Sunday we celebrated Easter. Christian and I preformed a reading to open up the service where I declared boldly and loudly that JESUS IS RISEN. I believe that. I do. I believe that death has been defeated and that the tomb was empty.

I believe in Resurrection. But I am aching for Easter. I am aching for marriages and brokenness and old wounds that are still. not. healed. I am aching for promises not fulfilled, and injustice running rampant. I am aching for myself, but also for a world, groaning under the reality that is, but was never supposed to be.

I am longing for just so much resurrection.

I am aching for wholeness and completion. I am believing in Easter, but I am aware that it doesn’t feel like that very often. Y’all, we live in a Saturday world. Sometimes Sunday breaks through, but so often it feels like Saturday.

I have witnessed miracles. In relationships, in circumstances, heck in my own body God has left signs of the resurrection. I believe that miracles happen. I believe that there is good in this world. I believe that Love Wins.

But I don’t always understand why Love can’t win right now. I think NOW is a good time for love to win, for death to die, for all oppression to cease. I think yesterday would be better. This waiting thing. This junk is hard.  It is hard being a Sunday person in a Saturday world.

I am currently finding my life hard on the both large and small scale. I am broken for and with friends, I am still uncertain about my future, I have a lot of laundry to fold.

Yesterday, with no future plans in hand, I rejected my contract for teaching next year. And on the way home from the dog park, Lucky puked all over the car. Twice. Surely these are both signs of my need for Easter. I still don’t have words for the travesty that is the Flint water crisis. Lord have Mercy. We are in desperate need of a miracle.

I have the Easter ache.

From the archives. It is Maundy Thursday, the day in the church calendar where we celebrate the Last Supper. This is the reminder I needed today. 

They announce the open table every week; every week the table is open, and all are welcome. I have heard this announcement before. But always there is an asterisk at that end. When we say all what we really mean is everyone who follows our rules. Everyone with our theology. Everyone who won’t cause a ruckus. The table is open on the one side, but the other side is for a very elite club. God made the membership rules, sorry if you don’t like them, here is the body and bread, broken for you to receive only.

I have always loved communion. I can still recite, word for word, what the pastor of my youth recited as he broke the bread, lifted up the cup. In my head, it is still in Andy’s voice, warm and comforting. “in the same manner our Lord took the cup and after blessing it He said, this cup is the covenant of my blood, shed for the forgiveness of your sins, take drink in remembrance of me.”

I petitioned to take communion early. You were supposed to wait until you were baptized, or at least until you could understand the significance of the holy meal. I was maybe in the fourth grade. I just wanted in on this thing that was happening. I too wanted to take, eat, in remembrance of Him. After a conversation where I explained myself to an extent that I guess was acceptable, the next time the metal plate came around I took a tiny square wafer, a plastic cup of grape juice.

I now walk to the front once a week, cup my hands as a piece of bread is placed in it, and I dip it into a cup of grape juice. I have learned this is called intinction. I watch every week as the servers first take communion, and then serve it to the rest of the congregation, a reminder of our response to the grace of our God. First you receive it, then you hand it out freely. If you sit in the center, and our pastor knows your name he will use it as he hands you the bread.

If you want to see me cry, serve a child communion. I didn’t know that this was true until I saw a server bend low and look directly into a five-year-old’s eyes. For you, Christs body. The cup-bearer responded in kind, bending low and letting the child carefully dip their piece of bread in the juice. I became completely undone. This girl is five and giggling, and yet she is invited. There is now way she could no, no way she could understand.

It is there that the spirit interrupted my scandalized logic. “And you? You understand? Abby, love, like this child, you are welcome, you are loved. Take. Eat. Not because you are worthy, because you understand, because you are properly contrite in heart, but because you are loved. Because you need fed.”

Juliet got upgraded to the five-year-old classroom. Her birthday is coming up anyway, and the sister’s forever dynamic between my two darlings was disrupting the learning of the three/four class. Five-year-olds come back to the service to take communion. I tried to prep her, sitting her on my lap and asking her to watch as the bread was ripped, and dipped into the cup. I don’t want her to get it wrong.

