More Pandemic Thoughts

More random thoughts about this pandemic.  My brain is scattered, and this won’t be the most eloquent writing, but I wanted to jot down a few things.  Most of us are on the struggle bus to some extent.  We may be staying on the bus all day and even sleeping on it (having anxiety dreams anyone?).  We may be functioning well most of the time and taking a 15-minute ride on the struggle bus each day.  Likely, most of us find ourselves somewhere in between.  For example, on any given day with the kids, I feel like I am being a stellar mom in some moments and the worst mom ever in others (anyone else?).  It's a weird time, y'all.  I want to explore a couple of things that I think are having a psychological effect on us that we may not realize and talk about how we can do the best we can right now. 

One of the most disturbing things about this pandemic to me is that we are being told to view basically all other humans as a threat to our own well-being.  The intent in having us stay away from everyone is communal health.  I understand that.  And I even know it is necessary to an extent.  But the psychological effects are real.  When I went to Publix the other day (in my tie-dyed headband mask), it was just so strange to feel like everyone around could be a “carrier” and knowing that they felt the same about me.  I tried to smile at people with my eyes because, well, they couldn’t see my mouth.  Just the fact that we cannot see each other smile is a major loss for our emotional selves.  It is a strange world where everyone is a threat.  It is a strange world when you can’t hug your parents or take someone you love a birthday gift.  We are created with a NEED for community.  We need other people.  This is scientifically proven fact.  Without relationships and without touch, people suffer and may even die. 
With therapy clients I talk about “protective factors” – those things in life that help lead to better mental and overall health.  Especially, if one is dealing with depression or suicidal ideation, protective factors are hugely important.  But they are really important for all of us.  And here is the hard thing about right now- our protective factors are being stripped.  We need community support, relationships, intimacy, purposeful living, fulfilling work, etc.  Some of us can maintain these factors through technology, at least to an extent.  But none of us can completely.  And if you are a person who lives alone and has lost your ability to work due to this pandemic, your protective factors right now are LOW.  We have to admit that this is a hard and strange new world we are facing.

Sooooo, what do we do?  I am trying to remind myself to do a few things right now. 

           1. Be kind to yourself.  Try to find some balance between doing things that make you feel purposeful (because this is good for mental health) while also having realistic expectations and a lot of grace and self-compassion. 

           2.    Be kind to one another.  This is not the time to nitpick your family or roommates.  It will be tempting.  We are all on edge.  That tends to lead to easier frustration.  And there is just So. Much. Togetherness.  Treat everyone in your life like they are going through something hard right now.  How do you treat the people you love when they are sick, are grieving, are adjusting to a huge life transition?  Treat them that way now.  Treat them with the most care and kindness you can possibly muster.  And when you fail to do so (because you will), be quick to say, “I’m sorry”. 
    

                 3.    Get outside and exercise if at all possible.  These two things are saving my life right now.

                    4.  Show physical affection to the ones you have around you.  Hugs and cuddles are important right now.  If you are completely alone in quarantine, this won’t be an option, and I’m so sorry. 

      

                 5.  Remember that the virus is the enemy here.  It’s hard to admit that you are fighting an enemy that you have no real weapons or control to fight.  But the people at the grocery store are not the enemy.  The ones who are still having get togethers that make you angry are not the enemy.  Some people are going to go into bunkers for this thing.  Some people are going to push the limits of what is allowed.  None of them are the enemy.  The leaders who are placing stay at home orders are not the enemy.  We have a common enemy, and everyone is scrambling and trying to figure out what in the world to do about it.  Most likely no one will navigate this perfectly.  Focus on personal responsibility.  Uniting against a common enemy is the best thing we can do.  Every chance you have, show compassion and humility to others - every chance you have.  Fighting each other will do nothing to stop the pandemic and will decrease everyone’s capacity to thrive.  

                6.  Practice gratitude whenever possible.  This doesn’t mean you need to pretend this isn’t hard.  But find things to be grateful for in the hard time.  Write them down in a journal by your bed.  Tell the people you are grateful to why you are grateful to them.  Tell the people you are quarantined with why you are thankful for them (especially when you are feeling frustrated with them).

                7.  Remember that you are resilient.  You have weathered hard times before.  You can weather this one, and eventually you will be on the other side of it.  Not knowing when that will happen or what the fallout may be is one of the hardest things about this whole situation.  Use your support system liberally.  Do not abandon hope.  Hope will keep you from sinking. 

