Youthful Manifesto

When I grow up, I want a two-story house with a porch and porch swing. I want hanging flower pots and a garden. I want to grow tomatoes and peppers and lemon balm and squash and okra and Indian corn and I want to plan hours out of my days and weeks to work in the garden. I want my kids to pick tomatoes off the plants, to learn what to look for when looking at growing things, to know how to use what the seeds and the sun and the rain and the earth give us. I want them to have to move the potted plants inside when it threatens to frost and to understand that to grow something, you have to take care of it. I want them to know how to cultivate good things.

When I grow up, I want to have a piano in my house. I want to play it and I want my kids, if they want to, to have the opportunity to play it too. I want there to be music playing while we live in the house and I want to sing along. I want to hum while I clean the kitchen or do laundry and I want to take my Saturday mornings to listen to the radio and reset the house after the week that’s gone by. I want my kids to have chores, because I think responsibility is taught by taking care of the things you own.  I want to have four Sunday dresses and one dress for parties, three pairs of good jeans and one pair of work jeans, ten sets of work clothes and ten sets of leisure clothes, and five pairs of shoes, because I want to enjoy my abundance but not over-use it.

When I grow up, I want a good car that’ll last me twelve years. I want to buy it nearly new and I want to take care of it. I want a notebook where I'll keep the inspection notices, the repair receipts, and a chart of the oil changes and the miles on the tires. I want to keep paper towels in the car, because spills shouldn’t be left to sit on the metal and plastic and upholstery. I want to clean out my car every sleepy Sunday afternoon, my one act of personal reorganization on the Sabbath. I want to teach my sons how to change the tires and I want to let my husband teach my daughters about the engine and all the parts of the car hidden away under the hood, because I think it’s important that my children know that intelligence about any subject is not limited by gender.

When I grow up, I want to be part of a church. I want to cook casseroles for church lunches and caringly serve on committees. I want to be in a Bible study that teaches me new things and I want to have a close group of people to hold me accountable, who I can pray for and who pray for me and my family. I want to sing and move and clap and smile during worship because I’ve never sung nor said a truer word than “O may Thy house be my abode, And all my work be praise.  There would I find a settled rest, While others go and come; No more a stranger, nor a guest, But like a child at home,” and I want my kids to see that. I want them to be rooted in hymns and scripture and tradition but I want them to find their own idea of God in the corners of sanctuaries and the ceilings of bedrooms and the halls of the places they go to learn. I want them to listen to sermons from the pulpit and from the forests and from friends. I want them to hear about the grandeur of God and I want them to be amazed by the size of the mountains, the unseeable breadth of the ocean, the unfathomable distance to the Moon and to the stars so that they have a context in which to place that grandeur. I want them to know about Jesus and to be moved by the Spirit and to join the church in their own right because I want them to see the Church the way I want them see themselves- loved, saved, protected, redeemed imperfection striving to share that same love with the world around them. I want them to understand the meaning of the word blessed and I want them to know that simply by the nature of the land on which we stand, we embody that word.

When I grow up, I want to serve my community. I want to go to PTA meetings and town council meetings and football games and baseball games and festivals and performances. I want to encourage businesses to endeavor to make better people out of the people who work for them now and the people who may work for them in the future. I want to speak out for teachers and schools and education. I want to hold elected officials accountable. I want to learn about the problems facing my neighborhood, my community, my state, and my nation, and I want to take proactive steps to bring those problems to a halt. I want to use the abundance that has been give to me to help others who have fallen or who were born into less to stand up and pull themselves out of those places, because I have seen the problems that we the people wash over and I know that there is something better out there for all of us if we begin to solve those problems. I want to watch in awe as we begin to think of ourselves as citizens not of a nation but of a planet together, because I think that we can and I think that we must, in order to preserve this wonder of a place that has been given to us.

When I grow up, I want to plan my time. I want to wake up with a purpose, eat three meals in a day, and read myself to sleep. I want half an hour in the mornings to be with myself and my God because I know the ways I need to be fed. I want to see my husband in the mornings and in the evenings and at night and I want us to have a night alone each week or as often as we can afford it, because I never want to sleep beside a stranger. He may not forever be the man I married, but he will always be the man I know and love. I want our family to do things together as much as we can and to talk to each other even more. I want to sit through recitals and plays and games and meets and performances and competitions and presentations because I’ve seen the way mothers beam when they watch their kids and I am jealous of the kind of quiet pride that admirable mothers have. But through all of this, I want to take time for myself, to be centered, to write or to read or to practice or to exercise or to learn, because I know that I should only do as much today as will allow me to do the same tomorrow and because I want to teach my kids self-care along with self-sacrifice.

And while I’m growing up, I want to travel. I want to live somewhere new to me, with new words for familiar objects, new ways of thinking about familiar ideas, and new accents to learn and decipher. I want to see the other coast of this grand nation, and visit the places around us. I want to take someone back with me to Vienna and Venice and Barcelona and Paris and Rome. I want to go to the cathedral in Dunblane again and see if it kept its sway over me and I want to stand in St. Peter’s Basilica again, long enough to decide how I feel about it. I want to visit a peaceful Jerusalem and Cairo and Baghdad and Tehran. I want to be convinced to take a trip to Tokyo or Seoul or Beijing. I want to stand in places where history has been made and places where history is in the making. I want to think on trains and planes and come back with stories to tell and moments to store up in my heart.

Because I know that I’ll come back. I know that my state has a hold on me and that I can’t be long away from the cardinals and the dogwoods and the pine trees. I know that I will continue to bleed that lighter shade of blue and God help my husband if he can’t understand that. I know that every summer night that I miss watching the fireflies rival the stars is a night for which I’ll mourn. I know I’ll regret being away from the mountains in the fall and the spring, when the leaves turn the world into new colors. I know I’ll long for crisp nights and clear skies, for the miracle of occasional snow powdering cold sidewalks and needed rain bouncing on green leaves, and for the summertime wall of heat and abundant sunshine. This is home. It will always be home. No matter how amazing the other places are or seem, this is where I want to build my life. Here are the people and here is the place I want to love. This is the state that I want to see follow our motto. These are the people that I want to see cared for, brought out of our difficulties, educated, understood, and loved. This is the land I want to see preserved and molded and pushed forward and never lost. Here, in this place, are the problems I want to solve and the goodness I want to celebrate.

Part of me wants never to grow up, to forever enjoy the nostalgia of imagining the future. Part of me wants to grow up this minute, to immediately have that love and create that world and curate that reality. But all of me knows that even now, while I’m waiting to start down the road that’ll take me to the person that I’ll be, I can shape who I am. I don’t have to wait to start taking care of myself. I can pick up discipline and know that discipline, like waking up on time or planning the time to read, to learn something new, to walk, or to write, doesn't mean giving up my freedom- it means freeing myself from the burdensome parts of me that stop me from doing everything I want to do. It means working to be healthy while good health is easy to have because I have seen the abundant liberty inherent in good health. It means working to learn and to educate while I still have the time and the mind for it because I have seen the value of understanding the facts of our complex world. It means learning and being sure of myself, of my needs and wants, and being able to articulate those ideas, those needs and wants, because that will help one day when I embark on that frightening endeavor of sharing my heart and mind with someone else. It means having peace in my heart and an unshakable understanding that even though I have all these wants and plans and values, my path will be guided by a different hand with a greater glory in mind and that that greater glory will serve the world better than my tiny dreams and hopes and goals.

Today, I function in a world of groaning maturity. Tomorrow, I’ll live in a world of understanding quasi-adulthood.

To be, rather than to seem.