Awhile ago I declared myself the scarcity hunter.

That feeling that there is not enough, that you better hurry up and get yours because whatever it is you are after is going to run out? The idea that if someone else gets it then you can’t have it to? Yeah. Scarcity is her name and I hate her.

I hate scarcity, and I had been working hard to build barriers in my life to keep the scarcity from getting in. But it wasn’t working. It wasn’t good enough. Plus, the scarcity barriers could only keep the scarcity from bothering me and maybe my girls, and I just hate scarcity so much more than that. I am not okay with letting scarcity snatch the abundance of life from anyone. I needed to go on the offensive.

So I did. I declared myself the scarcity hunter and asked anyone who wanted, to join me. I am a pack animal by nature (my spirit animal is a labrador retriever), so of course I hunt in a pack. But scarcity went on the offensive too. And this time, she caught me alone.

You can read the rest here. And if you haven’t signed up for my scarcity hunter emails you can here. New one comes out on Monday!

I have a friend we have started calling The Beauty Queen. At not quite 5 feet tall I don’t think Nicole Romero ever expected to wear that title. But she is, a beauty queen. The Beauty Queen in my book. But it isn’t what you are thinking. Nicole is like the queen of a kingdom where she is constanly inviting everyone to come and take their place. 

Nicole was leading a session on beauty at a retreat in Austin. She was tucked into a chair when she said something that simultaneously sucked all the air out of the room and let us all breathe easier.

“You don’t owe anyone you looking a certain way in order to be see and heard. You simply deserve to be seen and heard.”

You would think that a group of women who choose to publish their opinions on the internet would not need to be told that they deserve to be heard, women who regularly publish selfies would not think of it as news that they deserve to be seen. But we were all sitting their dumb struck at the truth. We don’t owe anyone a certain kind of look before we are taken seriously. We don’t need to ask forgiveness for taking up space.

I’ve been thinking about my brand a lot lately. I guess that is sort of a dirty internet word, but all it has meant for me is thinking about what I love and what makes me get all shouty and excited. What is it that I love about writng, about learning, about life?

I love when the physical meets the thoughtful. When the spiritual meets the natural. I tattooed the truth onto myself and the embodiment of it has been very real to me. I think anger breaks more easily when we break a bottle or to. I am sure that lies have less of a hold when we physically burn them.

If I really believed that I didn’t owe anyone any particualr experience, what would that mean in my practical space? It means I would wear lipstick whenever I wanted.

 It means I would wear lipstick whenever I wanted. 

I like lipstick. The brighter the better. Love that red. Wild Orchid. Purty Persimmon. Fuschia Fusion. But I save it for special occasions. For weddings and the first day of school, for days when I have time to do my hair or moments when someone has invited me to speak up. I wear bold lipstick at the times I know I deserve to be seen.

But what if I believed I deserved to be seen all the times I wanted to be seen?

Lipstick to the grocery store. Lipstick at the coffee shop. For sure lipstick in my yoga pants. Maybe I would wear lipstick today, when my eyes are tired and my children misbehaving. Maybe I would wear it on the beach, when my suit is ten pounds tighter than it was last summer. Maybe if I wore lipstick more often I would be reminded that it is my humanity that makes me worthy of being seen. Not an invitation or a special event. If I really don’t owe anyone a certain look before I deserve to be seen I would wear lipstick whenever I wanted.

I think I will start today.

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If you would like to join me head on over to instagram and make sure to tag your post #BeSeen plus some other popular lipstick tags like #redlips or #lipstick. If you don’t have an instagram email your photo to my amazing friend Jennifer who has been teaching me about the holiness in seeing, in seeing yourself through your own lens. She will put it up for you (jenniferuptonphotography@yahoo.com)!

I picked my word over a year ago. Like a lot of people say, it kind of picked me. be here. Be here now. Be present, and hear. I was working on my schedule for the semester when out of nowhere I wrote on the top of january’s page: It’s always messier than we want it to be.

It’s always messier than we want it to be

I’m a black and white thinker. I don’t know if it is deeply wired in me via genetics or parental guidanc, but I just think that something is either right or it is wrong. I am trying hard to grow out of the idea that people are either good or bad. 

I am mostly trying to believe that last part about me. 

Good people sometimes do bad thing Bad people sometimes do good things. Mostly we are (as my dear friend Nicole says) we are just toddlers, trying our best, but lashing out, pulling each other’s hair, hitting people we love. We are stumbling, confused, wonderful, inspired, and just plain messy.

This life is messy. Being a person is messy. And being a person in relationship with other people is beautiful, and messy.

It is all so much messier than I want it to be. 

I’m a pack animal. You’ve heard me say it before. I am. I like to do life with people. So inevitably, I dissapoint people, and people dissapoint me. Mostly, we do this, when we put each other on pedestals. It just hurts everyone a little bit more when we fall from those unnatural heights. Sometimes I put people on them, sometimes I climb right up there myself, and sometimes, sometimes I fall off a pedestal I had no idea I was even on. 

I wonder how many times I have done that to people. Made them a little less human, a little more perfect, so that they more easily fit into the ideas I am still clingy too about the simplicity of this world.They break you know, the statues you put on pedestals. The real people inside the china-doll casing tip themselves right over the edge. Your idea of them is shattered, they walk away bruised, everyone gets hurt.

It is always messier than I want it to be.

I have already dissapointed my two-year-old, more than once I am afraid. This time,  I painted my toe nails blue. She preffered the red-orange color I had been sporting for a month or so. After a distinct minute of consideration, she decided to “do my piggies” anyway, even if they were the wrong color. 

This piggy went to market. This little piggy had ROAF BEEF! This piggy went wee wee wee, all the way home. 

