The day’s prompt was: Write a poem about beginnings.

Originally, I had planned to write a birthday post based on my friend & writing teacher, ’s own post, from April. She wrote of “glimmers,” which she defined as:

“A glimmer is a faint, unsteady light, a shimmer that occurs when light bounces off an uneven surface and into you. Each glimmer is like a stitch of light, threading its way through the darkness.”

—Lisa named 52 of them, luminaries along her path through the years.

But as I reread my poem from last month, thinking of the doctor who inspired it—Pensive—I saw the steps that trace their way through my story instead of glimmers; steps I needed to remember. So instead of glimmers, I’ll name the steps.

—The steps that have gotten me to today.

Obviously, my feet themselves have travelled farther, taken more steps. Across oceans and cultures, mountain paths and beaches, on horseback and ox-cart.

But my spirit can only go at the pace of my soul, and she is 35 now. These are our steps.

1. Life. Breathe before lungs are ready. Rage, rage, rage against the odds.

2. Survive. Keep breathing, baby.

3. Laugh. Find joy beyond the grit it takes to stay alive.

4. Discover. Everything is unknown until it isn’t anymore.

5. Inhale. Discover the scent of a teacher in muumuus who loves you.

6. Exhale. Be brave enough to try new things (and lose a few teeth).

7. Embrace everything. The church you’re being taught to love. The family you’re a part of. The horse girl you know you are.

8. Sit still. Summer’s symphony has so much to say.

9. Risk. Say yes.

10. Risk. Say no.

11. Risk. Tell someone.

12. Risk. Believe yourself (even when they don’t).

13. Learn. Pour yourself into what someone else sees in you.

14. Believe. Turn to the God you know.

15. Go. Tell others about the God you know.

16. Read. School books are great, but have you read the Bible, which speaks directly to you??

17. Lead. Proudly raise your hand. You know the answer.

18. Fall in love for the first time. You didn’t know it was possible to fall for an entire country and her people, did you?

19. Shake their shoulders. Tell them how much you love that place. Show them. Don’t let them miss it.

    

20. Grind to a halt. Fight it till you can’t, then rest, until some other hand pulls you back up.

21. Get back to it. But take your time now—restfully. You’ve learned to much to regress back to your old, restless self.

22. Write. This is simpler than you think, and it’s bigger than your classes; it’s your lifeline (and I think you know it even though you’re fighting it so desperately).

23. Decide what’s next. Time to go back to that first love—well, maybe not the first, but the first that mattered.

24. Move your life there. Is falling in love the same thing as staying in love? Let’s find out.

25. Let yourself be shattered. There’s nothing you can do about it—except let it happen, write about it, and see what’s beneath all the rubble.

26. Live. You don’t have to put yourself back together again; that’s what the living is for.

27. Open. Risk the vulnerability of saying what was then and what is now.

28. Love. Not a place or idea, but a person, who calls you as he sees you: a rebel, a wonder, the only girl who said yes even to the roughest edges of him. Fall in love because he said yes to your toughest parts, too.

29. Vow. Say “I do” to the man who got you a Hamilton-themed 28th-birthday card and a framed print of your favorite poem for the only birthday he’s known you for so far.

30. Realize. You aren’t your job; you aren’t your faith. You can only be yourself.

31. Risk. Say yes to freelance, part-time, writing, health, a new home—and move your cat to new windowsills.

32. Join. A church who’s only mission is beauty; a community where you can finally find some friends.

33. Share. Your words aren’t just for you; in fact, they never were.

34. Believe. Your body is screaming for your attention and no one else is listening. Believe she is worth listening to, and figure out who will listen with you.

35. Relief. A new, next step arrives. One we haven’t landed on before.

    Except we have, if we circle back around, to the beginning—when we breathed before our lungs were ready, fought like hell before we knew how to, jumped out of gestation three months “too soon,” they said. / “Right on time,” we replied.

    Relief was knowing we were ready, even if it was a risk, even if it meant we could lose everything.

Relief is knowing we are ready, even if it is a risk, even if it means we could lose everything.

Gosh, that sentence reverberates through my whole being. Through every single step on this list, even if not labeled “relief.” Relief was in all of it. In the risks, the moving, the resting, the shattering, the sharing. Relief was at my premature birth—keeping me alive despite the doctor’s predictions. Relief as readiness has been there the whole time.

And it’s still here today.

Which is good, because here’s the unexpected update:
the surgery didn’t happen.

I thought relief was coming, clear as day, in the most expected way and definition—relief, healing, pain-relieving. I thought it was here, in the form of a surgery destined to fix something, to fix what has been named and believed by a medical dream-team, helmed by Dr. Pensive.

Instead, a nightmare unfolded.

I can’t go into the details right now. I’m nearing the current limits of my body in this very moment: I’m unable to sit up for more than about thirty minutes at a time without intense pain and pressure coursing through my brain and spine.

I’ve sat in two ERs, for 12- and then 24-hours, and ultimately was dismissed and sent home both times. But I can tell you this:

I believe myself. I do have a few providers who believe me. The system is the thing moving awfully slow for something that feels like it has drained the life out of me.

But rereading, editing, and sending this post (drafted before all of this) to you reminds me:

Life is not lost.

I am not lost.

Relief is still readiness—even if I don’t know what for yet.

A question to end with: Name a step you’ve taken in a single year of your own life. What action did it hold? What feelings? What relief?

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What started as a project of writing solely on deconstruction as a concept or on redefining theologies and practices I grew up with, has become writing about how it lives and moves and breathes within my body, which itself is deconstructing, too.1

This very embodied deconstruction is coming to a very unexpected crescendo this month with a surgery I did not see coming2.

It’s a literal deconstruction—a structure within my body being excised, removed, cauterized—to make space for pain to no longer pervade my everyday existence (that’s the hope).

These two ideas are woven together though, right?

Suffering & deconstruction feel like a liminal, braided tightrope beneath my feet.

And my feet—with my very dexterous (hypermobile) toes, let me tell you—that is, my body, is the thing walking it.

This year has proven that my body often reveals my old beliefs, especially about suffering and pain —beliefs like:

There is always purpose in suffering. We suffer so God can teach us something.

I must hope in God’s will only—not my own desires to get better or experience relief.

Or, seeking answers is the opposite of faith.

I no longer believe those things. I’ve deconstructed those beliefs. I’ve found that at the core of my experience, at its foundation, these ideas can be believed instead:

Finding purpose in suffering is not necessary; it’s grief avoidance.

And not only am I allowed to grieve, I believe that God grieves with me. God (or whatever name you have for him/her/they3) doesn’t want us to suffer. She doesn’t hide some higher purpose within it that we have to dig up as if we are treasure hunters; who has time or energy to do that while suffering anyway?! Sure, we might learn something along the way, about ourselves or even about God; lessons aren’t ever absent no matter what we are going through, but that’s not the reason why we suffer.

Some sort of goal or purpose in our suffering should never push aside our grief. Because we need grief to process & integrate what is happening.

Only then can we see the gifts of our grief and our pain—gifts that are far more beautiful than anything we can dig up ourselves.

Hope is not and does not need to be limited to “godly” or spiritual things.

Hope can be holy as a wholly human experience, as a fully embodied experience, not only as something or someone we pin ourselves to—like God’s will, which I believe is not a rigid, unchanging thing, not something we can say as if it is an X on the treasure map that we might find, if we do all the right things—like hoping in it only. I now believe that God’s will is more like grace than something predetermined—a gift we don’t have to figure out or follow a map towards. Grace includes us, too. It includes our hopes and fears, our desires and doubts.

So if you want to say you hope in God’s will, that’s okay, just know that it includes your hopes, too, because hope is within us, a part of us, and can be tangible and touchable, too. Hope can be held; I think it becomes more real to us when it is.

I am allowed to hope in both God (something/one higher than yourself) AND in the outcome I really, really want to see happen.

To that point, answers aren’t the opposite of faith. Why else would we pray or hope for certain things?

I’ve been told before that I should stop asking God for answers; that I should just wait upon his will. Get really still. But all that did was silence me, and I don’t think that God wants that. And, it made not getting answers so much harder, because then what did that mean? That I didn’t pray for them? Or that God didn’t want to help me? Suddenly, my faith was diminished. All because someone said wanting answers was the problem.

Sometimes there aren’t answers, but that doesn’t mean our faith or hopes were wrong or misplaced; it means, I think, that there’s more ahead of us than answers. There’s more journey to go on. That might mean there’s answer, after answer, after not-an-answer, after no-answers, after answer… on and on the journey inevitably goes, because this is the way of life. A collection of answers as stepping stones—and wet feet as we wait for the next one.

