Words for Weariness (March 5, 2009)

I’m tired. Worn out. Weary.

It’s my own fault. I’ve always had a tendency to run through life at top speed – there’s so much I want to accomplish and create and experience that I hate letting even small moments dribble away (although I am a very gifted procrastinator). I suspect I also have a skewed sense of reality – I always think I can cram more activities into a finite amount of time, and that if I push hard enough, they’ll fit. I’m not usually right, but that hasn’t stopped me from continuing to try (and may also explain why I am prone to being late).

The result is that I find myself either living full throttle, or plastered against a wall. Today, the wall won.

The thing about being weary is that when your natural strength ebbs away, the hidden monsters lurking behind your walls of activity feel safe enough to come out – restlessness, fragility, self-doubt. They know I’ve been ignoring them, pretending they don’t exist, but when I hit the wall, I know they’re watching. As I peel my numbed brain, glassy eyes and incoherent lips off the crash site, they start circling.

Restlessness rustles through me, irritating every nerve, igniting impatience and frustration with every conversation. Every glance, every word, every move made by everyone else annoys me. It amazes me that I can be bone-tired, but still throw a temper tantrum in my heart, kicking and beating the empty air inside me, many times without even knowing why. I’m just angry, that’s all.

Self-doubt throws punches, as well. They are usually harder and better aimed than my flailing heart. I question my purpose, my effectiveness, my ability to do anything right. I am blinded by everyone else’s successes and deafened by the roar of my own failures. Pity is Self-Doubt’s snivelly sidekick, leaning into all manner of whispers about what’s fair, and who’s right, and who cares anyway. I don’t.

It’s there, in the dim light of my pity party that the harsh truth of my weariness sinks in – I’m fragile. Breakable. I can’t do it all. I can’t be it all. I’ve built my jello castles with sugar hands, and in those stark moments of self-awareness, the rain comes down.

Where do you go when the rain comes down? Where does your soul settle when restlessness flickers through your veins and self-doubt has wrestled you and won? Is there a safe haven for fragile hearts? Where, where, where can I find rest when I am weary?

It’s late. My filter is off. I’m tired. I’m going to tell you the truth.

I need God like I need oxygen. Go ahead and laugh, but it’s true. He is the only place my soul settles. Heaven isn’t just a future hope for me; the home of my Heavenly Father is where my heart turns now when it can’t go on any further. Believe me, I’ve looked for other landing pads – friends, accomplishments, relationships – nothing compares. He patiently waits through my tantrums, letting me tire myself out with wrestling and flailing, and when I have nothing left, He picks up my bruised, exhausted heart, gently nestling it right next to His. And I wonder why it took me so long to be still.

Today when I hit the wall, when I was moderately numb and irritated with the world, the last thing I wanted to do was go running. It’s March and blustery outside. It had rained earlier, and the sky held no promises that it wouldn’t open up and unleash its cold yield on me again. The kitchen was a disaster, there was laundry to do, and it was getting dark. But, I pulled on my running pants and shoes, jacket and hat (more because of the unknown number of oatmeal raisin cookies consumed earlier than of any lofty spiritual goals, actually), and headed out the door.

It’s funny. God has this way of taking my efforts - I got ready, I went down to the river, I started running – and turning them into gifts from Him. Running there, swept along by the winds of evening – in that moment, there was nowhere else I would have rather been. The sky was still gray and pregnant with rain. I was still exhausted and, barring the arrival of pixie-dust bearing fairies in my absence, the kitchen was still a mess and the laundry undone. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed.

It’s not because I went running. Everything changed because I took steps to spend time with God, even though it was sort of the last thing I felt like doing. I think sometimes God lets me wear myself out so that I’ll stop fighting – it’s only then that I’m weak enough to let Him carry me. There’s a great song by a guy named Rich Mullins and he says:

“I can’t see how You’re leading me, unless You’ve led me here
To where I’m lost enough to let myself be led.
And so, You’ve been here all along, I guess.
It’s just Your way and You are just plain hard to get”

Sometimes I need to get lost enough to let myself be led. Sometimes I need to be weak enough to feel His strength, and sometimes I need to be poor enough to see the riches of His goodness. Sometimes it’s ok to be lost and weak and poor.

I admit that this all sounds like some crazy paradoxical up-side down way of living, and I probably would scoff at it too, if it didn’t actually work so well. Lots of people say that they are following God, but they insist on being right and strong and rich, and I think that they have missed the point. They have missed out on one of the great beauties of knowing God. He is good (good enough for the both of us), and He loves me (in spite of all my monsters) and if I know nothing else, I know that, and that’s enough. Sometimes God is “just plain hard to get”, and that’s ok.

There’s a great story in the Bible where Jesus has just given some really hard teaching. So hard, that a lot of people decide He’s nuts and turn away. The crowds that once swelled at just the sound of His name have dwindled to embarrassingly low numbers. I can see Jesus watching them slowly fade off into the clouds of dust kicked up in their hasty retreat, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads, throwing their hands up in disbelief that they had followed such a renegade for so long. He turns to His twelve closest friends who, themselves, I imagine, are shuffling their feet and trying not to meet His eye. I suspect weariness clung even to Him, at this point - you can almost hear it in His voice. “You do not want to leave, too, do you?” He asks.

Good old Peter looks around and says what my heart says every time my monsters try to get the best of me, when I’m tired and weary and God seems “hard to get”. I imagine Peter shrugged.

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:67-69).

Where else am I going to go? He is the place my heart settles. He is where I find peace in the midst of uncertainties. He is where my restlessness is quenched, my self-doubt vanquished, my fragility tenderly guarded. He leads me when I’m lost and carries me when I’m weak. Why would I go anywhere else?

