How to make a home

It is well past the first day of autumn but we have not shivered until today. Tonight I came home late and turned the lights off, save the string of white lights strung above our mantle. I lit the candles and the fire and am sipping tea while one roommate curls up in a cowl-neck scarf and eats leftover chili. Here is when I feel most at home in what is not home, and what I am coming to learn, may not ever be home.

I read a blog yesterday about a mother in Dubai who is making home there, as best she can, amidst all the things that war against her natural instincts.

The world clatters into our haven and tries to thwart us at every turn; we know it waking up and we know it going to sleep. The poet Richard Wilbur called it "the punctual rape of every blessed day" and the language may be harsh, but the days are nothing if not harsh, no?

I thought as I read her writing, home is hard however you make it. She has children underfoot and a husband to cheer and mountains of laundry and I have none of those things. But I do have bills to pay and a home to keep clean and a car whose check-engine light came on today, flashing at me in a fury. And I do these things alone, which, I sometimes think, is just as hard as doing them with a whole family underfoot.

Who of us chooses our cross and bears it well?

But home is what we make of it and we are all making home into something. This whole summer home has felt like a burning log, something bold and beautiful and soon to be only ashes. That is melodramatic, I'm sure, but how many of you with your picket fences and backyard gardens and daily schedules would handle the division of your home any better? I don't mean to compare, I just mean to say, be blessed and stayed in your covenant family because for some of us the front door of our American dream is a revolving one, always taking someone away.

I have to remember that home is what we make of it, but it is only our home for today. Tomorrow it might not be the same, it might not feel the same, and it might not be what we planned.

I have a friend who is getting divorced this year, nobody told her it would be this hard, she said through tears on the phone last week. I didn't know what to say because I did tell her once that it would be this hard. Another friend lost his wife two years ago. He parents on, but life is not what he expected, he says, and what he plans now for his daughters is that life would be an adventure, surprise built into their life. One more friend plans for her future, but there are so many variables she is learning to hold one hand open and one hand loosely—better to not plan too hard, too much, too deep.

When I was young, I'm not embarrassed, I dreamed of being a homemaker, donning an apron and making soup from leftovers. I still do dream of that in my moments of weakness, when I sit myself in a pile of self-pity and bask in the pool of what I think I deserve. But I am finding more and more that making a home is not so much the decor and menu and chore-charts and laundry. Making a home is making do with what I have today even if what I have today is not what I dreamed of having today.

But it is something.

Tonight it is white lights on the mantle and a lit fire, a roommate in her wool sweater and tea, quiet, calm, full and rich. For tonight I am home.

Deeper Church: Thirty Blackbirds or More

I've had a love/hate relationship with the Bride of Christ most of my life. In the times I have needed her most, I have felt failed by her, and in the times I have felt myself stray far from her, she has pursued and loved me. These are strange words to use about an entity, a full body of individuals, imperfect men and women stumbling through life and the Bible as clearly as they can, but they are true words. There is nothing on earth I love more than the Church. 

I have felt her failings near and I have chased her down in desperation—and there is no other place I would rather commune, break bread and share wine, than within her haven.

Ephesians 4 speaks of building the unity of the Church and oh how that resonates.

To see a whole body purified, strengthened, and grown into full maturity, ready to be presented to Christ—this I love.

And so I'm grateful that I've been asked to contribute monthly to a publication that pulls from every fold of her robes, every particle of her skin, and every joint and marrow, to build up and unify the Church as best we can with our earth encrusted words.

My first column is up today:

Bearing the Weight of Thirty Blackbirds or More

I pass a field of blackbirds every morning on my way from class to work. There are a thousand of them wide in a Texas spread and I can’t stop trying to count them with my mind. Thirty of them are perched on a shrub close to the ground, but its branches do not bend or weep. I marvel at its strength. I marvel at the lightness of the birds, all thirty of them.

This desert shrub carries the weight of the blackest birds and I think of Jeremiah 17 while I drive. Continue reading...

Did God REALLY say?

One friend and then four more told me this week they hope for me what I hope for myself, and that is to be picked, chosen, and loved. More than one friend and a few more have said the word deserve and when they do the blackest parts of me come to my mind's eye and I disbelieve everything they say from then on. A lie may be small (Did God really say?) but its infractions are limitless.

Today I am driving home from class, the sunrise to my back and a row of 100 cars stopping and going, stopping and going in front of me. I am thinking of Job's friends. Their comfort to his plight was how any of us would respond—with good wishes and you deserves and reminders of good deeds checked off: So why is God not near then? Did He really say?

We speak statements veiled in questions, buffered by doubting inflections so our collective unbelief sounds less wrought with sin than it is.

