Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

royal wedding

5 on Friday: Meaningful gifts I've received

My birthday is tomorrow. Which got me thinking about gifts. Not because I’m totally gift-focused because I’m not. Receiving gifts actually stresses me out a little bit because I’m not good at giving an instant reaction. My thanks is better expressed in how I use the gift than in the exact moment I receive it.

Photo courtesy of Stock Exchange | www.sxc.hu

Photo courtesy of Stock Exchange | www.sxc.hu

Here are some memorable gifts I didn’t ask for that touched my heart. (Please don’t be offended if you’ve given me a gift and it’s not mentioned here. These are the first five that came to mind and they aren’t all birthday gifts. The danger of making a short list is leaving someone out.)

1. A pink Columbia brand fleece jacket. The first Christmas Phil and I celebrated as a couple, this was his gift. I remember how excited he was to give it to me, and it is still my go-to outerwear in spring, fall and sometimes winter. My husband is great at giving gifts. I could spend an entire post on the best gifts he’s given me, but I’d probably lose readers.

2. The Book of Common Prayer. A couple from church gifted this to us as we’ve expressed an interest and love for liturgy, the church calendar and the use of the lectionary. I have used this book almost daily for months, and it continues to touch my heart because it is a gift I would have never thought to ask for from people who haven’t known us long but were thoughtful enough to present us with a gift we will cherish.

3. An ice scraper and a spray-on window defroster for my car. In the early days of my relationship with Phil, we spent a lot of time at each other’s houses, often driving home in winter in the dark, when northern Illinois temperatures drop below freezing and leave frost on the windshield. One night, Phil’s brother and the woman who would become his wife, gave me this gift to ease the process of driving home in winter. It was especially meaningful because at the time, our relationship was not strong nor was I terribly kind or loving toward them. Over the years, that has changed and I’ve learned that they, too, are exceptional gift givers.

4. An all-expenses-paid trip to a writers conference in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I will forever remember the generosity of a couple from my hometown who saw an advertisement for this conference and felt led to pay  my way. I had never considered going to a writers conference. I was working as a journalist at the time with no concrete writing dreams beyond what I was doing. It was a stretching experience for me as I drove the whole way by myself, took in some sight-seeing on the way back and let God open my world to the opportunities in Christian publishing. It was a life-changer for me, and I consider it an investment that has yet to accomplish its full return.

5. A royal wedding tea cup. When Prince William and Kate Middleton got married, my English friend and pen pal sent me a tea cup with their pictures on it. I was having sort of a blah day when it arrived and I was so tickled because of the uniqueness of the gift.

This is a small slice of the meaningful gifts I’ve received over the years, and recalling them makes me feel blessed to have special people in my life. It also challenges me to take more notice of my loved ones and find gifts that would be meaningful to them.

How about you? What meaningful gifts have you received?

Anything for love

Maybe it’s all the “Celebrity Apprentice” I’ve been watching lately, but I’ve been humming Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love” since watching a Royal Wedding special earlier this week. Meatloaf and the royal wedding — kind of a stretch, right? (By the way, did anyone ever figure out what “that” was? You know, “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”)

I was captivated by the Royal Wedding this morning. My husband set the alarm for me on his way out to the Y, and I had one hour of uninterrupted fairy tale romance time before the children woke up. (Side note: This bone china mug arrived in the mail this afternoon, straight from England, for my birthday. I’m a little giddy about it.)

Weddings, in general, have taken on new meaning for me since I’ve been married. My husband and I celebrate four years of marriage in less than a month, and it’s been a roller coaster ride so far but worth every crested hill and sharp turn.

During this television special earlier in the week, one of the reporters commented that he thought Kate would prefer that she wasn’t marrying a prince, that she would like to lead a nice, quiet life in the country and raise a family outside of the public arena. That struck me as truly amazing and sacrificial. Despite her personal preference, for the sake of love, she is entering a life she would not have chosen for herself, a life that will have its difficulties in lack of privacy, rules of etiquette, public appearances and possibly even threats to personal safety. All for love. She could have decided it wasn’t worth it, but for love of a man, who happens to be prince, she is choosing to sacrifice her idea of an ideal life and enter a world that certainly is different from what she has known.

In a sense, it’s what we all do when we get married. We join our lives to someone else’s, aligning our dreams, ambitions and goals to theirs, come what may. I didn’t understand this fully when I got married, and I’m not sure I ever will understand it fully, but joining my life to a man preparing to be a pastor has required sacrifice of things I thought I wanted and expectations I had for how life would be. But I wouldn’t change the choice I made to marry him. For me, there was no one else. He could have been a beggar asking me to live in a cardboard box with him or an astronaut with dreams of living on the moon. That’s the thing about love, the craziest of notions don’t seem all that crazy and as long as I’ve got my husband walking next to me hand-in-hand, I believe we can face anything together.

I imagine Kate could be afraid of the future. She will be queen someday. How do you live every day with that knowledge? Most little girls dream of being a princess; she literally is one. All because she loved a man.

Those of us who choose to join our lives with Christ experience this kind of love, too. For love of the one who first loved us, we’ll do things we never thought we could, give up the lives we’ve always wanted for the lives we never thought we could have. Living the Christ-life is scary, risky, unpredictable and difficult sometimes, but it’s also fulfilling, joyful, purposeful, abundant and freeing. Having experienced life with Christ, I hope that we would say we can’t imagine life any other way.