by Helen Burns

This afternoon, I have a long layover in Frankfurt, Germany so I am writing to you from the lovely Air Canada lounge. Before getting here, I had to go through security and immigration. I had to present myself along with my passport for inspection. Permission granted­—and my passport is stamped once again. It feels liberating every single time knowing that I have been authorized to move ahead with my travel plans unhindered and without complications.

This scenario often reminds me of the reality that God has a big expansive life awaiting each of us. There are places to go and things to do! Yet far too often we feel stuck, or unqualified. We sit waiting for someone to grant us permission when all the while God has already stamped our passport and beckons us forward.

“I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!” 2 Corinthians 6:11-13 (Message)

There have been many moments in my life when I had to make a hard choice to enter a wide-open, spacious life because small thinking was holding me back. One of the most life-defining moments for me was the day I was ordained.

It was Easter Sunday morning in 1986 and I was excited. This was the day that my husband John would be ordained at a gathering of thousands of people in Seattle. We had just planted our church in Surrey so a number of people from our young church had travelled with us for this very special occasion including all the members of my family. Shortly before the service was to begin both John and I were asked to join the pastor in the green room as there was something he wanted to talk to both of us about. I wasn’t expecting him to tell me that he truly felt it was not only the day for John to be ordained, but for me to be ordained together with him.

GULP!

I stood there trying to keep calm and collected while everything inside of me was freaking out. John was in complete agreement, my family and church was so supportive and yet I felt small, inadequate, under qualified and very aware that I was a woman! I had never seen a woman ordained before and now it was about to be me and in front of thousands of people on Easter Sunday morning! In the church that I had grown up in, the only time a woman stood on the platform was to sing in the choir or give a missions report. Yet, in that moment my heart said yes to this BIG invitation. I knew it was not an invitation from a man, but an invitation from God.

You have been approved, authorized and blessed to move ahead into God’s plan for your life.
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Permission granted. You have been approved, authorized and blessed to move ahead into God’s plan for your life. My education, my age, my gender, my life-experience and for that matter, an “official ordination” don’t qualify me to be a minister. But God’s Spirit living inside of me does and this is true for every one of us as believers.

We are confident of all this because of our great trust in God through Christ. It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God. He has enabled us to be ministers of his new covenant. This is a covenant not of written laws, but of the Spirit. The old written covenant ends in death; but under the new covenant, the Spirit gives life. 2 Corinthians 3:4-6 (NLT)

One “yes” will open the door for many more opportunities to say yes to an amazing adventure with God. That day not only marked my life personally, but God also used it to open doors for others. Sadly we still see so many women held back from becoming everything God has called and equipped them to do simply because of their gender. I am forever grateful for the amazing men and women in my life who opened doors of opportunity for me. I am committed to be that woman in the lives of others as well.

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Helen Burns

Helen Burns and her husband, John, speak around the world on the topic of relationships. They host the popular TV show “Relate with John and Helen.”

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by Cindy Brandt

“Mom, can I watch Youtube?”

“Mom, can I have a snack?”

“Mom, can I buy this book?”

My children are constantly asking me for permission to do just about everything in their routines. Mostly, it’s just out of habit. “Mom, can I go to the bathroom?” Um, yes, yes, please do, and really, you don’t need to ask. Other times it’s because they have decided it may be a good idea to microwave metal objects and we’ve asked them to please solicit adult opinions before proceeding with their wild experiments.

Some days, it is as rote as breathing to dole out permission to my kids. Other days, I pause incredulously: “Seriously? These real-live-human-beings are depending on ME to make all of these decisions for them? Someone made ME in charge of giving all of this permission?! Surely, there has been a grave error.”

Mothers are not immune to the imposter syndrome. We too, are afraid of being found out we were never worthy of this job.

Giving permission seems to be the responsibility of a King or a Queen, the CEO of a publicly traded company, super-smart human beings or the gatekeepers of very important things. It can’t possibly land on the shoulders of ordinary me. No, not me. I just shuffle along my everyday tasks, doing chores, running errands and just trying to make it through to bedtime. I can give permission to my kiddos wanting a snack after school, but no one else needs permission from me to do brave things.

Or so I tell myself.

And yet, I know that long after I have left childhood behind, I am still searching for permission. I put forth my opinions before others and hold my breath as I wait for their response. Searching their eyes, facial expressions and body posture, I am seeking validation, something that tells me, Hey, it’s okay. You get to be you. I crave affirmation from my friends, covet inclusion from my community and desire approval from my husband and children.

Before you judge me to be too needy, let’s remember that needing one another’s acceptance is not a sign of weakness, but a normal and necessary requirement of living in relationship with people. We belong to each other by creating intentional space for each other, giving permission for others to take up space in our lives.

I think the world is hungering for permission. I think so many of us bury much of our potential for fear of rejection and failure. We’d much rather be the person who we think is acceptable in the eyes of our community than to be who we actually are. I think we need to learn to ask for permission more freely. We need to practice being more fully ourselves in front of our people and say, This is who I am. Will you let me in? We cannot force ourselves into the lives of other people, we have to ask; and we have to come as we are.

As well, and perhaps more importantly, we have to learn to give permission. Like the spiritual discipline of prayer or generosity or hospitality, we need to embrace the discipline of giving permission. I think there are three general areas we need to exercise giving permission:

1) Encouragement. This is the art of paying attention to the uncovered gifts of those around us. This is being the cheerleader and putting on courage for our neighbors to pursue their dreams and passions. This is helping people young and old, to benefit the world with their unique contributions. It looks like me telling my sister she has a remarkable writing voice and my brother he has raw talent in his doodles and designs.
2) Validation. The dictionary definition of validate is: “to show to be true.” Decision making and risk taking are the inevitable elements of life. We can take those steps of faith with more confidence when we factor in the counsel of those who know us. One way we give permission is to validate, to mirror the truth-iness of each other’s life choices. When the working mom comes to us with tears of missing her children’s school events, we give her permission to be who she has chosen to be and reflect her courage to pursue a career back to her. To show to be true.
3) Rest. I find we need permission the most when we need to rest. I love stories of employers who strictly enforce time off for their employees. We need space to breathe, space to rest, space to be nothing except a human being. Learning to give one another margin to be a slacker for a day, to play hooky with a friend or to retreat for a girls’ night out is sometimes the most gracious gift we can offer.

Permission to stop being an adult for one day. Granted.

Unless my children are asking for something that is harmful for them, I almost always say yes. Yes, you may have a snack, yes you may build a fort out of cereal boxes, yes you may buy this book.

I want their lives to be filled with yeses, granted permission at every turn.

I hope this generosity of permission seeps out into the world beyond my home and I can offer those whom I encounter the ever open invitation to be authentically who they were created to be.

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Cindy Brandt

I write from Taiwan about finding faith in the irreverent, miracles in the ordinary, and beauty in the margins. I drive a Prius, am more interested in being evangelized than evangelizing. I'm super social justice-y, and a feminist. You can find me at cindywords.com, where I tap my words out from the thirty third floor of the high rise I call home.

The post The Practice of Being Ourselves appeared first on SheLoves Magazine.

by sheloves

By Michele Morin | Twitter: @MicheleDMorin

My faith unraveled at a Christian college. I know that’s not the way it’s supposed to happen, and I can remember wishing that a hostile, atheistic professor had bludgeoned me into my doubts with brilliantly irrefutable arguments.

It would make for a much better story.

Instead, the truth is I just got numb. The constant barrage of meaningless requirements that were, somehow, mysteriously related to Christianity: plowing through a three-inch thick commentary on Romans with no specific assignment in mind (other than to reach the back cover), fending off the desperate and over-bearing overtures of my “dorm mother” who wanted to befriend all “her girls,” and trying to stay awake while the combed-over, suited-up preacher-of-the-day got carried away and stole time from the class that followed our mandatory chapel.

One day it all got to be just too ridiculous.

Eventually, of course, I realized that the problem was localized and that what I had been objecting to was not “Christianity” itself, but a mindset that existed on a particular campus in a specific zip code. Having said that, it would seem that the road back to faith would have been like flipping a switch—yesterday I doubted, but today I am choosing to believe. However, the truth is that calluses on the soul are even tougher than the ones on the soles of our feet, and it’s a long exfoliation that thins their numbing presence.

My first mistake in trying to live my way “back into faith” was my direction. There is no going back into a former faith. There is only going forward. In looking for yesterday’s faith experience, I was forgetting that I was not the same kind of believer I had been before. Even so, mysteriously and graciously, through the blur of career and ministry, then marriage and four children, a sprout of faith was growing again, but in a brand new way. This time, I was being guided by Truth rather than by the “experts,” attempting to live in the moment of showing a spring daffodil to a tiny boy and then sitting on the damp grass to talk about the God who made it.

Always in the back of my mind during this quiet rebirth was the idea that I wanted to do something meaningful for God. “Something meaningful,” naturally, could only happen if I had to learn another language, live in another culture (the more remote and risky the better), or, most important, if I could see results for my efforts. Unfortunately, this was the polar opposite of what I happened to be doing at the time, which was caring for my young children, trying to write, and shoveling a path through the house every few days. Worshiping at the altar of “results,” I certainly could not see how ministry (as I defined it) would ever be part of my life again.

Then one day a back injury flared up, and I was lying on the floor trying to get relief from the daily pain, while at the same time entertaining my toddler and baby. Surrounded by building blocks and picture books, I grabbed my Bible for a quick read and was handed a job description from an Old Testament prophet:

“He’s already made it plain how to live, what to do,
what God is looking for in men and women.
It’s quite simple. Do what is fair and just to your neighbor,
be compassionate and loyal in your love,
and don’t take yourself too seriously—take God seriously. (Micah 6:8)

There it was, and it made perfect sense. There’s nothing like a diaper pail in the bathroom for 11 years to serve as a reminder not to take oneself too seriously. But even after it was retired, there were little boys who mirrored back my character flaws and stretched me to the limits of where I could confidently practice “fair and just.” Lately, it’s the puzzled amusement of teen boys: “Yeah, Mum, I check out your blog every so often.” My patient husband of 25 years shows me every day what compassionate and loyal look like, but most especially on the day when, standing in front of an empty sock drawer he declared, “Hon, even with all the studying you’ve been doing lately, you’ve hardly missed a beat around here.” (Is he a keeper, or what?)

For me, finding the way forward doesn’t mean that I never look back, but I’m careful how much time I spend looking in the rear view mirror–either wistfully or regretfully. The doing and the being of my Micah 6:8 job description are all present tense.

