Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

A Great Honor

 

If you haven’t heard the news, Five in Tow had a pretty great day, for a Monday.  My blog was highlighted on WordPress.com as one of the best blogs of the day…or year…or something.  See?  That’s us, right under a great recipe for eggs, to the right of a review of the Hunger Games.

I am grateful to all of you who keep coming back and reading my stories, and uplifting me with stories of your own.   I am often humbled by your comments, encouraged by the way you share my posts, and honored to be a part of a community of readers and bloggers who really care.   Thank you!

If you’re new here, and today was the first day you came across a little blog called Five in Tow, I hope you’ll stay.  There’s plenty of room.

Sincerely,

Kristen

 

Beauty in Brokenness

 

I was about half-way through my workout when my ankle gave out.   My foot rolled, twisting my ankle under my weight with a loud “pop.”   I crumpled to the ground, unable to stand, and grabbed my leg.  My ankle was on fire with pain.   I held it in the air, gasping in agony, and begged my brain to get a handle on the pain so I could breathe.  My ankle swelled immediately and I could see the blood start to pool under the bone.

The next several days found me confined to the couch, my ankle propped up on pillows and loaded down with ice.  The kids gathered around to assess the damage.

“Your foot looks really fat,” Kya said, noticing the way my flesh puffed up around the Ace wrap.

“And it really, really stinky!” Micah said.  He didn’t care for the herbal ointment I had rubbed all over.  It created a strange, bluish-gray hue over my deeply bruised skin.

“And your skin is all different colors.  Like a crocodile,” Jonathan added.

“I think your baby toe looks like a beluga whale!”  Faith concluded. They all giggled.

But Paul was worried.  “Your leg is broken?  You need to glue it,” he advised.  Then, every so often, he stopped in to pat my leg.  “That make it better?” he asked, patting.

“Yes, Paul, I think it does.”

“Good (pat, pat).  I make it better.”  He brought books and snuggled next to me and told me he liked me.

The pain subsided after a few days, but I couldn’t even walk to the bathroom without my entire foot swelling up and throbbing.  The only thing I could do was sit on the couch and give directions.  The kids scampered about, eager to help.  Faith made scrambled eggs for breakfast, helped the boys to the bathroom, and changed a set of wet sheets.  Jonathan set the table.  Kya dressed her brothers.  In tutus.  They unloaded the dishwasher and swept the floor and got out their school books, working diligently despite many interruptions.

When my husband came home from work, he was met at the door with a day’s worth of requests by five kids who didn’t have a mother to help.  All of the household responsibilities fell squarely on his shoulders as soon as he walked in the door.  Dinner, jammies, brushing teeth, grocery shopping, cleaning up the kitchen—no matter what the task, he did it all cheerfully and scolded me if I so much as thought about getting up.

My neighbors sent over crutches and cookies, friends offered to bring meals, and my mother-in-law stopped in with a big pot of soup and cornbread muffins.  She washed the dishes in the sink and cleaned up the kitchen that had been neglected all week.  The children bragged to her about how much they were helping.  Their faces glowed.

But by Friday, I was exhausted.  Sure, my foot hurt, but it was more than that.  I felt discouraged.  Helpless.  Worthless.  I felt as if somehow my value as a wife and mother had diminished along with my ability to do.

Day after day, I was a mother who couldn’t take little boys to the bathroom or get children ready to go outside.  I was a wife who couldn’t make dinner or pack a lunch.  I couldn’t make my own coffee or carry my own dirty laundry to the hamper.  I couldn’t even feed the cat.

It was strangely terrible, being in a place where I had nothing to offer, where I was broken and needy and unable to do a single thing about it.  I could only ask for help and beg for charity from those who were already stretched thin and worn out with the demands of daily life.  I dug in my pockets for something to give, desperate to contribute so I could feel better, but I found nothing except my own insecurity.

Who am I when I have nothing to give?  I am a coward.  It’s one thing for you to know that I’m weak and broken, generally speaking.  It’s another thing for you to get close enough to diagnose my disease.   I do not want you to get up close into my specifics and see my dirty dishes and my daughter’s failed math test and hear the way I talked to my kids when I had to give the same directions three times in a row.  I do not want you to know me like this.

If I can’t be left alone, I will insist that I’m getting better.  I may be broken now, but I won’t be broken later.  I am not this needy, not always.  This is a fluke, a one-time deal.  Soon I will be on the giving end of grace, just like I like it.  Just wait and you will see—I’m getting better.

But love doesn’t wait.   Love comes into my messy house after a full day, looks into my blotchy face, and gets to work setting things straight without saying a word.  Love is my husband’s arms, enfolding me, carrying me up the stairs even though I say I can manage myself.   Love is my children’s hands, bringing me water and pillows and sweetly accepting my injury as an opportunity to serve.  Love is a friend who brings dinner even though I say I’m getting better.  Love knows I am not better. 

And I find that this kind of love–the kind I don’t deserve, the kind I can’t earn, the kind that pushes into my weaknesses and exposes my fault lines–is hard to take.  It is the kind of love that is bathed in grace, and I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with grace.  I want to deserve it.  I want to earn it.  I want to believe I am getting better.  I do not want to need it, and the horror of grace is that it necessitates weakness, brokenness, and emptiness.  It rushes in when I dig deep and find nothing to offer.

It is the kind of love that looks at a woman shrouded in excuses and loves her in spite of the lies, not because of them.  It is the kind of love that smears mud on sightless eyes and raises servant girls to life and replaces the ear of an enemy.  It is the kind of love that heals ten when nine will forget.  It is the kind of love that gave up the strength and power I crave in order to take on the weakness I abhor so that I might be saved with the grace I find so difficult to accept.

