Category Archives: outrageous love

What I haven’t said but should

15 Saturday Jan 2011

Posted by in life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, unreasonable hope

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The calendars were thrown away and the new year came and, just like always, I did not think about the old until the new was firmly tacked up on the wall.

Too typical.

I don’t want to share everything about 2010. Just one thing. The one I have not written about yet and that will probably help what I’ve written in the past to make more sense. I don’t like posts that seem depressing, which is why I’ve skipped this one. But it isn’t really depressing, despite being about depression. Its really about hope and joy and lots of laughter. I promise.

Its the one thing that made last year blare out–like a roman candle exploding before you step back.

Years are like firecrackers.

 Some singe the eyebrows. None go off exactly alike.

This one burned deeper and the lights at the end lit up the sky.

In the middle of the cold winter, January of last year, a darkness exploded, which it can, and covered my faith and my moments in fog and I go back to the black ink in my old journal because it tells me more than I remember myself.

About the terror that I felt when it first came, how fragile I felt, and how I couldn’t talk myself out of it. It tells me that I was so tired I felt I could not move some mornings and how I wept because, earlier, I had written in the early light of January

 “I will not turn. I will not flee the barrenness. I will face it, reach out and finger the dry sand….letting it bite my eyes and dry my mouth. No other lovers…no wine to lift the spirit. Only God”

And suddenly the barrenness was reality. The barreness of doubt and anger and a heart broken. And God seems more than light years away. And I didn’t know why it had come now, when I felt more shattered than ever before.

And never before had I reached bottom so bad, and never, especially, without any reason as to why. Which is what drove me even deeper–because I had nothing to claim as a cause, therefore I couldn’t fix it.

And I tried to answer my own doubts within my own mind and my brain sizzled and crackled and left grey fog over everything.

And I lay on my bed and clung to the cross, not because it seemed to help, but because the rough wood did not candy coat the answers.

And then I remember, on my own, how people prayed and prayed and how one day the enemy pressed so close that fear was the air, and I was too tired to fight.

And I saw myself, lying broken in a black field, laying limp,and closer and closer came the enemy and I could not get up. Weak, I turned my head from him and saw an army behind me, and the faces were beautiful with friendship, and I knew them all.

I managed to keep up with the semester, with the help of those who loved, and then, slowly, like the spring, I pushed out of the dark shadow.

I called friends, and jogged, and bought flowers and learned to let go of my need to figure everything out. I drank sunsets like jasmine tea and ate mountains like Oreo ice-cream.

I learned to let go of my frantic desire to know  the purpose for the whys. I told myself did not need to see or to reason out a purpose in order to have hope.

And I learned I was more sin-crusted than I imagined. 

There were months filled with picking up the pieces in prayer and learning to breathe faith again–

–and letting go

 Then came the sunrise I wrote about here, and suddenly the heart cracked wider than I knew it could be, and the darkness only made the coming of the light more tangible and fierce in its beauty.

The cracking kept letting in more hope.

And I still smile, remembering one dark night, as I drove home from work in the warm moonlight, how I laughed tears of wonder, and cried joy out loud, because the theory I clung to in the darkness was no longer just a theory.

It is one thing to believe hope comes for those that touch ashes and taste barrenness–it is quite another to feel it deep.

And if the darkness lacked answers, the hope that imploded in on it was all the more unreasonable. And it was the not the hope that changed me. It was the burning and splintering that healed me.

 

I still don’t know what caused those months of sudden blackness. I don’t know why doubts clouded faith.  Maybe I’ll never know.

But I do know that through it I discovered how deep my pride ran and a lifelong frantic need to control how others saw me.

This past year, has been for me, a loss of answers. Not much makes sense to me anymore.

But I’m closer to being okay with that now.

And I have never felt joy like I have the last 10 months since.

A bitter experiment

04 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by in journaling, life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, unreasonable hope

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It may sound simplistic, but it kept me wrapped tight around truth when I wanted to let go.

It was not my idea, of course. Sheesh, I’m twenty. I can’t speak a word of understanding life and even begin to sound like I know what I’m talking about. Forget it. There are still years and years of dreadful wading through my own immaturity until I can sit, like she did, and know what to say.

 I met with her to ask for help. Wisdom to point out the path of healing out of the fear and anger and brokenness that I knew was there. I remember the way the light from the window make the tears on her cheeks glisten and how, just like Christ’s pain helps me see my worth, so her tears let me know I wasn’t completely bonkers.

