In my most recent post in the “How to Help Your Grieving Friend” series, we discussed tips and suggestions for bringing meals.
I added a little section at the bottom of that post so that people can more easily access the great ideas that came from other readers. Thank you everyone for your input and participation!
(Read the updated post.)
Add comment May 16, 2008
What age were your kids when you started giving them daily/weekly chores?
What jobs did you start with?
Any tips for keeping it fun and motivating?
At three and a half, O thinks that doing jobs is really great, but he’s not that good at it. His idea of dusting is taking a rag and wiping in one little area many times and then moving on.
I want to teach responsibility and a good work ethic to him, but sometimes it just goes so much faster to do it myself! But that’s what my mom did, and thus I didn’t know how to do laundry until I went to college. That was totally not cool.
29 comments May 15, 2008
Lately I’ve been thinking about more natural ways of living, more simple ways of living, etc. I hesitate to say “going green” because that means so many different things to so many different people. One area I’ve been researching a bit is safer cosmetics.
Some of what I’ve found is alarming. Some of what I’ve found is overwhelming. I simply don’t know how far to go with this stuff. Do we only put natural, “safe” cosmetics on our skin to prevent things like cancer, neurological disorders, and reproductive damage? Or do we live with what the cosmetics industry gives us and trust that they are going to do the right thing by the human race in general? Or is there a middle ground?
Most of my internet research has been at the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics website. On this site, they identify companies that have signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics.
Part of why I feel like I just want to give up on this whole issue is that there is so much information to know, so many products to avoid, so many more dollars to spend on “safe” products. I’m just overwhelmed.
Here’s the tension:
If any of you out there have committed to safer cosmetics, or have been researching and are farther along than me, I would love your advice and feedback. For others, what do you think about this issue in general? Obviously I haven’t made a decision either way, so I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on the matter.
35 comments May 12, 2008
Abraham filmed the following footage shortly after a special Mother’s Day breakfast of delicious pastries from a local bakery.
19 comments May 11, 2008
(She really shouldn’t have given me her password.)
1 comment May 11, 2008
When we lost Felicity, we had a lot of meal help from friends and family. I learned a few things from the people serving me about how to serve others—with food.
1. BRING MEALS!
It is essential, really. Bringing meals is a profound ministry to the hurting. Your friend’s mind is otherwise engaged and simply cannot sequence the steps for making a meal.
2. Organize the meals so she doesn’t have to.
Ideally, one person (not the griever) is coordinating meals immediately after the loss. If the grieving person has to coordinate what days they’re going to get a meal, who it’s coming from, what time it’s arriving, etc., that’s just as much work as trying to make meals herself. If there is no meal coordinator, volunteer!
3. Stagger the times that you bring meals.
Depending on the size of the family, meals may only be necessary every other day or even every third day. Because of leftovers, one meal often provides for two days of eating.
4. Bring a frozen meal.
As many of you know after a death, there’s often no shortage of food. A frozen meal can be set aside for when it’s most convenient. You can even organize your small group to bring a whole batch of frozen meals if they have an extra freezer (make sure first!). These come in handy a couple months down the road when the organized meals are over, and a particularly hard day/week comes.
5. Make sure everyone doesn’t bring the same thing.
Soup and lasagna are the most common meals to bring because they taste so good, they’re the easiest to make, and they travel well. But make sure they haven’t received a bunch of those already (talk to the meal organizer about that).
6. Should I stay or should I go? Yes.
When you bring a meal, feel the situation out for whether or not you should linger. They might want you to stick around and talk, but if you think not, it’s perfectly acceptable to drop it off and get going.
7. Don’t count on commiserating.
You’re bringing a meal because of their loss, but they might not want to feel that loss with you right then. Just before dinner might not be a good time for “a moment.”
8. Deliver dinner in dishes you don’t need back.
Always provide a meal in containers that don’t need to be returned to you. Having to keep track of 9×13’s and serving bowls is too much work. It requires the organizational effort that we’re trying to avoid.
9. Tell them not to thank you.
Make sure they know that you don’t need a thank you note. You can even go as far as telling them that you’ll actually be bothered if they take the time to write you a note.
10. It’s never too late to bring a meal.
Most of you probably don’t know anyone who lost a loved one so recently that meals are still being organized for them. But you do probably know someone who endured a loss six, seven, twelve months ago. I can almost guarantee that if you called and asked to bring dinner this week, you’d bless their oven mitts off. It’s never too late.
Maybe some of you have been meal organizers or have had meals brought to you–what things have you found helpful? Any other tips you want to share?
(Read other posts in this series.)
Many of the comments from this post were so helpful and practical that I just had to put them at the end here so that other readers could more easily access them. So here we go:
And one of my favorite quotes came from jamsco, who said, “Meals are a gift from God through the human giver.” Perfect!
