And at night…

I crave creative company, gobble it up when I find it, talk too much, laugh too loudly – but I have stopped caring about the “too” for now. I am restless, waiting to see what will happen next, unwilling – or too tired – to shape my own destiny just now. So life is happening around me. People laugh, they say words I know I should know and understand, but the only way for me to hear is not to see, so I stop looking and forget myself as I listen. I think maybe they think I’m hiding, but I’m not. I don’t process information through eye contact and acknowledgement. I absorb it. It becomes part of me, and I have to live it, even though I doubt I could ever regurgitate it or teach it to anyone. I would send others to them to learn it, rather than teach it myself.

I finished my new website. It is a place to start. I am in a new place, a new favorite place, waiting, listening. I didn’t bring my camera, but I see the wind, hear the water. I watched the gray fly away into blue this morning and thought as I walked with friends how it is strange and easy to be quiet in this place, strange because it is never easy for me to be quiet. I feel happy, but I am not sure how to say it, so when people ask me how I’m doing, I try to pick an answer. I haven’t succeeded with a good one yet today.

As I was working on my website, I decided that I would do something I haven’t tried before, that I would own my introversion. I’m not sure what that looks like. I’m the responsible one, the one who made up her mind to greet people and not be shy in church, the one who has to pull other people out and get them to be real instead of making them nervous. But I’m wondering if speaking softly would serve me better, if treasuring people would make me happier than worrying about fitting in or having the right thing to say.

I didn’t know a person could cry in their sleep. I don’t know why I did.

By kelle | November 9, 2012 | from here |

Unwind

On Monday, she told me that it was time to let the real Kelly come out. My heart cracked, just a little, just enough. My mind went into slow motion, staring at her words, as my own words spun around us. I felt dizzy, a little disoriented, a little hopeful.

I have always written better than I talked. The words that flow easily from my fingers and sing away in my brain, they get all jumbled up in my mouth. The open air steals the magic that caused me to speak them in the first place. The look in the eyes of my listeners. The way they gloss over my words, my foot in my mouth, how I become invisible…

She said I need some time to unwind, maybe two or three months to process what my years have taught me. I felt relieved on Monday; now I feel small. I want to disappear. I feel too much, think too much, say too much. I am not spiritual enough, healthy enough, open enough, closed enough.

Someone once told me that I needed more life experience to be considered qualified to “be a speaker.” He might as well have patted me on the head as I am tempted to do with my four-year-old sometimes. I was twenty-four.

I didn’t think it would be hard to take this on. To come out of hiding. To identify my reasons for it, and to figure out a practical way to be me with others, without all the shame. But right now, there is nothing BUT shame. Nothing BUT inadequacy, certain failure. I feel like I’m letting go of my life to find it again. Like the life I’ve been clinging to isn’t life at all.

I wanted to be a child prodigy. I wrote two novels when I was seventeen years old. I submitted them for publication. I knew the grammar, the syntax, the formula. But I didn’t know what was realistic. I didn’t know that you couldn’t grow up as sheltered as I did, surrounded by books, and not know what life was all about. At least not the life everybody else was living.

“Intimacy issues…” The plexiglass feeling that locks me in on my bad days came into sharp focus, like an automatic zoom lens on a high-tech camera. My words stopped, like they’d hit the glass. There was no point in talking past it. Nobody would hear me anyway.

I had a friend tell me once that I needed to live life – not just observe it. I rolled my eyes at him. People-watching was my favorite thing. I loved watching them laugh, seeing how they loved one another, how they lived. I loved them by seeing them. But I was always curious. What if I tried…? What if I did…? What if I said…?

If there is one thing I know, it is that God wants my mess right now. He doesn’t want me to try to gloss over it, to attempt more spirituality for His sake. He doesn’t want me to be anything other than I am in this moment with Him or with anyone. I prayed for humility. This is how He humbles me, letting me see what I am not, showing me how to consider others better than myself. This is how I am learning to be kind, as old wounds rip open and my need for compassion is the only thing I can identify in myself.

I wrote in my journal once about the girl in me, twelve going on eighteen going on one thousand years old. I wrote how she was just beginning to venture into a meadow, emerging from the dark forest surrounding it, how for one glorious moment she found herself in the sunlight and ran with wild, spinning joy into the day. She was my picture of “abandon.” And in the next sentence I told what happened to her, how love itself threw a stunning blow that felled her, how she crawled back to hide in the darkness, no longer able to believe the light was for her.

