here, too

Introduction

I had a specific vision for how I wanted to be healed when I was younger. This healing had borders. It was definitive, ultimate, undeniably evident and tidy. Here was the plan: I would go to sleep in the only body I had known, a body with stomach tubes and an indwelling catheter for nutrition, a body decorated by abdominal scars and tight distention and a host of digestive complications, and I would wake up the following day unmarked and entirely tube free. A midnight magic Freaky Friday swap with the ideal, healthier version of me. No trace of each past moment of suffering and a promise the future would now welcome me without limits. This is how I would know I was healed. On the mornings that followed this pre-bed prayer, I remember taking a minute with eyes closed tight and heart loaded with a Christmas morning level of anticipation, before pulling back the covers and lifting my shirt over what still felt like a distended and complicated belly. When I opened my eyes and saw it all there, the evidence of the life I knew and the one that seemed likely for this day too, it was a defeat. Possibly a failure on my end in terms of the strength and measure of my belief, the particular words of the prayer, or some missing variable overlooked, serving the sentence of another 24 hours in this condition carried shame. Often I gave it a try again the next day, and other times to avoid the sting of disappointment, I would stop myself from even imagining it for weeks. There is no count on how frequently I said this etch-a-sketch of a prayer, but it lived as a hope in my heart for a healing that was obvious.

Our desire for relief runs deep and shows up in suffering, in inconvenience, and in every strength of pain that lands somewhere between.

We are told daily how to remedy the broken parts of us. What supplements we need for our distracted brains, which apps will help us track and dial in our sleep for optimal performance, where to go for a restorative vacation so remote it forces us into a digital fast because our phones can’t even get a signal. We want to be fixed, we want to fix those around us, and the profit margins of this economy thrive on our hunger for the promise of change to be accessible, immediate, and permanent.

In 1990’s evangelical church culture this fixing often came with a variety of directives. Some were locational (there is a revival happening at x church in x town you must go to), some attached to a certain individual (pastor x will be here next week with a healing ministry, make sure you are there), some extreme (stop taking your medications and IV infusions and just watch what incredible things happen), some frequency driven (come down at the beginning and end of each service, and every time prayer is offered, and pray at home x times a day), and others came so explicit, the nuance of detail involved gave our tired hearts a boost of hope enough to try again. One particular solution was offered in the form of a cloth prayed over specifically for my young, broken body. My parents were told to put it under my pillow and to pray over it each night for a full week, and I would be healed. Absolutely desperate for me to experience relief and clinging to the possibility that this could be the moment, they brought it home and began to follow every part of what was said. On one challenging night that week, my rebellious digestive system added vomit, a soiled pajama and bedding change, and a grab bag of other additional medical steps to our routine. Mom and dad cleaned me up, connected my central line to the necessary intravenous infusion of nutrition and calories, and wrapped up the remaining tasks to care for the family before finally going to bed. After being asleep for a while, mom shot up in a panic as her exhausted brain remembered what had been missed- the prayer napkin. Was there a certain hour it needed to be said by to be effective? If we say it now will it still count? Did we miss it? Did we mess this up? The flood of questions came mingled with waves of guilt and with the pressure that the success or failure of this healing was somehow on our shoulders.

It was years later before my parents shared this tender story with me. As waves of my own guilt and fear began to erode the shoreline where this type of objective healing used to seem certain and entirely possible, they opened up about their hopes and disappointments as well. The question that took up space in us was how do we hold on to healing when it has refused to come in the ways we expected?

Instead of a clearly defined map or manual on healing, what I have found are stories of those who have encountered it, and been changed by it. I have set down the fear that I “missed my healing,” as if it were a single on ramp in my life, a borderline, a city limit dividing the sick and the well. In that glorious setting down, I am freed from the fixation of the one time offer and welcomed into the challenging and gorgeous work of becoming more whole. On that good path are fellow road worn travelers teaching from their own lives of how hope and healing met them, and continue to meet them along the way. And instead of a manual full of formulas, we collect this robust full color field guide from each other on how to spot the bright vibrant wings of the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.

And still, there are stories from those I know and those who existed long before me telling of a healing that is a moment of swift and unexplainable change. Those stories are stunning. Where these glimpses could add another description of a striking and unique form in the guide of how healing graciously shows up, they often turn into a tight rigid mold we attempt to make every shape of healing fit into- a once in a moment intersection of intervention beyond us that lifts us up and out of an undesired state into a better one. If that is not our story, it can be easy to believe that healing hasn’t yet found us, or that we have failed in being able to take hold of it. A lifetime of circumstances beyond me have worked out in me the desire to look for healing everywhere. I keep seeing it. Unexpectedly, beautifully, bafflingly everywhere.

We whose bodies and minds ache and malfunction and break apart are not excluded from wholeness, from knowing healing has met us even in our glaring need. Often the thing in us that looks broken or off kilter is the one spot others tend to offer up a variety of remedies and words and steps to take so that we can be better. These attempts feel as though they flow from the genuine desire we have for each other to not suffer, or sometimes from the deep aversion we have at seeing vulnerability on display outside us and acknowledging in those places we often try to avert our eyes that we ourselves are vulnerable too. There are no physical bodies immune to wear and decay. Our current capacities and abilities are borrowed, gifted, lent to us for a time and in a measure that we cannot control. Despite all training and interventions and antioxidants, they will eventually fade. We wage war against the fade. Sometimes I wonder what kind, quiet mercies and present moments of goodness waiting for us become casualties of that war. What if true healing was not the bubble wrap of a prayer to preserve us, but a prayer that builds a growing trust and settled heart which dare to hope even in the persistence of weakness and struggle and the often terrifying act of being a human, we can still be whole?

This is my offer of a field guide, a hand reached out pointing to where goodness and healing have shown themselves in this fragile life.

I have not experienced a healing that offers clear boundary lines of before and after. This 39 year old version of me still has tubes, continues to require the infusion of a chemically manufactured form of nutrition into my veins to keep me alive, and these symptoms often grab the reins of any given moment to steer it away from the agenda I had planned. The function of my body and the desires of my heart span a chasm wider than I can bridge. Last year alone involved three surgeries, the removal of most of my small intestine, and consecutive months where taking a shower was the proud accomplishment of my daily dose of energy. On paper, I am putting up a great defense against any evidence that healing has found me here.

Oh, but it has. Right here, in this very wild and unruly body, in this life with these limits, unfixed but somehow more whole, healing has come. It shows up so small I have to squint to see it. It arrives in unmarked packages that feel risky to open, unrecognizable from what I expected and was prepared to receive. At times healing has infuriated me, and it has given me space and permission for that disappointment and burning anger to ignite something terrifyingly new. It has wrestled me to exhaustion and then lovingly scooped me up. It has cost me when I wanted it to be cheap, and has been a gift when I was trying so hard to earn it. It is comforting and confounding. It has taken and offered much more than I thought it would. Healing has walked into my hospital room and bedroom and right into my midnight pleas for relief with a quiet, unassuming, gracious presence. It has left parts of me wholly undone, while mending places I didn’t realize so desperately ached to come together. It has been surprisingly what I most needed and has fully declined to look like what I thought I was hunting down. And now I cannot unsee it. Embracing reality with openness instead of graspingly trying to fix or fight against it has freed me to search for restoration and goodness and wholeness unfolding in every dusty nook and cranny of this world and in my fractured little corner of it. And when dark and hard times startle me by becoming darker and harder, the wick of this gentle thing still lit reminds me to rub weary eyes and look again- healing is here, too.

God of the panic attack

We don’t know what we don’t know.

And this is how it is for most experiences in life, not until we get submerged into a situation, baptized by a grief or a loss or a hurt so deep we feel filled up with it, or we walk close enough next to someone who splinters in a way that we get a front row seat to, do we have the categories and descriptors available to our little brains for that particular brand of suffering.

Pain is an exchange of commodities. When it hits full force, there are neatly packaged answers and clean, clear ways of thinking and understanding our lives that get pulled from our hands, and in turn we are given something to carry that feels a bit more tangled, less defined, a weightier way of being in and seeing the world. We lack the ability to answer if something is good or bad or easy or hard, because we now see that those things aren’t divided out places we reside in at one time, that all of these spots of gratitude and challenge, grief and joy exist in concentric, overlapping relationships. Eventually this more complicated thing can become a beautiful gift, taking something that was black and white and turning it prismatic, full technicolor. The gift of pain is in allowing us, from this fractured place, to let those broken things now act as facets that give us vantage points into depths of perspective that were inaccessible before. Pain offers us new lenses for living.

If you’ve never had the experience of a panic attack, it can feel impossible to imagine it fully. The out of control-ness, the fear that feels like it is coring something out of the center of you in a way that will stay unfillable, the embarrassment that you lack the mental fortitude to deal with what is happening in your mind and body, full out loss of control.

This most recent hospital trip was unexpected and unplanned. What started out as a manageable issue turned emergent, and parts of me that felt strong and stable quickly flipped upside down. I tried with intention to calm these waves of upset, drawing on what I knew as truth and the resources inside of me and around me to steady the shake. Even though there have been multiple surgeries and body frustrations these past few years, I haven’t felt this depth of fracture for over a decade. It felt as if a switch was flipped. After the necessary challenging medical procedures, when I knew my body was physically on the healing side of things, my brain still lived in the land of chaos. Waves of fear, full out panic, and even in the seemingly quiet moments, the buzz of anxiety hummed and pulsed its way through me without relent.

On one of my noisiest nights, I was still awake around 3am in a bit of a shame spiral, convincing myself I should be able to change out of this fear state as simply as taking off dirty clothes and putting on clean ones. I felt small, embarrassed, frustrated at my weakness and lack. In such a moment of mercy for my noisy mind, my heart landed on a story in the book of Luke about Jesus begging for the opportunity to bypass suffering. I don’t say this as a declarative theological statement, but in that moment I felt like Jesus knew what it was to have a panic attack.

In the gospels, the descriptors of that experience include: (AMP, ESV)

agony, sorrowful to death, troubled, fell on his face, weak, begged to remove this, sweat like great drops of blood, grieved, greatly distressed, deeply distressed and anguished, almost to the point of death, longed for support and asked his companions- could you not stay awake with me?

For anyone who has felt the depths of anxiety, this experience feels viscerally relatable. And in that moment at 3am in the swirling of my mental storm, there was a comfort in knowing I was seen and understood by the God of the panic attack. These words may bristle against what many hold to be true. They aren’t said in derision, and they aren’t meant to diminish. The physical and emotional manifestations of this moment in the life of the God of the universe detail a level of struggle that for those who have been or are in the place of unraveling, offer a solidarity beyond words. Most of us can’t manage to look at our own struggles, so the concept of seeing strength undergo crushing weakness is unpalatable. The words given to us don’t allow an easy path around the pain. Agony is not a splinter in a thumb, it is a depth of breaking open where the basic ability to function and manage life feel inconceivable. It is the desire for an eject button, a bypass route, a way out of the pressing and crushing. And when one doesn’t come, it is grief.

For all I don’t understand and can’t make sense of in scripture, for all that my small hands can’t hold, the concept of someone setting down full power and ability to never experience or taste suffering, and choosing to step into humanity in understanding and great love with people who are broken, is one of the greatest gifts of comfort I have known in this life. And in the middle of that night this truth scooped me up and carried me with such tenderness that I was not alone in my pain. I have found that to be the agent of greatest change in my life. Not shame or prodding or quippy encouragement, but someone stepping into the places I desperately want to bury with their presence and compassion.

