This past weekend we went to Orlando. Christian was presenting at a conference and I thought hanging out by the pool all day with the kids sounded like fun. I also remember the four days Christian was in New Orleans last year as being very long and very hard. So, family vay-cay it was.

When we got there we realized that the pool was only outdoors and the forecast was for rain the next day. The thought of keeping the girls in a hotel room where the internet was out all day long by myself made me want to turn around and drive home, so I did what anybody would do.

I took two kids one and two to Disney World. By myself. It was mostly successful. We may have spent our entire time in fantasy land, riding Dumbo three separate times. The truth of the matter is that Disney is the most magical place on earth because it is chock full of parents who understand that you just payed 85 bucks a person to have a magical day and they are going to help you out. They are going to ask you do your kids want their extra cookies or lug your stroller on and off the tram. They are not going to give you the evil eye for the fit that your toddler is throwing because how in the name of Walt himself are you supposed to explain to a two-year-old that you are actually closer to riding the elephant by walking inside a tent away from the elephant, and then again explain that the playground you went to was really just a time suck and now it is  her turn to ride the elephant (remember the fit you had twenty minutes ago? Nope, just this new fit? greeeaaaattt) They will tell you that it is okay and let you know as kindly as possible that your one-year-old is escaping out the back while you were dealing with the fit. Oooops.

Mostly, Disney was magic for me because it reminded me that I am good at this academic wife thing. I am the girl who will take two kids to Disney world by herself. And right now, that is who God is calling me to be. I’ve been praying for pixie dust, and what better place is there to get it than Disney world? I received pixie dust in the form of being reminded that with grace I am capable of manning the fort while Christian gets his academic on. Pixie dust came when there was always a dad to pull my stroller on and off the train. I got a huge sprinkling when Christian’s professor told me in the lobby of the hotel that he recognized the sacrifices I was making so that Christian could get this degree.

I expected the time and money sacrifices, but I don’t think I realized how lonely this stage in my life was going to be. Christian and I will go entire weeks where we essentially don’t see each other. He often finds out about my emotional state by reading my blog. It isn’t that he is being inattentive, it is simply that we have no time to talk after the did everyone poop okay today, are we out of diapers or milk sort of conversations are had. We are always tired. If you count my writing and his writing and my extra class at work and the whole parenting thing we have about 4 jobs between the two of us.

I don’t mean for this to be a list of complaints. I am sure, absolutely positive, that this is where God has our family right now. I know Christian belongs in grad school now, I know I am called to my work. I know these two crazy sisters we are raising are for this time and certainly for each other. I know this. But the leaning into it, the accepting of it, is just so hard sometimes.

It is so easy for me to look at the unmatched socks and the laundry piling up, the number of times we eat out, the toys strewn all over at the end of the day that no one has the energy to pick up, and proclaim that I am failing. That this thing is just too hard and I am not good enough. But the pixie dust showed me that maybe I am looking at the wrong things. If I looked at the smiling healthy girls, the papers of my students, my husband’s successes, my devotion to my friends, I would see that I am in fact doing this thing.

After all, I took two kids to Disney world. And not only did we survive, everyone came out smiling.

I teach freshmen. I am into the tough love. Once, at the inner-city school of my teaching youth, I saw a teacher interrupt a student bragging that they had never once got a whoopin’ with a roll of the eyes, a point of the finger and a “see that’s your problem.” And it was. Not the lack of corporal punishment at home, but certainly the lack of boundaries.

I remember when my dad used to spank me. I would, in his words, get my back up about something and there was nothing else left to do. I don’t remember the spankings, but I do remember when he would come back into my bedroom after I had calmed down. He would cry too. “I’m really sorry I had to do that,” he would explain, “but people who hit people go to jail.” It is the parents job to teach that. Both of my girls have inherited my penchant for the tantrum. I know how hard it is to enforce those boundaries and I pray that the love is as evident in me as it was in my dad. Even when I was getting punished I never doubted his love for me. That love was tough for both of us.

