With that said . . .

I so, so desperately need for something to change. I have been at the end of my rope in the work arena for going on three years now. Blah, blah, blah, be grateful you have a job . . . I know. But my dissatisfaction is growing up in me like a tidal wave, and I am desperate to be able to catch my breath, to break out from under the smothering force of this restlessness. I have been wrestling with this for far too long . . . I am so, so tired of these hopes deferred. I am tired of not being able to decide which direction I want to take, but more than that, I am weary at the doors that keep on closing at every turn. I just. want. SOMETHING. to. change.

There’s a song that I keep hearing on the radio that I don’t know what to do with, but the lyrics keep echoing in my mind nonetheless.

God gave me
A dream that would not die*

And that’s just it. So many of my dreams have died, or at least have faded away as I have lost interest, moved on to the next shiny object left in my path to distract me. And as doors continue to close, it is an uphill battle to convince myself that I’m not doomed to a life of career failure and dissatisfaction, that something better might yet be ahead for me. For now, I am doing everything I can to move forward, but every small setback brings back that fear that I am doomed to a lifetime of purposeless wandering. I am just not okay with that, and so I continue to press on, even when the destination is entirely unclear.

I pray that God will help me to see the next step, and that I will be faithful in this desert while I wait.

(*Shirley Murdock, The Dream that Would Not Die)

Words have had such power in my life, and for so long, that it’s logical that I want to believe that there’s nothing words can’t do. Words can persuade, can change hearts, can tear down or build up. They are a formidable weapon. They are a gift. John’s gospel reminds us that “In the beginning was the Word” . . . God’s answer to the impossibility of our sinful selves ever being able to be in His presence was a Word–THE Word. All God’s promises are “Yes” and “Amen” in Christ Jesus.

Every so often, though, I come up against a situation where words don’t seem to be able to reach. And I am never willing to accept this, to concede defeat and succumb to wordlessness, and to the admission that the situation is beyond my power to repair.

Over the last eight months, I have been up against a situation that has tested my faith in a way that nothing else I have lived through ever has. In some ways, I think the pain is more acute because it is something that is not happening directly to me, but to someone I love very much, someone who is like a sister/daughter to me.  And the things that she has gone through in this time have taken us to the most fundamental questions that humans struggle with. We have been slammed again and again with wave after wave of these unanswerable questions.

The knowledge that this God we trust in is described with the word “good” crashes into the reality of an overwhelming and unrelenting pain, a pain whose incongruity with that word “good” is intense to the point of mockery.

The word of God insists that He is passionate, even militant, about justice, and yet this justice seems so long in coming.

At some point as we were travelling this road, I came across these words from wise-beyond-her-years Hannah Reed. Hannah’s father Bob, a hero of mine, had suddenly and unexpectedly died a few months earlier.

Hannah’s description of the divide between the words we give lip-service to when things are not hard and the reality of the struggle to try to hold on to those promises when faced with a mountain of grief and pain captured exactly what I had been feeling throughout this whole ordeal.

Bad stuff happens. It happens to everyone, in varying degrees and in different situations. We have all experienced crisis. Many times, a response of ours is to question God. And many times we find that God is silent . . .

For most bad occurrences, I could usually find a satisfactory conclusion that allowed God to remain good in my mind, despite how bad the situation was. For example, the situation could test a person’s faith, make them a stronger person, allow them to touch lives with a story, or things like that.

It’s funny how when something happens to you personally, the questions take on so much more power then when something happens that is so far away. When Daddy died, the questions that began forming were absolutely overwhelming. I didn’t understand where God was when Dad was sick, didn’t understand why He would allow such a strong, smart, kind man to die when there was still so much good that could be done with his life. I didn’t understand why God would allow my family and me to hurt so badly. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t see the good in such situations as this.

And God was silent. I couldn’t hear Him. He didn’t give me a logical answer, didn’t write on my wall, and didn’t give me an epiphany. He felt distant, and I felt abandoned and alone in my grief . . . it didn’t seem fair or right or just or loving or any of the things that God promised to be and give to us as children that He professed to love.

Like myself and the friend I have been walking with, Hannah had found a place where words could not quite reach. She understands, and at far too young an age, that the faith we give lip-service to can ring hollow when those promises are tested beyond what we ever thought we could endure. And when the world has beaten you down and you are beyond the place where any words you’ve ever spoken can even begin to touch the immensity of your pain, you have come to the place where words can’t reach. What we are left with, then, is a wordless desperation and a tiny flicker of hope in the One who is the “Yes” and the “Amen” . . . the One whose final Word will finally reach that unreachable place..

Until that day, we stammer in our sadness, trying as hard as we can to learn how to sit in that silent place of suffering. Until that day, we wait and hope and carry on with broken hearts. Until that day, we continue to reside uneasily in this place where words can’t reach.

