Confessions of a Former Christian Blogger: From Doubt to Acceptance

The snow lies in waves like a summer river, polished and bright from the high winds sweeping the country. The temperature is below zero again, and indoor activities have long since lost their luster for the kids trapped by the cold. I watch the wind whip snow devils up from the hills, carrying the drifts up and over and up and over again. When it finally dies down, I think most of our snow will be in Lake Michigan or Illinois.

Winter is a time for hibernating in the colder areas of the world. We pack up our summer clothes, unpack the wool and the down, the coats and the long underwear, the duvets. We hustle around sealing holes and cracks against the wind. Sometimes, when the night chill threatens to sneak in on us around the door corners and window frames, we cover the windows with sleeping bags and pretend we are in Alaska's eternal night.

Doubt has turned into a restful state of not knowing. I tell people I am agnostic these days. I learned long ago not to profess what you will be in the future. One never knows how life will change us. I learn more about agnosticism, gnosticism, atheism, deism…words that had short bullet point definitions in my mind before now have paragraphs attached to them.

My earliest memories tell me I was once a gnostic theist, born into religion and faith as most of us are. I was sure of everything - at least until I finished high school. Because I was in the U.S., the god I was taught was Christian. Eventually, without really knowing why or how or when, I became an agnostic theist: I struggled over issues of creationism vs. evolution and landed on theistic evolution; I didn't understand how the Christian god could apply to the whole world when the whole world hasn't even heard of him, so I tried to find links between Christianity and other faiths, like Buddhism, Hinduism and Muslim. Could we all be worshipping the same god? I wasn't sure - and I didn't think anyone else was, either.

I used to think that as I went through life, I would grow into myself. I would understand myself, the world around me, and the universe a little better each day. It really wasn't until I sat with children dying that I began to understand how little I really knew with any certainty. My own kids, my career, my successes and failures, my cancer journey - all these have taught me, over and again, that I won't be more sure of myself by the time I die. Rumi famously said that we are each "the universe in one drop". We are made of the stars, the same chemicals and bonds. As life goes on, we grasp the fact of our smallness in relation to history, the universe, and the future. We are just a dot on a pointillist painting of billions and billions of dots. The most profound, daring, successful, and intriguing people of any era will disappear, too, into that sea of people that records no names and sees no faces. Death comes to us all, and our legacy is soon swallowed up with it.

What am I sure of, at 34? Only that I know very little for certain. I am certain I cannot explain the universe, not even one person at a time.

The leap to life without god was not made overnight, nor even in one season of my life. It started when I began to question the tenets of the faith I inherited when I was in my teens, facing a potentially terminal heart condition and the constant threat of death lurking around the corner every time I fainted and stopped breathing. I felt doubt as hot and painful as the breath of a stranger filling my lungs. It couldn't be ignored.

In my 20's, I came back to mysticism, but I was a skeptical church-goer at best. I tried all the time to see or hear god. I listened to the wind whispering, I looked hard at every cloud for a face or a hand. I kept a steady stream of worship music playing in my car to squeeze out the lingering questions that I struggled to ignore. My faith became my own. For over a decade, I worked hard at it, studying the Bible more often and with more tenacity than any book I read in graduate school. I used the principles of the Bible's teachings, especially in Psalms and Proverbs, to change my character, eliminating adult temper tantrums, weeding out negativity determinedly as I memorized verses and forced myself to stop "bad thoughts". Including doubt. I tried to kill it every way I knew how.

By 30, I was in serious trouble. Faith had taken a backseat to the constant erosion of the chaos of life. My own brain was trying to kill me, mostly because faith was telling me exactly how horrible I really was on the inside. I lived in fear of someone discovering the "real me" I kept buried, locked away, chained to the darkest and deepest corners of my self.

I opened the door to the cage in the beginning of this decade. I've slowly emerged, in all my failings and all my glorious individuality. I've long since learned to like myself, and slowly like is turning into love. 

It takes courage to grow up and be who you really are. ~e.e.cummings

When a Christian Blogger Doubts: Pressing Pause

The earth wears frosted tips on her assymetrical haircut, corn fields left standing and all the hay shorn. It's as if the winter has caught up to us before we're ready: frozen us in an awkward adolescence of soul growth, desires muted and minds still like the windless landscape. This is what coming to peace with not knowing feels like. Radically accepting life for what it is rather than what it should be? It sounded presposterous to me at first - for didn't I know that God had created us for something bigger, better? Time passes, and life hasn't changed much, no matter what divine inspiration I've claimed.

I've worn shame like an ill-fitting harness for most of my life. Somehow it smudges off on you - abuser wiping dirty hands right down the side of your life. And for all the bruises, visible and invisible, hope sighed out and never returned. I embraced labels because they seemed to give me an identity I lacked without them. Husband and children were my middle finger to the world. They were symbolic of change, symbolic of sameness, symbolic of my choice to re-enter a world that had chewed me up and spit me out again and again. Why do we keep revisiting the very places where our identity was stripped away in hopes that this time will be different?

Compassion is my modus operandi. I entered my profession to give voice to those who had none. But my self-talk never faltered. Yet somehow I had grown an abuser in my head who perpetuated all the pain. It was if I had climbed back into a cage through it's open door and locked myself in. I hear the truth in a Pinterest quote: "Stop wasting your time looking for the key to happiness. The door isopen and unlocked - just walk through it." It was hard to change the voices while I believed I deserved no compassion - until I realized that many of the people I'm compassionate toward don't "deserve" it either. I am compassionate to others simply because they are human and their humanity calls to the tender places in my soul; I am harsh on myself because I had been taught to loathe my body and my mind, and I was stupidly agreeing with another's assessment of my worth or lack thereof.

