My beloved wife speaks...

I heave. Startled. Eyes burst, but the night’s dark still covers the room, like a sheet protecting it from dust, those bits of grit and earth and all signs of death and life that settle heavy on our surface. And in my eyes. Burning eyes.

I remember to breathe again. Funny that I could forget, the covers all drenched in sweat. And I remember, through dust in eyes and clammy skin, that I am awake. Dreams are such strange things, really, if they can be called ‘things’ at all. Reality in layers, in and out of time, hopes and fears become mind pictures, colors, flashes. Stories not bound to laws of nature. Finally, untethered, I have a moment, in sleep or not I don’t care much, to consider the invisible, to rearrange the stars, to awaken, terrified of the unthinkable or stare into the face of an unknown beauty… only to be thrust back into pillow next to clock. I despise that clock.

From the depths of me, something shouts, “Awake, O sleeper!” and here I am, eyes a little wider to let in even the smallest reflection of light. Three little bodies sleep silently. Thank goodness. Their chests rise and fall to a steady rhythm of grace…

Whatever grace is. I want to know. Not a definition, but a state of being I can somehow enter into, receive, drink so it becomes a part of me. I have been a grace thief lately, seeking beauty instead of pain, blurry-eyed I gasp, inhale, crumple to earth. Repeat. I’m looking for sanctuary in moments of awareness, those moments where the sun streams in and transforms the dish suds into domes of light, so full of brightness they wobble, about to burst, colors magnified like an entire rainbow full of the promise of life… All of this and the breakfast dishes, too.

I am seeking the fullest life that births out of the darkest emptiness. You know, THAT emptiness. My comrade in all my wandering. The thing (or lack of) that drives me to keep looking. And the looking always comes first. The looking before the finding. Like Moses, who "kept right on going because he kept his eyes on the one who is invisible." (Hebrews 11:27) I only recognize my places of emptiness after tasting God's fullness.

I am trying to practice looking at life differently. I notice, now that my camera has become an extension of my own two eyes, the significance of small details. Focus and click…Details. Little graces. The ones I miss in all my impatience. Like right now,  children arguing, nonsense songs piercing ears. Please! Just five quiet minutes! I guess grace isn’t quiet today. I sigh.  I’m looking for a sanctuary in a moment like the one when I actually take notice of the rainbows floating in the sink. Oh, did  I have you fooled into believing I am an ever graceful person who sees beauty in scrubbing the toilet, too?  Hardly. I wear my ungracefulness loudly in my tense shoulders and sharp words.  I can’t seem to hold onto the grace-filled moments long enough.  I live my life in those dream layers, in circles, discovering, entering into, forgetting and losing, finding my way round again to another layer, peeling it away, and then, startled awake (or back to sleep), it is gone. I empty of truth and need refilling. Another crumple to earth. 

I have ‘chronic soul amnesia’. I didn’t make that up. I’m reading a book called ‘One Thousand Gifts’ by Ann Voskamp and it is kicking my lazy, ungrateful butt. She named her disease and I have claimed it as my own. 

Hand to chest, pounding wildly. But the house is silent. I wonder if God is trying to get my attention.  I convince myself during the chaotic day that if I could just find time to be quiet before my Maker, I could maybe hear his voice. I didn’t really have the middle of the night in mind… but here I am.  Stars poking holes in the dark so the truth God painted in the galaxies can seep down in moonlight on my window pane.

Life comes out of the dark places. 

I feel like a wanderer. I know my husband, deep in sleep next to me, feels it. I am so thankful we’re on this journey together. I don’t deserve the love he gives me every day. There it is again- grace.  But now I feel it dripping down from the heavens in drops of beauty.  It soaks through to my soul and I sit in it. I’m painfully aware that I need to pay attention to the details during the day, when the kids are pulling at my leg and jumping off the kitchen counter and I want to pull out my hair. I miss too many moments, too many graces. And I resonate with a question in this book-  how long do I have to figure out how to live full of grace, full of joy, before my children fly the coop and these mothering days fold up quiet?

So I will focus, and click.

