On Our Way To Crazy

Sometimes you’re having a hard time. A faith-shaking, maybe-I-don’t-even-believe-this-stuff-anymore kind of time. And then you read a quote that makes you feel like a person again, like you can get up and say yes and mean it, and let that be enough for today.

“If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?” No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and. . . great laughter.”

-Frederick Buechner

In my post earlier this week about Jesus Girls, I mentioned briefly that we had to define a spiritual metaphor for our lives in my ordination class. I meant to wind my way back to mine in the context of that post, I really did, but it was getting super wordy and I just couldn’t get there. But I wanted to write it out here, both for you guys and for myself. It always helps to write this stuff down.

The metaphor I used in class was a song. While I have no discernible musical talent of any kind, music has always been a big part of my life. I really like the idea of our faith being a song. It works on several levels: the individual as the songs, unique unto ourselves but also part of a genre or style of music as well as music as a whole; parts of a song like parts of a body, each playing it’s individual role but adding up to something bigger and more beautiful than it can be on it’s own; there is a basic theory and structure to music but within that functionality the form can be whatever you want it to be. Clearly I am feeling the idea that faith is personal and that there’s not one way to do it and if you don’t get it right you are out.

But the concept I like the best is the idea of Jesus being a song to be in tune with. I got the idea from Rob Bell’s Nooma video called “Rhythm”. (You can watch it here.) Here are some key quotes:

“An infinite, massive, kind of invisible God, that’s hard to get our minds around. But truth, mercy, love, grace, justice, compassion – the way Jesus lived… I can see that. I can understand that. I can relate to that. I can play that song.”

“Jesus is like God in taking on flesh and blood, and so in his generosity. In his compassion, that’s what God’s like. In his telling of the truth, that’s what God’s like. In his love, and forgiveness, and sacrifice, that’s what God’s like. That’s who God is. That’s how the song goes.”

I love the idea that when we are truly following Jesus, when our lives most closely resemble his, that we are in tune with the song. It just makes sense to me. It’s the kind of faith I can get behind, the kind I am comfortable teaching my kids to have.

Sorry to be so quote happy today, but I wanted to close this post out with a quote from Sin Boldly, one of my favorite books from last year:

“I have a favorite t-shirt that reads, “Jesus is my mixtape.” When I bought it, I thought its slogan was charmingly quirky, but over time it has acquired this transcendent quality, a motto that sums up my belief that everything – everything – is spiritual. At the center of that everythingness, as a pastor friend of mine likes to describe it, is a universal rhythm, a song we all play, like a giant, motley orchestra. Sometimes in tune, sometimes off-key. We call it by different names. Still, it remains – if only we have ears to hear it – the eternal soundtrack that plays in the background of our lives.”

I like it.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the church. We’ve been struggling lately with a multitude of things both directly and indirectly connected to our church and our role in it. It is exhausting. I wrote this earlier this week as a part of a conversation about church: what it is, what it means, why it exists and why we continue to be a part of it.

We are going through a really difficult time in our church, the details of which are outside the context of this conversation (and completely exhausting to type out), and I’ve been wondering about these things. We are in a place right now where we’ve done all the right things, served and participated and even taken a staff position, but somehow we are still struggling, and I am frustrated. I feel like we have worked really hard to make sure we are making the right decisions for ourselves and our marriage over the course of our church life as a couple, and now I am looking back and I feel like maybe some of those decisions have led us to our current frustrations and I don’t know what we were supposed to do differently.

I say all that to say this: in my current state of church and job frustration and my overwhelming desire to bail on all of it and start over somewhere that I can be anonymous and have no responsibility, I feel committed and connected to my church because of all the things it offers and represents: the history, the sacraments, the connection to people who came before us and will come after. It’s not even the people for me right now – I could take them or leave them. But we are a part of a body of faith that we are invested in and that is full of people just like us and completely different from us, and we need all of them. I am starting to view it as a relationship… we are in a serious relationship with the church, and we have hit a major rough patch.  So we have two options: bail or hunker down and get through it. And because I have also been in that position with Aaron, and have chosen to hunker down and get through it and have seen how beautiful that can be on the other side, I am choosing to do that here.

