The Margins

Living in Los Angeles, I rarely feel a sense of or ability to simply slow down. Life just feels fast, and most days I find myself scrambling and rushing, in spirit if not in body. Today, negotiating life in the coastal town of Tillamook, Oregon (home of the cheese factory and not much else!), I sensed a fairly seismic shift in my being. It was sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting for our appointment, and feeling no sense of hurry or impatience; it was driving through town behind slow cars and not resenting the delay; it was waiting for our lukewarm lattes to be remade at the little Safeway Starbucks stand, and not feeling any irritation.

I feel like I work hard to guard my heart against the things that are toxic about where I live. But coming to Tillamook has shown me that much more of the L.A. mindset has crept in and taken up residence than I realized or would like to admit.

We went to Safeway to pick up a prescription for Aaron (I am afraid this Family Leave has so far had way more to do with doctors and hospitals than we could have imagined, and I am so ready for that to change), and after turning in the prescription we were told it would be a thirty minute wait for it to be filled. So we meandered through the store, picked up a few groceries, sipped our second round of lattes, and entertained Aaron in the shopping cart. I am pretty sure that every person we passed or who passed us inside that store had a smile for the baby and time to stop and chat, make faces, or play.

I realize that Tillamook is about as far removed from L.A. as can be imagined, but today felt like we occupied an alternate universe. And it felt great.

We were watching TV last night and as we were flipping through channels we saw a few minutes of a show that revealed funny first jobs that celebrities had held. Did you know Brad Pitt was once the El Pollo Loco Chicken?

Anyway, we all tried to remember what our early jobs were, and some I remembered surprised me:

-Cleaning at a dental lab in downtown Seattle on Saturdays. I would ride the 6-bus downtown, let myself into a closed office building, and clean all things related to making crowns and dentures.

-Food service in the Athlete’s Village at the Seattle Goodwill Games: I still have a collection of cool things given to me by athletes around the world.

-DJing for a Christian radio station in Chicago: I would get up at 5am on Saturdays my freshman year and catch a bus that took me to a train that let me out a mile’s walk from the station. In the morning I produced two call-in shows, followed by hours of pre-recorded children’s programs and a playlist of classic “cheesy Christian” songs. After the talk shows, I would be the only one in the station until 3pm that day, and I would have to run down the hall while a long song played to use the bathroom.

-Cleaning hotel rooms at North Park University: our college had eight hotel rooms on campus for guests. It was the only non-work study (I did not qualify) job I could find my first two years there. The pay was better than other campus jobs probably because it was work that no one wanted to do. To this day, I look at hotel cleaning staff. I look them in the eye and I greet them and talk to them.

-Editing: I worked in the writing lab at North Park, and would sometimes get offers to help a student wishing to pay me for extra time. There was Vicki, the older Greek woman, who needed help with every paper she wrote as English was her second language. She paid me well and took me out one night to Chicago’s “little Greece” where I ate flaming cheese and was treated like a queen.

-Cocktail waitressing at the Cubby Bear. I got licked, grabbed, and hit on; wore as much beer by the end of the night as I had carried it seemed; and I regularly made my bartender laugh with my orders since I didn’t know the names of hardly any mixed drinks and the place was so loud.

-Coffee roasting: I was trained by good friends who owned a small coffee roasting company in Portland. This was my “tentmaking” job that enabled me to work on staff at Irvington Covenant. I loved the way my hair and clothes would smell after a long day of roasting. I also loved the challenge of creating roasts and of course all the tasting…

We spend so much time and effort achieving the illusion that we are in control; in control of our lives, our health, our children, our churches. And much of the time we actually convince ourselves, and others, that we are. This week has been for me a reminder that this is indeed a myth at best. It is the paralyzing snowstorm that freezes commuters and schools and shuts down the DMV on the only day you have to go and deal with the problem with your car title; it is the sudden illness that drives you into the ER in the middle of the night; it is the news that someone dear to you has been hospitalized after being injured in a hit and run; it is feeling immeasurably small as you stand at the edge of the Pacific.