I wrote of a heart laid out on a table, and of a pocket-knife used to rend it. I wrote things I have never said to anyone, only screamed wordless into the cold night as I collapsed into pain I had never known, pain I still don’t understand.

If the sacrifices of the Lord are a broken and contrite heart, if I am to be a living sacrifice, if I am to be nothing but clay containing Someone else’s treasure, I wish to do it without feeling. Without caring. Without being broken again. Without living or speaking or daring to enter the light again only to be shot down. I used to wish I could fly; now I want to be nothing.

I’ve really been through so little in my physical experience. I wasn’t abused or molested. I didn’t have eating disorders or do self-destructive things to myself. Almost no one close to me has died. God has been good to me. I have the husband I always wanted, children to love, family, and a few friends. We have enough to eat, and a place to live. I have a career and clients I love. I even have candles to light at night when I want.

I have all that I need – but I feel trapped and duped and invisible, and God wants me to become less before He’ll ever make me more. Or so I’ve been told…

“A bruised reed He will not break…”

“I have held My peace a long time,
I have been still and restrained Myself.
Now I will cry like a woman in labor,
I will pant and gasp at once.
I will lay waste the mountains and hills,
And dry up all their vegetation;
I will make the rivers coastlands,
And I will dry up the pools.
I will bring the blind by a way they did not know;
I will lead them in paths they have not known.
I will make darkness light before them,
And crooked places straight.
These things I will do for them,
And not forsake them.”

– Is. 42:3, 14-16

By kelle | September 20, 2012 | from here |

When Real Life is Dust and Ashes

There is pain in this world that no words can touch. It slapped me in the face this morning with the news that a fellow photographer had lost her almost-three-year old this week. I searched in vain for words, anything that would tell her how I was crying for her, with her, aching over this real life that picks us up and throws us back down without so much as a by-your-leave.

As I climbed into the shower with the pain firmly in place, I realized it’s not the dead ones I’m sad for. It’s the ones who are left – you, me, the mama with the empty arms where her little girl used to be. When you love somebody and they aren’t in your world anymore, it makes a hole in your heart that never, ever heals.

When real life is only dust and ashes, why – HOW – do we go on?

I absorb pain some days. I can’t escape it, and no matter how much God has given me, how much good I have in my life, I wrestle against God allowing it to stay this way. I’ve been realizing that all of life is a life-and-death thing. It’s not just the breathing, heart-beating life – it’s the choices we make that bring life, to love or to hate, to embrace or to reject, to open our lives up or build up walls.

First world or third world, LIFE is about these choices, not just about survival. It’s easy for me to “have a life” in America, unlike it is for many in third world countries. But death isn’t easier here than it is there. It isn’t less overwhelming when you love the one you have lost. For all the beauty I seek out and share, I can’t thwart death.

When Jesus said “he who loses his life for My sake will find it,” He wasn’t merely talking about martyrdom. This Man who never took a political or cultural stand was talking about living every day with your heart broken for those you love.

I’m trapped in this world, for richer or for poorer, caught in an exquisite middle that keeps me alive to love and to loss. The suffering of Christ I am called to enter into is the pain of loss that comes with loving real and loving deep. I can’t just shut myself down to pain – or the possibility of it.

The water ran hot over my skin with the sound of the song I’d left playing on my iPhone: “He is good, He is good, His love endures forever.” I reached for Him who means the most to me, and He spoke comfort I’d read over but never really acknowledged: “Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”

Somehow, He’s got to be enough to go on.

By kelle | August 30, 2012 | Dear God |

On Feeling

It’s funny how sometimes you run from words for what you feel. You dance around it, writing sentences, paragraphs, full stories that never quite speak of it; they are all seemingly unrelated symptoms of something more. And then you lie in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, realizing you don’t feel anything. Or maybe you do, but you don’t want to. You don’t want to think about it.

You don’t want to think about the ways you’ve failed.

You don’t want to think about the “no” that “is what it is.”

You think if you open the door to the pain, you’ll stop breathing.

But you always have pain. It isn’t just going to disappear. I think sometimes life is a slow mourning period for innocence lost, for childhood when even what wasn’t safe felt safe because we just didn’t know it all.

