Lessons for a 13-Year-Old

We are taught a lot of things at age 13 in churches and at our youth groups. I remember nights around the campfire at church camp that were profound and talked about Jesus in a way I hadn’t thought about him before. I remember hearing that who I was was in Christ and not in whether or not boys liked me or what I looked like. Those were the lessons I remember being driven home the most. Because, as I know now, a girl’s worth is one of the hardest fought battles in her lifetime. Our youth leaders knew this, so we talked about it lots.

This weekend I traveled to Seattle to watch my big sister speak at a conference called Revolve. It’s a speaking and concert tour for girls ages 13-18, 6^th to 12^th grade. I’ve gone to Revolve to see Jenna four of the five years she’s spoken on the tour. Each year, about ten minutes into her talk I always feel this strange mix of fandom-“wow, that girl is cool and knows what she’s talking about”-and proud sister-“wow, that’s my blood up there, speaking truth.” And each year I learn as much from her talk, and others’, as the teen girls who bought tickets to the event.

Anthem Lights performing at Revolve

But this year I learned extra. It was like the words spilling over the edge of that stage in that auditorium were heavier and whacking me in this almost annoying way. Because I knew it wasn’t new. People had been reading those scriptures to me and over me for years but I was feeling them deeply again and for the first time.

It makes me wonder, what does it take? Seriously what? For these lessons to stick once and for all? And to be so sticky they can never be scraped off? How do I keep it on me? How do I make sure it stays on the girls in the youth group I volunteer with? I see it bouncing off of them all the time, as much I try to put it back on nice and neat.

For truth being what it is—singular, God-breathed and, well, true—it is incredible how resistant our spirits are towards it and how thirsty they are for it. I’m dying of thirst, but don’t give me water, but give me water, but don’t.

Backstage with Jenna (middle back), my mom (arms around my waist) and little sister (front right) and some of the other speakers/friends on the tour–Christine Caine, Kari Jobe and Christa Black. OMG

I think confessing and recognizing our thirst is a continuous, conscious effort. I guess the 8^th grader sitting behind me at Revolve is just as in need as I am. In fact, I feel needier now than I did at that age. Even though I feel like I should “get” it by now. But believing Christ and comprehending grace is not a one-time event on your knees; it’s a lifetime of “getting” it. If we got it all right now in one moment, we would probably swell up with too much knowledge of the beauty of truth—think blueberry girl from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, rolled away quickly to avoid explosion.

We just can’t handle it all at once. But we would die without it in small doses.

The Houses We Build

my new balcony

I moved again, into a place that this time is mine. I own it. The whole thing. Both bedrooms, the kitchen, the balcony, all of it. The fridge and washer and dryer and everything else in the laundry closet and the cabinets. That is a lot of stuff to fall under my possession so suddenly.

Since I’ve moved in, I’ve become a little, or maybe a lot, obsessed with making it look good. Exactly the way I want it. I care about it all. The colors on the wall, the brass hardware (gross), at which position this lamp should be on this table and how the chair in the corner is angled. Now that I own something, I want it to reflect me accurately. And I especially want the giant mural over the fireplace in tribute to the great state of Tennessee gone asap, as well as the faux-painted marble columns in the dining room. No, I’m not making either of those things up.

A few days ago, I spent all day working on my balcony. Several hours spent working on about 20 square feet of space. I got pretty carried away and looked at the clock just in time to get ready for my friend’s birthday party.

Why am I doing it? Pouring myself into project after project, corner after corner of each room– why do we care so much about our houses? I say “we” when I may be in the minority, but I know there are others of you out there: you nesters, decorators, shoppers, ottoman-scavengers, just like me. It makes me wonder what we’re decorating and arranging and re-arranging, what we’re actually making look nice.

I’m no psychologist but I did take one semester of psychology my freshman year of college so you should probably write this down: I think when we rustle about in our homes, setting them up just so, we are wishing we could do that with ourselves and maybe even believing we are doing that with ourselves. We wish that inside of our souls, in the dark parts, we looked as nice as our freshly painted kitchens with the silent-shut drawers. If we cannot create perfection within our confused and sinful selves, we strive for it within the houses we build.

I’ve seen it in my condo obsession and I’ve seen it in my interactions with others. I like to know the right things to say to whom and when. The things that will make me look good and, above all, make that person like me. If I don’t know the right thing to say then I try really hard to figure it out, and if I can’t, I’m lost until I can. The work is tiring and endless. The work of perfectionism.

