I wish I could remember her name or when I met her or her actual wording; I can’t. We looked for homes for more than a decade before we finally moved last year. Met countless realtors. Her word-picture, however, not only traveled with me to every subsequent potential home visit, but my soul insisted on giving periodic attention-getting throat clearing gestures at threshold moments – ahhhemmmm...
“Remember Kat, thresholds give evidence of life.”
After our beloved Labrador passed more than a decade ago, I often paused when I walked through the door from the garage to the laundry room because when he entered and exited there for his daily jaunts, his collar hit the elevated metal threshold. Akin to the altar server at a Catholic Mass who rings the bell to signal reverence for the holiest moment, that sound gave decibels to the reality of the ridiculous blessing coming and going from home. No matter how tired I was when he planted his wet nose on my arm at O-dark-thirty for his morning relief or how much I wanted to isolate at times or how bad my cold was or how much I was tempted to stay hunkered down with a project which had long since reached the point of diminishing returns, that sweet dog unapologetically insisted on repeated escorts over that line from inner sanctum to outer world.
The echo from that threshold was still reverberating evidence of life when I scrubbed it clean in preparation for our eventual move. It jingles still when I hear the vet tag clink against the name tag on a passing pup.
When my mother died and we prepared to sell the house where the girls of 222 Seventh Street became little women… the house she built on a raw tract of beach-close land while struggling to make a new start after my father took his life… the house where my husband and child and extended family returned for nearly four decades to be with the matriarch… I scrubbed the thresholds. Sand, dog hair, a tiny eyeglass screw, the hole punched from a random paper, a broken bead from a dress or maybe a shoe [more likely, an art project]… a deluge of gratitude burst open for the life that came and went over that threshold.
The dam broke again last week when I scrubbed the patio-to-family-room threshold of my son and daughter-in-love’s new dwelling place where they and our grands are just beginning the next season of life. “Lord, thank You for all the life that will cross this threshold. Thank You for crossing in them and with them,” I prayed as I wet the surface with my salty tears and soapy rag.
And then, most recently, this. I crossed the threshold of a restaurant in Miami Lakes to meet with Don Blackwell, the author of some deeply inspiring books including Dear Ashley: A Father’s Reflections and Letters to His Daughter on Life, Love and Hope. We had much in common, Don and I. An extraordinary mutual friend who kept insisting that we meet for coffee; both of us lawyers; both writers; both parents; and both profoundly impacted by an unwelcome visitor – Mr. Ed – who snuck over the threshold of family members we love fiercely.
Mr. Ed is a bit like the personification of “mayhem” in the Allstate commercials. The creator of those ads does a masterful and cringe-worthy job of giving a human persona to a force that lurks in the hidden places of life intent on bringing disorder. He’s the chaotic racoon that takes up residence in the fluffy insulation in the attic, the cleaning person who vacuums up fish and clumsily breaks dishes, the bee in the car that moves the driver’s focus from the highway’s orderly flow to the distraction in the vehicle. Unlike Allstate’s Mayhem though, Mr. Ed has a singular specialty – disordered eating.
Literally, Mr. Ed moves in one day and demands that the resident reorder his or her eating in a way that harms the body because this new order brings with it an intense sense of control. Somehow Mr. Ed convinces the resident to reorder his or her loves – to love control over something essential to life (food) more than life itself -- because imperfect love has disordered the way things should have been or should be. Even though life-threatening, the new order is better than the disorder the resident has experienced and doesn’t fully understand. Mr. Ed convinces the resident much the same way the serpent convinced Eve in the garden – you can be your own God. Eat this and you can perfectly distinguish between good and evil like God and therefore avoid the pain of the latter through control.
This, of course, is a gross over-simplification, but it gets at something that pervades the type of disordered eating my mother suffered from – she was hurt by an abandonment she could not control as a little girl so she sought to control what she readily could [daily food] to avoid or numb the pain of disorder from imperfect love.
In his book, Don reveals a series of profoundly beautiful and intimate letters he wrote to his daughter as his family walked with her through her battle with disordered eating. The letters are raw and vulnerable and read like the confessions of a father who would do anything to save his girl, to evict Mr. Ed, and to make sense of something he could not control. More, the prose between the letters show the rolling transformation of a father who, through his daughter’s battle, explores, in real time, his own perfectionistic tendencies and need for control. It flows as if he has invited the reader to watch him live Psalm 139:23-24 and Psalm 51:10 as a constant prayer while he conducts a public dig to understand his own issues and the impact they might have had on his girl.
