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50 Years

June 10, 2012 by

Fifty years ago today, the course of our family history stepped onto a new and exciting path. Really, the journey toward this future began some time before June 10, 1962, but it is today that we remember and commemorate my grandfather, grandmother and the legacy that they left behind. Today is the anniversary of the church they started so many years ago.

It was scary. It was hard. It was beautiful and ugly and delicious all rolled together.

Legacy.

Lee and I have thought a lot about the legacy we want to leave to our children. Walking across the plains of Africa has shifted the course of that vision a bit, though, and once again we find ourselves reestablishing this idea of legacy. What are we doing now that will shape the futures of our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren?

We must not take lightly this responsibility we have to create a legacy for our kids. It’s daunting, really, to think that how we guide them doesn’t impact the short term. I don’t know if my grandparents realized the ultimate and forever impact they would have on future generations when they stepped onto the white sands of South Caicos in 1961 with their four young children. Did they know that fifty years later the Carribbean would still remember the family name?

Did they know that fifty years after that first dedication on June 10, 1962 there would be a service at Calvary Baptist Church to honor and remember their faithfulness and sacrifice?

Did they know that fifty years after leaving the United States their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren would have traveled the world with the Gospel?

Did they understand the legacy they were creating by the faithful acting of leaving?

My grandfather did not get to see the long-term fruits of his labor. He died in 1973 at the age of 44. But his legacy did not end and it will not because his hands, his feet and his love continues to spread through the Carribbean and the world.

My grandfather wasn’t trying to be faithful to a future he would never see when he left with his family and established a lasting ministry in the Turks and Caicos islands and in the Bahamas. He was being faithful to the present he lived in and he took his family on the journey with him.

Is this how we create legacy? Is it as simple as being faithful to those things that stand before us – the messy, the beautiful, the ugly and the delicious? Is it living fully in the present that allows us to create a legacy for the future?

My grandparent’s journey wasn’t without trial or hardship and not every memory from those years is met with fondness and yearning. But the seed that was planted all those years ago continues to grow and I am so, so grateful and honored to be a part of that heritage – that legacy. I’m proud of my family and the legacy in which we all share.

Messy. Beautiful. Ugly and Delicious. It is our legacy and it continues to grow, not to our glory but to His.

All to His.

 
 

The steeple and bell at Calvary Baptist Church, South Caicos

 

So what about you? What kind of legacy do you hope to leave for your children and the generations that follow?

*Three years ago this month, I had the privilege of traveling to the Caicos islands with my mom to see and feel the legacy that was left for us first hand. Here are a couple of the posts from that trip:

– Why I’m in Turks and Caicos 

– Another Story from the Mission Field

– I’m Coming Home Soon!

– A Journey through the Sands of Time

– Island Gallery

Sing it out with Nicole Nordeman’s Legacy…

Filed Under: blast from the past, faith, Family, Grace, Heritage, Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , ,

I want to Carpe Diem

June 7, 2012 by

A blog post written by an excellent blogger went viral a few months ago. In many ways, I agree with what she writes about releasing ourselves as parents of the pressure to enjoy every single moment of this parenting journey.

But part of me wonders why we get so upset when older women come up to us in the store and urge us to enjoy the minutes. Why are we so quick to lash out when strangers want to offer a bit of encouragement – even if it’s misguided? I don’t say this accusingly, because I, too, have found myself defensive when people make comments that I perceive to be insensitive, ignorant or laced with pressure.

But if I step back and take a deep breath, most of the time it’s really evident that whoever made the comment is not speaking out of judgement or malice, but simply from a place that’s different from mine.

Take the older gentleman in Sam’s a few months back – the one who tsked at me when the kids were acting like rabid baboons while we waited in line. At first, I was annoyed at his impatience. My initial reaction was to either lash out at him, or to encourage the kids to act out more simply out of spite.

But when I stepped back (as in left the store and thought about it a bit), I realized this: he’s old. Also, I have no idea what his background is. Maybe he never had kids and simply doesn’t understand. Likely, if he did have kids, his wife did the majority of the errands with them when they were small, simply because that’s how older generations operated.

The point is, I don’t know, so why get so upset about it? Why not just smile politely, try to quiet the kids and realize that once we leave the store we will probably never see him again?

