H: for How Long Will I Spend on This (or Honestly It's Felt Like Decades)

It's been a while.  I have nearly started this so many times over the last 2 1/2 years, but then I didn't know how or I got busier or I forgot or I was scared. 

But writing is in my heart.  It's how I process.  So here I am.

This was meant to be "Month 4: My Peeps" in my journey through Loving My Actual Life.  It started that way back in October 2016, and then I failed miserably.  So I gave myself another month.  And I really did try.

Month 4:
Boy oh boy, do I need this.  Husband and I have both been stressed with work--that makes us both withdraw.  So I have barely spent time with him, Daughters and I are doing a great job arguing, I miss my friends, there is a sweet babe I know who was born sick . . . all I want to do is read, and all I feel obligated to do is work.

So.  People.  The ones I love.  The ones God gave me to do life beside--to love my life with.

Quantity time.

Quality time.

I planned to schedule time in my calendar to be with specific people, send handwritten notes to people, be present with eye contact and no phone, and watch for moments when God put someone in front of me who needed me in that moment.

Y'all, that's where I got stuck.  Once I started looking for them, they were everywhere.

That month started with a phone call from a dear, dear friend I love with a mix of younger sister and niece and daughter telling me her baby boy had been born . . . and hours later had slipped into respiratory distress as a result of a brain bleed.  They were states away, and I fell to my knees.  I spent days staring at my computer monitor watching him in the hospital and praying, pleading, willing him to take one more breath.  Wondering if I should get in my car and drive to them.  Wondering if I'd ever get to meet him. 

That month was November 2016.

Day Nine: Today we sat the girls down to tell them about the election.  We also discussed our family rules and how that means we connect with people.  We look for people on the buddy bench, and we engage with them.  Because we're human.  Because love trumps hate.  I've always known that, but in the faces of my girls I see it.

Day Eleven: I am grieving.  This connecting means actually seeing where people are--actually seeing them.  And sometimes it means grieving.  So I am.

Day Sixteen: It's never-ending, the talking and the thinking.  And apparently the crying.  It's not lost on me that in this month of connecting I am finding myself withdrawing.  This election has truly built a wall . . . It's not lost on me how I am connecting with humanity as a larger part, even while pulling away from people around me.  It's a pity it takes this for us to see how much we need each other and be grateful we have each other.  I am praying that as this month progresses I continue to see and pursue those connections.  Also that I remember the hope and connections President Obama encouraged in his State of the Union: "I believe in change, because I believe in you."
May that be true today.  May I believe in change and in goodness and in love because I believe in myself and my sisters and my kids and my husband and strangers on the train.

Day (thirty)One: I think I need a redo.  None of my intentionality happened this month.  So December will be my peeps...again.  Today I spent largely by myself, with one major exception.  I drove to Kalamazoo in the sleet to place a Cubs pennant by Uncle Johnny's grave.  He would have been so happy they won.  And that made me think.  Part of being present--and loving my actual life--means truly knowing the people around me.  What is their thing?  What is the part of them that will seem important enough to their being that would make it worth standing in a cemetery an hour away from home forcing a baseball pennant into the semi-frozen ground at the base of a 30-year-old headstone in 30-degree sleet?  I want to know that about my people.

And so.  For the past 29 months I have been living a redo.  I've been failing and succeeding and then failing again at putting my phone down and being fully present.  I've written exactly one handwritten note and approximately one zillion text messages.  I've created hashtags and adopted colored hearts and started watching the Bachelor and eaten way too much ice cream and shared too many bottles of wine. 

Along the way a college friend's mom was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, and she died.  Another friend-like-a-father has seen the levels of cancer in his body dwindle and come back with a vengeance, even while his sister died from a years-long battle with cancer and his wife was diagnosed.  A friend from elementary school has courageously fought breast cancer--finally getting to ring the bell at the end of treatments and in remission--while also going through a divorce.  That baby boy nephew/grandson/friend turned two and is running and playing golf and hockey and making us all laugh with his sweetness, perfectly and miraculously healthy. 

I've walked part of these last 29 months with a friend through an eating disorder that left her in residential treatment and continues to call her name, another friend through realized childhood trauma that has eaten away too much of her adult life and threatened to steal her spirit, and the coming out and settling in to who God made them to be of friends and family.  I have been a confidant and a cheerleader and a late-night text and a hug.  I have grieved.  Oh, have I grieved.

