Category Archives: Personal Growth

I Didn’t Go To Church For 3 Months. This Is What I Learned.

09 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by in For the Love of People, Love, Personal Growth, Uncategorized

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Its Sunday morning.  I am sitting in the place where Americans gather to laugh and love and converse about life, the place where lives are encouraged and transformed for the better, the place that has come to be one of my favorite symbols of comfort and rejuvenation.  Yes, it is a beautiful bustling day at my local Starbucks.  You walk in, you pick your version of hope in a cup, you walk out feeling a little bit wiser and just a little bit more prepared to handle the troubles of the day.  Isn’t that what Sunday mornings are for- grabbing a little hope in a cup to take with you for the rest of the week?

I didn’t go to church for nearly 3 months.  That might not be shocking to some, but for me that is a huge statement.  I have spent most of my post-college, adult life highly involved in everything church related.  However, this past winter due to some uncontrollable circumstances combined with transitional timing and life in general, church was not a place in which I could be found.  After a few weeks I became aware of my absence and I began to take note of some changes that were going on in my spiritual life.  I started questioning why, as Christians, we go to church.  I started questioning why I go to church.  What is church anyways?  I know the answers I have been given from a life time of sermons, catechism classes, and Sunday School teachings but I needed to discover the answers for myself.  So I decided to talk to God about it as I trekked through an unusual winter sans church.  These were my findings.

  1. Church can exist outside of the a building.

Now I know that wherever 2 or more are gathered in His name then Jesus is present but during my dry spell from  church I actually experienced a completely different idea of what church could be.  It was so simple and reminded of how Jesus would often meet with people throughout the bible.  It was all about the food.   Friends, family members, and people we had just met would gather around our dining room table during the winter of no church and we would commence in some pretty spectacular discussions on faith, the bible, and pretty much everything you could think of that we experience on a daily basis.  You know…. Life.

I remember one particular evening sitting at the table after a big enchilada and Spanish rice dinner with some guests and thinking to myself that the dinner conversation was one of the most spiritually stimulating discussions that I had participated in for a long time. The conversation was honest.  I wished that I could have this all the time.  Wouldn’t it be great if this was how church happened always?  But of course, that is exactly how church began.  Jesus didn’t always sit in a building and wait for people to come to him.  He went to people’s houses and shared meals with them.  Even after Jesus had left this earth, His disciples would gather together in their homes and just talk.  They would share about what Jesus had done in their lives and how they experienced Jesus in their personal lives.

2.  You can still have a fruitful growth/ healthy walk with Christ without going to the physical building of a church.

No church did not equal no relationship with God.  In fact, I was clinging to my faith even more during those quiet months.  It was uncomfortable.  It felt wrong to not be going to church as if I was going to have my Christian card revoked.  I was constantly thinking about it.  So, I was constantly praying about it and journaling and reading.  I spent a lot of time alone, with nothing more than my bible, my journal, a cup of coffee and my conversations with God through prayer.  I wish I had the time to share with you right now all of the things I discovered about Jesus,  myself, my faith, and the world around me during those months of alone time with God.  We’ll just save those stories for another time.  I had such a fear that I would withdraw from my faith if I did not go to church consistently.  It was a refreshing relief to realize that church is not at the center of my relationship with God.  Nope, GOD is actually at the center of my relationship with God.  I think in a lot of ways attending church and serving in church ministries and participating in church activities had become a point system for me.  I had always been warned about that but never thought it could happen to me.  Those months with no church were a reset button on my spiritual life.  It was a time for God to clear away some of the gunk that was crowding our relationship and get my eyes focused on what was actually more important.  Him.  Which leads me to my next observation:

3.  Without the distractions of church your eyes are opened to be able to see the world around you and the people that God loves who aren’t going to church.

What am I going to wear?  What am I going to make for the church potluck?  What is going to be my lesson for  Sunday school class?  These were just a few of the questions that would fill my brain in previous seasons of churchgoing.  Notice that God is not actually a part of any of those questions.  But I was serving.  Right?  Serving has always been one of my arguments as to the necessity of church.  We need to be serving others and church always needs volunteers.  This is true.  But you know who else needs volunteers?  THE WORLD.

The winter church- solitude brought with it acquaintances with non-church goers.  Real people with very little to non-existent faith in a God who can bring peace to your life.  People with real problems, addictions, and pain.  People that churches had turned away in one way or another.  People who did not feel comfortable going to church because the church goers would ask you to take off your hat or to cover up your tattoos or to pretty much change your entire self before you come to the altar.  People who Jesus said to love and to win over with said love.  I guess, you could count all those months without a steeple  as research as to why people do not go to church.  Plain and simple: the church can be a very judgmental and daunting place sometimes especially to someone who is not accustomed to the culture of church.