I need God like I need oxygen, and that’s the truth. I’m too tired to make anything up.

Fingerprints (January 29, 2009)

Since I’m airing horrid little secrets, I might as well let you in on another one. I know this one ought to cause me great shame – when I meet other women effortlessly successful in this arena, I sense that great waves of inadequacy ought to wash over me and spur me on to make vast and sweeping changes. It hasn’t actually happened yet, but I always sense that it should.

Here it is: I am messy. I hate to clean. There – my dirty little secret is out in the open. If you’ve been to my house (or seen my office) you may already know this. It pains me to admit it, because society tends to peer down its polished nose at me and “my kind”, subtly suggesting that I am somehow less of a woman because of it. I warned my husband of this minor flaw before we got married, but, swelling with the dizzied flush of new love, he said, “That doesn’t matter – I love you anyway!”

A couple of years on and slightly less flushed, he said, “You’re messy.”
I said, “I know – I warned you.”
He said, “Yes, but you were supposed to change.”

Marital matters aside, the fact remains that brooms and mops do not inspire me. The scent of bathroom cleaner does not sweep me up into fits of ecstasy, and while I love a man with dishpan hands, washing them myself is sometimes the bane of my existence.

The wheres and whys and deep psychological issues related to my “neatness-challenged” self are not really what I’m getting at today, however. I mention it only because I spent today cleaning – not my house, of course (to my husband’s dismay, I’m sure), but a place where I have spent much my life over the last five years.

We, in Düsseldorf, call it the Clubhouse, and it is a special place; a literal and figurative home for myself and countless others who have walked through the door. It’s where we fit in and belonged. It’s where we were family.

As I wiped fingerprints off the walls, I wondered which hands had made them, for many hands have run along those walls. Many feet have slid up and down the great hall, many eyes have shed tears, in laughter and in sorrow. Many enthusiastic arms have hugged hello, and many heavy hearts hugged good-bye. Many memories made by many people had now condensed into little more than fingerprints on the wall. And I was wiping them away.

It made me think. Don’t we spend much of our lives making fingerprints on the wall? Trying to leave something lasting, something that will endure once we are gone? We reach out and touch others, hoping that we will leave an impression, a print that will not fade with time or circumstance. Sometimes, we succeed. And sometimes, the world comes along behind us, wiping our fingerprints away.

The lives we live are transient ones. Some of you know this better than others. While losing the Clubhouse does not erase the memories we made there, memories were made by other feet and arms and hearts before we came, and many other memories will be made, fingerprints left by hands we do not know, after we are gone.

What, then, is permanent? Where, then, is my home? Is there a place where my existence is validated, my heart settled? Where in the world do my fingerprints remain?

I don’t know how many times I have moved. I have changed schools 13 times. I have lived in five different states and three different countries. My hope is that I’ve left my fingerprints over all of them. I don’t know. I do know they’ve left their fingerprints on me.

I know because every time I travel or move somewhere new, there is still a whisper of familiarity, an aftertaste of home. I feel a little bit settled everywhere I go, even if I’ve just arrived. And while that is comforting, the flip side of the coin is that there are now pieces of me scattered all over the world. Everywhere feels a little bit like home, but nowhere feels exactly like home. Or how I imagine it would feel.

Soon I will long for Germany the way that I now long for Albania and Romania, and any beach I’ve ever been on. The landscape of my life will change again and wherever I land, I’ll feel a little bit at home. But not quite. Mere geography cannot quench the little blue fire of loneliness that sometimes creeps along the floor of my heart. I assign a person, place or thing to the feeling, I say that I miss so-and-so or thus-and-such, when what I really mean is that my soul is searching for lost fingerprints, for feelings of belonging, of fitting, of being home, and I think I remember those feelings in those places with those people. Have you been there? Unfortunately, seeing those people or going to those places doesn’t always satisfy the longing we've nurtured in our hearts for them – sometimes, it only makes the longing worse b/c we're at a loss as to what will truly satisfy it.

C.S. Lewis spoke to this phenomenon when he said, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

Often, people see the Kingdom of Heaven as the “pie in the sky, place where good people go when they die”, perfectly simple, perfectly calm, perfectly boring possible existence after this one. I don’t. On the day I cease attempting to leave fingerprints on this life and step into that one, all my misplaced longings will be satisfied, the bits of me scattered and left behind in one country or another will navigate their way back to each other and, at last, I will be Home. Home – where I fit, where I belong; where I am Family. Where my fingerprints will never be wiped away.

“…We have a priceless inheritance—an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay.” (1 Peter 1:4, NLT)

That is the appeal of Heaven for me. This good King has built His good Kingdom as the lock for my ever-searching key, every other “home” merely a layover on my journey there. It is beyond the reach of change and decay, a home sweet home that can never be anything less.

Perhaps the reason I am less than enthusiastic about cleaning is b/c of its transience – I can spend hours cleaning one day what will be messy again in a week. It’s a reminder that in this life nothing truly remains, all things and states of being will pass away; everything I do to make a lasting impression on the world will someday be forgotten. Forgotten here, that is. But God notices my attempts, feeble as they may be, to validate my existence. He sees each tear shed in laughter and in sorrow; He has known every enthusiastic and heavy-hearted hug, has watched my hands run along the walls of this world and treasured each fingerprint. My thoughts and actions, though often dusty and disheveled, are not hidden from Him, and He never fails to clean me up when I ask Him to. He’s much better at it than I am.

Which is good, because on my own… I’m a mess.