I once had a pediatric nurse who, while wheeling me back for an endoscopy, explained that she had just undergone this same procedure without sedation so that she could better understand her patients. What do you think that moment did for my ten year old trembling heart? Did it decrease my respect and confidence in her? Of course not! It is a moment of connection so strong I still think about it decades later. She willingly stepped into suffering on my behalf, to offer me a moment of feeling less alone in my pain. What a stunning act of goodness to give another person.

The photo at the top of this post is from a glass art exhibit inside the hospital at University of Nebraska Medical Center. When granted off floor walking privileges, it is my very favorite place to visit while inpatient. A visible reminder of those overlapping spaces of holding goodness and beauty and deep pain in this same little human address of a body I’ve been given. And as much as we wish we could shortcut our suffering, aren’t these the moments that work in us so that we can come alongside others and live out that same grace, offering that same gentleness and space of understanding? Instinctually, we want to cover up and hide our deficits. We fear allowing others into the places in us where we don’t measure up and can’t keep up. But in these passages of scripture we are trusted with witnessing all power breaking open on our behalf, and in doing so we realize we have never before witnessed such true strength.

There is a zero percent plea for pity in any words or behind the curtain moments that I put out for public eyes. I usually attempt to talk myself out of this level of transparency because of the possibility that it would look like a sympathy hunt. Any time we open ourselves up in our most tender places, there is opportunity for assumption and misunderstanding. There is also the beautiful chance that in sharing these moments, it allows someone else who has been dunked in the deep end to take a much needed breath of solidarity. I write for the latter. It has happened enough times in my life that someone has seen the space I’m in, and shared their life with me in a way that connects me to hope, and allows me to keep moving through another day. Hoping as we hear each others stories and see in ourselves these broken open places, we can move forward in a way that brings understanding and healing. We are not alone in our pain.

remembering: as healing

I open my phone to the camera roll and scroll back three months. A block of shots from a walk around the Big Thicket with Chase and Linus, photos from a spontaneous dinner with the family, a few snapshots of a dog park visit with a friend and a drop by the fire department to see dad. Small but significant reminders that I am more than my current reality, and still a (semi) participating, living, breathing human on the planet. This was my rhythm for a good while before surgery.

Prior to this most recent operation in February, the function of my body had slowed to crawl. I counted it a successful day if I was capable of feeding the pup and hooking up to my infusion. That low bar was the win. And it took all energy and fortitude I could gather to check those two small boxes. So as a practice and habit of sanity, my camera roll became a sanctuary of remembering. While in bed and feeling less than a full human, I would scroll through reminders of another Jana who felt very far from the unshowered weary version currently in charge. I would look at pictures of magic Disney trips, I watched videos from days when we loaded up Linus for a destination-less drive in the car, I pulled up memories of meals cooked and birthday parties attended, each small square a piece of me, broken off by the sharpness of life. I began remembering.

We have an endless possibility of things that dis-member us. Moments where we feel absolutely taken apart. A harsh word from a critic, or even more damaging, one from a friend. The unraveling of a relationship. Unexpected failure of a body function. Often it is more simple than that, a mundane routine that sandpapers us down into a lesser version of our full selves. Both intensity and lull can try and tell us that this current reality in our line of vision is the whole of us. These things slowly undo, leaving us feeling that the narrowness of our right now is the big picture.

Re-membering is a surgery, a stitching, a putting back together. Scattered parts of our full selves are brought in and attached. When I remember something, I pull it from being obsolete, filed away in a dark drawer. It is given life again, color, memory and scent. It breathes again. Remembering is an act of healing. It is a practice that reminds us our immediate is not our ultimate.

As beautiful as it is to be given a fuller view of our own selves, we are also able to remember in ways that reach past us. My one story is good and hard and complicated and wonderful. Still, what this life and this world is capable of doing (or undoing in us) can feel like more than what our individual stories could ever possibly hold or make right.

The craftsmanship of Jesus was in remembering for renewal. He built fresh things out of the old ways, he saw a path forward in light of the places he and those before him had walked. Jesus pointed to what had been as he remarkably made something fantastic and new. Jesus was able to look at what was in front of him through a lens of possibility. Death into life, darkness shifted towards light, weakness became strength. For all of the very good and very hard parts of my personal history that come together to make up and fold out into the fullness of my life, I am invited into an even grander re-membering.

For me, being part of the story of Jesus is an invitation to reach back and pull from a goodness and grace that is not just a patching up but a new garment. My own history can mend a few of the places I feel ripped open, but this is fabric, material, and supplies for something I didn’t even know was possible. I work so hard so many days to get back to a better version of myself that I have experienced along the way. I keep forgetting my own little life is not the limiting source of what I am able to draw from to be made whole.

Given to those in the Christian faith, communion is our practice of re-membering. Instead of a camera roll, Jesus uses carbs and wine (genius) to jolt our taste buds into a state of memory. When we bite into fresh hot bread, it is to signal our forgetful brains that we are not the sustaining source. And when rich wine hits the tongue, we talk to our hearts about grace, forgiveness, and redemption. He said to do this often because he knew our propensity for dismemberment. He saw all of the ways we’d get taken apart, and he knew we would need something much bigger than our own story to be put back together.

When the noise of my now feels loud, I have a standing invitation to reach back and be reminded of my place in this bigger narrative being rolled out. My own full life is more than this immediate moment. And when I feel stuck in dead, dark, weak places, I can pull from the wild and wonderful story of all love and goodness becoming a real human who opened up a restored way of being a person in this world. When I really allow my heart and imagination to wrap around that, I am not just stitched up, I am made new.

free

Off the grid of digital chaos has felt like the safest place of solace this past year, so I have tried to lay low and quiet to not add to the noise of it all. We are bananas in the face of adversity, this remains my word of the year for 2020 and now rolling appropriately, seamlessly, relentlessly through 2021.

B-A-N-A-N-A-S © Gwen Stefani

How skilled we all are at pointing fingers and quickly looking for any group, party, country to hold the blame of everything we feel has unraveled from our tight knit ball of control. A truth spoken by my pastor and a staff counselor at the beginning of this pandemic was that the weight of all the heaviness happening did not create the cracks we see, it simply revealed them. They have been there, the split open places of being part of the human race runs a fault line right back to our very origins in the garden. We’ve cracked this good creation wide open in every way imaginable. This year tilled up some overgrown patches of grass hiding those deep places of brokenness. Some of the ways they have presented themselves to us feel new in form (pandemic, shutdowns, rioting, racial tension, massive revelations of sexual assault within just about every major industry, closely occurring catastrophic weather events), but they reveal the same reoccurring struggles that continue to manifest in us (ego, pride, fear, anger, blame, selfishness, comfort, power, control).

I go back and back again to the experience of living within the confines of this body, this condition, as an education in the awareness I am not in control. Jesus felt that those in the quiet, weak, hungry margins of culture had some kind of blessing that they lived in, operated under. I feel the blessed gift of dependence fresh with each morning and over again in every hour of the day. I need something beyond myself that my body cannot offer, which wakes up a recognition for a greater, stronger source of life. He’s the only one I have found. Much against the tide of some teaching that gives me the hard sell of my faith being the key to unlock all chaos and dis-ease happening in this body, I have found instead this wild body to be a good and welcoming house for a God who seems quite comfortable in the presence of tired, weary creatures. I find Him not demanding I angrily march and stomp and shout right phrases to somehow claim a freedom from this body, instead He says this will make quite a lovely home, may I pull up a seat? We talk and laugh, read and pray, sit quiet and silent, or He lets me rest while He takes watch over the night shift. My body, a humble home for God. When we get invited into this freedom that is within us, we begin to recognize that no external circumstances are capable of removing freedom from us.

It is a good and holy and right thing to fight for justice, for a freedom that liberates and lifts off oppressive and inhumane burdens. The beautiful good gifts of a healthy functioning body, a flourishing source of resources, are all ways that we experience a glimpse of the on earth as it is in heaven life. Still, these gifts are not guaranteed by following the way of Jesus. Instead, we get a better thing. We get a liberation, deep and transformative, that allows us to remain free even when circumstances outside of our control attempt otherwise. We cannot neglect that deeper thing. It is a sustaining source that remains beautifully unattached from the external operating systems we encounter, and also rightly fuels any energy and efforts we take towards bringing goodness and liberation here on earth as it is in heaven.

Lately we have seen full force the marking of individual territory, working so hard to ensure no one steps on our turf or tightens our boundaries of control, autonomy. So many have staked a bold and spicy claim to dare someone to make them conform or cooperate.

When we find ourselves knotted up with fear and a frazzled concern that something may be taken from us, often it is a beautiful invitation waiting to be opened so that we can attend to the ways Jesus is wanting to bringing freedom in us. Once we wake up to that place, this inner little sacred peace party of knowing we are kept and held by God, nothing outside of our control can take that stunning freedom we’ve been gifted.

This frame and form that we get to live in and eat soft warm chocolate chip cookies with, and hold babies with and use muddied hands to plant fresh flowers with is one of impermanence. We’re not making it out of this gig alive, but this little human body still shows that hunger for eternity. We feel it in our bones and say it with our diets and home security systems that we’re trying our hardest to keep this human form and the ones in our care sustained and going. He has set eternity in the heart, dropped straight into our core is that longing for the life we now feel and the life we hope for to keep going. Our ideas of how to keep that life going are so different, and they collide around every corner into chaos because we each scramble to take our own paths of self protection. When we know He’s got us, we don’t have to hustle to keep it all together (because how on earth could we?) those tight little fists unfurl. Generosity blooms. Peace springs forth. We are kept by him. Good shepherd. Flowing, wild River. Bread of life. A fortress of strength.

I have no kingdom to defend, no turf of my own to mark. I’m invited into a kingdom established long before me that will keep on going long after me. And every single seat at the table is an invitation responded to, a feast prepared, a home with open doors. Every glimpse of this eternal tasted here is but gift and shadow of the greater still to come.

I have zero answers on how to be a human in these hard complicated places of life, but I know I have found compassion born from this place of knowing Jesus has got me, more tenderness and trust that I am cared for, which gives margin in my heart to care for who and what I see around me. I still vote and seek medical care and check the Find My iPhone app when I haven’t heard from Chase and it is 3 hours past when he said he would be home, I still grasp and ache and watch the news with monsoon storms in my belly thinking this is definitely the end of the world, but there it is, underneath every panic and longing for control, that place of peace. I am free. Free in this wild body because God says He is with me, free when this body fails because then I will be with Him. No guilt in life, no fear in death. This is the power of Christ in me. From life’s first cry to final breath. Praying you find your way there today no matter what is swirling in or around you. I love being on this planet with you incredible humans, what a gift.

becoming: as healing

“I’m trying mom, I am really trying.”

