I wake up in darkness. Many mornings I turn and glance at the green
digital numbers of my alarm clock: 4AM; an hour and half earlier than my eyes
need to be open and my brain alert. I lay
there in silence; my soul is full of tumult, my mouth unable to speak.
How do we live, how do we pray, when we are experiencing
constipation of the soul? I like when
the words flow smoothly like water from the kitchen faucet, even when they
trickle down in a slow steady patter. I
enjoy words that come out with laughter, and I love when they burst forth in
song. Words through tears are painful,
but sometimes it is our sorrow that ultimately unearths our depths.
Having no words, but desperately wanting them. That’s a different experience entirely. I’m no expert on this situation, but here’s
what I’m learning in this season of life.
It’s okay to have no
words. Not having words to
adequately express yourself may be as much a part of the human experience as
the ability to speak. It’s in these
moments that I take comfort in the words of Romans 8:26: In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know
what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through
wordless groans.
It’s okay to have just
one word. I challenged myself this
week with this question: What if I just
brought one word to God? I wrapped
myself in my blanket, sat in my chair, faced the window, lit a candle, and
simply said, “Stuck. God, I am stuck.”
It’s okay to go to
friends and family and ask them to use their words on your behalf. This is a season where I have openly
asked friends and family to pray for me.
There’s this beautiful story in Exodus 17 where the Israelites were
winning a battle against their enemies as long as Moses held up his hands. But, as the war raged on, Moses’ hands grew
tired. So, Aaron and Hur held his hands up--one on one side, one on the other--so
that his hands remained steady till sunset (vs 13). Sometimes we are facing a battle that can’t
be won until our friends come alongside us with support.
It’s okay to pray
words that someone else wrote. Often
in the dark hours of the morning, scripture I’ve memorized comes to mind and I
pray them as if they were mine. When my
soul if full of tumult, I find myself asking the words of Psalm 51: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew
a right spirit within me….I also think Ted Loder’s words in his book Guerrillas
of Grace: Prayers for the Battle are beautiful.
It’s okay to express
your words in song and pictures. One
of the most tangible ways I’ve found to pray is to close my eyes during worship
at church and picture the scenes that are swirling in my soul. Sometimes I picture God hugging me in the
midst of my need, but mostly I just hold scenes of my life in my mind before
God acknowledging that He is at work.
When my eyes aren’t closed and focused, I also like to open my mouth and
belt out songs with all of my breath.
There’s something emboldening about joining other voices in expressing
what is true. I love what Psalm 45:1
says, My heart is stirred by a noble
theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful
writer.
I'm in the middle of composing some guest posts for other blogs that I hope to share with you soon! In the interim, here is a re-post from 2014.
It was just before Thanksgiving when I found myself sitting in the second row at a funeral. A good friend of mine lost her brother to cystic fibrosis. He lived to be 40, which is outstanding for someone living with CF, but still too young to die. I watched as my friend laid her head on her husband’s shoulder, crying, and in turn, opening her arms wide to comfort nieces and nephews. The morning was filled with the hope of heaven and the reality of earth.
I sat there thinking about how this man never married or had children. Being born with disability or disease often leaves very loving people with naked ring fingers and empty wombs. It’s sad. Sometimes it makes a person feel like they are sitting behind glass watching everyone live their happy lives while you sit in the stands choking back tears, faking a smile as you wave to everyone else skating by. It was haunting for me to identify with the man lying in the coffin. I sat there at the funeral wondering if 50 years down the road that would be me.
Last Friday, my friend Steve posted this morsel on Facebook:
It took me a few weeks and a few more heavy moments, but eventually, I lay down on my floor and sobbed. Not the kind where tears gently fall down your face and land on your lips, but the kind where your whole body heaves.
Who is Jesus in these moments?
Sometimes it’s easier to believe Jesus really only came to earth for his final hours, and in our lives, the thing he must care about the most is the salvation of our souls.
Truly, the redemption of humankind and our salvation from sin and death are paramount. But it doesn’t negate the fact that Jesus also cares about the mundane: our earthly disappointment, our day to day pain.