When I wasn’t busy with churchy activities I really began to observe how there is this group-think mentality that is plaguing our churches.  It is this nebulous bubble that, if you are not careful, you can find yourself trapped in.  I really never noticed it before and I really didn’t even know that I was a part of it, but during those 3 months I could really see it clearly because I was on the outside with the outsiders and looking in did not look so good.  This is what it looked like.  As followers of Christ, we adopt all of these other beliefs that really have nothing to do with Jesus dying on the cross for our salvation.  These beliefs might have more to do with politics or cultural preferences.  After a while, each church begins to appear homogenous  in that its congregants tend to agree on  ideas not in the bible.  The average outsider cannot tell that there is a line between biblical truths and personal preferences because everyone seems to agree on just about everything from dress code to radio stations to political party to social graces.  The outsider sees this and thinks that being a Christian means knowing better than to wear a hat in church or knowing which way to vote.  To the outsider it is overwhelming and it is clear when you don’t fit in.   We wear these beliefs as badges and present them on social media.  These “belief badges”  have nothing to do with the love of Christ but we excuse it as love or pride even though it looks and feels unwelcoming and exclusive.  We relish in the us versus them mentality and when we go to church we join the congregation in cheering each other on and shaming the behaviors of the very souls that we claim to be praying for all the while failing to see our own shortcomings and forgetting to first take all of our concerns to God through prayer.

Yeah, I’m guilty of joining in on the group-think.  The idea is that we can all band together and encourage each other’s soapboxes that distract us from the sermon on the mount which says, “but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,”  Mathew 5:44.  We claim that we pray for our enemies and we are happy to post on our social media of choice that we are praying for our enemies.  But what about Mathew 6:1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.” and Mathew 6:5-6 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men.  Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.”

There is a real world out there that needs to know what love truly is.  In my research, the world thinks we look angry.  Maybe I now sound angry and judgmental too.  Like I said,  I am guilty of all of this as well.  I have been convicted that this cycle is not helping the world it is actually driving people further and further away from Jesus.  I’m ready to try something new.  You too?

4.  You fall in love with Jesus all over again.

Ok,  I might have gotten really passionate about that last one and I hope I didn’t lose you because this one right here is my favorite.  When I didn’t go to church for 3 months the best thing happened to me: I fell in love with Jesus all over again.  I don’t know, maybe the time away from the rows of pews was like a vacation for me and  my savior to relax and enjoy each other’s company.  Since I was often alone with nothing more than my prayers it became easier to pray throughout the day.  And while I was praying/ meditating throughout the day I began to see more and more how I need Jesus in every second of my life.  Left to my own devices, I am nothing but selfishness and mischief.  I already knew that I need Jesus every single day of my life but because I was in a state of heightened awareness my self-reflection was highlighted.  In evaluating myself all I could think was thank God I have my Jesus.  Thank God I have a savior who saves me from myself!

5.  I miss church as a community.

I’m still not exactly sure what is at the root of #5.  Maybe it’s the Catholic school girl in me that just adores systems and organization and the routine of going to church on Sundays.  Maybe it is because the new testament speaks of gathering together to pray for one another and to worship together.  Maybe it is because I really missed hearing about God from someone else’s perspective.  Whatever it is, I really missed going to church as a family.  Please understand that this list is not an encouragement to not go to church.  I did not purposely skip out on church.  I think it was a gift; a short season of my life for me to reflect on why I do what I do and a season to listen to what church needs to become for me.  It was a time of preparation.  I’m pretty sure I already knew some of this but I needed to be reminded and my thoughts refreshed.  It’s one thing to be told these things, it is another to experience it firsthand.

All across the country churches are changing, adapting to the next generation.  I have been to churches  held inside of coffee shops.  I have been to coffee shops housed inside of churches.  Sometimes I wish that church could be as simple as the experience of going to the coffee shop.  You walk in at your own pace wearing whatever you just so happen to be wearing because you are going to a place where you know you will feel comfortable.  Someone pours something wonderful into your cup or places something delicious on your plate.  You sit down with a small group of people and listen and speak and pray and savor.  Perhaps you take a moment to enjoy the music that plays in the background.  You pour out your heart as Jesus is poured into you.  Pass the sugar and cream please- I could get used to that!

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Living in The Fog

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in A Leap of Faith, Blogging 101, Faith, Living Unbound, Personal Growth, Quirky Stories

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Blue skies, soft breezes, mild temperatures, not a cloud in the sky for miles ahead of us- this is how we began our journey.   Kids in the back, sister as co-pilot, armed with the best playlists and snacks- we were ready to cross the great state of Texas.  We got this.  Classic road trip.

Then, there it was.  A wall of clouds stretching from north to south as far as the eye could see.  The wall cloud was so tall that my sister actually thought it was a mountain range.  The ominous wall seemed to be rolling towards us.  It was something out of an apocalyptic movie.  I had never seen anything like it and I have seen my fair share of snowy days after living in Minnesota for four years. It was enormous.  It was dark gray. And we were heading straight for it with my two babies sound asleep in the back.  From the outside there was no way of telling what the driving conditions would be like from within the strange cloud wall.  But if we wanted to get home we were going to have to go through it.  There was just no getting around it.  I mean, we were literally in the middle of the desert.  Nowhere to go but through.

As soon as we entered the cloud wall it was as if someone had waved a magic wand and had frozen everything in sight.  It would appear that queen Elsa had just passed through.  Just seconds before we were looking at sunshiny skies over dusty cacti and suddenly everything was frozen solid.  There was no snow or rain.  It was as if the air was too frigid to mess with moisture and instead everything was thick with white ice.  The scene reminded me of what my freezer looks like if you leave the freezer door open all night- everything coated with a thick layer of white ice.  It was beautiful.  It was quiet.  It was frightening.

