The Part They Didn't Hear

It seems there is always more to a situation than what meets the eye or, as in this case, the ear. For instance, those who have heard me in person as well as those who have never met me but have only heard me blog, may be surprised to know that one time last month, I swore. That is, I uttered words which caused my hearers to believe that I was swearing.

Yes, it’s true. And this from a mom who has been known to cross out swear words in the books her children read. (My mom did it for us children, and I thought it was the motherly thing to do. I did it the proper way, though – striking one line through the objectionable words with a pen instead of obliterating them with a bold marker and thus making the reader so curious that he would hold the page up to the light to discover which words were the ones he mayn’t read.)

This mom has also been known to firmly state, after hearing even borderline swearing by her offspring within the four walls of her house, that we do not use such words in our home. So, I can easily see why I shocked my family by my choice of phrase in a frustrating moment.

I didn’t mean to. And yet, I did mean to. This is how it happened. On a Saturday night, I was working on composing a blog post, laptop on top of lap and feet resting on the footrest of the loveseat where I was seated by my love. It came up as a matter of discussion and planning among some equally living-roomed family members surrounding me how that the present moment would be an opportune time to apply for our Nexus cards.

I agreed. Visions of being able to zoom past the long lines of traffic and whip out a little card to scan in order to cross the border in less than a minute seemed pretty appealing to me. (Is the word Nexus short for naa-nana-naa-naa?)

“This would be a fine time for my husband and daughter to navigate the cyber labyrinth of online application to such things,” I thought, as I kept typing blog sentences on my computer keyboard while listening to the applicants’ conversation with one ear.

The daughter who already has a Nexus card in her possession was a great guidance resource for the daughter and the parents who wished to apply for theirs. She soon had her sister and dad at the proper website and into the correct link on the right form to begin applying. Shortly thereafter though, the truth became plainer: each individual one of us three applicants, Kerra, Ken, and I, would need to fill out his/her own application.

“I will set my aside my blogging and prepare to begin slogging instead,” I thought. At least Ken and Kerra were part way into the process on their computers already and I could follow in their fingerprints. Preliminary blanks to fill in were quite doable, but then came the first snag. We each needed to enter a separate email address and Ken had used our home email address so I had to use his work email because we couldn’t double up on one. The Nexus Powers That Be claimed thus, on the form.

Having worked our way through that rigamarole, we began filling out the various pages of the application, typing out info concerning our place of living, moving and having our being. (I really mean where we’ve worked and what countries we’ve travelled to, and such) Then, the Internet decided to go Intermittent, as it is wont to do on Saturday nights - which is a puzzle that we have so far failed to solve in our history with technological things.

“Oh, great.” I thought. “But I think I can work with this.” I filled out the first page, and hit the confirm button to show that all the info was accurate. Then the connection fainted dead away. Some personal sighs later, the Internet revived, and I noticed that all my work on the first page remained. Whew. Ken and I discovered in subsequent Internet disconnections, though, that any partial work we had done on a page before the Internet cut out was lost.

The work info page was the longest and most time-consuming for me. It shouldn’t have been that complicated, with my having only two places of employment, but it seemed to be tedious with addresses, length of times working, job descriptions and such. The Internet connection held out while I got everything filled in - yay! - and I had just gone over it all to confirm accuracy and clicked the button when the Internet cut out again. That whole page time wasted, just like that.

“Lord God in heaven,” I said, aloud.

In my mind, I was simply beginning a prayer. Prayer that rose straight up out of the frustration in my heart. I’ve often started spontaneous prayers like that. In my head, of course, but still. Some essential gadget goes AWOL and I say, “Jesus, you know right where it is. Will you help me see it too, please?” And “Lord, have mercy!” when I hear of some atrocious abuse case. Or I get a heart-racing spell and I pray, “Father God, not these scary symptoms again – are you bringing me Home?”

And sometimes, when I’ve made a really dumb move, the complete beginning of a song-prayer issues forth: “Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive my foolish ways.”

