Tag Archives: life

A Holy Maybe

Another Sunday, another chance to get some words out of this mixed up maze of my mind.

Today, I am thinking about how the most holy thing we can do sometimes is to entertain the possibility that we’re completely wrong. What if this is not what it seems? is not as easy question to ask ourselves as it is to ask others.

Our perceptions are often prisons. In our sin-wrecked mind’s attempt to maintain status quo, we will easily trade peace for a prison sentence. We prefer our interpretations, not because they don’t hurt us, but because even if it hurts it’s familiar. I think there’s a component of this desire for familiarity that is beautiful and helps us find Home, but there’s another side of it that is rotten and miserable and claws at us, keeping us stuck because the Enemy knows how to take anything good and turn it evil.

I have been thinking quite a bit lately: my old scripts want actors. And it is hard, so very hard, to not find them in myself and in other people who seem to fit perfectly with patterns I think I know. It helps to differentiate myself from the “scripts”. I get to choose how I want to act; that’s part of my freedom in Christ. Jesus has a better script for me, a better part for me to play. But until I see Him face to face, that script and that part won’t seem fully natural to me. I also have to be honest about how much I actually want that old familiar script to keep running. It sure does make me look like the hero of the story, albeit a bit of an underdog.

I could talk about how the script goes, but I believe I would be giving voice to lies. I have done enough of that in my life. Even if you might relate to my particular version of lies, I want to encourage you that however your script of lies goes, it’s just that: a script, a soundtrack, handed down or built over time, and not necessarily any more true than any other soundtrack from any movie you might have seen.

People wiser than me have boiled this down to: don’t live by your feelings; submit your feelings to the truth of God’s word. I am not so wise yet for that to resonate. Or maybe I am just less of a feelings-person and more of a thoughts-person. I have found that if I try to attack the individual thoughts, I can barely function. It is all-consuming to rebuff each untrue thought. What helps the most is to just completely stand the whole thing on its head: what if none of what I am thinking right now is true? What if this is just a dusty old script looking for actors? What if there’s a loving God?

What if God, who did not spare His own Son, will not also freely with Him give me all things?

What if He wants me to come to Him with my foolishness and pride, to give it all to Him?

What if His commands really aren’t burdensome? What if His yoke is really easy and His burden is light?

What if He is doing exactly what He said He would do with me?

What if . . . what if He really loves me?

I wasn’t sure a post would happen today, either

The beginning of the school year caught me… I can’t say by surprise, because it’s not like I don’t have a calendar that’s in my hand roughly four hours a day. I knew it was coming. I even had FIRST DAY OF CC! in my calendar app weeks ahead of time. I had reached out to someone for help with planning my reading lessons. I was trying to finish. that. math. curriculum. But I also had my head so filled with all the insanity of signing up for a freelance job and then the ridiculous guilt of quitting that job that sitting down and planning anything seemed about as impossible as getting up and running a marathon.

I can tell I am overwhelmed by the length of my sentences. Well, not just the length; the quality of them. I write and speak in run-ons when my mind working against me, as if the full stop of a sentence risks me not getting the information out in time. What could happen between the breaths those end marks require? I could decide, as I often do, that the rest of what I have to say just doesn’t matter. If I pause too long I can build an entire, iron-clad case against my own reasons. My hands or my mouth may stop moving, but my mind doesn’t. When I am more relaxed, I don’t fear myself. But when I get overwhelmed, if I try to say anything in defense of my actions or feelings it must be said in those rushed run-ons with prepositions galore and barely a pause for breath — even a comma is dicey — because if I dare let myself silence myself I will.

So I have spent the past few weeks in that awful space of feeling like I need help, not sure what sort of help I need, pretty sure I don’t deserve help, thinking maybe I am being overly dramatic about my situation, certain that there is no way to express any of this to anyone without making a huge ass of myself. (Language, I know; give me a better phrase and I will use it.)

But the long and the short of it is, at the time I should have been in the thick of planning for this year’s homeschool I was instead taking long work calls and spending hours filing — not to mention the time lost of being fully in my head about the whole situation once I realized I didn’t have the hours to keep the job. And now, I am looking at yet another week of homeschool for which I feel ill-prepared to teach my children. And that’s just the basic, logistical, explainable portion of why I have spent the past few weeks under a mountain of guilt and overwhelm.

But God.

Last night, God reminded me through our weekly family singing time that God has given me everything I need already; that the flame shall not hurt thee; I only design thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine. I could hear that song every single day and still be astounded at all God has promised and provided. But then I went to church and the pastor apparently decided to preach to me directly as he spoke on God’s sovereignty. How can I believe that God is in control and still try to figure it all out myself??? There is no spreadsheet, no logical argument, no beautiful, color-coded plan that will solve a heart that doesn’t cry out to the Only Wise King for living water.

