Growing Up

Can you believe that soon I will be closer to thirty than to twenty? Thirty is such a grown-upish age and I know I can’t fathom that I really am approaching such a life stage. I do know this— I am as young at heart as ever. I love the charm of children and so have clung to childlike-ness in me with the tenacity of a Never-never Land urchin. Case in point: Just this past week I insisted on buying bows for my hair from the baby department in Walmart. Is this the action of a grown-up? I think not!

With my fateful 25th birthday looming, I have been reflecting on the ways I do see that the past year has grown me. I have decided that God has synchronized the challenges I have encountered to tug at me from every direction. He is using them to stretch my heart like putty. I have been spread thin, burnt-out, and heart-broken; and somehow in the tearing the place in my heart that longs for the Divine has become larger.

So maturity has come this year in a surrender:

A week ago I had a waking dream. I stood suspended in time my past was to the left of me and my future to the right. I had my arms extended and my hands balled into tight fists. I heard the whisper of God tell me to open my hands and receive the life He created for me. I realized that I’ve approached my life with an iron grip on the story I wanted to live. Growing up I just pretended the story was true, then in college I tried to manipulate my family into joining my charade.

But inside the fist is empty. The story I want is a fairytale that can never be true.

Similarly I have a vision for how my future should be and I spend countless hours and tremendous amounts of mental energy to trying to manipulate God into making my life all that I want it to be. I told Him that He should give me a pain free life to show His generous love, intentionally “forgetting” that Jesus taught, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.[Jn 16:33]”

But I am clenching only air because I am not the Author of the Future. I cannot dictate what will be.

As I looked to my left I saw the scars on my arm and then saw my life until now, the mistakes, the joys, the failures. When I looked to the future I saw only questions and uncertainties. I felt God telling me to open my hands to the riches he had given and would give me. All the pain, all the worry, all the failure, all the uncertainties would form me for the kingdom work He is calling me to.

After the Saturday service at Revolution I said “okay. Okay, I am scared but I surrender. I need You. I need to know where you are in this.” I closed my eyes and opened my trembling hands, as this wave of certainty smashed my former hesitations. Of course I want what God wants. I want all of it. Pain, brokenness, and redemption…

This surrender is the first blossom of the plant that has been growing in me this year. By pain its’ shoots have pierced the soil of my heart and it’s roots have cracked the foundations of my dreams for myself. God has not forced my hand in this decision to let go, but He has surrounded me with broken and suffering people to help me see how His way is the way to lasting life.
In the words of Elisabeth Elliot “The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it's going to be a lot better and a lot bigger."



It terrified me for so long, but now that I have actually done it I am surprised that Surrender actually excites me. Instead of assuming the absence of God in my difficulties or in the suffering I see in others' lives I find in me an expectation. Instead of asking God "Where are You?" I am more often asking "Where are You?" A small shift has changed so much in me.

New eyes for someday

Tuesday morning and I’m running late. The weight of worry takes its familiar place on my back as I skim over my mental list of prayer requests. Ugh. It’s so heavy today I don’t want to leave home and face the need I know waits for me at work.


I wring my hands as I wait for the microwave to finish heating my oatmeal. Sometimes life is just so blah I want to scream. I gripe inside and pray for more gratitude.

---But thankful or not the truth is that I can’t shake the longing for a more than figurative resurrection and new birth. I don’t want to “be healed” in a way that means I am still anxious, low, and obsessive. I don’t want to preach about freedom and be stuck watching people I love suffer one more day. In this flurry of worry I think of the verse in Romans chapter 8 that always stands out to me when I catch myself groaning for deeper freedom for all creation:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Romans 8:18-21

I so want to see this freedom—the glorious freedom of the children of God One manifest in creation. Right now we have promises. We all see miracles happen sometimes, but we all also die. We have prayed and prayed and

• he still died
• they never conceived
• she continued to suffer
• he refused to get the help he needs
• our friend just got sicker and sicker.
• we remained broken

Right now too often the miracle we long for in the moment is not the miracle we receive. So Life forces the honest soul to admit, “this is not the script I would have written.” For our faith to stand in this unpredictable and short life it must be found in a resurrecting King--- who promises that death is not our ultimate end.

I can imagine the conversations we will have with each other someday —sitting at a great party, swapping stories of how Christ intervened in history to save us:

• Peter will tell of how even after he betrayed Jesus his Rabbi took him back.
• Paul will share of the Blinding Light on the Damascus road.
• A mother will tell of her worries for a wayward son and how in desperation she turned to Christ who comforted her in her grief.
• One will tell of a life-controlling addiction and Jesus’ intervention.
• Another of growing up in church and the day she fell in love with the Savior she had been taught about all her life.
• I believe that at this table will be my sisters who still struggle in the grip of Anorexia—finally free--- telling of how the Father still received them, even after they rejected themselves.
• I believe at this table will be the women I serve as a companion for--- finally healed--- telling of how despite the inexpressible suffering they experienced, Jesus never, never, never left them.

And on and on the stories will stretch--- resurrected testimonies of God’s glory[… I get chill bumps just thinking of what it will be like.] I so want sit beside my friends who right now hurt so much and know that finally the full healing we prayed and prayed for is here. The hurting is over. We can all finally see how Jesus has the final word in the suffering that it tore us up to watch.

I find tremendous encouragement in knowing that despite all my failures my life will be among the testimonies of His power. My small, unexpected, often difficult story in light of Jesus is likewise miraculous, and glorious. I am surrendered to a process of being made new and will not be God’s first failure--- This promise is what gives me hope when life continues to detour from my girlhood dreams for sharing Christ. It may not make sense right now how small and hidden service is the way I can most fully show His love but I know I am given fully to him. So this is good—a beautiful part of whole I will understand someday.

Me on purpose

Me on purpose.

Recently I have been challenging myself to turn off the CD in my mind that constantly spins,

“You are not pretty enough. You don’t work hard enough. You don’t love God enough. Not enough. Not enough. Not enough.”

These messages [in some form and degree] have come against every woman I know, and I have seen how the way a woman faces the feminine insecurity is formative--- shaping the whole course of her life. For me the messages have already threatened to destruction.

Since I first became fully aware of her at 9 years old, insecurity has been the monster on my back, the monotonous lie stuck on repeat playing every day, all day. Her whisper casts doubt on every compliment. Her lies have taken me out with depression and made me run around like a crazy woman trying to make up for all the ways I fail at life. I have tried without avail to reason with the whisper of Insecurity. I would yell back, “It’s garbage. Not true. I’m enough," but whenever I try to fight the lie she bites back—drawing blood every time. So I have found she doesn’t need a speck of truth to make me cringe under her assault,

You are worthless, lazy, ugly. Your friends are more successful. The women at the Y are more attractive. You aren’t trying hard enough… If you were better you would be thinner, you would be closer to God, you would be pregnant by now…”

So how I am refusing to engage Insecurity’s lies in my thoughts anymore? By smashing the lies.

