I’m a pack animal. My students were picking what they wanted to be re-incarnated as, Lion! Otter! Something that FLIES! when their heads turned my way. I shrugged, “I guess it is un-cool but I really only want to be what I am. So, if I were re-incarnated into an animal, I would hope it would be as a labrador retriever. I just want a cozy place to sleep, a full tummy, and my people with me. It will be my job to make sure they are safe and happy.”

That is really all I want out of life, to be withmy people and make sure they are safe and happy. And I like being patted on the head occasionally too. I need my people. I need my people, and I need my people to need me.

I think Margaret Feinberg is a bit of a pack animal herself. In her new book, Fight Back with Joy she talks about getting  a cancer diagnoses and asking her friends to remind her to find joy. Her people meet her in a hundred different ways. Text messages, red balloons, an article about the enormity of a cows tongue. They meet her with rides and grocercy store giftcards and notes to say they are praying. She speaks, in the first chapters of the book, about the strength and joy her people brought her.

And I was thinking of the joy that these services probably brought her friends.

November and December were dark around here, and one of my friends noticed. I got a text that when I got home I was to go upstairs. The girls would be fed, bathed and put to bed, and dinner would be delivered to me. They saw how much I needed a break, and I got it. The joy this brought me was remarkable, but so was the smile on my friend’s face when she showed up at my door. It was a joy to her to do this thing for me.

I am awesome in a crisis. I show up, with dinner. I tell you you have to go to bed and I won’t hear another word about it. I take your crying baby so you can pee. I bring you chocolate and wine. I am like Mary Freaking Poppins with the occasional swear.

At least, I used to be. But then I had babies and a full time job, and things are just a little crazier than I want them to be. I often can’t show up with dinner and the news that I will be babysitting tonight, even if I want to, and most of the time I do want to. But I let the, I can’t do everything, move into, so I may as well not do anything. Which is simply dumb. People don’t want a five course meal, they want to know that I am with them, because that is what brings people joy.

Margaret goes on to say that joy is our destiny, it is what God created us for, and we often are able to be joy to each other. I cheat everyone out of joy when I decide not to show up in a smaller capacity if I can’t show up in a big one. So, I am declaring that I am showing up.

By mailing a five dollar starbucks giftcard if I am too far to go get coffee

By texting, tweeting, facebook messaging, emailing people what I really think about them (that they are AWESOME!)

By sending hilarious pictures of my face (you should see the gallery on my phone).

By calling and letting the girls sing them a song.

By dropping a picture of a puppy on their facebook wall.

By calling and having take out delivered (Turns out you don’t have to be in the same city to get a meal covered.)

By sending real mail.

I’m showing up because I am a pack animal, but also because life has been brutal lately, and sometimes the only thing to do is to fight back with joy, and these things bring me joy.

I highly reccomend this book after reading the first bit. This isn’t some fluffy rainbows and butterflies joy is so easy stuff. Margaret is giving us the honest and beautiful truth. Check out her video.

My friends and I used to talk about how many kids we will have taught when we finally retire, how many of those kids we really had a personal connection with, how many of those kids we perhaps also impacted their families. We used to talk about perfecting our craft, what we did last year, what we want to do better.

Sometimes we would talk about our perfect classrooms. The furniture, the books, the assignments, the schedule. We would laugh and start sentences with “When I am in charge….” knowing that we would never be in charge because in charge meant you don’t get to be in the classroom anymore and who would want to do that? Being a teacher was exhausting, but worth it. We were fed by it. We were good at it.

We still are good at it, the teaching part anyway. We are good at connecting with the kids, and communicating with the parents. We are good at coming up with creative assignments, and getting kids to really think about our subject and the world, about themselves and what they think.

But those are not the things that we are being asked to do. That is no longer what being a teacher is about. Those things that we are good at, that fed us, those are now things we do if we can squeeze it in.

There are emails to respond to and tests to be built, in a certain format in a certain program that we need to use. This year lecture is out of fashion it isn’t “student centered” enough, even if the data they are currently asking for shows the students learn well when I lecture.

