Tag Archives: God

All My Favorite People

Posted on by under Hope and Place

All my favorite people are broken
Believe me
My heart should know…

Orphaned believers, skeptical dreamers
You’re welcome
Yeah, you’re safe right here
You don’t have to go

—Linford Detweiler, Over the Rhine

***

“Good morning, Friendship!”

“Good morning, Darryl!”

And so begins the weekly ritual of Friendship Community Church congregation members sharing praises and prayer requests, joys and concerns.

It is November 1995, and I have been attending this quirky inner-city, inter-racial Presbyterian church for a little more than a year. Tucked between the university community and Pittsburgh’s Hill District—made famous in the 1980s crime drama Hill Street Blues— it is a modest cinderblock building that more closely resembles a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall than the hundreds of Gothic, steepled church buildings that populate this post-industrial city.

The wooden pews are five deep along three of the four walls of the sanctuary; we are a congregation “in the round.” I glance at the faces of these men and women—young and old, black and white, rich and poor—who are becoming more familiar to me, week by week. This is very much not like the homogeneous all-white, suburban, formal, upper-middle-class Presbyterian congregations I grew up attending.

The prayer requests begin.

A white female med school student asks us to pray for her grandmother, who has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Mr. Chappelle, an elderly African-American gentleman with snowy white hair, raises his hand to remind us, as he does every week, to pray for “the homeless and the afflicted.”

A middle-aged white man announces, with a mixture of pride and bewilderment, that he and his wife are expecting their fourth child. It looks like a career change may also be on the horizon in order to support their growing family.

A young, skinny black woman thanks God for waking her up this morning and adds that she has now been clean and sober for 27 days. We applaud.

A black woman in her 70s is wearing her customary Sunday-best hat; she stands up and clears her throat. And then, as she did last week and will again next, she slowly and deliberately recites Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

More requests and praises. Someone who arrived after the earlier greeting and announcement time tries to disguise a meeting announcement as a prayer request, and we all laugh. And then someone asks, “Has anyone seen Johnnie lately?”

Silence.

Johnnie is a tall black man with an infectious smile who has been attending Friendship Church since he was a child. Johnnie is also a drug addict. He hasn’t been in church for months now, but occasionally, someone will run into him in another part of the city.

We never forget to pray for Johnnie.

holding-hands-black-and-white-peopleAs we do every week, we join hands with the people on either side of us—if necessary, reaching for the hand of a person in front of or behind us—and Darryl invites us to “pray the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray.” We bow our heads and lift our voices:

Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name.
Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory forever.
Amen.

***

It is November 2016, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and we’ve reached the point in the worship service for the Call to Confession. A tall broad-shouldered black man stands and ambles up to the microphone.

“Good morning, Friendship!” he says.

“Good morning, Johnnie!” we answer.

Johnnie is a husband and a father and a grandfather. He is founder and owner of a construction company which provides job training for young black men, offering them a way out of the destructive lifestyle that he himself indulged in two decades ago. Johnnie is a gifted story-teller and a jokester and a hugger. He is a respected elder in the church of his youth.

And Johnnie is a recovering drug addict.

Nearly every time Johnnie gets up to call us to confession—which is most Sundays—he makes us laugh or cry, and often both at the same time. As he encourages us to prepare our hearts to confess our sins, individually and corporately, he reminds us with illustrations from his own life what it means to worship a God of second—and third and fourth and fifth and seventy-times-seventy—chances.

Johnnie celebrated 18 years of sobriety a couple of weeks ago. When someone pointed this out, we applauded, and Johnnie was quick to remind us where the credit really belongs.

I wipe my eyes and remember sitting in these pews more than 20 years ago, alongside people who are still here and many others who have passed away or moved on. We asked, “Where’s Johnnie?” and we prayed that God would meet him wherever he was and rescue him.

And He did.

Ash and Light

Posted on by under Reclaiming Place

Sometime in between “we are through” and actually being through, I got a new job and moved to “his town,” the town where my (now ex-) boyfriend lived during part of the time we were dating. He lived in an apartment above a store that sold brightly colored men’s suits. One of a handful of stores and restaurants in the downtown main street square of a small Georgia town.

