Easter

This morning, by my own unscientific estimate, millions of Americans got online and watched Easter services.  Pastors and their families presented themselves in starched outfits, smiling with the excitement of Easter Sunday.   

Growing up, Easter was always an odd holiday for me. Shredded green plastic to resemble grass and blocks of cheap chocolate shaped like a bunny seemed like the weirdest of traditions. And then we all put on itchy clothes and argued our way to a church building, to look at everyone else’s itchy clothes and smile, pretending we didn’t itch or argue at all.  

As I grew up, I learned more and more lessons about traditions. They connect us to the past, and part of their beauty is knowing that we are following in celebrations that so many have done before us. They can be fun – I've been sent cute videos of the children of my friends opening Easter baskets and smiled at the cuteness....   

But.... 

That’s not really the story of Easter, is it?  

And....we’re in a pandemic. We’re stuck. In our houses. In our uncertainty. In a space of unknowing.  

And THAT feels closer to the real story of Easter.  You see, traditions that intend to point us to a long history of honoring the Easter story can become blurred with a culture of covering and avoiding and presenting a saccharine image of ourselves, our communities, and our faith.  

Jesus died.  

For decades churches have asked us to put on our best clothes, pretend we didn’t itch, and smile as we greet one another.   

We live as if Saturday didn’t happen. We skip it. We go right from the pain of Friday and jump to Sunday.  

And we do not allow the real story, of Easter, OR OF OURSELVES the space it needs.  

A huge reason that people of my generation and younger are walking away from the church and never returning are because they are just utterly exhausted of the bullshit.  I said it. BULLSHIT. The bullshit of an incomplete Gospel that looks for the tulips and starched clothes of Easter Sunday while ignoring the awkward waiting and uncertainty of Saturday.   

Death, unknowing, dirty, dusty, unswept, messy Saturday. Stuck and uncomfortable and human.  

As many of you know, I am a trauma-focused therapist. I did not come into this career through the typical path. I spent many years working with students, community members, and others just being one human learning about other humans whose lives didn’t look like my own. Until I realized they did. Trauma doesn’t happen equally to all of us. But we ALL know the itchiness of being uncertain, being unwanted, being uncomfortable, and not being in control. And having no choice but to just sit in it.  THAT is a common thread across the human story, AND the Saturday of the Gospel.  

And as a therapist (and a human) I have learned that we cannot leave Saturday. WE HAVE TO GO THERE.  We must sit in the uncomfortable in order to heal.  

Let me repeat that.  

We must sit in the uncomfortable in order to HEAL.  

Not in order to get to the sunny picture on Sunday. Not to present ourselves as something or someone who is accomplished, has succeeded, or has been made complete or perfect.  We’re not Jesus. He may love us as if we are perfect, but trust me....none of us are.   

And if we present ourselves as having arrived, having completed the story, we are lying.  

Let me repeat that. WE ARE LYING.  

We are spreading a false Gospel message. And we are doing harm. By ignoring our own Saturdays, we are telling everyone else that they should, no, they MUST ignore theirs as well.  

Healing happens on Saturday. As a person who has sat with countless others as they shared their Friday stories (being unloved, unwanted, abused, not listened to, lot cared about, cast aside, silenced, etc.), I am telling you....you CANNOT rush to Sunday. You cannot avoid the Saturday. The pain, the ache in the back of your throat as you acknowledge the horror of how awful Friday was. How awful the pain or neglect or trauma was...you must feel it. You must. The depth of what makes us human, the place where deity connects with our humanity, is on Saturday.  God is found there, on Saturday, waiting to acknowledge and love our true selves. To sit with us, feel awkward with us, cry with us, wrestle with us, and calm the panic that arises within us when we attempt to sit in our own version of Saturday.  THAT is where we learn who we really are, and where we truly learn who God is, who God is within us.  

If you rush to Sunday, it is not a true story. It is just an itchy dress and some plastic grass. Nothing grows out of plastic grass.  

