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Dancing with the Holy: On Being Broken, Spiritually Mended and Called

Dancing with the Holy

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.

One Day: On Suicide, On Melancholy, On Living … On

359563392_8922d86823_oIt is a silent crucible
brimming with ache,

mostly inside.

If you haven’t experienced true melancholia
be glad. And it’s okay to be glad
for some who have gone through cancer and depression say they’d take cancer over the adversary of depression
which is really astounding.

It is difficult to explain and the only reason I keep trying is that

I want the world to be a more compassionate place for all.  You see,

Some people
kill themselves.  Some people cut or hurt
themselves.
And some shrivel up
like the moldy apple core I found under the bed, sticky

and covered in lint and decay.  But many people,

most

do

the hardest thing of all. They carry on, and
life
becomes a steep climb up a high altitude mountain.

I read, I pray, I try to understand

It. I try to understand myself.

I write.  And no matter how hard I work, and I do

work, very, very hard

I am still

a person who carries melancholia on my back.  I cannot shake it.  And if you’re a longtime reader you know,
I’ve tried.  Oh,

how I’ve tried.
This is something I carry, like Jacob’s limp after wrestling with God. And I can only hope

It sits well in me,

and can be redemptive for others,

One Day.

MHH

P.S. This, by Christine A. Scheller, is one of the most empathetic articles I’ve ever read on the topic of Depression and Melancholy   I felt understood.  I felt described.  I felt less alone.

Living a Life Worthy of Writing. It’s Complicated

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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,

for I want to live a life worth

writing.

A Bad Poem About My Sobriety

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SOBER.

Antonyms: alcoholic, drinker, drunk, lush, souse, wino

I’m Sober today. But I’m clutching at it. And not contentedly. Control is an illusion. I’m powerless, that I can confess. Today, when the whole thing, my duct-taped heart, feels like it’s falling apart and I’m heart racing tired, knowing I should never get.this.way. I think, “If I could I’d smoke then, … What?” But the broken down lungs no longer cooperate. I want a drink less than a smoke today, which is weird when you think about it. Alcohol does help you forget, for a while. There’s not anything to compare with the high of tumbling down out of your head, out of your Frantic Over Thinking, out of your heart, Bursting. Nothing like it. Of course,I’m sober and holding.on.tight to Teetotalling Me. Because even though I’m Scared, and Sad, and sitting here alone, feeling all kinds of Awful, I know

I chose that,

And now I choose this. Yes, I choose Sober every.day.

Other things I’ve written about my five years of sobriety, see My Alcoholism & Addiction.

Free To Love One Another or Afraid to be Free?

“if you loved me you’d let me die…”

I went with a reluctant, heavy expectation to the 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.

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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’s a 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.

—May it be so, friends, I pray.

The Writing Life, the Power of Voice

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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.

The writing life does this in me.

My Crazy Slow Surrender to Life’s Beauty

1-DSC_0038-001Life is worn and tearing, and this makes me profanely angry.

I hear a baby cry in the distance, just a simple need for succor and in an instant, I’m filled with Memory—Grief for What’s Lost. For when it was my breast, feeding the cry, when mine were young, I did not understand The Wonder.  A baby cries in the distance for its mother’s breast, and then quiets down, a need met.

For me, I gave, and gave to three babies, nursing for what seemed like years. Those moments, now a memory, I could not take them in, not fully, I was not wholly there. It’s Long Gone, that feeding.  I can never do again.

Sitting here, a decade later, there’s a grieving inside me, even here in this public place with a stranger’s baby crying, my heart tears apart, breaks with the memories—it is worn and tearing, rending.

I sit in a library waiting for my teen child, and appreciate the people getting old slowly before my eyes.

I think hard. I want to take in this Moment of Solitude, receive the slowing of time.

Be here, In This Moment.  Breathe it in.  I sense that I am becoming a better person, sitting amongst these Saints, the tomes and verses—Wisdom is everywhere to be found if you are listening.

I wonder at it all.