Changing the voices in your head isn't easy. In fact, it feels very false when you first start to try. I have a list of "self-validations" on my phone, something I can call up whenever the voices in my head starting chattering in a certain direction. Even the word - "self-validation" - grated on my long-time Christian sensibilities when I heard it. Validate myself? You're kidding, right? Because I am bad, I am worth less than nothing, the best I could wish for in life is to disappear so that what might appear instead would be good and right and truthful.

I stop and turn back to the words I've just typed because I can hear them come alive in my mind. Yes, that's what the voices used to say. But you know who taught those voices to talk that way? It wasn't divine inspiration but the Sunday school teachers, the pastor banging on the pulpit while his veins popped out of his neck, the glasses they trained me to wear before I opened my Bible. A thousand times I was told I was worth absolutely nothing without the covering of Christ, yet I don't see the reflection of Christ in the words and ideas my mind filled with in the wake of those condemnations. Because if the creator/savior paradigm is true, then he wanted me to be alive. If he is good and kind and merciful and just, he would not have created me into a life that was ultimately a failure and a fraud. Which means the voices in my head couldn't possibly be repeating the savior of my soul; if he thought I was worth nothing, he wouldn't have wasted carbon and oxygen and hydrogen to make me.

.......................................................

The doubts have grown into me and I've grown into a question mark. I don't feel compelled to understand why anymore. I feel compelled only to live this day and the next until all of my days are used up. I don't want to die in a cage and I don't want my children to watch me live in one. I am only setting them up for a life of slavery if I do that. And my own life? You know, the one I used to think wasn't worth a dime? I do want to live it - truly live it, freely and beautifully and tragically and totally. It is worth something to me to be me.

I'm halfway down the path away from god, and I'm crouching quiet, trying to get my bearings. But I'm not broken-hearted anymore because I don't know the answers. I understand my place in the grand scheme of things, and I am not big enough to understand something as overarching and metaphorical as an idea of god passed down through 2,000 years and countless interpreters.

I am okay with not knowing. I am okay with not always moving forward. It is enough, finally, just to be.

When a Christian Blogger Doubts: Stained Glass Memories of Hope

The leaves fall silent deaths in rivulets down the forested valleys. Walking is the fall activity of choice...feet swishing, kicking at the swirling blanket, or silent as a fox creeping on the carpet of damp watercolors strewn laissez-faire across the forest floor.

I stare at painted skies and huge questions float as heavy and thick as clouds through my subconscious. Where did this all come from? What is the purpose of this beauty? Why do I get to see it, here, today?

The older you get entitlement falls off you like the ill-fitting garment it always was. Replacing it is a new awe for the holiness of life. The sacredness of each and every thing we take for granted: warmth, light, growth, tenderness, affection, strength, courage, justice, breath and heart beat and a working brain. The sun rising and setting each day. The seasons turning like clockwork every year, from winter's storehouses of snow watering the spring earth to this suicide of the leaves in autumn that flames bright as a lit match and just as briefly as the coming cold paints the earth dark and slimy and dead. From death springs life and all life acquiesces to death in the end.

Buddha observed it - the "enlightened one", Siddhartha, a prince whose compassion was picqued by the tragedy of poverty in his kingdom. The starving prophet who teaches of kindness and justice and mercy and a long, winding road of meditation and searching to get to that place of understanding. Just another man, another prophet in a world full of prophets. Maybe it is the magic of the singing bowls and their endless single note of reverbration that gives a glow to Buddhism. Maybe it is the very soul of the man whose mission in life was love, shining pure through the ages?, through the pages of the Sutras, through the words, chanting voices, bowing bald heads of the lamas and monks who follow in the way to dharma. 

From my Christian viewpoint, Buddha has always towered like an unfamiliar Solomon, the king of the Jews who asked God for wisdom instead of wealth.

The Qur'an reads unnervingly similar to the Bible - the Old Testament, death and destruction, obey or else. Parts of the Psalms and Proverbs of Christianity are echoed almost word for word. I remember slogging through the Qur'an one winter when I took care of a Muslim child who was dying. His mother, devout Sufi, questioned her faith in the face of such tragedy. She had not yet been to Mecca, she did not always say the 5 daily prayers. She called this struggle the "greater jihad" - the struggle to maintain one's faith in the face of adversity. This jihad had nothing to do with killing others and everything to do with ravaging one's own soul with worry, doubt, and constant inadequacy. We often had the Bible, Qur'an and Torah open in front of us as we talked late into the night, I hovering over her sedated son. I remember her telling me, a few hours after he died, that to consider a life without Allah was too hopeless for her to fathom. She repeated Muhammed's words, the words he said when he lost his own son, "The eyes shed tears and the heart is grieved, but we will not say anything except which pleases our Lord." As she says this, I hear the echo of David's words when his infant son died, after days of supplication for mercy, days of weeping. The child died, he picked his disheveled body up off the dirt floor of his home, ate, dressed, slept with his wife. When his servants asked him why he had ceased to grieve for the child as soon as he died, David replied, "While the baby was still alive, I fasted, and I cried. I thought, ‘Who knows? Maybe the Lord will feel sorry for me and let the baby live.’ But now that the baby is dead, why should I fast? I can’t bring him back to life. Someday I will go to him, but he cannot come back to me.”

