Author Archive
Our closest relationships are the source of our greatest longing and deepest pain, so we armor-plate our souls against the danger. The only access is through the chinks in our armor where both arrows and salve can reach our core, and we martial all our defenses to these vulnerable spaces, blocking out both suffering and compassion. It is a terrifying dilemma. For love to touch and heal our wounds, we must reveal them and face possible rejection. The closer our relationship, the more power it carries to heal and to harm.
We all hide our so-called weaknesses with our individual schemes: humor or dominance, popularity or withdrawal. The better our defense mechanisms work, the safer we are from pain but the farther from deep relationship. My major defense was over-achieving, stuffing the gaps of failure with redoubled efforts at success… until the whole structure imploded. My greatest sacrifices and determination could not stop failure. And out of that ruin, genuine life began to grow. Those of us with broken defenses suffer most, but are closer to genuine connection and healing.
Kimberly tried to find safety by making everyone around her happy. She was good at it. They called her “Sunshine.” But inside she was dying as she stifled her own feelings and views to make room for everyone else’s. Both of us were too wounded to keep our shields up, but we found in each other a tenderness that invited deep connection. Our shared brokenness created a level of intimacy that few experience.
Eleven years ago on a forested mountain covered with treacherous ice, sparkling like slivers of glass in the sun, Kimberly said “Yes!” to me. I slipped on her finger a ring that we designed together, two light blue opals, the color of her eyes, surrounding a teardrop diamond. My wedding ring was a simple circle of beaten gold, showing the rough marks of the hammer blows that shaped it.
Our stories have always been forged by pain and sorrow, and we were embracing this together, the sadness and the beauty. It is the seeping wounds of cut limbs bound together that creates the miracle of grafting, the agony and glory of each coursing through the veins of the other. It is not just slow healing that we find, but a hybrid bouquet that far surpasses the beauty of either flowering branch on its own.
How perfect that our 11-year engagement anniversary should combine Valentine’s day and Ash Wednesday. How apropos that I inadvertently wore black pants and a red shirt yesterday to school where I had my one class called “Spirit and Trauma.” I came home to a living room full of lit candles, and Kimberly and I shared with one another our struggles and hopes, inviting God to pour in his grace.
Beginning with advent, our motto has been “find the beauty,” and for this season of Lent we have refined it to, “find the beauty in lament.” This week we will remember the goodness that has come to our marriage through our brokenness. “There is a crack in everything. That’s where the light gets in.” Our deep, genuine, close connection is the bond of shared sorrows through stumbling love. This week we will name each facet of that unique beauty of brokenness to one another.
I have posted very little about my internal journey for some months because I was too stressed, anxiety having blanketed my depression. This summer I was dragging myself along,step by shaky step under this heavy weight when school attacked me like a bear. I ran for my life, but as I got away from the bear, the weight returned. Where did all that extra energy come from and where did it disappear to again? Why can’t I manufacture an adrenaline rush, live hopped-up all the time sans anxiety… pretend there is a bear I am fleeing, but a friendly bear that doesn’t make me anxious… oh, I see why that doesn’t work. I guess fear is not a good antidote to depression, though I appreciated the diversion.
It rains here all winter long, so seasonal affective disorder (weather related depression) is a common aspect of living in this area, but it has little impact on me simply because my depression is deeper than that. One must have pleasure in the sun for its absence to be missed. It may be a contributing factor, but not a major one. A much bigger factor is my lack of close friendships. In an email reply, I told a friend he was the last close friend I had. That was 13 years ago. A recent study determined that lack of social connection was the number one variable in predicting early death. But it is hard to find meaningful connections in our fragmented, mobile society, especially for men apparently.
So my heart goes out to those of you who are lonely, struggling, shuffling cautiously through a dark and foreboding world. Know that you are not alone and that I for one am deeply sympathetic to your plight. For some of you, getting out of bed in the morning is a greater step of courage and faith than others need to skydive or perform on stage. May you feel God’s loving and caring heart today.
