Bo Stern

I’m speaking out of town this week instead of blogging, but I wanted to share this great book review from my friend, Annie from A Spoonful of Sugar.  It’s snowing this week in Bend, but that’s not stopping me from formulating a summer reading list and after reading Annie’s post, Bread and Wine will definitely be on it!   Enjoy!

“It’s about what happens when we come together, slow down, open our homes, look into one another’s faces, listen to one another’s faces, listen to one another’s stories.  It happens when we leave the office and get a sitter and skip our workouts every so often to celebrate a birthday or an accomplishment or a wedding or a birth, when we break out of the normal clockwork of daily life and pop the champagne on a cold, gray Wednesday for no other reason than the fact that the faces we love are gathered around our table.  It happens when we enter the joy and the sorrow of the people we love, and we join together at the table to feed one another and be fed, and while it’s not strictly about food, it doesn’t happen without it.  Food is the starting point, the common ground, the thing to hold and handle, the currency we offer to one another.” ~ Bread & Wine, by Shauna Niequist

 

 

Aaron and I love having people in our home.  We love lots of laughter, loud voices, and numerous stories being told at once.  We have a small home with rarely enough room to entertain our many times large groups of people, and yet we do it anyway.  We gather together to laugh, celebrate, pass time, reminisce, make new memories, sometimes cry, and always eat.  Sometimes it’s dinner, and sometimes it’s dessert.  Sometimes it’s hot coffee with slightly sweet, freshly whipped cream.  Sometimes it’s right out of the oven chocolate chip cookies.  During Christmas it’s plain sugar cookies that everyone decorates themselves.  In the summer it’s a tropical mixed drink and Mekenzie’s delicious guacamole with Juanita’s tortilla chips.  No matter the time of year, or time of day, we love to open our home to those we love!

I have been a huge fan of Shauna Niequist for the past couple of years, and her newest book, Bread & Wine, does not disappoint.  It is exactly what the title states: “a love letter to life around the table.”  It brings simplicity to an act that has become obsolete in our society today.  Inviting people into our homes carries with it a vulnerability that can be difficult to overcome.  Fear of what others may think of our messy home, or our lack of skill in the kitchen keeps us from experiencing deep relationship with one another.  The kind that happens when we pause for the day, look at each other around the table, share about the good and the bad, and nourish ourselves with food.

Throughout this gem of a book Shauna shares her own experiences, giving us hope to share life with others around our own tables.  Her stories touch the heart and have you feeling like you are sitting across from her dipping a crusty piece of bread in oil and vinegar, while sipping on a glass of red wine.  It’s delightful, full of soul, and filled with recipes that will make your mouth water!

For my very own “Bread & Wine” experiment I invited our dear friends Corey & Whitney and their sweet as pie little boy, Greyson, to be our guinea pigs for a full meal of new recipes from the book.  We dined on a pan of Annette’s Enchiladas, Esquites, black beans warmed with a couple of tablespoons of barbecue sauce and finished the evening with Dark Chocolate Sea Salted Toffee with vanilla ice cream.  And as we dined we shared about our day, smiled over our sweet little ones as they munched on crackers together, and laughed our way through stories told.  The food was easy to make and delicious!

This book is worth purchasing and reading cover to cover as soon as you can get your hands on it.   Curl up with it, get lost in the stories, and then invite those that you love to sit around your own table and share life.  You won’t regret it!

Psalm 23:1 The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.

This, I believe, will be the theme of my week.  It will be my mantra and motto; my hope and strength.

There is nothing I lack.  Really, nothing?  Not hope, not money, not romance, not satisfaction, not joy, not purpose, not …anything?  It’s such a big statement that I’m not always sure what to do with it.  Put it up on a shelf where I don’t need to deal with the incongruities or stuff it into a small box of positive confession where my expectations are manipulated to make the promise seem true. 

I don’t think this is talking about never wanting anything more in life.  I think it’s talking about the much bigger issue of never letting what we lack make us feel Shepherdless.  I have some bleeding wounds right now and I would rather not have them, but I also have a Shepherd, so I lack nothing.  I would like to have our future fully dialed in and secure, but I have a Shepherd who feeds me day-by-day and so I lack nothing.  I would love for my husband to be healthy and strong, but we have a Shepherd, so we lack nothing we need to walk through this temporary, Shadowy valley.   All my wants, needs and secret dreams are valid, but they don’t have the power to make me feel alone, unloved or incomplete.

