creative acts, audaciously arranging the Light, into
words that move stone mountains,
dances that soar, minds transformed,
images breaking hearts open crushing the death within,
chords shifting hardened souls with their tender tones.
all beings,
women and men in ensemble.
from verses and rhythms heard, ordinary humans all
flinging down pigment, colorful stains;
bent with sacrifice and unrealized possibility.
God spoke and said: Own your Light
blazing and luminous.
Be the light
on canvas, stage, page, seen and heard.
And God sang beside and in human beings
celebrating
the Light in one another.
Toiling in separateness and isolation, breaking
under the weight of creating.
See and hear one another.
Turn, ask, and take heartache’s sting.
Revel in one another’s triumphs.
be
the
Light
in the dark places.
All beings,
Women and men in ensemble
held one another up.
And God was pleased.
written for Blackhawk ChurchPulse conference, March, 2014.
Pulse: connecting arts to the heart of God
Pulse is a one day arts and worship conference designed to help connect a passion for the arts with a heart for God. Be encouraged, equipped and challenged. Whether you’re a worship leader, musician, actor, technician, video producer, dancer or visual artist, Pulse will help you explore how your art form can point others to God.
These words have leaked out of me, like tears trickling down the crevices of my heart.
It’s been an all-consuming few weeks. I owe friends updates, but it feels as if there’s no space for conversation when I’m taking in heaving breaths of air just to survive and dodging sorrow’s persistent arrows.
At the same time.
Time is in such a hurry, glaring at me as it rushes by. Other’s opinions are strong; swift and sharp like missiles: and advice flows so easily, that supposedly isn’t personal. Then a trustworthy and brilliant doctor tells me that I don’t have to be perfect.Of course I am not perfect, I think to myself. But it’s nice to hear a professional say that “you can stop trying so hard” and acknowledge that we cannot fix anything anyhow. It’s nice to know that I can stop but I’d like to see him try to get off this train.
1.
I’m a home-grown perfectionist partly from a critical upbringing. (That is no surprise to regular readers.) This has shaped me and made me who I am.
All my life I believed that if I tried harder, sweltered and burned through the workout of life, ran harder and tougher, perspiring and aching with my heavy burdens, then I Would Find God’s love, Feel It Finally.
The assumption was that life is hard. But I sought perfection in adversity. I’d become the perfect person for my husband and for my kids and for my siblings and for my mother. And for my dead Father, and for God, I’d finally Become Worthy. And then I’d feel Good Enough. Truth is, though there is no If,Then kind of promise from God or Life. A promise not really spoken by anyone anywhere, a false hope that a child of a raging parent needs, to believe—if I do this, he will … what?? —Stop yelling. —Stop raging. —Stop his anxious, relentless criticism. —Be happy with mamma, be happy with my sisters, and be happy— with me. Or simply be happy? He was a good Dad; He was bad I wrote long ago. If that’s the case then I am too. Both Good and Bad. My aim was always perfection.
Put your oxygen mask on first should be the advice given to every new parent in those first days when you’re learning the art of diapers and tight swaddling. Save yourself.
2.
The trustworthy and brilliant doctor asked “how are you both doing” and at the same time, same song with different notes, I answered Terrible and he replied Good. Our therapist laughed a little, allowing Tom to go on. But like a great therapist, he circled back around to my Terrible. I looked away from his piercing eyes, because I haven’t said that out loud in a while.
And I’m afraid if I give it space, a crack in the universe will open and, my grief will come screaming out. I’m in control, but holding in that Terrible makes me numb. I’m doing the job of motherhood and dying of pain inside. I’m not supposed to show my weakness and it’s indulgent to let others know how much I hurt when the others are children. Or school professionals and doctors wanting to help our family cope. Hold it in, if you can.
How are you? I’m asked dozens of times a week and the answer must be fine. I’m holding it all in and then the trustworthy and brilliant doctor looked me in the eye.
Skirting his gaze that is boring into me, I focus on his strange lamp—a clarinet turned into something that no longer makes music—how sad, a clarinet that no longer croons. Wretched, both, the instrument turned lamp and I.
I’m heavy with despondency. My cheeks burn red with heat, the toll of trying to control my emotions. My tears disobey my order slowly dripping down my cheeks. I’m staring at the wall and the sad clarinet that no longer sings.
3.
A person with anxiety or depression, they sometimes get that way from trying to control too much. Believing they can control outcomes, control people, control themselves and circumstances enough to make all the things work out, but real life isn’t like that. Controlling all that is a mind numbing mess. And the more you try the harder it is to feel anything.
Then a trustworthy and brilliant doctor, he said, “It’s alright you don’t have to do anything. There’s no magic answer. There’s no perfect choice nor will “enough” perfect choices make you all healthy and thriving.”
4.
Recently I attended Pulse, a conference for artists, at my church. I felt honored to have been asked to write a poem for the program. It’s here.
I should not have gone to Pulse. Even in the midst of the ache of our circumstances it was a calendared reminder that we were in this crisis two years ago at the last Pulse. And this tidal wave of events hasn’t stopped for a moment; it has been relentless and crushing for all those months, hours, minutes.
I went heart aching, sleep deprived, hurting, spirit crushed and of course feeling critical. Not a great formula. Not a great day. There were no momentous one-on-one conversations or amazing-prophetic-just-for-me-words spoken, only more lonesomeness and sadness in a crowd. But one must choose to keep on living even though you’re experiencing the hardest times of your life. You have to keep pretending you are alive, and it’s not cheating. Be open to healing. Keep going, heartbroken.
5.
Day after day, my depressed brain says lay down. So I get up, again. Night after night, I pop the right combination of prescribed medication to sleep, waking daily at 5:40 am to foggy and desolate despair before I get up again. Get up. Keep moving. But don’t pretend that the casual “Hi, how are you?” is an opening to tell your problems.
