Destitute

A brief preface: I’m sorting through a lot of things about God and my faith and church and grace. This post is not aimed at anyone – it is written from my journey, from this place in my journey. If you find something valuable here, please take it and run. Otherwise, please read with grace for a girl who has decidedly NOT arrived.

Does God leave us destitute sometimes, on the days that we’ve run half the day into the ground and feel no hope at all for the other half? How do you begin to pray when you’re a mess, when it’s okay to pray for others, but “good grief, can’t you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and DO SOMETHING about yourself?”

I think He does leave me destitute, leaves me lacking the religious things to say and the ability to just “change my attitude.” I feel like He sits back and He lets me see how little I truly have to bring Him. He lets me see the depths of my own fear and frustration. He reveals all the ugly and opens my eyes to exactly how weak and human and horrid I am.

And I really don’t like Him for that. I know the spiritual thing is to be grateful for it. But I get angry that He expects thanks in all things, that He asks for joy in all trials. HE doesn’t live with my hormonal issues. HE doesn’t lash out as I lash out at my kids with irritation over the smallest things.

I want to know why He doesn’t just make me NICE. Or SWEET. Or GOOD. Or even HEALTHY. I could live with HEALTHY. I don’t feel a lot like a Christian lately. In fact, most Christians annoy me. I have a problem with church people, and I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s because I feel that they are always RIGHT, and I gave up being RIGHT a long time ago. At least for the rest of the world. I suppose I still hold onto it for myself. Wouldn’t He like me better if I was good?

Almost everybody I know says the same thing, and it’s not Jesus. It’s not grace, and it’s not real Gospel. And maybe I grew up and church and I’m just tired of hearing the same thing over and over and over, but the things Jesus said don’t grow old. Not like the new law that we’ve created from Paul’s writings in the New Testament, not like the way we’ve constructed and reconstructed our idea of what a good Christian looks like.

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I’m a horrible Christian. Or perhaps I should say, I’m a horrible religious person. I can’t stand hearing religious stuff anymore. I can’t even bring myself to say it, and I used to be GOOD at it.

Some days, I walk around and I wonder how it is that I even consider myself to be His – I don’t look at all like the person I thought I should be in Him. If I’d met me ten years ago, I’d have patted me on the back and said “I’ll pray for you” and walked away thinking how far I’d come and how much better I was than the girl who doubted hard and made a real mess with her life waiting for God to change her instead of making up her mind to do it herself.

I keep coming back to an encounter I had with God and legalism in Colossians, the “do not taste, do not touch, do not handle” passage. I was surrounded by legalists like myself who were constantly “encouraging one another” and “building each other up” through a subtle judgmentalism that said “I see this in your life, I love you, you’d better fix that and be like me.” They were rather literally whitewashing each other’s sepulchres. When I hit that passage, reading through Colossians one day, it was as if my eyes were opened to the fact that whether I was told or not, “I would choose the good anyway!”

Having God in my life changes my IDENTITY at its core. Action always flows from identity. But coming into Christ isn’t the same as getting a makeover to transform me into something good. The disciples walked three years with Jesus, and Peter still denied Him. Coming into Christ merely facilitates the relationship that I can have with God Himself, but John makes it clear that I won’t be like Him until I see Him as He is. Paul also speaks of the dark glass through which we see, until we see Him face to face.

I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of Spirit-work, but I know the ugliness in me, the way I feel so strung out and frustrated so much of the time. I KNOW why Israel went after other gods. I do. “How could they?” people accuse, taking into account all that Israel had seen.

It is because religion itself is the idol that all good people serve. If you want to be good, you say religious things and you have spiritual attitudes, and you put yourself into a position to “minister” to others so that they can be like you – er, God. But religion is a product of man trying to do the right thing. It is Garden-grown, cultivated by Satan with his tantalizing offer for us to “be like God, knowing good and evil.” If we know good and evil, we can avoid the evil ourselves. If we know what is right, we won’t do what is wrong.

And even Christians, unable to escape our Adam-born humanity, have no hope of escape. And we’re the ones who know MORE right than everyone else, because, come ON – God is on OUR side! Sure religion is more palatable than the mess we make in the wrong we know we do, but seriously? What encouragement is there in “you just have to do more right!”???

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So this is where I live, in rebellion against “the right thing,” in utter frustration because of the waiting. We DON’T encourage one another to continue waiting on God to work in us to renew our minds and change our lives. We come into church with a “okay, let’s go, let’s get into ministry, let’s get to work on that to-do list of spiritual fruit and make sure we get sanctified good and fast!”

We don’t grow in grace, or in our knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We grow in our knowledge of “the whole doctrine of God” based on this creed or that fundamental principle, or that interpretation of Scripture. We accept that Jesus died for us as our fire insurance, and then we go on living our good lives and patting needier people on the head, hoping vaguely that we will be an example of a good life to them too.

