Weekend Guests

Douwe is thrilled when we have Steve for a visit once a month and this time we took it up a notch and invited one of Steve's younger brothers too . . . for those of you who knew Steve when he was six or seven . .you might say, hey that is Steve! . .

They are all having fun playing trains and Kapla and taping Zombie Survival tips videos for You Tube.

Steve's little brother disappeared for a few minutes before supper and it turned out he decided Douwe's sloppy bedroom needed a tidying up . . I've never seen it look so nice! He had all the blankets turned out and the books that were on the floor next to the bed were stacked up biggest to smallest on the side table. . he just did that for fun! I was quite impressed.

Although a tornado hit it this morning, or was it a hurricane or fire, you never know, but here's the Kapla structure they were building last night:

Snow is here!

Turning the hearts

"And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Luke 1:17

While reading the book of Malachi a few weeks ago, I left with the last verse of the short last chapter of the short last book of the Old Testament stuck in my memory: “Look, I am sending you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord arrives. His preaching will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers. Otherwise I will come and strike the land with a curse.” Luke 1 refers to this prophecy as it prepares Zechariah for the coming of his own son.

I picked out an old dusty book from a family member's library a few years ago, and have read it several times . . The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. It is one of those little books that becomes a special friend to me, because it puts so well into words a situation that is at the source of so much interpersonal grief: the inability of adults to fully remember what it was like to be a little child. So many of the intense emotional encounters that happen in a house between a child and a parent are labeled without question as the child being bad or naughty, when often the reality is that a parent is blind to the truth that the child is being a normal child with limited skill and practice of self-control. The parent can't see it and stay calm because the parent is being overwhelmed by an unremembered time when they were the same age as their child, doing the same childish things, and they did not have a parent who had a heart turned toward them to give comfort and affection. They are reacting in the present to a time twenty or thirty years past that they did not hear consistent, gentle, discipling words that patiently teach and model about expressing behavior and feelings with self-control (an art that takes humans a lifetime to master), or that they did not receive a reassurance that words of love with a hug is available no matter how immaturely a child behaves. Miller says that the only way we can keep from collapsing under the rage and grief of these unremembered memories that invade us as we parent our own children is to maintain the belief that what happened to us was good for us, and what we are currently doing to our children is good for them too.

I have the gift (or curse) of having a memory of what it is like to be a child. I kept a diary for several different years, and I still have those writings. As an adult, I have written out a lot of the stories and events I remember, and I have been able to put into words what I was learning and noticing and believing and feeling at the time that different things happened. It is a mystery to me how long term memory works, because of course only certain experiences get stored in there and I have no idea what makes a person's particular brain choose some things and not another for long term memory storage. In my own life it seems to me I stored many things to do with "danger." So maybe our long term memories save things that will help us survive if something "dangerous" comes our way again.

I think one of the reasons God became a human person Jesus, starting from embryo, fetus, and newborn, is to fulfill the prophecy of Malachi 4. God can know everything, but he did not feel what it feels like to be a dependent and needy and vulnerable child until he became one. Before he knew what it was like, his heart was not fully ready to turn towards his children. Hebrews talks of Jesus needing to learn obedience, so it is ok, I think, to imagine that God knew he had some living and learning to do in order to carry out his intent to redeem humanity from the curse of death on their behalf. A father's (or mother's) heart turned toward a child is a pre-requisite to a child's heart turning toward a parent, or even to God. God did not skip the pre-requisite and neither can we, if we are committed to seeing children grow into whole-hearted lovers of siblings, friends, spouses and God. I also think that the words of ultimate suffering that were said by Jesus on the cross: "My God, My God, Why have you abandoned me?" tell us that the worst most hellish place for the human heart to go is into the fully aware experience of the reality that we are rejected unwanted hated and ignored by the father or mother that we depend on for life, safety, identity, but who has turned a back to us and our plight. I am confident that because Christ lived and suffered as a human infant, and child, and adult, and because of his own alienating experience of death (and because his heart was never ignorant or calloused or hardened or cauterized to the pain of it), that he totally understands and empathizes with the misery, fear, alienation, brokenness and terror of being a vulnerable human. His heart is now forever softened and turned to us in our condition and he is intending to soften our own hearts to our condition, so that we realize that we have broken wounded hearts, so we come to him as needy miserable children who are crying for comfort and healing.