Those wet feet prove it: faith is a mystery. It’s trust, often in things we can’t see, water we can’t control. But we can also have faith in things we can see, the answers we need—and most of all, the people we have around us.

When we put faith in people, I think it’s precisely because we see that mystery—or Divinity—in them.

This is the mystery of faith I’m most seeing in my life, in these weeks leading up to surgery especially:

In friends who show up for you.

In my friends (and my husband), I have faith that I’m not alone. Even when it feels like I am. I learn that I don’t need to avoid my grief; I need to let others in on it.

In a surgeon who speaks words of kindness and care to you, who doesn’t hide his humanity from you.

In a surgeon, I see my hope for answers isn’t unfounded. His care for me agrees with me: answers are worth taking risks for.

In grief that offers gifts you didn’t see coming.

In grief, I have faith that the end is not ever truly the end. Unanswered hopes wet my feet with a current that whispers, “Look to the horizon; there is more ahead.”

In writing all these things, I find purpose that transcends suffering—without denying it.

In writing this year (especially these days/weeks), I’ve broken over a decade’s worth of silence around my body and all its pain. Writing has been my purpose all along, but it’s never asked me to push through my pain to fulfill it or to avoid grief in its name. It’s asked me to keep coming back to it, to process and integrate and grieve and cry—all while writing. Because purpose doesn’t have to be outwardly focused; it can simply be what you need to keep surviving.

When I see the mystery of faith in these ways, I find deconstruction in all of it.

No longer is anything black or white, though I will have to fight that ingrained pull the rest of my life; all is foggy grey—like how the misty clouds seem to grip both heaven and earth at sunrise.

Heaven and earth. Body and soul. Stepping stones and wet feet. We’ll always hold it all.

And I’ll keep writing about it here.

Happy one year anniversary to this space!

Thank you for being here. Because I am having surgery on July 22, know that new posts will be sparse for the coming weeks, but I’ll try and check in when I can. I will also be out of work for a few weeks at least. Which means a lot of lost income, to be completely honest with you.

If you’d like to support me and my family during this time, one of the ways you can do that is to upgrade to a paid subscription. This will get you some older posts in the archive, access to all paid posts, which you can go back and read during the time I won’t be writing, and more, depending on the level you subscribe at. You can choose a one-time payment for the year or a monthly one.

Subscribe now

You can also choose to do a one-time donation outside of Substack via Venmo.

Venmo Me

This would be such a big help to me during this time. Thanks again for being here.

A question to end with: How has deconstruction been both body and soul for you? In other words: How has it been embodied?

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PS: Did you notice my subtle nod to my history with India in the photos I chose for this post? That’s because July is when I moved back to the States nine years ago, after living in India for two years. So, just reminiscing over that place I loved, but it was also a fluke (or not) finding both pictures for tightrope & feet in water that are from India. Love!

I grew up pushing, pushing, pushing my feelings down—denying them, lying about them (a la the typical Southern greeting: “How are you?” / “I’m good!”), etc.

I don’t do that anymore; I allow the feelings, the tears, the pain to surface. To spill out. I tell the truth about them.

Earlier that day, as I journaled, my brow suddenly furrowed. I looked up from the page and realized:

Deconstruction has allowed me to learn how to grieve.

It has freed me from pushing my grief down or getting through my grief as quickly as possible. It’s freeing me to allow the tears to flow when they come up, to let thoughts and questions around what I have/haven’t grieved to not just flit through my mind, but remain, even if painful and hard to sit with. Because that’s what grief is for.

It got me wondering:

What are the reasons for these church-culture norms that keep us from grief (and joy)? What’s their theology of it?

What I found within my own history with church cracked open new layers of how deconstruction helps me not just to grieve, but to believe in something better than a church-sanctioned theology of emotion—which stamped out any semblance of who I am as an enneagram-4-empath who has always felt more than what she was allowed to.

Here are some of the reasons I found, making up a theology I no longer believe in.

Read more

Maybe because I discovered it as a child, barely in middle school, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this poem has inspired every single poem I have written since. Case in point:

A week before I wrote the grief poem, I wrote another poem—which shapeshifted to hold all the words on hope I’ve shared here. The prompt for it wasn’t about hope, though; it was:

Write a poem about a bird.

Emily’s poem instantly came to mind, because that’s the comparison she makes of hope. “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul…”

So I borrowed her first line and wrote about my own thing with feathers:

Hope has always been the word.

It was the word that got me through a season of depression. The word that felt like Jesus to me. The word that most epitomized “salvation” for me when the church’s definitions didn’t fit.

Hope has always been my word. And as she (hope) has shown up so often this week—even in the midst of grief—she whispers:

Our stories never stop weaving around the themes that tether us to ourselves.

Isn’t that beautiful?

I wonder:

What are the themes (or words) that tether you? (Please share in the comments!)1

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I didn’t know that in this season I’d return to a word that once held me together.

I didn’t know I’d need her so acutely. I think I had forgotten her—not just the word but the feeling, the belief, the ability to actively hold it.

I had forgotten that all along, ever since she first found me2, she was the one holding me.

Even as she was bashed, again and again, by doctors refusing to follow her lead and help find relief.

Even as she’s been flitting in and out of my view this year, as doctors are listening, caring, and believing me & my symptoms (I’ll share more soon).

She’s still been there. On the horizon. In the dark. Perched in the center of me.

I promised this in my last post, and I’ll promise it again: she’s still there for you, too.

Hope isn’t done with any of us yet.

If you need help believing that, perhaps you might borrow some of the belief I’m wrestling with and fighting for, written out in these posts:

Content Warning: Today’s post is going to get very specific into theology, misogyny, and church politics. If that feels unsafe to you, or just isn’t applicable to you, please don’t feel pressured to read any further. I try to write as inclusively, safely, and honestly as I can, but I know it’s not for everyone. But if you have deconstructed, or just want permission to fight back against those fighting against you—may these words resonate with you.

The last time I wrote in response to new breaking around the Southern Baptist Convention—a huge meeting of church members from the denomination I grew up in—was in 2022, when news broke of just how badly they had handled reports of sexual abuse within church power systems.1

As in, by and large, they didn’t handle them. They swept them under the rug. They moved predators to different churches instead of reporting and removing them from positions of power that allowed them to continue being predators.

It didn’t just break my heart; it hit close to home. It triggered a flood of memories that filled journal entries and blog posts. You can read some of that story here:

This week, they voted to formalize the exclusion (and even expulsion in some cases, if women already serve in this role) of women as pastors in their churches.2

The reason this is such a dangerous precedent is because:

Ultimately it isn’t just about a woman not being a pastor; it’s about a woman not having power.

Which is to say, it’s about a woman not having autonomy.

Or a woman—going back to 2022—not having the ability to speak to an authority figure about abuse that she or others may be experiencing, let alone for her to be heard, believed, or taken seriously enough for action to be taken on her behalf.

To state what’s obvious to you and I: This is not okay.

You can read a report on the story here, which contains this caustic quote:

"This amendment makes very clear that a church in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't have anyone other than a man as pastor in the office of pastor," Mohler [an SBC seminary president] said. "Truths consistent with what Baptists have believed, going all the way back to the 17th century, but it's because we believe those Baptists got it right according to Scripture."

The subtext of this quote is crystal clear: Because we believe we are right.

The heart of my deconstruction

I deconstructed my faith because I could no longer tolerate or stand in this dichotomy of right vs. wrong. More than that, I no longer had the “right” answer. I wasn’t just a missionary who knew I wasn’t going to be a missionary anymore. I was a missionary whose black and white beliefs—aka the framework of why I became a missionary—were slowly unraveling, and then more quickly unraveling.

When did the speed pick up?

When my answers to their questions weren’t right anymore.

When I no longer felt like having the wrong answers was wrong.

When my wrong answers began to feel right.

When the right answers for me—not for them—felt better than theirs ever did.

This happened in a conversation. A phone call.3 And when I look back at it, especially in light of this vote against women—I was a missionary commissioned by this convention, after all—I can see it much more clearly than I did then:

The person on the other line was trying to silence me.

They were trying to spoon-feed me the right answers. Trying to change my answers. Trying to manipulate me into choosing better answers. They, even if they didn’t know what they were doing, were guilting me and shaming me. They, very knowingly, did accuse me of walking away from God. Of turning my back on him and my calling.

Even though the reality was, God turned me away from that path. Who shuffled me to a better one. Specifically, to this one—to writing. To pouring my heart & soul into words like these, reactions like this one. Because many of you are deconstructing too. Many of you, who may even still be in churches sanctioned by the SBC, believe this vote is wrong.

