Last night as I stared at my screen to finish up Day 17 on INFPs & ENFPs, all I wanted to do was cry & pour out my heart of what I’m dealing with. I did not want to write about Myers-Briggs (I know shock!). I wanted to talk about how hard it isContinue reading “Day 18 :: Pumpkin Pecan Scones & Needing to Be Still”
Category Archives: Stories & Struggles
Father Wounds Lay Deep (Part Five)
There I was standing across from my husband to be, in the old church sanctuary. Palms sweating with what seemed the hottest June day we’d seen in years. Rehearsing what would follow in 24 hours. Our pastor went through the mechanics of who stands where, when vows would be spoken & how he wouldContinue reading “Father Wounds Lay Deep (Part Five)”
Father’s Wounds Lay Deep (Part Two)
Read Part 1 of the story. “Hi, what’s wrong?” I asked. Something had to be wrong for my brother to be calling. “Well…(a bit of hesitation in his voice), dad’s in jail again,” he replied. “What?! What happened? So he’s not going to be here is he?” I angrily responded. Willy informedContinue reading “Father’s Wounds Lay Deep (Part Two)”
Father Wounds Lay Deep
This week I read a very well-written piece on forgiveness & father issues. I strongly believe that father wounds can either be the biggest hindrance or the biggest encouragement in the way we see ourselves & function as adults later in life. They also serve as a catapult in where we will land in relatingContinue reading “Father Wounds Lay Deep”
Casimir Pulaski Day & My Firstborn
I’m an auditory learner. I thought I was a visual, but realized today I’ve misdiagnosed myself. This would make sense for my love of music, learning all the lines of the play I was in in third grade, & my ability to repeat most things when put to song or via storytelling.
Music..it’s a powerful tool, which is innate to most humans. It stirs emotion in the deep crevices of our life. It reminds us where we were & what we were feeling when a specific song is playing. It brings people together & tears others apart. I received my degree in History with an emphasis in Early Modern Europe. In fact, my thesis was on the complications music brought into the newly formed Protestant Church (tore people apart & brought others together).
Well, for me music is everything beautiful, sweet & good. I’m listening to Sufjan Steven’s ‘Casimir Pulaski Day.’ This song floods my mind & my heart with some of life’s deepest of emotions.
Ben had just bought Steven’s album “Come On Feel the Illinoise.”. It was late December of 2006 & I was about 38 weeks pregnant with our first child. Not quite knowing then how life altering giving birth would be, then mix in bringing a baby home whom you’d be responsible for it’s sustenance (makes for mental instability at times).
This album played non-stop. As I drove in the car, listened to my MP3 player, & when we were at home together. The song talks about a young girl getting cancer of the bone, which is depressing, especially when you’re husband points out after our daughter is born, “This song makes me sad, because I think of our daughter dying.” not really what you want to tell a postpartum mama.
But, this song now reminds me of how quickly she’s grown up. There have been times when I wished, “if only this could go more quickly!”. I’m reminded of all the fear I felt as a new mama, not knowing how I would make it through her first week, how I was going to get her to latch on…or…how would I make it through the dark night. I recall days just prior to sunset praying, “God, you’re my strength, I believe but help my unbelief,” over & over. I mustered all I could to not cry & think, “I don’t love her like Ben does, but I’m her mama.”
So as I listen to this song, I think of that scared mama sitting in the bathroom crying. I think of missing out on the beauties of my firstborn’s first weeks & how I wish I could take it back. But more importantly, which is now, I think of my dear, sweet, one of kind dreamer, firstborn daughter who will be three years too soon and how I want to bundle her up to stop her growing. I want to always hold her like I did the first day I met her. I want to cherish her beauty, her intellect, her quirks…everything that makes her the original handiwork the good Lord made.
This is what music does to me. It stirs up strong & powerful images, feelings, emotions, smells, tastes…creating stories for my life’s storybook.And I guess that’s why her middle name is Storey, which means ‘strong & powerful.’
My Soul Finds Rest
Have you ever walked through a trial wondering if you could make it through to the other side? It feels as though you’re swimming in the ocean sea and you’re barely able to keep your head a float. It’s the feeling of pure hopelessness. Your heart is wretched right from you. You can barely breath. When you finally muster some words up, all that comes out are tears. Or when there aren’t tears, there is anguish, anger & pain.
