Babies, anger, and being invisible

Jack and I have a deal:  if we accidentally get pregnant during grad school, I get a kitty.

Jack would love to have five kids right this minute.  I would love to not be asked about babies for four more years.  Not surprisingly, this is a source of some tension between us.

There are two conversations Jack and I tend to have about kids.  One is the “If, When, and How Many,” which always ends with me saying “Honey, I really have no idea.  Let’s talk about something else… like my graduate school!”  The second is the “Rising Panic” conversation, where we discuss who is more misunderstood for a couple hours, then we debate who started the conversation in the first place, then one of us who shall remain nameless tries to re-instate the “no fighting after 8pm” rule.  But that person can’t fall asleep anyway because HE OR SHE did not sufficiently get HIS OR HER point across about being misunderstood.  Often that person is extra noisy getting ready for work the next morning at 5am.  Good times.

See, unlike Jack, I learned the ex-hippie both-parents-are-teachers model of life.  Education is an end to itself, they told me, and there is no rush to do anything.

So after decades of believing that I would start a family in my 30’s, I sauntered into my marriage at the scandalously young age of 24 (thank you Jacob for paving that road for me), and Jack started talking babies.  And I reacted out of emotional whiplash.  Babies?  Are you kidding me?!  I figured I would make coffee for another decade first.

This topic of babies is on my brain again because of what happened at church.  We were chatting after the service with a group of peers.  One of my (married but childless) girlfriends was talking about how she loves her two new cats.  And one of the men said, lightheartedly and not at all maliciously, “baby replacements!”

Later I felt angry, really angry, at that comment.  Is that how people at church see me?  Is grad school just my “baby replacement?”  Does my whole church, or even my husband, think I’m an incomplete version of myself until I have kids?

Clearly I’m a little touchy about the baby thing.  Lately, going to church has been an exercise in ignoring my rage.  I don’t ignore it well.

I talked to my pastor last week.  I told her that the music at church is so irritating that I spend half of the worship set in the bathroom.  And that the sermons fuel a rage that I carry with me all week.  I told her that of all the places I feel any sense of God’s presence, church is at the very bottom of the list.  Once I started talking about it, I found a seemingly bottomless pit of anger.

I complained about church literally for an hour.  To my pastor.  That’s like having coffee with, I don’t know, Danielle Steele, and telling her that all her novels suck, using quotes from her novels to illustrate your point.

And here’s why my pastor is one of my favorite people on the planet:  She gave me permission to interrupt any of her sermons if I need to.  That’s right, a free pass to make idiots of both her and me, just so I could be seen and heard.

And that’s what all this anger–at the sermons, the music, and the babies– is all about.  I feel invisible.  Because at some point, despite my best efforts, I absorbed the message that if the pastor says it, I should think it too.  And if the song is played (you know, the one about pouring out the richness of the fullness of the glory of the flood of the spirit’s healing waters), I should sing it and be grateful. And if I go to church, I need to clean up and fit a certain mold.

So when I don’t agree with the sermon, or when I hate the song, I’m not sure who I can tell.  I’m scared that the real Christine will be ignored, or rationalized, or corrected—not seen and heard.  And I’m afraid that no one will believe me if I say I just don’t know if I want kids.

One of the last things my pastor said during our meeting was, “You’re not invisible, Christine.  I see you.”

Which was of course what I needed to hear.  And as I biked home, you know what I realized?  A lot of people are invisible.  I make sure of that.  I look around my church and I see “all those Christians.”  I look at the new parents and think “eh, moms.”  I hear the pastor and get angry that “everyone else” agrees.

I haven’t listened, though I so want to be heard.  I haven’t tried to know others, though I want to be known.

Tomorrow is Sunday.  I hope at church I get to hear someone’s story.  Maybe they can become visible too.