After I moved there, I drove downtown and parked in one of the nose-in angled spots on the street where he used to stand by my car and kiss me good-bye. I strolled past the storefronts, saw the entrance to the apartments above with the push button intercom where I would call up and he’d buzz me in. He was no longer there but that was his building. Up those stairs, we would laugh and talk and I would roll my eyes at his corny puns. On the nights we watched a movie, cuddled on the couch, he’d stand up as the credit music began to play and offer me his hand, pulling me into a slow dance under the skylight above our heads.

*******

A couple of months after he moved away from that town and our relationship gained geographical distance, he called me one weekend to say he was in town. He wasn’t there to see me, not specifically anyway. There had been a small fire at his old apartment. The landlord had called him. I was confused as to why he was notified, why any of his stuff was there.

“Oh. I just kept renting the apartment,” he said.

By this point in the relationship I was used to convincing myself to believe what he said. Used to ignoring questions in my gut and flipping down red flags. So, I accepted the explanation and jumped straight into planning when and where to meet up for an impromptu date, swept up in the romance of the unexpected.

*******

That day I moved to the town there was still a long aluminum chute that emptied into a dumpster hanging from one of the back windows of his building, evidence of the fire clean up.

I stared at it – wondering what blackened belongings of his had been thrown down it.  Did the couch where we dreamed about the future survive or was it in ashes?  What was left of the kitchen counter where I would sit and listen to him narrate his way through preparing dinner as if he had his very own Food Network show?

The last few months he lived in that apartment I was never inside of it. He called me one day and won my heart a little more by saying, “I think we should make sure that we don’t hang out alone in my apartment anymore. I want to be better at honoring you.” Reluctantly, but admiringly, I agreed. I treasured his leadership in our relationship.   “Honoring,” in our shared vocabulary at the time, meant no more kissing (or more) in private.

I had been raised to believe that men lead and pursue and I wait and follow. I was told that a godly man would lead in godly ways.  More than one youth group story had centered on a young man who went to pick up his date and then turned around and left when he saw her, because he was lusting so they needed to not spend time together in order to honor God.  And here I was with my very own godly leader who put God above me.

Yet there was that aluminum chute and a dumpster full of ash and rubbish.

I wondered what belongings of hers were in the dumpster. The other girlfriend that had moved in a few months before he left. The one that stayed to finish out the year at her teaching job while he took his new job a few hours away. The one who called and told him about the fire. The woman he was living with while he was “honoring” me.

*******

After the fire but before I knew about the other woman, I called him and choked out, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t feel like this anymore.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” he asked, surprised.

“Yes.” He didn’t fight, he just got mad and hung up.

I blamed myself. Over and over, the same message played in my mind: I wasn’t strong enough to make the distance work, to make him work.  After trying for years,  I was tired.

A couple weeks later, he called and renewed my hope by saying he wanted me back. I drove two hours to surprise him, my stomach in knots the entire way down because subconsciously I knew the one who was more likely to be surprised was me. I needed to not be able to lie to myself anymore. I needed to physically see and hear and know so that I could move on.

A woman yelled from inside for him to answer the door. With wide eyes he called inside to her, “It’s someone from work! I’ll be back!”

creative commons free - unsplashWe sat near a river bank and I watched with the muddy water flow by as he told me that he chose her, that he wanted someone who was physically close, that the long distance was too much.

“Why didn’t you just break up with me?” I questioned.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.

I drove home in tears. Mad at him. Mad at God. Mad at myself because the signs littered the road for the past three years.

*******

I stayed in my new, his old, town for two and a half years. The aluminum chute was still there when I left.  

He visited once.  I visited once.  He called often.  I blocked and unblocked his number. He stayed with the other woman. He told me I was better than her. I begged him to let me be, to let me go. I told him I didn’t know how to walk away. I was addicted.

My brain  didn’t know how to stop forgiving him, to stop believing that the good outweighed the bad, to stop my heart from trusting that things would improve and that my fantasy would come true.

I didn’t reclaim that town those years. I didn’t even reclaim my life.

*******

Ten years after the fire, I drove through that town again. The aluminum chute was gone. In the years between, I had learned to sort truth from lie from unknown in the jumbled web of memories from the years spent with him.  I had quit my addiction and gained a clarity about myself that is perhaps only possible when forged in fire.

