Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

small moments

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.

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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.

How to Live a Satisfying and Reverent Life

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I recently came across an intriguing quote from the second century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who asked, “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”

The question got me thinking about what things I would consider necessary for such a life. And so, before I could overthink my answer, I grabbed a pen and jotted a list into my journal:

Spend time in nature.
Move my body.
Enjoy good food.
Read.
Do good work.
Love my people.
Pet my dog.

It’s a remarkably short and pedestrian list, which perhaps means I’m the most boring person in existence. Or, maybe it means I don’t need to do much at all to live a satisfying and reverent life.

Turns out, my criteria for living a satisfying and reverent life don’t include fame or notice, worldly success, accolades or achievement. I need not travel to exotic locales or rub shoulders with influential people. I don’t have to climb ladders, set goals or check boxes. I don’t need an impressive job title, good connections, a big salary, a fancy house or name-brand shoes.

Truthfully, everything I need for a life of satisfaction and reverence is already right here in abundance — within my own self, in my own backyard, in my own community:

Fresh air. Nourishing food. Meaningful work. Beauty. Connection. Curiosity. Love.

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A few days ago Brad and I were sitting on the back patio with our son Noah, who will be a high school senior next fall. We were having a conversation about jobs and vocations, and Noah had asked my husband and me if we thought it would be possible to afford to live in a tiny house on an annual salary of around $35,000. “It might be possible,” Brad answered, “depending on what part of the country you were living in and what other expenses you had.”

“Good,” Noah declared. “That means I might be able to work part-time, or at least less than full-time, so I’ll have more time to do what I want to do.”

“What do you mean, work part-time?” I replied, aghast. “What kind of ambition is that? Your father and I certainly aren’t going to pay to send you to college so you can work part-time!”

Here’s the irony: I responded to Noah without considering the fact that I have two college degrees and have worked part-time for the last 18 years.

I also made these remarks forgetting that just a few days earlier, the criteria I’d listed for living a full life looked a lot like what Noah was imagining.

Turns out, it’s one thing to pen a quaint list into my journal. It’s another thing entirely to consider what non-traditional choices might look like in the life of my own kid. In responding to my son’s musings about what he might like his adult life to look like, I had automatically defaulted to both society’s and my own long-held definition of “success.”

Whether part-time work and a tiny house will actually be realistic options for Noah someday isn’t really the heart of the matter here. The heart of the matter, I’m beginning to understand, is that the definition of a satisfying and reverent life won’t necessarily look the same for everyone, nor will it necessarily mirror our culture’s ever-increasing “be more, do more, earn more, have more” expectations.

A few days after that back patio conversation, I thought again about the emperor’s question as I lay in the hammock, watching the clouds wisp across a sapphire sky, listening to a singsonging trio of goldfinches as they came and went at the feeder. The hammock rocked like a cradle in the spring breeze. I could feel the sun-warmed fabric beneath my bare legs. Above my head, seed pods dangled from the branches of the river birch tree like tassels on a Chinese lantern.

Do you see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?

I think I do. I think maybe, on the cusp of my 49th year, I am finally beginning to see.

When Your What’s Next Is What’s Right Now

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“So what’s next then?” he asked me, arms crossed, standing at the threshold of the conference room where I set up my laptop, notebook and file folders twice a week. I’d just told my boss about my recent decision to leave book publishing, and his question did not come as a surprise.

It was my answer that surprised him.

“This,” I said to my boss, nodding to my laptop and my file folders on the conference room table. “What I’m doing right now is what’s next.”

I could see surprise in his raised eyebrows and hear it in the pause that yawned open in the small room. He laughed a little, not quite sure how to respond to my vague, unambitious answer, and I changed the subject so as not to prolong the awkwardness.

But my answer to my boss’s question was the truth. My “what’s next” is what’s right now.