So, even though it will always be important to me to be learning about God and to be able to articulate what I am learning in some way, the difference, going forward, is that I really want to stand beside someone else and share the view.

To crack open the Word of God and dig for truth as if my life depends on it. To stand in awe of truth that feeds my faith and then sit at the table with my Sunday School class and be amazed together. To read, and re-read, and read again the words about Jesus that translate ordinary faithfulness into radical discipleship and that transform baked macaroni and cheese and a bowl of home-canned green beans into bread and wine. To put flesh on the bones of God’s commandments before my sons and grandson, even though I understand that they will see me contradict daily the truth I teach.

To read a book that presents theology like a laser show of worship and then pass it along to a friend. To come to the end of a blog post knowing that I understand some aspect of the walk of faith better than I did before I wrote it. To desire God, not as a means to the end of fulfilling my own wishes, but as the end Himself.

This, for me, is the way forward.

_________________

About Michele:

I am wife to a patient husband, Mum to four young men and a daughter-in-love, and, now, Gram to one adorable grandboy. My days are spent homeschooling, reading piles of books, and, in the summer, tending our beautiful (but messy) garden and canning the vegetables. I love to teach the Bible, and am privileged to gather weekly around a table with the women of my church and to blog about the grace I am receiving, and the lessons from God’s Word that I am trusting.

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by Heather Caliri

I was alone in my parents’ house when Nine Inch Nails helped change my life.

It was a few months after college graduation. I was listening to music while I packed everything—after just unpacking.

Not long before, my mom had told me I had two weeks to get out.

It was just me, a bass line, my worldly possessions, and empty boxes. The loneliness suited me. I could blast the radio as loud as I wanted.

The song changed, and “Head Like A Hole” came on.

Until that day, the song had repulsed me. I didn’t like the raw scream of the singer’s voice. I didn’t like the menace of the lyrics. I expected songs to make me feel good.

But the jagged edge of the music caught me at the right moment. It said everything I was feeling.

The radio was over by the mirrored closet door, so I moved over to it, cranked the volume up and then stood up. I started jumping, less a dance than an attempt to pound the floor to pieces. I glanced up and saw myself scream, my face contorted, my dirty hair flying, my pajamas still on, and I wondered, with shock, who I’d become.

I didn’t know the lyrics well enough to have any idea what they actually meant, but I chanted them with relish. Head like a hole. Black as your soul. I’d rather die than give you control.

I screamed at my reflection with a kind of triumphant bitterness.

I’d come back from college all squeaky-clean and polished. I graduated with honors, had earned a scholarship to study abroad the year before, and won my university’s writing competition.

When I got home, I knew I was supposed to look for a job. Was supposed to parlay my accomplishments into a career. Was supposed to climb higher and achieve more. I paged through a copy of What Color is Your Parachute, set up informational interviews at Hewlett Packard, tried to write out a resume.

But every day, I felt more bewildered.

Sure that those and other woes were a result of spiritual warfare, I went to Christian therapy for the first time. When my therapist told me she thought I was depressed, I laughed.

“Me?” I said. “I’m one of the most optimistic people I know. I’m, like, happy all the time.”

She tilted her head to one side, not amused. “Heather, someone once described depression as anger turned inward. Who are you angry at?”

All the air went out of the room. Because I knew exactly whom I was angry at, even though, moments before, I’d had no idea.

“My parents,” I whispered.

Why was I angry? My childhood had been filled with trauma during and after my parents’ decision to send first my brother, then my sister to a children’s home. I had never really felt any of my feelings about that—neither grief, or anger, or outrage. No, instead, I’d bottled everything up like homemade kombucha.

More than a decade later, everything spewed out at once.

Looking back, I have compassion for how bewildering this must have been for my mom and dad. I came home from that therapy appointment suddenly enraged, with all the coping mechanisms that had helped me manage severe depression ripped off like a child’s Band-Aid.

And we were supposed to sip tea together at breakfast?

They’d gotten used to me being happy all the time and had no clue how to relate to the person who’d replaced me. Our family had made a specialty of ignoring our emotions. My parents loved me, but they weren’t ready to shed their numbness.

After a few weeks of hell, they asked me to leave.

Now, screaming at my reflection in the mirror, I learned something from the wild look in my eyes.

I learned that screaming did not bring lightning down on my head.

I learned that I was not alone. At the very least, the songwriter—whoever he was—probably would understand my rage. I realized that angry, hateful, dark music existed because it was responding to real pain.

I realized that niceness did not cut the mustard for me anymore.

I learned that my feelings were real, and that I could give myself permission to feel them.

I learned that the colossal knot in my stomach loosened a little when I did.

And I realized, looking in my eyes, that afraid as I was of moving, independence and free-falling into depression and unemployment, I would never go back to papering over my anger. My spine, it turned out, was filled with steel.

I was standing in darkness. Complete darkness. Honestly, after that day, things got a lot worse before they got better.

But Nine Inch Nails sang a song of redemption for me. In its blackness was a wild beauty of truth, and honest self-examination, and finally, finally being able to look myself in the eye.

______________

Image credit: Porche Brosseau

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Heather Caliri

I like predictable breakfasts and baby steps towards freedom. Get my free e-book, "Dancing Back to Jesus: Post-perfectionist Faith in Five Easy Verbs", on my blog, A Little Yes, here.

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by Abby Norman

I was asking God to help me lose weight. Instead He made me buy bigger pants.

You see, I had been praying to God that my pants would fit. Not those words exactly, but for sure I had been praying all around that topic. God give me more discipline, more will power, help me to resist the cookie, give me good rest, help me to wake up early to run. God, PLEASE let the number on the scale be smaller than it was yesterday.

I really needed my pants to fit. They weren’t not buttoning or indecently tight, but they were making me uncomfortable, these size eight pants of mine. I had to suck in to button up. I had marks on myself at the end of the day. My pants just plain didn’t feel good, and y’all, I want my pants to feel good. Because my pants weren’t just making my skin feel bad, they were making me feel bad.

Every time my pants were too tight I was reminded that my body doesn’t look exactly like it used to. I guess I could blame it on the kids, but if you lose it once and gain some back, it is probably a little disingenuous to call it baby weight. The truth is I am a stress eater. I eat my feelings, and I have big feelings. They taste like chocolate, biscuits, and the salty sweet goodness that is chicago mix popcorn. (Emotional eating pro tip: Trader Joe’s has a caramel cheese mix that is completely perfect.)

I hadn’t lost the 15 pounds I gained when my grandparents died within a year of each other. But that isn’t the only thing contributing to my pants being too tight. I finally learned to cook and I am awesome at it. I turned 30, and sure enough my metabolism slowed down. My day job, plus four- and three-year-old daughters, plus a husband in graduate school don’t exactly leave a lot of room for the gym. Especially not with this writing dream of mine that won’t let me go.

So I checked my emotional eating, I cut back on the evening wine, I only ate when I was hungry. I drank a lot of water. Two months later, only five pounds gone. I was feeling better about my body and the choices I was making. My doctor told me I was healthy … and yet, my pants. still. didn’t. fit.

At the local discount clothing chain I got real with myself and only took size 10s into the dressing room. The first two pairs were perfect. Perfect. They looked great and I could breathe and pick things up off the floor.

Turns out, I am still learning how to make choices that make my body feel good. And one of those choices is bigger pants.

There isn’t anything wrong with my body. God says there is no flaw in me. God created this body of mine perfectly, and he delights in it, and it isn’t that those old pants were bad … they just didn’t fit anymore. I know God doesn’t have anything against size eight pants because pants are just pants, and my body—my whole self—was perfectly created by God! If the pants don’t fit, maybe it is the pants that are the problem.

The pants aren’t the only thing that aren’t fitting in my life. I have been a teacher for eight years, and slowly, the ways I have changed and the ways the profession have changed are leaving me uncomfortable. For about two years I thought it was me. I thought that I needed to change the shape of my convictions, of my relational interactions. I needed to have smaller feelings and care more about numbers and percentages.

I thought I just needed to suck it all in, my whole self. But this behavior is not without consequences. There are whole days I am completely uncomfortable, and recently I have started waking up in the middle of the night with the pain and stress of it.

Unfortunately, they don’t sell New Life plans at the discount store near my house. I am not in the place right now that I can just up and quit my job. (Who, besides the girl in the rom-com, is ever in that place?!) I still have to be the breadwinner and the insurance carrier while my husband finishes school over the next year. So even if it isn’t these pants, like I tell my daughters, we still have to wear pants if we are going to go to the grocery store.

This year in my final evaluation I said, No, thank you- to the professional training I was offered. I am normally a pretty compliant employee, so when I declined the offer my direct supervisor looked up at me in surprise. I took a shaky breath, looked at the empty wall to the left of his ear and told him I didn’t want to be a teacher anymore.

It totally sucked.

But then I felt free. I don’t have to pretend this is a good fit for me. There isn’t anything wrong with me. It’s just that this job doesn’t fit me any more.

It is hard to admit when the pants we once loved are making us feel bad–jobs we got a degree for, relationships that were once life-giving, places that represented our hopes and dreams. It isn’t that those things are bad, they just don’t fit who we are. Maybe they don’t fit anymore, or maybe they never did at all and we couldn’t admit it. We have been squeezing and holding our breath, punishing ourselves into making it fit for awhile, but that’s not a healthy way to live. God does not want us to live with burning red marks on our spirits. I think it grieves Him to see us like this.

We have permission to grow out of things, to change in ways we never thought we would. This can be hard and uncomfortable, but it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with us. If there is something in our lives that is restricting us in ways that hurt, maybe it isn’t us that needs to change.

Buy the bigger pants, sister. I promise, you’ll look and feel amazing in them. It isn’t you, made perfectly in the image of God, who needs to change. It’s the pants.

______________

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Abby Norman

Abby Norman lives, and loves in the city of Atlanta. She lives with her two hilarious children and a husband that doubles as her biggest fan. When not mothering, teaching, parenting or “wifeing”, she blogs at accidentaldevotional.com. Abby loves to make up words and is excited by the idea that Miriam Webster says you can verb things.

The post When Your Pants and Your Life Don’t Fit appeared first on SheLoves Magazine.

by Anne-Marie Heckt

Long before we know our ABCs most of us are pros at shame and self-effacement—which, to be clear, is not humility. If I could go back, I’d say several things to my younger self. But here’s the biggest: Sweetheart, stop. You don’t have to excuse every good thing, or feel embarrassed about every lack of perfection.

Just stop it.