So, as we are stuck in a shared Saturday of a pandemic, of quarantine within our own homes, let us meet with our real selves, and our real God in the middle of it. In our own dirt of Saturday, real grass (the messy kind with bugs and chaos) will grow.  

Daryl Dixon Got Me Through Mothers' Day

When your zombie-eyed dog snuggles you while watching zombies....its a perfect moment. 

I've been watching a LOT of The Walking Dead lately. And by a LOT and LATELY, I mean I started at 0 and am halfway through season six, in under a month. Healthy, no way. Surviving, absolutely.

The thing is. Hope. Hope is the thing. Every episode is full of gore and pain and death. And yet, you never stop being pleasantly relieved that Rick still has Carl and Maggie still has Glenn. (not funny writers....)

But the reason I have been swept up into this show, is that, if this real life zombie apocalypse were to happen, and people were to fight.....at least it would resemble what is happening in my own heart today.

Today is Mother's Day. Social media was flooded with pictures of beautiful, strong women holding the precious babies God has blessed them with. I was joy-filled with them. I 'loved' most of the posts I saw....my dear friends so excited (and rightly so) to celebrate being mothers. These pictures made my heart happy.

So let me just get to it. The real reason I am writing this post. To share something with all of you who would know or care about me enough to read my blog. I'm not too worried about posting this, as I am sure a very low percentage of my 800+ 'friends' will click to read......

Six weeks ago, I went in for a surgery to remove some fibroid tumors. I went in with the fullest confidence, in my surgeon, the procedure that I had heavily researched, and the God who has always shown up. When I woke up, the world's worst recovery nurse looked down at me and said "they had to take it all." I shockingly responded, "they had to take my uterus?" "Yes, you can always just adopt."

They had to take my uterus.

An emergency hysterectomy.....a few friends have casually said that word...:'hysterectomy' as I have been recovering (and loved so very very well in that time)....and the sound of that word makes me immediately nauseous.

It's gone. My fertility. My hopes of experiencing the intimacy of carrying my child inside of me. My ability to do that which is definitively female. My uterus is gone.

And I'm really sad. You know, if I were a better writer, or in a more capable mood, I would find a synonym for the word 'sad'....but nothing fits it right now. It's an ache I've never experienced.

My bones hurt. And I'm far enough out of recovery to know that the pain in my gut isn't the surgery, it's the sadness.

And I'm just in the sad stage now. I've done the anger....there was another blog post I started that will forever be locked away in the world of "good thing I kept that to myself." I've also done the bargaining....can you have a baby without a uterus if you go into a coma and the placenta is the only thing to protect it? No. Have there been successful uterus transplants? No. Is there any way to have a baby post hysterectomy? No. These are all things I've googled, and the obvious answer is no. Will Megan Flinn ever give birth to her child? No.



I could go on and on. It was my only dream. I never cared nearly as much about being married as I did about being a mother. All of my friends have secret Pinterest boards planning their weddings....I only have parenting ones. Teaching kids to read early, building resilience in your toddler, how to raise independent children in a world of helicopter parents....the list goes on and on.

I've cried more than I ever thought I would cry. And I'm not a crier. And I'm definitely NOT the woman who cries in front of other people. But those walls are down. The sadness is too much.

This entry is probably a mess. And I started with a dumb preface about a zombie show, but I don't know what else to say. I feel like my world is divided into Pennsylvania and Indiana....and Senegal and Panama and China and Ukraine and Kenya. People that I love from all of those places will read this. And I'm ok with that, because I might not be the only one....

And I can't actually bear telling anyone in person anymore.

And I'm not sure when I'll stop crying. Or if I will. At some point dehydration has to be a reality.

And some day I'll be elated over my spiritual children, my upcoming adoptions, the foster kids I will have filling my house...I'm just not there today.

This just really fucking sucks.

- - - - - - - -

These are some of the beautiful things people sent me today....knowing that I have people in my corner helps me to know that I will survive this. This won't kill me....or make me bitter or steal my hope. I will be different....but I will still be me.

