Cousins and brothers and friends, Oh My!

My daughter got married last week (lots more on that later, after I have fully processed it) but one thing I really enjoyed was meeting the groom's family and the couple's friends. Over 150 people attended the wedding and I knew less than half of

them when it all started - but a lot more by the time it ended. This was my kind of event! Lots of new people to meet, seeing lots of friends and relatives who I don't see all that often. It was fun! Still, I know that not everyone was feeling my joy. . .

School is starting soon. How do we go about teaching our kids to meet new people? What is the one thing they should know to do when meeting a new person? Just say hi and stick out their hand? Introduce themselves and offer to help with something? Wait for someone else to approach them?

I have no simple formula for doing this. You know yourself, and you know your child. If you relate to the world in the same way then model how to do this. If you don't, help your child observe someone more like himself. If meeting people is challenging for your child, then set a goal with her. On the other hand, if meeting people is like breathing for your kid, then help him or her learn to be a better friend and move beyond superficial relationships. It's a new year, and a time for re-invention.

As a natural extrovert I am always drawn toward people but I recognize that not everyone shares this inclination. I am moved by the knowledge that every person I meet is created in the image of God, and I learn to see God more clearly through other people's reflections. Some of us will have to meet a lot of people to get a fuller picture of God. Some of us will plumb the depths of a few close friends, and also get a fuller picture of God. Whichever method suits a person is fine. Just make sure that making friends is not overlooked in the busy, competitive, demanding days of school. It is one of the great blessings of going to school - just ask any family who home-schools how much intention it takes to make sure kids get enough socialization. Love your child enough to help them make friends - by the time you reach the age of parenthood you should know a trick or two.

Here's to new friends and new reflections of God all around us. Hope the new school year goes swimmingly!

The Listener

They were already at their table when I was seated a short distance away. I barely took note of them until I heard the older one say "Well good on you!" Lover of words that I am, I perked up my ears and jotted down the expression, wondering what part of the country it came from. I turned back to my coffee and list-making but repeatedly found myself eavesdropping on their conversation.

I studied them covertly. It was a young man of about twenty and an older man probably nearing his middle-forties. They didn't appear to be father and son.  Their dress seemed similar. Both were clad in denim and tee-shirts. The older guy wore a baseball cap; the younger one wore glasses and an earnest expression. They clearly didn't know each other well but something drew them together.

The older guy asked a lot of questions:  "How's that pick-up running? Who's this guy you're gonna live with this fall? How old is your little brother now? Is he still in Houston? What are you planning to do when you finish all that studying?" Every answer the young man gave received an affirming response: "That was a good move! There you go, now your mind is starting to work like it needs to. I understand. Great!" Sometimes he asked a question, either to make sure he understood, or to get more information. The young man sat up straighter under all that positive attention. His answers got longer and were punctuated with quick smiles.

I listened through their whole breakfast. I learned, from listening to their exchange, that the young man's father had recently passed away and that the older guy was his dad's friend. When the young man heard that he was getting to be "more like his old man every day" his eyes shone with tears and he grinned with pride and delight.

I don't know who the father's friend was, or how they met, or what their relationship meant to him. I don't know how much time he had spent with his friend's son or who initiated breakfast. What I do know is that when that man took a younger man to breakfast and listened and encouraged and cared about him, he made a difference in the world.

What a remarkable person. He demonstrated every listening skill I have ever been taught: he nodded as he listened, repeated what he heard in his own words to check for meaning, affirmed the speaker, and asked follow up questions. He also used great encouragement tactics: he smiled, nodded, affirmed, talked about what mattered to the other person, remembered stuff from previous situations, and said repeatedly how much confidence he had in the young man. In a final act of generosity he picked up the check. Good on him!

This should not have been a remarkable conversation.  Sadly though, a lot of conversations between people of unequal ages consist of the older one talking and the younger one listening.  When that is the case, the younger one doesn't get to hear words of encouragement and the older one doesn't hear anything new.  It was refreshing to see someone use God-given talents of listening and encouragement with a person who clearly needed it. The young man soaked in the older man's approval and encouragement and at the end he stood taller, like grass after a rain.

Is there someone younger who you could listen to and affirm today?

P.S. According to Google, "Good on you: is Urban Slang; a congratulatory expression to let someone know they have excelled at something.

Are We Friends?

Am I your friend's mother, or your mother's friend? Are you the daughter of my friend, or the friend of my daughter? Or are we friends in our own right?

Nothing can bring a puzzle like this to light like planning where everyone should sit at a wedding reception. My daughter did all the heavy lifting on this for her wedding - I just did the overthinking part on the sidelines. Some choices are easy - work people sit with work people, bride's family with bride's relatives, but there are always people who don't fit, exactly.  People who have independent relationships with the bride or groom and with their respective parents. Do they sit with friends of the bride and groom? Do they sit with family friends? Where do they fit in?

