Women of the ELCA

I’m a big quilt fan, and I especially love scrap quilts—quilts that are made from all different fabrics. I suppose I especially like scrap quilts because the many fabrics guarantee there’s always something new for the eye to see, and the many colors generally present such a happy image.

A few years back, a good friend and I spent a weekend in Cape May, New Jersey at a quilting retreat where we made scrap quilts. I chose a star pattern and Alison chose the bow tie block. We traded fabrics back and forth, expanding the colors and designs in each of our quilt tops.

You can get a sense of my quilt here (pardon the feline model, Spirit). The stars are made of a wide array of fabrics, everything from florals to dachshunds to paisleys. This quilt is a generous queen size, so in order to make it fit our bed just right, my husband and I know that a particular star has to go on the bottom corner of the bed, just so, and then the rest of the quilt will fall in to place.

That particular star is made from a wild red floral print, creating a memorable block and placeholder. (See the block in the photo at left.) When that wild red floral print star is in the bottom corner of the bed, the rest of the quilt will hang just right: equal lengths on either side of the bed, with just the right amount to fold back at the top for the pillows.

When I was making up the bed the other day, it struck me that lenten disciplines are a bit like that wild red floral print star. No, wait a minute, hear me out: When you engage in lenten disciplines—prayer, fasting, almsgiving, self-reflection—the rest of your life falls right in to place. Your priorities are set in motion, you achieve balance in your life and your relationship with God is realigned.

Ash Wednesday will soon be upon us, and we’ll recite again the extended Confession of Sin that marks that liturgy. We’ll be asked to reflect on our lives and examine our thoughts and behaviors.

What’s the wild red floral print star of your life that will help your life fall right into place this lenten season?

(If you’re looking for some lenten reading and reflection, consider Looking into the Mirror: A Lenten Reflection.)

Linda Post Bushkofsky made her first quilt in 1982 (if you don’t count the one she made for her Barbie dolls) and has been quilting ever since.

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The other day, I was with some teen girls who were looking at an old family photo of women in one of the girls’ families. One girl exclaimed, with some surprise, “none of them have ‘muffin tops.’”  

I thought it was an odd observation until I looked at this group of girls of different ages and sizes, all with rounded middles.

My generation calls this look love handles. When I looked up “muffin top,” I discovered that it is a generally pejorative slang term used to describe overhanging flesh when it spills over the waistline of pants or skirts in a manner that resembles the top of a muffin spilling over its paper casing. Lovely.

The American Dialect Society named it one of the “most creative” new terms of 2006. Seriously? Most creative? What were we thinking?

Love handles or muffin tops, whatever you want to call them, affect many girls and boys regardless of weight or size and are reported to be caused by everything from ill-fitting clothes to sedentary lifestyles to stress. If we care about girls’ health, we need to find a way to encourage them to get rid of the muffin top not because of appearance or because what they see in the mirror has been pejoratively labeled a “muffin top” but because of the potential threat to their overall health. 

The U. S. Surgeon General suggests 10,000 steps a day as a goal to healthy hearts and the elimination of muffin tops rather than endless diets or Relacore and the other countless infomercial drugs advertised as effortless. The average person gets in 900 to 3000 steps in a day.

We have to start somewhere, and adding steps to our day is better for us than a muffin or its top.

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I had a series of discussions with a Jehovah’s Witness some years ago, but our dialogue came to an end when she told me I was questioning her sincerity. This troubled me, but I had to let her go as she chose to go, which was out of my life.

I was thinking about her and our ending within the context of our country’s political life recently. Both sides are passionate. Both sides believe they speak the truth. Both are sincerely invested in their position. They are, in a word, sincere.

I try to listen to a little of each of them every week to keep up with what is being said, because real, life-changing decisions are—or are not—being made in Washington, D.C., and locally as a result of sincerely and strongly held positions.

This reminded me of “Sara” and how when our discussions and friendship ended, they ended in a heap of judgment. She saw her sincerity as evidence of her truth. By rejecting her truth, she saw me as judging her sincerity.

If today’s pundits and politicians would make a distinction between sincerity and truth, there would be less vitriol. Because really, who holds all the truth?

It is possible to be very sincere without having to be correct. A person disagreeing with something I sincerely believe in is not questioning my sincerity (for example, a sincere love of God and country) but the ways I have chosen to live out that sincerity, which may be different than how you do it.

These differences do not make one of us wrong and the other of us right.

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I’ve found that there are three basic types of couples you will find at a restaurant on Valentine’s Day.

The first and probably the sweetest are the newbies. This is their first Valentine’s Day as a couple, and so this date actually means something. I often find these couples cute and sweet.

