The Noticer

A little something different on the blog today.  Last week I wrote an article for the Christian counseling practice I work for, but since I have the rights to the article's content I thought I would post it here as well.  Here's the short article; a little reading for a Monday.

The Noticer

Freshly back to work from maternity leave with my first child, it’s predictable that the thoughts I’m mulling around lately come from lessons I’m learning from the very small among us.  I’m not the first mother to see God and His love in a clearer light after having a child, and I won’t be the last.  I imagine that the unfolding of this understanding will continue throughout a lifetime of motherhood, and I look forward to how it is that I might be changed by these new angles.

 

            The primary picture God uses to help us understand our relationship to Him is the parent-child relationship.  So when my infant cried his very first tear, I responded instinctively to him as his parent, but my heart also was instinctively impacted by seeing the similarity of how it is that God relates to me in my tears.  Infants cry from their first moments after birth, but they do not produce actual tears until about a month into life, as their tear ducts take time yet to form.  So the first time that a big, wet tear rolled down my baby’s face, I noticed.  But to say I just noticed is an understatement; I remember stopping in my tracks and almost in slow-motion turning my hand over to catch the tear in my palm.  I was cut to core by the sight of that little tear, by the feel of its wetness dropping into my hand. 

            In that moment Psalm 56:8 sprang to my mind, “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle.  Are they not in your book?”  In that moment, so many different occasions of my own tears flooded my mind and I realized—God noticed.  Each time.  Each tear.  I knew that the Bible taught that, but the emotion behind the noticing—the love behind the noticing—became so much clearer to me now that I am a parent to my little boy.

            In my work as a counselor, I see what I do as part of joining God in the work He’s doing in the world. So when I sit in my therapist chair where I am witness to many tears, I try to represent to my clients God’s heart in the matter.  I take notice of each tear, and with my presence I hope to say, “I see your pain, and it matters,” because that’s how God treats us.  Of course a therapist is limited; we can’t see or know every time you cry or hurt but what we try to be for our clients one hour a week in our office is a small, imperfect slice of what God is to us all the time.  Attentive.  Seeing.  Knowing.  Compassionate. 

Some people see therapy as a waste of time, “Why should I sit around and cry about my problems?” or as something to fear, “I’m afraid I will break down and cry.”  While none of us particularly enjoy sitting with our pain, it’s a faulty cultural message we’ve received that tears should be hidden, brushed aside, or simply pushed past.  The God who made us cares so intimately about our pain that He says in poetical language that it’s like He collects each of our tears in a bottle.  I learn from God that my pain and your pain, my experience and your experience, it matters.  He knows and notices and feels for us.  Let’s let ourselves be seen, allow our tears to be noticed, and in so doing experience the love and compassion of God—the one who notices, always.

A Writing Week

It's been a writing week.

Hours and days were likable as I worked on a little article for the student paper of the college where husband works.

It's also been a sunny week, and, this is old news now, but so nothing like winter.

It's funny to watch people's worldview of "earn and deserve" play out in street conversation about the Chicago weather.

"I don't know what we did to deserve it," people are saying as they squint in the sunlight at the L stops in a way that is part functional to shield the bright light, and part confused affect.

Some Chicagoans are downright ill at ease with the common grace of winter-relief.

To me, the easier weather translates to my acknowledgment that other places exist outside of the walls of my apartment.

This Starbucks is home away from home though, so I could have gone there to write in snowmageddon.

To me, a writing week is a good week. 

Although I have decided word count specifications are the death of the creative process.

I have also learned that a Starbucks drink only lasts for about the first 150 words. 

It seems that these are things I will have to learn to live with.

Article

I told you I'd link up my article when it found a home.

The wonderful thing about friends is that you tell them about your afternoon of sitting in a city cafe with a scone, a latte, and an empty screen you try to fill, and they comment and text and call and say they want to read it.

 That in itself is more inspiring than any sentence I've written.

I know I have the best friends, but really, 

I have the best friends.

End of story.

Oh wait, not end of story yet, find the article here.

 Up next, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

I mean, it's dark by 5:00pm now, so what else am I going to do?
Okay, the what else am I going to do part is kind of facetious, but the 5:00pm dark part is... so not. 
What books will you be reading, as we wait for snow and holiday sales?

Image Credit

Matured Character

 

Spotted on A Cup of Jo

 

Hello.

Hello to you, and hello to autumn.

I still have yet to say hello to the fall icon, the pumpkin spice latte, can it be true!

It seems I'm holding it off until October, when the days can no longer choose to reminisce of summer but must instead step fully into the matured character, autumn.

I've been distracted, busy.  My days have been full-bodied, but smooth.
Colors, temperatures, and flavors have started to shift with only so much as a wear-boots-with-my-dress-to-work nod from me.

But, under September blue skies and a busy schedule, I did find a place for my writing piece.

I got some editor's notes on it that I need to work in, but it will be published on the web soon.
Thank you, Bird by Bird!

I will fall forward into the season change.

Though it would really help if I could find my fall coat, all plaid and ruffled.
So far, I haven't had any luck. 

Maybe you could invite me for a chai latte, pumpkin spice cupcake date?
I never thought I'd have to say it, but I need help with this fall thing at the moment.

Bird by Bird

Okay, I'm in love.
Writing, and reading, and me.
I think we can grow old together.

I finished Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
Neal had to put up with me laughing so often, and asking him if "I could just read him this one little part?" even more often.

I highlighted the heck out of the thing, but I thought I'd leave you with the very last paragraph of the book.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation.  They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.  When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored.  We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.  It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea.  You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

I spent the afternoon alone at 3rd Coast Cafe today, writing.

Can I just say, I think I was made for this life?

And I was not alone, if you count the company of a raspberry scone and a latte.

(Note to self: I like their chocolate chip scone far better.  I should have intuited this.  When has fruit ever been better than chocolate?)

 I'm working on a small essay that's been mulling around in my head for awhile.

I have some ideas for why I'm writing it, and probably no one will care about it but me, but really I'm doing it because I believe in this.

I believe in how writing and reading connect us, decrease our feeling of being alone.  How it helps us to look down on our life from a bird's eye view and say, "Life is hard, let me count the ways.  But it's funny too.  And beautiful, and achingly familiar to all of us."

Bird by Bird, you're a rockstar.