Thanksgiving Ham

Sometimes I just hate myself.  

Generally,  I don't have time to wade around in my insecurities.  I have three children, a dog and a congregation full of people to lead and care for.  I'm 55 years old and have had plenty of time for God to help me to get over myself.  I've come to accept that I am not a compilation of accomplishments, abilities and actions.  I'm a person who has been profoundly shaped and transformed by the grace that I have found through Jesus Christ.  

But then I have a day like today and I just have a jag of DESPISING my weaknesses, my peccadillos, the stupid things that I have a tendency to do.  Today is Thanksgiving and I feel like I had almost ruined it.  I have roasted at least 40-50 turkeys in my life. It's not a big deal.  I can totally do it; just pick a recipe and make it happen. 

The New York Times Cooking recipe said to roast the dry brined turkey for 30 minutes at the unusually high temperature of 450 degrees.  I'm guessing that the purpose of this is to do something like a sear to lock the juices in. Then I was instructed to turn the temperature to 350 degrees for the remainder of the time.  It really was an elegantly simple recipe, something that an experienced cook, such as myself, could do quite easily while managing teen aged sous chefs, a hungry special needs young adult who kept emerging from his room demanding food and various side dishes.  

The problem was that when I turned the temperature on my oven down to 350 degrees, I had forgotten to push START! What that meant was that, after having been cooked for 30 minutes, my turkey had been hanging out in a slowly cooling oven for the next two hours.  By the time I checked on it, an hour before we were supposed to eat, I opened the oven door to a very comfortably cool oven.  The turkey might as well have smiled and greeted me with a hello for how uncooked it was.

This catastrophe, combined with the realization that I had forgotten to pick up a splurged order of various breads and baked goods at a local bakery until it was too late, drove me to my room to lay on my bed with the door closed, taking deep breaths. I hate that I am a forgetter. . . and a non-detail oriented person.  

One time, I was in charge of travel to a family cruise in Florida and I scheduled our return flights to be for the day before the cruise returned to port.  In college, I would schedule things so that I needed to be in three places at the same time.  This lack of organization is the thing that I am most tempted to judge about myself. 

Granted, I've come far from those organizationally out of control young adult days.  The years of being a full time mom of an incredibly medically and developmentally complicated child certainly gave me organizational and detail management muscles that I never dreamed that I would have.  I am also a pastor of a church where, together with a multi-talented team of staff members, we function pretty well as an intergenerational, multiethnic community of around 300 people who need to turn a middle school into a place of worship every Sunday.

But every once in a while, I still make mistakes out of my lack of detail orientation and organization especially when I am tired.  No matter how much I've grown and matured, I can't seem to escape this part of my personality.

Two things helped me to pull out of the vortex of self-chastisement.  The first is my amazing husband who did not share my hypercritical attitude.  He just told me that he loved me and drove to KFC and to the bakery to see if he could help save our dinner.  (KFC was out of chicken and the bakery was all closed up.).  Just as he came home, I realized that I had also purchased a small ham to serve at a later gathering.  I threw that into the oven to heat and serve with our stuffing, potatoes and veggies.  Fortunately, Thanksgiving dinner this year was just my nuclear family and my mother so it wasn't a huge deal.  The ham was barely warmed and rather boring but it was fine. 

In fact, the second thing that served to give me perspective and stop being so disappointed with myself was how much Josh loved the ham.  My son LOVED the ham.  He asked for more over and over again.  In fact, at one point, while I got up to get more from the kitchen, he grabbed a slice right off of his grandmother's plate.  My mom reflexes are still pretty fast so I grabbed it right off his plate before he could eat it and made him wait for his own piece acquired in a proper manner.  

At the end of this day, I am choosing to think not about what I did wrong or what didn't go well but about the things that I am grateful for.  The six of us were able to sit together for a nice meal.  We enjoyed the food, especially Josh.  My 83 year old mother was able to spend quality time with us.  We played a little game which had us ask each other interesting questions.  We laughed together about funny stories from our pasts. 

As much as I am a foodie, I have to remember that the food is not the point.  The most important part of any feast is the spirit, the love, the people and what or who you are celebrating.  I hope that I am able to keep this on the forefront of my brain as we enter into another season of food and celebrating.  

What if People Misunderstand My Son?

Sometimes I fear that, one day, Josh will do something that gets misunderstood as threatening and that people who are afraid of him will take harmful action.   Because of his disabilities, my son's behavior can seem suspicious and erratic if one doesn't understand what is going on with him.

There have been times when Josh has touched women inappropriately in public contexts, patting their butts or touching their breasts.  Usually this is just part of his flapping behavior, never something sexual.  Some people have been very understanding when they turn to see Josh and discern that he's developmentally disabled.  Some people have gotten very upset and have responded with great hostility.  Josh has picked up food at stores and has started eating it without paying.  He is twelve (and still very cute in my personal opinion) but he is already quite tall for a mostly Asian kid.  When he's wearing a big jacket or hoodie, he looks like a typical high schooler.   I wonder, at some point, are people going to interpret something that Josh does as threatening, dangerous or illegal?  And if that happens, will there be time for me or someone who is with Josh to interpret who Josh is and why he does things?  What if Josh happened to be alone?  Could he have a weird, random or intense encounter with police, a security guard or a neighborhood watch person? Could things go bad fast?

