Dynamite (soul seasons, part 2)

We moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand in June 2013.  As we drove across the border between Laos and Thailand for the last time there was a lot of excitement and anticipation about the year ahead.  Pete and I had decided to take a sabbatical year--a year to rest, listen, be restored, and see what was next.  Neither of us knew what lay ahead and beyond a sabbatical year in Thailand, but we were hopeful and optimistic.  The hardest part of our decision to leave Laos was leaving behind friendships.  The friendships that we made in Laos were some of the closest and dearest friends we have made along the way...

I vividly remember our drive from Laos to Thailand.  The windy road through the mountains, stops along the way to refuel and buy banana chips or pho (a bowl of noodles for lunch), and the song we played more times than I count.  Thanks to Silas' end of the year school performance in Laos, the song Dynamite became our boys' most requested song to listen to.  Can't say I would ever have chosen that song to be our moving theme song, but there it was...the song that seared itself into all of our memories as we made our move from what was known to an unknown future.   We blasted that song as loud as our ears could handle, and "danced" to the beat lifting our hands in the air (just as he sings in the song).  I felt free and light as we drove away from a place that had held so much heaviness and darkness in my life.  (Yes, I know that you cannot leave your problems behind just by moving, but I will admit that in this situation I think I believed I was doing just that.)  We didn't listen to that song much after that drive, but anytime the boys ask to listen to it now I am instantly back on that windy mountain road feeling the lightness in my heart and the excitement of what lay in store for us.

soul seasons, part 1

I don't like cold weather--never have--and so living in Asia, and now Florida, has worked nicely for this warm weather girl.  But after living in Kentucky for a few years, my love of fall grew.  Growing up in Oklahoma, fall was occasionally filled with bright colors, but mostly the leaves turned brown and just fell off the trees.  But Kentucky--wow, the falls were brilliant.  When we moved to Southeast Asia and Facebook came along, I would look with jealousy at my friends' pictures of their little babies in piles of leaves.  Especially the Gingko tree outside of Asbury Seminary (where Pete and I met and got married).  The Gingko tree would hold onto its yellow leaves and then all at once they would fall, and your window of opportunity to get pictures with your family was brief.  You had to time it--get there when the leaves had dropped and were blanketing the ground, but before the grounds crew came to rake them up.  Pete and I were fortunate to enjoy this picture feast twice--once when we were back from Laos with Silas.  Silas was just learning to walk, and I was so excited to get pictures of him standing in the midst of a yellow whirlwind of color, falling into the pile of leaves, laying on the leaves making leaf angels with our arms and legs.  And then once more when we moved back to Kentucky for a year and had Noah.  I still like to glimpse at these photos now and then, because who can deny the beauty of fall?  Even I who has chosen to live in warm tropical climates misses the beauty of fall.

But today I was struck by the rejection of seasons in my own life.  It seems there are seasons in our lives, just as there are seasons in nature.  In that way, living in a tropical climate disconnects us from the reality of soul seasons--and the necessity of experiencing seasons in our own lives.  None of us gets to live an eternal spring or summer--those are the seasons when growth and life flourishes.  But fall and winter remind us that even the trees and plants need a season of death and rest so that life can come once again.  Even in places where we do not experience a true fall or winter, I can still see the pause that comes in the cooler months.  It's not as dramatic as up north, but it's still there--a time of resting when the greens are not as bright and brilliant.  In Laos the winter months meant the cease of rain, and the red dirt began to cover over all of the plants.  So while the trees were still green beneath the dirt, everything looked dead.  By April there was a definite longing in all of us for the rains to start so that everything could be washed and made clean and new again.  

While nature reminds us that death is necessary for life to come once again, it is not something that we welcome in our own lives.  If anything, I can picture myself being the fall tree resisting the natural tendency for my leaves to fall.  "No leaf, don't go!  How can I be a tree without you leaves!"  But the leaves do what is in their nature--they fall.  It is a time of letting go, resting and making room for new life to come again.   

