The White Person’s Guide to Speaking Up Against Racism in 21st Century America

I struggle to know what to say in light of recent conversations concerning race in the U.S.

I’m a white girl raised in an upper-middle class home in the South, of all places. What could I possibly have to say about race that would be helpful?

As I’ve seen many of my other white brothers and sisters saying the same thing, it’s understandable that there’s a certain fear that accompanies these conversations. They’re emotionally charged as a result of such an offensive history in our country. Many well-meaning white people have migrated to the opposite extreme of our ancestors and decided the appropriate response to racial tensions is to sit down and shut up, the way a dog huddles beneath a table in shame after biting someone in the rear.

Well-intended though it may have been, our hiding has done little to do away with racism.

You may gawk at the suggestion, citing obvious things like abolition and anti-discrimination laws, and while those are marks of progress, in light of recent events we have to acknowledge the big, black elephant in the room: racism still exists.

If you think it doesn’t, let me assure you: we are most at risk when we think we don’t have a problem.

If you know cancer is growing in your body, you do something about it. You get chemotherapy, undergo radiation, and take care of yourself. Cancer is much more deadly when it sits beneath the surface, imperceptibly growing into multiple parts of your body until you begin to suffer, or until it kills you altogether.

Our silence has fed a silent, deadly killer. That’s why it’s important that we white people who “have nothing to say” start how-now-brown-cowing and speaking up for those who have been victims of our silence, especially those of us who follow Jesus. Saying nothing is saying something, and it’s a something I don’t want to say.

While it’s by no means comprehensive, I made my own White Person’s Guide to Speaking Up Against Racism in 21st Century America. Let’s not be silent any longer.

1. White people should ask questions.

I felt a sense of relief when I realized that what I say in regards to racism doesn’t have to be solution-oriented. That’s white hegemony talking, buying into the idea that because we are white, others look to us for answers.

We don’t have to have answers before we say something – we can speak in order to learn, too. Good questions to start with:

• Would you like to be friends?
• How can I love you better as a person of a different ethnicity or race?
• Have you noticed me doing anything that’s offensive to you?
• Would you help me understand how I might be treating you unequally?
• What do we have in common?

2. White people should acknowledge our silence and ask forgiveness.

For those doing our best to imitate Christ, the soil is fertile. We have an opportunity to empty ourselves of our white privilege, to “make ourselves nothing, by taking the nature of servants,” (Phil. 2) by saying things like:

• I am so sorry for being silent. I promise to speak against any form of hatred I see from now on, because what happens to any of my brothers and sisters happens to me, too. Will you forgive me for not openly standing with you sooner?
• I admit I have not regarded you as my equal and have refused to search for ways I might be endorsing racist attitudes and behaviors. Will you forgive me and help me grow?
• I am sorry for what happened in Charleston, Ferguson, and everywhere else where people have been marginalized based on skin color alone. Black lives do matter. The lives lost in Charleston matter. Your life, your feelings, your voice – they all matter.

3. White people should hold each other accountable. 

We have a responsibility to one another and to our brothers and sisters of other races, especially our African American family, to have a zero-tolerance policy of racist remarks and microaggressions coming from other white persons.

If you see someone say #AllLivesMatter, resist the urge to say, “Duh, all lives matter, but that’s not the DUH-king point! /facepalm,” and help them understand that #BlackLivesMatter is an agreement that black lives are just as important as all other lives, and an insistence that current systems should treat them as such.

Help your mistaken white friend understand that by saying #AllLivesMatter, she is discounting and brashly dismissing the unfair categorization, hurt, and discrimination African Americans have dealt with for years in a system that criminalizes more black men than white men and stereotypes & stigmatizes black women.

Help your white friend understand he’ll never know what it feels like to be slave to generalizations or stereotypes that force black men to earn the respect he is naturally given because he’s white.

And for Pete’s sake, do not let anyone get by using offensive terms that start with N’s or referring to a historically African American neighborhood with a word that rhymes with Gapetto.

4. White people should seek to identify our problem areas, not defend our innocence.

The appropriate response to these conversations is not, “This doesn’t apply to me. I’m not racist.” A better response is to humble ourselves and ask, “Am I racist, or reinforcing racist attitudes or beliefs in any way?”

We will eliminate racism much more quickly if we try to identify where we are in the wrong rather than immediately claiming our innocence. There’s no danger in honest self-examination. (But there is much to be gained.)

5. White people should seek to reconcile in our everyday lives.

Finally, and this is where I am most guilty, we should seek to diversify our lives. I loved Momastery’s response to the Charleston shooting – she admitted that she didn’t have a single black friend and that was part of the problem.

Are we saying we support integration with our mouths while we support modern-day segregation with our lives? 

One of the quickest ways we’ll overcome negative attitudes toward other races in America is by getting out of our bubbles and into each other’s lives.

• Are we worshiping with believers of other races?
• Are we friends with people who are like us in every way, or do we seek to befriend and learn from people of other colors, religions, and opinions?
• Do we live in white, Suburban paradise and avoid those “other parts of town” at all costs?
• Do we send our children to mostly white schools miles away from the nearest public school because it’s better, cleaner, or safer?

While I feel a little foolish for writing a random blog about something I feel I have no authority to speak on, I think I’d feel worse for continuing to say nothing.

To all my black friends and family in Christ, I am sorry. I promise to try with all my might to support you and love you in every way I’ve written and more. I’ll try to honor the lives of the nine saints lost in Charleston not only with my lips, but in my life. Your lives matter. Black lives matter. I’m standing with you.