It may seem simplistic but I trying visualization, prayer, and scripture memorization. From now on every time she whispers I am going to visualize myself smashing her CD in my mind and playing a different disk, a higher truth—the Word of God over my life:

The truth is I have spent my life chasing after God’s plan. Like my namesake, the matriarch Sarah, God has called me to a life and a world I had no grid for, and He has promised to be with me in the journey. He has made me who I am on purpose.

Here are the passages I am trying to memorize for October to root this truth in me:

John 15:16 (New American Standard Bible): "You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.

2 Corinthians 5:17-21 (New American Standard Bible): 17Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. 18Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, 19namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation 20Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Romans 8:31-39 (New American Standard Bible): 31What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? 33Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies; 34who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.35Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36Just as it is written,"FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG; WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED."37But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,39nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Ephesians 1:3-8 (New American Standard Bible): 3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him In love. 5He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, 6to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 7In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace 8which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight

God-stop while painting finger nails

I had a God-stop—a moment where I felt Christ pouring through me. Over the past several weeks one of the women I work with has been in severe pain. Since she is unable to say what hurts treating the cause of her pain is difficult and she feels helpless and afraid. She has periodically become very aggressive or spent hours screaming on and off at the top of her lungs.

Her behavior would be very frustrating if her eyes weren’t screaming her pain, “please make it go away.” Looking at her eyes—I feel her pain and helplessness, and any frustration in me melts into desperate prayer.

It’s hard to handle the fact that God does not just make the pain stop, but I have tried to learn to see His hand in the momentary reprieves while still praying for healing. One thing He has shown me is that He loves this woman so much, absolutely treasures her.

A few days ago Christ met us in her back hallway. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside her gently blowing on her nails to help dry the polish I had just applied when I sensed the Holy Spirit speaking to my spirit,

“Look at her. She is my beloved. It is not for you to know why she suffers so, but know this: I have not abandoned her Sarah. I have given her you. Your lips are my lips gently blowing her nail polish dry. Your heart is my heart groaning prayers of intercession before the Father. Know that I will heal her.”

Then in my mind’s eye I saw Christ sitting cross-legged next to my client. Gently cradling her hand in his nail scarred palm, head bent to blow her polish dry.

All resistance in me dissolved. The humility of Christ serving her that way became my evidence that He saw her pain, His heart broke over it all too, and someday He will heal her fully. I felt permission to be as angry as He was at the pain, permission to continue begging for an intervention knowing that, despite what it looks like, God has not abandoned us in this suffering. He has come nearer to mourn and suffer with us. In the dark night of the soul He treats us with greater tenderness lifting our eyes to tomorrow. Whispering in our spirit, “hold on not every day will be like today.”

Let me live your dream for me.

“There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way” - C.S. Lewis

Tonight a college friend confided to me that God was opening her heart to new dreams, new possibilities.


She seemed excited, nervous, swelling with anticipation. The question of her heart shone through her eyes, “Where will God take me? How I am I being called to serve in this kingdom?”

Talking with Ruth felt as though I was staring at senior- in-college-Sarah in the mirror. Just three years ago these same questions confronted me. Like many of my classmates I was all about serving where I was. I reached out to my campus as an R.A. and a small group leader, but I sensed the whole time this vague call of destiny and as graduation loomed nearer I needed details.

In many ways this sense of destiny had been haunting me since I was a small girl. It seems my heart has always burned to be in the middle of the next great move of God. A favorite scripture during my teens was this portion of Psalm 139,

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.

As I sought God's purpose in creating me my heart was captured by this image of the entirety of my life being known already by God . On days where my future seemed dark I comforted myself with the idea that God had already written a beautiful role for my life in His book. This promise of destiny kept pressing into God throughout college. I wanted so much to make the world a better place.

My senior year of college I read about how the Spirit is working in Asia and Africa, and dreamed of being God’s vessel there.

I prayed prayers of abandon, “God I’ll go anywhere. I’ll do anything. Just let my life bring you glory.”But two and a half years later I never made to any farther than Kentucky and now I’m back in McPherson and God is teaching my heart to dream his dream for me.



That is “to enrich the life of those I serve in every way possible,” [DSGP mission statement]

Over the past months I have become convinced that becoming a Direct Support Professional is a calling not merely a job [though we who serve don’t often see it that way at first.] We are called to listen, to protect, to challenge, to care,

to serve in the shadows
so others can have an opportunity to shine.

If while I was in college seeking-out-my-destiny you had told me that I would be working in disability supports I would have told you “you’re confused.” Twenty-two year old me had dreams of getting my doctorate, dreams of working overseas, and writing books. I had layers of pain I had not faced, and pride I didn’t know about yet.

I was blind to the ways that my dreams for overseas ministry were really dreams for me. I thought I was being so self-sacrificing when I moved back to McPherson to get married. I back-burnered my dreams to support Tim’s dream. I was still praying , “God I’ll go anywhere, do anything..”

But as the breadwinner for our small family I told myself destiny would wait until after my husband’s graduation. Clearly what I needed was any job where I could spend time with people and bring home a paycheck. So at first that is all my job at Disability Supports was for me. I gave it my all and enjoyed the company of co-workers and clients.

I didn’t know how much compassion I would feel for the women I began to work with. I didn’t know that this experience would shake and strengthen my faith. I didn’t know a job could be so much fun--- how there would be times I would laugh with these women so hard it hurt. I didn’t know how much care there was in me.

When I was working at Oakdale my co-worker remarked on my heart for children, “Sarah this is a gift and you truly love it. Embrace it. The blessing of the Lord makes rich and He adds no sorrow to it.” I got that.

Working with children has rarely seemed like work to me because I love it so. Today I am finding care-giving blessed in me, just like working with children.

Now I do know and am convinced that this care- giving was a huge part of God’s dream for me. For right now anywhere is McPherson, KS, and anything is pouring out my love and energy to serve an amazing community.

These gifts bring a beautiful humbling to my heart.

This humbling is described in a storybook I often read with one of the women I work with. It tells the tale of three trees. The each of the trees in his own way dreamed of achieving greatness and glorifying God. The items they ended up being made into were common, even humble. They thought nothing would come of their dreams, but in the end they were used by Christ. Then they realized that the Savior King had given their lives greater purpose than they could ever have dreamed of.

Whenever I read this book with her my mind drifts to the purposes and dreams God must have for the two of us. In our community our lives are unassuming, people can and some do overlook us.

I am learning to see even this smallness is a gift because of the awareness of our need for God it creates in us. In this vein I have begun to meditate on the exhortation of Peter, a humble fisherman turned apostle, “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you. Cast all your cares upon him, for he cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:5b-6).”

And here’s the hardest truth in the calling I stumbled into-- it'll break your heart. It’s difficult to work in supports many days because your heart hurts for the people you serve. This is the way that my job shakes my faith because I spend so much time in prayer for healing and understanding that sometimes it is hard to see the small blessings—the momentary calm, the growing sense of communication—as evidence of grace.

