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*trigger warning: birth trauma

Sometimes trauma sneaks into the gaps – the moments of what isn’t happening instead of what is. I find myself spending a decent amount of time these days looking at birth photos. I scan through my first birth, noticing and remembering the lips that looked like a shedding snake and my skin so swollen from the pre-eclampsia that I could see the lines from the nasal cannula on my cheeks. I look at the time stamp on the photos and remember when I began to panic as I struggled to breathe while awaiting the diagnosis of pulmonary edema. There was some chaos there. The figures are etched into my mind – mostly of heroic nurses and physicians who made me feel safe(r) and of my family and friends surrounding me with love.

Then I scroll to my second birth and a whole new set of feelings emerge. I want to warn the girl on the screen to buckle up – that there is more to come after you make it home with you ten pound giant of a baby. I want to reassure her that there would be more chaos, but that it would be ok. I remember that as the time before. The time before spending a year with an undiagnosable brain lesion or my anxiety disorder growing wings and taking to the sky, and the time before the painful, hard, and empowering choice to say goodbye to a community that had, for the most part, loved us so well. I remember sitting and crying in the parking lot of Nashville West listening to Rob Bell’s soothing voice reminding me that “this is only a wave” as I ate my fourth chocolate chip cookie of the afternoon. This was before I knew that I would soon find myself in Indiana, meeting Rob Bell in person at a school I’d never heard of and ugly crying at him while he hugged us and reassured us that we were going to be ok…all of this, of course, in the room where I will be graduating in a few months.

I looked at these pictures often after I received my twenty eight week diagnosis of preeclampsia with El. They got me through long afternoons of laying around because I felt like passing out every time I stood, or evenings when I would lay awake and wonder what the chaos might look like this time around. They got me through evenings of tears in her pink prepped nursery crying about ultrasounds and MRIs and so many unanswered questions. I would look at those pictures and remember it was all worth it. Those moments after your baby is born and you hold this little person in your arms and suddenly everything else disappears.

I don’t have any of those pictures with El – there is just this big time gap in my phone. After a very prompt admission and decision to go ahead with the c-section due to dangerous and rapidly increasing protein and blood pressure readings, I walked my trembling back-side-exposed self to the operating room. I walked barefoot down the hall where I had run in my oh-so-carefully selected chaplain’s shoes just a few months prior. I climbed on the table and went through all of the preparation, meanwhile my jaw was chattering so hard I thought it might break. Ryan came and sat with me and repeatedly kept moving the surgical hair cover out of my eyes. There was the waiting and then the tiniest little squeaky cry. And then nothing. No panic, no words of concern, just quiet while the doctors worked on El far away and out of sight. I saw a quick glimpse before they rolled her incubator out the door and to the NICU, and then I didn’t see her for twelve hours. They stitched me up and glued me back together, and my momma stayed with me so that Ryan could be with the baby. I tried to sleep – I tried so hard so that I could be rested to meet her, but I did not know that the reason I couldn’t sleep was severe anemia or that I was about to need a blood transfusion. I did not know that I would only see her a couple hours per day at the most for the five we still had ahead of us in the hospital. And I didn’t know that my brain was encoding this as trauma. I did not know that I would spend time grieving the first five days of her life (though she was mostly sleeping) where I sat in a hospital bed feeling much more like a recovering sick person than a woman who had just delivered a baby.

I tried SO hard to not have a traumatic birth. I know too much now. I was prepared. I was strong. I had resources. It didn’t matter. And because I was muscling through so much trying to be brave and to be ok, because I have watched so many beautiful mothers leave the hospital without their babies, or stay in the NICU for months – and because I knew that every time I was in the NICU that we were the lucky ones. I knew we wouldn’t be there for very long. Because of all this, it took me ten months to realize that I never stopped armoring up. I never stopped forcing “ok.”