This is an article that I really like because it talks a lot about how to practice parenting that cares primarily about hearts being turned to one another, and only secondarily about visible behavior and acting right. LLLI Gentle Discipline In general, this is what Jeff and I have been working really hard to practice, and after four to six years of trying it out with Steve some years and Douwe other years, I have to say it is fruitful and worth trying out. It makes me cry a lot, because this style requires me take a minute to feel during a hard moment how much I would rather yell or hit or insult my child with a withering label, and then stop myself as I remembered how it felt to be standing there as a child when that was happening to me. There is great wrong that happens between humans, and things to be angry and sad about, but not all caused by our children that we should be punishing them for it, or even ourselves, or even our own parents. The hearts of the fathers have been hardened towards children (and vice versa) for many many many generations, but God has made a radical change to the pattern by becoming a human child himself, and so our parental hearts can be softened as we think of Jesus being a baby, a toddler, a 6 year old. Our hearts can identify with Mary as she struggled to reconcile two seemingly opposite approaches to relating to someone: what she was familiar with when it came to handling a child, and what she believed about the honor and respect that a person gives to God. Maybe God was teaching her and us that the approach would be the same whether we are in a room navigating our relationship with Jesus or with our two year old.

Christmas Story

On the Wee Sing Christmas CD there was a carol that a French priest wrote in the words of the Canadian First People he was
bringing gospel to, so that they would understand what strange kind of good news came to the world one day in Bethlehem. . .
Twas in the Moon of Wintertime.

Being born in poverty isn't pretty, and that the tacky, trashy, smelly elements of the Christmas story aren't so much included when we see illustrations or sing carols about a cosy stable. . . Jesus was born in a style that would get him rejected by those closest to him, because it is just too sketchy and unsettling that God would let himself be part of such an unholy situation. Is Jesus' birth a cosy homey love fest, or a entering into the yuckiest of the yuck kind of birth into poverty and violence. Here's a take on what a middle-class, neat and clean Christian family from a nice town in the Chicago area might hear if Christ would have come this decade:

Did you hear about the baby that was born in a truck-stop bathroom off of 80-94 in Gary? The guy with the mom wasn't his real dad you know, and nobody really knows who got her pregnant. They were traveling into the area from somewhere else and didn't have any money or friends in town. . . .She didn't have any baby clothing in the trunk, so they had to use some paper towels from the self-serve car wash to wipe off the baby and wrap him up. . .no cradle, so she lined a big yellow mop-bucket with newspapers and that had to do the trick. . guess who were the first visitors to the bathroom? The convenience store clerks who were working the night shift across the street. . they came to see what was going on. . .

The family stuck around and stayed in a house in Gary for a few years .. not the best place to be, there were lots of burned and abandoned houses on the street, but the rent was affordable and there was running water and heat. .. .

Bad news though, the Indiana governor had a visit from a small group of nuclear scientists from a Bangkok university: an Iranian, a North Korean and a Sudanese. He didn't know for sure what religion or culture they were loyal to but it definitely was not American, and the way they talked through their interpreters about their crazy theory of a scientific discovery that gave clues to some new world leader being born in Chicago area, he figured it was some terrorist plot to take down U.S. government or something. . .so he told them to let them know when they found this new world leader and his secret hideout.