What about you? What would you add to this list of ways we can appropriately respond to conversations about race? How will you try to live differently to eliminate racism and love everyone equally?

always forward

If life is a series of breaststrokes, December is the breath, the lifted head, between the pull of our arms and the kick of our legs.

It’s the annual Sabbath, the time of year everyone pauses (even amidst holiday madness) and reflects on what this set of four seasons has brought; we seem to agree it’s the right time to exhale, to raise our eyes and replenish our oxygen supply as the new approaches and the old prepares to rest.

December did not disappoint this year, though now, predictably, it is January.

In a second’s time, one year ended and another began. Parties wrapped, decorations were boxed, and the familiar holiday spirit of “for auld lang syne” surged as quickly as its melody waned, drowned by the bursting celebration of midnight fireworks and cheers.

It was a reminder of life’s steady, unforgiving pace, that while we may treasure it with all we’ve got, life moves past us. Time’s steady march is at once a great comfort and an enduring tragedy. Quite fortunately, this too shall pass; and, all too unfortunately, this too shall pass. While I did my best to be present and cherish, cherish, cherish, I find a sting of sadness still with me.

It will be hard to move on from 2013.

I’ve never experienced such a profound series of events as the ones that defined me last year. The eleven months before December were full of grueling soul-work, tears and tough lessons, even a little fun, all capped by a final month of thorough, well-deserved celebration. While I watched the New Year’s fireworks at midnight, a small collection of tears said their final peace down my cheeks as I recognized my soul swelling with a tired gratitude, unlike anything I’ve ever felt. The tears only had two words to say, but they felt original, novel, purely sincere: thank you.

Yet all the reflection and gratitude in the world couldn’t stop 2013 from ending, and reality now insists:

it’s time to move on.

This is an exceedingly difficult reality for me, perhaps my least favorite discipline. I enjoy the safety of looking backward and gleaning from the past, while heading into unknowns and uncertainties nearly paralyzes me with fear.

I don’t know what the next year holds. I’ve no idea where I’ll be this time next year or how I’ll get there, who I’ll meet or what I’ll do. I have no idea how this year could compete with its predecessor.

This is all I know to be true:

The next twelve months will be hard, and unlike anything I’ve ever lived. There will be times of great difficulty and of great success, of moderate challenge and of mundane nothings. There will be forever moments, the ones I will tuck sweetly in my heart’s pocket for years, and there will be meh moments, ones that seem inconsequential. I’ll be happy, and I’ll be sad. I’ll want to quit in hard times, and I’ll swear I’m going to this time. I won’t. I’ll believe in Possibility and Potential too much.

Really, 2013 taught me that all we can ensure about the next year is that it can be different. Maybe you had a terrible year; you’ve a new start. Maybe you had a year like mine, one that left you forever changed. You’ve also a new start. We’re all holding blank slates, and, while they bless and burden us with responsibility, they are our gift from Hope Itself.

What a loss it would be to decide that this year, metamorphic though it was, was the best I’d ever live. Though I hate to see December over, I know there is much to be experienced until the next one. I know it’s time to put my head back underwater and keep participating in life’s unending breaststroke, to do more hard work and have more fun and learn more lessons that will make next December as sweet as this one.

It’s time to make new mistakes, to learn from them, and to keep going, because even in the aftermath of the best things, there is more. It’s part of the gospel’s beauty and Grace’s heart.

So: to new lessons, to new experiences.

To new joys and heartaches, to new pains and pleasures.

To this breaststroke, and to learning new ways it works and doesn’t.

To drowning, for it teaches us to swim, and to the Lifeguard that’s with us whether we’re drowning or not.

To new everything.

m

celebration

Around this time of year, it’s customary to reflect on the last year of our lives before we look ahead to the next, and I’m a big fan of custom. Though this year ran the gamut of emotion and experience, I keep coming back to celebration.

For me, celebration is nestled somewhere in the sweet spot between gratitude and sorrow. When you’ve been through something so bittersweetly difficult and good as the last year I’ve lived, it feels like celebration is the only possible culmination. I feel warm and tender, open and humble in ways I’ve never been before. Pliable, malleable, soft. Somehow closer to myself, closer to understanding something I was created to understand without having a clue as to what it is.

There are thousands of words I could say for this year.

One of the many voices in my head tells me I’m crazy for celebrating what has been the hardest year of my life. I can’t help but wonder if that part of me celebrates its ending, if nothing else. “Nowhere to go but up,” it seems to say.

Yet many of the other voices don’t say anything, they just smile a weary, thankful smile. I identify with those voices more than the other. It’s the same smile you fall asleep with at the end of day full of work well done, but work that has done work on you, too.

I don’t know that we can celebrate without adversity. At least, we can’t celebrate to the full. There has been much loss, much grief, over these twelve months. There has been hurt and pain and struggle, loneliness and abandonment. There has been joy and relationship, friendship and connection, travel and experience.

I have learned I am safe. I’ve learned I’m loved. I’ve learned grace is actually the most humiliatingly awful thing to receive in the world, and I’d much rather go on convinced that I deserve everything I get – but Grace came to me anyway, despite my best efforts. It has a way of doing that.

I’ve met some of the most interesting people in the world. I’ve met children I’d adopt today if I could. I’ve seen God as far away as foreign countries and as close as the heart of my own family. Friends have come, and friends have gone. Parts of me have died. Parts have come alive.

I feel so filled, and I feel so emptied.

I think celebration lives in that feeling, though the celebration is not itself a feeling. It’s an act of grief and an act of gratitude. It’s a giving and a receiving.

We celebrate to let go and release – and we celebrate to welcome and begin.