Because I cannot live in only those picturesque moments- I am no Walden recluse, or Alexander Supertramp- I am going back to those little bodies. Back to the world full of broken and suffering people, the world that is loud and busy and whirring round and round- orbits full, blurring. All these things lean hard into me all day. Me with chronic soul amnesia. Me who is too easily distracted from the fierce beauty that rages clear and powerful and loud as a thunderclap. 

I lay back down and close my eyes, thankful...for these moments...and all of the messy ones in between.

emotional misgivings...

   
    I've been reading "The Sacredness of Questioning Everything", by David Dark...and to say that I have resounded with his words would be an understatement.  (Do you ever have a book that you start reading and catch yourself nodding in agreement with?)  Anyway, it's been so challenging and encouraging to me that I can only read a few paragraphs a day.  I walk away and know I need to be...I dunno..."different" as a result.

    Last night, I only got one page in and had to stop.  Dark tells a story about walking home with an older friend of his after they had watched the movie Big (where Tom Hanks plays a child who gets his wish to become "big").  They both said they liked it, but his friend began to share that he couldn't help but feel like it was all a bit contrived...which left him feeling a little depressed.  When Dark asked him what he meant, this is what he said.

The film struck him, he explained with a bit of reluctance, as "a waste of perfectly good emotion." 
  
    Dark goes on to basically say that emotions are wonderful, but they can be played with, pandered to, and drawn out of us even if the circumstances that created them were false/fiction.  He continues...

It's an undermining, by way of unreal endearment, of our ability to hold one another dear, a way of drawing us away from a sense of what's real...but if such sentimental fare is what mostly constitutes our media diet, our affections might slowly become-hear this!-merely theoretical, sentimentality...We get to the point that we save our strongest emotions for people who don't exist. Or in the case of sports figures, celebrity politicians, and talk show hosts, we get most worked up and alive...by way of people we don't know and who in all likelihood don't want to know us.  The living, breathing people next door or in the next cubicle or in the same house who might benefit from our showing up to them emotionally get left behind.

    Wow!  This got me thinking about so many things...like...Why do so many guys use video games to escape and achieve a sense of accomplishment and adventure?  Why not a real adventure away from their couch?  Why do some women get caught up in romance novels (literary porn) or ridiculously sappy movies?  Couldn't they reinvest that very emotion into their significant other or maybe finding one?  Why do so many of us invest the emotional (and weekly time) into "reality" television or our guilty pleasure tv shows?   Do we truly believe in the underdog story, the conflict, or love connection?  Does it have any relevance in our daily life whatsoever? Or is that the point entirely.  Don't kid yourselves...it's not just because of how well it was written, incredibly acted, or even how titillating it was.  You were roped in emotionally...completely duped...hook, line and sinker...and you loved every minute of it. 

    I am equally guilty in all of this for sure.  Even though I do not have television at my house, I watch some of my favorite shows (i.e. The Office) and enjoy the entertainment value (see:escape) of movies a lot.  More than I should if, I am honest with myself...and now all of you.  It's something I want/need to change.

    So, what then?  How do I tap into my inner Steinbeck?  Go on my Walden-esque adventures?  I can't drop everything just to spite how deeply hooked I have become entrenched in entertainment, can I?  Billions of dollars are betting against us at every turn...luring us into emotional turmoil - quickly followed by a cure for the very disease we just found ourselves ailing.  Coincidence?  I guess the beginning is realizing that my emotions are what they are and that if my best emotions are being spent away from reality, I should check myself...again...and again...until I look to those around me.

    That's a snapshot of the journey from where I'm walking today.  Thanks for all of the feedback on the last couple of posts!  I was humbled to be quoted on a beloved reader's Facebook status last week...the ultimate compliment in 2011, right?  Peace and love...  

right back at it

    So, I have had two of the craziest, most encouraging/challenging, and overall "full" weeks in recent memory...any chance that's because I have made the conscious effort to let go of a lot of old garbage that was holding me back? 

