I’m not taking this space away, but I don’t know that I’ll be posting here anymore. If you want to keep up with my public writing, you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Medium. Or if you’re my dad and you ask me really nicely I will send you an email when I post something new.
We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgement, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless.
Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely.
That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.
Glennon Doyle, Untamed
I read those line this afternoon. I wrote these lines this morning.
Growing up, questions were an outward expression of inward doubts. I believed faith was the opposite of doubt, so if I asked questions, I must not be a faith-filled Christian. And more than anything, I wanted to be faithful to God, to prove myself acceptable by meekly submitting to the authority of God and the hierarchy of those who had been placed above me. But, I knew early in life, I would not likely be inheriting the earth, because meek is simply not in my nature.
According to those who held positions of authority in my early years, this lack of meekness is simply a temptation to rebel against God. It was my understanding that God called us to rise above our human nature in order to obey, becuase God’s rules were designed for our benefit. Uncomfortably restrictive prohibitions were merely a form of discipline to conform our spirits more closely to Jesus, the perfect God-man who had set the bar for overcoming temptation to the glory of God. And, honestly, I still believe there is some truth to be found in these ideas. Discipline is an important component to training, growth, and maturity. If I want to see continued improvement in any area of my life, I need to be disciplined in my practice. Eating well and exercising only when I feel like it will not advance my health. Practicing a musical instrument or a foreign language only when it interests me will not lead to fluency. At the same time, the idea that God created plants and animals to show their worship by simply behaving in accordance with their nature, yet we humans are meant to spend our lives overcoming our inborn nature in order to worship God simply doesn’t follow for me.
Amy Hutchisson, “Love Stories“
You can read the rest of my words about what I was taught and my thoughts now on faith, love, and biblical inconsistancies in today’s post on Medium.
I have a million thoughts all racing circles around each other to be the first one out. Imagine sheepdogs herding their charges through a narrow gate. Now picture the scene without the dogs . . .
I started sharing some thoughts in a new place. Come on over and find out more about Me, Myself, and Madonna Wearing Hats. Click on the red “Follow” button at the top of the page if you like what you read and want more.
“Mom,” asks one of my brood, dozing on the living room couch at 4:00 a.m., “Why are you cleaning the kitchen in the middle of the night?”
Because, Child, that is what moms sometimes do when confronted with undeniable evidence that we do not have the power to make the world into the kind of place we wish it were.
Because, Child, when I went to bed last night, overwhelmed by low blood sugar and high inflammation, I had a vague hope you all might follow through on your chores without my supervision.
Because, Child, I woke up at 3:30 in the morning to find a message waiting for me that a friend I’ve known for 30 years now had gotten news the cancer was back.
I said I was so sorry and I would pray.
Prayer is hard right now.
I don’t know what to do with the God I grew up being taught to worship. I don’t think I can believe any longer that particular version of God really exists. I’m not quite sure what’s left for me here, though.
Once upon a million times, I remember reading that if God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. Google tells me that’s a paraphrase of the 18th Century philosopher Voltaire.
Those words make sense to me this morning, a morning when very little else makes sense.
Because, Child, I don’t want to live in a world where God doesn’t exist. I don’t want to believe I am completely helpless in the face of cancer and abuse and heartache. Even if, truly, sending thoughts and prayers and love across the miles is all I can do, I really want to believe there is some benefit to that.
For a while now, I have been pondering the idea that what we call “relationship” is perhaps my best framework for understanding who or what God is. I do not attempt to set this out here as some sort of settled doctrine, but it’s a thought I’ve had that persists and makes me wonder more about what it might mean.
As a kid, I remember learning that God is the Light of the world (John 8:12). I wondered what it would mean if that were to be taken literally. “What if,” I asked myself, “every light we see—every campfire, every twinkling star, every bulb or candle or florescent tube—is actually physical evidence of God all around us?” I still think about that sometimes. How would it impact my life if, every time the sun rose or the moon glowed or I flipped the switch on the wall, I realized: God is with me?
Most of the time, I dismiss such thoughts as fanciful. Yet, lately I’ve been stumbling over the idea of panentheism. Not to be confused with “pantheism” (God is all things), “panentheism” means God is in all things. Wherever we are, God is right there. Whether it’s the light or the trees or the child on the couch or the terrifying diagnosis, God is there. Whatever is going on around me, God is here.
