Love is the only law left

Church camp when I was a kid was a place where everyone ran wild. "Safe" in the circlet of forest, our cabins mapped out in alphabetical groups, dirt paths between, our parents let all the kids run wild. They didn't know where we were or who we were with.

The problem was, I wasn't free there. I was haunted there. One person made the grounds a maze of bad memories and new tragedies. Unlimited access in a place where no one heard a little girl saying no, no one heard a little girl crying silent and flying out of body into thin air to escape.

Church camp for my kids will be different, so I say through gritted teeth and tension and anxiety. I watch them like hawks, send them everywhere with a "buddy", panic if someone is left behind. No one goes unaccounted for in a family already touched by the secret sins of a "safe Christian". Church camp feels about as safe to me as an obstacle course in an Indiana Jones movie. Only the treasure I'm trying to get through whole has 8 arms and 8 legs and it is 4 children who are too heavy for me to carry and too fast for me to keep up with and too excited about everything I'm terrified of.

The pastor smiles from the campsite across from ours, but all I see is the smile on another pastor's face smiling as he tells me what a hopelessly horrible person I am. I see the smile on another pastor's face when he taught that adultery was wrong while children were being turned into sexual toys under his very nose. I remember sweating under the heat of his thundering voice as he proclaimed homosexuality the most disgusting sin of all.

What if you were made that way by someone else? What if it wasn't your fault? What if you hated it just as much as the rest of the church? It was easy to hate it, and by extension, easy to hate yourself, so much that you thought the world was better off without you. Understanding our sin is easy, understanding the penalty is clear. Living with it is impossible.

But grace? Grace is hard. It doesn't fit into the nicely wrapped little boxes the church makes for it. "Believe, and you will be saved." That's what they tell you in the beginning. What they don't tell you is that they - as an extension of their "God" - will try to save you from every last inch of yourself. And while the process of sanctification through Christ is a lovely and holy and beautiful thing that is always consensual and incremental, the church does things a little differently. They tear your clothes from your body - those old clothes that stink of sin. They dance around your nakedness, celebrating as if you were a newborn baby naked in their midst. Never mind your arms crossed and spine bent to hide your shame. After that, they give you new clothes, clothes you might hate, clothes that probably won't fit you right, clothes that bind and pinch and scratch. Maybe clothes that are for the wrong season of your life. But those clothes are the only ones you're allowed to wear in church, so you wear them. You call it "your burden to bear" and smile just like them as if it's a mantle of honor and not a reminder of how the church raped you in order to admit you.

"Believe and you will be saved" is followed up by "and you must give up [fill in the blank with x, y, z]" and you find yourself rather quickly shepharded from a place of "acceptance" as a sinner to a place of shame if you continue to sin. As if sin were as easy to turn off as a water faucet. As if anyone, ever, anywhere, anytime, has EVER been able to turn off sin, defeat it entirely.

One day you wake up and you realize that God doesn't make bad people. God doesn't make mistakes. And if religion couldn't beat it out of you with all their tricks and sticks, is it ever going to go away? You wonder if maybe people are made this way. You wonder if maybe God is more opposed to hatred and violence than people and their "lifestyles". This God, the one who opposes hatred and violence? This God you could believe in.

It's just a whisper of possibility, but you hear it: maybe all this has been a great big Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors play for power by the church. Maybe they don't have the answers, so they deflect and defend and demoralize. Maybe there is no one answer.

This new thing I'm learning - the dialectic - says I can hold two opposites true at once. I can believe that sexuality can be sinful while on the other hand believing it isn't always sinful. I can believe that God granted me a heterosexual marriage with children and that perhaps that won't be his plan for everyone. Did my marriage "redeem" my lesbian lifestyle of earlier years? Am I a "converted homosexual"?

I don't want to be called that. I am redeemed and converted to the way of love. I have the chance to join Christ in loving every. single. person. I ever meet. I have the chance to be the reflection of Christ's beautiful face of love, his open arms, his embrace, his protection.

Hear this, my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters: I will never try to tell what path God is calling you to walk. I will not show you the sliver in your eye because there will always be a plank in mine. I will not decide what things you do in private are sin. I will encourage you to love, not hate. I will show you love, not hate. I will sing to you: "Love; it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you, it will set you free!" If you have kids, I'll send mine over to play. If you invite me for coffee, I'll come. And I will come quietly and humbly, because all of us are walking through different storms, and all I know for sure is the way to weather mine. I will come hushed to the sacred meeting of souls, for our souls are all naked and all beautiful and all made in the image of God, and souls don't have sexual orientations or baffled bodies or scars or shame. And here - two souls touching each other gently in the ocean of life - we can be free and lovely and grateful and peaceful together.

I spring up as we tumble into fall

It feels as though summer just began, and already we are tumbling like windfall apples toward autumn. The trees are beginning to turn to their scarlet brilliance, the farmers are rushing to gather last crops of hay before the hard frosts.

The plants that spent all summer growing strong are leaning over, turning their rusty brown, and lying their backs on the cool earth. It is the time of year for bonfires, sweatshirts and unearthing the deep down quilts from their summer closets. The front room is littered with bins of clothes as we switch our wardrobes over in preparation for the long Wisconsin winter.

This year, the butterflies are lingering, monarchs still blazing orange in the long grass and little yellow and blue swallowtails looking as though they had just cracked the chrysalis. The two kittens still home with us are learning to catch mice, although they'd rather play with their prey than eat it. We who hate shoes are still hanging on to our sandals, wearing long pants but refusing to shutter up our toes for the year.

