God – gianna soderstrom

the God of math

July 2, 2020Posted in Bible study, courage, parenting, writingTagged babies, baby girl, blog, blogging, coffee, courage, energy, exhaustion, God, Jesus, moms, motherhood, parenting, sleep deprivation, strength, toddlers3 Comments

I wake up some days already ready for bed. I don’t think I am completely alone. All it takes is children, especially children who wake up at night asking for Mommy or a piece of toast or wanting their pacifier back to feel as if you’ve spent half your day’s energy before you dropped back into bed at 3 am.

It’s days like this that I need to remind myself of God. God is good at math. Stay with me – a blog is a terrible place for a deep-dive into algebra and I am aware of it. God knows how many hours are in a day. Twenty-four. Ask him. He’s not stupid. He also knows I have kids. Two. An even easier number to count to than twenty-four. But (and this is where the numbers get tricky) with two kids pulling you different directions every waking moment, twenty-four hours can begin to feel more like forty-eight, or even (hang in there) like forty-eight hours that require seventy-two hours worth of energy. That’s three days and we can stop climbing there because you get the picture.

So suddenly the really simple math of one day = twenty-four hours is less simple. It’s less like addition and more like the quadratic formula. Once it was “8 hours of sleep = 16 hours of energy = 8 hours at work + 2.5 hours for meals + .5 hours of exercise + 1 hour of driving + 2 hours of in-between things and down-time + 2 hours of eating the food”. Now it’s more like “6-ish hours of sleep + 2 cups of coffee (drunk cold because of children) = 12 hours of energy + 1 dinner of cold cereal + 2 childrens’ and 1 adult meltdown + a quick trip to the Starbucks drive through = negative 3 attitudes”.

Things don’t seem to add up anymore. And that’s without dividing by 2 months quarantined at home, or raising to the power of 3 legos stepped on. I could go on. If you feel tired just looking at that kind of math, you’ve got the answer right. Tired. It’s tired. I’m tired. Tired is the answer even if you sneak in a third cuppa (luke-warm this time.) I think the quadratic formula involves imaginary numbers and I’m equally confident in guessing that your energy by the end of many days feels equally imaginary. (Also, can we please just raise a red flag about imaginary numbers in math? Seriously WHAT THE HECK. Ok, rant over.)

The math, I reiterate, is exhausting, confusing, and doesn’t seem to add up. This is where it’s nice to have a God who’s good at math. He can solve for X. Or for Mom, which is more important. He knows how much energy I need to get through a day. I mean, if he can number the thick hairs on my head (constantly changing as I enjoy what seems like postpartum balding), then surely he can figure out how much energy I’ll need after laying awake in bed for an hour, and getting up two times during the night. He hasn’t left me without resources. I have the strength of Christ waiting to be availed. I have hope that one day, in heaven, our attitudes will never slip into the negative and by all that is gracious I will never step on a sharp toy again.

I think of the woman with her unending jar of oil or the five loaves that filled five thousand bellies. There were two mites dropped into the offering box at the temple – all the widow had to live on – and I’m betting you she didn’t go home and starve. Maybe the prayers muttered over a morning cup of coffee have a power of multiplication just like the legos. Maybe the quiet of two kids napping simultaneously has spiritual power to calm the wind and the rain. I’ll probably never beat God at the word problems that read as long as a Thursday afternoon, but I begin to understand that the math will always add up. The bottom of the coffee cup with it’s dried brown rings is always steaming again in the morning like a very promise of God: there is always enough energy for the hours.

breaking days

June 25, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, courage, parentingTagged beauty, blogging, camp life, camp wife, children, Colorado, Eagle Lake Camp, faith, God, Jesus, learning, marriage, nature, parenting, parents, truthLeave a comment

For nearly a week now I’ve been clinging to five-minute increments of quiet while E plays flips the stiff pages of a board book or gnaws contentedly on a toy. And in between those five minute spaces I’ve tried everything.