32 comments May 7, 2008
We got an email a couple months ago from a friend in our church. We don’t see this guy very often; we’re not close friends. But one afternoon we got a message from him saying that as he was painting his bathroom that day, Felicity randomly popped into his thoughts and prompted him to pray for us.
The conclusion he drew from this experience was, “If I’m thinking about her three months later while I’m painting my bathroom, how much more is she still on your minds?”
All I could do was cry and think, “YES! He’s got it.”
Sometimes the Lord sends comfort from a three-year old, sometimes from a close friend, or sometimes, like in this case, from a 40-some-year-old single guy, who we don’t even know that well. (Thanks, Tom!)
So be mindful as the days and months march on for your grieving friend that their loss is in no way over for them.
I know only the title of this song pertains, but she’s always on my mind.
(Read other posts in this series.)
17 comments May 5, 2008
It’s been one of those days where I just keep shaking my head and thanking God that I haven’t dissolved into a puddle of inconsolable tears. Every plan I make seems to be getting thwarted.
It began with thinking, “Oh I need to return a phone call to my sister-in-law.” I pick up the phone—no dial tone. We spend much of the morning chatting via computer with the phone company customer service people, who were no help whatsoever.
The weird thing was, our phone wasn’t working, but our DSL was. So we were thinking, “We’re gonna call the repairman; he’ll say the problem is something on our end; and we’re going to get charged $60 for him to tell us it’s not their fault.”
Now normally I would be okay with not having a phone for a day, but today of all mornings was when my boss was supposed to call. Of course, I had to email her about not having a phone, and confess that we (*gasp*) don’t have a cell phone.
Then I was attempting to straighten up the bathroom a bit before hopping in the shower. Doing so, I managed to drop a glass bottle against the claw-foot tub. If any of you have one of those old beasts (by the way, I love it) you know the glass bottle had no chance. It shattered into shards of glass that were so fine that I spent probably a half-hour just getting the pieces up.
And I haven’t even told you what was in the bottle. Bath oil, of course! So not only is my bathroom covered in microscopic glass fragments, but also a bonus layer of minty OIL! I degreased the bathroom floor and bathtub for another half hour.
Side note: I don’t know how I would have kept my sanity if my husband didn’t work from home. I sent the well-meaning, but way too curious three-year-old downstairs to keep daddy company for awhile.
Eventually I got the shower.
It’s a beautiful day here, so we decided to stop at the cemetery on the way home from our one errand. Felicity’s gravestone was dug up and off to the side.
Turns out it was sinking and they were resetting it. Not a bad thing, I’m happy they’re doing it, but it was a little jarring. I just hoped for a nice visit on a beautiful day.
Then we came home, and I put Orison down to nap. He’s still laying in bed, not sleeping. He’s just whispering, rolling around, occasionally squawking, etc. I don’t know about you, but that makes my blood boil. More so because I’m already a little on edge.
Is this kind of day included in what James meant when he wrote that we’d face “trials of various kinds?” Is this day a series of “trials” or am I elevating simple annoyances to a place they don’t belong? Don’t other people have real trials?
Regardless of how “real” my trials are, I’m waiting for today’s testing to produce the promised steadfastness, so I will lack nothing. But maybe the word “various” is in there so that people like you and me can fit there on our normal bad days.
13 comments April 30, 2008
(Abraham here. Thanks to Molly for letting me invade her blog. I hope this article will be helpful enough to earn me my keep.)
If you read even one blog regularly, RSS is for you. It will save you time, I promise.
Some of you may be wondering, “Doesn’t everyone use RSS?” The answer is no; less than 6% of internet users take advantage of this extraordinarily helpful technology.
I’ve read lots of posts on what RSS is and how to use it, but they’re limited in their helpfulness. There are just too many options out there to fully explain any one of them in a post that tackles RSS as a whole. So I am going to use the majority of this article to help non-RSS-users get started on Google Reader.
If you follow these instructions, you will be subscribed to your favorite sites and already saving time by the end of this article.
The acronym RSS stands for a couple things. The most helpful as far as a clear explanation of what it’s for is “Real Simple Syndication.”
RSS is a technology that allows you to subscribe to any website that has one of these 
in the address bar. You can then track every site you’re subscribed to without having to go to each individual site.
If you’re like me there are a couple websites that you love to read. Without RSS, I would be looking at these sites regularly to see if there were new material. Depending on how often I checked, I wouldn’t see anything new most times I visited.
With RSS, I never again have to go to a site that has no new material. I subscribe to the sites I enjoy and am updated every time they post.
This is especially helpful for keeping track of those bloggers who we want to read but who only post every 3 months.
