By Your Agony and Bloody Sweat

I originally wrote this post on Good Friday two years ago (for reference, Pearly Girl was a few months old, Superman was almost two, and Little Professor was three and a half). Here it is for you on this Good Friday.

On this Good Friday, the title above is both fitting and--I'll admit it--a deliberate attention-getter (that's Comp 101 on "Attracting an Audience" right there). I don't actually like to think about what Christ went through on this day. I don't even like to use the proper language to describe it. Thanks to the Litany (again!) for the right words when my sinful flesh cringes at the truth.

Today the kids and I went up to church at noon for an informal prayer service. I told Papa I could walk there, no problem--he needed to take a few boxes of books earlier so he drove the not-quite-two blocks with our one vehicle. But after strapping on Pearly Girl (roughly fourteen pounds) into the sling and pulling the boys (roughly sixty pounds) into a twenty-mile-per-hour wind for about one hundred yards, I realized I was tackling more than I thought. By the time I got to church, my back and arms were aching-sore and I was totally out of breath. But no big deal, I told myself. Jesus hung on the cross for three hours and endured hours of torment and torture before that, so a little sweat pulling my kids isn't anything to complain about.

We went into the dark church where Papa had covered the cross with a black veil and lit a few candles. A few women from church were there, and we sat in front of them in the first pew. The sanctuary was very dark and quiet. But not for long. Pearly Girl wanted out of the carrier. Badly. My muck sweat from the walk doubled as I wrestled the now-squirming, flailing, wailing girly out of the Baby Bjorn. Then Superman got ants in his pants and would not hold still. After trying unsuccessfully to rock our Pearl and shush Superman, Papa stopped his prayers so I could hand Superman over to him. Then I took PG and left the sanctuary, mere minutes after we first had walked in.

I sat down on the pew in the narthex with the door to the sanctuary closed and began to feed PG. And I couldn't help it; the tears started pooling in my eyes and running down my cheeks. Why, I thought, why can't I just go into church and be able to sit quietly and hear your Word without interruption? All I wanted was to hear and remember your Passion. 

I could hear the quiet murmurs of Papa and the women praying the Litany. The soft, muffled cadence of their voices calmed me down, and I gradually just sat still and tried to remember the parts where I thought they were. After a few minutes, they came out of the church and stood by me for a few minutes. The boys, now quiet, went with Papa to the van.


"How is she?" one of the women asked gently, gesturing to PG.

"She's almost asleep now," I said. "I'm sorry about all the noise."

Before I could say anything else, all three of them shook their heads and started talking at once.

"They're no trouble--"

"No, don't you worry--"

But one of them spoke most firmly.

"Don't ever apologize for your children. They are a gift to us, and we are so, so happy to see them here. Always remember what a joy they, and you, are to us."

I was touched by her words and the obvious agreement all of them had for this woman's sentiments. In fact, I was overwhelmed. What I saw as burden and interruption, they saw as gift, total gift. What I saw as irritation and distraction, they saw as reminders of the abundance of God's grace.

That afternoon, I got an email from the same woman with the comment. She wrote:

Thank you both so much for taking the time today to worship with us.  It was a special service and I appreciate the focus during this time, especially as the work day passes, it’s wonderful to break away and focus on what matters in this life – salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord and the new life He brings!!

 I also want you both to understand, please never feel the need to say “I’m sorry” for those 3 blessings that you have in your children.  You cannot imagine the feeling of joy that I had when I heard Paul’s voice join in on the Lord’s Prayer.  Hands down, highlight of my day.  It’s always wonderful to have them there.  Both Nancy and I were so thrilled to see the wagon outside of the church when we arrived, and we were so thrilled to spend that time with your family – our church family!!  It speaks to the kind people that you are that you apologize, but I want you to know that you don’t have to.  There is absolutely no apology necessary, ever.  Children are to be in church, and we are SO GLAD that they can be at Our Saviours!!

Love, because of Him,

Linda

The subject of her email was "This was truly a Good Friday."