We are, each of us, fragile, susceptible, and ultimately submissive to powers and forces we do not control. In the Black church, there is a common and beautifully simple prayer I hear repeated over and over again: “Thank you God for waking me up this morning.” I think this prayer captures the only posture we can rightly have in this life. Yet, surrounded by industries that peddle control, inundated by messages of what we can “deserve” and “choose”, we lose sight of this central truth of who we are: creatures and not gods.

Lord, teach me to live as one who truly believes that “there, but by the grace of God, go I.”

I stayed in bed this morning, sick with what I hope is the end run of whatever bug I have had for the past two weeks. Doug was single Dad for the morning, and when I got up I asked how Aaron had been (he’s been a little fussy on and off the past few days), what he had eaten, if he had taken his bottle, etc. Doug rattled off a long list of everything Aaron had eaten for breakfast. If there is one thing our son does quite well (in addition to knocking down towers of blocks and doing a great tiger imitation), it is inhaling large amounts of food. After Doug finished listing off Aaron’s impressive breakfast menu he concluded: “I think we are creating an unsustainable human being.”

I read a great post by Don Johnson recently about service in the local church. He contrasted the “ivory tower” of ideals and innovations with the simple and seemingly unimpressive quiet faithfulness of local churches everywhere. As a minister who is certainly in a church context that presses the boundaries of normal, a church context more like the house churches that Johnson is contrasting himself with, I hear his words in a new way after these past two weeks.

As my grandma’s health declined this past year, it was the local Presbyterian church where my aunt and uncle are active members that ministered to her regularly, through visits at the care center where she lived, times of prayer and scripture reading, communion, and encouragement to her family. My Grandma had stopped being active in the church for many of her later adulthood years, and it was the ministers of this church and the chaplain of her residential community who gently embraced her and joined with God’s spirit in renewing her heart’s trust in God.

My grandma would likely never be on the radar of a house church or “missional community” like mine. But she was considered a vital part of the ministry of Knox Presbyterian Church in Spokane, Washington; she was someone’s priority there, while she likely contributed nothing to their church’s growth or vibrancy in the terms we tend to think in when we talk of those things. As I sat at her memorial service and listened to the minister share about his times visiting and praying with her, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the faithfulness of this pastor and the church that released him for such vital, missional ministry.

We have things to learn from the Knox Presbyterian Churches in our midst.

So yesterday I wrote about how there is no dress code so to speak here in Portland. Today we went to church and out to lunch in the Beaverton/Hillsdale area (a suburb of Portland), and I was amazed at the number of Volvo station wagons we passed on the road and the sheer volume of North Face jackets that came in and out of the restaurant. I stand corrected.

But the intent of Christmas is something totally different. The Child in the crib is not an ideal. It is only our love and often our sentimentality which have turned his story into an ideal…

Crib and cross—they are both of the same wood, they are of a piece.

And I believe that all this, with all its terror, is infinitely more comforting than the soft, sweet spirit we seek at Christmas, which afterward leaves only a hung-over, letdown feeling if it is the only thing there is in it…

From Helmut Thielicke’s “Christ and the Meaning of Life”

I forgot how totally colorful Portland can be.

There was the individual we shared an elevator with today at Pioneer Place who had the voice of a man, the body of a woman, and some impressive purple fur boots.

There was the steady stream of pierced youth, smoking lots of cigarettes and using colorful language, who seemed to populate every corner of the city.

There was the protest crowd outside of Schumacher’s Furs with poster-sized pictures of skinned animals and individuals dressed up as furry animals.

There were the old men gathered at outdoor chess tables, sharing booze and strategies in Pioneer Courthouse Square. 

There were the teeming masses in Powells, people of every shape and size, scouring shelves for treasures of theology, geology, and fantasy.

I have become very accustomed to the feel of L.A., so much so that being in Portland today felt to some degree like a cross-cultural experience. There is so much character to this place; much of it rough and unkempt, unlike L.A. 

I do love it here. The drizzle, the hills, the public transportation, the coffee… And the thing I realized today is that one of the things I miss about Portland is the way people are so free here to be strange. In L.A. there is such a greater sense of a quest for uniformity, in hair color and noses and sports cars. In Portland, there is no such dress code. And your breaths here feel just a little bit deeper.

