On life

The summer has come and is now begins its departure, and he's been gone through it all.  We left our church and I have lived in the loneliest of aftermaths, in the silence of friendships that never were and now will never be, and he has been gone through it all.  My closest, dearest friends have all departed this summer to glorious new lives outside this purgatory, and he has been gone through it all.  I have lived through intense fear and dread in the fallout of things that happened when he was here, I have lost God, found Him, lost Him again, and he has been gone through it all.  

I have learned so many things about myself through this season.  

I have learned my strength, a strength that says "there isn't a soul in this town to help you, so get it together, girl."  I have managed a crazy dog with crazy neighbors (I think they're even might like me now), I have crashed my bike trying to exercise my dog, trudged home, almost passed out cleaning my wounds, and sobbed for a while on the couch wanting my husband there before driving myself to the pharmacy for bandages.  I have put the chain back on my bike, jumped my stupid car, and figured out how to get my air conditioner running when it died after a storm.  Simple things, but things that remind me of my independent spirit, of the girl who up and moved cross country twice.  I have faced the fears I have of the people who have shown hate to my husband and I.  I have prayed and encountered the divine.  I have truly lived this summer, something I never allowed myself to do last deployment.

I have also learned a bit more about myself than I ever knew before.  I have learned that there are few things that will persuade me that it is a good idea to make large sacrifices for something abstract or larger than myself, particularly if there is any chance of corruption.  This makes me a terrible military wife.  It also quite possibly makes me a terrible Christian.  I have learned that the good I do, I tend to do to make people like me.  I have learned that when someone doesn't like me, it threatens to destroy me.  Utterly destroy me.  I will do anything for approval.  

He is gonna come home at some point, and he will come home to a changed wife.  That's weird to think about. So much of this he has no idea about.  That's hard to face.  It's not that I have been hiding, it's that only so much can be conveyed through email and it has become insanely not worth it to me to even try.  Knowing your husband's coworkers read his emails before he does acts as a filter, that's for sure.  

Above all, I have learned that I deeply love the man I married.  I am strong without him, and I am lost.  I am fine and I am utterly heartbroken.  

Come home soon, my love. 

The last two times I moved cross country, I moved to the soundtrack of "Follow Love" by FFH.

"I'm gonna miss the simple town full of memories
I'm gonna miss just hanging out with all my friends
The rainy days and summer nights
Skipping stones by the river side
But i know.. its time to go"

The lyrics speak of beautiful memories of a beautiful place alongside the knowledge that all good things must give way to the new.  This used to describe my life so well - with every move I made I discovered new life and new adventures and my life was filled with a good deal of fearless optimism.  

I loved Bellingham, WA, but I left with that same optimism - an optimism born of the wonderful experiences I had had my whole adolescence and early adulthood of steps toward independence that had defined me so sharply against the background of an idyllic upbringing.  I was the farm girl turned nomad - someone with a deep sense of home and belonging who had learned to live in the big world outside her farming community, and who had found a new sense of home in a new place.  

I would do it again.

And then I arrived in coastal Georgia for a new job.  For the first year, I loved my job, and I loved my friends, and that made my distaste for the weather and the culture tolerable.  I met a guy who I came to love, we got married.

The crazy thing is, the last two years have been hell.  My optimism has been stripped from me.  I find myself on the verge of being more alone than I have ever been, with all of my carefully built friendships becoming long distance with my friends' moving away.  My life is stressful and plagued by severe difficulties with family relationships.  My husband has been deployed most of the first year of our marriage and I struggle to survive emotionally in the face of long deployments with little communication.  My faith faltered in the past year and I made the difficult decision to leave my church to try to find God again.  I'm still living in the aftermath of that heart-breaking decision.  

My husband and I are moving at the end of this year to the Northeast.  Yet again, I am stepping into a complete unknown and a foreign culture and place.  This time, there is no cheery soundtrack and there is little nostalgia for a place that sometimes feels like it has stolen my joy and left me with loneliness, bitterness, and distrust instead.  

What do you do when life is so dark as to leave you with no cheery narrative with which to paint your life as one of constant progress, as a life with moderate challenges faced in wise and timely ways that result in personal growth and better the people around you?  What do you do when there seems to be no happy ending in sight, when you're not sure that moving is going to fix anything at all, when that narrative of positive thinking has become one of uncertainty and chaos?  My life is a broken mess right now, and there is seemingly no redemption.

I am reminded of one of my favorite Gungor songs, "Beautiful Things."  

"All this pain
I wonder if I’ll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found
Could a garden come up from this ground at all

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

All around
Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found in You."