What I want to do is to leave and make it easy on myself by only ‘doing church’ with the people I like and who don’t make me crazy. But I can’t grow like that. It doesn’t challenge me to learn and stretch and see the world from someone else’s perspective. And I don’t think that’s what church is meant to be.

I wanted to repost it here for two reasons: I don’t want to forget that I wrote it because I think our hardest times are still ahead of us, and I am curious to hear what you have to say as well. Do you go to church? Why? What does it add to your faith? Why church and not something else – a small group, a parachurch organization, solitary study and prayer at home?

Help me think through this.

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.)

Christmas is an interesting time. It’s such a weird mix of the holy and the insane. A beautiful season of waiting and reflection? Check. A plastic tree covered in sparkly balls and twinkle lights? Check.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the ‘everything else’ of Christmas. The shopping and the family confusion and the peppermint and the parties. That stuff is fun and special and kind of the epitome of everything I love. Sometimes you just want to wear an ugly sweater and exchange crap you found in your house, you know?

Kari wrote a beautiful post this week about Christmas being about all of us, that Jesus came for us, specifically and individually. For the world, yes, but also for me. Brandi.

She challenged us to find something that represents us and put ourselves in the nativity. To let ourselves be a part of what’s happening there, for us. For me.

We don’t have a lot around our house in the way of figurines, so the pickings were slim. I decided to go with my good friend El Tormento. Partly because he’s the only thing I could find that resembles a person, and partly because I do think he’s a good representation of me, if you squint and tilt your head a bit. Also, my ipod is named El Tormento. So there’s that.

I think he fits in nicely.

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.

Is there ever a point in life where you stop second-guessing yourself?

It doesn’t matter how confident I feel in my job, or how comfortable I am with my personality, or how secure I am in my marriage. I always have that little voice in my head, comparing me to that big youth pastor across the street, or that cooler girl at church, or that wife who really has it together.

I’ve been down about those kinds of things lately. We’re having some issues in the youth group that I feel like we wouldn’t have if someone stronger, more capable, more experienced was in charge. I think I know in my head that everyone struggles with self-doubt like that (don’t they?), but I spend an awful lot of time feeling like I’m the only one.

This week I met with my pastor and talked to him about some of these issues. It’s a tricky thing when your pastor is also your boss, and I didn’t want to give him reasons to start doubting my abilities. We had a good conversation about knowing where our strengths lie and focusing on them and how we can best put them to use. And about the opposite – knowing where we are weak and surrounding ourselves with people who can fill in those holes. If you’re an ear, be an ear… just make sure you’ve got some eyes around to do their part, too.

It was helpful to know that I’m not the only one who feels inadequate sometimes. It’s just so easy to get caught up in that idea, though, and convince yourself that you are holding everyone back and it would benefit the whole group if you would just get out of the way. I feel better. A little.

But I am afraid. And unsure. And some days I want to run and hide and quit and find a desk job.

From the very beginning, one of the toughest parts of my job has been volunteer recruiting. It takes a lot of hands to make the youth group run well and I have just never had enough. The people I have are awesome, and they have carried more than they should for a long time. But I have never really gotten a handle on how to find new people. You don’t want to just do a blind call for help… you never know what you’ll get in return and you don’t want a bunch of weirdos on your hands that you don’t know what to do with. But I exhausted all my avenues with people I do know pretty early. Every now and then someone comes along who finds me and wants to help, but those folks are few and far between.

A couple of months ago, a lady in our church approached the staff about creating a volunteer program. She, a volunteer herself, wanted to create a survey that members could fill out that laid out all of the options for service within the church. So about a month ago, we launched a big volunteer drive. People went online and answered questions about who they are, their background and experience, and how they might like to be involved, and then went through a list of opportunities and checked anything that sounded interesting to them.

This resulted in a long list of names for me. Some I knew, most I didn’t. Lots of people who want to help with fundraising, or special events, or food and transportation. A handful who want to get involved relationally with the kids. A whole mess of people who, if I manage it correctly, can make my life a lot easier.

