Stay This Way

It is very important for me to continue to feel this way. 

At least, that's what I think, every single day of my life. 

I visualize my feelings as a house that I walk into, one that it would be rude to leave before I've had a proper visit. Sadness is a comfortable cottage where I can see and be seen, a place secluded from the world but with the clearest view I could ever imagine. I settle into the window seat and accept whatever drink I'm offered. I stay so long that I forget I have lived anywhere else. 

Eventually, though, I flit about to other places. Anger is a third-floor apartment right above the space that Guilt and Resentment share, a space of hard corners and no money for rugs so you cannot help but alert everyone to your presence through stamps and swears. Exhaustion rents out the basement suite and Loneliness has the top floor. You can get the key to the roof if you ask the super.

Contentment and Self-assurance always have a guestroom set up for me and bananas and coffee in the morning. They don't mind when I invite people over to sit on their wraparound front porch and put hours of use on their wooden porch swing with the comfortable creak. Their kitchen is huge, their dining room larger, and there is somehow always enough seating around the TV or the coffee table or anywhere you want to set up a game. I don't mind looking in the mirrors at their house. All the same, I'm always surprised to wake up there. 

There are others. Excitement has a townhouse whose walls are covered with bright colors and books. Happiness has the most comfortable pillows. Worry has an entire lake house, complete with a dock where Fear can tether its boat. Resilience keeps a garden outback and grows herbs in her kitchen. Everyone has music playing. 

I probably spend most of my time on the road between Sadness and Contentment, but wherever I go, I feel the need to take off my shoes and stay a while. This feeling, whatever it is, it's something real. It needs to be experienced, lived, not just visited or, worse, ignored. 

But there are places we don't need to linger in life. We are predisposed to it I guess, but there are homes that we were only meant to pass through. 

I'm finding that that's the trick. Don't eschew the company of your feelings, but be wary of taking up residence in any given place. Follow the hand-drawn map from Anger's building to Determination's house. Answer the phone when Excitement calls you up at Sadness'. Let Happiness take you by the hand, even if you can't stay long. 

Because this thing that we're doing, this living, it takes every bit of us. Our outrage and our sorrow and our joy and our love and everything in between and beyond. Feel everything. Be wonderfully, delightfully human. And then carry on doing the good works set out before you. 

Tired and Angry

I have been so angry.

I have been so exhausted.

I have been so exhausted that when I see posts from friends who talk about how tough this second year of seminary was but how we all made it through anyway, I just laugh at them. I laugh at them the way I laugh at the self-evaluation question that asks whether I feel prepared for the realistic demands of ministry. Sure. Whatever. I feel prepared. It can't be worse than this.

I mean, it can. I'm sure that being a full-time pastor will bring with it more stress than I feel right now, and more despair, and more complications. I'm sure that I'll feel pulled in ten thousand different directions and that it will sometimes be unmanageable and that I'll have to make decisions that seem unfair to everyone involved (because they are) and that there will be days I will never want to revisit again. I'm certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that working three jobs while taking a full load of classes and an internship while trying to maintain a new relationship, after having gone through the all the rigamarole of becoming a certified candidate, has in no way truly prepared me for the trials and travails of ministry. Ministry, I'm sure, will be overwhelming in ways I could never have imagined. If this past semester has felt like treading water in an ocean with the tide perpetually coming in, I'm sure that ministry will feel like a never-ending series of tsunamis. There's just no way I can be ready.

God, it makes me want to scream.

Contrary to the assumption built into the question of whether I feel prepared for the "realistic demands of ministry," I am not some sweet summer child who has never dealt with anything of import. I am not naïve, I am not unaware, and I am not self-absorbed. I am not a stranger to hard work, to complicated work, to delicate work. I have weathered this storm and I will weather others. Like most of the women I know, I learned how to endure long ago. I learned how to endure the world and I learned how to endure your inaccurate expectations of me, so you know what? You can step off.

But you know what drives me nuts? You know what sends me over the edge? It's not these suggestions that I can't handle what will be put in front of me. No, I can endure and I will endure and I will put up with all the challenges thrown my way and you can bet that I will be here shifting the world towards better as long as there is breath in my lungs, but the thing that knocks the breath out of me is when the people who should be standing strong by my side are the ones who I have to turn my efforts against.

