Amber Waves of Grace

I pack with anticipation. Dreams flood and fly and I reach for them, frantic and flailing. He has a dream for me, I know, but trying to capture it, narrow and clear, is trying to catch a river in a paper cup.

The conference sessions are circled and starred in pink ballpoint. I can’t wait to internalize the holy truth, the power and beauty of the words from the mouths of these women who look like Technicolor Jesus to me, these powerhouses with humble hearts, beautiful speakers and writers, friends and sisters that bring me hard to my knees.

I’ve come here to meet the Divine and it’s all right there in my grasp, right in the retreat center meeting room where I’m sure I’ll meet with Him, where I know He’ll whisper gently that one. next. step. toward His big, beautiful dreams for me.

It’s cost a thousand or so dollars for me to get here, a small price to taste what lies in store, a holy encounter for merely a song, a diamond necklace in a nickel machine container, and I am breathless for it.

We are giddy. Anticipation does that and so does the wine and the salted caramels, the high from our still-bleeding foot tattoos, identical, the forever reminder for our each and every step: Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. I am wrapped in the arms of my sister and the sun will be up soon but time does not exist here. This is not a hotel room in the middle of Nebraska but a sacred space where tears fall easy from eyes which have been dry too long, where the seemingly insignificant trivialities are consecrated gifts, revelations in disguise.

Amy plucks my eyebrows and speaks with the mouth of Jesus and inexplicably, the sky ignites with fireworks and orange-breasted spring robins dance across the icy parking lot and there is somehow nothing strange about it at all. This is a thin place, nothing but a gauzy lace curtain through which we stare right into the eyes of Abba Father, locked in the gaze of El Roi: the God of Seeing.

Sleep is short and morning is hard. Bottles with prescription labels decorate this space, bottles with white caps, impossible caps that taunt these swollen knuckles and frozen fingertips, aid for broken bodies. In the sacred space behind the veil there is no need for these bottles, but here in this broken world these capsules are the currency that buys a few moments of flexibility and function. Last night this was a thin place; today, it’s a thick one. Thick with sickness and pain where the clock hands tick off the rhythm of this temporal world: Eight, Nine, Ten a.m. has gone and now so has eleven, and twelve. The hours pass past the pink ink on our conference schedules and we lament a little because it wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were supposed to be in conference sessions, dancing with the Divine, filling our hearts with His dreams for our lives, jumping off mountaintops in tandem with our sisters, arms locked, hearts beating wild with our one collective yes.

The heart wants what the flesh will not allow. Today there are no fireworks, no dancing robins, no giddy laughter. Today there is vomit, there is throbbing, there is frustration and disappointment and pills that don't do their job. Today the veil is not a veil of lace. It is a brick wall and it is a hard strain to see through it. He holds us still, there is no doubt, but I cannot catch His gaze.

Practical attempts are all that can be done but let the hours pass, let the darkness lift organically through the passing of time and tiptoes through the dark. I fire up the car and veer it toward the conference center, towards the speakers we long to hear, and drive right past. I have not come for this just now. I have come for a cold coke and a chicken sandwich and a prayer vigil held quiet in the driver’s seat of a rented Dodge Avenger.

I have come here, to Nebraska, to be spiritual. I have come here to draw near to the heart of God and I cry out to Him. I ask Him to intercede, to form my words and my prayers to the needs of my sister in the moments that make her feel weak. I am a do-er and I pray for practical steps, for action on her behalf while my own knuckles throb with the rhythm of sickness. I have come here to be spiritual. I try and conjure beautiful prayers, powerful prayers. I try and invoke a healing spirit because I believe in His power, because I know she deserves it, because I still believe that we will meet God here, today.

What does she need, Father? Oh, Jesus, what can I do? How can I help her? How can my words, my empty spirit uplift and nurture, encourage and love in action?

I think of the conference speakers, of the beautiful words, the eloquence of holiness and the leaps I have yet to make to be so eloquent.

And all at once, the brick dissolves. Light spills and there is lace once more. Holiness is not always eloquent. Holiness is messy and holiness sometimes comes with a splitting headache and a runny nose.

What can I do, Jesus?

And there it is.

You can get her a chicken sandwich, Cara. You can stop searching merely for moments of fireworks and lace and start standing in the moments of imperfection and brokenness. You can stop praying and start driving. You can buy a chicken sandwich and sometimes, that’s all.

It’s been a while since the elements held this much significance for me. It’s been awhile since the taste of communion was more than dry bread and sweet wine, and I have forgotten the taste of His body, broken even for broken-up me, broken for my hurting but lovely sister sleeping in the hotel bed upstairs, and I do this in remembrance of Him.