I feel all the time. When I’m asked to leave God out of my writing. When I’m expected to check me at the church door. When I react to – against – my kids. When I get rejection I knew was coming. When I try something and fail. When I receive criticism.

I get stuck between worlds. The functional daily routine pushes me forward in spite of the wounded parts of me, the little kid inside that is slowly being forced to grow up and leave hope aside. I can survive all right. But survival isn’t living. It doesn’t feel honest. It doesn’t leave room for love. It doesn’t make room for childlike faith in Jesus.

You have to look the pain in the face sometime. You have to open up and let it just be a part of you. You have to acknowledge God in it – because whether we choose it or not, pain is part of “all our ways.”

That breath you’re already holding? You have to take a deep one and plunge into the thing you think will stop it forever.

Otherwise, everything stops.

At least if you feel it, you know you’re alive.

By kelle | August 17, 2012 | from here |

When Nothing is Clear, Except…

There was a week I lived once, in which I stopped my introverted analysis of myself, stepped out, and told some people the truth about what was happening in my heart. It was the “never” week, the week that broke my heart, that destroyed relationships, that left me alone to find God for myself without anybody else’s approval or instruction.

What I lost that week has never been restored to me.

What I lost that week had already been lost to me. I just didn’t know it until I opened myself up to hear the truth.

A body can’t sustain pain like that, the kind of pain that leaves one hunched over on the kitchen floor, trying not to vomit, the kind of pain that follows you to work and forces the door closed to hide the sobbing, the kind of pain that grasps at the smallest hint of grace even from someone who had hurt you before.

I lived long alone after that week. Being told that “I don’t believe God would tell you to love someone,” that “I don’t see any fruit in your life,” that “all I saw in you was anger” by people who had claimed to love me… I wasn’t ready to open myself up to the possibility of loving, let alone BEING loved. I didn’t blame God, exactly. I just… pushed Him away.

I thought those walls were beginning to come down, thought that I wasn’t still so standoffish toward these I once called friends – and toward people like them. But the last few weeks, since someone close to me confirmed that I can come across as “annoying,” since I went into near-hysterics over a situation that left me feeling helpless and empty and unable to trust God – the emotions are flooding back. That old pain is chasing me down, and it’s coming in different clothing.

Pete talks to me every day, reminding me that I am in Christ and He is enough. I try to cling to that, but it is HARD, because the voices are HARD, and there are “right” things I do not do because I can’t, and I can’t explain to anybody why I can’t, so I sit judged as others accuse me of judging, and I think they are right, but I can’t be a person and not “judge” because that is how I make sense of my world, that is how I think about people, not to condemn them but to look at someone or something and see what it is and who they are and try to make sense out of it. That is how I learn – if only I could learn without having to think it out loud.

I feel so dumb, as if I have a learning disability, like I keep saying things I shouldn’t say, and not saying things I should say. I want to run away, change my name, start over. I never say anything without tearing it apart, but if I never say anything at all, I feel I should cease to exist. I don’t believe He is enough; I am scared that He made a mistake with me, or that my mistakes mean that I was created for dishonor – but even if I was, He will still be glorified.

My “never” week is coming back on me now; I say too much, write too much, ask too much. I am not good enough, kind enough, loving enough. I want grace – I want it so badly – but I can’t get grace unless…

And there you see. You see why I write here the way I do, why I scribble such fire with my fingertips, because the second any one thing is added on top of Christ, I forget that I am loved, that He loves me, that I can love as He loved me, and my walls go flying up again as I run away.

But right now, sitting here in grace, it HURTS. MY GOD it hurts. Because everything in me knows that I cannot go back, that right now I am in the midst of His refining me, that He is showing me how I have no place to stand over anyone – not anyone – in judgment, but that I have to stay where I am in Him and let His Spirit work in me and make me real again, make me more than me gritting my teeth to do what’s right, break my heart for the healing.

And I don’t know what to do or how to offer grace to those who refuse to accept it, to those who won’t NEED it because they serve a hard master and “living” doesn’t look at all like breathing and being when there is so much “ministry” in which to be poured out.

