Sharks and Cemeteries. Or Kim Goes on Vacation

Todd and I have this terribly unhealthy thing we say to each other (okay, it's almost always to me) when one of us (again, me) is tempted to make a decision based on how we feel at any given moment:  feelings are stupid. And of course, they're not. Feelings should be honored and heard, but what we're trying to say is that feelings aren't the whole story.

If you've met me in the last six months or so, you know that we're going on vacation soon. One of the stops on our trip is Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA (vacationing with us is a hoot, people!). On a hill in the cemetery is  "Author's Ridge" - a spot where several famous 19th century American authors are buried. I've been doing a bit of reading of these authors' works in preparation and I keep coming back to one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous quotes: "Always do what you are afraid to do."

I'm afraid. There are a few situations in my life right now that have me pretty well scared shitless. Fear speaks one thing to me on repeat:  you don't have what it takes. This fear that I don't have what it takes, that I'm too much or not enough, that I'm going to fail and take the people I love down with me makes me ashamed. But here's where Fear overplays its hand. I may quake in the presence of Fear, but Shame just pisses me off. If I know anything about this Jesus story, I know that shame has no place in it. And anger gives me the perspective I need to put fear in its place.

Am I terrified by kids, jobs, ministry, relationships, vulnerability, commitment? Yes times eleven. But so what? Fear is stupid. It's not the whole story. I can do the things I'm afraid to do.

I am afraid of flying, so I travel.

I am afraid of telling the truth, so I find one person and I say it with my voice shaking.

I am afraid of being vulnerable, so I tell the Internet about my hurt.

I am afraid of trying again, so I give myself a break and then I do it anyway.

I am afraid of calling some place home, so I plant a garden and paint some walls.

I am afraid of rejection, so I invite.

I am afraid of being eaten by a Great White Shark while kayaking (thanks to this picture my helpful friend Wesley showed me), so I'm packing my water shoes and hopping in that kayak every morning on our vacation.

Fear can bite me (as long as the sharks don't).

"Always do the thing you are afraid to do." See you Friday, Ralph.

On Losing Faith

I’m afraid my faith is slipping through my fingers. Once solid like a brick and now it feels like it’ll dissolve into water and flow right through my hands, no matter how tightly I try to hold it. Some days it’s a gradual losing, a fading, the old answers becoming less convincing one question at a time. Other days it abandons me in a rush so quick, so emptying, I struggle to breathe around the vacuum it leaves behind.

This beloved faith, worn thin with love and smelling like home, is ripping at the seams, full of holes I’ve tried to patch. Every time I try to put it on, it crumbles a little more in my hands.

This faith of mine has been so dear to me. I love its clarity, its certainty, the sense of belonging it gave me. This faith fit well for a long time and I will always be grateful. But it hasn't fit for a while now.

I need a faith sturdy enough to hold up when the cold lasts too long. A faith made for perpetual summertime, full of easy answers and breezy clichés, won’t last me through these winter seasons when I’m tempted to forget that there is life even here.

I need a faith welcoming and safe even when I’m tired, especially when I’m tired. A faith that allows me to admit that sometimes it’s too much and hope feels like a cruel joke and the only right answer is to lie down in the face of it all. A faith that will let me mourn with those who mourn because it is unfair and the pain is real and silence is better than bullshit.

I need a faith woven through with my questions and my doubts, so integral to the way I encounter God. I’m a wrestler, they say, and I need a faith that will let me examine it, stretch it, pull at it, take it apart to see how it works. I need a faith smarter, stronger, braver than I. I need a faith that doesn’t make me feel like I am a danger to it.

I need a faith that is unafraid of what will happen if we let people in on the news that grace is free and you couldn’t earn it even if you wanted to. I need a faith more concerned about people made in the image of God than about the rules, a faith where shame is banished and we are free.

I need a faith with room enough for the God I have faith in, more generous than I can imagine, compassionate on all He has made, beckoning the tired and spiritually bankrupt, closer than my breath.

I need a faith that isn’t worried about slipping through my fingers because it knows that I was never really holding on to it. It’s a faith in the God who has always been holding on to me.