“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23-24. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Psalm 51:10.”
The ESV version of that last verse says it this way. “Create in me a pure heart…” -- a desire that comes with a stunning assurance in Christ’s sermon on the mount: “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.” Matthew 5:8. Perhaps without even seeing it this clearly, Don was essentially asking to see God on the inside of this terrible threshold.
“Ashley’s battle took me across a threshold I never would have chosen to cross. But once I found myself there, everything changed about the way I saw life, my childhood and the impact it had on my need for control; how I lived my life; and how I interacted with others. I started to see how my own past led to attempts to avoid more pain through working insanely hard and demanding exacting standards from myself and those who worked with me. I saw how my perfectionism alienated me from others. Mostly, I saw how it prevented me from receiving and giving God’s love like a little child.”
Don Blackwell
While his parents clearly loved him, their love didn’t include any real form of intimacy, connection or community in his eyes. Don received the unintended message that “doing more” would fix his unmet need for intimacy and connection. Maybe if he was more productive, compliant, better, or, better yet, perfect, he’d get the love, acceptance, and affirmation of worthiness he desired. So, he doubled down on everything. He became a high achiever. But achievement didn’t make him feel any more connected or loved. Achievement only made him feel more isolated and alone. And he swore when he had kids that he would save them from the pain of feeling like doing “more” would make them somehow worthy of love.
As Don allows the Lord to search his heart, he begins to confess the unintended messages his perfectionistic movements might have sent to his children:
“…you and your brother received similar spoken and unspoken messages from me along the way—looks of incredulity, frustration or disappointment from dad, when you acted in a way that I never would have expected you to act or failed to perform at a level that I had come to expect of you, and sarcastic comments when you made mistakes and attempted to apologize—comments that almost certainly were taken literally at times (“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it!”). I’m also sure that there were times when I was far less subtle in my spoken and written criticisms and admonitions.” from Dear Ashley (p. 45) Morgan James Publishing. Kindle Edition.
One honest confession after another in one letter after another brings Don no closer to unearthing the “cause” of his daughter’s eating disorder. Instead, he begins to see his own disordered way of loving more clearly -- the mistaken belief, seared in his heart as a young boy, that love and acceptance were tied to doing. It comes to Ashley in a letter recounting an encounter with a stranger. He sees a woman in a parking lot holding a baby. The baby is abiding in the mother’s love. Safe in her arms. She can’t perform for acceptance. Trust is not an issue. She’s being held. All she can do is rest in the mom’s unwavering love. He ends the letter differently than the others. He tells her that he’ll pursue this image of love the rest of his life. And he does.
In his writing, Don echoes Christ’s call to become like a child. To see the Lord at every crossroads, in every threshold, and on every face. Every threshold he crosses, he crosses with childlike faith that the Lord is with him as he comes and goes. His loves have become reordered, allowing the Lord to be the perfecting force, not his own merit.
Thresholds and Reordered Loves:
When theologian Tim Keller died, his son wrote a piece that attempted to describe the reason for Keller’s ability to reach so many with his story-telling and preaching. He writes that much like Augustine, his father focused people’s attention on the order of their loves. He framed our suffering and our longing for peace as a desire to have rightly ordered loves. When we trust anything or anybody more than we trust the Lord, things get distorted. Keller’s life mission was to relate on every reasonable level to people and the loves that the world urges them to elevate as supreme. His approach brings all of our disordered loves into healing focus, not simply our love of control.
November's Mobile Mission
In your mission pack you have three things. A red heart sticker, a yellow “Cleaned” sticker and a HOLD tag.
Part 1 -- The Clean Heart Images: Put those stickers in a place you can see them all month long. At some point this month, consider scrubbing all your thresholds as you meditate on the life that has come in and out of each doorway. Look at the residue of your one ridiculous life. Can you see the Lord with you as you walk in and you go out? When we allow Him to cross the threshold of our hearts, He goes with us always.
Consider praying Psalm 51:10 as you scrub. Let the Lord show you what should stay on the other side of that threshold and what should come in. Let Him have his way. When we do this, aren't we essentially asking Him to reorder our loves?
Part 2 -- the HOLD image: You also have a HOLD tag. Consider placing that on the door where you come into and go out of your home. Consider pausing at the threshold before you come in and go out each day in November. Ask the Lord to put a hold on the old. Ask Him to open your heart to Him like a child. To see Him in the people you meet and in the circumstances you face. Ask Him to remind you that He dwells in Your heart, or wants to dwell there if you haven’t allowed Him past the threshold yet.