Calmly Engaged

I haven’t written in a while (other than grad school papers).  Life has been a little hectic, as it is for many right now.  But I know that writing is important for me anytime I am dealing with something stressful.  It’s a processing tool.  So, here goes.  The world is a strange place to be these days.  I started out 2020 with these grand plans of what an amazing year it was going to be.  And in many ways it has been, but I would never have imagined that 3 months in we would find ourselves facing the worst pandemic in 100 years and sequestered to our homes to ride it out.  I have gone through the gamut of feelings over the past few weeks – anxiety, sadness, gratitude, calm, fear, joy – you name it.  The first week in quarantine I was so anxious that I could barely eat.  This week I felt calm and got a little too fast and loose with my eating (“Kids, let’s make cookies again!”).  I mean, honestly, what else are we going to do after we finish school for the day?  Before this pandemic started, I felt like a had a very small margin of error in my life with everything I am juggling.  Even something like one of the kids having a sick day would put me behind.  Now my margin of error is in the negative digits.  Managing school for four kids at home, working remotely doing teletherapy with clients, and staying caught up on grad school is no small feat.  But at the same time, I am so grateful for the wonderful home that we have, the time we have had together, and the fact that we are currently healthy and have everything we need.  It is so sad that Wyatt is missing baseball season, Ty and Ansley are missing track season, Brinley may not have Kindergarten graduation, the list goes on and on.  But we are learning something about slowing down and not always being in a hurry to get somewhere, and for that I am grateful.  However, if this thing goes on for months, you may find me rocking in a corner somewhere and crying.  Haha.    

So that was a long intro, but here is what I really want to write about today.  I had a conversation with co-workers today (thank you God for Zoom!) where we talked about helping people find the space between panic and not caring.  And that concept has been on my mind all day.  I’ve been trying to decide what to call that space, and I think the best term I can come up with is “calmly engaged”.  Finding that space is a real challenge for most of us, and here is why I think that is the case.  Panic allows a person to live in the illusion that they have control over the situation.  For instance, with this pandemic, if you are panicked about catching it, you will become fanatic about making sure you don’t catch it.  You will judge all your friends who go buy groceries, but secretly buy all the toilet paper on amazon.  You will believe that no person is safe.  Every person that walks down your street is a threat.  You will believe you can’t touch anything.  You will watch the news around the clock so that you can have every last piece of information so that you can STAY IN CONTROL.  Panic is to some extent a function of the ego and a way to delude oneself into believing that you have more power than you actually have. 

On the other extreme, you have not caring.  What happens with not caring is you convince yourself that you have no control, so you give up.  What this looks like in this pandemic is a person refusing to make smart choices to protect self and others.  It looks like coughing on your roommate or having the whole neighborhood over for a bonfire.  It looks like pretending nothing is happening and everyone who cares is ridiculous.  Not caring is a form of defeat.  Instead of allowing yourself to feel any anxiety, you withdraw from responsibility.  One common defense of this attitude is “God is in control.  There is nothing I can do.  He has already decided what will happen to me.”  And so, you ignore science and data and the people who are begging you to be smart.  Because, well, you just don’t care. 

Being calmly engaged in the middle of these two extremes is difficult, and here is why.  When you are calmly engaged you have to admit two things: I am personally responsible for the decisions I make, AND I ultimately don’t control outcomes.  This is a hard place to live because here you have to be diligent and smart and remain engaged and CARE, but you have no guarantees that any of your efforts are going to pay off in the end.  It is the ultimate gamble.  And yet, this is where healthy people live.  Responsibility meets trusting in something bigger.  Fear can live here, and the calmly engaged person can talk about that fear and move through it.  This is a scary place to be – personally responsible with relatively little control.  But as it relates to this pandemic, and as it relates to life in general, this is where we need to be.  This is where we can breathe.  This is where we are the best neighbors and friends and family members.  This is where we thrive.  This is where societies take care of their people.  The ego quiets down.  The best self steps forward.  This looks like loving well.  And it looks like holding space for when things don’t go the way you planned.  This is an open-hearted way of living that both accepts that you really matter in the grand scheme of things and that you are also small in the grand scheme of things.  Here you rely on God to be ultimately in control, while you do the absolute best you can with what he has given you.  This is being calmly engaged. 

