Over My Head: When the Rains Come

Drafter’s Note: I really did write this in its entirety from my airplane seat. And part of me wants to flesh it out and another part wants to put it in perspective but the ruling voice—majority vote or bossy vocalist is hard to call—says to leave this as I wrote it, because this is why I made this space to begin with: to be who I am.

I can't say that I don't know why I'm crying, why the tears seem to be related to gravity and thus closer to my surface the higher we climb. Last night in my eighth-floor hotel room I could feel the building pressure of them just beneath the surface, shifting every image to one seen through salty water. But today as the gravity lessens and our wheels lift from the tarmac I'm more grateful than I think I've ever been for this two-seater, this window, this two hours all to myself. Because loss seems inevitable—not every day, not all the time, but in some hours it grips across the skin the way I imagine an octopus would, relentless and stinging and impossible to remove. Some days it's brief, painful but passing. 

But there are moments when I cannot see an end but the obvious—and the simultaneously unknown. These tears will not be brushed away, and though they come quietly they will not be overpowered. I don't look for their end or their cause. Up here in the open I let them coast down my cheeks, hit my chest, roll where they will. Because though we coast over neighborhoods and highways there's no one beside me, no one to search for meaning or try to understand. How could they when I myself fall short of words? When only snippets and pieces of the brokenness find their way into focus? When the raw patches draw tears from the deep for the things that, barring a miracle, will never be felt by this heart? 

I let the mess run its course. I let the tears come as they need to and don't analyze their reasons. And I lean, lean reliantly and desperately and utterly into the Holy Spirit who harmonizes with me to make something beautiful, worthwhile and worship-worthy to my Father, my Tatì, the Writer and Remaker, the King and Captain and Comforter, the One who knows what He's doing and always has my hand and never forgets or falls or fails. He has a plan that is perfect for Him, and He draws me in again and again because His Son sacrificed everything to bring me home, and the Father loves me still, loves me too much to leave me out of the story that glorifies Him in every way.

And when the story seems too much for me—when the pages look blank and the words garble in my mouth and I don't know where to set my next step—keep me leaning into You, following after You, never quitting until that day that I am Home and falling at Your feet and having nothing but Your priceless name to cry back in glory, reason, worship, end, beginning.

Over My Head: This Morning

Drafter's Note: This was a prayer journal entry at 4:00am, a Facebook post at 5:30am, and is now shared here with minimal editing: a busy day for these little words. I wobbled on going public to this degree--brave faces are so tempting--but summarizing on social media didn't do it for me. I find myself wondering if this is a small way of speaking out, acknowledging brokenness and unglossed truth, in the face of the devastating and unbelievable in the world. 

Or maybe I'm just crazy.


Here I am, awake again--comfortably enough, with the rain pattering heavily and a little cold lo mein and the knowledge of a day of nothing set out before me.* No pressure to stay awake or rush back to sleep--I can hover in this limbo. Why not.

I can feel the little losses this morning--or maybe I'm just looking at them more head-on, acknowledging them more than usual. Nothing big. Just the pieces that aren't there: plots of books I've too-recently read, details of movies I think I love, names to match with new faces, lost lyrics to songs I can only rhythmically hum. And these are the pieces I notice missing. Are there larger holes, hard to see at a distance but gaping wide, ready to swallow more, gravitational black holes in my memory?

I don't know.

It feels that way sometimes.

But, to be fair, I've always had this melancholic strand woven through me, coming to the surface sporadically. Maybe these little lost pieces harmonize with the near-waltzy sway of melancholia to see those holes where there is, in fact, only good plowable ground. (I pull my dictionary app out here, and I stay with that word not for its first definition of mournful depression but for "sober thoughtfulness"--medievally, a bit too much black bile, which strikes the right note for me in here.**)

So this, too, like joys and dreams and supposed promises, I hold in open hands for You to take--or not.

And the image that comes--from You or me, I'm not sure--is You closing my fingers, letting me hold it while Your hands remain, holding mine. Sobering. Thoughtful.

(In these moments, it is simple to me how those in this legacy who chose a Saviorless life reached instead for a bottle: a supposed steadier for these waves and wobbles.)

So I'll sit here with You, Savior of mine. And together we will own this: the real and the imagined, the solid fact and the melancholic fog. You won't leave and I won't give up. You'll hold my hand until I fall asleep: each time, and then the last time, when you'll raise me out of the bile and into breaking, remaking, transforming light.

For now, in this time of imperfection, we see in a mirror dimly, 

we see a blurred reflection, a riddle, an enigma. 

But then, when the time of perfection comes, we will see reality face to face. 

Now I know in part, just in fragments, but then I will know fully, 
just as I have been fully known by God.

- 1 Corinthians 13:12, Amplified version 

(parentheses and brackets switched out for natural punctuation)

* Amazing how today ended up--almost like Someone was penning a better story. That "day of nothing" became an early morning of worship and quiet and peace; a later morning of service and great conversations with fellow churchgoers and strangers as we volunteered cleaning our neighbors' homes; an afternoon of great conversation and beautiful walk with a new friend; and later tonight, a game night with friends and other strangers. Prayerfully I'll remain conscious for everything. 

** "Melancholy," according to my dictionary app (combining some definitions but remaining true to order): 
          1) a gloomy state of mind; mournful; depressed; 
          2) sober thoughtfulness; pensiveness; 
          3) Archaic. the condition of having too much black bile. 
          Origin: 1275-1325 Middle English melancholie: condition of having black bile.

Proof of Life

Drafter's Note: I promise, I yet live. I promise, in fact, that I yet write--brief evidence below! Have just fallen off the bloggy wagon, as I seasonally do. (...In this case, three seasons. But who's keeping score.) A couple of items that have lived on my phone since I wrote them (in April and May, respectively), and should see the light of day--though apologies for the whiplash from the one to the other.

If you've returned, faithful reader, all I have is thank you.


Sitting by the Willamette on a Springy Morning

I've always been an ocean girl. The rhythm, the pulse of roaring-rough or quietly lapping waves has had a stilling, restful, spiritual effect on me since my earliest memories. From a girl playing pretend to a teenager's broken heart to the constant mess of "adulting," the sea has been more faithful than fathers, more healing than chemo. That pulse gently reminds me that there is no rush, that things will come in a time that is out of my control but exactly as it should be. A lullaby of rest, a practice of patience.

But this morning I sit in this diner, eavesdropping on the men near me discussing King Kongs they've known in their lengthy lifetimes, their histories and love interests--those of the ape, not themselves--and a few dozen feet away the Willamette (don't be an outsider: "will-AM-it") surges past us with shameless enthusiasm, hunks of ice from the mountains churning through it in an ancient calligraphy. 

And I realize that this might have spun me very differently, had I been raised by mighty rivers. There is no gentleness--what seems still is only skin over tumult and currents--and nothing comes to you, in any frame of time. It passes. It approaches and then flees and does not pause for you to wonder. I have a glimpse of Lewis and Clark, Huckleberry and Jim, of those who could not keep watching things lost but had to see where it went--not how it ended, but where it took them.

I wonder if it's possible to change--not to leave the sea (impossible!) but to let my salty soul get a little brackish as the constancy and rest is sometimes traded for the unknown, the passage, a new world around this next bend. Because no one is called to stay. Not always. Shifts--physical or something larger--may be infrequent but no less necessary. Not running away, not fear of commitment, but knowing that sometimes a churning is good for the soul. Remembering what's passed, what was good and what was lacking, but taking the risk of the new and unknown. 

Like the Kongs, I think, and bring my attention from the surging script of the river, but the conversation has moved past Kongs old and new, traded for self-driving cars. I drain my cold coffee and gather my things--time to move on, even in little ways. 

"Tell me," asks one of them, leaning over and looking into his mug, "how does it know what 'home' means." 

