Required Viewing: “Won’t You be My Neighbor”

Thirty or forty years ago, you never would’ve convinced me I’d be sitting in a movie theater in 2018 weeping about Mister Rogers’ life. But there I was last week, sitting with family, tears flowing down my face while “Won’t you be My Neighbor?” played on the screen. I never really knew this man who was Fred Rogers.

Confession: when I was a child and watched Mister Rogers—and when I was older and watched the shows with my sons—I thought Mister Rogers was a little odd, a little boring, and predictable. Put on a cardigan everyday? Don’t you have some variety in your wardrobe? And always throw that shoe from one hand to the other? Aren’t there more tricks up your sleeve? And can we talk about that set? A little more creativity and pizazz, please—especially after decades on the air.

But just the fact the show survived for decades without pizazz speaks volumes about the power behind Mr. Roger’s philosophy toward children and towards all people. He believed in the God-given value of each person and treated all with kindness and dignity. When he hosted special guests on the show, he watched each guest with intensity. When Yo-Yo Ma came on and played his cello, Mr. Rogers watched Yo-Yo Ma, not the cello. When a young boy, Jeffrey, came on the show to talk about being confined to a wheelchair after a tumor destroyed nerves in his body, Mr. Roger’s excitement over meeting Jeffrey and hearing his story made you think the boy was fortunate to have such a special piece of equipment to carry him through life. Jeffrey beamed during the interview.

Children in the audience mirrored Fred Rogers’ piercing stare. Shots of young faces showed captivated kids staring at this quiet man with unblinking eyes—this gentle man who always told them he liked th

em just the way they are. Were any of us even aware we needed to hear this message? Were any of us aware we needed to speak this message to others?

I watched his spell on my own children when they were young. One particular son came into the world with an excess amount of energy and whirled about our home like a Tasmanian devil in perpetual motion. But the strangest thing happened when Mr. Rogers came on the television set. My son walked over as if in a trance and sat down in front of the television, falling silent and still for one hour. I often stood behind him in shock, wondering how this man in a cardigan sweater could quiet my son in a way few others could do.

Mr. Rogers believed children had the right to process hard issues and feelings. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Lady Aberlin had a conversation with Daniel Striped Tiger about the meaning of the word assassination.  King Friday the Thirteenth wanted to build a wall around his castle (!) to prevent change from coming to the Make Believe Kingdom, so they set up barbed wire around the castle. The puppets in the Land of Make Believe had a conversation about why change might be scary and the wall came down.

Children weren’t the only people captivated by Mr. Rogers. While going before congress to ask for 20 million dollars’ worth of funding for Public Broadcast Stations, Fred Rogers hypnotized one of the more negative senators the same way he hypnotized his young audiences. As Mr. Rogers shared his philosophy in  his characteristically gentle, sincere voice  about the needs of children and how their feelings shouldbe validated, the senator began to list to the right as if under a spell, his tone changing to mirror Mr. Rogers’ gentle tone. In the end, PBS received their funding.

Fred Rogers also believed in the power of television to be used for good and that the medium had the real chance to build community and healthy children. “What we see and hear on television is what you become,” he once said. Sit on those words for a moment and think about the images beamed into the homes of our nations children. Scary?

As the credits rolled at the end of the documentary, all of the tears caught me off guard—mine and the tears of others. Why do so many people cry when they see the movie? Certainly nostalgia played a part. I felt nostalgic for my own childhood, my sister’s childhood, and my sons’ childhoods, but I also felt nostalgic for kindness, slowness, and quiet. We live in an environment in stark contrast to Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. Few people care about the welfare of children as deeply as Mr. Rogers and are able to teach children about hard topics in a healthy, kid-friendly way without forcing them to be adults before their time.

I left the theatre wanting to see the world through the same eyes as Fred Rogers and offer the same compassion and kindness to all. In other words, this ordained minister called me to a higher standard of living and loving—and to a slower, gentler lifestyle.

