On Our Way To Crazy

After we finished our read-through of the Bible in my ordination class last month, we decided to take it easy for a while. Take a break from the insane pace and piles of studying we’d been doing for over two years and just spend some time talking. So, for the past several weeks, we’ve been taking turns telling our stories. Who we are, where we come from, how we got here. What we think. What we believe. It’s been such an interesting and enlightening exercise getting to know each other in such an intimate way.

I worked for days putting mine together. I wanted to hit all the important details, but also have a thread that tied the whole thing together. Part of what we were required to do was define a metaphor for our spiritual views… a picture of how we see the world and how our faith fits into that idea.

If I had been asked that question ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, it would have been easy. Something about spiritual discipline, exercise, how working hard will get you where you need to be, spiritually-speaking. But I’m not really that person anymore. My life, and my outlook, has a lot more grey than black and white.

I took my turn before I read this book, sadly. It would have made the process a lot easier. Or, if nothing else, reminded me that I’m not alone on this road.

Jesus Girls is a collection of essays about “growing up female and evangelical”. It’s a book of women, like me, who came of age in the church and have had something of a complicated relationship with it ever since. Some have reconciled, some have not, but they all have a story to tell. And not a black and white, right and wrong story. A real story.

Like this, from Anne Dayton, that I’m pretty sure she wrote while looking INTO MY BRAIN. She writes how it felt to get involved in church as a teenager with a family that didn’t find it as… appealing as she did. (It is taking all the self control I have not to type out the entire essay, just FYI.)

I was hooked. With the fervency of a new believer, I threw myself into youth group. I started coming every Wednesday night and promptly developed a crush on one of the boys. I soon felt very comfortable there, but no matter how many weekend retreats and campouts I went on, I knew almost instinctually that I could never quite fit in. I hadn’t been in Sunday school with them since nursery. They all seemed to have this vast and secret knowledge of song lyrics that I could never hope to acquire. They listened to the right music – Michael W. Smith and Stephen Curtis Chapman and Amy Grant, and later Audio Adrenaline and the Newsboys – not Mariah Carey and Nirvana and Weezer. In short, they had a carefully filtered world filled with positive influences and inspirational media that would lead them along the way everlasting. I had a family who watched PBS on Sunday mornings.

My family listened to America’s Country Countdown on Sunday mornings, but the rest of it sounds very familiar. It didn’t have anything to do with my family, or, really, with the youth group specifically. I just had such a desire to belong. There is nothing worse than being fifteen and feeling like an outsider.

I wanted someone to give me a True Love Waits ring. I craved one of those “Go Against the Flow” t-shirts.

But I never got any of those things. Mostly, I think, because I never bothered to ask. And to this day, I’m not really sure why. My parents are not selfish ogres, nor are they anti-church. They never denied me much.

I guess it somehow didn’t occur to me to ask my parents to buy these things for me. Part of my reticence was a shyness, a sense that religion was a private affair, and that talking about it was deeply revealing and embarrassing. Even in church, I couldn’t work up the courage to pray out loud; prayer was something I did in the quiet space of my mind. We rarely talked about God in my house. The one time my mom suggested I pray over a Thanksgiving dinner, I was so self-conscious I just shook my head and started eating.

I’m sure there was also a certain sense of guilt involved, as if embracing the Christian subculture was rejecting the mainstream world my family lived in, and thus, them.

In Kari’s review of the same book, she talks about the idea of testimony and how we were taught early on that ours needed to be compelling so as to win more people over to Christ. That was never an idea I was comfortable with, partially because I didn’t really feel like it was my job to convince people to believe, and partially because my story wasn’t all that interesting. I wasn’t a drug addict or a gang member or a prostitute before Jesus found a place in my life. He didn’t turn my life around, he came alongside me on the path I was already taking.

Instead, my story is about finding room at the table for everyone. I had the idea that Christians were all the same shape, and you better squeeze and contort yourself until you fit the mold. Now I understand that we are all who we are because that’s who we’re supposed to be, because we are made in the image of God and there’s a lot more to who he is than we can imagine. I understand that faith is personal, and unique, and that it has very little to do with listening to the right music or wearing the right clothes or having the right job.

