More Intentional

New Year’s Resolutions.

I don’t like them . . . not at all.

There was a short time in my life when I made them. Mainly because that’s what you do for the New Year, right? They were always hastily made and even more hastily forgotten.

But last year, at the end of 2007, I decided I needed to give it another try. It had been a really hard summer and fall for me and I figured I needed to give myself something to focus on . . . some sort of balance on which I could measure my worth.

I gave a lot of thought to my list of resolutions.

I started listing out all the things in my life that I needed to change. The more I listed, the smaller I began to feel.

But I kept listing.

And I began to dread the New Year.

The last day of the Old Year, I woke up with one thing on my mind: the word Intentional.

I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I thought about it as I got up to let the dog out. I thought about it as I poured myself a cup of coffee with cream – the real stuff, because I’m a purist when it comes to my coffee. I thought about it in the shower and I thought about it while I checked my e-mail. I went to the kitchen to prepare some munchies for a party our family was going to later that day – and I thought about it there, too.

Finally, I knew what to do with my word.

I would make IT my New Year’s Resolution.

Why not?

I picked up the list I had compiled during the last few weeks. I studied it and saw the evidence of all the wrestling that had gone on in my mind . . . all the things I should work on were underlined, scratched out, rewritten, circled and prioritized.

I realized why I don’t like to make New Year’s Resolutions. They point out all the negative stuff in your life; all your short-comings.

So I decided to throw out my long list of “should do’s” and focus on my one word; on being intentional.

Being intentional has meant that I’ve had to take a good look inside . . . and outside. It has meant that I’ve had to be more honest with myself when it comes to making choices. I’ve had to learn how to say “no” to things that, a year ago, I would have said “yes” to. I’ve had to really think about what’s important to me.

I have to admit that my word hasn’t been at the forefront of each of my days this year. But it’s now the end of November and I actually remember what my resolution was. I can honestly say that there have been more days that I have worked on being intentional than days that I didn’t.

I’m not ending the year a different size, a vegetarian, or a tri-athlete. I think the change I’m aware of is not so much a change as it is a shift . . .

And I like the shift I see.

I like it so much that my New Year’s Resolution for 2009 will be two words.

More Intentional.

Photo: Mother watching her children participating in VBS inside her village church, Colote'el, Chiapas, Mexico, 2006.

Incredible Spirits

Monday, we began our 8th year of homeschooling at The Academy.

It’s been a tough week of trying to get back into the swing of things – for all of us, not just the kids.

This was the first time during our homeschooling journey, that I have allowed myself a true sabbatical. Not that I was diligent in holding office hours and planning sessions during the other summers. I just never allowed myself to pack up all the school stuff and completely shelve it for the summer.

During June and July, I didn’t even THINK about school.

The reward is that this has been a great summer . . . full of lazy days at the beach and in the mountains, children laughing and playing games and lots of lemonade!

Forcing ourselves back into the schedule of “real life” has been difficult, at best.

I’m reading Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Mortenson is a mountaineer-turned-humanitarian who has spent the last 15 years building more that 55 schools for impoverished Pakistan and Afghan villages. It is quite an amazing chronicle of Mortenson’s journey.

I’m only two-thirds of the way through the book, but something I read last night, on page 151, really struck me:

“Predictably, the jeeps carrying the wood [for the school] to Korphe were halted by another landslide that cut the track, eighteen miles shy of their destination. ‘The next morning, while Parvi and I were discussing what to do, we saw this great big dust cloud coming down the valley,’ Mortenson says. ‘Haji Ali [the village of Korphe’s chief] somehow heard about our problem, and the men of Korphe had walked all night. They arrived clapping and singing and in incredible spirits for people who hadn’t slept.’”

I’m reminded of the villagers in Chiapas, Mexico where Phillip and I have gone on several missions to help construct churches.

It’s not easy work.

