My sister sent this picture to our group text this morning. It’s a picture of our grandparents’ old house, now with new colored siding and solar panels on the roof. She saw it on one of the several Instagram accounts she follows from one of our former hometowns of Germantown, NY.

Seeing the picture made me think of my grandma. My relationship with her has been one of the most formative of my life, if not the most formative, particularly when it comes to faith and having a personal relationship with Jesus. (I almost put “personal relationship with Jesus” in quotation marks but it felt and sounded disrespectful).

This morning I asked myself what it was about her that ministered to me so deeply. Not even thinking of the all the times she and my grandpa took me and my sisters with them to missionary conferences, VBS, church on Sunday mornings then back again for Sunday and Wednesday evenings, within seconds I thought of these four things:

1. She fed me
2. She housed me
3. She listened to me
4. She encouraged me
   
   I called my grandma and told her the four things, and that it reminded me of another set of words I have read before, when Jesus turns to the ones who will inherit the Kingdom: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me…Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did to me (Matthew 25)”.
   
   I haven’t gone crazy with it, but over these extremely personal past several months, I’ve been reading a bit about the human nervous system. Knowing what I know now I can look at that list and see that what my grandmother gave me was the felt sense of love. My body, soul, and mind were merged to register safety and love by her actions. She would’ve never even had to use the word love, and I still would’ve known I was loved by her.

Words can only mean so much. Thanks to the invention of modern technology, as I have read and listened for several years to the people who grew up with similar and different church backgrounds talk about their faith deconstruction stories, I have noticed a common thread in these personal faith experiences. Somehow you can hear and know for years that Jesus loves you, so much so that he died on the cross for your sins.

And there can still be a disconnect. Stay in the place of disconnect for too long and the truth begins to feel like a lie, and in some kind of twistedly complicated and intricately physiological way, they wouldn’t be completely wrong. Somehow people in the church missed the felt sense of love. In a long-term relationship, you can’t just say “You are loved, and I love you.” The felt sense of love is built up in small moments. It’s the ten-thousandth tender small text to your spouse saying, “I’m here at the store. Do you need anything?”

As people who belong to the body of Christ, we are now in a permanent, everlasting relationship. In the parable of the sower, Jesus tells us that though the Word will go out and people will hear the good news of the Kingdom of God, not every seed becomes a lifelong faith. At the same time, as a human needs to be clothed and fed, and a marriage needs to be tended to often, so the body of Christ comes with a need to be nurtured.

Yoga went really well yesterday. There was no smearing ourselves with sand, and it was a sweet time of being with the girls. The thing I appreciate about yin style yoga (I’m struggling to say and like this word) is that it’s non-judgmental. You’re not judging your body saying, “You know, I think I’d like you better if you were more like this.” Instead you’re saying, “This is who you are, softly loved and welcome here.” Those are times when healing comes.

Some experiences in life form us and others deform us. For the times that formed me, I truly give thanks. For the times that deformed me in detestable ways, I’m coming to the point where I’m raising the white flag and saying to God, “You have searched the very depths of my soul. I have tried to be different. I have tried to change, but certain things about me aren’t going away. I will do my best to steward these wounds, and I will hope in the word that you can love me like this.”

“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it build itself up in love.”
~Ephesians 4:15-16~

One of the things I can no longer tolerate is a disembodied spirituality. It’s not enough anymore for me to spend hours of my life reading through YouTube comments. If you’ve ever wondered if you’re the only one suffering, I suggest you stay away from places like Instagram and Facebook. Go to instead to YouTube and Reddit, where people are much more freely real. I promise you’ll find ones with all kinds of problems.

There’s such a thing as compassion fatigue. You can experience, know of, and be personally surrounded by so much suffering that your soul will gradually begin to shut down. The human being can only take so much, and that “so much” is actually quite a lot to be sure. I can tell you with certainty that there is also such a thing as compassion anemia, where there’s not enough blood in your body to hold the love in your heart. Believe me, I have tried to ignore it, to bind up my heart and make myself as small as humanly possible, hoping shrinking myself down would be the cure for what ails me.

In the earlier days of motherhood, I’d come home from walking the empty streets. I remember seeing the blogs and entrepreneurship of women. They were simultaneously managing marriages, young children, homes, and personal-hobbies-turned-businesses. I wondered where they got their freedom, not in regards to time, but in their personal consciences. It’s not like these were secular women. They called themselves Christians. Surely they weren’t doing it all. Something was suffering. Something always does.

I was taught to be on guard against the siren calls of Satan. I remember a conversation I once had with another young mom and pastor’s wife. She was telling me how she felt like she wasn’t doing enough for others, how she wished she could do more and not be so inwardly focused on just her own life. I remember the feeling and the ways that I dealt with it. Mostly I just told myself that there was nothing more important I could be doing than raising my children. They needed me there, every minute of every day.

