Rise From the Battlefield, My Friend

It’s our first spring here and the tree outside our bedroom window started blooming this week. I’ve strained long for those shoots of green, narrowing my vision to examine brown bark, longing for a breakthrough.

The last few springs have been dark ones for me, humid and hot ones and icy cold ones too. They’ve been cast in the shadow of all the wrong places, darkened in the depth and ache so familiar to those landscapes which became spiritual battlegrounds, bloody and muddy, gray like the dented armor of my walled-up heart in those years.

Endless were the midnight games of holy hide-and-seek and I was running in place, peering for God inside heart holes and behind graffiti’d buildings.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

But this spring is different.

This spring there are fat yellow flowers and white petals that trickle from trees and stick to my hair, and there are tulips and strawberries right in my very own front yard, damp with the paint of God’s fresh brushstroke. This spring there are cloudy days too but the low wisps and gusts tickle colorful branches, scattering light about us like a thousand tiny mirrors tumbling from the sun.

This blistering battlefield threatened to evaporate me in those years. I thought I might dissolve into nothing but a puddle of melted-down armor from the weight of it and the intensity of its temperature. Straining hard for grace or maybe deliverance, still searching frantic for my hide-and-seek God, I stumbled hard into patches of white, suspended in tangles of sweet honeysuckle, fragrant and tangy with the taste of grace.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

In the stumbling, I learned to see. To look through eyes that linger long on a dusky pink sky, to twist a child’s hair between my fingers and take in a breath like a whisper, to taste a taste of love Divine.

 It is not midnight hide-and-seek after all but a secret scavenger hunt, our moments and years on this earth. There are millions of tiny treasures tucked away for you. Have you noticed?

Love notes, written straight to you out there tucked inside acorn shells and flittering from tree branches, scrawled on the footprints of a child. They are bound majestically in a single grain of pink sugar, splashed across the foamy coastline, dancing in the filtered lace-light of sunrays through spring leaves and reflect the creative brilliance of our Father.

Rise from the battlefield along with me and smell the honeysuckle, my friend. There is so much to see.

Come out, come out, wherever you are.  

When It's Time to Breathe

Like others in this season of politics and tension, I am thirsty for grace. And in my thirst, I realize how much grace I fail to show, how strong my desire that others see things my way, how hard I have to fight my own nature to reflect Christ's character.

But today, I'm asking you for grace.

Grace because I'm far from this place lately, wrapped up in a budding life ahead, a bunch of big changes on the horizon.

I'm going back to college, God willing, and I've brought my kiddos home to learn at the kitchen table again too, navigating a public charter school curriculum program that looks exciting but still has me a little lost and anxious while we get our bearings.

The foster babies are very nearing their own transition out of our home, a home the lot of us are moving out of at the end of November to be nearer to school and other things. I'm neck deep in editing a book and writing another one, and I can count the days until our newly adopted son will be here without having to even turn the calendar page.

Deep breath.

I've had to pull away from blogging and reading blogs for now, and I just thought I'd tell you all why. Soon, the dust will settle and life will look like something I recognize again, and we'll begin to build something new, brick by brick.

Love you friends. Thanks, as always, for grace. 

On Excavating Earwax, Panty Raids, and Joy With Dish Gloves On

Friends, this post is long... like making-up-for-lost-time long...like more-of-a-chapter-than-a-blog-post long, and I apologize (kind of) for the length. I really feel desperately that I need to post it anyway and I ask if you'll give me the grace of getting through it because I think this message is a good one for us all this week. There are some things around here knocking my socks off... things I believe truly will rock your world, too, if you soak it in. So go get a coffee refill and stay with me in this, if you can...come back to it if you have to. Thanks for trusting me, for getting through my wordiness and letting me unravel the beautiful, terrible mysteries I'm drifting through these days.  

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I haven't been writing much lately—not here anyway, and I'm sorry for that. 

It's not for lack of trying. I've sat down at my keyboard dozens of times this week and the last one and the one before that to keep this space current and relevant and real. What happens, though, is that no matter what I set out to write, it all ends up coming out something like this:

"This is hard. This is hard. This is hard. Joy is here. God is good. He is teaching me so much. And oh, yeah… did I mention? This is hard. "

It's true of course. This is hard. God is good. And He is teaching me measure upon measure more than I ever dreamed this season would be about. I am learning dependence and how gratitude can overcome attitude. I am learning about love in action when the feeling of love is elusive. 

I am learning about what importance and success look like in the Kingdom, and how wrong I've had it all this time. I am learning about need, about nourishment, about food and laughter and organization and the power of a smile or a scowl, about volume and voices, love languages, trust, fear, home, and the wild and wonderful human spirit.

- I am learning that love is joy with its dish gloves on.

- I am learning that the words I grumble or yell or whisper or pray are longer lasting than the words I type, that tying up life lessons nice and pretty in a package works well on paper but doesn't serve me at all when there is poop in the sandbox or when I see my own forked-tongue wagging back at me from the mouth of my flesh-and-blood boy. I am learning that hot, silent tears into my pillowcase are a hallowed kind of prayer, and that I would be wise to utter less the phrase "Lord, give me strength" and utter more the phrase "Thank you, Lord. Give me joy." Also, that He always responds swiftly to "Help me, Help me, Help me," even if I whisper a curse word in the middle of that prayer somewhere.

