God’s glory in the month the world didn’t end

Dear Cam and Scott

There was this ancient prophecy about the world ending on 21 December 2012 (Google it). Just another thing to make people look feeble and freaked out for nothing and just another thing to remind us that God is the Big Truth. So it’s been another month of life, rich as pudding.

Cam, you and Granny spent two days exploring your new classroom at HCS. You got your bearings, and a new school bag from Father Christmas which you’ve already packed. The Grade 00 playground has been modified especially for you (*WOW*) and all the jungle gyms have been painted super bright. Teacher Karin even laminated your name (stuck on your bunk bed) so you can get used to what it will look like on your locker and the birthday chart and other such classroomy things. I strongly suspect that Teacher Karin is actually not a real person (i.e. angel).

Then you got chicken pox, Cam. (I think you had it, too, Scott, just sans the spots.) We had to cancel a week of back-to-back play dates and fun and we lived like lepers. We made it to Sleeping Beauty at the theatre, though we left at interval because Scott was terrified of the evil fairy and Cam’s eyes were tired of trying. So, a sad heavy week but the down time was good. And I did need a refresher in My-Plans-Are-Not-Always-God’s-Plans 101.

I’ve loved just chilling at home with you both and hanging out with your cousins and aunts and having dinners at friends and walking the streets looking at lights and having real conversations with you, Scott, and solving the world’s problems with you, Cam. We’re doing a blitz on table manners and gustatory values in general. Something’s getting through because yesterday Cam said, ‘I’m going to make a sign for Scott that says, “Remember Scott you must eat all food not just carbohydrates!”’ We've had hot days and thunderstorms and a steady stream of feet through the house for dinners and mince pies and catch-ups and the carpet sorely needs vacuuming. Dad and I celebrated our 8^th anniversary at Alfi’s and we made plans on the paper placemats and we could have been in Rome. Oh my boys, be like your Dad. You’ll change your generation, and probably the world.

We flew to George last week while Dad and Lola held the (quiet) fort and Dad continued to solve the ocular holiday crises of the city, working even longer and later than normal. Cam, you were very anxious about the flight and all the unknowns but the reality was thrilling and you loved it. Scott screamed going up and screamed going down. Both times. The iPad saved my sanity, though still it’s quite tricky going to the ladies’ room with three bags and two children and making sure that none of them is stolen. We spent three beautiful days at Nature’s Valley. We were in the water more than we were out and the sand and sun and salty mountain smells made me feel like I can do life for another year, for sure.

Scott, you loved the water a little too much. You’d wander in, deeper and deeper and deeper, Ophelia-style… You didn’t seem perturbed by the near drownings. You are transfixed by every living creature, breathless and wide-eyed and incessantly asking for ‘Animals! Animals!’ You ask me longingly every day, ‘Granny? Grampa? Beach?’

Cam, you were so vibrant – collecting shells and insects and skills like fishing and paddle skiing. After catching your first fish – off the beach with a real rod like Grampa – you were proud and wistful: ‘Pirates eat fish…’ ‘So do we,’ I replied. You corrected me. ‘No Mom. We eat fish fingers.’ You also kept saying, ‘Mom! I’ll remember today forever! I’ll remember this wonderful day forever! This has been my favourite day!’

Christmas was tremendous. The Reyburn and Ferreira clans gathered at our place for pudding and general hilarity on Christmas Eve; then it was early morning unwrappings and croissants and church and lovely lunch with the de Kocks and van Reenens and then the sweet-sad-quiet aftermath.

I’m glad the world didn’t end in this season of worship and hope and peace. Our times are in his hands.

All my love and gratitude for another year of so much joy,

Mom

xx

Stories with Granny

Ice-creams on the beach

The first fish (of two)!

Nici and Cam

Cam and Uncle Gav

Scott promptly did the puzzles he unwrapped...

(I have no idea why Cam had taken off his pants at this point.)

Cam, wearing as many Christmas presents as possible...

250 words on how you’re finishing 2012

Cameron – December 2012:

Today you were suddenly tall enough – and so excited – to reach all the light switches. You’re kind of OCD about closing all the little windows on your advent calendar (can’t think where you get that).  You asked me, ‘If Dad is the head of the house, who is the feet?’ You add, ‘…I should think,’ to the end of statements – the influence of Enid Blyton and C. S. Lewis (I should think) because we’re done with the Faraway Tree and we’re onto Narnia. You may have chicken pox (or, in Scott-speak, chiggen pock). You’ve had a headache and today the number of mozzie bites all over your body steadily increased. And they don’t look like mozzie bites anymore. Your thirst for knowledge humbles me. Every day you ask me how-what-where-why-when and you drink in definitions of words like antagonise and bachelor and society (‘So that’s like, the public?’). The world comes at you so differently. Yesterday Scott was cold in the pool; you said, ‘But I don’t hear him shiver?’ You remind me every day: ‘Mom! Ask me what was my favourite part of today and what was my not favourite part.’ Then: ‘Mom, what was your favourite part of the day and what was your not favourite part or haven’t you got to it yet?’ Your freckles make you positively edible. You’re super chuffed to drink out of a grownup-real-mug. You are scarily not scared of heights. You are God’s glory to me in the mundane and the magnificent.