“Are you still hungry? Is it your teeth? Do you need tylenol again? You can’t be tired already… Shall we go outside for a bit?” Anything. Anything to stop the grunting, the whining. Camp is flexing its muscles, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race. The woods are wearing their Sunday best. Ocean Spray like lace spills from rocky outcroppings, Showy Daisies and Black-eyed Susans pin an emerald cape to the shoulders of the hills. The meadows wear lavender flowers of Columbine in their hair. And for a week I struggled every day; just don’t cry, just don’t cry.

I cry anyway. By the time he goes down for his morning nap I have been tempted to pull my hair out so often that if I had any follow-through, I’d be bald. When he wakes up, too early and still cranky, the angst has scarcely had time to settle. I try to remind myself of all that is lovely.

“You’re a sweet boy, and we adore you,” I whisper. He stares blankly while I spoon up more applesauce and attempt to smile around the despair I feel. I try to play with him. He only wants to be held. I try to let him play in the other room; maybe if I am out of sight he will be content. I only get one dish washed before he is crawling across the kitchen, wailing heartily with real tears in his hazel eyes. Forget the dishes. Maybe he needs another nap. Ten minutes of “cry-it-out” later, I reluctantly admit this is not the solution either.

All the camp is blossoming, all the hearts are reveling in discipleship and the study of God together. These are glory days, and these are breaking days.

Yet somehow, these days drive me deeper into faith, deeper into marriage, deeper into parenting. I pray nearly constantly, and God begins to answer. After nearly a week, the teething abates slightly, the smiling boy is back, recommencing his giggles. Grant digs in, buying me chocolate, telling me to set aside the dishes for when he’s home, changing the diapers. I get down on the floor instead of cleaning or scrolling or reading, and we play tag, tackle, chase. The beauty begins to shape out of the frustration. The glory of life grows slowly back up beside the brokenness. I take time to look at the hard edges of parenting a 1 year old and I ask God for eyes to see what he would show me; ears to hear what he would tell me, a heart to receive what he would give.

When we walk down to dinner, I point out the way bushes bloom out of rocky crevices. I chatter back to E’s cooing and we discuss all things wide and wonderful. I breathe deep and smile at the wriggling boy, and count the stars in the waving grass with the few minutes I’ve been given.

beauty from ashes

May 26, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, habits, writingTagged beauty, beauty from ashes, Colorado, creativity, earth, Ephesians, Ephesians 3:20, exploring, God, learning, more than we ask or think, nature, parents, photography, stillness, truth, walking, writingLeave a comment

“The Waldo Canyon fire burned all the way around camp,” Grant tells me. I’m impressed, and I see the hand of God in the story as clearly as if he were opening the camp gate to let us in. But to me it is just a story still. In the year of the fires I was in Minnesota, celebrating my graduation, finding a new job, planning travels for the next year. I didn’t understand just how close the fires had come until I began to explore.

I walked back to the horsebarn one evening. There are trails and work roads that split off into the hollow woods as I walk, and I notice that the forest is scarred and sooty. Black and gray trees point up like crooked bony fingers. They stretch down to the very edges of this tiny green valley, closer than I imagined. With practice you could stand at the edge of the barn and spit into the burn area. It is the same when I walk around the rest of the camp, stretching my legs on a cool afternoon and looking for the places I will walk with Erik in the lazy days ahead.

“This is Excursions Valley,” Grant explains as we crest a hill and walk down towards the cabins dotted along its side. There are more wildfire scars here. We walk in the spring-green valley and when we look up at the next hills their rounded tops are clearly arched against the blue sky. There are no evergreens filled with the low rush of breeze to obscure the edges of rising mountains here. No, there are only the skeletons. Here the green pines are gone and only seasonal grasses and the young whip-like Aspens bring color to the hillsides.

But there is color. The grasses have come back; their green ranks have pushed through the dry growth from last year and are springing up, brighter with every sunny day. Where mature Aspens grow in the mountains they form delightful streaks of bright green amongst the evergreens, and here instead of veins and pools of lighter green amid dark, they form a haze of bright growth around the bases of old burnt stems.

