What does this word, "grace," mean? What does grace have to do with playing with shoe boxes and toy tractors in the lawn behind the house? The grass seemed so huge, and we thought, in our minds, for a minute that we might be helping. We sat in the grass, seeing it close up, cutting it with that hand-held clippers, mostly rust with some red flecks of paint still clinging to its handle, enough to feel both rough and smooth against our skin.

My mother was the one who cut the grass, those big lawns, with the self-propelled mower that took you along with it if you held tight to the handle while it bounced over the bumps of dirt and occasional ant-hills. It was a farmer's lawn. My mother, who worked too hard and wrapped her anger around her like a fuzzy shawl, because the men ran the farm, milked the cows, mowed the hay.

They mowed the hay in fields so big, that at night, during haying season, my father would sit at supper with a fine green veil of hay dust clinging to his face, just to the line where his cap covered his forehead. He and the hired hands took the big tractors, and the truck, and the hay wagons out to those fields, where you could look far out over that same green hue, lightened by the sun.

We played at haying. We cut the grass, enough to fill the shoe box we pulled behind the wobbly tractor, connected with a string. And then we were done, with nothing much to do with that pile of grass, unloaded from the shoe box onto a spot on the lawn, until the blade of the lawnmower would blow it away.

What is this thing we call grace? It is the thing we can't possibly do. It is the thing we work too hard to do. It is the thing that's too big. It's the thing we give up.

I know strange things. I know to drive past the airport in Minneapolis 
to get to the closest gas station. I know that the clock in my kitchen 
is four minutes slow. I know that when my son was two he hated to get 
his hands dirty. I know that in one of the women's restrooms in the 
Seattle airport the door of one stall flies open when the other stall 
door closes. I know that no one will ever ask me those things.

"No experience is ever wasted," my mother would say as I grew up. Would 
she say that still? Would she say that about the bathroom stalls in the 
Seattle airport, a place in an airport in a city she will likely never 
see, having decided she is too old to go to somewhere new?

I once had a dream that we pulled our character behind us like a 
rollaboard suitcase, labeled for everyone to see. Honest, arrogant, 
kind, loyal, thief. Trailing the consequences and the evidence of the 
things we had done to each other.

We pull the things we know behind us, the strange, the obvious, the 
remarkable, and the helpful, unlabeled and invisible, until we give them
away, until we get close enough to read the questions in each other's 
eyes, and recognize the wisdom in the lines of a face. We give them away
because eventually, we have enough to carry.

I'm waiting for someone to ask me about the bathroom doors in Seattle. 
Some day it will happen. Some day, that thing that I know that I pull 
around behind me will matter to someone else, and on that day we will 
both be lighter for it.

There is a boy, in that small place we heard about a few weeks ago, who prays, I hear from Tim. Tim, who prays with him on Tuesdays, and tells me of the simple things the boy prays for. "Keep my mother safe, let me live another day, do this simple thing for us."

Do we have too much to pray for? What would be the first thing you ask God to save, your job, your house, your reputation, your car?

When there are only simple things left to pray for, when we push our way past the things that are too big, our arms reaching up and through them, like we would push our way through that fluffy prom dress we wore when we were sixteen, and settle them down around our feet, when we stand alone, at the face of God, what simple things do we pray for?

Would simple be enough? Be all I need. Be everything.

I cry over those, "give people a new home" shows, over the pictures of smiling people with hammers, building someone a house. I cry because it seems so real, this thing that we can do with our hands that changes everything for one family. I cry, but I think I could never do that. How good am I, really, at swinging a hammer? Not very. Not since I was a girl on the farm and I played at scraps of wood and leftover nails, tagging along with my dad in the big shed where he fixed and built the things that made the farm run.

But if someone asked me, it might be something I would try, once.

People call and ask me to give money. People who don't know me. I guess if they had the choice they wouldn't want to know me. They want my money.

What if someone asked me to do something I was good at, if it were someone I knew, or could imagine knowing, and if that something I am good at did good for others too? Would I try that, once? Would you?

