All the books say the three-month mark is especially hard after a death. We're rapidly approaching that date, and I can see how this may be one of the uglier parts of loss: AKA REALITY.


The reality is that Ethan—son, brother, friend, more—is gone. We'll not see him again in this life.


Pictures bring reality to the forefront and are hard to see now. Watching videos is still out of the question, but I'm thankful they exist and are there for me when I'm ready to watch them.

Spiritually, supernaturally, I believe with all my heart that he is OK.

Friends and loved ones have reminded me that "our days are numbered" on God's calendar. When the Grim Reaper pops out of your particular advent calendar window, that's that, the jig is up. According to my calculations, Ethan had 9,478 days on this earth, almost 26 years.

It's the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, but there it is.

I do believe in an afterlife. I believe God has a plan that is full of overwhelming mercy and grace we tend to be too small-minded, critical and judgmental to comprehend. (Let everyone in??? No way!!! Where's our wall???) I also believe—and science agrees with me—that energy cannot be lost, only changed. What that energy changes into is subject to interpretation (and all our interpretations are probably inaccurate on one level or another.)

What's hard now is the realization I'm not going to see Ethan's sparkling blue-gray eyes twinkling over a joke again, or his bright smile telling me everything would be OK, except in pictures. I'm not going to get to pester him about his dreadlocks, his braided beard, his weird tattoos, or his strange attire (he never failed to shock me with a new, strange accessory or outfit in 25 years). I won't get to argue with him about philosophy or religion or whether humanity is worth trying to save. I'll never cuddle his children (he had an appointment for a vasectomy scheduled, I found out after his death), and I'll never be the mother of the groom at his wedding. That said, I know his spirit/soul visited me in a dream after his death. We argued vehemently about how long toenails should be. Believe me, if the subject had come up in the flesh, the conversation would have been the same.

I keep running across random FB posts and think, "I should share that with E!" And then I remember he won't see it unless he's surveilling social media from the ether. Somehow I think (hope) he's beyond that inanity.

When will we ever be closer to grasping the weight of the afterlife, the eternal, the love of the Creator and the time to come after death? When is the veil between eternity and reality ever thinner than now, in the midst of grief?

That doesn't make talking to God or resuming a prayer life any easier. When your prayer journals are clogged with promises and pleas for the safety and protection of your children, and one of them dies anyway, it's a little challenging to return to your doctrinal theories. I'm trusting God understands my hesitation and will lead me in the way I should go, whatever that looks like.

Ethan was a torch. Not just a bright light, not just a flame. He was a TORCH. To ignore his absence is impossible. At the same time, I have four grandchildren and one on the way in February. I have much reason to rejoice and to celebrate. My three living children deserve all the love and care and comfort they can get this year. I want to do more for them than ever before, yet I know there's nothing I can do to ease their pain. As an only child myself, I don't even fully understand their loss, and I'm aware of that.

I miss my Ethan, in all his crazy personas, many of which caused me untold stress, embarrassment and fear. I'll miss my firstborn son for the rest of my earthly life. That said—and this may sound awful—I don't miss WORRYING about him every single day. I don't miss fretting over his future or wondering if his next sword-swallowing gig would be his last. But I do miss HIM: his presence, his calm spirit, his ability to argue for hours without losing his temper. I hate that he's gone and that his "numbered days" ended before he'd accomplished all I believed he was capable of, but I know that's no excuse for the rest of us ceasing to live life to the fullest. He wouldn't want that, not for any of us.

I was going to skip making penuche this year because it was his favorite Christmas treat, but now I can't skip it. If I don't make the penuche, I'm letting death win. So I'll make the penuche, for him and for Vanoy, who gave me her recipe before she passed from this realm, and we'll call it good.

Ethan was the last baby delivered by Dr. Burke at Aspen Valley Hospital in 1992.

I said the words aloud three times this weekend: "since Ethan died."

Those words are like lead shot falling from my lips. They drop into my heart, cold and hard. I know he's gone, but saying "he died" adds a strange permanence and flatness to the situation, a way of dragging me into reality.

