Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poetry, spirituality on August 12, 2012 | 4 Comments »
If God were a mother bear
My mother bear
And all the earth were her cubs
I would throw my arms around her girth
Press my face against her fur
I would feel her breath wrap itself around me
And she would comfort me.
If I listened to the strong beat of her heart,
My ear melting into her chest
My heart would start beating with hers
Until I loved all the earth like my own cubs
And being
Breathing
Heart beating
Would be enough
Photo by Karin Jonsson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged depression, mindfulness, spirituality on June 21, 2012 | 7 Comments »
My spirit—you know, that intangible part of me that’s connected with God—I’m not sure it lives inside me. Sometimes I think it’s as if I made her a little house out front. Like a birdhouse, pretty and ornate, but probably too small, now that I think of it.
I go out and visit my spirit every day, sometimes a lot. It’s very important to me. Sometimes it sends me back with little gifts, like flowers that I put on the table and draw strength from, and bask in their beauty.
But I don’t invite my spirit inside. Well, sometimes for a tour or a cup of tea. But not to live here. She lives near. She is part of my life.
But what if she were inside and saw me, head in hands, drowning in depression? Would she have something to say?
Or if I said, “Yes, yes, I’ll do this or that,” to please someone else, when I knew the promise would compromise me—what if my spirit saw that?
What would my spirit do when she watched me sitting at the computer, lonely, longing for love and thinking that it comes from outside of me?
What does she think of my physical exercise—is she present? Does she come along for the walk, and jog when I jog? Does she surround my body and take pleasure in the feel of strength and sweat?
Why do I leave my spirit outside in her little house when I’m worried about where I’m going to live or what is going to happen to my family? Would she not comfort me?
Why don’t I let her in, with her golden connection with God? Why don’t I let myself feel my heart full of Divine Love that pours and pours until I can’t hold any more and then it still keeps pouring?
Why don’t I let her be my advocate, and feel her tangible confidence protecting me when I need someone to tell me, “It’s okay to say no.”
What would it feel like if I let my spirit live throughout my body, see through my eyes, notice the sounds that I normally ignore? What if I lived from that place of unity with my spirit instead of just going to visit?
P. S. Dear friends, please take this as metaphor, not theology. It’s about realizing that I often forget that my spirit, intertwined with God, is my life, not just an intimate part of my life.
Photo by Valerie Everett
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged authenticity, changes, depression, spirituality on June 13, 2012 | 3 Comments »
“There’s a problem with the baby,” said the doctor, pressing the ultrasound probe to my belly. It was 2002, and I was 16 weeks pregnant, at the hospital for a normal prenatal checkup. I looked over at Steve. I could tell from his face that he understood that “problem” was a euphemism. The baby was dead.
The next piece of news was almost as bad. I was too far along for a D&C. I had to go home and wait for labor to start. A midwife told me to try not to think about it. Right.
Not only did I fail to distract myself effectively, I obsessed about this dead baby I was carrying. I felt like I couldn’t grieve, couldn’t say good bye, couldn’t move on. I was sad, but what I felt most was out of control. I so badly wanted this ordeal to be over.
I didn’t put this into words, but looking back, I can see that somewhere deep down I believed that if I prayed hard enough and often enough, if I wanted it enough, if I used enough mental and emotional energy, that somehow I could end the torture of waiting.
For two weeks I agonized over continuing to carry my lifeless child. Then the doctor decided to try to induce labor. I spent the weekend in the hospital hooked up to an IV, waiting for labor to start. At one point I was weeping under the weight of it all, and a nurse told me, “Don’t cry. You’ll give yourself a headache.”
The induction didn’t work. I went home again, still praying and straining with all my emotional might, as if I could do something.
About a week later, something clicked. I realized that ending this ordeal was truly not in my hands. Instead of praying that I would go into labor NOW, I started affirming that I released the timing into God’s hands. I made myself a mix tape (yeah, this was a while ago) of songs about release, surrender, and God being into control, and I listened to it over and over. When the ache of not being able to do anything hit, I came back again and again to opening my hands in a gesture of letting go.
The last week of waiting was actually peaceful. One month after finding out the baby was dead, I finally went into labor. I had previously wondered how women handled labor when they knew there would be no live child to hold on the other side. That wasn’t an issue. My experience is that labor pains fill our vision and we can’t think of the future, whether beautiful or tragic.
We saw our baby. I remember how each tiny rib stood out under the purple-grey skin, how the eyes were closed and the head a little misshapen from too long in a temporary grave.
The waiting was over. We could say good bye to our baby, and life could go on.
In another post, I talked about how during depression, something beautiful is growing, hidden in the darkness. But this gestating beauty often has a twin—death that is waiting to be released. The birth of newness and the letting go of death both create labor pains that eclipse the view of what’s ahead.
Though unseen during depression (as in labor), a future still exists. That future holds the relief of final good byes to parts of our lives we have been needlessly carrying, and the future holds the emergence of new life that would have been unimaginable before going through the depths.
To me, these thoughts are gifts from a painful experience. The hope of both release and beauty occasionally peeks through the darkness of depression and encourages me. May these thoughts encourage you as well.
Photo by Jon Ovington, CC License
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged authenticity, spirituality on May 29, 2012 | 12 Comments »
Gestation of Darkness
(This is a silhouette of a pregnant woman in case you can’t tell)
I have recently been in the midst of the most severe bout of depression of my life. That’s saying a lot, for those of you who knew me 6 or 7 years ago. Part of how I have been helping myself is to draw almost every day. I’m not sure I’d call it art, but it is therapeutic.
When we are depressed, our bodies and everything around us seem consumed with darkness. But, because of my previous experiences of depression, I believe that hidden deep in the blackness is beauty that is growing and waiting to emerge. (It took me about two months and a hospital stay to start believing this again, so I’m not saying hope comes naturally in depression.)
In my first significant experience of depression as an adult, I experienced a deep knowledge of God accompanying me in my suffering. In my second depression, which also marked the beginning of what I would call the Dark Night of the Soul, I found all the foundations of my life unravelling. But most significantly, what unravelled (and still is coming undone, honestly) was a lot of unhealthy and unhelpful ways of relating to God. This period of time started opening space in my life for new appreciation of mystery, a reluctant willingness to face uncertainty, and a new practice of courage and authenticity both with myself and with others. These painful periods of my life have changed me for the better. And I’m beginning to believe that good change is on its way this time too.
That hidden gestation of beauty in the darkness is what I was trying to capture in my sketch this morning. And I wondered if it might give hope to someone else as well. I would love to hear in the comments if it means something to you.
From my heart to yours,
Christen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cross-cultural issues, spirituality on April 15, 2012 | 10 Comments »
I’m going to make up a Bible story.
Once upon a time, Jesus was teaching his disciples, saying, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” (Ok that part is real; it’s in Matthew 5…the rest I’m making up.) But someone in the crowd, wanting to justify himself, asked Jesus, “But who is my enemy?”
Now, in my story, if I was more creative, Jesus would tell a really great parable that turns the question on its head, asking the crowd, “Who am I treating as an enemy?”
If we try to answer that question, we may note that our killing sprees are infrequent, and we no longer push people down on the playground. We would probably find ourselves repenting over ways that we have treated a spouse like an enemy, or ways that we bulldozed our son’s boundaries, or spoke harshly to a coworker. But I’d like to go a bit beyond that to ways that I have seen myself treating people as enemies in the past.
You know how we don’t really notice the aroma of home until we’ve been away, or how our hometown landscape is invisible to us until we’ve lived in a different place? Well, I noticed something about American Christian culture when I moved toBahrain. I noticed that Christians feel like a lot of groups are their enemies, even though we don’t call them that.
American Christians often feel like a small, persecuted minority. Other people don’t see us that way. In fact, others can feel overwhelmed by the strength and prominence of the Christian presence inAmerica. Christians feel like others have an agenda to take away their freedom of religion, and Christians feel the need to defend themselves. Others feel that Christians fight to have their own rights trump the rights of other groups.
Some of these feelings lead Christians to feel that we are being attacked. But we don’t call those people enemies. Sometimes I wish we would. I wish Christians would just say, “Yeah, I think (fill in the blank–Muslims, Democrats, gays, atheists, immigrants, or non-Christians) are our enemies. I think they are intentionally trying to destroy our way of life.” Because if Christians would admit that we think people are our enemies, wouldn’t we have to make the connection that Jesus told us to love those people?
But suppose we don’t ask “Who is my enemy?” Suppose we ask, “Am I acting like an enemy?”