So I have to figure out how to deliver information that is in my head, that needs to be in my student’s head into those heads without telling them. Youtube, readings, anything but lecture, even if I have spent the last 6 years perfecting the jokes in my “intro to Shakespeare” slideshow that also has all the information the state includes on the test.

I’m not opposed to oversight. I get why people would want to make sure that teachers are doing a good job. I think education is really important. That is after all, why I became a teacher. I just wish I still liked my job. I wish it made sense, the things that are being mandated. I wish I believed in the system still. I still believe in education. I still believe in teaching. I just wish I still was doing that.

We started going to a new church. I think for some people this isn’t really a thing. They do it every few years, or every few months. They don’t start so they don’t ever make it to the new part. There are just churches, one old one new.

We aren’t like that. My parents still go to the church they found when they were just married. They tried out three and ended up at one because they served communion every week and the choir spent the majority of their time sitting with the rest of the parishioners. That was that. I know every inch of that church building. It is as much a home to me as the house my parents have yet to move out of.

I had every intention of having that story. I know that for some it is heresy, but for me, well, I really hope to grow up to be like my mom. I wanted to stay. I was hoping to stay. I planned on it, really.

So here I am, not staying, looking for new, feeling out if perhaps we had found it. I told God when I left that I needed somewhere to land. God does not always agree with me about what my needs are. It seems this time, perhaps we agree. And I am sitting in the historic sanctuary, filled with light and art, but not quite enough heat. Historic, it seems, is synonymous with drafty. And I am crying. Not just a few tears, really crying, silently.

It suddenly occurs to me, as my shoulders shake and I try not to breathe too loudly, that the congregation that has met me warmly does not know that when the Spirit moves, I weep.

Once, while praying in front of my (old? Is it still mine? former?) congregation, after reading the Scripture, something broke inside and I started crying before I could get out the “amen.” I managed it and then walked all the way down the side aisle and out the back door. Someone found me outside and told me it was good. That my broken prayer ministered to them that day in a way that a well thought out sermon never could.

I miss that easy comradery. I miss people knowing that crying is just another way I worship. I guess I miss being known. But this takes time, the knowing, the being known, these things take time. And I am sad for that, so I cry.

I sit in this quiet sanctuary and actively remind myself that it is right and good to feel whatever it is what I need to feel, and cry some more. I wipe away the tears the best I can so that no one else will feel weird when we are passing the peace.

I manage to keep it together until the final hymns and the communion. The breaking of the bread always breaks off some of the hard pieces inside, and I am again undone. This new church has communion every week, so I figure they will get used to this faster. At least I hope so.

I think about how I cry in movie theaters, at plays, in my home, sometimes when I read a particularly beautiful passage out loud to my students. I often cry when I am tired, and almost always when I am watching Parenthood. I think about how I like that about myself, that the feelings come freely and easily if I let them. I think about how I want to be in a church where the crying and the laughing just come when they come.

I figure I am only in charge of myself. So I go to the prayer corner after the service is over and I ask for prayer. I start crying before I even finish my request. By the end of the halted and sometimes awkward prayer (can you blame her? I mean, this new girl is just crying all over), the pray-er has tears in her eyes. She tells me that she too is a tired mom with too much on her plate. She tells me she will remember me this week, and I believe her. And I am crying again, because I am grateful.

When I started blogging I found the Spirit met me at the keyboard, at the explaining. The writing helped me untangle this messy life to find the threads that were covered in Glory. It is woven into the every day. That is just the way things are.

But lately, the Spirit has met me in the quiet. In the stillness. I have found increasingly the spirit tell me, shhh, this one is just. between. us.

And it is scary and strange because I have commited to living a transparent and authentic life.

And it is scary and strange because the writing often helps me remember, and I don’t want to forget these bits.

And it is scary and strange because that is what people like about my, my ease in vulnerability, my willingness to talk about it all. It is one of the things I most like about me.

But mostly, it is scary and strange because it is new and unfamiliar. Will this work?

I have a word for 2015. I am not sure I want it but I have one. I have told my husband, my writing group, my sisters. But I don’t think I am telling the whole world.

