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I love the simplicity

When we moved back to my home town last year, one of the hardest parts of leaving our old community was leaving our church. Having gone almost ten years of sporadic church attendance and almost zero sense of belonging, we had found a place to call home for almost five years.  A real family. We were involved.  We were eager.  We were loved.

Then we decided to move.  A year after making the decision final by putting our house on the market, we are still 100% certain we made the right decision.  Absolutely no regrets.  But my heart still aches for my old church.

Yesterday, we began the process of officially joining our new church. We visited a handful of congregations last summer when we moved, and we chose this one quite honestly because it was very similar to our old church. Eerily similar.  I’ll spare you the list, but it’s safe to say we have a type when it comes to church. And not just because of denomination. This is some very specific stuff.

We were attending regularly by September, because the kids love Sunday School, and I love church. I like hymns and organ music.  I like good sermons and insightful scripture readings. I like the bell choir and the coffee between services.  But I love church.  Love it. I wasn’t ready to join officially last fall, because it felt too soon. Like cheating on old church. But this is a new year and I’m ready.

Our last Easter at our old church. Any excuse for an adorable picture of my kiddos.

During new member class yesterday, my new pastor perfectly articulated why I love church so much: community. He explained how hard it is to do this Christian thing alone. Christianity, he said, is about your relationship with God and your relationship with God’s people.  The end. I love the simplicity of that explanation. And I love what it can mean for people who don’t choose to attend church, or believe in God for that matter.

My dad didn’t attend church. When I was a kid, I would ask him, “Dad, how come you don’t have to go to church?” (The fact that I “had” to go to church was one of the reasons I left that church right after confirmation.  I didn’t love it.) And my dad replied, “Me and the Naz have an understanding.” Jesus of Nazareth.  The Naz.  My dad was sooooooooo cool, right? Anyway.  “I don’t have to go to church, because the Naz knows how I feel. That’s enough.” My dad fought and suffered in Vietnam by draft order. It tortured him every day he was there and every day after until he died in 1996. I didn’t know that when I was 9 and trying to understand why he didn’t come to church with us, and I didn’t know that until after he was gone. Once I knew it, though, I understood completely. His relationship with God’s people was a little complicated. His community was elsewhere, but he had it.  His relationship with the Naz was elsewhere, but it existed.  I know he’ll greet me in heaven.

A friend of mine asked me when we were in college, “Do you think I’m going to hell?” He was a proclaimed atheist, but the question alone makes me re-label him agnostic. “Why do you think I would think that?” Answer a question with a question. Probably I was in the middle of freshman psych. “I don’t know. I guess I wonder about that, if you’re judging me.” I asked him if he believed the world cared about him.  If he cared about the world. He said yes.  I said that’s enough of God for me. Plus, I don’t really believe in hell.

God loves you. The world loves you. You love God’s people. You love the world. It’s just another way to say the same thing.

My relationships with God and my relationship with God’s people is best nurtured in church, because that’s what works for ME. It’s actually kind of lazy. It all happens from there with little effort on my part. I don’t have to seek service opportunities or giving opportunities or educational opportunities.  They are all right there. I just sign up. (Picking a church that offers service and giving and education that align with your goals and convictions is pretty key.  That’s a little tip from me to you.)

We are slowly getting involved. We are just shy of eager. But I know we are already loved. Soon, I’ll stop calling it our new church. We will foster our relationship with the Naz in an awesome new community of people, who are so ready to welcome us. My new pastor also said in new member class, “Have a cookie.  We like to eat and we like to sing.” So there’s that, too. Amen to cookies.

This just isn’t right

At the age of 40, my spouse became a firefighter.  Fifty men and women applied for the ten spots available on the part-time…

…this is where I was in a brand new blog post when my phone rang. I found it just now as I opened up Word to write something else.  It was still here, unsaved and waiting to be finished. I was so proud of myself that immediately after the kids left for school I had opened up the ol’ laptop and finally started writing a new blog post. Usually, I scroll Facebook while I leisurely sip my coffee, enjoying the quiet after the always-crazy-get-ready-routine. It had been too long.  This essay was going to be two things: an ode to my hero husband, as he was about to work his first shift in our new town and a testament to doing whatever you want to in life, no matter how old you are or how stuck you might feel.  You can reinvent yourself.  It was going to be good.  I had an outline and everything.

Then that pesky phone rang.

It was my best friend.  She calls me all the time, so no alarm bells went off.  Plenty of people could’ve called me at 8:30am on a Tuesday that would’ve made me immediately think, “Uh-oh.” But not Heather.  Heather actually prefers the phone for talking.  She’s so old-school.

“Hey, girl, what’s up?”

“Are you in a position right now where you can hear some very bad news?”

This is where my heart dropped. (Note: this is excellent practice when you are the bearer of bad news.  ASK.) In the three seconds it took for me to say yes and for her to tell me what actually happened, about four possibilities ran through my head. I was not even close.  It was way worse than I could have even imagined.

Our friend died. Our healthy, 36-year-old friend, who had loved us and entertained us and amazed us for 18 years, died.

So I did not finish my blog.  I screamed and I sobbed.  And then I got dressed.  Because my friends were coming to pick me up.  And we would drive in a car for an hour to get to our other friends.  And we would spend the day together. We would cry and laugh together, share pictures and make plans.  Every few minutes someone would say, “This just isn’t right.”

And of course it isn’t.  Of course.  It isn’t right for a healthy mom of two to die.  It isn’t right for a loving spouse to die.  It isn’t right for a professor and activist to die.  It isn’t right for a loyal, hilarious, kind, smart friend to die.  But this is not an ode to Dr. Suzanne Berg (but you can read an excellent one here). I am not ready to write an ode to my friend that died just 15 days ago.

