Choices

I spoke with someone very wise this week about what it means to set healthy boundaries and allow others to make choices for themselves. I really struggle watching loved ones make poor choices when I have done everything to help direct them in the right way. Sometimes we can teach, preach, lecture, model, guide and counsel those closest to us toward the right path, only to watch them choose the wrong one. It can be discouraging and frustrating.

This wise friend brought up the story of the rich young ruler. The young man asked Jesus what good he could do to have eternal life. Jesus answered that to receive eternal life; this ruler must follow the commandments and give all he owned to the poor. (Jesus knew this man's heart was more dedicated to his wealth than the heart of God) Matthew 19:22 says, "When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth." The interesting thing my friend pointed out is that Jesus did not chase after him, trying to persuade him to change his mind. He did not coerce or control the outcome, despite knowing the ruler’s choice was wrong. He let the ruler choose and reap the consequences of that choice.

I think as people - parents, friends, children - are often uncomfortable allowing God to be God, so we step in with our high and mighty Messiah complexes, trying to fix our families and friends. We entangle ourselves in the choices of others and often assume responsibility for burdens that are not ours to carry. We have poor relational boundaries this way. We think our excessive and obsessive "care" and entanglement in the choices of our loved ones mirrors Christ. Given the story of the young ruler, however, Jesus did not act this way at all.

Jesus loved by allowing the freedom of choice to remain in the hands of the individual. He taught, preached, lectured, modeled, guided and counseled while permitting free-will.

I think Jesus grieved the decision of the young ruler and the many others who rejected Him as Messiah, but he did not chase after them and force His will or His message upon them. Instead, He trusted the heart of the Father and knew that not all would believe.

Sometimes the best conviction is to allow the choices of another to come full circle. Sin does not go hidden and consequence-free for very long. We call it tough love and healthy boundaries. I think Jesus would have just called it the way of the cross. Matthew 7:13-14 says, Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it. We can teach, preach, lecture, model, guide and counsel those close to us toward the right path, but, in the end, every person must choose for themselves whom they will serve and what path they will tred.

I'm trying to set better boundaries!

Midwifery Decisions

I am pregnant. I am four months along and have chosen to manage my pregnancy, labor and delivery with midwives at The Midwife Center for Birth and Women's Health in Pittsburgh, PA. Since it seems I must explain and often defend my decision to go this route, I wanted to explain my rational in detail here.

I can imagine most everyone’s surprise at my decision to go to midwives. My sister, who has done almost everything before me – cut Barbie’s hair, shave her legs, use a curling iron, get married and have babies – delivered her two beautiful children at The Midwife Center. I have to be honest and say, I thought she was NUTS! Before and after her first child’s birth, I was pretty against any delivery that was not in a hospital. I couldn’t imagine birth without drugs and didn’t want to even consider any other options. Keep in mind though, I hadn’t read anything about pregnancy, labor or delivery either. Nor was I in a place in my life where these things required any research.

Fast forward two years. I was engaged to my husband and my sister was pregnant with her second baby. I had recently gotten into a little tiff with my gynecologist of three years because she would not spend time with me to discuss some cervical concerns I had from a previous procedure. She was always rude to me and I just never really liked her that much. Since I cannot stand male gynecologists, I knew I needed to find a new practice soon since neither my soon to be husband nor I wanted to wait very long to get pregnant. Ha!

It was around that time that my sister and I were shopping for some items for my wedding and decided to combine our trip to the flower-girls ballerina store with one of her visits to the midwives, that my eyes were opened. She was in for one of her 7month check-ups. I was really impressed with the relationship the midwife had with her and the time she took just hanging out with my sister and gaining her trust. It seemed so different than my gynecological experiences, and since I moved around so much, I had had many gynecologists over the years. The midwife actually cared and didn’t seem bothered by the time the appointment took.

I was really overwhelmed with a sense of “home” after that visit so I decided I would switch my care to the midwives, since I greatly disliked my OBGYN anyway. When I first found out I was pregnant with the baby we lost, I decided I wanted to stay with the midwives but deliver in a hospital. It seemed the best of both worlds. I could have drugs but also nice midwives to care for me. But then we miscarried. My cervix dilated, the uterus contracted, and we lost the baby. The pain was horrible but something interesting happened in those intense hours of expelling. My body took over and found tolerable positions. I breathed through each contraction, even the medicine induced contractions, and I got through it. Hopelessness and all. There was no pot of gold at the end of that pain, no baby to make it worth it, only disappointment and grief. But I still made it through.