Today there is more than bread and wine. Today there is coke and chicken sandwiches and a veil so thin it vaporizes into air. Today, I have met with the Divine and He has dreamed of me. My time in Nebraska didn’t look like I thought it would. I missed every one of the breakout sessions I’d so looked forward to enjoying. I hugged necks swift with quick smiles and polite words and too few stirred-heart conversations with the beautiful people gathered in this Midwestern God-spot.

And yet, we found Him in Nebraska all the same. Tangible holiness, sacred beauty in prescription bottles and breakfast menus, milk soap and nose rings and airport bathrooms. Thin places, all of them…thin spaces thick with grace and reverie.

I am grateful for the parts of the conference we were able to attend, blessed beyond measure by the words and dreams of Deidra, Jennifer, Emily, Dan, Shelly, Diana, Kelli, Holly and Holley, Sandra, the ViBella team, Amy (of course), and all the beautiful women and men who dreamed big and dreamed scared and slid hands across the table to one another this weekend. We all whispered yes with trembling voices in the middle of the corn fields of Nebraska, catching rivers in paper cups, scribbling on stones with abandon in the amber waves of grace where God-sized dreams unfold. 

When It's Time to Untangle

My heart took a big tumble this week. It bounced around and hit a few sharp corners. It is bruised and bleeding today still, pulse-tender like blistered flesh burned on an electric stove. It is still on crutches today, slathering itself in ointment and retreating to quiet spaces.

And I have a lot of thoughts to work out about what's behind all the brokenness and what God has to do with any of it and what it means for my understanding of The Church at large and my voice and my place in things. I don't know quite how much of the pain is a result of my clumsy tendency to stand up for unpopular injustice with a fierce spirit and too many words, and how much is an answer to that prayer I pray in the dark… the scary, exciting, beautiful, awful one. The one that goes, "Break my heart for what breaks yours."

But it's all tied together like a knotted necklace chain and I'll have to untangle it later, after the ointment works its magic, after the wincing has stopped.

Because I'm still slipping between raging indignation and quiet tears. I'm still racing from corner to corner of my mixed-up mind, from the icy shadows to the warmth of the sun.

Somewhere in the midst of this, truth and love and healing will bring me back. They're already beginning to.

But what's saving my life this week are the soft places, like the crook of my husband's arm…the first place I want to bury myself when the hurt stings sharp and the brokenness weighs heavy and he listens, quietly, and hears. Ryan is my safest place, the corner I retreat to when nothing is sure in the world… when my thoughts about God and friendship and mothering and church and work and life bury me in fear and doubt. And then he sits with me, quiet, and I don't need to speak and he doesn't either, and it's love all the same. Ryan is all I know about love on some days, because the way he does it is really something worth taking notes on. He understands the value of presence and his short words linger long when I'm tempted to ask "Why?" What's saving my life today is gratitude for the man in my bed who taught me all I'll ever know about staying.

What's saving my life today are the tiny miracles… picking up the right book at the right time, communities so full of grace and love that I can't escape from Jesus love even when I try to retreat. What's saving me now is that slowly, hour by hour, I'm reminded that there are others standing up for the kind of love I believe in, people who aren't afraid to listen, to speak up for the marginalized and the wounded, people whose stories and lifestyles make a lot of people squirm. Fear brings out the ugly in some people, but intolerance brings out the ugly in me. I'm working on it.

What's saving me now are people like Tammy and Lindsey and Annie and Emily, praying and loving and sending me emails like grace with skin on all through my day. What's saving me, as always, is wild, extravagant grace, and a Nazarene whose love is making nothing in my world comfortable anymore and I suspect it's exactly the way it's supposed to be.

When the heart breaks open because you prayed for it to happen, because you know deep and raw that there's more than the moldable deity you see in modern American culture, it will mess you up. I'm not all that sure I even know what to make of it yet, or what it's going to mean for me, but I know this. It's time to step into quiet for a few days (a week?), to tiptoe away from social media and politics, from hot button issues and phone calls, to quiet my fired-up soul, listen to the breeze that wraps around in an embrace, and learn love from my kids again, the ones who I overhear in their bedroom in tiny voices saying, "You are beautiful," and "I love you," and "Jesus gave us to each other", because this is the love that washes over and saves us all, the love that is worth stopping and smelling and tasting and grasping with all our grip on the tender, unsure days.

So, friends, thank you for grace as I slip quietly away from this space for a few days to read and bake and pray and paint and swing and slide and laugh and sing and be still.

I promise I'm okay… really, truly. Quite full of joy and peace today after the fog of hurt is lifting and just being mindful that this is a place I need to linger for a beat, a pause to usher in Fall and learn a few things about the nature of love and experiencing God. A sorta-kinda spiritual retreat, if you will, a chance to untangle. 

Love, love, love. 

Be back soon.