Night Driving Synchroblog: Is This Even Faith Anymore?

I was on fire once too. My faith burned bright and hot, full of certainty and passion, as electrifying as all of the other emotions and experiences of adolescence. Then there were the eye-opening college days, the shock at learning there were other ways of being a Christian, the wonder of a God who was bigger than I had imagined, the freedom in discovering how to be wrong. I married a man newly graduated from seminary. We set out to be missionaries and nearly lost our faith and each other on a bike path next to the Rhine River. Then came the angry years of my mid-twenties, three years of grad school and drinking too much and pretending I was too busy for the church where my husband pastored. I found my way back to that church shortly before we started to lose our babies, miscarriages over and over and over again, and I felt held there. The God of grief met me during all those early infertile years. It was sweet and intimate and quiet, even if it looked not very much like I was taught that it should. And then there was the morning in the coffeeshop in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, one final culture war battle lost, where I renounced the label evangelical in what is becoming a rite of passage for so many of us who were once on fire.

As I feel my way forward, away from an evangelical Christianity I can no longer claim as my own, a pastor-friend recommends I read John Shelby Spong. I pick up the book and wear out a yellow highlighter on it and when he writes that he can no longer think of God as a being "up there" or "out there" who could and would intervene, answer prayers and reward and punish according to the divine will, I set the book in my lap and look up.

And nothing breaks. Nothing shatters, or cracks. I feel nothing give way beneath me. There is very little angst. There is just me and the growing realization that I may have already let go.

It's spring here. The redbuds and the dogwoods are in lush, ecstatic bloom. I wake in the middle of the night to a symphony of birdsong outside my open window and I report to my balcony faithfully for the sunset on the progressively later evenings. I stare and I admire, I marvel at it all with a sort of detachment I am not used to. I am not moved by it, not animated by it or by whatever force is supposed to animate us both.

The husband and I escaped to a hillside winery a few days ago in the middle of the afternoon. Good books, cold white wine, a canvas bag full of sharp Irish cheddar and salt & pepper Triscuits. It looked perfect. It Instagrammed perfect. I pretended yes, this is exactly what we needed. But all I really took with me from that perfect afternoon was a sunburn on my left arm. It got hot and we drank the wine too quickly and I had to keep shifting his head from my lap so I could go pee again. I feel like I cannot even show up for my own perfect moments.

Wise people tell me not to fear this detached, darkening place. That I am not staring into an abyss, I'm on the precipice of my own becoming. That the God I'm certain I have lost is as close as my breath, sitting with me now even as I recount this emptiness, here in this cliched Nashville loneliness: lit candles, Eagle Rare whiskey on the rocks, the Liturgists album on repeat. I don't know that anymore. But I see that God was there in the heady, passionate days and there when I nearly set my whole life ablaze just to watch it burn to the ground. God found me in the angry years and the grieving years, I can see it now, trace a merciful hand through all that pain. Is God even here, when I am not certain of anything except that I seem to have misplaced God somewhere along the way? Find us, Addie writes in Night Driving. Find me. I starred that line in blue pen in my book today, as much of a prayer as I can manage: find me.


A Synchroblog with Addie Zierman to celebrate the release of her fantastic new book Night Driving (read this! It was so honest). Read the rest of the synchroblogs here

Ash Wednesday

It was on or about this time five years ago that we stood in a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, staring at an ultrasound photo of an 8 week old embryo. We had already had a scare that took us to the emergency room in the middle of the night, but today the doctor told us that everything looked fine, that we didn’t have any reason to be afraid. I will never ever forget standing next to Todd’s car in that parking lot with my arms around him and asking him are we really having a baby and how he held me and said, yeah, I think we really are and we giggled. Just burst out laughing for the joy of it all.

I’ve been thinking about those kids in that parking lot for a few weeks now, how young they seem in my memory, how naïve and scared and hopeful, how simple it was then, how clueless they were to what was ahead. How here we are, 5 years later, and still no babies. How old I feel now, both more mature and tired.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. We lost that first baby on Ash Wednesday, 2011. Stood again in that same parking lot, gaping at each other in complete confusion, bewildered as to how to cope with the sudden loss. Clueless again, having not yet learned to love each other while grieving. My first real taste of hope turned to ash in my mouth.

It’s unfair to say we’ve been trying for babies for 5 years. We took a healthy break for a while. Then we took a longer, unhealthy break. The times we’ve tried I’ve only been 1% braver than I was afraid and there were lots of times I was 800% more afraid so we put it off. But we’ve been trying again for half a year, maybe finally no longer completely paralyzed with fear, and I was certain for a few reasons that this was going to be the month.

It wasn’t. Obviously. And the finding out we weren’t pregnant was brutal, drawn-out, inconclusive for far too long to be fair. Todd said it wasn’t personal; it felt personal.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. Our pastor opened the sanctuary for most of the day for people to come and receive ashes. Todd and I were the only people there at 5:15 yesterday evening. The reading provided for our meditation was Joel 2:

But there’s also this, it’s not too late—

    GOD’s personal Message!—

“Come back to me and really mean it!

