Learning to Say No

I remember a time in junior high when I found myself committed to something every night of the week: Bible study on Monday nights, drama practice on Tuesday nights, youth group on Wednesday nights, piano and voice lessons on Thursday afternoons, and regular youth social functions on Friday nights. Add homework, discipleship group meetings, regular church attendance on Sundays, and quality time with family and friends to that mix, and my thirteen-year-old body was about to drop dead from exhaustion!

The thing was, these things had crept into my life so quietly, so subtly, and so . . . naturally. I had signed on to them because they seemed a part of who I was, or who I imagined myself to be. When my mom expressed concern and gently suggested I tone down my involvement in so many things, it was hard to agree with her that this needed to happen. Eventually, I agreed to drop the drama group.

This is a tame version of my inability to say no.

Less tame are the compromising situations I faced in my dating life while growing up. Or the early marriage I stepped into after calling it off for three months. Or the tacit acquiescence to values not my own in group settings. The more I say yes, or choose to say nothing, when my gut says I should speak up or walk away, the more I feel my dignity, my self-respect, and my basic sense of self slip through my fingers.

Now I find myself in a season where flexing the "no" muscle is being required with greater regularity. For example:

* I was invited last month to act as the public relations liaison for a new film society on campus. I said yes immediately, being excited by the prospect, but then felt the discordant strum in my gut that said it was a distraction. I tried to back out the next day, but then ended up agreeing to come for the first few meetings on a trial basis. I finally told the president -- just today -- that I need to withdraw my involvement.

* Additionally, I volunteered myself a couple weeks ago as the key actor in a film shoot for the first installment of the film society's ad campaign. As the shoot date dawned upon us, it slowly occurred to me and Kirk that I had signed up for 1) a chase scene 2) at night 3) in a wooded area 4) when I had no health insurance to speak of. My "can't say no" self died at the thought of backing out at the last minute, but my more rational self said it was a risk too steep to be worth it for a small student club film shoot with no official campus oversight. I called the director with the bad news that I couldn't make it. Thankfully, he was gracious and another student filled right in. (I also got my health insurance worked out the next day.)

* A classmate of mine who wants to go into screenwriting also has been working on a fantasy/sci-fi novel for the past handful of years. When he learned that I'm a writer and have also worked in publishing, he asked if I'd be willing to discuss his stories with him. I said yes, since that sort of thing interests me and I enjoy helping people, but then realized later that I don't actually have the time outside of class to give to something like this. I had to tell him -- again, today -- that I can't commit to this after all.

The thing that bothers me about each of these situations is that a lot of trouble could have been saved if I'd just thought it through ahead of time and said no at the beginning. Instead, I gave my commitment and then backed out later. This not only diminishes the strength of my word in the eyes of others but also leaves them in the lurch. Facing this reality three times in a row in the space of one week has been a powerful way to learn that I want my yes to be yes and my no to be no. It's hard work! But I'm glad to be getting the practice, and following through on my gut instinct eventually, even if not immediately.

* Post-note: I should also add the additionally embarrassing fact that the key person I had to break my commitment to in each of the three stories above was the exact same person each time. Talk about humiliating and really feeling like your word means nothing to someone anymore. Argh!

Jehovah Jireh

So, about three weeks ago I started praying a quirky little prayer. God, please help us finish furnishing this cute little house in more creative ways than we can imagine.

I started praying this prayer because I began to see that our current financial situation was not going to get the house furnished any time soon. This had been okay for the past three months, when we could still legitimately say we had just moved in and were getting used to our new school programs, but now we were getting to the point of wanting to settle in, truly. When people came to visit, we wanted to offer them more than a hard chair to sit upon at the dining room table. When we finished doing laundry, we wanted to store our clothes in something other than plastic boxes on the floor. And when I start the focus groups here in our home in the coming month, I want the girls involved in the groups to feel safe and welcomed into a comfy space that feels homey and secure.

So I decided to start praying the faith prayer. I was prompted to do this because I kept remembering the story of a lady I met a few years ago who had gone through a horrific divorce about twenty years prior and suddenly found herself living alone in an empty house with pretty much no possessions to speak of. (Thank goodness our situation hasn't been anywhere near as drastic as hers.) In that devastating place, she told God she was relying on Him to give her everything she needed, both emotionally and physically. And then she came home from work the next day to discover a ton of good furniture had been left on the front curb of her property. She had no idea where it came from, and still to this day does not know.

What can I say? I felt inspired to branch out and humbly request for God to provide for our needs, too. On the same day I prayed that prayer for the very first time, I even got up out of my seat at the dining room table and opened the front door to see if God had prompted someone to drop a couch at our curb in the few minutes it took me to articulate the prayer . . . or perhaps decided to miraculously drop one out of the sky Himself, just because He can.

He hadn't.

It took me a few days to let Kirk in on this new approach to our situation, since I felt kind of silly for praying it in the first place, and especially silly for getting out of my seat to check on it right afterward. But eventually, of course, I told him, and then every few days after that I would give him an update.

"Um, sweetheart?" I would call into the other room from where I stood at the front door or the window.

"Yeah, hon," Kirk would call back, having no idea what I was up to.

"I just want you to know that there is no couch sitting at the edge of our curb."

