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| The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander |
“Failure! Fraud! Less Than!” Those were the words my brain screamed as my
husband and I sat with the “popular” parents at my daughter’s soccer banquet
last night. They didn’t do anything to
make us feel unwelcome and we had polite small talk, but then the conversation
turned to one of my least favorite subjects in the entire world. . . travel
soccer. My husband and I sat at the
table silent, like it was junior high and we were at the wrong lunch table.
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| False thoughts can make us feel alienated |
Obviously the subject was not inappropriate since we were at
a high school soccer banquet, but it’s a topic that I find parents obsessively
talk about no matter who is in the discussion circle. My children didn’t play travel soccer because
I refused to spend every minute of our free time going from practice to
practice or out of town for tournaments. I didn’t want to answer every “how are
you doing” question with “busy.” I am a
firm believer in free time and some of my children are not even interested in
travel soccer. Yet, in standing by this
decision, I feel I have alienated myself from potential friends and my children
from bonding experiences with their classmates.
I don’t even enjoy watching soccer, and I worried my decision was based
on selfishness, and inhibited our connections in these soccer social circles.
How do these feelings of soccer unworthiness translate to my
faith? I was reading Caryll
Houselander’s The Reed of God before I went to bed that night, and one
passage served as a balm to my anxious and depressed mind. Page 102 reads,
“Christ
always chose the purest and simplest material things as the means of giving His
grace, which means giving himself. Think
of the things He used to make our life sacramental: water, oil, salt, wheat,
wine, and words.”
All at once, I felt validated as a parent and as a child of
God. I don’t have to feel unworthy
because of my children’s lack of extracurricular activities. Christ makes the simple sacramental. The
feelings of inadequacy I have do not come from the other parents or Christ;
they are my own demons telling me more friends, more accomplishments, more,
more, more, will make me lovable to Christ.
But Christ wants lowly, plain, so He can elevate it to holy. My worth in the eyes of Christ has nothing to
do with participating in what the world finds important.
I don’t regularly obess over travel soccer, but the
experience at the banquet served as one of the many catalysts that magnify my
feelings of worthlessness. But, I need
to embrace those feelings and transform them into something more beneficial,
mainly humility. Because no matter how
many travel sports my children play or how many parent friends I have, I cannot
come before Christ unless I am simple.
It is only through this lowliness that my life operates according to
God’s plan and not my own.
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