Seeking Holy Solitude

2013 was a painful year for “community” for me. I spent much of the year pursuing relationship with people all over the country, sending emails, having coffee, inviting people in for dinner, sharing in group settings, even beginning to attend a small country church in our area. But “community” never really materialized, and relationships take time to grow, especially as you grow older and the childlike appropriation of a “BFF” is no longer as easy as it used to be, because “trust” and “peer groups” and “schedules.”

I went into a tailspin at the end of the year, grateful for the people who were still in my life (it is not unusual for me to sign off an email to a friend with a “thank you for being in my world”) and frustrated with the crushing sense of loneliness and invisibility I felt.

The super-spiritual side of me says “well, you should just find everything you need in God” or, on the other hand, “you are never going to find the perfect community, because it is made up of humans – just go and get involved.”

But the physical side of me has limitations which don’t allow for that “involvement,” and the Spirit keeps asking me to wait. He has given me a spiritual gift which, in its individually-nuanced fashion, is more meaningful to the Body of Christ in an individual capacity. He has not called me into a large group of people to be at its center, but rather to keep building relationships with individuals, and to keep having conversations, and to keep learning how to love as He loves, wherever I find myself.

“All human beings are alone. No other person will completely feel like we do, think like we do, act like we do. Each of us is unique, and our aloneness is the other side of our uniqueness. The question is whether we let our aloneness become loneliness or whether we allow it to lead us into solitude. Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.

 

Letting our aloneness grow into solitude and not into loneliness is a lifelong struggle. It requires conscious choices about whom to be with, what to study, how to pray, and when to ask for counsel. But wise choices will help us to find the solitude where our hearts can grow in love.”

 

– Henri Nouwen (via Diana Trautwein)

Nouwen is right about “aloneness.” I can sense God calling me out to cultivate it right now, something that seems counter to my training and my understanding of the way things are supposed to work. While I don’t see that He’s aiming at the seclusion of ye olde monks for me, I do see that there is a grasping neediness in my loneliness that shuts me down to others, or lashes me to them merely through a sense of obligation and an unquenchable (and uncomfortable) desire for affirmation.

When I am not okay without others when life – or God – requires aloneness, then community has become the god in my life. I am myself detached from the Head; my love for others is not His love because His love is not enough for me. I am never stronger in Him than when I have been alone with His love, than when I can walk into a roomful of people and know that He is, has been, and always will be my safest place.

My husband recently asked me where in Scripture God commands us to be “in community.” Community is a discussion that comes up a lot for us in conversation, especially as we have not found a “church home” in South Carolina. If you consider the Church as a full Body, made up of individuals instead of a standardized corporate structure run under Robert’s Rules of Order, then you can begin to see how utterly important it is for each individual in the Body to have and understand their own identity in Christ as they “submit therefore to God.”

After years outside of a traditional church community, I have learned that there is freedom to be alone within the Body of Christ. There is holiness to be found in solitude, and glory, and God Himself, who met Moses on a mountaintop away from Israel, who called His prophets into the wilderness, who died on a Cross alone and sent His Spirit to dwell in every *one* of us who comes to Him, to teach us and comfort us and seal us each individually for the day of our utter redemption.

The Church’s power comes by way of Christ, bringing each member of the Body to Himself. We need aloneness with Him to draw us together for glory. The Church is not a “fix” for loneliness; we should not be bound to each other through obligation. Our expectation is from Him, not from one another. This, I think, is what we need to know before “we can bear one another’s burdens.” We need to dare to let Jesus and His righteousness be our identity, instead of our community and our culture.

By kellē | January 20, 2014 | Church, God n me |

What Love Looks Like

Oh, the days when I drew lines around my faith
To keep you out, to keep me in, to keep it safe
And oh, the sense of my own self entitlement
To say who’s wrong or won’t belong or cannot stay

‘Cause somebody somewhere decided
We’d be better off divided
And somehow despite the damage done
He says, “Come”

There is room enough for all of us, please come
And the arms are open wide enough, please come
And our parts are never greater than the sum
This is the heart of the One
Who stands before an open door and bids us come

Oh, the times when I have failed to recognize
How may chairs are gathered there around the feast
To break the bread and break these boundaries
That have kept us from our only common ground,
The invitation to sit down, if we will come

Come from the best of humanity
Come from the depths of depravity
Come now and see how we need
Every different bead on this same string.