I said this as we held hands lamaze level tight, both did that kind of crying that chops up full words into broken pieces and turns shirt sleeves into kleenex. I was in the throws of my gut refusing food for a good amount of time and we were headed to a family function in the country where the fried fish was fresh and my favorite nostalgic dishes would be plenty. Hunger rises back up like the sun. Hard as I’ve tried, I have never outgrown its pangs or trained myself to mute the impulses and signals that propel a person in search of food. And still here I was, trying. I was trying with everything in me not to crave what I could not have. Some rare and celebratory days food nourishes and I get to keep it, most days it stages a rebellion and finds a way out. Many of us with gut issues have this complicated tangle of nausea and hunger, layered with such guilt for feeling we should be able to by discipline or by restraint or maybe by enough organic bone broth fix our uncooperative bodies. In this moment of a frustrated clash in the desire to both minimize the gut war raging inside and to revel in the connection, savoring, and joy that comes from enjoying a meal with family, Ronda McNeel entered into my hunger. My mom did not reprimand me for wanting so badly to eat, or attempt to pacify me by saying it would all be ok. In a beautiful act of solidarity, she willingly withheld from the feast available to her. We made eye contact during the day, seeing each other and into each other and each glance was a tender reminder that I was not alone on this no-food island.

About two weeks after my birth, mom recognized the barriers present would keep her from letting the overflow of her maternal body, full of intentional design and perfectly crafted nourishment, be given to feed her child. I could not eat, she could not nurse. Something in the body weakens when it cannot receive, and something in the soul shrivels when it cannot give. We have both grieved.

The solidarity of restraint from food mentioned in the story above was not isolated to one day, mom spontaneously and routinely fasts on my behalf. In restaurants, on road trips, in hospital rooms and on Wednesdays and beyond, I have witnessed her refusal of food as a desire to connect with what I am experiencing in my body. Her stepping into my hunger does not fill my stomach, but it eases my heart. There is sacrifice in it, she offers her empty belly alongside mine, and somehow I am fed.

To willingly participate in the suffering of another is one of the most Christ-becoming activities we are invited into. The incarnation of Jesus was power laid down, not strength taken or lost. Fullness becoming hunger. Privilege becoming vulnerability. Freedom becoming restrained. Holder of cosmos descended into an embryonic state with umbilical chord attached, wrapped up in an amniotic sac for about 40 weeks. He untouched by sin and brokenness picked it all up and shouldered it by choice, so that our crushed lungs could be gifted the capacity to take in a deep, cleansing, Spirit filled breath for the first time in our lives. Willingly withholding his rights, for the sake of becoming, for the purpose of connecting. The legacy of Jesus is that He descended and suffered both for relation and for restoration.

By choice, in a way that allowed Him to embody and relate to every single ache that we will or could encounter in our fragile human state, His giving over, letting go, and laying down created a safe solid place for us to meet Him. Starting from the most cellular level, He let mitosis and gestation split up and build up until each vertebrae and nerve pathway and hair follicle emerged. Conceptual artist and architect of The Milky Way galaxy and beyond made Himself small enough to be dropped through the water breaking, contracting labor of a vaginal birth.

Is that not the wildest thing you have ever heard? Maybe even describing it in those terms feels mighty uncomfortable. We like neat and tidy creeds with easy to check boxes, and here Christ came attached to a placenta. Immanuel, God with us. That is what we are saying we believe, or try to believe, or catch us some days and it seems so poetic yet impossible. My darling little brain has such a fractured grasp of all the implications and intricacies of a virgin birth, a triune but singular God, and other pillars of this faith tradition that I am in. It is far too much for these small hands to hold without dropping heaps of it along the way. I have reconciled to myself that I cannot hold it all, but I can be held by it instead. When I am not big enough to keep it or figure it out, it will keep me, because after learning the story of maker becoming made, where else could I possibly go? It is here in this understanding we first connect in a way that does not just change a religious status or punch some kind of membership card, but flings wide open the door to an entirely new way of being a person. I am not alone in my suffering. I am seen and understood, from feeble start to weary end, a universal longing fulfilled. For this reason, I cannot let go of the scarred hand of Christ.

So what do we do with this knowing? Just as my sweet momma often lays down the option to eat, and chooses to become hunger for me and with me, Christ experienced our frail humanity, but He did not stop there. Christianity says that God will eventually put back every disjointed place and illuminate all darkness, and until then He sits with us in the tender knowing only those who’ve worn skin can claim. If that is all I can ever say I know for sure, it would be enough. It is the most healing thing I could ever imagine. In His fasting he knows my hunger, and in His sacrifice He becomes my bread. This twofold example of how to meet others in pain is ordered and intentional. Becoming and givenness for the purpose of relation and restoration.

Becoming is the choice to relate to the pain of another, givenness is sacrificing to bring ease to that pain. This has given me a different view of the disciplines and practices we are called to engage in. These acts are not pieces of flair to show how fantastic we are or auditions to secure a spot in the afterlife. They are exercises that make our stiff, stubborn muscles capable of bending. In fasting we practice denying our cravings on purpose, intentionally feeling hunger. This helps us taste the ache of those who are empty and spilled out, reminding us of the shared way we all long to be filled. Silence and solitude is the choice to be alone, and perhaps even lonely. We do not have to enter into this place if we wish not to, we all could crank out a list of ways to stick a pacifier in our restless hearts. We can distract our way through any anxiety or discomfort, but to choose to be alone, particularly for the sake of cultivating an increased connection with those who are lonely, that is radical in a way that just might make the evening news. In generosity we practice giving over of what we think is ours. Sometimes this starts through clenched teeth and tight fists, but if we stick with it enough eventually we learn that we are not the source. We are guests at a table we did not set, with food we have not provided, invited to feast. This revelation transforms us from someone brazenly guarding the dinner door and asking to see tickets to a person pulling out chairs and asking if we can pour drinks. After all, how in the world were we even let in here to begin with?

When I feel the urge to be inflexible, when I find myself quick to say what someone should have or could have or if that was me I would already, I will go back to this place. He met me at my least common denominator. He orchestrated a way to understand me, getting hands and feet dirty in the process. His bend towards me spanned light years, my lowering only covers inches, feet at most. I need to remember that on my haughty days. Lower child, remember He went down there. Go find Spirit of God hanging out with the poor in spirit, and be blessed.

animals: as healing

This is the first writing of a series called: as healing. A little more backstory here, and here. We all walk through some weary places and need reminding that even if healing doesn’t show up like we think it will, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t shown up at all. Out of necessity, desperation, I have started to pay attention to the ways healing meets me right where I am. These posts are an acknowledgment that many things, concepts, creatures can show up in our lives and offer us doses of beauty and comfort, they show up as healing. This healing may feel small, incremental, but if we miss it or minimize it, we may pass up on a life raft to help us survive today and float on to an even deeper healing tomorrow. If every good gift is from above, then even a tiny thing offered by a grand, imaginative Creator is worthy of our attention.

I am starting this series with a soft pitch. Anyone with decent aim could knock this right out of the park.

Animals as healing.

In the creation story, our initial responsibilities and interactions were with animals. Deep set in the heart of a human is the desire to connect with living things. Animals can be kept as pets to bring comfort and playfulness, or remain wild and create in us a sense of awe. Some animals are trained to carry out tasks, learn skills. They offer us healing through companionship, assistance, and even wonder at the many shapes and colors they put on.

Also, animals quick break our pride.

Here is the scene. Tonight there is a work function at the home of your boss. You try to remember if you have been there before, maybe to drop off a usb drive from her top right drawer that one week she had the flu. It was a big home, right? Kind of formal. You try on an outfit range from lazy Saturday brunch all the way to Grandma passed away, and start panicking because underdressed just concretes that millineal stereotype while overdressed and you may as well have worn a Halloween costume. Text work BFF. “Casual but nice” she says and sends you a quick photo of her striped top with dark wash skinny jeans and you feel some relief and solidarity. Nice blouse, black tights, check. You don’t want to get there too early, you can’t handle the anxiety of being the first one responsible for full conversation so you drop off last nights movie to the Redbox on route as a buffer. You finally arrive. House seems bigger than remembered. There are already 3 cars in the street and 4 in the driveway, one belongs to Frank who also watches “The Office,” so now at least you can hull up together in a corner entertaining each other with “that’s what she said” grenades dropped into conversations at the worst time with intention. You stand around uncomfortably and try really hard to remember the name of Sheila’s oldest son so you can ask about his transition off to college when you see it. Curled up and napping by the fridge, on best behavior by either old age or training, a dog. Setting a coaster-less drink on the table without hesitation, you missile your path to it and drop down. After shamelessly checking the undercarriage you begin a narrative, out loud, mind you.

“You are a lady aren’t you? The classiest of ladies and your name is,” [grab collar] “Lady! Of course it is,” [formally extend hand] “well it is an honor to meet you Lady. I work with your mommy,” [the babiest of baby voices] “yes I do! And she has a picture of you on her filing cabinet and I sneak in when I am sad or mad at Frank to see your little angel face! But you are even prettier in person,” [as she is licking your face] “mmmmmm yes get it all! That is Taco Bell, I ate before I came, get it. Help yourself to whatever is leftover” [from behind, the jingling of another collar, you turn back to see] “A SECOND PUPPERS???” [you don’t say this, you scream it while actually starting to cry a little] “I didn’t know there was a SECOND PUPPERR” [burying your wet face into its soft body] “RRRSSSSS!” This continues for around 17 minutes 24 seconds and we know this because Frank clocked it all on his watch starting at the time you said “Taco Bell,” and for weeks he will not let you forget that your black tights were covered in white fur and your pale face streaked with dark mascara from the actual real self demeaning tears you cried on the tiled floor of your bosses home while in a dog pile. With dogs.

And the craziest part of this whole scenario? You do not care. Released into a room of your peers, same ones whose opinions you work hard to maintain and have imaginary conversations with in your head so the real thing doesn’t come out gibberish, you choose in their presence to wad up all ego and reputation, throw it in the trash, and drop down to the filth of a floor, all for the love of an animal. [Or two].

How many of us have been on that floor? We stoop over for them, get dirty with them, take naps with them. When we talk about them, we use language like “family member,” “best friend,” “literally saved my life.” The solace of a creature we love crawling in our lap after a heartbreak is so relatable an experience that it has television episodes, novels, and entire movies dedicated to reliving it. We are soothed by the presence of our pets and pay money to gaze upon species too wild for us to get close to. We love animals, and in spite of ourselves, they seem to love us back.

In one of my Social Work classes, we discussed the common occurrence of elderly individuals living on a fixed income who regularly purchase food for their pet in lieu of nutrition for their own bodies. My heart broke, but I understood. We care well for the things that care for us. Having a pet keeps some people alive. Service animals who are trained to carry out tasks as clinical as alerting for low blood sugar, or placing paws on someone in mid panic attack to bring them back to reality, are indispensable to the owners they protect. Other animals, by just sheer presence, convince their human with tender affection to please hold on for one more day. “If I was gone, no one would be here to take care of Buzz. Buzz needs me and I need him. Ok buddy, I’ll stay.” You may flinch, but let’s go there. Many have been so wounded, abused, or hurt that the deepest bond they will let themselves form is with an animal. The drive within us to be loved and have relationship is so strong that if we cannot find connection with other people, we reach to animals to close the gap. Even if we do have a really great community of love and support, we may feel misunderstood or trapped in shame, perhaps lonely even when surrounded by those we know. We may have conversations with a horse or a bird that we would feel terrified to speak in the presence of a person. Often we pray with our animals, not to them, but out loud and somehow as we rub behind ears and kiss furry foreheads we feel heard and seen and a little less alone. Animals show up for us as healing.