I am constantly having to re-center myself on Christ. In light of Him I see clearer. I realize that the willingness to help carry the real pains of another is evidence of a greater capacity for love growing in me. On the days when I return home from work crying and praying, Christ is teaching me that loving will always mean hurt. I have found that He is bandaging and healing my heart as it is stretched by the suffering.

A few years ago , right before I graduated from college, I heard an interview with Bono where he quoted a Christian leader. His advice has stuck with me all this time, “Stop asking God to bless what you’re doing. Find out what God’s doing. It’s already blessed.”

Tonight I have the blessing of know that right now I am where God has led me. He is teaching me here. He is working in me [willing, caring, and desperately inadequate] to show his love to the women I get to serve. He has answered my prayers and is letting me live His dreams for me.

Somewhere over the neon rainbow:

I took a break from writing.

Partly because life got so busy at the end of August. School started for Tim again. I got full time [hooray], but am currently still working a couple of my old shifts each week until the company hires for them. Tim got into two car accidents in one week-- parked vehicles. We celebrated our one year anniversary.

Partly because life got so inexpressible. Maybe I was just worn out but when I arrived home from work at the end of the day I literally had no words to describe the emotions churning in me. Not that they were all bad just numerous… and intense- a neon rainbow of feeling, spanning the spectrum:

• from elation
• to frustration
• to helplessness
• and hopelessness
• then faith
• and finally to a profound experience of love,
  

a deeper love than I knew existed.

It’s mid- September now, and , though my work schedule has yet to slow, I have gotten into more of a rhythm. Though the hood of our 1996 Dodge Stratus is forever dented I am happy to announce that Tim and I are emerging from the neon rainbow fog more in love than ever if still rumpled in spirit.


As I gazed at the reflection of the past weeks in my rear-view mirror all is still a haze. The lessons I absorbed as a result are scattered:

1. Car insurance is expensive. Car accidents are generally more expensive. Be glad you have insurance.
2. Nobody is perfect. The only way to find peace is to forgive everything and everyone at the end of the day [including yourself.]
3. People are different. It is better to relate to every person as an individual than to try to make blanket rules about communication.
4. Despite the cultural insinuation that it is impossible[ or just plain boring] to only ever give your lips, body, heart, and spirit to one other person, it is possible [and it is good.]
5. Even more amazing is this-- it is also possible to fall more deeply in love with your spouse everyday of your life.
6. Humans are by design diamonds in the rough. In you there are layers of pain you don’t even know about yet, and talents you have not yet discovered.
7. What is true and what appears as truth are often two different things.
8. God is love. He loves us broken. He does not want anyone to reject herself or to abandon the hope that the Father’s love will set her free from all the lies that keep her bound.

It would be silly for me to attempt to form a cohesive narrative from these highlights so I will leave them as they are. I hope they make you smile. If you have the time and energy, pray for me. Pray for my husband. Pray for the women I work with. In retrospect my eyes are open to the ways that God is giving us peace--- granting more clarity where there was only mystery, working even the miserable and the hard points out for our good. So praise Him for a beautiful hope and perspective, and ask that He will also comfort our hearts in the face of a growing awareness of all that is broken around us.

The Doorway

A dear friend of mine told me this week, “You are standing in a doorway not a tunnel, just a few more steps and you will be there.”

Where is there you ask?



There is the stuff of my dreams. A land with fewer headaches, muscle aches, and heart aches. A land:

1. where truth is heard louder than lies,
2. free fear of abandonment and filled with trust reborn
3. saturated with God’s presence and love

There is the true land of plenty… where I am no longer hungry, alone, and afraid.

Fear has told me time and again that there does not exist. “There is a fairytale. Here is all that exists.” one day she whispers and then the next, “why would God allow a girl like you to ever go there?”

I am ashamed to admit that for the past years I have been buying her lies once again. Since middle school she has been a relentless tormentor of my soul. She makes her voice sound so much like my own that I am fooled into believing her lies are my own thoughts and desires. Even when I can recognize the constant deceit dripping from her tongue-

I can’t silence its ping. ping. ping. ping. ping…

I am four years in recovery and Fear still tells me I am:

• a shallow girl,
• only decorative—empty on the inside,
• socially discardable,
• undeserving of nourishment,
• always going to be hungry,
• too weak to win this.

I got so tired of fighting these lies that I gave up, ran to the corner, and covered my ears--- “you’re right. I will never be wholly free. The thoughts in my head are too twisted, my body too conditioned to fear gaining weight, to completely kick this thing.”

This week my friend’s words reached me here in my corner-of-doubting-the-Father’s-love. She challenged me that it is really not so many steps from here to there. The journey to here has been difficult. Four years ago Jesus met me in the clutches of a disorder that fragmented my emotions, disfigured my body, and was slowly driving my mind towards madness. People may think this melodramatic, but I know He stood in the way of death. He held out his hand to me—a throw away girl, a basket-case in the middle of her final breakdown, and pulled me of the mire of self-hate Fear had sucked me into.

You’d think after getting in so deep with an eating disorder that I needed divine intervention to save my life I would make a speedy exodus from my task-master once out of the pit.

But at the top of the pit was a pitch black room and though I could not see them I knew from the yowling, the whispers, the crying; that surrounded me in all directions that Jesus had lifted me into my own Valley of the Shadow of death. His voice, his message has been constant: “follow me. follow me into all the things that most terrify you about yourself.”

It is my voice that has wavered. One day the dark will not be so scary and I will confidently follow the voice that leads in darkness. I will begin to believe that we are finally gaining ground. Then the next day Fear will hit me hard again and again--- forcing me to retreat. So like the children of Israel wandering around the desert I have wandered--- only four years so far, but it may as well be forty.

I got free enough to keep people [besides my husband] off my back. I have continued to control Fear to the point of maintaining weight—not health. I survive in a perpetual state of headaches, confusion, and fatigue, but here’s the real rub my heart is broken in this struggle. Fear has never ever relaxed her grip on my heart. I’ve just learned to cling to a faith that allows me to limp towards another day.

As I have talked with friends over the last couple of weeks I have realized (1) that I am truly not at a healthy point in my thinking, and (2) this poisoned thinking is not my heart.

No matter how hard the lies batter my soul they simply are not true. I don’t want control. I don’t want to live my life fearfully protecting my needs or guarding my wounds. I know anorexia is empty and I hate it. I do believe that the name of Jesus is exalted above the lies of this culture. I know I am a daughter of God. He has given me a beauty that captivates his eye and a purpose that both transcends this life and is lived in the nitty-gritty details of serving the disabled and loving my family. These are not empty words, but truth that nourishes my starving soul and hope that gives me strength enough to walk through the door.