Now before unpacking the truck, I have to unpack an important detail about rodents. We moved from a 2000 square foot home in Virginia to a 1000 s.f. rental house in Asheville (but paying a lot more for it). We tossed out a lot of stuff and crammed the rest into one bedroom. But something else found a cozy spot in there this past summer. We found mouse droppings. I set a humane trap, and when I caught the mouse, I took him two miles away, loosing him in a wooded area. We found more mouse droppings. Over several months we caught 5 mice, requiring ever more ingenuity.
KIMBERLY’S GRAND FINALE
We knew they were hiding out in our storage room and clearly reproducing, but we had no way to clear them out of that solid wall of tightly packed stuff. These were the boxes we would be loading onto the truck, transporting our infestation to Washington with us. Our fears came true when I found a nest of three baby mice in a mattress cover while loading the truck. What else had I missed? I could think of only one solution. When we reached Washington and the two of us got ready to unpack our 26-foot van, we emptied every box inside the truck, checking for mice, then repacked it to carry inside. We did not finish in a day.
As we were setting up house, we started transferring bank accounts, phones, licenses, car insurance and titles. That’s when Kimberly discovered there was a warrant out for my arrest. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. I was on a national registry because I had not paid last year’s car insurance in Virginia. Yeah, because I WASN’T LIVING IN VIRGINIA! Kimberly and I have moved multiple times across many states and never had this issue before, but Virginia DMV apparently requires car owners to provide proof that they have moved out of state. We soon discovered there was an arrest warrant out for Kimberly as well. She spent hours (literally) on many phone calls over two weeks to finally resolve it. But proving our innocence did not remove us from the national registry. That cost us $150 each.
In the middle of all this craziness, I was trying to hold it together in school. Missing a week mid-semester had set me back seriously in my studies. The practicum was not the only important class I missed in our drive west. I had a key paper due that Monday for another class. I finished most of my research beforehand and took books with me on the flight to Asheville, but when I saw I would miss class, I spent two nights in hotels pecking away at my computer (after driving 13 hours) and sent it over the internet. It was not my best work, but it would have to do. A few weeks after moving into our new apartment, my graded paper was returned. I got an ‘F.’ That was a shocking first for me.
After explaining my situation to the professor, she allowed me to rewrite the paper (with a letter-grade deduction). Unfortunately, this completely consumed my reading week which was designed to give us time to finish other assignments, so I ended the week as far behind as ever, but also confused and anxious. I was mystified by my grade, even after looking back over it carefully with the grading matrix in hand. I sat down with the teaching assistant to get clarification and left as confused as I had come. I could not understand their expectations or how to meet them. If I failed my coursework, then “just survive” was a meaningless motto… and moving across country was a huge waste of money and effort. Doubts, turmoil, confusion swirled through me, and anxiety more severe than I have ever experienced.
That’s a snapshot of my whole life: determined to take the right course while working with a busted compass. I never seem to hear that voice, “Here is the way, walk ye in it.” A little guidance here would be appreciated, God, instead of leaving me in the dark guessing which way to turn. Two weeks ago I got my grades. I made straight A’s. I don’t know how. Apparently one can stumble around in the dark and still make it home.
But that’s chancy. I need clarity to ensure I win that full affirmation: “Well done you good and faithful servant.” That’s my final report card, the measure of my effort and commitment… my A. Except it isn’t. Once again I remember that all God wants is my open, honest, struggling, broken heart, and I can give that to him today apart from any goals, plans, or accomplishments, even in the midst of all my confusion. He needs nothing from me. He just wants me. I am already safely home, accepted in the beloved.
My studies suffered from a month of homelessness while working 25 hours a week and trying to get settled in a new place—learn the transportation system, look for affordable housing, plan for moving our household across country mid-semester. I was dependent on internet connection for directions, classwork, and local information, but my phone would not connect to the internet even when I had 5-bar reception. Then my computer started dumping me from wifi. Fearing a virus, I restored both to factory settings only to realize my word-processing software was in Asheville. I now had no means to write school papers. Each assignment deadline seemed like a flash flood that nearly drowned me (I had about 15 papers due for the semester). My motto became, “just survive.”