In the last year of our time in Laos I was really fragile.  I was burnt out, emotionally depleted, and physically struggling with health issues.  I was doing everything I could to repair myself, to get better, and to flourish.  It was painful to admit that I didn't have what it took to be a superstar missionary, a superstar mom, a superstar wife.  I was human, and I was fighting my frailty.  But when    I look back on that year now, I see that it was the year I experienced God's arms around me in the form of a group of women.  We would meet each Tuesday afternoon.  It was my lifeline.  I don't think I could have survived that year sanely without that group to look forward to each week.  One week a woman who I didn't know joined our group.  She was visiting from another province in Laos, and she sat in with us.  It was a week when I couldn't hold my tears back, they flowed like a river betraying the feelings of grief, sadness, discouragement I was holding inside.  At the end of our time together, this visiting woman said that she felt she had a verse for me--John 12:24.  

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

I was quiet.  This wasn't really the verse that I had hoped to hear.  How can this be encouraging to me?  This verse speaks of death...going into the winter soil.  But I wrote the verse down because somehow I felt it really was for me.  My only hope was that I was experiencing the winter of my soul already--that this verse was not pointing to a winter to come.  Perhaps the verse was saying "your spring is coming".

  to be continued...

love notes to self

  I have been writing myself love notes.  Does that sound silly?  Perhaps it is, but I think that the passage in the Bible that says "love your neighbor as yourself" is not merely challenging us to love others as much as ourselves, but is saying you have to love yourself to love others.  Let me explain--if I don't really see myself as lovable, worthy, or anything special, then it's going to show in how I treat others.  I see it with my own children.  When they make mistakes, how do I respond?  Do I yell, get upset, berate them, tell them things like "how could you do that?"  The messages I speak to my children are telling of the messages I speak to myself.  And so I am doing an experiment.  If I start to speak love to myself, start telling myself things like "be kind to yourself" or "have grace on yourself", what will happen?  I think that if I am loving myself better and well, I am going to love others better and well.  But often I think in the Christian world we are told to love others, deny ourselves, suffer for Jesus, and that it's selfish to consider ourselves before others.  I am going to propose that if we don't love ourselves, if we always put ourselves on the back burner, if we deny ourselves before we've ever loved ourselves, that we are going to grow bitter and resentful of others when they don't love us back, thank us, or when they keep asking for more.  Because we are all needy of love.

  I worked with a project in Laos for several years that was helping women restore their lives after working in the sex industry.  I often minimized my own problems.  These women had been raped, sold into the sex industry at young ages by parents, tricked by friends, and basically were left feeling that their worth was zero.  All they had to offer was sex to ungrateful men, one after another.  I am sure they never felt loved, never felt thanked, never felt worthy.  But I found that I really had very little to offer them.  What they needed was love.  But my own feelings of worthlessness and insecurity kept me from really being able to love them.  I knew the Bible, knew in my head that God loves me and loves them, but experientially my sense of love and worth were low.  And when your own love bank is running on low, there's really not a lot left to give to others.  Sometimes I would even feel jealous of these women.  It was easy to feel like they deserved to hear about God's love over and over again, but I should already have gotten it by now.  I mean--they had had far worse experiences than me in their lives.  So why couldn't I just shake that feeling off of "but I need to feel loved.  What about me?"  Eventually, I did burn out, and due to health reasons and a general feeling of resentment, I could not continue to help these women.  It had taken its toll on me and my family.