That’s Suzanne to my left, with her hands on my shoulder and waist. We didn’t notice until we were putting pictures together for her funeral that she always found her way to the center of photos. It’s perfect.

But I am ready to write this: holy fucking shit. People die.  Real people you love just die.  This is blunt and possibly callous, but shit. I have been to 23 funerals in my 36 years.  I know death.  Both of my parents are dead.  All of my grandparents are dead.  Death is not new to me.  But something about this death, this sudden and inexplicable death, has shaken me to my very core.  And here’s what I have to say about it: do the things.  Do them all.

I find myself in the most cliché state of mind here.  “Life is short! Make each moment count!” Blah, dee, blah, blah, blah, I know! BUT.  It’s SO stinkin’ TRUE. When my mom died, I was super sad. Really, really super sad. But I didn’t feel my own life was precious.  My mom did not live the healthiest lifestyle and she was certainly not 36. We had some unresolved issues requiring me to come to some terms. My mom’s death taught me to leave nothing unsaid. Suzanne’s death is teaching me to leave nothing undone.

On Friday, the same friend that picked me up 15 days ago will pick me up again.  We will meet our other friends again, but this time we’ll meet them in a rental house many hours from here.  For a vacation we planned in December, which was many, many, MANY years in the making. That Suzanne was supposed to attend with us.

Let that sink in.  She died just 17 days before our girls’ trip. All but two of us hadn’t seen her in more than two years, because she also lived several hours from here.  I can only think about that for a few seconds before I completely lose it.  And while we texted nearly daily, she was the type of friend whose presence really mattered.  She was the best in-person friend.

So no more waiting years for vacations.  No more thinking you’ll see someone next time they come to town, or you’ll visit them when things calm down a bit.  No more binging on Netflix instead of going to meet your friends for a drink. Say “YES!” when you’re invited.  If you are not invited, plan the thing yourself.  Then invite all the people.  And tell the people you love them.  And mean it.  Because people fucking die.  But even if they do, you don’t cancel the vacation, because you don’t know when you’ll see the rest of those friends again.  And we will have ALL THE FUN in the name of Suzanne Valerie Loen Berg.  Not just this weekend, but forever.

Photo credit: Amber Bell Portraiture (@amberbellportraiture) Suzanne was very lucky to have such a talented friend snapping her photo from time to time.

Hooray for our small family

Last year, my mom died.  Three years ago, my father-in-law died.  And twenty-one years ago, my dad died.  All four of my spouse’s grandparents and all four of my grandparents died long before we had kids.  Seven of the eight of them died long before we even met.

My kids have one grandparent.

And while I am supremely blessed in the awesome mother-in-law department, she is 81 years old.  And lives two hours away.  And my babies (I will call them that forever, so just hush) are grandchildren numbers 14 and 15 for her.  And numbers one through 13 are all adults, because my spouse is the youngest of seven and all of his siblings had kids long ago.  My own sister and her spouse have no kids.

Usually, I’m pretty woeful about all of that.  I grew up seeing my grandparents weekly.  My cousins were my extra siblings.  My kids will never have that.  Their cousins play with them at functions to be nice, but are mostly their babysitters (really good ones).  I get easily jealous of my friends whose parents fight over who gets to watch the kids.  Of my friends who have never had to pay a babysitter.  Of the pictures of cousins lined up in matching PJs under the Christmas tree.

But then I have friends describe the five Christmas celebrations they had to squeeze in this weekend.  Or the friend whose son, because of different divorces or other situations throughout the family, has TEN grandparents.  TEN.  But all ten of those people want to spend time with him over the holidays.  And buy him gifts.  Can you imagine getting grandparent-spoiled by TEN people!??! For the love. All weekend in my favorite Facebook parent group (yes, good ones do exist), there was story after story of family drama and fights about how much time to spend at whose house on which days.

So, on Christmas especially, but often other holidays, too, I say: hooray for my little family.  Hooray for no one fighting over our presence.  Hooray for having so few obligations we don’t hardly know what to do with ourselves.  Of course I miss my parents and grandparents the most at Christmas, but that is unavoidable.  Instead of focusing on the missing, we can focus on what we do have.  Or rather, what we don’t have and how that can be viewed as a benefit. We aren’t displaced, we don’t live far away from the families we have, we just don’t have anywhere to be but with each other.

My aforementioned awesome mother-in-law decided long before I was in the picture never to celebrate holidays on the actual days, so she never has to compete with in-law families.  It is more important to her for all to be present.  The date on the calendar varies each year for each holiday.  This year, we had Christmas with them on the 23rd.  My mom’s family will have a gathering on New Year’s Day.  Those are our only obligations this entire season.  And frankly, if we didn’t go to one of them, no one would get upset either.

Actual Christmas Eve and Day were ours alone. We went to church and made dinner. Looked at Christmas lights and watched a movie. We danced in the kitchen and put the kids to bed early. We slept in (as much as kids on Christmas morning will allow) and ate breakfast slowly, knowing we had absolutely no schedule.  We opened presents and played with them.  We stayed in jammies ALL DAY.  We watched another movie.  We made pizza.  We ate candies and cookies and to the very extent of the word, we just relaxed.

I might like huge rooms of people playing silly present-opening games.  I might like a long table set with fine china and crystal, ready for meals labored over for days.  I might even like entire extended families in matching PJs.

But I sure am happy with what we have.  In the future, we might even be the family that goes to the tropics for Christmas.  For now, our little family of four in our little house for two days straight is just the perfect celebration.

Happy holidays, no matter how many times you celebrate them!