Soup

I had a set-back this week. I just came off two weeks of feeling really good. I was feeling happy and peaceful about my treatment, my competency and accomplishments. I dare say even proud (that little stinker of a besetting sin rears its head quite regularly at me). But the start of this week brought something weaker, dependent, frail. And it has brought me back to a question I’ve been thinking about for awhile.

I have been thinking about frail things – in the world, in me, in nature.  

(I like the word delicate but that’s for another time…)

Our culture shields itself from all things frail. We value strength and power. I hate feeling weak.
Maybe it reminds us just a bit too much of our own smallness. Maybe we’re afraid of hurting.

Maybe it makes us face dependency, impermanence, or our need for and responsibility toward others and the Other.

I have been noticing the difference between when I feel frail and when I think I am strong and I had to wonder…

Could it be that my past, present and future would truly be worse off without Lyme?

When I ask myself the question, What is saving my life right now? I am caught off guard but each time the answer is the same: Lyme.   

“Things that happen in my body break the illusion that I am in control of life…The body makes theologians of us all.” Barbara Brown Taylor

Lyme.

Otherwise known as

The undoing of my willful-weaving to create a life that gave me a sense of value, control, power, purpose.

God’s mercy comes in this spiral-shaped unravelling that says, Come away with me. It’ll be a mess for awhile. Some of it might even feel like breaking… And it will take the rest of your life to learn… But come away with me and learn the unforced, reoriented, rhythms of grace…

Of genuine faith

Of delight

Of humility

Of contentment

Of gentle living accompanied by chutzpah

Of valor

Of dependency

Of mutuality

Of simplicity

Of stillness

Of nature

Of giving, serving and loving without binding the other

Of being loved without being bound

Of joy

Of truthful words and truthful living

Of seeing and telling the truth about myself and what I know

Of having the courage to see past what is unreal to what is real

Of facing my addiction and compulsions for the sake of approval, validation, being special

Of trading work to be loved for I loved you first, before any of it

Of experiencing deeply the first Love who stitched and stitches me back together with beloved, enough, good

Of a willingness to live counter to my culture (church and society)

Of a growing desire to stop building up my “kingdom” and embrace what is more whole, more human, more ordinary, more uncertain, less tidy, more honest, more faithful, more loving, more holy.

*****

Could it really be that this twisted Lyme journey is healing me?

We can be healed without being cured. We are offered healing, never promised a cure.

Enter homemade soup.

“To eat is to acknowledge our dependence—both on food and on each other.” Frederick Buechner

There is something inexplicably comforting about the nourishment of soup. I have been trying to figure out what it is about the soups you made that heals and humbles.

Each time I open my freezer, I notice your soups.

Each night, I set out a soup I will eat at lunch the next day.

Each time I gulp down the warm broth, I feel nourished and grateful.

Sometimes as I eat, I even wonder if dependency in community can really taste this good.  I think of you and say a prayer of thanks for you, your efforts and your love displayed in this very practical way. The soups have made a huge difference in giving me more energy for our family needs. 

Eve Ensler writes about her journey through cancer, “The thing that really heals is to know we have not been forgotten.”

When I blogged the request for soup, I did so aware of a very practical, tangible need to help me conserve energy so I could put it toward healing and caring for other basic needs in our family.

In hindsight, I wonder if at some deeper place I was also hoping to be reminded that I am not forgotten, that I am supported, that we are not alone as we live out this hard place.

Your soup is nourishing my body and my soul. I think I can even say it is healing me.  

I shouldn’t be surprised. It seems to be the way of God to use the tangible, material to convey and accomplish the holy and healing.  

“Matter, matters to God…this is embedded in both testaments of the Bible…” Barbara Brown Taylor

Over and over we see symbols – touchable, smell-able, see-able symbols conveying a Mystery we can just barely understand if we are lucky. It allows us to know and to experience the sacred here and now in our human skin and senses, to let the Mystery enter us and change us. (Incarnation, Eucharist…) It’s real matter/material that brings to human reality the Mystery. Another example of this is the sacrament of “anointing the sick”.

Rachel Held Evans in her new book, Searching for Sunday, beautifully articulates the deep significance in this sometimes weird-sounding sacrament.  And because a theology of suffering and healing are typically shallow, dismissive and entitled in north american churches, I was encouraged and comforted by her way with words.