Maybe I was extra sensitive to these divisions because I was also doing camp where young counselors were part of my team and as the week progressed I got to know them better than I knew some of their parents.  I can now count them as friends because we have laughed and suffered together as friends do - especially when we are the "adults" in a room full of children.

This week our "sermon" was delivered by young people who had recently attended the ELCA National Youth Gathering in New Orleans. They shared some wonderful stories of their experiences but one haunting note chimed in: they did not feel part of the church before they went to the Gathering. They felt that they were not fully part of things - that church was intra-generational. The youth group did things together, and the adults did things together. They did not whine about this - in fact they celebrated the knowledge that this is not actually the case. It made me wonder though; when did people stop mentoring young people at church?

I think banishing young people to a single generation lifestyle is probably a bad idea. It robs them of mentors,  restricts their activities and conversations to a particular cognitive level, denies them the opportunity to see things from another perspective, makes nearly everything competitive, and also limits their historical perspective. On a purely utilitarian level - who will be more qualified in the job market, the one who understand her peers, or the one who understands people of multiple generations? From a faith perspective, it seems to have similar benefits: knowing people's stories helps us to understand how God works in the world and we reap the richest rewards when we hear those stories first-hand.

Engaging in real friendship with people of another generation is not a stream that trickles down from the oldest to the youngest. It is a two-way street where I gain from knowing my daughters' friends and my friends' daughters, and they gain from knowing me. While the mechanics of relationship probably differ for men and boys or across the gender divide, the benefits remain.

Blessings on your friendships! May they span many generations.

Delight in Life

Yesterday I watched a bunch of six- and seven-year-old children jockey for positions at a table where they got to use an eyedropper to add vinegar, with a little food coloring added, to a tray of baking soda to watch little eruptions of colorful foam. Again, and again, and again. Their delight never waned. It was a little miracle right before their eyes.

A few feet away they built tube towers they could roll marbles down. Squeals of laughter erupted as the marble spun through the segment that made the wheel spin and when two marbles coming from different directions collided, forcing one to jump out of the structure and race across the floor.

Earlier that day they ate corn tortillas they pressed and baked themselves, and most of them ate two or three.  Another remarkable experience.

We forget, as adults, that everything is new to them. They are still just discovering the world and they still see that it is good.

My grandpa used to delight in feeding pickles to babies. Babies get so much bland food that a dill pickle can cause their faces to contort in hilarious ways. Some babies loved the pickles. Others threw it on the floor as you can only do from a highchair. I always suspected that my grandpa tried to guess ahead of time which way the child would react. Watching him watch the babies was almost as good as watching the babies. He had found something that brought him delight well into old age.

A couple days ago I watched with amusement as three young men in their twenties spent close to ten minutes examining a huge cicada they found in the pool filter. They looked at it from every angle, turned it over, moved it where no one would step on it and admired the mechanics of its legs, the shimmer of its wings and talked about the sound it made when it was alive. I went and looked at it after they had finished their scrupulous examination. It was an impressive specimen.

Jesus told us to be salt and light to the world - that is, to make ordinary life better. Kids know how to do this. We should take note. . .

Preventing Erosion

I am continually amazed at the common sense of children. Yesterday, in a discussion about wants and needs with the children at Daily Bread Cooking Camp, one soon-to-be fifth grader rolled her eyes and said, "It's like a mansion. Everybody wants one but nobody needs one." Out of the mouths of babes. . .

There was also a decision at camp about who got to go first for a specific activity. I turned it over to the kids who had lively discussions within their groups of four and ultimately chose, without tears or counselor intervention, who would go and who would wait. They could do this because they trusted they would get their turn.

I sometimes made my kids choose their own punishments. My girls were almost always harder on themselves than I would have been. They didn't like having to choose their own consequences, but when faced with the challenge usually judged themselves quite fairly.

At some point human beings learn to rationalize. Once that happens, the innate fairness, trust, and honesty that kids have starts to erode. Erosion is a character issue. It's also a "natural" issue. Consider soil erosion; left unprotected soil will wash away in the rains or blow away in the winds. Two things can slow or stop the erosion: strengthening the soil's "hold" and creating barriers to the eroding factors. If we want to keep soil from blowing or washing away we plant vegetation like ground cover or grasses so the roots will help hold the soil in place and build windbreaks like trees or fences that will keep the wind from blowing away the soil you want to protect.

Those same methods, creating a root system and building windbreaks, can work to protect character. Building a root system is having a strong community for your children: a community with common values, woven together by culture, memory, and connections. For my family our church has served this purpose well. Some people live surrounded by family and have their own built in root system. Any community will work, as long as your community is authentically rooted, and not merely superficial.