These are my babies.

Not the only animals I have loved in my life, but the two I am responsible for and who scratch the itch of motherhood. Linus is 2 and excited about life every day and loves to watch squirrel videos on youtube and after being shaved for the summer, grew back the fluffiest coat of feathery chicken fuzz from front to bottom. Jovie is 10 and the boss and she lived with Chase in this house long before I ever did and on my sickest day I can see her eyes and the way she follows me from room to room and I just know that she knows.

They both give beyond what they take. After returning from this most recent surgery, I have spent more time with them than any of my people people. They are my nearest companions in the recovery process, loving me on my quiet sleepy pajama days, offering me a ball to play with, or curling up to join me in a nap. Healing.

GIVE IT A TRY

It likely won’t cure a diagnosis and can’t reverse a loss, but maybe it will lower your blood pressure, pump some serotonin into your body, give you permission to cry and process with another living creature who looks at you like you hung the stars and moon. If you have a pet, spend some time with them today. Go for a walk, write a little poem about them, show someone a picture of them and tell the story of how you found them. If not, hop on youtube for a video montage of baby goats, call a friend with a gerbil and ask if you can gerbilsit, volunteer at an animal shelter. If you are close enough to the zoo, explore and marvel at the wonder of creation. Just go find and hug a puppers, ok?

Also, how has an animal helped you heal? Do you have a story of finding some bravery from saddling a horse or swimming with a dolphin? Has a pet been with you in a crisis, kept you company in loss? Did you wake up to wonder at being introduced to the marvel of a kangaroo and think “if something this incredible exists, then I am glad that I do too?” We all need to hear, and pictures make it even better.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

• Article on pets & feel good hormones

• “How to Be a Good Creature,” a memoir by Sy Montgomery, both cover and content are remarkable

• An article about Dr. Bill Thomas, Geriatrician. This one is worth explaining. The segment below from the article describes an incident, or adventure depending on perspective, when Dr. Thomas introduced a cluster of animals into a nursing home with the hopes of bringing some life back to the residents.

“They ordered the hundred parakeets for delivery all on the same day. Had they figured out how to bring a hundred parakeets into a nursing home? No, they had not. When the delivery truck arrived, the birdcages hadn’t. The driver therefore released them into the beauty salon on the ground floor, shut the door and left. The cages arrived later that day, but in flat boxes, unassembled. It was ‘total pandemonium,’ Thomas said. The memory of it still puts a grin on his face. He is that sort of person. He, his wife, Jude, the nursing director, Greising, and a handful of others spent hours assembling the cages, chasing the parakeets through a cloud of feathers around the salon and delivering birds to every resident’s room. The elders gathered outside the salon windows to watch. ‘People who we had believed weren’t able to speak started speaking,’ Thomas said. ‘People who had been completely withdrawn and nonambulatory started coming to the nurses’ station and saying, “I’ll take the dog for a walk.” ’ All the parakeets were adopted and named by the residents. The lights turned back on in people’s eyes. In a book he wrote about the experience, Thomas quoted from journals that the staff kept, and they described how irreplaceable the animals had become in the daily lives of residents.”

Parakeets as healing. I love it.

as healing

My young mom and dad were handed a small cloth that came with some heavy strings attached. “This has been prayed over, if you put this under her pillow every night for a week and continue to pray, Jana will be healed.” Full of equal parts hope and desperation, they brought it home and complied. Mom said there was one night that week I was so sick. She was trying to get me hooked up to my infusion, while cleaning up vomit, changing sheets and clothes and finding ways to soothe me so I could fall asleep. A jolt of panic shot her out of bed hours later when she remembered the cloth. She said she held the fear that she had missed this opportunity or somehow messed it up. I don’t think about this story without heart aching and eyes leaking. Regardless of intent from the one who gave the cloth, they handed my parents the weight of a boulder they were not meant to carry.

What does it mean to be healed? Does it mean better? Does it mean fixed? Do we have a part to play in it? Is it my responsibility? Does it happen a little at a time or all at once? Does it involve pills and operations, prayer and devotion, potions and chants? When it occurs will it be as good as new or just patched up? Do I chase after it until I can grasp it or do I stay content and find it inside? If I research enough, is there a piece of information I am missing that will fix this? Do I pretend that I am happy when I show up or can I be real with them? If I seek counseling, intervention, medical care is that showing a lack of faith? Should I travel to another country in search of it? Should I tweak my diet or add a $400 supplement or switch to all organic or not eat sugar? If they haven’t called back yet with the results, does that mean it is good or bad? Is this in my head, can positive thinking launch me out of the pain? Is it causing a burden on my family? Should I take pain medication? Will that make it worse? Am I making it worse? Am I crazy? Would it make it easier on everyone if I didn’t wake up? Did you just write that in my chart? If pain makes me feel that I am a fraction of the person I was before, is that enough? What does it mean to be a good human? Was it something I did while I was pregnant to cause my child to be sick? Do they blame me? If I call in again, cancel again, will it make me look flaky or lazy? Can I talk to them out loud when I miss them? Are they actually looking down and watching over me or is that just something I say to soothe myself? Is this payback or karma or reaping what I sow? If I keep myself busy, will it make me suffer less or run me down? Do I still have anything worthwhile to contribute? Can I do this day? Do I have what it takes? Where can I find relief? How can I help them get relief? How do I live as a caretaker for someone who is sick and completely dependent on me, and not turn resentful or burn out? Does that make me a bad person? Should I open up and really share how I am doing, or just say great?

Actual uttered questions from living, breathing, pulsing people in deep suffering, loss, or pain. Some are questions that meet me on the mat every morning I wake up, and we wrestle it out.

If that little cluster of chaos was too much and you skipped over, it did its job. People who smile at you and who you work next to or live in a home with are carrying questions like these right now. This minute. While seemingly functional individuals file paperwork and put bandaids on knees and coach little league and close business deals, they suffer. They also try to make sense of that suffering. Not every person is holding deep angst or wounding. Still, I have met enough who do, and who hold it silently, thinking that if their noisy chatter inside is too much for them, it would certainly be too much to unload on someone else. I don’t feel I have to sell this, if you interact with any number of humans on a fairly consistent basis, you are wide eyed aware that people are hurting.

Healing is complicated. Maybe this isn’t true and I just haven’t figured it out, but for me it has layers and layers. I have been processing and even wrote about it recently here. I am usually leery of writing on something I can’t wrap my brain or thoughts around, but this just keeps coming back because I live in a body that doesn’t let me forget.

I have a buoyant soul. This is not a brag, this is a straight up gift. Wiring, disposition, an obscenely large support system, and a faith that digs in past ritual or routine have kept my little spirit floating in some rough waters. My natural default is sunny side up, so it is not surprising that I attempt to reframe struggle and difficulty into possibility and sunshine. I am grateful for it, and it has served me well. I can remember walking down the hall in elementary school to the nurses office to throw up, fix my tube, get my labs drawn and rush back to class unfazed with playfulness and a cheshire smile. Birthdays, first dates, Neches River Festival, high school and college graduation, I have vivid memories of being so sick, wiping it off my face long enough to celebrate or at least participate, and then melting into a puddle of nausea and pain. Our wedding was stunning, every detail and each set of hands behind the day made that ceremony just drip with love. As soon as we were presented as “The Daigles,” our first moment together was my darling husband holding up the creamy satin ruffles of an Amsale wedding gown so that I could dry heave and decompress the contents of my bloated stomach through a tube into the bathroom sink. The celebration and sacredness of our union was begun by my suffering finding some ease in his gentle, selfless presence. That is healing.

That speaks all I know of healing. That snapshot right there, not the one below of us looking the part, but the uncaptured one of us in the bathroom. I see the kindness in his eyes, he sees the weariness in mine. We both know when we open the door we will smile and pause for hundreds of photos we will be glad to look back on and dance to a song by a man we once drove to a coffeeshop in Houston to hear. We will revel in each moment with the zeal and anticipation of glowing newlyweds, but this one still frame, hunched over that sink, is more holy and more meaningful to me than any other part of 11/14/09. He met me in my pain, fully aware it would likely follow us through years and anniversaries, he committed to lend me his strength and promised whatever comes, we will do it together. And I have never been so healed.

And it has come to me just like this, over and over. In friends showing up when I was hiding and in pots of moms chicken soup and in kind words and grace and ibuprofen finally kicking in enough to close my eyes. This is all I know and I am going to write about it until I run out of words because too many people who hurt think healing just may be out of their reach. And what if it is blooming in their backyard or is in the 5th line of the 34th page of a book on the nightstand or lives next door or gives them a hug on Sunday morning and that is exactly enough for them to keep being here today. Healing is wholeness, wellness, restoration. It may not look like what I intended, and maybe that is why I am so quick to miss it. But I know it is here because I am still here, and when I encounter it in all its forms, it keeps me moving forward.

So let’s do this. A wild and crowded scavenger hunt for the beauty and balms that ease us and carry us through the pain. Together we will name them, talk about them, cheer that they exist, maybe even disagree a bit. I think there is plenty of space for that. We won’t have to deny that pain is still present or wait for it to pass to celebrate, but we will party a little bit harder because we know deep suffering unexplainably expands our capacity to hold deep joy. We will keep our eyes open to see what shows up, as healing.

tired bones, rest, and the bachelor

When this bear of a body has screamed loud enough for long enough, I just want the noise to stop. Ditching any notion of gaining understanding, or growing from this, or learning some grand life lesson in the middle of the pain, my instinct is to cover my ears and check out. Numb is a pair of earplugs. Comfortable and quiet, numb can let you feel an escape from that one nasty noisy thing that has a way of taking over. Numb tunes it all out, a hall pass to pretend it doesn’t exist, an instant auditory vacation. Even though that thing may still be true and happening, the earplugs of numb are a giant dose of intentional ignorance, sometimes as a means of survival. 

I haven’t always been a fan of The Bachelor. There were years that my nose tipped at the thought of watching that brand of mindless babble. Waste of time. Pointless. Insert your own moral high ground here. Then 2011 happened. After escaping 15 seasons of The Bachelor and 6 seasons of The Bachelorette, I finally jumped off the high dive and landed in an ocean of drama and tears and “you know the producers are just keeping her on for ratings” commentary during commercial breaks. Maybe curiosity or maybe boredom, but mainly the 25 staples holding my gut together pushed me into those battles for a rose. I needed numb. This surgery was rough and had left a mark in more ways than one, and on this side of it all I can see how rest and growth could have been better nurtured in that place, but my core was weak, and my core was weak. Both the center of my body and spirit felt ripped wide open. Too fragile and too painful to acknowledge or listen to at the time, I chose numb. I looked forward to that alternate reality every week, and still do. I am always reaching for ways to check out of this loud body. 

Chronic illness steals your gusto, your niceties, your basic human maintenance skills. It’s exhausting. But let’s just take chronic illness off the table- this being human is not for the faint of heart. Which is why we escape it. Netflix marathon or heroine, don't fool yourself, we all numb. Insanely different consequences, but both a way to break from the tiredness of wearing skin. How do you escape?

