A God Thing

I’m a bit of a skeptic at heart when it comes to “God signs.”  That phrase alone makes me cringe (along with its sibling “God thing”) and I have always had a hard time claiming with any amount of certainty that something was a sign or word from God.  

I used to think this was an indication of one of my many shortcomings.  If I just had more faith I could speak confidently of what I knew God was trying to communicate.  If I was a better Christian, God would make himself known more clearly.  If I read the bible/prayed/fasted/devoted myself more, I could use language of certainty.  If only I was more, then those “God signs” would be real.

Sometimes I still believe this.

But I’ve also been around long enough to see how people manipulate these signs from God.  How they speak with such certainty about things that are not certain.  How their “God signs” were often things that they wanted to see or happen. Or to serve as proof of their very “in-ness.”  We Christians are very good at speaking what we want to believe as though it were sound truth.

If I have to err on either side of this conundrum I think I would rather err on the side of skeptic.  I don’t want to be cynical, but I’d rather not feel like everything must be a sign from God in order for it to warrant merit.  And also, if I’m being real honest here, I’m just not confident enough to say with any amount of certainty that something is from God.  Maybe that reveals a weak faith, or maybe wisdom from years of witnessing the voice of God sound an awful lot like whoever is speaking on His behalf.  Probably a little of both.  

And yet still I feel like maybe the spirit is nudging me to be more open to naming God’s work.  Maybe I can acknowledge deep in my heart movement I hope to be of God.

I have two red headed babies.  They have the kind of red hair that stops people in their tracks.  It is truly beautiful hair.  Everyone always asks, “Where on earth does it come from?”  My husband and I are both brunettes through and through.  Neither of us has the fair complexion or ginger roots that would naturally be inclined to produce such vivid red hair on a kid.

For a long time I would answer that question with a simple “my side of the family.”  This is certainly true; my dad, sister and brother all have heads of different shades of ginger.

But I’m never telling my whole truth when I answer this question.  What I want to say when people inquire about their red hair is much more vulnerable.  I want to say, “I think their hair comes from my dad.  I think it’s a sign from God for me to trust that my dad in heaven and God is still good.  Because my first two babies have honey colored and dark brown hair but then, when I was pregnant with this third baby, my dearly loved, red haired dad unexpectedly died and the effects of this tragedy took a toll on my faith and my understanding of God.  Then, six months later, I gave birth to a little red haired anomaly and it felt a little kiss from my dad.  

Maybe it was from God, but it could have just as easily have been a nice coincidence.  

But then, sixteen months later I gave birth to another ginger haired baby and I wonder if surely this meant God was trying to tell me something, that this was more than just coincidence.  Maybe it is a sign.”

If it had just been Lou, the older daughter, I might have been able to convince myself that it was all just a lovely coincidence.  But then Rory came and two babies with the same hair color that is nothing like their parents but everything like their grandfather and maybe, just maybe it’s more.  

It could be a little piece of my dad in the babies he never got to meet.  Maybe it was God’s way of keeping my dad’s name on my tongue.  Whenever anyone asks where their unique hair color comes from I get to speak of my dad.  And I get asked that question multiple times a day.  Or maybe it’s a visual reminder of him I get to kiss and hug every day. 

But sometimes I wonder if it’s even more that that.  Maybe it’s a reminder of God’s love and care for me still.   A physical representation that God cares about me enough to send me a sign, an answer to the rawest and most vulnerable questions my heart holds.  These two babies and their unique hair color came during a season of my life when I so desperately needed to know that God was good.  Could God’s answer to the biggest questions and fears I have about Him lie in the hair atop my daughters’ heads? An answer I desperately need to hear?  Maybe it is a God thing…

I’m learning in this season to claim this truth with a little more certainty.  I could be wrong, sure.  But I’m tired of letting my fear of being wrong allow me to assume that God can’t or won’t move in my life.  I don’t want to stop looking for God’s hand because I’m afraid of placing too much significance on some innocuous seeming event.  I don’t want to be silent because I’m afraid to hope.

And while I will likely not go into this whole mess of theology and belief with the check out girl at Trader Joe’s each time I am asked about their hair, I will settle in a little more deeply in my heart my own truth about God’s work and his “sign.”  I will choose to believe this God thing…

Happy New Year

A terribly cute/terrible toddler with some current sleep issues kept Tommy and I from ringing in the New Year together this year.  He took the big three kids to the Farm while I stayed home with the youngest.  My NYE consisted of sushi with my mom, and binge watching New Girl alone in bed, all of which had me asleep well before midnight.  NYE looks a little different these days and that is fine by me.

As a result, however, nothing about the last few days felt like any sort of “holiday” and I kind of forgot that there was any real significance to the day, other than the fact that I got to bust out my brand new Paper Source Art Grid calendar.  Instagram reminded me quickly though and I watched as many people posted their joy that the dumpster fire of a year that was 2016 was finally put to bed.

2016 was a crazy making year and unfortunately much of what made me crazy will be coming with us into the new year.  For me, when I look at our country and our world, the things that produced anxiety and hopelessness in me this past year are still very much in play.  And I don’t really know what to do with that as I look ahead to 2017.  The scary things feel too much outside of my control and out of my ability to produce any kind of change.

I really haven’t written much since the election.  I haven’t known how to start or finish anything.  When I write I’m looking for grace and hope and redemption and, well, that’s been harder for me to find.

But it’s a new year and I want to get back to old practices. I want to look at life a bit more like a camera lens this year.  My resolve in 2017 is to zoom that lens in and out this year.  I want to remember to zoom out, to look at the big picture and to care about what’s going on in the whole world.  For me this will look like paying attention, getting involved in whatever is resisting bigotry and hatred and injustice, and using whatever cards I have to speak up when necessary.  I’m going to read and listen and learn.  I’m going to be extra aware of what’s going on when I zoom that lens out and see the big picture.

But, that big picture can be overwhelming at times and I can seem powerless.  There is a lot I can’t fix or do.  And so I’m going to remember to zoom that lens in real close too and pay attention to my people, my kids and my husband, my family and the friends that have become family.  I’m going to focus the lens on them and their needs and how I can be of service.  I will make my world very small and settle into it, because this is where I can do the most good, this is where my actions produce the strongest ripples.