I planned to fly to North Carolina on a Wednesday after my last class and get back in time for my Monday class. Kimberly was sure we could not make it across country in three days in a moving van, but I had a new urgency. After buying non-refundable tickets and booking a truck, I discovered that my Monday class, a year-long counseling practicum, only allowed for one absence per semester. My two hour commute to school was by bike (or car), ferry, and a mile walk. I needed a spare absence in hand in case of sickness, accident, or a cancelled/missed ferry because a second absence would fail me, wiping out the year, delaying graduation and greatly increasing an already heavy loan.
I arrived in Asheville Wednesday night, slept little, and interrupted early morning prep to go get the truck at 8:30 when Budget opened. The couple ahead of me in line had a reservation, but after 30 minutes of phone calls, the agent sent them away with nothing. Thankfully she had our size truck in the lot. Since volunteers were already arriving at our house, I quickly signed the paperwork, jumped in the truck, and dashed off… or lumbered off—26 feet is a very large truck. (The next size down was 16 feet, which was too small.)
After I ran over our water main housing and spent 30 minutes trying to maneuver this monster around a hairpin turn driveway, we started to pack. Half way through we discovered we had no license plate. It had been torn off by the previous customer, the packing tape used to repair it still flapping from the part that read “Oklahoma.” What should we do? We were on a tight schedule, and every imaginable fix would put us at least a day behind if not more. (Were we going to make these eight 70-year-old Presbyterian retirees from Kimberly’s work unload and reload into another truck?) Since the car carrier we would be pulling had its own license plate, I decided that would suffice.
We hurried back to the rental office to hook up the carrier with my Honda only to find the turn signals were not working. They called someone to come out and look at it, and he replaced a fuse to get it working. We got 20 miles down the road when we realized one of the indecipherable dashboard gauges was close to empty. There was no manual in the glovebox. We called the rental office and they said, “That is the DEF gauge. It will ruin the engine if you drive with it empty. You have to come back and let us fill it.” And so we turned around and drove back.
We planned to make it to Indianapolis by bedtime where Kimberly’s family was gathered to wish us goodbye on our West coast adventure, but that bedtime was getting later and later. At dusk we pulled off the interstate for gas and supper. When I started the engine back up and flipped on the lights, the pavement in front of the truck stayed dark. We had no headlights.
We started phoning Budget for help. It was a nightmare of epic proportions—they could not even find our truck in their system—it didn’t exist–even though I gave them our reservation number, our license plate number (from our paperwork) and the VIN number stamped on the truck itself. Realizing we could make it nowhere that night, we found a hotel a mile down the road, and with my emergency flashers blinking, I managed to get us there in the dark. I pulled out my last-ditch plans—if we could make it within a few hundred miles of Seattle, I could back the Honda off the car carrier and drive all night to make it in time for the practicum, coming back for Kimberly afterwards.
The next day Budget rerouted us away from Indiana and through Kentucky to a mechanic who works on their trucks. We thought it might just be another fuse. He spent several hours on the truck, slowly discovering that the whole electrical system was malfunctioning. We would have to unload and reload a whole house’s contents into another truck, but Budget was sending a team to do that for us. The team arrived. It was one guy.
I finally admitted our schedule was shot. I would miss my Monday classes… and Tuesday classes… and Wednesday classes so as to unload. I might fail out of practicum and fall a year behind, but I had to let it go. We’ve learned to accept disappointing reality with a sigh: “It is what it is.” We say it often. We stop fighting the inevitable and rest into the mystery of God, a mystery that seems to saturate so much more of our lives than the lives of our friends and family members. We long for “normal” lives, but our road never seems to take us there. Perhaps our faith is stronger because of it.
After sleeping a few hours, I got up and asked the clerk at the 24-hour truck stop where I could catch a park-and-ride bus into Seattle (the school has no parking). She told me that she and her husband regularly caught a bus from a terminal just a few exits down that always had parking. I drove to the lot expecting to find an attendant, or at least a posted bus schedule and map, but just found rows of cars. I called the public transit office, and after a great deal of investigation they told me the next bus would not stop at that lot till the afternoon. As they seemed to know so little about their own services, I started walking up to cars pulling in to park and asking their advice. Someone told me about the main western terminal where I could get lots of buses.