“The slow and biblical work of healing is to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy and stick around no matter what. (Anointing the sick) is an acknowledgement. It’s a way to speak to someone who is suffering without words, platitudes or empty solutions. It says, This is a big deal. This matters. I’m here. Anointing is really a commission, a sending out on a special mission. How significant is it that (for centuries) Christians anoint suffering? Healing is a slow, relational, meandering path. It requires patience, presence, and willingness to take the scenic route [with one another]."  

I have thought about your soup and how it has been an outward sign of an inward grace, much like this idea of anointing the sick. This is how we define sacraments – outward signs of inward grace. The root of the word means “sacred, holy, to consecrate”.  

Seeing your soup sitting in my freezer has felt like you commissioning me to live within this hard place. To make it required your attention, your money, your time, your care, your hands. These are your prayers. In chopping and simmering and delivering you gave me your presence that says, This is a big deal. This matters. You're not alone.

In many ways, the soup has been the best our community has done to see our “suffering” and bless it. No platitudes, no scripturizing (though well-intended), no judgments, no covert advice on how we should be living this out. Just a lot of grace healing me bowl-by-bowl.

So I am healing. I have high doubts about ever being cured (though I do have hopes for becoming physically well).

Not because I don’t have faith it is possible but because I know I have stumbled upon a more faithful life in this weak place. I may never get back what I had before. And in light of all I have just written, you’ll understand why I sometimes wonder if a cure would even be the best thing for my life – the one where it seems to require my frailty and weakness to see and receive the gifts of the unforced rhythms of grace. I do, however, have complete confidence in my healing. For the rest of my life I want to be healed. And what I am learning is that healing is not a single or solitary instance. It is ongoing. It is not about regaining the life I used to live. It is not even just me and God. It is relational, communal. It comes when we enter one another’s suffering and help redeem it by blessing it, carrying it, staying present and patient with a faith-filled heart that trusts in the Mystery of God when healing sometimes looks like dying. I am learning that suffering ceases to be suffering when we are able to find its meaning in the story of redemption. And your soup is one of the ways we've been accompanied and the best way our pain has been acknowledged, blessed, carried. It helps me see and tell our story with a theme of redemption.

With heartfelt thanks!

Choosing the Fragile Side of Life (Starting Treatment)

I start treatment on Tuesday.

I have all of my pills and medicines lined up waiting.

Photo Credit

I am scared. I’m so glad I feel scared.

I am also ready. I am ready to begin this winding, crooked road.

I used to think I was unafraid, tough enough to handle the hardest things. But in truth, I was so disconnected from my body that when it told me I was afraid, I refused to hear the message. If you do this enough times, you’ll cut off from your very own self. I was good at it.

I don’t recommend it. It’s a long, hard journey back.

Once, I watched literally paralyzed as my brother was dog-piled and beaten by a group of young men none too pleased with the cocky white kid dunking on them. I felt pure terror, helplessness and then I felt … nothing. I was so afraid my beloved brother would die that I cut off from the fear and the terror. The fury with which they attacked him was matchless and twelve-on-one is hardly a fair fight. I disconnected from my body as it sent all kinds of terrified, horrified, panicked messages about the threat I was helpless to stop. I had already developed this skill throughout my life in much less terrifying situations. It was a literal miracle that saved Ryan that night. And there have been many small miracles since that have saved me from this disembodied way of doing life.

Having a baby was one of the first things that broke open my disconnected way of being human. You cannot ignore the very embodied experience of pregnancy and birth. Giving birth, partnering in creating life, broke me wide open to life - to really feeling things in life. And there have been many other openings since; some as blissful as a baby and others much uglier, more difficult. Two sides of the same coin.

Lyme is one of those, I think.

So I am ready to start treatment. I am also scared. And I am glad to feel these things. I am glad to be living grounded into the human experience I have been gifted.

It is not much of a secret that I had given up on life in the spring. I kept going through the motions but Jason already knew it, even before I did. I felt nothing and I didn’t care. (This is called depression.) I gave up on my fight, my life. Maybe I only gave up on my fight with life – to order it, control it, to get my way with it. It felt like the same thing even though I know they aren’t. I gave up on my will to live. Under the weight of the uncertainty for the future, of all of my fears and guilt, I just quit.

Salvation came for me in that dark place. Sozo (to be saved; salvation) to be kept from danger, restored, made well (whole), preserved. He reached down and pulled me from the mire (sinkhole). Psalm 40:2

I was pulled out, pulled into the heart of God where I knew with certainty the whisper to choose Life. The whisper in my soul spoke of God’s will for me. I heard this question over and over again. Will you be so vulnerable and brave to choose this fragile, beautiful, uncertain gift of life?  