If someone told Josh to put his hands up in the air or to get down on the ground, he is not likely to comply because he wouldn't comprehend what was going on.  Josh does not understand what a police officer is.  He has no concept of legal or illegal.  He is not good about boundaries and social expectations.  Given recent events which have been in the news, such as the deaths of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, I can't help but to play a dark scenario in my imagination where a tense situation leads to his injury, arrest or death.

In general, I still believe that police officers are men and women who are out for the good of the general public and I am very grateful for them. I hope and trust that most have been trained well enough to slow down and try to understand what is going on for people when things seem strange. Yet I cannot deny that somewhere deep inside me is a dark fear that is rooted in the reality that the world is not a safe or fair place, especially for young men of color.  My heart breaks because of this. Lord have mercy on us all.

Today I will lift up a special prayer for the mothers of all of the young men who have been the victims of violence.

"And a sword will pierce your own soul too."  Luke 2:35

Being Defensive and Saving the Planet

A high school girl with the biggest blue eyes I had ever seen, accentuated with a massive amount of black mascara, walked over to me with a desperate, serious look on her face. Her ponytail bobbed up and down and she walked over to my car with a quick determination.  I had been on the phone with my mother so I quickly signed off with her and turned my car on so that I could roll down my electronically powered window to see what was the matter.  She looked like she needed my help.

"Excuse me, were you idling your car?"

"What?"  I replied, confused.

"Your car.  Were you sitting here with it on?"

"Uh, I don't think so.  I think I just left my lights on.  Well, I'm not sure. . . Why?"

She took a quick breath and said, with utter conviction, "Because idling cars, especially near schools, is a horrible cause of pollution and it's so avoidable and it looked like you were just sitting her with your car on and I just wanted to ask if you could turn it off if you are going to sit here because, like, I really care about the planet.  I mean, you could also ride your bike to pick up your kids, right?"

In the span of about 2 seconds, the following speech went through my mind.  "Listen Missy.  You have no idea about my life.  Do you know what happens when I walk or bike to pick up my girls at this school in the afternoons?  I will be late to pick up my autistic son off his bus back at my house and he will be a screaming mess and will be hitting himself on his head or biting his hand until it bleeds."

"Um.  O-k.  I don't think I was idling my car . . ." was what came out of my mouth.

Perky-enviro girl and I stood there looking at each other, awkwardly and with unspoken hostility.  We were definitely not connecting.  She asked me to just "keep it in mind"and bounced back across the street.

Yes, I felt defensive.  I was being talked down to by a person at least two and a half decades younger than me.  This girl had taken action on her convictions and, for that, I was a little bit proud of her in the midst of being massively annoyed.  But the larger emotional reality was that she had judged me without knowing anything about the context of my life.  And she started with an assumption that she had correctly observed that I had been idling my car, which I was pretty sure I had not been doing.

This is why judgemental evangelism of any sort does not work.  When people feel wrongly and negatively evaluated, they don't tend to respond well.  Why don't people of conviction understand that?

On a deeper level, I realized that this girl had tapped into a current of guilt in me.  I do actually care about how car emissions are effecting the environment.  I want to be free to walk or bike my girls to school.  I don't want to be ruled by the fear of my son's strange reactions.  Yet, I'm stuck in this ridiculous reality of driving 8 blocks down the street every afternoon so that I can avoid a Josh tantrum situation.  Sometimes I see parents who are biking, who live much further away from our school than I do and I feel sad and embarrassed.  I want to explain to them, as I wanted to explain to this teenager, that I have to drive or else my child with special needs will start his afternoon off with having a big, sad problem coming off of the bus and I just can't have that right now.  So, yes, I feel guilty about driving my girls home from school but I have no good alternative right now.

The other day Hope informed me that we should never drive our car anywhere anymore because we are killing the penguins by using cars.  Her class had been doing a unit on penguins and had talked about how global warming was affecting their habitat.  This was very upsetting to her.  I told her, "Sweetie, sometimes we just need to do what we need to do.  That doesn't mean that we don't care about the earth and about penguins but we need to try to be mindful of things while living in the culture that we're in.  In our culture, we drive cars and, sometimes, I have to drive mine."  Hope seemed to accept this explanation, especially since we were driving to the library to pick up a book that she was waiting for.

The morning after the encounter with the teenager, I chose to have us ride bikes.  That afternoon, as expected, we were late coming back to meet Josh's bus, which was already waiting for us outside of my house (idling it's large engine).  While the bus driver seemed irritated at our tardiness, Josh was oddly and deliriously happy.  He was busy clapping his hands like crazy and laughing.

"Want ice cream.  Want popsicle." he said, as I rushed to get him off the bus.

"Yes, Josh."  I replied, deciding to enter into the moment of grace.  "Today there will be popsicles for everyone."