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.