::Ignorance is Bliss::

 I don’t need no man, no fancy blood diamond ring. To hell with your white picket fence, country club, and lake house by the sea. Answering my questions with “because it’s biblical” has never done any good to this cynical heart of mine, and I assure you it never will. And if that’s honestly what it means to be a Christian woman, then, shit, I don’t want to be one. The more I read, the more I realize how little I know. It’s getting harder for me to hope, to celebrate and see beauty through this doubt. It’s all too big, too much for me to handle. One most days I walk these cobblestones teetering on the brink of despair. I’m sick of toiling over what is and what ought to be. I’m exhausted. I swear to you, one day I will withdraw from society, and it is there I will be free. There are indeed moments, when the brokenness of this world crushes my every last bit of hope, leaving me crippled. All I want is to seclude myself with nothing more than a vegetable garden and an aluminum airstream.

Ignorance is bliss.

Yet, those moments are fleeting, and I am reminded that seclusion in a mansion or seclusion in a trailer is seclusion all the same. And I refuse to be a reclusive woman.

There are indeed sleepless nights when I am wide-eyed, staring at the ceiling thinking of worse case scenarios.

That one day I’ll wake up, and find myself sleeping next to a man of white collared conventionality, both of us locked in the never-ending pursuit of fleeting promises of the American dream—with the dreams of living in an airstream or in community on a farm that once filled our youth completely stamped out, as our California King swallows us in our master suite. Creativity, whimsy, spontaneity replaced with a bureaucratic personality.

There are indeed nights when sleep does not come easy, and my thoughts are filled with fears of worse case scenarios.

That one day I’ll wake up, and find myself numb to injustice, violence, poverty--it’s all hopeless, I’ll say one day. That this cynicism will grow to eclipse all things beautiful and the power of extravagant love, that there would be limits to my compassion, that I would distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor. That I would pledge allegiance to the land of equal opportunity, pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Equal opportunity my ass, I don’t buy that. That I would come to use the rhetoric of democracy and freedom to justify violence and war.

Sleep does not come easy when the future is on my mind, with the fear that I will become the very person I don’t want to be.

That one day I’ll be a USDA agro-bureaucratic prick that delights in oppressing the honest farmer that is growing food with care and integrity. That I would work for Tyson, your abuses “justified” in the name of capitalism. Yeah, I don’t buy that either. That I’ll have a flashback to the years when I was young and full of life, and I’ll regretfully wonder how the hell I got here, and why I didn’t take more risks. That one day I’ll value my possessions over people, and consider the needs of the poor solely a responsibility of the state. That one day I would come to justify extravagance and why I will need a 5 million dollar house. That all of my attention would be placed on the kingdom to come, and not life in the present—that religion would become my opiate, as I sit submissively (like good Christian girls are to do!) in a pew, careful not to wrinkle my church clothes.

There are indeed these sleepless nights when I am convinced that complacency is inevitable as I finally drift off to sleep. That as hard as I may try, I will end up back in that false sanctuary, the 1%, ignorant. That the most adventure I will have is when I take my kids to the water park. That the only time I will encounter someone of a different socioeconomic status or skin color will be when the cleaning lady or landscapers come.

Oh, Lord may complacency never wash over me.

Yet, in my wildest dreams of distant lands, you are already there—I know it.

For you set the rhythm of this wander-lusting heart of mine, beating relentlessly for justice, peace, resurrection, and redemption.

Oh, and I am left with nothing but to trust in your goodness— a goodness I so deeply denied in the constant wake of tragedy, a Sovereignty I slowly learned to lean on.

And it is in the wee hours of the morning that I am only comforted by the reminder that complacency is impossible, complacency is impossible, if all that I am is woven to the heart of my Maker and Redeemer.  

Here I am—I stand in your presence—your broken daughter, full of contradictions, paradoxes, wrought by fears, filled to the brim with angst. Impatient, inconsistent. A rich girl acting poor. A hypocrite of hypocrites. But dammit I’m trying, oh trying to navigate these tensions that you have so clearly placed on my heart. I’m waiting to see how you will take these two opposing tensions to form the perfect synthesis. Oh, I’m trying to build this bridge between theory and practice.

I am fumbling, and falling, and tripping, and crawling. But navigating, nonetheless.

Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est

[Where charity and love are, God is there] 

missional community.

[sunday: conversations; bagels;abigail washburn; crisp weather & chilly feet; brainstorming; harmonica; coffee]

Missional community seems to be the word of the past few months, as I've been processing what that even means alongside my community group and home church (Jericho Road). Throughout this process, I've become easily frustrated and cynical because I feel like it's hard to live missionally as an overcommitted student--like there is no place for me in this whole pursuit.

This past summer I was beyond blessed to be a part of a missional community in Amsterdam. I worked at a Christian hostel that literally gave the poor wanderer a place to lay her/his head. There would be days where I would have tears of joy because I was so thankful for being a part of something that I only dreamt of before. There would be an almost equal number of days where I would be in tears because of the overwhelming amount of heartbreaking stories I would hear and see. But goodness, my dear friends, it was so powerful to be in a community that loved and served in bold ways--a community that did life and shared meals with people from all walks of life. No longer was the woman caught in prostitution just a statistic, or the man struggling with alcoholism just a wanderer on the street, but they were my friends and very much involved in my life.

