Here’s something I’ve been learning about sin: it moves us towards a content, medium, and generally unfulfilling state. By that I mean we are moved away from real feelings and experiences  and back to average places. I want hard things to be easier, but when things are good I am suspicious. Why do I want my life in the middle of the road? I want, perhaps, to avoid pain by staying in the average, not realizing that I am forfeiting the joy and richness that has been offered to me. This is a dirty trick. I’ve been thinking about it since I last read C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” a few months ago, and noticing how true it is in my life and the lives of people close to me. Lewis touches on it here, writing as a senior demon to a nephew demon regarding the temptation of a young man whose soul the nephew has been tasked with obtaining for a place in hell.

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”.

The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

If this passage doesn’t startle, convict, or affect you, I don’t believe you. How many nights have I stayed awake to watch reruns or marathons? How many hours have I wasted on the internet, foregoing the real relationships of my neighbors and friends? How many days have I been annoyed and irritable for no reason? How many times have I regretted doing nothing when I could have been doing anything else? How many afternoons have I avoided a quiet time because anything else might be happening. I  live like this, and have been doing an extra bad job the last year and a half since we’ve lived in Tampa. It didn’t take a long time to get angry after we got here. I hated my job, this city, the dull life I felt like I had. I refused to even look for joy; I didn’t want it. I wanted to be bitter, I wanted to be a victim, I wanted God to feel sorry for me, and I spent too many hours and days and weeks and months doing and seeking absolutely nothing. We played a lot of video games and read a lot of stupid articles. I watched a lot of reality TV. I avoided my bible and my journal; I didn’t want to be convicted of anything true. The days I did feel, I felt awful. I cried. I threw things. I hated myself for being sad. I was exhausted all the time. I felt abandoned and mocked. Praying for a redemption from that place felt futile. I couldn’t muster up the attitude to even start. So I just put it off. It felt better to be medium than to admit I was heartbroken.

What I’ve seen recently that I didn’t see then, was that I was giving up on the beauty and the hope of the gospel. By avoiding my real pain, I was also avoiding real grace, and any chance of allowing myself to receive it or let it change me.

At some point in the last few months I started praying to see beauty - it was what I missed the most in that season of darkness when everything was dull and boring and medium. I started praying for it at first out of exhaustion and desperation. Please, please, let me find something good in this sea of disappointment. Please let me find some trace of You in this disaster.   

The Lord has been softening my heart and answering my prayers, and I am so grateful and relieved for what I feel is a new season. We have a community, and we are leading a small group at our house, and I am finding small and beautiful things in more places. I am thankful for so much traveling this spring, and for weddings and showers and parties. I am thankful that our veranda faces a courtyard, and I can watch people play there in the afternoons. I am thankful for part-time work, and for the extra time in my day to sit and rest and relax. I am thankful for home-cooked meals and for Kyle, who is the best. I am thankful for new books and game nights and people to love. Most of all I am thankful that I am being rescued and redeemed, that the Lord makes all things new and is not giving up on me.

My neediness is creating a place for his mercy. My prayer for beauty is more joyful and thankful than before; it is lighter. I am watching for His hand in more places, seeing and tasting His goodness. I am broken, certainly, but not abandoned, and not hopeless. I want my life to have a larger, richer, range. I want to know my own depravity and His immeasurable Love, and not pretend to be OK somewhere in the middle of all of that. I want to hurt and feel, but rejoice more, because we are not without hope, not without a Savior. We are on our way home, we are getting there. We are being made whole. 

Joshua is leading his people out of the desert to claim their promised land. It has been forty years. They aren’t even the same people as when they started. They have been changed by the time and seasons and wandering and thirsting and expecting. And they are moving slowly, surely, into the place that God has called them and prepared for them. The priests among them reach the banks, and the Jordan stops. The whole people cross over the dry riverbed where flooded waters should be flowing, and they are safe.

Here, God has them stop. “Choose twelve men from among the people,” He says, “and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan… and put them down at the place you stay tonight.” And so God’s people pause, just out of reach of their promised prize, moments away from the finish line, on the eve of the famous fall of Jericho, to build an altar. To remember, to notice, to sear this thing into their hearts and memories and history.

“These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”

This fall I read Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles In A Thousand Years” as our pastor preached through Joshua. Donald Miller thinks that lives, like stories, are made of scenes, and that the good ones (lives and stories) are the ones with the most memorable moments. He thinks that probably, when God has people stop and build altars in the bible, that it’s for their own sake. 

“…something that would help them remember, something they could look back on and remember the time when they were rescued, or they were given grace….”

The altars are for us, so we can look back and remember the feeling, color, intensity and beauty of seasons and moments in our lives. 

