Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

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Peace is a dangerous thing (on actually listening to Dr. King)

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Image by Daniel Rarela

There was a time when I wondered how twentysomething radicals turned into straitlaced middle-aged professionals with fond but fuzzy memories of those old days.

Now, at 28, I know.

It’s not just that I’m comfortable now, with my granite countertops and savings account and nice white professional friends—though of course that’s part of it. Of course those things are strangely seductive; however silly they seem listed out there in black and white, I cling to pretty, to safe, without even realizing it.

But that’s not really why I’m tempted to quit. It’s because—as much freedom and joy as getting older brings—I also see how small I am now, and how big the problems are. It’s because burnout is real. It’s because the powers-that-be seem unbeatable, and because I’ve made so many mistakes, and because unlearning and relearning and letting go and starting over are so very tiring. I often think I will be beaten—not by pain or adversity, because these can be used as galvanizing forces; instead, I often think I will be beaten by simple exhaustion.

I see now how you can start to get woke, but slowly drift on back to sleep.

We grew up learning about the nice Dr. King, not the woke Dr. King. In the process our schools martyred him over and over—by silencing his radical voice, turning him into a vague inspirational figure, and pretending his death meant more than his life.

Some of us cherry-pick our own issues to apply his quote to: “injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We fail to admit what he was really saying:
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.

The truth is, 75% of whites had an unfavorable opinion of Dr. King when he was assassinated for the second time, and killed. He disrupted the status quo, and that made him dangerous. He told the truth, and the truth set people free, and that made him dangerous. He loved them enough to stand for justice, and that made him dangerous.

In the Bible, “peace” (shalom) is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of right relationship between all beings. Over and over, we see God bringing peace through an unsettling—even violent—reckoning with evil. Intentional *and* unintentional evil. Personal *and* systemic sin.

And this is good news! If peace is not an absence but the presence of God’s Spirit making things right, then peace is not something we can only wish for; it is something we can become.

If I am not beaten by simple exhaustion—if someone stronger and wiser rises from the embers of my burned-out striving self—it will be because I learned, somehow, like Dr. King, to pray.

To live and work out of something other than guilt, or anger, or fear, or self-righteousness.

To listen and follow, listen and follow, Spirit’s voice spoken by the marginalized.

To sit down in my spirit with the Spirit, and one day at a time to do what is right, however confounding it is to the outside world. 

However dangerous they say we are.

To embody a supernatural and immoveable peace.

nothing for Advent

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There is a tiny, sour, hyper-materialist atheist who lives in a corner of my brain, and of all the things she hates about religion, Advent is the worst.

Christmas? Fine. Sing songs, put up goofy decorations, and tell a story with baby animals added for effect—you can’t blame people for distracting themselves from the cold and dark of winter.

But Advent—all this talk of being patient, and these abstractions: hope, peace, joy, love—it’s everything that drives my tiny atheist to tantrums. Escapism, she charges; four weeks of nothing, pretending to be something. People trying to convince themselves things are okay when they aren’t. And the waiting—just useless, helpless inaction while the bad guys go on winning.

And this year, of all the years, as refugee camps spring up outside U.S. borders and child detention camps grow within them, I have to admit: to pretend I know anything of waiting would be to make a mockery of someone else’s silent nights.

I’m not much of a 2 Peter person. I’d much rather make fun of fire-and-brimstone sermons than read one out of my own Bible. Since I quit reading the Left Behind series around age 13, I don’t know what to make of this thief-in-the-night business. I don’t spend much time anticipating the second coming of our Lord, not even during Advent.

But here is 2 Peter 3 in the middle of my reading for the season. As I vacillate between Christmas cheer and moral outrage, this passage that seems neither here nor there; neither Hallmark Channel nor protest song, it’s a supernatural action flick dropped in the middle of felt-calendar season.

