I often compare my state in this world currently to attempting to tread water in the ocean. Wave after wave it never seems to end. It was like that again this weekend.Sunday I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to get through the week. A Monday “workday” where no work got done because we had to be in meeting after meeting didn’t help my head for the week. Then I woke up with a head cold at four this morning. Awesome.

I had no idea how I was going to make it through the day, especially considering that I was scheduled to babysit tonight until Christian got home from class at around 10. Then, when I checked to see if I could get coverage to leave at noon, I got a distinct “sorry.” Subs have been a little sparse.

I am not quite sure how it all came together, but I had 3 people at work offer to cover my classes, Elizabeth found coverage for her job and offered to take my girls until Christian got home, and Betsy (who is staying with us for a while) had cleaned my pantry, and done the grocery shopping for the week.

All of a sudden the ocean was more like a wave pool. A wave pool that had suddenly been drained. I was sitting on my kitchen floor with the a nap being the only thing on my to do list. I literally did not know how to feel secure.

When I woke up from my nap brownies were done and my house smelled like the casserole that was about to go in the oven. There was enough being made that I have lunch tomorrow.

I felt good enough to pick up the girls. They were dressed in borrowed pajamas having just gotten out of the bath. The Peanut’s hair smelled heavenly. I felt so deeply loved.

If I am honest, I am wrestling with that a little tonight. Love can be so humbling, disarming. I think I have put on the armor of tired and too much to do and crawling out of it I feel a little bit vulnerable, a whole lot freer.

Thank you for the mercy friends, the grace, the love in the doing. I am not sure I am accepting it gracefully, but I am trying.

I call myself an accidental Baptist. I joke that I want a teacher that says “Not that kind of Baptist.” I assure people that my church is “Baptist, but doesn’t function that way” I have all sorts of coping mechanisms to explain my denomination away. But today I am sure that God is calling me into the tension of it.

Prior to Atlanta I had always been a part of a denomination that (aside from some “extremely churched” people) no one knew anything about or had opinions on (Disciples of Christ as my growing-up church, Christian Missionary Alliance in College.) But now, I am a Baptist, and Southern Baptist, and for better of for worse, people have opinions about the Southern Baptists. They seem to know more about it.

I know the reason I explain it all away, brush over it, joke. I am not totally comfortable with the label either. How can I be both a feminist and a Baptist? In the past I have been quiet or jokey with one side while I was with the people of the other. Coming out as a feminist at a  church marriage seminar once I was told I couldn’t be I didn’t hate men. About two weeks into our car-pool relationship, my lesbian friend referred to me as “not-evangelical” because I hadn’t yet told her to “turn or burn” and I wasn’t really planning on it.

I feel like a poser in either circle, like at any minute someone is going to question my credentials, kick me out. Sometimes at church I wonder if people role their eyes, “there she goes, you’ll have to forgive her, she is a feminist after all.” Sometimes in especially academic circles I wonder if they too are rolling their eyes. “Can she really  be a feminist; she tithes to a church without a single female elder, to a denomination that will not ordain women.” I wonder if I am truly welcome in either place, even though both places have always welcomed me. What if you really knew me, I wonder, would you still value what I have to say?

I am aware of the accusations made about people who read the Bible and come away with an egalitarian view. I used to wield those swords myself, and oh how I am repentant of those swipes. The Lord calls the body to unity, and there is nothing grace-filled about dismissing someone’s honest and struggled-to conclusion of scripture as simple, easy or conveniently cultural. Just because you and I have come to different conclusions about biblical interpretation does not mean that one of us is unwilling to trust or believe in the sanctity and inerrancy of God’s word.

I have avoided this conversation because it is controversial. I have let women like Sarah Bessey and Rachel Held Evans handle it because they are better writers and have a larger following. I can just quietly sit on the sidelines and nod my head. Nice work ladies. Mostly, I have avoided speaking up out of fear.

I am afraid of being rejected by everyone, and then where would I be? Whose tribe could I claim? It is hard enough to walk in the tension of my own heart. How am I supposed to walk this tension out on the internet for the whole world to read? I have more than once questioned the wisdom of raising two daughters in a church that will only affirm them to a point. But my church is my family, and they love Jesus desperately. Even when we disagree on what the Bible says about women, I can see the Spirit moving in their lives. They want to be Jesus Lovers too.

