OIL, WATER, and the LIES we tell ourselves

I’ve got layers of lies that I don’t even know about yet. Sara Groves

Here’s what happened:

A friend told me something and I believed her. I do that. I’m a believing, trusting sort of person. The thing is, what she told me was only half true. Not half true to her—she told me the truth as best as she could, but it was only half of the whole truth. I didn’t know the other parties involved, so what could I do? I believed her. This is what friends do.

But the water has sunk to the bottom and the oil has risen to the top and with it all the floating particles that are still coated with enough water that I can’t look into that cup without seeing more of the whole story.

And my heart is sick.

Because her true-to-her story was only half of the story and now I know the other half, and the other half is my friend too, and when you love oil and water, even if they hate each other, what can you do? You believe them both with as much grace as you can muster. This is what good friends do.

But at some point the whole thing gets shaken up again and it takes a while for things to settle and while it’s still shaken you feel sicker and sicker still because there are always three sides to every story, hers, his, and the horrible, awful, honest truth. With a choice so divided, what can you do? You choose truth. This is what the truest friend does.

To choose truth, though, means to lose other things, namely trust.

Today trust was lost and I mourn that. I mourn it so hard and so deeply because I have been lied to, though neither of them did the lying.

I was the one lying all along. And that is the most heartbreaking of it all.

Paul admonishes the Thessalonians to “aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.”

I’m stuck on that today because I didn’t live quietly and I listened to the lies. But the lies were of my own making and they said something like this: You are big enough to handle the heartbreaking details of someone’s life all by yourself. You are big enough to have an opinion on lives that aren’t your own. You are big enough to discern truth from lies and from opinions and cries.

The truth is that I am not a part of the problem or the solution here; I am only a particle that floated to the top of his story, coated in the residue of her story. Just one small particle.

And if God did not give me the grace to handle this (at least without some amount of bellyaching), then it is probably best for me to simply bow out.

YOU, ME, and EVERYONE we know

Imagine with me a kingdom. A palace set on a hill with a town below littered with small homes of people—and a Troubadour making his way from Palace to People, back and forth. In the palace there are servants, kings, footmen, princes, cooks, and taste-testers; there are seamstresses, children, queens, and teachers. In the town there are servants, fathers, children, mothers, cooks, teachers, sellers, and tailors. And there is a troubadour making his way from Palace to People.

In the Palace everyone has a role and no one without a role is allowed in the door. There is a code of conduct within the castle walls and any outsiders are known, and all the insiders have things to say about them when their backs are turned.

Among the People outsiders are common and welcome, travelers pass through, sick people rest for a while, everyone earns his own way and they get there by the sweat of their brow. There is no protection out here and it is every man for himself. No one dares cross the threshold of the Palace.

And there is a Troubadour who goes from Palace to People to Palace to People.

From the People to the Palace he brings his stories, his lore, his songs, making melody from their harmony. He represents the town-people to the palace-people and they all clap their hands, their cheeks red with laughter and strong drink, they point and beg for more, more, more!

From the Palace to the People, he brings his secrets because who doesn't trust the ears of nearby troubadour? Plans and propositions fly mightily across the tables in the great hall when the wine flows freely and the kings toast in the presence of a mere entertainer.

The Troubadour never belongs in either place and carries with him the residue of both places, the People and the Palace. But kingdoms will rise and fall on the shoulders of this Troubadour, this ambassador, he who is never at home wherever he is, he who is just another person to the People and just another participant at the Palace.

Are you from the Palace or the People? Or are you a Troubadour, easily slipping in and out of both places effortlessly? There's no right or wrong answer here. I've just been thinking about cliques and culture and the people we trust to let in and the people we don't trust and, most of all, the people who purposefully don't fit anywhere.

SHOOTING STRAIGHT

I knew it was going to be okay when I learned that I was an arrow—shaped, sharpened, and shot to hit a target the archers couldn't hit on their own.

I knew it was going to be okay, that my parents, my churches, and my own heart were all archers in their own right, forming and formulating strategies to wage war. And sometimes my parents, my churches, and my own heart would go to bed at night, lay down their arms, and rest knowing they had done all and stood well, and now it was time to rest.

