Update on Mother Teresa

I was sitting in church last night, just after the time of worship ended, when the lights dimmed and our worship pastor stood on the stage for a few moments to share with us about Psalm 10. This is the psalm that begins, "How long, O Lord, will you stand afar off?" It is a psalm, he said, that had been on his mind for a few days, one reason of which was the upcoming release of a book of letters that reveals Mother Teresa's sustained season of feeling bereft of God.

I sat up straight, of course, and nudged Kirk with my elbow. He nodded at me encouragingly, knowing my ongoing and continually growing interest in this woman.

Vernon (our worship pastor) went on to say that this season of darkness lasted over four decades of Mother Teresa's life. Whoa. And he also made reference to the book's title, Come Be My Light, which sent me on a hunt again this morning for more information.

That hunt led me to this extraordinary article that TIME released last Thursday that explores Mother Teresa's doubts from a number of well-researched and thoughtfully considered angles. (I was happily surprised to see that James Martin, whose book was among the favorites of those I wrote about reading here, was one of the key persons interviewed for this article, and I thoroughly enjoyed and felt deep resonance with the perspectives he shared on the subject.)

After my indignation at the CBS article last week, which cooled a bit after reading the CNN article shortly afterward, this TIME article did much to repair my faith in solid news practices. It is a thorough rendering of a complex subject (at least, as thorough a rendering as a magazine article can give), and I appreciate the efforts taken to secure a greater degree of historic understanding of the movements of personal faith.

For those interested, Come Be My Light releases on September 4. I know that I, for one, will pick it up . . . and you can expect to hear more on the subject here, as I go.

Mother Teresa and Faith

Back in January, I wrote a post about how I was led to know more about Mother Teresa. Then I wrote another one that marveled at the obedience that directed her life before she could serve the poor. And today I am writing one more.

CBS News has just released an article about Mother Teresa's doubts. This article is based on a new book of letters coming out, many of which have never been seen before. Some of these letters find Teresa voicing her doubts about God, about prayer, about the existence of the soul, about Jesus. She questions the integrity of her heart sometimes. She wonders at what she is doing.

Personally, I love that she wrote these things. I want to pick up the book and explore its every page because I expect to find encouragement and kinship there, a greater sense of her inward person.

The media, however, pose a different view. To them, the voicing of questions unhinges our faith in her piety. It calls into question her service, as though those acts were performed with divided motives and an insincere heart and therefore, supposedly, worth nothing. And it seems that, for them, if prayer ceases at some point in time, it's never recovered again.

I suppose we can't expect those whose understanding has been darkened and whose eyes have not been opened to apprehend the life of faith, to know that it rises and falls with great tides at times, and that God is still near when it does. But it bothers me that such powerful entities get to stand on such visible stages, leading the rest of the world to conclusions perceived with their unseeing eyes.

Interesting postnote: As I was doing a search for the book of letters to determine its title and date of release (as of yet, I've been unable to locate this information), I uncovered this article released by CNN on September 7, 2001, which relays much of the same information, except in a more objective spirit. It's unclear to me, given the six-year lapse, what CBS is seeking to accomplish with their recycling of what I now see is actually "old" news.

Run to You

About three weeks ago, I read a psalm that struck me with the disparity between David's faith and my own, between his relationship with the heavenly Father and mine, between what he knew he could ask of God and what I feel I can ask of Him. The words that I read were as follows:

I love you, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,
and I am saved from my enemies.

The cords of death encompassed me;
the torrents of destruction assailed me;
the cords of Sheol entangled me;
the snares of death confronted me.

In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry to him reached his ears.

Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations also of the mountains trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.
Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.
He bowed the heavens and came down;
thick darkness was under his feet.
He rode on a cherub and flew;
he came swiftly on the wings of the wind.
He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him,
thick clouds dark with water.
Out of the brightness before him
hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds.

The Lord also thundered in the heavens,
and the Most High uttered his voice,
hailstones and coals of fire.
And he sent out his arrows and scattered them:
he flashed forth lightnings and routed them.
Then the channels of the sea were seen,
and the foundations of the world were laid bare
at your rebuke, O Lord,
at the blast of the breath of your nostrils.

He sent from on high, he took me;
he drew me out of many waters.
He rescued me from my strong enemy
and from those who hated me,
for they were too mighty for me.
They confronted me in the day of my calamity,
but the Lord was my support.
He brought me out into a broad place;
he rescued me, because he delighted in me.

--Psalm 18:1-19

Such awareness, once it struck me, produced the following prayer in the margins of my Bible:

I can't help but wonder if You would respond this way to me, too, Lord, if I called for help in my distress. Sometimes I go and bury my head in Your chest, or throw myself down at Your feet, but I don't ask You to come and rescue me, to come down from the heights of Your heaven and defeat my enemies on my behalf. Sometimes I pray for You to send Your angels to protect me, or for You to hide me under the shadow of Your wings, like the words of Psalm 91 encourage me to do. Sometimes I pray that You would send Your Sprit of peace, like a dove, to rest upon my head and the heads of others.

But I do not pray for You to come and rescue me. Perhaps I doubt You will, and perhaps it's easier for me to run to You, knowing You are there, than to expect You to come to where I am. At least with You, Father, I want to grow in my faith and understanding that You will -- and that You even want -- to come after me like You came after David. Help me grow in the faith that moves me to receive what You have to offer me. Amen.

I've been sitting with this psalm and this prayer since then, marveling at the rock-bottom truth of my heart in this place, the truth that I do not expect that God will run to me and rescue me with the vengeance He showed His servant David. Then last night at church, my thoughts on the matter expanded yet again.

Our church has just moved into a new building. I may share more on that experience later, but let it suffice for the purposes of this story that the new building is much larger and more technically complex and, overall, inspiring quite a bit of awe in all of us. (We've worshipped in a rundown but renovated old rollerskating rink for the past 20 years.) Our pastors were good to us in many ways this weekend, encouraging us with gentleness back to the King, bestowing on all of us the permission to sink slowly into this big change, and then reminding us that we are meant for worship. "Remember that it's about Him conforming us ever more into His likeness," our pastor said, which turned my mind back to this psalm and my quandary in grappling with it.

If it is God's nature and desire to run to us and rescue us and lift us into the palm of His hand, up into a safe and quiet place, does this mean we are to extend the same to others? Would this be one part of what it means to be conformed into His likeness? This question struck down deep inside me.

Why do I cry at the brokenness of others? Why do tears stream from my face as I lay in bed some nights, the faces of beloved friends and family whose stories I know and whose journeys I have watched, flashing before my mind's eye while unspoken, wordless prayers bubble up from my spirit to His? Why does God choose to sit me beside random, lone women at church, my heart burning in prayer for them throughout the service, prayers that plead with God for the rescuing and heartening of their spirits, though we have never met and I know not the road they walk? Why do the words of Isaiah 61 and 62 haunt me evermore, bringing me to weep and pray for faceless girls and women I can only believe someday I'll meet?

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to grant to those who mourn in Zion --
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;
that they may be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified. . . .

You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her,
and your land Married;
for the Lord delights in you,
and your land shall be married.
For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your sons marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you. . . .

You shall be called Sought Out,
A City Not Forsaken.

--Isaiah 61:1-3, 62:3-4, 12

Trinity in This Place

When I was little, I remember being aware of Jesus all the time. Even before I ever made a public profession of faith, I felt Him in my house, in my bedroom, at school, and on the playground. When I went to my first children's church at 9 years old (my family had attended the Catholic church until that point), my heart leapt with joy at the discovery that we were going to spend the entire time singing songs and making crafts about Jesus. This was unlike anything I'd experienced in Catholic church and catechism. A year later, I was baptized, and three years later, in junior high, I learned the official lingo of what it meant to have a "personal relationship with Jesus."