Then again, the language seems less strange and less dangerous if I read this passage as if it were the first century, as if my land is under occupation and I belong to a fringe religious sect. I feel myself being swept along by depictions of the fiery end of the earth, refining the world and revealing the truth at the core of things: the new heaven and the new earth. I feel myself ready, so ready for this revolution, for the pain and fear surrounding me to just burn itself up in one great flash so new things can grow. When I imagine that day, it seems like anything is possible. It can’t get here fast enough.

And what does the author say to do? In the midst of lurid visions of the end of days, the exasperating message: Wait. “Live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.”

I’m ready to go kick down doors and lay claim to justice, or become some radical missionary proclaiming the good news of the fiery heavens, or move to some mountaintop and pray 24/7, but this guy’s advice is to “be on your guard…grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Useless, helpless inaction: the tiny atheist growls.

If indifference is one of the chief failings of people with privilege, its seductive shadow side is impatience. We’re liable to kick down doors without much thought for who’s going to put them back up.

When my white (or wealthy, or male) friends and I learn that a problem exists, we expect that as with most of our personal problems, we will quickly find a solution and bend the world to our will that the issue be fixed. Trained all our lives to be Leaders and Achievers and Problem-Solvers, we splash into the middle of complex issues that don’t directly affect our day-to-day lives, often making the Problem worse.

It takes a long time (or a huge disaster) to fully understand our Helping as masked superiority; our Leadership Skills as assumptions that work in only one cultural context and power dynamic; our need to fix as a need to control, and not confront, the world’s pain.

A desire to make a problem go away is very different from a commitment to being formed in the way of justice. The former is a project. The latter is an undoing. The former requires being right. The latter requires humility.

To be honest, all the people trying to instill compassion in me as a child were not doing particularly difficult work. I think compassion is human, and especially easy for children. Instead, I wish someone had invited me earlier to humility.

Now, when it is pointed out to me how my attitude or behavior is making a situation worse, I’m likely to sputter, well, did you want me to sit and do nothing? I am the one who can hardly bear to receive the compassion behind the hard and gentle word, yes.

In 2018 I began learning to sit and do nothing—I took up trying to meditate. It’s the opposite of my achieving tendencies. In the past I’ve tried to meditate and given up; I suppose I thought that “anything worth doing is worth doing well” and decided to put off an encounter with myself, the universe, and God until I was fully prepared.

Only this year did it occur to me that if your goal is truly to sit and to nothing, the only way you can fail is to give up and go back to rushing around, chasing things you already have.

By sitting and doing nothing, I am learning the humility of waiting. To encounter the world’s pain from a place of grounding in our belovedness—instead of piling onto it with my need to make it go away.

I am discovering I’ve never known how to listen before, and allowing myself to truly hear others in new ways.

I am leaving the world in God’s hands and waiting for the particular calling of my one small life.

I am believing when others tell their own stories, and echoing their calls for better systems and structures.

I am sitting still with Love, love even for the parts of me that refuse to believe in it. 

And I am discovering that to “grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ” is the hardest and most essential work that can be done—more earth-changing and less visible, more beautiful and less measurable than any project, or even any revolution, has ever been. It is work that does not give up hoping for a new heaven and a new earth, but also knows they will emerge when this raggedy old world is transformed by love. Love for what is, not just what could be. Love that humbly learns from the lowly. Love that is fierce, but also patient, drawing strength from stillness.

And so this year, of all the years, I have to admit that hope and peace and joy and love, in this moment, look like waiting.