Do you share this longing? I encourage you to see this movie.

My Ditzy Self

 

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I have a ditzy side. I like to think it’s endearing, but maybe it’s just annoying to certain people close to me. In this high-tech world, many opportunities arise for ditzy people like me to make mistakes. Several times I have intended to write a text message to my husband only to discover I have written on a previous thread that included my sons. How was I supposed to know they were listening in?? The potential for embarrassment abounds here. My husband and I were texting about a private decision he was trying to make, only to have one of our sons pipe in with a wry comment.

You never know who’s listening.

Other times, my husband and I have been sharing thoughts or concerns about a certain offspring only to realize one of us (named Linda) texted the son rather than the spouse.

Oops.

I’m not the only one who makes these errors. At my job, a plethora of women named Linda exist, thanks to the fact that in a certain decade this must’ve been a very popular name. I have sent and received emails intended for other people named Linda. On occasion, the sender was quite embarrassed by the snarky content of their message, read by this unintended audience.

Be careful what you commit to writing.

When I was growing up, I had a close friend who came from a troubled, broken home. She liked to say, “Just call me stupid,” when referring to herself. She shared my ditzy side—but I don’t think she was stupid. She lived with our family for a time, needing a respite from the chaos in her home. When my father made the decision to move us all to Florida from New England, they invited her to come. She refused. But on our moving day, she sat alone in our empty house with absolutely no place to go, breaking everyone’s heart. I’ve never forgotten her, despite losing touch. When I Googled her name a couple of years ago, her picture popped up in the form of a mug shot, taken in the very city where my family had moved to in Florida all those years ago. For some reason she followed us there, but never reached out.

Abandonment can make smart people feel stupid with damaging results.

During that same time period in my life, a popular song played on the radio, the lyrics going something like this: “She was a little bit dumb and a little bit smart.” A friend remarked, “That’s YOU, Linda. You’re a little dumb and a little smart.”

I always wondered which part of me seemed smart.

Sometimes we feel less smart than we really are. To my husband, I sometimes refer to myself as “the most educated dumb person out there.” He corrects me, never letting me define myself this way for too long.  Many of us do feel more foolish than we are, often accepting false messages from others or considering mistakes to be stupidity. Other times we see the ability of others to soar into places we can’t imagine going, mistakenly attributing their rise to success (or highest office in the land) as “smarts.”

Wisdom and intelligence seem to be a different animal. Wise people are discerning, able to read a situation and make good, sacrificial choices promoting the welfare of others and themselves, sometimes at their own expense. Wise people avoid trouble, temper behavior, treat others with dignity, introducing calm in the testiest of circumstances. They speak surprising truths, refreshingly insightful. They see the craziness of someone’s behavior and refuse to engage or become complicit. They stand up to wrong, do no harm, and behave counter-culturally when behaving counter-culturally can harm their prospects at relationships, success, and promotions. In the Bible, the word “wisdom” is used 222 times. Quite an important word and something worth pursuing.

In my case, I may never be the smartest cookie in the package, (while writing this post, I just sent a personal email to the wrong recipient. Not kidding.) But I can strive to make wise choices. Hopefully those choices will be like water in a parched and dry land— and allow me to post this piece on the correct blog—the one that belongs to me.

 

 

 

Confessions of a Suburban Mom – Part Two

In “Confessions of a Suburban Mom – Part One”  I confess to raising our sons in a safe, secure environment, what I perceive as too sheltered of a life, blocking out a broken world. Today’s post picks up where the last post ended. As I ate dinner with a dear friend to discuss her recent trip serving in a dangerous refugee camp in Greece, I brought up my struggle with suburban guilt, telling her I didn’t feel we did enough to introduce the broken world to our sons. She graciously responded, “But what is enough?” 

