On telling the story and not stopping at the joke

A boy doesn't look happy to be cleaning the kitchen sink.
An image of a boy who doesn't love doing chores.

My father was born in the Netherlands in 1942, almost two years into the Nazi occupation. He was young enough to have only one real memory of wartime: sitting outside and playing, refusing to come in while the air raid siren blared and his mother and nanny tried to get him to come inside.

But he had three older brothers who remember the war.

They tell only a few stories from that time, but one of my generation’s favorites took place during the last winter of the war when the families of three Fonds sisters were all living in one house out in the country: 6 adults and 12 children (plus any people they might be sheltering in the hubbub). All the husbands worked in the resistance movement.

With that many people, everyone had a job. Even two-year-old Peter had to go into the woods to collect kindling. Tante Nell made sure the household ran.

One day, it was the job of one of the boys to do the dishes. But children are still children, even during war, and he didn’t want to, so he hid in the bathroom under the stairs.

Nell saw that the dishes were not being done, figured out where he was, went there, banged on the door and announced loudly for all to hear: “Poop on your own time! Dishes now!” He came out and did the dishes.

That’s the story they told us when we were young, and we laughed and laughed. Between the pounding on the door and the yelling about poop, it was fantastic.

I asked to hear it again when I was in my 40s. That time, they gave me the actual story.

With that many people in the house, everyone had a job. Even two-year-old Peter had to go into the woods to collect kindling. Tante Nell made sure the household ran.

One day, it was the job of one of the boys to do the dishes. But children are still children, even during war, and he didn’t want to, so he hid in the bathroom under the stairs.

Nell saw that the dishes were not being done, figured out where he was and gathered everyone in the living room. She gave a very serious speech about how hard things were, how they were all sacrificing, how they all had to pull together and play their part, that each person was needed. The boy felt so guilty that he came out of the bathroom in tears and vowed to never try to skip his chores.

Not nearly as funny, but I was glad I got to hear the real version.

This makes me think of Hannah Gadsby’s first big Netflix comedy special, Nanette, where she initially plays a lot of painful situations for laughs.

“When you laugh you release tension, and when you hold tension in your human body it’s not healthy psychologically or physically…it’s even better to laugh with other people…. When you share a laugh you will release more tension because laughter is infectious…. Tension isolates us, and laughter connects us.”

Then she explains that jokes just need a setup and a punchline; jokes are frozen at the middle, at the trauma point. Stories, on the other hand, need a beginning, a middle, and an end. In Nanette she takes us past the joke point and tells her real story about how those traumas affected her and, writ large, how they play out in society as a whole. And we discover that truth and vulnerability can connect us even deeper than laughter does.

We’ve all told the joke instead of the story, like my uncles did with their war story. When we were kids they never introduced it as, “In July of 1944 the Nazis searched our house in Velp, hoping to find proof of our father’s work in the resistance cell headed by our family doctor. The cell was dismantled; several members were arrested and either executed or sent to concentration camps, where they died. We fled to our mother’s sister’s house in Ermelo, in the country, a couple of months later. On the way we had to sleep in a barn because the farmer would only let our mother and baby brother in the house. Another sister’s family fled there, as well, and all of us rode out the Hunger Winter and avoided starvation together.”

It’s human nature to play trauma for laughs, to tame it for chit-chat purposes.

For example, I could say that the day after my marriage ended our daughter came home with lice. Lice! On top of everything else, creepy crawly little bugs!! And then talk about all the different ways I tried to get rid of them over three rounds of treatment.

But any further conversation would dig into more vulnerable territory. How it was actually the day after three police officers came onto my porch to arrest my husband of 21 years for a sex crime. How angry I was at him, how hurt, how shocked but not surprised. How I had to tell the kids and our parents about his arrest. How I’d stopped eating and drinking from the stress and wandered the aisles of Target, light-headed and overwhelmed, buying new bedding and pillows and lice removal systems, worrying about spending the money because my husband would surely lose his job and I was a stay-at-home mom who only worked freelance.

How I oddly came to appreciate the lice situation and the three rounds it took to get them truly gone from her long beautiful hair because we had to sit together for hours, me tenderly and patiently running the fine comb through her hair. Over and over and over. It would have been easy for us to retreat to our corners to nurse our wounds, but the lice forced us into close proximity. So there was good in it.

The joke versions of our stories are fine. But I hope we keep getting better at telling each other the full stories.

I’m going to give Gadsby the final word:

Stories hold our cure. Laughter is just the honey that sweetens the bitter medicine…. Your story is my story and my story is your story…. That is the focus of the story we need: connection.

Setting Gratitude Free From Happiness, Pleasantness, And Goodness

An image of an empty bird cage with an open door.

Alternative title: Gratitude practices for the grieving, ashamed, and stuck

An image of an empty bird cage with an open door. Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash

Of course we should be grateful—everyone says so. Literally everyone.

Expressing gratitude to their deity is central to every major religion. Thinkers as diverse as Cicero and Oprah, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Tony Robbins tout not only its benefits, but also its necessity for a well-lived life. A Gratitude Industrial Complex has sprung up to sell us journals, coloring books, posters, wall hangings, online courses, greeting cards, candles, jewelry, and social media memes. They all say that gratitude is the root of happiness, grace, beauty, love, sweetness, abundance, comfort, and success.

That sounds lovely.

But life is not always lovely. 

Gratitude experts know this, too, and will remind us that there are always things we can be grateful for, even during difficult times. These are often small things in our lives that make us happy, bring us comfort, or are admirable—a hug from a child, a warm sunbeam, a gift of a meal.

Again, lovely. 

But akin to using a chef’s knife only to spread butter on your toast: an underuse of a powerful tool. In relegating gratitude to the realm of the pleasant and admirable, in linking it to happiness and comfort, we weaken its ability to change us for the better, especially when life is difficult. 

“Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” G.K. Chesterton

If gratitude is happiness, what am I supposed to do with my gratitude that my cousin Esther died of colon cancer in more pain than a human being should be able to endure at age 39 with a 3-year-old daughter who would have no natural memories of her—but secure in her father’s love for the first time in her life?

Because I’m grateful for that, but I also fervently wish she were still alive to know the daughter who is the spitting image of her yet is also her own glorious person. Being grateful that she died secure in her father’s love does not make me one bit happy. Years later, I still grieve her.

Esther and I were born a month apart in the same city, went to the same tiny school for grades 5-8 where we were the top grade for the last three of those years, lived together for a year in college, and became close as adults after my move to New York City gave her a free place to stay. We both saw the spirit of our Opa (Dutch for grandfather) on the same night when we were 9. I’d thought we were as close as the sisters neither of us had, with the petty rivalries and jealousies and intense confidences.

But she never told me how unhappy her home life was. I didn’t find out until she was dying; some stories I didn’t learn until after she died. Her mother struggled with mental illness and alcohol abuse and their family life often revolved around managing or reacting to those. In addition, the things Esther was interested in and good at weren’t things her parents put much stock in, so she didn’t feel appreciated.

When it was clear that she wouldn’t make it through her cancer, she and her father were discussing her desire to be cared for at home. They went back and forth until Esther plaintively asked, “Don’t you love me enough to take care of me?”

What could my uncle say but, “Yes”? 

Because he did. He’d loved her that much all along, of course.

In the months that followed, he took the tenderest round-the-clock care of her, burping her colostomy bag, managing her mountain of medications, hand-feeding her when she became too weak. She died not only secure in the knowledge of her father’s love, but completely wrapped up in the experience of his love for her. I am so grateful for this—not only for her, but also for my uncle. 

But happy? No. 

“Gratitude paints little smiley faces on everything it touches.”
Richelle E. Goodrich

If gratitude is all about feeling warm and cozy, what am I supposed to do with my gratitude for my friend Bernadette, who called me out on a matter of racial stereotyping? Because I’m grateful to her, but any warmth I felt at the time was due to the heat of shame burning up my neck. There was nothing smiley about it.

Friends and I were talking about poll statistics before the 2016 election and I made a desperate joke about Hispanic people and cell phones and she called me on it. At first, I defended myself, because I knew my intentions, and I knew my love and respect for the people I’d stereotyped. I wasn’t mean-spirited. So I justified my behavior. After we parted it took all of 10 minutes for me to realize that I’d been wrong, that my intentions were not the most important thing in our interaction—that my words were. 

I immediately sent her an apology, and by the time I saw her the next day, I was grateful to her for calling me out, and told her so. Because she had the courage to say what she did to my face, I was given the opportunity to hear my words from another’s point of view: I couldn’t hear the stereotyping until she revealed it to me. I asked for her forgiveness, she gave it, and our friendship deepened. I am grateful for this experience because it made me a better, more humble person. 

Was it cozy? No. Is there a smiley face on the encounter? No. My gratitude has not made me any less embarrassed by it. 

“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
Dalai Lama

If gratitude is all about highlighting things that are admirable, what am I supposed to do with my gratitude that my husband of 21 years was arrested for a sex crime, enabling me to leave a marriage that was good enough, but that was also breaking my heart every day? Because I’m grateful for that, but what he did was not at all praiseworthy, and caused both immediate and ongoing trauma in our family. 

My marriage wasn’t horrible. My spouse and I could still have fun together, and we worked well on negotiating the needs of the kids and family life, but there was an essential hollowness to our near-sexless marriage, and there were years of agreements that he didn’t live up to, deals he didn’t keep. I was last in his life, but I decided over and over that I wouldn’t leave him; it was part of my deep value system to stay and I couldn’t imagine explaining why I was leaving to my kids. So I used the practice of gratitude to make my marriage livable for me: focused on what was good about our relationship, worked at being compassionate instead of bitter, and was disciplined about thanking him for every little thing. The day-to-day lived experience was more pleasant, but gratitude didn’t address any of our deep problems, neither did it heal my heartbreak.

I told very few people about this because I didn’t see the point: no matter what I did, he wasn’t changing, and I wasn’t leaving, so why make other people frustrated with him? After all, he was my husband and I loved him. It left me utterly stuck and lonely.

So once he was arrested and the truth (and then more truth) came to light, making sense of years-worth of his behavior, it was a relief: here was a solid reason to leave. I was grateful for that (and that he was caught before anything worse happened), but was there anything praiseworthy to focus on? No. 

But that’s also not entirely fair: our marriage produced two wonderful and sometimes infuriating children. It nurtured and encouraged our friends. We supported each other in our artistic pursuits and made it possible for each other to grow in our chosen fields. I can be grateful for that, but it’s a complicated gratitude.

A.J. Jacobs ran into a similar problem when he tried to thank everyone involved in his morning cup of coffee. In Thanks a Thousand, he writes that when he told his friend Brian that he was thanking dockworkers and truck drivers, Brian asked whether he was going to thank the meth dealers for selling drugs to the drivers so they could drive all night. That put Jacobs in a quandary:

“Brian’s comment may be flippant, but it sticks in my mind. It’s brought up an interesting problem. Not everyone who helps get my coffee to me is a good person. Or at least not everyone is acting in a way that is good for the world…. So…does the CEO of Exxon deserve my thanks?”

Jacobs doesn’t answer that question, but thanks the CEO of Exxon anyway, sending what he describes as a passive-aggressive, “Thank you, now please change,” letter.  

Gratitude can be more of a mixed bag than theologians, thinkers, and marketers often give it credit for. And I haven’t even gotten to people who are grateful for things other people think are tragic, like people with disabilities being grateful for their disability. 

