Healing Feels Like

Healing feels like suffering at first. It feels like pain that comes in pulsing waves that sometimes lap over, sometimes crash into the shore.

It looks like wide-open eyes at night when you should have fallen asleep hours ago.

It looks like friends who know the pain is too great to talk or hug away, and so they simply sit and breathe with you.

It sounds like angry questions you ask God even if you don't believe in him.

It sounds like the same song repeating, repeating, repeating as it sings and sews the sutures that barely hold you together.

It feels like sliding down an icy hill which takes you toward something, somewhere new against your will.

It tastes like the tears that swell in your eyes, roll down over your cheekbones, and cascade over your lips.

Healing feels like awkward transitions.

It feels like the itch of scabs that form over your wound that you want to scratch.

It feels like the fear that chains itself to your ankle and makes you wonder if you'll ever be right again.

It looks like the squinting of your eyes when you first leave a dark room and meet the bright, burning embrace of the sun again.

It looks like the mess of pebbles, rocks, and dirt all over the road and sidewalks after the snow melts.

It looks like the indecision on your face when you wonder how you feel when you see or hear or run into him or her or it for the first time in a long time.

It sounds like the wobble of the chuckle that marks the first time you're able to laugh about the situation.

It sounds like the tapping of your fingers on the table, your feet on the linoleum, your heart on your ribcage, because you're antsy and ready to be over this.

It tastes like the tears that still come, though less frequently, as you ask yourself that nagging question...What if?

Healing looks like time.

It looks like days, weeks, months, and maybe years.

It feels at first like the days have stretched into the shoes of centuries and walk ever so slowly toward specks in the horizon.

It feels at some point like the days have shrunk themselves to the size of a hummingbird's wings and beat several times a second.

It sounds like the swell of songbirds signaling the sunrise of a spring you were afraid might never arrive.

It sounds like Amazing Grace but in a language you comprehend for the first time in your life.

It tastes like tears that slide down your face and around the corners of your smiling mouth when you realize how far you've come.

Healing is a mess.

Healing is a fight.

Healing is time, and time, and time.

Healing is coming. Healing we'll find.

***

Feature photo ©2013 Duncan Rawlinson | Flickr

Be Careful What You Pray For

I'm no expert on prayer. Sometimes, my prayer looks like a formal process: Bible in front of me, my head bowed, eyes closed. I have a structure, an order I follow. Occasionally, I pray the Lord's prayer with slight modifications.

Sometimes, it looks like the pages of a child's coloring book--colors outside the lines, erratic strokes, mismatched colors. A whisper before I make a phone call. A request for forgiveness after I judge someone for liking Jason Statham movies. An exasperated "God, please!" when I'm watching the Steelers play. (Being totally serious.)

I know that sometimes God waits to answer my prayers.

I know that sometimes God says no. Like how he has said no to my numerous requests to win the lottery despite my insistence that I'll be responsible. Then again, maybe it's a "Let's wait and see." Fingers crossed.

For all the waiting and all the no's I seem to get, I also know this: sometimes God gives us exactly what we ask for.

Several years ago, I wrote down a prayer in my journal. I was a sophomore in college, and I was all excitement and idealism and bravado and naiveté. Here's what I wrote down:

God, take me through the fire.

At that time, I believed that nothing worth having in life would come easy, so in order to have the best life possible, I wanted God to shake me up and make it hard. I resonated with what John F. Kennedy said decades ago: "Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men." That made sense to me. The best things in life shouldn't come easy. So I prayed for refinement by fire.

What an idiot.

And I wrote it down, thereby providing documented evidence of my silly prayer. I couldn't even take it back or claim, "I never said that!" (Because sometimes God falls for that, right?)

Let me be clear. I wasn't an idiot for believing that life shouldn't be easy. I was an idiot because God sometimes grants us exactly what we pray for. And in this case, he did.

When the fire came, it stayed.