      --      --      --      --      --      --      --      --  

Can I Be a Witness

I don't know where Cain's wife came from.

I just thought I'd open on that note, because it comes up a lot--that, or some other quiz question aimed to stymie Christ-followers who call the Bible a holy text. I've discussed and debated and studied that book over college classroom tables and youth group meetings and in conversation with friends and with my own self. And some things I know and some I don't, but when it comes down to it I can't prove a single one. I won't win this argument--in fact, I'll try not to enter it at all.

I can't prove God created the world, and knit me together while my mother thought she'd just have a son. I can't prove that Jesus, Son of God, gave Himself to pay my sin debt. I'd drown in the details of why God cared enough for broken people to sacrifice the perfect to save them. Thankfully, I don't have to. I can't make it all make fit together--maybe because it doesn't, and mostly because I don't need to.

All I am is a witness.

I've witnessed God step into my life in the wake of brokenness and redirect us to new family and community found in a church. 

I've witnessed Him close my ears to opportunities of wreckage and addiction as a teenager, piecing something else, something less polluted together. 

I've witnessed Him save my life--keep me from acting on my considerations of suicide--by weaving people and books and song lyrics into something that resembled this faith everyone else had talked about and I'd never known. 

I've witnessed Him send me into a foreign country to find how unfathomably big He is, how blessed I am, how to worship Him outside of words I knew. 

I've witnessed Him steer me from place to place, job to job, calling to calling. 

I've witnessed Him heal me of deep wounds, bring me out of habits and thought patterns that owned me, and lead me from puddles that vaguely met needs to springs that overwhelmed and restored. 

And I've witnessed Him take a simple prayer--"come and do whatever you want to"--and weave a seizure and a brain tumor and a biopsy and radiation and chemo and MRIs and bald spots into the best story I've ever had. 

And that's just the highlight reel.

I can't prove to you that my God, this particular God of mine, did all this. 

All I have is my story... and the fact that my story lines up in crazy ways with those of friends of mine... and echoes back to those stories that fill up the pages of that holy book that never sits on a shelf because it is too actively harmonizing with my life to put it away.


Like sitting in a box where the lawyers will argue and accuse and the judge will decide, all I can do is tell what I know. Not because someone told me to or I read it somewhere. Just because this is my story.

Sucker Punches & Resuscitations

Drafter's Note:
A couple of assurances:
1: It was a surprise to see how long it's been since my last post--I've been writing a lot! But it's been of a less public nature--no big stuff, just processing. (And, for the record, I wrote this two weeks ago...!)
2: I haven't spent the three months since my last post stewing on fatherlessness. Promise.


Four people--two adults holding two toddlers--stand in front of a huge mirror and count themselves, call themselves by name and identity. The names of two little boys, "and Mommy Karen and Daddy Matt." The boys smile, but there is something else in their eyes, and it will take its time in leaving.

I spent two weeks of this month in Canada getting to know my new nephews. They are towhead blonds and they squawk and scream and make silly blubbering noises and crash trucks and trains and hammers into every surface from book to floor to flesh and I am head over heels. I love feeling out each one's personality, finding how they overlap and distinguish themselves even at two and three years old. And even in our play, it breaks me to see them working out their already broken history as they test their new parents, claw for attention, need to be assured of sameness and stability. I want to wipe this away from them like maple syrup from their faces, but I know it doesn't work that way.

I know even as I watch my brother embrace and be this new thing, a father--alternately joking and tickling, teaching, gently disciplining--that this initial brokenness may stay with them, not unhealed but not erased. I know because even as I went to write about it, I found myself breaking apart. It has been nearly three decades and countless prayers and journal entries and blog posts since my father left us and that ache still opens every once in a while.

Pulled from sleep with that ache, I stood in the kitchen making coffee and thinking about early brokenness, about how it is the ultimate sucker punch: the one who is supposed to have your back, to never fail, to always be waiting for you is suddenly not there. At times, I still haven't caught my breath. I wonder if these beautiful boys will know the same.

Even as I started to write this, I had to spend a few minutes having a full-waterworks ugly cry--for me, for the boys, for getting broken before you know what whole is. I cried and I looked through the ceiling to the God Who Hears and I had no words but He listens anyway and it's there that I find the response to that sucker punch: the God who fashioned supernovae and the gnats that circled the cantaloupe in the kitchen this morning has every right and reason to be above, away, outside... and instead He is right here. He doesn't pat me on the head or remind me how often we've talked this one through. He just is. He just stays. He just heals and restores and remakes and breathes new life into us--the ultimate resuscitation--and fifteen years after I started bringing each angle of this hurt to Him, I am still pulling that new breath into my once-crushed lungs. He remains, and that is a truth stronger than stories.*

I watch my brother and my sister-in-law act this truth out to their boys, reflecting the love and restoration of God. I see it as they count themselves in the mirror, as they hold and hug. I hear them speak slowly and carefully: our books, our toys. Our house. Our forever family. Even in discipline, in time-outs and temper tantrums, love and stability and permanence are woven in amidst it with "I'm still here" and "I love you." They echo the love God has lavished on them, the healing He has worked on their wounds.

"God in His holy dwelling is a father to the fatherless... 

God provides homes for those who are deserted." 

Psalm 68:5, 6 (Holman translation)

* "a truth stronger than stories" is maybe my favorite line from a poem I wrote about the loss of my father, saying that he "was gone, and that is a truth stronger than stories." (You can read it here.) That remains true--but there are other, better, eclipsing truths.

Maybe I'll Be Sorry When You're Gone

If you said goodbye to me tonight,
there would still be music left to write...


"This song always makes me think of when my father died," I say casually, and my friend snaps her face toward mine as we sit at the traffic light. "I know," I cut in before she can say the necessary "...This song?"

I know it's a love song. It's whimsical and weird and meant to be accompanied by snapping fingers. I'd be hard-pressed to find something further from funereal. But his death remains one of the oddest events in my life--too many emotions and nowhere to put them but in the past--and there's a certain justice in associating it with such an unexpected song. 

It was one of the first times I ever knew my thought patterns and my words to travel two different routes, because multiple times that day I went to say, "I found out my father died," and in my head all the words were calm and sad and slow, but as they left my mouth they were hijacked by a jumble of hiccuping sobs so the listener heard something like, "I found out my father dAAAGGHHhhhyyyykkkk--" before the place that makes the words yelled at my hands to stop my mouth.

But as the hours and days went by, those routes began to merge. I could say it with only choking up but no tears, or tears but no choke. I learned to insert "estranged," a word I'd never used, as that guided the listener in their response. I spent hours talking through the mess with my brother, my mother, my closest friends, forcing words through emotions like raw garlic in a press.

A couple weeks passed, and the summer trip to my uncle's place on the Cape suddenly seemed heavier, important. I tried to ready myself, to consider my words and looks so I could be truthful but not hurtful, allowing for all of our emotion jumbles to jumble in one house.

But there were no words about him. That first dinner began with a quiet toast, "considering recent events." The words seemed distant--a prepared statement--but you could feel the pain nearly choking them away in delivery. That same sort of traffic jam of words and emotions I'd been feeling, just in a different head. And that was it. A couple days later, some stifled tears, but my hesitant hand was shrugged away. And then nothing at all. We talked about everything else but him, which is the way our family has always handled something. Of the emotions I felt, I realized surprise wasn't one of them. 

That last night I was there, we went out to dinner, talking and laughing--a medicinal, necessary kind of pretend. And later we were driving home in the dark woods of the Cape, four windows open and four faces looking out at nothing in particular. And gradually the quiet voices on the radio were joined by one, two, four more. Not singing together--no harmonies or shared looks--but not singing alone. Singing louder, voices pressing further out our respective windows, accompanied by Billy Joel and tears or laughter, it was honestly hard to tell.

