Into the Confessional

Last night I went to dinner with a friend. Though we’ve been acquainted for a while, this was the first time the two of us hung out alone. I was looking forward to a casual dinner and expected casual conversation. I had no idea the two of us would still be talking long past our food was finished and that our conversation would turn the direction it had.

A month or so ago I saw Rob Bell speak at his Drops Like Stars tour, which deals with the topic of suffering. At no point did he attempt to explain the “why” of tragedy with a trite explanation of why bad things happen to good people. Sometimes people just want their heartbreak acknowledged and the opportunity to grieve in the midst of others who are hurting as well. The news of my niece’s brain cancer was still fresh so the timing of his message was truly divine. At one point in the evening he asked members of the audience to stand if they had a relative impacted by cancer. I stood…so did a hundred others. I attended the show alone, but as I stood amongst this multitude of strangers, I instantly felt part of something much bigger. It was a “standing on Holy Ground” moment. The point Rob was making was how suffering bonds us. He is right. For the first time since Hannah’s diagnosis, I felt like we weren’t the only family to experience cancer. I can’t quote Rob exactly but he made a comment that when someone just utters the word cancer it’s like the molecules in the room start to change. I never asked for membership into this club, but I can’t begin to articulate the profound comradery I felt that night with the fellow war weary.

My dinner date lost her mom to cancer just a few years ago. Cancer barely came up in our conversation. Suffering is universal. The simple knowledge of our shared pain was enough. Rob said suffering makes you honest. Last night we were honest. Before I knew it we were sharing secrets and swapping war stories. I couldn’t believe the skeletons that were coming out of my closet. It was like therapy…with chopsticks and soy sauce. Honesty disarms people. For every failing I revealed she reciprocated with a fear of her own. This wasn’t just therapy, this was confession. It’s a powerful experience to expose your wrongs and the wrongs committed against you to another person only to have them met with acceptance instead of judgment, grace rather than criticism, and compassion in the place of indifference. The evening was a tangible example of the truth in James 5:16, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed”. I left the restaurant feeling like we had been through battle together and like we had treated each others' wounds as well. Who knew shrimp tempura could be a spiritual experience?

Adventures in Community Center Yoga

I did yoga this morning. On the rare days I do exercise I prefer to attend the easiest of the yoga classes offered at our community center. However, this morning I opted to follow along with the video at home in my living room rather than braving the snow. Everything about the class at the community center is better though. One instructor always plays Enya, while a different instructor once exposed us to something like "Sounds of the Ocean". It was either recorded actually underwater or in a cave. There were definitely whale calls at one point (only slightly distracting). The class is held from 8:30-9:30am while most people are at work, so it's usually filled with women in their late 50's and 60's. It’s really humbling to see all the women who have 30+ years on me executing their Plows with such precision and ease while I’m straining and tipping over.

But the best moment in my class was when one of the participants was feeling a little gassy. We were lying on the floor with one leg tucked into our chest when, “eeerrrrrr.” Someone let out a little squeaker mid-pose. Apparently all the women are much more mature than I as it made me chuckle aloud. Not two minutes later, “eeerrrrrr,” again. This one really tickled me and my second giggle was a little louder. Now I was the one distracting the class with inappropriate noises.

A few weeks after that class I woke up feeling a little gassy myself. After a few hours of no relief from my usually reliable Pepto Bismol, I looked up some home remedies on the internet. Many sites suggested some yoga poses, so I tried them out. After working my way down the list, I found a familiar formation. I had done this pose week after week in class without ever hearing its name mentioned. Sure enough there it was in black and white, “Wind Relieving Pose”. This was the exact pose where my fellow yogi did indeed break wind. Who am I to giggle when her body was simply responding the way the pose had intended for it to.

No such luck for myself that morning with Wind Relieving Pose. I sucked down some more Pepto and waited it out.

The Worst Day of My Life

Oh boy. This is the entry I’ve been dreading having to write. But it has so much to do with why I am taking on this year long project in the first place that I have to talk about it. Everyone close to me already knows that my 3-year-old niece Hannah has, had, is being treated for, however you want to say it…cancer. So many of those words should never be put into a sentence together: 3 year old, cancer, Hannah…please not Hannah. Each member of my family has a different story for where they were when they first found out. It’s like how everyone in my parents’ generation remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot or how we all remember the first news of September 11th. Those events certainly changed the course of history, but a personal tragedy has the power to change the course of your own life. I would say for each member of my family Hannah’s brain tumor has completely altered our lives forever.