Death: the unquestionable final barrier between life as we know it and a space and place we cannot fathom, understand, or confirm. Is it streets of gold or a cold grave we never even feel? Can a soul, which is invisible matter, disappear entirely and cease being?

The room was hushed and quiet as I helped her bathe her son's small body with scented water, white flowers floating like little life rafts in the bowl. She called this absolution, the washing. She said all Muslims do just so to prepare to pray. Her quiet voice punctuated the deep and reverant silence of the room with a sacred melody of both longing and abiding faith. She brought beautiful hand-embroidered white sheets from the mosque, and we wrapped him slowly, the kafan of the sheets a cocoon where he would wait for resurrection. I asked her about her silence. No tears. No weeping. No gnashing of teeth or asking why in that last lap to death and now to her cold son wrapped in his kafan. She would never see his face again on this earth. Her black eyes glinted for just a moment while her jaw clamped and unclamped. I will never forget the forced breath, almost through gritted teeth, with which she said, "I am compelled to believe, else I will follow him from heartbreak. This cannot be the end. I must believe my son is with Hazrat Izrael, alaihis salaam*." Her son's death, the final separation, cemented her decision. She could not face a world in which death is the end. She could not face life without hope.

The Jews say Jesus was perhaps a prophet. Not a messiah. After all, does it seem like the world has been saved? Christians argue that in some eternal, unseen way, yes, we have all been saved if we will only accept Christ's rule over our hearts and bodies.

I remember the first time I saw the bald head of an Orthodox hasidic Jewess: in the overly warm confines of her son's ICU room, full of the smell of his failing body, she sadly tilted her head to the side as she sighed, pulling her shietel from her shining hairless scalp. I had no idea she wore a wig. She saw my curious stare, and she said quietly that she shaved her head to avoid tempting her husband with the beauty of her hair. I watched her for months, praying 5 times a day, reading in Hebrew to her other children, the quiet submission she put on like a heavy black cloak when her husband was present. She was a spitfire, a real female dynamo: she often engaged in screaming matches with one of the harshest physicians, arguing with him that her son would live, his rotting flesh would transform and renew, that G--, whose name she could not speak aloud, he prospers and rescues the faithful. Around Jewish men she was silent; she even moved quietly and meekly. She was steeped so heavy in the laws of the Torah that she wept each night in agony that her unconscious missteps might be causing her son's agonizing death from leukemia.

When he died, they called him go-sess, a person who has passed into a sacred time of life to prepare for death and eternity. Because he was unconscious - blessedly - his father left the room to gather a minyan, a group of ten upstanding Sephardic Jewish men who could say the Vidui, or final confession, in the dying boy's place. This series of Yiddish and Hebrew prayers and chants went on for hours, accompanied by the wailing of the women. No sanction from the nursing staff could quiet them. Wailing is part of the process, the rabbi whispered to us outside the room. As the moment of death approached, each space between breaths becoming longer and longer, the teenager's body growing colder and darker as life ebbed away, the displays of the women became more and more dramatic. They tore clothes, dragged nails across skin as if by wounding themselves they could buy back time, buy back life, buy back a world they could understand.

We all have gods, I heard a preacher say more than once. Love of money. Fellow man. Liberty. King and country. Family. Education. Career. Fame. True love. Some claim Allah, some claim God, some are too afraid to claim a name out loud, and call it shem shalo - "the name that is his". We are all on a path from birth to death, so far universally inextricable circumstances about which many of us have formed or adopted elaborate mazes of protective reassurances. Some seek enlightment. Some heaven. Some nirvana. Some seek Truth. Some seek equality. We all want to believe there's a reason for us to be here. We all hope for something that transcends the eat-poop-pee-sleep-sex-work-illness-loss-joy ordinary of life. A reason for being. A reason for suffering. A reason for dying.

Is it wrong to believe something just to comfort yourself? Is it possible that God and the whole story is a figment of our collective imagination, a construct for the world that allows us to keep the dark mysteries of the universe at bay? All who turn to the skies for answers, all of us the world over, we are part of a pulsing ache - the same yearning for a perfect divinity who is master of the universe and is pulling the puppet strings on our behalf.

The only ones who can answer our questions are those who can no longer speak. Perhaps they speak through the very dirt their bodies return to, as their lost lives feed this flaming world of beautiful dying. They are the life that feeds the maples turning. Can it be enough for me, to see the beauty and to see the pain, to hold close the helpless truth that I can alter none of it except for my actions while I am here and breathing?

I call this radical acceptance. I call this the never-ending river of questions that runs through us all and rushes loudly in some souls more than others, demanding attention, demanding answers. When there is no answer, how do we continue on?

Two verses from the very book I'm doubting press gently on my back, nudging me to walk on. Faith without deeds is dead. Put your hand down, nurse, on the suffering hand before you. Open your mouth, teacher, and guide others toward justice, peace, love, sacrifice, fulfillment. Extend your arms, mother, for embraces here may be part of the answer. Soften your heart, lover, and find the path your partner is plodding along, find the hand that has given up hope of holding yours. Even if it is just this moment, even if there is nothing else, love matters. If all we have is each other, and there is no commander in the clouds, love is everything still. 

Finally, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things.