    Come fasting and weeping, sorry for your sins!”

Change your life, not just your clothes.

    Come back to GOD, your God.

And here’s why: God is kind and merciful.

    He takes a deep breath, puts up with a lot,

This most patient God, extravagant in love,

    always ready to cancel catastrophe.

Who knows? Maybe he’ll do it now,

    maybe he’ll turn around and show pity.

Maybe, when all’s said and done,

    there’ll be blessings full and robust for your GOD!

I bowed my head and tried for a minute to conjure up the properly contrite spirit for Lent. But you know what I really wanted to say? You’ve put up with a lot from me?! I’ve put up with a lot from you! Kind and merciful? Sure, if I tilt my head and squint real hard I can see your kindness. Where is the kindness that blows the doors off the place, the mercy that is more than me just being grateful for crumbs?

I promise I’m more scandalized by the contents of my heart than you are. I read through some of my old blog posts recently, back when we were actively losing babies all the time. I was in all kinds of agony back then, but damn if I didn’t also really believe in the mercy of God. There was a song back then that saved me, played on repeat for an entire few years, with one line that I loved for its honesty but I realize now that I didn’t fully understand: if this waiting lasts forever, I’m afraid I might let go. I get it now.

And yet. I say I’m all out of hope, but there is a voice in the back of my head that says, this is it. This is when the miracle happens, when hope is completely run dry and five seconds before you let go.

Ah hope, you sneaky bastard.

My Lenten reading this morning was from Habakkuk 3:

Though the cherry trees don’t blossom

    and the strawberries don’t ripen,

Though the apples are worm-eaten

    and the wheat fields stunted,

Though the sheep pens are sheepless

    and the cattle barns empty,

I’m singing joyful praise to GOD.

    I’m turning cartwheels of joy to my Savior God.

I want that kind of faith. I don’t have it today. 

Last week I stood at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, with my toes in the cold wet sand, a crystal clear sky ablaze over my head, my best friend next to me, and I felt...anxious. Yep, there's me, in my happy place, stressed out. Why oh why, Kimberly, are you anything but grateful, here surrounded by this beauty?

Here it is [This has taken me 31 years to learn about myself]: I was afraid I wasn't taking it all in deeply enough. What if I'm not enjoying this to the fullest extent? I knew my time with such beauty was limited and I just wanted to be big enough to fill all the way up, to remember it all exactly, so I could carry it home with me. There's a Mary Oliver line about this (there's always a Mary Oliver line about this):

Have I lived enough? /  Have I loved enough? / Have I considered Right Action enough, have I / come to any conclusion? / Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude? (The Gardener)

It's been a long, suffocatingly dark winter and I needed the beach. I needed to stand in front of something bigger than myself and feel small. So I searched out a cheap hotel deal, I persuaded Todd into "just one more vacation," I talked the Wakefields into coming along and splitting costs, I bought a plastic bucket and a shovel for Eli, I willed the snow in northern Alabama to give way, I loaded us all in the car for a seven hour trip, I checked us into the hotel, and then I bolted for that shoreline.

It's easy to imagine that I chased this beauty and after all of this effort, I needed to make sure I didn't waste it. And so I felt anxious.

The next morning I woke up early and made for that same spot and I got an image in my head of me, standing there in front of all of that water, with my hands cupped open in front of me, full and running over. Along with this image, a little nudge: I don't have to make myself big enough to contain it all. I just have to cup my hands and accept what I can hold.

Saturday morning, a week later, my toes in my slippers and not in the cold wet sand, I read this:

Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. (Psalm 23, The Message version)

And there it is. I don't have to chase. I don't have to find room inside and fill up before it's gone. I am not chasing beauty and love. I am being chased. Maybe I didn't find that beach or orchestrate that moment of beauty. Maybe it found me.

I stood at my sink, doing dishes but mostly just avoiding the eyes of the people I cannot fool. I put all the cheer I could in my voice as I waved them out into the night with wet hands. Then I called Becca, and I laughed and I cried so hard it made a weird sound from somewhere deep while she said "fuck" into the phone.

I had just found out that both my darling sister-in-law and my beautiful best friend were pregnant again. In the space of two hours, we got a phone call from Todd's happy family and then I heard Heather shriek my name from the bathroom of our apartment, where she was finding out she was having another baby, thanks to a leftover pregnancy test in the back of my medicine cabinet. Miracle #2 of this strange day (Miracle #1 was the babies themselves, of course): My initial reaction, my gut reaction, to both moments was joy. More babies! I am Aunt Kim to Nola and Eli and it is one of the deepest pleasures of my life. The grace that has been given to Tonya and Heather - it's beautiful, it's a gift, it's my gift. There are new baby clothes to buy and more books to add to the Niece/Nephew Amazon wishlist I keep and this summer there will be two new babies and I will get to hold them in my arms and whisper love over the tops of their sweet-smelling heads. I am so grateful.