Sometimes choosing life, showing up for life, is an act of vulnerable courage.

In loving kindness, God whispered and waited for me and ultimately let me choose – life or death. I still believe the Spirit of God grew hope so deep and raw in me so that I could choose life that day. And every day since.

It was a turning point being met by Life on the bluff at King’s Fold. The point where I chose consolation of God’s presence instead of life on my terms, in spite of the desolation and darkness I felt in overwhelming circumstances. I chose the consolation of recognizing the tiniest flickers oflight in the darkness and knowing it was enough for contentment and life.

I chose life. In the act of saying yes to Life, without realizing it, I gave my broken heart back into the hands of a loving God who keeps on healing it. Sozo.

I am ready for treatment.

I am also scared.

I feel a constant anxiousness in me vibrating just below the surface. There in the anxious buzzing are the unanswerable questions.

How sick will treatment make me?
Will I be able to care for my family? For myself?

Will there be pain? Agony?

As the spirochetes die off in my brain, how out of my mind will I be?

Can I handle the pain?

Can my children handle me in the pain?

What can I do to keep this process from harming their sense of security?

What if I cannot function at all?

What if nothing happens?
What if it doesn’t work?

Maybe these are only worst case scenarios and I’ll be tired and nauseous but able to hobble around attending to the basic needs of our life.

Can Jason bear the weight of all the extra responsibilities when I cannot?

How much help can I really ask for?

When and who will I know to ask?

How do I plan for all of these possibilities?

Question after question keep coming all with the same answer…

I cannot know. We won’t know until we get there. There is no certainty.

Instead, I have decided to focus on different questions. Questions to guide my new year and this uncertain treatment process. And these bring a sense of peace. They lead me to a still place where the anxious buzzing quiets a little and I see a bigger picture. (And also make some plans around the most basic needs.)

(Questions taken from one of my heroes and teachers – Parker Palmer)

1) How can I let go of my need for fixed answers in favor of aliveness?

2) What is my next challenge in daring to be human?

3) What is waiting to be birthed in and through me during this time?

I continue to ponder these questions and am learning to live into them. But one thing has become clearer to me as I consider these.

My next challenge in daring to be human and to be alive, to choose life is this: 

To accept and companionably live into the fragile side of life. I feel sure there are real treasures to be found in this fragile place. 

Advent, Hope & Our Lyme Update

It is past time for an update on my October appointment with the Lyme Guy.

A few people have expressed concern about my silence. It is less about distress and more about discernment. It takes time to listen for wisdom. It takes time and quiet to discern a way forward. For me, it takes time to discover what I want to share and what I don’t want to share. And that what I don’t want to share is a-ok. Our retreattoward rest has looked like withdrawal on many fronts – some intended and some unintended (like this blog). This has not been about isolation but about healing and growth.

****

Advent seems the perfect season to pull all of the pieces together and reflect on where we’ve been with Lyme and where to from here.

Painful and hard are not the same thing. But I have used these words interchangeably for so long I didn’t notice when they stopped being one and the same for me.

Lyme. It is hard and it has been painful and likely it will be again. But the heart-shattering, suffocating, pain of Lyme and all the ways it has changed us has passed for now. It is still hard but it is not breaking my heart. I think this is because of the deep, dependent, life-giving relationship between faith, Hope and love.

I believe faith is a gift. I cannot conjure more of it up. I cannot work harder to get more of it in my hands or heart. It is a gift I receive and a gift I participate in when I remember and trust in the God I have come to know and the ways I see him at work mending the world. It is this faith that often keeps me from giving up on Hope. Hope is sometimes the tiniest seed, a trust or a sudden knowing that light is always there in the dark places even if it is only unseeable flecks of light moving through the darkness. 

Hope is the presence of God breaking through suddenly and unexpectedly in the most desperate places. Before the hope comes fully alive in me, I usually experience it as Hope hoping for me. The power and presence of God that is Hope. Christ our Hope or Come Lord Jesus are common prayers during advent. But they are prayers that have become more real to me in this season of sorting through Lyme, longings, what is growing and what is dying while I listen, watch, and wait for light to break through.

This is why I love advent. (And also because I'm typically melancholy.) :) 

Recently, I was talking with a spiritual mentor about all of the threads of hard and beauty running through our lives. I told her of places where I felt like giving up. I told her I sensed these were the same places that could connect me to a deeper experience of advent this year but I couldn’t see it since advent is supposed to be about hope and I was all out.  As we talked about hope she said,

Places of hopelessness are the places for advent.  