My faith works in opposite of the seasons. This is the 4th autumn of cancer. I am still fighting it. The side effects of treatment drag my body down, but my mind and my soul are ever growing, ever more strong, ever more seeking. I remember the first November, when I went into radiation hibernation for a week, then spent two with my grandparents - them now gone ahead to heaven and my parents working hard to make their home into a vacation spot for the generations. They call it Skønnestad, Danish for "beautiful place". It lies in their sleepy hometown on the coast of Lake Superior, and they paint it in muted grays and blues, choose yellow comforters, lay maple flooring. A new beginning for a new November.

I won't leave for cancer scanning again till January this year. Last year, just before the holidays, and it was too much - too much to think about cancer so much, too much to be away from family. This year, we wait an extra month. My tumor markers have stayed stable all year, and will be checked again in October, in the height of autumn. My night sweats and hair loss tell me something is awry, but so far I receive no answers. By the time my scan comes around, I will be deep into my first hockey season since I had my first baby. I buy larger breezers to accomodate the extra inches, and skate hard till my lungs burn down the road where there is fresh tar.

God tore me down to my foundation this summer, a long road of construction I've been walking since last October, peaking this summer with hospital stay after hospital stay to treat the sudden onset of a black hole of depression unlike anything I've weathered in the past. I am slowly coming alive again, my laugh returning, my anxiety waning, my fingers able to make music again. While the earth sheds life for sleep, I am shedding dark for light. I wear a shirt too tight just because on the back it says, "I'm alive like never before". It's true. God is putting some amazing structure onto my foundation, and it looks nothing like my faith of before and more and more like Christ. In stripping me of my Christian "home" - my church - He is showing me that He and I are inseperable, that He will never strip me of His presence. Even when I could't look in the mirror for fear of the hatred I had for my reflection, He loved me. In the most tear-filled nights, He soothed my soul. He allowed me to come to the brink of myself, and now He is pulling me back into His arms.

And so, this autumn, we lift our arms in praise, we sing to Him in thanks, the tears flow for joy instead of sorrow.

...bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor. (Isaiah 61:3)

I read this passage at a child's funeral - the Caleb we named ours after. I see his parents, who came through what no parent can imagine, and they are indeed a display of His splendor, almost ten years later. All this we've come through - my cancer, Amelia's brush with death, her ongoing special needs, the loss of our child, the chaos of infections, my doctoral studies, depression, anxiety, financial trouble - He is teaching us to lean on Him so hard that He can graft us on, never to be separated, part of His planting for the display of His splendor.

My time in jail

Charleston jail

Did you grow up thinking being a Christian was kind of like being in jail? Once you were in, you couldn't get out. Inside, it was sort of pleasant because you got to know Jesus better, and you loved Him with all your heart for sacrificing Himself on the cross for you. But God the Father was kind of scary, and you weren't quite sure what the Holy Spirit was doing rummaging around your insides. In jail, you expected to spend most of the time prostrate in praise of God, and the rest of the time, using armor in these epic battles with evil during times of trial. When you finally left jail when you died, you entered another - albeit more pleasant - jail called heaven where you really couldn't picture what things would be like other than praising God for endless hours, which sounded kind of boring.

You treated God the Father kind of like the jailer. You tried to stay off His radar because you were afraid He would eventually figure out you were a fraud and you didn't really believe as sincerely as you were portraying. You act out a series of lies in order to keep things looking perfect on the surface. You are the good prisoner, you don't need to sit down and talk with your Father, and you certainly hope He never disciplines you.

Bad things happen with no warning. Guard your heart - it's not shatterproof. Keep life noisy so there is little time to think. Never let God down; work harder and harder. ~Sheila Walsh, Love Melts Frozen Tears, from "Outrageous Love: a Love that Seeks No Reward"

The truth is, life is muddy sometimes. You get caught up in arguments, in pain, in difficult relationships, and - heaven forbid - your own sin. A friend sees your perfectionism, and whispers, "When the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the pain of change, then you will be ready to change."

Something in your life clicks into place, and the ice in your heart begins to crack, water bubbling up over the surface, a whole well inside you of frozen tears and broken promises, disgrace and disgust, pain and unsaid prayers. You live in a fog and feel completely frozen in time, with no way out and no eyes to see. You turn on the fan to get rid of the mist ushered up by the melting tears in your soul, and from time to time, you see a little bit of your future. Sometimes it scares you and sometimes it exhilarates you.

You are the broken butterfly, dead on the table and missing a wing. Your glory is being destroyed so that Christ's glory can shine through you, but you don't know it.

I don't know your story. I don't know what you are dealing with or not dealing with. What I do know is this, God doesn't want you to merely survive, He wants you to live! Every weekend I listen to stories of women who have dressed in an overcoat of shame for years. Childhood tragedy leaves such deep wounds, but they are wounds that can be healed by the outrageous love of God. Perhaps, like me, you are afraid to face what is going on inside of you. I had no idea what would happen to me when I walked through the doors of the hospital and they locked behind me. All I knew was that I couldn't live as I had been living any more. I also believed God loved me: I just had no idea how much. At the lowest moment of my life God's love began to melt every frozen tear that I had carried for years. It was a healing rain. ~Sheila Walsh

Let your wounds be bound, oh wounded. May you go free, captive. In a way, God has no expectations of you at this point of your life. What He cries out for is for you to love Him back. And out of that mutual love, then you will see the extravagance of His embarrassingly deep love and pursuit of you, and all you will be able to do is praise Him and work for Him from that point on. You hold the key to your personal jail in your hand. It's in the shape of a giant heart that was handed you long before you were even a twinkle in your parents eye. He has planned your escape from this prison since the beginning of time and all you have to do is put the key - His love - into the lock.