So, as we move through this strange period that is unlike anything we have ever experienced or would have seen coming, remaining calmly engaged is key.  Anxiety is bound to come.  Hard times are here for a lot of people.  None of this is easy.  So, when you feel panic setting in or you feel yourself losing the ability to care anymore, reach out to someone.  Having healthy and loving relationships helps us remain calmly engaged.  We have an opportunity in this mess to love people better than we ever have before.  We have the chance to think about what is important to us and who is important to us.  We can pull one another back to the center when we feel like we are slipping into the extremes.  We can get through this together.  And when we finally get to have cookouts and bonfires and birthday parties and ballgames and playdates and church and school again, we will all be so grateful for the everyday things in our lives that we have so dearly missed.  

              

There's Something About a Baby

Four times.  Four precious times in this life, I have screamed and cried and experienced the last grueling moments of pregnancy.  And then a nurse or doctor has placed a brand-new baby onto my chest, and I have felt a love like no other.  Four times I have stared at this tiny new creation and felt the immense responsibility of caring for and guiding this child.  And everything was changed forever.  There’s something about a baby that changes things.  A difficult day is made brighter by the smile on a baby’s face.  The smell of a baby’s hair can calm an anxious heart.  When we welcome a baby into the world, there is great celebration.  Something new is afoot.  There is possibility and hope.  When we watch someone die, we feel the sense of release and completion of their journey.  When we watch someone be born, we feel the sense of excitement and anticipation of what is to come in their life.  They have zero mistakes, zero heartbreaks.  No one has told them that they have limits.  There is a concept called “tabula rasa,” a belief that a baby is born with a “blank slate” and that everything about that person is determined by events after birth.  I don’t completely buy into this psychological theory.  I think that babies are born with plenty of predetermined characteristics.  Just ask any parent of multiple children.  But certainly, a large part of who a child will become will be connected to their experiences. 

An unhealthy parent will look at this tiny new creation and make a (usually unconscious) decision to mold it into his or her own image.  This tiny baby that God created in his image with unique gifts and talents and personality and purpose will be required to grow into the image of his earthly parents, to think like they think, talk like they talk, vote like they vote, you get the idea.  Unhealthy parents seek personal validation from their children instead of seeking to support them as they grow into their own unique selves.  Healthy parents support and guide their children as they become who God created them to be. 

This week we will celebrate the birth of a baby.  This baby’s birth brought forth the ultimate hope.  This baby came with great excitement.  This baby’s name was Jesus.  And this Christmas as I look down into the manger and stare at this baby, this new creation full of possibility, I have one question for him.  “Who are you?”  You see, I fear that we have grown this baby up into our own image.  We don’t look at the baby and see the new beginning and the possibility so much as we look at the adult version of Jesus we have created or embraced.  And I’m afraid that we have some things wrong about him.  At least I have had. 

You don’t go through a life crisis like I have experienced the past couple of years without tearing down some things and rebuilding them.  You gain perspective and experience that make you see blind spots you had before.  You pay a painful price to get there.  And it’s hard in the middle of your life to rework major things about your belief system.  But this year I’m starting with the baby.  I’m looking at the baby, and I’m rebuilding my ideas of who he is to become.  You see, in America, we seem to have created a Jesus that is white, Christian, republican, waves an American flag and carries a pistol.  But the problem with that is that Jesus was actually a Jewish, middle eastern man who rebelled against the Roman empire and non-violently laid down his life on a cross.  I fear that what large segments of the American church have done to baby Jesus is to form him in our own image.  That is not healthy behavior.  We could start to understand Jesus better by learning about Jewish faith and Jewish culture.  He was a real person living in a real time period.  We would be wise to take that into account.  

Another image we portray of Jesus is one of the holy vending machine.  Allow me to explain.  We tell people that if they pray hard enough, have enough faith, live righteously enough - that Jesus will give them whatever they want.  The only problem with this is that if that were true, no devout father would ever bury his child, no devout woman would watch her marriage implode, no devout child in a third world country would die of starvation today or drown trying to get to a safer place.  You see when we try to sell the vending machine Jesus, we say to those who didn’t get what they wanted, “It’s not Jesus, it’s you.”  And in the most painful moments of life, when you feel like you are in quicksand, being told to pray harder or live better feels like someone pouring more sand over your head and tying your arms behind your back.  To support these “pep talks,” we use the verse in Matthew 22, “And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”  But we don’t talk about the fact that Jesus said this right after cursing a fig tree because he was angry that it had no figs for him to eat.  I think this is one of the moments in scripture where we really see his humanity.  His disciples are so impressed that he can wither a fig tree on command for disappointing him, and he tells them that they too can do miracles like this if they have faith.  Does this also mean that we can have whatever we want in this life if we just believe it will happen?  Some may question my faith, but I don’t think that’s how Jesus works.

