Spreading Christmas magic, one family at a time.
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Researching to make your historical writing accurate and relevant.
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What’s your journey? How do you honor where you’ve been? Where is your journey taking you?
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What would be the worst thing you could find out about your family?
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What gives?
“You asked me what I thought, and now you’re not taking my advice? What’s up with that?”
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No, I don’t believe he did it. Why would you even ask me that question? I won’t believe he did it. Not without more proof than what today’s paper said.
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Dusky, dark blue sky hovers over the wide, tree-edged lawns. Brown, dusty fields fade into the horizon. Honking geese drown out distant city traffic as they fly in packs southward, from where I came. Abbey bells peal across the way, calling the monks to prayer.
Photo by Alexey Demidov on Unsplash I step from concrete onto the short-trimmed grass path. It winds, only one way, into a center, spiraling, twisting, back-tracking in a carefully mown, eternal pattern. Its width is just enough for my two feet in their natural stance to walk, stroll, or amble. And so I do. At the beginning, one foot tentatively placed in front of the other, my hands clasped behind my back, I am thoughtful and expectant, purposeful and slow. I notice how the stately, tall edges of the grass keep me focused on the worn path, whose occasional patches of dirt testify to the journeys of previous pilgrims. I settle into a rhythm, and a cadence thrumming in my head.
Photo by Mahina Gelderloos on Unsplash Soon, my mind begins to burble: I worry, fret about life, even though I know it does no good. I question and criticize, even though that does no good either. As I turn left and then wind right, I grumble and spew. God lets me purge until I wonder, as I continue my mental rant, "Haven’t I been on this path before?" By the time I finally reach the center, a time to pause, I can leave the negative behind, be thankful as I step around the circle, praying thanks for my world inside the semi-concentric rings. And for messages sent and received. I leave the core, fully centered, peaceful, light-hearted. As always, the journey in has eased my heart. I venture back into the path, eager to embrace the Lord’s positivity, to choose the bright side, to allow the glistening tall grass to lead me back even though I must veer left and right and curve back on myself.
I set out briskly. Night is falling quickly across the great, green expanse, and something new pushes away my newfound peace, the comfort and confidence of the center: I’ve never walked such a complicated design, nor a labyrinth so wide. "How long have I been walking, anyway?" The wind has picked up; I pull my collar higher and shiver. The lights from the abbey seem brighter in the distance, a welcome sight. There are people inside. But are others outside? Hidden in the shadows? I should walk faster, get back to my room where it’s warm and I can pray in solitude.
I glance down at the path. Where is it? The tall grass has vanished. All the turf looks the same: dark, dark black. There are no taller areas tipped in glistening white dew. Does the path turn or go straight? I can’t say. I can’t see it! No part of my return is clear now. All the grass seems the same height. Nothing is clearly demarcated. "What is happening? Is it the distraction of the lights in the distance?" I’m nearly blinded by the bright halogen. The lamplight obscures my vision and my progress.
I must slow down. In my leather shoes, my feet are cold and wet from slogging through the damp grass of the disappearing path. "Should I step out of the coil? Excuse myself from this self-inflicted diversion and simply walk straight back to the abbey where I can relax, be warm and safe? After all, I made it to the center. Isn't that enough?" My hand raises and blocks the light. I look ahead, farther down the path. Ahhh… I can see the path, my goal. Darker, but more distinct, It's still there, waiting for my feet to leave their mark. “What is happening? Isn’t the light supposed to help?” “Don’t get distracted,” I hear. “Don’t let bright lights or noise or darkness stall your progress. Keep focused ahead. Not on the minute details underfoot. Then your goal -your life- will be clear and manageable.” And with God’s hand in mine, walking this journey, it is.
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“Who are you?” an elderly woman demands as she peers up into my face. I have never met her.
A middle-aged man shrugs apologetically, “I should know you, but I forget your name.” I’ve never met him, either.
Barely making eye contact, a young person nods at me and shoves a folded paper my way, while continuing a conversation with a friend. I’m not sure I want to meet her.
What none of the three said was, “Welcome to our church.”
My husband and I have been searching for a new church since late spring. Every couple of weeks, we wade into the discussion about where we will worship next as we look for a church home. He announces the names of churches he’s recently driven past and wondered about, as I grab my phone and type their names into Google for the low-down.
Evaluating the options isn’t an easy task.
