Stealing from Life: Don’t Forget the Prankster

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I will admit that I’m writing this post as a not-so-gentle nudge to get back to work on the 2nd book in the David and Saul series — my lack of alone time in summer wreaks havoc on my concentration. Also, I’ve told a story from my Hart side that influenced a scene in It Is You (the 1st book), and it’s time my Steenwyk side got a little glory.

The book series takes place around 1,000 BCE. Things were not luxurious for most of my characters. Theirs was a survival economy and survival was tough. So I’ve tended to make everyone focused on survival all the time, with very little lightheartedness once they reach early teen years.

But I forget about my grandfather, John Steenwyk. He was born in 1915 in Chicago, but moved to Byron Center (when it was all celery farms) soon after. They were, apparently, impressively poor. Even other poor people remember thinking, “At least we aren’t as bad up as the Steenwyks.”

And there were a lot of them — seven kids to feed and put to work to survive.

Yet Grandpa, the oldest, was a lively and curious kid who loved building things, messing around with electricity and chemistry, and playing pranks. The quotes below are in his own words.

Four of us boys all slept in one bedroom in two beds. My brother Herm slept with me and brother Joe slept with Lou in the other bed. Sometimes Herm and I would talk together about some scary things, like falling stars, to get Joe and Lou in a scary mood. One night I started telling a scary story about the stars falling down, and the boys, Joe and Lou, asked questions, you know. “Does it make a big noise when they fall?” They fired all kinds of questions at me. So I said, “Yes, sometimes they do.” Well, finally I said, “Well, let’s go to sleep now.”

Herm and I had made up a plan together. I gave him a very heavy book and I said, “You bang this book together when I give you a nudge.” Now, I had about 4 or 5 dry cell batteries under the bed with wires connected going up the window to a light I rigged outside the window. When the boys were just about nodding off, I gave Herm a nudge with my elbow so that he would bang that book together. Meantime, I snapped that switch off and on and that bulb shone and flashed in that dark room real bright. Those boys were so scared, especially Lou. He thought the house was on fire.   They were scared stiff! They thought sure that a star had fallen. 

Herm told me the same story at Grandpa’s funeral; it was a great memory of his boyhood. He said that the book closing was as loud as a gunshot and Joe and Lou thought the world was ending.

What did I learn from this? Even in desperate situations, people like to mess with each other, especially boys. Given that this David story is mostly about male persons, I can’t forget this.

Grandpa didn’t grow out of pranking, either. During the Depression, when he was 18, he joined/was drafted into the Civilian Conservation Corps, and cut down the forest to build roads in northern Michigan. He wound up with a group of only guys, living in barracks, doing hard, physical work all day.

Another story of the CCC Camp: On Saturdays we didn’t have to work all day. We could take the afternoons off and if you wanted to go to town and they would take you in the truck. Some of the guys would go and get some booze to drink. One Saturday evening, there were some fellows who had come back from town. They had been drunk and had gotten in a fight in town. Then me and a couple of pals and another fellow who liked to fix radios too, Joe Hamilton from Detroit, decided to play a hoax using my radio.
 
Joe had given me some parts so I could fix my old radio. Way out there in the sticks my old radio didn’t get the best reception but by adding a tube in there, I made my radio more powerful so I could get reception none of the other radios could get. We could even get police broadcasts on my radio and pretty plain too. So we made up together with a guy, Bucky O’Connor, who had a big voice like a truckdriver, a plan to pull off a hoax on those guys who had gotten drunk and in a fight.
 
Bucky was the broadcaster. I had run a fine wire over the ceiling from my bed towards Bucky’s bed, connected to an earphone which he was going to use as a microphone. He was going to pretend to be sleeping in his bed with the comforters thrown over his head. I had the radio. The plan was that when I gave the signal, three taps on the floor, he would begin his broadcasting.
 
So first I turned my radio on and got some regular police calls and the guys who had gotten drunk were playing cards at a table and they didn’t pay much attention. Then I gave the signal and there was a call about “a drunken brawl in Nigawni, Michigan, and the perpetrator alleged to be in the CCC Camp” and that sort of thing. So then those guys pricked up their ears and started to get really worried. Then, to tease them a little, I would turn on the regular police broadcast for a while, and then a bit later, give the signal for Bucky to do his broadcast again. Now I had about 30 of those guys going; they stopped playing cards and said, “Now, listen! Listen!” And then they all looked at the guy who had been involved in the fight and he said there were others who had been involved too.
Pretty soon, Bucky accidentally disconnected the wire to his earphone microphone and didn’t know it. My radio went dead and there was a muffled mumbling coming out from under Bucky’s comforter: “Calling all cars! Calling all cars!” Someone ran over to Bucky’s bed and pulled off the comforter and there was Bucky with that microphone, trying to broadcast.
 
All we had to do was connect that wire and we were in business again. The fellow who had been so scared from our hoax wanted to pull that same hoax on two other guys that were involved too. So we could continue the hoax when those guys came in.