To ask if God really said what He did indeed say is virtually the same as if to say He did not really say.

In class this morning we read a passage from Genesis that a man read over me a decade ago. He put his hand on my head and promised that if I would do as this man of old did, I would taste of the same richness of relationship in life he did. I set my feet there and I have not moved.

If you were to make a list of my good deeds you could check them off, each one. If you were to cup a portion of the love I have given, you could fill a lot of hearts. I say that because I have so many convinced that I deserve God to come through, make good on what was seemingly promised.

And yet He does not.

And He might not. Not in the way I think He should.

We read about how Abraham died before he saw what was promised and I wanted to shake my fist at God for one moment. How could you promise him and then not deliver!? How could you hold that promise far off like a carrot in front of the face of a working mule? All this, for this? For nothing?

It is no secret that I am doubting Thomas. I know Thomas more than I know any other disciple. I need to thrust my hands into my Lord's side, my fingers into his hollowed out hands. I need Him to walk through walls and I'm not ashamed of that.

Faith needs people who will ask and not stop asking.

But today I am seeing my doubt for what it is. My asks should not be statements punctuated with question marks.

They should bring me further into the light, not the darkness.

Further into His character, not my own.

Further into joy, not sorrow.

Further into what He did say, and not what I think He might have said.

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.

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.

SILENT FIGHT

It is hard to win the battle when you don't feel like fighting.

Depression is no stranger to me, even if he has been the crazy uncle who was ousted from the family a few years back. He was kicked to the curb in 2010—I stood in my doorway and told him to never come back.

But he's been peeping in my windows and knocking on my doors recently. The other day I saw him in the swirls of paint on my bedroom ceiling. I lay there quietly, willing him away, asking him kindly, ignoring him, and finally looking him full in the face and telling him in no uncertain terms he was unwelcome.

He moved to the bathroom, staring back at me from the mirror, in the sad eyes, the straight mouth.

"Where is my joy?" I asked him. He shrugged. He is indifferent, this Uncle Depression.

I've been listening to a sermon from 2006 a friend posted. I've listened three times. It's my own pastor and he's not saying much different than he says in 2012, except a short rant on how ipods are here to stay (seriously?). He's talking about how sometimes we just have to move our feet in the direction of water and trust that wilderness can be where we find hope. 

There's something different about this visit with Depression—different than his previous occupancy in my heart. Before he felt like he was there to stay, unbidden, but there to stay. This time he's just teasing me but he's also leaving room for me to still see the water. This time I know where the water is and I want it, I'm thirsty for it, and I know where to find it.

I just don't feel like it.

It's hard to win the battle when you don't feel like fighting and I guess that's where I am today. Everywhere I look, Uncle Depression is lining up his battalion, setting up a formation of fighters who will accost my soul and threaten my joy. And I feel alone. I know I'm not alone. But I feel alone. And no amount of people on my side will change that, I know. I've been down this path before.

What's different is formerly I'd fill my army up with doing, doing, doing. And this time I feel I just need to be still, trust. He will fight for me. I know it. I don't feel it. But I know it.

"The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent."

Exodus 14.14

COME to BE

I'm weary. Can I be honest?

I'm weary.

I'm tired as soon as I wake up in the morning and I'm tired long before I turn my light out at night. I'm tired of being and doing and having and knowing and I'm tired of being tired of those things.

In the past two years the gospel has felt oh, so near to me. It has been such a deep well to me and a rich source of joy for me. And, to be honest, I'm confused. I'm confused about why my heart feels so cold these days, so far from Jesus, and so indifferent to the Holy Spirit. He has and continues to abound with grace and goodness toward me, so why the weariness?

The truth is I don't know. I don't have an answer. I want to be spiritual and hope-filled and talk about the valleys of faith and how we have to experience the valley to find joy on the mountain or some other Christian-speak. But I have been doing this long enough to know knowing isn't enough.

So this is what I'm doing in my valley: I'm just being weary and I'm being okay with being weary.

There is one thing you can do in a valley you can't do on peaked mountaintop: you can walk a level path, a flat one, one made for the weary. And I'll take it. Today I'll take it.

I'm listening to Come to Me a lot these days.
(Written by our stellar worship team.)

Weary burdened wanderer
there is rest for thee
At the feet of Jesus
In His love so free

Listen to his message
Words of life, forever blessed
Oh thou heavy laden
Come to me, come and rest

There is freedom, taste and see
Hear the call, come to Me
Run into His arms of grace, 
Your burdens carried, He will take

Bring Him all thy burdens 
All thy guilt and sin
Mercy's door is open
Rise up and enter in

Jesus there is waiting
Patiently for thee
Hear him gently calling
Come oh, come to Me

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the NEIGHBOR'S CAT

You keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed on you,
because he trusts in you.