The Bible has a lot to say about tough love but not like we talk about it.

²⁷ “But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who ^[o]mistreat you.

I am 14 and I don’t like her. She is rich, popular, blonde, and mean. Looking back I wonder if I was just a little too sensitive. I may be still working on that. I was comfortable in the group of gifted kids who I joined in the fourth grade and I am unsure of why they added some to this eighth grade English class, but there she is. She is mean and I don’t like her. She makes me feel even more insecure than I already am.

I go to a conference where they tell me to choose three people to pray for every day. The speaker tells me to pick my enemy. I pick her. I write the three names down, hers included in blue paint marker on orange construction paper. I put Jesus fish in the corners. I hang it on the inside of the hoosier cabinet that was once my changing table and now holds my sweaters. I pray those names on and off for the entirety of my high school career.

4 years later, second semester senior year we are lab partners. I still don’t know how it happened. She has her varsity letter in track, some sort of sprint. I have mine in speech and marching band. She admits to me as we are dissecting worms, that she is a little jealous of the easy camaraderie of the nerd-gang I run with. She longs for the safety of my friendships. My friends seem to actually like each other. We strike up an unlikely if not close friendship. I find myself genuinely rooting for her, a little sad we weren’t better friends.

²⁹ Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your ^[p]coat, do not withhold your ^[q]shirt from him either.

I am driving through town distracted. I took the baby to the doctor in the morning and we are supposed to drive to Orlando in the morning. We are headed to the perpetually necessary pre-trip Target run and I am making the list in my head. I don’t see the pedestrian and her two kids waiting patiently at the cross walk. The law says I should stop, and I do. But a little too close to the line.

“You’re supposed to stop!” she yells at me from the street, a little hand clasped in each one of hers. She is right, but her anger stings. I am doing the best I can. That just isn’t very good right now. I take a deep breath and roll down my window. “M’am” I call, “You are right. I should have stopped.” I mean to say I am sorry, but her eye roll cuts me off. I feel like I have been smacked all over again. Tears spring to my eyes. From the back seat I hear a very serious voice, “Mommy,” the peanut tells me eyebrows furrowed, “that’s not you business.” Out of the mouths of babes indeed. I continue on.

³⁰ Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back.

I know I am not supposed to keep score, but my estimation is that I am way ahead. I am still waiting on the loan to be returned and trying not to be mad when I find out that I am eating ramen while she is dining out. I am furious. That money belongs to me. I would have told you that our friendship was worth more than a couple hundred bucks. I would have been wrong. It never recovered. A decade later I am not even positive we are Facebook friends. I wonder for the first time what part of the rift do I own.

The Bible has a lot to say about love, how tough it is. Turn the other cheek, give what is taken, forgiveness multiplied. But lately, when hearing about tough love, those aren’t the things we say.

I read about the Rolling Jubilee the other day. Essentially the Occupy Wall Street people are taking advantage of the fact that fancy financial people buy and sell debt for pennies on the dollar in order to make a profit and are raising money to buy debt at this rock bottom price, and then forgiving it.

This news from the twitter-verse left me equal parts excited, and sad. I think the idea is brilliant. $25 buys $500 in debt and they are going to change people’s lives forever. This is awesome. But I couldn’t help being sad. Why had the church not thought of this sooner? Aren’t we supposed to be in charge of the Jubilee? Isn’t Jesus described as the ultimate Jubilee? Isn’t buying people’s debt and then forgiving it forever the most obvious metaphor for the cross we have?

Somehow I think people would like getting a note in the mail explaining to them that the debt they thought they would die under has been permanently forgiven and an explanation of how much greater Jesus’ gift to them is a little better than receiving a tract in place of a tip at the end of a Sunday shift.

I spent much of my teen years learning about how to be “counter-cultural for Christ.” One of the only times I was disrespectful to a teacher was when I was “defending Genesis.” The only time a teacher held me after class was when I did not think abstinence had been adequately represented as a viable birth control option in my health class and I said as much. (It wasn’t and I think I was right, but still that isn’t the point.) What a fool I was. What a fool I was taught to be.

