Will I Be Enough?

Do you ever have those moments (or hours or days) when you feel like a caricature of your worst and yet most familiar fears? I was there when I cried in the shower after work, and ate, and scrolled across my tablet screen, and ate, and scrolled across my tablet screen, and ate some more to hide from the feelings that I hate. You get the idea.

I'm so weary of this.

I watched the newest version of Cinderella tonight. At the climax of the movie, the kind and beautiful heroine finds herself locked in an old attic, dressed in rags, and verbally abused by her bitter stepmother: "You are nothing; you don't matter, and I forbid you to leave!" These are the words thrown at her at the same moment one of prince's troops has finally found her and invites her to come out of the attic. The burly henchman puts the mother in her place:

"The KING forbids you to forbid her to leave!

How dare you rebel against an officer of the KING that way!"

As in all good fairy tales, the moment of truth had arrived and the girl was being offered freedom from her deepest fears and most painful circumstances. She could follow the officer out the door, never to return.

But the twist to her choice is this: if she leaves and joins the prince, she has to admit to him that she's not actually a princess (as he thinks). She's just a girl. A commoner.

"Will I be enough?" She asks herself as she peers at her soot covered face in the mirror.

In the end, she decides to leave the attic and the lies behind her. She thinks enough of herself to ignore her stepmother, and yet, at the same time, she doesn't think too much of herself to by pretending to be something she isn't. So she offers...just herself in rags...to the prince, and he accepts her and makes her a princess after all.

Princess stories don't normally make my heart flutter. All the pink fluff and glitter and corny dreamy princes usually seem overdone and garishly sentimental to me. But this time, her plaintive question in the mirror, "will I be enough?" echoed a similar question in my own heart. It's the same question unanswered that had me crying in the shower and eating and scrolling earlier this evening.

When Cinderella decided to leave the attic, she offered herself, whether she was enough or not. In a sense, she wasn't really ready to live in the castle in her current state, but to get there, she had to be completely honest about what she really was. It was this act of vulnerability that set the stage for her rescue. In a similar way for me, maybe the question, "will I be enough?" is beside the point. If I'm brave enough to stand without hiding before God, I may be setting myself up for a grand rescue away from my own "attic."

No Words Yet

A year ago I wrote about joy (Joy Comes) when I didn't feel any joy. But it did come and is coming here:



There's some kind of clog between my heart and my tongue (and by extension, my pen) these days and I'm not sure why. It's like calcification growing on a bone--the awkward bump that remains after the messy part of healing is over. A clog. A bump. A blockage? However, whatever you want to call it, the more compellingly important thing is that my heart is fleshy and pink, healthy and slowly growing  a new batch of hope. I want to tell people about it, about my hope, but like I just said, my words are having trouble getting past the blocks and out of my insides to my tongue.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not even sure that this new thing inside me is even "word-able" yet. Or maybe there are actually so MANY words that I know if I started letting them out all my guts might come out too, and I'm not sure I really want to create that kind of wet squishy mess right here. At least not yet.

But here's to undefined hope, and to pink fleshy-ness after long grey coldness. Here's to life.

"To love anyone is to hope in him always. From the moment at which we begin to judge anyone, to limit our confidence in him, from the moment at which we identify [pigeon-hole] him, and so reduce him to that, we cease to love him and he ceases to be able to become better. We must love in a world that does not know how to love."

Walking on Water, Madeleine L'Engle, 112

Joy Comes

 "...weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. "

Today I looked out the back window of the prep kitchen at work and noted the cold, snow, and dim light. It has been a long winter. And the cold only seems to be getting colder some days even though it's already March. 

"What if we lived in a world where we never knew for sure spring would come?" I asked my coworker. "What if some years winter lasted all year long, and we never knew for sure if the weather would ever be different?" 

"Oh, that would be awful!"

Later, I walked out the back door to take the trash out and admired the late afternoon sun I'd missed looking out the back kitchen window. In an instant I remembered that God is not sadistic or cruel...and why.

He's not cruel because spring always comes after the hard winter. He made it that way. And actually He makes everything that way: showy flowers after dead seeds, butterflies after dead caterpillars, rain after drought. It's as simple as that. He always makes "amazing-ness" after "dead-ness."