Discontentment with marriage and motherhood was the primary sign and symptom to watch out for. This is where the devil would get his foot in the heart’s door, to steal your joy, to kill deep love, and to ultimately destroy the entirety of your calling and personhood. The way I saw it, while I understood there were such things as joy and Christian freedom and Law and Gospel and liberty, there were only two choices when it came to my life: Keep watch, or fail to be the wife and mother God had called you to be.

Call it pride, call it sin, that the world religion of grace and mercy became for me the total opposite. If something wasn’t right, then there was something wrong with you, with me. In the darkest of moments I only had God, whatever figments and words of Jesus that still remained in my mind. I thought I was called to be holy and suffer. Keep going. Keep working. Do not let yourself become the one who calls it quits. Keep shrinking. Keep dying. Keep telling yourself this is what God’s good and gracious will for you looks like.

In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan writes, “It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.” Indeed, the mighty chains are heavy.

How many times in a life can a person wander far from God? The more I live, O bless the Lord, the more the scales just keep on falling. It’s embarrassing to me to see the obvious ways I got things wrong. I want to curl up into his lap and rest my head upon his chest and say to him, “Never will I leave you, Lord. Never, Jesus. Never ever. Never will I foolishly forsake you again.” There comes this proverbial breaking point, where no matter how worldly or impurely selfish it sounds to say it, you have to be real and fully true to who you are.

I have no idea who started this, but even when Josh and I worked here, the counselors referred to each other as “male staff” and “female staff”. Over the recent beach weekend, floating by from the middle of the lake, one of female staff members shouted my way,

“That’s what we could do for choice activity! Yoga on the dock!”

She wasn’t necessarily even talking to me, but in the afternoon sun, as I came up out of my soft forward fold, instantly I saw evening and shade. I could see us spreading out on the sand with our towels. Within seconds the idea bounced back their direction.

“Yes. Or on the beach!”

And that’s as far as it went, which was fine by me. I love spontaneous ideas like this. Entering into the worlds of possibility and ideas…it’s like the video game I could play for hours and never get tired. Though nine times out of ten the idea drifts away, it satisfies my inner child, keeping the creative spark inside of me from completely dying out.

So when one of the girls approached me during breakfast this morning, asking if there was a particular day this week that would be good for me to lead beach yoga, I froze. This isn’t how things typically go in a day. Coming up with ideas like doing yoga on the dock or beach is the easy part, the fun part. She didn’t know what she was asking of me.

Get me with one or two people, and yes, we’re doing yoga on the beach, rubbing sand all over our bodies as a natural exfoliant, and running into the warm brown-watered lake to wash it off. Yoga on the beach would be “that time” to be forever remembered, and into the years of being old and grey, whenever we were together, we’d bring it up.

At first I told her I didn’t think I could do it, but I really wanted to do it, with them, for them, or if I did, I would have to get over my issues first. Yoga is another one of those things that sounds useless and trendy, but besides lots of time, rest, and the generous grace of God, it is something that has truly helped my body these past few months.

I told her I could do it, not today, but any of the others. While I was eating my breakfast I also started thinking that we could even use this choice activity time with the girls to talk about being created in the image of God and Jesus’s overflowing unconditional love for each one of us. In one day I’ve bitten off every nail I’ve grown and not been biting since April.

She was asking me to commit. She asking me to plan. She was asking me to think and work and show up. Those aren’t even the things that bothered me most. She was asking me to get over my much weaker self-confidence, at least when it comes to doing something different that I’m not used to. She was asking me to face my fears.

I have a fear of doing things in front of other people. And I’m happy to do it. Please. Finally. My own inner child has been driving me nuts. There comes a point when the child isn’t happy be a child anymore. They have to grow up. They have to be able to be something else other than little. They have to, they have to, they have to give back.

This afternoon we went down to the camp lake to swim. I slid off the dock into water chest high, half-expecting the sudden outward change to unpleasantly trip the inside of me. It didn’t happen this time, or the other two times I’ve gotten into the water. The kids played with counselors out on the lily pads while the adults interacted, watched, and relaxed. There’s a weightlessness to the body when it’s surrounded by water.

I tiptoed around before leaning in for a few crawl strokes. I was mostly there just to not be in bed, to see if even though I didn’t feel good enough to walk down, maybe the sunlight would help me somehow. It was a good past week, but I think I may have slightly overdid it with the socializing. I pay for overdoing it in the following days. So I was there to get in, and swim a few crawl strokes. Mostly I just walked and breathed.

Little by little clearer thoughts come to mind. I told Josh that I’ve been thinking about this in terms of healed or not healed. Instead it’s almost more helpful to think of each day as presenting opportunities for healthy coping with life or unhealthy coping. God gives us something to get us through for each day, including little moments throughout our days for fun and sunshine.