Y’all, trauma is not so much about what happens to us. It’s not about the “worst possible things” and it certainly isn’t about comparison. Trauma is about the way our brain encodes the experience. It’s about the way the experience fits into our unique chemistry and set of core beliefs as well our other life experiences thus far. And trauma is nothing to be ashamed of.

As Dan Siegel says, you have to name it to tame it. Well here goes. I have three beautiful, healthy children and I had three traumatic births. People have had worse experiences – way worse. And also, I’ve had three traumatic births.

It’s been over a year since I left Facebook and stopped blogging. There were a lot of reasons for this – some really healthy. As a person with generalized anxiety, I was able to notice that time spent scrolling Facebook really increased my experience of panic. In addition, we were deep in the throws of welcoming our third baby and evolving into a completely different experience and expression of our family. I also started believing that my voice wasn’t trustworthy, that my voice didn’t matter very much, and that it was not worth the relational cost of sharing. This is what I am standing against in starting again.

That all being said, I haven’t been writing. I haven’t been writing here on the blog, and I haven’t been writing for myself. It feels like there is something missing for me – a discipline of sharing, of expressing, of engaging in what has become my experience of art.

So we are going to try again. I am going to try to share about what gives me life, what I am learning as a therapist, and what I am learning as mother. I hope that as I share my experiences of pain and learn to allow myself to feel, something I have struggled hard against and will talk about more soon, that it might give you some permission to experience, feel, struggle, and dream along with me. I hope it encourages you that your voice matters as well.

Rumi tells us that the wound is where the light enters us. I feel like I have patched up the cracks so ardently that the light has no way to squeeze in, and I have no way to get out. Here’s to chipping it away and allowing myself to be right where I am.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of anxiety, hope, terror, and peace. Eloise had her 20 week ultrasound on the 28th of December, and they discovered a well defined mass on the back of her cerebellum. The doctor’s did their best to be both honest and upfront with us about their concerns as well as to keep us calm until we knew more information – there were, however, a lot of really terrifying options. This past Monday, after a week of crying in the nursery and vacillating between blind hope and blind fear, we headed to Riley Children’s Hospital for a fetal MRI. The radiologist came to talk with me directly following the procedure, and while they scared us by asking my mom to join me for the conversation, she relayed that while she had yet to do the final report, she did not see any evidence of a mass. Today, we got the official results that show a healthy baby – a healthy brain – and no mass. While we are overwhelmingly grateful, it has caused quite a bit of confusion for the physicians on our case. We had a follow up ultrasound and saw our feisty little girl wave her hello. They were able to locate the spot they had previously seen, but said that it was much less prominent and looked much less like a mass of any sort. They speculate that it could have been a strangely reacting cyst, or some other sort of mystery. We will continue to visit MFM for follow-up ultrasounds every 2-4 weeks, and Eloise will have a head ultrasound when she arrives to confirm that everything is ok.

To say we are relieve is an understatement. We are elated, grateful, and still a touch cautious. I am grateful for the chance to see our girl so frequently between now and her arrival, and I am grateful for the physicians who are all collaborating to keep us safe and well cared for. I am grateful for each little kick and flutter, that are getting much more noticeable (especially when I try to sleep) and every day that we have with her.

Most of all, I am so grateful for our village. We only told a few close friends and our parents when we heard the initial news because we did not really know what there would be to tell. This has been a difficult two weeks, but not a day went by without someone checking in on us or offering their love and support. Friends showed up for us in the hard and the vulnerable, and some even stepped into their own deep pain to join us in ours. God has been so present with us through each of these moments. We are more aware than ever just how loved and held we are.

Please continue to pray for us as we navigate uncertainty over this next four months. There was plenty of swirly concerns around my own health and birth history, and now we have another element to keep on our minds. We are soaking in each moment and each day with our dream-come-true daughter, the perfect completion to our little family.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything new. I’ve been listening. I’ve spent quiet moments watching the leaves change and dance, their bright colors twirling in the wind, and I have been quiet.