I remember my exact words, asking her, desperate, “What do I do with this? How, how do I let pain be felt and tasted yet still move forward into hope?

Practical. I wanted something to use in everyday life. A way of not deadening the longings, without letting them deaden me.

“Do you journal?” she asked.

Laugher with a touch of bitterness.

“If wouldn’t be for my journal…..”

So she gave me the experiment.

Everyday write the longings, she told me. And then after they are written and the sin-crusted woman inside you knows what she wants to do with them. Then—then write out what you decide to do with them instead.

Taking her advice I started. In black ink they scarred the pages—lies, longings, pain, and anger. Out of the darkness inside they raced out and overwhelmed my hand and often my words slanted longer and wider as I wrote with more emotion.Then after the storm was scribbled, came the decision.

“Yes, this is how I feel, but today, today I’m going to take this pain and…..”

Then the decision was also written in black and so it spoke back. Loud. Firm.

For over a year I tried it.

Pain. Longings. Anger. Frustration. Decision to reach for hope.

Now, a year into the experiment, the struggles still remain, but the bitterness has left in the light of the hope. The hope fills up the page now. And the pain is only the black ink that makes the hope seem more whole, more complete.

It was a simple experiment, from a wise woman.


 

The leaving of burdens

20 Monday Sep 2010

Posted by in life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, silly fears, unreasonable hope

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There is so much to write about. Too much to write. My pen doesn’t move fast enough across my journal these days–and still my brain races to the next thing and I scratch out and scribble in my haste.

I’m home.

I have this strange new, never-felt-ever-before hope and contentment, yet can’t shake a strange reflective mental-churning of the last months.

And all the while still struggling with trust and wistfulness and questions.

Recently I received an email from a close friend with an attachment icon blinking on the subject line. I read..

“….Long, long ago we were both in Virginia. You were…. walking across a field, and there was a tree nearby where people had piled their stuff, and I thought it would make a lovely picture: the princess wanders through the field, leaving her burdens behind…or something…”

The attachment was this picture.

What held me was not so much the picture itself, but the “leaving her burdens behind”.

Those words caught the straggled ends of my thoughts and gathered them into meaning and something my heart recognized.

For that is what these last two years have been—a leaving of burdens. Not physical or relational burdens. Burdens of sin and wounds and lies. Burdens I never knew were there until they began to catch on the thorns and I was snagged, helpless, unless I laid them down. Divine thorns, I think.

A year ago this week, a woman who had looked deeper than most and who cared enough to ask questions, sent me a letter. Not all of what she said, I was ready to hear. But, like He does, God used her words. And at the end when she wrote…

“Whatever happens… in the future does not need to destroy you…you are responsible for your own choices. I am your greatest cheerleader believing in God and your heart as a woman …knowing that the path toward healing will include pain and hard choices on your part…”

…I heard Him. Heard her. And little by little stopped playing safe and nice like I had for so long.

I used to think that all my burdens were wounds—hurts that I carried around like unhealed scars. Indeed yes, some of them were and still are. But I am learning that somehow, somewhere along the way, I’ve made my wounds a bigger issue than my sin. Wounds only exist because of sin, because of someone’s rebellion against God. Sin creates wounds, wounds do not create sin, like I always imagined. And, suddenly, I couldn’t blame my sin on my wounds anymore. My wounds made me want to hide and in the hiding I rebelled against the One who said “my grace is sufficient for thee” and the burdens piled up over a lifetime.

Never more so than this year have I realized how fallen and sin-crusted I am. How good and perfect and sweet I tried to be, and how dishonest and sinful the shell was.

There was so much in me that needed to be crushed.

How much needs to be crushed still.

How many burdens still clank around, and how the sin still creeps in everyday.

And yet, now, there is hope for being gentle since what she said, I think, is true. One can be unhidden—because hurt is reality, but nothing has the power to destroy the heart that rests in being forgiven.

And as broken and fallen as I now see myself to be, I have more hope.

If He can forgive my hiding and hold my shattered pieces together than He is big enough to take the control from my fists and I don’t need to fall apart.

And so here is to a God who forgives, and lifts burdens, and gives unreasonable hope.

Truly He is the reason.

Truly He is good.

Truly He IS.