For the Americans, the work day lasts from about 6:30 am until about 12:30 pm – then we have lunch and prepare for VBS with the village children. The villagers arrive at the site before daybreak. The husbands escort the wives to the community kitchen where they spend all day bent over open fires cooking beans, tortillas and chicken soup for their men and for us. The men spend all day tirelessly moving dirt, mixing cement, installing rafters and metal roofs.

It’s not easy work – but it is good work.

And everyone is happy.

As Mortenson said, there are “incredible spirits.”

There are incredible spirits because everyone knows what a blessing it is to have a school or church . . . to have a safe, warm, dry place and the freedom to learn and worship.

In our country, we’ve turned these blessings into expectations . . . and we take them for granted.

As my family begins this new school year, it is my fervent hope and prayer that we can remember what an honor and privilege it is to have the freedom to learn at home - that we can face each day with “incredible spirits.”

Photo: Building a church in Colote'el, Chiapas, Mexico, 2006 - with approaching thunderstorm.

Making the Grade

This morning, I had the rare opportunity to take the Boy to breakfast.

Alone.

Spending one-on-one time with any of our four children is something that doesn’t happen often. As homeschoolers, we’re all together . . . all the time.

I knew that if we stayed at home, it wouldn’t be long before he would ask to go play with his best friend. I was feeling selfish and wanted some uninterrupted time with our son.

So off we went to have breakfast.

The thing I love about taking most children out to eat is that they’re not impressed with exotic ingredients or artistic presentations (of course there are exceptions to this and the Chef is the perfect example – she will try anything and has an uncanny knack for choosing the most expensive item on a menu).

But the Boy is easily satisfied with two breakfast burritos, milk and a hash brown, so our logical choice this morning laid under the Golden Arches.

It happened to be Inspection Day for the restaurant and when I saw the inspector filling out the grade card, I had to laugh.

When I was young, my Dad was a Health Inspector and among other things, he inspected restaurants.

Like many children, keeping my room clean was my responsibility. This was not an area I excelled in. My idea of cleaning was pushing everything into my closet or under my bed. When I got older and wanted to put my mattress directly on the floor, I lost a major storage space. My solution was to clear a path from the door to my bed.

My parents’ solution was to keep my door shut.

One day, after I had cleaned my room, Dad decided to encourage me to keep it clean . . . or maybe he was just teasing me . . . he was good at both.

He brought his brief case to the dining room table and with authority, opened it up. He took out a grade card, got out his pen and signed it. He explained to me that all grade cards are required to be posted in plain sight. They are not to be hidden from view.

I shook my head in agreement . . . a second grader always wants to be in compliance with the laws of the state!

He took the grade card to my bedroom door and ceremoniously taped it up so everyone who entered my room could see my grade.

Then, he stood back so I could see it for myself.

An “A.”

Unbelievable . . . I had received the highest grade possible!

It was true. I had received an “A” and it was signed:

by a Blind Man.

Runaway Boats

Our two oldest daughters, the Horse Lover and the Chef, are learning to sail this week at a local lake.

The first day, they had a general overview of sailing, they learned some important knows and had a swim test. They spent the second day in the water learning how to right a capsized boat.

Today . . . they sailed.

Our commute gives us about 45 minutes of good, uninterrupted conversation. This morning, our conversation gave me a chance to teach a small science lesson about on-shore and off-shore winds. We talked about the Horse Lover being nervous about steering the boat and the fact that they may be sailing in the rain – which they’ll do as long as there’s no thunder and lightening.

It made me remember all the fun I had at sailing camp when I was their age.

I went to Camp Don Lee, a sleep away sailing camp located on the Neuse River which is about three miles wide at that point.

The first two years, I was a weeker. The next two years, I was a tweeker . . . camp terminology for a two-week camper.

Weekends were the times when one group of campers finished camp and went home and a new group arrived. There weren’t any group activities planned at the camp, so the tweekers and the freekers (four-week campers) would go to an outpost and camp for the weekend.

We sailed on Sunfishes and each sailboat had two sailors. Anytime we sailed, there was at least one motorboat of experienced sailing instructors keeping up with us . . . herding us in the right direction, relaying messages and helping us with technical issues. They also carried our gear and food on overnights.