I must repent of my pride.

I have repented, though this requires some accountability now, because I know myself; I have had this same realization in different forms for the last fifteen years. I need to find someone to check in with on a regular (maybe daily) basis who can help me quickly confess and repent of the pride I am so wont to walk in. I wrote a Think List for when I can feel that crummy guilt keeping me down, but I tend to get off the path long before I feel the mud sucking at my feet. If you don’t know what a Think List is, let me show you what I scribbled down during the sermon today as a potential Think List for this “I am a failure” funk:

  • There is a God and I am not Him
  • His yoke is easy and His burden is light
  • His commands are not burdensome
  • He is close to the brokenhearted
  • Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven (Psalm 32)
  • Repent, rejoice, repeat

This isn’t my best Think List, but essentially it’s a list of truths to combat a lie or lies that want to choke out all the benefits of being God’s. A single verse is powerful enough to dispel any lie, but often our minds need to drown out particularly noisy lies.

I’m thinking that I don’t just need the Think List for when I feel bad; I need to spend real time dwelling on these truths and confessing/repenting quickly when I am not living them.

But again — God is good and He will not be confined to a method. He is transforming me and working on me through all this. He alone gets the glory for showing me my pride, and He alone will get the glory if by some miracle I leave this life with less of it.

In my mind, this post was really good but I think I got a unnecessarily rambley and self-reflective. I will leave it alone because I am not at a point in my life where polished writing is the goal. I just need to keep getting the words out, keep posting, because in this I might finally prove to myself that I can (however imperfectly) keep my word to myself, even when no one is asking me to do it and maybe no one benefits from this.

Procrastinating & Reflecting

I should probably be scurrying about like Mrs Tiddlemouse fussing over the state of my house and trying to get it all tidy. I do not have it in me. We live here; it’s clean enough for us; I will give the bathroom a once-over tomorrow before guests arrive and make sure we don’t have any dirty rags hanging out around the sink.

Tomorrow, we host our annual Family Birthday Party which for now is focused on the younger ones. As they mature, I hope to keep the annual summer party alive with a growing focus on the family as a whole. Mine and Love’s wedding anniversary is in July, and a while back I heard of a family doing a “family birthday party” on the parents’ anniversary and that stuck with me. We did become a family in July, after all; it’s worth noting and celebrating. For now, however, we are enjoying throwing a big celebration for the kids, whose birthdays span the summer months.

Love went out to acquire some balloons (we are so prepared, ha ha) and my job was to . . . clean? But it’s almost 10pm and I plan to be up early and I got distracted on the internet like any genuine elder millennial, so here we are.

Aaaaand, the party has come and gone, and the only snag was not ordering enough pizza. We should have gotten thirteen and instead we got . . . eight. The year before we hadn’t planned on having food and decided last minute to get pizzas, only to have them arrive after most of the guests had left. I did not want a repeat of leftover pizza for days, so I overcorrected by . . . a lot.

Anywho, the kids had so much fun they were sad that it was over; we hosted over fifty people; my mother-in-law’s slushie machine was a huge hit; we got to see some people we hadn’t seen in ages.

While I am not a party person, and I don’t seek out large gatherings, I love seeing people enjoy one another’s company. Most of the people at the party were engaged, talking with people they didn’t know and catching up with those they did. Very few people got their phones out unless they were taking pictures. Everyone made themselves at home. It was amazing to see people from all different communities all participating in a celebration of our children.

Love and I believe our children worth all the fuss, but I am still moved by how many people showed up for them. We are unbelievably blessed, and our children are growing up in a shower of love and blessing. It is almost incomprehensible to me.

Heading out to church now . . . Thank you for reading. This blog exists because of people like you who take the time to read my silly musings and tell me you enjoyed reading. Remind me to tell you all about how a unicorn job fell in my lap last week. Until next time . . .

Delicate Flower

Something I think about too often is this time when my supervisor told me that I am a “delicate flower”. She was not trying to compliment me. This supervisor routinely told me that I was making her job harder, that she didn’t understand why I was hired, that all I did was make mistakes and that in this job, mistakes are not allowed. “You are just a delicate flower,” she sneered; “I know you go crying in the bathroom when I give you any criticism. I don’t even know what you are doing here.” When I finally got the courage to ask for a transfer from the person who actually hired me, the Operations Officer, she wondered if maybe there was a language barrier.

A language barrier. Sure. I shrugged and said, “Whatever it is, I don’t think I can keep working here if I have to work for her.”