Come, there is room enough for all of us
Come, and the arms are open wide
And our parts are never greater than the sum
This is the heart of the One
Who stands before an open door and bids us come
And bids us come

– Nichole Nordeman, Please Come

By kellē | December 5, 2013 | love |

From One Mama to Another…

“Do you take your kids to church?”

My breath stopped as I scrambled for an answer. I was standing in the pet store chatting with a very nice former graphic designer who had just helped me obtain a photo of a kitty for my three-year-old. She had wandered from our discussion about our job commonalities into a conversation about her two grown children, and suddenly “church” was on the table.

“That’s my one regret,” she went on. “I only took them sporadically, and now they don’t even believe in God.”

She couldn’t know that as I was en route to the store, I had been asking God about church, and about being godly and about how prone I am to need “religious” habits in order to feel that I was on good terms with Him. I’d been agonizing over directions in a strange city, at the same time wondering again if He is really enough, if there is a Law that He means for me to be keeping that I am not keeping.

“Is it enough for me to know You?” I asked, and then struggling with the sense that it wasn’t. That on the other side of all of this “knowing Him” there is some sort of rule or action required of me to prove that I know Him.

I stuttered out an answer about how I’d been raised in a fundamentalist Bible culture and had to leave church years ago in order to find God.

She looked at me sympathetically. “It’s ’cause they’re all hypocrites, isn’t it? You need to try a non-denominational church. They have children’s programs and everything.”

He’s been telling me to listen lately. Not to answer everything or run the conversations – just to listen. And as I listened to her and to her heart as she told me how “it’s just all love and helping one another that gets us to God, you know” my heart broke because I know that just “giving it forward” isn’t enough, that really, it is just Jesus in us, making up the difference.

Tears choked my throat. I said His name to her. She didn’t hear me. She had it figured out. She believed in God, and she was good, and that was enough for her now.

I don’t know how to live a life of faith well, but dear God, may I never, ever, ever have it all figured out enough that I can’t hear “Jesus.”

By kellē | October 20, 2013 | Dear God |

It Never Hurts to Ask

I used to live by this mantra – “it never hurts to ask.” I chanted it to myself as I walked the streets of a historic Virginia town at eighteen, knocking on doors with my little writing notebook, meeting new people, and having surprising conversations. I used it to justify the random side trails I took on my “senior” trip with my aunt to drop my sister off in Kentucky for a horse gig the summer before I left home. It took on new meaning when I participated in street evangelism at Bible College during my first year of school – few people on the team I went out with knew how to start a conversation beyond the script they’d been taught since Kindergarten.

And then when I fell in love for the first time, God told me to ask Him for a person. Which was a little odd, and something I was not at all ready to do, especially since the asking entailed a submission to His will – for a yes OR a no. It took me two years to ask. And God said no. Only, He told me later it was because I wasn’t the only person the boy had shut out. God knew what he would do. He knew how to keep my heart open and continue drawing ME into life, no matter what came about with a situation that could have turned me cold and hard.

Lately, God has been asking me to ask Him for weddings – I don’t have any booked from here, and I know He is waiting for me. I have the sense that He’s planning to run in and say YES, YES, YES – it’s not a “yes or no” thing this time.

Hebrews 11 says that anyone who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them who diligently seek Him. It is really, really, really hard for me to believe that second part. It is more spiritual to love a God without wanting to be blessed. It’s safer to believe that He is and not engage my desire when it comes to His provision for my life. But He MADE me with all this desire, and He says that He will give me the desires of my heart.

I struggle with His statement to Abraham that “I am your shield and your very great reward.” There were so many promises He made to Abraham that he didn’t see fulfilled in his lifetime, and Hebrews 11 talks about others too who died without seeing their desire – and who died TO see their Desire. This is a paradox to me, the giving with the taking away, the laying down your life to find it again.

I’m still thinking this through, but feeling that He is leading me to prepare for more weddings, even though I can’t see them right now. I’m walking out a little on faith. Maybe a lot on faith. But the faith to ask. That’s what I’m looking for right now, to ask believing that He wants to give good things because He is God, not just because I deserve them or need them or desire them. I’ve known so many people who sided with Elihu, that fourth friend of Job’s who gave Job the what-for, saying “he was right, because God didn’t have Job make a sacrifice for him.”

But what I have seen since God handed me Job’s story when I was struggling with God using me and giving me nothing that I wanted, is that Elihu was young, that He knew God, but was unable to understand the specifics of the story God was working out for Job’s heart. God wanted to tell Job who He was. God wrestled with Jacob, who He had to limit in order to save his life. He is not the sort of God who expects blind obedience in exchange for due blessing.