Scott – December 2012:

You let go the swing – wave to me proud, like, look-Ma-no-hands. You get breathless about birds and aeroplanes and you love big trees and big sky. Softest heart – aggressively affectionate – my Scott-Scott. At supper you make us play your copying game. Hands on hips ‘til we all take your silent Simon-says cues. You prompt Cam – you get that he doesn’t see like you.  You copy him, too, scrutinizing things too close – pupils constricting.  I can tell what you’re singing from the sort-of tune though the words are hit and miss and achingly cute. Quite a temper, you have. Sharing is caring, my love. The cause-and-effect pathways are forming in your brain i.e. ‘Note to self: she’s taking out the wooden spoon. Do not throw cucumber again.’ You tell me long, riveting stories and I understand 20-25%, approximately. You can do the 24-piece Noddy puzzle all on your own in ten minutes and then you help your brother. It’s getting easier to take you to restaurants. I open the front door sometimes to find you and Maria burying yourselves under a blanket on the couch. She’s giggling and you’re stage-whispering. ‘Hide! Hide!’ You couldn’t find the Lego man’s hat this afternoon so you put a steering wheel on his head. Pure genius. When it’s your turn to choose the bedtime audio book you pretend to decide (‘Ummm….’) but always it’s, ‘Heidi!’ You’re asleep before Clara ever sees the Alps. You are God’s glory to me in the mundane and the magnificent. 

A good Friday full of broken things and goodbyes

The day starts with the sacred caffeinated ritual of the two enormous mugs. But the orange one with cows on it has one of those thin lines on the inside. Which means it’ll crack pretty soon and I will have to go to Clicks and get two new sacred enormous mugs because maybe it’s not about the bike but for me it is totally about the mug.

Teeth brushed juice bottles packed ‘bye Dad!’ seatbelts clicked reverse. The lawns in our street are green mowed geometry and there’s recycling on the driveways and the world seems so fixed. Except that last week there was a gunshot in a room behind walls a stone’s throw from our jungle gym because a neighbour just couldn’t do life anymore. And I think, behind serene suburban doors everyone has coffee-mug cracks.

It is Cam’s last day at Heavenly Tots. I ask him what he’ll miss the most: Teacher Hendriette and the hotdogs. The front seat of my car balances a bright pile of teachery presents and the traffic gets blurry because we’re sliding the bookmark out of this four-year chapter of Maltabella porridge and painting and playing. It’s been a weighty chunk of Cam’s miraculous so-far-so-good story.

I get to St Alban’s with much less mascara. And then even less because there’s another letter from a College boy I’ve loved. I have redone my report comments, which were eaten by the system. I’ve transferred my life from old laptop to new. There’s seven years of stuff stored now on a hard drive hidden in my – well I guess I shouldn’t say where it’s hidden – and I think about how much of my hope is in devices with screens and the confidence that surely our house – or wherever the hard drive is hidden – won’t burn down but how if it does I’m kind of screwed in terms of tangible memories.

Yesterday I started packing up my corner of the English office. I blew dust off the good times and tried to shove my sadness into the plastic sleeves of past papers. Next year tugs hard at my sleeve. The changes are rolling in fast and frightening like the thrill of a summer storm.

Our last exam comes in. We’re marking like zombies and decide to carry on tomorrow. So I fetch the boys from Nanna and we’re home at last. It’s hot and it’s Friday and I’m too tired to be responsible so I agree to Scott’s ecstatic request for Monsters, Inc.

I get dressed for my last carol service at the St Alban’s Cathedral. Murray gets home to take over supper-bath-Bible-pillow-fighting. I drive with John, Bruce and Yol and I think how much I’ll miss these people. The cathedral hums and swelters with incense and staff in academic gowns and peace-on-earth parents and boys exam-free and expectant. I sit with the Kean and Kim and the nine lessons begin punctuated by the choir and the carols that build and swell and it’s all rather glorious. We get to O come all ye faithful and I think of my Gran and I’m homesick for the Christmases of my childhood. I glance around to take it all in and lose the war on my mascara for good.

It’s been a wonderful day, really. I’m grateful that God is the great Fixer of broken things. I’m grateful for God in my past bringing life in the now from seeds planted then. I’m grateful for God in my future holding steady.

‘Where is another God like you?’ – Micah 7:18

 Cam completes his first 24-piece puzzle with Aunty Manty!

 Trying on ALL Mom's shoes... Eek.