Maybe this won't last very long.
      - - -
I don't care what consequence it brings--I've been made a fool for lesser things.
      - - -
Maybe I'll be sorry when you're gone.

About a year before he died, my father and I and a dozen other relatives from that side of the family were vacationing together near Rockland, drinking and reading and playing croquet and cards. And at one of my peak moments of frustration, when all The Unsaid Stuff was piled up to my ears, my father stopped me in the stairway and apologized. And for a second I thought we were going to have a Dr. Phil-style breakthrough, but he was only assuring me that if he'd seemed frustrated, it wasn't at me but my grandmother, who was driving him crazy "because she just leaves so much unsaid." Wired with a different personality, I might have said, "How fascinating--sit down for a second. I feel the same way about you." But I assured him (honestly--more honestly than I intended, in fact) that I hadn't felt anything from him at all.

When I think of that night on the Cape, I hope someone was walking their dog along the road that night, and as our car rolled by the song grew and peaked and faded, like a strange incarnation of yuletide carolers. I hope there was surprise, and then a quiet laugh. I hope that somehow four mournings equaled one small joy out there in the dark. 

Or maybe the joy I'm thinking of is mine. Because recalling this seven-years-gone story to my friend, I remember the jumble and the tears, but not as fully and clearly as the laughing through those tears, as stumbling over lyrics that we mostly sort of knew, as letting words find their own way through the mess.


And it's more than I hoped for.

An Unreliable Witness

Drafter’s Note: This is not an Over My Head post—this isn't about things that are happening to me. This is about the things I can control—my response, reactions, attitude, self—and how I let the world break a little more when I don’t.

There have been some constant frustrations in my life lately that are out of my control. They are fixable, but I am not in a place to fix them, and so my frustration stews and ferments. It turns into something else, even worse than the initial frustration. It’s some kind of magic, but not a useful one.

Frustration isn't new—all of us have those everyday things in our way that we [think we] could dismantle in five minutes were we in charge, but instead they sit. Being. Irritating. And like any other irritant—allergies, bug bites, Donald Trump—the most desirable way to deal with it (avoidance, scratching, one solid slap in the face) doesn't actually fix the problem. Doesn't even address the problem, but just knee-jerk reacts to it. Which is, in fact, just another layer of problem—a smear of mud instead of a Band-Aid. Hardly magic, now that I’m writing it out. Which fits, as my most commonly-used verb these days isn’t “witch” but “wench,” an approved-for-all-audiences substitute for bitch, as in “bitch and moan.” And I list that out because at the end of the day, that’s all it is: moaning. When you get hurt, you make a noise—you cry, you moan—but then you get to work fixing, healing. Moaning is the natural, and maybe even necessary, reaction. But it’s not the fix.

How do I know? Because in the quiet, when I come home, when I don’t have an audience to wench to, those wenchy thoughts start rolling over me:
  Wow, you talk a lot.
  Why did you say that?
  How did that fix anything?
  What is wrong with you?
Because those wenchy reactions I had caused reactions of their own, and like too many waves in an enclosed space, they echo back at me at odd angles and only then do I see the full reflection: That instead of being a peacemaker, a reconciler, a counselor, I choose—a choice, not foisted upon me—to be this whiny, negative, simpering thing.

How quick I am to justify here—so many explanations that start with, “No,” like I’m answering an accuser. I want to list and recount all the offenses against me, but those are the things I cannot help, that are outside my authority. My reactions, how I live, is not. The outside factors that affect me and those around me, we all deal with. But why do I weigh down myself and those around me with all of my mess, too?

Here's why this matters, and why it matters now. Why I’m writing this.

Because this week, I remember and celebrate the strange and beautiful story of Holy Week: of a God-man who could have moved heaven and earth and instead took my punishment, my mess, on Himself so that I could live free of it. Not because I was something special, but because He is. As usual, the math makes no sense to me but I know it works out with no remainder because I've experienced it, I know it to be true. I'm not a victim, as my wenching might claim, but a witness.

No, I didn’t stand in crowds shouting first "Save now!" and then "Crucify!" I'm a witness because that very crucifying of muck and mess that I had, that very saving me and replacing mess with where-did-this-come-from joy and hope—that happened to me, and continues to happen to me.

It happened when I contemplated suicide in my late teens, and again when I struggled with identity and image in my early twenties; it happened when I lost a dad I never remember having and when I sat in an ER and heard "tumor;" it happens every little time I hand over something useless and dark—jealousy, selfishness, deceit, unkindness—and take up something better, from Something other than me. I could be a witness of this, a storyteller of my own personal proved truth.

But my testimony recently cannot be relied on to testify to who Christ is, and what He has done. I have been as bedraggled and messy and negative as anyone else lately, and not even for big justifiable reasons like brain tumors. It's been the little stuff, the daily stuff, the everybody-deals-with-this stuff. And I've proven an unreliable witness because my present day-to-day life doesn't back up my story, my testimony, of who I am in Christ.

We overuse “turning over a new leaf” and the like. And I don’t say that I’ll be perfect at this tomorrow because I won’t be. But I want to be better. I want to be the one people come to with their frustrations and hurts (and joys and jokes), not the one who piles on more. I want to be a witness—authentic and reliable—for hope and optimism and camaraderie. And when they wonder where that hope comes from, I want to testify boldly to Who gets me through my life. And what better time to commit, again, daily, to that than Holy Week?

I was driven to write this. As one of our pastors read yesterday, the Holy Spirit prompted Philip to do something, and he ran to do it (Acts 8:29-30). So while other posts simmer for weeks and months in my head and on my phone, this has gone from prompting to posting in hours. I trust that means there’s a reason for it—and hopefully, prayerfully, not just for me. When the Spirit prompts and the only potential loss is pride, you don’t wait, you don’t even walk. You run.

So this is where the witness confesses.

I’m sorry that I put my pride and self ahead of better things like compassion and peacemaking.
I’m sorry for being another negative voice in the crowd instead of a counter, an alternative.
I’m sorry for not listening, for waiting (or, more often, not waiting) for my turn to speak.
I’m sorry for valuing surface things over truth, popularity over balanced peace.
I’m sorry if this is the first time you’ve heard/read me say Jesus’s name.
I’m sorry if you’ve seen nothing to distinguish how I live from the rest of the chaos.
All of that is on me, not Him.

My shortcomings and failures are mine. Please don’t hold them against others who share my faith—and most importantly, don’t think that my messy, hypocritical self accurately reflects what Jesus is, and what He does. It’s only an indication of how indomitable He is, that He hasn’t given up on me yet. Let me be a witness that He is doing massive things, in me and in the world; that even my present mess can testify to what He’s already done in me, and points to the work He has in mind.

Yet it was our weaknesses he carried;

    it was our sorrows that weighed him down…

He was pierced for our rebellion,

    crushed for our sins.

Isaiah 53:4-5

Three Lovers, in Brief

"The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world's end."

- C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

I can't say what it is about being up here that I love, that puts me at a different ease than anything else. I'm no child, I don't look for fairies or angels. And though it's no spiritual heaven, I wonder if that trips at the reason: that up here I am heavenward, not so much up as away, apart. As a hundred intimates and I plow through perfect white cloud in a little humming machine, the worries and unrelenting questions fall earthward, corralled in the geometries of midwest farmland, diverted into the hollers of the Blues and Smokies, disoriented in the plains and deserts of the West. And I am left with nothing between me and the words that seem to have been waiting for me up here with the clouds.

“While I, haunted by a magic tune,

should know to come in out of the moon.”

Paul Frances Lowe, my grandfather

The moon is a strange fascination, in part for the duration of my love for it. To lie in my dark room and feel its cool brightness even through closed eyes, finding none of the spooky and suspect notions of ancestors... Though these days, I can’t miss that those ancestors believed gazing at the moon caused seizures. Lunatic, indeed. But it’s more than beauty; it’s the wonder and reminder of light in darkness, of the power of reflection, of watchfulness, of fullness, of just being. The moon does nothing special; it just passes something along. And it’s always been a comfort to me, the surest way to slide into sleep and peace.