One more image I have had of Jesus at various times in my life is that of a pious and judgmental Jesus.  Maybe you have seen an image of Jesus pointing his finger at you and asking you a guilt-inducing question.  Maybe you have read a passage where he addresses sinful behavior, and you wanted to crawl under a rock because you know that one all too well.  But looking down in this manger today, I just ask anew, “Who is this King of glory?”  Who is this God that in all his holiness, in all his splendor, instead of expecting us to ascend to his level – chose to descend to ours?  What kind of God steps down from heaven and lays in a manger surrounded  by the stench of manure?  What kind of God takes on a human body with all its aches and pains and submits to living inside it?  What kind of God becomes one of us?

When my oldest child was one year old, he came down with a bad case of croup.  After his going from fairly healthy to barely able to breathe and a temp of 103 in a matter of a few hours, we were sent to the hospital.  We spent the night in the ER that night with him.  No rooms were available in the hospital.  So, they rolled in a crib for him to sleep in.  And I remember that he needed so badly to lay down and sleep, but he wanted his mommy.  So, I did what most mothers would do.  I climbed over the side of that crib, curled my body around his, and stayed with him.  And when I think back to that night, I think it is a tiny glimpse of what God did and continues to do for us.  He came down.  He climbed into the manger.  He met us in our illness, in our despair, in our inadequacy.  He met us in our pain.  He had it all.  And he stepped down into our misery because he loves us.  And he still curls around us in our pain.  Emmanuel, God with us.  He laid his hands on people and healed them.  He wept with Mary.  He walked on water with Peter.  He hung out with Zacchaeus.  He defended the woman the people wanted to stone.  No one was off-limits for him.  He embraced people from every walk of life.  No crib was too dirty to crawl into.  In Luke 4, he told the people in his hometown why he came:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
  because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
    and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

            Has there ever been such a beautiful mission?  That baby in the manger would grow into a man that wanted to right the wrongs in the world.  He had brought a kingdom to earth that would change everything.  So, as I look at him today and ask him “Who are you?”, I trust that this year he’s going to continue to tell me.  I’m starting with the baby.  Because there is something about a baby.  God could have come as a full-grown human, but he came as a baby - full of hope, full of possibility.  I am throwing out my preconceived notions of who he will become and asking him who he truly is.  Because much more beautiful than my making him into my image is my being formed into his. 

Leaving a Better Legacy

Last year I took a Seminary course called “Gender in Ministry.”  We read many books and articles.  We dove deeply into scriptures that are often used to support the subordination of women and learned of the context and culture surrounding them.  I learned the origins of beliefs that women are to be subordinate and discovered some of the many holes in this doctrine.  My heart had known for many years that there was a problem with this doctrine.  I suppose the first time I felt the stinging injustice of it was when I was 16-years-old,  stood up in church to tell a story from a recent mission trip, and watched an older couple that I loved exit out the back.  Hierarchical theology has affected my life in more ways than I can or want to list here.  But the course I took last year and my continuing study since then has helped me reconcile the concerns of my heart with the knowledge in my mind.

My concerns about the negative impacts of the conservative church’s traditional views on women are vast.  But for a moment I want to discuss how our treatment of women in the church affects our children.  As a children’s minister and mother of four, I am passionate about what we are teaching our children as they grow in our churches.   We may believe that our churches are welcoming and nurturing to young women.  We may value them and love them.  We may have only the best intentions toward them.  But we seem to avoid the truth of how a male-dominated church affects our daughters.  Even if no one tells them that they are less in the kingdom of God or that their gifts are less welcome, children are brilliant, always piecing puzzles together in their minds.  When their model is a male-dominated hierarchy, it affects them.  When a little girl attends church every week and only sees men stand in front of her as preachers, prayer and worship leaders, communion presiders, etc. it sends her a message about who she is in Christ.  The message goes something like this, “Jesus loves you.  But he likes the boys better.”  Children don’t understand these messages that are being written on their hearts.  But the messages are being internalized all the same.  And the message doesn’t leave them when they walk out of the church building.  They carry the message about their inferiority in their souls.  Our daughters are taught that they can do anything and be anything in every area of their lives.  They can run corporations, lead schools, chair non-profits, and run for President.  But they walk into their churches, and suddenly they have very palpable limits. Many young women are leaving traditional churches because they cannot reconcile their calling with the limits that are forced upon them. 

