Love and Ice Picks

In the continuing vein of having a “happy not crappy” Lent (see my post on “Giving Up Lent”) I’m writing about stuff that makes me happy. This story makes me extremely happy. But first, let me paint you a picture of what life has been like for the past few days.

I live in East Tennessee. It’s currently unseasonably cold here. Like, break-out-the-waffle-weave-longjohns, stock-up-on-firewood, freeze-your-nose-hairs-together cold. It hasn’t gotten above 20 degrees in a week (which for us is cold) and the windchill has put the temperature repeatedly into single digits. As I write this—sitting by the fireplace—it is currently 5 degrees with a windchill of -8. I don’t care who you are or where you’re from, that’s cold. Our people and our infrastructure just aren’t built to handle this kind of cold.

All this weather has come because of some “arctic blast” which brought snow with the cold. The same system that’s been pounding the Northeast quadrant of the US finally made its way south. However, due to a nice “warm” front pushing up from the Gulf, here in East Tennessee we didn’t just get snow. We got ice. We got sleet. We got a day of freezing rain followed by snow. This means everything is coated in ice with about an inch or two of snow on top of that. School has been closed for a week, businesses are running shortened hours, and TVA (our electric company) has asked everyone to turn off non-essential stuff to try to conserve power. It’s been…fun.

Despite all this, my mother has been hard at work. Her office is also her home so there’s none of this “Oh sorry! I can’t get to work! I’m snowed in at the house!” business for her. Her car has been sitting in the driveway for four days where she parked it upon getting home from the grocery store just before the icy portion of the arctic blast hit. She’s been hard at work. Her car’s been accumulating various forms of freezing precipitation.

This morning, she was scheduled to leave for a weekend getaway with her sisters. This would involve chiseling her car out of the glacier it had become. Two days ago, it took me half an hour to carve my car out of the ice, a feat which involved a snow brush, an ice scraper, a small ice pick, and a few swear words. (Side note here: the main roads have been clear for days, and the sun has been shining, so driving in general is not a crazy death-wish adventure. Driving is fine as long as you take it slow and allow extra time. And you’re not trying to take a loaded school bus down back county roads.)

Needless to say, Mom was not looking forward to finding her car. But here’s where the happy comes in. As I shuffled, pajama-clad, into the living room sipping my second cup of coffee, some movement caught the corner of my eye. I walked to the window looking out over the driveway. And there was my father. Jeans tucked into his boots, ski jacket zipped up to his chin, scarf wound round his face, toboggan cap pulled low over his ears, looking for all the world just one red snow suit away from being Ralphie’s little brother (“I can’t put my arms down!”) painstakingly clearing off my mother’s car. He chipped methodically away at the ice around the doors, scraped the windows, and pried the truck loose so Mom could load it. He started the engine and put the heater on full blast so it would warm up. He even turned on the seat warmer.

It occurred to me, as I watched my father carve a sedan out of an ice block on a negative-8-degree morning to help prepare for a trip he wasn’t going on, that this was love. True love was right here in the driveway. And it was holding a small ice pick.

My parents just celebrated their 40^th anniversary this past December. They bought each other a card and let me take them out for a quiet dinner, but nothing more. They all but forgot about Valentine’s Day, and rarely—if ever—do they partake in mushy-gushy romantic stuff. Their idea of “date night” is to order a pizza and watch DVRed episodes of Blue Bloods and White Collar, which they do with seemingly tedious regularity. I often roll my eyes at their predictability, and yet, I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Love isn’t a sappy card or heart-shaped chocolate. It’s not all passion and romance all the time. It’s not even saying, “I love you” for the first, fifth, or thousandth time. Love is being able to rely on someone with almost tedious regularity. Love is chipping your wife’s car out of an inch of ice on a cold, windy morning without being asked to do so, but doing so because you want to.

It’s clear to me that 40 years together hasn’t even begun to quell the love my parents have for each other. This is sometimes mystifying, sometimes intimidating, and always inspiring. And definitely makes me happy. 

Giving Up Lent

Today is Ash Wednesday. It is the day in the various manifestations of the Christian faith where followers of Christ traditionally choose to give something up for the 40 days between now and Easter Sunday. This is typically a time for spiritual reflection, a time for people to give up a distraction in their lives in order to get closer to God. The idea is that if we’re not doing something else, we are actively trying to seek out what God would have us do. This practice is supposed to represent Christ’s time in the wilderness, where, according to the Christian scriptures, Christ spent 40 days in the Judean desert fasting from food and drink, sitting in the dirt, being tempted by Satan, and being served by angels. It’s really not a bad idea, but I’ve never been particularly good at it.

My faith tradition doesn’t have much to say about “fasting” in its various forms for Lent. If you want to, fine. If you don’t want to, that’s okay as well. I gave up chocolate one year (my friends made me swear to never do it again,) and one year I tried giving up biting my nails. I tried adding in painfully honest journaling, and I’ve attempted a devotional a time or four. Each time I felt there was something missing, something I wasn’t doing right. I felt less like I was getting closer to God and more like I was fighting with myself (which I do enough without any holy season’s help, thank you very much.) As I was reflecting on today’s multitude of Facebook and Twitter posts—“What are you giving up for #Lent ?”—it suddenly struck me what it is about this season that makes me feel a little…lost.

The 40 days of Lent are supposed to mark Christ’s time in the wilderness, but how do you faithfully remember someone’s time in the wilderness when you often feel that your whole damn life is spent in the wilderness?

Now, I don’t mean to say that I feel lost and directionless and that I have no momentum in my life. I have a great church community, wonderful friends, fantastic family, and a meaningful career; but I do have WAY more questions than answers and I often feel like I can’t see the forest for the trees. The good part is, though, this is okay.

I’ve been realizing for some time that somewhere along the way I got the idea that being a good follower of Jesus meant that I would feel mowed over most of the time; as though doing God’s will meant I should feel like I was plodding uphill in the snow wearing 60 pounds of gear headed for a destination I despised. That if I was enjoying something it must be inherently wrong. This is not only bad theology and mildly delusional, but is also absolutely incorrect.

Yes, God calls us to do hard things that will feel like we’re plodding uphill in the snow, but God will also ask us to do fun things and amazing things and hopefully we’ll get to feel like we’re making a difference in the world. Jesus didn’t say, “I came that you may have a life of misery and awfulness.” He said, “I came that you may have life and have it to the full!” Yes, “to the full” means that you have to take crappy with happy, but there should also be plenty of happy with the crappy.

Which gets me back to Lent. I’m giving it up. Sort-of.

I finally decided that if Lent makes you feel crappy, you’re probably doing it wrong. Practices in Lent are supposed to make you feel closer to God, and if I read the book correctly getting closer to God should not make you feel crappy. A lot of emotional reactions are associated with meetings with the divine—everything from cower-in-a-corner scared to dance-naked-in-the-streets joyous—but crappy isn’t one of them.

So, what am I giving up for Lent? I’m giving up crappy. I’m giving up feeling like I’m living wrong if I feel joyful. I’m giving up assuming that God wants me plodding uphill. Sometimes life just happens. As Frederick Buechner said, “Welcome to the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.”

In order to give up the crappy, I’m taking on the happy. I’m taking on impromptu dance parties to my favorite song-of-the-moment. I’m taking on sending encouraging texts to friends. I’m taking on not feeling guilty for naps. I’m taking on more runs. I’m taking on writing blog posts about what I’m taking on in an effort to remain accountable to the universe. I’m taking on getting closer to God.