 

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Each person must discover their unique answer to “What is enough?” based on their wiring, means, and calling. Adoption and foster care aren’t the only ways to teach compassion and empathy and invest in hurting lives. One of my sons works with Feed My Starving Children today and tells us about the kids who want to celebrate their birthday at FMSC or bring money they’ve personally raised for the hungry kids. These kids are being trained in compassion. Of course, I experienced guilt when I first heard these stories, lambasting myself for not teaching my kids to be so sacrificial.

But let me offer a warning in the face of these impressive gestures of generosity and compassion.

Writer Jenny Rae Armstrong, raised in Liberia as a missionary kid, offers a caution on her blog about these commendable gestures. Kids should never feel pressured to take on heavy burdens of poverty before their little hearts are strong enough to handle the weight, or because it’s the parent’s agenda. After her own experience growing up overseas, she sometimes looks at her sleeping children and thinks, “Let them have birthday parties with lots of fun, frivolous presents, let them lick the frosting off the cupcakes, their little minds untainted by thoughts of famine. Let them grow up in the same little town, attend school dances with girls they’ve known since they were two, and graduate with their football buddies.” Jenny’s words speak softly to my guilt and regret.

And here’s where it gets complicated in my own life: despite my guilt and regrets, my sons have grown into the very men I was hoping to raise. In their adult lives, they have found their unique paths to live purposeful lives. They work compassionate jobs, helping to feed kids overseas, find permanent adoptive homes for kids in foster, lead music on staff at his church, create video stories highlighting people struggling with health crises. I might even see potential foster or adopted children in the future. Who would’ve guessed? And why do I still feel so inadequate?

Recently, one son and his wife had a prolonged discussion about this topic of a safe suburban upbringing. They acknowledged a great appreciation for their secure childhoods, but the safe experience gave them a desire to expand their horizons now, do and see more now. Even as I confess to not exposing them enough to poverty and brokenness, apparently their limited exposure taught them something about how to step away from self-occupation.

I still hold to my confession. We overprotected our sons, blocked out the outside world, focused too much on the safety and growth of our family by ignoring others, and let the suburban hubbub determine how our time would be spent, thus dictating our values. But I also confess to not giving enough credit to the power of strong community to raise good men, to the value of books and words and photographs to describe life beyond our suburb, to good teachers and pastors who instilled a vision for others. We never get a chance to do it all again, but I hope and pray my sons will continue to carry out these values with their own families. If we all just did something to help those in need, how much of the needs would be reduced? Something might just be enough.

What are the ways you can and do live sacrificially and dangerously right where you live? And what is enough? We all need to answer this question for ourselves, as long as we choose to do something. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If this topic interests you, Ashley Hales book, Holy in the Suburbs, will be published in October of 2018. Her book discusses how the suburbs reflect our good, God-given desire for a place to call home—and our own brokenness. Through her writing, Ashley invites us all to look deeply into a suburbanite soul and discover what it means to live holy there.

Confessions of a Suburban Mom – Part One

While writing my suburban mom confession, I need to confess to writing a long and unwieldy blog post.  Whenever you combine suburban guilt and mother guilt, things get complicated, so I’m making this a two-part post.

 

 This is my confession:  I chose to raise my four sons in the safety of suburban life. I chose to protect them from the troubled experiences of my own youth and from a mean world outside. I knew living in a safe area never guaranteed an absence of danger, but I was going to try my hardest to offer them a secure childhood.

When I started bringing adorable babies home from the hospital and my strong maternal nature kicked in, I strove to keep these little guys safe. Certainly a safe upbringing would contribute to their ability to live meaningful and productive lives as adults? In my mind, protection meant giving them strong school experiences and an intact place to return to each day in a safe neighborhood with available parents who helped with homework in the evenings rather than guzzled down cocktails. (I grew up in a town where many of the parents behaved like the adults on a Charlie Brown episode, never seen on camera, only appearing as a wah, wah, wah sound from off-screen.) Protection meant attending to my sons’ emotional needs, being available as they processed middle school and high school heartaches, and pushing aside parental distractions and diversions to celebrate their wins and grieve with their hurts.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