What about James?

"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.....Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you." James 4:7~10"

This really doesn't sound like the abundant life I've heard Jesus came to give us. But it must be. There must be something worth the weeping and the moaning and the gloom. 

I have had a lot of desires over the years. I have thrown myself into ministries and loved hard. So hard. I have had deep desires for cancers to be gone, for babies to be born, for women to be restored to who God created them to be, for marriages to be saved. I have watched the sin and brokenness of this world swallow people whole. Mental illness and the deep psychological effects of trauma run rampant here. Right here, in the great United States of America. Right here in every day of my life. 

My soul is tired. My very soul. I feel it in my bones, in my heavy breath. In my gut. Weariness and exhaustion have crept into every tiny particle of my body and spirit. I don't quite understand why it hurts like this. Why there isn't a break from it. A friend referred to it as a 'hamster wheel.' It all just keeps coming. 

For the thousands of prayers I've prayed; prayers for healing, restoration, life, joy; I've seen so little tangible answers of 'yes' from the One I've prayed to.

So I'm torn. I want to rage and be angry and throw my fists to the air and fight Him, tell Him He isn't doing it the right way. This hurt, this ache....this longing for abundance and joy and freedom, this should not be here. Not if the debt has been paid like it has been. Not if He says He is both sovereign and loving. My soul shouldn't be hurting like this. 

In moments its tempting to say the prayers and move on. But the dilemna is that my heart doesn't work like that. When I pray for the Talibe in Senegal, or the girl who is forced back into trafficking on the east side of Indy, or the friend who sits, still barren....I can't stop at the thought. My heart feels the feelings. I need to DO something with those feelings.

Most days, I just hold them. Because I'm too angry with God to talk to Him about them. 

So it comes out in a snotty mess. In a snotty, crying mess. I scream at Him. I don't understand and this life, this broken, hurting life, it isn't fair. And all that hurt in my soul, in my bones, in my breath, it comes out in the snot and the tears and the shaking. 

My prayer life isn't calm. 

And I get all the anger out. I yell and I sob and I pace around the house. And in the last moments of these prayers, I just collapse. I'm exhausted of the brokenness and the sin and the hurt and the yelling. 

And in those last moments I often hear these words from Him, "I love you and I love them."

Then James makes sense. The weeping and the gloom, they draw me to this moment. And I'm not ok with the brokenness of this world. I still have longings, I still have aches. But I am ok. 

The Creator of the Heavens and the Earth still whispers to me and loves me.

Knowing I'm loved doesn't always feel like enough, but it does make me ok enough for another day of fighting.

There is no logic to make it make sense. There is no way to give weight to why it is worth it. But to be drawn back into Him. To be a crumpled mess and know that He's holding me. He's holding all the mess of me and this world....it is worth it. 

Last Bell - Serving the Orphans of Ukraine

I wrote this entry after being asked by Last Bell to share about my trip. It will be included in their organization's newsletter.

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This past July 4^th I left the land of the free and the home of the brave and traveled to a much different place. Ukraine has only been free from the Soviet Union for twenty-four years, but the deep history of that place, and the even deeper pride of its people is a stark contrast to the infantile patriotism of America. It’s a place not lacking in stories of hardship and struggle.

And despite these stories of hardship, they refuse to give up hope that there is always something more beautiful on the horizon. My purpose in traveling to Ukraine was to visit with a ministry called Last Bell. They work specifically with young people who have aged out of the orphanage system. Andre and Oksana Pankyeyeva had visited the ministry I work with, Outreach Inc. (working with homeless teens and young adults) earlier this year. Andre is the director of Last Bell and during their visit, we realized that even across these very different cultures the ministries have many similarities.