“Attention must be paid.” Linda Loman (Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman)

So what gives these non-pleasant experiences of gratitude their power? At its base, gratitude is about paying attention. The pleasant versions of gratitude have us paying attention to things that make us feel happy, warm, cozy, and positive. The more robust versions can withstand us paying attention to things that are true whether they make us feel sad, uncomfortable, ashamed, or free because the more robust version highlights our connectedness–and we need connection.

“As adults connection nourishes us in a literal, physiological way, regulating our heart rates and respiration rates, influencing the emotional activation in our brains, shifting our immune response to injuries and wounds, changing our exposure to stressors and modulating our stress response.”

Chapter 6, Burnout, Emily Nagorski and Amelia Nagorski

Because of my cousin Esther’s illness and death, I know her better and I know my uncle better—I am connected to both of them in deeper ways than I was before. Because of my friend Bernadette’s forthrightness and her forgiveness, I am better connected to her, and better connected to myself as a person who can be wrong and not be destroyed by it. Because of my now-ex-husband’s arrest after years of lies and neglect I am better connected to myself because I’m no longer trying to convince myself that grievous behavior was loving; I’m better connected to my community because of the help they gave me in the aftermath; I’m better connected to friends whose families have gone through something similar; and I’m better connected to my children because of the intensity of what we went through together. My gratitude for each of those events is rooted in those connections and branches out in my writing, my relationships, and my work with children.

I am both more compassionate and more courageous, with myself and with others, than I was before these events. There’s no need to hide from or to deny sadness, grief, shame, or anger as incompatible with the practice of gratitude, or to expect gratitude to lift me out of those states, because I know I can be grateful for things that have made me feel each of those emotions. 

So let’s free gratitude from the cage of loveliness. Practicing gratitude may bring you happiness, beauty, sweetness, and success. But gratitude that rises from situations of grief, shame, and anger may connect you more deeply to yourself and to others. 

I’ll take gratitude-fueled connection over unrelenting sweetness any day. The more tightly knit our connections are, the more they’ll sustain us, encourage us, and challenge us to see connections where we’d been blind to them before. That can change the world. And that’s something to be deeply grateful about.

Do Christians follow their leader or his first followers?

screengrab of Derek Sivers How to Start a Movement

This short TED Talk (Derek Sivers’s, “How to Start a Movement”) tells the story of a man dancing alone at a music festival, how first one person joined him, and then another, until crowds were running to join the dance. It’s only 3 minutes long and kind of funny.

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I’m always struck by this observation: “New followers emulate the followers, not the leader.I can’t help but think of Jesus and his first followers, who constantly got him wrong even though they had him right there with them.

They left everything to follow him but didn’t understand who he was

They’d been with Jesus for some time, watching him heal and preach, and argue with religious leaders. One day, when they were sailing across a lake, a dangerous storm came up. The followers wake up the napping Jesus, who tells off the wind and waves, which makes them calm.

The disciples were terrified and amazed. “Who is this man?” they asked each other. “When he gives a command, even the wind and waves obey him!” (Luke 8:25)

Peter is the only one who will say it out loud

In Luke, after they feed the 5,000 with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, Jesus asks them point blank who they think he is, and only one gives the answer:

One day Jesus left the crowds to pray alone. Only his disciples were with him, and he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”

“Well,” they replied, “some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, and others say you are one of the other ancient prophets risen from the dead.”

Then he asked them, But who do you say I am?

Peter replied, “You are the Messiah sent from God!” (Luke 9:18-20)

I imagine all of them silent and nervous about Jesus’s question, either because they aren’t sure or they’re afraid to get it wrong, and then Peter blurts it out (as he often does).

They are obsessed with greatness

Jesus ate with the despised and rejected, healed people no matter their socio-economic status, and constantly beefed with the authorities, but his first followers were obsessed with greatness. In Matthew 18 they ask Jesus who was the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. In Mark 9 Jesus confronts them about their “who’s the greatest” argument on the road. In Luke 9 they argue about which of them was the greatest. In Luke 22 (at the Last Supper) they argue about who would be the greatest. In each instance, Jesus gives a similar response:

“Whoever wants to be first must take last place and be the servant of everyone else.” Then he put a little child among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes not only me but also my Father who sent me.” (Mark 9:35-37)

He even has to correct his first followers for preventing parents from bringing children to him to be blessed: “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like these children” (Matthew 19:14).

They didn’t get that his theology was so different from what they grew up with

When the followers see a man blind from birth, their question to Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” sounds odd to our ears, but reveals their theological assumption: if you are sick or suffering, it’s a punishment for something you’ve done or something your family has done–you deserve it. But Jesus says something radical:

“It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,” Jesus answered. “This happened so the power of God could be seen in him.” (John 9:2-3)

This was a radical healing all around. By making it so a man born blind could not only see, but understand what he was seeing, Jesus put everyone around this man in a tizzy. He got dragged in front of the Pharisees, some of whom were upset because this healing took place on the Sabbath (when nobody was supposed to work) while others thought the healer must be from God. They hauled in his parents to ask them what they thought of this Jesus who healed him. Kept grilling the man, who could only repeat what his experience was until they threw him out of the synagogue.

They didn’t get that he challenged the status quo on purpose

Jesus has been arguing with the Pharisees about what makes a person “unclean” or “defiled.” The Pharisees ask him about ritual hand cleaning and Jesus ups the ante by talking about how what you say reveals the state of your heart. Jesus draws a crowd to tell them,

“It’s not what goes into your mouth that defiles you; you are defiled by the words that come out of your mouth.”

Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you realize you offended the Pharisees by what you just said?” (v.11-12)

He sure did! He already told the Pharisees, “you cancel the word of God for the sake of your own tradition. You hypocrites!” And goes on to call them the blind leading the blind. The followers’ “do you realize you offended the Pharisees” is kinda sweet, but reveals that they didn’t understand Jesus’s ministry.