Celebration is a discipline of spiritual people. It helps us maintain forward motion in our lives while soaking in the past. It’s the only way to live future and past to the full.

So, this December, I am practicing the discipline of celebration.

I am thanking God through tears for every person and experience that has brought us to where we are, and as I celebrate, I release. I relish that they happened; I relinquish the need to keep them. It is an act of worship through submission as I remind myself I am not in total control of everything that happens. As I celebrate and release the past, its very existence gives me cause to celebrate and take hold of my future without knowing what it holds, celebrating above all the God who gives hope to it all.

And in celebration, this curious intersection of grief and gratitude, I find peace and contentment, my focus drawing ever upward, ever forward, and I gently, sweetly, sorrowfully exhale the most meaningful, heartfelt thank you I have ever breathed.
m

okay

I don’t think this is a the worst thing was the best thing blog, though maybe my story will be eventually.

This isn’t a story of how my life got better because it got worse first, and how if it weren’t for such grace I never would’ve made it out – even though some of that might be true.

These are a few thoughts I’ve had since experiencing grief and learning to stand up again.

In the aftermath of leaving a life-changing mission experience early, and not of my own choosing, my life is different. I’m different.

Books have tried to explain to me what I’m feeling, and many have helped. Processing grief is just that: a process, and an ongoing one, though I’m not sure we ever fully recover from shattered hearts. God pieces us back together in the most beautiful way, and that’s something to celebrate; even still, we are differently whole, never pieced the same way twice.

I think it’s part of the plan and the beauty of it, this reality that God is constantly remolding our hearts. I also think it’s why we feel sorrow from things long passed – there are parts of us that die and are reborn, put to rest and awakened, but these parts of us may never see each other again, leaving us with palpable loss in the heart of our hearts, an ache to know what we once knew, the sucker punch of impossibility.

Change changes us.

My heart broke at the sudden shattering of expectations. I quickly learned my life was going to look vastly different than I’d been thinking, and I was scared facing new territory. This is where I diverge from the books I’ve read about the worst thing becoming the best thing.

The reality is my internal life was an absolute train wreck. It was and is indescribably hard.

There is no romanticizing everything I felt after coming home. It cannot be spiritualized; it was just ugly, naked, raw and painful. Though I didn’t cry every day or flail my arms running naked down the halls of my house screaming like I wanted to, my reality was just a quiet desperation, a general feeling of paranoia and fear that I was not going to make it, that the unknowns were too much and that I couldn’t make it out of this one.

I legitimately thought my life was over, but it’s not as though I said that to people; in a quiet, resigned, hopeless kind of way, I agreed to believe I wasn’t going to recover and settled in for a boring, lonely life void of purpose and meaning.

They say time heals all wounds, and I don’t think that’s true in my life. Time creates space for God to heal our wounds, and we must use that space to do our part, as well.

So, even after September – the weirdest, most difficult month of my life – time has passed, God’s done his thing and I’ve done mine, and here I am.

I think that’s so powerful – here I am. It makes me laugh. All the energy spent thinking about how I’m never okay has been redirected to reminding myself just that – here I am.

And I’m okay.

All the desperation and grief has uncovered that I really have never thought I was okay, even before coming home. Every day I’ve woken up and been scared about something – being alone, the people I love leaving me, not measuring up, not stewarding my gifts well. At the same time, I had so many right answers for so many things, my own problems and everyone else’s, and my answers were my salvation.

I worshipped certainty for keeping me safe.

Yet the most unusual, abnormal season of my life has shown me what is most true and most reassuring: I have no idea what’s going on or what’s going to happen.

What I also know to be true, though, is that I’ll be okay. God, through time, has proven such.

By okay I do not mean bad things won’t happen. Everything I’m scared of probably will. There will points in my life where I’m inconsolably lonely. People will leave me. People won’t choose me. I won’t get what I thought I wanted. My life will fall apart at the seams, sometimes because I made mistakes and other times because life is life, and frankly, it can be brutal.

The miracle of okay is that all of those things happen, and we still remain. It’s the miracle of the Gospel – even after death, we remain. And we remain with Love.

Therefore, while I don’t have many answers – what I thought I wanted – I think this journey is teaching me that the answer is not about answers.

It’s not about knowledge. It’s not even about knowing where we’re headed all the time.

It’s just to remember that we children of God are all heading somewhere, and wherever we end up, that’s where we’ll be and it’s where we were going, and we’ll do our best while we’re there, knowing, no matter what –

we’re going to be okay.

m

look the thing

Much to my sheer delight, I am finally understanding myself a little more thoroughly.

For those familiar with Myers-Briggs’ personality types, after many conversations, much contemplation and realizing many of my most compatible, balanced relationships are with INFJs, I have gingerly decided that I am an ENFP after all.

Even if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it only matters that you know ENFPs highly value authenticity.

I cannot understate how much I appreciate and admire genuine people. Maybe it’s because we can’t really be whole, healthy people without forming inner substance and learning to be at peace with who we are.

At least, I can’t.

I was talking to a woman in church yesterday who said with utmost conviction, “I just don’t ever want anyone to know I don’t like them… even when I don’t. I don’t ever want to seem mean.” I chuckled, hearing my own heart in her words, and asked whether she cared about actually being mean.

She stared blankly, paused and laughed a nice, Southern laugh.

“No, as long as they don’t think I am.”

How often I have said essentially the same thing.

I can’t help but ask myself – wouldn’t it be better, even more Godly, to actually be those things we wish to seem?

Rather than looking the thing, whatever it is – skinny, competent, spiritual, smart, funny, respectable, loving – wouldn’t it be so much more satisfying to look in the mirror and say,

look! the thing!