As I work the courage to try again in this area I keep thinking about something I read in the Message:

God means what he says. What he says goes. His powerful Word is sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, cutting through everything, whether doubt or defense, laying us open to listen and obey. Nothing and no one is impervious to God's Word. We can't get away from it—no matter what.

Now that we know what we have—Jesus, this great High Priest with ready access to God—let's not let it slip through our fingers. We don't have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He's been through weakness and testing, experienced it all—all but the sin. So let's walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help.

Reading these words now I remember that Jesus wasn’t the one abandoning me in the dark. Though I haven’t always been able to see what He is up to, I have heard his voice calling out, “this is the way,” and “don’t be afraid Sarah, I will never leave you.”

And He hasn’t.

So this time I am going to muster enough courage to follow His call. This time it’s going to be different. God helping me this time I will break all ties with Fear. I will step through the door-way into freedom---and keep my eyes on Jesus knowing that He loves to give me the grace and help in my time of need.

Lessons without words,

Ask anyone what the key to a successful relationship is and they’ll tell you: trust & communication.

And up until February trust and communication were skills I felt I had mastered. After all, I am a lover of words. I enjoy talking with people [in fact as a child people even accused me of being superfluously verbal.]

Polite language has scripted and choreographed my relationships until now. I have shared honestly and I have listened and I thought that was enough to make me a great communicator. Then I started working as a disability support person and began to re-learn everything I thought I knew regarding the relational realm.

I met people who are unable to say what they long to share and I realized how I had been isolating members of my community by limiting my communication to language. Consider for a moment the slow progression of verbal communication:

1. There are polite one-line reflections [normally on the weather] we can say to strangers.
2. Socially acceptable topics we draw on when in conversation with acquaintances.
3. Anecdotes we laugh over with friends and family.
4. Deep wounds we tearfully uncover with our trusted few.
5. And secrets so hidden within our hearts that we only share them with our most intimate love--- pains so private they can only be safely revealed behind closed doors, with the lights turned out, by husband and wife lying close enough to feel each others’ heartbeat, under the covers, in their most hushed whispers.

When I began to care for nonverbal clients, I made efforts to decode the significance of a blink, the emotion reflected in sounds of different pitches, the meaning of each expression, the real implication of every oft-repeated phrase, and the message of the tears.

Within a month I had realized two things. (1) For people without words life is a battle to be heard, and (2) they don’t beat around the bush. On one level I always knew these two points. These “realizations” are easily assumed by outsiders to the disabled community, but in near proximity to lives deeply affected by an inability to communicate [in the most culturally recognized manner] the truth of the situation is heavier.

I began to view verbal communication as only effective when demanding honesty. I was disappointed with how many of the words I say are really at the core dishonest, wasted in a cultural dance—exhausted trying to make everyone else join. Conversely the more practice I got using non-verbal communication the more it felt like a return to honesty, to prayer.

I became thoughtful about what I shared. Often I spend an entire evening trying to communicate one message—“I am glad to be a part of your day. You are a terrific person. No matter how hard it has been today, I am here for you and I am listening.”

I learned that showing people you are there for them is harder than saying it, but it is more real. Nonverbal communication is honest. I can say many things, but action shows it to be true.

The work required in action is the real foundation of communication and trust. Nonverbal communication is requires action on both sides, and a relationship of trust must be built to scaffold the difficult effort of communicating.

It’s been beautiful and rewarding, and yet

I cannot be all rosy about these lessons in communication. The depth of semi-effective nonverbal communication is no balm for the ache of watching someone suffer and not be able to express their pain.

There are evenings when I leave work with a burdened heart because I know something is not right and I have no idea what it could be. It hurts even more when I think of how this “feeling of disconnection” in my relationship with non-verbal clients must be similar to the way they feel in every relationship.

I recently I read a description of the way autism can feel by an amazing young woman, Carly Fleischmann.

After 11 years of being silenced by autism, Carly found her voice—she went to a computer and painstakingly spelled out H-U-R-T, H-E-L-P, and then ran behind her coach and threw up. Since that breakthrough Carly has begun typing to communicate what she’s feeling. Her portrayal of autism gives a glimpse into the world which has been so hidden,

You don’t what it feels like
When you can’t sit still because your legs feel like they are on fire
Or it feels like a hundred ants are crawling up your arms…

It is so hard to be me
And you would not even under stand
I wish I could put you in my body just for one day so you can feel what it’s like…

What do I want?
I want not to feel what’s happening in my body
I want to stay at home and not go to the farm
I want to be like every other kid
But I can’t
Because I am Carly

I looked up Carly’s blog and poured over everything she has posted. She is so normal and so extraordinary at the same time. She is 14 in all its glory. So many of the things she writes about are exactly the feelings I had fourteen. She is sassy. She is articulate. She knows what she wants...

But the video footage I found of her revealed a young woman fighting to live in a body that betrays her and it is the unmistakably painful struggle that makes her words so poignant. She has been described as an autism angel because when Carly’s story was broadcast on Larry King and ABC news her voice became a voice for those whose speech is still silenced. Finally we do begin to understand how overwhelming input is that takes away their words.



It is painful to recognize that the women I work with are like me—hurting, frightened, overjoyed, and hoping--- but with no words to express the emotions building in them, but Carly reminds me how true it is.

And without words people do become blunt in their non-verbal communication, using whatever form of communication they are able to—smiles, laughter, tears, tantrums, even aggression to tell the people in their world what they need, what they like, or how they are frustrated and hurting.

The lengths I have observed people with limited ability to communicate go through to make themselves understood is further proof of that the need to be heard, understood, and validated is intrinsic the human soul. The desire for a deeper connection is strong enough to push through the static of autism and make another effort to be heard.

Still for the women I serve often all I can do is sit with them as they hurt.

Even sitting with the hurt is a lesson to me—a girl who has been given the gift of words and language. Words were given to me to give away, but they must be weighed and backed by action or my words will become as meaningless as a TV script. When I am careful with my words I know sometimes sitting with someone in silence is all I can offer.

Sitting quietly is my admission that I have no idea what to do…
I can only listen. I can only love.
And honestly this is most often the truth of me.

Fear that's not frightening

I, even I, am he who comforts you. Who are you that you fear mortal men, the sons of men, who are but grass, that you forget the LORD your Maker who stretched out the heavens and laid foundations of the earth(Isaiah51:12, 13a.)

As the death bell tolled renowned poet, John Donne, wrote furtively.

He too had been diagnosed with a death sentence, bubonic plague. With the tens of thousands in his community who lay dying Donne grappled with the haunting absence of goodness in great tragedy, “Where is God in suffering?” Donne composed his Devotions to sort through his own questions of Sovereignty and Compassion.

In the end he came to bottom—God gave no answer for the question “Why me?”’s of his heart, but Donne realized there were only two options--- he choose either to trust God or to abandon his faith.

It was at his faith’s watershed the poet prayed that God would teach his heart to fear Him,

"O most mighty God, and merciful God, God of all true sorrow and true joy too , of all fear and all hope too, as Thou hast given me a repentance, not to be repented of, so give me, O Lord, a fear, of which I may not be afraid.”