- I am learning much, much, much about grace.

Overcoming my critical, complaining spirit in this means not running to my blog just to purge out the grime of the day every time I'm tempted to, even though you all take it so graciously and mold it into a golden gift through your comments and outreach and prayer. You all are my heroes and you are how I do most anything—all this inspiration I get from the people out there walking around on Jesus-feet, kissing with Jesus-lips, giving with Jesus-hands.

Having foster kids in our home these past few months has rocked us, not in a flip-our-world-upside-down sort of way, but in a gnaw-away-daily-at-our-false-ideals one. The temptation is to say that with each challenge, I am growing and loving them deeper and deeper because that's what the neat and pretty answer might look like, but that just isn't always true. 

What's true is this. I still don't have a maternal instinct for these babies, not completely, and though I love them as much as I can make myself love anything, this is a hard love. It's a love that acts and does, a love that wipes and kisses, a love that moves and rocks and holds and bites its tongue, but not so much a love that feels. It's different, and I am learning, too, to be okay with different, all the while praying for a bigger heart to overflow with Jesus-love when these little faces still seem so exoteric, so marvelously foreign here. 

The intimacy with which I am caring for these sort-of strangers who are also long-neglected little children means this work is mostly gross and bloody and sweaty and stinky, covered in waste that emerges from bodies I have not carried and have not watched carved by formative years of nursing and growing and living. The truth is, it often makes me wearier than I wish it did. 

And though I am immune, mind and body and spirit, to whatever is produced by my own children's bodies, there is no such lack of repugnance with these children, yet. I shouldn't admit it but that's the hard work of motherhood, what biology affords us the capacity to endure out of instinct. When biology is the missing link between these strangers and myself, the already-hard stuff gets harder, if only because it is not nature but effort that drives me.

I am shamed further by the shame I feel, by the way I cringe and curl inwardly at the hazards of motherhood, the green and brown and foul-smelling things, the yucky stuff that from my own children leaves me unscathed. Per doctor's orders, I had to go out and buy a tool last week designed to excavate impacted earwax, a tool I never knew existed and have lived peacefully without for 32 years. Then, draping wriggling half-dressed children over my lap one by one, I dug deep into their oozing orifices and hummed loud to make them still and safe but also to suppress my gag reflex, to transform repulsion into grace, to remind me to find the joy here, in earwax, somewhere…in puddles of drool and vomit, in overflowed toilets, in asthma and tantrums and middle-of-the-night toddler pantry raids (not to be confused, of course, with panty raids, but with the same sort of commotion and cunning thievery involved).

I am struck by how unnatural this love can be, how the actions of what love does can sometimes be so instinctual but other times requires intense suppression of human instinct. And yet, even this unnatural and irregular love is complete and perfect love all the same, for such a time as this. 

Foster parenting is, by nature, the role of coaxing a square peg into a round hole and making it as comfortable there as possible. It is oddly unnatural. Intentionally unnatural. And, challengingly unnatural for me.     

- It is an unnatural love that chisels impacted sludge out of a half-naked stranger's head with a miniature plastic melon-baller and sings her quiet all the while. 

- It is an unnatural love that peeks beneath peculiar habits and whispered statements to the dark underbelly of human existence and reveals the despicable truth of the trauma and turmoil which raises babies in badly broken homes.

- It is an unnatural love that attempts to explain foreskin to a puzzled preschooler who accidentally discovers anatomical differences in his same-age counterpart (a delicate and highly charged conversation to have with a boy still wearing Spiderman underpants, just a baby but already corrupted and confused by sexual abuse and body shame).

- It is an unnatural love that whispers lies to a baby for a holy purpose. Their mama won't be visiting today; she's in jail again, but their hearts can't receive the truth of this. Not yet. And sometimes, a lie can be an act of love, too. 

Love so often is the tough work of exposing joy when there doesn't seem to be any.

Love can be natural or unnatural, and the tough kinds are pulled and stretched from all corners of our body and soul and spirit.    

- It is hard physical work to excavate joy like I excavate earwax, digging and prying and scooping for it to make things better, to enhance my ability to listen more clearly. I round my posture and strain hard for the delicate sound of joy amidst the clamor, the wailing racket in the world all around. There is a din of falling ashes and abundant hopelessness, but I tune in careful and with clarity hone my senses to simply hearing. In doing this, I decipher a soft symphony of intricate miracles, joy's peaceable volume growing over the clatter with each passing second. 

This love? This hard love... this careful, deliberate, focused, slimy and grimy, exhausting love? 

It amplifies the sound of joy. 

Love always amplifies joy because love teaches the lover to listen. 

- It is hard mental work to locate joy when a food-obsessed toddler leaves a midnight trail of empty soda cans and potato chip bags strewn about in her wake like rubble after she cleans the cupboards bare and we are all oblivious, snoozing in spent slumber. But as tight fists unclench, I look closely and there it is...joy, giggling about the silliness of it all under a pile of granola bar wrappers. 