There will be a time for zooming the lens out and pulling it back in close and I need to do both.  My job this year is to pay attention and respond accordingly.  I can’t forget that there is a greater world out there that is hurting, that there are real injustices and abuses of power that need attention and resistance.  And I must remember that first and foremost I am called to the people in my home and in my community.  That making dinner, or reading stories or listening with full, undivided attention to my four-year-old as she rambles on about a weird dream she had last night about a unicorn, wonder woman and her best friend is often my most important ministry for the moment.

So this year I’m attempting to zoom in and out with my lens, to remember both views and forget neither.  

Happy 2017, friends.  

On Practicing Gratitude...

gratitude journals should always be polka dotted...

It’s Holy Week.  In a few days people will return to Facebook and social media after their 40 day fast during Lent.  Others will consume sweets again or other forbidden foods.  Catholics will no longer frequent Fish Frys on Friday nights, finally able to eat meat any day of the week they please.  If my dad were alive he’d be counting down the days until he could enjoy scotch again, his yearly Lenten “fast.”

In the past I’ve fasted from television and online/impersonal shopping during the season of Lent.  I hadn’t planned on doing anything this year, but a few days before Ash Wednesday I saw Momastery’s

challenge on Facebook to “fast from ingratitude” for Lent this year by noting three things you were grateful for each night.  To be honest I dismissed it pretty immediately.  I felt like I didn’t have much to be grateful for at the moment and in light of these past few months I didn’t think I should have to practice gratitude.  I felt like I deserved to be ungrateful.  I was angry with the turn my life has taken and the ways that everything feels heavy and hard.

In short, I was in the midst of the Infinite Sadness and practicing gratitude felt like more work than I wanted to do.  It required me to claw and scratch, to work at something that I just wanted to come naturally.  And in this season gratitude has not come naturally.

But as Ash Wednesday approached I found myself rethinking this stance.  It’s a poor way to live, really.  I had felt like Eeyore for weeks and if I wasn’t careful I knew I would find myself so deep in that mindset that it would require much more than I had to get out.   Still, I waffled, not sure of what I wanted to do.

Then something happened on that Wednesday that made me so deeply and profoundly grateful.  I broke down in the shower at the gym that morning, desperately needing some sign that hope and light still existed in my life and I begged God for just that, hope and light.  And then, later that day, two incredible friends gave me an early birthday gift that was so thoughtful, so loving, and so generous that it took my breath away.  It was a gift that made me feel loved and cared for, that supported my marriage that has borne the weight of so much stress these past few months and that gave me something to hope for and look forward to after many months of feeling hopeless and dark.  It was light and hope all in one.

And so I knew I needed to keep looking for things to be thankful for.  If God had given me such a big gift of hope and light maybe there was more I was missing while I held onto my “right” to be ungrateful.  And maybe this would be what I needed to pull myself out of the Infinite Sadness.

things I'm grateful for

I’ve been writing down three things every night and it’s been a good practice.  There is so much to be thankful for.  Even in the midst of the hardest season of my life so far, there is still hope and light.  Noting things each night helped me to feel profoundly grateful in the moment each day.  Most things were as small as gratitude for the way Toots shines when she laughs or Monster’s sweet little voice when he tells me “I like you Mommy.”  But to acknowledge them, to see them as the gifts that they are is a choice, an act of work at times.  It’s good work, though.  And I think I’d rather scratch and claw my way to a life of gratitude than wallow in Eeyore land. 

Every Family has a Few Crazies

I came across these verses today:

9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. 10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

It’s from Galatians 6.  I was heartened by verse nine, but then, to be honest, I wanted to stop there.  I don’t particularly like that tenth verse, the last part of it at least.  It makes my stomach turn a little.  Verse ten is always hard for me and I find myself cringing a little when I come to that final command, wishing Paul had just stopped with “let us do good to all people.”  I can handle that part.  It's the "especially those who belong to the family of believers" that gets me every time.

On the surface I could say I don’t like that second part of verse ten because it has an “in vs. out” quality.  It implies, to me, that one group is better than the other.  That one should get priority.  And, it part, this is true.  I don’t like this verse because it makes me a little frustrated on behalf of those not in the family of believers.  Why especially them?

But my “gut-reaction” to the second part of verse ten has a lot more to do with this family of believers that drive me crazy.  Particularly the ones that think differently than me.  The ones who claim to be the same as me but act (in my opinion) poorly.  The Mark Driscolls and Westboro Baptists.  I don’t like that last part because I don’t want to be called to help those believers.  I feel they give me a bad name and I don’t want to associate with them.  Their words and actions make my blood boil and I don’t want anyone to mistake me for them.  I don’t want them to be “in.”

But isn’t this attitude just as bad as that of those rallying to keep the “sinners” out of the “saints’” table?  Isn’t that caring more about my identity than my identity in Christ?  My blood boils when I see Christians treating my non-believing friends as unworthy, unloved and less than.  And then I turn around and treat my brothers and sisters the same way.

I may not get to pick them, but they’re still family.  And I suppose that grace towards even the most frustrating and repugnant family members is an excellent way to prove that “everybody’s in.”

On Shame and Vulnerability. Or Really Hard Things God is Teaching Me

I should have seen it coming.  I asked for it, really.  It started with “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown.  I’ve heard such good things about this book and suggested it to book club. 

I cracked open the book, fully prepared to be zapped again and again with resonating truth punches.  I expected this book on shame and vulnerability to pierce me, shake me, astound me with self-realization after self-realization.

Instead I found myself merely nodding in agreement with the first few chapters.  It wasn’t that I didn’t find what Dr. Brown was saying to be absolutely true.  They just felt like truths my heart already knew.  I didn’t feel called to live any sort of way terribly different from how I was living.  At one point I found myself thinking, hmmm, well I guess I have this whole vulnerability and shame thing down.  I’ve graduated.  Score.

And what cometh after pride, pals?  The fall.  That’s what.

I won’t go into details but I will say that mere days after graduating myself out of vulnerability and shame school I found myself in the middle of a conversation that had me feeling so raw and exposed that I relapsed all the way back to pre-K.  I was vulnerable in the truest way and I didn’t deal with it particularly well.  I dug up decade past hurts all while feeling so naked and ashamed for having such a visceral reaction.  Maybe I didn’t have this whole vulnerability and shame thing down after all.