This kind of fear--- that is the fear of the Lord--- has been the theme of my week.

When the Holy Spirit is stretching my understanding of some truth, it seems like everything I read and hear is theme-related. Since Saturday I have been chewing on this topic. When I discovered Donne’s story in the book Reaching For the Invisible God, my reading selection this Monday, my heart instantly connected the poet’s recognition of his own hearts need to be enlarged to Saturday’s sermon.

The pastor taught from Mark 10:17-27, the story of The Rich Man, a biblical narrative I’ve always disliked until hearing this sermon

The rich young ruler comes to Jesus and asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. The rich ruler explains that he’s kept all the rules. He has loved and followed the law all his life.

Jesus looks at him. Loves him. And raises the stakes.

“Sell everything and follow me.”

And the rich young ruler leaves brokenhearted because he simply can’t bring himself to part with his wealth.

It seems unfair.

Jesus own disciples took up for the rich man, “He was trying, doing a better job than us, if he isn’t good enough to be save; who can be?”

I have echoed this sentiment. If I were there with the disciples I too would take the rich young man’s side. He had tried all his life to be good enough for God, and it wasn’t enough.

The plight of the ruler whose face fell when he discovered that Jesus would demand everything struck a chord in my heart. I too had tried all my life to be good enough for my dad and it wasn’t enough. “Doesn’t effort count for anything?” my spirit would question, “God are you like my dad? Can me trying to follow be enough for you?”

I know as an American I am rich. So often I feel like I am not doing enough. I sponsor a 3 yr old little girl in Haiti. Is it enough? I give to missions. Is it enough? I give to the Church. Is it enough? I spend my life serving women with disabilities. Is it enough? I love my husband as much as I know how. Is it enough?

Am I enough?

And the answer is “No” I know I don’t belong wholly to God. Anorexic has hooked claws of anxiety in to places in my heart even I cannot touch. Daily my best efforts at holiness fall dismally short. Time and again I am too-afraid to love; too-afraid to even make eye contact.

Facing the truth about my efforts to be fabulous always leaves a bad taste in my mouth—like a crushed Tylenol mixed with applesauce.

Because of the “yucky” feelings created by my interpretation of how Jesus interacts with this seeker, year after year when I came to this story in my Bible reading plan I would rush through it and check it off my list. It was to me medicine that tastes so bad you stick the spoon way back in your mouth and try to bypass the tongue as you swallow it quickly. I had never lingered in the story to taste the flavors.

But on Saturday the pastor drew attention to a verse I had always glossed over: “ Jesus looked at him and loved him- Mark 10:21a”


The pastor paused here, and grudgingly I paused with him. He started to explain how Jesus really felt compassion for this man, how Jesus wanted to show him the way to know God. The pastors voice faded farther and farther away as the truth of my condition before Jesus weighed heavy again on my heart. I abandoned my body to the pew and went into the pictures flooding my mind. I found myself imagining me as the young ruler before Jesus. Making my case before the Incarnate Creator,

“Jesus I know I still haven’t sold out. I am just so duplicitous. A part of me loves you and a part of me loves the pursuit of perfection. I feel like I will never beat the dark Sarah who tries to fill the needs of her heart by being thin. She believes that by keeping all the rules someday she will be good enough. She hangs onto a beauty that is causing her heart so much anxiety because she needs people to like her for her body. She is addicted to approval. I have tried explaining to her that I don’t want this thinness anymore, but she will not surrender her territory. Can’t you see how hard I am trying? Can’t my trying be enough?”

And for the first time I saw the Lord watch my anxious entreaty and his eyes were full of love.

“He loves me?” I thought, “He loves me still.”

I had never realized how passionately God longed for this man to know him. This is the way Jesus loves. It is hard medicine for a perfectionist to be loved as she is, but if she will allow love to dissolve on her tongue it is actually sweet to taste. It is scary territory for a girl-not-good enough to be asked to leave the land of shallow-acceptance by culture, but it is the way to freedom. The only way.

Realizing my not-enoughness again, I wanted this time to be different. I didn’t want to leave the Presence of Jesus face fallen, feeling sad. I thought about how fear holds me captive to fragments of an eating disorder and social isolation. I thought about how even as I look into the eyes of Christ I could feel the pull of fear—telling me that if I sell-out and follow Christ my heart would not be able to handle all that gaining weight represents to me [surrendering control, facing rejection, experiencing abandonment.] I fear abandonment more than I fear the Lord, and some days I fear that this fear-wound in me will end up being the very reason He abandons me.

This is what connect my fearful heart Donne’s prayer--- my lips whisper the prayer, my spirit echoes:
“Give me also, O Lord, a fear, of which I may not be afraid.”

Me too. I need a fear of which I need not be afraid. This is what I’m praying towards. I am memorizing lines from the admonition the Lord spoke to his people through the prophet Isaiah—and repeating there truths to myself when I find anxiety is near my heart:

I, even I, am he who comforts you. Who are you that you fear mortal men, the sons of men, who are but grass, that you forget the LORD your Maker who stretched out the heavens and laid foundations of the earth(Isaiah51:12, 13a.)

I don’t know what else to do. I keep praying the Josiah-prayer: “God we don’t know what to do, but our eyes are on you."Somehow I hope if I learn to fix my gaze towards Him—the anxieties which today distract and enslave my mind will slowly fade and disappear. Please pray for me on this one.

The First Tears

Recently I have been reflecting on how so many of the problems I see myself and the people around me struggling with are aggravated by the personal commitment to not cry in front of people.


The general philosophy towards pain people have adopted seems to be one of avoidance:

• We would rather escape our pain then walk through it.

• We choose keep our pain buried inside instead of bringing it to the surface

• We have been hurt in relationship, but we keep smiling and pretend that we are unaffected.

and it is this commitment to an independent, untouchable façade that allows us to die inside without anyone knowing.

I am rejecting the ticket. I will not ride this train. Though I don’t fall apart crying in front of the whole world, I have made a conscious decision to be real and broken with Jesus and with my friends because I believe honesty is setting me free.

This past week I have been considering how I came to the belief that it is okay to cry. It is a long story, a too common story, a story that is still unfolding, but to me it is a story filled with glimmers of a beautiful healing I groan for. I hope you see it too:

The First Tears

In third grade I realized my family was broken and that we would never be perfect on the same night.

It was horrible.

When I think back to that night the picture that comes is in freeze frame and I am able to recall every painful detail:

I was curled up on the bottom bunk of Bubba Chisholm’s bed secretly snacking on cookies while reading a missionary novel loaned to me by his sister Michelle in the room I shared with my Mom and 3 younger brothers.

It was two weeks since my father’s anger had provoked mom to pack up and leave with John, Andrew, baby Peter, and me; and for two weeks we kids had lived in a kind of Limbo. When we left, we hadn’t known where we were going. In the beginning I’m not sure Mom did herself. Just away.