And I have been wrong. Not the kind of wrong that comes from harmful or malicious intent, but the kind of wrong that comes from stubborn belief. I have been falling once again into categories and dualism. As I wake up to suffering and oppression, I am also waking up to my own part in it, and that can be a hard pill to swallow.

There is this interesting story Jesus tells in which I see myself lately. You can find it in Matthew 18. Jesus tells of a servant who owed a great debt to the king. The servant begs the king for mercy, and the king feels pity and forgives the servant’s debt. The servant immediately goes to someone who owes them a small sum of money and demands immediate repayment. They likewise beg for mercy and patience and the servant denies it to him.

How quickly the oppressed can become the oppressor. There were certainly systemic injustices involved in both situations. The king was born into wealth and power, unlike the servant. There was inequity – there was inequality…there was a reason he was in debt – much of it was probably outside of his control.

It can be easy to identify the ways in which systems of power have caused you harm. As a woman, I have certainly tasted some of this…but what have I chosen to do with it? I continue to participate in the same systems and practices that disempower others – from those in distant countries who make my cheap clothes, to those who suffer climate change consequences of my amazon prime dependance, to the way my voice is heeded  in a different way than other voices at the table. It is so easy to want to dismantle the systems that have caused me harm, and so much harder to want to dismantle the systems that keep me in power, privilege, and comfort.

This is not about guilt, shame, or feeling bad about myself. Quite the contrary, it is about mercy. It is about me learning to accept myself where I am in my own becoming. And it is about me learning to extend the same mercy and grace to you where you are. As I have learned from a mentor I greatly admire, you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.

I need to learn new ways to be. I need to learn new ways to see. I need new tools.

That doesn’t mean I am not angry. It doesn’t cover over or soften injustice. It doesn’t mean I won’t fight for what I believe in. It means I am trying to find a more gracious way to walk in the hopes that others might join along. Part of leaving the ideology of scarcity – which I have learned is an epidemic proportional to privilege – is realizing that I already have what I need. That I am already blessed. It allows us to open our hands from our grasping, to release that which we have  with those around us who need it rather than clinging to it in the fear of “what if” or “just in case.” It allows us to welcome others to the abundance, rather than fighting to keep our place in it.

I believe in my heart that so many of the people I love who I also disagree vehemently with – underneath it all, we share similar values. We value life. We value justice. We value the dignity of all human beings. I truly believe that it is fear and scarcity that steer us all away from these values and into dualism and black and white thinking these days. Let’s not let fear win this time. Let’s stay open to learning from each other about the ways our words and actions affect one another.

There is room for all at the table if we stop storing up “back up” seats for ourselves. I am learning from the abundant wisdom of my friends who are women of color these days – who know what it is to struggle, who know what it is to grieve, and who also know what it is to live – to come alive right in the midst of where you are. There is some Divine truth in this – that in recognizing you already are worthy, you already have dignity – no matter what your circumstances say –  then you are freed up to invite the rest of the world to join you.

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

I knew as soon as I saw the feathers on the ground. The fluffy white down looked almost like clouds in the tall green grass. I glanced around, but didn’t see the small, lifeless robin until I turned the corner in the large glass stairway on my way to the basement. There it was, laying on its back picked to pieces. Part of me broke just a little at the sight of it, and I was filled with a sense of incompleteness and sadness – a voice that called from the inside silently screaming that this is not how things were meant to be.

But then, in the stillness, I thought of the hawk. I thought of the beauty of the hawks’s wings stretching across the sky, dancing across the horizon, and riding the current of the wind. In contrast to this exquisite image, the hawk’s basic survival relies on violence. All of the energy and the resources the hawk needs to propel through the air are provided by that meal.

I stopped and reveled in the gift of breathing in deeply, and my heart turned to humanity, and to the inevitability of violence. Death is part of the song of creation. The robin doesn’t stop contributing to the earth after death – the nutrients nourish the hawk and the soil – nothing is wasted, it’s just transferred and transformed.