As kids we see images of Jesus surrounded by children, smiling as he rides on a donkey. As adults we ponder Jesus, who, for the joy set before him endured the cross… Certainly, there had to be many moments where Jesus was giddy, bubbling with joy as he worked to bring healing and redemption to the world. Performing miracles was like pulling the curtain back giving the world a glimpse of heaven as if turning over the pages in a photo book revealing visions of home.
So I find it interesting that “happy” is not how Jesus is heralded or remembered in scripture. Isaiah foretells Jesus as a Man of Sorrows, well acquainted with grief. Can you imagine it? It’s as if Jesus was sitting down conversing with Grief, as if they were two old men, swapping stories, nodding their heads, often just sitting together in silence, acknowledging the weight of pain.
In Hebrews, the author writes that while Jesus was on earth, he made petitions to God with loud cries and tears. Even before Gethsemane, I wonder if Jesus often had wet eyes to show the Father when he went off to pray. Being that close to humanity had to wonderful, but it also had to be hard because sometimes beauty and suffering exists in the same face.
I imagine Jesus off in the corner, heaving and crying loud. The disciples looking at each other, shrugging their shoulders and whispering, “He’s doing it again…”
“We’d better leave Him alone.”
____
With the end of the Advent season, it might be helpful to wonder what it was like for Jesus the first time he stretched out his hand and clenched his fist; feeling the limitation and the strength of tendons and ligaments and skin and bone working together in a human body.
It might be helpful to ponder what it like was for Jesus to change his perspective. No longer looking down on us from above, but staring back into the face of humanity, the creation, seeing us through his own two eyes….
What was it like to leave the vastness, comfort, and eternity of heaven to be confined, hurt, and limited?
All of these things point towards the fact that Jesus knew what it was to become human and dwell with us. It reminds us that he is with us in our humanity even now.
“What:Proprioception
is the concept of knowing where your body is in space (body awareness) and the
ability to safely maneuver around your environment. It also includes the use of
heavy work activities and the ability to stimulate the joint receptors.” (Source: Amanda, Matthews, OTR/L http://nspt4kids.com/parenting/what-is-proprioception-and-why-is-it-important/)
A
colleague introduced me to this concept last week and I was captivated by
it. Words can be restrictive containers
sometimes; a poor limited method to express what is welling up deep within the
soul, but sometimes they can be absolutely explosive, illuminating what we have
been experiencing, but unable to name. Here was this word that I had never
heard before: proprioception, five
syllables describing a fascinating function of our bodies that I never knew
existed. Sometimes proprioception in
children with autism or other conditions have a hard time sensing the world
around them, so they exhibit behaviors like hitting the wall or the ground
repeatedly. A parent can be helpful by
offering a hug, or placing their hands on their child’s shoulders so they are reminded
that the ground is beneath their feet.
I fell
in love with this word as it came up in conversation, because it seemed like a
great metaphor for life. Lately I’ve
felt like I’ve been losing my grounding.
What once used to feel safe, secure, solid, and familiar seems to be
shifting and moving in ways I didn’t expect or understand. I’m not sure how to clearly navigate my
environment right now. I’m finding
myself afraid and confused. I’ve
questioned my judgement, my motives, and my decisions. In the end, I want to exercise until I’m
tired, and I dream about endless hugs. I
wonder if I too, would like to cuddle up under a weighted blanket.
I’ve
told trusted friends and family about my “proprioception,” and they’ve
listened, tried to give advice, hugged, and prayed. I’ve been praying too: In the morning, in the
afternoon, before bed, and lately around 2:00AM. My mind has been flooded with comforting
scriptures, and I realize He is with me always.
This is going to last as long as it lasts, but until then, I must keep
moving forward.
There’s
been something else that’s become an unexpected comfort. Not a fix, but a little ray of light creaking
through the door into a dark room: the
words of C.S. Lewis. I’ve been a Narnia
fan since before I was able to read. When I was a preschooler, PBS aired the BBC’s
Chronicles of Narnia which Grandma let my brother and I watch one evening in
the den when we were sleeping over. It
sparked my imagination and filled my heart with wonder…the Lion has meant much
to me over the years. This is probably
why I get choked up when a child asks me if we have Narnia in the library. I am
convinced the wardrobe doors are open to all who seek to enter, and I can
almost hear the pages call out in cheerful invitation to every reader, “Come
further up! Come further in!”