Maybe we would see that we take whole groups of people and the individuals in that group, and we assume negative intentions on their part, and then treat them accordingly. We might discover that we don’t really listen to others’ perspectives, but insist on believing that we know what they “truly” believe, or what their “real” agenda is. We might find out that when we say things like “love the sinner, but hate the sin,” we have no idea how deeply we are hurting the so-called “sinners.” Especially when “loving the sinner” is theoretical, whereas “hating the sin” is well-practiced and oft-articulated.
I want you to know that I’m writing this because I feel deeply grieved over the ways in which I have done these things. I have valued rightness over kindness, honored evangelism over unconditional love, and held so tightly to my foundation of certainty that I wasn’t able to truly respect people who believed or lived differently from me. It took some pretty big (and painful) paradigm shifts in my life to see how unloving I could be at times—especially when I thought I was being loving.
I would love it if you would share your thoughts about who we treat as enemies.
Photo by Aislinn Ritchie, CC license
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cross-cultural issues, spirituality on April 6, 2012 | 4 Comments »
This says,"I am Muslim, and I love my Christian brothers and sisters."
Men kept touching me. They have this way of reaching out in the middle of a crowd and brushing your body in inappropriate places without ever looking your way. Then you doubt yourself, because no one looks like they did it on purpose. But it’s too targeted and personal to be an accidental touch.
I had only been in Bahrain about a year, but I knew that none of my friends were having this problem with guys. I was doing everything I could to dress and behave modestly and appropriately. But it kept happening.
One night I was home alone and the doorbell rang. We had an intercom, like everyone else, but I couldn’t understand the person on the other end. I went out my front door and unlocked the gate to find a Pakistani man standing there. “Give chance. Give chance,” he said. I thought he wanted to wash my car.
After several attempts to communicate, he asked, “Russia?” “No…America,” I answered, puzzled. I closed the gate, and by the time I got inside it dawned on me—he thought I was a Russian prostitute. I was stunned, and also ashamed and nervous. Why would he think I was a prostitute? Was he watching the house to know that I was alone? Was I safe? Were there others?
Several days later he came back. I ran up to my roof to see over the wall and confirm that it was him again. I called my neighbor, a Bahraini man with several daughters who I knew would help. He called the police and came over and held onto the man until the police came. I was really shaken. And all the police questioning makes you feel like it’s your fault.
Funny, even writing this now, I wonder, will people think this was my fault? I felt that shame much more back then–because women often feel that way, because Middle Eastern culture tends to put responsibility on the woman in these kinds of incidents, and maybe mostly because I was trying so hard not to draw attention to myself, to be above reproach in that culture.
As these incidents added up, they started to weigh on me. I was nervous. My stomach would knot when I pulled up behind a truck full of Pakistani workers. The stares unnerved me. I felt jumpy dealing with men at shops or in the souq.
After a while, some ideas started to rise up inside of me. Two Bible verses became mantras to me, not just to say them, but to imagine them. One was “The name of the Lord is a fortified tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.” (Proverbs 18:10) I would imagine God as a tower with strong walls all around me, and it helped me to feel safe. The other verse was “But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, the one who lifts my head high.” (Psalm 3:3) In many ways the hijab, or veil, is a symbol of honor and protection for a woman.* But my physical coverings didn’t seem to be doing their job. So with this verse I actually pictured God wrapping a cloak around me that hid me from those who wanted to take advantage of me. The part about God being the lifter of my head helped me let go of some of the shame I had been feeling.
These practices, done consistently every time I felt uncomfortable or frightened helped me recover a feeling of safety and security. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to move from feeling protected to actively loving. So there was another component to my practice. As is often the case, my fears had generalized to all men of similar ethnic origins. So it wasn’t just a handful of people who hurt me that I was now afraid of—it was lots of people. So every time I felt uncomfortable I would ask God to bless those people that I was afraid of—I would try to desire from my heart that God would do good things for them.
Recently I have been thinking about how negative experiences with a few people can grow to become anger toward and fear of a whole group of people. It happens all over the world, but my heart particularly aches when I see this happen between Muslims and Christians.
Individual hurts have taken place when Americans have been affected by terrorism, when Muslims have been bullied or hurt by hate crimes, when people from each group try to convert each other in disrespectful ways, and when we assume the worst about each other. But those hurts that happen on an individual level, or on a small-group level become culturally ingrained fears, prejudices, and inability to love.
There is no magic formula for overcoming these hurts, because they affect us each individually in different ways. I shared my story as just one example. For me, the emotional touch points were fear and shame. It’s important for each person to invite healing into their lives in a way that is personally meaningful, in the way that your gut tells you you most need it, and then to turn around that healing toward the people who hurt you, even toward their whole ethnic or religious group.
