For Tatterdemalion - Part 3

As I sit clacking keys thinking back over my time at this new church in Bainbridge, my thoughts run sweet. The church is imperfect, yes. I do not idealize it. But for the first time, I feel part of a body. The Body. There are still times when I feel uncomfortably apart by virtue of my uncovered head, my education, and even my love for fairy tales. Fairy tales and other tales spun of fancy might seem like a small thing, but to me they're really not. I know I'm going off on a tangent here, but hey, why not. My blogging style is sitting down and typing. No revising, no planning ahead, really. Just sitting down and writing. So. My take on fiction in two sentences. I've met God in fiction, in fairy tales. I know Him better because of them.

Now back to what I was saying.

Despite our differences, I've come to know the people of this church as family. We're all bound up together now. I love them, and I know that--some of them, at least--love me, too. For the first time, I'm in a place where church can mean brokenness. It can mean honesty and searching out. I think this church has changed a bit over the past several years because of all of the sorrows God has allowed it to pass through in such a short time. A 15-year old adrift in the Susquehanna. A 17-year old gone to her Lord after months in the shadowland between life and death following a car accident. A 10-year old dying of malaria in Benin. These three were each children of families in church. A church cannot bear up under these sorts of griefs without changing. It can only break open, naked before its God. And this is when His real work begins. I walked in right in the midst of the breaking, and I've seen a people groaning for God, crying out to Jesus for rest. My heart's cry joined theirs, and we became family.

During my first year of teaching, in my aloneness I tentatively reached out to the people at church. I'm a shy thing. Writing is immeasurably easier than speaking when it comes to the deepest things, but my tongue gradually learned to let words roll out into the open here and there. I began learning a new culture (the majority of the families at church have Amish or Hutterite backgrounds), a new way of thinking about hospitality. I was also learning to talk with God on my own time, too. It was only when I had no one else at home to know and be known by that I started really understanding this chase He'd been on with me. I thought I'd been seeking Him out, but perhaps I had it backwards. I don't have the heart, the mind, the soul to know God. They are incapable of knowing Him unless He draws them first.  My eyes cannot see His face until He blows the scales off, and my heartbeat cannot join His until I die and Christ lives in me.

The winter of my first year in Bainbridge was a hard one. The dark, the cold, the stress, and the loneliness battered my spirits. I clung to Jesus, reading my Bible and praying each morning in earnest. Not out of duty, but out of a growing love.

It was that Christmas when a dear friend sent me a book titled One Thousand Gifts. To describe it briefly, it's an autobiographical, poetically-written narrative sharing the author's hunt for grace. A friend challenged her to list God's gifts in writing, and to make the list stretch to a thousand. I cannot do the book justice without a longer review, but suffice it to say that it is all about God's grace in the everyday, and the way in which the natural fruit of giving Him thanks for His graces is the joy we spend our lives seeking. After reading the book I began keeping my own journals full of God-gifts (I'm still at it, and am nearly to 2,000).

What I noticed was profound. As I paused in my busy-ness to give thanks, my busy-ness started to reorient itself around Christ. And the joy did come.

The first three gifts I listed were the last gulp of milk in a glass, the pink of grapefruit flesh, and the surprise moon framed in my window. In looking back at my books of gifts now, I see that what I'm writing is changing. The gifts are becoming harder. Some of them are things that break my heart. But the marvel is, I'm learning to count them as gifts because they help me know Christ.

Midwinter, that book--along with my students, my Bible, my prayers, and my family at church--began changing how I looked at life.

I'll never forget the day I was driving to work and, without warning, a wave of love stopped my breath in my throat. I loved Jesus. I didn't just look for Him, talk about Him, read about Him. I loved Him.

That's what I'd been longing for in high school, in college. That breath catching in my throat.

In the spring I at long last made the big decision to get baptized, a decision that had been a bit intimidating to me prior to this point, and still was because of the vulnerability a public declaration required of me. But in late June, I made my way to a pond on a church family's property. The whole church was there. The sun was brilliant, the water crystalline. Trembling, I wept as I tried to speak of Christ. Then I stepped into the water, was dipped beneath it, and rose, dripping. Crucified, buried, resurrected with Christ. The families started singing, lining up to hug me as I wrapped myself in a towel. No, this church isn't perfect. But it is home.

Fast forward through that summer and the whole next school year. I kept learning, kept waking up. Christ kept getting closer, taking on flesh and substance.

