31 days! Half way there! Start at the beginning, I am housing this crazy month here.

I have been having a really hard week. Work stuff is hard, relationships are hard, and someone said something to me that only the worst parts of myself whisper to me, about me, when I am feeling very scared.

I missed an appointment I really wanted to go to.

I missed an emai I should have caught.

I missed a guest post of someone I have mad mad MAD respect and affection for (but seriously check it out because it is gooood).

I was late to work. My house is a mess. My kids are being particularly difficult.

I am still afraid that that thing that someone said is true.

Yeah, I am having a very very hard week. And scarcity has been going off like a siren. Scarcity is telling me that I am only as good as my very worst self. I am only as good as the worst things I do even if they aren’t purposeful, even if I am doing the best I can. Scarcity tells me that the best I can do does not always measure up, so I don’t measure up ever for any reason.

But I have been taking deep breaths and trying to find the abundance. Abundance is me saying that I am worthy. That I am worth loving even in the midst of my failures, that I am everything I think my potential might be worth and probably more, and you are too.

I am so SO thrilled to have Addie Zierman here today. Her book When We Were on Fire was like reading out of my own more eloquent high school journal. Addie tells the beautiful and difficult truth, always. I am a BIG FAN. 

The Kingdom of God is like a Squeaky Hamster Wheel

We accidentally-on-purpose got a hamster last week. His name is Hurley.

We got the hamster because the boys kept catching moles that had gotten trapped in the egress windows. Dane, in particular, had become devoted to creating habitats for these vile little critters with their sneering snouts and theirappetite for worms and grubs.

So we struck a bargain — release Squeaky the Mole, and we’ll buy a hamster.

Deal.

Hurley is a cute little Winter White from PetsMart who looked so docile and sweet in his cage.

But then, we got THE WHEEL.

Do they make hamster wheels that don’t squeak? If they exist, I have never met one.

It starts right when we put the boys to bed at 7:30. Squeak, squeak, squeak, the wheel goes as Hurley goes round and round, and it brings me straight back to my pink-wallpapered childhood bedroom and my loft bed, where I’d lie at night, staring at the ceiling while my own hamster, Sniffles, went squeak, squeak, squeak on his own wheel.

At ten o’clock, when Andrew and I turn off living room lights and come upstairs to bed, it’s still going. Squeak, squeak, squeak. “That little thing has to be running miles,” Andrew says, as we lie side by side in bed, listening.

At two in the morning, when I trundle out of bed to let the dog out, the hamster is still running, the squeak, squeak, squeak echoing through the middle-of-the-night quiet. I can hear it perfectly from the kitchen, where I lean my head on the cold patio door, waiting for the dog to come back in.

At five a.m., when my alarm goes off, and I lie in bed, blinking into consciousness, it’s that squeak, squeak, squeak that pulls me out of bed, because once you start hearing it, it’s all you can hear. It’s relentless and impossible to ignore, and it’s what I’m hearing when I open the prayer book I read in the mornings: The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime.

It’s the song behind me when I speak into the morning dark the first part of the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father, who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy Kingdom come.

Thy will be done on earth

As it is in heaven.

The hamster wheel squeak, squeak, squeaks, and it occurs to me that the Kingdom of God has been at work all this time — that when I am asleep, when I am distracted, when I am unaware, it is still turning, turning, turning — God at work, always, in the world he created.

Listen, I am a whiz at believing that I am the center of the living universe, that the world begins and ends with my to-do list. That if I stop holding it together, it will all fall apart. But in the dark morning, the hamster wheel turns, and I am reminded of the on goingness of it all — that as I sleep, the Kingdom of God is growing and moving and changing everything, turning the world around.

That we wake into a Kingdom that is always already happening.

The wheel squeaks its relentless song, and the sun rises a little bit at a time, and we are invited to step into the healing, nonstop current of Kingdom living once again.

Addie Zierman is a writer, blogger and speaker.

She has an MFA from Hamline University and is the author of When We Were On Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love and Starting Over — which was named by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the best books of 2013.

I am a GO-er a DO-er a recovering YES addict. And today, right this minute I am totally wiped. I learned when my babies were both under two, that the Lord would give me rest, but it didn’t always look like I wanted it to.

Scarcity. Scarcity says if it doesn’t look the way I want it to, it isn’t real. Lies. LIES FROM THE PIT!

Abundance says, take the rest and be grateful. Receive the enoughness. You are enough. It is enough.

So, I didn’t use the words, but I wrote about scarcity and it is up at the Mudroom.