"For whatever we lose, like a you or a me, 

it is always ourselves we find at the sea."

- e. e. cummings, [maggie and millie and molly and may]

This has circled my heart and clutched at my memory for the dozen years since my fingers first pressed to the verse. Crashing surf or gentle lapping, smooth sand or rocky outcroppings, from land or vessel--the sea brings me home to the girl who wandered beaches instead of streets, who spoke with friends and imagined lovers, who sang into the wind and wondered how far it could carry before the notes dissolved. The sea and I are different every time we meet, but there is a heartbeat in me that finds a syncopated natural rhythm with the waves. Regardless of coast or temperature, the sea steeps me in history, and in the unchanging weight of the everlasting.

Over My Head: Pretty

I was caught by this idea last fall, in the early days of treatment. I took photos to supplement the inevitable blog post--my phone helpfully documents that they were taken November 7. And while the drive to write about this has continued rummaging around in my head, digging through old boxes and making a mess, here we are months later. What big-name writer said that so much of writing happens before pen touches the page? Truth--but equally good for euphemistically disguising procrastination, fear of what's in those rummaged boxes.

I grew up on fairy tales, but very early--too early--in my childhood, I was gripped with a certainty that while I could play at it, I wasn't the main character because I wasn't beautiful. I don't have any crushing early memory that brought this on. No scabs to pick at here. I don't remember being upset by it--I wasn't upset that I didn't speak Spanish, either--it was a fact, to be known but not worth dwelling on.

By middle and high school, I had found my way to what I thought was a healthy place of understanding that real beauty was on the inside, that looks weren't everything, and the rest of the mantras. I learned to love the songs that made something of how the woman looked to just that one particular man who loved her. That was the key: to find that one boy who would see through all the layers of worldly unprettiness and see the charming girl underneath. A favorite movie musical of mine was West Side Story. "I feel pretty," Maria sings--lyrics that fit so well into the mythos: Why did she feel pretty? "For I'm loved by a pretty, wonderful boy."

I kept growing up, and came to a better adult place of seeing beauty, and seeing myself. I didn't stumble on some great truth; but over time, through little lessons here and there, small places of healing and shaking off the indoctrinations of the '90s, finding a happy place of self-image. I was beautiful in my way of being beautiful, like everyone else. I had made choices in high school and college--defiant, reactive choices--and now I began to unmake them. I had stopped wearing pinks and purples, had never been comfortable in skirts or makeup. As I grew I bought bright colors and high-heeled shoes, got over my fear of blinding myself with mascara. And I kept growing.

When I was diagnosed last year, sometime in the first couple days, someone said the word "chemo," and in quick succession I heard in my head its pair: "bald." I steeled myself--I remember choosing that word--purposefully, carefully steeling myself. I would be the strong woman, who did not need her hair to define her, who would not be shaken. But some of those middle school shadows jostled in forgotten boxes. I prayed and leaned into the poetry of scripture and songs, cried quietly with only God to hear, growled at myself for being so fragile, so predictably weak. "So you'll look like a dude," I told my mirror image one night. "You'll deal with it. There are worse things." And there are. But that was somehow not a helpful answer.

I stood in a grocery store line as a friend whispered if I'd noticed hair loss. I combed my hand through my hair confidently and we gaped helpless at the dozens, maybe hundreds of strands piled between my fingers. The world went silent for a second. This was happening now. The steeling began in earnest, and the next day we made a game of it--what better defense than humor. Hailee chopped at my hair with kitchen scissors, did my makeup at the kitchen island; Julie snapped pictures, first the informal process and later an autumnal photo shoot outside. We laughed, and made it something more than loss.

I came home. I kept the bathroom light off. I was sure I would come around, it would be okay. There are worse things, there are worse things. And the initial few glanced reflections were more surprise than anything--your hair is dead, so being bald doesn't feel any different--you need your other senses to know it's true. I had so steeled myself, had erected so many defensive walls that it took a few days. First, to realize I didn't need them--to realize it didn't hurt to see my reflection. And then, to see something else.

In passing the mirror--and, increasingly, stopping at the mirror, studying the picture in front of me--I found that I didn't need to fight for balance and self-image. I didn't have to argue or placate. I didn't have to tell myself that I was still beautiful around the eyes or mouth. Because being beautiful wasn't even in question. I would hear Maria's voice singing her song in my head: for the first time in memory, I felt pretty. I'd find myself catching half a glimpse  of myself and giggling. I acted like a teenager who preens and gazes at their changing features. And all that makeup I had piled up to smear on, to convince the world that I was still female, became a way to celebrate, not to hide. I was joyful instead of ashamed, and what was behind the face was being healed, not breaking further.

"Yet God has made everything beautiful in its own time," Solomon wrote a few thousand years ago (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Like so much else that's easily simplified or misunderstood out of context, I digested that verse in high school to be followed by, "...Your time just isn't now. He'll make you beautiful... later. Stop asking." It was a little comforting--but mostly not. Now a new voice speaking those words was what came to me in my giggling and blushing. What I planned and prepared for? Yeah, the absolute mind-blowing opposite of that.

Is this the big headliner story of this process? Maybe not. I still have a brain tumor. I still have to take fairly serious drugs to tame it. Blood tests and MRIs and consults pepper my calendar for rest of this year and beyond. So who cares if I feel pretty?

I guess... me.

Less Maria's dancing, I suppose. More that the God of the universe, who created all things to move and work and evolve in every way, who will handle warmongers and peacemakers with perfect justice, cares enough to meet me in the middle of such a little, should-be-below-His-radar thing. "Those who look to the Lord for help will be radiant with joy," Solomon's father David wrote. "No shadow of shame will darken their faces. In my desperation I prayed, and the Lord listened" (Psalm 34:5-6).

I keep this photo on my phone so that I stumble on it occasionally. Because the newness, the noticeableness of feeling pretty has become the new normal, and sometimes I need to see how much it struck me at the time. Not being pretty itself, but joy, the surprise, the gratitude of knowing my silly little need was heard and met and held and answered. Because Maria was right: I feel pretty because I'm loved.

"See that pretty face in that mirror there? Who could that attractive girl be?

Such a pretty face, such a pretty dress, such a pretty smile, such a pretty meeeee."

- Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story

"In my distress I prayed to the Lord,

and the Lord answered me and set me free."

- Psalm 118:5

And Now for Something Completely Different...

I've spent so many words on the larger things lately--faith, sickness, healing--and from some inner curve of myself, I feel the need to balance it out with something smaller: the human interest piece after the stories of bombings and rescues, if you will. This memory has caught my attention a couple times in the past few weeks, like that particle in the water as it circles in the sink. Such a little thing, how does it keep snagging my attention and not just go down the drain?

I still can’t pinpoint what it was about him but, to borrow Josh Lyman's word*, he ensorcelled me; this half a lifetime later, it's the only word that holds up. I could say I loved him--"It might have grown to that," cries a younger me--but it didn’t, so it wasn’t. He spun me, but didn't toy with or trap me. We each meant the best in our different ways, and how much he knew--that what was friendly love was also something else--I couldn't say and certainly never told him. He was real and kind and present with me in a way I'd only guessed at from the stories, and I fastened myself to it, even as I felt his passage through and out of my life.

Here in the present tense, I hang up in the sky today, seatbelt fastened low and tight across my hips, and I let myself spin with the water as the moment snags me again. And as I'm snagged, I realize how little I actually remember: I can see him clearly, can sound out the feeling of being with him, but when it comes to actual memories, anything more than a snapshot, I only have the one. More fitting than strange, really--like most sorceries, the power fades with time.

