Category Archives: Embodied Faith

When You Feel Like You’re Just Treading Water

Posted on August 1, 2012 | 10 Comments

These past few weeks, I drove to Massachussets, swooped across states to Chicago, flew to Florida to start a new job, and returned, all on the heels of a big decision for my husband and I. We’re selling our house, figuring out new job set-ups for both of us, and trying to fit in as much good friends and family time as possible before we leave.

And I can’t say that I have been very healthy or balanced in my approach to braving the transition. I am, however, learning as I go, and have found a few things to be helpful:

Take care of your body. I found this gem of insight from Scottish scholar and evangelist Henry Drummond:

“If you would know God’s will in the higher [realm], you must begin with God’s will in the lower; which simply means this — that if you want to live the ideal life, you must begin with the ideal body. The law of moderation, the law of sleep, the law of regularity, the law of exercise, the law of cleanliness — this is the law or will of God for you. This is the first law, the beginning of His will for you.”

In other words, eat well, rest, exercise, take your vitamins, make that chiropractor appointment you’ve been putting off because you’re too busy (I am completely writing to myself here). These are the essentials that fly out the window as soon as we feel stressed, but without them, our work and our faith will suffer the effects. We need to care for our bodies so that we can use them for the good work to which we are called.

Strike a balance. Sleep, good time with my husband, reading and writing, and even just sitting are important. And if I don’t make time for them, I will fool myself into thinking that I have to be wired up 24/7. But my days will be far more enjoyable and far more effective if I don’t cram them full with “to do” items.

Follow the advice of Psalm 127:2: ”In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat— for he grants sleep to those he loves.” It’s a false assumption that by sacrificing our rest and well-being we can get ahead.

This often means exercising the discipline of saying “no” to an otherwise good opportunity. We can’t do it all. Don’t take on an extra project that will have you working late into the night, even if the compensation is tempting.

Let go of guilt. I’m generalizing here, but it seems to me that women have a particularly strong tendency to sink into the guilt of what we haven’t accomplished in a day. But I want to feel good about what I’ve done at the end of the day, and I’m realizing the difference is determined not by tasks, but by outlook. If I am realistic about what I want to accomplish, then I am more likely to feel content about what I am able to do. And if I don’t get something done, I am learning to give myself grace.

When you’re busy and stressed, what is usually the first thing to go? What ways have you found to keep a healthy balance? 

 

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This Week’s Writings and Readings

Posted on June 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

“Thinspiration”  Yesterday I wrote for RELEVANT on the stomach-turning carousel of comparison I get swept up in by Pinterest, magazine, ads, etc., and why we need a new body model (which comes from a surprising place).

I’ve been immensely enjoying The High Calling’s “Everything Matters” series, exploring the idea from the vantage points of vocations across the spectrum that our work matters and creates culture. Today I’m privileged to contribute a few thoughts on why book marketing is not “dirty work,” but actually participates in an incarnational movement of Word becoming flesh, in Everything Matters: Book Publicity as Cultural Act.

This month when I was traveling, I missed out on both reading blogs and writing posts. But now that I’m back, good grief you people put out some good stuff! These are three posts that have fed and challenged me this week, and hope they will do the same for you:

  • Image Journal’s Good Letters blog is simply one of the best. And novelist Sara Zarr’s contribution this week, Writing on Empty, came just at the perfect time. Read it, and remember it.
  • Why the Bodily Resurrection Matters–Especially to Women by Sharon Hodde Miller is something I sincerely hope all my sisters will  be able to internalize–that our bodies are not shameful, and that the resurrection affirms that God cares about us as whole people, body and soul.
  • If you’re an overachiever like me, you might tend to over-commit, and then get miserable when you’ve taken on too much and it’s too late to back out. Christianne Squires has a word for us in her graciously challenging post, Living a Rhythmed Life: Having to Say No.

What have been your favorite reads this week, whether online or in print? 