Join me there. 

Start at the beginning, I am housing this crazy month here.

I am writing 31 fighting scarcity. I will be collecting them all at the starting point. I hope you join me this month. 

I have been dumping my words out into the internet for a minute now. I started on another blog in 2010, and moved here a year later when I was on maternity leave with Priscilla.

Priscilla is four, sleeps through the night, and can get her own snack. I sometimes still think of myself as a newcomer. That isn’t even a little bit true.

I have been blogging long enough that some of my closest friends are bloggers, that we have met people from all over the country and housed people in my home that I had never actually met until they brought their bags into my house. It has shaped me in ways I never expected and I am deeply grateful.

But it is sometimes hard to put your words out there multiple times a week. Blogging has changed and there aren’t as many comments. But I love the discussions we have on Facebook and the interactions I have on Twitter, and I love seeing what you are up to on the daily via your Instagram feed. How cute are our kids? Almost as cute as our pets! Sometimes you have no idea what is happening with your post and whether or not what you are saying matters.

Scarcity tells me that my words only matter if the stats bar is higher than yesterday. Scarcity tells me that my words don’t matter because there were no private emails in my box saying they did. Scarcity tells me that only certain things count, and then as soon as I hit that mark it doesn’t count anymore.

Abundance tells me that saying it matters. That just the act of the saying is enough of a reason to do it, that the saying matters because it shapes me, and my shaping is enough, every person’s changing shape, changes the shape of the world. Even if just a little bit, that little bit counts. Abundance also tells me I never really know what my words are doing after they enter the world.

I was reminded this weekend of all of this. I received an email asking me about this post I wrote about why I stopped telling the stories of my first students. One I had written as a guest post for another blog a few years ago. Apparently this person uses it in a class that teaches teachers. I was flattered and encouraged that this piece of writing had shaped something I had no idea about. This interaction also reminded just how much this piece of writing shaped me. It was the first time I wrote about that life. It was the first time I talked about the things I had done wrong. The comments on the blog no longer even available made me consider that maybe I did have a story worth telling. I started my manuscript a year later.

I know the majority of my audience doesn’t blog. But I also know that most people feel as though the thing you are doing doesn’t matter. The diaper changing, the feeding, the laundry, the emails, the paper work, the driving. Does this thing matter?

Yes. It matters because you matter.

am writing 31 fighting scarcity. I will be collecting them all at the starting point. I hope you join me this month. 

This summer when Esther and I hung out we talked a lot about a lot of things, but we also talked a lot about blogging. Why do we do it? What are we doing it? What do people like? What has caught us by surprise?

I was doing the love bomb posts, so I was writing about scarcity then too. Esther was telling me how much she liked when I write about scarcity and I wans telling her that I was very very afraid I would run out of things to say, or people would grow tired of hearing me talk about it. She started laughing.

Right in my kitchen she asked me, what about preachers? What if you showed up to church and your preacher said, I am tired about talking about Jesus, so let’s do something else! Or Sarah Bessey (We both love Sarah’s writing.) What if Sarah stopped writing about breastfeeding, and ordinary life, the spirit meeting her there. What if Idelette decided she had said all the says about Sisterhood?

In this writing world, with all of the pressure to say something NEW and interesting and new. It isn’t okay to be struggling with scarcity two years after you start a newsletter about it. It isn’t delightful to still be delighted by the way the sune comes through the tress, as least not to write about it again, even if that is where you find yourself again.

But what if we decide we can’t write about the thing that is on her heart? What if we are afraid we already said that?

I think we should say it again. I think there is an abundance of rooms for an abundance of voices, and that sometimes God gives us one message, one thing to wrestle, one voice, and we should use it. Maybe I am not the only one who needs to hear something more than once.

I am writing 31 fighting scarcity. I will be collecting them all at the starting point. I hope you join me this month. 

I am afraid of hope. Our whole lives are up in the air for next year and I want to know where things are coming down. I have some opinions about what should come down where and how those things should stack up.

I have some very specific hopes I have set up for myself. I am trying to hold them loosely. I am maybe not very good at that.

Two days ago my youngest came up to me and beamed. I was a SURPRISE! I SUPRISED YOU! She isn’t wrong. Priscilla is my surprise. And she is my reminder that my hopes are sometimes two specific.

I hope sometimes in one good thing, in one right thing, in one certain way that people should shake out. I have a scarcity of hope, and I am slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y, learning to unclench my understanding of what to hope for. I am learning that I can hope in abundance. There are an abundance of good things, good ways, good places for my life to land.