This past weekend one of our pastors spoke about fatherhood and I broke.

I broke because I have failed as a daughter and have been failed too. Because in my family there is estrangement and brokenness. There is a failure to acknowledge the good that was and the bad that shouldn't have been. I broke because all of my misconceptions about God have been rooted in a failure to understand that parents are only earthly shadows, not even a particle of the real thing—and I have gotten it backwards. I broke because my pastor read this verse: For [our fathers] disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.

As it seemed best to them.

Best. To them.

I broke, more than anything, because if there is one thing I come against again and again it is the failure to recognize that my life's circumstances, and the people in them, are mere archers. They have done their best to craft me and shoot me straight as it seemed to them. But I am the arrow—ultimately hitting the target is not up to them, it is up to me and the Master crafter.

We are a reactive generation—holding up our parents and churches and even our own wicked hearts at times, and we are saying, "None of that now! They have done us wrong! A new way! A better way!"

But here is the truth, more than anything: the better way, the best way, is to trust that every way that seemed best to those we feel failed most by, was part of the best way for God to discipline us for our good, that we may share in His holiness.

He took all our collective brokenness, the unfair rules and poor theology, the bad politics and dysfunctional church environments, even the abuse and shame, He took all of it, bore the fullness of it, and whatever He has given to us to bear is for our good. We get to share in His holiness because of it.

Even broken archers can shoot straight arrows and even broken arrows can still hit targets.

He's already won the war for us.

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior

are the children of one's youth.

Blessed is the man

who fills his quiver with them!

He shall not be put to shame

when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

Psalm 127:3-5

I DO

If you put two girls together, both with mousy brown hair, both awkward eighth graders, both with startlingly blue eyes, and both avid collectors of, well, anything, it would be a perfect recipe for friendship. 

If you make them both short, one a little dramatic, the other a little quiet, one a risk taker and loud laugher, one a bit shy and safety finder, the possibilities are endless for the trouble they could get into. But the certainty of haven is sure.

If you mix them well for over 15 years, have them as nearly next door neighbors for a few, move one seven hours away, move them both to another country altogether. Maybe have them share a room, and then keep mixing well for the next few years so they are never in the same place at the same time for more than a few days, you could have a mess on your hands. 

Or you could not. 

It would be good if they are equally matched in all things, so there is no competition, no jealousy, but it would be best if they are unmatched in nearly everything, leaning heavily on one another for what the other lacks. 

Long periods of silence may be necessary, both in the presence of one another and when apart. But oh how sweet it is when they are 30 years old and still whispering under patchwork quilts late into the night. 

It would be very good if each girl still called the other the same nickname no matter how old, and if at the age of 80, when to be called Bean and Lowly would seem embarrassing and childish, they are still doing it. 

It is good when one or both imagine their weddings, the line of girls accompanying always changes save for one another, they always remain. But it is better that one or both imagine their life, the circle of trust, dependability, unconditional love, loyalty, and those who know how to hug the right amount of time with the right amount of pressure, there is always that other girl. 

Not everyone has that sort of girl in her life. 

But I do. 

Happy 30th birthday dearest friend. 

RESIDUAL

The great tragedy of my generation, and perhaps yours too, is we cannot appreciate the residue.

Almost two years ago, when I was ready to leave the church, finished with unanswered questions, unexplained theology, and mostly my unchanged heart, a wise man cautioned me. He didn't say I couldn't leave, he didn't even answer my burning questions about tithing and church membership. He simply talked about residue.

He told me how every place into which we walk, we take with us the residue of the former place. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes it isn't. But it doesn't change the fact that there is residue.

I know this residue because I know my family, and the awful and beautiful desperation in each of us to find some resolution in our faith. The thing is, I'm not sure any one of us realizes every new place is unsoiled in our minds until we walk in there with our past and hand it with trembling hands to yet another person to review.