What happened next boils down to this: God started teaching me some frustrating things about myself.  For years and years I’d seen the story one way and suddenly God opened my whole heart wide open and showed me the other side.  For years I held on indignantly to the notion that I had been wronged and gently, gracefully God showed me I was wrong. 

I felt the shame I thought I’d long conquered.  I was supremely embarrassed and uncomfortable. 

I found myself at a crossroad.  I sensed God had work to do.  Work that would require me to have awkward conversations, voice uncomfortable truths, admit risky and vulnerable realities to myself, to God and to others.  It was the kind of stomach twisting work I typically avoid.  I could allow God to do the work, and face my insecurities, fears and vulnerability.  Or I could shut myself off, push God away and forget it all.

I had a moment with God where I imagined myself holding my heart out to him.  It was kinda mangled, broken and in obvious need of repair.  I held it in my hands and just whined “fiiiiix it!” like my kids do when their Lego creations come undone.

So we did the work, God and I, faced the fears, said the words, mended the heart. 

“I stood there saved- surprised to be loved!

God made my life complete

When I placed all the pieces before Him

…

God rewrote the text of my life

When I opened the book of my heart to his eyes”*

And here’s what I learned:  When you stay open to the uncomfortable work of God, when you remain vulnerable with him, when you give him your broken, mangled heart and tell him to “fix it,” He does.  It feels gross and embarrassing and like everyone in the world can see your whole inner dialogue displayed on your forehead.  They can’t. And the One who can is safe.

When you open up and have the hard conversations, when you allow yourself to be vulnerable and exposed in the presence of others you are strengthening the ties of your relationships, deepening the roots of your community and softening the landing spot of the next hard conversation.

And in fresh ways God reminded me of the truth I knew so well I forgot I still needed to practice it: vulnerability brings you closer.  Telling hard self-truths and receiving them in love are perhaps the most bonding acts two people can participate in.

Perhaps that fall wasn’t so bad after all.

*From 2 Samuel 22:20-25 in The Message translation. 

When the Best Thing and the Hard Thing are the Same

Monster has two ears again.  His implant was activated last week with little fanfare and stress.  He did great at the audiologist, cooperating fully with the mapping and all the things that went along with it.  He seemed proud of his new ears, showing them off to friends and family.  He asked to call Aunt Ry that first day so that she could “see new ears!”  I was so proud of my little man, breathing a little easier with that hurdle cleared.

And then the hard part came.

Part of his activation process is to spend some time each day using only the implant.  His hearing aid must be turned off for one hour each day to allow his brain to get acclimated with the implant.  Initially the cochlear implant makes everything sound strange.  The best explanation I’ve been given is that everything sounds kind of squeaky, like Minnie Mouse and differentiation between voices or different types of noises is all but impossible at first.  Over time his brain will be retrained to understand the electronic impulses but at first everything sounds like the inside of Minnie Mouse’ head.  Monster does not like this one little bit.

The first day I turned his hearing aid off while he was outside playing.  Immediately agitated, Monster kept crying, “turn back on, turn back on” while reaching for both devices trying desperately to return his hearing to normal.  My mom distracted him with a lollypop and he calmed down.  He asked for his aid to be turned back on intermittently throughout the next 40 minutes but overall he acquiesced to hearing with just his implant.  Unfortunately he did not appear to understand anything that was said during that first hour.   It was unsettling: the blank looks whenever we asked him a question.  Eventually we turned the hearing aid back on and let the tension of those 40 minutes settle, assuming it would be easier tomorrow.

It wasn’t.

Day two I put both devices into his ears after naps but never turned the hearing aid on in the first place.  It was an epic failure on my part.  I did it this way because I thought it would be smoother, rather than taking away the comfort of his “regular hearing” I thought it would be easier to not introduce it at all after naps.  In retrospect I think he thought this mode of hearing was permanent and everything had changed forever. 

At any rate he cried and cried devastated tears.  This time he didn’t even ask for his hearing aid to be turned on.  He just grieved.  I held my boy as he sobbed knowing he was being thrown unto an uncomfortable situation where he felt little control, knowing he was unhappy and frustrated and didn’t have the language to communicate or understand why.  Knowing he must be scared and confused and more than a little freaked by how different everything sounded.  I wanted desperately to take it all away, but I didn’t.

I don’t know what was harder, watching him cry and mourn and wrestle with these big feelings or knowing there was an easy fix and choosing not to use it.

Because that’s the crux of it, isn’t it?  I could have turned his hearing aid on, problem solved.  It would have made everything better, lightened the load for my sweet boy who has already borne so much this year.  It was all I wanted to do really.  Just turn the damn hearing aid back on and make it better.

But, though it may have been better, it wasn’t best.  I’m realizing that parenting requires a lot of “doing difficult things.”  Some of these hard things are flung upon us, matters in which we have no choice but to put our head down and one foot in front of the next, each step more unbearable then the last because there are no easier options.  Those situations are hard, but in a way the lack of choice helps.  There is only one way to go, difficult as it may be, and so you go.

Sometimes though as parents we must choose to do the hard things even in the face of easier options.  Because the hard thing is the best thing.  It is the thing that will shape our kids, define their character, enable them to survive on their own.  Painful and torturous as it may be to send our kids into the fire alone, it is there where they are refined.  Keeping them safe is more dangerous in the long run.

And I remember my Jesus who chose the hard path time and again.  Who could turn water into wine and fish into more fish but chose to fast in the wilderness for forty days because it was the right, hard thing to do.  And I think of his Father who sent him into the world fully human to suffer not just death, but a life where he would be misunderstood and mistreated.  He chose to put Jesus into a life of hard things because that was the best thing.

And I realize Monster and I, we’re in good company.

What Bryan Taught Me

Earlier this week Tommy and I gathered with a number of others to celebrate my friend Bryan.  Bryan is moving back to Texas after ten years here in the greater Chicago land area.  I met Bryan five years ago.  He was the director of the ministry internship program I participated in.  I sat in his office for the first time on a cold morning in February.  It was the first in a long day of meetings with all sorts of ministry leaders and interns.  Outfitted in my new brown boots and my favorite burnt red J.Crew dress, the one that was professional but not stuffy, I was in full on interview mode.  I desperately wanted to be accepted into this internship program.  On the precipice of a career change I saw this opportunity at a well-known mega church as the door-opening venue I needed to make the move.   Having sat across the desk from countless principles during interviews for teaching jobs, I knew the drill.  Put your best foot forward, be likable, relatable, professional, and above all competently pulled together.  