There is an unused wood stove in the Dining Hall that people have set wood paintings of encouraging sayings on. A small one near the front says Beauty From Ashes. I remember it day after day when I sit at our kitchen table, looking out at the burned slope reaching down almost to the camp; the soft green haze of fresh leaves reaches a little higher and shimmers a little brighter every time I look. Glory and growth are springing up from the graves of old trees. Beauty from ashes.

I have given up on writing many times. There was a year when I scarcely wrote at all, even to journal. There were a few months when I pushed through a large project only to set it aside, unfinished, for over a year. I eventually began to consider it pointless to pick up again. The last season has seen me working and spousing and parenting all together and addicted to my phone in between. There wasn’t time or energy to write. There wasn’t quiet space to find creativity.

I’ve discovered the vitality that walking and silence bring to my creative side this season, and writing has been possible again. Fear has been sliding away. I’ve been pushing fear away; fighting for my words, my inspiration, my quietness. Some beauty is returning to this old love of mine.

I keep praying over my writing. I’d love to be famous you know, and perhaps I have it in me, but I don’t think that’s what my writing is for. If my goal is to be a well-known and well-loved author, it will get in the way of having a unified, sound marriage, of parenting with connectedness and wisdom and presence. Those goals are more important.

But God is the God who “can do far more than all we ask or think, according to the power at work within us…” (Ephesians 3:20) I keep asking for beauty to come from the ashes of my writing habits, my creative desolation. I keep asking that God would do far more than all I could ask or think – that he would use this creativity and desire for His purposes, that he would help me to focus on what is most important, and bring the writing to fruition in its own time.

seeing

May 11, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, habitsTagged adventure, Adventure Camp, beauty, blogging, cabin, camp life, Colorado, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, earth, God, gratitude, Jesus, kids, learning, light, nature, outdoors, parenting, parents, sky, teaching, truth, writing5 Comments

Yesterday we moved most of our summer things up to camp. The back of the truck was full of boxes, the baby boy full of rice and stew. The higher we climbed up Rampart Range, the higher the anxiety mounted in my own heart. We unpacked, stowing our favorite mugs in the cabinets, tucking away canned tuna and steel cut oats in a cupboard, setting bread and tortillas on top of the fridge.

With each thing I unpacked, the stark reality of our summer at camp took on form. I had known the fridge would be small as but I tucked kefir on the top shelf and then negotiated the almond milk behind it I wondered how I would work with this space. I knew there wasn’t a bookshelf but when I stowed my favorite books behind a charming little end table door, I wondered how I would survive in this literary desert. The windows, larger than I had remembered, were covered in window wells and my heart sank a little more. I had planned for Erik to share our room but when I put him down in the pack’n’play, still unhappy after a bottle of milk, I wondered how much more motherhood I could manage for the day.

I saw the sun shining through a hedge a few days ago. The sidewalk was shadowy and dark but in the gap between the leaves the sun was bright and gold, all the more beautiful for having trickled through the leaves, maybe. And when the sun slips behind the dark-rising mountains in the evening, the colorful rays of evening shine out the more lovely for being ephemeral.

Perhaps that is the way with all beautiful things. I must learn to see them. The moments of glory in parenting will only shine the brighter when I am looking for them, when I have walked through the frustrations. The small closet, the narrow cupboards, the welled windows; these will all become worthwhile when I have looked for the ways that camp life is shot through with light. The same moment the sun sets, the stars begin to appear. When the challenges rise like the dusky mountains in the evening, the soft rays of joy may just become more beautiful.

Look for the light, my friends.

the succulent and I // repotted

May 10, 2018May 10, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, courageTagged aloe, blogging, camp life, camp wife, Colorado, Eagle Lake Camp, earth, gardening, God, learning, nature, planting, repotting, succulents, transplanting, writingLeave a comment

Last week I repotted my succulents. I bought them from Sprouts nearly two years ago; the dark aloe in copper colored pots played perfectly into my wedding color scheme of rose gold and green. I used them as centerpieces and kept them as living souvenirs of that day. I’m not a green thumb, and I don’t think they’ve thrived under my care, but they’re still alive.