Fear is a child that sneaks into our lives. Uncertainty in the form of a fleeting, shadowy, disheveled, mischievous child. A thing we loathe and can't resist. What has it come to visit on us? We don't know, but we can't not look for it, having seen it out of the corner of our eye, once, outside the kitchen, on the way to the sink to do the dishes. And then another day in the hallway, just inside the white painted door, we see its darkness go by.

We stay inside. We go away on business, or vacation, or we just leave, telling ourselves it will stay behind. We breathe false relief while we're away.

We stop. We stay inside and walk a smaller path. The one that keeps the shadow in the corner of our eye, just beyond the place where we will have to meet it, face to face, and shout, "Not here," and, "By the grace of God, go away." How much easier, how comforting, to let it hang around, let it keep its smallness encircling our lives.

Fear is a child that sneaks into our lives.

My son is waiting for those college acceptance letters. The big ones that bring the residence hall sign-up forms, not the small ones that are only large enough to convey the sincere regret the institution feels so deeply at having to turn down that perfect son or daughter.

I have played out the possible scenarios in my mind a thousand times, or ten thousand. This seemed so easy when I did it. One application, one acceptance, and one way to pay for it. God's call seemed so certain.

And the shape of that call has emerged, clearly formed in that early decision. Clearly the right decision to have made.

What if more than one big envelope shows up? Each opportunity seems so great, and so different. And all I want, have ever wanted, is for him to discover the shape of God's hand on his life. Now I am afraid there will be too many choices and not enough shaping. How do you decide?

A beautiful thing happened in a small place last week. Not like the big places we mostly see, where important people spend important time.

This small place is where some teenage boys spend their days, waiting to see what life will give them, waiting for a judge to send them to prison, or let them go back to mothers who chose other vices ahead of them. Small people in a small place.

Except one beautiful thing made these boys important. Doug Edmunds, who spends his days taking pictures, mostly for suburbanites celebrating the accomplishments of their oh-so-talented sons and daughters before they send them off to ivy-covered futures, came to this small place on that day. He spent this day taking pictures of boys whose futures are raw and gritty. And each one of these boys was beautiful, seen through the eyes of Doug and God, for that moment, and for as long as they would hold that picture in their hands, and for as long as they would remember the man who told them, once, that the shape of their smile, or the curve of their eye, or the arch of their cheek is beautiful. And proved it with his work.

For a moment, and for God's eternity, they are not small.

If this were your last year? Your last day? We've hardly gotten used to writing an "8" at the end of our checks, and now we only have 48 weeks left to carry out our 52-week plan. Or write one.

I tell my son that greatness is not a single choice, but the sum of the thousands of small choices that fill up our minutes, our days, our years, until we look back and wonder what we've done. What would you do differently if this were your last year? And would God put an end to your year because you had finished His work, or because He was tired of waiting for you to start?

I once had a piano teacher ask me what I played for. I don't remember what I told him. It didn't matter. He told me why I played, why anyone plays, because they want to be loved. At our core, he said, we want an audience to see us, and hear us, and love us. It is the gift we earn in return for our offering.

Is it possible that this is the reason we do most things? Our work, our calling, our creativity? I see it in my work. The way I feel when I hit the "send" button on every report to a client. Let this be what makes them happy. I see it in the face of my father, smiling as he hands me his writings about faith and belief, hidden in a plain envelope, asking me to, "Show it to someone and see if it's right. You know a farmer doesn't get taken seriously." Please let my gift be good enough. Please love me for it.

Is it possible that this desire, what we might consider our greatest weakness, is responsible for our greatest accomplishments?

What do you play for?

Good questions make life more interesting. We see things in new ways when we ask good questions. Not leading questions, like, "How long have you been doing that wrong?" or, "Why don't you do something productive?" Those impossible-to-answer-without-incriminating-ourselves questions we use to get our way or put each other down.

Good questions really care about the answers. They are a gift to each other because it is a gift to be heard.

I've been called the Question Lady from time to time in may career because the thing that I have been good at is asking questions. Maybe because I mostly work with people who are smarter than me, and by asking  questions, I can at least be a part of the conversation.

So I am using this space to ask my favorite questions, and inviting you to share your thoughts.