Prize Fighter

locked in a fight
to the death
she
would
win

on her own terms
not before a marathon of sparring rounds

she was too conditioned
her body beaten into everlasting strength and submission
for
any
other
outcome

many before her have duked with Life
they were bested, beaten down
worn down
ground down
grooved and weary faces told of every blow
leathered hands showed every feeble swing

but the only tail of woe
on her young face
was of an ill-kept corner
no one ready at the toll of the bell
to help
to bolster
no shoulder rub
no advice
no water

her face told the brutal reality
in the end, not even
her own cells, her own genetic frameworkers
were on her side

they trained her by accident
never seeing her
or their own hands swinging
toughening and hardening
without intent.
they sold her
down the river
too far


but she could read the stars
but she could sing the melody
hum the rhythm of freedom
chanted by the river

they reached higher up
by stepping on her crumpled body
and when Life threw a punch
the bone that had already exposed
she knew in each cell
that Life held nothing

because she'd already seen
had already survived and
she
still,
would
win.

Shoes

I went walking along the beach trying to find you,

The trials and burdens of this life heavy as the fog clinging to the shore.

I found your shoes by a driftwood shelter

Mockingly standing guard at a life you lived while I was trudging.

The sand seems to ever lay me down, slow me, tire me.

You come running as if oblivious of the dense, sinking sand.

Life shrouding your sure and confident body with uplifted butterfly wings.

Mommy!  Mommy!! Come quick!!  See what I found!!

You flitter close, then turn and run away

In excitement

In eagerness

I will get there my Love-- I am coming.

I fear I will evermore be too late, your shoes outgrown when I arrive

But I always, faithfully, am trudging to you Love, 

Bringing remnants of your past 

Silently bearing witness to the you You used to be, 

Back when I picked up your shoes

Old Turtle and the Broken Truth (It's a children's book, you should go get it, if for nothing else but the pictures are divine)

I'm a bit overprotective of a few things in this world.  Those of you who have ever seen me parent might be a bit surprised.  I'm generally hands-off, free-range, live-and-let-live kind of mentality.  My kids climbed on things (not furniture unless they wanted my wrath, but normal stuff) from a very young age interfered with.  I'll give directives, such as 'stop the rugby-play' but will rarely step in.  So the idea of hovering around and stepping in immediately about anything in particular is, in fact, very rare.  But there are a few things I think are just absolute.

I once saw an interview with a convicted child abuser.  The man said something that has never left me.  "I'm a murderer.  I killed who those girls would have become."

That's an absolute.  I protect, fiercely, the ideology that there is a spirit within each of us that needs to hear whole truths, absolute truths in order for us to become who we were supposed to be.

For example, I've been told that little girls want to be 'beautiful'.  The truth is that every single female alive is simply stunning, wholly captivating, and worth every single effort to shine in the world.  But the broken truths are that she must be a certain way, sound a particular rally cry, drum to a particular beat.  And there are those out there who would perpetuate these broken truths, sometimes meaning to but not necessarily, and that makes me angry...  because any truth that is partial, broken, halved is a wet blanket to a shivering and cold person.  Worse than useless; detrimental in ways the human eye can't always see.

I'm currently going through a Bible study at a friend's church with a group of women.  I don't know these ladies much at all.  Many are brand-new faces to me and since much of the time we are together is in guided discussion and then watching a video, I haven't gotten to know them.  But as we were watching the movie on a Monday night, I wanted to get up, pause the movie and take each and every single one of the young women's faces in my hands, meet their eyes and tell them they were hearing a broken truth deeply veiled in a particular perspective.  You see, each person has a perspective, which means every single person has their own personal truths.  Ones that may or may not transcend to others, but are no less completely accurate for them.  A person who has battled with depression may have a particular perspective on the word "crazy" that doesn't necessarily translate to the next guy, but in the midst of that struggle, "crazy" being offensive, wrong, humiliating is absolute truth... to her. And this is what I'm getting at.  There are absolute truths and then there are absolute truths for each one of us.  Turning my personal truth into universal, absolute truth... that's when the thing gets broken, twisted, maimed into a weapon.

I've participated in the creative process.  I've grown four sets of lungs, 40 tiny toes and eight beautiful eyes.  Each one of those babies was a complete miracle, and completely ordinary.  Both, absolute truths.

Growing up during a time when the machine that was the Evangelical Christian Conservative Movement during and post Billy Graham, I Kissed Dating Goodbye and short-term mission trips, I have a particular perspective.  A set of lenses through which I see the world.  And I'll be really honest, I have a passion for talking about and uncovering that perspective because I feel like I really do share a set of lenses that are very, very familiar to so many of my generation.  The difference for me is that I bought into and believed with every single nook and cranny of my fiber every single one of the broken truths that were fed to me.  And it bit me so hard in the ass I haven't been able to sit for years.

I was trying to explain a topic-who-lacks-vocabulary to a friend who didn't grow up in the The Machine.  To her, "kissing dating goodbye" holds no meaning.  She doesn't conjure up sacred promises made between young girls and their fathers in solemnity and solidarity with other fathers and daughters.  The "purity movement" doesn't make her taste the guilt of wearing soccer shorts that some mother 'tsssk' at because they were too short, too tight, or worse, too big and baggy so that underwear can be seen when the girl slide-tackled.  "Doesn't she realize there are boys around who could see that!?!"  And in all these conversations, I find myself identifying more and more with the Apostle Paul, who was the most Jewish of all Jews, but spent his ministry among the Gentiles.  He knew the words, the terminology but he also had discovered a rooting, a grounding when he saw his world through a new set of lenses, in what was and was not important.  If you look at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, you'll see him calling out the leaders who demand from the Gentiles what they themselves could not deliver.  Broken truths, from the beginning.  And here's the thing, I fully understand how those Pharisee converts completely thought that everyone would come to Christ the way they did, understanding religious words as they did and practicing faith the way they did.  When you're so in the truth of your own perspective, it's hard to see that another vantage point might look differently.  More than hard, it can often be impossible.  Time and time again, across history, we see factions breaking off because personal truth and perspective is taken up as the ONLY perspective, the ONLY truth.

And that space, right there, that's where I get that rubbing, raw feeling.  I have experienced that interaction between personal truth and projected absolute truth.  I see it and I want to protect others from it.  Much like those young women in that Bible study room.  I want to take their faces in my hands, look them directly in the eyes, and say, "Don't be scared, that is her perspective, her truth. Your's may or may not be the same experience."  I once heard a sermon where the pastor kept coming back to the idea of before the fall of the Tower in Babel and after.  Before, everyone did the same thing, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, engaged in the world in the same way because they had to.  Uniformity of faith through conformity of deeds.  You want to paint?  Too bad, we're making bricks.  And after the tower fell, it was uniformity of faith through diversity.  Because we have to remember, after, there were many languages after those bricks came down, so people had to find someone, anyone who understood them.  Factions arose instantaneously because they had to, out of survival.  But that didn't mean the God of their faith was different, it meant that the expression of that faith was.  There's this video that I love going around facebook right now that has more than a dozen artists singing in just as many languages singing the same song of worship.  And some randomly crazed part of me wants to defend every last breath of THE TRUTH that is the whole, not just part.

Give your all to Jesus and He'll see to your every need.  Absolutely, but that means give your all to Jesus, not to a church or pastor or organization or mantra.  Jesus.  Have discernment, excersize it regularly everywhere else.  

Save yourself for marriage.  Yes, absolutely save the best parts of who you are for your spouse! Save the best, most vulnerable side of your heart, the soft sides of your personality, the deeply held beliefs and convictions, not just what's between your legs.  

Fill yourself, your time, your energy with good and holy endeavors.  Fill your life with Beauty and Love and Light and Ebenezer Stones, things that remind you of the awe-some-ness of the creation around you, because it will remind you of the AWEsome Creator who made it.  That doesn't mean only "christian" it means lovely, edifying, beautiful, and revelatory.  Things that make you pause and give glory back to the Father of Lights, even if that's a new relationship with a mom from your son's kindergarten class who speaks so little English that it's a battle to get one thought across but you see Glory in each fight or a five year old screaming the words to "Shut Up and Dance With Me." 

God gives us trials to act as the 'refiners fires'.  Oh Jesus, I know you have put things in my path (ahem, that crazy biology teacher in high school) to test and prove me, show me gaps in my theology and heart.  But, I also know the arch of so many repeated stories in holy and non-holy books.  Some trials are from above, some are... not.  Yes, trials CAN come from you (just like I can put the trail and inhumanity of cleaning up his toys to my son), but they don't ALL come from you.  You can turn mourning into joy and you can sit in my dark pit, but you are not the source of all my pain.  Some choices would NEVER HAVE BEEN your Plan A for my life.  Never. 