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Travel Stories: Grace on the Go

Posted on June 25, 2012 | 10 Comments

Two weeks ago on a trek to Image Journal’s Glen East workshop, I pulled off the road at a welcome area to grab some iced coffee. But what I left with was much more than that.

The social commentary of the American coffee line could keep anthropologists busy until the next transit of Venus, especially at travel plazas, where everyone is just trying to get from one place to the next. We want a toilet, a caffeine fix, and then we want to get on our merry way.

But this coffee line was going nowhere fast. The three customers in front of me had not moved in twenty minutes, despite the fact that there were about seven employees busy behind the counter. To be honest, they didn’t look like they knew what they were doing.

The woman at the front finally snapped. ”I’m been standing here for 20 minutes,” she said, “and you haven’t even taken my order yet.” Her earrings dangled furiously. A dash of lipstick dotted her teeth.

A tall teenager hastily prepared her coffee, fumbled over the cash register, and handed her the drink. “All I wanted was a cup of coffee,” she said, and her wedge sandals clipped across the travel plaza tile off to a car, off to who knows where, and who knows why she had to get there so fast that common courtesy would weigh her down.

When it was my turn to order, I saw why the line was taking so long. The two young employees at the counter, dark-haired, unsmiling, had what I thought were name tags from a distance. Scrawled in magic marker, they read, “I’m from Kosovo.”

Kosovo. The country that is often named in the same sentence with genocide, war, death toll. Who knows what losses they have sustained? And we, Americans on the go, tapped our feet in line, irritated at such a small thing as having to wait for an indulgence the rest of the world is rarely afforded.

These boys had come from a home country severed by violence, flecked with blood and hate. We were just concerned with one creamer or two.

“What would you like?” the tall one asked me in stilted English. I realized these boys were new to American money, they talked to each other in their own language, checking their math on this foreign coin before giving back each customer’s change. They were new to everything here.

Waiting for my coffee, I realized that we never know where anyone we meet on the road is coming from. Not everyone has a name tag citing their dark history, their private wounds, their stain of regret. Every stranger and neighbor with whom our lives intersect is a mystery. Sometimes they will tell us, I’m just coming out of a messy divorce. Or, I’m on my way to recovery from this addiction. But more often than not, they won’t. The refugees will appear silently among the put-together parents, talented artists, earnest students, and we may never know what pain they are trying to put behind them.

Maybe, knowing this, I can better infuse traveling mercies into this journey–at the travel plaza, and in the sprawling road ahead that is open before all of us.

When he handed me my coffee, I thanked him, a few English words I hope he understood.

This post is part of Prodigal Magazine’s Travel Stories series, read more stories here or add your own! 

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Why the Skull & Crossbones is More “Christian” than “Pirate”

Posted on June 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

A few years ago I spent a weekend at JPUSA, the community of Christians in Chicago (who host the Cornerstone Festival) who live together in the old Chelsea Hotel and call themselves “Jesus People.” And during my time there, I saw a lot of skulls.

Skulls adorn the hallways, the door frames, and the forearms of the people who inhabit them.  Five doors down from my room there was an unapologetic mural of a skeleton, squarely behind a baby gate and next to a sign that warned in loud purple Crayola, “Nursing Urijiah! Piz come back. ” All over the community, there were instances of this odd juxtaposition of life and death.

I wondered if the skulls were some kind of talisman, like some cultures have to ward off evil spirits, but when I asked one of the women on staff about their significance, she laughed.

“Well,” she said, “People here are kind of obsessed with death.”

She explained to me, “The skulls and skeletons are representative of the knowledge that there’s more.  We anticipate death, in a way, because we are eager for our new bodies and the new life ahead with Christ.  We are living in a dichotomy between this world and the next, and we are very aware of that.”  So there are skulls: a reminder of our mortal decay.  She also told me that people at JPUSA tend to live in the awareness that, in the city, they are surrounded by the living dead.  They are among the spiritually destitute and dying.