Then everyone wanted to broadcast too. Half of the guys wanted to broadcast. Some had guitars; some had mouth organs and other things. The other half would go outside and stand in the cold snow listening. So that was some excitement there that they had never experienced before.

I have to add a prankster to this manuscript. Of course, there was no electricity to aid in mischief, but I’ll think of something. I’m at the point in the story when David is first living in the caves in Judah. He’s hiding out, but more and more men escape their desperate situations and come to him. And wind up in an even more desperate situation. It’s not like he has giant reserves of food for them, yet, as their leader, he has to figure out how to provide for them and (in my version) to do it as honestly as possible. Even so, there’s got to be some nonsense happening, just to blow off steam, and to make David frustrated.

J.K. Rowling used the Prankster to great effect, with Peeves and the Weasley twins. So today, while I go about my business, I instruct my imagination to get to work on some first century BCE pranks.

Wherein I Win at Relaxing

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

A couple of months ago, the family and I took a trip to Chicago, to the Museum of Science and Industry for the fantastic MythBusters exhibit. While there, we played Mindball. In this game, two opponents wearing headbands sit opposite each other. Sensors in the headbands detect each person’s brainwaves, and the most relaxed person moves a little ball towards the less relaxed person. As the MSI says, “Compete to Relax … Relax to Compete.”

This is how NOW Magazine describes it:

Mindball is “an experience product.” Players use their alpha and theta brainwaves (two of four major brainwave types) to control the rubber-coated steel ball and move it across the 4-foot-long game table. Each player wears a headband equipped with electrodes that act as biosensors to measure their brain’s electrical activity as recorded from the scalp – similar to how a neurophysiologic electroencephalogram(EEG) machine is used to assess brain damage and epilepsy.

The person with the stronger alpha and theta brainwaves will be able to “push” a magnetic carriage under the table (visible to players and audience as a ball on the surface) into their opponent’s goal and score a point.

On the face of it, this isn’t a game I should win, especially against my husband. One of the major ways we complement each other is that his steadiness and general relaxedness balances out my excitability and general high-strungedness. If you were to try to give him a neck/shoulder massage, you’d find the area pliable; he never needs a massage. I’m always in need of one; the area between my neck and shoulders is constantly tense.

Yet I beat him in the game of relaxing. This was even more odd because I was not relaxed. My heart was pounding and there was a small crowd around us, watching, so I also felt like I was performing. I love to perform, but it makes me tense and nervous, especially when I could hear them comment on our competition.

So how did I win?

Alpha brainwaves are strongest when a person is relaxing, when the brain is neither actively working through something nor engaged in an activity that requires thought. Meditation or yoga often brings on alpha waves. Theta waves are slower than alpha, and can occur when a person is daydreaming, or when engaged in an automatic and repetitive activity, such as driving on the freeway (all those times you can’t remember the last few miles) or exercising outdoors.

My husband was trying to empty his mind, which is what the MSI worker told us to do. I couldn’t empty my mind if you paid me serious money, so I closed my eyes, worked to control my breathing to a steady four beats in and four out (no matter how shaky those breaths were), and I mentally counted those 4 in and 4 out.

I won, not because I was the most relaxed, but because I was concentrating on something utterly repetitive. One line in the NOW Magazine article allows for this: “What adds an unusual and exciting twist to the game is the fact that alpha and theta waves are strongest when a person is calm and relaxed, or concentrating intently.”

It’s no surprise that my powers of concentration are stronger than my brain’s ability to relax, but I sure was amazed that I beat my husband in this game.

It should also be noted that he made the mistake of opening his eyes and peeking at where the ball was. Maybe all the above is hogwash and he defeated himself. But every now and then, I like to gloat that I won at relaxing.

Diaries: Ordinary Teenager

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

What do teenagers do? Sleep in, watch a lot of movies and TV, and obsess about their appearance and social relationships. Yup.

1/3/81 Today I watched football, washed my hair and returned some overdue books. My hair finally went the way I wanted it to. Then we had a speedy dinner  with Oma and then went to Ordinary People. It’s a really neat movie. It was really good. A mature movie, excellent acting. I really enjoyed it. Bye-bye.

1/4/81 I was asleep ’till 11:00 a.m. so I missed half of the day. I saw the movie Seems Like Old Times for the 2nd time. I think it’s really funny. Then I watched skating. Two people skated separately then got marks together. There were 3 10’s given. One to Dorothy Hamel and someone else. The other two were given to Peggy Flemming & Toller Cranston. Tomorrow we go back to school. Bye-bye.

2/5/81 Teen Club tonight was a learning experience to say the least. At first, I thought my only friend was K. But then I was hiding with D. and he asked me if I hated his guts. I said no, not necessarily. Then I got the surprise of my life, he said he liked me. I wasn’t expecting that. And on the way home I found out that J. doesn’t hate me. Or he did a good job of covering it up, but I think he likes me (normally of course). Bye-bye.