But infertility doesn't allow for uncomplicated emotions. This damn thing takes and takes and as the evening progressed and the shock started to wear off Wes and Heather's faces, I felt my grief rising. Which is how I found myself standing at the kitchen sink, scrubbing plates, willing the tears to wait just a little while longer, telling God through clinched teeth: show me where you are. Tell me something. Show me. 

I cried to Becca for a while. I said out loud all the darkness, admitted the guilt, raged against the unfairness, marveled at how a woman who can't decide on any given day if she still wants children could be so grieved. Becca, as she has always done, graciously made space for my anger. Embodied it in her holy "fuck," giving me permission to feel all of it. I crawled into bed out of words and whispered Walter Brueggemann's in the dark: "You are God of our impossibilities. You have and will preside over those parts of our lives that we imagine to be closed. What we want is a gift and the open graciousness to receive it."

I woke up on Sunday and was surprised how tender the spot still was, like a bruise. I went to a new Sunday school class at the church where Todd works, trying to be good at this pastor's wife thing and nearly all of you know how naturally that comes to me. (It doesn't, if you didn't know.) But I put on my biggest, woolliest scarf, as armor more than warmth, and I sat, shoulder-to-shoulder with 12 strangers in a tiny room and we read together this: "he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?" All things? ALL? Really? How can I have all things when I don't have this one thing, this thing that matters so much? Here's Miracle #4 (Miracle #3 was Becca. Always Becca.): I believed it. I don't know why. But I believed it. I will be graciously given all things, even if I never receive this thing. It's both impossible and true. And then I cried in front of 12 strangers.

I went to the late service at the hip, progressive church and instead of a sermon, it was just space to pray. They'd been beautifully creative with stations and candles and all the ancient words I love, but I couldn't move from my chair. I was invited to let the real me meet the real God. But the first surprise wasn't the real God - it was the real me, hidden until that moment from even myself. Real wounds as yet unacknowledged. Real questions unasked. So I started offering up my truths, whispering them into my knees, pulling them up from my gut and holding them in my open hands.  And in a mystical, transcendent moment that I still only half believe was real, I felt Love take my hesitant but honest offering and replace it with Truth, beautiful, illuminating, too-good-to-be-true Truth.

Then there was Wes, come to find me in the dark sanctuary, his arm around my back. Once again proving himself big enough to hold both pain and joy, once again shoving back against my fear that I was somehow failing them. In yet another room full of strangers, with my face covered in snot and mascara, I was brave enough to lift my head and let myself be seen.

Tonya's having another baby girl. Heather is waiting to be surprised. These babies still have a few months before their much-anticipated debut. But both of them have already been miraculous in my life, both for the sheer delight of their existence and for the role they've played in a weekend of profound healing I didn't know I still needed. If this were a good story, it would end there and I could postscript this and tell you that it's all joy and shopping for baby girl tutus and highlighted baby name books now. It is all of those things but it was also a dark Christmas and a long conversation about my anxiety in the face of Heather's peace and learning to manage my resentment when it rears its ugly but understandable head.

Cheryl Strayed writes, "The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. It's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there." Glennon Melton says that "the tender places are the learning places and the holy places." Even preparing to put this out before your eyes, I am tempted to snatch it back, embarrassed to admit my reaction was so dramatic and intense*, afraid Tonya or Heather might hear my pain louder than my joy. But this is my tender place - it may always be - and it is holy and I will learn what it has to teach me and be grateful.

*I had Todd, Heather, and Wes read this first and I asked if it was too melodramatic and Wes said, "it's Kim," which of course is yes.

Can you believe how big they are? And they're going to have baby siblings. My heart might burst.

It is Not Enough but It is Not Nothing

Todd came home from work last night and in the middle of the "how was your day"'s and the last minute trying to keep the food from burning while getting it to our plates, he told me he had a podcast for me to listen to over dinner. (To be honest, I kind of hate it when he does this. It's usually something brilliant, something more than my post-work brain has room for, and it delays our watching of last night's Tonight Show.)

He put his phone on the table between us and played this story:

A man met a woman. They fell in love and got married. While they were still in the early years of young love, she was diagnosed with a particularly debilitating form of multiple sclerosis. She lost the ability to walk. She eventually became unable to breathe on her own. Most days she cannot remember their family members or her caretakers. But every day, now 30 years into their marriage, he takes her on a walk to get ice cream. On good days, she can eat a few bites. Then he pushes her wheelchair home and they enjoy the sun on their faces.

And you know what he says about all of this?

It's not enough. 