Someone shared about “Post-Regret” this week – I have word-regret. He has called me to speak and to live, but every time I open my mouth to say anything, I question myself and determine not to say anything again. But I can’t help it. Because BEING means that I say sometimes – that is how I LEARN to be a different person, and I don’t speak it to be the only right person, I speak it because that is what makes sense to me, but my words can be a conversation if someone would talk back to me.

But when no one does, I feel alone again, and I’m afraid that His love isn’t what I have believed it to be, that this thin line between right and wrong is really a gulf and I have missed it, but I can’t. go. back. because God isn’t there. No matter what anybody says or tells me, I can’t believe that He wants me to walk out of grace back into a Law that nearly killed me when I was younger.

And if He wants to strike me dead, I don’t have anything else to say but “Lord, Your will be done,” because He’s all I’ve got and He knows more about me and the rest of this than anybody does, this God of judgment who declared me righteous in Christ, who claimed to give me a new heart, who created me to live and breathe and get out of bed in the morning and have lyme disease and two kids and a husband and a photography business.

I am so HUNGRY right now for love that comes without conditions, that accepts that I am His and just dwells with me right where I am, right where He has me. Pete and I, we have that, but sometimes I worry it’s not enough, if maybe we’re both wrong, if I’m just being immature and insecure and “them’s the breaks of living, Kelly – get over it.”

Then bad things happen all over the world, and I feel guilty because I can’t care enough, can’t reach out enough, speak enough, be enough – and I feel guilty when we catch a skink in the morning after we’ve taken a walk with a lovely breeze blowing sun all over us, and I just… this can’t be what God meant for me in Christ. Is this my dust, groaning so hard?

I’m weary and heavy-laden seven days out of the week lately, and I’m not what I want to be, not the people I admire, not so loving or grace-filled or kind or godly as I wish. But I’ve got the name of Jesus over me, and I’m holding onto it, holding onto Him, remembering how He stayed in His Father, how He told the Pharisees the truth and gave grace to the clueless, how He never much worried about how “abiding” made Him look when the rest of the world was “doing.”

I think I’ve already lost something, something that is precious to me; I think it may not be restored this side of heaven. I don’t want to let it go, but I have learned that there is life on the other side of loss, that His love comes more real then, He can be more than I know if I will let Him. I just want the pain to stop now so I can breathe.

By kelle | July 20, 2012 | from here |

I’ve been thinkin’…

When have we ever been told by God that we should pray for Him to bring suffering in our lives? When did we stop asking for joy?

Is there a “Christian” cynicism that causes us to believe that He is but that His Reward is only for heaven?

Do we understand what “judgment” is; do we allow the Holy Spirit to be the one to make it?

When have we ever taught that we ARE the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus, that we ARE no longer sin because He became sin for us?

Why do we trade “identity” for “roles”?

Why is going to church the most important proof of a walk with God?

What is abundant life, really?

How will they know we are Christians by our love if love walks around carrying an approval stamp? If we don’t care about others where they are?

Why does the busy keep us shoving even our best friends and families off to counselors for fixing, instead of sitting, waiting, praying, weeping with those who weep?

Did Jesus reference “two or three” because He knew the “two or three thousand” was too many?

Did God create me as me to change me into becoming someone else?

May we not believe that He has given us a new heart?

What is the difference between responsibility and legalism?

Is it possible that “witness” is a command to see? That testimony requires us to tell only what we have seen – not what we have been taught?

Is “right and wrong” the biggest sin, separating us from God who asks us only to love Him and our neighbor?

Are we ever told that emotions are sinful?

What is godliness? What is sanctification?

Do we justify ourselves and our actions because we still hide behind our fig-leaf religion when God approaches us?

Do we take Him at His word when He speaks on our behalf, or do we believe that our sense of guilt is a higher power?

Fear drives me to a frozen place. A place where these questions that don’t always have answers for me sit and go round and round with even more questions, a place where I can only sit, wait, and sometimes weep. My mind screams at me the answers I SHOULD know; His Spirit extends a hand to my trembling heart, whispers, “wait. You need only Jesus.

I do things I don’t want to do. I still live my life in the flesh. I am finite, limited, broken.

But I am also perfect – complete in Christ. The life I now live, I live by faith in Him.

I keep thinking about dying, about how I will have to, about how I almost have, about how living every day can feel like death under the weight of condemnation that is no longer mine. I want to know that there is more for me on the other side of here, so much more that I don’t have to cling to here. I want to know what it means that I have a GOD as my Very Great Reward. I want to know what it means that He loves ME, how He justified dying for me while I was yet a sinner, how His love changes me now.