litany for survivors

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All-loving God, who was named by Hagar ‘the God who sees’ in the midst of her oppression; see us now in our anger, fear, grief, and need.
Lord, hear our prayer.
For survivors of harrassment, that you might speak to them their unassailable innate worth;
Lord, hear our prayer.
For survivors of assault, that your tender healing might bind up wounds of heart, body, mind, and soul;
Lord, hear our prayer.
For those whose earnest truths have been met with disbelief, that you would remind them of the strength and comfort to be found in the company of the disbelieved witnesses to your resurrection.
Lord, hear our prayer.
For those victimized in childhood, we know you weep with them. That you would be an ever-present source of strength and unfailing restorer of life;
Lord, hear our prayer.
For those betrayed by their churches, that your holiness might shine beyond human evil, your love beyond congregational walls;
Lord, hear our prayer.
That you would cause our societies to repent of individual sexism and systemic patriarchy;
Lord, hear our prayer.
For perpetrators of sexism, harassment, and assault, that the slow and difficult work of repentance would lead them to reconciliation with you.
Lord, hear our prayer.
For bystanders to sexism, harassment, and assault, that your Spirit would offer courage and conviction to abandon complicity with violence and choose the side of the oppressed.
Lord, hear our prayer.
For Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, that you might protect her and bring her honor as a courageous teller of truth.
Lord, hear our prayer.
For Judge Brett Kavanaugh, that truth and justice may roll down like mighty rivers.
Lord, hear our prayer.
For your beloved world,
that power would no longer be used as a weapon,
that all would find healing from the wounds of patriarchy,
that with your help, in facing difficult truths, we may see the dawn of a world where all genders may live without fear.
Lord, hear our prayer.

the plaque that ruled my life and the web that made me free

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Jesus
Others
Yourself.

As a young kid I’d stare at the plaque on the wall of the Sunday School classroom. Someone must have hung it there almost absentmindedly, just another bit of Sunday School kitsch—maybe even someone who didn’t want it in their own house anymore. They couldn’t have known they’d be forming a child’s worldview for years to come.

Jesus, Others, Yourself, I’d chant growing up, and at some point I discovered it worked. I felt something like joy every time I helped someone else, took on their projects and problems; but more insidiously, I felt something like relief every time I minimized my own. I could ignore my own problems and my own feelings if I focused on others’, and I could silence the voice of judgment in my head if I never attended to my own needs. After all, by using resources to care for myself, I was taking them away from someone else, right?

So I abandoned myself to please a plaque.

Theology and justice work ensued. As I learned more and more about poverty, oppression, and justice, the issues became more thorny and the work more difficult; but in my most hopeless hours, I reminded myself: we are all connected. I cannot flourish until my neighbor flourishes. And I cannot see Jesus without loving my neighbor. Jesus, Yourself, Others—we exist all as one web.

Still, though that truth could carry me through my work on behalf of others, it took many years more to trust that the world is not a zero-sum game. It took time for the web to really call into question the hierarchy—to actually ask: can my neighbor flourish while I refuse to?

When, exactly, was I planning to stop neglecting myself? Who, exactly, was supposed to be responsible for my basic well-being? How, exactly, did I expect to be fully present to others when I was so practiced at avoiding myself?

And why did I think I deserved never to rest from the work of caring for others, while men in business suits took themselves on vacation to the Pacific? How can I be an advocate for people like me—women and care workers and the chronically ill—if I never advocate for myself?

You see how even my deepest self-love is pretty tough.

Working for justice means fighting for the intrinsic worth of every human being—including myself. That means my work isn’t the most important gift I offer the world; my self is. I don’t take time out of justice work for self-care. Self-love is justice work. Self-love is the most radical statement I know how to make; and I work for justice in hopes of empowering others to make the same statement for themselves.

Self-love is not soothing your ego or indulging your bad habits. It’s not expensive and it’s rarely dramatic. Self-love is meditation and prayer: escaping the trap of ego. Self-love is eating your vegetables and going to bed on time. It’s forgiving past selves and forgiving other people. It’s taking a rest, taking exercise, taking a breath. It’s giving space to your own intuition, your emotions, your body, your soul. It’s a phone call, a budget, a glass of water, a night full of laughter. The choice to be here for yourself.

Once I thought self-care was selfish, but that was before I discovered my self is all I can ever offer anyone else. Then, I thought I was giving of myself, but I was only letting people drain me. Gifts that came at a dear price to me so often rolled off the backs of others. And that self I thought I could give of lessened by the day, until I was handing out scraps and calling it love. But love is not a lessening.