We raised them in a kind neighborhood where the residents supported each other by caring for one another’s children. Their homes mirrored our home with two parents, lots of support, lots of stability. Once, my middle son rear-ended a bus on his way to school with his twin brothers in tow, totaling the family van. When I showed up at the scene of the accident, a group of about 10 neighborhood parents stood encircled around him from a respectful distance, showing deep concern as he wept with embarrassment. None of the adults said a word, but I’ll never forget that caring gesture. Can anything really be wrong with this upbringing?

Yes and no. Our suburban life had much goodness to offer our sons as they grew up, and I feel deeply grateful for those influences. But unfortunately our full calendar held us all captive and dictated our values, whether we knew it or not, preventing us from moving outside our sheltered existence. We raised them under the demands of busyness:  Boy Scouts, youth group, soccer games, swim meets, band practices, concerts, and then the jobs of their teen years. Who had time to go serve the poor, to bring the stranger into our midst? And birthday parties. Woah. They had to be excessive, themed, costumed, and absolutely exhausting. Each month as I added all the committments to the calendar, I had a nagging feeling something was deeply wrong with our frenetic pace, but I couldn’t find the brakes for the train.

I confess this all to you, dear reader.

I frame this as “a confession” because as the mother of four grown sons, I struggle with the disparity between the life we gave our sons and the life that remains out of reach for so many other parents and kids. I wish I had let more of the broken world seep in, not so that my sons were harmed but so that they had more opportunity to grieve with those who grieve. I wish they saw more poverty at an earlier age, more of the inner city and knew how many children desperately need good homes.  In their adult years, they have seen it now.

I applaud anyone who adopts or does foster care, always wishing I was the kind of person who could bring kids into our home without having a nervous breakdown. I know myself well enough to know this introvert barely handled her own kids with the necessary grace. I don’t believe adding more kids to the mix would’ve helped anyone.  I looked at my limitations and determined I wasn’t up to the task but feel deeply inspired by my heroes who raise kids in challenging—even dangerous settings—either the inner city or foreign countries, or who raise children born to other parents.

I stumble over stories about sacrificial living, wondering why I didn’t/couldn’t do the same, why I couldn’t be more like writer Dorcas Cheng-Tozun who moved to Kenya with her husband and child and writes about her experience in “How Moving to Kenya Made Me a Less Fearful Parent.” She made this move despite her own sheltered life growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area where her immigrant parents kept her in familiar communities as protection, and where she had internalized the message that the world outside their secluded community was scary. She faced her fears and moved overseas anyhow.

Author Meadow Rue lives in an intact neighborhood but decided to bring the broken world home when by adopting an abandoned child from Uganda suffering from cerebral palsy. Meadow tells her story in her beautifully written memoir, Redeeming Ruth.

Why couldn’t I be more like Meadow or Dorcus, moving overseas or taking in a child with severe health issues?

Because I am not Meadow or Dorcas.

I don’t believe I could’ve handled the strain, but I wanted to handle the strain. I wrestle and wrestle with my limitations and regrets, and then I settle on the words of Margot Starbuck who authored Small Things with Great Love . This book speaks with great encouragement, helping me to see I can start small and start where I live: “Small things happen when I learn the name of my daughter’s school bus driver,” Margot writes. “Small things happen when I listen to the dreams of a woman who lives in a group home on my block. Small things happen when I risk crossing a language barrier even though I look really stupid doing it.”

Sarah Arthur and Erin Wasinger write about their efforts to teach great compassion to their kids in the suburbs in their book, The Year of Small Things. After years living in radical urban Christian community, showing hospitality to the marginalized and the stranger in the inner city while sharing meals, possessions and living space, the Arthurs moved to the homogenous suburbs and discovered how to live out New Monasticism in their safe neighborhood where everyone seems to be fine.