My question, then, is how do I translate that back home? I'm a busy student. Most of my week is filled with classes and clubs. I don't have a car. I live in a small apartment with three other woman. I live in a bubble.

So, this morning I decided to stop throwing the "I'm a student so missional community is hard" pity-party, and actually started to rethink my definition of missional community. Don't get me wrong, I dream to one day live in an intentional, missional community--to have a space where I can pursue that more fully through hospitality and the like. But that's not where I'm at these days.
     [and does missional community come easily for anybody? I can't think of any situation in which a missionally-minded lifestyle would come naturally. We're all working through this with different committments, resources, responsibilities. It's something we all need to work through]

I need to stop restricting my involvement by what I can't do, but rather think about what I can do. And the beautiful thing about community is that we all have different resources and gifts to bring to the table to accomplish what is impossible to do with just one.

My prayer for you and for me is this: to get creative with what we have and to actually do something with it.

[i typed the word "missional" 9 times. now 10]

fręêdøm

[Sitting on a train; coffee on my breath; hope in my heart]

I live in shades of gray, but what I know to be true is this: freedom is only found in my Maker. Freedom isn’t in broken me, nor is it in you [he or she, him or her]. I’ve sought this freedom here and there, near and far; time and time again I confuse Freedom with all things fleeting and flaky and false, and this pursuit of freedom in all things other than my Maker ends up becoming a burden—enslaving myself to things that never deliver what I so desperately long for.

[But too often these truths get stuck in my head and never make it to the heart]

Often, [unpredictably] my mind travels back to what was & I sift through the soil in which this heart of mine was planted—you know, those valleys in your story that are saturated with more paradoxes than most—of pain, heartache, laughter, salty tears, toothy smiles—and you accept that you don’t fully understand why it happened but you’re thankful for it, anyway—or at least thankful for the valleys on the days when the sun is shining and the wind is at your back and everything seems well in the world on the other side of things.

The pursuit of Freedom has been a theme in my life, and I think it’s safe to assume that it’s been a theme in yours, as well; most likely taking on different shapes and colors in different seasons.

You, my dear friends, were created to be free.

                        [pursue it confidently] 

thoughts on courage.

I vividly remember [clear as crystal] the night I chose the words powerful and courageous to describe who I was [are those appropriate words for a evangelical woman to describe herself as?! ;)] I remember being called a woman that night by someone who actually beleived it. Cold, we were, sitting on a bench eating ice cream, and venturing into places we have never been before--verbalizing ideas freshly explored. It was a beautifully vulnerable moment, really.

That was many years ago, seems like decades [but I haven't even been alive for 2 decades, so it couldn't have been]. Those words, powerful and courageous, have traveled with me. Sometimes I didn't seem fit to carry them, sometimes I didn't even want to carry them. But it was almost impossible to let them go, and I don't think I really wanted to let them go, either.

[Those words and I are one and the same] and we have been to places I never even knew existed, and some places I never wish to visit again.

Courage is never a pure noun, is it? It has, for me, always been mixed with fear and other emotions that make my stomach flip around and tie in knots. For most of my life courage has manifested itself in the form of words. These words are like the moments before you are going to throw up: you start to have hot flashes [the top of your head sweats] and you realize that whatever is inside of you has to come out, and waiting to throw up is almost as bad as actually doing it.

I've been thinking a lot about tensions recently. Mainly how I need to embrace places of tension instead of running away from them. If courage is something that doesn't come with age, but rather grows as we experience hard things, then how does that relate to having enough courage to enter into places saturated in tension?

All I'm saying is that I want to become a woman that isn't afraid to have hard conversations, to get messy, to say that I don't know but I want to talk about it. Isn't that what we're supposed to do? What a shame it would be, my dear friends, if we lived our lives seeking places of comfort and safety.

This is difficult. Can we admit that? Is it ok to tear down our walls and admit that we don't know what the hell we're doing? This is really hard, and most days I don't know where to start.

May you sit in the tension. Embrace the tension, whatever that may be--because it is in those places where beauty is waiting to be discovered. I would remind you to not forget your power and courage, but something tells me that you carry them always. And for that I am glad.

I think I'm turning into a post-colonial feminist. And I'm ok with that.

I used to fear normalcy. Until I realized that even the craziest, most radical life would get normal after a certain period of time. Living in a traveling nomadic community would become normal to me after a while. Normacly is inevitable, and I think that's ok.

I need to redefine my normal. Normal doesn't have to be something to fear. Complacency, yes, should be feared.

Normalcy is inevitable, and I think that's ok. Normal doesn't equal complacent if my definition of normal discourages habits that cause me to get stuck in a rut. Ruts are bad.

Nuts are good, though. Like the roasted nuts they sell in the mall.

What is your normal?