It's not enough, this sun and the few tentative bites of ice cream and her intermittent recognition of him. It's not right that they have not been able to enjoy full, vital, healthy lives. They have not been able to live the life they wanted and it's not enough.

It is not enough, but it's not nothing either, he says, and they will not despise it.

It's not enough, but it's not nothing.

And I sat there at our table, with my fork of root vegetable puree stopped midway to my mouth, tears pooling and spilling down my face.

It's not enough but it's not nothing.

This life that Todd and I are building, it's not enough. It's not. This life without children and a full table and seeing my husband as a daddy. It's not enough.

I never felt permission to say that before. I think maybe that ingratitude is the worst possible sin. I'm not even sure you can be a Christian and feel ungrateful. And I have so much for which to give thanks. I'm married to the best man I've ever met and he's in love with me. He does the laundry and sings me songs on my work voicemail and stays in the room when we fight even as everything in him tells him to flee this conflict. My toes still curl when he kisses me. We have jobs that pay us more money than 99% of the world will ever see. We have friends we love like family and family we enjoy as if they were friends. 

But it's true. I will say it now. It's not enough.

It's not enough but it's not nothing. 

It is not nothing, this life we are building. It is not as we had planned it, not as we want it, but it is rich, more full of sweetness than I can begin to hold. And I will not despise it.

I think sometimes that I will spend a lifetime learning to hold these two things: the gratitude and the ache.

It is not enough, but it is not nothing.

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.

Body Grief

Can a body grieve?

Tomorrow was my due date for the baby we lost in May. I have felt a general sense of malaise the last few days, a sadness that lingers on the margins, making me irritable and quiet. But strangely my body has just plain hurt. From my eyeballs to the soles of my feet. My hands hurt, my teeth hurt, what I think might be my spleen hurts. So much so that Becca had to try to convince me this weekend that it probably wasn't liver failure or cancer.

I woke up this morning feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. It doesn't feel like sickness; it feels like brokenness, like protest, like groaning.

Is it possible that even the cells in my body know that things are not as they should be?

Somehow I am still tempted to cave to the accusation that to say that out loud, to say that things are not as they should be, to say that women should not be barren, that babies shouldn't die, that my body shouldn't know what it feels like to create life but not give birth to it, indicates a lack of faith.

There is so much good here. So many gifts here. There is so much God in this pain. In small ways, sometimes, I'm even grateful for all of this. Like Naaman seeking a cure for his skin condition from the prophet Elisha and receiving as well a cure for his heart condition, it seems clear that I am being healed from diseases far bigger, far deeper, far more insidious than infertility. And I am so grateful.

It feels like a betrayal of all the good to acknowledge that things are broken.

But my body is more honest than I.

I grieve not because I lack faith that this pain has meaning or that our story has a good end. My grief does not nullify or deny all the good here. I'm sure (nearly almost most of the time) that it is grace that has brought me right here - to this shaky, post-traumatic-y ache.

I grieve because things are not yet as they should be. Not yet as they will be.

This is my act of faith.

"In its peculiar way lamenting is an act of faith because it speaks to our understanding that things are not as they should be." - Enuma Okoro, Silence and Other Surprising Invitations of Advent

Thanksgiving

There are all these things in this season of my life - lessons, truths, insights, what have you - bits of broken glass, worn shiny and smooth by the relentlessness of grace and pain and breathing. I feel like I have pockets jangling with well-worn color, pieces to hold between my fingers while rubbing the uneven edges: the necessity of hope; the entanglement of joy and pain; the importance of gratitude for my soul's well-being and survival.

We set aside today for gratitude. And I wish there were something here today for someone else but I write because it's cheaper than therapy and my voice on the page annoys me less than the sound of it out loud and so, today, for me, I write my gratitude, this pouring out that fills.

It makes sense to start with whatever's closest and right now I'm warm, and full, and in the company of people who love me - against the odds - so I'll start here.

I'm thankful for Wes and Heather. I'm grateful for the day we first really met, them sitting at our dining room table, hours and hours going by while we caught ourselves in a hundred "oh you too?" moments, slowly and bravely telling our stories, finding in each other safety and community and church. I'm grateful that if I'm not sneaking baby Eli out of his carseat, someone is handing him to me, allowing this woman the gift of teaching someone to blow raspberries, of feeling the sweet limpness of a baby finally giving in to sleep while praying beggy prayers for grace and favor on his little life. I'm grateful for the way they have loved our friends, quick to take them as their own, and quick to offer their own friends for us to love. I'm grateful that we can choose our families and that I'm spending Thanksgiving this year with a part of mine.

I'm thankful that I'm learning these three terrible truths of my existence: that I am so ruined and so loved and in charge of so little (Anne Lamott). This is the kind of pain that heals.

I'm thankful for my family - these people who are still my training ground in forgiveness, and showing up for each other, and learning to share.

I'm thankful for a new understanding of "eshet chayil" from Proverbs 31 - that it's not necessarily about what we do, but how we do it - and the exquisite challenge to do what I do with courage and heart.