I’ve often felt this restlessness, of living in the cracks between Eden and Heaven, which some call the age of the in-between, the already-not-yet of the kingdom.  It can be exasperating: is the kingdom here, or is it to come? Christ has come into our world and has promised victory over sin and death, but we still live under its affects while we wait for His return. And it can make us impatient in the waiting, while we see the world around us in such need of redemption.  We were created for eternal life, to bear divine image and have a face-to-face relationship with our Maker, but sin ruptured this paradise and now we live in the imbalance, caught between what was supposed to be and what is now utterly broken. Even the earth is a victim of this tension, “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Romans 8:22).  Even the earth and the roots of mountains straddle this gap between the kingdoms.

There is a dichotomy at hand. We are finite beings with eternal life or death at stake. Perhaps the reminder of our mortal frame, whether skulls and bones or just knowing that there is more to come, can lend urgency to our days to live well, to reach out to the dying, and to eagerly await the life ahead.

How do you navigate this tension in your daily life and work?

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When We Fight the Hand that Feeds

Posted on May 23, 2012 | 2 Comments

Following recent advice to play with words in today’s post. What words are you studying recently, challenged by, learning from, at play with?

Scholars will tell you that Bethlehem, the city where Jesus was born, has a double meaning in Hebrew, that a slight turn of the tongue is all that lies between “The House of Bread” and “The House of War.”

It was through these strange crossroads that Jesus entered the world, and also how He left it: breaking bread with His disciples, on the brink of war. In Bethlehem, the Bread of Life was given for the world, nourished by sweet milk, and presented at the temple, where His parents were told that their child had come bearing a sword. Its sharp edge would divide the hearts of many, and cause the rising and falling of the people of God. And so the infant-God was born, bringing bread, bringing war.

I wonder if we are not all born in this field of contradiction, alternately receiving and resisting the miracle food that would truly nourish, fill, and sustain. We are inconsistent creatures, sprinting back and forth between grateful collection of grace and fighting the very hand that feeds.

Is this not the very life of faith? The sacred ground where we meet Him made the House of Bread or the House of War by our own choosing, determined by the shape of our hand in approaching, open palms or clenched fists?

Perhaps this is also our heritage— a life divided by bread and war, and faith, the tension wire threaded between.

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Tomato Seedlings, Dave Ramsey, and Sustainability

Posted on May 17, 2012 | 4 Comments

The week we got our tomato seedlings and herb sprouts in the ground is the week I finally sat down and read Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. Both things speak to me of the value of being self-sustainable in a nation underwater in debt.

Like a lot of people, my husband and I have school loans, and we’re committed to scaling them down to zero. I’m willing to get a little crazy like Dave Ramsey suggests to come out on top.

I’m grateful that my husband and I were raised similarly in the way we were taught to handle money, which makes it so much easier in our marriage to spend and save together. It would be difficult if we disagreed on this point, because we do a lot of weird things, such as making our own chicken stock and granola, choosing not to own a TV, going through a Christian non-profit for insurance cost sharing, and not owning credit cards. We both love to go out and try new restaurants and go to the movies, but we can do these things comfortably because we don’t have monthly bills for cable, smart phones, or stuff bought on credit.

In the past two years of marriage and learning to live within our means, I have noticed a few things about making, growing, and doing things by hand the slow way.

It’s empowering. Our backyard garden plot is small, but war-weary generations before us called it a “victory garden” for a reason. It is empowering to create something from scratch that costs pennies, that is fresh and free from a bar code. It’s empowering to know that we can feed ourselves on what we grew by hand, food that is not reliant on a system–farmers, factory workers, machines, airplanes and trucks–to find its way to my plate. And as a freelancer subject to nearly 40% self-employment taxes, guess how good those Italian green beans taste.

It teaches me to be resourceful. Our American concept of “need” is becoming more and more subjective. I’ve found that it is healthy to look within what I already have and ask, what can I use that is already within reach? I am proud when I can re-purpose a yard sale item instead of buying new. I am learning the difference between consuming and creating, and it teaches me to take a second look at things I already own and get creative, to see fresh possibilities.