Problem solved.

The fact of the matter is, our time with our children is short. It will go by quickly. And before we know it, we will be the older women in the check out line watching a young mom wrangle in her children, frazzled and tired, and we will probably miss those moments – yes, even the moments that are “helluva hard.”

So even in the crazy, when the kids are running rampant in the store, try to take a deep breath and remind yourself of two things:

– This will not last forever and you’ve got hundreds of solo shopping trips ahead of you in life so don’t waste time getting embarrassed over the small stuff.

– These days really will fly by fast, so seize every moment you can and laugh as often as possible.

 

I don’t say these things as someone who’s got this down. I scowl more than I laugh some days and I look forward to bedtime as much as the next person – it’s the nature of the beast. But I’m not for a second wishing this time away.

Just because I don’t always Carpe Diem doesn’t mean I shouldn’t at least try.

In fact, with the realization that my “baby” is going to be five at the end of the year, I find myself a little sad and wistful. I watch the new moms around me with a faint smile and I find myself whispering softly, “Enjoy every minute of this time because it goes by so fast.”

Yes, I remember the sleepless nights, the endless crying and the non-stop work of having an infant. And I miss it. I actually do miss it. I didn’t think I would when I had an infant, but I do now. I would take a hundred sleepless nights all over again if I could. If I feel that way, then it’s quite possible that the older women in the store feel the same about the harried state of life I’m currently in.

So the next time you’re at the store with your kids and they’re wreaking havoc, try to take a minute to sit back, laugh and be present in the moment. And when the older woman smiles and urges you to seize the day, or asks you if you are going to “try for a girl/boy” or wonders why they’re not in school, smile politely and thank her for any encouragement she has to offer.

I think the old women at Target have a lot to teach us, if we’re willing to listen…

Filed Under: Family, Kids, Landon, Life, Motherhood Tagged With: , , , ,

And now I’m back

June 6, 2012 by

Oh hi there! How are you? Me? Oh, I’m fine, thanks. Now that I’ve finally finished all three books in The Hunger Games Trilogy. I read them on my iPad. I don’t know how many pages the books were, but on the iPad, all three books totaled 15, 215 pages. I swiped my iPad screen 15, 215 times in the last four days.

My eyes hurt.

Yep. I took the plunge. I started The Hunger Games Saturday night and I finished the third book, Mockingjay, last night around midnight. I have done absolutely nothing in between those times. Except turn thirty-four, which I largely ignored anyway, so no big deal.

So my take on the books: I was skeptical when I went in to the series. I didn’t want to like it but, alas, I did like it. I had to fight through the first five chapters of the first book, which I found to be painfully boring. I almost gave it all up, but once the story finally picked up, I was hooked.

From a story standpoint, the books were great. There was a love triangle, lots of action and fantastic descriptions that pulled me right into the world of Panem. I could see it and smell it and feel the terror of it all.

That is great storytelling.

My suspicions that it isn’t the most grammatically sound piece of literature were correct, but I see the freedom that the author took with creative license and I could appreciate it. There were a few paragraphs that were overly fragmented in my opinion and a couple of times I laughed out loud at the, perhaps, overly judicious use of creative license, but overall I understood why she wrote the book the way she did and why an editor didn’t change it.

About half-way through the book I started to feel a bit squicky about the idea of watching the movie. There was this nagging idea that the author was making a pretty braod social statement, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. But all I could think was that The Hunger Games were meant to be a thing of entertainment. People from the Capitol watched children killing each other as a means to entertain themselves.

Doesn’t it seem odd that we would want to watch the movie in that context?

By the end of the series, though, I got it – I saw exactly where the author wanted to lead us, which made watching the movie version of the book less offensive to me (though I still don’t know if I’ll see it). The Hunger Games is supposed to be an allegory of war. It’s a loose allegory and I think it’s meant to be an extreme picture on purpose.

We send young people into battle and they have to fight to the death with the knowledge that really, there can only be one victor. But in the battle, the good guys and the bad guys get muddied and soon, everyone kind of looks alike, because the battle for survival makes us all act in desperation.

