Monthly Archives: March 2014

helter shelter

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The anxiety is ramping in our lives and surely in my belly.

We have a signed purchase agreement on our home. All will be well and good pending a thorough inspection. Someone just spent five hours inspecting our 100-plus year old home.

Now we wait.

In Rochester, our realtor is fielding a counter-offer to the offer we made to buy a home. It was the first one we saw lo those many weeks ago, and it has lived and breathed with us since. We believe it is so very right.

Now we wait.

Oh but I am a crabby woman; thin of skin and jumpy-antsy because this thing called home is a morphing thing.

And in the midst of my crabby, I am chastened by awareness of my staggering privilege.

I have a larger-than-I-need home and I want to purchase same and what, oh what of all those who feel anxiety every day because they are assured of nothing in the way of home.

What of those who are children and teens and adults and elders who have no home?

Our church is working with an organization called Beacon in the metro area. Beacon is an interfaith housing initiative seeking to eradicate the all-consuming misery of soul and body that is homelessness. Through one of their programs called “Families Moving Forward” we will house four families at our church for a week.

It is a monumental undertaking. We are organizing to make sure that we have a welcoming space and food to offer and hospitality to bless but really, one of the most monumental things we privileged folk are undertaking is the willingness to face the reality that the families we welcome live without what we take for granted: home.

We have become willing to encounter our neighbors. We are a ministry outpost in the way of Jesus.

I know myself to be needful of perspective in these days.

I surely want to let go of the soul-roil engaged in fretting about the more-than-I-need.

Time is better spent in pondering what to serve our guests for breakfast on Saturday. Time is better spent thanking God for the volunteers who are committed to showing up. Time is better spent being open to what the Holy has for me to learn.

staged!

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In this household books are sacred.

Both Cooper and I are inhalers of print. Books are friends and teachers and they mark the cycles and seasons of our lives. To say that we have many of them is an understatement.

In readying our house for sale we have taken many trips to the second hand book store. We get a mere pittance for them, but at least we know they will have another life. Many of our books have gone to the library at Richfield UMC. We have thinned and it is not a task for the faint of heart but we did it.

So when I came home yesterday to stacks and stacks of books on the floor I was flummoxed. We had a stager come in to ready our home for photo taking tomorrow.

She had assassinated our bookshelves!

I asked her how it was she determined which one or two survived to grace each shelf.

Her answer? She chose the ones that were prettiest and looked the best.

I knew it was time for me to leave.

So I did.

Wow. All those words, all that beauty, all the hours of grace shared were summarily consigned to boxes until we unpack them in Rochester.

And so it is. We are being staged. I recognize my house, but it feels that I have moved into the time of transition when assumed relationship with space and surroundings is no more.

There is gift in this. I notice the lovely ways the leaded glass in the dining room creates prisms. I thank the trees in my back yard for their cardinal-bearing ways. I wonder at the foolishness of waiting so long to do so much good work in order to pretty up our home.

I can forgive the stager. She wants our house to speak welcome.

So I’ll box the books and imagine that they will find welcome and a place to be.

Stagers bring lessons.

Don’t they?

snargle

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I sat at table with a great bunch of folk on Saturday evening. We had just celebrated an intimate wedding together and were sharing the thin place of being witnesses to life change.

One of the women had just come from hearing the Dalai Lama speak here in Minneapolis.

She said that the gathered energy in the room was beautiful and the shine coming from the Dalai Lama was stunning.

She quoted one line that had caught the imagination and wisdom of her heart.

The Dalai Lama said that the quickest way to an early death is to meditate on pessimism.

It makes so much sense it doesn’t even feel like it needs saying.

The answer to the snargles that hold the soul of the world hostage are found in each of our choices made day after day.

Do we choose to focus on pessimism and record-of-wrong keeping, or do we choose to stoke the fires of compassion Jesus so sought for us to nurture?

We have power to make choices.

The couple who married chose the difficult path of growing soul with another.

We may choose to nurture the spark of the Holy that dwells within us each.

Pessimism kills. Compassion heals.

Choosing life matters.

dogs and houses

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We are readying our house for sale.

This house energetically reached out and grabbed me from the moment I first entered her front door.

Home for the last nine years is a grand old foursquare Victorian. She has gleaming wood and stained and leaded glass windows and she has held us with such grace. Parties – those I know about and the many I do not – to celebrate graduations and weddings and college leave-takings and returns and room to settle when life threw curves and coffee pots drained and cards dealt and meals shared and flotsam and jetsam accumulated through nine years of merging and setting out; all these things live in this place.

We are readying her for her next work.

And we are having to do our own work of celebrating and marking and mourning that which was and that which will be no more as well as that which will always be.

It seems I tell my life through dogs and houses.

I mark my days and ways of being according to the dog love and the house that conspired to hold me.

This house has held me and mine with such grace.

It is the house of Zoe, Mick and Ball and an Olm Wiggen Macaulay clan made flesh under her roof.

Good work.