It's funny to me, typing this now, because it's right around that same time of learning about a personal relationship with Christ that I shifted from an acute awareness and love of Jesus to an overwhelming awareness and reverence for God the Father. I had just gotten my first adult Bible, a soft blue leather New King James (I'd received a hardcover NIV with illustrations as a baptism gift in my younger years) and had also begun a prayer journal, always beginning each prayer with "Heavenly Father." With my new Bible, I began reading much more of the Old Testament, and books like Isaiah and Ezekiel and Hosea and Joel opened my eyes to the holy and awe-inspiring nature of our God. I thirsted for truth, strove to do what was right in the sight of God, and saw the world through a pretty black-and-white filter according to His principles.

It's pretty amazing the way this view of God affected my work. One of the jobs I held in that first year out of college was a part-time writing instruction post for the honors program at my college. After the first round of paper grades went through, I discovered the students had monikered my name in such a way that basically translated in plainspeak into something like, "Has your paper been put through the blender yet?"

It was true. In every meeting with students, I cared most about the ideas they had chosen and whether they had hit upon the truths of them. I ran those meetings like I was their adversarial opponent. On the pages of every paper I graded, I cared most about whether they'd examined every possible angle I could perceive of their argument, were using the English language with authority and correctness, had sourced their citations properly, and had used the absolute minimum number of words necessary to communicate their point. I remember a colleague approaching me after the first semester's papers had gone back, saying, "You're pretty tough. I took a look at one of the papers you graded, and in a sentence that had fifteen words in it, you had sliced through at least half of them. But when I read what was left, you were right: they could have said the same thing in half the words, and it's probably good that they learn that."

I thought so, too.

By the second year, though, things had started to shift a little bit. I had begun to spend a lot of time in the Gospels. (You'll remember that I shared my realization of a complete lack of understanding of grace and lack of connection to the Second Person of the Trinity. I figured that one way to rectify this lack was to go straight to the source and spend time getting to know Him better.) As I watched Jesus walk around those pages, I became overwhelmed with the idea of the disciples spending the time they did with Him. They got to converse with Him, hear His voice, share long meals with Him, walk long distances together, and even touch Him. It hardly seemed possible, and I became incredibly jealous. (I know this sounds silly, but it's true.)

The other thing I noticed was His gentleness, sincerity, and grace. He who was the perfect embodiment of God and followed the Law without error still knelt and forgave an adulterous woman, still let a woman with an issue of blood touch His cloak, still let a woman who'd been a prostitute wash his feet with oil and tears, still reached out and touched a leprous man, and still chose to hold closest to Him a group of fishermen, tax collectors, and sinners who often strayed into purposeless fights among themselves.

This was not a man who campaigned with zeal for some black-and-white principles. In fact, He criticized most sharply the ones who were doing just that, and it seemed those folks completely missed the boat. No, He came to offer something else, and the best word to describe what He came to offer is grace.

If that was what He came to offer, then that is what I wanted to learn how to receive from Him, and it's also what I wanted to learn how to offer to others. There seemed to be a certain amount of rest to be found in grace; through the pages of the Gospels, Jesus doesn't seem preoccupied with making sure people "get it" and "shape up" and "do better." He seems more concerned with meeting people where they are, listening to the stories of their lives, and offering them water for their thirsty souls in that place. This is gentler and more caring than the other way of doing things could ever be, and it seemed to actually do something in the hearts and lives of the people He met. Maybe relaxing into such a gift myself was the best way to let Him do something in me, too.

I immediately saw this value shift affect my work again. My conversations with students became more personal. I reached out to those I saw imprisoned in the same performance trap I'd known so many years. I cooled a little bit on the grading (but not a lot). And I started experiencing the dysfunction and terror that I wrote about in my last post.

It might sound surprising that those gasps and shakes happened after so much good had been accomplished in my spirit and understanding. It was surprising to me, too. I've come to see at least two reasons for this, though. The first is that understanding, or knowledge, does not equal transformation, in the same way you hear people say having knowledge of a wound does not make it healed. I had simply become aware of what God was about and what He was after, but I still had to walk through the process of change.

The second reason is that all of this change resided on such a relational level. I could learn to receive this kind of care from God because I knew it was His essence and what He wanted to offer. I did not, however, believe that the rest of the world would value or offer or want to receive this same thing. It was in my person-to-person relationships at a young age that I'd learned the danger of vulnerability. It was in this world that I'd also ingested the notion that my invisibility and perfection made all things well. And now I was trying to become more visible, to share myself more transparently in the world, and to out my inability to be perfect. I didn't want to live in those prisoned walls anymore, but I really didn't know if the world would go along with that decision.

I stumbled along for many years in this integration process. (Say, five?) It's only been in the past two years or so that things have clicked and that a greater freedom has been released in me. The funny thing is, I went back to that same college honors program two years ago, after about three years away, and though I stumbled and fell on my face a lot in my first semester back, mostly for all of these same reasons I've been sharing above, God set my spirit free in the second (and last) semester I was there.

And actually, thinking about it now, I don't think it's any coincidence that it's during that period of time that my relationship with the Holy Spirit began to flourish. You know how I told you I grew jealous of the disciples when I started camping out in the Gospels those many years ago? Well, somewhere within that span of time I was stumbling and inching along into grace, I wrote a poem about that jealousy. I'll share it with you here but can now preface it by saying that God, over time, responded to my heart's cry for greater nearness to Christ through the gift of the Holy Spirit. I now cannot imagine getting through my life without the power and peace and intercession the Holy Spirit affords my faith and understanding and relationships. It's so incredible to me now to see it, but this must be what Christ meant when He said, "It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you."

Consolation Prize

What is our consolation,
now that You've left us for heaven,
and we'll never
walk on water
or clutch firm your heavy garment
or behold your gentle gaze
in silent wonder?

We're left only with this history
and this mysterious,
silent Helper,
meant to be our only
God's invisible breath.

Breath of God,
if you are equal,
just as worthy of His glory,
fill yet up the
part of me that
disbelieves.

What Happened Next

I had a chance to view Steve Jobs's 2005 commencement speech for Stanford on YouTube the other day, and he shared a specific bit of insight that I find helpful in recounting my story to you: "You can't connect the dots of your life going forward; you can only connect them looking backward."

Boy, do I know that to be true. Ten years ago, you would have found me operating at high-speed performance. I had graduated high school with top honors and such extracurriculars as co-running the school yearbook, leading worship in my high school youth group, discipling young girls at my church, and working four nights a week as a waitress. I had an active church and social life, a boyfriend, and what felt like a second part-time job applying for college scholarships. I made it to college, at which point I took 18 units a semester, got another part-time job that quickly ramped up to 30 hours per week, volunteered to tutor inner city kids in the afternoons, eventually got engaged, and was suddenly married by my junior year. Life was cooking, and I was handling it. Wasn't that what I had always done?

Because, really, when you take a girl who has learned the unpredictable nature of the world and you give her raw talent and eyes to see other people, what you get in return is someone who shields her most intimate self from the world, offers the strength that she has to others, and depends on every asset she has but her heart to make her strong. In other words, she bets her very existence and survival on her core competencies and her mind. But as I shared with a good friend recently, just because you're competent at something doesn't mean it's what you're meant to do. Sometimes it just means you did what you had to do to get by in life. That's what had happened with me.

The thing is, I didn't know that was what had happened. I thought my ability to succeed at everything I set my mind to doing was what made me good. I thought keeping myself free from depending on others was an asset to my character. I thought it held me up in other people's eyes, and even the eyes of God, since it made me someone other people and God didn't have to worry about too much. To be honest, there was a certain amount of pride to be found in that. But also a certain amount of sadness.

So then I read that infamous book I told you about. You know, the one that opened my eyes up to grace and how I didn't think Jesus had any real thing to do with me. The book not only helped me see I actually believed these things deep down but also that I had come to depend on the ultimate wrong thing: me. And somehow the idea got through to me that God had much more to offer me than that.

Within two years, this notion had gripped me. And slowly but surely, everything in my life came to a grinding halt. I just stopped doing. No more journaling. No more Bible reading. No more volunteering my time. No more going out of my way to connect with people in my life. I shrugged my shoulders at anything hard. I stopped trying to remember every minute detail of every single interaction or experience I had. (My memory is still recovering from this.) I experimented with curse words and wondered what it would be like to smoke. (Still haven't followed through on that last one!)