I have serious doubts about some things in Scripture. I, who grew up knowing it all – I could STILL beat you in any trivia competition. I, who went to Bible college for a year and came out with a 4.0. I who wanted to grow to the point where I could be in ministry of one kind or another and walked away from it all because I couldn’t sit in church and be okay with what was being taught.

I’ve got nothing left on my religious resumé that would make me an authority on anything.

If you want to know what I know, it is that Jesus Christ died for me so that I could know God. Eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ who He sent. If I love Him, I will obey His commands, which are to love God and to love others. As far as I am concerned, I can spend a lifetime focusing on those things, and I’m STILL not going to arrive until I meet God.

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Jesus did NOT come to complicate our lives. The wisdom that comes from above is pure and peaceable, and full of good fruit. The to-do list that ticks off in my head about being good or doing right or fixing this or that about myself brings only confusion and anger. It is a weighty burden that I direct at God, and He looks at me and says, “who told you to do this? I don’t require more than Christ.”

“But it’s not enough, God, it’s not enough. I still want to be good. I want to be sweet. I want to reflect You to the world.”

And then He reminds me that I am the earthen vessel that houses His treasure and will I let Him worry about His glory already.

This is not a conversation that makes me feel richer. Or better.

I know His grace and what it is for. I know it good, and I know it deep. But I don’t know how to LIVE in it. I don’t WANT to live in it. I want to be able to stand up and HOLLA! I’M THERE! when it comes to God. I don’t want my reward to be Him and His return. I want to be known by others. I want to be respected. I want to be at the top of my religious game and have all my bases covered.

I. Don’t. Want. To. Be. Broken.

But He says it is harder for the rich to come into His Kingdom than it is for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. We could MAKE a big needle and fit a camel through. The hardest thing in the world is letting go of myself and letting Him choose how I will reflect Him, instead of walking off by my big self and making me look good. No matter how well-intentioned I am in doing good, it just makes it harder to get to my heart, where God speaks and moves and lives and works.

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So yes, I think God does leave me destitute. I can’t circumvent that. It keeps me talking to Him, even in anger. It gives Him a chance to respond to me. I have a bold relationship with Him, and it’s not just about receiving mercy. I can’t flout Him, and He knows I can’t, but He also knows how utterly confused I get when it comes to dealing with “right and wrong” – because these things conflict with my new identity in Jesus Christ. Either I am a new creation, or I’m not. Either Christ died once for all, or my whole Christian life must now be “Christ-plus” – just to make sure I’ve got my bases covered when it comes to pleasing God.

Jesus couldn’t give me rest if He didn’t do it all already, and that, I think is what Hebrews is talking about in the context of “be content with such things as you have.” The very next line is “For He has said ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.'”

On days like today, or the last week, or heck, the last six months, I may not LIKE God. I may not want to be faithful to Him, but I know that He IS, and that He is a Rewarder of those who seek Him, however grudgingly. I know that He Himself is faithful, even when I’m still trying to figure things out in the muck of life down here. And my greatest comfort is remembering that Jesus came and lived in the muck, lived here in the flesh like I do, and understands exactly how hard it is to die in obedience to God, even with the hope of resurrection on the other side of all this.

By kellē | September 15, 2011 | from here, God n me, His |

Places

It was rumoring autumn in New England last week when we visited Pete’s parents. The Japanese maple in his old back yard was tinting more red than usual, and one evening while we were there, we could smell wood smoke on the cooling breeze. We slept with open windows, woke to memories, started scheming how we might move back north for the fall and winter. I tried to picture him as a baby, a little boy, a teenager growing up in the same place all his life.

I never quite know how to go home after we visit the many places where I grew up. I know that I’m growing up here in Charleston too, and I know when I leave, I will be homesick for the history, the architecture, the waves brushing the shore, the hint of passion and pirate all over here. There’s something here that draws me out, something safe in the old places that gives me rest. How do I choose, and what is home anyway?

Someone asked me if there is one thing I can drop in order to live my life to the fullest. My health issues – I’d drop them, I think. I don’t want to quit anything else. But that can’t be dropped, and when I start the treatment again after feeling better for a few days off, and my kids write on walls we’ve just cleaned and I want to sit down and cry…

Pete asks me if I’m still here.

I fall toward despair, wonder why I bother living at all, and then, annoyed with myself, look out the window at the wind in the trees and the wild rumors of life in this place, and I hear my own rational voice in my head giving me the what-for about how much I do want to live and good grief, how ridiculous can you be, letting the Lyme defeat you? I know why God has me in Charleston. It’s a rebellious beautiful city, built up from the sea, living on a dare.

Yes, I’m here.

I don’t like this place, the one where I exist and certain things refuse to change. I live outside of it as much as I can, but some days I can’t, and this is where I am and this is what I am, but this is not who I am and it never will be. I will not let it define me.

