Release

Marriages are never ours to possess in the first place. We can maybe have illusions that they are, expecting certain outcomes from certain actions that we may take to save them, believing that what is being released out into the universe is ours to take captive in order to save them. This is where I’m at today. Sometimes marriages don’t need to be saved. Maybe it’s that some long happy marriages are really just that: long happy marriages. Any maybe it’s not that those marriages failed, but that they were successful, and yet ended.

For those of you who know me well, you would know that the past eight months have not been easy. You would also know that I’ve had a beautiful love story with Jeremy, one that has touched my life so profoundly, that it inspired me to begin writing just because it was bubbling to get out, setting the ball rolling for my writing in general. Jeremy and I have known each other for twelve years now, and had been a couple for almost eleven of it. Not everyone gets to fall in love in the way I did, and yet for some reason painted in the stars, I feel like I was given this incredible gift. I can’t help but be truly grateful for what I’ve been given. My marriage, for the most part, has been long and happy, full of life, love, and passion.

Today has been a day of letting go for me. I ended my marriage seven weeks ago, and while it’s been a wobbly letting go over eight tumultuous months, I feel like today was a day of much needed closure. As I stood over the copy machine, copying the hand-written letters of our beginning, remembering how in love we once were and how we just knew we’d be together forever, I sobbed over every sentence I read, and knew that our love affair really is released.

I’m not angry anymore. I know now that the end of our marriage hasn’t been the result of just one thing, but rather that I knew in my soul that it was time to finally give up the fight and let it go. I wish to honor Jeremy tonight in that.

Jeremy, if you’re reading this, thank you for the letters. Thank you for our story. Thank you for our kids. Thank you for the laughter. Thank you for the passion. Thank you for every last one of our years together. If I could do it all over again, even knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t hesitate.

From 1,291.33 Miles Away

W

Happy Mother's Day, from Miriam

hen I think about my mother, a thousand things I love about her comes to mind. My childhood friends used to say, “Knowing your mom is like knowing you,” even though she was many things I wished I could be and wasn’t. I wished I had her stick-to-it-iveness. I would go gung-ho at an assignment or project, and if I didn’t enjoy it fully, I’d let it fizzle out. She would see something through until the end. I remember hoping that one day I would have her classic beauty. During my employment at Maurice’s in high school, one of the uber-popular Stevens High School girls I worked with (and was therefore intimidating to my shy, homeschooled self) said, “That’s your mom? Wow, she’s beautiful!” I remember thinking to myself on multiple occasions how blessed I was to have a mother whom I could talk to about almost anything, rather than the strict disciplinarians of some of my friends’ mothers. She seemed to relish in motherhood and enjoy every part of it, even in the commonly dreaded teenage years. And though I was never keen on kids or babysitting as a teenager, my mother was the reason I knew I wanted kids someday.

There are a few things that I want to express my appreciation for this Mother’s Day, Mom:

Happy Mother's Day, from Ben

1.  Thanks for bringing me into the loving and (honest to God) one of the quirkiest families and extended families I know.

2. Thanks for all the Eskimo, butterfly, and fish kisses while growing up.

3.Thanks for sharing your smell-good Mary Kay lip gloss with me every Sunday morning on our drive to church.

4. Thanks for hugging me, always, no matter what.

5. Thanks for reading Rikki-Tikki Tavi, Make Way for Ducklings, Where the Wild Things Are, and Apples Snakes and Bellyaches about a thousand times to Chad, John, and me during our childhood and never seeming to tire of it.

6. Thanks for not killing me on the spot when you found me in my room lighting Kleenex’s on fire with a lighter.

7. Thanks for reading to us well into our teens, just after breakfast and before we started each day of homeschooling. You have no idea how much I loved that.

8. Thanks for cultivating in me those things that I loved: reading, writing, and music.

9. Thanks for teaching me the value of meaningful relationships.

10.               Thanks for teaching me to draw and paint.

11.                 Thanks for not scolding me too much and then buying me a safety razor when you discovered I dry-shaved my legs for the first time when I was 9…Nine?? Hadessah’s that age. Ugh!

