2016.10.26: Speaking and Listening

I was assigned to lead the chapel time this morning, which is actually called morning prayer. On Wednesdays this fall term, the faculty are giving homilies on phrases from the Nicean Creed. Sometimes, they seem like a mini lecture, which was also a common tendency at Trinity. So, I tried to navigate to a deep reflection.

The crazy thing is that I lost track of time and looked at the clock at 7 minutes to 10:00, and morning prayer starts at 10:00. The Spirit must have nudged me! I grabbed my laptop and quickly went to chapel. I didn’t even print out my notes, that would have taken too much time! I had just enough time to plug it in and take half a minute to breath. It would have been quite embarrassing to be late for my first morning prayer speaking.

Fortunately, my new laptop is smarter than me. When the cable is plugged in, then PowerPoint automatically goes into presentation mode. I saw on my laptop screen the slide that was projected, a box of notes that I had copied into PowerPoint, and the next slide. Whew! It went better than I expected. It was encouraging to have a few students and staff take out their cell phones to take pictures of the slides. One of the teachers relayed how my message just beautifully followed up on what was in her class that morning. So in spite of me speaking in English, I’m glad it was meaningful and helped to connect people to a loving and merciful God.

The rest of the day was mostly listening to Swedish. There was a 3 hour and 15 minute faculty meeting, with only two 5-minute breaks. Sometimes I wonder if my listening capacity has improved much at all, in spite of all the effort. Perhaps my expectations are higher.

Anya continues to thrive. Yesterday she gave me permission to tell you a story. We were talking and playing ping pong. She said that higher level economics was pretty easy for, especially the math. There was a quiz coming up, but she thought that she didn’t even have to study, because she understood it all already, and her higher level math is way beyond the basic math currently used in the class. But she said that she took her book home anyway to make it look like she was going to study. Then she wouldn’t frustrate the others in the class who were lugging their book home to really study. Well, compassion is one of our core family values!

I wrote to a friend last year about how these values developed in our family, because she had her first baby, a daughter. With some tweaks to remove names, here’s what I shared with her.

Perhaps this is a celebration of the life of your new girl, perhaps I am just procrastinating finishing an essay. But, I’m caught up in sharing in the joy of your motherhood. Someone said that the closest thing we get to being like God is creating life. What a great honor!

I was one who perhaps changed three diapers before I had my own daughter, and wondered if society could really entrust me with this fragile life. Now, almost 16 years later, I couldn’t image life without Anya. But one of the best ways I have learned to be a mother was through something I stumbled upon with insights from women friends farther along in the motherhood journey. I encapsulated my motherly yearnings for my daughter in a short prayer. Later, I realized it became a mission statement for me, and I’ve told Anya that this prayer summarizes my responsibility as her mother. The wonderful thing is that you have a few years to incubate a prayer, so as she is growing up, it becomes such a part of life, a deep understanding of your love for her, and a grounding of identity that it can help carry her through the unsettledness of adolescence.

The seeds of my prayer for Anya were planted by two of my women friends, both of whom only have daughters. The virtues central to our family became embedded in the prayer, which I prayed for her so often that she can recite it without a blink. There are five core virtues, but they don’t remain on lips; they get lived out in life.

One of our family virtues is respect. Then in life, we engage it in discussion and action–in mostly informal instruction–as well as seeking forgiveness of each other when we mess up. We have imagined the world together if more would value respect. We’ve talked about respect from playgrounds to watching Project Runway. Some of my greatest joys have been seeing the prayer blossom as a few of Anya’s teachers have described her with the very names of the virtues that began as whispers in prayer.

So, my prayer and mother’s mission statement is that Anya would “grow to be a godly, wise woman, full of love for Jesus, and compassion and respect for others, and the courage to do the right thing.”

With blessings,

Beth