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.

-untitled-

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.

the stopping

I don't typically curse, but as I drove across town yesterday, I let it all loose.  It didn't make anything better, really, but it was sort of freeing to acknowledge that words are just words and sometimes strong ones are the only ones left.  I cursed my life and the corners into which I have backed myself.  I cursed the Lack of Belonging, I cursed All of the Church People with All of the Answers.  I cursed the fact that there is one person currently in this town who somewhat gets it and we orbit in separate circles.  Well, we orbited.

I'm about to stop orbiting entirely.

I came to a breaking point yesterday, or rather a series of breaking points in the last week, and I can't do this anymore.  I do not belong here, and it's time to stop trying.

There is no back up plan except my cozy apartment, a phone, and a reading list.  There is no one coming alongside, no hand to hold in this journey.  My husband is deployed and so I'm left with earbuds and a good playlist, with a barking, whining, bone-chewing puppy, and with the desperate hope that maybe God is here.

No, I'm not leaving my church, and, no I'm not quitting any of the ministries in which I'm involved.  God has me here, and curse the consequences, I will persevere.

But I'm done with crowds for the sake of crowds, I'm done with hanging out with people to assuage the loneliness.  I'm done with all of the ganging up, all of the "us-against-everyone-else"mentality.  I'm done with needing to be understood by anyone.  I'm done.

Curse it all, I'm done.

I won't be pulled along because I'm weak-willed.  I will come alongside because God is my strength.  I will not believe things because "that's what we're supposed to believe or maybe we're not really believers."  I will believe things because I am compelled to believe them.

Lord, have mercy.

for the melancholy days

Today was saturated with melancholy.  It drenched me as I dreamed dreams of not belonging, it greeted me in the tossing and turning in the minutes before my alarm sounded, it followed me like a ghost through my work day of falsely cheery greetings and lack-luster customer service, and when I arrived at the assisted living center to play music for my elderly friends, it gave me a far-away look and a penchant for haunting hymns.

Abide with me

Fast falls the evening tide

The darkness deepens

Lord, with me abide.

And so it went.

Today I feel the desert wandering more acutely than most days.  Today I feel the need to quit everything "productive" I'm doing in my life and go off into an obscurity that maybe, just maybe, will yield the presence of God.

~~~

The hymn book from which I play at the assisted living is the hymn book of my youth.  This has always been a nostalgic thing for me, something that conjures up happy memories of choir like voices uniting in praise to God in four-part harmony.  But tonight it was a double-edged sword.  Tonight the hymns of my youth were a constant reminder of the fragility of that institution which I thought was so sure.

I think up until recently I didn't let my home church's current troubles affect me on a personal level.  I think I thought they'd figure it out, that they'd come to the light, that they'd just magically get over it.  After all, that church was my rock growing up.  It was the source of my spiritual education, my discipleship, my social life, my...well, it was pretty much everything.  If they can't get it together, no one can.

Of course, confidence in human institutions is always a bad plan.

~~~

I don't always deal with change well.  If I'm not at the helm of the change, I feel the lack of control very acutely.  My small group has changed dramatically in the last few weeks.  From a small group of people I trusted discussing the Bible together to a large combined group of opinionated people, things have changed, even if only temporarily.

The center of gravity has shifted, and we're now talking in certainties.  I can speak that language well, and last night I gave it my everything.  The topic was safe, so we spoke in faith and certainty.  Next week isn't so safe, and I likely won't be talking.  As that last vestige of "maybe I can be real with someone here" falls away, I'm reminded yet again that God must be my everything.

