Hello, friends. This is the first time I’m linking to something I wrote for one of my freelance jobs, partially because I’m proud of it — I think it manages to be truthful while maintaining a light but not overly jokey tone. My goal was to make it seem possible to do something about the grief, pain, and fear pastors (and the rest of us) are feeling these days.
But I’m also linking to it because I’ve been pressed down by grief, pain, and fear over what is happening in my adopted country. As a person who’s sought out diverse neighborhoods, churches, and schools, as a person who’s been pastored and taught and loved by African-American pastors and friends, as an immigrant and a daughter of an immigrant, as a person who writes about black and Hispanic churches in Grand Rapids and who sees the deeply good work they do, I am in despair about guns, about policing, about anti-immigrant rhetoric, about the love of power and strength without an accompanying love of wisdom.
So this article comes out of my own despair, as well as what I know about how many pastors in Grand Rapids are feeling. I need to take my own counsel.
In my part of the world, it is summer. Glorious summer.
Okay, this summer’s getting some mild side-eye. I worked as many hours as I could during June, since a freelance contract was ending, so it hasn’t been fancy-free so far. But mostly the side-eye is because my family wasn’t able to get together for a beach day until this past Sunday — in July. And Lake Michigan was cold enough that there were hypothermia warnings for boaters. Hypothermia — in July.
I may be exaggerating my frustration with summer, because I did get to go on a road trip to an exotic foreign land.
My son and I have caught a few local pro soccer games, and now that the team is in first place in our league, the remaining games are going to be even more fun than before — We love you boys in blue!
The beach day was marvelous, and there *was* a beach to sit on (which there hadn’t been even two weeks ago).
I went to a Canada Day picnic (to which I had to wear a sweater and was jealous of the woman who had a fleece blanket, ahem, summer).
The kids and I have gone to the park to kick and throw balls and frisbees around. They even made me sit down and do nothing while they cooked dinner (I totally shed a tear).
We’ve even teamed up to do some basic home repairs, which felt amazing and empowering.
And gone out for frozen yoghurt and ice cream numerous times.
The cooler-than-usual weather has meant that I can sit on the porch in the evenings and read or watch movies.
So I have had a fun summer so far, but you know what I don’t have? Photos of the fun. I decided to spend more time IN my summer than documenting it.
Lest this become known at The Lost Summer, I may relent a little. But I’m enjoying being there and not worrying about whipping out my phone. Frankly, I’m also enjoying not having to convince teenagers that a photo wouldn’t kill them.
Whether you are in summer or winter, whether you document your fun or not, whether you jolly people into joining you or fly solo, I wish you many, many enjoyable moments.
(Also, many thanks to giphy.com for making this lazy post just a little more interesting.)
Last weekend I went on a road trip with my daughter. I love a road trip.
I load up with books on CD and snacks and we’re off. We went to Toronto, the city of my birth, the city I left at the age of 19, the city I never drove in. I did not have cell service in Canada.
“How lovely,” you may be thinking. “No nagging emails or texts or anything to pull you away from where and who you were with.”
Sadly, no.
Because I am directionally impaired. I do not have a N-S-E-W grid in my head that I can use to orient myself any place I go. Even with step-by-step directions, I will make a wrong turn.
So without my blessed Google maps, there was no yellow arrow telling me what to do and where to turn, no distance calculator counting down the miles and feet to where I need to make a transition. I had only the three sets of directions I had printed out before I left, which didn’t prevent me from veering off the Gardiner once I got into to Toronto and taking the Lakeshore at the first opportunity, instead of at the last opportunity (this was exacerbated by my renting a Canadian car that operated under kilometers, and having directions that were calculated in miles).
I still got to where I was going, but I was worried the whole time that I’d done the wrong thing and I’d have to backtrack and I didn’t know enough about that part of the city to wing it and I couldn’t call my cousin because I had no service, and on and on.
My cousin believed me when I told him of my affliction, and took me on a Google street view trip to get to his dad’s condo, which was glorious. But later that day, when I had to follow instructions in reverse, I still managed to turn the wrong way–during rush hour–and added 30 minutes onto what should’ve been a 20-minute trip.
And on the way home, I missed the turnoff to the 402 and wound up in Windsor instead of Port Huron. I toyed with heading back to London and continuing on as I normally did, but I went with my mistake and took the tunnel, had a super-short border experience, and The Blessed Phone Worked Again, so I was able to find my way out of Detroit and onto I-96 and home.