Love overflows.

I love myself because God’s love gives me permission. I love myself because duty and despair are false friends, seductive soul-suckers, and they’re mighty poor dinner companions. I love myself because all that time people spent teaching me to fear myself, they never mentioned they were the ones afraid of me.

Because you see, once love starts to grow, it cannot be contained.

If you can actually accept all the ways you’re going to fail, all the things you’ll never do, all the Others you’ll never please, you can accept just about anybody. If you set boundaries that allow you to give your best in the places you’re truly called, you are freed from comparing your calling to anyone else’s. If you can love yourself fiercely, you can love anyone with abandon. And that’s a dangerous thing.

For every false expectation you declare you will not meet, for every condemning voice you flick off your shoulder, you gain energy from defending yourself and put it toward your actual job: becoming, and becoming love. It is your being, your shining, that gives others permission to shine out themselves.

And then you discover it is your being who wanted to love others all along—you discover caring for people is also caring for yourself. Your work is no longer scraping off bits of yourself to hand over.

Instead, the you you give is a bright and beautiful force of nature, of creation, of joy, of clear-eyed, unrelenting love.

P.S., if you’re looking for a simple and concrete way to try this whole thing out, I’m leading a free Facebook group to spend four weeks going through my free devotional, Making Friends with My Body and God. Once the group ends, the devotional will no longer be free—so get your copy now and join us on Facebook!

I’m a nice white lady—here’s why I marched

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photos courtesy of Gary Votour https://www.facebook.com/gvotour/posts/10213769297799199

Today I ugly cried in front of a group of about 40 strangers until some guy came and held my hand for long enough that I could finish what I was trying to say:

As long as our systems are designed and maintained to hurt people, business as usual cannot go on. The time has come for drastic action.

That doesn’t sound like a terribly weep-worthy statement. In the quiet before the Poor People’s Campaign protest today, as everyone risking arrest shared their reasons for joining the campaign, we weren’t supposed to stand up and fall apart. I don’t exactly know why I was crying in that moment,  except that months of frustration and anguish and fatigue started to pour out the moment I said these words out loud. Years of pain I have witnessed and (just barely) experienced welled up alongside the simple words and few sentences that made up the story of my journey to that seat, in the Unitarian Universalist church with forty beautiful strangers.

I’ve not long felt that protesting was a worthwhile thing to do. Shouldn’t we do something concrete to effect change besides shout at the general public? Couldn’t we put all that work into caring for someone specific, or meeting with our elected officials, or expressing our opinions as individuals?

I suppose I’ve also not long been convinced that democracy, peace, and basic human rights were actually threatened here. While I’ve understood for several years that oppression and injustice were alive and well in the USA, I didn’t see voter protections being actively rescinded and voting barriers erected; I didn’t see basic welfare programs like housing assistance and food stamps being gutted. I didn’t see education treated increasingly as a privilege, I didn’t see a gun violence crisis casually dismissed, and I didn’t see xenophobia, racial profiling, and racial terror becoming national policy before my eyes.

For the first time I have understood what it means to discover that all the normal channels and lawful means of making change in our communities mean nothing. To find yourself up against a government that’s happy to let us plead, write, phone, post—and yes, cry—while it goes about its death-dealing business as usual.

This afternoon, I watched on the sidewalk with my friend’s children while she was arrested in her clericals and stole. Later a friend posted a photo of the arrest, and the inevitable comment came: why was she arrested if she was peacefully protesting?

The short answer is that civil disobedience is a form of peaceful protest. We can’t go around praising [wealthy white dudes in] Silicon Valley for idolizing “disruption,” then roll our eyes when regular people are actually disruptive. Protest says, this cannot go on.