Our collection of artsy-geeky friends are piled around the theater front doors and the sun is high and bright. It must have been the spring for how we are basking, eking out all the sun and green and warmth we can. In the instant just before, he has said something--not cruel, just gentle teasing--and I have turned away in feigned hurt. (This is a move I have seen in the stories, and it always plays out well for the girl.) There is a beat where I regret sliding away from him, chalking another tally for life falling short of the story--and then a hand has curved and tightened around my side and his head is on my shoulder and his voice floats just under my chin. "Aw, no," he says with my name. "You know I love you."

His hand holds and does not slide to curves north or south. The pose is held two, maybe three seconds before he pulls away to look in my face and see that no real hurt hides there, and the film roll flaps abruptly and I don't remember what follows.

It is such a tiny thing, but I held it so many times in my hands that I now, as I sit here in the clouds, it speaks to me in very simple truths:

That there are many loves in the world, and English faults at having only the one word for all of them.** I was cherished and loved and even held in that moment, and it was all meant fully, nothing withheld. Thorough friendship, solid and smooth. It isn't worth less because I wanted it in a different color.

That even for this woman who loves them, words are not enough. He followed the script to perfection, even to gesture and tone, but they didn’t serve. He was another's then, and has long since gone to be others' since, but never mine.

That memories can lie. It was in fact cold, gray November, or I had pizza sauce dropped on my shirt, or others in the circle rolled their eyes and murmured to each other--it's virtually certain. The photoshop of nostalgia, the softening and refocusing of self-preservation and pride, shines the memory the way fingertips polish a stone. I’ve just been reading C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces: "By remembering it too often, I have blurred the memory itself."

But lastly, that in between the lies, memory holds purpose. There was truth and reliability in that moment that I didn’t see for a long time. Though we left each other's lives and are now different people--strangers, in fact--that afternoon ended up serving as a litmus test for me for years. Not a line of unattainable perfection like those other stories, but a way to see counterfeit more clearly and leave it more quickly, no matter the mood, the loneliness.

I guess I lied, too: I have one other memory of him. Two years later, I am visiting friends and without warning he is suddenly there, nearly as close as in that spring-November moment. And I see him and smile and hug and there is nothing remaining in me but the platonic, the love he had held me with once upon a time. I had been so far from him that I hadn't felt the release until it was long-done, without bitterness or ache.

No fairy tale, that. Not what I wished for as I waited at prom tables and backstage opening nights. But he gave more than he thought, and more than I knew at the time. Some lessons are fought and earned in tears and passion; others are slower and quieter in appearing, the stone turned over and over in the hand. 

*English nerd and librarian to the core, I had to look up the episode for the real credit--and of course, that was written by Aaron Sorkin, the man himself. (The West Wing, Season 3, Episode 11.) 

**without fail, this thought makes me think of Anthony Abbott’s "Carrot-Colored Words" (scroll to the second poem). Oddly, I found out this week that my father had similar feelings, choosing the made-up word "verg" instead of using one so unclear, worn out, and misused.

This Christmas: Joy, Mourning, & Joy in the Mo(u)rning

I wanted to stop each family and person--or maybe wear a helpful explanatory sign--to say that this wasn't Vanna White schtick. I wasn't being paid to stand here in the cold fog and be happy. My "Welcome" and "Merry Christmas" and "Come on in" were genuine, were meant, were whole-hearted. This glowing place behind me, through this open door, is my home and church, and you--if you call this family or you've only stepped into churches for weddings and funerals--are welcome, just as you are.

(See, even here, I need the sign. No schtick! This is who I am, who we are: an open arm, welcoming but also giving you your own space to see, test, experience.)

But as I stood there on Christmas Eve, unable (or maybe just unwilling) to tone down my smile, I couldn't help but let the Dickensian fog float me into past Christmas Eves: the present, and the last two.

Two years ago was joyful--I had hit my thirties in full-joy mode as I found a true Place for Me among my friends-made-family, my church and ministry, and my job. I knew all I needed to know, and I looked expectantly to the next year as one of growth and new things, opportunities to stretch even further in my own strength and in faith. "Giddy" is the word that comes to mind--I was ebullient with hope and eagerness for where we were going.

One Christmas ago, life had changed, had upturned and uprooted. Up was down, black was white. The things I had been thrilled by were now causes of pain. I had watched, powerless and slack-jawed, as great divorces rippled across my community, and with God communicating some things clearly, I was still not allowed to react, to break things and yell and lecture as I wanted to. (God is smart, and knows that that strategy hardly ever works, I suppose, as good as it might feel.) And in other places--namely, What Am I Supposed to Do Now?, He had remained silent until just a couple weeks earlier, when He had begun to confirm things with me--but remind me also of commitments I had made, and my inability to act immediately and still keep my word, so on the eve of Christmas I sat looking down a tunnel of waiting, months long and lonely and dark. I was mournful. I sat in my mother's church, and looked at that growing and joyful community with ache and woundedness--intellectually I remembered how that felt, but it was like that year of pain had taken away my ability to feel that. Glimmers and moments, but nothing secure. Nothing real.

And then there is this Christmas Eve. And in some ways, it's hard to make sense of this, because the woman you saw last year, from the outside, should be more complete than this one. She'd had hair, for one thing. By any human accounting, I should be bitter this Christmas; sad, exhausted, weak. But that human accounting does not take that Sunday last spring into account, stepping into a new church and knowing it was being given to me as mine, as a gift. Having a seizure this summer, yes, but never knowing a moment of it or the diagnosis that followed on its heels without my friends-made-family with me, first holding my hand and then making a bed for me so I wouldn't go home to silence. Living under this new life-redefining thing this fall, and watching God use it to strengthen relationships and solder my dependence on Him all the more and lead me to bring Him into conversations and relationships where I'd never allowed Him before. Being so wrapped up into this new church, not because of what I can bring it, not because of this headlining story, but because the family of Jesus draws people in for the outliers' sakes. With an open arm, welcoming but also giving space.

And so I stand in this present, and am still, continually, amazed to see God very steadily and at times literally turn my mourning into dancing.

You did it: you changed wild lament into whirling dance;
You ripped off my black mourning band and decked me with wildflowers.
I’m about to burst with song; I can’t keep quiet about you.
God, my God, I can’t thank you enough.
Psalm 30:11-12, The Message

And so tonight, this Christmas Eve, it's with a degree of authority that I welcome you, stranger. You stepped gingerly from your car, you checked your phone twice as you walked toward the building, and I saw as every doubt rolled around you: your fear that walking through this door won't fix what's wrong. And I'm not here to argue with you--it won't. Few of us ever trade mourning for dancing overnight, let alone in one service. But you take each singular step. "Come back next week," Eric advised as he spoke.

Come back--to our church or another, that's not the point. But come back. Because staying away may numb the pain but it doesn't heal it. The only thing that heals is handing it over to a King who was so eager to reach us that He didn't come to royals on a throne but to shepherds--regarded as unclean and unworthy in their culture--and a shamed, rumor-covered couple.

I stood greeting again for the third service, and greeted the last of roughly a thousand people, and wondered, out there in the fog, about that Christmas Future. While I don't see some dark skeletal specter, Ebeneezer, it is certainly unknowable. In a year when a brain tumor was part of a wave of joy, what on earth could 2016 bring to surprise me? And yet, I have no doubt that surprise is on the docket. And so I take another half-step into the arms of that King who came into my life like He did that first time: with subtlety, with quiet, unwilling to scare me, but instead asking, over and over and over again, to be brought in, to be able to remake me not only each Christmas but every morning (and maybe more often than that). He doesn't tell me the future--as one of my favorite verses says, I wouldn't believe Him if He did (Habakkuk 1:5). But He knows it, and the closer I am to Him, the more my eyes are on Him, the less those winds and waves rock me--or more accurately, the more stable I feel regardless of them. "Lift your head," sings Amanda Cook on the album I haven't stopped listening to since August. "Now the wind and waves don't matter."