So you can imagine my surprise when Bryan started asking me all sorts of feeling questions that morning.  I faltered with these questions, not sure how to respond.  Feeling questions were vulnerable, risky and not interview appropriate.  My honest response to these feeling questions did not exactly reveal a competently pulled together me.  I tried to answer as competently and honestly as possible without revealing too much of the catastrophe that was the real me.

Months later, after hours spent in that office answering a million feeling questions that elicited a billion tears, Bryan would tell me that their one big hesitation in accepting me into the internship was their uncertainty that I could be open, vulnerable and honest with regards to the emotional journey of the internship.  In short they worried I would try too hard to look together.  #interviewfail.

Anyway, as I sat next to Bryan on Tuesday night surrounded by other people whose lives have been profoundly affected by him I felt the way I always feel in Bryan’s presence: supremely grateful, awkwardly emotional and on the verge of opening my mouth and spewing all my most vulnerable thoughts and problems in an inappropriate display of verbal diarrhea. 

The thing is, without being overly dramatic, Bryan changed my life.  It didn’t take long for me to give up the “I’m totally pulled together and competent” façade with him.  Bryan has a way of drawing out people’s most authentic selves.  He doesn’t do it in a harsh, confrontational, “I see through your bullshit” kind of way.  You just can’t help but let your guard down with him.  Bryan has a way of making everyone feel that there is something likable inside of them.  He is perhaps the safest person I’ve ever met.

I sat in his office week after week revealing the truest, most loathsome, hardest parts of myself.  I cried the ugliest of ugly cries and left his office puffy eyed and snot nosed more times than I could count.  I spoke aloud all the thoughts I kept under lock and key for fear that bringing them to light would result in my complete banishment from society because no one could still like someone who harbored such beastly thoughts and feelings.

And with each repelling truth I flung his way Bryan responded with pure grace.  More than that, despite knowing my most repulsive truths, Bryan still seemed to like me.   He didn’t distance himself, or turn me into a project, kick me out of the program or deem me an unfit Christian leader.  In fact the more Bryan learned about my most authentic self the more he seemed to like me.  It took me a little while to trust this reality but once I did a strange thing happened.

I started to think maybe God might like me too.

I spent years assuming that God was perpetually disappointed with me, frustrated with this child who couldn’t ever live up to his expectations.  Unlike everyone else, God knew all the monstrous thoughts I hid from the rest of the world, so naturally he wasn’t pleased with the real me.  This notion that God might not be tallying up all the ways I wasn’t enough, that he might still like me despite my shortcomings, was hard to swallow at first.  But slowly, with Bryan’s help, I began to shrug off the heavy cloak of shame I wore, suffocating me and my relationship with God.   It was hard work, accompanied with set backs and tears and distrust.  God had been a cold, distant, displeased father for so long.  I didn’t really know who he was if he was no longer that. 

But here is the greatest lesson I learned from Bryan: Shame, when brought to light, loses all its power and this has an opposite reaction from what you fear.  For years I stored my most shameful truths inside, terrified to be found out.  I thought if I could just keep a lid on it, eventually the shame would go away.  If I were to be found out, my shameful truths revealed, it would repel everyone who loved me.  But in that kind of secretive, fearful environment shame grows exponentially, gaining power with each unused opportunity to expose it.  But speak your truth aloud to a safe source and shame is diminished, extinguished over time.  The heavy burden of shame is lifted and light prevails. 

What Bryan did for me, extinguishing my shame and teaching me that God does, in fact, still like me, changed my life.  I continued to meet with Bryan after the internship ended.  After each meeting I walked to my car feeling lighter, more hopeful, closer to God.  It’s Bryan’s gift.

Ultimately Bryan taught me that God liked me.  But the greater lesson lies in how Bryan taught me this truth.  I don’t remember Bryan telling me that God liked me.  I’m sure he did, but the words weren’t the catalyst for belief.   Bryan convinced me by liking me in spite of my many faults.  He didn’t talk about grace he embodied it.  It is important lesson for me, wordsmith that I imagine myself to one day be.  I’m a words person.  I enjoy crafting witty and transformative sentences with them.  And while words can carry significant power they are nothing in comparison to the influence of my actions.  The way that I embody a truth can change a person’s life.  I can write thousands of posts about how God likes you, but you are more likely to believe this truth because of the way I show you how much I like you.  Words are important, but actions are life changing.

And thankfully my path crossed Bryan’s at just the right time for his actions to change mine.

So this is what Bryan taught me and it’s why I find myself so emotionally grateful when I’m around him.  He changed my entire relationship with God and taught me how to help others do the same.

Grace and Cooking

It’s Bread & Wine week!!  This week I’m devoting myself to all things relating to ShaunaNiequist’s new book Bread &Wine: My Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes.  Tomorrow I’ll share my thoughts on the book itself (spoiler alert: I loved it.)  As I read Bread & Wine I kept coming back to this idea, this truth from my life about grace and cooking.  So today I’m going to share what I’ve discovered.  Later in the week I’ll tell you all about the dinner party I threw in honor of Bread & Wine (aka the best dinner party I ever threw).  And check back here on Friday for a GIVE-AWAY!!!

I never used to be all that interested in cooking.  In college I mostly ate tuna fish and crackers and cheerios.  While registering for wedding gifts at Crate & Barrel I may or may not have burst into tears in front of the wall of kitchen gadgets because I didn’t know what any of them were used for.  At my wedding shower my sister gave me a list of restaurants in the area that delivered.  My reputation for cooking was widely known.

Cooking just made me nervous.  The recipes weren’t always precise.  Following the directions didn’t always guarantee success.  It seemed to me that cooking required you to depend on instincts about food that I didn’t yet have.  You relied on feelings about food and trust in their “doneness.”  And the stakes felt so high with cooking.  If it didn’t turn out all that food (and money) was wasted!  Or what if it tasted really bad?  What would we eat instead?  And the choices!  There seemed to me to be all sorts of choices I had to make with cooking, all kinds of options for substitutions.  What if I made the wrong choice?  It was too intimidating, too risky.  Cooking wasn’t like baking.  Baking had clear rules.  Follow the recipe exactly, mix the specified amounts of the specific ingredients, bake for the instructed time and voila!  Cupcakes.  It didn’t really require me to guess or trust my gut.  I could follow the rules and was rewarded for my obedience.