She takes the bread, she dips it in the juice, she cups her hands underneath the meal and heads to her seat. Juliet sits between her very nervous parents and slowly puts the wetted bread up to her tongue. “Eat it!” we tell her. We are terrified she will declare that the body of Christ is “nasty,” loud enough for everyone to hear. We don’t want her to get this wrong.

“Or you could let her taste and see that the Lord is good.” 

And as I watched her taste, and see. As she turned her adult sized portion into a more manageable three bite meal and declared that she liked it, that it was in fact good, I was reminded that the table is always open, you can’t do it wrong, you won’t mess it up.

You are loved. You need fed. The table is open. Come.

I tried to even. But I can’t.

Y’all adulting is really really hard. Maybe I am a whiner, maybe my barely millenial status makes me immature and soft like all those think piece articles say. Maybe it is my social media use and how no one instagrams their boring grocery trips and only their fancy dinners so I really do feel like I am the only one who does things in a boring not so picturesque way. Maybe it is that the instagram filter of “fine” leaves the clutter of kids and jobs and simply existing just out of the frame of conversation. Maybe I am doing it all wrong. But I have been looking, and I can’t find an easier way to do life.

Maybe, adulting is actually really hard.

Who knew? Who knew that this normal thing that everyone is doing every day, going to work, feeding the kids, putting them to bed, getting up and doing it all over again would just be so….draining.

I speak from the experience of a working mom because that is what I am. But I think everyone has their own set of circumstances that make their life just really difficult sometimes. Longings not fulfilled, relationships that are complicated, coping mechanisms we probably need to unlearn. I don’t care who you are, if you are a person it is probably all too much sometimes.

Then you add things like being there for each other, holding people in our hearts, chasing our dreams. Holy moly. That is a lot. How do you pick up the groceries when your hands are already full? This is the thing I need to know.

Sometimes life throws pieces at you and before you know it you are juggling what can only be described as allthethings plus. Plus a sick parent, a divorce, a move, an unsold house, a dream that won’t let you go…..whatever it may be and life is just too much. It is hard enough to just get up and brush your teeth, now the world wants you to do the laundry and not even give you credit for it. What do you mean I am just supposed to do it because I am an adult? Heck yes I want credit for it!

When I was in elementary school it was the cool thing to do to reply, “oh do you want a cookie” sarcastically when someone announced something you thought wasn’t impressive. And I always wondered about that because, HECK YES I WANT A COOKIE! Why would I not want a cookie? Or a gold star, or some tiny sliver of recognition that YES! Adulting is super hard, and you my friend ARE KILLING IT! Or just making it through even though you are carrying more than you ever thought you could. You are doing this. You are adulting. You are even-ing, even though you feel like you can’t, YOU ARE!

That feels brave to me. It feels important that you went to the grocery store, fed yourself, got your kids to school, AND THEN brushed your own hair, worked on your dream even a tiny bit, let everyone know your real self even if it was just on Facebook. That junk is hard and YOU DID IT!

Stop beating yourself up because you ordered pizza twice this week. You manged to feed everyone every single day. That is a lot, even if it was just yourself. Maybe you did pull your clothes out of the giant pile you have dubbed Mt. St. Laundry, HEY! You are wearing clean underwear! You remembered to wash your clothes even though you were so tired you could not remember your middle name. Wow. You do need a cookie, or maybe a glass of wine. Or both.

I know. It is hard. You can’t. You can’t even. But you did! You did even! And might just even tomorrow.

Life is hard. Adulting is hard.

Here. Have a sticker. Or a cookie. Or a quarter of a key lime pie after you put your kids to bed. You know. Hypothetically. Adulting is hard, and you are doing it.

This is a link-up for Addie Zierman’s Night Driving which comes out today. Happy book birthday Addie!  Addie is a much needed voice in the church who is willing to engage darkness, cynicism, depression, and other things that don’t get mentioned much from the pulpit. Plus, her prose will make you straight jealous you didn’t think of that sentence. Get it here.

