The Day I Stopped Talking

I wore fear like a muzzle from the time I was a child.  I don't know all the reasons why, really, but I always had a nagging sense of being uninvited.  To protect myself, I chose, many times, not to speak.  If I didn't speak, you might not notice me and if you didn't notice me I could hide and if I could hide I felt safer and make sure that I wasn't too much trouble.  The thing is, I carried inside of me a world of color and imagination and when I felt, I felt REAL BIG and when I imagined,  I imagined a n i m a t e d l y.   I would look for a place to let it out of me, like a bubble coming out of my mouth, getting larger and LARGER.  And so, I would retreat to my bedroom, which became a stage for me to dream out loud.  I remember singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, when I knew my mother was outside hanging laundry and I could not be overheard.  That song seemed to understand me and made me cry.  It still does.

As I got older, I found a new friend, a friend I could trust to share my secrets, to help me speak.  I picked up a pen and words came out.  My writing hugged my heart and squeezed out of me what was bound and gagged.  I kept journals and wrote stories and maudlin teenage poems with trite phrases like "pipe dreams", when I wasn't sure what a pipe dream was.  But I wrote, laying the words out like diamonds on velvet.  The meanings of them, the sound of them, finding just the right one, mattered to me and kept me company.

I grew up and became a mama, six times over, and my world was a swirl of motion and noise and playdough and dandelions.  I used my hands to wipe up spilled juice and wipe off runny noses and hug my babies close.  But all was not as it should be in my world and parts of my heart were breaking and that haunting uninvited feeling crept back in, and so, when everyone was asleep at night, still I wrote, so that I could feel like I belonged someplace.  My words warmed me up when my soul felt cold.  I held nothing back and it kept my spirit from getting infected and helped me sort out what felt like puzzle pieces that made no sense.

One day, one really bad day,  those words were found and passed out to others, like a peddler selling wares.  My heart gasped and ran down the front of me and I felt my voice, the one that my writing gave me, go mute. The words that I'd heard in my head to navigate my life were gone.  My gift had become a weapon against me.  I thought I'd disappeared for good. I didn't write again for four years.  I stopped talking, really talking, to everyone.  No one would know my heart again, I vowed.  It was too violent of a business.

But God?  He had another idea.  He waited, like a gentleman does, until one day He knew I was ready, and He came and asked me to dance.  He told me that He loved me and held out His hand to me. No one had ever asked me to dance.  I lifted my eyes and decided to believe Him. That was the day my words came back and I could not contain them.  Except, this time, the words had Life to them and they pushed their way to the surface with a heartbeat, strong and vibrant.  These were His words, and He'd allowed them to be born in me.

Today, I have more words than I know what to do with and put them in containers full and running over.  I rush to write them down some days, they roll up on me so fast.  I still find myself in the middle of life sometimes and feeling something bigger than I can seem to figure out how to speak out loud,  so I sit down and quilt a covering of words, quiet and thoughtful.  I pick them careful, the shades of color mattering deeply, and pass them out to people, sometimes shyly, tentatively.  Sometimes, when fear wants to visit again, they are almost too quiet to hear and you have to lean in close.  My words are the deepest part of me, the biggest thing I have to give.  They are my heart on a plate.  And He gave them to me and has asked me to give them away.


"Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body."  Proverbs 16:24

The Most Perfect Human Being

They walk IN water puddles, not around them.  If there's a more challenging way to get from one place to another, they take it.  When there are noises to be made, they make them with gusto.  A song to be sung does not need to be sung the "right" way, but words can be bent and morphed into silliness and please, let's not necessarily sing it in tune.  

They call objects with grown up labels like "structures" ...."the big metal thing" and they want to climb it simply because it's there.  They make things for their momma's because they can't imagine loving another girl as much as they do her and they are not ashamed of it.  Their hair falls in their eyes or becomes a "toy" to mold into other shapes and stand straight up and it doesn't matter if others see it because why else would you have hair?  They fish with sticks and string and don't care if they catch anything; it's not the point.  The point is you have sticks and string.  Their shoes are raggedy from being busy living.  They eat and eat and then eat again.  They gather treasures that aren't worth much except to them, which makes them worth it all.