The deeper truth about my relationship to cooking vs. baking boiled down to this:  becoming proficient at cooking required trial and error, failing and learning from my mistakes, screwing up and giving myself grace and moving on, something that made me extremely uncomfortable.  Baking meanwhile was black and white- just follow the rules to a “T” and you succeed.  In my early twenties I was paralyzed by the idea of failing.  I wanted clear-cut rules to follow so I wouldn’t disappoint anyone.  The way that I baked was boring and required little creativity, but at least I knew what was expected of me. 

When I was 25 I was finally confronted by my worth earning, perfectionist, grace denying junk through an internship at a large church in the area.  I was making the career shift from teaching to youth ministry and had decided to do this internship to give me some hands on experience in ministry so that someone would actually hire me.  I was just looking for a resume boost.  It ended up changing the way I thought about God and grace and myself.

Part of the internship required some intensive counseling type mentoring.  I met one-on-one with Deirdre and Bryan and Devon each week.  Each person acted as a therapist and grace dispenser and listener and exact right question asker.  Deirdre helped me walk through failure.  She took me down the path of facing my fears, naming the worst possible outcomes and then helped me to see that it wasn’t really the end of the world after all.  If I did in fact fail, disappoint, come up short, my life would go on.  I’d survive.  Devon helped me to recognize the constant, graceless internal dialogue I had with myself and introduced me to a voice much more loving and reasonable.  Bryan in particular met me in my brokenness with supernatural grace.  Each week I would confess all the ugly thoughts and feelings I tried to hide from the world lest they figure out the real me and each week he accepted it all without batting an eye.  I would unload all my shame and he would respond with grace.  I expected every confession to elicit disappointment, to taint his opinion of me.  And every time he would remind me why it was perfectly normal for me to feel/think/respond in a particular way and show me that I wasn’t a monster unworthy of love after all.  Bryan made me start to believe that perhaps God wasn’t completely disappointed with all the ways I couldn’t seem to get it together either.  Through these mentors, these giants of grace, I met, for the first time, the God of grace.

And it was there smack in the middle of my twenties that my relationship with God shifted from baking to cooking.  I had been living a life with God that looked a lot like a complicated baking recipe.  There were a lot of legalistic steps and rules but if I could just follow them perfectly I would be rewarded with God’s approval.  As long as I didn’t take any risks, didn’t make any mistakes the cupcakes of God’s love were mine for the taking.  Once I began to understand the God of grace we started cooking together.  I was free to make some mistakes and learn from them.  Free to try some new things and fail, knowing that failure wasn’t the worst thing in the world.  Free to have grace for myself in the process of this life I was cooking up.

This way of living found its way into my kitchen as well.  Cooking became much more fun.   Burning dinner or cooking something that didn’t taste great wasn’t the end of the world and didn’t mean I was unworthy.  It just meant we got to have take-out later.  I learned that substituting an ingredient here and there sometimes made the meal even better than if I’d stuck to the recipe.  I learned from my mistakes and then I didn’t make the same mistake again.  Perhaps the best lesson I learned in the kitchen was that it was harder than I thought to completely ruin a meal and, more often than not, adding more cheese covered any mistake I made. 

I’ve found the same is true for life.  It’s harder than I expect to ruin relationships by revealing the real me.  In fact being honest about my shortcomings, hard parts and vulnerabilities usually brought me closer to others.  And, more often than not, adding more grace covers all things.  

On Grace for Monsters

I wasn’t going to write about this.  I have a list of other topics I planned to write about during my naptime writing session.  Updating you on my failed Lenten practice or a light, breezy post regarding our upcoming move and how I am the worst at packing topped the list.  But since Tuesday morning this topic has consumed my thoughts, refusing to leave, hanging around the corners of my mind, never far, always finding its way in to the forefront.  I think maybe it’s something I need to work out.  I’m still undecided on whether I will click the publish button on this or keep it filed away in my drafts pile.

My hometown has been rocked with a scandal this week.  A high school teacher has been arrested and accused of having an almost year long affair with a student.   He, reportedly, admits to it all.  This isn’t the first time such a scandal has hit my town.  It is the first time a teacher so beloved has breeched this trust and committed this kind of sin.  Shocked, stunned, angry and sad don’t even begin to cover the reactions to this story.

For me, as a former student of the high school where this all took place, this is much more personal than just some teacher from my alma mater that I vaguely remember turning out to be a creepy predator.  I knew this man as both a student and an adult.  He was one of my favorite coaches of an activity very near and dear to my heart that I participated in as a student.  He was still coaching when I returned years later to coach the team myself.  Ironically, the night before the scandal broke, perhaps at the very same time he was being arrested, I came across an old photo of this coach and set it aside to send to him with a sweet “remember when/thanks for being great” note.  On that night, before I knew what I know, I would have called him a friend, said he was someone I knew well, someone I adored, respected, enjoyed and thought highly of.  As a freshman he pulled me into the heart of the team, which allowed me to find my place in an activity that forever changed me.  As a fellow coach I saw him change the course of students’ lives.  He was one of those coaches who kids wanted to be around.  His classroom was a safe haven for the dorks, nerds, jocks and achievers alike.  I can name a number of students who would count his influence upon them as life changing. 

And now, I don’t really know what to do with all this.  As a parent and youth worker I hold a special, significant amount of rage for perpetrators of this crime: preying on the innocence of children and teens.  I have spent most of my life writing off those guilty of this particular sin.  It is reprehensible.  My stomach turns in disgust upon seeing the mug shots of men, these monsters, who have slept with students in their classrooms or youth groups.  I am swift and final with my judgment: they deserve all the years behind bars and more, they should never work again, I hope they lose everything.  For those guilty of this crime I want to take away any and all happiness now and forever.  But now the face in the mug shot is familiar.  The monster has a name and a distinct laugh that, should you say or do something to elicit it, makes you feel like a million bucks.  For me, the man in that picture carries with him dozens of happy memories.

Because he is (was?) so beloved I think people are having a hard time knowing how to react to this news.  Some have turned to blaming the victim- she should have known better, she is partially to blame.  This is wrong.  She is a sixteen-year-old victim.  He is an adult who knows better.