    Laird Hamilton might not be a household name to you.  He was the first surfer to use a jetski so he could be towed into waves bigger than a parking garage.  This not only saved him from trying to catch the behemoths the standard way, but meant he could ride waves approaching 100' tall!  All that to say, Laird does stuff I could (and would) never do, but I read a quote from him one day that has stuck with me forever.  He once told a reporter (and I am paraphrasing, sorry Laird) that we live in such a fortunate and comfortable place, that it is essential that we challenge or scare ourselves DAILY to remind ourselves how fragile life is. 

    Although I don't get to surf waves daily anymore, I really agree with what Laird Hamilton said.  I have missed being challenged (and even scared, honestly).  I woke up a couple weeks ago and realized that at some point unbeknown to me, I had pushed the cruise control button on life and had become ambivalent, cautious, and had resigned to be a casual observer within my own skin. 

    When it came right down to it, my reasons for playing it safe were all good ones (aren't they always?).  We just recently bought a house.  I have three young children and a wife who is deserving of all my love and attention.  I work long hours as a street outreach worker at a local non-profit.  I have physical limitations and daily pains as a result of a surgery that messed me up almost a decade ago.  I even beat myself up every week on the basketball court at a ministry outreach I run. 

    I say those things to show you that the best lies are the ones that are 1/100th lies and 99/100ths truth.  It wasn't wrong to provide for my family or want to do well in my job, but I was playing it safe and comfortable because it was easier.  I grew complacent, because I no longer took the tasks at hand as challenges and blessings, but instead saw them as my lot in life...the daily grind.  I let it all wear on me, instead of seeing them for what they were.

    Now that I have begun to force myself to be as straight forward and honest as I can be (beginning with myself), I have shook off a lot of the old dust and crap that was keeping me where I was.  I see now that there are new possibilities and challenges in my day to day that MUST be embraced. 

    The best gift in this lately, is that my world has opened and I have started to dream again.  I now try to listen to the words that echo in my mind telling me to act, to do, to think outside the box this instant.  Old friends have come out of the woodwork.  New ones have appeared out of thin air.  Conversations, opportunities, and new challenges have begun to sprout and I feel so blessed.

   My challenge for you is the same as the one I have for myself each day now.  Are you being honest?  If not, is what's holding you back worth it?  Just some thoughts... 
      

comfortability and change

   

    The difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.  - Ellen Glasgow -

    Over the past months, I have really begun to feel fenced in...bound to my circumstances and life in a way that has left me feeling listless and frustrated.  Sure, cabin fever and a long Minnesota winter can batter the will of the hardiest of soul, but this felt different.  As easy as it would be to blame the sub-zero temperatures, frozen vehicles, or even the Groundhog day-like routine of shoveling snow from my driveway each morning, I knew none was the root cause.  Although it's much harder to have a positive outlook on your world when your back and shoulders go through a perpetual state of soreness, it wasn't until the wheels fell of that I truly got a glimpse of what needed to change.      

    In college, I spent a restless night trying to figure out why I felt such an inner battle over my future.  That night, I found myself writing my thoughts in a paper entitled "Comfortability = death".  The basic idea of my conclusion was that the allure of a nice house, steady job, 2.5 kids were all good things, but that we were continually being sold into believing that we deserved much more and couldn't be happy until we were COMFORTABLE.

    Awww...comfortable, the illusive ever-changing feeling that if we could just have x, y, and z or be in this economic bracket, that we would be healthy, wealthy, wise...and happy.  Such a scary and sad way to look at life if you ask me. 

    A body in motion stays in motion and a body at rest stays at rest, unless acted on by an unbalanced force.  - Sir Issac Newton's first law of motion -

     Where I had grown comfortable, was that I had quit listening to the still, small voice inside of me that told me to be more bold, more honest...with myself, my friends, coworkers, and the world around me.  Over time, I had sugar coated or eliminated things all together, because it was uncomfortable and I truly believed that I was more mature now that I had learned to sit back and "let people be people".

    Don't get me wrong, I still love everyone and will not be throwing stones of judgment...I just needed a kick in the pants to be who I am...and now I have it in full force. 

    I wish I could've posted this when I first started on it.  Now I have a few weeks under my belt and have new things I want to say!  See you all again real soon.