I believe I will always have questions, but I’m not afraid of them, not when I can remember “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” not when His name is all I need to know my God, to hang out with Him, to hold onto holy fear that keeps me back from “right and wrong” that must believe that He is all and I am nothing if not for Him.

It’s poetry, unresolved rhythms of life that aren’t meant to come clear until I see Him face-to-face.

By kelle | July 16, 2012 | from here, God n me |

Roles or Relationship?

When I was younger and thinking about faith, my question used to be “what CAN God do?” Now that question has changed. Now I ask “what WILL God do?” The change in the relationship surprised me when this hit me the other day – the first was about existence; the second is about trust.

Before God blew out of the box I’d put Him in, I thought He was pretty easy to understand. The roles were neatly defined: He was God; I was human. He saved me; I had a duty to serve Him.

The problem with the whole scenario was the number of times I walked the church aisle to rededicate my life to the Lord. The problem was that no matter how good I was, how much I served, there was always more good to be, more service to offer. God would use me up and pour me out for His glory and His purposes and that was all I needed to know. My desires didn’t figure in unless I wanted something He wanted (so nothing “worldly” was okay), my needs were irrelevant because of course God would supply them – and if He didn’t, I wasn’t trusting Him enough or praying right or being content enough or believing enough that His grace was sufficient.

I think He’d had enough of my box. Enough of my careful arranging to please Him and justify myself to Him and everybody else. So He asked me to wait on Him. And when I say wait, I mean WAIT. Things that HAD to happen just didn’t happen. Relationships blew apart. Practical daily needs started cropping up and not being met. And when the big need, the one I was scared to pray about, hit and I didn’t see it getting met the way I expected it… Well, that’s when He managed His way out of my box. When He let me shake my fist in His face and tell Him exactly what I thought of Him and how He had “used” me in the past and said, “okay, now what?”

And I said, “now what?” too.

Because I just shook my fist in SOMEONE’S face. Because this Someone wouldn’t be manipulated or controlled by me or anything I did. He wasn’t saying “if you, then I will” – He was saying “You BE, and I’ll BE, and we’ll have a relationship.”

It was invitation, not obligation. It was grace, not duty.

I ask myself sometimes why if I was so capable of being good and doing right, why did I stop being good and doing right? And the answer comes: “It felt like a lie.” The truest things I did didn’t look “good” or “right” to people, even to my closest friends. In fact, sometimes they weren’t visible at all. They were spirit things, a kinder heart, a more honest love, an upward tilt of my soul that changed my perspective.

My mind was – still is – being renewed. And transformation? It works from the inside out. I couldn’t teach a class on what the Holy Spirit did in me. I kick myself because I don’t have more “lessons” to impart, no seven-step formulas, no hard-and-fast principles.

I don’t even have “more faith.” I have only the measure that was given to me, that “He is and He is who He says He is.” It’s a mustard seed for sure, and not much for moving mountains on my volition.

But when every day is a mountain, when there are five steps to getting dressed and I can’t find the pants I was going to wear and have to sit down and start over and end up showering instead, when I sit down at my computer to rack out projects and meet obligations and then I get lost on the way to… what was it I started again?

I am not good anymore. I don’t have the energy to BE good. I don’t have the energy to be bad, either – I can just BE. And every day I ask myself what I CAN do, and ask God what He WILL do. And some days it feels like He won’t do much, because He’s got other things He’s sharing with me, things like humility and rest and truth and stuff that has nothing to do with anything on my priority list.

I know He CAN make me feel better, can change the kids’ hearts and get them to chill out, can just miraculously dispense with time and spread it out so I get more done – but He doesn’t always. He lets me fall, lets me make a mess out of my life – not because I’m trying, but just because I am dust – and then He comes in with all this compassion and reminds me that He is still Him and that because He’s Him, Jesus is enough for me, Jesus means that He can be there even if I do the things I don’t want to do.

When it boils down, He wants me to know Him, and to know that I am deeply known by Him and loved just as I am. He’s not on a one-track improvement mission in my life, taking me up a spiritual ladder. He’s working through me, soaking Himself into my soul, blowing out darkness with His light and being who He is.