 

Nicole bio YAH

 

Learning the Mystery

Posted on by under Learning & Place

Mystery is not the absence of meaning,
but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.
~ Eugene Peterson

*    *    *    *    *

When I was a girl sitting in church pews—a girl still small enough that my feet swung back and forth because they didn’t reach the floor—I learned that God was holy. Being with God meant spending Sunday mornings in a space like no other in my life, with ceilings reaching three stories high, painted blue like the heavens, and walls of stained glass to my left and right. In that space I learned that mystery and rituals matter in equal portion—that Sunday after Sunday we did the known things we could do in hopes of glimpsing the edges of the unknown things shrouded in mystery.

unnamed (1)I learned very early on that God is loving and accepting of all, but also that my own potential to sadden him had no bounds. Through unison prayers of confession, I became aware of not only of the many things I could do wrong, but also of the “right” things I left undone. Between the sins of action and those of omission, how could I possibly get through a day unscathed?

The God of my childhood was not a God of fire and wrath, but a God of head-shaking and disappointment. It seemed he was always looking down on me, wishing I had made a different, better choice.

*    *    *    *    *

At high school church camp, I learned the night sky could be the ceiling and the northern Michigan trees the stained glass of a different kind of church. I learned that God could be met anywhere, apart from pastors and acolytes donned in robes, and even apart from my family sitting alongside me in the pew.

I also learned, through the testimonies shared around campfires by leather-jacket-wearing ex-convicts and -addicts, that God’s love is bigger than his disappointment, and that he’s in the business of changing lives, not critiquing them.

*    *    *    *    *

During my senior year of college I sang in a gospel choir at a diverse urban church whose style of worship couldn’t have felt more different from Sunday mornings in the stained-glass church of my youth. In addition to learning the importance of clapping the off-beats, I learned my alto part by listening to the choir director sing it—I learned that God could be found outside of music staffs and key signatures, and beyond written confessions inked on pages at the back of hymnals.

In that place people wept their confessions, which were scripted in their hearts. I also learned that God made people raucous and joyful, and that I could get caught up in that joy for a moment or two, but faking it wasn’t the same as making it. My understanding of God had broadened over the years, but now I could see it was still flat, easy to see right through.

*    *    *    *    *

At a church in St. Louis, a couple of years into my marriage, I learned how God works in the lives of grieving people. We arrived just months after the sudden death of the church’s beloved pastor, and while that could have easily been a reason to leave the church, it became a reason to stay: In that place I first glimpsed an entire church full of people being raw and real in the presence of God.

I saw a broken community of people trying to make sense of a senseless tragedy, and trying to hold one another up. They worked out their anger with God over months, not hours, and I learned that God accepts our anger, like a father who lets a grieving child beat upon his chest until, finally exhausted, the struggle becomes an embrace.

*    *    *    *    *

But when my own life was falling apart, a handful of years later in another city, my new church presented me with a different God—one who wasn’t there to absorb and then transform my pain, but to deflect it back on me, to multiply it with guilt and regret in order to help me learn the hard, unforgettable way.

In that place, I almost unlearned everything important I had learned about God—the loving and holy mystery that can’t be contained by stained glass, the God of transformative power, who meets us in our raw pain and failures. Instead, I was learning why so many people walk away from it all, as I finally did one bright spring Sunday morning.

*    *    *    *    *

Until one day a few months later, when I walked into a space that felt nothing like a church, with its coffee stains on the carpet and institutional ceiling tiles above. It was in that place—filled with unpredictable, moving, awkward, painful, and joy-filled people and worship—that God taught me about grace, and about all of the learning I have yet to do.

Diapers & Degrees

Posted on by under Guest, Role & Place

It was around noon, and I was in the men’s room at Target with my five-month-old daughter. The wall-mounted Koala changing table had seen better days, but I was just glad there was one in the men’s room at all. It was clear, though, that installing the changing table was an afterthought because it completely blocked access to the hand dryers. As my daughter squirmed and screamed while I changed her diaper, other men had to decide whether to reach over my shoulder to dry their hands, or to just use their pants. I struggled to maintain composure, wishing I could say that was the only time I had cried in Target that week. As I finished up I asked myself through eyes filled with tears, “How had my life come to this?”

The past year has been one of shifting roles. I quit a tour-guiding career of eight years (which is long for a 30 year old), became a father, and finished grad school. With my new roles came a shift not only in what I do, but also in who I am.