Top Ten ages I wouldn’t want to relive…

1.Thirteen

2. Twelve

3. Fourteen

4. Fifteen

5. Sixteen

6. Eighteen

7. Nineteen

8. One

9. Ten

10. Twenty-two

Strangely, seventeen was fine.

Cradle-robbing

Sometimes on Sundays Jack and I go to Peet’s for employee-discounted coffee. This past Sunday I got to introduce Jack to my 3rd-favorite customers.

I know my 6 readers will wonder, “who is her first-favorite customer?” Or perhaps, “will this post be as long as the last one?” No, no it won’t.

My first-favorite customer is a 73 year old woman who enters our doors everyday looking like she might burst with happiness if she doesn’t let some of it out real quick. If the line is long, she visibly quivers with all the joy inside of her. When she gets to the front of the line she proclaims… yes proclaims, her drink order as if it’s the good news of Jesus. Makes me wonder how she’d tell the gospel, if an extra-hot decaf nonfat latte merits such joy. Then she tells us that she’s happy to see us, that we brighten her day every day, that we do such a good job. Then she puts a dollar in the tip jar. And as she walks away I always think, “is she joking?” I feel like a truckload of rainbows and happiness was just dumped on me, and she tips me?

Anyway, Jack met my 3rd favorite customers. They’re two guys in their 40’s. They order “the usual” every day: one coffee and one tea. Soon “the usual” got shortened to “the youzh.” I’m not even sure how to spell that, but it’s the first syllable of “usual.” Then last week Matt said, “we’re youzhin’ today.”

“Sorry Matt, but I refuse to acknowledge that as a verb.”

“Youzh!” He responded emphatically. “Youzhing. Have youzhed, have been youzhing… Used to youzh?”

That put them into the top five instantly.

So today, after they both got to meet Jack yesterday, Matt talked about how sweet we look together. How comfortable. Then he said, “he looks a lot younger than you! Did you cradle-rob?”

Be cool Christine, I thought. You don’t want to embarrass him. Just take it lightly.

“Yeah, the beard helps a bit, but doesn’t cover those boyish cheeks.”

I’m hoping it’s just the pallor on my cheeks and the bags under my eyes from getting up at 4:30. Or the air of defensive maturity I seem to have sometimes at work. Or maybe he just expected my husband to be a few years older. But really… did you cradle-rob?

Fear and Prayer, Part II: The Woods

Part I of this post is here.

Two years ago one of my customers and her grown daughter were murdered while on a popular hiking trail. It was all over the news, but they still haven’t solved the case. I worked the early shift that day and someone brought in the front-page story by 6am.

A lot of people in the community had known this woman, and many came in crying that week. I grieved her death too. But I also dwelt on the horror of it all. A mother and daughter, shot, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the summer, on a well-known hiking trail. That morning when I took my break, I called Jack in tears. I told him what happened, but he didn’t really get it.

He didn’t get it because I didn’t know how to explain it. What I told him was that I had known one of the women on the front page. I didn’t know how to tell him about the fear and terror that was settling in. I pictured myself hiking on a beautiful summer’s day and finding a gun at my head. In every way I imagined it, I couldn’t escape.

After a few months, these dark thoughts had formed their own dark place in my soul. I privately named this place “The Woods.” Soon, like all roads leading to Rome, all of my thoughts ended up in The Woods. If I started worrying about falling off my bike, five minutes later I was imagining my lifeless body lying in The Woods. When my mom invited me out for a walk, I refused, certain that the park would mean The Woods. If I couldn’t get a hold of Jack… well, Jack is confident he would not only get out of The Woods alive, but also whoop ass while in there. But in this horrible part of my imagination, no one was safe.

I didn’t know how to talk about any of this. I didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t about my customer and her daughter anymore, but about the terror of my own inability to control anything. The thought that maybe God really didn’t care… or else he just didn’t get that being murdered in the woods would be really fucking scary. Why else could it have happened to those women? Where was God then? If he let it happen to them, he might let it happen to me.  How could I trust him?