I want you to know: You are not alone. And you will not be silenced.

If a former president can say, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” then hear me say:

The only one who can silence you is you.

Instead of choosing what others may call the right way, choose the better way. Choose your way. Whether or not you believe your answer is God-given, universe-endowed, or mysteriously-otherwise-directed—

Choose you.

Which makes me realize: deconstruction has been the driving force for that. I grew up pushing, pushing, pushing my feelings down—denying them, lying about them (a la the typical Southern greeting: “How are you?” / “I’m good!”), etc.

I don’t do that anymore; I allow the feelings, the tears, the pain to surface. To spill out. I tell the truth about them. So this week, here’s the hard, terrible, awful truth:

We had to unexpectedly, suddenly, quickly say goodbye to our sweet cat, Simmer.

I wrote this to a friend this morning: This might be the first time I'm actually letting myself grieve, which honestly feels like a gift from her.

A gift amidst grief—how can it be?

Maybe it’s hope, actually. Hope breaking through, not to dismiss the grief but to honor it. The horizon of hope promising to never disappear on us.

My favorite poem is about hope—Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson. (More on that in the post I originally had for today; I’ll send it in a few days).

The morning after we had to make the decision to let Simmer go, as I cried through writing my morning pages and my One Poem A Day, I remembered I recently borrowed the first line, which is also the title, to write my own poem about hope. To imagine what I’ve been writing about & wrestling with, as a thing “with feathers.”

And then I thought: What does grief look like? What thing is grief?

So, I wrote a poem in the same form as Emily’s. And I want to share it with you.

There’s a nagging voice in my head that says pet loss is not as significant as other losses. I’ve even believed it before, to be honest, which I guess is why that nagging voice feels so embedded & loud. But now I know the truth: loss is loss. Full stop. And this one is the worst of my life. Thus far?—only time will tell that.

For now, I can’t think that. It is the worst thing I’ve ever felt. I can’t stop feeling it.

And, I’ll keep giving myself permission to feel it, as fully as I can. To cancel plans. To get down deep in the devastation and let my body & soul know:

It’s okay to feel this fully. It’s okay to let it wreck you.

Because: that’s the only way through.

If you’re grieving something—anyone or anything—I’m sending you permission to feel it as fully as you in. To process the loss imperfectly and integrate it intimately.In ways only you know: crying, screaming, writing, poetry, cancelling everything, watching movies that make you cry, etc.

Let yourself love your loss, comfort yourself, and find your way through
the wilderness of grief.

The horizon of hope is still there, I promise. She is still there.

I see her in my other kitties. In friends who are checking on me, validating my grief, sending Door Dash gift cards (because boy the last thing we want to do is cook right now… especially because Simmer loved putting her face in our food… pizza was her favorite thing to try and eat).

She’s still there for you too.

Have you ever noticed this? Can you picture it?

My easily-carsick self couldn’t stare for long, but it was long enough for a whisper to drop into my ears, almost startling me:

“Everything ahead looks like a mirage. But that doesn’t mean it is… it’s a trick of the light.”

I’m not sure I even realized how perfect mirage is for how hope feels right now. Since I last wrote you, hope has shapeshifted further, at times feeling like it did when my pain was first believed back in February, at other times feeling just as uncertain as it did as I cried over hummus and gluten free pita two weeks ago.

The ups and downs make hope feel illusive, uncertain, something I struggle to hold onto for very long. It’s shifty, mirage-like.

The opposite of mirage

When I zoom out or look down at my feet, what I see is that the landscape of these ups and downs is a wilderness. In her book, Tethered to Hope,1 calls this “liminal space.” Towards the end of the book, she has some wonderful journal prompts—which felt like The Artist’s Way’s homework—one of which is “Describe your liminal space.”

I wrote about getting sick in 2012, the potential catalyst for the cascading medical issues I’ve faced since then, all of which grew exponentially worse after my CRPS2 diagnosis in 2023. So, my liminal space has by no means been short. It’s been full of ups and downs, ins and outs, betters and worses.

What’s different about this year—which led me to purchase Adriel’s book—is that this space is coming more into focus. The ground is firmer. It’s becoming clearer, not because suddenly I know it exists or is ending, of course, but that it has a waypoint, a guide, a means by which I can orient myself.

In other words, it has a horizon.

After writing that word out, I searched for it on my phone, hoping to find a definition; instead, it showed me a document I wrote way back in 2015, called “the hazy horizon”—cue my jaw hitting the floor. I was a missionary in India, facing down a lot of dark, hard times, between my own depression and the organization I was with being in dire financial straights.

Its subtitle held a prayer:

let us lift our eyes away from the heaviness to the horizon. though hazy, the dawn remains to break, and the night will surely end. “take heart,” he said.3

I followed that prayer by quoting an old devotional I was reading at the time4, but it ended with a quote that made my jaw drop all over again. In my present-day journal, I wrote this in response:

After so long of my own wilderness feeling limitless, after so long of feeling lost in it, this horizon’s edge is a glimmer of hope that a liminal space is neither limitless nor a place we’re perpetually lost in; instead, it is “a road that leads [you] home.”

My old friend, Jacob

Those who have known me since the first summer I spent in India (in 2010) might know I’m not talking about an actual real friend, but a biblical character. I’ll try and keep this brief, but his story has been very formative in my life to say the least.5

The first words I knew from his story are nestled in another wilderness, in his very own liminal space, between pulling off a cunning but life-altering heist, and a very unknown future. I plucked words that God spoke to him—as only an evangelical golden child can—and applied them to fit my own story. “I will bring you back to this land,” suddenly became about India, not a barely-named wilderness.6

But then I arrived back in India… and nothing was as promised. Hence my document’s descriptor: “hazy horizon.” Nothing was as clear as it once had been.

So I went back to Jacob’s story. To his wilderness, hoping to find a bit about my own hidden in it.

Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I needed to know Jacob’s story first.

And while it might’ve informed my own at the time, it’s taken a decade to see through it like a lens—not co-opting it, but letting it show me a better way forward in this moment’s liminal space.

Perhaps because I know my own story better. I mean, I just printed a bound copy of my memoir and sat it on my bookshelf to rest. I know my story better.

But knowing and living my story are two different things. And something I’m learning right now is this:

I can know it on my own.
I can’t live it alone.

I’ve felt alone for a long time, perhaps in a similar way to Jacob, later in life. After several decades, another chapter shows him—don’t miss this—on his way home to meet his brother, the same brother left holding nothing on the other end of that heist Jacob pulled off. Jacob’s scared of what’s going to happen. Unable to hold out hope that forgiveness might be possible. He’s pretty sure he’s about to lose his life on the other side of a final night he’s spending alone.

It’s there he wrestles. Scholars don’t agree on whom he wrestled with. An angel? God? His brother himself? Either way, it’s just him. No spectators to cheer him on. No words from the one he wrestles with (until after).

Jacob asks for a blessing, and gets it—via a broken hip. A permanent limp. He also gets a new name, which feels significant given what happens next. At first light, Jacob-now-Israel gets up and goes to his brother, who has forgiven him. Who welcomes him home. Finally, his next chapter begins. Maybe the first one where it no longer feels like liminality, but like real life.

I, too, have felt alone for a long time, wrestling with God over and over again. Thinking that was the way forward, the only way forward. But all along, I was meant to go across the river, embrace my brother, and make a life with those I love and those who love me.

It’s too easy to feel like that’s the mirage, right? That there couldn’t possibly be a horizon that leads home. That that’s too big a hope to have right now. That aloneness feels much safer than vulnerability.

Today, that might feel true for you and me; even typing this right now, it feels true—too big, too risky. I’m writing this before yet another doctor’s appointment (a few hours before this publishes), where my hopes will be judged and my next steps will be in someone else’s hands.

But can I tell you what I also heard yesterday while staring at the horizon, with all its hazy, murky, shadowy slants in my blurry eyes?

“You can trust the Light to reveal the real when it’s time.”

I’ll offer a slightly adapted version of that prayer I wrote over 10 years ago again—as an offering of solidarity with wherever you are in the process of waiting for the Light to reveal the real for you:

let us lift our eyes to the horizon. though hazy, the dawn remains to break, and the night will surely end. “Take heart.”

I don’t want to tell you that the hopes I quietly carried until two weeks ago, when I unabashedly wrote about them—didn’t pan out the way I wanted. But I saw this post1 by this week, and I knew: I couldn’t skip another week without writing, without confessing the truth of what happened and how I feel now. Here’s part of her post:

To bring you up to speed it you missed it: two weeks ago, I wrote about the big hope, but there was a smaller one, too.

