Outliers, part 3: Rolling with it

Our son is a bona fide outlier in terms of his weight. He's got good motor and cognitive development for his age, but he hasn't really been gaining weight for the past year. Working with his pediatrician, we've kept an eye on it and kept giving him time to add some poundage, and it's never come.

So in February, we did a round of initial blood tests. These showed no reason why he wasn't gaining weight. So our doctor wanted to next check for cystic fibrosis. I have done very little reading about the disease because the name sounds so scary. But my understanding is that cystic fibrosis could be preventing him from absorbing the nutrients he needs to grow.

We went in for this test which measures the salt in his sweat. But he didn't sweat enough. So we're going to need to go in again which we'll do at the end of April. We could have scheduled earlier, but February was too full of tests. We all needed a break.

I think that people see positive outliers (those smarter, faster, taller, etc.) and think, man wouldn't that be wonderful and aren't those parents so lucky to have kids like that. And there are some great things about such a situation, but also some draw backs -- like what kind of bed and what kind of clothes did 7ft+ Yao Ming need?

Then I think that people see negative outliers (those sicker, dumber, slower, etc.) and think, isn't that terrible and aren't those parents so cursed to have kids like that? And as we peer into the (hopefully remote) possibility that we will care for a son with an awful disease, I don't think my heart is processing things that much differently.

Part of it is my own mess, from part 1, where I grieve the loss of "normality" that comes with giftedness. So grief for smarts? Check. Grief for illness? Check. But we're in a place where we don't know for either kid. There are signs and symptoms that suggest that our daughter's intellectual development may be ahead of her peers, and there are signs and symptoms that suggest our son may have cystic fibrosis or some other disease.

For now, we have to live by faith that God is providing what we need for today. And for May, if we discover our son does have a dread disease then we will move forward trusting that God will provide for that occasion. And if, in a year or two or three, we discover one or more of our children are unable to flourish in their school, then we will move forward trusting that God will provide for that occasion too.

UPDATE: links to Part 1 & Part 2

Outliers, part 2: Basic principles

As we watch our daughter develop, we wonder if she too will be an outlier and what does that mean for her and us? Here I mean that she seems to be doing somethings ahead of schedule, and I'm not excluding this possibility for our son, but he's not so startlingly precocious at the moment.

Because of my childhood experiences, I have gone through a period of mourning over this possibility concerned that being different from her agemates would bring her inevitable grief. But as I have processed my own stuff, I have also thought about foundational principles that I would like my child or any child to understand.

I think one such principle is that God created us individually for his pleasure and glory (see Isaiah chapter 43 for one expression of this). This was translated for me in a 6th grade chapel as "God does not make mistakes." What a life-giving message to hear as a preteen, one that I went back to many, many time as a teenager. I wish that every outlier who feels alone and "not right" or "not normal" would be gripped with the reality of a loving God delighting to imbue him or her with just such qualities.

And just as the Creator God gave individual attention to each person, a second principle I want for our children is that the Redeemer Christ died for all. Translated, this means every individual is of the same, glorious worth, bought back with the shed blood of Jesus. So for all the pain of being an outlier,  if you're out there in a socially approved way, smarter, faster, richer, more beautiful, etc. it's easy to believe that you're more special. And that, of course, is bupkis.

If we can communicate these two principles to our kids, I think their hearts will be well-prepared to handle life.

UPDATE: links to Part 1 & Part 3

Outliers, part 1: Someone had a bad day

In sixth grade, sometime at the end of math one day, the teacher handed back some graded something. As I was returning to my desk at the back of the class, L.O. stopped me and asked me, "What did you get?" I was kind of reluctant to tell her. She asked again, "What did you get?" I don't remember the grade, but just guessing, it was a 95 or 100 because that's just the way my math grades were. Then she said, "I hate you!" and stomped away.

I have lived for 20 years crushed by that encounter. When I think about how it felt to be effortlessly good at school, I think about that moment. Me being me was cause for a classmate to hate me, to see me with contempt.

I've been processing the experience of being an outlier lately and found that I kept running into grief. And when all roads led to this afternoon in sixth grade, I was finally able to reconfigure the moment. I had taken the experience completely personally which isn't surprising. Twelve year olds are only just coming into mature empathy and I was a late bloomer in that area. But with some perspective, I bet that L.O. was herself having a bad day. She was frustrated about her own grade and whatever else was going on in her life. Her pain was not meant for me, even though I carried it around for a long time.

It feels immensely freeing to give that memory and the emotional associations back to God. I've asked about half-a-dozen outlier friends about their childhood experiences and none of them seem to walk around wounded the way I was. I choose to believe that their positive experience is possible and that I had the more rare experience.

UPDATE: Links to Part 2 & Part 3

Effort and faith

I think a lot about what's my part and what's God's part. Like when it comes to becoming a mother who is kind to her kids, what's my part and what's God part? Kindness is very hard to fake, in my mind. So it's probably going to involve an inward reorientation and that always makes me think of something God has to do.