I'm thankful for my pit crew: Amanda, Beth, Sharon, Joan, Marcy, Mariah, Josh, Lisa, Micah, Cyndi, Corey, Anna, Janelle, Becky, Sandra, Katie, Amy, Jessika, Brooke, Jimmy, Becca, others even still. "What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them" (St. Anne again, of course). I am thankful for 3:33pm prayers, glasses of wine, life-saving sustenance via Facebook messages and homemade bread and the benefit of the doubt and sushi lunch. I am thankful for people who do not flinch at my words, who help me separate the true from the nonsense. I'm thankful for connections instant and deep and I'm thankful for slow, halting steps toward friendship. I'm thankful that I spent the very worst day of this year in bed with my best friend watching British soaps and eating gummy worms.

I'm thankful for cardigans from Target, for iced tea, for the homemade quilt Alissa made for my wedding.

I am thankful that I am finally learning to pray. I am thankful for this confession: "You and I both know what we are dealing with here" (Anne Lamott); for this honesty: "come as Your true self and contradict the world so full of unbearable deathliness" (Walter Brueggemann); for this awareness: "you can let the whole scenario be bathed in God's gentle, gracious light, and in that light even for a few stolen moments, you can behold" (Brian McLaren); for this consistency: "give us today our daily bread" (The Book of Common Prayer).

I am thankful that my unfaithfulness serves to render me speechless in the face of God's great faithfulness to me.

I am thankful that Todd Waggoner chose me nearly a decade ago and keeps choosing me every day. I know some days that choice is harder than we'd both like it to be - I'm thankful that most days it still seems like a no-brainer. I'm thankful that we are both equally certain that we got the better end of this deal. I am thankful that we still send flirty text messages to each other during church. And I'm thankful that I have never once felt afraid. God alone knows the enormity of that gift.

I am thankful for my grandmother's stuffing recipe and that my husband begs me to make it every year.

I'm thankful for the way this last miscarriage shook me out of my silence, making me so desperate to refuse the shame that I stripped down naked and paraded my bare, broken self around the Internet. I'm thankful for the sweet, freeing release of being denied the possibility of pretending that I have it together. I'm thankful for the light streaming in through the cracks in my heart and my sense of self-worth and my desperation to convince you of my competency. Oh my God, thank you. I'm so grateful that the light does get in.

I am thankful for the bread and the wine and that there is more than enough for this grace-beggar.

There is so much here and it's all a gift. And I am thankful.

Woman of Valor

I put the book down and cried. I had spent a delightful amount of a long weekend, cuddled up in my oversized yellow chair, wrapped in a quilt, devouring Rachel Held Evans' A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I read most of the book laughing or rushing to post quotes to Facebook, so I was a bit surprised by the tears leaking out as I finished it. I think they were tears of gratitude. I tweeted the author my thanks.

She gave me the gift of a new understanding of Proverbs 31. Entire women's ministries have been built around this one chapter of the Bible. It's a poem about a superwoman. She rises early and works through the night. She manages her home, runs several businesses, volunteers with charities, and is praised by her husband and children. She annoys me. Somehow she's become a standard for women, a measure by which we always fall short. And yet in modern Orthodox Judaism, it is men who memorize this chapter not women. They memorize it so they can sing it to their wives. It's not a standard by which women are to judge themselves. It's an anthem by which men are to praise their wives. The "wife of noble character" depicted here is more accurately translated "woman of valor" (eshet chayil in Hebrew). Valor - a military term, meaning boldness, courage, strength, intestinal fortitude, heart, backbone, moxie, guts.

I haven't felt like a woman of valor lately.

Though he didn't say the words exactly, I heard someone say to me, "you can't be intelligent on matters of faith and theology - you're a woman." And the persistent drumbeat in my head began: you are too much. Quiet down. 

In a moment this week that could have been a chance for graciousness and praise, I came face-to-face instead with the real contents of my heart: a lack of mercy and the ugly, rotting stench of unforgiveness. And the beat goes on: you are not enough. Not merciful enough. Not good enough. Not strong enough.

The depth of my desire for kids has been reduced to groaned prayers as eloquent as "babies. please babies."  And yet every month when the news that I'm not pregnant arrives, a piece of my heart exhales with relief. One more month to delay the consuming panic that accompanies every twinge and pang. One more month before another test of my faith and my stamina and my intestinal fortitude. One more month before I have to face the question: do I have what it takes? Am I enough this time? And then the guilt, oh, that ever and always present companion of women everywhere. Too much and not enough.