After talking with one of the midwives, she explained that everything I went through, all the meds I had to take to make me contract, felt a lot like childbirth. (minus the pushing and crowning…which I know is really hard!) I’m not comparing it as if they are the same but in a lot of ways, I feel like I got a taste of childbirth those hard days and I woke up to the power and beauty and pain that women are capable of managing, naturally.

It was then that I started to think about the kind of atmosphere I really wanted when we got pregnant again. Did I want any of the local hospitals with their technology and policies and 40-some% ci-section rates or did I want a more family-friendly environment that had a proven track record of safety and low interventions? And the real question, did I want medication or did I want to do it naturally? After much discussion and thinking, I came to a personal conclusion that while I am NOT a hippy/I will never use pain meds sort of person, I AM the sort of person who has a strong will when I choose to do something. I realized that the reason I always wanted to deliver in a hospital was because I was afraid that I couldn’t handle the pain. It was about fear, not about a love for my baby or even for my own body. As someone who does not want to be controlled by fear, but instead love, I decided to read more about natural childbirth. “Perfect love casts out all fear.”

Since I had already gotten a taste of childbirth, minus the baby and including deep sorrow, I decided then and there that I wanted to try to deliver naturally. I had a new respect for my body as a woman and a faith in my ability to withstand pain for the love of a baby. Hope and resolution of will are profound tools! And the fact remains, it IS healthier for the baby to remain drug-free. It IS a better recovery for the mother to deliver drug-free. It’s unarguably better to deliver naturally, unless something goes wrong. Naturally, if something does go wrong or the baby doesn’t turn I will deliver in the hospital, probably with drugs and still be happy if the baby is healthy. I’m NOT saying I can brave it ALL but I am saying, I’d really like to try.

I know there are many differing viewpoints on this subject. I know you many people have pre-conceived ideas about midwives but I think those are people who haven’t experienced the loving care of a midwife, haven’t done honest research and are afraid. I read Your Best Birth and watched The Business of Being Born by Ricky Lake and Abby Epstein recently and it truly confirmed my stand on this issue. It is my intention to go this route, despite the seeming negativity that surrounds the decision.

Asking Too Much

I haven't posted in a year.

I feel like that needs to be said in a whiny..."dear diary, i'm sorry for neglecting you" voice that I used to have when I was an awkward 12 year old writing in my diary about my crushes and my mean mommy that wouldn't let me wear bright red lipstick on my first day of 7th grade. I guess I feel neglectful; my whining above will have to suffice as penance.

It's been an interesting year. My husband and I bought a house. We're homeowners. And we got pregnant, had a miscarriage, and 62 seconds later got pregnant again. I'm four months along and doing well, minus the tri-weekly vomiting and the constant nausea. I could go on and on about the pregnancy symptoms no one ever mentions when you're a blushing, bright eyed, hopeful bride ready to go off birth control. But I'll save that for another day.

I guess I just wanted to say that today, today I'm lonely. A lot more than a house and a soon to come baby happened this year. In some ways, my husband and I grew up a little since last February. Together we've braved some intense relational storms that have left us closer to each other but distinctly distant to several very close individuals we have been deep friends with for years. Life has a way of changing relationships, and marriage has a way of becoming indirectly isolating. While marriage is like always being on a team, the game can get sort of confusing. And pregnancy, well, that has a way of ensuring that isolation in ways I never predicted or could have prepared for.

I don't think it's all bad and neither do I think this isolation is unhealthy. Two becoming one flesh and then creating life is heavy in the areas of responsibility and mystery and beauty and depth and weight. It's impossible to remain unchanged in the midst of that intensity. But I find myself surrounded by friends who can't quite relate. They're all single and childless. It's not that bridges have been burned, it's just that it takes many more bridges to relate than it used to. That goes both ways.

Needless to say, this loneliness, this isolation, goes both ways. They don't know what to say about my painfully swollen baby boobs and I don't get invited out anymore because the bars they go to are smokey. Mostly I'm fine with that. But today, I miss friends. I miss laughing at stupid things over a few glasses of cheap wine. I miss investing in something other than work, work, sleep, and my growing ass.

I am happily married and happily pregnant. I guess I just want the perfect trinity... I want to be happily social too.

Am I asking too much?

Ready?

