Pip just asked God for a “circle nose.” The adult in me says “look out, God might give it to you and how would He do that – YIKE” and then I realized that when we pray like children, He is still good, and this is what He wants, to share in our silliest, smallest requests.

“Dust can be anything,” He must have thought when He made us. “Let’s see what happens.”

I can’t help thinking that our own childlike faith might be His biggest adventure too.

It is hard to have a tender heart, when it seems the world is out to misunderstand you, when you don’t fit anywhere, even with other believers, when people like you or don’t like you based on what you DO instead of who you are. It is hard to be childlike enough to walk humbly with God who asks this tenderness of you when it is easier to keep your walls up and welcome cynicism and suspicion where trust should be. It is hard to be small and build another up whose is living the way you know you should have lived and you didn’t. It is hard to confess and be humble and seek the face of the One who gentles you sometimes through the acknowledgement of your own sin through His Life lived out.

But it is harder to be angry, harder to live with your chin tucked and your guard up, ready to lash out at anyone who backs you into a corner. It is harder, because the angrier you are and the more unyielding you become, the bigger your corner gets until the whole world is there pushing you into it and you feel you have to be big enough to fill it, when you just simply want to walk out there, where everyone else is just living and being and not really noticing you in the corner. It is harder to be dead when you could be alive. It is harder to hate and to envy and to judge when you could simply love.

God give us tender hearts, in spite of our hardness.

Last night, I dreamed a hard one. I dreamed I was happy – sooooo happy – and then the happiness shattered, and I cried in my dream. Wept. Sobbed. Wailed. I couldn’t walk or be strong or keep going, things hurt so bad; then mercifully, I came up through the shadows into my own room beside the one who loved me where others did not.

What do you do when pain wakes you? I always thought nightmares were driven by fear, but this wasn’t fear. It was heartache, stemming from something so deep inside, I had only touched it a few times before.

I have been feeling my way through “vulnerability,” lately, having come to see that for all that I say and all that I put out there, there are parts of me that I understand that I simply don’t make available to others for the knowing, as much as I want to be known in those places. Some of it, I’ve discovered, is just my personality. The reason I don’t – CAN’T – cry in public is because my feelings are often internalized, while my *thinking* is extraverted. It makes a me a good blogger, if I can get a hold on what I’m feeling, but for the living? I wonder.

Yesterday, I created a name (all by myself) for my wedding business that feels like one of the biggest risks I have ever taken, that says in one word everything that I want to give my brides in their experience with me, everything that I want my work to be. It is a HUGE name, a huge calling to live up to, and I shook as I bought the URL and solidified commitments I have been making this year as I’m trying to move my business forward. I feel vulnerable owning this name, vulnerable offering this commitment to my clients, because while it was always there in my heart, stating it means that I will have to tap into my own heart and bring it to life through my work; it means that the beauty of the happy that broke me apart as it was taken from me in my dream last night is something I need to embrace for myself too.

One of the weddings I shot recently was… the happiest wedding I have ever attended. I cried from the joy surrounding me, and I think I cried because I so rarely reach for that, so rarely acknowledge its existence in my life because I know what it is to have it removed.

I don’t have an easy answer for my conundrum; I just know that I want to be happy, and I know now that I am loved, which is a change from the time my dream brought back, when love itself was stripped from me and I wasn’t sure God – or anything – would ever be enough to replace it.

I looked at leather-bound journals at Barnes & Noble the other day when we went in. The kids wanted to play there, to look at the books, to absorb the general atmosphere of one of their favorite places – and to visit the cafe for a sweet treat. I sat in front of the journals for what seemed like an eternity, weighing the colors, the textures, the feel of the books in my hands, and trying to envision what I would write in them.

“You’ve bought journal after journal for years, and you haven’t filled any.”

But the year I filled ten journals felt a bit like this year. I thought I would fill some last year. I could try again.

“You don’t have anything to say. You can’t justify the expense.”

None of the empty books inspired words to respond. I sighed. Maybe I would find a book someone else had written. I had no idea what I wanted, though. The inspirational section was “safe” – I didn’t want to deal with decisions. I prefer to read things other people recommend. Actually, I like my own writing.

I woke up this morning thinking that I’d make a good editor. I’m really good at going through others’ writing and calling out their character inconsistencies and their grammar and their storytelling ability. It’s one reason it’s so difficult for me to read others’ work. It has to be REALLY good for me to like it.

But my journals weren’t ever *really* good. They were just me, pouring out on paper.

