Look at the Fruit ~ Jen

Big ups to Adopting James for blowing my mind on this one.

Last week, AJ posted an article by the band Switchfoot, in which the lead singer said he doesn’t want to be known as a Christian singer because he thinks people then make the assumption that he is a better Christian than other musicians. He believes that we all have one calling: obedience. None of us knows what that means to another and we can only be obedient to our own calling. A teacher is not being more or less obedient than a preacher, if that is what God has called them to be.

AJ invited discussion about this topic at the bottom of his blog and I basically asked the question “How do we know when someone in the secular world is being obedient?” My example was Beyonce, who calls herself a Christian, but her music tells another story. I while I may be able to relate to the kind of mother and wife and woman she is off the stage, the sexualized and money hungry message of her music is not something I want in my life.

AJ responded to me with this: “Beyonce, I assume, has no fruit bearing from her songs. That is how we can tell.”

Say what?

Forget about Beyonce. Let me get this straight. All those sleepless nights I spent wondering if I was doing the right thing with the right people for the right reasons? Good Lord, how do I knooooooowwww?????

And all I had to do was think about the fruit??

Man, while I am sure that somewhere along my 42 year path, someone has said this same type of thing to me before, this time was the one that stuck.

Look at the fruit. That’s all I have to do. Because God knows the plans He has for me, to prosper me and not harm me. So if I am in right relationship, if I am obedient then my fruit of the spirit will be abundant, nourishing, sustaining.

And if I’m not, well. We know what that looks and feels like because we’ve all been there. Our souls screaming at us that we are doing the wrong thing with the wrong people for the wrong reasons and the fruits of our spirit are shriveled and dead from anger, jealousy, greed, spite, vengeance and fear.

Even if we are in that wrong place, the Good News is that we just have to get right to make our fruits blossom again.

Yet another reason to give up sleepless nights.

Just look at the fruit. That’s how we know.

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Friends, the one year anniversary of the passing of Dana’s dad is approaching and it’s been really hard for her. A year ago were the toughest times of her life. If you could please wing a prayer in her direction or send her an encouraging thought, I think it would nourish her soul and I would be so incredibly grateful.

Thank you.

Mouthy Women

This morning, Dana and I made it to yoga for the first time in two weeks. My kids have been sick, her kids have been sick, and the dang time changed. You know what I’m saying right? One of those weeks.

So what to write about?

We just passed the one year anniversary of Full of Graces….Almost 500 honest to goodness readers…we just had our first comment criticism and throw down, which made us very excited because you must be doing something right if you can’t keep everyone happy…it’s women’s history month, you know we have things to say about that…and it’s Lent, a very holy and sacred time of the year.

Too many choices, too many choices! So today we’re going to punt, to ourselves and a post that originally appeared on Hallelujah Highway in 2012.

Do you know Glennon, from Momastery?

She’s been talking lately about a woman named Brene Brown, a research professor from Texas who has spent ten years researching shame and courage. She posted a pic of a page of Brown’s new book Daring Greatly. This page talked about the social rules women are expected to follow, summed up here: “Basically, we are expected to stay as small, sweet and quiet as possible”.

Glennon was almost smothered by these rules. So many women can relate to that feeling. Trying to stuff themselves into some mold and feeling inadequate when they don’t quite make it.

But her post made me think about other women, the ones who never followed the rules, or at least knew the rules were crap from the beginning. They never stayed small, sweet and quiet. They opened their mouths and said what they felt, thought and meant. Or, they looked small and sweet, but opened their mouths and roared like lions.

I have always been a mouthy woman.

Maybe because I was six feet tall since I was twelve, I did not feel constrained by the rules. The small and quiet ship sailed fairly early in my life, and I was not on it.

It could also be that in my family, children were seen and heard. We were encouraged to talk and the adults listened to us. I knew my opinion was important very early in my life. I saw my dad honor my mom’s opinion, and my grandfathers honor my grandmothers’. Not once in my life have I ever struggled to voice my opinion. More often, my struggle is to discern when my opinion should be voiced, or how to express it appropriately.

Maybe it was sports. My success was not tied to how I looked or dressed, but how hard I played. And I controlled that. In college, boys flocked to us, drawn by our strength, health, intelligence. They were the men who didn’t need us to be quiet or small. Most of us married men like this—men who are delighted at our “take on the world” approach to life.

But they are the exception. Most people are extremely uncomfortable with the Mouthy Woman. Some men don’t like her because she seems threatening, like she’s reaching out of her province and into theirs. See how male politicians expressed Cave Man opinions in this last election. See women at the highest levels of politics in this country and how they are treated. See that we have not had a female president. Yet.