Afterward she asks me, again, why my “poes are blue.” She lets me know (again) that she likes them red. Almost a month is a long time for a two-year-old. I wonder how long it will take for her to adjust. Knowing Priscilla, she may never get used to it. What feels like a personal afront to her, was just something I felt it was desperately time for. 

One person’s, it was just time for a change, is someone else’s why would you do that. One person’s, I may have spoken too harshly is another’s I wonder if I’ll ever recover. One person can drop something carelessly and watch as someone else gets impaled by it. 

It is always messier than I want it to be.

I went to the tenth anniversary of my church a couple of months ago. There were speakers,and a slide show of everything you would expect to see. Baby dedications, Easter services, Christmas Eve and baptisms all streaming happily onto the front screen as we ate dinner. It was nice to see my smiling face at the first retreat I ever attended. It was good to see the preaching pictured, and the worship songs sung. But I was sad there were no picture of people crashing on our pastors black couches.

When we were new to the city, and Christian had to leave every weekend to coach his speech team. Before babies and a house of our own, I used to get desperately lonely on the weekends. But I had a tiny almost three-legged dog to take care of. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but enough that it was a semi-regular occurrence. Me and my funny little dog would sleep over at my pastor’s house. Because I was lonely and they knew I needed people.

I think I’m the only one to have slept there with my dog, but I am not the only one to have slept on those couches. People who worked late in the city, but lived in the suburbs, would sometimes crash their after a midnight shift. There were at least two different halves of various married couples that slept there for a week or two while still engaged but in between leases. Someone slept there for a month while she house hunted, I think.

But we didn’t have any pictures of those magical black couches in the slide show. Because we take pictures of the big things, the baby dedications, the weddings, the special services. But we don’t take pictures of the little things that pile into the big things. The crashing on couches, the shared meals, the welcoming of a lonely lady just moved to the city and her funny little dog.

I love the pomp and circumstance. I think the big days are important. But I know to not neglect the every day. I love all the pictures my family has of christmas eve, of easter, of dance recitals and prom. But can I tell you that the best-loved I ever felt was when my mom would come home from her night class with a TCBY ice cream sandwich for me? When my dad made popcorn in the giant bowl, when we went to the video store and my dad let us rent A League of Their Own…..again. When my mom would read from a chapter book just out of our reading reach, just me and her.

I don’t want to de-value the important days, but I wonder if we might be taking pictures of the wrong things. When we look through the scrapbook of our lives, I hope those moments are there on the page, not just in our hearts.

1.

It is a strange thing the way ordinary words become hot and sell-able. I suppose it would make more sense if I was talking about t-shirts and new cars, about blow-out sales and low low prices. But I’m not. I am talking about the church. The way we co-opt words and repackage old concepts into new books with smiling authors on the back. I joke often that my parents were missional before Francis Chan had a name for it. Back then they were evangelizing, before that their parents were just being good Christian’s. Now we call being good to our neighbor’s “missional living” and we talk about community in all of its forms.

We are a community, we are in a community, we do community, we have community. we need community, we look for community, we find community. We are in community groups and participate in community initiatives. We pretend that this is some sort of new focus as we plant our churches next to 80-year-old places with community in the name. We have neglected these places, written them off because they “don’t have the same values as us.”

2.

I think a lot of people want to have community, but they don’t want to be the community. By a lot of people I mean often times, me.

3.

My mom tells a story about me that I have probably already repeated here. We were at Girl Scout camp, discussing what it means to be a sister to every girl scout. She asked a group of first grade girls what the word sister meant. Having two older ones I was a bit of an expert on the matter. The story goes that I shot my hand in the air and announced. Sister means you are STUCK with each other so you may as well make the best of it. I don’t think it is an accident we are described as sisters and brothers in Christ.

4.

I spent a glorious four days in the foothills of Austin with a group of women I call story sisters. There are over 100 of us now, only a small contingent showed up at our in-person retreat. I led a session where we broke bottles, yelled into the hills, burned our lies. I pray that those lies remain ashes as the brave women go on to lead their beautiful and mess-filled lives. I am We are a community, an artist community still in the early years. I don’t think it is an accident we call each other “story sister.” Every day we choose to be stuck with each other.

6.

I spent a perfect three days in the Tennessee mountains. It was a speech team reunion. We all not only chose to be stuck with each other, but chose to depend on each other, to create with each other, to win and lose with each other. This all while we were between the ages of 18-22. Not the best for decision-making. There were days when we hated each other, but what were we going to do? We were on the same team.

I wanted to hop in a time machine, and have a little chat with my 19-year-old self. I wanted to tell her some things about these people she loved, and drove crazy, and was driven crazy by.

I know this part is hard. But these people, they really see you, especially at your worst, and they still think you are pretty great. You only have four years with them. And then you will all move away, get married (some of you to each other), have kids, and when you re-connect eight years later all the bad will have melted away, but all the good will still be there.

And suddenly you are sitting at the foot of a bed in the middle of the Smokey Mountains, as your husband’s old roommate explores a children’s book with your three girls (two belonging to your family, one to his).

“Which hat is your favorite hat?’

“Why do you think that bird is despondent?”

“What do you think scarlet means?”

His desire to explore every facet of everything that interested him made you absolutely crazy sometimes at eighteen. The conversations would never end, he would beat entire video games before anyone else could. (You never really cared that much about this, but it made the ginger-headed boy you were dating totally furious.)

But now? Now you can see how valuable this thing that you used to try to wish away is. All three daughters are completely engaged. What does that mean? What will happen next? How does that work? What a gifted dad he is, partly because he is interested in exploring every facet of a thing.

I want to tell my twenty-year-old self that we are all so much better at thirty. I hope my forty-year-old self has the same good news.