Digging deeper

Photo by ScaarAT

During my senior year of college, I wrote a short story about a twenty-something wanderer trying to come to terms with losing his faith and disappointing his missionary father. In the last scene, he had a mystical experience in a church building and decided to go home.

My professor read it and told me to chop the last two pages. “I don’t buy the ending,” she said simply.

My stomach churned. I was reeling from my own crisis of faith; I needed to believe that the world still operated with logic and meaning, with a pattern of redemption. If I couldn’t write this into a story, did I really believe it?

“If I just leave it hanging, the story will be so depressing,” I protested.

“Life is depressing,” she answered.

With her help, I wrote a second draft, and a third, and a fourth, because I couldn’t just leave the story bleak—I needed to scratch my way toward a real experience of hope. In the final draft, I cut the mystical church scene, and ended instead with a subtle moment of reconnection to his childhood. My professor loved it.

*

Most of the time in life, there is no revelation in a church or on a mountain or while watching a sunset. Most of the time, our moments of redemption are only temporary, until we relapse back into the mess.

On the other hand, I believe people change. Inch by inch, and never linear. So that you barely notice until fifteen years have passed, and you are no longer the socially insecure and moderately self-righteous girl you once were.

It is hard to write this in a short story, or a blog-length piece, because you can only show an inch. The balance is tricky. One day I let the pendulum swing too far and I have shown a mile of change, and it can’t be believed. The next time, I forego any kind of change or deeper awareness, and it is like a mirror in the dark.

The art of writing redemption takes many drafts.

*

When I began my more purposeful approach to the blog last fall, I wrote many drafts. These days, I have sometimes been coming to the blank page hours before I hit the publish button. I think you know this.

It’s okay. Blogging is a discipline as much as an art, so sometimes I will publish something less inspired.

I want to dig deeper, though, to go beyond easy resolution or depressing reality, to find the seed of change and the kernel of truth beneath it all. That is what makes writing worthwhile: not the audience, not the affirmation, but that long, hard reach for hope and understanding.

I am working full-time this summer, and I don’t always have time for drafts and digging. I’d rather sacrifice quantity than quality. I won’t be writing quite as often in the coming weeks, but I will be trying to deepen my reflections: a process which is so difficult and gratifying.

Leaving Cherokee

I never wanted to live here. I say this with much love and gratitude and apology to the people who have accepted, guided, and known me while I have been in Cherokee this beautiful year and a half. You have sustained and cared for me this whole time, and you have made it worthwhile. But it wasn’t in my plan to move here, and Cherokee was the first place I’ve ever moved without looking forward to it.

When John first mentioned his job interview for a position here, I thought it was a terrible idea. I thought it would put pressure on our first year of marriage. It did, but it also gave us a space in which to really focus on our relationship. I thought it was the wrong job for him and not worth moving for. It was the wrong job, but while we were here he found another which led him to the perfect career. I thought I would be incredibly lonely moving somewhere I knew no one and did not understand the rural, native culture. I was, and I have misunderstood and hurt some people because of it, and I am sorry for that. But I also drained away my city-life stress and ambition, and learned to listen to the birds and to write, so maybe the loneliness has had its fruit.

When John was given the official offer, I kicked and screamed and begged and asked for more time and complained to several trusted friends and mentors and appealed to my mother-in-law, pastor, anyone who might be able to talk some sense into John. I prayed and journaled profusely. Please God. Don’t make me move. Not now, not just when things are seeming to come together here in DC, not just when I feel so surrounded by love, not just when I am sensing the stirrings of a career—a calling, not just when I am going to be starting a marriage.

Despite all my begging and pleading, though, I think I knew from the moment John said he wanted to go, that we were going to go. I just needed time to accept it, to realize that I couldn’t allow myself to stand in the way of a chance for him to explore his calling.

So we moved, and at first I worked at Subway, and I felt very lonely. Then I found a job I absolutely loved (even if only part time), and slowly I began to find beauty and grace in the days as they passed, while still looking with hopeful anticipation to moving on quickly, which had been my goal from the start, because after all I knew I wanted to go to seminary at Duke.