12.                Thanks for sharing all your shoes (when I could still fit into them), clothes, and jewelry with me, and not getting too terribly upset with me when I’d lose them or wear them so often you never got the chance.

13.               Thanks for letting me negotiate Saturday chores more often than I should have.

14.                Thanks for all the road trips, and singing at the top of your lungs with me, helping me learn harmonies, listening to books on tape, and cleaning up chocolate milk puke in the back seat without complaint.

15.                Thanks for giving me direction in life, even though I don’t seem to have it anymore.

16.                Thanks for loving me even when I’ve screwed up.

17.                Thanks for being way too overly protective.

18.                Thanks for attending the births of your grandkids.

19.                Thanks for being a loving grandmother to them too.

20.               And perhaps most of all, thanks for being an example of a great mother—one that I don’t know if I could ever outdo. 

This Mother’s Day, make sure you make Jim slave away extra for you. Make sure he gives you the hugs and kisses your grandkids and I can’t. Make him take you for a walk on the campus, and out to eat, and let you nap. Pet Hoshi a lot. She’s a poor substitute for your family, but I’m sorry, that silly asthmatic cat will have to do.

Happy Mother’s Day from all

1,291.33

Excruciatingly long miles away.

Why Am I a Christian?

The following is my talk this morning in a series we are doing, entitled Why Am I a Christian?:

Why am I a Christian? Really, I have no idea. I will say that I don’t always claim to be one. In fact, most of the time I don’t even bother. It’s just easier that way. It’s easier than trying to explain myself as to why I am the way I am. To put it lightly, I’ve been through a lot as far as my Christianity is concerned. I come from a place where everything, even really complicated things, can be explained away in a scripture verse or two. I come from a place where people dance during worship services, arms waiving in the air, tears streaming down their faces, and speaking the prayer languages they were lavishly given from above. I come from a place where prophetic words, particularly over my life and what I would do with it, were simply the way things were. Life was this big destined-by-God event that we had the privilege of living out.

I guess you could say, I have a lot of God issues.

Actually, most days I wake up and wonder what the heck just happened to me. How could this angry, recovering charismatic and fundamentalist now be…living in a church? I feel like one of those rappers whose music only tries to reconcile the extreme disconnect of his poverty to his excess, surviving in the ghettos to the lavish lifestyle he now lives in Beverly Hills. It’s the rapper we still hear about on the news, participating in those high-class drive-by shootings. He doesn’t know exactly how to move away from his past life, leaving it just where it belongs: in the past.

I’m scared to admit that this might possibly be exactly why I am a Christian; I just can’t leave my past well enough alone.

Most days, my mind tells me there’s nothing more supreme than what’s right in front of me. In short, if you were to ask me if I believe in God on those days, I’d say, “I really want to.” But then, every now and then, something will touch me in way that reaches through my hardened heart. Most recently, it was big Taize gathering here at Shelter50, or The Well, or my home, or whatever you want to call it. Something touched me in the way the singing surrounded me that night. Like a warm blanket on a winter’s night, that experience shielded me from my own inclinations that there really isn’t anything out there other than what I can see, touch, taste, smell, or feel. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I know I must believe in something.

At work, no one knows about me. I joke about drinking too much. I swear too much. I believe in equality of all people. I can easily entertain people who talk about psychic readings and auras and offer my own experience into the conversation.  I can talk with people like my brother and cousins about how science and how it is simply “the way of things.”

“Wait a minute,” someone somewhere along the line will eventually stop my whole charade and say, “you live in a church?”

“Yeah,” I’ll say. “But it’s really more of a commune than a church.” I say this as my way of protecting myself from a conversation I can’t reconcile with myself, let alone another person.

“But you just said you’re a music pastor,” he or she will reply.

“To the city government, I am,” I’ll say.

Then we’ll get launched into the conversations that I dread having if the person is a professed Christian. Yet if the person isn’t, it is still a conversation that I feel stupid being in. I had one guy say to me, “C’mon, you’re more than halfway there [meaning, toward full atheism]. You’re just to chicken shit to jump in all the way.”