I am having trouble praying lately. Too antsy to sit still long enough. Too full to know where to begin. Too quick to assume that God is annoyed with me anyway. My sweet patron saint Anne put it like this on Facebook last week:

God isn't stalking around bitterly, muttering about how I've stepped away from the

heart cave where I can be with/feel/share with/hear from God. S/He isn't grousing, "Boy, I'm tired of that stupid narcissistic Annie Lamott. She makes me 

sick." I think He or She is thinking, "Poor Princess Tushy. Coming to be with me ONLY in between games of mental pinball: Amazon sales figures, candy corn, obsessively reading about Karl, Grover, and Peggy Noonan...." I think God gently rolls God's eyes, like I do when my grandson is fixated on a broken mini-transformer and how his life is ruined, and why he can't have gummy bears when he wants, plus why he SERIOUSLY will not take a nap, and is, as he says, "Soooo mod. I just sooo mod at you, Nana. No nap!"

That's me, I guess. Fixated on all the broken mini-transformers and certain my life is ruined when I probably just need a nap.

So what to do about it?

I'm having a sort of love affair with the Eucharist these days. Jonathan Martin tweeted a few weeks ago that while a time of worship and a sermon are good and have their place, it is the bread and the cup that compel us to come. It's the body broken and the blood poured out that transform. Communion has been a sweet time for me lately, usually a time for introspection and gratitude. This past Sunday, I couldn't muster the courage for introspection. I didn't feel a lot of gratitude. All I felt was desperation. So I stumbled fast out of my row, grabbed the elements, and just consumed. It didn't feel particularly holy. It may have been wrong. But it was honest-to-God desperation for what truly sustains and satisfies. If I thought it would have helped, I would have buried my face in the tray of crackers and poured the tiny cups of grape juice over my head.

And I stood in the shower yesterday. Home alone and desperate still. Not nearly serene enough for silent, contemplative prayers. So I just started talking. I'm not enough. I don't have what it takes. I'm too much. I don't have anything to give. Help me, help me, help me.

My phone chirped. I finally forced myself out of the stream of hot water, unsatisfied with the time of prayer, if you can even call it that. And on my phone, a response tweet from Rachel, the author of the book:

"Eshet Chayil!"

Woman of valor.

Neither too much nor not enough. Woman of valor.

What to do about it? Let's start with changing the drumbeats.

I am working to provide money for my family: woman of valor.

I chopped vegetables for a salad for my lunch today when I wanted to just go to bed: woman of valor.

I offered a friend an hour and a glass of wine when I didn't feel I had anything to give and left feeling like I had gained everything: woman of valor.

I spoke the truth a little too vehemently and shaking all the while, but I spoke it anyway: woman of valor.

I keep trying for a baby, daring to hope, risking my heart again: woman of valor.

I will keep praying when the sky feels like lead and I will keep desperately consuming the body and blood of my Savior because where else would I go: woman of valor.

Valor: boldness, courage, strength, intestinal fortitude, heart, backbone, moxie, guts. 

Eshet Chayil!

Major Baby Funk

I am in major baby funk today. Like my heart is ringing a bell and wearing a "Hope is for Sissies" sandwich board and marching up and down the street. Mocking me. Protesting all the hippie-dippie feel-good mumbo-jumbo I've been spewing forth in this space lately. On strike, walking the picket line, demanding more babies and less personal growth. I think it's Halloween - all the cute kids in costumes - and the remnants of the stomach flu and the domestic chaos two sick people can cause during two hurricane days stuck inside. Nothing permanent. Nothing irrevocable. Nothing disqualifying.

But when I feel this way - hopeless, sad, pathetic, and self-pitying - I smear salt into the wounds like some sort of deranged psychopath bent on torture and starting naming myself:

Failure.
Liar.
Hypocrite.
Wuss.
Unaccomplished.
Unworthy.
Not Enough.
Too Much.

I tell myself all my words of hope are thin and transparent, blowing away like all these leaves under my feet, fragile as cotton-ball spider webs decorating office hallways today.

Maybe this is hope: it takes less time before I realize I'm lying to myself again. I stop scrunching up my face to hold back the tears and I breathe in and out again and I find courage somewhere to stop the self-inflicted assault.

I've committed to walking through this pain, but it'll be honest pain, you bet your sweet self. None of that deceitful, name-calling bullshit. I confess truth. I'll stand up real tall and declare it with authority and conviction when I can, but I will speak it, even when my voice shakes. I am sad today, oh yes, but I am not failing. My emotions today are neither too much nor not enough. They are true and they are real, but they are not the most real or the most true. Hope doesn't feel true today. But it isn't any less so.

So I think I'll go home here soon and I'll open the door to little hands asking for candy and I'll make soup and I'll pick a few things up off the floor and I'll light a couple of candles and I'll wrap myself in something warm and cozy and I'll speak my real names, like confession, like prayer, like an incantation:

Brave.
Strong.
Beautiful.
Grateful.
Human.
Hopeful.
Beloved.
Enough.

