our fraying selves

To hear Brandi’ read this essay instead, visit https://youtu.be/lvdy_cPgO0E

I am a teacher, and this week I have had the privilege of talking with some other teachers who were honest about the weariness they feel. Education in the Covid era is not for the faint of heart, and I sense the compiled exhaustion they experience.

I also care about quite a few health professionals, and they too, struggle to find the hope and joy in serving others for which they are known. It is not just Omicron, or caring for hurting people who reject the convictions of those who comfort them. It is entering the 24th month of this work. It is long, wins feel rare, and losses pile up.

Because it is late January, I’m also thinking a lot about many friends of color navigating the days between Martin Luther King, Jr’s Holiday and Black History Month. This year, in addition to bracing themselves for the blows that come with performative tributes to Civil Rights Heroes, matched all too often with little to no action, they also, we also, have to grapple with the fact that our Congress will not secure easy access to the voting booth. Additionally, in these two weeks between King and Black History, we discover that Southern States, states that protected slave owners and white supremacist segregation, have drawn new district maps that appear to intentionally diminish the voting power of Black and Brown bodies. For folks who care deeply about equity, about protecting those our society has a track record of abusing, late January 2022 feels dark.

I live at the intersection of these identities: an educator, married to a health care professional, with White and Black children, who cares deeply about injustice and equity. Everywhere I look, hope is hard to find. Purpose, even, can feel hard to pinpoint. This week I don’t have a lot of fire, and I certainly don’t have big answers. Instead, I’d like to offer a few small glimpses of restorative hope, of perspective that might help us find the ground beneath us.

First, you aren’t alone. If you are lonely, angry, weary…you aren’t alone. If you wonder how your work or presence matters each day, you aren’t alone. If you find yourself ragey or teary or numb, you aren’t alone. If you vacillate between purposeful action and passive abdication, you aren’t alone. I believe we were all made in God’s Divine image, and I believe God when God says the poor in spirit will be comforted, that those with broken hearts will be bound up. Moreover, I find great solace in the fact that humanity is groaning together right now. Folks from Burkina Faso and Yemen are scared and hurting. Those of Jewish or Asian descent in America face the chronic unease of fear. Parents in line for groceries they can’t afford live with anxiety crawling within. We are not alone. In the vision of humanity called the Beloved Community by King and others, inspired by the teachings of Jesus, our community holds us in joy and in devastation. We are holding each other even now, sharing a long term, slowly unfolding trauma. You aren’t alone.

Second, do what you can do, not what you can’t. I am typically driven by Big P Purpose, but these days I struggle to find it. When I find myself frustrated by all that I can’t control, I find a small glimpse of hope in showing up as well as I can for the people in front of me. I’m not trying to save the world this week, but if a friend comes to mind, I can reach out. If a patient or student appears, I can offer them my full attention. If a kid is scared or upset, I can hold them. Each of us has a lot we cannot do. So be it. Each of us also has a little we can do. So do it.

When we feel the fraying of our inner selves, sometimes we hear a call that helps us rise to a big occasion. This week, I humbly submit that your Self, as small and battered as you might feel, is a beautiful reminder of God’s eternal community. Just in be-ing, you remind those around you that we all belong to a shared community. Look around, be where you are, knowing you are enough, and that you are held.

resistance baking

To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/lhuCExhPHjw

I’ve been baking in a frenzy lately. Cookies, brownies, chewies, biscuits, waffles and pies. Sounds delicious, but baking for me is like church and therapy and confession and entering rehab all at once.

I like to think of myself as a self-aware person, but, alas, I am often late to the party when it comes to acknowledging deficits in my mental, emotional or physical health. To compensate for these blind spots, I look for familiar markers to help me recognize the moments when I am no longer crushing it. For instance, if I find myself screening calls or hiding from a knock on the front door, I usually—finally—realize that something is going on with my internal everything. It’s not rocket science. I’m even a little ashamed of it. How can I think I’m doing well when I’m clearly not?

I have an iron will that pushes me to keep going no matter what, and that will tends to bully my mental and emotional need for restoration. I insist things are all good, even if another part of my soul and body know they aren’t. My problem is that those parts don’t communicate super well, so part of me thinks I’m great while the other part of me is barely hanging on.

As an educator married to a physician with 4 school-aged children, the impact of the pandemic is everywhere. My students struggle to function and learn, my husband faces impossible life or death situations more frequently, both of us can’t find the joy that used to come easy, and my children don’t remember what if feels like to learn collaboratively in environments where they are safe, known and celebrated. The pandemic has taken a lot, and with the rise of Omicron, we all fear it will continue to do so.

Amidst this mess, I felt bombarded by updates from the cases of Kyle Rittenhouse and the killers of Ahmaud Arbery. Then a fifteen year old in Michigan got a gun for Christmas, openly fantasized about shooting up his school, and then did so.

