We're All Broken, but Nobody Breaks the Same--May 26,2013

 

                Cancer. Tornados. Shootings. War. Disability. Abuse. Depression. Divorce.

                We’re all broken. Not a person alive is untouched by tragedy, by pain, by loss. Faces try to mask their internal strife, while our hearts  wear their hurts on their sleeves, their scars unable to hide behind emotional detachment. Every soul is broken. But no one breaks the same. While we may try to put our pain into categories the truth is that no one breaks from the same tragedy in exactly the same way. There are a million pieces that make up each story, each life, each hurt. Things like cancer, natural disasters, poverty, and war shatter lives like snowflakes—each life marred a little differently by the ominous pains of life. Sure, the categories tell of patterns of loss—but it is always personal. It’s no wonder we feel isolated, alone, stuck in a dark and silent room that no one else can quite relate to.

                Ironically, the uniqueness of our brokenness is what unites and binds us. It is when we acknowledge that we don’t “exactly know what you’re going through” that we are invited to enter into the struggle to cope, to heal; to find a new normal. The naivety of platitudes such as “I understand completely” reveals our innate desire to be known, to be understood, but in reality they are just sentimental. The hearer nods in agreement or defiantly thinks “yeah, right…but you don’t have this too” but yet in a different circumstance, when confronted with another’s pain—is compelled to utter a similar hollow line to fill the silence that follows a revealing of suffering.

Our understanding and connection is found when we are free to admit the unique nature of suffering. When we concede that we don’t “know exactly how you feel” we open the door for an honest discussion of pain—one that acknowledges the labels are the same but the stories are diverse. Souls can share when the false pretense of sameness is shed and the reality of difference is stated.  Each life is shaped by a thousand hurts, victories, loves, and losses. Accepting our shared experience of unshared suffering is essential to healing, to helping. We’re all broken, but nobody breaks the same.

I Don't Want to Forget May 26, 2013

Tonight, I click through the pictures as mental snapshots flood my eyes. Unseeing the images in front of me, I am taken back. Sitting in my chair I am walking the red dirt road, passing pockets of chatter in Swahili, answering the calls of “how are you!” with “fine thank you how are you!?” and grinning at the shy smiles that answer me. I am cupping a warm bowl of ugali and sakuma wiki, grateful to know that the children are leaving school with full stomachs…today. I am walking past fields of chai, hearing a rooster crow on the hour, and drinking in the moist mountain air. I am surrounded by chocolate faces, their fingers running through my muzungu hair, and being passed the secrets of their hearts and hurts—with the hope that I would pray for them. I am futilely attempting to quiet the classroom, aching for these souls to know how loved they are. I am listening to tales of hunger and hurt that cannot blot out the hope of every child. I am grasping an orphan’s hand, smiling into their face, and willing for them to know that they are loved beyond measure. I am sitting by a window, writing and listening to the hard Kenyan rain and drinking in the renewing smell.

                I am amazed at the strength of my memories and fiercely preserving them in writing. I don’t want to forget the mere 90 days that will forever mark my life. I don’t want to forget the beauty of connection—the way that a shared experience –even for a mere 4 days—binds people together. I don’t want to forget the sound of the birds, the view from the tree house, the enthusiastic greeting of Joseph, our guard. I don’t want to forget the camaraderie that power-outages brings, cramming into a taxi, spontaneous theological discussions. I don’t want to forget because even now, almost a year after I embarked on the journey—I am still being shaped and changed by the people I met, the stories I heard, the place I lived.

                Even now, it is my responsibility to speak, to write, to let the memories come, to tell the stories that tug at my heart, and to fight to remember. I am connected because there is one body, one hope, one Christ that calls and conjoins his people. So tonight, I write to remember, to reflect, to rejoice at where I have been, who I have known, and where I am going. I won’t forget.