In advent, we are actively waiting, repenting, looking, listening for Hope. But it hasn't made itself known yet. Christ our Hope bursts on the scene in the powerless places. Incarnation is Eternity, the Eternal One, always being born into the manure places of our lives. 

I have been and am still wrestling and discovering how I understand and how I explain to my children why advent matters. Evan already asked me the question, If Jesus already came, what is there to wait for? It’s really the question for all of us. If you believe Jesus already came and that it matters, what are you waiting for now? Why does it matter now?

To me, the promise of my Christian faith is not that a life with God means the lights never go out or that we’re never hopeless in the dark or that it is only at the end of our lives that we will get a golden ticket out of this mess. Rather, I am convinced that in the dark, barren, painful, broken, fearful messes of our life the soil is primed and ready for Hope to break through; for Immanuel – God with us to be known and experienced again.

In suffering, in places where we realize we are not in control of our lives (sometimes called rock-bottom), Hope breaks through. The excitement and anticipation in advent for me is that the Incarnation happens  not just 2000 years ago in the birth of Jesus, but that it keeps happening over and over again in the hopeless, isolated, betrayed, broken, sick, dying places of our lives if we will open our hearts and lives to see and participate in it. It is not self-sufficient demanding disguised as hope expecting the certainty that if I put my money into the candy machine and select A5, I will get exactly that (I would choose skittlesJ). It is the love and light of God that breaks in like a flame in the darkness warming and nourishing what looks dead.

This is not hope in a particular outcome that fits my script. But Hope in the divine creative presence of Immanuel – of Love with us, accompanying us, comforting us, shaping us, coming near to us. To bring my longings and fears and questions and the experienced knowing that it is really all we need. Contentment in this Hope of God with us. To trust and know that to be accompanied in all of it is enough.

****

My appointment in October clarified several things. Lyme Guy is very knowledgable about Lyme. He answered several very pressing questions we had. He ordered tests that will help guide the treatment process. But he is also 1300 miles away. For a controversial and uncertain treatment process, this does not seem wise to me.

For some time, I have been leaning toward a natural (herbal) antibiotic protocol to treat the borellia (lyme bacteria) and other co-infections in my body. In September, I met with a naturopath here in Calgary with eight years experience treating Lyme disease. One thing I realized from meeting with Lyme Guy is that most Lyme treatment is a crap shoot. It’s not a perfect science. It will never be a perfect science. Its just the best thing up to now they’ve discovered has the possibility of working. But the pharmaceutical antibiotic treatment route has significant risks. Treating any disease is a cost-benefit analysis. So we have carefully, with a grounded patience and waiting, attended to our own cost-benefit analysis.

While we have weighed our options and the cost-benefit analysis of treatment, we have had the heart-breaking, impossible difficulty of considering every member of our family. I used to think this was more than I can bear. But Hope. Hope breaks through and gives us just what we need for the present inch. Hope. A flicker of light where before there was only dark. There is nothing bleaker for me than knowing I have passed on this disease to Jason and our kids. In advent this year, I am welcoming the flickers of light that keep growing into a brighter light, breaking through what seemed like the most oppressive dark.   

Seeking treatment options for our kids solidified my growing intuition that the natural approach is the best next step.  

We are tag-teaming our treatment because well, someone needs to take care of things around here. So Cara and I (Team Shepherd Girls) will begin treatment at the end of January. Team Shepherd Boys will be gearing up for treatment at a time still to be determined.

Our naturopath emphasized that we should not be fooled by the term “natural” and the treatment process will still be very difficult. Whether it is a pharmaceutical or herbal approach, the goal is to clear enough of the infections that our immune systems are able to take over and keep/send the disease into remission. This essentially overloads the body with toxins your body is often unable to clear easily or on its own.

Lyme is not cured. It is managed. So the question then becomes how do we equip and strengthen our bodies, our immune systems, to deal with the borellia for the long haul? What do we do to keep it in remission? What do we do when it decides to rear its ugly head sometimes? These are questions for which the Lyme community has many good answers. But there are other questions it cannot answer. Questions like, What kind of ongoing damage is the bacteria doing to organs, the nervous system? How much does this bacteria leave our bodies vulnerable to other diseases? (It is very likely that the amount of abnormal moles I have had since I was 19 is related to my body dealing with borellia.) How much does treatment really change the course of the illness in the long view? What is normal childhood ache and pain and what is Lyme kicking in? How do we help our kids listen to their bodies but not be defined by this label? Will we ever get better? What does better even look like?