I love Rudy Francisco. I'm a sucker for Button Poetry and spoken word in general and I know this about myself, but what I appreciate about Rudy Francisco is that his vulnerability happens for a reason. He is willing to name difficulties by the names we'd actually recognize and he is willing to pop off about things that matter, things that we should be angry about. 

More than one of my friends has said that they were warned about going to seminary because in seminary, "they take away your Jesus." Which is fine, I guess. I get it. We all misunderstand who God is, who Jesus really is. We forget that if Jesus showed up in America today, he'd for sure get stopped for a "random security screening" at the airport. The Son of the Heavenly Father came down to Earth and lived and died and rose again for us and for our salvation and a whole bunch of the people who claim to follow him likely wouldn't give him the time of day if they saw him on the street because Jesus, you see, was brown.

See, seminary didn't take my Jesus away from me. I am set on following this Arab Jewish carpenter rabbi from the backroads of Palestine. I'm just glad that the salvation he won extends to me. No, seminary didn't take my Jesus from me. It took my church.

Because the church I knew would never have doubted my ability to lead. The church I knew would not have questioned someone's call because of who they love. The church I knew didn't struggle with integration. The church I knew would have lived into its polity and its principles in the prophetic way. The church I knew could have sang In Christ There Is No East or West and They'll Know We Are Christians without a shred of cognitive dissonance. The church I knew was guided by the Holy Spirit who is Love.

And it exhausts me to have lost my church. It exhausts me to have lost my songs and my worship and my surest connection to God. There is death and new life in abundance in the world and the everlasting purgatory of the inbetween that this past year has been was electrified with it, but I have no idea how to ground it. All the electricity of new events has shocked me and then dissipated into the air. I have offered more hugs of condolences and congratulations than I care to count, sought out more hugs of comfort while in stasis than I care to admit. And all the while I have sought out every empty piano in every quiet room with a hymnal that I could find because God has been difficult to locate here in the inbetween and my spirit has noticed the absence.

It is tiring to not know where you belong.

It is enraging to realize that your home was taken over by someone else.

But I have found that the quietness of tomorrow offers you the chance to try again, to sweep clear the room and invite a new spirit in. I don't know how to fix our problems. I don't understand why faithfulness looks so different in so many different hands. But I can pray that the God of love will fill me and you with an everlasting Spirit so that we can dream dreams that are unheard of in this age, and I can pray for the Spirit of strength and patience to dwell deep in our hearts so that we endure until the day when the kingdom comes and the will of a good God is done on this earth as it is in heaven.

Until then, though, we have work to do.

Tension

Readings for Palm/Passion Sunday: Mark 11:1-11, Philippians 2:5-11, Mark 14:1-15:47. 

Image from theycantalk.com

Sometimes, in my Christian journey, I have been this donkey, blissfully unaware that I am not at all what the people are paying attention to. I carry Jesus all the same, but I have a skewed perception of what's really going on here. At the same time, I see this, and I tense up a little. Jesus knows what's going to happen this week. The donkey doesn't. The crowd doesn't. Smile and laugh all you want, but we smile and laugh here in the face of sadness and hurt. Maybe out of nervousness, maybe out of discomfort, maybe out of ignorance, but always for me with a bundle of tension growing at the back of my neck.

So, would you pray with me?

God, you are God when we are at peace and you are God when we are tense. You are God when we are near and God when we are far. You are God on Palm Sunday. You are God always. Be with us today and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

There is always some tension in Palm/Passion Sunday. At the beginning of the service, we’re up here waving our palm branches to celebrate Jesus, but at the end of the service, we’re going to crucify him.

And it’s frustrating because Palm Sunday feels right. It feels right to wave palm branches in praise, to recognize Jesus as king, to put our lives and our faith in the hands of this man who we trust to save us. We as Christians know who Jesus is. We know that Jesus is God’s Love made flesh, powerful enough to make every wrong in this world right. We trust in the saving grace he brings and so we show up with our branches and our coats and we climb trees and we jump up and down and we shout hosannas until our throats are sore. Palm Sunday feels right, so how could we crucify him on Friday?

Well, maybe we aren’t seeing Jesus the way Rome saw him. We see our peaceful king, riding into town on a donkey; Rome sees a worrying protest. We see a rabbi with his faithful disciples; Rome sees teacher and a bunch of teenagers talking too loud. We see the man who can set us free; Rome sees a threat to law and order. When we step back, we can see that Jesus means to change things, and change is not comfortable when you’re the one in power. Jesus means to change each of us, and that is not exactly what we want to hear.