But even though I was stuck with parents who drank wine with dinner and believed in science, they allowed me space to be who I wanted, and they tried to encourage a healthy balance between my “church things” an the rest of my world. In other words, they were always trying to get me to lighten up.

College is a time when you’re supposed to refocus your view of the world. My Christian friends were questioning the narrowness of the culture they had been brought up in, and many started rebelling against the parents who had sheltered them in the bubble of Christian pop culture. I, on the other hand, was looking at the choices I had made and wondering if maybe my parents might have been right all along.

And the reason I can understand those things is not because of the church, at least not the church as I knew it in high school and college. It’s because of the family I was born into, the one that taught me to love the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac and Sunday morning breakfast, and also how to think for myself and be independent and not let someone else dictate who I am.

They were teaching me the lessons that would later define both the faith I cling to and the way I teach the teenagers in the youth group I am now in charge of. I just didn’t see it at the time.

Happy New Year’s Eve, friends! What are you doing tonight? Got big plans? We bailed on all party plans and are instead grilling fajitas and drinking both the champagne of beers and actual champagne. Should be a good time. I made guacamole.

Was 2009 good to you? Does anyone else feel like it was about three seconds long? We had a pretty good one. A lot happened. Lots of stress. Lots of fun. Lots of taco salads from Baja Burrito.

I was trying to decide what kind of post to write on the last day of the year – introspective? Celebratory? Thought-provoking? (Ha!) I had a whole mess of stuff I wanted to mention, so I decided to go with the old standby. The list.

Things I Loved In 2009

• Twitter. Are you twittering? You should be twittering. It is the best, even though I’m pretty sure it’s to blame for my weak posting action this year. All the little thoughts I would usually try to stretch into an actual cohesive post are instead dumped into twitter where all my random friends can see them. Do they care? I don’t know. But I enjoy reading their little thoughts a lot. Also, Amazon mp3.
• Service projects with the kids. After a rough start, 2009 kicked into high gear for GPYG at MFuge. They spent the week working hard and serving people, and came back with a strong sense of purpose that it didn’t have to end there. Based on that, we started a program called Second Saturday, where we take the second Saturday of each month and use it to serve the community. This fall we packed thousands of food boxes, served food and washed mountains of dishes in a soup kitchen, helped 300 needy families find gifts for their kids and wrapped gifts for the angel tree. I am so proud that the spirit of service has become one of the defining characteristics of our group, and I can’t wait to see where they take it in 2010.
• Switchfoot’s Hello Hurricane. I mentioned this one yesterday in our best songs of 2009 list, but I want to make sure I am getting my feelings across here. THIS RECORD IS AMAZING. Easily the best Switchfoot record. It has a great mix of rock songs (like real actual rock songs, not the Christian music lite-rock version) and mellow ones, and lyrically they completely knock it out of the park. I could, and have, listen to it over and over and over again. I love it so much.
• Sin Boldly by Cathleen Falsani. I read this way back in January, and it stuck with me all year. I don’t do a lot of rereading (says the girl who read all of the Harry Potter books this year, AGAIN), but I think this one might be an annual read for me.
• Glee. The most fun TV show there is. I love Puck, I love Sue, I love Mr. Shue. But most of all, I love the way they portray the kids. It’s fantastical, sure, and you have to suspend pretty much all of your disbelief. But the kids nail it. You really care about them. And the singing is awesome. Plus, it’s influence brought us the Sing-off, and that brought me the Beelzebubs. And they are awesome. (Watch this. And this. And this.)
• My Blackberry. Don’t judge me, y’all. This stupid little thing changed my life. I had a smartphone before, but it totally sucked. The Blackberry doesn’t freeze up on me, the battery lasts forever, my church email pushes through onto it and it has GPS. I know you think your iphone is cooler, and you’re probably right. But my Blackberry keeps me from getting lost, keeps me from being chained to my computer and NEVER DIES.
• The Youth Room. 2008 ended up being kind of a tough one for my GPYG-ers. We lost our meeting space last August and worked really hard to hold ourselves together until we built our building, only to end up with no youth space then, either. At the end of the summer I talked the board into letting us take over part of the church office building so the kids could have ownership over something. It’s not ideal, but it’s ours. We took a boring brown conference room and youthed it up good, and now we have a space that is ours for the first time ever. It’s too small, it doesn’t have heat and if the weather is bad we are crammed in there tight, but our name is on the door. And that is good.
• Shows – Andrew Peterson, Waterdeep, Jennifer Knapp, Counting Crows, Ben Folds, Over the Rhine, Wicked, a ton of youth productions, a thousand Remedy Drive shows, Chris Thile, Andy and the Andys, and a million more I can’t even remember. It was a good year to buy a ticket and see a show.
• My girlfriends. This is kind of a new one for me. I’ve always had friends, and my job comes with kind of a built-in social circle. But I’ve never been that great at letting people in. This year was different, though. I had a lot going on, and I needed to talk about it. So I did. I let my walls down and really talked to my friends. And they talked to me. And we assured each other that the things we were saying weren’t crazy, and that we weren’t horrible people even though we really felt like we were, and that we could get through it and it was okay if we had to have the same conversation a million times. I would have gone crazy this year without them.

