Mr. & Mrs. Seitzler

Monday started off innocently enough. I went downtown to be part of a Child Abuse Prevention Month awareness event that I helped organize. My father-in-law provided the technical support for the event, and Brandon helped. It was a great morning, lots of reporters came, great awareness for child abuse prevention and intervention issues.

After the morning’s festivities, I told Brandon we needed to take Jim out for lunch to thank him for giving of his time. Off we went to Potbelly at Knox and 75. Except, when we got there and parked the car, we changed our minds and decided Chipotle decided better. So we went across the street to Chipotle for the world’s most expensive burrito.

Halfway through our lunch (we were in the restaurant for all of 45 minutes, if that), I got this really strange panicky feeling that my car wouldn’t be in the lot when we returned. Jim and Brandon both said not to worry about it, that they were sure the car was fine. I had seen tow warning signs, but I assumed we were inside one of the businesses that shared the lot. Little did I know. My advice to everyone is this: listen to the women in your life when that intuition strikes.

And of course, you know that when we left Chipotle, my car was gone. Someone called a “security spotter” had reported that we parked in the lot without frequenting the correct businesses. In less than 30 minutes, my car was gonezo. So, that sucked.

Jim drove Brandon and I over to the wrecker lot to pick up the car. $160 and 45 minutes later, I had my car back. Now you understand why lunch consisted of the world’s most expensive burrito. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

When I got home from work, Brandon was still studying (for any strangers out there reading, he’s a grad student and works from home). He was frustrated because our Internet has not been working properly ever since we got it installed. Thanks a lot Time Warner. We thought we were going to get better service by switching. Instead, we got a modem that doesn’t work with Brandon’s computer. Awesome.

I supposed this day couldn’t get any worse, and I thought that trying (again) to get Time Warner to help us find a fix for the connectivity might improve the day. Why I thought this I will never know. I called Time Warner and spoke with a very nice man in Austin who told us it sounded like the modem just wouldn’t talk to our computer. So, to try a new modem. He informed us we could make our way to the Time Warner office in Plano to swap our modem for a new one.

We thought we could make it by 6 p.m. We pulled up at 6:01 p.m. Two employees were sitting inside the lobby and refused to open the door. The folks at corporate tried to call them to tell them it was OK to help us, but the local employees wouldn’t answer the phone. So, they didn’t know it was OK for them open the door. No less than seven customers came, peeked inside to see that there were employees present, and left after unsuccessfully trying to pay their bills. Finally, a very nice woman named Kelly told Brandon over the phone that she would be sending a technician to our home in the morning to swap out our modem. We knocked on the glass again to say, “Hey, corporate really wishes you would answer your phone. Thanks anyways for your help!” A huge guy yelled back, “Have a nice day!” At this point, Brandon said back, “Why is this the first you’re actually talking to me?” And the man yelled back that if Brandon said one more word, he would call the police. We left. Time Warner’s customer service folks said that our account would be transferred to a special unit that deals with employees being abusive or threatening to customers. So, that sucked too. At this point, all we want is for our Internet to work and for people to be nice to us. I’m sure the people at the Time Warner knew we weren’t exactly in a pleasant mood, but there was no need to threaten police action against us. Ridiculous.

After all that, we went home, cleaned off the impound lot sticker and writing from my car and took my car to the car wash. We prayed the day off while going through the wash and hoped for a better Tuesday. When we got out of the car wash and pulled up to the free vacuums, we noted that my rear windshield wiper was missing. It got knocked off during the car wash, and the car wash manager was unable to find it. O’Reilly Auto Parts won’t have one in for us until tomorrow. And today it looks like it might rain. What a mess.

Basically, yesterday was the kind of day that makes you wonder why you left the house. This morning the technician came to the house with the exact same modem that we already have. He apparently had not been informed of our situation. Also, he said this is the only modem they have for our Internet package. So, I’m wondering why in the heck the lady on the phone told us she could send another modem over.

So I’m coordinating and scheduling Kid’s Worship stuff for church (Providence Church – Frisco, TX) and I’m listening to this song, Do Not Fear – Isaiah 41:10, by Seeds Family Worship.  Seeds has three volumes of songs for kids and their families…but don’t be mistaken, just because the songs have little kids singing on them doesn’t mean they aren’t for you too – whoever you are.