One of them betrayed him

Judas has always sounded to me like a disillusioned true believer: Jesus wasn’t who Judas thought he was, so he set Jesus up so the authorities could arrest him. In Matthew, the last straw for Judas seems to be when Jesus allows the woman to anoint his feet with very expensive oil. But whatever it was, he goes to the people plotting to kill Jesus and offers to hand him over. Then he follows through and does it.

Even Jesus seems surprised 

At the Last Supper, when Jesus is trying to sum up his entire ministry for the disciples who will be charged with spreading his message, his followers are still confused about who Jesus is.

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”

Jesus replied, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and yet you still don’t know who I am? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?  (John 14:8-11) 

They never understood what the kingdom was

Even at the very end of Jesus’ time on earth, post-resurrection, his closest followers still didn’t get what he was all about:

 So when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking him, “Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?” (Acts 1:6) 

They were with him for 3 years, hearing him speak, able to ask him anything, sharing meals, travelling the country, hanging out with him after he died, and they still didn’t understand that Jesus was not about kicking out the Romans and restoring Israel’s political power.

So what about us?

We’re supposed to be following Jesus, not the first followers. But we’re only human. Like they were. It seems inevitable that we would be like those first followers: not understanding who Jesus is and what he’s about, obsessed with the wrong things, not grasping just how deeply Jesus challenges rules-based religion.

Sivers wants his listeners to embrace the crucial role that first followers play:

“First follower is an underrated form of leadership…. Have the courage to follow and show others how to follow.”

For Christians, I’d change it a little:

“Have the courage to follow the leader (Jesus) and show others how to follow the leader (not you).”

I’m glad we’ve got the example of the disciples and all the ways they get things right and wrong. It means we get to be aware of our human tendencies to get obsessed with the wrong things and to see Jesus through our own cultural lenses. But we are also aware that we are to be Christlike, not disciplelike. We are to be first followers, ourselves, enticing others to join the dance. 

What is saving my life right now

A photo of a woman in the snow looking determined and strong. Photo by Hannah Van Houten.

We are halfway between winter and spring. The West Michigan winter has been cloudier than usual: in December we saw 12% of possible sunshine; January gave us less than that. As Barbara Brown Taylor notes in Leaving Church, we know what’s killing us, but it’s harder to recognize what’s saving us. So today I’m joining with Modern Mrs. Darcy and naming what is saving me right now.

That photo of me.

My daughter took it for a portrait assignment for her photography class. Look at this woman. She looks so determined. And so strong. This woman will keep going and not give up. And this woman is me! I love that she captured the steely side of my core.

The coat I’m wearing belonged to my Oma, my Dutch grandmother, who took 5 children through World War II in the Netherlands (two of whom were born during the Occupation). They had to move suddenly when the Nazis commandeered their home. Her husband was in a Resistance Cell, so he was often gone, working to undermine the occupiers; whether he was out or at home, there was a constant sense that the Nazis could come for him at any time. Because they did. The last winter of the war, the Hunger Winter, she walked for 2 days with her husband and 5 young children, one of whom was an infant, to get to her sister’s country home where there was food — if you count ground fish heads and bones as food. The Nazis didn’t; they’d commandeered all the truly edible stuff from the family’s soup factory. But three families survived that winter on the disgusting scraps the Nazis left them.

I see that legacy in this photo. And I love it. (Also, I love that I was right to suggest my daughter take a photography class. #momwin)

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

When I shared my post last month to Facebook, one of my friends recommended that I read Burnout. I burned through the audiobook in a few days (see what I did there?).

It is already saving my life.

The first tenet of Burnout is that whether or not you are able to change the stressors in you life, you have to complete the stress cycle in order to deal with the stress. The purpose of completing the stress cycle is to tell your body and mind that you are safe, that you have dealt with the adrenaline caused by the stressor, and that you do not need to constantly be in a state of alarm.

There are multiple ways to complete the stress cycle: exercise is the best, conversation with a trusted love one, getting enough sleep, connecting with deeper meaning in your life, doing things with a group that highlight your togetherness, expressing your creativity.

All things I love to do, but all things that I neglect when under stress. When the kids were younger, and not rational, I endeavored to be the soul of patience and not yell — I wasn’t successful, but I tried really, really hard. And I wondered what I could do with all the anger and frustration that I’d pushed down. This book would’ve saved my life back then. Being able to divorce the stress from the stressor, being able to consciously pursue those things as a way to complete that stress cycle, would have been a big help.

It’s a big help to me now.

The second way the Nagorski sisters are saving my life: I realized that it is actively unhealthy and unhelpful for me to constantly hold in my stomach muscles. I’ve been doing it for years. Partially because I thought it was one way to ensure good posture, and partially because I’ve gained weight and I don’t like my tummy. But it also signals to my body and brain that I’m bracing for something. Constantly. Which is a way of being perpetually in an alarm state — unable to complete the stress cycle. It also put constant pressure on my internal organs, and I’d been experiencing some unpleasant urinary symptoms: not being able to hold it in the morning, and frequently feeling like I needed to pee, even when I’d just peed.

Once I let my stomach relax, those unpleasant symptoms went away. Within two days.

And my posture is just as good as it always was. My pants fit differently, but I’m getting used to it.

So there are three things that are saving my life these days.
How about you?

Wherein I am sarcastic to God and God is good to me

An image of the cover of The Giant Slayer by N A Hart with a quote superimposed on top. How long would it take? A few days? Until the new moon? Could Adonai keep him in suspense for a whole season?

One of my favorite moments in The Giant Slayer is when young David, having just been anointed by Samuel, who won’t tell him why, wonders,

How long would it take? A few days? Until the new moon? Could Adonai keep him in suspense for a whole season?

It’s adorable. His disbelief that God might make him wait a whole season.

Of course, it’s not nearly so cute when God is making me wait.

