Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

Mr. Whitter’s Cabin

Mr. Whitter's Cabin

Mr. Whitter’s Cabin

Mr. Whitter lives two doors down on the opposite side of the street. He owns an old hunting dog named Rosie and a faded blue ten-speed which he sometimes pedals up the hill to collect his dog when she comes to call on our chickens. “Hey, Kiddo!” he says when he sees me.

It has been Mr. Whitter’s objective to get our family out to his cabin. His thirty-acre slice of Alaska lies along a river just past the town of Willow, where the Iditarod starts every year in early March. Decades ago, Jim and his wife built a cabin on the bluff overlooking the water. Over the years, more and more grandkids carved their names in the ladder leading up to the loft, and extra bunk beds have been built along the wall in the great room to accommodate them all.

In other words, it is the perfect place to share with the neighbors and their slew of kids.

coffee pot

Mr. Jim Whitter could not stand the fact that the silvers were running, wild raspberries were dripping on their canes, and the long summer days were already beginning to yawn—and not a single kid was running rampant over his land, taking advantage of it all.

“Just go on out there, and treat it like it’s yours,” Mr. Whitter said, pressing a hand-drawn map into Jeff’s hand. The combination to the padlock on the rusty chain fence was scribbled at the top, and Mr. Whitter had already hauled out the portable generator and an extra can of fuel to tuck into the back of our van.

“I think we’d better go,” Jeff said with a grin when Mr. Whitter left. The thought of being able to shoot targets with the kids at Jim’s homemade range was more than my husband could bear.

Mr. Whitter's flag

But it was Sunday afternoon. I was still in my church clothes, and the children were eating stale popcorn for lunch. Nothing was packed.

A few years ago, that would have been a deal-breaker. A spontaneous overnight camping trip for seven people would have stressed me out to the point of making it less-than-fun for everyone.  I would have said no. I would have offered a million reasons why going right now was impossible: My refrigerator was bare, the laundry wasn’t done, and did we even know where the camping lanterns were?

cook stove

But I’ve grown a little, I guess.

Instead of saying, “That’s not enough time to get ready!” I said, “Okay!”

We fed the chickens extra, made a quick food-intolerance-friendly dinner in the Instant Pot, dug up fresh batteries for the lanterns, and hit the road. I forgot deodorant. At least two kids didn’t pack underwear. But I didn’t stress, and I didn’t give my family an extra chance to practice forgiveness.

Because of that, we got to spend the night in a cabin by the river, nestled in the trees, with beaming kids who couldn’t stop saying, “This is the best place ever!”

I would have missed it all—and forced my family to miss it—if I had given in to my nature that says, “I can’t do this on such short notice and still have a good attitude.” That little area of growth in my life opened us up to an incredible blessing that my weakness would have robbed from me.

campfire at Mr. Whitter's Cabin

I realized that perhaps I’ve been a little backwards in my thinking. I have operated under the assumption that God longs for my sanctification because He is tired of my immaturity. He is sick of seeing the same sins and mistakes day after day. Won’t she ever grow up?

But I am beginning to understand that God longs for my sanctification so that He can pour more of Himself into me. My Father wants to bless me with all that He is; He desires me to grow up into the riches of Christ in the heavenly places. I can reach some of it now, right where I am. But God’s riches are like the cherry tree in my grandmother’s orchard—all the best fruit is in the top branches.

raspberries at Mr. Whitter's cabin

The more I grow, the more of God’s abundance I have available to me. He has such good things in store just beyond the reach of my stubbornness, fear, and rebellion. I think I would be devastated to know how I have closed myself to God’s blessings because I have been unwilling to let go of my lack.

 

It makes me wonder, perhaps what saddens God the most about my weakness is not the fact that I am messing up, but that I am missing out. I am missing out on His infinite fullness, richness, abundance, and power to more than fill everything that is lacking in me.

teapot at Mr. Whitter's Cabin

Suddenly, God looks a lot like an old man on a rusty bike, holding out a hand-drawn map. “Hey, Kiddo!” He says. “The salmon are running and the raspberries are dripping on the canes, and I can’t stand that you’re missing it.“

The riches of God are there, waiting.

All you have to do is say yes.

lunch at Mr. Whitter's Cabin

Stuck

tag

My brothers and I used to play freeze tag on balmy summer nights when the fireflies dipped low across the grass and pesky mosquitoes delivered welts to our bare feet.