Civil disobedience is meant to call attention to the injustice of the State. Civil disobedience proclaims,

Life under this government is no longer tolerable—I will do anything rather than let this go on—By any means necessary other than violence, I will refuse to acquiesce to my own disempowerment, disrespect, and abuse.

As long as these policies remain in place, I will force this government to symbolically enact that abuse on my own body, until the law guarantees the safety of my body and all bodies.

The more specific answer is that if you take a photo of a person being arrested to mean that that person is a violent criminal, you have never loved a truly poor person—someone trapped in the ghettoized poverty of urban housing projects, immigrant communities, or rural Appalachia. Someone who lives in fear of the police because our society has imagined a thousand ways to criminalize poverty. The Columbia police were models of professionalism and respect—but as a broader group, police officers can usually only enforce the laws handed down to them, through the cultural lenses they’ve been given. As long as our society and our laws display contempt for the poor, racial hatred, the belief that poor people deserve additional obstacles while the wealthy continue to rig games in their own favor, and the belief that violence solves problems? Our police will display those same biases.

The fact is, peaceful and innocent people are arrested every day, and we who stand to benefit from business as usual declare ourselves judge and jury—ruling in favor of the uniform every time, because the uniform represents power, represents more of the same, represents the comfort of benefiting from the system.

And I guess that’s why I was crying. NOT, to be clear, out of pity or guilt. I was crying for myself, for the pain that pierces when you open yourself up to a world that is hurting, a world in which some people can no longer bear to live, a world where we continue to act out horrible, broken—and frankly, boring—old stories of fear, violence, and greed. I was crying for myself because the Bible that guides my every day tells me our lives cannot be untangled from each other’s any more than a hand can choose to live without an eye. When I pray to see with Holy Spirit’s eyes I find that there is no suffering anywhere in the world that does not touch my life; there is no unjust system that truly benefits anyone.

There is no place to really escape from the suffering of others and the voice of truth deep in our own hearts. There is no material advantage worth the price of injustice—the loss of community, trust, learning, joy, simplicity, neighborliness. There is no privilege that, once given up, isn’t exchanged for something of a stranger, more difficult, and vastly deeper beauty.

That is why I’m honored to belong to a movement committed to the leadership of poor, black and brown, queer, disabled, and other non-privileged people. The heroes of today’s story of protest are the trans, black, and poor people who put their bodies on the same line as the white clergy, even though the marginalized have real reasons to fear arrest. And as long as they are willing to stand in the street toe-to-toe with the State, I have no choice but to be there, witnessing and standing with their declaration:

I am a human, and I will stand in the way of the machine of oppression until I am crushed if that is what it takes to retain my humanity—if that is what it takes to resist business as usual. I stand for life, beauty, prayer, song, joy, I stand in defiance of the uniform-as-tool-of-oppression, I stand for the future of God’s peace and prosperity for all, the future that is breaking in here and now in this street and in our world, the shalom I still believe will always find a way.

a mop and a prayer

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Dear Lyndsey…
[Re: that post on slow]

How do you house-clean slow? I’d like to do that but can’t picture what it looks like!

Dear Friend,

First—I’m sitting here in awe of your sense of spiritual adventure. I don’t know many people who would like the idea of cleaning slow, let alone who would bother to ask for tips. I wonder if you’ve tried it yet; I wonder what you’ve discovered. Here’s what cleaning and some old books have taught me:

When you clean slow, you clean like a monk. Both Buddhist and Christian monks and nuns do manual labor in order to keep their community fields and homes, but also in order to inspire humility. Ora et Labora—work and prayer—was one of the oldest monastic mottoes, describing the daily activities of the monks under St. Benedict’s rule of life.

Benedict knew hard work makes us better, somehow, perhaps especially when we work on our own spaces for the good of our communities. And ever since he split his brothers’ days between work and prayer, generations of monastics have whispered that the ultimate goal might be to bring them back together. Work in the presence of God; the body praying; God in the chapel, God in the garden miracle, God in the dusty cracks between floorboards.