I drove there only to discover garage parking that would not fit my 11 foot high camper. I drove to the adjoining office complex with multiple buildings and open parking. Did they require parking decals? Would I get towed? My camper stuck out like a hillbilly in Times Square. I parked and walked to the terminal where someone told me I should take the next bus. I climbed on and stuck a $20 bill into the till. The conductor shrugged, “Say goodbye to your 20 dollars. We only take exact change.” “That’s an expensive lesson,” I replied. I made it to school, and after the day’s program was over, walked to an ATM and got $60… in 20 dollar bills. I bought some overpriced item in a corner store to get change and walked a mile to the bus stop to return to the parking lot. To my relief my truck was still there and unticketed.
The plan I worked out over the last few weeks was to stay in a Washington State forest that allowed free camper parking and was driving distance from the dock where I could catch a ferry across Puget Sound to Seattle. It was dark by the time I turned off the main road for the last ten miles. Within a few minutes I had lost all cellphone coverage, including GPS, so I pulled out my printed map and flashlight (my cab light had burned out years ago). I expected to see signs for the forest… at least road signs… but after wandering fruitlessly, I finally pulled into a church parking lot to spend the night, pulling behind some tall bushes so as not to attract undo attention from the street.
My forest plan was shot anyway. The ten miles were much too steep for my broken truck to handle daily. But what was I to do? A cheap hotel in Kitsap County where I had transferred my Home Depot job would cost me $2000 for six weeks… while we were still paying rent in Asheville. I couldn’t park my outrageous blue monstrosity on a street and hope to get away unnoticed. I did some Google aerial searches of the general area near where I would be working and spotted a small church that bordered on a wooded area. Perhaps no one would notice if I showed up late and left early. For two nights in a row I showed up at 10 pm and parked in the back of the lot. The second night at midnight, the pastor showed up and told me that I could not park there. I was running out of options.
Out of desperation I parked the next two nights behind a doctors’ office complex, and not finding any other suitable spot, I finished out the week there, sleeping very lightly as I listened for the police to stumble on me and fine me or have me towed. Having exhausted my nerves, I finally decided to move to a state park for $35 a night. In the meantime, Kimberly’s friend Elisabeth kept pestering her brother and her pastor whose son lived in the area. The pastor’s son connected me to a social worker who helped the homeless, and she thought I qualified. She gave me several sites through which to find help, and I started checking those out. Then Elisabeth’s brother got me in touch with John who was selling his daughter’s place and offered me a bed in the empty house—electricity, hot baths, microwave, and fridge. It was perfect.
I was headed for Washington, 3000 miles away with no place to stay, no knowledge of the area, and no one I knew in the whole state, leaving midday Thursday intending to start classes on Monday (Kimberly would come 6 weeks later). I could drive my Honda and rent a place short-term–a cheap hotel or Airbnb–or drive my truck and live in the camper I had built on back. It was a 1991 Ford with uncountable miles, and I had no time to fix it up and sell it in NC for a pittance. If I made it to the Northwest where the survivalists love tiny homes, I might get a better price. It was a gamble, especially through the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains, but I could save a lot of rental money.
So I packed up the truck and headed out. I made it through the Appalachians but realized my camper was creating a serious drag I was getting less than 15 mpg and putting too much strain on the engine, but I could think of no way to fix the aerodynamics while traveling. All the money I would save on free rent was going into the gas tank—it would easily be over $1000.
By Friday night I reached South Dakota. Ahead of me was the biggest thunderstorm I had ever seen, with continuous lightening across the whole black face of the sky. I pulled off to get gas and a sudden wind shook my truck like a chew-toy. Stepping out, I looked up to see the clouds swirling in a circle over me, and a tornado siren suddenly blasted. The gas attendant gave quick directions to the shelter of the courthouse basement, and with a dozen others I soon found myself huddled there, wondering about my homemade camper, but it rode out the storm fine.
