HOW to be a good INTROVERT

You don't get to be a successful introvert without having somewhat of a panicky gaze on your heart and head and all things you fairly constantly. What I mean is, if you want to know who's going to struggle with preoccupation of self more than anything, look in the mirror first, and then look to your left and right. We're everywhere—you can't hide from us. Why? Because we can't even hide from ourselves.

The benefit of this self-awareness is that if you want to know what I think about any issue, you can ask me. I will probably have a litany of thoughts on which I have ruminated and masticated until they're confiscated by some other mounting question. You want thoughts, I have thoughts.

The damage of this self-acuity is that when it comes time to put my eyes on someone or something else, I have so poorly trained my eyes in the direction they should go that I cannot hold my gaze for very long without looking away.

I can train this heart of mine to follow the tracks, but even that doesn't stop the train from derailing. The only steady things sometimes are the rails themselves.

The train has been derailing for me this year. It began with a glance away from beautiful Jesus and faithful Father, and it continued downward until my eyes have been setting somewhere south of healthy. So it's time to trust the tracks. Time to trust that training my heart will get me home and, oh friends, there is no other place I want to be than home.

The tracks for me are repentance and rest, quietness and trust—and if this post resonates with you, I would guess those are the tracks for you too. To do those things, though, it's going to mean sacrifice and I'm willing to do that.

Here are three of the ways my sacrifice might affect you:

I. If you primarily come to Sayable from Twitter, nothing will change there for you.

II. If you come from Facebook and you aren't a close friend, family, or colleague, I would recommend that you go over and Like this page. This is because I will be slowly be straightening the rails of life by keeping a close watch on what I ingest on social media—beginning by removing the amount of people on the friends list of my personal page.

III. I will also be shutting down comments on Sayable for a season. If you'd like to contact me, please do so through email, though understand it may take some time for me to respond.

I said above that I know my heart more than anything else I know, and the truth is that I love interacting with readers. I love hearing your stories. I love when you track me down, find me, and say, "Lore, your words, they have encouraged me and changed me." I love that. I love it mostly because I love knowing that the deep and agonizing work God does in me results in deep and beautiful work in you. But I'm afraid that sometimes all the words coming back at me don't bear the sort of fruit I want the beautiful work of God to bear. Please don't read into that statement or assume it to mean anything other than what I am saying: I want the work that God does in me to result in good fruit. If it does not, I want Him to prune it.

Thank you for loving me well and thank you for space. Thank you for always encouraging and thank you for challenging. I long to write for Jesus, but He lets me write it for you too, and I'm grateful for that.

but His joy comes in the mourning

I’m tired. There, that’s out there.

I’m exhausted. No, I don’t have a little baby waking me up at all times of the night, or four kids to corral into fine formations, or a family to provide for or a company to lead. But I am just one person and being just one for 30 years can be tiring too. I’ve been getting up while it’s still dark most mornings and for this night owl, that’s enough to spin me into the oblivion of tiredness.

I sat across from a friend on Wednesday and we talked about what it means to enter into one another’s sorrow. How it means that we don’t just feel pity or empathy or a burden, but that we actually enter into it. We feel it. We know it. We know it as acutely as our own sorrow.

This goes for joy too. But somehow joy peddles us forward, while sorrow only seems to hold us down.

There are so many, many sorrows in me today. I can’t even give number to them and so few of them are my own that even if you ask, I won’t tell you anything is wrong, they are not my sorrows to tell.

My pastor back home told me once to do my homework in class: pray for a friend while I’m with them, counsel them right there, and that doing this would alleviate some of the burden someone with a gift of mercy is going to carry.

It was some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten and I rarely let an opportunity go by without praying for someone.

But sometimes mourning with those who mourn means that we ache with their unanswered prayers. Sometimes it means we wake up aching and go to bed aching. Sometimes it means we keep careful watch on our phone for updates and careful watch on the messages we send out, keeping watch over souls that have been entrusted to us.

I’ve been depressed before, no secret there. And this season feels acutely like those seasons before: I want to sleep, I forget to eat, smiling feels like too much work, work feels like too much work. But last night as I slid between my sheets and put my head on my pillow, closed my eyes and felt the tears brim to the surface, fall over my cheeks, I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, “There is nothing light about mourning, but there will be light in the morning and morning is coming.”

I woke up late this morning and for the first time this week the sun streamed in my window, a sliver of light across my comforter.