A lot of key people in my life didn't understand why I was doing this. I remember, in particular, one person fighting with me and saying, "This isn't the Christianne I know. The Christianne I know would toughen up and fight through this and go out there and do something! The Christianne I know was going to take on the world!" But I stood my ground. I knew this was unlike any action (or, I should say, inaction) I had taken in my life, but somehow I knew it was monumental. It was something I had to sit with, in order to let whatever was trying to happen, happen.

Somehow I knew that I was asking God to show me what it actually meant for Him to love me for who I was and not what I could do. I knew He said this was how He loved me, but I didn't know what it meant to experience or receive that kind of love in reality. All I knew how to do was to bolster myself up with more deeds and accolades, in order to make Him proud of me and send me off into the world "all grown up." I didn't know how to just be, and still be loved.

The irony is, in the same way He'd given me the gift of seeing and loving others, He was helping me through that time to learn how to be seen and loved myself. He was giving me back my heart, and now He's going to use me to help give other women back their hearts, too. Stay tuned for more.

Some Background on Why Me

If you're at all familiar with the Ransomed Heart corpus of literature (of Epic, Sacred Romance, Journey of Desire, Wild at Heart, and Captivating fame), you know they hold close a few core beliefs:

1) That our lives are caught up in story at both a micro (our own) and macro (God's ultimate) level.

2) That knowing both stories helps make a lot more sense of our lives.

3) That one powerful way we are meant to unveil God's glory on earth is through the unique imprint of His glory in us.

4) And that we have an enemy that seeks to steal, kill, and destroy that glory in us, with an aim toward rendering God's power impotent on earth.

These are pretty powerful truths, if you think about them. I've spent the last big handful of years making sense of the first two points in my own life -- what story have I been living in? how much of that has been given by God and how much is of my own making? where do I go from here? -- but it's really with the latter two that it all begins. It's with the question of His unique imprint in us and the enemy's attempts to mar and destroy that image that we're able to begin making sense of the part of the story God meant for us to share.

And it's with these latter two ideas that I'll begin to establish some backstory with you about this new adventure He's invited me into.

His Unique Imprint

Were you to see me as a little kid, you would more often than not find me one way: curled up in some random corner reading a book. Some people who read this voraciously as a kid did so to escape their reality. Others did it as a precursor to their own eventual storytelling. But neither of these were my bent. (Indeed, the teacher's invitation to make up stories or draw something of my own choosing felt more like a ticket to horror than any exciting ride.) No, I finally realized recently that the reason I gobbled up novels like candy as a kid was because it was the closest I could get to inhabiting another human being's skin. (I find it interesting that my appetite for real, human stories has grown considerably in my adult years, completely overshadowing my previous interest in novels.)

Let me elaborate on this further. When I read Ramona Quimby, Age 8, I felt that I truly knew Ramona's insides. I got all her jokes, even if nobody else did, and I felt each and every one of her scowls. I keenly sensed Beezus for the awkward, gangly, miserable teenager that she was. I could feel Susan with the Boing-Boing Curls's impudence as a mask to some other deep-seated loneliness. (Whoa. Did I just psychoanalyze the Ramona Quimby books?!) Similarly, when I read Dear Mr. Henshaw, I felt the deep layers of that young boy's pain as he wrote those heartfelt letters, and I wished I could have responded to him myself. And when I read Island of the Blue Dolphins, I felt the young girl's acute loneliness on the island and applauded the bravery, ingenuity, and strength she demonstrated in her forays. I even felt the joy and friendliness of the visiting dolphins when they came around!

And when it came to knowing people in real life, it was more of the same. Obviously, I was bent toward one-to-one friendships rather than the raucous, popularity-driven crowds, preferring to know one other person deeply rather than lots of people superficially. (This was a conscious choice in elementary school.) But at a deeper level, you wouldn't believe the kind of conversations I held with adults in my life when I was very young age (say, seven?). There was something in my makeup that caused other people -- even, and especially, adults -- to trust and confide in me. For some reason, I could go there with them and even champion their journey.

I guess, simply put, you could say that God embedded in me a deep ability and desire to see people as they truly are, to hear their actual stories, to care for their unique journeys, and to be sensitive to their needs. Summed up, He gave me acute perception, discernment, and sensitivity . . . which, to be honest, was also, and often, a crying curse.

The Enemy's Affliction

I suppose in a way you could say all that reading was still a form of escape. It was fueled by the desire to really and truly know another, to find kinship and understanding and beauty in their personhood, but that's probably because it was so difficult to find that in any safe and authentic way in the real world. What I mean is, when God gives you a gift for seeing others and being a strength for them on their journey, it really is a gift -- it's not something every single person in the world has an ability to do. Which means, if you're the one giving it, you often feel lonely and unseen by the people you love in that way.

I've endured the pain of loneliness in my fair share of relationships in my life, and I wish it wasn't so. Sometimes I've wanted to throw in the towel and not be so giving (clearly one of the enemy's attempts to thwart God's glory in my life), since it makes me so perceptibly aware of what I, too, desire to receive but maybe won't. But then I can't do it. This is partly because God formed me this way, and I can't not be it. But it's also because I know the desire to be known is implanted by God -- it's really a desire for Him that people have, as He is the One who knows and sees us more deeply than any other human being ever could -- and so loving people this way, I know, is one way I bear the Imago Dei. It's also what keeps me running, arms splayed wide open, straight into His chest when I need to be known in that way, too. It's also what makes me unfailingly grateful for the people in my life who care in this reciprocal way. It's rare, and I don't take it for granted.

When I think about other ways the enemy tried to advance his forces against my soul, even in my youthful years, a few sharp memories spring into focus.

The first happened when I was 5. I was in first grade, and I had a crush on Stevie Moore. The teacher had taken the class to the upper playground, where there was lots of grass, for the daily dose of physical education (which I hated), and we were playing a chase game called "Trees." At the first whistle, everyone in class runs around like wild hyenas. At the second whistle, groups of two pair up and interlace their hands overhead, forming a "tree," while the remaining kids run underneath the paired arms to get "caught" in the trees. Or something like that.

On the day of this particular memory, I got caught in Stevie Moore's tree, only facing the other way, toward his partner. Then I felt a small kiss on my back. Stevie Moore had kissed my back! Wow. Can a five-year-old experience heart palpitations?

Back in the classroom, winded and exhilarated, I confided this with a girl at my table -- the prettiest girl in class who always wore frilly dresses and had silky, long brown hair and deep blue eyes. "He kissed me on the back!" I cheered.

"Well, he kissed me on the lips," the girl said, and flounced her hair over her shoulder. And just like that, I was dismissed in a moment when I had chosen to put myself out there.

Another time a group of boys, led by the class bully, circled around me at recess as I wandered through a line of trees on the edge of the playground field. They circled closer and closer, and finally grabbed my arms while the bully ordered another one to lift my dress so they could stare at my underpants. I remember the small boy's face who took the order, pleading wordlessly with me for forgiveness as he put me through this shame, as though he knew it was wrong and that it would hurt me badly. And it did. Again, another moment of dismissal in a moment of vulnerability as I wandered, carefree and joyfully, through the line of trees.

It's these kinds of experiences (and there are more that I could tell) that caused me to close up and guard my words and actions, and definitely my deepest thoughts and feelings, from the rest of the world. It's probably what made reading feel so safe and established, since I got kinship and deep knowledge of another without the pain. But really, the pain was still there. I had just learned to lock it up deep inside, hidden from others, and even sometimes, though not so successfully most of the time, even myself.

In my next installment on the subject, I'll share more about the path toward freedom God began to carve out in my life . . . and how this all, eventually, relates to what He and I are beginning to build, together.

Body Relations

Ever since I was plunged into the world of health at my job last fall, I've been learning a lot more about how best to take care of the body. And, motivated in part to better take care of myself and in part to just lose weight, I began to make some changes. Within those first few weeks, I started toting 3-4 bottles of water with me to work each day. I packed small bags of almonds for a midday snack, an apple or ripe peach for the afternoon. I tried to let up on Starbucks (though not so successfully!). And I stayed away from soda.