I have not been building altars this season. Not really. I haven’t posted, I haven’t written, I haven’t stopped to be still or consider the work that God might be doing. I haven’t been looking for beauty during this long, refining walk through my own personal desert. But I have stopped on several nights to look back on my old altars. I have been comforted by the memories of seasons where the Lord was sweet and gracious. I have remembered moments of conversation, road trips, skits, friendships and sunny days when I knew that I was loved and that there were great things in store for me. 

I believe all the things I was once sure of: that I am loved and made beautiful, that I am being led and changed and altered, that I am being refined and worked out. I believe that the God who is providing for me in this desert has a new thing for me on the other side, and that He wants me to remember what He has done along the way. I believe that He will show me the beauty in this hard part of the story.

I am so thankful for those of you who have been building your own altars around me. Liz, Erin, Ashley, Jen, Tara, Eleanor, Natalie: your lives and honesty and listening have helped to reassure me of the goodness and faithfulness of the Lord.

I don’t know that we ever realize what God is doing before an hour of glory. How hopeless must it have felt to be an Israelite, wandering through the endless desert, crossing an impassable river, stopping to be circumcised at Gilgal, marching around the impenetrable walls of the city… until the walls fell down? FELL DOWN. 

The Lord doesn’t want us to forget what He is doing. He doesn’t want us to forget where He is taking us. He wants us to know that He will deliver what He has promised, and that we have reason to hope and wait in eager expectation. I am thankful to be His.

(Joshua 3-7)

Just testing the waters, everyone. 

Just testing the waters.

(Originally posted July 22, 2011)

Looking back now I can see that it was more than anything a failure to believe in the story of who God is and what he is doing in this world. Instead of living that story – one of sacrifice and purpose and character – I began to live a much smaller story, and that story was only about me. I wanted an answer, a timeline and a map. I didn’t want to have trust in God or anything I couldn’t see. I didn’t want to wait or follow. I wanted my old life back, and even while I read the mystics and the prophets, even while I prayed fervently, even while I sat in church and begged for God to direct my life, those things didn’t have a chance to transform me, because under all those actions and intentions was a rocky layer of faithlessness, fear and selfishness.

-Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet

There are a lot of these sorts of feelings in my life. You maybe wouldn’t know it if you talked to me, and I try to ignore it because I hate it, but the truths are that it’s hard to work at a job I don’t love in a town I don’t like without a community or a plan. I don’t want those things to be true but they are and I am a poor handler of my own emotions. I pray for rescue, not redemption. I pray for direction, but not to be able to trust. I have been throwing a nearly year-long tantrum. I know these practices aren’t what are best for me, and I know that I am failing, like Shauna, to believe in the ultimate story and character of God. I know. And now you know too. Please pray for me, for the right things.

(Originally posted June 13, 2011)

I don’t remember one jump or one leap

Just quiet steps away from your lead

-Reasons Why, Nickel Creek

I have not been a wonderful person recently. I have not been kind, patient or content. I have been mean, I have been selfish, and I have failed to believe things that God has promised: that He is sovereign, that He is powerful, and that He loves me. I have been bitter about being lonely and homesick and have forgotten (of course) the Truth about who I am, and whose I am. I have slowly forgotten the best way to live, and have failed to pray, be still, or love well. I have discovered these things under the veil of self-pitying justification I have been hiding behind, and I am bringing them out to air.

I’ve restarted this next paragraph a dozen times already, because I’m not sure how to go on from here. I can at least report that my heart is softening. Tampa and I have reached a peaceful alliance, and Kyle and I have begun to make friends, small in number but great in significance as we readjust to living life alongside other people. We are confident that we have found a church where we will find a loving, available community. Our life feels to be normalizing in spite of my kicking and screaming, and it seems that God is making something beautiful after all.

Our God is full of grace, especially for me, especially in this season. He is scooping me up and brushing me off and looking me in the face to tell me some things I desperately need to hear.  I am not angry, but I am aware of my own helplessness. I am humbled by the forgiveness He has shown me and sure of His faithfulness. I wrote the following things in my journal tonight:

“Thank You for making saints out of the ashes. Thank You that You have chosen to redeem Your children. Thank You for being a good Father. I love you. I am just small and hopeless and I love you. I think that you are glad to hear it.”

(Originally posted May 18, 2011)

I was most emotional on the drive from Raleigh into Wilmington, but not for the reasons I expected. I was preparing to feel like I was finally going home, and had practiced all the things I would have to tell myself to keep from stubbornly refusing to get back on any plane to go away from there. I was almost looking forward to that feeling, as I think that at some point my hostility towards Tampa had become spiteful. I was mad at Tampa. I didn’t want to give it any more chances. I wanted it to be easier, and I didn’t want to have to try. This was an easy resentment to keep up – everyone sympathized with my loneliness and nobody was telling me to get over myself already.