It's been four weeks today since I last saw my oldest son alive.
I hugged him, told him I loved him.
He looked odd to me, through my maternal view. I asked him if he was sick. He said no, he was fine, but to my eye, he looked "faded." Something was wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. That was a Thursday. He ran the delivery route, then returned to his college classes and retail job. Sometime around midnight the following Monday, he died in a single vehicle accident on top of a mountain some 70 miles away from me.
One day I won't remember in weeks or months, I hope. One day I'll just remember my son without remorse. Honestly, I've been grieving him—a piercing and a tattoo and an over-the-road job at a time—for a decade.
I want to remember Ethan with joy, not with the mind-boggling, gut-wrenching message the county coroner brought to my office midday on an autumn Tuesday. I always thought my husband would be the one to get "the call" I've always feared. (yeah, you crazy cult religious peeps, "that which I have greatly feared has come upon me." Here's your lovely justification and way to consider yourselves immune to destruction. I feared, and so I suffer, and you can count your blessings.) But, back to reality, everyone knows where to find me, so I got the notification. We go to the same church and chat at commissioners' meetings. When she asked for a private meeting I was expecting a juicy county news scoop. My adult daughter left the office to give us privacy. The coroner, seated in my cheap folding chair, asked if my legal name is Samantha Turner, and if my husband's legal name is John Turner, and if we have a son named Ethan Alexander Turner. That's when I knew something was seriously wrong.
Jail? I thought. He's been arrested for doing something stupid.
And then I remembered to whom I was speaking.
He'd been in an accident sometime the night before, on a high mountain road with which my husband and I are intimately familiar. It was our high school party road some 30 years ago. Ethan's body was found early Tuesday morning, ejected from his vehicle in a rollover some 113 feet from the road. He'd only owned the SUV he was driving for 24 hours, his third car in as many months.
Oddly, I slept soundly through the night that night. I'd always thought if something happened to my children I'd KNOW. I'd wake up. I'd have a panic attack. I didn't. Someone else had to tell me my child had died.
Initial reactions? Thank God his little brother wasn't with him. Thank God no one else was with him. (If someone had been with him, he probably wouldn't have wrecked... he was responsible for everyone, just never responsible for himself). Why wasn't he wearing his seatbelt? DUMBASS.
For the first few days, I felt like I had a bad case of Tourettes Syndrome combined with the stomach flu. Both reappear periodically.
Now, some weeks later, when I can't escape the feeling I've fallen into an ugly parallel universe, I scour the initial accident report from the state patrol. They have a little diagram of the accident in which the location of the body is shown as a tiny burrito-shaped bundle, like a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. Somehow the accident report makes it real and practical and is oddly comforting. Maybe that's my journalistic nature coming forward. Just the facts, please. I can deal with facts.
In the early days after the accident, a telephone call from the coroner told me the cause of death was "aortic laceration." There are comprehensive YouTube videos about aortic laceration for the morbid among us. I know because I've watched them all. I haven't decided if I'll request the full autopsy report. I can't decide if knowing all the details will be less traumatic than the horrific things my writer-brain imagination has conjured about his demise.
Meanwhile, thank God for my husband, who called all our family members and took care of all the other dirty work. I'd had to call him and that was bad enough. I couldn't say "Ethan's dead." I said, "Ethan's gone, and I need you to come to the office." He took care of all the hard things, the things I couldn't have endured, while I continued working, and for that I'm grateful. When you own your own business, and it's a weekly newspaper, there is no such thing as "bereavement leave." There's just being bereaved and going to work anyway. Suck it up, peeps.
People have been wonderful and kind and supportive. It really does help, the way stanching arterial blood flow helps an accident victim. Just when we think we'll bleed out, someone steps up with soft words and comforting food and physical hugs and encouragement.
We made it through the memorial, held on what would have been Ethan's 26th birthday, Oct. 20, 2018.
And now we return home, and we continue to deal with the "detritus of death," words that came to me the morning after the news. Death is messy.
My daughter took on the responsibility of memorializing her brother's online accounts, my husband and son went through his personal effects, and we're still stumbling across the random reminders that hit like a sucker punch to the gut: the CD of his wretched thrash metal music left in my car CD player; his phone number in my "favorites" list; is ashes in a temporary container in my living room because I can't bring myself to move them and I twistedly enjoy having my adventurer safely under my supervision. (I took the container with me to the memorial service, safely buckled into the backseat of my car. Poetic justice.)
We will never be the same. This I know.
There is a word for a person who loses his or her parents: orphan. There is a word for the person who loses a spouse: widow/widower. There is no word for the parent who loses a child, or the sibling who loses a sister or brother, or the grandparent who loses a grandchild. There literally are no words. I'm still a mother. I still birthed four children. One of those children is no longer with us. There's no easy way to explain that in casual conversation.
We will always love him. But we refuse to allow his loss to define us, individually or as a family. He's in us, and we love him, but his loss will not be the fulcrum of our lives. He would not have wanted it that way. If Ethan wished anything, it would be that we would, as his knuckle tattoos reminded us, "LIVE FREE," and that includes not allowing his untimely death to define the rest of our lives on this planet.

I almost skipped church today. I'm glad I didn't.