An awful thing happened when the governor didn't hear back from the scientists . . he had some scientist friends tell him that the most likely place that terrorists would hideout was a place near the water systems and energy plants at the lakefront, and another of his friends woke up with the Gary, Indiana tune from THE MUSIC MAN in his head. So he sent in CPS and a couple swat teams to make sure all the male infants and toddlers in Gary were forcefully removed from their families and institutionalized into sketchy group homes where they were misused and mistreated and overmedicated in order to break them down into chaotic creatures, forever to be locked up within juvenile facilities and then eventually max security prison. It was easy enough, as all the poor people in Gary could easily be falsely written up for neglect or abuse or something or other . . .seeing the deplorable conditions of their rotting, moldy, rented houses, and they would have no access to anybody with power or interest to help them recover their babies. The one baby and his parents were warned just before the round up (in a mysterious text-message), so they hitchhiked to Mexico where the baby and family lived as refugees for several years until that governor was no longer in power. . . The baby and his family ended up back at his parents home town by the time he was school age, but Spanish was his first language and he never quite seemed to fit in as a normal American child with his accent and his food preferences and all . . and all the kids were told to keep their distance because this child's mom was a not to be trusted (pregnant before marriage you know, and weird stories when you asked her who the real father was.) Everybody expected this child to be strange and not quite safe for their kids to play with.

Getting ready for Christmas

No pictures in my camera for a few months!
So this entry has no visual aides, but a summary of some of our Advent activities in the past 3-4 weeks.

We took Douwe to Oak Park area for a special evening holiday concert: Canadian Brass. It was perfect for him, musical and entertaining, and a wonderful variety of music. So enjoyable!

We joined some of our Lanting family members in listening to Illiana Community Chorale sing most of Handel's Messiah.

Douwe had 30 seconds on Santa's lap at the Kid's Peace Christmas party at Old Country Buffet for foster families and their children. An amazing gift that was provided for each one of the children: A handmade quilt! Some women somewhere made about 50-60 of them so each child got his/her own.

My fourth year in a row of making banket with Mom Groen . .I rolled out and rolled up eight sticks and they were not too shabby!

Our Advent theme at Peace Church is "Mothers of Hope: A Shoot will come from the Stump of Jesse" and each service has focused on one of the five unlikely mothers mentioned in Jesus' geneology in Matthew 1. We have been learning and singing a wonderful song each week called: In Matthew's Gospel There Are FIve

Looking forward to the service of Lessons and Carols at our church tomorrow evening. The readings, the artwork, the congregational and choir music are all tied together to show how the Good News of God WIth Us is the primary story throughout the Old and New Testament.

First gingerbread house kit attempted by Douwe and me. Messy, but I was pleased that it turned out better than I expected.

Silly and fun holiday musical for children at Beverly Arts Center: Mrs. Claus.

A visit to the Atrium in Museum of Science and Industry to see the collection of Christmas trees from around the world.

Annual trip to DeMotte area tree farm to find a live Christmas tree and our usual wreath that hangs on our front house wall.

Douwe went with others to the Journey of Joy tableaus at Cottage Grove church to remember the stable setting of Jesus birth.

Our 6th? annual Christmas feast with our monthly supper club, at our house this year. So many delicious drinks, appetizers and desserts!

Our Holiday collection of kids books on CD are back in the car for a few weeks: Sam the Snowman, Santa Duck, Room for A Little One, Merry Christmas Curious George, and I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow, Bear Stays up for Christmas.

Best few weeks to open the mailbox because there are actual items from people we know instead of just solicitations and ads and such.

Many many repeats of the Wee SIng Christmas CD, track #6: The Twelve Days of Christmas. Douwe can't get enough. .

Costumes and Jack O Lanterns

Douwe put on a costume this year for the first time . . the last two years he didn't have any interest in putting or keeping a costume on. He put on three costumes this year: 2 of them were the rejects from the last two years, ghost and Thomas. And one was a dr's costume but we didn't get a pic of that. He decided he would wear one to a costume party on Saturday night, the second to a midday festival at the Town Hall, and the third for Trick-or-Treating. And he did! He had so much fun running around the neighborhood with his neighbor friends (and all their parents in tow.) We also had a fun time carving pumpkins on Saturday afternoon with some family members at my sister's house. .

Mount Desert Island Rocks: Day 6

This day was not rainy but quite foggy or low clouds, so when we would drive around the island we could tell what the elevation was by whether we could see ahead of us or not.

We got a few neat photos on Echo Lake: