Words Like Jacob

I haven't posted here in a while.

I don't tend to post when I'm fighting, when I feel like life is a series of fallings and failings, when I'm not quite sure how I am in the midst of it all.

Some people know, they just know, all the time, how they are and who they are and where God is, and I'm not one of them. I fumble for light, for truth and I question it all, because that's the way I'm made, to question and dig, deeper and deeper, until one day I hit the truth.

And I live in the moment, swept up by the feelings and the tasks and the people, when I don't know what they mean until sometime later, after I have the space to take a breath and look back on them, to connect the dots that I couldn't see when I was waking up each morning and taking steps (one, two, three).

Life to thoughts to words takes me longer than it does for some, and when I'm living it's hard to think and even harder to write, even though the writing makes it real. Words on paper - there's a fine line between forcing them and making space for them, between letting them have life and forcing it upon them. 

If Thomas Mann was right, that "a writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," then I am a writer and this fumbling about with words is a grace. Writing is the way I follow Jacob, asking for blessing after a long night of wrestling, rolling around in the mud and the river wondering what it's all about.

Because I do wonder, in these times between words, if there's meaning in the struggle, if there's a point to it beyond getting soaking wet and so filthy I stink. Meaning is hard. Do we make it or find it? How do we know if we're imposing meaning or just finding the connections God left for us to see? 

But we must have it, we crave it, we would give up our very selves, some days, to find a coherent line we could follow. Meaning is a drug and we're all addicted, all trying to understand, especially when it feels like chaos. What, I wonder, do I give up to find meaning? And would it come to me if I waited, hands open and ready to receive? Or is the struggle part of what makes it special, part of what gives meaning its . . . um . . . meaning?

May you be blessed by the Imperfect Prose community, as I have been. 

Where do you find courage in your everyday?

Thank Jesus for internet! Ours has been out all day due to this storm and I've been wanting to share with you all.

I have an article up at Ungrind, on a topic that's increasingly close to my heart. This is something that I'm walking through daily, one of my own growing edges, and I'm excited to share it in this venue.

I believe it takes courage to live out our normal days. What do you think? And where do you see your courage coming through?

Grey Day

Grey clouds, of heart and soul, and outside too, for that matter. It feels much later than it is, on this stretched day when I can't find the reason for the stretching.

"I want to be a better mother," I said yesterday, and I meant it. The new tech, with it's tiny glowing screen and oh-so frustrating conglomeration of competing buttons and applications ate the day, the day I'd meant to spend with her.

He's gone, three long weeks of soul-searching, and I love him all the more for it. All on his own, no tech, not even a phone, praying and thinking and feeling. I wonder how he'll come back, if I'll recognize the eyes or if they'll tell me how different he is. I pray she knows him, changed or not, and shrieks when she sees her daddy coming like she shrieks when she sees a puppy.

And so my days are grey, without him. Technology is small substitute, though one that fills the emptiness . . . with more emptiness that doesn't feel like emptiness, at least not until the day is over and there's not much rattling in the soul.

Detoxifying Hiddenness

I've said it before and I don't mean to harp on the point, but 2010 was a difficult year for us. Seeing it there, in those black and white letters, "difficult year" seems so far understated that I struggle to connect it to the events of that last 15 months.

You may have noticed that I haven't continued my series of God in the Yard posts. It's not because I haven't been reading the book, trust me. I've read chapter 8, "Cycle:sabbath" over and over, but haven't been able to make heads or tails of it. The words tumbled into my mind, rattled around a bit, and then seemed to dissipate like so much ether. I couldn't grasp them, couldn't find meaning that didn't become mist the moment I tried to articulate it.

And then we moved, cross-country, embracing unknown because it seemed better than what we had but, more than that, because we heard the echoes of a call we couldn't yet understand but that we could still choose to follow. I read the chapter again, curled up in this new-old room (we're living with family for the moment), and the meaning became conscious, like tipping over an iceberg to find the immensity underneath.

L.L. Barkat talks about the Sabbath as an act of hiding, as opposed to absence. It's a day to "veil our work for a time, the way night hides the things of day, and it is okay."