Neither were met with certain, sure fulfillment. The latter, a quick, impersonal “no.” The big one, a murky few days full of maybes and shrugs and tears and anxiety.

I didn’t immediately eat without pain, which was the hope and the expectation of my doctors. Instead, the pain morphed and shifted. It felt different. It was overshadowed by other conditions’ flares—something I haven’t experienced before. It was a strange reorienting of which pain hurts most. I didn’t expect that.

So, the question anxiously flitting & buzzing around my mind like a hummingbird is this:

Will it be enough?

Which sounds dangerously close to:

Is hope enough?

I don’t know the answer to either of those questions, to be honest with you. But I’m also not sure I have to. Granted, the first one is more objective; it’s what I’ll be carrying into the follow up with my doctor a week from today. Ultimately, it’ll be one he answers—an answer I might have to counter with the kind of self-advocacy that scares me.2

The second one is carried deeper within me. Next to the risks it takes to hope at all; beside the doubts that are inevitable; alongside the litany of disappointments I’ve walked through before these. I have to have compassion for all of them. I have to welcome them, let them balance beside hope on the scales I seem to be holding right now.3

Because without them, hope cannot exist at all.

This week, the scales tipped hard with disappointment. Clanging, crashing, pulling me down with them. Hope became light as air, elusive and a stranger to me. The certainty it felt like these past few weeks? It may still be in me somewhere, but I’m numb to it.

From certainty to clarity

As I moved through the days after the nerve block, I had to think a lot about my pain. From panic-attack moments to sitting in silence after a meal, wondering when/if/how the pain will show up. I took copious notes, pouring over every sensation for a whiff of how I felt, what it could mean, how I could put it into words, both for myself and my doctor.

It was an exercise in clarity—definitely not certainty. I’ve never uttered the word “maybe” so many times. But as I sat with my pain—which is to say with my dashed hope personified—things felt a little clearer. I softened into what I felt.

My vision grew sharper, not around my hopes, but around myself.

About what I want, what I need (or don’t); what paths I’d like to take, what paths I’m still on (or not).

Here’s what I got clear on:

I want to write. This may feel like a “duh” to many of you, but to me, it has never felt like a duh a day in my life. But it’s coming into focus now. Every week that whizzes past where I miss my Wednesday writing groups4 feels awful, and not in a self-blame kind of way (usually), but in a I-miss-it-so-much-I-can’t-stand-it. This is clarity.

I want to advocate for my health and do all I can humanly do to increase my quality of life. Again, another potential “duh,” but if you’ve never dealt with chronic illness, you cannot imagine how incredibly difficult this is. It’s not a given. It’s something you have to fight for over and over again. Most—if any—doctors aren’t helping you. You have to fight for this. You have to hope for it, even, which feels impossibly hard. But sometimes hope is action, not feeling, and sometimes you know exactly what you have to do. This is clarity.

I think clarity is the balancer of the scales I’m holding.

It knows the risk & hope on each side. The disappointment & expectation. Clarity offers counter balances, stills their oscillations, tips the tipping points. Clarity picks them up again when they lurch out of my hands.

Maybe clarity even removes the blindfold that keeps me from seeing exactly what I’m holding.

Because sometimes what you can’t see, but hope for, is not what you get. Clarity helps you see the hope beneath the hope.

(The thing you really want). The risk-you-took-then behind the risk-that-is-now. The scabbed-over disappointment beneath the fresh wound of disappointment.

This weekend, clarity was crystal clear pictures I held in my hands.

A walk down memory lane that held photos of my 24-week-old preemie self. A tiny incubator. Eyes taped shut beneath the invisible oxygen flowing all around. A heart monitor threaded through my onesie at home, months later. Breathing treatments at Disney World.

Chronically ill, even then.

But as the photos followed me growing up, it’s clear—I start to smile. I found myself. I loved horses. I briefly modeled. I remember the feel of Christmas presents and Easter dresses, leopard print purses and polyester fabric. I saw 4 photos I didn’t expect or know existed, each a different snapshot of a memory I share in my memoir.5

Clarity is written into our stories alongside every hope and fear and disappointment. Maybe it’s a line scratching something out. Or a thread holding a story together. Or a handful of tiny calibration weights balancing us back to steady stillness.

Whatever it does, I think that, most importantly, it brings us back to us. Not what we hope for (though sometimes it does; sometimes these are one and the same), but what we feel, what our bodies know, and what makes us who we are.

Hope may be a shapeshifter, but we aren’t.

Thanks for being here. If this resonated with you, please consider hitting the heart below, commenting, or sharing. You can also hit reply to email me. This helps support me—and encourages me to keep going, to keep writing.

I could tell you that it’s been a month because we went to London & Oxford/Bath! Or because I was tired when we got back. Or because I haven’t quite known what to say or write since then.

All of those things would be true, but they wouldn’t be the whole story. Because the whole truth is, 3-ish posts ago, back in March—I was living a before story. Read it here:

And life might just be about to break into an after. At least, I’m hoping it does.

I’ll get back to that. First, a moment for joy.

Revisit London with me!

I promise to circle back to some of these images/moments/lovely days, but for now, here’s a few glimpses. If you’re like me, maybe they’ll make you smile. Savor that, like I am, writing this. Joy is hard to come by. Savor it. Vicarious joy is better than none.

And now, the impending-after story:

Here’s what I didn’t tell you in that post (linked above):

In February, I met with a new GI. He’s a bit Instagram-famous, but he’s local, too. Last year, he went into private practice, so I made an appointment and subsequently waited ~6 months. So, I sat down on Zoom with him and spent an hour going over my history, symptoms, etc.

Yes, you read that right, an hour. An hour of me mostly describing the past two years—although the argument could be made that the last two years have simply been an apex of an entire life’s worth of symptoms. Two years of debilitating pain after every meal, every drink. Pain that’s been ramping up to happen when I turn over in bed, or when I take a deep breath.

First, he said, “I’m sorry you’ve been going through this.” His words dripped with honesty, as if my rambling had punched him in the gut.

Then, his voice shifted. He spoke with confidence.

“You have MALS.”

“Really?” I said, vaguely familiar with the condition, but unused to a doctor naming anything up front—let alone something rather rare.

He went through the tests I’d get, then the surgeon I’d see. I nodded along, trying to stamp down any hope. How many tests have I gotten with negative or inconclusive results (read: almost all of them)?

The two test results came in. One was negative, the other, had notes that, when Googled, affirmed what the GI had said. “Evidence of MALS.”

Here’s what MALS is: Median Arcuate Ligament Syndrome. Basically, a ligament in my chest is in the wrong place. And because it’s in the wrong place, it’s compressing my celiac artery. Between the ligament and artery, there’s a bundle of nerves, so each time this happens, the nerves light up—pain.1

The surgeon confirmed it a week later and ordered a half-dozen more tests, scans, appointments. For those keeping score, yes, those 6 to 8 appointments I mentioned in March… April-May have held 6 to 8 more of them.2 I’m in the middle of all of these right now.

Waiting.

Hoping.

Praying.

Next Wednesday (May 20th) holds the next step, and it’s a critical one. It’s a nerve block, which will serve as a test-run to know if surgery to remedy this is a good idea. There are several other factors that go into all of this, but it is the first hurdle that I need to pass to potentially get relief.

What I’m most noticing as I’ve been in this sort of liminal space is the word HOPE.

Yes, that pesky word I found in the same breath as sorrow during Lent.

The last time I was facing this level of medical chaos, I lost hope pretty quickly. With each dismissive doctor, every inconclusive test, all the ways in which I felt isolated and like my life had just stopped.

By the end of it, I just knew that hope was too dangerous to touch, let alone trust.

This feels so completely opposite. Not only because of the confident, caring doctors I’ve been seeing, not only because the scans are conclusive, but because hope feels close.

Hope feels like certainty, perhaps for the first time.

And so, I’m practicing hope. I’m writing prayers in present tense. I’m repeating this mantra: “be certain.” I’m letting others in on this journey, instead of isolating myself until I see the hope come true.

Even writing this is an act of hope, because I could get to next week and then have to tell you that it didn’t work, that my hopes have been dashed (again). That’s terrifying.

But my word of the year was balance, and if I’m going to balance in this moment, then I’m allowed to be both terrified and hopeful.

If you are a praying/holding-in-the-light-type person, I’d appreciate your thoughts next Wednesday (5/20) morning. Specifically, that the nerve block works and I can eat without pain—for the first time in 2 years—after it.

