Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

The Apple and the Ark

*These are not Noah’s hands

The news was completely unexpected.  For the past five years, my husband has been teaching Bible and theology at a small private school in our area.  But the economy has taken a toll on the school, and enrollment is down.  The board was forced to make cuts, combine classes, and let a teacher go.

It made sense, in a way.  All the other teachers are responsible for core classes.  Latin.  English.  History.  Math.   My husband has two master’s degrees in Bible and Theology, but he couldn’t tell you five things about Shakespeare or explain why x equals 3, or how the alphabet got mixed up with the numbers in the first place.  It really was the most logical decision: Jeff should be the one to go.

The principal was very kind and even apologetic about the decision.  He gave the typical “it’s not you, it’s us” speech that one would expect in a situation like this.   They didn’t want to let him go.

Still, when I got the news, it felt like a punch in the gut.  It felt personal, even though I knew it wasn’t.  I spent the day feeling nauseous and fighting back tears and trying to make the rational side of my brain sit on my emotions.  What are we going to do now?  I thought about my kids and my mortgage and the school books I had just ordered and wished now that I could return.

Then my husband came home from work.  He walked in the door with a huge smile on his face but stopped when he saw me.  I burst into tears.  “Kristie!” he said, wrapping his arms around me.  “Don’t you see?  God is about to do something!  It’s going to be okay.”

“I know,” I sniffed.

“Really?   Because you know He’s going to take care of us.  He’s always taken care of us.”

“I know.”  I did.  Really.  I was crying because I was just so…happy.

“Then be excited!”  He looked like he was enjoying this.  “We’re about to find out exactly where God wants us next.”

I smiled and said, “Yeah!”

But inside, I was thinking about how much easier it would be to be excited if I didn’t know a thing or two about God.  I know that God sometimes has a funny way of making everything work out for the good of those who love Him and have been called according to His purpose.  Sometimes, the working out for the good takes the long road.  Sometimes, it doesn’t make any sense at all.  Sometimes, it even hurts.

That night, after I’d finished crying and eating some conciliatory ice cream, I settled down in the rocking chair with the book of Hebrews, chapter 11—the great Hall of Faith as it’s sometimes called.  I got through Abel and Enoch and came to verse 7 where Noah caught my eye.

Noah.  Everyone knows the story about Noah.  He’s the one who built the ark, collected the animals, and floated around with them while the rain came down and filled up the whole earth.  You know, that Noah.

This time, one little phase about Noah struck me.  The writer of Hebrews said, “In reverence, Noah prepared an ark…”  Reverence.  Awe.  Fear.  Praise.  Worship.

Suddenly, I pictured Noah up there on his ladder, banging away on his ridiculously large boat, praising God while his fields went to weeds and his goats broke through their fences.  He already knew the “working out for the good” was going to hurt.  It was going to hurt like nothing he’d ever known.

In fact, when God came to tell Noah about the flood, Noah’s father was still alive.  His grandfather was still alive.  The Bible doesn’t say it, but he probably had brothers and sisters and most certainly a slew of cousins and friends and neighbors.  He didn’t know that his dad would die before the ark was finished.  But he did know that there was only room for eight.  He did know that almost everyone he had ever met in over 500 years of living was not on the list.

The years came and went and Noah kept felling trees and planing boards while the people he knew and loved came and stared and pointed at his ark.  Maybe they even looked inside and gave advice about the size of the windows.  Maybe they laughed.  Maybe they praised.  And all that time, Noah looked at their faces and listened to their words and thought about how much it was going to hurt.

But he didn’t stop working, even when his wife came out after washing up the dinner dishes and said, “Really, Noah?  An ark?  You haven’t even finished my kitchen cabinets!”  Noah just grinned at her with a nail between his teeth and kept on banging, but in the secrecy of his thoughts, he knew that that the woman he loved was going to have to watch her world wash away.  And it was going to hurt.

But somehow, Noah also knew that God was at work, and Noah believed that any place where God is working is holy ground.  The whole world was degenerating into apathy and filth, but this, this was holy ground.  He took off his shoes and smeared pitch all over a house of worship that looked like a lot like a coffin, a coffin that might just save the world.  He chose not to fear.  He chose to stand in awe.

With reverence, he loaded up the wife and kids and all the animals, including the ones he didn’t particularly like and the ones that didn’t particularly like him.  He double checked to make sure he packed food for the lions.  Then he herded in the sheep and the goats that he knew would be a sacrifice to God when this whole thing came out all right.  Because the whole thing was going to come out all right.

When the time was full, God slowly shut the door, and the last glimpses of blue sky melted behind a door Noah and his family could not open from the inside.  In the dimness, they waited.

The animals felt it first.  They shifted their weight against the splinters on the floor, uneasy as the barometer fell.  Then he heard it.  The rain.   They listened, and everyone jumped when they felt the wood scrape against the earth and bump into the rocks as the water rose and lifted them away from the only home they had ever known.