Slow cleaning is a meditation—a thing done for its own sake. It takes the time that it takes, to scrub the grime out of the bathroom crannies and out of the week and out of the soul. Sometimes in the calm chapel of repetitive motion, our bodies are able to sync with our minds or coax along our lagging hearts. There is healing in setting our space to rights. There is hope in finding the stubborn humility to do it again and again.

When you clean slow, you clean like an artist. You take in every window pane, expecting to be surprised. You watch the soap bubbles pop and you imagine where they went. See, some artists chase “inspiration,” but the best know that is only a name for the ability to look and see anew. The best artist cleans to rediscover the crack in the tile, the one that somehow perfects the regular, gleaming pattern of the whole. The best artist knows the answer to her project’s impasse lies somewhere between her own moving muscles and the layers of grime on the windowsill, just waiting to be uncovered by patience, faithfulness, care—those underappreciated virtues best cultivated by repetition.

Cleaning slow is cleaning like a lover. Like it’s the last place you’ll ever live, like you can’t imagine a better home, like this very kitchen and its crooked cabinet and the worn-off numbers on the stove dial are gifts to you personally from God. It’s coaxing the beauty out of tired and fresh things alike, not by willing them to be better but by seeing their goodness under the dust. When your cleaning is a lover’s sacrifice,you end up weary, coated in dirt—but exulting in the beauty of your place, satisfied in your family’s enjoyment of it.

Yes, it takes patience to put all the dishes away, to fold all the towels and socks. But when you care for the things that serve you, they shine for you. In a world of all new, all better, all more disposable, caring for something old is a radical act of contentment.

I, for one, am always cleaning fast. I tend to half-do the jobs in between church work, writing trips and houseguests—but when I let cleaning take its time, I am taught simplicity. I remember that I don’t want a bigger house and I remember the dignity of the other manual laborers whose work supports my life. Somewhere along the way of being lost in thought, I find gratitude for my body, my messy dirty family, my clothes and carpets. I pray for party guests and houseguests; for corners and crannies and the past and the future; for all the muck of this world that’s not so easy to put in order. I pray for every little thing to be made clean, uncovered, made more truly itself; for the grace of simple beauty revealed over and over again; I watch my wood floors give and give to us, and I pray that my own little self will take pride like them, pride only in being myself, in service. I pray that all will be made truer, be made new by the simple, unremarkable, patient, unfailing love of the one who returns to labor with us and for us, who is faithful to make us clean.

ora et labora, in love and in joy,

Lyndsey

Can I trouble you for a breath?

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slow living. slow writing.I think if you knew what others pay for your attention, you might covet it more, yourself.

For over a year now, I’ve been learning the business of writing. Folks don’t seem to like hearing that writing is a business—we all prefer our artists starving. Still, while writing is a privilege, it’s also hard work, and I have the audacity to hope to get paid.

I attended conferences. I took an Instagram course. Listened to podcasts. Started an email list. Because to sell books these days, you have to have a platform—and to have a platform, well, buckle up.

If you’re already gagging at the mention of the word “platform,” I’m sorry, I guess; but this is how the sausage is made. Every writer you know and every musician you love obsesses over these things. An artist is just one more competitor in the attention economy; we’re supposed to demonstrate to publishers that you love us long before we can ever ask you to buy from us. So we’re learning how to market—how to manipulate your emotions, your brain, your thumbs—and we’re just hoping we can keep up with the trends and keep our integrity at the same time.

Do you want to know what they’re saying about you, the audience?

They say folks should focus on solving problems for you. They say we should get you hooked on an easily-consumable, glamorous version of ourselves so that you want what we have. Bloggers and online teachers are all about the how-to post, the five helpful tips, the twelve outrageous facts you need to know. As an expert, they say, don’t solve the underlying problem you know people have; solve the problem they think they have. And they’ll come back again and again.