Multiply these questions with a just-now-growing recognition in the medical community that Lyme can be passed congenitally and there you have heartache, sadness, worry, hope, anxiety and so much more. There are many questions and no answers when it comes to the kids. And yet, despite all of my fears about telling them and helping them process it – faith, hope and love have been at work to make it a very tender, raw, gentle place of moving toward each other.

Perhaps you see why placing hope in treatment and its faux-certainty will never be the answer. Perhaps you can see why getting sick has been one of the most difficult and necessary gifts toward living a life of surrender. 

It has been the soil for Hope in my life, for experiencing the gift of God’s presence coming near when we have run out of certainty and answers and ways of ordering and demanding the desired outcome for life. The deal with life that if I am good, it will be good to me simply hasn’t paid off. And so I have begun learning about a different economy of unconditional love, of God’s goodness and presence. An economy that takes hard places and moves us out of pity and desolation and into connection and contentment. I am learning of a deeper, bigger and wider faith that promises in our desolate, fearful, broken places we will be held and Hope will sprout to become faith and they will live co-mingled so that love is the only thing that blooms out of it. Its about contentment in all things.  

I am certain of very little these days.

But for a girl who has lived with a lot of fear, I am certain of this …

Perfect Love is the only thing strong enough to overcome fear. And it often happens in the most unexpected ways and places.

I am noticing and nurturing faith, hope and love in my spiritual practices in advent. Faith, hope and love at work in me, with me, for me, in you, for you, with you. The greatest of these is love. But I’m not sure we get to love without the first two.  

****

We will keep you posted as the start of treatment comes closer. I am terrible at asking for what I need. But I am learning. So we will ask.

For now, I hope advent opens space for you to bring your own uncertain, dark, maybe even hopeless places and wait for Hope.

Check out this link that offers some great questions for advent reflection and also ideas for families.

The questions that are staying with me…

When I wake up on Christmas morning, how will I be different? How do I hope the meditations and practices of the season will shape me?

Have I left enough space in the season to pay attention, to listen, to wait and to be surprised? What practical ways can I take to guard those quiet moments but also embrace divine interruptions?

Consider the effects of light. It can warm and it can guide, but it also exposes and surprises. What does light in the darkness mean for the world? What does it mean for my life in this season? 

Angels in Disguise

When its coming apart, you had it all

It wasn't enough, no its not enough

They tell you its not worth the price

So just let it go

But you know you can't, you know you won't

Its not easy, no, finding the words to say

When you're feeling lost

You'll find your way

The world is so broken and sometimes it leaves you cold

And at times you can’t feel the fire to guide you home

The demons will haunt you and try to steal what you know

But the angels, they brought you and they’re gonna hold you up.

They see fear in your eyes, heart sinks like a stone

‘Cause when you’re afraid, it weighs on your soul

(Hold You Up by Shane Harper)

******

I am not sure what I believe about angels or demons. I know what I learned in church or seminary but what I have actually experienced or believe is probably a different matter. I know I have plenty of “demons” of my own without blaming what’s wrong on forces outside of me.

Recently my spiritual director said something that has stuck with me though. She spoke of places in our life marked by an unusual intensity, struggle, or maybe even evil. She said something like this, Where there is a spiritual battle, the Kingdom is always waiting to break through.

Just before summer, I confided things to Jason I never thought would live in my soul let alone come out of my mouth - really sad things, tired things, things that scared me. We were pressed on every side and some of the information that came our way about this Lyme journey completely broke my heart and left me gasping for air. It was a breaking point. Who can live with this? I wondered.
I was too heartbroken and tired to care about the sinkhole and suffocating in it.

Tremors, Bike Rides & Learning to Leave

I live in the most beautiful country in the world, I thought. I seriously gulp in the air and my whole body does a sigh of longing and contentment. 

I was riding in response to the way my illness is changing my body.

The tremor set in again today. Sometimes it stays all day and sometimes a few hours. It disarms me. My head wobbles and bobbles unnoticed to others. But because its my head, I notice every movement.

I rode to remind my body, soul and mind of strength.

I rode to retrain my motor memory. Body, you are strong. Remember this. Don’t forget it.

I rode so not to lose the strength and mobility my body has now. I rode in response to fear of losing more.

I rode to delight in the day.

I rode to notice beauty rather than dwell on weakness and fear.