  Fast forward to nearly two years later, and I feel like the anxiety crisis I have been through these last six months has brought me to a low point.  A place of darkness and desperation.  It has been a place where I found myself wondering how I could keep going forward.  I've actually thought a lot about these women in Laos during the past six months.  And today it occurred to me...we all need love notes to ourselves.  I have been writing myself love notes these past six months.  Writing them all over my journal, and then in the past week I started writing little notes of love and care on 3x5 index cards to carry around, place by my bed, etc.  And I get them out and read them.  They say things like "hope", "be kind to yourself", "let go", "rest", "you are not alone", "you don't have to carry this by yourself", "you are going to get better", "grace" and so on.  One of the ones that has really stood out the most is "be kind to yourself".  And it hit me, that if I can be kind to myself, how much kinder will I be towards others?  THAT'S IT!  The message of the gospel.  Love others as you love yourself.  And so I am realizing that God loves me so much that he wants me to really know how loved I am.  That he would allow me to have a crisis and experience darkness and desperation--to come to the bottom of myself, so that I could begin to hear him say "I love you."  But it's taking lots of time.  It hasn't been enough to hear it once or twice.  I've had to hear it said over and over again, every single day for the last six months.  To hear Pete tell me "you are going to get better.  I believe in you!" and to hear my counselor and others say "there is hope!  I believe it for you!"  

  Now I feel like I am starting to slowly get it...that if I want to be able to minister to others it has to come from a place of having received it myself.  How can I really give anything to others that I don't even have myself?  If it's just head knowledge, then I'm just speaking words.  (If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.)  But when it becomes something I've experienced, then I truly have something to offer others.  And when I reflect on how long it is taking me to heal, how long it is taking me to "get it", I realize that the same amount of time and patience and compassion is what others need in their own healing journeys.  To hear it or experience it only once (or even twice) is not enough.

  And so, I invite you to give yourself love letters.  If you don't feel loved, and yet you know with your head that you ought to feel loved...maybe you need to hear "be kind to yourself".  Or maybe you need to hear "it's okay, you can step out of all the giving of yourself and take time to receive my love today".  It's okay to recognize your own need for love, rest, kindness, patience, self-care.  When we listen to our needs, when we care for ourselves, it is not being selfish.  As we honor ourselves and listen to our needs, we will find that we have so much more to offer others.  And how can that be selfish?

Love yourself today...and tomorrow...and the next day.

letting go

  I am
letting go of worry
letting go of the past
letting go of figuring out the future
letting go of fixing everything
  so that I can
be present with today
be present with what I have
be present with my children
be present with my husband
be present with my reality
  because
we only have today
we only have this moment
we only have this breath
we only have the here and now
  but we miss so much because
we focus on what we don't have
we focus on the past
we focus on the future
we focus on our problems
we focus on what we can't control
  and in the end
we have held onto our worries
we have held onto our problems
we have held onto our past
we have held onto regrets
we have held onto possessions
  and we realize
that life was not really lived
that life has been lost
that life was in the moments never lived
that life is what is going on now
that life cannot be relived
that life begins when we enter into the present
  but it is never too late
to let go and breathe
to let go and be
to let go and see
to let go and behold
to let go and notice
to let go and become
to let go and live
  and we will be free
to live fully