I ask God what I should be thankful for, and I know it is not this, not this place, not this limitation, but this: that He is good. It’s His Person, not His actions regarding my life or how He runs the world. Good is just Him, who He is, and somehow that means everything will be okay, like the happy ending we all know has to come sometime, no matter what we go through getting there. We all know it down deep, this sense that the bad will be defeated.

I’m too tired to think beyond this, and this is my home for this moment, His goodness.

By kellē | September 5, 2011 | depression, from here, God n me, grace, health |

Hold

Sometimes you are given a gift that you don’t know how to accept. You don’t know how to receive it, because you don’t know the depths of your own heart, and the little you do know leads you to believe that you will ruin it if you do accept it or if you don’t.

Sometimes you don’t have faith enough to believe that the good you are given is really good, and sometimes the life factors that play against you contradict the good. Sometimes you feel the grace running out with the time; you wonder if God is really on your side after all, if He would bother to act on your behalf.

You ask big things of human people, breaking intimacy over fear, building walls around your broken heart. How does it hurt this much, how can God feel so far away?

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“It’s death,” he said while we talked the other day, me letting Canaan-dreams slip away in betrayal, wondering how Sarah felt in all those barren years of travel away from what she’d known.

I rummaged through my hope chest and ran across a poem – death laced with hope. I woke again to a time I’d forgotten, a time before I told God I didn’t want to be used by Him, a time that feels more real than now, a time merging into now.

Don’t know why I’m standing here,
Caught in this place for too many years,
Chasing shadows, chasing dreams,
I can’t trust, I can’t get free…
Pain-filled eyes haunt my mind,
The darkness comes, and I am blind
It killed me, I am dead—
I am a walking dead.

I can’t help that I’ve seen too much,
This pain that I can’t seem to touch,
I can’t be strong, can’t heal this wound,
I’m in too deep; I’m dying soon.
These demons that are crushing me
Don’t care that I am dead, that I can’t see.
I’m running here, so afraid
Why can’t I get away?

Can’t be weak, must be strong
Must fight back, can’t go on
Too afraid of the black night here
Helpless sobbing—too deep for tears.
Garbled words escape my lips,
Still burning from betrayal’s kiss.
I am sorry, I am dead, I’m dead
I’ve lived too many lives.

I’m running, falling in this place
Finding here a strong embrace
Whispers from a voice so soft,
Cutting through the fear and loss…
A song I think I’ve heard before
Gentleness I’ve never known—
Thought that I was all alone,
Dying in this place.

The rising moon is silver-gowned,
Cutting lightly through the clouds
I’m leaning hard on a shoulder firm
Covered by a gracious arm.
Don’t need to hope, just rest for now,
Shadows fleeing the moonlight glow.
Trembling, with a hand in mine,
I am not alone this time,
Sheltered, cradled in this grace.

– Kelly Sauer, May 12, 2004

I tell myself that I won’t be here forever. That this lamentation is not who I am. That the three words He gave me – breathe, open, receive – are the hardest words I’ve tried to live, and none of them about the trying.

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I hardly believe it when someone tells me that they love me anymore. I went through stacks of cards and notes yesterday, people telling me they loved me, telling me who I was, who I am. It’s not enough to hear it, and there seems no proof strong enough to convince me, at least on my bad days when the barometric pressure drops and the world falls apart for no reason at all.

But I have these gifts, the ones who love me, who reach out in spite of me to give from who they are and live into my world and I hold them and I look at them, not knowing what to do with them.

I keep hoping for another chance to do things right, to be what I’m supposed to be, what I think everybody else thinks I should be, but time always runs out on my mess.

I look at God with all the hollering voices raining down on me like some storm and He stays so very still and says nothing at all, but I can feel Him near. I am not angry enough to rail at Him – I haven’t been for a long time – but I feel too tired to stand before Him with my questions now, too tired to even kneel, so I sit up and lean back and fall down and we’re getting nowhere, He and I, because I can’t pick up and live the grace I know.

And yet, I wonder if somehow I am living it, and I’m not meant to be more than I am at the moment?

Every night, I tell them “God loves you more than we ever could,” and even as I say it, I wonder how those words will play when their world grows old and they have known loss and longed for intimacy.

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I am so weary today. There are things that cycle around my life and my relationships that have come back up, and I want to run away, to hide from it all, come back a better person. But it’s becoming apparent that in this place there is no way out but through, and I struggle, wondering if even “through” will bring me to the other side, when I will be able to hold the gifts and enjoy what God gives without looking over my shoulder, waiting for the ball to drop.

I’ve been dealing with depression, anxiety, and panic attacks lately, so much so that I have pulled back on the intensity of my treatment. Convulsions I can handle. Panic I cannot.

We’re waiting for Irene to pass us here, and with the first spin she made over my house, I felt as though my heart might come out of my chest, as the helpless tears squeezed out the way they did when Piper was born. “Not alone,” my heart whimpered. “I hate the storms…” I hate when the light goes out and dark comes in during the daytime, hate when the wind flies through a world more fragile than I know, hate the pounding sound of wind-whipped rain on my windows.