Indeed, ordinary teenager stuff. I remember the February incident. D. is the boy I loved when I was 9. Even though I was all of 13 here, he still made me feel all fluttery and terrified. On this day, we were either playing Sardines, a fun variant of Hide and Go Seek (coincidentally, that my kids learned from their Canadian cousins this month), or Hide and Go Seek in the dark. In Sardines, one person hides and everyone else seeks. When a seeker finds the hider, they hide with him or her, until everyone is squeezed in like sardines and the last person finds everyone.

D. and I were hiding in a supply closet at church. I, true to form, as soon as he entered the closet, stumbled over church decorating supplies in my haste to get deeper into the closet, as far away from him as I could, something that could be mistaken for distaste, but was more like the terror of a mouse when the cat is near. I’m ridiculously overstating it even now.

What’s curious about this is the question of how to use these memories of teenage crushes in my writing of the David book. Being a teenager in 1,000 BCE was not the same as being a teenager now. They were essentially adults. If I had been born then, I probably would’ve been married off at 13, not lazing about thinking about who liked me. Boys were working in the fields since the age of 10 or so, although they didn’t marry until the end of their teenage years or later.

Still, there had to be some of the same emotional immaturity teenagers now have. In my telling of the story of how David came to marry Saul’s daughter Michal, Saul throws a dinner to officially introduce David to the rest of his family. At this point, David has served in the army with Saul and his sons who are of age, but since Saul clears the room when David plays for him, and since any smart king would keep his young daughters away from the army, David has only caught glimpses of the daughters, maybe heard them from out a window, and probably heard servants gossip about them during his years of living in the fortress. Just enough contact to know that Merab is a pill and Michal is intriguing enough that when the offer from the king turns from marrying Merab to marrying Michal, David doesn’t fight quite as hard against it. Here are some snippets in which I try to uncover some teenage romantic angst (David is 18).

Did the king order him to wear the cloak so he’d look marriageable tonight? Or was it a not-so-subtle signal that Saul would try to kill him again if he didn’t cooperate? Knowing the king, it was probably both.

The cloak made all the spots on the tunic stand out, so David wrapped it tightly enough that less than a handbreadth of the tunic was visible. He secured it with his own belt, which was actually Jonathan’s. It looked so disreputable next to the linen, it was a joke: you can dress up a goat, but you can’t invite it to dinner unless it’s dead.

He tugged at the lapel to smooth it against his chest and fingered the embroidery. The sandstorm in his stomach made small, swirling eddies that died down when he breathed deeply. He grabbed his lyre and trudged up the hill to the city proper.

***

Not singing words was odd, but the rest of it was fine with him. Sitting in a corner and playing his lyre was something he could do with his eyes closed, so he did. As usual, joy and peace sunk into his soul while he played. He couldn’t keep silent, so he sang sounds, his voice bending and sliding and adapting to his mood.

He opened his eyes a sliver to gauge whether they were enjoying the music. Michal was watching him through the curtain of her hair, out of the corner of her eyes. His skin went hot and prickly and his throat closed up. Now that he’d caught her looking at him, he couldn’t stop himself from checking to see whether she still was. After the fourth time, he shifted so she wasn’t in his sightline.

***

At breakfast the next day, David stirred his leban. The paleness of the yoghurt and wheat nestled in the warm brown bowl reminded him of Michal, her creamy cloak next to her nutty skin.

Oh, I’m so glad I’m not a teenager anymore. I have one in the house, though, so I’m going through those years again, whether I want to or not.

 

Apt Analogies

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

When an analogy works, it’s a beautiful thing. The reader has both a richer and more precise understanding of the situation being described.

This is my new favorite, from The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements.

The author, Sam Kean, is talking about the element gadolinium and its many unpaired electrons (he credits this brilliant analogy to Wolfgang Pauli in 1925):

Despite the willingness of electrons to bond with other atoms, within their own atoms, they stay maximally far apart. Remember that electrons live in shells, and shells further break down into bunks called orbital, each of which can accommodate two electrons. Curiously, electrons fill orbitals like patrons find seats on a bus: each electron sites by itself in an orbital until another electron is absolutely forced to double up (p.170).

It’s rare that a book on science manages to make me laugh out loud, but this is so perfect, even a humanities person (and ex-public transportation rider) like myself can instantly picture what’s going on. I totally get it. And can probably even remember it.

Following are three of my analogical attempts. The first one occurs when Saul is first introduced to David. David has just walked into Saul’s receiving room. The place is unusually crowded because people want to see whether this kid will be able to do anything to help the king, which makes Saul feel self-conscious and paranoid and angry that all these people are speculating so freely about his problems.

The whispering in the room that had started up as soon as Saul returned to his throne got louder, worming into Saul’s ears, swirling in his head like dry leaves.