I’ve often struggled to find a voice as a writer—and just when I was seizing upon mine, I came across advice like that. Humming above my writing was the pressure to “stay top of mind,” “provide quick wins,” keep the reader hooked, and produce, produce, produce.

But as time went on, I recognized in myself an addiction to the hustle. Not a commitment to faithfulness, but a need to be seen as hardworking, clever and confident in order to be seen as worthy.

And I realized, by trying to make it as a certain type of writer, I was teaching to the test of a culture of busyness, production, disconnection, of jobs half-done and a life halfway noticed, half-lived.

So often we get the message: don’t let life pass you by; decide today what you’re going to do! But lately I’ve pressed into that desire to seize the day, and found it’s far more important to decide how to be. And how I want to be is simple, and slow.

Just because I’m a bit of an analog person doesn’t mean that’s easy. Part of me believes deeply in the hustle, in working harder and smarter and longer to prove your value. And every social justice issue appears so very urgent. And that Instagram course I took a year ago is already largely outdated. And starting a new church? Easiest thing to talk about values, grace, rest, Jesus on Sunday—then hustle and grind your way through the rest of the week trying to do and be and attract more, more, more.

Then again, even if I thought I was ditching the hustle, it could be easy to buy into a certain brand of simple. The minimalism that’s actually far more attainable to the rich than to the poor; or the many products that are supposed to make my life easier by hiding complexity from me (exhibit A: the Keurig). Or a sort of tourism into simplicity—simple when it’s convenient or pretty.

And yes, being slow is an aesthetic choice. I want the slow-simmered stew, the long read. I’d go so far as to say that I long for them—that the aesthetics of my choice mean something. But slow is also a spiritual choice. See, the more I learn about empires and injustice, the more convinced I become that the heart of our resistance is love, and nestled close to love is simplicity.

The simple person doesn’t covet or steal; the simple one has time to listen to her neighbor. The simple one is not deceived so easily, because her own values are so plain to everyone. There are many areas of life where we can simplify; but slowness is what simplifies time. We need slow food, mended clothes, Sabbaths, bicycle commutes—all things that disappear when we cram our schedules full.

We need, too, slow writing. Even if I know you’re only going to skim, I am compelled to practice a craft, not perform a trick. I don’t know if my words will solve your problem. I don’t know if I can be relied upon to comfort or inspire every day. There aren’t ten steps to grace, or justice, or love, or simplicity. You don’t wedge Jesus into your Instagram grid as part of your brand. I mean, I don’t.

So I’ve been quiet lately, after a good year of weekly blogging; some of my writing has gone to my email list, some stays hidden in my black-bound notebook. It’s not that I mind writing here weekly. I just gave up on keeping the schedule for the schedule’s sake. I gave up on the notion that you need me here all the time (because, really, how much time would I get back every day if I stopped asking the Internet to tell me one more time that I’m important, worthy, lovable?)

I’m not so talented, spiritual, or Real™ that I’m exempt from hard work or even marketing. But I’m figuring out how to show up to those things with the best of myself. I’m committing to knowing the difference between timely and hurried, interesting vs. sensational, relevant vs. compromised. I’m committing to an audience that’s willing to go deep with me because we simply can’t help it, one that’s trying to do this Internet-connection thing with savvy and wisdom, one that’s still reading—and this is outrageous, I know—a thousand words later.

I don’t know yet what any of this means for me. I’ve done enough announcing projects and ideas and beginnings lately. I’m not quitting Twitter, or blogging, or my job; I’m not swearing off productivity or ditching my car (yet). I still want to get paid to write, and to be honest, I still want millions of adoring fans. I only know I’ve made a commitment—when in doubt, slow down.

I am writing by hand in purple fountain pen. I’m savoring the vegetables from a local farm and sticking with the fits and starts of my own garden. I’m tending to the ritual of handmade coffee, cleaning the house slow like a madwoman’s meditation. I’m letting my Youtube-intoxicated youth group swirl around me and then asking them, once again, to stop and breathe.