More distressing to me, though, is how women turn on the Mouthy Woman. Why is that? Why do women eat their own? Why do we poke those who do the very thing we all say we wish we were strong enough to do?

Just recently, a friend of mine told me that my very presence demands honesty. It took me a minute to see the whole truth of this statement: it’s a compliment for sure; but also a question, a “How can you be so sure that you are right?”; and a request to go easy—honesty seems like a hard standard to meet.

I do hold myself to a standard of truth. I believe in truth. Lies are unpredictable and messy. Truth is simple. Truth is a survival skill.

Glennon would agree. She is with those of you who are still struggling to find your truth, to silence your shame, to open your mouths. I know you can do it. You can find and live your truth. I don’t know any secrets. I just made a choice. You can make it, too. Start by telling yourself the truth. Then tell others the truth. Make a commitment to never lie. This doesn’t mean you have to speak all your truths all the time. Sometimes it’s enough that you know the truth. But never speak a lie. Not to yourself, not to your partner, not to your kids, not to your friends. Make truth a habit.

To my mouthy sisters, to the ones who were never concerned with being small and quiet in the first place, or have learned to speak the truth: Keep talking. Talk for your daughters and grand-daughters, so they will know that truth is safe. Talk for your sons, so they will know the value of an honest woman. Talk for those less fortunate, talk for those who cannot talk.

And listen to them all. Show them the respect of being heard. Grow a future that believes in itself and the honesty of what it knows. Grow a future built on a mighty mountain of truth.

#Truth

Some truths are easy and fun. We’re not dealing with those today, because those aren’t the ones that cause us trouble.

All the time, I see these posts on Facebook that tell us to Live your truth! Find your truth! Speak your truth!

It always makes me think Why not just say “Live, Find, Speak The Truth”?

Truth is Truth—verifiable, supported by facts, actual. In a sense, the quality of Truth is one size fits all.

We can be in denial, or fear, or have strong opinions about the Truth in our lives. We can wish the Truth away, act like it never happened or try to misrepresent the Truth in our words and actions.

But none of that changes the Truth. It’s still there, squatting powerfully in the corner of our hearts, driving us to reach for anger, fear, shame. Another drink. Another bowl of ice cream.

That truth can be hard. Scary hard. Especially when it tells us that we are our own worst enemy.

Or that our lives are not going to go how we thought.

Or that a dream is not going to come true.

Or that we have experienced a pain from which it will take years to recover.

None of those things create “my truth” or “your truth”. They create the Truth. And isn’t there a kind of beauty and consolation in knowing it’s a shared Truth? Because these things happen to everyone. Which is how, in God’s wisdom, these hard truths can give us new life.

A life of recovery. A life of surviving. A life of new beginnings. A life of triumph.

Truth is not darkness. Truth is coming out of the darkness into the light.

It’s not complicated and oppressive. It’s simple and straightforward.

Even hard truths can be known, tolerated, understood. The moment we accept these hard truths in our lives, we can begin to move on from them. We can heal. We seek forgiveness. We can forgive.

And I just know, because God is good, that the more we stand on Truth, the less hard Truth there will be.

So whatever we are eating, drinking, smoking, snorting, hitting, stealing and lying about, it’s not the Truth. If it’s keeping us in the darkness, it’s not the Truth. It’s shame or anger or fear of the truth. It’s what we are letting ourselves accept, or take responsibility for. It’s how we wish it were all different. But it’s not the Truth.

The Truth is somewhere else, bathed in Light. If we seek it, we’ll be in the Light too.

Crazy Mode ~ Jen

Crazy is a tough word.

In the purest definition, it refers to a mentally deranged person. Through common usage, it has also come to mean “possessed by enthusiasm and excitement, immoderately fond and infatuated, intensely involved and preoccupied, foolish or impractical”.

I have been all those things.

Not so very long ago, control was my unhealthy obsession. In the “intensely involved and preoccupied” sense, I was crazy about my control. I believed that if I could control things—myself, others and things, then I could shelter my family from the storm. I read every horrible story on the internet about every child who died or disappeared. I read the story until I found the place where someone had lost control, where if they had just made a different choice, none of it would have happened. Then I held on to that “lesson” in my head to make sure I never made that choice.

The stories where there was no moment when a choice was made, when there was nothing anyone could do, haunted me. Two of those stories had things in common: a mini-van, a big rig and an off-ramp. Accidents. But I traded in my crossover for a Tahoe. It has a third seat that I didn’t let my kids sit in. I needed the four feet of empty space between my babies and the big truck with no brakes slamming into the back of us. I started avoiding the off-ramps where traffic had a tendency to back up suddenly. And if there was a big truck behind me, I’d move over.