Is this my life?

This can’t be my life.

This cannot be what my life is about.

These phrases said to me in a car, at the park, over the phone, in a text, sometimes tossed into the conversation as a joke. But it isn’t a joke. Not really. Multiple women around my age, around my circumstances have thrown out this phrase in one form or another. Always there is a searching for something. The only thing I have to offer is solidarity.

I know. I am surprised too. I wasn’t expecting this either.

……….

Four years ago, in March I was telling my co-workers just how exhausted  I was. Two under two, a full time job and a husband in his first year of PhD all while trying to be a High school English teacher was showing its wear. I had forgotten my lunch or a meeting, or showed up to work in dirty pants again. Something adults were not supposed to do, I again had done. I am sure I was trying to laugh it off.

“I don’t know whether it was the PhD or the second baby, but our lives have been thrown into chaos.”

My co-worker with the southern accent and the exceptionally sharp wit looked at me incredulously: “Abby, It is the second baby.”

I stammered. I had my money on PhD putting us over the edge. “I think it is probably the PhD. I guess we will find out when it ends.”

The PhD is about to end and I am afraid she might be right. There is a pile of laundry in my bedroom that has been folded twice but never put away. A month after it came out of the wash it is still in a crumpled mess on my floor, some of the pieces have been washed, worn and thrown back in the pile. Despite being a “girl mom” I have Legos all over the living room.  Turns out liking Legos and not wanting to pick them up is a gender neutral trait.

I wake up at 6 and get home at 6 and keep thinking I will do something fun on the weekends, but my husband and I really just tackle the dishes and take turns catching up on sleep.

Is this really my life?

…….

Everyone but me is sick at my house. Fevers, coughs, chills, nausea. We have apparently communicated how glad we are that the girls puke in a bowl. They tell us proudly when it happens. I feel their foreheads constantly and second guess my self about taking them to the doctor. One more day, I think, and surely it will be gone. They seem better at night, but are hot to the touch in the morning. Okay, I think, one more day.

I sneak off to the spare room to lie down when everyone else is napping. I take the dog with me in hopes of one less mess to clean up in the future. At least this way I know she isn’t getting into anything. Inevitably, I am woken up by someone needing something.

M-O-M. The cry comes from the living room and even after almost six years I am surprised that I am the one in charge. That I am the one they are calling for. I have no idea what I am doing. They call for mom, and I wish my mom was here too.

Here is the thing about being an adult: You never stop calling for your mom.

……..

Some of my earliest memories are of my mom. Her red trench coat and black heeled boots. I remember following her around the local University campus, and her coming up the front walk of the babysitters house to collect me after kindergarten. I remember a mostly clean house and a caper chart with our activities listed faithfully at the bottom so everyone would get to piano and indoor soccer when they needed to. I don’t remember her being exhausted by the pace of daily life.

I call my sisters and we shrug and marvel. We have no idea how mom did it, and we have no idea why none of us inherited that gene. I call my mom and she tells me I am doing a good job. She reminds me that she didn’t work full time until I was in first grade, and she certainly didn’t have the commute that I have. She tells me I am doing the best I can and she is right. I just wish it were better. I didn’t expect my best to look like a never ending pile of unfolded laundry and exactly zero tropical vacations in sight.

…….

I cover up my shivering daughters on the couch and check with my sick husband before I escape to the coffee shop. Writers group, that is supposed to meet every other week, is meeting tonight and I need to write a few things before they get their. When your writers group is full of adults who are juggling kids and illness and being in community in their respective neighborhoods,  people cancel more than anyone wants to. Today this writing dream of mine seems extra impossible and exceedingly selfish. It is a perfect spring day. The kind that makes me want to never leave the South East, and even the art work is exceptionally bright and cheery. It makes me feel like everyone else is thrilled with life and I am somehow missing out. I wish it were raining and the photos of abandoned places that were up in October were on the walls.