The second type is the couple that has been together for several Valentine’s Days and still think it’s a big deal. There’s pressure to find a great place to eat, maybe an expensive gift exchange, maybe … a proposal?

The third type is the couple who goes out because our society and our media tells them they should, but really, they look like they don’t want to be there at all!

My husband and I have progressed through these three types and are now in the “the last place I want to be on Valentine’s Day is a cheesy romantic restaurant” stage. I can eat chocolate whenever I want and I can tell my husband I love him anytime I want.

It’s not that I can’t be sentimental, but I think I’m more stubborn  if a “holiday” tells me I have to be especially sweet and loving on one day of the year.

Forget it. Don’t tell me what to do Hallmark. You’re not the boss of me.

But, I know, many people love Valentine’s Day. What about you? Where do you fall?

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This month I’m celebrating Black History Month. I don’t assume that all folks do, and I don’t assume that everyone knows that in March we’ll celebrate women and their accomplishments. But I’ve been reading a little each day about people of African descent, particularly women, who have helped shape these United States.

The older I get, the more I realize that history is not so much about the past as it is about how past voices and actions affect people today. What I did yesterday is history. It would be fine to think of it all as past if life afforded us the opportunity to live life one frame at a time.  But life is a journey in which each action affects the next. Here are a couple people I’m celebrating:

Barbara Jordan, lawyer, politician, teacher and the first Black woman to serve the Texas Legislature, 1967-1973, and the U.S. House of Representatives, 1973-1979. She said it this way: “Just remember, the world is not a playground but a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday but an education. One eternal lesson for us all: to teach us how better we should love.”

My favorite quote about life I learned from Ms. Bailey, my fifth grade teacher, a single woman who gave her life to loving and preparing children for life. She gave me these words from George Washington Carver, the scientist, botanist, educator, and inventor who created more than 100 products from the peanut: “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”

Whether born in 1864 or the 1930s or later, our lives, our history-herstory,  each day shapes what will happen tomorrow.

I hope we are kind today in our history making.

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Stephen Colbert had a great interview last week with a Harvard philosophy professor, Sean Dorrance Kelly. He talked about how, as a culture, we’ve lost the notion of what’s sacred because there’s no collective agreement in our culture about the religious beliefs that ground meaning. So while individuals might have a strong sense of their own religious beliefs, those beliefs don’t play the same role in their lives that they once did.

It’s hard for us to find meaning today. The result is that, culturally, we find our collective meaning elsewhere–particularly in sports, because they are something we experience together with others. When something great happens, they provde us a sense of what is excellent and “sacred.”

There are other places in life where we have similar experiences, but with the Super Bowl being a focus in recent days, sports was the example.

Colbert says, “We’ve traded an all-knowing, all-loving, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnitemporal God for, you know, fourth and goal.”

Have we? Kelly says we can take what’s left in our culture, like the Super Bowl, and grab onto it and use it as a place to start to experience the sacred in other ways. I’m not sure how one makes the (Lambeau?) leap from a shared “sacred” experience of football to a shared experience of what people of faith call sacred.

What do you think of this idea of finding the sacred in football, or anywhere else?

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Did you know that January was national Thyroid Awareness Month? Do you ever even think about your thyroid? It’s estimated that about 10% of women have some degree of thyroid hormone deficiency, and millions of people have underactive thyroids and don’t even know it.

I’d never given my thyroid much thought until a few weeks ago, when my doctor discovered a “generous” thyroid when she palpated around my neck. So she sent me to get an ultrasound.  When multiple nodules were confirmed, she ordered a fine needle aspiration—you know, where a tiny needle gets stabbed (okay, maybe I’m being dramatic) into your neck.

I brought my husband, Aaron, with me for the first time for a medical procedure. Needles are not my friend, and although more than 90% of nodules are benign, I was feeling anxious.

While I waited for the results, I started to speak of my thyroid like a friend—though one that was having a tiff with. I mean, this same thyroid used to let me down many cupcakes with only minor weight gain and regulated my body temperature perfectly. And now it felt like my thyroid was turning on me.

Nobody knows why these nodules show up or why thyroid hormones start to run amok. It runs in families, they tell me, and families with a history of auto-immune diseases are especially susceptible. It’s important to diagnose a thyroid condition early, even before symptoms occur. In the early stages you barely notice anything amiss, but, over time, untreated hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid) can cause a number of health problems, such as obesity, joint pain, infertility and heart disease.

The January/February 2011 issue of Lutheran Woman Today magazine features a very informative and important article about what you need to know about your thyroid.

It turns out that my thyroid lumps were nothing to worry about, so we took her out for dinner to celebrate.

So love thy thyroid, and after you take it dancing, learn what the symptoms of an out-of-whack thyroid are and talk with your doctor about checking to make sure it’s working right.

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