Wisdom seems to swirl around like a dust devil in the prairie wind, a tumbleweed moving too fast along the dust to chase. In the moments just before the dawn, my eyes search deep into the black night outside my window. And a single phrase, Spanish, comes to mind, and I can rest. "Y si nada nos libra de la muerte, al menos que el amor nos salve de la vida." It is a line from a poem by Javier Velaza, written for his book Torn in 1963. In my language, this dusty Latin professor from Universitat de Barcelona says, "If nothing saves us from death, oh that love would save us from life."

the pain itself 

crosses the threshold 

of fear, 

with your arms 

a lifeguard, I sink to prevent 

the grievous, lethal plummet

-would that I could almost hope- 

not a word well-remembered, 

you manage my forgetfulness and the gift of unconsciousness, 

which shelters me from my worst enemy 

and more tenaciously, you grant grace, 

even lie - 

because everyone is lying 

and yours is pious - 

which seals my eyes 

and tells me it is over, it's over, it's over 

and comfort me that

nothing happens, because nothing is past, 

is past, 

is past, 

is past, 

is past. 

And if nothing frees us from death, 

oh that love would save us from life.

(from El Salvavidas, "The Lifeguard")

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*(from above): "Hazrat Izrael, alaihis salaam," means "the Angel of Death, peace be unto him"

Simply human

The neighbors probably think I'm crazy. I tried to keep my voice down. It came out in tight, painful whispers that had all the pressure of a scream behind them. I shook my fists, I shadow-boxed in the dark like a real fighter. I kicked the dirt so hard my shoe flew off. I flung myself down on my back in the ditch and looked up at the stars and they seemed so cold and far-off and inconsequential. I've never thought that about the stars before.

I've shouted at God to answer me. I've begged him to make me see if he truly is there. I've shaken my fists and poured out my angry heart, and the sky stays silent. The wind blows steady against my face. There are no shapes in the clouds. There is nothing at all. No answer. No acknowledgment. Not even a sense of peace as I stare into the vastness of the universe.

If it is all just empty. If this is all we get, this life. If it's lies or miscontrued ancient teachings or inspired writing or an extension of a set of laws invented in ancient Jewish history. Because it doesn't read "God of mercy" or "God of perfect love". He says perfect love casts out fear, but I am afraid of him. I am afraid of his supposed standards and how my very being defies them. How does one live with those questions? How does one write a "Christian" blog when god and christian just got demoted to lowercase letters?

I don't know what I like to wear. I don't know who I like to make friends with. I don't know how I like to spend free time. I don't know how I ended up where I am, here in the lonely now with 4 kids. I don't know if I like my hair, or whether or not I want to keep wearing make-up, shaving, using perfume.

Giant questions spewing out everywhere with no easy answers. I try to be gentle with myself, trust that it will turn out, somehow. I have begged the sky and received only darkness in return.

I ponder scientific laws and Bible verses, the words of Rabindranath Tagore and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. I wonder how much has changed from the Hebrew, the Greek - what has survived and what has been altered, adulturated to meet the standards of the time in which it was revised. How culturally embedded is our Bible at this stage of history?

Funny thing is, I'm sleeping great. And so far I haven't been struck by lightening. 

Ampersands and semicolons

The wind is cold and my swollen eyes take in the Monet-by-midnight landscape of 4 a.m. A city glows pink over the ridge. Mist has just begun to drift upward off the wet grass. I draw in a breath of the air, all crisp like an apple sour-ripe from the short summer.

Sitting here means staying. Shutting down and clinging with eyes squeezed shut. It's everything that could be disintegrating back into the stuff of dreams like sunrays being swallowed by mist. After all, you still don't know who you're running from, or what you're running toward.

Prudence demands you wait, then, stuck in a mountain of remnants of life like an incomplete sentence, a hanging semicolon, a song ending in the middle of a verse.

The whole earth is violent in her beauty, the last flame before death and ice and winter. Sap runs dry and leaves scream red-faced as they are drained of life. The green trees yet to starve of moisture as water recedes deep into the earth's skin, they are silent witnesses to the bloodbath. They speak only in whispers brushing each other in the morning breeze.

The next hour the mist returns to mute the bold display unleashed by the rays of light breaking through. Rain descends, a surrender of the clouds to the dying earth, spiraling away from light and life, shot out of the slingshot of the sun's pull, path marked out and measured before we are far enough from her again that she will begin to pull us back, her fingers drawing spring from the fleshy brown earth as she reaches through emptiness to bring us back into the embrace of the universe.

The rain rushes down like a wounded woman's weeping, surging and quelling, as if each drop is an apology for how rain will behave in the earth in the colder days coming, splitting her and heaving her upward, expanding and gnawing up out of her wrinkles and scars.

I stand up from my swing, and realize that the rushing sound in my ears is not the wind bringing the rain ever toward us over the invisible hills. It is a cascade of words about something that is nothing - now in this time of everything. Why write about nothing when there are so many things hovering unsaid in the space between us?

I suppose words have always been the blanket I pull over myself like chain-mail against the world's evils. Falling down in typewritten font from the creased vanilla of old, sturdy pages...literature and plays and poems, whole volumes ravenously devoured in a single afternoon. Stories written that plumbed the darkest sides of twisted lives and left adult readers shaking their heads and wondering how a little girl with an innocent face got that in her head. Poems unwritten rattling around in the racing mind on walks through the forest. Lyrics to songs never recorded scribbled on the backs of receipts and in notebooks and journals. Now today it is the clickety clack of typing, the orange publish button hovering, a day when every authoress can read her words in print and it seems as though we're more connected and more isolated than ever before.