We have a few limiters to begin with: the first is geographic. A potential church can’t be located in the small town where I retired from teaching. I’m not interested in sitting in worship with my former high school students.
Then there’s the content of the service. Neither of us wants politics to be the focus of a sermon, and we definitely don’t want any groups of people to be targeted for hatred. We both grew up in “God is Love” theology, so labeling people as “evil” is a stretch for our faith.
Music is another issue. We’d like a blend of traditional music and praise music, but nothing that lasts more than about ten minutes at a time, that is unintelligible, or that is missing lyrics and music to follow.
Photo by John Price on Unsplash Then there’s the “dead time.”
I’m most comfortable with a significant amount of quiet worship time. I don’t need a pastor or musician or layperson to fill all of the service with noise. I prefer time to process, center myself, and listen to God. The energy of the gathered silence speaks to my condition.
Not so much my husband’s. As in Life with Father, he’s the Methodist.
After sitting through the unprogrammed worship time the first time he attended my semi-programmed Friends meeting, he asked in earnest, “What was all that dead time?”
Sigh.
I’ve come to accept that attending an unprogrammed Friends meeting every couple of months will meet that need for me.
Photo by Naassom Azevedo on Unsplash Our beliefs are another challenge. That’s where the Internet helps. I can scroll through the “What We Believe” page of the church’s or denomination’s website. I usually read them aloud, and if they pass muster for both of us, I move on to vet a recent sermon that’s been recorded on YouTube. That’s the next big hurdle.
As a former secondary ELA teacher, I’m told I set a high bar for sermons in organization, content, grammar, and presentation. I can accept that. I want to follow the pastors’ reasoning and support, while also being moved by their fervor. I also want them to speak using subjects and verbs that agree. And I want to be left with a challenge, a call to action. Not that I’m grading them…exactly, but I want a sermon to be effective, both in content and delivery. I can accept a pastor’s casual clothes, but I don’t want to be distracted by the pastor perched on a tall stool with a foot jiggling as he speaks or pacing around the stage gesticulating wildly, or standing perfectly still, reading behind the lectern and looking up at the ceiling every couple of paragraphs.
Together, we have a long list of needs, expectations, and wishes. So many that it’s almost like house shopping: which ones are most important? Which can we set aside?
Even so, we’re trying to be open-minded.
During the past months, we’ve worshipped at early services and later ones, with a handful of people and large crowds. We’ve worshipped in a converted hardware store, a crumbling stone church, and a labyrinthine renovated one. We’ve wriggled to get comfortable on simple wooden pews in a plain country meetinghouse and practically taken root on padded pews in a neo-Gothic edifice. We’ve had our ears blasted by rock bands and also sat in silence with only roosters interrupting our meditation.
Photo by Zander Betterton on Unsplash With all these varied worship experiences and despite all my teacher-like, analytical evaluation of each church’s location, its denominational beliefs, and unique contents of its service, surprisingly, I’m finding that our lasting impressions generally come back to the people we’ve encountered.
We’ve met a gamut of church members. We’ve been surrounded by complacent elderly worshippers and young Christians on fire, as well as everyone in between.
We’ve been completely ignored during the “friendly” greeting time, and we’ve been chased through the lobby when we slipped out before communion. We’ve been interrogated about where we live and which church we attended previously, and we’ve had attendance pads and pencils thrust into our hands to fill out “for attendance.” We’ve had adults seated behind us talk continuously during the service, and we’ve had young people in front of us walk in and out of the service to refill their coffee cups.
But we’ve also received warm hugs—mostly from elderly women who are the self-appointed huggers of the congregation. We’ve been invited to join the congregation in tea and cookies and discussion after a service. We’ve joined the congregation in singing our hearts out with a well-worn hymnal in hand. We’ve listened to orchestral music from lofty pipe organs, and we’ve been inspired by gifted singers sharing their amazing vocal ministries. We’ve been prayed for and kindly invited to return.
And most importantly, in several places, we’ve felt the loving arms of our Lord.
Years ago, a wise pastor once told my youth group that he was secure enough in his faith to worship anywhere. Maybe that should be our aspiration.
Photo by Filipe T. Soares on Unsplash -
“Not everyone thinks the way you do,” a friend and coworker once told me. I suppose it was meant to rein in my higher-than-average expectations of myself and others.
But as I think about how doomscrolling, social media, and AI are infiltrating, perhaps hijacking, the lives of young people today, I can’t help but think everyone might be better off if they were at least a bit more like me.
