Ask, and you will receive. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door is opened.
—Matthew 7:7-8
We are the champions, my friends
And we’ll keep on fighting ’til the end.
—Queen
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. OK, I borrowed that famous opening. Thank you, Charles Dickens, for setting up the description of my disappointment. You are the patron saint of hardships, like debtor’s prison. (Please don’t tell my husband I recently bought two more pillow covers from Pottery Barn.)
Each year, I plan a family beach getaway. Water is my thing. I crave it. I was born under a water sign, cancer the crab, and one of my besties was too. She embraces the crab and swears by beach rejuvenation as an annual pilgrimage. Of course, shells, water, and getting soaked is also a sign of new life for us Christians.
I make reservations several months in advance somewhere on the gulf coast around the long stretch of road known as 30A, which is advertised on bumper stickers affixed to the backs of mom cars across the south, whispering, I was there, Sister, and I’m going again. It’s a twelve-hour jaunt with four kids, although our friends swear it only takes ten hours. As with most vacations, our family thinks about it, talks about it, and looks forward to it—for months. We’ve made some big, beautiful memories along the seashore, and we’ve had a few Oh, wells.
I’ve thought a lot about why I love the beach. Maybe it’s the hypnotic sound of the waves going in and out, which is not too far removed from what you hear when the doctor lets you hear the swishing noise going on in your pregnant belly. My affection for the beach may also include imagining Jesus hanging out along the shore with his friends, grilling a day’s catch. I admit I didn’t think about Jesus as much when I was spring-breaking with my college girlfriends. Jesus, I’m just being honest. I was young and thought more of myself than you. Maybe my love of our annual beach trip also has to do with cleansing because I’m forced to simplify in a small rental condo and get in really close quarters with my people. I once read that an early Christian said if God is at the center of the circle, and we are all around the circle, then the closer we get to one another, the closer we get to God. I bet that early Christian didn’t have four boys. Another possibility for my love of the beach pilgrimage is that the sand and water are my Protestant-girl Lourdes.
One of our more recent beach trips was lousy. I’m calling it. Straight up. It did not conform to my standards. At all.
Two significant events happened the month before we left for Beachdom, which already put me under stress—more stress than the children’s summer schedules and running a house in which the laundry is downstairs and the three bedrooms are upstairs.
1. I had unexpected hernia surgery a month before we left.
2. I began a new ministry job the week before the hernia surgery.
There were obviously bigger, more important fish to fry than my silly beach inconveniences.
These events, plus a looming school year with four kids, made my longing for salt life even greater.
The first day on the beach, as always, we lathered with sunscreen. In particular, I need it because I’m a very white girl. The second day, I noticed my lower legs were itching, so I put a towel over them. I’m way past wanting a suntan, and fake-and-bake lotion is my reliable friend.
That evening, I came in and showered. My husband noticed a rash on my upper arms. My legs felt prickly too. I had what appeared to be blood blisters below the skin of my ankles and one knee. The itching that night was so horrendous. I barely slept. Benadryl and hydrocortisone didn’t touch it. Aloe gave it a really good team try.
On day three, I stayed inside, miserable. That night, Sister arrived with her husband. They watched the boys while we went to a walk-in clinic. I got a steroid shot and a dose pack. I slept. Oh, did I sleep.
For the rest of our vacation, it rained. This rain was like nothing I’d ever experienced at the beach. It sprinkled lightly, and then suddenly it fell in sheets. There were storms almost every night. Lightning is very pretty—at home. Naturally, I barely slept those following nights because I was jacked up on steroids. Almost every day, two red flags were hoisted on the beach, warning everyone not to get in the water. The waves were outright hostile. I can’t believe we paid money for this trip tragedy that I assumed would be 85 percent perfect.
And then there was the day my husband helped pull a thirteen-year-old boy, who was wearing a life jacket, from under the rolling waves. Victor signaled to a woman back on the shore who was watching the disturbing scene. He put a thumb and pinky to his head, the international “call me” sign. She understood and immediately dialed 911. By the time Victor and the boy’s father brought him to sandy, dry land, the boy was unresponsive. Thankfully, he had a pulse and, in a few minutes, woke up, but his breathing was irregular. After the paramedics got there, they sent him on to the hospital.