Isaiah 26:3

It is providence that on Thursday Single Roots will be publishing a piece of mine on peace—providence because right now I have none. Providence, also, because I've let laziness creep in like our neighbor's cat who fancies himself at home on our back porch, taking ownership over something it has no rights to own or inhabit.

A year ago at this time I was filled with an auspicious peace. It was the kind that rested in the pit of my stomach, on the shelf of my shoulder, and on the tip of my tongue. It was present. It was hopeful. It was solid. It was certain.

This year I feel battled from within and without.

Last night my roommate and I sat on the couch next to one another and there was a lot of "Me tooing" going on. It landed us with clasped hands and prayers for one another and for ourselves.

It is true that I have taken my eyes off of the Father in these past weeks, it is true that I have worshiped the creation over the Creator, and it is true that I am not broken by my sin, not in the way I long to be and not, most certainly, in the way that spreads wide the path to peace.

It is also true that I do not let myself simply receive from the Giver of perfect peace, to be like our neighbor's cat who assumes that the world is his and everything in it, which, I think, may be the truest way to peace after all.

FACEBOOK, UNDERROOS, and SELF-CONTROL

It's been about two weeks since put myself on a Facebook, Google-reader, and a few other media outlet fasts.

I have friends who say things like, "I don't know why people do things like that. It's attention seeking" or "Why can't people just practice more self-control, why do they have to make it all fast-hiatus-sabbatical sounding, all holy..."

Heck, I say that to myself.

But it's no secret that I lack self-control—I'll tell you face to face, it's my besetting sin. And in conversations with some single friends, I don't think I'm alone.

Singleness is a good place to be if you want to be lazy.

And I hear you, the mass of single readers, who feel like you've had enough of an emotional pelting for the week what with yesterday being what you call, "Singles Awareness Day" and all that. I hear you. You'd like a little love and wouldn't we all? Wouldn't we all...

(For what it's worth, I love Valentine's Day. I do. I have a hard time with nearly every major holiday for various reasons, but a day just to celebrate love? This I can do. The truth is, I'm pretty hopeless about celebrating love every day, ask anyone. So February 14th is just a good excuse to buy red candies, flowers for my mates, write cards with honest words of love, and who's kidding who, wear sexy underroos.) 

(Don't worry, this will all come together.)

The longer I'm single, the more I need to face the fact that my natural bent is toward laziness. I have no one responsible for me and no one to whom to be responsible. I know this isn't the case for all you singles, some of you parents or grandparents, single because of life circumstances, death, or divorce. But for me and the majority of my friends, it's the case.

We aren't necessarily happy singles, but we sure are free and clear ones.

So, for me, my social and otherwise media hiatus (and the other fasts I'm imposing on myself these weeks) is just a way that I can flip the bird to laziness. I'm just trying to say to mindless navel gazing, to sleep, to wasteful conversations, to food, to unproductive uses of my time, "Hey, Time? You don't own me. I don't even own me. My Father owns both of us and I want to remember that well."

That's all.

When I said sexy underroos, 

this is, of course, what I meant.

Good

I stretch my legs this morning in bed, my toes frozen with familiar feeling. I forgot how cold my toes have always gotten here in this damp country.

I've been trying to not count down the days until I drive away, fly away. I want to be fully here, not let the sadness of leaving interject on Wednesday, Thursday, almost Friday. I'm packing a vial of maple syrup and a bag of apples is my carry-on. I hope that the scent of here sticks to me. I hope I wear the residue of here well.

Yesterday I ran a marathon of visits with people I love and who love me and some of them took my face in their hands, took my heart with theirs and said "You belong here. You fit here. It feels right with you here." And I couldn't disagree. No matter how out of place I have always felt, wherever I am, I cannot deny that others feel that I belong here. This morning after she made pumpkin pancakes and while I sipped my too-strong coffee slowly, she said it again a different way: I just want you to be breathing the same air we're breathing.

I love the air here. Today is a rainy autumn day, but the clouds, they move fast, billowing greys, whites, yellows and they carry new and fresh air with them. The water falls over the river dam, a constant hum, carrying new water to the St Lawrence River. These leaves are dying, giving their brilliant best before making way for new ones in the spring.

And I feel myself blown past too.

It is not easy to leave places you love. It is less easy still, to leave places you love and the people you love with them. There is nothing simple about making a choice because you know it is the right one and having nothing, really, to say in your defense.