After keeping them alive – somehow – for so long, I decided to stop hoping and start learning. I looked up how to repot them; it seemed like a logical first step since they’ve grown so much. Then I learned how often to water them. Having tabs about succulents open on my web browser is one thing, but it was another completely to walk into the garden section at Walmart and ask for the correct potting soil. It was yet another to grab an old kitchen spoon in lieu of a garden spade, buckle my baby boy in the patio swing, and start scooping a few handfuls of gravel out of the alley behind our house to act as drainage in the bottom of the pot.

They are happily repotted now. I just watered them for the first time (you’re supposed to wait about a week to let them adjust to the new soil.) I’m a little worried that they haven’t loved being transplanted, but hopefully they begin to adjust since they have more room to grow again.

Today we beginning our move up to camp for the summer. We don’t need to bring our entire household since the staff housing there is furnished, but clothing, books, baby toys, cold-weather and rain gear, hiking boots, and anything else we may need up there that we won’t need down here is going in today’s truck load. I’m feeling like my succulents must have, lined up beside the patio waiting to be transferred, at the mercy of gentle fingers and an old kitchen spoon. We’ll be living next to families I already know and love, but I haven’t known them long. I’ve gone to camp before and been in the mountains, but never this camp, never for a summer, never in this role. It seems like a natural role to assume, but a challenging one. It will require adjustment.

Somehow, despite all my nervous anticipation, fear of the unknown, the strangeness of the “camp-wife” role, I’m excited. I flourish in the outdoors, honestly. And I’m beginning to think I’ll adjust well, having more room to grow again.

I used to joke about being a “black thumb” – once a cactus under my care died for lack of water. But there is something about nurturing plants that feels very much like embodied hope. Perhaps even our doomed-to-decay bodies have the essence of life flowing in their very fingertips. Perhaps in a sin-broken world we can still thrive, grow, even nurture.

example

April 4, 2018Posted in Bible study, habits, parenting, writingTagged Bible, Bible study, blogging, caring, children, Colorado, God, heritage, kids, learning, love, loving others, loving well, Mom, parenting, parents, Proverbs, Proverbs 4, teach, teaching, truth, writingLeave a comment

Morning nap – first nap of the day. Sit you down and read I tell myself. I leave the breakfast dishes, the scattered letter blocks with baby teeth marks, and I begin my mid-morning with scripture. It’s a slow-forming habit. To ignore the sunshine, the messy floors, the urge to spend quiet hours indulging in youtube – it’s not easy. The rewards come slowly, but they come. So I sit with my Bible again.

I don’t like to have a daily time with God unless I have a plan of some kind. Lately, as I attempt to parent well, I have chosen Proverbs as my starting point. I’m reading through the gospels as well, but I start each study time by reading through the chapter in Proverbs that corresponds with the day of the month.

It is four months in; I love the repetition. Again and again I hear the same warnings against adultery, the same urging to seek wisdom, the same need for a fear of the Lord. And again and again Proverbs says “listen, my son”. Each time I’ve read it I’ve thought, What have my parents taught me that I need to remember and listen to right now? Today, God changed what I heard. What do I want Erik to learn from me, and remember?

That was not a comfortable question.

I want Erik to learn love. I want him to know the “breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,” so that he can love others with that same abundance. So then, that is how I need to live. I am pondering now how I can better love others. I want to be somebody who cares, who remembers somebody’s name, who hears their struggle without condemnation.

My mama was a great one for loving people. She’d invite anyone over for holidays if they didn’t have a place to gather. She’d talk to a stranger in the grocery store or a wrong number on the phone for an hour, just because she cared enough to feel their hurts. I want that heritage to run strongly in Erik, so it will need to run strongly in me. I have heard it said that a mother’s biggest contribution to the world may be those she raises. If that is true, then the only way I can truly magnify that contribution is to lead Erik by my own example.