So what might I have learned from this slightly silly story:
When I make a wrong turn, I can correct it.
When I feel lost, it doesn’t mean I’m irredeemably lost.
It may not be perfect, but I CAN DO IT.
You know what? Those are good things to know about myself and about life in general.
Do you have any good getting lost stories you want to share?
All gifs courtesy of the very fun-to-browse giphy.com.
Just because my hand is on you, doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.
These are words I believe God spoke to me as I was raking leaves in my front yard several years ago. They didn’t come out of the blue: I was pouring out my heart about my disappointments and rejections, mainly to do with my writing and (lack of) publishing.
There were three things I took away from this message:
My hand is on you.
It’s not going to be easy.
Things being easy is not the sign that my hand is on you.
Number 1 was powerful and moving to hear, and #2 wasn’t exactly encouraging, but #3 got at an assumption that hadn’t yet made its way to my consciousness: I’d been thinking that when God was with me, all paths would open up before me and I’d skate right through to success.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one with this assumption. It comes out in positive comments when things go your way, “God is really blessing you.” I heard it recently from a child of friends who, when thing after thing went wrong, asked, “Is God against us?” My complaint that day went along the lines of, “I thought this project had your blessing. You’ve energized and grown my writing and my faith so much through it, why isn’t it finding a home?”
Where did this assumption come from? Maybe a bit from Old Testament passages where God is begging the people to obey and they will have peace and rain and good harvests. Job’s friends certainly ascribe to the math of you are righteous = God’s blessing comes in the form of tangible success; therefore, lack of success = lack of righteousness.
Maybe a bit from my old fixed mindset: some things are easy for me, which means I’m good at them, I must be bad at the things that are difficult (or even, that something is difficult means that I’m not worthy).
And maybe a lot from the very simple human preference for things to be easy.
So those words that day changed me. Once that assumption came into the light, it was revealed as a sham, as something that was getting in my way.
These days, everything is hard. Getting published was a ton of work and risk and learning new things and tears and yelling at the computer, and there’s only more to learn and more to risk and even more work to do to make the book a success. This week is just really tough. Three days from now, it would have been my 22nd wedding anniversary, and as luck would have it, I have to be with my ex-husband that day; I’ve had a constantly simmering panic attack for over a week. I had a job set-back, so now I’ve got some employment decisions to make that could impact my availability for making the picture book a success. And I’m scared and grieving for my adopted country that is so divided, and so in love with guns.
But at least I know that none of these are signs that God is not with me, that God isn’t blessing me.
Just because my hand is on you, doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.
I said that to a friend about her situation on Sunday, and, as it often goes, I needed to be reminded of it, myself. Maybe you do, too. Let’s go forth and do hard things, secure in the knowledge that Jesus’ promise below is given in the present tense: I am with you.
“I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”
(Matthew 28:20 NLT)
For the last month and a half, my main focus has been on getting the Kickstarter rewards for As Real As It Gets distributed. We’re so close — only 5 true delinquents who we cannot get addresses for. But we’ve tried multiple times, so I’m calling it good.
Which means now the real marketing begins.
The emailing, oh the emailing: schools, school libraries, public libraries, picture book review bloggers, social service agencies, adoption agencies, and anyone else we can think of. If you know someone for us to contact, tell in the comments. If you want Amanda and/or me to come to your school, let me know in the comments. We’ve got a lot of books to sell!
But I’m taking a moment to revel in these delicious things:
It’s a dream come true. A dream 13 years in the making.
Yes, there’s a crazy amount of work ahead (including begging people to go to those sites above and leave a review), but today, I’m just going to smile and daydream about ways to celebrate this accomplishment.
How have you celebrated major accomplishments?
What do you think I should do?
I was browsing through the List app this weekend when I came across one that looked like fun: a list of one memory per country the person had visited. My kids are out of school, and I’ve attended the Zeeland Memorial Day Parade, so summer has officially started, and doing that list for myself just sounds fun. And summer is about fun (even for my son, who will be working 6am-2pm doing janitorial work, but he’ll be doing it with half of his crew, prompting the mother look and the admonishment, “make sure you work“).
Here we go, in alphabetical order (after my birthplace):
Photo by Andrew McLachlan – I loved that curved beach and the giant bluff rising straight out of the water.