To have substance, not surface.
A thick latte with steamed, frothy milk, not an americano with water.
Hearty, not hollow.

The other day, I called an emergency internal board meeting (as we must do in our hyperemotional moments bereft of all capability to reason) when I actually ran away from someone I hadn’t seen in a while just because I’d gained weight since I last saw her and I was pretty sure her opinion of me was defined by a version of myself I hope forever stays in the past.

She lives here. I’ll run into her in a few months after I’ve spent more time at the Y, I thought, frantically turning the opposite direction.

I stopped, asking myself what in the world I was doing, and gathered my imaginary staff members around the table. We remembered the words of a friend when his family laughed at him for wearing the same clothes two days in a row.

“What?” he said, obviously and good-naturedly not caring. “My character’s the same either way.”

My board and I remembered admiring him, thinking jealously how peaceful and ideal it would be to live in a way that prioritized who I am over who I look like I am, to always be confident, regardless of what I’m wearing or how well my waistline is handling my diet or what mistakes I’ve made in the past.

And my board members reminded me that I could still do that, right then.

I swallowed, tried to forget what I looked like and what she might remember about me, and I turned around to call out her name, running over and giving her a hug.

So what if I spilled the Nutella drizzle on my shirt earlier making a latte and hadn’t washed my hair in two days? Though I was a little mad no one told me there was also Nutella on my nose, we were mutually excited to see each other, and, even if she’d remembered negative things about me, at least this time I was kind. And I meant it.

Isn’t that how we change? One interaction, one choice, one risk at a time.

More importantly, I took a step in the right direction, and she didn’t call me TubTubs or comment on how my neck and jaw became one singular body part in a matter of months or totally berate me for being who I used to be and possibly still am, for all she knows.

I’m realizing that when I spend so much time trying to look like the thing I want to be, what I do or who I am becomes increasingly less important. It only matters what I sell to people and how much they buy it.

My INFJ frientor once told me to “talk to people you can’t fool,” and I thought she must have been off her game that day.

Now I understand what she meant.

When authenticity is a higher priority, when look! the thing!-ing is of more value than looking the thing, we become better people. We don’t have to fool anyone, because we’re being real.

Pursuing authenticity assigns us the responsibility of doing the work necessary to become who we truly are.

I must actively be like Jesus, because it’s who I want to be.
I must intentionally be kind, because it’s what I want to be.
I must every day be a dedicated writer, because it’s what I want to do.

I have to work at these things, put forth the effort to develop character and skills, give them that time and energy which I’ve historically spent on pretending, and become – practice, live – what I am inside.

As I externally practice my internal conviction, all of my energy is invested wisely in something true and lasting, unshakable and solid, until

slowly,
painstakingly,
gradually,

I become the thing I always hoped people would think I was.

I develop substance, character, solid footing and a steady heart.

If you’ve never been a real person, becoming one is tremendously gratifying and nourishing. It’s like eating McDonald’s for years then tasting a real burger grilled over a charcoal fire.

It takes more time, it takes way more effort and a superhuman humility and willingness to fail,

but it is so worth it when you face the mirror at the end of the day, smiling (because you’ve discovered that deep inside, you’re really a smiler), and say:

look! The thing.
m

what i thought when i learned that people paint their grass on purpose

Yesterday I went walking with my cousin Ivan on his afternoon jaunt through suburbia. Though he does not insist on himself as some others might by incessantly barking or begging attention, Ivan does enjoy casually, unassumingly making his individual mark on everyone’s private property in the most postmodern, I do what I want, where I want way with little regard for stodgy, mainstream yard-markers, and as we stopped to admire and autograph everyone’s manicured lawns, I noticed something unusual.

I think maybe it’s usual and I’m just abnormal having been gone for a while. Or, if it is unusual, maybe it’s more blatantly so as I compare it to neatly swept Mozambican dirt or windblown Peruvian sand.

But yesterday, I noticed that people actually have their grass painted green.

Their nicely placed sod
that is already green
…is painted.

I’m guessing on purpose, as I’ve not read any news of a conniving gang of botany-loving graffiti artists run amuck in Vestavia.

I let out a chuckle so full of disbelief I might have temporarily passed for an atheist and I wondered aloud to Ivan, who didn’t seem too concerned with anything but the lingering scent of a lesser man at a tree trunk:

Are we really so concerned with the way we’re seen in our community that we must paint our own grass when it’s not up to par?

He must have been rendered speechless by his conviction, because he didn’t respond.

Even so, I marveled at how painted grass reflects what is important to us.

While I’ve never actually taken a can of paint to my front yard on a sunny day, I could only think of how many times I have painted my metaphorical grass green, and I no longer felt superior to those who’ve taken it one step more literally than I have.

I felt sad.

I buy the clothes I think will get people to perceive me the right way. I obsess about the way my clothes fall on my body, trying to hide the wrong and accentuate the right. I buy brown canvas totes for my iPad and write on a bluetooth keyboard in hipster coffee shops hellbent on changing the world with their fair-trade, pour-over brews and wide selection of hemp merchandise – and boy do I Instagram while I’m there. I post funny Facebook statuses and haikus on Twitter to make sure people know how much I love my life and how well I’m doing and how much I sit around soaking in the awesomeness of everything around me.

I make sure everyone around me sees my greenest grass – even when, perhaps especially when, my lawn is tired and patchy.

I’ve been asking myself lately what I’m so afraid of, generally speaking. Half of my grass-painting quirks are borne of fear – fear of rejection, fear of… being truly seen? I’m really not even sure. But why on earth would we paint our grass if we weren’t afraid of something?

