My wife hit me with an egg

While I was making pancakes for my daughter, my wife hit me with an egg. Well, that’s not exactly how it happened. My wife and I were both in the kitchen this morning, rushing around, getting our daughter ready for school, my wife ready for work, and myself ready to go visit my mom in the hospital. I was making pancake batter for my daughter’s breakfast. She likes the pumpkin pancake mix from Trader Joe’s. Today, I mashed up an over-ripe banana in it just to mix things up and so I didn’t have to throw it away, but I digress. 

As I gathered the ingredients for the pancake batter, I saw that my wife was getting something out of the refrigerator. I asked her to grab me an egg because the pancake recipe called for one. She got one out of the egg bin, reached over to hand it to me, and just as she did, I turned toward her, the egg and my elbow meeting at just the right time and angle for the egg to go crashing to the floor. 

For about thirty seconds, we both blamed each other for the mess and then it turned to joking. As my wife cleaned up the egg on the floor, which I think I thanked her for doing but will thank her for later just to be sure, I mixed the pancake batter and proceeded to make my daughter’s breakfast. In spite of the whirlwind of chaos, my daughter got to school on time, my wife made it to the office, and I drove out to the other side of the beltway to meet up with my brother who was acting as my mom’s caretaker for the day, and to see my mom. 

As I sat in a local coffee shop writing, reading, and waiting for the message that my mom was out of surgery, my wife called to ask if I needed any help getting our daughter home from school later. We talked over our plans for the day and both agreed that, if the other needed anything, we would be there to help, eggs in hand. We both laughed at the beautiful chaos that is our life. 

Some days things feel like they are going perfectly. Everything runs smoothly, we are on time, and it feels like nothing can stand in our way. The wind is at our backs, all the traffic lights are green, and the life just seems to fall into place. But other days, in spite of our best intentions and preparation, nothing seems to go right. We feel hurried, clumsy, and like nothing we do is working out. We oversleep, argue, we hit all of the red lights, and we drop the eggs. 

What I try to keep in mind is that God is ultimately in charge of all of this. Of course, we play our part. We have free will and God doesn’t make us do anything we don’t want to do. On the other hand, nothing happens in this world outside of God’s will, either his perfect will or his permissive will. Whether life seems to be going well or poorly, it is all being divinely orchestrated by a God who loves us. He is writing a divine love story for us, even if we don’t understand it from moment-to-moment or day-to-day. 

We don’t always know the plan. We can’t always see the bigger picture. We are asked to trust, to have faith, and to walk forward into the dark unknown on a promise, a promise that God loves us and will not fail us. In faith, God allows us to walk across the stormy waters toward him, but even when our faith falters, when the winds and the waves frighten us and we begin to feel like we are drowning, if we call out to him, he will reach out his hand to pull us up out of the depths (Matthew 14:22-33). 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

He asks us to trust him

My mom is scheduled to have voluntary surgery on her neck tomorrow. She has one or more herniated discs that have been causing her pain for some time. The problem is that the discs are pressing up against her spinal cord. This makes her two options of either getting the surgery or not getting the surgery both risky. 

On one hand, even with our modern standards and practices, surgeries are inherently dangerous, especially around the spine. There is a risk that the surgery may not help her, or that it could make things worse. Additionally, some other unforeseen issue like an infection, for example, may arise as a result of the procedure. We simply can’t know. 

On the other hand, if she does nothing, the problem remains. She will have to live with the pain that has been bothering her for some time. Additionally, she has been warned by multiple doctors that, because her discs are pressing against her spinal cord, if left untreated, an accident could result in her being paralyzed from the neck down. This threat of paralysis is ultimately what motivated her to get the surgery. 

But I’m worried. I’m worried because I cannot predict the future and I don’t know what is going to happen. I’m worried because the whole thing is out of my control. While I know that this worry doesn’t help and it won’t change the outcome of the surgery, fear still haunts me. And yet, as I write this, I’m reminded that all God really asks from us is that we trust him. 

Since the beginning of time, God has been asking this one simple thing of his people, but, in spite of the fact that he is always faithful and always keeps his promises, we still hesitate. From Adam and Eve, Abraham, Noah, Moses, and the people of Israel, to David, the prophets, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, and Jesus himself, God asks us to trust him. 

He promises that he loves us, that he is always truthful, always faithful, always just, and that he will never lead us astray. He proves this in his written word in the Bible, in the living word of Jesus Christ, and in our own lives day in and day out. But like Adam and Eve in the Garden, we so often don’t believe him, like Moses at Mount Horeb, we are reluctant to answer his call, and like Thomas after the resurrection of Jesus, we doubt him and demand proof that he is who he says he is.