My
girlfriends and I have decided to dive into the deep intellectual pool of C.S.
Lewis’ Mere Christianity this month. I’ve
been hearing good things about this book since I gave a copy of it to my
seventh grade English teacher in 1997, but I’ve been afraid to read it myself for fear that I wouldn’t
understand it, that Lewis’ words to adults weren’t for me. In truth, I don’t understand all of his
thoughts, but I have been reminded with childhood delight what a friend his
words have been to me. I will conclude
this post with ten great quotes I found from @CSLewisDaily on Twitter…so beautiful and so good.
There is an
intriguing little story tucked into the middle of C. S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy finds herself in the upstairs room of an
old magician’s house, pouring over an ancient book of spells. Within its pages, she is drawn so deeply into
beautiful pictures of herself, that she becomes captivated in her own vanity. Lucy turns the dusty pages of the book
further and discovers the opportunity to listen to her friend’s opinions of herself. The conversation is so vivid Lucy has a hard
time remembering what is actually real.
Her heart is so overwhelmed with disappointment that it spills out in a
tear trickling down the page, before Aslan the Lion appears with a gentle growl
and the urging to stop eavesdropping.
I heard the
gentle roar of the Lion New Year’s Eve, while driving in my car to a friend’s
house. I was sitting at a stoplight,
when I asked myself a simple question, “What is most troubling my soul?” I’d love to tell you that I was deeply
burdened over the tragedies of our current events, concerned about matters of
social justice, or simply wanting to love my neighbor. I had been carrying around an ache in my soul
for about a month, like a meal eagerly consumed in haste, now sitting like a
rock in my stomach.
The ugly
truth: I was consumed by how many people
had not responded to my recent Facebook post.
I have a
bachelor’s and master’s degree in Information Media. I recently finished writing my doctoral
dissertation about social media use. My
Facebook friends helped me complete my 18 weeks of training for a 5k, helped
raise money for clean drinking water in Africa, and have been an audience of
readers for my blog.
But,
I had
stopped looking through my newsfeed, unable to take in one more picture of
another person’s success without feeling like I was losing at life. I had deemed Facebook, The Daily Disappointment, chronically discouraged that my pictures
of shoes, clothes, and daily antidotes received so much attention while the
posts about things I care so deeply about were continually ignored. My mind was such a buzz, wondering what
clever thing I should say next to gain more attention, having to resist the
urge to constantly check my phone to see if my thoughts were validated with
enough “likes.” I found myself in a continual
state of distracted thinking. I missed
the pleasures of deep thought, and wondered if I could actually read a whole
book or if my attention span had been severely amputated to Twitter’s 140
character limits.
How many
times had I snuck my phone off with me to the bathroom just so I could continue
to check it? I was addicted. I was reaching for human connection and
significance, both good things, but I was struggling to find them in a stream
of pictures and texts. I was attempting
to medicate my loneliness by inhailing a fog of social media haze.
So, about a
week ago, I deactivated my personal Facebook account. Call it a New Year’s Resolution, if you will,
I just wanted my soul back. I hope it reduces the amount of noise I have in my
life and increases my focus, inspires me to search for significance in the
right places, and propels me to interact with more people face to face. I hoping to see in 2016 that Lewis’ words
prove true, “Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions.”
Dear Readers, Last week I told you about my friend Steve Wiens and his new book, Beginnings. His guest post is below to tell you more about his manifesto. If you are a reader, I hope you'll give this book a look.
It came to me as a question, but one with a smirk and a wink. It was a delicious question, the kind that invites you to leave Bag End with only a walking stick and a stomach hungry for adventure.
I was stuck, but I was only beginning to realize it, and it was a sickening kind of feeling when I finally did. My life seemed to be drifting away from me, like someone was using a pair of bellows all wrong, extracting breath from me instead of adding it.
The question thundered around me, accompanied by random flashes of lightning, and I was dazzled enough to turn aside to see what it was before it rolled by.