Canada
Aliens camping. One of my favorite places we camped as a family was Bon Echo Provincial Park. When my dad was just out of law school, he started a company to explore affordable yet attractive housing; he didn’t find the solution to the housing dilemma, but he did wind up with an amazing tent system. There were three tents that zipped together, made of canvas and full of all kinds of interesting angles so his 6’3″ frame could fully stand in two of them. One tent was our living room; it contained seating, as well as the kitchen he built for camping purposes (it was made of wood and folded down). Zipped to that was my parents’ tent, and zipped to that was the kids’ tent (although I think Bon Echo was the first year my brother took a pup tent off on his own). Our camping spot was next to a rock outcrop tall enough that atop it, I could look down on the tent system. I liked to stand there and pretend an alien ship had landed in the wilds of Ontario.
Australia
The billows When I was maybe 8 and my brother 6, we went camping during monsoon season. And a storm came. Our spot was on top of a bluff by the ocean; although all the other campers hightailed it out of there, and we could’ve moved anywhere else, we stuck with that totally exposed spot. I remember the sides of the tents puffing out like a billows, and then sucking in, over and over and over — canvas makes a lot of noise when whipped about by monsoon-level wind and rain.
The Dominican Republic
Sanity, sweet sanity We went to a resort during Christmas of my freshman year of college. Nothing can beat the Sanity Bag I found in a dresser drawer. As the mother of teenagers, I might need it now more than ever.
France
Entirely unromantic I was in Paris for an afternoon, and my boyfriend-at-the-time and I had to get from one train station to another one across town, with only time to grab a sandwich in between. He took me to get a Greek sandwich in a neighborhood known for prostitution, apparently. I did not love this.
Greece
My life for a burger I was 9 and my brother 7. My sole memory of Athens: being near the Parthenon and not focusing at all on its majesty, but grumbling because we had to tramp all over a hillside to find a stand that served hamburgers, because that’s all my brother would eat.
Italy
Hangry zone We were in Venice, and we arrived during early-mid afternoon, hungry and tired. Of course, everyone in Venice was full and tired and having their afternoon rest, so almost no restaurants were open. I remember being embarrassed as my dad got increasingly annoyed. Also, Venice smelled like sewage.
The Netherlands
Teenagers think they’re so funny (sometimes they are) There is a delicious donut that is traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day: oliebollen. Translation: fat balls. Batter with currants, formed into a ball, deep fried, and then thickly covered in powdered sugar. In Amsterdam, they’re street cart food. When I was there during college, I watched a group of teenagers buy oliebollen, follow businessmen down the sidewalk, and blow the powdered sugar all over the backs of their black cashmere coats. It made me laugh.
Singapore
Non-jolly blond giant We were here when I was 9, and I have no memory of this vibrant place other than that of being horribly, gut-twistingly embarrassed as we walked around because I was taller than most of the adults! And at 6’3″, my dad was what seemed like twice the height of everyone else. I wanted to curl up in a ball.
Spain
Self-obsessed much? I was in Denia, on the coast of the Mediterranean Ocean, during college, visiting my boyfriend-at-the-time during his off-campus semester. We went on a lovely hike in the very gentle mountains, yet I was in tears, because I had my Dance Guild show in a week or two, and I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize my ankles. Silly girl.
Switzerland
My brother’s keeper One of my dad’s brothers worked for the Canadian government and was stationed in Geneva for a year while we were in Australia, so we visited him and hung out with our cousins. When we were sightseeing in the mountains, my brother kept going really close to what looked like the edge of a cliff, and I was crying because I really thought he was going to fall to his death. He didn’t.
United States of America
Romantic reading spot My mother grew up on a farm in a one-stop-sign, two-church town called Overisel. Every year, as soon as school was done, we’d drive down to visit my grandparents in time for strawberry/sour cherry/rhubarb season. I was not as stellar a picker as my mother, so I’d wind up with a glorious amount of free time. For a few years, until puberty hit and my hips grew, I liked to take a book up into one of the sour cherry trees and settle into this one spot that was just barely big enough for me to perch in. This was always more romantic ideal than comfortable reading spot, but I’d tough it out, gazing over the corn fields, thinking about how great it was that I could read in a tree, and get through 10 pages max before climbing down.
Anybody else have travel memories they want to share?
Anyone out there use the List app?
Only God can say what this new spirit gradually forming in you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The prayer above — that starts, “Trust the slow work of God” — has always just slayed me. There has never been a time when it didn’t speak to me about the deep things I was going through.
I have a printout of the whole thing tucked in my prayer journal, so I often return to it … when I’m using my prayer journal. But since my marriage imploded, I haven’t been writing my prayers. I’ve been praying. Oh, yes, I’ve been praying. But I let that longtime spiritual practice go. In its place, I’ve been resting.