This year was a mixed bag for me, but overall, I think it was a success. The good outweighed the bad, and I am thankful.

(Sorry for the lack of capital letters in this list. I typed them in correctly, but they came out lowercase and I don’t know how to fix it. I promise I have better typing etiquette than that.)

Hello, internet. Nice to see you.

I have been gleefully unplugged for about a week now. I didn’t even have Blackberry service for a couple of days. Somehow I managed the jitters and cold sweats. I think all the food and alcohol helped.

We were in Texas for eight crazy nights. It was glorious. We played the Wii my mom awesomely got my dad for Christmas, decorated mountains of cookies and stayed up til 3am with my parents listening to stories about hanging out backstage with Ted Nugent (the Nuge!) and watching my mom do the moonwalk of losers. We worked really hard to make Aaron’s dad’s grandpa name “Buckethead”.

We ate Whataburger, La Madeleine, Pappasitos, Pasados, Whataburger again, Corner Bakery, homemade tamales and a few chocolate pies. We dipped thousands of peanut butter crackers in chocolate. My aunt forced me to eat a cream cheese jalapeno jelly cracker thing and got mad when I didn’t like it. Aaron’s mom tried to burn the house down by cooking pizzas with the cardboard still on the bottom. We ate dozens of bowls of taco soup, the Official Meal of Friends Aaron and Brandi Go Visit.

I got to spend eight straight days with people I love. Texas people. Home people. I spent my 30th straight Christmas crammed into a house with fifty people yelling, eating, and unwrapping a tidal wave of gifts. The Wii golf team of Brandi and Papaw got two birdies in the same game and is poised to take over the world. I watched football and wrestled the kids of the guys Aaron went to middle school with. I shopped and wrapped and cooked with my parents, then lost to them at every game we played. I talked about marriage and depression and recipes and uncertainty and getting older with the same girls who were on my t-ball team.

We are really lucky to be in job situations that allow us to travel home for Christmas like we do. We got real, honest-to-goodness REST. And we are very, very thankful.

Does anyone feel like it was September about three seconds ago? How is it time for Christmas already?

This month has been a tough one. Aaron has had job stress like never before. We’ve had a million youth events. Two of the pastors on staff at the church left for what are very personal and totally up-and-up reasons, and while it is totally the right thing for their family (and therefore the church) it is going to be a serious challenge to move forward without them. We had a heck of a time trying to figure out Christmas with our families. December has been long and tiring.

Every year, when September rolls around, I get excited. It’s the start of my favorite part of the year – fall, school, Halloween, pumpkins, holidays, coats, boots, Christmas. It’s the best. But it just FLIES by, y’all. I blinked twice and it’s time to fly to Texas for Christmas. CHRISTMAS. How did we get here?

The season has been full of fun things, too. I took the kids to see Remedy Drive and Family Force Five (alone!) and it was one of the best nights we’ve had in a long time. We had our annual Christmas service project and party, where the kids helped over 300 people pick out gifts for their families and then made videos of themselves singing songs to strangers and doing high kicks in front of Starbucks. We had a full fancy holiday meal with our care group and I came home with a sweet plastic sword that makes swordfighting noises when you swish it. (That’s what you do with a sword, right? Swish it?) We went to the Andrew Peterson Christmas show for the sixth straight year and got to spread out on the pew after our friends bailed at the last minute. We went through several chocolate pies.