It is time I stop dancing around who I am. I am a Baptist, I signed the papers, dedicated my babies, and give regularly to a Southern Baptist Church. This is where the Lord has called me. And I am a feminist. I believe that God created man and woman, in His image He created them. Equally. And I have come, by a pretty serious and prayerful search, to the conclusion that this is the view the Bible supports.

I am not always sure whether you can be both at the same time. But I suppose Jesus was a proponent of the paradox.

I used to have all the answers. I did. I was maybe in the third grade when I wrote a letter to president-elect Bill Clinton to let him know that there was a very obvious answer to the homeless epidemic. My dad sometimes let people sleep in his office. People aren’t using office buildings at night anyway, I reasoned, just make them share. People should want to do it. Now that I am older and understand why people are homeless, things like mental illness and drug addiction. I understand why I wasn’t selected as an 8-year-old advisor to the president.

At one time, I had all the answers to the huge education problems in this country. I was an education undergrad. I could have told you a lot about what everyone should be doing and how and why. I loved to talk about my theoretical classroom. As a public school teacher, working in the practical classroom, I have as many questions as I had answers. About as many answers as I have feet. Lets just say my actual classroom does not run as smoothly as my theoretical classroom did.

When I reflect on the prompt I got in my email box this week for Mercy Mondays, I am reminded of all the times my big ideas disintegrated the second my theory landed in the dust of reality. When practicing mercy, how do we move from the theoretical to the practical? It is the thing I think I love most about Jesus. My faith does not rest in a theory or set of practices that should work, it rests in a person who did.

If I want to be more like Jesus, it is not okay to sit on the side of the pool and talk about how you should be swimming. This girl’s gotta get wet. Care to join me?

The word that keeps me from diving into mercy head first, is the word should. I have learned to despise this word. In the context of the classroom, especially at a “high needs” (read high poverty, high minority,) school, I learned that it was one of the most useless words in the English language. Conversations would go something like this.

Peron 1: Students show up to school hungry, they can’t concentrate.

Person 2: Well they should eat breakfast.

Person 1: I don’t know that there is anything in the house to eat.

Person 2: Well, their parents should by them something, they should have something available to eat. Their parents should spend the money to do that.

Every single thing that person two said is correct. The kids should be fed, there should be food in the house, someone should care enough to buy it. (My friend calls this pattern “shoulding on people.”) All of those things are true….and yet the students were still hungry. They still needed fed.

I work with a group of high needs students at the suburban school I am at now. As we go to meetings and form plans to help these kids who are floundering, I have been confronted with that word again. Should. It is as useful now as it was then (not at all). More than once I have found myself sputtering: You are absolutely right, a student should have a pencil, they should have done their work, they should not have talked back…but they did. What now?

I don’t want this to sound like my colleagues are unmerciful hags and I am a bringer of mercy. My heart shrinks at the thought of giving mercy, and mostly it is because of my righteous indignation. I shouldn’t have to do that!

I find myself using should to relieve me of my responsibility to provide mercy to someone who God loves. He should have done it my way, She shouldn’t have gotten herself into that mess, they should do better.

Even if I am right. Even if they should have done it my way, should have avoided the situation, should  do better. More often that not, especially when dealing with issues like systemic poverty that person is acting out of pain.

Babies should never be left unloved.

Kids should never go hungry.

Wives should never be abused.

Men should never have to bury their babes.

We don’t live in the should. I think the Bible calls that Eden, and while we were designed for that place, that is not where we currently reside. I use the word “should” to take the responsibility to offer mercy off of myself and place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the person the Lord has called me to serve. 

In the hijacked words of the pop-princess Gwen Stefanie in the prophetic classic “Holla Back Girl”  This SHOULD is bananas B-A-N-A-N-A-S! (Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

This thought pattern doesn’t help anything, it doesn’t solve problems, or feed people, it simply perpetuates the cycle of brokeness that sin started, but Jesus ended. God did not look down on us and say “you should stop sinning, if you would just knock it off everything would be better.” No, He had mercy on humanity, more specifically me. He said, “You should be with me. You will be with me. I will find a way.”