In school, I learned it wasn’t ok to be smart unless you had something else to prove you were still cool. When a grandmother in a tiny northwest town pointed down a long table and ridiculed the way I held my fork I was sure, by the tone of her voice, that there was something truly horrible about me. Now I know there was something awful about her that she’d criticize and embarrass a child in front of a group of people she’d never met.

Even on missions in Mexico, my homestay family made it clear they preferred the cute, humorous boys they’d had the summer before. Couldn’t I be funnier, please? I agreed with them all. I must be the wrong kind of smart, stuck up, too quiet. It was my kids who helped me the most. For them, I found my confidence and my tongue.

When I had two boys who were so extraordinarily more, I kept finding myself explaining. When pushed to the limit about a child who was doing fine in just about every way but never did things in the “usual” way, I finally said, “You know what? They are all different.”

This line has really stuck with me since then. It has reminded me not to judge others when I don’t understand them, and helped me to hold off on judging myself.

We are all different.

When he was small, my eldest had a huge engine and often not the strongest guidance system. Unfortunately, church became the one place he did not feel wanted or comfortable. When we turned over the turf for the community garden he was right there. He labored for hours to break soil as hard as concrete. He went back, out of loyalty to me (the garden was my project), but he got some judging glances as the only non-church kid there.

Now, he’s hard-working, goal-oriented, charming, and fiercely loyal even to those who might be critical of him. He loves his family even when we make different faith choices than he does, or want different types of vacations. He is all there for his brother. He is different in some of his choices than we are, but he is altogether lovely.

Just as I’ve learned to stand up in my corner and firmly state what is wonderful about my children, because of them I’ve learned to stop apologizing for everything about myself. Well, I’ve started to stop.

Hiding our gifts is not humility, but giving in.
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I wish I could go back to that endlessly long table with the matriarch at the end, keep my knife in my right hand and the fork in my left and say, “Isn’t this cool? This is how they do it in Spain.” Oh how I wish I could go back to that smart girl with the report card and say, “Great job! Do your very, very best.” Because hiding our gifts is not humility, but giving in. It’s giving in to the critical, unhappy voices all around us that want us to hide that light under a bushel, keep the seed in the packet and not plant it, leave the seedling thirsty rather than water and feed it because we’re so afraid someone else will get crowded out by its shade.

I wish I’d cheerfully ignored all the sharp comments about my children’s strengths and challenges. One way or another we all get them, especially when we try to stand up for something or someone. Because standing up can mean standing out. Because being unique can be scary and a little lonely.

Let’s not be so sure—for ourselves or for others—which are the faults and which are the strengths. Sometimes I think only in heaven will we really understand how it all goes together. Only with the long view can we know what is ugly and what is beautiful. Man looks at the outward appearance, but God judges the heart.

Paul has these extraordinary words:

I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court. I don’t even judge myself. I don’t feel I have done anything wrong. But that doesn’t mean I’m not guilty. The Lord judges me. So don’t judge anything before the appointed time. Wait until the Lord returns. He will bring to light what is hidden in the dark. He will show the real reasons why people do what they do. At that time each person will receive their praise from God. (1 Corinthians 4:3-5)

Let us press on with confidence, and STOP apologizing for the beauty we are.

Note to self: Stop.

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Anne-Marie Heckt

When not scrambling eggs, I manage a community garden which grows veg for a food bank. I’m a full time mom of two almost-grown boys. Saturday mornings you’ll find me at the Farmer’s Market, religiously. Goals include extending my rollerblading distance to marathon length and getting the courage to quit picking at my novel and publish it. A scary re-emergence into paid work may need to happen soon. Eons ago I taught ESL at a community college. Farther back, I taught in China and worked at a church in Mexico City. Childhood included a confusing mix of Spain, military bases and a tiny town in Washington State. What I would really love to have is not a job, but a puppy. I live north of Seattle and somewhere east of organized with a husband, our younger son, and a turtle.

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The post Note to Self: Stop Apologizing appeared first on SheLoves Magazine.

by Lisha Epperson

As a young girl I’d imagine what life would be like in a mosque. I wanted to touch a prayer rug, smooth my hands over the knee worn familiar weft and, in holy adoration, bring my petitions before a God who would refuse me—if I didn’t get it right. I wanted to know what it was like to approach the throne five times a day and, every day, dip my body in the ritual and dance of reverence.

My father proclaimed a loyalty to Allah and with it, introduced a mosaic of ideas about what it was like to embrace the call of Islam on his life. But he never took me to a mosque. And I never saw him pray.

Daddy was Muslim and mommy was not. Therein, I suppose, lies the reason I never saw my father’s faith in the rhythm of worship.

It didn’t stop me from wondering.

What I knew about the ritual came from a Muslim man selling incense and oils on the subway platform at the Hoyt Street station in Brooklyn. His daily devotion was a welcomed respite from my hurried pace shuttling between Brooklyn and Harlem and back again. Watching him helped slow me down and satisfied a curiosity about the side of my father I didn’t know.

Faith was something I had to figure out. I needed wisdom and courage to see beyond tradition and labels to the inner working of my parents’ faith. I had to watch and learn. I needed to decipher the unseen, private beliefs that transcended words. Only as an adult can I fully embrace all I’ve been taught from the holy transcribed moments that impacted my faith before I had words to describe them.

Finding God at 21 ushered me into a world of believers. But there were borders and boxes and so many lines drawn; unspoken parameters and edges I longed to look over. It was the kind of faith that left no room for questions. No room for conversations about social justice, or politics. No room for science.

It seemed we were so faithful we forgot the God of beauty and wonder. The God of the unknowing and known. There was only room for religion. The one way or highway kind of church that makes robots out of humans and leaves little room for a dispensation of love come down.

Growing up in God means giving myself permission to explore and experience the gospel beyond the confines of what I’ve been taught. And I’m using the Bible as God-breathed sanction to do so. Living a life of faith means I endorse Jesus and how he works through me. It also means, and maybe more so, that I leave room at the table for others.

Living a life of faith means I allow breathing room for the blessing to empower others. It means that I grant space for how He shows up in you.

This is about freedom to be nimble. To wade, soul deep in a grace that says yes to tolerance and grants a license to love beyond my understanding. This isn’t a hybrid of theological postures. It’s bowing down to the expansive love of Christ.

It extends beyond logic and reason and like poetry, His Word helps me believe the unbelievable. I’m convinced taking this leap opens the door for God to do whatever He wants to. The further I push from the shore the more I find myself awash in this beautiful exchange. Access granted. A heart given, freedom received.

It’s what finds me seated and barefoot in the discipline of a weekly meditation circle. It’s what pushed me—after all these years–to visit a mosque. The communal prayer is a passionate synchronized choreographic offering. I always wondered. Now I know.

It’s a privileged vantage point—to see, like Jesus, beyond the natural. He saw the woman beyond the harlot and the disciple beyond the tax collector. He saw humans beyond our frailties and mistakes and beyond our judgmental stance on anything unlike us. He saw beyond our sin.

If theology is like poetry (and I think it is) then it shouldn’t have to rhyme.

If theology is like poetry (and I think it is) then it shouldn’t have to rhyme.
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It should be fluid and, like any body of water, just a little bit dangerous.

It’s daring to believe, to redeem even, what’s beautiful in the world through joy and suffering. It’s speaking in tongues, learning a new language, exploring a new vocabulary and reimagining the breadth of a word like love. It’s living in the paradox of simplicity and complexity and moving beyond religion to faith.

And it’s about resting, knowing I could be wrong.

Lord grant me permission to be wrong. Wisdom to invite. A heart that forgives.

Even me, Lord. Even me.

____________

Image credit: Keith Roper

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Lisha Epperson

Hi! I’m Lisha Epperson, a hopeless romantic, lover of Jesus and most things antique. I love being a wife and mother of 5. I’m hooked on books (got the library fines to prove it) and all things ballet. I work out a life of faith with fear and trembling in New York City and blog about it all at lishaepperson.com.

The post When Theology Is Like Poetry appeared first on SheLoves Magazine.

by Bev Murrill

The Lord announces the word, and the women who proclaim it are a mighty throng. —Psalm 68:11

My dad was a very authoritarian father. Whenever my sisters or I asked permission from him for anything, the answer, almost without exception, would be no because no was his natural default.

It was so much of an issue that our dear mother coached us to come to her when we wanted anything. The idea was that we would ask her and when the time was right, she would talk to Dad about it and talk him around, and then would come back to us and tell us we should now go and ask our father. We would ask Dad and he would magnanimously give permission for us to do what it was we wanted to do. It didn’t always work but it worked often enough for it to be worth it to us girls to take part in an elaborate charade that often lasted anything up to a week from first mention to permission.

For a seemingly innocuous word, Permission is a very large concept. Without permission, the only two courses of action are acquiescence or rebellion.

When we’re talking in terms of leadership, acquiescence to lack of permission is subjective. What do you most want? To get what you believe is right, or to preserve the status quo?

If preservation of the peace is paramount, then acquiescence is the only course of action. This can be a good thing, for instance, in the behaviour of children with their parents. Keeping the peace is great in a family, especially when the leadership is healthy and is invested in the well-being of the one to whom permission has been denied. It’s reasonable to assume under those circumstances that the best outcome for the one denied permission is tied up within the lack of permission.

But leadership isn’t always healthy, and when it is not, it is also not invested into the well-being of those who are being led. In leadership like that, permission is denied in order to control, constrict and confine those who are being led so the status quo can be preserved, and the status quo is keeping the leader in their position. (Think Kim Jong-un, leader of North Korea.)

When leadership isn’t healthy, non-acquiescence is seen as rebellion, and indeed, it may be, but rebellion against a corrupt rulership. All over the world, in ever century and every nation and people group since the beginning of time, people have been laying down their lives in order to overthrow corrupt leaders and legislation. Think Apartheid, the English workhouses, the plantations of the deep South, women and First Nations people denied the right to vote, FGM, child brides, the Dalit people of India, Mahatma Ghandi, the Hebrews in Egypt, the Arab Spring of 2011/12, Michael Brown, Philadelphia, and many, many more.

I could fill innumerable books with stories of people who have made a decision to not take NO for an answer. And some of them died of their decision. But the world was changed because they no longer waited for permission.

Jesus said, “I didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword to divide families/nations/people groups.” (Matthew 10:34-36) That’s an odd thing for the Prince of Peace to say and yet peacemakers have so much more power to bring peace than peacekeepers. Peacekeeping may look quiet on the surface, but underneath is a roiling, boiling sea of tumult in which there is never any rest. Resentment, fury, depression, grey, unimaginative drudgery is the result of efforts to keep the peace.