It’s all been good. But all the good plus all the hard equals a blur of a month and an exhausted couple of people. I am looking forward to going to Texas. I am. I just can’t believe it’s time to do this already.

It’s 11:00. I am in bed next to a sleeping husband and a snoring dog. My kitchen is clean and my fridge is full of leftover potato casserole and green bean bundles and chocolate pie.

I spent the whole day inside my house. This morning we got up early and had the-turkey-is-finally-in-the-oven celebratory champagne and cranberry cocktails. We watched some of our kids perform in the parade on TV, made a thousand side dishes and snuck food to Miles while everyone else was looking the other way.

The house filled up with family and friends who brought pear stuffing and sweet potatoes and wine and laughter. We sat down around a beautiful (if I do say so myself) table and told stories about Thanksgivings where tables fell to the floor and mashed potatoes were thrown and that one time Aunt Donna’s jello exploded all over the kitchen and she stormed out without saying a word. We ate and ate and ate.

The Cowboys came on and our sweet friends patiently sat through two quarters of a game they didn’t care about while my husband and my father-in-law yelled at the TV. We fell asleep on the sofa. We played a super fun game at halftime that made me laugh so hard I cried. We ate more pie and watched the second half. I changed into my lucky shirt and we won, again. I am made of magic.

Our friends left and we settled in for the Texas/A&M game. Well, they did. I sat with my back to the TV and read a novel that made me cry and want to visit Wyoming. One by one, we went to bed.

And now I am sitting here, exhausted and stuffed and blissfully happy. We all have so much to be thankful for, we know that. And I am. So thankful. For all of those things.

Especially the sleeping husband. And the snoring dog. And the sweet life I get to live with them every day in this tiny house on this tree-lined street in this amazing city. And the intensely stressful jobs full of people we love who drive us crazy. And all the people we’ve met here who have become our family. And our actual family who are our rock and support even though we are so far away.

And the chocolate pie. Oh, the chocolate pie.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

TWO EXCESSIVELY GENIUS IDEAS I HAD TODAY

1. Aaron should only sign and manage bands with guys in them who are brothers. Then, he could change the name of the company to “Hey, Brother!”, and have the receptionist answer the phone a la Buster Bluth.

2. My extended family is very competitive. We have always been game players, for generations. There are legendary stories of games of 42 between my great-grandparents that ended with dominoes being thrown and my sweet little old great grandmother calling someone a HORSE’S ASS.

We’ve been tossing around the idea of having a family tournament of some kind during the Smith Family Christmas Extravaganza. Darts, maybe, or peanut, something fairly simple that kids and adults can play quickly. (There are fifty of us. It will take a while.)

Tonight at dinner we were discussing the logistics of the tournament. We decided there needed to be some kind of trophy that the winner would get custody of for the whole year. But what? What would be the perfect trophy idea, the best name for our tournament and our award?

Then we got it. We are going to find a plastic horse, glue it to a platform, spray paint the whole thing gold and attach a little sign – THE HORSE’S ASS AWARD.

Genius.

Well, here we are again. Awesome.

Last time I spoke up. I stood up for myself and my family. And you know what? It sucked. It sucked a lot.

This time my hand is being forced a bit. I am being asked not to get involved, not to participate, not to speak up. So I’m not.

But, oh, how I want to.

It amazes me how easily selfishness comes for you. How you don’t even see what you’re doing or how badly it’s hurting the people who should be closest to you. How those people are cutting their emotional ties to you to keep from being hurt. It amazes me how you can take something that is meant to be sweet and meaningful and fun and make it ugly and awkward and unpleasant.

But this time my attitude is different. If you’re okay with ugly, then so am I. I’m not fighting for peace anymore. I’m not going to be the mediator. I’m not going to work with everyone to make everyone happy and put a ton of stress and pressure on myself. No one else cares. So neither do I.