Forget a day. That phrase, friends, feels like a description of the entire last year.

Ok, it's not perfect. We didn't exactly choose to walk away from our jobs (though in some ways we did). We didn't choose to send our dreams up in smoke, or even to set them aside. We didn't choose pain and depression and sickness and difficulty and fear.

But we have felt hidden. Oh, have we felt hidden! Shoved under the bed like the Velveteen Rabbit when the boy forgot about him, more like. Missed. Forgotten. Ignored. Unseen. Over and over and over again.

Our temptation - my temptation - runs twofold. Either God has better people, more charismatic people, more gifted people, people who represent him better, and there's nothing left for us when he's doled out tasks to them, or he's ashamed of us, somehow, hiding us under the blanket so the world doesn't see.

This hiddenness has not felt good. It has not felt okay. It has not felt like a gift. But I read Barkat's words and wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was.

Enforced Sabbath. It's not an idea I'm comfortable with, but it sends shivers up and down my spine that I realize are reverberations. Resonance.

"Sabbath is a weekly invitation to go nowhere," she says, "to believe that hiddenness is part of presence . . . in the sense of rhythm that sees nowhere-somewhere, presence-hiddenness, as inextricably linked, with God on both sides of the dance."

If Sabbath is a chance to see this once a week in daily life, part of the reason we have a Sabbath is to see how these cycles play out in the rest of life. So, while I don't think our difficult year is a Sabbath, precisely, it plays out this same cycle. Right now, we're nowhere, hidden from the world and success and even ourselves, sometimes. But that's not the end of the story. And maybe, just maybe, we are headed somewhere.

It seems, then, that two choices lie before us when we think God has forgotten us: we can claim hurt and anger, let them simmer into bitterness, and forget God right back, or we can remember the cycle, the one we're to live out weekly, and settle into the hidden time while waiting for him to come back.

For me, I choose the second. Living it out is hard, like living out anything that requires embracing paradox. But Barkat's words remind me of what I would have known if I was a good Sabbath practitioner: God doesn't leave, and He doesn't forsake, but sometimes He covers us for a time and asks us to trust Him for the uncovering.

Joining also with Ann in naming grace. Grace is . . . 

 . . . gappy baby teeth

 . . . friends who pray

 . . . an array of choices where there used to be none

 . . . living in the land of fabulous clouds

 . . . a cross-country network of friends

 . . . books that make it feel like home

 . . . tree symmetry revealed

 . . . how story reveals truth and truth is the best story 

 . . . he, who embraces the Hard in the name of the future

Hoping

Hope is a funny sort of thing. It springs up at you, out of nowhere sometimes, to tackle you around the waist and hold you down until you listen to what it has to say.

I wrestle with hope, most often through early morning hours. I don't want it to claim me, don't want it to grab me from behind and I don't want to listen to what it's telling me.

Hope can cost quite a bit, Disappointment stings to the core, makes me wonder if I dreamed it all up in the first place. I've followed hope before, and tasted only gall.

But learning not to hope has it's downsides, too. Without hope, life is dark, dreary. It weighs more than it should, more than it needs to. And everything becomes anticipatory of Bad Things, the kind that lurked under bed and in closets when I was a child.

When Mirren was born, I lost sight of hope. I couldn't find it, not for her or for me or for the two of us together. I knew it was there, I could feel it, smell it, taste it, but I couldn't see it and I certainly couldn't grab it.

For months, hope and I fought. We wrestled, though that dark time when I so much wanted to feel like it was a new day. Like Jacob, I couldn't see what was attacking me. I couldn't feel the thing that so badly wanted me in its grip. Instead, I just tried to keep my footing through the next round, knowing morning had to come eventually.

Also like Jacob, I emerged from that fight with a strange sort of victory. A new name, a new piece of me, more resilient and positive than the pieces I've known before. And a year of struggle, so profound in some ways that I may limp from it for the rest of my life, though in the end I think it will make me stronger, not bitter and lost and sad.

For all that I couldn't find hope when things looked better than they do now, these days I find it everywhere.