The barometric pressure drops; the bottom drops out of my carefully-measured calm.

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When you’re a child, it’s easy to believe that Someone Bigger cares about you and about the things that matter to you. Before you get picked up and thrown around by life, before you learn not to say the true things, before God doesn’t do what you think He should do, before you’re really old enough to think He should do anything at all.

You expect big things of God, because He can, because He has; you don’t doubt that He can come through.

And then He doesn’t, and He doesn’t because He wants you to look at Him and not at the pony you prayed for, because He is a Rewarder of those who seek Him, because He is their very great Reward.

So you wrestle with Him like Jacob, and demand that He bless, when all the time perhaps He only wanted a conversation, and when it is over and you limp away, you don’t even know why you were wrestling in the first place.

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I feel less than a person and too much of a person. I write myself off, my old self who trusted so easily, my new self who doesn’t trust much at all, the dreams and the passion and the ideals I had. I know things now I wish I’d never found out. I want to go back to the safest places, places that are gone now. I don’t want to grow up. I want to stay young, to have the dreams and the optimism that carry hope around with them.

Getting out of bed in the morning, hugging my children, talking with my husband, taking pictures: these are my small acts of faith. It does not feel like enough, but it is all I can do with surety that I live them true from my heart. The rest overwhelms me.

So I wait in a holding pattern I can’t break for my limitations. It is this, I think, that grace is for.

By kellē | August 26, 2011 | depression, from here |

Reach

I went into the hospital in June of 2004 with a herxheimer reaction that ended for me any questions that I might not really be sick. I was having convulsions and I couldn’t stand up, let alone walk. I was in an incredible place with God at the time, and I went into the hospital with hope and a lot of trust that He knew what He was doing. I was initially placed in a repurposed maternity ward with a window from which I could see sunlight and trees over the hospital’s roof.

There was a doctor there who was baffled by the God-conversations I had with my visitors, baffled by the joy he saw in me. His Buddhist faith could not account for my illness when I seemed so happy. He told me that I confused him, that if I could just think myself well, I could get well.

But the IV they had given me contained 5% dextrose. Because I had a severe sugar sensitivity, the IV meant to help me actually weakened me, and the doctors began sending out my blood for diseases I could not possibly have had. One of these diseases was a highly contagious condition that was generally contracted in South America. Three days into my hospital stay, they moved me into isolation, a room with florescent lights and a window that looked into a wall blocking almost all of the light.

Sometime in the course of the next couple of days, God spoke quiet and firm in my heart, that I needed to speak the name of Jesus to the Buddhist doctor. He also told me that I needed to ask Him, believing, to bring my first love back.

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As I waited for test results and felt myself growing weaker and more afraid, I began to trust less that I knew God. That I knew what He thought or how He worked. Was God just a place in my head that I went to in order to make things better, or was He a Person who would actually act on my behalf, who would fight for me?

During that nine-day stay, I never managed to ask Him for my first love, believing that He would cause him to come. Actually, I never did ask Him believing He would bring that boy back.

And I almost didn’t speak the name of Jesus to that Buddhist doctor. He came again, and I shut up. As soon as he left the room, I felt my spirit sink within me. I justified it to myself. I tried to convince myself that it was okay – people didn’t really go around speaking the name of Jesus to people anyway. He was a doctor; I was a patient.

But I’ve never been one to quantify people by their roles. In one sense, I suppose that makes me disrespectful. In another sense, I just see people as people. The important ones have the same struggles the unimportant ones have – they just hide it better, I think.

And I knew better than to gloss over the conviction in my heart.

But seven days in, having been transferred to another doctor, I didn’t know that I would ever be seeing the Buddhist doctor again.

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Seven days in, we figured out the dextrose issue, and they pulled the IV. At nine days, I was again strong enough to leave the hospital. All of the tests they had run had come back negative. My first love hadn’t come. I was surrounded by the biggest mess I’d ever been in, the past, the unknown future, and the very uncertain present.

On the ninth day, I sat up in my bed with an anger that I’d never known before, listened rebelliously to “It’s a Good Day” on the CD player my sister had brought for me, and steeled myself to face the wreckage.

And into this walked the Buddhist doctor, to say goodbye. To tell me that my second Lyme test had come back negative. Regardless of the fact that I had two positive tests from other doctors. I reached into the mess of my racing heart and looked him in the eye, unable to leave without saying what I knew I had to say.

“I’m supposed to speak the name of Jesus to you.”

The man physically reeled. He looked as if I had slapped him. I stopped breathing, shocked at the force of his reaction.

Shaken, he recovered as best he could, telling me that he knew Jesus, and Buddha, and a list of other names that I’ve lost to time and brain fog and irrelevance.

I left the hospital and read through the book of Job. And then I started back to work, all the while questioning the love of God, questioning the real depth of my relationship with Him, questioning everything I was and everything I would become.