I wonder often if I am just too sensitive. Do other people just hear criticism like that and “take it on the chin”? Do they respond with, “Okay, I will stop making your job harder and never make a mistake again,” with a little rueful, penitent smile? Do they fire back with something about how difficult it is to work for such a particular person?

I have received criticism without batting an eye. I don’t always take it personally when people make unflattering observations or comments about me. I have been a liar, adulterer, murderer-in-my-heart, envious, ungrateful, disobedient. I am not someone who walks around believing that I am in any way a good person, or even always a well-meaning person. Criticism doesn’t make me fold.

What makes me feel like a delicate flower is raised voices. My fight-or-flight kicks in pretty quick when someone around me is yelling, insulting (calling names), using exasperated tones, or threatening. My ability to think rationally, even to the point of understanding what the person is saying, vanishes. As I have gotten older, my ability to steel myself against verbal assaults has diminished. I don’t know if I have ever been the type of person to laugh while someone else is clearly having an intense moment. That has been the case as long as I can remember, but what is happening lately is this lingering sense of I am not okay, long after the yelling has stopped or I have left the situation. My mind swirls with fear. I do not feel safe.

Over a year ago, someone went berserk on me in a parking lot for hitting their car. The kids were all talking and I was distracted and all I was thinking about was getting parked so I could just stop for a moment and CRUNCH. Ooh, that was bad enough, but the person whose car I hit was sitting in it and she was livid. I think too often about that. I am more careful in parking lots, quick to hush the kids, afraid not just of hitting someone’s car, but of what the person might do. The kids probably remember this incident, but they aren’t scarred by it. I am.

I am not scarred in the sense that I replay the scene or constantly fear someone yelling at me again; I am scarred in the sense that I don’t trust myself to be okay if someone does. That may seem like splitting hairs, but the difference is staggering. Fear of someone yelling is focused outward. I can scan for threatening people and avoid them. I can drive more safely in parking lots. What I am afraid of cannot be avoided. I am afraid that I am not a strong person. I am afraid that I make things worse by reacting to anger instead of choosing to respond to it. I am afraid that something is terribly wrong with me, broken inside me, and I am terrified that there is no way to bind it up or heal it.

I don’t know if these are words fit to be shared. I just know that this is what kept me silent yesterday when my husband was asking me to please just talk to him. I spent years whining and acting like a victim. I don’t need to go on and on about how unsafe I feel in my own skin, having these sensitive ears, carrying this too-tender heart. I do not need to make much of me.

So in hopes of rescuing this post, I will answer my fear with what I know to be true: there is One who binds up and heals my brokenness. Fortunately/unfortunately, He refuses to do so by making me strong. His strength is sufficient in weakness. I may live the rest of my life practically blacking out when people yell at me. That doesn’t make me less safe, because my safety doesn’t come from my own coping skills. He is near to the brokenhearted. No matter what my broken internal alarm system is screaming, I know that He is near. And I do not have to tolerate abuse. Refusing to stay in a room where someone is yelling at me isn’t weakness. Do I really believe that? No. Should I? Yes, one hundred times yes. It is not weakness to leave an abusive situation, regardless of who the abuser is.

Maybe I am a delicate flower. But it doesn’t matter, really. Whatever I am, or was, I count as loss compared to the surpassing knowledge of knowing Christ. He is continually forming me, and I can say with great joy that it is better to be a delicate flower in His hand than a strong rock apart from Him.

Walking this out may take a lifetime. But the truth remains: God is good. His strength is perfected in weakness. All my hope is in Him.

Gospel

I go on detours. Sometimes it seems like the detours take more time than the actual race. I have spent years in ditches, weeks on mountain ranges (just look at those clouds!), days meandering in meadows or swamps. If life were a finish-first type race, this would be devastating.

Life is not a finish-first type race; it is a finish-strong type race. Thank God.

Detours may be off the path, but I cannot deny how those detours inform how I walk the path when I return. Falling from heights has made me grateful, truly humble. Being chased from swampland by an alligator has made me think of it as the safest foundation. God pulling me up from the ditch has me dancing, not walking, on the rock beneath my feet. Every detour has only made the path more beautiful, more certain, more alluring. And while my desire to remain on this path grows with each detour, I find my tendency to stray no less.

What does this mean?

Only that after such a long detour this past several months of swimming in perspectives that glorify human experience, grasping at understanding like one who does not know he is in the dark, accepting reasoning that falls short of gospel-reasoning, I come up for air and find that the path is still here; the Ancient of Days is, in fact, still unchanged.

And my greatest problem is still — not the society I live in, the pain I feel, my coping mechanisms, DNA or even the sin of others — my greatest problem is my own sin. My own rebellion, my own hard-heartedness, my own selfishness, greed, and pride. And while all those other problems exist, if I attempt to understand them outside of the deep knowledge that my greatest problem has been gloriously solved for all eternity, I will despair.