In hindsight, I realize this was the start of my postpartum anxiety journey that would come to a fractured head in 2012. My efforts to control everything around me were evidence that I was slowly sliding off my rocker. In the midst of my madness, it’s fair to say that I was addicted to control. I was also only working in my head. It was an overly practical, logical place to be. My heart was crying out for rest from all the worry, horror and anxiety I was dumping into it, but my brain was driven to understand, to head trouble off before it came knocking on my door.

Trouble came knocking anyway. It always does. Life and death will out.

In recovery from my crazy, I spent a lot of time reading Richard Rohr, who I have talked about before. Two of his books met me where I was, like the Good Samaritan: Everything Belongs and Falling Up. They were a challenge to get my heart and faith in the game. I had left them behind. I wasn’t trusting God at all. I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t praying. I wasn’t reaching out a hand. I wasn’t letting myself be loved. I had crowded God out of my life and was trying to do His job.

And I was letting fear—a huge, angry, anxious, evil fear—eat my peace.

I needed to unlearn the things that hormones and fearful motherhood taught me. I have unclenched my fists, to let go of what I was holding so tightly.

It’s no good to me strangled.

I turned my hands up and out and am learning to cradle. I’m giving my fear to God, as fast as it comes to me. I am listening. I am praying. I am believing.

I had to give up my need to control, which drove me out of control, to get some self-control.

I would have never believed it five years ago, but letting go has brought me more peace than trying to control it all. It has decluttered my life, simplified it, clarified it.

In a wonderful turn of events, I have less to worry about now than I did when I was trying to control everything so I would have less to worry about.

Crazy, but true.

Be ~ Jen

Multi-tasking is bad for us, right? Big bad. Stress-us-out-and-give-us-cancer bad.

We try to make multi-tasking into a badge of honor, but that’s crap. All it does is place our need for validation in one 90 mile an hour basket.

This used to be my life, when I was a teaching, mothering, wifeing, friending, volunteering fool. I could teach the children, answer email, shop for shoes, plan vacation, grade papers and mentor colleagues all before lunch. Then I came home and worked out, answered texts, baked cookies for the bake sale, helped the kids with homework, did the laundry and cooked dinner. My life looked like this:

Check me out. Man, you either got on board my crazy train or got run over. C’est la vie.

Then I one day I told Shea “Sure, I’ll have another baby, if I can stay home.” He called my bluff and two years later, I was a stay at home mom with a newborn. I hadn’t quite considered all the consequences:

Some people may see those gaps as an opportunity for rest. But the Master Multi-Tasker has no idea what rest is. To me, those huge gaps look like wasted space. Just having a newborn was for rookies. I would have a newborn and serve on the PTL and a corporate board and turn laundry into an insane art form. I would blog and post on Facebook three times a day and monitor the weather and traffic for all my close friends and family.

Do I have to say that this level of go is not sustainable? For anyone? Something will give. In my case, two somethings before I paid attention.

I was doing too much. Way, way too much. I was trying to be all things to all people. I didn’t want to let anyone down—not my husband, not my kids, not my students, not my colleagues, not my bosses, not my neighbors, not my family, not my kid’s school, not my church, not anyone.

You think that list is crazy?

What does yours look like?

We do too much. And in order to do too much, we multi-task. That means we do none of it well, because we’re moving too fast to really have a care. There’s no time for care! We say yes to everyone on that list, and then we short change them all, because that’s the only way to do it. We train ourselves to believe that rest is sloth, and we forget how to be. Still.

Then we are diagnosed with anxiety disorders and get cancer and divorces and we turn around one day and our kids are grown and we cannot for the life of us account for the years.

What if we just didn’t. Didn’t try to be all things to all people. Didn’t say yes. Didn’t try to balance our lives so that all things are equal. Yeah, that’s right. All the things in our life are not equal. The boss does not deserve the same time and attention as the spouse or the kids.

And what if we just be. Be the one who learned to say no. Be the one who cut some things out, like team parent or coaching or that committee at work. Be the one who made room for rest who took our charts, cleared them out and made some space. And then, instead of filling the space right back up, did this:

We can do less, but do it wider, slower, better. We can take only the things we need, the things that make our lives lovely and amazing, and fill them up and out. Maybe–probably–we would feel less hollow, guilty and not enough. Instead, we could have more space and feel more fulfilled.

The thing I loved the most about this Christmas season was the ground swell of voices talking about less and slower. We can carry that momentum into 2014 and into all parts of our lives.

Do less. Be more. Happy New Year!

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