The institutions around our kids serve as the windbreaks: the churches, schools, sports clubs, camps, and musical groups can all help to prevent character erosion. If these institutions value fairness, are trustworthy, and not punitive, your child's innate systems will be protected. If there is favoritism or exclusiveness, your child's innate values may begin to erode. How are your kid's windbreaks performing?

I don't want to romanticize children into fantasy creatures. There are values beyond fairness that are not innate and need to be taught, but like the protective vegetation that ultimately dies and further nourishes the very soil it protected, and the tree that drops its leaves, which also serve to nourish and protect, and even the snow that covers or the rain that soaks - all of these things change the soil for the better. Your anti-erosion systems will do more than protect your child's character; they will nourish it, and help your child grow in the face of challenge or hardship. The communities and institutions will even create the situations where your child's character can be further formed.

We all have communities and institutions in our lives. Are they helping you protect and nurture your child's character?

Further along the parenting journey

I thought that by now I would be much further along with my "after the kids leave" list.  I started my own private Pinterest about twenty years ago when I realized that this or that hobby would take too much time or too many resources away from my kids. I have lists of books I have been meaning to read for a decade or more. Lists of places I want to visit someday, a box full of recipes to try, pictures of quilts I would love to make, and a Netflix queue I didn't even start until shortly before my nest became empty.

Like nearly everything else I anticipated about parenting, the transition to the empty nest has been much more complicated than expected. I figured the girls would go to college, get jobs, get married and eventually there would be  grandchildren . I guess I imagined that they would call for advice from time to time, keep me up to speed on trends, and that we would gradually evolve into friends. That's not exactly how it has gone.

I really miss being their primary debrief-er. Sometimes I find out about things weeks or even months after they happen. This implies there are things I never find out about at all. They aren't being secretive - there's just so much life going on that it can't all fit into phone calls and e-mails. And, there are no buffers either. When something goes wrong, there isn't the day-to-day interaction to rub off the sharp edges. I have to find my way out of these bruised places by myself. I understand all too well now why, as a young woman, I always felt that I left my mom wanting more. She did want more. I do too.

The hardest part has been the intensity of the feelings that accompany each of their milestones. The joy, pride, excitement, and amazement overwhelm my attempts at detaching. I realize that I still want my eyes to be the ones they search for in the crowd, my arms to be the first to go around them, my ears the receptacle of all the backstage details of whatever event is underway. Now they have husbands and in-laws and friends I don't know. I have not been displaced; I am still their mom, and will always be, but my role has changed, probably not for the last time.

Eventually my heart will catch up to my brain but it's not there yet. In the meantime I listen for what God wants me to do next, and keep one ear tuned to my "baby monitor" in case I should be called upon for something that only a mother can do.

The Long View

It is the tradition, when building a cathedral, to lay the first stone at the east end of the church and build backward from there. The Washington National Cathedral was built in this way. Its first stone was laid in 1907. Five years after construction began, the first services were held in the Bethlehem chapel. Construction continued until the final stone was placed in 1990. The finished structure has over 83,000 square feet, is 102 feet high in the middle, has over 200 stained glass windows, and tombs containing the remains of several notable Americans, including Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller.

I recently took a tour of the Cathedral and left pondering the sheer magnitude of this project. Who could conceive of a project that would take 83 years to complete? The original architect of this project, George Frederick Bodley died less than a month after the first stone was laid. All told, a total of five architects contributed to the building of the Cathedral.

One of the most famous features of the Cathedral is the "Space Window" which contains a rock brought back from the moon. It was hard to imagine a plan that would be flexible enough to incorporate such an artifact when the first flight at Kitty Hawk had just happened. According to the docent on my tour, the south windows were designed from the beginning to represent the gifts that people use to serve God. This particular opening was designated for the Scientists and Technicians window. The white spot in the center of the red circle is a slice of moon rock brought back and donated by the crew of Apollo 11.


In the instant world of the 21st century it is almost impossible for us to think in terms of decades, never mind centuries. That is partly a consequence of the pace of change in the life we live today, and partly the result of our ego-centric worldview. In the midst of this, the one place where we are perhaps still called to take the long view is the family. Having children is an act of hope. It is a dream of the future; an act that tells the world we believe in life. When we become parents, we have to remember that we are raising children who will most likely outlive us. We need to prepare them for a world we cannot see or even imagine.

Can we learn something about life architecture from the great architecture of the cathedral? The cathedral is shaped like a cross - reaching up, yet reaching out. It points toward God, and is put together of millions of smaller pieces - each small piece someone's best work. It is surrounded by enough natural space to allow time and calm for reflection. It incorporates the very greatest stories from the Bible and recognizes the gifts of all people. It acknowledges that there are fearful creatures around us, but lets the light in to chase the dark away. Both life, in the form of the baptismal font and the table where we can gather to eat, and death, in the form of crypts and memorials, are woven into the construction of the whole. What a wise design for a church, or a life!