Joy finds a pathway to humor when humor is a lifeline to grace.

(Or a pathway to chocolate. Chocolate is always a lifeline, in my book.)  

- It is hard emotional work to find joy in rising anger when three sets of tiny, mighty hands demolish weeks of careful bedroom decorating in mere seconds of raucous fun. They tear curtains off walls, thrash the personalized name signs I meticulously painted for each one of them, bust closet doors, and crush the paper lanterns that once hung from the ceiling—cheerful orbs now ripped and ruined by careless, overactive play. I almost cry but I yell instead and lose my cool completely. Later, we talk about destruction and forgiveness and how wrong we each were in all of this, me especially. And we forgive.  

Joy flees when anger roars but gathers at the feet of a humble lover. 

- It is hard spiritual work for me to remember, minute by minute, that they are children and not just to find joy in that but to create and nourish it also with room for imagination, creation, amusement, and wonder in the bustle of passing days. I'm so often tempted to wish them into mature beings fully capable of order and reason, but joy knows better and sees clearly.

Joy in you begets joy in others, and where there is much joy, peacefulness abounds. 

Though it doesn't make it any easier, I am grateful in small ways for this fissure between me and my foster children, for what is lacking here. These are not my forever babies, and my soul has not given birth to them the way it has to my others, the ones I could not bear losing like I will lose these ones, someday. 

So I go about the work of stitching my heart to theirs word by word and action by action, bathtime by bedtime, meal by hug by juice cup by storybook by smile, each action another stitch in the fabric of our stories. I baste love like scar tissue over fresh wounds with wide, loose stitches. I sew loops of thread like care and clockwork with lots of open space in this tapestry of grace that covers over them, space for the tight stitches of redemption that will someday not only cover the scars but heal them also. I am leaving room for those who will come after me, the new strong embroidery of an adoptive family perhaps, or the delicate healing sutures of reformed (or, rather, reforming) biological parents.

Theirs is not a forever love within me, not a soul-birthed love like I have for my biological kids and also for our boy in Texas whose adoption is underway. His stitches are sewn short and tight and strong like my others, and with the sweaty, painful work of bearing and birthing a grown-up boy from my heart's womb with all the fight and fire and breath of bringing forth new life—new life right out of existing blood and bones, thoughts and scars and needs and dreams and fears…a partnership between redemption and creation, a partnership between an average family and a Divine and Holy God. I don't know why it was different for him than the others, why his love gets to be natural and permanent, except that it was designed to be. The story was already written. 

And just like there are different sorts of stitches—wide and long and loose, short and tight and strong—there are different sorts of mother love, too—fierce and physical and permanent, nurturing and healing and temporary, bold and beautiful, quiet, clumsy, complicated, selfless, distant, biased, graceful… And I might exhibit a different love dynamic with each little body, each big life that passes through my care. 

I see now that my work in this world, in everything, is not merely about action but first about vision, to see joy and Jesus everywhere, and then to act accordingly. 

So, I seek joy...deliberately, intentionally, increasingly, I seek joy in every. little. thing.

I don't always find it. My heart gets hard and my voice gets loud and the laundry pile grows and I give way to weariness.

But I squint hard through the goggles of grace and try to be mindful if nothing else because the thing about joy is that it's really the awareness of its presence that's elusive, not joy itself. It is sometimes just a vapor, a supernatural and hazy transformation from empty to full, heavy to light, beastly to beautiful.

Sometimes it's wide right there in the open like a spring tulip, beaming bright in a child's happy smile or whispered thanks. Often though, at least for mothers, it is buried as treasure, settled hard under dirt and germy filth or else obscured and camouflaged—an optical illusion that requires a spiritual squint to recognize it hidden from sight right there in the open. Grace goggles, like paper spy glass prizes in sugary-cereal boxes, reveal the secret message in blue beneath a blur of red squiggles, beneath the ugly and exhausting work of mothering, of sustaining life every single day, all day long, again and again and again. 

The secret revealed is always this:

This is hard. This is hard. This is hard.

Joy is here. 

And God is good. 

The Anatomy of a Fight

It's hard to be a good wife.

Especially when you don't always know what that means. When you practice selflessness and not being a nag and you try and remember to rub his feet more often than you'd like to, and you work on first and foremost being aware of his needs, and their needs, and the needs of what seems like the whole entire world so many days.

And then you have an argument about who should drive which car and you feel for a while like you've been had, like you're the only one on the whole planet looking out for you, for them, for what seems like the entire world, and it's. all. up. to. you. to do it all.

So you get fired up and it rises within you because somewhere inside you're afraid that what it really means to be a good wife is to always be pleasing and agreeable, even when he's wrong, even when he's dead wrong, because that concept makes your ears ring like they did another lifetime ago when your head was being smacked into walls by a different husband. And even though the memories are distant, the gripping anger rises up inside when you get afraid, because your value as a woman is attached somewhere in the folds of these words about gas mileage and seatbelts and who ought to make the decisions here, and you think, fists clenched, I just have to put my foot down. If no one else is going to look out for me, I'll have to look out for myself.

