Puppy Sex (got your attention)

I am upstairs in the master bathroom, bent over the bathtub, scrubbing the jets with a toothbrush.  Suddenly, I feel something unusual at my feet.  I turn to look, and I find Charlie, my six-month-old puppy, gleefully practicing his newly-discovered puberty on my tennis shoe.  Yes, that’s right, my dog is humping my shoe.

I make a mental note:  “Call the vet tomorrow and make an appointment to get this dog neutered.”  I shove Charlie off my foot, and go back to toothbrushing my tub.  Not to be deterred, Charlie bounds back and mounts my New Balances with ease.  I shove him off again, and he slides across the tile floor with the splay-legged grace of a puppy. 

Now he thinks it’s a game, and he comes running up to my shoe with a happy bark.  I sit back on my heels with a sigh, put down the toothbrush, and do a little rough-and-tumble puppy play.  Charlie forgets about foreplay and begins jumping and rolling around, loving every minute of attention that he gets.  I forget about my toothbrush and enjoy living in the moment, giving  affection to my sweet puppy.

So what’s the point here?  Well, you have to read between the lines.  I am in the bathroom, cleaning the tub for the fourth time.  I have spent hours, probably four or five, cleaning the bathroom today.  I am stuck in an OCD cleaning ritual, and I’m not too happy about it.  I’m struggling to maintain a positive self-image, to not berate myself for returning to the tub.

Then, suddenly, as a distraction, God sends (of all things) a randy puppy into the bathroom.  I am near tears.  I don’t want to clean the tub again.  But the compulsion is too strong.  Until I meet something with a stronger compulsion:  Charlie.  The thought crosses my mind—how many times have I turned my husband on while cleaning this tub?  I never thought it would work on dogs, too!  I have to laugh.

Father blesses us in such creative and unusual ways.  Finding the blessing in the middle of the mess is often the difficult part.  That’s where I’ve been recently.   Discovering unpleasant memories.  Fighting old, unhealthy habits.  But I read this today: 

…sometimes I think of that story in the Old Testament….when God gave King Hezekiah fifteen more years of life?  Because he prayed for it?  But if Hezekiah had died when God first intended, Manasseh would never have been born.  And what does the Bible say about Manasseh?  Something to the effect that Manasseh had led the Israelites to do even more evil than all the heathen nations around Israel.  Think of all the evil that would have been avoided if Hezekiah had died earlier, before Manasseh was born….Just that maybe…maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds….There’s a reason I am not writing the story and God is.  He knows how it all works out, where it all leads, what it all means.  I don’t.

                                                                                       -Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts

I’m caught up in an OCD cleaning ritual avoiding memories that I don’t want to think about.  But what if I was writing the story?  Of course I would write these memories out.  Of course, I would make my life a Cinderella story.  But what disaster would I inadvertently create?  Would someone else be hurt instead?  Someone who didn’t have the support and help that I have?  Would I be willing to give my pain up if I knew someone else would feel it instead?  No.

So I clean my tub knowing that my Father will give me the strength to fight this.  I take joy in the intermissions of pleasure given to me, and I wait with anticipation for the day when He chooses to take this pain and crush it beneath His awesome feet.

boundless optimism

“Don’t get your hopes up,” I told my daughter yesterday, and was met with this response:  “But that’s where my hopes are supposed to be!”

If you’re looking for a little holiday spirit, come feast at the Colvin household.  My daughter has a glut of enthusiasm and it is spreading.  Even her Grinch-y aunt got into the spirit through holiday emails between them.  You can’t help but love Christmas when you are near Carina.

 How can I continue to cultivate that thrill and joy that Carina has for the birth of Jesus?  Because for her, the thrill is so much more about giving than receiving.  She has worked hard to save money to give to the orphanage that her cousin came from as a special Christmas present, and didn’t think she would make her goal until she received Christmas money from her grandparents.   Her first response at receiving that money was to enthusiastically tell me that she could now give her goal of $365 to Sadzi’s orphanage.

Carina optimistically proposed that she would give a dollar for each day of the year to her cousin’s orphanage, even though she had no way of earning money and only an allowance of $12 a month.  She made this proposal in the fall after I had read Crazy Love by Francis Chan, and challenged the family to do more, stretch themselves.

Since then, she has pinched pennies, saved every dollar given to her, pocketed away birthday money, worked for her father, and even made bets (dubious money-making, I know) with her father, which she has won.  She has given up several purchases that she really wanted, to give to this cause instead.

Now, her brother has saved nearly double that amount without batting an eye, but he has a fairly successful business building and repairing computers while Carina’s talents are as yet somewhat unmarketable.  So I find her sacrifices so much more poignant.  She wants a ten dollar book, but has waited two months, hoping to get it for Christmas instead, putting the money in her orphanage fund.

She believes that God will provide, and He did.  He made a way for her to make her goal.  And that book she really wants?  It’s under the tree.  God cares about twelve-year-old girls and their hopes and wishes.  He cares about thirty-nine year-old mothers who want their baby girls to succeed without intervening.  He cares about all of us enough to put his son in the middle of our mess, with boundless optimism.

God sees in you and me what we don’t see.  He sees that special gift that will take us over our goal, he sees the potential that we have no idea lies within us.  And he drops those gifts at the most surprising times, just like he did over two thousand years ago.

Merry Christmas.

eye emergencies

I can name exactly one good thing about eye emergencies:  I married an eye doctor.

This usually gives me ultra-primo front-of-the-line care…like when Carina took a nose dive off the merry-go-round at preschool and landed on her face, with an eyeful of mulch.  Fifteen minutes later (and a whole bunch of screaming), all was better.  Or the Thanksgiving when things got a little too rowdy in the grandparents’ basement, and a flying balloon cut Jacob in the eye.  He was back in time for all the food and festivities.

But when what looked like a minor injury turned into a major one, we were an hour away from home, at the beginning of an hour-long dinner followed by a three-hour show.  And I was the one with the eye emergency.  Six hours of excruciating pain later, and I was wondering why hubby didn’t carry an eye emergency kit with him wherever he went.  Especially when the first thing he did when we got to his office was to put a blessed numbing drop in my eye that immediately took all the pain away.

I’ve been thinking about that numbing drop.  You see, I’ve had a bit of time to think as I’ve lain around not seeing.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a numbing drop for life?  When things get too painful or difficult, just take a few drops and float away in happiness for awhile…but I suppose that’s been tried a million times over, with never good results.  The bad thing about numbing drops is that they always wear off, leaving you with the same pain as before.  You’re just delaying the inevitable.

I found it interesting that when Chris gave me the numbing drops to take home, he said, “Be careful how often you use these, because using them too much will delay your healing.”  Isn’t that true with emotional pain as well?  We can ignore and put off dealing with it, but it is still there under the surface, and repeatedly “numbing” the pain just delays the healing.  It doesn’t make the problem go away.

Facing my problems is scary.  Especially because facing the problems often turns into facing up to my own shortcomings and insecurities.  Sometimes I don’t want to numb the pain, but my mind does it for me anyway.  I get frustrated with my own brain because it won’t do what I want it to do.  It seems to have a mind of its own, and it decides when to numb and when to allow the pain.

I am the kind of person that likes deadlines and bulleted lists to follow.  So learning that life is really just a series of hurts and healings, nothing ever completely finishing before something else pops up, is really a difficult concept to take.  I want nice, clean beginnings and endings; I want to know that my eye will be better on such-and-such a date, and my heart will be healed on such-and-such a date.  But our hearts are never fully healed, which is why it is even more important to be the bride of the Great Physician.

“If I keep my eyes on God, I won’t trip over my own feet.”  Psalm 25:15