My story ends with a dramatic, but not immediate transformation. I had to keep the practice up for a significant period of time before I noticed that I was settling into a feeling of safety and love again, but it was a big change from the fear and anxiety that I had been experiencing.
Do you have stories of seeing this kind of change happen in you? Do you have experiences that you would like to see turned around from hurt to love? Tell us about it in the comments.
*Note: Yes, there are ways the hijab can be used negatively as well—it is a mixed bag that is experienced differently by different women, but I think it’s important to understand that it can have positive connotations.
Photo by Gigi Ibrahim
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged authenticity, spirituality on February 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
I have a confession. I worry a LOT about getting things right. Sometimes I worry so much that I get stuck and don’t make any decision at all. For me, this happens most often with spirituality and with writing, but sometimes it’s when I have an hour free and I have so many things I want to accomplish that it takes me the whole hour to choose one.
Does that ever happen to you? Do you know what issues summon this paralysis for you?
I first hit on a solution in Quaker meeting. Our meeting is “unprogrammed,” which basically means that we sit together in silence for an hour. I love it, but as I mentioned, I worry a lot about getting things “right” spiritually. I was finding myself spending so much energy trying to decide what I was going to focus on, and then second-guessing myself once I had decided on something, that I never really focussed at all. Near the end of one of those hours it hit me: I needed to start the hour with an intention and then stick to it.
So the next week I did exactly that. In journaling the night before, I noticed a theme that I needed to marinate in a bit more, so I summarized it in one question. I decided that I was going to keep asking myself that question throughout the meeting, and whenever my mind went off on a tangent, I would bring myself back to that question. No second-guessing allowed!
You know what? It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t the most amazing experience of my life. But it was powerful. I started where I was, I made progress, and I didn’t have to wait until I found the yellow-brick road before I started off for the emerald city.
Intention-setting has become my new favorite tool in overcoming fear and perfectionism. In order for it to work, I have to challenge the feeling that life will come to an end if I don’t make the right choice. I also have to remove the option of questioning myself after I’ve made a decision. Not surprisingly, I’m a lot more productive when I settle on something and stick with it, whether we’re talking about prayer or what to get done during the kids’ swimming lessons.
So now, when I start noticing that anxiety creeping up and threatening to paralyze me, I take a reality check on how dire the consequences of imperfection really are, and I just choose something.
Photo by brO, CC License
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged authenticity, cross-cultural issues, spirituality on January 14, 2012 | 4 Comments »
On Thanksgiving morning I checked my facebook, as I often do. I clicked on a link a friend from the Middle East had posted, and all of a sudden I was face to face with pictures of a man whose head had been blown open during the Arab Spring protests. As I clicked the images closed, I felt almost as violently assaulted with the juxtaposition of this suffering and pain against cheery Thanksgiving messages.
All day I struggled. Physically, I was in the world of turkey and stuffing and apple pie, but mentally I was feeling guilty and ashamed to be celebrating in a safe place with my family when I have friends hurting in other places.
When I talk about this kind of survivor’s guilt, other people’s heads nod in solidarity. It’s a common experience, but not a road that ends well.
Here are some thoughts I have about survivor’s guilt and combating it:
Recognize dichotomistic thinking. When we see thousands of people dying, wounded, and homeless from an earthquake, our brains tend to go to a place where our lives are perfect and their lives are terrible—and why should we have it so good? We separate “our lives” from “their lives,” and we paint a sharp contrast between the two. Not only is the reality is less clear cut, but this automatic way of thinking separates us from those who are hurting rather than connecting us.
Focus on our connection rather than our separation. In truth, our lives are not all good, and their lives are not all bad. Though we may not have experienced the same disaster or magnitude of suffering, we do know pain. Whether we are faced with a large-scale tragedy or a friend who is hurting, opening our hearts to the common experience of loss and heartache allows us to replace guilt with empathy.
Accept our shared helplessness. I think feeling guilty is one way we cope with the terror of seeing the helplessness of the human condition. We cherish our sense of control and the related fantasy of fairness in life. When we are confronted by undeserved tragedy, it helps to allow ourselves to grieve over the powerlessness of both the sufferers and ourselves, rather than mentally fighting to maintain our illusion of control.