I have found an abiding rest among people who laud the character of God more than the handiwork of God. For my oldest brother, he found solace in liturgy and the Orthodox church; another brother finds his sanctuary among people and an adventurous life; yet another one took his to the grave and another one has sworn off religion entirely. The one who was four when he declared he would be a pastor, is 17 now and I have no doubt that wherever he goes the gospel is carried. I have yet to see where the youngest two land.

This I do know: were you to gather the doors of every church we have collectively darkened the hallway would go on for a seeming eternity.

The residue my parents left with us (and I'd venture to guess they carried over from their own parents) is a unsatiated curiosity that will not be silenced by the mere telling, but only by the experiencing.

We were the experientially educated.

This meant while other families were stuck in their routines and normality, rote reasons for what they did every single day of life, my family was on some sort of adventure to figure it out. And sometimes it looked different every year. Because this was our family we didn't know any differently, and I cannot thank my parents enough for the flexibility of spirit they gave each of us. There is not one of our brood who will not choose risk over reward every day. This is what they gave us, this is the sweet residue of growing up in my family.

But it also meant my parents were sometimes figuring it out in front of us, as we went along. And that residue was left on us as well. It felt like whiplash sometimes, the speed at which things would change, new convictions, new ways of living. It was always an adventure, but not always a pleasant one. And it left us, me at least, with more questions than answers. This is what I mean when I talk about an unsatiated curiosity--I likely won't stop until I understand something as fully as is possible on this dirt-ridden kingdom (regardless of how many things get torn apart in the process).

It also left me with a deep, deep understanding that people everywhere are figuring it out. Democrats and Republicans, Reformed and Arminian, complementarian and egalitarian, churched and unchurched, organic and prepackaged. Deeply in us, we're still figuring it out, still walking by faith, atheists and Jesus-lovers both.

And deeply in us we bear the residue of someone else who was trying to figure it out, and on and on it goes.

The great tragedy of my generation is that we fail to appreciate truth regardless of the package or label, and more so, we fail to appreciate the residue it holds and leaves on people around us.

You and I, we're shaped by ideals, ethics, theology, and practices and I guarantee not one of us arrived there on our own. 

We all carry the residue of what came before us.

The next time I find myself wanting to preach something, retweet a clever 140 characters, facebook a quote, or sink into deep thought over an ideal not my own--I want to think about this: who arrived at this thought and what reside were they carrying? And how does my residue read this differently than it was perhaps meant? Or how might my residue lend wisdom to this thought?

I think I would be quieter, less egotistical, and certainly more circumspect if I asked these questions more often.

I think the residue I would leave might be more of a pleasing fragrance than a sticky mess:

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.       II Corinthians 2:14-17

BY DESIGN

My great-grandfather was an artist and so was my grandfather, and my father, when he took a pencil to napkins in restaurants or bic pens to paper in our kitchen, he was an artist too. He, like all parents of burgeoning children, thought me an artist too, but I felt that every sparse compliment was his way of taking ownership over me: this is mine, I created her and now she creates too. And so I stopped drawing.

I still inked in margins and doodled on homework, but the real work of artistry happened in my head where it would be safe from the gift of DNA and genetics. I am stubborn like this.

I was in middle school when my father left his position of 25 years to work as an entrepreneur, a graphic artist. I couldn't understand work being a calling or working at your gift because work, to me, was laborious and had little reward. My parents were always into hard work and never into allowances, both models which I am grateful for now, but despised then.

"You could do this too, you know," he would tell me and I would shrug my shoulders.

He had boxes of paper samples and a fanned book of colors with codes I didn't understand, but I was secretly fascinated by it all. Sketches of designs and type and programs he left open on his computer—all of it some secret world into digital design. This was 1992 or 1993 and he was just starting out, so his tools were crude, but his creations were not.

I remember the first design of his that I saw in the real world, a car-dealership logo on a highway in Upper Bucks County. I knew all the headache and pain and frustration and fears that had gone into that logo and I knew that though the rights no longer belonged to him, the artistry did.

In college I was the senior editor of our literary magazine, a 100 page annual of the finest our English and Arts departments could offer up on the altar of narcissism. I was the editor because I was a hard worker and a good writer and our faculty liked that about me, but I knew next to nothing about layout or design. It was the first time I touched the digital tools that had come so far in only a decade, since my father was towing the line of graphic art.