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Maybe it was the vulnerable position we were in, two women with small children idling through a sinister mist, but I quickly realized that I felt very alone. It was the kind of alone in which you have this desire to go back home but you are not exactly sure what you mean by “home.” I thought about my beautiful house and my loving family and it was immediately apparent to me that I was being ridiculous. How could I feel alone when in reality I am surrounded by loved ones and I have a beautiful home?

Except that it wasn’t ridiculous.  For the past couple of years my little family has been on a challenging journey of sorts.  We have experienced all manner of frustration and doubt as we continue to pray and have faith that this “thing,” this goal will somehow come to fruition.  We don’t know how this dream will be realized or how long it will take or if we will even live to see it.  Let’s just say that we kind of feel like Noah at times.  Here we are building our ark even though we don’t exactly know why because we have never seen rain.

That is the journey that we had been on when I was fortunate enough to experience the crazy winter weather in the middle of the desert.  My soul was aching with melancholy doubt; I was just trying to hold onto the dream when I first got glimpse of the ice cloud wall.  When I began to feel alone I took a hold of those feelings and harnessed them to make sense of this journey that really feels like a ship lost in the fog.

What I came up with is that on this journey you never really know what is going on in your life.  You really have no control and that fog of not knowing what lies ahead is scary and seems dangerous.  It makes you just want to get back to a place of comfort and security.  And so you try to find that security.  You look for that warm fuzzy blanket or your favorite lovie- something, anything to cling to.  But sometimes there is no way to attain comfort and security in this world.

Sometimes you have nothing to turn to and nowhere to go but through.

Through the journey.

Through the unknown.

That beast of not knowing must be faced and conquered and tamed. And yes, you should feel a little scared and vulnerable.  The vulnerability heightens your senses; it pumps you up with the adrenaline you need to be brave.

You just have to have faith that God will bring you through this journey.

Not long after the drive through the freak polar vortex of Texas, my husband and I took a drive down the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Francisco.  It has always been on my bucket list to experience the majesty of the great giant Sequoia Redwood trees.  While driving through the redwood forest I felt claustrophobic and insignificant.  I was sick to my stomach from the winding roads and change in air pressure.  At times the forest was so dense that the trees completely blocked out the sun.  It could be a sunshiny day but you would never know that in the redwoods because the trees had conquered the sky.

I had a hard time taking a good picture of the Redwoods because they are just too tall to fit into frame.

I had a hard time taking a good picture of the Redwoods because they are just too tall to fit into frame.  “The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.” John Steinbeck

Naturally we drove past huge cliffs and bluffs that dropped into the icy Pacific ocean.  The cliffs were breathtaking and catastrophic looking- an insurance company’s nightmare.  Each wave that crashed upon the black rocks was a warning to stay away.  So of course this meant that we just had to climb down the rocky cliffs despite a rain storm and warning signs that we were entering tsunami hazard zones.  But who could resist getting a closer look at the ocean filled with all manner of mystique?

Here's hoping the tide doesn't come in!

Here’s hoping the tide doesn’t come in!

In places like that, places in which nature demands your attention and announces its strength by simply being there, I am reminded once again that I really have no control of my life.  I could run my day on schedules and events and budgets but an gigantic wall of ice could just go ahead and sweep through my life and commandeer my plans for the day. Or, a tsunami could just come on through and knock all of my kingdom down just as it would knock out all of those stately redwoods. Just like that.  And of course I know this already but I am hard headed and sometimes I have to be reminded.

Those of us who have chosen to be on this journey.  Those of us who have our heads in the clouds. The dreamers.  The crazies.  Those of us who keep the faith and muddle through the unknown focused on a mission.  We have to know that we are not alone.   It’s going to be murky and it’s going to be a windy road and a little scary at times- you might get nauseated- but we can’t be afraid to take that first step into the cloud wall.  We can’t be afraid of climbing into the tsunami hazard zone.  We must trudge on through. Something you have never seen before can be a little scary like the height of the redwood forest or the fluorescent looking moss on the trees in Oregon or like an enormous cloud of ice in the middle of a Texas desert.  We just have to go through it and maybe allow ourselves to get swept up in the mysterious beauty of the unfamiliar .  Perhaps if we take the time to admire the beauty of the unknown we will begin to feel more like we are home.  Maybe we can learn to live within the fog.

I have never seen fluorescent looking moss on trees before. I don't know what kind of trees these are but they were everywhere in Oregon.

I have never seen fluorescent looking moss on trees before. I don’t know what kind of trees these are but they were everywhere in Oregon.

Yours on the journey,

Elizabeth

A Minority in a Land of Majorities

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in A Leap of Faith, For the Love of People, History, Living Unbound, Maid's Room, Personal Growth, Uncategorized

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A Treasured Family Tradition: Great-Grandma was a "Soldada" During the Mexican Revolution

A Treasured Family Tradition: Great-Grandma was a “Soldada” During the Mexican Revolution

Ferguson.  Immigration reform.  Racial unrest.  The country has been restless and angry and hurt.  And so have I.

I am restless because there is not really a name for the confusion that I feel when it comes to these things.  There is no way to pinpoint the awkwardness that comes from being a minority in a land of majorities.  I wrestle and grieve like everyone else, no matter what side you take.  I look at my house and sometimes feel worse.