I felt better about my body right away in those first few weeks, but the weight loss benefit didn't come the way I thought it would. And, to be honest, I wasn't sure how much weight there really was to lose. My body sure didn’t look a whole lot different to me, even though my clothes fit more snugly than they did when we left for our wedding and honeymoon in June. Of course, a near-month in Europe and the first few months of a marriage are bound to take a toll on the waistline, but still, I didn’t see much of a change. (I’ve heard people who gain weight often can’t see the reality reflected in the mirror, though.)

The thing I mostly mean about not being sure how much weight there really was to lose is this. Since we live in a tiny space, we take our clothes to a wash-and-fold service to get them cleaned -- a place where you can drop your laundry and pick it up the next day, all washed and dried and folded -- and I thought the tightness of clothing had to do with that. You see, back home in California I would wash pants and delicate tops in the washer and then hang them up to dry so they wouldn't shrink, whereas here I didn't have that option with the wash-and-fold service. They put all our clothes through the full washer-and-dryer rigamorale, no exceptions. Trust me, I asked! So I figured this new process was slowly shrinking my clothes.

But then came the day of reckoning: my first visit to the doctor for a regular checkup in early December. When the nurse asked me step on the scale, I could hardly believe the number that turned up!

"That can't be," I sputtered. "I've never weighed that much in my life!" She clucked sympathetically and led me into the examination room. I sat down in the chair, completely dazed, repeating the number in my mind, unable to fathom the truth of it. "How can that possibly be?" I wondered aloud again. "I've always been thin. I've never worried about weight."

I had, since my last weigh-in about six months prior, gained a whopping 25 pounds. Again, I'll grant that this was due in large part to the sheer amount of life change that had happened in that six months of time: preparing for an overseas wedding, wrapping up a stressful job, packing up my life in California, saying goodbye to family and friends, driving across the country, saying hello to a new home, and then traipsing over to Europe for our wedding ceremony and honeymoon before settling back into a new life with Kirk in a whole new state -- not to mention all the celebratory meals that had filled that time!

But still, I could hardly believe it. It was a huge wake-up call, and not a little depressing.

Since that fateful day in the doctor's office, I've been doing what I can to change my body, and all to no good effect. I've exercised in spurts, and I've kept up the healthy snacking. No change. I’ve stayed away from soda altogether. Still, no change. And the fact is, Kirk and I like to celebrate. Even though I snack smart through the day, we usually go out for sushi or Thai or Italian in the evening, plus eat out on weekends. But we’ve often broken it up with steamed salmon or chicken or salad in the evenings on a pretty regular basis. Still, no change.

Of course, the other fact is that I don't know how to care for myself.

I've known this for quite some time. I was thin my whole life and never had to worry a pinch about what I ate. There was no freshman fifteen for me when I moved to college, and I maintained a slender 115 for my first two years, only popping up to 125 once I got married my junior year. I ate like a bird most of the time, knowing the whole while that what I ate was never healthy. Still, my body complied and kept me thin, and I loved that we had this agreement. I loved never worrying and doing as I pleased, always with good results.

Now that I'm struggling with weight, I'm learning all kinds of new and scary things. For instance, I'm learning that I don't have any sense of a relationship with my body. I’m realizing, to be brutally honest, that I view it as an object -- an object I control. At least, that’s the agreement I thought we had. Now that my body is in breach of this contract, I’m pretty put out.

If I’m to be even more honest, I must concede that in the past I have done mean things to my body in order to get the results I want. If I went up about 5 pounds, I wouldn’t feed it for one or two days so I could drop back down to what I felt was an acceptable weight. Instead of actual food, I would feed it Starbucks and Hot Tamales and Dr. Pepper and Jack in the Box tacos and Peanut Butter M&Ms -- and nothing else -- yet in small enough doses so that I wouldn’t gain weight. And I would stare obsessively at my tummy every time I walked by a mirror or went into a bathroom, and especially first thing in the morning. This, indeed, was a sickness.

And it still is, only now of a different sort. It’s the kind of sickness I don’t have any sense how to handle. My lifestyle has changed significantly: I’m not flying solo anymore and feeding myself the junk food my body knows how to comply with getting. Now Kirk and I eat full meals. We eat regularly. We celebrate often. And I love all this.

Because the other truth of the matter is what I’ve been learning about walking the road of grace. In almost every other facet of my life, I’ve been learning to care more gently for myself. And slowly but surely, I see how this has made its way into my eating habits. No longer do I want to live in a deprive-it-because-I-control-it-to-get-what-I-want relationship with my body. That just seems so harsh (because it is), and harsh is not a word I want showing up in my vocabulary toward myself (or others, for that matter) ever again.

But what this means is that I’ve swung to the other extreme. In the name of grace, I have chosen to let myself do whatever I want. I didn’t understand that freedom, as shared by a dear friend recently, means the ability to choose what is good.

And that’s because, when it comes to my body and food, I don’t really know what is good. As I said earlier, I don’t know how to care for my body. I don’t know how to have a relationship with it. I don't know how to make good choices. And that, my friends, because you asked, is the reason for the (Almost) Raw Foods Diet. Operating on the objective knowledge that fruits, vegetables, nuts, and some meat is truly good for the body, I chose to eat those foods without the mediation of lesser-quality choices for a while. As my post revealed, I was able to see the true results of eating good choices versus eating poor choices right away. This totally mystified me. It was like I was witnessing a miracle, so floored was I that my body could talk back to me!

I'll confess right now that I haven’t been unswervingly faithful to that raw food eating plan over the past week and a half. But for me, rather than being a strict diet regimen, it’s more about a process in which I'm bent toward learning how to relate to my body, how to no longer view it as a faceless object I control, and how to slowly learn something new about all this, together, along the way.

A Traipse through My Literary Life

Here's a look at what I've been reading the past two weeks. If you can believe it, all of them were purchased by Kirk -- so I say he's got exceptional taste!

Crossing the Desertby Robert J. Wicks

Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith by Henri Nouwen

As has been clear from recent posts, I've been walking through a desert experience and, as a result, am learning to listen more closely to the life of the heart in this long walk of faith. As such, these two books have been a fitting and tremendous gift to take with me along the path.

Crossing the Desert shares wisdom from the Desert Fathers and Mothers about what happens when we move into the desert. The author applies four questions to the desert experience: What am I filled with now? What prevents me from letting go? How do I empty myself? and What will satisfy me yet leave me open to more? I'm sure you can tell from my recent writings how relevant these questions would be for me to consider right now. Perhaps they'll be relevant for you to consider, too.

The spiritual direction book by Henri Nouwen was published posthumously as a collection of his thoughts on the subject by two people who studied him extensively and knew him well. Some of the writings included in the collection were previously published, and some were excised from his private journals and notes. This book speaks quite sensitively to the life of the heart and how to live from a place of belovedness in Christ. Many sections made me feel as though Nouwen was speaking to me from across a table in a coffeeshop or armchair-to-armchair in his office. He writes with great tenderness and compassion, for he understands all too well the duplicity that can be found in our hearts and the aimless and useless striving we often employ to cope with the world.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

A gifted and successful writer who wrote five years for GQ (and was nominated for several awards along the way), Gilbert gave it all up to spend a year exploring the balance between pleasure and devotion. The clincher is how she did it: by spending four months in Italy to learn pleasure, four months in India to learn devotion, and four months in Bali to learn a balance between the two.

This book is absolutely a gorgeous read, as well as funny, tender, and even heartbreaking. To be honest, I wrestled at times with her section on devotion (she follows the Yogic tradition), even setting down the book in a huff or wanting to throw it across the room at times because of our major differences in faith, but in the end I found myself grateful, stimulated, and challenged by what she learned from her struggles to attend more faithfully to her faith and meditation practice.

Becoming Who You Are by James Martin

Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing by Robert Inchausti

These are two excellent books more contemplative in nature.