Thank you for reading this. If you made it this far, thank you. It truly means the world to me that you’d take the time to read this update in particular. Especially because it wasn’t exactly what you signed up for.

But I truly believe that deconstruction is embodied, and the chronic pain and illness my body endures are just as much part of my deconstruction journey as anything else.

Which makes me wonder—

What in your body understands deconstruction? Or have you noticed where your body has memories of how your faith has morphed and changed over the years?

I’d love to know where you / your body is at. You can leave a comment at the button below, or hit “reply” on this email to reach me directly.

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This week, a friend and I exchanged video chats on a Tuesday morning, and it led to me ranting a bit on how the church and deconstruction both broke us in different ways. Fun surprise: that video will be available to paid subscribers below—a small way to celebrate hitting 5 paid subscribers, halfway to my goal of 10 for this year!

As I began to write this rant, though, a different format came to me: a love letter. So here it is—

A love letter to our whole selves:

Dear whole self,

The evangelical church asked us to live broken, telling us we were broken by asking us to bypass all the things they called “wrong.” Wrong emotions for right ones. Wrong theologies for right beliefs. Wrong people for right standing. On and on the list goes.

We could never feel whole because we were being asked to ignore half of our selves.

Right or wrong—they said, “Make yourself less and less so God becomes more.” Except he never did. Because how does God become more when the body they dwell in is held in contempt? When the self God breathed spirit and life into is splitting itself apart?

Deconstruction shatters us again because we got used to convincing ourselves we weren’t whole enough. The fractures feel deeper.

Ultimately, we’ve been fractured back to how we felt at the beginning, when the church began to teach us to live this way.

And because we’re so trained to bypass what feels “wrong”—fractures and questions and feelings—we begin think there’s another side to it. We can get to the “right” deconstructed point. We can reconstruct until it’s just right again.

But here’s the secret: deconstruction is ongoing.

It doesn’t have an end point, no resolution to reach. It can’t be “made right” because it doesn’t need to be. It’s okay with doubts and questions and the ability to hold both—all things that we were taught should never be held but discarded. Dropped. As fast as possible. Hot potato hands.

There will also be something new to be fractured. A long-forgotten theology to deconstruct. A framework to reconsider. Some old belief popping up out of nowhere, asking for change.

We have to learn to live in the tension. How?

By letting the centripetal force of deconstruction to take us back to the beginning—the very beginning of us, not when the church interrupted & stunted us.

By letting the shattering to show us that fractures don’t break us; they mend us. Because we were never broken to begin with.

If we allow them, our fractures prove it. They reveal the marrow of our whole selves—you, me, us—worthy and unbroken from the start.

Hear it again, whole self: You were never broken to begin with.

Sincerely,

Deconstructed-but-Whole Me

Let’s talk about it:

What might you write in a love letter to your whole self?

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PS: Click below to watch the video rant that inspired this love letter. For paid subscribers only. (You might be redirected to sign in.)

To those who watch it—let me know what you think! Do you want more content like this?

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They were there. Deliberately present.

They woke early, shaking from nightmares, hoping it was all a dream, and walked a long distance. Willing to go with grief and ache and tears rolling down their faces.

Willing to go to the place of their pain, and sit down.

They watched the world shake and groan. Did they think they might die here, next to the grave of the one they loved?

They saw a stone roll, light as a lemon on the floor, until the tomb no longer had a door.

They watched the powerful men shake in their boots, collapse like corpses, as lightning struck and reverberated through the grave until it spoke to them and said,

“Do not be afraid.”

The women straightened their spines to prove they weren’t, sitting tall in defiance of every flight signal in their bodies and minds.

But in the next words, their spines couldn’t hold them up. They crumpled, but not in fear or doubt or even hope—in relief.

All that was wrong is made right.

All that would die will receive life.

All their risky hopes are fulfilled—

Their friend is alive.

They lose no time, turning to leave, running with different tears down their cheeks, to relay this story, these words to everyone they know:

We went to grieve, but return with joy.

We went to mourn, but felt the mountains tremble.

We went with a single shred of hope, but it struck like lightning in our hearts.

We went to see a dead man, feeling death within us, but he’s not there;
he is risen.

. . . and so are we.

Content Warning: This is a lot of Jesus-y words today. If that feels unsafe to you, no need to read any further. I try to write as inclusively, safely, and honestly as I can, but I know it’s not for everyone. But if you have deconstructed, and want a glimpse of what it could look like to look at Jesus with deconstructed eyes and ears—I hope these words offer you peace.

You likely already know this about me: I’m an introvert. A bit of a loner. Ask me about some of my best days and I’ll paint a picture of me, alone, doing very little. Ask me about my worst days and I’ll show you me crying, alone, hiding.

I’m not judging that as a bad thing; I need alone time, like a battery needs recharge, like a soul needs a dwelling.

Where it becomes dangerous—hopeless—is when that aloneness turns to isolation. When hiding becomes habitual. When aching silence is easier than the risk of words.

The line between the two is grey, and very thin.

And often, I’m a ghost, towing it.

One of the many reasons I tow this line between aloneness and isolation is because I’m afraid others won’t get it. I’m afraid they won’t understand what I’m going through, afraid their responses might be trite, bypassing, or simply untrue and/or hurtful to my experiences. I’m afraid that instead of compassionate listening, they’ll offer quick fixes. Instead of being with me in it, they’ll try to impose their own solutions on me, a la:

Have you tried this supplement? Yoga? Acupuncture?

Pray more. Push through. Find gratitude.

Turns out, even Jesus experienced this.

When he tells his friends the next steps—towards suffering—one of them tugs on his arm, drags him aside, and rebukes him.

“Never! This isn’t going to happen!”1

The typical reading of Jesus’ response to this is intense anger. He explodes:

“How dare you not get it?! Get out of my way, you accuser.”

I picture something much more human.

First, the word rebuke is a bit gentler than what we expect of the English word. In Greek, it speaks more to warning than chastising. Literally, it means to “place value on.” Peter values Jesus and doesn’t want to lose him. It changes his words from stern to gentle, from his voice quaking to shaking:

“No, don’t say that! If you keep speaking like this, it’s gonna come true! And we don’t want that, right?! I don’t want that.”

Do you hear his voice breaking, like I do?

I picture Jesus flinching at his words.

For just a moment, the strong façade drops. A vulnerable flash in his eyes agrees with Peter, wordlessly spoken in a blink:

“No, I don’t want that either.”

Perhaps his heart breaks here, not his voice.

After all, he’s human. Which means there’s an innate protection within him, seeking to avoid death. He knows it’s coming—he’s upset the religious rulers way too much by this point. But that doesn’t automatically override his humanity, something he shares with Peter.

I think he sees himself in Peter’s eyes for a split second.

But then he hears the milling sounds of the friends Peter dragged him away from. He sees them over Peter’s shoulder. Perhaps he sees their confusion, their eyes darting between Peter and himself, wondering who to believe, which friend to put their own hearts behind.

He sees his friends, and it pulls him back to reality.

To his reality, different from what Peter wants, different even from what some small part of him wants.

Community is the magnet that pulls Jesus back to his why. To the risks he is willing to take so that his being with them can be unfettered by human timelines. So that he can be with them forever.

So where others may see Jesus exploding, I see him unfolding.

Yelling into a mirror:

“Go away, accuser! Human perspective is fledging at best to see what God is doing here.”

Opening his eyes as wide as he can to remember the bigger story he is a part of—the larger community he loves and is more than willing to risk and give everything to be with them.

He turns to that larger community—perhaps taking Peter’s arm this time, leading him back to the group—and invites them to do the same thing. To follow him into the risks and vulnerabilities and storylines that aren’t pretty, that contain more hurt than healing, that don’t feel good, where human perspective falls short even though it’s all we’ve got.

What good does it do to climb to the top of the world, never risking a damn thing, if you lose your soul in the process?

Or what is a soul worth to you?

Jesus knows what it is to keep his soul intact, whole. He does so by staying close to his friends. By refusing to let community go.

This is the hardest part of the story for me.

If I’m honest, I’d rather go it alone. Bury my head in the sand and move on. Not deal with the messiness of being human with other humans. Avoid the hard conversations.

You think it’d be the suffering, the cross, the pain, but those are easier things to deal with. Keeping my soul intact, whole, by keeping it tethered to others? That feels impossible.

But every single step I’m watching Jesus take towards Easter reverberates with his utter refusal to go it alone—even though he knows he’ll be abandoned by so many.

He allows a woman to anoint his feet, preparing him for his own death, when his connection to community—and communion—will be cut off.