Back in November 2021 I was at a retreat at The Transforming Center. It was a gift to the staff and church leaders from my boss and pastor who was about to retire. And it truly was a gift. After a year and a half of doing ministry during COVID, I needed a retreat. They actually gave us time to listen to what God might be trying to say to us–like, hours, not just a token 10 minutes before a session. 

One of the best things I did there was grieve: grieve what COVID stole from me, from all of us, grieve the upcoming loss of my pastor. I needed a good cry and I got it. The retreat gave me the space and time to get out of management mode so I could recognize what emotions I needed to process, and then begin to process them.

But then I sensed that God was promising me rest–not just rest for that day, but capital-R Rest. My response,

That’s adorable.

Other than those few days, I would get no chance for rest in the near future. In fact, I knew that the near future would be busier than ever. What a hilarious thing for God to promise me.

With the pastor retiring and me on the celebration committee, I’d be going full steam ahead on all the party plans as soon as we got back, and that was on top of my normal 5 part-time jobs. And then once he retired, I’d be on the transition team tasked with searching for and calling a new pastor. And the children were finally coming indoors for ministry so there was extra COVID-planning and -proofing to do. And the middle school youth group was finally going to start up. That was just what I knew. I didn’t anticipate that fewer people would return to church and that even fewer would want to come back to volunteering so finding people to do ministry things would become even more torturous. Or that the worship director and associate worship director would leave the church. That more and more and more responsibility would fall into my hands.

Jim Gaffigan tells a great joke about what it’s like having 5 children: “Imagine you’re drowning. And then someone hands you a baby.” Here’s a church-staff-coming-out-of-COVID version:

Imagine you’re doing everything normal plus extra to try to connect everyone virtually and hold the church together. And then some people come back and are so excited for what you were doing and so glad to be there, but you wind up with more to do and nothing taken away. And the thing is that you love these people. They are your church family. You know they’ve had an exhausting pandemic, too, so you don’t want to burden them or ask too much of them. So you shoulder it yourself.

I began to see that a new job could be part of God’s promised rest. The end of July 2022 I traded one part-time job for a full-time job with benefits. The end of December I left my church, my denomination, and two more of my part-time jobs (the stress of which brought me 10 additional pounds and three vertigo attacks in 6 weeks). I’ll free myself of one more tiny job by the spring, and I’ll keep one that is faith and justice related and only a couple of hours a month.

It took 14 months since God promised me Rest for me to reach the conditions that would make it possible. I am so grateful.

But here’s the thing I’ve realized: I’ve been running on adrenaline, in emergency survival mode, since the three police officers walked up my porch steps to arrest my now-ex-husband for a sex crime. Over 7 years ago. That’s why I managed COVID so well — I was already in a state of emergency, so I could just fold that in.

I know how to escape, chill out, have fun. But capital-R Rest? No idea. I had a tiny taste of it last week on Tuesday evening and I cried.  

How long until I re-learn Rest? How long until I step out of the high-alert pathways? Until I no longer constantly clench my jaw, my stomach, my glutes, my legs? Until my left eyelid stops twitching? My heart stops randomly beating hard?

A few days? A month? A whole season?

That’s adorable. I think it’s going to take a long time.

When change really does set you free

A neon sign reads CHANGE.

A neon sign reads CHANGE.

When God communicates with you, does he use sarcasm? Only me?

Here’s the story. I’d been employed at my church as the children’s minister for 6 years and the office administrator for 3 years. I loved the work and I loved the church. Truly. It was powerful and meaningful work, especially when the pandemic hit. My work was making an actual difference for people.

And taking up a ton of mental and emotional space.

I pretty much stopped writing because I was doing so much of it for work and because my out-of-work time was spent researching ways to keep people connected.

As COVID receded, and our staffing shifted and people did not flock back to church, I took on more responsibilities, not less, and still not full-time status, still no benefits. Even with a health care stipend, it was so expensive and so stressful to get my plans through the marketplace.

In the middle of this, my church’s new interim pastor noted my deep love of God’s Word and my gifts in communicating about God’s Word, and suggested that I consider whether I had a call to be a pastor. He’s not the first one to suggest that. Another friend has brought it up repeatedly, telling me I was more pastoral than a lot of ministers they knew.

I’d always brushed off these suggestions, but I decided to at least mention it to God this time.

The Lord responded.

Oh. Really. You’re going to ask me about this when you already aren’t doing what I have called you to?

When Jesus called Peter, John, and James, who were fishermen, he didn’t use his own carpentry lingo. He didn’t say, “Come build a framework for God’s kingdom with me.” No, he said, “Come with me and we’ll fish for people.”

So for me, God was mildly sarcastic. And it worked.

It was finally the thing that got me to seriously look for other work in hopes that a new job, full time with benefits, would give me the security and mental space I’d need to write again.

And it worked.

I got a full-time corporate gig as an office administrator with all the benefits and I really like it. My creative brain is exploding with ideas. I’m writing new blog posts. I’ve started a new novel. I’m following through on ideas and plans I’ve long put on the way-back burner.

This one simple and huge change has set me free to do what God has called me to do: write. I am so grateful.

Is there change that you need to set you free to do something you really want to do? I hope it happens.

 

 

The ancient art of faith formation

Sanilac petroglyph

This summer I went camping in the The Thumb of Michigan, and yes, I did hold up my hand and point to the spot on my own thumb when telling people about it.

An image of the back of a left hand two arrows pointing to locations on the thumb.

The Thumb was beautiful and, unlike at west-side campgrounds, we could get a great spot only a month before we wanted to head out. I think we’re going to make it an annual thing.