Built circa 1896 in north Texas, I can take my guesses as to the muscle that labored this house into fruition.  Perhaps my suspicions are wrong.  For some reason I do believe that the original owners of this home were good, honest, and kind people.  Lets call it my gut instinct. Despite my hopeful gut, I have to be realistic when it comes to the circumstances that surrounded this corner of Texas all those decades ago.

Race was an issue then.  Race is an issue now.

We live not even two blocks from a historical monument that marks the place were 41 men were hanged (allegedly the largest hanging in US history) for treason during the Civil War.  They were accused of being unionists and were denied a fair trial. I pass that monument nearly every day.  It turns my stomach into knots. Not because I am angry at the people who hanged them; no- we must forgive them. The monument puts me in an uneasy state because it reminds me of the cost and the struggle of millions who came before me all so that I could be a college educated, Mexican-American woman who owns property.  The responsibility to live a life that is honorable to their sacrifice is heavy.

The Great Hanging; photo cred: Wikipedia

The Great Hanging; photo cred: Wikipedia

Many days, I walk through the halls of this house studying the intricacies of the crown moldings and the stairwell banisters and the artistry of the stained glass windows and I wonder who the original owners were.  What would they think of a Mexican-American couple buying their house over a hundred years later?  Like I said, for some reason I think they were humble and open-minded people.  Something in the way these walls were built whisper of a family who were content to be considerate of their fellow man.  Even still, would they be surprised to see my darkish skin?

Surprised is exactly the word that describes the faces of people when they find out who owns this big, white house.  Its like they are expecting some older white couple to live here because, lets be honest, that is usually the population of people who own houses like ours.  We stand out.

Yes, we stand out and it often feels like we stand alone.  But, that is not necessarily a bad thing.  I like to think that we are pioneers in a corner of the world that is still growing and grappling with these issues.

I grew up in a city in which everyone looked like me.  I never gave much thought to being a “minority.”  It wasn’t until I moved to Minnesota in my early adulthood that I really began to feel the gravity of the race issue that veils our country.  I guess, you don’t really know what it is like to be a minority until you actually are one.  I know that sounds obvious but, surprisingly, most people who are in the majority are not familiar with this concept or maybe they are but they have never experienced what that feels like.  I know I used to be one of those people.

Had we bought a house in a cute little subdivision, I don’t think I would be thinking about these kinds of issues so frequently.  This house forces me to weigh in on the heavy issues of race and class because I have become part of the history of this house.  This house has seen the suffrage movement, World Wars I and II, the end to segregation, the feminist movement, MTV, the first African American president, etc.

Bottom Line – the chances of a Mexican-American couple owning a house like mine in 1896 were pretty slim, if not impossible.  America has come a long, long way and I am proud of her for that.  I am thankful that I do not have to live my life under a constant barrage of threats due to the color of my skin.   I am thankful that I don’t really have a lot of stories revolving around hate.  My experience has been blessed by people of all different “colors” who are content to being kind and decent human beings.  For the most part, the people I have met throughout my lifetime know that it is wrong to judge a book by its cover.

There is a room in this house that I assume must have belonged to “the help” back when the originals moved into this house.  The crown moldings are distinctively plain with no ornate detailing whatsoever.  The floor in that room seems to be in the worst shape and it is the room that is adjacent to what would have been the washroom/kitchen area back then.  From my very basic knowledge of history and how families operated circa 1896 I can deduce that the originals must have had hired help (aka live in nanny or cook or maid or farm hand or all of the above).  Now it is our family room in which my kids run around barefoot and hang hand made ornaments on our Christmas tree and where they are always expected to clean up after themselves because we are not living in 1896.

Sears Arlington House Plan from the Sear's Catalog 1919 is almost exactly like our floor plan. I spy the "maid's room" Photo cred: http://www.searshomes.org/

Sears Arlington House Plan from the Sear’s Catalog 1919 is almost exactly like our floor plan. I spy the “maid’s room” Photo cred: http://www.searshomes.org/

I tend to feel anxious when I think about the “maid’s” room in my house, and the monument of The Great Hanging, and that this house might have been built by men who were in seriously unfortunate circumstances.  They are the ghosts of Christmases past that remind me and inform me of how much things have changed for a woman like me. They make it real.

Perhaps this house was actually built by very well paid men who never felt discriminated against.  That may very well have been the case.  But I’m willing to bet that somewhere else in America in 1896, a house was being built by men who were degraded and downtrodden.  That is the reality of those painful times and my heart aches for them.  Because I am reminded of that every day, I feel a great responsibility to live a life unbound and purposeful.  I don’t really know what that will look like for me but I remain the ever hopeful optimist on the hunt for my way of honoring the blood, sweat, and tears of all the pioneers who have proceeded before me.

I googled "Mexican Suffragettes" and this was one of many images that came up- Soldadas from the Mexican Revolution.

I googled “Mexican Suffragettes” and this was one of many images that came up- Soldadas from the Mexican Revolution. Brave pioneers in my people’s history.

The Life and Death of a Wallflower

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by in For the Love of People, Personal Growth, Uncategorized, Wallpaper

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Cotton candy flora

Cotton candy flora

Are you brave enough? Because I am not.

I like to hang back in the background and comfortably blend in like the big, fluffy, pastel flowers that adorn the walls of my house. Fitting in is just too important to me. It always has been.