And yet, in spite of our prideful mistrust and disbelief, the Lord remains steadfast. He provides what we need, even when it is not what we think we want. He is faithful even when we are not and he loves us even when that love is not reciprocated. So, am I worried about my mother’s surgery? Yes. I am. Do I have reason to be? Well, I guess that depends which part of me you are asking. 

The selfish, broken, and sinful part of me worries because, like Adam and Eve, I have eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and I want to be like God, knowing what God knows, seeing what he sees, and determining the outcome of all things. But the faithful, trusting, and humble side of me knows that my Heavenly Father is always good, that he knows what is best, and that he has a plan that is beyond my understanding. And so I remain to pray. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Snowmen aren’t forever

As we were coming home this evening after a long day of church and youth wrestling, my daughter and I noticed that the snowman she built earlier this week had started to melt. It still has its general shape and the sticks she used for arms are still there, but it is a smaller, less distinguished version of itself, and its holly-leaf eyes and nose are gone. “Awww,” she said, “My snowman is melting. I worked so hard on him.” 

“Sadly dear, nothing in this world lasts forever,” I told her, “So we have to appreciate them while they are here.” “But daddy,” she replied, “I saw a sign the other day that said, ‘Presidents are temporary. Wu-Tang is forever.'” I grew up listening to the hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan so I couldn’t help but to laugh when I heard this.

“That’s just hyperbole, dear,” I said, “Wu-Tang is not really forever any more than your snowman is.” “What’s hyperbole?” she asked. “It’s an exaggeration,” I told her, “but its an exaggeration not meant to be taken seriously. It’s a joke. Wu-Tang Clan has been making music for over thirty years, but, like your snowman, they aren’t forever. Only God is forever.” 

Now, I realize that this is too much for a nine-year-old to fully comprehend. Honestly, the concepts of transience and eternity are too much for any of us to fully comprehend. However, I don’t think it’s a conversation that should be avoided. Our time here is extremely short and our time with our children is even shorter. What good does it do to withhold the most important conversations about the most important subjects from them? 

Of course, I want my daughter to enjoy her childhood and to be a kid for as long as she can be a kid, but I also want her to know that there is more to life than simply what she sees and feels. My hope is that, by understanding just how impermanent her snowman, or Wu-Tang Clan, is, that she appreciates it even more while it lasts. 

Her experience of building that particular snowman in that particular moment was truly one of a kind. It never happened before and will never happen again. Her sadness in seeing it melt is real and it should be acknowledged as such. If she cared about what she created, of course there is some grief in its passing, even if it is just a snowman. This sense of loss is real and it will not be the last time she experiences it. 

But I don’t think God created this world of impermanence simply for us to exist in a perpetual state of sadness, grief, and loss. Rather, the fact that we live in an ever-changing world where everything that is born eventually dies and everything that is built eventually crumbles should make us appreciate the preciousness of each and every moment, experience, and interaction as the amazing gift that it is. Furthermore, this experience of impermanence calls us to go deeper, to seek or settle into that which does not change, does not die, and does not pass away (Malachi 3:6). 

Like my daughter’s snowman, “Everything around us is going to melt away, (2 Peter 3:11).” So our task, it seems, is to cherish our time here as much as possible without clinging to it. As St. Francis of Assisi said, we are to “wear this world like a loose garment.” But we are called to do so while loving so deeply that, through our example, others may also come to know the constancy of God’s eternity through Christ Jesus (John 13:34-35). 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Be right or be free

During the recent snowstorm we had, my wife unknowingly parked in a parking space that someone else had shoveled out for herself. By the time she parked there, almost every parking space in our complex had been cleared out, so it seemed harmless to take whatever space was available. But when she returned to her car, there was an angry note on her windshield. 

The note read something like, “I don’t appreciate you parking in the parking space that I shoveled out for myself. I had to get surgery and was counting on being able to park in that space when I got back. That’s why I put the orange cone there.” 

The problem is that, when my wife parked there, there was no orange cone. It was simply one of many empty parking spaces. She also had no way of knowing that the person who shoveled it out was having surgery. Nor was this an assigned or handicapped parking space. It was truly an innocent misunderstanding, but this misunderstanding created an unfortunate chain reaction.