I recently spent the day in the company of one just like this.  And I can tell you; the most perfect human being is a twelve year old boy.  I know this is true.  I've had three of my own.  And they taught me what joy looks like.  <3

Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth.--Eccl 11:9

Worship plus Nothing

I've tried to write a blog post for almost two hours tonight.  I pawed through words like scrabble pieces but they sat mute in their little wooden pews.  I wasn't hearing anything.  Except "worship".  Then I realized it was Him, telling me what He wanted.  The thing is, I wanted the "company" of words and I'm feeling lonely.  

In a minute I'm taking the list of names of those of you who have messaged me today to pray for you.  That will be my only companion, at least one to hold in my hand.  In November, I had someone pray over me prophetically.  In that prayer, God specifically said two things that I can't seem to get away from; not that I'd want to; but it keeps coming up to me in what I read, conversations, in my spirit.  The first is, "I've created you to be exactly who you are.  You are unique and I have placed inside of you a spirit of joy.  BE WHO I MADE YOU TO BE.  With that joy, you will bless others and draw them to you, and thus to Me."  The second thing was "I am taking you to higher and higher places with Me.  I have a new place for you.  I want to bless you.  Make yourself ready before Me."

As I type this, I'm shaking.  I feel Him asking me to give Him the control.  Not that He doesn't already have it?  But He's wanting me to do it deliberately.  I sense He's telling me that He is waiting to speak until I do.  I have run many times lately to my room and gotten on my knees asking Him hard questions, craving to hear.  Tonight, He's got His hand out.

I know I'm not alone.  But all I hear right now are birds, all I see right now is me in my yard and one lone deer.  If you are reading this, could you pray for me?

I want to learn how to worship Him even when I feel like I have nothing else to live for.

A Slow Dance for Raggedy Anns and Andys.....

The  white Christmas lights that I keep up year round, just because their light makes me happy, are glowing warm tonight in my otherwise dark kitchen.  It's been raining for hours.  The trees outside look sad because they don't have their leaves yet, but I know growth is happening on the inside of them.  He promises that.  My girl is in the next room crocheting a blanket from a bag full to the brim with balls of yarn, like multi colored scoops of ice cream.  I have my music playing in my ears, singing me truth lullabies as I write.    "I'll love You with everything.....Hear I am, Lord; all I am,  Lord." haunts me and I play it back over and over.  Faces of people I know and love, their stories, weave their way in and out of those words like disonant chords.  It squeezes my heart and I find my eyes filling with tears.  It hurts to sing that, God.  Some of us, most of us?  We got nothing to give You but what already hurts.

I start to sing the song out loud to God, and close my eyes to imagine what He had, what He still has in mind for us.  We are a wounded, raggedy lot, the bunch of us.  And we gather around together to warm our hands a bit and somehow find love and hope and the courage to believe again, or for the first time, that our stories mean something.  The notion that "breath and sex and sight" can be pulled out of the mud and made new and beautiful and sacred; that they are gifts this side of the veil, to give us a light that points to Him, fills our lungs with clean oxygen and sets us upright to dance again; it makes me throw back my head and open my arms wide to take it all in.  

I ask Him to hold us tight, to wash off the dirty tear trails on our faces.  I ask Him to help us trust Him again, or more, even when nothing makes sense.  And He?  He invites us to slow dance with Him.

Slapping the Walls

Sometimes, it's that sense of isolation that threatens to take us down; take me out.  Broad daylight's bad enough but in the middle of the night; that's the killer.  So He wakes me up and I find myself reaching for my headphones, taking care to put the left earpiece in my left ear, because I sure don't want to hear my right eared music in the wrong ear, and the sound of what nails me back down to what's real fills my head and I feel myself grab hold of the words like an oxygen mask.

My biggest contradiction is that, while I sometimes fear I'm too different from everybody else, I peel the layers of myself open wide to show you, in hopes that I can silence that lie, in the effort to flattten the imagined hills and valleys that separate us from each other.  In my vulnerability, I can make you feel real to me; spark the arc of connection.  In our realness with one another, He becomes more real to me.   Soverign, by Chris Tomlin, sings to me now and I go to my post on Facebook about praying for all of you and find there messages from many of you...."say a prayer for me". It feels like whispering in the dark.  He wraps Himself around me in those messages.

I begin to walk through my house, listening.  "God, whatever comes my way.  I can trust You.  Soverign in my greatest joy, soverign in my deepest cry.  With me in the dark, with me in the dawn.  From beginning to the end, I can trust You."  I play it over and over as I pace, speaking your names out loud to Him in those words.  "Yes.  YES," I say out loud and slap the wall as I walk by.  Just to make sure it's real.