I just need to believe in the abundance of that hope, in the delight of being surprised, of the lack of scarcity in the ways things are going to turn out.

I am writing 31 fighting scarcity. I will be collecting them all at the starting point. I hope you join me this month. 

Speech team was a major part of my college career. A major part. Like art majors spend all day in the art studio, hang out with the other hyper creative types and the creative writing majors all smoke cigarettes outside the english building, I spent hours in the top floor of the communication department and all weekends with the team, even if we weren’t traveling to a tournament.

I am back at my college and judging now. I am the old stodgy person wondering why everyone is doing the events WRONG!

WRONG. It is really really easy to change, or have something change and decide that either the new or the old. must. be. wrong. I have changed a lot since college. I mean I hope I have. If you get from 22 to 30 without your thoughts evolving on something I am not sure you are paying attention.

And here I am, on my old stomping grounds, remembering. Remembering when I was in this coffee shop and taking classes in this building. Even just watching the generic white vans from all the speech teams across the midwest pull into the parking lot is taking me back,

Part of me is cringing, embarrassed by the way I used to think so clearly and strongly on nuanced subjects. How things were RIGHT and WRONG. And a part of me is wistful for the way it was so easy, how I didn’t hem and haw and say “it depends” when people ask me about what I think. I am embarrassed by how I wasn’t a very good listener.

Scarcity is telling me that I can’t like both of us. I can’t have affection for the girl I once was and be proud of the person I have become. But, as we are learning this month, scarcity is a liar. I don’t have to be embarrassed about the way I used to think or the things I used to say.

I had to be her to get to who I am now.

Abundance allows me to honor the people and places I used to be. Abundance says everyone does the best we can with what we have, and being different now doesn’t mean we can’t honor where we were, and that we were also doing the best we could when we were that person.

Abundance says that the Holy Spirit changes with the wind, and there is a lot of room for everyone to grow and change, without being embarrassed that they had to.

I can’t really pinpoint the moment I met Meredith on the internet. But I am glad I did. This is not the first time I have been very impressed with her writing. It certainly won’t be the last. Meredith is on my writers to watch list for sure. I didn’t plan it, or tell her, but I think this peice captivates scarcity thinking and the freedom of abundance perfectly. Consider this day 9 of my 31 days of scarcity.

The Kingdom of God is like a Line with No Order

A line curved out the door of my church and wrapped around the block. I hadn’t intended to stop at the church, but driving past this event, I found myself pulling over and parking on the side of the road. Frankly, I had never seen this many people here ever. Not even the Sunday my pastor preached a sermon from the roof (a story for another day). 

A few women pulled blue coolers and children along with them as the line inched forward, leading to something through the double red doors of the church; people were piling into God’s house. The June day paraded around like one in mid August, cloaked in heavy, humid air. The voices and sounds outside the church layered on top of one another, the sounds of caps popping off bottles joining low resonant voices, all punctuated by the high squeals of children’s laughter. Sweaty in my car, I watched out of suburban curiosity of the unknown, watching the citizens of the line.

I could not tell where one family started and another family ended, or which children belonged to which adults.  Kids wove in, around, and through the line, running and taunting one another, while the parents watched them together. A sign stuck in the church lawn announced the presence of the Mexican consulate helping with “los pasaportes.”

The body language of those waiting in front of our white-steepled church gave no tell of the stakes of the line, of what hung in the balance on this summer afternoon. I thought of the lines I had waited in at movie premiers or the Gap with crossed arms, policing my surroundings for budgers and those with over-complicated questions and demands taking more than their fair share.

I watched a boy being chased through the churchyard, his head not reaching the waist of most of the adults around him. Then, looking over his shoulder as he tried to escape, he ran right into an elderly man’s legs. At first the boy backed away, his eyes darkening with concern, but the man put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and just laughed, a full throated, head thrown back laugh, making the boy ease into a giggle too, which quickly assuaged the kid’s concerned mother who had come to fetch him. The man picked up the boy and began to talk with the mother, inviting her into his spot, earlier up in the line.

My peers taught me from an early age that lines are about status. I have memories of my kindergarten classroom, waiting in line to receive a waxy Dixieland cup full of lukewarm water and a hand-full of Teddy Grahams. I peered over the shoulders in front of me to make sure Mrs. Cummings had enough for me, counting back to see where I fit in the line, losing track somewhere around ten. I oversaw the portions given to each of my classmates, no longer friends, but competitors making the level of Teddy Grahams go down, down, down in the plastic canister.

