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S. A. J. Lyttek, a multiple award-winning writer, always loved writing, but didn’t arrive at the profession in the typical manner. After college and graduate school, she plunged into government consulting. In this environment, she discovered a knack for writing tests, interviews and other measurements. That soon became the focus of her career—reigniting her love for the written word. Thus captivated, she spent evenings freelancing “fun” writing including short stories, poems, articles and cards. When her eldest was a toddler, she quit full-time work to stay home and write. Eager to spend more time with her children, homeschooling intrigued her. From preschool through high school, she homeschooled both sons while continuing to freelance. While an integral part of the homeschooling community, she developed and taught writing classes to a generation of homeschoolers. Married to her childhood sweetheart, Gary, Mrs. Lyttek loves to share her commitment to learners of all ages and her fascination with the written word.
I couldn’t figure out what I was going to write this week’s blog post about. Initially, I thought about All Saints Day, which is Friday this week. Or Reformation Day (aka All Hallows’ Eve that we call Halloween) which is Thursday. But I’m currently working on a massive rewrite and expansion of A Very Grimm Christmas, which, based on the title does refer to and allude to a few fairy tales within the pages of this sci-fi romance. I’m also editing the book about Hortense, yet again, with plans to submit it by the end of the year. And that book’s tag line is, “What if every fairy tale ever told was influenced by just one person?”
Yes, I have fairy tales on the brain. Truthfully, though, I always have.
First of all, I like the moral lessons they contain. While some only apply to the world of yesteryear, many of them hold timeless truths. Sometimes the lessons are obvious, other times you have to dig to find them. One thing I know for sure, if the people are too beautiful (fairies) or if you’re tempted to avoid work by their actions (leprechauns for instance), run in the other direction.
It never ceases to amaze me how many of the fairy tales, particularly those of European origin, are Bible lessons in miniature. Most Prince Charmings typify Christ. Most helpless princesses are human beings prior to salvation. We can do nothing to enact our own rescue. We have to wait for Jesus to swoop in and save the day. And He loves us for reasons we cannot fathom. The intensity of that love and the total inability of man to reciprocate it in kind prompted the magical element of the tales. To people of the Middle Ages, what they understood of the Mass they attended weekly was indeed magical. And since they couldn’t read or write, they invented tales they would remember, often with refrains to keep the story going, to both share the divine truths and to revel in their incredible glory.
But that still isn’t what I love the most.
If I can’t sleep, if I am stressed out, I often reread or replay the stories in my head. I always have a book (or two) of fairy tales on my Kindle. Even the tales I don’t know have common threads. The familiarity of the tales reassures me so much that I read an assortment of retellings as well. The fairy tale format always reminds me that God will use whatever He needs to in order to communicate His love to people. So savoring any one of these tales feels like a hug when I need it most.
But that still isn’t why I absolutely adore fairy tales, even though all of those things definitely play into it.
Fairy tales take me back to what was best about being a child. They remind me of possibilities and potential. They make dreams real and fantasies true. Fairy tales, as well as the portions of God’s word that they often imitate, say that your adventure, the one designed just for you, is around the next bend. Tomorrow is beautiful; today is filled with opportunity; I still have lots of growing up to do. These traditional stories help me remember that as long as we have breath, we have purpose. As long as we walk upon this earthly soil, we have the potential to tap into miracle that is today and try something new.
The following poem kind of ties it all together.
Dangle my Feet
Somewhere,
in the constant drive to be a child,
lurks the need
to sit on a too-big chair
or ledge
and let my calves and feet
dribble over the sides;
Moving in the remembered music
of grand ambitions,
magical plans
and tiny feet
click, clicking
against the legs.
Let’s all go read a tale… and dream of blessings around the corner.
I have spent more days on a beach than I have on a mountaintop. For this life, that seems appropriate. After all, the new earth won’t have any sea, so I imagine beaches won’t exist either.
Unless the Jordan, as big as it will be, has a beach.
That seems possible.
My memories are gravitating to beaches right now because I will be on one for the next few days. I’m accompanying a group of ladies who are renting a house on the beach.