Perhaps it is only here, where people are a captive audience, I can let the words and heartache flow. Most people cannot enter into the darkness of our lives now and I’m not totally not sure why. In the improvised dogmas of other’s lives, our anguish is too much. In a way, I get it. I’ve been there knowing people’s heartache and not having the courage to follow-up. I get it. I keep moving too.
6.
I’m not living in the Light but I’m watching for glimpses of it every day. The gift of quiet solitude is time to see the shadows moving across the wall and capturing a moment, beautiful but never to be seen again. My philosophy is see the beauty in a light filled moment, quickly. Before another call from another so-called expert comes. And I lie down again and see in the window, a twinkling that is different from the one moments before. Holding on to these seconds of tranquility, then I get up again, pick up the phone and make another call. Always searching for answers. Then the trustworthy and brilliant doctor says finally, in that quiet hour with just us two, that we can both stop striving so hard for answers. There’s no fix. There’s no answer, perfect or otherwise. A final fixing when we’ll suddenly be done. That’s the heavy grief and the answer for now. And, help yourself and in doing so you’ll become the parent your kids need.
7.
I can feel my heart heavy and tight in my chest. Then it comes to me, the thought that Jesus on the Cross experienced everything real to us humans, including mental illnesses like anxiety and depression and bipolar and all. On the cross, that’s what Jesus did. Jesus took it for us all.
8.
No, I cannot join you in the happiness of Light, enjoying casual encounters or live music, feeling the anticipation of love or joy of birthday milestones, no laughing hard at jokes, or knowing the thrill of spiritual mountaintops – I cannot join you there. I listen, I am physically present, and I might even laugh but I don’t feel it. Even laughter tastes bitter on my tongue. I am living in the shadow lands of unremitting lonesomeness and I sit here. I am waiting for it all to end. But that’s just it. I have to learn that finding my oxygen mask is to save myself and in doing so it will save them.
When the trustworthy and brilliant doctor said it, something resisted. Our lives are on a careening train but I’m supposed to jump off, save myself and watch the crash? No.
“You cannot stop this train. Save yourself,” he said. And,“The only way you can help your child is to save yourself.” And later, “Know that no one around you is going through what you are: no one, none of your neighbors or friends, can possibly understand nor will they ever have any idea of the depth of this sorrow you carry.”
9.
And so I go on. Watching for patterns in the sunshine and shadows, for lessons, for language, for hope, for rhythms that show me God’s order in the midst of this unrelenting sting. Light beckons the heart toward hope.
I have so many things going on. The heaviest specifics, I don’t dare to write about.
These are Heavy, hard days of—if not Suffering —Pain. But I know so many, many people going through Pain. In that, we are not alone, but being a writer and photographer comes with a price. I know what’s happening to us isn’t for public consumption. Lives, hearts and souls are at play. If I cannot write, what do I do? If I cannot Speak through images I fear I’ll drown in my grief.
I have been thinking hard about what’s useful for others. What I can pass on.
I was recently at a meeting for parents of youth, a “you rah rah” sort of meeting where a couple traipsed up on the stage as Master Parents (My words). The pastor said: “If my children could turn out like anyone’s I would have them be like so and so’s kids.”
I thought to myself, “Damn. He did not just say that.”
This was before I went back on Effexor, when I could still cry.
I’m not a public crier. I actually try very hard to never cry in front of others, men especially because of the stereotype that women are overly emotional. (This is one of the sexist ideas that I most loathe.)
So I ran from the room in grief and anger and disappointment (I know this pastor and I was surprised he’d say such a thing.)
+
Our recent months, even the last year and a half, were difficult. I have had moments in the last while that I was certain I couldn’t go on; as doctors, and friends, and mentors, and experts, all had no idea how to proceed with some of our challenges.
We’ve wept, we’ve prayed, we’ve read, and we’ve met with experts, We have done more than everyone can imagine, turned over systems, got to the top of the chain of command, advocated beyond what everyone said was possible. And yet, after all that, life’s not much different. Circumstances improve incrementally and then fall apart, then settle down. We adjust and we try again to find normalcy.
The same issues continue. With a new normal, we have a new resolve.
I ran from that room coming face to face with the audacity that we might be able to DO something more to create a certain outcome for our kids. As I slithered to the floor, I wept uncontrollably for our situation, for our lack of hope, and for all the kids growing up in homes where parents do think there is a formula to arrive at “a great kid, a healthy kid, or a spiritually grounded kid.”
And when I had composed myself, I very nearly walked out of the building to never return to youth group, just yank my kid out, because I’m impulsive like that.
I am rash. And that kind of haste is wrong when it comes to an unfortunate turn of phrase with someone you trust. I say things now and again I don’t even mean. Second chances are important and I’d want one. I returned inside.
But I haven’t felt so alone in a long, long time. I sat in the back, on the steps so I could make a run for it. Knowing the Church isn’t cognizant of how to help families with mental illness. One, because we’re not sure we can talk about it, sure. But also, they just don’t know to help.
+
I cannot pray. It’s ironic and convicting as I spent the summer reading everything I could find about prayer since I was writing an essay on Praying without Ceasing, will be published next year in a book. And today, these days, lately, I cannot pray. I’ve always struggled with praying.
My heart feels like stone. Partly, this is the anti-depressant medication. I know this because I’ve been on it before. I didn’t cry for more than five years last time. Yes, that’s a special hell. Don’t make that decision lightly, to take antidepressants.)
I cannot feel, except a flat, emotionless, disorienting pain. My heart feels like when they numb you before a shot; if I poke at my heart I know it’s still there but you get the idea.
+
So what then? What’s the outcome of a Most Difficult Year?