“You don’t deserve to have a journal. You don’t have anything to say.”

I don’t have words. The voices are right. But I’m getting up in the morning. I am pushing through frustration and depression and existing, because sometimes that is all we are meant to do, just keep breathing, and that is worship and that is processing and that is what life looks like when you wait on God.

“You can always blog, if you have something to say.”

Yes, yes I can. And I have a whole bunch of journals with only a few pages filled, where I can scribble if I want. And maybe, if I find the right one, the one that has words for me when I see it, I will buy a new journal sometime.

Sometimes when I go out, I get the feeling that nobody sees me. I think other people feel that nobody sees them too; they don’t know I watch them walk past me, wonder what their world is like, wonder if they are running from something like I am some days too. “Care” is such an overlooked thing. People don’t see others as people until death enters the picture, but even then, death itself becomes a platform for self-gratification and the play of guilt pouring out from all our lives lived in the shadows.

Sometimes when I go, I get the feeling that everyone around me is mad, that we are all slowly driving toward insanity, because we were grown-ups before we were ever allowed to be children, because we are cut off so much that it is odd when I see someone make eye contact and smile at another person. Sweetness sounds funny coming out of my mouth; I would rather seal my lips than engage another person.

It is the indifference that destroys us, that sends planes into buildings and crazy men into schools. We’ve lost the value of life – we don’t want it anymore. We don’t know how to cling to it because we all live in this netherworld where nothing is real unless we all agree it is real, unless the majority acknowledges it happened and it is acceptable in our world.

But joy comes anyway, and even though He says to weep with those who weep, we cannot lose sight of the light that filters through the shadows. I will not stop smiling at the people I pass or stop speaking kindly to others when the opportunity presents itself. I will care ALL the days, not just the days when something horrible has happened. I will be mindful today and tomorrow and the next day so that I cannot be indifferent to life itself, so that I will always value the hearts of each one of us that God created in His image.

This is the day the Lord has made too – I will rejoice and be glad. The sun came up, and we are all still in the hands that held us when it went down yesterday. Nothing has happened that is out of His reach.

There is no part of our death that He will not redeem.

There is no darkness that the light won’t banish.

There are no words now but alleluia.

All my life I’ve been told that “character” is what you are when nobody’s watching, but I have come to the conclusion that character is what you are when everyone is watching. Or at least when your kids are watching. Or when they aren’t.

This comes from an introvert who can be generally fine and mostly “without sin” when she is alone, but introducing a toddler and a kindergartener into her world from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed? Forgiveness is no longer theoretical. Kindness has to take action. It’s not as easy to distance yourself from anger. Objectivity is out of reach.

Living Christ with my kids around doesn’t happen through my writing. My strongest communication skill is useless with them. My next strongest – seeing – feels awfully useless too.

They don’t know how “there” I am when I sit on the couch trying to stay aware of them through the plexiglass depression keeping me there. They might never know. My love for them is so often not a “doing” love; when I do have to “do,” it is often accompanied by frustration because I am just. so. tired.

They ignore me because they think I am ignoring them. They push their boundaries because they know I can’t enforce them. Every day, they trash the house and I can’t clean up after them.

They scream and holler and throw fits when I tell them no, and when I have to walk out of the house to get some air and some quiet, they call after me so the entire neighborhood can hear, “Don’t leave, Mom!”

As if I would. As if I could…

Yesterday, the neighbor boys told Pip they were coming over to kill the cats. What I said didn’t matter – it was the end of her world. She hyperventilated. The fear won, and my love wasn’t enough to break through. When she started with the “I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy, I want my Daddy,” I quit.

I quit about once a day. Yesterday, a bad day, it was six times or so.

On the one hand, I know I am going through a deep grieving process that goes back to Pip’s first year when the post-partum depression stole her babyhood from me. On another, I know that I am grieving the mom I wanted to be. I am having a hard time right now accepting my life as it is, with its limitations, figuring out how to interact with my kids as people and not as my ultimate source of irritation.

But the days when they ARE the ultimate source of irritation scare me. It’s the days when I don’t want to be a mom anymore And I start praying. Because God and I both know that this isn’t who I am when I’m alone. We both know that being with people is harder for me. Ever since my second year of college when I wasn’t allowed to be alone – for health reasons – I have struggled in my interactions with others, either overcompensating for my insecurity, or shutting down and hiding me altogether.