Redneck Hicks

18 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by in friends, laughter, outrageous love, ranting

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 That title really has nothing to do with this post, other than the fact I attended the local county fair yesterday and watched their Motocross racing so I was pretty much surrounded by tobacco chewing, American rednecks, walking around with that arrogant swagger that makes their beer bellies jump around under their stained t-shirts. Fascinating  people.

The Motocross was wonderful though. It reminded me of the hick version of a Canadian hockey game—lots of noise, pain, rednecks, and raw emotion.


(my camera flew off the hood of my friends car so no pictures did I take. This photo is credited to motocrossactionmag.com)

I attended the fair because my car broke down on the way to work. It was very traumatizing. I hate sitting in the middle of the road by myself. But the up side of it all was that work let me off for the night, my car got rescued, and my friends invited me to go with them to the county fair instead.

And sitting there on the metal bleachers, watching the races, I started thinking about thrills. I mean, the guys flying through the air on those tiny pieces of mental must really get crazy thrills. I got thrills from just watching them and wincing when they crashed into piles of bike and body. As they loaded one rider into an ambulance, I thought of the young guy with the goatee and the tattoos who had to call me every time he needed to turn over or use a bedpan. I remembered him at that moment because he had ridden a bike too, before it smashed into pieces. I understood what those guys were risking.

Yet, at the same time, as stupid as it seemed, there was a certain element of raw nerve that appealed to me—that fascinated me with its refreshing idiocy. Mostly, I think, because it seems our culture is bent and determined to get the thrills without the guts and blood nowadays. You can buy an energy drink at two bucks a can for goodness sake. It could be argued that is the best route—safe thrills, you know. Why go out and risk life and limb for a rush when you can stay safe at home and play Call of Duty, read a passionate romance novel while munching on chocolate, or watch the football game?

Which makes me wonder whether life was meant to be safe or risky—smart or stupid? There are definitely times in life when we leave reckless immaturity for a deeper pursuit of life. But when do we cross the line from reality to fantasy. In fleeing to safe thrills do we not run out on courage, risk, and determination? Or are we just being smart?

Now, obviously, the risk those bikers were taking was rather senseless. No one was going to benefit from them tearing around the track and busting their brains to smithers.  Yet, is there a chance that cultivating that kind of nerve in ourselves might go a long way in the earthy, damp everyday living of Christ-like lives?

Jesus lived in the very center of storms and angry crowds. He overthrew temples and cast out demons. He took more risk than any human in history.

And we read the latest inspirational bestseller, flirt with the cute guy in the youth group, and feel our dedication rise when we go to Wednesday night prayer meeting.

Our children learn to ride their bikes on the safe side of the road, play safe games, and choose secure occupations.

We are smart, artsy, intellectual, spiritual, funny, witty, and charming, rather than passionate, ruthless, brave, and risky.

We don’t bleed well.
We fight even worse.

And many times our relationships reflect our apathy. Forgiveness takes guts, love takes determination, vulnerability is a risky thrill, and humbleness is like jumping on a raging bull when you’ve never seen a cow.How can I expect to practice any of them if I’m all about being safe?

So if my future son ever gets up from his gameboy long enough to ask me, “Mom can I have a sheet to make a parachute? I want to jump off the shed roof.”, I’ll probably give it to him, and tell him to have fun. And then drag a mattress out to cushion his fall.

Sometimes it takes innocence

12 Thursday Aug 2010

Posted by in 3 am moments, laughter, life dirt, outrageous love, unreasonable hope

≈ 5 Comments

 Long ago the rest of the house went to bed and, although I combed my hair, slipped off my shoes, and almost joined them, I still sit, wrapped in a warm blanket in front of the blaring air conditioner.

My heart is at rest, but I need to find my spot again. That place where all is well despite the chaos around you. So much in me winces—and cringes in the callousness that sneaks up when your back is turned and the bitterness that hides in the marred surface of our world. I find that just one day living can muss a heart, cleansed in the morning with Grace, back to its wretched state.

The world would let you know that nothing is worth it and that everything is pleasure. There is no option for truth strong enough to hold the heart loyal, love deep enough to trust, or relationship pure. It finds you, this serpent of lies, everywhere. In the blaring of your clients TV screen, in the lewd comment from the clerk, in the heartache of a friend, and in the subtle pull of the prettier-than-you-girl that makes you want to binge on makeup. It slathers the spirit with the sticky weight of discontent, and nudges the cynical smile to life. Just one day and one is weary with the stench of earth soil.