Looking at it all by itself, naked there on the page, I realize that I’m mixing metaphors, with both worming and swirling. It might still work, because there’s a circularity to both motions, but I think I’ll have to decide which I like better and only keep one. It’ll be the dry leaves. But it’s still too wordy. I’ve got a little more work to do there.

The next one comes courtesy of Jonathan, reminiscing with his father about a particularly satisfying defeat of the Philistines:

“And then the Lord made the rest of their army panic until they were swinging their swords like blind men trying to kill bees.”

That’s a pretty good one, although it reminds me a bit too much of me standing at my open screen door yesterday and waving to my neighbor, but the wave turned into wild swiping when a bug flew too close to my face. If I looked even half as stupid as I felt, it had to be pretty funny.

The next one might be my favorite analogy in the entire manuscript. It’s certainly one of the earliest ones. I had this image in my head long before I started writing the Goliath scene.

Goliath was closer to the other end of the Israelite front line with his back to David. “I’m getting bored,” he shouted. “Maybe I should choose my own challenger. Someone from here.” He took a few running steps towards the army. “Or here.”

Wherever he aimed his body, the Israelite soldiers faded away and shifted like a flock of birds in the sky.

If you watched the “Murmuration” video about two young ladies kayaking and the flock of starlings that put on a spectacular shifting show, you know exactly what I had in mind. While googling about to find that video, I found out that murmuration isn’t just what they named that video, it’s the actual name for a flock of starlings. What a gorgeous term. It might tie with my usual favorite word, susurration (a soft rustling sound).

Then again, doing a search for “like,” so I could find all my analogies, I discovered yet another overused word in my manuscript. Will it ever end?

Hearing Their Story

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

According to this great TED talk by Andrew Stanton (of Toy Story and WALL-E fame), Mr. Rogers carried this quote around in his wallet: “There isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love, once you’ve heard they story.”

In the last twenty years, readers have definitely grown to love all kinds of characters who’ve traditionally been villains: vampires, thieves, werewolves, etc. I certainly found this to be true while writing the first David and Saul book: writing Saul, the “villain,” the “failure” of the piece, made me more sympathetic to him. In the first book, anyway, I find him a more interesting character than the upright David. (David gets more interesting in the 2nd book, when he has to compromise his very high principles in order to survive.)

Saul “fought against his enemies in every direction — against Moab, Ammon, Edom, the kings of Zobah, and the Philistines. And wherever he turned, he was victorious. He did great deeds and conquered the Amalekites, saving Israel from all those who had plundered them” (1 Sam. 14:47-48). Yet he’s remembered as a failure. The book of Chronicles (the point of which is to detail the reign of the kings of Israel) contains only the story of his death, nothing about the 42 years of his kingship.

The more I wrote in his point of view, the more compassion I felt for him. His main qualification for being king, other than God choosing him, was that he was tall, head and shoulders taller than everyone else. He seems to have been a good son and a hard-working farmer, but when he and his servant went out looking for some lost donkeys, the servant was the one who thought of seeking out a seer and who had silver to offer Samuel. After Samuel privately anointed Saul and told him the Lord was appointing him leader of all Israel, God had to change Saul’s heart (1 Sam. 10:9) to get him with the program.

Even after this and after all the signs Samuel predicted came true, after prophesying (and being made fun of for prophesying) and having the Spirit of God fill him, he didn’t tell his family what had really happened. The next time he’s anointed, it’s going to be at an official ceremony, but Saul hides in the baggage. And I don’t blame him. Who else gets to start his coronation by hearing how upset God is that the Israelites wanted a king, how God felt it was them rejecting him? Not exactly a rah-rah endorsement.

At first, Saul does the smart thing. “When Saul returned home to Gibeah, a band of men whose hearts God had touched became hi constant companions” (1 Sam. 10:29). There were some haters, but Saul ignored them. When there’s a threat to an Israelite town, he answers in dramatic fashion: cuts up the oxen he’s plowing his father’s field with and sends it around Israel as an incentive to get people to come and fight. They do. There’s a tremendous victory and another public ceremony to crown him king.

Depending on what the “then” in 1 Samuel 12:1 means, it could be that right after Samuel re-re-re-anoints Saul, Samuel gives a long speech detailing precisely what is wrong with the Israelites for the extreme offense of asking for a king. (Or it could take place at some unknown time later in Saul’s reign. Storytelling in the Old Testament is not necessarily linear.) Samuel gets the Lord to send thunder and rain and the people are terrified and cry out, “Pray to the Lord your God for us, or we will die!…For now we have added to our sins by asking for a king.”

No matter when the above scene happens, Saul is most likely standing right there. No matter what kind of character you bring to the situation, that’s a lousy position to be put in.

So I feel for the guy. He was given a job that he didn’t want, that he was unprepared for and that the people were unprepared for. No wonder he so often responded to situations out of fear and insecurity.

At the beginning of this post, I put quotes around “villain,” because I don’t think of Saul as a villain. I write him more as a foil for David because I have pity for him.