Walking with Ivan, I felt the ever-present Nudge within me to stop my part of this facade.

The Nudge said to let my barren parts be known, because all our yards have imperfect patches, the parts where the Ivans of the world have romped and rolled and messed up what was pristine; all our yards have grass we’re proud of, where it grows plentiful and tall and naturally green, and they all have places the grass won’t grow at all.

The Nudge suggested – why don’t we stop running around like deranged, suburban maniacs wielding buckets and brushes of grass-stain pretending that nothing is wrong with us or our lawn?

Do we really think people can’t see past what we paint, even when it’s our best coat?

When I wear the right clothes, do I think people can’t see what I don’t want them to see?
When I do something well, do I really assume people think I do everything perfectly?
When I smile without stopping, am I so naive to assume people don’t know I’m not actually so happy all the time?

Neighborhood news bulletin: we can still see each other.

We can still see each other’s grass, the real grass underneath the fake green.
We’re not as convincing as we hope we are.

So, what if we just up admitted it?

Just walked into the street, threw up our arms and shouted, I NEED HELP WITH GARDENING, PEOPLE, AND I KNOW YOU ALL SEE ME STRUGGLING – MY GRASS IS OBVIOUSLY AND UNNATURALLY SEA FOAM GREEN, FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE.

Now, I’ve learned that there will be neighbors who peep stealthily behind cracked curtains and, instead of helping, call the Beautification Council to complain about how your yard is not up to the neighborhood’s standards.

They will be the ones with the most pristinely painted lawns. They will wear fancy clothes and their children, achievements, jobs and bodies will be better than yours. They will be the president of at least three things, active on multiple church committees and somehow still have time and energy to play tennis after their personal training appointments.

We must admit to ourselves if and when we are these people, and we must fight to the death not to become these neighbors to those around us.

These perfect people actually need the most help, because they’re the ones creating and sustaining the community’s fear of brown patches in our grass. After you get your own help, you should cook them something in your inferior kitchen and invite them to know God or go to therapy. Probably both. We all need both.

But, fortunately, there will be other neighbors.

And when we shout in the street, these are the neighbors who happen to have some fertilizer to share, or who incidentally minored in gardening in college, or who are willing to admit their yards aren’t so impeccable either, and you all get to relax into the medicinal chuckles that come with every me too, and then, despite your imperfect grass –

at least you have made some friends.

And maybe they’ll even offer you some lemonade or a cup of decaf.

When our grass is brown (because it is for us all at some time or another) and we’re up front about it, we aren’t left to try to grow it alone. We aren’t forced to pretend, to try to paint something unpaintable, and then we have the opportunity to get to the real thing, the soft grass that’s naturally green and tickles your toes without tie-dying them.

Painted grass prevents us from pure grass. It’s an imitation at best, and it robs us of the chance to get grass that’s green because it’s healthy, well-nourished and well-tended.

It does take courage in places we’re not encouraged to be courageous (by the perfect neighbors, no doubt) to admit our shortcomings in landscaping and in life, but in the words of Anne Lamott, tough things – like admitting our imperfections – are “spiritual weight training,” and I’m hoping I learn what it looks like in my life to un-paint my grass. I hope you will, and I’m sure Ivan is doing his own reflection, too.

And, if you’re interested, come over and have some coffee or lemonade with me and Ivan in suburbia, and we can laugh together walking and talking lawn care, painted grass and the beauty of our brown, patchy imperfections.

We could even bake the perfect neighbors a cake.
m

about the ache in our hearts

I have been able to have wonderful conversations with several people I love recently, and while I’ve had fun catching up, nearly all of them told me stories that absolutely broke my heart.

For now, the stories aren’t important. The broken heart is.

Yesterday while catching up with another friend, my heart nearly physically ached at the culmination of a series of heart-wrenching situations, both others’ and my own, and as he wrapped up his tale I found myself helplessly staring off into the blue sky wondering if my eyes were going to form the tears I felt like crying, mouth slightly open and breath paralyzed, not because of the story itself but because of the sad desperation that surged within me.

this is not how things are supposed to be

Normally, I grimace at the way Christians use the phrase “supposed to.” It shames people for their shortcomings more than anything, and I don’t know that it’s ever really helped someone to tell them, religiously, that they are supposed to be doing this or that. For me, it’s only ever made me feel angry and disempowered and sinful; discouraged and incapable, not spurred on to righteousness.

But in this sense, when we feel like weeping upon the news of a friend’s mess, only because we know all too well our capacity to make our own – the mess we spend all of our time trying to pick up, hoping no one will notice and wishing someone would just show us her mess, too, so we didn’t feel so alone;
in this sense, when we’re forced to confront our weaknesses
or when the relationship didn’t end the way it began
or when everything perfect in our lives is only a memory
or when we finally admit that life isn’t at all what we’d dreamed,
the same cry comes from within all of us,

this is not how things are supposed to be,

and “supposed to” is absolutely the correct phrasing.

I think that cry is one of the things we all have in common, Christian or non. We’ve all been disappointed, put all of our hope in something only to be let down in the deepest place, forced to admit there are some things we can strive for and never earn or gain or have. We can give something our all, and it still might not be enough.

My heart has hurt enough to believe the ache must be indicative of something.

This is the tether on my ankle that will never let me leave God, this idea that there once was Paradise, that we were made to be there, and now, we are not, though our hearts are still synchronized to the rhythm of our original intention. We feel the disjointedness of this life’s rhythm and our heart’s beat in every failure and sickness, every sin and every death.