The time is finally here. While I am itching to start my classes, and get a chance to be in ministry, and take concrete steps toward my calling, and connect with new community at Duke Divinity School, and eat Thai and Indian food, and buy organic produce—I am also surprised to find my reticence to leave.

You see, I want so badly to see my GED students through this journey, to see them pass all the tests and then give them a giant pat on the back and help them apply to college. I want to keep the habit of long runs by the creek on Saturday mornings, and then eating brunch afterwards with my running friends. I love the comfortable rhythm of socializing and introspecting, teaching and writing, that allows me to have energy to give to John and others. I have come to appreciate that my small band of friends here includes people at such different ages and life experiences, who have so generously offered me themselves. I feel something like joy in these spring blooms and the blue skies of the Smokies, and I wish I had spent more time hiking and camping and taking it all in.

I am sad to leave these things behind. I am also full of uncertainty at what is ahead.

I’m scared of re-learning and adjusting all over again with John, of new rhythms and new communities and new pressures affecting our marriage. I’m scared of the inevitable return to a busy, stressful, overexerted lifestyle, of starting all over again, of examining my faith under the microscope again, of making big decisions about our future.

And maybe I am reluctant to move forward without ever having really loved my life here—a life there were so many reasons to love—without ever really felt it was home, without having understood why I had to come here and what I was supposed to learn and whether I learned anything at all. Maybe I worry that the sometimes-aimlessness and confusion of this stint is the new standard for my life, that I have become someone who doesn’t know how to live fully and gratefully into the places and experiences in which I find myself.

I hold in my heart all of these things as I sort and pack boxes. There are days it overwhelms me.

But I believe I should act out of my love rather than my fear, which I guess means finishing well for my students, saying thank-yous and goodbyes as best I can, and trusting that the grace that has sustained me here goes on before me.

Deepening

A re-post from my shared blog in Hyattsville a year and a half ago--circumstances have changed but the sentiment rings true this time of year, I think.

A month ago, catching up with old friends, I chose "deepening" to describe my experience of the past year. Deepening, I said without thinking too much. I meant vaguely that I'd been affected in a profound way by the challenges of work, the challenges of community, the challenges of relationships, and most of all the experience of finally--for the first time in my sheltered, blessed life--tasting the sorrow of death.

Sometimes I feel silly bringing up again and again Grandma's death. It is not unique. Almost everyone age 12 and up has experienced the death of a grandparent; many a death of a friend or even parent. But Grandma's death, like her life, has affected me deeply. I still am trying to understand why, how, and how long. With grieving, what is too much and what is not enough? What is love and what is wallowing? I know that I was zapped of energy the first 3 months. I felt sad that people didn't understand that. I know that I am more scared of losing people, more aware of mortality, hold my family more precious. I'm playing the piano again sometimes. I've added two items to the queue of jobs to consider: "nursing assistant in a nursing home" and "hospital chaplain." I hope I also have a deeper understanding of loss and more compassion for those who are experiencing it. I think that's what I mean by deepening.

The plants in my garden this spring are waiting for something. The basil, peppers, and tomato plants haven't grown any taller than when I planted them. But I just learned their roots are probably very active right now. Deepening. Healthy root growth happens under two conditions--the soil has to be warm and loose enough, but also the roots grow most when the shoots aren't growing--early spring, late fall. You might plant a tree one summer and it spends a whole year seemingly dormant. It doesn't grow much until the following summer, but the roots have been deepening all along, preparing the way.

Like our lives. There are times, I am learning, where we don't grow above ground. I feel like I'm still in the same place I was 3 years ago. Still pattering around trying to make up my mind about "vocation" and "work." Still waiting for things to settle with my community, my city, to feel like I belong in a place long-term. Still making the same mistakes, the same sins, even moving backwards in some cases, or so it feels.

But surely I am deepening--learning to garden, learning to pray, learning to accept the loss of a leaf here and there, learning to mourn. Surely these roots will soon drink some living water and bring forth a mangled, misshapen, worm-eaten, delicious tomato.