See, I’m rarely bored. Sometimes that’s a problem, but usually it serves me well.
I have too many interests to sit around and complain about having nothing to do. My crowded, but generally well-organized home office is evidence.
On the bookshelves, textbooks related to teaching grammar and writing hover above a shelf of Quaker history texts, which lean next to filled journals and books about journal writing. On the black-slatted bookcase behind my grandmother’s wingback chair are volumes about the healing properties of herbs, essential oil recipes, Myers-Briggs Personality Types, the enneagram, and an oddball book on numerology. My classic books are downstairs, alphabetized above the shelf with travel books and biographies. My collection of Trixie Belden mysteries lives in the guest room with the fantasy classics discarded by my youngest son.
The office closet is stuffed with salve and tincture-making supplies: bottles of all sizes, droppers, beeswax, cheesecloth, extra stainless steel pots and utensils, and even a single-burner hotplate. That equipment shares the double-wide space with sewing paraphernalia, snorkeling gear, luggage, paper cutters and bookmaking supplies, stained glass-making materials, and floral design tools for the annual winter greens workshop.
On Great Aunt Hazel’s dropleaf table, I have just enough space to work on papercraft because the back of the table is covered with oil painting and colored pencil art supplies. An overhead projector–a gem in the world of intaglio printmaking–takes up space on the floor between bags filled with research notebooks, copies of manuscripts, and plat maps. It’s waiting patiently until I decide on purchasing a small intaglio press. I’d love to continue my foray into printmaking, but having enough time to justify the cost is an issue.
Between the table and the louvered closet doors, I’ve wedged an old-fashioned collapsible wooden clothes rack. It works perfectly downstairs on the dining room table when I am drying herbs a few times each year. The pie safe in the family room is filled with Ball jars containing dried herbs.
The drawers of the one-ton walnut credenza in the office overflow with scrapbooks halfway completed from trips to China, Peru, Japan, and India. Someday, I’ll finish pasting in all the receipts and brochures and geegaws I collected…but maybe not. I’m probably the only one who cares about their contents.
Outside the office, downstairs is my digital piano, which gives me hours of frustrating pleasure as I enter my third year of piano lessons. Outside is my fenced-in herb garden, which has now grown to include a few raised beds for vegetables and has prompted my new interest in home canning. With several friends who grew up canning and three kids who worked for the premier company of canning fame, I have ready advice at my fingertips. But my kitchen is small, so my husband and I are working to create a canning kitchen in the garage.
Here’s my point: I always have stuff to do and things to learn.
But I found that’s often not true for young people. That’s especially problematic when it comes to helping kids improve their reading skills. According to NAEP, “The 2024 scores [for reading] at all selected percentiles except the 90th were lower compared to 2022 percentile scores.”
In the classroom, when I monitored reading level gains among my high school students, I counseled students to read more outside of school. As they groaned or glanced away, not wanting to confess that they hated to read (as if I didn’t already know), I told them they could read ANYTHING, it all “counted” and would help them improve their skills if they just took time to think about what they read.
I came to understand that concept when one of my sons began reading by noticing the names on the backs of cars. He loved his Hot Wheels. I also learned it from my husband, who hated reading in school, but as an adult, he discovered Tom Clancy and became a voracious reader.
Here’s generally how the student reading conferences went:
Me: So what are you interested in?
Student: I dunno.
Me: Well, how do you spend your time after school?
Student: I dunno (or don’t want to say).
Me: Hmmm. What does your afternoon and evening look like?
Student: I just hang out.
Me: So what does that mean?
Student: I dunno.
Me: (tugging at my eyebrows) Okaaaay.
Too many of those conversations encouraged me to keep my classroom flooded with a wide range of reading materials on various topics. My students even organized it by genre to make finding interesting books easier for kids who don’t enjoy reading yet.
But when kids don’t have any interests, that’s a problem.
Especially when social media or chatting with AI is so readily available to fill the gap.
About ten years ago, Passion Projects were a thing in the education world. Students chose a topic related to the subject area they were studying and spent one period or day per week researching and writing about it to create a product to share with the class at the end of the term. With clear goals and skill instruction, these Passion Projects helped students build knowledge and tick off many academic standards while using higher-order thinking skills. But sadly, like many educational strategies, Passion Projects seem to have faded away. Maybe it was too easy to let the time slide into a free period for kids and a time for the teacher to grade or plan. Or maybe the modules swallowed them.
