostalgia!}

My friend Evi has a brand-new link-up, and I’m sharing this post over there,
because I’m sure God smiles when we bake a cake for no reason:

evi like chevy

Filed Under: family, joy, small moments Tagged With: Evi Wusk, fun, Laura Boggess, Playdates with God

Courage and Grace: Elizabeth DeRusha

March 8, 2013 By Michelle

Nana was matter-of-fact when it came to God and heaven. She insisted my sister and I inscribe our initials on the bottom of every Hummel and Royal Dalton lining the living room mantel. “Pick which ones you want, girls,” she’d tell us. ”Where I’m going, I won’t need a thing.”

She also took a decidedly practical approach to funereal fashion.

“Now when I die, this is the dress I want to be buried in, girls,” she’d instruct, rifling through her closet while Jeanine and I protested, “No! No! Bleh!! Nana, yuck!” She’d carry on, detailing her funereal outfit down to girdle and shoes, every now and then testing us – “Which dress did I say, girls?” – to ensure we had committed her selections to memory (We did. More than 25 years later Nana was buried in the dress she had chosen).

As a nurse Nana had seen her share of death; she had even cared for Papa’s younger brother Roland in their home in the months leading up to his death from cancer. Jeanine and I begged for macabre stories from her R.N. days; we even tried to cajole Nana into telling us which of the two beds in the guest room Uncle Rollie had died in. She refused, of course, so when she turned off the light and kissed us goodnight, we taunted each other over who was sleeping in the “dead bed.”

Of all her stories, though, there was one she never shared. Baby Paul, my father’s younger brother, died just a few days after his birth. In our youth we were innocently cruel, asking Nana over and over about baby Paul, but she always brushed us off, never revealing any details about the circumstances of his death. It wasn’t until Nana’s wake decades later that Jeanine and I learned about the impact of Paul’s death on her.

As we stood by Nana’s casket, Ann pulled a folded sheet of notepaper from her purse. My grandmother had written her the note after Ann had lost her own baby, and on that rosebud-embellished paper, yellowed and wrinkled soft through decades of handling, Nana’s anguish was finally revealed.

This note, I realize now, is the most telling testament of Nana’s faith. In it she offered practical advice, urging Ann to rest and get her full strength back before resuming household duties. But she also wrote explicitly about God and his comfort.

“It was just twenty years ago that our little Paul came – and left us to be an angel,” Nana wrote. “Knowing how I felt those twenty years ago and every day and year since, I know your little one will always hold a very special place in your hearts.”

Then she wrote the words that reflected the deep reservoir of faith that thrived beneath her sparkling, sassy exterior. “I am sure this is just the very beginning of the trials, and heartaches, and joys, and happiness of married life,” she said. “God is good, and as young Catholic parents you will carry on with courage and grace.”

Despite her own anguish and pain, despite the devastating loss of her own infant son, despite that and all the other trials and heartaches life had tossed her way, my grandmother felt in her heart that God was good.

Nana’s faith was never so apparent as the day I stood next to her casket and read the words she had written forty-six years earlier to another grieving mother.

: :

Sarah Bessey is collecting stories of Patron Saints and Spiritual Midwives in honor of International Women’s Day this week. Will you join us over there?   [The Blogging Benedict series will return next Friday!]

Filed Under: faith, family, grief Tagged With: International Women's Day, Sarah Bessey

When You Need a Reminder that Miracles Don’t Just Happen in the Bible

January 23, 2013 By Michelle

I’ve been thinking about miracles lately. Sometimes I get in a spiritual funk, a period of minutes or hours or days in which I rant and rave a little bit at God. Such was the case last week, when I learned that a former colleague has recently been diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer. It’s terminal. With chemo, he has maybe 12 months.

“But God can still do a miracle, right?” Rowan asks, when he hears me pray for this friend. “Yes,” I answer Rowan. “God can still do a miracle.” I hesitate, but I feel compelled to say more. “Sometimes, though, he chooses to take someone to Heaven right away,” I add. “Sometimes he chooses not to do the miracle.”

That’s when I get mad. “So where are our miracles?” I ask God later, as I push a sodden mop over the wood floor. I remember the loaves and fishes, Lazarus and the blind man, and the paralyzed guy who’s lowered through the roof on a mat, and I think, “Why so many miracles back then, why so many miracles in the Bible, and none now?”