I feel like it’s August 1939 in eastern Europe; pending doom is palpable. “Hitler's government envisioned a vast, new empire of "living space" (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe. The realization of German dominance in Europe, its leaders calculated, would require war.”(1) Control, force and manipulation were of primary dominance in Germany and what started with a dictatorial vision later became the devastation of so very many. (over 70 million casualties)

Our country, and world for that matter, seem to be on the brink of disaster; I’m terrified of our decisions. A Great Depression is almost imminent and I feel like the world we now know is about to change. Forever. I know people say this, crazy people… They prophesy doom and destruction that most ignore while others scoff. I don’t want to claim I have any word of God, I just have a sense…we’re living in the beginning of the end. Times are changing; the empire hangs on by a thread.

What the church does and does not do in these times may make all the difference. Oppression and poverty, even persecution of the faith has often led to an outpouring of Spirit and revival, an opening of heaven. Yet western Christians have no idea of what it means to suffer for the faith or to go through hard times. We don’t know war on our soil, calamity or true manifest evil. We’re not ready to deal with tribulation; we’re not equipped to overcome the dragon.

A war between two kingdoms is prophesied but we stand blind, in the middle of a mine field. We hear the cries of the destroyed all around but keep walking, ignorant to the destruction, passive in our defense. The Gospel is under attack; the enemy has breached the walls and the church is destroyed one piece at a time, from the inside, out.

I want to scream, to say “people get ready” but alas, my voice is over-powered by the masses. We sit idly by while germanic ranks steal our neighbors and rob us of justice. We do nothing and say nothing though something is what is required. Offering, of self and life and even freedom for the sake of Truth and the preservation of Justice, is the price to pay. Are we so self-focused and blind that we cannot see the shifting, the pending destruction, the eminent take-over? The end is coming; where does our security lie?

(1) wikepedia: WWII

A Co-existing Forgiveness

Someone recently asked me the age-old question. “Do you have to forgive in Christianity when the person who hurt you didn’t ask for it nor has changed? And if so, how?” I get this question a lot. It doesn’t surprise me. God has had to do a lot of work in me to get me to this point, this point being the knowledge and understanding that forgiveness is a choice. The act of it requires no one other than a broken and honest heart speaking to a Healing and Trustworthy God.

In moments where I’m speaking to a new believer or someone who has known God for a long time but has never had to walk through hard forgiveness, I start explaining the process of forgiveness by giving my “story.” In the end, I simply say that instead of my bitterness and hatred affecting that rapist or that molester or that mean lady, it affected me. Down in my core, in my center, the place Spirit and blood reside, it affected me. It turned fluid to stone and movement into knots. Bitterness destroys. Un-forgiveness kills. Its roots touch hell.

If I’ve told my story once I’ve told it one thousand times. It’s not that mine is more effective but personal testimony, I’ve found, moves mountains. It gives the pain worth. And I quite literally believe that Scripture passage in Revelations which states that we will overcome the Enemy by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. I like to say, whenever I get the chance, that in this…in THIS area of chosen forgiveness, Jesus works! The way of the cross makes sense. It really is the best way to live, as Rob Bell put it.

After I share my story and encourage forgiveness, the conversation often shifts and I realize something. Most people, people who aren’t dealing with childhood wounds or serious past offenses, are really just asking the question, how do I deal with a person in my life when I find them offensive to my heart and abusive to my soul? How do I copy with a relationship I’m forced to be involved in (in-laws, co-workers, leadership, etc…) when it’s literal emotional torture to be around them?

It turns out, in most cases lately, that people are really just asking how to co-exist. It’s interesting that the question would originate with forgiveness though. As much as I believe forgiveness is a huge issue in our would and in our faith communities, knowing how to deal with difficult people is even greater. The questions abound, boundaries vs. confrontation vs. intentionality vs. co-existence. At what point can you “wipe the dust off?” At what point is “speaking the truth in love” imperative?

It’s my opinion that there are different forms of forgiveness. Going back and re-hashing a painful memory and forgiving the person involved is one form. That’s the form I’m most familiar with. But the other form is trickier because it involves a daily surrender of will and emotions – a constant surrender of self. Walking forgiveness, as I like to call it, is hard. Plain and simple. It’s the stuff “take up the cross and follow me” is made of. Only Jesus Himself was fully capable.

Over the next few days I’m going to make this a prayer focus. I’m going to journal about what this means practically and spiritually in order to give myself, and others if they’re interested, clarity and calm amidst their difficult relational moments.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Yesterday I wrote out some questions, questions of God and the church. Questions that may make me seem jaded and doubting and distant from God. As I wrote and dissected the pattern of my thoughts, I walked down a trail of reason that left me feeling fulfilled actually, validated almost, like I had found some secret treasure and was on the right path.

A few hours later I read a chapter from Rob Bell’s book, “Velvet Elvis,” and was bombarded by the same type of general thought and questions and reasoning as I had discovered previously in my personal time, that very day.