Women's lives are made up of circles. (Men's lives might be, too, but I'm not a man so I can't testify.) We have a family circle, a close friends circle, a church circle, a work circle, maybe a gym circle or a hobby circle. With the advent of the internet, we now have email circles and Facebook circles and blogging circles and LinkedIn circles, too. Those circles are precious and important to our mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

“I think that is one reason why women live longer than men. Friendship between women is different than friendship between men. We talk about different things. We delve deep. We go under, even if we haven’t seen each other for years. There are hormones that are released from women to other women that are healthy and do away with the stress hormones … It’s my women friends that keep starch in my spine and without them, I don’t know where I would be. We have to just hang together and help each other.” —Jane Fonda, Vanity Fair, January 2015

Eight years ago I was invited to join a circle of women who blogged together, focused on our mutual goal of becoming published inspirational authors. Through email and blogging, those women became my friends and my sisters in spirit. They were (are) my prayer partners, my encouragers, and sometimes my commiserators. I love them.
Shortly after my hysterectomy, which followed close on the heels of an uncomfortable move and a dramatic change in lifestyle, I was welcomed into a circle of women who gathered weekly to practice Reiki. We were all from different backgrounds, religions, generations, and every other socio-political-economic-educational difference you can imagine. And those women became my friends, my sisters in spirit. Healing came to me through their hands, physically and emotionally and spiritually. They offered love unconditionally, and I needed that. I love them.

“Women understand. We may share experiences, make jokes, paint pictures, and describe humiliations that mean nothing to men, but women understand. The odd thing about these deep and personal connections of women is that they often ignore barriers of age, economics, worldly experience, race, culture — all the barriers that, in male or mixed society, had seemed so difficult to cross.” —Gloria Steinem, New York Magazine, December 1971 

Tonight I had the privilege (and I count it a privilege) of being included in a women's new moon circle. Coming together on the new moon, creating a sacred space of trust and inclusion, setting aside those things that are holding us back and establishing positive intentions for the month ahead, was both uncomfortable and strangely familiar. Again, I found myself in a room of women from all different backgrounds and stories and beliefs. And again, I found myself in a circle of women with each other's best interests at heart.
Women in modern culture spend a great majority of their lives in comparison and judgment and competition with one another, and we are weakened because of it. The circles we build together (no matter how awkward and uncomfortable the building process is... I always feel like an oversharing dork afterward) are building blocks for the future. Not just for ourselves, but for our children, for our society, and for civilization.
Our ancestors understood this. Despite living in eras when women were more oppressed and endangered and vulnerable than we can imagine, women came together to encourage and support and strengthen one another. They did it in new moon rituals, in prayer groups, in quilting bees, and in a thousand other ways. We need to continue doing that. We need to hold one another up, not tear each other down. We are stronger together than we are apart.

"Anytime women come together with a collective intention, it's a powerful thing. Whether it's sitting down making a quilt, in a kitchen preparing a meal, in a club reading the same book, or around the table playing cards, or planning a birthday party, when women come together with a collective intention, magic happens."~Phylicia Rashad

(I keep beating myself for not blogging, and then I remember I write an editorial column every week in the newspaper and should probably give myself a tiny bit of credit for work accomplished.)

Blog Stops

I've been silent for while on here, partly because I finished two novellas this summer in my "spare" time and partly because I've been keeping a YUUUGGEEE (I threw up a little in my mouth just typing that) secret for the last few weeks. I've learned a bit about myself during the process...

Parenting is a sticky wicket.

You do the absolute best you can with the tools you have from your own experience, and the results are still a bit of a crapshoot. Children, unfortunately, don't come with guarantees. They don't turn out like you imagine, they turn out like they turn out, like they're divinely intended to come out.

Hopefully, you've installed enough programming in them that they will be decent, caring, thoughtful creatures and not selfish, ignorant, nasty ones. Hopefully.

I parented in the "I'm proud of my honor student" bumper sticker generation. (I never had one, because we homeschooled, but they were EVERYWHERE.) We wore our pride in our children's ability to read before their peers, their report cards, their sports achievements, their scholarships, etc., on our bumpers for all the world to see. And judge.

I homeschooled mine... so, yeah... that's how that works.

My children are all ADULTS now.

That's a tough pill to swallow sometimes, but they are, even when they try to play the guilt card (I know where they picked that up!) and tell me they need me to feed them. Sometimes I wish I could still stuff them into their footie pjs and put them to bed, knowing they are too short to turn the doorknob and escape, but those days are over.

For my own mental health, I've had to start referring to them as "my adults" instead of "my kids" because they're all grown up. It's a transition.

Do they always make choices I approve of? No.
Do they do dumbass stuff sometimes? Yes.
Do I always agree with them? No.
Do I always love them. YES.
Will I help them if I can? Absolutely.

It's NOT unhealthy or abnormal or unusual to have kiddos that turn into adults who don't resemble anything we thought we raised.