We’ve been talking during Lent about Being and Doing, about who we are in Christ and the things we do because of it. If Jesus wants to change us, I think we’ll find that there’s a tension between being and doing too. We know who we are, that we are beloved by God, but the entire rest of the Christian lifetime is figuring out what that means. We know we’re forgiven, but what does it mean to live without the things that needed forgiving? We know we’ve been set free so that we can love and serve God, but how do we love and serve God when it feels less like freedom and more like a burden? We know we should be more like Jesus, should “have the mind that was in Christ Jesus,” but what do humility and obedience really look like for us? We know we should grow closer to God, but how should we pray? How should we worship? How should we love?

It’s hard enough to know how to be. Now we have to know how to do too?

Well, of course we do. Because Jesus did.

There’s a tension for us in Palm/Passion Sunday, there’s a tension for us in our being and doing, and it seems like there’s a tension in Jesus too. The Gospel writers all notice it. Jesus is fully God, but he cries for his friend Lazarus. Jesus is fully human, but he raises people up from the dead. There is a tension, from our perspective anyway, between the humanity and the divinity of Jesus and we see it all throughout his ministry. He’s baptized and called the Beloved Son of God, but then he goes into the desert to be tempted just like us. He preaches words of wisdom to the crowds, but he also needs some alone time. He rides into town the picture of peace, but then goes into the temple and starts flipping tables. He knows Judas is going to betray him for blood money and he lets it happen, but as soon as he goes to pray after, he starts sweating bullets. If we ever have any questions about how human Jesus is, they’re answered as soon as nails hit skin on Good Friday. If we ever have any questions about how godly Jesus is, they’re answered by the fact that he knew the cross was coming, and he went anyway.  

Jesus, knowing who he was, knew what he had to do. His doing came out of his being. Being the Son of God born of Mary in first century Palestine meant that he would end up at Golgotha, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves, making us right before God and bringing us back to God. He did this for us, and he did this because he is what he was and always will be, what God always is: Love. And love can’t just be. Love does.

There is tension all around us. We live in a tense world that is getting more tense by the day. There is tension between our being and our doing. There is tension between the crowd that cries Hosanna on Sunday and crucify early Friday morning. But when it comes down to it, when the road that leads to Jerusalem also leads to the Place of the Skull, there is no tension in Jesus. There is only love because God is love. Wonderful, miraculous, life-changing, heart-breakingly deep love. Love unknown, as the song writer says: 

My song is love unknown,

My savior’s love to me,

Love to the loveless shown

that they might lovely be.

Oh who am I that for my sake

My Lord should take

frail flesh and die?

Beloved of God, reflect on this love, this love that was shown to us while we were yet loveless, that we might be lovely. Amen. 

Flying Out

Listen, I am a life-long believer in the Location Cure. Get out of town. Go see or stand in some place your eyes haven’t seen before, or haven’t seen in a long time. I guarantee you that, for a minimum of ten seconds, everything you’re running from will be gone. When you travel, projects, people, enduring circumstantial pain, all of that stays on the platform and you, free from hateful burdens, get to be somewhere, anywhere, else. I deeply believe this to be true. 

Now, all those things you left behind don’t go away entirely. Some find a way to follow you into the next big city, or down the highway, or into the next state, or across an ocean. Taxes, usually. They follow you everywhere. And your anger and your hate and your frustrations. Those are inside you and so you never really leave them until you deal with them. They're just easier to ignore when you’re in a new postal code. But given the enduring nature of the things that grieve our hearts, the Location Cure provides you a necessary, invigorating, momentary reprieve. 

But what do you do when you’re not in need of a cure? Because it’s happened, friends. I have arrived at the moment when I am bored at an airport. The ride to airport was a chance to have a fun conversation with a roommate that I hardly ever get to have a real chat with, rather than a stomach-turning half hour of enthusiastic nerves. Check-in and security were old hoops I’ve long since mastered jumping through. I almost checked my metro map while waiting for the train to my gate because this all felt mind-dullingly routine. I wandered past the shiny bright airport shops and took in the dozen languages being spoken around me without so much as a blink, answering a couple of texts from my friends as if this were any average Sunday, as if I weren’t going to get into a deformed metal cylinder with wings and engines attached and be hurtled from one continent to another as the world below me turned into night. 