I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that violence is, in fact, natural…but want to sound a reminder that just because something is natural, does not mean that it’s “good.” The hawk has no choice but to participate in the cycle of violence, but we were given the beautiful gift of choice – choice of how we will use our agency in the world. In what ways are we contributing to global violence? In what ways can the human violence we see around us be attributed to the survival impulse…and can we separate survival from power? Can we separate survival from fear? Can we separate survival from nationalism or ethnocentrism? How can we hold perpetrators accountable without denying the value of their humanity?

It’s just heavy. It’s heavy, and it should be heavy. How do we hold the tension between grieving and working towards the reduction of violence, while still validating humans’ basic instinct to survive? I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say it probably has little to do with increasing military defense spending. It probably has little to do with building walls. It probably has little to do with cultivating division both nationally and internationally.

It probably has more to do with generosity. It probably has more to do with making sure everyone has something to eat. It probably has more to do with making sure that everyone has access to clean water and health care. It probably has to do with building bridges and creating conversations and dialogue that build understanding across differences.

It’s inevitable – I know it is. My children will never know a world without violence. But I can’t stop thinking about this or simply look the other way. I can’t normalize it just because it has become “normal.” I don’t want my children to have everything – I want them to have enough…because I also want your children to have enough. I think that is a good place to start.

For good measure, here are some interesting thoughts on the lie of redemptive violence…

 

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

There is this constant tension in my life right now – a pulling in two directions that is difficult to articulate. A current consistently pulls me towards the now, towards the present moment, towards gratitude and joy. When I allow myself to float along this gentle stream, I learn to experience peace. I love bigger. I find myself overwhelmed with wonder at creation, at human beings, and at the One who spoke it all into being. I practice yoga, and I experience the beautiful symphony of body, mind, and spirit coming together to find unity…and as I practice, I am learning to listen to all the different parts of my experience, and all the different divinely-created parts of my self.

Then there is this other flow – a river that is full of twists and turns and rapids. As I am jostled and jolted about, I am constantly reminded that there is so much I don’t know. There is a depth of suffering in the world that I have never known, and (the worst part for me) that I have unknowingly perpetrated. The suffering of children crying for the arms of their parents (through the MANY circumstances that bring them there) is unbearable. The suffering of racial oppression – both inherited trauma, outright acts of racism, and the many daily micro-aggressions that are the everyday experience for so many in our world, forcing people to expend energy, effort, and emotion, and strength just to hold on to their sense of dignity and worth – it’s unbearable. The suffering of poverty – of not knowing how one’s basic needs will be met each day – of expending energy, time, and emotion just to survive – it’s unbearable. I could go on and fill oceans with words on suffering, but I think you get my picture…

I often wonder if floating down the peaceful river makes me complicit in the drownings I see (and those I don’t see) in the rapids. Sometimes I feel guilty when I am at peace, when I experience joy, when I experience gratitude…and I would wager that I am not alone. For those of us who are waking up to our privilege, guilt can be overwhelming, distracting, and even paralyzing. Listen, dear one, please keep waking up, but don’t drown in the process. Please keep opening to a wider vision, but don’t model to the world that advocating for social justice and masochism are one in the same. Your power is limited, your influence is limited, your responsibility is limited and, friends, your capacity is limited. As a freshly budding therapist, I am going to give you some free therapy for when you start to feel your heart race with anger, your stomach church with disgust, your thoughts swirl with guilt and rage…take it or leave it (but I hope you take it). As counterintuitive as it seems sometimes, exhausting yourself and drowning in a spinning pool of anxiety does not lead us toward a more just and generous world.