One summer, when I was 13 or 14, our group was coming back from an overnight at an outpost. A fierce thunderstorm came up from nowhere. The motorboat came around and told us to head towards a small village which was straight across the river. We were making progress, but it soon became a race. The wind picked up, thunderheads got bigger and darker and closer, waves grew fiercer and quickly turned into whitecaps. Soon, the rain began to fall in sheets which pelted us like handfuls of gravel being shot out of cannons. Boats ran into each other . . . several tipped over. Masts bent, booms broke . . . we were all terrified . . . and we had to keep sailing.

Eventually, we made it to the village.

I don’t know if the motorboat had driven ahead and asked for help or whether someone in the village had been watching us and had alerted their neighbors.

Regardless, when we got to the shore, there were angels there to take us into their homes. They gave us dry towels and hot chocolate and listened to the stories of young teenagers who were trying to be brave.

The storm moved on - as most summer thunderstorms do. And as it did, all the sailboats were tied together in a long line. We boarded our vessels, and the motorboat towed us all back to camp. We looked like a line of ducklings following their mama duck.

As we were being pulled back to camp, Amy, my sailing partner, and I sat on the deck of our boat and relived our adventure. As we relaxed into the knowledge that we’d survived, we looked back at the little village that had soothed our nerves and calmed our fears . . . and there, in the sky above it was a rainbow.

Photo: Abandoned boat on the coast of NC

Sandcastles

Our youngest daughter wants to be a princess when she grows up.

Truly.

If you ask her what she wants to be, she’ll lean in close, look you right in the eye and with a look of enchantment, she’ll say, quite simply, “a princess.”

We know we could explain to her that real princesses are born into that role . . . that neither of her parents descends from royal bloodlines. But why spoil her dream?

I grew up in a coastal town . . . a hop, skip and a jump away from the neighboring island which has grown into a resort community. Access to the island was a high-rise bridge on the west end and a draw-bridge on the east. 21 miles separated the two bridges. The island road was narrow and bumpy and white oaks, shaped by years of ocean breezes, grew on either side. In some places, they almost touched overhead. As a little girl, about the age of our Princess, I used to love riding on the island. There was a small town on each end and an eclectic old fishing village in the middle and I would imagine the “tunnels” in between to be secret passages.

Time has changed the island. The road is a lot wider now. There aren’t so many white oaks. The draw-bridge on the east end of the island gave way years ago to another high-rise. Fishing piers are being replaced by fishing boats too large to haul home, so the owners store them in dry-stack marinas. The occasional tacky souvenir shop of then has turned into scads of boutiques. Where sand dunes once protected the island from wind and waves, there are now walls of hotels and condos. The small beach cottages which used to be the perfect beach get-away are now hidden among the masses of three- and four-story, multi-million dollar sandcastles . . . with pools.

The change is not all-together good or bad . . . just different.

We spent this past week visiting my Mom. During the week, we made several trips up and down the island, and each time, I noticed something new.

My favorite discovery was an old trailer park.

Now, I know, there’s no way to make a trailer park as enticing as those enormous, tropical-colored mansions across the street – the ones whose shadows mingle among the trailers in the afternoon sun. But what I noticed is that some of the trailers have been given a face-lift with fresh paint . . . the colors of the islands. It’s as if the shadows of the big giants have reached across and shared some of their glory with the singlewides.

Would I spend a week or two enjoying life at the beach in one of those big homes . . . choosing whether to sun in the sand or by the pool? You bet! Deep down, I think there’s a small part of all of us that craves a life of luxury . . . even if it’s only for a little while.

But my hope is that we can teach our children a sense of balance . . . that in the midst of having dreams and keeping them alive, they can also find contentment and peace within their present lives.

Understanding that their sandcastle may be big or it may be small, but they can still choose to paint it a beautiful color . . . and that their pool may simply be a tidal pool on the shore, but it can still be enjoyed.