My sister Carina will begin telling you the story beginning on October 2nd, the night Hannah was rushed to the ER, and even recall days before when she began showing mysterious symptoms. But for me it was the morning of October 3rd. I woke up to an unknown caller at 6am so I ignored the call. When I woke up at 9am I listened to the voicemail of Carina calling from the hospital. It’s late night calls and early morning voicemails that always indicate trouble. No one calls with inconsequentials at these hours. No, these calls carry with them the most serious of consequences. After failing to reach my sister I called my mom who proceeded to calmly administer the news. This woman has been through the fire (her own cancer included) enough times to deliver life-altering news in a steady and even tone. “Hannah’s in the hospital. They found a mass on her brain. She’s having an MRI as we speak.” After receiving instructions about where to go and how to reach my sister, I hung up the phone and leaned over to tell Daniel, I didn’t know how to begin my next sentence for I was now the one delivering this nightmare to a new victim. My life was changed and now his was going to change as well. Before I could find the words, a word, anything to utter aloud, the weight of it all hit me and I simply cried. (This is really hard to write even now as just remembering that morning is like reopening up the wound and getting sick to my stomach all over again.) Daniel asked what I wanted to do and I said I didn’t know. I just wanted to cry and grieve for a minute before I attempted to think beyond what I had just learned. He went downstairs to call Jason, our brother in law, and returned to the bedroom more wrecked than I was. He had happened to catch Jason in the midst of a momentary breakdown and the two men wept together over the phone for a brief few minutes.

Next thing I knew we were in the waiting room at Children’s Mercy waiting for Hannah to emerge from the MRI. We sat there numb listening to Carina retell the events of the last 12 hours over and over as each new member of the family arrived. The next handful of days were spent at the hospital crammed into Hannah’s tiny room watching cartoons and faking smiles through our “game faces”. We didn’t want to scare or alarm her, so all grieving was reserved for private moments caught alone. For me it was the half hour drive back and forth from the hospital where I did most of my weeping. My prayers took an interesting tone during these drives. They were not serene petitions like when praying for the sick members of other people’s families, “Lord, please comfort them and bring peace and healing and whatever they need during this time.” When it was my own family I was praying for, when I could see the face of the sick 3-year-old, when I could hear her laugh, and when I knew the helplessness of her parents, my prayers were much darker. They didn’t really consist of words but usually all I could do was cry and scream at the top of my lungs in a dark car. I heard myself a few times yell the words “why” but more often I heard myself insisting times insisting “no”. If I could somehow yell loud enough and insist earnestly enough, maybe God would take it all back. Despite all my “fist-shaking”, he didn’t.

My sister Amy said she wished we could just fast forward to six months from now and see how everything would turn out. It was this statement that helped me to articulate my opposite thinking. During those first few days I kept picturing Hannah playing at her neighborhood pool. It was a memory from a summer afternoon just 2 months before. She had been wearing her swimsuit and life jacket and instead of actually swimming she was playing with the little fountains that sprayed in the kiddie pool. It was this reoccurring memory that triggered the tears most for me. I had been rewinding to memories before news of the brain tumor. I kept wanting to go back while Amy was wanting to see ahead. I told her, “You want a fast forward button and I want a rewind button.” Over the course of that first week, the two of us threw out our fast forward and rewind buttons and landed on a phrase and idea that I continue to cling to now, “a new normal”. We cannot go back and we cannot foresee the future. Things are forever changed from here on out. We cannot reclaim naivety or innocence lost. Instead, if we are to survive, we have to accept reality and begin living new, different lives even if we loathe the changes that have occurred.

Though it’s hard to get started on this, I could probably write for days. And over the course of this year, I will surely write about Hannah frequently. I did mention that she and this experience were pivotal in taking on this year of living imperfectly. With anxiety and depression I have wasted so many days stuck in bed, too many days. It may sound cliché, but for anyone who has experienced something like this you know it to be true, I don’t deserve to waste any more days. Hannah is only 3 and she deserves so many more days than she’s gotten, so what gives me the right to throw away my days so carelessly? In addition to “The get out of bed everyday” title, another idea for the name of this project was “Not another day wasted”. That is a challenge to at least give each day a try. But I have more motivation to live life well when I’m viewing things from the lens of a new normal.

Hannah in July with new kid sister Callie.
Hannah's Caring Bridge Site

Lifers

College kids are on winter break so I took a few of my old Young Life girls down to the River Market for lunch today. We enjoyed patty melts (and a fried bologna sandwich to bring home to Daniel) from Harry’s Country Club and a half dozen cupcakes from Baby Cakes next door. I thoroughly enjoyed the food and conversation with these “lifers”.

Some Young Life leaders refer to their graduated kids as alumni. I prefer to call them lifers. As leaders we spend years befriending kids. We show up for the big and little events in their lives. We get to be there for so many of the defining moments that happen during the high school years. So when kids graduate, the friendship doesn’t just stop because Young Life is targeted at 9^th-12^th graders. You can’t graduate from friendships like these.