As an English teacher with research standards to address, I always assigned a variety of research projects that connected to our literature. For example, students researched modern-day slavery after reading Civil War novels, they investigated current issues on American Indian reservations, and chose topics about everyday life to present in booths at a Renaissance or Asian or Americas fair. Over the years and courses, I kept hashing and rehashing projects to keep students engaged and learning, often in hands-on ways. “Project Based Learning” is the current buzz term, although it’s not a new concept.
I invested hours creating engaging research projects and topic choices, always eager to entertain student-generated topics to get better buy-in from reluctant students. Sometimes they produced amazing work that was a joy for me to learn from, too. But too often, some students just jumped through the hoop with little interest or curiosity.
Now, almost three years later and out of the classroom, here are my concerns and questions:
Many kids spend too much time on screens. Check out what the toddlers in strollers have in their hands!
If social media is too addictive for adults to pull away from, of course, it must be more difficult for kids who, by nature, are in the throes of seeking peer approval.
Trauma can be overwhelming and make people turn away from what they love; why aren’t there more live counselors in schools who can help kids?
How can parents and grandparents build interests in their children?
Of course, money seems to be the obvious challenge. It takes money for kids to have interests. Sure, it can help, but there are plenty of ways to cultivate interests away from electronics and learn, too. Here’s a list of possibilities, taken from my playlist of interests:
Daydream about your future…or the past.
Draw something you see.
Whistle a tune you made up.
Sing some songs you know.
Silence your mind and listen to the world around you.
Take a walk in your neighborhood and make a map.
Write or tell a story about your life or what you’d like your life to be.
Find images in the clouds and watch them morph into something new.
Inspect some plants, compare their color, size, shape, blooms.
Read a book from the public library, a little free library, on a shelf in a classroom or borrow one from someone you know. Hate to read- Bah! You just haven’t found the right material.
Build something from discarded boxes.
Make a puzzle or word search or number game.
Catch a bug and examine it closely.
Play with a younger person.
Have a conversation with a friend.
Count things, classify them, and make a chart or guide.
Ask someone older about the lessons they learned in life.
Make up jokes or riddles and try them out.
Organize your space, sort and pitch and clean.
Photo by Tarikul Raana on Unsplash Do I ever get caught up in scrolling through the Internet? Sometimes. Usually, it’s at night when I can’t get to sleep, and I don’t want to wake up my husband by getting up to play piano or read or draw or write. That’s when having several interests can be negative: there’s always something I could do. I can also get pulled into doomscrolling when I’m worried about something in the news. Happily, the antidote to being preoccupied with the news is to stay away from it.
Younger folks might dismiss this as unrealistic, an outdated, generational approach to a contemporary problem. They might say I’m out of touch. After all, my peers and I often made our fun as we free-ranged our neighborhoods, farms, and streets, when today, some say, there’s nowhere for kids to do that safely. The malls are gone, the streets aren’t safe, and farms are few. Okay, maybe we need more safe places for kids to hang out today. Places without electronics. That takes effort to organize, and perhaps only some of us have the time and contacts and energy to do that.
But we all can start by limiting our own screentime at home and replacing it with cultivating our own interests. Let kids see adults chasing and enjoying unique hobbies and diversions. Non-electronic ones. Make a jar filled with slips of paper with your own playlist of ideas, and make a show of pulling one out each day or each weekend.
With our passions so evident, it won’t be long before the kids join us.
And I’ll bet that they’ll get healthier, manage their stress better, and find interesting things to read along the way.
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Fill the Aegean
Blue ripples shimmering with silver ridges, rolling away toward the Sun that brightens the palest azure horizon mesmerize me.
My exposed skin browns with freckles, moistened by the late summer rays that burn in the cerulean sky. Those Aegean sailors bound for Troy, fiercely loyal or stupidly tricked by a sailor much cleverer than they toiled on these same lapis lazuli waters. Unlike me, whose sinews only strain when climbing, they strained against the sail, begging favor from the gods who alternately favored or thwarted their schemes. My schemes are few; my goals minute: To walk in the footsteps of apostles, to consider what might have been, to envision battles and ghosts and bishops on the plains and In their gymnasium and baths.
Are there kingdoms here to save or subdue? No royalty I, with souls dependent on my decisions. All I have are peace and prayers and dreams for my children who also await my safe return.
