One More Truth

Reflections on faith, truth, and being human

Flood My Heart

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Rain drove me to the desert. Years of rain, actually. I’d grown up under gray Midwestern skies that lasted weeks in a row during winter and spring. And fall. Recess was soggy grass and slick playgrounds, a purple raincoat and foggy glasses. At fourteen, we moved to the sunshine state where humidity would collect in spring and summer clouds, and eventually let loose drops so big they stung. The rain fell in torrents, but minutes later, the sky was blue again.

Years later, as a mom in the South, rain meant spoiled plans. It ruined park dates and grocery shopping and birthday parties. The final straw was an Easter Sunday when I braced against icy rain while the kids searched for hidden eggs. I was over it, primed and ready for the job offer that came the following month. My husband’s company wanted him in Arizona. We said “yes.”

The moving process stretched months longer than planned. Chronic pain spasms intensified, which I attributed to the pressure of raising four kids in a house that had to be kept perfect for spontaneous showings. There was packing and piles of paperwork and school withdrawals. The neighbors hung Christmas lights; I said goodbye to my family, my job, and many friends. I often imagined myself in my new bedroom, sighing with relief. Rest is coming, I’d assure myself.

But long after the boxes were unpacked, peace was still elusive. My insides were frenzied, which made sense considering we’d uprooted our lives and were deep in the throes of making a new life. I speculated my unrest was further aggravated by grief, which I avoided by compulsively keeping busy and staying in motion. I wore a heart monitor for a month to figure out why it sometimes felt like my heart might jump out of my chest, but the readings said my heart was fine–strong and healthy, actually.

Every day, the desert sky poured sunshine, and every day, I hurried out to absorb it all. This went on for months, and then one afternoon, the air smelled like rain. The sun shone bright as ever, but a few miles north, the sky was dark. The unmistakable scent of rain loosened my muscles a little and a sense of relief shot through my veins. I settled into a chair by the window and watched the rain come down in sheets. The cracked ground gulped what it could, but the streets quickly became rivers. My kids and neighbor kids ran out with boogie boards and danced in water to their knees. In less than an hour, the monsoon transformed the desert into a rushing waterway, and I soaked it all in, completely still. If this was what renewal felt like, I wanted it. I was ready…

 

Read the rest at The Redbud Post.

Burnout, Crisis & Faith

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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

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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

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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.