Just as in a war, the end results of The Hunger Games are devastating. The victor is never the same, having seen and done things that are unspeakable. The families of the victims are forever left without their child and every community is ultimately affected with the horror of it all.

But who is the Capitol supposed to represent? This is something I had a hard time figuring out. Maybe it’s not a representation of any one thing or group of people, but on occasion I got a vague sense that maybe the Capitol was supposed to represent America and it felt a bit underhanded.

Other times, however, that didn’t seem to be the case at all.

In the end, it was one more story that leads us to believe that the only answer is a sort of Utopian society, where a new race of peace loving people is the only hope for the world. A nice thought, I suppose.

But in the end it’s all just fiction, isn’t it?

So what do you think? I realize I’m roughly two years late to this conversation. I’m edgy like that.

*eye roll*

In all honestly, though, before I read the books I truly had no idea what they were about so I’ve read nothing on the subject. What message did you take from The Hunger Games?

Filed Under: books, Product Reviews, writing Tagged With: , , ,

Thirty-four

June 4, 2012 by

I’m not one of those people who is embracing age with verve and gusto. Forget all the wisdom and knowledge and experience that comes with each passing year. All I see are wrinkles and blah, blah, blah…

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.

There are fun things about getting older, but most of them center around the fun ages of my children and where we are as a family. But just the plain old process of getting older? Meh. I’m not a fan. So…in honor of me growing one year wiser older, I present you with my very own….

Top Ten List of Signs You’re Getting Old

*drumroll please*

10.) Your left hip pops every time you walk up a flight of staris. Only if you turn your foot out *just so* and walk up the stairs at a sort of sideways angle, the popping stops. Then you just look weird and your eight year old asks loudly why you’re walking so funny so that everyone looks at you and you have to walk up like a normal, not-getting-old person and deal with the popping. Obviously this is just hypothetical…

Ahem.

9.) You get excited by things like Crock Pots and Foreman Grills. Let me repeat that – CROCK POTS EXCITE YOU!

*If someone would please just pass me my cane*

8.) You visit the eye doctor and he prescribes readers, which causes you to envision punching him in the teeth, but you don’t because you’re older and responsible and your children are watching.

Plus, you know, it’s not nice to punch people in the teeth, which in general is a pretty good rule of thumb to live by no matter what age you are, don’t you think?

7.) You call anyone between the ages of 18 and 25 “kids.”

Really? REALLY?! Weren’t you just one of them?

(The answer to that is a resounding NO.)

6.) You see the aforementioned “kids” and feel like you could easily merge right into a group of them and be accepted, and mistaken for, one of them. Then you look in the mirror and realize that, indeed, you could not. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. Not gonna happen, Grandma! 

5.) You find a new wrinkle every day and no matter how much silicone is inside your jar of face cream, they don’t seem to be fading.

4.) You train everyone in your house to automatically mute all commercials because Oh my heavens the noise. You also find yourself muttering more than once about the general decline of society thanks to television and you reminisce about when you were little and there were only a few stations, which meant you didn’t spend all day sitting in front of the TV because there really wasn’t anything to watch anyway.

3.) You are always quick to join any conversation that involves current gas prices or the economy.

2.) It physically pains you to type “LOL” on anything and “ROFL,” “LMBO,” “LMFAO” and other such acronyms nearly send you into spasms from the sheer ridiculousness of it all. And for heavens sake don’t even get you started on “text talk.” Is it really that hard to hit two more letters to spell the word “you?”

*seriously – forget calling me Grandma. Just jump right in to calling me Mamaw*

(For some reason, though, OMG does not bother you, but instead gives you the giggles. Especially when you hear a little girl, who has obviously been trained well not to take the Lord’s name in vain, utter loudly and proudly, “O-M-Goodness.” )

Bless her sweet heart.

1.) You spend the morning cleaning out the floorboards of your minivan…and you’re actually excited about it.

And there you have it – my Top Ten List of Signs You’re Growing Old.

I know, I know. 34 is not that old. Age is just a number.

Whatever. I’ll believe you tomorrow.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got anti-aging cream to apply and a minivan to clean.

Any of you have anything to add to that list?

Filed Under: Life, Minivans, Motherhood Tagged With: , , , ,
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