In my own life, small things happen when my husband and I get in the car and drive to the maximum security jail located in our small city to volunteer. Small things happen when we work with refugees in our safe city which serves as a resettlement spot for World Relief. I’m finding ways to serve that fit my introverted personality and location. We do visit inner city churches in an attempt to walk across the street for relationship building, but I don’t see a move to an impoverished area in our future. I may not have been able to be Meadow, but maybe I can emulate Margot, Erin, or Sarah to some degree, serving and showing compassion right where I live. I can do small things—and I can do something.

My sons recall that we did do something as parents. We supported numerous children through relief organizations and raised our sons with these kids looking back at us from the refrigerator whenever we went for a glass of milk. We sent our sons to build a home for the disabled in West Virginia with Habitat for Humanity. They traveled to Jamaica to help those in need and packed meals for kids in other countries.

Relationships and community played a major role in developing passions within our sons. The people we invited into our inner circle influenced each of them in quietly powerful ways. One of my closest friends adopted three children as a single mother during my son’s growing up years: a bi-racial baby, a son with Down syndrome, and a little girl who had experienced eight foster homes in her first nine years of life. Today she lives alone in one of the roughest parts of her city. We stayed at her house for long periods of time for visits, and she spent long visits with us, often celebrating holidays and special events together. My sons witnessed firsthand the power of laying your life down for others even if I never committed to the same choices in my life.  We can’t discredit the power of community. My sons emulate this friend today in so many ways.

But looking back, none of it feels like enough to me.

Over a dinner the other night with my friend, Kara, we discussed her recent trip to serve in a dangerous refugee camp in Greece. My thoughts on this topic of suburban guilt came up, and I told her how I feel we didn’t do enough to introduce the broken world to our sons. She graciously responded, “But what is enough?”

Read this continued confession and a discussion about “What is enough?” in Part Two.

Birthday Reflections: Waiting and Continuing

I turn another year older today, another year closer to a very big number that ends in zero arriving in 2018. We’ll hold off talking about that birthday until next year.  All wrapped up in my birthday package this year comes the surprise fact that getting older gets easier. In fact, these bigger birthdays are more of a celebration than when I turned 30.

 

On the eve of my 30th birthday, I found myself spinning into fear, regret, and depression over my “lost youth.” I had four young sons and daily saw an exhausted image looking back at me from my mirror, someone who sported a harried and panicked expression, as if she couldn’t figure out where her plans had disappeared to. No outside employment filled my days, just hours and weeks with four adorable but high-maintenance sons who captured my heart but prevented me from using college skills.

But no regrets. Less years stretch before me than behind me now, but I turn the page on the calendar today and rejoice at my deep contentment with life—hardships and challenges included.

If only I knew back then of all the fresh and unexpected opportunities waiting in the wings while I raised my family—sons who would grow up to be unspeakably wonderful young men, partly due to our investment of time. And I share my birthday with something else this year—the birth of my new website. The website symbolizes an assortment of changes for me over the past 12 months, and the changes arrive like a promise saying many things wait to be accomplished. An increase in age doesn’t mean an ending but a continuing.

Months ago I signed with a literary agent who is representing my fiction work (a middle grade novel and a novel for adults) to publishers. Part of the transformation that comes with aging is my ability to accept the potential of failure with more grace than when I was young. Signing with an agent isn’t a guarantee a publisher will take a risk on an unknown writer. The novels might make their rounds at publishing houses and never find a home. Or they might be acquired and find an audience. Either way, I hold this work loosely in my hands and rejoice – no matter the results.  Writing is joyous work for me, and I plan to enjoy the process and keep it in perspective. The future is still unclear and invisible to my eyes but looks promising to me, no matter the results.

While writers far younger than me stumble into success early in their careers, I contentedly resign myself to being a late bloomer who once put projects and a career on hold to raise a family. Today I find encouragement in the lives of other late bloomers who found their stride in life after committing many years to other tasks. Their collection of years represent waitings and continuings—not endings.

