Wisdom and Folly

I have a good friend who likes to say that “life is a series of deaths.”  In saying this, he is referring to the fact that our journey on this planet involves many farewells and demands of self-denial—and each of these represents some kind of permanent loss.  As you grow your childhood perishes.  With each graduation during your school years you say goodbye to friends, many of whom you will never seen again.  And the ones with whom you do stay in touch you will never know in that context again.  When you marry, much of your freedom dies, and with the birth of each child you must lay aside worthwhile projects and even some dreams.  And then come the real deaths.  You lose friends to accidents, cancers, and even suicide.  Your parents begin to fail and suddenly you find yourself having to parent them in return, perhaps nursing them into that good night—always half believing its not really happening.  It’s just one death after another.

Sounds pretty bleak, doesn’t it?  Well, it would be if that were the whole story.  And I suppose that if I thought it was, perhaps I’d have gone the way of some of my departed friends by now.  But it’s not the whole story.  Because with each of those deaths has come new life.  God has a way of replacing lost projects and dreams with even greater projects and dreams.  Far beyond the meager imaginings of my youth and even my young adulthood is the joy and satisfaction I’ve found in my wife and children as well as the broader community of which we are a part.  What calling is higher than investing your life in other souls?  Even the pains we feel in this context are, as C.S. Lewis would say, “more precious than all other gains.”

Of course, there are goodbyes ahead for all of these relationships as well.  More deaths to come in a seemingly endless train.  But it’s not really endless.  One day, we are told, all death will cease and God will wipe away every tear.  And, if Scripture is to be trusted, there are good things which emerge from our earthly trials—good things which are endless, such as the virtues we develop in persevering (cf. James 1:2-4; 1 Pet. 1:5-7).  God does not put us through this soul-grind without reason.  He does so to mold us into something wonderful, even the image of Christ.  And if that isn’t worth enduring a series of deaths, then nothing is.

How I clean my house is, I’m afraid to say, indicative of how I live my life. I often care less about whether things are actually clean than about whether they have the appearance of cleanliness. I love people coming to my house when the floor still smells like Pine-sol and you can make out the tracks of the vacuum cleaner. But if you happen to open the wrong closet door, beware of the avalanche of “yet to be filed” items that will shower down upon you. In the same way, more frequently than I care to admit, I find myself greeting people with all the visible surfaces wiped clean and the scent of pulled- togetherness hanging about my head. Upon such occasions, if you were to peek in the windows of my soul, you are more likely to be shocked by the resentful insecurity and anger that are lying about like dirty socks which missed the laundry basket than bedazzled by how pristine my heart is.

My superficial approach doesn’t stem from a desire to impress but rather a terror of disappointing people with the reality of my inner life. This is one of the reasons I love my husband and need him so desperately, both in my housekeeping and in my spiritual life. He will spend three hours cleaning our stove and can’t stand for people to see the evidence of the frenetic cleaning which took place five minutes (sometimes less) before their arrival. He is very methodical in his cleaning, just like his approach to spiritual development—slow and steady wins the race. His substance draws me back to reality and his graciousness has helped me to feel less fearful of being a disappointment to people.

Lately I have been connecting the dots as to how my fear of discovery bleeds into every area of my life including my hobbies and interests. I love Victorian literature because of the formality and restraints of the time, not in spite of them. I love going to the movies and eating out, having an experience and leaving behind all the dirty dishes and the empty popcorn boxes. I love organizing and putting things where they belong.

One of my favorite sayings of my dad’s (though I must confess to not particularly appreciating it in my younger years) is “a place for everything and everything in its place.” As I look back, I realize that this desire to be tidy has paralleled my desire to be more spiritually mature and serious. I used to be an absolute slob. My father, a methodical cleaner just like my husband, once accused me of starting a new landfill in the backseat of my car. Soon after I got married, however, when the rubber of married life was hitting the road of my need to change my selfish ways, I began to enjoy cleaning. Now that I have four kids, my standards have lowered significantly but I can spend a good hour organizing my daughter’s bookshelf by subject, size, and age appropriateness. Of course, you could be eaten alive by the dust bunnies hidden under the bookshelf. Still, I will defend my longing for order.

When you study the Bible and see all of God’s wisdom and promises fulfilled, you see we weren’t meant for this chaotic, grey world but a world revolving in perfect harmony around the God who created it with “a place for everything and everything in its place.” My penchant for categorizing everything is my longing for heaven, an attempt to make sense out of chaos. Maybe my desire for things to be orderly isn’t a desire to appear perfect so much as a reflection of my desire to be made perfect.

Recently the kids and I found a stray kitten along the side of the road. When I say kitten, I mean tiny fur-ball-with-tail, fit-in-the-palm-of-your-hand size kitten. While this description may conjure up adorable calendar-worthy pictures in your head, this kitten was—how shall I put it—repulsive. Let’s just say she had eye “issues.” Still, eye infection or no, we couldn’t leave her, so we took her home with us. Since Jim is an animal lover, much more in practice than I am in theory, she settled in to await adoption. (The first order of business was clearing up the eye goo which increased her curb-appeal ten-fold.) We were soon the family to be avoided as the rumor circulated that we were desperately trying to give away a kitten.

Unfortunately, Bootster (admittedly a less than stellar name lovingly bestowed by Sam) didn’t last long enough to know that she was unwanted. One morning a few days after she arrived, Bailey woke us to say that Bootster was dying. Jim and I hurried downstairs to discover the kitten in obvious pain and quickly fading. Jim and Bailey took her to the vet where she was “put to sleep” (a phrase surely created to terrify children into never closing their eyes again). Each of the kids reacted in their own way—Bailey crying, Sam acting as if nothing were the matter, Maggie immediately going to draw a picture for Bootster, and Andrew standing poking at the body and saying “booboo?”

But later in the day things got really interesting. We were holding graveside services for our little furry friend when I suddenly realized that Maggie and Andrew (four and two respectively) had no idea what we were doing. As far as they knew, we were getting ready to bury Bootster alive. I had sudden visions of them trying this out on one another and gently tried to guide them away before Jim threw on the first pile of dirt. Alas, I was too late and Andrew threw his hands up in outrage as he watched Daddy “being mean” to kitty. I tried to explain but as the words were coming from my mouth I realized the absurdity of what I was trying to convince him of. Had it been one of my own would I have so glibly said “Child X (I can’t even bring myself to insert one of their names) is in a better place? He/she is with Jesus and waiting for us in heaven.” Heck no! I would have been right there along side Andrew, throwing my hands up in protest to heaven and begging for him/her to be spared.

As Maggie began to chime in, probing about the process by which we enter paradise, I realized how hypocritical we are with our kids when we try to whitewash death. Or maybe I am not so much a hypocrite but rather one who is greatly lacking in faith. It’s easy to believe that kitty is better off. After all she was a bit smelly and, frankly, a pain in the rear to take care of. But would I be willing to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to those I love, who are a bit smelly as well and often a pain in the rear but who are also the center of my small world? I pondered these things while I watched the kids play at Taylor Lake that afternoon, marveling at how quickly they seemed to recover. I sit here now, calling up each of their dear faces, half paralyzed in fear at the thought of them being taken from me. My conclusion? God knows how small I am and how very limited is my thinking. He doesn’t ask me to understand His ways, only to take His hand as I walk away from the graveside of my expectations, hopes, and dreams and trust that Daddy isn’t really being mean after all.