A while back I watched the movie The Greatest Showman.  Phillip Carlyle, a wealthy white man, was dating an African American trapeze artist from the circus he managed.  Set in the 1800s, this was certainly not socially acceptable.  Phillip’s high-society parents caught them out together.  His father accused him of having no shame and parading around with “the help”.  His mother then said to him, “You forget your place, Phillip.”  And Phillip replied immediately, “My place?  Mother, if this is my place, then I don’t want any part of it.”  Like Phillip in this movie, I think many of our young women are staring the church in the face and hearing the messages it gives them of who they are and how they should be restricted.  And when the church tries to mandate their place, they simply say, “If this is my place, then I don’t want any part of it.”  But the girls who stay, who embrace the message and internalize it, those are the ones who may sustain the most damage.  Because many of those girls will live with a narrative that tells them they need a man in order to be complete.  They will feel like they aren’t enough in and of themselves.  As long as they carry these beliefs, they will always feel a little less than whole.

            It’s easy to see how an environment that disqualifies women would have a negative impact on our daughters.  But surely our sons are fine.  They have a good thing going.  They can live up to their potential and use all their spiritual gifts.  So, we don’t have to worry about them.  This system is good for them, right?  Absolutely not.  I venture to say that the systems in place are just as damaging, if not more so, for our young boys.  Our boys receive the not-so-subtle message that they are superior to women, at least in the kingdom of God.  They are filled with doctrine about how they are to be the leaders and they deserve respect and submission by default.  They are taught to marginalize the women in their lives, and it is spiritualized for them as God’s will.  They are infused with a sense of entitlement from the very institution that should teach them humility. 

            What kind of life are we molding for our boys when we model this standard for them?  Well, as mentioned above, we are teaching them entitlement.  They believe they deserve – fill in the blank – by no accord of their own, but simply because they are male.  At a minimum, we are setting many of them up for dysfunctional marriages because we are teaching them to undervalue their wives.  And at the extreme, we are giving abusive men spiritual backing.  I recently read in one of my textbooks on family therapy that men with more conservative Christian theology than their wives are more likely to be guilty of domestic violence than the general population.  Allow the tragedy of that sentence to sink into your heart.  Domestic abuse is rampant in our churches and is very rarely discussed.  Why?  Because actually dealing with it would require churches to admit that their theology is contributing to the problem, and having to rework theology is daunting and fear-inducing.  

Finally, we are teaching our boys to objectify women.  We are priming them for a life of pornography and/or sex addiction.  When young men are taught that women are supposed to be submissive and subordinate to them, it is not a far leap to conclude that women exist (at least in part) for the pleasure of men.  The inability to view a woman as a whole person in her own right is deadly to a young man.  Families are being destroyed in our churches due to pornography and other forms of infidelity.  Christian men very often fall into these behaviors.  And when women discover these behaviors by their husbands, the church will often advise them to just forgive and move on.  After all, they say, “Most men struggle with purity.  It’s just how God made them.”  And they excuse an entire gender from incredibly damaging behavior and leave the women who have been crushed to suffer in silence.  This all stems from the theology of subordination we have embraced.  Of course, we would never say that our theology encourages these behaviors.  But these behaviors seep out of the cracks of our doctrine infecting every area of our lives.  Our precious young boys are given a picture of who they are supposed to be that more closely mirrors worldly patriarchy than the heart of Jesus.  And many of them will spend years in therapy as adults learning for the first time that it’s okay for a man to have emotions other than joy and anger.  Our children deserve better.

The truth is that in the church when any one group is marginalized we all become vulnerable.  The enemy loves marginalization.  And he certainly loves the thought of half the people who love Jesus being quieted.  As men and women, we must join hands and work together to bring healing to this world.  God created us as teammates, not as competitors.  The idea of competition in the church is completely foreign to the Gospel message.  God calls us into relationships of humility, gentleness, and oneness.  Hierarchy and power structures do not fit well within this framework.  In the New Testament, we read that the last shall be first and the first shall be last.  The early Christian movement worked in contrast to the power structures that were in place and called for radical counter-cultural practices like mutual submission.  The Bible and other ancient documents make it clear that men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, all joined forces in working together to spread the good news of Jesus in the days of the early church.  They all had the same passion - Jesus.  And his message was spread through this passion.  An important aspect of the message of Jesus was that everyone was on an equal playing field in his kingdom.  This was in stark contrast to the society of the time.  Social class and pecking order meant everything.  A person’s worth in society was completely determined by his or her station in life.  But in this kingdom, worth was defined by the Savior.  What a message of freedom to the slaves, the women, the poor, the downcast!  They mattered!  In Jesus’ kingdom, they mattered.