There is no question in my heart that I will meet the Buddhist doctor again someday. That God put me in that place for that time to speak Jesus into a life that He intended to redeem.

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Several years later, I told God I didn’t want to be used anymore. I wasn’t going to be good for Him anymore. It took me several years to figure out that I’d stopped trusting Him somewhere around day three of my hospital stay. That I didn’t want His purpose so much as He wanted His purpose.

I didn’t know how to trust a God who could let everything in my life fall apart and somehow, at the same time, be FOR me.

I have since come to see that I can’t lock God into my idea of who He should be, but I still struggle with that sense of betrayal. The boy who never came back. The life I live now. The pain I see falling into others’ lives that rips me apart and raises my fears.

I don’t swallow spiritual platitudes. I don’t jump on religious bandwagons or follow a set of principles. I have a hard time going to church without becoming physically ill.

If my faith is to be real, then the God I place it in must be real. If He is to be any real comfort, the fears I have must be real. If He is to really heal, then I must be really broken. If He is to give grace, then I must be humble enough to receive it.

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At least in this place where I fight against the way my life has broken apart, I know He doesn’t despise me. He says He doesn’t. That this is the sacrifice He desires.

I don’t GET how He uses me now. I’m an exhausted mess of a girl who hardly dares to speak of God because He seems too much sometimes. I am the weak and the fool, the Jeremiah who says “I cannot speak” and “they’ll look down on me,” and then writes my sorrow and my doubts and my fears out without the victory half the time, knowing that my only hope is in God who must have something other than all of this mess in mind for us.

“Don’t add to the wound of the world,” she says, “count the gifts He gives and you can’t be afraid.” She has known much loss of her own, and I read 13 pages into her story and could read no further, overwhelmed by what I saw in her first memory.

“Give thanks in all things,” Paul said, and “Whatsoever you do, do all in the name of Jesus.”

So in the name of Jesus, I tell the truth about the things that hurt and try to make sense out of my life without any forthcoming answers from heaven. I try to step back and look at the people who have cared for me, to see their hearts through a haze of unresolved pain. I try not to be afraid and I ask God where the joy comes from, when is it real, and when will I not be making it up?

And in Jesus’ name, I ask God why He cared more about a Buddhist doctor than He cared about me, and all He says is that “you knew Me, and he didn’t.”

This mess of a life I live isn’t about being one whom God uses greatly. It’s not about being great or being small, it’s just about God being God, and me being me as He made me, and letting Him work out the details so that the real of me honors the real of Him, whether I thank Him for air conditioning and thick green grass and nobody knows but Him, or whether speaking Him out through my wreckage sends others to Him for an encounter of their own.

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Ann sees the first sin as ingratitude (I am not content with what God has given me), and I see it as God-grasping (I will be like the Most High), and this is what God has given us both, and we are not wrong but not God either.

I hope every day that there is an “other side” of all this for me. I really do want to be happy. I really do want to be grateful. I don’t want to deepen the wound of the world – but God tells me to see the wound of the world that He created, and to see how we all groan soul-deep for Him, and how will we know it is a wound if we pretend it is not there, or think it can be repaired by the force of our human will?

I would shut my eyes to it if I could. I would hide myself away from it so it could not touch me. But it has already touched me, before I knew it could. Nine days in a hospital without a diagnosis, a first love that never returned for me, years living in the wreckage that followed both and all the doubts I should never have had about God being raised the way I was and knowing what I knew about Him.

But that was just it. I only knew it about Him. Now I know Him. And I know this: how Jesus stands between me and Him, and how everything on earth that matters to me can be taken from me and I will still know Him right where I am because of His Son.

And oh how I pray I learn to receive the good He is without fear.

By kellē | August 22, 2011 | from here, God n me, health, walk with Him |

Settled

I mentioned panic and anxiety attacks on Monday. I asked a friend to pray for me. She asked another friend, who stepped in strong on my behalf yesterday. I told the truth; they spoke it back. There is no feeling like that helplessness, hitting the point where I have absolutely nothing left to give and I have to rely on others for their help, their grace, and their willingness to be real in my life.

I also have to learn to say no. And I hate saying no. Because I want to say yes. Because everything I need to say no to right now was a yes just a few months ago. But when you cannot function past the moment without feeling as if you are going to lose your mind, things have to go.

I farmed out a wedding for post-processing. I emailed two design clients to let them know I might not be able to work on their designs until September. I bit the bullet and publicly declared a leave of absence from my main blog – and all the branding drama that I have associated with it. And I went back on medical leave from the business and the branding. Because two days back at work was too much for my body.

When I woke this morning, I felt more hopeful. More refreshed. I started kicking myself. “You don’t need to rest today. You shouldn’t have pushed all that off.” And then I got tired, and I thought it might be a good idea to just rest. But my brain didn’t stop there. I kept thinking of things I forgot. Keep trying to figure out how to get better here so that I can come back full steam. I found out some DVDs I’d mailed had never been delivered. I remembered earlier conversations when I was feeling worse and wondered if that feeling bad was even legitimate.