I’ve been taught that as the bride of Christ, the church must stand out from the world, we must make sure that the differences are stark. But that isn’t what the Bible says about it. The Bible says that the church is different than the world, like red is different from blue and sea is different from land. When doing what it is called to do the church is different because the world has no interest in being that radical. Radically gracious, radically giving, radically forgiven, the world doesn’t want in on all that self-sacrifice.

When I was learning about the ways to defend my faith and wearing my “Heaven Yes, Hell No” t-shirt to school, we used to sing a song adapted from a psalm.

Ain’t no rock, gonna stand in my place. As long as I’m alive I’ll glorify His holy name.

Psalm 118 tells us that the rocks and the trees will cry out if we don’t and sometimes I wonder if that isn’t true for more than just praising the name of Jesus. Debt forgiveness, orphan care, taking care of the least of these. These things are the legacy of the church, what the church was originally known for.

In college I was a registered libertarian. I thought that the government should get the heck out of social welfare. That was the churches job. Now, I suppose I am a theoretical libertarian. I just don’t trust it in practice. I don’t trust the church to step up.

I worry that the church gave its legacy away, traded the chance to care for the least of these for the opportunity to explain why Biblical principals are superior. Neglected defending the defenseless for being right. We have spent generations praying “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” and never once have we corporately attempted to forgive debts.

If rocks and trees cry out when we neglect to praise our God, does the Lord hand out pieces of the churches legacy? Does He find ways for his face to be shown, even when we aren’t showing it? Because there is a secular group rolling out a Jubilee, and I am sad that the people who believe in the ultimate Jubilee didn’t think of it first.

Accidental Communion.

I recently started reading the blog of Preston Yancey. He always gives me something to think about. Sometimes his theological musings put words to the practical I have been trying to wrap my heart around. He hosts a series called Conversations with Myself. So I had one, a conversation with myself. And here it is.

I step into the cabin I know she will be. She is alone, sleeping. This is what happens when a teen with a middle-aged ladies disease goes to church camp. She needed a nap in the middle of the day and she is about to sleep through dinner.  It is her sister that will come get her.

I am not worried about waking her. I remember that furious and deep sleep her body used to fall into. She has just completed her first year of high school, had her heart broken truly for someone very trivial, had her first kiss in the high school gym during the homecoming dance. She has been serious about God for three years already.

Abby, I call softly. Abby honey, I need to talk to you for a minute. She blinks at me slowly, trying to discern the time of day. I sound exactly like her mother, and look almost the same too. I had forgotten how confusing a deep sleep like that could be. She looks at me and blinks two long slow blinks. She rubs her eyes and scrunches up her face so that her tears leak behind her dry contact lenses.

“You aren’t….” She catches her breath. There is enough youth left in her longing to believe in the mystery of making this possible.

“I know,” I assure her. “I think it is really weird too.”

She sits up quickly. “What do you need to tell me? Is everything okay?”

I smile at her and wonder if there were ever a day where I would not ask that. “Yes love, everything is okay. It is more than okay. We are good. I just came here to tell you that you are enough.”

She looks at me questioning. It is only now that I look deeply into her face. Her big brown eyes are so steady and bold. “Enough for what?” She does not have to speak the rest of her wondering aloud. What things are coming? What might she not be enough for? Surely this means something grand, something BIG is in her future. She knows that she is set apart. At twelve she heard God speak to her.

“Just that you are enough, right as you are. In the great, the trying, the working on it. I need you to remember that you are enough, even when things don’t go the way we thought they would, it isn’t because you aren’t good enough.”

“So that thing God told me about my voice…….”

“You heard him all right. It just isn’t going to pan out the way we thought it would. That doesn’t make it any less true.” I get up to go and she almost lets me. I hear her big breath, and the question she is almost too afraid to ask.

“Will I ever be healed?”