“I know,” I’ll respond, because he is right. But in all fairness, I am also too chicken to delve fully back into the way of my upbringing either.

Some would say that I’m stuck in this perpetual state of paralysis. I would just say it’s honest, then pretend like it doesn’t fill me with a crazy amount of conflict to sing a few Christian songs on Sundays.

Where am I going with all this, you might ask? The thing is I don’t know. I don’t know if tomorrow I’ll be a Christian, just the same as today I don’t know if I even am. I won’t presume to know what I’ll be 10 years from now, and I’m relatively okay with that. Relatively.

I know I’m jumping around a lot, but stick with me. At least now you know why I avoid these conversations and why I avoid calling myself a Christian. Life’s conversations just move along smoother when I do.

I guess you could say that I view Christianity in much of the same way that I do music. Music, I believe, is spiritual. Even if you just sing along to it because it’s a fun. It’s spiritual because it makes you happy. If the song makes you sad, it’s spiritual. If it makes you angry, it’s spiritual. If it makes you confused, hurt, relaxed, or energized, it’s spiritual. In other words, emotions, whatever those may be, I believe are spiritual experiences. And if something like music provokes those emotions, it’s a spiritual event.

Christianity, for me, provokes all kinds of emotions. And I do mean all kinds. Christianity, perhaps even chiefly because of my upbringing, provokes so much emotion in me that I can’t deny that there is something about it that draws me to it. Christianity, I’m convinced, will haunt me forever. And it’s not about what Christianity is technically defined as that haunts me; it’s what Christianity represents. Christianity represents my life in a way that only points to my brokenness, you know, the deepest parts of my life that I can’t reconcile. If Christianity represented all the ways I could reconcile my life, I would have jumped ship by now, but it’s because I can’t reconcile it that I believe there’s something to it. I’m like that rapper that can’t get away from his past so it follows him to his new life.

You may think that I mean to paint my Christian experience and negative, and truthfully, parts of it are, but that’s not all they are. The fact that I can’t get away from it is at the very least honest and it points to my brokenness, which I think is intensely spiritual. Christianity in my life is a catalyst for all things spiritual. It is what provokes me to ask the big questions about God and life. It’s what makes me search for something outside of myself, or maybe inside myself. (Wow, I really am conflicted.)

So, in closing, all I can tell you is that I don’t know why I am a Christian. The truth is I’m probably not, but yet what Christianity provokes in me is something I can’t ignore. Like my philosophy of music being a catalyst for spirituality, so too are many elements of Christianity for me. Christianity haunts me, and I’m quite sure that it always will. So maybe I’m not a Christian at all, but at least I’m honest. 

To Claim Love is What it Isn't

I question what my ideas of love are daily. You see, from the time I was a little girl, I have had the narrative of what love looks like handed to me in its neat little doctrinally sound package: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

Again, I question what love is daily.

Is love all these things that this well-known scripture claims it is? Or furthermore, can love betray all these things and still be love? Does love fall on its face again and again, betraying all the things it claims to be and still be every bit as authentic as it is in its perfection?

Is love only love when it is all these things, or when it does all these things? If I am unkind or easily angered by someone, is it true that I must not love that person in that moment? Is it true that love must have many kinds of bi-polar attributes to it? In other words, is love either switched on or switched off at any given moment, depending on the action of the individual who claims to love another (or not love another, respectively)? But my question goes far beyond this, and I wonder if I may even be thought foolish to consider my questions. Can love be authentic even when it plunges into the negative? Can love be authentic even in the betrayal of love itself?

I don’t even know what I’m saying. All I know is that my whole outlook concerning the nature of love is being deeply challenged. It would appear that love is not all the things that it claims to be, but maybe even exactly the opposite.

Love, it would seem, never perseveres and always fails.

But it doesn’t make me seek to find it any less. 

All Saints Day for an Ordinary Person

When asked to write about someone who’s passed away but who’s also been very influential in my life, my first inclination switched from this person to think of someone more important to society as a whole. I think of the Mother Theresas of the world, the Ghandis, heck, even the directors of local soup kitchens would do. For some people it’s easy for someone famous and whom they’ve never met to make a profound impact on their life, those people may have read a book or two, maybe watched a documentary or interview about the famous person.