I spent hours on those programs, aligning margins, editing content, placing objects and that semester I also took a class in digital illustration. I found the classes easy and intuitive, a creative outlet from the technical writing and literary analysis I was spending the bulk of my time doing. The design lab was a secret and dark room, special permission only and I was let in—they let me in.

The following semester I took a class in painting and somehow became friends with the professor, a young, brooding artist who pushed my skills from flat, boring still-lifes to my real love, mixed media with a message. I illustrated my favorite Flannery O'Connor story and gave the finished product to my mother for Christmas. I rarely go to Florida, where she lives, so I haven't seen it since.

I finished college, picking up enough art classes for a minor, though graduated with plans to only write for the rest of my life. But DNA is a hard beast to beat and now it is my desk that holds paper samples and a fan-book of Pantone color codes, my pens and pencils inking sketches on notebook papers.

The truth is that I design, though I am only marginally good at it, because to do what I really want to do is too fearful a step to take. Sometimes I think about my dad, who quit after 25 years to pursue a dream and a gift and I wonder if I will ever be as brave as him to stop doing what I accidentally discovered I could do, and to start doing what I know I was born to do.

A MIRACLE BABY

Today is the 11th birthday of my youngest brother Benjamin. He was, what you would call, a miracle baby.

You may argue that every baby is a miracle baby, and you may have evidence to back up your claim. But that doesn't change mine.

On April 19th in 2000, on a rainy morning where the grass was a brilliant green and the trees were still stark and dark, like a cowlick that won’t stay down, two of our teenagers left the house shouting and running, laughing and gunning an engine.

In fifteen minutes one brother was dead, lying in the middle of the highway less than a mile from our house. Traffic was stopped on both sides; lights spun, sirens blared and our brother, the best brother, we had always said, was lying misshapen on the wet blacktop. Death never comes conveniently, but it always comes memorably.

And for one week our family, who was beginning to fracture already, we banded. We gathered close, hundreds of people came through our door, and we clung. We clung fiercely for those weeks. My smallest brothers slept in bed with me, curled close, and I laid awake at night praying that God would never take them, not ever, because losing a part of yourself once hurts enough for a lifetime.

But it did not take long for those small fractures in the togetherness of us to spread. Death, when it comes, puts a pressure that even the strongest glass cannot withstand.

So it is a miracle that my mother found herself to be pregnant a few months later. It is first a miracle because she was in her forties. It is second a miracle because she and my dad were hardly on speaking terms. But it is a miracle most of all because that conception happened in such a way that that baby was due to come on April 19, 2001—one year from the day Andrew died.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away—but not always in that order.

Sometimes the Lord takes away and then the Lord gives.

We have always been small babies, petite, tiny, fragile—all of us. But nothing prepared us for the smallness of Benjamin when he arrived, because—as today is his birthday—he came two months early.

Two months.

When he was born my hand could cup his entire body and I am known to have small hands. We could not touch his skin, so fragile and thin, translucent, like a bad burn. He was kept in an incubator for weeks, and we, who had never concerned ourselves with weights and measures smaller than pounds or halves, suddenly knew the worth of a gram.

2200 grams. This was the target. But when you are born less than 1000 grams, this is half your life.

We watched that incubator with long hope.

And life, it seemed, was put on hold.

The fracture was complete at this point, divisions were deep, and we were all living separate lives, but in that NICU, we were a family. We had witnessed a miracle and a miracle can go a long way—I held on to that belief for a long, long time.

I still do, in some ways.

The day we brought Benjamin home, all I can remember was how cold it was. Not for us, maybe, but how cold it must be to be apart first from your mother’s womb and now the incubator. We are a warm family still, withstanding the fracture, but even we cannot grow a child when it is outside the safest places in the world.

Benjamin has never known our parents to be together. Half his life he lived with Mom and half his life has been with Dad. He has never lived in a home with all of us together and I’ll be honest—I worry about that sometimes.