The truth is, our culture demands that we have our “what’s next” all figured out. We are expected to follow a logical trajectory in our professional and personal lives. We are expected to have a one-year plan, a five-year plan, a ten-year plan. We are expected to have goals – to be ready with an acceptable answer when we’re asked “what’s next?”

It’s the American way, right? We strive. We have ambition. We have our “what’s next” lined up, and it typically follows an upward trajectory.

For most of my life this is exactly how I’ve operated. I had the plan, the strategy, the vision. I plotted my trajectory, methodically ticked through the necessary milestones to reach my goal. I’ve always lived with my heart, mind and soul set on the future – one foot in what’s next, and what’s next after that.

These days, though, I’m finding what I most desire is to live with both feet firmly planted in right now. I am craving small and ordinary. I am craving valuable but not necessarily publicly visible work. I am craving face-to-face connection, intimacy, smaller circles.

Admitting I don’t have my next thing worked out – that in fact, my right now is what’s next – is the antithesis of societal and cultural expectations, especially when it comes to one’s professional life. And yet, it feels right. I feel incredible freedom and contentment in doing good but largely invisible work for The Salvation Army, in stepping back from the relentless push toward platform- and brand-building, in living more intentionally in the mundane but surprisingly satisfying facets of my life.

I write fundraising copy for my part-time job. I refill the Oriole feeder with grape jelly. I shuttle one kid to tennis lessons, the other to a study session. I walk the dog and empty the dishwasher. I follow my son across a wide-open space as he takes photographs for a class project. I sit on the back patio with my husband as the evening breeze blows through the white pines and the cardinals call to one another from the honey locust trees. A painted lady butterfly lands on the lilac, and the baby squirrels skitter up the river birch.

Maybe a big “what’s next” will reveal itself in time. Or maybe not. Maybe, as Susanna Wesley once said, some of us are called “to be content to fill a small space if God be glorified.” For my right now, that feels exactly right.

Filled with the Fullness of Your Own Everyday, Ordinary Life

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A few days ago, as Josie lingered with her snout deep in the weeds – “reading the newspaper,” as a fellow dog-walker once observed – I watched a girl on roller skates sidestep, arms outstretched, down a grassy slope. She wore old-fashioned skates, the kind with four wheels and a rubber stopper like a nose on the end of each boot. Suddenly I was back under a rainbow of disco lights at Interskate 91, Beat It pulsing, skates thumping over the hardwood floor.

Nearby a young man had slung a striped hammock between two white pines. His backpack resting at the base of one tree, bike propped against the trunk of the other, he stood tilting his phone this way and that, angling for the perfect shot, patient as the hammock twirled like a double-dutch jump rope in the early spring breeze.

Making our way through the neighborhood, I caught the almost-familiar scent of something spicy – cumin or maybe curry — wafting through the open window of a basement apartment. The food smelled nearly but not quite like the dishes our Yazidi friends prepare for us when we visit.

Two doors down a new scent, the nostalgic smell of hot dogs on the grill, whisking me back to Fourth of July cookouts on the backyard picnic table. Josie smelled it too, stopping to lift her quivering nose in the air.

Tipping my head back to gaze up at an enormous sycamore, I saw that its bare branches were hung with hundreds of seed balls dangling like Christmas ornaments. I picked one up from the ground and carried it like a cherry on a stem, gently so as not to crush it. When I got home from our walk I put the seed ball on a dish and placed it on my desk.

I’m halfway through my Lenten social media fast. After a month away from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I feel grounded. My body is grounded. My senses are grounded. My brain is even somehow more grounded. I hadn’t been aware of it until I dialed back the constant noise and distraction, but my thoughts had begun to feel like untethered balloons bumping along with the current, strings dangling.

Being grounded in my own body, in my own environment, in my actual real life, rather than constantly peering into other lives as they are presented on my cell phone screen, has given rise to a keen attentiveness. I notice the girl on the old-fashioned roller skates, the scents whispering through my neighborhood, the regal, whimsical Dr. Seussian sycamore tree.