Recently my family has gone through this sort of wretched pain. The kind that makes you wallow with those deep guteral sobs of relentless agony type of pain. And then the things in which normally give me solace, like cooking, talking, coffee, reading, or writing, barely scratch the surface of healing the wound.
Then, I think about hospitality and I think of all the four letter curse words I want to yell out at people who complain about how their technology isn’t serving them well, or how they’re uncomfortable in the heat, or some other half-assed reason to moan about how their lives aren’t exactly perfect. I don’t want to serve these people. I don’t even want to serve my own family, because my soul feels as though it has been ripped from me and then smashed down with a sledgehammer. Even trying to make dinner last night was impossible, as I stared aimlessly into the fridge then sat on the floor and started to sob.
And without going into details about the nightmare my family is going through (specifically my brother & sister-in-law), I began to realize a lot as I sat there crying with my fridge door wide open. I was carrying this burden of disaster upon myself and it was way too huge. I was listening to my mother grieve, listening to my sister-in-law grieve, and trying to help my mom make sense of it as well. The reality of this nightmare finally hit me a couple days later as I sat with the cool air rushing out of the fridge hitting against me. I couldn’t listen to another ounce of troubles, or I would explode. I needed to let it out, and the best seat in the house was my kitchen floor.
I realized that hospitality is about giving a voice to people, through listening to them when no one else will, but there are times when it’s good to stop listening. I found myself hearing this song, “My soul finds rest in God alone, My Rock & My Salvation.” What I realized is I kept trying to listen and help, while bearing the brunt of the burden on my shoulders. Finally, my shoulders gave way and the floodgate of tears began to pour, along with my heart. I kept singing this one line from the song (because that’s really all I knew) and understood that God was calling me to rest in Him. Well, what does that look like–right?
It dawned on me that I needed to take a Sabbath from listening and dealing with the pain. I could take a day to rest in God alone and not deal with being a hospitable daughter, sister, and friend. I can take a day, in order to be a host who guides my guest to the cross. So today as I rest in God alone and in my Sabbath of rest, I can walk confidently in knowing that there is hope for the future. I can sit and cry on my kitchen floor, but it won’t always be a puddle of tears, but a puddle of spilled milk will come in the future. I don’t think it will necessarily be tomorrow, or maybe it will be a mixture of spilled tears and milk (because I do have a 2 1/2 year old running around) for a while. But for the current moment I have to rest in knowing that my soul finds rest in God alone, in order to stay a float.
Shalom for Supermom
There are places within my life that creep out without any announcement of its arrival. As I’m simply sitting, walking, going along my day, I’m hit with this sense of distress. It’s like a suffocation that begins in my toes and slowly makes it way to my neck. I feel overwhelmed and disconnected. Disconnected with life. Disconnected with being a mom, being a wife, or simply being. I want to run far away to release, but even doing that doesn’t stop the disjointed feeling within me.
This would describe how I felt on Saturday. Both girls napping and me folding laundry with Ben sitting in the chair next to me. I was irritable, frustrated, angry, annoyed and probably any other negative adjective you can think of to fill in the blank. I knew my fuse was super short and I couldn’t put my finger on it. All I knew is something was out of balance. I began to tell Ben about my frustrations. How I felt like I was endlessly working on our home (household duties that are neverending, i.e. feed girls, wash dishes, do laundry, clean & sweep, etc, etc, etc). I felt like I wasn’t being appreciated for the work I did. I was feeling like there were expectations being put upon me that I felt were unfair, or even unrealistic. As I was talking (being the extrovert that I am) out how I felt, whether it be rational or not, it was as if I was peeling away layers of an onion coming to the core of the real issue at hand. The cause of this suffocation. As if I was Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader clawing away at my skin to release myself from this metaphorical dragon skin.
As Ben listened to me and let me simply vent, I was able to scratch through the surface and two truths emerged from the core of these feelings. One was what Ben said, (as I paraphrase) “you don’t have to be Supermom, Superwife, or super anything. Remember it’s like what Rob Bell wrote about, ‘you need to take your Superwhatever and take it out back and kill it.” The second was me realizing I simply needed grace.