Over My Head: The Story or Healing

(Pre-script: It's cold in my living room this morning, and I went over to my stack of hats. I set a couple others aside in order to pull a certain previously-mentioned red hat over my head and around my ears. It is even more comfy and perfect and helmet-like than I imagined.)

That title's not a typo.

I found comfort last night as I read through my other OMH posts--the comfort of knowing this feeling isn't new. Each time I hear someone ask in tremulous prayer for healing, I have an inner knee-jerk reaction, and I have from the beginning.

I feel like I come to this point from so many places: I am so aware of God's wonder-working abilities to heal. I am constantly reminded of his loving care for me. I am grateful for the prayers of those around me--close friends, and friends-of-friends who've never set eyes on me. I don't want to discourage faith or prayer, but I do want to direct it--not to my narrow vision, but to the openness of God's purpose in this.

The LORD replied... "Be astonished! Wonder!

For I am doing something in your days--

you would not believe it if you were told."

Habakkuk 1:5

I have loved that verse from the first time I came upon it. It rests comfortably in my head, and (when I'm not overblown with emotion) frames every prayer: His vision and plan in this is massively bigger than I can construct. If I pray for something and it doesn't happen, the answer wasn't so much "No," as "Mmmm better. Keep watching."

My sister-in-law set aside specific times to pray over me this last week while she was here, resting an open hand on my shoulder or fuzzy scalp. And each time, she used the words that have hovered in my own head, and that I have shared here: that God would continue to write this story through my life as He has imagined it. That He would give peace and calming and refreshing when necessary. But not that He would just take this away because it's scary.

I listened to another friend as she prayed for me recently. And knowing her heart, I don't say this with an ounce of judgment--I know her prayer was spoken through her love for me--but as she asked for healing, all I heard was fear. She spoke the right words, but wrapped through the curves and holes of them was the fear of unanswered specific prayer, and the shuddering vacancy behind it: I am asking for a good thing, so if You don't do what I'm asking for, how can You call Yourself good?
(Please, please do not pray this way, because it is rooted in a lie. God is good; we are blind to the big picture.)

In a still moment before my biopsy, I was lying on a gurney, my head bolted into a metal frame. And in the quiet of a bustling hospital hallway, I felt a gentle nudge: "Do you want Me to heal you of this?" I don't know what would have happened if I'd answered differently. I don't really think He was asking if it was okay to do one thing or the other--when I'm making big decisions, I don't go to a toddler for my answer, either. But I think He was asking me to look at the options.

Option 1: (Yes.) The story goes that Chandra is taken in to the biopsy, and Jeff the Wonder-Surgeon drills into her skull to discover... brain! All brain! No tumor! Chandra gets a stitch, tosses her meds in the trash, and skips off into her old life. ...And when she meets someone with cancer a year from now, she says something mildly kinder-sounding than, "I had that once but God loved me and fixed it." And the person with cancer changes the subject and pretty much never talks to Chandra again. Story done.

Option 2: (...No.) The story goes that Chandra has her biopsy, and is given several labels and names. Chandra's treatment is scheduled, intimidating glass bottles with yellow warning labels and poison decals arrive in the mail, a mask presses over her face for a daily swarming of machines, her hair comes out in handfuls. And hopefully, gradually, the tumor stops growing, maybe even shrinks a touch. Story...continues down there toward the end...

I know--how is Option 2 even an option? But there on the gurney that morning, taking slow breaths and moving as little as possible from the pain, the story-loving storyteller in me piped up, like the small child with the word of wisdom. "No," she said. "I want You to tell me and my friends a good story."

"Come and do whatever You want to."   - "Crash Over Me," cited 

The thesis statement, I suppose:
My God created the world, invented thunderstorms and kiwis for fun. He saved me from death and despair and my own stupid self, and keeps on saving me, always, repeatedly. It's not that I don't think He can or wants to heal me--He is healing me all the time, from things much less finite than a tumor: selfishness, self-shame, deceit, disappointment, narrowmindedness, sin. He is at work, doing massive things in me, and whether Junior stays or goes doesn't speak a word against His power or compassion.

A brief example: My hair.
I sugarcoated the likelihood of hair loss in my mind, telling myself and everyone who would listen that I've always wanted to buzz my hair. That's truth--but it's also a cover story.
The history: I never felt like a girl. I played the princess as a small child, but by elementary school I was playing with the boys, never wearing skirts, hating the color pink. As my friends slimmed and then curved in the places they were supposed to, I did not: my weight piled on, my breasts remained in stealth mode, I was 17 before I got my period. I was forever The Girl the Guy Talked to About Other Girl, the one who was described as "Not being, like, a girl-girl," as though that was a compliment. Makeup, jewelry, cute shoes--these are things I have played at but never been comfortable with. Of course, Being a Woman is far more than that, but if we are talking feelings, I've never felt it.
The now: My first handful of hair was in a grocery store line with my local family. The next day in the shower I was nearly sick with how it piled out, how I had to pry wet handfuls like dead animals from my hands. "So much for looking like a girl," I said to myself as a joke, but felt the tears well. I went to my local family's house that night to make it fun, to keep myself from crying. And instead we laughed--laughed till we cried, in fact--and did makeup, and took pictures, and I couldn't stop smiling. The next day I kept catching reflections of myself and laughing, giggling like a schoolgirl, charmed by her own self. "I feel pretty," I told the mirror the next day, casually applying some mascara like it was something I did when I felt like it. Pretty as opposed to beautiful in that everyone-is-beautiful-on-the-inside way, the way I've repeated to myself like a mantra for twenty years. Bald patches and dark stubble all over my big head, and I only wear a hat when I'm cold because I feel not like a woman as much as a girl: silly and adorable and stumbling and graceful not because she's trying but just because she is. I am seeing myself as a completely renewed thing, and how could I possibly trade that in now, knowing what I know? Who would choose keeping their hair over that? But had God told me a month ago that I would shave my head and feel more feminine and actually-really-in-the-face beautiful, I would not have believed Him.

Option 2, continued:  This story is not a medical one about a dangerous tumor. The enemy is not a 10-year-old growth. There are relationships that are formed, conversations that happen, personal strongholds that are torn down and overcome only because of the timing and placement of this weird thing. There is a God who is praised for being always more than this woman thought He was. This woman with cancer doesn't just have cancer, in the same way that she doesn't just have blue eyes or a sense of humor--this is just another piece that makes her who she is, and allows her to meet and interact and love and be loved by dozens of people she never would have known; Lives are changed starting--but not ending--with hers.

I have needed to write this, and have wrestled with it, for weeks. It is not my intention to discourage you from praying, or to be/appear ungrateful. In fact, please, pray for healing:  pray that I would continue to be healed from brokenness, from frustrations and lying and impatience and a lack of compassion. Pray that I would speak with people more, listen to them more, be a better person and friend. Pray for me and my mother and the rest of my family as we process the emotions and the steps of this process. Praise God for the amazing church He has set me in for this season.

But don't pray that my brain tumor would suddenly miraculously be gone.
Not because it couldn't happen.
Not because it's asking for too much.
But because it's asking for too little.

You hold my every moment

You calm my raging seas

You walk with me through fire

And heal all my disease

I trust in You, I trust in You

I believe You're my healer

I believe You are all I need

~ Kari Jobe, "Healer"

Over My Head: Beauty in the Waiting

"Come and do
whatever You want to..."

I wrote out those lyrics the night before this little neurological adventure began, so it was with more than a wink at God as I wrote them out again the last week, hours before my mom and I would head out into the dark morning for my biopsy.