But it also meant that we were only 30 minutes away from a place I’d wanted to visit since I learned about it in 2019: Sanilac Petroglyphs Historic State Park. This park is dedicated to educating visitors about and maintaining the stone carvings that were made by Native American people there between 1,500 and 300 years ago. The carvings are called Ezhibiigaadek Asin, “written on stone,” in the Anishinaabemowin language.So much history is told from such a small location. From how the petroglyphs were discovered: two fires devastated The Thumb in 1871 and 1881 and cleared the brush so people could see this rock again (the 1881 fire burned so hot and moved so fast that the technology didn’t exist that would allow people to outrun it so whole families jumped in their well to try to save themselves). To how Native American tribes used that land both to sustain their lives and to commemorate and  pass along their history and worldview.

The Anishinaabe (original people) used this Marshall sandstone outcropping by the Cass River as an important gathering place, a place to talk about who they were, where they came from, where they were going, and what their values were. An elder would gather the people, take a stick in hand, and deliver a teaching while tracing the figure being spoken of in the sacred rock. With each repetition, the figure was carved deeper into the sandstone.

The above figure is the archer, who shoots knowledge into the future for coming generations. The items around it are offerings of tobacco, copper, and feathers that contemporary Native American people have given in gratitude for these gifts their ancestors made for them.

A stone carving to aid in teaching about the Thunderbird at Sanilac Petroyglyphs State Park.If I remember correctly, this is the thunderbird with wings outstretched, creating thunder with each flap.

This figure has been subject to more erosion than others, so it’s no longer as clear. At the bottom right corner of this photo you see a round hole in the rock–vandalism. At some point, someone dug a figure out of the sandstone and removed it. Which is why there’s now a high locked fence surrounding the site.

There were stories the interpreter couldn’t tell us because we were a group of men and women, and some teachings were only for men and others only for women.

A line of indented circles in the Sanilac petroglyphs that runs perfectly north/south.

This line of circular indents was a mystery until someone used a compass and realized it was a perfect north-south line.

I felt so connected to those long-ago storytellers. For hundreds of Sunday mornings, I have knelt or sat in front of a group of children and talked about how God loves us with a never-ending, always-and-forever love; that God always wants to hear from us; that God is involved with our lives in mundane and amazing ways; that the life of faith is one of both comfort and challenge.
While I tell the stories, I move my hands over sand, manipulating wood and clay and felt figures as I tell a rotating group of 80ish stories. Over and over and over for the last 24 years. Carving them deeper into my own heart and life, while hoping to plant seeds in the children’s hearts and lives.

I can say the beginnings of many stories from memory:

The desert is a strange and wild place. During the day, it is burning hot. But at night it is freezing cold. The wind comes, and as it blows, it shapes and molds. The desert is never the same. So many important things happened in the desert that we have to have a small piece of it in our room.

Once there was a man who said such wonderful things and did such amazing things, that people began to follow him.

This is the season of Advent, the time we are all on the way to Bethlehem. But who will show us the way?

Words, images, repetition.

These have been the way people have done faith formation forever. This trip was a beautiful reminder of that.

I am OK | I am not OK

Two Randi Ford prints, one Paul Stoub print; one Basil Wiering photo; one Butch Schepel print; one Nora Faber clay painting; two Chris Overvoorde works (preparations for paintings); one horseshoe found at my Grandpa’s farm in Zeeland; on the far wall a photo by Evvia Marshall, and an image of a print of a tulip that I tore out of a magazine over 25 years ago.
I am doing OK. 

Work life is good

In this COVID-year I’ve had paid work that took advantage of my mixture of skills–writing, social media, newsletters, administration, organization. The week after my church started doing online services, I started sending out weekly emails newsletters (and print versions by mail for those members who don’t do email) that contained news about the church and about each other, and a meditation by the pastor. I gleaned the news from anywhere I could find it: Facebook, Instagram, emails. My new best friend was command-shift-4, so I could take screen shots and, ahem, borrow photos from those platforms.

To this I added a weekly email for parents/grandparents-who-bring-their-grandkids-to-church with children’s bulletins, notes of encouragement, information about kids and coping and parents and coping with COVID, flyers for writing Pandemic Prayers, faith formation activities. Four times in the last year, I printed out faith formation activities for the children of the church, added snacks and fun craft supplies, and driven the packets out to each house and apartment. I hosted Backyard Bible Clubs in my backyard when the weather was good. The videos I made at first weren’t as successful among the kids (our parents didn’t want all their kids’ time spent online), but I can now shoot a video, edit it, and upload it no problem.

A month into the pandemic the leadership of our food pantry left, and I was the one to pick it up–to make sure that we had enough volunteers, to change how we gave out the food so the volunteers and the community would be safe, to order the food and decide what we were packing each week, to report to FeedingAmerica. This was good work and I felt connected to my Dutch ancestors who helped their family and neighbors get through the Hunger Winter, that last year of WWII.

While the church building has been fallow I’ve been doing a deep re-organizing of the children’s materials, the storage rooms, and the church filing system. Organizing is one of my favorite things to do, and the resulting ease of use of each space is a satisfying reward.

This work of keeping the congregation connected and encouraged, and keeping our community fed, has been a privilege. Having paid work that is so meaningful has kept me going, for sure.

But it’s also, if I’m honest, sometimes a heavy emotional burden.

I am grateful for the active and energetic deacons we selected this fall; they’ve taken over leadership of the food pantry and I just get to do the fun part, taking the names and information of those who come for food and handing them their bursting bags. I know them all by name, and I love seeing our regulars every Tuesday morning; I worry if we haven’t seen them in a couple of weeks and can get teary when a missing regular comes back.

My church is full of encouraging people, so I get thanked for this work all the time.

But still, after a year of this, I’m bone-tired.

Kids are mostly good

My adult children are home with me. It’s been good to have them home because I both love and like them, but this has been a frustrating time for them. Neither was in school or felt solid about a direction for school, and work has been hard to find. They’d prefer to be on their own, but that just isn’t possible now. They did enjoy the fire pit I put in the back, gathering with their friends for late-night fires, and I loved hearing the sound of raucous laughter again. We’ve always been the hang-out house, and I miss the kids’ friends.