We’re being strong. We’re hurting, but we’re cognizant of a long-suffering kind of trust in God. Right now doesn’t feel good but over our lifetimes God has been present, faithful, supplier of hope, our healer and God has sustained us. That doesn’t change.
But most days are like today. Sitting here feeling isolated, feeling afraid, feeling unwilling or unable to be with humans. But I know, even still, God in Jesus is present. God waits.
I don’t feel it. I know it. I hold on to Belief, clutching. Today, it’s all we have.
for my shy and wary child,
would I have begged God
make him less cautious?
Would I have wasted
a wish, a prayer, even a thought
on that part of my personality that I hate
and have come to
tolerate.
Make him less afraid.
Make him less
like me: petrified, wooden, shaken, sick to my stomach
terrified.
Though I hate it about myself,
could I possibly hate this
in
my son?
How is this conceivable?
My baby, my flesh, my skin and bones
always crawling away from people
just like me.
I have learned, when the extroverted-overjoyed-inner-glowing-pastor says almost gleefully to
turn to our neighbor, I don’t immediately
run. I have learned.
Still, the bathroom is a cool, echoing, quiet and comforting place just then;
and I can hear
my heart exploding inside me. Blood pumping, rushing to all extremities.
The fear rushes about me, like pixies dancing, mocking,
Silencing me.
When extroverted-overjoyed-inner- glowing-pastor says:
this is love
I think
I may puke, not because I want to puke
mind you. (What kind of fool would want to throw up in church?)
But.
seriously
when will church life be easier for introverts? And how to tell my kid,
that forcing him to attend Church events is virtuous?
It’s for your own good.
How? I’m thinking.
How? He’s asking.
This isn’t faith, I know. This isn’t my religion.
What’s an introverted mom to do?
Teach him to run?
The answer lies somewhere in between. Even
with programs bent on making you
fit
your circle shaped heart into their
square pegged hole of a program.
Still, love wins
when you risk. And for us introverts, some days that’s
I read the book of Hebrews through this morning in THE MESSAGE, a translation by the legendary and wise, brilliant pastor and author Eugene Peterson. All these thoughts come directly from that reading. When I used Peterson’s words, I tried to give “credit” but this is completely my interpretation of his translation. Don’t blame him for my ignorance or lack of understanding. This is written to myself but you can listen in.
The book of Hebrews likens life to a race. I’m not that competent at running. Last summer, I started running trying the Couch Potato to 5k program. At first I barely stumbled around the block, untrained and unprepared. But it didn’t take long before I was running three miles. Today, after static winter, I’d have to start all over again. I would have to start from the beginning and mature into a runner, again.
Like those listed in the book of Hebrews, our faith Story, should point people toward their true home. We can please God through our Story by believing that God exists and that he cares enough to respond when we cry out to him.
“Be confident that you are presentable inside and out.”
Even with wickedness in our back story, in the book of Hebrews we learn that in the final review this is the point—that we are unworthy and that through the actions of Jesus, we become presentable again.
How are we to live now, today?
The Message translates that we are to “make our way as best we can on the cruel edges of the world.” That’s dramatic, but I can relate. Life has felt more than a little cruel of late.
Hebrews holds a roster of pioneers of faith, people like my father, imperfect – whose lives were unfinished and incomplete when they died, even if they were exemplary; or whether they tripped up over and over, even if they had to learn how to run many times throughout their lives. They are all at the last finish line, shouting and cheering us on.
Hebrews says their lives combined with ours becomes The Story—a completed whole.
So, even when you feel inadequate, knowing that you’re broken, feeling you’re too lame to run, you are commanded TO RUN!
But how are we to carry out this impossible feat?
Key your eyes on Jesus. Know Jesus. Study Jesus.
When you feel most down trodden and unable to run, go back to the basics to who he was and is, how he behaved, how he treated people, how he fashioned his time and priorities and days (and nights). Study him.
And, if you begin to feel life is unfair, that yours in particular is full of suffering and pain. Consider these things to be ways for God to love you. We are disciplined and corrected by love.
This is growing up spiritually.
Know that your pain is God’s training ground! Life isn’t hard because you’re bad, or undeserving of good things, or even unrepentant. No, life hurts because God the father LOVES YOU! It’s the University of Spiritual Development.
And so, stop resisting. Stop complaining. Wipe your tears. Wake up to God’s love! These hard moments, this unimaginable pain in your life or those you love, is making you not breaking.
Hebrews is a heavenly warning. “God himself is fire!” He’s burning, aware of…our immaturity, our gracelessness, our negativity, our tearing one another down.
He’s looking at you and me – challenging us to care for one another.
It is simple things.
“Be ready with a meal or a bed when needed. Why some have extended hospitality to angels without ever knowing it.
Regard prisoners as if you were in prison with them.
Look on victims of abuse as if what happened to them happened to you.
Guard your marriage, your relationships.
Don’t be obsessed with getting material things.
Watch how your pastors live and let their lives instruct you.
Share what you have with others. Worship God with your generosity and love.
And pray that God, who put all this together, who makes all things whole, who gave us Jesus, may he train you, put you together—providing you with everything you need—in Jesus.”
Sometimes, truth is so simple that we ignore it thinking that can’t be all. That can’t be it. It’s not spiritual enough. It’s not complicated enough.
But the book of Hebrews makes it pretty clear. We are to love one another in the daily race of life, look to Jesus as our example for how to live, trust him, be trained by him … Grow up.
My daughter thinks she Knows My Dreams, she pushed hard recently trying to get me to admit them. Telling me “Go to seminary and be a pastor that writes, mom. That’s what you want. Just do it.” It’s so easy for her to say, I think to myself, with my incessant dissatisfaction and oh so many fears.
I think to myself: I’m stuck. I’m not worthy. I’ll never Be.
First came sin.
I mean we’re all sinners for sure, but the home I grew up in, I never met Jesus. I never knew Grace.