The woman with the small boy had made it to the red doors now, and she hadn’t moved back to her place in line yet. I worried that someone would embarrass her or ask her to move, the way I’ve seen old men do at Starbucks and deli counters. If they don’t shout it, they mumble to their party or whoever will listen, “Do you see this person cutting in front of me?”  Lines are full of the implied rules of justice and fairness, and we patrol those around us to uphold these laws. We make sure no one takes what is not rightfully theirs or, more importantly, rightfully ours.

___

It’s not just a problem of our capitalist society. The disciples worried about their spot in line too. Instead of watching their Jesus, who turned lines and hierarchy inside out, who washed their feet and insisted those late to work in the vineyard would be given the same pay, they worried about where their seating assignment in the heavenly realms would be.  

The line in front of my church did not stratify those gathered, but instead unified them. After all, people in line with you often want the same things. In that line, the order didn’t seem to matter as much as simply being there.  I often ignore this commonality in lines and stare at my shoes rather than connecting with those around me.

It reminds me of the stories I love about Jesus, the way he ignored the politics of lines and legalism of the pharisees and noticed the woman who grabbed his cloak, the man who asked for healing on the sabbath, and another who was lowered through a rooftop by his friends. He told the children to come unto him and noticed a snively little tax collector who climbed a tree, telling him he’d come over to his house for dinner.

The kingdom of God is like this, a line with no rules, a line that offends the righteous, those who’ve been in line for a while doing the right thing.

—

  I saw a man leave through the side door of the church. He held the hand of his son in one hand, and in the other, a packet of papers. His wife laughed, holding her pregnant belly. A couple of people clapped for them as they walked past. Sitting in my car, I smiled too, wanting to join the people, to get in line and walk away new or different, not by getting but by waiting together in the middle of it all.

Though at the time I gawked out of curiosity, the image still stays with me, deepening and fermenting to explain something I believe in my gut. It’s the kind of story I want to tell my kids instead of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant or the tale of the little red hen. I want them to see that to live out grace we must at times discard the vocabulary of “deserving” and “bootstrap-pulling” and instead usher the later-comers to the front of the line, sharing in the community of reaching towards the same desire. This. The kingdom of heaven is like this.

Meredith (Vosburg) Bazzoli is a writer and comedian living in the Chicagoland area. Meredith loves hearing and recording other’s stories, finding glimmers in the mundane,  exploring and collaborating creatively, making good food, and seeking what it means to love and follow Christ in the everyday. She writes about living the revealed life on this blog and performs at the iO and Playground theaters in Chicago. Meredith is married to Drew, a web designer and 6’4″ man with the self-described physique of a tube sock. Connect with her onInstagram and Twitter! And check out her blog.

I am writing 31 fighting scarcity. I will be collecting them all at the starting point. I hope you join me this month. 

This past weekend I went to the Story conference. While I loved the city, (Nashville, let’s hang out okay?) and I loved my company, I was a little bit underwhelmed by the conference (maybe a little bit more than a little bit). The bright spot for me was the opportunity to meet Seth Haines (you can get his tiny letter here) and buy a copy of his book. Apparently it doesn’t come out until October 27th.

In it Seth talks about sobriety, but also he speaks of healing. In fact this is the first place that I have read about healing in a way that honors the mystery of it all. And it felt like water in the desert, like a window opening, like pulling into your driveway. YES! Me too. I get it and I was finally more home on this earth with Seth’s witness right there for me to read. Me too. It was wonderful. It is wonderful. Buy the book.

It has taken me a long way to get here. Just a few months ago it would have crushed me that Seth wrote this thing that is just so true. I mean, I am thinking about a book about healing and if Seth and I think the same thing, and he got there first, then I am going to lose out. His witness to the Good news to the masses is actually bad news for me.

Y’all, scarcity is just such a LIAR. It is just a terrible LIE that because one person said it in their own beautiful way that I can’t say it too. Imagine, imagine if Luke or John had said, welp between Matthew and Mark, the life of Jesus is covered. Imagine if Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou were pitted against each other, told there was only enough room for one of them. Imagine. Just imagine. This is the dumbest thing I have ever almost thought, that just because someone else is saying something I shouldn’t say it either. I was almost a complete moron.

There is absolutely enough room for my voice, especially if it is something God places on my heart, especially if I feel called to say it. The fact that someone else is saying it only proves the point. This thing that God is doing is too important to just have one mouth piece. Everyone should join the chorus. There are an abundance of voices and stories, and mine is one.