I have two pairs of shoes right now that I am able to walk in with minimal pain. Both are black; one is more of a dress shoe, but the other is a big, clunky pair of New Balance sneakers. I am a size 10 wide, so it’s not pretty under any circumstances . . . but it is summer, the season of capris and (as short as i ever go) Bermuda shorts. I need to be able to walk, though, so without apology, I wear my capris–and yes, even my shorts–with socks and black sneakers.

I cannot go up to every person I pass on the street and say to them, “I’m really not usually this tacky in my choice of footwear. I DO know that capris are not meant to be worn with giant, ugly sneakers.” I can’t communicate this to everyone, and because of this, I cannot control the assumptions people are making about me. And it suddenly struck me the other day that all of us are wearing some kind of “clown shoes”; we all have some outward trait that may not make sense to others who don’t know the story that lies beyond what the eye can see.

A friend of mine has this quote as part of her email signature: “Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some sort of battle”. Those words convict me; I am hardly kind at all, let alone “kinder than necessary”. But perhaps I need to remember my clown shoes, and try to have more grace for those around me. To remember that we only see the shoes–that behind every pair of ugly shoes inappropriately paired with socks and shorts is a story, and a journey. As I hobble on my way, I need to remember that, just as my own shoes tell a story, so do those of the people I meet.

In time, as I continue to heal, it’s possible that  I may be able to trade my clown shoes in for footwear that doesn’t call attention to me, shoes that allow me to mask my brokenness and blend in with the crowd. In doing so, however, I don’t ever want to forget where these shoes have taken me.

To respect a person’s story, to see without judging, is the best way to honor that person’s journey. And although judging others seems so automatic, I am grateful that I have these ugly shoes to help me remember that there is more to the story, and that I can never go wrong being “kinder than necessary”.

Today I found myself in the presence of someone who is the type of person that brings out this jealousy in me. She is successful in her career, an amazingly talented woman of God who serves in her church in a variety of ways, has a life rich in relationships . . . one of those people I can look at and see everything that I am not.

I immediately kicked off the self-pity party, measuring my own lack of success against her many accomplishments, and as always, finding myself guilty of not being someone other than myself.  With her example staring me in the face, all I could think was “and I can barely get my laundry done”. I am Just. So. Tired. And I don’t understand where she finds the strength to persevere, and even to thrive.

Today, though, I realized something significant about this longing.  It isn’t just the tangible outward signs of success that I envy, but something even greater than those surface indicators. It’s not merely that I wish my life in some way looked more like hers, although that is part of it, because no matter how others define “success”, my own definition is simple: Success is anything that I am not. And no matter how many people tell me that I should consider myself successful in things that I might label as trivial (being a good friend, loving the children in my life, etc.), it doesn’t matter to me. I am not answering to anybody else’s standard, but to my own internal critic. Plain and simple: I am not okay with being who I am. And so I grasp onto this longing to be like the people I see (or think I see) who seem to have these traits that have eluded me.

And yes, blah blah blah, I know that God doesn’t require “success” of me, but it goes back to the concept that God is like your grandmother–He HAS to like you. So although I would not disagree with the notion that I am valued by God no matter what I do or don’t do, I am still hopelessly bound to my own (seemingly unattainable) definition of “success”.

But I realized something else today . . . aside from the impossibility of achieving even a fraction of what this woman has achieved, and even beyond my own faulty reasoning and twisted self-image, there is a deeper jealousy, one that feels more valid, healthier, maybe even God-given.

She is beautiful. And I want to be beautiful as well.

I’m not speaking of physical beauty, although that often seems to come with the territory. No, this is a beauty which goes so much deeper than that. This woman, and others like her whose “success” I have envied, is beautiful down to the depths of her being. She radiates God’s light, and *that* is where her beauty comes from, not from the outward achievements, but from a place that seems far more unreachable.

I want to know how she got to be this beautiful . . . I want to know how I can be beautiful too. But, even more than I despair of reaching an acceptable level of success in my career or in my personal life, I am certain that I do not know how to get there . . . I do not know how to become beautiful in this way. I am too tired; I am too selfish; I am too prone to inner ugliness. And yet, something within me holds on to some irrational hope that perhaps, if I sit at the feet of these women long enough, I just might find a way to glean from their wisdom, to figure out a way that I might be able to take on even some small piece of who they are and what they have, and to create some of that beauty within myself.

I think I am afraid of the truth that I am certain lies behind this–that the greater the beauty, the deeper the pain that has been weathered . . . and yet, I am hardly a stranger to pain myself . . . so why do some turn that pain into something lovely and glowing and inviting, when people like me exude ugliness instead?

