This is so fun! I’ve decided from time to time to feature new friends that I meet. I’ve been intentionally making new friends each week and asking them deeper questions than I normally would. I love it! Once when a group of friends were talking about traveling and wanting to see all the places in the world, I sat quietly for a minute thinking “I just want to meet all the people.” I get to meet them and get to know them so deeply in my counseling office, but to get to know people from all over the world–the way I know my clients–that would be my dream. So I’ve set out to really get to know the beautiful people God has made. All so different, all so unique, all so wonderful!

So for my first featured new friend, let’s call her “Ms. Janie.” I want to protect her identity for now because she was so vulnerable with me and frankly, I am in the business of secret-keeping. So, even though she gave me permission to write about her on my blog, I’d like to give her a different name. Just in case in reading, her words feel too exposing.

I’d just finished up running my mile around the track at the Y when I noticed Ms. Janie walking her laps. I kept feeling pulled to talk to her, but I made a loop or two first. Finally, I walked up beside her, found her pace and said outright,

“I bet I could learn some things from you.”

She grinned the prettiest grin. “Yes, child, I bet you could.” And I began to ask, without even getting her name,

What is the best decision you’ve ever made?

She had no hesitation about that one. She was excited to tell me

Oh following the Lord, Jesus. I don’t know how anybody can make it without Him!

I agreed and we talked about the Lord and her love for Him and my dependence on Him. Then I asked about another decision she made that maybe changed her path and she was thankful she chose it. She told me that marrying the man she married over 40 years ago was the second best decision she’d ever made. “Me too!” I said. I had just recently answered the same question for Kelli Bethea, our dear friend and babysitter who has inspired me in asking deeper questions and truly learning from the people around us. Kelli had made me really think back on my life’s decisions, and there is no doubt that marrying Kaleb Deese is the second best one I’ve made next to accepting Christ.

Ms. Janie went on to tell me her struggles with infertility, uterine cancer, and having no children of her own. But she helped to raise her husband’s six children and loved them like her own. They have been good to her, and oh how she loves them. She lost her husband within the past few years, and her affection for him and their family was evident in her warmth as she spoke of them. She mentioned that sometimes things aren’t what they seem at first. Imagine signing up for raising six children when you marry your husband! And now they have been the greatest blessing to her.

What would you say is your biggest regret? Something you would go back and change if you could?

She thought for a bit, and she replied that she regrets ever focusing on material things or financial gain. Working overtime just to make a little more money–it’s not worth it, she said. She wishes she had spent more time investing in relationships and people, spending time with them instead of striving for material things.

No matter how much you get. You’re always going to want more. You get one thing, you want another.

She said those hours that she worked extra, she wishes she had spent with her loved ones.

Ms. Janie loved her family well. She learned, through that love, acceptance of her circumstances, contentment and joy in her role as a wife and mother, and the value of investing in people. She was such a delight to meet, and I have frequently thought of her advice.

I wish I could tell it to all the young people. They all could benefit from what I have learned.

Time with people has much richer returns than working for more material gain. It reminded me that this life and all this “stuff” is so fleeting. I’ve tried to tune in and be present even more. Kiss more cheeks, scratch more backs. And I’ve found myself thinking less about getting a bigger house or adding on to this one and thinking more about what I want to teach these children.

It also made me think of a book I had been reading with our neighborhood book club–another place I’ve gone deeper with new friends recently. I’m so thankful for my neighbors Jess and Ashley who started it. So let me pause to say,

If you have neighbors and want to get to know them, start a book club. Serve some biscuits or ice cream sandwiches, and they will come!

All that to say, we had been reading Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, a book I’d read before and that I had recommended (see my book review below if you’re interested). We had just finished it when I met Ms. Janie, and after talking with her, I just knew she’d love it. It’s a story of a woman who grows from a girl and into a wise old lady throughout her journey through death and loss, redemption, and the blessings of people, community, and a sense of belonging. Ms. Janie reminds me of Hannah– how she loved, how she lost, how she kept on loving, and how she learned the value of investing in the people closest to her.

So the next morning, I left my copy of Hannah Coulter, dog-eared and underlined and all, at the front desk of the Y for Ms. Janie to pick up and read. Later in the week, I got a call from her that she’d gotten it and had started it. How I hope it encourages her as much as it has me–and as much as SHE has encouraged me. What a delight to meet my new friend. What an inspiration she was! And might I also encourage you to find someone this week and go a little deeper. It seems my first words to her were indeed true. “I bet I could learn some things from you.”

My Personal Review of Hannah Coulter the Book

Hannah Coulter is a beautiful first-person telling of the life of a woman who grew to love the people and place of Port William- a farming community that radiated beauty and love, fellowship and “membership”. Wendell Berry has a voice in writing that is almost poetic, and every page contains wisdom and inspiration about such deep things as how to live through loss and death and how to move forward and fully live and love again. The images are serene and clear, the message is deep and enduring, and the story is settling even when Hannah experiences the trials of her life. It’s the kind of feeling you get after reading the Psalms of David. If you let it, it can strengthen your resolve, make you love your husband and children more, be intentional to work hard, make memories and cultivate love with those close by and the place you’re planted.

