New Marching Orders

These days my heart is living with a new awareness of being alone. I’m not talking about a lack of community or relationships. I’m temporarily living in a home with fourteen other people who I love and who love me. I’m surrounded by a community that has my back. I have more relationships than time to fit them all in. But there are moments (coming now in frequency) where I feel alone. A different kind of alone. My heart craves partnership, for the consistency and solidarity of one person who is always aware of what is going on, who has my back, who takes joy in jumping into the trenches of life and faith and ministry right along side me. Someone who will be in my corner for life, who will say ‘I do’ and mean it. Someone to care for me, help put food on the table, notice when I’m pushing it too hard and pull me aside to slow down.

My heart is awake to these desires like never before. Singleness smarts this time around in a way that is new. My life is so full it hardly seems I have margin for something else. I have plenty of things—good things, fabulous things—to keep me busy, productive, about the kingdom business. Yet that doesn’t erase the throb in my heart beating slowly in the background. When I pause to think or take a walk or crawl into bed exhausted at night the awareness comes. The bull-headed, barreling-through side of me has finally realized I don’t want to go this alone. I don’t want to juggle all the bazillion pieces in my two hands like an acrobat. TA-DA. I don’t want to be superwoman. I just want to be a woman.

In The Path of Loneliness Elisabeth Elliot writes, “It is possible both to accept and to endure loneliness without bitterness when there is a vision of glory beyond. This is a very different thing from the sigh of resignation or defeat, the hopeless abandonment to a malevolent fate which merely ‘sits there and takes it.’ In circumstances for which there is no final answer in the world, we have two choices: accept them as God’s wise and loving choice for our blessing (this is called faith), or resent them as proof of His indifference, His carelessness, even His nonexistence (this is unbelief).”

And it’s true: I am so grateful to be single in this season. I’m grateful not to be getting married in two weeks time. Yes to one thing means no to another, and no to Aaron has meant yes to things I couldn’t have dreamed of before. Because I’m not getting married I’m getting to continue living life with four of my roommates and get a house and do life together. I’m getting to step into ministry of a sort faster than I anticipated. I’m getting to re-engage with my family and partner with my mom in a way that has never happened before. The list could go on. And so I truly am grateful. And content. I’m excited and not afraid of singleness.

But more than one thing can be true at the same time. It’s also true that my radar is up, that I’m ready to be surprised by love whenever God sees fit (sooner rather than later?), that my hands are open and waiting expectantly. God, how are you going to provide? How are you going to surprise me? He’ll do it, in some form or another. Because that's what He does. He crafts seasons and experiences that are better fit for me than anything I could conjure on my own. And in the meantime I’m launching into a new season. I’m not waiting around, holding my breath. I’ve no time for that. God has filled my plate with good things that I am privileged to give my attention. Elliot calls this a new set of marching orders:

“A new set of marching orders. That is what always follows loss of some kind—a mother’s loss of her child, a wife’s of her husband, a lover’s of his beloved, a man’s loss of his job, his health, his self-esteem, his home—if only we have ears to hear those orders, eyes to see the gain God intends to bring out of our loss. Even when trouble stops our ears and clouds our vision, He goes on working in secret and perhaps years later reveals what we had not faith to lay hold of.”

To Control or not control, that is NOT the question

The irony of my life is that four to five months ago I was reading books about marriage. Then I got unengaged. Now—and I just have to laugh—I am reading books about parenting.

Don’t worry. Breathe easy. I’m not pregnant. And the books I’m reading are really more about leadership, discipleship, shepherding, and mentoring. I’m reading to decipher this nearly invisible line between boundaries and control. Because that’s my weak spot—control. And I just came out of an environment where that was the theme song. And I desperately don’t want it to repeat its theme even subtly buried in the score of my own musical performance. Yet sometimes I sit there, trying desperately to puzzle it out and can’t quite figure the most life-giving thing to do. Is this a moment for silence or input, grace or boundary, comfort or feedback? A mentor told me last week (laughing as she did so) that God would continue to put circumstances into my life where I couldn’t control. And He is. In the artistry of His severe mercy that is exactly what He is doing.

I don’t have any children. But I do have these girls—these women—living with me who are mine to love, mine to lay my life down for in friendship, laughter, and midnight bouts of tears. Mine to serve and brainstorm with, to tackle a high school diploma (and party till there’s serious lack of sleep when that sealed document arrives in hand) with, to go down a river with, to set up a house with, to ask questions, and get to do life with.

And when I say mine, you must cancel out all connotations of possession or rights or control. And you must add in the connotations of family, loyalty, and being honored to serve. They are mine and I am theirs because they have made me laugh, and watched me break up with a man I thought I loved, and held my hand as I grieved, and created dance parties where the required attire was donated grandmother-issue purple pants, and tag-teamed the death of a possum in the hen house, and not hated me when I pushed them away, when I forgot to read them bedtime stories or make dinner or help them fix a dress because I was too busy swearing at God. We are each other’s because God saw fit to pull us together from unlikely corners of the country with our threads of broken stories and weave us together into a rag-tag kind of extra-special family.

And I’m not in this family because I deserve it or because I know what I’m doing or because I have something inspirational to offer them. They are mine because—for some crazy reason or another—they have chosen to trust me and want to spend some life with me. And I them. And I am blessed.