I worry that the miracle baby will grow into a boy and man who never knew the security that comes of two parents together and older siblings who were never close enough to make Sunday dinner a priority.

But I’ll be honest—I don’t worry too much.

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the length to which God goes to save us and to restore creation in ways we call miracles, but He originally just called good. And when I remember that I stop worrying because God cares about due dates and death dates and He doesn’t mix them up, not ever.

Andrew David didn't die too soon and Benjamin David didn’t arrive too soon. And healing, when it comes for this fractured world, will be on time too.

That’s the beauty of birthdays. I think. They’re right on time.

Happy 11th birthday, Benjamin David Ferguson. You are a miracle in every sense of the word and I love you.

 Benjamin, our neice, Iliana, and me last October

the girls next door

We make a home slowly, because this is how homes are made. It takes a year, but after a year, when we are piled on top of each other, sharing space, sharing rooms, sharing air, when the space finally seems too small, we discover that we have made a home.

This morning we are eating pumpkin oatmeal, sipping coffee, sitting on the floor and she says "I'm sad. I'll miss our small home." We are just moving next door, so please forgive our melancholy--homes are made slowly and we know this.

Someone asks me yesterday what Texas has given me and the answer is quick, without thought: this home, but in particular, these girls. In this home I have known grace toward me and grace inside of me, more than I ever thought possible. Wherever I have lived I have been happy, whether pockets of happiness or streams of it, there has been happiness. I have known community. I have known the struggle of living life beside another breathing, thinking, feeling life. And it has been hard. And it has been good.

But this home?

In this home it has just been good, a steady stream of good. We have wrestled through doubts, questions, crushes, first dates and last ones. We have laughed until our sides hurt, and wept in fear or anger. Here, in this place, we have known Jesus and we have known each other. Here is another thing we have known: that we are not finished yet. And what a comfort that has been, to me especially, to know that this home is a work in progress and we are each too.

I come from a place where the doors are always open and where people freely come and go, and I wished for that for this home. In the beginning I tried to make it happen and was sad when it didn't. Our neighborhood isn't conveniently located, and while it has a lovely downtown, there isn't much to draw people here. I don't know when the shift happened though, in my heart, where I realized that if our home is our primary place of ministry, then the people we share life with ought to get the first parts of us.

This is why, when a friend asked me the other day, why I didn't move closer to where the action is, where my church family is, and where I'd be certain to keep my social calendar full, the answer was easy for me: these girls are my family. I'd rather minister to and be ministered to by these girls than to have a bigger house, or a more central location. I'd rather wrestle through life, questions, faith, and fears within this home than start all over again.

I know my nemesis is a fear of commitment, a fear of locking myself into anything or anyone, a fear that I will be needed beyond what I have to give. And when I signed my name as the primary leasee the other day I checked my heart for that fear, I dug around a bit, pushed on the tender parts of me, checking to see if that fear still lingered.

It couldn't be found.

I know that in this place we are not covenanted with one another, at any point one of us could leave, get married, move away. In the past this lack of covenant has been a source of frustration for me because I want unconditional love and I can't find it anywhere on earth. But more and more I am learning that part of covenant is choosing to love and not loving because you have to hold contract. Loving because it's a decision. Building a home around trust and mutual care, selflessness.

But I find that you can be surprised by covenant--that it's not something you choose with a flourish and a signature. That it comes slowly, the way you build a home. That it is shared, the way you live in your space. That it is binding, the way you care for the wounds of another. That it is full, the way you stock your life.

That it is here, in this home, where we have been a family.

And that it will be there, next door, where we will be more.

We're emptying out.

residue

The great tragedy of my generation, and perhaps yours too, is that we cannot appreciate the residue. A few years ago, when I was ready to leave the church, finished with unanswered questions, unexplained theology, and mostly my unchanged heart, a wise man cautioned me. He didn't say I couldn't leave, he didn't even answer my burning questions about tithing and church membership. He simply talked about residue.

I know this residue because I know my family, and the awful and beautiful desperation in each of us to find some resolution in our faith. The thing is, I'm not sure any one of us realizes that every new place is unsoiled in our minds until we walk in there with our past and hand it with trembling hands to yet another person to review.