I rode to pretend I am who I always was.

I rode to distract myself from the shaking and the unwelcome firework show my nerves were putting on.

But I finally stopped riding and pretending and distracting. I sat on the rocks and watched the water and canoes float by on the river.

My body trembled and I didn’t try to stop it.

I thought about how I have always been a stay-er. In relationships, churches, jobs, with cell phone companies and difficult tasks. I have stayed way past when I wanted to leave. Maybe this is good for character. Maybe I should’ve learned leaving before now. Who can say? It doesn’t much matter to me now.

My illness is teaching me many things. Gentling me. It is also teaching me that this might be a season of realizing I have learned to stay. This is not a gap in my formation. I’ve been a stay-er. I am now learning about leaving and letting go. Maybe this is precisely because I have learned to stay. Richard Rohr talks about something similar here.
Its teaching me to live more open-handed perhaps. Sometimes I’m too weak for grasping.

But in this beautiful home, neighborhood, city, bike path, country – I’d like to keep on being a stay-er. You, beautiful places, give me somewhere to stay as I’m learning to leave.

PS. It was also fun to be a rebel :) and ride without a helmet. So much more relaxing and peaceful.

The Desert, the Gentle Life & Turning 32

Celebrating 32! 

The Journey

Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

Though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug

at your ankles

“mend my life!”

each voice cried. 

But you didn’t stop

you knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world (desert)

determined to do

the only thing you could do-

determined to save

the only life you could save

*******

Writing a birthday post has been like pulling teeth this year. My best guess is because I am in a desert: a season where everything is shifting but hasn’t settled yet. It’s hard to use words to describe the landscape and the view from here, things are still dusty.

Last year, I sensed I was entering a spiritual desert. I did not want to be there/here. It felt lonely, long and dusty. I wondered if I was in a desert because I can be drawn to scarcity, fear and hard things. I knew that nurture, love, and real care make me feel vulnerable and nervous but was I not learning to trust in the innocence and goodness of those things? Did I really need a desert to teach me? I wondered if this was a desert of my own making and if I would get trapped here. Back then I wrote,

Will it be a slow death of some part of me as I wander in this wilderness for who knows how long? What might die? My joy? My humor? Relationships? Hope? My thirst to grow and become or my belief that these things are good and worthwhile? I don’t want to be here. How did I get here? How do I get out?

Really, I just wanted out.

In the middle of these questions, I was reading the story of the Exodus. And a couple of non-descript, after-the-grand-story, verses stood out to me and helped me trust:

“When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road through the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said, ‘If they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt (bondage). So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea.”

The desert road was God’s good gift to His people. It hardly felt like it to them. He knew their fragile faith could not handle a different route. Their time in the desert was excruciating and long. But it was in the desert that God gave His precious people a new way of living in relationship with Him. Coming out of generations of slavery, even their bodies needed to be purified from their life in Egypt so they did not bring those things with them into new life. He did not leave his people alone in the desert. He was present to them, guiding them in the way they should go by the pillar and the cloud. 

I started praying that I would listen and look for the pillars and the clouds along my desert road.

A year later, I know the desert is necessary and good for me. In my thirty-one years I have accumulated a lot of junk (literally and metaphorically). While I clutch all of the things that make me feel ‘safe’ and ‘secure’, I have been unable to receive other gifts that lead me toward a life of love. So the desert has been/is a gift. I can say this honestly now. Henri Nouwen wrote about the movement from desert to garden. “To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert and change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden … A dry desolate garden can yield endless variety of flowers.” I didn’t go into it with gardening in mind, more like uncertainty and just a little trust. This desert-garden has been a place of learning to let go; to stop clinging to people and their opinions of me, books, experiences, plans, and fears. But along this way, I have found/am finding budding flowers and see the promise of a garden. In this coming year, I am committed to tending the garden in my desert.

It isn’t an easy (painless, pleasant) process letting go of favorite things that have, in many ways, comforted and “worked” for me for most of my life. I learned to mask these in a way that often got me approval from others but when all of that is stripped away, what’s left is this:

Perfectionism

People-pleasing

Silencing my voice

Jealousy

Co-dependency/Being needed

Sugar

Justifying the ugliness of my heart

Insatiable thirst for specialness

Pride

And … did I mention pride?

As I walk the desert road it has become a journey of taking off, discerning, repenting and detaching these from my true heart. It has been and still is (always will be?) messy. But even as I write this, I realize it isn’t just about losing things. It’s about losing these to find real life; life alive to God, others and myself. In place of these old things, I am finding new things. So while I’ve thought this past year has been about dying, I now realize it is about new life, growth.