Anger is a funny thing. It often seems as if it’s contagious. For example, my wife unknowingly parked in a parking space that another woman believed belonged to her. The woman got angry and left an inflammatory note on my wife’s car. When my wife read the note, she got angry. Feeling she was unjustly criticized, I then got angry on my wife’s behalf. But I soon began to see the absurdity of all of this anger over a parking space. 

As I sat with this thought for a while, it occurred to me that resentment is really a distraction. In fact, it’s a deadly distraction in that it separates us from God. It prevents us from looking to him for guidance and listening for his quiet voice. Resentment convinces us that our feelings are more important what Jesus’s says is the greatest commandments of all, which is to love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40 NIV). To willfully hold onto a resentment is to defy God himself. 

And so we have a decision to make. We can either be angry or we can be obedient. We can hold onto resentments or we can make room in our hearts to hear God’s voice. We can be right, at least in our own minds, or we can forgive and be free. As it says in the book of Matthew 6:14-15, if we forgive others, God will forgive us, but if we choose not to forgive, we will also not be forgiven. A heart filled with anger has no room for love and, since we are told that God is love, that means that a heart filled with anger has no room for God (1 John 4:8). 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Check your connection

We had a fairly big snowstorm hit us earlier this week. That is to say, for our area and the infrastructure we have in place to handle it, we got enough snow to shut things down for a few days, including my daughter’s school. As such, we have spent a lot of time together at home this week. 

While her mother and I worked from home, we let our daughter watch a few movie’s on her mother’s iPad in between playing outside, reading, doing art projects, etc. Since I need some degree of quiet to do my work, I asked her to wear headphones while she watched Shrek for the hundredth time. I’m not knocking Shrek by the way. It’s a great movie and, apparently, since I just found out it came out in 2001, it stands the test of time. 

Not a moment after she got set up with the iPad, headphones on, all snuggled up in her blanket, when I heard her say, “I don’t hear anything. Daddy, I don’t hear anything. It’s not working.” Not wanting to get up from my work, I decided to draw experience from my former career as a commercial coffee-equipment repair technician and I went into troubleshooting mode. 

  1. “Does it have power?” Yes.
  2. “Is it connected to the wifi?” Yes.
  3. “Is the movie playing?” Yes. 
  4. “Is the volume turned up?” Yes. 
  5. “Are the headphones plugged into the iPad?” Yes.
  6. “Is the wire plugged into the headphones?” Oh! No. It’s loose. It’s plugged in now. That worked. Thanks, daddy!

Problem solved, but, being in the middle of studying and writing about Christian theology and spiritual practices, this interaction got me thinking. Prayer, it seems, works a lot like this. 

One aspect of prayer is petitioning to God for answers to questions we have. We humbly ask him for guidance, inspiration, or discernment so that we can better understand and conform to his will. But sometimes we pray and pray, and the answers just don’t seem to come. 

It’s easy to assume that, when we can’t hear Him, God is just being quiet, that he is not answering our prayers, that we are being ignored, or that that we need to pray harder. But we rarely stop to think about our connection. What if we can’t hear him because our connection is broken? We know from Scripture that God does not abandon his people (Psalm 94:14) and that, if we reach out to him with a contrite heart and faithful intentions, his hand will be there (Jeremiah 29:12-13). 

The Bible also tells us that God is faithful (Deuteronomy 7:9), that he hears and answers our prayers (Psalm 34:17), and, above all, that he loves us (1 John 4:16). In fact, it also tells us that God knows what we need before we even ask (Matthew 6:8). The problem, therefore, is not likely to be on God’s end. When we pray and can’t hear the answer, we may need to check our connection. 

Here are a few questions worth asking yourself if you have been praying, but feel like God is not answering. 

  • Are your prayers sincere? 
  • Is there an answer in Scripture? 
  • Have you consulted with other Christians, perhaps with a spiritual director? 
  • Do you genuinely want God’s answer or are you simply waiting for the answer you want? 
  • Are you just avoiding making a decision and stepping out in faith? 
  • Is there something you have kept to yourself that may be blocking you from hearing God’s voice, something that requires confession? 
  • Have you turned your thoughts to someone else you can be of service to? This often helps distract us from our own selfish concerns, leaving room for God to speak. 
  • Are you simply being impatient? 
  • Do you leave space in your life to hear God’s voice? Do you have a quiet hour in the morning and/or the evening for spiritual reading, prayer, and contemplation? Or are you so busy that you couldn’t hear him even if he was yelling? 