Suddenly, I felt a rising need to bake.

The weekend after a man killed children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I made homemade cinnamon rolls for the first time. After George Floyd was killed, I perfected scones and waffles. When my psyche feels overwhelmed by terrifying grief that defies easy processing, that undermines my trust in the world, I feel a weird desire to bake or cook complicated, intimidating recipes. I don’t really understand it, but I’ve learned to trust it.

When I’m baking I am not conscious of the battles that rage within me. I don’t realize that I am searching for a way to ground myself, to trust that the center will hold even as evil swirls around my family. Still, somehow, baking becomes my creative act of resistance against the evil of this world. A biscuit becomes my mark of defiance against the dark. A scone bears witness to the fact that I believe God cares deeply about the injustice we face, that Christ laments alongside us, that God brings healing and restoration to ruined people and places.

Advent reminds us that God comes toward us. Jesus knows all is not well, and brings miraculous justice to speak good news over bad realities. Advent is an invitation to reflect on the parts of us that need hope and healing. “For those who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” These are words for people covered in flour, trying to work out their salvation with fear and trembling in the kitchen.

Wherever you go to find the ground beneath your feet when the world throws you, I pray you will lift your eyes to the God who sees and knows you. I pray your broken heart would feel bound up by your Maker, that you would find some freedom from your captivity. In the community of God, a rolling pin and a pastry cutter can be sacraments, blessed to bring healing to a weary world. In this Advent season, I hope you begin to recognize your need to push back against the dark and make room for the light. Give yourself fully to those traditions, and enjoy a God who can heal you through ridiculous routines.

lent reading, week three

To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/Y8c6U0j31Ps

Week Three

Two years ago, I was frantically trying to reorder my family’s life so we could soak up every moment with my nephew Judah, who was dying as a tumor grew in his brain. When he died, the grief was utterly consuming. It still is on many days. He is talked about and longed for every single day.

My grief changed me. Is changing me. I’m different in the way I trust God and think about my community and wonder about what we are all doing here. Those questions are for another day though. Today I want to tell us that grief can change your body and your brain too. It can make you exhausted without knowing exactly why. It can consume you in a fog, making it impossible to think clearly, to remember what you are doing, or to stay focused on a thing. Grief distracts.

500,000 people have died in America in the last year from Covid. Millions of people have lost their jobs or closed their business, while millions of others feel their mental health fraying by the day. 300 million dreams of what the year ahead would offer have been disrupted. Grief abounds.

If you find yourself distracted, unable to focus, as if you are moving in slow motion through a fog, you might be swirling in grief. It comes uninvited. It lingers without explaining why. This week of Lent, I gently suggest you get in touch with your grief. It is not unfaithful to do so; students of lament know it to be a faithful act of worship. We suffer. We long for healing. We are made for eternity and our mortality wounds us, sometimes permanently.

As you explore your own grief, I do hope you will sense God’s gathering, comforting presence there. You might not, and that will hurt. You might find other bodies to grieve with though. You might ask for help, or notice someone else seems to hurt like you do. Henri Nouwen reminds us that we welcome and heal and sustain others through revealing our hurt, sitting with our pain, exposing our vulnerable spots. Healing doesn’t come only from our effort to reclaim our focus or in our determination to keep going. Often it comes from the communion of grieving with others. It is tempting to turn inward, knowing how overwhelmed you are, how incapable of connection you feel when you’re not your best self.

This week I hope you find new energy to lift your eyes and see that you aren’t alone in your grief. That in God’s design, you are comforted as you seek to comfort. Your capacity to receive love increases as you choose to love sacrificially. Perhaps the Beloved Community begins when we witness, move toward and help bear the staggering loads of others, staggering though we may be. If Nouwen is right then the pressure is off to understand who created our grief-burdens, how we efficiently manage them, or where/when/how we drop them. Maybe a way forward is to see the burden of another and then get so close that we begin to carry part of it just because we are there. Many of us are hurting, and I pray this week we see Lent as a time not just to renew our awareness of God, but to experience the fullness of God as we bring our distracted, overwhelmed, hurting selves into full relationship with wounded others.

Grief distracts. It is worth noticing if all the ugh you feel is actually rooted in grief. It is also worth bringing your distracted self to sit before God, around other hurting folks, and offer thanks that you aren’t alone.

To Ponder:

“To only have a theology of celebration at the cost of the theology of suffering is incomplete. The intersection of the two threads provides the opportunity to engage in the fullness of the gospel message. Lament and praise must go hand in hand.”                                        -Soong Chan Rah

“Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life.” –Henri Nouwen

To Read:

Mar 3 Job 42:1-3

Mar 4 Isaiah 40:21-31

Mar 5 Ps 142

Mar 6 Hosea 5:15-6:3

Mar 7 Luke 6:20-31

Mar 8 Ps 143:5-10

Mar 9 Ps 25:4-18; 19:7-14