She seemed as disoriented as the rest of us when our family’s white station wagon took us 1400 miles away--- from Salt Lake City, Utah to Champaign, IL; where Mom’s best friend, Frannie Chisholm, lived. She was driving confused. I was living confused…

Since leaving Utah questions had tumbled relentlessly in my 9 year old mind:

• Why did we need to leave Dad?
• Did Mom not know that that whole thing was my fault?
• Were we really here because I hadn’t cleaned my room fast enough?
• Would my parents ever stop fighting?
• Would they get divorced?

In the tension of the unknown the cookies were solace---the missionary novel, escape. When both were gone—I found myself alone with the painful questions. There the answer dawned on me, “As long as my parents live together they will be unhappy,” and some dark place in my heart whispered, “it would be easier if they just got divorced.” I realized then that I was longing for an end, for surrender. I wanted my family to give up trying to squeeze all our pain into one home. Peace at all costs was my prayer.

Of course I hated myself when I realized how I hoped that my parents would “get a divorce and stop fighting.”I dreamed of it, and felt so ashamed because I knew that a good daughter would try to bring her parents back together

like Sharon and Susan in the Parent trap. You know---

“let’s get together. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

But unlike that precocious twosome I had no inner conviction that the problems in my parent’s marriage would go away if they merely realized that they really loved each other.

I felt just awful:

1. Awful that I had not cleaned my room fast enough and my dad had had to punish me.
2. Awful that my punishment had been a catalyst for leaving.
3. Awful that I had not even tried to convince Mom to stay.
4. Awful that I secretly wished for peace at the cost of my parent’s marriage.

I had never wished for anything as dark as divorce before. At nine years old I feared for my soul. I covered my face with my blanket and began to pray, tears streaming down my cheeks,

“God do you see me? I am so sorry. Do you see how I am crying? Please help me. I have never been so sorry. Would you heal my family? Fix us. Bring us back to Dad. Help Dad and Mom stop fighting. God save me. Don’t let me go to hell for the black thoughts inside my heart.”

I cried all my tears that night. I had no tears for the difficult years that followed. No tears for my grandmother’s funeral. No tears for me. I cried rarely, briefly and not about anything that really mattered. I felt empty, disconnected from hurt… numb. Nothing could touch me.

When with puberty the tears returned, I welcomed them [hormones are good for one thing.] Pain upon pain had been piling up through my girlhood had become a lump in stomach and a flood in heart. The day I entered middle school the emotions that had been submerged, hidden from me for years, found their way to the surface. The floodgates of tears re-opened with frightening consequences.

Dieting, cutting, burning, binging, purging… anything to release the pain.

The pain would well up in my heart when I was still and alone, waves of tears deep enough to drowned in. No one but God to call to for help.

Faith was the surprising upside of the emotional hurricane of my teens. I found myself too broken to connect with my peers so I clung to God. Sin made me desperate as it had when I was a girl.. Countless nights I lay awake whispering “Lord have mercy on me a sinner.”

And He did.

God has brought that girl, who is me, a long way toward healing. He has never condemned me through the numerous nights where I was Eve expelled from Eden, crying “Mea culpa, Mea culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa [my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault]" and refusing to be comforted by lofty thoughts of love, grace, and forgiveness.

Recently as I have continued to stumble towards belief in grace I have wondered then how Eve felt in the years after she was expelled from the garden.

What surfaced in the mingling of relief over not being obliterated from the face of the planet and the joy of becoming a mother---with a tragic disconnection from God and the pain of losing her home and then her son:

Did she feel crippled by her own guilt?

Did she cry until there were no more tears when she realized things would never be perfect again?

Did she hate her body, her appetite, how quick she had been to trust the voice of her enemy?

Did she blame herself for Able’s demise and wish she had died instead?

How human her story is. How like my own. God reaches out to me and I walk away. I listen and trust in the lies. I choose disobedience and am filled with shame. I feel tied to this first woman… my tears flowing from the same river of pain as the first tears she shed. Humanity is broken and it is we did it to ourselves.

“My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault,”

This is a breaking.

But it’s real.

“God’s on His throne so we shouldn’t ever cry or complain,” is a lie which I have heard subtly preached through my own trite dismissals of others' suffering too many times to count. And it's a lie I've been fed as well-- "how you feel doesn't matter as long as you're living for God." It’s like Christians are afraid that if they ever mention their discontent, the dissonance between the lives they live and the way they long to live God will abandon them for being whinny, ungrateful children.

But for me tears are the first step to grace. I complain about my brokenness. I stumble towards faith in the desperate whispered prayer “God you know how hard this is for my heart to grasp. Only You can change me. Only truth can turn my mourning into dancing.”
As I groan in pain --- pouring out my shame before God-- the Spirit has have baptized my hurting heart over and over in the truth of Romans 8,

Sarah know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now.

And not only that,
but you who have the Spirit as the firstfruits —

you also groan within yourself,

eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of your body.
Now in this hope you were saved,
[yet hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees? But if you hope for what you do not see, you eagerly wait for it with patience.]

In the same way
the I also join to help in your weakness,
[because you do not know what to pray for as you should, but]
the I intercede for you with unspoken groanings.

And He who searches the hearts knows my mind-set,

because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God:

those who are called according to His purpose.

When this happens I close my eyes and cry… because this life hurts and I want to be with God so much. I cry because my heart remains so broken and I need more of Him. I cling to the words that He “works all things together for the good of those who love Him.” I say them over and over.

Then I am overwhelmed with this knowledge that Christ is with me, and He loves me. I feel that I am being held – safe and tight---

• I cry for the lost,
• I cry for the oppressed,
• I cry for the suffering.

I keep crying until there is relief and I am still…

Jesus is there in the tears. He isn’t repulsed by me. He isn’t overwhelmed by my grief. He is honored by the transparency. He is touched by the groanings of my heart. If there is anywhere in the world where I do not have to suppress my pain or pretend to possess a more righteous heart it is here.

Receiving Love

The second half of June I spiraled into the blahs. It’s been a long while since I’ve really been up to writing. I’ve got no “good” excuses.: I’m wrestling through some tough stuff, letting go of some dreams--- well at least learning to hold them loosely. I'm trying to stop pouting about things I cannot change---


As I look at all I feel I’ve lost this year I’m trying to stay soft toward the Spirit. I’m still asking God, “What do you want to do with my life?”

1. But I’m angry.

2. And I find myself half-believing that His answer will make me miserable.

3. So I’m not listening very well.

It’s weird that I get so pigheadedly obstinate with God because besides the fact that Jesus saved my soul by dying on the cross [which ought to silence any complaints that well-up concerning the difficulty of following Him], He has blessed my life in some major ways.

(1) My husband, Tim is the most wonderful man on the face of the planet and (2) work is going great.

