pull up a chair {let's eat}
Streaks of fire and amber color the clouds, royal streamers declaring another day done, and I sit down with the glory at my back and the warm, afternoon breeze tickling my cheeks. We love Summer for meals on the screened porch out back, where we can hear the birds singing loud and see the worms dangling from their beaks.
Kevin’s not yet home, so I slide into a chair just to see them, my three, while they eat. Our dinner, mine and his, will be a quiet sigh in the twilight, just before we switch off the lamps and give in to rest.
Just for a few moments, I breathe, and give thanks. That sky. That breeze. The way the sun has already streaked their hair blonde and left their cheeks warm. This porch. A place to settle. The food to feed them. The medicine they need. The beeping, clicking sounds of blood sugar meters and insulin delivered. The sound of forks against plates. Stories they can’t wait to tell me. The anticipation of dessert. The way they reach for each other, the way they notice. That they want me sitting here, not in there doing. The feel of the Bible in my hands, the way it reminds me of my dad, sitting with Bible in hand at our table. Sometimes I’m so busy I miss it, this wealth of grace.
“Okay, now listen. This comes from Philippians 2 (a fact I know Riley will remember and Zoe will forget and Adam will know but not say). Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.” I stop, feeling right then that I might choke on all my own selfishness, how many times during the day I’ve been lost to it, how often I’m motivated by what I wish and what I want and what I’m just not ready to do. I look up to find my children absorbing, blue eyes trained on me.
Adam trills, always humming his own song, thumping one hand percussively against his chest. One of the greatest false assumptions neurotypicals make in the absence of our accepted social cues is that a person with autism isn’t paying attention because they don’t appear to be. Lean not on your own understanding (Proverbs 3:5), Word says, because our eyes see but a reflection and we only know in part (1 Corinthians 13:12). The longer I love these extraordinary children, the more I realize that they know more of the deep things than I do. I think maybe their vision is clearer because their hearts are more pure. I trust in myself and what I think I see and what I think I know and it complicates things.
“So, what does that mean, Riley? ‘Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit?’”
I ask her first, because Zoe will always have something to say, and Riley needs more help decoding the words, and (it might surprise you to hear) Adam will instantly boil the whole thing down to it’s core. When he speaks, the lesson will be taught. I smile, hearing my dad’s voice intone the question.
“Well, what it means is that we should help other people,” Riley says simply, skipping ahead of me.
“True. We should. And it does. But what are selfish ambition and vain conceit?”
“I don’t know.” She really doesn’t, probably can’t even conceive of such bitter, misguiding shadows.
“You don’t know? Which words? Ambition? Conceit?”
“All of them,” she says, unflustered, lifting her fork.
“Zoe?”
She’s been waiting, reaching one hand (still holding the fork) toward the ceiling.
“Well, I don’t know what all those words mean, but it means something about not doing things just because you want to.”
“Yes.” So I offer them definitions. Selfish: focused on ME. Ambition: really wanting to achieve, do, get. Vain: really caring a lot, thinking a lot, about what you look like. Conceit: thinking you’re really, really great. So, doing something out of selfish ambition means?”
“Really wanting to be good at something or have something because I’m just thinking about myself and what I want,” Zoe says, blinking, bright-eyed, thoughtful.
“And vain conceit?”
“Thinking I’m a-MAZING because ‘Look how good I look, dahling,'” she says, giggling, thowing her hair over her shoulder. “Doing something because I think it’ll make me look good, and I want to look like the best EVUH.” Again the giggling, dancing through the breeze that lifts the edges of their napkins.
“But it’s okay if we do some things that way, right? It’s okay to be all about ME, every once in a while?”
“No. He says nothing, Mom,” Zoe says, indignantly, suddenly serious. “Do nothing that way, because of that. And Mom? I know some people like that.”
I smile, pointing my finger at her. “But this is about you. And me. Not someone else.“
She smiles, the quirky smile of someone comfortable with her own weaknesses. She knows that we are all quick to point the finger elsewhere, that doing so is part of our selfish ambition, our shared disease. I give thanks right then, swallowing hard. That she knows you love us right in the middle of our vain conceit, but that you want to grow us better. And so we bend, toward the light of Him.