Lately, the Dallas Willard stuff has been making me think hard about what's my part. Willard's model for change requires "VIM": Vision, Intention, & Means. What vision do I have about my relationship with my children? For starters, I want them to experience grace from me that they can hook up to the grace they've received from God. I can't imagine memories of their mom yelling impatiently at them is really going to help. As I understand it, by intention Willard means the focus of our will. When I come to the point of yelling or not yelling, will I force my will to override my emotions and choose kindness?  Means, in the case, the means are very easy. My vocal cords and lungs can modulate my volume and my tone easily. There's no physical reason why I have to yell.

This notion of forcing the will to override emotions is the most unnatural part of this to me. It feels a little godless, like all I'm going to do is muscle up and sit on my yell button so I can't hit it. But as I think about it, for my example, it's probably the place where I need to be most disciplined about calling God into the process. "God, help me to carry through with not yelling, with having an attitude of kindness."

I think I question the what's my part, what's God's part because God is so obviously more able. So why should I expend my puny effort or how can I believe  that my relatively puny effort will be necessary or productive? Here I think the answer is that I need to ruthlessly apply my effort not because it is big in God's world but because it is big in my world. My efforts represent my desire for "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." Is it more important for me to get my way, or is it more important for God's will to prevail, and surely his will is for me to be kind to my children? Who sits on the throne of my life? If I'm to allow God to sit on the throne and run my life then surely it's not surprising that I have to spend my effort to keep myself off the throne.

Lent: Giving up Contempt

It's that awkward time of the year again where Lent starts and I never know what to say, "Happy Lent?" That just seems weird.

Anyways, in brief, since I have dishes that need to be washed and a bed calling out to me, I've been listening to Dallas Willard's lectures on his book the Divine Conspiracy and one of this themes is a reading of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew chapters 5-7) as Christ calling us away from contempt, arguing that what Jesus does in those passages is redeeming the contemptible. I haven't read the book, but the notion has given me pause.

So for Lent, I'm giving up political news which always stirs up my contempt-o-meter. I've done this before with a general sense that my news addiction was unhealthy, but this year I feel I have a bead on the problem: when I read news, I'm not really just encountering information I'm judging and condemning. It's ugly.

Sadly, however, the news is really the least of my problems. What I have realized recently is that the object of my regular contempt is my children. When I get impatient and raise my voice, when I feel I can't take it any more, what has happened in my heart is that I am holding my children in contempt. So while Lent is frequently about foregoing something and I am doing that, this Lent, I want to dig in an embrace kindness and embrace my children.

Close

I deadlifted 150lbs today. A deadlift is where you pick the bar up off the floor until you're standing straight up with the weight hanging at the ends of your arms.

That would have been lifting my body weight, but I've gained weight since I started. So I should get to lifting body weight next week. Meh. I guess my next goal is 1.5 X bodyweight or ~225-235 lbs.

At the other end of the spectrum, my squat and press are at 37 lbs. I'm not even at the 45 lbs that makes up the standard empty bar. As far as the press goes, I'm not surprised since 1) it's an upper body movement and 2) I have a tear in my left shoulder socket.

The squat, however, is a total disappointment, especially since my deadlift is triple the squat. Well, it turns out that the hip flexors in my post-surgical hip are super weak, but I don't use them in everyday life so I never noticed. The hip flexors help bring the knee up toward the chest. Not a huge set of muscles but clearly the limiting factor in squating.

This kind of makes me wonder what other niggling little weaknesses I have in my life that preventing me from doing what I should be able to do.

Lifting weights

So sometime in December, I was trying to get my daughter in and out of shopping carts and realized I was having a rough time. And then I realized she was only 30 lbs -- maybe 32 lbs. And I thought to myself When did I become such a weakling?

Then my mother noted that I had not been exercising and sent us some money for Christmas to rectify that problem.

I've been lifting weights for 2 weeks now. I saw a couple recommendations for Starting Strength and decided to try that program.

To sum up the program, all I do is lift weights. Squats, presses, and deadlifts. Here are things I'm enjoying in no particular order.

• It's very simple
• No cardio
• I'm focused on moving weights and not how terrible I feel
• Currently, I can finish everything up in 30-40 minutes, and I'm sweating hard within 10 min
• It kicks in enough endorphins to help with the depression
• There's daycare for my kids
• Since I'm shooting for strength (low reps) vs endurance (high reps) there's not a lot of lactic acid and I'm not cripplingly sore
• In 2 weeks, my posture is already better
• Since I keep a log, improvement is easy to see (I deadlifted 118 today!)
• I have been going at a time where there's no competition for the equipment and no traffic on the way
• In the 5 minutes I spend warming up on the elliptical, I've been reviewing a memory verse, currently I Thess 5:23-24