But I just can’t sit still anymore. I’m restless. There is a big bad world out there with so much heartache and pain. People are hurting day in and day out. People have lost hope. And here I sit pretty in pink all nice and cozy on my wall. Don’t make a sound. Don’t move or someone might notice. Blend in. Wear the right clothes and hairstyle. Take your kids to the right functions. Say the right things on social media. Be on time.

But I am always late. And the right clothes and hairstyle never look right on me like they do on her. And my kids are usually the ones who make a scene at all of those functions. My place on the wall is getting old and dusty.

I have been living amongst the floral wallpaper for so long that it is starting to grow on me. Sometimes I actually think it looks pretty. Gasp! Then I come to my senses and realize that while it may look feminine and pleasant, the wallpaper really is outdated and just has no business in this 21st century world.

Denial. Been living in it for some time now concerning my wallflower status and people pleasing tendencies.

It’s hard to go against the grain; take a stance; stand out; be brave; journey into the unknown; step out of your comfort zone; try something new; chase that wild dream.

I fear that everyone will laugh at me. Perhaps everyone is already laughing at me just for dreaming about the dream and sharing it with the world.

But I am learning.

You have to get to that point in which you don’t care if anyone is laughing at you. You just have to get over that hump and expect that you will be ridiculed and make peace with it and move on.

At the end of the day I want to teach my children to be brave and to not be held back by the fear of fitting into society. How can I do that when I am so often crippled by fear? I have to get them a wallpaper scraper too and teach by example. They need to see mommy and daddy scraping off the old and trying something different to change our little corner of the world. If I want my kids to be brave enough to fight the good fight then I have to be brave enough to fight the good fight.

I’m tired of being the wallflower that watches as others claim and conquer their dreams. I want to have a fabulous story too. I don’t want to be held back by my shoe collection and social media profile. I need to get off this wall and into the light.

There is this dream, this passion that is burning bright red. It’s not my dream. It doesn’t belong to me. I don’t own it. It is bigger than that. This dream cannot be contained by four flower speckled walls and a roof. Well, at least that is how it feels when it is thumping and pounding in my chest and squeezing my heart.
Impossible. Echoes in my head. And it is true. It will be impossible to ever even coming close to the dream realized if I continue to be content with the status quo.

Daily, I waiver between painting over the walls of wallpaper in our house and just scraping it all off and starting over from scratch. I don’t know the answer to that question yet but I do know that I am tired of looking at the cotton candy flora. We have already scraped a significant amount of wallflowers off the wall but we are nowhere near being done. Those pearly rose and teal colored peonies are a constant reminder to get out of the past and into the present. I hear those flowers crying out to me, warning me that if I don’t act soon my fate will end up like theirs. I will be doomed to live a life of pretty stillness: complacent and stagnant like the images of women from decades past. Not me, nuh uh!

For too many years I have listened to countless stories of brave people doing amazing things and all the while I am thinking, “oh that is nice, thank God for people like that who are willing to take risks for humanity. People like that are so inspiring but not everyone is made for that kind of greatness.”

People. Like. That. Where does that idea come from anyway? Those “people like that” are really just normal, every-day people who made a choice to step out of their comfort zone and think creatively and live bravely towards a life uncommon. They got off their wall, took a deep breath, and while holding their dream in their hands plunged into the great unknown.

They were brave.

We don’t have to wait for “people like that ” to change the world. We can all have a part of a greater story if we are willing to let go of some of the lesser things in life. What are we waiting for?

Seriously though, what are you waiting for? What is holding you back from that dream bubbling inside of you?
What are your thoughts? Comment below, we are not meant to do life alone.

Living on the edge because it just has to go. No place for complacency.

Living on the edge because it just has to go. No place for complacency.

Nowhere to go but up

Nowhere to go but up

Enter into our house of flowers

Enter into our house of flowers

Tilling the Earth

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Backyard, Personal Growth, Uncategorized

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Cultivate- to till and prepare (land or soil) for the growth of crops: 2. to plant, tend, harvest, or improve (plants) by labour and skill; to prepare or prepare and use for the raising of crops; also : to loosen or break up the soil about

Cultivate- to till and prepare (land or soil) for the growth of crops: 2. to plant, tend, harvest, or improve (plants) by labour and skill; to prepare or prepare and use for the raising of crops; also : to loosen or break up the soil about

The sound of the razor blades tore through the air running shivers down my spine. The buzzing held my disturbed thoughts suspended in air enveloped by clouds of dust. A great dissonance had moved into my soul. There was something cruel about watching all of that lush green grass being ripped out of its comfortable earth.

Our backyard was a mess- uneven and hazardous for our two small children to play in. My husband, Emmanuel, got a hold of a tiller and our friend, Richard, volunteered to help with the labor. For two days we could hear that tiller ripping up the grass and smoothing out the plateaus that were often the cause of so many scraped knees .

Just a few days after we finished the tilling project we made a trip to my hometown. We have made the pilgrimage across the great state of Texas to visit my folks many times but this time was different. This time there was the looming reality that this just might be my last trek across the desert. My mom and grandma were both preparing to move out of their homes and my siblings were scattering across the world living out their lives. It seemed that no longer would we have our home base. Everywhere I turned my loved ones were moving on into a new chapter of their lives. To me, all of this moving and shifting was getting out of hand. It felt like the tectonic plates were rumbling in anticipation. An earthquake seemed inevitable.