The Tunnel Vision of Fear—May 23, 2013

                This morning was day three of an aid that wouldn’t turn on until I changed the battery and “turned it on and off, on and off” a bajillion times. Then it would quietly sputter to life and after a few more rounds of “turning it on and off” would be back to full volume. Just in time for me to be late to work. In these frantic mornings my mind turned from panicked prayers to frantic fear. In my groggy and frustrated state I went from the immediate, “I’m going to have to call in sick if I can’t get this aid to work” to the future fears “I won’t be able to go to grad school, because I’ll have to drain my savings to pay for my hearing aids…” (since insurance, even disability insurance, doesn’t cover it) to scenarios of me locked in a basement typing my life away and being useless to society since I couldn’t sustain a job, get insurance, or hear—ridiculous. Fear is a vicious animal that plays hulk in my heart and suffocates my soul. It is the thing that disables me. Yes, my hearing loss is severe. I do rely on machines daily. Yes, I miss many things and have to say “what” more than the lazy teenager. But the thing that really stops me in my tracks, derails my days, and cripples me is the fear. Fears that are often rooted in real things-I do need my aids to function, soon I will have to shell out the $7,000 grand for new aids, but they take on a life of their own and rob me of today’s hope, joy, and provision.

 Fear tries to make me forget I have a choice. It momentarily convinces me that the things I am terrified of are “just around the corner” and that there’s “nothing, I can do”. It tugs at my prideful heart and tells me that I only have value when I am independently functioning well and isolates me by coddling my stubborn independence saying “YOU have to figure this out, ALONE”. Fear tries to intimidate me into an isolated existence that believes people around me simply see me as a burden.

Later today, I read a blog post where the author articulated “I think most of our "I bet they think they're better than me" assumptions have nothing to do with them and everything to do with us.  And no one can make us feel crappy about the way we parent, what we eat, how we tend to our marriage, where we shop, how we spend our money or what kind of person we are--no one but ourselves” (Kelle Hampton).

Personally, this translated to how I feel about my loss and how others perceive it—that I’m less than them because of it –like a “not yet a girl, not yet a woman” sort of separation—“not quite disabled, not quite able”. That somehow I “miss the mark” on worthiness because of what I lack—hulk smashing my sense of worth, value, contributing-ableness to the world around me.

But what really stuck me today—was the underlying fear that I look on the former “pre-hearing-loss-me” as “better” or “more worthy” the personal reality that I feel less worthy. No one has told me that—sure, there was the customer service lady that hung up on me, the people who yell about 2 feet from my face—awkward and embarrassing attempts to “help” or my favorite—speaking in slo-mo as if that will help me understand them—but in our politically correct culture—no one would TELL me I’m less. No one, but me. Granted, the fact that there is no insurance help unless you’re profoundly deaf makes me feel like society doesn’t care, sees my need as not worthy of attention, but it’s my choice to internalize it.  

Early morning tunnel vision tells me that my loss is all there is. That I’m just as broken as my dern aid, sputtering through life and not quite functioning where I should be, and that I might as well throw in the towel. Tunnel vision steals my strengths, my abilities, my value and worth.

But, if I keep going, there’s a light at the end of that tunnel. There’s the light of perspective, of people who DO care, of the hope of help when I humbly ask for it—the reminder that no one is independent—we all “get by with a little help from our friends”.

As this day closes I am grateful for grace. I am out of today’s tunnel. I realized that I had been one-sided in my perspective of what “stewarding my hearing-loss well” looked like (to throw out some-christianese). I thought it meant I had to have joy all the time, had to “grin and bear ii” and just “make lemonade” out of this disability I hate, and certainly didn’t ask for. But tonight I grasped the truth that the other, equal, aspect of stewarding is being real. It’s admitting that suffering sucks—and in that honesty there is freedom. The sharing of my woundedness is my window to the world. It isn’t something I have to hide or sweep under the rug. I don’t have to always be happy and show that I have hope—I have to be honest. I have to be honest when it hurts, when I need help, when I am grieving and angry. Suffering connects me to people and to my Savior—who is even more upset about loss, tornados, starving children—than I am. Thank goodness there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Keeping my faith When I Don’t Understand May 8,2013

                Faith requires tenacious persistence. It means we don’t give up when it gets complicated. We stay committed. However, we live in a commitment-phobic society. From jobs to relationships—our culture tells us, beckons us, to throw in the towel when it’s not fun anymore, when you feel tied down, when you “just don’t feel the love”. My generation is seen as hard working and proactive—but not reliable in the long term. We’ve extended our adolescence into our 20’s—we can move around, “find ourselves” and throw off and away things we don’t like in search of the next thing destined to truly fulfill us and enable us to “be all we can be”. Now, seasons of refining are good. But a life characterized by a lack of commitment will have a lot of short lessons but not a lot of legacy.