To which he would laugh, and I would laugh, and then I'd go into the other room and shrug my shoulders. "It could happen," I'd say. And he would say, "I know it can. And I love you for your faith."

This whole time, I knew God would work it out, even though I also knew it could take a really long time. Like, maybe His creative way of helping us would be to help us find a way to set aside some extra money from the budget every month until we saved enough to buy some items. That could take a long time, and it really didn't seem feasible, given the constraints of our budget, but it could happen.

Thankfully, that's not what happened. What happened really was a creative surprise, just like I had prayed it would be.

For one, my mom came into town last week and told us she wanted to buy us a housewarming gift. She said she'd been planning it for some time and had either a TV or a couch in mind for the gift. Wow! Since we'd made a conscious decision to go without a TV for the time being, we opted for the couch. How amazing that the primary item I'd been hoping God would drop onto our curb ended up being the very first item He provided.

Ta-da! We found this brand-new couch on sale for a great price that included five gorgeous overstuffed pillows. And the material is microfiber, which works great when you have oft-shedding kitties, such as we do. (Thank you, Mom!!)

For instance, Diva likes to shed her hair all over the place . . .

And so, for that matter, does Solomon . . .

But the story doesn't end there, folks! This past Friday night, after we had already picked out the couch with my mom, we went to the Night of Joy festival at Disney with our friends Tom and Cindy, who had received five free passes. After singing at the top of our lungs and dancing to our hearts content at the wonderful David Crowder Band and Chris Tomlin concerts, we headed out of the park near midnight, happy but exhausted. (And we would certainly feel that exhaustion in our leg muscles in the days to come, especially the calves -- from all that jumping up and down!)

On the way to the Monorail that would take us to our parking spots, Tom turned to us and said, "You guys have a complete bedroom set, right?" I didn't think much of this question, even though we'd spent a good length of time earlier in the evening discussing Tom and Cindy's upcoming move into a new home. It seemed like a pretty simple, straightforward question to me, and besides, I was really tired.

"Um, yeah," I said. "I mean, the house came with a full-size bed, but no nightstands. No dressers, either, actually. But we're okay for now." At this point, I was just answering the question, not even connecting it to the question Cindy had posed to me earlier in the evening about a set of backyard patio furniture and whether we had need of any. (We don't.)

"Well, we have a complete bedroom set from our guest bedroom that we can't take with us in the move," Tom replied. "It doesn't come with nightstands, but it's a queen four-poster bed with a dresser and a chest."

Whoa, I thought. A queen-sized bed and a dresser and a chest of drawers?! All of these items sounded like heaven to me.

"And you don't need the set?" I asked.

"Nope."

Now it was becoming clear what was going on: they were offering this furniture to us. I turned toward Kirk and shared the news. We turned back toward Tom and Cindy. "So, are you wanting to sell it, or loan it out until you have need of it again?" Either of these options would have been fine by us, since they'd still mean getting a great set of furniture for much, much less than it would cost to buy a new set.

"Well, if you guys can use it, you can take it off our hands," Tom said.

Double whoa.

So now, because they're moving in two weeks, they need this bedroom set out of their house within the next week. This means that very shortly, another room in our home will be full of next-to-brand-new furniture, for just the cost it takes to move it and then take Tom and Cindy to a nice lunch for being so generous to us, their friends.

God's goodness and lavish behavior just never ceases to amaze me.

The First Cigar

When we were in Paris on our honeymoon, I was tempted to try smoking cigarettes. It just seemed like a romantic thing to try for the first time in Paris. But Kirk, talking sense, said, "If you don't like it, you might regret having done it. But if you do like it, you might not want to stop." Smart man.

Last night, though, I did have my first smoke.

We had just left the Enzian Theatre, trying out a new French film in advance of my mom's visit, as she flies in tonight for a week's stay. As the Enzian is a great place to spend an evening with a film, with tables and comfy cushioned chairs dotting the landscape of the room and a great selection of food and beverages from which to order as you watch the latest independent film to breeze through town, we figured it would be a fun time to share while she is here -- if the latest film was worth seeing. (We made the mistake last time of taking her to see The History Boys.)

So we went for a preview. This week's film is My Best Friend, about a rich man who has no friends and, even worse, no idea how to make them. Being proud, he makes a bet with his business partner that he can track down a best friend in 10 days. Chaos ensues.

Having decided the film was cute but probably not worth viewing again with my mom, we headed home. On the way there, though, we stopped to pick up a bottle of wine. And when Kirk went inside the store to do the honors, he came out with an additional purchase: petite cigars! (These were, of course, for him. He enjoys a fine cigar every now and again.)

When we got home, he poured each of us a glass of the Franciscan cabernet, and then we headed out for a walk in the moonlight. This was not only a romantic idea but also so that he could smoke out of doors.

I thought he looked quite handsome and much the philosopher-intellectual type, smoking his cigar as we strolled down the lane, and I told him so. He, in turn, offered me a try.

What could I say? At first, I didn't say anything, just took the small, slowly burning article between two of my fingers and held it up to my nose. It didn't smell like cigars usually smell (meaning, badly). In fact, it smelled somewhat nice.