What IS unhealthy is to continually strain and strive and struggle to change them, to turn them into something we think they should be, instead of letting them become who they are destined to be.

Parents, let your fledglings fly. Don't hold them back. Don't tether them with guilt and fear and all YOUR unresolved baggage. LET THEM FLY.

Last weekend, smack dab in the midst of our monthly ACFW chapter meeting, my new-to-me-a-year-ago MacBook Pro decided to drop dead of a hard drive failure. There were no warnings, no blinking lights, no error messages... it simply went to sleep and never woke up.

After a couple visits to the nearest SimplyMac store it was determined that my hard drive was inaccessible, meaning anything I hadn't backed up to an external drive or to "the cloud" was lost forever.

Of course, in the classic scheme of things, the ONLY thing I hadn't dragged into Google Drive was my work-in-progress. I lost somewhere around 12,000 words. And I'm on a deadline.

After a night of mourning, and multiple attempts to apply countless random key combinations to resurrect my machine, I finally gave up. We returned to SimplyMac the next day, wherein I purchased a new laptop and a new desktop, as well. According to my husband, you should have the best tools available for the work you do. He's probably right, but I still wince at the bill.

It's taken me a full week to finally get all my software downloaded and everything back on track. Now I'm ready to start over, from word #1, on my newest novella, and the task feels daunting. So I've got this little ditty running through my head... (an improvement from last weekend, when I couldn't get Madonna's "borderline, feels like I'm going out of my mind" out of my head).



Enjoy a little Sinatra on this Friday evening and wish me well... I'll be spending the weekend BIC (butt-in-chair), pounding away at the keyboard.

I haven't posted anything in a very long time.

I've been buried under deadlines, graduated my youngest from high school, and had a whirlwind of crazy things go on in the last month. None of those things are conducive to creativity, blogging, writing, or anything much beyond drinking and sleeping... not necessarily in that order.

Today I tried on a pair of pants I bought last month at a second-hand shop.
Yes, it has taken me a month to try them on. The tags were still attached.
No, they didn't fit.
Sizes are deceptive, especially at thrift stores. Twenty years ago, at this same weight, I wore a 10. Today it's a 6. So if you buy older clothes, the sizing is all off.
This pair of pants didn't look old, but the size was definitely off. Maybe they were Aspenite pants...
Which brings me to the subject of sizes.

Comedienne Amy Schumer resented Glamour magazine's cover that named her a "plus-size" person. According to Amy, she and I are the same approximate size, which makes me like her that much more.

Anyway, that makes me "plus-size," too. At least I'm in humorous company.
Having been through a bout of anorexia myself (I just called it my skinny stage... my therapist put the anorexic label on it), I've come to the following conclusion: Plus Size is anything over a 0. DUH. If you are more than ZERO, you are PLUS (positive).
Deal with it.

In other body modification news, my dentist wants me to get braces.
I'd rather get a tattoo.

Mind you, my mother vetoed braces when I begged for them as a preteen.
"You can eat, can't you?" she said.

Now my open bite, which exerts undue pressure on my molars and makes them break (and prevents me from eating a sandwich without embarrassment), is the subject of scrutiny. I even went so far as to make an appointment with my dentist's recommended orthodontist, hoping for a recommendation of Invisalign, or some other non-intrusive option (the last dentist wanted me to have my jaw broken and wired shut for 6 weeks).

No such luck. Orthodontist's opinion? 18 months of regular, old-fashioned braces WITH rubber bands. For $6,300.

I listened, I looked, I wasn't convinced.

For $6,300, I'll go get the blubber frozen off my belly.
It would have a better impact on my self-esteem... more than having braces at 45, without question.

Ugh. My hometown is considering a ban against smoking (read: smokers) in the downtown district. An editorial in the local paper highlights how a smoking ban would make our town more "family-friendly" for tourists. (Note: There's already a law about smoking indoors, and a law about how far you must be from a business entrance to smoke, so it's not like the whole town smells like an ashtray. or anything... besides the pervasive scent of weed that wafts across the entire state.)

It's going to get a little ranty here.
Sorry, not sorry, in advance.

The spread of misinformation, particularly when it's done with the intent to spur fear and wrath, is one of my biggest pet peeves. It comes in a close second to my dislike of people who inconsiderately spread germs to their friends, family members, and co-workers, and even overrides my frustration with misspelled memes.

So, for the sake of truth and justice, here are some of the latest Facebook posts I've seen that are... are you ready??? Blatant untruths. You may have seen them, you may have even shared them. If you have, there's no condemnation... you are a victim. But please, in the future, do a little investigating before you share that "unbelievable" story. Because if it's THAT unbelievable, it's probably...um... unbelievable.