I didn’t know Jesus who is the Lord of the Universe and Hope for the world, that my Dad was always talking about. I couldn’t believe, not for decades, that I was loved and that if I were the only Blessed Sinner on Planet Earth, Jesus would have died that grizzly death, for me. No Way.
Work Harder.
I have lived day by day, believing that if I could just be A Better Person. If I accomplished that much more than other people, worked harder, worked longer, worked better, then, I’d be okay. And so for years that’s what I did. I worked and worked and worked, and I lived a lie.
I was never okay. I was always terrified.
I was a mess inside, deep down where you cannot admit working at a Christian organization that you’re not surethat you ever believed.
Motherhood.
So I quit all that, thinking Being a Mother is noble (enough) and even a very good thing to do. I mean, who doesn’t find meaning in motherhood?
Never mind that I just wasn’t ready to be at home.
Too Broken Up Inside, Not Even Knowing Jesus and With a Hole in my Heart, I quit work in ministry for all the wrong reasons.
Then cameDespair on a Colossal Level.
Was I ever unprepared for the depth of my anguish. For the loss of meaning without Work. The hole in my soul was frantic with fear, day after day, still.
I thought to myself I must miss My Important Work! All those years of Chasing Significance and Feeling Important, all that had made life meaningful in the past was gone.
Stripped Naked, the rug pulled out from under me, I fell hard; I fell flat.
Major Depression.
Depression hit just as I was starting to meet the Jesus Everyone Knew and Believed in. We were now attending a lovely church that ministered to my Broken-down Heart. Just as I began to learn and study scripture for myself. Just as I was learning that no matter what things I did or didn’t do with my life, I was loved and okay. Just as a little of that truth sank in,
I slid down into the darkest pit of misery and hopelessness and despair. A place So dark, so bleak, so heavy that I was surprised by this new level of unhappiness. I never knew that people could feel that lost. (I wrote about that in Not Alone: Stories of Living with Depression.)
Broken by a life that was bereft of meaning, tired beyond comprehension with three babies in diapers, bored by being at home, dissatisfied with my contribution to the world, rejecting Grace still though I had begun to understand it intellectually, then came drink. It was a respite in the beginning, an oasis.
Alcoholism.
As the years went by what had been a brief escape, a place to go when all else seemed
Worthless, Hopeless and Endless,
I drank. And drank. And five years passed, and I was
Work-less, Meaningless, and soon a Fallen Down Drunk. I was addicted. And working through the Depression and All Of The Above, I finally heard the
Sweet
Whisper
of the Spirit. By this time I knew a bit more, I believed in the Grace of Jesus and God broke in and confronted my
Cycling Toilet of Shame, the hole in my heart leaking pain all over the floor, and
my F E A R.
An Ode to Joy.
A decade has passed and I’ve been sober almost five years. I’m still
a colossal addict even sober, who wakes up every day on the verge of an existential crisis. Deep, DEEP within, I crave significance. I crave making a meaningful contribution to the world. I long for Joy, real Joy.
Even now, listening to the mystical, providential, sweeping Spirit of God who Speaks and Holds me every day and quiets my frantic heart, that says:
{Just Be. And wait and Trust me.}
The surrender daily is bittersweet. Because I still don’t know What I’m Doing with my LIFE. This poverty of spirit within me breaks my heart; I feel I betray Jesus in every moment that I’m
fearful, restless, dissatisfied, and confused.
Because unlike what my daughter believes, I don’t know what I am to DO, more than
Just Be. And so, I wait. And in the waiting, I am transformed.
It was holy—it was so intimate, so exquisite and precious, that to put it down in words here for you will diminish it immediately. That is the nature of being Spiritually Mended.
There I was, clinging. I came with a cavernous pain, my need was huge.
I came saying to myself I’m broken into pieces. I’m useless.
But isn’t that the way we must always come to Him, open?
I’ve been hurting. Life’s been bitter and difficult for a long, long time. Most recently I thought, I won’t survive this. But here’s the beauty of what I learned: We are all Broken and the Holy One offers healing.
This weekend was Pulse, a conference for Artists in the Church. I barely showed up, but there I was breathless and desperate. I sat. I worshiped. I walked amongst other artists and creatives. I sensed the Spirit of God who is always with us, mystically and profoundly, but at times we allow the chaos and rush and performance and pain of life to intervene. I did. I had.
I thought this weekend might be intellectually stimulating. In my pride and arrogance, and no small amount of insecurity, I slipped into critique mode where others always come up lacking. Reflexively I began to evaluate and not admit that I was there to receive.
God saw my haughty heart.
God said bring me your broken heart.
And there it was, in tension.
I think I’m too good for this. I think I’m not good enough.
Both, And.
Strangely that is the dichotomy of being Spiritual Creatives.
We have to accept our humanity but so many days it is our very humanity that gets in the way of growing spiritually and being able to celebrate – being able to absorb, to revel, to dance and sing with others who are different from us, perhaps even better than us, at least more accomplished and successful and happy.
It is there, in our doubt and weakness, that we must face our brokenness, humbly. And receive from and celebrate others. And most importantly accept that God has gifted us all in some unique, distinctive way.
I sat, knowing all this and facing that I’ve allowed my broken heart to keep me from Believing, from Creating, from Joy, from Hope. To receive A Holy Call takes brave heart. We know our brokenness, we’re all too aware of our ugly hearts.
God was saying to me—I want to use the way I’ve made you, I want your Story. It has a purpose.
Say What?
I was imprisoned; the bars surrounding me were of my making. I had built a cage and painted a bold sign on it: DISQUALIFIED. I believed it too. I came convinced that my brokenness disqualified me from making anything good, from being useful, from my life holding a Holy Purpose.