Even in the questioning, He has proven himself faithful.  Even as all else fails, He is good.

~~~

I wandered through the open field in the park across from my apartment complex tonight.  The stars were brilliant, and I aimlessly wandered, soaking in the splendid isolation.  I am alone, and it's disconcerting at times, but it is also beautiful in its way.  As I drift outside of the camp of belief in which I have spent my whole life to this point, as I explore the furthest reaches of my faith, I am increasingly confident that God is with me. I don't know where it is all leading, and I know I'm so far off on so many things.  But God is here.  He's distant and unreachable, and yet He's all around me.  He's just beyond the fabric of this reality,

Tonight I stared up at the stars in frustration with a God who I cannot see or touch.  I asked him where He was.  And this song began playing in my earbuds (Jenn Johnson):

I am the Lord your God

I go before you now

I stand beside you

And I'm all around you

Though you feel I'm far away

I am closer than your breath

And I am with you

More than you know

Even if it wasn't God talking to me, it was certainly a good reminder of the faith that I hold in an invisible God.

To that I'll cling, no matter what.

~~~

in this season

I sat among those I love most here in this town tonight and felt the distance grow, the unrelenting and growing knowledge that I have never fit here, that I will never fit - that one day I must depart.  I even added my voice to the certainties, to the answers.  When I should have remained silent, I spoke, when I should have spoken I remained silent.  But mostly I talked needlessly.  The room was full of people with the answers, and as I added my voice to that number, I was struck by how little I really wanted to be talking.  How little I want the answers.

Sometimes I am struck with the intense need to walk away from it all for a season, to abandon others' expectations and the constant reminders that I'm the skeptic, the doubter.  There are increasingly common moments when the conversation slides so entirely out of the realm of my control, and increasingly common moments when the desire to wrest it back fades almost entirely.  This season of my life, this lonely time, this solitary time - this is a time for introspection, a time for single-minded pursuit of God, and a time for the abandonment of all the things that would slow me down from that.

I have little left these days.  With my husband's departure came the removal of the last bit of security I had.  I was thrown out into the wilderness, and -oddly enough- I find myself thriving there.  I find myself wanting less and less to waste the time in this wilderness.  I want to enjoy every moment of the questions, of the searching.  I want to throw myself wholeheartedly into this pursuit of God.

He will be found.

I wonder, though, where I'll find Him.

Curse the answers.  Curse the textbooks and the systematic theologies.  Curse the Sunday School questions and their corresponding answers.  Curse our cornering of God and our small-minded conceptions of who He is.  Curse it all.

I'm reading.  I'm asking all of the wrong questions and finding all of the wrong answers.

And God is working.

Of that I am sure.

For the first time ever, I'm no longer confident that my presence here is fruitful in the least.

I might disappear into the wilderness.

a desperate whisper into a raging storm

~For my church family in South Dakota~

Everything has fallen apart, at least for those dearest to me.  I watch from afar as that which is most dear to my memories of my childhood crumbles into so many pieces.  I haven't lived it, and so I find myself stricken with a painful neutrality, a neutrality that demands my sorrow at the decisions made by each of those living the reality.  I will be going home in December to a world I won't recognize.

We were so strong, why would we let it fall apart?  Why would our issues with one man tear an entire assembly in two?  Why would he allow it?  Why would we allow it?  What does all of it mean, anyway?  Does one mistake, one sin, disqualify my entire youth?  Is an entire lifetime of biblical and spiritual training now meaningless?  Were our shortcomings truly enough to result in this chaos?  Were we following God at all?

As all falls away, I am left with an unshakable confidence.  Although there are no answers about the frailty of my childhood church family, although the institution is rent asunder, although it seems hopeless, still there is God.

Follow Him, my sisters and brothers.  Remember that your identity is found, not in an institution that seemed unshakable, but in an unshakable God.  Your church is not your foundation, and to the degree to which it was mine, God forgive me.  God forgive our pride and our superiority complex.  God forgive our hoard mentality, our "with us or against us" mindset.

We weren't Right.  We weren't the only Good ones, the only True ones.  We weren't good or true at all.  We didn't have it all figured out, our piety was so meaningless.  All of our service, all of our beautiful singing, all of our dependable membership, all of our tradition in an age of dying traditions, all of it was meaningless.  It has fallen into chaos in an instant.  With a terrifying power, one domino fells them all.

And now, for so many Dear Ones, it is gone.  In the void of institution, there is only wilderness wanderings, only painful exiles, only wondering where God has gone.