"I don't know how to do this," I said. "Is it going to ruin my lungs?" I didn't like the thought of my lungs being stained for good at my first puff, even though I've inhaled secondhand smoke plenty of times.

"Not a cigar," he said. "You breathe it in, but you don't inhale." That sounded pretty Clinton-esque to me.

"How do I do it?" I asked. I was nervous, but also a little mesmerized, staring at the little brown paper-shrouded piece in my hand.

"You breathe in deeply, from your lungs, and then you puff it back out," Kirk said. "But don't inhale."

I tried it. Nothing.

I tried it again. Nothing.

"I think I'm breathing in with my nose," I said the third time, coughing. "It burns my nose when I do that!"

"Yeah, that will burn if you do that. Don't breathe with your nose. Breathe from your mouth."

"Okay." I tried it again. This time, when I exhaled, smoke came out. "Wow! I did it!"

I held the cigar in front of me, examining it critically. "That wasn't bad," I said.

I tried it again. "Hm. I kinda like it. It tastes kinda . . . good." Weird. I never thought it would taste good. The smell always made me think it would taste awful. Except this cigar really didn't smell so bad. And going in and out of my mouth, it had a smooth, almost yummy taste. Did I just say yummy?!

We kept walking, each of us with our own cigar, the puffs of which we interspersed with sips of wine. We headed down and along the lake at the end of the street, then up to a small park with a bench that overlooks a pond. We sat down and watched the moon, which was covered with a thick veil of mist.

"She looks modest," I said quietly.

Kirk raised his glass. "To you, moon, for the beautiful eclipse you offered us this week."

I raised mine up. "To you, moon."

The orchestral murmur of croaking frogs sustained us in the moonlight, as we finished the cigars to their very last puffs, then slowly turned toward home.

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.

Business Not as Usual

In the past two months, I had begun to adjust quite nicely to quiet mornings at home after dropping Kirk at his morning class. I’d come in the door, get my English Breakfast tea brewing, and launch the Becoming Jane soundtrack on iTunes. With my cup of hot tea properly creamed and sugared, beautiful strains of music softly filling the farmroom, Diva purring at my feet, and soothing green forest scenes randomizing on my screensaver, I would open my Bible and begin to read the next few psalms. Then I would read three or four chapters aloud from Isaiah, and then a few verses from Matthew. I’d journal a couple paragraphs in the margins as offerings of prayer and then head to the bedroom to spend time in silence, listening for His voice. After that, I’d re-enter public life: check e-mail, catch up on blogs, and begin to prepare for afternoon class.

Unfortunately, the past two weeks have disrupted that lovely expectation. This month's course in project and team management has found me working busily away at a major project that aids a local non-profit, which has meant team meetings and phone conferences and lots of project planning, not to mention keeping up with the regular course material and preparing for exams. Add to that mix the occasional lunch or coffee date with a friend, and you have one very busy girl!

But that’s not all. Also due this past Friday was our business plan proposal. (Have I mentioned yet how insane this month has been?!) This has meant crystallizing the slow incubation process I’ve been going through and watching my idea begin to take on glorious new life.

This new life was mostly spurred on by necessity. I learned through the grapevine (meaning Kirk, since he's a month ahead of me in this process) that the faculty who approve the business plan proposals are looking for achievable ideas that don't require an exorbitant amount of capital. They want us to be working on ideas we can actually make happen once we leave. I can certainly appreciate that, as I'm in this program to make something happen when I leave anyway.

So, as I'd been preparing for this proposal in my head over the past few weeks, I continued to imagine that my idea was achievable simply because I could envision it in my mind and knew that I would work hard to develop it and would eventually assemble the team necessary to make up for the abilities and talents I wasn’t personally bringing to the table. Achievable? Check.

I'd also begun preparing myself to scale down my initial expectations of what the online product launch could look like so that it doesn't require as much start-up capital as I'd come to believe it would need. In other words, I began to talk myself into being willing to consider ways to bring my initial launch costs into the $300,000 range instead of $3 million. Affordable? Check. (Well, at least more so than before!)

But ultimately, I had to rethink both those things. An idea is not achievable simply because you can envision it in your head. You have to consider milestones and how to get to those milestones and what resources and talent you will need at the ready to reach them. And plainly put, the idea I’ve had in mind requires a greater scope than I’m presently qualified to meet by myself. This means taking on capable partners and assembling a hefty board of advisors, neither of which I am in the least opposed to doing but both of which will require a lot of time to instate, which consequently means quite a bit of lagtime before any results can actually, finally, be tested and proven. And to some degree, you need some legitimate, proven results before you can expect major funding, even at that lowered figure amount I mentioned above.

As the deadline for the proposal neared, I began to realize how far in over my head I would be if I pursued this big idea right away. So I began to ask the question, What can I do right now?

What I can do right now, I discovered, is start a small group right here in my own house that goes through the kind of personal development process I was envisioning creating for the online world. This will allow for immediate testing with immediate feedback, all in a context I love best and with the opportunity to grow into my capacity and authority to lead this venture wherever God decides to allow it to go from there. For all I know (and hope), perhaps one small group will expand into two, or three, or even four over the course of this next year, which puts me that much farther ahead of the curve at graduation than I could have been with the initial idea. Plus, as a major bonus, getting started this way is virtually costless, and the costs I'm imagining would come with an official, real-world product launch are somewhere in the range of 10-20 percent of the lowered expected cost for the online version. And as this real-world approach incurs profits, we can begin to pave the way for online adaptations.