These seasons of my life where things are hard and gritty and it’s difficult for me to remember what’s important or true, where I have to write myself notes that say “God is real” and “the gospel is still true” to find when I wake up in the morning, are the ones that bring me most graciously back to this place of remembering that this is not how things are supposed to be.

In hearing the story from my friend yesterday, I was reminded again.

I survived with a heavy heart the rest of the afternoon, wandering around wondering after it all, feeling sad and hopeless for the world, for the state it’s in, for all the people I know whose lives haven’t become what they hoped and are hopelessly stuck in a rut of self-hatred and other-hatred because of it, and for myself. I was sobered by the inevitable disappointment we face.

In the midst of asking God and myself what we do in light of this uninviting reality, I received a text reminding me that tomorrow was World Communion Sunday, when the Church worldwide celebrates at the table together.

Communion.

Many of my friends have lovingly, apologetically, awkwardly laughed at me during Communion, because for the last three years or so, I haven’t been able to participate in it without crying.

It is the most sacred thing in the world to me, one of the holiest things we do, because it’s where Paul’s words to the Galatians – “all are one in Christ Jesus” – come alive before our very eyes. It’s where we watch the modern day Church meet the ancient Church at the same table of the same Lord to partake of the same bread and wine that represent the same ancient salvation for all people. It’s where the Church agrees together that this bread and wine is what gives us purpose, wholeness, completeness, forgiveness, unity and salvation.

And what is Communion if not remembrance that something happened so long ago to right this wrong that our heart aches to indicate,
to put right what was undone at the beginning of humanity,
to celebrate Love that has saved us from ourselves and this unpredictable, volatile world that leaves us disappointed and insufficient to arrange for our own lasting happiness,

and to know with full assurance that Paradise will one day again be our home?

We celebrate in Communion the body that was born to be broken for the brokenness we bear.

After I read the text, I broke down crying. I really haven’t stopped since. So many times in all the stories over the last couple of weeks my heart has broken for the brokenness in me and in those around me, for our unhappiness and for her shame and for his pride and for her judgment and for his struggle and for my resentment and unforgiveness and grief and loneliness.

This morning, I brought those heartaches to the Table and offered them there, between the softness of the bread and the tartness of the wine, and I was reminded that, unfortunately,

this is not how things are supposed to be

is our present reality.

But the Table, Communion, reminded me of what I had lost sight of – that fortunately, Love has outdone our heartache, and though we may suffer disappointment and failure, the message of the Table rings stronger and truer than the sadness and despair of a broken world, and we can rest knowing that one day,

things will be exactly how they were supposed to be,

and our hearts will still be synchronized to the rhythm of our original intention;

but they won’t ever ache.
m

happy world communion sunday.

breath

My life feels as real as it ever has.

I’ve never felt quite so alive, so in touch with my own humanity and helplessness. The breath I breathe every day not only keeps me going, but reminds me that I am.

My present reality having been reduced to such simplicity, such apparent nothingness – no job, no formulated plans, no idea where my next step will be – has drawn my attention to my breath. It is a welcome constant.

Granted, I can do other things other than breathe in the meantime – some of my favorites right now are panic, fret, pace, cry, obsessively journal, stare, and sleep for ten hours a night – but through it all I go on breathing. I have no choice.

Yet breath has become this beautiful, momentary reminder that as much we’ve lost, we still have not lost everything. Every exhale is a tiny victory cry:

you are still here

While I’m doing a great job of romanticizing all this oxygen exchange, I’m still just waiting. And I’m not used to waiting. Waiting makes me feel like I don’t matter, like God is looking at his watch and tapping the face in rhythm with his toe, making clicking noises with his mouth on his shaking head and growing in disappointment every second that passes by.

And there I sit, dumbly breathing, wide-eyed and terrified, because it’s all I can do.

However, the fortunate reality is that God is no neurotic parent. I doubt he even has a watch.

God is Patience, and God is Time. Is not waiting the very essence of our Christian life? Are we not resigned to “groan and wait,” even as expectant mothers? There will always be waiting – it characterizes our lives as Christians.

So I realize that it is not God tapping his watch in disappointment.

It’s me.

I exhale, perhaps on purpose, and I wonder, frustrated,

Why is it so hard to wait?

I’ve always avoided idle, waiting, resting seasons because my identity is in what I do. What I do is who I am, and when I wait, I can only breathe.

What a pointless existence.

Doesn’t God want me somewhere doing something? Isn’t that when I matter? Why isn’t he doing anything with me?

As I hyperventilate to make breathing more important, I’m starting to think he is.

I think it’s ultimately difficult for me because, now, I have nothing to present to God as the reason he should love me. I’m forced into this odd place of authentic trust where Grace must become more sufficient than my performance and where I must choose to hold fast to the truth that God loves me on the couch as much as he does in foreign countries.

Still, I have these paralyzing moments of panic where I am suddenly aware that I am only breathing, that I’m not doing anything, and I immediately, valiantly stand up from the couch to do something to justify the breath I am taking.

It cannot be enough to just breathe, I gasp.

I think I hear a Whisper suggest otherwise.

There are moments where my desperation to get out of this season, to have answers, to serve somewhere – to matter – is so tangible that I could almost peel its very fingers from my throat as it tries to steal the last thing I have, my breath itself. Time crawls. Sometimes it completely stops. Where are you, God? I frantically cry. What am I doing here? What do you want from me in this place? Send me anywhere, anywhere but here!

The moments only get longer, and usually, they turn into tears. It’s as if they’ll never pass and I’ll be resigned to wait for the rest of my life, my life that is over and meaningless.

And still, I breathe.

you are still here

I can’t help but wonder if time seems to crawl in our moments of utter desperation because God is giving us a slow-motion opportunity to take hold of the very thing the waiting is for. Maybe minutes pass like hours so that we have longer to realize, to understand, to aha.