I’m finding my own reaction hard to process.  What do I do with what I thought of him before?  Does this negate any good he has ever done?  Does it wipe clean the record of countless kids whose lives were positively impacted by him?  Should it?  And yet what he did is so, so wrong.  Inexcusable.  Horrifying.  Just plain awful.

What do you do when you know not to excuse the crime and not to blame the victim, but find yourself feeling less disgusted than you think you should and more grieved?  My usual reaction of rage seems dormant.  Instead all I feel is grief.  Grief for his wife and daughter.  Grief for all the students who called him a mentor and must now navigate the confusing emotions of seeing a hero fall from grace.  Grief for his victim, a sixteen-year-old girl who will carry this with her for the rest of her life.  These emotions are not surprising though.  I expect to feel this grief. 

What I do not expect is to feel tremendous amount of grief for him.

I feel sadness for him, for the past that is now tarnished and the future he threw away.  I am finding myself worried about him and his bleak, empty future.  I keep thinking about my friend alone in jail having the darkest night of the soul.  Does he despair his choice, these actions?  He must.  I can imagine him there, wrestling his demons, defeated and alone.  And I feel sad for him.  And then I feel guilty for feeling sad.   Shouldn’t this be the least of his punishments?  Shouldn’t he get everything coming and more?  Doesn’t he deserve to see the end of any happiness now and forever?  Isn’t he now a monster after all?

What does grace look like in this?  How does the God of grace respond?

I’m finding my grief for him to be a surprising key to grace in all of this.  I usually imagine God as angry, annoyed and short- tempered with regards to my sin.  I often assume my wrong doings cause him to write me off, knock me down a few ladder rungs that I will have to earn my way back up.  I assume his judgment is swift and final (much like mine for the nameless monsters in mug shots).

But grief for me, the sinner?  It’s not an emotion I would connect to God’s response to sin.  Does God grieve my sin?  Does he grieve the consequences of my actions, the future I may throw away with a bad choice?  Does he feel sorrow over the ways I have hurt myself with my sin?  I expect God to feel sad for my victims, for the people my sin hurts.  I don’t expect him to feel sorrow for me, for how my sin hurts me.

What if God responds to my sin with grace that sometimes looks like grief?  What if grace is sometimes sorrow and sadness for the sinner too and not just his victims?  I think I am encountering another facet of grace in my emotions following this scandal.  Part of my graceful response towards my friend who did a very foolish, painful, awful thing is to allow myself to feel sadness for him.  He is not undeserving of my grief.  I must let this emotion wash away the judgment and anger and disgust.  And I must remember it when I am presented with a mug shot that is unfamiliar so that I can grieve for that sinner too.  And grieve for the fallen world and the consequences of our actions. 

I must let grace look like grief today and remember that just as I am never outside the grips of grace, neither is anyone else.

On Doing Hard Things

We can do hard things.  That phrase turns and bumps around in my head on constant replay.  I’m pretty sure it’s from Momastery.  It sounds like something she would say.  (If you’ve never read Momastery, go right now and do so.  She says everything I would ever want to say one billion times more beautifully than I could ever hope to say it.) 

We can do hard things was all I could think as I sat in the audiologists office while she explained the inner workings of cochlear implants and what the surgery and year’s worth of follow up appointments would look like.  We can do hard things, like spend months fine tuning an artificial hearing device so that my son can do what most people don’t have to think twice about.  We can do hard things, like put my son through months of relearning how to hear.  We can do hard things, like stay engaged through this meeting, tears streaming down my face, when all I want to do is leave, sit on my couch and watch hour after hour of old Office reruns.

When faced with hard emotional things I find myself completely paralyzed to do normal non-hard things.  In the face of uncertainty and fear for Monster’s future reading the packets and pages of literature on the different brands of cochlear implants feels like an insurmountable hard thing.  As does making dinner, figuring out the logistics of our upcoming move, and cleaning my bathrooms.  All of these relatively simple tasks feel like impossibly hard things.

I know that in the face of hard, emotional, big, scary things some people find comfort in the mindless tasks.  Keeping their bodies busy relaxes their mind and they lose their anxiety in the mundane chores and busywork.  I am not one of those people.

The truth is I tend to avoid things that feel hard.  Convenience is so readily available in this day and age and if I’ve learned nothing from my procrastinating ways it’s the reality that if you avoid something long enough it really might just go away.  I want to skip over the hard things and dive into the fun, beautiful, easy things.  I want the dinner party without all the cooking, cleaning, planning.  I want to take beautiful pictures without having to pour through the 500-page manual that accompanied my new fancy camera.  I want to raise kids who are polite, respectful and obedient without the one million and one time outs.

But some hard things I’m realizing are unavoidable.  Monster has lost more hearing.  So now we are heading down the road of cochlear implants.  Doing the research that accompanies this road is annoying and overwhelming, but I have to do it.  Making appointments and faxing immunization records and keeping track of all the paperwork is not “in my wheelhouse” as one might say.  But loving my little boy is.  And giving him what he needs, regardless of how hard it feels is what I need to do. 

I don’t want to be someone who can’t do hard things.  I don’t want to teach my kids to avoid hard things.  I want them to be able to because life is all about hard things and if I curl up in a ball and avoid this hard thing my son will suffer.    So I’m trying to do it.

And I’m also giving myself grace.  Because if I can just do one of the 15 hard things on my list today then that will be better than none.  And if I give myself a weekend to only do easy things I may just find that I’m much more equipped to do the hard stuff come Monday.  So that’s what I’m doing.  In a timing only God could orchestrate, Tommy and I are flying to San Francisco this weekend to celebrate a dear friends’ birthday.  I’m declaring it a weekend of easy things.  I’m going to read all the books and magazines I’ve been meaning to read.  I’m going to watch the 5 episodes of Project Runway I loaded on my iPad.  Tommy and I are going to enjoy each other and laugh and play and try to forget about Monster’s hearing and the packing and moving waiting for us at home. 

I can do hard things.  And sometimes the hardest thing is giving myself grace when I need a break from doing hard things.

The problem with first world problems

A few days ago I wrote about my seeming invisibility to God.  This post stemmed from that one.  As you can see, prayers and doubt in God's desire to answer them are a reoccurring theme right now...

I’m having a hard time praying lately.  Every prayer I bring to God carries with it this little phrase “First World Problem.”