What if the creative act of God described so richly in the Genesis poem was not simply an event in time, but a process that is reflected in all beginnings that follow?
What if new beginnings were lurking around every corner, inside every whisper, and even stitched into every ending? What if they hovered above us, and filled in the fault lines beneath us? What if being stuck wasn’t the inevitable destination?
What if the world, right here and now, is crying out once again, and what if the God who hears is responding, and sending, and moving, and acting?
So I wrote and wrote and wrote, and with three boys under the age of six, it was mostly done by magic tricks and stopping time. The more I wrote, the more I believed. It came in torrents, flooding me, until it didn’t. Then it trickled in: a paragraph, a sentence, a word. But it came all the way out, and I’m about to let it go into the world.
Beginnings is my manifesto of hope, that the creative activity of God is not finished, not even close. Beginnings is my defiant shout that even when we are lost in the inky blackness, there can emerge out of that swampland something glorious, something eternal, something covered in the goodness of God.
What follows are the first words I used to translate the fluttering reality in which I now am grounded. I hope it leaves you hungry for more.
“THE ACHE HAD probably been creeping up on me, but I didn’t notice it until that night, sitting on the deck behind my sub- urban house looking out onto my suburban life. Isaac was two, and the twins were six months old. I was a pastor at a large church, I had been married for fourteen years, and my twenty-year high school reunion had come and gone.
I didn’t go to that reunion. I didn’t have the energy for the awkwardness, the sizing up, and the plastic cups of stale beer to chase down our stale memories.
But the ache that had been whispering through my body rattled to a clumsy stop on that night, in those suburbs, on that deck.
I had been looking at pictures of my friends who went to the reunion: my old girlfriend, the guys I used to go all night skiing with on those blisteringly cold nights in Minnesota, my soccer team. And I remembered all the beginnings.
I remembered moving from Southern California to Belgium the summer before seventh grade. I remembered the sour, un-American body odor of the team of men who moved our old furniture into our new house. That smell was the baptism of our new life in Europe.
I remembered my friend Colin who lived across the street in a two-story white brick house in Waterloo with black shutters, like they all were. I remembered the in-ground trampoline in his back yard, on which we spent hours and hours, jumping our way into adolescence. I remembered his mother’s unbearably loud voice, as it boomed around their house like a grenade and made us run for cover.
I remembered falling treacherously in love with Tammi the moment I saw her, coming down those stairs in the fall of my ninth grade year. She liked me back, and then she didn’t like me. I was devastated. That’s when I started listening to the Cure and Depeche Mode, bands who were created for teenagers like me who don’t know how to express the frightening chaos brewing beneath our skin, bubbling and boiling.
I remembered Mr. Tobin, my tenth grade English teacher. Every student should have a Mr. Tobin. He got to know each of us and selected books based on what he thought we’d like. The first book he gave me was Trinity, by Leon Uris. I remember staying up late into the night reading about Conor Larkin, the main character, who was everything I wanted to be but feared I wasn’t: brave and passionate and rough edged. Almost thirty years have passed since I met Mr. Tobin, and I credit my deep love for reading to his deep love for teaching.
I remembered kissing Angie under a starry summer night on that dock that jutted out into Lake Como, the thrill of that moment reflecting off the lake and making everything luminous that summer before our senior year. I can still see the picture of us at the homecoming game: she was beautiful, holding my hand under the dark October sky. I had a ridiculous acid-washed denim jacket on, with only the bottom button fastened in the chilly air. There was a grin on my face and my eyes were sparkling. I was seventeen.
I remembered driving around in Matt’s Bronco for hours, finishing off the beer that Carl’s older brother bought us. We must have burned hundreds of gallons of gas on those cold winter nights; we were irresponsible, irrepressible and immortal.
I remembered deciding to go to college in a sleepy little town in southern Minnesota, instead of up north, where most of my closest friends from high school had chosen to go. I remembered trying to explain it to them, in the awkward way that high school guys do. I don’t remember much of that summer before college. I only remember the familiar sensation that comes with every new beginning: the thrill of reinventing yourself running parallel with the fear of the unknown—the twin tracks that lead to everything else.