For me, I can’t embellish a story that’s barely there in the first place. Sure, I’ve met and read literature on some pretty great people, but have I been profoundly influenced by them? No, not like I have been by someone else, someone far more ordinary, someone who barely did anything great—except for maybe break the record for the running long jump in his fifth-grade track meet.

My brother Chad had terrible taste in music. He liked terrible musicians like Metallica and AC/DC and all their terrible songs. When he got his braces off, his teeth were scarred everywhere except where the brackets had been from all the Mountain Dew Big Slams he drank. He liked detestable “foods” like pork rinds, Jackson Pond snapping turtles (no, really), and blueberry candy canes, and with this diet, he was nearly unbearable to be around on a hot day if he forgot his deodorant. He was the kind of brother who pulled his bothersome little brother’s hair so much that he started to get a bald spot. He was the kind of brother whose horseplay with his sister ended with an unfortunate mishap with a preheating iron, searing its imprint into her butt.

But above all the ordinary things he was and did, there were three extraordinary things that I most loved about him: one, the fact that I, his little sister, got to teach him how to drive a stick shift. Two, his uncanny ability above anyone else to beat me in any game of chess—one-on-one chess, team chess, speed chess, it didn’t matter. And three, he could get me to smile no matter how mad I was at him.

What I’m trying to say is that you realize that the ordinary things about someone are truly extraordinary once that person is gone.

Sometimes the most ordinary people in the world are who influence you the most. They’re the ones that make the biggest impact on your life, not in what they do and say, but simply because they have existed in this life alongside of you. You’ve shared meals together. You’ve fought with each other. You’ve shared your secrets. You’ve laughed at each other’s expense. You’ve grown close. Others have impacted me in this way: my younger brother, my husband, my mother.

I’m a different person today because I knew Chad. What Chat taught me while he was alive were no age-old wisdoms. I don’t necessarily remember any remarkable quality about him that I wished I had. If anything, he taught me that deer hunting did not have to be a silent affair. We could drive through the forest, blaring and singing the lyrics, “and all the girlies say I’m pretty fly for a white guy.” Mother Theresa didn’t teach me this. My brother did.

But the truth is, it was not Chad’s presence in my life that impacted me the most, but his absence. Because of his absence, I want to make all my relationships with people count. Because of his absence, it distresses me to leave a conversation on a bad note. Because of his absence, I look at life differently. Because of his absence, I doubt my faith constantly, but perhaps have more of a drive to figure it out. And, maybe most of all, because of his absence, I don’t really mind the smell of pork rinds on someone’s breath anymore, but I’m afraid that eating Jackson Pond Snapping turtle was a one-time, or rather, two-time deal.

The Day I Moved Into a Commune with No Showers

As Jeremy would say, it’s not the physical act of moving into a place with other people that’s the problem; it’s the mind-trip of doing so. It was a good thing we didn’t see it coming, otherwise we would have had too much time to take that mind-trip. To explain, we were supposed to take up residence in this church building on Thursday, November first, but the contract for deed/lease had been signed and we were anxious to get in and paint, to make it our home before ever taking up residence. Mainly, we wanted to get the kids’ rooms situated so that they didn’t feel uprooted in this whole process. But on Friday afternoon, as I sat at work, I got a text from Ryan asking if we’d like to split the cost of a U-Haul truck and that maybe we could move the next day.

We agreed to bring our families together for a night of pizza and painting and general readying of the new place now that we’d received a key. Ryan and Erin brought their dining room table—now our dining room table, and as we stood around it, eating a sort of Passover if you will, because we didn’t have any chairs, Erin began to pace. “Why don’t we friggin’ move in tomorrow? I mean, we’re bringing all the mattresses over tomorrow. Where’re we supposed to sleep? Both our families have hardwood floors!”