Why do we appreciate what is Magnificent and Beautiful, only when it’s Too Late? What is happening now that I need to Take In, Understand and Catch before it is too late? Before I am one of the aging, Watching Time Ticking, like them.

Life, is worn. I hear it tearing apart—Or is it my heart breaking.  Can I hear callouses accumulating on my soul?

Life is worn and tearing, I see the Zigzag of Age on my skin. I’m Breathing In my Life,

Its Beauty

Passing Quickly,

Knowing Suddenly

I’m here. I’m—still—here.

Grateful for a second chance, to Know Things Differently, Again.

Be Here, Be Here. Breathe in, I whisper to myself, to the Aging, to the Baby, to the Mother, to them all.

All isn’t all lost yet.

I Read.

I am the lily, beautiful. You are the lily
Life is the lily, consider it.
Full
Of the One
Who Made Us All.

I am worn. I am tearing.

But I am going to stop worrying, if I impossibly can.

Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. — Luke 12:2 7

 

 

Remembering Daddy

Being the perfectionist that I am, and that my goal for this year is to be FEARLESS, this simple act of writing without editing for five minutes, has become a good thing for me.

Five Minute Friday. 

Five Minute Friday

When I Remember, it’s my childhood and it is pain that floods in. My soul must taste bitter, most of all. I don’t want this, I wouldn’t choose it, but without Grace, remembering Hurts.

That’s me, on the right.

I try hard these days not to live in the past, to settle into that old startled, distress filled and petrified place of childhood fear; that place makes me feel

Broken, that’s the place that makes me feel Useless.

That place of remembering you, daddy,

Hurts.

The fact is that you hurt me.  And when I remember you, my child heart is bursting with your disappointment, your anger, and my tears.  The flood of tears from your slow angry glance.  You just looked at me,

And I fell apart.  And then ironically my tears angered you. What kind of a daddy is angry when his child cries?  What kind of daddy SHOUTs and shakes, when he looks at his little girl?

Crushed by him, my daddy that’s who.

It’s only Grace that helps me forget.  That rewrites on my soul what FATHER means, that changes me, and though it cannot rewrite the past I know it’s only forgiveness that pushes back the memories and covers the pain and eventually, one day, I believe I will be able to remember

Differently.

I BELIEVE, HELP!

water 3I cannot see the future. That’s what makes today

hard faith, not constructs, conjecture or speculation. This is faith

in the Present Personal God. And the unknown, unwritten, unlived days ahead,

and today

a (not so) Simple Practice.

Today I have my need, absurdly. My inability to hope

beyond a millisecond, my fear, my lack

of faith in a present and personal God.  For I cannot see

You, but bless me anyway Holy One.

Amidst my perplexities,

from my ambition,

out of blindness,

toward Belief. Today,

I cannot see; help me!

In the ordinary things of today, help

me to hold fast to You.  To see with the “eyes of the soul.” Dazzle

me and scare away the shades of gray.

Do I trust you? No. Do I long to? Deeply, reverently. Can I set aside today ME into

Divine Safe Keeping. For you, for understanding more of you.

A Holy Habit of trusting in the hidden, blinding, dazzling Light;

Even as I cannot believe, make me bright and beautiful.

Calm Down and Breathe

039-20120504_0154I’ve learned something profoundly important about myself.  I thrive off difficulties.

It’s a tendency of addictive persons. And though it’s not all bad to have this penchant, it can be bad.  There’s good too, to be into problem solving, endlessly considering three steps ahead, to be that type of person that is wondering about the options, potentials, and liabilities for every scenario.  Not all bad, no, but exhausting.

It’s not all bad except when it takes over life and you find yourself a bit like a chicken with its head cut off running and squawking about the sky falling—it is vulgar and disruptive and fruitless, and it’s erratic.  Hard on everyone around you and utterly unfaithful to a God who is in control of all things.

Yesterday in so many words, we were told by an expert psychologist (one of the best in his field)

to just stop it, already! Calm down and breathe.

Be in

this moment. 

To accept and surrender to right now.