I have found an abiding rest among people who laud the character of God more than the work of God. For my oldest brother, he found solace in liturgy and the Orthodox church for a time; another brother finds his sanctuary among people and an adventurous life; yet another one took his to the grave and another one has sworn off religion entirely. The one who was four when he declared he would be a pastor, is a man now and I have no doubt that wherever he goes the gospel is carried. I have yet to see where the youngest two land.

This I do know: were you to gather the doors of every church we have collectively darkened the hallway would go on for a seeming eternity.

The residue my parents left with us (and I'd venture to guess they carried over from their own parents) is a unsatiated curiosity that will not be silenced by the mere telling, but only by the experiencing.

We were the experientially educated.

This meant that while other families were stuck in their routines and normality, rote reasons for what they did every single day of life, my family was on some sort of adventure to figure it out. And sometimes it looked different every year. Because this was our family we didn't know any differently, and I cannot thank my parents enough for the flexibility of spirit they gave each of us. There is not one of our brood who will not choose risk over reward every day. This is what they gave us, this is the sweet residue of growing up in my family.

But it also meant that my parents were sometimes figuring it out in front of us, as we went along. And that residue was left on us as well. It felt like whiplash sometimes, the speed at which things would change, new convictions, new ways of living. It was always an adventure, but not always a pleasant one. And it left us, me at least, with more questions than answers. This is what I mean when I talk about an unsatiated curiosity--I likely won't stop until I understand something as fully as is possible on this dirt-ridden kingdom (regardless of how many things get torn apart in the process).

It also left me with a deep, deep understanding that people everywhere are figuring it out. Democrats and Republicans, Reformed and Arminian, complementarian and egalitarian, churched and unchurched, organic and prepackaged. Deeply in us, we're still figuring it out, still walking by faith, atheists and Jesus-lovers both. And deeply in us we bear the residue of someone else who was trying to figure it out, and on and on it goes.

The great tragedy of my generation is that we fail to appreciate truth regardless of the package or label, and more so, we fail to appreciate the residue it holds and leaves on people around us.

You and I, we're shaped by ideals, ethics, theology, and practices and I guarantee that not one of us arrived there on our own. We all carry the residue of what came before us.

The next time I find myself wanting to rant on something, retweet a clever 140 characters, facebook a quote, or sink into deep thought over an ideal not my own--I want to think about this: who arrived at this thought and what reside were they carrying? And how does my residue read this differently than it was perhaps meant? Or how might my residue lend wisdom to this thought?

I think I would be quieter, less egotistical, and certainly more circumspect if I asked these questions more often.

I think the residue I would leave might be more of a pleasing fragrance than a sticky mess:

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.       II Corinthians 2:14-17

home(less)

They say to write what you know best, but I suppose I have transplanted too many times to know anything but my own soul best. And so I write about this.

I know this may irk the stay-at-home mom whose life is a series of ebb and flow normality, or the theologian who feels that the soul is a mere mirror and not worth the time I spend on it. It may bore the businessman or collegiate. But I know no other thing on earth well, so from this I build my stories.

I am jealous of the homesteader, the one who has birthed generations in the same house, who has first steps on the same ground as first kisses and then their own child's miracle steps. I am jealous of dialects and regional habits. I want a language that identifies me instead of the mashup of history, people, and landscape that I call home. I say that everywhere is home, because it is, but partly because nowhere is home and to say this out loud is hard.

Christ is home and in this I take comfort, but it sounds more cliche than true, so I'm careful about how much and to whom I say it. You doubt me even as you read that, I suspect.

Because to be homeless, save Christ, is not popular, not even recommended. So go home, come home, people say. But you should know this, when you say that, my soul answers: I am home. Wherever I am, I am home.

Or my soul asks: where is home?

If it is with people I love or people who love me, then I am home. If it is where I grew up, then it is impossible to return. If it is where I grew most, how does one quantify that? If it is with blood and kin, my home covers the globe. If it is a church, a sanctuary, then I am making my own and building it with others. If it is simply the place where I am most myself, then I will always be homeless.