He's among you.  Don't forget it, please don't forget it.  Pursue Him and He will be found.  Draw near to Him and He will draw near to you.  Don't ever forget those things you learned in the sunny days of unshakable faith in God and one another; never forget that God is merciful, that God has not abandoned you.

And don't forget each other.  Don't forget that this is so complex, and that everyone experiences life from a different perspective.  Don't forget that sanctification is always a process, that just as you have not arrived, neither have those whom you always thought infallible.  Please don't allow hate and bitterness in.  Please don't divide into factions.  You can choose your own path, and have great reasons for it, but please don't hate those who cannot travel your path, please don't hate each other.  As much as my voice is a whisper into a raging storm, I beg you to sacrifice everything for unity, beloved.  Not necessarily unity in the choices you make, but unity in spirit.  Never forsake meeting together, never forsake praying for one another.  Love one another.  In the painful messiness of choosing to pursue relationships at all costs with those who have chosen another way, you will find restoration.

And when all falls apart, when there is nothing left, remember this: In death, we find resurrection.  Above all, don't forget this.

He's making all things new, brothers and sisters.  Don't despair.

i am a stumbling Jesus-follower

My Twitter profile gives me 150 characters to describe myself - a nearly impossible task.  I sat down tonight to revise my self-description (it doesn't get much more naval-gaze-y than that), and I knew with everything in me that although there is no one with whom I would rather identify than Jesus Christ, I also would be dishonest to claim his Name in any confident way.

I described myself as "a stumbling Jesus-follower."

That's what I am - kicking and screaming, yes.

~~~

I drove to meet an acquaintance for dinner tonight.  I have hung out with her and her husband all of one time.  I barely know her.  As I drove, I contemplated how I would go about describing myself to her.  I was overcome by emotion, because I can never be what these people need me to be.  Certainty, confidence, boldness, these are things not mine in all fullness.

I want those things so desperately, and they're no where to be found.

Kicking and screaming, I'm learning to embrace the ambiguity that has come to characterize my life.

~~~

I married an evangelical in the full sense of the word.  A verse-memorizing, Bible-donating, small-group leading man who is pretty much a word-for-word description of who high school me wanted to marry.  (Except that he can't sing.)  Through my relationship with him, I have learned that my doubts do not automatically exclude me from the community of believers.  If he can accept my questions, if he can marry my questions, maybe, just maybe, there's hope for me.  Maybe I'm not as alone as the voices whisper to me on the darker nights.  Maybe I'm not crazy.  

~~~

I'll never belong in the South.  The heat and humidity, the trees, the lack of topographical variance: all of this means that adjusting is extremely difficult.  I fell in love with a place, and this place will never be that place.

In the same way, I'll never belong in evangelical Christianity, at least not the strain in which I currently find myself.

And no, I have no intentions of leaving my church.  I wouldn't change where I am for all of the world.  In this situation, I have found love - a love individuals show toward other individuals, and a love for God that is admirable and speaks of God's presence among us.

After all, God refuses to be labeled, He refuses to be boxed in.  He just Is.

~~~

I don't know anymore.  I don't know what on earth kind of church with what on earth kind of members and what on earth kind of leadership I was raised in.  I cannot comprehend the situation in which my home church finds itself, ripped apart at the very seams, with seemingly nothing left.  I have no blame for any of them, I have no opinion in the matter.  But I cannot help but wonder.

Who were we following?  What were we following?  Or rather, who and what was I following?  Taking apart the pieces of my childhood and upbringing, I find myself more confused than clear.  I was taught that we believed All of the Correct Things.

Clearly we didn't.

No one does.

And if we didn't believe All of the Correct Things, was any of it correct?

What, anyway, is this obsession with belief?

These days, I'm equally pulled by theology and practice.  Inertia keeps me from following both poles whole-heartedly, but I am equally disturbed by the amount of things that I have no earthly idea about and convinced that all of the correct opinions about all of the theology still means nothing without action.