It stayed almost every single day for the last eight years.

In the midst of that fire, it's been easy to forget that I asked for this.

I have a friend who told me a similar story. She had prayed months ago that God would remove someone from her life if it wasn't right, if there was something better, because she didn't think she could do it herself. Later, when that person left, she was devastated. In the aftermath, in the midst of brokenness and questions, her prayer came back to her.

She remembered that she had asked for this--not so much the pain, but the "something better." The beauty and power of God's grace is that it sometimes does something for us we wouldn't have had the courage to do ourselves.

That prayer I wrote down eight years ago has become both a face-palm inducer (Why did you ask for this, moron? Pray for lots of money and beach houses from now on!) and a source of quiet hope. Hope that God is doing something. That my suffering isn't senseless. That ultimately, I need that fire.

Our U.S. Forest Service has been managing the tension of fire for years. Every year, wildfires break out in forests all over the country. While most of us watch these fires on our TV screens with fear and concern, the prevailing philosophy experts and scientists have adopted says to let the fires run their course. While we should do our best to protect homes and valuable infrastructures, the fires ultimately are good for the landscapes they seem to be ravaging.

A short-sighted perspective sees only scorched earth, smoldering ash where trees and green grass used to grow. Land that has been burned by fire won't see significant regrowth for decades. Anyone with a mind to develop buildings in or around the affected area faces significant challenges.

A longer, more patient view, though, helps one understand that fire makes forests healthier and more resilient. According to the 1995 Wildland Fire Policy, forest fire is a "critical natural process." After a fire initially moves through and burns dry brush and excess timber, that forest, left with its strong trees, then provides less fuel and thereby less destruction when subsequent fires move through again.

When I prayed for fire as a headstrong, naive nineteen-year-old undergrad student, I had no idea what I was asking for. I was an unsuspecting, overgrown forest full of pride and immaturity.

Dry as dust.

Ripe for fire.

My vices in need of being burned into a coat of ash.

And that fire came. With smoke all around me, I had the hardest time finding hope. Seeing a plan. But as the fire has moved through the different parts of my life and my heart, as the haze has thinned, as the ground has begun to cool, I see more and more the beautiful, mysterious, painful grace that took my silly prayer and used it to do more in my life than I knew I was requesting.

So be careful when you pray. You might just get what you ask for. And more.

I Don't Want to Be a Christian Anymore

I like to think of myself as an optimist. I try to see the best in people or situations. I try; I really do. More than I'd like to admit, though, I can sink below my idealistic clouds of hope and positivity and bubbles into some serious cynical swamps.

Had one of those moments today, and it materialized with this thought:

I don't want to be a Christian anymore.

Actually, I've had several of these moments over the last few weeks and months. Today's moment in particular was sparked by a friend who jokingly emailed a link to a song by Ray Boltz called "Thank You" to several people, including me.

Some background: Ray Boltz made it big-time as far as Christian contemporary music goes back in the 90s and early 2000s. He was famous for some fabulously cheesy Christian songs such as this, this, and as I previously mentioned, this. When my friend linked to "Thank You" in his email, I assumed it was for the cheese factor, to put a smile on our faces. (It worked.)

I know that song particularly well because after my dad became a Christian in 1997, he fell head over heels for Ray Boltz's glorious mullet- and mustache-fueled ballads. The amount he played and/or sang Boltz's songs was directly proportional to the degree to which I wanted to grind my head with a belt sander. Our church sang "Thank You" at least once a year every year for thank-you services we'd have for our pastor or volunteers, and other Boltz tunes made their way into special music performances. My dad loved Ray Boltz. Our church loved Ray Boltz. A good chunk of conservative Christians all over the country loved Ray Boltz. Ray Boltz was to contemporary Christian music what Full House was to a 90s household: Pure. Gold.

And then Ray Boltz told the world he was gay.

Well. That changes things.