But I did not feel any of those angry things on the 1,000 miles of I-40 between Raleigh and the coast. I instead was overcome with an intense and unexpected feeling of relief, not because I was escaping something terrible but because I was reminded of something very good. Perhaps sometime in my fight against Tampa, Wilmington had become unreal. It had become a dream or an oasis, and I had forgotten that it was not a romantic ideal, but a real place with streets and people and smells. I think the road signs did me in. I suddenly realized that Wilmington still existed and was surprised to feel, more than anything else, remarkably reassured.

People still love each other in Wilmington. God is moving there. There are churches there that are telling people the Truth. The gospel is alive, and if it is alive in Wilmington then it is still alive in me and I am not as alone or as unlucky as I falsely believe. I am weary of this lie and I am anxious to learn to trust in the sovereignty of a God who knows more than me. What I am realizing, slowly and reluctantly, is that I tend to not believe in His good intentions. This is dumb.

“But he gives more grace.” James 4:6

There is hope for me yet.

Our weekend was extraordinarily refreshing. I am most grateful for familiar faces, conversations about life instead of work, and being surrounded by people who love and know each other. Also, Agnolotti at Osteria Cicchetti.

The week we got home I sat down to unwind and finally prayed for peace with Tampa.  I wrote in my journal, “I feel empty, but it feels like spring is coming.”

I am so thankful for you, friends. Please go hug someone you love. 

(Originally posted April 18, 2011)

I think I post so infrequently because I am unsatisfied with what I have to report. There is so much happening in my life that no one knows about, but it feels like so little as I’m living it, and so normal. People’s lives are really crowded, always, and when you live around them and know them and share with them, all of the crowdedness gets overlapped and understood and lifted up. Since I am gone, it feels like the crowdedness is just contained here, like Kyle and I are changing and growing and no one knows, and it’s hard for us to measure.

I’m different than I was when I left Wilmington. I wear flats now, not sandals. I have a lot of cardigans. I own a bedside lamp and I plan meals for the week so we can go to the grocery store just once. I have a designer handbag. I wake up earlier. I’m lonelier. I cry a lot more, not because I am depressed but because I am fighting and I am changing. I am more aware of my selfishness. I am more thankful for my friends. I am more amazed at Kyle’s patience and contentment and more grateful for his calmness in the face of all of my emotion.

I think that I am mostly homesick. I sometimes indulge myself in pretending that the tree branches outside our bedroom window belong to the tree that stood in front of our apartment on Ann Street. It’s nice to imagine that there are familiar faces down the block or that if we go out we might run into someone we know and be glad to see them. I am often sad about this, but also really pleased with my time in Wilmington, and proud of how much I learned to love, and how much I learned at all. It is hard to be gone but it is sweet to remember. I sometimes feel like an old person at the end of a movie who has lived a blockbuster life of adventures and montages and the credits are about to roll and the old person if just so sweet for living such a feature film sort of life. I know that this is ridiculous, since I am not an old person and I am not nearing the credits, but I think I feel this way because I am having a hard time looking forward or letting go.

I don’t know where we will be in six months, or a year, or five. I have hoped to be in Austin, or anywhere but here, but the truth is that we don’t know. The prospect of going to Austin with the company is a carrot that keeps getting pulled away, and I am tired of putting my hope there. There is a better place for it.

Thanks to those of you who have visited, called, and otherwise reminded me that I am not alone or forgotten. I love you more than you could know.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice.

Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore me to the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Psalm 51:7-12

(Originally posted March 1, 2011)

I am so very sunburned. I am embarrassed about this, because I feel like I am smarter than the sun. Unfortunately, Saturday got the best of me and I was asleep before I was SPF protected and here I am, three days later, my face slowly peeling away in layers of skin.

On the inside I am less irritated, at least for this week. I say that in a tone of celebration, since it’s been a jerky ride so far, but not with any expectation of permanence, since I can feel that the Lord is shaping me and He is not close to being done.  I have felt like a mine field especially recently, exploding unexpectedly, unfortunately for Kyle. I am not adjusting well to being a business woman and I fluctuate significantly between “fine” and “disaster.” I feel like I am growing, and that is good. I haven’t been able to identify why I am so unpredictable, or why I feel so unstable. I think it has a lot to do with learning how to practice unfamiliar habits.

As a leader, my sensitivity was a good thing. I was allowed to empathize and love freely. In an office, I am encouraged to do things like improve processes and be on time. It’s not that processes and checklists aren’t satisfying for me (let’s be honest…) but under the surface I am searching for something that is beautiful instead of something that is a machine. Instead of being told I am loved, I am being told I am a valuable asset. Instead of being encouraged, I am being praised. Instead of being poured into, I am being utilized.