#1.  No Nazi-era submarine has been recovered from the Great Lakes. The photos (Did you know you can research a photo by right-clicking and selecting "search Google for image"?) are from Russia and National Geographic. BTW, Barbara Johnson, shame on you, whoever you are. (http://hoax-alert.leadstories.com/604527-nazi-submarine-discovered-great-lakes.html)

#2. That picture of the 12-week-old fetus you keep sharing to discourage abortion? That's a picture of a handcrafted resin doll which looks very little like a 12-week-old fetus. Just sayin'. (http://www.snopes.com/photos/medical/12weekfetus.asp)

#3. Facebook did not remove a picture of "Little Timmy Saluting the Flag" because non-Americans complained. First: If you are SEEING the picture of Little Timmy on Facebook, Facebook didn't remove the picture. Second: This meme was created and shared by a satire group who likes to stir up conservative angst. The same charming individuals who got your panties in a bunch last year by telling you Denali was a Kenyan word for "Black Power." Remember that one? (http://www.snopes.com/little-timmy-facebook-flag/)

#4. Those are not the twins you're looking for. The post that supposedly depicts the conjoined twins separated by Dr. Ben Carson all grown up in their letter jackets, yeah... not them. Sorry. It's even worse when it's a happy story and you get played, isn't it? (http://www.hoax-slayer.net/does-a-circulating-image-depict-now-grown-up-conjoined-twins-separated-by-dr-ben-carson-in-1987/)

I could go on, and on, and on... but it's too depressing.

Be aware... there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of "satire" sites that look and sound like real news sites, and unless you look closely, you can't tell the difference. Apparently, it's gotten so bad Facebook was considering a way to mark certain pages and/or posts as satire.

Case in point: back in December a FB acquaintance shared a post about President Obama refusing to allow soldiers to receive Christmas cards as "the first salvo in the war on Christmas." Now, I think the "war on Christmas" is a load of hooey anyway, but I did a little research just in case. Come to find out that post was generated by a Facebook page called "Fox News the FB Page." It looked real, it seemed real. But it's not real. It's satire. Really well-done satire. And people are responding in raging, mob-mentality style to these artfully photoshopped posts and shock-value headlines.

So... for your future reference, take a minute to check snopes.com or hoax-slayer.com, both sites have been around a long time, back before FB, even, when our hoaxes arrived in our inboxes with all those notifications that we have a long-lost relative in Bosnia who wants to send us the family jewels, for a shipping fee of $49,000 wired directly to said relative.

And here's a link to a list of satire, fake news, parody, and conspiracy theory sites: (I can't even tell you how many of my friends are apparently subscribed to some of these... SMH) https://www.facebook.com/notes/hoaxes-on-fb/list-of-satire-parody-fake-news-conspiracy-theory-sites/1063012267075709

When in doubt, check it out.

OK, maybe that's not the right question. EVERYONE has anxiety from time to time. Even the strongest, richest, most successful people among us.

Anxiety is defined as a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.

Anxiety is different than, but related to, stress. Stress can cause anxiety, but anxiety can appear completely out of the blue, with or without stress.

Everyone has anxiety SOMETIMES. But some people have anxiety ALL the time, to the point that it affects their day to day life, influences the choices they make, and hinders them from enjoying life to the full. That kind of anxiety (I'm learning) is NOT normal.

Growing up, my parents dismissed my anxiety...
You have an overactive imagination. Stop over-reacting. Get over it. 

When I got married, my husband dismissed my anxiety...
There's nothing to fear. It will all be OK. Here, let me cast that demon out of you. (Yes, we're still married, but that was an ugly, ugly fight.)

My church condemned my anxiety...
If you'll just pray more, and get closer to Jesus, you won't have anxiety. Anxiety is just a symptom of fear, and fear is a sin. Repent, sinner!

My children ignored my anxiety...
"What mom doesn't know won't hurt her." 

And yet, despite all that encouragement, input, pressure, the anxiety remained. It ebbed and flowed, but it was always there, and I always felt ashamed and condemned and weak. If I just had enough faith, you see, I wouldn't be anxious anymore. If I was just stronger, I wouldn't be anxious anymore. Really? REALLY?

This year I'm reading very slowly through the Psalms. One per day. I'm trying to glean from these ancient writings what God would say to me through them. Last week I bumbled into Psalm 55 for probably the hundredth time in my life and suddenly recognized a kindred spirit in David...

Yes, I said David. King David. Forerunner (and ancestor) of Jesus. He's really never been one of my favorite Bible characters... He kind of fell off my radar after the Goliath thing. And the Bathsheba scandal.

But now I think David knew anxiety, intimately, and that puts us in the same boat.