I have watched my daughters navigate the end of elementary school and the beginning of middle school.  They have said goodbye to friends and welcomed new ones.  As a country we have endured too many school shootings to remember all their names, and as a mother I have sent my daughter to school because school officials and the school police officer insisted our kids were safe despite a threat of violence. And then I did it again.  And I stood on the sidewalk surrounded by middle schoolers at a March for Their Lives rally my 7th grader helped organize. 

My heart has wandered away from church as I've watched and listened to too much hate spewed in the name of a God who commanded us to love.  And then, in the end, I've wandered back in . . . because people.

I stood on a corner in beautiful Charleston, SC, in disbelief as my husband told me--through the phone and my protestations that I had just sung a song with him the day before--that a vibrant man, the backbone of hospitality in our church, had died that day at work.  I have been to funerals, I have been to support groups, I have intervened in harassment of a sleeping homeless man on a train, I have mothered a drunken college student on a train platform, I have stopped a drunken hair-pulling fight between strangers at a concert, I have born witness to countless stories of trauma and mental illness, I have fought with words and actions for marginalized people, I have marched...and I have loved.  I have loved.

And I have failed miserably at loving. 

I have allowed myself to love those I deemed worthy of my love.

And the others I have judged with a harshness and a disdain and even a disgust.

And, oh, God, I have so much to learn. 

So how long will I spend on month four?  It's become Groundhog Day or Before I Fall for me, a month I'm destined to repeat until I figure out how to get it right.  In truth, these 29 months have been the longest decades of my life.  They have been heartbreaking and challenging and beautiful and life changing.

These 29 months I've spent weaving in and out of intentionality around loving the people in my actual life--in person, via text, over social media--ended in two remarkable and contrasting ways.  Both with death, and, in a way, both with life.

Easter.  It's the dawn after the darkness.  It's the promise that the grave doesn't win and that sin doesn't win and that somehow, some way, what has been turned upside down will be made right again.

And then, days later, Rachel Held Evans died.  How many lives have I pleaded for in these 29 months?  How much healing have I banged on the Throne of Grace for in these 29 months?  Rachel's is included.  My wandering back into church--and the staying power, if I'm honest--began with the words of Rachel.  Like so many others, I am in church #becauseofRHE.  In the hours and days after Rachel's death, I came across this Tweet from @jamieleefinch:

"#BecauseofRHE tweets today I'm struck with the awareness that the greatest thing Rachel may have given all of us was each other."

I replied with this: "#BecauseofRHE I know I am not alone...in my doubts, in my convictions, in my hopes, in my longings.  She gave me Church."

But she gave me more than that.  As I've read so much of what's been written about her, now that we won't get anything more written by her, I have been struck by the grace with which she treated those who belittled and attacked and hated her.  She saw in everyone one truth: the image of God. 

I haven't seen that.

I've allowed myself to decide that certain people have decided to ignore the image of God in themselves and in others they don't like or are afraid of and have therefore made themselves unworthy of love and grace from me.  As if I'm the one who gets to decide any of that.  I have done the very thing I have accused them of doing.  I may choose to let in those traditionally locked out, but I'm no different if I'm pushing others out the door in order to do it. 

Y'all, I want to be loving.  I want to be safe.  I want to figure out how to embrace even those with whom I disagree.  God, let me see You in them.  All of them.  I want to figure out what is important enough to their being that I would stand in the sleet or stay up half the night or storm the Throne of Grace on their behalf. 

"But the gospel doesn't need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out.  It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, 'Welcome! There's bread and wine.  Come eat with us and talk.' This isn't a kingdom for the worthy; it's a kingdom for the hungry."    - Rachel Held Evans

At the end of the day, we're all the wrong people.  And we're all the sinners saved by grace.  And we're all welcome, because we're all so, so hungry.

 

 

 

Finding Hope

I just finished reading The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb.  It is a book that had long been on my "To Read" shelf on Goodreads, and I was excited to walk past it on the shelf at the library while I was stocking up on vacation reading . . . for my daughter.  (I'm not sure how looking for books in the Young Adult section led to me being in the adult fiction section, but those sorts of things happen to me.  Any time I'm around books.)