When I first heard the phrase first world problem I loved it.  I liked using it sarcastically, cheekily.  I like the perspective it gave me, particularly in my whiney-er moments.  Ug, I had to leave a cart full of groceries at the check out at Target and drive all the way home and back (with two kids!) because I forgot my wallet!  #FirstWorldProblems man, #FirstWorldProblems. 

Over time, however, that phrase has turned and banged around my psyche like sneakers in the dryer.  It’s become a voice all of it’s own, a voice that is condescending and sneering, angry and condemning.  This voice first inserted itself in my prayers and a dialogue began.

Please, Lord, please let this showing be the one.  Let these people be the buyers.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEM.  Do you really think God cares all that much if you sell your house?  You should be thankful you have a house at all!  That guy standing there on the expressway begging for change would probably love your house.  Don’t you know there are starving kids in Africa?

And then, slowly but surely this voice, the First World Problems voice, became the voice of God and I imagined He was the one sneering and angry about my requests.  It spiraled downward and eventually God became an angry god, furious with me, his whiney petulant child.  Haven’t I given you enough already?  Do I really need to help you with another problem?  Can’t you just leave me alone already?  I have other more important things to do. 

Little by little, day-by-day I find myself going to God less and less, feeling more and more undeserving of his provision.  I rationalize that in the grand scheme of things I have so much.  God has given me so much.  And I really don’t have any right to expect Him to give me any more.

It’s as though I’ve come to believe that the blessings of God are finite, a limited currency doled out to each person and I wasted all mine on iPads and new clothes and dinners out.  Not only that, but since God has given me so much, since I am so blessed I really should be able to do things on my own.  I am not worthy of depending on God.  If I can’t make it work with all that he’s given me I’m a pretty worthless disaster.

And so I stop praying. When it comes down to it, all my prayers, all the problems I want to bring before God are really just first world problems. 

There is danger in this phrase, this #firstworldproblem.  It creates a spirit of cynicism in me.  Cynicism about God and His love for me.  Cynicism about my place as a daughter of Christ.  I'm drowning in this cynicism.  Because of this phrase I've cast myself as the spoiled daughter, the one who has everything and still wants more, even though her other siblings are struggling with a lot less.  But is that really my role?  Is this really the part I am playing with God?  Are my needs and fears and anxieties no less real because they are the needs and fears and anxieties of a first world person?

When I think about my kids, my two sweet precious pals, would I deny them help because they already used up their requests for the day?  Sorry Monster, I know you want that toy up on the high shelf, but you have a thousand other toys down here.  First World Problem man.  Uh, listen Toots I’ve already changed 5 poopy diapers today.  That’s my quota.  You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for a clean one.  I know you want another glass of milk, but you know what, kids are dying in Africa because they don’t have any milk.  Deal with it.  GOSH!  Are you seriously asking me to read you ANOTHER book?!  How can you be so selfish?!  Don’t you know there are kids who can’t read any books?

I would never do this to my children.  Why do I expect God to do it to me?

Perspective is good, and for some of us, those prone to think a chipped nail is the end of the world, the idea of first world problems is probably a good thing.  I need the reminder when I'm struggling with the seatbelt in my daughter's car seat cursing the day I was born into this horrible lot in life.  I need the reminder that there is a lot worse out there than a few days where everything is not sunny all the time always.

But for those of us prone to internalize our blessings with a guilty conscience for those who have not also received them, for those of us trying to deny dependence on God because we don’t think we deserve to lean on Him, there is danger in this phrase.  God’s blessings are not limited.  They don’t run out because you wasted all your coins on cheaper, lesser blessings.  God is not limited to the third world as much as he’s not limited to the first.  He wants all his children to come to Him, to depend on Him, to pray with open, honest hearts to Him regardless of whether those prayers include a desperate need for food for the table, or the sale of a perfectly good home.

The God who sees me

I have a sign in my office that says “You are the God who sees me.”  It’s from Genesis, from the story of Hagar, poor, mistreated Hagar, a chess piece in the game between Sarai and Abram.  Cast out and pregnant, alone in the world, God showed up and showed Hagar that she was not alone, not invisible.  And she met “the God who sees her” in this encounter and was forever changed. 

I caught sight of this sign today as I hurriedly packed up my things, rushing home to beat the impending storm.  For some reason these words provoked a strange reaction in me.  I felt a rush of hope rise from my gut and then my heart immediately pushed it back down.  Ha, it said.  I am not seen.

I’m in a season of unknowns right now.  We don’t know where we are going to live, when we will move, where Monster will be able to go to school.  Life feels like the complicated domino set ups I used to create where one piece, one unknown becoming clear, will set off a chain reaction knocking down the other unknowns.  As we wait in this holding pattern for something to happen I find myself absentmindedly running through all the possible outcomes, going through them over and over as if some sort of answer will become clear and our wait will be over.  If this happens then we can do X.  If that happens we’ll be able to do Y. If and then and if and then.  Too many combinations and possible outcomes.

And then, of course, we got news last week that hit our domino setup like my brother's basketball bomb, scattering all the unknowns, changing nothing and changing everything all at once.

And lately I’ve wondered if I’m invisible to God.

We’ve lived in this land of unknowns for months now.  I have prayed big prayers during this time.  I’ve vacillated back and forth from calm and trusting to panicked and fearful.  I’ve asked others to pray, an act of faith and vulnerability I don’t often exercise.  I’ve prayed expecting God to show up and prayed expecting Him not to.  I’ve mostly behaved like a high school girl with the boy she likes, desperately trying to play it cool so as not to reveal how much I care about these outcomes, how not ok I will be if it turns out God does not see me.  I tell myself that my problems are not that big, first world at best.  My kids have food in their bellies and a roof over their heads.  I can afford all the things I need and even a lot that I want.  Maybe God is frying bigger fish, like ending world hunger or human trafficking.  Just be cool and take one for the team on this already.  Or maybe the reason God doesn’t see me right now is because I’m not holy enough, not good enough.  If I were living more righteously, doing more for God he would see me.  I know plenty of people who were in the same boat as me, in the exact same situation, and God did not answer their prayers.  Why do I think I’m any different?