Sometimes there has to be a fight. Sometimes people have to die to bring freedom. Sometimes permission is not what we need, but courage and faith and determination that the world we live in can be changed, and that we, with our tiny little lives, can contribute to that change.

The world we live in now doesn’t look like the one God created. The determination of governments to protect a peace that has no Prince of Peace to bring direction is a lost cause. The heavy religious leaders whose overbearing edicts have kept women and girls in places of deep shame, humiliation and subjugation, are becoming uncomfortable and agitated, as permission is no longer being sought and women are choosing not to take no for an answer.

Peacemakers are rising in numbers that even ten years ago we would not have thought possible. People with a greater vision and revelation than those who are leading them are growing up from the grass roots, refusing to wait for permission any longer. They have a call, they are empowered and empowering each other, and freedom to live according to God’s design is becoming the new norm.

Permission is a good thing to look for if it’s a God-given call. By all means, wait until God gives the word …

… but when God does, don’t wait for anyone else to sign the forms in triplicate!

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Bev Murrill

Bev’s mandate to mentor and commission leaders streams effectively into her desire to teach people the the fullness of what God designed them to do. A native Aussie, Bev has ministered in the UK for almost two decades, but speaks in conferences and leadership settings across the world. Mentoring women in leadership holds a specific place in her heart and she feels keenly the need to make sure that gender is never a reason to disqualify a person from the call of God on their life. For this purpose, her most recent initiative is KYRIA, a network of Christian women leaders to provide support, encouragement and friendship among Christian women who are called to lead in the Church or in business. Bev is the author of two books - Speak Life and Shut the Hell Up, and Catalysts: You Can be God’s Agent for Change and has a few more in the pipeline. In 2001 she founded Liberti, a magazine based in the UK for Christian women who want faith with attitude. She lives in the passionate conviction that Christians are seeded into their cultures in order to take the Kingdom of Heaven into every sphere of influence. Rick and Bev have been married for 42 years, all of them great, but not all of them wonderful. They have four married children and nine grandchildren.

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by Claire Colvin

I am learning to give myself permission to try again—to not get it right the first time.

A few months ago I decided I wanted to make macarons, those fussy but beautiful French cookies that are popping up everywhere these days. I knew they were notoriously difficult to bake, but I’m decently experienced when it comes to baking and I thought I’d be okay. Sometimes it’s fun to take the long way round.

I researched the process carefully. I let the eggs warm up to room temperature. I weighed out all of the ingredients. I was diligent and precise—the whole process took several hours. But when I took the cookies out of the oven, they looked terrible. They were somehow both over- and under-done, burnt around the edges and the wrong consistency in the middle. They weren’t pretty at all.

I stood there in the kitchen in the face of my baking disaster and my first thought was, “Why did I think I could do this?” It says a lot about where I am in my own journey that my first instinct was to both doubt myself and blame myself. I didn’t ask, “Where did this go wrong?” or, “Did I misread the recipe?” I went straight for the jugular—why did I think I was a person who could do complicated things? I cut hard and deep.

It’s not the first time I’ve done this to myself. I gave myself no grace for a first attempt. I was not gentle with my feelings. I had this idea of flittering around the kitchen like a butterfly, making fancy French cookies with love songs playing in the background. It was a great idea, and it made a great Facebook status. But when the bottom fell out I turned on myself pretty quickly.

I would never say to a friend what I said to myself that day. I can be very critical and hold myself to unhealthy standards. I’m learning, finally, at 39, that I need to give myself room to try again. Very few things are perfect the first time around. Most things take practice.

After a bit of space and a good cup of tea I decided to try the cookies again. There was already a huge mess in the kitchen, so what was a few more dishes? I went back and researched a little more and I saw that if you don’t let the cookies dry before you bake them there’s no chance of getting them to bake correctly.

I piped the cookies and waited. It took more than an hour for the tops to dry but they finally did. They went into the oven and 20 minutes later they came out, and they were perfect. The tops were smooth and shiny; the insides were soft and chewy.

It turns out I am a person who can do complicated things—all I needed was to give myself another chance. I am trying to hold on to the lesson in those cookies. Starting over is not a failure. It’s exactly the opposite.

Starting over is not a failure. It’s exactly the opposite.
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Perfection sounds like a lofty goal, but as I get older I’m learning that it’s actually poison. I read somewhere that “perfectionism is the highest form of self-harm” and I believe that’s true. When I hold myself to a standard of perfection, I’m just setting myself up to fail. There’s no kindness in perfection; only an exacting standard that looks to find fault.

As children we’re told that, “Practice makes perfect” It makes perfection sound attainable. But outside of a very few Olympic athletes and maybe a concert pianist or two, perfection is not the human condition. Our pursuit of it, my pursuit of it, is misplaced pride.

I’ve spent years of my life in theatres, so you’d think I would have learned the value of practice and repetition by now. Often you’ll hear the director asking an actor to do it once more, with feeling. It’s a call to take a deep breath, dig deep and really go for it. I want that to be my rallying cry. Not a rigid idea of perfection that says there’s only one correct way to do everything, but rather, an invitation, an invocation, to dig deep and try again.

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Claire Colvin

Claire is learning to call herself a feminist. She has been writing and editing professionally for more than a decade. In 2013, her National Novel Writing Month entry was a science fiction story about a broken world where everyone was required to be as similar as possible. Claire wishes she could fold the world like a map so the people she loves weren’t so far away. She lives on a small mountain near Vancouver and writes at clairecolvin.ca.

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by Diana Trautwein

I had a boss once who used the phrase, “Better to ask forgiveness than permission.” That little sentence used to bother me. I lived the formative years of my life as an oh-so-obedient eldest child, one who asked permission for everything. I spent way too many minutes (years?) of my life worrying about where to go, whom to ask, and how to find permission to try anything and everything.

But if there is one thing I’ve learned well in the past few decades, it is this: permission is highly overrated. Too often, the word has been dangled over our heads (our female heads, especially).  With eyebrows raised and fingers pointed, we’ve been asked, “Who said you could do that?”

I grew up at the tail end of the “behave like a lady” thinking that permeated North American culture for generations.  Like children, women were to be seen, but not heard, “respected,” even revered, but not fully included nor even invited into the story of the 20th century church. But in 1950’s southern California evangelical circles, there was one woman who changed that trajectory dramatically.

Her name was Henrietta Mears and she was a dynamo. She broke through barriers right and left. Though I never knew her, her life made a mark on mine. And then there was Roberta Hestenes, an ordained Presbyterian pastor and seminary professor who singlehandedly began to change the way many streams of evangelical mid-twentieth-century Christianity viewed women. She never asked permission for anything, she just quietly followed God’s lead and taught us all some valuable lessons about personhood, calling and obedience.

In the spirit of solidarity with such women through the ages, I’d like to pause a moment and remind us of what we never need permission to do. Are you ready?

You are loved.  You do not have to ask for it, earn it, hoard it or distrust it. That’s the bedrock truth of this universe: God loves you, exactly as you are, before you do one single thing.

You are enough. Drop the scarcity thinking ASAP, okay? You already have what you need to be who you were designed to be. Yes, you may need things like education, training, experience. If so, go for it! But the gifts are yours—all the things that make your heart sing, that make you catch your breath just a little, that raise the little hairs on your arms—those are the clues. They are the whispers of grace, the small signs that you, wonderful you, are the one who can do this thing. So do it.

Your tears are welcome and necessary.  How else will we know we’re not alone on this journey? You don’t have to be made of steel, you don’t have to be big enough or strong enough, or courageous enough, or whatever … enough. Your weakness and vulnerability are what make you beautiful and ultimately, what make you strong and resilient. So weep when you need to, talk about hard things, ask dumb (and not so dumb) questions. Being weary or overwhelmed or sad—these things do not in any way disqualify you from life and/or leadership. In fact, it is those very things that will help to form you into someone we want to hear and follow.

You are never too much.  No matter how loud your laugh, how weird your questions, how big or how small your physical presence may be, you are amazing. Do you know that? You. Are. Amazing. Yes, you. You have gifts that this world needs. Not just the BIG world with a capital W, but your world, right where you are. Your neighbor, your family, your church, your school, your team—whatever and wherever you are, you’re there for a whole long list of reasons. Believe it.

Whatever and wherever you are, you’re there for a whole long list of reasons. Believe it.
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You are allowed to speak up, shut up, stand up, stay up, turn up. You’re allowed to say no, or maybe, or yes. You are the one who knows your limits. Please don’t let anyone else put limits around you that are untrue and unnecessary. Learn to know you—strengths and weaknesses, gifts and struggles, abilities and areas that need help. Listen to wise people who speak gently and truthfully and refuse to hear the ones who yell, cajole, bluster, argue or nay-say.

We all need good, true people to speak into our lives. But we do not need bullies, judges or “friendly” advisors. Whether your platform is enormous or tiny makes no difference. YOU are the one God has placed right where you are, with all that you need, to do all that you are meant to do. Do you believe this? Do you believe this?

Well then. You don’t need my permission for anything, do you? Thanks be to God.

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Diana Trautwein

Married to her college sweetheart for over 40 years, Diana is always wondering about things. She answers to Mom from their three adult kids and spouses and to Nana from their 8 grandkids, ranging in age from 3 to 22. For 17 years, after a mid-life call to ministry, she answered to Pastor Diana in two churches where she served as Associate Pastor. Since retiring at the end of 2010, she spends her time working as a spiritual director and writes on her blog, Just Wondering. For as long as she can remember, Jesus has been central to her story and the church an extension of her family. Not that either church or family is exactly perfect . . . but then, that’s what makes life interesting, right?

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By Jamie Arpin-Ricci | Twitter: @missional

For most of my life I dreamed about being a father. In the innocence (and naïveté) of youth, I imagined a brood of six to eight children filling my home. Having a father I love and who clearly loves me, I could only imagine the inevitable richness of life as a father myself. Of course, time, wisdom, and my wife tempered the more extreme details of my dreams to a more reasonable vision of our future family. However, we both shared the same desire for family. When we first became pregnant, our hearts swelled with the expectant hope of what was about to be born into our lives.

And then we lost our baby.

I could have never imagined a grief and suffering that could match our hopeful desire, but in that loss it was almost surpassed. Perhaps that is inevitable, as the depths of pain can be measured in proportion to the heights of longing from which we fall. In this case, the fall was devastating. For more than a year, I could not attend church for fear of catching sight of fathers holding their new babies. Through the eyes of grief, they were suddenly everywhere.