We have always had a joke in my family that, if someone caught you nodding off on the couch, the appropriate reply was: “I was just resting my eyes.”

So today, after giving Mercy a heavy dose of medication, we watched her become increasingly drowsy as she sat on her Daddy’s lap watching a movie. Pretty soon she was rubbing heavy-lidded eyes. Someone asked her, “Mercy, are you sleepy?” To which she replied, “No, I was moving my hair.”

What is it about Haubs, holidays, and hospitals…

Last year on Christmas day, my dad and brother-in-law drove Doug and me to the emergency room where we spent seven hours with what felt like half of Los Angeles. I was nine months pregnant and sick with the flu, and when we walked in the attendents mistakingly rushed to my side with a wheelchair. But it was Doug who needed emergency care that night, and so we waited for hours in an overcrowded waiting room filled with very sick people of all ages, and some of the hardest chairs I have ever felt (especially for an enormous pregnant woman). It was a very miserable night for all us, most of all for my poor sick husband.

Last night, after a delightful day and marvelous feast, we put the kiddos to bed. Doug tromped through the mud and cold to bring in some firewood, and we looked forward to another relaxing evening in front of a crackling fire. But it was not to be. A little before 10pm, we heard Mercy crying through the monitor so Doug hurried upstairs to comfort his little girl. It didn’t take him very long to become a little alarmed at how disoriented she seemed, and how she was utterly inconsolable. He tried bringing her in to the bathroom with some hot steam (we have all been sick with terrible head colds since our arrival in Spokane) but she would not calm down.

By the time I came upstairs to see what was going on she was crying uncontrollably. We brought her downstairs hoping that she would reorient and maybe fully wake up and snap out of whatever was going on, and she did seem to get her bearings a bit–enough to request her Pooh movie. We put it in, and it was then that she told us that her ear hurt. We had already given her a full dosage of Tylenol before bed so there wasn’t much we could do for her. But after twenty minutes of constant crying and complaining about her ear, I called our doctor’s office to see what we should do. “She probably has an ear infection. Give her some Motrin and take her to get checked out first thing in the morning,” they said.

Doug left right away to go buy some Motrin, but of course being Thanksgiving, all the stores were closed. You can only give a child so much Tylenol, so we were basically stuck. We did our best to soothe her and calm her, with valiant performances by all members of Doug’s family. But when 2am rolled around and she could still not stand to lie down, and when her crying persisted with pleas for “Help, mommy,” Doug and I quickly decided a trip to the ER was our best bet.

Mercy was a champ. She didn’t cry once as they weighed her, took her temp, examined her ears, and finally gave her the medicine that would ease her pain. “Oh, wow. I’m sorry,” were the doctor’s gentle words as he peered inside her right ear and saw how badly infected it was. It was 4am when Doug and I pulled into the driveway of his dad’s house. Mercy was sleeping soundly by then (thank you Tylenol with Codeine) and Doug was seeing his 24th hour of being awake as Mercy had woken him up early that morning and he had not slept since. We got her into bed and she slept at last, though not without needing her Daddy to come crawl into bed with her soon after. They are both sleeping soundly now.

It was astounding to me the difference in care we received last night. If you ever need to make an ER visit, St. Vincent’s in Portland, Oregon is where you want to go. In L.A., the prospect of going to an ER is enough to MAKE a person sick. There are simply too many people in that city without access to normal health care that the ER has essentially become the doctor’s office for the poor. Last night as we sat in a spacious, carpeted room on cushioned chairs, I marvelled at how fortunate we were to be there and not in the waiting room at Huntington (and that is the NICE hospital outside of the city).

As nice as the facilities were, and as short as the wait was, it was the humanity of the place that amazed us. Living where we live in L.A., you simply begin to accept a certain level of inhumanity in how people are treated. So to walk up to the ER reception and be met with immediate empathy and kindness (and Bob the Builder stickers in abundance) caught me completely off guard. And I almost choked when the woman who was responsible for completing our registration and handling the billing came to our exam room (in L.A. you can’t get past the waiting room until you have completed this step) and, after asking Mercy if she liked sheep, handed her a precious little stuffed lamb to take home. It was definitely one of those moments where you remember what being human is supposed to feel like.