I have Him, so I am full.  I am led.  I am whole.  Anything added to that is beautiful, but not essential for my joy to overflow. 

With hope for a well-fed week,

Bo

Let me start by saying:  I certainly do not speak for everyone in crisis.  There are a  million different kinds of people and a million different kinds of battle.  I’ve tried to stick to things I’ve heard many times from many people, but this list reflects my two years in the trenches more than anything else.  

1. Sometimes your life is hard to look at.   I will try to attend your daughter’s wedding and I will be so happy for her.  But I will look away when her father walks her down the aisle and I will leave before the daddy-daughter dance.  These things are too much for me.  I’m not mad; I’m just swimming through some deep-water feelings about the future.  I don’t need hugs or help; I just need a little room to breathe and none of it is your fault.  This is my heartache.  For some, it’s seeing an anniversary celebration on facebook, or flirtatious banter between a husband and wife.  For others, it’s witnessing the baby milestone while imagining how old their own would be.  Different things are difficult for different people, just know that while we love you, sometimes your world is hard to look at. We know you have problems, too, and we’re not jealous of your life – we’re jealous for the life we used to have before our battle broke out (or the life we’re wishing for that hasn’t quite started yet).   Action point for armies: don’t stop inviting us into your lives, but give us grace when we need to look away for a bit.

2.       How much we feel like talking about our battle can vary wildly.  Some days are very difficult and so I will answer questions abruptly in order to save us both from my messy emotional breakdown.  Some days it’s very cathartic to talk about it.  So, how can you as my friend, know which day it is?  You can’t.  And this is when it’s hard to be you (and I’m sorry); but what you can do is ask:  “How are things with Steve?” followed up immediately by, “I understand if you’d rather not talk about it.”  Perfect.  You’ve shown me you care and also given me an easy exit should I choose to use it.   And let me add – even when I don’t feel I can give a detailed answer, it really does matter to me that people ask. (So thank you, sweet friends, for the question.  And thank you for understanding when I can’t linger over the answer.)

3.       We’re secretly afraid you’ll grow weary and disappear.  We don’t fear it because we doubt your character, we fear it because we would probably choose to leave our battlefield too, if given the option.  Through tears, I type this:  I can’t imagine what I would do if I lost my friends as well.  I just can’t imagine.  I know so many people who run out of steam in supporting a friend and then they’re embarrassed to step back into the battle again.  Don’t be embarrassed…just give a call and say, “I miss you.  Can I bring over some mac and cheese?”

4.        We still want to fight for you, too.  Don’t stop telling us what you’re going through, don’t stop asking us to pray.  It gives me comfort to know I’m not the only one in a fierce fight and it gives me courage to know that I still have something to offer the world outside my war. 

 5.  We love you.   And we’d be lost without your friendship.  Even when we lack the strength to say it or show it, please just know it.

Comments are open – I’d love to hear thoughts from both sides of the battle.

A few things I’m loving on this, the first Friday in our beloved month of April (Steve’s birthday month!):

These aprons.  They’re dreamy.

This baby.  He’s dreamy, too.

This nail polish for spring.

Essie: Mango Bango

This book.

 This web site, because it has helped us rally an extraordinarily awesome army.  As Steve’s condition progresses, I find myself less able to do everything that needs doing and I can’t tell you how this web site has streamlined the coordination of meals and tasks which spread the load out over many hands.  I share this for two reasons.  First, if you are experiencing a crisis, creating your own Lotsa Helping Hands page is the first thing I recommend.  Secondly, if you’d like to be a part of our little band of amazing helpers, you can shoot your email address to wparnell@westsidechurch.org and she will add you to the crew.  Then you’ll be notified when we add a new task and can choose to fill that spot or not, based on your availability. No pressure, no phone calls, no problem!

That’s it for Friday.  Today, I am wishing you a song in your heart and a spring in your step!

Bo

Today, for the very first time, I opened the books Steve’s doctor gave me on the day he was diagnosed two years ago.  They are filled with helpful information, but I wasn’t ready to read them before, nor was I ready to re-visit that day.  So the books had been sitting in the corner of an unused room in our house, waiting for a day when I needed them more than I feared them.

Courage almost always works like that for me.  It’s theory until it’s necessary.