He then takes up the same task, washing his disciples feet, making them clean mere hours before they’ll all make a clean break from him.

He becomes visibly upset during dinner, and then he vulnerably shares why.2

He tells them he loves them, knowing they’ll question it before the end of the week.

The religion I grew up in never mentioned Jesus this way. Weak, doubtful, needy.
But this is the Jesus we need. The Jesus whom we can identify with. The Jesus who looks like us, walks like us, thinks like us.

This is the Jesus we journey towards Easter with. The Jesus who gets it, who gets us. Who is staring down scary things—and refusing to face it alone.

May we refuse to go it alone, too. May I refuse to be a ghost.

Not just by looking Jesus in the eye, but by seeking out others as well, risking relationship when real life get real tough.😉

They’ll remind us of things we’ve forgotten.
Prepare us for things we can’t prepare ourselves for.
Have faith when we doubt.
And show us the other side—the hopeful possibilities—of situations we can’t see past.

That’s what a soul is worth. That’s what we’re all worth:

Not being alone.

Let’s talk about it.

What’s the hardest part of the story for you right now?

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But for the very first time, there’s a faint glimmer of hope on the horizon of all of these appointments. I’m not in maintenance mode, currently; I’m in investigative mode. Figuring out mode. Seeing-if-we-might-have-some-new-answers mode.

And, at the same time, that faint glimmer gets overshadowed real quick.

By my own over-analyzing. By world events dragging us all into a timeline we didn’t ask for. By fears that my hopes will be dashed (again). By simply the time it takes to get from appointment A to appointment B.

Before I know it, hope is hidden, eclipsed by a cloud of fear, anxiety, and sorrow.

Old me, and her old faith, would’ve dismissed those other feelings, desperate to stay hopeful.

Because hopeful equaled faithful.

And faithful equaled worthy.

I no longer ascribe to that logic. I can no longer dismiss those feelings. I can’t ignore them or forget them.

I couldn’t back then, either, if I’m honest; I just wore a thicker mask to disguise how I felt. My faith was that mask, actually. It helped cover up the tears. It helped explain how God was going to take care of everything. It helped bypass every anxiety with adages to “just have more faith!” and “pray more!”

But masks don’t heal; vulnerability does.

Ask me how I know, and I’ll tell you two sides of the same coin. I’ll tell you the areas where I have been vulnerable, sharing the deep, hard things, with others—and have felt the unburdening it offers.

And I’ll tell you there are areas I haven’t been vulnerable yet—where I am still masked up, isolated, and struggling. Where I am still feeling my way through to the vulnerability I’m not quite ready for.

Because the me that still has a semblance of faith today? She feels her way through.

She can name her emotions like a pro. She can spot her analytical part, spinning circles around a situation. She sees her anxiety like a woman in white,1 pacing back and forth in the corner of her mind.2 She knows exactly what she is afraid of.

She knows: the only way to get to hope is through all the other emotions.

Here’s a list of emotions I’ve been spiraling around this week:

The fear of being dismissed again, told my symptoms aren’t real or don’t matter.

The anxiety of a million-and-one what if’s spinning around in my head.

The sorrow of chronic pain, debilitating fatigue, and meds upon meds upon meds.

I used to think that I couldn’t feel hope if I also felt these things. I used to think hope could only be hope if it was pure—if it was all I was feeling. If it was my sole focus.

Now, I know: I can’t feel hope without them. Not truly, not fully. After all, these sentences contain at least some of my hopes within them:

That I won’t be dismissed. That my symptoms will be believed.

That the what if’s will be replaced with what is, what was.

That the meds might help the pain and fatigue. That it won’t always be this way, even if not in my lifetime.

If I don’t know fear, how can I hope for it to dissipate? If I don’t feel anxiety, how can I hope that the moment will pass? If I don’t grieve, how do I fix my eyes on a greater hope beyond a life of chronic illness?

I saw a glimpse of this in a few readings recently for Lent.

First, I read Romans 8—perhaps one of the most famous, most quotable passages of the New Testament. It’s packed full of bangers:

• We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.

• God works all things for the good of those who love him.

• If God is for us, who can be against us?

That last one is the beginning of the end of the chapter, and—if I’m remembering the class I took on Romans correctly—the writer is breaking into song at this point. Poetry takes over his prose, eventually crescendoing with astonishment that nothing can separate us from God’s love. Nothing.

But then, chapter 9 rolls in, or rather, skids in on hot, squeaky breaks:

“At the same time, you need to know that I carry with me at all times
a huge sorrow.”

Knowing that Romans is a letter to a church, and wouldn’t have had chapters and verses, just words—can you imagine going from that crescendo to… that?

It’s a leveling moment. An equalizer, from someone they likely admired and looked up to and maybe even thought: this guy writing to us doesn’t deal with emotions like ours. He’s just hopeful & faithful all the time.

Wrong.

Essentially, he’s saying, “I don’t always live in this hopeful reality that I’ve just described.”

I’m positive that there were more than a few people holding their breath the entire reading of chapter 8—feeling more suffering than hope—that exhaled when that sentence was read.

Wait, really? It’s not just me?
I’m not alone in my struggle to believe all of this?

—I mean, that in itself is hopeful!

But I wonder if Paul’s song felt stronger as he crashed into the sorrow he also felt.

I wonder if it was easier to admit his sorrow because he’d just remembered the laundry list of hopes he’s got, too.

It’s not one or the other. We can’t expect to feel only hope, and we won’t always feel only sorrow.

And the faith Paul is singing about? It’s not asking any of us to wear a mask one way or the other. In fact, it’s asking the opposite. Lay it down. Admit the hard thing.

You might just be surprised at the hope that mere act will bring.

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In Case You Missed It

This post is a sort-of continuation of my last post—also on the themes of Lent, suffering, and hope.

A note for those not-so-biblically or Jesus-y inclined: I’d encourage you to read this one anyway. Because you know suffering, too. And the world, outside of any faith, give plenty of false reassurances of hope you know are bogus, too. Try and think of those. Replace “God” with “Universe” or “Spirit.” One of the things I’m passionate about post-deconstruction is writing in such a way that anyone can find themselves in my words, and find encouragement, too.
I hope that’s true for you today.

I’m crying more easily these days, at least behind closed doors, with my therapist, staring me down over a Zoom call with her quintessential “tell-me-what-hurts-today” look in her eyes.

Or, as one of my favorite writers put it, I’m “living a perpetual Lent,” where the thought of further burdening my already-overwhelmed system quite physically hurts.

Thankfully, my church is giving a weekly reminder that if that’s you—me—God doesn’t want to add more burdens to you in this season. Instead, God wants to walk with you, to show you that it’s okay to ask for help, to cry, to not understand why, to let others carry the burden of prayer for you, maybe even to carry you.

That simple permission has opened up something in me. Where others may read bible texts during Lent and see their sin and the ways they need forgiveness, I’m seeing my suffering and the ways I need God to meet me in it.

I used to draw a line between those two phrases. I grew up in a tradition that said—speaking for God—“you are suffering because of your sin” and “if you pray the right prayer enough times, you will be made well.”

But when your suffering is chronic, perpetual, when prayers fall short and answers are few and far between—and never what you really want—that tradition crumbles. That system fails.

That kind of religion may save, but it doesn’t comfort.

And if we believe in “the God of all comfort,” why would we believe in a God whose voice dismisses comfort?

I can’t. Can you?

(And if you can, I’d challenge you to put yourself in my suffering shoes—sandals, because a pain condition keeps me from wearing real shoes on my left foot—and try answering that question again.)

I didn’t expect to learn so much about suffering during Lent.

Maybe I should have expected it, but the way I’m learning is different—especially from the lines drawn about suffering above. It feels less like intellectual lessons, more like rays of light piercing into the darkness I’m living in. It’s a kind of comfort that helps me understand what’s happening—not why.

I haven’t been abandoned. Or left behind. I’m not walking alone in the wilderness. Nor is God a hard-nosed father, peering over his glasses, asking, “Have you learned your lesson(s) yet?”

God’s much gentler than that. Even if there are lessons in this liminal space, they comfort instead of freeze. They offer solidarity and hope, not isolation or manipulation.

The psalms I read remind me I’m not the first to feel the way I feel, to suffer the way I suffer. Even in the most grandiose of stanzas, the writers still wonder: Where is God? Why am I still waiting?

And today’s words in Romans 5—finally exiting the “romans road” reminders and entering other territory—sparked a thought in me that caught me completely off guard:

“There are a lot of steps before hope gets cultivated in you as you suffer.”

—these are immensely hopeful and helpful words because I grew up believing basically the opposite.