Every single bride I had this year was a real person who didn’t want to get sucked into what she felt was the “machine” of the wedding industry. Every single bride I had built her wedding around the little things that meant the most to her. Every single bride I had became a friend who trusted me to see her heart and remember her wedding day the way she wanted to remember it. Every single bride I had gave me a wedding to shoot that gave me life too. I know beyond a doubt that God planned each bride this year just for me, and just for my heart, and that He planned me for them too.

I don’t expect less from Him in 2014. I’m not afraid of God’s ability to provide more than I can ask or imagine. I think I’m just scared that I’m not ready to do the work yet. And I’m a little scared of the loss that always comes with life and investing more and desiring more and being given more.

(*And she wanders off down the rabbit trail of “perfect love casting out fear…”*)

By kellē | October 16, 2013 | God n me |

A “Better” Service

by Kelly Sauer

“You can do God a better service by…”

The rest of her words didn’t fade the way I needed them to fade, didn’t give me the grace to fail, to fall down, to not be enough. All I could hear was the echo of the obligation I’d already known I wasn’t meeting. God wasn’t using her to tell me I was letting Him down, was He?

I need a resounding wake-up call when He needs to get my attention sometimes. Maybe this was it. I’m too nice to myself. I’m good at justifying myself. Except… He doesn’t break my heart when He convicts. Not that way. He never, never tells me that He isn’t enough if I don’t do.

I’ll never do enough. Never be enough. If Christ isn’t enough, all is lost to me. “Bootstrap” faith, “God helps those who help themselves” – it’s not for me or He’s not for me. The only thing I owe – or can afford to owe – is love, love that flows from a Person who IS love, taking me over and making my heart like His. He either does it all or I am out.

I am so tired. I can’t afford this risk. But I can’t afford anything else.

By kellē | July 15, 2013 | Uncategorized |

A New Nose

Pip - by Kelly Sauer

Pip just asked God for a “circle nose.” The adult in me says “look out, God might give it to you and how would He do that – YIKE” and then I realized that when we pray like children, He is still good, and this is what He wants, to share in our silliest, smallest requests.

“Dust can be anything,” He must have thought when He made us. “Let’s see what happens.”

I can’t help thinking that our own childlike faith might be His biggest adventure too.

By kellē | May 15, 2013 | Dear God, God n me |

The hardness of tenderness…

Mark-0000856

It is hard to have a tender heart, when it seems the world is out to misunderstand you, when you don’t fit anywhere, even with other believers, when people like you or don’t like you based on what you DO instead of who you are. It is hard to be childlike enough to walk humbly with God who asks this tenderness of you when it is easier to keep your walls up and welcome cynicism and suspicion where trust should be. It is hard to be small and build another up whose is living the way you know you should have lived and you didn’t. It is hard to confess and be humble and seek the face of the One who gentles you sometimes through the acknowledgement of your own sin through His Life lived out.

But it is harder to be angry, harder to live with your chin tucked and your guard up, ready to lash out at anyone who backs you into a corner. It is harder, because the angrier you are and the more unyielding you become, the bigger your corner gets until the whole world is there pushing you into it and you feel you have to be big enough to fill it, when you just simply want to walk out there, where everyone else is just living and being and not really noticing you in the corner. It is harder to be dead when you could be alive. It is harder to hate and to envy and to judge when you could simply love.

God give us tender hearts, in spite of our hardness.

By kellē | May 3, 2013 | His |

the dreams we dream with broken hearts

a lovely workshop, iPhone outtake

Last night, I dreamed a hard one. I dreamed I was happy – sooooo happy – and then the happiness shattered, and I cried in my dream. Wept. Sobbed. Wailed. I couldn’t walk or be strong or keep going, things hurt so bad; then mercifully, I came up through the shadows into my own room beside the one who loved me where others did not.

What do you do when pain wakes you? I always thought nightmares were driven by fear, but this wasn’t fear. It was heartache, stemming from something so deep inside, I had only touched it a few times before.

I have been feeling my way through “vulnerability,” lately, having come to see that for all that I say and all that I put out there, there are parts of me that I understand that I simply don’t make available to others for the knowing, as much as I want to be known in those places. Some of it, I’ve discovered, is just my personality. The reason I don’t – CAN’T – cry in public is because my feelings are often internalized, while my *thinking* is extraverted. It makes a me a good blogger, if I can get a hold on what I’m feeling, but for the living? I wonder.