Sometimes relationships with kids get even better after they graduate because even though they’ll never stop being Young Life kids, they do become more like actual friends. This is the case with Daniel and me and our Young Life leaders. We consider Peach and Mel our good friends now, but they’ll forever be referred to as our old leaders.

This summer Daniel and I were asked to be scripture readers in the wedding of two of our old Young Life kids from Jeff City Cody and Bailey. It was really cool to return to Jeff for the wedding and drive through the parking lot of the high school and football stadium where it all started. It’s now 9 years since we met Cody and Bailey as high school freshmen and we couldn’t be prouder of the adults they have become. They love Jesus, each other, and their friends and family very well.

Daniel and I talk frequently about the kids at West that we're currently leading. It’s so fun when we identify kids that we are sure will become life long friends. I look forward to a lifetime filled with former Young Life kids’ college graduations, weddings, and even kids of their own.

Laura and me & Addie and me at my wedding in 2006.

Me and Bailey at her wedding this past summer.

Hattie for Hire

Recently I have taken over a job for my sister of creating the window displays for the small kiosks around an outdoor shopping center once a month. I am not employed by the mall but rather work as an Independent Contractor. The title “Independent Contractor” seems very professional and entrepreneurial to me. Seeing as how today I completed the displays for January in 8-degree weather, I had originally intended to write about my perils of pinning and hanging with frozen fingers. However I find myself reminiscing instead on memories of my only other experience as an independent contractor.

One summer during high school my best friend Jill and I were hired to help fill orders for a uniform company. Memories of the first week are blurry to me because we spent our first few days working in the un-air-conditioned warehouse. I now understand why city riots always occur during summertime because after 8 hours of working in the stifling heat the typical bickering between Jill and myself quickly escalated to fisticuffs. I remember clawing at her helplessly with my back pinned against the concrete. Jill was and always will be much, much stronger than me. Therefore any effort at really fighting back was quickly met with an even stronger retaliation. I found it best to alternate between scratching and biting or to wait out the remainder of her aggression in the fetal position. After the forklift driver caught us mid brawl, we were moved inside near the air-conditioned offices.

The job consisted of the same tasks each day: review the stack of order forms, pull the appropriate (postal in our case) uniform pieces from the supply shelves, and send the sealed boxes to the shipping department. Jill and I were determined to make our process more and more efficient each day by trying out different assembly line techniques and patterns. The most time consuming portion of our work was assembling the mailing boxes. Our obsession with making this particular aspect of our assembly line more efficient is what spurred the naming of our summer job as “The Box Factory”. We were constantly experimenting in efficiency: was it faster to make a box then fill the order, or make 20 boxes at once and then fill multiple orders, or even better…devote an entire day to making boxes as preparation for the rest of the week? One day we opted for the third technique and made hundreds of boxes at once. “What is one to do with hundreds of mailing boxes,” you might ask. Well make a fort of course! Jill had the brilliant idea to stack the boxes floor to ceiling leaving the middle hollow. Inside our fort we ate our lunch and took naps during our two 15 minute breaks. (I think Jill still has the photographic evidence of this glorious feat.)

Towards the end of our stint at the box factory, our boss, a friend’s dad, asked us to start reporting how many orders we completed each day. He said he suspected the guys in shipping were slacking off and he wanted to compare their outgoing packages to our numbers. We couldn’t believe the irresponsibility of the shipping crew and diligently began tallying our orders. Maybe shipping wasn’t slacking off but rather we had become such masters of efficiency that they simply couldn’t keep up with our productivity.

After that summer, our friend, whose dad had hired us as independent contractors, let us know that her dad had us report to him because he believed us to be the ones negligent in our work. What fools we were! Masters of efficiency he thought us not.
He must have discovered the fort. In our defense hundreds of empty boxes must be stored somewhere. Just because our neatly stacked rows of boxes happened to form a hollow center, does not deem our stacking inefficient. I would suggest our dual-purpose structure actually declares us as even more so.

So if you are looking for two independent contractors who have experience with box construction and pride themselves in efficiency, I know some girls who can be of service.

An All-American Party

For Daniel's birthday we threw a party including some of Daniel's favorite things: Mexican Coke, McDonald's double cheeseburgers and fries, and football.

the birthday boy between plays

fierce competition: Hartzell reppin West

Rogan won the award for smallest competitor and eater-of-the-most-brownies.

the cheering section

So why do you wanna know?

Over the past few months we've had a lot of fun answering the question, "Was that Daniel in the car commercial?". Our friends, and Daniel's co-worker, the McCarthys did an ad campaign featuring their daughter entitled "Lauren Wants to Know". Daniel is featured in a quick TV spot administering the line, "So why do you wanna know?". I got a call from a friend just this morning asking if that was Daniel on TV so apparently the ads are still running. He does great on air and is available for all your advertisement needs. Please direct all booking inquires to his manager.