You're not afraid because he made you that way but because it's scary how fights can always seem like the end of things to a girl too used to getting left…how the brain can flesh out the disastrous destruction of this whole big life anytime the paint gets scratched, when the fading color starts to show.

And you stew and you steam and when it's time for bed, you stay awake awhile because you're still fuming mad, because nothing was resolved, because he's snoring with the Olympics on full volume and you hate the Olympics and you hate snoring and you aren't even sure how to verbalize what this is all really about, whenever you decide to speak to each other again.  

So you breathe a lot and you think about perspective and grace and the benefit of the doubt. You remember that you're on the same team, even when it doesn't feel like it. You do what it takes to stop having the same conversation over and over again in your head, the one where you tell him off, where you really let him have it, where your words are so enlightening that he suddenly just gets it and agrees with you and everything is happy and wonderful again.

Instead you study the state of your heart, you figure out where all this is coming from. You remember that he was up before the sun today to take a side job for extra money because the family needed it, and he's sleeping because he's dead tired from lifting bags of concrete all day, on his day off. You remember how your legs looked all tangled together while you chit-chatted only yesterday and recalled together all the wonderful things about life these days. You remember the babies you made together and how he kisses them on the forehead and nicknames them and sees straight into them the same way you do. You remember how happy your whole wide life is this season and how a few short hours ago, you were praising God for this marriage, for this man.

And you see from behind your fear that this really is just about gas mileage and surface semantics and not about control or power or upper hands. You remember that this is the man who has sat in hospitals and held your hand, not the one who put you in there. You realize that respect can sometimes just look like taking a different vantage point, stepping over the divide and into their court, even when his logic isn't clear to you.

So you sit in the dark for a few minutes and listen to the clock on the wall, how it reminds you of this fleeting life, of all that's not worth hanging on to. You graze all the sleeping babies' sweaty foreheads with your chapped lips and smell their hair and whisper goodnight. You tiptoe to the bedroom and wriggle the throw pillows out from under his arms, the ones he's all wrapped up on, the ones you made for your marriage bed that say "Mr." and "Mrs." on them.

And even though he won't hear you through his slumber, you whisper I'm Sorry and I Love You and you trace his wedding ring round and round because rings are so very fitting an icon for what marriage is really…round and round, swirl and roll and circle 'round each other. And sometimes it's a whirlpool of turmoil, but sometimes it's a band of strength or a halo of sacredness or a wreath of celebration or sometimes a belt, round and round, just holding this all together. 

Trials and Tattoo Jesus

They fight all the time.

ALL. The. Time.

He took this! She hit me! He said no! She broke that!

They are forever not each other's best friends, anymore.

The big one lies and talks constantly about prison and drug references. My own little guy shrieks and gasps in hypersensitive freak-out mode over everything they touch or say or do. The little one, at two, outweighs my 4-year-old and then some and my back screams from sloughing her around in my arms. She eats everything.

Everything.

Paper. Books. Photographs. Pine cones. Food wrappers. Styrofoam. Batteries. Napkins. Dirt. Rocks.

Everything.

My husband is gone again, 10 more days this time. I am cranky and tired and I miss him, and my head pounds while I struggle to admit that today, I don't want to do this. I don't want to wrestle with three car seats when it's 102 degrees and the car has no air conditioner. I don't want to jostle children between time-out and a too-hot backyard, give three baths while the other two wait for showers, slather on another round of Band-Aids and hair gel and toothpaste, wash another load of miniature underwear, sort train tracks from toy cars again.

I don't want to hear the ABC's out of tune again today, or explain for the hundredth time why it's not okay to talk about prison in front of the baby. I don't want to imagine the pre-placement life of a child who doesn't know his last name but likes to pretend-arrest the other children and recites the Miranda rights with sickening accuracy.

I will load up the whole crew in my overheating rig again this afternoon and take these babies to see their mother, praying they won't ask to call me Mom (again) in front of the lady who birthed them both. She will fill them with junk food between meal times and give them things I won't let them have when we get back home. While they're at the visit center, I will hold my own babies longer than they'd like to let me, since my time for this is scarcer now than it used to be, and we will eat ice cream in a restaurant and pretend like life is normal.

After an hour, I will go back to the visit center and the babies will run to me, and Birth Mom will cry and tell me to be careful again and again and I will fight the urge to roll my eyes, since careful hasn't really been on her agenda before now, because I'm the one treating her babies with tender hands and doing the things she ought to be doing. Because I know she has a big screen TV and wears designer jeans when I'm buying thrift store duds so I can afford to feed her babies. I will feel a mix of anger and compassion at the mixed-up woman whose kids are in my care, and she will whisper things to them in Spanish so I won't understand her.

As she passes little M back to my arms, whose bottom lip is stuck out into a pout because she doesn't understand the Mom who hands her over every time, I will see the enormous Tattoo Jesus looking back at me from her arm, shoulder to elbow, in sandaled feet with faded background glory, like the one on the candle jars at the grocery store.