I say “you should do better” but mercy says “this situation should be better.” Frankly, I need to get my should together: Stop using it as a weapon and start using it as an invitation to join with others as we usher in the Kingdom of God.

Sometimes I feel like the other nine lepers, who walked away healed but did not turn around to say thank you. I remember being in Sunday school learning the lesson, vilifying those ungrateful ex-lepers, praising the one who went “walking and leaping and praising God.” It isn’t that I don’t appreciate it, or don’t want to glorify God. It is simply that I do not know what to say. I don’t want to hurt anyone else. I don’t want to testify flatly to a full and round story.

The healing I can talk about. It was one of the first things I wrote. Drop the insecurities, cling to the cross. Easy peasy.

What I don’t talk about, what I don’t write about is the waiting. The in-between. The half-dozen times that I named it and claimed it, asked for healing. I let sisters and brothers and strangers alike, put their hands on me and pray to our God for healing. I believed it would come. Only to find myself at the doctor again, having yet another specialist insist it was my thyroid and poke me with a needle while exclaiming “wow your veins are tricky!” (Spoiler: It was never, ever, not even one time, my thyroid.)

Every single time I was prayed for, it was like climbing up a high dive ladder, stepping out on the board of hope and leaping off of it, only to discover there was no water in the pool. Flat on my face on the concrete, every single time. And every time I made that climb to hope it was two steps higher, the impact of the unanswered prayer hurt that much more.

My dad sometimes wonders why more people don’t step forward when the altar is opened and the prayers are waiting, but I understand. I know the cost of climbing that ladder, I know why it feels safer to take a pass rather than take that leap. Sometimes I would land right into the pool of others people’s well-meaning words.

The things people said, heart-felt and purposeful, looking me dead in the eye, those things sometimes hurt just as bad. “Abby, it is because you are so strong, that is the answer to the why me.” So you are telling me that the all mighty all loving God made me strong so He could afflict me with constant pain? “Abby, have you tried more sleep?” I have been tired for three years, but no, it never occurred to me to sleep more! “Just choose joy, just don’t feel that way. Pick Jesus.” Or my personal favorite “are you right with God? Do you have any sin you haven’t dealt with?” I don’t know have you dealt with all the sin in your life? Oh, you haven’t? and yet you are not afflicted with daily pain and exhaustion. Huh, must just be me. Don’t even get me started on “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Let’s just say you shouldn’t tell a middle-aged church lady that perhaps those mysterious ways suck. Apparently suck isn’t a word a teenage girl is supposed to use in the church sanctuary. Even if she is sick.

The most holy thing that anyone ever said to me was when my Mom enclosed my 14-year-old body in her arms. As I sat in her lap and wailed she told me “It is okay to be mad at God. I am mad at him too. David was mad at him. He is big enough to take it.” The relief in that moment that I was not bad for being angry, that relief was like the breath you take when you have held it for too long. It almost made me dizzy.

Now that I am healed, now that it is all over, there is so much more that I understand. What’s all that about hindsight being 20/20? Because looking back it is so easy to insist that it is all so clear. When that isn’t the whole truth, while there is more I now understand, there is even more I don’t know how to say.

When I look at the time that I spent sick, I can see the way the Lord met me. The tangible dependence, the reality of not being able to get out of bed unless the Lord willed it. I learned how to depend on the church as the body when mine didn’t work. I watched as the Lord really was most glorified in the weakest of my moments. I tuned my ear to His voice out of physical necessity and know that helps me hear Him now. I am grateful for all the divine appointments when I was too tired to go anywhere and someone “randomly” showed up to talk and the Lord allowed me to speak truth into their life. I am grateful that I found a church family happy to have me sitting on the floor. I know that as painful and terrible, and unfair as it all was, God used my illness to make me more like Jesus.