There are a lot of broken truths that I've come face to face with over the years, many of them in the most brutal of ways.  Many, I'm still fighting to find words for.  But I know this, the brokenness in these truths mirrors the brokenness I see in most evangelical churches.  And it hurts me.  I want to protect the Church, the Church's witness... her reputation, but when all the little individual churches and people cling and fight for their truth to be designated as THE truth... I hurt.  I ache.  I bleed.

Not so long ago that I don't still know all the days between here and there, I was pummeled by the very real, very physical reality that nothing lasts forever.  It's not all that I hoped it would be and yet, it was a dream come true.  I have been told from more than a few people that I need to "move on" and "get over it" but MY truth is that I'm glad I can't, I'm glad I haven't, I'm glad I know in my marrow I never will.  I, in a sense, married a church and what happened  was a divorce, a widowhood, a death.  I would never go to a friend and say she needed to "get over" her divorce, she needed to move on from burying her husband.  I'm learning to live and move in a new way, because that is the only way to keep living.  But in the raw space of deep need, I've been confronted with so many of these broken truths.  Much like partially softened sea glass, normally they won't cut or hurt, but when put to new flesh, baby soft, they can and will cut.

Skin in the Game

In June, I got a birthday present.  My birthday is in January, my mother has forgotten it more times than remembered, and presents have always been rare.  But in June, I got a birthday present.  A dear family I've known since I was six... the mom, the dad, the oldest daughter (my age), the youngest daughter (hubs recruited her to our alma mater) and her husband... they let me join them.

I was so excited I went to the house half an hour too early, just for a few extra minutes of hugs and excitement.  We drove to the transit train, went into the city.  All six of us found our seats on the balcony and sat while our very pores soaked up the amazing musical Hamilton.

This is one of those musicals where, if you want, you can really steep yourself in it: the history, the lyrics, the sheer enormity of it all, for a good long time.  I'm steeping.  Have been even before watching.  But there's a line that seems to catch in my throat, almost like a sob.

When you got skin in the game, you stay 

in the game.  But you don't get a win 

unless you play the game. 

-HAMILTON The Room Where It Happens

I'm in the game.  All in.  I spent my childhood trying to mask where I was coming from, trying to be who I thought THEY needed me to be... not my parents, but the ones I thought might actually care. When THEY kicked me to the curb, said I was useless and therefore not worthy of any of THEIR time or compassion, I sat down, reevaluated.  

And here I am, sitting, homeless and with four kids but I see the game.  The Game of Life... and I have skin in this game.  I'm not throwing away my shot.  I wonder how many think they're playing the Game, following the rules and collecting the points, only to realize later, somewhere down the line, the Game wasn't played on the gameboard... and they wasted all their time on the gameboard.

I've got skin in the game, so I stay in the game.  I'm fighting, cajoling, tooth-and-nail-scraping and I'm deeply, deeply satisfied with what I'm turning up.  

Now that I'm not doing life as it's "supposed" to look-- house, kids, car, school, activities... now that I'm homeless by choice, wandering, by choice, with absolutely nothing that on paper ticks any of the boxes of successfully living an adult life... now, now I'm finding contentment again. 

The family stopped at Mt. Rushmore on our way between what we wanted to do and what we had to do.  The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, told the workers who went 'up and over' to chisle the mountain face that they needed to close their eyes and feel with their hands the way the model felt; then feel the rock they were carving until the two matched.  

When I look at life with my eyes, no matter how hard I try, I can't stop seeing life without the lenses of could and should and would.  But with my eyes closed to the mandates and edicts of society, I feel with my hands the model of the master.  My rock isn't carved yet, but this way of playing the Game, with my eyes closed, feeling with my gut the tuggings and pullings of my own heart... it's working for me.  

Moral Licensing

American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay once penned the words, "Wisdom enough... is daily spun; but there exists no loom to weave it into fabric."

Without a storyteller, many parts of history, or humanity, stay stuck as random and misconstrued, or worse still, completely unevaluated events.  Fabric unwoven, disjointed, without purpose.   For me, my truth is that everything IS indeed connected.  Storytellers, loom-weavers, mystics who put context and texture to the facts; these are the people who inspire me.  

During one of the episodes of the Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell, the narrator, explains that moral licensing is what can happen when barriers are broken.  In the particular story he was speaking to, moral licensing was being specifically used with women being allowed into a "man's world."  He talked about how getting "in" can be logistically impossible, and also how having one female let into the "club" didn't mean that a precedent had been set.  What can happen is that people feel they have proven their own open mindedness and then feel the moral latitude to go back to a biased and narrow view.  The story is exceptional, but there was a part that profoundly spoke to me.  It connected a documentary I'd watched a few months back on the passing of the 19th Amendment for the right for women to vote.  The connection was in a simple phrase that Elizabeth Butler Thomas (an artist) wrote in her memoirs about how she missed being elected into the Royal Academy by two votes, missed it and "rightly so."  When the ratification of the 19th Amendment came down to one state assembly, in heated debates, many of the loudest voices against women voting were women themselves.  So beaten down and entrenched in the dogma of their culture-- that they were lesser, that these women defended the very institution that held them in half-status.  Modern psychologists might allude to Stockholm Syndrome or some such, but for me, it feels more.  Deeper.

As if the very idea of facing a world where there are two choices, and the lesser of the two choices were taken, was too bleak and too dark a reality to face.  So the loudest defense of the "rightness" of one is made so fervently that the quickened heartbeats and sweat brimmed brows can be ignored.   How can you live in a world that chose to be so willingly cruel to you by gender, economy, religion, ethnic or any other standard unless, of course, you are wrong? Faced with that choice, then, the world itself, it's rules and regulations weren't cruel at all.  That world was right.  That world was just.  That world has the correct answer-- it is as it is because it should be as it is.

Except...

Expect Huckleberry Finn realized his world condemned Jim and he said: "All right right then, I'll go to hell."

Except Atticus Finch sees the "justice" around him and still tells Scout:  "Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."

Except Reverend Msimangu sees his world and says:  "But there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power."

Except Turner Buckminster III sees the town and it's prejudices and thought:  "I almost touched a whale."

Except Jacob sees his world where the oldest is exalted and the younger forgotten, and crosses his hands and said:  "I know, my son, I know."

Tradition of Daily Bread

To raise children in a land not your own, keeping to your own distinct heritage and traditions, your own identity is pretty brutal.  But when the traditions, heritage, the very identity is less a noun and more a verb, it becomes more than brutal, it becomes nearly impossible.

For three decades, I've had a tawdry affair with the organized evangelical church.  I've put on my best face, the church itself has been showy and loud, but ultimately, the organization has proved cheap, of little or no substance, and easily broken, and I end up with a broken mask and shattered heart.  Thing is, I'm not cheap.  I'm not easily broken.  My LORD is not cheap and He most certainly isn't easily broken.  All the time and energy spent trying to be showy, cheap, trying to be of lesser quality than I really am has nearly crushed my very soul.  But I, for a whole lot of reasons myself and others like me who grew up as a kind of breech in the gap between Billy Graham and his holy crusades and the current reality of the world, have managed to claim and identify with the scattered diaspora of the first century.  It doesn't feel like there are many who are in this Babylon with me, but I know there are.  Like Little Foot in The Land Before Time, there is family out there, somewhere, I just have to muster the energy and courage to find it.

But finding that family, searching out, especially on days like today, seems monumental.  If I want my children to understand and be brought up into their identity as followers of a rabbi who lived and taught centuries ago, then died a criminal's death and was raised for the redemption of all humanity... if I am to raise my children up as threads in the fabric of THAT story then I have to make it through days like today. I have to cling to the culture and tradition handed down to me, the one I've seen, the one I've tasted, the one that instilled bone-level theology in word, deed, and song.  Theology that, like Abram, understands intuitively the name of Yahweh generations before Yahweh named Himself to Moses.

We lived in South Africa for what was such a short and far-too-brief time.  I have been unable to replicate so very many priorities about the life and culture there that sang the song of my heart, the song of my Savior.  I just didn't have enough time with the stories to memorize them, I didn't have enough time with the beauty and the food and the warmth and the people to retrace each recipe, follow each wrinkled furrow.  Being raised in the evangelical, white, anglo-saxon church in America did not form in me a deep, gut-level theology; it formed in me prejudices and biases that I have spend years and years untangling.  And the last few years have personally been some of the darkest days of my soul. One blessed thing I was given, or rather I think my marrow understood in a way that was impossible for my conscience brain to comprehend, is that I was part of a story, a tradition that went in when everyone else was running out.  A tradition that said it's not enough to just be saved and let God's grace, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart for another time, another place.  Because being saved by grace and then just waiting for death isn't enough.  The holiness tradition I was raised in fell away from itself, it went to the suburbs, it wanted and chased after the pictures of the "good life" being projected by the American culture.  But what my young heart heard, what was formed into me in a way I'm only beginning to scratch the surface of, is that God is BIG and grace breaks out INTO humanity.  It's not enough that we can go behind the curtain. He had to rip it into two and let His goodness break out INTO THE WORLD.