Listening to and Honoring My Voice

I have been journeying toward this for the past thirteen years but this year I realized the central importance of voice for each of us. Finding and honoring voice - our formation, longings, fears, etc -  is a marker for recovery, for healing. I gave up my voice as a kid. Seemed safer without it I suppose. Silencing my voice went hand-in-hand with working hard to be "good" and lovable. But I lost something vital then and am only now reclaiming it. The neat thing is that as I learn to honor my own voice, it does not make me more stubborn or selfish (as I thought it might), it makes me kind and compassionate and more likely to listen for and honor the voice of others. This does not mean it has been easy for the people around me who are used to a “silent” me or a more-at-work-in-relationship me. It’s been a growing place. I have not lived into it perfectly but I am learning and figuring it out. As I learn to listen to my own voice, I can release the tight hold I’ve had on my self-concept. I am (just a little) more able to see not only the ways I am wounded but the ways I wound others.  

Honoring my body

The past year, my body offered me a wake-up call. I had no choice but to listen. It sparked a desire to honor my body and what it gives me for life. It’s kind of ironic that debilitating pain, a fragile and falling apart body, helped me see how disconnected I am from my body and offer a place of gently reconnecting to my whole self. So God-honoring. At times I have ruled my body like a task-master, sculpting and pushing it without rest or nurture. Other times, instead of listening to my body and what it needs, I have gulped down sugar or comfort food that allow me to keep numbing out. Since there isn’t a lot going on in a desert (or a lot of StarbucksJ), it has been a time to slow down, learn to listen and take care of this great gift of my body. Several times I have pushed myself, with determination into sugar detox, without success. Its interesting that in this desert, as I have started a less severe relationship with my body, the sugar addiction has faded almost naturally. A gentle rhythm of feasts and fasts. Of moderation. And of nurture.   

Gift of work

A career that is full of purpose and Kingdom work. I have blogged before about my dilemma with work and staying at home. I still live in that tension. But in the middle of the tension I recognize a gift. In the past year, particularly in the hardest parts of my health issues, though I felt desperate to not be working, now I can see it was one of the best things for me. On a practical level, it forced me to pull myself together 2 ½ days a week and go out of the house. It forced me to put on nice(ish) clothes and fix my hair. It also allowed me not to become consumed by myself – my pain and my fears. When I get to my office, I light two candles on the table and do so as a marker that I am transitioning into a different role than that of wife, mom, friend, complicated person. JIn that room, my own stuff is moved aside to hold space for the people sitting across from me. This was so good for me during that really hard time of waiting, aching, depression and wondering.  

Private practice has grown my faith, transformed my understanding and experience of diligent work as something good and central in our God-breathed humanness even if I would rather it all came on a silver platter. It has been a reminder that God’s grace with diligent effort is a beautiful thing. I am humbled and grateful to say that Birdsong is thriving. This beautiful work allows me to see God at work, healing and redeeming broken places in so many lives as well as be home more than at the office - both of these are so good for my heart.

Embracing an ordinary life

My heart has tuned in to a more “everyday spirituality”. Sacred in the ordinary. The desert is teaching me how to notice and look for the sacred in the ordinary, how to be sacred in the ordinary. Somehow it seems this is the antidote to my insatiable appetite for specialness. Dallas Willard writes that most Christians are so ‘ready’ and focused on dying that they are not prepared to live this gift of a life. A life with God is not (only) about a ticket out of here. I want to be satisfied and grounded in an ordinary life, marked by love rather than a pursuit to prove and validate my own specialness. Somehow, I think they are intertwined. So often I have snuffed out the candle of others (covertly, of course) so that my own candle can shine brighter. This is shifting. I don’t know much more than that.

           

A favorite quote: Frail dust, remember you are splendor.

A most beautiful surprise has come in this desert-garden: the beginnings of the gentle life. 

The desert changed my direction; one I thought I would hate. The willfull, determined, self-sufficient way I have lived does not work in the desert. And so I am learning a gentler, slower, way. It’s ironic. Over the past several years, I have blogged a few times about my longing for gentleness, my wonderings about how to craft it with my fierce and typically “effective” determination. Who knew I would discover this beautiful gift (not craft it) smack dab in the middle of a dry and barren desert? I am looking forward to discovering and living into the gentle life Jesus calls us to.