Now it’s Monday and I’ve been stewing in these words and feelings today. I pulled out Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell to find that chapter on the Superperson image. If you’re not familar with Rob Bell, he’s the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan, making of the NOOMA videos, and in my personal opinion, is very refreshing to hear or read.
In the chapter, Tassels, in Velvet Elvis, he speaks about a time Mars Hills was growing and growing and he found himself in a closet between the 9:00 and 11:00 am service holding his keys, wondering how quickly he could get out of there. He was suffocated, like many, from trying to do it all. He was trying to be Superpastor. You know the image, doesn’t say no to anyone, needs to be the model father & husband, needs to live up to the potential that has been inscribed for self, basically a facade. No one can survive living a facade for long.
Let’s translate that to my feelings on Saturday and what I was really feeling. I would take something good in Scripture and slant it a bit, like Proverbs 31. A wife of noble character. As I looked at this description, I began to think how was I this wife and mother? How was I becoming “my ideal?” How was I living up to “my potential?” How was “I” filling or meeting my husband’s needs? How was I being a self-sacrificing mother? I mean, is it not a good thing that I have chosen to stay at home with my children, because it’s the best thing for them? I still believe that and I wouldn’t start working outside of the home to find “my grace,” but I was missing the mark.
Back to Rob Bell, he writes about the tzitzit appearing in Numbers 15, which are the tassels on the corners of the garment. The Israelites were to wear these tassels as a physical reminder to remember the commands of the Lord when they looked upon them. To not just remember the Lord’s commands, but where they came from. Not just where they came from, but who they were made to be. And not just who they were made to be, but how they were meant to live life (meaning for modern day: was I prescribing an anecdote that simply didn’t fit God’s for my life?)
What’s interesting about the tzitzit is how Jesus as a good Torah abiding Jew would have been wearing these on his prayer shawl when, the woman who was bleeding for 12 years touched the corner of his garment. But even more so is what Jesus said to the woman, “Go in Peace.” Too often peace is described (as Bell puts it) as “without conflict or absence of conflict,” but it’s so much more. It’s easy to find in Bellingham bumper stickers that say, “Know War Know Peace, No War No Peace,” which describes peace as a picture of all nations holding hands in unity. This picture misses the point.
To know peace is to know restoration. Jesus isn’t merely wanting to give us a peace without conflict or war–it’s deeper. Jesus was telling me on Saturday and today and constantly, “Kamille, go in peace, have shalom, walk in the total presence of my restoring, redemptive peace I’ve given on the cross. Not just in physical realities like the woman I healed, but the mental, emotional, all-encompassing peace. Let all of you be restored.” It’s this holistic beauty in the cross.
Salvation is more than simply saying a prayer and having a ticket to ride for free. It’s allowing Jesus to move through all of me. To have true shalom moving through me in all that I do. It’s the restoration of all things through Jesus. On Saturday, my way of doing things was breaking down. I had this image in my head of what “spiritual” looked like, what a “good” mom looked like, what a “loving” wife looked like.
Here Bell puts it very well: In addition, there is always a mystery behind the mystery. There is a reason we do what we do, and often it is the result of something that is the result of something that is–you guessed it–the result of something. What happens is we try to fix things, but we stop at the first or second layer. We’re stressed and so we make adjustments in time management. But a better question is, why do I take on so much? But an even better question is, why is it so hard for me to say no? Or even, why is that person’s approval so important to me?
But it’s even deeper than that and it’s not until you dig up everything–that you discover the core problem. The core problem is walking away from Shalom and walking in sin, which usually comes from a lifetime of lies I’ve believed about myself. I have believed in the facade of who I need to be and it’s an insult to the creative God who made me.
Instead, this is my job, “the relentless pursuit of who God has made me to be. And anything else I do is sin and I need to repent of it.” My job is not supermom, superwife, superbaker, superdaughter, superfriend, or whatever super fill in the blank I’m putting on myself. I need to kill the “super” image. I need to rest in God alone and get back to finding my identity in Him. I need to have my own tzitzit in my life to bring me back to the restoring grace and love of my Savior. I need to wipe out the voices of even good intentioned people in my life, because it detracts me from my job, “the relentless pursuit of who God has made me to be.” I still have a long ways to go in this journey, but I hope you’ll join me in it. I pray that we will find true shalom in our journey & we take our Superwhatever’s out back and kill them.
Backdoor Hospitality 