This is the tradition I'm raising my children into.  And like South Africa, I didn't have enough time.  My experience is so limited.  It's not enough to know the songs, say the Bible verses.  It's not enough to sit back and be an observer because "I'm just waiting out the storm until Christ calls me home."  It's not enough to form a holy huddle down in the cellars and let everyone and everything else pursue the visions they have of the Good Life.  It's not enough to just be Abram and be wonderously called out to literally go forth and become yourself.  He had to go, he couldn't stay in the same place with the same expectations as before that holy encounter which took him into his own story and the story of the people of faith, globally.

A pastor I love dearly used to work in Pasadena, California.  He spoke once about some Armenian folk in his congregation and how the body of Armenians would bake homemade pita bread, make hummus, sing the songs, tell the stories, and call their young people into the fabric of what it means to be Armenian even in the midst of living an exiled life in a foreign land.  The word picture was to literally weave their lives into the tapestry of the larger Armenian story.

Donal Trump was elected president today.  There is no doubt in my mind that America can no longer be called a religious nation, and by extension, there can be no assumption of religiosity or faith from anyone.  I don't care what religion you follow, HE is not the one who embodies any of what your religion holds up.  His siren's call is to wealth and power at all cost, taking and taking and taking because it can be taken.  Like a mob who loots stores during a crisis, he doesn't take out of need or to prove an ideological point; he takes because it's there. It's.  There.  He takes money, he takes land,  he uses and abuses the environment, women, he takes dignity.  He takes because IT. IS. THERE.  I know of no religion that says greed by all measures is good, let alone justified. Not a single one.  Which means, whatever religion you follow, this country isn't with you.  

There is a prayer in Proverbs 30 that says, Take emptiness and lying speech far from me, and do not give me poverty or wealth. Give me a living sufficient for me or I may feel satisfied and deny you... or I may become poor and steal and give the name of my God a bad reputation. 

What will our traditions be?  What will be the anthem we choose to sing?  What loom will we use to show our children how to weave themselves into the tapestry of their day and age?  What will be the constant undercurrent hemming in all of their decisions? Wealth?? Money?? Power??  The pursuit of taking because it is there?  Or the tradition of poetry in action?  The generations of blessing by being a blessing.  Will the children yearn for the taste of cheap, selfish and flashy or will they remember the simple pita and hummus of their youth?  or for my children, will my lighting candles to remember the God who brings hope and love and peace and joy into the world, will my homemade yogurt and granola... will it be enough??  Will there be enough family members that we find along the way to help raise up my children in the ways they should go?  I'm a kick-ass mom, but I know that I am not enough.  Not even close.  I know that for my children, for any children, to know their own identity and to let that identity inform who they are takes more than me.  For my children to become their own Abraham while still living as Abram, to live into their own inheritance, it's going to take more than cheaply denouncing that they're American, therefore they're Christian.  Will enough people who hold their heartstrings be sitting at the table to make them want to come in, sit, and eat of the broken body, the shed blood?

The tradition I want my children to be raised up in is this-- to act with justice, to treasure the LORD's gracious love, and to walk humbly in the company God.  I'm not Armenian, I'm not an evangelical christian.  I want no part of America. To say I identify with this idea of being a stranger in a strange land would be a gross understatement of reality.  I have no home, and I know I never will again feel safe enough to really put down roots.  Not until I see heaven.  But I'm not waiting for that great and glorious day.  It's too great a thing for my LORD and Savior to have laid down His life for me, so I cannot just sit and bide my time until He comes again.  My focus right now is simply trying to raise my children in the ways of my God, in the ways of my spiritual ancestors, in the ways that seem on this dark day to be lost forever.  Last Saturday, at a Jewish temple nearby, it was the part of the Jewish calendar where the story of Noah was read.  It's a big deal for the community as the children are more present during this particular scripture reading than others because there are animals and boats and, I don't know, it's a kids' story??  Honestly, I still have no clue what's going on most of the time.  Yet I go.  I go because it's beautiful.  I go because it's a safe place to ask questions.  I go because no one there pretends to have all the answers.  I go because my rabbi talks simply, poetically about life and faith and God in a way that my heart finds to be water to my very parched soul.  I go because I get to wear a prayer shawl, which I was once told to picture as a warming hug, from all the worshiping Jews of today, and all the Jews who came before.  A warming hug.  Poetic and yet, so very tangible and powerful when you feel lost, without tethering, without any sense of an anchor to the soul talked about Hebrews beyond the ideological.  Shabbat came with kids everywhere, it was basically trying to herd cats throughout the entire morning and there was a man who was part of the Torah reading, an official part of the service.  He stood, in his Sabbath best, with his kippah and prayer shawl, fulfilling his duty within his community. His small son crawled up to him and started fussing at his ankles.  Without skipping a beat, the dad bent down and picked his son up, enveloping him, head uncovered and shoulders bare, in his own prayer shawl, thus making the child acceptably dressed for the worshiping space he was inhabiting.  When the child started fussing again, the mother tried to get him but it was very clear the only thing this boy wanted was mom and dad together, with him.  So the man once again opened his prayer shawl and covered his family within the confines of his robes... his own snapshot of where poetry, tradition, culture and generations collided in real space, real time.  This is the song I want my children to sing for years and years to come.  This is the tradition I place priority in passing onto my children.  This is the siren I strain my ears to hear the undeniable call of; that there is enough room under the banner of Christ for everyone-- father, mother, young, old, white, black, slave to sin or aware and working out the salvation of freedom through the grace of God... like the Syrophoenician woman intuited, like my heart understood, like so many are coming face-to-face with in light of Tuesday's outcome, there is room at the table for everyone.  Period.  

There.  
Is.  
Room.  

The question is not is there room.  The question is, do you want to sit?  Do you want to keep the story of the culture that is undeniably calling you to take and take and take?  Or do you want the burdens of wealth and fame, security and status to fall away?  Do you want a "living sufficient"... or as another translation puts it, do you want only your daily bread?

The Right to Speak First

There is a critical point in an argument, not an every day argument but the kind that tears at the actual fabric of your being; the point when you know speaking will do more harm than good.  A spouse realizes the only words left to say are, "divorce?" and a parent is left with only a screaming, "get out!!!" to an insolent teenager.  The point where moving, even an inch: one moan, one utterance, and that's it.  Game over.

So many times during my life in christendom I heard story after story about how "God was silent" in the pain and the hurt and the suffering.  I heard the anger and bitterness behind those moments of silence.  But in the last few years, my God has been silent, and for that, I'll be forever thankful.  No grand displays of splendor and omniscience, just the tide of life ebbing and flowing-- waxing, waning, constant and always changing.  As if He knew that a whisper would send me over the proverbial edge, past the point of no return.  As if, in building and forming my soul He memorized each of the kill-switches in their exact order, and once a particular chain of events was set off that landed me here instead of there, He knew.

Silence.

No sudden movements.

Everything else is moving, everyone else screaming, shouting.  But from Him, no noise.  No words.

Don't.

Spook.                                                                           

Her.

I struggle every day to scratch and claw my way out of the dark depression that is my reality.  It is very rare for me to wake up and have a good day, to be able to get out of bed without fighting a dozen battles before my feet even touch the hard wood floors.  And this morning, I woke up happy.  I woke excited.  My whole house was quiet, the kids still asleep, Todd blissfully snoring, and I was looking forward to a moment.  Life in christendom (think Stepford Wives here folks, christendom as the place you move into where everything has a specific way it should and shouldn't be) is prescribed.  For a thousand reasons that I mostly understand and generally feel can be helpful and beneficial, they are prescribed.  But just as quoting to someone who has just lost a baby Jeremiah 29:11 isn't helpful, might even be harmful; sometimes, those "prescribed" advanced directives aren't always helpful, might even be harmful.  And today, as I woke early, grabbed my Bible and my new women's Bible study book to sit and do my "devotional time with Jesus" that's "highly recommended" and part of a "spiritually disciplined life" my joy, my happiness, my fleeting moment of feeling like ME evaporated like a puff of smoke in the coastal breezes.  It all felt so cheap, so sterilized, so out of the big, messy context that is my reality, my life.