What if all the love is God’s love? Does that mean we’ve made God up? I know some of my friends would say so, that what we like to think of as “God” is merely some human manifestation of unconscious energy. And maybe that’s true. Or maybe it’s the other way around, that we humans are a manifestation of God’s energy. Or maybe, maybe it’s some of both.
Maybe God isn’t merely a high and mighty Creator above all things, but is influenced in some way by our being. Maybe, just like any good relationship, God is as affected by me as I am by God.
And that may shed light on the few words of prayer I have to offer at the moment.
Please, God. Please. I am not enough to change all the things. I am not even enough to be actively showing love to everyone I know who is in need. But you, whatever, whoever you are, you are a power that is greater than I. Please be here in my need. And be there, in the places, in the moments I cannot possibly reach.
Is God energy? Spirit? Personal? Transcendent? I think so. I don’t really know. In fact, I don’t think I can really know.
Because, Child, if I could explain to you the mysteries of God, I don’t believe that would leave a God much worth my while.
The words of the Bible, I once believed, could be extrapolated to create an exhaustive list covering all that was pleasing to God. Anything that wasn’t on that list must therefore not be pleasing to God, and was thus sinful. Christians, I understood, were supposed to do everything they could not to sin. Although we could never, ever, not possibly succeed in this endeavor, we were still supposed to try hard and beg God’s forgiveness each time we failed (usually several times a day).
Even the concept of choosing something that might not be supported by chapter and verse was slightly terrifying to me. Intentionally choosing to do something I believed was wrong (even if it wasn’t specifically covered in the text) was a sure path to condemnation and an eternity in a rocky, fiery place far from the love of God.
Wanting to be a good Christian child, I didn’t merely consider this view as accounting for my spiritual choices, but all the everyday, along-the-way choices for my physical, mental, emotional self as well.
I got to thinking about this topic today after seeing a post on Facebook advocating a mother’s enjoyment of sharing a bed with her kids in those fleeting years of childhood. Reading the paragraph that accompanied the drawing of a smiling woman with a toddler snuggled in for a kiss to one side and an infant on the other (well down from the pillows and not covered by a blanket), I found myself growing frustrated and anxious. That seemed a bit of an odd reaction, so I decided to dive into it.
One of those “godly” expectations I had of myself as I became a mom was to practice a particular style of parenting that involved keeping my young children physically close to me at all hours of the day. I wore my babies frequently, we co-slept throughout infancy, I thought my role as their mother was to be 100% available all the time. Of course, as a good Christian wife, it was my duty to be 100% available to my husband as well. If you are counting, you’ll have noticed I’m already at 200% of me and we haven’t even covered the housekeeping, homeschooling, church activities, individual Bible study, or any of the other things I honestly believed I was meant to be devoting my whole self to, every day of the week.
Rereading that last paragraph, it sounds positively ridiculous. Why would anyone have such a crazy notion of what must be expected of them? How could I not have immediately seen there was no possible way I could do all of that? Ah, but remember, I had already internalized from a very impressionable age that I was meant to be trying my best to live a life pleasing to God, all the while knowing I could never actually succeed in doing so.
Truly, I expected the mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion of burnout was somehow the abundant life God intended me to lead. I was just missing the mark because I wasn’t quite doing it well enough. Maybe if I’d tried just a little bit harder . . . . Burnout, I have learned, leads quickly to resentment when I have no real sense that the choice was freely mine to make in the first place.
For most of my 45 years, I never mentioned this to anyone. I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t have it as together as I hoped people might imagine. I desperately wanted to be loved, and I thought the path to love was being “good.” I mean, that’s how I was meant to get God to love me, right? By obeying in all the things, because the Bible tells me so? And surely imperfect people wouldn’t, couldn’t love better or differently than God. How preposterous!
I’ve been thinking and talking a lot lately, primarily offline, about toxic theology. By that term, I mostly don’t mean specific tenets of particular faiths, but the essential misunderstandings the faithful allow to expand unchecked, in the face of official recognition that such beliefs are untrue and even dangerous.