Starting last summer, references to resting in God have come to me in waves. I did a silly post about it (Apathetic Prayer), but then they kept coming, which I experience as God trying to tell me something. So I’ve payed attention.
It’s not easy to come to God without an agenda, whether that’s a long list of prayer requests or the need for spiritual insight and practical assistance, but the truth I believe is that God loves me without any striving necessary on my part. It’s easy to get hung up on the striving, to get all into checking things off lists and feeling like I’m doing all I can to move forward, whether that’s practically or spiritually.
But for this time, God clearly wants me to rest in Him.
I’ve had some powerful experiences in prayer in the last six months. The 90-minute Garden Prayer on Maundy Thursday at The Revolution. And the contemplative prayer time at the Renew and Refine mini-retreat before the Festival of Faith and Writing. There have also been plenty of walks in the Calvin Nature Preserve when I let myself feel God’s pleasure. Plenty of times I’d breathe slowly in and out and ask God to be with me. Any word/impression I’ve received during those times has fallen into two categories: “You are my beloved,” and “Rest in me.”
So instead of berating myself for letting the practice of writing my prayers slide, I’m seeing this time as learning to experience the love of God independently from anything I may try to do to “earn” it or “deserve” it. Because God loves me. End of sentence.
It’s my way of trusting the slow work of God, and of “accept[ing] the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.” Because anxious and incomplete and impatient and suspended between old and new is definitely how I’m feeling. I’m trusting that a new spirit is gradually forming in me.
***
In case you need it, too, here’s the full prayer:
Above all, trust the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.
We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on
the way to something unknown,
something new,
and yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability–
and it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually–
let them grow,
let them shape themselves,
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time (that is to say, grace and
circumstances acting
on your own good will)
will make them tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense
and incomplete.
but the books are finally here, piled up in my dining room and in Amanda’s living room.
The hardcovers came in yesterday (finally!), so now we’ve got all the books. I am totally biased, but they are gorgeous. The paper is nice and thick, the covers so nice and soft that I keep wanting to pet them, the colors so vibrant. (I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that you can order them here, on sale for $12 and $17 for the release month.)
“But wait,” you may be saying, “what are those things that look like greeting cards?”
Well, they’re greeting cards 🙂 If you’re in the Zeeland, Michigan area this Saturday, May 21, come and see me and Amanda at the Peddler’s Market, where we’ll be selling the books as well as some cards. We’ll be putting the cards for sale on westolivepress.com after the weekend ($4 each) — three birthday cards, one Father’s Day card (the one of the dad making silly T Rex arms), and three cards with general statements that could be used for birthdays, Happy Adoption Days, and any day “You are so loved” and “We’re in this together” would be appropriate.
There are what seems like a thousand things to do: get the Kickstarter hardcovers signed by all three of us, send them to our contributors, send the orders that are coming in through the website, make price tags for the Peddler’s Market, get us set up on Fulfillment by Amazon so the books will be for sale there (soon!), get set up on Goodreads, get onto the SEO wagon for the website, make sure my Square reader works, put the cards on the website….
The list also includes fun things. I got to upgrade my membership in the Alliance of Independent Authors from Associate to Author (see the shiny new badge in the sidebar).
And we got our first feedback from a reader:
I received the book today and read it to my son at bedtime. He made me read it three times and the last time he wanted to read the boy’s part and have me do the mom. He’s in first grade so it was a lot for him to read but he was adamant! He really liked that the boy looked like him and I actually do happen to look like the mom. Thank you so much! He said his monster looks more like a dragon and had a lot to say about his monster. I’ll try to get him to draw a picture for you. Great book!
It’s so easy for me to get caught up in the to-do list, in the thrill of finally living my dream of being a published author, but that letter grounds me: this project is for those kids, for those families. And it’s a privilege to play a role.
On my favorite writing site, Writer Unboxed, today, Donald Maass is talking about injecting the pixie dust of enthralling events into our manuscripts. Here’s one of his sets of questions:
What food delights you? When did you first eat it? Who and what made that experience so special? Recreate that—not the food necessarily but the experience—in your current novel.
By these questions, he’s hoping to get at moments of deep delight, at those meals we always remember:
What are you putting into your work in progress that will provide that kind of delight for your readers? Food, drink, friends and comfort are undeniably associated with our most delightful times, but what makes those times meaningful are not the places or what was there, but who was there and what those experiences meant to us; i.e., what we did and what we felt.