I'm trying, ever so hard to get my stuff together.  To do the things I'm supposed to do.  My therapist and I made a check list.
1. Feed children when they're hungry
2. Clean underwear for the family
3. Make friends
4.  Do normal things- go to the park, make coffee dates, hang a picture, plant something, etc

I've worked through my check list.  My kids are always fed, I do the laundry, I've gone through the agonizing process of making friends, not just acquaintances but good friends.  I go to the park every day during the school year and most days during the summer.  I go out.  I decorate my house.  I've even planted shit.  But my life isn't any more put together right now than it was the moment I stepped on that plane to leave my country and my people and myself.  My life LOOKS fine, but it's not.  My Bible study LOOKS fine-- every blank is filled in, all the answers and thoughtful questions dutifully written down, but it's not fine.  Because I'm still in that argument.  I'm still standing on the brink of no return.  I'm still in a yelling match between myself and my faith family, with Jesus caught in the middle.  My faith is too simple, too basic for most of mainstream evangelical christendom.

I love Jesus because He loved me first.

That's.

It.

And no one else seems to get that.  No one else seems to understand, and in that lack of understanding, harm is being done.  Except the One who created me, the one who knows I need to speak first, I need to ask the questions, I need to make the first move.  Don't distract from the task at hand.  The battle against the Powers and Principalities is vicious and brutal, and sometimes, looks an awful lot like a staring contest.  And He knows me, He knows that, and He's staying quiet... and that gives me permission to stay quiet; stay quiet and fight with everything in me to no look away first, not blink, not give in to the bitterness and anger and rage that would be able to consume me, heart and marrow.

He gave everything for me, including the right to speak first.

And He sits quietly, not moving, not speaking, letting me BE in the midst of my battle.  So I can focus and fight, not being distracted because He knows and I know that if left to the two of us, He and I will win.  So I quiet the anger at the simplistic and categorical Bible study that reduces the God of the universe to a simple one-liner.  I linger in the silence of the song that says I'm a "friend of God" when I don't want a friend, I want a thousand things, but friend is not one of them.  He sits, quietly, and lets me be quiet... because He knows the plans He has for me... and He will work all things to His good, according to His will, and right now, that means Brittany gets to chose when it's time to speak, and He'll stay silent until the time is ready.

Across the Line

I went to my parents place this weekend.  Loaded all four kids into my tiny Honda so that we could attempt a few relaxing hours of family and outdoor time.  It was cold and rainy and brilliant.  Farmer's Market early on the grey Saturday, playdate that ended with kids in a creek all muddy and mucky (a hallmark of childhood fun) and a nice, leisurely meal with friends as they loved on me, loved on my kids.  It was all wonderful until the topic of church on Sunday morning came up.  

Part of me still feels obliged, mandated, compelled, ingrained to go to church by 10am on a Sunday.  In the same way that you don't think about whether or not you need to urinate upon rousing in the morning, you simply go to the bathroom, first thing; I feel a deeply set-in habited part of me that formatively needs to be at a church at that designated day and time.  Every Sunday seems to be a tug of war between feeling like I must go to appease some undisclosed judicial system, and the other part wants to not attend until I sort some things out.

Generally, I don't follow American politics.  I read up on issues, I vote, I complete my civic duties, but I don't go to rallies, I don't donate money.  Fundamentally, I think the system is flawed and all that jazz we Millennials are known to haphazardly gripe about.  But this particular presidential cycle, with all the crazy shenanigans and myriad of candidates, including the most controversial one, Donal Trump, has me perking up my ears.  Not so much to the dialogue from the standard news-types, but more to the NPR or independent types.  One such gal interviewed here a conservative radio host out of South Carolina, Tony.  This man is deep in his religious beliefs and those beliefs are deeply connected to the stances of the Republican Party.  In more than one interview, he talked about how if Trump was the voice of the Republican Party, than he had to separate.  To him, he could get behind people who were slightly less conservative, slightly more pro-whatever, but he could not get behind Trump and what he stands for.  Which leaves Tony, a conservative political radio host, literally, a man without a party.  In the interview, it's clear Tony feels betrayed, angered, with a feeling of, "when did 'we' (Republicans) turn into 'that' (people who agree with the viewpoints of Trump) and how did I miss the signs?"

I feel for Tony.  The parallel between a man who foundationally feels there is a moral high ground in politics and the only place to stand is on it, and myself, a girl who felt foundationally there was a spiritual high ground and the only place to stand was on it... to me at least, it's the same story.  Different details, but the same story no less.

Blindsided.  

Baffled.  

Unable to understand because understanding would look a particular way according to my deeply held convictions and the current reality is not inline.  

You going to Sunday School or just church?

Um, neither.

I choose the option not given, I choose not to go.  I choose to stand back, lick my wounds, let them heal, and figure out what the hell happened and how I missed it.  Tony will do the same.  He'll wonder which debate, which bigoted rant, which racial/ethnic/religious shooting-off-of-the-mouth everyone else missed by Trump that he, Tony, clearly saw.  Meanwhile, I'll wonder which meeting, which encounter, which reprimand I clearly saw as out-of-line that apparently was clear only to me.

There is a line in the sand, a breaking even point.  Everything between where you are and that line is acceptable.  Sure John McCain wasn't as conservative as Tony hoped, but he was generally in the same vicinity as Tony.  Sure I didn't agree with every decision the evangelical organization made but they were generally making sense, in my same logical vicinity.  But once that small line is crossed, there is no way to go back.  What's worse, the bewilderment and astonishment are often so great, you have no words to describe how the twelve steps leading up to that line were more or less acceptable, but that one tiny step over, that one wasn't.  The straw that broke the camel's back-- what does that even mean?!?

But for those of us who have been there, either politically, ethically, morally, religiously, or sexually, once that line is crossed, the planet shifts on it's axes and never goes back.

The question was well meaning.  The intentions were more or less, "This used to be a thing I did with you and I miss having you there," but the fact that the question is being asked at all says the asker still doesn't get it.  There will never be a "getting over" this.  You will never "get over" the death of a child, witnessing a horrible crime, having your foundation cracked open beneath you.  These things you don't "get over" you only can get through... and anyone who asks if you've gotten over it, they don't get it.  They can't.  It's beyond them, at least, until they cross their own lines.

Nothing Is Next

Becoming a mom is a different journey for different people.  I love the African proverb that says a child is born the moment the mother conceives of that child in her heart.  I have friends who have families through surrogacy, through adoption, through intense pregnancies and through some compilation of all of the above.  Getting the label "mother" can sometimes feel like graduating from university.  You have the logical and very rigorous steps to becoming a parent behind you.  Now you have the kid.  Diploma in hand.  Then comes that moment when you meet an old friend or worse, a friend of your parents', at the local grocery store after graduation.  Because the inevitable question happens: What's next?

I used to think that everything was BC (Before Children) and AC (After Children).  More often than not, these days, I'm beginning to come around to this idea that parenthood, and in my case specifically motherhood, is much more grey than one side of the other.  I had friends who were pregnant, had a baby, but have never fully lived into motherhood.  Yes, they are mothers in the strict definition.  But the idea that parenting, motherhood is a craft to be fine-tuned, with skills that require maintenance and training... I think that's a concept that might never have been, or at the least, is slowing dying away.

Daily, I craft the skills of knowledge and bonding with my child so that in the moments when she is going to break, the world as she sees it has fallen short of her every expectation, I have the words and the touch that can resonate with her soul when her brain is just overloaded.  Some days are better than others, but I don't go without.  There's no 'walking away' for a break.   


Chef David Chan was doing a series on how a chef thinks and he went into a factory that processes fish in Japan.  He watched a man, a line worker, break down a tuna:  "Here's a guy who has done this a million times.  For me, whenever I watch someone that butchers anything and it's so clean and so fast, it's like... it's watching art, it's watching somebody that has mastered their craft."

As my third gets ready to don the preverbal backpack for kindergarten, as I struggle with the full mother's intuition that she's not ready for OUR particular, American, highly-driven elementary school setting, I keep running into people asking the question, like when I left university:  What's next?