A day later, we were still thinking about the boy. There were obviously bigger, more important fish to fry than my silly beach inconveniences.
On day five, my niece Kelly arrived with her boyfriend, Rob. They love to cook. After discussing some food ideas inclusive of children, they came back that night with fresh and plump boiled shrimp, some spicy, some plain. They prepared garlic bread, salad, corn, and potatoes. Sister had made a pan of brownies earlier in the day. We filled and passed plates to one another and refilled. We talked and laughed and ate.
I was reminded of the final story in John’s Gospel, the one in which the disciples clearly feel lost without Jesus (see John 21). They can’t even catch real fish anymore. And then this guy appears on the beach and offers instruction as they slog around in the boat. It is only at that point the disciples catch a huge, net-straining load. Afterward, they sit around a charcoal grill and eat, and then they recognize Jesus. In the communion of eating together we see Jesus best and, likewise, who we’re meant to be: people who care and nurture one another beyond ourselves. That’s why Jesus tells Peter, “Go feed my sheep.”
Of course I needed and wanted some time to unwind, but when I saw the father of the boy who almost drowned grab my husband’s hand and grasp his shoulder in the way that men do when they might otherwise hug, I was glad we were there in this maddening weather, which is another thing I cannot control. “Feed my sheep” means “Be the next of kin whatever the circumstances because we’re all family.”
The day before we left, I’d scheduled a photographer to take family pics. She called the shoot done when the rain hit within minutes of our big family getting down to the beach. I told her to send any pictures that might be decent. In the four photos she e-mailed me, we look damp, happy, relaxed, and fed. And we were. I will never forget the hard-luck, beautiful-on-the-inside vacation.
You know what I call that perspective? I call that “womenade” because when our women plans crash and things go sour, God calls us to get creative and see life as a pitcher full, though sometimes tart.
Recently, I traveled to a clergywoman thingy in Houston with a group of younger women from my state. I didn’t know some of them well, so I offered to drive my van because it was an opportunity to make new friends. I thought about flying, just doing my own deal, which is sort of what I wanted to do. It’d be nice to be anonymous and avoid church talk. In the end, I decided it might be an adventure, if the young ones could tolerate my back-in-the-old-days-when-I-first-started-out-in-ministry stories. I promised not to tap them on the shoulder with my cane.
Guess what? I learned so much. They are wiser and more savvy than I was when I began pastoral ministry.
We not only attended the conference and visited tons but also, one afternoon, took an excursion in the big city, enjoying a wee bit of retail therapy. We went to the Kendra Scott jewelry store where there was a holiday sale. It was way groovy. Next we stopped by a toy store so I could take home some Legos for my boys, sick woman that I am. Then—and I was jumping up and down—we went to Trader Joe’s grocery and bought cookie butter, dark chocolate espresso beans, and plantain chips. Some food just screams heaven.
All that was great, and a few of the conference preachers rocked; but the better part, as Jesus might say, was to sit in a car for close to sixteen hours and share our lives over cheddar puffs and food we brought and bought. And there was this mystical time, OMG, that Lynn said she wanted a DQ. Behold! Surely it was a sign! Yes, it was a DQ sign in the sky. We made a hasty left turn. I expect big things from the squad. On that long, tiring trip with these fabulous young women called by God, I wasn’t sure what to pray for, what to search for, since I was conflicted about how this trip should go, control freak that I am. But, I asked God to figure it out, and God gave me what I needed.
Jesus, who loved perfectly, had his haters too. And his job wasn’t to please people but to reveal God.
My experience reminds me of the time Jesus said that we should ask and expect we’ll receive (see Matthew 7:7-12). I’m not sure women are very good at asking, since we often ask everyone else what we need to do for them.
For a long time, I didn’t like this passage of suspicious scripture at all because I’ve asked in my nicest, humblest voice for stuff to unfold my way. So, isn’t it a shock, I didn’t get what I expected or, to be more exact, what I thought I wanted?