I will carry the sniffling baby back to the stifling car and ask Tattoo Jesus if he ever didn't want to love, if the smell of sickness or the filth of life annoyed him as bad as it all annoys me, today. I will wonder how to be like him when my house smells like another family now, that my own babies now know about cocaine and prison and their bedrooms are inspected by ladies with clipboards and they can't have a kiddie pool in the yard anymore because the clipboard says so, because we're all just trying to love when we sometimes don't want to.

He will tell me, as he always does, that love doesn't have anything to do with wanting to, and that love doesn't come from me anyway so I'd better make more room in this equation for him to do the work. He will kiss the baby on the cheek with a breeze and wrap himself all back up across the arm of the mixed-up woman who needs him, too, to cling to her in tattoo ink on the days she can't cling to him for the power of addiction and poverty.

I will roll down the windows and we will drive away in the overheating rig and sweat off Band-Aids and hair gel, and sing our ABCs all out-of-tune, again. 

Making Room - Where Love Fits In

The week started with a bang… a publisher meeting, a book acceptance, a tearful hug, a bottle of champagne…long chilled for the day this excitement came, popped and poured and savored. I didn't know that wouldn't be the most exciting thing that happened this week.

Tuesday we were notified our foster care certification was official, that our home was opened to provide care, and less than 24 hours later, our phone was ringing… would we take a 4- and 5-year-old sibling set in an hour? We had said we had no room for boys, what with three already in one bedroom, and could only accept girls for placement, and with my writing and work commitments, only school-aged children fit into our current life.

But when the call came, it was so much clearer than it had been before… we don't fit love into the rest of our life. We just walk in love, first, and let the rest fall all over and around it, soaked up and stained by the color that bleeds from what love does.

With shuffling feet they came, feet but no shoes for them to fill, only the smoky, stained clothing on their bodies, and the funds normally set aside to clothe wards of the state previously squandered by those who came before us. They both wore diapers (and it turned out, they were 2 and 4 in actuality which made three babies under age 4 in our three-bedroom rental, plus our 8 and 12 year old, plus the 15-year-old whose adoption is underway).  They came with no clean diapers to change into… no car seats, no clothing, no belongings but the dime-store teddy bears that they had selected at the child services office.  

They peeked cautiously around corners, suspiciously tiptoed into their new home with trepidation and I watched my biological kiddos, the ones who didn't really choose this arrangement and told me, before the others arrived, that they weren't excited about it. I prayed, I asked you all for prayer, and we were covered, abundantly.

I know because despite my own bout of insomnia, three preschoolers snooze in mismatched sets of my son's pajamas, divvied up across the crowd until we can make it out shopping for right-sized ones. I know because there were way more laughs than tears today and because my children took the lead on loving them, taking hands and leading prayers, sharing toys and whispering sweetness, breaking my heart wide open with the simple practice of love that they grasp so much easier than I do, loving wide and well even when they didn't want to.  

Little J took deep whiffs of the ill-fitting pajamas after his bath and proclaimed, "They smell so good," and I remembered how simple delight could be. Then, kissing his sweaty forehead at bedtime, he asked, since the others called me Mama, if he could call me Mama too and if he could stay forever, and my heart swelled with the ease with which he felt at home here, despite his world being ripped wide open just a few hours ago even while I fought to remember that I was not charged with forever for these children, just for now.

They said Little M wouldn't sleep without her big brother in her bed, that they'd shared a twin mattress their whole lives and I probably shouldn't try to sleep her solo, but we read about Jesus and I stroked silky hair and her eyes drifted away and I knew this tiny girl needed a bed to grow into, a spot in the world that was only hers.

Mr. Smitten had to be away this evening, so I juggled a little more than usual and uttered a holy thank-you for the frozen flautas on hand for dinner in a pinch. There were tears and fibs, spilled milk and popsicle juice in the carpet, messy pants, bumped heads, cranky moments, and for Mama, excruciating back pain that leveled me to bed before the laundry was sorted (and yet, insomnia gets up me again and to my keyboard for the telling).

But there was love… much, much love. The kind that comes raining down like invisible pearls and echoes of the whispered prayers of friends and strangers. The kind that has me choking back tears at not just the disgrace of a world where foster care is needed, but the beauty in it, too.

There is love.

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Linking up at Emily's for the summer's last Imperfect Prose and with Jennifer at Getting Down With Jesus. Join us?

Over and Over...Still. {Part 2: On Depression and Anxiety}

Source

My last post may have given the impression that I'm in the Anne Shirley condition these days, in the "depths of despair"…"a perfect graveyard of buried hopes."

It's not really the case, and I'm okay, for the record.

I can write vulnerably about depression and anxiety because I have some distance from the valley these days, and I'm blessed that I've never had to sit in that valley too very long without Hope and Light and Truth.

Sometimes, though, I need to drive through the old neighborhood with the windows rolled up, lock eyes with the brothers and the dealers, the pushers and the hustlers, and keep on driving.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face (the hymn goes) and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.