There is a place for healthy diversion, but only if we can have our finger on the pulse of when an activity gives life versus when it takes it away. The best way I know to define the kind of life I am talking about is this: life is soul energy. That sounds super new age and transcendent, but I really don’t mean for it to. I had to make this distinction when I thought that energy was unattainable for me. Physical bodily energy, pep, zest- give it whatever label you want, and it will still be something I struggle with daily. My bones feel tired, and not in a nap and recover or I need more B 12 kind of way. If I waited to do anything until I had the physical momentum to do it, I would be a piece of furniture. Out of necessity, I had to find another fuel source for my days. 

There is a source of life that can be my life when I feel I have no life in me to give. 

A rest that gives energy has less to do with closing my eyes, though that is entirely necessary, and more to do with opening them. When I wake up to what is around me and to the understanding that I am not the source, it brings a freshness from the inside out. So much of my internal exhaustion comes from this broken cycle of wishing I had more energy to participate in life, being frustrated that I don’t, and numbing out in disappointment. This pattern robs me of the energy I do have. I have found that the kind of rest I choose either gives more life or takes it away. 

Resting to resist

Resting to renew

Two different kinds of rest, two completely different outcomes. 

Resting to resist- 

Flat out avoidance. This is intentionally putting in those earplugs to numb. Something is hard or difficult or noisy and you look for something else to mute it all out. The danger of a mute button is that in an attempt to silence the roar, you mute life. The good stuff, the rough stuff, the stuff stuff. All of it goes blank and you feel like a detached visitor in your own world. It starts like this- I am run down and depeleted, but I have something at hand I need to complete. Feeling that I don’t have what it takes to tackle what’s in front of me, I search for a distraction to lift me out of the discomfort. I open my phone and scroll Pinterest, I click “YES” to tell Netflix that I am, indeed, still watching, I look for anything that will keep me blissfully removed from that pain point. Pinterest is not poison, I am not anti-media, anti-social platforms, anti-Target, puzzles, reading, bubble baths, Jeni’s ice cream, or anti-any of the other innocuous activities that could be listed here, I am just growing in my awareness that these things are often mute buttons for me when I approach them with the desire to numb out instead of savoring them as the gifts they are. After scrolling or eating or tuning out the world for a while, I come out the other side in some kind of stupor. Not really feeling more rested, definitely not feeling more energy, not feeling much of anything at all. Pain is difficult to be present with, particularly when it cannot be immediately soothed or removed. Numbing to not feel that pain seems a promising alternative when you are in the middle of it. It may be a buoy help you survive for a season, but it never brings real lasting relief. Resting to resist is not about the activity, it is about a position of the heart. From this place I am attempting to shut down, close off, and isolate myself from the noise/pain, which isolates me from everything and everyone in turn. No matter the outward activity taking place, coming at it from this angle always robs me of life because life is that very thing I am seeking to avoid at the time. 

Resting to renew- 

That hard thing, that loud thing may still be there. As a matter of fact, its presence is usually the reminder I need to point me towards my need for this deeper kind of rest. Resting to renew, much like resting to resist, is an internal matter, a heart posture. On the resistance path, I tend to shut down because my focus is fixated on me- what I feel, what I am lacking, what I wish were different. My pain becomes the center of my orbit, and the weight of that is too heavy to be present in so I resist it entirely. When I choose rest as renewal, I start with that same awareness that I am not the source and have limited resources/energy/strength to complete what is in front of me, but I don’t let it stop there. Instead of mulling it over and getting stuck on what I don’t have, I remind my weary heart that there IS a source, an unlimited and overflowing supply of life and love and energy that I can find my rest in. In Him I live and move and have my being. He is before all things and in Him every single thing is held together. I don’t just think about this as a really lovely notion, I put it on like clothes that cover me. I use it like a medicine that helps heal me. I take it in like food that nourishes me. I have to. When we experience or face something beyond our capacity to manage, beyond ourselves and our limited resources, we can either become hopeless, or we can connect with someone or something that is truly beyond what we have access to. This is what happens when we seek medical care, we recognize that we don’t have the knowledge to figure out what is happening in our bodies, but someone else does. So we connect to means more than our own, and by doing so, we can get access to much needed treatment, medications, and care plans that tap into resources we previously did not have. My gratitude for the medical care I have available to me now and have had my entire life runs so deep. I am aware of it every time I infuse my nutrition or meet with a physician or have the ability to call one of my clinicians. It is a tangible expression of help and healing that has brought me this far. In the same way my body needs this support, my soul desperately needs it as well. I want to be fully awake to this gift of a life, and I know that these circumstances that are beyond me require a source that is beyond me. Having the understanding that someone super-nature, above and beyond the laws and processes of nature, created this intelligent and intricate world of cosmos and honey bees and peaches and salivary glands, is my present reminder that I have absolutely every single thing I need. For me, this is rest as renewal. From this posture, taking a nap or savoring a delicious meal or even working can be done from a place of deep inner rest because I am so aware that He is a well that will not run dry. I do not have to wring out my tired body for a few small droplets when there is a river out there, and I can come to it any time. This is soul life. This is eyes wide open rest, this breathes the life and marrow back into my bones and lets me do another day. Certain rhythms help nurture this rest in me: silence & solitude (getting still enough and quiet enough to let the debris of my day and my busy mind settle to begin to see things more clearly), going marveling (like a scavenger hunt for the amazement and wonder that exists in the most ordinary of things), gratitude (recognizing the gifts, thanking the giver, generosity results), and practiced presence (cultivating an increasing awareness of God present, Immanuel, with us). More to come on those, but it surely needs to be said that I am not writing from a place of “killing it,” because I certainly am not. The only thing I seem to be consistently killing is time, but my awareness is growing and I am reaching more and more often for this better way. 

If reading this feels just a bit Jesus heavy and you wish it were more practical, I get that. Faith can feel far off and fluffy when offered up next to very real, very tangible pain. When I made the leap into writing out loud, I knew the only way I could do it was to write from what I have experienced and to write from a place of honesty. That is truly all I have. So I offer no edited palatable bulleted list of ways to fix a life marked by suffering, knowing full well that is exactly what I would want to pop up from a quick google search on my hardest of days, but it just isn’t in me. I write with suffering on one side and hope on the other. They seem like ill matched partners, but having spent a decent amount of time with them both, I am learning how their sharp contrast makes me see a deepness and richness in this life that is so worth not being numb to. 

spirograph

A daily ritual of my childhood was playing with my brother at the kitchen table. So simple, so fond. Sometimes this looked like our tiny hands rummaging through a mound of LEGOs, Justin was the builder, I was the finder.

“Red 1x4, 2 wheels, tiny green circle, grey smooth top bar that looks like this, look, this one.”

When I found them all and pushed the pile of loot towards him, he would offer me an approving smile that was fuel enough to take on the next hunt.

Other kitchen table activities: pogs, sand art, potholder looms, creating our own recipes (mandarin oranges + sautéed chicken ≠ orange chicken), on the most delightful of days, Barbie (to the opposition, I hear you, I see you, and I understand your resistance, but I am all nostalgia for Barbie, full stop).

Entirely unrelated to this post, I need to tell you a quick story. When I turned 6(ish) my parents purchased and trusted me with this dreamy slice of heaven:

So this is what I did with my first car. I powered that pink baby all the way down Shirley Circle at a tornadic 3.5mph. My heart felt so free on the one block of roadway. I could drive myself to fetch the mail, check on neighborhood dogs, put out some snacks for them (a regular occurrence), I picked up and collected all of the adorable miniature neon flags left along ditches and stored them in the glovebox (grand apologies to hardworking Entergy & utility employees from 1989-1993), I waved to onlookers like the one woman parade I was. Until. A friend from a few houses down stepped out into the street. This is where memory and fact blur a bit, all I know for sure is he 👏 was 👏 in 👏 front 👏 of 👏 my 👏 car 👏. He would not move. He may have been asking me a question, complimenting my wheels, or just saying hello. I ran him over. Pushed my tiny ballet flat topped by ruffled white sock with intent and kept on going. My parents forced me to walk (on foot, leave car at home, humiliating) down and apologize and it felt like rocks in my mouth and only fell out into words because I feared loosing the keys to my new murder mobile. The end.

I truly don’t even know how to find an on ramp back, so I will take a generous reach into my TAAS Standardized Test bank of transition words.

Nevertheless, with all of the toys and activities we had access to, nothing compared to the excitement and anticipation of a fresh, crisp, blank sheet of white paper. An untouched canvas, a pond of possibility waiting to be brought to the surface. This clean slate was not a problem to be solved, it was a world of wonder. Anything could happen, and that thought played notes of joy on the strings of my imagination. I did not break out measurement tools for this project. Nothing needed to be quantified, calculated, or figured out. No ruler, no protractor, no formulas. My instrument of choice was the Spirograph. Super hypnotic swirls of bright, random color that looped together to form a refrigerator masterpiece. I was mesmerized at how it seemed haphazard, moving forward in a way, turning back on itself senselessly, until something beautiful emerged.

A recent tweet from KS Prior sparked this connection for me and resonated so deeply:

Aware of it or not, many of us may view healing as formulary, quantifiable, linear.

Put in: [Green Juice, Essential Oils, Prayer, Diet, Counseling, Medical Intervention, Coffee Enema, “this book that you have to read that changed my life forever”] + Character trait of choice [Tenacity, Grit, Resilience, Belief, Stick-To-It-Ness] = Successful Desired Outcome.

We want a hard, solid, measurable transition from A to B. You were sick, now you are well. Your heart was broken, now it is mended. A relationship fractured, now it has been fixed. You experienced a loss, time tidied it up. When you suffer, everyone, with beautiful intent, wants you to be better. We all want a finish line for each other, and it hurts to imagine the possibility of a perpetual pain.

I haven’t yet experienced an equation to crank this out assembly line style, so all I know is that, for me, healing is a loop of a thing. Like a Spirograph weaving its way into and out of, forward and back again, healing has moved me into spaces of better, and pain, and recovery, and resurgence. I have held healing and hurt in a simultaneous, disorienting wave, and don’t fully take up residence in either one, but still live in them both all at once. I am writing now from the curve of a loop.

This June I had a major abdominal surgery in Nebraska. In operations past, I would approach with the equation mindset. Surgery + Determination = A Fixed Body. When symptoms and issues would re-emerge, these equations created defeat, like I did not hold up to my portion of the formula. After many collisions with a linear view of healing, I have loosened my grasp on this mathematical approach and found an alternate way of seeing. I now view things from where, and how, healing has left its warm fingerprints all over my life. After 34 years in my body, from this human address, I recognize that healing touches every minute, wraps around every day, I do not achieve healing or cross over to it as an alternate destination from where I am now, but it carries me instead. No magic wand, no finish line, no equation. This perspective has released me from trying to figure it out or arrive. I am free to ride its gracious waves.

These past few months healing has shown up in all forms.