I swim in the proverbial primordial soup of self-awareness and here there are puzzle pieces of my life floating about me - Indian music and pages of a Bible and the words of a prophet that have always caught the ear in their foreignness. I can't begin to decipher where this return to the beginning will take me. Like the song that's playing broken record in my mind - I don't know where this journey will end, but I know where to start...

I am afraid of encouraging anyone with false hope; I hold my heart like a poker hand closer to me. No one is going to get a chance to break it this time around.

Prompt: "Write"

When a Christian blogger starts to doubt

The night slowly fades into day as the gray on the horizon turns pink. I lie in my bed, alone, watching the dawn appear. Life is like this, I think. We are in the fog, in the dark, and we can't even remember what the sun looked like; we have given up believing it will ever return. Like everything else that comes and goes, leaves and returns, the cycles of the mind, of emotions, are so vivid that you forget they are part of a cycle.

Time: 11 p.m. f/1.8 ISO 1600 ss1/6"

The nightscape of life is like an impressionist landscape. You're groping in the dark, but every now and then the most incomparable beauty lingers in the night sky.

It is hard to know what to write as I go through this darkness yet again. Therapy is pulling off layers almost frantically now, and underneath I find someone - me - who has never defined herself without thinking in the context of others. When I was hurt as a child, I did the thing that came instinctively to me: I became a protector, a helper, a healer, a listener, a friend to the broken. This is how I became a nurse instead of a doctor: I need to help, to heal, to listen, to befriend, to advocate, to know people. It fills up the empty space where I suspect my "self" is supposed to be - and fills it up with something admirable, good.

Time: 730 a.m. f/4.5 ISO 200 ss1/2400

These days I feel like I am constantly "faking it". I am afraid that, when the light comes again after this season of doubt and depression, I won't recognize myself. I am afraid of what all I might be pretending about. I am afraid to discover what is left after this debridement of the inner self. Will it be bloody and battered? Healed and scarred? Will I ever be able to claim accomplishments, compliments, love as evidence of my true self?

The doubt grips so hard that it has squeezed the big G right off the name of god and I am foundering in disbelief, disillusionment, even anger. I went through this when my heart was at it's worst in college. At that point, I needed to claim my faith for my own - not just because it was my family's faith, or because it was the way I was taught. But because it was what I believed.

This season, though? Instead of watering my soul like it has whenever doubt has crept in before, the Bible reads as a law book, misogynistic, sardonic, even malicious. Prayer feels fake. Who am I praying to? Right now, I'm not praying to the God I believed in for 30 years. A line sings in my mind: "I'm still alive but I'm barely breathing/ Just prayed to a God that I don't believe in". I just don't want to be alone in the universe, and so the words still sometimes flow.

I don't know what the future holds for me, for my family, for my faith, for this blog. It seems inappropriate to spew my disbelief onto pages that were set apart for the glory of God while I still believed. I hope this is a season of doubt, and not a life transition. I hunger for your thoughts, your comments, to hear of your struggles. That by one dim flame, my own dark candle may be lit again.

O lord I think I'm falling

To my disbelief

I'm cursing like a sailor and lying like a thief

It's hard to heed the calling from the better side of me

When I'm blaming everybody else and no one's coming clean

O lord can you see my thick skin wearing thin

And the demons of a lesser me are beckoning me in

Those who gathered 'round me - I'm watching them all leave

Cause I am my own ragged company

You can take a trip to china or take a boat to Spain

take a blue canoe around the world and never come back again

But traveling don't change a thing, it only makes it worse

Unless the trip you take is in to change your cruel course

'Cause every town's got a mirror and every mirror still shows me

That I am my own ragged company

O lord it's lonely, lord it's mighty cold

And I don't want to live this way

Afraid of growing old

It's hard to heed the warning when you cannot see the crime

The only way to remember is to forget in a rhyme

And I'm scared to tread the red road that leads to Galilee

Cause I am my own ragged company

"True"

Still waters run deep

Life goes on. With or without your consent, reality is reality and there is not much you can do sometimes other than accept it. While the big questions brew and boil inside your head, there is life happening all around you. The children on the lakeshore. The parents' 40th anniversary. The new niece born. The school year starting.

Busy brings quiet to the mind. It's my go-to coping strategy, and probably the root of my workaholic personality. If your life isn't great at the moment - make someone else's better. If you're down, help someone else up. If you're confused, take refuge in the things you know for sure - medical facts, how to get a whole class of students laughing, story-weaving, making time for grand adventures with the kids.

Every joy may feel stolen, but even stolen joy warms the heart. The title of a favorite song drifts through like a theme to my late-summer days: "swing low, sail high". But there’s no one who/ 
makes it all come true/ Just altars gathering dust while we bow to them.

Cancer is haunting me again. The semester is packed and I don't want to take time to deal with the bad stuff. I'd rather plow through pretending than get stopped up by the knowing. I put cancer away like a bill I can't pay and paste a cardboard smile on until I've once again turned my mind by the upturn of my lips. The doctors are threatening with scary possibilities like "lung metastasis" and "nodules on x-ray". I am ploughing through my 2nd round of pneumonia this year, brought on by a simple summer head cold, and they can't complete the testing until I am better. For now - breath deep, ignore the wet cough and bloody phlegm. Keep assuring people I'm not contagious. Keep on teaching, keep on writing, keep on keepin' on.