And so it began, this crazy adventure that we’re taking, this adventure that nobody seems to understand, and that I’m not even sure we do. And the highlights are these: Jeremy and Ryan are already deeply saddened that Alex and his array of home-brewed beers are not coming, and that Erin and I would have really benefitted from a voice of reason, Carla, in choosing these crazy paint colors for the girls’ room. Two of the three cats have been acquainted and greeted each other with decided unfriendliness. We still have hope though, for their greeting did not end with any scratched-out eyeballs. Our youngest, in an insightful moment put together the idea that she now has “two mommies,” and we begged her, whatever she does, please don’t also tell her preschool teachers that she has “two daddies” too. We just don’t feel like explaining that one yet, especially since (entirely coincidental, trust us!) we all four have tattooed wedding bands. Ryan met a neighbor and as he tried to make friendly small talk, the neighbor said, “So what’ve you got, like 4 or 5 families moving in?”

Apparently, rumor of a cult moving into the neighborhood has also surfaced, but with Ryan and Erin’s ancient Toyota station wagon with a gazillion bumper stickers like, “The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth,” “Coexist,” and “If you can’t play nice, play roller derby,” we're hoping the rumors of a cult will be dispelled fairly quickly. But in trade for what? For the idea that we are a bunch of dirty hippies living in a church with no shower? We might as well start smudging with marijuana leaves now, and then invite the neighbors over for coffee.

Ryan and Erin's youngest and our youngest playing dolls on the handicap chair lift

Speaking of trippy, there’s a trick to making moving into a commune a little less anxiety ridden: you’ve got to make your current living situation totally unbearable for moving into a commune to be a breath of fresh air. For example, our house has been emptied of furniture for weeks now. Because we had the floors refinished, it made little sense to move back in since we were so close to moving anyway. So imagine if you will, a small little house, all hardwood or laminate flooring, completely devoid of furniture or sound-absorbing rugs, and then imagine three crazy kids in it. I cannot even begin to describe how terrible that echo is. Forget a short fuse. I’ve had no fuse with my kids at all lately. Move into a building with 6,300 square foot to run in, even if you’re adding 3 more kids in the mix, it feels like a little bit of heaven. Heaven, I tell you.

There are two more things to note. One, I am now a music pastor, but if you refer to me as Pastor, I’ll never forgive you. And two, there was much conflict in me about this, it ended with my bloody nose. True story.

Getting Used To You

As Sarah and I walked the boulevard today, I reached up to touch my face, realizing that in the rush of getting out the door to meet her I forgot to put on foundation. As I felt my face flush from our brisk walk, I said aloud that I’d forgotten.

“I thought you gave up makeup,” she said, in reference to my August 5^th decision.

“I did. Foundation’s not makeup,” I replied. “It’s colored moisturizer.”

She laughed, and I admitted that I’d cheated, almost always wearing foundation throughout the whole ordeal, wearing a ‘full face’ of makeup when I sang at two different funerals (sparkly eye shadow and everything!), and  wearing a touch of mascara for a few of the days, especially recently.

“I think I’m ready to give up giving up makeup,” a said as I ducked under a low-hanging tree branch bordering the sidewalk.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You know, giving up makeup was really hard. For the first month it sucked. I didn’t want to look in the mirror because I looked terrible. Wearing makeup every day since I was 13 had trained me never to get used to what I looked like without it. But now, it’s not so bad. It took almost two months, but I’ve finally gotten used to seeing myself without makeup. This isn’t to say that I finally think I look better without makeup, but simply that I don’t feel rotten and unpresentable if I don’t wear it. Not to mention, not wearing makeup came in really handy when I gave up Conroy.”

Even my hairdresser says that she tries to go at least one day a week without makeup for this reason alone. “Women aren’t comfortable with themselves anymore because they are never purely themselves for most of their adult lives.”

And as I think I’ll officially give up giving up makeup, I realize that this may have been the point all along. The point isn’t that it’s wrong to spend $20 on a tube of hypoallergenic blackest black mascara. The point isn’t that that makeup won’t be acceptable at Shelter50 (where I’ll take up residence come November). The point isn’t that I made a decision to give up something and now I can’t turn my back on it. The point is that it’s possible to retrain your mind how to view yourself. Sometimes what you once thought was terrible is really neither terrible or beautiful; it’s just you, and it’s never a bad idea to get used to you.