It's a long, long book.  Possibly the longest work of fiction I've ever read.  Some of the reviews on Goodreads point to the fact that Lamb touches on five or six plot lines in this book, and he certainly covers everything from the Civil War to Columbine to PTSD to women's prisons to the current war in Afghanistan and Iraq to infidelity to . . . nearly everything else.  At first glance it really is a disjointed conglomeration that makes the reader wonder why we have held on for so long.  And then he says it.  On page 685, Lamb has a character say, "Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful."

And that's it.

That's what all these things have in common.

And that's what they have in common with me reading it right now, finishing it yesterday, the day a group of people accidentally shot down a plane full of innocent passengers.  Passengers who included three infants and a hundred men and women who had dedicated their lives to saving the lives of others through HIV/AIDS research.  And the day Israel sent ground troops into Gaza.  Shortly after a local Christian radio host was arrested and charged with the sexual trafficking of a young boy.

"Life is messy, violent, confusing, and hopeful."

I have two friends whose families endured terrible and violent shooting tragedies over the past several years.  The devastation has been horrible, and it has changed everything about their worlds.  But they have hope.

I also have a friend who died following his battle against PTSD.  He fought willingly in a war against bullies and tyrants, because that's who Zack was.  But he was baptized, and he loved God, and we have hope that he is finally at peace.

For some reason Columbine has always stayed with me.  It has been tucked in my mind since it happened, and I continue to be impacted by it.  Perhaps it was the timing--I was a senior in college, so I was aware and had the time to watch the coverage and read about it.  Perhaps it was the fact that I joined my friends in taking a group of high schoolers to Columbine just one year after the shootings.  Or maybe it was standing in a church there, worshiping with my friends and those high schoolers, just miles from Columbine High School.  We sang "Better Is One Day," there in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains alongside Columbine students who knew and loved the children who died.  And we sang, with all our hearts and voices, "Better is one day in Your courts than thousands elsewhere."  Because even in that mess, that violence, that confusion . . . there was hope.

As I wrote following our break in, I have friends and family members who have lost jobs, been betrayed by friends, been abandoned by spouses who vowed to always stand by them, and have their families continually ravaged by addiction.  And all I have to offer them is this.

Life is messy.

Life is violent.

Life is confusing.

But, at the end of all this, life is hopeful.

Oh, my God.  He will not delay.
My refuge and strength, always.
I will not fear, His promise is true.
My God will come through, always.  Always.

{"Always," Kristian Stanfill}

The Nineteenth Sabbath

A different sort of hymn today: "Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus."

The Lofty Task of Motherhood

I came across this today: " 'Salvation' isn't just about me, BTW. It's good news for the people around me, too, when I live as Jesus taught. His way of living restores relationships, sets injustices right, frees me from anxiety and slavery to money, for instance, and is GREAT news for the most vulnerable people in my life, when I try to live in a way that brings the Kingdom to Earth, as it is in Heaven." (see comments)

It strikes me that, as a mother, "salvation" truly changes the way that I raise my children. It changes the way that I think about, treat, care for my unborn daughter, and it changes the way that I discipline, love, potty train my oldest daughter. It changes the way I live my life. It has to. And it truly does have to be good news--for me, yes, but for everyone around me.

I love the way the author, in his comment above explains salvation--by grace, through faith, not works--to an admitted nonChristian who inquired about how this relevant gospel changes our lives . . . and brings about good works without requiring them. I want to save this forever and share it with my little girls when they ask why we go to church every Sunday. Ellie, Meg, it isn't about making our lives richer or seeing our friends or complaining about how weak the coffee is . . . it's about learning how to make OUR salvation GREAT news for the people we meet every day. For our friends, for our enemies, for our families, for our neighbors, and for the most vulnerable people in our lives.

Does being a Christian have an impact on my parenting? Does being a Christian have an impact on the television I watch? On the jobs I take? On the job I do at the job I took, or the way I talk about my friends or my pastor or my coworker, or the way I spend my money? What about the way I vote and what issues make me angry? It damn well better. But maybe it isn't being a Christian that does it . . . maybe it's "being saved" that does it. Because I'm "saved," my whole life needs to change . . . and it needs to change for the better. Because if my neighbors hate to see me coming, then it surely isn't good news. And I heard once that if it isn't good news, then it isn't the Good News . . . for anybody.