That’s a lie, of course. I do care. We care. But we have to stop letting you hurt us. The difference between expectations and reality is disappointment, and this time I refuse to be disappointed. So instead I will lower my expectations. To none.

Maybe you will surprise me. But I doubt it.

We survived wedding weekend! Here’s what went down.

Thursday morning I packed up way more clothes than I could possibly wear in three days, rented a sweet Focus and headed out into the spitting rain down I-40 to Greensboro, NC. It was time for Alisa’s wedding and I did not want to be late. And by not late, I mean not by more than my usual half hour or so.

(Sidenote: I bought leggings last week. I wore them on my drive with a long plaid button down and I was so self-conscious every time I stopped that I almost dug into my suitcase for some jeans. My efforts to be cool are so futile.)

I pulled into my hotel with its hallway full of food smells just in time to turn around and run back out for the girls’ dinner and lingerie shower. I love a good lingerie shower… it’s one of the only places a youth pastor can get away with inappropriate comments and I try take full advantage. We made wine charms and told funny wedding stories and ate amaretto cupcakes. It was super fun.

Friday morning I got up and went to the nail salon to discuss yellow nails and R. Kelly themed wedding receptions. Got a manicure just in time to be an hour late picking Scott up from the airport and have the phrase “WATCH THIS HAPPEN” enter my life. We drove around for a thousand hours, made thirty-seven illegal u-turns and finally made it to the non-rehearsal dinner with the Hollands, Trey and Andrea. I had the most delicious chocolate chess pie there has ever been and visited Eugene Street, but I can’t tell you what happened there.

Wedding day! Susan and I got up, got dressed and got ourselves over to Kari’s house to help the girls get ready and ohh and ahh over mustard heels and leopard wedges. Then we drove to the church to ohh and ahh over flower girl dresses and leaf necklaces and work on our Beyonce dance moves before heading out for a quick lunch. And that’s where it all went wrong.

If I could take back one moment of the weekend, it would be this one. I have the most adorable pair of grey round toe stacked heels in the world that I had never worn. I’d put on my sensible flats in the morning, but thought I would put on my fancy shoes before lunch. BIG MISTAKE. Everyone always says you get what you pay for with cheap shoes. But what they don’t tell you is what those cheap shoes are made of – plastic and SHARP ROCKS. We ate lunch and headed back to the church where I was to begin my guestbook duty. By the time all the guests were seated and I made my way into the church I had lost all feeling in my toes.

The wedding was beautiful, of course, and Alisa and the girls looked fantastic. I cried where I always do at weddings, when the dad gives the bride away and during the vows. It ended, we got up and I limped and winced my way to the reception which was full of photo booths and crossword puzzles and seriously delicious apple pie. We had a great time, she tossed the bouquet, we blew bubbles at them as they made their way to the ice cream (!) covered car. I have never been so happy in all my life as I was when I finally pulled those sensible flats out of the trunk of my car and slipped them onto my feet.

After the party is the after party! (R. Kelly! What up!) These are the things you need to know about the after party: there was beer. There was delicious pizza. There were ex-girlfriend stories and Iranian boss stories and moldable plastic frames. There was a trip to the Sprint store (that was almost VERY embarrassing for me) and Target (who hates me) that included a “Conquest” singalong that made me laugh until I cried. There was moonshine and football and a big white fan.

After the after party is the after after party! Everyone cleared out and four of us sat around and talked until FOUR IN THE MORNING. Four! You guys! I have not seen four a.m. from that side in a thousand years. But it was fun and cathartic and enlightening and I didn’t need that sleep anyway. Even though when we left it was so cold outside I wanted to cry frozen tears.

Biscuits the size of your face.

I drove to Greensboro alone, but I got to ride most of the way back with Susan. Susan is awesome because she knows all the words to “Lovefool” and “We Danced Anyway” and she will unwrap your Dilly Bar for you on the windy roads and she knows what you mean when you talk about how much you love Jack’s Mannequin. We talked about old boyfriends and inappropriate crushes and whether or not it is a good move to put someone you know in real life on your list.