I haven't been biding my time between a career that I was passionate about but set aside for diapers and midnight feeds.  I haven't made all the financial and personal sacrifices to hygiene and individual toilet time for designated amount of time.  I set aside a particular set of knowledge and craft, (teaching) so that I could develop, hone, and creatively embrace another craft, motherhood.  I want to mother the way that line worker was able to break down that huge fish- effortlessly.  I don't think my skills are so strong that I can walk away for a week, a month, a few years, and pick right back up.  I'm not sure my kids need me any less now that they sleep through the night, are toilet trained, or can put their own pants on.  Not as a chauffeur, but as a mediator, between the world and their hearts, giving them lessons and language on life and love and beauty and tragedy. All the things that make up their world are still just as new and scary but full of wonderful potential, in the same way that my first learning to walk faced a world of obstacles and dangers, but it was a wonderful, beautiful world full of discoveries to be made.

In Judaism, the home is called a mikdash ma'at, a little sanctuary and the goal is to try and emphasize not what each family member does but who they are.  The house then, is a sacred space for being and practicing who you are at your deepest levels.

Being a mother of four, which is generally considered a lot of kids in the States, I realize that my skill in navigating grocery stores, banks, airports and playdates with all my children in tow has made me acutely away of a sort of "mommy-math" I didn't know existed a few years back.  There are values placed on personalities, daily dispositions, time of day dispositions, and the amount of energy expenditure to do a particular activity, and factoring in the physical need of the proposed activity.  So going to the grocery store first thing in the morning for the week's food, right after breakfast, even with all four kids, is simple.  Kids are good, not grumpy, no naps needed, fed, and we need food.  More value on need, less value taken from capacity.  But that exact same scenario, at 12:30pm when naps and lunch and grump have set in, and the math doesn't add up, the capacity to accomplish the shopping versus the need is too great.  Thus, we get pizza for dinner and call it done.

I know the math, because I practice it.  Every.  Single.  Day.  It's good math, sturdy math.  Math that lets me know when I've pushed too hard, demanded too much.

For me, that kind of knowledge comes from intimacy, proximity, daily flexing muscles to practice all the aspects of that equation.  I LOVE my job.  I love trying my best to make my house a sanctuary, both in body and soul.  I get frustrated with my kids, like everyone else, because just when I think I have my times tables memorized, they change the figures, but I love the discovery of the new (usually from hindsight in fairness though).  I'm not ready to say my craft is as good as it's going to get.  Many folks, male and female, are better parents when they are focused, through constraints like time and physical space.  I'm not one of them.  I feel like my heart and my brain work more slowly, like a long cure or a slow marinade.  I'm honing my craft, and just as in cooking and liquor and wood working, this craft takes effort, space, so I'll put in the time to master my beautiful craft.  The craft of Emme Capri, and Monkey; Cooper Nash and Snugaboo... because they are as much a part of me as any master's prized piece.  The symphony of their lives sings back the rhythm and rhyme of mine.

So nothing.  Nothing new is next.  Just them, just this, just me.

Reclaiming Sabbath

I've been chastised, a lot if I'm brutally honest, on how we could go from a family of so-called "professional Christians," people who were lay leaders in the church, earned a living doing "the work" of the church, and now we're, well, not.  We're not leaders, we're not working in a Christian institution, we're not even attending a church regularly let alone members.  And the first question anyone asks (and there are very few bold enough to really ask) is how that happened.  I've been fighting within myself to figure out the answer to that question and I can sit and share about all the decisions, the dominoes that led to us leaving Africa, leaving our home, our life, but I think the really big question that people are asking isn't about me at all, it's about them.  I overheard a word spoken out loud, a truth that was put out into the vast, wide universe meekly asking to be returned.

Random Person:  They were THE Christians, and now look at them.  If all that can happen to them, what chance do I have of making it?

And therein, is the bigger question, the bigger fear.

How can bad things happen to good people... and how do I make sure it doesn't happen to me?  

I don't have an answer.  Truthfully, I'm not capable right now, not strong enough right this moment, to even attempt to ask that.  The sheer weight of that question is just too big.  Yet the circumstances that have led to "bad things" happening to me and my not-so-small tribe influence every single aspect of life as we know it now.  So, on some level, I have to deal with it.  I have to figure out how to take bite-sized pieces and digest them, lest I choke on the whole.

The thing I found most startling about this entire exodus is how brutal the fight for each hand hold has been.  Picture this:  A person, on the ledge of what is always called something like "God's Window".  One of those really tall mountain tops out in the middle of nowhere so the views are stunning, sunsets and sunrises life changing and the peace around just soul satisfying.  Then, for whatever reason (be a push from behind or a leap out) that person who was taking in the vista is plunging to the earth.  Verses memorized in childhood and adulthood alike, verses about plans to prosper me and angels not letting even one hair on my head be damaged race through the mind because there's nothing to do in the midst of the fall.  Flailing and screaming accomplish nothing because the volume and magnitude of the fall, the sheer gravitational energy being exerted is more than any scream can fix.  For me, I knew that, so I fell without a fight.  It didn't matter how I came to the ledge from which this monumental plunge happened, it didn't matter whose hands were at my back or who was beside me.  I was doing down.  Period.  And down I went, mostly quietly, trying to remember landmarks on the way down so the path back up would be marked familiar.  As generally happens, I landed with an unceremonious thudding, a crater forming in the planet that hadn't been there before, yet was more or less completely unknown to the realms.  One of my favorite movies is Stardust and in the movie, a star falls into the magical land of Stormhold.  When she falls, her leg pains her, there are bumps and bruises and a burnt streak in the landscape.  That pretty much sums the feeling up.  Moving, walking, trying to figure out where to go and how to get there is nearly impossible, certainly unplanable.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, some part of your soul knows you're in danger if you just sit in a crater of fallen-ness.  That's where so many things come into play that a very good many evangelical Christians haven't understood about my person path.  I've been called to judgement and rebuked, "prayed for" that we would "rejoin the fold" and so very many other things that really just hurt. Because when you're in the midst of a crater from a world-changing fall, you have to climb out. Someone shouting you should pray more, doesn't help the climb.  Someone asking how to spell your name to add to their weekly prayer request, doesn't help the climb.  Someone telling you that you should be singing joyous songs of the very people who had a hand in or witnessed you being up on that ledge in the first place, doesn't help the climb.  Sometimes, in fact, those very acts feel like stones being thrown down on your head.

On this climb out, the first I've done with an entire family in tow, I've realized a few things.  The whole American "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" and "rugged independence" mentality are just horse shit.  Plain and simple.  Just like poverty is more complicated than good financial planning and eradicating malaria isn't answered in a simple mosquito netting.  Climbing out of betrayal and depression, wounds and seriously deep questions about life and faith and God's purposes aren't answered in my own strength. In the same breath that I realized I wasn't big enough, I also realized my community had very little practice with being the community that pulls me up all broken and bloody.  Many in my community were the very ones wounding me farther with their 'helpful' comments to right myself and others were on that ledge looking down.  That's where my journey to right-ness began, from my deep and sincere need to get out of my pit but a realization that I needed help.

The conservative, evangelical christian background that I come from didn't help me one little bit here. I had no prayer book for when I had no words to pray.  I had no professional counseling outlets because, largely, the church doesn't "do" professional mental health workers.  Worst of all (for me) was that there was no space to be a doubter.  Not necessarily in God, but that might have been nice. Remember, I was trying to bite off small pieces of this really big thing, a really big question, HOW. Small pieces aren't easy to eek out of that, and it's hard work, sweaty, smelly work, and I found there was a lack of grace for the wrestling match that is Doubt.  Doubt in myself.  Doubt in my choices. Doubt in my organized church and doubt in where to go from here.  Compared to some, my doubts were small.  I never doubted the sovereignty of my Lord, Ha Shem.  I never doubted that my path of faithfulness was anything but beautiful.  Those doubts would need even more room, more grace, and I can see why people have left the fellowship of believers in those times.  It felt like (my personal perspective here, my personal truth as I live it) I was trying to climb a sheer marble cliff, with no handholds, no cracks or crevasses... and no one throwing down a helpful rope.

So I turned to foundational things.

Things I hoped and prayed could give me some kind of traction, some kind of Sabbath,a peace of wholeness, completeness.  I went into to look at beautiful rocks in nature on a Sunday instead of the places where I knew rocks had been thrown from in the past.  I self-protected and avoided certain places and people, all the while seeking God in such a way so that I could start to re-assimilate His Holy into the fabric of my heart without all the mess I simply could not deal with.  I found reading my standard Bible was too hard, held too many un-dealt-with-packages of grief and loss and mourning but my soul needed to hear Truth.  So I found a people who spoke of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, MY God, in a way that wasn't steeped in evangelical inch-deep-mile-wide mentality. I took my kids to a Jewish place of worship, now our cornerstone of community and mental health. Believe me, the irony here isn't lost on me.  But, I'm allowed to ask questions there.  For the first time in my life, I'm not an insider, expected to speak insider speak and do insider things.  The space to wrestle down my demons of Doubt and Fear and Baggage is built in, partly because biblically, I'm surrounded by people who have historically fought the demons of Fear and Doubt and inherited Baggage, just like me (individually) but also generationally.  Also, though, because I have zero expectation other than just to be present.  Learning the spiritual practice of connecting to the One who is described as "Was," "Is," and "Is To Come"... the One whose very name is defined by BEING, it's new to me, and I'm loving it.  I'm finding it's okay to recognize boundaries within my own soul and it's  okay if I have a bad week, need a hike, reconnect with my own breath or find God's stillness on a mountain.  I'm unlearning some broken truths planted deep within me, and replacing them with good, full, whole Truths.