Happy birthday to me and my website!

A New Novel Worth Persusing

Debut author Katherine James’ discomfort with self-promotion has led her to share photos of dogs on social media promoting her new book. But some of us who deeply enjoy and respect her writing feel it’s worth helping her out with a human voice.  🙂

In her novel, Can You See Anything Now?, an eclectic group of characters find their lives overlapping in the small town of Trinity when tragedy strikes, all with unexpected results. The novel features a suicidal painter and her evangelical neighbor, the town therapist, and a college student and her troubled roommate in this gritty, grace-filled story.

To hear directly from Katherine about why she decided to write a novel when so many bookstore shelves already are filled with both new and old books worth reading, take a peek at her behind-the-scenes blog post here.

Pre-ordering is available now by going to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Paraclete Press.

So Much Sky

An excerpt from my empty nest essay, appearing in the latest issue of “Under the Sun” literary journal.

The note appears hooked to the knob of my front door, a warning. The emerald ash borer disease has ravaged the hundred-year-old stately ash trees lining our road, and our city has decided to take them all down. The forty trees that spread their canopies over the length of six blocks like cupped protective hands will be removed as a permanent solution to cure the infestation. The city offers a plan to replace the trees in the spring with saplings, but how do you replace a tree that took a hundred years or more to grow its roots down deep while sending branches toward the heavens?  And saplings come with no guarantee of surviving even one brutal Chicago winter with its hostile winds and temperatures.

Gusty autumn winds have already stripped the trees bare. I stare at the silhouetted branches most days as I come and go, as I stand in the living room holding a warm cup of tea, watching neighbors walk their dogs. The demise of the trees creates grief as I prepare to say goodbye to their shade that protects me while I read in the yard, goodbye to the whispers I hear through my open window on windy days, the haunting call of leaves brushing together like two hands meeting in applause.

Then one day as I study the silhouette of the trees against a gray November sky, I see something settled into the meeting place of several branches, many dark and dense objects cupped in those tree limbs. Empty nests—and lots of them. In the warmer weather, a city-sized community lives just above our heads, hidden from sight. Maybe former birds’ nests or squirrel’s nests, but all that matters in my mind is the picture of these shelters once formed by a mother to protect her young and prepare them for life, built with twigs and leaves and probably even a few gum wrappers – whatever it takes. CONTINUE READING HERE

 

Spoken Blessings

Today I have the privilege of writing over at The Mudroom blog, “a place for stories emerging in the midst of the mess.”
When my twin sons accidentally caught 17-acres of land on fire while filming a World War II movie with their high school friends, it wasn’t the scorched trees I remember most. Or the helicopters flying over head to drop water. Or even the news stations capturing the flames on camera. It wasn’t the shots of nearby residents emptying their million-dollar homes of irreplaceable objects in case the fire took over.… Continue reading over at the Mudroom Blog.

Homesick

Our family loves to drive past our old homes in  Massachusetts and Virginia, trying to catch a glimpse and a memory of the rooms we once inhabited, the place where we loved and laughed, cried and fought. We critique the changes the new owners made, wonder why they took down that tree fort built by our sons’ young hands, cut down the tall trees out back, or why they changed our favorite paint color.

My childhood friend owns a home in the same Cape Cod neighborhood where my grandparents once lived. When I visit her, we walk over to my grandparent’s old house and stand at the end of the driveway. I silently long for my grandmother to walk out the breezeway door and invite me in for her homemade clam chowder and gather me up
for one more walk along her beach over to the boathouse—our final destination where we always turned back for home. She’s been gone a very long time.

Once, my twins stood outside our old home in Virginia after our move to Illinois. The new owner recognized them and kindly came outside, saying, “You used to live here, didn’t you?” When they nodded, she invited them inside to take a look. They respectfully declined.

