Month: April 2018

Sometimes I wish I could put you in a little plastic bubble…where pain, rejection and suffering will bounce off playfully like tiny rainbows of light. But, my loves, momma knows that every bubble pops eventually…and living in a bubble not only keeps you from transformative experience and growth, but also prevents the rest of the world from experiencing your beautiful light.

You are full of light, love, and wonder. You worry and fret and cry. The truth is, the world you live in is both beautiful and tragic. While you sleep, and I am getting a fleeting glimpse of your sweet baby face, I marvel at just how unfathomably lucky I am to be your mom. And I also start to worry. I worry that illness may visit, that tragedy may strike. “Surely, this is too good to be true,” I think.

And in the morning, after I have marveled at your beauty and innocence, I go to the hospital. I visit babies whose lungs are filled with the help of a ventilator. I visit moms who are saying goodbye to the heart that walks around outside their chest. I see sweet bald-headed toddlers whose bodies are filled with poison – a poison that will hopefully make them well someday. These babies, these mommas and daddies, they are so brave because they have to be. What happens in these rooms are the realization of a parent’s deepest fear…but also of a greater reality…that life is a tension of joy and grief, beauty and pain.

No amount of worrying, of throwing resources at orchestrating the perfect circumstances for your development, or prayer can guarantee you a pass here. And as you grow, beautiful boys, you will learn this. You will learn that sometimes you will follow the “rules” and you will still get hurt. You will have people who love you and you will still feel lonely. You will strive to seek justice and peace and still sometimes inflict harm. You will feel rejection. You will feel pain. You will be afraid.

But you will not be alone. As your momma, I can’t keep you from these things, and I would be doing more harm than good if I tried. While you are here with me, and with each day that we have together as you grow, I want you to know these things.

You are a Divine Blessing – and you, right where you are today, you are good. You are loved beyond measure, and there is nothing you can do to change that. You will make mistakes…you are learning, and you are never going to have it all figured out. You will always have a growing edge, and while it may feel painful to acknowledge it, awareness of it brings strength. You are yours…you are not mine. You get to make choices about who you are and what kind of person you are becoming. Those who love you are here to teach you and guide you, but we are not making you…we are watching you become. You get to define what success means to you…not culture, not your peers, not your family. You will learn what your heart beats for, and I pray that you follow the Life.

No matter where you are, my love will find you. Whether we are near or far, I’m tugging on your invisible string, babe. I will not walk for you, but I will walk alongside you.

I will make sure I take care of my own being too. I will make choices that lead to health, and I hope you will see in those choices the miracle and gift that is your body. I will acknowledge my mistakes and make amends, and I hope in those moments you will learn that perfection is not what earns you love. I will show up in vulnerability, and I hope that in these sacred moments, you will learn that it is not only ok, but holy to ask for help…and to acknowledge our own powerlessness. I will continue to seek justice and truth and we will struggle through what that looks like together as a family…I hope you learn how to be an advocate and ally, and you will use your privilege in a way that benefits creation. We will openly wrestle with our understanding of God in ways that are developmentally appropriate, and I hope that in this you will learn to wrestle too…that faith is not a list of answers, but a beautiful dance of questions and tensions to live into.

I really needed Easter this year. In chaplaincy, every day feels a little like Good Friday. Everyday, I am meeting people at the verge of a goodbye, at the edge of a battle that feels hopeless, or repeating a discouraging pattern that never seems to change. Sometimes I can see the terror on their faces so clearly that I can feel it, and other times I can see a peaceful surrender. Both faces are hard to see. Sometimes it gets too heavy.

This week the heaviness was complicated by my own fresh sense of Grief – the church that formed me as an adult spent their last Sunday on the hill where I fell in love, where I became, where our life happened for so many years. And yet, I am grateful. I am grateful for the memories on that hill. I am grateful that the hill will continue to be a gift to the community as the site of a brand new high school. I am grateful that I can carry the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful today and every day because that hill will always be in my heart. It’s permanently imprinted in my mind, and the people I was so gifted to interact with there are forever woven into my story.

This goodbye seems like the peaceful surrender…like the graceful letting go of one chapter to begin a new one. That doesn’t make it easy, and it doesn’t take away the grief. It is still hard – but there is a little glimpse of hope in it. There is an Easter moment – one where we remember that no feeling is final and that life will keep moving us forward – forever transformed and new, but sacred.

And do you know what’s funny? So many of the painful moments that come with this goodbye are, in some sense, ways in which I became too permeable to this community. It’s in the places where I didn’t create a strong sense of boundaries. In fact, it wasn’t until this year that I learned what boundaries in ministry looked like for me. I am learning that it is possible to be present for people without driving through the flood…that I don’t have to drive through the flood to be worthy. Others may ask or expect me to drive through it, but I am the one with my foot to the pedal and my hands on the wheel. I am coming to a place where I can accept these moments of too much permeability and pain as necessary parts of my own formation and the building blocks of the strong foundation growing beneath me.

Wishing peace and love and Easter hope to all of those who are grieving on the Hill this week. Blessings on your new chapters – I hope you thrive.