A year after the murders, Jack and I were driving North to visit relatives. We were driving through the town closest to the hiking trail where it had happened. I imagined two women driving and chatting through these roads, not knowing it was their last day. I felt nauseous. I started sweating, and my heart was racing. We weren’t in The Woods, but we were close, and it was too much. I started crying, then I started bawling. Jack pulled over and I cried and cried.

The next day at church I asked a couple to pray for me. Bill and Becky had a reputation for being “good at prayer,” which is kind of hilarious… but they were good at it. They would do things in prayer that I wouldn’t be caught dead doing, like speaking in tongues, and sighing, and saying “Oohhh yes. Ohhhh yes Lord, yes Jesus!” But I think the strangest thing that they did was listen. They didn’t start their prayers with “Dear Heavenly Father, please give us…” they started their prayers with long silences, believing that God knew what they needed and would speak.

I told them about the murders. I told them that I still saw the woman’s husband every day and I didn’t know how to reach him in his grief. I told them about the trip through the town the day before. I didn’t tell them about The Woods because still, I didn’t really know how.

So we all bowed our heads and no one said anything for a minute, except that Becky was murmuring in a whisper. I was crying because, well, I cry a lot. The worship band was playing an inappropriately upbeat song, and the rest of the church was clapping and singing in the streaming sunlight.  After a few minutes, Becky looked at me and said, “Christine, the word that comes to my mind is “images.” You don’t know what happened to those women, so your mind has been filling in the images of how they were killed, like thousands of movie clips. You see yourself in these scenarios too, and you can’t stop them. Is that true?”

And I couldn’t answer, because it was so true that I felt like my soul had just been read out loud. And maybe what I should have thought was, “Holy shit, this woman is psychic.” But instead, like a spring breeze blowing open a rusty window, this thought rushed in to my poor exhausted soul:

“God knows.”

God knew about The Woods. He was in the deepest darkest most alone place of my psyche. He had stood next to me for a whole year while I imagined his absence. He had held me in his enormous metaphorical hands while I tried fending for myself and planning my escape routes. Once again I had turned around and collided with Jesus.

I wish I could remember the rest of that prayer time. It was amazing. The thing I do remember is that in the weeks and months that followed, I didn’t imagine The Woods. The worn path (more like a slip’n’slide, actually) that led there had closed off. I felt like I could breathe deeper and love more generously than I had been able to in months; not because I would never be in a place like The Woods, but because I knew if I ever found myself there, I was pretty sure I could turn around and find Jesus behind me.

But in recent months, like an abused dog slinking back to her cruel master, I’ve gone back to The Woods. It’s a terrible place, but so familiar and in a way, comforting. It’s easier to trap myself in fear than to try to comprehend the freedom, love, and courage that I have with Jesus.

Paul (the Bible’s Paul… or as I think of him, “run-on sentence Paul”) wrote a lot about the old self and the new self. He insisted that the old self, the one that’s trapped in fear, or lust, or self-deceit, or all three and then some, died because Jesus’ death killed it. The new self is free from the old compulsions, and is a slave only to the deep-wide-far-and-high love of God.

I wonder if Paul noticed how often he was having to “remind” his flocks of this. Apparently, the Christians in Rome and Corinth and Ephesus also found The Woods easier than the grace of God, because every one of them got the “Old Self, New Self” lecture.  Being trapped is just so much easier than freedom.

Pray for me. Pray that I remember that my fear is in the old Christine. That the new Christine is free to breathe deep and love big, and to play and run a long way with her Jesus.

Fear and Prayer, Part I: Colliding with Jesus

I became a Christian when I was about 20, over a period of several months. And even though my wedding day was awesome, and I loved that one trip we took to the beach and spent a whole day making apple butter, and even today there’s a warm breeze and I have the whole day off… despite how happy my life has been at so many times, I think the months of becoming a Christian were my happiest.