But on that night, on that deck, in those suburbs, the continual forward movement seemed to have stopped. The tracks had run out. I used to be in motion, rattling forward toward a destination that kept morphing. But on that stationary deck, I had become solid and stable, and stuck.
There would be no new beginnings.
My life should have felt full and rich, but instead it felt empty and dark. There was only the slow work of playing out the reality of the decisions that had already come and gone. I was a pastor. I was a father. I was a husband. I didn’t regret any of those things. I loved my kids and my wife and my job. But the finality of it all was a relentless crashing—wave after wave, under those stars, in those suburbs, on that night. It felt vacant, like staring into nothingness.
It was empty and full at the same time. Empty of beginnings, full of endings.
As I sat there motionless with the emptiness closing in around me, there was something else hovering above me in the darkness, but I couldn’t see it.
If I could have seen it, it would have looked like a beginning.”
I think, behind most
good books, lays the story of an enduring friendship. This post is about my friend and pastor Steve
Wiens, who has cheered me and my
writing on since we became friends in 2009.
Steve wrote the foreword to my book and has since written his own called
Beginnings which will come out this Friday. He will guest post next week so you can read
more, but this week, I hope you enjoy the story below.
“I’ll write it out for you!”
I stopped and looked wide-eyed at Steve, wondering where
those words had come from that had just spilled out of my mouth.
It was a Wednesday night and the lobby at church was
swarming with people. I had just finished
telling my story to a room full of junior high students and wasn’t ready to
spill out a summary in the middle of a crowd.
“Maybe not tomorrow, but this weekend, I could write out my
story and send it to you. Would that be
okay?” I nodded along with my
suggestion, trying to convince myself along with Steve that this was, in fact,
a good idea.
We wrapped up our conversation, and as soon as I was out the
door, I turned to my friend Camry and squealed, I think my life just changed!
That wintry night back in 2009 was a beginning.
There are rare moments in life where God allows you to see
people, and, as you look at them, you don’t just see the moment you’re in, but
several moments into the future. You
realize you are connected, even though you’ve just met, and somehow you know
things about the person looking back at you, even though they’ve never been
said.
That night, in the midst of a buzzing church lobby, I looked
at Steve and saw that he was a writer….
….but somehow, I was the one writing.
I went home, opened my laptop, and began to pour out my
soul. I had never committed to paper, or really even said aloud what it was
like to have cerebral palsy, to look down every day at feet that didn’t
match. I had never expressed to another
person besides God how deeply hurt and disappointed I had been that God had
decided not to heal me when I had begged Him day after day. I was just learning how to love God again in
this area of my life, to let some light in, to really trust that He held me in
His hands….
I wrote and wrote and wrote…..my words became an e-mail
attachment that became an article that became…a book.
Writing a gut-wrenching memoir is like subjecting yourself to
a wound being cleaned, being scrubbed over and over again until you are deeply
and fully healed. I remember one August afternoon I was sprawled out on the
floor, exhausted. I had wanted to write
for six hours that day, but by 2 PM, I had fallen well short of my goal, bogged down by the work of carefully revising some of the most painful chapters in my
manuscript. I remember convincing myself
to go back to the computer, to keep typing, and there I found an e-mail from
Steve:
Jenny,
I've been writing a little bit lately. Just writing some essays that may be a
part of a future blog. And I thought of you - and I wanted
to say: Keep writing! Keep
going! You have something to say and people need
to read it! You go girl!
Steve
Steve did go on to write a blog,
and I remember him texting me the morning it went viral. I smiled, because Steve, along with the rest
of the world, was realizing together how good his words were, how much they
needed to be shared. The writer I saw
that night at church was beginning to compose.
I have had several unique opportunities since I finished Walking with Tension in 2014. Joni Eareckson Tada and I both had articles
published side by side in the Bethel Magazine. We had an opportunity to
meet months later and talk about the experiences of grief and disability. This was quite miraculous, seeing as I threw
her book angrily in the trash when I was a teenager.
I got to meet and thank Dr. Victor Anderson, a Dallas Theological
Seminary Professor whose thoughts on friendship and contributions to the book Why
O God have been such a mentor to me in my journey of accepting disability
in my own life and in the lives of others.
