Time

One of the things I love about the Anglican tradition is the liturgical calendar – the idea of rhythm throughout the year. Lent, the weeks from Ash Wendesday to Easter, is a  season of soul-searching and repentance., a time to slow down, take stock, simplify the schedule. Traditionally, the forty days of Lent are meant as an imitation of Jesus’ withdrawal into the wilderness for forty days (Sundays aren’t included in the count, since they commemorate the resurrection. For some, they’re feast days – but that’s a different discussion).

Some years I’ve given up chocolate, or coffee, or sugar, or all three, a way to pull myself back into balance after the binging on cookies through the holidays and Girl Scout cookie season. This year, I chose not to give up any specific thing, but to focus more intentionally on time – really taking time – to think, pray, read, reflect, prepare.

Our church is also focusing on time: life in the balance. And as if by design, the weather has been assisting, with snowfall after snowfall. Today, again, schools are closed, roads drifted, snow falling, wind stirring little cyclones of white that swirl across the yard.

This morning, with coffee in hand, and binoculars nearby to inventory hungry birds venturing through the snow in search of seeds, I’ve been reading Think Orange, a book by Reggie Joiner about the need to weave church and family more closely together. His thesis is that churches on their own are ineffective in discipling children and youth – as he points out, most churches have less than 40 hours a year of direct, strategic interaction with children. That’s probably a generous estimate, and the truth is, not much can be accomplished in such a small, scattered amount of time.

Ask

Here’s a question that comes up fairly often. It’s a question I’ve asked, and been asked, more times than I like to count:

How do you love someone deeply when you’ve never been loved that way yourself?

Or – rephrase it – how do you mentor someone else when no one’s ever mentored you?

Or – how do you set wise boundaries, when no one did that for you?

Or – how do you invest in others, when you’re not sure of the investment in yourself?

As a young mother, this really worried me. I remember holding a new, very loud baby, and wondering if it would be possible to love her. I did love her, on some simple, elemental level, but I also knew if she cried too long, too loud, too late into the night, there was part of me that would gladly hand her back.

Maybe that was closer to the surface for me than for most: my own parents couldn’t handle the challenge of parenthood, separated, and vanished, before I turned two.  I grew up in the care of my grandmother, who had raised four boys of her own, and then found herself with four more small children just months after her youngest son left for college.

So – how do you love someone deeply, when you’ve never been loved that way yourself? How do you parent, when your own parents let you down?