My older brother was just enough taller and faster to outrun me every time, and he tagged me down by the creek where the shadows of evening crawled into a hallow of trees and went to sleep. It was impossible for my team mates to see me there and even harder for them to sneak past his lanky arms to set me free.

I was stuck, frozen in some awkward mid-run stance while stars slowly blinked awake. The game continued on around me in squeals and shrieks while my feet remained planted in the cool, packed earth of the creekbank.

At first, being stuck wasn’t so bad. My burning lungs caught a breath; my muscles stopped screaming. I could notice the beads of sweat that trickled down my forehead and into my eyeballs.

It was a welcome pause.

But as the dusk melted into darkness, being stuck began to wear. I slung my body over my knees and squatted in the moonlight, wondering if anyone even knew where I was, or if I’d get a chance to play again before Mom called us in.

The longer I waited, the more I wondered if I even wanted to play anymore, if I wanted to run my legs into jelly and my lungs into fire. Trying to outrun boys was hard. Maybe I just wanted to read my Nancy Drew book and call it a night.

Probably no one would miss me anyway, I thought to myself. They hadn’t so far.

And clearly, I wasn’t the fastest runner, and I wasn’t contributing much to the game. In fact, I could see that everyone else was carrying on very well without me.

Stuck

That’s the stuff you think about when you’re stuck by a creek in the dark.

It’s also the stuff you think about when you’re stuck in real-life, when circumstances plow you over and tag you out, and you suddenly find yourself frozen mid-step and unable to move beyond the little space of ground right in front of you.

At first it can seem like a welcome reprieve, a chance for your soul to catch its breath. But after a while, even the rest can be wearisome. You spend your days warming the same spot of earth, head down and wondering about your contribution to life.

That is where I’ve found myself the past few years. Frozen. Tagged out. Stuck.

Within a few months of each other, three of my kids were each diagnosed with separate but significant learning issues. Their unique brains are mazes of strengths and weaknesses, and the older they grew, the more evident their challenges became. Our days were filled with trips to therapy, intense work at home, teaching and re-teaching the same material, and the daily effort of trying to communicate with kids who could not process language easily.

I found myself in a place that did not have room for much more than my husband and kids. I did not have the space to think or create or wonder. I had to step back from every ministry I had previously cared about. I did not have the capacity to invest in other people or even to let other people invest in me.

It was all I could do to manage the few things that mattered most.

At the end of each day, I felt as if God had taken everything I had, and out of my emptiness I had to trust that in the morning, He’d give me enough for another day.

I’d like to say that I did this really well. But I was often fearful and angry. I allowed impatience to fester where trust should have grown, and I made frustration my crutch instead of leaning hard on faith. I wondered then if God would ever allow me to use the gifts He’d given me, all the while failing to see how God was using me right then to do the things only I could do: be a wife to my husband and a mother to my children.

I felt like my feet were cemented to the ground, and every time I’d remind God that I was missing out, He would gently say, “There is no place more important than where you are right now.”

tagged

That’s a hard truth to swallow when you’ve been stuck in the same square of ground for so long, you wonder if you might be growing roots right into it. Maybe this is it for me. Maybe all those things I thought I’d do and everything I thought I’d be were just dreams and nothing more.

Those are the things you think about when you’re stuck, when little lies begin to creep into the slow and quiet.

You see everything that’s going on where you’re not. You notice how everyone else seems to be able to be and do and go while you’re just frozen.

You fail to notice that the little piece of ground you’re manning is holy ground. What felt like a punishment was really a planting, an opportunity to go to the deep places that busy doesn’t allow.

The truth was, I had not missed my calling. I was knee-deep in my calling. The God of the universe did not ordain me to be a writer or a speaker or even a stellar friend.

He made me to be a mother.

And a wife.

And a faithful child of God.

Those things are the irrevocable call of God on my life, the things that do not change whether I am standing in one plot of ground or running the field.

Everything else is an extra.

But those three things? Those things are worth getting stuck over.

Because it is in those moments of sacred stillness that God does the best work. My children are now reading. All of them. I could cry when I see Paul curled up on the couch with a book, voluntarily doing what used to be agonizing to him. Micah’s personality has come alive now that he is no longer afraid to speak in public. Kya is writing stories. Every single one of them has a relationship with their Father-God that is sweeter because life has been a little hard.

As for me, I would not have seen the hand of God unless I had been stuck up against a mountain that had to be moved.

And it has moved. All around me, the ground has shifted, little by little, until I realized one day that I am not stuck anymore. The days are not so hard, and I am not used up at the end of them. I have come to the end of my un-doing, and everything I thought was frozen is now free.

stuck
And to my surprise, I have not missed a thing.