The summer my book came out, Victor happened to be preaching alongside
Steve and Northern Pines Camp and it was incredible! I woke up every morning and wanted someone to
pinch me, it was so good. You can hear
it all online.
I’ve been on television,
spoken at two
universities, a few non-profits, and have had several opportunities to sit
across from people who have also been impacted by disability as they share
their stories. I’ve had the occasional
reader come up and thank me in public, sometimes in tears, because, as Steve
tells me, my words have helped people name their vulnerabilities
and move towards wholeness.
Perhaps my
favorite experience, though, as I’ve begun to write, is watching my friendship
with Steve unfold as we cheer each other on in sharing our words with the
world. Steve has written a beautiful
book about creation called Beginnings, which comes out January 1st,
2016. I’ve had the honor of reading this
book in its entirety; what a gem. Steve tells personal stories in a warm and
welcoming way as if he is your next door neighbor. Although I grew up reading
the Bible, I found the way he illustrates stories accessible for me, sometimes
for the first time in my life! There are spiritual practices and questions at
the end that you can ponder on your own or together with friends. It’s a
perfect gift for you or your small group.
I hope you read it soon and enjoy it as much as I did.
Every year as we turn our clocks back and the clouds roll
in, I get sad. Driving at night, I feel
almost as if the darkness is trying to reach into my car windows so it can
devour my soul. Kind of like Harry
Potter’s Dementors, but without form. I
can become withdrawn from humanity, losing my appetite for human contact, and at
the same time, feel desperately lonely.
I’m less motivated: I
want to sleep more, eat more, and cry more. Christmas is not the most wonderful time of
the year; that honor belongs to the month of July. So, since mid-November, I’ve started to make
what I like to call, The Joy List. I’ve tried to notice and remember things
in my life that bring joy. I hope you
enjoy reading mine, and in turn, are inspired to create your own.
Joy is…
The grandpa whose life was saved from what could have been a
fatal freak accident and now gets to spend his golden years with his grandson,
playing cars and trucks on the floor, laughing and holding each other close.
The auntie who visits her niece’s freshmen dorm to deliver
the surprise that’s she’s been secretly saving for her niece’s college
education for years…and the dream she holds to study abroad, the one she had
been praying for that morning, is not only going to be a reality, but it’s
going to be paid in full.
The friend who invites you to dinner, the one who has
already attended her mother and brother’s funerals, has some news to
share. You squeal with delight and embrace
in a hug because she is pregnant!
Joy is eating dinner with friends. Part way in you realize the food is so good,
and you feel so relaxed and at peace, but the real reason you feel at rest is
because of the people sitting with you; they know the real you and love you so
much.
Joy is running into your little nieces and nephew while you
are in town. Everyone lights up and is
so excited. Every time. The littles share their news and their love. There are rounds of hugs and kisses before
everyone goes on their merry ways.
That extra day off you weren’t expecting.
Your second cup of coffee.
Joy is standing in church to sing. You catch the harmony and sing it out
strong. Suddenly your whole body is
participating in expressing what is deep in the soul. Joy is closing your eyes in that moment,
imagining yourself standing before the throne room of God, earnestly pouring it
out, this overflowing expression of gratitude Thank you, thank you, thank you, but in this dream you are standing
there in this cute black and white party dress, with shiny red heels, whole and
complete, but even then, you realize, the thing you want most, is still the
love of God.
Joy is sitting in the living room by the fire.
Joy is watching the sun rise, painting the sky with fiery
pink.
Joy is working hard to pedal up to the top of the hill in
the park, pumping my legs, throwing my back into it, lecturing myself, You can do this, or your name isn’t Jenny
HILL! Come on! Joy is finally reaching
the top and then sailing down it like a little kid.
Joy is giving your friend a second big hug, because the
first big hug just wasn’t enough.
Joy is holding a wee baby, new to the world. Kissing his head and whispering in his ear: You are precious.
Joy is celebrating with your friend who, after many years of
work, has finally published his manifesto.
Joy is wearing pink and feeling pretty.
Joy is dancing around your kitchen to songs that make you
happy.
Joy is discovering the beauty in the person you just met.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy
and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow
with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13
