Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose

I started this post over a month ago. I am sad to say it is still just as relevant today as it was then. Have y'all ever seen Friday Night Lights?  The TV series, not the movie.  I stumbled on it on Netflix a year or so ago and binge watched my way through it.  And then I found the movie and watched it. I loved them both. One of the things that has stuck with me ever since I watched the first episode of the show was "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose".  It became a mantra that the Dillon Panthers shouted before they headed out onto the football field to play.

Victoria Macey - Dribbble

It also became a mantra I started applying to my life. I'm a firm believer that change comes from within. If I want the world to be a better place, then I need to start with me. Start by cleaning out my baggage, my preconceptions, my biases. View every person I meet knowing that they have their own struggles, their own beliefs, but they were fearfully and wonderfully made.

Fill my heart so full of love that when terrible things happen in the world, I act, and not just speak.  I fully believe in the power of prayer. But words without actions serves me, not others. It can be something as simple as a friend with a sick child, or as terrible as an attack.  Prayer can be my first step, but it should not be my last. Can I take the mother of the sick child a meal? Offer to babysit her other children so that she can get her child to the doctor? How can I help her? Can I give blood to help out when a tragedy happens? Donate supplies to the blood banks to help out the donors when they are far away?  How can I actively show love?

During the movie, Billy Bob Thornton, who plays Coach Gaines, gives a speech. In it he says: 

Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart? If you can do that, gentlemen, then you're perfect

If we can live in this moment with clear eyes and love in our hearts, we're perfect.  Clear eyes, to see that our world view isn't the only one. To see that just because we haven't experienced something, doesn't mean it hasn't happened. It just means it hasn't happened to us.  Hearts so full of love for mankind that we would listen with open ears to others concerns and make them ours. That we would begin to try and find a way to heal our country together.

Where have all the children gone?

Or rather the Mom's of adult children.  I'm an avid reader, online and in life. I devour books and I read multiple blogs daily.  Many, no actually all, of the blogs that I read about motherhood are from the viewpoint of mothers whose children are still young.  Usually 14 or younger.  I feel like fourteen is sort of a cut off date. After that we, as mothers, know that our children are heading into their teenage years. And we remember those years. We know how chaotic they are, how you feel like you don't fit in anywhere. I know if the internet had been around when I was a teenager, and my mom made a post about me. Well I would have just "died."

So I get it. I understand why the blogs are all from mommy's who have young children and why they go (mostly) silent about their children during the teenage years and beyond. I think, though, that it's also because we're ashamed. When your child is little and makes a mess all over the house, well heck, every parent has dealt with that.  Or when your elementary school child needs help with homework that you don't understand.  Been there, done that.  But when our children become teenagers, we start to think they will magically morph into pillars of society who will rarely, if ever, do anything wrong.  And telling the world that our child messed up (read, "is human") is a super scary thing. Because if they're messing up then I'm obviously a horrible parent, right?

There is no way that a good parent would have a kid who lies to them, who sneaks out in the middle of the night, who drank before the legal drinking age, or (God forbid) who cusses like a sailor.  That isn't what a good kid looks like. Especially a good Christian kid. Being a Christian isn't especially hard.  Being what society thinks is a Christian is almost impossible. When you have children who are now adults, who aren't what society thinks a christian should be, it's even harder.  I'm still a mama bear. Even though one of my cubs has a cub of his own, I still want to protect them.

I am the worst at keeping up with my blog.  It's mostly a place where I share my random thoughts, my grief over my mother, and my never ending battle with weightloss.  But I want to try and start sharing stories with you about my children.  Most of you who read this right now have young children. But one day they won't be young. And maybe you'd like a place to go to read stories and think to yourself, "hmm, someone else went through this too. Maybe we're not so different"  Because in the end, I don't think we are. We're just afraid to share.

It's ok to grieve

In June my mother will have been gone from this earth for three years. It doesn't seem like it's been that long. Some days I roll through life perfectly fine, thinking of how she would have loved this or that, how much she would enjoy the beautiful weather.  And then others, for seemingly no reason at all, I will find myself struggling with even mundane tasks, like running errands.  She'll pop into my mind, my throat will constrict, and tears fill my eyes.  And suddenly I am struggling to keep it together.  

Grief in silhouette by Tim Green

When someone you love dies, no one gives you a manual.  You're usually given three days off of work to grieve them, and then it's back to the daily grind.  When my grandmother died, I thought the grief process ended that suddenly. That after just a little grieving you turned off your emotions and got back to the business of living.  Aside from her funeral and that first week or so, I can't remember ever seeing my mother or her sisters cry.  I thought they were over it, that it was done.  It wasn't until my mama died that I realized how wrong I was.  I was sitting at my Aunt Sue's house talking with her about when Granny (as we called her) died, and she began to cry.  I was shocked at first, and then so relieved.  I told her exactly what I just told you. That I thought they had gotten over it and just moved on. I had thought I must be doing something wrong because I was still upset over a year later.  She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, "No".  

Light after Darkness by Jhong Dizon

It was like a switch flipped on in my brain. Grief isn't something you just do for a little while. It's something you will do the rest of your life, in different ways.  And that is OK. It's OK that sometimes I need to break down and cry. It's OK that sometimes I can remember sweet times with mama and be happy. There is no right or wrong way to do this, and best of all, there's no time limit. I don't have to "get over it" and move on.  I just have to live, one day at a time, sometimes one moment at a time, and living is all mama would want from or for me.  Just to keep going and live my life.