When my friend from work has a bout with her chronic illness, when an acquaintance from a summer job gets afflicted with the exact same thing I had, I want to look them dead in the face and promise the healing that was extended to me. I want to assure them that God wants more for them than chronic pain. I believe he does, I believe God desires us to be healed. But I also know that it isn’t always in the time or place we think it is, that for some the promise of a new body later is the best they will do this side of heaven. Even if they deal with all of their spiritual issues, even if they are filled all the way up with faith.

I want to walk and leap and praise God like that one holy leper. I do come to the cross eternally grateful that I am not crying out in pain. I will never ever deserve the mercy of healing the Lord had for me, and am so amazed by the luxurious gift the Lord gave me, even past the gift of life. But I also know the importance of treading lightly, of just how scary and painful hope can be sometimes. I don’t ever want to add to the pain and suffering by speaking words that indicate you are partly to blame for your illness.

I want everyone to be introduced to The Great Physician, even when I know he won’t always write the prescription we are asking of Him. I want to Praise the Lord for my healing, but how do you talk about something you don’t understand?

Sometimes you look around your living room and say something to the effect of “I guess I was not that impressed with that take away. I mean, don’t people know that already? Why did the people around me look surprised?”

And your dear husband looks at you and says “How you doing with that not judging thing?”

Change of plans this morning. Elizabeth had an opportunity that was too good to say no to, (look for her on WALKING DEAD! My girls babysitter is going to be famous!) and Tiffany is pinch hit babysitting for us (and girl had coffee and breakfast in a bag waiting for me when I dropped off the kids. Someone knows me well enough to know I will not get up earlier; I will instead run late and skip breakfast. She did me a favor…and then fed me breakfast. My friends are the coolest. The. Cool. Est.).

This is where we ran into the problem. Our GPS got stolen out of our car sometime this summer (mostly because I don’t lock it) and we haven’t replaced it. Those of you who have had the pleasure of riding in a car with me know I have no sense of direction. None. At all. I got lost last year on the way home from work. The same work I had been driving to and from every day five days a week for 3 or so months. I just get confused.

Tiffany lives up by my work, so it makes the most sense for me to drop off and pick up the girls. I got to the house with only one whoopsie-turn-around. Christian had looked up and explained the directions to me. But then, I had to get from the house to the school…which I had only done once with the help of the GPS. Oooof.

Through no small miracle I ended up going the right way on the right street. But right as that street went around the bend it all suddenly looked so very unfamiliar. So I turned around. Right in the middle of the street I pulled a u-y and went back the way I came. Doubting myself the whole way. So, just in case you got lost in all this lostness: I am now going the wrong way, which I think might be the right way.

I think this wrong way is the right way because:

• Having just traveled this way, it now all looked familiar, and familiar feels better even if it is wrong.
• By turning around, instead of continuing on I feel like I am doing something pro-active, even though it is detrimental.
• Direction wise, I have been wrong too many times so all the voices in my head start competing and I listen the loudest most obnoxious one, not the steadiest one.
• I cannot see what is just around the bend, I would rather go with what I can see than what I cannot.

After a few emergency calls to my husband and a call to my department head to let him know I would be there late albeit shortly, I found myself exactly where I had turned in the first place. I had taken a twenty-minute circle only to begin again. So I hung a left on Mansell and did it right this time. When I got to the bend in the road, I continued. Had I waited it out another thirty seconds I would have known exactly where I was.

The car is not the place I learned this behavior. I am all to familiar with this pattern just about everywhere in my life. Right when I get to unfamiliar territory I freak out. I worry. I turn around and stay in familiar places because it feels better. Even when I know that it isn’t the right way, even when I know it is only driving me in circles. I ignore the still small voice in favor of the loud obnoxious one saying DO SOMETHING! CHANGE GEARS! STOP! TURN AROUND! I am afraid of what is just around the bend, simply because I cannot see it. So instead, I go in circles.

I refuse to drive in circles anymore, in my writing, in my parenting, in my classroom, in my relationships. I don’t want to act out the familiar simply because it is familiar. I will not do, and say, or try to strive simply because I need to feel like I am doing something. I will push through the uncertainty that the still small voice is ensuring me is temporary, and emerge on the path that feels right once again.