And then I noticed the knot in the pit of my stomach. The feeling that all of my life was going to come up over top of me and I wasn’t going to be able to breathe.

I’m not one to not think. I’m not one who can’t objectively view and handle my problems. But right now, with my body doing what it is doing, I absolutely cannot think past the moment that I am in. And IN THIS MOMENT, I have to be on the couch. I have to be what I am. Right here. Right now. Limited. Sick. Hopeful.

It is a physical picture of so much more.

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I used to corral myself toward perfection. I had a to-do list that was five lives long. And then I got my heart broken, and things that wrapped up so neatly in my head got hung out in the whys and the waits and the I-don’t-knows. Suddenly living meant more than perfection. It meant more than doing everything right the first time or spending my life making up for my mistakes. It meant that as long as I was breathing, I could still grow, relationships could shift and change and heal, and hope deferred was something to wait for, because it wasn’t over if my dreams didn’t come true just the way I’d dreamed them.

But I still live too much in the “have to get this right.” The branding is the worst battle I’ve ever fought on this front. I want God to be a part of my brand. I want to be this kind of person and that kind of photographer.

I’ve wondered how people who don’t choose to be real live the way they live. I have judged and dismissed others because they claimed to be authentic and held themselves back. But I’ve had moments where I have held myself back. Where I’ve deliberately chosen to present me as something I want to be rather than the mess that I am. I rationalize. I don’t want to be a burden. I want to be professional. I want to have an airtight brand that will pull in every client I want. I want to make sure that my followers won’t unfollow me and that my friends won’t unfriend me. I want to be so sweet and kind that people will love me and definitely see Christ in me.

But when it all falls out, I have a snarky sense of humor, I’m kinda cynical about a lot of stuff, I say things without thinking, my teeth stick out, and I haven’t really decided on a visual brand yet because I’m trying too hard to make it perfect. I’m repelling potential clients and thinking about quitting photography altogether because I definitely can’t be (and don’t WANT to be) what the industry requires, and I’m dropping stuff out on my Facebook that have people annoyed with me and getting upset because I don’t sound enough like Christ should sound. And I get judged as I judged others. Jesus was SO not kidding.

I cannot live outside of the moment I am in, anymore than anyone else can. I cannot possibly take every voice and every caution and every caveat into account as I go forward into life. My body right now draws this truth into sharp relief – if I even attempt to fill the moments with thoughts of tomorrow or the next day or the next year or ten, my body freaks out and starts firing neurological stress signals that trigger my adrenals to fight-or-flight and I either sit very still and quiet RIGHT HERE or I scream and run.

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If living in this moment means that I bake cookies because I want to spend time with my kids, if it means that I sit on the couch and watch something, if it means that I am not thinking and stressing and trying to cover every base and serve my identity over my God – or if it means that I say yes to a shoot and no to something else, if I want to edit, if I want to design – I can’t be every place at once. I have to choose.

And I am learning to choose, to live here and not there. The only place my heart settles is in knowing I have God’s grace for this, no matter what the rest of the world thinks, no matter how helpless I feel to accomplish what I want to accomplish. “Jesus” seems too simple for a girl who overcomplicated spirituality, but simple is what I have to have right now. Simple as in Jesus loves me, this I know. Simple as in “it is finished.” Simple as in “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things are passed away, all things are become new.”

I find myself becoming less. Not by choice, but by truth. I remember how Jesus prayed, “Sanctify them by Thy truth. Thy Word is Truth.” Jesus, the Word, the Truth – the only reason I have grace to know God in this place I’m in – He is my sanctification, not any growing perfection that I can accomplish.

I’m trying to live in the new. I am stepping back right now, evaluating what brings me joy, what my dream really is, why I am doing what I am doing, and what are the real risks I am taking? I have no choice but to embrace that my body is doing what it is doing right now, and trust that it is a GOOD thing, this tearing open of the old wounds to heal and rebuild for the new.

By kellē | August 3, 2011 | from here, grace, health |

Unplug

Today has not exactly been a good day. It has not exactly been a bad day. Or maybe it has been horrible. Or spectacular.

I think that the technical word for my state today is “stir-crazy.”

I feel like I’m losing my mind. “Don’t say this, don’t say that, SHUT UP AND QUIT TALKING ALREADY” are the voices in my head. I’m fighting them, tooth and nail and Facebook and Twitter – which is NOT helping. I’m watching my “brand” tank. One person unfollows me on FB. I must have ANNOYED THE HECK OUT OF THEM. I lose a friend on FB. WOW. I CAN’T BE REAL AND HAVE FRIENDS.

I can’t think of ONE PERSON I can call when I am in this state. I’m sitting as still as I can and trying not to relive the panic/anxiety attacks I had ten years ago, attacks that sent me into the smallest corners I could find to throw my hands over my head and try to hide from everything.