I am growing as I read. Learning. Being changed and encouraged. I am loving it. I hope you do too!

Clocks have a way of taunting and antagonizing us. Right there in front of us, minutes pass before our very eyes, as if to say “You’re running out…better hurry!” Perhaps that’s part of why until recently we’ve only had one working clock in our house, and that’s on the kitchen stove. Even that one is set for a few minutes fast as if I can somehow outsmart those glowing green numbers or trick myself into being on time. I have trouble with it. Being on time that is. So of all people, I’d love to have the superpower of stopping time.

My husband says it sounds a bit ridiculous for me to say “I try to be on time.”

It’s like saying “I strive to wear shoes. I see other people wearing shoes. I make up my mind to wear shoes. But then…I just find myself with no shoes on!”

—Kaleb Deese

Touché. His point is that being on time is not an unachievable concept. It’s something people do every day. So I have now completely edited my paragraph about my striving hard after the discipline of punctuality. And I’ll spare him, my darling husband, the verbal homage to the value of being on time. He called my bluff. But maybe JUST MAYBE my chronic running lateness has something to do with the fact that most of our clocks are stuck somewhere in time.

For years, we have joked that we leave our living room clock where it ran out of “juice”—At 8:35–so that our company would never leave. “Awe…don’t go…it’s just now 8:30,” we would laugh.” At least a few times, our people stayed longer.

And that’s all we want really isn’t it? We want our people to stay longer. We want the laughter to never stop. We want the good times to linger and our babies to never grow up. Hence the popular hashtag #timeslowdown.

What if we COULD slow down time? What if we could freeze our children right where they are— smack in the middle of their cutest ages—mine with all their blonde curls and snaggle teeth. I think I might just do it! The older I get, the faster time flies and paradoxically the nearer my long-ago memories seem. It’s frightening at times—jarring. Almost as if we’re on some type of decline and the further we move into time, the steeper the downward slope becomes.

What speeds it up? Is it really our age? OR our distractions and preoccupations—not being fully present because we are more spread thin than ever—mentally and spiritually?

Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.

—Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

As the mental load increases, our ability to settle in and soak up moments subsequently decreases and we lose any sense of wonder. As children, we didn’t have the mental load—we only had wonder. Deep, radiating awe about the little things. We chased fireflies and watched them glow—really watched them. We caught lizards and watched their “goozles” (as we called them) blow up like a balloon and deflate…over and over. In wonder. And time moved sooooo slooooowly. Beautifully, magically, wonderfully slowly.

When is the last time you lingered in wonder? Do you find yourself distracted by all that’s swirling about? What is all this distraction stealing from us? Not just beautiful moments, I’d contend, but also the ability to settle into the moments and savor them.

In her book, One Thousand Gifts, author Ann Voskamp proposes that we can find more joy and live more abundant lives when we slow down moments and weigh down time by being thankful. It’s through gratitude that we stop and observe, look deeply at the beauty of our experiences and surroundings, and that we can really soak it all in and ultimately slow down time. By stopping—really pausing to be in awe and wonder—we defy the steepening incline and dive deep into a buttercup’s pistol and stamen or close our eyes and feel salty ocean air on our cheeks.

From Scripture to spiritual books to secular articles I’ve read in Psychology Today, there is a universal agreement upon the powerful impact of gratitude, awe, and counting our moments and days. Teach us, Oh Lord, to count our days. Let us no longer be blinded by the blurring day to day mental traffic whizzing by our minds’ eyes.

In his book, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis uses the characters Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood to represent the ongoing attack on humans to draw them away from God and His ways- to distract and blind them. In this excerpt, the senior demon, Screwtape, is trying to help his nephew in his agenda to make a new Christian slide away from his faith. (Remember that “The Enemy” Screwtape is referring to is God, since Screwtape wants only to lead Christians away from God.)

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you
will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

So if in fact our enemy is out to destroy us (which he is), and if in fact our separation from God is the enemy’s end goal (which it is), then how is this enemy using our chaotic running to and fro to lull us into an unawareness and complete distraction from God and His Glory all around us? The stupor induced by our smartphones and mindless scrolling. The autopilot drives to and from work. The meaningless nods we give neighbors as we pass instead of stopping for a long porch visit or a prayer. All these things…they push us further down that steep, time-robbing slope.

So stop to visit. Linger longer. Hold the hands of your little people and look into their eyes as you talk to them instead of over the top of your iPhone. Stare at the shapes in clouds and let your mind be in awe. Smell your babies’ hair and watch it grow. Be warmed by the sunlight falling white on your kitchen sink, smell the crackling fire and let the smoke scent soak into your bones. Get soaked up in wonder and worship. Really worship. This… This is the closest we can come to stopping time.