Wow! My mind is ablaze with dazzling sparkles of light at the mere thought of all this goodness. Isn't yours??

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

She Moved Me

So, did any of you see Becoming Jane this weekend? Kirk and I went Friday night, and then again today, on Sunday afternoon.

The first night, it left me feeling dumb and speechless. I don't mean dumb in a stupid sort of way. What I mean is, I couldn't speak for about an hour. I went home and lay myself down on the bed and listened to the soundtrack for about an hour, until I was ready to speak.

And when we finally spoke, Kirk and I discussed beauty (which is what I felt I had encountered) and whether it requires any fitting response from us, or any response at all. Because I'll be honest: the film raised feelings in me that I hadn't felt in a very long time. I felt like I couldn't speak because the need to respond in some visceral, productive, articulate way was so strong, and I knew I couldn't do it justice. I couldn't measure up to the feelings I felt inside. I didn't even know what such an attempt would require.

We finally happened upon the possibility that perhaps what beauty actually requests of us is worship. If we are moved by beauty and turn to God in response, then some of the pressure is off. We get to be human, responding to a great God who is more infinitely beautiful than we can imagine, and He doesn't require perfection in response from us because He knows that we are human (even though we don't believe this of ourselves sometimes). Then we are free to respond in a human, imperfect way. But if we turn from beauty and try to respond out of our own strength, we will fall mute and dumb and lost. It just can't happen. We aren't strong enough, in our actual makeup, to handle it well.

I don't like this arrangement very much, because the fallen part of me wants to be strong enough to respond out of my own ability and merit, without having to turn to God first and then become human as a result. For some reason, I keep wanting to be superhuman, even though I find humanity intensely mysterious and wonderful much of the time.

Then I went to see the film again. It had the same response. I couldn't speak very well, but at least this time I could identify some more of the reasons why. A few of the scenes moved me beyond words: the scene where she is staying in London and, in the early hours of night, conceives of the Pride and Prejudice premise; and the scene at the end, where she is giving a reading of that great book, and her words are more perfectly placed and filled with understanding than she could have known in her earlier years. For some reason, both of these scenes filled me with such longing.

I haven't written to express myself creatively in some time. Even though writing is as much a part of me as my own breath, I haven't regarded it with the respect it deserves in my own life. Plainly put, I am scared. I'm scared I'm not up to the task. There is a whole landscape inside my soul that has yet to be traversed because I'm afraid. I despise myself for this fear. I've basically shut it down because I believe am not up to it. I've given up trying. I've moved to other pastures. Unfortunately so.

All that aside, the last thing I'll say is that Anne Hathaway is, indeed, a believeable Jane. I had my doubts, as usually I see Anne Hathaway as an actor in a role. She's cute, but she's still just usually herself. But she (thankfully) broke free of that stereotype for me in this important role. I saw her as Jane, plain and simple. And I was thankful.

New Haircut!

Welcome to my new hair, folks.

Green Things

I find myself surrounded by green these days. First, there's my new Mac's cover . . .

Then, there's my Mac desktop . . .

Can't forget my Mac screensaver (which randomizes gorgeous forest photos at a slow, reflective pace) . . .

And then there's me . . .

Green is such a gentle and inviting color, isn't it? It's friendly in a soft-spoken way. It imbues one's awareness with growth.

Growth. That's what I'm about these days.

Photo Woes

So, I've got a few ideas for some fun new posts, but they all include photos. Unfortunately for me, that means having to pull out the big camera, stage the photos, upload them to my hard drive, and then fiddle with Blogger in order to get them spaced just right with the text. For some reason, Blogger never behaves when I include photos with my posts (anyone else ever have problems with this??). Anyway, the posts themselves are simple and in good fun and really shouldn't require that amount of work. So, this is the reason for the lag.

This is also the reason I've begun to get in the mood for a small, sleek, highly pixellated digital camera I can keep in my purse for snapping quick shots whenever I get the fancy. In that dream reality, I would then quickly and easily upload them to some as-of-yet undiscovered perfect photosharing site that lets me do all kinds of fun things I want to be able to do, like categorize my photos, write unique captions, create quality photobooks to order, and upload individual photos via URL to my blog. Oh yeah, and somehow streamline the process for uploading all my thousands of photos currently stored on my hard drive through Picasa. Argh!

You can see why I might be stalled. :-)

Get Caught Up Sometime

If you'd stopped in at my house tonight, you'd have found me, at least for a portion of the time, wandering aimlessly about. After the Harry Potter blitz of the past couple weeks, I found myself craving more of the imaginative story experience. I wanted to get caught up in something that would captivate my imagination and turn off my analytical brain, which has become somewhat weary of all the thinking I've been doing in recent days.

The only trouble was, I was hard-pressed to find such a book in this house. My nightstand is riddled with business books and startup books. Another of my bookshelves is full of books on soul care. The cupboards of my built-in bookshelf open to reveal lots of nonfiction of the theological, travel essay, and personal memoir persuasion, loads of fiction I've already read dozens of times, some classics I've never been able to finish, and some other literary fiction I've been working on for over a year. Those classics and fiction selections are unfinished precisely because they're too serious -- definitely not "getting caught up" material.