In my heart, I want to be processing. I want to be preparing for the wedding I’m shooting this weekend. I feel ready – totally ready to get this done and make this happen. But my body is FREAKING OUT, and taking my brain with it. I can’t think one thing without thinking another. I can’t turn off the constant noise in my head about “you should, you shouldn’t, They say, why does everybody, everybody can’t be that bad, GOD SAYS, help, I quit…”

I skipped a treatment dose this morning, but it didn’t lift this. I guess it was already in too deep and doing the work. So the good news is that I’m back here. And the bad news is that I’m back here.

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I call this a faith journal. This is a HARD place. The place where I’m supposed to write about God, and about having faith in Him. But faith doesn’t exist without doubts, and days like today raise a lot of them. I can’t just say that God is going to come down and miraculously lift this off me. Heck, He may want me to go through it and destroy the “brand” that seems to be locking me in – GOD, I hate that word. It’s like everything I do publicly is supposed to serve my BRAND.

Good grief.

NOT HAPPENING.

I’m uncontrollably restless. I can’t stick to one thing. I just can’t. I want to – you have no idea how I want to – but I am like the wind, like the mountains, like the storms that used to scare me and don’t anymore, because they speak to a part of me that is whirling and ready to fly away into them. I’m unpredictable and unprofessional and I DON’T do all the right I know to do because I DON’T think of it in every moment, and if I have to think of it in every moment, I completely freeze. This is not perfection. This is ridiculous.

I know some will say that I just need to rest in the Lord. I need to pray more, read my Bible more, go to church more. But with this all out naked and getting nakeder (is that even POSSIBLE – man, I wish I knew it wasn’t!), I literally have no idea which direction is UP.

The absolutely only thing I know is Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and that is a TERRIBLY uncomfortable place to be, when I don’t want crucified, and I’m not sure that Jesus is a good answer to all the things I want for here, not sure that He is reward enough for me.

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I write things NOBODY admits. I know that. Heck, maybe nobody gets to this point. But for me it’s all out raw, and I can’t just make it stop or go away, and even my confession is done in the name of Jesus Christ because there is no other way on earth I’d be brave enough to admit that I struggle with this stuff, that I don’t want easy answers or easy fixes or cliched encouragements or seven steps to fixing all this mess.

I want real God for a real life, that is MESSY, that doesn’t necessarily carry the hope that everything will get better or perfect or saner or whatever. In this moment, that is the only thing I know that I want. So my doubts about whether He’ll come through visibly in the physical realm? I think they’re legit. Because if I know Him, He really probably won’t.

But if I know Him, somehow, somewhere in my heart, I’m going to know that He Himself is reward enough for me. And living from there, mess, mistakes, restlessness and all – I can still have peace, regardless of the shoulds and the have-to’s.

I really hate being so bombastic. But maybe that happens because my heart wasn’t made for here, and it’s pushing for Home with all its might.

By kellē | August 1, 2011 | depression, from here, God n me, His |

More

Pete says he sees a change. He says I’m doing better. I do see a little more energy here, a little faster movement there. My brain is a little clearer than it has been. But this week has been hard on me. Because more or faster or clearer, the herx is taking me back through the depression, and every day has been a struggle.

It has been hard to lift my hand to do anything, hard to feel that I’ve done it when I have. I half-pray for a team of people to just keep telling me that “you’re doing it!” and keep reminding me that I am more than I think I am – but then I kick myself for thinking that way. How self-centered can I be?

My doctor told me 2-3 days of this. We’re at about four weeks today. My body just feels like it’s having a very long bad day. My heart feels jerked around.

Tomorrow, I decide whether I should travel to North Carolina for a wedding I scheduled next weekend. We don’t have childcare, which makes everything interesting anyway. I don’t know how my health will handle it. I think with another week, a small, laid-back wedding, I can do it, but any stress at all exacts a price.

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I wrestle with my nothingness, wanting to be great. I fight my limitations, wishing I could do more. I stare down my pride, asking for humility, and in the next moment, God reminds me that I am not so good as I wish to be, praying the humility so I can be greater.

My heart goes in circles, only settling if I stop trying to figure it out, if I just rest and let God be God, regardless of what I am, what I don’t want to be. The trying, the wrestling, the fighting – it doesn’t get me anywhere. These are the days that nothing really helps, when I am strong enough to go through the motions and too weak to feel as though I am really living.

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I know that I am His, but I wish for more. I want answers. I want Him to tell me what to do. I want Him to just make me what I hope to be in Him – right now. “Then people would love me,” I think. Maybe some would. But others – the more I become like Him, the more of a catalyst I am. They would have less reason to want me.

I wish I didn’t care so much about what other people think of me. I wish I wasn’t like every other real person out there in the world, trying to find a place and wondering why no one cares, why no one comes running for what I have to offer when it might be so much better than what someone else is offering.

I think I want to be the person who cares. The person who sees who others are where they are and gives them courage to be. But all this me in the way seems too much sometimes. All this tired, all this down – it’s hard to see past the very next moment. Heck, it’s hard to see, period, right now with the detox passing through my eyes.