One day, Sister and I were talking about this annoying passage. We both raised our collective eyebrows and admitted that we were a bit more seasoned since our first, rather naive impression of the text’s meaning. Of course, back in our younger days, we’d assumed it to be about God giving us mostly what we ask for if we just pester God enough and it’s not offensive. Admittedly, the assumption about expecting God to give me my heart’s desire always troubled me. Surely that’s not what Jesus meant.
As my ideas about who Jesus was and is deepened beyond my own expectations, I realized how often we treat him as some hack magician to do our bidding. This great passage I now love is not—I’m willing to pinky-swear, Sisters—a sure-fire way to get God to do what you want. God loves us, yes, but relation with The Mystery presents the world in its own sweet, divine, revelatory way.
Try this interpretation on as a more fruitful and realistic translation.
We may ask God for what we want, of course, but Jesus includes that we must search, which means the asking should not be a blind “gimme” request. Perhaps asking God is the initial way of saying aloud what we want, so that we can determine if our request is truly what we need.
The search for what we want may indeed lead us to what we need. I think searching equals discernment. Searching can’t be avoided, or we will rush the process.
Knocking on the door is, I’m pretty sure, listed last in Jesus’s list because then, and only then, are we ready to take the initiative. We’ve done the proper soul-searching. Searching means we’ve taken the God whispers seriously before we tap on the door.
At different times in my life, I’ve screwed up the steps. I’ve gotten what I wanted or what I thought I wanted.
Once, I wanted to marry a certain man, but it became clear that he was not the partner I needed in my life. It was painful to GPS-style recalculate my spirit because it meant I had to change, allowing God to rework me as I moved forward.
Another time, I asked to serve a church I really wanted, but what I got from that church was not what I wanted, but what I needed: a great deal of discernment, introspection, and painful learning about where God really wanted me to be.
And, yes, I asked for children. That was a game changer but, on the whole, more like hitting the jackpot in Vegas, after which these tiny people below your waist ask you for a loan, like, every day.
Do I think of these challenges as my misfired, misguided asks? Do I wish I could take them back? Occasionally, it crosses my mind that I’ve bit off more than I can chew, but then I’ve also come to realize the paths I’ve chosen are hard-wired into my story. If only all of us women could shut down the negative talk that keeps us reliving mistakes in our heads, second-guessing ourselves. After one hard life lesson, my brother Steve said, “You know what they say? When God closes one door, nail that sucker shut!”
Amen.
We need to detach from what other people think and say about our marriage, our children, our parenting, and our work choices. Get an umbrella for the shade thrown your way. You know what I mean. Dry-erase that board in your head of the names and opinions of those who are always judging your life. Once, I heard someone had called me Betsy Barbie to demean me and my leadership, but that’s OK because Barbie is ordained now—thank you, Mattel—and before that she was an astronaut. Reframing our painful experiences can be divine.
Jesus, who loved perfectly, had his haters too. And his job wasn’t to please people but to reveal God. When humans discover God loves everyone, it’s rather shocking because, surely, we have convinced ourselves, God loves the most perfect, best, and all-together person in the room. All I must do is get me perfect.
Think about that.
What if our personal choices, our challenges, our searching, our knocks on the door arose from our sacred calling to reveal, above all, the love of God, even for us? That might help us turn down our worry knob, stop pushing the button to gauge our popularity, or put away the tape measure that we use to decide if we’re like the people whom we have convinced ourselves have it all together.
I’m not some Pollyanna Preacher. I don’t believe Jesus’s path is easy; but, as hard as it is to stumble and second-guess and suffer the consequences, there is still love. And somehow God doesn’t seem to hold it against me or you when we have not searched and listened more before we ask. When I feel that gracious God love, I want to get a very big scripture tattoo somewhere on my body, but I think it’s OK if I simply rewrite the God love (maybe in Sharpie) on my heart. That is probably enough.
Jesus, help me remember that you always help me discover what I truly need.
There are these unseemly bad-mom behaviors I want to take back after the fact but can’t. Maybe you have some too. Sometimes I yell, which is not what I want to do or who I want to be. It’s just that I sometimes feel like a carnival barker trying to get people who are ignoring the freak show to pay attention to my nifty, loud tricks. And let’s be blunt. There are four growing boys in my home.
