It's All a Matter of Perspective

Yesterday my youngest was home with the coughy crud that seems to be hitting hard and early this year. As we sat across from each other watching our 743rd episode of Lego Ninjago (are they humans or snakes? I still don’t know…) we ate our lunch.

As he ate his soup, with the box of crackers between us, he said

“These little crackers would be good with tomato soup, because that’s what the box shows.”

“No honey, that’s chili I said.”

“No. It is really red. It’s tomato soup”

He was annoyed, that I thought he didn’t know what tomato soup was.

“Hon, chili is red too. It is lumpy and has beans but it is red.”

Now I’m thinking I need to make chili more often so this kid can identify what chili looks like!

“No, it is soup” he said with a finality I knew the discussion was over.

I grabbed the box of crunchy carby saltiness that is my absolute kryptonite.

I turned the box to reach in and saw …

We were both 100% right, but how would we have known what each others perspective was.

I believed I knew what he was seeing and was wrong. He knew what he was seeing and knew I was wrong.

And in fact, we were both correct.

How often do we truly think we know the perspective someone is coming from? But the reality, is we don’t. We know our own truth, our own path, our own reality. Even someone less than 5 feet away may be experiencing the world around them differently.

Choose grace,

choose kindness,

choose being happy instead of being right.

We can never really know through what perspective someone may be living.

Never Say Never

To the Seniors I photograph, if there was a piece of advice I could give you, it would be this: “never say never.”

I know most of you have your life planned out. It looks a little like this:

The reality, is in about 30 years, it may look something like this…. with more cats.

I don’t say this as an old crumudgeon, but more of a suggestion to listen for signs, for whispers.

There was one point in my life I said I would “never move to Valley City!”…. it has been 10 years now, And have no plans of leaving anytime soon.

I also Exclaimed emphatically “I am “Never going to Be a Professional Photographer!” Well… I’m going on about 5 years of that now, and the going is getting good…

Last night I got this message from a Senior’s Mom

It made me cry. For quite a while, and for a variety of reasons, I denied I had a gift.

But there came a point, after hearing a couple different sermons about “we are called to share our gifts,” some signs and some conversations, I gave in and gave it up to Him.

If you are not a religious person, I still say, listen… the Universe will send you signals. It usually whispers instead of taking neon billboards, but there will be signs. And they may lead you directly to the place or thing you said you would NEVER be or do.

And there will probably be more cats…

Confronting my biases: Lessons Learned at Synod Assembly

This past weekend my husband and I attended the Eastern North Dakota Synod Assembly of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.)  Over the two days, I heard Pastors speak who came originally from Peru, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.  I heard prayers said in the Native language of Lakota.  Hymns sung in Vietnamese filled the air.  A Roman Catholic Bishop delivered the homily.  I witnessed the ordination of a Pastor who is from South Sudan.

This is NOT the Lutheran church I grew up in. 

It is so much more beautiful.

The stereotypical stoic Nordic Lutheran Church congregation is transforming into one of a multitude of heritages, stories, languages and colors.

The Church is inside and outside of walls. It is generations deep and of displaced refugee status.  It is male and female, straight and gay.  It is Hispanic and Nordic and Asian and Native American.

If I am honest with myself, the diversity I experiences this weekend, did not always sit well with me.  Upon hearing of a group of undocumented teen entrepreneurial Lutherans who are succeeding and tithing part of their income, the word “undocumented” hung in my ears, tolling its ugly sound.  All of the white privilege rationales I tell myself attempted to cry out in my brain, trying to tell me all the things that were wrong with this success story.  To be brutally honest with oneself is hard.  To lay my own opinions and stories I tell myself out on the table and accept that some thoughts are racist and incorrect and unacceptable and completely un-Jesus-like is incredibly hard.  But as the Catholic Bishop pointed out, that only out of discontent does change begin.  To wrestle with the icky feeling of realizing the unjustness of some of my own stories is the only way to truly change.

The Catholic Bishop and Lutheran Bishop, leading a service, together.

I heard one refugee teen speak of hiding in the bush of the Congo to escape being killed by gunfire, when he was 6 years old.  I thought of my own 6 year old splashing around in the pool and my tears fell.  He will never live in constant fear of being shot as he walks the streets of our small town.  This teen did not come to America to “live off our system” as we may say about “those refugees.”  He came to America for a chance to survive. Plain and simple.