You Don't Even Smell Like Smoke

It was a Wednesday in late September last year. I was newly pregnant again and it was still possible that the first lost pregnancy had just been a one-off genetic fluke. I had gone to sleep the night before with a worrisome pain and growing anxiety and had woken up to an increasingly clear confirmation that this pregnancy would not result in a baby either. I woke Todd up, made phone calls to the doctor and my office, took a shower. Todd eventually fell back asleep while we were waiting for our doctor's office to open and the panic wouldn't let me sit, made me want to crawl out of my skin, so I drove to Panera to bring us home breakfast, because that's what my people do when the sky is falling. We feed people, we bring casseroles, we eat jalapeno-cheddar bagels.

Back in the car, with the bagels and the decaf coffee, I started to pray. I expected to articulate the groans of my breaking heart with pleas for this baby's life, offering God various bargaining chips if only, but what came out of my mouth, my fists clenched around that steering wheel and hot, angry tears making the drive difficult:

I believe. I believe.

Eight months before, before the first pregnancy, before the floor of my expectations for my life had fallen out from under me, I didn't know if I believed. I was married to a pastor, I would have told you I believed, I would have told myself I believed most days. But the previous ten years had wrung my faith into tatters. I had seen people who professed to believe do horrible things. I was neck-deep in a graduate program about poverty and the faces of women trying to feed their children were wrecking me, surely more real than the God I mostly believed in. I was dragging around heaps of baggage, crammed full of well-intentioned but devastating teachings about God.

And it was in my car, driving home from Panera, on that Wednesday morning in September, losing again a life I was desperate for, that I realized something I never saw coming:  I believed. 

I have been haunted throughout this excrutiating struggle for babies by the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the book of Daniel. They are Jews in exile in Babylon and when the king declares that everyone must worship an image of gold, they refuse, despite the king's threats to burn them alive in a furnace. They respond like this to the king:

"If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." (Daniel 3:17-18).

It's the but even if he does not that haunts me. It's one thing to believe that God can save us; it's quite another kind of faith entirely to believe even if he does not. That's the kind of belief that I knew that morning. It wasn't intellectual assent. It wasn't something I felt. I just knew in that moment, in my gut, in my bones, that I believed. That this was the Really Real.

After my third miscarriage in May, in the ridiculously illogical bargaining phase of grief, I told God often that I would walk through infertility as long as God was glorified. I begged God to make this pain purposeful, to draw us and anyone he'd allow deeper into this mystery that what is truest at the center of the universe is Love.

We, inhabitants of this broken planet, drowning in grief and tragedy and mess and stupid, people who want to rip the face off someone because they disagree about which of two Presidential candidates is better, when we see the glory of God, we have to speak it. We have to whisper it into someone's ear real close or shout it at passersby. Look, glory! 

So here, look, glory:

I was sitting outside the other day, drinking wine and seeking wisdom from a woman I love like crazy, and she said to me:  you don't even smell like smoke.

I had forgotten the rest of the story in my hang up about verse 18. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into the furnance, where a fourth person "looking like a son of gods" joined them, and they are all just walking around in there. The king, freaking out, calls them to come out and when they do he saw "that the fire had not harmed their bodies, nor was a hear of their heads singed; their robes were not scorched, and there was no smell of smoke on them." (v. 27)

They didn't even smell like smoke. 

I have no idea what the end of our story is. I do not know if God will save us from any more fires. But I know this, I know this: He can bring us through so we don't even smell like smoke.

Look, glory!

Sunrise

We were offered a gift, a free weekend at a beach house, so we packed up some friends, a couple of coolers, that pile of books waiting to be read, and we headed off toward the sea.

Yesterday we decide we need to be there, on that beach, for the sunrise. I can barely sleep, I keep waking up, afraid I'll miss it, excited for the dawn. And I know this must be vacation, this eagerness for daylight, all my normal alarm clock-induced dread gone.

So Todd and I sit in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, our feet burrowed in the sand trying to keep warm. We watch the waves come in, constant and faithful, predicting which one will make it the farthest up the shore. As the sky lightens we read Walter Brueggemann prayers out loud and Hosea and talk about the hormonal God we serve and how to love God with our bodies, if toes in the sand can be an act of worship.

It's pretty light out now and this man I call mine, cold despite being huddled up next to me, says "alright, where is this sun?" I tell him I think it's already up, hidden behind the clouds on the horizon. It's beautiful, yes, and I've resigned myself, almost unconsciously, to this less-than-dazzlingly display, sure that the clouds and the haze are preventing something grander. I had hoped for glory, bright rays of pink and orange and yellow reflecting off the water, but I told myself this was good enough, I didn't want any more.

And then, a few minutes later, this:

A few more minutes go by and then this:

And I hear, clear as this day waking up right before my eyes: those who hope in me will not be disappointed. (Isaiah 49:23)

I have to get up. I want to dance. I run to the water, we play in the waves, holding tight to each other as the water races back to the sea. I literally want to break into a jig on this empty beach for the joy of it.