We Got This

I don't hate Mother's Day. I actually think it's kinda sweet. I've got a mother I love and mama friends doing the hard, beautiful work of raising their babies and all of these beautiful women mothering me into the kind of woman I want to be. And we should celebrate that. Yes, it's a painful day for me. But we know that pain doesn't negate beauty or joy.  Joy and pain. Both-and. We got this. We can do hard things, am I right?

If Sunday will dawn all tender and raw for you or if Sunday will be sweet and special or if Sunday will be a little bit of both, I offer this tribute written by Amy Young:

"To those who gave birth this year to their first child—we celebrate with you
To those who lost a child—we mourn with you
To those who are in the trenches with little ones every day—we appreciate you 
To those who experienced loss through miscarriage, failed adoptions, or running away—we mourn with you
To those who walk the hard path of infertility, fraught with pokes, prods, tears, and disappointment—we walk with you. Forgive us when we say foolish things. We don’t mean to make this harder than it is
To those who are foster moms, mentor moms, and spiritual moms—we need you 
To those who have warm and close relationships with your children—we celebrate with you 
To those who have disappointment, heart ache, and distance with your children—we sit with you
To those who lost their mothers—we grieve with you
To those who experienced abuse at the hands of your own mother—we acknowledge your experience
To those who lived through driving tests, medical tests, and the overall testing of motherhood—we are better for having you in our midst 
To those who have aborted children—we remember them and you on this day
To those who are single and long to be married and mothering your own children—we mourn that life has not turned out the way you longed for it to be 
To those who step-parent—we walk with you on these complex paths 
To those who envisioned lavishing love on grandchildren, yet that dream is not to be—we grieve with you
To those who will have emptier nests in the upcoming year—we grieve and rejoice with you 
To those who placed children up for adoption—we remember with you
And to those who are pregnant with new life, both expected and surprising—we anticipate with you."

There is room for all of us. There is room for all of the joy, the anticipation, the dressing up and posing for pictures, the baby dedications, the brunch. There is room for the pain, the crying in the bathroom stall, the heartache, the anger. We are women who love and there is more room.

Love you, sisters.

K

What do you do when someone else's happiness feels like it's shattering you?

We sat at the end of the bar, my hands wrapped around a glass of house white, him drinking a beer so hoppy my lips puckered when I sneaked a taste. He was telling me his good news, how everything sounded perfect, had worked out perfectly. I smiled and nodded and said "that sounds so perfect" because it did. It was perfect for my friend and felt terrible for me.

He knew this of course, the way friends of a certain kind do. He stopped talking and made a twisting motion into my arm. "I don't want you to feel like I'm just driving the knife in."

With most other people, I would have lied. I would have brushed off the concern and turned the attention back to his good news. But you can't lie to people who can see right through you, so I acknowledged that his gain felt like my loss. We spoke of the tension - how happy I was that he was happy and how sad he was that I was sad. And then we sat - him sipping that horrible IPA, me staring into my pinot grigio, the weight of our happiness and sadness around us.

What do you do when someone else's happiness feels like it's shattering you?

Infertility offers lots of opportunities to practice your response to this question. Almost every time another friend announces her pregnancy, there it is: jumping up-and-down, squealing and hugging joy and hot, angry tears choking me as I hold them back.

I'm afraid people think that because I feel joy and sadness, I feel less joy. As if my heart is a zero sum game, capable of only so much emotion, so because it is split among happiness and grief, it must mean there is less happiness. I don't think this is true. I think the I-can't-breathe feeling that accompanies pregnancy announcements is just my heart's struggle to hold all of the emotion. All of the happiness alongside all of the grief.

My best friend has received nearly a dozen text messages in the last year from me: so-and-so's pregnant. And every time, she responds by telling me that she'll be the one to get angry. She'll throw things, she'll stomp around her house, railing at the ceiling about how unfair it is, so I can just be happy. She temporarily holds the pain for me so that I can offer my pregnant friend only the joy I feel. And as weird as it sounds, it helps every time. Somehow knowing that someone else is marking the injustice frees me from it. She takes the grief for a minute and I can breathe again and get back to the hugging and squealing.