The airport muzak was playing Hall and Oates when I found my seat in the waiting area. So that was nice. 

And it’s not that I’m not excited for where I’m going. My friends and I planned this trip in January of 2017, when tickets for Hamilton on the West End went on sale, and I’ve been waiting for it since, fourteen-ish months of checking countdowns and making plans and updating budgets. I’m ready to see everyone again. I’m very excited to be in Edinburgh and to see it decked out in snow. I’m delighted to be going back to London for a bit. I’m ready to spend a couple of day traipsing around parts of the UK I haven’t been to before. I’m going to take a thousand pictures and live aggressive amounts of life. (I’m also going to have multiple study sessions with my friends because we’re all grad students, but let’s not talk about that.) I should be pumped right now. This is the beginning of an adventure! 

And I am. And it is. And I know what a privilege it is to be able to be blasé about it, and how weird it is that international flights are a fact of my life. But for maybe the first time in my life, going somewhere different has felt like an interruption of the adventure already in progress, rather than the adventure itself.

My heart is settled where I've been. I’ve got a pile of classes to attend to in pursuit of a degree I’m incredibly suited for. I’m really happy with where I’m living and my roommates. I’ve got two good jobs that I enjoy doing and don’t enjoy leaving. I’ve got an internship that I had to pry myself away from. And I have relationships that I don’t necessarily want to put on hold for ten days. I’ve been enjoying being me of late. I kinda don't want to leave. 

But I’ll enjoy being me on the other side of the ocean as well, I’m sure. 

I’ve just got to get there first. 

Love and Roses

Traffic doesn't move any faster because you're grieving.

On the day when you found it difficult to get out of bed, difficult to convince yourself that it would be better for everyone for you were at work and chapel and class, the traffic lights will still turn red at inconvenient times. On the day when you had to remind yourself that when your body is still, your spirit is still, your mind is still, and that if you stay here, you will only end up immersed in thoughts that are not good for you, the drivers will still make unnecessary lane changes without signaling. On the day when you just needed to catch a break because things are hard enough as it is, you will instead get caught between a bus and someone trying to make an illegal left-hand turn and you will end up jogging into work with a cloud of aggravation around you and a soreness in your throat from all of the screaming you did at the beltway, at the universe, at your feelings.

The weather won't change because you're grieving.

You might hate clomping around in boots and fumbling with scarves and digging gloves out of bags and purses and corners of car seats, but the temperature will not rise just because it would make things easier for you. Your skin will continue to crack in the dryness and you will forget your lotion and your chapstick at home and you will sit with the uncomfortable weight of winter clothes in the uncomfortable greyness of a bland winter day and stare uncomfortably at the deadness of winter around you because nothing has told the bulbs it's time to bloom yet. In all likelihood, the forecast will promise snow and deliver freezing rain instead, all the misery without any of the beauty.

The world won't stop because you're grieving.

On the morning that comes after the night of poor sleep brought to you by the feelings death has swirled up in you, the guilt and anger and fear and disbelief and lostness, there will still be news about stocks and politics and systematic injustice. There will be meals cooked and meals consumed, somewhere around the world. There will be fights and arguments and love and agreements and ideas and doubts and laughter and tears and boredom and apathy and immense amounts of inertia and mind-boggling amounts of passion. There will be collections for flowers, maybe, or donations to organizations, and cards sent and support offered, and hugs and phone calls and messages, and we will do all of these things because we're alive. We're still alive. Today, this day, the world didn't stop for us, for any of us who are still here, not yet.

It has been beautiful to see the way my Sigma Alpha Iota sisters have come together to remember the sister we've lost. I know that many of us are still in shock over how such a genuinely beautiful person could be fine on Friday and gone on Monday, but it has been heartwarming to see the remembrances and words of kindness and comfort which have so quickly turned into concrete actions. I know facebook is much, and rightly, maligned, but it was a godsend yesterday, connecting those of us who have gone so many different places in the years since graduation. It was a deeply lovely thing to see all the comments and love poured out to each other and in support of another sister in her loss and grief. In these moments of sharing, we offer a testimony to the love that binds us now and promise of the love that we'll bring to each other when tragedy comes for any of us. Take a breath. Take a moment. Be kind. Receive kindness in return. Be loved.

Remember, love didn't stop because we're grieving.