But it’s been hard to know how to parent adult children in this time. What is the right balance of encouragement, empathy, and incitement to action when so many things feel impossible? They’ve had forward motion in important areas, so they’re feeling less stuck, but it’s been tough. There was so little of a difference I could make in their realities.

My romantic relationship is good.

My boyfriend and I have been pushing back the furniture and dancing in the dining room instead of at Billy’s. We’ve made an event of cooking together on Friday nights and watched a lot of good TV and movies. We are good for each other and I’ve been so grateful for him.

But oh the sameness of everything. The unrelenting sameness.

My house is good.

In September I took my only week of vacation during 2020. Didn’t go anywhere, but dedicated that week and the following few months to doing ALL the nagging jobs in my house.

  • Redid the basement: removed carpet, painted floor and walls, reorganized storage room (the mouse infestation clarified what to get rid of), made an exercise space.
  • Redid garden in front and back yards.
  • Added fire pit and chairs.
  • Repainted kitchen floor and exterior kitchen cabinets.
  • Repainted all trim.
  • Repaired many things myself and hired out what I couldn’t do.
  • Organized all closets.
  • Added a bar in the kitchen and learned how to make mixed drinks.
  • Finally learned how to keep a clean house, not just a neat house.
  • Framed and hung ALL the art I’d been collecting from friends for many, many years. This is the thing that makes me happiest when I walk around my house. The cover photo is the grouping from my stairwell. The one below is from my dining room.

I did all that so I’d have my mind free to get back to my own writing. The idea was that with nothing hanging over my head (except this COVID) I’d be out of excuses not to write.

And I haven’t written.

Food is good.

Like so many others, I explored in the kitchen. I made my own granola for the first time. There’s almost always cabbage in my fridge now because I discovered how easy it is to make great coleslaw with mayo doctored with Asian and Mexican sauces. And I love coleslaw. My Community Supported Agriculture share brought in tons of veggies that I used in all kinds of things I’d never made before–Asian-flavored Swiss chard; the Spanish sauce Romesco (with red peppers and almonds); the Middle Eastern dish of eggs cooked in tomato and pepper sauce, Shakshuka. It was a really tasty food year.

But I keep burning myself.

Four of the nine scars in a row; two more on my index finger knuckle.

I have 9 scars on my right hand from the last 6 months. They will be a lasting reminder that this has been a hard year, that even when things were generally OK, they were also generally hard. I’ve never burned myself on the racks in my oven this often. And that doesn’t include all the times I’ve picked up a hot handle with my bare hand.

To me, this is a physical sign of how not-OK I am. I’m scatterbrained, when I’ve always been focused. I am not careful with myself, not paying attention.

My other relationships are not good.

This inability to focus on anything but what is right in front of me (and sometimes not even that) has meant that my friendships and family relationships have suffered. In the summer it was OK because we could see each other outside. But now that it’s winter, I’m over Zoom (and so are they) and I forget to call during hours when people are awake, and I feel guilty for neglecting my parents. I vow to do better, and then I get distracted.

My devotional life has suffered. I’ve spent so much time and energy making sure the children and families of the congregation have faith formation things to do that I’ve neglected my own spiritual practices unless my church has a Zoom group. We’re reading Lent of Liberation: Confronting the Legacy of American Slavery now and it is excellent–each devotion includes a slave’s story. But I’m so tired of my own excuses for neglecting time with God.

The state of the country is not so good.

In June of last year I wrote about the opportunity we had with the pandemic and all of us feeling our lives and hearts plowed up, to enter a time of truth-telling and reckoning about systemic racism in our country. The skyrocketing sales of books about Black Americans’ experiences this summer tells me that lots of individual white people have learned a lot. But the country as a whole barely budged.

It is so disturbing to me how a solid one quarter to one third of the country is under the glamour of a huckster and fully invested in a complete delusion–that Tr*** is even remotely competent, that he has been treated worse than any other president in history, that the election in November was not safe and fair and valid. Even more disturbing is how many Christians have been taken in–and that they use their faith to justify it.

Admittedly, my general stress level is reduced since I no longer have to hear the previous president’s voice all the time, or read what craziness he’s up to every day. But the people he emboldened are still here, and the Republican party is, for the most part, still in his thrall.

I now that chances are better if we love people out of a delusion, but how on earth do we do it?

Right now is good.

I’ve been lucky to not lose anyone I know to the disease, although I know lots of people who have, lots who’ve gotten it, including one friend who’s a long-hauler. Things are looking up for my kids. The vaccine rollout is happening.

I’m on my first real vacation in years–not visiting anyone, just relaxing. Doing yoga, going for walks, napping, taking saunas, reading, and trying to jumpstart my spiritual practices and my writing. Aggressively taking it easy to correct the burn-out I was so close to.

I’m finally reading All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, the last of Mildred D. Taylor’s books about the Logan family, describing their lives from 5 years after the Civil War to the 1960s. I read the previous 9 this fall. The storytelling is amazing and important.

How about you?

How was your COVID-year? What was your combo of “I am OK | I am not OK”?

Plow up the hard ground

An image of a hand plow scraping over hard ground.

“Plow up the hard ground of your hearts!
    Do not waste your good seed among thorns.
O people … surrender your pride and power.”

Jeremiah 4:2-3 NLT

This has been my prayer for many years. It’s a tough one because it leads to discomfort. It means that I’ll eventually have to admit that I’m wrong, that I do not always choose to do or say the right thing, that I need to forgive people who have wronged me, that I do not know everything, that I am not the center of the world. I will have to change. And I’m sad a lot because the state of the world affects me. And it’s a tough one because the world seems to reward people who’ve let their hearts grow hard against anyone unlike them.