So as not to pick on a particular sacred tradition, let me give an example from outside the realm of religion. A popular media personality from a well-known cable news and opinion channel was sued last year for some of the comments he’d made on air. The defense brought forward by his legal team (and accepted by the judge) was that he couldn’t be blamed for viewers taking his clear “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary” to be actual fact (see: You Literally Can’t Believe The Facts Tucker Carlson Tells You. So Say Fox’s Lawyers). The problem with this defense is that, clearly, many people watch his show and do, in fact, believe the assertions he makes to be truth, even though, apparently, no one was ever meant to.
Toxic theology works much the same way. Preachers and teachers and authors and interpreters of sacred texts put forth their words in ways that are too often miscommunicated, either because they are not clear in the speaking or we as listeners mistake their intentions. Yet when we all continue to use the same words without clarification, we believe we understand one another. The toxic part comes in when traditions focus on authority and respect and acceptance without question. In the faith of my childhood, to question someone in authority was tantamount to doubting God. And doubt, in this conception, was the antithesis of faith.
The underlying assumption seems to be that the expectations of God as Father are clear and understandable, so anyone not following these rules must be doing so because they want to disobey. This is bad parenting and bad theology.
Over the past decade and a half I’ve been a mother, I have come to the conclusion we are all just making it up as we go along. None of us knows exactly how to be a great parent and we’re simply doing our best, hoping we aren’t messing our kids up too badly. I am coming to understand faith works the same way.
Now, I am not of the opinion there is no objective truth. I very much think there is Truth (with the capital “t”) and there is a God who exists and who comes near to us, even as the story of Jesus so tangibly relates. I also don’t think anyone has it all right. None of us has cornered the market on Truth. We are all just doing the our best, hoping we don’t mess it up too badly.
I might be wrong.
It could be that the rigid religious constrains with which I was raised really are the true path to righteousness, and I’ve veered off sideways. I have friends and family members who have told me they believe this is so. The only response I can offer is that, for the years I spent trying to follow all the rules, I was exhausted and lived in great fear of losing God’s love. Now, I can honestly believe God loves me, and nothing I do (or fail to do) will ever change that. And getting things wrong? That’s not the end of the world as we know it. Rather, it’s another chance to learn something new, to uncover a previously unrealized facet of God’s immeasurable grace.
And that is the most liberating theology I have ever experienced.
(Content Warning: This post contains mentions of emotional abuse, physical abuse portrayed in the media, grooming behaviors, and self-blame.)
Why do we tell our stories? Who deserves to know hidden truths? What is the purpose of sharing the heartbreaking, stomach-churning parts of our intimate realities? Do we do it for show? Are we looking for accolades? Is there some inner restless diva bursting to get out?
No, to the last three. Who deserves to know? Probably very few people reading this. Why am I posting today? What is my purpose? Truth. Transparency. And maybe to be a voice for somebody who hasn’t seen their own story in the light of Love.
I didn’t write out most of what follows today. These words are several months old and the thoughts months older than that. I’ve shared this with a few trusted friends and have been encouraged to share in a more public way.
I learned I was abused more than a year after my husband died. I knew what had happened, of course. I wasn’t suffering from memory loss or stupidity. I simply didn’t have the language to categorize his insistence that I was manipulating him as projection, that I was making a big deal out of nothing as minimization, or that his angry outbursts were caused by the actions of the children and me as gaslighting.
I knew our relationship wasn’t all I’d hoped, and I understood I didn’t always feel comfortable with his behavior, but I managed to excuse it, because he’d been abused as a child, because he’d grown up with significant shame, because he’d battled depression throughout his life. The empathy I felt for him blinded me to the standards of accountability that should have been in place. Good boundaries were minimal or absent for most of our relationship.
As a victim of abuse, I carry my own shame. Why, as a smart woman, could I not see what is so obvious to me now? How did I recognize the discomfort, the sense of feeling something was wrong, yet not be able to pinpoint its cause? My higher education focused on the liberal arts with an emphasis on social science. I was trained to see patterns, yet I disregarded this one completely.
I loved my husband. I didn’t want him to be abusive. I waged an internal war, pitting what I could see and sense with what I so wished to be true. I denied my gut feelings urging me not to trust this person, and allowed myself to believe him when he told me full-blown lies and half-truths (which are also lies).
