NECESSARY ENDINGS = NEW BEGINNINGS

Welcome to the new blog!

I am unsure of how often I will post here. But just like with the old blog, if you want an e-mail when a new post goes up, you can enter your e-mail address on the right by entering your address where it says "Follow By E-mail" or just bookmark this new page. Shepherd Snapshots will be made private and the link to this blog will no longer be accessible. 

Finally, I did not allow comments on our old blog but this blog does have an open comment section at the bottom of each post. Feel free to leave your own thoughts and musings!

This phrase, Necessary Endings, has been bouncing around in my head and heart since June but trying to find its way in my life for much longer.

Endings. I think I have seen them as unwanted finality, loss, failure even.
I've written before that leaving or ending is not well-developed in my life. I cling. Hard. In reality, I fight to keep all of the things I have created, built, participated in. I've called it faithfulness. Sometimes it is but sometimes its fear. It is hard to receive anything new (friendships, opportunities, new habits or dreams) when you are so weighed down by every last treasure you've collected over a life.

Lyme has given me opportunities to learn endings and to see they are so very necessary. I am just coming to see that whole endings are maturity not failure. I have had opportunities over the past couple of years to experience endings - some I am proud of and others not so much. My next task is to pay attention and learn how to end well.

Our family blog, Shepherd Snapshots, has mostly been a joy and delight. I have repeatedly said how thankful I am to have pictures and anecdotes to return to with the kids. But our kids are growing up and becoming more conscious of privacy, perception, who they are and how they want to show up in the world. And in a techno world, I want to teach them to be wise with their online profile. They already have this wisdom and hesitation. I want to foster it not correct it. In the past couple of months, when I take a picture, I have heard some version of Okay, you can take that picture but don't put it on Instagram or the blog.  

I started that blog as a way for far-away family to keep tabs on our life. It was fun. I started blogging before we had kids even. Our blog has been a great memory keeper. Shepherd Snapshots also became a place where I learned to use (write) my voice. The power of telling our stories cannot be underestimated in the process of healing old stuff and becoming a more whole human. I am grateful for that little space to write and ramble on about what I am learning and wrestling through and for those of you who have encouraged me in the process. In thinking through our necessary blog ending, I have decided to continue my blog musings apart from our family life. I'm sure motherhood, the kids and a few pictures of us will make their way to this little blog and I'll continue to use my voice as I always have here though separate from telling the intimate details of our family life.

Some of the wordy posts from Shepherd Snapshots have been moved over to this blog and can be found on the right most easily under "Labels". I will move the rest over eventually.

Here I will continue to write and have snapshots (because I still love photos!) of what I am wondering and learning about faith, lyme, motherhood, being human, grief, community, delight, gluten free ... on and on.

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? 

The Appointment

As a traveller - Don't be gazing at that mountain or river in the distance saying,

"How shall I get over them?"

But keep to the present little inch that is before you and

accomplish in the moment that which belongs to it. The mountain and the river can only be passed in the same way; 

and when you come to them you will come to the light and strength that belong to them. 

Tomorrow morning at 6am, I will have my long-anticipated appointment with the Lyme Guy (affectionately dubbed).

I have tried to contain my hopes and expectations for this one appointment. It's called foreboding joy, avoiding disappointment and heartache. And I am tired of Lyme breaking my heart. It feels like so much is riding on finally talking with someone knowledgable and experienced in working with late stage Lyme. We have so many questions. 

The night before I left to come to the States, I was laying on my yoga mat listening to our instructor talk about letting go. She encouraged us, with each slow breath out to release tension and tightness and say LET.IT.GO. 

As I did this, I almost starting weeping. I realized my body along with everything else is holding many questions, expectations, fears and hopes for this appointment and how we move into treatment. 

Your prayers are appreciated as I go tomorrow. I am praying for discernment, peace in our decision-making, trust despite the many unknowns that will undoubtedly remain and a few solid answers to help us find our way. 

Trust, peace and hope seem to be more abundant when I humbly attend to the inch in front of me, recognizing that when I get to the mountain, I will be given what is needed to make the climb. 

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.

A Call for Honest Conversations about the Hard Places (Celebrating 11 Years of Marriage)

It has been a rough season in our marriage because it has been a very rough season for our family. We felt caught in the eye of the storm that roared through our lives.

When it was clear the clouds were moving in, we did what we do best. We got prepared. We gathered our metaphorical umbrellas and pulled out rain boots. We worked together. Jason and I are at our very best when we have a project and need to get.something.done because we both like creating order in our life and we work hard and diligently together with a goal. I think we appreciate each other more when we can tangibly see the other contributing.

When the rain came hard with frightening winds, we battened down the hatches and huddled together to wait out the storm. But by June of this year, it was every man/woman/child for themselves because from inside our life, it felt like we were being tossed like rag dolls in the waves. Everything was flying everywhere; our words, our desperation, our fears, our future, our money, our energy, our parenting, our losses, our grief, our anger … We were hanging on for dear life.