Sometimes I wish the table miles around, these discussions shared by multitudes who grow together with our roots all entangled in the kingdom soil. This meal, sitting looking at my three, with glory warm against my back—it’s the best part of my day. Please, pull up a chair.
“So, do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.” I pause, and for just a moment, Zoe and I wander through the poetry that follows, meandering past all the words about how Jesus came here not to see everyone bow and treat him as a king, even though he was “in very nature God.” We pluck the ripe fruit, tasting Truth, the sweet juice dripping from our lips. We live in the Spirit’s garden. We dwell with God right now. And our Christ, He made himself nothing. He became a servant. He went to the cross. We can taste it, so sweet. And so, God exalted Him.
“We live backwards,” I say it laughing, and Zoe’s eyes twinkle across the table, “thinking if we just take care of ourselves, make sure we get what we want, what we think we need, we’ll be better off. But God says that when I make myself nothing, when I become a servant to others, when I care about others instead of myself, when I have the mindset of Christ, He’ll take care of me. He’ll see that I have what I need and blessings overflowing.” He’ll offer me a wealth of grace, as He does already, despite my stumbling attempts to be less selfish.
Zoe giggles with me, giddy, thinking about what all our living would look like if we all valued others more than ourselves, if we all looked to the interests of others instead. What freedom, what joy to imagine it. I am so self-centered so much of the time, and it truly is my prison. “We’d always be making each other go ahead of us. ‘No, you first. No, you first,’ she says with a wide grin. “We’d have to take turns letting each other be the last one.”
Riley sits listening, sharing our smiles, and I want to draw her in to the conversation. “What do you think, Riley? Do you understand all this?”
“Yes, I understand. It means we should help other people.” She smiles, as though all along it’s been that simple, and really, it always has.
“And it does. And we should. But ‘selfish ambition’ and ‘vain conceit?'”
Her brow furrows. “I don’t know about that stuff. I just think I don’t really understand that part.”
Caring about what other people think, looking good to other people, being better than other people, wanting to get ahead—those ideas just don’t even make sense to Riley. She is without a doubt the least selfish person at our table. My daughter lives as a true sojourner in this crooked place, because she doesn’t need or understand our comparisons and competitions. She just loves and accepts and helps and cares. She challenges me. And so many people pity her the inability to navigate our social complexities, when the truth is that autism has left her free to live out love without understanding the desire to exalt self. That she doesn’t have to be gripped by an ugly preoccupation with herself. Another unwrapped gift of grace.
I look over at Adam just in time to see him swallow a piece of asparagus whole. His face is turned toward the sky, but with his eyes he looks toward me. He bounces in his chair, making sounds in his throat.
“Adam, you need to chew,” I tell him. “Chew the asparagus.”
He turns his head toward me. It’s as though he’d slid his soul sideways for a bit and then suddenly righted it. His blue eyes lock on mine. “No. No chew,” he says quietly. It’s more a discussion than an argument.
“Yes. Chew. So, what have we been talking about, Adam?” I don’t really expect him to articulate much of the conversation. Too many words. If Riley doesn’t get “selfish ambition and vain conceit,” how could he? But I love to hear his voice. So I ask, even though I’m not confident he will say a word that’s relevant.
“Jesus,” he says, gripping me strong, his eyes holding on to me. Then he slides sideways again, turning his head toward the sky, bending his eyes in the opposite direction. I touch the wrinkle in his brow with one gentle finger, still, remembering that even as a newborn he looked perplexed. I always imagined his baby mind thinking, “What am I doing here?”
“Well, yes. But what about Him? What about Jesus?”
Again the soul rights, straightening, and the eyes full grip me, bluer than the sky. “He is Lord.” He says it clear, without stumbling over the syllables.
And there it is, the core, boiled down and solid, offered from an uncluttered heart.
To understand that truth is to acquire all the others. What is selfish ambition in the face of lordship, in the submission to that truth?
Jesus is Lord.
And at the finish of their meal, I know that we have feasted on the true bread, though not a forkful of what we all call food has yet landed on my own tongue. Still, I sit soul-satisfied, and not because I have fed my children but because they have fed me, laying the bones of living Truth solidly in my palms. And the evening glows, star bright.
