Category: personal

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people are marching for life today

It’s an important event, this March for Life…thousands of people converging at the Department of Justice to bring attention to a piece of legislation that never should have happened. So many decades later, it’s still a hot button debate argument, and one not likely to move the masses, um, en masse. It’s not the law that has to change, it’s the hearts of people, and when that happens, everything else will change.

I believe the way this happens is one person at a time. One. It’ll get the job done. Because each of us has a story to tell, and if we’d tell it, well, miracles can happen. I know of one. Her story is hers to tell, but I can share my part of it.

I’ve always been plagued by a cloud of doubt in my faith that creeps upon me unexpectedly. Perhaps it’s my academic training to question, maybe it’s some tragic flaw, maybe it’s just what makes me human — the point is, I know the right things to say, but the conviction? Maybe it’s there. Maybe it’s not. That’s not my story today.

My story is about a couple very dear and close to my heart, and the day they called to tell me that their 5th child, the baby she was carrying, had an irregular ultra-sound and would we please pray. Of course. And then the conversation turned to the quite dramatic medical diagnosis, the shocking news that the obstetrician recommended an abortion, and their plan, which wasn’t much of a plan. You see, all they were going to do was trust God.

That’s all. Not much, right?

Trusting in God’s plan was the right thing to say, but to really have the conviction? I know I didn’t have it at the moment. Still, I prayed with them. For them. For the baby. For some consolation and insight and understanding and strength and peace. And everything else that occurred to me. You see, they asked for prayers to learn what they had to do for their child. They never asked for a miracle to “fix” the grave and frightening realization that a  lobe of their child’s brain had not formed. It was a profound lesson in faith, this trusting in God’s plan and then working with it, instead of begging Him to change it.

The prognosis was hopeless. She’d have a miscarriage. She’d be stillborn. She wouldn’t survive the first 24 hours. She wouldn’t survive her first month. Every milestone that parents look forward to was always cast with the pall of death.

And yet, they chose life. Every. Time.

You might wonder what happened to that baby. I just spent the weekend with her. She’s a delightful young woman, very smart, very athletic, very … full of life. And capable of kicking some ass in this tough world everyone thought was going to own her.

Everywhere she walks is a march for life.

 

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in which we laugh. heartily.

What is it with me and staying up all night talking?

For the second time this week I talked into the wee hours with a girlfriend — this most recent time, it was my sister. Long after our husbands fell asleep. John, at least, went to bed, but Alex fell asleep on the couch while she and I crowded into the love  seat and laughed. Loudly. Dare I say we laughed out loud?

There were just too many stories to tell. We get that gift from our mom, who is the best story-teller in the world. She’d be the best in the universe, except that she rarely gets through the story on the first go because she has a tendency to crack herself up before she gets to the end.

Anyway, Mom’s storytelling has taught us a great deal, and it has less to do with weaving a story well, and more to do with the attitude with which she approaches life. Thank God for that because I can’t tell a story without getting distracted and going down a multitude of  sidebars, back stories, and wild tangents (clearly, I get that from her sister).

The stories matter, of course. They are wildly entertaining and very funny, but there’s also some lesson to be learned. At the very least we can learn how not to do something that turns out disastrously, or we learn some grand moral lesson.

The best stories, though, have no discernible lesson beyond the simple sharing of an adventure, and the guffaws that follow. Those are the stories that family myths and legends are made of.  Our mom finds the comical in everyday events and turns them into little moments of joy worth sharing, and that, perhaps, is the greatest lesson of all.

She’s taught us, by example, that we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. That life, even when it seems hard and difficult to maneuver, usually has some little grace attached that shows us things will be all right.

And that, my friends, is nothing to laugh about.

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just wondering

I think that the worst thing that can happen to a writer is to be misunderstood. To put something “out there” to be read that has some great meaning for oneself, and to have somebody go down some random lane and not get it.

Sadness.

That’s probably worse than being ignored. No. It’s definitely worse than being ignored.

Poor old Prufrock wonders, too:

It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

Also, I wonder if I used one space or two after the periods.

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