And yet, I'd be foolish and naive to assume that belief does not inform action (and action likewise informs belief).  If I believe, for example, I'm going to another place called Heaven when I die and that one day this earth will be destroyed, that will make a difference as to my approach to life.  Sometimes my actions are informed by beliefs I don't even realize I have.

...and so it goes...

~~~

I'm following Jesus with everything I have, but I'm stumbling down this winding road.  There's no intellectual or even emotional certainty for me, only a relationship with a God who has turned my world upside down.  I love Him, but I know so little about Him.  I love Him, but my service for Him is so weak and betrays the weakness of my love more often than it does its strength.

I'm a mess.

Gracious Lord, have mercy.

~~~

I have decided to follow Jesus,
I have decided to follow Jesus,
I have decided to follow Jesus,
No turning back, 
No turning back.

even my life

The pain is taking me under again.  I'm finding myself wondering how I'll make it through this week and do anything productive.  I'm feeling tempted to just quit my jobs and hunker down and somehow survive.  I need time to cry & breathe, to gather the shattered pieces of my heart together and somehow be strong for him.

***

I'm not strong.  My bravado was the bravado of someone who'd never really suffered.  All those hard things I thought I'd gone through?  Not really hard.  And now I find myself faced with a reality that thousands of other spouses face all the time and I don't have any idea how to make it through.

He's everything to me, and yet he's ultimately not mine.  In not very long I have to somehow let him go and still manage to survive.  Tonight I don't know how to do that.  I don't know how to paste on the smile, say "see you later," and carry on with my life.  I don't know how I will get up, go to work, or even how I'll go grocery shopping.  I just know that everything hurts right now.  Right now my heart is broken in a way it's never been broken before.  I know this makes me the weakest, the lamest.  He's not dying.  He'll be back.  He loves me desperately.

***

This is the trial that will prove what I'm made of.  If I allow it to do its work, if I face the pain, if I face it head on, I believe that God will make me new.  Up to this point in my life, I've always had my own strength to rely on.  I've always been able to cope, always been able to survive.  I've had "tough" things happen, but they were never like this.  Now the reality is exposed.  I don't have it in me to face this.  I just don't.  People tell me I'm strong, and they're so wrong.  I'm not strong at all.

I'm completely and utterly broken.  At this point, I don't have any idea how I'll survive.  Lord, have mercy, I don't have it in me.

Lord, have mercy.

***

When I pray, I'm no longer praying for the pain to go away.  It may be sick, but I need this pain like I've maybe never needed anything before.  As hard as it is, as much as I can't bear it, I have for maybe the first time in my life truly lost myself.  I want to follow Christ wholly, and up til now I've not ever been able to jump fully into his arms & let him carry me.  I've always walked alongside him as a stubborn child refusing to admit that I can't do it.

And now I can't do it.  There's no part of me that's able to say goodbye to the man who completes me.  There's no part of me that's able to face that pain without breaking down entirely.  God, have mercy, I need You.  Break me down further if that's what is necessary for Your will to prevail.  Even now I feel my rugged persistence coming back, as the tears dry up, I am tempted to think I can maybe do this on my own.

Remind me to come to You for everything.

Don't let me fall, Father.  Take these things I have always believed about You and make them real in my life.  I know it won't be easy, but I want to follow You more than anything else in this world.

Ultimately, more than my relationship with Justin, more than my mental sanity, more than anything in this world, I want You.  Teach me to despise even my own life.

Even my life.

shattered poetry

Just when I had thought my last tear was finally spent
Just when I thought maybe I was strong
Reality shatters all my defenses
Love & loss
Sorrowful joy
Reunions and goodbyes
The not knowing how I can survive
Not knowing how to be strong
The knowing that I need to be.

God, be my strength, my portion, my endurance.
Father, be my Rock, my shelter.

I can't carry on
So carry me.
Carry me.
Please carry me.

The tears fall unstopped,
I long since became powerless against gravity.
Pooling and spilling down.
I'm weak more often than strong,
Shattered more often than complete.

Nothing left.
So find me here.
Find me here.
Please find me.