If you’re not a current RSS-user and would like to be, my hope is that by the end of this article you’d have everything you need to begin. In order to do that, I need to pick one feedreader to show you how to use. (”Feedreaders” are the programs that people use to collect and manage their RSS subscriptions.)
I’ve chosen to use Google Reader for 3 reasons:
1. Create a Google account.
2. Go to Google Reader and make sure you’re signed in.
1. Select “Add Subscription” from the left column.
2. Type in the address of a blog you want to subscribe to and click “Add.”
1. When you are visiting a site that you want to subscribe to, click on the orange icon in the address bar or on a link provide on the site.
You will either see a page like this:
Or like this:
2. On either page, select Google as the reader you want to subscribe with.
3. On the first page, you will need to click “Subscribe Now.”
4. On either page, choose “Add to Google Reader.”
Reading Options
You now have a few of your favorite blogs listed in the left column of your Google reader page. The best way to go through your feeds is up to you. Here are some options.
Scanning Options
In the upper right corner you will see tabs for “Expanded view” and “List view.” These allow you to decide whether you see all content as you scroll through your feeds or just titles and the first few words.
Marking as Read
You will mark a post as read when you click on it. Scrolling through posts will also mark them as read, although you can turn this feature off in settings if you want to. Finally, if you want to mark all your new posts as read at once, you can do so at the top of the “All Items” page.
Unsubscribing
When you change your mind about being subscribed to a blog, you can unsubscribe by going to the settings in the upper right corner.
As you poke around in Google Reader, I’m sure you’ll find more nifty ways to improve your RSSing. But for now, you should have what you need to go on a wild subscription binge.
You will, of course, want to subscribe to Molly’s blog and and to the blog of whoever referred you here. And then maybe even to mine. 
If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. Happy blog reading!
35 comments April 28, 2008
About a year ago, friends of my family lost their 27-year-old son in a motorcycle accident. He died instantly. Not living close to them, I wanted to send a card so they would know that I was thinking about them and praying for them.
Buying this card was a first for me. Not because I hadn’t ever bought a sympathy card, but because, now that I’m a parent, this was the first time I could imagine this kind of pain in some measure. I have a little boy.
Hallmark was just not cutting it. I looked and looked. Eventually I think I settled on one that was blank inside. I remember being frustrated that all the sympathy cards were just…so…pretty.
I’ve come to use a phrase since Felicity’s death: Hallmark answers.
Hallmark seems to offer comfort and explanation too quickly or lightly. Unfortunately, real people do this too sometimes. I think this tendency, even when offering “spiritual” comfort and explanation, comes from an inability to accept or understand grief.
I know that I was this kind of well-meaning comforter before we lost Felicity. People in too much pain made me nervous. I wondered if they might be losing their faith, so I felt the need to say something quick to patch up their brokenness. I was unable to easily reconcile my view of God with the pain I encountered.
The result of this kind of nervousness and discomfort is often Hallmark answers—flippant comfort. It’s as if when we say something like, “God is good. God is good,” we’ve fixed the problem for ourselves. But where does that leave the brokenhearted?
Hearing that God is good doesn’t always feel good. For people who are walking through deeply painful times, knowing that God is good can actually make things feel worse, because if this is goodness….
Hallmark is too pretty; Hallmark is too decisive; Hallmark is too composed.
None of the things your grieving friend is feeling can be described with these adjectives—pretty, decisive, composed.
The problem isn’t that Hallmark answers are false. They’re just inadequate because they don’t get deep enough to touch the pain. If you haven’t entered the person’s pain, even declarations of God’s goodness or sovereignty can feel like Hallmark answers.
Speaking into someone’s pain requires empathy. Choked words through tears are empathetic. Offering supplications and prayers with loud cries and tears, like Jesus, is empathetic. Speaking a verse with a posture of “I don’t understand how this all fits with your pain, but…” is empathetic.
A few months ago I attended my first baby dedication since we lost Felicity. I knew this would be hard, but our dear friends were having their beautiful little boy dedicated. I wouldn’t have missed it.
Right before the service began, I was really struggling. I’m sure it was obvious to anyone who saw me in the commons. At that moment, a woman passed by with her family. I knew her story a bit, but I’d never had a conversation with her in my life. What I knew is that they have a twelve-year-old, blind son with severe autism and stunted growth. And I knew that this woman nearly died of breast cancer a few years ago. She hugged me tight and spoke through teary eyes, “God is faithful.”
That was all. And it was incredibly powerful for me.
The point is not that you have to have suffered more than someone to comfort them; you just need to empathize. There was no question in my mind that she knew my pain. I discovered that once you have entered someone’s pain, then you are in the place to offer comfort, and it won’t be from Hallmark.
All things work together for good. He gives and takes away. God is faithful and good.
(Read other posts in this series.)
29 comments April 27, 2008
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