Her tears spill over as she looks at me fearfully. She asks the question even when she is afraid to hear the answer. She is braver than I am. I take her worn broken body into my arms as I sit back down next to her on the bottom bunk. I know that my chest feels just like the comfort of her mother’s. My two girls have shaped it so.

I let her cry the fear, and the weariness into me as I rock her. I know how much she values honesty.   I take a deep breath and, holding her head to my chest, I say to her, “It is going to get better, and then it is going to get much, much worse, and if there were any way to save you from it, I would. I promise you.”  I whisper, “Not a single second of suffering will be wasted. God will count every tear, and He will be there through this and in this, and you will know Him because of this pain. It isn’t as soon as you want and it isn’t in a way you expect, but eventually, by the time you look like this, God will have healed you, set you free.”

She pulls away to look at me and nod. It is not what she wants to hear, but she accepts it. “Go back to sleep,” I tell her. “Your sister will be here in a moment.”

I decide to sneak off to the vespers spot and hope I don’t interrupt any couples who were looking for a place to be alone. I want to sit on the bench once more, the place where I first heard God speak so clearly. There was less static then.

I am staring at the cross and the altar, remembering what it feels like to be a teenager in love with Jesus, when I hear someone come up behind me.

“I thought I might find you here.”

I turn around to the sound. She sounds and looks so much like my mother. She smiles knowingly. She knows there is enough youth left in me longing to believe in the mystery of making this possible. “I know,”  she laughs. “I think it is really weird too. But…” she shrugs, “here I am.”

I can’t help myself, the worry springs from my lips. “Is everything okay?” She gives me a sad smile. I return it. “We don’t ever break that habit, huh?”

She laughs again. “No, but we learn to embrace it.”

“The girls?” I ask.

“Still the loves of my life.”

She knows I need to still hear the answer spoken aloud. “Everything is okay. It is more than okay. We are good. I just came here to tell you that you are enough.”

All the breath escapes from my lungs and I look up at her, now standing in front of me, knowingly. It is only now I look deeply into her face. I find the lines around her mouth strangely beautiful. Her eyes are lighter, warm and familiar. She knows that I have spent the last two years wondering if I was good enough, deeply afraid that when the time came, I would not be. Afraid that the time had come and gone, and I was already not enough, so I was already passed over. I hope that I am still set apart, that the voice I know I heard is still good.

She stands me up in front of the altar of my youth. “Abby, you are enough. I promise. He has made you enough.”

I stand trembling before her, my future self. “I want so badly to believe that is true,” I whisper to her, head down, ashamed of the ways I have not yet embraced the truth I freely dispense.

“This is our life’s great work,” she tells me, looking earnestly into my face. “Learning to love yourself as Christ loves you.” I nod my head and we both sit down on the smooth wooden benches, silent in the weight of that truth.

Emboldened by my younger self, and weary from the battle I have waged this school year I look straight ahead and say, “So….. the depression; will I ever be healed?”

She takes my scared and weeping head to her chest. It feels just like my mother’s. I wonder how many babies have shaped this comfort.  She says the answer out loud as I recite it silently to myself. “It is going to get better, and it is going to get worse, and if there were anyway to save you from it, I would. I promise you,” she whispers. “Not a single second of suffering will be wasted. God will count every tear, and He will be there through this and in this, and you will know Him because of this pain. And it won’t be as soon as you want and it won’t be in a way you expect, but eventually, God will heal you, set you free.”

We sit there for a minute breathing together, staring at the cross. Simultaneously we stand up and walk out together. I stop half way down the aisle. “The twins…,” I gasp, “the ones that God promised me.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“I did here from God.” I answer.

She smiles.

“It will not pan out the way I thought it would.” I continue.

She nods.

Together we finish, “that doesn’t make it any less true.”

Hello there world. Sometimes I forget that other people read this (even though that is the exact reason I hit “publish” and not “save draft”). So, after multiple private and public checkups in the last twenty-four hours I feel the need to add some things to yesterdays post.