I don’t know the answers to this. But I find myself drawing nearer to these beautiful women, to do everything I can to put myself in their path, to try to glean some of their energy in place of my own constant exhaustion, to try to become what they are.

And maybe, just maybe, if I put myself in their presence often enough, I will be able to put aside my desire to be “successful” in the limited ways that I have defined success, to find new ways of defining it. If I can only learn how to do this, maybe someday I will find a way to be beautiful.

the questions that are currently getting in the way of my falling asleep:

• how is it that a person can be so convinced that things are heading in one direction, to feel in the deepest part of their being that this thing is going to come to pass, but then have that certainty shattered in a few short hours by an equally intense pull in the opposite direction? To “know that you know that you know” a thing, but then to be confronted with a sense of being equally certain of another thing that, if true, would make the former thing, that thing that you were so sure was about to come to pass, an impossibility?
• how much does a person choose to give up out of love for someone else? This is where I know that I am quite clearly NOT as much like Jesus as I would like to be . . . because a selfishness screams out of me, and the words I’ve heard so often echo in my mind . . . is it a lie, something the world tells us, or is it a healthy level of self-preservation that brings the advice, “you need to take care of YOU . . . you can’t live your life for other people”? even in this, there’s confusion, because the reasons I want to do this thing “for me” have so much to do with this calling I’m convinced I have to “do” for others. . .
• how do I let go of my desire to feel like what I’m doing is “important”, as I define that word? (part of that definition involves a rejection of any other person’s attempt to convince me that my idea of “important” is too limited.)
• is my dissatisfaction with my life a flaw in my character, or is it a catalyst that will bring me to a place where I can assuage this intolerable, unrelenting restlessness? really, will I ever have a life that I don’t despise? it’s not even so much about having a “Spark-worthy” life as it is about feeling like I am doing what I was meant to be doing. is the problem really in my circumstances, or am I doomed to be restless, dissatisfied, and feeling like an underachiever for the rest of my days on this earth?!

The crazy thing is that all of this middle-of-the-night speculation is based upon two things that I don’t know at this moment. In other words, neither has come to pass as of yet. There is this thing that I feel so certain is going to come to pass, but there is also this new bit of information that would wreak havoc on that certainty.

In a few days, I will know about the latter, and in three weeks or less, I will know about the former. But in this moment, I have zero knowledge that either thing will even come to pass . . .

I am just so afraid, though, no matter what the outcome, that my life will not be any less unsatisfying than it was before this journey.

And now, having spewed up some lovely self-serving, too-much-informationing ranting, I am finally feeling sleepy enough to try to go to bed . . .

buenos noches . . .

It’s just a beautiful picture of what our world could be . . . 

or maybe I’m just cheesy. 

PS–I didn’t win. Now I want to go back next weekend, and so on, until I actually DO win. who SAYS I’m not a hopeless optimist?!

but one story he told me really touched me and made me re-think my usual assessment of my place in our family.  he said that he remembered the day that my family went into the city to “get” me . . . how excited he was. It was April 23, 1970 (the reason I know the date has to do with LMT; more on that later). Michael says that he remembers sitting on the floor, playing with the bows on my mother’s shoes. He was four years old.

The reason that this struck me was that I know a little something about kids . . . and I know that for a four-year old to have had this level of excitement, there had to have been some enthusiasm coming from the parental units that my brother(s) must have picked up on. So this little anecdote tells me something that doesn’t jive with the narrative I’ve held onto for so long. This story tells me that, at least at one point, I was truly wanted.

Now, I suppose it’s easier to want something (or someone) before you are fully conscious of what you will be “getting” . . . and, sentimental adoption rhetoric aside, I wasn’t really “chosen”–it’s not like there really IS a “baby depot” where you can go and pick a kid, any kid. The agency picks–they lie, too. I found out later that they told my birthmother that my adoptive mother was a teacher–but it was nice to hear this story, given the fact that when I was fifteen, my mother informed me that “I love you, Lorraine, but I wish I had never adopted you.” It’s nice to know that there was a time, however brief, when she didn’t wish that.

But that is the fear that those of us who are “chosen” must face every day. We were not “wanted” at least once, and we then lived in fear that those who had “chosen” us would eventually “unchoose”. My security as a member of a family is never absolute. I am not truly anybody’s blood . . . I do not really belong.

and it was bittersweet to hear my brother share this recollection because of another story that he has told me a few times . . . the story of how, becoming frustrated with him, my mother would sit him out on our back porch in just a diaper and his shoes (“just how we got you”) and tell him that she had made the call and that “they” (the adoption agency) were coming back to get him. They had “gotten” him, and they could send him back–such is the legacy of the “chosen”. and when my father got home from work, he would play along with the deception. I wonder sometimes how long they left him there, alone with the fear of being sent back.

maybe they forgot that kids tend to take this type of thing literally . . . maybe they didn’t realize the terror that their words would cause in the heart of my small and vulnerable brother. Or maybe they were just that that cruel. I’m not sure I will ever know.