This has happened time and time again and it bothers me. It happened countless times while reading Blue Like Jazz, as well as Sex, Sushi and Salvation. It happened while watching The Changing Faces of Worship.

I’m not saying I have any brilliant thoughts or even profound new ideas but am frustrated when I realize that it seems I am two years behind the fore-runner ideas and patterns in post-millennium, ground breaking Christian thought.

Then I started thinking about Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, how it must have seemed pointless to write and create for a while after their brilliance was spread all over the world. But people did, eventually. They had fresh and changed views on faith and God and life and love and fantasy and worlds. People started to process again and eventually new-ish threads of faith and outlook and styles and vision were birthed and created.

And I thought about Augustine’s Confessions. Way back in 397, a great man created Emo. It’s been evolving ever since, the outpouring of flesh and spirit, and the confessions of struggling humanity. We know it now as a genre of music put to guitars and keys but back then, it was revolutionary. (actually, it took a while for it to be considered a classic, obviously, but still…you get the point)

I don’t even know what I’m rambling on about now but I guess I was just taken aback by how real and clear the “nothing new under the sun” verse spoke to me last night.

*big sigh*

I told my husband these things in bed, right before we went to sleep. My last sentence was, “I don’t want to do the ordinary or the two years behind the super revolutionary and have un-original thought. I want to be radical and ground-breaking. I don’t want to do good, I want to be good.”

I awoke much later to a very real dream, of my life. Something uneventful; just me being me. I wish I had been flying but instead I was talking. So ordinary.

The Great Wall

I listen to music. Every day, I sit and listen to different kinds of music - worship, rock, pop, even some ghetto rap. (What can I say; I get bored easily so I have to mix it up!) In our new home, if you sit in the living room and turn out the lights at night, look up and out our window, you can see an ornate roman cross sitting on a Catholic Church steeple, gleaming over the city streets. It stands tall, high above the dirt and the filth and the sin and the pain that limps around the streets of the north side, the place we call home. When I’m in prayer or worship, I find myself staring at it in wonder and fear, from the corner of my couch. I turn out the lights to watch it glisten, as if somehow, Jesus is there.

It’s funny, I don’t believe in idols. I don’t believe in making images to capture and solidify God or any aspect of the Triune Majesty I worship. Yet, this cross has come to, in some ways, be my golden calf. When I’m asking for wisdom or a sign to help me make decisions, I’ve found myself staring at this distant and highly held cross and wondering if Jesus hears me.

Tori Amos sings a song called “China.” It’s one of those beautiful chilling songs full of double meaning and intricate depth. Tori is always good for that. Part of the chorus says, “Sometimes, I think you want me to touch you. But how can I, when you build The Great Wall around you? ooohh, China…”

I was listening to this beautiful song during a darker moment a few weeks back and had this thought while staring at my window cross: what if God, in all of His glory and holiness, stands like that cross - high above the harlotry of humanity, protected by The Great Wall called the institutional church? True to Tori’s song, I do feel Him asking humanity to touch Him and to taste Him and to intimately know Him. He calls out, from the cross and from the streets even, Emmanuel, God with us. And yet, somehow, so many of us have lost the ability to find Him. All of a sudden, as I get closer and closer to the core of the church, I sense the looming Great Wall, a tremendous divide.

Something in the church, something about staring at that distant highly held cross, puts me outside the intimate place. While I know He is a relationship and not a religion, I stumble on the idea that to find Him and really know Him, the hoops and the hype of church are required to hurdle in order to be in the center of His will.

All of this, in darker moments, makes me wonder if I want to be part of any of it; the massive historic and deeply rigid walls the church has built that keep people in as well as keep people out. The rules, the hierarchy, the struggle for power and position and placement, the marketing of salvation and faith – Red China, The Great Wall, unbending. It’s hard sometimes to see, where He ends and His church begins. Something about The Great Wall blurs my vision and I’m left to really think through what it means to know my Savior inside and outside that wall.

Is He who He says He is, or is He what is demonstrated? Intimate or distant? Is He protected behind a wall of rules and reason and distance or is He a mystery and a relationship? These are the questions that pop circles around my head and my heart; after all, I’m part of the “jaded generation.” Regardless of personal belief and faith, I’m duty-bound to ask the questions.

And I am asking, limping and broken and unsure, I stare at the distant cross, feel The Great Wall, and pray with all feebleness and honesty that Jesus move and breathe outside the walls, away from the lofty steeples and glistening untouched crosses, to find me… in the dirty streets. To find us… who move in and out of China.