Later, after my conversation with Rowan and my subsequent rant at God, Brad comes upstairs while I’m reading in bed. He’s just gotten off the phone with his brother, Cary. “They were out for their anniversary dinner, that’s why he didn’t answer before,” he mentions. I’m confused for a second. Anniversary? Cary and Vanessa’s anniversary is in October; it’s the middle of January right now. And that’s when Brad reminds me: Cary is celebrating his ten-year anniversary. Ten years since he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Ten years since he was given a 30 percent chance of survival. Ten years cancer-free.

I remember the day like it was yesterday. I remember exactly what we were doing when the phone rang, Cary calling with the news of his test results. We’d been eating baked chicken and potatoes at the dining room table. After Brad hung up the phone, after we’d stood in the kitchen and cried, Noah still strapped into his high chair, I slid the half-eaten chicken off the dinner plates and into the trash can.

As I sit with my book face-down on my lap, Brad standing at the foot of the bed, I think about these ten years that have passed. And I know that each of these years, and every one of these days, is a miracle. For Cary. For his family. For all of us.

What do you think about miracles? Do you think they happen in the here and now? Have you ever experienced a miracle yourself?

Filed Under: family, memories, miracle Tagged With: cancer and miracles, esophageal cancer, when you're looking for a miracle

When You’re Afraid You’re Raising Spiritual Barbarians

January 16, 2013 By Michelle

You may recall that we don’t have a good track record with family devotions. I’ve tried a number of them, and so far we’ve failed to make it a regular habit. At one point last year, fed up with my kids’ persistent mutiny against devotions, I actually gave away my own copy of Sarah Young’s Jesus Calling for Kids in a random blog drawing.

When Advent rolled around this year I decided to simplify the whole process by going straight to the source. I decided we would read some of the Gospel of Luke as our nightly dinnertime devotion.

“Mommy! Read more!” Rowan begged one night at the table, after I’d finished the story of Zachariah. “Are you serious?” I asked, closing my Bible and setting it next to my plate.  “Yeah, yeah, I’m serious, read more,” he said. “It’s catchy, don’t you think?”

“Catchy” is certainly one way to think of the Bible.

Two weeks into Advent Noah asked if we could continue the dinnertime Bible reading even after Christmas. Again, I asked if he was joking. Turns out, he wasn’t, and so that’s the plan. I’ve wanted to try The Message translation for a while now, so I picked up a copy at Barnes & Noble last weekend, and this week we started from the beginning, with the light and darkness, the heavens and earth.

For the past three years, whenever I read about many of my fellow bloggers and their families, I saw a Norman Rockwell picture of perfection – the family gathered around the dinner table, heads bowed, Scripture in hands. Then I’d look at my kids, falling off their chairs, silverware clattering to the floor, giggling through grace, mutinying against every attempt to bring God to the table, and I’d inevitably assume I was doing something wrong. “Why? Why is this so hard? Why can’t my kids be polite and Godly?” I wondered. “What am I doing wrong that they are such spiritual barbarians?”

The answer, of course, is nothing. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I simply needed to persevere until it clicked; to keep trying different options until one fit. And to wait. Patiently.

Maybe it’s simply that they are older now, a little better able to concentrate and understand. Or maybe I should have cut right to the chase, bypassing the devotional books and going straight to the Bible. Or perhaps this, too, will turn out to be a fad. Maybe three weeks from now they’ll mutiny again.

I’m not telling you this story so I can pat myself on the back, or so you’ll look at our family the way I looked at others. Instead, I want you to see what’s real, so that you’ll know that it’s all okay, in every less-than-pretty variation. I want you know that boys tumble from chairs, and silverware clatters to the floor, and someone burps during the prayer, and thanks is given more often for Super Mario Bros. than for the soup.

Grace isn’t always pretty, at least at our house. But through it all, God is present. Even, or perhaps especially, when we fall off our chairs.

 What about you? Do you read the Bible or evening devotions at dinnertime with your family? Do you ever feel like you’re raising spiritual barbarians?

With Ann Voskamp’s Walk with Him Wednesday series {because we are trying, again, to make a habit out of this…}

 

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Filed Under: A Different Advent, Bible, expectations, family, God talk: talking to kids about God, parenting Tagged With: A Different Advent, Bible study and kids, how to talk to kids about God, The Message

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Triple Type A, “make it happen” (my dad’s favorite mantra) striver and achiever (I’m a 3 on the Enneagram, which tells you everything you need to know), but these days my striving looks more like sitting in silence on a park bench, my dog at my feet, as I slowly learn to let go of the false selves that have formed my identity for decades and lean toward uncovering who God created me to be.

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