First, if you did contact me, thank you. Seriously, thank you. Just knowing you see me, really see me is a treasure, a gift. I know I don’t have to go through this without any help. I am seeking help. I realize now that it sounded like praying for pixie dust was the only way I was dealing with this. That is not the case. I know that God can heal me miraculously and I am praying for that. I am also seeking out some sort of chemical that can be my miracle every day until I feel like maybe I don’t need it anymore. I am extremely weary of doctors (bad experiences in High school, getting told to my face there is nothing wrong with me etc.) but I have asked for some recommendations from people I trust to find a general practitioner who can either help me, or point to someone who can help me. But I appreciate your concern and care. It means a lot to me. Also, have a doctor who is great at listening in the Atlanta area?  I would love that contact info.

I write-through this thing because it helps. Putting words and faces to shadows and echoes of fear unnamed helps me to see these things in their true dimension, rather than the dimension I project them when they are only in my own head. When I put it in words I see the shadow puppet, where as before I thought the shadow on the wall was the reality. It helps me to explain it in metaphors of temperature and clothing.

I write-through this thing because it makes me feel less alone. History of depression on both sides of my family? Who knew? Now I do. But also, in my friends, in my church, in my Facebook acquaintances. I don’t have to think I am the only one doing this, and they don’t have to feel like it either, and that helps.

I write-through this because this is where I am at right now. It may sound super pretentious to say that you think God called you to write out your story as it is happening, and yet here I am, saying that. This is where I am, and this is the space that I have to tell that, and explain it, and that needs to be okay. I think there needs to be spaces for the dark corners too. Because God sheds light in the dark places, and how are we going to see that light if we aren’t willing to go into that corner?

I write-through this to explain, so that people who don’t do this can understand, so you won’t roll your eyes at the girl crying at church….again. I write-through it so you have words when your friend seems off to you, when she seems unable to return your phone  call.

But mostly, I write-through this because when I do, the shame falls away. When I choose to share, the secret doesn’t grip me, the lie that I should be better than this looses all of its power. I write-through it because it lightens me, leaves me unashamed of who I am and what I am struggling with. I write-through it because the shame does not stand up to the light of day, the anxiety dies down when everyone already knows. The truth shouts louder than the lies.

I write-through this because the truth of it all is setting me free. Sometimes in the writing, sometimes in the comments, sometimes in the private messages. The truth has been finding me and it has been freeing me. I promise it has.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my depression. I have been taking my meds and getting more sleep and yet here I am, Monday morning, grateful that my friend now waits for me at the train station because I needed the extra moment to propel myself to school this morning.

It gets better, and it gets worse. There are days when I feel like my soul has been sitting all day in the chilly bleachers of a drizzly November mid-western football game. You know how your butt gets all numb? Yeah. Somedays my soul feels like that.

This Sunday it felt like my whole self (all parts of me that aren’t physical) came to church naked. I spent equal time trying to pretend I was dressed like everyone else and hoping that someone would notice I was in fact naked and throw me a blanket or jacket or something. At the end of the day you are a little cold, a little embarrassed (though no one made you feel shame specifically), a little confused. Did no one really notice?

The anxiety is for me, what is exhausting. Every time I check my email, my phone rings, my phone doesn’t ring, I have to feed someone, I first convince myself that it is going to be exceedingly difficult and also that I need to do it anyway.

I know that these things are not from the Father. I know they aren’t. They are joy killers, love stealers, peace inhibitors. But I also know that all things work to His good, if we just hand them over, if we just let Him have it.

Yesterday, during our last hymn you could hear me sobbing under the music, again. There I was, again, soul-naked at church. Somebody get that girl some clothes. When Christian came to wrap his arms around me, pray for me, I admit to him that it isn’t my money, my time or my voice that I am witholding. It is my shame, my fears, my certanly not enough.