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.

[PURE?] ENJOYMENT

"I enjoy your company." Because life is too short to mess around, I admit, I've asked a guy frankly on more than one occasion, "What's your intention?" The conversations are never fun, never comfortable, and never feel very fruitful. But it scratches the itch, gives them the opportunity to 'fess up, and lets me let my heart move on. In about 98% of these conversations I hear this one line: I enjoy your company, but...

This past weekend JR Vassar spoke at a conference for the home-group leaders at my church. He spoke on the Trinity and it was, let me tell you, enjoyable. It was heady and theological, it was convicting and reassuring, and it was life-giving and healing, but more than anything else, it was enjoyable.

He spoke about enjoying the gospel and never have I wanted to simply enjoy someone enjoying the gospel before as I did him. He's a brilliant guy with a deep love for Jesus and the Word, he obviously loves my church family and my pastors deeply, he's the pastor of a church plant in my native north—what is not to enjoy about this guy? But see, he wasn't talking about enjoying him, he was talking about enjoying the gospel—a different thing altogether.

This week, this month, I'll tell you, it's been hard to enjoy the gospel. There are some things weighing on me, family, time management, book details, the heaviness of my job, homesickness, tight finances, roommates, sleep, these things push in and crowd out my joy quickly.

I've started to enjoy things and people who enjoy the gospel, but it's not the same is it? It's not the same as enjoying the gospel. Enjoying the depth and richness that exists in being rescued from the clutches of death, covered with the righteousness of Christ, and called a son or daughter of a King. There's joy there, right there, sitting in that.

Yet I'm too busy enjoying the substitute instead of The Substitute, the creation instead of the Creator, the friend instead of the Groom.

But He's truly is the better choice. He is.

So here's my question to you today: what or who are you enjoying today?

Are you enjoying the company of a girl or guy because you haven't found "the one?" Are you enjoying religious things instead of God Himself? Are you enjoying the attention of your children, your readers, or even your spouse instead of dwelling deepest on the enjoyment that God has in you and you can have in Him?

ADOPTION as SONS

Once I climbed to the top of a Himalayan foothill to watch a sunrise over the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal. The sunrise was brilliant and beautiful, but what I couldn't take my eyes away from was a small girl and her brother who stood in front of their broken-down stone home at the top of that hill. I took her photo and she took my photo, black and white film. And then I put my hand on her head and asked God to give me babies of my own. They did not need to be babies made from love and knit in my womb—I asked Him for babies from other worlds and other hills, babies with black hair and black eyes. I asked Him to make me an adopter.

That was seven Augusts ago and I never knew it would take so long for Him to lend His ear to my cry.

I thought marriage would happen in between then and now.

I thought a baby or three would have been knit already within me.

I thought I would have been there and back so many times, bringing home babies without homes.

But sometimes God lends His ears to our cries and sometimes His answers are, "Not yet."

I have friends who struggle with their womb's inability to make, hold, and keep a baby inside them. I have sat across from them and I have heard their cries, the cry of a mother who feels less a mother because she has no child to mother. And I have felt that angst in me too. Singleness brings with it a form of barrenness, though we won't say that of course. We won't say that because only the married should expect to have progeny, seed.

Last night I think about God and I think about the groaning of creation to be with our Father. I think about how desperately my soul longs for heaven and God and all that is eternal. I think about my adoption into a kingdom like His. I stand in front of my broken down home and he puts His hand on my head and longs to bring me home.

I think about a father who has already adopted his children, but who is waiting to bring us home.

And I think about my Nepali girl and her broken-down stone home, my hand on her head, my ask to God. I thank Him that He has lent His ear, been near to the needy and brokenhearted, the orphan and barren. And I thank Him that what feels far off is a mere moment, a vapor, a breath to Him.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first-fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8.22-23

hey you

Hey listen, you. You hiding behind your litany of projects and your mountain of responsibility. You, with your put together persona and your perfect bouts of transparency. You, who reveals little to everyone but lets the world unveil herself to you because you are perceived as trustworthy and wise. You who picks up the burdens and carries them to the next rest stop. You who goes about your duties, shirking love and fearing commitment because it means you are needed and being needed is grounds for running away. Yeah you.

You’re the one I’m talking to.

And I’m saying this: you can’t hide.

You cannot hide.

