I remember a girl that almost messed up her life....

Life comes in stages, it seems. My daughter, Elizabeth, has just graduated from college, and is now home for good after working as a camp counselor for 6 weeks. It seems like, in a four-day-span, her life just ratcheted down into slug mode. I can feel her pain. She was in a bubble away at school, a senior year filled with deadlines -- last year of college volleyball -- first semester with 19 hours, last year of college basketball -- second semester with 21 hours (not to mention the class she took over Christmas break), then her Senior Capstone project just for fun..... and to top that, she kept her Hope scholarship all four years and made Dean's List this last semester..... But college can be an artificial environment compared to the real world. Then away to a hyper-intense camp situation for six weeks. Back home, where I've let her sleep and rest for the last four days. As we ate supper tonight, I felt her decompressing .....realizing for the first time that now she is facing the rest of her life without a plan. Without a coach in her face, a schedule to follow, a class to go to, a deadline to make. The world is out there, a still, sullen, stagnant place for now. Nothing is stirring. The humidity is stifling. There is no wind, no rain, no change. This is finally, it. Childhood is over, high school is over, even college -- is over. Mr. Right has not made his swoop into her life. No ready-made job was waiting for her upon her exit. It's all a great mystery, waiting to unfold. In truth, it's not really a fun place to be. 

I remember a desert time in my own life, many years ago. I left college after two years, defeated, deflated. I was a rock star going in, a stupid and foolish girl going out. I came home where my best friend, my sister, was leaving for her own college adventure and my heart was lonely and sad. All my aspirations and dreams had fallen flat. I had come close to marrying someone in college and realized I had been deceived into believing he was my soulmate, when truthfully his heart did not at all share the God that I loved. I had been simply stupid. My eighteen years of a respectful, accomplished life before that were no reflection of how I behaved those two years in college. I felt ashamed of my littleness, my inability to discipline myself apart from my parents and coach's boundaries. I ran home, realizing that I had to be cocooned under my family's protection or I might be lost forever. 

It was the best thing I could have done.

I came home, humiliated. In humiliation, you are ready to hear from God. I went to work at my old summer job in an office (which I hated), went to the community college at night, hunkered down and worked hard. I confessed my sins. Put my nose to the grindstone, no longer expecting oohs and aaahs from the crowd. Went to church with my family. I bought a used bicycle. Started riding it around the country roads near our house. I picked blackberries with my sister that summer, talking blue streaks with her, then meekly cried when she left to go off to college in the fall.

The world was lonely. The people I worked with did not understand (or care) who I was, urged me to drink and party with them, but instead I went to school at night and then home to my parents for the weekends. The world was a dry, parched land. To me, there was nothing else exciting that was ever going to happen. Nothing was going to change. God had forgotten me.

It seemed that way for a long time.

I was tired of playing games. Tired of dating people that didn't love God with all their heart. Tired of guys that were too attached to their Mamas. Tired of games, so many games. Sick of performing and sick of trying so hard to not miss God's will and never knowing what that was anyway.

I surrendered. To God. I just gave up. I said, "Hey, it's You and me." I cried in my car, alone. I prayed. Cried some more. I sang songs. Some jammin' rock songs. Then surrender-to-Jesus songs. Then love songs, but to Him, not to anybody else. My heart was quieted and I learned what it meant, finally, to really fall in love with the Lord. I had been stripped of man's accolades and ideas of what success were. I felt like I was nothing.

God sent me two crazy friends. Ken and Brian. Two funny, smart guys who loved the Lord, but who treated me like a sister. They were both very desirable men, but we had a summer without those kinds of expectations. They would pick me up for lunch, for weekend outings, for whatever. We would talk and laugh and laugh some more. It helped heal me. I was crispy-burnt from that wrong college relationship and needed the agape/phileo love that comes from brotherhood. They would say really offensive, edifying things like, "Hey Rose, we don't think there are any guys in this church tall enough for you, you Amazon!" Or -- "Rose, we think you're cute. But there's NO guys around here for you." Or -- "Rose, don't you want to go out with __________? Oh yeah, he's too short." Or, the worst one of all: "Rose, we love going out with you, because you're safe." Wow. Just what a gal wants to hear (who's being simultaneously hit on all the time at work by a bunch of heathen men). 

God has His own highly-honed sense of humor. He intended Ken and I to be together and make awesome progeny, from the foundations of the world. When the electricity ignited, we got married in a fever and the rest is history. It has been pretty much a 32+ year whirlwind. 