I grew up forcing myself to hope, like tugging a too-small sweater over my head in the heat of summer.

I grew up racing to hope, like it was the replacement for suffering instead of its reward, as is being outlined here.

I grew up thinking that if I wasn’t hopeful, I wasn’t holy. I wasn’t doing something right in my suffering.

If I wasn’t feeling hopeful, all the time—especially in suffering—my faith wasn’t genuine.

No, Paul lists a very different chain of events out for us: “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”1

suffering > perseverance > character > hope

A lot of steps between suffering & hope, right? A lot of movement, a lot of not things to do, but things that are happening, forces at work beyond just the suffering. Here are some word pictures that the Greek paints for us:2

• Suffering: Pressure—literally “crowding” or a narrowing.

  • Our world closing in on us.

• Perseverance: Patience, endurance—literally “remaining under.”

  • Staying put as our world closes in. Not what we’d choose, but perhaps what we need.

• Character: Growth—tested-ness, trustiness, proof, mettle.

  • Growth happens when we stop trying to make it happen. Metals don’t melt because they know how but because of the elements at work around them.

• Hope: Expectation, confidence—open arms to what one is certain of.

  • First, we learn what hope really is: what is it we want and need in order to live authentically.

  • Then, we find ourselves hopeful: that what we want and need will find us.

How to move from suffering to hope, then?

I don’t think we can rush this process. Like the stages of grief, we might flow in and out of the different pieces, the different moving parts between the start of suffering to moments of hope:

Our world closes in, and we can’t help but buckle beneath the pressure.

When we buckle beneath, we’re trapped beneath the rubble—and God doesn’t ask us to dig ourselves out. That would be the opposite of endurance, the antitheses to patience.

As we stay put, we grow. It may not look like growth; it may not even look like us. But that’s the tested-ness, ultimately—what comes to the surface? What doesn’t? Who am I? Who am I not? What (or who) stays with us? What (or who) doesn’t?

Then, comes hope. Not because everything feels hopeful, not because everything is put back together, but because we’re still here, and we know who we are and what/who is still with us in it.

I think it’s important to note that this isn’t a formula; it’s a river’s current we’re caught in. We must flow with it, trusting its movement. Trusting that, like the psalmists and writers throughout history, hope does eventually come back around—just as suffering does, just as doubts do, just as growth happens again and again and again.

We’ve seen the photos, moments of hope crystallized just as plainly as grief. Here are two such moments of me. The first is in India, where my world shattered and my teammate took a photo of the very day it happened—and then on the other side 1.5 years later, a selfie on a train in the UK, of a girl who knew who who she was and was hopeful for the future, even without a single clue of what that future held:

If you’re suffering right now, instead of rushing to hope, here’s an invitation:

Let your soul develop like a roll of film.

Sit in the darkroom of suffering, grief, pain.

Until the full picture of who we are is ready to be seen.

First by ourselves, then by others.

Then, and only then, crack open the door and let the light in.

May it be so.

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Content Warning: This is a lot of bible-talk today. If that feels unsafe to you, no need to read any further. I try to write as inclusively and safely and honestly as I can, but I know it’s not for everyone. But if you have deconstructed, and want a glimpse of what it could look like to reread the bible with deconstruction in the margins—I hope these words offer you peace.

I’m regularly reading the bible and journaling about it for the first time in years for the season of Lent1, and it’s surprising me. It’s surprising me how natural, how normal it feels. How it’s like riding a bike—something you don’t really ever forget how to do, even if the why and what-for does feel more elusive. Even when it doesn’t feel “yay, look at what I’m reading, this is good,” but more like “gosh, this feels more honest than I remember.”

It’s also surprising how things jump off the page very differently than before.

Ten years ago, what jumped off the page were words that helped me frame my life, like a house I was building from scratch. I looked for words that helped me remember my own calling2, my own purpose.

“Tell me what I already know,” was my unspoken prayer.

“Yes” was my margin-note answer.

These days, that silent prayer might sound more like, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Deconstruction” was this week’s answer, scribbled in the margin next to not one, but two passages very familiar to me.

First, Jeremiah. A prophet, called as a young man. I felt connected to him growing up, because I felt similarly both called and ill-equipped for that calling. But all along, the calling he’s given has contained deconstruction within its very core, at it’s very inception:

“You’re going to tear down, uproot,
undermine what’s always
held strong.”3

Deconstruction is this prophet’s destiny.

Actually, maybe it’s every prophet’s destiny. Especially when corruption, greed, scandal, and coverup are everywhere, hidden in plain sight within the faith we inhabit or the faith worlds we’re part of. (Feels familiar, right? It always has—from Jeremiah to us now.)

And it comes to the called4 first, because God knows we’ll listen. We won’t let anything slide. We’ll speak against the kingdoms that need to be spoken against. We’re more willing to evolve than to maintain the status quo for someone or something else. Even if it means our whole worlds are the first to shatter. Even if it means our own shatterings become the stories by which other shatterings occur.

We live them first.

Perhaps so the most vulnerable don’t have to.

But also—so that the most privileged get the chance to.

The chance to be shattered, after all, is really the chance to be saved.

Then, Paul says it. Probably a fellow Jeremiah-lover, though not as young when he encountered God in a new way than the ways he grew up with. His world was shattered when God met him on his way to destroy Jesus-followers; he was saved by it and joined those Jesus followers instead.

He writes to a church absolutely coming apart at the seams with strife and internal conflict, unsure of how to be together, how to practice their faith, how to do any of it:

“There is only one foundation…
if your work on it
isn’t up to snuff—it won’t make it.
It’ll be torn out & started over.
But you’ll still make it; God’s sacred temple—you—
will still be intact.”5

I appreciate the reminder that there is only one foundation here6, because I think the temptation is finding another one, mistaking it for God or God’s will, then building your life upon it. The church Paul is writing to is right there—wondering what to build upon: The different people who brought them to faith? The way they practice faith? The ways they eat or don’t eat certain things?

I’ve done that, too—my calling to India being the prime example. It was a foundation I built not just my life on, but my world around. Every thing and every one at one point was tied to it.

As I paraphrased above, that wasn’t up to snuff. Not because I did something wrong, but because there’s something better to build our lives upon. And so, like if the framing of a house being built was found to be rotten wood, it had to be torn out. Gutted.

That kind of shattering feels deeper, feels like it will tear you out too. Because it is you, essentially. It’s a part of you, named “Foundation,” by some other actual designation (calling, purpose, destiny, “what I was supposed to do with my life”).

But those other foundations are all the same thing:
an attempt to circumvent transformation.

An attempt at a good story instead of a good life.

An attempt at living up to something or for someone instead of simply living.

Deconstruction is its undoing. And it’s often our undoing, too.

But it’s not our destruction.

Because God won’t destroy God’s temple.

That’s already been done, in Jesus’ state-sanctioned murder, for us, to be with us—
and he rebuilt it, as us.

So we don’t have to face that. Even if it feels like it (hence, the honesty I’m finding in the margins).

Thanks be to God.

Let’s talk about it:

• Have you returned to the bible post-deconstruction? Why or why not? If you have, what do you find in the margins?

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There’s another facet of that skipping-over, though. Perhaps a darker side.

It’s the side that cherry-picks that life clean apart. It’s quoting Jesus without knowing Jesus. It’s turning Jesus’ life and teaching into nothing more than a set of demands, a spiritual to-do list, a holiness regimen that does the last thing Jesus wanted:

It trades one law for another. The Old Testament, Mosaic law for the Christian law.

The temptation in Lent is to do the exact same thing: to make a Law of it instead of a time of illumination.

It’s all too easy to do, because Lent is all about fasting, and most churches are going to invite you to fast from something—be it sugar, Diet Coke, chocolate, coffee, or non-food items like social media, screen time, etc.

Suddenly, we’re on the to-do list train. We’re trying to better ourselves by abstaining from something. These practices aren’t necessarily bad, but they aren’t the focus of Jesus. In fact, when Jesus is asked about fasting, he jokes back—

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The lockdowns of Covid slackened—and then we moved.

We finally felt settled—and then I fell and developed a life-altering pain condition.

We bought a house—and then I developed more chronic illness issues.

Our marriage started with change, too—beyond my name change, our shared address, etc.

We got married mere weeks before Covid shut down the world, and while we stayed home, I found my voice as I wrote online. As I found it, though, not everyone was happy. I was speaking against the status quo I grew up in, after all. One day, I got a text in response to something I wrote. The grey bubble accused me of being in a cult. The sender was convinced that what I was saying didn’t align with Jesus.