Taking a Break

In general, I want to be better at things.

Actually, that's a lie.

I want to be naturally gifted at everything I do and never have to put in the effort of practicing in order to gain skills or a higher level of competency. 

But I've been told that that's not how anything works, and so, in general, I'm willing to practice and try and try again. The wonderful thing about keeping up a regular blog is that I get plenty of practice at writing. The terrible thing about keeping up a regular blog is that I get plenty of practice at writing in the same style and with the same level of effort. I'm comfortable and conversational and I'm not exactly sure that that's what I need to be practicing. I've entrenched some habits that I've found to be a little problematic. 

Since I know that about myself, I'm going to take some time away from the blog, do some evaluating, and hopefully come back with better posts that are less "let me dump all my feelings on the internet for strangers to see" and more "let me process my feelings in a way that will hopefully allow strangers on the internet to have more empathy for others." I want to practice being more thoughtful and less reactionary and I need some space to figure out how I want to do that.

Besides, last semester was a whirlwind and I could use a little bit of breathing room. I want to stare out a couple of windows and let my mind wander for a couple of hours each week instead of slamming my fingers against the keyboard, trying to make sense of things that I should probably just sit with. It'll be good for me. 

And some space will probably be good for you too. Take the fifteen minutes each Wednesday that you might have otherwise used to read through what I write and do a little bit of staring and thinking of your own, away from the internet. Here's hoping it's a restorative break for us all. 

New Year

2017 was a whirlwind.

So much happened that my person journal is broken up into two pieces, one that starts in January and one that starts at the end of June, because I felt that 400 single-spaced pages was a bit much for a document. So much happened that, as friends recount stories, I say, “Oh, yeah, that happened this year!” So much has happened that I have multiple print calendars and planners to reference and I still have problems processing everything I did this year. It’s worse than the year I spent less than half of the days sleeping in my own bed.

2017 was breathless.

This entire year was like that time in the fourth grade that I fell off the landing of the playground at church, not the old metal one, but the new wooden one, before they got the new new plastic one. I was gonna slide down the fireman’s pole, this thing that I’d been scared of since I first saw it, and I reached out and I grabbed hold and I was going to slide and then suddenly I wasn’t. The sky appeared and started rushing away from me and the ground came out of nowhere and pushed the air from my lungs and every time I tried to fill them again, a thousand knives stabbed me from the inside and the outside, leaving me wanting to scream but without the air I needed to, which was maybe the most frightening thing of all. 2016 was the fall, 2017 was hitting the mulch and the subsequent fight for oxygen.

2017 was interminable.

They say that as you get older, the years start to rush by. I don’t know who “they” are, but my twenties have been some of the longest years of my life and that doesn’t really seem to be letting up.  This year dragged on. It was a whirlwind, it was breathless, and it kept on going. 2017 was like being trapped in a perpetual hurricane. No, 2017 was like treading water in the ocean with the tide forever coming in. No, 2017 was a never-ending dust storm. Nothing ever settled long enough for me to get my bearings and I started to think that the only thing I had ever been was dusty.

All of this is, of course, slightly dramatic. On a local level, it was like most other years. 2017 was a mixture of good and bad, with fewer personal tragedies than usual, I guess. I settled into a comfortable chaos sometime around September and while I’m glad 2018 looks to be less busy, I don’t regret how full my life was. I am uneasy about how my life intersects with the larger world, but I think I’ll be spending some time unpacking this year for a while yet.

That’s why I made everyone else talk in our year-end video on the vlog.

I’m not really sure what I want to leave in 2017. I’m not sure what I want to take into 2018. I know 2018 is a few days old already, but you have the option every day of setting something down and not picking it back up. I’ve got time. I want to leave insecurity, I guess, and exhausting myself, but I don’t want to carry pure bravado and desperate self-preservation in their place. I want to leave bad thoughts behind and take good thoughts with me. I want to be able to tell the good thoughts from the bad. I want to want the right things. I want to know what it is I should want.

In the end, all metaphors and constructs fail us and so maybe this was never going to be a method of processing that was going to work for me. Or maybe this year was dense and I need to do more work than I thought. Either way, I think I can say, along with most other people, that I’m glad 2018 is here. I’ll read more books and drink more water and exercise more often and sleep better and do my best not to obsess over the things that 2017 wouldn’t let me set down.

That seems reasonable.