Becoming Who You Are is written by a Jesuit priest culling primarily from the writings of Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen on the subject of the true self. I appreciated so much the humble honesty the author brings to this discussion, especially in sharing his own journey to finding his authentic self and walking away from a life of falsity. His story and the gentle way in which he writes moved me to even try to track down his e-mail address online in order to thank him! (I was unsuccessful in this attempt.) In short, this is a great read for those wishing to live a life of true courage and authenticity with a willingness to walk away from the trappings that so often ensnare us. I finished this book in a few hours, which should tell you not only how accessible it is but also how stimulating and deeply felt the material can be if you open your heart to its message.

I'm only about twenty pages into Echoing Silence, but already it has been helpful for the writer in me. It pulls together everything Thomas Merton ever wrote -- either in books, articles, published journals, or letters -- about his vocation as a writer and how he struggled to marry it to his life as a Trappist monk. The book gives a revealing look at Merton's very human side in the ways he struggled with pride and arrogance and even anger at times. By seeing Merton's humanity, him being such a great teacher and modern saint, I am being brought to believe even more in Christ's power to transform hearts, inhabit our being, and even triumph over our inadequacies by ministering His power to others despite our own limitations and failures. Again, this is another great primer on finding the true self, and an encouragement to embrace authenticity.

Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen

The Selfless Way of Christ: Downward Mobility and the Spiritual Lifeby Henri Nouwen

I read these two at a monastery in Santa Barbara that we stayed in for a few days last week. Life of the Beloved was a surprise-find in one of their libraries and held me in its grip from the very first page. It reads as a letter Nouwen wrote to his young friend who was seeking the relevance of faith to a secular life (or one lived outside a monastic or religious calling). As you read this book, you are both rooting for his friend to be enlightened and transformed by the words while being enlightened and transformed at a deep and visceral level yourself. I felt fully engulfed in the love of Christ and my place in God's great heart while I read every single page of this short, remarkable book.

The Selfless Love of Christ has been a challenging read for me. As you know, I've been wrestling to "let go of my lists" and stop striving for acknowledgement and worldly gain. Just as its subtitle suggests, this book helps us understand how a life of downward mobility -- a stripping away of our fleshly desires (but not desire itself) -- is the heart and example of Christ, who is the very foundation and model for our faith. I haven't finished this one yet because, as I said, it's been hard! But I do believe it speaks true and tells a message that's worth our embrace. I plan to continue reading it in the coming weeks.

And, up next . . .

The Crime of Living Cautiously by Luci Shaw

Kirk handed this one to me tonight, and I look forward to reading in it about the importance of risk-taking in order to live the lives we were created to live. Should be a good read!

Postnote: I just re-read this post and realized how very much of a book nerd I am. Kirk is, too. We're actually self-proclaimed book addicts. (Remember my post from a few months ago on this subject?) Just to give you a heads-up on our habits of book behavior, when we were on vacation last week, we had to have spent at least $350 on new books. This is more than we spent on food the whole week, I think. And to give you an idea of what this looks like in real life, we had to pack many of the "old" books we had brought with us on the front end of the journey in our checked luggage on the way back just so that we could enjoy some of our new finds on the homebound flight! So, yeah, we're dorks about this. We love bookstores and the feel of new books in hand, the anticipation of how they might help form our souls into what God's making them to be. And Kirk is especially good at finding unique and well-suited-to-the-moment books for both of us. We love this about each other, and we love this about ourselves, period. Can you relate to this at all??

To Be Found in Him

I spent a lot of time this past week reading Philippians 3. You know, the part where Paul says, "You think you've got stuff to brag about? Listen to what I've got." The part where he proceeds to rattle off a mile-long list of credentials that qualify him for saint status in God's Ineffable Hall of Greatness.

Since I've been clutching my own list of what-makes-me-great credentials these days, and fighting tool and nail with God to let me keep it, Paul's question reeled me in. And what can I say? I engaged.

Yes, I do have stuff, I said. See? And I pulled out my very own list -- not a long one, mind you, but a good one. One whose contents mattered, at least to me.

So then Paul pulled his out, too. Oh, I thought. He has a real list, and a long one. Whereas I'm just speculating here.

Because I'm the creator of this list. I'm the one who fawns and pets at it often. I'm the one who tailors it whenever it needs tailoring. And I'm the one hoping it gets me into that Hall of Greatness -- and maybe even nabs me a seat at the banquet high table on opening night.

Whereas Paul had legitimate stuff that even God couldn't dispute. I mean, come on: who else besides Jesus could claim blamelessness under the law?!

Reading Paul's list, I grew significantly smaller. Compared to him, I fell way short. Of course, this shouldn't have surprised me. Just a few days ago, after all, I fell short of Jesus, too.

But then, if you can believe it, Paul flips the tables again. "See this great list of mine?" he asks. "I count it all as trash. I'm throwing it away right now! Just watch me." Rip, rip, rip.

Why does he do this?! The only sane answer is the one he gives for himself:

"I count them as rubbish, in order that I main gain Christ and be found in Him . . . that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead." (vv. 8-11)

Somehow, Christ's value is worth losing our lists for. And what's more, we're invited into an altogether mysterious life in return. Because let's face it: What, exactly, does it mean to be found in Christ? And what, after that happens, does it mean to be resurrected from the dead? I sure wish I knew. But I have a feeling I'm about to find out in a very real way.

What Happens in Death

On Holy Saturday, the day we usually remember the disciples and their grief, I remembered Jesus. I thought of Paul's teaching in Philippians 2, how Jesus so regarded equality with God a thing not to be grasped that He humbled Himself unto death, even death on a cross. Paul says we are to emulate this humility that leads unto death, and I couldn't help thinking of the death He is trying to accomplish in me as He leads me in this long trek across the grainy wilderness.

I sat meditating on that passage and my own little death for some time, astounded by the connection to this daily reality I have been living, until then a new truth emerged. All at once, like a windfall, it became so obvious that Christ's humility forever exceeds any humility He could even be asking of me in this death knell time. His righteousness was true righteousness, undeserving of death, yet He suffered to die for the love of us anyway. I cannot claim an inch of that kind of righteousness, yet here I kneel, grasping and fighting and kvetching to keep the shards of my life in my fists.

It is fitting that He brought this passage to my attention on Holy Saturday, or Low Saturday, for that is the day Jesus spent inside the tomb. It is the day that, for all intents and purposes, nothing seemed to happen. It is the day He was, truly, dead. A Christ-sized wilderness had sprung up in place of His life, and all that could be seen by the eye was desert and sand and plains devoid of life, leaving us all to grieve in a daze of wonder and confusion.

Yet what happened underneath what the eyes could see? That is where He descended into hell. That is where He overcame death. That is where, in the power and strength of the mighty hand of our God, He gathered the souls of the faithful into His arms and shot His way heavenward.

And that is where life -- the kind you would suffer and die for -- was born. In the seemingly paltry wilderness.

In the Wilderness

Sorry I've been lax in posting lately. It has to do with what I shared recently about being emptied out by God. This is cropping up in all areas of my life, not just writing, and it leaves me feeling empty, empty, empty, like a forever expanding expanse of barren land.

I know it serves a purpose. In fact, on Sunday I realized He's altogether quite intentional with me. I'm in the wilderness, but it's not the first time. The first time was about 10 years ago, when He helped me see I operated my life from the belief that I'm loveable purely for what I do, and do perfectly. He helped me see the folly in this. He helped me learn how to receive love for simply being. He helped me believe I was beautiful just for merely existing. It took about four years of confusion, tumult, anger, apathy, and pain to come into the light on this one. But He was faithful. And faithful even still, as I need to re-learn these truths even still sometimes.

The second time was when He stripped me of every thing and person in my life. When I thought I was moving on to grad school, I got denied entrance. When I turned to others for comfort, I got voicemail every time. When I was interested in new relationships, the roads before me shriveled up and disappeared. Eventually, He even led me to leave my job without another job lined up in its stead, no matter how irresponsible and unjudicious I'd always thought that to be. I was walking in darkness, and it was pitch black. I learned real quick I didn't trust Him that much. But I did eventually learn the true meaning of faith: choosing to walk into black, because you trust the One who holds you. What else could faith possibly be?