So that got me thinking about times that food brought deep delight in my own life. I’ve written about one such time before (One vulnerable risk that led to my favorite Thanksgiving), when a co-worker admitted he had nowhere to go and asked to join my celebration.
Then there was the first time I ate an artichoke. I was 19 and newly home for the summer after my first year in college, and one of my cousins was starring in a summer stock play in an outdoor amphitheatre outside of Toronto. The Hart clan was planning to go together to one performance and have a picnic dinner on the grass, but my parents couldn’t go, so my Uncle Willem and his wife Carroll took me. Given how memorable this event was, I should say that my uncle didn’t just drive and feed me, he took me under his wing. He is a gourmet (and now my book and cover designer, sneak peek at the bottom of this post), and he brought for each of us, a steamed artichoke.
I should say, a perfectly steamed artichoke, with the choke removed.
I had to watch him carefully to see what to do:
Pull off a leaf, the resistance as slight as a tooth that’s more than ready to come out.
Dip it in the sauce.
Scrape the flesh off the leaf with your teeth.
Lay the discarded leaves in an attractive pattern on your plate.
The ritual of it was as intoxicating as the vegetably sweetness of the flavor. And the lusciousness of the heart — a revelation. I felt so sophisticated and grown up. It was deeply delightful.
It also opened up an approach to feeding oneself with style, with pleasure, with precision, with openness to new ingredients that I began to explore once I was cooking for myself every night.
I still love artichokes, although I don’t steam them whole; I slice them in half to make removing the choke easier. In fact, I saw some at the store yesterday, as big as a newborn’s head. Now I know what’s for dinner.
How about you? Do you have any good “First time I ate…” stories? What meal or food has brought you deep delight?
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As promised, here’s the sneak peek of The Giant Slayer’s cover. There are a couple of tweaks needed, but this is it. I love it.
In the last couple of months, I’ve almost lost track of the number of times the word “beloved” has been aimed my way. It started in the communion circle, when the person offering me the elements said, “Natalie, you know this, you are God’s beloved.”
Immediately, I cried. Actually, it still makes me tear up.
On the Thursday before Easter, I went to the Garden Prayer service at The Revolution — an hour and half of prayer that started at 11pm. They removed several rows of chairs and circled the stage with pillows. The lights were low, the music was pulsing, and dry ice was blowing. Prayer time was not quiet. People stood, sat, bowed, curled over the pillow, cried out, spoke in tongues, moved around. The word that came to me often during that time: beloved. I was God’s beloved.
I sobbed. Loudly. Like I hadn’t since my marriage imploded in August.
The word kept leaping out at me from a variety of blog posts and sermons. And then last week, at the Renew and Refine Retreat the day before the Festival of Faith and Writing, the contemplative writer himself, Ed Cyzewski, provided this verse as one option for us to use for centering prayer:
I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me. (Song of Songs 7:10, NRSV)
Yes, it’s from the sexy book of the Bible, but an argument can be made for reading it as an allegory of love between the Lord and His people, so that’s how I took it. For twenty minutes, I lay on my back on the floor of my church and focused on that, singing to myself an old youth group song,
I am His and He is mine, His banner over us is love.
I am His and He is mine, His banner over us is love.
I am His and He is mine, His banner over us is love.
His banner. Over us. Is love.
And then Ed and another organizer of the retreat stood in front of each person and said their name, followed by, “You are God’s beloved, and His desire is for you.” There were over thirty people in front of me, so I got to hear them say it over and over, and anticipate them saying it to me. I cried the whole time.
You see, it stings a little every time because it makes me realize that I am nobody else’s beloved, and that I wasn’t even my husband’s beloved while we were married. So there is grief.
But mostly I want to bask in the knowledge that I am God’s beloved, and that He has chosen me and will not stop choosing me. He treasures me; I am His treasure.
How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! (Psalm 139:17, NLT)
I’m grateful for each person who has looked me in the eye and told me this. And for each person who will do it in the future. Because I’m not done needing to hear it. It still needs to soak further into my spirit, into my brain, into my heart before the need is not so acute. But I’m getting there…
Of course, this is not just true about me and God — it’s true about you and God, too.
You are God’s beloved. Bask in it.
Hello, friends. This is the first time I’m linking to something I wrote for one of my freelance jobs, partially because I’m proud of it — I think it manages to be truthful while maintaining a light but not overly jokey tone. My goal was to make it seem possible to do something about the grief, pain, and fear pastors (and the rest of us) are feeling these days.