I'm broken at your feet, Daddy,
in a way I've never been broken before.
Gone are my defenses,
gone is my strength.
Gone is my emotional health,
my coping mechanisms.

I'm shattered,
I'm broken,
I'm unable to carry on,
unable to see the light.

I need you.

Give me purpose in this season.
Give me joy in the sorrow.
Please don't take the sorrow because the sorrow is a reminder of love.

Each of these tears are precious,
They pull my heart out with each drop,
but they remind me that the love I have has meaning.

I would change these circumstances,
but if I did, I wouldn't know the strength of this love,
and so
I wouldn't change a thing.

Even in the darkness,
I wouldn't change a thing.

when it all falls away

I don't know how to write this with grace or with tact; I don't know how to put into words the hard truth.  These people are beautiful, this community we have is beautiful, the souls that are connected to me are beautiful.  Each of them in their own ways, each of them with their own stories.  Wrong has been done here, but so much right just is.

And yet, I don't belong here.  I never have, really.  There have been brief moments when what existed was beautiful and I had a place in it all, but generally this has not been the case.  Each to its season, I've been the new girl, the feminist, the old one, the leader, the newlywed.  And now it has all fallen away.  Everyone surrounding me is beautiful, and yet, the people who made my life beautiful here are gone.  Some have moved, some are gone for a season, others have fallen away of their own choosing.

Tonight I felt the wreckage of what once was, what never really was anyway.  I felt the weight of the not-belonging, the heaviness of knowing that I don't fit, that however much I may be wanted, however much I may be loved, however much I may want to fit, I just don't.  I'm older than them, I'm different, I'm hopelessly academic and out of place in this world of submarines and not-very-tasteful jokes and banding together against the world as if to prove that in so doing we're right.

I'm alone here.  My husband is gone on deployment and that leaves me with the stark reality of my situation.  There is nothing.  There is no one.  Some care, some reach out, some love me, and I'm still alone.

She left me behind, she knows, and yet the tide has shifted and it's pulling us irrevocably apart.  Fateful or fatalistic, I'm not sure which.  He's deeply racist and doesn't know it and it tears at the fabric of everything without anyone even sensing it.  She's hopelessly young, just beginning and full of promise, yet for me impossible to relate to on a deep level.  Each of these people are my friends, my brothers, my sisters.  And yet, I'm alone.

There has to be more to life than this.

Has to be.

You Are Not Alone

My Daughter,

I know that life has never felt worse.
You are not alone.

I know you feel completely abandoned.
You are not alone.

I know about all the tears that fall.
You are not alone.

Like Hagar in the wilderness,
You are not alone.

Like Joseph in the den of lions,
You are not alone.

Like the thief on the cross,
You are not alone.

Like the woman who touched my garments in desperate search of healing,
You are not alone.

I am the God who sees.
I am the God who heals.
I am the God who reconciles.
I am the God who blesses.

My daughter, you are not alone.
Even when all the lights go out, when no one sees your pain,
I see you.

You are not alone.

When you cried yourself to sleep,
I was there.
You are not alone.

When you for the first time in years just wanted to go home,
I was there.
You are not alone.

When life was too much,
I was there.
You are not alone.

Take heart,
I see you.
I love you.
You are not alone.

When all else fades,
I AM.

on the hope beyond institutions

Growing up, I knew, as surely as the sun rises, that my church was the best church in town.  Just like my high school football team was the only team worth rooting for, my church was the only one with good doctrine and sound teaching.  We believed the right things.  We taught the right things.  We were right.  Even today if I went home to visit, I'd have a hard time overcoming my prejudices and stepping foot in another church in town.  After all, they're all dead churches in my mind.  Or at least inferior.

And now, from the sound of it, my church is dying.

I'm not there, so I watch helplessly from the sidelines as it all crumbles around them.  I watch as person after person makes the tough decision to leave, to maybe never return.  My heart is broken.  If I ever go home to visit, I might not be going back to the same church.  Those people who were my world growing up have disintegrated.  It seems that they're fractured from within, even if they still are cordial on the surface.