I'm leaving a whole lot out. 

But the most important part of all doesn't start until the very end of my second year of teaching. More and more, I began feeling a quickening, an expectation. I was determined to make the most of my summer (this one just past). Through the hours spent reading, praying, walking out in the middle of nowhere on state land feasting on wild blueberries for lunch, I could feel my world stretching out, growing larger. It was a good summer. 

I spent many of my evenings with friends, family, or people from church. Towards the end of the summer, the younger adults in church began meeting to pray every Monday night. I have never experienced prayer like this before, and it's making me realize how little I know--we all know--about what it means to pray. It's beautiful. 

Then, right before school began God started breaking me utterly. I had been praying for hard things if that what was needed to wake me up thoroughly, and He took me seriously.  Through continuing to try to love a neighbor family whose children I work with at school, giving comfort to one of my students whose sister was killed in a car accident just weeks before school, and going through one of the hardest personal upheavals I've ever experienced, I found myself in God's fire. I won't go into detail here. What I will say, though, is that even as I found myself grieving I knew God as my anchor. And my anchor held. I was not alone in bearing my sorrows, for they had been borne long before by Another.

Over the last few months I have learned to long for humility, for complete self-forgetfulness. I've learned to ask for the hard things if it means knowing my Jesus more. I've learned what it looks like to take up my cross daily and follow Him. I've learned that self must be emptied, and this perhaps is the hardest lesson of all. 

Above all, I've learned that Christ is the center.

I'll leave you with a song: Different Kinds of Happy (Sara Groves)

For Tatterdemalion - Part 2

So. 

Two years ago I found myself in Bainbridge, NY teaching students of all varieties, beautiful each one (even when they tried my patience to the breaking point). My job? Elementary special education teacher. 

I'm going to skip over a ridiculous amount of living here out of sheer necessity. There is no way I can capture it all. Suffice it to say, it is impossible to work with children who have backgrounds oftentimes full of more darkness than light day after day without being changed. It is impossible to continue arranging the world around yourself when you see brokenness and need. It is impossible not to seek God's truth when you're part of a system with glaring flaws that stare you in the face when you go to work each day.

I cannot describe all of my kids, all my little lovely ones. They've made me smile and cry and pray and bite my tongue and ask forgiveness when I don't bite it soon enough. They've made me laugh from my belly with their quirks, their questions, their odd little mannerisms. They've made me ache. 

As I was learning how to reorient myself around all the years-old souls in my classroom, I was changing in other ways, as well. I found myself alone, completely, for the first time in my life. Growing up in a beautifully large and crazy family gives one a taste for familial chaos. As the youngest, I'd grown accustomed to the empty feeling that twisted me up inside each time one of my siblings left the nest. We were all Growing Up. Now I was the one leaving. The only difference was that I was the only sister to live on my own. It was new. It was lonely, and it was hard. 

I'm finding more and more that my soul needs hard things. It's only recently that I've begun to have a bittersweet longing for them, too. Christ comes awfully close in the hard things when I have the sense to feel Him. 

While I was getting used to the rhythm of teaching and coming home to an apartment thick with quiet, growing all too familiar with my friend, Five O'Clock In the Morning, and learning to turn the radio on while I ate my solitary suppers, I was also meeting new friends at a new church. 

Church has been on odd creature in my life. I grew up in a Plymouth Brethren church. Admittedly it is a subculture, defined in completely disparate ways depending on who you ask. Ask a member, and they will tell you they are the little flock following the narrow way (what they might leave unsaid is their belief that said narrow way has been utterly missed by...well, by pretty much Everyone Else...they don't have Darby, you see). I'm being too harsh. It wasn't all bad, but it certainly gave me an exorbitant amount of food for thought. Ask a friend of the brethren, and they will tell you that they are seeking to follow truth without compromise. Ask someone from the outside, and they will tell you it's a cult (I've heard it before). Ask an enemy of the brethren, and they will tell you that it's a sectarian, dogmatic group too full of themselves and not full enough of Christ. 

