by Christie Purifoy | Nov 17, 2011 | Family, God's Love, Grace, Jesus, motherhood, Scripture, Stories, Uncategorized
A brief story about a Purity Ball in my Sunday newspaper catches my attention. There is an image (a church altar decked in lace like a bridal veil) and there are words spoken by a twelve-year-old girl (“I’m saving my purity for my husband”), and I feel troubled, as if there is a small pebble in my shoe.
I don’t know why I am troubled. These are my people, after all. We speak the same church-y language, we love the same Lord. And goodness knows we need more fathers like this one, fathers who dance with their daughters and whisper prayers over their heads.
It would be easy to keep turning the pages, forget the nagging pebble, but I do have an eight-year-old daughter, after all. I hold the paper still and say to the sky, “Lord, do you have wisdom for a firstborn girl raising a firstborn girl? I’m troubled, and I don’t know why.”
And I can’t say if it’s an answer to my prayer but what comes to me is a story: the woman at the well. The woman with five husbands and one who wasn’t even that. Considering her, I decide that she wasn’t created for a husband (or five). She was created for Jesus.
In fact, she was so highly esteemed by him that Jesus chose her to be the first to hear his earth-shattering news: the Messiah you have longed for is here. I am He.
I want to take this lovely twelve-year-old girl by the hand, look her in the eyes, and try to explain (but how to explain?) that purity isn’t some thing wrapped up in a box. It isn’t a commodity exchanged for a price. It’s a fire, it’s a light, it’s a fountain, and, yes, it turns the values of this world upside down because it’s holy and it’s a sacrifice.
What I would try to say is something like this: purity is a renewable gift, not a thing to grow dingy and worn (though I’m not quite sure who is the giver and who it is that receives, is it me? Is it Jesus?).
But the best news of all? Husband or no, you are invited to live the kind of love story in which even a prostitute can be the belle of the ball.
So, dear little girl, may your light shine, may my light shine, may the light given my daughter and my sons shine and shine. For He is ours, and we are His.
Good news.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 10, 2011 | allergies, Community, Faith, Family, Food, God's Love, grief, healing, Jesus, motherhood
On Friday, our weekly pizza-and-a-movie night had to be postponed (and, yes, for those of you wondering, I make two: one deliciously normal for four of us, one dairy-free, wheat-free and “pizza” in name only for the middle child).
This middle child, our accident-prone five-year-old, had to be taken to the emergency room after a fall onto the cement floor of our garage. He came home late that same night happy to show off his new plastic dinosaur and the half-dozen staples on the back of his head.
I still remember, years ago, the preschool teacher who told me that if any child was going to fall into a puddle or trip on the curb it would be my son. Always. This has never stopped being true.
Twenty-four hours later, three of us kneel to receive communion. We prepare to remember death and taste resurrected life while the boy so recently knitted back together stands behind us. The boy who knows what death tastes like better than any of us. He does not yet receive the elements, but he is always given a short blessing, a gentle hand on his head.
Our servers are an elderly couple unfamiliar to me. They must be Sunday-morning regulars moonlighting at our Saturday-evening service. The husband places his hand on my son’s head and leans in close. He prays and prays until it seems that the attention of a whole room has condensed and fixed itself on this prayer for one small boy. I don’t remember a communion blessing that ever continued so long.
It is long enough for this memory: I am seven-months pregnant with my miracle baby, my-sewn-in-tears-and-reaped-in-joy son. I am filled up with a baby and with fear. Having waited so long for him, I am sure that this gift cannot be given with no strings attached. There must be some price, in pain, that I must pay. Until someone touches my own head and prays for me, and I see … well, I hardly know what I see, but it is as if my unborn son and his maker are alone together. Then I understand that I have only a peripheral role in the relationship between them, and I see that my love is small and weak compared with the love God has for the child he’s made.
Kneeling at the communion rail, I can see that the young couple next to me are also watching my son and the gray-haired man. I can see tears in her eyes and feel them in my own, and I know that this, this, is what it means to live in a beloved community. We have been so well-loved by God that our hearts break for how he loves everyone around us. We are loved, and we are loving, and our hands touching broken heads and fearful hearts are the hands of Jesus, always.
And the heavy burden of love that I carry for my son is shared. It is not, has never been, mine alone. Of course, my husband shares it, the firstborn (who runs to her room weeping as the car leaves for the emergency room) shares it, but Jesus also shares it and his beautiful church shares it.
We are a beloved community.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 2, 2011 | Family, motherhood, Stories
Fairies flying in my sister's yard.