Spontaneous Disney vacation with my favorite human on the planet, solid gold. The “Last Supper,” mashed potatoes and Pioneer Woman cappuccino, a feast for the books. A pre surgery LEGO session, sweetest Bubba in his full childhood glory. Quiet hospital chapel to reconnect. A recording of my papaw reading the 23rd Psalm, peace for the soul. Walking into the waiting room, surrounded by support. Confetti toenail polish, my own stealth O.R. party. Wrapped up under warm sheets. Zero nausea in the recovery room, pain well managed. Blue ceiling lights that looked like stars. Despite infection at the incision site, I did not run fever or require additional drainage tubes. A mercy. Surgeon, nurses, staff gracious and eager to bring relief. Tender husband who didn’t leave my side, offered so much comfort while he was there. Cozy, handmade blanket, a pillow from home, and bright Christmas lights strung up in that sterile room. Tiny oasis. Piles of cards, notes, surprises, text messages, friend visits, phone calls each attached to someone offering love, encouragement, support. I am rich beyond measure. Hallway walks. Papa, pure joyful diversion- rooftop gardens, free little library, medical center art exhibits, choice of three gift shops. Marathon episodes of The Office and laughing so much it physically hurt. Medicine. Cucumber Lime Gatorade. Chicken ramen broth. Firework show from the window. Mom, gentleness housed in a body, reminding me I don’t have to be “on,” let it roll to voicemail, or turn it off completely, and remember there is no race to see who can recover the fastest, slow and steady. Let go and rest. I breathed out heavy, closed my eyes, first time I slept through the entire night. Foot rubs, TLC, her kindness present in every way possible. Released from the hospital, and free to return home weeks earlier than expected. Floors swept and mopped, home cleaned by the hands of others. Puppy snuggles- soul restoring. Permission to be quiet and rest like it is my full time job. Food in the fridge when I feel I can eat. A tube for relief and intravenous nutrition for fuel when eating is not an option. Sitting in a service at church, soaking up a room full of collective praise and gratitude and trust that we can reach for a grace beyond ourselves. Fresh grocery store flowers on the table. First cup of post-op coffee. The precious shadow of a husband, mom, papa, brother, sister, family, friend following so close to me as I make each wobbly, weary, forwards, backwards step. Complete gift.

I fumble and lack a clear, quip of an answer for how I am doing right now. Things are layered, hard and good woven together inseparably. I have to continually release myself from the need to be understood, wanting to explain why the phone goes to voicemail, why it may take days to reply or respond, and why I am not yet able to show up for it all. Desire (I want to) and function (I can) have not yet aligned. There are flashes of progress, then times when body systems fail to hold up to their ideal textbook functions, when [eating, participating in the day, returning a call, leaving the house, running an errand] are not options that I have the energy or ability to check off and windows of time when they present as possibilities. Some portions of the day pain/nausea hold me hostage, others it releases grip enough for me to pass as a functioning member of society. Healing is nuanced and non-linear, but I know it is right here, making every advance, retreat, swirling circle and loop into a complicated masterpiece of a life, and for that I am so grateful.

Also, if you ask me if I purchased a Spirograph just for this blog post, I will deny it. Mom bought it for me.

pain points

For the past few months, since around August, my body has brought new pain. There is nothing out of the ordinary about pain for me. Many of us experience it daily, routinely, constantly. It can show up as physical pain, a heavy heart, a restless mind, grief, loss, loneliness, overwhelm, diagnosis or a list of other undesirable forms. With time we begin to figure out ways to manage it, navigate through it, and find how to cope in it even when it does not go away. For those who carry long term pain, from the outside most would not even recognize that you are dealing with anything at all. The longer pain sticks around, the more familiar it becomes. We learn all of its curves and edges, and we create a map that helps us traverse its unlevel terrain, but new pain is different. New pain surprises us and jolts us. We finally become skilled at juggling what we have been handed, and suddenly an unexpected ball gets thrown into the pattern that brings chaos and confusion. New pain starts a new map, lost and uncertain of what is ahead, this suddenly becomes a strange and unfamiliar territory.

Yesterday this new pain hit beyond my body. After months of tests and troubleshooting, phone calls and reaching out, pushing through and pushing past, new tubes, new creams for this new pain, I felt defeated. Both heart and body searched for the way around this new map, and stared at what felt like a brand new road that I did not have the strength or energy to travel down.

I don’t write this for sympathy or for encouragement. I get buckets of support poured on my dry ground by more loving humans than I can begin to number, I am a rich girl. I certainly don’t write for pity. Pity is a dangerous drug, addictive in the moment because it holds up the wound for all to see, but in doing so, all focus and emphasis gets fixed on that place of pain. Instead of bringing relief, the pain becomes your entire center, and pain is much too fragile a foundation to hold the weight of a full, whole person.

I write because I have to. I write because years have brought people into my own life with their own blank maps, carrying them around to others, desperate for help to fill in the legends and lines that make the roads for a way out. We ache for a compass to point us in the right direction, and when there is no point, we wonder around aimlessly in our hurt.

Grief becomes hopeless when we feel that it is pointless.

What is the point? We have all said it, grasping for understanding in the middle of the hard and complicated things. Pain is not soft or pliable, we don’t control it or manipulate it. Less silly putty and more a shard of glass, pain is sharp, full of harsh corners, full of points. Sometimes the more we try to handle it, wrap our hands and our heads around it, the more wounded it leaves us.

Advent is a heavy, holy season. For those in pain, the contrast of celebration and grief can feel like a poorly paired duo. Last year I wrote about this same thing in a post titled Tidings of Discomfort and Joy.

So what are we to do with this jagged pain? Even when we cannot change it or fix it, we can allow our pain points to point us to something greater.

PAIN POINTS IN

No matter what shape it takes, pain has a way of doing something in us while it does something to us. The sharpness of pain can cut away at frivolity. It can dismember those shallow and surface things that usually hold our attention and affection. Meet anyone face to face who has allowed deep pain to do deep work, and you will find in them something untouchable. Long line at the grocery store, cut off in traffic, cold meal served from the waitress, angsty and trivial circumstances that most swat at and give energy and focus to can be seen as the gnats they are by the one who has done deep work. It does not mean that they never give in to anger or aggravation, but there is something inside the core of a person who has let pain work in them that sees and distinguishes what matters most. Often this will rise up and roll out in the form of gratitude. Our pastor recently referred to this as Thanksliving- moving through our lives in a way that we not only experience gratitude internally, but we let it motivate us to live thankful, generous, open handed lives in return. When we allow our pain points to work in us, we gain much more than we could ever lose.

PAIN POINTS OUT

Our tendency is to nurse our wounds in isolation. I believe and have experienced it to be true that solitude and silence are healthy, necessary ways for us to create some space to process pain and gain perspective, but healthy coping also involves community. Yesterday, for me, this community looked like a living room couch where my snot and tears ran free in front of my people. As I hung up from a phone call that shook me and etch-a-sketched what little was left on my map, I couldn’t hold back the emotion. I am an expert at being on. Most don’t know I am struggling because I don’t allow the struggle any real estate on my smiling face. But this day on this couch with this group, I curled up and sobbed. Again, no pity, just a behind the scenes reality that you have a fellow friend in this fight who is all too familiar with pain. When we allow our pain to point out, we are given the gift of helping others who are hurting, and if we can be vulnerable enough, letting others in to help us too. There is no fixing here.

There is no fixing here. There is no fixing here. There is no fixing here.

If I didn’t think it would be overkill, I would type it a hundred more times. This does not mean that there is no place for appropriate solutions and options from those around us that bring help and healing, rather an acknowledgement that in the moment of grief, answers may not be the primary response we are needing. We often hesitate to enter into someone else’s pain because we lack answers, we lack what to say, and we carry heaviness of our own. After years of work in a faith community with real people who have real hurts and messes, I have learned the gift of presence. Someone with us. Simple, beautiful, and highly underrated. Ask anyone who has lost a loved one, and most can list by name the faces present behind them at the funeral home. Each face is attached to a set of hands that somehow help carry a piece of the grief, lifting some of the burden off of the shoulders of the one. The day the diagnosis came, the first night back at home without them, the waiting in the ER in silence is wounding and awful and just bearable by the sheer grace that we are not in this alone. Pain points us out of ourselves, past our own minds that try to trap us and trick us into believing we are the only one.

PAIN POINTS UP

Pain and discomfort are a gauge on the dashboard of our life. They point to an ought, a standard, a belief in the way things should be. Physical pain declares that my body should function better than this. Loneliness says that I ought not to be alone or separated from those I love.

I should be married by now. Things ought to be different. I shouldn’t be this tired, this overworked, this hurt or sad or empty. I thought that it would be better than this.

In her book “It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way,” Lysa Terkeurst explains:

Genesis tells us that the human heart was created in the perfection of the garden of Eden. He said it was all good. Very good. Everything ebbed and flowed in complete harmony. There was nothing that didn’t look right or feel right. There was no disease or divorce or depression or death. The human heart was created in the context of perfection. But we don’t live there now. This is why our instincts keep firing off the lie that perfection is possible. We have pictures of perfection etched into the very DNA of our souls.

There is a repeating cadence of “it was good” pulsing in the air around us and throbbing deep in our hearts. There is a should, and we know it, and we will hunger for it until we are reunited with it.

This final place that pain points, my final hope and the reason I cannot get past or get over Jesus. Just as the presence of those we love is lived out in our pain as a healing balm, Christmas is a flesh and bones example that there is no pain we will ever have to experience alone. The Hebrew scripture spoke of Immanuel to come. It means “God with us.”

With us in our hurt. With us in our disappointment, With us as the compass to keep pointing our gaze up to the better things we seek. Advent means to wait for the arrival of, and many of us finding ourselves right now in this second so desperately waiting for relief. Christmas is the gift that reminds us that we do not wait alone, and we do not wait in vain.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer-

Advent makes people whole: new people. Stand up, look up, your view is too much down towards the earth, fixed upon the superficial changes and happenings. Look up, you who have turned away disappointed from heaven. Look up, you whose eyes are heavy with tears and who mourn that the earth has snatched everything from you. Look up, you who are so heavy laden with guilt that you feel you cannot look up. Be patient. Wait for a little while longer. Wait and something quite new will come over you.

God will come.

peanut butter jelly time

In college I once wrote a paper titled "The Marriage of Peanut Butter and Jelly." It was about my parents. My mom is jelly, pure sweetness simmered on a kitchen stove, full of sugary homemade comfort. Dad is peanut butter, straight nutty, smoothly skilled at many things, full of variety with that unexpected crunch thrown in. I love them each on their own, both so different, so unique, bringing their distinct flavor to the world, but it is the combination of the two that is remarkable. 

Mother's and Father's Day, along with both of my parents birthdays and their anniversary, fall within weeks of each other. May and June create a sandwich of celebration in our family.

On big days for dad- we highlight his joyful energy, sense of adventure, the way he has this delightful amusement and engagement with the world around him. I remember while still in the hospital after a major abdominal surgery, dad came up to stay while mom took a break and went home. We somehow stumbled on a Will Ferrell Saturday Night Live marathon, and I found myself in tears clutching a pillow as he did an impression of Ferrell doing an impression of Alex Trebek. It was equal parts sheer delight and stabbing pain, worth every stretched stitch. A day with dad can start out one way, and quickly take an unexpected turn. A movie date in 1992 to see Chuck Norris in Sidekicks ended us up at the Taekwando facility, signing dad up for weekly classes. Basic, run of the mill errands have somehow transformed into us planting a garden, test driving a Harley Davidson, spontaneously painting the kitchen, digging a pond in the back yard (killed the telephone line but we did find an old spoon), and other fantastical whirlwinds of adventure. He writes and speaks in story, telling details and weaving creativity into every word. I have saved all of the cards, little notes, and letters he has penned. In each he pours another layer of strong foundation for me to build from and to know that no matter who the world thinks I am, my papa simply adores me. He works as hard as he plays, and it is a side of him I still get surprised by when I get a glimpse. I am usually on the receiving end of his playfulness and wit, but watching him lead organizations and create a culture of respect and integrity within his department reminds me that there are so many levels still there for discovery. His generosity to others ranges from randomly purchasing the meal behind him, speaking words of encouragement to bring life, giving of himself until he is bone-tired, and beyond. I love every shape and variety he takes. 