It all sounds too easy, I know. Jesus with the cape and the white horse, who swoops in and rescues and the earth goes dim and the credits roll.

Except he rode a donkey and not a white horse, and the whole rescuing business is a lot muddier and bloodier than maybe we're wont to recount. We come back to the rescue day by day and sometimes, minute by minute, and we learn and we heal. Because the beauty is so consuming that it's all we might be tempted to say, the rescue is so very worth it.

But there is still an old neighborhood. There are broken hearts and people who don't know and are just tired of all the mud and the battle. For them, and for us when we forget to cling tight, the things of earth are raw and real and not strangely dim at all. So we tell our truths, go back into the valley when we can, when we're secured tightly to the harness of Grace, and extend healed hands but not clean ones and do what we can to help them turn their eyes.

What Good Christians Do.

Source

Good Christians go to Africa.

Or, at the very least, to the soup kitchen.

They go to the bad neighborhoods and evangelize the homeless.  They risk their life in countries closed to the Gospel.  They give everything in order to serve.

And if I understood anything at all about Christianity, it was that my choice to follow Jesus was first and foremost a call to die. 

I knew that the only way to make God happy was to find those verses in the Bible about feeding the hungry and caring for the orphans and widows and live them wholly to the detriment of all else.  I knew that the only way to be a good Christian was to do something drastic in the name of the Lord… and that then, and only then, would I be enough in His eyes.

I didn't go to Africa.  I wasn't good enough to do that, after all, without a degree in Missions or International Ministry.  I didn't even have a passport, but I had a willing heart.

Instead, I went to Texas.  I cared for orphans.  I put on my Christian smile and my Christian uniform and I said the right catch phrases to be one of those women who give everything up for the calling to love the least of these.

Except that I wasn't.

I was drowning in my own effort, I was grasping for God in a dark, hopeless place inside myself – farther from Him than I'd ever been.  And I didn't know what to make of it.

I knew how it was supposed to work.  Good Christians go into full-time ministry, then God rewards them with warm fuzzy feelings and a gold star in the Book of Life.  That's how the equation was supposed to go – I'd been told that my entire Christian life – but no matter how I figured the numbers, my math just wouldn't line up right.  I couldn't get the right answer. 

I've never been good at math, so I puzzled over the integers.  Gave up belongings.  Check.  Left my family.  Check.  Cared for orphans.  Double check…carry the one…

But the pit continued to grow and the algebra of giving and serving continued to puzzle and I wondered if maybe Texas wasn't far enough but was afraid of what I already knew.  I wasn't a good enough Christian.  I wasn't satisfied with all this selflessness because I was a rotten, weak, selfish girl who probably hated all things holy and was doing more harm than good there, and Jesus probably couldn't love a girl like me anyway.

So I left.

In the leaving, I laid down my good Christian.  I left her in Texas where she belonged because I had no use for her anymore.  I scooted across the country with a moving truck of things I wasn't leaving behind this time in the interest of running… just getting away from the incredible expectation of the kind of life I knew I could never lead.  And I sort of whispered "I'm sorry" to the idea of serving Jesus with my whole life because I'd obviously failed at that whole thing, and I might as well just get back to my regular old failing life where I wasn't dragging anyone down with me.

But a funny thing happened.

Jesus met me.  Right there when I stepped foot out of the moving truck.  Right in the middle of my mess and though I'd looked for him all along, I found Him only when I looked beyond the expectation of the holiest kind of me.  Only when I had failed and admitted that I wasn’t holy at all and had no good at all in me – when I finally knew, once and for all, that my ugly, messy love just paled in comparison to the love of a Father that never had to try.

"Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God."                                  -2 Corinthians 3:5

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Linking up to:  http://www.mommadaybyday.blogspot.com/

We're reading through Emily P. Freeman's Grace for the Good Girl (affiliate link).  This week is chapters 2-3.  Join us... but even if you don't.... please, please read this fabulous book.  Truly life changing.  

I'm a Recovering Good Girl

I'm a try-hard.  Actually, I'm a try-harder, since try-hard never manages to measure up.  And I care desperately what you have to say to me, about me, about my worth.

(As Emily P. Freeman says, "If you wonder what gives you the authority to define me, I will say it is because you exist.  I must have worth and it is up to you to give it to me…I beg you to see me, to notice my goodness, to ignore my failure, to be inspired by my beauty, to be captivated by my essence." (Grace for the Good Girl, p. 17, 18)

I shouldn't do that, of course.  

I know where my value comes from.

But I am afflicted with a syndrome that makes me ever striving toward a make believe notion of good enough.

I am a good girl.

And this book?  Grace for the Good Girl by Emily P. Freeman…. Well, I'm only on chapter 1, but it's rocking my socks off. 

"I taught people around me that I had no needs and then was secretly angry with them for believing me.  Somewhere along the way, I got the message that salvation is by faith alone but anything after that is faith plus my hard work and sweet disposition." (GFTGG p. 13, 14)

Can I get an "amen"? 

…And all the bloggers said…Amen.

Maybe you're a good girl too.