My counselor texts me, "hang on for those four babies." And so we travel to Lake Superior, climb haybales, have crazy family movie nights, go skinny dipping in the dark, drive to the corner store on a whim to pick up ice cream and candy. We visit parks and go to sports camps; celebrate birthdays and milestones; soak up the whole great green earth with wonder.

Doubt has settled like a cloud of mist, impenetrable. In my careful deconstruction, I have reached a point where I have to choose again, almost like a child, who I will be. Which parts of myself I will reject or suppress. Which parts I will encourage and fortify. Who am I? What do I believe about myself, others, the world and it's suffering, the God I've been taught to love and follow?

It only comes in flashes, faith: looking out over the vast blue of Lake Superior, it settles as quietly as a butterfly on a bud. Certainty. Paired right with the only verses in the New Testament addressing homosexuality, there is a clarion call for all, whether they've been introduced to the Christ or not: "ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God." (Romans 1:20)

There is a host of memories I've long cherished of how I've seen the divine hand in nature. Yet right now they all seem to end in a question mark: was it really God, or was I just fulfilling my own prophesy by seeing things from just the right perspective? I would be lying if I didn't say that I am struggling to make sense of faith right now. God, once again, seems punitive and brutal, like he seemed to me when I went through life's hardest times as a teenager. I ask myself, do I believe to make myself feel better? Do I believe because I was taught to do so? Is God so wound up in my worldview and way of living so as to be inextricable? What if I had been born elsewhere? Would I still believe in this God? Can I stop believing if I want to? Is it possible that God is much bigger than the Bible he inspired? Why didn't he stop my suffering if he loves me?

I never dreamed I'd be here again in my 30's. I thought I'd put these questions to bed in my 20's. Certainly once cancer hit. God has felt so real to me for so long! And now he does not feel real any longer. I find myself stammering as I pray the verse that carried me through the last season of doubt: "Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief." (Mark 9:24) A song whispers alongside the hesitant prayer: "I'm still alive, but I'm barely breathin'. Just prayed to a god that I don't believe in."

I long for a voice in the darkness to ring True and silence these doubts that plague the soul and spawn despair. I cling to those things in my life that I believe are right, sacred. My marriage, my children, my family, my work, my students, my colleagues. Perhaps in their shining faces I will someday once again see the very face of God.

If you knew that you would die today

If you saw the face of God and Love

Would you change?

If you knew that love can break your heart

When you're down so low you cannot fall

Would you change?

How bad how good does it need to get?

How many losses how much regret?

What chain reaction

What cause and effect

Makes you turn around

Makes you try to explain

Makes you forgive and forget

Makes you change

If you knew that you would be alone

Knowing right being wrong

Would you change?

If you knew that you would find a truth

That brings a pain that can't be soothed

Would you change?

Are you so upright you can't be bent

if it comes to blows

Are you so sure you won't be crawling

If not for the good why risk falling

Why risk falling

If everything you think you know

Makes your life unbearable

Would you change?

If you'd broken every rule and vow

And hard times come to bring you down

Would you change?

~Change, Tracy Chapman (sent to me by a true new friend) ~

Conviction

The end of the semester rush is here, and I feel like I am constantly running a few steps behind the pace! I have over 300 pages of carefully typed papers to grade in the next week, along with some 20 research articles to peruse as I grade my sophomore students' research analysis projects. It is enjoyable work but exhausting and time consuming. Today marked my final clinical day for my first year of teaching full time! I have to say I am happy to see the 3 a.m. wake-up time going by the wayside until October.

With the busy season comes a stillness to my writer's heart and mind as all energy focuses on the tasks of teaching and evaluating my beloved students. It is a breath of relief from the agony of self-reflection and healing, as the troubles of the day disappear into the abyss of yesterday with the coming of each short night of sleep. I have felt deep conviction since writing my last post. My dear mother shared a verse with me, in a different context, and the Lord has been quietly speaking deeply into my soul with the simple phrase of that one sentence from the King James. I share it here so that you know how He speaks to me, even through pain, busy seasons, and the few moments of quietness in the morning before the sun dawns again.

...the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. (James 1:20 KJV)

A new painting of mine from this Sunday's "day of painting" that soothed my soul

When peace is a distant memory

Photo by Ann Voskamp

Sometimes I wonder, if this is how love feels, what would His anger feel like? Life seems an insurmountable pile of trials thrown together like dirty laundry, and you will never complete it all. If suffering is to be our food for the rest of life, are we willing? Oh, to skip back to the naïveté of childhood, before I realized the weight of this life.

How do you roll the crushing boulder off your broken frame? What could possibly give me leverage in this mire? I keep counting blessings, as if to make a rope ladder up from the pit out of these gifts numbered. But it is slogging work, to push away the dross of each day to hunt for the few jewels. Life is hard, times are bad, and it seems too much to bear.

Guilt piles up heavy as well. Every time the dark thoughts collide inside, more wounds are created, in me, in these children, in my husband who so tenderly supports and comforts me. How can I keep doing this to the ones I love? If it were up to self-control, if I could fix these broken places myself, I would have, a thousand times over. The problem is, I can only rely on the One stronger than I to heal me, and instinct makes me push Him away, as He seems, too, the source of my pain. By His allowing it feels as though He gives His consent. How can He not rise as my shield and make the sun shine upon my soul for a season? Does He really think I am strong enough to survive all of this?