Neither works with my kids, in the day-to-day living. I can’t MAKE them do anything. I want them to know that they are free to choose. But when they consistently choose actions that hurt themselves and others, when they choose again and again to disobey me and to write me off, I feel my own fear taking over. And then they get scared.

And I can’t turn that scared off for them. My love isn’t enough. My strength isn’t enough. What I am when I am by myself with God isn’t enough – but at least I am the same person with them that I am with Him.

That, I think, is what character is. It’s being the same person, wherever you are, and letting God be God over all of it, including the change He is working in you. His strength has to be enough for all of us right now. His love has to be the thing to take my fear and draw my kids into Himself. I’ve left some pretty big things in His hands over the years. I think this is another one that has to rest there.

I crave creative company, gobble it up when I find it, talk too much, laugh too loudly – but I have stopped caring about the “too” for now. I am restless, waiting to see what will happen next, unwilling – or too tired – to shape my own destiny just now. So life is happening around me. People laugh, they say words I know I should know and understand, but the only way for me to hear is not to see, so I stop looking and forget myself as I listen. I think maybe they think I’m hiding, but I’m not. I don’t process information through eye contact and acknowledgement. I absorb it. It becomes part of me, and I have to live it, even though I doubt I could ever regurgitate it or teach it to anyone. I would send others to them to learn it, rather than teach it myself.

I finished my new website. It is a place to start. I am in a new place, a new favorite place, waiting, listening. I didn’t bring my camera, but I see the wind, hear the water. I watched the gray fly away into blue this morning and thought as I walked with friends how it is strange and easy to be quiet in this place, strange because it is never easy for me to be quiet. I feel happy, but I am not sure how to say it, so when people ask me how I’m doing, I try to pick an answer. I haven’t succeeded with a good one yet today.

As I was working on my website, I decided that I would do something I haven’t tried before, that I would own my introversion. I’m not sure what that looks like. I’m the responsible one, the one who made up her mind to greet people and not be shy in church, the one who has to pull other people out and get them to be real instead of making them nervous. But I’m wondering if speaking softly would serve me better, if treasuring people would make me happier than worrying about fitting in or having the right thing to say.

I didn’t know a person could cry in their sleep. I don’t know why I did.

On Monday, she told me that it was time to let the real Kelly come out. My heart cracked, just a little, just enough. My mind went into slow motion, staring at her words, as my own words spun around us. I felt dizzy, a little disoriented, a little hopeful.

I have always written better than I talked. The words that flow easily from my fingers and sing away in my brain, they get all jumbled up in my mouth. The open air steals the magic that caused me to speak them in the first place. The look in the eyes of my listeners. The way they gloss over my words, my foot in my mouth, how I become invisible…

She said I need some time to unwind, maybe two or three months to process what my years have taught me. I felt relieved on Monday; now I feel small. I want to disappear. I feel too much, think too much, say too much. I am not spiritual enough, healthy enough, open enough, closed enough.

Someone once told me that I needed more life experience to be considered qualified to “be a speaker.” He might as well have patted me on the head as I am tempted to do with my four-year-old sometimes. I was twenty-four.

I didn’t think it would be hard to take this on. To come out of hiding. To identify my reasons for it, and to figure out a practical way to be me with others, without all the shame. But right now, there is nothing BUT shame. Nothing BUT inadequacy, certain failure. I feel like I’m letting go of my life to find it again. Like the life I’ve been clinging to isn’t life at all.

I wanted to be a child prodigy. I wrote two novels when I was seventeen years old. I submitted them for publication. I knew the grammar, the syntax, the formula. But I didn’t know what was realistic. I didn’t know that you couldn’t grow up as sheltered as I did, surrounded by books, and not know what life was all about. At least not the life everybody else was living.

“Intimacy issues…” The plexiglass feeling that locks me in on my bad days came into sharp focus, like an automatic zoom lens on a high-tech camera. My words stopped, like they’d hit the glass. There was no point in talking past it. Nobody would hear me anyway.

I had a friend tell me once that I needed to live life – not just observe it. I rolled my eyes at him. People-watching was my favorite thing. I loved watching them laugh, seeing how they loved one another, how they lived. I loved them by seeing them. But I was always curious. What if I tried…? What if I did…? What if I said…?

If there is one thing I know, it is that God wants my mess right now. He doesn’t want me to try to gloss over it, to attempt more spirituality for His sake. He doesn’t want me to be anything other than I am in this moment with Him or with anyone. I prayed for humility. This is how He humbles me, letting me see what I am not, showing me how to consider others better than myself. This is how I am learning to be kind, as old wounds rip open and my need for compassion is the only thing I can identify in myself.