How is one to walk without being exhausted by the sin and the dirt of life?

How to return to innocence? A search for the-way-it-should-be. Sometimes it is not so much a returning, but a rediscovery, or sometimes maybe a gift.

Tonight I found it looking into the wide eyes of the little girl who ran through the rain, laughing. And as I swung her up onto the water-soaked slide and caught her as she sailed down, giggling, there it was, right up close. All the noise that rattles from vain hearts and smooth-talking, hair tossing idols filled with pride and vanity and lust seemed as silly as the reality that they are.

I’m still trying to figure out why that innocent look made all the messy dirt from the day seem to float away.

Or why when I hold a soft puppy, I feel fresh hope again.

 Hope for the beauty of vulnerability rather than coquettish, hard brilliance of today’s femininity. Hope for a life overflowing with the deep joy of contentment, and lying still at the end of the day, always, at rest, without needing to run and fill it with the millions of things our broken culture offers to help us hide.

All that from looking into the eyes of a child and holding a hound pup?

No, not just that. In the innocence I see the horrible mess of my own heart reflected. Then there is not much else to do other than to run to foot of the cross and to Jesus. He is the one who hands out hope, and joy, and second chances to someone as marred and fallen as myself.

Days bring dirt.

May I be innocent, like a child, in my faith, in my joy, in my running to Jesus.

Touching God

31 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in 3 am moments, life dirt, outrageous love, realized dreams, silly fears, the wilderness, unreasonable hope

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 The mug is warm and I curl my stiff fingers around the smooth ceramic, holding in the heat with my skin. I lift my head. My hair catches, tugging, fighting icy wind. I feel it—the wind—feel it twirl around my neatly pinned hair and brush along my scalp. My toes curl, burrowing in the pine needles. Their points, dulled by decay, swollen with dew, dance under my weight, tickling my feet. The rain falls, wet on my cheeks.

And I find comfort in the texture—in the touch. In feeling life slide, scratch, and brush its unique pattern beneath my skin. Solace. It’s the security of fingering, of gripping reality. This is here. This is real. All will be well. I can feel it.

As a small child I turned to touch for reassurance when I was sick. A stuffed doll,  a Lego block, or a icy freezy pop—I would always hold something. I still remember, closing my eyes, trying to memorize the creases in my hands while my eleven-year-old body fought off influenza. As long as I felt something I was anchored in the truth that my pain would pass.

Mom should know. As she reminds me, I could never walk through a store without touching everything in sight. “Look with your eyes Esta, not with your hands”. And she said it over and over.

Those who know me well would say I’m a touchy-feely sort of person. My personal bubble is very small—tiny—if in existence at all. I struggle to communicate with people if I’m not able to be close to them, face to face, or holding their hand.

I’ve received 20 years worth of gifts from my younger brother. Special, all of them. But none near so treasured as the night he caught me as I crumbled and sat, holding my sobbing head against his shoulder, while my heart fell apart and he offered me his sleeve for a tissue.

I experience life and hope and love though touch—through the feel of the wind, the rain, and the warmth of a handshake.

But sometimes I feel a bitterness creep in, because the Person who I want most to feel close to remains beyond my grasp.

I can’t touch God.

I can’t put my fingers in the nail prints like Thomas.

(Doubting Thomas is one of my kindred spirits)

 I’m horribly jealous of the woman who got to washed His feet with her tears and dry them with her hair.

And it seems the most infuriating thing in the universe sometimes.

Sure, I can stroke the smooth bark birch, cup my hands under the icy splash of mountain stream, and hold the hot, sticky fingers of a preschooler. But I can’t touch the One who made them. And while in my head I know full well that in touching his creation I am communicating with him, at 3 o’clock in the morning it still seems all terribly unfair.

But, recently, the bitterness has left.

Not because I’ve resigned myself to waiting until heaven, or have accepted the limitations of my fallen mortality, or otherwise made myself feel mature and spiritual.

But because something in Lamentations told me not to do any of them.

Awkwardly, very wobbly like, I’ve begun to ask to be able to feel more.

 And honestly, I know it’s the most obvious thing, but I’ve begun to realize that when it says “God is spirit”, that’s what it actually means.

And suddenly the unseen is not “unfelt” like I somehow believed, but felt even deeper than a mug of hot coffee. Actually felt.

In reality, it warms from the inside out.

Really, it really does. And it’s truer than really for real, and honestly serious, not even kidding.