If, however, it is Christ alone, then there is no matter my dialect or my region, I am home wherever and there is never anything to leave or to come.

And so, I am home.

 (these are things)

iliana

My hippie big brother and his almost ethereal blond wife put their heads together and came up with the great idea of making this beaut. I get to meet her in about four weeks. Forgive me for using this blog for my own personal shout-out, but, well, it's my blog and she's my flesh and blood and I want to.

We are wiling away our Sunday in good ways, with coffee and conversation. Honest questions and solid answers. Communing in life.

It is good that The Bird and I decided to do our series on community this week and I hope you'll keep coming back for it each day this coming week. I say it is good, though, because it has been a challenge for me in this season.

I am built for community. We all are, I think. We are built for communing and sharing and partaking, mourning and rejoicing with. We are built to need.

But there has never been a time in my life where community has felt further from me. I am from a culture where doors are always open, extra space at the dinner table is always made, schedules are cleared for relationships and where personal space is rarely a consideration (sometimes to a fault).

In my last home I never knew who would be sleeping on our couch, floor, or upstairs room when I woke up in the morning. We lived outside in. We lived transparently and openly with anyone who would cross the threshold of Home. All were welcome.

I miss this life.

No matter how often I say, hey, our doors are always open, it just doesn't seem to happen here in the way in which I'm accustomed.

This isn't bad. It would be bad if it were ongoing. But I understand that I am new here and things take time.

But I'm not content to have it stay this way.

So I am grateful for a visiting brother this week--one of the people who has taught me through blood, sweat and tears, that God sets the lonely in families and sometimes he uses lone individuals to BE family. I have always been set in families, my entire life, my natural family, my church family, my makeshift family--all these groups of people who take literally the mandate "be fruitful and multiply" even without the transference of genes and DNA.

I am the product of families.

And I am learning so deeply that I am creating a family even now. I am investing in my future family by creating family right now.

I do not have to wait for natural or adopted children, a husband's vision, a life shared in marital covenant. I begin now to create family, habits that I want my home to be identified by, a spirit that I want my habitat to encompass. I begin now to seek lonelies and create havens. My family. My community.

I have seen her twice in the past week. Once in the car on the way home from Chattanooga and once while walking down the street, passing windows, with two friends.

People say I most resemble my aunt and sometimes I see it, in my very blue eyes, in my five foot glory, or the dimple in my chin. But in all the recent sightings, peek-shows in mirrors and reflections, I see my mother in me. Perhaps it's the loose ringlets, encouraged by southern humidity, or the way I walk when I am unconscious of walking at all. I don't know. But I see her often.

I see her in the sewing project that has been spread across our dining room table for a few weeks, slowly filling a large cardboard box set to be mailed to California soon. She sewed baby quilts for all of us; I think mine was dark green, mauve, and grey with a rocking horse on it. The last time I saw it it was hanging on the wall of a nursery belonging to some other person's baby, but there was always the promise of another quilt of my own someday. I've forgotten about it. Now I am sewing baby quilts for someone else.

I see her in my love for colors. My bedroom pieced together in burnt orange, apple green and sky blue, and a plethora of found objects building my eclectic kingdom. People say my room is peaceful. I remember the houses in which I grew up—and it is peace that I remember the most until my teens brought out the monster in me and the angst ridden marriage brought out the fear in the rest of us.

I recently called her to let her know that the one thing she always did that bothered me most was the one thing I found myself doing. But if you knew that two perfectly good, beautiful pieces of furniture were about to be thrown in a dumpster by unsuspecting renovators, you would rescue them too. A deep blue dry sink and a lovely dijon colored cupboard are residents in our home now. I knocked on a door and asked to adopt them, just like she always did. I refinished one and left the other with all its scratches and coats of paint, because it adds character. Just like she always said.

I see her in the way I apply mascara, lightly and rarely. I see her in my love for folk art and jazz. I see her in the way I am with words, keenly aware of my power to communicate whatever I feel, sometimes unaware that death and life are in the tongue. I see her in my passion for homemaking—for making a home wherever I am with whatever I find. I see her in my green thumb. At last count there are twenty-two plants in residence on our front porch; she and I spent a half an hour text-messaging herb care pointers the other day.