It was a great weekend.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

I am thankful that I grew up in a music house. Even though I never really learned any instruments (SORRY!), there was always music. We listened to America’s Country Coundown on Sunday mornings while we ate breakfast. Stevie Ray Vaughn was always on ACL on the television. You were always playing Crosby Stills Nash & Young songs on the guitar in your chair.

I remember one day I was sitting at the table doing my homework and singing “Landslide” under my breath, a song I thought was by the Smashing Pumpkins. After a confusing conversation about why I was singing an old Fleetwood Mac song, you made me get up, go to the gameroom and listen to the ‘real’ version. Which, as we all now know, is usually the best version.

They may not have stuck, but for a while there I had all kinds of musical talents. I could play the intro to “Wanted Dead of Alive” on the keyboard, the intro to “Daytripper” on the guitar, the marimba solo to “Margaritaville” on my little bells set from the junior high band. I don’t know a lot of other dads who were teaching their kids that stuff.

You taught me a lot of stuff, Dad – not to follow the crowds, to think for myself, that white gravy is delicious on eggs. But today I am most thankful for the music. The desire to find new bands, to see my favorite bands live, to amass as many individual songs onto my ipod as possible.

I don’t understand the non-music people. I blame you for that.

Thank you.

Sometime back in April, Southwest was doing these one-day half-price sales to different locations. Each sale was only available for 24 hours. One day I woke up and, thanks to Twitter, learned that the location for that day was Nashville. I called my parents, they said they would look into it, and I didn’t give it another thought.

Now you may not know this about me and my family, but we are kind of last minute people. I have gotten better after seven years with Aaron the thinker-aheader, but my roots are still there. So it came as no surprise when, at 11:45 that night, my mom called me in a panic because she couldn’t get the website to work.

After some panicking, a few phone calls to the airline and several attempts to sign up for a rewards account, we booked the tickets. And this past weekend, my parents made the trip.

I picked them up at the airport on Thursday morning and took them straight to Noshville, home of the dancing pickle and the best breakfast in town. After a good long nap and a brief incident with a busted tire, we had dinner at Kalamata’s (where they know our names and give us free dessert) and headed home to bed.

Friday was a long but awesome day. We started out with a trip to Trader Joe’s, where my parents experienced the awesomeness of ginger cat cookies, caramel clouds and chipotle pepper hummus. Then we loaded up the Jeep, made a quick flamingo stop, and headed down to Lynchburg where we toured the Jack Daniels distillery.

We’ve talked about going there for ages, but just never made it. We were missing out. It was really really fun. I had no idea. I don’t even like whiskey, but it made me want to drink some. The whole process of how they make that stuff is crazy, and it was really entertaining to see.

After the tour we had dinner at the freaking awesome BBQ Caboose in downtown Lynchburg because the internet told us to. All we knew was that it was a small place with a live ‘classic country’ band. So when we walked in and they asked for our reservation, we were a little surprised. Lucky for us, the Andersons were out of town, so we were able to sit at their table. We ate our barbecue chicken, potato salad, red beans and rice and DELICIOUS peach cobbler and ice cream and listened to the musical stylings of Mama Tried. And even though Aaron and I were the youngest people there by about 40 years, we had a great time.

Saturday we ran all over town all day and threw together a cookout for a bunch of our friends. We had a great evening in the backyard playing bocce ball, pitching washers, drinking blueberry beer and eating my dad’s from-scratch (non key) lime pie. Recipe to come.

Sunday was slow and relaxing, which was perfect, because we needed to rest up for Monday. Because Monday? We took the NASH TRASH TOUR. You guys. Oh my gosh. I have never laughed so hard in my life. Singing, dancing, swingers jokes, passed crackers and spray cheese, extremely old country star gossip… it was hilarious. At one point they were just pointing out random people on the street and calling them celebrities. We saw Boyz II Men, the Village People (who had put on a little weight), Emmylou Harris, Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, the list goes on and on. It was so much fun.

After the tour I took my parents to a new burger place I’d read about that turned out to be really delicious, took a quick shopping trip with my mom and we headed to the airport.

It was a great weekend, as always, and it was hard to say goodbye, as always. I know it’s the right thing for us to live in Nashville, and I wouldn’t trade our life here for the world. I just wish Nashville and Dallas were a bit closer.