Lately I have felt like I need to untangle all that I have gone through as a child and young adult, and spending so much time reading about the life experiences of others. I have been reading some (really good) parenting advice and I dipped my toes into the waters of psychology again as a means of trying to understand myself and how on earth I might heal a soul and body that has been through more than some people experience in twice as many years. YouTube recommended a channel about healing from cPTSD. The word “safety” keeps coming up in terms that my ancestors would have had a good laugh over. A dirty house makes you feel “unsafe”? Lipschein, I think the word you are looking for is “uncomfortable”.

One step into the waters of psychology quickly pulls me under, as these are the waters of my youth. I go from just wanting a little more context than I can find in scripture for my particular areas of struggle to breathing the water of God-outside-the-world, not relevant to the everyday, insufficient or indifferent to my emotional distress. God wasn’t enough to explain, so He lets me see how far I get without Him. Turns out, not far. I go from feeling like I am walking a narrow road with a small lamp at my feet to plunged in total darkness, no path at all, only a relentless tidal wave that batters me and threatens to pull me under.

The most upside-down thing is what brings me topside: a reminder that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood”; a reminder that the gospel tells me my biggest struggle isn’t a body that “keeps score”, a brain full of faulty wiring, or even my own understanding of how to deal with those things. My biggest problem is that I am prone to take detours.

The detours are not the problem; I am not the problem; I am simply a human being who wanders like we all do. My choosing to take the detours — that choosing is the problem. But thanks be to God, I know the path. So many do not. So I am confronted today with a blessing that does not look like one until you see the other side of it: I have sinned and I can repent.

God uses all these things for good. Some of this I see; some of this I must trust. But this I know after so much wandering, so much meandering — He even uses my sin.

So I am going to publish this and it will probably serve more to confuse than edify, so if you have read this far let me leave you with something unequivocal:

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ came to save sinners. He didn’t come primarily to bring rest to the weary (though He does), to bring justice to earth (though He will), or to make us “better people” (though we find in the course of following Him we have no choice but to look more like Him who is infinitely better than all we can ask or imagine). Jesus, on the cross, solved our biggest problem. When things get heavy or confusing, start there. You might just find yourself asking Him to keep you near.

A Reflection on Appreciation

Katie said she misses my writing. Here’s something I messed around with a couple months ago and kept waiting for inspiration on how it should end. Looks like the ending is good enough. It’ll do, anyway.

I was in my late twenties when I posted a “shower thought” on Facebook: Saying thank you when someone does what they should anyway is sorta like thanking them for existing. No one responded except for one lone comment: It’s called showing appreciation. Try it sometime. Ok, ok, the “try it sometime” is probably an addendum of my bitter imagination and several years’ rumination, but the correction stung. 

In fourth or fifth grade, I was asked to be a reading buddy for younger children. I did not do it for long. I can’t remember how it ended, but I do remember being chastised for my lack of encouragement and enthusiasm. 

When I was doing some team-building exercise with my youth group in high school, my team wasn’t doing well. In an attempt to spur us on, I called out, “Guys that was pathetic!” Mrs. H knitted her brows at me and said, “Well now that wasn’t very nice.”

Appreciation. 
Encouragement.
Niceness.

These are things I learned in time, and often through these kind of unpleasant experiences. I still am quite confused by niceness, but I try to make up for this, and frankly most other things, with genuine kindness. 

I grew up being told, as most children of my generation were, that I was good inside and smart and could do anything. And yet I was also berated constantly for my thoughtlessness, rarely praised for anything but perfect results, and frequently told that I can do better. 

I grew up believing that the way to success is through constant criticism. And why praise anything less than the best? It cheapens the meaning of praise. I grew up thinking that spurring people on meant correcting every error until all errors were gone. Then and only then would it make sense to let up, to show appreciation and offer praise. 

I started to see in my mid to late thirties (far too late) that this is entirely backwards. We don’t grow from condemnation. Success isn’t the result of ruthless criticism. Ruthless criticism kills the drive to succeed at all. Sometimes it even kills the will to live. 

I cringe at high-school me shouting, “That was pathetic!” But I also want to wrap her up in the biggest, warmest hug and tell her that it’s okay — you don’t know what you don’t know. Because I know now that this is what I needed. I know now that we grow through nurture, which includes a bit of pruning, but is certainly not the whole work. 

I don’t post much anywhere anymore (another learning curve), but when I do it is with this in mind: the world is full of hurting people who are still learning what “appreciation” means. The least I can do is be kind.