But then, off to the side of the very top shelf, hidden behind the post that divides my side from Kirk's side of the shelf, I spied it: the Narnia series box set. It's a box set I've had for years and must confess I've never read straight through. I think I've only read two of the seven books, which means there was loads more to be enjoyed.

I'm so glad I found these books! They fit exactly the need of the moment. For instance, check out these two enjoyable gems from the first book, The Magician's Nephew:

1) The two main characters, a boy and a girl, discover there may be a way to sneak into an old abandoned flat a couple doors down from where they live. Both of them think but do not say that the house might be haunted. Instead, they try to be brave. The boy says the house might be taken by pirates or a criminal gang in the night. The girl, on the other hand, says her father mentioned faulty pipes. And do you know what the boy says to that? "Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations." I should say they most definitely are! This line made me laugh.

2) When the boy and girl find themselves in a strange wood and are about to start exploring their way around, they get into a quarrel. And here's how Lewis narrates it: "The quarrel lasted for several minutes but it would be dull to write it all down." Ha ha ha! That made me laugh, too. Imagine, a storyteller who doesn't want to bore his young readers with dull details. I love it. I had to read that part aloud to Kirk, and then I giggled some more.

I can heartily appreciate a book that not only takes me outside myself and fills me with wonder but also makes me laugh. This is, no doubt, why I love the Harry Potter series. But it's also why I can appreciate C. S. Lewis, a longtime predecessor to J. K. Rowling.

Mac and Choice

It wasn't so long ago that I fell into Mac envy. June 5th, to be exact. That's not so far, either, from another important date in my recent history. June 4th, to be exact -- the day I gave notice at my work.

On the Monday I gave notice, I was positively shaking with nerves. Nevermind that God had shown up on the scene to tell me what to do with the next huge chunk of my life, and nevermind that I'd prayed for weeks about leaving on June 29th and giving notice on June 4th. When the Day of Notice came, I was quaking in my boots.

One big reason for the nervousness was because I felt I would be leaving my department in the lurch. We had some other positions that needed filling, which made it hard enough, but there was also the fact that I was part of a smaller team within a bigger team that managed a lot of its own multifacted projects. My leaving would make that small team-within-a-team even smaller.

The other big reason for my nerves was the sheer audacity of the thing. Basically, it meant cutting off our income stream -- kablooey, bam, pow, it's no more! And even though we believed it was the right thing to do and had complete faith in God's provision, it was still one of the scariest moves I'd ever made. Thankfully, Kirk's faith in God's financial provision had been strengthened a lot in the past couple years, so he was nothing but supportive as we moved in this direction.

If you'll remember, though, there was also the factor of having just taken on a new lease in a new house that was five times the expense of our previous situation. That's right -- five times! (Obviously we got our previous digs at a rock bottom rate.) We knew all this change was right around the corner when we took the lease, so it's not like we were looking around to suddenly find ourselves stuck with this expense we hadn't planned for, but still -- it required faith to keep going forward with the plan now that the new house was officially ours.

Things moved into slow motion on that Monday morning. I told my big boss first, who was gracious and kind and prayed with me for this venture. Then I told my girlfriends in the office suite when we met for morning prayer. They prayed for me, too. Then, when my immediate supervisor came in, I told her, too. Before I knew it, the move had been made. I was officially leaving. Gulp.

Make that: Double Gulp.

Cut to Tuesday, June 5th, the very next day. It's after work, and dinner is done. Kirk pulls out his beautiful new Mac and shows me its squeaky clean, super cool features for the very first time. I fall in love with my very first Mac. I write an ecstatic post. Kirk pops his head into the farmroom from the kitchen as I'm writing and says, "You know how you can get your own one of these, don't you?"

"Oh yeah," I respond a bit sarcastically, since I knew he was joking me. "Be like you and get a master's in entertainment business from Full Sail, too?"

"Ha-ha-ha!" we laugh. "Ha-ha-ha! That's funny!"

And then we stopped. We stared at each other. We cocked our heads and raised our eyebrows. Hm.

"Hm," Kirk said.

"Shhhh! I know what you're thinking, and it's nuts! That's crazy! I'm not even going to let myself think about it!"

"I think it's time for a family conference," Kirk says anyway. "Meet me in the other room when you're done writing your post."

I finished a final once-over of the post and then strode into the other room, where he was already sitting with the course catalog in his hands, slowly perusing the pages. We looked at it for the zillionth time, only this time through the lens of what these courses might mean for me and this new business I'm embarking upon. If I took the program, I'd enroll in courses like Storytelling in Business. Brand Development. Business Venture and Finance. Executive Leadership. Project and Team Management. Entertainment Media Publishing. Mobile Marketing and Commerce. Business Plan Development.

In other words, courses that would give me everything I don't have -- business knowledge and entrepreneurial training and web media instruction -- to supplement everything I do have -- passion and intuition and creativity and personal journey and feminine insight.