Maybe those chokingly infinite moments of desperation are invitations, invitations to active waiting, which is to say that maybe they’re invitations to belief.

Maybe all this waiting is just an invitation to believe.

To believe in the larger story God is writing and the ending we already know.

To believe in God the loving Father, who has not given up on us and will not. Ever.

What if waiting is God’s pause button, the one that creates just enough silence to hear God screaming through our efforts to do everything, begging us to remember him, to find him. To know him.

What if the desperate seasons of waiting and uncertainty – the ones where we are so utterly lost for where to go and what to do that we’re forced to confront our powerlessness and driven to our knees – are Grace-in-disguise, confusing, stopping, pausing or altogether thwarting our plans in order to save us from ourselves and direct us to what really saves us?

And what if the point of waiting is exactly what has happened to me,

to reduce us to our breath,

to remind us

that breath is all we are.

In the agonizing stillness and silence, waiting reminds us what is real:

that we are only breath, yet our breath itself is proof that nothing is over yet, that something greater than present reality is at work and that in each moment, however defeated we may feel, we are not quite.

Each breath we breathe is an extended hand, inviting us to agree to believe in the veiled future we await.

May each breath blend together through the unfolding of our lives to create the steady rhythm of hope, hope that we are not done and that greater things are yet to come.

And may such rhythm, such ebb and flow, the ins and outs and gasps and sighs, invite us to soak in the waiting, the rest in the current moment, and whisper sweetly in our ears:

you are still here.

m

what it means to live, what it means to be great and how neither is what i thought it was

I’m presently living what I’ve affectionately termed my “quarter-life sabbatical.”

That’s a romantic way to say I’m a 20-something, unemployed college grad living at her parents’ house for a little while. (I’m moving out next month, calm down.)

While that is hilarious and really sad and sometimes throws me into the kind of panic that feels like I just swallowed a whole grapefruit, this sabbatical season is surely God-ordained in my life. I haven’t really stopped moving since I was 16, always living to do the next thing, never slowing down to breathe or take emotional inventory or check up on my character or heart. Since I was mostly doing Christian things – mission trips, worship leading, ministry of various types – I thought that was kind of built in to everything I was doing.

Maybe it is for some people.

But I need a pause button to do all those things, and I feel lovingly, divinely forced to the sidelines, my Coach taking me by the shoulders and begging, “Hastings, will you grab a Gatorade and rest a minute, maybe look back over the playbook? You’re not even playing the game anymore – you’re just flailing your arms like a madwoman around the court.”

I’ve measured the value of my self and my life by all these things I’ve done. I became the sum of my last great adventure, living to announce the next destination or event that awaited me. Simply, I live(d) to be great, and each time I did something new, it was “the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”

This time, the greatest thing was the World Race. I really thought it was something. When I came home, it had made up such a huge part of my life for so long that I didn’t know what to make of myself anymore.

What would I do without this thing to define me, to speak for me? And what in the world was I going to do with no idea what was next? I had nothing to stand on.

In the best and worst way, I just was.

And after swallowing my fair share of grapefruit, I have accepted that right now in this sabbatical, I just am.

In the midst of just being, then, I’ve had tons of reflection time. I reflect in the morning and the evening on paper and in reading, and I reflect all through the day in my head. I reflect in conversation and I reflect while driving. I might as well be turning into a mirror with all the reflecting I’m doing. At least then I’d have a job.

But slowly, through all the reflection, I’m starting to see that “the greatest thing I’ve ever done” might end up being quite different than I expected.

Too often I expected that each next, big thing would unleash greatness in my life, as though a secret, magical number of plane tickets and pictures with orphan children would unlock the key to my happiness and success. Either I haven’t hit it yet, or I’m learning something different.

And that is this:

Life is too full of potential, too much like baited breath, to wait for “the greatest moment of our lives” to happen to us when the capacity to live greatly is already abundantly ours. How to reveal that potential, to let out that suspended breath in a warm, nourishing laugh, depends on where we think greatness waits to crown us.

I already remember less the grades I made or the positions I held, and more the people sitting beside me, the things people said to me.

Our lives really are the sum of a million moments, the resounding echo of a million different sounds, and I think I’m starting to believe that the seemingly insignificant moments or things or people or deeds or words often are where greatness lies hidden, waiting.

In the most cliche way – because some cliche things have earned the title not as kitsch, mindless adages but as seasoned veterans, weathered and worn in the best way, like used leather, highly decorated from their many years battling in the war of life – yes, in the most cliche way, the greatest things I’ve ever done have been the simplest things.

They haven’t really been defined by where my physical location was or how many miles I traveled or how highly touted and applauded the endeavor was. No, I’m seeing as I reflect on my quarter-century of a life that the greatest things I’ve ever done have been things that seemed inconsequential.

The small choices that made big impacts, the choices made from love and not selfishness, the acts of kindness for strangers, the hug or the shoulder or the time given to someone dear when there were other things to be done.

The acts of ordinary courage, of humility to ask for help, of humility to give it when asked.

The times we stay at the table when it’s easier to walk away, the times we don’t give up on the people in our lives who struggle.

The times we don’t give up on ourselves.

That is where greatness lies.

Those are the moments I cherish, the ones I’m proud of.

And that, I’m learning, is life.

Live is not lived anywhere but where you are, and life itself is available to us at every moment. We don’t need to be anywhere, we don’t need to be doing anything specific. Life is lived greatly not in vacations or trips, but in weekdays and dinner times, working hours and afternoon walks, lunches and workouts. Wherever you are.