It trains me in the art of cultivation. This was humanity’s first call–to enjoy and cultivate a garden. I love growing our own tomatoes, making my own peanut butter, and getting crafty to decorate my home because the process teaches me to better appreciate what has been provided. In these simple tasks, I get to participate in the divine action of creating, and it reminds me, better than swiping a card, that all of it is a gift from God’s hand.

Do you see value in being self-sustaining, financial, spiritual, or otherwise? How do you pursue this in daily, simple ways?

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Has Our Attention Span Stunted Our Spiritual Appetite?

Posted on May 15, 2012 | 18 Comments

For our wedding, my husband’s boss gave us a copy of A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken, writing slant inside the cover, “Zach and Steph, their hearts have so much to teach. Learn and live.”

It was not an easy book to digest. I picked it up, and put it back down, for months. But I always came back, because if ever there was a book that was the result of opening a vein on paper, this is it.

A Severe Mercy is deeply honest in a romantic throwback style–a couple falls in love, buys a sailboat and breaks a bottle of baptizing wine on its bow, they travel to study at Oxford, living cheap in a small flat with a hot pot, and befriend C.S. Lewis, who is instrumental in their eventual coming to faith. But perhaps most romantic, and most heartbreaking, of all is the moment when Sheldon realizes he is no longer Davy’s first love. The jealousy he feels for her Savior is very real, unclouded by years of faith grown familiar, still new and sharp. As Sheldon says himself, “This book is, after all, the spiritual autobiography of a love rather than of the lovers.” 

And that it is. Through painful renegotiation, Sheldon comes to terms with his beloved’s new first love, and he slowly wrestles to make it also his own.

I was saddened by a review of this book by a woman who disliked it because she felt the “C.S. Lewis plug” was a cheap marketing ploy, played up beyond the truth of their acquaintance. This seems telling about our expectations of books and authors today. We expect them to pull out a bag of tricks. And tragically, somewhere in the process, bad art has conditioned us to be suspect of good art.

A Severe Mercy goes against the grain of the books that are published today, but it is one of the most honest books I have read in a long time. It threads an organic grace through its pages that I did not find as calculated. It is a slow read, not a page-turner, but something to savor. I can fly through the Hunger Games in a weekend and get caught up in the grip of its plot, but I won’t underline a single sentence. My copy of A Severe Mercy is jagged with ink, prose I could not bear to lose.

Neither does the book hook the reader in by dazzling solutions to felt needs, but it ministers to something even deeper, like those people you hear about who unknowingly carry around head injuries for years and finally receive healing.

Our attention span is shrinking, yes, but I have a theory that our capacity to be awed remains the same. We need what is sacred and what is beautiful as much as ever, only our hunger for it has been stunted. Sheldon writes it best, “If, indeed, we all have a kind of appetite for eternity, we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in a society that frustrates our longing at every turn.”

Thank God for books that are harder to read, that stretch the limits of attention and distraction, that cultivate spiritual imagination, that strike a deep nerve that provokes us to longing.

What books, or art, or movies, or other mediums have you encountered recently that have challenged you in a similar way?

 

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The Best Thing My Parents Gave Me

Posted on May 10, 2012 | 8 Comments

In honor of Mothers Day this month and Fathers Day next…

It is said that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. In my family, I was raised on both.

Strawberry-picking, shucking fresh ears of corn on the side porch, and pumpkin bread so good it’s become a family legacy, were supplemented with the delicious cultivation of a child’s imagination through stories.

Bellies full from the table, my sisters and I next hungered for a bedtime story. We were tucked in by words–Jonah and the Whale, Noah and the Ark, the Feeding of the Five Thousand, as well as The Princess and the Goblin, A Wrinkle in Time, The Magician’s Nephew. We swallowed them whole, and they fed a budding spiritual imagination that was only beginning to grow.

Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies author Marilyn Chandler McEntyre was once asked, “Where did your love of writing begin?”