Participating in my victimization doesn’t paint me in a very flattering light, I don’t think. The fact that I didn’t recognize what I was doing at the time seems little more than an excuse. As an American girl raised in the 1980s, I saw my share of made-for-TV movies about battered women. I always wondered why on earth they allowed themselves to be treated that way. While Adam never physically abused me, I have begun to understand a little more.
I didn’t enter marriage expecting to be abused. I got married because I was in love, I cared about this person and I wanted to spend the rest of my life making him happy. That, right there, was the first problem. I can’t make anyone happy.
That’s not a disparaging remark about myself, but a simple statement of fact. No one can make anyone else feel any particular way. We are each responsible for our own emotions. That is part of the healthy boundaries I never learned growing up.
Both in my family and at church, I was taught to consider others more important than myself. There is even a Bible verse telling me exactly that.
Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves
Philippians 2:3 (NASB)
That does not say, you might notice, not to care for ourselves. It doesn’t suggest that adequate self-care is actual selfishness. In fact, the sentence continues into the next verse.
Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.
Philippians 2:3-4 (NASB)
I didn’t notice. That words “merely” and “also” escaped me entirely. I read on to the part where the exhortation is to be like Jesus, who “emptied himself” (v 7) in order to serve others. I believed my role was to ignore myself completely as I worked for the best of those I loved, and, as it happens, those I didn’t even like, as Jesus also instructed his followers to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44).
While I still bear responsibility for all the choices I make, I was not provided a healthy paradigm from which to make good decisions. At the outset of our marriage, I believed Bible passages calling for the husband’s leadership and the wife’s submission meant that when we came to a point of conflict we couldn’t resolve, I had to give in to Adam’s point of view, simply by virtue of his being a man and my being a woman. I thought he was meant to love me, “as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25, NASB), but even if he didn’t I was still supposed to sacrifice myself for him, even as Christ sacrificed himself for me, that he might have been “won over without a word by the behavior of [his wife]” (1 Peter 3:1, NASB).
The fact that I was a very bad complementarian wife, that I could never bring myself into a full state of subjugation under what I believed to be the God-ordained authority of my husband, simply reinforced my own sense of shame and my own willingness to accept Adam’s blame for our marital disharmony as biblical, holy, and right. It was not.
One of the classic findings among victims of domestic abuse is difficulty recognizing our abuse is real. Or harmful. Or not, at least partly, our own fault. These are the lies we are fed by our abusers, and sometimes our communities that—purposefully or unwittingly—reinforce the abuse.
Adam never hit me, so it wasn’t abuse, right? (Wrong.)
Adam wasn’t always seeking to be the center of attention, so he couldn’t have been a narcissist, could he? (He could.)
He didn’t know . . . except he did. He’d misunderstood . . . only he hadn’t. He didn’t mean . . . but he made the choice.
I claimed all the excuses, because I didn’t want to be married to an abusive man. I didn’t want to be an abused wife. I didn’t want to accept the truth, so I stretched and compressed and contorted myself until I could make believe there was some sort of sense in what was happening. And coming from a Christian tradition where great attention was paid to being all sinful and falling short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23), I’d learned I was not worthy of love. I understood my own failures to be a good wife to my husband, a good mother to my children, a good woman who emptied herself for others (and was fulfilled by these roles, rather than feeling resentful of everyone and everything demanding I give even more when I already was operating at a deficit) were the root cause of my unhappiness.
I couldn’t blame my husband, I felt, for what I’d brought down on myself. After all, what did Adam demand more than anything else but personal responsibility? He told me, he told the kids, we needed to take responsibility for our own actions, our own attitudes. We couldn’t blame anyone else for our behaviors or our choices. Yet we were to do as he said, not as he did, for he regularly insisted he only shouted because someone wasn’t listening or his anger was caused by someone’s disobedience or disrespect. He hid. He lied. He denied. And he claimed someone else was at fault.
I want to talk about how I’ve found such healing and am in a new healthy relationship and I can see all the good that has come from the pain, but I can’t. I’m not there yet. I am still in the trenches battling through this with myself. I am still revisiting old memories only to discover new examples of how truly damaging our relationship was, how utterly unhealthy Adam had been, long before he was diagnosed with the tumor that brought an end to his life. I am caught by my own compassion for a man I loved for more than half my adult life. The man I told, at the end of his life, he was worth loving forever. I haven’t been able to reconcile my own feelings yet. I am carried by waves of emotion from seething anger to gracious compassion to fear that I am damaged beyond repair. I understand I have to choose faith and trust and love, even when I don’t think I can.