Is this really my life? I didn’t expect it to be this hard.

…….

I wonder if this is just what the middle looks like. I wonder if I am just in the middle of the tunnel and if I just keeping inching forward I will eventually see the light at the other end. I know I am not interested in turning back the other way. As hard as this drive is today, I am sure the only way is through it. But I have learned that I am not in this tunnel alone. The greatest gift I have to offer is also the one I desperately need to receive, and I have, but there are days I need to ask for it.

You weren’t expecting this either? Just plain old daily life is harder than you ever thought it would be?

Solidarity. Me too. You are not alone.

Monday one minute before the bell rang I got a pretty amazing text.

“I have an extra ticket to see Glennon Melton, you want it?”

Um. Yes. I was going to buy a ticket for myself when I got the email for pre-sale (if you want to see the heart behind Momastery it is best to be on her email list. Sometimes the tickets sell out before she even tells the public.) I thought Oh! I should ask Christian about that. 30 dollars is currently a lot of money at our house and I just wanted to check. Also, I needed to make sure he was available to be the parent at home. By the time I got around to asking, tickets were already gone. I shrugged. I would just catch the YouTube clips. So, duh! So, I checked with Christian who told me there were plenty of leftovers, he would man bedtime, and PS the dog rolled in cat poop but he already handled that stiuation, and I went to see Glennon Melton.

It was good. I see why her tickets sell out. She is the exact same person online as she is speaking in front of a crowd, and I imagine as she is hanging out in her pjs in the hotel. It was good.

But it wasn’t, for me, the spiritual experience that so many people speak of when they go to see Glennon. It was just good. Worth the money and time and quick text to my husband, but not life changing. I think that is because the thing that makes her different is a thing I already do. A thing I already have.

Glennon is deeply vulnerable in her writing and social media. She tells us like it is, even when it is bad, even when it is hard. Her brand is truth telling, and so she goes for it. She tells us when she is joyful, or hurting, or wrong. I am most impressed by her when she tells us when she has gotten it wrong.

I think for a lot of women, Glennon is the first woman they have seen stand up in a church and choose to be fully herself.  

Through out the night she told charming and self desparaging stories about times she came on too fast and too honest when people asked her how she was. I have very many of those same stories. My friend was once explaining the difficulty of a new Bible study she was in.”During prayer time, we still only give requests about other people.” I told her I had never been in a Bible study like that, and she laughed. “Yeah, that is because you lead with I’m Abby, here is my underwear.” She isn’t wrong. I don’t actually show people my underwear (usually) but I do tend to get real, real fast.

Every time, every single time I publish something kind of vulnerable here, or I get real with my prayer requests at church and things get a little too quiet because I said something that freaked someone out, a few weeks later someone pulls me aside to thank me. Then they tell me their stuff. Every single time.

Being vulnerable and telling the truth is the hard and holy work of community. It is what the church is for. I am grateful to Glennon Melton for modeling that on the internet over and over again. But I am telling you right now we don’t have to wait for Glennon to come to town to have the vulnerable truth telling moments we all so desperately need to have.

We just have to go first. I absolutely promise you people won’t be far behind. If they are, email me. I will give you my “me too.”

I am up at the Mudroom today. That space is just so special to me. I messed up my post a few months ago and texted Tammy: I am sorry I am making this hard. And she texted me back: I believe you are worth it. I still get teary thinking about that. I want to create spaces where instead of saying: No problem! When it was clearly a problem, I say: You are worth my trouble. She is that kind of leader.

I wrote this month about sacrifice. It was pointed out to me about a year ago that I will sacrifice my whole self and all my happiness on my principles, and while noble, maybe that wasn’t the best way to live my life. Maybe there was a way to have my principles AND my happiness. Maybe God didn’t want me to be miserable as a permanent life choice. I wrote about that this month. Maybe you need to hear that too?

Let me just let you know up front: God isn’t asking you to bleed out. I do not believe that God is asking you to just sit there and take it, whatever it is.