We live in an age of trolls–people who attack those they disagree with in horribly personal ways, threatening them with violence or telling them they deserve violence. Friends have shared a little bit of the trolling they’ve received and it’s upsetting and scary. We are governed by a Troll in Chief who relishes name calling and threats of violence–and millions of people cheer him on, including people who profess the same faith I do. Whole TV channels are devoted to people yelling at each other from their own little boxes, reiterating the same self-satisfied points, the same outrage over things nobody should be outraged about.

And these days a hardened heart feels so dangerous. Is so dangerous. Racism comes from a heart hardened against people with a different skin color and has been codified into a system that is bound and determined to keep its power and is threatened by truth and facts.

However, because of coronavirus, we are all feeling more vulnerable. Most of us are taking everyday actions designed to keep others safe–masks keep people safer from those with asymptomatic COVID-19, we’ve been staying home and not seeing our friends and loved ones, especially if they have any kind of health condition. People all over the world do a 7:00pm noisy cheer for their medical teams. Show many of us a story about exhausted medical workers or anyone who does anything remotely kind for someone else and we get a little teary. Or a lot teary.

And then three unarmed African Americans were killed (Ahmaud Aubery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd) in short order, and two of those killings were filmed, and two were by police, and it scraped against our already-vulnerable hearts and became unbearable–unbearable for those who experience racism, unbearable for those who understand how deep the tentacles of systemic racism reach, and even unbearable for people with a vested interest in the myth that they are not racist but how dare black people make uppity demands for freedom from danger in their own country. Nobody can turn away from what is happening; we can disagree about what they see, but we can’t turn away.

Which makes this a unique opportunity.

Our hearts feel thoroughly plowed up. Even for those who would deny it, their actions reveal how raw they are feeling.

The more we pay attention to the peaceful protesters, to those who have long been working towards a society with real justice for all, and to those who bring the energy and passion of youth to that work, and ignore the siren call of being more outraged by violence to buildings than we are by violence to persons, the better the chance that we’ll take advantage of those plowed-up hearts and really listen, and really talk about the deeper issues of systemic racism.

The more white Christians pay attention to biblical calls to live with truth, mercy, justice, and take care of the orphans, widows, and strangers within our gates, and the more we remember that it is the most basic action of Christian faith to admit that we are wrong and to ask forgiveness, the better the chance that we’ll really listen and really talk.

Frederick Douglass said,

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground…. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle.” 

Our cultural ground and our hearts are all plowed up. But that’s only step one in producing good fruit. There’s a lot more work to be done.

Oh I hope and I pray that we take advantage of it. I hope and I pray that white America really listens and gives up its pride and power and that there’s real change. I don’t know that I’m exactly hopeful, but I’ve seen more white people talking about systemic racism in ways they haven’t before. Maybe this time it will make a difference.

Do we need a Garden of Gethsemane moment?

Have you ever had to do something that was hard, that you’d rather not do, but you do it because it’s part of a bigger plan for the good of all people?

You, know, like now?

We’re staying home, away from our friends and loved ones, avoiding human contact. Every aspect of our lives has changed: school, work, religious practice, shopping, eating, entertainment, how we express love and care. It’s really hard. But we’re doing it–partly out of fear of getting COVID-19 ourselves, and partly out of the desire to protect the more vulnerable in our community.

As Dr. TaLawnda Bragg said in a Zoom call I was part of:

COVID is something new. We have no defense to it. Despite what you hear, there is no cure, no vaccine. All we can do is supportive care (help you breathe) until your body figures out how to fight it. Our only response is to limit the spread. 

So we change our lives. It’s hard, and it’s sad, and we grieve the things we miss. But it’s our only choice, so we do it for our own good and the good of our community.

There is a person in the Bible who knows exactly how we feel.

Jesus.

Remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before he died, saying,

“My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” … He prayed that, if it were possible, the awful hour awaiting him might pass him by. “Abba, Father,” he cried out, “everything is possible for you. Please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”

Mark 14: 34-36

He prayed that three times. Dying and suffering for us was not something Jesus did lightly or easily. It crushed him with grief. Even after he’d stopped asking that he not have to go through with it, Luke describes him this way:

Then an angel from heaven appeared and strengthened him. He prayed more fervently, and he was in such agony of spirit that his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.

Luke 14:43-44

Grieving. In agony of spirit. Suffering and dying was going to be hard and sad. But Jesus did it anyway because he loved you and me and all the people and his death was the plan to bring us right with God again.

Jesus knows how we’re feeling now. He’s been there, too.

And he shows us how to deal with it:

  • talk to God,
  • ask your friends for support (not that the disciples were much good to him–they kept falling asleep),
  • tell God how you’re feeling,
  • ask God for what you want,
  • have an “and yet” orientation and be prepared to follow God’s way even when it isn’t the most comfortable.

We can do that now.

Lord God, I am sad that I can’t hug my friends, that my kids can’t hang out with their friends in person, that I can’t visit my parents, that my mother’s aunt died without anyone able to visit her for the last few weeks of her life. I cried this morning when I watched my pastor lead communion by himself as we recorded our worship service for tomorrow. I miss my church family, the children most of all. I am frightened for the poor and vulnerable in my community, for those who’ve lost work, for those who live in homes that are not safe places. Oh God I want to leave the house without worrying about what I touch and when I washed my hands and whether I’m going to be able to find toilet paper when I need it. I want this to be over. And yet, I want to keep people safe, and I want to do what I can to help. I want to love people with a love like yours. So I will stay home as much as I can, and I will greet people with jazz hands, and I will explore every other way I can to keep up my connections, and I will do my part to share physical and digital resources. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

When your soul feels crushed to the point of death because of everything sad that’s happening now and the hard things that are being asked of us, let it be your Garden of Gethsemane moment. Jesus had to do something that was going to be very difficult and painful and made him very sad, but he talked to God about it, and then he did what he had to do for the good of all people. Let’s be like Jesus. Our version, in Spring 2020: stay home, stay safe.