Tag: friendships

all the light that came after.

Shoes by the front door, a stone fireplace with stockings that looks sturdy enough to brace my shaky frame against.

I stand there half expecting myself to blurt out the words everyone keeps telling me not to say.

Because the words that pour out of the radio this time of year are, “let your heart be light” and as we know from last year, I’m a sucker for trying to figure out exactly what that means.

My eyes scan pages and pages of my textbooks for final exams and I’m trying to cram in all this information about how the first stars came to be. The authors tell me about what happened when they exploded, about all the light that came after.

I keep thinking about God and how His first words of creation were “let there be light” and I know there must be something to that.

I keep wondering if I explode or speak if some kind of light comes after.

Because maybe the magic of this whole season, the reason that we’re all obsessed with Hallmark Christmas movies is that they are scene after scene of people saying a bunch of horribly strung together sentences of things we’ve never had the nerve to say.

I’ve never felt I lacked nerve, but I’ve hoarded silence in the moments that seemed to matter. I’ve felt like a lover of lost causes in moments when it felt improper to say the thing that sits heavily on my shoulders.

Timing. Timing has never been my strong suit and it always seems that Christmas comes at precisely the time in which I have an armload of things I need to say and a crowd full of people and thoughts saying, it’s probably not the best time.

Because Christmas is cozy, quiet, a soft piano in the background of a department store. It’s chunky scarves, rosy cheeks, passing babies, wondering why everyone doesn’t get together more often. It’s silent nights, holy nights, it is good words written and stuffed inside gold foiled envelopes.

But I am the last minute shopper, donkey locked out of the stable, little off-beat drummer girl. I once demanded to be the angel in the Christmas play holding a stuffed beagle. I am the Barbara Robinson novel come to life. I am the girl who once nearly cut off her circulation and had a purple arm trying to buy Christmas presents in a Christian bookstore.

All is calm, all is bright. I am not good at calm. Sometimes I get the bright, but I rarely get the calm.

I find that I’m so occupied these days with sewing up my mouth, putting on my Christmas best, and hoping that no one notices me leaning against this fireplace holding back all the things that Ralph and Hugh (the writers of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas) missed when penning that song. Like sometimes gathering faithful friends and dear ones do not make my troubles feel miles away or out of sight. Sometimes, it makes me have to bite my lower lip because I do not know how to let “the fates allow”. Who are these fates? I do not know if I want them to allow. I think maybe I want to step in and decide some things and say some things before these fates get tangled up in this whole thing.

How am I going to have myself a merry little Christmas when this whole thing is left up to these vague fates and I’m just supposed to be hanging some star and figuring out what it means to “let my heart be light”?

Let your heart be light? I keep going back to that. Is that up to me or those fates? If it’s up to me, I want to say all these things that people tell me not to say. But then again, what if that makes us all heavier?

So then I’m supposed to hang some shining star. Well, that seems possible. I read about God and how light was His first priority. My textbooks then tell me those first stars exploded into all these other stars (according to science).

Well, then I think maybe if I just start with one thing, just one bit of light, more will come.

So maybe this blog is just about hanging that one star. Maybe it’s about saying that one thing, throwing out that one light and hoping that it explodes into a thousand more little lights.

We all have heavy things weighing on us and we all want this moment, this time, this season to be magical. We want it to be healing, something that brings us hope and helps us believe in goodness again.

Maybe you’re like me and you’re a little shaky, holding some things that you wish you could say, fix, change, or make happen. Maybe you’re a little lonely, tired, terrified, broken, confused. Maybe you just wish you had more time or capacity to enjoy it and feel it all.

Whatever it is you’re holding, I’m not going to tell you that all your troubles are going to be miles away. Your troubles are where they are. I’m not going to tell you it’s “a bright time or the right time to rock the night away” (mostly because I don’t even know what that means). I’m just going to tell you that I don’t know if any light will come after we say things we wish we could say. But there was the best Light that came, that stayed, that’s still here. It was here before the first words of “let there be light” were ever even spoken. And I don’t know what fates Ralph and Hugh were talking about, but I can assure you of this, the Faithful one who gives us all this light, well He’s tangled up in all of it.

A couple thousand years ago, He hung another star and regardless of what our shoulders might hold, we have to remember all the light that came after. It allows us to all have ourselves a merry little Christmas, even in this, even now.

 

 

 

Celebrating and the Weight of Grace

In the days after we celebrated, I spent most of my hours painting.

I am not a painter.

But that month my hands stayed stained with shades of blue, my shirts dyed, brushes dripping over the sink. I left my apartment only to grab takeout and steal from the sky another hue to replicate.

The secrets we were keeping were ones that I eventually realized my hands could not tell. No matter how many strokes I made with those brushes, the truth was still trapped inside.

A few weeks later I sat in the corner booth of an old Italian restaurant in my hometown. The person who sat across from me was the first person to ever really hear the whole truth, the terrifying, gut-wrenching, honest-to-God truth. Out of my mouth came the thread that threatened to unravel everything inside of me—the truth about how disappointed I had turned out to be.

Disappointment, that was a word I was so afraid to say. It felt so heavy, so dark, that was a shade, a hue that I’d refused to paint. Admitting disappointment felt like defeat. And even though I knew nothing would ever turn out the way I had once hoped, admitting disappointment for even a second had never been an option.