Maybe the craziest thing is I don't see a whole lot of evidence of that hope springing up.  All I see right now is chaos.  And that's I guess where the faith comes in, trusting that all this chaos will make way for life and light one day.  Right now I don't see it.  Right now I see a place that has stolen my joy, made me paranoid and stressed and angry.  I see a place that has been a dead end for my career, a place that has too many biting insects in the summer, and no mountains.  

But maybe it's time to start looking for the hope springing up.  

Maybe it's time to be thankful for the blessings (and they are many) that have come from this place.  I have made several very close friends, I have married the love of my life.  These things have been plagued with hardship and pain, but good things in life will not always be free or easy.  Beautiful things sometimes come from scars, from pain, and from the death of dreams.  

I will hold onto hope that although this life is not what I expected or hoped, it will be far more than I could imagine.

i have decided to follow Jesus

When I was a very little girl, I made a decision that has shaped my life the most profoundly of any decision I have made.  I decided to follow Jesus.

The Jesus I followed then is the same Jesus I follow now, but I am a wholly different person today than I was 25 years ago when I decided to follow Jesus.  More-so even than being twenty-seven rather than two, I view the world through a profoundly different lens.  I'm politically liberal and theologically confused.  I'm a feminist.  I hold all of these identities rather open-handedly, I think.  It's hard to be too close-minded when you've spent the last five years switching world views.  I get what it is to be conservatively Christian and I can play that part when the situation calls for it.  I get what it is to be completely un-moored from my religion, wandering confused and alone, making decisions based on my rationality alone, because for the past year or so, I've been doing that like a pro.

A few months back, my husband and I sat in some dear friends' living room at the small group I was leading through my then-church.  I told them I was leaving their church, and that I was leaving because I had to follow Jesus.

I cannot tell you how much that phrase has haunted me.  What does that even mean, especially when I was the most confused I'd ever been, when God was the most silent He'd ever been, when my life was falling apart in ways it had never fallen apart?  What does that even mean, when so many of my dear friends are following Jesus, and they're following Jesus at that church?  What does it mean to be profoundly disillusioned because of the church I'm attending and yet know that where my spiritual life is located is squarely my fault?

I've been church-hopping since then, attending a few different churches, most of them more than once, but never allowing myself to become a regular.  I'm not ready for that yet.  There are times when I attend a church hopeful that my relationship with God is coming back, there are times (like this past Sunday) when I attend a church unsure whether I can continue to label myself a Christian.

I have been broken down by life.  I have become obsessed with belief, obsessed with political issues, obsessed with theology, and I have forgotten the God I claim to serve.

A week or two ago I resolved to pray more.  This was a pretty big thing for me, I haven't really prayed much lately, at least without a huge dose of cynicism mixed in.  What I can say though, is that when I prayed, it was largely surrounding huge amounts of fear that God would abandon me, that He had stopped caring about me, and that my political views and theological views were going to damn me to hell.  I begged Him to show up, but I wasn't ready for Him to actually show up.

And then all was lost.  Not because of any huge events, just because one day I ceased being able to cope.  And finally I told God I would go on a walk and not take my phone, that I would talk to Him, and that I was listening.

I cried as I walked.  I told God about how alone I felt, how scared I was, how much I didn't understand about the world.  I confessed how I'd been putting the responsibility for my spirituality on my husband's shoulders rather than leading and seeking God for myself (ironic given my Jesus-feminism beliefs).  I confessed how I'd been so angry at God for his silence, I confessed becoming obsessed over belief rather than a relationship with God himself.

And I began again.  I once again began to follow Jesus.  I had never turned back, but I had certainly dug in my heels a little bit.

I have resolved to pray without ceasing.  I want to think of God throughout the day, not only at the day's end or when things are falling apart, but all the time.  I want to go to God with my fears and sadness and loneliness. I want to seek Him first in all things.

Today I received an email from my husband, and he has been realizing many of the same things I have, but he realized them without having yet received the email in which I explained what I had realized.

I'm a believer again.  I believe in the power of prayer (you wouldn't have caught me saying that at any point throughout the past year).  I believe that God cares, that He's here.  I haven't believed that - truly believed that - in far longer than I wish to admit.

I have resolved to follow Jesus, not a political or theological creed.

I have my beliefs about our country and about the social and political issues that plague our country, and I have resolved to hold those beliefs with an open hand.  They are certainly things I believe, but they are certainly not what defines me (or at least what should define me).  I want to be defined by my relationship with the God who I pledged to follow as a toddler.

I have resolved to follow Jesus, no turning back.

In retrospect, that announcement at small group about leaving our church was more true than I understood.  God has revealed so much to me because I stepped out in some sort of broken faith and said, "I care more about following You, I care more about picking up the pieces of my shattered faith than I do about pleasing people."

