One More Truth

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Burnout, Crisis & Faith

June 3, 2022 by michelle Leave a Comment

I wake to two of my favorite things: a cup of coffee on my nightstand and a sky warming for the sunrise. Gratitude should be first on my mind, but in the split second between sleep and awake, my mind rests on an unsettling word: depersonalized.

Indicators of burnout have been popping up for months—waking up to a sense of dread, going to bed defeated, pervasive sluggishness in between. There’s the constant drip of cynicism, even on the good days. The busyness of life is unrelenting, and I hover above work and writing projects with an aerial view of every overwhelming detail and little ability to narrow my focus.

The Red Flags of Burnout
There are the red flags of detachment, too. Forgetfulness, apathy, the inability to answer an acquaintance’s simple question, “What’s your favorite summer activity?” Dysregulation is overriding muscle memory and I’m running into door frames, getting turned around in familiar places, even forgetting to rinse the conditioner from my hair, as I discovered one hurried Saturday afternoon. My mind and body are out of sync with each other and their surroundings.

I call it burnout because it’s less cumbersome than calling it compassion fatigue, the very thing I’ve trained my team to avoid over the past few years of upheaval. We work with women in crisis and we know the statistics. We know abuse increased, addiction spiked, and the impoverished fell into deeper poverty. We know death has come too soon and too often. Our work puts faces to the numbers. Sara packed her two young children and left her violent husband yesterday. Jasmine was almost a year into her recovery, but we haven’t seen her in weeks. Maria is living in her car. Frances lost four family members in less than two months. I’ve continued the work by disconnecting.

But what do you do when crisis comes home? When the statistics say emergency department visits for attempted suicide rose 51% among adolescent girls in a year, and your daughter’s face and name make those numbers part of your story, what do you call it?

Continue reading at The Redbud Post…

Settling In & Allowing God to Work

April 14, 2022 by michelle 2 Comments

Last week, I happened upon unexpected traffic on my way to the gym. Three lanes were being funneled into one, bringing every vehicle to a dead stop. I was in the middle of returning a Marco Polo message to a friend (I may have been rambling) when a successive slamming of metal caused me to look in my rearview mirror. A work van was squealing toward me, swerving hard to avoid colliding with my rear end. There was nowhere for me to go, and all I could do was brace myself and hope for the best.

Fortunately, I was spared. I took a deep breath. But a deep breath couldn’t undo those few seconds of tense anticipation. I was so unsettled my bones ached. The Barre class I’d been looking forward to didn’t matter anymore. As soon as I could manage, I made a U-turn and headed home, taking notice that, had the work van not missed me, I would have been the fifth vehicle in a nasty pileup.

My instinct to return home surprised me. We were renovating bathrooms, and I had tolerated dust and drop cloths, toilets and tubs in places they do not belong, ladders and contractors, and all manner of noise for weeks. Being at home and working from home had been challenging, but despite the temporary disorder, it was still home.

This was an important realization, because I have a complicated relationship with home, even when it’s in order. I love my home, no question. The rooms are situated and styled for both beauty and utility. Each room has an intentional palette suited to accommodate the room’s purpose. The furniture—my great grandma’s writing desk upstairs, the repurposed table in the foyer that used to be a sideboard, my standing desk that was rescued from an office dumpster by a friend who knew I’d use it—has history or story, form and function. Home has all my things, all my comforts, all my interests, each of them in order. Home has all my favorite people. Home is endearing.

But home is also where tasks cycle through states of finished and unfinished by the hour…Finish reading here.

Sensing My Way Toward God

March 2, 2022 by michelle 2 Comments

I grew up in a central Indiana trailer park that smelled of antifreeze and the continuous waft of a neighbor’s cigarette. A half-charred trailer leaned at the park’s entrance, a monument to the short-lived relationship between fire and manufactured homes. All my family’s coming and going was marked by the collapsing shell of someone’s former living room. I wanted to look away, but at five years old, I was compelled to stare at the remains every time we passed.

Even after it had finally been leveled, the image of that trailer remained burned in my brain. At night, alone in bed, I’d think about fire, how it could snatch my happy world with one lick. I’d pray feverish prayers until the panic burned away and I fell asleep.

Fire introduced me to fear; fear introduced me to prayer.

We moved from the trailer park when I was seven, a few days after my dad’s graduation from seminary. My late-night prayers continued, often fueled by new fears – car crashes or plane crashes, mostly – and other times fueled by beauty. My younger sister and I shared the upstairs room, where we’d giggle about things well past our bedtime. She’d fall asleep first, and I’d lie in the silence, my eyes toward the small window that framed the moon perfectly in summer months. That’s when God seemed closest.

At the office entrance of my dad’s second church hung a picture of the Emmaus travelers on a long stretch of road. There was an energy about them, an excitement in the way they leaned toward each other, an eagerness in their walk. Below the painting was Luke 24:32, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” That kind of burning from within was incomprehensible, but even at twelve, I knew I wanted it.

I wanted to see God.

But by age fifteen or sixteen, a few years after moving from rural Ohio to Florida, I felt that the growing burn within me wasn’t good. The Florida heat, beaches, and orange-scented air suited me, but the culture shift was more than my young body could metabolize. The South was vibrant and diverse. And it was fast. The kids knew more and tried more. There were rules about “yes ma’am” or “no sir.” There were boys and their attention. There was pain.

Read the full article at the Redbud Post.

 

 

The Lens of Wisdom

November 30, 2021 by michelle Leave a Comment

I found out I was pregnant on a scorching July morning, one month before my senior year of high school. Swim team would begin practicing soon. I had a college tour scheduled later that week, senior pictures the following week, and I’d already chosen the ten classics required for my honors English class. Pregnancy was not part of my plans.

Honestly, I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t on a rebellious rampage, wasn’t a victim of peer pressure, wasn’t a misguided girl with low self-esteem who was trying to earn love or attention, or whatever it is people say to fit teen pregnancy into a box. I was a 17-year Christian girl who’d memorized Bible verses since she was young, but there was a disconnect between the goodness described in those verses and the not-so-good feelings and situations I experienced in real life.

I couldn’t make sense of it, and one day, it was too much. An impulsive decision set me on a path I knew I should avoid, but once I was on it, I wasn’t eager to turn back. My behavior and choices were wrong, I knew that. The Psalmist describes “sins piled so high, I can’t see my way out.” It’s a precise picture and things went there quickly, but I hadn’t expected an additional pile of consequences.

Pressing pause on my Jesus-life, I’d hoped (for lack of a better word) I could test drive the world’s solutions for pain, privately admit my wrongs to God—maybe around my 18th birthday or during those emotional final weeks before graduation—and then, having a new appreciation for goodness, I’d circle back to my faith, values, and better behavior.

That’s not how things went…

Finish reading at Mudroom.

 

 

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Michelle

Hi, I'm Michelle. Some of the best things I've ever done are the things I never planned - teen mom, women's mentor & advocate, becoming the writer of One More Truth. Yep, these pursuits found me, and fortunately, they fit. Much of life is unplanned, but we have choices for how we respond. Want fresh approaches for seeing differently, finding a way through & living integrated? You're in the right place. I'm glad you're here.

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