So the quote Mr. Rogers carried with him is true from the positive side, but also from the negative side. A couple of years ago, my book club read Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan. It takes place in post-WWII Mississippi, telling the story of a landowning white family and an African-American sharecropping family who each have a son who comes home from the war. There are a half-dozen points of view, half white, half black. It is a deep and gripping story. But there is a villain. The father of the landowner is evil. He isn’t given any redeeming characteristics that I can recall. He makes everyone’s lives miserable and sets into motion horrifying events. As we were discussing the book, one of us noted that the author had originally included some passages in that man’s point of view. My reaction was immediate and visceral: I was glad she took them out. I didn’t want his point of view, because that would make him human. I didn’t want to know his motivations or how his upbringing and experiences brought him to where he was at the time of the story. I just wanted to be free to hate him.

Are there stories you can think of that got you to feel sympathy for the villain? How about villains you’re happy to be free to hate?

 

 

 

Diaries: Firsts

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

The beginning of my teen years. Romance gets less vague, but no less confusing. I become obsessed with the size of my person. And there are firsts.

1/1/1981  Well, the first day of 1981, and it’s a great one. I spent the whole day watching football. The Cotton and Rose Bowls. A few days ago I went on my first date. It was with T.M. We saw a movie and that was it. It was fun, even though I felt funny. I knocked at the door and L. answered and said she wasn’t expecting me. When I told her T. called she stood as if paralyzed, it was funny. Today marks the first day of starting the Pritikin Diet. I think it’s going to be fun. I met Rob, he’s lots of fun and I really like him. Bye-bye!

My first date was with the older brother of a friend of mine. I was just thirteen. A couple of months before the first date, but unremarked on in any diary, was the first time a boy told me he thought I was beautiful. It was T.M. I was sitting at their kitchen table with my friend, L., and he walked into the kitchen, leaned over so his face was level with mine, and blurted it out. I made a snarky comment in return, and he replied, “No, really.” I was that squirmy little mix of embarrassed, pleased, and confused about how to proceed so I brushed it off again. It wasn’t the best timing, but it was a big deal to me.

That same week, I happened to read an advice column in Seventeen magazine about the importance of accepting compliments — that it’s rude to the complimenter to disagree with them. Which made sense. T. wouldn’t have said that to me in front of his sister if he didn’t mean it. I decided to always accept compliments, and, in general, I have. I might deflect a little bit, depending on what’s said, but a compliment is a lovely thing, and “thank you” is easy to say. Not as easy is believing the compliment.

I do still remember L.’s reaction to seeing me at the door for her brother. Uncomfortable. I also remember wearing light blue eyeshadow and mascara that smudged under my eyes by the time I got across town to their house. I scrubbed it away while I waited for my friend to fetch him. Why I was the one who had to take subway and streetcar to his house when he was the one who invited me, I don’t know, although I suspect it had something to do with wanting to avoid alerting any member of my family to the happening of this date. Did I even tell my mother? I could easily have said I was going to a movie with L.

I also don’t know which movie we saw, but here are a few possibilities: Nine to Five, Seems Like Old Times (with Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn, Charles Grodin), or Popeye (with Robin Williams). I saw each of these in theatres, and on January 4, I note that I saw Seems Like Old Times for the second time.

The comment about the Pritikin Diet is a sign of my family’s times. My father had been diagnosed with high cholesterol, and his father had died a few years before this of a heart attack, so he became part of the clinical trials for statins and we went on the Pritikin diet. This is also the first of  a depressing number of comments about diets and fatness in my diaries.

1/2/1981  I went to Esther’s house and helped her babysit N. He’s so easy to babysit. Esther and I made a chocolate cake with really thick choc. icing. We also ate chocolate syrup. That’s called cheating on the diet. It was freezing cold. I had dinner at Est’s. It’s not pleasant. Esther and K. acted up and were sent to their rooms. That’s why I went home directly after dinner. Bye-bye.

My cousin Esther was only 39 days younger than me, and we spent a lot of time together as kids. It pains me how much of our lives and energy we wasted feeling fat and then researching and going on ever more insane diets. Once, at the cottage, we decided we’d only eat 500 calories a day for the whole week and exercise every day. The first day, we walked for miles and miles, stopping only to suck on some bitter crab apples, which we debated because of the unplanned calories. When we got back to the cottage, legs shaking, her brother was eating liverwurst on saltines. In reaction to the ridiculous deprivation, we gorged ourselves.

There was nothing wrong with how either of us looked. I wish I could’ve seen myself accurately, but that belief that if only I were a leeetle bit thinner, things would be better won’t entirely leave me, even now. My rational brain knows the facts and likes the size I am now, likes the things my body can still do, but a little dark corner of my brain makes me compare myself to the itty-bitty women at the gym and tells me I’m enormous. Which is no more ridiculous now than it was when I was 13.

Some firsts are good, some not so good. Anyone else want to share?