When we focus in on mom- it is her desire to nurture, her abundance of grace, the ability to welcome people in and make any place feel like home. Mom's compassion is otherworldly. There are so many spaces in my life where fear and anxiety about this failing body had begun to wrap around me tightly, and in her I always find my unraveling. I let those things slowly fall off, I share, I speak my heart and mind, and I have never failed to find anything but a healing balm of love in return. Her life is poured out, every day she finds ways that she can give of herself and her time. She sees people in a way that most fail to do, she is unafraid of those places of need and hurt in others. I have seen her step straight into the deep end to pull someone up and perform some kind of spirit soul body CPR that infuses hope back into the lungs. She is always growing and re-setting, reminding her heart not to let offense or bitterness take root. She is a giver of the benefit of the doubt, which is something so rare these days most have a hard time believing it when they see it in action. When sharp words or selfishness get thrown at Mom, she is able to find her way past the hurt, and remind herself of the goodness and truth she sees in that person. Most of my failures in life have been handled in her care, I feel a safety to bring the worst parts of me to her, and in doing so, get a fresh perspective on who she knows me to truly be. Her cooking is like her heart, she makes big generous meals and lets no one go hungry, the meals are planned where each person finds something they want or need, and just when you think you have been spoiled beyond belief, she packs up whats left in a to-go box to see you through tomorrow as well. She loves the noise that comes with a full home, and quietly finds a chair to sit in with a baby in her arms to rock as she takes it all in. Even without the spotlight on her, she shines so brightly. 

I believe what my parents both did (and still do) so beautifully is to love us as they are, from where they are. Loving us as they are means they love us each with a unique style, meeting different needs by simply being different people. I am certain there are moments when Jelly looked across the table at Peanut Butter and thought "well I bet it is just great in this moment being the NUTTY one," or when Peanut Butter thought "of course they came to the SWEET one with that!" Even so, they keep giving us the best parts of themselves, as they are. Loving us from where they are means they often give from those places where they know they still aren't yet their best. Mom often says that we grew up together. This quality of acknowledging the need to continue to grow allows others to do the same. It is a welcoming curiosity that says, "I have not arrived, I still have something to learn, and I am willing to learn from those around me." Loving us from where they were then looked like two young parents who made mistakes, but in that imperfection, they did something I find so very perfect. Mom and dad had many age-appropriate heart to hearts with us that involved exposing their own humanity and vulnerability, asking forgiveness, quickly apologizing for a harsh tone or misspoken word, and not wielding their power as a weapon, but rather as a tool to guide and teach us as they continued to learn and grow alongside us. Watching them engage in this type of humble approach brought such respect for them, it allowed us to know what to do with those areas of pain and brokenness we found in ourselves, and freed us up to ask for help in those places we felt lack.

As I find myself in this season of celebration for both of their lives, I also find a desire to bring that same environment they created for me out to others. We are all wildly different, and we often walk this tightrope of admiring the unique traits we see in those around us, while still somehow wanting to make them act, think, and be more like ourselves. I will likely be challenged today with wanting to make someone into who I wish they would be. Our role here is not to change someone else’s flavor into our own, but instead to name those ingredients we see in them that offer nourishment and goodness to the world, and to celebrate that like crazy. 

I may also be pulled to make myself into something I am not. This doesn't discount the need for growth or for learning new things, but is a gentle reminder that comparison can lure me into a game of label swapping. When I see others getting noticed and praised for their qualities, I could easily fall into the trap of trying to manufacture those traits in my own life to produce the same results. Slapping a jelly label on a jiffy jar is false advertising that will surely get found out. Instead of a shallow switch, I am given the opportunity to do the hard and good work of growth. There are no shortcuts here, but instead a commitment to cultivating the seeds and traits in my life that will become the raw materials for my very own jar of goodness to offer this world.

There are so many life lessons I could pull from their examples to give words and space to, and every road would lead back to the gratitude I have for them both. I am so grateful for the beautiful marriage of peanut butter and jelly lived out in front of me, and for the depth and fullness these two different sides of the sandwich have given to my life.  

sacred small

“So, what are you doing now?” It is a harmless question from someone I have known as far back as I have memories and have only ever known as safe. In the middle of the produce section I struggle for an answer. 

“I am taking care of my body,” I say it as my cheeks start to flush with heat and pink and a touch of shame. It is the only valid answer I can give. At the time, not working. At the time, barely showered and feeling that making it to the grocery store that day was an accomplishment outstanding enough to merit a bullet on my next resume.

I fumble to add in a few more lines of spending time with the niece and dreaming of someday pursuing a certification in Child Life, but at the end of my answer all I am is a stay at home human and I can sense the hollowness of it as it hangs between us. 

“Well, you aren’t getting any younger,” he says.

My ego singed, blistered, then popped. 

I am raw. 

I glance at the packaged pineapple and start naming the colors of piled produce in my mind to keep that pride-zapping tear from showing up on an already blanching cheek. We talk about other things and I smile, I try to soften and remember how much love there is between the two of us and how my sensitivity in this area can transform a nonchalant comment into a grenade. I pull out the shrapnel, give a warm hug, and decide whatever is in my cart is enough for now. Slowly working my way from the scene of the humiliation, I make it through checkout, and load the contents of the unfinished list into the back seat. I recognize my part in it, get in my car, and call mom. 

So much grace on the other end. She is saying kind things, true things, things I tend to forget when the weight of my body buries who I am underneath. She is an archeologist, gently taking a brush to my dry and brittle ground, she patiently sweeps back some of the layers to help unearth the gems and treasures I forgot were there. She offers me this soft place to remember who I am and that just being human is enough for today. I make it home and carry in an armful of groceries as I catch the eyes of The Husband. Same ones that have learned the look of my hard days, X Ray vision seeing straight through what others miss. He is eager for me to hang up and explain the tears, probably accounting them to a stray dog or poorly timed pedestrian squirrel since the majority of my emotions are reserved for the animal kingdom. I tell him about the encounter and he says sweet things about who I am to him and silly things about how big of a job it is to take care of both he and the dog and we laugh and I go to the bathroom to take off what’s left of my mascara because I am just so done. He has somewhere to be in the next 30 minutes but decides to stay, I convince him I am okay and after a lot of smiling and please go’s, it’s just me and Jesus left to talk about this. 

Take what is in my hands, Jesus. Because this life is fish and loaves and work that feels so hidden. It is dishes and loving a husband, sending a card and cooking a meal. It is so small. It is so simple. And I pray that I don’t dare pack a sandwich or attend a birthday party or put back a shopping cart without it dripping in love. Because that’s all I have in this place I find myself and because what else is there? 

I am many accomplishments and job changes and remarkable milestones past this conversation, yet the noise of it rings. There is still this struggle of feeling the great chasm between what I want to give and what I have to offer. This wide space that often separates me as a human being instead of a human doing. I wish that I could crank it out. I so desperately want to be this little factory of production and progress, taking those blueprints of my goals and dreams and seeing them framed up and built out in front of me. I often feel that if I could keep up, I would be unstoppable. If body and heart were on the same page, I'd race through this life with such ease. Instead I wake up with a war-time ration of energy and decide if the laundry or the items rolled over from last weeks to do list or a lunch date with a friend get my portion for that day. 

What are your fish and loaves? Those things you bring to the table, worried they will barely feed. We feel we don’t have much to give, so we hold on to it, not realizing that our open hands are all that is needed. He is the great multiplier. Chronic Illness can whittle your giant oak of a life down to what feels like thin branches. You worry that you can’t support the life you've built around you, unable to offer what you used to or want to or still desperately try to. 

When you give from a place of need, weariness, or lack, it is something of a sacrifice. The desire to still give what you have, however small, is that thing that is powerful and tells pain that it may rob you of your energy, but never your generosity or your ability to contribute to this world in a meaningful way. Generosity is one of the ways you can lean in and listen to life past the noise of pain. It is a bold declaration that you will not believe the lie of scarcity and not enough. At the height of my season of feeling so trapped by this body, I remember how every task became sacred. Waking up a few minutes before The Husband, I would make his lunch and pour him a cup of coffee as I prayer breathed words of gentleness and strength for his day and appreciation for him and all he does. Slowness will do that to you. It will put a magnifying glass over whatever task is at hand, and you can see the strokes and beauty and purpose in it's pores. I once heard it described as living life in first gear. Yes, I get that. When you move slow, life becomes more artisan and less assembly line. You can give yourself fully to this one thing before you and with intention let it become a masterpiece. And at the end of the day, you may have less to show for it, but what you do have is so rare and valuable because it was made with great attention and care. When we cannot control what we have to give, we can focus in on how we choose to give it.

Let your giving be the gift.

When I was younger, every birthday brought an envelope with scribbled handwriting in a generic card with a two dollar bill from my Granny. They came as consistently as the years until she was placed in a nursing home before she passed away. Each October I found them in my stack of cards, recognizable yet unremarkable. On the other side of more life and understanding and struggle of my own, I think about them so often. They were so meaningful. A two dollar bill. She surely would have had to make a special trip to the bank, knowing that two dollars couldn’t carry much in worth, she chose a way to load it up with value and thoughtfulness that sent the message that we mattered to her. For Granny, two dollars was a sacrifice and I know this now and I know this too late, and I would pay much more than that to get back one of those bills I probably spent on some kind of gum or frivolity. A shift in heart brings a re-defining of your economics. You begin to unfold those words of first/last, least/greatest, seen/unseen.

Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin. Zechariah 4:10

Do not despise the ways you can give and the things you can do. Do not underestimate  those offerings small and simple. Let the giving be the gift. Make it a practice, a habit. Shift your eyes from seeing what you don’t have to searching out ways of offering what you do. And let go of the outcomes. What if, instead of worrying about producing, you gave yourself over to planting. How freeing would that be? Every thing you do in your day could be this tree of potential deceptively packaged in a small shell of a seed. If you open your hands and drop those tiny little seeds as you go, you may never see the end result, but you will leave behind you a garden of a life grown from something so sacred small.

rare

A few years ago, I was looking for a photo or video for a project that showed me hooking up to my TPN, the intravenous solution that feeds my body. I couldn’t find any. I had a small handful of pictures that captured my pump while I was infusing, but even in those it wasn’t the main focus. This routine of hooking up is something I have done almost every day for the past 30+ years, around 10,000 times in my life, and I couldn’t find a photo of it. Not a single one. At first I thought this was so strange, then I realized it somehow spoke a greater truth about the life I have chosen.

My photos show me doing life, they tell the story of slumber parties, birthdays, bad haircuts and big accomplishments. Given the photo album of my years up until this point, it would be challenging to know I had experienced anything more serious than a paper cut. 