As I talked with this person, though, it became obvious that the actual issue wasn’t with what I was saying at all.

Their issue was with who I was becoming.

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My eyes were closed, having already set an intention for myself—be my own best advocate, at a doctor’s appointment later that day—and for a few friends.

“What’s your heart’s deepest desire for the world?” the voice repeated.

Peace came to mind first, but was swiftly met with a strong inner voice:

“Peace is not enough.

“I want world mercy, world justice, world compassion.”

I let those thoughts swirl in my head, with the ways they might be known right now:

ICE out of our streets. Detainees returned home, given due process at the very least. The SAVE Act not passing in the Senate. Impeachment. Revolution. Billionaires defunded for the sake of those who have little.

And then, I thought about Jesus, and how little he spoke of peace. I mentally listed a few instances:

• When he sent the disciples out to preach the Kingdom, he told them to stay where the peace they offered was reciprocated, and to leave when it wasn’t.

• At the end of his time with them, he said, “My peace I give to you; not as the world gives…”

• The most striking to me: “Do not supposed I have come to bring peace to the world. I came not to bring peace, but the sword.”

It’s interesting, right? Peace isn’t the bulk of Jesus’ message; it’s ancillary.

I think it’s because Jesus speaks more about mercy, justice, and liberation instead.

I mean, just picture how we view peace, right? It’s often the opening image of this essay—an ethereal, inner, light-filled experience of calm or stillness. And maybe it is that, but if it is, then it’s certainly not what the world needs, right?

The world doesn’t need a bunch of aloof, peacefully ignorant people.

Maybe our peace needs some disruption—at least those of us not on the front lines of liberation-in-progress.

They need that peace. They need to be allowed to sit in only peace for a moment. Unfortunately, they are the ones who most often can’t—perhaps because so many others are.

Peace isn’t enough. We need to be shaken. Our peace needs to be disturbed so that we can do the work we’re meant to do.

At church, this week’s lectionary text is the transfiguration, and its story feels like a disruption of peace, too.

Peter and the others were desperate to stay in the gentle, powerful light with the pioneers of their faith—it could just be so peaceful there, on the mountaintop, in the comforting stories of old.

But Jesus said, “No.” It’s time for a new story.

Where peace gets shaken up.

Where darkness seems to win.

Where resurrection will prove that it can’t win—not forever.

Jesus writes this story, but then says, “You’re the next iteration of it.”

So we, too, have a choice:

Stay in the safe, peace-keeping parts of the story of Jesus. The ones we were kept in growing up; where Jesus wasn’t liberator but sin-and-hell defeater.

Or actually follow him—which is an invitation to imitate what he did. Fight systems of oppression. Speak up for the oppressed and marginalized.

Stir up the peace because a better version of peace awaits.

A peace that’s more than smiling during a meditation. A peace that multiplies from one heart to the next, from one system toppling to the next, from division and sword becoming liberation and plowshares harvesting abundance.

Let’s talk about it:

• What’s your deepest intention for the world? What comes up first? — Does anything, any voice inside you push back on that first thing that comes to mind?

• How does it feel to think about your peace being disrupted so that something better than peace can happen?

• What safe parts of Jesus would you rather have than the actual imitation of what he did? How does deconstruction impact this for you?

Use the comments below as a community forum. That’s what I want this space to be—a safe gathering place for those deconstructing their faith and those we’re in community with.

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I long-distance voted for local elections only, republicans all the way down, in my Tennessee hometown—almost solely to honor my parents.

Because, as I’ve mentioned before, in 2016, I was living in India as a missionary. Election night for me was uneventful; I went to bed early just as the polls in America were opening.

I woke up the next morning, a mix of sad and surprised that Hilary hadn’t won. My gut told me this isn’t good, even if I didn’t feel right voting for either candidate at the time.

But then I got a call from my supervisor that India had demonetized several of its bills—and that news took over our lives for the next several weeks as we scrambled to get our hands on the new bills.

Imagine if suddenly all $20s and $10s were no longer useable currency… that’s what we were dealing with. And I didn’t have a bank account, so I couldn’t pay my bills without the correct cash, which meant I spent most of my time standing in ATM lines all across our city, trying to sneak in more than one withdrawal at a time.

So, you’ll forgive me for not paying attention to American politics back then, hopefully. Maybe even for not voting?

I was isolated and insulated. Far from home, and in the middle of a changing faith while still living in the system that raised it. I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I’d be leaving India in less than a year. I even knew by that point that I wouldn’t be a missionary anymore, ever again.

What I didn’t know is what would happen next.

I didn’t know how much the world would change.

I didn’t know just how much hate was entering the white house, setting itself up on a throne therein.

I didn’t know how things would spiral.

I didn’t know it would get this bad.

It’s been almost 10 years now. And honestly, we should’ve known then. Many did, I’m sure. I didn’t.

I was silent back then. Stoic, even. Sure, I had other things to worry about—like living in India, dealing with demonetization, navigating the internal combustion of a faith I thought was unshakeable. I was also a missionary; I was teaching women and trying to share my faith.

Back then, I though evangelism was all words, all talk, all language and script and getting caught up in the Spirit.

I was wrong. I got the great commission wrong.

Because if you get to the end of Jesus’ life and hear him say this:

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”1

But completely ignore the very way that he did it…
you’ve gotten it wrong, too.

He spent years modeling it before he gave it to us, and yet we ignore that. Completely. We miss it. Over and over and over again—we miss it.

This week, I saw a post that proved my point. Oh, it enraged me.

The whole post was about protecting your own peace, but in doing so—and in saying this—the author gives a free pass to not loving your neighbor. To not protecting their peace.

Also, if I may, a Christian is a Christ-follower—not someone who “is saved.” And a Christ follower MUST love their neighbor. That’s, like, the bare minimum. All the law and prophets are summed up in “love God, love your neighbor.” Those are red letter words, right there.

Jesus didn’t just come TO the least of these; he came AS the least of these.

He said whatever you do to the least of these you do to me, so the converse must be true, too. Whatever you don’t do. Whatever you refuse to do.

So if you are silent in this moment on behalf of the least of these, then I don’t think you get the great commission anymore.

Because it was never about just telling a story.

It was never about conversion or salvation.

It wasn’t even about having a personal relationship with God.

—those are all modern inventions and paradigms and theologies we’ve developed to make sense of our faith, and they aren’t bad, necessarily. They aren’t doing any harm on their own. It’s the permission they give us to not actually live like Jesus did. That’s what’s bad.

Because Jesus didn’t announce a gospel; he was the gospel. What he actually announced was something even more radical:

“The Kingdom of God is at hand.”

Kingdom. That’s subversive language.

Announcing that in a land ruled by Rome, in a land governed by the religious elite of Israel?

That’s, like, oh, I don’t know, screaming “ICE OUT NOW” into the faces of armed pseudo-military police who think they own your city and your people.

And that’s what Jesus was telling his disciples to go preach—the same message they were given. A subversive message. There’s a new kingdom now.

A new kingdom. Not a remaking of the current kingdom—although we fight for its policies to do similar things, definitely. But ultimately it will fall short whether it’s MAGA or democrats. Because it’s a flawed power system.

The Kingdom of God isn’t a power system.

It’s not a system at all.

It’s a table. The Kingdom of God is a table.

A table of equality and equity. A table where everything is shared, nothing is wasted, no score is kept. A long table, where all are welcomed. From the least of these to the greatest—but if you are the greatest, don’t expect to remain so. Seat yourself lowest because the least will be raised. The social order will be turned on its head.

If we live in that kingdom, then we have to speak for the least of these not against them. We have to act for them not against them.

If we live in that kingdom, then we have to do as Jesus did. Say what he said. Live how he lived.

If we live in that kingdom, then we email our senators and love our neighbors. We have to defund ICE and demand for humane treatment of all people.

That’s the great commission, ultimately: Live in the kingdom, love like the king.

Ten years ago, I didn’t know this. I got it wrong. I’m sure I’ll get it wrong again.

But I’m gonna fight—and vote—like hell to make sure I live out what I believe now.

My evangelism will never again look like it did in India, but it’ll still be there. In the way I live. In the way I write. In the way I bring my whole life into alignment with the kingdom of God—not a system, a religion, or politics, but a table where all are welcome. A table I fight from, for all to be welcome where I live, too.

Let’s talk about it:

• How did you used to view evangelism/the great commission? What about now?

• What might “evangelism” look like for you today? In these current events, with the world on fire?

Use the comments below as a community forum. That’s what I want this space to be—a safe gathering place for those deconstructing their faith and those we’re in community with.

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