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Strangely, at the end of this ramble (which has played oh-so-many times through my heart this week), I find myself grateful for the ones who see me. Grateful for small words of encouragement dropped into tired days. Grateful for affirmation of my strengths from a friend with the gift of encouragement. I think maybe humility begins in gratitude. It is HARD to say thank you. Hard to acknowledge that you were given something you couldn’t secure for yourself. Hard to think of others as better.

“What do you have to lose?” I hear Him ask in the quiet of my heart. “Just my own place,” I answer.

But if I’m His, I’ll always be found in Him. I might want more, but I know down deep that is enough.

By kellē | July 29, 2011 | depression, from here, health |

Sunset

Here is where the gold
gets all tangled up in brown,
dancing tangos with the crimson
in the old, tired oaks.

-July 27, 2011

I hate being a writer sometimes. You think you have inspiration, and it stops after one sentence. So I made a poem. I think it’s awfully pretty, even if it didn’t flesh out into more.

By kellē | July 28, 2011 | poetry |

Diminish

“Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.“
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942

By kellē | July 27, 2011 | from here, health |

Opinion III

I don’t talk about politics. I actually have some very strong opinions about them, but I honestly feel that there is no need to add one more shout to the din by expressing them. So this opinion isn’t about politics. It is about Christians in politics. And I will try to be kind, but I’ve had a lot of time as a Christian NOT talking about politics to be able to feel that I have a reasonable opinion to offer here. You know, while I’m allowing my own subjective approach to come out.

I was a freshman in a college that was out to change the world by training and connecting its students into government. I had gone in as a creative writing major, so I didn’t feel the same strictures to my thinking that my friends felt as they set their eyes on the prize – I think most of them imagined that they could be president one day. One of our classes was a discussion class that posed a question or two per week, intended to give us training in both speaking and critical thinking.

The question that came up on the day I will never forget was “How involved should Christians be in politics?”

I started an essay running the predictable lines I’d heard, and then I stopped mid-essay, realizing I didn’t actually believe what I was saying. By the time I was finished, I’d come to the conclusion that while it wasn’t a sin for a Christian to be involved in politics, there was no real Biblical mandate that we must be.

I was on the essay examination panel that week, holding that position in a room full of students who were there to get into politics. At one point, someone else on the panel turned to me and asked incredulously, “What are you doing at this school???”

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I am not pro-choice. I do not support gay marriage. I believe that abortion is murder and that homosexuality is an abomination to God. But I will not be a voice for the religious right to speak their condemnation of these practices into our political system.

I believe that God has placed earthly governments over us – no matter which party is in power, what leader we have, what the rest of the world says about us. It is NOT a theocracy or a church hierarchy. It is a completely secular entity formed by man and propagated by man. God holds the heart of the king, but He allows the king to make the decisions he will as a man and uses those decisions for His ultimate glory.

He is perfectly capable of speaking His own wrath, when He is ready.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

-Romans 1:18-32

Christians in America have had unprecedented involvement in politics. They have turned sins into political agendas, waging a religious war against flesh and blood, a war that they are destined to lose, because flesh and blood will return to dust. It is a war that Paul attacks in Romans 2, warning his readers against judging, reminding them that as they judge, so will they be judged.

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I personally don’t care if gay marriage is legalized in all 50 states. I would not choose it for myself; it is not my responsibility to hold others back from their choices. I am extremely cautious about politicizing abortion. Judgment offers only death in attempt to preach life. The idea of a government run by a religious right terrifies me – not because I’m party to the left, but because we have no more business forcing God on those who don’t choose Him than He has taken forcing Himself on us. We are told to gird ourselves for battle by putting on Jesus Christ – not by attempting to drown out and eradicate all the voices that rise up against Him.

If we back out of the debates, we run the risk of becoming “good men who do nothing”, but it will only prove the matter I already suspect, that we have already taken on such futility in our thinking that we have forgotten how to be a light. That we have stopped believing that our very lives lived in Christ are enough to condemn others for not choosing Him. That we believe our city on a hill is dependent on an earthly government for its existence.

God has given man up to his passions, but He sent Jesus to die for love of us all. Our voice in politics – or anywhere – should be the echo of a loving God who sees us for what we are and has done everything He can do to reveal Himself while He may yet be found.

As a Christian, I believe that it is my place to speak the Gospel – that Jesus died to redeem us and reconcile us to God so that we could know Him, not to reform us and our character. This is good news indeed – good news that is not being preached in the political arenas where judgment and a louder “right” is the going rate to gain a seat in any district.

There will be no such thing as a Christian Utopia or earthly Kingdom of God until Jesus returns. People sin and will continue to sin until sin is no more and God dwells with us without separation. Making political wars over sins won’t speak grace to a world that desperately needs Him.

By kellē | July 26, 2011 | grace, opinion |