Are you stuck? Do you feel as if your feet are frozen in place, and everything you thought you’d be and everything you thought you’d do are lost in an intense season of being a wife and mother?

Know this: There is a time and purpose for all things, even a time to be still and a little stuck.

But it is not for always.

One day, God will free up your time, your gifts, and even your dreams. And you will find that you did not miss a thing.

When Your Heart is Hard Toward Your Child

hard heart

It was a long season of unrelenting conflicts. Day after day, they beat on me like a hot sun until I felt like I had all but dried up. My heart was baked hard and impenetrable, drawn out from my body like clay from a kiln.

I did not like this child of mine, not really, and any emotional feelings of love I had once known had long cemented into bare obligation. Fissures of anger and frustration ran through me like fault lines; I felt at any moment, I would break.

Of all my children, this one had challenged me the most. We rubbed each other against the grain until static sparked. And I was weary of it. The constant friction had skinned me of any tenderness, compassion, or delight until I had little toleration for even minor infractions or personality differences.

I had become quick to anger, slow to speak praise, resentful, irritable, and everything else that love is not. I had become everything I never thought I’d be as a mother.

There was a deadness in me that was terrifying, ugly, and shameful. I knew it. I felt it, heavy and horrifying within me. I thought about the unspeakable damage I was doing to this child by being overly critical and harsh. Why, God? I cried. Why did you give me this child if I was going to mess it up this bad?

But I had no idea how to change it. Maybe it was already too late. Can a dead heart beat again? Can something so hard become soft once more?

hardened heart

Then one day, everything shattered. It was the same battle we had fought before, on repeat. Only this time, I had nothing left. No margin, no buffer, no grace. What may have been normal childish behavior felt to me like willful disobedience and purposeful provocation.

It felt personal.

When my husband came home from work, I was so upset, I could barely speak, and what I could say was vile. “You have to handle this,” I said, “or I am going to say something I shouldn’t.”

He went to our child’s room and talked in low, patient tones, the kind I didn’t seem to have in my settings anymore. Then, a long while later, he found me. I didn’t want to talk about it, yet somehow, I ended up telling him everything. He listened until my anger slowly distilled into its true form: fear.

I was so afraid.

I was afraid of what I felt in my heart, afraid of who I was becoming, afraid of the trajectory of my relationship with this kid if I could not get a grip on this, and so afraid that I would not be able to fix it.

All that fear came bubbling out. Even shame could not hold it down, even though I wished it could. It is a wretched thing to vomit up all the bile in your soul. But once I started, I couldn’t stop.

“I think one day you’ll be great friends,” my husband said quietly when I was done. “But this is not something you can fix.”

In my frustration and bitterness, I had forgotten that. I didn’t want to ask God for help because I didn’t want him to know I needed it.

That changed the minute I confessed my struggle out loud. There in the bedroom before God and my husband, everything that had been stuffed into the hidden places of my heart was hauled out into the light. It was shocking. Unholy. Disgraceful.

And freeing.

What else could I be afraid of? What guilt could torment me and hold me down? I had already said it all.

A little space opened up in that stone of a heart for life to pulse. For the first time in a long time, I felt the heartbeat of hope. Perhaps it was not too late for God to raise the dead.

There was no Lazarus awakening, no sudden transformation, but only a slow softening, like spring. In fact, I found it hard to pray at first. I was still raw, and it’s hard to pray over the hurting places with any amount of faith that one day, it will be different.

But it only takes a little bit of faith to melt a heart of stone, and God was willing to supply it. The more I softened, the more I could pray, and the more I prayed, the more God rebuilt the relationship I thought was destined to failure.

Slowly, God began to show me the beautiful blessings of having a child so unlike me. The friction that created sparks in our relationship also sharpened us and drew us both closer to Christ. I needed this kid to be exactly the way God created them to be. 

What started out as a set of circumstances that hardened my heart turned out to be the single greatest thing God has used in my life to grow it.Big ol' broken heart

Perhaps you have been in a difficult season of parenting, and you feel devoid of any joy toward the child you bore. Your heart is hard, and you wonder if there’s anything that can ever change that.

I’m here to tell you there is hope for you, mama, and grace. It is never too late for God to soften your heart and restore the relationship you have with your child. God will do the work.

What is keeping you from running to him for help? What is holding you back?
Perhaps today is the day to lay down your anger, guilt, and frustration. Perhaps today is the day to let God begin mending your heart.