 

Prayers of Children

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

Sunday was our last day at our church. They said “see you later” (not “good-bye”) beautifully, with tears and hugs and prayers and gifts. We served them one last time in music, dance, prayer, technology, and children’s worship. Handed in our keys. Now we start our summer of rest, when we actually get to sit together for the entire service, to hear my husband sing the songs right next to us instead of through the speakers. We will arrive at church at the same time, in the same vehicle, even. It’s been nine years since that has been possible on a regular basis.

I’m not going to belabor the leaving after this, but I do want to talk about one thing I’ll miss: praying with young children.

I loved it. You never knew what you were going to get: could be sweet, serious or silly. I accepted it all. Prayed for it all. There were a few sticky situations over the years, of children asking for a baby brother or sister (when I knew that wasn’t happening) or wanting me to pray that their mother never die. I would pray for God to shower the family with blessings, pray for a long and wonderful life together.

While cleaning out my office, I found sheafs of notes I’ve taken of the kids’ prayer requests (so I wouldn’t forget them while we prayed). They are so dear and such a reflection of what children are concerned about. Indulge me as I list some below.

brother hurt his chin
people in New Orleans
brother with surgery on his head
Nana died
Mama’s baby
a big dog
burned myself
sister crying
me and Mommy playing
brother got shot
Aunt Susan is going to have a baby, so he doesn’t die
that I make the basketball team
blisters on my toes
sister, Mommy and dad and friends at school and help me be nice to them and play well
Mom and Dad pick flowers
falling off my bike
happy to play video game at friend’s house
boo boo on Daddy’s braces
friend burned her hand
grandma died / grandpa died
little girl hit by a car
the Lost Boys
my tooth came out
my cough go away
my friend who doesn’t have a home
scratched myself on my face
that I have a good time at my dad’s today
that I can do something special with my dad
my grandma needs medicine
my brother is having bad dreams
stop my sister’s biting

There was a lot of concern for family members and friends, and very few requests for God to give them specific items (although my children would periodically want prayer for “Mom and Dad going shopping,” which is odd, because we almost never go shopping together. Maybe we should?).

We always thanked God for our snack, and I let any kid who wanted to do the prayer to do it — if 4 kids wanted to pray, they each got to do it. It never failed, at least one kid would give a heartfelt request that nobody would have to be sent upstairs and that they’d all stay downstairs. So sweet.

I will miss this little window into their lives.

The last story I told was the Ascension, a version that includes the line: “This is the mystery, that Jesus went away, but somehow he is still with us.” When I asked how Jesus could still be with us, a few children said, “In our hearts.”

I told that story on purpose, so I could tell them that it was that way with me: I was leaving our church, but I would always be with them, because they were in my heart. They are.

Humbling: Being the Problem

~ Natalie Hart ~ 7 Comments

In the summer of 2007, I was freelance editing this book: A Practical Guide for Life and Ministry: Overcoming 7 Challenges Pastors Face, by David Horner. It was a good project, pretty well-written and well-organized, with engaging stories about church life and what seemed like good advice. I was well into Section Five: Learning to Grow Through Your Troubles. I was shaking my head at all the terrible congregants who make life difficult for their pastor. At least I wasn’t one of “those.”

Until, of course, I was.

Right smack dab in the middle of editing that section, I lost it at church. I’m not saying I raised my voice or snapped at someone. I went ballistic: high-pitched, barely intelligible screaming and crying to one person on the phone in front of someone else. I wrote an impassioned email to my pastor. Because I was right. And because I’d worked so hard at the church for so long, I had no doubt that he’d see my rightness, too.

Thank God he didn’t.

A little background. One year earlier, our church administrative assistant and my partner in the dance ministry was arrested for and charged  (later convicted) with embezzling money from the church and from our pastor. This was a serious sucker punch for me. I’d thought she was my friend. We not only danced together, but I also trusted her guidance when she told me God wanted us to “flow” in a given dance, which means we don’t choreograph it, we go where the Spirit leads us to. This was not in my tradition, but I prayerfully did it, and it was a tremendous and intense experience. We’d prayed and cried for and with each other. And we’d laughed so much.

The church didn’t handle it particularly well. As often happens in multiracial churches, everyone “went to their corner” and most of the white people voted with their feet, including almost all of the other children’s ministry leaders. We talked about leaving, too, but after a discussion with the pastor, decided to stay. The correct phrase for my attitude would be soldiering on. I went back to leading the children’s worship program (which I’d been about to hand off to someone else who left). Being one of what were now only two teachers, I was downstairs with the kids half of the time, two weeks on, two weeks off. We were also back to having all the kids together, age 3 through second grade, which leads to less worship and more crowd control.

I also wound up taking over the administration and leadership of our church’s Calvin Institutes of Worship grant. I went to the opening retreat/conference mostly because I was available during the day. The language on our grant application (done by the embezzler) was so garbled and jargony that I couldn’t understand what the grant was about, and I had to talk about it repeatedly. I was in tears or on the verge of tears almost the whole few days. But as the conference went on, God inspired me to really take charge of our group.