The truth my friend and I found while sitting at the bar is this: I am both happy for his gain and sad for my loss. He is both sad for my loss and happy for his gain. One emotion does not negate the other. My sadness for me does not cancel out my happiness for him. We can rejoice, fully and freely, for one another while grieving, deeply and profoundly, with each other. This is magic-and-pixie dust friendship, capable of embracing the awkwardness and tenderness of this dance.

A favorite blogger issued a challenge to thank someone this week, so here are my thanks:

Thank you, BFF, for letting me catch my breath and exhale joy.

Thank you, IPA-loving friend, for looking past the tears that leak out when we're celebrating for you, for letting me be happy when you know that I'm also sad, and for being brokenhearted with me.

Thank you, dear sweet pregnant friends, for sharing your joy with me and for allowing that my grief does not take anything away from it. I cannot wait to squeeze your babies.

Six Candles

There are five new candles lined up on my kitchen counter. Each one for a woman I know who is either newly pregnant and facing complications or who has recently lost her pregnancy. In the last two weeks, all five of these women have shared their stories with me. It is such an exquisite gift, this sharing of stories so intimate and secret. This call to compassion, a call to literally hurt with, is brutal and holy and life-giving.

A friend, one of these candles, lost her babies yesterday. And all the words I use when I talk to God swept right away. "Comfort" and "peace" sound like cheap plastic. The radio plays a song calling God "a friend of mine" and all I can say is "This is salt, God." I'm tired of asking God for anything. I'm done asking Him for babies. A newborn infant was found dead in a pond here Sunday morning. I manage a few more words: "are You aware of how broken this all is?" A few more words then that make me ask Todd what blasphemy is. 

We showed up at our monthly dinner last night, the best part the prayer for each other at the end and Joan's homemade bread. I already know what I'm going to say when it's my turn to share what I need. All of these stories, it's too much, God isn't enough. The quiet, gentle whisper, my ass. I need Him to show up, we need Him to show up. Louder. It's all so broken. 

We are asked to pray for the person on our left and I turn to my left and the woman next to me shares: I'm six weeks pregnant after ten years of infertility and I'm bleeding. 

I let other people pray first. I'm too busy trying to decide if I'm being cosmically punk'd. It's my turn and what else can I do? I take a deep breath and I ask again. God, this baby, please. Calm this fear. Be near. Your breath on her face, fingertips on her cheeks wiping away these tears. 

There is nothing magic about these candles. I buy them in the Mexican food aisle at Giant. But the act of reaching my arm out and igniting these wicks, somehow it forms tangible and external the pain and the hope inside my heart, making it bearable. 

For today I'll add another candle and I'll borrow someone else's words and I'll wait for God to show up. It's all I've got.

We tell these stories

about being hungry and thirsty

and frightened and angry

and desperate.

And then we tell stories

about your food and your water

and your presence.

But the second half of the story

does not ring powerfully true in our own experience,

so much so that we find ourselves

and our whole beloved community

are often pilgrims in a barren land;

and we find our sophistication and our affluence

does not at all treat our condition of wilderness.

So finally we are driven back to you,

about to receive and then drawn up short

by the One who has nowhere to lay his head either.

We are bold to pray for your gifts

and for your presence

but we do so prepared to endure a while longer

our thirst and our hunger and our sense of absence

because we have resolved to be on your way with or without you.

Amen.

(Walter Brueggemann)

Easter in Three Parts

I slid into the back pew, grateful to be anonymous and alone. Another friend had just had another perfect baby and I was thrilled and then I was sad. The hole, this void, opens up sometimes and it feels like a vacuum where my heart just was. Like a black hole in my chest, threatening to pull me in, to engulf all of me, folded in from the center. It happens less often now, but it leaves me quiet, a little hollowed out.

So I came alone. I sat in the back and watched the bare black branches melt into the darkening sky. They read the story, the one I’ve heard ten thousand times, its gruesomeness made less so by familiarity. Its sharp edges dulled by repetition. I want to be undone, torn open by this sacrifice, broken with grief and gratitude. There is no great rush of evangelical emotion though. There is just me, sitting in the last row, palms lifted, offering my dead and dying things.