“Honestly” I chide myself, “ I ought to be ecstatically happy—I one of those rare people who loves her job and her marriage .“

But often the reverse is true. Every morning I think about how grateful I “ought to be” that I have Tim and my job at Disability Supports and it depresses me. I like to blame it on a chemical imbalance, but truth be told I’m just struggling through plain old impatience, frustration, and doubts about God’s generosity— because I am not satisfied with the wonderful life I have…

This Saturday the sermon was about not wasting our lives and the rewards we will receive in heaven if we become sold-out followers of Christ in this life. I wrestled with it. I have so many passions in me--- I dream of showing the love of Christ in huge ways, in deep ways, but I feel like these passions have been put on pause. God has given me small things:

• Love your husband deeply—be completely honest with him.

• Love the women you serve well --- learn how to communicate my compassion, my value of them, my heart in language that will speak to their hearts.

• Love your church and your community ---leave the prison anxiety has built for you and risk rejection.

• Love me--- trust my love when I hold in my hand the good things you are looking to for life, Wait for me.

My heart responds,

“Oh God- I’m waiting. I’m loving with all that is in me…Is it enough?”

I hurt.

Deep inside I ache.

There is so much grief in waiting on God… there is grief in letting go of smaller dreams to embrace something scary and uncertain…

Something way too big to do on your own.
Something that will require time
and trusting God’s love to cover your broken best effort.

I’m trying to keep perspective. Trying to reframe the circumstances of this process taking place in me:

Could it be possible that the ache—the blah is a part of the grieving stage of faith? Maybe I need to grieve to face what following God in will cost me. Maybe grief will lead to my whole heart embracing His way at all costs. Maybe I am okay today… Maybe God is catching every tear I shed over letting go of my-way in a bottle. Maybe Jesus sees me in the moment of death and weeps…

Maybe God [instead of viewing all this hurting inside me as failure] sees the love that keeps me clingy with desperate hope that “I will not be God’s first failure” as the truest profession of my love.

Here’s hoping right?

Yesterday I listened to a sermon entitled “Obstacles to Receiving Love” from the Greater Boston Vineyard Fellowship that cut me to the core. I made Tim listen again this morning and poured out all the ways that it connected with where I am, “I feel like a heel that receiving love has been such a struggle for me. I make you tell me you love me at least 20 times a day. I have been going off and on to the same church for four years and I am just now getting involved. I don’t keep in contact with friends and family because even when they call me I am afraid that I may return their calls at an inconvenient time. I feel like my skin is protected by a shell of glass and whenever love is poured on it rolls off like rain on the window pain. I’m dying for water, but nothing gets through. I see our marriage changing this, but so slowly…"

The sermon ended with some take home points which I have adopted of as goals for however long this season lasts:

(1) Be open with your pain.

(2) Listen to others pain.

(3) Treat anxiety and self-opposition as problems to be brought to Jesus

(4) Meditate on Scriptures that describe Gods passionate love for you.

(5) Making peace with the circumstances of your childhood.

I desperately want to be satisfied with the Jesus I meet today, but I need His grace to shatter the glass that has encased me. I believe Grace will. I am meditating on truth to ease the pain of waiting. Specifically these promises have become lifelines.

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. (Philip 4.6-7)

Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. (James 4. 8a)

My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. (James 1.2-4)

Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you. (1 Pet 5.6-7)

And for now this is me. Praying. Hoping. Broken. True.

Jennie & Quandary

Today is my day off and I’ve been spending plenty of time spacing--a quirk of mine which begs to be indulged on lazy afternoons when the mosquitoes are too thick to go out for a walk. It’s simply absorption in a thought to the point of absence. In other words the light’s are on, but I’m out drinking Chai with my BFF two states away.

Sometimes when I space I go into an empty room, a closet or a forest, but often into a memory. It’s different than a flashback because it’s not like I am watching a rerun in my mind. The present me is there --conscious of what is going on, conversing with God about it.

Since I was a little girl I have been able to space out without consciously working at it, and I when I’m alone I mostly like it. I like the lightness I feel when I escape to my own private world. Spacing out in public is troublesome though—and it happens more than I would like. In fact if you’re attentive enough, you’ve probably caught me at. When I am not really here my responses to what happens in the present usually sound strangely fuzzy and mechanical, as if I’m flying on autopilot with one engine out . I hate this side-effect because I know I sound dumb. Fortunately over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good at making a quick snap back to the present to laugh at whatever dumb thing I said and hopefully save some face. When all’s said and done I am forced to acknowledge that spacing is my way of processing. I accept it, but wish I had better control over it.

Something happened yesterday that has given my mind plenty of material to ruminate over. So today I’m spacey. I keep thinking about a conversation with my friend Jennie after she caught me spacing out in the way I just described. Her words stuck in my heart and won’t let go of me. The entire conversation keeps replaying in my mind and dangling a new perspective in front of me like a canteen of water in front of a desert nomad. Here’s the jest of what happened:

Jennie and I were talking about some deep stuff when all of the sudden the present world went out of focus, and in my mind I was standing beside God. Then Jennie called me back to the present:

Jennie: What are you thinking? Where are you?

Me: I was thinking of how I used to pray when I was a little girl. God has been so good to me but there were times in the middle of the mess of my childhood when I literally begged God for deliverance. I can see myself nine years old, in limbo trying to care for my mother and little brothers. I was so afraid I cried out for God to rescue us.

Jennie: And it never came?

Me: Maybe it’s been coming.

Jennie: And you’re angry?

Me: It’s just that the deliverance has been so long.

Jennie: And you hurt…

Me: and I just want the hurt in me to stop and I don’t understand why it must keep going … Maybe in the end my taking the long way to deliverance will be the best for everyone.

Jennie: Sarah, what if this process, this long-way, can be the best for everyone here in the middle?

The question “What if this process can be the best for everyone here in the middle?” is nagging me, like a hungry cat. What if my yet-fully-realized deliverance could comfort, could teach, could be a catalyst for hope in my community? What if I could really be okay the way I am?


Initially I found myself inwardly screaming at this dumb-cat’s question:

• I want to be finished.
• I want to be polished.
• I don’t want to face these ugly unprocessed places in me and definitely don’t want to invite others into the middle. No, I’d rather the exodus of my soul to be over before I ever allow people to see it for the mess it was. Thank you very much- dumb cat, but letting people get to know all of me would hinder my ability to show God’s love.

And that was that until later that night I read this passage in Abba’s Child,

If I am not honest with myself, why in the world would I be honest with you? It’s an ugly customer this spiritualizing. It wears a thousand faces, every one of which intends to scare a little child back into hiding.

And I knew at once that was what I was doing. All that hope that I could be okay the way I am--- was a child’s hope--- “I am learning freedom. I am growing. Can I be okay? Can I be loved? Can I do something good?” And I was forcing the child in me to hide once again. I was being pretentious—which I hate because it sends an unspoken vibe to all those around you that who we are as humans should be hidden and controlled. In order to stop the fakeness I needed to listen to the child. So I asked her what she wanted and she told me to invite the cat in. "Just think about it." She asked.