Jesus sat with the outcast, healed the most forgotten, forgave the most sinful, and met with the most reviled.  He went beyond “not shaming” those who had no status.  He embraced and honored them.  His treatment of women in a society that commonly used and suppressed them was nothing short of extraordinary.  Rather than marginalize them, he loved them, defended them, elevated them.  Jesus came to free the oppressed.  The Bible has been used to defend oppression throughout history.  It has been used to defend slavery, segregation, the Holocaust, denying women the right to vote, mistreatment of immigrants, and genocide.  I cannot help but believe that it grieves the heart of Christ when the Bible is used as a tool of oppression.  His example shows us a completely different way, a healing way.  May we follow his example in the way we teach our sons and daughters.  I believe the future of the church depends on it.  In the wise words of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better.  Then do better.”

Longing for Fall

            Here we are in mid-September in Tennessee.  Everyone is ready for fall.  Anytime I log into social media, I see a trend.  People are despairing that fall seems to be nowhere around.  The calendar says mid-September, but the temperature says early August.  With highs in the 90s each day, it is more difficult to get excited about pumpkins, mums, and fall festivals.  And going to a football game before sunset feels equivalent to sitting on the sun.  We are dreaming about the brisk mornings, sweatshirts, and fall-themed coffee drinks.  We are looking forward to watching the trees change color and eventually give way to the force of nature that causes their leaves to fall to the ground.  The changing, dying, and hope of renewal in the spring await us outside.  And we want to see it all.  And as much as it seems right now like it may never come – it will.  It will come, and the cycle will continue.  And in March we will be thirsty for spring. 

            This year I find myself longing for fall in the depths of my soul.  I really love fall.  It is my favorite season by far.  If ragweed were eliminated from the earth, it would be downright perfect.  I love the coziness it brings.  The holidays and hayrides, the fall sports, the gratitude, the pumpkin bread, the beautiful leaves – they are all so amazing.  But this year as I wait to watch the leaves turn and give way and let go, I find myself pondering all the things I want to let go of in the coming fall season.  With the trees as my inspiration and partners, I want to drop some leaves and make way for new growth.

I want to drop my insecurities, the voice in my head that tells me I’m not enough.  I want to drop the trauma that made that voice infinitely louder and refuse to let it define me.  I want to drop allegiance to the systems that gave me a false notion of who I am.  I want to drop any version of myself that paints me as anything other than a loved child of God, created in his image.  I want to drop my self-doubt and second-guessing.  I want to drop my fear of what people will think when I drop my leaves - because holding onto dead leaves won’t nourish anyone.  I want to drop my need to explain myself over and over and over again.  I want to drop my tendency to apologize incessantly when it isn’t warranted.  I want to drop my tendency to look in the mirror and wish I looked differently.  I want to drop the tendency to fear people and ideas that are different than what I know.  I want to drop the constant temptation to tend to everything except the breathing of my soul.  I want to drop resentment.  I want to drop the picture in my mind of how things are supposed to be and the notion that I have to make everything perfect.  I want to watch these leaves fall from the trees.  And then I want to rake them up.  I want to jump in them and play and laugh at the fact that I’m not carrying them anymore.  I want to make leaf angels and pile them over my head, so I can jump out and shout.  I want them to know that they no longer have power over me, but rather that I can smile at the ways they have opened up the opportunity for growth in the spring.  And then I want to bag them up and send them on their way. 

            And when spring comes, and it will come, I want to grow back new leaves.  I want to grow back leaves that are vibrant and nourishing.  One leaf will be called confidence.  Another will be called peace.  There will be leaves of self-love and self-acceptance.  There will be a leaf called courage.  There will be leaves of more encompassing compassion and love for others.  There will be leaves of speaking up when necessary and not being embarrassed to take up space in the world.  There will be leaves of education and empowerment that I will spread across other people who desperately need them.  There will be leaves of new ideas and new experiences.  There will be a leaf of self-compassion and a leaf of perpetual hope.  There will be the beautiful leaf of communion with God, and really, I guess that is the root system of the whole tree.  And in the spring, when I have grown these new leaves, I will create oxygen that is clean and new and needed.  I will be able to breathe new and full, and my breathing will give breath to those around me.  And the leaves I carried before the fall, they will be a memory, an important part of my journey, and a reminder that things are always being made new.  And when I see one of those leaves on someone else’s tree, I will love them and know that I once carried that leaf too. 

