A Twinkle in Her Eye

My mom and my grandmother Mammy made their living as musicians, finding cracks in solid concrete walls to literally at times put food on the table.  I could list the hard stuff in their lives that would have brought defeat in most people's lives.  But I am also very aware of how they navigated the difficult passages.

I had a front row seat for their actions and reactions, since my grandmother lived with us from before I was born.  I can remember when things got tough, Mammy would get a familiar twinkle in her eye.  When I saw that look on her face, it was like she was declaring out loud, "Now let's see what God does with this."  She had seen too much in life to question God in her latest momentary affliction.  It was hard.  But there was always hope.  And she knew her strength was not her own, but in the God she loved.  Mom was like that too.  Mom was born during the Spanish influenza, struggled through the Great Depression, lost both her father as a teenager and her husband not too many years later in the war.

It was never the circumstances that dictated their action.  It was their response to it.

I learned personally from the two of them that crisis can either bring you down or nurture great creativity.  I actually think the two of them were energized and drew great delight in turning hardship into new creative ways of thinking about something.

How can we approach this differently?

In a single-parent household, having no money was a way of life, but for them, never an excuse.  "You want to go to college?" my widowed grandmother asked my mom in the economically-ravaged years of the mid-1930s.  "How can we make that happen" was not a question, but a plan for action.

Neither one of them was afraid of hard work.  They expected it.  They were not dismayed by what they did not have, or by barriers erected in the way, but they looked for possibilities in the scraps at hand.  As Jesus asked the disciples in the face of 5000 hungry men, "How many loaves do you have?"  (Matthew 16. 34) 

Things rarely turned out the way they expected.  But that was not a bad thing in their eyes.  They found God's wonder increasingly come into view.  Not just enough to squeak by, but more than enough to share, baskets full of leftovers.  And along the way, the two of them blessed more people than can be counted, more than they were ever to know.

In the face of trouble or storm or need, they knew to bring what they had to Jesus.  And adding to their praying, some divinely appointed perseverance, long hard hours, a heaping scoop of imagination, and as Mammy always said, "a little elbow grease." 

In its extremes, creativity emerges from crisis.  There are different ways of doing things after all, different paths of which we are totally unaware, a whole universe we have not known.  Doing new things -- or even the ordinary or mundane in different ways -- physically, relationally, and tangibly changes us by establishing new neural pathways in the brain and strengthening the chambers of our hearts.

Do we recognize the sacredness of the ordinary? Do we embrace the opportunity in the radical changes before us?

Dwelling not on "What should I do this afternoon?"
      but "What should I do differently this afternoon?"
What is right before me,
what is waiting
           ...and has been waiting a long time
    in the hallway
    and at the front door,
out of my direct view
            or clinging to the edges?

Not just how to navigate through this,
nor how to walk around it
           or thinking beyond it,
but how to respond,
      how to respond in a different way,
following not just His direction
                  but seeking God Himself.
And He whispers in our ears,
"I am going with you.
                  Do not be afraid."

These things are what I am contemplating this Mother's Day in such strange and turbulent times.  I was blessed by my mom and grandmother, by the twinkle in their eyes, how to navigate this, not in despair but in wonder, to show me who God is, and make known what God's faithfulness looks like in real time.