Life’s psychotic touch had sucked the breath out of me; it felt as if I might drop dead in a moment from the strain of life’s challenges. I was living a lamentation, I was walking dead with Job, and I was crying and desperate on my knees confessing with David.
I came, fraught and anxious, suspicious, daring God to speak.
But I came. And that’s really all he asked. Come to me. I came, doubting. Worried that if I surrendered there, admitted my weakness, I was already disqualified to create and I’d get a double crushing from God. How twisted, fearful, and uncertain I was.
And He called me: Beloved. Chosen. Blessed.
Like Mary when she learned that she was to be mother of Jesus, as she was being told by the angel that this was her destiny — doubt, disbelief, and dismay all ran through her. And yet she did not question it or seek clarification. She boldly said, “Yes. Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said will be accomplished.” She believed.
I’m full of doubt, disbelief and dismay. I keep thinking I’m not good enough, I’m too broken. I am certain I of all people am shattered into so many pieces that not even God can glue them, paint them, write them, duct tape them back into something useful,and in that,
I am wrong.
Jesus called to me: Beloved Sister, I love you.
I thought all my pain had made me self-centered in a gross distasteful way, “curved inward on myself” as Tim Keller calls it, “creating a dissatisfaction, irritability, an envy and brooding, a resentment toward others” whose lives aren’t as painful and difficult as mine.
I resented those whose spiritual walk seemed dreamy, whose day-to-day was so much less complex than mine. Who seem to create so easily, have less troubles, and live full of joy – I disliked them all!
But I heard Him. He called to me, the Holy One breathed in me an awareness this weekend.
Broken doesn’t disqualify.
Honesty and transparency are not shameful when you are living on the way to healing. When there is Grace.
God’s work is Restoration; he’s in the work of renewing us.
We are made in the image of God for a purpose, to live, to worship, to create beautiful art!
But, all for His Glory not our own.
“Whoever wants to save her life shall lose it, but whoever loses her life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:25)
This is what I see now. We’re all wounded. Some of us admit it.
In disclosing my story, there is a cost and risk. Living and creating on the precipice of risk and possibility, that’s petrifying.
But it can also make you gentle and empathetic. It will help you SEE others differently; both their pain and their glorious gifts and you’ll want to dance with them! I don’t naturally dance, literally or euphemistically, so this is a holy uncomfortable realization.
God made me with an inclination to be vulnerable and with a melancholy that aches within me. Many days I resist admitting how much the pain sits on me heavy, thinking it makes me look weak, less than holy, and not good enough to be a spiritual leader.
I’m learning: Confessing our anxious humanity, fraught with our need, perhaps even accepting our brokenness, this living on the edge is accepting the way God put me together. Have you accepted the way God put you together?
And this is accepting a Holy Call.
She named me—Story Teller. She didn’t know me or my story but she said it’s important to tell our stories. To the audience of many, she said our Stories Matter. As we learn to tell our Stories of Suffering, they become an Offering. As we set aside fear, we can accept the gifts God has given us. He didn’t make a mistake. And this opens a Doorway to a different life.
This song says it all.
Joyful, joyful we adore thee.
God of Glory Lord of Love.
Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee,
Hail the as the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin, sin and sadness
Drive the dark of doubt away, Drive it away
Giver of immortal gladness
Fill us Fill us with the light of day Light of day!
As Artists we live on the Edge of the Precipice and we have a Choice. We live between the worlds of What I Am and What is Possible with God.
Because of the Hope we have in Christ, we can lay our inadequacies and fear, our sin, our broken duct taped hearts, whatever it is, we can lay it all down at Jesus feet.
We can accept that we are broken. We must accept that we are healed, we are useful, our life has a Holy Purpose.
Both. And.
And then, we must listen to Him, with our intelligence and fierce expectation, with our minds and hearts. This discipline of listening (John 10:3-4) is as important as our confession.
Creatives are you listening?
How is God shaping your soul? How did he make you, both the strong and the weak parts? He wants both. What is he saying to you in your broken places and how is he mending you? That’s your story. That’s your Purpose and Holy Calling. It is through our Stories that God will renew the world, in the coming together of Us and Him.
The visions are intoxicating and limitless, filling the world with the Light of his Gladness. Frederick Buechner’s challenge is to find “the voice of our own Gladness.” That’s where we find our Call.
I woke up today, still Broken. I’ll face this day with my Fears hanging heavy, like most days. The difference is, today I’m refreshed and relieved to start again. Mercifully, I’ve found some Gladness. I’m filled with a little bit of light; the rays are shining through the shuttered places in my heart. In sharing this I hope, just for a moment that you see it too, as you dance with the Holy that you’ll find your gladness too.
It is Virginia Woolf who is credited with the notion that for most of history anonymous was a woman. I thought of that yesterday when a friend (who is more like a mentor) was intently praising me on my writing and expressed that I should continue. Then she said, “Perhaps you should write under a pseudonym.”
That statement made me wonder. I think she felt that without my name or life connected, that I could write my story even more vulnerably— bravely, truthfully. She thinks
My Story is one that many people Feel, Live, Carry.
One of the many things I like about being with her, and at the same time frustrates me, is that I often go away from conversations without Answers—pondering hard things, wondering, asking myself questions, many questions.
She’s so Open and Free—with her time, ideas, insights, her life, that it compels me and draws me in to the freedom in which she lives life.
I know that I don’t live with that sort of freedom—not yet. I live with fear of reprisal, with sheer guilt over my Life’s Narrative so far.
I live with the Fear Beast. I live with the Guilt Monster.
Yesterday, I read from Richard Rohr that the phrase “Do not be afraid” is present in the Bible up to 365 times. It’s the most common one liner in the Bible. A command of sorts, DO NOT BE AFRAID. The imperative when the angel of the Lord told Mary, who was selected to be the mother of Jesus, Do not be afraid.