My life is not defined by disease, but it is not unchanged by it either. Chronic Illness is a tightrope of listening to your body, but choosing to not let it be the loudest thing about you. In any given day, you may be managing symptoms, carrying pain, juggling appointments, infusions, procedures, while still trying to keep up with life.

I rarely vocalize what my behind the scenes struggle looks like with a rare disease, not for the sake of denying it or being ashamed of it, but just to have the capacity to fix my focus on what is in front of me and beyond me. Giving into illness places pain at the center of your world, and everything in turn revolves around it. This could be said of anyone who has experienced hard things. There is a choice you have to make to allow that thing to be the focus of your life, the center of your orbit, or to choose to live with it, and still beyond it. Living with, yet beyond the noise of an illness is to choose a life that is bigger than the pain. It is beautiful and rewarding, but so hard fought.

The RARE movement champions those living with a rare disease, not because it sees them as more special or to celebrate disease itself, but the purpose is to come alongside and encourage those who are fighting to hear the symphony of life over a very noisy body. 

The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) is a leader in this cause, and they have advocated and raised funds for the 30 million Americans with a rare disease. Many of these patients struggle to find treatments or research specific to their condition because of the limited number of people who live with that disease. With the help of NORD and others, these small subsets of conditions are being brought to the forefront of the medical community, and their voices are being heard. 

I now have a few images that capture my TPN routine. Some are with friends who share this same need for IV nutrition, others have been taken to use as visuals for speaking engagements, and some are just of me doing life with my backpack and tubes. 

They are still the minority, and the album of my life is continuing to overflow with moments and experiences that are not focused around an illness. Even though it is a part of my world, it is not the center of it. 

Today, on Rare Disease Day, I join the chorus of those singing the truth that a beautiful life can grow in the midst of deep pain and suffering. Our song is louder than our diagnosis. #rarediseaseday #shareyourrare

tidings of discomfort and joy

My mother's chicken soup can raise the dead. She chooses not to advertise that, and I can't say we have completed any successful double blind studies, but I will claim it still. And if not the body, certainly the soul of anyone who tastes it experiences some type of resurrection. Mom started making this soup when I was very small and intolerant of most foods. On my worst of belly days, even ice chips and broth refused to cooperate. When the waves of nausea calmed down and the contents inside stopped trying to get out, my belly would feel like an echoing cavern. Anyone with a good bout of the stomach flu can attest, after the worst of it has passed, you experience a hunger that feels almost animalistic. Appetite says that something specific sounds good, a bag of chips, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, an entire block of cheese, but gut emptied hunger is different. The luxury of picky has passed, and every commercial for every food that would normally skim under the radar comes alive. You could swear that your TV has smell-o-vision. If this hunger is an extenuating circumstance where you are not allowed to have food for a long period of time, you may even resort to watching hours of Giada on Food Network or searching for recipes on Pinterest to get some sort of psycho-caloric satisfaction. Real hunger wakes you up. The deep hunger that is born from a prolonged time of fasting creates a unique gift, the first bite experience. Much like seeing your first snow, or feeling the magic of a first kiss, the first bite experience is a state of heightened awareness, a freezing of time. Your tongue has lapsed into flavor amnesia, and swears that this bite of food is the only bite of food it has ever encountered. You may plan very carefully what you choose to eat for this food reunion, or you may step cautiously back into the land of the digesting with a few saltines. What's crazy is it doesn't matter. Whether a juicy steak or just some pitiful refrigerated pre-made turkey sandwich from the hospital cafeteria (real life), breaking a fast is a glorious, visceral experience. Most of my times without food were welcomed warmly by my mother's soup. I am not sure how many simmering pots of affection she has made for me over the years, but each one spoke love and healing to my hungry body. As high of an honor as this chicken elixir holds in my heart, today as I get to enjoy another bowl I find myself thinking more on the hunger than the cure. Last night when mom dropped off my portion of the pot, I was looking forward to it, but my appetite had already landed on a certain salad from a certain place, so in addition to the soup I had that as well. After both, I still felt a little hungry for something else, and landed on my go-to love for lunchmeat. Yesterday, I wasn't the one who was sick and in need of the soup, but I got a bonus bowl because good mommas can't help but feed their chicks. The soup was the same recipe that has made the clouds part and angels sing in the past, but I was too full to fully savor it. Full from the Chinese food I had for lunch with my cousin, full of intentions to seek out that salad I was hung up on, and even full of the distraction of making to-do lists for the coming week as I sat down to eat it. The measure of comfort that soup brings me is tied up and tangled with how much I need it at the time. The hungrier I feel, the richer it tastes. 

And so it is in life. These times when I have received the most love, comfort, seen the most kindness in others and found it all to be so satisfying are in the spaces where I feel the most lack. In the discomfort, we give people the room to offer us what they have. Our dissatisfaction and emptiness gives us eyes to see what will truly fill. 

Being aware of what is not right makes what is right much sweeter, much brighter. Like driving out the miles to a secluded spot lets your eyes see the stars in a way that street lights just won’t allow, suffering is a dark road that lends itself to some stunning scenery. Discomfort is a doorway to joy. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. It is in the grief over what hurts and what is not how it should be that we are given the space to really recognize goodness when it shows its face. This season of cheer can place those in a time of suffering in the awkward position of trying to pretend everything is fine. We mistakingly trade the depth of celebration for the veneer of having it all together and looking happy to be doing it. This is a great loss. Historically, advent is a season of tension. We hold our breath because what we see in front of us and what has been promised feels incongruent, unfulfilled. Advent can only culminate into a big beautiful celebration because we know what it is to wait and to grieve. Advent is truly a time of hunger, but because of the space we find ourselves, we don't have to feel the hunger if we don't want to. Small deposits can fill a shallow place, and many people who spend their lives avoiding deep pain end up missing out on deep joy. If this December you find yourself grieving what feels empty or off, give thanks. The deeper the trenches, the more they can hold. You are digging wells, my friend. Don't try to cover it up with more stuff or a busier schedule or a Venti mocha. Stay hungry for a while. Let it wake you up and remind you of what truly fills. Your pain is not an obstacle to joy this Christmas season, it may be the dark road to it.

why loud bear?

Let’s not waste time here, you are being attacked by a bear. You have two appropriate responses. 

1. Play dead and let it pass

2. If you can’t escape it, fight back

Both sound like horrible options. If I could create an option 3 it would look more like:

3. Stay at home in jammies eating something crunchy and watching a Parenthood marathon on Netflix because the outside world is too dangerous.

But there he is and you can’t deny him. Less Saturday morning cartoon icon and more an upright, heaving buffalo. His size is fierce, he certainly does not want a hug. What now are you going to do? Your response hinges on his particular type, grizzly or black. 

Grizzly bear? Option 1. You lay there and pretend that he missed the party, another bear has done the job. Cover your neck, hide your face, and just give him enough time to leave. He is a transient issue, he will wreck shop and move on. The waiting is terrifyingly awful, but you know he is a passing train. So when you stand up in your soiled underwear and wipe off tears and mud, he will be gone. You may be changed forever, but there is nothing else he can do to you.

Black bear? Bless your heart. This is his turf and you are about to find out what you’re made of. He is here to stay, and you are having waves of regret for all of the undone cardio in your life. Take a look at option 2. Running is a joke that may land you (the memory of you) on a few major news stations. You have to fight back. Brother, sister, friend- draw from whatever well of gumption and grit that lives inside of you. If you’re lucky, you are in for a battle. Sometimes, you are here for a war. 

My bear is black and he was waiting on me in the delivery room of a Beaumont, Texas hospital in 1984. His timing was quite cruel, not even giving me the chance to learn that a season of life without bears was a possibility. If this analogy could serve me well, I would say we we started out the same size, both naively new to the world. 

When I arrived on the scene, I looked and smelled and seemed a healthy normal little gift to my mom and dad. Fingers and toes in place, I passed all of the first tests given to a fresh human, before I even knew how the pride that comes with passing something was supposed to feel. I was deemed a good egg, and sent home to no longer take up the pricey real estate of a sterile hospital room. Then my bear let out his first weak roar. I wasn’t keeping down any feedings. If you gave me food, I gave it back. After enough of these feedings, my parents picked up on the roar. Sometimes our ears block out what our hearts cannot handle. But the sound was loud enough and long enough, it couldn't be ignored.

My parents response to this beast of a situation looked like a major abdominal surgery on their 7 day old baby girl. The first of a list of surgeries I couldn’t even number on my perfectly formed fingers and toes, I was meeting the bear. His first name was long and hard to pronounce, but I heard it so often that by the time I learned how to write my own name, I could tell you that I had a disease called Chronic Intestinal Idiopathic Pseudo Obstruction. This particular brand of illness came with a lot of tubes and catheters, bags of nutrition to infuse and often enough hospitalizations. I wonder if not present when I first arrived, if maybe our paths had crossed much much later, that I would have been more afraid of him. Instead he seemed so tame, this sickly bear. His presence seemed as normal to me as walking or going to a movie or brushing my teeth. If Siegfried and Roy have taught us anything, it’s that a wild animal can only be tame until it isn’t. Circus Philosophy 101. It’s a bit of a waiting game, and while I was brushing my normal teeth and hooking up to my normal IV nutrition, I waited. Normal is such a sliding scale, much like wealthy or attractive or athletic or intelligent. It increases and decreases based on the level of those very things around you. So when I started school, normal changed. The pump that delivered a steady drip of calories into my bloodstream was past the toting limit for such a tiny girl, so I was allowed to push this pump and nutrition solution around in a baby stroller. There aren't too many bears visible at elementary school, at least not ones being pushed around in bright pink buggies. I love to look at pictures from that time because there was no shame on my cheeky kindergarten face, this was a brand new adventure for me, bear and all, I was so ready for the challenge. 

The gap between then and now takes up over 30 years and my bear is there when I wake up, and my bear is here as I type. The rest of the story will be filled in along the way, but I realize at some point we both got so used to each other that sometimes it is a challenge to hear anything but the sound of the roar. If I am not careful, it can be how I define myself, a way of not picking up on the symphony of sounds around me because this body is always louder. This pain is so, so loud.

Your bear might have a different name. He may be grizzly, hanging around long enough to do some damage, and then making his escape. Or, like mine, your bear may be black, lingering far past his welcome and showing no signs of retreat . Either way, he just showed up on the scene uninvited. He may have ravaged your kidneys or wrecked your bloodstream, he doesn’t seem to ask first. We shouldn’t be surprised when he shows his face, after all:

    In this world you will have trouble [bears], but take heart! I have overcome the world.

Jesus may not have leaned into the bear analogy, but his candor about the difficulty of being a human in the world was refreshingly honest. It gives us space to have an open dialogue about our struggles, a community of those who will walk with us in them, and a purpose that reaches beyond them. 

Loud bear is a place for people who are living life with a chronic illness, dealing with something that demands great inner strength. It is for those who are choosing to hear past the noise of a body that refuses to stick to the plan. There are no easy solutions here. We can only speak to what we ourselves have walked through. We can create a home for those who are looking for a resounding “me too,” a beautiful sound letting others know that they are not alone in this. I hope the words that land here are full of comfort and inject a little buoyancy into the weary spirit. May they give you courage enough to wake up one more day to fight your bear and to turn up the volume of the beautiful life that exists just underneath the roar. 

Lean in and listen.