There have been days already in this process where I've prayed for the surface things--calming fear, granting peace--and there will, in not too long, come days when I just plead for it all to go away. But so far, I've tried to let this song define and hedge my prayers in this direction: that whatever the bigger-plan, higher-calling, God-sized dream of this is, let it be that. Because my version is purposeless, and pretty boring: Chandra has a brain tumor, Chandra gets brain tumor treated and removed, tumorless Chandra returns to Chandra's normal life.

That's a terrible story. I would never read that story. Why I would choose to live it (and I would) is beyond me.

God's version is a much better story--it will be. I know this, because He has written my story far better than I could have, right from the beginning. And right from the beginning, there were things that *shouldn't* have happened, had I been the editor: a father wouldn't have left, I would have fit in with the crowd, I wouldn't have wrestled with depression and suicide. But those things shaped me, and drove me into a life that is better not in spite but because of the pain and struggle.

So that's how this will be, too. I've decided. No turning back, no turning back.

Many people were praying for me Tuesday morning and, if we're being honest, some of those prayers weren't answered as requested. If you prayed for a lack of pain or stress, for a smooth transition to recovery, for a quick process, for rest, none of those things happened. The pain was otherworldly. The stress was more than slight. The process less than smooth.

"This isn't exactly what you described," I breathed as the screws cinched the metal frame tighter around my head, and I repeated to myself that it wasn't actually going to split me in twain like a horror movie. "I know," my neurosurgeon replied, and I understood his wisdom: that sometimes it's better to go in blind. Even with my immense trust in him, my stress whirred my heart like a strange instrument that my lungs couldn't match. Pain and stress were my compatriots all morning.

I had the earliest surgery slot, with the plan to move me to a room as soon as the 4-hour recovery watch ended. Four hours became ten before I was moved upstairs. Everyone who has heard this has sighed and frowned, and growled of hospital organization, and apologized. Those who prayed for swiftness and speed were given a no.

But I didn't pray for painlessness or total calm or speed. I prayed that He would come and do whatever He wanted to.*

To say that I floated in a calm state of godly quiet for the day would be the greatest of inaccuracies. I was frequently frustrated, in pain, exhausted. But there were moments--sometimes seconds, sometimes hours--when He showed up in me, and everything else paled in comparison, as it always does.

There was Gwen, the wonder-woman nurse who could find a vein even when there wasn't one to find. This was her introduction, and as she petted and swatted at my hands looking for a blue line, I prayed it was true. She found one, but no dice. As she found a second, she met my eyes with seriousness: "Sometimes, all you can do is pray." I squeezed her hand as the needle slipped in, painful but fruitful. "Prayer works," I sighed back, and she smiled and nodded and pressed the gauze firmly to my hand.

The next was Casey, who was calm and sweet but I initially dismissed her as flighty. Until my neurosurgeon told me to close my eyes and I began to feel first needles and then screws, and nothing in the world existed but that pain--and her hand, which was holding mine, petting it lightly like you would a bird. Every ounce of me went into that corner, and I only distantly heard my neuro surgeon say, "You're refusing to say, 'Ouch,' so I'll say it for you?" When they wheeled me to Recovery, she came around to look at me, and brushed my hair away from the clotting blood on my forehead. I don't remember what she said--"You'll be pretty again soon," or something like it. One of those weird things that's exactly what you needed to hear.

There was Liddy and Amanda, both friendly and, as the hours ticked by, increasingly compassionately frustrated for me. They brought ginger ale and saltines, and apologized for not being able to do anything more. They agreed that I should be Miss Congeniality for putting up with such a wait, listening over and over to other patients wake up, groggy and confused, and hear the explanations of surgery going well, wives waiting to see them, timeframes of going home.

But my favorite is what kept me from writing this for a week, because it doesn't suit my writing needs. She was the nurse I bonded with the most, the one I would never have seen (let alone had multiple real conversations with) had I not been stuck in Recovery so long. She was the one who brought me mac & cheese and green jello, and a real bed to replace the sweat-inducing gurney. She bore a reasonable resemblance to Belle, but in scrubs. And the problem is, I never knew her name.

Her tag was flipped, and we were always too busy talking for me to ask. And I didn't want to list everyone else and miss her.

But yesterday, I started thinking about the number of interactions I'll have in this journey that are momentary, or that I won't remember at all. Those are still people who can be affected--by my being pissed off at lying prostrate for ten hours, or by me being kind, talkative, interested, real. In short, I think her name is supposed to be blank for me, to remind me that I won't see all the pieces fall into place, and that the unknown doesn't make its own excuse. There are dozens--hundreds?--of people I will interact with only because I have a tumor, only because I needed that test or this treatment.

I can sigh through the wait. I can whimper and post on Facebook and growl and be pitiful in every sense of the word. And there will doubtless be times when I do.

But I'm glad I prayed what I prayed last week. I'm glad He came and did whatever He wanted to, because it meant Gwen and Casey and Liddy and Amanda and two dozen other nameless nurses and residents and the like. I'm glad it hurt, because it meant the ease of pain was another wall down, another thing to be thankful for. I'm glad I couldn't wash my hair for three days, because every time it ticked me off I reminded myself that its time on my head might be short, and to breathe thanks. A week later, I'm still occasionally woozy, and still have to half-dry my hair in order not to upset stitches, but still I'm glad.

He's doing what He wants to.

Let's do this.



* Please don't take this to mean my prayers count more than others--only, as one of our pastors reminded us on Sunday, "When you pray with boldness, brace yourself. Adventure is coming."

Over My Head: My Mother, Knitting

My mother has been sitting in chairs on the porch, in the kitchen, knitting. It is August and we are in a beach house and she is knitting--thick, cable-knit, gradually narrowing and cinching. It is bright red, almost unnaturally red, something out of a children's book, the one that is all sepia tones and this single red thing. It is history and symbol and other things bigger than itself, the pattering scrape of wooden needles singing a song over and through it.

She has not said the words, but I knew before I saw its shape that it was a hat. I knew before she tossed it across the table, halfway-done, to check the sizing, that it was for me. It is soft and the yarn is thick and she says it's acrylic so it won't bleed or shrink.

What hangs like humidity over our heads is what this hat is for. Winter holds no real mysteries for us, and Alaskan-born and Maine-living, the snows and winds don't frighten me anymore. But I am not acrylic. A different season, less defined and not to be easily outsmarted, hangs before us. Now, it is still summer, and this perfect place meant for vacating our troubles has tried to protect us as it has before, but real life is not escaped so easily as it was when I was a child. I still let out the usual sigh as we crossed the Cape Cod Canal, but some burdens refuse to be left at the bridge. Summer soon fades, and there will be pills and infusions, poisons meant to save me, plots of myths and fairy tales twisted in on themselves. And in an effort not to lose my life, I will bleed and shrink, and I will lose my hair.

And here in this vacation place of history and rest, in this small way my mother does what she can to save me in all this unknown. This is no knit hat but a helmet straight from those myths and stories I love, surged and bound in the burning forge-heart of a woman whose child is out past her in the storm. It is prayer and love, each ring of knits and purls its own hedge of protection rounded in soft bright red.

I am sweating from the heat of the kitchen when she puts it in my hand, complete, a blessing in cabled cord. But it is too hot, and I hold it and press it to the table, at first unable to contemplate more layers but also in acknowledgment that this season isn't here yet. In months, maybe weeks, my head will be shiny and smooth and vulnerable, and I will slide this unnaturally vibrant guard over my ears and let it hold me together. It will cover scars and evidences, and will force the cold and pain and weakness that waits for me to stand off just a little more because This Is a Woman Whose Mother Loves Her, and she will not be easily taken. 

"God is our refuge and strength, a helper who is always found in times of trouble.
Therefore we will not be afraid, though the earth trembles
and the mountains topple into the depths of the seas,
though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with its turmoil. Selah...
'Stop your fighting—and know that I am God,
exalted among the nations, exalted on the earth.'
Yahweh of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold. Selah."
Psalm 46:1-3, 10-11

Book Review: Pray Like a Gourmet

In a hard contrast to my previous review, I really wasn't expecting to like this one, I don't even remember why I requested it, other than maybe a vague "Jesus is your jam, food is your jam, you can't not request this book" knee-jerk.