I breathe deeply, knowing. I can certainly get stuck
in the life I’ve lived so far feeling like it’s impossible to redeem it. Stuck in Fear. Stuck in the Shame Story, feeling nothing but Regret. For it’s a story of Redemption (for sure) which means mistakes, sin and regrets. But that’s not the point really, My Regret.
In Being Human and facing our humanity we aren’t disqualified from the Story of God, but rather
right in the middle of God’s Grace. I want to learn to trust Jesus’ powerful presence in My Story and believe that somehow all this serves a Greater Purpose.
I have long believed that if I could sort out how to write it down, the poems and prayers of lament in my story,then it would be Redeemed through the Telling. If I write it down. And before then, or even while that’s progressing, I want
TO BE the person Redeemed, Wholly Forgiven, compelled by Grace, driven down on my knees perpetually,
I went with a reluctant, heavy expectation tothe Maundy Thursday service. My child’s words ringing in my ears.
My need was great.
It hit me, sitting there. I was in the middle of the Community of God, but felt utterly alone. And it was all my fault. For I have built up these mammoth walls around myself, so high that I sat there,
Alone, Weeping in the middle of the Community of Believers. Some in the crowd of hundreds I know, though most were strangers, I had no idea where my friends were sitting. I sat alone.
I fled as they began the Eucharist. I was still in the pain of just moments ago, dealing again with the rivers of sorrow carved into my soul over the last year, it was all catching up with me.
How difficult it has been, and that raw emotion was sitting close, heavy, the madness of my child’s mental health situation, an invisible dagger in a wound that I walk around with these days.
Then suddenly Old Regrets began replaying, again and again in my head—my sin and guilt, my humiliation. I have made so many mistakes.
Even after almost five years of sobriety I still haven’t forgiven myself for becoming a drunk in the first place. I am
clearly not willing to receive the freedom of grace and forgiveness for being sober today. That would take a level of courage and humility that I don’t have, at least not yet.
I am clearly still unwilling to admit how little control I have over my life’s circumstances. Sitting there, facing the courageous, loving sacrifice of Jesus, I couldn’t bear it. I fled.
I sat down in the darkened hallway entrance in-between the lobby and the sanctuary hiding from the Holy One, now I was really crying and embarrassed at my lack of composure. When just as suddenly it occurred to me – Jesus experienced every human pain—even mine, even my child’s. (And much much worse.)
And I cannot run from Jesus because no matter how far I flee, he’s there beside me in this moment of anguish.
I have learned.
Listening to your places of pain as a believer in Christ is both mystical and sacred—attending to the Soul’s Ache. It cultivates the depth of understanding that can only come when we slow down and feel. Although last night I was running away, in general lately, I’ve been listening hard, in good ways … And what I hear, finally has been a discovery seen through my photographs …
for a long time I’ve been on the inside looking out at life.
This has built up an inner turmoil that requires sorting and reconciling and answering this question:Where does all my fear come from?
I’m not petty but I get insecure, Still, I feel sincere joy at others’ success, and friendships, and connections.
All my life, I have felt alone.
I just don’t think I deserve that sort of thing: a Community who is Free To Love One Another; it’s too beautiful, too holy, and too wonderful to experience the hospitality and community of people. It’sa blessing I’ve never felt worthy of, and I have my bag full of excuses and reasons: I’m too broken and useless, unwanted, undesirable, and therefore, I deserve to be alone.
Even here. Even now in this Holy Place on Maundy Thursday with hundreds of people around.
And worst of all, I cannot sort out if I made this happen, this Place of Lonesomeness. But I think I did.
Henri Nouwen expressed so often in his writing and often lamenting:
Even as we need solitude—I know I crave it, seek it, relish it, because it is where I listen for the Spirit and learn—when I finally poke my head back up into the world (go on Facebook or something) I realize that the world went on and people have enjoyed one another suddenly I feel rejected. And Alone. And the heartache and feelings of rejection that come are unbearable at times.
Sitting there last night physically alone but in the presence of hundreds of Christ followers, knowing the Saints of Old are there too, with Jesus, surrounding us.
—I laid the last six months down. Months of being wrapped up in caring for both a sick child and my aging mother. Months of fear over lack of solutions. Still knowing we don’t have them.
— I laid down my recurring depression which feels like my personal screw-up, a failure I cannot conquer.
— I laid down the isolation and loneliness that comes from shame and fear of rejection by others.
—I remembered all the good people that have reached out to us, asked how they can help and faced my confusion over not knowing what to say. How many times I said, “thank you but no, we’re managing.”
—I accepted that I don’t know how to receive from others, whether it is because I don’t feel like I deserve it I wonder? That just might be true.
Jesus’ mandate of Maundy Thursday is a challenge to us to love as we have been loved BY HIM. Last night, shattered and broken, flooded with all my regrets, I just sat by him and knew, I don’t have to have the answers.
I don’t know how to let people love me.
In Hebrews it says, along with Faith, one must believe that God rewards those who seek him. (11:4-6).
I’ve had enough looking out of windows, watching others live joyfully and only dreaming of entering into Community while refusing to risk, fearful of the messiness and imperfections of humans.
Jesus said: Love one another ya’ll! That is so hard to do when you’re on the inside looking out. When you’re so afraid of being hurt that you continuously push people away.
I heard him, there, Jesus said to me:
Stop turning away. Love as you are loved, enter into hospitality, healing, wholeness and love—this sort of devotion is made up of my compassion and hope! There’s no fear when you are abiding in me.
If we allow it, the power of fear dominate us. What others think of us, fear of failure, fear of intimacy, fear of God, fear of ourselves and what we might actually do for him, even fear of success.
As Nouwen said, “All our thoughts and actions proceed from a hidden wellspring of fear … but we were loved, before we were born we were declared BELOVED, and that should make us Unafraid.”