Yet with that kind of blessing also comes pain. The pain of the possibility of watching them get hurt. That’s where it becomes easy to control. Because here’s what happens in my brain. There’s this person I love. I live with them. I watch them. I see pain within them. They make a decision or lifestyle choice because of that pain and my brain throws up a red-alert, like a flashing red light attached to an annoyingly loud buzzer that goes off in a factory when there’s danger. And my brain’s first reaction is to try to get that buzzer to shut up. Enter control. Oh wait. STOP. Wrong story. That’s a story where fear gets the upper hand, where I stop loving and start valuing results over people. Been there. Experienced that. No thank you.

REWIND. Enter perfect love. The kind I don’t possess, but the kind God does, the One who has every detail of the universe balanced on the tip of His eyelash. He’s got this. I just get to rest and watch and be myself and let others be their selves. I get to get up every morning and ask Him how He wants me to partner with Him and be surprised at what I receive in return. And yep, we all stumble over our lines and trip across the stage a time or two or twenty. But the stage hasn’t moved and the audience of One still awaits. And every day I have forty-two moments or so when I get to remind myself of all of this, lay down the stress, and keep enjoying life. Because I have some amazing people to enjoy life with.

Absolute control is abuse. But so is absolute freedom. And somewhere in the middle is a perfect cocktail of discipleship, boundaries, and grace. Somewhere in the middle is family and life and a messy finger-painted masterpiece of a mysterious story that has me sitting on the edge of my seat as it unfolds. Somewhere in the middle is a space where I don’t get it perfect, but I grow and people forgive me, and I learn to navigate it a little bit better than the last time. And the hand of God’s severe mercy brings a celebration of joy handed round in goblets fashioned of redemption. Cheers.

Wholeheartedness: Working out a Definition

My leaders asked me if I could be wholehearted in the rest of the internship. They doubted my ability to be so under the circumstances. They wanted to know how I was going to make it happen. If I couldn’t be wholehearted then I should leave.

In my history with them I had questioned leadership. I had watched painful dynamics and harbored offense. But I took care of my offense. I let Y’shua cleanse my soul of its anger and pride and control. I released and I went back. I wanted to learn to bless and make things work. So although there had been moments in the past when I was shut down and not fully present, on that day I can say I was wholehearted. I had broken trust. I had remaining questions. But I wanted to find reconciliation. I was there with my honesty trying to work things out. But they interpreted my position as a lack of wholeheartedness.

I was reading again today in Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts. I found these words: “When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. And when I’m always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter…Giving thanks for one thousand things is ultimately an invitation to slow time down with weight of full attention.” Next to these words in the margin I wrote, being wholehearted. And something in my spirit broke and wept.

I’m not on the farm anymore. It’s been nearly two weeks since I left. The Lord released and moved me on, along with several of the girls in my house. We have pitched a refugee camp at my parent’s for the time being. And I find that Y’shua has rescued and safeguarded my heart for the second time this year. He has brought me to a good place. And yet today I felt a sting at the thought of my leaders’ words and insinuations. You have been not been wholehearted.

But I believe they carried a misperception about the definition of wholeheartedness. Their version of being wholehearted equaled utter compliance, and a cheery countenance as I did so. My questions were unacceptable. They could be infectious, spreading doubt. They made me rebellious. But I wasn’t being rebellious. I wasn’t even demanding answers anymore. I was honestly sharing where I was at, refusing to lie, to put on a fake mask and pretend like everything was okay when it wasn’t. And they thought that wasn’t wholehearted.

But it was. It has to be. There’s this unspoken assumption in Christian culture that being whole means you have all your wounds and messy, broken spots healed, completely resolved, tidily assembled. Then you can be whole. But if that’s true then none of us are whole. Not a human being in the entirety of history—with the exception of the one that was also God. And if none of us are whole then why all this talk and striving towards being whole?

Because being whole is something completely different. A friend shared this perspective with me a few months ago and my mind keeps going back to ponder it over:

Being whole doesn’t mean you’re not broken. It means getting to a point where your brokenness doesn’t hinder your ability to be fully present.

That’s what Voskamp was getting at—slowing down time to be fully present. Being grateful for the present moment so you can actually be in it and enjoy it rather than obsessing over what it is not and missing out completely. She writes, “I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.”

Being wholehearted means bringing every piece of yourself to bear on the present moment. Every part. The perfect and the imperfect. So my issues are still over here on the side, those things I keep mulling over and asking the Lord to finish healing—my pride, my wounding, my grasping for control—but I can still bring myself to this moment and be present with you and not completely absorbed in myself. I can still function and thrive and be alive and contribute to the kingdom while the Lord is still renewing what is not yet fully right within me. And that is good news. For all of us.

Being wholehearted includes questions. It has to. If I have them, then I am not being wholehearted to keep those tucked away in preservation of an atmosphere that is neat and tidy and religiously politically correct. So in that moment with my leaders the most wholehearted thing I could do was sit there with my questions, open-handed, and be honest about who I was. Wholeheartedness means we stop pretending and we be real. It means people are more important than appearances or programs. It means performance has to go out the window—sayonara, you’ve been a bad friend to us. When those things aren’t true the setting is ripe for spiritual abuse, legalism, and religion that’s just that—a religion.

There are people that aren’t going to agree with me. They might make assumptions about my heart and my motivations. They may decide I was lacking in willingness, immature, or simply being rebellious. But that’s between them and God. My job is to let their judgments go. Y’shua, you know my heart. You be my judge. I stand before you unashamed, clothed in my Beloved and His righteousness. Before Him I am always wholehearted.