I need to be reminded of what I already know is true: Things that happen in the secret, just between my God and I…those things are real and beautiful too.

I needed Advent this year. I needed the time of mourning, the time of lament, the time of honoring loss. I needed to let the ashes lie and not cover them up with worthless glitter. I needed to lean into the waiting. I gained a lot this year, and I am grateful. But I lost a lot too. There has been a lot of leaving. A tribe lost, a waiting extended, and last Sunday was our last as members of a church we have walked with for 8 years.

My word for the year was here, and I was told recently, “It is ironic your word is here, because all of your heres have disappeared on you.”

I’ve spent the last weeks praying for a silver bullet. A celestial intervention. I needed God to do something already.

This year I taught the Greek tragedy Medea for the first time. At the end, right when Medea is about to be put to death, a chariot pulled by fire breathing dragons swoops down and picks her up. The gods intervene on her behalf and she does not have to deal with this world. Lately, I think that is what I have been praying for. Will you please come get me out of this mess?

But I don’t worship the Greek gods. Instead God has gently, and in a hundred private ways, let me know that He is still Emmanuel. God with us.

I don’t know why all the losses came for me this year at the end. I don’t know why God won’t just come down and fix it already. There are moments, I think I will always have, where I certainly wish He would. But I am learning that God is never quite where you expect to find Him, but that He is always Emmanuel.

And I am grateful.

I needed to lean into Advent, and now I am ready to celebrate all 12 days of the miracle that is God, as a baby, just to be with us.

Merry Christmas.

Sometimes when I think I want to quit Twitter, I remember I met Esther Emery there. I don’t know quite how to say that I have never actually met in person someone who has laughed and cried and spoken deeply into my life. So, when she offered to write for me about Christmas and money I was thrilled. Then, I read it. Listen up y’all. Esther is about to PREACH. 

Questioning Christmas

It was the year I was five years old that I got a doll for Christmas. It came in a shiny, domed plastic package. It had styled hair, and a poofy dress. It had real shoes that you could take off and put back on again. I looked at it in absolute wonder.

It was simply inexplicable to me, how that strange thing got underneath my tree.

You see, I was never a child who liked dolls. I didn’t dream of dolls of any kind, but much less the plastic ones with fancy dresses. Surely Santa would know that my radical environmentalist mother didn’t buy things like that, and in the case of the doll I had never begged her to. I wanted toys with wheels, or animals. In my wildest dreams, maybe a microscope.

I don’t know what happened to that doll. I might have cut it up. I have done experiments with it. Most likely I just forgot about it.

It was through a mistake – an adult slip of the tongue, as these things always are – that I discovered we had received the doll along with other gifts under the tree that year – labeled from “Santa” – as charity from the church.

We had been designated a “needy” family. And for that I got a doll.

The year was 1984. My parents were divorcing. There were medical bills, a bankruptcy claim, feelings of failure, loss, regret. For all this I got sweet, sad eyes from grown ups and a gift I never asked for. For all this, I got to feel like one of the ones who need.

Oh, lucky me.   

 December comes around every year, like clockwork. ‘Tis the season, of giving to the poor. Jingle jingle. Merry Christmas!

Don’t be selfish, y’all, be generous! Give! ‘Tis the season of giving! And Christmas belongs to the poor. This is the real meaning of Christmas.

But I want to tell you that I’ve been the poor. I’ve had other people’s gifts for Christmas, and it tasted like someone else’s party. It tasted like it probably made someone else feel awesome. I’ve gone to a lot of work to reclaim my heart from that bitter taste.

You might be calling this ingratitude. I would be accustomed to that. I have often been warned (as the poor usually are) about the dangers of my own bad attitude. I still hear the voice from my childhood that says, “WHERE ARE YOUR MANNERS COME ON AND SHOW A LITTLE GRATITUDE.”

But I am no longer a child. And I have lived a searching, thoughtful path into adulthood. I have drawn the line back and back from personal feelings of scarcity and desperation to our collective compulsion to justify excess…by passing it on to others who “really need” it.