Choose actions carefully. Acting from guilt or from separation rather than from connection can do more harm than good. For large scale problems, we may desperately throw money at the tragedy without carefully considering the most helpful channels for those resources. For more personal problems, we may feel inclined to try to fix the problem or make it go away in order to deal with our discomfort. This often ends up coming across as “helping” from a position of superiority, rather than from a place of equality, and it belittles the sufferer. In either situation, slowing down, allowing ourselves to connect and be vulnerable enough to empathize, and waiting for wisdom can lead to more purposeful, calculated, and useful action.
Do you struggle with guilt when you see others in pain? What helps you overcome guilt and move to a more constructive place?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, Easter, spirituality on April 13, 2011 | 18 Comments »
This post is part of the April Synchroblog. In honor of Easter, this month’s topic is living the resurrection. Links to fellow bloggers will appear at the end of this post.
As Christians, we wonder how to live out the resurrection. We would love it if Jesus being raised from the dead meant that we would always be in a place of green fertility, newness, and wholeness. But that is just birth, not rebirth. I believe that living the resurrection means embracing the entire cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
We enjoy spring, when things are beautiful and we see life everywhere. Perhaps this is when our faith is new and fresh. Maybe it’s when we first fall in love with someone, or it’s a ministry we’ve begun that we are passionate about, or it’s a new job that we feel like we were born to do. But these experiences will mature and change; it’s as certain as death and taxes, to paraphrase Ben Franklin. Living the resurrection during spring means holding our experiences with a light touch as they change, grow, and emerge, and not grasping at the first excitement as the ultimate fulfillment of our vision.
In summer, our passions are no longer new, but they are thriving. I guess we feel and see God working during this season. We can tell people about the things that God is doing within us and around us. As the season goes on, we go blueberry picking, and we suffer some itchy chigger bites from crawling in the bushes, but it’s worth it because we get to eat and share yummy blueberry pie. Living the resurrection here means persevering through the battle scars and both enjoying and sharing the “fruit” that is showing up. But, again, it means knowing that the fruit won’t last forever.
While we are still harvesting, leaves start to change, and we start to see signs that death is coming. Death comes differently for us all the time. Sometimes we don’t see it coming; we are blindsided by a loss of health or being “downsized” from our job. Other times it creeps up on us slowly, like, for me, realizing that it was time to leave Bahrain after 11 years. Then death is upon us.Through faith, we grieve, while remembering that “blessed are those who mourn.” (Matt. 5:4) With one hand we let go of what we have lost, and with the other hand we hold on to the knowledge that there is no resurrection without death.
Then, rest. Watch. Wait. Nothing external is happening. We see no evidence of God’s work in our lives. We have lost what we thought he had given us. Undertaking the spiritual equivalent of “rebound dating” will not be fruitful. Resurrection is not something we make happen. It is something we wait for. For a whole season. It’s quiet. The only things happening are so far under the surface that sometimes we don’t believe anything is occurring. When we live in resurrection, we let it be quiet during the winter. We wait as changes beyond our control take place beyond the reach of our vision.
But the resurrection does come. At last. After a long winter, we start to see new things growing. Perhaps this should be the most obvious season of resurrection, but in some ways it is the most deceptive. Our caterpillar died, and we may be looking for him to be raised as a fresh new caterpillar. But instead he emerges as a butterfly. The seed that was buried does not push out of the ground as a seed; all the potential that was hidden inside that seed is what peeks out of the ground. Living the resurrection is holding open our expectations, because the new incarnation of God’s dreams for us won’t look like what we imagined.
Rather than being a place, or an outward manifestation that we live in, resurrection is something that we carry in our hearts through all the seasons. It enables us to be present with each season without holding tightly onto any of them.
In this metaphorical year of my life, where I have said good-bye to so much of who I was and what I expected of God by leaving Bahrain, I feel that I am nearing the end of winter. I’m starting to see hints that life is showing up again. I still don’t know what that will look like, so I want to keep my eyes open to see beyond my expectations.
Would you share what season you are in and how you are living the resurrection in that season?
Check out the other great posts for this month’s synchroblog:
Phil Wyman at Square No More – Apocalyptic fervor spurs benevolent giving
Marta Layton at Marta’s Mathoms – Getting Out From Behind The Rock
Mike Victorino at Simply A Night Owl – Crawling Out From Under A Rock
John Paul Todd at E4Unity - Still Asleep In the Light
Patrick Oden at Ravens – A Resurrection
Brambonius at Brambonius’ blog in english - hiding the Resurrection life like a candle under a bucket?