I know that this isn’t just something that God asks me to give him as a fringe benefit of faith. I know that the Lord actually requires me to give them to him. I also know he is patient and gentle with me as I figure out how my hands got re-wrapped around this stuff in the first place.

So this week I am praying for Pixie Dust. I got to read the first couple chapters of a new book called Wonderstruck. It comes out on Christmas day and will be loaded into my kindle before Santa comes. Because in the first chapter this is what Margaret Feinberg prays, and it is exactly what I need.

I want to see God where I know him to be…but have not felt him for awhile. I want to stumble upon holy moments, holy musings, holy ground. I want to have an accidental devotional so often I cannot catalogue them all here. I need to exist once again in the realm of the extraordinary as I walk through this ordinary time.

I feel so much like the muggles in Harry Potter, the adults in Peter Pan, the villagers in Beauty and the Beast. There is something I am missing, just beyond my grasp. I am praying for Pixie Dust, and the heart to embrace it.

Seriously, go to amazon and pre-order this book. It is going to be exactly what I want to start the new year with.

Today I pray that you would feel like enough. At work, at home, in the traffic in between. With your co-workers or clients, your children and spouse, your best friends you are enough. I pray that you would lean into the enough of God and trust that He is not only enough for you, but He is enough for everyone who needs something from you. I pray that you would sense the completeness of God and rest in His promise of enough.

I pray that you would live in the tension between work and home, feel each side pulling and allow it to not turn your head back and forth, but instead up toward God. It is hard sometimes to leave your baby and hard sometimes to leave your job. I pray that you would   rest in the tension between the two, knowing that God has both for you in this time.

I pray that you would not feel lost. As you change from professional you, to mommy you, to  wife you and back again, know that you are enough simply as you. You are seen by the one who made you, you are more than the sum of your parts. There is a soul in there that was crafted in the image of your God.

I pray that you would know that God has this for you, right now, in the midst of the babysitters, and the day off because of a fever, in the midst of the milestones you feel like you are missing at home, and the things you feel like you can’t do at work, in the midst of the mommy guilt I pray that you would know with everything you are that this today is what the Lord has for you today.

It is hard, but it is good. May He meet you there today.

Four years ago I voted for one guy then wept with joy when the other one won. Amidst the confetti and the crying and the adorable family, I was proud to be an American.

Maybe I wasn’t as hooked to social media. Maybe it was my first year being registered to vote in a decidedly unswingable state. Maybe  I am remembering it all wrong. But I don’t remember it being this heated. I don’t remember it being this mean. Maybe it was me. Maybe I wasn’t as emotionally invested.

I tell the same story in my personal life. If I can see the benefits of both sides I am happy to let God be in charge. It is when I am sure that I am right that I get all up in arms. I get defensive, I roll my eyes, I call names. It makes no sense to be right with the law but not right with God.

I have traded righteousness for rightness more times then I even know. Rightness is a shny box with emptiness inside. It needs to be defended against and closely guarded. It promises but it never ever pays out. Not like righteousness, not like the homely, steady pace of doing the next right thing for our God., only to find yourself humbly before him, resting, complete, fulfilled.

I don’t know if I’ll stay up to watch the election. If I don, it will likely be by twitter and not by television. I may instead go to bed and guard my heart against the rightness it wants to grab onto. I may just hold out for righteousness instead.

Who is in charge of the revival? she asks. We are talking about religion again. It seems like we talk about God a lot, seeing as only one of us believes in Him.

The Holy Spirit. I respond, laughing. The Holy Spirit is in charge of the revival.

She calls this bullshit and I am not offended. I want a more clear-cut answer too. I would love for the person in charge of the revival I am longing for to have an email address and a twitter handle. Some way I could get a hold of him, the person in charge of the revival, maybe get an eta. I could use some revival around these parts.

tomorrow, when we vote, I pray we will remember who is in charge of the revival. I hope when the votes come in and we all know the answer (and please Jesus no repeat of 2000) that neither victory or loss would make us forget who is in charge of the revival. I pray we pray for that revival to come.