(a side note: I agree with this guy that faith is a process and not a one-time event, but because I am lazy, I’m going to pretend I only had to do it once).

I had made a few friends who were Christians by then, and when I told them that I wanted to commit to following Jesus, they brought champagne over to my apartment and celebrated with me. And it was actually kind of awkward because my mouth was full of toothpaste when the doorbell rang, and my roommate had no idea what was going on, and I really just wanted to sleep. But the intention was so sweet.

I told a lot of people about Jesus then. I know it’s corny. I know you’ve been accosted on the street by fake smiles and fake enthusiasm and a tired old sales pitch like: “when you hear really good news, you don’t hide it, do you?” But I didn’t think I was like that (although I’m sure I was).

So I told all my friends that I had found Jesus, or he found me, or… well, more like on the walk of life I turned to look behind me and collided with him. And the shock of knowing he had always been there made me drop all my crap, but Jesus was a gentleman and was helping me pick it up. Some of my friends humored me and some retreated away from me. It got old for everyone pretty fast.

I started wishing I knew some grown-ups. I mean, grown-ups who would be excited for me. Christians over the age of 22, surely they must exist? Then I realized, hey, I know two. My parents had two Christian friends, and I had known them all my life.

Now, most of the blogs I read anonymize people’s names. It seems silly with a readership of, oh… like 4 now, I think. But I suppose we live in strange times. If my Dad can find my blog mere days after I set it up… anyway, let’s just call them Paul and Nan.

So I wrote to Paul and Nan, and told them that I had collided with Jesus and he was helping me pick up all my crap. I looked online for their address and sifted through pages on pages of their common last name until I found what I hoped was them.

And I swear, like a day and a half later I got a package in the mail. They had sent me books, great books on what to do after you and Jesus finish picking up the crap you dropped. And Nan wrote me a letter that was a thousand times better than the awkward champagne party. Hell, she might have been drinking champagne while she was writing, that woman was so happy. They celebrated with me in their letter. Of all the things I’ve ever lost, I think I’m most sad about having lost that letter. I don’t know what happened… in one of the moves since college it disappeared.

So that’s the back story. I promise this post really is about fear and prayer.

I got another letter from Nan yesterday, after she had read my post on Wrestling/Psalm 13. I read the first line of her email: “Your dad sent me your blog address today.” Then I had six heart attacks in a row.

Once I got over my dad finding my blog, I read the rest of Nan’s letter. It was about her experience with God and with prayer. If I try to summarize it I’ll ruin it… let’s just say that for every 99 people who can talk about the love of God, one person is stunned into silence because of it. Nan is in the 1%. She knows God loves her, and the rest of us just babble endlessly in hopes it will make him love us.

The point of her email, though, was to encourage me to pray about my fear and my godless thoughts. I’m not using that term ironically… they really are thoughts in which God is absent. And she said she was praying for me, which I cling to like a lifeboat, because I just don’t know how to pray anymore. I start praying then I use bad grammar in front of God, and how embarrassing is that?, so I stop.

And I started thinking about my fear, and what it’s meant in my life of faith. Grandpa John says “perfect love casts out fear” (“Grandpa John” is how I think of John in his letters in the New Testament. He reminds me of a toothless Grandpa that can’t throw you in the air anymore, but is hell-bent on making you know that you’re loved and should love others in return). And I think he’s right too, God’s love leaves no room for fear.

But I’m also pretty certain that this particular disease– fear and worry– will be much like doubt in my life. Never quite eradicated, but in good times, submitted to the will of God… and maybe for brief moments, invisible under all the awe and worship I have for him.

Nan talked about miracle healings, and I indulged my cynicism for a day. A family joke is that Jack’s Nana gets up so early because “there’s so much worrying to be done.” Like Jack’s Nana, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t fret. If God healed me of fear, he’d have to heal me of boredom next.