Because you slip away, drive away, pull into a parking lot and put your head in your hands. You don’t cry because crying doesn’t help, but you sigh and you ask what’s wrong with you? Why is it so hard to be needed? Be wanted? Be loved? And how can you be those things and still feel like none of them?

You tell yourself the lies and then you tell yourself they’re lies and then you lie to yourself again and say it will be okay, that you’ll try harder next time, that you’ll say no next time, that you won’t feel the weight of the world next time.

But you do.

You stub your toe on the “too close, too long, too much” line and you back away slowly, desperate to grab your favorites parts of you back. You’re an introvert in an extrovert’s kingdom. You feel upside down because you’re called to decrease (which you like), but you’re also called to preach and make disciples and be discipled (which you don’t like). You feel inside out, like you’re walking around with your insides out and no one points and stares, they just expect it from you. They feel that they know the real you.

Here’s my heart, you say, it’s on my sleeve.

Here’s the only thing I have to say to you:

You cannot hide because I know where to find you, you’re always near me, like a second skin, like my own breath, my own heart. You’re like me.

And once, I was like you.

You cannot hide because I emptied myself for you, taking on your form, obeyed the sentence of death on my head, for you.

And you’re not beyond me. Trust me. You, with your litany of projects and mountains of responsibility: you still need me.

Falling APART

When I was in bible college I had a paperback bible, the cheap sort they give away in church seat-backs, the sort zealots cover with stickers identifying who they are apart from the words inside the book. My stickers were hiking destinations, a round REI one, a Life is Good stick figure standing on the side of a mountain. The truth was my bible was falling apart and the stickers were holding it together. The spine was all but gone and the pages were falling out in chunks, particularly in the New Testament. One of my professors took one look at it and quipped, "A Bible that's falling apart is a sign of a person who's not."

I swallowed the line that day.

I may have been in bible college but I was not a Christian. Not in the sense that I understood the Gospel was not self-help rhetoric, but a life-changing, redemptive way—the only way. This was before my brother died, before a group from the Bible college traveled 14 hours to my home for a funeral, and shared the gospel with me over broken bread and broken bodies on the eve of Easter. I had that bible with me that night, clutched it in hope there was hope out of this nightmare.

The church I found shortly after that Easter used the NASB translation and a teacher/professor/mentor there gifted me with my own leather-bound bible a few weeks before my 21st birthday.

But I never forgot what the first professor said about a bible that was falling apart.

And years later when my NASB was frayed and torn and falling apart and my life was too, I wanted to shake my fist at everything I thought to be true about faith, which was this: the harder you try, the better it will go for you.

It is ironic, then, that the person who gifted me with my current bible, a simple black leather-bound, was someone who had left the faith in a way. He'd wandered across the world and the United States for years, landing in our small college town for a few months, becoming my friend. We would talk for hours about faith and argue and he would frustrate me and I wanted to shake him so hard sometimes because it didn't even seem like he was trying.

It took someone who was falling apart to show me a bible that is falling apart is not the sign of someone who isn't. A bible that is falling apart might actually be a sign of someone who is trying to hold their world together.

I left my NASB back in New York when I moved here, in a trunk in a dusty attic, not forgotten, but not necessary to prove my worth anymore. I need it, though, for a class I'll be beginning soon and so my brother dug it out and is mailing it to me this week. He texted me a photo just to make sure it's the right one.

Holy. I said. Yes, it's the right one.

Holy is right, he said back.

Here is what I know about holiness: sometimes we bring rags before the King of Kings, rags because we have been torn and ravaged by life. And sometimes we bring rags before the King of Kings, rags because we have torn our own clothes, we have beaten our chests with candoitiveness and fortitude. We have shouted our worth and proved it by our piety. But in the end, it's rags we all bring before Him, falling apart lives, brokenness, emptiness, nothingness, and He breaks in, shouts our worth, and covers us with the finest robes, the signet ring.

And sometimes He does it in unlikely ways, through unlikely people, through people who are falling apart and a bible that isn't.

WHO is GOD?

The roads are pockmarked and uneven, my step is steady and forward. The sun is rising over the horizon in front of me and this past weekend's sermon sounds in my ears. The Holiness of God.

I have struggled for many years to understand the character of God. A misunderstanding of it ultimately led to a crossroads where I had to ask the question: am I saved at all? And I don't think that's too extreme. Some would say that He is a mystery, and I would agree, but for me to know Him at all the veil had to be torn in two, and He did that for me. He did that for me.