I wait and wait and steel my will.  I stand on the edge looking over into the great abyss.  I wish I could be anywhere else, doing anything else.   And then I close my eyes, hold my breath and step over the rim of the known and into the gaping Somewhere only He knows.  I remember a song in the 90′s called it the “Glorious Unknown” and while that’s an awesome phrase, it’s far too lofty a notion for what I feel about going where I’ve never gone before.

This season of ALS is a new frontier for us.  It’s pushing us into places we’ve never been to read books we’ve never read about decisions we’ve never wanted to make.  It doesn’t feel glorious, but I do feel brave.

This season of ministry is a new frontier for me.  It’s pushing me into places I’ve never been to talk to people I’ve never met about the God who makes us able to do what we never thought we could.  It doesn’t feel glorious, but He does.  He is glorious.

And that, for now, is enough.

 Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

How are you doing with courage today?

She woke up and rubbed her weary eyes, trying to wish the memories away.

He was gone..  Gone in the worst sort of way.  Gone, not in a blaze of glory but in endless hours of agony. Not with a shout of victory, but with an anguished cry to His Father.

Many were incredulous that he was really dead.  Some couldn’t believe and thought perhaps the whole thing was staged.  She gave a bitter laugh, and looked down at her stained hands.  They could ask her and she would tell them.  Oh, would she tell them!  Her eyes had seen His body, destroyed by Roman guards with nothing better to do. Her fingers had helped to tend him after it was finished, and she remembered being so gentle handling his flesh-torn-from-bone.  She knew being careful was silly; knew He was no longer there.  But she longed to somehow surround his broken body not just in cloth, but in tenderness and love. She wondered if maybe she worked with extra affection, it might retroactively cut through the pain of His past twelve hours.  Though it seemed an impossible idea, she hoped to care for to Him in death the way that He had cared for her in life.  His outrageous love had worked backwards in her life.  It soothed old wounds and rearranged painful memories and softened hardened places in her heart.

She closed her eyes tight again at the memories that careened through her mind; weak and weary from a sleepless night.  A walk might help.   But how would it help?  It would feel like a search for Him and she knew He would not be found.

He had said it Himself.  In fact, she had jumped at the sound of His voice as it tumbled out through His bloody lips with surprising force.   Finished.   He said it.  She heard it.   And He had sounded so angry – like He was done with this world that had treated Him so viciously.

His words came on the heels of the darkest three hours she had ever lived through.  People say the weather is always crazy this time of year, but this was not ordinary cloud-cover in the middle of the day.  It was dark.  Pitch black.   Clearly, the sun couldn’t bear to watch the injustice taking place on that wicked hill and she was somehow comforted knowing that even nature was on her side in loving Him.  It was at that moment that she stopped praying for deliverance and started praying for mercy.  “Please,” she wept into the darkness, hoping to be heard by a God who had never seemed more invisible, “If You will not set Him free, please let Him die.”  She must have said broken pieces of that sentence a million times until she finally heard His words.

It is finished.

A stunned hush had swept over the crowd.  No one knew what to say or do.  This rabid mob had been hungry for His death for hours, chanting and cheering and at one point she felt that if they could, they would lap up His blood in their hate-fueled insanity.  And now that the deed was done they were…silent?  No raised fists?  No victory lap?  No laurel wreath to drape over these small-minded “winners”?  She glanced surreptitiously at the chief tormentors and thought she saw something that looked like confusion, maybe tinged with sorrow, or maybe she was just seeing through her own heart.  But one thing was certain: the glee was gone.  Jesus was finished, yes, but so were they.

Gruesome.  The day was gruesome from beginning to end, and He was gone and she was tired and alone and where would she go from here?  Peter had once told her about Jesus offering him a clean getaway after a big group of their friends had abandoned Him.  Peter had answered, “Where else would I go?” and he had meant it, she knew he had really, truly  meant it – that there was no one else worth following.  And now, even Peter was gone, swept away in the madness of a day that should have never been.  She wasn’t angry at him, though she might be in  days to come when she had more energy to invest in an emotion other than grief.  She wasn’t mad at Peter; but she couldn’t stop replaying his words:  “Where else would I go?  Only He had the words of Life.”

Where else, indeed?  She wasn’t ready to ask God for help.  The God who could have shown up yesterday  and chose instead to look away?  No.  She would go it alone for a day and see how she felt about God’s indifference tomorrow.