Visiting Last Bell was an invaluable experience. While we were there my team, consisting of Ellen Jackson (Last Bell board member), Robert Pallikan (former Outreach Inc. employee) and Max Oglesby (son of Ellen) were able to work closely with the staff of the ministry. A three day staff retreat was our main focus, but we also were able to visit the shelter, walk the city with some of the youth, experience the moms’ group and enjoy a party with Last Bell youth that had been some of the first in the shelter. Through these experiences, my lens for how our God cares for orphans has transitioned to a global view. It’s an exciting and encouraging thing to know His hand is at work in Indiana as well as Ukraine. He is active in His care for orphans in all parts of the world.

Spending three days with the staff in a beautiful wooded setting in the Ukrainian countryside allowed me to get to see them, not just as workers in a ministry, but as people who are deeply committed to the kingdom of God. We spent the three days writing out what we called our ‘personal narratives’ with the idea that seeing God working in our own lives gives us clarity to know that He can and will work in the lives of the youth we serve. Our team encountered the expected cultural differences; Americans are much more emotionally expressive. However, after our second day and prayer for the Spirit to work, we saw such beautiful things happen within the team. As each team member took the time to share a part of their story, we saw how God has woven this team together in an amazing way. They were respectful and responsive to each other. From the youngest female staff, to the oldest male they deeply care for each other and continually point each other to God and His love for them. I was sure as I sat in that room, I knew I was on sacred ground. The team became more intimately united as they allowed the Spirit to do this work.

After the retreat we were invited to experience other parts of the ministry. My unique experience was being able to sit in on a moms’ group meeting, as I run a similar program in Indiana. The girls filled the room and every spare inch of seating was taken up. I saw the deep respect the girls had for the female staff, which is evidence of the hard work that has been done to build trust. The youth were completely comfortable sharing their stories with the staff, and the essence of something more than social work was present. There was deep love, deep care and refreshing unity. It was evident that the staff were not there to run a program, but were greatly invested in the hope for these girls and their babies. Smiles, hugs and focused, concerned conversations made this abundantly clear.

After the moms’ group was over, we were able to visit the homes of some of the girls. Outside of one of the government houses, one of the children of a mom’s group participant and I were playing and giggling and chasing the stray kitten around the courtyard. Her bright eyes and shrieks of joy were refreshing that childlike spirits are universal. The inside of the home was in terrible condition, but this little girl still knew what it meant to enjoy a sunny day with a fuzzy kitten. As we spun around and I ran out of breath from laughing, I was keenly aware of how important it is to bring joy into wherever God takes us as His children.

The ministry of Last Bell does that. They know the dark stories and bring hope. They’ve seen fears come to reality and still fight for restoration. In a world where history is filled with uncertainties in government and structure, they bring the certainty that God is real, He is loving and He is advocating for the orphans of Ukraine. It was a particularly special gift to see a glimpse into this world; a world where hope is stubborn, in the best way.

This Life....It Isn't Easy.

Psalm 13 - The Message

(1-2)Long enough, God—

    you’ve ignored me long enough.

I’ve looked at the back of your head

    long enough. Long enough

I’ve carried this ton of trouble,

    lived with a stomach full of pain.

Long enough my arrogant enemies

    have looked down their noses at me.

(3-4)Take a good look at me, God, my God;

    I want to look life in the eye,

So no enemy can get the best of me

    or laugh when I fall on my face.

(5-6)I’ve thrown myself headlong into your arms—

    I’m celebrating your rescue.

I’m singing at the top of my lungs,

    I’m so full of answered prayers.

My last post was from New Years. Full of excitement and hope for 2014. 

My excitement has not dwindled, and my hope has not left. 

But some days.....

Some days are hard. Some days I walk into terrible stories and hard days and I can spot the metaphorical seedling poking through the dried out dirt. And some days I can't. 

I can't see it at all. I can't find that potential for life to burst forth into bleak situations. 

Tonight I attempted to do a Ladies Night program on the idea of "hope". It turned into many tears of girls sharing their stories of hopelessness, and their anger against the idea that hope can be just conjured up. I didn't have answers and I didn't pretend to either. I simply sat with them, cried with them and hugged them. 