There are black and whites, rights and wrongs in life, but when it comes down to it, when you are faced with a million choices in life, most of them will not be of that sort. It will not be so easy to decide whether something is worth fighting for or whether to say that enough is enough and it's time to choose a different way. It is not easy to pack up and move across the country on a deep soul hunch and not much more.

And people will balk, there will always be those. Wherever you go or whatever you do, someone will weigh in. Because when the choice is not their own, it looks very simple, very black and white. And there will be shame, because to leave one thing is to choose that another thing is better, even if you don't mean for it to be that way. It just is. And there will be fear, because new things are risks and leaving old things is a risk too. What if the laws of gravity are true in life too, and you are the only thing between every thing and one, and the hard ground that will break their fall and them too?

The only thing that keeps you, then, in a place where you feel out of place, a bit empty, void of the things you think are most beautiful, what keeps you there is only the confidence that God only does what is most good. And the daily realization that what you call good is not what He calls good.

Because here, on this porch, where the sun is beginning to peek over navy clouds in the distance, where the water is rushing past me, where the leaves are hanging on for dear life, this is what I call most good.

But He knows it's only a wind, a vapor, a breath and then gone.

For good.

 (This is my view from from the porch)

How to die beautifully

There are things I ought to have learned in science class, but I was too busy hankering for art class to pay much attention.

Did you know that the reason the autumn leaves are so spectacular in the northeast is because the weather has a indecisive air to it? It's true. One night it's cold enough to frost and the next day it's warm enough to kayak in a tshirt. In the mountains the reds and oranges are deep and rich, and in the valley fields the green is vibrant and lush. The sky is almost always a steel blue, nearly grey, but still clear. I cannot describe this well enough, I know. I'm sure I tend to romanticize it because I tend to romanticize everything. It makes for a better story, see?

But trust me: it is beautiful here. Even today, while it rains steadily outside the side porch where I complete my wedding tasks of the day, it is beautiful (of course it helps that my wedding tasks for the day were to take buckets of flowers and make them into eleven presentable bouquets).

Tonight I'm going to leave these bouquets of roses and hydrangeas, seeded eucalyptus and ranunculus here on the porch. Outside, where temperatures will probably dip into the forties. I'll leave them here. And for the same reason that the leaves get more and more spectacular, I have no fear for these flowers.

It goes against my gut to do this, leave them outside. Because flowers bloom in the warmest months, I assume that that's where they'll thrive best. But a year in Texas is teaching me that while the heat may force a bloom to open, it does little to sustain it.

We all need a little indecisive air, a bit of a chill, to be sustained.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day and she's asking the right questions: why does it have to be so hard sometimes? Why does it have to hurt?

I don't have answers for her. I'm finding the more I know, the less I really know.

But I know this: those leaves wouldn't take our breath away if they weren't dying in the process.

And I don't like that. That makes me uncomfortable. I hate death, it is nothing but stings and barbs. But I love life because it is nothing but newness and cycles.

I love life because I know that I will die a million deaths until that final one, but each one makes me a little more vibrant in the process, and each one brings the promise of newness. That's something I can plant my soul in.

A few peeks at my colorful day

season

It's apple season at home, so soon there will be bushels full of lush green and red sitting on road stands, and the scent of crisps and northern spy in the air. We light candles every night and wrap ourselves in color and woolens. We make fall bouquets out of what others call weeds and we call beautiful. The air is alive and we can taste fall when we walk out the door in the morning.

We take off our sandals. Exchange our summer skirts for jeans.

The ground is deep, lush green, the treeline is orange, burnished tipped trees, and the sky is a brilliant blue every single day--billowing grey clouds settling into spectacular sunsets every single night. We don't even bother taking photos because it is life as normal and nothing special.

Oh, but it is.

The space heaters get turned on at night and we sip tea while playing scrabble, warming our hands around hot mugs and high scores. We ride bikes late into the night, meandering on college town streets, talking to strangers and loading our bike-baskets with sweet potatoes that we roast at home with garlic and olive oil. We are eating autumn and it tastes so good.

It is busy, bustling, bursting with life even though we know it is about to bed with death, but we don't mind. We have enough squash soup to keep us warm through the long hibernation. We pull out the knitting we never seem to finish, we take a detour to Lake Placid and breathe mountains. The air smells of campfires and wood burning stoves.

We ask ourselves if every kayak outing is our last.

A northern autumn gives me words, more than any other season.

I miss this.

(i didn't know this would be my last autumn in Potsdam when I made this bunch)

That, my friends, is a Texas sized puddle.
I want to stand in it all day.

"But things have changed. I'm taking the
side of my core of surviving people:
Sowing and harvesting will resume,
Vines will grow grapes,
Gardens will flourish,
Dew and rain will make everything green."
Zechariah 8:11