I hope this helps. When in doubt, check your headphones. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh

To read my poetry, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior

The love of the Father

It pains me to see my daughter suffer. When she is sick, injured, or melancholy, it hurts my heart. It’s not hyperbole to say that I would do anything in my power to alleviate her suffering, to save her from pain, and to keep her alive. If it came down to it, if her life hung in the balance and I could take her place in death so that she could live, I would do so. 

I know I am not alone in this. I’m not special for feeling this way. In fact, I assume that every loving parent feels exactly the same way about their children. Perhaps this is a God-given instinct because, according to scripture, this is how God feels about us, his children.

God loves us so much, in fact, that he came to the world in human form, as Jesus, simply so that he could take our place in death. He sacrificed himself for our salvation. He died on the cross so that we may live with him in eternity. Is there a greater expression of parental love than this? What could be more loving than to give one’s own life for the sake of someone else? Yet this is exactly what God did when he sacrificed himself, in the form of his only son, so that our sins may be forgiven. 

And since this sacrifice has already been made, we do not even have to ask for it. We did not, cannot, and do not deserve it. All we can do is to accept it. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Prayer is the return message

Every morning, I set aside time for God. Upon awakening, I say a prayer of thankfulness and petition to God for guidance and strength, and then, after taking care of my morning hygiene, I go downstairs and sit down to read a few passages of scripture as well as some other spiritual literature. This period of reading is followed by twenty minutes of silent, centering prayer, after which I write a poem for my Meditations of a Gentle Warrior blog and a longer piece for my personal website. 

On a perfect day, this is all done first thing in the morning before my wife and daughter wake up. Many days, however, this time is broken up by my making breakfast for my daughter and helping her get ready for school or whatever other activities she has going on. When this is the case, I usually listen to a spiritual podcast or lecture while prepping her food. 

Lately, I am listening to a variety of things, including Father Mike Schmitz’s ‘Bible in a Year’ podcast, the audiobook version of Henri Nouwen’s ‘Spiritual Direction,’ the ‘Turning to the Mystics’ podcast with James Finley, Steve Macchia’s podcast ‘The Discerning Leader,’ as well as a variety of YouTube talks by Fr. Mike Schmitz, Bishop Robert Barron, among others. 

Today was a snow-day for my daughter so she didn’t have school and we all slept a little later than we usually do. For me, sleeping in means waking up at around 7am. I have never really been a late sleeper. When I woke up, I said my prayers, listened to a talk by Fr. Mike Schmitz while making some french toast for my daughter, and then sat down to read and sit in silence.

A few minutes into my silent prayer, I heard my daughter walking down the stairs. I could sense that she was trying to be quiet because she saw that I was in prayer and, to the degree that a nine year old is capable, she tends to be very respectful. My eyes still closed, I could feel her standing next to me. She then leaned in, kissed me on the forehead, said, “I love you,” and walked away. 

She asked for nothing. Unsolicited and without expectation, she simply returned the love so freely given to her. Her kiss and the words, “I love you,” were her return message, her way of saying to me that she knows I love her, that my love is felt by her, and that this love is reciprocated. In that moment, it occurred to me that this is what prayer is really about. Isn’t it? It’s our way of saying, “I love you,” to the one who has loved us since before we were in the womb, much like I have loved my daughter since the very possibility existed of her ever even being born.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Finding God’s purpose in a snowstorm

As the snow began to fall, I grew increasingly anxious. The feeling of inevitability settled upon me like a heavy weight being laid upon my chest. My mind raced in denial as my schedule, my plans, and my desires for the coming day and an unknown number of days to follow began to slowly disappear with each falling flake. Then the messages started pouring in. 

“With the snow coming, should we cancel classes?” “Are we closed tomorrow?” “What are our plans for tomorrow? It looks like the roads are going to be bad.” 

With every text, my mind rebelled, rejecting the idea that I was going to be stuck in the house, the momentum of my life coming to a grinding halt because of some snow. I grew increasingly irritated at the thought that my appointments, my jiu-jitsu classes, and my daughter’s school would all be canceled for what amounted to less than a foot’s worth of accumulation. 

Putting out of my mind other people’s concerns, their safety, and their wishes, an argument started up in my mind. “I grew up in the Northeast,” I thought, “We got way more snow than this and we still went to school. My father still went to work. He woke up early to shovel and went about his day. What is wrong with people here? They are always looking for any excuse to stay home and it’s ruining my plans.” 