These songs are full of truth, the Truth.  Each of the songs is based on a verse of the Bible.  They are incredibly repetitive and intended for teaching scripture to kids.  This brings us back to who you are; who we are.  Think of how we talk to puppies, children, foreigners…you know anyone we view as inferior to us for any reason, even if its just for lacking a grasp of the language.  Ya, we talk to them like they’re idiots.  We speak slowly (understandable) but in the case of non-English speakers (or whatever your mother tounge happens to be) we speak loudly and repetitively.  Puppies and children get “soft and sweet” (until either chews something up) and foreigners get “loud;” my argument is that we all need both.  Why?  Because we are idiots, all of us.

Let me prove it.  Remember high school?  Remember college?  Remember the “break” you took between high school and college to “find yourself?”  Remember wide leg pants?  Remember the first person you “fell in love” with?  Remember the second person you “fell in love” with?  Remember crying during a candle/campfire/dimly lit of some sort youth camp when you promised God that your life was His?  Remember that fall semester after you got back from camp and quickly proceeded to break every promise you made to God that summer?  So here’s why we’re all idiots: either God is a fraud and it takes a lifetime to figure out that we’ve been manipulated by “the man” into “loving” “Him” at various “weak” points in our lives, or, He’s for real.  Now if God is for real then He must be God.  God, by definition, wouldn’t change, wouldn’t make mistakes, etc.  Remember, I’m not presupposing that God exists. I’m assuming we’re all idiots.  Surly we can agree on this.

So here’s my feeble point – I need repetitive.  I need loud.  I need a constant voice to speak softly and lovingly to me like I’m an idiot, because I am.  The only thing certain is that I’m a human.  Someday I’m going to die.  Think about that; someday I will inhale my final breath…and I will exhale.  And that’s it.  Its that simple.  I don’t want to live in a cosmos that I create.  I’m inconsistent and that’s scary.

God looks at us in this situation and he gives us Isaiah 41:10

fear not, for I am with you;
be not dismayed, for I am your God;
I will strengthen you, I will help you,
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

“I am your God.”  Throughout history God has come to us and lovingly reminded us that He is our God.  When our god is the wisdom of men, God reminds us otherwise.  When our god is safety God reminds us that only He is secure.  When God blesses Jacob in Genesis 35, Jacob has to tell everyone with him to put away their foreign gods; now we’re going to worship “…the God who answers me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone.”  If Jacob recognized that God had been with him wherever he had gone, why did his family have other gods in the first place?  Because he was just a human, and just like us he was an idiot with foreign gods.

Listen to the song, and rest in the comfort that God’s promises are for you.  You don’t have to figure “it” out on your own.  Enjoy the repetition.  Enjoy being a creature.

Randomly this week, I remembered trying to write something shortly after the death of my grandmother, my dad’s mother, Mimi. I wanted to write about the life she lived and her influence on me. I never finished writing it and have since misplaced the file. I think I wrote it on my old computer, so the document is probably on the hard drive in our home office. Anyway, I thought it seemed like a good time to take a stab at re-writing it.
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My cousin Alicia wrote a letter to Mimi after she died to express in her own way how much Mimi had meant to her and to our family. As she read it to all of us for the first time at Mimi’s funeral, and even as I read it today, I am struck with a distinct feeling of sadness knowing that I didn’t know Mimi as well as the rest of her grandchildren did. Even they, I am certain, only skimmed the surface of her wit and intelligence, the depth of her character. When I occasionally realize how little my husband knows about my childhood and formative years and how little I know of his, I am struck with the question of how any of us truly expect to know another person.  Add that to the fact that my sister and I were much younger than the rest of our cousins and that we rarely visited Mimi since our family lived a couple hours away in “the big city,” and it’s easy to see why the memories that Alicia wrote have little to do with me.

And yet, Mimi and I had our own special bond. My parents at an early age encouraged me to write letters. It seemed completely natural to send letters to my grandparents and aunts with regularity because writing has since the second grade seemed an intuitive part of who I am. I’m not saying I’m a great writer…just that it’s how I process information and best communicate with others. The introvert in me would now much prefer to write someone an email or a letter. I’m totally awkward on the phone.

Letters have the added bonus of making a person feel special and noticed. People of my grandmother’s generation loved and appreciated the art of a hand-written letter, and from an early age, I remember being excited to shop for beautiful stationary and imitating the styles of the letters they wrote.

My mother’s dad wrote with a blue roller ball and always penned his letters on yellow legal pads, each row of print sitting neatly beneath the preceding text. In true military fashion, he would note the time of day in the top right-hand corner: “Thursday, 07:00″ or “Wednesday, a.m.” His sign off was always the same: “Nothing else to report. Much love.”

Mimi’s script scrolled across the page in loops and curls of ballpoint ink with space between the rows, and I remember thinking she could fit more on the page if she wrote closer together. I now realize this may have been habit aimed at making sure her handwriting wouldn’t blur together since her eyesight was getting bad.