But then I remembered The Woods. And the way God healed, or delivered, me from The Woods. And I’m so embarrassed to have forgotten what God’s presence feels like, to have gotten an email from Nan and responded, at least in my mind, with sarcasm. If I’m going to talk about fear and prayer, I need to talk about The Woods.

Stay tuned for Part II: The Woods tomorrow.

Apparently my dad found my blog!

Leave it to google!  Or Facebook, I’m not sure which.

Hi Dad!  Leave a comment, k?

Wrestling

I found a little booklet while I was unpacking called “Prayers from the Bible.” The prayers are divided into four sections: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication…or ACTS.

OH BUT WAIT a minute! ACTS is a book of the Bible! And a handy acrostic! This is to help me remember that God doesn’t want me to launch directly into “Shit that I want,” or STIW. Notice that there is no book of STIW in the Bible.

So naturally I flipped straight to the “Supplication” section. Because what I want to know is, what shit do the Bible People ask for? Because if the Bible People ask for it, surely I can too.

Here’s a random sampling of what the Bible People ask for:

“Show your strength, as you have done before.”

“Correct me, Lord, but only with justice–not in your anger, lest you reduce me to nothing.”

(Are you feeling like your prayers suck? I sure am)

“Help my friends grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ”

Side note: I can’t help but notice that in the, ahem, editing process for this little booklet some Biblical prayers were left out, such as

“Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked.”

Apparently the International Bible Society doesn’t want me praying that. Even though David did.

OH HO HO HANG ON!!! I just thought of something way better than ACTS…

AMOS!

Asking for Shit You Want

Moaning about Shit you Don’t Have

Obsessing over Shit You Don’t Want God to Take Away

Supplication.

Now doesn’t that come just so much more… naturally?

Okay, but none of this is what I meant to write about. What I set out to post was this: as I was flipping through the Supplication section, looking for ways to ask God for Shit that I Want, I found this prayer from Psalm 13. A supplicating prayer. Ready?

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?/ How long will you hide your face from me?…”

Do you hear the despair in those lines? David must have known such love and joy from the Lord, and an equal measure of sadness and fear at his absence.

The next line is absolutely shocking:

“How long must I wrestle with my thoughts/ and every day have sorrow in my heart?”

What happens when God hides his face? Think of the world without God’s presence.  Then listen to this again: How long must I wrestle with my thoughts?

I don’t know about you, but my thoughts are only about Shit that I Want. Then my prayers become about Shit that I Want. Not like a Wii or naturally hair-free legs… mostly I pray about not getting raped or murdered, not ever being unsafe or uncomfortable. Jack, I happen to know, prays that he will never ever appear inept at anything ever. Okay, maybe he doesn’t pray it. But I know he thinks it. He wrestles with the fear of failure just like I wrestle with fear for my safety.

And I don’t mean “wrestle” like “I’m trying to give it to God but it’s hard.” I mean that every day my imagination goes haywire. My nephew is kidnapped, I’m murdered in the woods, my mom is killed with me or else wails at my funeral. Even when I don’t do anything all day I’m exhausted from wrestling these horrible thoughts. When God hides his face (whatever that means), there is no joy or peace, just wrestling in my mind and sorrow in my heat.

Here is how the psalm ends:

“But I trust in your unfailing love;/ my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me”

And my final question is: how long did it take David to write this? Years? Decades? Because I’ve been stuck in the “how long must I wrestle with my thoughts” bit since, oh, like a day after I became a Christian. When do I get to move on to verbs like trust, rejoice, and sing?

I’m not much for Acrostics or pneumonic devices or corny sermons or really anything in Christiandom outside of Jesus and maybe Paul (and now, possibly David)… but tonight, I might be browsing the other sections of this booklet.

That’s how I feel too…

From ASBOjesus

Crisis of faith

“But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”

” ‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for him who believes.”

Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

My only questions

Who is God?

How should I live my life?