He came out publicly in 2008. I vaguely remember hearing about this a few years ago, and I never really gave it much thought. I think that's because when I moved out of my house to go to college, I was glad to leave Ray Boltz, his music, and all thought of him behind. A guy can only take so much cheese before he can't stand the sight or smell of dairy anymore. He was off my radar for years, and when the news first came out, it was a tiny blip that barely registered with me. Today, though, when my friend linked me to "Thank You," I felt compelled to look up Ray Boltz and get the scoop on this whole deal.

There was one article in particular I found entitled "Ray Boltz: Still Gay, Still Christian, Still Living the Dream" that moved me. Listen--I had spent years playfully mocking Ray Boltz. To be fair, he made it really easy. He combined the mullet of MacGyver, the mustache of Tom Selleck, and the campiness of the Left Behind series into this parody-friendly soup that begged guys like me to make jokes. It's accurate to say I, right or wrong, had little respect or concern for Ray Boltz.

Until I learned more of his story and what he's had to face. Coming out of the closet when you're a staple of conservative Christian culture is akin to the president of the NRA trading in his guns for daisies and an Obama t-shirt. In the article, Boltz mentions some of the backlash he faced:

I was very well known in the Christian music world when I came out. I had some people tell me to buy a gun and shoot myself. Other people demanded that I return the music awards I had received. Some people mailed my CDs back to me. They never bothered to understand that I wasn’t going out and picking up hustlers during all those years. Some people hunted me down here and knocked on the door to give me a piece of their mind.

And cue my heart breaking. Sadly, I bet that's only a fraction of what he's had to deal with.

These are the moments that tempt me to disavow my association with Christianity. That make me want to scream at the top of my lungs, or sink to the floor with my head in my hands, or run away to some island where the only dangers I'd have to deal with are starvation and hungry predators. Anything but hear more examples of how so many people in the church are brilliantly lighting the torch and setting the example for how to absolutely miss the point of the gospel.

Instead of gravitating toward the "untouchables" of society--the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the poor, the sick--"we" (and I use the word "we" with a great deal of frustration) push them out, hurl stones, and add to their burden and pain. We make people who shouldn't be untouchable feel more untouchable, more undesired, more marginalized.

We wield scripture like it's a weapon. We wield it like it's something that we have complete mastery of (which we don't). We flail it around recklessly like a kid with a Nerf gun, and we do it with embarrassing pride. We use our position of feeling like we're right to brand messages onto people that sear their skin, burn their flesh, and leave them with a limp in their gait.

I know there are a lot of great Christians who "get it," who are filled with love and grace. It may even be that those who aren't represent a minority. But every week, I read about or experience firsthand enough Christians who say or do something so graceless that it's enough to make me want to cut the cord and wash my hands of them.

Each time, I find myself saying, I don't want to be a Christian anymore. I'm done with this nonsense.

But then I remember this thing called grace, and it starts to lift me out of the swamp. I've got to believe that we have a God who offers grace even to the graceless.

At some point, I've been the monster I've come to loathe so much in conservative Christianity. I've lacked compassion and humility. I've used my platform of being right to crush someone beneath me. I've left someone branded with the wrong message about Jesus and the gospel and love. Graceless as I've been, God drenched me with grace, drowned me in it, wrung me out, and let me dry in it. He still does, almost daily.

The Jesus who calls me to have grace and compassion for the outcasts and the untouchables is the same Jesus who calls me to have grace and compassion for the graceless Christians who know not what they do.

God's grace was enough for me, and it's enough for Ray Boltz, and it's enough for every single person who has sent him a hateful email or returned his albums or showed up at his door.

It's enough for me to keep holding on.

This Is Not Your Forever

This is not your forever. This has felt endless. Maybe it's been days. Maybe it's been years.

You've questioned, you've fought, you've wrestled, you've thrown your hands up, you've held on for dear life.

You've run, you've limped, and you've crawled.

You've endured.

