Two Years

This weekend I started reading Barbara Brown Taylor's new book An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. It's a follow up to her incredible book Leaving Church and in it she shares how she began to find life, purpose and God outside the walls of the institutional church. This book had me hooked from the introduction. On the third page she writes that when she was asked to speak at a church in Alabama she struggled with what to say. The wise old priest asked her a single question – and this question has been burning a hole in my soul since I read it.

"Come tell us, what is saving your life right now?"

What is saving my life. . . right now?

My answer has to be that somehow, every single day, I am learning to be just a little bit more alive. Somehow I am learning to forget the rejections that would only lead me back to a time in which I questioned my value as a child of God. I am remembering that permanence is a mirage and that in the beginning God brought order out of chaos. I'm remembering that God still brings creation out of chaos and that God calls it good.

I'm also remembering that Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so, little ones to him belong, they are weak but he is strong. Yes. Jesus loves me.

Those are the things that are saving my life. Right now.

It's been two years this week since Open Door asked me to resign. It's kind of funny, but I just remembered that today. And, rather than feeling like a punch in the stomach, the way it has felt for the last 24 months, today it just felt like a road sign of the edge of life's highway. I saw it. I read it. I kept right on driving. 

The evidence of how far down I had gone in the last two years was that it never really occurred to me until today that all the pain that I had been experiencing was plain old, garden variety, run of the mill grief. I was mourning the death of a dream and coping with the loss of so many things – my personal calling, a church full of family and friends and the certainty of the purpose and vision that had driven me. In metaphorical ways I had laid down my life for something, and then, with no warning, it was gone.

I could have, and would have, pointed that out to anyone else. It took me two years to figure it out for me. I went through all the stages, some of them many, many times. That anger one, even now, still raises its ugly head every now and then.

1. Numbness, Denial

2. Yearning, Anger

3. Sadness, Withdrawl

4. Reconstruction, Working Through

5. Acceptance, Hope

Moving towards acceptance and hope is the stage where I'm finally beginning to feel the sun warming my bones again. The anger is beginning to be transformed into laughter. When I got the call that told me that a certain leader in the congregation who was instrumental in my departure is now stripping in a bar with his new boyfriend I laughed out loud. I laughed until it hurt. I laughed. But, I didn't cry. That's moving towards acceptance.

I can't change the past. I can't change him. I can only change me. Changing me is all that matters. I get that now.

Later on in her book Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the spiritual practice of getting lost. For her, every human foible is an opportunity to meet the Divine. In writing about the spiritual fruits of our individual failures she says, 

"When we fall ill, lose our jobs, wreck our marriages, or alienate our children, most of us are left alone to pick up the pieces. . .When the safety net has split, when the resources are gone, when the way ahead is not clear, the sudden exposure can be both frightening and revealing. We spend so much of our time protecting ourselves from this exposure that a weird kind of relief can result when we fail. To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live."

And yet I live.

What is saving my life right now? The laughter that comes with acceptance and the hope that warms me like the sun.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.

– Psalm 30:5