A grain of wheat

My last couple blog entries, I noticed as I pondered a title for today’s post, have been about mourning, grieving. Apparently, in addition to being a summer of sunny walks and delightfully simple bike commuting and silent retreats and deeply intentional ministry, this is also a summer of grieving, if I will let it be. Based on my experience of God, I can only suspect this means that new life is just around the corner.

Photo by Capture Queen

It's been a year since we lived in Cherokee, but John and I visited a couple weeks ago. It was a perfect sunny day in late spring. We drove past blue ridges and walked small-town streets. While he worked, I went to see elk in the park and ran on my favorite trail by a rolling brook.

Over a pensive cup of hot chocolate, I thought: this is quite possibly the most beautiful place I have ever lived, maybe even will ever live. I thought: And I never loved it.

Perhaps this is why a guard goes up when I hear the word Cherokee. To say Cherokee conjures up disappointment, not with the town and the lovely people there, not even with John for having brought me to a place where it was hard to find outlet for my gifts, not even with God for the loneliness I experienced there. To say Cherokee conjures up disappointment with myself for being unable to live into the gifts and beauty that were before me.

So I missed out. And in an attempt to rebuild and find new community in Durham and move into bright futures of real careers and family and community, in wanting to leave the past behind, I have not let myself mourn for what might have been, for the beauty that eluded me.

*

This summer in Washington DC feels like a homecoming. Biking along the familiar streets—having instant familiarity with the neighborhoods and networks of half the people I meet because of the smallness of this city—running into old friends on the street or at the park—all of these things have made my first two weeks here rich and lovely.

All of these things remind me, too, of what I lost when we moved away from here.

Even if we moved back, the area around the metro has been built up and gentrified, the grocery store gutted and redone, the church that was my primary community disbanded, friends have moved away. Maybe most importantly, I am no longer a single twenty-something with other twenty-something friends who spend hours eating and laughing and sharing on Friday nights.

Marriage, it turns out, is a kind of loss. You have to release one thing to cling to another.

*

For a school assignment, I ask my internship supervisor for a verse from Scripture that captures the spirit of the Church of the Saviour. She thinks for a moment, then shares a saying of Jesus.

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (John 12:24)

The Church of the Saviour movement, she explains, believes that wholeness—both inner wholeness and the growth of a healthy community—is only possible through the steady work of dying to our egos, letting ourselves break open for others. 

Am I ready for this? Am I ready to walk through the grieving process towards wholeness?

In church Sunday, a man spoke about the void he had felt for the past two years, since his father died of cancer. There was a dullness, an emptiness, like a banner over his every step, and he was constantly aware of his desire for it to go away, to let him get back to clarity in his work and family life. And then in a flash of intuition he realized that God was in that nothingness. The very feeling he wanted to purge was the place where God and joy and love could meet him.

I’m a nodder, and as he told this story, I nearly bobbled my head right off of my shoulders. I felt I knew exactly what he was talking about.

When my grandma died, there was a dullness to life for about a year, that same strip of void traveling along above me wherever I went. In some ways I miss it, because in that aching hole she was always with me. I also knew without a doubt that God was in that place, in that death, in that grief, slowly cultivating something that would spring forth anew.

What I had not thought until Sunday was to relate that experience to the past few years that have felt so spiritually vapid. What if God’s presence is in the very dullness I’ve tried to avoid? What if I have to lean into that disappointment for a moment to meet God in the place God has been presenting Godself to me? What if I need to accept gravity, become dead weight for a fraction of a moment, and fall to the ground like a grain of wheat pregnant with fruit and beauty?

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.

The grace of the ordinary

It is a mopey snow day and since it is approximately my fourth in a row, I have been withering away all day in our small apartment, failing to work up the energy to clean the house or drive to a coffee shop to write or read. I slept till eleven and I have been eating chocolate chip cookies and playing online all day.

My husband knows this, because when he comes home I am only just rising to start making spaghetti.

So later on, after another dinner-by-Netflix and a quick phone call from my friend, as we relax into our evening reading, he is surprised when I tell him.

“I am happy,” I say.

“Are you sure?” he asks after a moment. He knows it is a big thing for me to say, after the last sixteen months. He is still skeptical that I am happy with him, ever since I aired my disappointments to the whole internet.

“Yes,” I insist.

Four months ago when I wrote about our first year of marriage, when I began to air it out, I held it out in front of me and I saw that it was actually quite ordinary. I saw that we had passed through some tears and challenges and landed on our feet. People responded to the piece, and I saw that I was not alone—that it is never an easy task, making two lives one.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I tell him.