Then the thought came to me, “What are you really bothered by? What are you afraid of? Do you think you are in charge of all of this? Even if you show up to open the academy, no one else is coming to train with you this morning. They are dealing with their own problems. They have their own kids and jobs to worry about. Why are you so bothered by the idea of staying home with your family, of being still, of being stuck with yourself?”

As I sat with these thoughts and feelings for a while, I said a prayer, asking God what He was trying to teach me, asking what the lesson in all of this was, and asking Him to use this moment of anxiousness, resistance, and discomfort for His purpose. After a bit, I began to settle down and accept the situation for what it was, for what all circumstances, pleasant or unpleasant are, and that is an opportunity for God to express His love for us and for us to either accept or reject that love. 

Did I want the academy to be shut down for snow? Did I want to stay home all day? Did I want my daughter to miss school (she loves school)? To all of these questions, the answer was a resounding, “No!” However, I also had to ask myself, “Do I trust my Heavenly Father? Do I long to know His will and to serve His purpose? Do I have faith that He is not doing this, whatever ‘this’ I happen to be upset about now, to punish me, but to teach, guide, and shape me in His image?” Yes, of course, yes, even if that “Yes” is the reluctant “Yes” of a child who, having just been scolded for throwing a tantrum, knows he was wrong for doing so. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Tension between the world and the Word

At church this past Sunday, the pastor gave a sermon that centered around a passage from the book of James which states, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like (James 1:22-24 NIV).”

As part of the sermon, the pastor gave out small, circular stick-on mirrors for the congregants to take home and stick in a conspicuous place as a reminder of James’s message. My daughter and I each took one on the way out, but as my daughter received hers, she dropped it on the floor and exclaimed, “Oh no!” When she picked it up, she let out a sigh of relief and said, “Whew! It’s not broken. I won’t have seven years of bad luck.”

Being in a hurry to get down the road, I didn’t think much about what happened. But then, as we were leaving the church, I noticed one of these small mirrors on the steps, broken in several pieces. “Someone dropped their mirror,” I said to my daughter. “Oh no,” she replied, “Whoever dropped it is going to have seven years of bad luck.”

Hearing what she said a second time, I couldn’t let it go. We had just left a church service wherein we heard about, praised, and proclaimed our faith in an almighty God and here my daughter was, albeit innocently, worrying about superstitious bad luck from a broken piece of polished glass. I said to her, “You know that God is more powerful than a broken mirror and that is just a superstition, right?” “Of course,” she replied confidently and sincerely.

As we drove away, this interaction got me thinking about how, even when it seems innocent or insignificant, the teachings of the world and the teachings of God are so often in direct conflict with one another. This tension between the world and the Word is a fact of life as old as humanity itself and is precisely why God gave us the filter of Scripture through which to view and understand life. I can’t and don’t fault my daughter for her childish superstitions because she is, after all, a child, but this experience did make me take a look in the mirror, so to speak, and ask myself where I hold false beliefs that keep me from accepting God’s truth.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

God wants you to make a decision

I have recently been struggling with what to do with my life. More specifically, I have been contemplating a career change. This has me thinking about whether or not I want to go back to school, either for my master’s degree or for some type of specialized certification. Where I struggle, however, is in trying to discern what path God wants me to take.

Where does He want me to go? What is He trying to tell me? What is He asking of me? How can I best serve Him and my fellows in this next chapter of my life?

I have prayed extensively about this and I actively listen for answers in meditation. In addition to my spiritual practices, I have also been talking to people I trust and doing a lot of reading, research, and listening to podcasts for inspiration. In spite of all of this, I feel stuck. I simply do not know what my next steps should be.

Then, while driving to church this morning with my daughter, I feel like God gifted me with a clue. My daughter and I were talking about what she wanted to eat for breakfast. I gave her two options and asked her to pick one. Unable to decide, she assigned each choice to one of her hands and asked me to choose, left hand or right.

Growing somewhat frustrated at her indecisiveness, I told her that neither choice was better or worse than the other and that she simply needed to make a decision. As the words left my mouth, I realized that I was telling her the thing I needed to hear. In my words to her, I could hear God speaking to me. As I spoke to her as my child, I could feel God speaking to me as His child, with the same love and sincerity that I have for her in my best paternal moments.

From this perspective, I was able to see that, while God will lovingly lead me to a point, ultimately, He requires that I make a decision. He does this precisely because He loves me enough to not impose His will on me. Like a loving father, He is guiding me, not to blindly do His will, but to make good decisions of my own free will based on what is in my heart.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.