When we learned that our chances of starting a family through pregnancy was virtually impossible (though no cause could be determined), we realized that our family would have to come into being through other means. Thus we began our journey into the world of adoption.

Initially, we looked locally. Being inner city missionaries, we knew many young mothers who needed homes for their children. Many such options came to our door, but they always fell through and each time it was another miscarriage of hope and longing. Looking for more stability and protection against such repeated injury, we decided on international adoption. It took nearly half a decade to adopt our son, Micah, from Ethiopia.

For many Christians, adoption is praised as an act of godly compassion, extending to an orphan the love and acceptance that mirrors God’s love for us. Adoption is often seen as a ministry to “the least of these,” extending our privilege and faith to those who might otherwise not enjoy such a life. While I see the merit in these intentions (though all too often they become prey to unintentional patterns of colonialism and even exploitation), our intentions seemed far more selfish: we simply longed to have the family that circumstances had denied us.

When our son finally arrived in Canada to take his place in our family, I wish I could say that I slid into fatherhood with the ease and passion of youthful idealism. In truth, after five years of expectation (and an undiagnosed case of Post-Traumatic Stress from a separate incident), I fell apart the moment he arrived. For weeks, I was plagued by overwhelming panic, persistent insomnia and terror at the prospect of what the future held. This precious child deserved better from me—a fact that only heightened my anxiety as I considered my own inadequacy as a father.

In time, and in no small part due to the patience and perseverance of my wife, Kim, the anxiety melted away and was replaced by love. I found myself looking into the innocent eyes of my precious son and being humbled at the trust, admiration and love he poured into my heart every day. Even when he couldn’t speak a word of English (and I didn’t speak Amharic), he communicated with his arms tightly squeezing around my neck or the gentle brush of his hand over my stubbled cheek. And his laugh! What strange magic do children possess that their laughter can send a thrilling charge through body and soul? My heart was filled to overflowing, day after difficult and precious day.

In Micah’s embrace, I learned that I was a father worth loving.
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Many people will say to me how noble and giving it is for us to give this poor African orphan a home. Each time I hear this, I cannot help but respond with incredulity at the very idea that we somehow gave this child so much. Even in the face of all that we legitimately did give and sacrifice for his sake, it pales in comparison to the gift he gave me.

He made me a father.

He made me Daddy.

Gregory Boyle, SJ, a Jesuit priest who has served among Los Angeles’ gang communities for decades, once told the story of a “homeboy,” Cesar, who had come to call Greg “father” in a way more familial than priestly. As Father Greg affirmed that he, indeed, saw Cesar as his son, the young man was transformed:

“In this early morning call Cesar did not discover that he has a father. He discovered that he is a son worth having.”^[1]

In adopting Micah, a similar transformation occurred in me, only from the other direction. In his embrace, I learned that I was father worth loving.

^[1] Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (New York, NY: Free Press, 2010), 31

_____________

About Jamie:

Jamie is an author and inner city pastor whose passion is to pursue radical faithfulness to Jesus in the context of true community.  He is the author of “Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick” (Paraclete Press) and  “The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis & Life in the Kingdom” (InterVarsity Press).  He is pastor at Little Flowers Community, co-director of Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Urban Ministries Winnipeg and a director at Chiara House , a new intentional Christian community who share life “on the margins.” Most importantly, he is husband to his Australian wife, Kim, and father to his Ethiopian son, Micah.

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by Osheta Moore

The first two years of my marriage were loud.

Reverberating slams. Stomping away. Disgusted voices. Angry silences.

More than once, I wondered if my dad was right. Did I marry too soon? Did I marry the wrong person? Did I make a horrible, horrible mistake?

In the sweet moments, the quiet cuddling moments, we’d apologize for our hot tempers and make promises and offer reminders that we knew our marriage would be hard. Neither one of us had a shining example of a healthy, much less Christian, marriage so we were going on faith and encouragement from mentors plus five step plans from whatever hot Christian marriage book was out. We were also an interracial couple so we knew we’d have unique conflicts and complications, but we were also set on re-writing the stories about race and gender in our marriage.

When we were at our best, we’d resolve to think the best of each other. Then we’d kiss and hold each other close marveling at the depth of our love that warred with the fierceness of our desire to be right.

Those moments were just that–moments–because too soon after those impassioned promises, one of us would say something which the other would then take the wrong way and we’d spin out all loud, disgusted, angry and distant.

“I think we need counseling.”

I said it into the dark one night after a particularly loud argument–one in which I broke a coffee mug when slamming it, for emphasis, into the sink in order to better communicate that my husband was wrong and I, of course, was right. I think he wasn’t listening to me or was being insensitive or forgot to get diapers for our toddler. I don’t remember. But I do remember the shards of glass from my favorite mug, broken and irreparable.

I wondered if it was a foreshadowing of my marriage.

Like my shattered mug, he was once my favorite. Our friendship was invaluable to me but now I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. Our relationship felt broken into pieces. Irreparable. Waiting to be tossed out.

My husband sighed and threw his hands above his head. After a pregnant silence full of all the things he wanted to say and full of resignation that saying them wouldn’t make the situation better, he finally agreed. “I’ll ask Kevin tomorrow if we can come over to talk.”

As promised, he asked his boss, a non-profit director and former psychologist, if he would spend a couple of hours with us in counseling. Kevin agreed and asked us to come over the very next morning.

Kevin approached us with a tray of coffee and books. Settling in, he doctored his cup and leaned back in his chair to study us.

“TC. Osheta,” he began. “I knew during our pre-marital counseling that we’d be here.”

My husband and I gave each other surprised glances and looked back at Kevin.

“Tell me exactly what happened yesterday that brought you here.”

So we launched into our versions, trying not to interrupt each other.

Kevin poured himself another coffee then offered his assessment.

“So, it sounds like TC had an idea and when TC told you the idea, Osheta, instead of hearing him dreaming, you heard him committing to the plan. And TC, when you were excited about your idea you wanted your wife to be excited, too. Instead, she came off as unsupportive and argumentative when she listed all the reasons why your plan was impractical.

“What if we tried on a communication technique for moments like these. TC and Osheta, you’re both very passionate, very opinionated and very big dreamers. Sometimes, when big dreamers marry each other, they have a hard time dreaming together.

“What I’d love to see is you two learning to dream together and see each other as partners and not adversaries.

“Your homework for the next month is this: before you verbalize an idea or even a thought, I want you to say, ‘Honey, I need to verbally process this idea,’ or ‘Hey, I’m just dreaming out loud about X. What do you think?’

By starting your conversation with an invitation to dream together or think about a problem as a team, neither one of you will feel on the spot to make a decision.”

So we took his advice. For the next month, any time either one of us had an idea–from things as small as chore distribution to big plans for how best to spend the educational grant my husband would get at the end of his Americorps term–we’d start with, “I’m just dreaming out loud” or “Babe, think about the budget with me” or “Hey, let’s dream about ministry here in New Orleans.”

And our marriage transformed.

We were still loud but, a different loud. A happy loud. Overlapping chatter. Belly laughs. Kisses before bed, loud.

A month later, we sat around Kevin’s pool again. This time, our chairs were a little closer and there was a knowing smile on his face.

“So, tell me how our little experiment went.”

I looked at my husband and smiled. “You were so right. We needed to get on each other’s team and learn to talk better. Your technique worked! I can’t believe it.”

My husband nodded and squeezed my hand. “Beginning with a disclaimer gave us the ability to hear the best from each other and have fun dreaming together. I really need my wife to be for me and inviting her to dream with me was the perfect way to help us get back on track.”

Kevin nodded and raised his glass. “Well, we should meet a few more times, but I’m happy to hear you’re progressing. Sometimes, you just need permission to love each other well. Sometimes, the expectation for conflict is strong. As Christians, we need to be subversive and resolve to love well, think the best, and never, never give up.”

My husband interlocked his white fingers with my brown, squeezed them a little, and whispered, “Amen.” He looked up at me.

“Amen,” I said and squeezed his hand back.

______________

Image credit: dusk-photography

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Osheta Moore

Osheta Moore is an Anabaptist-y, stay-at-home mom right in the thick of moving her family from Boston to Los Angeles . She's passionate about racial reconciliation, peacemaking, and community development in the urban core. At the top of her bucket list is dance in a flash mob—all the better if it's to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" or Pharrell's "Happy." Catch up with Osheta on her blog, Shalom in the City.

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By Yabome Gilpin-Jackson | Twitter: @supportdevelop

Everything is permissible, but not everything is helpful. Everything is permissible, but not everything builds up. 1 Corinthians 10:23

Everything is permissible. Really. As human beings with freewill, we really can choose and self-permit ourselves to do and be anything. We can choose fear, we can choose hopelessness, we can choose inaction. We can choose these old friends that beckon us to sit with them, talk to them, spend day after day and night after night with them, become so familiar with them we barely notice that they have wrapped and cloaked us so finely with their glossy veneers, that we see no other way, no other alternative than to stay in their company.

After all, status quo isn’t so bad, is it?

Life with our glossy veneer friends, fear, hopelessness, immobilized inaction, is at the very least, predictable, isn’t it?

I have always thought of myself as brave, fearless, able to do any and all things I set my heart to. A year ago, I would have probably laughed if you had told me I have been held back in the company of my old friend, Fear. You see, Fear had done such a wonderful job enticing me to be a friend that I hadn’t even noticed how much time we were spending together.

In my little corner of the world in Vancouver in Beautiful British Columbia, my life is good. I have a loving husband, three beautiful children, a home, an amazing job and I teach at universities when I feel like I have time to. I was living EXACTLY the dream I had for myself.

Nothing conveys this better than the “icebreaker sheet” from just over ten years ago I found recently while clearing out old work files. I listed my favorite animated character as Lilo from Lilo and Stitch, because of her fearless compassion and determination, and my dream job as working/consulting and teaching in my field. Done all that. So what had I got to do with Fear?

Well, another reality of my life is that I love Sierra Leone, the land of my roots. And like many transnational/global citizens who migrate to “greener pastures,” talk of the old country, reminiscence and the never-ending debate of needed changes are always with me and around me. What I never admitted to myself is that in as much as I love listening to and being part of those conversations, I also hate them.

I hate them, because deep down, every one of those dinner party conversations immobilize me. The issues seem so big, so complicated and so endless. They also remind me that I am afraid. Afraid to do anything, afraid to lead the conversation in a different way that leads to alternatives and actions. Afraid to speak up. Afraid to step into waters so murky and muddied for all of the valid economic and sociopolitical reasons we re/hash over and over, because I’m sure there can only be quicksand or a sinkhole in those waters. Afraid—that my little life, my one, little life, cannot possibly make one iota of difference to the magnitude of changes required in my “Swit Salone.”