Joy comes. 

And my guess is that it CANNOT BE STOPPED. It's coming. It has to. It's the way it works around here, folks.

5 Years Later: An Old Blog Post Remembered

 

In five years so many things have changed: instead of running the kitchen in a tiny country Bible School, I now spend my days in a downtown Boston restaurant. Yet when I reread this post tonight, I remembered what is still the same:

Now that I have my very own blog, I'm excited to write in it. On Tuesday, I planted tulips. Digging around in the dirt made me feel very philosophical, and so I plotted a blog post about dirt. It made my task much more interesting except that now I've already forgotten what it was that I was going to say.

Hmm...

Tuesday night, I played volleyball with my girls. Usually, everyone plays Tuesday night sports but this time all the guys but one were away on a field trip. The volleyball net was duly lowered to our fair height and theoretically I could have spiked a mean one. But I didn't. With writing on the mind (except this time I think I was planning a letter to a friend), I waxed philosophical again. This time about my job.

Philosophizing is an excellent occupation. It allows one to back away from the fray and intensity of your own self and watch the "show" with the jaunty stance of an unconcerned bystander, chin in hand. From this position, I discovered my work was meaningful. Not the cooking. But the people.

Have you ever noticed that some people have scars on their faces; except they aren't physical scars? I know some people like this. Sometimes it's obvious, other times subtle.

I know. When I planted my tulips, I mixed manure into the dirt and carefully tucked the bulbs in for the winter. I know they will grow grow into healthy flowers because of my care. I know that loving these people will help heal their faces. It's almost as if I can see the future and understand how much the words, the patience, the listening, and the kindness will rebuild the broken down parts.

Funny how much sense it makes now and how little equipped I've usually felt. Mostly it seems that my days are filled with keeping my own act together. I'm the one that needs help!

I know. But somehow, I know right now that something can be done for these people. It's almost one 'o' clock in the morning. I tend to be overly dramatic in the middle of the night. Oh well. I still know!

Sarah's Very Amazing Goals for 2013

Ok folks, here they are. Sarah's very amazing goals for 2013. Stay tuned, because I will publicly declare (I think), at the end of 2013, whether or not I met these very amazing goals:

*Go on a date
*Weigh 125 lbs
*Try to publish something

Happy New Year!!!!! YAYYYYY!!!! Wahoooo!!!!

Daddy's Girl

When I think of Daddy, I think of God. I guess it's because he seems... a little fearsome, and yet wonderful and safe all at the same time. In fact, many of my ideas of what God is like are mixed up with Daddy.

You could say that talking about God is Daddy's job. For most of my growing up years he was a pastor (for those that don't know, that's kind of like being a priest). I've spent a lot of time listening to him talk about God, in church (fidgeting in the pew), and at home (squished on the couch with seven restless siblings). To grow up a PK (the official acronym for Pastor's Kid) wasn't on my list of Most Wanted Things to Be, but I didn't happen to be around when God made that particular decision. So, I heard about God, and the Bible, a lot (did I say that already?).

But it wasn't just talk, it was action too, for the whole family. So, instead of Barney and Sesame Street, we listened to Christian Adventures in Odyssey on Saturday morning radio, and instead of riding to school in a yellow bus, we did our math at the kitchen table. And I knew how to say Malachi at a very young age and was shocked one day around age ten when I heard a lady say "oh my gosh!" (people swore?). My friends were the kids at church, and I wore skirts all the time.

And along the way I watched my dad. One day, he gave away the sneakers he was wearing (and walked away in his socks) to a homeless man, and another time he sang "I Would Love to Tell You What I Think of Jesus" to a crowd even though he's not a singer. He was the only person that I ever remember seeing dance in church (think stoic New England kind of congregation) . He had a "fire in his belly" in the words of one parishioner; he couldn't do anything halfway, whether it was preaching a sermon or playing a game of pick-up basketball. Now he works and prays overseas in a politically fragile country when most men his age are enjoying retirement.

And somewhere in there I believed God too. Not because he was always perfect, or because I always liked how we did things, but because he made God seem believable. If you want to meet a real Christian I would be happy to introduce you to Bob Adams.