I'm not sure what to make of it all.  I am not there, and I don't know who's right and who's wrong.  And it really doesn't matter to me.  None of it matters.

I want them to love each other.  I want them to not forget the years, the decades, the lifetimes of investment in each other's lives.  I want them to stick together, even if it's messy, even if it breaks hearts.  I want them to look to Jesus.

But mostly, I want them to remember that when the dust settles, when the flames burn down, when everything is lost or everything is found, that then, God will still be found.  God is above and beyond institutions.  God doesn't need Brooklyn to reach that community.  God doesn't need that building or its rich heritage of faith.  God doesn't need its carefully written by-laws or its place within the denomination as a whole.  God doesn't need its tradition of weekly Sunday School, even in an age where most churches have abandoned such an antiquated practice.  God doesn't need a Bible-believing-and-preaching pastor, he doesn't need a faithful elder and deacon board.  He doesn't need the children's ministry or the missions fund.  And he certainly doesn't need vacation bible school.

God will be faithful regardless of the outcome for this particular institution.

I am praying, though, for reconciliation, for unity of the true body of Christ.  The body of Christ goes so far beyond the church walls, and so I pray for my church family to pray together, to eat together, to do life together.  I pray for an awakening of community, of love.  I pray for hearts that draw near to the Father for every breath.  I pray for hearts that stop striving after earthly justice and that strive after Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ will judge; His purposes will prevail.  I pray that leaders will step out and up.  I pray for women and for men to prophetically speak into this situation, not about institutions or policies, but about Jesus and His mission.  I pray for a re-awakening, for a transformation.  I pray for a sifting, for a harvest.  I pray for revival in the hearts of the people I love.  I pray for peace for them, for hope.  I pray for soft hearts and quick feet.  I pray for hands that reach out to unite.

I am thankful for the way that God used that church, in all of its imperfection, to mold me into the person I am today.  I am thankful for its time-honored traditions, for its faithfulness to teach from the Word.  I am thankful for the people whose parents, grandparents, even great-grandparents were all raised in that church.  I am thankful for the faithfulness and consistency of the people I grew up with.  I am so thankful for it all.  My church wasn't perfect, that is becoming more clear to me with every year I spend separated from it all.  No church is.

I pray that this trial will refine the people I love most.  I pray that God's purposes will prevail.  I pray for the Gospel to extend far beyond that church building's four walls.

Look to Him, my brothers and sisters.  He is near.

for the absence of writing

My blog is named "The Mundane Made Beautiful,"  and I've been writing here for years.  This blog has served several purposes, but for the most part it was either me figuring out life, me making the mundane things in life beautiful.

In the wake of my recent nuptials, I find myself with little to say to the world.  It's as if my need to process my world through writing is gone.  My life is mundane, and it is beautiful, and all of that is simultaneously not worth sharing and worthy of not sharing.

I think it's why my Facebook presence has subtly shifted, as well.  I post pictures of my new life every once in a while, I share things once in a while, I try to give things away, I talk about my dog.  But all of it is less than it once was.  It's less often, and it's less of who I actually am.

I just don't need the Internet in the ways I once did.

My life isn't perfect.  Parts of it really suck.  I'm processing so much, dealing with so much.

But I'm no longer alone, and that partnership saves me of the need of proving myself to the world, of baring my soul to the world.  I'm free to just be me now.

Maybe some day I'll come back to writing.  Maybe some day I'll share stories about the married life, maybe (heaven forbid) I'll become a mommy blogger.

But, in any case,
Goodbye for now.

for God's absence

I'm drowning in a sea of confusion, and God is so very silent.  I'm lost in a maze of perspectives, and God is in every path and in not a one all at the same time.  I'm disoriented and increasingly frantic and there's no one coming to my rescue.  I'm stuck in the slow sadness, the shattering silence, the sneaking suspicion that not all is as it appears.