My family now practices Shabbot dinners on a Friday night.  I'm not sure what it actually is supposed to look like since I've (so far) turned down every invitation to join an actual Shabbot meal.  For me though, it's in the idea that I set aside a time, a space, for my family to get the best from me, the best from each other, and the best atmosphere to experience the Lord in and through one another.  So the house is cleaned on a Friday, or at least, we attempt it.  I don't like being a task master or getting frustrated and then shouting because of socks everywhere or papers all over the floor.  I intentionally start cleaning days early so that by Friday night, I can take a mental break from dishes and vacuuming and whatever else comes up.  We have candles and good plates, because I want my kids to know they are special enough for the "good stuff" even when it's not a holiday.  I don't want them to get this warped idea that the house is only ever clean for guests, or that they aren't special enough for our good plates.  And then, because the house is clean and the meal is sorted (even if that's just ordering pizza), we light candles so that everyone wants to linger around the table, enjoy the beauty of tribe.  If we can, we invite others to share in this space with us, because who better to share the enjoyment of your family than with others who like them as well?

Falling is hard.  Climbing out of the crater after the fall is damn near suicidal.  Somewhere early on, I remembered truth that dear friends at Grace Point Methodist Church in South Africa had said, "If you don't know where you're going you will have a hard time finding it when you get there."

Foundations.

Fundamentals.

I want my kids to love the Lord God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength.  I want my family to be close, connected, and feel like no matter what is going on in the world, they can come into the sanctuary of our home and find some rest.  I've found that as I work toward and cling to the goals, standards really, that I've set forth for my family, I'm finding more hand holds myself.  Having space in the home for love and acceptance and apologies has helped me carve out space in my own heart for the love and acceptance of where I'm at, and how I got here, but also how far I've come.  Each time I make a physical move toward wholeness for my family, it feels as if there is a move towards wholeness in my own heart.  And each time I find myself more whole, I realize that my own personal HOW gets smaller, easier to chew.  Maybe someday I'll be able to re-enter certain places, certain institutions.  Maybe not.  My goal is not to be a denominational person.  My goal is to be a whole person, worshiping God, and I'm getting there, in my own way, on my own time.

The Shema
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.  Blessed be the name of the glory of His kingdom forever and ever.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.  And these words which I command you today shall be upon your heart.  You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise.  You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes.  And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.... I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God; I, the Lord, am your God.  True. 

Even Here

Even here
is hallowed ground

For this wretched plot
is resting place for my weary body

I own my footprints
my trail
my plight.

The Word promises that wherever I go
He, too, shall be
Ezer

Hemming in
Ahead
Behind
With

Therefore even in this misery
With shadows of monsters lurking
in corners
in my head

Even here
is hallowed ground

Thanks be to God.

Amen
selah

Amen

Old No. 33

Unbeknownst to me as a young person, there's this thing in North America called a "Golden Birthday".  It's the day when your age matches the physical day of the month you were born.  I was born on the 15th of January, which made my 15th birthday my Golden Birthday.  In some places, a Golden Birthday is a big deal.  I suppose I can claim mine as a 'big deal' but not in a particularly positive light.  

I still remember going to bed the night of my 15th birthday so hurt and angry at my family.  I fell asleep thinking, "They MISSED it!  Completely.  Entirely.  They missed my birthday."  

I specifically remember the grocery store check out, the vantage of my mother writing out a check to give to the store clerk to pay for groceries when she wrote "Jan. 19" and paused.  She looked at me and asked what we did for my birthday.  Yep, she realized she'd missed it, but tried to play cool and asked what "we" had done.  

That was the first of many birthdays to be forgotten and by the time I was turning 21, the legal age of drinking and "adulthood" in the States, I just wanted to crawl under a rock and let my birthday pass unnoticed.  The whole idea of something that's supposed to be important, but ends up not being important, to me, was the most depressing thing.  I didn't tell people, didn't get excited, everything was all about managing my expectations and the inevitable let-down.  I spent YEARS with the idea that if I just cared LESS, then eventually, not being remembered and celebrated would be acceptable.  

Three years ago, just before my 30th birthday, a life marker I'd been looking forward to since my first child was born, I told my husband my 30s would be "epic."  I completely forgot that "epic" doesn't always mean great and adventurous.  Homer would not describe his 'epic' journey with the same excitement and gusto as someone who had just gone on an 'epic' hot air balloon ride over the Serengeti.  I planned for the latter, I'm getting the former.  But even so, I'm claiming my 30s as something to be marked, not something to be plowed through, forgotten, wasted time between college and the rest of life.  

My 33rd birthday was Friday.  I was so tempted to fall back into familiar territory, skip over it and let everyone else off the hook for forgetting it as well.  Instead, though, I took a leap.  I decided to throw myself a party of sorts.  The kind of party that might, just might, make my soul a little happier.  

To the outside observer, my life here and now is unbelievably amazing.  I currently live in a first-rate house, overlooking the beautiful San Francisco skyline.  I've lived on three continents, have traveled all over the world, I have an amazing (and hot!) husband of more than a decade who has managed to make THREE successful careers for himself in different organizations all before his 40th birthday. I've had personal and professional success myself, all while making and raising up four of the most beautiful babies I know.  They are each kind and loving and engaging, a joy to be around... unless they're trying to put a sibling in his/her place.  But even so, standing back, my life is hands-down amazing.  Problem is, it's not the life I wanted.  Climbing Everest, surfing the Big Waves of Hawaii, trekking the Appalachian Trail, these are all epic endeavors, worthy of throwing energy and effort into.  But if it's not your dream to stand on top of Everest, when you get there, it'll still be amazing and "worthy" but it won't be something that fills your marrow with soul-satisfying accomplishment.  

In I Samuel the people of Israel argue with God that they want "A king" and God keeps coming back to them that he is "THE king."  English-teacher nerd me, that difference is massive. 

A- one of many, indifferent to which, any old one will do

THE- specific, only one in particular will do

I'm fighting to reframe my perceptions, to reorganize and recalibrate myself so that this amazing, wonderful life I'm living won't be "A life."

Friday.  The party.  My party.  The party I've been waiting to lay claim to for a long, long time.  My house was clean, garage and all.  (This mama was thrilled by that!)  My food was good.  I made things I love, Greek salad and cottage pie, a chocolate stout cake topped with candied oranges. There's nothing about any of it that Martha Stewart would say had a 'theme' but it was mine and I loved the cooking, I loved the taste and I loved feeding my friends, all moms who, like me, needed a break, needed a clean house and a satisfying meal.  We chatted, we laughed, and I promise you, I could feel my soul filling with love and joy and contentment.  I often see people reaching for something, anything to fill them.  Food. Shopping.  Kids' activities, whatever.  I wanted to reach for something concerted, intentional, deliberate... something that mattered to who I am as a person.  It may sound crazy, but the planning, the cleaning, the cooking and the baking that came before the party, the conversation, the laughing, the messy kitchen that came after the party-- these things made me deeply content.  I felt useful.  Needed.  Wanted.  Enjoyed.  Fundamentally seen as a memorable human being.  

When my mom forgot my birthday, after years and years of my father forgetting it, I felt like I wasn't important.  If not to them, then who?  Celebrating Old No. 33, with new friends, good friends, deep and meaningful friends, it helped me reclaim my own sense of value. It also helped, in many small and one very big way, for me to move from seeing my life here on the West Coast as not just a consolation life, "A Life", but as the Next Chapter in THE LIFE that is mine.  

A Call to "We"

I'm not giften in many areas.  But the places of gifting, I know and own.  It has taken me so very long to not chase after what I've seen others do before me, to go with 'known' areas of ministry, of service, of worship.  I was a children's pastor all through college.  Todd and I ran the Littlest Hearts program for 2-5 year olds in South Africa through two pregnancies and three babies.  I have been on leadership for children's camps, youth ministry, VBS, mission trips and more.  I'm more than capable of putting together a seriously great program, Biblically based and with grit for the kids to remember for years to come.  I can do those things, but it's not my gifting, it's not the thing that I do because I find a worship melody within the work.  Someone once said they do the work they do because it "makes my heart sing."