Yet, even as I flounder in this fretful sea, the One whom even the wind and the waves obey holds me close and lets me know, over and over and over again, how very much I am loved.
I have a bit of an epilogue to add here. I said I hadn’t found healing and wasn’t in a new and healthy relationship. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to trust myself, that I’d simply fall into old patterns and choose another man who would treat me abusively. That’s no longer the case. While I am not fully healed, I am healing. And I have a new relationship that by its health is continuing to bring to light how much damage I lived with for so many years. The difference between what is now and what went before is palpable. I continue to be amazed at how much better it feels to actually be loved, rather than simply told I am.
“Are you sure?”
I don’t remember whether those were the exact words he used. I don’t actually remember a whole lot of details about the event at all. Those I do recall, I no longer know how accurate they are. The feelings have always been clear, though: the wishing to be together and the deep understanding that it was not meant to be.
Perhaps I should begin at the beginning. The way I tell my story may not be exactly the way it happened, but this is how I experience the memory.
It was a Saturday morning, much like this one. The sun shone in the partly cloudy sky, streaming down on the grass and the concrete in front of our ranch-style suburban home. My father stood in the living room, his 5’10” seeming very tall compared to my own few feet. He was asking whether I wanted to join him as he ran some small weekend errand.
I really, truly did. I was a Daddy’s girl when I was little. My parents told me the stories of when my father had to travel for work. He would lay his suitcase out on the bed to pack. He’d set neatly folded clothes in place, then when he turned away to choose another item from his dresser, I would take something out. Apparently, I believed if he couldn’t finish his packing, he wouldn’t be able to leave for another business trip, and I wouldn’t have to miss him.
This morning, though, I was being invited to go with him. It was a special opportunity for some daddy-daughter bonding time, something that wasn’t always on offer. I desperately wanted to go, to enjoy the chance to ride in our big Dodge Maxivan (beige, because it wouldn’t show the dirt as easily), and visit exciting destinations, like the post office or the butcher or wherever the banal tasks he had planned might lead. The actual activity was never the point, it was the chance to spent uninterrupted time with my dad. As the youngest of three children, that was not something I was often able to do.
Yet, on this particular occasion, I said, “No.”
I can’t say why. I’m not even sure I knew at the time. All I can express was a deep certainty I was not meant to accept; I should not enjoy the little excursion as I truly wanted.
He asked me more than once, of this I am almost certain. I suspect it was the expression of open longing on my face. I’ve never been very good at hiding my emotions from those who take the time to look. Even as he repeated the invite, I sensed the answer I needed to give was the one I already had.
I’m not sure how old I was in this memory. It seems as though I couldn’t have been more than a preschooler, yet the living room I remember as the setting for our brief conversation was of the house we moved into when I was nine years old. Memories fade and change over time, so I am aware one or the other of these impressions didn’t quite play out as it seems in my head.
After he’d asked again, my dad made some comment to me, along the lines of, “If you’re sure,” and headed out the door to climb into the van on his own. I kept vigil from the front window. I may even have pressed my nose against the glass, watching him walk away, wishing I could be walking beside him.
I have wondered for years how I might best interpret this particular scene, especially my unfortunate belief that I should deny myself the pleasure of his company. I’m not sure exactly what led me to this conclusion that day, but I know it was a common theme throughout my childhood. Even as an adult, I battle a fear that, because I want something so much, I shouldn’t have it.
I suspect a part of the answer comes from my misunderstanding of the things taught in Sunday School. Throughout my childhood, we were part of a fundamentalist Evangelical branch of Christian tradition. My dad even stuck a clever bit of wordplay to the back of that beige van: letter stickers spelling out EVANGEL (with the V-A-N in a brightly contrasting red). “Evangel” is a churchy word used for someone who shows and tells the story of Christ.
We were taught to love God with our whole hearts, our entire minds, and our full souls (see Matthew 22:34-40). Anything that might come between God and me was to be considered an idol and eradicated posthaste. I was to lay myself on the altar, offering my body as a living sacrifice caring nothing for what was to become of me, but to do God’s will (see Romans 12:1-2). Anything I may want was not only of secondary importance, but very likely in opposition to my own chance to be made holy.