I’ve been thinking that I need focus to get my life more solidly on track, but really, I think I need wonder. I need to just see Him work, sit right here and watch Him move through my life. I need to wait like a child, impatient for love and attention, less willing to run ahead of One who asks me to trust Him, more willing to believe He knows more than I do.

By kelle | July 8, 2012 | from here, God n me, walk with Him |

Going Under

Today I don’t know what I have to offer anyone. It seems like everything I say or do is a copy of someone or something else, and I know this is how I learn, but I also know that the truest things I say are the things that stem from the place in my gut that isn’t quite permissible on any public level.

I’ve learned the rules. The ones about what to say and what not to say, and since most of what I think is what not to say and most of who I am is what not to be, I feel trapped and resigned and ready to quit everything. As much as I want to break the rules, I don’t want to be disliked. I don’t want to make people uncomfortable. And let’s face it – I’m just not good at breaking rules.

Only I look at myself ten years ago, and I know the letter I’d have written then for me to have now:

“Let your heart break. Live wide-open. Don’t hand in your passion, ever. Follow your heart and don’t apologize for it, because God made you this way and He meant for you to live this alive.”

But a body can only take so much breaking. A person can only swallow so much head-patting and misunderstanding. And that grain of truth in the lies just grows bigger and bigger until grace seems too small to overshadow them anymore.

I’m blowing apart here, and I’m looking down on me in the past and thinking, “wow, Kelly. You needed to be more reserved, you needed not to talk, not to be like that, not to say anything.” I’m doing what I always hoped I’d never do, head-patting others who have passion and thinking, “just wait, just wait.”

Because staying alive is the hardest thing to do, especially when life bowls you over and you’ve got nobody speaking the life back in because safe is easier and, well, safer. I don’t want to be erased, but sometimes erasure – nothingness – is the only option I feel I have, because I can’t deal with all the pain, the expectations, the way *I* am too much and not enough every single day. I get why people drink, why they do drugs, why they find whatever they can to make themselves feel the good things, because the bad things chase you down no matter where you are. We walk around every day in the valley of the shadow of death, and sometimes being human is simply not. okay.

This is when I walk humbly with God. When I’ve got no spiritual genes to my name, when I can’t ask for conviction but can’t shove it away either, when I’m nothing more than just me, blowing apart. This is when grace is the only hope I have, when Jesus is the safest place because the “safe” ways of living aren’t safe anymore because I’m an alien and a stranger and world-thinking is all about shutting life down, in the church or out.

Sometimes I hope I’m on the other side. That I can stand up again and not get broken. That I can be grown up and people won’t really know how weak I am. But when it all falls out, I don’t get to choose who and what I am. I just AM, and this is how He created me, in His image, outside of cultural boundaries, peas, and queues. He’s all I’ve got.

So what I have to offer anyone? Me. Just me. And if I’m too much or not enough, I won’t hate you; I’ll just wish me away. I’ll try to hide. But eventually I’ll break because I wasn’t meant to be alone, wasn’t meant not to need.

I can’t be passionate right now. I’m too tired. Too ready to give up. And too scared to ask the amazing people I love to be there for me. What DOES this to a person?

By kelle | July 6, 2012 | from here, God n me, health |

Sometimes it is all too much, you know.

Some days I go through the world, almost able to believe that I am in control of my own destiny, that I’m autonomous and I’m doing okay. But there are days too when I feel as though I must absorb the pain of everyone and everything, when I bleed out poetry in words and pictures because speaking stark truth makes it hurt worse.

Do you know I sometimes forget that I am real? And then one day I wake again and I get scared. My old habits wake up and I look at myself and see how far short I fall of everything I thought I wanted to be when I was younger and spiritual and safe enough.

I go running to Him who never moved, try to make… something His fault – I am never sure what, because I know that He is good, that I am not condemned, no matter what I feel. But then I try to make things my fault, pick up blame and salve my old, tired conscience with shame, still arranging, still trying to fix me and the whole wide world. I don’t know how to be free, not really, not with all the voices and all the world set against Christ in me, being big enough.

The world’s on fire, as Sarah McLachlin sings, and it’s more than I can handle. There is so LITTLE I can do to help. I want to believe that the beauty I pursue is enough, that it can help others breathe the way it helps me, but some days I wonder. I want to believe that being who I am is a way God can use me in the world, but I’ve been learning that a whole lot of the world might actually despise who I am.