I have been broken down and I have gained some perspective and I have prayed and wept, and God has shown up.

I'm so thankful.

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You realize things are going badly when you no longer remember how to pray, when you no longer sing the songs in church with interest or sometimes even sincerity.  You know that things have gone wrong when you leave church discouraged and fighting for faith, when your struggle to believe in God becomes more apparent with each passing week, and is particularly obvious in those lonely hours after leaving the church building.

And so you leave church.  You don't leave church because you're done with God, you leave church because you are absolutely desperate to find him.  There is so much to work through, and you do the hard work of processing your disappointments and wounds as well as the things that were good about that season, about that group of people, about that place.  You're trying to rediscover God, rediscover prayer, rediscover what you really believe when the doors close and the lights go out and you're by yourself.

At the core, you never lost your faith.  You just lost faith in those who call themselves His people.

And it's in those hopeful moments after you begin once again to pray, after you begin to re-imagine, after you begin to truly allow yourself the grace to ask the questions and come to new answers that you realize yet again and with a new perspective just how bad things were.

They weren't bad, but you certainly were bad with them.  

You realize that you spent most of the past years fighting an intellectual battle rather than doing anything.  You realize that it was more important for them to defend marriage between one man and one woman than it was to fight systemic injustice, racism, poverty in this nation.  You realize that in remaining among them all your energy was spent fighting this, if only in your head.  You realize how not okay you are with this.  You realize that the persecution complex was driving you away from church and ultimately God, not simply because it was annoying or because you didn't agree with it, but because it was a fundamentally different way of looking at the world, a way that says "my political views are the only ones that matter and this nation is only free if it leaves me free to press my views onto others who do not claim the name of God."  You realize that even now as you write you're still fighting those intellectual battles, still trying to defend your basic instinct that to clothe the naked and feed the hungry is so much more important than defending marriage.  

You realize when you listen to sermons online that you love Jesus more than ever.  You realize that you stopped praying and you stopped believing but that you never really stopped hoping.  You realize that God is more near than ever, he has just changed his way of being near.  You realize that he's taken his hand off the bike and is letting you ride without the training wheels and that maybe, just maybe there is freedom and hope on the other side of this divide.

You realize that you may not understand how God works in the world, that you may not have the correct views, the most godly views, and that none of that matters.  

God's got you.  He's guiding you.

You gotta stop fighting it, daughter, you gotta stop fighting.

Sanctification is happening.  It's messy and it's not always uphill.  But it will come around in waves, and it will make you new.

"stories, we've got 'em"

Eventually you hit rock bottom.

You're driving to the river boardwalk after sunset, tears blinding your vision and sobs wracking your entire body.  "Beautiful Things" by Gungor is playing and you hear more about "all this pain" than you do about the "beautiful things."  You sob and pray, asking God if He'll come if you call.  If maybe this one time things could be different.

And you know that you're just a mess.  Bogged down in self-pity, there isn't much about you to deserve any true sympathy.  You've created this mess in your selfishness and bitterness and aloofness.  You deserve every bit of the pain, every single tear that falls could have been avoided had you been better.

You wish there was someone, anyone left.  Your mind goes through all the people in your life that care - there are so many - and somehow all of them with all of their selfless love and support of you through this entire mess you've made of your life are not nearly enough.  You need someone older and wiser, someone to mentor you, someone to tell you how it is, to tell you what to do, who will walk with you.  You don't know anymore.  You need someone that isn't moving away next month, someone who isn't going to leave no matter how much you scorn them.  You need a rescue and there doesn't seem to be one coming.

So you keep driving, you keep crying.

You reach the river, pull into the parking spot next to an old sketchy van with people sitting inside.  You're still sobbing, and are grateful for the cover of darkness.  You walk to the wilderness spot, the place where he proposed, the place where you've cried so many times before, the place where so much joy and so much pain has been.  Those benches that have seen it all.

And you sob.  You are coming to terms with how much of a mess you are, how much there isn't a solution.  How selfish you've been, how prideful, how haughty.  How even in all your rightness, you were always, always wrong in some way.

Always wrong.

He's not here.  He won't be here for months.  You're on your own, and this is only the beginning.  Next month they all leave.  You don't know how to follow God anymore - you follow Him still, but it's probably the most broken of followings of your life.  Always before there were answers.  Now there are few, except the haunting reminder of your selfishness, of your pride, of your bitterness.

The sobs subside, leaving as suddenly as they came.

There isn't ever a voice.

Eventually that's okay.

For today, you will keep on.

On honesty

Somewhere along the road a mile or two back I lost my way.  They all have their scape goats, their explanations, their reassurances, or sometimes even their apathetic ignorance.  