So, here is to living the large love my mother taught me. Listen well, baby boy.

he dug down

April 3, 2018Posted in adventure, habits, writingTagged adventure, Bible, blogging, California, California Redwoods, digging, God, horses, Jesus, learning, Luke, Montgomery woods state reserve, Northern California, outdoors, photography, redwoods, scripture, travel, truth, writingLeave a comment

When I was half-grown, my family got horses. I thought it would be cool. It turned out to be a lot of work. My dad roused our family one Saturday and told us it was time to fence in a pasture for our future horse. He had outlined the perimeter of it, he said. Now we had to fence it. We set out, loading our supplies onto the four-wheeler. One of us took the post-hole digger and started digging. Dad would measure, and tell us to dig deeper. Two of us came behind, one holding the post with thick work gloves while the other slammed a post-pounder down on the top of it, over and over. Behind them we came filling in the holes, snapping on the insulators, stringing the wire. It was a long day. When we finished we could scarcely even see the slim wire fence against the thick prairie grass. It was there, and effective, but practically invisible.

I read the parable of the builders today, in Luke 6. Jesus says of the first builder that “he dug down” and laid a foundation. It didn’t even take having a horse to know that I hate digging, and here’s God, saying you have to keep digging if you don’t want your life to fall over.

“Do you really think these trees have been here for a thousand years?” Tiffany asked. Jon looked up. We all looked up. Standing there under the towering fragrant forest, we couldn’t doubt that they had seen a thousand years of sunrises, heard a thousand years of laughter. Their roots, I learned, grow up to 6 feet deep and nearly 100 feet out. The Redwoods are anchored for the centuries.

I spent about a year, maybe even more, digging through my crippling insecurity, trying to find the root of it, to dig that out too. You’ve got to dig down into yourself, but dig down into God too. It was only ever after I started with Him and His words as a foundation that I was able to dig up the crap I’d been standing on.

I’m trying to build this life-foundation strong, because I want to stand tall. Maybe it is hidden work, but even if nothing of the foundation shows, then at least the life-that-does-not-crumble will. Perhaps it will take hours at my kitchen table, reading and underlining and praying the scriptures. Maybe it will take years. Maybe it should take years. But perhaps if we stay where we are meant to be, if we dig down deep enough, then in a thousand years we will be as beautiful as this.

holy Saturday

March 31, 2018Posted in UncategorizedTagged Bible, blogging, courage, Easter, fear, God, habits, holy Saturday, learning, love, outdoors, photography, redwoods, scripture, SFO, travel, truth, truth and love, writingLeave a comment

Truth, truth. It is like a dye, staining every thought I have this weekend. I have scripture ringing in my ears – a lying tongue hates its victims; Proverbs 26. I repeat it to myself, thinking not just of telling lies but of softening truths. It is so easy to sidestep truth, to just assume somebody knows my beliefs and positions and that I don’t need to clarify them.

I never want to present truth unlovingly. It’s the spoonful of sugar with the medicine. But you can’t be nourished on spoonfuls of sugar alone, and that’s the way our culture has leaned. Religion is suddenly acceptable if love is the only real application. But truth and love are inseparable. That is actually my clearest memory from my recent trip to California.

Redwoods are beautiful, don’t misunderstand me! I loved them. But on the way back to the airport, Tiffany reminded me of the absolute vitality of truth. It’s unloving to not speak the truth she said firmly. She’s right. I’ve been mulling over those words since I reached the airport and quietly circled the terminal with hot coffee.

I read a post about celebrating Easter as a millennial who’s left church culture, and the post was about the spirituality (in a loose sense) of the holiday and the beauty of celebrating newness. I love newness and celebration, but the truth of Easter is so much more brutal, so sin-dyed. And it is so much more powerful, beautiful, so earth-shattering light-filled. Easter is the obliteration of our blackest wrongs through brutal death. Earth is the glory of new life where no life was even possible before.

Tiffany was right about truth. To withhold the glorious beauty of Easter and just celebrate newness? That is no kind of love. I do not want to alienate people who are on the fringes of faith and church, but I’m not going to break the truth into pieces we can consume without fear. Truth in love, yes. Half truth, no.