This morning I am reading Psalm 145 which is like flash fiction or the cliff notes for the story of God. His character there, splayed out on a quarter of a spread in my bible, mercy, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, enduring, gracious, greatness, righteousness, glorious. If ever I find myself waning on the character of God again (And I do. And often.), I can turn here and get inoculated for yet another slew of tiring, confusing, humble, failure-ridden days.

I don't have to be, because He is.

He already is, so I don't have to be.

And some, myself included, might argue that until they are flush in the face and full of can-do-itiveness. And some, myself included, will undeniably fall again, fall short of holiness, miss the mark, falter in faith, and try their best to make a mockery of God.

I ate dinner with a friend last night and as we stood by my car we talked about how God cannot be mocked. Paul said it to the Galatians and as much as I want to defend my faith against the cajolers and mockers of it, the truth is that left to my own devices, I make the greatest mockery of His name of anyone I know.

"It's why the cross." I think this morning, over Psalm 145 and my coffee. It's why the cross, I have to remind myself when I feel tired, confused, and ridden with failure. It's why holiness, perfect character, hung on a cross—so the veil could tear in two, so I could enter into His holiness with my wretchedness.

Are you struggling to believe His goodness today? I am. I'll tell you, I am. But here's something, friend, He knew that. At the end of Psalm 145, after David exholes the grandeur of God, he comforts the little people with this: The Lord is near to all those who call on Him, to all who call on Him in truth.

All I know some days is that He is all that I know to be truth and that's good enough for me. He is good. He is my good.

Have you subscribed to Sayable yet? It only takes a second and from then on I'll come to you, you won't have to come to me!

the GIFT of the DECADE

Sarah Elizabeth, or so the story goes.

But it was the 1980s and Sarah Elizabeth was the name of the decade, so it wouldn't do.

I don't know how long I was called Sarah Elizabeth, but since my birth certificate reads Lore Ann, it must not have been long. I don't realize until my first grade teacher corrects my desk-mates repeatedly that the name on my name-tag does not sound like the name I am called. I don't realize that my name, the gift of a name given by my parents to me, will feel more like an anti-gift for many years.

The first time I meet someone named Lori, I state that her name is the one with an odd spelling and she rolls her eyes at me. I am nine years old.

Tonight I am reading Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: reflections on faith and art and I am at the part when Madeleine begins to talk about names, the gift of names. And I will be honest with you here: I have never liked my name.

I like that my father insisted on my name over the name Sarah Elizabeth. I like that I was named after someone who was special to my mother. I like that my parents loved my name (though I wonder if they had known I would be their only girl if I would have been given the name Hannah or Emma, girl-names that were front-runners for all my younger brothers). But I have not liked my name.

It has never felt like a gift to me, instead like a cross I bear, explanation always necessary: "No, it's Lore, with a long e. Like Loree. Emphasis on the e." Many times I just default to introducing myself as simply Lo, which is what most of my good friends call me anyway. But I wonder then if by offering the gift that belongs to my closest friends so quickly, I cheat those who know me best of intimacy?

Perhaps I over think it. Don't we all have things about ourselves we wish came without explanation?

I sat on the couch last night with one of my roommates and I said I was sorry for being of a certain temperament. I'm not funny, nor am I the life of the party. I get exhausted by social engagements, by needing to be on, to have the right words at the right time. She took my hand in hers and dipped her head so that she could see into my lowered eyes, "Hey, who you are is a gift, we don't need you to be anything else."

It's hard sometimes, you know? Hard to just be who we are without explanation. To trust that God, who knit us together in quiet and secret, who named us before the foundations of the earth, who fires the neurons and names the cells, to trust that He who has done all this, knows us as we are. Loves us as we are.

It's hard sometimes, you know? Hard to know that the name my parents gave me, a name I've never known anyone else to have, sets me up to hold an automatic conversation with everyone I meet. An expected explanation. A gift, depending on how I look at it. An opportunity to know and be known with immediacy.

This is my name, this is my story, the lore of my life.

RUNNING [away] WALKING

Last night we talked about being small and running away. Finding tall pine trees in our native north and shimmying our way up to the nearest branch, then climbing, climbing, climbing until we were at the top of our tower of Babel, touching God and letting Him touch us. And then we'd climb down, forgive our strict parents their brief irrationality, and go home.