At first I looked at him in disbelief. This guy is supposedly the expert and he’s telling me one of the simplest ideas.  BE PRESENT – with your life, with your kids, with this minute.

This is intense for a doer like me, I’m a problem solver.  I feel calmer exponentially calmer from such a modest and unpretentious idea.   ACCEPT THIS MOMENT.

RIGHT NOW.

For months we’ve had a few big problems in our family that we have been trying to solve.  It’s no secret that I’ve become frustrated, consumed with confusion and anxiety, allowing despair to take hold.  This is who we are, I thought, Tom and especially me. We project out to the future and come back and cannot visualize it working out.

But we cannot project good outcomes.  We cannot resolve it.  We cannot solve it.  We cannot think our way out of it.

Partly this is not trusting God.

Partly this is simply fear.

Partly it is that we believe we have control over the outcomes of our lives, and more importantly no matter how much we say that we don’t think so intellectually, we think we have control over the outcomes of our children’s lives.

Suddenly I see that we cannot control the outcomes of our life even as we work hard to be better people, learn to be better parents, strive to be better community members, even as we do, make, inhabit, create, prepare, plan, teach and attempt to control who our kids become, we are challenged to accept what is.

He said, it’s okay.

No, my mind wanted to say and I did say to it’s a mess, it’s falling apart, it’s out of control.  We’re in big trouble.  We cannot manage.  We don’t have answers.

It’s okay.

He just kept coming back to it.  It’s okay, what is.  This is the state of things. It’s okay.

Our current circumstances are hard, some of the toughest we’ve ever faced.  But right at this moment, still high from the clarity of the simple truth of yesterday, I see.

If we take life minute to minute, moment by moment, I’m fairly certain we can bear it.

Just now, right now.  Only this moment.

Stop projecting three steps ahead, three years ahead … and it’s a sweet surrender!  There’s a sense of less straining, less fear, less need for control and more of getting out of the way for God being God.  I’ve talked a lot of late about surrendering to God but haven’t known how.

We do it right now.  This is the only moment we can surrender and then we’re free.

Ask yourself: What’s going on right now?  What are you accomplishing in this moment by worrying three steps ahead?  Not a thing.  Why not be here?  What’s to be solved by imagining the worst and best outcomes?  What might happen if you just stopped?

I’m Already Drowning

SUN_SLIDES_LYR_MHH_10-11 (96)The noise of him rising wakes me, suddenly
aware of morning.  I must have slept, for I am now fully awake.
Before any awareness of the day
a familiar dread pounds inside, stomach lurching.
Life’s burdens stream in, pooling around as the bed floats.
A Swelling river of tears, and fear and heartache.  I’m already drowning.

He’s rushing to work because work put him to sleep, kept him dreaming
and woke him.

All of life, lately is spent reeling and the current
is upstream, I’m grasping
at some kind of Hope, any kind of goodness,
holding on to the bits of sweetness I can find, anywhere.
Rancorous contemplation engulfs the good I long for, for I’m no good
at holding on to hope,
in fact I’m drowning in grief; not yet awake I’m by now clutching the pillows
as the bed floats around me, surrounded by my dreams
and tears.

In a moment the dreams are prayers, my heart’s Beat and Breath joins
into Knowing.
The Holy One searches us, knowing everything so how
can I persistently go on alone?
In the Holy Book the words are written, all our days are Known.

Before she was inside my womb.  This I cannot comprehend

as I’m drowning.

Still, You Know and now I believe again.

Even one so lost, is not so lost to you.

Waiting to be Born

3954991177_90ed5da242What is waiting to be born
inside me,
hope and delicate, childlike faith
and courage.  I am
wrecked, at the moment.  Empty,
consumed, used up and useful to no one.

This
life
is too much to bear.

I’m waiting for it.
I’m wavering, it is
flickering within enough
to burn.
Bright and on, or
out.

—————————————————————————-

“Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!” [Yeats]

THIS WAS A WORD CANDY PROMPT.  What is waiting to be born?