Because my mom and grandma were moving out of their houses, there was a lot of purging going on. Boxes and boxes of mementos, keepsakes, and junk lined the hallways of both houses. Pretty much everything had to go. My mom had piles of stuff already ready for me to take back home with me but there were other things that, unless I rescued them, would become garage sale fodder. Our library of children’s books and the bookshelf that they sat in were amongst the items ready for the chopping block. Well, I wasn’t going to let that happen.

I walked into my mom’s garage and amidst clouds of dust I began packing up the books. It made me think of my husband and Richard tilling our backyard. As the blades of the tiller loosened up the soil little puffs of dust littered the sky and their clothes. At the end of the day, they each looked like Charles Schultz’s character “Pig Pen.” And now here I sat as “Pig Pen” with a dusting clothe wiping off Snoopy, Cinderella, Spot, The Cat in the Hat, Angelina Ballerina, and all the rest of my childhood friends. Each book unearthed a swirling of memories. I saw myself reading certain books at my grandma’s house. I saw my mom reading my favorite books at bedtime. I saw my dad assembling and painting the bookshelf. I saw myself buying books for my sisters as souvenirs. I read inscriptions to me, to my sisters, to random people I had never even heard of. I found my sisters’ names in the Dr. Seuss books. My name was in a few books as well as the names of my mom, my aunts, and my step-brother. My childhood unfolded before my very eyes as I flipped through the pages. It made me laugh inside to think that at one time these books were such a precious part of the fabric of my daily life until I grew up and moved out and on with my life.

How long had these books sat here in the land of forgotten items, otherwise known as our garage? About four layers of dust- that’s how long. I really had forgotten all about these books and really didn’t even care about them and now here I was reclaiming them, saving them for my sweet children. They would once again become a precious part of the fabric of my daily life as my children would rediscover them.

As I sat in my mom’s garage, my head was a dusty fog of melancholy nostalgia. It was an end of an era. Things would never be the same. Even the garage was evidence of this fact. I could always count on the garage to be this never-ending pile of random junk and now it was nearly cleared out except for books and the ghosts of Christmases past.

The truth was that the earthquake had already hit my family. We were going through a painful and personal family crisis. Perhaps I was holding onto those books so tightly because I was really trying to cling onto my siblings, my parents, and my childhood. Perhaps we were all just trying to hold onto each other.

While digging through the dusty books I was really digging into my past. The Great Tiller of My Life was ripping through my memories like the tiller had ripped through the grass. What was once buried was brought to the surface. Oh there were so very many happy memories of a girl who had an idyllic, blessed, and even blissfully sheltered childhood. The good times were so plentiful that they far outnumbered the difficult times. But I could not ignore the painful memories of early adulthood that were uprooted as well. Through the great purging of our family’s junk I could see evidence of the conduits of magma that eventually erupted into the volcano of pain and suffering that my family was now experiencing. So much emotion was buried in our garage and now out of necessity we were all forced to reconcile with certain truths that had gone unnoticed for so long. It brought my family closer together as we braced ourselves for the aftershocks.

“Why was God allowing us to go through this?” I wondered angrily. Why would God reveal all this ugliness and beauty simultaneously? Why would he force us to deal with such horrible and painful truths that we had all buried deep inside of us? Through prayer, I was instantly drawn back to the image of our backyard that lay waiting for fresh pallets of grass. That pretty yet uneven grass that had been hashed through and ripped up was now a soft pillow of rich soil just waiting in hopeful anticipation to grow new life.

God was cultivating us.

He was preparing us for something new and fresh. All this digging would not be in vain. All of these things were unearthed to bring truth to light and healing in preparation for the next chapter in our lives. I could acknowledge the hurtful parts of my past, learn from them, heal, and move on. You can’t stay buried in the past- it’s much too dirty there.

A couple days after we returned back home, Emmanuel and Richard were at it again. This time they were ambitiously laying pallets of grass in the few hours that exist between dinner and nightfall. When the job was completed, I sat on our new, leveled grass watching the kids run through the sprinkler. I thought about how so much of the backyard had to be pulled out, rearranged, and redesigned just to make this yard a safe space for my children to play. That is the thing about gardening that has always turned me off to it- work. It takes some labor and skill to grow something.

The kids were thoroughly enjoying their “summer chore” of watering the grass meanwhile the volcano that was our family crisis was still fresh. It was time to take a closer look at those conduits buried deep within. Flipping through those books stirred something up in me; it reminded me that perception is reality. Mixed emotions about the past puffed up when thumbing through old books. But why was this all important? Because it was necessary. Just like it is necessary to pull out the weeds in your yard on a regular basis, its necessary to reflect on the good ‘ole days and those not so great times as well. It’s just something that you have to do.

When you allow The Great Tiller to rake through your soul, you will inevitably pull up some weeds. But fear not, you come from good soil too. Those dusty old books helped me to come to grips with some bad habits that I learned back in the days when Dr. Seuss and Angelina Ballerina were a part of my everyday life. But they also reminded me of a million little details of how God had planted me in rich soil. Sometimes when your life has been abundantly blessed it is easy to ignore the bad habits and character flaws that date back to childhood.