Photo: Chateauneuf-en-Auxois Castle, Burgundy Region, France.

Artifacts

Shards from a pottery bowl.

Shards glued together.

Old button the Boy found.

Digging Up The Past

We've been spending some time at a nearby archaeological dig over the past few weeks. It's not a dinosaur dig . . . or a classical archaeological dig, but it's exciting, nonetheless.

The dig is the site of a local Presbyterian minister, David Caldwell (1725-1824), who also started an academy for young men. He was a devoted husband and father. He doctored the sick and wounded British and American soldiers after the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. He was a farmer. And as a statesman, he served at local, state and national levels. David Caldwell was obviously an outstanding leader and role-model for the people of his time . . . but also of our time.

The kids and I literally stumbled upon the dig a few weeks ago. We were having a picnic in this particular park. After our lunch, we were ambling around the park, reading the historic posts about David Caldwell and his "log cabin" academy. When our walk took us to the dig site, the archaeology team was just coming back from lunch.

"There's some helpers," the lead archaeologist, Ken Robinson, said to us as we approached.

I looked at them like they were crazy . . . I was sure this mother and her four children had been mistakenly recognized as a trained team of archaeologists.

"Come on over" he encouraged.

After seven years of homeschooling, I've learned that when someone is offering to help you literally use the world as your classroom, you don't ask questions . . . you put your bag down, roll up your sleeves, remind the children to behave and "dig in."

So far, we've been back four times . . . and we'll certainly be back again

Photo: Sieving at the David Caldwell dig.

The Garden Variety

We have a garden.

Two 4 x 8 raised beds that the Big Guy built when I announced that we were planting a garden this year. I was just thinking about digging a place in the ground . . . but it's hard to do that with clay and rocks. The beds are beautiful and both have rims around them which double as benches.

Arguably, it's the first garden we've had since having children.

I say arguably because the children planted a couple of tomatoes and peppers in the shade at the edge of our woods a couple of years ago. And when the Boy overhears me saying we have our first garden this year, he is very swift to correct my error of historical accuracy. We did enjoy a few tomatoes from that small shaded patch, so I suppose it was a garden by definition . . . and by experience.

When the Big Guy and I first got married, his job took us to Alabama . . . the town was teeny-tiny and was 13 hours from home. 13 hours from everything we had ever known. As far as we were concerned, we were in the middle of nowhere.

Our house was an old, old house with a big back yard. Our neighbors owned the local Feed & Seed and they invited us over for dinner one spring night. As we visited, we started talking about gardens. It didn't take long for me to decide that we should have a garden.

I asked Tommy if we could borrow his tiller. He grinned and said "yes."

I asked what kinds of seeds we should buy . . . and where we should plant them. Tommy grinned and answered all of my questions.

Tommy told me to come by the store the next day after school and he'd help me pick out the seeds. I was excited.

The next day crawled by. All I could think about was picking out our seeds, carrying them home in those pocket-sized brown paper sacks and planting them in our garden.

For some reason long forgotten, I needed to stop by the house on my way to the Feed & Seed. Our driveway ran the length of the house, hooked around and ended at the back porch. When I pulled to the end of the driveway, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

Tommy was in our garden.

He had picked out the seeds, brought his tiller and fertilizer and had planted our garden for us. He was just finishing up when I came home. When he saw me, he grinned and waved.

I walked over and he explained what he'd done. He pointed out where our corn would be popping up and how the pole beans would use the corn stalks as support for their long sprawling vines. He showed me the mounds of earth that contained our squash and zucchini seeds. There were tomato plants and cucumbers, too.

I felt so blessed to have been put on that corner of the earth.

What Tommy did that day was one of the most neighborly things anyone has ever done for us.

Tommy and Jo were just regular people - the garden variety. But they are the Gold Standard to which I measure good-neighborliness. Each time I go out to our garden, I think of them. I think of how much they taught us in the 10 months that we were neighbors . . . and I miss that we didn't get to spend more time with them.

Photo: Sugar Peas from our garden.