Who am I when I can’t give, when I can’t do, when I can’t be better than I really am, when there is nothing but me, on a couch, broken?  Who am I when I have nothing to hide behind?  Who am I when I can’t do anything to make myself more appealing to earn your friendship or your favor, your admiration and your love?   What if all I have is grace?

Then I find myself in the place I most need to be.

 

Junk Eddie

Grandpa with Jonathan, May 2007

 

For as long as I can remember, people have called him Junk Eddie.  He lives in a junk yard a few miles down the road from my grandparent’s farm.  Although I’ve never seen it myself, I’ve been told he sleeps in an old abandoned house trailer that seems to drift about in the sea of used tires, household appliances, and rusty farm equipment that covers his property.  Since his house burned to the ground several years back, he’s made the trailer his home, though it has no running water or indoor plumbing.

Ed is a quiet, elderly man who likes to keep to himself.  He doesn’t talk to many people and very few people talk to him.  He isn’t a drunk.  He isn’t homeless.  He doesn’t abuse women or hunt down children.  He gives his money to the local Catholic church and slicks back his hair once a week to go to bingo.

But people treat him like a criminal.   They turn away when they see him, walk on the other side of the street when he’s coming toward them, and laugh about him when he’s close enough to hear.

For his part, Ed doesn’t do much to raise people’s opinions of him.  He takes particular pride in the fact that he has never in his life paid more than a quarter for a piece of clothing.  To demonstrate the fact, he walks around town dressed in filthy, ill-fitting clothes, a pair of worn out shoes, and an old hat that makes a half-hearted attempt to cover his stringy gray hair.  More than once, I’ve seen him rummaging through a curbside trash heap, looking for discarded clothing and putting on anything that fits.  Sometimes it’s an improvement.  Most of the time, it isn’t.

Some days I see Ed behind the grocery store, pulling soggy lettuce heads from the garbage bin.  He waits by the back door for the manager to dump out all the rotten or expired food.  He tries to be there early so he can salvage the meat and dairy products while they’re still cold.  If anyone asks, Ed says the food is for his dog, but no one believes him.

The truth is, most people are a little afraid of Ed.  People like him could be dangerous, unpredictable.   They lock their doors when he comes down the street and pull down the shades.   They avoid him because they don’t understand him.

But not my grandpa.  Grandpa has been a friend of Ed’s for years.  I don’t know how my grandpa, a former missionary and an elder on the church board, got to be friends with this eccentric outcast, but I have a feeling it has a lot to do with Grandpa’s relationship with the Lord.

I never knew my grandpa when he wasn’t a Christian, although he tells stories of his wild days before he came to his senses.  He used to be an alcoholic, although it’s hard to imagine him that way now.  As long as I’ve known him, he has had a passion for God.  Every morning, he gets up before daylight to read his Bible and pray.  He sits in his favorite chair by the window and begins his day with God.  He commits the things he reads to his heart and applies them to his life.

Maybe that’s why Grandpa started reaching out to Ed.  He read that those who follow Christ should walk as Jesus walked, and he believed it.  He read that Jesus walked among the sinners and the outcasts and the untouchables of his day, and Grandpa decided that if he was to be like Jesus, he’d have to do the same.  So he started walking with Ed.

Every week, Grandpa makes a trip down the road to visit Ed.  Very few people ever stop in to see Ed.  They can’t get past the smell of rotting food and the trash that seems to cover every inch of his property.  Sometimes he gets a visit from a high school kid looking for some odd car part, or a from a city council member looking for some way to throw Ed in jail for health code violations, but that’s about it.  I imagine Ed must get awfully lonely at times, which is probably why he enjoys Grandpa’s visits.  Grandpa is probably the only true friend Ed has ever had.

And Grandpa considers it a privilege to be a part of Ed’s life.  When he comes home from an afternoon at the junkyard, his face is glowing.  Usually, he walks in the house with an armful of food Ed salvaged from that day’s trip to the grocery store.  Sometimes he brings home a piece of scrap metal or a machine part he can use in his shop.

He comes home with stories too, stories about how God is working in Ed’s life and how Grandpa has had a chance to love him like Jesus would, not always with words, but with deeds.  Inevitably, when Grandpa talks about Ed, he begins to cry.  Tears well up in his eyes and run down his weathered face.  “I hope he knows how much I appreciate him,” Grandpa will say.  “I hope he knows.”

It is in those moments that I begin to see clearly what it means to walk as Jesus walked.  I understand what it means to love without condition, and what it means to be a light to the world.  I begin to realize that if Christians hope to impact the world for Christ, they must first live Christ out in their daily lives.  When my grandpa, in his worn leather vest and straw hat, leans on his old blue Dodge and talks to Ed while the work piles up in the shop, he looks a lot to me like Jesus.  Not the pristine, stained-glass Jesus reserved for Sunday school and Easter cards, but the friend-of-sinners Jesus, the Jesus who mixed mud with His hands, who smelled of dust and the bottoms of fishing boats, the Jesus who kept company with corpses and allowed sticky children and scandalous women to touch Him.  He looks a lot like the Jesus who loved with His life and not just with His words.

Some people might want to pat my grandpa on the back and tell him what a noble thing it is he is doing by befriending Junk Eddie.  Still, not many of us would go in his place.  But Jesus would.

 

*This story was originally published in Moody magazine, which is no longer in print.   I entered it in a writing contest sponsored by best-selling author Jerry B. Jenkins.  Since I had written it the night before and printed it just minutes before the deadline, I was shocked when I won.   But I was thrilled that this story could be told because it captures the heart of a man who has deeply impacted my life.  My grandfather lost his battle with cancer last year.  His was a life well-lived, and this is how I will remember him.