It is easier to spread the disease of too much than to try to recover from it.

‘Tis the season, of compassion. This we translate into: it is the season of buying things, some for ourselves, and some for those less fortunate.

We need so desperately, to give. We need to give, and yet we dare not have less. We will find or manufacture a need that fits the narrow range, that allows us to keep our wealth intact and skim a little off the top to meet our soul’s deep hunger for generosity.

But if Christmas is about being able to give things to the poor, then Christmas is still, really, about being rich.

And I don’t think that’s what Christmas is about.

I don’t buy Christmas gifts for anyone anymore. Used things, sometimes. Homemade things. Cans of jam and applesauce. The time and effort to fill a stocking full of candy, frost a cookie, tell a story beside the tree. There is this one story we tell about a child king who had no roof, no toys, no rattle…

How much would it cost, to buy back an hour of sacred poverty? How much would it cost, to become again the child who can receive?

I know there is resistance. Brave resistance, often. But every act of resistance is assimilated. Tut-tutting over our overconsumption at the winter holidays is now almost as popular as the shopping itself. We switch back and forth like channels.

I’m just done.

My holiday high wire act falls apart at the foot of the manger. My guilt-and-giving dance is ferociously exploded by the upside down miracle of incarnation, in which the empty becomes full, and the profane becomes sacred.

This is what happens to the rich, when we become the poor. And this is what happens to the poor, when we become the rich, not by toys or packaging, but by the pure miracle of starlight.

This is Christmas.

Bio: Esther Emery used to be a freelance theatre director and playwright in Southern California. These days she is pretty much a runaway, living off grid in a yurt and tending to three acres of near wilderness in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She writes about faith and rebellion and trying to live a totally free life at www.estheremery.com. Connect on Twitter @EstherEmery

The Christmas lights are everywhere. The decorations are taking over. Even on the highway I find cars with elf ears, wreaths on the front bumper, a red-Rudolph nose. Even when it all sort of blends together, there are two tiny narrative voices let me know what I have tuned out.

“Look! White lights”

“I see Santa!”

“A Santa hat light up dinosaur, that’s weird!” (Juliet is right though, that is a little weird.)

Our stockings are hung. Our tree is up. We even have a train around the tree-skirt that the girls keep knocking off the track because they cannot resist touching it. (Even they have been told repeatedly to keep their little hands off the tracks.) The nativity set has been set up and yesterday Priscilla was having the angel and Mary protect baby Jesus from a flying dragon.

But I’m not ready.

I’m not ready for the sparkles and the sugar and the general holiday cheer. I am just not ready. I read somewhere that Advent, the time leading up to Christmas, used to be a lot like lent. Somber, thoughtful, sad even. The Jewish people waited a long long time for the savior to come, and  Advent is a season to remember the waiting.

And aren’t we all waiting? Waiting for the very things we light the candles for, for hope, for peace, for joy, for love.

How long, Oh Lord?

And some of us are waiting for things we have been promised, hopes whispered into the air, dreams buried deep into our hearts. Another year is coming to a close and still there is no…… How could that be?

How long, Oh Lord?

Some of us are just waiting for this life to hurt a little less, to be a little easier, for space to breathe. We need something to give and we are afraid it might just be us.

How long, Oh Lord?

I am done fighting the darkness with fake cheer and a light up dinosaur clad in a Santa hat. I am leaning into the darkness, the waiting, the lament.

How long, Oh Lord?

And I am lighting the candles, of Hope, of Peace. I am choosing to say, I know the end, and this is the waiting. We are waiting, but we are lighting the candles anyway, because we believe that the Lord will come.

But you can hear us crying in the darkness,

How Long, Oh Lord?

I didn’t cry when my parents dropped me off for college. And I didn’t cry when I went to sleep that night or the next day or the next. I wasn’t sad, I was just excited. I didn’t cry about leaving home because I didn’t feel like I had left home. It felt like the times I had stayed at a summer camp, or a youth rally. Even when I started going to classes and managing my own food, it still didn’t hit me that I was not home.