I have been giggling, for one thing. I am laughing again at the kind of jokes and stories that I once thought were funny, and then didn’t think were funny for a tearful, too-serious year. Also, I don’t lie awake thinking can-i-really-do-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life. Also, when he asks me what is wrong I talk, instead of stifling a scream and bottling the emotions I can’t even begin to understand.

“I know we still fight sometimes, but it all feels lighter.”

He is looking at me, listening, and his eyes are the same deep brown eyes that have received so much of my story, my love, my honesty, my anger, my joy.

“And I have come to love the small things about our life together.”

“You mean like watching Netflix and cooking dinner and drinking wine?”

“Smaller,” I say.

The day to day things, the moment to moment things. Kisses on the cheek. Whispers for no reason. The tone we use when we talk. Coming home together after a night out. Car trips with my feet on the dash as we discuss everything from vocal resonance to twitter culture to spiritual growth. Resting my arms on his feet as we sit at opposite ends of the couch, reading. Looking over at him and thinking, here we are.

It is almost like falling in love again. It is different than the first time, of course—not wild and limitless in a dewy meadow with stars above, not feeling like I am going to jump out of my skin with joy and possibility. More like going for a walk in the winter and then sitting by a fire, sleepy, late at night. Strong, peaceful, and warm. Safe.

I know in reality, this life we have is anything but safe. I know we are still very young, still on the very early stages of this journey. There is danger ahead: the danger of being angry or broke or sleep-deprived or isolated. The danger of wanting different things. The danger of pain or sickness or loss.

But we are building a strong foundation. I can feel it. Much of this foundation came before we got here, from the love of our family and friends, from the beauty of our meeting when we did, from the unending patience of God. And here we are, building on it day by day with tiny blocks of spaghetti and hi and what-can-i-do-for you, and I am grateful for perseverance and guidance and the grace of the ordinary—all the things that have brought us this far.

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Today I am linking up with Kirsten Oliphant's "Not So (Small) Stories" to connect with other writers and work on craft. Click below to see more about the series or join in!

A journey, part 2: A sinking feeling

This is part 2 of a story in five parts. Catch up here: Part 1: Waiting for a sign

Disclaimer: for the record, the college friends I mention are STILL some of my best friends, years later. So when I say I was lonely, I don't blame anyone. It was a confusing time, for all of us. We were all figuring things out, piece by piece.

At age twenty, sure I wanted to be the kind of Christian who lugged my Bible everywhere, hugged trees and denounced the Iraq war, I followed Jesus to Bangladesh for a month of studying rural poverty and development. I took with me a jar of peanut butter and a vague notion that this would be my training to save the world.

Upon arrival in Dhaka, while jet-lagged and drugged with the new scents and the thickness of the tropical air in January, I met Rumana. One of our student guides for the month, she translated the culture to us and painted our hands with henna in the evenings. At the hostel in the village, Rumana prayed five times a day. When she heard the call to prayer echoing from the minaret, she looked at all of the American girls huddled in a small room and asked gently, “Do you mind if I pray?” Then she bowed towards Mecca, her sari glimmering in the twilight.

In the evenings, the twelve of us Americans fumbled over our observations of village poverty and pretended we could figure out how one day, the women wouldn’t have to bathe and wash their saris in the polluted sludge. Our professor Haroun discussed pros and cons of micro-finance, the need for good governance, and the peace of the message of Islam.

The yellow mustard fields bloomed and the imam woke us every morning at 4:30, calling the faithful with an ancient song.

Photo by Abhijlt Kar Gupta

*

I returned to Minnesota, head full of unprocessed images on culture, religion, and poverty. Second semester began.

My religion class was called Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. Stansell, a professing liberal Christian, gave us a text called The Secular Bible and spent the first few weeks on Genesis—the creation story, the story of Adam and Eve, the stories of Noah and Abraham. He explained, with a little too much of a gleam in his eye, that Genesis was mostly legend. He compared it to contemporary Middle Eastern sagas. He claimed much of the Bible was more ideological treatise than history.

I stayed after class and asked why we were spending so much time drilling into our heads the idea of legend. “I want to get to the text and the meaning of the text,” I said. He told me he wanted to challenge my critical framework.