When I looked at the time after working so hard on brainstorming what type of hanging plants to purchase for my balcony, I had to tell myself, “Just quit. The work could always keep going. You have places to be. Take a break.” I was speaking truth to myself. The work of perfection is never-ending; there is always more to do, and I wonder what places it is preventing us from being.

Why Do We Love Those Who Don’t Love Us Back? Part II

A little over two years ago I wrote a post entitled Why Do We Love Those Who Don’t Love Us Back? It is consistently my most-read post. When I visit my handy dandy WordPress dashboard, that tells me I haven’t written a blog post in months and 14 people viewed it last Tuesday, I see that one of the most common search terms bringing people to English Lessons is a variation of that question: Why do I love someone who doesn’t love me back?

This has fascinated me for these past two years. People Google that. A lot of people Google that. Unrequited love is a mystery we are asking a search engine to solve for us. I think I get why. Loving someone who doesn’t seem to return our feelings is painful, and when God doesn’t make the pain go away when we ask Him to, we ask Google. And then we land in places like my blog that do not wholly answer the question or heal your pain, but they do make us feel less alone. The power of this, this realizing your problem is shared by many others, can not be underestimated.

Two years ago my answer to the posed question was that this type of love mirrors the Gospel, and we can find solace in that and the fact that sometimes we just love people we shouldn’t and we can’t help it. I talked about my dad making me feel better by telling me, “You can’t help who you love.” Now that I’ve seen how many people responded to that post, needed to read that post, I realize that maybe my dad’s statement was so helpful because he was using the plural “you.” He wasn’t saying, “You, Andrea, are unique and can’t stop loving the person that broke your heart.” He was saying that none of us can stop loving the people we don’t have business loving. And that communal element helps heal us and give us what we need: the strength to move on or the strength to persistently love the unloveable.

I wish I had learned more about this subject over the past two years and had more to say right now. I wonder at how little clarity I’ve gained and how cloudy it remains. But here it is, what Google has to offer you as a result of your search. I hope you’re encouraged and I hope you come back in two years for Part III, where you’ll see that I’ve managed to learn even less about this stuff.

In 2013, I Will Run

Running is not exactly a New Year’s resolution for me. I’ve been running regularly for about 11 years. I’m not fast. I’ve never run a full marathon. I don’t do sprint training or wear pretty Lululemon running clothes. But I know running’s rhythm. My body knows it. It’s familiar: slip on running shoes, turn on iPod, lock the door behind me, feet hit pavement, I’m off. I hate the first five minutes then before I know it, more minutes have passed and I’m circling home.

I know running.

I spent New Year’s Eve with friends who know me well and who I know well. A few of us couldn’t say we were the biggest fans of our 2012 and breathed a small sigh of relief when midnight rolled around. We huddled up with our champagne and vowed to look forward.

In the grand scheme, our lives are pretty wonderful, whether it’s the year 2012 or another one. But there are things that can keep a year from being your best, and it was nice to be in the company of those dear to me who agreed we should warmly embrace January 1, 2013.

And on January 1, 2013, I found myself hungering for a good run while I traveled from Austin to San Antonio to Nashville. Sometimes it’s my body that hungers for a run, and sometimes it’s my soul.

So I am confident many days in 2013 will contain a solid half hour of running ahead, even if I’m having a hard time looking ahead. It will whip my eyes in the direction they need to be looking. For if my feet are moving forward, my head will eventually have to also, right?

I’m ok with this not really setting a resolution thing. I’m focusing on the basics, clinging to a familiar routine.

It’ll be good.

The Church that Raised Me

Maybe it’s the onset of the holiday season and Thanksgiving rapidly approaching that has brought on this much-needed wave of gratitude. Not sure what it is. Don’t care. I’m keeping it for as long as my selfish, needy flesh will let me. So while it is in me, allow me to express gratitude to the institution that rarely gets it: the church. My church, in particular. My as in the church I grew up in in San Antonio, Texas.

My church experience is similar and different from anyone’s who can not remember not going to church. A preacher’s daughter, I was at church on Sunday morning. And Sunday night. And Wednesday night and other times during the week to visit dad at his office and on weekends for retreats and over spring break with the youth group, at camp in the summer. My family was the last to leave after service let out. I knew where the communion cups were hidden and the communion crackers were stored and sometimes snacked on them with my friends while we waited for our parents to stop talking to “EVERYbody.”