It took until the first Sunday that I cried. I walked across the campus and into the church that mother had gone to when she had been on the same campus years before. I walked into the unfamiliar place, and suddenly realized I had no idea where to sit. There were lots of open chairs. The problem wasn’t that there wasn’t a place for me to go; the problem was that I didn’t already have a place to belong.

I am writing for You Are Here Stories, a new collective blog that has put out some really high quality stuff. I am honored to be a part of it. You can read the rest there.

Yesterday was the first Monday of Advent, and already I felt as though I have missed it. I got sick over Thanksgiving and I was seriously just trying to make it through my first day back at school. I turned the heat up and the lights off, but my nose wouldn’t let me nap. I had to blow it too often.

I was weary. I am weary.

I could tell you that it is the illness, the long drive home, the too little sleep. I could tell you that and it would be the truth, but not all of it.

Every single one of my plans for the significant future shifted beneath my feet this fall. The landscape of my summer, next fall, beyond, became unrecognizable and impossible for me to navigate. Where I once had a solid three-year plan, I now have a lot of questions.

I was, for a while, trying not to be angry, but have learned it is best for me to be hospitable to my own emotions, to feel whatever it is I want to feel. I have learned that anger is almost always my way of defending against a grief I am trying to avoid.

I am so weary.

Of promises not  kept, of dreams deferred, of disappointment.

I am wondering how long, not yet really is. How much longer will not yet last?

I’m asking these questions for myself, but also for the world.

How much longer will violence prevail, will kids be shot, will death win out?  How much more can our world be ravaged, can our communities be broken, can our souls take?

How much longer? How much more?

As I begin this season, the slow and steady walk to the manger, I can’t be shake my head a little. The balm the Lord has to offer seems a little thin.

We have a world need rescuing, and you sent a baby? Born to a poor woman? In a manger that is not even in her home town? Are you serious?

I am weary, thirsty, and so very tired, and you give me….hope? What good is that going to do? I need a PLAN! I need ACTION! I need HELP! and I get a baby, in a manger, and the promise of hope.

Isn’t that just like God? Isn’t it just like God to give me the solution that I am sure is not going to work. Isn’t it just like God to give me a baby in a manger and an invitation to the whole world to come, when what I want is some sort of Rambo figure coming down to take care of the pieces I don’t want redeemed? Isn’t it just like God to offer me hope to cling to when I am wishing for a binder full of the plans for the rest of my life.

Last night, we didn’t decorate the tree, or even finish unpacking. I got pizza, and noticed a candy coated sky. Then I fell asleep at 6:30. What I wanted was to do all the holiday things, but what brought me healing was rest.

A baby, a manger, a promise of hope. Okay. Let’s try it this way.

I am very excited to introduce you to my friend Tara Owens. Tara is a spiritual director and just totally the real deal as far as genuine and authentic people online. She is running an e-course that I think is really worthwhile, so I invited her here to share with you about it. Everyone who took it last year raves about it. Here she is.

I have a penchant for depressing Christmas music, I admit it. As the winter closes her dark wings

over us, my husband and I like to turn off all the lights, ignite the (admittedly, depressingly fake)

fire and listen to Christmas music that makes us ache. The tree twinkles, the house creaks in the

wind, and we sit in semi-darkness, feeling the edges of ourselves. This year, I’m listening to a new

album, Blood Oranges In The Snow, that has a line that makes the hair on my arms stand up and

my gut clench. The song is called “Let It Fall”, and the lyrics are an invitation into something I

can’t quite name:

’Cause rain and leaves

And snow and tears and stars

And that’s not all my friend

They all fall with confidence and grace

So let it fall, let it fall

My husband and I, we’re not masochists, I promise.

And I don’t think we’re alone.

There’s something about this season filled with thanksgiving and tinsel and joy and song that feels

a little like homesickness to me. It’s not strident, it’s not brash, but the undercurrent of the

holidays tugs at us with its longings for something more. Something we struggle to name,

something about hope and about disappointment, something about desire and about loneliness,

something, I would hazard a guess, about where Home really is.