This time it's a barren desert. There is light this time, but no signposts. I feel Him on the wind and sense Him in the sand, but it is gritty and dry and lonely and empty. I don't have any reserves of my own. All that I have is given by His hand. All I can do is wait.

I don't know how long I've been walking this wilderness road, to be honest, but I can see sprinklings of it all the way back to December when I wrote this post. And I can see that this turn in the journey plunges deeper than the other two ever did or even could have. The first one toppled outer idols of performance and pleasing others, even God, but it was about opening my eyes to a graven image I didn't know I worshipped in the first place. The second one was a stripping space, where every security and hope and dream vanished so I could turn to and trust in Him alone.

But this third time, oh, this third time. It's a deep and interior and alone time. It's a scooping out of every conscious sense I've carried about myself on the inside. It's about dying to myself and all my thoughts, every single last one of them, for they are idols, idols, idols . . . and in His grace He wants to banish them from my soul.

How He Sometimes Strips Us, or What Writing Means to Me (Part 8)

This past weekend, in celebration and remembrance of our engagement that happened on St. Patrick's Day last year, Kirk took me to our favorite Orlando hotel, the JW Marriott, which I have shared about a few times before. (For those inquisitive types out there who may be somewhat new to this blog, you can read more about those times here and here.)

We spent time at the pool, enjoyed the luxurious bed (I can never get over the splendor of their fabulous beds!), and shared a fantastic meal on Saturday night. It was a meal replete with soul-stirring conversation, a glorious bottle of wine, and melt-in-your-mouth desserts.

The restaurant was a new experience for both of us and, like I said, a fantastic one. The place is high-class, and they serve perfect portion sizes of the most perfectly prepared food, all of it organic and grown either in the garden right outside their doors or brought in from local farmers and fishermen. (For those of you un-health-conscious types, this is not to say that "organic" and "locally grown" translates into "boring" and "blah" food. On the contrary, actually. I enjoyed a very light and tasty shrimp scampi linguini, while Kirk enjoyed fall-apart-in-your-mouth sea scallops and asparagus spears. Yum!)

That was one fantabulously perfect meal, I tell you. I would love to re-live it again.

But the most important aspect of the weekend was quite outside all these things. The most important part of the weekend was the way God showed up when we asked Him to. On our way there, as we were driving away from our home toward the yet-undisclosed-location, I said a prayer out loud in the car that invited God deeper into our time away. We had previously voiced that this weekend was set aside as a devotional one, filled with worship and closeness in Him and the seeking out of His face, so I prayed that He would reveal the deeper heart of His plans for us over the course of the weekend, no matter what that might mean. And in His faithful way, He did just that.

He did this in a number of ways, but I want to share one of the life-crashing ways He did it with me. For some context, I should say that for the past two and a half months, I've been committed to a writing partner I have never met. She contacted me through a mutual friend toward the end of last year, and she lives in Iowa. We agreed to work on "pages," as we've come to affectionately call them, and to send them to each other for review at regular intervals through the mail. Just what this agreement actually means to both of us has morphed several times in the near-three months we've worked at it, as each of us have had to clarify again and again to ourselves what, exactly, our projects are. It has been exciting at times, and it has been flat-out exasperating at others. We've said things to each other like, "I resent your presence in my life, even though I choose for you to be in it" and "I like the way e-mail can keep me from dealing with you." All said in the most affectionate of tones and with the greatest of respect, of course.

The truth on my end of things, though, is that I've dried up like a stick. I'll commit to a project, write ten pages on it, send it to her, and hit that infuriating wall. So then I'll commit to a different project, tell myself, "Yeah -- this is what I should have been committed to doing instead," distance myself emotionally from the previous project, only to slam up against that blank wall of a page a few days later. Pretty much, it's awful. Pretty much, I hate it. Pretty much, it makes me loathe myself.

You know what it feels like? It feels like I've gone all the way back to that writer-poser self I thought I had so successfully sloughed off of my skin. (You know, the one I wrote about here and here.) But as I've faced the fright of the blank page with absolutely nothing soon in coming, the terror of having nothing to say has grown worse and my resistance to sitting down and continuing to try has only grown stronger.

Has my worst nightmare descended finally upon me, I've wondered slowly. Am I a writer with nothing to say?

All of this came to a head this past weekend. As part of our commitment to the devotional aspect of our weekend, Kirk brought along some ivory cardstock cards and proceeded to lead us in a time of giving-over on Saturday night, after we'd returned to the room after dinner. As we sat with these cards, we kept asking ourselves the question, "What would He have us commit to His care and His lordship?" We then would take turns writing things down on the cards before signing and dating them.

On my second card, I wrote, "My writing -- whatever it's meant to be and to be for." I signed and dated it. I put it in the pile. I affirmed in my heart that He means my writing for Him and that He wants to dictate what it becomes. I brought my will into agreement with that belief and went to sleep peacefully upon it.

I did not, however, realize what was waiting just around the corner.

In the morning, Kirk and I left the hotel and stopped by a restaurant for breakfast. We had a great conversation that stirred up a bunch of energy and excitement, and so we decided to stop at Starbucks before going home so we could work out some of that energy in productive activity. He was going to work on his business idea, and I wanted to work on my writing (even though I had no idea, at that point, what that actually meant anymore). But as we drew nearer the Starbucks, the more my enthusiasm faded with every mile and turn. I felt a sinking in my heart. I felt a dense, cold, clay rock begin to ball itself up in my stomach. In actuality, I wanted to throw up.

We decided to sit outside, and Kirk went inside to order our drinks. I pulled out my laptop, opened it up to a brand-new blank page, and stared blankly at the screen. I blinked a few times, since the sun was hitting it, then moved around to a better angle. I stared at the screen some more and then realized: I didn't have anything to say.

Kirk came out with our drinks. I made an effort to smile. (It was a pitiful effort.) Shortly afterward, I closed the laptop and asked if he could pass me a notepad from his backpack. Perhaps if I write it longhand it will come, I thought. Nevermind that I hadn't written in longhand in probably at least six years, but maybe this would do the trick in freeing me up to land upon an idea.

I wrote about a paragraph that was a puking, mewling attempt at prayer. It was riddled with complaints and cries. It testified to my very lost self. Pretty soon, I gave that up, too, and began drawing in the margins with my purple felt pen, making designs and then blotting them out. Kirk watched me for a while and then gently suggested we make our way on home. I shrugged and then let him lead me to the car like I was a blind girl who needed to be steered.

When we got home, I curled up on the couch and faced the wall. I pulled a blanket over my body and closed my eyes tight. I have nothing to say, I admitted to myself in a tiny, tiny voice. I want with everything in me for this not to be true, but it's true. I don't know what to say.

You want to know the point of this whole story? It's to say that even though, in theory, I wanted my work to be God's, what I actually wanted more was to have work. To have written. To have something to say.

"I want to be shiny," I confessed to Kirk a little later, after I'd come to grips with this truth inside myself. That about sums it up.

Because He loves me so much, I believe God is allowing me to come to the end of myself through this whole process. I believe the point is to begin to realize how insufficient I am to control or dictate my own life, and even my own measly words. I believe it's to have absolutely nothing left so that all I have is this big gaping hole that needs Him and Him alone. Because that is His greatest joy: our need of Him, His own sufficiency.

I am only beginning to scratch the surface of what this might mean. But I have hope that the surface is there, that I'm scratching it, and that it's leading to more. I hope you'll accompany me along in the journey. Amen.

Lessons from the Pool

When I was a sophomore in high school, I went out for the swim team. My brother and I both did, figuring that swimming since age three for both of us was bound to count for something, and we were right. After a week of time-trial tryouts, we both landed swiftly on the team.

At my first meet, the coach put me in the 500-meter event: twenty laps of the freestyle stroke. In case you don't know, this is the event nobody watches, as it runs over five minutes at its quickest and upwards of nine at its slowest. Couple that with its being run four times in succession -- twice for boys and girls JV and twice for boys and girls varsity -- and it is, hands down, the point at which everyone stands up and takes a break. Except, of course, those poor souls inside the pool.