Then, here, in my writing, I am snatching back the quick win. I am asking you—not to do more and do better, nor to adjust your attitude in five easy acronymized steps—I am asking you to walk with me a long, long path of truth and beauty and hard things and laughter—and there is plenty of time yet to stop and breathe.

we need to talk about bodies.

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The middle school locker room. The other 99% of the day, I could generally pretend not to have a body, but in the fluorescent seventh-grade gym, there we all just…were. I remember my routine: find a corner, try to shrink, change as fast as possible, wear an indifferent face so no one will think you’re a baby. Make an exit. Breathe again.

Middle school bodies will never not be awkward and maybe a little painful. But that constricting feeling—the fear others will find out I have a body, and a complicated relationship to it—remains with me well into my 20’s.

How many of us are still trapped in the middle school locker room when it comes to our grown-up bodies? Deeply embarrassed, but trying to seem brave; feeling immensely lonely in a room full of people who actually share our exact feelings and issues.

This tragedy repeats itself over and over because shame breeds shame. It festers in darkness and tightens its grip on its victims day by day. That feeling of unworthiness will suffocate you, feed on your joy, it will isolate you so that you have no chance of hearing the truth.

The only way to break its neck is to gasp out your secret and then wait for the sky to fall, and if it does, well, that’s better than dying silent and hiding.

I thought I knew about shame, but then I wrote a devotional last year about making friends with my body and God. It was surprising, the places I’d feel shame trying to tiptoe back in. Writing about food or stretching would suddenly feel like I was recounting all the details of some terrible, intimate secret. Or a voice would whisper, you’re too small, you don’t have this all figured out, you’re too young to write about this.

On my better days, I realized that voice was a signal I was in exactly the truth-telling place I needed to be.

See, our culture has done alright in the last few years at acknowledging it’s hard for women to love our bodies. But we’ve rushed on trying to muster Girl Power, thinking we could skip over the work of healing. We’ve told each other to be happy, be confident, be yourself—and in the process we’ve failed to make room for one another to admit we’re grieved, insecure, fractured.

So the shame buries itself deeper and goes on gutting us.

Writing my stories and confessions about my body taught me that even though bodies are intensely personal, there’s no use pretending they’re really private. Our bodies are the only site we have for meeting other people. Our weight, our health, our sexuality, our race and gender and ability, our comfort and discomfort with our own flesh affect every person we meet.

When we try to keep our body struggles and victories to ourselves, we’re denying the reality that we need others to share the journey with. I am making friends with my body and God, but I also have to reckon with my parents and grandparents, my pastors, my middle-school bullies, my best friends, every boy I’ve ever kissed and every man who’s ever stolen my smile.

I can’t do all that alone.

I needed late-night stories; safe warm hugs; conversations with my best friend about body hair. I needed to confess my sexual “indiscretions” to friends and hear the same confessions back from every. Single. One of them. I needed to eat and drink and sing and swim and cobra-pose with other people. I needed to hear my own brave, shaking voice, telling the truth, unlock sighs of relief from others who didn’t even know they were holding their breath.

Alone, you can start to rattle your cage. But get a few people together and you can pull down the whole damn prison.

Bread, Sex, and Other Devotions helped me find my little brave voice. Now I’ve created a getting-started group guide to help you find yours by discussing it with a circle of friends. Whether you hope sharing your stories and struggles will help you find deep healing, or you just need some accountability to actually finish the thing; whether you circle up your closest friends, a group you’d like to be closer to, or a few middle school girls—it’s time to end the silence.

Once your group gets started, send me an email, too—I’d love to Skype in on a session (or stop by if you’re in Charleston).

All you need is your people, the free downloads, and yummy snacks (always yummy snacks). So don’t wait. There’s not going to be a “good time” and you’re never gonna get un-scared. And that’s what’s beautiful about it: you get to be brave. You get to decide that today is the day, this year is the year when shame doesn’t win.