When you’re like me and my sisters, you know every back hallway and sunday school classroom. Which one has the closet with the felt boards and felt people. The rough, light blue fabric on the pew may as well be the floral fabric on the couch in your living room–both as familiar as the other. Church, for me, was not a place of worship; it was my second home. Everyone knew who I was, it seemed, and I knew who most of them were too.

And I am deeply and forever grateful for all of it. For all of the hours spent with all of those church people. I hear a lot from my generation about how the church has messed with our thinking, how it may have presented us with faulty theology in our formative years. We are recovering from the churches that raised us. Trying to re-learn and re-do the right way. I have felt this before, but I’m beginning to see things differently.

In all of this complaining we do about our church history, it’s like we are awaiting some big apology. An apology from the people and place that taught us the only lesson worth teaching, the only story worth retelling again and again and again as many times as is physically possible: the gospel. Well, I don’t want the people that taught me the lesson of my life to apologize for anything.

No, instead I want to thank them and, even though this sounds strange, I almost want to thank the building and place itself. For it was within those walls that I met Jesus. And it was within those walls that I got to know him. That is no small gift.

The Ones Who Help Me Figure Me Out

I know these people. But I’m having a hard time finding words to describe them. They came to visit me this weekend. Five of us all together. I had never realized how small my apartment was nor how few bathrooms I had (one). But around these other four, personal space is not usually a luxury. And that’s just fine.

To describe these people as girlfriends, old college roommates, besties…none of that really works. Who they really are are the ones who walked alongside me for four years as I tried to figure myself out for the first time, on my own. And I alongside them. They were with me when I first fell in love, had my heart broken and first lived abroad. They were in the kitchen when I baked/burned my first loaf of banana bread, in my room as I made the terrifying phone call to a boy to ask him to a sorority function and sitting on the coach beside me as we laughed and laughed and laughed our way through those four years of life suspended. College isn’t real, you know.

They still see each other at important events: birthdays, showers, holiday weekends. While I limit my Texas visits to weddings and Christmas. The sporadic nature of our visits would be easier if the “finding yourself” part was done. Without them, I find it difficult to figure out the parts of me left to be figured. But in my mid-twenties I’ve realized there is much figuring still to be done and it is possible, though not preferable, to do so without the familiar faces.

Sitting around at dinner one night, if midnight at a greek deli counts as dinner, I looked at everyone and wondered how we had all met, all become close. How this particular set of people of all the people had become linked. I had no answer. I think very little logic is involved when finding lifelong friends.

 

 

A Poem for the Twenty Something

On Friday night, I packed into the sanctuary of my church in Nashville with about 700 other women to listen to author/blogger Ann Voskamp speak. Well, that was what I thought she would be doing. Before she came on stage my friend sitting in front of me turned around and said this was going to be a spiritual spa experience. What? I thought. And, sign me up! I like the spa. A couple of seconds into Ann’s talk, I got what my friend had said.

Ann did not preach, she did not give a lesson. She did not have any bullet points, fill-in-the-blanks, even any “turn to chapter ___ and verse __ of ___”s. Ann read almost every word of her…what shall I call it…art. She read us poetry. For half an hour. Slowly and rhythmically. Something about that poetry lulled me into a fascination with her words and the way they sounded, all together. It was weighty and light. I had not sat and listened to poetry in so long. It’s not really something we do here on the weekends, is it? I wish it were.

So, inspired by Ann, I have written a poem. Warning: It doesn’t rhyme. The one time I tried to write a rhyming poem, my classmates in poetry workshop in college ripped it to shreds. So I will not be attempting that here. This is a poem to me and people like me: the confused ones trying to soak it all in as it goes flying by.

A poem for the twenty something

On my trampoline at age seven, in a winter coat unnecessary for the moderate January of South Texas

I lay alone and thought, as I watched clouds, that time moved quite quickly,

too quickly for my liking

The clouds I proudly identified in my head as “cumulus” were, I noticed for the first time, moving

and quite quickly, too

To where?

Where is there for clouds to go?

Don’t they know that right here, above me on the trampoline, and our two giant trees,

this is the best place for them to be?

I knew the earth was round

I knew the earth was big

They would come back, I supposed

They would have to, right?

The earth would carry them back to me

But that could take a while, and I could not wait

My over-zealous coat and I were being called to dinner,

and the moon was being called to rise