No.
Absolutely not.
That is twisted and evil and wrong.
I grew up second guessing everything I ever wanted. I wholeheartedly believed that God would keep me from the deepest desires of my heart, because it would be good for me. When I stumbled upon verses like Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (NIV), I understood the “delight” part to mean I was only to have pleasure in doing good and godly things like reading the Bible or attending church or serving the poor. And when I could do that, God would change my heart, so that I would only desire to do more good things like that. The natural desires in my heart, those for love and belonging and fun, those were never meant to be mine.
My dad and I have long had a complicated relationship. His misunderstanding of God and love obviously influenced my own. The night before my mom died, after coming home from the hospital, I lay in bed and said a prayer. I told God if Mom had to die in order for my relationship with my dad to improve, I believed God knew better than I what was needed.
As I look back on that night now, I cry for the confused and hurting teen who was only trying to make sense as best she could of the crazy she saw in the world and found it weirdly comforting that a divine being would find such a tragic exchange necessary or satisfactory.
Yet, in the almost 29 years since that night, my dad and I have both grown and changed. Today, we do have a much better relationship than we did then. I don’t believe my mom’s death was required to make that happen, but it certainly changed the dynamic, for better or for worse.
When I was in high school, maybe 16 or 17 years old, I told my dad I wanted to be a linguist when I grew up, to learn and study lots of languages. He laughed. I don’t know what he was thinking, but at the time I only understood that he found my life goals laughable. Last month, he sent me an email that included this line, “The intellectual, emotional, and spiritual maturity you displayed is simply amazing. I’m so very proud of you!” We’ve come a long way over the last three decades.
Today, my dad turns 83. Next month, the kids and I are moving to the desert southwest. It will be the first time we’ve lived in the same state in almost 20 years. When he had first moved, I remember thinking that our relationship was improved greatly by the 1,500 miles that separated us. Now, I am voluntarily moving just 30 miles away, and I’m excited we’ll be so close.
Over the seasons of my life I’ve learned many terrible and wonderful lessons from my father. But as I look back over the last 45 years, as best I can remember them, the most important thing I have learned from my dad is that we all have the capacity to change. We are formed and grounded by the beliefs under which we were raised, but it is our job, each of us as individuals, to determine the truth of any such claims for ourselves. Sometimes that means dropping a long-held and cherished doctrine. Sometimes that means embracing it with greater fervor. But never does it mean we are stuck with only what we knew as children.
Happy birthday, Dad! I’m so glad you were born and that I’m your kid. Not everything you’ve passed down to me has been beneficial, yet the greatest example you are providing offers me hope that I, too, can continue to grow, to develop, to mature even when I’m old. Thanks for being my dad. I love you.
I pulled up my Facebook memories for today and read a post I’d forgotten I wrote back in 2015. These words are kind of amazing to reread in light of everything that’s happened over the last six years.
God, I want You to be Lord of everything in my life. Not just the pretty parts. Not just the parts I’m proud of. I want You to be closer to me than my fears, closer than whatever stressful situation I find myself in. I want these cracks and holes and ragged edges in my being to serve a purpose—to allow Your glory to shine out from me.
Lately, I’ve thought a lot about what I might be able to say to the Amy from childhood or the Amy in college or Amy the new mom, all of the past versions of myself who don’t yet know what I know now. Is there any way I could explain what has happened that wouldn’t just leave those women and children terrified of the future?
When the whole world falls apart, then falls apart again, and again, yet here I still am and I can look around and see the presence of Light and the beauty of Love; I know that though I may be broken, I am not destroyed.
I’m not sure I could have accepted that message before I experienced it in my own life. I didn’t yet have any sense of how much transformation begins with cracks, holes, ragged edges, and even complete brokenness.
About three years ago, I got this mental image. I didn’t see the violence, but there was a crystal vase that had been shattered. I could see the room clearly: I was standing in what would have been a dining area. The vase (or, rather, all the shattered pieces that had once been the vase) were spread across an island counter separating the dining room from the kitchen, as well as having spilled onto the floor. The island was in front of me and to my left was the living room. The kitchen and living room had massive windows and a sliding glass door. This space was open to a ton of natural light. As I stood there staring at the broken pieces, the sun broke over the horizon in the distance. As it rose, the light came in through the kitchen window and the crystal shards were lit up with tiny rainbows refracting through them.