And then Ebola showed up. And my friend Fear could hide out no more. It rose from the deep recesses of my body where it had been buried and exploded all over me, exposed. The horror of the past year reminded me that living in fear, hopelessness and immobilized inaction, individually and collectively, does contribute to results, albeit not helpful ones. The results have included more than 11,000 deaths as reported by the World Health Organization, thousands of orphaned children, devastated families and communities, too many tears, too much trauma and re-traumatization.

The situation has caused me to confront my fears surrounding taking action for social change. Those fears have been deep-seated in my heart from years of growing up afraid, because every time there was political unrest, soldiers would show up at our door, because my father was a public and political figure—of those loved and hatred, and in the “global south,” often harassed, persecuted, and sometimes killed as quickly as the political winds change.

I was afraid, because I had a glimpse of the civil war in Sierra Leone before fleeing the country, and whenever talk of needed reforms showed up, my old friend Fear would remind me of my refugee fleeing experience and somehow convince me it was just better to stay put, in Beautiful British Columbia, halfway across the world and oceans away from the troubles of the old country. The thing about exposing and confronting old friends like Fear, Hopelessness and Immobilized Inaction however, is that once you do, there is no going back …

God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love and a sound mind. 2 Timothy 1:7

In October I wrote a call to action for Ebola, from a heart crying out and trading hopelessness for the hope that the Mano River Union area of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Conakry would get to 42 days with no new cases and be declared Ebola-free. This May, Liberia has done it. In Sierra Leone and Guinea the cases have dropped, many regions have sustained at zero new cases for weeks and schools have reopened.

I am been inspired by the actions of countless individuals and groups, defying fear to defeat this deadly virus. Hope stirs and rises in me. And more than any time before, I have given up excuses and waiting for permission, some of Fear’s sidekicks. Speaking, writing about and advocating for long-term sustainable plans to restore health, leadership at every level, psychosocial and overall development and change in Sierra Leone and other parts of the African continent where it is needed are becoming part of my journey. I am staring Fear in the face and moving onward in power, love and a sound mind.

My encouragement and question for you is this: what fears do you need to confront and expose so that you can take action in the personal or world issues that call you?

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared [predestined] in advance for us to do [walk in them/be our way of life!]” –Ephesians 2:10

One look at the news and you know there is no shortage of issues that we each may be connected to where we may be called to action. And just as we choose our old friends, we can choose new ones like, Faith, Hope, Love and Action. Because my little life does and can make a difference … and so can yours.

Now hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. –Romans 5:5

Selah.

_______________

About Yabome:

My name means woman … I love the obvious simplicity and profound impact of carrying that name. It’s a name ascribed to the wisdom of an older woman, an elder, and was my grandmother’s. On top of that, my mom meant to also name me Satia, meaning satiated, full to abundance. It is her favorite cousin’s name, infused with the double entendre of a woman overflowing with the joy and blessing of having had me, her 7th biological child. So what can I say about me? I am a woman, seeking after wisdom, determined to live life to the fullest and help, in whatever way I can, others in the world to do so also. I believe in and love God. I am also a wife, mother of 3, academic, working professional, consultant and budding author. I love learning, new experiences…and fashion. I, Yabome (Satia) Gilpin-Jackson am who I was born to be…and I am (re)discovering that daily.

______________

Image credit: Jared & Melanie

The post Everything Is Permissible appeared first on SheLoves Magazine.

by Cara Meredith

I called her for an appointment because I thought I needed help dealing with a bad ending to a job I’d just left.

After we lined up our schedules, I drove 45 minutes to meet her, confident that after she heard my story, she’d provide me with neat and tidy next steps and send me on my way. Given our mutual friends, I figured we’d eventually become comrades ourselves, following each other on Facebook and exchanging updates at an annual Memorial Day BBQ.

But she was neither my friend nor my confidant. She was my therapist. And the gift she gave me was permission to cry.

I’m not sure what went haywire in my insides, but for a period of seven years between high school and college, I didn’t cry. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel the need to cry or that I wasn’t emotionally moved by various events in my life—it was that I didn’t let myself physically shed a tear.

I remember cozying together with a bunch of girlfriends to watch the epic love story of Jack and Rose in Titanic. I recall the sound of saddened sobs around me; the tears that burned my own eyes, and the catch, the gulp, the tightening in my throat that yearned for emotional release. But clenching crumpled tissue between my fists, I refused to let tears stream down my face.

Major events continued to happen around me, with my tears seemingly oblivious: I watched with devastation the horrid events of 9/11, shaking my head in disbelief.

I stared at the television screen, horrified at the number of school shootings, including one on my university’s campus mere days before my own college graduation.

I held the frail hands of my dying grandmother, humming sacred tunes to a barely-there skeleton.

I clung to dear, best friends after an intense summer of campy, kindred friendships—mascara running down their faces, while I prayed the dab of a tissue might do the trick, might make them think I too could gulp a tearful farewell.

I hung up the phone one last time with an ex, saying a final good-bye to a boy I’d thought was The One for a couple of months there.

But through all of these events I refused to shed a tear, because I had somehow come to believe my tears were a sign of weakness. I’d thought that being my strongest, most jubilant, most Christ-filled self meant not succumbing to emotional fragility.

As the years went on, I ceased to let my tears run free. A simultaneous pride and misunderstanding in Nehemiah’s words to the people—The joy of the Lord is your strength—became my guiding light.

But really, I was just running from the pain.  

Really, I was just too scared to give myself permission to cry and to feel, to let down my guard and taste the salt that springs from within.

So when I finally showed up at my therapist’s office that day, and after I kept going back there week after week after week, eventually we had The Conversation. And in the gentlest but most direct of manners, she gave me permission to cry.

It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, she whispered.

For tears are good and tears, my friend, are holy.

So let yourself cry.

Let yourself feel.  

Let yourself breathe.  

Truthfully, but for the It’s okay part of her sentence, I don’t remember her words verbatim–because as she spoke truth over me, perfect, salty tears silently streamed down my face.

She ushered me into a greater understanding and connection with my insides—heart to soul, mind to body, spirit to strength.

Because when we grant each other and ourselves the ability to let go, to feel the weight of the pain, to embrace the Sad and the Scary and the To-Be-Feared, we give the Spirit permission to enter in. By unclenching tightened fists we make room for Jesus, for the man who wept over his friend’s dead body, for he who was no stranger to tears. We make way for the weeping prophet, for the one who sees and hears and holds our tears, for the one who has fed his people with the bread of tears.

And that, I’d say, is one permission I want to be granted, over and over again.

______________

Image credit: N02

Author information

Cara Meredith

Cara is a writer, speaker and musician from in the greater San Francisco area. She is currently tweaking away at her first book when not on the hunt for the world’s greatest chips and guacamole. She loves people, food, reading, the great outdoors and her family. She and her husband, James, try to dance nightly and live life LARGE with their two young sons.

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by Tanya Marlow

On Friday, May 8, when the election results were announced in Britain, I spent the whole day with a red and puffy face, and I couldn’t stop crying. Friends wondered why I was so upset about politics, but it was because I knew, even as it was announced, this would be bad news for the poor, and very bad news for disabled people.

In the election campaign I kept waiting for the drastic cuts to disabled people’s benefits to be brought up as an issue. I watched the debates, sure the populace would see this systematic of essential support being taken from disabled people as a terrible injustice. But it wasn’t even mentioned.

Then I watched for disabled rights to be mentioned in the Christian “voting issues” guides. I read one guide after another—it wasn’t there. Apparently the right to smack your children was more of a “Christian voting issue” than the removal of benefits affecting half a million disabled people. No one was speaking up for disabled people; no one seemed to care.

On Friday the 8th, I wept. On Saturday, I spent time with my family and kept off the Internet, and tried to forget about politics. By Sunday, I was ready to do something.

I was ready to do anything.

In a state of exhausted and over-emotional stupor, I put out a call on Facebook. “Does anyone know of a Christian organisation against the cuts to disability benefits? Because if not, I’m going to start one.”

If I’d had more sleep that night, if I’d been thinking logically, I never would’ve posted that.

I’m the last person who should be setting up a campaigning organisation.

Reason Number One: I have a severe autoimmune illness, myalgic encephalomyelitis, meaning I need to be in bed for 21 hours of the day and can rarely leave the house. I’m ill, severely ill, and have very limited capacity for reading and writing anything.

Reason Number Two: I don’t know what I’m doing. I have no experience with campaigning or politics.

I shouldn’t have done it—there are a thousand other people better qualified than me, more physically capable than me. But—and this is the key point—they weren’t doing it. I had been watching and waiting for others to step in, and no one had. I was tired of waiting.

I thought of SheLoves‘ Dangerous Women, and what it takes to change the world, and in my sleep-deprived state, I had an epiphany: “Something is better than nothing.” I decided to do it myself.

One week later, Compassionate Britain was born, launching with a blog post that had more than 13,500 views in its first 36 hours.

It’s early days, but already people are telling me they have written to their representatives about the injustice of targeting disabled people for welfare cuts, and that is something in itself.

I took this step because I gave myself permission to fail. Sometimes we say we have permission to fail, but we don’t mean it. We say, “something is better than nothing”, but we don’t believe it, because we fear doing something that makes us look foolish. We believe doing nothing is better than looking weak or stupid.

This month I have been giving myself permission to fail, (and flail wildly), as I learn on the job what it means to campaign, still wrestling with the significant limitations of my health. “Something is better than nothing,” I keep whispering to myself. It’s weak, and I’m weak, but it’s glorious, and it smells of Jesus.

Whenever you feel a burning desperation to change the world, my advice to you is to get sleep-deprived and weak. Be so weak that you know your dream is impossible, and you will probably fail. Be okay with that. Turn off the logic and the fear, and give yourself permission to fail.

Something is better than nothing. Do that something.

Author information

Tanya Marlow

Tanya Marlow was in Christian ministry for a decade and a lecturer in Biblical Theology, until she got sick, and became a writer. A fan of opera-singing and dark chocolate, she has a bad habit of laughing at her own jokes. Author of Coming Back to God When You Feel Empty, she loves writing honestly about suffering and searching for God. She blogs at Thorns and Gold, and can be found on Twitter @Tanya_Marlow or Facebook.