By Saturday evening I made it to Bozeman, Montana, when my engine suddenly died and would not restart. Pulling to the side of the road, I called a tow-truck which dropped me at a repair shop parking lot where I spent the night. The next morning I realized it would stay closed all day. I was going to miss my first day of orientation if I couldn’t get the truck fixed, but how could I find an open shop? Just then a car pulled into the lot and I went over to the couple to ask if they knew where I could go. They gave me the phone number to a shop that was open, and when I called them, they agreed to work on my truck. It was an electrical problem that took several hours to identify and fix, but I didn’t realize until I got the bill that they were charging me $115 an hour. Money was slipping down a black hole on this trip, but at least I would make it to class in time if I drove all night.
As I pushed the old truck up the mountains, a flashing road sign alerted me “Caution! Forest Fire Ahead!” I could smell it and see the smoke off to my left, but the road stayed clear. Still, the Rockies were too much for my truck. Going downhill it slowed to 30 miles per hour before I pulled over so as not to destroy the engine. I called for another tow truck. Again I was dropped at a closed shop where I spent the night, only to discover that this shop did not open on Mondays. After filling it with oil and antifreeze, I started my truck up to see if I could coax it to another repair place, and discovered it was driving okay, so I decided to chance it and headed out.
I had almost reached the Western border of Washington State when I pulled over for gas and discovered that my engine was leaking oil all over, having splattered the engine, and puddled under the truck. A young fellow who pulled in next to me offered help, crawling under the truck to see what might be the problem. He told me the repair would be thousands of dollars, and when I told him I needed to get to Seattle he said, “If it was me, I’d buy a bunch of oil and just keep filling it until I got there.” He told me about an auto parts store one exit down where I could buy it cheap and of a mechanic at that exit who could give me a real diagnosis of the truck.
I pulled in to Adams Automotive and asked him to take a look. He told me that oil dripping onto the hot exhaust system was a sure way to start a fire. When he could see I was going to push on, he told me to wait till after dark as it was 100F and to be especially careful going over “The Pass,” an ominous sounding ascent into the Cascade Mountains. He told me that his fire extinguisher had passed its expiration date and he would need to get another one anyway, so he handed it to me to keep in the truck. Under these desperate conditions I realized the best way to lose drag was to remove the front panel of my camper and let the air blow through to the back. If I had thought of this two days before, I might have saved my engine.
I waited till dark to start the rest of my journey. The Pass proved to be the longest, steepest climb I had made the whole journey. When I finally reached the summit late at night, I pulled over to give the engine a break and lifted to hood to help cool it down. The engine was on fire. I jumped into the truck and grabbed the extinguisher, quickly putting out the flames before any damage had been done. At 3:30 am, after 8 quarts of oil, I made it to the outskirts of Seattle and pulled into a truck stop to rest a few hours before heading for school a day late.
Since August I have been clutching a runaway roller-coaster as it crashed through a collapsing building. You know the “fire and flood” metaphor… well, it wasn’t a metaphor in my case… but we’ll get to that. Let’s back up to July when Berly and I realized that we could not live on my low-level wages, that I needed more training to land an adequate job, and that my best option was to go into counseling. The right program fit was a school in the opposite corner of the country, and I started inquiring, thinking to start in the spring semester. But they only accepted new students in August… one month away. We both said, “That’s insane!” But should we wait another year while our savings dribbled away each month?
They assured us that acceptance would be valid for a year, so I started the process: updating my resume, getting references, requesting transcripts, and writing a couple of essays while we took our vacation to the west coast. We joked about the craziness of uprooting ourselves and moving across country in a 3-week time frame. Finally, Berly asked me, “So what would it take, how would it be possible?” And ever the problem-solver, I laid out a theoretical plan, which she outrageously declared workable. “Are we really doing this?” we asked each other incredulously. I was accepted into the program with barely two weeks to give in my notice at work and transfer my Home Depot job from the Southeast to the far Northwest corner of the continental U.S. It felt like moving to a foreign country.
I was scheduled to work until the day before leaving, with 3 1/2 days in hand to drive 3000 miles, just in time to reach school for the first day of classes. Berly would come later. I had to sell my cast-iron jointer and repair and sell my zero-turn mower and trailer; I had to fix my truck, get a student loan, plan my trip and living arrangements in Washington, register for classes, get our rental house ready for final inspection. It was a crazy two weeks, but far saner than what followed.