To make a long story short, all of this came to be. It took a couple conversations with our good friend Paul in admissions to learn that my professional work experience in book publishing, magazine, and newspaper, coupled with the high GPA from my totally un-business-related bachelor's degree would qualify me as a candidate for this program. It took another conversation with the financial aid department to learn that I'd get student loan funding not only for the school expense but also for living expenses. It's not much, but coupled with the amount Kirk's getting from his program, too, it amounts to a little more than I was making on the job. Wow!

Not to mention I'm now the proud owner of my very own Mac. My beautiful, beautiful Mac.

Ah, life sometimes converges into some very, very sweet spots. We enjoy them to the fullest when they come.

The Road to the Beautiful New

Seeing as how meaningful conversations bent toward others have been the cornerstone of my days, even at a very young age, and that the unfolding of the individual journey has become the increasingly central theme of the past 10 years of my life, it should have come as no surprise that God would tap me on the shoulder to create something new that honors these themes on a grander scale for others . . . but it did. It came as a very big surprise.

Seeing as how God led me deeper and deeper into the wilderness in recent years in order to strip and strip and strip again thick layers of identity in order to render me barren and empty and poor, with nothing but upturned hands to offer Him, it should have come as no surprise that He would place something new into those hands in His due time . . . but it did. It came as a very big surprise.

Seeing as how I've been willing to risk more and more of my heart and resources on behalf of God's work in recent years, so much so that risk has become a deep value of my faith, it should have come as no surprise that God would ask of me another risk, this time even bigger and more unknown than ever before . . . but it did. It, too, came as a very big surprise.

And yet, once all this had arrived, it came as no surprise at all.

Earlier this year, Kirk and I had begun sharing conversations about different business ideas he might pursue, now that he'd finished his entertainment business degree at Full Sail. We'd been brainstorming and getting excited about some of them, all with the understanding that any of these projects, if pursued, would ultimately be his deal. He's the more entrepreneurial of our pairing, after all, and I felt satisfied to simply provide insight, intuition, and support.

One early evening, driving home from a great Mexican dinner at a local restaurant, Kirk looked over at me in the car and said, "You know that this idea [the one we'd talked about at dinner] will likely resonate most powerfully with women, don't you?"

I nodded.

He paused. "I never, ever saw myself starting a business for women."

"Me either!"

We laughed hard, finding it a bit hilarious in the moment.

"I'll be here to help you out," I said. "I can help with the women's intuition side of things."

He nodded, and we left it at that.

About a week and a half later, we shared a conversation that left us both with the impression that perhaps I was the one to be pursuing this idea for women instead of him. It surprised both of us to think this, especially me, since I'd not considered myself in any sense the primary "owner" of any of the ideas we'd been considering the whole time we'd been discussing them. Like I said, he's the entrepreneurial one who thinks big and creatively and strategically. I, too, am willing to dream and imagine with him, and even ask the hard questions that will eventually make the ideas go, but I hadn't anticipated engineering one of them myself! But I agreed to pray about it through the weekend and asked God to confirm if this was indeed part of His plan.

Well.

You know how I'd been walking in a desert recently? God hadn't shown up on the scene in ages. I was okay with this, since I knew He was still there, but I didn't have much faith that He'd show up over the course of the weekend. Except then He showed up in a whirlwind. Over the next five days, He led me to a windfall of resources about how to reach women, how to market to women, how to brand a business for women, and how to understand female behavior on the Web.

All of this was unusual reading for me, but very interesting. And that's because He was simultaneously reminding me of my deep heart: the journeys that people, and especially women, take to discover who they are. I started thinking about the countless relationships in my life that had sounded upon this theme. I recalled the way the Life Group community of girls I led last year in California changed all of our lives for the better. I realized that even this space, Lilies Have Dreams, has been a gathering place of what? Primarily women.

Through the course of that weekend, He caused me to view my life in retrospect in order to see how my heart had already been opening up more and more to women and the journeys of their lives with each passing year of my life. He also kept presenting me with information about how women, in the busy climate of their demanding lives, are increasingly turning to online communities to express themselves and find support. You can find dozens of online communities out there that are just for women. But why would the world need another, I wondered?

As I continued to do research, I found that those online communities offer two primary things for the female soul: information for their interests (such as articles on health, beauty, entertainment, parenting, and careers) and platforms for free expression (such as blogs and forums and chatrooms and specialized interest groups). What they lack is a redemptive objective. What if something beautiful was created in response to that need? Is there, in fact, such a need?

I couldn't avoid the bald fact that God had indeed showed up that weekend in response to my prayer for confirmation. He seemed to have something in mind, though I had no clear idea what it was or how it would come to be. But at this point, in obedience, I agreed to be the key player on its behalf. And I began to generate some preliminary ideas.

After about a month of working on this part-time, in the evenings and on weekends, I reached a critical point. I needed to either jump in all the way and start the formal development process or resign myself to the fact that it would take a long, long time to get done. I asked God to help me determine if leaving my job was the right and timely thing to do. He responded by providing a continued knowledge that I'd leave my job at the end of June. This seemed somewhat crazy, but I couldn't shake the belief that it was right. I put in my resignation letter, and the very next day, as if rewarding this obedience in the face of great risk, He provided some surprising but perfect resources (which I'll share about in another post).