9 Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:9-10
8 “Or who shut in the sea with doors,
When it burst forth and issued from the womb;
9 When I made the clouds its garment,
And thick darkness its swaddling band;
10 When I fixed My limit for it,
And set bars and doors;
11 When I said,
‘This far you may come, but no farther,
And here your proud waves must stop!’ Job 38:8-11
When God separated the waters from the land, he created beaches. He created the border between land and water, the place where, according to God’s testimony in the book of Job “your proud waves must stop!”
The beach ecosystem is such an odd and fragile mix of the two worlds. The incoming tide nourishes many of the creatures who live along its shore. The outgoing tide removes a lot of the waste and debris to keep the beach more or less clean. And, in God’s wisdom and balance, it’s all controlled by the pull of the moon.
Amazing.
In this season of remembering, I remember many peaceful and awestruck days walking along the beach. One of my favorite things about being on the Atlantic beaches is watching the sunrise, and taking pictures of same. The clouds, the waves, and the light can make for some inspiring photos like the (somewhat blurry) one attached to this post.
Growing up in the Midwest meant I spent a lot of my summers at the beach, but not the kind of beach that people on either coast think of. Rather, I spent endless days on Lake Michigan’s beach or climbing its dunes. From most places on its shores, you can’t see the end of it and it feels as limitless as the ocean. But it’s fresh instead of saltwater. Even so, it’s still a borderland between the world of water and the world of land.
The Biblical account that talks about both these worlds the most is the book of Jonah. In that, we see the chaos that the sea symbolizes. Due to his disobedience and attempted escape, Jonah endures a storm of his own making (as sin often does for all of us). We see him preserved in the great fish, not because that was what Jonah wanted, but because God was not yet finished with the prophet. We see God ensuring Jonah survives chaos and the watery grave so that he can walk the path of obedience.
But we also see that God is more powerful than the most tumultuous sea. In the Job quote above, God limits the water of the seas and the lakes by the beaches. But, and this is an important but, when we feel fragile and besieged by wave after wave, God limits the chaos that comes into our lives. He creates in our days and times beaches between the seas (fresh or salt both can drown us) and the lands. He tells the disasters that approach us, “this far you may come into this life, but no farther!”
It's fitting that God’s quote about the limits on the seas, occurs in the book where a man endures more chaos than anyone else in Scripture. God had told Satan early on, “this far you may go into Job’s life and no farther.”
We all have seasons where life seems to spiral out of control. When you walk along a beach, remember. God will not only create beaches in your life to protect you, but he will show you some awe-inspiring sunrises of hope along the way.
Today, October 16th as I write this, in 1936, my mom was born. It has been seven years since I could give her a present to honor the day.
October 14th in 1983 was Gary and my church wedding. That means, memory-wise, this is a bittersweet week. Such weeks, such times, drag up all sorts of memories and mental snapshots.
I like the mental snapshots, as flawed as they can be. However, I have a love-hate relationship with the physical pictures, photos, and memorabilia. Unorganized, it’s just boxes of clutter. But sorted, scanned, and preserved, the glimpses into the past have meaning. They are images I can link to the memories.
Thankfully, I’ve transferred a good chunk of my physical photos to digital… reducing the clutter in the office. Someday, I will have to purge the rest of them. As it is, I have thousands of photos in both the physical and in my computer directories. It’s easy to browse through decades of memories, due, in large part, to the efforts of my mother.
I have come to one astonishing conclusion.
My mom loved pictures.
Much more than I do, truth be told. She blessed me with multiple copies of the same pic, just in case one got damaged or if I wanted to pass a copy onto someone else. But some are unique gems, like the one attached to this post. (And yes, I did post this pic with a similar blog post a few years ago.) I remember riding a camel, but not an elephant. Yet, there Deb and I are swaying on the back of the huge creature.
Of course, it is a totally Susan move. I tend to be impulsive with God’s creatures. It is why I have pictures of me holding an alligator and a tarantula. It’s why I snorkeled with stingrays, babysat a boa constrictor, spent hours playing with daddy longlegs in our basement, and cradled hissing cockroaches at the bug exhibit. If someone said it was perfectly okay, and it was creature related, I did it.
But back to my main point.