We can never really go home. My twins knew the house wouldn’t be the same. They knew they wouldn’t find our Brittany spaniel sitting by the backdoor, watching the squirrels. Their room would be painted a different cor with different furnishings and Godzilla their bearded dragon lizard would be gone. Their brothers wouldn’t be inside listening to music, playing guitar, or reading.

 .

Recently, I’ve discovered I can find my old homes online by typing the address into Google and watching the most recent Real Estate ad pop up. In the case of our
old home in Massachusetts, I caught a glimpse of the rooms where we lived, the grape arbor in the backyard, the renovations the new owners made to improve the
place.

But the irony of longing for these old days, these old homes, is that while I lived there, I longed for home somewhere else. As a young person, I assumed everyone else’s home
was more peaceful than my own turbulent home. When my sons were growing up and I had found the family I always longed for, a part of me still longed for a more ordered home, some idyllic place where I would never feel the anxieties of this world and the push of needing something, anything.
I know now that my imagined home doesn’t exist anywhere on earth. I know this because of my skewed thought process when I look into lighted windows on my evening walks in our neighborhood, imagining the lives of the occupants, thinking surely they have fewer problems than me, better health, more robust financial portfolios. Surely they live in the perfect home, that place where I want to live. I imagine their lives with symphonic music playing quietly in the background, the lighting dim and warm, the bookshelves lined with great material. An easy chair sits by an ottoman laden with stacks of books and literary journals. Someone reads there with a cup of hot tea by their elbow
while the smell of dinner wafts from the kitchen. In the cold weather, a fire burns warmly in the room. Voices are quiet or silent in this safe, safe place where strife ceases to exist.

This imagined home is a mere fantasy, a mirage in most cases. Many of the homes I pass likely have worries over bills, grief over the tension between spouses when one reclines in the basement watching sports for hours on end and one uses their tongue to slice and dice people. But here’s the puzzling part. Why create this phantom life in my mind when my home today fits the lovely description above, a comfortable refuge for us and for others who visit? My home may not be luxurious or fit for Home and Garden magazine, but it’s the kind of home that just might be the best you can find on earth, despite its small size and simple furnishings. Everyone feels welcome and safe here. We enjoy a steady stream of rich company and great conversation around the table, creating memorable moments.

Yet I continue to imagine home elsewhere as a place where strife truly ceases to exist, where some sort of internal longing quiets. Even as I write these words, I hear the absurdity. Could it be, as Jen Pollock Michel writes in Keeping Place, that we are “hardwired” for a true home? Will our souls only recognize this place when we find it finally satisfies all our longings?
I write about homes a lot, especially old New England homes with their sturdy construction and the way they’ve passed the test of time still standing through nor’easters and New England winters. I long for permanency provided by one of these colonials or farmhouses that when I walk through their doors, I stop searching for a new and different home. Despite all the houses where I’ve lived, I’ve never stopped longing or found my true home here. Yet I hear its call on those evening walks through my neighborhood, on those internet searches to find my old abode, on those visits to past residences, in my longings to move someplace warmer, less expensive, closer to the ocean. C.S. Lewis
wisely describes this longing in Mere Christianity: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”  
Some may attribute my longings to my own failing, my own lack of contentment and craving for what others have, and at some level, this may be true. But I know I mostly feel deep contentment in my life, which adds to the perplexing state of my longings.
In the meantime, instead of entertaining fantasies that the perfect home exists in another state or in my past, I will sit down by the fire, relish the good and safe conversation in the home I do have as it images a future home.
I’d love to recommend a more in-depth reflection on this topic. Jen Pollock Michel’s Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home addresses this innate longing uniquely and with far more detail than this brief post. I’m so enamored with her book that I want to buy multiple copies and pass it out to my friends. So many people long for something this world doesn’t offer. I’d love to hear if you are one of them.  Here is an excerpt from her book: http://wp.me/P3GUgu-12H
In the foreword of Jen’s book, Scott Saul writes, “Keeping Place
is both memoir and rich biblical theology, and is, in all of its parts, an
aroma of the Home for which we are made and for which we are destined. With
wit, candor, a good bit of humor, and with transparent glimpses into her home,
her history, her travels, her travails, her worship, her marriage, her table,
her rest, and her longings—Jen offers an oasis for all of us who are homesick.”