If you'd asked me a month ago if I was a good girl, I'd have shook my head.  Nope.  Not hardly.  Good implies … well… good.  And I never feel good.  Not really.  I'm not even well behaved.  I am prone to surfing the internet when I should be cooking something nutritious for my family and craving a glass of wine every now and then and ten minutes ago, I devoured an entire king-size Snickers bar without coming up for air.  I sometimes watch rated R movies and used the "s" word yesterday and considered, at least twice this week, running away to join the circus.

Good girls don't do things like that.

Reading this book, though, makes me realize just how much good girls do do things like that.  They tell themselves all kinds of lies about the hundred arbitrary ways they'll never measure up… and then suffer in the misery of persistent failure.

If you don't already have a copy of this book, do yourself a favor.  Join me.  Buy it, read it, soak up the truth that has already begun to penetrate my mask-wearing heart.  And thank you, Emily P. Freeman, for writing such honest and beautiful words that cut to the core of this people-pleasing, try-hard heart.

Linking up to: www.mommadaybyday.blogspot.com.

Buy this book through my Amazon affiliate link and support WhimsySmitten.com!

Beyond Perfection.

Source: Pinterest.

 A friend of mine gave me a gift recently.

It wasn’t wrapped, and it wasn’t even my birthday.  

Now before I tell you what she gave me, you should know… this girl’s got it together.  She’s always been a little better at this whole life business than me.  She nurses her babies into toddlerhood.  She sews them adorable outfits and cooks healthy, amazing meals with seemingly little effort.  She balances two babies on her hip while teaching her daughters fractions and ancient history.  She paints rooms and builds furniture and plants gardens and knits scarves in her spare time.  And she’s sweet…and funny… and pretty…and gracious.

I don’t see her often enough, as she lives in another state, but we passed through her town on the way from Texas to Oregon.  They’re in a bit of a transition, like we are, and have 4 young children living in a 2-bedroom apartment, but her and her husband offered to let us stay the night anyway and cooked us dinner, then booted her own babies out of their beds so we could get a comfy night’s rest.

We arrived after the third day of 12 hours of straight driving.  We were travel-weary and probably smelled like sweat and Taco Bell, but she threw her arms around us and welcomed us in.    

She was wearing sweat pants, which was wonderful because I was too and I just didn’t have it in me to dress like a human being for dinner that night.  The kids’ bedroom was a happy jumble of toys and blankets and blocks and dress-up clothes and magic wands.  Books and papers piled willy-nilly around the living room.  Dinner took longer than expected, and the bathtub cleaner sat beside the tub with a rag that hadn’t been used.  The bathroom was out of toilet paper, and the only hand-towel was tied around a 2-year-old’s neck, cape style, as he and Caleb and Buzz Lightyear all saved the world from the evil Emperor Zurg.  

We laughed.  We ate bruschetta by the pound.  My son dumped spaghetti on the couch while hers threw it on the floor.  We laughed harder and the kids laughed too.  She left the dirty dishes and didn’t let me touch them.  They were still there when we left in the morning.  We drifted off to dreamland that night in disassembled bunk beds with fingerprint paintings dotting the wall beside us.  I slept sound and sweet in the loveliness of it all. 

My friend gave me the gift of real living.  She let me into her honest, dusty life and it was full of grace and beauty.  She didn’t once apologize for the imperfect state of things – she just went right on doing what she did and let me stand beside her and enjoy the hours as they passed.  She didn’t let guilt or perfectionism ruin a wonderful time of fellowship, and she blessed me beyond measure with genuine hospitality.  

I challenge you… I challenge myself… to let go of the perfectionism that creeps into an otherwise perfectly imperfect you, and let others see the nitty gritty. 

Source:  Pinterest.

Give your friends and loved ones a gift, too.  Let them in.  Bless them beyond perfection. 

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Linking up to:  Gypsy Mama's Five Minute Friday.  Blogging, too, can be full of gift and grace when you write beyond perfection.  Try it, here. 

A Hole in My Wholeness

Five Minute Friday:  "Whole".

Join us?  Write for just 5 minutes, no editing, no fussing, no stressing.  

Then, link up here.

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GO

I used to be whole.  I know what it looks like.  I’m aware of the source.

And yet.

I chase wholeness down with good deeds, commitments, conversations.  Pursue it with perfection-set eyes, just so very sure that if I was only good enough, I would be whole again.

All the while, there is a hole in my wholeness.

And in all my chasing down goodness, the hole widens and looms, gaping, and my tennis shoes scuff the edge as I brace and try not to fall in to the chasm between my goodness and His goodness – the hole that leads down the rabbit hole, into the unknown, into the giving up of all I ever thought I knew.

(I seem to be channeling Lewis Carroll these days, but I digress.) 

Goodness is not wholeness.

And man, how I have gotten it confused.

So my shoes toe closer to that widening pit and I peer down into the black and spin around, then throw my arms wide and…

…freefall…

Into my own imperfection.  Into the unknown.  Into the gap of all I cannot and never will be in control of. 

I freefall into grace.