The first time I swam this event, I didn't know all these things. I didn't know this 500-free event was the most ominous and foreboding of them all, not to mention the most boring. All I knew was that my coach had put me in it, and that meant I would swim it.

Except that about three minutes before the girls JV event was to start, I found out I needed a lap counter. That's right: a lap counter. This event is so long and disorienting, it requires asking some merciful person to stick around for the whole event and count your laps with you. It means having them dip a huge, white, rectangular board with the bold, brazen, blue number of your lap into the pool every time you reached the far end so you don't lose count and can perhaps plan a little speed strategy.

I had no idea I needed one of these lap counters. In a scramble, I ran to a friend and asked if she'd be there to count my laps. Having just learned what this mammoth of a swim actually meant in the first place (twenty laps, really?!) and that I was actually going to swim it, I waited with dry mouth and jumbled nerves for her to say yes. (She did.)

And so, shaken and very nervous, I assumed my position on the mark board. I looked at my friend at the other end of the pool, now sitting there with the lap counter boards and looking very small across that wide expanse of water, and realized I was about to jump into a literal pool of the unknown. I had no idea how I would do it. I had no idea if I had even the strength to do it. All I knew was that once that shrill whistle sounded, I would jump in the water and then put one hand in front of the other again and again and again. All I knew was that I would do what I had been trained to do: swim.

To my surprise -- and the surprise of everyone else! -- I placed first in that event. I placed first the second time I did it, too. By the third time around, my coach pushed me up to varsity, and that's point at which I began to lose. Badly. From that point forward, knowing I would lose and how far I had to go, swim meet days became almost unbearable.I still participated in meets (I had to, to stay on the team), but it was the 5:30 a.m. morning practices and the afternoon swim period practices I craved. It was the missives from the coach to swim a 200-free or a 100-breast or some kind of inordinately hard speed drill that I gobbled up like candy. It was, in no short order, the practice, not the meets, I loved.

It has been twelve years since that time, and I haven't swam serious laps since. At least, not until this week. This past Saturday, Kirk and I were at Sea World. The Sunday before that, we were at Discovery Cove. Both of these are water-intensive theme parks, and both of these are filled with animals who love to swim. I gawked at their magnificence and marveled at their sheer love of the water. And what can I say? Their ethos for the water got to me. I came home from Sea World last Saturday and headed straight for the gym, swim suit in tow.

I'll say right off the bat, having completed two workouts of twenty laps each, that I am nowhere near as good a swimmer as I was twelve years ago. My form is off, my breathing's shallow, and my muscles have a long way to go to glide me smoothly and swiftly back through the water. But I'm choosing my love of the water and the movement of my body within it over all these other things. I'm exploring what it feels like to let my body and the water -- and not my brain or expectations -- do the talking. I'm asking myself to swim each day for love of water. To swim for love of the feel. And maybe, just maybe, I'll learn to apply this same grace to life outside the pool just someday soon.

Our God Is So Ingenius

As many of you know, when I first moved to Winter Park I was going to write full-time instead of working a regular job. After a couple months, I discovered that was a plunge I was not ready to take. So, I started hunting for work. Where did I direct most of my hopes? Relevant Media Group.

As many of you also know, Kirk has been working on a degree in Entertainment Business over the course of this past year. (And he just completed his last class on Saturday. Bravo for him!) Along about three-quarters of his way through the program, he started thinking about life after Full Sail. Where would God have him go? One night over sushi, he shared that if he ever worked for someone else again, he would want it to be Walden Media.

And you know what? God gave both of us those dreams but in unexpected channels. Instead of working for Relevant, I got to write for them. Instead of working for Walden, Kirk got to independently contract his services to them as the marketing coordinator for Amazing Grace here in the Orlando area. And what's more, both these gigs were centered on Wilberforce's story -- something we've both cared about for longer than this film's been around or even in the works. Pretty cool, huh?

When Kirk pointed this out to me tonight, we got dazzled by God's genius. After that, we scratched our heads. What on earth is God up to with us, anyway? He sure takes us along the most inventive of roads on this journey of life we are sharing together. I, for one, am glad to be upon it.

Gleanings from Amazing Grace

This is probably obvious from the trailer, but with all the talk about modern-day slavery we've been having and the connection this film has to the Amazing Change campaign, I thought I should at least clarify something: this film is not about the modern movement. It is, in the purest sense, a historical bio-pic.

That said, here are some of the manifold encouragements you will receive when watching the film this weekend:

1. You will see that faith does not require a retreat from the world to be effective and substantive.
2. You will see that a person can have influence in the exact sphere in which he or she has been gifted. (What sphere has He given you?)
3. You will see the strength that's gained from community when a group, however small, unswervingly commits to something bigger than itself.
4. You will see that unity in one point is sometimes more important than unity in every point, as demonstrated by Wilberforce and his band of co-belligerents.

And finally, you will see humor. You will see friendship. You will see fervency and passion and love and pain and heartbreak and victory. When you get back from the theatre, stop by and share your thoughts!

What Forgiveness Means, Maybe

In case you were wondering, I am still working on forgiveness. I don't do a great job of it most of the time, but I do think my heart is moving in the direction required to offer it up eventually. Want to know why? Because this thought keeps resounding inside my head:

Perhaps forgiveness means trusting God is big enough to handle it.

What this means is that perhaps when a person chose, and kept choosing, to do something that ripped my heart to pieces and made me wonder if my heart, soul, and body were, in fact, worth anything at all, God saw it happen, knew how small and discarded and alone it would make me feel . . . and allowed it to happen anyway.

What it means, perhaps, is that despite assaults against my very soul, God's goodness is bigger still, for all that He's provided in return: a time to heal, the gradual replacement of lies with truth, great love and affirmation from those around me, and the granting of dreams bigger than any I'd ever have dreamed for myself.

Perhaps it means that we are, each one, upon a journey only He can determine the end of, and that it's His job to weave it and ours simply to follow. Perhaps this applies even to those who wounded us.

Perhaps, in the end, it means He is about our greatest good and that He intends, ultimately, for us to trust Him. Perhaps it means that what He intends for us -- wrapped up in a plan that may even include those wounding moments that tripped us up from believing in His plan in the first place and got us thinking we'd be stuck in that abused and painful place forever -- is big enough to overcome all that happens, ever, because He is just that sovereign and capable and intentional and big.

Find a Stranger, Pick Them Up?

While driving to pick up dinner from the best sushi place on the planet last night, I saw a middle-aged black woman standing at the bus stop right across the street from the restaurant. She was wearing a long, heavy coat, and she had a small roller suitcase propped beside her. I wondered if I should ask if she needed a ride somewhere but decided to wait until after I picked up the food, since it was almost time for the restaurant to close.

When I stepped outside my car, I heard music coming from across the street. The music was kind of off-key and a cross between praise songs and 80s hits. It was the woman; she was singing to keep herself warm. I stared at her for a moment, totally taken in by the freedom she was apprehending by doing this, and then stepped inside the restaurant.

When I came out, she was still there, and still singing with gusto. I smiled and made my way to the car, wondering again if I should offer to give her a ride wherever she needed to go. I thought again of her heavy coat and the cold air and wondered if a warm cup of coffee wouldn't do her some good as well. I turned the car onto the street, made my way up to the stop sign so I could turn around, and felt incredibly jittery. I'd never done something like this before! I wasn't sure I had the guts to pull it off.

Then I looked ahead and saw, making its way down the street, a big purple bus. I wondered if it was coming to pick her up. I waited at the stop sign to see if it would stop and let her in. It did, and she did. And there went my opportunity to help a stranger in need.

I'm wondering if any one of you has ever chanced into a moment like this -- an opportunity to help someone or simply offer kindness to a face you don't know. Did God show up in the moment? Did He overcome your fear of rejection, ridicule, or being taken advantage of? Did you know it was a moment you had to take? Did you ultimately decide not to take it?