But the night with the strings of lights, sentimental words, and the seconds of forgetting the past flung me back to reliving that reality: sometimes we paint the perfect picture in our minds and wake up one day to realize that picture is never going to be possible.

I had to relive that over and over again, that the world I’d painted in my mind would never quite be the one God would paint on the canvas that is my life. Every time I celebrated another milestone, I would also wince at the bitterness I felt that God was using a shade, a tone that was different than the one I would have chosen.

Then came Room 176.

When the sweet lady with her yellow paper gave me that location, I never had the thought that it was going to be a place that would change my life. Four white walls, but that’s the place that God pulled back a piece of the curtain and said “I made all the colors and I mix them just right.” 

If I had gotten the life I tried to paint, I would have been standing somewhere else.

Those words are the hardest to swallow. As I now reflect on the greatest moment of my life to date, I break my own heart with the truth that God knows if He leaves us to work out our own lives, we will take away the greatest gifts He gives. Sometimes He breaks our hearts now to keep us from missing our dreams later.

I think of the moments when I’ve sat with God and told Him not to use that brush, that color, that shade, that I’m disappointed with His pace, His technique, His progress. I think of that day in the old Italian restaurant and my disappointment. I think of the birth of my nephew, the moment when I laid down my paintbrush and felt my knees buckle at the weight of God’s grace.

In these days we’ve been celebrating, I haven’t picked up a paintbrush. My hands have not been stained and I haven’t gone to that old Italian restaurant and cried in the corner booth. I’ve still thought about the promises we broke, the disappointment I’ve felt, and the picture I had in my mind. Honestly, I still thought about my favorite shades of blue and for a split second wished God used them more. But last night, I rocked that baby boy to sleep and started to fall in love with shades and hues that before those moments I’d never even seen.

 

 

Confessions of a Former Chronic Fixer

I came to you.

The silence we swam in that day felt like hours, in that tiny room we created tension that would last for years. Your ocean eyes were locked on the floor, my arms stayed crossed in anger.

Last week, in a room where the walls were the same kind of dull and the carpet a similar texture, I sat across from someone asking for my help.

I thought about you and I thought about how I came to you and gave you my plans. You never asked for them. You never asked me to fix it.

Confessions of a former chronic fixer: until recently, I would still apologize to you under my breath when seeing all the things that followed that day, the things that broke your heart. I’m sorry I couldn’t fix it: those have been the words to continuously rattle off of my ribcage and settle into my soul.

Then a pair of eyes your same shade, the one that Sherwin-Williams calls Flyway Blue, came to me.

I finally figured out what you’ve been trying to tell me across the years and miles. I finally heard you, over all the things we yelled and the things that I stacked there in my mind since that day. You never asked me to fix it.

It took loads of people trying to fix me, years of trying to fix myself, and a room that mirrored the one I stood crying in that day to know that my apology should be: I finally hear you.

Sometimes we don’t want someone to fix it; sometimes we just want someone else to know that it’s broken.

Another confession of a chronic fixer is that we aren’t trying to fix you, we’re trying to fix all the things that broke you. We’re trying to stop it from happening again. We are, in a far too subtle way, trying to tell you that your pain is our pain.

It can often sound like us yelling stop and please don’t go that way! Sometimes it looks like us giving harsh directions. Sometimes it us not knowing quite how to hold your brokenness because it is leading to our own.

But I finally heard you, after all these years.

And being afraid of that brokenness was on me, not on you. Letting your brokenness lend to my own heartbreak, right or wrong, was a choice that sat only with me.

As for your choice to be broken, to stay broken, that was and will always be yours. I’m sorry if it seemed like I tried to take that away from you. If it seemed like I was trying to rush you out of your pain.

Confessions of a former chronic fixer: I’m learning how to sit with questions and with pain. To let someone come to me. To offer them a bandage, but not force them into a sling. To let them cry, cry with them, swim in the silence without constructing tension. I’m learning how to lay the map and compass down, sit in the passenger’s seat, offer help only if asked. I’m learning not to yell over the radio. I’m learning not to yell. I’m learning how to not grow impatient if we stay parked longer than I expected. I’m learning that flyway blue eyes are more forgiving than I’ve believed them to be.

I’m learning that sometimes it’s enough to know someone is broken. Sometimes just knowing and staying is the most loving thing we can offer.

I wasn’t trying to fix you: the thing I couldn’t say and you couldn’t hear over my hurried riffling through my toolbox. At the end of the day, through everything I tried to sort through, that is the thing I should have said the loudest. Those were the words you were asking for and are now the thing I hope you someday hear. You were and are not your brokenness. You did not need fixing and I’m sorry if all you got from me was a girl with her hammer and nails, handing you an instruction manual. I’m sorry if you heard in my words and felt from my stance that you were the problem, that I was trying to deconstruct and renovate you.

Confessions of a former chronic fixer: Someone came to me. I knew they felt broken before they came. In the days leading up, everything inside of me wanted to chase them down, but I thought of you. So, I waited. Then, I stayed. I heard them out. I stopped shuffling through the toolbox, the clanging sound quieted, and finally I was able to hear.

Afterwards, for the first time, I didn’t have to stop and apologize under my breath for all the things I wanted to, but never had to fix.