The biggest transition has been from working 40-60 hours a week to being the primary caretaker of my daughter. I have never been good at errands—even simple errands done on my own would exhaust me. So, the prospect of running most or all of the errands for our family with a baby was daunting, if not petrifying. It did not go well at first, which made me question whether I could even be a stay-at-home dad. I wanted so badly to take care of our daughter so my wife wouldn’t have to run errands and care for the home as well as work. The chalkboard-painted wall I used for my to-do list was a constant source of anxiety motivating me more to escape and watch Netflix than to be productive.

Thankfully I started to get better. I hadn’t realized how much practice errands and housekeeping would take in order to do it well. Over the past four months, since defending my thesis, I have grown tremendously in my competency as a stay-at-home dad. I can even enjoy multitasking—managing a list of things to do all while keeping a 10 month old alive and happy. That’s not to say everything is perfect. My daughter’s newest favorite pastime—pulling her bib off while I’m feeding her—is a lot for me to handle, and I get jealous seeing my wife come home and have so much energy to play with her and make her laugh while I often can only muster the energy to prevent her from melting down. I’m sure this too shall pass and I am getting better at finding joy in the present with her and cherishing every little step in her development.

When I’m not chasing after my increasingly fast and destructive daughter, I am attempting to start a career. After years of work and late night study sessions I finally finished grad school in December, and I am applying for teaching jobs. There is a sense of being in the wilderness during this transition, not knowing the path or even the destination. Early on I was feeling lost and hopeless about job prospects. This brought about financial worries and brought up deep insecurities around my fear of being rejected or passed over by prospective employers. You might even call it a mini existential crisis. After some great encouragement from a friend and my wife, and a lot of prayer, these feelings have lessened. I have come to see being in the wilderness as an important experience that allows me to develop patience and reflect on other shortcomings and insecurities. I’ve even been able to see very clearly the providence of God through a few extra jobs and medical expense reimbursements and aide.

IMG_0109Practicing patience and silence is difficult in a time where all I want to do is stress and vacillate between escapism and attempting to solve everything on my own because God is taking too long. Thankfully I have an adorable little companion to practice with and learn from. This morning I spent time in the amazing San Francisco Botanical Gardens with her. As I pushed my daughter in her stroller, along the small dirt paths through the Native California garden, I talked to her about each of the different plants that we passed and we sat and admired them together. Sometimes she would reach out to grab the plants. Taking time to feel, smell, and taste them, to experience them for the first time. At one point she grabbed a California Poppy, my favorite flower which I learned to love during my years driving a bus. This particular poppy was the only one in bloom in the entire garden. I watched her discover for the first time something I have loved and cherished for years. It was so beautiful. I’m not sure what it means, if it means anything, but I will never forget the overwhelming feelings of love for my daughter and God’s love for me in that moment in the garden.

Being a stay-at-home-dad and struggling to find work was never in my five- or ten-year plan. I may have never asked for this experience, and I did not know what it would require of me, but I am grateful for it. There will certainly be other unexpected roles that will challenge me in the future, and I will greet them with fear and trembling knowing that whatever they are, they will bring me closer to God.

*   *   *   *   *

Gluch Bio Pic“Diapers and Degrees” was written by Danny Gluch. Danny grew up in the suburbs of LA with his parents and older brother. He moved to the Bay Area in 2002 and has enjoyed calling San Francisco home ever since. Currently, he, his wife, their daughter, and their dog Madison call the Mission District of SF home. After struggling to find an enjoyable area of graduate study, he found the Philosophy program at San Francisco State University, where he recently earned his MA writing his thesis in Feminist Ethics and Moral Psychology. Any extra time is spent with his church community, or playing golf (or practicing golf, or thinking about golf). Find Danny on Twitter @danandstephinsf.

Scarves & High Heels: The Layers of Personal Geography

Posted on by under Guest, Role & Place

I was fresh out of grad school and decided that if I just wore high heels and scarves I’d be taken seriously in the classroom. Because at 5’2″ and just a few years older than my college students, I needed something to communicate big words like “authority” and “stature” and “smart” and “serious.” I walked around that campus with the air of someone who knew what she was about, who knew her subject matter and who knew how to teach.

But I felt like I was playing a giant dress-up game called life.