My mom made certain from days way before internet that life was documented in pictures. I always knew to send her a family photo at Christmas. If I didn’t, I would have been in trouble. Big trouble. In a way, the annual collage of pictures I assemble and put on the wall is in her honor. There must be a visual tribute to life that changes as we do.
But she loved to take pictures herself and valued what a photo could capture. I remember her taking a photography class and going on road trips to try and find just the right image to use for an assignment.
One of her favorites from that exercise, a closeup of icicles melting, was framed and hung on the wall for many years.
Going through what she sent me I found pictures that I was sure I didn’t have, like those of my graduation from Officer Training School back in 1986. I had the class picture and a couple of snapshots, but she had documented the entire event.
The fact that she compiled events in my life without my realizing it is precious.
But because she valued pictures so highly, she actually took and saved more than I can possibly use. One of my long-term goals is to scan them all. I will keep a couple of the scrapbooks she took the time to assemble, but the loose pictures belong in files I can access to use for my Instagram or blog posts like this one. Or just to savor in the middle of a busy day.
Over the years, the piles of pictures grew. The pile grew, in part, because I wasn’t willing or able to deal with the emotions. It was easier to have masses of pictures hidden in the office closet.
But now, those piles feel like a weight on my soul. I keep processing them in bits and pieces, trying to honor the work my mother invested.
I will end up tossing a lot and that’s okay. I do not need fifteen copies of my wedding program or twenty pictures of Karl showing his missing teeth.
However, hidden gems, I’m convinced will continue to surface.
And each of those feels like a hug from my mom.
Happy birthday, Mom.
I think I’m done, at least as direct intent, with memories and dreams for a while. This month will lean towards ideas of thankfulness and December will have an Advent focus.
That said, events at the end of last week, November 1st to be exact, absolutely required to be told.
Gary and I spent most of last week in Knoxville, Tennessee. We had a great time. Because of our hotel’s proximity to it, we were able to walk around the World’s Fair Park, go up in the Sun Sphere, pose in front of the giant Rubik’s cube, and in general reminisce about our trip to the World’s Fair in 1982. We had been only dating at the time, but were pretty serious about each other. (We became engaged at the end of 1982.)
In addition to getting some writing done, I saw everything on my must-see list and even got to spend time with Aunt Joan. Then, on Wednesday night, Gary and his cousin, Kim, joined us for dinner. (Forgot to take that picture!) All in all, a great trip with uneventful flights in both directions.
When Uber deposited us at home, however, things became a bit disconcerting.
We had assumed based on an earlier discussion, that our son would be at home, teleworking that day. But his car was gone. And Gary’s parents, my lovely in-laws, weren’t home either.
That presented a bit of a problem since our keys, my set and Gary’s set, were securely locked within the house.
Not quite willing to give up yet, I entered the code for our garage door. Maybe we could get inside that way. Since the code most definitely worked, we made it into the garage. Unfortunately, our family default of automatically turning the deadbolt was in operational order. The door between the garage and our home was securely fastened, keeping us on the outside.
Thankfully, Friday was a lovely day. Sunny, low 80s, pleasant breeze. We put our suitcase and carry-ons in the garage and began to do things to keep ourselves busy. Gary swept the porch, watered the plants, and mowed the side yard. I emptied the recycle box into the full-sized bin at the back of the house and then began to rake leaves. None of what we were doing was urgent, but things that needed doing at some point and since we were there…
Thus, we kept busy until Gene and Gracie got home.
The whole experience made me think of Jesus’ account of the bridesmaids and the wedding feast in Matthew 25. All ten had the key to attending: a lit lamp. They only needed sufficient oil in their lamps to last until the bridegroom returned. The foolish ones knew this, but they underestimated the time that would elapse. Like Gary and I imagined people would be home when we returned, they thought they would only need a small amount of oil, a miniscule investment in time and circumstances to be included. But they needed to be “all-in”; in order to attend the feast, the foolish maids had to put their interest in being included over their comfort. Sleeping when their oil began to run low wasn’t wise.
And though we definitely don’t need our car keys when we fly out of town, the next time we travel I will put a house key in my wallet.
For while I am grateful that we eventually were let in, that it wasn’t bad weather, and that neither of us had an urgent need for the bathroom during our wait, locked out life could have been so much worse.
And like the wise bridesmaids, I don’t want to go there.