It’s funny how you can think you’re brave when there’s nothing to be brave about.  In the darkness, as the wood of the ark groaned under the weight of the water, Noah had something to be brave about.  More than likely, Noah discovered he wasn’t brave at all.  But he had faith, and he held on to the expectation that he was right where he was supposed to be because he was right where God had told him to go.

So here we are, my husband and family and I, feeling the floorboards creak underneath us and wondering where God is going to lead.  It might not be easy.  It might hurt.  But we have a firm expectation that God is at work, and God is leading us right where He wants us.  With reverence, we are waiting for the ark to move, fully expecting everything to come out to the praise of His glory.

Just like Noah.  The waters did not stay.  They raged and foamed but they did not stay. The ark came to rest and the door was opened from the outside by the hand of one who is Mighty to Save. Noah walked out into the blinding light, knelt down on the earth still swollen with water, and began to dig out rocks for an altar using his bare hands.  He built it up and brought out the animals he had preserved for such a time as this.  Out of the reverence of his heart, out of the expectation and belief and faith that was in his soul all along, Noah prepared a sacrifice for the realization of what he fully expected to happen.  God would make all things work together for the good for those who love Him and have been called according to His purpose.

It hurt, no doubt about it, but God had made it good.

A red apple award for five years of teaching and the book of Hebrews

The Thing About Mother’s Day

It was the day before our first wedding anniversary when a home pregnancy test confirmed my fear: I was pregnant.  The second pink line was so faint, I almost convinced myself it wasn’t there.  But when I walked out of the bathroom and showed my husband, his face lit up and he wrapped me up in a huge hug.  “Baby!  This is such great news!” he beamed.

I burst into tears.  It most certainly was not great news, and I was hurt by his excitement.  I wanted his emotions to match mine; instead, they revealed the ugliness of my disappointment and fear, the ugliness of a woman who didn’t want to be pregnant with her own child.

It’s not that I didn’t like kids.  I adored them.  I had worked with street kids and orphans.  I paid my way through college by being a nanny to a wonderful little boy.  Everywhere I went, I drew kids to me like a magnet.  But I didn’t want my own.  I never had.  I did not dream about being pregnant or holding a baby or decorating a nursery.

Everyone always said that when the time was right, I would want to have kids, and I believed them, partly because it was easier.  It’s a solitary thing to be a woman who does not want children.  There’s something abnormal about it.  “I should try harder to want children,” I reasoned and tried to muster up some maternal instincts by sheer will-power.  I wanted those feelings.  They just weren’t there.

I held on the hope that one day, my desires would change so I could stop feeling like a foreigner in my own gender.  Surely one day, I would want to have my own children.  Someday, I wouldn’t have to explain that I didn’t hate children.  One day, I would feel like a normal woman.

I did not expect to get pregnant first.  I did not expect to have a baby before I was ready to be a mother.

A few weeks later, a blood test confirmed the home pregnancy test.   Soon it became obvious that my stomach wasn’t flat anymore.  I couldn’t quite fit into my jeans.  I stood in the dressing room of Motherhood Maternity with a belly form under my shirt, trying on clothes, while tears streamed down my face.  I walked out without buying a thing.

An ultrasound showed the baby was a girl, but I didn’t want anyone to know.  Somehow, it made it worse to verbalize the fact that we were having a girl, not just a baby, but a girl.  Deep down in the darkness of my heart, I hoped I would miscarry the baby.  A friend of ours had lost her baby, and I wondered to God why He would take that baby, that loved baby, instead of mine.

Another couple we knew was struggling with infertility, and we had to call and tell them that we had gotten pregnant without even trying and I had to pretend to be happy because I couldn’t imagine how much it would hurt them to hear that I didn’t want this baby.  I didn’t understand why God chose us and not them.  Why not them?

The months passed.  We found a hand-me-down crib and set it up in our walk-in closet because our one-bedroom apartment was too small to accommodate a baby.  I came home from work and saw it there up against the back wall between my husband’s clothes and mine, and I bawled.  I wanted to run away.  I didn’t know where to go but I didn’t want to be in my own body anymore.  I didn’t want to live my own life anymore, but how could I undo it, once it had been done?  Something fundamental had changed and I could not put it back.  I could not reverse it.  I could not run away from it.  I wanted to accept it, to embrace it, to be happy about it, but I couldn’t.

I couldn’t be happy because to be happy meant to let go.  I was afraid to let go.  I was afraid of what God might do if I let Him, as if my fighting and struggling could keep Him from doing it anyway.  I was afraid that accepting this baby might make it okay, and I wasn’t ready for it to be okay.