And then real life happened, by which I mean, life in the dailyness of washing dishes, and learning how to love, and making the bed, and grocery shopping. Life full of the glorious mundane. And then there is the life that happens when you add lives to your own, and spend your hours changing diapers, and making dinner, and trying to make meaning from the crying, the napping, and developmental milestones.

So slowly, as we moved from Los Angeles, to San Diego, to Salt Lake City, and as I moved from student to professor to mother, this “game” of life took on a bedrock finality where I had to concede I was, in fact, grown up. I didn’t need high heels or tomes on my bookshelf. I had a mortgage and a minivan full of kids to prove it.

It just took me to my mid-thirties and seven moves—one international—to begin to feel at home in myself.

Each place has whittled me down based on who I am becoming in each place. As I turn the pages of my past selves, each place holds for me a tender space with an accompanying nostalgia akin to flipping through old photo albums. Each place gives a geography to the chapters of me.

Each place we’ve lived has shown me more of who I am and more of who God is. Each has evidenced a terrible beauty. The painful beauty of becoming. Every home has shown me how wide and deep the Kingdom of God is and that there are good gifts in each spot; that there are always people who need you and whom you can connect to one another. Each place has stripped me a bit bare.

Los Angeles laid claim to my know-it-all-ness, as I put on my grad school knowledge like a scarf and found it lacking. For all the learning in the world couldn’t tell me about marriage, and sacrifice, and how to balance work with new motherhood. San Diego showed me my idol of my self-sufficiency as I floundered with two children under two. I felt helpless and at sea, having left the pats-on-the-back of academia and instead, spent my days pushing a double stroller up and down hills at the zoo.

And now, in what many consider the conservative capital of the US, I have been given bravery in Salt Lake City. It’s a city dominated by the LDS temple, the center point around which the city’s grid system is based. And yet, there are other factions which orbit that hub—factions that challenge, and augment, and move gracefully around the dominant religious culture. It’s made being a Christian here something exotic; and even with the pressures of four children, a college ministry and a dominant religious culture of which I’m not a part, Salt Lake City has birthed my voice.

Places do that. They push and pull at who we think we are and stretch us into who we are becoming.

Places, if we let them, usher us into a multi-orbed story, where in each new place we carry our past layers, have the freedom to shed some old ones, and to don new ones.

Places finally take up residence in our souls, not for their amenities and attractions, but for how they birth us into new people. And how, after awhile, we can look back at each place with a certain fondness after the terror of becoming has abated.

So as I string those dear places together—as connected dots on a world map—I’m reminded that there is no space that is too unlovable, too hard, or too unattractive. And, as we anticipate another move this summer, I’m looking forward to another dot on the map that I will weave my story around, and in whose stories I will be woven.

*   *   *   *   *

ashley

“Scarves & High Heels” was written by Ashley Hales. Ashley is passionate about helping others to tell their scary brave stories. When she’s not stealing time to write at Circling the Story, she’s chasing her four kids or helping out with her husband’s college ministry in Salt Lake City, Utah. She also holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. You can read more of Ashley’s work on her blog, or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

 

Rotating Places, Rotating Faces

Posted on by under Guest, Role & Place

Sometimes I wonder if I live as if I am a prism.

I distort the light within me through my many different facets.  My many different faces.  And it is my roles and my places that determine these faces.

At work, I am confident, focused, and confronting.  I solve problems.  I complete things.  And, I am undistracted in my pursuit of success.  My face is one of determination.

At home, I battle distraction.  The typical things of a home filled with children – and internet connections – vie for my attention.  I am less sure in this space.  The tasks that I manage to complete just start over and over again – laundry, meals, school drop-offs, homework.  At home, I try to make love my ambition, not productivity.  But it is a struggle.  My face is one of striving.

prism

At my writing desk, I am neither here nor there.  I am in Kairos, that other-than state that transports me into an openness that can only be explained by God.  In Kairos, the immensity of Him and the tiny molecule of me intersect in a way that makes sense.   My face is one of receiving.

At church, I am unmasked.  I am at rest in the company of imperfection.  I am enough.  I filter, I question, I doubt.  I accept that I am incomplete.  I pursue connection.  My face is one of seeking. 

And so this is the orbit of life:

Rotating roles,

Rotating places,

Rotating faces.

But is this the revolution that God intended? 