Late last night as I drove home I thought about not stopping, just driving, finding the lowest branch and clawing my way out of here. Away from the metroplex, the bubble, the place where I am known and where I do not feel known.

Instead, I called a friend and left a message.

"Call me," I said. That's all.

I unhatched my plan without hesitation, with or without her, but she agreed and so we threw swimsuits, tshirts, and spare change into our bags and we left Dallas at 11:32pm.

Rolled the windows down and left.

We found a hotel a few hours later, convinced the kind gentleman at the front desk to let us go swimming and then we slept hard and hardly.

We woke at 7am and the city was still. I couldn't help but feel like this was what people have meant for the past two years when they have said that I will love Austin, that Austin will feel like home. We read and journaled at a coffee shop, strung a hammock between two trees, talked, talked, sat, and just enjoyed one another and the Lord. And then we drove home.

My heaven will be a still one. A quiet one. The sort of place I can fly fish or enjoy Debussy (who I hope will be there). My heaven will be a place free of distractions, where the groaning of creation has stopped and we have come to a grand rest. It is still.

I am learning more than ever that I cannot run the race.

Everywhere around me people are running the race. The prettiest. The godliest. The best. The most. The biggest. The fullest. The busiest. And I find even the mention of running the race exhausts me. I toe the start line and already feel the defeat. I can not run it.

I crave stillness. I crave quiet. I crave even the groaning of creation over the groaning of concrete roads and the suburban sprawl. I want to shimmy up my tree, find a solid brand on which to stand and I want to touch God.

We're on our way home, less than 13 hours later, and I tell her that all I really want in life is to be like Enoch. Enoch who walked with God and was no more.

"Your heart, Lo," she says. "He loves that about you."

And I suppose He might love that about me. I suppose He might. The bible doesn't say that Enoch died, it just says He was no more, that God took him. I can't help but think that God in His goodness, just took Enoch home with him, plucked him from the race of life, and brought him home where he belonged.

I wouldn't mind being like Enoch.

[In any case, all of you were right, Austin did feel like home to me. Thank you.] 

FISHING on the FLY

I read stories, A River Runs Through It and The River Why, and both made me into a fisherman. But two summers ago, on one of my last nights on the lake, I caught a fish and it made me a storyteller. The fish got away, but it was a big one, heavy and strong, as all the ones that get away are. My friend Matthew let me have my story and a week later his older brother caught my fish. It was as heavy and strong as I knew it was.

When I was small, I went fishing in the early morning with my father and my older brother on Lake Nockamixon. We wore denim jeans with holes in the knees and we wore flannel shirts. We stood on the rocky edges in the cove casting and reeling, casting and reeling and I caught a small bass, my first fish and my father said we should let it go. I slid it from my hands, into the pool beside me and watched its speckled body through water reflecting the sky like one of those paintings on the PBS shows we watched in the afternoons. My first fish.

I helped my uncle catch a fish when I was nine years old. He kept it for himself and I never said otherwise. Hindsight says that if anyone was helping anyone it was probably my uncle helping me. But I wanted bragging rights more than the fish itself.

A writer never knows when the stories will quit him or her and the stories have quit me this month. I feel like every word I bring up is a bottom dweller and better left to swim away in clearer waters. The words I bring to the surface are the ones that get away, no matter how strong they feel on the line and in my hands, they get away.

This makes me still a storyteller in the same way, though. I am simply telling the story of words instead of letting the words tell the story that should have been.

Tonight I feel sick in my soul and the words feel far, far from me.

I remember a line from A River Runs Through It. It was underlined in my copy of the book and probably written it on a scrap of paper tacked to my wall: Many of us would probably be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect. 

And I know that is me, that I am watching and waiting for something to become perfect, a final crescendo into resolution, the one that doesn't ever get away. But I am a writer, I am. I may spend half my time trying to convince myself that I am a writer, but the truth is that I am one and the only way I am one at all is to stop waiting for the perfect fish to hook my line and still cast anyway.

  ...I am watching and waiting for something...Click to tweet this post  

KNIT ALL TOGETHER

He said I was too submissive and she said I wasn't submissive enough. What is a girl to do with a heart like mine, whose depths are filled with big ideas and fragile sensitivity? Everything natural in me fears and succumbs, because it is what my flesh does—it is only flesh, see? But when the cream rises to the top (and sometimes when the dregs do too) it all tastes of leadership because I have been knit of strength and foresight.