So often I forget what's important in this life. Yet in the midst of sweat (literally) and tears (literally, all around, everybody join in!), Christ comes. My agony might seem terrible, but it's nothing compared to what He bore for me. He came to bleed and sweat and cry and die on the cross for us so that we won't always. I thought I'd missed His Passion. But He brought it to me anyway, just in a way I hadn't expected. And His word, that does for me what I can't do for myself, keeps me always. For this I am eternally grateful, just as I am so incredibly grateful for the love He gives through women at our church who remind me of Him so steadfastly.

Happy Good Friday.

Monopoly With Friends (Old Long Ago)

Monopoly with friends is comfortable. We talk smack, exchange fake bills with glee and frustration, laugh and laugh again, and groan loudly when a certain someone lands on Free Parking--AGAIN--and rakes in our taxes and dumb fee money.

This New Year's Eve, we've consumed lots of water and chocolate and near-misses on the Millennium Edition board. It looked so futuristic twelve years ago, but its shine is too metallic now and its tokens quaint (a ginormous cell phone and a roller blade. Chortle with me, now). But life is like that, isn't it, especially in these long evenings that go by so quickly and that turn into years, and years. We don't know what's coming next year, whether the cliff will serve us a belly flop, whether we'll get an unexpected raise or a much-wanted child or a surprise move or none of the above, or whether our friends and family and dear ones will suffer and love and cherish and go homeward, heavenward. What comfort then that no matter the monopoly that sin and the unknown hold over us, that our lives are in trust.


But I have to go now, here in these last moments of 2012, because Papa's about to win the game. Happy New Year, friends. For Old Long Ago, my dears. 

Old, Gold Friends

Growing up, I always wanted a bosom friendship like Anne Shirley and Diana Barry shared. I was blessed with a twin sister--a topic worthy of not just a blog post but an entire book. Probably a series!--but I guess I was attracted to the allure of finding a female kindred spirit that didn't happen to come from the same parents and share the same uterus as I did. I made a few good friends in high school and never lacked for people to run around with, but especially my senior year I felt lonely a lot. I'd made some really great friends over the summer at Lutheran Summer Music the prior summer, and those four girls gave me a wonderful blessing of deep, if quickly made, friendship. I hoped I found a hint of that bond in college.

Well, God was gracious, and He gave me a dear, wonderful friend in Monica, who was my roommate throughout college, excepting the year I studied abroad and she took a turn as an RA. To this day she and I are great friends, and words can't express how thankful I am for her. Funnily enough, she grew up in the same area as Papa, and they attended the same Lutheran grade school, though not at the same time. (I've learned that I really like blond, stoically Lutheran, super awesome Milwaukee-area-bred people. Call me a wannabe-Wisconsinite.) Anyway, Monica and I made friends in other contexts at school, and through a long and circuitous route we befriended and were friended by a group of terrific girls. Our senior year we all tried to live together in a ramshackle house just a block from campus, but the house could hold six, and we were seven. So Monica and I roomed together in an apartment with two other awesome ladies and popped over to the Green House throughout the year to hang out and visit.

Fast-forward eight years to now. Some of us have married; some of us have traveled; some of us have lived rural and some of us have lived urban. All of us have completed master's degrees; all of us are still trying to live the lives that God has set before us in the ways He would see fit. We've never been together again, all of us, since graduation, until late in May. After kicking around a 30th-birthday-year get-together for almost a year, we finally settled on having a reunion here over Memorial Day weekend.

I wish I could adequately express how logistically perfect everyone's travel, job schedules, and life events generally had to coalesce to make this happen. Suffice it to say that we managed to get all of us together in rural Minnesota (which was amazing by itself!), when just weeks earlier three--I think--of us had been overseas (China, France, Switzerland/England) and Monica and I were between babies (C nearly six months old, Monica's babe about a month from birth). On paper, we didn't do much: ate a LOT, took walks, visited the Monument, went to church together. It was perfect. We laughed a lot and cried a lot and didn't stop talking for forty-eight hours (with a few winks for sleep in there). And I can say that just thinking about those precious days together make my eyes water and my heart swell. These women are incredible. We have our differences, as everyone does, but we support each other and love each other. "Keep the old," the saying goes about friends. They are gold. They are priceless, and their friendship is priceless.