I know the truth, or at least the bits and pieces that come to me through the fog of loneliness and unbelonging and self pity.  

I lost my ability to trust God.  

The most shameful part is maybe that it happened with no real reason, just evolved out of the aftermath of a couple moves across the country.  

As I moved and attempted to fit into new cultures, I slipped off of the sure foundation of faith and family and heritage and belonging.  I floated adrift, free to be who I wish to be with nobody to see or care.  My faith shifted, and I asked more questions than I had ever asked before.  Everything was up for grabs.  

And then the last year happened, a year of the highest highs and the lowest lows of my life.  I got married to my wonderful husband who has spent more time away than here in the first year of our marriage.  I struggled to belong in a church that had always been more his than mine.  I struggled to find my way through the pain of broken familial relationships and the strains that put on our marriage.  I struggled to hold onto piety and even faith in a God who was so silent when I desperately cried out to him again and again during one of the darkest weeks of my life.  

One thing led to another and I was making the painful decision to begin again, even with only six months left here.  I couldn't bear to be simply "Justin's wife," and hear empty offers of help should I "ever need it."  

I needed help long ago and help simply wasn't there.

I prayed and prayed and begged and begged and God was (and is) largely silent.  They all said "God would have me do this" and "God would have me do that" and I didn't believe them.  Not a bit.  Especially when it had to do with dating and breaking up.  Especially then.  

It is hard to trust the God of a people from whom I could not feel more estranged.  

~~~

I have been praying more recently.  This past Sunday I drove an hour to get to church... This farm girl needs an urban setting, I guess.  I consider myself fairly desperate for God at this juncture.  Desperate for hope, more accurately.  What, after all, does "desperate for God" even mean?  I am desperate for reconciliation, desperate for justice, desperate for answers, desperate for peace, desperate for faith.  I have to believe God is the source of those things.  I have to.  But as I drove, my prayer was more simple.  I prayed that God would show up at church. 

I need him.  I am so aware of it, and so unaware of how to find him.  Because the darkness is still here.    It keeps coming back.  It won't let up for more than a day.  

If God can be said to be present in this world, he had to have been present in that movie theatre church on Sunday morning.  He had to be present in the raw honesty of the pastor, in the vulnerability displayed when we shared around our tables with perfect strangers why we were in need of God this past week.  I will cling to that.  For that hour and a half I wasn't alone.  I was among family and they cared though they were perfect strangers.  For a few hours that evening God was there when I fellowshipped with some of my closest friends in my town, when they accepted me among them even after I left their church.  

He is here among us as we serve and love one another.  And he hasn't left us alone, He sent a Helper. I will cling to that when the body of Christ is absent.  He is here.  I will trust that even when I have no faith, even when the darkness keeps coming back, even when I feel alone.  I will believe.  

On being in hiding

I think maybe it hit me last night, as I socialized with people in real life for the first time in a long time.  I smiled and joked and sometimes even said a few brutally honest words about my desperation to leave this region. But for the most part, I hid behind a polite smile and pretended that my world continues revolving around its old axis: piety and church involvement.  But that all obscures the reality: my world has fallen apart. 

I am tired and sad and so very lonely.  I am trapped and free all at the same time.  I can't bear the people with whom I once surrounded myself and I miss them desperately all at the same time.

They say you can't walk the Christian journey alone. They are so right. 

Maybe it happened when she who is supposed to represent love told my husband and I to "have a nice life." Maybe it happened when I sat through yet another communion service alone.  

But maybe it was the more continual reminders week after week that you can "know" people and not truly be known or know at all.  Familiar faces often produce the most aching of all loneliness.  But suddenly those people who have constituted my world here in the South were all gone.  Moving away, drifting away, running away.  No more Saturday night church, no more game night get togethers, no more casual evenings eating out.  Fragmentation and the continual comings and goings of life in a military town took their terrible toll. Meanwhile those with roots here treated me as an outsider, because that is what I am here.

That's all I have wanted to be.

And this is where the story gets complicated. How can I expect them to love me when I hold myself at a distance? How can I do anything but when my very foundation is built on a different material?  I struggle to hide what makes me me, and it tears me apart from the inside out until one day my husband is deployed, my friends are all gone or in the process of checking out, and I am utterly isolated.  

It isn't a pity party, and yet that is exactly what it is.  Exactly.  

It is hard these days to summon the energy to try again.  I want so desperately to sign up for a small group at my new church, but I am terrified.  Terrified that who I am with all my craziness isn't enough, that I will destroy more than I build.  

And so I hide.  I hide away where no one can find me, where I can't hurt them, where they can't hurt me, and I desperately pray that God will show me how to find the light again.