Those are my thoughts on this Saturday of waiting – the day in between death and Resurrection, a grave day of not celebrating, not yet. And this is my invitation to you: celebrate with us tomorrow. Celebrate life and grace and forgiveness, the truth of the holy day.

counting

March 19, 2018Posted in adventure, courage, habitsTagged adventure, blogging, Colorado, friendship, God, gratitude, habits, hiking, learning, Minnesota, outdoors, sky, songbirds, thankfulness, winterLeave a comment

Songbirds are not as common in Colorado as they are in northern Minnesota. I miss them. Each time I hear one, I listen. I want to write it down, remember it. The songbird trills warm me gently like audible sunshine.

Last year I created the habit of cultivating gratitude. Each morning as often as I could I wrote down something I was thankful for. Anything, even simple things. A healthy meal. A quietly playing boy. Baby smiles, husband flirting, slow dancing, clean laundry, sunny days, snow on the mountains.

I’ve gotten a bit out of the habit lately. This year I wanted to practice trying new things in courage, but I haven’t stuck to the gratitude as much, at least not to writing it down. But each time I hear birdsong, I still stop to listen.

My friend Mariah once gave me a tiny book Santa Claus on the cover. There was twine strung through a hole in one corner – it was meant to be a Christmas ornament. Instead I started writing down what I was grateful for; 1, 2, 3, … I skipped every other number to leave space for her. Then late in the winter I gave the book back.

“Here – it’s a gratitude journal for you!” She smiled and started writing; 2, 4, 6, … A few months later she gave it back.

“I originally gave it to you – I want you to have it!” she said gleefully. I read through her moments of gratitude and remembered my own. I kept writing. Later I gave her a small journal I had picked up in India. “I got us another,” I said eagerly, “Let’s keep writing!”

Journals have been going back and forth for almost four years now. We hunt down the sweetest, prettiest small notebooks and journals we can find for each other. One came to me at my bridal shower, a yellow leather book with loose-leaf pages on tiny five-ring binder. Another came with a baby package she sent us; this one a tiny journal with an adventuring compass on the front.

I get to see her in four days. I have a tiny notebook that didn’t quite have space for 600 numbers, half-full and waiting to memorialize her happiest moments. Time and again when I’ve forgotten this habit of counting, counting, that I learned first from Ann Voskamp, I suddenly remember Mariah and our shared tradition. It brings me back to rootedness. I plant myself in gratitude, listening eagerly to the few songbirds we do have, counting their trilled whistles slowly and happily.

where courage comes from

March 15, 2018March 15, 2018Posted in adventure, courageTagged blogging, climbing, Colorado, courage, courageous, God, hiking, learning, Minnesota, rock climbing, sky, yuccasLeave a comment

One of my friends talks a lot about courage. We went cliff jumping together once and it became our metaphor for doing brave things. We call each other cliff jumpers for pep talks, encouragement.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. There have been long seasons where fear played too big a role in my life. Should it have any role? I don’t know the answers to all my questions about fear, but I think maybe courage is the better train of thought. Perhaps questions about courage will inspire, where questions about fear shame.

I was wondering today where courage comes from and I think part of my answer is space.

Nearly every week Grant will send me away to get coffee, take a walk, spend some time coming back to myself. It usually works. I end up quieted. I come home with new energy and joy and ideas. Being alone gives me a chance to talk to God, to remember how much bigger he is than all my insecurities and doubts and nervousness.

You may be thinking coffee shop and that sometimes helps but actual wide space is even better. My home state had space. Growing up in Minnesota the horizons stretched open like arms and when I looked up there were no peripheral borders besides the clouds. The sky was wide, wide, and I could remember how wide and deep and everywhere God was too. I needed the space then and I need it now still, maybe more even. Now I find it in the rock crevices and pebbly trails bordered with spiky yuccas, in the way the rocks reach for the sky like I do.

I climb for the sky with the rocks, and my courage swells up, drunk on all the space I can give it. It is enough.