My heart sings, worships, when I'm calling people into sanctuary.  Ever since I came across the concept in the Jewish faith that each individual home is a temple, a sacred space set apart (after the fall of the actual sanctuary in the Temple), I fell in love.  That's what I want do.  I want to make my home, my space, my sphere of influence into a holy space, a vulnerable and sanctified space where sins are sacrificed to make room for the beauty of the Creator.

I have a friend, and for the life of me, I cannot remember a time in our friendship that wasn't messy.  We were among the few in a small, private Christian college in the heart of the midwest who came from "less than perfect" backgrounds.  There was a bond before a friendship, an understanding that we, we know how to muck through it.  When I look back on our tenure as friends, I see how we have come from hardship to hardship over the years, and one of the reasons why she is such a dear friend is because she has very quietly let me be in my muck.  Not fix it, not start throwing things at me in order to "help" get me out, she's let me be right where I am.  As she put it last week, "this is a holy friendship."

I often wonder why so few other relationships are that connected, that special, that holy.  There are certainly people I see more often, connect with far more frequently.  And then I realize the sheer amount of vulnerability and exposed fears we've shared.  Being real is always beautiful work, but it's never easy work.  I was listening to a sermon by my favorite pastor.  My absolute favorite preacher. (Side note:  When I die, Todd knows to have a bonfire, good food, bagpipe music and at least snippets if not full sermons of Pastor Scott.)  In the sermon, Pastor Scott called out the times when we use the term "we" but really the meaning is for someone else to be the "we".  The example he used was the moment when his wife would say, "we should put away the fall decorations" when really she meant for Pastor Scott and their son to pack the boxes up to the attic.

I feel the "we" in my marrow, the real WE, not the one that calls on others.  I yearn for there to be a call from my life to the world that says, COME BE PART OF THIS WE!  Because community is ingrained on my soul, etched into my very bones.  I want to remind people that WE are a people called to love, WE are called to remember that Christ came as a baby not as a weapon of mass destruction (both actual options by the way... think about it).  I have lost countless hours of sleep because of the state of this world, but more specifically, the state of so many who sit in pews in churches all over this country and mull over gun control and presidential candidates and how glad they'll be when our borders will finally be "closed".  Every fiber of my being cries and weeps because WE are called to be a people who are vulnerable, willing to give not just our coat but our shirt as well to those in need.  WE are called to be a people who fully know and recognize that it is within each and every one of us to turn from the Truth WE know.  That WE all need to daily, if not hourly, remember to "Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee."  Because fear is powerful, and the more fearful we are, the more individually we forget who WE really are.  And I want so deeply to remind people who WE are...

Because it's been years since I have felt real and honest community.

Because it's been so very long since my heart could gather around and say, "You are my people. This is my WE."

And I was made to be in a WE.  I was built, as a living stone (James), to participate in the loving action of building the holy temple into this world, not just storing up and protecting here on Earth where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal (Matthew).

The Greek word for wander, as in stray or walk away, is the same word that gave the planets their name, because when the heavenly bodies were being named, they seemed to wander, with no real connect to each other, totally detached.  I want to propose to the forces big and small from this little hidden dark alley of the world wide web that no matter how much we each think we are our own people, our own unique individuals, that none of us are not detached, independent, unconnected.  Each action we individually have has a reaction on what WE ARE.

My bones call out for community.  My blood demands to be reconnected to the bloodlines from which I came.  I am an adopted daughter, heir to the Kingdom, seeking where I come from.  Would someone, please for the love of God, come and tell me about my people?  Would someone, please for the love of Mercy, share with and in me about our family?  Would someone, please for the love of Peace, come and listen to the stories of the One who called each and every single person, who bears the image of Yahweh, Beloved???

The Day Between That Life and This

It wasn't yet five in the morning, but it was sweltering hot on the tarmac.  Even as the plane was taxing to our parking space, I could see the heat waves rising from the unnaturally black hue of the pavement and for the tenth time in 48 hours, I wanted to vomit, but that action would require more energy than I had to spare.  So I sat, and bundled all the emotions in my soul up, shoving them in some spiritual closet.  I couldn't deal with them, not then, not there.  There was work to do.

The intercom had politely informed me that the plane was more than an hour late because of the miserable storms we'd passed over central Africa.  The storms that had kept my four babies awake, the storms that had tested my nerves, the storms that seemed to go completely unnoticed by my zombie husband.  Mentally calculating the amount of time we had and the obstacles we needed to traverse to make our connection was sapping precious energy.

Original layover was exactly 107 minutes.  107 minus 62 left us with 45 minutes.  Curses and bad words.  Focus, Britt, you gotta do this or this hell will just last even longer.  45 minutes to wait our turn patiently and deplane, get four babies plus all our carry-ons down the stairs, run through the building, passports stamped, personal screenings, security check, down the stairs, out to the bus, back up the stairs and onto the plane sitting two spaces over, the plane I can SEE from my window. Two.  Spaces.  Over!  If you stress or panic, they stress and panic.  Pull.  It.  Together.

Terribly politely, belying the few snatches of unrestful sleep I'd gotten, while waiting in line to deplane, I spoke to a very understanding Muslim flight attendant who recruited two more attendants and like a mass of crows haphazardly circling a blue sky, we stumbled and tumbled like a gelatinous blob trying to stay quick but in keeping with the steps of a grouchy two year old, the sleepy three year old, and the wide-eyed four year old.  I tried to ignore the loud whimperings for comfort and attention coming from the bundle on my back.  We simply had to make this connection.

Standing in the endless sea of people waiting for all the appropriate stamps, scans, and questions, just like us, I thought again of how this punishment, this forced Exodus, this damned flight path didn't fit. I could not believe then (and I still cannot believe now) that anyone, any sane person with love and compassion in their heart would send a family of six, after packing up their lives in 4 weeks time, would willfully choose the flight path we were given.  We were given it and then told to be grateful. It felt like being violated, and then told to be grateful for not being beaten to a bloody mess.  Only, I felt very bruised, very bloody.  None of it made sense.

I cannot believe its been two-year since I was on that tarmac, in that plane, trying to make the connection in Qatar, in the blistering morning heat of that December morning.  I strained so hard because I knew not making the connection would just add time to our already 42 hour journey.  Miriam Webster defines epic this way:  extending beyond the usual or ordinary, especially in size or scope.

Epic.

I used to think that was always a good thing, always in regards to an adventure, a voyage, something spectacular that you tell your kids and grandkids about.  Right here, on this blog that no one reads, this is the first time I've told even part of the story of that journey.  It is still so very painful, so very, very raw.  Because it was decided to be "best" for me.  "Best" for my family.  "Best" for the church. And we just had to take it.

Johannesburg to Qatar. Southern to Northern Hemisphere   
*Epic layover marathon.  No food, no water, no toilets. Too many check points. Too many babes still in pajamas.

Qatar to Chicago.  Eastern to Western.  
*Epic layover in the middle of the night in miserable and drafty O'Hare airport.  No food.  No place to lay down. Night two of no bed, no shower.  Too many check points.  

Chicago to Philadelphia.  Three and a half hours.  We'd flown three and a half hours too far west, so we had to backtrack three and a half hours more back East.  It would have seemed more cruel had I had any ability to care.  

I know who made those plane reservations.  I know him personally.  I know the rational he gave.  I know because I heard it all from his lips... over dinner... that I cooked... at my old house... in my old life... the life where he was a near, and dearly loved friend.

I miss my old life, I miss my old house and my gardens and my dog and the crazy way that ANYONE on the street could see directly into the lives of my family.  I miss my fire-pit and my clothesline.  But more than that, I miss the naiveté I had back then about friendships, about right and wrong, about love and compassion.  I know things now, valuable, helpful, wise things.  Things that make me a better person, give a finer age to my fermentation.  But today, on the day that marks the Day Between That Life and This, in the space where I was living into the reality that sometimes, just because you call it compassion, doesn't mean it is...  just because you call it Christian charity, doesn't mean it is... just because you call it love, doesn't mean it is; in THAT space, I sit.

I sit and I mourn.

I sit and I mourn what was, what might have been... who I was, who I might have been.

I mourn for the person who is living her Day Between That Life and This right now.

I mourn for the person who cannot see that words and actions must match up, because if they don't you're living a lie.

"Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food.  If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?" James 2:15-16

I mourn because the world we are living in, the world most of us are settling for, isn't right.  I mourn because there are words for these wrongs: lies.  Lies of mediocrity, lies of substandard living, lies of complacence and lies of bureaucracy.  And some days, when I see very clearly how wrong certain 'compassions', certain 'charities', certain 'loves' are, on those days, like today, I'm sad.  Because it wasn't meant to be like this.  It was never meant to be like this.  But God's promises remain, His love is never a lie, and there is always, always promise yet for a new dawn, a new life, a new world.

"I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness." 

Jeremiah 31:3b (NIV)

"I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty.  I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.  I can do everything through him who gives me strength" 

Philippians 4:12-13 (NIV)

"We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that reaching past all appearances right to the very presence of God" 

Hebrews 6:19 (EST and The Message)

A Declaration of Affirmation

amen:  
     a declaration of affirmation

I was up early this morning.  There were a hundred and one things to do and I was awake, snuggled down deep under my blankets, trying to calculate the seven things I had time to accomplish and which were the most pressing; my own personal Top Things To Do.  One of the things I went about tackling was moving a car seat from one car to the other.  I love my car seats.  I spent innumerable hours researching them, picking just the right brand, color, all of it.  I'm emotionally attached as much to the metal-and-plastic as I am to the crazed and driven person I was in the choosing. That said, I loathe moving them.  Every parent does.  It's a chore that is just beastly, you end up smelly and sweaty, and when it's o'dark thirty, it's not nice to worry about losing a toe or finger should you allow your mind to wander for even a split second and drop said safety device.  My seats are particularly heavy, my sole complaint.  As I stepped into the predawn repeating my mantra, "focus Britt, focus and don't drop this" I was engulfed by tiny pink particles that seems to be spun, or rather, spinning sugar.  It was as if the sky was trying on bubble gum pink cotton candy, but was fickle and teasing deeper color out of the mixture, settling finally on a stunning coral.  I could see it.  I kept expecting to be able to stick my tongue out and actually taste the cotton candy, the spun sticky sweetness of my own childhood in the very air around me.

And that's when it slipped from from my subconscious to my lips.

Amen.  

I've historically been an early riser and being an athlete helped cement that tendency.  There's something mythic about watching the world wake up, the people, the land. all of it.  Here I was, perched as our rental is, almost atop what my mother refuses to call 'a hill' because it's simple too steep for that inadequate definition.  I stood, breath taken away, imagination completely captured, and I was again reminded that I was, in fact, in full agreement, in firm affirmation with the world around me.

Amen.

Ha Shem, LORD, I agree with everything I see and call it good, just as You did.  

Amen.  

It was a fleeting moment,  the sheer weight of that car seat jerked me back to cruel reality all too quickly.  Reality that I am in agreement with very little these days.  My body and soul are still groaning, but I, as yet, cannot understand the words behind the sounds, nor can I identify all the bruised and broken places in my soul.

Eugene Peterson, in The Message phrased Romans 8:26-28 so poignantly for me.

     "...God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along.  If we don't know how or what to pray,

 it doesn't matter.  He does our praying in and for us, 

making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.  

He knows us far better than we 

know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition,

and keeps us present before God.  

That's why we can be so sure that every 

detail in our lives of

love for God is worked into something good."

Maybe it's because I've been pregnant for the better part of the last decade.  Maybe it's because I feel something in my bones which I know is so incredibly common and yet so incredibly unique as well, my own quiet, ordinary miracle.  Maybe, I just need to believe in impossible things.

I'm battling today, as so very very many other days.  I'm battling homesickness and frustration, depression and defeat.  I'm battling lessor demons that seem to be much scrappier than their bigger, more ominous counterparts.  Loosing faith, belief, God Himself all seem common place.  Loosing purpose, community, sanctuary... not so much.  I feel today, as I often feel, left without words in a storm, no blanket, no lighted window, no direction. I know I must trek on.  A few years ago I was really struck that whatever the reason for embarking on the current trajectory that is my life, I had to be in each step, owning where I stood.   I know the journey is a beautiful, holy sojourn.  But that doesn't change the loneliness, the cold, the sadness.

After the atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese soil, the Emperor Hirohito, over a crackling radio, called all of Japan to allow the war to end.  "The hardships and suffering to which our nation is to be subjected hereafter will be certainly great," he warned.  "However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unedurable and suffering what is not sufferable."

This journey of hurt, of wounding, of gut-wrenching sorrow, of "enduring the unedurable" is not unique to me.  Having a baby is not unique to me.  But each of my babies was their own miracle. And each step of this journey is my own unique, beautiful disaster... pock-marked by spun sugar sunrises and sweet friends at my dinner table.

"... making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans ... and keeps us present before God..."

Amen.

Singing Amazing Grace

I've been inside of a church since I was born.  My father worked for a Christian organization.  My mother sang in the church choir.  My first step-father was an off-again-on-again music minister and my second step-father has been an off-again-on-again church board member.  I come from what most would classify a "religious" family.

As such, I followed the rules, the 'truths' as they were presented, both whole truths and the slightly broken, damaged truths.

Whole.
Don't murder.  Done.

Broken.
Go to a Christian university and marry right after graduation.  Done.

The thing of it is, I never questioned any of these rules, this path I was being herded down.  If I did ask, it was explained that it was "for my best" and a bunch of other nonsense like that.  It worked out well for me.  Really well.  I may in fact be the poster child for why those cultural practices are around, but even so, I still find myself deeply, deeply wounded by the lack of conversation.  I find that I'm terribly discontent and grappling with ideas and concepts that I have no vocabulary with which to explain because there was no communication ever to be had.  You either believed and accepted or you were out, needing to be 'prayed back into the fold', wayward.

I was talking yesterday with a dear friend.  She is in the midst of being a leaning post for another who is walking the very hard and broken path of marital separation.  And my friend, the one supporting a load of weight, she's struggling to support while giving her friend the vocabulary to explain.  I found myself hurt over a situation I have no stake in, my heart deeply entangled with a person I have never met, simply because I have been to that broken place.  And no one talked to me about it either.  Because as I came to understand in my finite wisdom of pre-pubescence, we, the little "c" church, the ones who come and worship but are always broken and human ourselves, do not talk about BIG things because we serve a BIG God who can overcome all.

Hear my heart.  I firmly believe and have staked my life, my children's lives, and my husband's life on the very truth that says I serve an infinitely big God who can and will overcome any and all obstacles, in my life or anywhere else for that matter.  Period.  That is as core to who I am as the marrow which makes up my bones. He is big, and He will do big things.  That doesn't mean we have to leave every child in the midst of a separation to their own devices to "pray it out" with Jesus.  That does not mean that we have to heap judgement on each other because we don't "have enough faith" to overcome a situation and that most certainly doesn't mean we were somehow lacking and this current trial is God's way of teaching me about that lack.

Bull.

Shit.

Every good and perfect gift if from above above, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights, who does not change like the shifting shadows.  James 1:17 (NIV)

To put it another way...

Every generous act of giving and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father who make the heavenly lights, in whom there is no inconsistency or shifting shadow.  James 1:17 (ISV)

I may be totally out in left field here, half rantings of a mostly crazy person.  Maybe.  But if music is the theology of the masses, and so many "old" hymns are coming back into popularity, then I wonder if I really am that far off or if, maybe, just maybe, I'm not the only one yearning for more.

More commitment to the Body of Christ, the big "C" Church, the one who is supposed to hold up my arms when I am no longer able to raise the staff to win the battle.

More transparency and conversation about these broken, half truths we've been told, we've ingested, and are now getting sick from.

More authenticity and vulnerability to big, tough questions like How is your soul?  Followed immediately by more grace and compassion and accountability when the answer to that scary question is Not too well.

One of my children's favorite songs is Fight Song.  They sing it incessantly and at the absolute top of their lungs.  One of the lines in the song makes me so deeply grateful to the writer of the song and to Rachel Platten for birthing it into popularity.   It is a line that will be forever embedded in my children's souls... and that, is good.  Maybe the church can figure out how to grab a hold of the concept and run it all the way, teaching a whole new generation that truths aren't truths until they are whole... and whole truths are the only ones worth having, worth fighting for.

"I might only have one match, but I can make an explosion."

My heart yearns and breaks to be part of a people who realize that we are the Church.  Full stop.  The Bride of Christ.  Called to be together, called to purity, called to unity through all our many and diverse parts.  To celebrate at the wedding feast the union we have through Christ Jesus our LORD, our bridegroom, our co-inheritor of the riches of the the Father.  That we are called not to aspire to be from a "religion" but to fight the powers and principalities in our minds and in the world, all the while singing out the amazing grace of the LORD who calls each and every one of us "beloved."