God is not asking you to bleed out slowly as you turn pale and feel the life slowly leaking out of you. That is not God who is asking you to stay there and die. Bad theology might be asking you to do that. Or fear, or shame or something someone told you about expectations and being a good . . . girl, wife, teacher, something. You don’t have to sacrifice your whole being to be good.

Read the rest here.

I wonder every once in a while why the heck I still do this thing. I wonder why I put my words down on the internet and invite anyone with wifi to read my words. I mean, it is a little weird, still, when I really think about it. It is. A little weird.

But also, it isn’t. It isn’t that weird. I started getting serious here when I had 2 kids under 2 and a husband in graduate school. I would race home and he would hand off the babies as he headed upstairs to study or out the door for class. When papers were due he would come downstairs and eat standing up and rush upstairs to finish his work on time. I used to joke that when he got his diploma, I would write my name on pencil in the back.

Instead, I got serious about blogging. I started calling myself a writer. Right when there was no more time or space, I created this space. I found the time, two minutes at a time. My life was telling me that there was not another inch of space available to me, but my heart was telling me I really needed some room to be something besides a mom or a PhD wife or a teacher. I just needed room.

Virginia Woolf famously explained that a woman writer needs a room of one’s own. It turns out she was right, and my room has been digital.  When everyone needs me for food and cleaning and comfort, this space has been the space where I needed to breathe.

Sometime last year I started censoring myself and then, I didn’t blog for a month at the beginning of this year, which is totally unheard of for me. I just, wasn’t sure that what to say next that would matter. I forgot that it mattered because it matters to me. I write first because I need me to write, if it helps someone else that is also good.

In a world where there are a lot of things pulling me in a lot of directions, it is good for me to remember that making space for myself is a totally viable reason for doing something. If it is good for me. That is a good enough reason to do it. Maybe you also need some space today?

My posts for SheLoves are due the fifteenth every month, so when I wrote this I was sure my waiting for a job for Christian would be all done by the time this came up. I could not have been more wrong.

We are still waiting to see where God wants us next Fall. With the location comes questions about what exactly I will be doing. There is still a lot up in the air. Way more than I thought would be. I am coveting your prayers that I may be extra gentle with myself and my family and that we would get news soon. Turns out the you at the beginning of this post is me.

Hey You, the one who is waiting.

I just want to let you know that I see you. I see that you are waiting. I see that you have been waiting. I see that you don’t see an end to your waiting and I wish I could tell you that I see the end. But I don’t.

So instead, can I just sit here with you? Hold your hand? Rub your back? Not touch you at all because that is really the last thing you need right now? I brought chocolate. I probably don’t have any good words. What words are there to say? You are waiting. And it totally sucks. Waiting is the worst.

I hate waiting because I suffer from chronic do-er syndrome, and there isn’t a whole lot of doing in waiting. It is really all about being. So I will try my best to be here with you as you wait for it to start, or finish, or for you to know what your next step is. Let’s just be together. Here. In the land of the waiting.

When I was pregnant with my second child I started having contractions three weeks before she was actually born. Three weeks. I was so uncomfortable I really could not be nice enough to my students to teach them. Plus I was totally terrified that I would give birth on the side of the road if I braved my terrible commute. So I started my maternity leave early and I waited. And waited. And waited.

You can read the rest here.

In December, in that strange space between Christmas and New Years when the only acceptable thing to do is eat carbs and cheese and sugar and wear yoga pants all day, a friend announced she would be buying no new things on Facebook and something about the idea struck me. I liked it, but I thought it was kind of crazy. I have enough up in the air, I don’t need to spend extra time and energy thinking about seriously changing my normal routine.

Except this is something I have always wanted to try and have long suspected a month or 40 days wouldn’t really change my life enough to change my habits.

Except I had been noticing my habit of window shopping on Amazon when I was feeling sad or overwhelmed. I seemed to be operating under the delusion that the right product or system or service would definitely make my life better or easier or…something I am looking for. Comfortable? Probably I am searching for something that would make it better. I don’t even know what it is.