1. Stop for a moment and breathe. Close your eyes. Focus on your breath. Allow yourself to feel grateful that you have today, that your have life, that you have an opportunity to participate in the unfolding of the world. This is a gift. Notice what is around you – the people that relationships that fill you with purpose and hope, the love you experience around you, the ways in which your needs ARE being met. Notice the way your body is working for you and marvel at all of the intricate details involved in it’s function. Allow yourself to rest in this joy and gratitude for a little while.
2. Spend some time exploring your voice, your power, and your boundaries for this situation (whatever it is that is bothering you). What can you do about this issue? Is it an issue of policy? Can you call a senator, sign a petition, or donate money? Does it require personal action that is in-line with your purpose and abilities – could provide pro-bono services, or offer to help with meals or childcare? Does it require your creativity? One of the most important things to explore in this stage, I think, it to explore your own limitations and not take on responsibility for things you don’t have any power over. This will exhaust you, and leave you feeling like a constant disappointment – not to mention, nagging and persistent anxiety. You are limited, and you alone are not responsible for the justice of the world. After you act on what is within your power, voice, and capacity, you have to let yourself off the hook for the things that are outside of it. Operating from a place of guilt, shame, or fear is vastly different from doing justice work from a place of love, generosity, compassion, gratitude and joy.
3. Put down your phone and take a break from social media. You do not need to engage every comment (especially note immediately) and you do not need to be inundated with words and images of the same suffering over and over and over. You already know…spending your whole day stewing in it is not going to make it clearer or change anything – it is going to rob you of the joy of the moment you are in, and it is going to move you back into that place of guilt and powerlessness. Not to mention, it keeps your brain in a place of fear…in a state of anxiety…in a reactionary position. There are a few things to know about fear…fear makes it difficult to make good choices, fear makes it difficult to engage in meaningful dialogue, fear makes it difficult to live in the present moment, fear makes transformation damn near impossible, and it will make our work unsustainable.
4. Repeat steps one through three (“five…make you fall in love with me”…sorry, couldn’t help it)

There is a purpose in this tension and we need to live into it. Please, if you are starting to feel the fatigue, drop some of the weight, friends…take some time to float…and then pick up what you can and carry on. There is so much work to do, we will never run out of work to do…and we need you. We need you whole. We need you healthy. We need you joyful and grateful. We need you at peace. We need you overflowing with love and compassion. We need you fully alive. I am not asking you to give up the fight, I am imploring you to fight well, and holistically, and sustainably.

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

a starting point…more thoughts to come

These days, it’s hard to sit down and write about any one thing. There are just so many issues swirling around in my brain all the time – not unlike the whirlwind of our news cycle. Polarization around immigration, race, guns, marriage, and the list goes on and on… It’s exhausting trying to keep up with where I stand, where my friends and family stand, who am I talking to right now – do I need to be careful about what I say to this person? Do I need to have my filter on? Do I need to avoid certain subjects for the sake of the relationship as a whole? I am not even talking about talking to people across ethnic or cultural divides…that always involves education, humility, and a bent towards grace…I am talking about people with whom I have previously had almost everything in common – it is absolutely exhausting and it’s too much work.

Last Friday, as my family was loaded up in the mini van on the way to a quick vacation in Chicago, I got a text from my son’s elementary school that said the schools were being placed on high alert and increasing police presence due to a situation in Noblesville – a mere 10 miles away. I immediately checked the news only to realize the horror that there was an active shooter situation. Of course, this must be some sort of misunderstanding, I thought, recalling the bomb threats that proved nothing throughout my time in high school. No…it wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a seventh grader, a SEVENTH GRADER, who had brought two handguns to his middle school and wounded several people.

Suddenly, all the swirling and thinking and work, it just stopped. There was just stillness, and shallow breaths, and terror. And then there was anger. Just a raging anger that this keeps happening and it seems like nothing ever changes. I looked back at my boys, one of whom will start kindergarten this fall, and I felt simultaneous swells of gratitude and fear. We are here. We are safe. We are together. But also, I don’t have any control at all over how long this beautiful season will last. As I realized that the anger was driven so much by fear and powerlessness, I (being a human with a narrative making brain) started to try to figure out how all of these things fit together. What did I need to do. Immediately, my husband and I started talking about gun control. Yes, we need more common sense gun reform. Yes, we have a beautiful constitution, but you also have to remember it was written in and for a different world than the one we live in now. It has to be a living document for it to serve the people it was intended to serve…not to mention, the people it wasn’t intended to serve.