The heartsickness from hope deferred is miserable. I am unconvinced that there are sadder words in English than "I had hoped." But hope is not optional for me. I am called to hope. And I will choose to dance like a fool at the edge of the water with the joy that my ultimate hope will not be disappointed. I am so grateful that when I'm tempted to resign myself to a God who is just good enough, the sun leaps up from its hiding place below the horizon and I hear:

Oh honey, you have no idea.

Crying about Jesus in Dunkin Donuts

Todd and I walked to breakfast a few Saturday mornings ago. And I pause here to say again how fiercely I love living across the street from places to go. So we walked to Dunkin Donuts and not a cute little sidewalk cafe, but still. If I squint I can almost convince myself that I'm a hip city girl.

What is it about sticky tabletops, the chaos of screaming, powdered sugar-covered children, and all the suburbanites in Lycra bicycle shorts that inspires so much more intention in our conversation than if we'd eaten our bagels at the quiet of our own kitchen table? Whatever it is, Todd asks me to tell him about the best thing I'd read last week. And as is so often the case, I tell him about what Rachel wrote this week, as if she is someone we know or my BFF (because I'm certain if she knew me we would be, of course). So he gets out his iPhone and he starts to read it out loud. At first I'm distracted by the man on his knees trying to fix a wobbly table and the woman sitting with her husband and children who looks like she could never possibly have eaten a donut before, but then the words wash over me and I lean in close and when he's finished, even though I'd already read it twice, tears are streaming down my face.

He asks me why I'm crying and I say random, inconsequential things for a bit because I'm embarrassed and I don't really know and I'm afraid I won't be able to say it, I'll just sob it out like a crazy person. But I know he'll understand, or try to, so I finally blurt it out, sobbing of course, I just love Jesus. We laugh for a second at the absurdity, sitting in Dunkin Donuts, crying about how much I love Jesus. And then we talk while I cry some more.

I've heard stories of people reading the Gospels and falling in love with Jesus. And I've never really understood. The Jesus of the Gospels can be cagey, vague, infuriatingly unclear, answering questions with more questions, telling parables instead of just coming out and saying it. I suppose I've loved Jesus, because of my understanding of how, somehow, he died for me and saved me and now God and I are okay, but it seems to me now like I loved Jesus for what he did for me. Like you'd love a soldier who fought for you or a teacher who taught you something you needed to know.

But the Jesus Rachel described? I didn't know him before. The one who confided first in a sinful, outcast, foreign woman that, yes, I am the Messiah you've been waiting for, and was so satisfied by this truth-telling that he told his disciples he didn't even want lunch anymore. I picture him now, offering dignity to this woman who knew so much shame, telling her to drink up, he was what she needed and she'd never have to be thirsty again and then sitting back in the sun by that well, sighing deeply, full. 

The Jesus who chose to appear after his resurrection to his female followers, commissioning Mary Magdalene to go tell the others, entrusting the most important news in history to a person whose eyewitness testimony wouldn't hold up in the court of her day. 

This one who saved the woman caught in the act of adultery, exposed to a vengeful public right at the moment of her darkest deeds, her most intimate acts, her deepest, most shameful secrets, and he saved her life and then offered her mercy and not condemnation and saved her again.

This Jesus who inspired a woman to break open a bottle of expensive perfume, pour it on his feet, and wipe them with her hair. And then the men start to grumble and accuse her of wastefulness. I wonder if she paused, stricken by the idea that she may have done something wrong, feeling shamed for her impulsiveness and emotionality, wondering if Jesus was dissatisfied with her offering. But Jesus speaks in her defense, telling them that wherever the Gospel is preached, we will tell the story of her love for him.

Jesus who tells us he came for the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed. Who identifies himself with "the least of these." Who reached out his hand and touched lepers, these disfigured men and women who had gone who in the world knows how long without the touch of another human being, placing compassion far above any concerns about religious cleanliness.

Maybe all this is another gift infertility and miscarriage have given me. My story is small, but I relate to the shame and the brokenness just a very little bit. I think I understand a fraction of the desperation that caused the woman who had been bleeding for 12 excruciatingly long and lonely years to fall on the ground and reach her fingers out to brush the hem of Jesus' robe, on a hope that he'd be willing to heal her, too. And I think I can imagine what it must have been like, not just to feel healing flood her body at that moment, but for Jesus to turn around, seek her out, and see her.

I keep saying I feel seen. It's more accurate to say that I'm convinced I'm seen, even when I don't feel like it. Because it's easy to doubt, when yet another friend posts their happy news on Facebook (no offense! I'm excited for y'all, really!). When I'm happily cuddling my friends' babies, it's easy to believe that no one sees the longing that feels like it'll split my heart wide open. But if Jesus came to show us what God is like, I believe in a way I never would have dreamed that not only am I seen in these moments, I'm saved in them, too.