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by Claire De Boer

My husband and I pray together at night before we go to sleep. It’s wonderful, and something we’d never done until recently. Sure we prayed around the dinner table and in church, but the heartfelt prayers? They were for God’s ears alone, until our relationship caved and we were hanging on by a thread. Prayer became the branch we clung to.

Now every night I lay there with my head in the nook of his shoulder, legs curled around bed sheets, happy to know that together we can place all of it, including our hurting relationship, in God’s hands.

This is how we pray: we give thanks for everything we have—health, home, children, finances, safety. We pray for our kids, friends, family, and anyone else who has asked for prayer. In my mind I go through “the checklist,” making sure to cover all the basics and to highlight any unanswered prayers, just in case God hasn’t been listening too closely.

But lately I have been feeling limited by my prayers. There is something missing for me in the way we pray.

Our prayers are small.

Our prayers are timid.

Our prayers remind me of the kid who sits at the back of the class with her hand half raised because she isn’t sure she wants the attention.

What is it about prayer that has so many “shoulds” attached to it? Why do I feel like I shouldn’t pray for that thing because I don’t deserve it? My husband and I discussed this and realized we are too afraid to ask. When there are so many needs in the world, so many hurting people, how dare we ask for more? Yet I have these crazy audacious dreams. So, how can I dream big but pray small? There’s something disturbingly ironic about that.

Now, as we pray, I sense a stirring deep inside me, telling me to be audacious, to step out in faith and believe for more. I feel the excitement and fear of praying for the seemingly impossible.

Some of my dreams seem crazy to me, like the one where I take off around the world for a year, husband and kids in tow—I mean, who would finance that? Or the one where we build our own home and we are standing hand-in-hand on our plot of land, talking about the winding staircase that leads to a studio loft. But we don’t talk about that dream much—don’t we have enough already? Would God not think us terribly ungrateful? So we don’t dare ask. We just assume it will never happen, make do with the tremendous amount we already have, and don’t bother making ourselves feel bad by mentioning “those dreams.”

And then there are the really audacious dreams. The ones where relying on God is the only way forward and every step is a leap of faith. I dream of changing hundreds of thousands of lives—of convincing people of their innate worth, by giving them a voice through writing their stories.

For the longest time I didn’t have a voice, and now that I’ve found it, I know what a precious gift it is.

But when I look at myself in the mirror and think of how small I sometimes feel, it seems like an impossibility. How can I, the girl who has always been in hiding, step onto the world’s stage and use my voice to influence? Me, who has always blushed when speaking in even the smallest groups? To the outside world I would seem like the most unlikely candidate.

It’s time my prayers matched the size of my dreams.
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This shouldn’t come as a surprise to me, that God would pick the voiceless girl and plant a dream in her heart to be a voice to thousands. God is pretty sneaky that way.

It’s time my prayers matched the size of my dreams. I may not ever build my own house, or travel to every land on this globe, but if I don’t have the audacity to ask, and believe that God will grant those desires of my heart that are weaved into His purpose, I can’t hope to live a bigger life.

I don’t want to keep my dreams under lock and key anymore. I don’t want to be afraid to ask because I already have enough or because I’m not up for the job.

I have a dream, and I’m giving myself permission to have the audacity to believe it will come true.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” —Eleanor Roosevelt

Author information

Claire De Boer

Hi, I’m Claire and though you may only see my words here once a month I’m part of the wonderful sisterhood of women who edit, upload and brainstorm behind the scenes of SheLoves. I was born and raised in England but pretty much see myself as a fully fledged Canadian. I spend just about all of my spare time blogging, editing and creating stories. I’ve also ventured into the world of teaching and mentor students in using writing as a tool for personal growth. My passion is to help others find the value and beauty in their stories and to find healing or self-awareness via journaling, memoir, or just "soul writing", as I like to call it. To learn more about my journey and the work I'm doing visit The Gift of Writing

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The post I Have This Audacious Dream appeared first on SheLoves Magazine.

by Bethany Suckrow

It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me. —”Hurricane” by Mary Oliver

//

I read Mary Oliver’s words on a Sunday morning in early spring. I’m sitting on my porch with a coffee mug in one hand and my copy of “A Thousand Mornings” in the other. There’s a big oak tree that bends over me; her leaves glitter in the morning sun. It’s a peaceful scene I’m resting in, one I’m grateful for in this season of my life, but … there’s also this part of me that’s trying not to feel guilty about skipping church for so many months in a row.

The truth is, I went recently and it was an utter disaster. You probably know how this goes. I walked in the doors of a place I’ve visited a few times before, hopeful of another positive experience. Instead, the pastor’s message was a storm of confusing, harmful theology. The God he described is one I don’t recognize and can’t trust. I could only watch the black clouds gathering, until his words broke open in an unfortunate downpour. I walked away completely ravaged.

A few weeks later, I’m sitting in a friend’s home with 40 other women to talk about faith. This unnerves me for all the same reasons I can’t bring myself to walk into church right now, but I’m there anyway, hopeful for a sisterhood that is safe and understanding.

We are given blank notecards and a question: What is the biggest loss you have survived?

I take my notecard and I write down the first, most obvious loss:

My mother.

I stare at the words and the empty space around them for a moment, and then I scribble down something else:

My easy faith.

This still doesn’t entirely do my feelings justice, but there they lay, like the wreckage after a hurricane.

When everyone has written their answers and grabbed their refreshments, my friend who is hosting the gathering takes the bowl full of notecards and then stands before us to read each one aloud. More than 40 answers, all different and deeply personal, and yet they echo one another.

These women have survived abuse, addiction, sexism and racism, the deaths of loved ones, divorce, family estrangement. Every one of us in the room has lost our faith and our sense of self. The back of the hand to everything.

But listen now to what happened to these women:

We survived.

The losses we’ve sustained, the leaves and fruit we have shed, are enriching the soil of the women we’re growing into. We go around the room and share our truths, the leaves that are pushing through our wounded limbs. And we shed tears, but they’re the life-giving kind, the baptizing and soul-watering kind.

I still find myself sifting through the wreckage of so much loss—the loss of my mother, the loss of my faith in Church and its patriarchal God. I may not be able to walk through the doors of an institution, but the sisterhood of believers still saves me. I recognize Love in their faces; I trust the God that made and gathered us. My faith group sisters, my SheLoves sisters and internet sisters, my school sisters, my work sisters, my grandmother and aunts and cousins, my poet sisters—Mary Oliver, Marie Howe, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson. I stand beneath the shade of their wisdom, sheltered and encouraged through my own storms, to survive.

For some things there are no wrong seasons, which is what I dream of for me.

Author information

Bethany Suckrow

I’m a writer and blogger at at bethanysuckrow.com, where I shares both prose and poetry on faith, grace, grief and hope. I am currently working on my first book, a memoir about losing my mother to cancer. My musician-husband, Matt, and I live in transition as we move our life from the Chicago suburbs to Nashville.

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by Nicole Joshua

I am deep in the fog of motherhood. I am also deep in a space of grief.

That is hard for me to say because I have desperately wanted to become a mother. Through nine years of infertility, I waited for my baby. And now she’s here, and I am completely in love with her.

But I am in some way grieving what feels like the loss of my old life. This is amplified by the fact that these past few months stand in stark contrast to the same period exactly a year ago.

A year ago, to date, I was in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), reflecting with my Amahoro brothers and sisters about Christ in Conflict. A few days prior to this trip, I was in Kigali, Rwanda, working as part of a team to contextualise theological reflection material for the African continent. After Goma, I returned to Kigali and over the following two days, visited the holocaust museum and a church in Nyamata where 10,000 people were brutalized and murdered within its walls.

I returned home from this trip, desperate to make sense of God and the Rwandan genocide, and energized to engage in ways to bring about transformation in my own country. I engaged in conversations that invited me to be an active participant with God in extending his kingdom in South Africa. I found myself in dialogue with young people that energized me and renewed my hope for the future of my country. I was invited into a conversation around a movement to awaken and equip the Church, mobilizing people at grassroots levels to work together and bring about transformation that would end inequality, unemployment and poverty in South Africa. And in the midst of all of this, my husband and I were in the process of applying to become adoptive parents.

The six months subsequent to the Rwanda and DRC trip were a whirlwind of activity, and it completely energized me. Then our beautiful baby girl arrived and my energy and engagement within these spaces came to a halt.

Now my life has a very different rhythm, a rhythm that is a slow and steady routine.

Each day unfolds with the same elements as the previous day, varying only in order and duration. Wake times … nap times … feeding times … play time … laundry … sterilising bottles, pacifiers and toys. And that’s just baby’s routine. My husband and I are finding our lives stretched and expanded to include our daughter’s life, a process that is both beautiful and painful.

It’s beautiful in blinding ways. Her infectious smile in the morning, her warm body curled up on my chest as she falls asleep, the daily wonder of her growth, her belly laugh, her smell, her joy at bath time, the absolute delight on her dad’s face when she is in his arms, the beautiful scenes of baby girl and her dad cuddling on the bed.

Alongside this beauty is pain.

The pain manifests in different ways. The feeling of helplessness that wells up when she cries and I cannot identify the source of her discomfort, the sense of inadequacy I feel about my parenting, my fears surrounding my daughter’s attachment to us, the yearning for the time my husband and I had with each other when it was only the two of us.

And then there’s the loss of my engagement in spaces of social justice and transformation. It is this loss that I am struggling with most keenly. The following question taunted me: “What about God’s work that I have been involved in?”

The guilt slowly seeped in.

I then found myself acknowledging that part of what those social justice activities afforded me was affirmation, food for a deep-seated need to be needed. I have to face how deeply I missed the affirmation.

Then I remembered conversations I had with my spiritual director in anticipation of this new phase of my life. I remembered him teaching me about the unhelpful, hierarchical classification of God’s work versus secular work, of how the church elevates “full time” vocations in church as being the “true” work of God, with everything else seen as “second-best.” I began to recognize how I unconsciously bought into this worldview and, in the process, disregarded raising my daughter as God’s work.

As I voiced these thoughts to my husband and a close friend, they helped me see how raising my baby girl is God’s work, how nurturing her and loving her is the work of God to which I have been called. Loving her well and raising her to love and be passionate about God’s heart is wholly God’s work.

Loving her well and raising her to love and be passionate about God’s heart is wholly God’s work.
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I’m slowly letting go of the guilt and learning to adapt to this new rhythm of life. Part of this learning process is reflecting on, and choosing to develop, what Ernest Boyer, Jr. calls in his book A Way on the World, a “spirituality of family.”