And I ask myself, why have I been knit together like this? Why so strong, so capable on top? But underneath, why so timid, so fearful?

"You knit me together in my innermost parts."

I ask Him often: what does it mean to be knit?

You know me. You made me. You put each gift inside of me and you are not unaware of my fears or tendencies. Each part of me knit to bring You glory. Each part there to draw me more deeply toward You. So what does it mean that you have knit me into a conundrum?

I have found a place of rest among a people who embrace a complementarian theology, but I also find a place of influence and friendship too, among those who embrace egalitarianism—and, oh how I feel this tension among people I love. I know where I land and I land there joyfully, happily, but I only land there because, hear me, because I have been knit here.

If we talk of experience only, I would tell you that every relationship (familial, church, or romantic) in which I've been where there was egalitarian leanings has been abrasive to me. I would tell you that I have never experienced the abrasiveness that others talk about in places where the roles of men and women are defined in complementarian terms—in fact, my specific gifts and leadership have been more widely used in these places. But this is my experience alone and I cannot share it with you more than to simply say it.

Here is what I want to say today, though: I want to say that though theology is the way we see God, my theology on gender roles is never the lens through which I see God, but instead I ask, I plead, I beg the giver of all good gifts to show me theology through His character alone.

This means that when I look into my experiences, my church, my theology, my personality, my flesh, my past, and my future, I cannot see it without first seeing that He is a good, good God, who creates good, good things, and intends them for good, good measures, and I can trust that regardless of the terms we paste upon our ways, His way is always best.

Not culture's way. Not a reactive way. Not an abusive way. Not an abdicating way. Not a domineering way.

Not any way that takes my eyes off of Him and onto an issue.

He is better.

So this isn't an issue for me. I rarely think about the roles of men and women, egalitarianism or complementarianism. I never feel undermined or afraid of speaking up at church, at work, or among friends. I feel heard in every avenue of my life because more than anything I know I am heard by the God of the universe.

That's enough for me. He knows me best anyway, He knit me that way.

This post has been brewing in me for months, but I felt that this week would be a good week to pull it out because Rachel Held Evans is holding a link up to her series on mutuality in the church. I think Rachel and I would be friends even if we disagree on some key issues, mostly because as I stated above, many of my good friends are more toward her camp theologically. I'm okay with that, really. I think that the beauty of life on earth is that we're not finished yet—all of us blind beggars asking for more of God until He unveils the fullness of the new and perfect earth. 

SLEEPING ALONE

I wake slowly, face-down, stretching my legs, cupping my toes over the end of the bed, feeling my calf muscles pull and retract. My head is lying flat, on 400 thread count white sheets. I am facing left, the breeze from my open window setting across my face, the window's linen blind pulsing steadily in the same breeze.

I spread my right arm out feeling the empty space in my bed. My heart sinks.

There has never been anyone in this space, but I still feel the void all the same. My bed has never been shared, I have never been cuddled too tightly, or felt the aching space of an evening argument which keeps two hearts and bodies apart. I have never had to fight anyone for the covers and when I am cold, I am cold alone.

I stretch my left arm out, toward the window, rest my hand on the screen. My heart breaks a little more every day. It breaks itself and heals itself, and it does it all under the watchful, loving eye of God, so I am not alone, though I feel alone.

I used to worry I would not be married by 24. Then I worried I would not be married by 29. Now I worry I will never come to terms with always being alone. It is a hard thing to share one's bed with no one and it is a hard thing to wake every morning feeling more undesirable than the night before.

Friends think they are consoling when they say marriage is hard work (who among us thinks it is not?) or when they complain that she steals all the covers or he snores or she likes to cuddle and he only like sex. They think this is consoling.

But it is not.

Because the night comes slowly, every blessed day, like the poet, Richard Wilbur, said, a punctual rape, same in, same out; but morning comes quickly and I spread my arm across this empty space feeling aloneness more than ever before.

Fabs Harford wrote about Fasting from Intimacy and this resonates in me because there is no monster inside of me more ravenous than the one who craves intimacy. I lean across the table in loud restaurants and ask hard questions. I hug tightly without discretion or discrimination. I touch the hands and shoulders of people I love, and sometimes barely know. I lean in. I do this because I am starving for intimacy and I am unafraid of that monster. I know he can kill me. But I know I will starve without his hunger.