So now I have this the hungry-cat question taking up space in my mind. I am not sure what to do with her, but I am giving this my best shot. I decided to give her a saucer of milk and told her she could stick around awhile. I even named her, “Quandary.” I confided to her my doubt's about her, "I must admit I am still troubled by the long way to deliverance—can this really be for the best right now?" But she doesn't seemed fazed. Instead she has taken up residence on my mental couch.

Thus far Quandary has made a good house guest. She purrs when I pay attention to her, sleeps when I ignore her, and is far more pleasant now that I have let her inside my mind than when I was trying to shut her out.

So I have decided to sit and space awhile--- stroking Quandary and meditating the words of David’s song, “You hear, Oh Lord, the desire of the afflicted; You encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more (Psalm 10:17+18.)”

“You do Father,” my heart resonates in rhythm then in dissonance, “but how long will we wait?”

Love and Dirty Laundry

This Monday the daily reading from Ransomed Heart Ministries quoted Gerald May,

Choosing love will open spaces of immense beauty and joy for you, but you will be hurt. You already know this. You have retreated from love countless times in your life because of it. We all have. We have been and will be hurt by the loss of loved ones, by what they have done to us and we to them. Even in the bliss of love there is a certain exquisite pain: the pain of too much beauty, of overwhelming magnificence. Further, no matter how perfect a love may be, it is never really satisfied . . . In both joy and pain, love is boundless.


It is the 10 month anniversary of my marriage and I am thinking how much of the joy and pain of being a newlywed is tied up in the ways marriage challenges me to love.

Marriage can be beautiful:

I relish the bliss of discovering more and more love everyday

unapologetically.

I find my writing centering around what Love is doing in me because everything has changed. Priorities are shifting. New ideas about Love, God and myself are boring pathways through the scar tissue of my diseased mind.

And this process of changing means Marriage can be painful:

Here’s the latest thought I am trying on for size-

Thin does not equal beautiful.

Though prior to my marriage, I would never have acknowledged the strength of my mental correlation between size and beauty, it was there—lurking in a dark corner of my mind, always vigilant to remind me never to relax around food.

This belief is the desperate woman in me-- thin, beautiful, and grasping. After a week of living with me 24/7 Tim recognized my fear for the life-draining taskmaster she is. One morning as I mutilated my omelet while I mustered confidence to eat it, he called me out on it, “Sarah eating those eggs will not make you less beautiful.”

My heart beat fast.

My head felt light.

Hope stirred inside my stomach.

and the desperate woman in me rebelled against truth’s awakening

I cannot remember a time in my life where upon entering a room I did not feel that I had been thrust into an unspoken beauty competition with every other woman present-- a sick competition where “thinness” was the first category on the judge’s rubric.

A rubric I had failed to pass for the first 18 years of my life.

I grew up in chaos. I coped by vacillating between inflicting bizarre diets upon myself to punish me for feeling and then when I could no longer resist the comfort of food, stuffing the pain with Doritos and cream cheese. I was a thick teenager. Food was my frien-nemy, and

Thinness was my heart’s desire.

being thin meant I would be beautiful, accepted, desired…

Like every girl becoming a woman these are the things I lusted after.

Even when they became my idols and started taking over my life.

I accepted the paranoia as a matter of course until I got married… and it started driving my husband crazy. Right away Tim saw me for who I was, a little girl sitting on top of a hamper packed with a thousand pieces of dirty laundry-- unwashed memories that had attached to putrid beliefs and were only held in check by so many compulsions.

I was desperate to be so grown-up and independent. To have someone see the girl in me was unsettling. Tim was fine with his boyishness. He was both gladdened and confused by the discovery of a girl surviving inside his somber, grown-up bride.

The girl-Sarah seemed nice enough, but why did she insist on sitting on a hamper all day? He invited her eat ice cream and dance. I refused explaining I was forced to sit on top of my hamper to prevent it from exploding dirty laundry around the room and strewing the floor with all my painful stains and memories.

For awhile the girl in me attempted to convince Tim that holding my hands and swaying back and forth while I sat on the hamper could be as fun as ice cream and dancing.


To his credit, he went along. For weeks a befuddled Tim patiently tried to negotiate the hamper—the way I had survived. Nobody had warned him about how confusing girls could be.

I was confused by Tim too. I had thought the hamper would make Tim happy. Compulsion kept my body looking great by almost everyone’s standards, and it kept the dirty laundry off the floor. I thought only I would know inside I was rotting. Desensitized by a over a decade of sitting on top of filth I had forgotten how much the rancid mass of laundry stank.

As I watched the compulsions like knives stabbing his love for life every time his exuberance threatened their control, I saw my future boil down to a choice:

Who would I let love me— My husband or the hamper which had for years hidden all my dirty laundry?

Conviction stung as I acknowledged to myself this hamper I had been sitting on was all about me.

• Me needing to exercise.
• Me frowning as I size up my body in the mirror.
• Me afraid of other women.
• Me requesting that he cook with less oil.
• Me hungry and mean.
• Me crying on the floor.

me, me, Me…

So the next time Tim extended an arm to me and asked “Would you come down and dance?” I swallowed the fear in my belly and rose to take hold of his hand. Immediately dirty laundry flew everywhere. I was crying, hiding my face, because I “always make a mess of things.”

But Tim was picking up the memories all over the floor and loading them into the washer with plenty of strong soap… saying “don’t worry, Sarah. These will come clean in the wash. You’ll see.”

And the reordering of life’s priorities began.

Soon I was taking out clean beliefs to try them on for size.

Starting with the idea that being thin should not be equated with being beautiful. For me being thin is about the dirty laundry and the ugly grasping compulsions. Thinness is not beauty-- it is the most hideous parts of me demanding that I kill myself to remain thin and giving me subtle strokes when I feel that I have beaten other women in the rat race, but I hate it.

Hate the shallow person obsession makes me.

Hate the ways I bow to fear and worship the idol of Thin.

Because of the way Thinness has used my desire to be beautiful as a power card to demand my worship, God has shown me the source of my beauty is the first battle I need to settle in my soul.

In Plan B Further Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lammot reveals two truths that have made it so she no longer feels compelled to compete with the "skinny girls":

(1) When we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and our skin was 127th on the list of what mattered on this earth.

(2) And that I am not going to live forever.

Knowing these things has set me free.

This life is too short for all my energy, passion, adoration, and hope to be tied of in compulsions about my body:

Truth of God,

I beg you to reveal to my soul what is beautiful and pleasing in your sight. Make me a woman who takes your breath away.

Most Beautiful Jesus,

You taught your disciples. “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life (John 6:63)” Feed my heart with your word so that I no longer crave the feeling of beauty thinness can give

… please continue to wash all this dirty laundry.