In the hole where I can be made whole.  In the vast wide hole of faith and trust and stretching arms and heart wide open to receive what I can never do and never be and never give without Him.

Grace.

Big and wide and long and deep.

Crazy, extravagant, stunning, radiant grace.

And in this gap where the grace rains down, I am filled to the measure of all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:18).  And my goodness floods in the light of His goodness and I can take a breath and stop striving for anything I can do in my own strength.  The grace…just…floods.  And this is what it means to be whole. 

STOP

Joy and Failure and Vienna Sausages

Let me be honest, in case that last post gave the impression that I, so graciously put my needs last and serve and serve and serve all those around me.

I’m a mess.  More of a mess than my house.  More messy than grape jelly smudges.

Because my heart is not all want to clean and cook and serve and love.  I want what I want, too, and not just the good things He wants for me.  Which mostly is time for myself.  And too much Coca-Cola and not enough vegetables.  And time to be lazy and have fun and never work a moment of my life, and sleep in on Sunday instead of riding a noisy bus to church with shrieking and giggling teenagers.  Truly.  That’s where my heart can go.  And it’s a good thing the Good Lord doesn’t leave me where I’d put my own self most days (in bed, under covers), but gives me whatever I need to get up and do it anyway, at least most of the time.

Yesterday, I got dressed for the day at 11 a.m.  As I type this, my 2-year-old is smashing Pop Tart pieces in my hair… remnants of his sugary-snack-food breakfast, while the others guzzled down a big glass 'o Kool Aid as the sun came up.  I am not getting any mother-of-the-year awards any time soon.  (Which is why I so appreciated the always lovely Lysa TerKeurst's post at InCourage today).

Sometimes, I yell at my kids.  I burn the biscuits.  I leave the dinner dishes in the sink and they’re still there, stinking, the whole next day…. Just so we’re clear.  I served my son Vienna sausages from the can for snack today (yuck, I know).  Shameful.

And the whole thing about baking fresh bread?  I love to bake bread.  I do.  But when I went to get around to it yesterday, I discovered that the insides of the bread machine were missing, probably left behind when we moved here.  Seven months ago.  Because that is how infrequently I get around to baking bread.  In case I had anyone fooled…

I’m just sayin’.

I have twelve people in this house and there are more days than I care to admit that I high-tail it for the back of the house, for my bedroom, and close the door and pound my fists on the bed with hot tears and plead with the Lord about why in the world He put me here, about why He called someone here who is so obviously, so painfully inept at domestic responsibility. 

But I do long to serve these ones around me.  I really do.  As tiring and frustrating and oh-how-exhausting all this living can be, at the end of the day… what’s the alternative?  I can come around to finding the joy in these things because… would I rather there be no more grass-stained toddler tees to wash?  No more powdered donut dust trails across tables or size 7 footprints to clean off dining chairs?  No more giggles or sticky-lip kisses or Pop Tarts in my hair?  Heavens, no.

And I count it all as joy…

Finding Home

I am learning, very slowly, to find home here amongst the brush and young aching hearts that surround me.  It’s been an intense sort of awakening, of late.

The truth is, I have struggled against this ministry since the moment we arrived.  I wanted to love every minute of it.  I (foolishly) anticipated this whole experience to fill me with wonder, to carry me through every difficulty with a spiritual high that found me on my knees, hands lifted high, surging with joy.

No one tells you how hard you will have to fight to keep your faith when you lay it all down, for Faith. 

Of course I didn’t really think I’d soar with happiness all the time, but deep down I believed that saying a big, fat “yes” to the God of All Good Things would free me up to experience a resounding confirmation that I Can Make a Difference in These Lives. 

And friends… it’s been hard.  Soul-ripping, head-pounding, gut-aching.  Difficult.  And the world we’ve shifted to, here, has seemed so… barren… that the rusty deadness creeping through the poverty in this map-dot town has crept right into the heart of me and dulled it down to shades of brown and beige and rust.  I have been, here, as brittle as the dry grass that swallows up this place, swept harsh by wind and the pain that beckons or keeps each one of us in this place. 

I have lived decades in the last six months.  I wasn’t sure I’d make it another six.

But it occurred to me, recently, that surrendering to this ministry – to loving and serving and giving it all for these kids really means surrender.  It means vulnerability and (gulp) sacrifice.  It means embracing all that is foreign about this life and the living of it, and emptying all that I think I need in order that I might be filled.  It is only when I am filled, filled with Grace and Gratitude and Real Love that I can spill over and bless these kids, these wounded hearts that I am here to nourish. 

It is only when I fully receive the gift of God’s presence that my presence can be a gift to God.

And little by little, grace by grace, the grass is beginning to grow.  My feet are steadying, here, and my heart is sewing strong stitches to the hearts of these seven little strangers that honor me and call me Mom, though we are still new at learning each other.  And learning to love is always a wild ride.  

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"The ransomed of the Lord will return.  They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads.  Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.  I, even I, am he who comforts you..."/"I have put my words in your mouth and covered you with the shadows of my hand -- I who set the heavens in place, who laid the foundations of the earth..."  Isaiah 51:11-12; 16