I signed off the same way that Paw did. I imitated Mimi’s syntax and conversational style. I told them about my life, about ballet recitals, tryouts for the drill team, becoming an editor on the school paper, getting braces, attending proms, going on first dates, even my first kiss (actually I’m pretty sure Mimi was the only one I wrote about that particular milestone). I so wish I could re-read those letters now to see how my writing and the things and people I found interesting have changed. I can only imagine writing to my grandparents about my first boyfriend and how embarrassed I would be now to read it.

Letters are immeasurably more personal than emails, Twitter messages and Facebook posts. The fact that the two correspondents are separated by space (and age in my case) doesn’t necessitate the stifling of information. In some ways, it encourages one to share. When you don’t see someone other than at Thanksgiving, when you have no looming Facebook record to hold you back, what else should you share but the important stuff? Who cares about the trivial? It was this approach that allowed Mimi and me in particular to become close though we rarely saw one another. And how thankful I am for those letters back and forth. After Mimi died, my cousins and aunts who lived close by and saw her more often told me that Mimi saved every letter. They were lost when she moved out of her old house, but the knowledge that she held on to them is enough for me.

This post isn’t meant to be a diatribe on the lost art of letter-writing; it’s just that through our letters, I saw how she loved me, her family, even though I didn’t fully understand who she was as a person until after her death.

Mimi died just after midnight on a Wednesday. It was her late husband’s birthday, July 8. Our family couldn’t understand why she had drifted in and out all day the day before. My cousin Jennifer said she might be hanging on to make sure everyone was OK or perhaps lingering until Papa’s birthday the next day. Sometimes the dying will do that…linger until they are certain their loved ones are accounted for. Brandon’s great-grandmother didn’t pass away until Brandon’s mom Kathy spoke to her on her deathbed and told her Jon (Brandon’s grandfather) was OK though he wouldn’t be able to come to the hospital to say goodbye. In Mimi’s hospital room, we weakly joked that every time our family was afraid she was dying in the past, she would end up recovering because one of her grandchildren was always preparing for a wedding or a baby. For the first time, when she entered the hospital in July of 2009, no one was pregnant or engaged. All of us were safe, accounted for, healthy and happy. No babies were due, no weddings pending. She was two weeks away from her 100th birthday party. And she didn’t want that party. Somehow all of us knew that Mimi was going to have the last word.

Brandon and I drove with my parents to Graham that Tuesday to say goodbye. We left a few hours before she died, and I got a Facebook message in the morning that she had passed peacefully shortly after midnight. Papa’s birthday. I’ve since learned things about Mimi’s life and how she cared for her family that I never anticipated or expected. I won’t share them here…they aren’t my stories to tell…but I don’t think even Mimi ever fully understood how God used her to cherish and protect his children.

On Saturday, we drove back to Graham to attend her funeral. The minister who led the service shared with us about the many conversations he had with Mimi as she got older. As her eyesight failed and her hearing slipped away, he would visit regularly. Conversations with Mimi involved a white board and a dry erase marker. On one occasion, she told him she was ready to die and didn’t understand why God had not taken her yet. Writing on the white board, he asked her, “Inez, when you die, what do you expect?” Without missing a beat (and perhaps a little indignantly…she was nothing if not sassy!), she replied, “Jesus!” If my sweet grandmother had any visions of what heaven would be like, she didn’t share them. To her, being in the presence of Jesus was its own reward. That was Heaven. Her desire was for Christ, to see him and hear his voice. It suddenly made sense that we sang her favorite hymn, “I Come to the Garden Alone,” at her funeral.

The church community and faith circle I’m a part of subscribes to the idea of Christian Hedonism…the belief that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. I don’t think anyone has ever helped me understand what that meant more than Mimi did. I don’t actually know that she lived her life this way, but her simple expectation–that she would open her eyes and look upon her savior, that he was a treasure to be sought–to me pretty much sums up a life well-lived, a family well-loved and a woman certain of God’s love for her. And that’s the kind of life I want to look back on.

I found the following note while cleaning my office today. I believe I wrote it during an Afshin Ziafat sermon:

Its an interesting thought that because of Christ’s propitiatory death we get to stand in front of the Father in Christ’s glorious robe of life rather than the grave clothes of Lazarus. Christ died wearing our clothes of sin, death, and filth and then calls us in our death and filth out of the grave to clothe us in righteousness, that we might become the righteousness of Christ, so that when we stand in front of the Father on that day he will see Christ in us and say “well done my good and faithful servant.” Christ in us is indeed our hope of glory. Amen!