So now I'm home, working on this idea, and officially in the research development phase. Like I said already, I've generated some ideas about what this online space might eventually look like . . . but I'm only one woman carrying one perspective, and I'd love the privilege of hearing yours! 

And please note: Every woman of any age or stage is welcome to participate in this research process, and the more the merrier, so pass the word!

The Final Goodbyes

Even though I didn't know as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I eventually came to believe my most satisfying version of an adult life would find me doing one of two things: teaching in a university or working as a book editor. Thankfully, I've already had time to try both, and it's been a very surprising ride to learn that neither of these roles are ultimately the best fit for who God created me to be in this world.

You already know how God turned me away from a collegiate life, but even after I faced this realization I went back to the college honors program to teach for one more year. I shared in my last post that my second year of teaching in this program found me relaxing into a bit more of a personable creature. This third year (and three years had elapsed since that second one) made even more clear how much of a metamorphosis I had undergone.

Students who remembered me from the previous era warned others that writing for me required a pretty ambitious game face. As a result, younger students flocked into my office, eager to learn what they could do to survive. "Um," they would begin, a bit nervously. "I wondered if you could share what you are looking for when you grade?"

The first few times I faced this question, I almost laughed aloud, so clear was it to me that I had changed from my previous incarnation at this job. The last time, I would have upheld the written word as a pristine entity to be respected, learned, and preserved. I would have required that students learn its technical aspects in order to earn my esteem. I would have railed against undisciplined writing as evidence of undisciplined thinking. And probably those things are true. But it wasn't my job to campaign with zeal for those things anymore. God had changed me too much. (This isn't to say I didn't still teach these things. I did. But my heart was no longer enflamed with passion to uphold these tenets the rest of my life.)

What mattered most to me in that third year were the conversations students carried with me about who they were. Most of the time, all they had were questions. But those moments of vulnerability and questions and doubts, and the moments of sheer epiphany that sometimes followed, were the real reason God had me there. I wouldn't trade those conversations for the world. I've come to believe those moments literally expanded the kingdom of heaven.

Like I said in my previous post, it took about half a year to settle into the knowledge that this was the case, that creating a safe space for real conversation was what He had created me to offer those students and had brought me there to do. But once this clicked, the conversations took off. I could hardly keep up with it all, and I loved it. I fell in love with many of those students, and I was sad to let them go in order to move to Florida. I'm thankful, though, that God used that year to show me more of who I am, and also who I'm not.

Over the course of the next year (meaning, this last year of my life), I had the opportunity to experience that second life I always thought I wanted: that of a book editor. I made some great friends, developed relationships with some wonderful writers, brought my technical merits to bear on my work each day, and learned just how many projects it's possible for me to manage at one time.

If I had found this job about five years ago, I probably would have been in heaven. For some of us A-types, there is a certain kind of high to be found in managing a busy production schedule and bringing an editorial eye to a diverse handful of projects each day. But I was no longer just an A-type, and no longer just a strident editorial eye. I needed more relational and creative expansiveness if I was to flourish in life.

The greatest gift I received in that time was the opportunity to work with novelists and champion their projects from the first time the agented submission came through our office on into the acquisition process, and from the time the contracted manuscript came in until it uploaded on deadline to the printer. I say it was a gift because, for one, I loved working with novelists. They have such extensive creativity and depth because they have to inhabit whole stories and characters. The phone conversations and e-mails we shared were among the most satisfying of my career at that publishing house. Since I loved this part of my job so much, I thought perhaps my greater involvement with this line of books would provide the expansiveness I sought in that professional corner of my life.

I also say it was a gift because it was through the fiction line that I was able to witness more concretely how the publishing process unfolds. I was invited into acquisition meetings to represent novels, and I saw the kind of decision-making that necessarily goes into contracting a book. Again, my five-years-ago self would have flipped out in ecstasy at the challenge of learning this process and getting better and better at pitching books to the acquisitions team. But my fire for these things had just burned out. I cared more about the relational side of life and the unique stories each of us inhabit than working with pitches and sales. In the end, I saw that life as a book editor was, in fact, too closed-ended a life for me. Being invited into those meetings was a great gift because, again, it showed me who I had become and who I had moved away from becoming.

It was also along about this time that I looked around to discover myself in a wilderness. Most of the things I had used to define my life previously had suddenly fled the landscape, and I was left with nothing. Nothing that could be seen, at least. All I could do was wait. It was hard, but I found myself surprisingly willing to endure whatever process was having to take place because God clearly seemed to be up to something. I had no idea what it was or where it was headed, only knew that it required my letting go of my plans and ways of defining myself until He showed back up on the scene. And eventually, of course, He did.

My next post will (finally!) detail what He showed up back on the scene to say, what I've walked away from full-time work to do, and how you might even play a part in helping me design it.

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.

A Series of Unfortunate Career Phobias

I'd like to say that what happened next is that I began to bask in God's irrepressible love and receive care from others with the greatest of ease and that, ultimately, everything became all good rather quickly. Unfortunately, that's not how it happened at all.

As I shared in my last post, everything came to a standstill about two years after my junior year. For a college student, this roughly translates into the time of graduation and finding one's first real job. What that translated into for me was two first real jobs: one that was full-time and one that was part-time but acted like a crazy full-time job every couple of months.