Today, hope took the face of a little girl discovering balloons. Shrieks of joy echoed through the halls, and hope unfurled a tendril that played, gentle-like, through my hair. When I saw Dave go shovel snow for the sheer joy of it (he'd never done it before), the tendril began to wrap around me. And when I watched the sleepy girl giggling on her back on the floor because it was too much effort to get up, I gave in and let it hold me.

May you be held tonight, friends, no matter your struggle.

New Life

It's a long time, I've been gone from this space. Long in days and weeks, but also long in distance from the previous life.

New job, new state, new rooms. We stuffed boxes, filled a truck, drove cross-country, had our car stolen, listened to the baby bark. Then we unstuffed the boxes, learned how to live with one car, watched it snow and felt the cold tingle up our arms and legs, and held the baby so she could sleep.

And now we're here. Down one car and some possessions we probably didn't need anyway, though my heart grieves the original art pieces we'll probably never see again. They're most likely in a dumpster somewhere, valuable only to those who could see with our eyes. But we're up a new life, a new start, a place to begin again, and I value that beyond the car and the TV and the microwave and even all of Dave's tools and his dress clothes.

There's power in beginning again.

I feel like I need to say that one more time, for me and maybe for you, too. There's power in beginning again.

I don't pretend to think that we leave everything behind, that the shadow of this last 14 months won't continue to influence how we think and feel and see and pray (or if we pray - I'm the first to tell you that it's hard to pray when God seems like a wall). But I feel like we can breathe here, like there's some space for us to heal and seek and, if we're blessed with it, to find.

And maybe that's enough - to live in these moments, to hold them close and let them be and just receive for a bit, where we've been struggling with what's been taken.

I think that's what we're to do this year - to live. Just live. To breathe in each day as it comes, each hour and each moment, and then move on to the next. To release everything that last year was and wasn't, and find what we have now. To let the hard, hurt places release and become soft again. To let it be what it was, without trying to make it into something it wasn't.

So here's to life, my friends, and the living of it.


I love that Imperfect Prose is back just as I'm posting again. Serendipitous.

Thoughts on the Christmas Crazy

I've been thinking about the crazy that is Christmas, and I'm going to step out of my usual voice here to share some of my thoughts.


Christmas is always crazy and this year even more so, what with the moving cross-country two days later. We're not frenzied, just busy, and things will only pick up as we move closer.

It's not in the spirit of the season, some say, and I buy that. It's hard to contemplate the Christ-child when you're running hither and thither, like a jackalope in molting season.

Then again, I can't imagine the first Christmas was exactly a contemplative picnic. Think about it. What part of:

• riding a donkey while pregnant
• searching a full town for a place to stay
• giving birth among the animals
• all while trying to register your family in some #$^! census

sounds like a set of peaceful moments for you? Because I don't see anything there that looks like the restful time I always want for Christmas.

Now, there's something to letting go of a lot of the crazy that goes with this season, of walking away from some of the things that make it so nuts and making space for the peace and the quiet. But there's a reason why we do all of those things. It's different for different folks, and each person has to decide if they're going to parties/making cookies/decorating the house/buying gifts/singing in choir/etc. for good motives or bad.

For me, when I search my heart I find that I want both - I want to give gifts to people I love (and, heck, receive them, too), and celebrate with them at parties, and bake and cook up a storm, and decorate and see Christmas lights and wrap like a frenzied little wrapping-paper sprite, but I also want the peace and the quiet.

Clearly, I can't have everything I want.

Or maybe I can.

See, I think Mary had the right idea. Her life was crazy right around the time Jesus was born, but instead of trying to make it other than it was, she held on to the things she wanted and found her quiet later. She took them in, held them, and pondered them in her heart.

I'm not saying we should embrace the crazy without thought, that we should do things because we feel like we have to even if our hearts aren't in them, or that Christmas is everything it should be. What I am saying is that there's a way to make peace with the action. I think it's possible to be both Martha and Mary (the other one) this season.

What do you all think?


This doesn't fit very well with the usual tone of Imperfect Prose, but I'm linking anyway, because I love the community and the people there, and because it's the last one before January!