I want to follow the call of Jesus that is unlike the disciples’ call to “renunciation or deprivation,” but so like that of Mary and Joseph. It is the call to “hardship and routine,” a call to “form love into flesh and bone, then care for it and help it grow.”

Boyer writes:

” … (P)arenthood … can be in its own way a vision for a world remade. With every family, human society has a chance to begin anew, to start again and correct the mistakes that went before. Every set of parents have the opportunity to work together to form a model for a better world and create in microcosm a new community. All parents are then, potentially ‘builders of liberating communities that free love in [themselves] and free love in others.’ “

This spirituality, then, invites me to rest in my new role of parenthood and to see it as the way in which I continue partnering with God in bringing about healing and transformation in my country.

And so, even though I am still in the beginning stages of embracing this spirituality, I am:

… learning to extend grace to myself and be patient as I wade through the hard spaces of transition.

… needing to embrace the routine, and learn to see the holy in the mundane.

I’m not there yet, but I’m giving myself permission to settle into this new spirituality, and to rest in these spaces of growing, of learning, of letting go and adapting to new rhythms, of grace, of patience, of embracing routine, and learning to see anew.

And so I’m praying,

“Lord, grant that I never shun the pain of giving birth to love, nor the fatigue of the effort that nurtures it from day to day. Teach me to value each moment as I value each beat of my own heart, and to find in the pulsing of my blood that distant tempo of birth, of growth, of love and of death which repeats itself over and over through a billion hearts and a million years, and which is the echo of the one eternal rhythm.” —Ernest Boyer, Jr. (p.15)

______________

Image credit: Shardayyy

Author information

Nicole Joshua

Nicole Joshua is a teacher, academic, reflective practitioner and encourager. She loves passionately and deeply and feeding people’s tummies and hearts makes her whole being smile. She is also a reluctant writer and sometimes blogs at Finding And Owning My Voice. Nicole and her husband cannot contain their excitement at having just embarked on their journey to adopt their first baby. And when you're in the same building as her, and you need to find her, all you need to do is follow the sound of her laughter.

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The post The True Work of God? appeared first on SheLoves Magazine.

by Bethany Suckrow

At the beginning of this month, my husband and I celebrated our one-year anniversary of living in our new city, Nashville, Tennessee. It felt like such a victory, knowing we had survived such a significant change and all the obstacles that came with it.

These days, we rent a sweet little brick house on the east side, we have a garden overflowing with fresh produce that my husband planted from seed, we have a home office to work and write in. I have two jobs that I really love, that challenge and grow my creativity. My husband plays in a band, and he’s finishing the final recordings of a new album.

In very tangible ways, this is the life we wanted when we decided to move almost two years ago. My husband and I had been through so much together for being newlyweds; my mom had died and we could feel ourselves orbiting around that tragedy, surviving yet not moving forward. We knew we could thrive, we just had to give ourselves permission.

So we told our friends and family we were leaving. We packed, donated, or sold everything we owned. We quit our jobs and said goodbye to our too-expensive one-bedroom apartment in the Chicago suburbs, and we moved 500 miles south.

It sounds adventurous and rewarding when I write it that way. This is the part where I could laud the merits of “living a good story” or proclaim that everyone should just quit all the things that make them unhappy. Another blogger might tell you that ditching their job and moving cross-country set them free AND got them a book deal, so you should do it too. It seems to be a cultural (or perhaps generational) archetype, these days: millennial girl is completely unhappy with her career path/relationships/tiny apartment, so she quits everything and finds a new vocation that makes her deliriously happy, spiritually enlightened, and wildly successful.

But I think the way we talk about “chasing our dreams” idealizes the process. What often gets left out of stories like these is the long, slow effort of everyday choices. The economic privilege of quitting mediocre jobs is usually glossed over. Or the details about how many times they over-drafted on their bank account get left out of the conversation, because it doesn’t fit the narrative of freedom and success.

So here’s the real-talk version of our first year in a new city:

For the first six weeks after we moved, we had no permanent place to live. For the first six months, I worked as a maid for a residential cleaning service. My freelance writing didn’t pay off the way I hoped. My blog sat empty for months, and then my website crashed. Our bank account went negative more times than I care to admit. There was the weekend that will live in infamy, in which we moved into and right back out of a cockroach-infested apartment. A few weeks later, my car broke down and the repairs were too expensive, so I shared vehicles with my husband and our housemate for a few months. It took several months longer to gain back all the necessary furniture we had sold before the move—a couch, a dresser, a desk, a filing cabinet, a dining table and chairs. It took even longer to regain a sense of stability and confidence in our future.

I’ll spare you the self-help speech of “quit everything and do whatever makes you happy!” Clearly, our move to a city was not the magic solution for getting our ish together. For awhile, the move felt distinctly like failure. Progress was so slow that I felt certain we were actually moving backwards.

When I talk with my friends about the parts of our lives that we want desperately to improve, or when I’m relaying all the overwhelming obstacles and small victories of the past year, I’m reminded:

Wherever we go, there we are. 

Each of us absolutely have permission to pursue lives that make us content and fulfilled. But there is no magic formula, no reset button, no shortcut to a better version of our lives. There’s no quick leap into the future where everything is fine and nothing hurts.

Transformation happens slowly, over a whole lifetime. I think each of us know those deeply-rooted parts of ourselves that need restoration and healing, the parts of ourselves that go so much deeper than a job or a relationship or a city. I knew, though I couldn’t even admit it to myself, that finances were my big, instant trigger for shame and fear and self-sabotage. I knew that my husband and I had yet to be really honest with each other about how deeply the trauma of my mother’s death had affected our marriage. The move to a new city helped us see all of it with fresh eyes; it was like stepping back from an impressionist painting to see the big picture emerge from the chaos. But the move didn’t fix me or us; that’s the work we have to do every day now that we’re here.

I’m proud of us for leaving a life that made us unhappy, but that was only the first step. I’m more proud of the hundreds of days since, when we rolled up our sleeves and got to work building a better life, even when the effort felt impossible.

If our goal is to thrive—to live a wholehearted life that gives us joy and resilience and connection*—then it is the slow, daily work we do that will set us free. No shortcuts, no leaps.

So leave if you need to. Or stay. The lifelong work of self-love starts wherever you are.

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*Reference to “wholehearted life” is inspired by the work of Brené Brown, particularly her book Daring Greatly. If you haven’t read it, Lovelys, here is a link to the Red Couch Book Club discussion on it from last spring!

Author information

Bethany Suckrow

I’m a writer and blogger at at bethanysuckrow.com, where I shares both prose and poetry on faith, grace, grief and hope. I am currently working on my first book, a memoir about losing my mother to cancer. My musician-husband, Matt, and I live in transition as we move our life from the Chicago suburbs to Nashville.

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By Rebecca Laramée | Twitter: @larameereb

“Put down the gloves,” he told me, “and stop fighting.”

Biting back the tears, a silent pause held in their place, my body slumped to my bedroom floor. That day in October, I reached the end of my rope. Exhausted. Depleted. Sucked dry of inspiration and overwhelmed.

“Please, give yourself permission to rest,” he continued.

Jonny is one of those friends who will pick up your phone call in the middle of a movie. He will drive to meet you at the other end of the city in the middle of a snowstorm. He knows exactly what to say and how to say it. But that conversation we had in October wasn’t just Jonny’s voice that I was hearing–it was as if I was hearing God say the words he wanted to tell me all along, “Give yourself permission to rest in Me.”

Here’s the truth about me: I am addicted to over-giving and over-doing. I fear slowing down and being still, perhaps because it brings feelings of inadequacy.

I have never written this down before and it’s hard for me to even publish. It’s hard to admit my weaknesses. But if I have learned anything lately, it is to stop being afraid of looking like a failure. Vulnerability is beautiful and silence doesn’t benefit anyone, so I am learning to be brave and go first.

That day in October, I ached the sadness of a spent soul. I’d been putting in long hours and too much work, balancing school, community leadership, church ministry, family and friends. What suffered were my relationships, attitude, health, and stress level. I spread myself so thin that I gave very little to the people around me, and I put God in my back pocket.

And that’s the challenge: the world tells us that long hours and work matter more than people and God. The world tells us we’re not good enough, that we’re not worthy of rest. There is nothing more painful than walking around with heavy shoulders, burdened from an overwhelmed schedule, believing there is more that God made us to do. I’ve been there. We fear rest, because if we slow down or let ourselves be still, we will see the mess and the root of it.

I can’t recall much else from the conversation with Jonny that day, but I will always remember the words he uttered: “Resting honors God. This is where blessings flow and transformation happens.”

When I slow down, when I focus on saying yes to the right assignments, when I take the time to enjoy the beauty of Creation, or sit down with a good book and a cup of tea, or when I belly-laugh with girlfriends until our sides hurts: this is where self-love takes place and stress levels decline.

Rest is where we are made whole again.

Rest is where we discover the beauty in our flaws and where hopefulness is found. It’s where all the little things inside of us become rewired and beautiful again. It’s where relationships are restored and healthy ones are formed. Rest is where tiny victories are won and blessings are found.

Bill Johnson said, “We’ve been designed as a resting place for the spirit of God, changing every environment that we walk into.”

When my soul is refreshed, I become aligned with God again. We can express those spent parts of our souls, so that we can go out and serve others with the right attitude. This is where we become more like God. Our attitudes, relationships, how we love others and ourselves, is a reflection of the One living within each of us. This transformation in ourselves–from busy and overwhelmed to refreshed and Christ-like–can transform the environment we walk into.

I am learning that people need me and God wants me. They need the best parts of me. Not the exhausted, burnt out, overwhelmed and depleted me. The hopeful, joyful, loving, healthy me. The one who reflects the light of Jesus in the places I enter and in the things I do.

I now give myself permission to rest, slow down, grow, feel, and to be afraid. I am learning to choose my assignments more wisely.

Let’s rest, knowing we are enough, just as God made us.

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*EDITOR’S NOTE: Rebecca recently joined our editorial team to manage our SheLoves Instagram account. We’re thrilled! If you don’t yet, come join us on Instagram at @shelovesmag.

About Rebecca: 

Rebecca Laramée hails from Toronto, Canada, where she works in healthcare by day and leads a non-profit organization called Cotton Words. She spends her nights running miles, speaking to the skies, and reading good books. She’s the auntie to two sweet angels, who have taught her how to love well. Most of all, Rebecca is passionate about helping others be found, and encouraging each other through the messiness of every day life.

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Image credit: Jimmy Brown

The post Rest as Transformation appeared first on SheLoves Magazine.