Today I am to be at a women's conference, but I cannot drive, I cannot think, and I cannot be in a group of women - anathema to an introvert's bleeding heart. It would be like walking back into the fire the day you get out of the hospital with your old burns still weeping. I cannot make myself participate.

Oh, how I beg for deliverance.

Grace.

Peace.

Healing.

When will my Lord hear and comfort me?

Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help. Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. (Psalm 35:1-3)

Detangling the lie

As soon as the snake saw his chance, he slithered silently up to Eve. "Does God really love you?" the serpent whispered. "If he does, why won't he let you eat the nice, juicy, delicious fruit? Poor you, perhaps God doesn't want you to be happy." The snake's words hissed into her ears and sunk down deep into her heart, like poison. Does God love me? Eve wondered. Suddenly, she didn't know anymore. "Just trust me," the serpent whispered. "You don't need God. One small taste, that's all, and you'll be happier than you could ever dream..." Eve picked the fruit and ate some. Adam ate some, too. And a terrible lie came into the world. It would never leave. It would live on in every human heart, whispering to every one of God's children: "God doesn't love me." (from The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name, by Sally Lloyd-Jones)

THIS is how God looks at us, every moment of every day

It's lies that create the clutter in our hearts, crowding out the Truth. When we're listening to the hissing, relationships crowd out, joy flees, the dark clouds descend to touch our earth. Does God love me? quickly turns to does my husband love me? Do my friends love me? Will my children love me when all is said and done? And suddenly there we are, stranded alone on a desert island of our own making, built with our fears and our tears and a steady inundation of doubt.

God unites. Fear isolates. When Evil sees me in a corner, keeping to myself, wrapped up in the clutter of thoughts, it strikes. Only when I open up that wounded heart and let the words of God and His children wash over the sore places, fill up the empty ones, scrub out the dirt - then I can walk in the light as He is in the light. There, in the light, relationships are still difficult; finding worth in myself is still an almost impossible task; dark clouds still threaten. He says, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in Him (Ps. 34:8).I'm opening my mouth to let the flavor of His love sparkle over my tastebuds, washing away the bitter of the poison apple of doubt. 

Yes, it's disappointing to fight depression again after so long a hiatus. It's disenchanting to understand that a beast you thought you slayed was only injured and is back to wage war with you again. Yet the very same Truth that rescued my spirit last time will be what rescues me this time. God is always good, He is always loving, He is always there, and He will someday put an end to suffering.

Yes, today might be difficult. But I'm not going to "just get by". I'm going to get up and keep trying. Keep looking for the whispers of His love that rebuild faith and bleed joy and heal hearts.

Where there is desire

There is gonna be a flame

Where there is a flame

Someone's bound to get burned

But just because it burns

Doesn't mean you're gonna die

You've gotta get up and try try try

Funny how the heart can be deceiving

More than just a couple times

Ever worried that it might be ruined

And does it make you wanna cry?

When you're out there doing what you're doing

Are you just getting by?

~Try, P!nk~

Sometimes believing, sometimes pretending

The sky is a black void pebbled with stars, swept with the Milky Way's belt, like a chocolate cake gilded in gleaming white sugar sprinkles. Moonless and magical. It's been a day of feeling off, just a bit cranky, from the moment I woke up to my son's UFC style cuddling in our predawn bed to the hours spent editing powerpoints for the 39 hours of lecture I have to prep for in the coming month.

The stars hanging in still life bring the chaos to a halting stop, and the last breath I took is held in my lungs for a moment as I stand, hand in hand with my two youngest children, looking up, up as far as the naked eye can take us into the question marks of the universe.

They're tired for once, these late night children I've bred from my own insomniac bones, and the house goes still. Aaron and I pop in a movie, one to match my mood, The Gray. It's one for Aaron, all action, hunting, man against nature, survival. But deep in the plot are threads that pull at the frayed edges of my own: a man with a gun-barrel in his mouth; a poem about the exhaustion of putting up yet another fight to live; the poignant flashbacks to moments with a wife who died of cancer.

I break, just a crack this time, not into a million shards of shiny glass like I might have months or even two years ago. I stutter out the words, how I know the taste of rifle bluing. How I struggle with the exhaustion. How I fear abandoning this man I love to raise our children (can he do it? How can it be possible that I would watch from heaven without tears?).

I crawl into the familiar fetal position, knees to chest, my face still in the inner panic of the moment. And he, this Lover who abandons me not, folds himself into a warm parenthesis around my ache, diffusing the sorrow that I feel all the way down to the morrow of my bones.

My list of questions flows brittle, jumpy like a Jack Karouac poem up to God, silently, questions from Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Isaiah. A prayer from Revelation (come, Lord Jesus, come!) that ever more often finds it's way to my lips. And with the doubts, I've by habit paired the words of the desperate father in Mark 9:24: Lord, I believe! Help thou my unbelief!

How can I long for life so deeply that it threatens to break me in two, yet struggle not to give up in those moments of utter exhaustion when the very last thing I can do is fight longer and harder and for who knows how long?