Religion and culture, faith and sight, grace and the law – it all runs together in the should. I am not what people who love me wish I were. How could God be okay with me if I don’t measure up to even the friends who have shown me such care?

I wonder if I love God. If I love others. If my life is bearing the fruit even my closest friends once told me wasn’t there. I am hard on myself; I am afraid of others being hard on me.

And I remember. I remember the soft things, the safe things, the homemade apple pies and the scent of wood smoke, the feel of the wind on my face, calm voices talking in the living room after I was put to bed. I remember the beautiful things, flower gardens, happy moments, silly pictures. It is the wonder that brings the tears out of the fear, the exquisite that soothes the ache I can’t ever really shake while I am alive in the world.

There is too much. Too much noise, too much grown-up stuff. I want it to be okay to not know. To be right where I am and care for the needs that are right here in my house, in my heart.

I ask Pete for help. He tells me what I know, what I’m doubting, that Jesus is all I need. That worship is living as God made me to live, breathing just like He created me to do, delighting in Him where I find Him, letting Him carry me, trusting that His righteousness is enough. He trades beauty for ashes; He changes me in His time, leaves me where I am sometimes for His purpose and His people who need me to not be all that perfect I used to be when I was covering up and hiding Him under my better ideas of Christian.

I fall back. Try to be still. Let the ache wash over me, and the beauty too, and keep breathing.

By kelle | June 27, 2012 | from here, grace |

What He Wants; What People Want; What I Want

I woke this morning and thought about spending time with God, thought about all the people who told me that every day was not enough, that a whole life was not enough – as if they were trying to pay Him back for grace, as if they didn’t know after all the time they spent with Him that they never could.

I woke this morning and thought about getting published, which is happening today, and thought about how much I wanted to share that and be excited about it, but felt myself stepping back from that real excitement because one is not supposed to promote oneself, because people must be getting annoyed with me for only taking pictures, because doesn’t everybody stand off – even just a little – from someone who is successful?

It’s easier if God is just an obligation, a box we can check off our list for the day – or for life. But He doesn’t want to be an obligation, anymore than I do – so He poured His breaking heart out to the prophets, asking for our love for Him, and finally stepped down into our world to show us first how He loves us best. And we talk about His death and let it become a given, except when it reminds us that we somehow need to repay Him for it, except when we look at our small suffering or at the suffering of others and think, “that is what it means to sacrifice ourselves.”

But we don’t really lay down our lives. We don’t really acknowledge Him in all our ways – or I wouldn’t feel so alone today, knowing the good that is coming, feeling bummed about sharing it at all because it’s just not that big a deal, except that I’ve poured my heart into it for my bride, for myself, for the publisher, and God if this is the letdown I feel when I am successful, why should I keep doing what I’m doing?

Watery sunlight filters through yellow-gray humidity, dulling color in a landscape that normally sings brightly with it. I sigh. Determine to shower. Change some diapers – B is going into the bathroom to fill them now, silly boy. P wants to watch TV, but I ask her to use her imagination today. She says she is bored.

I think He wants me here, in this place, living and breathing and working toward excellence, not sitting half on the fence and half off. It’s not payback – it’s a commission, to go out like the stewards and invest the grace I’ve been given, to see what yield He’ll return, as a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.

I don’t know how diligent I’ve been. I do know I can’t settle for anything less than Him. I never quite thought I’d look as “non-Christian” as I do when I knew Him. I figured I’d be more perfect somehow. Actually punch those time cards with Him I never could punch before.

Instead, I breathe Him in and breathe Him out and He is in me and changing me and making my heart not like the me I used to be. So really, it’s not about me “becoming greater” – it’s about me becoming one with Him, and that is the most beautiful grace, for how does one pay one back for existence, for life itself?

I woke this morning and I was alive.

Today will bring what it does, friends will speak in or they won’t. Success is going to come and go – I’ve seen it happen enough times. It’s just being His that I need today, His in success and in stress and in failure. He is my truest friend and my very great reward, the one who knows me inside and out, who asks me to come to Him with my weary and let Him give me rest. He doesn’t need me to do anything for Him. Doesn’t really even want it.

By kelle | May 16, 2012 | from here, God n me |