Monday night witnessed our first visit from the Candy Fairy. For parents of highly allergic and/or cavity prone children (and I have one of each), she is a Very Good Thing. After the trick-or-treating, after the just-one-more-piece before bedtime binging, she empties the still-brimming candy buckets and drops a small toy into the plastic orange void.
For the firstborn: rosebud earrings and a Pippi Longstocking book. For the middle child: a Lego alien “blaster” (The language of a five-year-old boy is amazingly onomatopoeic). For the baby: a red Thomas the Train engine with an unpronounceable name stamped on his side.
This largesse came fast on the heels of another nighttime visitor: the Pacifier Fairy. When Jonathan noticed the baby’s teeth looking more than a little misshapen we took quick action (assuming, rightly I think, that delay would be deadly for our resolve). The baby was sweet-talked into stuffing the mailbox with much-loved pacis, and the Pacifier Fairy soon whisked them away, leaving a blue Thomas the Train engine behind.
Add in Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, and Easter Bunny, and our home is a busy intersection in the fairy/magical creature highway.
Since she was first old enough to string words into sentences, my daughter has asked me, “Mom, do you believe in fairies?” And I always say the same thing, “Well, I’ve never seen one, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” (And for the rational-minded among you, shuddering at my deceit, all I can say is how often have scientists discovered bizarre new species in ocean trenches or volcano tops, creatures more surprising than any fairy?)
I tend to think that belief (in anything unseen) is a subtle orientation towards the world. It’s a just slightly off-kilter way of looking around oneself. A way of seeing that goes beyond the physical perception of your eyes. To believe, is to be always ready to say, “Perhaps, there’s more (rather than less) than meets the eye.”
And so, I’ve introduced my children to more. Fairy rings and tomtens. Santa Clause and mermaids.
I don’t share this under the category “advice for parents.” Perhaps, you’ve heard me mention before that I believe in the sharing of stories but not the sharing of advice?
I’m sure any number of you could put together a highly convincing, highly reasonable argument for why I am wrong. Honestly, I’m already half-convinced, and we will probably be telling the firstborn the truth about Santa Clause this year (the truth: Santa Clause is a magical story that you now get to help tell for your little brothers).
But here is what I cannot do: I cannot give my children lists of beings worthy of belief (Jesus, the angels) without demonstrating for them a capacity for belief. I want them to see in me a willingness to be surprised, to be proved wrong. I want them to know that the world God made is always more beautiful, more startling, more good than what we previously knew.
This world is full of magic. It’s evident in science textbooks and in fairytales.
I believe that the great magician behind it all has revealed himself to us in the figure of a man. This man walked the same solid ground that we do. In him, story and history intersect. Magic and flesh-and-blood-reality are joined.
He is the good news, too good to be true.
And he lives.
by Christie Purifoy | Oct 19, 2011 | Family, Grace, Vacation, Waiting
The firstborn and I will be back in Chicago soon. Four days with the people and places we both love best.
I feel an urge to write that we are going home, except that we aren’t.
It isn’t only that we sold our Chicago apartment 18 months ago. It isn’t because we have no family there. We do have many friends, and they were our family for ten good years. Rather, it is that I was once planted in Chicago. I’m not planted there any longer, though I haven’t yet laid down roots in any other place. I feel as if (actually, I hope as if) we are in between homes. (Florida, you are lovely, but I do not think you will ever be home.)
Perhaps I can write of Chicago from my daughter’s point of view. She was born there, after all, and has more of a claim to the place than I do. Here is the hospital where she took her first breath. A few blocks away is the converted hotel (with a tunnel where Al Capone once smuggled gin). It was her first home. Here is the museum that became her own private wonderland; fairy castle, baby chicks, and all. And there is pebble beach, our pebble beach, where we swam in summer and climbed ice dams in winter. Even now when I stand at some water’s edge and look to my left, I half expect to see the glittering wall of a downtown skyline. Perhaps she does, too.
In this life, home is always temporary. In Chicago, I learned that it is possible to feel at home in a temporary place. It is possible to breathe deeply and live thoroughly in a home that won’t always be home.
Possible, yes, but never a given. Or, perhaps I should say that it is exactly that: a given thing. A grace thing.
When God tells his exiled people in Jeremiah that he will bring them home one day, he also says: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage …” (Jeremiah 29:5-6). His gift to them is a home in exile. Permission to live, even as they wait.
“For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land – a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills.”