I long for those idyllic days of Bible verses and Bible answers.  I long for simplicity and camaraderie.  I long for passionate outspokenness and for the euphoria of corporate worship.  Those days are gone, replaced by doubt, uncertainty, even cynicism and distrust.  I am not the person I once was.  She disappeared in the wide sea of liberal arts education and real life and was replaced by this monster, this girl who cannot accept a single thing you say without scrutiny, by this girl who will always choose questions over answers, by this girl consumed by the "what ifs?"

I've isolated myself in this new life of mine.  I've told myself I'm not worthy of leading Bible studies, not fit to mentor others.  I've remained silent when I should have spoken, I've edited myself to the point of feeling somehow swindled into a new opinion I never held, I've cried.

I cried this morning in church.  It wasn't a euphoric crying.  It was a cry of despair.

God, you're so absent.  I need you to figure this mess out for me.  How do you work in the world?  Where are you?  What would you have from me?  How should I follow You?  

The people who attend my church view the world so differently than me.  It's so nice in some ways, iron sharpening iron or whatever.  In other ways, it threatens to drive me over the brink of insanity.  In a world where Scripture answers every question we could have about the world, there is no room for doubt.  There is no room for questioning the entire framework.

There is no room for me.

I'm struggling to breathe, struggling to find space to occupy in this reality of mine, this reality where life is full of questions, where the Bible tells us about God and how He works in this world.  I am struggling to hang onto my faith in an environment which constantly shouts at me that there is only one way.  I'm struggling to have faith in a seemingly absent God among a people for whom God is consistently and tangibly present.

I remember those days.  I remember a time when faith was simple, when I had a Bible verse for everything, a rebuttal for every objection.  I remember the childlike joy I found in being in His presence.  Those days were good.

I long for those days, even as I know those days are over for me.

I'm stumbling along, trying to find my way.  I won't be finding it, at least not more than the next pace or two.  But I know the One who leads me, and at the end of each long day, that will be the hope to which I cling.

I believe in God,

the Father almighty,

Creator of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died and was buried;

he descended into hell;

on the third day he rose again from the dead;

he ascended into heaven,

and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;

from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic Church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and life everlasting. Amen.

for the desperate hope that there might be a light in the darkness

I've descended into a dark pit and there is no escaping.  I've tried to save the world, I've tried to be strong and brave, I've thrown up a fearless front.  And now, all the walls are down.  I'm exposed and bleeding,  I have nothing left.  The depression is starting to set in, and I'm wondering how on earth I'm supposed to have one of the happiest days of my life in just twenty-seven days.  How can such joy mingle with such sorrow?

I've failed.  I've failed people around me left and right and I've failed God.  I have nothing to offer him, no bravery, no righteousness, only my skewed pursuit of "justice."  In this world where I was always right and everyone else was always wrong, I left no room for God's way.  I have pushed Him aside, invoking his name out of a need for self-justification and neglecting entirely any real pursuit of Him.

My walls were sky high; no one was getting in.  They were all the enemy, none could be trusted.  I was alone in my fortress as the walls crumbled from the inside out, fell away, and revealed me curled up in the fetal position.  ...To think I pretended to be strong.

I'm alone now.  Some of it is the result of the huge differences between me and the people in this town.  Some of it is the result of poor friend selection.  I find myself now with  no one here on whom I can rely besides my fiance.

I'm alone now.  And God reaches down and reminds me that in my brokenness He can most easily work.  My walls have fallen, and God forgive me, I need Him to teach me how to live unafraid.  I need Him to teach me how to follow Him.  I need Him to teach me how to exist in a world without walls, a world where not everyone is the enemy.

That's in my brave moments.  In my not-so-brave moments I struggle to hold onto the hope that God can redeem my mistakes for His Kingdom.  I struggle to comprehend how there can be a light at the end of this seemingly endless tunnel.  I grope along the walls, hoping against hope that the sunlight will break through, and yet knowing that it will not.

Consequences are painful.

And yet I have a desperate optimism that this can't be all there is, that there has to be joy and peace ahead, maybe even a friend.  There are certainly opportunities for me to reach out for others who feel alone, and God forgive me for becoming so insular that I missed those opportunities.  God forgive me for it all.  And God help me.  God show me the way.  God be my rescue.