If I didn’t evaluate the habits picked up in my youth, both good and bad, then I could not be the rich, healthy soil in which to plant a new life with my husband and children. Tilling the soil is the best way to insure proper cultivation. I must heal and allow God to prepare my soul for a lush crop of new life and focus my energies on creating new memories in this house. My part in the cultivating process would be to release the bad memories and bad habits learned to make room for new ones. Not necessarily to forget them, but release them like puffs of dirt that evaporate into the sky. Eventually, the dust settles and the earth is like new.

Confessions of a Dishwasher

22 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Bitterness, For the Love of People, Kitchen, Personal Growth

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It’s fun to journey down the rabbit hole of bitterness. Everything goes according to plan in that wonderland of justice. Everyone gets theirs and I am the queen, shiny and right. I have done nothing wrong and, therefore, justified in my revenge. My rally cry “off with their heads!” as my hands are elbow deep in dish soap bubbles and clanking silverware.

I hate washing dishes.

In the not so distant past when I lived in a land without a dishwasher, I noticed that while hand washing dishes my mind would frequently drift off into the realms of my bitterness. Usually, recollections of some past hurt would come up and I would begin to journey down a spiral of anger into an alternative universe in which everything turned out according to MY plan.

That’s the thing with menial tasks such as dish washing. The simplicity of the ritual allows for your mind to wander. If you are not careful the mind wanders to places better left for fairy tale villains.

When we moved into this house and I realized that, for the first time in my life, I would actually have to wash every single dish by hand I was overwhelmed. I had to swallow my pride and accept the fact that I was going to have to wash dishes every day and I was going to have to do it with a joyful heart.

It was time to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty.

Months went by in which dish washing time meant time for me to deal with all the dirt and grime crusted onto the insides of my heart. Unfortunately, it often turned into a pity party beginning with my whiny attitude towards the fact that I had no dishwasher.

Sometimes I had help washing the dishes

Shortly after moving in, we began a pattern of inviting people to come and live in our home. Sometimes they were strangers and sometimes they were loved ones.

Inviting people to come and live in your house is completely contradictory to what society tells us is appropriate. We are to be wary of people entering into our personal space. Your home is your castle and we are taught to protect that castle; protect our families from the dangers of strangers.

These days it is even frowned upon to have family living with you. The thought is that family living in your home is too close for comfort. Of course, there are situations in which it really is dangerous to invite someone into your home; I am not making light of those sensitive issues. I’m just saying that most of the time when we told someone that we had opened up our home to xyz person, we were met with stares of bewilderment and criticisms of “you all are crazy” or “are you sure that is a good idea?” We just felt that God gave us this big, old house that really was too much house for us. It is our responsibility to put it to good use and if someone needed a place to crash we would open up our doors.

Living with other people in your house is hard.

There, I said it. Living with new people, no matter who they are, is challenging for both parties. You could be living with your best friend and still find conflict. Everyone has their views on how life should be lived and there is always a period of adjustment as both parties get acquainted with each other’s preferences. It can get dirty.

In the last year we have had 6 people live in this house at different times and I found that in their help with washing the dishes they were really helping me wash away some of my bitterness. While washing dishes, bitterness time was replaced with deep conversations with these loved ones.

Perhaps these menial tasks exist to slow us down and give us time to think and maybe to connect with other human beings. As I look back over this last year and all who have lived here, a vast majority of my memories take place in the kitchen cooking and washing dishes together while we attempt to clean out our souls through deep conversation; through getting to know each other. If you want to get to know somebody and help them, and I mean truly know them, you will probably have to get your hands dirty. You will probably have dishpan hands. You will probably have to do grunt work that you just don’t want to do. But it will be all the worthwhile. It is totally worth it to help someone out during a sticky situation. I’m willing to do the work if it is the least bit helpful in keeping someone clean.

But truly, truly I was the one who was getting washed clean.

Dish washing time had once been a time of resentment that would spill over into the evening and onto my family. But when other people start washing your dishes for you, you feel kind of silly complaining about something so small when there are others who are struggling with much bigger problems than a lack of a dishwasher. With the help of some loved ones, it had become a time of personal growth for me. The humility that comes from other people helping you out gave me a clear head to stare my bitterness in the face and see it for the wicked witch that it was.

We live in a dishwasher world, we want to rinse things off quickly & let the machine do the work. When I entertained the bitter beast that lived in my imagination, I thought I was helping myself. A quick little trip to the land of revenge should make me feel better about my pain. “A quick little rinse should be enough to get these dishes clean.” But in the real world, the steel scouring pad is the weapon of choice for deep cleaning.

Just like the bitterness, my pride was being scraped as well. I learned a lot of good, strong, and hard life lessons by opening up our home to temporarily help people out. There are always bumps in the road when someone comes to stay with us. Some days are better than others just like some dishes just need a quick wipe down. But then there are other days when you feel like God is taking that scouring pad and scraping off your pride. But no matter how it ends I am always pleased with what God has taught me through the process. The dishes always look cleaner when you take the time and wash them by hand.

When Your House Floats Away

15 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Foundation, Personal Growth

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Stay Clear; Random woman just floating through life

Stay Clear: Random woman just bobbing through life

I watched my house float away on the small river that had overtaken our street. There she was in all her glory slowly being torn apart by the cruel force of nature that was our plumbing. From under the house the flood had corroded the floor boards and unhinged it so that the house was now sailing away. Bobbing further and further down the street. Floating and falling apart. Floating and falling apart. Eventually the house would completely crumble and cease to exist and all I could do was watch.