And our life’s greatness waits patiently in small packages.

Perhaps the greatest things I’ve ever said are not in any blog post or college paper, but merely, I don’t know or I believe in you or thank you or I love you.

Without a doubt one of the greatest things I’ve ever done is to forgive someone.

Without a doubt one of the greatest things I’m learning to do is to forgive me.

And one of the greatest things I’ll ever do, unusual as it is for me, is take this sabbatical to discover what the true meaning of greatness is, how it’s not anything I thought it was, how it’s not even the point, and how life is not waiting to begin at the destination on my next plane ticket.

It’s now,

and it’s in this cup of coffee and the chipmunk outside my window and the sun peeping through the woods, gradually, imperceptibly, imitating the slow, steady unfolding of our lives as light breaks through the trees, and in the candle burning the smell of fresh cotton through my room and in my spirit as I breathe in all that there is to be lived here, now, today.

Do something great today.
m

trees

Today, I noticed fall.

While lazing in a lake, a single, autumn-red leaf tapped me on the shoulder, stem standing at attention and tips spread like fingers. I picked it up, delighted by its color, admiring the beauty of Creativity.

It was one of the first signs I’ve seen of the shifting seasons, and, since I was only floating in a lake with nothing else to do, I gazed up at the branches above me, and it made me wonder.

It made me wonder if trees ever get overheated in the summer and daydream about the day their leaves will slip into their annual shading, excitedly anticipating the season that always returns the spotlight to them. I wonder if they think of all the oohs and ahhs they’ll get as people gaze upon their crop of striking colors.

I wonder if they fear the moment the first leaf falls, knowing all too well the yearly cycle and what happens when it watches the inevitable, inexorable fall of the leaves that give it a greater purpose for a season.

I wonder if they’re sad all through the barren chill of winter, pining for warm spring breezes to dance through their full branches, to sway to and fro to the sweet melody that sings life to the same tune every year.

I wonder if they’re delighted at the first swallow that rests in their bare arms and rings out the news to the rest of nature, the exciting news of newness – how it’s happened again, how spring never let them down before and how this year is no exception. I wonder if they suffer growing pains as they bud new flowers and leaves from trunk to tip, and I wonder if they quickly get hot and begin again to wait anxiously for fall.

I wonder if they see the pattern.

Floating in the water holding the leaf, it suddenly seemed to be asking if I saw the same thing.

Every time something changes in my life, I am legitimately surprised. It seems that as I settle into one season, I am convinced that this will be the one that stays, that this will be my life, that I can finally settle into this routine I’ve found. These are my friends, this is my job, this is my schedule.

And then it all changes.

I finish the project. Someone moves away. Relationships wear out.

Things inevitably change.

And every time, I am devastated.

I’m thrown into a panic, questioning my very existence and purpose, questioning God and his goodness and the agreement I thought we’d reached about my life staying the same this time.

Now, in yet another season of change, I feel God beckoning me to notice, to recognize – to see – the pattern.

We are just like the trees.

We are seasonal beings subject to seasonal changes in a seasonal life.

Our lives will never stay. To stay is not who we are; to remain is not our calling. We are dynamic, and our lives are sometimes colorful, sometimes green, sometimes bare and sometimes blossoming.

That is just how life is.

It’s how life has to be.

And it seems like we have a choice amidst all these changes as natural as the leaf I studied, the water I floated in and the breeze that tickled my eyelashes.

We could insist on our own way – on being rigid, unmovable beings content to stay in one place, one season, because we like it there in the place where, at last, we are content. Happy. We found where we could stay forever, and we could try to stay.

But we don’t have that choice.

Look at the trees. If they chose this, they would cease to be what they are. They would shrivel up and die in their choice of perpetual summer. They would never live without leaves in an endless winter. They could never sustain growth in an eternal spring and they would run out of leaves in fall that lasted forever.

The permanence of what they loved would ensure their death.

One-season lives would kill them.

No change,

no life.

What’s most difficult about change is enduring the rough seasons. Resting there in the water I thought certainly most trees must hate winter – they’re stripped of everything that makes them trees: no leaves, nothing green, no life; just ugly, naked trunk.

But maybe the trees are more mature than I am, and maybe they don’t hate winter.

Maybe they see that their

barren, stripped seasons,

the ugly, naked trunk seasons,

are just as much part of who they are

just as necessary to their life

just as beautiful and important

as the plentiful, blossoming seasons

where everything is right with the world

and they look like perfect trees.

Maybe our biggest mistake in enduring change is mistaking some seasons for more important – dare I say better – than others. Maybe change isn’t the culprit in our unhappiness and discontentment.

Maybe it’s us.

Maybe it is we who are guilty when we under-appreciate this beautiful, captivating, unstoppable rhythm of life we’re dramatically and utterly subject to.

How breathtaking that we can do nothing about the inescapability of shifting seasons in our lives, that Something so wonderfully benign is orchestrating things not even our wildest imaginations could muster.

How breathtaking that we are as the leaf I held in my hand today.

My desire is to be more like the trees, who, I suspect, have understood this for quite some time, who in their wisdom have learned to stand tall throughout each season that comes and goes each year.

My desire is for us to be as they are: firmly rooted, deeply planted, unwavering through storms and sun;

all the while content to blossom and die,

to rejoice as our leaves bloom and mourn as they fall away,

to bask in the sun that shines and to drink up the nourishing rains when they come,

and to endure with outstretched and thankful arms each season that will undoubtedly come to us, day in and day out, until, finally, we fall to the earth from which we came to become part of the life that is lived forever.

to the trees.

m