 
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A Year Without the Internet

“This is a story about
going all still and quiet—and how that changes you.”                                                                                      ~Esther
Emery

I’ve only owned a smartphone since December. The day my
husband and I ventured into the Verizon store to make the purchase, I had a
very dark and bad attitude toward the sales clerk and technology in general. My computer’s screams felt
like more than enough distraction in my life. How would I ever focus and
function with the noise of a smartphone? But I wanted to be able to Facetime with my sons and receive texts that weren’t garbled on my old phone, among other things. I felt forced into this new, beeping,
pinging, ringing world where someone or something would have constant access to
interrupt me and my thought life anywhere at anytime. The world I love to abandon when I enter the refuge of my home now tags along in the new digital age,
and this private introvert does not always like all the company.
So I was curious about Esther Emery’s experiment of giving
up the Internet for a year, a journey she chronicles in her beautifully written
memoir, What Falls from the Sky.  As a successful playwright and theater
director, wife, and mother, one day she found her professional and personal life
starting to unravel. Many of us would seek out a counselor, change our
location, look for a new job—but Esther logged off the Internet and dove into
the silence. She took the drastic step of leaving behind ATMs, social media, and
email.
And she began to listen.
“If you’ve heard it said that God can be found in the silence, or that
silence can be found in God, then it is fair to say that I found both at the
same time.”

Without the Internet controlling her life, she learned to
love her neighbors in her Massachusetts city, visit the library with her
children, buy books at Goodwill, use a phone book, read a paper map, shop at
brick and mortar stores. She stared longer at her children, played with them on
the floor, visited church for the first time in a very long time, and wrote
letters by hand.

She began to ask questions and wonder what happens when we leave
the digital world and open space and margin in our lives.  I know for me I deepen and hear the voice of
God better when I allow more space and margin. I change, feeling a little less
angry, annoyed, inadequate. Esther made many of the same discoveries.

What happens when we find our validation somewhere other
than the false affirmation of the Internet? A hard question for many of us to
answer but worth the asking. The result for me is an internal warning saying I
should retreat from using  the Internet so
much, exercising caution and awareness over its pull. I should try with all my
might to pull back from the constant barrage of information, communication, and false affirmation, fighting
the urge to scroll through my phone in a doctor’s waiting room or the lobby of a
restaurant, instead sitting in stillness and thought.

In my nod to Esther’s book, I decided I would try to give up
social media for Lent. I failed miserably. First I began checking Facebook because
some people use FB to reach me–but I vowed not to scroll. But then I was
scrolling. I’ve only been on Instagram when my husband told me my four sons
posted pictures of their brother trip to the mountains. (But I didn’t scroll)
My failed and minor experiment has shown me the power of the
Internet to woo me and distract me, waste my time, and destroy my attention
span, which seems to be decreasing by the week. As a writer, I used to be able
to write for hours without yielding to a distraction. Today I check my email
and Facebook constantly…and I hate this behavior.
So as a result of reading What Falls from the Sky, I will be
making an intentional effort to resist the pull, however poor my efforts. I
want to take long walks without any noise, go on a drive without playing any
music, sit in a park with a paper book, and write a novel or a blog post without
reading people’s status. (And if I write a blog post, you can always receive
it by providing your email over at the right-hand side of your screen. Wink.)
And if you’re wondering how Esther’s story ends, you’ll have
to read her book, which you can buy here. But I will say that she now lives off
the grid in a yurt in Idaho with her husband and three children on three acres
of land. And that sounds like a life enriched by silence.

#WhatFallsFromtheSky