All valleys must end. All nights must give way to sunrise. So must yours.

This is not your forever.

There have been long nights, some spent wide awake. Some spent in and out of troubled sleep and unsettling dreams.

There have been longer days, some you haven't wanted to face, some you didn't want to end because you knew what the night would hold.

There have been tears. Sometimes, they've flowed almost endlessly down your face, through your hands, to the floor. Sometimes, they've merely simmered in the corners of your eyes as you refused to let them fall anymore.

This is not your forever.

You think about the past and what you could have done differently.

You think about the future and see only more of what you're experiencing in the present.

You don't know how much longer you can carry this.

This is not the way it will always be.

This is not your destiny.

This is not your forever.

You fear you've lost yourself along the way, but you haven't. He or she is there, has always been, deep inside. Each piece of you that has fallen off or been chipped away is part of a necessary pruning, a peeling back of layers to reveal a stronger, truer you.

You've had dreams, times when your heart has refused to accept this reality, moments when your soul has stirred up visions of what you know you were created for.

You have a God who knows you, who sees your suffering, who hears your cries, who has the whole world in His hands.

This is the God who's near to you even now. This is the God who hasn't left you to drown, who hasn't abandoned you or forgotten you.

This is the God who will redeem your brokenness.

This is the God who will rescue you from this pain.

This is not your forever.

On My Wasted Life

If you asked me when I was eight, or ten, or thirteen what I thought I would be when I grew up, you would get some sort of answer that involved professional hockey, professional football, or professional wrestling. During those years, I must have been using some kind of trick mirror that made me see a body frame much larger than the one I'd been given. For a long time, I lamented not having the body frame I needed to become a pro football player. Looking back though, I hold very little regret. It's funny how what we go through leads us to where we are. I'm grateful for the quirky path my life has taken after the day I stood in the football locker room in ninth grade and realized I had grown (or not grown, to be more accurate) out of place there. You couldn't have convinced me then that it was a good moment, though.

I stand at a similar crossroads. The last several years have been the hardest of my life so far. I've lain in my bed on countless nights praying that I could close my eyes and wake up in a different life. I've asked for rescue, for peace, for comfort. I've asked, "Why me?" more times than I'm proud of. I've grown angry and have shaken my fist at God. I've grown sad and have barely found the strength to open my eyes to acknowledge the light of another day.

Yes, these years have been hard. I'm sometimes tempted to think they have been my worst. I'm also tempted to think they've been a waste. I've wasted them struggling to carry burdens too heavy for me to handle.

That's where I couldn't be more wrong.

Every heartbreak, every disappointment, every dark moment I spent wide awake at 3 a.m. staring at the ceiling (sometimes through tears), every lonely car ride I spent struggling to breathe after an anxiety attack...made me into a deeper, stronger, more humble human being.

Every painful moment that I thought was making me weaker forced me to rely on the strength of friends and family. Each time I wanted to walk away from God because I didn't think He could hear me, I chose to trust Him more and lean in closer instead. And each day, God has carried me to somewhere I didn't think I could go.

My pain has given me the freedom to sit with others who struggle, who hurt, who need someone to care. My struggles have given me grace for people in broken places, because God's given me grace as I travel through my broken places.

My weakness has taken my pride away. It's helped me to know what it means to need mercy, grace, and compassion because you don't know what those words really mean until you find yourself needing them like food, water, or air rather than an optional dessert at the Cheesecake Factory.

So no, these years haven't been a waste. I once read something that Theodore Roosevelt had said, and it comes to me quite often. He said, "Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty..." I don't think it's a universal truth, but it's something that keeps me going when I'm discouraged. I take heart knowing that I'm living out the second half of that statement--the effort, pain, and difficulty--and it's only a matter of time before I can taste whatever it is that's worth having that I believe I'm running toward.

These years haven't been a waste because while I may hate what I've gone through, I'm grateful for who it's made me and where it's taking me.