A Letter to Myself on the Day of My Baptism

           

          Twenty-eight years ago today I walked down the aisle during the “invitation song” at church and asked to be baptized.  I had spent the previous week at church camp.  I remember that we learned about the “Armor of God” in Ephesians 6 that week.  I think something about the power and the courage that passage called out spoke to me.  I was a quite passive and fearful child.  At the age of (barely) 10, I decided that I wanted to walk with Jesus for the rest of my life.  I remember my Dad baptizing me.  I remember my mom and miss Betsy helping me get ready.  I remember the 1990’s denim dress I was wearing that day.  And I remember when I walked out of the front of the church building after getting dressed again that our preacher, Mr. Keith, smiled at me with his always genuine smile and said, “Well, do you feel cleaner?”  He meant metaphorically of course.  And I remember being a little confused.  At that point in my life, the worst thing I had done was a couple of years earlier when I stole a few pretty crafting stones from one of the stations at VBS.  I know - how wrong to commit my first crime at VBS!  I carried the guilt and agony about that one around for a long time, so I was glad to know I had washed that moment of insanity off.  But honestly, I didn’t fully understand the dark side of humanity or the deep need of redemption all around me.  But I knew I loved Jesus, and I knew I wanted to walk with him.  That part has never changed. 

            Some people have strong feelings about whether or not children should be baptized, and I guess it all depends on your starting point.  If faith in God is seen as an intellectual assent, then children may not be intellectually ready to make a lifelong decision or to sign onto a distinct theology.  But if faith is seen as holistic and spiritual, I tend to believe that children are able to grasp it more easily than adults.  After years of working with children, I am convinced that they understand and experience God on a level that adults rarely achieve because of our life experiences and intellectual attempts to explain God. 

            Today, as I close my eyes and try to connect with that 10-year-old little girl with a fire in her heart for Jesus, there are a few things I want to tell her.  So I am writing a letter to that little dreamer. 

Dear 10-year-old girl,

I want you to know that, yes, you are ready to make this decision.  You know God and experience him, and you are ready to make the decision to follow him.  But I also want to tell you that your walk with God started before you were born.  You didn’t have to be baptized before he would start working in your life.  He has been there with you every moment. I’m so glad that you want to follow him.  The innocence of faith and connection with God that you have now will be hard to maintain as you experience more life.  Don’t let it go easily.  He won’t let go of you. 

            Dear 10-year-old girl, I want you to know that faith is a journey that will take twists and turns you might not expect.  Faith is often treated like a destination.  But that is actually religion.  Religion says, “arrive at this belief, and your work is finished.”  Faith is a continuous walk with a loving God.  It has mountains and valleys.  You will find that things you once believed will fail the test of life and love.  You will find that things you once doubted will become clearly evident over time.  Twenty-eight years from now, you will have more questions than you have answers.  You will have given up on formulas and checklists.  You will realize the arrogance of anyone who claims to fully understand the things of God.  You will find that the deeper your faith in the greatness of God becomes, the smaller your need for a tidy theology becomes.  You will become more and more at peace with your questions because as Father Richard Rohr says, “The opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is control.”  You will learn a lot in your 30’s about the elusive and deceptive nature of “control.”  And as you let go of the illusion of control, you will feel more secure in the presence of God than you ever have before.  You will find that he’s not afraid of your questions. 

            It will take you a while, but eventually, you will learn to see the image of God in everyone.  You won’t only see him in the people at church.  You will see him at the grocery store check-out, in the prison, at the park, on the news, in the person who hurt you, and in the person who disagrees with you.  You will become increasingly sensitive to the tragedy of any human who is being treated as anything less than one who is created in the image of God.  And you will understand more and more that no one of us bears his image any more than another.  It is equally written onto our DNA.  When we turn away from goodness, when our darkest moments surface, we have simply lost touch with our inherent God-image.   We can help others find that image of God that is planted within them if we love them purely, because that is when his image is most evident in our own lives.  We can call that out in others by encouraging them and being honest about our own failures.  As Thomas Merton said, “Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.”  The world needs real people.  Be as real as you can be, trusting the God-image within you.  