Singleness is a beautiful thing and when I take account of the past decade I see a faithfulness to its beauty in my life in a way that only comes from grace, but I also see a succession of tiny funerals every step of the way. A cemetery full of them. Adventures I have had alone. Mornings I have woken alone. Moments I have reveled in alone. Each one bringing joy in its experience and mourning in its completion.

Life is meant to be shared and marriage is not the only way to share life, I know this, but the mystery of two flesh becoming one is a mingling that cannot be known by me, with my bed all to myself, 400 thread count sheets, open window, and quiet morning. And I mourn this.

Tim Keller preached a sermon called Jesus, Lord of the Wine, and he teaches how Christ is the Lord of the wedding feast, how His first miracle was in a wedding, turning water into wine and how this is a sign to us that He is for our joy. And not just our eventual joy, as the old Calvinists would have us believe, but for our present joy, our joy here on earth, in empty beds, empty hearts, and single flesh.

I meditate on this morning before I break my night's fast.

The hunger in my belly a reminder that there is a feast before me, whether it is the feast I envision for my life or not, it is a feast that brings joy somehow and in some way. And there are mornings when it will be hard, like this one. There will be nights when my fast from intimacy is painful and I shake my fist at God, or ignore Him altogether.

But He is for my joy and joy is there too, in the song of birds outside my window, the Roman blind shivering in the breeze, and the 400 thread count sheets, covers all to myself. There is joy there—a small, but ebbing joy.

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WANNA GO WITH?

"Y'all know I love nature and all, but there's a wicked loud bird outside who only knows four notes in the same order."

I tweeted that this morning.

And then I looked at it and thought to myself, "Lo, you put y'all and wicked in the same sentence."

My mom told a story once about how she was visiting friends in Ohio and their neighbor was visiting as well. After some polite conversation, the obviously studied man asked my mother what town in southern Bucks County, Pennsylvania, she was from. She probably sputtered out her drink that a perfect stranger in the days before google was a verb could pinpoint her origin so specifically. See, she was precisely from southern Bucks County, Pennsylvania, born and bred.

Apparently this gentleman was a linguist and the southeastern Pennsylvania dialect is a noticeable and memorable one. We didn't know this of course— too busy were we making fun of the accents on the Beverly Hillbillies and To Kill a Mockingbird, to notice that we ended sentences with prepositions and every O was formed with perfectly round Marilyn Monroe lips, drawn and quartered into a song of its own.

When I moved to New York the word wicked became an intensifier instead of an adjective, as in "This mountain is wicked high" and "Those trees are wicked colorful." I also learned that prepositions with no determiner attached to them were lazy, "Finish your sentence!" my friends would say. Others pointed out that my Ls were swallowed, that I said "saut" instead of "salt" and "faught" instead of "fault." So while I was unlearning how to swallow my Ls, I learned to enunciate and elongate my NGs, as in "eloNGate."

This mostly happened without my noticing.

A few years later I moved to Tennessee and slipped y'all into my vernacular. I also flattened my perfectly round Os into a more acceptable singsongy sort. Others still pointed out that my Ls were swallowed.

Yesterday my mom posted a photo to Facebook of two pages in her address book (I think it's cute that she still uses an address book because it seems that the rest of us have forgotten that most people still have physical addresses where they can be sent actual mail (which she also does a standup job of (see, there I go with my prepositions again.).).).

It was the F page. Ferguson. There are eight siblings, but only four of us spanned these two pages. Residences represented were New York, South Carolina, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Iraq, Afghanistan, and also our native Pennsylvania. My address had been scribbled out five times. From the addresses contained it would seem that she's only had this specific book about six years.

I have moved more than twice that in the past six years. I have had ten addresses. Ten homes. No wonder my tongue is tied. No wonder even my mouth doesn't even know its home. I haven't even been in some of those places long enough to change my address.

I've been on Meadow Lane for 18 months now. Two different houses, but the same street. I consider this a mild success.

Texans consider that I say "y'all" now a grand success. But as for me, I will still slip "wicked" into casual conversation (to piss off the evangelicals) and pass the saut when you ask for the salt, and occasionally attach a perfectly fine sentence with a preposition onto.

(All my Bucks County friends can read that last part without any trouble. In fact, they're probably still wondering what's wrong with it.)

How many times have you moved? What lasting effect has this had on you?