So she would rest and wait and maybe visit the tomb, but this would be a silent Saturday.

It’s interesting to me that we call the worst day in all of history “Good Friday.”  Maybe we intuitively understand that the best thing in our lives came out of the darkest moment in His.

I think Paul got it exactly right with this bold statement:   “I want to know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering…”

I don’t like suffering, but I keep running into evidence that it’s important.  Suffering sets the stage for victory, making all things possible.

Unless a seed falls and dies, it cannot bear fruit.

When our seeds of hope are buried in the soil of suffering, everything falls away from them except real, true life.   And it feels like all is lost and all is winter.

Then bursting forth in glorious day…

I love this Beautiful Friday.

Happy Easter,

Bo

Photo credit.

I saw a movie once where a man’s leg was trapped beneath a fallen tree on the shore of the ocean while the tide was coming in.  My stomach knotted as wave after wave closed in on him and he sat desperately, hoping for a miraculous rescue, trying to survive the increasing onslaught of the water until finally the ocean won.

It was horrific, but it is also the closest thing I’ve ever seen to living with ALS.

My courageous friend, Patty.

While you know many people would love to rescue you, none of them know how.  So you sit and wait and try not to be afraid.  Your friends sit and wait and watch, feeling helpless and inadequate, trying to make your trapped-beneath-a-tree life more comfortable and distract you from the nearness of the waves.

My courageous friends, Brian & Jenny.

My sweet friend, Jane, who often comments here on my blog, lost her husband on Monday to the final wave.   And I was…bereft.  You’d think we’d be immune to that sort of grief…that we’d get used to the dying.  You’d be wrong.  Every time a friend dies, I feel my head go under water too.

Our courageous friend, Pastor Jack Louman

So, I’m here today to be a voice crying from the shore, reminding the world of what we already know:  people are stuck and we have no way to get them out of harm’s way.  Finding a way will cost money and I know that money is very tight.  I know we need it for lots of things.  But changing the world does not come cheap, and this level of rescue is worth every penny.

Bravehearts: Akhil and Steve

Here’s my speech from the ALS Gala.  I hope you like it, but mostly, I hope you’re moved to make a difference for those who are trapped in failing bodies and their families who are desperate to build a life for them in the rising tide.

Donate to make a difference here.

My courageous friend, Jane, with her beloved, Jim.

We sincerely thank you for not looking away,

Bo for Team Stern (and Patty, Randy, Jack, Akhil, Brian, Annie, Bobbie, Ron, Stephanie, Eric, Linda, John, Glen, Fred, Lou, Jeff, Arne and especially Santa Jim Lellman)

Almost two years ago, I wept at my computer while writing this post about my cousin Michelle, who lost her mom and her unborn baby within days of one another.  I told the story in the book as well, because Michelle has been to me such a clear example of someone who grows more beautiful in the most difficult battle.

When their sweet baby, Layla, was stillborn, they said sad goodbyes and buried her in the arms of her grandmother.  Layla was the second baby they had lost that year.

In Romans 8:28, we are promised that He will work all things together for the good of those who love Him.  That verse does not actually say that He works everything out for those who love Him – but that He works them together to make us look more like His own dear son.

I’d like Him to fix everything.  To fill all the empty places.  To repair all that was lost.  But the promise is that He will fill us and repair us.  He works sorrow into beauty inside of us, even when the circumstances don’t seem to agree.  Even when our dreams seem to be delayed or denied.  He is at work.

He is building and creating and weaving His purpose into our lives and sending rain to our thirsty hearts.

Sometimes, however,  His work is not the way we hope it will be…it’s better.  It’s exceedingly, abundantly, outlandishly more beautiful than we could ever have scripted it.  Sometimes, in fact, His work is so good, that we experience a great rush of relief that He never let us hold the pen.

Look what was born onto Michelle & Kirk’s battlefield this fall:

Welcome, Miss Andrea.  You are a long-awaited miracle.

If you or a friend have suffered the pain of losing a child, I highly recommend the book, See You in a Breath, by my friend, Stephanie Nelson.  It’s just $2.99 on Kindle and it’s filled with raw truth and real gold mined from the shadowy valley.

How is He turning beauty to ashes in your life today?  I’d really love to know.

For Beauty,

Bo