We can walk through the world Free To Love One Another.
Life is pathways that become our Story; where we meet the Holy One and God renews us. These realities run parallel to one another, making life unbelievably complex.
I am a woman, a mother, daughter, and sister while being a life-partner and friend. And I’m a writer, a creative photographer, a poet, bringing logic and imagination together here, all which engender Me–this follower of Christ. I am also a sometimes runner, forever an alcoholic who is sober with gratitude and Grace, I am so many things.
I’ve been thinking a lot about God’s hand all these roles and trajectories, this my first year of being an intentional writer, finding my voice, my story, my purpose.
For me, one pathway has been as a stay-at-home parent and homemaker, a role I haven’t liked, more like suffered through, but that’s a part of my story of resistance to what is.
Another part of my story is working solidly on perfecting writing as a craft, including relentless reading and writing; finding and accepting my style, my voice, which is different from others, but these are the ways and words that God puts in me. Again, I resist this discipline.
I’m also a person drawn to studying scripture and this year I’ve been rethinking How I read the Bible, learning the big Story of the Bible, reluctantly accepting both the patriarchy of organized religion, and the most incredible fall-down-on-your-knees awe for a good and loving God. Time and again the stretches I spend, the more of a contemplative I become, brings a craving for the quiet whispering voice of the Holy One. I have sought the life of the Spirit in new and ancient ways. This is discipline.
Another path I have been on is learning what it means to be a woman in the evangelical church and being healed; coming utterly unstuck from years of bitterness over women’s roles.
I was feeling ignored, unheard, and even unimportant – lacking a voice, while being gently chastised for being so outspoken and for clinging to Feminism. I was simply keen to talk with others about their experiences as women. I felt alone, except for some community I found online. Writing “Why I Stay” (as essay in Finding Church by Civitas Press) brought a healing that I couldn’t have experienced any other way.
Being at home, being a contemplative, being hungry for the Bible, being a women, being a writer, I have had years of feeling very alone in all respects of my spirituality—Joining Redbud, I experienced the affirmation and community of women. It is a place of healing, growth and affirmation for me if I allow myself to enter in.
More than a year ago, at a time when I was crying out for my life’s purpose (or even just a job) what I wanted was to believe that my life could make a significant impact. I was challenged by my husband and a pastor friend to write, ahem, TO BE A WRITER as my vocation.
I remembered all the others over the last year or two, and over the course of my life, who affirmed this in me. I was full of arguments “I don’t know how. And you cannot just do it. You need a plan, a proposal or idea for a book or two, and connections eventually to an agent or a publisher.” This was more of my resistance.
But I also knew, before all those lofty goals, if you want to be a writing you must simply write—write often, write everything, write it all down learning to collect words and ideas, putting them together in your individual way, finding your voice.
I have learned this year too, that you must occupy your own Story and portion out your life experiences with care and discretion. You will be exposed and vulnerable, and yet you’ll learn to trust yourself and your story to others, as you engrave your story on the “page,” sharing it with a community of readers, it deepens your character.
There is an excavating of the soul as you stay vulnerable and open to the Holy Spirit, to evolving in your faith journey, to sighting places where God’s work in you—and God does and it is the most miraculous, deeply challenging thing.
There will be times of feeling abysmal, but always the promptings and the difficulties that seem to come are a part of life and if you allow them they will be your writing life.
Writers must grow! Lean in to your troubles, to your pain, to the heartache and write it all. This year of intentional writing has been one of the more difficult of my life and yet, I thank God for the panics, the gaffes, the worry, the heartache and the pain.
Even as I often feel alone in a desert of fear and solitude, and worry that perhaps my writing will be forever done in obscurity, I know that God doesn’t ever turn away from me and my story. The story still matters with or without the accolades. If you believe that you are on the right pathway.
This writing life has become about remembering and living My Story, no one else’s, and acknowledging the power of God in Me. Believing deeply and knowing with certainty in the midst of heartache, that God is good, and God is Present and God is okay with the fact that I’m quite imperfect.
And as each of these paths run parallel, of being a writer and living this imperfect yet Spirit filled life, the challenge is to not allow the writing to overtake the emerging of your Life Story.
I cannot let my writing out shout the Holy Spirit’s whispering and the narrative of scripture’s truths and all that God is doing inside me.
This is the tension filled place of living the writing life, which is less a place of perfection and more a place of being perfected into the image of God.
I see them splattered, dried on my glasses as I peer out the window into the wintry, cold, gray, foggy morning;
tiny specks on the panes of my eyeglasses.
I wipe hard at these dried salty witnesses.
They are a record of my sodden heart.
Ten thousand tears come raining down.
The soil of my soul is softened. Broken apart by tears, which took forever to reappear. Though I fear
that I cannot stop them, deep down I know that they are what keeps my heart growing.
Soil ready for love, open
to the community of believers, to grace, to healing, forgiveness and new life, to hope.
My tears, such an old and forgotten notion
for me.
When I was a child I pinched my eyes closed to reject my weakness, my torment as I was hollered at by a daddy that
didn’t know
better.
I closed down my heart;
it hurt too much to feel bad all the time. So I told them, you aren’t welcome here.
And my heart and soul slowly turned
hard as stone.
Today my tears rain down though I fear them, they make no sense
their intensity, they make me vulnerable,
they make me feel weak, even when I know this
is
wrong thinking. But it is true now, I cannot protect my soft heart, sodden and murky, saturated
still,
My tears, they are here to stay I hope, welcome.
MHH
I’ve lived with depression, at some points melancholy as a part of my “personality” for much of my life, but it only became clinical major depression about ten years ago. A variety of things came into play and I fell into a dark, frightening place. (I tell a little of my story in Not Alone. I tell parts and pieces here on the blog — under My Story.)