It was a hard night. As I drove home my mind was filled with a million "I wish it was this way..." "Why can't this be easier...." "Please God, show her that...." thoughts. And it just feels heavy and unending.

.

God is still God. I am still not. Hope is still there. The seed may not have grown into even a seedling yet. But it is there, hidden from my eyes. The only answer is to wait.

These thoughts drew my mind back to a Psalm I turned to in the hard days after Ebony passed away. Back when I was so angry with God because He hadn't healed her. He hadn't healed her in a way I could see. He took me through a long journey to understand the depth of His love for her and how much it outweighed mine. And how His healing may not happen in a way that I see it, but it happens. 

Psalm 42 - The Message

(1-3)A white-tailed deer drinks from the creek;

I want to drink God,
    deep draughts of God.
I’m thirsty for God-alive.
I wonder, “Will I ever make it—
    arrive and drink in God’s presence?”
I’m on a diet of tears—
    tears for breakfast, tears for supper.
All day long
    people knock at my door,
Pestering,
    “Where is this God of yours?”

I ache to see Him show up. I wonder when it will happen. I admittedly even wonder IF it will happen. Will He still show me that He is who He says He is? As I hear story after story it weighs on my heart. He calls me to attune to their hurt, to feel it with them. I willingly and joyfully do this - but only while trusting Him to meet me there and soothe their hurt and mine. 

As they tell me their stories they are looking for that soothing, and sometimes the only thing that I offer is my own listening ear. It doesn't feel good enough. 

(4) These are the things I go over and over,
    emptying out the pockets of my life.
I was always at the head of the worshiping crowd,
    right out in front,
Leading them all,
    eager to arrive and worship,
Shouting praises, singing thanksgiving—
    celebrating, all of us, God’s feast!

I have had seasons of my life where I didn't bat an eye to assume the best result would happen. A result that would be beautifully wrapped in a bow because "God was in control." The reality is, God is always in control, but His bows that He wraps up things with - don't look good to my eye. The resolutions of situations are hurtful to my eyes. They make me take seasons away from leading the voices into saying "God is good!" Sometimes I need to sit and know it quietly. Today was one of those times.

(5) Why are you down in the dumps, dear soul?
    Why are you crying the blues?
Fix my eyes on God—
    soon I’ll be praising again.
He puts a smile on my face.
    He’s my God.

Life happens in seasons. I know these seasons will end. That doesn't mean a harder winter won't knock me down and cause me to close my windows and stay inside more than usual. It WILL end. I will have a refreshed view of His love for me, His love for these daughters He asks me to love with Him. I know it will come. It always has come in the past. And the joy will be in an even deeper recess of my soul. 

(6-8)When my soul is in the dumps, I rehearse
    everything I know of you,
From Jordan depths to Hermon heights,
    including Mount Mizar.
Chaos calls to chaos,
    to the tune of whitewater rapids.
Your breaking surf, your thundering breakers
    crash and crush me.
Then God promises to love me all day,
    sing songs all through the night!
    My life is God’s prayer.

The great testimonies of Who God is remind me that He does great things. He has done great things for me, and I will once again be able to have these things first on my mind. The aches will melt a bit and the resilient core of the truth of God's character will remain. 

(9-10)Sometimes I ask God, my rock-solid God,
    “Why did you let me down?
Why am I walking around in tears,
    harassed by enemies?”
They’re out for the kill, these
    tormentors with their obscenities,
Taunting day after day,
    “Where is this God of yours?”

Some moments it really doesn't feel like He is there. And others point to those moments and ask why He hasn't shown up. Why He hasn't stopped the hurt. I don't have answers for why. Because I am not Him. I can only learn to trust Him more as I wait. 

(11)Why are you down in the dumps, dear soul?
    Why are you crying the blues?
Fix my eyes on God—
    soon I’ll be praising again.
He puts a smile on my face.
    He’s my God.

Praise Him. He is my God.