What's saving my life right now

Fall edition

Always the sunrise that starts my day with a relaxing deep breath and the reminder that every morning brings new mercies.

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My friend Emily, who I’ve only actually met in real life one time but who truly feels like a friend because in that one ten-minute meeting she listened like she actually cared about what I was saying, talks a lot about reflection and how it helps us be present and appreciate our life and learn from the past to make better decisions for the future. She describes reflection as a “spiritual practice,” which has been a curiosity to me. I was about to ask her to define “spiritual practice” and to explain what makes this habit of reflection such. Then I woke up one recent morning to this newsletter from her and it explained it all. I really do encourage you to go read it.

But for those of you who hate leaving one newsletter/essay/post to go read another, or for those who want the TLDR version, here it is in just a few of her words:

It’s part of living a reflective life … a way to honor … the small gifts of daily life.
It is simply about naming what you look to for fun, comfort, grounding, and hope.
It’s grounding in a sometimes sinking world. ~Emily P. Freeman

As she explains, this practice of reflection on what is good in my life “is often not about the thing but about the becoming.” Who am I becoming by taking the time to name the good and helpful things in my life? And now I understand why she calls this act of reflection a spiritual practice. It’s thankfulness on purpose.

She says in another post, “It always helps me to remember that the goal is not to be good at spiritual practices. The goal is union with God.” And that makes it so worthwhile.

The phrase “saving my life” almost sounds a little too dramatic for me, the ninest of enneagram nines. But I am continually trying to step out of my self-induced comfort zone, so I’ll just go ahead and use the terminology that gives me a teeny bit of angst.

So what is saving my life right now? I’m so glad you asked. It’s people, a car, and a book I could not put down.

People

I have been overwhelmed by the heart-nearness of my children in this very hard season of caring for elderly parents. When we had my mother-in-law living with us, my kids popped in at regular intervals, and she got to spend a lot of time with a few of her great-grandchildren, whom she treasured. Nana referred to my son Elijah as “that handsome man.”

Now we are helping my parents, and while the logistics are a little different because we live 3+ hours away, the emotional aspect of it is very similar. Obviously, my husband is here with me through it all, being the one who daily deals with my mental and emotional exhaustion and me being away from home most of the week, and I could not do this without him. But my children are also in the trenches with us. Only one of the five lives close to me, and the others are here in spirit, here in love, here in texts and DMs and phone calls and how did we do this? How did we create children who love us so much? I have never felt so blessed nor seen the grace of God so evident in my life. They are wonderful in spite of us, and they are currently helping to save my life. I’m excited to see the farthest-away one and his family next week.

A car

I have always been a Honda girl. I was driving my favorite car ever, a white Honda Accord EX-L with their fancy V-tech 6-cylinder motor that was the best thing on wheels for an average mom, when I was hit head-on and had to say goodbye as the wrecker dragged it out of the ditch. It was a sad day.

Do you see how intact that car is after being hit head-on though? It did exactly what it was supposed to do in a crash and I am forever thankful I was driving it that day.

Three weeks later I was car shopping, still suffering from a concussion and the PTSD that hadn’t been diagnosed yet, and I just didn’t care. Mentally, I was not in it. I read a few articles in Consumer Reports about the best mid-size SUV and bought the first Toyota Highlander I drove. It had 100,000 miles on it then. It was black (I never wanted a black car) and I thought it was ugly. Whatever. I just needed a vehicle. It was the least excited I’d ever been about something to drive.

Here we are, five years and 140,000 miles later and I have to say I am now a Toyota girl. We change the oil, do the brakes, put tires on it, and that’s all. What an amazing car. It has hit a deer in Georgia, hauled hay and cattle feed and thousand-foot rolls of high-tensile wire, delivered coolers full of beef ( we crammed a cow and a half in there one time), and taken us all over the country when we got sick of flying under stupid Covid rules.

Nowadays, it takes me back and forth every week from south-central to northwestern Virginia, and with 240,000 miles on it, it just keeps going. What do I love most about it? My Highlander starts and goes and I don’t have to worry about it. It’s reliable. Faithful. And right now, one less thing to think about is saving my life.

A book

I love to read. I am like a lost puppy when I don’t have a book or three or twenty. I often buy books on the spur of the moment based on something someone else says about them. This does not always work out well, but once in a while I find a gem. I also learn over time whose recommendations I usually like. (Lookin at you, Nina.)

I read a book a few years ago called The World’s Largest Man, the story Harrison Scott Key wrote about his father, with whom he had a kind-of good but somewhat complicated relationship. Doesn’t everyone have daddy issues? I liked it in spite of the language. Key is a great writer, funny, but also tender, and brutally honest.

So when I saw his latest book recommended, I wanted to read it as well. How to Stay Married is not at all what I expected and also comes with a language warning. It is the story of his wife’s infidelity and how he begins to understand his role in it. Key is an unconventional Christian, not your garden-variety Baptist by a long shot, and their story has more twists and turns than a Six Flags roller coaster.

One of the things I loved was hearing Key’s bohemian—unorthodox? offbeat? outlandish?—interpretations of the Bible. I could see how someone reading through Scripture for the first time could view it that way. His total honesty with God is (dare I say it?) refreshing. I laughed and cried, often in one sitting. If you can stand the language, I highly recommend it. (But I warned you about the language.)

While I wouldn’t say this book has saved my life, it has provided a welcome diversion in the evening after a stressful day, and it’s given me food for thought, always a plus.

Honorable mention

Also saving my life is online check-in and boarding pass downloading to my phone. This is genius.

And the ziploc bag of frozen cookie-dough blobs in the freezer so I can bake two or six cookies whenever we want them without gorging on the whole batch.

I am also not taking for granted all of the automatic appliances in this house. I’ve had a few conversations with my mother recently about her growing-up years and how her mother was so thrilled when she received the gift of a wringer washer. The kind you had to fill with hot water you had heated in a pot on the stove, and had to work the agitator by hand, and then feed the clothes through the wringer before hanging them on an actual clothesline with wooden clothespins—the kind that did not have little springs in them, but had a tapered slot to slide over the clothes and line. My mother said she was fascinated by the wringer when she was a child. When is the last time one of your children was fascinated by a household appliance? So many changes in eighty years.

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What’s saving your life right now? Are you reading a great book? Listening to a good podcast? Enjoying some little thing that makes your day easier or more pleasant? I’d love to hear about it.