I wrote in my journal once about the girl in me, twelve going on eighteen going on one thousand years old. I wrote how she was just beginning to venture into a meadow, emerging from the dark forest surrounding it, how for one glorious moment she found herself in the sunlight and ran with wild, spinning joy into the day. She was my picture of “abandon.” And in the next sentence I told what happened to her, how love itself threw a stunning blow that felled her, how she crawled back to hide in the darkness, no longer able to believe the light was for her.

I wrote of a heart laid out on a table, and of a pocket-knife used to rend it. I wrote things I have never said to anyone, only screamed wordless into the cold night as I collapsed into pain I had never known, pain I still don’t understand.

If the sacrifices of the Lord are a broken and contrite heart, if I am to be a living sacrifice, if I am to be nothing but clay containing Someone else’s treasure, I wish to do it without feeling. Without caring. Without being broken again. Without living or speaking or daring to enter the light again only to be shot down. I used to wish I could fly; now I want to be nothing.

I’ve really been through so little in my physical experience. I wasn’t abused or molested. I didn’t have eating disorders or do self-destructive things to myself. Almost no one close to me has died. God has been good to me. I have the husband I always wanted, children to love, family, and a few friends. We have enough to eat, and a place to live. I have a career and clients I love. I even have candles to light at night when I want.

I have all that I need – but I feel trapped and duped and invisible, and God wants me to become less before He’ll ever make me more. Or so I’ve been told…

“A bruised reed He will not break…”

“I have held My peace a long time,
I have been still and restrained Myself.
Now I will cry like a woman in labor,
I will pant and gasp at once.
I will lay waste the mountains and hills,
And dry up all their vegetation;
I will make the rivers coastlands,
And I will dry up the pools.
I will bring the blind by a way they did not know;
I will lead them in paths they have not known.
I will make darkness light before them,
And crooked places straight.
These things I will do for them,
And not forsake them.”

- Is. 42:3, 14-16

It’s funny how sometimes you run from words for what you feel. You dance around it, writing sentences, paragraphs, full stories that never quite speak of it; they are all seemingly unrelated symptoms of something more. And then you lie in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, realizing you don’t feel anything. Or maybe you do, but you don’t want to. You don’t want to think about it.

You don’t want to think about the ways you’ve failed.

You don’t want to think about the “no” that “is what it is.”

You think if you open the door to the pain, you’ll stop breathing.

But you always have pain. It isn’t just going to disappear. I think sometimes life is a slow mourning period for innocence lost, for childhood when even what wasn’t safe felt safe because we just didn’t know it all.

I feel all the time. When I’m asked to leave God out of my writing. When I’m expected to check me at the church door. When I react to – against – my kids. When I get rejection I knew was coming. When I try something and fail. When I receive criticism.

I get stuck between worlds. The functional daily routine pushes me forward in spite of the wounded parts of me, the little kid inside that is slowly being forced to grow up and leave hope aside. I can survive all right. But survival isn’t living. It doesn’t feel honest. It doesn’t leave room for love. It doesn’t make room for childlike faith in Jesus.

You have to look the pain in the face sometime. You have to open up and let it just be a part of you. You have to acknowledge God in it – because whether we choose it or not, pain is part of “all our ways.”

That breath you’re already holding? You have to take a deep one and plunge into the thing you think will stop it forever.

Otherwise, everything stops.

At least if you feel it, you know you’re alive.

There was a week I lived once, in which I stopped my introverted analysis of myself, stepped out, and told some people the truth about what was happening in my heart. It was the “never” week, the week that broke my heart, that destroyed relationships, that left me alone to find God for myself without anybody else’s approval or instruction.

What I lost that week has never been restored to me.

What I lost that week had already been lost to me. I just didn’t know it until I opened myself up to hear the truth.

A body can’t sustain pain like that, the kind of pain that leaves one hunched over on the kitchen floor, trying not to vomit, the kind of pain that follows you to work and forces the door closed to hide the sobbing, the kind of pain that grasps at the smallest hint of grace even from someone who had hurt you before.

I lived long alone after that week. Being told that “I don’t believe God would tell you to love someone,” that “I don’t see any fruit in your life,” that “all I saw in you was anger” by people who had claimed to love me… I wasn’t ready to open myself up to the possibility of loving, let alone BEING loved. I didn’t blame God, exactly. I just… pushed Him away.