Dear 10-year-old girl, you will go through years where it is hard to see your own worth.  I wish I could guard you from that pain.  I wish I could silence the voices that will demean you for your gender, your stature, your intellect, your personality, your choices.  Those voices will sometimes drown out the small still voice within you that reminds you of your lovability.  Remember that when people treat you this way, they have lost touch with their own God-image.  Eventually, you will be secure enough to know your own worth again, just like you do now.  And in a lot of ways, you will finally feel like that 10-year-old girl again.  And it will be beautiful.

            Dear 10-year-old girl, you have ahead of you so much beauty and so much pain.  They will intertwine so tightly that sometimes you won’t be able to unthread them.  Some days you will wish you could avoid the pain, but others you will know that you are uniquely you because of what you have endured.  And the beauty in your life will be absolutely breathtaking in contrast to the pain.  And believe it or not, you will even find a way to turn the pain into beauty when you release it to the one who has walked with you since before you were born.  Pain does not get the final word, sweet child.  Love does.  And that is why today you made a wonderful decision.  You don’t fully know what it means.  You don’t know what it will look like to walk with Jesus.  You don’t know just how faithful he will be to you.  But he will never leave you.  Now rock that wet hair and denim dress and get some hugs from the people who love you.  You’ve got a journey to continue.  And it’s going to be amazing. 

A Year of Becoming

              As 2018 draws to a close and a New Year looms near, I find myself reflecting on 2018 and things I have learned.  It has been a year of immense change and growth, a year of immense pain and intense hope.  I didn't know you could have so much peace in the midst of so much pain or so much hope in the midst of so much uncertainty.  We tend to see these things as mutually exclusive, but they are not.  This year taught me so much about the beauty of authenticity.  I learned this year that when you become vulnerable and honest, you experience a freedom in living that is beyond compare.  The process is painful, like walking through fire and feeling the unnecessary things burn off.  But the reward is great.  When you lay out your cards and stop playing the “everything’s okay” game two things will likely happen.  Some people will be upset that you had the nerve to acknowledge the truth.  You will lose relationships that you never thought you would lose (or wanted to lose).  But this is not the end of the story.  Because when you show your true, authentic self and stop trying to hide the broken pieces of your story, something else happens as well.  The people who truly love you will love you in a way that is more precious than any love you have ever known.  Because now you are giving them the chance to love the real you – all of you.  Not the putting on your best face and pretending everything is good “you”, but the face in the mud dealing with your reality “you”.  You find out that there are people in your life who will hold your hand through your most difficult days and laugh with you when laughter is desperately needed.  You find that some people can accept and love you even if things look messy.  You will grieve the ones who couldn’t love the authentic you.  But you will learn to truly value the relationships that stand the test of authenticity.  And when you are finally at peace with being authentic and real – you will learn to love yourself fully as well.  And suddenly, when you love yourself and you have the freedom to be real, it doesn’t really matter that your honesty is not okay with everyone. 

              Many Christians live their lives in fear of being broken.  We think if there is a bruise on our story, we become less beautiful to God.  I might have said before this year that God’s love was not about my performance.  I might have intellectually believed that was true.  But I didn’t really believe it until this year.  This year I learned in my soul and in the deepest parts of my being that God’s love for me transcends every part of my story.  I have felt his love for me in the most precious ways in the most needed moments.  He has whispered to me over and over again “You are okay, and I am here.”  And those words he has spoken to my heart over and over again have gotten me out of bed in the morning.  There’s something about being honest with God and saying, “I’m at the end of myself here” that allows him into your life in places that he is not welcome as long as you are saying “I’ve got this”.  As a parent, I want desperately for my children to be able to come to me with any situation and be authentic and real.  How beautiful it must be to God when he sees his children live out of their truest selves, refusing to hide from him or anyone else.  I am learning to entrust my story to him completely.  It will not look like the one I wrote in my head and in my heart.  But while grieving the loss of a dream, there is the hope of a future that only God holds.  There is a faith in redemption and a joy in knowing that no matter where life leads – he is there.  And that means it will be good.

              To anyone reading this – I encourage you in the coming year to strive to be authentic.  Be brave enough to be honest with yourself and others about the truth of your life.  Live in freedom, not in bondage to the need for approval.  We can spend our entire lives worshipping the god of approval, which leads to an empty existence full of shallow relationships.  Or we can be authentic and real and live our best lives in truth.  We can love and be loved wholeheartedly.  Authenticity does not come cheaply, nor is it the path of least resistance.  But it is invaluable, and it is the path of most radiance.