The thing is, I did love children.  I loved them so much, I couldn’t tolerate the idea of giving a child anything less than my best, of loving her any less than she deserved.  I knew what would be required of me to be the kind of mother I knew I needed to be, and I wasn’t ready to do it yet.  I wasn’t willing to do it yet.

But God has a funny way of taking our wills and conforming them to His own.  He has a funny way of using babies to shake things up, of using the small things to take down the big things and to bring to light the stuff that shouldn’t be there at all.

The sun was just beginning to come up when we drove to the hospital to deliver the baby.  I couldn’t stop shaking.  I shook when they prepped me for surgery and I shook on the operating table.  Even with a system full of drugs, I couldn’t keep my teeth from chattering.  I saw a bright red, squirmy baby pee all over the doctor.  My husband named her Faith.

Faith.

It doesn’t take much faith to move mountains, and I certainly didn’t have much faith.  I couldn’t even pray for more.  But my husband did.  He loved me through the ugliness and encouraged the tiny glimmers of love he saw in me.   Somewhere in the depths of a very dark heart, that very little love began to grow.  It was not immediate and it was not easy, but the more it grew, the more it wanted to grow, until one day, I realized how fiercely I loved this child of mine.

Then I cried.  I cried every time I held her.  I cried while she slept.  I looked in at her and my heart broke because I had not wanted her.  I cried because God had trusted her to me anyway, even though I was not ready or willing to open my heart to her.  I cried because something I had never had but always wanted was slowly awakening in me, and I did not deserve it.

Over the course of the years, I have grown into motherhood, but it has not been an easy journey.  Every year, when the Mother’s Day cards come out on the shelves and the local florists get a surge of business, I feel a sense of sadness.  It is still difficult to accept the words “you’re a good mom” because I remember when I wasn’t.  Some days, I’m still not.

Every Mother’s Day, I am reminded that I did not want this life.  And every Mother’s Day, I am so thankful I did not get what I wanted.

My Pagan Deity of Choice

 

Sun, the shameless self-promoter

If I were an ancient pagan, I’d worship the sun.  In my opinion, none of the other ancient deities comes close to being worthy of the same amount of reverence.

Who would worship the moon?  It’s not even made out of cheese.  Cheese could change the equation, but it’s just a lie promoted by mothers who want their children to become astronauts.

Earth?  In the lineup of ancient deities, earth is the redneck cousin from Alabama.  Don’t hate me.  Religion is a polarizing topic but we can still love.

Wind?  Wind never really stood a chance because of all the jokes made about it in the pagan deity locker room.  It’s hard to feel reverent toward a deity that reminds prepubescent boys of gastrointestinal malfunctions.

Fire?  Before the invention of the S’more, fire was not even a contender.  So it burns things.  Big deal.  Lightening does that.  Insensitive boyfriends do that.  Sun does that.

Fertility?  Eh.   Seriously, what have you done for me lately?

Help me! My feet are so tiny!

No, Sun is where it’s at for me.  Here in the Pacific Northwest, the sun is distant, aloof, and fickle, just like any good pagan deity should be.  You can’t depend on it for anything, and if you try to predict it, you’ll just end up sounding like the Channel 5 weatherman who puts little clouds over every sun in his forecast, just in case, and then tries to makes it sound like “high cloud cover” and “sunshine” are synonymous.

They’re not.

Vicious little clouds…I’m on to you

Nothing can compare to the sun.  When it makes an appearance, the whole world comes out and stands on the sidewalk with arms raised to shield humble eyes from the glory.  With one voice, worshipers chant words of adoration and awe.

“Wow, it’s so bright!”

“It’s making my eyes hurt.”

“Where are my sunglasses?”

“They’re in your other fleece.”

“Oh.  If this keeps up, I might have to mow.”

“Did you know we have a view of the mountains?”

Mommy, that ball in the sky hurts my eyes!

We put on special worship attire like tank tops and shorts and try not to stare at each other’s white legs and remind our husbands that they should take off their socks before putting on their Birkenstocks.  We bask in the knowledge that it could be a good hair day.

The I-5 corridor clogs up as the faithful pilgrimage into the glowing orb bearing sacrificial lattes and liquid Vitamin D.  They squint and drive slower and put down their visors because they know that mere minions can never look directly into the face of a god.  Traffic reporters, who are sun worshiping apostates, try to contain their disdain.

But those of us who are believers send our children out to play and wash the flannel sheets and consider planting roses where the moss is growing in the back.  We stop envying our friends in California.  If the sun stays out long enough, we also stop hating the other 45 states that get more rays than we.  That’s the transformative power of the sun, and that’s why it’s the ancient pagan deity for me.

I’m assuming, of course, that the ancient pagans didn’t worship coffee.

Ancient pagans, you missed the boat on this one

*I am not promoting pagan worship, even if it includes coffee, but I am completely enamored with the Son.