I wonder if the revolution He desired is one that transforms me from a prism into a window.   Because, for His light to shine through me, don’t I need to be transparent and fragile, not rock solid and rotating?  

I think I want to be a window.

window

But in transparency and fragility, I am vulnerable.  It is easier and more comfortable to play my roles and change my faces.  Rotation is protection.  Vulnerability is risky; it is complicated and messy.  Vulnerability is letting others see all of my faces, even the ones I don’t want to see.

Yet it is in this vulnerability that others see not only me, but themselves.

So I think I want to be a window, still enough to have one face, transparent enough to let His light shine through, fragile enough to let others see through me to themselves.

Determined, striving, receiving, seeking. 

If I am a window, I am all of these faces, and more, at once, in every role and in every place. 

If I am a window, I am one face.  One face that stays rotated to God, letting His undistorted light shine through.

Yes.  I want to be a window.

*   *   *   *   *

H1“Rotating Places, Rotating Faces” was written by Holly Pennington. Holly has rotated faces through roles such as a physical therapist, health care executive, mother, writer, and entrepreneur.  Her rotating places include Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado.  She is pursuing a window kind of life in Washington state, despite the rain and fog.  She blogs about faithfully merging “dreadlocks” and “goldilocks” selves at www.dreadlocksandgoldilocks.com.  She can be found on Twitter (@dreadsandgoldi) and Facebook at dreadlocksandgoldilocks.

What to wear to the mall

Posted on by under Guest, Role & Place

Moving South is unbecoming on me. Or it is my becoming. I’m not sure. For the first time in my life, I care about what I wear to the mall. I make sure to wear matching socks. I make sure I wear make-up. I make sure I have something not too wrinkled on. Sometimes. Most of the time.

I hate the mall.

Or I hate that the people at the mall from whom I am trying to buy goods treat me like I am from the wrong side of the tracks who has no business being in their shiny, ridiculously expensive store filled with things from origins unknown and created by unknown people. What factory did that sweater originate from? Asia? Central America? Do you think it came overseas on a ship and airplane, on a semi? Hello, salesperson, don’t ignore me! Oh, there she goes. She is ignoring me, again.

I live in Durham, North Carolina. It’s quirky, retro, and trying to relive the 90’s in hipster style. Think: the more tattoos and mohawks and vintage clothing the better. Local artisans, food trucks, and community gardens are where Durham pours its resources. It’s hip, it’s entrepreneurial, it’s grungy.

And I fit in. In fact, I’ve mastered the hipster grunge look. I am a mom of two young kids, so I’ve haven’t slept in five years. You might think the “she looks like she just got out of bed” was on purpose, but no. I probably forgot to brush my hair because I had to chase my daughter around the house in order to brush hers. Except when I go to the super suburban, high end shopping mall twenty minutes south of the gritty, brick, tobacco warehouses called Downtown Durham, then I try to brush my hair, brush my teeth, and wear my Sunday best.

I grew up outside the Washington, DC area where BRAINS were what always mattered, not whether you wore Lululemon or Kate Spade or Tory Burch. Growing up, I was told, “who you are” is more important than what you look like. And so I cower, when women at the make-up counter with flawless but obviously overdone makeup say things like,”I treat anybody who comes in here the same. No matter what they look like.”

IMG_3197Are you talking to me? What are you talking to me about? What impression am I giving you as I try to keep my four year old from trying on every single lip-gloss? Do I look like a strange hobo? Is there a reason you are pointing out your graciousness? Do I look that bad? I did not try on purpose. Honest. Umm, here, please take my hard earned money, and give me some tinted moisturizer for sensitive skin. Hush. Please don’t talk anymore. You are giving me a complex, over-dressed salesperson.

The mall makes me vain. It makes me feel inferior. Perhaps that is the marketing strategy: Make people feel so unfabulous that they have to buy fabulous, unnecessary objects to make them feel better. Except, I just I feel unworthy. The mall has become a place where I feel my unworthiness. And it’s unbecoming on me. I turn into a grouch, my neuroses and angst come out, then in defense I become a snob. They judge, so I judge. It’s a terrible game.

So I am here, on the border of the conservative south, where the mall is located, and a liberal academic town, where my favorite coffee shops, farmer’s markets, and community spaces are. In one, I am secure and know myself. In the other, I am puzzled by my insecurities and apparent weakness for vanity.