                As I sipped my chai and basked in the May sun—I realized that another element of the commitment phobia is being uncomfortable with questions. Our digital age has it’s perks—but it also means we expect answers, immediate knowledge, and the tool to attain these are endless. But this entitlement of understanding sets us up to fail when we face tragedy.  In those situations our comprehension starts and stops at “why?” in light of marathon bombings, elementary school shootings, children dying of diseases, millions of babies never taking their first breath. Daily we are faced with things we cannot fully explain or understand. All too often, true to our non-committal stereotype—we give up, get jaded, paranoid, and depressed. We can’t know it all. The futile attempts only press us further into unhappiness and fruitlessness.

                I have seen this play out personally in this process of re-entry into the US and in grief. I cannot understand or fix cancer, accidents, world poverty or hunger. My gut is to get angry—like an angsty teen with nowhere but my wardrobe or the people who love me to display my disdain. Our generation, myself almost included, has thrown in the towel on faith. Oh, we’re “spiritual”, “coexist” but neither of those require commitment or an assertion of truth. We don’t want answers we don’t like. We want it our way—and now.

                But faith requires commitment. It’s a choice to not let the unknowable drown out the reverberating shouts of truth. We are loved, purposed, created. But we’re also really screwed up. Anyone with a toddler will tell you that you don’t have to teach a child to disobey, rebel, to try to do it their own way.

                So where does this leave me—my faith? Do I give up because it’s hard? Do I get jaded because I don’t like the immediate answers? Do I use the excuse of “I’m in my 20’s, it’s time to explore”? or do a look back to my roots, the example of the generation prior to my “baby boomer” parents, and persevere and trust? If anything, Christianity is the one belief that explains our world. It tells me that life will suck at times—it doesn’t try and make me feel better by telling me that I’m a “good person”, rather, it acknowledges the rebellious inner two year old I know is there.  Instead of heaping guilt and to-do lists, it bestows abundant grace. It is in a lack of understanding the pain of this world that I better understand the strength and veracity of my faith. I am emboldened to proclaim the unpopular truth of Jesus to my peers who so desperately seek understanding  and something worth committing to.

Writing when I have nothing to say

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything new...well, “awhile” by my standards. These late spring days have been full of work, rushed evenings of exercise, bills, grad school details, and periodic evenings of rest. I have been able to carve out some time to begin to tackle books that have long been collecting dust in my “need to read pile”. Writing has taken a backseat while I’ve also been processing a lot of strong sensory memories-feeling like “I’m there”—back to walking the dirt covered sidewalks, alleys, the maze of Kibera, and in equal poignancy—chatting in the mid-summer breeze, fingers chilled as they grasp a cool drink in contrast to the warm fire smiling and laughing—I alternate between snapshots of my friend and cousin who are no longer here.

                Tonight as I cleared my head—cooling off as I briskly walked around my block, squinting into the sunset—I was struck that my writing doesn’t always have to be profound—it has to be transparent and real. Wearing my heart on my proverbial sleeve means I don’t hold in the ugly, the hurt, the confusing reality of life, death, hunger and plenty. Every life, each day, matters.  Yesterday, in the midst of the bustle of the classroom; the distinct sounds of laughter, swings squeaking as they swayed, and balls bouncing—I looked into the deep chocolate eyes of a very special young man—one whose laughter lights up a room and whose care-free running causes contagious smiles—and for a moment our eyes locked. In that instant I had the rare assurance that I was exactly where I was supposed to be and doing exactly what I am called to. Each day, the people I am with—they are what make life profound because each moment has eternal meaning.

                Finally, the last of my reverie passed in long shadows behind me, I looked up from the sidewalk, inhaled the fresh sun-filled air, and as  I turned toward home I realized that the confidence in my faith and where I am at has quietly dawned and settled in my soul this week. I knew that today I brought and received joy. I shared in victories and danced with kiddos as we hopped over concrete lines and appreciated the warm sunny day. Today, and every day, I have a life worth writing about.