So these are the two images in my head . . . the young family, eager to add a little girl, and that same family, wanting “out” already with her brother at a young age,  re-evaluating fifteen years later and wishing she hadn’t been a part of the narrative.

I live with this dialectic every day. It reminds me of who I am. But today, I have a new piece to add to the puzzle. Once upon a time, I was wanted.

“They say your style of life’s a drag
And that you must go other places
But just don’t you feel too bad
When you get fooled by smiling faces”

–Stevie Wonder
 

Every time I go back to New York, I am hit with a profound and echoing sense of longing. I don’t know if it’s my need for variety and visual stimulation, for movement and excitement, but breathing in the very air around me (not breathing it in too closely, in some cases!) fills a need in me that I can barely express. And the sounds! And the accents! And the people! As I say very often, “I love my city!” And when I go back “home” to Michigan, I always feel like I’m leaving a part of me behind.
 
When I was in college, I came close to going “home” several times. I graduated six months early in large part because I just had to be back to New York. When I moved back to Michigan at the end of 1999, it began as a life-or-death situation, but ended up being a better decision than I knew I was making at the time. I often describe it by saying, “life is easier in Michigan.” If I’m feeling particularly sorry for myself, I will tell people that I tried to live in NYC and that the city “chewed me up and spit me out”, which is sometimes how I feel about it, even now.
 
I tried to come home just over a year ago. God said “not yet”, and then He said “no”.   And every time I’m back, I return (home?!) to my boring midwestern life and wonder if I’ll ever get “home” to NY again.
 
Last weekend , a friend asked me why I wanted to be back in NYC so badly. I was hard-pressed to find the words to express what I was feeling . . . I could only say that I didn’t want to have to say that I am “from” Michigan . . . that I didn’t want to lose my “New York-ness”. Here in the Northern Bible Belt, where it doesn’t matter if my clothes are in style, it’s just so easy to become apathetic . . . and mostly, I fear losing my identity; I fear no longer being a “real” New Yorker.
 
I think it’s a self-esteem thing, too. Can I feel good about myself if I’m constantly reminded that I couldn’t handle living in NY? Maybe it doesn’t matter to anybody else, but to me it does. I feel like I’ve lost a part of my identity, and I don’t have the confidence that I’ll ever get that back. I certainly don’t want to go back to Staten Island; I had that choice at the end of 1999, and saw Grand Rapids as the lesser of two evils. But do I need to learn to “settle” for Grand Rapids, to accept that this is my life now? I don’t know. I can accept that this is where I am *now*; I’m just not sure that I can see it as “forever”. I literally dread the time when I will have to say that I have lived in Michigan longer than I have lived in NY. I’m more than a dozen years away from that point, but as the song goes, “I’m only afraid that my dreams will betray me, and I’ll never get home again.”
 
What is not an option, to the extent that I can help it, would be for me to move elsewhere. When I first came to Grand Rapids, I immediately saw that the problem was that pieces of my heart were in two places. I can barely fathom the idea of tearing my heart into even smaller pieces, and leaving pieces of myself in yet another place. The first spring break I spent back in NY, I dreamed that Grand Rapids was located where New Jersey was. Ever since then, I have wished that I could take the map and fold it up like the back cover of Mad Magazine, and bring those pieces of my heart close enough to each other that it wouldn’t hurt so much. So although I cannot say what God might do, it is hard for me to think beyond these two options.
 
I suppose that, for now, I just have to be where I am, and try not to tie my self-esteem up with the choice of living in this “uncool” place living an unexciting life. Unexciting as it may be, it’s enough to exhaust me, and it’s where I am right now. and if this world is truly not my home, then perhaps this sense of homesickness will be my companion until the day I reach that final home. I’m told that in that place, my angst will cease. It’s hard to imagine, but intriguing nonetheless.

Every now and then, I will see the more expensive versions in the store, and will find myself wondering, “is it really worth it to pay 59 cents instead of the 17 cents I pay for the regular ramen?”

(yes, I know . . . there is surely no more important question in the entire universe!)

Finally, I decided to purchase the deluxe variety recently, and I have to say that I was extremely pleased with the results. And because I regularly read fancy food blogs written by folks much classier than myself (like this one and this one),  I found myself wanting to appropriate some WT version of a cooking blog, so I grabbed the camera and tried to photograph the lovely noodles:

Sadly, the picture really doesn’t do them justice, but I am happy to report that they were definitely well worth my 59 cents! The broth was miso-flavored; the noodles were thicker than my usual brand, and it was just an all-around enjoyable experience.

Plus I get to blog about it . . .