She has short, straight hair now, not the long ripples of black with which I grew up. She drives a black four-door Malibu, trading in the vans and station wagons of my youth. She listens to bands I've never heard of and is up on all the latest BMXing news, compliments of my 18 year old brother who breathes bikes and boards. She calls Florida home now, oddly for me, proudly labeled a northeasterner even if I live in the south. Her new house is filled with black leather couches, pink dining room furniture, and flamingos of every sort—I think they started out as a joke and turned into a hobby.

But some things always stay the same because they are the things she passed on to me, her tangible Bucks County accent, her mannerisms, the tulip I painted on the cupboard, replicated from the fraktur folk art of my youth. We joke about the Brady thighs we both have, and she always tells me I have lips like her mother, round and pouty. We'll never

We don't see each other often, and it is usually when she passes through Tennessee on her way to New York, and I can't promise that we'll live near one another when she, or I, are old and grey. But there are some things that time and money and location and divorce, and even change can't change.

Like my love of color and my green thumb, my frugality and my creativity. These are things my mother gave me for keeps. These are the ways I see my mother every day.

Reposted from June 2007.

I don't write much about my family here, some things are too tender to ply with and I guard the subject dearly. Too many years of misunderstandings and hurts and battles keep my mouth silent on that front. I love them each dearly, even though we are spread to all corners of the United States and the globe. I am grateful for our story, as haphazard and dysfunctional as it may seem to both the casual observer and the intimate friend. That's the thing about not knowing someone at all or knowing someone very well: you can imagine the worst or know the worst, so it's better to just get it over with and know people well.

But once in a while I do let myself think about this living, breathing organism that birthed me, crafted me, grew me, released me, and still lets me call them family. And once in a great while, when I am brave enough to let you peek at those thoughts, I write them here:

Today is April 19 and to you that is just another day. Perhaps you thought of the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, perhaps it's your birthday, perhaps you remembered a bill that was due today, or perhaps it was just another Tuesday.

To me, though, April 19 is never just another day and only one thought pulses through me all of this day every year. Five years, six years, seven years, last year it was ten years and this year it makes eleven years.

Soon, he will have been dead longer than he was alive.

Andrew David Ferguson 1986-2000

I think about that a lot.

Something about it still being less than 14 years since he died, keeps me feeling like I know him still, he is still fresh in my mind, his voice is still present, familiar to me, his crooked smile is stayed, permanently crooked.

But soon, in a few years, then the baby who was born so soon after he died will turn 14 and we will all know then, then it has been a long time. A very long time.

Soon, all the photos I have of him will begin to look their age.

It will stop feeling like he was here, real, a part of us.

I remember worrying that I would forget him. Those months and weeks after he died, I would lay in bed at night and try my best to remember his voice, his steps, his smell. I would cry sometimes, more from the worry of forgetting than the actual missing. The missing becomes normal, but even the possibility of forgetting feels like a betrayal.

But it is more than a decade now and I don't worry about forgetting. I remember. More clearly than so many other memories in my life (Perhaps this is why I forget so many things in my past; my energy goes to remember this one Very Important Thing.).

It is sometimes strange to me, people's response when they learn that I have lost a brother. I'm so sorry, they say, their heads drop, they feel my past pain so acutely for one moment. But I am quick to reassure them that it is not an awkward subject for me, nor one I'm uncomfortable discussing. This is a mark of the gospel, death has no sting.

A family in my church lost their young son this week and after the service I made my way to the very last row, where they sat, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand.

I ask to pray with them, for them. And I say to them to not worry, to let themselves grieve without the worry that they will forget or that his siblings will forget or that someone will forget. God gives grace to the humble and there is nothing more humbling, I say, than losing a part of yourself.

Especially because he's not really lost, is he?

Then we who are alive, who are left,
will be caught up together with them
in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,
and so we will always be with the Lord.
Therefore encourage one another with these words.
1 Thessalonians 4:17-18