Kimberly found the metaphor into which we jumped, a scary new twist in our pilgrimage. We clung to our trust in a God who was an unmoving rock in our ever-confusing and unpredictable journey only to realize that God is not static, but always moving, inviting us into ever-fresh insight and experience. He is full of surprises, shocks that pry our fingers from our clenched securities. Peter Mayer’s lyrics speak for us:
Mazie, our white spitz mix, sat on the floor in front of the love seat, wistfully eyeing a narrow spot between Kimberly and me. Mitts likes to sit on our laps, which makes room for both dogs, but he sometimes spills into the gap, and he guards his personal space with warning growls. Kimberly pulled Mitts over a bit, slapped the empty space, and urged the timid Mazie, “There’s room for you!” Then turning to me she added, “That’s our family motto: ‘There’s room for you.’ It may feel uncomfortable or even scary, but we always make room for each other.”
When I make room for others in my space, I have to adjust. Their preferences, priorities, viewpoints, and feelings all stick out in odd shapes that don’t fit well with mine. What they say or do may upset me, and in defense I may push back, growl to make them stop. We make relationships “work” by excluding the parts that are at odds–go silent about politics and religion and the morality of disposable diapers. After repeatedly hitting the same potholes of conflict, we learn to steer around them, thinking that smoother relationships are better relationships. But this dance of avoidance hides our true selves, and our deep need for connection goes unmet.
Family and marriage is the quintessential formative ground for these dynamics. We are most vulnerable here, with the greatest potential for harming or healing. And the redemptive way forward is no Hallmark movie. The “precious moments” of marriage, the things that make it rich and rewarding and powerful, are not warm fuzzies but cold pricklies. It is not romance that makes a marriage great, but the frustrations, fears, and foolishness responded to with stumbling grace. We build a marriage by the messy process of learning to embrace our real selves with all its brokenness. This shared grace is the foundation of trust on which every deep relationship is built. Because the two of us are weak and fearful, we sometimes fail, but we always return to this core value: “There’s room for you.”
Isn’t it odd how we are often the last ones to realize the obvious about ourselves? You may have spotted a theme that has been bubbling up through my posts recently, but I didn’t notice it until a few days ago: anger. It is one of my defense mechanisms, so reflexive and short-lived that I often don’t notice it or I pass it off as a normal response. In fact, it was a major piece of armor for my whole family, our shield against a sudden sense of danger, so quickly deployed that it even parried our sense of vulnerability. Like so many family traits, it was carefully disguised–no shouting, name-calling, or slamming doors, but an intense burning that everyone felt without being able to name. When I stumbled on Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger, it turned on the lights for me, so much so that I bought every sibling a copy for Christmas.
Many years ago I realized that an unexpected burst of anger is a telltale sign that I feel under attack, not from the incident itself, which is just a release valve, but from the pressure of turmoil building inside my heart, a festering wound that needs attention. I don’t need a scolding, but a warm compress of grace–I need to locate the wound and apply self-compassion.
I have known for some months that my emotions were foundering, but it was a gradual, insidious tide that crept up past the gunwales without any alarms sounding. Who doesn’t get mad at selfish drivers? Who doesn’t get pissed at overbearing customers or lazy co-workers? It seemed normal… except that it wasn’t.
The slowly building tension came from a big drop in income, a stressful job, and even an unsafe home (our cars have been rifled more than once, and I caught a burglar trying to get into our house). The major soul cost has been a loss of even a minimal support structure–my low-wage job works me till 11 p.m. and on weekends, blocking me from making social connections here. And when the scales are already heavily offset, even small weights added seem unbearable. It becomes hard to do simple daily tasks, not to speak of the huge effort to overcome our current set of circumstances.
None of that is going to change soon. It needs to change for life to be sustainable, but in the meantime I need to lean into self-support, be conscious of my pain in specific ways and direct compassion to myself as I would to any dear, suffering friend whom I love.
Janathan Grace Reflections 