It was a tough year. We were all hurting, but gritted our teeth and pushed ahead. It was also a good year. Through studying multiracial worship and church life, we were drawn together and encouraged that what we were doing was worth it.

However, I know now that I kept a little part of my heart hard. I nursed grievances. I expected problems. And when my calculations for the grant disbursement didn’t match those of the money team, I lost it, utterly and completely, to one of our financial managers over the phone, screaming and getting nasty and personal in a way I will be ashamed of forever.

The pastors let things calm down for several days and then called a meeting. Nobody was treating me like I was right, so I wasn’t hearing anything until the woman I’d screamed at faced me and said, so simply and quietly, “I feel like you’re accusing me of doing what embezzler did.”

That’s exactly what I was doing. I’d never gotten the chance to confront my old friend, never gotten the chance to be upset with her, never dealt with the betrayal at all, so I took it out on this other woman. Everyone knows what it’s like to be blamed for something you didn’t do. It’s a horrible feeling. And I’d just done that to her at my highest possible decibel. I was the problem.

I cried and apologized profusely on the spot. I apologized to the man who’d witnessed my end of the phone call. And then a few months later, I confessed this story and asked forgiveness of the woman in front of our Women’s Fellowship group. She gave me her forgiveness, something I’ll always be grateful to her about.

And all the while, I had to edit these chapters about what it’s like for the pastor when there’s a problem person. Unsurprisingly, this is one of the defining moments in my church life. I am a better congregant, a better leader, a better Christian for having failed so spectacularly, for being forced into the humble position of asking for forgiveness and being granted it.

This experience also informed my recent decision to leave the church that had taken such good care of me in that low time of my life. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision done in a blaze of emotion. It was the culmination of a six-month period of prayer and conversation with my husband and with others. Even so, it’s breaking  my heart. This is the week of “lasts”: last praise team practice for my husband, and for me, the last time dancing with one of the kids, last time giving the second grade “graduates” their Bibles, last time leading children’s worship. It might be the last time I’ll worship with some people I love. I’ve been cleaning up my office and straightening up the story materials, finding old photos of now-big kids back when they were little, wallowing in nostalgia. I’m just plain sad. Grateful for how important this place has been to me, but sad.

No pithy ending for this longish post. It just isn’t in me today.

 

Humbling: My Inner Pharisee

~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

Ten years ago, the church women’s group I went to studied a book called 12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee (like me). The premise is that all those dozens of daily explosions of irritation at people in the grocery story line, drivers on the highway, etc. make you like the pharisees: you are putting yourself above those other people because you’d never do what they’re doing, except of course, when you do, except of course when you do it you have perfectly legitimate reasons for doing it. It was initially striking and convicting. By the end of the book the message was diluted, because it seemed like everything you thought made you a pharisee. Still, it has stuck with me all these years.

I had a not-so-recovering pharisee moment last week and I feel like I’m paying for it now.

Last Friday, I was pulling into a parking lot to do a little grocery shopping. I had to wait what seemed like forever for two women to move diagonally and painstakingly slowly across the aisle and through the spot I was aiming for. One woman was older, but she was speedy compared to the younger one, who hobbled and shuffled like a woman in her 90s. There was nothing visibly “wrong” with her and she was laughing at the older woman ahead of her. I am not proud of it, but I said unkind things about that woman in my head. I was smug about my relative physical fitness and vigor. Classic pharisee.

Classic enough that I recognized it immediately and changed my mental script. I reminded myself that she might be recovering from an injury, or knee surgery, or have a chronic illness, so that the speed and manner in which she walked may be an enormous victory for her. I tried to be glad for her. Still, it gave me a vague sense of, “I’m going to pay for that original attitude by being forced into something similar.”

And I was.

At 3:30 that morning, I awoke with pain every time I took a breath and terrible pain in my neck and shoulders. I thought it might be heartburn or asthma, so I took some Tums, some Advil, heated up my neck roll and deep breathed myself to sleep. Same thing at 5:30. Woke up for good at 8:30, and after the pain increased every time I moved, and I was breathing more and more shallowly to avoid the pain, I woke my husband up and had him take me to the E.R. They plopped me in a wheelchair, rushed me to a room, two people slapped a dozen 3M stickers on me and hooked me up to an EKG machine and who knows what else.

There is no place else in this piece to also mention the relatively minor indignity of having to ask my young male nurse to escort me to the bathroom so I could change my periodical supplies. Yes, while having this emergency, I had to deal with that.

Thank the Lord, it was not a heart attack or a blood clot. It was pleurisy, inflammation of the lining of the lungs. Scary and painful, but not life-threatening.