George Elerick at The Love Revolution – (for)getting the resurrection
Liz Dyer at Grace Rules – I Will Answer That Question In A Minute, But First, I Want To Talk About Jesus
Jeff Goins at Jeff Goins Writer – Resurrection
Tammy Carter at Blessing the Beloved – Rock and a Hard Place
Kathy Escobar at the carnival in my head – little miracles
Alan Knox at the assembling of the church - Living The Resurrected Life
Christine Sine at Godspace – Palm Sunday Is Coming But What Does It Mean
Matt Stone at Glocal Christianity – Living The Resurrection
Steve Hayes at Khanya – Descent into Hell and penal substitution
Bill Sahlman at Creative Reflections – Do We Live Under a Rock of Belief?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged authenticity, changes, spirituality on March 9, 2011 | 8 Comments »
This is part of the March Synchroblog, multiple bloggers writing on the same subject. In the spirit of Lent, this month’s theme is “Experiences in the Wilderness.” Links to fellow synchrobloggers are at the end of this post.
I have a confession to make. I am one of those people that peeks at the end of a story to see how it’s going to turn out. I don’t go straight to the end before I start the book, but sometimes the tension just gets too much for me and I have to see that everything is going to be ok before I dive back into the conflict.
This does not serve me well in real life, because (shockingly) I never get to flip ahead to the end of my story to make sure things will work out. And being in the middle of the story is hard.
There are times when it is encouraging to look at someone else’s whole story, to see how dark their situation seemed and then to see the good that came out of the darkness. Sometimes that annoys me, though. Sometimes I would rather look at a snapshot of the hero at the height of the drama or the depth of their pain and confusion and feel the compassion, the “suffering with,” of someone else having been there, not knowing what would come next.
It is one thing to look at a hero and conclude that their perseverance in the face of hardship was worth it because their side won, or the situation worked out in the end. I can look at Madame Guyon, 17th-century Christian mystic, and take courage from her seven-year-long dark night of the soul, where she truly believed that she was going to hell and that God had abandoned her, because I know that that period of suffering ended with great spiritual strength. But can we take courage from those pictures of darkness even when we don’t know the outcome?
While having faith in a certain ending can encourage us, it can also do us harm in our dark nights. If we attach our hope, our reason for perseverance, to a specific outcome, we can miss the gifts of the process. The problem with these gifts is that they are kind of like getting underwear and socks in your Christmas stocking—you need them, but you don’t really want them, especially not as a present. And to be honest, the gifts of suffering are often even less appealing than those Christmas undies.
It is hard to separate the gifts of the suffering from the outcome of our dark seasons because during the night the seeds are planted, and during the following day, the seeds come up and blossom. The seeds transition seamlessly into plants. Once we start seeing the plants, we forget about what they felt like when they were just seeds. And when they are still seeds, we may be blind to them because we are too busy looking or hoping for fully-grown trees.
During the last few years, which have been a desert, wilderness, dark night—whatever you want to call it—for me, the future has been totally clouded. That has enabled me to be more fully in the present. Though I have no idea what will come out of this time, I have been hanging onto the joy of the seeds I see going into the soil.
One of these seeds is that I have been discovering my limits. This is not a fun gift. It has been really painful to lose illusions about my time, energy, influence, and power. But one of the first gifts of this time of burnout was learning that I have much more joy when I accept my smallness and respect my limits.
Another seed of change is feeling connection with people that I used to think were different than me. Unravelling who I thought I was has torn down walls that I thought existed between me and others. Again, ouch! It’s just a seed, because I know more of who I’m not anymore than who I am, and so I feel homeless, community-wise. I don’t feel that I fit anywhere yet, but at the same time I feel a more universal connection—that I share something in common with everyone, when I used to only feel connection with people like me.
I have made brave baby steps. I haven’t turned myself into a successful writer, but I have put my writing out on this blog and submitted some web-content articles. I still struggle with being vulnerable and open, but I have shared scary things with close friends and still been loved and accepted. Steve and I don’t know our direction in life yet, but we made the step of acting on what we did know and moving back to America. In these things, the gift of darkness is the status quo growing so uncomfortable that I become ready to move into a new stage of growth, even when the way ahead is cloudy (or pitch-black).
Even though this is not a complete story with a glorious wrapup, I hope that the middle of my story is encouraging to some of you. I would love to hear some of the things that are being planted in your lives in the midst of hard times.