Three babies have lived and died in this body of mine. My Lenten experiment in humility only heightened the rotting stench of pride that permeates me. Relationships are changing shape and I can’t heal people I love.

The Bible ends with this invitation: “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life (Revelation 22:17). I sat in a booth this week in front of a young woman, clawing her way to God through a mess of religious legalism, and it was one of the privileges of my life to be able to say to her: all you have to do is be thirsty.

And there it is, hidden in this too-familiar story, Jesus, dying horrifically, says it: “I am thirsty” (John 19:28). I come and I find the God who thirsts.

There is no great breaking-open. I still feel the hole at the center of me. But here I am now, alone, thirsty, with the God who ends the story with an offer of free water. A God who know what it is to thirst.

______

We tell it at funerals. When people have died and the grief is suffocating, we clutch this hope: He will wipe away every tear from our eyes (Revelation 21:4). Teaching this recently, I mentioned how intimate this gesture is, how very close you must be to wipe away someone’s tears, to reach out and place your fingertips on damp cheeks, how very gentle this motion is. And how very not like the God I usually know.

The Great Vigil of Easter, it’s called. We sit in darkness, made all the more cavernous in this giant cathedral. We hold our little candles, defiantly and hopefully. And when the lights turn on, we ring our bells and exhale and laugh with strangers, we practice proclaiming the resurrection while it is still dark outside.

And we celebrate baptisms. Tonight a middle-aged man who looks like he belongs here in Washington, DC. The bishop held his head above the water and gently lapped water over it. Then she cupped his face in her hands, rubbed oil on his forehead with her fingertips, and pronounced him sealed to God with so much tenderness, I had to look away.

It was one of those thin moments in time, when the curtain is pulled back, and God says, this is what I’m like.

(And please, isn't this why we need religious leaders both male and female? How much do we miss when we only see half of the image of God?)

______

I cooked while she followed me around the kitchen cleaning up after me and we tried to keep her ten month old from pulling himself up on the oven. Others showed up and we popped open bubbly wine and the sugary drinks given up for Lent. My potato casserole earned me a kiss on the cheek. We laughed until we cried at a game of cards and at each other laughing at the game of cards. I covered a tired tech guy with blankets. We reheated the leftovers and talked of promises to each other and moving to England someday.

And then it was much too late and I laid there on the couch alone, exhausted, leftover peeps hardening on the counter and my house smelling of Easter ham, thinking of how often I have begged Him for a table full of people to feed, for a family. And how just like Easter it is of God to answer my prayers in ways I didn’t expect.

Of Red Balloons and Blessings

Todd preached a sermon recently about the Love of God. As usual, he taught me many things I didn't know, among them that it's an ancient Hebrew tradition for parents to bless their children before they walk out the door. Hands on little heads, speaking words like, "I love you, you're my child" over them. He compared this to God, blessing us, hands on our heads, I love you, you're my child, as we walk out the door, and then God follows us along the way. God in the car, I love you, you're my child. God as we walk into our offices, I love you, you're my child. God at the gym, God at the grocery store, God at the doctor's office, God on the beltway, I love you, you're my child.*

The day after Todd's sermon, I walked out of my apartment and floating in the hallway, directly outside my door, was a red, heart-shaped helium balloon, with the words "I love you" on it. Escaped from one of my neighbors' Valentine's Day celebrations no doubt, but still. I literally gasped. And then laughed right there out loud. I nearly felt the Hand on my head. I love you, you're my child.

Beautiful, right?

Todd and I fought most of Sunday. Impatient, barbed words. Off-the-cuff comments that stung. A fight that kept finding itself tangled up in other, bigger fights, so that each word took on a heaviness, a weight, the other didn't intend.

Sunday night we went over to our friends' house in desperate need of translators, someone to ask the right questions, someone to say "Kim, what I hear Todd say..." Our friends came through like pros. They asked just the right questions. They told me to wait my turn when I wanted to jump in and tell Todd why he was wrong. They know us. And they knew exactly what we were each trying to say.