“Many of us long for gentleness in ourselves and others. It is like a treasure lost, buried under the pressures of an achievement society. Gentleness does not exclude strong and courageous stands. I can rest or work, give in to people or fight with them, both gently and violently. Gentleness is more than just relaxation and giving in; it is more than the opposite of fight, work, ambition. It is an attitude which affects and changes the style of my play or work, my fight or surrender, my admiration or rightful indignation. How I fight, argue, study, entertain, work or play then reveals the presence or absence of gentleness in my life…The gentle person is more free. She can take herself and the world as they are because she feels free to be herself and to let all things be with the same gentility. There is a friendly accord between her and her life situation. She does not feel she has to push herself (willful life) forward or hold herself back.” (Spirituality & the Gentle Life, Van Kaam)

As far as I can see, this year holds more desert walking. But maybe I am walking with more hope and joy and trust that this desert-garden is a great gift to me. As I keep discerning, repenting and detaching from the deformed ways I have built my life, I sense I am and will be freer to run the race marked out for me. I am excited at what I will learn and how I will learn to live into the gentle life in year 32. 

Breakdown and the Gift of Uncertainty

Over the past couple of years, I have started learning to be okay without tidy resolutions. I am more comfortable with the phrase this is what I know for now. It’s more honest. One woman said that phrase in the class I taught last week as we discussed sexuality and God and faithfulness. And I was moved by the humility, love, trust and vulnerability that comes in a statement like that. No pretending paradox does not exist, no pretending/controlling to feel better in the middle of the tension. This is what I know for now. Not only is there freedom in that statement but there is grace and there is room for each of us.

In November 2011, I had something of a nervous breakdownspiritual awakening as Brene Brown might say. In desperation, I picked myself up off the bathroom floor and packed a suitcase and drove to Bragg Creek as I felt everything I thought held my life together seem to fall apart. Really, it was my false selves falling apart, not my true life, but it sure felt like it. Sitting out under the big Alberta sky, scared to pray for fear of how I might twist or misunderstand whatever I thought I heard coming back to my heart, I wrote a list of the things I could say I knew to be unshakable truth. I wasn’t sure I would have anything. I did, but surprisingly, it was a very small list. I still work off that list scribbled on a tattered piece of notebook paper.

There is a Creator

Who loves me (us) fiercely 

Who is good

Who is Mystery 

Who is Love

I will not break

This is what I felt and knew and held unswervingly. I realized everything else might fall away for awhile or maybe forever but this I knew for sure. 

My life had formed around so much fear. I believed the lie that control could tame/manage fear. I worked hard to keep fear in line but really, it was keeping me in line. This looked like a lot of closed-fisted control in my life. Perfectionism. The gentle life is not possible when our hands are furiously and desperately clutching an illusion of control. This happens with sincere faith too. It is out of fear that we clutch desperately and leave no room for conversation about the mystery of faith and God. Mostly, I am no longer afraid of saying This is what I know for now. Usually, I am just hoping to have the maturity and wisdom to remember this in any given conversation. I sometimes still clutch, but not as tightly, and it is starting to feel foreign to me.  I continue on the path of God-ward obedience without the fear of one/every misstep. All is Grace. Because of this, I am freer to share the ragged, unpretty parts of my story, to become more human. I am also freer to hear and hold the stories of others without needing to control them, give answers or make them fit within my own ‘tidy’ (narrow) theology. It’s messier but it is rich and deep.  

1 Corinthians 13 is a great comfort to me as my heart ponders and wonders and shares experiences that often hold many questions and tensions. It gives grace and permission to not control and distort by pretending we have all of the answers. There is room for the Mystery of God because we know our spiritual vision is blurry. There is room for me to release the perfecting and trust that it is enough to do the best I can to walk with trust and hope in God and living out love the best I know how, even if it is messy or inadequate or wrong. There is grace because God already knows we don’t see things quite as they are so He gives us trust, hope and Love to guide us toward the day when everything will be clear. For now, we’re called to do the best we can with what we know now. When we acknowledge we don't know where every piece of the puzzle should go, there is room for sharing and honoring the stories and wisdom of others.

What we say about God is always incomplete…We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting as through a fog. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright. We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us … But for now, until then, and in all that fog we have three things to guide us toward that time: Trust steadily in God, Hope unswervingly, and Love extravagantly. And the greatest of these is love.

Love this talk  on the faith pilgrimage/spiritual formation.

I know it's been awhile since I've posted. Check back soon for pictures/stories of the past couple of weeks.