I'm asking this for two reasons. One, I'm surprised by how taken I was by this woman and wanted to somehow connect with her. Was it a moment provided by God? Did I fail by not ensuring I found her before the bus did? And two, as I've shared in comments on two blogs now, Laura's and Al's, I've stumbled upon an idea to do even more of these things with complete strangers and am entirely scared of doing it. Laura and Al have been asking people to think of something they could do with $100 to expand the kingdom of God in their own sphere, and my idea is to buy coffee for 20 different people and offer to share a conversation with them. How do I muster the courage to do it?

More Thoughts on Mother Teresa

Did you know Mother Teresa didn’t even want to become a nun? When she was 12 years old, she wanted to become a missionary to the poor. However, when she learned that she could only become a missionary if she first became a nun, she changed her mind. “I didn’t want to be a nun,” she recalled years later in an interview with an Italian journalist (later recorded in Teresa of the Poor by Renzo Allegri). So she put her missionary dreams on hold.

Six years later, when she was 18 and the time for choosing a vocation had become imminent, she found her desire to serve the poor remained unchanged. If becoming a missionary required that she first become a nun, then so be it, she decided. This time, she took her holy orders.

After her novitiate period, Teresa’s superiors sent her to teach in a prestigious high school for wealthy girls in India. This was not the life she had in mind when she committed her life to the convent, as it was a far cry from serving the poor and disenfranchised of the world, but she kept at it for eighteen years. Eighteen years! And during that time, out of obedience, she worked at it with all her heart. She did not look to the right or left. She committed herself firmly to her students and her colleagues and was quickly beloved and admired by all. Eventually, they named her principal of the school.

Then one night in August 1946, she was in the train station on her way to a weeklong private retreat in Darjeeling and found herself surrounded by the homeless, the fatherless, and the poorest of the poor. It was the night she later referred to as “the night of her conversion”—the moment her eyes were fully opened to the misery of her brothers and sisters in the world, and the moment she saw Christ in each and every one of them.

In that moment, Teresa knew that Christ was calling her into a brand new kind of life. She had no idea what it would entail, and it ended up costing her a great deal. “No Catholic religious congregation had set forth the ideals that Mother Teresa intended to carry out,” Renzo Allegri wrote in his book. “The new plan she had for her life was unheard-of, highly unusual, and totally unfamiliar within traditional church organizations.” But she decided to fulfill it anyway. After all, she had pledged her life to Christ, and as His bride she needed to carry out the plans she distinctly believed He was calling her to do.

What I find so enrapturing about this part of Mother Teresa’s story is her undivided obedience for those eighteen years before she received permission to pursue the truest desires of her heart. Even though the girls she taught in the high school regularly visited the poor communities right outside their cloistered walls, Teresa never accompanied them or spoke with them about it. She had committed herself to what God and her superiors asked of her in that present moment, and she did it unwaveringly until He or they spoke otherwise. How many of us would do the same?

A Wrecking Ball of Life

The latest issue of Relevant Magazine hit the streets two weeks ago, and I devoured every page of mine over the course of about seven days. Nestled in the middle, under an article by someone I'd never heard of before, was something that has caused an interesting turn of events in my life.

The article was called "Jesus Wrecked My Life." The author was a guy named Shane Claiborne. Ever heard of him?

He lives in Philly. He grew up in Tennessee. He walked the mainstream evangelical life for most of his youth but, disenchanted and disillusioned by it in college when he started hanging with the homeless in the downtown streets of Philadelphia, he went to visit Mother Theresa in Calcutta for a few months. There, he served the poorest of the poor, the dying, and the lepers, and even befriended many of them and learned what it meant to see Jesus incarnate on the earth. Then he came back to complete a one-year internship at Willow Creek in Illinois. (Big culture shock.)

The culture shock propelled him back back to Philadelphia, where he and small troupe of believers started something they called The Simple Way. This is centralized around a house (of the same name) where they live in community and exist to serve the poor and the homeless. They dish out food and dispense clothes. They plant gardens in concrete jungles and rehabilitate abandoned houses. They play with children and pray with prostitutes. And this is their daily reality, birthed from a passion to live the gospel Jesus brought to the world, not just theorize or talk about it anymore.

I was disarmed by Shane's sparse, deceptively simple message. And I wanted to go back to part of the source of it: Mother Theresa. That same day I read his article, I checked out three biographies on Mother Theresa from the library and settled into reviewing them in bed. From last Thursday to this past Sunday, I have pretty much lived and breathed Mother Theresa. She has been pretty much all I have talked about. (Ask Kirk. He now knows more about her life than he ever knew before, too, since I've been sharing whole passages about her life from one of the biographies, and we even rented and watched a movie about her on Sunday.)

Now I'm reading Shane Claiborne's book, The Irresistible Revolution. All of this is pretty much wrecking my life, too. I'll share more as my thoughts have time to surface and make sense. In the meantime, you should check out his book. Be prepared to start thinking about life in a whole new way.

Falling Into Love (Part 3 of 3)

The thing is, I’ve been through all this before. About 8 years ago, my life flipped upside down. (If you’ve been following the “What Writing Means to Me” series, you’ll know my most recent post in that series began to cover this.) Out of one paradigm-shattering experience—that of reading a book—I began a life journey that still hasn’t finished and I guess could be classified under the ornate, kaleidoscopic umbrella of what I’ve now termed “falling into love.”

About two years into this journey, my then-husband and I moved to the beach to be nearer the fire academy he had to complete for his fire school program. We were in need of a church, and some good friends suggested Rock Harbor. At the time, Rock Harbor was a church about three years old, had about 2,000 regular attenders, and was under the leadership of its founding pastor. Now, six years later, its membership climbs upwards of 5,000 every Sunday, spread out over seven distinct and vibrant services, has moved to a team leadership model, and has finally inhabited a building it can, and does, call home—a chock-a-block-style warehouse in one industrial neighborhood of Costa Mesa, California, the insides of which were gutted and completely redesigned in vintage urban style by the skilled and artistic hands of Rock Harbor’s very own volunteers.

Then as now, the truth of attending that church was the same: in order to find community, you have to do more than show up on Sundays. So we joined a life group that met on Wednesday nights in someone’s home. At the first meeting, I was dismayed to find people ranging in age from 20 to 50, to find well-seasoned parents and brand-newly-weds, to find singles as often as I found couples married upwards of 15 years. Having been used to groups that clustered around the “life phase” model—college-agers meeting with other college-agers, new-marrieds meeting with other new-marrieds, and so on—this was quite an adjustment of style, and I wasn’t sure I would like it.

But I’m really glad God opened me up to “doing life” with that whole host of folks. It was exactly what I needed right then, when I was starting this long process of unlearning how to perform in order to receive life from the vantage point of grace. That diverse and eclectic group of weekly company helped me see that human beings are, in fact, brilliantly stunning. That they are unique and they are soulful. That they are bizarre and they are funny. That they are caring and suffering and kind and forgiving, too. And that they are, each and every one, learning to walk this journey home. Just like me.

This experience of weekly life with that small group is where God began showing me how to love people right where they are—to let them be themselves, because their selves engender wonder. To listen to their stories and their struggles and their joys, because these lay bare the truest mirrors of their souls, souls that are wrapped in tender sleeves of skin that won’t be born in any other form again, ever.

This is a big part of what “falling into love” really means, I think. Not that I’m an expert on loving people the way God loves them, of course, but I’ve found there’s a certain grace extended—a grace that’s born of heaven, I believe—when we allow others the space and freedom to be exactly where they are, right now, in this very moment. A grace unburdened by expectation. A love that delights in the brilliance of that person’s beauty, which is the beauty of the Lord shining in and out of them. They are, in fact, the image of God made flesh, and dwelling among us.

Finally, when it comes to God offering us this kind of love, we get love in its highest form, perfected and rained down from on high. This love encompasses our entire being whether we know it does this or not, every moment of every day of every year of our lives. And this love waits quietly, patiently, givingly, for us to fall backward into its extravagant, billowing pillow once we have given up trying to achieve some other cheap form of a high somewhere else. And that’s what I’m learning to do right now.