I tried to understand what this might mean. I got the sense that I was the vase and God was the light and, even broken, God shining through me was beautiful. But there seemed to be more. A couple of months later, I pictured a crystal vase that was shot through with gold—as though all the shattered bits from the counter and floor had been gathered together and mended, kintsukuroi style. Somehow, that felt not quite right. I kept thinking and praying periodically, hoping I could figure it out.
Many more months passed and the image returned. I was still in the dining room, the vase was still in broken pieces all over, but the pieces began rising up. They were being gathered, as if by an invisible hand, and fitted with gold wire into this elaborate chandelier. Now, as the light shone through, there weren’t just some small rainbows, but this amazing, brilliant, colored light, filling the whole space and dancing on the walls and floor and ceiling as the chandelier gently twisted and swung.
I’d been hoping and waiting, I realized, for God to take my broken pieces and fit them back together into the vase I believed I was supposed to be. Yet God has a whole different plan and purpose than I ever imagined. The point was never to repair the broken pieces of the vase, but to transform them, to transform me into an entirely new Amy.
God certainly could have used the crystal vase for those uses there are for crystal vases. But for whatever reason, in whatever way, the vase was broken. Breaking the vase did not destroy the crystal. Instead, it allowed it to be redesigned into something useful in a wholly different way, for a completely new purpose. And that is redemption. That is God NOT healing us back into the people we used to be, not piecing the broken bits back the way they were, but transforming us into something completely new and utterly different than we have ever been before.
So, the thing about being broken? It hurts. It’s scary. It feels like the earth is crumbling right out from underneath my feet, like I am falling and I can’t see where I will land. I’ve frequently said I wouldn’t wish the events of my past few years on my worst enemy. That is absolutely true. Yet I wish for everyone the peace that came in those moments when some of my worst fears were realized, and I found myself still breathing, still held, still loved.
And before anybody imagines I’ve graduated to another plane of existence where nothing bothers me anymore because I have arrived, no. Life is not a lovely peaceful experience of simply letting God’s light shine through me. Maybe somebody else has found that life, but mine continues to involve a whole lot of wiggling and scrambling and discontentedness. But, even in pain, even as I argue and lament, feeling frustrated and afraid, I can remember with a knowledge forged deep in my bones, this is not meant for my destruction, but the making of me.
The Watch is a Church tradition of praying through the overnight hours between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. It is meant to symbolize the disciples’ inability to watch and pray even one hour with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane without falling asleep.
This year, I signed up to pray between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. There is nothing special about that particular time, it was just the latest spot open on the schedule when added my name. I set an alarm to make sure I’d be awake in time, but woke up earlier than my alarm was set anyway. As the clock approached 4:00, I opened my journal to pray in written form. I began with the Lord’s Prayer, because that seemed a good place to start. This is what followed.
God, there are so many ways we twist and turn and pull ourselves away from you. So much sin that piles up between us. So many ways we hold our relationships as transactions in scarcity rather than the abundance of love. Forgive us for our limited view of love, God. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to understand love without conditions.
I am so often afraid to love, God, afraid I will not be able to love they way I need to, to love the way you deserve, to love the way others deserve. I am afraid I can’t even love me the way I deserve. Yet not my will, but yours. It is not my love, but yours. Even as I have given money to my children to buy gifts for me and for one another, you bless us with the very love we need to give to you and to others.
Your love is always there. It never fails. And—unlike the money I have set aside into gift budgets for the kids—your love is not limited. As I accept your love for myself, as I love you back and I pass your love on to other people, love grows bigger and stronger and deeper.
God, I’m not sure what it means to feel sorrow to the point of death. Is that like depression? Like feeling so terrible that you just don’t know how to keep going? Like even getting up and taking a single step seems to take so much effort? Or is it like grief? The pain is so deep, it’s a physical sensation beyond words, that expresses itself in tears and deep cries of the heart? Or is it fear? Did you feel afraid? Was the comfort you received in prayer that night simply, no matter what, God is with us? And if it is, what happened the next day? What was the deal with quoting Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Or was that just the beginning? Was that just the first line of the whole familiar psalm? Was the whole point that this was not a rejection, but it was, in fact, finished, “[God] has done it!” (v 31)? Because that makes this whole Friday seem a lot more Good.