That was my first experience of church. My family was a bit of a wild card in the group, the black sheep of the church, if you prefer. We females wore pants at home... (after giving a horseback riding lesson to his be-skirted sister, I was once asked by a sanctimonious 7-year old, "Do you love the Lord? Then why do you wear pants?!" Funny thing is, now that 10 years or so have passed his sister wears pants, too). Only two of my siblings asked to take communion (something akin to membership in the Brethren); the rest of us loved the Lord but not the Brethren and didn't come forward. None of my siblings married into the Brethren. We went to Christian school where our Brethren doctrines could be perverted (rather than the accepted route of going to public school, where Brethren doctrines could...well, I never quite figured that one out...). Add up all the preceding, and what do you get? A Family Who Does Not Measure Up. 

I always felt that, the not measuring up. 

To roll many years of living into a few brief sentences, as I grew up I watched my siblings take different paths as they found places to worship. Two Baptists, one proselytizing Roman Catholic who sneakily brought the number up to two, one Reformed Presbyterian, one "Mere Christianity-ite," and me. I just want to be like Jesus. Call me what you like. My fiercely Protestant parents who sent us to a fiercely Protestant Christian school had an awful time of it when my first brother converted to Catholicism. We all did. But looking back, I believe God used it to save my disillusioned, intellectual, tradition-hungry brother from agnosticism. Yes. I believe that many of my Catholic brothers and sisters and I are kin, even though we harbor some pretty deep doctrinal differences. But that is another story for another time. 

So. Back to Bainbridge. With this ridiculously checkered theological background (in addition to which I went to a Wesleyan college and met all sorts of what-have-you's who follow Christ...I'm growing weary of labels...), I found myself in a place I never could have even conceived of. 

From my first Sunday in Bainbridge until now, I've been seeking Christ with other members of His body in a conservative Mennonite church. Well--they'd say they're just followers of Christ. Which is good. But they're followers who wear head coverings and homemade floor-length dresses, they're followers who have large gardens, large families, and grind their own wheat. They're followers who homeschool as a matter of course.

So for simplicity's sake, they're conservative Mennonites. 

More to come in the Spiritual Adventures of Debbie in Installment 3! 

The best is yet to come.

For Tatterdemalion - Part 1

Words are slippery things, and my fingers feel clumsy tonight. But I'll give it a go and see what comes of it. I'm not especially good at sharing the deepest parts of myself. I tend towards one of two extremes: speaking through the lens of rationality or veiling things in symbols. That way the soft, hidden parts of me remain invulnerable. But tonight? Tonight perhaps I'll let just a little bit more slip. Tonight perhaps it's important.

So. The highlights, because there are not enough hours this night to write a book. I'm leaving out an awful lot, but the most important parts are here.

Spring of 2011. I had just graduated from college and was in a job-hunting, application-filling, interview-preparing frenzy. My senior year had been a good one, filled with the honey of friendships turned rich by 4 years of searching each other out. It was also a year when I began to feel the tuggings of Christ a bit more persistently. I'd always felt them.

It started when I was young, a 4-year old whose simplicity found Christ good. I said yes to what I knew of Him. It continued on the bus on the way to Christian school when I had no qualms about putting words to this Jesus, telling stories in which He was the hero to whoever happened to be sitting near me on the bus. He compelled my tongue. When I was 8, 9, 10 years old things became more complicated. My mind started getting in the way of my faith even then. Tear-streaked in the dark, I would pad to my parents' room night after night to wake up my mom, desperate for the assurance that I was heaven-bound. Mom would give me comfort, tell me that I wouldn't even be worried about this if I wasn't saved. Somehow that didn't make sense to me. Plenty of heathen felt the worry and chalked it up to something other than God. Or they felt it and stuffed it into the cobwebbiest part of their minds where it could only sneak out at night. Maybe I was a heathen...

In high school the doubts began in earnest. All the classic questions assailed me: is God real? Am I truly convinced of it, or is His reality somehow bound up in the persons of my parents? Would He still be real without them? Do my prayers float up, bump the ceiling, and fall limp to the floor? Is praying just thinking good thoughts about the people I love? What about the sincere Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists who are just as fervent--or more so--than me? Are they all wrong? How can I be right and not them? Am I just a product of where I was born? I was a true creature of my time, full of questions and void of answers. And so it went. Day after day. Night after night. Afraid to talk to my parents. I didn't want to hurt them. Afraid to talk to anyone. Good Christians had no doubts. They just believed. I was desperate for that! There must be something wrong with me...

I attempted, time and time again, to begin reading my Bible and praying in earnest, certain that the broken parts of me would be fixed. But that was all it was: attempts. I would compulsively fulfill this obligation of daily devotions for two weeks, three, four. And then it would dwindle. I would go long stretches without touching the Bible or breathing a prayer, and it left me guilt-ridden. Doubting the efficacy of what I trying to do.