So laugh all you want at me for finally realizing such a simple truth,

But to me its like discovering a whole new world.

A world where you can actually reach out and touch laughter, not just hear it.

 

And all is glad

26 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by in life dirt, outrageous love

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I drive home, heat throbbing around me, through me, unchecked by my nonexistent air conditioner.

Breathe it in.

It mixes with the smell of chemicals still clinging to my scrubs. Remnant memories of alcohol swabs, latex, Bedadine, and the new trauma patient.

Traffic is heavy. Again.

Home I discover my arms cannot lift themselves. The door handle is Mount Everest to my fingers. But I make it in the door and up to my room. Airy cotton replaces the scrubs and I crawl into bed to trying to bury my body, hoping it will resurrect, new, in an hour or so.

But the heat and aching bones have followed me.

The flu that has been stalking the house is waving its flags.

Toss

Turn

Ache

Sweat

Life grows huge and menacing in the dazed fog. Hot, messy tears arrive without asking for permission.

And something else.

A constricting, clawing,  oh-too-familiar thief.

Sniveling, measly emotion.

Selfpity.

Yet, it closes around me—like one of those big traps they use to catch unruly black bears in the spring.

The fight is on.

I remind myself my heart is not bound to my circumstances. My spirit is not a captive to my emotion

The Power of my life does not come from the tired body or aching mind.

I wash the dishes. I pray.

I bring order to my room.

I read something beautiful.

I take the mess that is my heart and coax it back to praise.

Happy music is turned up.

A goblet is pulled out of the cupboard. Ice water splashes against the swollen sides. And mint leaves— not enough to taste, just enough to whisper.

Blessings gush through the dirt floor of my heart. My cup runs over. I am overflowing.

And the resurrection wins.

For the Power of my life comes from His present aliveness.

kissing boring men and hot pink aliens

14 Friday May 2010

Posted by in family, laughter, outrageous love, silly fears

≈ 4 Comments

“ I just think it would be the greatest tragedy to have to kiss a boring man” 

I almost did clumsy nose dive into the sink of dirty dishes I was washing. Its not every day you hear a close friend utter such a mind-boggling statement. She was quite serious too.

 Despite that fact, I laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed until I was bent over, trying to breathe in the air that wasn’t there anymore.

 The statement had come popping out in the middle of an frustrated rant on God’s inevitable choice of her future partner.

Most likely He would choose someone solid and good. Someone entirely lacking in color. Besides, she reasoned, those were the only guys that would ever fall for her anyways.

I laughed, wheezed, and ran to write down the quote in my journal. And our chat continued as we finished the supper dishes.

While I do think she might need to reevaluate her definition of “the greatest tragedy”, I heard her. No, I don’t worry about kissing boring men—never have, and, hopefully, never will need too. Other things keep me awake at night. But they follow the same thought pattern.

At times, at least to me,  life seems far too much like one of those big toy machines at the mall. The big square plastic boxes filled with stuffed animals. They were the big thing when I was a kid.

You would put  two dollars in the slot and then attempt to maneuver the long arm inside the box, trying to snag the cute stuffed bear at the back. Those things are dream killers for a five year old.

For some reason it always grabs the sick looking, hot pink toy alien at the front and plops it neatly down the slot into your waiting arms. I hate those things. At least with a gum ball machine you know your going to get your gum.

Sometimes, just like a five year old, we dare to dream and our eyes sparkle with the possibilities.

Then, plut, ploop, smash……

….. life comes with its big clumsy arm and grabs an hideous looking situation and plops it down—squishing our silly hopes to nothing.  So we learn, like I did, to stay away from those big toy machines. Don’t even look at them, cause you know that those cute little teddies are only there to entice you into giving up another two dollars.

So we trade in our dreams for what we call reality.

And we become afraid that we will only get to kiss boring men
and be stuck with hot pink aliens for the rest of our lives.

tragic…

 

 “There is no fear in love: but perfect love casts out fear: because fear is agony….God is love and he that abides in love abides in God….……casting all your cares upon him, for you are his charge…..and he fed them according to the integrity of his heart; and guided them by the skillfulness of his hands. ….And the Lord direct your hearts in the love of God, and into the patient waiting for Christ …..For this God is our God for ever and ever; He will be our guide even unto death

  Thess 3:5,  Isa 42:16, 1 John 4:18, Psa 48:14, Psa 78:7