"My thoughts trouble me and I am distraught at the voice of the enemy;
at the stares of the wicked;
for they bring down suffering upon me and revile me in their anger.
My heart is in anguish within me;
the terrors of death assail me.
Fear and trembling have beset me;
horror has overwhelmed me.
I said, 'Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest—I would flee far away
and stay in the desert." 

(Psalm 55: 2b-7)

If that doesn't describe a panic attack I don't know what does.
And yet, God called David "a man after His own heart." God didn't condemn David for his anxiety, who do we think we are to condemn one another?

Now, we know David had real enemies. He was literally running for his life for years. Most of us will never know that experience, thank God, but that doesn't mean our reaction to the situations that cause us to be afraid, to feel distress, or to dread, is any different. Our anxiety triggers may be different, but they produce the same response, and we can still learn from David's journey and emulate his example.

1. He recognizes that his soul (mind, will, and emotions) has a life of its own, and he frequently addresses his OWN soul... "Why so downcast, O my soul?" Throughout Psalms, David talks to himself, something that's admittedly hard to do when anxiety has it's grip on you, but a necessary paradigm shift. You are NOT your anxiety.

2. He acknowledges what he's feeling, what he's experiencing, without condemning himself. This is huge, especially for those who have been told if they just had more faith, they wouldn't have anxiety anymore. Sorry, denying anxiety's existence doesn't make it go away. I know, I've tried.

3. He looks to God NOT to solve his anxiety, but to sustain him in his anxiety. There's a difference. If you've ever had a panic attack, you know waiting for someone or something—even a medication—to swoop in and rescue you is the worst kind of hell. Knowing, instead, that you can endure the anxiety while trusting God to bring you through to the other side, knowing that it won't last forever, is a hope not often offered. We know anxiety won't kill us (though it tries to convince us otherwise), but in truth, anxiety is just a feeling. It will pass. Just like grief, infatuation, sadness, and joy. This, too, shall pass.

I don't want to minimize it, anymore than I would try to minimize grief or joy. Anxiety is real. It's rough. I'm living it along with many of you. But there's hope, and that's what I want you to take away from this post... anxiety doesn't make you less of a person.

Anxiety is not the end of my story or yours. It may be part of our story, but it's not the main character.

We've had a crisis this month (defining crisis as a time when a difficult or important decision must be made). Our oldest daughter and her husband decided to move out of our shared abode, relocating 50 miles away with my four grandbabies.

In the *real world* 50 miles is nothing. If we were urban dwellers, they'd merely be on the other side of town. In northwestern Colorado it feels like half a continent, at least in the winter. 
But that's not where the trauma lies...  I've spent the last four and a half years interacting with my grandbabies every day. I've babysat while #2, #3, and #4 came home from the hospital. My life is intertwined with theirs, and having them absent is an alarming shock to the system and triggers fear that they will forget me. 

I cried for four days when I found out they were leaving. Then I ran away. Literally.

I corralled my oldest and youngest sons in the car and headed south, on the pretext of doing book research (they were willing abductees.). I did do book research, but mostly I needed distance from my emotions. From Gallup, New Mexico, we headed to Phoenix, the home of one of my dearest friends, who took us in and offered sanctuary. 

For a few days I was able to separate myself from reality, for the most part. 
Once we crossed the county line on the way home the tears started again. 
The house (the part we don't inhabit, except for the kitchen) is empty. 
I cried most of the day yesterday. 
I was doing OK today until my dad came to check on me, and then he cried.

But tears are not fatal, or toxic. Tears serve a purpose: they help us bend and adapt to the changes life demands.Today I did yoga, and I reminded myself that those who survive successfully are those who bend, those who flex, those who adapt to the crap life throws their way. 

It could be worse. 
It could be better. 
It is what it is. 
And so I will bend, I will flex, I will adapt. And I will -- in the words of one of my dear friends who suffered a loss I cannot even comprehend -- I will not allow my response to this situation to define my life going forward, because I have half my life left to live. 
I can bend or I can break.
I choose to bend.

Yeah, I read that title and I think, "I'm getting old."
In reality, it's part of my new program of "learning to live lightly."

I don't live lightly. I live heavy. Every action, every word, every activity is carefully weighed and balanced and examined and questioned and questioned again, and if something bad actually happens, those actions and words and activities are interrogated all over again.

I've spent two weeks dreading my last two days of medical appointments. Like, waking-up-at-night kind of dread. Couple that with young adult children who insist on traipsing all over the place (really, what's wrong with sitting at home with mom and dad watching TV?) and my dread levels are at meltdown stage.

Dread is a terrible place to live. If I were more artistically minded I would try to draw the Land of Dread... but since I'm limited to words, let me try to describe it for you (I know some of you have never even visited! I envy you!)