And I blamed it all on Lyme.

I am coming to see that isn’t quite right. 

The winds and rains have died down and there is room for reflection as we step out and survey the damage and talk about how, where and what we need to rebuild.

It might be that the Lyme diagnosis (storm) brought some buried things to the surface. Pressed on every side, things that were minor became major. Some of what was revealed was good stuff and some of what came up was old junk that we had sort of buried and left to harden and corrode. The minors were easy enough to ignore before they became what we needed to survive the storm. 

In the height of it, I was reminded (perhaps a God-whisper) that this could be a refining, transforming, place brought on by things outside of our control we would rather do without but that also were immeasurably worthwhile.

I was reminded that our marriage is not deeply flawed because we are struggling to find any stable ground to stand on together. Our life is experiencing a trauma in very difficult, heart-breaking ways. When the storm stopped flinging us around, it did not set us back where we used to be. We can clutch to our old dreams, our old selves, our old life and watch them die or we can do the pruning, planning, preparing, planting and wait for a new season, new seeds, new growth and new life.

It is always hard to lose the life you planned. The one you dreamed about, worked toward, hoped for. It’s why it is so hard for me to follow Jesus and lose my life to find true life. Because, really, it is so deeply painful to have the layers I built to protect myself and get my way in life, peeled away.

It’s hard to start over. It’s hard to feel weak. It is hard and humbling (and freeing – but that comes after the hard and humbling) to recognize we are not in control of our lives. Because the mercy of God that breathes life into these broken places looks different than the sweet, feel-good kind we really pray for.

But I have always been thirsty for real life with God. Mostly, I don’t want it to cost me any of the things I have built or think I need. I don’t want it to wound me in the process. This is why it is a loving, severe mercy that God gives me what I most deeply need and desire but would rarely agree to if I knew the cost.

Here is the beautiful and hard grace of this place we are in. We are cultivating new ground. We are working out what is lodged between us when it would have been much easier to ignore it or walk away from each other. I know with absolute certainty that it leads to more intimacy, a deeper life together. We are doing the work of cultivating the soil and planting new seeds. What life will bloom still remains to be seen but I know there will be new growth after a very hard, devastating season. This is Hope. This is Trust. This is Love.

We have been coming back to each other and finding firmer (and at the same time, gentler) ground. We have begun holding on to each other again.

Those of you with long marriages that have survived storms, been battered in storms, but found the courage , vulnerability, grace and hope to rebuild, you have something of immense value to offer the rest of us earlier in our journey of  cultivating a real marriage.

There seems to be this skewed view that only those with trauma-free, scar free, marriages can speak about the success of their marriage. I don’t agree. Every marriage has rough seasons and we need those who have found their way through them to offer us wisdom, guidance, and hope by their vulnerability. Your vulnerability helps us to know that just because we experience hard places in our marriages does not mean we should give up or even that our marriages are deeply flawed. Frankly, I cannot relate to people who portray a perfect marriage. (Though this may be what others need so if your marriage is wrinkle free, maybe just don’t tell me about it J but encourage others who have wrinkle-free marriages. For the record, I do not know any of these couples.)

The silence of the wise people that could speak honestly and deeply to young marriages gives the impression that the 30, 40 and 50 year marriages we see got there scot-free. Once we’ve been married for more than five minutes, we know this isn’t true. But we need your stories – your honest, vulnerable stories of your own severe mercies. We will not judge you. You will give us hope and comfort and direction. Tell us about the joys and delights of marriage. Talk about your friendship. But don’t just speak of hard places with humor, or a wink or a roll of the eyes. Tell us your stories of how you step/stepped on each other. Or talk about the hurts that lodged between you and kept you from loving each other fully. Speak about the isolation in hard places, the pain of it. Tell us of your uncertainties or doubts or anger or fears when you were in the middle of the hard times. Tell us how you nearly broke – or maybe you did break – and then tell us how you trusted each other again, how you recovered and found your way back to each other. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it needs to be real. My generation cringes at preachy and pretending but soaks up authenticity. So share your stories with authenticity and vulnerability. We will be better for it. You will be better for it too. You will offer comfort, peace, and wisdom. You will give us perspective to see beyond painful experience of our marriages. Maybe we will tuck away your story for the future or maybe it will be exactly what we need to hear for the hard place we are living in. In your stories, we can be comforted and challenged and cheered on at the same time.  

Real marriage is not smooth sailing for years on end (though there are lots of periods of smooth sailing – we’ve had those too). It seems to me it’s really about holding on to each other, coming back to each other, listening to each other, cultivating new soil, planting new seeds and rebuilding together over and over when storms of life rock the boat.

PS. Remember how I said we would not judge you? Maybe don’t share it with engaged couples. The chances of judgment are high. When I was engaged, I knew my marriage would be perfect and would have seriously judged you. ;) 

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A favorite song by Dave Barnes.