And you guys? It kind of paralyzed me. I was overwhelmed by the response, and very excited, but also scared of it. Who are these people? What are they going to do?

How am I going to relinquish control?

I have never thought of myself as a control freak. Not really. I am not particularly neat, I don’t have specific ways things have to be, I don’t get mad at you when you don’t follow my rules. But, WOW, I really like to be in charge. That saying about doing it yourself if you want it done right? I am right there.

This whole experience has been really stretching for me. I am creating teams to take over fundraising and event planning. I am on those teams, but I’m not in charge. When people offer to bring food to events, they will just bring it. I don’t get to tell them exactly what to buy. This is not easy for me to deal with.

The most interesting and exciting part of this has been the people who’ve come forward wanting to be involved in small groups. So far, mostly because I’ve been recruiting from my friend base, the youth staff has been fairly young. But I’ve got people from all across the board who are interested in helping out. And while it’s going to make me think differently about how I operate and what a youth worker looks like, it’s also going to open up whole new worlds of possibilities for input and relationships and learning. And even in my scared control freak state, I know that is exciting.

So I am learning to let things go. I want what is best for the kids, even if that means I don’t control every decision that’s made. This is so great for us – it raises awareness of the youth group within the church, it provides a lot more people to make things happen, and, long-term, it relieves a lot of stress and pressure for me.

I just have to get my brain to be okay with it.

You can be who you are without wearing it like a badge everywhere you go. Don’t be in such a rush to define yourself for people before they get a chance to find out for themselves. Be careful of shouting from the rooftops all the things you wish you were as though they were true… when it comes to light that they aren’t you will lose all the people you wanted so badly to like you.

Just be. Let it be confusing. Let it be gray. Let it be undefined. Even let it be ugly. Let it ebb and flow and change. Maybe those convictions you’re holding onto so tightly today will knock you over tomorrow. Maybe you’re not the person you thought you were after all. Maybe that’s okay.

Remember who you were ten years ago? Remember how sure you were that you had it together and knew how it worked? Remember how different everything turned out to be? Your future self will look back at you today and think the same things. And she should.

The things you’re experiencing now don’t negate the things you experienced then. I know it feels like they do. You’re not undoing them, you’re building on them. Growing from them. They always told you life was complicated. Now you know they were right.

Keep moving forward. Except for the days when you’re moving backward, or being pushed sideways, or standing perfectly still. All those days, those directions, those loop-arounds and double-backs and repeats… they’re getting you somewhere. Somewhere you want to be. Even if you don’t quite know where that is. Yet.

Hello, normal life. Nice to see you.

I feel like our summer is finally winding down. I thought that school starting would make a difference, but I feel like the last four weeks have been busier than ever. We’ve had friends in town, one or both of us has been traveling almost every weekend, we’ve had tons of events in the evenings. Life has been all over the place.

Today I went to the grocery store for what felt like the first time in ages to just buy regular food to feed us for the week. Not a quick trip because we’re out of milk, or a huge load of hot dogs and sodas for the youth group, or eighteen kinds of fruit to make salsa for a party. Just normal lunch and dinner stuff. We cooked tonight. I was a little worried we’d forgotten how to turn on the stove.

I love being busy. I fee like busy means I’m doing something right, you know? The youth group has so much going on! The band is in town! We have so many obligations! But I also think I cling to my business (busy-ness? Neither one of those looks right.) because it makes me feel important. Like I’m really DOING something. And maybe I’m doing it incorrectly, or I’m focusing on the wrong things, or there’s some gaping hole in my life that needs some work. But I can’t think about that now. I’m so busy.

So I’m mostly looking forward to a bit of a slower period. The school year doesn’t slow down my work, but it does shift the hours around a bit and gives me some structure to my days. Aaron has traveled a lot with the guys this summer, but that will slow down for the fall. We will be back in a regular routine. The Cowboys are back in our lives. Fall is very exciting.

And I have some things to look at. Some gaps to fill. Some patterns to re-evaluate. I mostly want to take care of the things I’ve been glossing over all summer. Mostly. The rest of me just wants to eat soup and be cozy and push them into next year. We’ll see how it goes.