And then there is God.

I hear Him and his strong sturdy voice, reminding me He is the God of every place. He speaks, almost with a chuckle, “Child, you are my child. Let those microaggressions roll off your back. The mall is not my kingdom. It does not recognize you as I recognize you. I am the source of all you need. The mall, the mall is mammon. You don’t need to worship at its throne. Durham, Durham has it flaws, too. You know that. You know that the world is filled with people in need…of Me.”

And later, on the car ride home with my bags of materialistic items from China, Mexico and Haiti, I realize that it’s okay to feel uncomfortable at the mall. I should feel different. I should feel like an outsider and befuddled and an imposter. Because that is what I am. I was not made for that world—I don’t want it to “become me.”  And I don’t want Durham to “become me,” either.

I want something else to become me.

I want grace to become me. I want God’s grace to become me. I want to wear that no matter where I am, whether I am enjoying a beer with tatted friends or buying a pair shoes with people decked out in Burberry. God is the God of Comfort and Discomfort, and the power of His grace is found in the tension between them.

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Photo on 4-19-14 at 3.52 PM“What to Wear to the Mall” was written by Sarah Hudspeth. Sarah is a mom of two kids full of life and mischief, a wife of a grad student, and a middle school math teacher to students with learning needs. Coffee is her favorite, as are books, Twitter, and any day spent outside. Sarah lives in Durham, North Carolina, and eats extremely well due to food trucks, her garden, and the eat-everything-local movement.

Coming Home

Posted on by under Guest, Home & Place

I had just been through a broken world experience and was now living in a broken world on account of inappropriate affection that led me away from God and into sin. A father of three, a plastic surgeon by profession, a founder of a major Christian movement in the Asia Pacific region and here was I, trying to put together the pieces to do a ‘make-over’—one that would look real from the outside even if it was still broken on the inside.

I am reminded of the words written by another doctor called Luke who gives a detailed account of the happenings the past nine months must have been for the mother of Jesus of Nazareth when he wrote after the visit of the shepherds in a town called Bethlehem, “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart”.

As each day passes and the year draws to an end, I ponder in my heart what were ‘all these things’ that happened this year that I can treasure and the rest discard. To be honest, I will not discard anything because every ‘thing’ that took place in my life was of my own doing. Some people are good at burying past events but I can never seem to do that. In my field of practice, I deal with scars all the time. Scars do not disappear but only fade with time. They will always be there. But as I recall all that has happened to me, good and bad, right and wrong, I realize that they have been ‘coming home’ happenings that have led me to seek out the plague in my own heart and with folded hands turn to God for mercy and forgiveness.

The Scriptures remind us that God is faithful and will, with the temptation, also make a way to escape, that we may be able to bear it.

Able to Bear It? As a father, as a spouse, as a doctor, as a friend to another, the ability to bear all the scars inflicted this year can be difficult. When patients seek advice for scars, I show them scar tapes, scar creams, lasers, scar gels and the list goes on but as I treasure up all these things and ponder them in my own heart, I know one place where the scars seem to just somewhat ‘disappear’ and that is at Calvary, at the foot of the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. What God does not protect us from, He will perfect us through – Robert C. Frost

In a few days my second son, David, will be coming home for Christmas. Will my three children ever know what this year has been for their daddy? Will I know what the year has been for each of them as their father? But this I do know that we have a Righteous Father in heaven who knows what ‘Coming Home’ means when His own Son returned from Calvary in glory.

As I gather my three children together this Christmas, I have only one message for each of them: Coming Home for Christmas can only bring the fullest of glory to God when we see Bethlehem in the light of the ‘Old Rugged Cross’ at Calvary. Only then can we experience the full meaning of what it is to come home from a broken world and into a world of peace, love and joy where theCharles walking out of Mulu Caves, Sarawak, Malaysia Spirit of God reigns eternal.

It is like walking out of a cave enveloped in darkness and into the dawn of the light of life. Truly a ‘Coming Home’ experience that is deeply engraved in the labyrinth of the soul.

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Dr Charles Lee“Coming Home” was written by Charles Lee. Charles, who lives in Sabah, Malaysia, is a husband, a father, a plastic surgeon and founder of a Christian Discipleship movement called APCOD. He spends most of his time in the operating theatre, playing the guitar or cycling. He blogs at Awaken the Dawn.