We each spoke. This is why I'm angry, this is what I want you to do differently, this is how you make me feel.

It was this beautiful moment of community and vulnerability and laying ourselves bare out of love for one another and as I bent down to put on my shoes so we could go home, the whispers almost made me sink to the ground: they think you guys are failing. They think you guys have a bad marriage. They probably think it's all your fault. They know that you were wrong.

Our friends are hugging Todd and me, telling us they love us, they believe in us, we can do hard things and all I'm hearing is well, the jig's up, now they know.

(As if anyone who's ever met me thinks I've got it together, let alone the people who know us best. Shame - it's such an insidious, lying bastard.)

But then.

Don't you love when there's a "but then?" So much grace.

But then. We walked out their front door, and there, caught in bare tree branches, was a red, heart-shaped balloon.

"I love you, you're my child."

God is with us. Hands on my head when I'm failing. Hands on my head when I'm listening to Shame even as Grace is being poured out. Hands on my head, I love you, you're my child.

I read it like this: "Gospel is the shocking, provocative, revolutionary, subversive, counterintuitive good news that in your moments of greatest despair, failure, sin, weakness, losing, failing, frustration, inability, helplessness, wandering, and falling short, God meets you there - right there - exactly there - in that place, and announces: I am on your side."**

God on my side. Even then. Even now. Even here.

"I love you, you're my child."



*Listen to Todd's sermon here: http://vimeo.com/61030608
**From Rob Bell's new book.

Barren Places

As much as I love to buck gender stereotypes, I have to confess that I have no aptitude for science of any kind. I'd love to blame an evangelical upbringing that pitted me against my 6th grade biology teacher as I obnoxiously argued with him about the origins of life (oh Lord, have mercy), but regardless, I don't have it. So I had to Google this fact: Decreasing temperatures cause trees to go dormant - to reduce metabolic activity to conserve energy so they can survive the winter. The trees look pretty lifeless around here right now, but they are, Google tells me, full of life mostly unseen.

It's been a few weeks, but I'm still haunted by an image my pastor used in a recent sermon series. We attend one of those ginormous, suburban complexes of a church so we've gotten pretty used to fairly elaborate stage props. But no one could miss the giant leafless tree that appeared on stage a few weeks ago. Brian was speaking about divine imagination, the gift from God that allows us to see that which is not yet*.

I stared hard at that leafless tree asking God for the divine imagination to see myself, my life for what it is not yet and then, in the last song, the word came: fertile. Well then. It's good to know that God isn't messing around here. That will certainly take a divine amount of imagination.

It's been ten months since the last miscarriage, over two years since the first. I don't feel particularly sad anymore. Oh, tears still occasionally spring to my eyes when Todd holds a baby or on certain anniversaries or whatnot, but I'm not often sad. And I don't think I'm afraid of trying again. Overwhelmed, maybe, apprehensive, sure, but I don't think fear is what I'm feeling.

I feel barren. Dormant. Quiet. Fragile. Winter-y.

I went for a walk the other day, desperate for even the weak early March sun and for Jesus, who seems to meet me outside. Most of the time these days, I'm talking to a God who feels a little further away, a little quieter, than in the broken, shattered days of last summer when God felt so near I could almost feel His breath on my face. As I walked, identifying with the brittle grass and the deep quiet that hangs over the lake in the winter and seems to muffle all sound, I finally heard a whisper of a thought:

Be patient, little one. There is life here.

I want life. Like eating peaches till the juice runs down your face and arm as you sit outside smelling fresh grass life. Like babies crying in the middle of the night and teenagers slamming doors and I-won't-tell-you-again-to-turn-that-down life.

But then Google tells me that the trees are not dead in the winter, just dormant. And Romans tells me God is the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. And the Voice that is so often barely perceptible tells me that there is life here too, in the quiet, barren, winter-y places.

So today I ask for myself and maybe for you: may God grant us the divine imagination to see life in all barren places.

*The Divine Imagination sermon series was unreal. Go to cfellowshipc.org to check it out.