I know how she feels. I lost myself there for a while. For almost ten years I bobbed around through my life like a wave crashing buoy anchored in one place. I don’t regret it for a second. That is not a popular thing to say in this day in age but I know now that I had to put pieces of myself away for a while so that I could focus on a bigger picture. I needed time to figure out how to be a smaller part of a larger whole so I collected some of my smaller parts and put them in a shoe box to deal with at a later time.

Most of those small collectibles needed to be put away. Like forever. In fact, they needed to be buried at the bottom of the ocean and never seen again. Selfishness, discontentment, disillusionment…. Who needs those things anyways?

Other parts, however, were sweet and beautiful and reminders of a girl who used to dream and twirl around in tutus. Those parts, while very dear to me, just needed to be put to sleep for a while. They just took up too much of my brain space and I needed every ounce of my mind, body, and soul to figure out my place in this new “larger whole” that I now belonged to. The music, art, and poetry of my life were packed up and saved for a later date.

The later date came this past summer. It was time for those sleepy parts to wake up. The awakening was a slow and subtle process that rolled in waves over the long and hot summer. As June and July sizzled by we noticed that the house was shifting as old houses do. The ceramic tiles in the hallway were popping up and doors were no longer closing properly. The house in her restless unsettling was trying to warn me that the foundation was shifting. The flood would soon follow.

The warning signs were all there but I was distracted by my own restless unsettling. Years of suppressing the little nuances and quirks that assembled my personality were now bursting at my seams just ready to explode. I had reached a time in my life where I no longer felt like I had to put myself away to concentrate on that larger whole. The “larger whole” was now, well, whole. It was good and pretty strong actually. I had worked so hard for so long and now I saw that the foundation had been laid solid and sturdy. Because I put in the time to focus all of my energies on this one huge idea I was free now to open up that box of mementos that used to be me. It took ten years to get there but I had arrived at a place where I could take some time and breathe. The hard work had finally paid off.

Over the summer, tidal waves of memories rolled in gently reminding me of the person that I used to be, the person that I had always been. A favorite song, an encounter with a long lost friend, readings of journals from days gone by, and rediscovering old photos crashed like waves along the surf and there I was riding my boogie board trying to stay afloat and navigate my way through the ocean of memories that were flooding my head.

It all came together and made sense on the day that we discovered the flood under our house. A pipe from the upstairs bathroom had broken in half (a complete fluke and not at all a result of having an old house) and water had flooded the crawl space under the house. Since the foundation of the house sits above ground it took a while for the water to seep out of the crawl space and into our backyard and our neighbor’s backyard. Nevertheless, hundreds of gallons of water were rolling around under our house. A tiny ocean. Had we not noticed the leaky pipe when we did, the water would have begun to corrode the foundation of the house.

The foundation was in jeopardy of completely falling apart and the house we built could have been lost forever.

Okay, that is slightly over dramatic. Our house certainly did not float down a river of despair (welcome back little nuances of my personality known as over dramatization and romanticizing of the mundane). But that is what it felt like.

I imagined what that would have looked like- the water busting through the floor boards and the through the cracks in the bricks until the house began to crumble. Thankfully that was all in my imagination and all it took was a pump and three days to get all of that water out from under our house.

But that silly little over dramatic image spoke to me. It was the whispered message that I needed to hear; the kiss from the prince that woke up this tulle wearing princess.

A broken pipe caused a flood which caused the house’s foundation to shift which gave me this image of our house floating away which then turned into an image of me floating away.

My personal foundation was waiting for me to save the day. The flood of yearning for the long lost me had finally bust through the box that I had hidden myself in for such a long time.

It was perfect timing.

Like I said, I really believe that it was necessary to put some things to sleep temporarily while I figured things out. We all go through seasons in which we just have to cut back on some areas of our lives. But there comes a time that we have to open up that box and pull out those old pieces because if not they could get lost forever. At least that is how I felt. The timing was right. I was primed and ready to break free. After focusing so long on the foundation that I had help to build, now I had the freedom of focusing on me without compromising the foundation.

In fact, the foundation needed me to put those missing tiles of my life back in place. When I began to unpack some of those sweet, little parts of me I noticed that my husband and my children seemed to like me more! Well, of course they did. Who really likes to be around a person who is trying too hard to be something that she is not? When I was reintroduced to myself I felt this peace and contentment roll over me. Freedom. Completeness. After all I was created to be this person; this dreamy tutu wearing girl that my husband fell in love with and who my children feel more comfortable around. I had woken up from a deep, deep sleep and it felt good! I was refreshed and free to be a part of this beautiful larger whole that God had created for me to be a part of.

Again, like I said, I do not regret for one second that I spent the last 10 years without these little pieces of me. Temporary sacrifices are sometimes necessary for personal growth. These last 10 years have been so fruitful for me as a human being. Lessons have been learned (many times the hard way); growing up has happened. I think that if I had not put some things away for a while my spirit might be stuck in the same 23 year old place. That frightens me. Have you ever been around someone in their 30’s who still acts like an early 20 something or worse- a teenager? Yikes! When you look at the grand scheme of things ten years really isn’t that long after all.