The reason I took two jobs straight out of the gate was because I'd recently become a bit of a Dorothy Sayers fanatic. If you don't know her, she was a contemporary of the Inklings in England who could hold her own in the classics at Oxford while publishing mainstream detective fiction. She had all these interesting notions about work that basically boiled down to our needing to find the work we were uniquely suited to doing in the world and then doing it with all our might. (In case you're interested, this came from her interpretation of the creation account in Genesis, in that man was created in the image of God but that all we know about God and the image He bears up to that point in Scripture is that He is a creator.)

At this point, my life split onto two drastically different train tracks. On one track I was hunkering down and refusing to conform to anything that reeked of my value being contained in how I performed for anyone else in my life. On the other track, I was performing like crazy at work because I thought work was the end goal of my life. Looking at this now, it's hard to believe these two trains coexisted inside me at the same time. But they did, and I was blind to the contradiction for a while.

Of course, the eventual collision of these two freight carriers holding the cargo of my life was inevitable. As my conviction grew to follow God through the complete overhaul of some of my most deeply seated core beliefs, this had to eventually also affect the person I took with me to work every day (meaning, myself). The only trouble was, things became very, very messy for a long, long while.

There were days I would wake up and feel like my lungs were stuck in my throat, their too-big size for that constricted space keeping all the fresh air out. My stomach seemed to gnaw on itself interminably. I would avoid people's eyes, passing through halls with my eyes on the ground or making eye contact only briefly before quickly flitting away. Every Sunday found me sinking into a slow but absorbing funk as the prospect of yet another five days ahead became an unavoidable terror.

Why the extreme behavior? It certainly wasn't intentional, and I would have done anything to make it stop, but I think it was the natural (albeit unbearable) result of a war between my two selves: the subconscious self that was scrambling to keep up the acceptable order of the day, meaning stellar performance after stellar performance in order to keep things safe and controlled and protected, and my conscious self, which had begun to firmly reject that way of being.

It's like my subconscious self was yelping and screaming, "Hey! Go back now! You're going to die! You're going to die! And no one will come to your funeral!" Whereas my conscious self was like a young girl in summer stepping off the porch steps into the sun with a yellow tank top and hot-pink shorts setting off her spindly, tan legs, and the wayward strands of hair that won't quite fit into her ponytail puffing and curling around her head like a halo in the heat of the day. You see how truly young and vulnerable she is in that bright light, with only those tiny legs to hold her, except she knows she's somehow held and strengthened by the sun.

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.

One Favorite Girl

One of my favorite girls, Kate, is coming to town tonight and staying until Monday. Know what that means? Great conversation with one of my favorite people in the world for almost four days on end! She'll be the first to see our new home in its as-of-yet incompletely furnished state.

Besides planning a fun and girlie thing to do (afternoon tea and scones, anyone?), Kirk and I plan to cook a few good meals, play a few fun games, and take her on the relaxing and scenic Winter Park Boat Tour. Oh, and she's also requested an afternoon at Gatorland, inspired by my hub's enthusiasm. :-)

So you may or may not see me around for a few days. Know that I'm basking in blessed Kate-ness . . . and loving every second of it!

Embracing the Unknown

Besides absorbing books like a sponge, I also loved solving math problems as a kid. And playing piano. And the way stories always resolved themselves like cadences in a classical piece. In other words, I liked things that eventually figured themselves out. It soothed me with a kind of satisfying, interior release.

Except that's not how life operates on an actual, day-to-day level. Things don't resolve themselves at the end of the day. They don't work out like some elaborate geometric proof. With the 798,067 variables at play in our lives at any one moment, isn't it somewhat outlandish to hope we can somehow make sense of it all?

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Check out what David Whyte has to say about it in his Crossing the Unknown Sea:

We need a sense of spaciousness and freedom, but find we can claim that freedom only by living out a radical, courageous simplicity -- a simplicity based on the particular way we belong to the world we inhabit. The genius of an individual lies in the inhabitation of their peculiar and particular spirit in conversation with the world. The task is simple and takes a life pilgrimage to attain, to inhabit our lives fully, just as we find it, and in that inhabitation, let everything ripen to the next stage of the conversation. We do this because that is how we make meaning and how we make everything real.

According to this view, every person has a unique genius to uncover and offer the world, and it is a gift that must be found and offered or else the world will be much less without it. Uncovering it, though, means meaning-making, sorting through the past that has led to this actual moment and then garnering enough strength to cut our lives down to the simplest common denominator that is only ours to claim.

My own path has led to me to this cliff's edge now, and as of Friday I will step into the wide unknown to take a chance on building something that will bring my "simplicity" to life. It's an exhilarating step, knowing that I'll be inhabiting that truer claim on my identity, and yet it is a terrifying feat. Thankfully, David Whyte has encouraging words to offer on that score, too:

Taking any step that is courageous, however small, is a way of bringing any gifts we have to a surface, where they can be received. For that we have to come out of hiding, out from behind insulation. Wherever our edge of understanding has been established is the very place we should look more intently, but it is also the very place that fills us most with fear. Once we begin to engage those elemental edges through daily courageous speech, we start to build a living picture of our own nature.

It's good to know other good pilgrims further along on the journey have set down truths for the rest of us newer, greener sojourners to find that light the way.