But I have worked hard to face my mistakes and demons,as I did I began to heal and then had the strength to do the personal care that one must do who lives with this sort of mental illness.
Though I am in a similar place today, depressed I know that I am a different person. I am different “Spiritual Soil.” I thank God for that picture that came recently from a friend’s teaching in Luke 8. I know God as I never knew God then. I sense the Holy Spirit’s whispered truth of healing and hope. I have enough hope to believe the truth that I will heal, I will heal again even as ten thousand tears rain down.
Much of my blog has been about my depression, beginning in 2001 which worsened through a series of personal and family adversities over the next several years (including the death of my father from brain cancer, during which time my sister and I cared for him in our homes). In 2005, when I became even more severely depressed, I was nearly non-functional, attempted suicide, and I was hospitalized for a while.
In later years, I became a quiet, desperate drunk attempting to self-medicate and forget.. My drinking addiction grew worse and worse over the period of my depression, becoming debilitating by 2006 or so. This was very difficult for my husband and the children at a quite impressionable age saw me frequently out of control. They are now to the age when these things do impact them, though I got sober in July, four and a half years ago.
These are not easy things to admit. They make me feel damaged, weak, and if ever there was a stigma related to being broken I feel it like never before. But it came to me recently, that I have to write my story. I have to tell it, and let it go. So that’s where I will go, to that place of heartache, depression, my experience with being a hard-core fallen down drunken mother and my cavernous personal grief about that, and interlaced in-between is Hope that I have found.
So as much as I fear my own tears, I fear more the depth of my sorrow and grief when it I shove it back inside. That’s what makes one depressed. That’s what made me drink.
I know this is the next step for me, to sort it out and live hard days, weeks and months of therapy, sleeplessness, and depression ahead.
I am thankful for the everyday, tangible and incredible voices of love and encouragement I find foremost from my husband, but also from friends and family.
Thanks for all those that read and live this story alongside. I know there are fellow sufferers. I know there are others who have family or friends who descend into this murky, sinkhole of a hell and you cannot imagine how to help. I hope that whatever I find in my story that’s redemptive will one day help others understand, find help, and live through it as you walk beside a fellow sufferer.
I’ve never read the Bible from end to end. I grew up in the church but biblical literacy was not encouraged, until Blackhawk. Reading the ancient books I wondered—does God love me? Who am I to question God? And yet, I regularly bring questions and doubt to my reading of scripture.
I cringe reading the Old Testament, at times embarrassed that it is a part of my religion because the God of the ancient stories seemed appalling to me. As I open up the text, doubts loudly dominate as I wonder: Is God full of wrath, as ruthless and destructive of cultures as these stories seem to convey? More vital personally, does God look down on and limit women, or simply ignore women’s existence like so many of the Old Testament stories do, or worse, does God consider me less worthy because I am female? This is a topic I’ve dedicated a lot of time and thought to, with questions I bring to the text because of their application today.
As a result, for months I quit reading the selected texts for Eat This Book. Dejected, I felt heavy-hearted, even bogged down with discouragement, that this ancient, patriarchal, violent religion was connected to my faith and church, thoughts I have dodged for most of my adult spiritual life.
A wise friend suggested I read it differently, and listen for themeta-story of Yahwehwhich is told and retold over many generations. Still questioning and wondering, still doubtful, I tried to understand what the God of the Old Testament has to do with me, or you, the 21st-century followers of Jesus. In time, through God’s gracious gift of connections, I saw that we, followers of Christ are part of this innumerable family! The Story matters because of the character of God whose faithfulness and love is clear throughout the generations. We are a part of a community of faith — the whole line traced through the Old Testament. Believers are connected, continuing forward. This is our inheritance. This story, the promises and covenant and love of God is for us all, the Story a continuum, toward Jesus. And now I see grace, even back in the ancient stories with the care for the poor, the alien, the widowed, the barren, even the environment.
All my life I’ve been yearning to be a part of something, and finally I understand fully that I am! I know; I see in the Story that God’s faithfulness is infinite, and as it touches each of us, God’s love transforms us through atonement of our sins, actively reconciles people to God and one another. That’s the promise for you and me.
I read the ancient stories with different eyes now, knowing that we are each a treasured part of the Story. I have intimacy with God in a new way, for the first time.
Strangely this came from knowing the Story. This is utterly awe-inspiring. Yes, God is formidable, to be revered and feared. But “fear of the Lord” is a reverence that strengthens and fills us through our dependence on God. I am significant to this God, who is and was and will be, for all time and outside of time.
Frequently in the ancient texts I noticed people fell on their knees before God when in His presence. I believe this is to be our posture too, awe. Revel in His presence, His affection. I have been both wrecked and healed.
The religion that caused me pain as I began to read the text over time has healed me, bringing reconciliation and restoration to my life. I am part of that story. It is also my Story, which is breathtaking and devastating, from beginning to end. Soaking in the big story of the Bible faithfully, as I was truly listening, truly pursuing understanding and wisdom, the Holy Spirit revealed a gift, God’s love. It was there all along, but I was so caught up in and caught off guard by cultural differences and my assumptions, out of ignorance and naiveté. How difficult it is for us to hear the Truth. And this limits God’s work in me. Now, humbled and convicted, I open the word of God differently—on my knees. Sure of his acceptance and love, in faith that there is something in it for us all no matter our background, our brokenness, our gifts or abilities, or our gender. There it is, hope for us all.
MHH
This article was originally published in Illuminate, a magazine of Blackhawk Church.
These words have leaked out of me, like tears trickling down the crevices of my heart. 
5.
I have so many things going on. The heaviest specifics, I don’t dare to write about.
If I could have demanded anything
I’ve never read the Bible from end to end. I grew up in the church but biblical literacy was not encouraged, until
Logic & Imagination 