My family, on the other hand, went precisely by what they heard me say at my computer. “Lord God in heaven.” To them, it sounded like swearing – the taking of God’s name in vain. I could see why they didn’t view it the same way I did, but the reason they didn’t take it as praying became even clearer to me in a conversation we had a few weeks later.

We were visiting around the supper table with some relatives when somebody in the circle mentioned an incident in which he had come mighty close to swearing. That reminded me of my own experience and I told my little story. The lady cousin sitting next to me got it right away. “You were just praying,” she said to me, when I described what I had done.

“’Maybe, but we thought it was swearing,” said Ken, “because we couldn’t hear the rest of the prayer.” We all laughed and went on to other topics in the conversation.

But I visited that thought numerous times in the weeks that followed. In my mind, I kept coming back to that one phrase, “…we couldn’t hear the rest of the prayer.” The rest of the prayer… is this something I have been missing with other people, too? How often have I misinterpreted the actions of others because of only a partial understanding of the situation? How many times have I heard merely the beginning of something and used that beginning alone to place a judgment on the whole?

Why is it so easy to do this? To hear a remark that feels hurtful to me, and not see past it to the pain from which it stems in the speaker’s own heart. To see the mess that people are in and write them off because I forget that when it comes to restoration – even restoration of the heart – often a thing has to get worse before it gets better. To hear a youth express doubt or questions while wrestling with current issues and allow the worry of where this could lead to distract me from hearing him out. Could it be that listening to the end takes more time, more energy, and more sacrifice than I am willing to give? Does my selfishness override my giving the benefit of the doubt?

You know, while I don’t like to think that I swore, I like to think that I have learned some things from the time I did. I learned that when I am stirred – under the sudden pressure of fear or anger, or the slower pressure of mounting frustration or deepening pit of helplessness – words will rise and spill out, unbidden. I realize that those words will come from an inner place that I feed and nurture. What is near to my heart will be the thing that springs first to my lips.

And I learned that if it is prayer that automatically issues forth from my mouth in situations that stir me, I want that prayer to be genuine. I don’t want the mention of my Lord’s name to be profane – a disrespect of sacred things; the cheapening of that which is valuable. When I mention my Lord’s name, yea, when I cry out in desperation to The Help of the Helpless, may it not be in vain, for I cannot live without Him.

I learned that the people who know me best can easily spot the difference between what I preach and what I practice, if there is a discrepancy. I am grateful to belong to a family that recognizes Mom-swearing when they hear it; and are not afraid to call me out on it, naming my inconsistencies what they are.

I also learned that if I am going to start what sounds like a prayer in public, it is probably a good idea to say the rest of my prayer.

“Lord God in heaven, help me truly listen to what others are saying. Help me listen especially to the part I didn’t hear; to always be attentive to the rest of the prayer.”

This Post's Quotable:

A third-grader, in reciting his memory work to his teacher, came up with this rendition of the passage in Revelation that talks about a great multitude which no man could number: “…all nations, and kindred, and people…and places, and things…”

On another note, the answer to my last post’s Quotable riddle: duck down!

This Post's Childhood Memory:

In the first years after we moved to the Peninsula Road property, gardening was very challenging for my parents and us children, their undergardeners (or would that be kindergardeners?) Rocks, “quack grass”, heavy soil, and thistles were some of the problems we were up against. I remember spending quite a bit of time together out in the garden hoein’ weeds, pickin’ rock and diggin’ thistles. It was profitable in many ways, considering the skills we developed and the memories we accumulated, and we did have some monetary profit once in a while, too. One summer my aunt planted some vegetables in a patch at the end of our garden. When the thistles threatened to take over her growing things, she told Annette and me that she’d pay us a penny for every thistle we uprooted in her garden plot. Over the next weeks we twins dug out and counted our way to 500 thistles apiece. At pay time, we got our payment in the form of a check. My very first check – made out to Danette Schrock for the sum of $5.00. It was so exciting!