Yesterday, I created a name (all by myself) for my wedding business that feels like one of the biggest risks I have ever taken, that says in one word everything that I want to give my brides in their experience with me, everything that I want my work to be. It is a HUGE name, a huge calling to live up to, and I shook as I bought the URL and solidified commitments I have been making this year as I’m trying to move my business forward. I feel vulnerable owning this name, vulnerable offering this commitment to my clients, because while it was always there in my heart, stating it means that I will have to tap into my own heart and bring it to life through my work; it means that the beauty of the happy that broke me apart as it was taken from me in my dream last night is something I need to embrace for myself too.

One of the weddings I shot recently was… the happiest wedding I have ever attended. I cried from the joy surrounding me, and I think I cried because I so rarely reach for that, so rarely acknowledge its existence in my life because I know what it is to have it removed.

I don’t have an easy answer for my conundrum; I just know that I want to be happy, and I know now that I am loved, which is a change from the time my dream brought back, when love itself was stripped from me and I wasn’t sure God – or anything – would ever be enough to replace it.

By kellē | April 14, 2013 | love |

The Journal

I looked at leather-bound journals at Barnes & Noble the other day when we went in. The kids wanted to play there, to look at the books, to absorb the general atmosphere of one of their favorite places – and to visit the cafe for a sweet treat. I sat in front of the journals for what seemed like an eternity, weighing the colors, the textures, the feel of the books in my hands, and trying to envision what I would write in them.

“You’ve bought journal after journal for years, and you haven’t filled any.”

But the year I filled ten journals felt a bit like this year. I thought I would fill some last year. I could try again.

“You don’t have anything to say. You can’t justify the expense.”

None of the empty books inspired words to respond. I sighed. Maybe I would find a book someone else had written. I had no idea what I wanted, though. The inspirational section was “safe” – I didn’t want to deal with decisions. I prefer to read things other people recommend. Actually, I like my own writing.

I woke up this morning thinking that I’d make a good editor. I’m really good at going through others’ writing and calling out their character inconsistencies and their grammar and their storytelling ability. It’s one reason it’s so difficult for me to read others’ work. It has to be REALLY good for me to like it.

But my journals weren’t ever *really* good. They were just me, pouring out on paper.

“You don’t deserve to have a journal. You don’t have anything to say.”

I don’t have words. The voices are right. But I’m getting up in the morning. I am pushing through frustration and depression and existing, because sometimes that is all we are meant to do, just keep breathing, and that is worship and that is processing and that is what life looks like when you wait on God.

“You can always blog, if you have something to say.”

Yes, yes I can. And I have a whole bunch of journals with only a few pages filled, where I can scribble if I want. And maybe, if I find the right one, the one that has words for me when I see it, I will buy a new journal sometime.

By kellē | March 7, 2013 | from here |

Groan

Sometimes when I go out, I get the feeling that nobody sees me. I think other people feel that nobody sees them too; they don’t know I watch them walk past me, wonder what their world is like, wonder if they are running from something like I am some days too. “Care” is such an overlooked thing. People don’t see others as people until death enters the picture, but even then, death itself becomes a platform for self-gratification and the play of guilt pouring out from all our lives lived in the shadows.

Sometimes when I go, I get the feeling that everyone around me is mad, that we are all slowly driving toward insanity, because we were grown-ups before we were ever allowed to be children, because we are cut off so much that it is odd when I see someone make eye contact and smile at another person. Sweetness sounds funny coming out of my mouth; I would rather seal my lips than engage another person.

It is the indifference that destroys us, that sends planes into buildings and crazy men into schools. We’ve lost the value of life – we don’t want it anymore. We don’t know how to cling to it because we all live in this netherworld where nothing is real unless we all agree it is real, unless the majority acknowledges it happened and it is acceptable in our world.

But joy comes anyway, and even though He says to weep with those who weep, we cannot lose sight of the light that filters through the shadows. I will not stop smiling at the people I pass or stop speaking kindly to others when the opportunity presents itself. I will care ALL the days, not just the days when something horrible has happened. I will be mindful today and tomorrow and the next day so that I cannot be indifferent to life itself, so that I will always value the hearts of each one of us that God created in His image.

This is the day the Lord has made too – I will rejoice and be glad. The sun came up, and we are all still in the hands that held us when it went down yesterday. Nothing has happened that is out of His reach.

There is no part of our death that He will not redeem.

There is no darkness that the light won’t banish.

There are no words now but alleluia.

By kellē | December 14, 2012 | from here |