 

Where I Am: Four Houses, Four Turning Points

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

I live in Urbana, Illinois, a city I didn’t want to move to in the first place. My opinion on the matter was weakly based on the handful of times I had driven by the Champaign-Urbana exit on Interstate 57. From that vantage point it was just another flat, cornfield-edged town with predictable, treeless suburbs and chain restaurants.

But in 2001, when my youngest daughter was still in diapers and I was finally admitting to myself that my marriage was falling apart, it felt like God was urging us to move. More precisely, I thought that moving—and my husband’s new job—would somehow save our marriage.

In the 13 years since moving to Urbana, four houses have been home. I don’t know if it’s by design or coincidence, but it seems that each significant Act in my life here has demanded a new stage, as if the inner transitions couldn’t be complete without the leaving of one tangible place and the arrival at another.

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Our first Urbana house caught my eye because—if you could see beyond the birdhouse and ivy wallpaper—it reminded me of the beloved house we sold in Michigan before moving here. Both were 1920s-era Mission style, with sturdy stucco exteriors, generous wood mouldings inside, and plenty of tall windows paned with thick, wavy, antique glass that creates mottled patterns of light when the sun shines through.

During the three years we lived in that house, our toddler and pre-school-aged daughters were at that kill-you-with-cuteness stage of life, busy choreographing dances, creating elaborate plastic feasts in their play kitchen, and layering on the most unlikely costume combinations.

But in spite of those bright moments, I think of that first house the House of Pain. Yes, I know it’s overly dramatic (and also the name of a nineties hip-hop band), but for me, the house was the scene of much yelling and crying and despair. Ultimately, it was the place where I gave up—not just on marriage, but also on my long-held childhood belief that God had plans to prosper me, not to harm me.

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If I was drawn to my first Urbana house because it reminded me of a house in my past, I was drawn to the second Urbana house for the opposite reason: It was nothing like the House of Pain. It was one-story not two; 1960s not 1920s; brick not stucco; and straight-forward, not “full of charm and character.” Most importantly, I was bound to it only by a 12-month lease, not a mortgage. I signed the lease after my divorce was final—after the House of Pain was sold and our marital collections of books, CDs, artwork, and kitchen appliances had undergone a necessary but unnatural process of division.

This second home can best be described as the House of Rebellion (clearly a perfect name for an angry metal band). Just like music that serves to numb the mind, the House of Rebellion provided an escape hatch from the life my ex-husband and I had shared. It played into my desire to be tied to nothing: not a marriage certificate, a church membership, or a mortgage. I devoted myself to my daughters when they were with me, and on the weekends they weren’t, I did whatever I pleased.

Like many rebellions, however, this one led to rock bottom, not freedom or enlightenment. One day about a year after moving into the rental, I knew it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and start claiming my place. Maybe if I chose to live here—decided to put down roots on my own, in a house of my own—that whole sob story about “following my husband to save a marriage that couldn’t be saved” would lose its power over me.

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Buying house number three happened amidst a flurry of change: I ended a bad relationship, decided to try church again, went to a new counselor, and generally began figuring out who I really was.

This was my House of Healing (yep, cue the cheesy eighties CCM band). It’s the house where I learned to sit and just be in the moment, and where I learned that God wants me to find myself, not fix myself.

I worked in my garden, pulling out weeds with deep roots and planting perennials, and I invited new friends to sit around my table and share the meals I cooked. My daughters grew in those sunny rooms, writing stories, learning to play my grandmother’s piano, and forging great “wilderness” adventures with friends in our large, tree-filled yard. Along the way, as I mowed, painted, baked, and parented, I recognized this truth: I have more power to shape my place than it has to shape me.

And then I met Jason. We eventually got married, blending our families in that House of Healing, all five of us crowded in, watching and learning in awe (or at least the grownups were in awe) as redemption was worked out in one surprising way after another.

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Finally, last spring, as our three girls (and their groups of friends) grew bigger, Jason and I sold “my” house and bought “our” house: The House of Hope (or Truth)? The House of Second (and Third and Fourth) Chances? The House of New Creations? I’m not quite sure yet, but that’s OK—I don’t feel the need to pin down the life that’s unfolding here or the God who works in so many places, in so many ways.