We like to define ourselves by the titles, labels and stories we tell ourselves.  To challenge any of those is not comfortable.  We want to be right not wrong, and if we change our story, maybe our initial beliefs were wrong?  And Lord knows we hate to be wrong.  But it is only when we choose to sit in the discomfort of a viewpoint that makes us uneasy that we can grow.  A pearl is the beautiful result of an incredible discomfort.  Acknowledging that maybe we actually have some unloving thoughts and judgements of others is the first step to growth in becoming a church that is truly one, together.  When we maintain our static beliefs as to what we feel the Church or Lutheran should look like, the Lutheran Church of our youth,  we maintain an outdated and dying model. When we focus on the similarities that bind us rather than the differences that isolate us, we learn and grow.  It is only through acceptance and evaluation of our own hang-ups, curiosity for those different than us and love for ALL our neighbors that we will grow and change into a compassionate, diverse and global Church.

There exists an I in Marriage.

I have a close friend who is getting married this month.  I am wondering if there is any wisdom I can offer as the Hubby and I approach our 17th married year together.  (I was obviously a child bride.)  My friend isn't a naive 20 something.  She has been through a number of her own ups and downs in relationships and life, learning a lot along the way. So I honestly wondered what advice can I offer her from the other side?

As I sat tonight staring into the flames of a bonfire pondering marriage with my head on my Hubby's shoulder (ignoring the marshmallowageddon enveloping me from smores gone wild) it became clear: There IS an "I" in marriage, and it lies right smack dab in the middle. 

Over the last few years, my romantic "love can conquer all" heart has taken a beating, impacted by the stream of marriages dissolving around me. 

Fifty percent of them do, my brother reminds me. 

Some divorces I get, they make sense, and some leave me bewildered and confused.  I am left with a sense of sadness because LOVE did not win.  Because so much of my being naively wants to believe it really can.

I only know our story, and "I" definitely lies in the middle.  If I share one tidbit of advice with my friend it is this: most of marriage comes down to meeting somewhere in the middle.

It involves things you would really, really rather not do.  It is doing that thing asked of you, with a sigh and groan, but you do it because it makes your spouse happy. It is tucking your ego into your spanx and playing nice. Plain and simple.  (No I am not talking about weird bedroom things, or dangerous or illegal things.) I am referring to touring a decommissioned missile silo command center when you are starving and ready to eat your own arm, the kids are crabby and tired and hungry and just want to go home.  You do the tour, because he really wants to and you know what? It was actually pretty cool, you learned a lot and the kids thought it was amazing. It leads to watching War Games as a family and the kids actually understand the fear we grew up with; the Russians blowing us off the map. 

It looks like him making hotel waffles for 3 kids and accidentally buttering the middle child's waffle, much to her utter dismay. He watches in bewilderment as she dissolves into a flailing pile of torment because on this particular day, she didn't want butter and insists him to "SCRAPE IT OFF!!! SCRAPE it off!!!! scraaaapppeee iiiiiiit offfffff.........!!!!!!" melting off the chair into the floor. 

... and make sure you get it out of all the holes too!

All of this occurring 2 hours after you literally ran away to run 13.1 miles.  You actually PAID MONEY to run for some reason unbeknownst to him. Yet when he sees you coming down the road, cursing the stupid idea yourself, he says you are doing great with undeniable pride.

The natural tendency of a person is to want to be right or correct (and damn the consequences). We can act as stubborn as trying to move a goat from a pile of corn.  Marriage is a bigger picture painted more vivid and exquisite when we practice some compromise and grace.  

This is what I know.  If the "I" lies on one side or the other, MARRIAGE doesn't work. 

Imarriage

a bad Apple App bound to crash after the first update.

Marriagei

a strange Italian dish made with remorse and chutzpah that leaves a bad aftertaste.

I have done a lot of things for my husband that weren't on my list of "Things I would love to do!"  You know what,  it didn't kill me, and more often than not, some part of it created a great memory.  Whatever it was, it is important to HIM, and HE is important to ME, and that is reason enough to go along with his plan.  That doesn't mean I probably won't protest, complain, even use creative language to predict how terrible it is going to be... but I'll do it. 

The reality is, sometimes the plan completely falls apart.  Like when we found ourselves stuck at a-sure-to-get-you-killed-motel-that-still-uses-an-actual-key, we end up in a giggling fit.  Laughing in the parking lot, the theme song to National Lampoons Vacation sung between us, wondering how five of us will share a full size bed.

The years and experiences we have shared have prepared us for the fact that life never plays out how we think it should.  Marriage can find us in the middle of a F5 CrapStorm, on a four-wheeler, two miles from our property in a pasture. As flood waters are rising and icy sleet is falling hard and cold, we are on the only mode of transportation other than horses that can take us to our property.  My husband stops, looks at me and starts laughing. "THIS! This is our life!"

We share an ability to laugh at the absurdities that are often created when we are each willing to walk through the barricades of self toward that place in the middle...

the "I" in the middle of our marriage.