The Land of Dread is cold, dark, and inherently dangerous. It's like the worst possible sci-fi scenario come to life. Nothing operates according to the laws that govern physics or statistics or logic. If it's possible for the imagination, it's probably in the Land of Dread, where things don't happen to other people, they happen to you. Bad things, that is, never good ones.

The inhabitants of the Land of Dread exist in various stages of paralysis. The worst cases are house-bound agoraphobics. The rest of us suffer in varying degrees. Unable to go to a party. Unable to make new friends. Unable to let our children stay at a friend's house. Can't drive in the snow. Can't go to a festival.

Can't. Won't. Shouldn't. Those are the words that rule one's choices.

In the Land of Dread you can only expect the unpleasant. Every waking moment (and sometimes the unconscious moments when you're supposed to be sleeping) are spent waiting for "the" phone call, or "the" notification, or "the" big disaster. When the phone rings, you tense and your heart rate speeds up. A knock on the door or an unexpected visitor can only mean tragedy, right? YOU won't be the Publisher's Clearing House winner. When someone is late coming home (and late tends to be a bit subjective), full panic ensues. When the "breaking news" alert comes on TV, you're sure it's the beginning of the end of all things.

Living in the Land of Dread is exhausting.

My well-meaning religious friends (and irritated family members) used to tell me to "just believe" and "have faith" and "trust God" and so forth, assuming my Land of Dread problems were nothing more than mental weakness or demonic possession. All attempts to deal with both possibilities failed.

So now what?

In the last year I've enjoyed highs and lows. I've successfully hurdled personal goals I've held in my heart for decades. I've cried with a friend over the death of her child. I've cuddled a new grandbaby and waved goodbye to an adult child who chose a season of homelessness over safety and security. I've danced a mother-son wedding dance with one child and filled out college applications with another.

Despite the dark spots, there are numerous bright places. There are multiple places in the corridors of 2015 where I so clearly see the hand of God at work that I'm left open-mouthed in awe.

But still, I'm living from a perspective of dread, and that has to stop, so for 2016 I'm adopting a new mindset, that of "living lightly."

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling...” ― Aldous Huxley, Island

That, to my mind, means a dramatic shift in cognizant thinking. One instant, one second, one minute, one hour at a time. Lightly. Lightly my darling.

It's hard to live lightly when you've spent your entire life feeling deeply, refusing to let things happen, and acquiring baggage as if you're the princess of an entire country. But living, and thinking, and feeling lightly are my resolutions for 2016.

It's all a grand adventure. Don't just endure, live. Don't just exist, thrive.

Let's live lightly, my dears. I believe it's what Jesus would do!

Scooby Doo cartoons were the scariest thing I watched growing up. You never knew who the bad guy REALLY was. It only took a few episodes to realize that the ghost, or goblin, or swamp monster, or whatever, was really a guy in a costume (wasn't it always a guy?) with a greedy plan to prosper himself at the expense of someone else.

These days we seem to be surrounded by greedy people with schemes to profit and empower themselves more and more at the expense of others. Instead of putting on costumes, however, these villains hide behind other people, ideologies, religions, political positions, and real, manufactured, and imaginary wars. Sometimes they even hide behind masks. Actual masks.

It's tempting in these hours and days to yield to fear, to react in panic, and to begin shouting, spitting, and blaming whatever and, or whomever, we see. Lots and lots of people are telling us where to point. What they forget to tell us is that whenever we point a finger, there are three pointing back at us. We still haven't learned Adam's lesson in the Garden of Eden... resorting to casting blame does not solve the problem.



A particular verse of Scripture keeps coming to mind, from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Now, mind you, the church that was in Ephesus was a divided, contrary bunch in a crazy, pagan city with a lot of really strange goings-on... the kind of things that would make today's Christians who are in a snit about "keeping Christ in Christmas" completely berserk. (For more on ancient Ephesus, this is an excellent article: http://bit.ly/1QAFhgV)

Paul writes:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood [contending only with physical opponents], but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this [present] darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly (supernatural) places. (Eph 6:12, Amplified)

Wait a minute... our struggle, our battle, is NOT against people?
No. Our struggle is against the unseen enemies of the soul. The temptation to be ignorant, divisive, greedy, loveless, fearful, angry, hateful, prideful, selfish, and so on.

Ephesus was in the midst of some serious socio-political upheaval. I wonder if the Christians there were tempted to start pointing fingers at their "enemies" who wanted, in some cases, to kill them. It's a natural reaction. If someone wants to destroy you, it's primal human nature to fight back. But according to Paul, battling "flesh and blood" isn't going to solve the problem.

Now, the church has often taken this verse and started praying and binding and casting out. That's all well and good, but as one minister has said, you can't take authority over principalities and powers if you can't take authority over a sink full of dirty dishes.