I thought those walls were beginning to come down, thought that I wasn’t still so standoffish toward these I once called friends – and toward people like them. But the last few weeks, since someone close to me confirmed that I can come across as “annoying,” since I went into near-hysterics over a situation that left me feeling helpless and empty and unable to trust God – the emotions are flooding back. That old pain is chasing me down, and it’s coming in different clothing.

Pete talks to me every day, reminding me that I am in Christ and He is enough. I try to cling to that, but it is HARD, because the voices are HARD, and there are “right” things I do not do because I can’t, and I can’t explain to anybody why I can’t, so I sit judged as others accuse me of judging, and I think they are right, but I can’t be a person and not “judge” because that is how I make sense of my world, that is how I think about people, not to condemn them but to look at someone or something and see what it is and who they are and try to make sense out of it. That is how I learn – if only I could learn without having to think it out loud.

I feel so dumb, as if I have a learning disability, like I keep saying things I shouldn’t say, and not saying things I should say. I want to run away, change my name, start over. I never say anything without tearing it apart, but if I never say anything at all, I feel I should cease to exist. I don’t believe He is enough; I am scared that He made a mistake with me, or that my mistakes mean that I was created for dishonor – but even if I was, He will still be glorified.

My “never” week is coming back on me now; I say too much, write too much, ask too much. I am not good enough, kind enough, loving enough. I want grace – I want it so badly – but I can’t get grace unless…

And there you see. You see why I write here the way I do, why I scribble such fire with my fingertips, because the second any one thing is added on top of Christ, I forget that I am loved, that He loves me, that I can love as He loved me, and my walls go flying up again as I run away.

But right now, sitting here in grace, it HURTS. MY GOD it hurts. Because everything in me knows that I cannot go back, that right now I am in the midst of His refining me, that He is showing me how I have no place to stand over anyone – not anyone – in judgment, but that I have to stay where I am in Him and let His Spirit work in me and make me real again, make me more than me gritting my teeth to do what’s right, break my heart for the healing.

And I don’t know what to do or how to offer grace to those who refuse to accept it, to those who won’t NEED it because they serve a hard master and “living” doesn’t look at all like breathing and being when there is so much “ministry” in which to be poured out.

Someone shared about “Post-Regret” this week – I have word-regret. He has called me to speak and to live, but every time I open my mouth to say anything, I question myself and determine not to say anything again. But I can’t help it. Because BEING means that I say sometimes – that is how I LEARN to be a different person, and I don’t speak it to be the only right person, I speak it because that is what makes sense to me, but my words can be a conversation if someone would talk back to me.

But when no one does, I feel alone again, and I’m afraid that His love isn’t what I have believed it to be, that this thin line between right and wrong is really a gulf and I have missed it, but I can’t. go. back. because God isn’t there. No matter what anybody says or tells me, I can’t believe that He wants me to walk out of grace back into a Law that nearly killed me when I was younger.

And if He wants to strike me dead, I don’t have anything else to say but “Lord, Your will be done,” because He’s all I’ve got and He knows more about me and the rest of this than anybody does, this God of judgment who declared me righteous in Christ, who claimed to give me a new heart, who created me to live and breathe and get out of bed in the morning and have lyme disease and two kids and a husband and a photography business.

I am so HUNGRY right now for love that comes without conditions, that accepts that I am His and just dwells with me right where I am, right where He has me. Pete and I, we have that, but sometimes I worry it’s not enough, if maybe we’re both wrong, if I’m just being immature and insecure and “them’s the breaks of living, Kelly – get over it.”

Then bad things happen all over the world, and I feel guilty because I can’t care enough, can’t reach out enough, speak enough, be enough – and I feel guilty when we catch a skink in the morning after we’ve taken a walk with a lovely breeze blowing sun all over us, and I just… this can’t be what God meant for me in Christ. Is this my dust, groaning so hard?

I’m weary and heavy-laden seven days out of the week lately, and I’m not what I want to be, not the people I admire, not so loving or grace-filled or kind or godly as I wish. But I’ve got the name of Jesus over me, and I’m holding onto it, holding onto Him, remembering how He stayed in His Father, how He told the Pharisees the truth and gave grace to the clueless, how He never much worried about how “abiding” made Him look when the rest of the world was “doing.”

I think I’ve already lost something, something that is precious to me; I think it may not be restored this side of heaven. I don’t want to let it go, but I have learned that there is life on the other side of loss, that His love comes more real then, He can be more than I know if I will let Him. I just want the pain to stop now so I can breathe.