For one thing, the title. It rhymes! What's that about?? Also, book-long metaphors hardly ever hold up: they look good for two chapters, and by the halfway point you're ready to throw the book through the nearest window. The book arrived, and there were all these colors and different fonts... Oh, it was going to be a mess. I sat down and prepared myself to be annoyed and underwhelmed by Pray Like a Gourmet: Creative Ways to Feed Your Soul by David Brazzeal.

My first heart in the margin (shorthand for "love this") is on the second page. My first exclamation point (good point/review note) is on the fifth, and it just never stopped: I loved this book. Brazzeal expertly uses his meal metaphor, drawing lines between lingering over or rushing through food or prayer, repetition versus exploration, alone or with friends, simple or elaborate. (It bears mentioning, he also knows when the metaphor doesn't stretch, and doesn't force it.) "Does your prayer life feel like you're eating the same food over and over every day--mixing the same ingredients but hoping for a new, more enticing dish? ... We, too, can push back and engage in seeking authentic, calm, and refreshing nourishment for our soul--each one of us, of course, with our own flair" (7, 8).

My initial reaction to the look of the book has fully turned on itself, too. Like a simple but carefully assembled meal, it is organized and beautiful but not distracting from the content. Swaths of watercolor highlight specific prayer ideas, while brief shifts in typeface and color draw attention to particular moments without overdoing it. (My only real issue is that a font color frequently used is a soft golden yellow on white paper, difficult to see even with my reasonably unaged eyes. Possibly purposeful, meaning to slow you down to notice, but potentially problematic for some readers.)

With a brief intro on how he came to ponder and experiment in prayer so much, and a closing couple chapters on using these practices even when rushed, and bringing them into a group ("Eating on the Run" and "Dining with Friends," of course), the majority of the book is organized by "courses" or types of prayer. Some are old standards, others equally established but less commonly practiced, but for all Brazzeal makes a solid case for the purpose and use of each. The weakest chapters--Confessing and Asking--are understandably so. Confession is a complicated thing to get into, especially trying to be as open to a potential reader as possible; Asking is, as he points out, what most people think of first when it comes to prayer, but his downplayi of it comes off a little too strong--just because it's an automatic response doesn't make it a bad one. But while the finer points of our theologies differ occasionally, it's never off-putting--his ideas, like good recipes, are made to be adapted.

As I was thinking on this review, I could see two potential non-ideal reactions from a reader, both of which I started to have as I read:
   1) This Is Too Much. In the same way that few of us have time to prepare a seven-course meal every day for our loved ones, who has the time and energy for all of this? While Brazzeal hints at this, I wish he was a little more blunt with it in both introduction and epilogue: to continue the metaphor, no, you rarely make a seven-course meal. But, in an effort to keep things interesting, to learn and stretch and experience, you might have soup and a sandwich one night, a salad the next, steak and potatoes and pie after that. You do a little of this and a little of that. You have your favorites, and you have those that you don't always like, but you explore every once in a while just to play. You try something new with an open mind. You vary.
   2) This Is a Bunch of Eastern Religion Hippie Dippie Hoohah. With chapters like Observing (primarily but not exclusively nature) and Meditating, I found myself starting to have a predictably American Christian reaction of "ehhhhhhh this doesn't feel like me." Here, Brazzeal does confront the issue head-on, and well. He gives brief examples of meditation from Scripture, and points out that "meditation is a spiritual human activity like mourning, fasting, or praying, and is not limited to one religious group while remaining unavailable to others" (103). Well done, well said.

I'm looking forward to keeping Pray Like a Gourmet on my night stand with my prayer journal. And turning to it frequently to stretch myself, to find new ways of communing with my God, since, as Brazzeal speaks for Him in his intro, "Wasn't this supposed to be a relationship, just you and me--not a group project?" (13). I look forward to using it to break me out of the routine, to step up and sit down at the table with my God and snack, share, feast.

I'll wrap up with a blessing of sorts, from me and from David:

"I highly encourage you to experiment and find out what works for you, but also to leave your comfort zone, to be open to trying things you never thought you were good at or even associated with prayer before" (40).


Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through  the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Fedral Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255.

Book Review: Abandon

I have very mixed feelings writing this review. Its official rating from me on GoodReads and Amazon will be 2 out of 5, though it's really more like a 2.8 (but no, that doesn't round up). I have no doubts that Tim's heart is in the right place, and that he means very well, and that this is only a beginning step in all he has been gifted to share, but Abandon falls just enough short that I can't roll that into a it's-the-thought-that-counts kind of review.

Abandon: Laying Aside Your Plan for God's Purpose is meant to be a primer for stepping out into full faith, leaving behind worldly and selfish plans and walking into the mystery God has in store for your life, whatever that may turn out to mean. While it's not a new concept for a book, there's nothing wrong with new voices for new generations--there wasn't actually much revolutionary in Blue Like Jazz when we read it ten years ago, but it was someone speaking these things for us, for my generation, and there is real value to that. But what opens with solid points and minimal distractions begins to slump, and by the last few chapters my margin notes included "What is the purpose of this?" and "No idea why this chapter is in here."

The most frustrating angle of this is Tim has the bones of a really solid book here. He makes some nice points in his first chapters about stepping away from formulaic religion and lip service, but [similar to my last reviewed book, The Esther Blessing] the problems come with tying in the story of Jacob. While there are a handful of solid connections between Jacob's story and where Tim's going, it's not enough to keep us bouncing back and forth, and ends up being a stumbling block. 

Amid, and gradually outpacing, Tim's strong points are distractions and issues:

- Brevity can be a strength, but here it comes off as rushed, as nearly an outline with a plan to return and fill in the gaps later. My paperback clocks at 172 pages, but the word count would reveal it to be much shorter, between large type, heavy spacing, frequent bullets, and nearly-every-page callouts (a tweetable quote from the page, complete with #Abandon).

- There's a consistent feel of being hurried, like Tim only had so much paper on which to write: "I've taken the time to list a few [ideas on prayer] that stick out to me" introduces a page and a half...on the Lord's prayer (114-116); after giving two examples for a point, "I could continue with this list for a long time but I won't. I think the point has been made" (121). This isn't helped by the frequency of typos, including in one of the tweetable callouts, p. 82.

- Audience questions: most of the time, Tim sticks to the pretty standard examples of sacrifice and fear: money (job/house/possessions) and marriage. This is fine, but personalizing and getting specific can do a lot. There are also some weird moments that beg the question, Who is your audience? "You're scared you won't be able to live on a five-figure instead of a six-figure salary" (54). ...I've never met these people you're talking to, Tim.

Overall, the book is more disorganized than problematic. While there are many books I'd point to before this one, I wouldn't pull it from someone's hands. That said, when dealing with an entry-level book like this, odd phrasing and throwaway sentences can find places to burn and breed in a new or reignited believer's head. One example: "The time is right to stop listening to the if onlys and start understanding that God has made many difficult sacrifices to give you your unique identity" (45). A hang-up many of us work through in our early years as a Christian is clarifying the God-as-parent metaphor, separating the inevitable human brokenness of our parents from His perfection. But here, Tim doesn't seems to be detailing God as sacrificing himself for love, but as a guilt trip. [Frustration point: On the very next page, a very well-done clarification on giving up your life.]

The marketing copy and front blurbs clearly set this as a book that will provide easy steps to follow to find "your secret to living the life beyond your wildest dreams!" (back cover). In Tim's efforts to tie in his life experience, the story of Jacob, and some generic "this is what you need to do" language, he gets lost somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, Abandon suffers too much from these hang-ups and stumbles shy of being what it could.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.