I really don’t know how they got here, or, let’s just say, some days it’s rather foggy. Let me squint and think. My eyes aren’t what they used to be even with my prescription-strength Ray Ban glasses. Thankfully, I’ve come to realize that it’s not just seeing what’s in front of me, but it’s looking inside.
Yet I’d like to find an easy way to turn on the personal back-up camera. Looking behind at the past is a way to get prepared to move forward. You can’t look behind you forever, but there are reasons I screw up, and I want to understand and do better. It’s not just yelling at the boys, which, admittedly, turns me into the child. I’ve literally had a boy say, “Momma, just calm down. It’s not that bad,” to which I said, “And how did you get so grown up, for goodness sakes?”
At the end of a day, these kids prance gleefully through the house, or so it seems, when I’m tired or empty or vulnerable. Who said they could be so carefree? Who said they could throw towels and underwear with abandon? Who said they could leave chunks of toothpaste in the sink or help themselves to my ice cream? And that doesn’t include the indignities they unknowingly call out.
Recently, I put my sleeveless arm around Sullivan on a hot summer day in the car while Dad drove. That sweet little boy smiled at me sheepishly. I smiled back, thinking he was happy just to sit next to me. “What is it, Honey?” I said, love sparkling from my eyes, making me warm and content. He said, “Momma, your armpit has a beard.”
Are there no secrets?
I want to sit them down and say, “I have worked hard and done a million things today that you don’t know about. I have coordinated all your activities, packed your lunch, tried to figure out how to get on this stupid app to see your homework status, loved a bunch of people on behalf of Jesus, and planned outreach that will knock your socks off, plus I washed your dang stinky socks, found your shoes in places you never could, fed the dogs, and washed the dishes. Yep, look at me, Little Man. I’m the ‘shero’ and don’t forget it.” I really want to say stuff like that, and I do sometimes. Sort of.
But my list of accomplishments essentially goes on the same shelf as yelling. I’m talking to me. These are my problems, not theirs.
It is absolutely true that they need to help get their laundry, carry their clothes to their upstairs rooms, put dirty dishes in the sink or dishwasher, teamwork stuff. But sometimes it seems easier to do it myself. Maybe—Lord, help me—I do it because I like to have control over the way it’s done. I am pretty certain my way is best. Maybe it’s because I’m not the best coach. I’m more of a vision person, so I’m thinking I know what this tidy life is supposed to look like, which is killer when you have boys who are fine with “good enough.”
Geez, maybe it’s because I’m not playing man-to-man but zone, and it’s wearing me out. I’m an older mom. Please don’t judge me because I bought some purple, gray, and fuchsia lipsticks recently. Maybe that’s partly what Pablo meant. Don’t be afraid of color. Parenting is not paint-by-numbers, and neither is faith and trust in God to walk with us when we are uncertain. Haven’t you noticed how God likes to meander and take God’s own sweet time? Revelation is not the same as WiFi.
On days when I’ve hit a wall or a vivid memory, I think of Mom. She wasn’t perfect by any means. I see some of her shortcomings in myself: I am jealous, have a sharp tongue, am easily hurt, have a need for recognition, and act on gut instinct. But she hugged me often, told me she loved me, encouraged me far beyond my dreams, never told me I couldn’t do anything, and very rarely judged.
There was that one time after my first year of college when I rolled in at two in the morning. As soon as I opened the door, she growled between clenched teeth, “I don’t know who you think you are, but I’m not running a flophouse!” She set a boundary: “You are not going to use me for cheap meals and lodging.” I loved the way Mom could roll her eyes with the smirk of a stand-up comedian. The thought of that single, hilarious look is like a drop of precious, scented oil on my secret shelf, to pull out and open occasionally. I breathe it in and rub it lovingly across my dry, aging hands that are starting to look like hers.
Mom, I cannot wait to tell my boys that I am absolutely not running a flophouse.
So don’t think that Jesus’s mother didn’t lose it, because she did. I wish she’d kept a journal because we’ve only got a few pages of the photo album in the Gospels, but that’s enough for us to consider.