I could go on and on about this, but I'll leave with this: thank you, thank you to Monica, Julie, Gretchen, Sarah M., Katie, and Sarah S.--to all the Green House girls. You are old, gold friends--bosom sister-friends!--and I pray we will have many, many other reunions as we age.

Jules brought some decorations!

Together after church. So incredibly special.

Anticipation

We're T + one and two days, respectively, of the due dates of a dear friend and a sister. While the hours can seem long to us, hopefully waiting for a text or a call that "It's TIME!," these hours are much longer to the women who wait with fatigue and restlessness and ready-to-be-born infants in their swollen bellies. It's nice to think that willing birth to happen can actually, um, happen, but we've learned here in the Olson house that birth comes when God says. So we wait, and pray, and hope, and get giddy with excitement, to hear about the birth of two precious ones that will become God's children very soon after their earthly birth. And what anticipation must our Heavenly Father and the whole host of heaven wait for that second birth! So please keep Monica and Rachel and their families, especially their little ones, in your prayers, particularly that God would bring His wee children to the waters of Holy Baptism safely and healthily.

You can't see 'em, but there are angels dancing around the font!

Gentle Sunshine Sunday and P's Two Cents

4-11-2010

Here's my first attempt to add some very current pictures of P -- let's hope it works! (If so, I've finally gotten to the point where getting pics to family is "easy" -- that is, this takes less than five minutes. This, suffice it to say, AFTER J took 30 minutes to add pics from our camera to Picasa (if I would have done it, I'd have taken an hour. I am SO DUMB with this stuff.) Anyway, I'm still holding out hope that adding pics here will get easier -- and you all will benefit in the long run.

We had a nice weekend -- M family over on Saturday night, along with their new yellow lab puppy Brinkley. P calls him "Binky." I think the nickname has already stuck. Today we enjoyed an uplifting church service and then spent the entire afternoon with the B family in Fulda (Dad D and Mom J) -- dinner followed by the community theater production of "Anne of Green Gables" in which not one, not two, but six B offspring took part. And four more awesome B kids were at home with D and our P, who slept the entire duration of the play. All the B's did terrific, and we greatly enjoyed the relaxing time both watching the play (and me reminiscing about fun productions) and visiting with the B's. We also met JB's parents and marveled at their experiences -- J's dad is a retired pastor who was an assistant pastor for a time in Stamford, Connecticut (a skip over from Norwalk, where our J vicared!) and J's mom is a German-speaking Ukrainian by birth who last saw her parents at age 6 during WWII, managed to immigrate to the U.S. at age 18 in the mid-1950s, and generally has lived through enough hardship and heartbreak to put us to shame (I'm leaving out lots of incredible details), and yet radiates warmth and kindness. Amazing. God gives perspective in so many ways.

So we moseyed home in the late afternoon sunshine and chilled on the porch for awhile. P decided to organize his cars in several places (see pics above) -- SUCH a typical activity for him. J and I were discussing evening plans (you know, the kind that don't address what actually NEEDS to be done but rather what we WANT to do), and I threw out a few movie ideas, which J shrugged off. Then I said to him, "Well, what other happy movies can you think of to watch?" And after a pause, P looked up from his cars and said simply, "Ning-ning," his word for "Lightning," the main character in Cars. J and I just started laughing. P is so much smarter than we give him credit for -- and it's slightly unnerving at times like these to realize that he understands 85-90% of what we're saying because he throws in his two cents. Of course, when the Little Diplomat saw us laughing, he really pressed his case and rattled off the names of the other Cars characters -- "Doc," "Wee-ja" [Luigi], "Ma-ma" [Mater... I try not to take this personally :)], "Darge" [Sarge] -- as he promptly went in the house and sat on the couch, expecting us to put in the movie right away. Maybe he WILL be a lawyer like his Uncle C. Thank you, Pixar, for expediting the argumentation education of our son at his ripe old age of 21 months. And no, we didn't actually watch his selected movie but another Pixar flick -- which he actually loved. Maybe we're going to move beyond Cars someday!