Lent: So Glad It Only Comes Once a Year

For several years running I gave up complaining for Lent. It took me that long to do it right. I gave up complaining out loud two years in a row. After that I worked on quieting the inner complaints. Last year I gave up complaining to God Himself. The habit of grousing has its back broken enough after all that hard work that I am able to nip it in the bud with just a little effort whenever I notice myself falling into it again. I developed a new improved habit to replace it. Moving on. I want more of that!

Next!

For various reasons, I decided to give up the façade of toughness that is my habitual response to the pains and arrows of the world. Toughness is not a sin, no. Nor is a shell around one's softer spots a bad idea. The only problem is when the habit of relying on a tough outer coating interferes with other strategies that are just as necessary to a happy and healthy life. I was finding I had more faith in my ability to protect myself from Life than in God's desire to give me what is good for me. When that habit of relying on myself superseded a reliance on God, it became disordered. 

I am disordered when I habitually use my wit to distract with laughter those who stumble uncomfortably close to the truths of me. I am disordered when I selfishly wield my Socratic questioning skills to open up the other person and use their natural desire to talk about themselves as a shield to hide myself behind. My barbed snark is the final weapon and it proves fatal to any budding friendship not healthy enough to live until the apology can take the sting out of the wound and stop the hemorrhage. Wit, getting others to talk, and sarcasm are not inherent evils. They are talents that can be invested badly, invested well, or buried in the ground. 

I've not buried them. For the most part I use them well. Yet, they are also part of the armor I use to keep this Hermit Crab crabby. As weapons, they are offensive, and in matters of the heart friendly fire wounds deepest. My heart has long stopped needing such a vigorous guard since I am better able to discriminate friend from foe. This Lent my guard is called to stand down and accept new orders. The Medic has been called.

I won't go into the details of how hard a Lent this has been. Let me say vaguely that I am battle weary from fighting off friend and foe and now I must engage against myself. Let me protest that my old wounds have scars that open up when pulled in a new direction. The barest hint of fresh air on that sort of thing stings and smarts and makes me wish I'd left well enough alone. Finally, let me say it's been a heartache, of course. Heart surgery hurts. The stone must be crushed and crumbled and removed before the heart of flesh can beat again. I am mixing my metaphors and yet I am still ending this paragraph. See? A certain amount of hardness can be used for good.

Here we are three days into Lent and I am exhausted and beyond my strength. I have Confessed and been shriven and admonished with the phrase, "You do not trust in God enough." I was assigned a penance to last all through Lent, too. God isn't kidding around! And just when I was thinking, "Well, I asked for this. Time to buckle down to it." I got hit with a nasty cold and an ear infection. I've had more than enough already, thank you. 

Time to rely solely on the only thing that is ever reliable: the only Person who is ever reliable.

Jesus, I trust in You. 37 days and counting. 

Good thing I haven't given up complaining this year.

A year later and we're almost done with the Ugly Yellow Trailer!

We bought another house and it cost even less than the trailer did. Of course, it will cost us more by the time we move it onto our place, but right now it's at about $1.15 a square foot. Yes, that's a decimal there. That's one dollar and fifteen cents for those of you who skim.

Soon we will be tripling our square footage. This is a cause for rejoicing not merely for the fact that we will be able to take a step in any given direction without having to say "excuse me" first, but mainly because we will have room for more children. We've been wanting to foster another baby since our youngest was weaned, but couldn't until we had more space. There's regulations about that. Wise ones.

In case you are curious, my husband and I would love for our family to be larger and are taking these steps to make it possible. We've always been open to more children by the usual means: by birth, by fostering, and adoption. I've always wanted nine children. He's set his heart on 12. We'll have to see how that all works out. Even the thought of more children is making my heartbeat quicken! I can hardly wait to get started!

We are excited and will be filling you in on the big move. Even though the house is moving and not the household this time, I'll still have to pack. We don't have enough room on our narrow acre to keep the trailer and put the new house on it in any logical manner. And since my camera got experimented on by a curious five-year-old (my fault) I have to share these less than stellar pictures from the auction website where we bought the house. Here it is...

 

The house is L shaped and over 2,000 square feet, too big to move in one chunk. Each section of the L will be loaded onto a truck and shipped down the road separately. The move will be towards the end of summer.

 By the time we get done with it, it will look a lot less like this. One of the first things we'll do is stucco the sides and put on a metal roof. Since we moved from our little town of Washburn last year, we live in the middle of a lot of prairie. Stucco and metal do not catch fire as easily as wood and shingle (and grassland), so it'll have a different exterior. We'll also be digging a big hidey hole off one of these porches. Since we've moved to Texas I've heard two tornadoes go by while crouching in a shelter with my family. One churned directly overhead, having hit just outside my husband's workplace before going aloft to skip over our town before it touched down again in a field. One skimmed the fields just outside of town and we heard it approach and move past. Like a non-combustible exterior, shelters are worth every penny even if you never have to use them.

This blur is the kitchen. You can't see the breakfast nook to the left or the pantry or the place where we will move the washer and dryer out to make a "goat milk" section of the kitchen to deal with all the goat milk, cheese, and related clutter (right now it's stuffed into the broken wall-oven and in a shed outside). That counter right in front of you is perfect kneading height, in case you were wondering why it's short.

Even though you can't see everything in the new kitchen, even what's on the picture is more than what we have in the trailer--shown here before we moved in, before we painted and before the wall oven broke...