After a couple weeks, he announced that we were going to begin to delve into the prophetic books of the Old Testament. “Now let’s find this story about when Isaiah was visited by angels…” He thumbed around for thirty seconds. “Where is it now…”

“I think it’s Isaiah 6,” I said quietly. I happened to have read it the day before.

“Aha! A Bible thumper!” he said in the same half-mocking tone he used when he talked about Fundamentalists and Creationists. “Now, the book of Isaiah actually represents two separate prophetic traditions…”

Stansell’s teaching was well-researched and clear, if his tone was a little biting. The more I read, the more evidence slowly piled up on the side of his interpretation. Meanwhile, in another class, Darwin was making a pretty brilliant case for evolution, and Freud explained that Christianity was wish fulfillment, the ego’s hope of something bigger than itself. Until now, I’d thought I could gracefully tread along the balance of intelligence and faith, obedience and compassion. But was that wishful thinking? Did believing in the Bible mean I had to reject science? Accept holy war and genocide in the name of God?

Most of the kids in the class were either non-religious or liberal Christians. They did not seem perturbed. But there was another girl in the class. With a smile on her face, she would raise her hand and give the evangelical pat answer to questions about the Bible. When asked about the three historical/archaeological theories of the Hebrew people establishing themselves in Caanan, she would simply say, “Moses led them out of Egypt and God cleared the way for them in the promised land.” I wanted to shake her. Was she dumb enough not to realize that these theories were contrary to everything she believed?

Now I know. Everyone’s brain works differently. Maybe she did not see these historical theories of the Bible as a threat to her faith; maybe she was able to hold it all in tension. Or maybe she was challenged, but was clinging to the familiar words and beliefs as a means of defense. All I know is at the time, she seemed to me an image of the unthinking, head-in-the-sand Christian I did not want to be.

*

“What if Genesis is myth?” I queried my evangelical Creationist boyfriend over coffee during a study break. “When did we start thinking it had to be literally true? Saint Augustine and C.S. Lewis didn’t think so.”

He was worried about me; his eyes shifted quickly, right and left.

“What if we’re actually missing out by believing that? It could be more real, more powerful, as a story,” I said.

“You write stories,” I accused.

“Why are we so scared to admit it could be a story?” I added.

He didn’t argue. He knew I was talking to myself.

*

As the questioning voices grew louder, I didn’t know how to be honest with my friends about what I was going through. They had problems and conflicts of their own, which sometimes seemed too much for me in my agony. They knew I had doubts, but they did not realize how I was suffering. They had their own existential questions to deal with.

So I holed away in the library, reading The Secular Bible. I ate dinner alone in the cafeteria. I spent evenings analyzing Freud and Virginia Woolf in front of the computer screen, hoping with each footstep outside the door that someone would come in my room to ask how I was doing. My roommate sat at her desk wearing headphones as she wrote papers.

Woolf gave words to my experience: the estrangement of all human beings from each other and from reality. Where could a loving, or logical, God fit into this world of alienation and absurdity?

As I fell asleep some nights, throat would ache from holding back tears. This was more than “doubt” or “questioning my faith.” Those words are too small and mathematical. What was happening to me felt like an illness of the soul. Love, security, and meaning were being snatched away from me everywhere I turned.

One late night after another unfruitful talk with my boyfriend, I struggled to complete a short response paper on Nietzsche’s analysis of Christian faith. “Nietzsche is right; there is nothing rational in Christianity,” I finally wrote at two a.m. “Nevertheless, I will hold out for humble, sacrificial love, because it’s the only thing worth living for.”

I knew that I could not maintain this feeble grip much longer.

*

Thursday at Bible study, the speaker talked about dancing and laughing, leaving your sorrows, traveling light. We should be full of the joy of the Lord. We should drop all our sorrows and run full speed towards God, laughing all the way. We should stop being so boring and serious.

I sat still and did not smile at his jokes. My pack was full of books and questions and messy relationships. I left early, without talking to any of the smiling faces. I stopped at my friend Leanne’s room to say goodnight.

She was reading Nietzsche, but she stood up and gave me a hug.

I started to cry. “I’m so scared.”

“Scared of what, honey?” She held me close.

“That he’s not real,” I whispered, for the first time admitting it aloud.

She listened to me cry. “Even in my darkest moments, there has remained a core in me, deeper than emotion, that is faith.” She squeezed my hand. “God won’t leave you alone.”

She did not speak lightly. Her faith had been the only seed of hope to sustain her through the three years since her two sisters and brother were killed in a car accident.

Keep reading with Part 3.