 Connie, Cam, Hendriette and Baby

Last swimming lesson with Tannie Lette

30 gifts in November

Dear Cam and Scott

It’s the crazy-busy eleventh month and the air crackles with static. Everything feels charged and significant. My senses are heightened to lightness and laughter. I’m simultaneously measuring my words and my tears carefully and prayerfully and my eyes are wide open to life. Finish strong finish strong finish strong pounds in my head.

Scott, you are ending the year as a truly terrific two-year-old. You’re into talking and tantrums and trucks and you’re terrified of thunder and you laugh a lot and run a lot and you’re still deeply in love with me, which I’ll treasure for just a little longer because I know Dad is about to usurp me as hero. Cam, you are into your last weeks with the Penguin Class where you’ve been happy and loved and brave. But it’s time. You need to take your heartsong and your happy feet to new oceans where you’ve got bigger fish to fry. I’m into the goodbyes at St Alban’s and I’m mentally reconfiguring my identity into a strange freedom where school bells don’t ring. Dad is gearing up for his busiest month of the year just when the rest of the world kicks off its shoes for Christmas.

So in this heavy month shot through with hope, I’m reading a book that Aunty Terry Brauer gave me. Wow. It’s called One Thousand Gifts and it’s about how the secret to joy – which is kind of what everyone wants, really – lies hidden before our very eyes in what Jesus did the night he was betrayed. He took bread, gave thanks, broke it and shared it. The Greek for gave thanks is eucharisteo. The root word is charis – grace – which is derived from chara – joy. He received the bread as God’s grace and there was joy in that. It’s all over Scripture. The thing that precedes the miracle is always eucharisteo. So living the miracle life – the life of joy – is rooted in thanksgiving. That’s why I blog here for you, my bears. I want you to live the good life – the full life – the deeply aware life of abiding wonder. I want you to learn eucharisteo. Here and now, even in bread. Find God’s glory in the mundane and the magnificent. Celebrate life.

And now I can hear the cynics. ‘You’re so naïve. So trite. Getting all excited about Christmas lights and foam on your cappuccino and calling it God’s glory and goodness. Whatever. Where the hell is God in the tragedies of this world and how can you be so bloody cheerful?’ I know that’s what some people think. Because sometimes it’s what I think – like tonight when the News is ugly with rhinos poached and Gaza bombed and Bangladeshi slums on fire and vigilante violence on the Cape Flats.

Ann Voskamp has the exquisite, eloquent answer I’ve been looking for:

I think how God-glory in [everyday things] might seem trifling. Even offensive, to focus the lens of a heart on the minute, in a world mangled and maimed and desperately empty.

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is the joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks. (page 58, One Thousand Gifts, 2012)

So anyway, I thought I’d write a gift list of 30 things – one for each day of November – because even in the unknowns and the challenges, I am deeply grateful. Soulfully joyful. Because to choose to be thankful – to name the gifts God gives – brings them into sharp focus and the sea of blessings is no longer a blur.

I thank God for these November gifts:

1.       A Cape robin on the bird feeder eating my first attempt at homemade granola bars.

2.       Very-high very-beautiful heels.

3.       Out-of-the-blue phone calls asking, ‘What’s up? Why aren’t you blogging?’

4.       Gifts to be wrapped.

5.       New tyres on my car.

6.       An old lady who has gone Home and whose suffering is over.

7.       Cam’s Christmas present ideas for his teachers. (One is getting a wreath for her front door, one is getting a string of golden tinsel, and one is getting… wait for it… muesli.)

8.       Scott’s chubby tight elated hugs.

9.       Being musically plebeian and unsophisticated enough to totally love Boney-M playing in the supermarkets.

10.   Questions I can’t answer. (e.g. Cam: ‘How do rocket ships come back to earth if there is no gravity in space?’)

11.   Teenage boys who take the time to write letters to their English teacher.

12.   Lettuce and spinach seeds that have been magicked into baby green banners of life and yum.

13.   Long talks in the dark with Dad about life even though we’re exhausted and should spend the time sleeping.

14.   People with fascinating stories to tell.

15.   Granny’s 62^nd birthday.

16.   God’s favour, and God in our future.

17.   Memories in the stains and seams of your newborn baby clothes.

18.   Lights in our windows.

19.   Fresh cut lawn on a Thursday.

20.   Hearing the gate and knowing Dad is home.

21.   People eating, laughing and staying late in our home.

22.   Duvets that fit in the washing machine and dry in an hour on hot windy days leaving no trace of vomit.

23.   Colleagues who quite ridiculously and unnecessarily insist on hooking me up to a drip and driving me home when I faint at school. [True story. Blush. Cringe.]

24.   Birdsong and dawn light and waking up to new mercies.

25.   Butter that’s been out of the fridge long enough to be soft and smeary.

26.   Bargains.

27.   Farewell speeches that make me cry.

28.   Hiding and whispering with Cam under the coffee table.

29.   Scott asking me to sing Jesus loves me at bedtime.

30.   Hope.

You got a list?

Love always,

Mom

xx