holding on

It's been nearly five months since my last post.  And ironically, my last post was about hope.  I had no idea that this would be tested (and still is) in such an extreme way just a month after I wrote it.  I thought lower back pain was hard...and then my son's eczema flared like it has never flared before, and again I was faced with despair, discouragement, and anxiety.  And this time I really plummeted into darkness.  I have experienced dark seasons before, but I would say this past spring has been one of the "darkest nights of the soul" that I have lived through yet.  And I say "lived through" but really I am still on the edge, perhaps emerging out of the darkness, but not yet in the light where all feels well.  My hope has felt tested, rung out, dried in the sun.  I have had many days and nights where I had to ask others to hope and believe for me.  There have been days where I couldn't imagine how I would make it through the day.  Anxiety is like that...it pushes your mind into a hamster wheel spin and your body goes into fight or flight mode.  The future looks bleak, and so the present moment feels intolerable.  And yet the only way out of this is to enter into this present moment as much as possible and begin to feel "safe" in it again.  It's a LONG s l o w journey back to the present moment.  In four months time I have filled my journal's pages with prayers, requests to be restored, and anything I could imagine that might help encourage me to take this breath...and the next breath.  And hope has just been a small flicker, at times virtually nonexistent.  At other times a moment would find me saying "I will get better" and I would be surprised by this "out of nowhere" hope.  And so hope's seeds were in me, they just seemed covered over by all the despair and anxiety.  And yet, they did not disappear altogether.
Perhaps hope is like that.  It's not some big bright flower in full bloom that makes you feel all cheerful and happy, but rather a subtle new sprout poking through the winter's soil.  It takes courage to hope, and it takes hope to have courage.  It takes trust to hope, and it takes hope to trust.  Really, I had little to do with the hope that would suddenly spring up in me.  It was a miracle, really.  And that is only the beginning of what I am learning in this season.  How much my faith is about Him and not about what I can muster alone.  How having enough faith doesn't mean it all turns out as we wanted it to.  I am seeing how much more faith it takes to hold on to my beliefs when it's in the unseen, not the seen.  When the storm waves are high and we cling to our faith, that is where courage and trust are truly tested.  And that is when the hand of God, holding onto us, is all that we can hope for.  I could not have made it through these last few months if God's hand was not mightier than my own.  I have heard people say "hold onto God" but my grasp was not enough.  And so I said "God, hold onto me."  And that is what he did for Peter when he stepped onto the water, out of the comfort of his boat.  When Peter's faith was not enough to hold him up on the water, Jesus reached his hand out.  "Oh you of little faith."  Those words can sound harsh and condemning and yet I am coming to see how full of compassion they are.  Because, yes, I am of little faith.  If we are honest with ourselves (and others) are we not all of little faith if life isn't going well?  Faith seems strong and easy when our prayers are answered and all goes as "it should".  But when our prayers go unanswered, or the answer isn't what we had wanted or imagined...where is faith?  Yes--I am of little faith.  And yet, Jesus reaches his hand out to me and saves me from falling.  He loves me that much!  He has faith in me!  And that is what enables me to hope again, and what enables me to have faith the size of a mustard seed (that's tiny).  Because it's not about what I bring to the table that will get me out of this place of darkness.  It's what God brings to us.  It's about Him.  And that is enough.

to hope

Hope does not disappoint us

I have heard this line many times, and I've even said it to myself.  But it has never struck me with just how profound it is until today.  I have been laying flat on my bed a lot this year (yes, the year is only 2 weeks old...).  I had the flu for a week, and then just when I was feeling better I got struck with lower back pain.  Back on the bed.  And while for some they would just roll with this knowing it will pass soon enough, I began to feel despair.  Will my back ever get better?  Will I ever get off this bed? Will I ever be able to be "normal" again?  And while these questions seem ridiculous to my husband who would try to assure me "Yes, you will get better!"  I was not feeling too sure.
This morning I got out of bed and could feel the tightness in my back.  Ugh, still there.  Each morning I roll out of bed and see "will it be a good day today?" based on how I feel.  The tightness and pain seemed to say "nope, still there.  Perhaps it's just not going to get any better."  Yep, that's what kind of "optimism" I am wired with.  I know, kind of pathetic.  But there it is.  This belief in me...this idea that when things are hard there's really no hope.  I see the dark side of it all.  Start imagining myself being a mom that is sick and laying on a bed all the time.  I start to play out the worst scenarios.  Horrible back pain that I will have to learn to live with.  And on and on.  My husband tries to be sympathetic towards me at first, but his patience runs thin.  (Whose wouldn't?!)
But these words "hope doesn't disappoint us" came into my head this morning...seemingly out of nowhere.  And instead of letting them float out just as they floated in, they stuck.  They felt like a message I was supposed to listen to.  So I pondered what it means that hope doesn't disappoint us.  You mean, I can have hope even when I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel?  Even when my back aches day after day without relief, I can entertain hope?  I don't have to be filled with fear, despair, worry?  I can dare to hope?  Dare to believe that things will get better.  Dare to believe life is still good.
This is new to me.  A major "aha!" moment as I savor this idea.  As I attempt to let hope enter into a heart that has been so full of fear.  Anytime I suffer or face pain, my first response is fear.  But oh, to hope!  To be free to let what I cannot control be God's, and to let hope lift my spirit.  To feel the lightness of hope.  To DARE to believe in what I cannot see yet.  That is so delicious sounding!  I want it!
Lord, teach my unbelieving heart to hope.  Stretch my spirit beyond what I see.  Enable me to expand to new heights--to trust you and thus be filled with hope.  That is my desire, my prayer.  Let it be!