(Deuteronomy 8:7)
by Christie Purifoy | Oct 13, 2011 | Art, Books, Family, Stories, Writing
With three talkative children at the table, the ship of dinner-time conversation is rarely steered by the adults in our house. Which is surprising given that the youngest is working with a somewhat limited vocabulary. To make up for this handicap, he frequently resorts to loudly repeating a single word with varying intonations. His vocabularly may be small, but he certainly knows what talkative is supposed to sound like.
Recently, I yanked my mind from some daydream or other and recognized that the children were discussing Harry Potter. This, too, is strange, given that not one has finished reading a single book of the series, nor have they seen the films. I recognize, with a bit of sadness, that Harry Potter has joined the company of imaginative figures, untethered from any particular medium, which populate a child’s imagination. Harry Potter, Winnie the Pooh, a Jedi Knight … they’re all hanging out together in my five-year-old’s dreams.
As if trying to get a firmer grasp on all that she doesn’t yet know, the firstborn says, “But Harry Potter isn’t …”, and I gasp. I am suddenly sure that she’s about to say “true.” She doesn’t. Finishing her sentence over my raised eyebrows, she says, “Harry Potter isn’t real, is it Daddy?” He says easily, “No honey, it isn’t real.” And I sigh, grateful I don’t have to intervene.
But if she had said true? That would have been a very different story.
It isn’t simply that I love Harry Potter. I do. Much as I loved Narnia when I was my daughter’s age. But it isn’t love (or delusion, for that matter) that would have caused me such pain to hear my child say, “That story isn’t true.”
Despite what you may now be thinking, I don’t believe there are broom-flying wizards right around the corner. That’s our reality. No broom-flying wizards. I might wish it otherwise, but I accept this.
But true? Not true? To me, at least, those words suggest something very different from what we usually mean when we say “true-life.” No, Harry Potter’s world is not “true-life.” But true? Yes!
Ours is a fallen, not-quite-what-it-was-meant-to-be world, and our reality isn’t always true. At times, it lies. It says this world tends towards chaos, you are on your own, watch out for number one, pursuing goodness is a waste of time.
Stories – at least the excellent ones – give us a glimpse of the world as it was always meant to be. Through the lens of a story, we can see the world as it will be again one day.
Reality? Too often it is a cracked lookingglass. Stories? No matter how fantastical, this is often where we spy the truth.
When Jesus came walking in bare feet to rescue us, he was asked many questions. More often than not, he answered them with stories.
He told us himself that his name was Truth, and he told us stories.
by Christie Purifoy | Oct 11, 2011 | Family, God's promises, motherhood, Waiting
If there is one word to describe most parents of young children, it is this: tired.
However, the tiredness itself doesn’t always make sense. It isn’t always logical. For instance, there is this strange equation: I am less tired, less overwhelmed now with three children than I was with one (and my youngest has yet to learn to sleep all night in his own bed).
I’ve come to believe that many of the most difficult periods of parenting are like bad weather. The radar map of my early years as a mother was covered in angry reds and oranges. More recently, the forecasts have called for blue skies, occasional rain.
Is there some parenting secret to be tapped here? Have my years of experience brought me wisdom and thus fair weather?
I don’t think so. If anything I have abandoned my early intensity to always do the right thing. I have forgotten much of my new-mother knowledge.
Absorbed in the busyness of living, I can no longer recall the good advice of the parenting books I used to read. When the two-year-old refuses his bedtime and asks for popcorn instead, I sometimes remember how firm and controlling we once would have been. Now, more often than not, our evening couples time is spent in the company of a toddler. We talk over his head and share our popcorn. Maybe it isn’t ideal, but it isn’t terrible, either. He’s very cute eating his popcorn, this one is.
And yet, the “secret” if there is one doesn’t lie in a relaxation of standards or parental laziness. The weather is fair, but I’m convinced that we can take little credit for this.
The little girl who was overwhelmed by life (and so overwhelmed her mother) has shifted into the child who starts her homework as soon as she walk in the door after school, the child who makes her bed every day because she likes her room to look nice. Knowing firsthand how emotions spiral out of control, she says to me, “The girls will probably fight to sit next to Emma at the birthday party. But, I’ll be okay sitting next to someone else.”
How did this happen? And why did I assume that the weather would always be rough? Why did I listen to the well-meaning older parents who said, “Oh, just wait! If you think it’s hard now …”
Jesus has said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will worry about itself.” And, yes, I find that each day does have its own trouble. But far worse than the particular trouble of each day is our despair when we believe that all we can hope for are storms. The storm is one thing, but the hopelessness that says, “morning will never come” is much more destructive.
Morning will dawn, and the one who is beaten down by life’s storms will open the door and find sunshine. Perhaps that day is coming sooner than you think?