They sent me home and told me to rest and take Advil-type stuff. I did. Usually, when I’m sick, I hate being hovered over and cared for, but I was a good patient on Saturday. I stayed mostly in bed with my laptop and a bunch of books, sending chat messages to my husband when I wanted something. Sunday, I was okay. If it had been any other Sunday, I would’ve stayed home from church, but it was our 2nd last Sunday there, and my last chance to say an official good-bye to our pastor, so I went. Then I rested and went to an evening event, where I lasted an hour — looking totally normal, but feeling tapped-out.

Monday, more activity, but moving slowly and looking normal. Tuesday, more activity yet. I even went on the treadmill at the gym: a totally healthy-looking woman going at half her normal effort level and quitting after only 20 minutes. Even that was too much. I had a lovely and fun day, but I pushed myself too hard, and today I’m paying for it with a little pain back in the lungs.

Have you caught the theme: I look totally normal, especially with the full armor of make-up on, but I move like a sick person. The woman in the parking lot has her revenge.

There are people who would tell me that God sent me pleurisy as a punishment (after all, it’s unusual for a perfectly healthy person with no cold or bronchitis or pneumonia to up and get pleurisy), but I prefer to think of God using this event to teach me to be kinder in my thoughts, to engage the fabulous imagination he’s given me to spin narratives for people I see who might initially annoy or puzzle me, to give people the same benefit of the doubt I give myself. To get off my f^@&ing high horse, because I really have not earned the right to be there. To be more humble.

 

Humbling: Kids’ Opinions

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

In honor of a humbling experience this weekend (Saturday morning trip to the ER with piercing pain on breathing, diagnosis: pleurisy), I’m going to do a few posts on humbling experiences.

Number One: Asking kids for their opinions of my writing.

I’ve written the first in what I hope to be a series on novels based on the biblical story of David and Saul. I’ve tried to aim it at the middle grade audience — mostly at my son, who was 11 when I started writing it, just turned 13 now. I’ve never written for that age group before, so when I finished all the drafting and after my two mothers read it through and I’d incorporated their comments, I recruited my son and some of his friends. The deal was, if they read it and answered 9 or so questions, I’d give them a small honorarium and I’d put them in the acknowledgments if this thing was ever published.

I’ve gotten five response sheets back so far.

They were mostly good news. All the boys said it held their interest from the very beginning, they mostly understood the passage of time (it being B.C.E., years run backwards), they all enjoyed the level of poetry/psalms included, and they found the ending generally satisfying and believable (given that it’ll be a series; as a standalone, it’d be a bad ending).

After that, there was little they agreed on. I let all the comments percolate for awhile, and I hadn’t even thought about making changes until this weekend. It’s fascinating how, even among this small group of 5 guys, age range of 11 to 14, certain responses split by age. The younger two liked the battles, including killing Goliath and the lion, best and got a little bored when David played for Saul and when he was shepherding. They weren’t as into Saul’s story, which makes sense for their age group: the drama of grownups isn’t as interesting as the drama of kids. They wanted to know more about the battles.

The older three didn’t mention anything about Saul being an issue. One of the older boys got bored during a family dinner scene during which David interacts with Merab and Michal for the first time (Saul’s daughters, each of which had just been offered to him in marriage). There is plenty of tension in that scene, some of which is David fighting his sense of place and his sense of Michal’s crush on him and his growing attraction to her. I don’t think I’ll mess with that scene too much, because boys that age can have their own tension about more romantic scenes, and, on the other hand, one of the adult women who’s read it wanted to know more about the stuff between Michal and David. Although this is a book written for young people, their parents may likely read it as well. I certainly read a lot of what my kids do, including other middle grade and young adult stuff for my own enjoyment. How to balance those two interests? Should I even try?

There were a couple of points the older boys made that I am going to work on: one scene of David’s early days at Saul’s fortress was a bit slow to get going and another piece of character motivation wasn’t clear. I’ll look at the battle and army scenes to see how I might expand them a bit to show more detail.

But what to do with Saul?

I’m going to keep him and stop calling the book “middle grade” and call it “young adult.” Saul and David are perfect foils for each other. Their stories start out identically, but because of who they are and what they bring to the table, their stories diverge dramatically. All that time David spends playing for Saul and overhearing Saul’s ramblings teach David a great deal about how not to be king. The interplay between the two is where the story is meaty for me. If the older kids didn’t object, I think I’d do better to keep Saul and stop aiming it at the younger side of the age range.

Maybe that might even entice potential agents to ask for a full. At my stage in publishing, I’m querying literary agents with a descriptive letter and however much of the manuscript they like to see in order to get someone to ask for the full ms. I haven’t gotten even one request.

Humbling: Repeated rejection.

On the one hand, this isn’t surprising. Rejection is par for the course. I’ve been rejected for other projects many times without it bothering me this much. Except that I know this book is good. Not perfect, but good. Really good. We’ll see whether calling it YA will garner any more interest. If not, I’ll be doing a lot of research on self-publishing and searching for a good cover designer.