as we wait

Advent is a season of waiting.  The time we prepare for Christmas.  In tangible ways we are buying presents, decorating our homes, and listening to songs that get us in the mood.  But deeper down, I think the question remains of how are we preparing our hearts and clearing the way for the real gift of Christmas?
I wonder if some people stop celebrating Christmas because they've given up on the idea that there is anything good coming at Christmas.
What are we really waiting for?
Every year we put up the tree, put the lights up and hang the ornaments.  We may even set out a nativity scene.  We do the same thing each year--do you ever wonder why?  Or perhaps you've even stopped practicing some of these traditions (who likes putting the tree back in the box when the season is over?!!)
Do we still believe that there is something to hope for in life?  has the waiting become too long for our weary souls?  Are we living in parched times where the only things that seem like the answers are what the shopping malls and amazon tell us will bring us and our loved ones joy this Christmas?  Is there anything more for our hungry souls and minds?  Is there really any good news worth celebrating Christmas for?
I feel thoughtful as we put our own tree up.  The boys were so excited to get the tree out of its box (no real trees here!) and woke us up at 7 am the day after Thanksgiving.  By 9 or 10 am our tree was fully lit and decorated, and with only a smidgen of help from an adult.  Their childlike excitement was in the air, even if mom and dad weren't encouraging it.  (Some holiday music thanks to iTunes helped set the mood for mom and dad).  And then the step back...admiring the tree.  Beauty.
And then we wait.  "How many days until Christmas?" Noah asked.  And this question could never come up with a satisfactory answer as in a 5 year old's brain, weeks are hard to process.  So we broke it down to days.  Of course, anything greater than 1-2 days seems like eternity to a child.
But wait is all we can do.  (And as adults we know that really 25 days is hardly any time at all to wait...we've been doing this so long that we know it comes and goes like the blink of an eye).
So what do we do while we wait?  And what are we really waiting for?  Those 20 minutes on Christmas morning when the presents are opened, and then it's all over?  Days and days of waiting for this glorious moment, and then it's just a pile of wrapping paper...
What can we learn about this time of waiting?  Can it not be the place of great joy as we anticipate the coming of a little baby?  The arrival of a baby at the end of 9 months of carrying and "knowing" this little child.  The anticipation of labor--something that brings fear, yet also joy to the waiting parents.
But do we have hope or despair as we wait?  Do we feel a sense of dread as we wait?  Perhaps nothing good will come after all this waiting?  Or do we still have a childlike wonder...that life really does have good things at the end of a long wait?  There really is something worth waiting for--something we cannot hurry and buy or fix, something we must hope for and believe will come.
What are you waiting for?  A new job, a raise?  Or maybe you're waiting for the depression to lift, or the anxiety to go away.  Waiting for a friend, or a spouse to share life with.  Waiting for things to get better.
Do you have hope as you wait?  Do you still believe in the goodness that will come after the wait?  Or do you feel despair?  The wait has felt so long, or everything seems to point to disappointment.  In a time when waiting is hard, when we can push a 1 click button on amazon to buy the thing that may bring momentary happiness, waiting is more important than ever.  Our souls are hungry.  If we stop for a moment and reflect, we will see, there is something we are still waiting for.  Something that is still calling our childlike wonder to hope.  Can we not allow the Christmas lights to beckon us to hope?  That there really is something Good worth waiting for.
And he is faithful...he will not fail any of us in the waiting.
And still, we wait.