The gospel isn’t a machine or a process. Faith is not a philosophical ascent. It is more important to know God than to know about God. So I am focusing in this season on remembering His character, and believing that He is who He says He is. He is more sovereign than I understand, and more Good than I give Him credit for. He is planning things I couldn’t dream of, and He is not holding back. He is relentless in His pursuit of me. He Loves me. He has rescued me. It is Good News, and I don’t want to ever grow out of it. 

(Originally posted February 17, 2011)

Kyle and I drove to Birmingham last Saturday for the best weekend of life. This was the third year in a row we’ve gone to Alabama to visit Kyle’s best friend Grant and see Step Sing, an annual song and dance show that Samford University puts on that rocks my world. We expected to have a great time, but we didn’t expect that Grant had sneakily invited Caleb and Scott to crash the party, and so we were totally blown away by seeing some of our favorite people on top of all the rest of the adventure. Birmingham is a small pocket of sweetness in our life. We love the city, the people that we know there, the show, and the thrill of being on the road and being somewhere different.  We sat around the campfire at Grant’s, explored parks in downtown Birmingham, frequented our favorite local coffee shops and had a few impromptu dance parties in the backseats of cars. It was a drastically fabulous break from the routine of our regular life and an encouraging reminder of the richness of friendship and community.

It is refreshing to sit with people who know and love me; who say my name because they want to hear about my life or want to tell me something about theirs.  I have a lot of thoughts simmering right now about communities and thankfulness and the way that I am changing so quickly and that my life is so different now than it was even a few months ago and what that means for my heart. I am wrestling with my identity and finding that if I define myself as anything other than the rescued daughter of a mighty King then I am deceiving myself.

I am so thankful for this weekend and for my life. I believe that the Lord is orchestrating something monstrous and wonderful for us. I believe that He loves us. His mercy is long.

(Originally posted February 7, 2011)

I have been decidedly lazy about putting up my first post, much to the chagrin of Brittany. So now it’s evening and I’ve got The Tallest Man on Earth in my headphones, and I will try to write about something someone might want to read. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
 
My experience is very different from Brittany’s here, not because we actually do anything separately, but because we are just so different. I’m thankful for that. I am more solitary, I think. Or maybe it’s just that during college, I got used to only being around one other person for most of the time and this is pretty similar even though it’s completely different. Having Brittany around all the time is so much better than being by myself, and I remember Graham saying one time that you become such a weenie so fast about sleeping by yourself. My sanity is closely tied to Brittany. I enjoying having someone to rely on. There’s a verse about a man who works in a field by himself. Who will pick him up if he falls?
 
Then there’s work. Work is an adventure. I swore up and down for a very long time that I would never work in healthcare. Being the son of a doctor has a funny way of eliminating one career path very quickly. My appraisal was always that I didn’t want to be a doctor because they work too hard. That (and a loathing of biology or freshman year or something) were what steered me early toward some other applied scientific pursuit. Engineering is clearly a good place to go if you’re trying to work less hard than a doctor. Fortunately the engineering industry sucks and here I am. At least once a day I try to figure out how the monster that is healthcare even exists without imploding. I’ve still never found any good indications except that it somehow continues to work.
 
When I got to Matrix, I started as a customer service rep [CSR] and first entered data, then called insurance companies to get medical equipment authorized, then eventually played cleanup for all the orders that had passed those two steps. I got doctor information, located suppliers, and made sure packages got to their desired destinations. Chuck also enjoyed giving me tasks like reading long laws and figuring out problems in the computer system. Finally someone figured out I am good at math and very careful and made me review invoices for A/P and A/R. I liked all these things. I take a lot of pride in my work and always apply myself to whatever is given to me. I’m also an analytical thinker and take careful inventories about processes, operations, and procedures in my brain all the time (it’s either wonderful or horrible). When Stuart realized I knew exactly how long each process department took, he locked me in a room painted with whiteboards, and two days later we had a streamlined operations plan.
 
Meanwhile, I applied to be Team Lead for the Ancillary department and won the promotion and tried to play defense for my supervisor; I handled routine questions so she could focus on other things. In early December I presented the Ancillary Operations proposal to my manager, the VP of my department, and the CFO. The CEO had a soft copy the next day, and quickly everyone was in favor of implementing the new plan. On Friday that was put into effect, and I was promoted to Supervisor of Ancillary Support.  Basically, Stuart and I figured out that there is a Customer Service side and a Logistics side of the process which occurs in my department. I am the head of the Logistics side. (See illustration)