devotional Archives » Lyndsey Medford

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.

I am reluctant to speak into the din of these days.

An observation: we have reached a point where the two major sides in our debates are both driven by fear. Our president was elected for his projections of strength: for promising to protect us from bad hombre immigrants, from the globalized market, from terrorists, from the pace of social change. And now his policies have stricken terror into the hearts of his opponents—worried for themselves, for minority friends, worried about international relations or about creeping authoritarianism.

Though the cacophony appears to address many issues, in the end we are mostly responding to threats. We all perceive our particular threats to be very real, while dismissing others’ fears and blazing with disbelieving outrage when they dismiss ours. In our anger we cannot see how lonely this has made us. We feel the loneliness, but not consciously; the ache only fuels our outrage.

The Ph.D. in political science ~~whom I keep on retainer~~ who is my dear friend tells me that the biggest protests work, even when they’re not supposed to, even when no one expects it. So I will go to the protests. But I won’t be outraged; it’s not in my nature. With Paul I will proclaim that we all have gifts differing and I will thank God for those who do outrage well and righteously. I’ll be the one giving out water bottles, or crying. You’re probably not supposed to cry at a protest, but I’m mostly sure that’s what I’ll do.

What is in my nature is to passionately declare the extreme urgency of everyone sitting down and thinking some more. This is an unglamorous and unpopular vocation. Thinking sells best when paired with a vice—traditionally pipe tobacco or whiskey. Outrage is brighter, the work of a moment, and pairs well with that comfort food, superiority.

Still, even the most active of activists is already acknowledging that our task won’t be over for a long time, and we’re going to need something that burns a bit slower. I hasten to add that, while we must equip ourselves for a long-haul future, we have a yet lengthier past with which we must also deal. This crisis did not develop overnight, as if caused by some particular genius of Trump’s for villainy. This is the overflow of ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years. If we accomplish political goals without any mention of these things, they will only fester. The colonization of rural places, for instance: extracting resources from a place while systematizing contempt for its people. The abandonment of national politics to lobbyists and of local politics to the dogs. The abandonment of our minds to our screens. The utter lack of restraint on our consumerist desires, so that each side accuses the other of entitlement with great accuracy and total hypocrisy. And an extreme failure, on all sides, to know the oppressed, to sit with them in their pain, to share bread with them.

These things, of course, cost more than five minutes and 1000 words. These things rarely go viral.

But perhaps, I concede, the past is a discussion for another time. Perhaps what is before us, just today, is to excavate and banish our fear. If you are a Christian, you have no excuse for it; if you are not, let me assure you fear remains a hindrance to you. It is not naive to resist fear. You may be aware of a danger without giving that thing power over you. To the contrary, once fear is acknowledged and set aside, you are more agile, more perceptive, less prone to mistakes. Once fear is set aside, it clears the way for that most searing weapon: love.

I read an article several days ago about what to do, the basic actions that would be essential to resisting the extremism we’re witnessing. I found it wise and compelling in its simplicity—things like interacting with your representatives; seeking out reliable news sources; taking care of yourself (in the long term, going to bed on time and eating your vegetables); learning about privilege and oppression; getting to know the people in your community who stand to lose the most. And as the list went on, I realized that these were all things a truly excellent citizen would be doing regardless of who was in power. It was comforting and intimidating, I suppose, to realize that all anyone needs to do to stand up against a bullying President is become a truly excellent citizen.

What was, for me, conspicuously absent from the list was becoming aware of any new development within ten minutes of its occurrence; scrolling through Twitter with increasing indignation and despair; firing one-liners or articles at people on Facebook who would then be compelled to recognize the error of their ways. As the days have gone by, I’ve felt more and more antipathy towards the hot takes and the outrage machines and even the copied-and-pasted Bible verses. So much blame for our situation goes, in my mind, to our penchant for preferring the viral to the true; to our self-righteous armchair activism; to our willing deliverance of our attention to the antics of national figures, at the expense of understanding the goings-on in our own cities and states.

Do you want to drive out fear? It doesn’t happen when you get a good grasp of the situation from twitter or even from the news. It happens with love. Have the courage to love yourself without the safety blanket of self-righteousness. Have the courage to love someone else without assuming you already know who they are. Walk around your neighborhood and talk to the people you meet. Plan an uncomfortable dinner party: invite someone different from you. (Have lots of comfort food.) Call your representatives on behalf of someone else even though it inconveniences or terrifies you. Read about an issue you don’t want to face. Take up that habit you know you’re supposed to do—riding your bike places, donating to charity, praying for your enemies.

Pray. Pray more than you tweet. Pray before your political calls. Pray for the country. Pray for refugees. Pray before you eat. Pray before you buy. Pray with other people.

Read books. Gather with friends. Don’t think about doing good deeds; do them. Be aggressively present to your own life, your place and time.

Be still. The Lord will fight for you. The noise will take care of itself.