I remember looking up as the cornfields raced by out my window and saying these words, “I don’t think that’s enough.” It has been easy for me, up till now, to look at gun violence, especially in the setting of a school, and just think, oh, we need gun control. It was that “simple.” And then it happened here, my yoga teacher in the adjacent room hiding and calming her kids while she barricaded the door. Yes, we need to look at the way that we treat guns from a policy standpoint, but there is more to it than that…

I started to think about what a thirteen year old boy must be going through to bring him to this place. I was thinking about all the kids huddled in a corner – fearful and powerless. I thought of the teachers, who did not sign up to be bodyguards, who pushed through their own fear to protect them. I continued to scroll through my newsfeed and saw all of these articles about the shooting, and about #wherearethechildren, and my empath heart was just broken open.

You guys, I do think we have a gun problem, but I think at the root of it all, we have a dehumanization problem. We look at people and evaluate their worth based on their effect on us, their effect on the environment around them, their effect on our sense of certainty, their effect on our traditions, their effect on our power. It seems to boil down to this – what do we stand to gain or lose from their existence in “our” world?  We have completely lost the capacity for empathy, especially empathy for the “other,” and it is literally killing us. The gap between those who have and those who don’t grows wider and wider, and let me tell you, powerlessness can make one do desperate things. Suddenly, I started to see things a little more clearly. All the people out their screaming about their second amendment rights – maybe they are afraid. Afraid that they will lose something that ameliorates their sense of powerlessness. The people who balk when you start talking about privilege and systemic racism – maybe they are afraid that for someone else to gain some power and agency, means that they will lose some of their own. Those who can look at an immigrant child in a detention center, separated from a loving parent, and say, “well, you shouldn’t have broken the law…” – maybe they are afraid that acknowledging the pain and humanity here would mean asserting that following the rules does not give them the kind of control and protection that they rely on to not feel powerless.

We have to start seeing each other. We have to see the fear behind the anger and the entrenched, self-protective beliefs. Powerlessness can lead to dehumanization, to desperation, to violence, to anger…but powerlessness can also lead to strength. If you come from a position where you have grown up with a relatively large amount of agency, it feels like the scariest thing in the world. There are those, however, who had to make friends with powerlessness at a young age. Who had to learn that they could accept it, or fight it tooth and nail no matter the cost. Those who have accepted it, find a sense of agency and power that, I believe, comes from Love – from being made in God’s Image. It is when we realize we are not in control, when we let go of what we hold so tightly too, that a strength beyond us, a peace beyond us, and a hope beyond us rises up.

I am not saying to stop fighting for justice. I am simply saying that, especially to those of us with a lot of privilege, we have to stop looking at people as objects in our world, who have either a positive or negative effect on our lives, and start seeing them as human beings, as God’s image bearers, as children of the Divine, as people of inherent worth and value. We are all afraid – let’s be afraid together and do something beautiful with it.

A poem for the children I have seen during my time as a PEDS chaplain – specifically those children who spent their hours in the hospital without a parent to comfort them.

 

Presence
Unfamiliar eyes stare into her big beautiful browns
Rocking gently as lids flutter off to sleep
Finger holding the renegade pacifier in place
Air filling with gentle words of love and peace
Not alone

Plastic tires glide across crisp white hospital linens
Sticky little fingers pull at my yellow mask
“Hug?” is spoken, and received
Little boy body relaxes into the mattress
Not alone

Tears and terror squished into the tiniest ball
Rising up when fear and sadness is spoken into the silence
Giant stuffed puppies that attack pink dollhouses
Strange hands hold pink basins, strange fingers are squeezed
Not alone

Bubbles pop on the cutest little brown nose
Dimples come out to greet as laughter swells
Tiny toes reach through bars to be tickled
Stories, songs, and peekaboo as little eyes find their rest
Not alone

Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash

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.