Do you know what the problem was?

All those questions I was asking--they always had different answers. Some days I would believe God was the firmest thing in the universe. Other days I would be tortured by my fear that I didn't think He was real after all. Nothing was solid. I never doubted that there was absolute truth; I merely doubted that I would ever know what it was. One of my deepest worries was that all the Christians who seemed so confident in their faith were merely masquerading. That the Church was all one big facade, that if I knocked it would ring hollow. Perhaps if I had known different Christians, gone to a different church these fears wouldn't have stuck with me. But God planted me in the place He wanted me, near the people He wanted to be part of my life.

Above all, I was disillusioned. My taste of 21st century American church was rancid from long stagnation. I don't mean to make a sweeping generalization. I can only speak for the bit I experienced. But what I experienced was apathy. Lifelessness. A faith that required nothing but my body in a building. And I didn't like it.

My doubts remained my companions as I went off to college. I built deep friendships during my four years. A few of my friendships made no sense; some of my very closest friends had hugely disparate views on a wide variety of issues. But we learned how to listen to one another. We talked about what it means to be human and about what it means to be a Christian. Through these conversations I not only began learning how to listen to--but not be convinced by [my dear friend, if you are reading this you know who you are... and I love you...:)]--"those liberals," but I also began understanding myself a bit better. Half the time in college I felt like my own psychiatrist. But it was good. I learned that yes, I did believe what I was taught growing up. And not merely because my parents told me so anymore.

My senior year of college left me much more convinced of many of my beliefs, but no less hungry for truly knowing Christ, being part of His body in a way that demanded something of me. My mind had gotten in the way of knowing Him, and it was still putting up some resistance at times. But what I really longed for? I longed for Christ to be outside my head. I wanted to know Him in the deep places.

And that brings us back to where we began: spring of 2011, when I had just graduated from college and was in a job-hunting, application-filling, interview-preparing frenzy.

God must have seen all that frenzying and decided I'd keel over if He didn't do something, so He gave me a job. Seriously, though, in His good purposes He knew that the move to a new place, meeting new people, and feeling utterly alone would give Him the space He needed to change me. I do believe I was His before then--starting when I was 4--but I just didn't know what it meant until two years ago.

{Part 2 will be arriving--well, I'm not sure when! If you're still interested, Titi, Part 2 is the encouraging part. It's where things start to get interesting. It's when Jesus starts to come in, all the way in.}

Under the Sun

At first the walls were all I could see. Bare, peeling, grimed by fingers too young to know the trail they left behind. Contained within was my little life. The space was small, but it was Home.

A little thinking, a little stirring in the soul can change things.

The walls grew roots, tangled and labyrinthine. But solid. Immovable.

The walls grew branches, taut and supple. They started to bloom.

I began to hear a sound beneath my feet when I went to bed at night, a slow sound that isn't really a sound at all. It was the sound memories make when they're covered in dust and you start to sweep them off. It was the sound of whispers behind walls and around corners. It was a sound that let me know I was not alone, a reassuring sound.

The first one to come was the robin. Straw by straw, with a strand of yarn and a few threads of hair to give some character, a nest took shape in the crook of two of the lower branches. Not long after I heard the unmistakable cries of young life, hungry for the stuff that helps it grow. Chirps, buzzes, pecks, and chatters began filling my ears during the days. And they all said, "Live. Live, live, live, live..."

______________________________________________

It has been many months since I last posted. I've been too busy living to write. All the words I possessed found their way into journals and into a few close friends' ears. 

But to give the rest of you (all 2 of you) just a taste, life has been shaken out and turned upside down since I last posted. 

I feel at least 15 years older. 

And at least 15 years younger. 

I know only a few people read this blog, and even you have probably given up on me by now. But if you're reading this and you want to know how a few months made years' worth of difference, just let me know. 

Because I want to tell you about being broken and emptied out, about being filled back up, about mysteries, about love and impatience and learning contentment. 

That's been my life for the past few months. Perhaps it sounds pretentious. But I don't mean it so, not one bit. It's just that it's 10:56 at night, and I have students to teach tomorrow. Patience requires sleep. Yes. Yes, it does. 

But, golly.

God is good and real and true, and Christ reaches deep. 

Hallelujah.