My beloved and I have two mom and pop recliners in our house as empty nesters often do. Red ones because I’m the one who picked them out. Mine’s on the left. Just to keep things spicy we switched up sides when we changed houses. I used to be on the right. Risky business.

If I spend just two minutes too long in that puffy chair with its well-worn me-shaped curves and its Kleenex and popcorn-laden cracks, it does not bode well for my thought processes. I can take you to those crazy places if you’re interested. No? Fine.

This year I’ll be 63. I don’t always hide my age well, a fact that is evidenced in my lack of high-end beauty products and very few receipts from salons, habits that at least one of my daughters wishes I might pay closer attention to. Ah well. Them’s the breaks, sister.

When someone with my genetic composition is approaching their mid-sixties it is both a “whoo hoo!” celebration and a wake-up call. Longevity has not been a frequent visitor to the ol’ DNA pool. Makes one ponder about this and that a bit too long occasionally in the red recliner. And wonder why that pesky Apple watch keeps telling me to get up.

Have I done enough? Learned enough? Read enough? Created enough? Soaked in enough scripture? Spoken with Jesus as much as I should? Helped people? Served? Loved? Listened? Modeled what it looks like to love my Savior during both smooth sailing and high seas? Anguished over salvations adequately? Asked forgiveness here, there, and everywhere? And had the discernment to know when not to?

Are my photo albums complete? Did I get rid of enough stuff so as to unburden my children? (Boy howdy, you guys had better proclaim a resounding, “Yes, Mother Dear!” because you literally have NO idea . . .) Are the instructions in the lock box clear, concise, and acceptably intelligent? How about my silverware drawer? Did I get the crumbs cleaned out recently? Should I leave written explanations inside my mom’s jewelry box which contains most everything in the world except jewelry or should I just let them muddle through like I have? Will someone find the dog folder so they’ll know about Phoebe’s rabies vaccination schedule? And when that last file drawer gets gone through and the birthday cards I’ve been writing each year to my separated grandchildren are seen, will somebody make sure they get them? “Yes, Mother Dear.”

Ugh.

Too much preparing. Thinking about preparing. Worrying about preparing. Self-flagellation in advance because of course I’ll fail at preparing and the ramifications will echo worldwide. I’ll forget something. Or do it all wrong. All this from the swirling thoughts of one who’s been caught on the other side of being unprepared — the side that deals with it — loved ones’ Crumbs in the Silverware Drawer.

I have seriously got to get out of this chair. My dear red-recliner buddy across the way (over on the right side) is the one who got me that Apple watch so I would do just that. It fusses at me if I’m not up and at ’em. One of these days I’m going to drop it in a bucket of water.

When 9/11 shook the world on a Tuesday morning in 2001 our children were ages 16, 13, 10, and 6. I was substitute teaching at Sunnyside Elementary in a 5th grade classroom which I could describe to you down to the last pencil and wide-eyed kid as far as the “where were you when” experience. To say that day changed everyone everywhere is fact. No one would argue. But to different degrees and details. We in our Idaho Falls home for instance, were blanketed comparitively little by the dark ash of the trickle-down effect birthed from the unspeakable horrors suffered by thousands far away. True, the fear spread far and wide, reaching into every community and home, but still . . . we did not see or suffer through what they did. Also true is that Americans mostly gathered together as a country, a spirit of nationalism rising up (in the good, patriotic camaraderie sense — not the “we’re better than you” sense) that we hadn’t seen since post WWII, yet separately, individually, over time, each one of us became different than who we had been on September 10 and manifested that phenomenon personally. Sometimes for the good. Sometimes not.

What welled up inside me, mother of four, was the germinating seed of fearful preparedness as I was still very much in the middle of raising children and did not want them to experience difficulty or anxiety (let alone a horror like 9/11) that I could prevent or soften. Still slogging through the swamp mud of grief over the recent loss of my own mother, the natural responsibility I’d always felt as a mother myself morphed into a mental, emotional, and spiritual load that kept me awake at night. I scrambled my own squadron of fighter jets.

Everybody pretty much got out of my way and let it happen. No one in the house was new to that look in mama’s eye. It’s just never a good idea to get between a mother and her protective instincts over her brood.

Being adequately prepared for natural disasters, wartime conflict, interruption of services, or anything beyond our control (even our own deaths) is wise. Fearful preparation, however, is burdensome not only to the one frantically managing the machinations of it all but to those being “protected” by it. Over time I began to give off a vibe of fear rather than calm protectiveness. What was meant for good had twisted into an air of distrust and underlying panic. “Enough” was not a word I had retained in my vocabulary.

Thanks be to God for His faithfulness in rescuing me from that overboard fearful, jittery motivation and getting me lined out into a more reasonable pattern. It took a few months, a steady husband, and Jesus. Always Jesus.

Occasionally my post-9/11 persona rears its head and I start issuing orders to get the water tanks filled and the pantry stocked, but that could also be just a quirk, not another dip into my former self. Right? RIGHT???

Happily, my children have always been blessed with the uncanny ability to make fun of me without crossing the line of making me mad (usually), and when they refer to 10-lb. bags of pinto beans way up high on a shelf as “Mama’s War Beans” we just let it slide. I take life lessons where I can get them.

Now that we do not have children at home, I get my preparedness fix by gifting them emergency kits and crank radios at Christmas. At least I can check that off my “I’ve done enough” list in the category of helping them be prepared — never mind that they’re all, no doubt, way smarter and better prepared than their mother. I like to think I keep a lid on fear and just make these Amazon orders pragmatically. Mmm-hmm. Yep.

Regarding that point, I can speak only to myself and would never assume to be inside your griefs, sorrows, situations, or memories, and neither am I a counselor, but once I realized that at least a portion of the mental stew I have occasionally created for myself in an effort to achieve an adequate view of what was Enough, revolved around other people and their role in my dramas. And enough was enough was enough of that.

Here’s a scriptural promise you can hang your hat on. Your frights and/or hangups can find rest in it. Your past traumas can be swept away in its awesome magnificence. If you are a follower of Jesus then you hopefully have heard He will be returning. I claim that promise wholeheartedly and as loudly as my computer keyboard will clack it. During days of fear, inadequacy, self-doubt or feelings of what-in-the-world-has-our-world-become, you can count on this. We don’t know when. We don’t know how. But we know.

 For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

Listen to this. Rest in it.

Much love,

MM

P.S. In no way do I espouse the idea that professional counseling is not useful and beautiful in particular situations. Please hear that. Seek help, high quality Christian counseling, if you are in need.

P.S. x 2 I left my mother’s jewelry box sans instructions. Happy mysteries, young ones!