I know someone.  He’s so smart.  Just about everything.  I find that shiny and interesting and I love to hear what he says.  I wonder how he KNOWS that …..he just shrugs, like it’s nothing.  It makes me laugh, delighted in that.  Somehow it settles me and I feel peaceful and  safe and it stirs my curiosity to hear more.  “I wish I was that smart.  That kind of smart.  Important kind of smart,” I think to myself

I’m smart.  Just in a different way.  I like words and using them to touch people’s hearts.  I can understand different than me and different than me doesn’t scare me.  I’m drawn to what people don’t say or the small things that sometimes go unnoticed, unless you’re paying attention, and I pay attention.  I notice the ignored, the struggle, the sparkle that goes beyond surface that makes a person who they are in a quiet room when they share it with you.  I realize that my own struggles have sewn themselves together to make a safe quilt that I put around others.

It’s just…..not all that shiny.  And it pushes my invisible button some days…..the one that says….”yeah.  right. as if….”   Today, as I’ve done every day since school started, I walked the halls of the building in the dark of the morning praying.  I plug my ears with worship music and begin talking…..and listening.  Partly because it sets my heart in it’s place.  Partly because it drowns out the doubt that causes me to feel like I can’t keep up with an imaginary standard.

This day, I was alone, I thought, when I heard my name called behind me.  “Tamara,” said the man, “I know you pray.  I’ll be traveling later today.  If you think of it, I’d appreciate you praying for me.”  It was a quiet, simple request and then he walked on.  I thanked him for asking me and stood for a minute in my spot.  Smiling.  I know you pray.  

Into the school store charged the kids, a few minutes later.  I had no candy to pass out this morning.  I’d just plain run out the night before.  “I don’t want any candy.  I just came to tell you that I love you and give you a hug.”  These kids.  They beat in my heart.  They know that I love them.

These things?  I know they’re small, I can’t take them into a board room and impress anyone.  But if today, I died?  I know you pray was enough.  Thank you, Father, for giving me my legacy.

My kitchen hums right now.  I’m home in the middle of the day, Windham Hill playing the Lucy and Linus theme song on the CD player.  The dryer is doing what it was created for.  It’s my dream day, really.  I love days that are party sunny, or partly cloudy, and I don’t much care which way you choose to see it.  To me, it’s lovely. I’m doing the completely insignificant things in life that  bring life to me.  Folding laundry, doing dishes, putting things where things should be, creating order, creating “home”.

Time was when I did it with six children swarming around me like so many bees.  Today I’m thinking about those bee children. Last year, at this very time, two of them set sail on making dreams come true out west.  They held me tight and told me goodbye and I lost it right there in their arms.  And yet I knew they had to go, should go. I set my girls’ coffee cup on the window sill, the one she used when we shared our coffee together before she drove off, and told her it would stay there until she came home.

 Last night, my oldest boy, the one I practiced being a mama on for the first time, called me excited and nervous.  He’s finally going back to Africa; a place he’d lived for a year and returned with it still beating in his chest.  “You’ll go back,” I told him then.  “Just watch.  Just wait.  You’ll see.”  He almost lost sight of that a few times, holding back tears of frustration and wanting to set down his flashlight and stop looking for the way.  But always, I’d tell him, I know it…..know it……in my heart.

So soon, he sets off.  God threw back the sash and pointed the way, just like that.  I listened to his voice in the phone and silently fist pumped.  My boy, wildly imperfect, unabashedly himself, Mr. Rogers creative; he’d rather make it himself with construction paper than buy it; the kid who planned his own birthday parties with a list attached to a clipboard……that boy is headed south.  In a big way.

Those mamas of you, in particular, reading this?  You can feel what I’m feeling right now.  You grab them hard and hug them close and cry proud and don’t want to let go because it may be a long, long time before you see that face up close again?  But you push them away so they get a running start.

And watch them fly.

I love you, boy.  I love you.  I love you.  A thousand times.  And more.

I’ve been reading the blog of the husband of Joey, part of the husband and wife country duo Joey and Rory that, until very recently, I was not familiar with.  It’s breaking my heart, really.  This man and his wife are saying goodbye, one moment at a time.  She is dying.  They have a young child.  They had plans and things were going well in their career.  They had a concert barn right on their property where they were able to live and work together, they way they wanted it.  They loved their God.  And all was right with the world.  And then this happened.

Her friends are coming a few at a time to tell her goodbye and share memories and tears and spend earthly time with her, so fleeting now.  It’s rich time, her husband writes.  Her rough cut wooden coffin with a cross on it, handmade by friends to Joey’s specifications, sits in a compartment under their tour bus, waiting.  Their focus is narrowed, highly sharpened. And yet the edges are soft and wrap around them, their friends and family.  They are making a difference in people’s living, even while she dies.  They’re looking into each other’s eyes.  Speaking words.  Taking time to notice the details of each other.  Sometimes they’re at peace and sometimes they gasp crying to keep breathing.

I think about how easy it would be to panic.  To frantic grab for distraction or denial.  To waste time wringing hands.  But they seize wisely and hold firm.  I want to be like that in the land of the living; the right now.  So that when the dying comes?  I can know I didn’t waste time on what didn’t matter.

I think about things that hurt me, scare me, disappoint me.  This living, it’s not for the faint hearted.  Not to live well, at least.  I struggle some days to keep my face to the wind.  Times are, honestly, when living is not all it’s cracked up to be and you reach to find the meaning of the dailies.  But I dare myself to not give up.  To grab hold of others and whisper brave for them to do the same.  To look for the sweet Providence in the bitterest of roots.

To not waste time.