“Why have you forsaken me?” the psalmist asks. “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?”
Yet.
I consider all that hangs on that little conjunction.
Where are you God? I’m hurting so badly you must no longer care. And yet, even in this pain, you are worthy to be praised.
I am a worm and not a man: scorned, despised, mocked. And yet, it was your doing that I was born, and I have praised you all of my days.
Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one here to help. And yet, God “has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help” (v 22).
Have I missed this great truth of Good Friday all these years? It’s not that you rejected yourself, your Son, Jesus, but that you never did.
You were always there, the Father never left the Son, just as we, every one of your children, will never be left alone. You hear all our cries for help, even when we can’t see it. Even at the point of death, when we beg for the cup of sorrow to be taken from us and your answer is, “No.” Even then, you do not forsake us, but for our sake you listen to our cries for help and do not hide your face.
Thank you for your presence. Thank you that even when I turn away, when I hide my face from you in fear or despair, you reach out, once again, and lift my chin, inviting my gaze to intersect yours, to see and to know the love I find there.
You did not reject Jesus and you do not reject me.
Amen.
I have always been fat, ever since I was a little girl. As other kids were outgrowing their baby fat, I was adding to mine. I was teased about it. I was shamed for it. I can’t even count how many people over the years have said I have “such a pretty face.”
This is a backhanded compliment fat girls hate.
It sounds nice, right, like somebody thinks I’m pretty? But there is left unsaid the fact that the speaker doesn’t feel my body is quite nice enough to simply say I’m pretty, period.
A friend recently told me the two biggest things I seem to dislike about myself, and expect others to dislike, are that I talk too much and I weigh too much. That’s partly true. The fact is, I think I simply AM too much. Those two pieces are merely symptoms of this more pervasive “disease.”
I say too much. I feel too much. I eat too much. I weigh too much. I worry too much. I expect too much. I fear too much. I love too much. I want too much perfection. I need too much stimulation. I’m too interested in . . . everything. I want to know all the information, all the stories, all the theoretical constructs, all the pop culture references, all the subtle humor, all the languages, all the math, all the ways people think and act and feel. And that both drives me by insatiable curiosity and threatens me with unending failure, because I will never, ever be able to know everyone and everything.
Small is cute. Small is acceptable. Small is unassuming and unobtrusive. Small does not take more than their fair share. Small thinks of others more than themselves. Being too big, too much in a world, in a church community that celebrates smallness is devastating. As a child, I learned to be ashamed of myself simply for being me, because I was too big for the box I was meant to keep myself in.
But, I’m only just beginning to recognize, I’m not the one who has been wrong all this time. The fact that I didn’t fit the box I was told was my appropriate space to be isn’t my wrongdoing. It’s the wrong box. It’s the wrong size; it’s the wrong shape; and maybe there shouldn’t even be a box at all.
Now recognizing that, unfortunately, doesn’t take away 45 years of conditioning to believe I’m meant to fit inside the box.
But, a few days ago, I wrote this.
Today, I will stop apologizing for my body. My body tells the story of my life. It shows the times I gained and lost weight, the stress eating, the pregnancies, the thyroid disorder, the injuries, the strength that has carried me through and still carries me on. I’ve been ashamed of my body most of my life, because I don’t look “perfect.” I am just starting to understand, I look like me, right where I am, right now. And I am learning to love me, right where I am, right now. My story is nothing to be ashamed of, and neither is my body.
Losing weight isn’t going to make me happy, because I’ll just find something else to obsess over. But, I have an inkling that being happy, learning to be content with who I am, truly loving this amazing person—IN THIS BODY—may actually lead me to a place where I will have more ability to choose wisely what I put into my body, when, and how often. What actions I ask my body to take, when, and how often. But starting from a place of shame (much like any relationship) I will never be happy trying to conform to some ideal of perfection I have in my head.
The first step is to be honest about who, what, where, how I am. Right here, right now, living my story as best I can, being loving and compassionate with myself as I inevitably fail. And fail again. And again. Because without failure, I am becoming convinced, we never learn anything.
Of course, all of this sounds great in my head and as I type it out, but letting it grow to the place where I wholeheartedly believe and embrace it (and myself) is a whole nother thing.
Before There Is a Word 