I’ve had the familiar tune, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” wending its way through my thoughts

and emotions since, oh, probably late September. It appeared as a snatch of a song, and it has

been persistently presence—you can count on me—almost every day in some way—there’ll be

snow and mistletoe—shape or form.

It takes me a while to catch on, sometimes, and that’s why God winds melodies into my story to

suggest, to invite, to point me in the right direction. It happened when I first came to know Him

with a hymn I’d learned during choir practice, and this year, it happened again with my Christmas

earworm.

If you’d told me in August just before our daughter was born that I’d feel compelled (with joy,

even) to offer a 6-week interactive online journey and retreat through Advent, Christmas and

Epiphany, I’d have laughed and called you crazy. This holiday season is busy, after all. There are

so many things to juggle, so much pressure from consumer culture shot through with a desire to

redeem the time, to find the sacred in all this mundane, to listen with my heart’s ear to the story

of Christ in the world, Emmanuel, God with us. And this year, as I hold a babe in my arms, it

would be easy to let the overwhelm of this new life we are living pull me away from the rhythms of

Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Easy, and understandable.

I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.

The plaintive last line of the song calls me back to myself and to what, I suspect, is going on in

more than a few of us. I’d rather bury the ache with busy-ness than face it head on. The hope, the

desire, the longing for more. I’d rather not risk the homesickness getting deeper, wider in me,

instead I’ll cram my calendar full so I can’t feel any of the empty. I’d rather try to dress it up with

decorations than press into it, let it bloom into something that might, just might, lead me closer to

that which I’m longing for.

But what if the Christian calendar actually invites us to less, not more? What if coming home isn’t

about the destination (the perfect turkey, the Martha Stewart tree, the ideal present wrapped

flawless for everyone) but about the journey?

Here, I’m back to the depressing Christmas songs, not because they are dark, but because they

acknowledge the complexity of this time of year. It’s no coincidence that the longest night of the

year occurs right before Christmas itself, that within the rhythm of the seasons there’s an

acknowledgement that things come with a cost, that they aren’t as they should be.

And there are treasures of darkness to be found, too (Is. 45:3, NKJV). There is something to

dwelling in the hidden places in this season of flash and fanfare, letting the desire for more rise

through us as we wait for the light to increase. There is something to choosing silence while the

world turns up the Christmas carols, something to finding solitude when the holiday-party-

merry-go-round starts spinning.

So, instead of running from Bing Crosby’s siren call, I’m pressing in again, listening. What I hear

is the call of the One who loves us most, the incarnational hope of the One who became small

enough to hold. Can I trust God’s voice? Can I lean into a call and a community this Advent,

finding and forming a journey together into complexity of what it means to come home? Can this

be about more than my strength, but the glorious weakness and wonderment of a group of

pilgrims journeying together toward home?

My heart said yes, as it had been saying yes since the first strains of the song sang through it.

And that’s how Coming Home: An Online Journey Into Advent, Christmas and

Epiphany was born last year, and reborn again this year. Just as the Christ child is reborn again

and again in our remembering and reliving what is true right now.

It’s a risk, I know, to step in when everything pulls at me (and you, I’d wager) to step out. It seems

so much larger than me, and that’s probably the way it should stay, because I can’t control God

any more than I can control the winter wind. I’m excited and terrified and hopeful and full of

longing. I’m wondering and nervous and brimming with the sense that the Wild One is up to

something gloriously good. And gloriously good yet again.

“It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to

tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like

this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay

of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room

opposite to the window there may have been a looking-glass. And as you turned away from the

window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass.

And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real

ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different—deeper, more wonderful, more like

places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference

between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country:

every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.” ― C.S. Lewis, The

Chronicles of Narnia

So will you join me? Will you let the call of less, of longing, of love lead you into

something different this Advent? Will you walk alongside us staggering pilgrims, the

ones who chose for the ache, who press into the darkness, in order to find the light

on the other side? I’d be honored, so honored, if we could walk Home together this

season.

I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams…

To learn more about the Coming Home eCourse, you can click here