I see that though it’s April, the magnolia buds are still tightly closed, fuzzed sepals clasping drowsing petals. Even spring’s overachievers, the daffodils, are biding their time, keeping their sunny yellow encased in their papery wraps. Everywhere there is something new and fresh and beautiful to see, to hear, to smell, to touch. Everywhere there is a sense of expectancy.

My life has a different kind of fullness these days – different from the bloated, pants-too-tight-after-a-big-meal fullness created by noise, distraction, input, information, images. Different from the full-of-emptiness one can sometimes feel from ingesting too much of other people’s lives as they are presented online.

These days I am grounded. I am full. Filled with ordinary sights, sounds and smells. Filled with the fullness of my own everyday, ordinary life.

How to Live in This Season

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Thanksgiving arrives next week, and along with roasted turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie will come a cacophony of Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads, crowded malls, snarled traffic and a to-do list the length of the Magna Carta.

Truth be told, most years my home is stripped of autumnal décor and festooned in evergreen garland and sparkly white lights before the Thanksgiving dinner dishes are dry. Every year I aim to “get a jump on Christmas,” and if my holiday shopping isn’t finished by Thanksgiving Day, I consider myself “behind.”

I suspect I’m not alone in this. Our go-go-go culture insists that rather than fully experiencing the present season, we hurry on to the next one. Nowhere do we see this message play out more clearly than in retail stores. Beginning the day after Halloween, Jack-O-Lanterns, creepy costumes and bite-sized KitKats are whisked from displays, replaced with shiny tinsel, red and green wrapping paper and Elves on the Shelves. By the time dusk falls on Thanksgiving evening, the message is as loud and incessant as the carols blaring from every local radio station:

There’s no time to linger over a second slice of pie as the candles burn low.

There’s no time to stroll beneath a canopy of russet oak leaves, the November sun still warm on our shoulders.

There’s no time to relish the gifts of Thanksgiving – family and friends gathered, gratitude, good food, leftovers (and more leftovers) — when there’s a fence to drape in icicle lights, cards to sign and envelopes to address, presents to purchase and wrap and Nutcracker performances to attend.

Or is there?

This year, I’d like to suggest a different way.

Rather than succumbing to society’s relentless siren’s song compelling us toward what’s next, might we practice being present in this moment, in this day and in this season of Thanksgiving?

Rather than heeding our culture’s call to more, bigger, faster and busier, might we lean more fully into the rhythms of the present season and listen to the call of own souls?

It could be that you don’t know what fully embracing the rhythms of this season looks like. When we are in the habit of living with our hearts, minds and souls fixed on what’s next, we often struggle to recognize what brings us life right now.

If that’s the case, think about the kinds of activities that bring you satisfaction and joy and allow you to feel most like your deepest, truest self.

It might be something as simple as watching the chickadees and the cardinals at the feeder outside your window.

Or enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee and a quiet conversation with a good friend.

It could be cooking a satisfying meal for someone you love, or taking a walk, not to burn off last night’s extra-generous slice of pumpkin pie, but simply to notice and appreciate the remnants of autumn’s colors.

Our culture continually calls us to what’s next and woos us with the false idea that there is something better around the next bend. It demands that we do more, be more and buy more. It fuels our fear that who we already are and what we already have are not enough.

Our souls, on the other hand, call us to fully experience and relish in what is right now.

The many gifts of this present season are readily available to us. If we rush by in our haste to get to the next thing, we will miss them altogether.

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Hey friends, just a quick note to remind you that my next book, True You: Letting Go of Your False Self to Uncover the Person God Created, is available for pre-order. And to sweeten the deal, I have some really wonderful free gifts for you — a downloadable True You companion journal, a guided audio meditation and a set of beautifully designed Scripture memorization cards — if you pre-order before January 1. All the details are OVER HERE. Thank you so much for your support!