Luke gives Mary more ink than the rest of the New Testament writers. He gives us long scenes of Mary and the angel who comes with a message from God. Mary wonders. Mary ponders. She ponders when the angel approaches her, when the shepherds arrive under the stars of night to repeat the angels’ glad tidings. She ponders when her child is presented in the temple and Simeon blesses them. She ponders as she watches her child grow up.
I have a picture in our bedroom, a rather large pastel drawing of the angel Gabriel as a woman. There is no picture of Mary, only the angel bending down and extending a lily to the woman beyond the picture. While I’m not concerned about angelic gender, I sensed the artist was saying that perhaps this particular angel could have appeared as a woman to announce a particular kind of motherhood, woman to woman.
The anemone, the flower most artists have put in this annunciation scene, was probably the most rich and bountiful wildflower in the fields and hillsides of Palestine. This flower was easily picked and offered up as a symbol of how much God loves the smallest of details, including, I think, our details, the times women grapple with best practices and ways to organize and embrace our messy selves and families (see Luke 12:27-31). Maybe each of us moms needs to embrace this angelic messenger who extends a lily, an invitation, a gift to remind us what is important when we embark upon a life of mothering.
Pondering accompanies joy. Yes, we know Mary rejoiced with her pregnant kin Elizabeth, singing that radical song, the Magnificat, a song not about what Mary’s child would do for her or about the maternal role he would give her, but what this child would be for others, for the whole world. I don’t see Mary as a passive figure; she’s a bossy momma. Mary is going to be there, to be present for her child on a very long journey, from birth announcement to ascension and beyond. From the beginning it’s not easy: a doubtful fiancé, a barnyard birth, even a nighttime escape to Egypt to protect the child from Herod (Matthew 2:13-15).
Imagine her thoughts the time young Jesus disappears. Mary can do without her son’s quiet departure from their large caravan when he treks all the way back to the temple in Jerusalem. After locating him, she looks her rabbinical prodigy in the face and says, “Son, why have you scared us to death? You listen to me! Your dad and I have been worried sick. We’ve been looking everywhere for you!” (Luke 2:48, my paraphrase) Mary says, “Excuse me, I’m not running a flophouse!” This is not the first or only time Mary’s son will brush her off and begin, as all children do, to claim their own calling.
When Mary’s host instinct kicks in at a wedding, she asks her son to do something about the wine, which is running low (see John 2:1-12). He balks, but I picture her pulling her son in a corner and saying, “Now you listen to me. This is about generosity and hospitality.” Boom. And maybe Mary was also thinking about how long she’d been waiting for him to show the world what he was born to do.
When Mary seems concerned about the crowd with which Jesus is associating, when she tries to bring him home from this open-door ministry, he announces within earshot that blood does not determine family. Jesus says that doing the will of God alone makes us family (see Matthew 12:48; Luke 8:21; and Mark 3:33). I bet she pondered that little zinger for quite some time. Oh how children can pierce your heart.
Still, I see Mary always near, as most mothers are, wondering how this story is going to end. Bless her. She’s there until the end and beyond. As her son is executed, she stands at the foot of his horrible cross. Jesus tells her she has a new son, who is the disciple standing next to her, and, amazingly, this beloved disciple has a new mother (see John 19:25-27). Mary gave her child life, and now he gives her a son.
Following Jesus’s death and resurrection, Mary is still there at the ascension of that child she once held in her arms. At this point, the story gets very personal. Letting go is hard work. Of course she knew he was going to grow beyond her. She’d been told from the very beginning that her son was going to be a gift to the world, but it’s different when the day to say good-bye finally arrives. She looks up into the sky, and it’s hard to look away, even after she can no longer see him, like the glow that follows after the flash of a camera. All that is left are two men clothed in white, who tell the followers it is time to move ahead together. So they make their way back to an upstairs room to pray and to wait for the Spirit of God to pour itself upon all people who might now, finally, understand one another and the meaning of one big God family.
And, in my imagination, Mary ponders again what has happened and what might happen next, as all responsible mothers do, always and forever. We ponder and wait and hope.
What we get is not always what we want, but what we most need is making it through the hard and fun stuff that happens in our families, that crazy, messy tangled ball of people who are learning to practice forgiveness, grace, and love. Over and over again we practice because it never goes according to plan. Thank God.