The First Year

It began with a perfect wedding. We were surrounded by more love than we had ever felt. A perfect honeymoon, hiking in Montana, eating huckleberry pie, open communication, laughter.

Then we timidly began to make a home in Cherokee. We tried new recipes and carved pumpkins and played footsie and drank wine and lit candles. We discussed possibilities for our future, grad school and children and returning to Africa and the visiting the Grand Canyon.

We built a life together, a life that hasn’t always been perfect, but is real, is ours. We kept a container garden on the porch and a worm composter in the kitchen, and we learned that we would have to vacuum the fruit flies out of the worm composter daily to prevent infestation. We obsessed a little over Jack Bauer and Michael Scott and watched too much Netflix. We complained about our jobs, coffee breath, and the amount of space in the bed. We discovered that if we put dimes and nickels in the Coke machine and pressed “coin return,” it spit out quarters for laundry. John scrubbed a lot of mold out of the shower, because there is no ventilation in the bathroom. We ate burned cookies and expired chips when I worked at Subway, and a lot of farm veggies when I volunteered at the farm. We developed a two-person version of Settlers of Catan so we can play anytime we want. We spent one six-hour road trip re-telling from memory the stories of young adult novels Game of Thrones and Divergent.

It’s almost impossible to believe, the beauty we experienced in and around and beyond these little moments. We live on a riverbank and can build a fire and watch the flames flicker on the water, and when we get bored of the flames we can look up at the stars. We joined a relay team that ran 212 miles through the mountains in the spring. We hiked the Appalachian trail across the Smokies. We saw Over the Rhine and Bob Dylan in Asheville, some of our favorites. We went swimming and tubing and saw a million waterfalls and ate a million potlucks and went to a million weddings with wonderful friends and family. We won $4000 at the Casino one night (just kidding).

It has been good, and there is much to be thankful for. This is the first year.

Yet alongside the first retelling, there is another narrative weaving through it, a truth of heaviness and disappointment, which does not negate the beauty and the gifts but remains with it.

Many afternoons, I glued myself to the couch in pity, willing myself to get up and garden, run, write, or pray, wishing I had a friend here to call, wishing John wouldn’t be gone so much at the gym or watching football. Knowing that if he were home I’d stay on the couch anyway.

Many times we held on to the negative characterizations we made for each other. Un-thoughtful, unhealthy, domineering, untrusting. We wouldn’t let go of our caricatures; we intentionally lived in to them, even.

Many nights I lay in bed with tears in my eyes and a knot in my throat, refusing to let out the tears because then I’d have to explain, to be vulnerable, to dwell on unmet expectations and unfulfilled hopes. And as he lay inches from me, yet so far, still I desperately wanted him to know the depth of my loneliness.

Many opportunities were lost out of numbness. John was too tired or sick or rainy or injured to go hiking. I grew weary so that I didn’t want to look at the stars, that great expansive beautiful sky that had brought us together in the very beginning as we stared at it in a field in Africa, falling in love. That place seemed so far away.

When I told John one night I did not want to go outside and see the stars, I knew this year had changed me. In anger or defeat, I had closed myself off from the aching after beauty and after God.

After all this, there were attempts to fight back. I would go home or on a trip and return with revitalized friendships and renewed hopes for change. Only to find that as soon as I returned to a sink full of dishes and a TV blasting a show I didn’t want to be sucked into again, I would snap at John and rebuild my internal walls.

And the questions would return. Why. Why did you make me move here for a job you didn’t even like, a career you decided not to pursue. Why haven’t you been exactly what I want. Why can’t you anticipate my every need. Why are you so happy when I am so miserable.

In all this there has been relief, and dessert, and whispered conversations at night, and a tender touch to say I’m sorry. But there have been no real answers.

This, too, is the first year.

There is a third piece of this crazy puzzle. A perspective that says we are not the only people in this story, not the center of it, and not alone.

There is a ring, a promise, a grace and patience from beyond ourselves.

There are a hundred witnesses sending prayers and love our way.

There is time enough to take our disappointments and fears one by one.

There is the character and humility that this year has forged.

There is the possibility of starting new every morning.

There is a weekend away, alone, to talk it all through and set new goals and remember: that what drew us to each other is always there, buried in the brokenness but also above it, waiting to be noticed if we take the time to look for it.

There is the image of God in each of us, more subtle but deeper than the tears and fights, and that is not going anywhere no matter how long.

So as we begin another year, I promise again to never give up.

Photo by David Cea