In other words, start with your own heart first. You are, after all, "a heavenly place" because the kingdom of God is within you. And you are the only "heavenly place" you have direct authority over.

So ask yourself, what's manipulating your emotional reactions? What's driving your thought processes? Who told you to feel or think or react that way? In too many instances, every day, I have to admit it's not the Spirit of God... it's me. My flesh. My fear. My ignorance. Sometimes it's just because I've been feeding myself nothing but the news, so that's what comes out.

Now, I'm not saying that people don't do bad, evil, wicked things. They do. Because they, too, are being controlled and manipulated by those "spiritual forces of wickedness" Paul was talking about. Here's the problem... we don't have the power to change them, we only have the power and authority to change ourselves. As Ghandi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world."

We have to start somewhere, as the song we sing at Christmas says:
"Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." 

I'm re-sharing an old post from 2010, because in light of all the vitriol and anger and rhetoric we've seen and heard in the last few weeks, it's something to think about, and a good reminder that just because we slap a "Christian" label on something (or someone, or ourselves)  that doesn't make it so... 

Does more than one make you MORE Christian?

Bestselling author Anne Rice's recent Facebook announcement that she has "quit Christianity" garnered a deluge of media attention. After years as a self-avowed atheist followed by a public return to the faith of her childhood - Catholicism - Rice said she is done with organized religion. Her announcement incited a vitriolic stream of criticism from Christians questioning her salvation, her faith, and her morals.

To be perfectly honest, I totally understand where she's coming from. (Ducking now to avoid stones.)

If you've never encountered "friendly fire" in church - in the form of gossip, condemnation, oppression, legalism, rejection, etc. - count yourself among a very blessed minority. Let's face it, there are a lot of mean, hateful, hypocritical people sitting in pews and standing behind pulpits every week. Don't get me wrong, there are thousands - nay, millions - of people in churches who are loving, genuine, and kind, too. People who are earnestly seeking to be doers of the Word and not hearers only. Unfortunately, it's the spiteful, critical ones who tend to have the loudest mouths, carry the biggest picket signs, and make the most damaging waves. And they are usually the first ones to stand up and call themselves the true defenders of Christianity.

But what is it that makes one a Christian? Is it a Jesus fish car emblem? A shiny gold cross? A church membership card? Which version of the Bible you read? The kind of music you listen to, the clothes you wear, your hair length, or the movies you watch? Is the evidence of your faith limited to the Thomas Kincade lithograph on your wall?

The bigger the cross???

Most of us, if we have any understanding of the Gospel, are quick to say "no." Christianity is based solely on our belief in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who accepted the price of all the sin of humanity and suffered the consequences for us in his death on the cross, and then was raised from the dead by the power of God, having paid our debt so that we can be set free. All we have to do, according to Romans 10:9-10, is confess with our mouths the Lord Jesus and believe in our hearts that God has raised Him from the dead. And we will be Christians.

Right? Not exactly. Romans 10:10 actually says "you will be saved."

So where did the Christian label come from? Jesus never called anyone Christians. He didn't say, "I'm starting a new religion, and I shall call it Christianity, after Myself."


Christian shows up in only three places in the Bible - Acts 11:26, Acts 26:28, and 1 Peter 4:16. A derivative of Christ (Greek for "Anointed One") the word Christian literally means "an adherent or follower of Jesus."

Here's the funny thing. Those early followers of Jesus didn't call themselves Christians. Acts 11:26 says "...and they were first called Christians at Antioch."

Get that? They were CALLED Christians, by other people. Jews and idolators and atheists and agnostics labeled them. Not just for what they professed, but for what they did. Throughout the book of Acts we see the followers of Jesus going out into all the known world and healing the sick, sending aid to victims of famine, helping widows and orphans, raising the dead, setting the oppressed free. Everywhere they went, they did the same things Jesus had done. They "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil." They continued His mission without missing a beat. And the people around them saw Christ in them.


I want that. I want someone who has never known the love of God, never felt His healing power, never understood the depth of His mercy and grace, to encounter Him in me and say, "You must be a Christian" based on what I do, not just what I say.

I hesitate to say "I'm a writer." Any shmuck can declare him or herself to be a writer, but until someone else acknowledges what you do, it doesn't mean much. I can tell anyone I'm a wife. But if I don't do wife-stuff - or worse, if I do anti-wife stuff - haven't I claimed wifely status in vain?

 The third commandment given to the Hebrews when they came out of Egypt says this: "You shall not use or repeat the name of the Lord your God in vain [that is, lightly or frivolously, in false affirmations or profanely]; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain." Ex 20:7 AMP
Red Letters by Tom Davis