How can He say that these are "light and momentary troubles" (2 Corinthians 4:17)? How could Paul, watching his comrades burn at the stake, run from lions, hide for their lives, starve in poverty, rot in prison? How is that light and momentary? Does He see our family? Does He see the struggle at dinnertime with Amelia (please just eat one bite of toast, I beg you child). Does He feel the heart flipping and leaping and pounding relentlessly in my chest throughout the day? Feel the blood drop from head to feet in one giant waterfall, and see the stars and hear the thunder in my ears and feel my knuckles whiten as I hold on for dear life so as not to lose a job, or knock something over with my head, or, God forbid, stop breathing during class or clinical or in front of my dearest, beloved children? How do we grasp eternity in the face of this compelling portrait of everyday gall?

How can He say there will be no tears in heaven? How can He make life so utterly beautiful, even in it's wretched brokenness, and say that we will not miss it even enough to cry? How can He paint such a shattered and desolate backdrop to the very aching resplendence of our lives here on earth?

Does He see my daughter quaking on the floor, froth on her lips, vomit on her t-shirt, excrement and urine rising putrid from her 6-year-old jeans? Does He hear my silent prayer for her life, hear my tears as I hold her until she stills in my arms and wakes? Does He know that I know that I cannot take care of a 40 year old daughter who soils herself and cannot drive or work? Has He prepared me for this, is He preparing me for this?

There are days all I see is the sovereign. The Judge on His seat, behind the bench, the finality of that gavel ringing in my ears. There are days I see only glimpses of mercy in between the God who says He will not tempt me beyond what I can bear (1 Corinthians 10:13). Why would a loving God tempt me at all? Is all this character building worth the blood, sweat, tears, vomit, poop, messiness, gut-wrenchingly hard work?

There is a moment in The Gray when the main character, desolate, alone, and hopeless, throws his head back to the heavens, an admitted atheist, and pours out his anger and his cry for help to the empty gray sky. There is no answer. He stands, and says, "I'll do it myself." He cannot wait five minutes for an answer from the God he does not believe in, trust, or wait on for rescue.

Sometimes it feels like I am calling out to an empty gray sky. But what are my alternatives? Whether He answers or not, whether I understand His will and His actions or not, I have only two choices: hopelessness and unbelief, or to walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).

And herein is the hard road of faith: the waiting through the long, dark night, for the next time you see your baby smile, and you glimpse God again. Those glimpses of sight that light our path like gifts doled out for the moments when we need them most, reassurance when we are about to give up and give in. For those who cannot wait for His rescue, who give up on the God who often seems distant and even not there at all, the smile of the baby is just another coincidence. But for those who have made the thousand choices to believe when all evidence is to the contrary, we see the handprint of the Great One in the smallest nuance of life. The smallest victory. The shortest moment of joy can redeem every long season of grief and disbelief. All that teetering on the shrouded path suddenly becomes two feet planted once again on solid ground.

I stare into her eyes, limpid. She doesn't know the hard path of faith. She is only six, and can barely understand seizures and brain injuries, and pooping her pants. She doesn't know she was the light today that brought me back to the path, relit the fire of faith somewhere deep inside. For her, her sisters, her brother, her Papa, I walk once more into the fray. However the road may twist or turn, however heavy the gray storm clouds are that shroud me from the face of God, I will keep putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes truly believing, sometimes desperately pretending that at the end there is a heaven where He will wipe away every tear and say, "Well done, my good and faithful servant." (Matthew 25:23)

image credit

What questions plague you in your daily walk with God? Do you find the daily practice of faith difficult? Do you struggle with disbelief?

Linked to A Pause on the Path's On Your Heart Tuesdays

The jail of a questioning mind

Rainbow row in Charleston. Rows upon rows of homes right up against their neighbor. It's famous for it's beauty. I look up and think of Noah's rainbow, the sign that humans would never be extinguished by God again.

En masse that is. Many have been killed since the rainbow, including His own son Jesus Christ, who took our place before the wrath of God.

I hear about God - that He is good, that He has overcome eternal death, that He always gives a way of escape. Where is my way of escape? Where is His goodness?

Round church in downtown Charleston.

How about that He works ALL things for the good of those who diligently seek Him. That God's plan does not always match up with my plan. He seems so very, very far away. I heard something else - something considered a fallacy - that God is a distant cosmic creator.

I can't understand how the earth and all that's in it came to be without God. Why, if His eye is on the sparrow,  every one of them, do I struggle to believe His eye, provision, and love are real and true and ever present in my life? I can't seem to latch on to the power I hear He offers, and I feel abandoned and alone, even when others tell me His promises do apply to me. I am afraid of my own questions and afraid of the consequences if I let my mind go in the direction it's flowing.

For you refuse my discipline and treat my words like trash. "Mark this, then, you who forget God, lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver! The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me..".(Psalm 50:17,21-22a)

I struggle to believe that the trials that have plagued me since age 13 will ever end. I don't understand why I hurt, and He does not help or comfort or heal?  I cry I need your help, oh God. I need to change how I see you. I can't do it by myself. By myself, I'll become a theist agnostic.

Take the brush from my hand - the one I'm using to paint your picture and the picture of my life. I struggle to believe that I will not always be the victim, the sufferer, the child injured - the picture that suffering alone is my destiny. That even here you have great plans for me, that you are providing here even in the worst of times, when I bow my head and close my eyes hard so I can't see you anymore. I struggle to believe that you have not turned your face from me already.

These are the bars between mind and soul that leave me with questions without answers. Wherever He is, I want Him to show up in a big way because otherwise I'm floundering. Not just shells on the seashore or B-3 organs for free on the curb. I'm talking about mercy, justice, love, pursuing, disciplining...a God who shows His involvement in my life.