To each her own~

My entire life I learned that marriage was 50/50, a partnership. But I heard something a few years ago that completely changed my views on marriage.  Marriage isn't 50/50, it isn't even 100/100.  It's more like an ever shifting plane. Some days you give 90%, some days you give 10, but the thing about it is this: you both have to give all you have every day. Because when you're both giving all you have, then all you have is enough.

I absolutely love marriage helps. I have an entire board on Pinterest dedicated to them. For years I poured all that I was into being the best mother that I could be. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I failed, but my marriage would often take a back seat. And now that our kids are grown, I want to give that same dedication to my husband.

It's seems like I'm not the only person interested in making things great with my significant other. In the last few months I've read articles on Why You Should Have Sex Every Night, Why You Shouldn't Have Sex Every Night, Things Every Woman Should Know,  Things Every Man Should Know, and Why Your Spouse Should Always Come First (woops!). You know what I have learned from all of this reading?  Nobody knows anything about your relationship except you and your partner. That's it. Everyone else can have tons of opinions about what will make it better, but the only two people that know how to make it work are you. So ask for advice, read up on what works best for others, but in the end, it's the two of you. And marriage works when you work. So work it.

I still believe

This is the second in a two part series

A few years after the whole poem fiasco my uncle was singing in the little church when he had a massive heart attack and died. After that our attendance there slowly dwindled to nothing.  As my parents church attendance had been spotty, so was ours from that point forward. 

Ryk Neethling/Flikr

While my church attendance wasn't "up to par" my relationship with Jesus was doing well. I was praying and studying my bible daily. And then our kids introduced us to an online game. Over the next few years it consumed our family. All of us played, often together, and nothing was as important as playing the game.  During this time I met an atheist who was firm in his belief that there was no God. He posed some interesting questions, ones that I didn't have answers to. And so I began to wonder myself. Was I just believing this because I had been raised in it? Why did I believe that there was a "mystery man" in the sky who would protect me? 

My struggle began there. I first started investigating why I believed God existed. The best answer I could come up with at the time was "because I just know" Which, as you may realize, didn't get me very far. To me he's in the sunrise and the sunset, in the perfect elliptical orbits of the planets, the distance between the sun and the earth, the earth and the moon, the rise and fall of the tides. But to my atheist friend, all of this could be explained by science. My faith faltered, what if I was wrong? Look how far science had come in just the last 50-75 years. What if in the next 100 years they could explain so much more?  

Hubble Sweeps a Messy Star Factory - NASA

The easiest thing for me to do was to search for Jesus. Because, in my faith, Jesus is my salvation. I couldn't prove that God was real, but could I prove that Jesus existed.  Could I do it outside of the bible? Could I find evidence that Jesus was who he said he was without turning to the one book that atheists scorn so?  I wondered. 

To type out everything that I learned would take about 20 posts. But I would like to share with you a couple of things that I did discover. Jesus is mentioned in many historical documents, almost always in passing. The most notable of these are in the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, both respected historians.  Josephus said of Jesus: 

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the trut gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. 

The passages in italics are debatable. That is to say, it is likely those were added by early Christian copyists, and were not written by Josephus.  On the whole, though, this passage is believed to be authentic by many scholars.

Tacitus wrote:

Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstitution, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome...Accordingly, an arrest was first made of tall who pleaded guilty: then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. 

Rather than bore you with a long list of other minor mentions I will sum up what I learned. If we threw out the New Testament (which are biographies and historic letters), and other Christian writings there are still some major points we can glean from historic references about Him.

1. Jesus was a Jewish teacher
2. Some people believed he was the Messaiah
3. He was rejected by the Jewish leaders
4. His enemies acknowledged he performed unusual feats. (healings, exorcism)
5. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius
6. Despite his death his followers believed that he was still alive.
7. His followers multiplied rapidly and spread as far as Rome. 
8. Many people worshiped him as God

Honestly with my bible background, and what I knew from that, that was enough for me.  He existed, he died in the manner that my bible says he did, and his disciples continued to worship him even when facing death. They truly believed that he was the Messaiah. And if Jesus exists, well then so does God. 

While I tried to find evidence for Jesus outside my bible, I came to one interesting conclusion. Excluding the bible is a little silly, honestly. If these books weren't religious writings they would be honored as historical documents.  

I found this site helpful in my research.

Dear Mama,

I'm going to be a grandma. Things are going so fast since you left us, mama. I wish you could meet Brittany. You would love her. She's sweet, and country, and perfect for Shane. I think this is the first time he's ever truly been in love. And I'm so thankful that God put her in his life.

My family is growing by leaps and bounds mama. It's amazing how fast it happened. Matt has found himself a wonderful girl. We just got to meet her last week. She's from Wisconsin, her name is Melissa. And she's a sweetheart. She would remind you a lot of me. She talks super fast, which I love. Finally someone who can keep up with me.

Amanda has a new love as well, Isaiah. They're planning on getting married. She asked him. I know that doesn't surprise you a bit, she's an assertive little fart. Always has been. Oh, and they've all moved out. But don't worry, I'm not alone. Hunter and Lolo are here most days. So I am plenty active. And when they go home I turn off the TV, put on some music, and chill.  It's so nice mama. I'm working on getting healthy. I want to live to a ripe old age. I hope I can live up to the huge shoes that you left to be filled. You were the best grandma I have ever seen. I hope I can be half as good as you were.

Love you mama, miss you always,