So I commented. I am in. I too will have a No New Year. I hadn’t prepared by assessing what I needed and buying it ahead of time, or even letting my husband know. I just kind of said, hey! me too!

I’ve been at this two months now and planned on giving you a monthly update. Consider this January and you will get a February update mid-march. Then, hopefully I should be back on track.

There were a few things I knew I needed and I put those on the “doesn’t count” list. I needed new underwear, both my kids needed new shoes. I was allowed to buy those. Things like deodorant and toothbrushes did not count. I was wondering what to do about gifts. I am still navigating that.

Here are my rules: Nothing new for me, or the house, or my classroom. I will first try to do without. If I need something (or really want something) I will buy it used. Mostly I just won’t. I just won’t. It turns out I have enough stuff. And the buying of the things has very rarely simplified my life in any significant way. (There are exceptions to that rule, I love my Keurig with a love that is greater than love forever and ever amen.) Instead, mostly it just gives me one more thing to put away, get rid of, or otherwise figure out what to do with.

The first thing I noticed was how many sale flyers I get in my email. The unsubscribe that first week was significant. And also, kind of delightful. I don’t have to see what Old Navy has on super clearance or what the daily deal is on Amazon. I don’t have to decide if today is the day I decide to splurge on something I kind of want and sort of need but also could do without. The answer is no. Going to Target has never taken less time.

No. No. Nopenopenoppitynope. It isn’t that I am not deciding. It is that I have already decided. The answer is no. It turns out that decisions about buying things have taken up a lot of brain space.

Everything was awesome, until my girls were invited to a birthday party. Oh crap! What do I do? Look. As a parent, I am like PLEASE please come to the Birthday party and do not bring a thing. My kids have enough stuff, more stuff than they could ever want. I know in my brain I don’t actually need to bring anything. But my heart says that it is rude to not bring a present. Plus, the girls are not down with showing up to a birthday party empty handed. They want to bring a present.

We were invited to a ridiculous amount of birthday parties in January. Seriously. We had two in one weekend, WHAT? I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I went into the girls room and raided the book shelf. Then, I pulled out a present I was supposed to return and did not. Finally, I raided a used book store and for about 3 dollars per book, I now have a whole stack of children’s birthday presents ready to go.

I think, for now, my plan for adult presents is to make them. If you are expecting a birthday present from me this year, expect salted caramel sauce in a mason jar I already own. It is the probably the best thing I will ever gift you.

But also, I am really learning that people like me even if I show up empty handed. I don’t have to bring a present, and when people say that my presence is enough I need to believe them. I should gifts out of joy, and not out of obligation. I am surprised at what a hard lesson this has been for me.

So far, my no new year is going well, tune in next time for the time my dog ate through her collar, my boot falling apart, and my current obsession with the used clothing website Thred Up.

My time as a teacher in a classroom is quickly dwindling away. I am having big feelings about that. And then. AND THEN the Mudroom went and had Vocation as their February theme. Good, but brutal.

When I was twelve I heard the voice of God. Like, literally. I know. I think it is totally weird too. I was the most awkward almost thirteen year old you could possibly imagine, and I heard the voice of God, behind me and to the left. I was at church camp. God told me God would use my voice.

I know. I too don’t really believe it. But it happened, so what else was I to do?

I came home and told my parents. The even crazier thing is that they believed me. They believed their twelve-year-old daughter and even trusted me to interpret it. I was an almost thirteen-year-old in the Evangelical nineties. What else could it mean? I was going to be the next Rebecca St. James, Jennifer Knapp, Jaci Velasquez. They found the money to get me voice lessons at the local university.

The voice lessons faded out, but the call on my life did not. At fifteen I was at the front of the church sobbing after an altar call for future missionaries. I remember the sweater I was wearing, the name of the boy I was sitting next to during the service. (Thank the good Lord I gained better taste in men.) I remember thinking, okay. This is it. This is how God will use my voice.

Read the rest here.