Watch out friends. I am just clearing the bend, and something tells me I am about to pick up speed.

Tell me, where do you trust your insecurities, instead of what you know? Because now that I have made these declarations I am feeling pretty intimidated!

I slipped into the back of the auditorium. The lights were off and the kids in front leading worship were a little too loud and a little too bright. They were singing the same songs I used to sing in the big deal worship extravaganza on Thursday nights in the auditorium of my college days with 498 of my closest friends. Those songs were also sung just a little too loud, a little too bright. Both worship leaders, ten years apart, called for a very awkward “shout out for the Lord” where everyone in the dark room screamed on cue. Ten years later it was still weird and awkward. But this time I could see the heart of the worship leader, a High school senior who wants her classmates to know God. She is doing the best she knows how. I suspect the college worship leader who used to attempt to take “I could sing of your love forever” literary, had much the same heart. But from where I was sitting I couldn’t see it. I chose self-righteous I-could-do-it-better glasses to look through, and they were blinding me.

I started joking about “infiltrating” the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at my school last spring. Mostly because the kids in my class repping the Jesus t-shirts were mean, and my closest friend at school is the leader of the gay-straight alliance. Through her I found out the gay students are “afraid of those Jesus kids.” But also, I was sure that I could do it better. With my missional background and my cool city church, I could change these kids. I could make them more like Jesus. I could make it better.

I need to stop joking about stuff, because sometimes God takes me seriously. (Case in Point: Christian and I used to joke that we needed to move south for the weather and the barbeque. God called us to Atlanta.) One of my kids from last year walked into my room the first week of school and invited me to join the FCA leadership meetings every Monday at the local Chik-Fil-A. I guess I was really doing this thing.

If I’m honest, I was pretty pretentious about it. Even the way I was asking for prayer can best be described as stuck up. My good and gentle friend Brooke did not yank that plank out of my eye and beat me over the head with it. Instead, she simply suggested that I wait till the third meeting to say anything. Two listening meetings, one talking. So I shoved my chicken biscuit in my mouth and vowed not to talk through it. The kids mostly talked about the next worship service, how to make it better and I ducked out early to make it to school on time.

My kid came to see me that day between classes. She wanted to know what I thought, so I told her. I told her that while I think that they mean well, if it is all about the worship service then it is all about the believers, the focus of the group is all about meeting the Christian needs, not loving the school. I told her I wanted desperately for the FCA to be known as the reason there are no bullies, or lonely kids in the cafeteria. I want other kids to meet Jesus at lunch.

I don’t love the phrase, but what is happening at school can only be described as “A God Thing.” Speakers that the kids select asking them how are they loving their classmates, the senior girl leader feeling all summer that something need to change, and then the Lord allowing me to see these kids for who they are, and not what I feel like they represent, and prompting my high and mighty self to speak gentle truth into the lives of these sweet souls.

This past Friday I wandered down to the auditorium to the weekly worship service. What I saw was this: The leadership team stepping off the stage to join the audience in praising our God. It was still too loud and bright for my taste. But I believe that it was holy and good to the Lord.

As I reflected on compassion for Mercy Mondays this week, this was the image I thought of: My high school kids, giving up their right to be on the stage, one that they had earned by dutiful obedience, a position that some of them had surely longed for, to join their peers in the seats.

Pity is what I had been feeling for my christian students, “If they only knew God the way I know  God then they could do things the way I want them done.” Pity isn’t merciful. It is distant, and prideful. Pity comes from above, and directed at those beneath. Pity does not come from the Lord.

Compassion is merciful. It is a coming alongside, a joining in with.  Compassion means I willfully give up my position of privilege. Compassion listens first, pity has the first say. The Lord has taken me off the stage of my heart to go and serve Him with my students, not above them.

And  I am almost moved to tears by the truth in it all: Jesus didn’t pity me. I can be compassionate because He was merciful to me. Jesus didn’t come from above to roll his eyes and feel bad for my behavior. He did not die on a cross to prove to me that He could do it better. He walked first where I walk, He felt first what I feel, He came to invite me to join in with him, to die with him. Jesus had compassion for me.

Thank you Jenn Lebow for the prompt!