Could I have believed what God had in mind for me, all those lonely evenings and seemingly-stagnant days before? No. He never does anything the way we plan it. Not my original words, but they bear repeating: "If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans." It makes me happy to hear Him laughing.

I think you can fry crickets....

Babe's quilt. (Babe was Ken's maternal Grandmother's name). It is gargantuan, like a patchwork field in a giant's neon-lit dream.
Seriously.
It was made, apparently, for either a king-sized bed or to cover field crops before the earth warmed up in the spring.
It is the ugliest combination of colors imaginable: neon green and pink, brown, orange, yellow, bright blue, and the odd patch of some other color. Zillions of tiny octagons, crafted with thousands of hours of hand-sewn quilting.....and all done in a fabric that has stood the test of decades: polyester knit. For those of you who do not remember that revered fabric, suffice it to say, it doesn't breathe or tear. I'm pretty certain it's still off-gassing and putting chemicals into our home. My husband is nearing 60 years of age, and his earliest memories of childhood include this quilt. Here it is, all these years later, in full, bright color, unscathed and unmoving, heavy as lead and probably as radiation-proof as that. Babe gave it to us when we got married, because it was his favorite quilt when he was a child.

It accidentally got left out in the rain a few years ago, for months, when we were building our last house. It was covering the whirlpool tub we were storing in the yard (because I bought it too early). When I salvaged the Quilt, it was covered in mud and looking quite sad. I was ashamed of myself for not paying attention, for disrespecting Babe that way. I took it to the laundromat and dutifully washed it in one of those monster machines. It came out completely clean and bright, like a newly-minted penny. Garish and unashamed, ready to face another century or two.

We have raised four children to adulthood and this has always been known as the Beach Quilt. For heaven's sake, who could actually put it on a bed, in these politically-correct, Martha-Stewart-infused times......though it did serve us well when our heating system died last winter. You could insulate a house with that thing.

The beach.

We always drag Babe's Quilt to the beach with us. It's some trouble hauling it out there, with all the other necessities. But it's also always worth it. When you unfold it in all its tacky glory, you have a huge area to throw your towels onto, easily seen for thousands of yards. Our kids never had trouble finding out where the family was stationed. This year's trip was especially memorable, as our three brand-new grandbaby girls shared it for the first time. Call it tacky, vintage-tacky, or just plain embarrassing, it's the only one of its kind.

This summer, we hit the jackpot. We got two trips to the beach. We have some dear friends who invited us to go to the beach with them, and they provided the condo. Not just any condo. A  million-dollar penthouse suite, up in the ozone where you can see the sky, the moon, the stars, the beach, the water....in ways you didn't know existed. I don't know if they know, still, how much that meant to us. Ma and Pa go to the beach! Ken and I have enjoyed various blessings in our life and we'll start bantering back and forth like two country bumpkins, seeing things for the first time (or maybe it's just seeing)...."Look Pa!" Opening God's box of delights is always an adventure.

I'm thinking about one of our days on the beach. I was out in the ocean, floating idly about, when I noticed a cricket floundering in the water. I have no idea why or how a cricket was swimming in the gulf of Mexico, but poor thing, he was going to drown for sure. So I slid my boogie board up under him so he could get a footing. He promptly sprung towards the shore. I did this a few more times until he could get onto land....then I went back to my floating duty. Eventually I flopped myself out onto dry land, onto Babe's Quilt. Twenty minutes or so go by as I'm sunning and drying out. I look down and notice the cricket, yes, the cricket....sitting on Babe's Quilt. There are hundreds of people around us on the beach, but that cricket found me. How could it not?! I told Ken and our friend, Kent, about how I had saved that cricket. They laughed and made jokes about it. I reached down and kind-of petted it. It sat there quietly for a few more moments. Suddenly, it popped up as only a cricket can, straight towards my face. It flew into my (typically) open mouth! Yelling and spitting, I got the thing out without killing it. As I calmed down, I realized it had either bitten or poked both my upper lip and the inside of my bottom lip. I spent the next few days nursing my poor lips and pondering life. What did this mean -- that a cricket tracked me down after I saved it and then tried, in his own little way, to kill me? There are so many deep and meaningful stories that follow us through life, so many things we can use to illustrate spiritual truths and drive home all the important stuff.

That's not what this was. 

Sometimes life is just weird and we are given things that make us laugh hysterically. And ponder the life of a cricket. Or a quilt.