“At the table,” was her answer.

It is also mine. It is where my parents urged me, “Tell us a story,” to answer the standard, “How was your day?” dinner conversation question. It is where I learned to listen well, to ask good questions, to savor both a taste on my tongue and a fitting phrase in my ear. And to laugh.

It is where we read aloud after dinner, sighing and sitting back in our chairs, crumbs of cornbread and table salt flung wide across the tablecloth as evidence of a good meal.

Perhaps I am no longer a child, but my days are still anchored by these two very things. I work all day with words in the life of a freelancer, and come 5pm I roll up my sleeves to create in the kitchen. These are the rituals that lend structure to my days, and I rest in them, thrive in them.

I can’t imagine a higher task for parents than to teach their children to hunger for that which is good, noble, and true. Not just for bread, but for words.

In their gift, I am doubly fed, and doubly blessed.

 

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The Christian Tendency to Make It All Better

Posted on April 25, 2012 | 18 Comments
This will be a short post today, while I continue to process the past week at the soul-stirring Festival of Faith and Writing. More on that later. But for now…

We have this tendency as Christians to absorb the shock of tragedy and then, without missing a beat, rear our heads and say, “BUT”–God is good. There is hope. I’m better for it now.

But sometimes it doesn’t get better. And sometimes it’s not good.

And it’s as inappropriate as wearing white to a funeral.

Grieving is okay. Sackcloth is okay. Pain is allowed. It is even merited.

And yes, redemption can break through the tomb like it did two thousand years ago. But have you ever wondered why Jesus was in the grave for three days? Do you think His resurrection would have been as powerful if He’d popped back out, fully healed and alive, after 5 minutes?

Sometimes the resurrection isn’t in view yet. And we just have to sit in our sorrow and keep our eyes open.

There’s a difference between redemption and a teachable moment. We have this incredible hope in Christ, and sometimes it’s hard to resist the urge to shout it out. But I hope in my living and storytelling I will treat redemption reverently, without making it cheap, without making it premature.

Your thoughts? 

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How Easter Sets the Pattern for Great Storytelling

Posted on April 9, 2012 | 10 Comments

When I read, I can enjoy following one solid plot line until its resolving end, but in my opinion what makes for really excellent reading is when a story weaves not one thread but three:

  1. The immediate story of the narrator, well-told
  2. The story of the personal life of the reader as drawn out by parallels through personal identification
  3. And the story of Christ’s unfolding drama of cosmic redemption, as the author and the reader both are led to walk through, inhabit, and reenact His life, death, and resurrection

I was reflecting on this storytelling craft this weekend, as the church moved through Holy Week. As hundreds of thousands of people this weekend walked through the greatest story ever told, culminating in Good Friday, Silent Saturday, and Easter morning.

My parents often took my sisters and me growing up to a passion play, and every year I seemed to forget that the play ended just as the sun set, with the sealing of the tomb. It killed me that the story left off suspended in such high tension, everyone walking silently to the parking lot to go back home. But I have since learned of the soul’s need to dwell in the funeral hour before rushing ahead to the resurrection.

Like the hinge of success for the perfect joke, timing and pace matters in storytelling. If we get stuck in the grief of Good Friday, the liminal space of Holy Saturday, our hope will crumble like the dust. And if we skip ahead to the hallelujahs and the empty tomb, our victory becomes shallow.

The Good Story requires us to walk faithfully, thoughtfully, through each scene. It requires us to witness the violence of Good Friday, the disturbing details of which the gospels do not censor, and certainly aren’t family-friendly. It requires us to wade through the shadowlands of Holy Saturday, unsure and in between. And then it invites us to experience resurrection.

This is the kind of story I want to read, live, and worship.

What stories, books, testimonies do you enjoy that have exhibited this redemptive story pattern? Does this kind of story development resonate with you, or not?

P.S. If this kind of story appeals to you, I invite you to check out a new book project from Moody Publishers and STORY Chicago which I’m excited to be working on behind the scenes.

 

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