And still, at my deepest core, I want to know that I am seen.  I want to believe that God sees me, sees my problems and cares.  The story of Hagar is the story of a mother and a son.  Of God seeing this mother and providing for her so she could provide for her unborn son. All of these outcomes boil down to my son, to what is best for my son, and I need God to see me as he saw Hagar, to allow me to help my son.

So I am praying today to be seen.  I know that God sees me.  I know this logically, but today I want to believe it wholeheartedly.  I want glimpses of being seen by God.  I want to trust that what I can’t see about our future, God does.  I want peace that we are on the right track.  My girlfriend texted me this line from Shauna Niequist’s book Bittersweet, and it is my prayer today “maybe there’s something I can’t see.  And that’s the core of prayer: admitting that just maybe, there’s something going on that we can’t see.  So when I’m afraid, I pray and ask for God’s help, that I will be able to see something I wasn’t able to see before, or at least trust Him to do the seeing.”  Praying to see and be seen, to banish my invisibility and trust God with what remains to be seen.

Let's talk about SEX, part deux ('cause French is sexier, ya'll)

On Monday I started talking about sex.  Or rather about how we shouldn't talk about sex.  Today I'm wrestling with how we should talk about it.

I’ve written and rewritten this post about sex too many times.  I’ve wrestled and struggled with what to say.  I’ve typed and deleted and typed.  I’ve put ** marks next to incomplete thoughts with the intention to return and flesh out again later.  And I’ve opened a new document and started again.

If I were to only speak from my own experience on this subject I would have very little to say.  I was a 24-year-old virgin on my wedding night.  I’ve been with one man my whole life and I have very few sexual encounters of the awkward, painful, negative variety. 

And if I’m being truly, deeply honest- there is a part of me that wishes I had more stories.  I know this isn’t what you are supposed to say, but when I watch movies or hear my friends retell their tales there is a small part of me that wonders if I didn’t live enough.  I wonder if I missed out on experiences because I followed the rules.   I wonder if I could have ended up in exactly the same place only with a few more interesting stories to retell in my old age.

Because the truth is I have plenty of friends who had sex with multiple people before they were married and are doing fine.  I have plenty of friends who didn’t get STD’s or pregnant.  Who met and married the men of their dreams and weren’t disqualified from happily ever after.  Who had sex and weren’t left feeling damaged or vulnerable, used or manipulated. 

So when I start to write about why one should save sex for marriage these friends come to mind.  When I think about a different way to talk about in contrast to the shaming of the purity culture, every logical reason gets shot down by an example of someone for whom this wasn’t true.  And this is why I am struggling with what to say.

I work with teens.  We talk about sex all the time.  And my kids all want to know why.  Why should they wait? 

I think about my own kids.  My two small children who will one day be teens.  What do I want to tell them?   There is a part of me that panics when I think about my kids having sex outside of marriage.  It’s a voice of fear that worries not about how sex may hurt their hearts or put them at risk for STDs or unwanted pregnancy but rather what that says about their faith and commitment to God.  This is the voice of a recovering fundamentalist.  And so when I think about sex I have to quiet this voice and give it a lot of grace.  I have to sort through what is Pharisee speak and what is true.

And as I’ve sifted through this and thought about how I want to talk to my own children about sex I want them first and foremost to know that no matter what they decide to do on the matter nothing would or could separate them from the love of Christ.  That no matter how much the Pharisees try to bring them center stage and hurl stones of shame and guilt and grief, Jesus condemns them no more.

And I want them to know that physically sex is dangerous.  There is the risk of STDs or AIDS.  Sex can get you pregnant.  (And if I’ve learned one thing in the last two and a half years, it’s that kids are dangerous.)

And I think God made sex physically dangerous for a reason.  It’s physically dangerous because it’s also emotionally dangerous.  We pay attention to the physical dangers because we can’t always understand the emotional danger.  Sex is vulnerable and exposing.  We can manipulate and abuse each other with sex.  With sex, especially casual sex, it’s really difficult for two people to really be on the same page.  What is a fun but maybe unimportant encounter for one can be a deeply intimate, vulnerable experience for the other.  What is no big deal for her is actually a huge deal for him.  What was not far enough for him was too far for her.

And I want my kids to know this.  To understand this.  To hear this.

But I also know that it is entirely possible for my kids to have sex outside of marriage and remain pretty unscathed.  I understand that they will be surrounded by people who will be telling them, from their own experiences, that sex is not actually all that dangerous, physically or emotionally. 

To which I say, you’re right. 

But here’s what else I know.  For some reason, God tells us to keep sex within the structure of a committed, monogamous marriage.  This is God’s desire for sex.  He created it to be fun and powerful and intimate and enjoyable and bonding and healing and all around great.  And it is his desire that we experience all that wonderfulness with our spouse and only our spouse. 

And so maybe, just maybe, we wait to have sex quite simply as an act of trust that God’s ways are better than our ways.  Maybe we wait because not doing so could temporarily damage the intimacy we have with Christ.  Maybe abstinence is a (difficult) act of faith. 

At the end of the day I don’t want my kids to save their virginity as some sort of a gift for their future husband or wife.  I don’t want them to believe their abstinence somehow makes them better for their future spouse (or worse yet, better than others!).  I don’t want them to abstain from sex because they think they aren’t real Christians if they don’t.  I don’t want them to care more about their virginity than their tendency to gossip or judge or lack compassion. 

I do want them to value intimacy with Christ.  I want them to love Him so much that they desire to honor Him with their words, thoughts and actions.  I want them to trust that God’s plans are best for them and to live up to that in every way, whether it’s His plan to unleash unprecedented compassion on the world, to care for the poor and the orphans, to spread the word about the Prince of Peace and the love He gives, or to keep sex within the confines of their marriage.

Here is what I can speak from experience.  When I was flirting the line of physical intimacy with my husband before we were married I found it very hard to find intimacy with God.   It was hard to come to God in the morning when I had played with fire the night before.  Sex is like any other kind of sin; when we are entangled in it we are not free before Christ.  And I desire for my children to live lives free in Christ. 

If I’ve taught my kids to worry more about what exactly they can and cannot do than whom they are doing it for I’ve got them asking the wrong questions.  I think we need to take the focus off the shame of the sin and put it back on the One who saved us from it. 

So I guess that’s what I would want my kids to know about sex.  And I’m sure that both ends of the liberal/conservative spectrum will be able to find something wrong with what I have to say.  Which again, makes me thankful that no one is really reading this anyway.